Splinter Cell: Conviction is more fun with a friend

In between our single-player runs of amazing titles like Just Cause 2 and Shin Megami Tensei: Persona, my pear-shaped comrade and I have found time to enjoy each other's company while we snap necks and turn out lights with deadly force in Splinter Cell: Conviction on the XBOX 360. A formal review of the solo campaign is inevitably forthcoming, but this'll have to do for now: "game's pretty fun."


The four-chapter co-op campaign serves as a prequel to the solo campaign, with players playing the role of two Agents, Archer (American, working for Third Echelon) and Kestrel (Russian, working for Voron). Gameplay in SC:C's co-op campaign is nigh-identical to its single-player counterpart, its stealth-action sequences bookended by weapon-stash checkpoints and co-op objectives that force both players to join up. Technically, one player could blast through the stealth-action sequence and wait at the checkpoint for his buddy -- the co-op maneuvers offered by previous Splinter Cell games have been stripped away for a more streamlined experience -- but where's the fun in that?


Even without specific co-op maneuvers, there's still plenty of opportunities for players to help each other out. If two targets are in each other's line-of-sight, both players can sneak up behind their targets and simultaneously choke-hold them before the other target gets a chance to radio for backup. Both players have a separate bank of Mark-and-Execute tokens, as well; if either player melee-kills an enemy, both players' tokens are replenished, and players can execute each other's marks. By flanking a large room from two entrance points and splitting up, each player has a different angle of attack and enemies visible on sonar. Since a fully-upgraded Five-Seven allows for up to four marks, a well-coordinated duo could drop eight targets with a single press of a button.


Screwing up in SC:C's co-op campaign isn't the end of the world, either. While setting off an alarm in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory's co-op campaign meant guards donned body armor and whipped out their biggest guns, in SC:C it mostly just a few more guards come in and everyone's more alert, and results in a lower score at the end of the campaign. It's definitely easier to get through a level when players avoid detection entirely, though.


Ultimately, SC:C's co-op campaign is as entertaining as two players are willing to make it. While a team could play the game by sending one player in guns blazing until he reaches the checkpoint and waits for his buddy to catch up, the real thrill comes from infiltrating a room together, silently snapping the necks of every guard inside and reaching the next area without setting off any alarms. If you have a co-op buddy and you've been looking to scratch that stealth-action itch together, SC:C is the game for you.

Until Peace Walker drops, at least.

Humble Indie Bundle: wait, "indie" is a genre? :(

This week, five game developers threw on their scarves, cycled out to their nearest Starbucks, and teleconferenced through free wi-fi to band together and release the fantastic Humble Indie Bundle: five fully-featured games for the combined cost of $0.01 and up, which can be split between the developers and two charities of their choosing, at whatever ratio you desire. As of this writing, the average donation is close to $8; since there's no way to physically threaten a website, I decided to give them $15 from the shell PayPal account I use to harbor my ill-gotten e-cash, under the pretense that all charitable funds be given to that one organization that ensures I can post on Blogspot pages about my favorite graphic sex acts without it being all over the news. What can I say? The games looked good, and in my defense, I was drunk!

Torchlight: The sub-$20 price tag is a clear sign of its poor quality and distinct lack of fun game mechanics.

Reading forum threads online about the deal, it seems a few people are angry! I know, people getting inexplicably angry about something fantastic and wonderful on the Internet seems like kind of a stretch. But it's true; people are up in arms about having the option to pay as little as physically possible for five critically acclaimed indie hits! Their criticisms focus on 'indie' as a genre of games; as though they received their first indie 'hit' off of vile skunk-blunts like Braid, Passage, or Super Columbine Massacre RPG, and as a result, believe that all games made by small development studios are from starving artistes with a limited grasp on the concept of "fun". To them, all indie games may as well all be two-dimensional open-ended platformers about crying girls exploring handpainted barren landscapes, which end with messages like "SELL ALL YOUR POSSESSIONS" or "END THE CRISIS IN DARFUR" before the curtain-sprites draw closed and the player is booted to desktop.

