Five Great Games I'll Never Play

So many video games have been made over the past few decades that no single person could ever hope to play them all from beginning to end. This isn't an exaggeration; it's pretty clear that there just aren't enough hours in a lifetime, especially when you consider that a third of a life is spent sleeping while another third is typically spent on other irritating obligations such as a full time job. I'll let you do the rest of the math, since I'm not exactly sure how to estimate the average length of a video game or the total number of video games ever published, but I'm certain that you'd have to dedicate your life to video games in order to experience everything this medium has to offer.

Of course, no single person would really want to play all these games, either, since no one likes every genre and a lot of games are just crap. The list gets a lot shorter when you limit yourself to games which are generally considered to be worth playing, and there's an even shorter list of games that are so highly regarded and well known that they're almost considered mandatory.

I have to admit, however, that I've missed out on a lot of supposedly great classics. I grew up with Super Mario Bros. and Doom, and I've played my fair share of Zelda games, but there are a number of immensely popular games that I've never played, and most likely never will. For your reading pleasure, I present the first five such video game franchises that came to mind, listed in reverse order for dramatic effect.

5: Metal Gear Solid

I grew up with two brothers, and at some point my mother must have lost her mind, because by the time the Sega Dreamcast came out, we each had our own console. Of course, though we weren't sharing them like we did with the old SNES, it would have been silly to keep more than one of the same console in the house, so after my older brother got his own PlayStation, I got a Nintendo 64. He got Metal Gear Solid, and I got Ocarina of Time. Fair enough, right?

I watched him play the game for a while. It was pretty entertaining to watch, although I couldn't tell if it was really fun to play because he was the kind of person who would constantly get mad as hell at any game that presented any sort of challenge, which is probably why he hardly plays video games at all anymore. (That, and having a life.) I was really only interested in the story, even if it was hard to follow, but I never had a chance to play through the game myself.

Every time a new Metal Gear game is released, I think, "wow, that looks pretty cool, I should play it." But with a story-driven series like Metal Gear, I could never bring myself to play the latest installment without playing through all the ones that came before it (useless non-canonical spin-offs, if any exist, excluded). At this point, I'm so many games behind that I don't think I could possibly catch up. Even if I wanted to try, doing so would be quite an investment, since I don't even own a PlayStation 3. (The alternative is to watch a few dozen hours of "Let's Play" videos on YouTube, which would be fine, since the later Metal Gear games have such a high cutscene-to-gameplay ratio that they're practically movies anyway.)

Update: I must have psychic powers or something, because a new Metal Gear game was announced just after I wrote this stupid post. Too spooky.

4: Final Fantasy

I have my doubts about whether it's possible to enjoy Final Fantasy without liking anime, and my history with anime was short and complicated. I thought Japanese animation was awesome when I watched Princess Mononoke and Cowboy Bebop and Fullmetal Alchemist, but when I saw what typical modern anime was like, I was filled with shame and disgust.

Okay, so maybe it isn't quite fair to say that this has anything to do with Final Fantasy, but there's also the fact that I'm sickened by turn-based combat.

The Final Fantasy franchise is so famous and influential that I almost feel like I can't call myself a gamer without having played at least a couple of games in the series. Then again, I don't call myself a gamer because "gamer" is a stupid word, and on the few occasions when I actually watched my Playstation-owning older brother play Final Fantasy VII, I was bored to tears.

And don't get me started on the character design.

3: World of Warcraft

I never liked MMORPGs, and I've always refused to play anything that requires a monthly subscription fee (which is why I don't own an Xbox 360). It's probably no surprise, therefore, that I never bothered to play World of Warcraft, and that I fully intend to die without ever having played it, especially now that the newest expansion looks like an homage to Kung Fu Panda, or a strange attempt to grab the attention of the furry crowd, or both. (Okay, so the Warcraft franchise never took itself that seriously, but really, this is too much.)

I wouldn't say that World of Warcraft is a classic; it's not quite old enough for that. But it is — or was, during the height of its popularity — extremely important in the gaming world. I am, though, a bit surprised that the game ever became as popular as it did, considering its connection to a series of RTS games that the vast majority of WoW subscribers have almost certainly never played. Brand recognition wasn't a factor, for them; the game must have earned its popularity by being fun, or something. I can't say I understand it, but WoW just managed to nail the perfect combination of whatever things make MMORPGs fun for those who don't despise them.

