RICKRUCKER.COM
George Lucas Joseph Stalin Used
mythological archetypes to seize control of the imaginations of the common
people. Surrounded themselves by cretins and yes-men late in life that
unconditionally supported their stupidest ideas, while utilizing technical
geniuses lower down the hierarchy to oversee vital industry and
production Established edicts during the Battle of Stalingrad decreeing the
family members of surrendering or self-mutilating Red Army soldiers would
be stripped of assets and sent to the GULAG Socialist beliefs early in life give way later to redoubled,
hypercapitalist and competitive ethos later Wide
disparities between their creative ideas and reception/reality reflexively
caused them to assert their ideas more forcefully, much to their
underlings' terror; Failed projects blamed on characters nobody much
liked, who were then immediately purged Wrote
and directed THX 1138 Reduced the function of Soviet cinema to reinforce the propaganda
of the state Reduced the function of Hollywood cinema
to reinforce sales of Joseph Campbell's
The Hero with a
Thousand Faces in the Hollywood
Barnes &
Noble
Executed 644,000 in the Great Purge Selectively micromanaged products, production processes and
industries, often leading to disaster Forced to Relinquish Control of the Red Army to General Zhukov
after Years of Martial Catastrophe Forced to Relinquish Control of KOTOR MMORPG to
Bioware Remained unmarried late in life, and despite power and status
maintained ambiguous sex life Widely distributed propaganda encouraging rebellion against
established order in the third world Despite the crushing diminishment of the human spirit due to their
actions later in life, remained incredibly successful and
unopposed
Rickrucker.com FACE OFF!
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
9/15/08
The Game Revolution, Leashed
Around the new year, George Lucas's people presumably bartered with Vanity Fair. "We'll give you the scoop on Indiana Jones, if you run a puff piece about our new Star Wars game, The Force Unleashed. The final piece was notably clueless and out of touch, even if you were expecting the best from the game. They sent some totally game-ignorant celebrity reporter to Lucasarts, I guess to emulate the mindset of people ignorant of games. Pretty objectively arrogant and stupid.
This week, Lucasarts finally released this dubiously epochal, terminally overhyped, supposed quantum leap called The Force Unleashed. Four (!) years in development, it's available on most every console, barring piracy-prone PCs. Released with a novelization, comic and merchandising blitz, clearly the creative inspiration here was starwarsgameprofitfigures.xls, or more specifically, Row H, 1996's Shadows of the Empire , a game nobody has fond memories of, but sold real well.
Boots on the ground, turns out The Force Unleashed is middling, samey and arcadey, like Shadows of the Empire. The force powers are initially cool, then the thrill suffers diminishing returns, level by level, based on some mild miscalculations in playability. It's pretty fun, especially if you like Star Wars, but your lightsaber doesn't even instantly kill guys. You get a half-assed RPG system to level up your force powers and combat, queering both the RPG and immersion factors. To ratchet up the cinematics, they put in quicktime events, which annoy everyone. Then it ends. The vaunted technological breakthrough is cosmetic, if you're being generous, or nonexistent. The story and cut-scenes are well-done, but the finger-to-button-to-screen dynamics are a little off, which is the most important, fatal thing.
It can be a lot of fun, though, some people will like it. It's just not as fun as 2002's Jedi Outcast, which made you feel like a badass Jedi unleashing the force, the whole stated, dedicated purpose of The Force Unleashed. That's a fighting game for you. A few extra foot pounds per energy per second per second. Coulda happened to anyone.
It's worth going back to that clueless Vanity Fair preview, with the (unintentionally hilarious) title, "The Game has Changed ," written by Frank DiGiacomo. With a number of delayed Next-Gen pseudo-duds hitting us hard and fast, maybe we should look at how exactly the game is changing. Since tens of millions of people other than Frank DiGiacomo know quite a lot about video games, let us say a few simple and obvious things.
It's not that this DiGiacomo's a bad, or even irresponsible writer. He gets no facts wrong-wrong. It's not even the puffery, since every single game preview say, IGN or Gamespot do is shameless puffery without reservation.
That's the nature of game companies allowing you to preview the game. You're as nice as possible about what you see, and it's not so pernicious, since the alternative is no previews whatsoever. You'll savage it when the time comes. The preview is there to whet the appetite of expectant nerds. Whatever. The funny part of "The Game has Changed" is the form the puffery takes. This is the best bit:
"By the time the demonstration was over, I
was left with the unmistakable sense that LucasArts was on the cutting edge of a
huge leap forward for the video-game industry?a technological breakthrough,
nearly as revolutionary as the introduction of sound in film, that could finally
give gaming the kind of immersive realism that would enable it to join movies
and television as a form of mainstream
entertainment."
He sounds like one of those hack suckers from the thirties, visiting the Russian countryside. "The collective farm I visited was absolutely idyllic! Truly the people are delighted by this benevolent comrade Stalin and his collectivization policies! They are on the verge of the transformation of the human spirit! Why here's a happy commissar now!" You know, Red Star Over China style, for the clueless masses, pure sales.
