I'm Thankful for Video Games

I've been too busy to write anything interesting for this week because I've started a new job, and this one actually requires me to go to sleep before midnight. Since I do most of my writing between midnight and dawn, this is a small problem. However, it isn't going to change anytime soon unless I get fired, so I hope I can work around it somehow. Of course, I do have a day off tomorrow, but it won't be spent in front of a computer. And on that note, to those of you who live in the United States, have a great Thanksgiving. (To everyone else, have fun getting up for work in the morning.)

But while I'm here, I might as well mention that Steam has begun its Autumn Sale, presumably in honor of Thanksgiving and to coincide with Black Friday. This comes just a few days after the Autumn Seal website stopped giving out free coupons for a short list of games (Alan Wake Collector's Edition, Alan Wake's American Nightmare, Trine, Trine 2, Trine 2: Goblin Menace, Trine Complete Collection, Legend of Grimrock, and Rochard).

The Trine series coupons have already expired as of last night, but the Alan Wake series and Legend of Grimrock coupons are still good for the rest of the day, and the Rochard coupon is still good through tomorrow. In addition, all of these games are currently 50% off, as a result of the current sale. So here's the big question: Do the Autumn Seal coupons' discounts stack with the sale's discounts?

As you can see, I have a few of each (unexpired) coupon left, since it took that many spins of the Autumn Seal slot machine to get the Trine coupons I really wanted.

All week, I've felt like an idiot for having so many of these coupons and not using them — I wanted at least to give them away — but it looks as if my coupon hoarding might have paid off.

The Rochard, Legend of Grimrock, and Alan Wake's American Nightmare coupons all work as expected. Only the Alan Wake Collector's Edition coupon doesn't seem to work at first glance, but that's because it's misnamed (and this is a good thing). Despite what the coupon says, it actually applies to the Alan Wake Franchise pack, which includes the Collector's Edition as well as American Nightmare.

Since the discounts are applied one at a time, a 50% coupon used on a 50%-off game totals to 75% off, as is the case with Legend of Grimrock and the Alan Wake games. Rochard, on the other hand, ends up being around 87.5% off, which would be a fantastic deal if the game weren't so recently included in a pay-what-you-want Humble Bundle. Overall, though, this is pretty good. While a Steam coupon is typically useless because it almost never offers as good a discount as one might find during a seasonal sale, the fact that these coupons can be used during this event makes them worth having.

Of course, the coupons are only good for the very beginning of this sale, and some of these games will surely be featured as daily deals after the coupons expire, in which case they will end up being around 75% off anyway.

At least now we know that it is possible for coupons to stack with existing discounts. Since it so rarely happens, a lot of people tend to think either that coupons are deactivated during sales or that they're timed perfectly to expire before any sale begins. (During the last Winter sale, coupons were given out, but they weren't activated until after the sale was over, and there wasn't another sale until the coupons were dead.)

Anyhow, I'm planning on trading away (or giving away) as many of these coupons as I can, and perhaps even using a few of them myself to buy gifts for friends. I could just wait until a daily deal gives me the equivalent discount, but this way, I actually get to make use of my Steam inventory instead of just letting stuff sit there until it vanishes.

Boss Fights & The Suspension of Disbelief

I've been playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the past couple of days, and it's been an interesting experience.

Just as when I played the original Deus Ex and its slightly awkward sequel Invisible War, I'm afraid my perfectionist tendencies (though not, I'd like to think, a lack of skill) are to blame for the amount of time it's taking me to finish the game. It's hard to resist loading my last autosave every time I trip an alarm or waste an item, but part of me still knows it's more fun to improvise when facing the consequences of a stupid mistake, so I'm trying to keep the save scumming to a minimum.

In terms of item hoarding, though, I'm still hopeless, just as I am in every game with an inventory. When I bought Human Revolution, it was on sale, but so was all of the downloadable content, and like a fool I bought the whole package. The end result was an inventory full of extra stuff — a few bombs, a silenced sniper rifle, and a double-barreled shotgun — and I've been carrying it around thinking "hey, I might still use this." More generally, my inventory is full of crazy things that I've been waiting for the right time to use, and some of these things are loud and explosive.

But they're going mostly unused, because I've decided to take the non-lethal stealth approach. It seemed like the easiest option in the beginning of the game, and it continues to be the easiest option now that I've had plenty of practice at sneaking and very little practice at shooting. Like its predecessors, Human Revolution doesn't seem to encourage players to charge in with guns blazing. Perhaps this would have been a viable option if, earlier in the game, I had picked up a nice assault rifle and every combat-oriented augmentation I could afford. But I didn't, and despite my extensive experience with more generic first-person shooters, I found myself dying very quickly whenever I made the mistake of being seen.

So I stuck to sneaking around, as the developers intended, and at this point it only seemed right to avoid killing people whenever possible. My weapons of choice are a tranquilizer gun and my own metal fists. I've probably left about 150 unconscious dudes in my wake, and I hope their imaginary families appreciate it. There have been times when lethal force would have made things easier, but I've already come this far. If it takes me twice as long to complete a mission because I've committed to carefully sneaking past the guards instead of blowing them up with fragmentation grenades, so be it.