2: Counter-Strike

Counter-Strike, the popular Half-Life modification turned stand-alone game, seems like a pretty big deal. However, at the time of its release, I hadn't graduated from console games to PC games, and the only "modern" shooters I can remember having played at length are GoldenEye 007 and its spiritual successor Perfect Dark. I never even played a first-person shooter online until my brother bought an Xbox and a copy of Halo and needed a fourth player to beat some racist kids at CTF via GameSpy Arcade.

Also, I'm ashamed to admit it, but it wasn't until 2005 (when I bought the PC version of F.E.A.R.) that I realized how much easier it is to play first-person shooters with a keyboard and mouse. The downside is that I haven't been able to go back to console shooters ever since. Awkwardly aiming with my thumbs just feels so wrong, and I don't understand how I ever managed to enjoy it.

The result of all this is that I missed out on a lot of competitive online shooters, Counter-Strike included. After the most recent winter sale on Steam, I did end up with a free copy of Counter-Strike: Source in my inventory, but I'm probably going to send it to someone else instead of playing it myself. I'm sure the game is fun, and that it rightfully earned its place in gaming history, but it's... well, it's old.

Don't get me wrong; I can appreciate old games. But Counter-Strike is a competitive and exclusively online multiplayer game. Forget the fact that I prefer single-player games and care little for competitive FPS — when I say that Counter-Strike is old, I mean that its online community, while still active, is almost entirely composed of people who have been playing for hundreds (if not thousands) of hours and already know exactly what they're doing. Considering this and the game's competitive nature, I suspect the players in the average Counter-Strike server would be less welcoming to newcomers than the other guys playing another game that came out last month.

Starting Counter-Strike or Counter-Strike: Source now would probably be like joining a random DotA server with no prior knowledge of how the ARTS genre works. (In case you're not getting the joke here, I'll just point out that ARTS players are widely known for being obnoxious jerks who talk trash more than they actually play and who frequently ban people from their servers not for cheating but simply for being insufficiently skilled at the game in question. I even considered putting DotA on this list, as well, since I have no interest in ever playing a game in which being a newbie is a bannable offense, but then I'd have to admit that DotA is "great" in some way, and I cannot.)

If I wanted to break into the Counter-Strike scene, I'd probably be better off buying Global Offensive... but, again, I still prefer single-player games and care little for competitive FPS. Haters gonna hate, I guess.

1: Sonic the Hedgehog

My first video game console was a Nintendo Entertainment System. (I was actually born just a few years after the console came out and, by the time I played it, the Super Nintendo had already been released in North America, but my parents were thrifty. I'm sure they saved some money by getting an old console, and I was too young to know I was playing with outdated technology, so everyone was happy.) Although I did, eventually, inherit a Sega Genesis from a member of my extended family, this wasn't until years later, and I only ever played the games that I got with the console. Sonic the Hedgehog wasn't one of them.

At this point, I could have gone and bought the game or one of its sequels, but I wasn't interested in collecting old games at the time, and I had no feelings of nostalgia for the spiky Sega mascot. Running fast never seemed like a very cool super-power anyway. To this day, I've never played a Sonic game, with the exception of Sonic Adventure, and that was only for a few dull minutes.

I can't really say I have anything against the Sonic games, since I've never played them. I am, though, a little freaked out by the fanbase with which I'd be associating myself if I actually decided to put the Sonic series on my to-do list. At some point over the past 21 years, the Sonic franchise began to accumulate one of the worst followings in all of video game history.

It's almost difficult to describe what makes Sonic fans so horrifying. While the most hardcore fans of any video game series tend to be a bit kooky, Sonic fans set themselves apart from the rest with some of the worst fan-art and fan-fiction ever created — loads of it — complete with innumerable attempts at "original characters" which essentially amount to badly drawn re-colorings of the original Sonic design. I learned to avoid sites like deviantART because of this stuff.