Castle Crashers: A game about the grave consequences of military imperialism and traditional Anglo-Saxon attitudes toward the subjugation of women.

And hey, I could :colbert: my way through this and make believe that I actually dislike the thing that's good with a slew of cheeky asides that show my true feelings, but since it's the Internet, I can't take it for granted that people will know what I'm getting at. This attitude that all games made for under a million American dollars are nothing but smug, elitist garbage that puts 'story' and 'art' ahead of 'fun' needs to stop. All five games in this bundle were meant to be played, not to be run through so you can comment on the one-man "company"'s blog post about the amazing twist at the end where the main character straight-up dies. Of the five games in this bundle, none were made by Robert Pelloni or Tale of Tales Studios.

Trials 2: Second Edition; a game that bores you to death with its endless cutscenes, pretentious prose, and hamhanded messages.

It feels like a lot of the negative energy focused on indie titles seems to be based not so much on games like AudioSurf as it is on games in the vein of VVVVVV; games that have a strong focus on original characters and a creative visual style that may be different from the norm. I realize that some games have aesthetics that can be difficult to swallow, and I know the sub-$20 price tag sure does make you wonder about the value you're really getting, but neither of these traits makes independent games fundamentally different from their big-brand equivalents except in terms of whether they were put in front of a focus group or not. I'm willing to bet most of the indie stories critics call "pretentious" would be right at home in a Square-Enix or Grasshopper Manufacture game, and the "gimmicks" that forumgoers whine about would fit in perfectly along Nintendo's release lineup. As far as pure quality is concerned, the distinction is meaningless.

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity! Don't let Dejobaan's stunning reputation fool you; I bet it's filled with memory leaks and horrible crash bugs! If only there had been an Activision label in front of it.

...But that's just my opinion, and you know me -- always ranting like the distinguished, erudite dragon I am. Go, comrades; check it out for yourself! Maybe you'll find something of valoh who am I kidding World of Goo is in it GET IT NOW

Videogame artists need your support!! *buys ten copies of Eternity's Child*

So, Double Fine came out with Brutal Legend last year! Though I had to switch the soundtrack to smooth saxophone rhythms in order to play it without getting a horrible pounding headache, I think we can all agree that it was new, interesting, artistically inspired, cleverly written, and ultimately beautiful! You couldn't describe it in a single sentence, though, unless you decided to fudge a few facts: "Jack Black kicks metal ass in a rock-inspired open world" doesn't begin to describe the Pikmin/Sacrifice-ish proto-RTS enhancements they added onto what was initially sold as a God-of-War-style action-slasher game, and ultimately, it was a wash. People defended it to the death, though, citing the genius of Tim Schafer, creator of the stylistically perfect Psychonauts, and how he had done the game industry no wrongs up to that point -- and he really hadn't, but this came with an unintended side-effect. Schafer has unwittingly created for himself a cult of personality, mostly through amazing blog posts and wonderful adventure games; games where the focus is on the writing. Brutal Legend attempted to nudge the focus over to the game underneath the writing, far more than Psychonauts did; as a result, a lot of people -- myself included -- were totally baffled and disappointed. Tim's writing was good, but it wasn't enough to make me want to play a game I didn't sign up for.

eddie riggs in mouse-cursor mode! yech.

Believe it or not, this tragic story has a moral! People, don't buy games just because of the personalities behind them! Games can be artistic masterpieces, but they're also consumer products that you're expected to interact with -- and that interaction can be difficult to get a sense of until you see videos or play the thing itself. Wait until the overall "picture" of any given game is complete enough to see if it's fun, first! If it isn't, you can still feel free to attempt to sway market forces in the direction of an artist, personality, or game development wunderkind, but ultimately, your money is sending the message that you're willing to consume anything a certain person-of-games is willing to throw out onto a disc. This is bad business from a consumer standpoint; it hardly ever works; it only results in bitter disappointment!

hey these 'headbangers' have cromagnon heads and fat necks! that's funny for more than two seconds, right?