But even a non-lethal run through the game will involve some necessary bloodshed. The bosses in Human Revolution are notorious for taking that element of choice away from the player; with one exception (or so I've heard), they all must be killed. So far, I've fought two of them, and both fights were an unwelcome departure from the playstyle I had already established. Unable to sneak away or knock my enemy unconscious with a punch to the face, I was forced into a brutal fight to the death. I realized it was a good thing that I kept all those lethal weapons in my inventory instead of dropping them on the ground when I made that commitment to imaginary nonviolence.

Of course, there are always weapons lying around in the room when a boss fight occurs — the developers make sure these fights are winnable — but running around the room collecting loot (and accumulating damage) before even starting to fight back is an easy way to die.

In any case, as with most boss fights in most games, I died more than a few times in each fight before getting the hang of the enemy's attack pattern and thereby developing a viable strategy. And in each case, the strategy I ended up using wasn't exactly as fun as I hoped it would be. It wasn't the jarring transition from methodical stealth to ultra violent carnage that spoiled the experience. It was the transition from a semi-realistic world into one in which a dude can take multiple shots to the head from a high-powered sniper rifle and not die, and in which a chick can happily absorb a hundred rounds from a heavy machine gun after stepping on a couple of landmines and then blow me to pieces. Yeah, I get it, they're mechanically augmented, but so is the protagonist, and the superhuman feats do need to be kept within reason. Even metal parts can be blown up.

When I nail a guy in the head with a sniper rifle (or any other weapon) I expect him to go down, or at least be severely wounded. Even with a pure adamantium skull, he should have a concussion. If the developers want a boss fight to be challenging, they should be able to think of ways to make it so without giving the enemy so many health points that the suspension of disbelief is utterly destroyed before the fight is half-way over. If they don't want the player to blow the guy's head off in one shot, they should find a clever way to keep the player from doing so, rather than making the guy's head (along with his other parts) nearly indestructible.

I suppose a force field would have been too much of a cliché, while taking away the player's sniper rifle would have been too restrictive. Maybe there isn't a good solution. That is, maybe — just maybe — games that strive for any amount of realism shouldn't be designed with long boss fights in the first place. A fight involving firearms should be over in less than ten seconds if both parties are mortal human beings, with or without super cool prosthetics.

Human Revolution isn't the first game in the series to have boss fights. The original Deus Ex had them too, and some of these bosses also absorbed an unreasonable amount of damage. However, I distinctly remember winning one of these fights in less than a second by blowing the guy up with a few cleverly placed bombs. I walked out of the fight unscathed. It wasn't the manliest way to win, but it was what I chose to do, and it worked. Furthermore, some of the boss fights in the original Deus Ex could be avoided entirely — for example, by using ones investigative skills to uncover a killphrase which causes the enemy to self-destruct.

So why does Human Revolution force players into long, grueling battles, even when the player has chosen stealth over brute force and non-lethality over wanton destruction? I almost think the developers were under the impression that video games just need bosses, which clearly isn't the case here. I'm reminded of the Mass Effect 3 director who took a lot of heat from fans for saying that boss fights were excluded from his game because they were "just so video-gamey." He went on to explain how he didn't want to include boss fights just for the sake of having boss fights. This whole portion of the interview is ridiculous for a lot of reasons (e.g., why the heck shouldn't video games be video-gamey?), but I think having boss fights for the sake of having boss fights — happily fulfilling this particular video game trope without regard for whether it really improves a particular game or the player experience — is exactly what the Human Revolution developers have done. The game might have been better without them, or at least without the necessity of participating in them.

All in all, I think Human Revolution could have learned a lot from its predecessor. The original Deus Ex is outdated, but it still has some good ideas that could have been put to use in the prequel.

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Update (November 18, 2012):

For the record, I did finish Deus Ex: Human Revolution last night. My opinion on the boss fights hasn't changed much. The game's third boss wasn't nearly as frustrating as the first two, since I'd dropped the unused double-barreled shotgun and amassed a small collection of fragmentation mines, but it still wasn't particularly fun. Based on my single brief engagement with this particular enemy, I have to surmise that he wasn't very bright. After taking a couple of hits from his plasma rifle, I simply ducked behind some nearby cover, and he just kept shooting (and missing) without attempting to move to a better position.

Since he didn't seem to be going anywhere, I started chucking those explosives at his feet, and from this point onward he was stun-locked by one explosion after another until he finally died. I would have expected him to be reduced to a fine paste after all that punishment, but instead he bled to death rather peacefully as if I'd shot him with a single well-placed bullet. In fact, that's how most of the bosses seem to die, even though killing them usually requires a whole arsenal of heavy weaponry.

Again, suspension of disbelief destroyed. But it didn't really come as a shock this time.

Only the final boss was really interesting, since the fight had multiple stages and multiple targets. This doesn't make it the most original boss fight I've ever seen — a lot of it was still "shoot this, shoot that, press this button, repeat" — but at least it didn't feel like attacking Superman with a BB gun.

"I'm Not a Gamer"

If you've watched TV in the past month, you might have noticed some odd Nintendo 3DS commercials.