Almost all fan-art is horrible, and fan-fiction of all kinds is so uniformly bad that I wish copyright holders (particularly of Twilight, Harry Potter, Sonic and every anime) would try a bit harder to crack down on unauthorized use of their intellectual property. At the very least, perhaps this would put an end to the delusion that fan-art is actual art and that a work of fan-fiction will ever be recognized as actual literature. (Please don't use Fifty Shades of Grey as a counter-example; erotic fiction is trash, and by the time it was published, the novel had no doubt shed all connection to Twilight, which is also trash.) Anyone who uploads poorly drawn cartoons of "[insert name here] the Hedgehog" to deviantART, or writes erotic fan-fiction based on Sonic or any other video game involving anthropomorphic animals, deserves to be sued into bankruptcy.

I know that playing the game would not mean participating in this foolishness, but I just can't do it. Playing Sonic the Hedgehog after witnessing what goes on in the terrifying underworld of Sonic fandom would be like watching Signs after seeing a video of Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix viciously beating a small child to death with a couple of crowbars. (Disclaimer: this never actually happened.)

Retrospective: Asphalt and Trouble

The 1995 LucasArts adventure game Full Throttle is a cherished memory from my younger years. As a result, I think it's impossible for me to discuss it without bias; if I say the game is great, it could just be the nostalgia talking. But a little bias never hurt anyone, so I'll just say it: The game is great.

Sure, it's a bit outdated; the graphics, obviously, are laughable by modern standards. Still, I'd argue that the game has aged rather well, considering how long it's been around. While the graphics (in a technical sense) are pretty awful, the artistic style can still be appreciated. Instead of attempting realism (which never looks good seventeen years later), the game's designers chose a rather cartoon-like aesthetic, which might seem at odds with the violent biker gang theme, but the game is not without its share of humor. What's important is that it still looks good... I mean, once you look past those big pixels.

It might not be good enough for children who grew up with HD everything, but it's good enough for me. In any case, whether it's pretty or ugly — especially, in fact, when it's ugly — a game has to be fun. Unfortunately, I'd be lying if I said this game is for everyone. Given that it's heavily story-driven and consists mostly of clicking on things, some might find it rather dull. I think some might even claim that it's hardly a game at all, but more of an interactive cartoon.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, such things have been said — perhaps unfairly — about several recent releases by Telltale Games, a developer of similar story-driven adventure/puzzle games. The similarity, in fact, is no coincidence; the company was founded in 2004 by former LucasArts employees, who were working on an unreleased sequel to the classic Sam & Max Hit the Road, when LucasArts suddenly pulled the plug on their entire adventure game department. Since then, Telltale Games has been making what are essentially the modern equivalents of the old LucasArts adventure titles (and even a few sequels, most notably their episodically released Sam & Max series).

Despite the common criticism regarding a lack of what some purists would consider to be "real" gameplay, however, many of these recent games have been well received, so we know there's an audience who can still appreciate what Full Throttle has to offer. Then again, perhaps it's just more nostalgic bias, since a lot of this audience probably shares my fond memories of the '90s. Certainly it's not the same desirable mainstream audience that thinks Call of Duty is the pinnacle of interactive entertainment. Full Throttle, though it's a very short game (easily finished in one sitting if you know what to do), is probably not for the player with a short attention span.

Like many of the adventure games of its era, particularly those made by LucasArts and based on the SCUMM engine, Full Throttle is essentially point-and-click puzzle game. As such, it requires a bit of patience. You walk around, talk to characters, and find items to use with other items in specific places. That's pretty much it, except for a few mandatory mini-games with frustrating controls. While it is a bit more than an interactive cartoon, you'll have a lot more fun with this game if you do like the idea of an interactive cartoon, because without the story this game would be little more than a series of items to collect and doors to kick open.

In other words, aside from a few deadly biker fights (somewhat reminiscent of a backwards-facing Road Rash) and a single demolition derby gone wrong (warning: you just read spoilers), there isn't a whole lot of action outside of the cutscenes, and winning the game means little more than doing the right things in the right order, rarely with a time limit or any sense of urgency. Surely Full Throttle is among the most action-packed of the LucasArts "point-and-click" adventure games, but it's not an "action game" by any stretch of the imagination. Like all of its brethren, it's a "casual" game if I ever saw one — at least, that's the modern terminology — and, worse, there's only any replay value if you're highly entertained by the plot. That being said, though, the plot of this one is rather good.