Maybe this is a side-effect of an instinctive behavior of Internet people to dramatize something they're passionate about? Regardless, here are some words to live by: Videogames aren't "causes" that need to be "supported". Brutal Legend sold at least a million copies worldwide, according to dodgy site VGChartz. That means it probably turned a profit (especially considering most of its development costs were likely already paid for by Activision), but even if it had failed, it wouldn't have been a death knell for the concept of "good writing" or "decent storytelling" in video games. Plenty of video games are written well -- the Persona series, the Telltale adventures, Banjo-Kazooie, Borderlands, and Prince of Persia are all brilliant examples of games that have excellent and clever dialogue, a few of them have a narrative structure that trumps anything Brutal Legend was capable of, all but one of those games/franchises have seen moderate success, and most of them are way sexier, too! You shouldn't feel obligated to buy a game you feel weird about, just because Internet people tell you it's "important" -- unless, of course, that person is me!

And if a game you're looking for focuses all its promotional media on the non-game aspects of it, wait for a review before you buy it! I've learned my lesson; have you?

Moral Choices

While I don't play as many role-playing games as my pear-shaped counterpart, I've noticed a pervasive trend in her games where the player is forced to make a decision that will upset the very balance of good-and-evil in the game's universe depending on the choice the player makes. This choice typically boils down to selecting between two clean-cut dialogue options or actions; buying a seasonal gift for the crippled boy with the funny accent is Good, while torching his village and laughing as he awkwardly hobbles away is Bad.

I don't mind this perceived open-endedness – it makes the game's plot seem less on-rails, even if it sometimes just forks into two paths of equal length – but it seems like developers keep trying to make the moral choices exceptionally "game-y" by linking them to a slider that arbitrarily shifts between More Good and Less Good. I'm sure this is easier from a design perspective: the plot can fork based on the world's general perception of a character, rather than having the world specifically reference the player's various Good and Bad actions. But it leads to an unintended gameplay mechanic where "morality" becomes another meaningless stat for the player to level up, or down.

Because I have some personal experience with it, I'll loosely use Fallout 3 as an example here. If I pick some guy's lock, my Karma takes a small hit. If I pick several hundred locks, my Karma plummets until I become The Dreaded Baron Phenoix, Picker Of Locks, feared across the lands for my lock-picking ways, and I'll even get a shout-out from the Galaxy News Radio DJ, Three-Dog, about how dreadfully feared I am. However, if I then give some bottled water to a beggar a thousand times, I'm a Paragon Of All That Is Good again and I can venture into a distant town and walk the old lady across the street. Picking all of John Q. Owns-A-House's locks should put me on bad terms with John Q., and rightly so, and I wouldn't find it unfair if John Q. subsequently packed up his locks and skipped town before I could do him any favors. But I would think I could pick every lock in town and still maintain a moral high-ground over someone who dropped a bomb on it.

As far as moral choices in dialog options goes, in Fallout 3, it usually works out like this: if you ask to be paid, you're a bad person. As a result, during my Good Guy run, I did everything everyone asked and refused their rewards at every turn, not because I'd "feel bad" if I asked for compensation, but because I didn't want my Karma to go down. Conversely, on my Bad Guy run, I still did everything everyone asked, but made sure to ask for a hearty reward for my efforts.

Fallout 3 almost does a few things right. For example, it's possible to put a bullet in Three-Dog's head. This isn't the result of a dialogue tree nor is it guided by some sort of prompt, the game simply puts the player in a situation where one is armed and in the same room as Three-Dog. Killing him actually effects the world: he'll no longer DJ GNR and his plot missions and sidequests will be inaccessable. However, this causes other characters to be annoyed with you at worst, and at best indifferent toward you after you've satiated that thirsty beggar a few times.

Maybe on my next playthrough I'll just rummage through Three-Dog's stuff and steal his wallet. That'll show him.