Where does this guy get his unmistakable sense? Me, I don't drive, so sensibly enough I don't presume to cover the ?fringe? world of automobile mechanics and handling that tens of millions of human beings living right now are intimately aware of. How would slightly more realistic physics allow games to ?break through? to the mainstream? Five minutes with the game is enough to tell you 2002's Jedi Outcast is 80% of what The Force Unleashed is, graphically. Plus, in Jedi Outcast the gameplay is crisp, the lightsaber mechanics are awesome and the stormtroopers have that invigorating, Quake 3 circle-strafin' A.I. It's fun.
?Movie?-like immersion, which DiGiacomo is ignorantly enamored by, was flogged half to death, in the games industry, in 1996. Cut scenes are cut scenes. And players were pretty well immersed in Ms. Pac-man, after a fashion. While technology alone has allowed some incredible breakthroughs in immersion and narrative, all such breakthroughs were tethered to sharp, sophisticated designers who basically knew their gaming history, and implemented strategic, visionary enhancements, usually in gameplay. The Force Unleashed has none of this, except in physics and tech. Although ?basically competent writing? is admittedly something of a visionary enhancement, in the game industry, other Star Wars games like KOTOR have much more interesting, wide-ranging and engaging narratives.
The real threshold the game industry is approaching is the realization graphical sophistication and physics are at least three-fourths bunk. Next Gen titles now have to spend a disproportionately large amount of money just to get the slightly better graphics and physics that mean almost dick, which has translated into less sales, in most cases (hence Lucasarts porting The Force Unleashed to virtually every active active game platform). All this high tech investment earns is the ?wow? you could glean from a non-gamer by showing them 2002's Jedi Outcast. Hell, you have showed DiGiacomo Jedi Outcast and he wouldn't have known the difference!
Many gamers are addicted to the ?wow,? but the technology end is way overrated, even in many more realistic titles. The game industry has painted itself into a corner, financially, by boosting their polygon counts and all the rest, necessitating costlier development teams, and longer development cycles. Which Lucasarts is stupidly continuing to crow over in Vanity Fair.
Meanwhile, Gamestops, selling used games, have been popping up on every American street corner. Why pay more for a game system when the used Playstation 2 games you can get at Gamestop are $5 and look 85% as good? Or even the same, to a lot of eyes? And play the same. The Gamecube is $30 at Gamestop. Kind of better than the initial prospect of buying a $600 PS3 without a single good game. The opposite of DiGiamcomo's argument is true: Next-Gen games are mainly for nerds, who've been "leveling up" with every graphical improvement, needing their RPG "wow" hit points. For the mainstream, 2002 looks roughly the same as 2008. The games?pretty objectively?haven't changed. If they did, it was years ago. The world of ?Next Gen? has earned a big shrug, mainly, except for a few stand-out titles. And some of the ?Next Gen? titles they inexplicably invested years in (solely for the tech), like ?The Force Unleashed,? turned out to elicit barely any ?wow? at all. At least not a ?wow? that extends beyond the first hour.
So the next gen systems are, in fact, allowing gaming to break through as a "mainstream" form of entertainment in this way: by lowering the prices of the last generation's consoles and games. Meanwhile, the huge titles they were promising were delayed, and delayed, and then most of the games came out looking...a little shinier. Which was admittedly cool. Wow.
It's just not much of a revolution. And when new visuals are tied to dull-ish gameplay dynamics, the farce is leashed. And I'm sure that tendency to enshrine and fixate on the technology end of a next gen project didn't contribute to the designers losing sight of the basics. This is Lucasarts.
So individual titles have grown costlier to produce, while game dynamics have remained largely identical to previous generation titles. Hence the success of the Wii, the great Japanese success story. The Wii has lesser graphics, on the horsepower end, and somewhat innovative gameplay. Plus the Nintendo guys are geniuses at fundamental finger-to-button-to-action dynamics, and they've always realized those dynamics dwarf the significance of sheer graphical sophistication. Unlike Hideo Kojima, that barking lunatic, the Nintendo people smartly avoid excessive dialogue, sticking to what's really innovative about games, as opposed to previous forms of storytelling. But then you don't need to be a visionary to intuit sheer graphical ?wow? is horseshit unless the game is really, really fun.
With the contemporary games that do work, the real big picture becoming clear is that even the ?wow? is coming from sheer hard work, on the part of particular teams, not an industry advancing steadily, or new miracle technologies, like The Force Unleashed marketing team was trumpeting. Nobody's gotten the "wow" of Half Life 2's physics (2004), in four years since it was released. Someday Grand Theft Auto 4 and Super Mario Galaxy might be seen like Fantasia. Animation technology is still there, but who puts the craftsmanship into it anymore? People worked their asses off on them, and visionary individuals were in charge of particular projects. ?Next Gen? isn't magic. It necessitates a lot more sweat for a slightly increased surface sheen that is only significant?and can only be made significant?in independently brilliant games. Notice CGI hasn't gotten much better since Jurassic Park? Just certain uses of it are outstanding, innovative and striking.
Go
Home