Not much of a back-story is explicitly revealed during the game. The presence of hovercraft technology, of course, tells us it's sometime in the future; meanwhile, the heavy security at the local gas tower and the sad shape of the surrounding town tells us that it's not a very nice future, at least not for the barren wasteland of an unnamed western state in which the game takes place. There are even some vague hints of something post-apocalyptic — see, perhaps, the lyrics of this pleasant song that plays on a radio in the game — but all we really know is what we see. Except for the occasional gameplay hint, none of the characters seem willing to explain to the player what Ben should already know.

Ben, the protagonist, is a bit of an enigma himself. We know he's a tough-looking dude who loves his motorcycle, and that he's the leader of a biker gang called the Polecats, but his past is a mystery. His future, also, is anything but certain; he and his buddies are running low on cash. (Being an outlaw in this particular post-apocalyptic future doesn't seem to be as lucrative a career as one would hope.) Ben, however, is confident that things are about to change.

Meanwhile, Malcolm Corley, the founder and owner of the last motorcycle manufacturing company in the nation, is in poor health, with only a few months to live. This is bad news for bikers everywhere; Malcolm is somewhat of a hero to them, while Adrian Ripburger — the man who plans to take over Corley Motors in Malcolm's stead — has only his own best interests in mind... and we can only assume he's plotting something horrible.

It's not long before their paths cross; when the Polecats happen to encounter a fancy hover-limo on Highway 9, Ben pops a wheelie and drives right over the top of it, presumably unaware that Malcolm Corley himself is inside. Corley, more impressed than offended, catches up to the Polecats at a nearby bar, and Ripburger takes the opportunity to offer the Polecats employment as escorts to the Corley Motors shareholders meeting. When Ben refuses, he gets knocked out and stuffed in a dumpster, while the rest of the gang — believing that Ben changed his mind and got a head start — is tricked into driving straight into an ambush.

Things start out kind of slow — after the long opening cinematic, your first act as the player is to punch your way out of the dumpster so you can find the keys to your bike, which (spoiler alert) gets wrecked shortly thereafter, and following another long cinematic you're sent on a quest to find the necessary tools to have the bike repaired. But once you're back on the road for good, things start to get interesting... like, murder-and-conspiracy-and-explosions interesting. I don't want to spoil any of the really good parts, but things very quickly go from exciting to completely over-the-top, culminating in some truly awesome scenes part-way through the game and a ridiculous finale involving an airplane.

As far as I was concerned, back in 1995, the game was a masterpiece. Critical reception, while not quite that enthusiastic, was favorable to say the least. But I suspect it's not as timeless as I wish it could be. Today's critics and players would no doubt be more harsh. Perhaps, at the time, we were more patient. Or perhaps we were all too easily amused by the use of games as a storytelling medium, complete with full voice acting and witty dialogue.

While storytelling in games had been around for quite a long time, Full Throttle did it well, due in part to a talented cast. (Despite the developer's obvious connection to the Star Wars franchise, I was surprised to see Mark Hamill in the opening credits.) Throw in a notably enjoyable soundtrack, a ludicrously bad-ass main character, and a handful of explosions, and you've pretty much pushed the point-and-click adventure genre to its absolute limits.

Finding a working copy of the game shouldn't be too much of a challenge, despite its age; last time I checked Amazon, there were a number of them for sale. (I'm sure you could download it illegally, as well, but I never tried this; I still have my seventeen-year-old CD copy of the game, and it's a bit scratched, but it still works.) As for getting it to work on a modern computer, you can thank the makers of ScummVM for doing this for you. Their software is free, and it runs these old SCUMM-based adventure games almost perfectly on a number of operating systems and devices.

So is it worth playing? If you're a fan of old games, absolutely; if you're a fan of biker gangs and exploding bridges, most definitely; otherwise, it's hit or miss. I'd like to think anyone can enjoy this game, but it's hard for new players to get excited about old things when there are a million newer (much prettier) games to play. But if outdated graphics aren't a problem for you, then Full Throttle might just be the old-school biker-themed graphical point-and-click adventure game you've been missing all your life.

What Ever Happened to Cheat Codes?

If you've been playing video games for more than a few years, you almost surely remember a time when cheating was a standard feature a lot of games. I'm not referring, of course, to the kind of cheating that gets you permanently banned from your favorite server — the kind that requires exploitation of programming bugs or "hacking" of the software — but rather to the use of built-in cheat codes that developers would include in their games to spice things up and to assist the less gifted among us.

You might even know a few of them after all these years. If you ever played Doom, then IDDQD and IDKFA should be burned permanently into your brain. While invulnerability and instant access to the game's entire arsenal of weapons have the potential to suck all of the fun out of any demon-slaying adventure, the developers trusted us to use these codes responsibly, whether that meant using them only in dire circumstances, only after completing the game without them, or never at all. Some players, I'm sure, preferred instead to use them all the time, but that was okay as long as they had fun doing it.

It wasn't very long ago that the inclusion of cheat codes was the norm, but at some point, they gradually disappeared. Although I have nothing but anecdotal evidence to back it up, it seems to me that cheat codes faded out of common existence around the same time that "achievements" became ubiquitous and downloadable content (DLC) became the industry's choice method of squeezing more money out of their customers. There isn't necessarily a causal relationship here, but the disappearance of built-in cheats does seem to coincide with a more general transformation in the way games are made and marketed.

There were cheat codes in the 2005 horror/shooter game F.E.A.R. — one of my favorite games of the past ten years, although I don't like to admit it, since the plot went from mediocre to insufferably bad after the first installment. The same cheats worked in both expansion packs, Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate, released in 2006 and 2007, respectively. But the first true sequel, the 2009 game F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, was devoid of cheat codes. Want to be invincible? Too bad.

Instead of cheats, the game had a few dozen achievements to unlock (which, like most achievements, don't really give you anything except a little "congratulations" for performing various in-game tasks which usually aren't very challenging). This, along with the inexplicable removal of several useful features (like dedicated multiplayer servers and the ability to lean around corners) as well as the implementation of digital rights management (which is arguably far more intrusive than a simple product key and disc check), makes the transition from F.E.A.R. to F.E.A.R. 2 somewhat representative, in my eyes, of how video games have changed as a whole.

While achievements are by no means a logical replacement for cheat codes, they have filled the spaces formerly occupied by cheats on websites like GameFAQs. Look up any recent game and go to the "cheats" tab, and you'll likely see a list of trophies, achievements, or other unlockables instead. The page will likely tell you how to unlock each one, but this is information which can usually be accessed in-game. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to list achievements on a cheat site, but achievements must have seemed like a logical replacement for the cheat codes that disappeared around the time that these non-functional "unlockables" emerged.

Of course, cheat codes and unlockables are not mutually exclusive features; many games have had both, and some games (like the Nintendo 64 shooters GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark) combined the two concepts by including cheats that had to be earned, not simply looked up and punched in. However, the trend in modern games is to forgo cheats entirely in favor of unlockables, which are more often achievements than anything useful. If a game does have achievements, cheats are usually absent, and vice versa.

I won't say this is because cheating makes the achievements too easy to get — after all, if the developers want to preserve some kind of competitiveness or genuine challenge in achievement hunting, they can just program their games to lock achievements if cheats are activated, as is done in Half-Life 2 — but developers who put achievements in their games likely care a bit too much about controlling the player's experience. They care about "challenging" and "rewarding" the player (which is unfortunate because the gameplay is rarely challenging and victory is rarely rewarding). They don't care nearly enough about letting the player have fun in his or her own way.

But I can't lay all the blame on developers. They're not alone in their belief that cheats can ruin a game, even though the player is free to decide not to use them. A lot of self-proclaimed "hardcore gamers" share this sentiment. I do not.

The fact is that cheats aren't always about gaining an advantage or winning a game with minimal effort. When cheat codes were commonplace, it wasn't unusual for developers to include cheats that had little or no effect on a game's difficulty. These cheats existed either for laughs (see "Paintball Mode" in GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark) or to alter the rules of the game in fun ways that didn't necessarily benefit the player (like the reduced gravity cheat in Vigilante 8), not because we needed them to win. Even when they did have an obvious effect on difficulty, cheats in single-player games were used primarily for screwing around rather than getting to the end of the game as quickly as possible. For players with an ounce of restraint and self-control, cheats add replay value rather than subtract it.

Unfortunately, cheats are unlikely to make a big comeback. Today's developers don't seem to have any interest in hiding secrets in their games, and if they think of anything that adds extra value to their product, they'll most often try to sell it to you on the side. Usually, this means offering "additional" features (such as levels, items, and playable characters) as DLC with a price tag, even when these things are already available at the time of the game's launch and could have been included in the game itself. Occasionally, however, a developer actually has the balls to try to charge you for cheats, whether they're sold as DLC (such as the "Invincible Pack" for Saints Row: The Third) or as unique codes that unlock features already included in the game's files (as in Clive Barker's Jericho and some other games published by Codemasters).

From the back cover of the Clive Barker's Jericho manual. I have no idea if the hotline still works (nor do I want to try it), but it seems that the web page doesn't even exist anymore. The small print at the bottom of the page [not pictured] clarifies that codes obtained via the hotline would cost only what they charged for the call, but that getting codes online would require a "small" payment by credit card or PayPal.

This is pretty horrifying, but the success of the microtransaction business model applied to video games — most prominently to "free-to-play" massively multiplayer online games — has shown that a staggering number of people are essentially willing to pay to win. Since it works for multiplayer, it's not so crazy to think people might be willing to pay extra to gain an advantage in a single-player game as well.

I still think selling cheats is insanely dumb, but people are still going to buy them, just like they'll blindly pay for everything else the publishers take out of the finished product at the last minute and set aside as "DLC" for the purpose of grabbing more cash. (Imagine buying a movie ticket only to find out that the last ten minutes of the film will cost you an extra $3.95. Now imagine all of the people who don't boycott that movie. My point is that day-one DLC is evil and consumers are stupid.)

Since the current attitude of big video game publishers is that anything non-essential should be sold off as "extra" content, cheats might regain some real popularity in the form of DLC, but it seems unlikely. Cheat codes clearly went out of style for unrelated reasons, perhaps for the same reasons that we haven't already seen every major developer jumping at the chance to make some extra money by selling invincibility and extra ammo. Perhaps the most obvious problem with cheat codes is that most video games have gotten so easy that developers think we don't need cheats at all. Again, however, I should point out that it's not about need; it's about fun.

Personally, I'd like it if things would go back to the way they were before. Oh, sure, everyone feels that way, especially the nostalgic, aging video game enthusiasts such as myself, but I have no desire to hold the industry back. I realize that most of the changes made by the industry in recent years were, successfully or not, made for the sake of progress. But cheat codes only have the potential to make a game better — never worse — and the fact that they've almost completely been taken away can only be seen as a step backward.

Alan Wake & Cinematic Games

A few days ago, I finished playing Alan Wake. I'd previously mentioned the game in an earlier post about movies based on video games; although I hadn't yet owned the game at the time, I had heard it was very story-driven, and perhaps, therefore, an ideal candidate for a film adaptation. Then again, as I pointed out before, such a movie serves no real purpose if the game already functions as an interactive movie by itself. Alan Wake is, in fact, what you might call a very cinematic game; while the term "cinematic" has often been used as a meaningless buzzword by the industry in recent years, it's fitting in this case. Not surprisingly, there has been some (wishful) expectation of an Alan Wake feature film. Though nothing has been announced, it almost seems bound to happen.

Much like the Assassin's Creed franchise (which spawned the short films Lineage, Ascendance, and Embers), Alan Wake has already branched out into the realm of live-action entertainment, and this is pretty easy to do when so many of the game's characters are modeled on the actors who play them. Bright Falls, the promotional web series that serves as a prequel to Alan Wake, somehow manages to be worth watching, and I have to say it's considerably more unsettling than the actual game.

For the moment, however, I'd like to forget about the predictable attempts to push the franchise into other media, such as movies and books, and focus instead on the game itself. Don't wait for a score at the end, though, since it's not my intention to write a proper review. I don't really see the point, since the game is already old enough that I'd surely be the millionth guy reviewing it. While it's still relevant enough to have its place in a more general discussion cinematic games (and I'll get to that shortly), it's not unfair to say that Alan Wake is yesterday's news. This is usually what happens by the time I get around to playing a game, since I'm strongly opposed to paying full price for anything.

Despite the game's age, however, I'm not as far behind the times as you might assume. While the Xbox 360 version, released in May 2010, is already more than two years old, the PC version (which I recently purchased) wasn't released until February of this year. Although a PC version was originally planned at the time of the game's announcement, the game was published by Microsoft, and selfish Microsoft wanted the game to be exclusive to its own Xbox 360 console. Apparently, this changed only after lots of nagging by Alan Wake's developers at Remedy Entertainment, who still wanted to release a PC version of the game despite the juicy exclusivity deal. It took a while, but Microsoft finally agreed, and the PC version sold well even though the console version had already been around for nearly two years.

Since the personal computer is my game platform of choice — and, more importantly, since I don't even have my own Xbox 360 — I had to wait for the port. Fortunately, once the PC version was released, it didn't take long for the price to drop low enough to get my attention. During the recent "summer sale" on Steam, I picked up Alan Wake (including DLC), along with the sequel/spin-off Alan Wake's American Nightmare, for a combined $9.99. I haven't played the latter, but the first game alone was, in this writer's opinion, worth at least one crisp Alexander Hamilton, give or take a penny.

In short, the game is pretty fun. After hearing so much about its plot-driven nature and so little about its gameplay, I feared it would be disappointing as a game, and notable only as some kind of casually interactive storytelling machine. I've heard as much about several recent titles, most notably Jurassic Park: The Game and The Walking Dead, both by the (appropriately named) developer Telltale Games. To my surprise, my fears about Alan Wake were unfounded.

The combat is seemingly very simple — dodge attacks, weaken bad guys with flashlight, shoot bad guys with gun, repeat — but there is some unexpected complexity in the subtleties of managing multiple enemies at once, and in using the environment to your advantage. More importantly, there is some real challenge involved; you'll occasionally find yourself getting cornered and chopped to pieces after the simplest mistake on the easiest difficulty setting. (The gameplay isn't actually difficult, per se, once you figure out what you're doing, but you will have to learn things the hard way if you don't learn them quickly.) Additionally, whether you think this matters or not, the combat just looks so freakin' cool. It's entertaining enough, at the very least, to stave off boredom for the duration of a single play-through.

But I fear that Alan Wake's great balance of enjoyable story and exciting gameplay is an exception to the rule, and beyond that first run through the game, things can still get tedious. (I should mention, by the way, that when I say I finished Alan Wake, I mean to say I finished it completely. I beat the game on every difficulty level, found every hidden item, and unlocked every achievement. Don't ask me why I do this with every game I play; I guess I'm a masochist.) But in Alan Wake, the lack of replay value doesn't stem from repetitive combat, or even from spoiled plot twists. Playing a second time is tedious because, in its attempt to be "cinematic," Alan Wake includes a lot of dialogue and other brief but mandatory breaks in normal gameplay.

While the cutscenes can be skipped, a lot the dialogue falls outside of these cutscenes. Characters will talk (and talk and talk) to you, as you walk around and explore your surroundings during the non-combat sequences, and you're not always able to ignore them. Occasionally you'll even be instructed to follow a character, as he or she slowly plods around, revealing bits of the plot via typically one-sided conversation — which, on your second or third play-through, you won't really care to hear. The story is fantastic, but hey, it's the same story every time.

I'm using Alan Wake as an example, but these are issues that plague a lot of story-driven games, to varying degrees — even first-person shooters like Half-Life 2 and more action-oriented games like Assassin's Creed. In each case, many players will praise the plot, the characters, the acting, the soundtrack, and the aesthetics, while the rest will see these things as harmful distractions from what really matters: the challenge and the complexity of the game.

Perhaps Alan Wake in particular has some immunity to this common criticism, since it's no secret that the game aims to be as much like a TV show as possible. Divided into episodes, each ending with a theme song and beginning with a recap of prior events ("previously on Alan Wake..."), the game might as well have been a television miniseries. Take out the episodic interludes and it still might as well have been a movie. If you don't want like your games to be cinematic and movie-like, you probably wouldn't play a game like Alan Wake on purpose. The game is rather transparent about what it is, and players know what to expect, so you don't hear a lot of complaints that gameplay has, arguably, taken a back seat to plot and style and other cinematic silliness.

Ironically, one of the major problems with Alan Wake, and other similarly plot-driven games, is actually the result of misguided attempts to retain as much "game" in these shameless interactive movies as possible. All of the major plot and character development could have been confined to skippable cutscenes, but instead, we play through a lot of it. In Alan Wake, this accounts for a lot of lost replay value. Outside of the scary monster-shooting parts (i.e., during the day), you're left with little to do but walk from point A to point B, admire the scenery, listen to characters talk at you, and position the virtual "camera" at different angles while you wait for things to happen. It might make you feel more like a director than a player, and, unfortunately, this is fun exactly once.

There's something to be said for storytelling in games, but unless you're the type of person who can watch the same movie ten times in a row and love it every time, you probably won't find yourself playing Alan Wake repeatedly. When I just want to shoot things, I always go back to Killing Floor or something else with minimal character development and maximal carnage. That way, I won't have to sit through mushy romance stuff in between fights.

It's not that I have anything against story-driven games. As I said, Alan Wake was enjoyable to say the least. However, the best story-driven games are those which tell a story in a non-intrusive way. Sometimes this means condensing the heavy plot development into cutscenes which the player can opt out of watching, but this tends to cause a sharp separation between the game we play and the story we hear. An often better solution, if the developer wants the game and the story to meet seamlessly, is to have dialogue occur during normal gameplay without stopping the gameplay, or to show the player what's going on through subtle cues without having the protagonist's sidekick stop and explain everything. It's a classic case of "show versus tell" (or perhaps "let-the-player-find-it versus shove-it-in-the-player's-face").

The player shouldn't be forced to sit and listen to dialogue, or watch a ten-minute cutscene, or follow a character around at a snail's pace for the sake of plot development, because if a game is riddled with these kinds of tedious, non-gameplay moments, the best gameplay in the world can hardly make multiple replays worthwhile. I'm sure, however, that Alan Wake's developers were aware of this, for at least they gave us the ability to skip past cutscenes and rudely walk away from some of the less important conversations.

It would even seem that someone on the development team isn't too fond of excessive dialogue in games... that is, unless this in-game encounter between Alan Wake and a more-than-slightly crazy video game designer named Emerson is just an attempt at self-deprecating humor:

Emerson makes a good point, even if he's too insane to know it.

But characters (and toasters) who talk, talk, talk, all the time, aren't the only problem with games that attempt to provide some kind of cinematic experience. Bad camera angles, sluggish controls, and frequent breaks in gameplay are all symptoms, and Alan Wake suffers a little from all of them in its attempt to look cool. As far as the controls are concerned, I am grateful that the developers patched the game with a "Direct Aiming" option to make the game more suitable for mouse and keyboard controls, but there's still some delay when jumping and performing other actions, and I'm fairly sure it's not just a performance issue on my computer. It's just a consequence of the game's smooth character animations.

More natural character movements often necessitate less natural gameplay, and while Alan Wake was never meant to be a platformer, this does make the game somewhat frustrating. Once the novelty of playing such a realistic-looking game wears off, you'll wish Mr. Wake could just turn on a dime and jump at a moment's notice like your other video game heroes.

Eventually, you will get used to the controls, and even the awkward camera angle, but those frequent breaks in gameplay — which usually involve the camera moving to focus on some far-off object or event, often to show the player where to go — still make replaying familiar sections a snore-fest for impatient players such as myself.

There will come a time when video game developers will need to realize that video games are not movies. I hope they also realize that trying to imitate movies is not the only way to tell a good story. For decades, stories have been an integral part of video games. We've come to expect some kind of story, especially in horror/mystery games like Alan Wake. But the video game industry has long been unable to drop the habit of turning to movies as the inspiration for their storytelling techniques, and as developers strive to make games even more "cinematic" (and otherwise more visually impressive) with every passing year, they seem to be losing sight of what actually makes them fun.

Too Lazy to Write, Have a Funny Video

Since I already posted something this week, I don't feel obligated to write up the usual Wednesday post. Once per week is enough. Anyway, here's something that made me laugh.