In each one, a celebrity talks about a video game and then says, "I'm not a gamer; with my 3DS, I'm a _____." (The blank, of course, is filled with some other title relating to a hobby, career, or activity.) The goal here is obviously to sidestep any negative connotations associated with the word "gamer" and, more importantly, to attract those potential customers who don't call themselves gamers but who might enjoy a casual game once in a while. They want everyone to know that 3DS games are not just for video game enthusiasts; they're for everyone. It's also pretty clear that they're marketing to girls.

Both of these things are fine.

Do I like the commercials? Well, not really. Celebrity endorsements are meaningless to me, even when I like the celebrity, and in these cases, I can't say that I do. (Prior to looking them up for the sake of writing this post, I had never heard of Gabrielle Douglas, Dianna Agron, or Sarah Hyland. I'm sorry, but I don't care about the Olympics or gymnastics in general, and I don't watch Glee or Modern Family.) On top of that, the games they're advertising look pretty stupid. Even so, I appreciate what they're trying to do.

Not everyone does, though. The commercials have, predictably enough, provoked a minor backlash from those who are somehow offended by Nintendo's supposed abandonment of the word "gamer" and all those who self-identify as such. Browse the YouTube comments if you need an example. Why, they ask, does Nintendo think "gamer" is a dirty word? Why are they intentionally targeting everyone except gamers with their game-related ads? And if these girls are playing video games, aren't they gamers too? Why deny it? Why go out of their way to deny it?

The people behind these seemingly reasonable complaints are forgetting that "gamer" still is a dirty word to nearly everybody who isn't one. Even though we've seen, in recent years, a peculiar movement to redefine "gamer" such that the label applies to everyone who ever enjoyed a video game, most of us haven't forgotten that the original definition was considerably less inclusive. You don't become a "gamer" at the very moment you buy a handheld Nintendo console, and this is for the same reason that I don't call myself a "biker" just because I own a bike.

If you're correctly using the word "gamer" to describe yourself, it means you see video games as a legitimate hobby — you take them seriously, you spend a lot of time on them, and playing them is a part of who you are. It's easy to see why this could be alienating to someone who, for example, might just want a 3DS for the casual puzzle games and the kid-friendly platformers, or someone who likes to play iPhone games on a long bus ride but doesn't know (or care to know) the difference between an Xbox and a GameCube. This person isn't likely to buy anything marketed specifically to gamers, and Nintendo had only good intentions in their attempt to distance their product from such troublesome vocabulary. Did they have to do it explicitly? Probably not. But they successfully sent the intended message — that you don't have to be a "gamer" to play a Nintendo game.

It's easy to argue that everyone who plays games is a gamer but, if you don't take "gaming" seriously, what's the purpose of the label? I know how to bake cookies, but I don't mention in my Facebook profile that I'm a baker. Likewise, you don't need to call yourself a gamer just because you've played Angry Birds on your smartphone. Oh, you have an Xbox? I'm not impressed. Not even playing Call of Duty: Black Ops makes you a gamer. Not even Minecraft. And it's not even a matter of contrasting these (almost sickeningly) mainstream games with material which some might find to be a little more sophisticated. It's about devotion to a hobby. If you have as much passion for games as a devoted, IMDb-addicted movie buff has for movies, you can call yourself a gamer without sounding like a complete douchebag.

Personally, I don't even like using the word outside of discussions of the word itself, and I don't identify myself as a gamer despite the fact that I've been maintaining a gaming blog for nearly five months. In my own opinion, the word just sounds completely idiotic. The word "game" never needed to become a verb.

Unfortunately, this idiotic word is becoming absurdly overused by people who play only one or two games casually but nevertheless attempt to adopt the label so they can be part of some non-existent "nerd culture." There's another term which, by the way, doesn't need to exist. I'm not sure exactly when people decided that "nerd" was the new "cool" but it needs to stop. The so-called nerd/geek culture is composed almost entirely of fake nerds and fake geeks — a bunch of hipsters who choose to identify as nerds and geeks just because they want to be different, and they go on and on about how proud they are of their nerdiness and geekiness but they don't actually have any nerdy or geeky interests aside from their manufactured nerd/geek pride and a vague interest in "science" (which, to them, probably means spaceships and dinosaurs).

A nerd is, in as few words as I can manage, a person with relatively obscure interests that take precedence over the desire for social acceptance. It's not something you can become by dressing a certain way. It's not a label you can adopt by choice. Playing a video game or reading a book or watching a science-fiction movie does not make you a nerd. Wearing glasses does not make you a nerd. Doing your homework and getting good grades does not make you a nerd. If you've ever written or spoken aloud the phrase "I'm such a nerd," you're almost certainly not a nerd. If you're popular, you might have been a nerd many years ago, but you're not one now. If you ever made fun of the nerdy kid in high school, you're not a nerd. Likewise, if you ever made fun of the gamer kid in high school, you are not and never will be a gamer. So please stop saying you are.

To get back on topic for a moment before I wrap this up, I'd like to point out that Nintendo shouldn't be trying to market to hardcore gamers anymore, anyway. It's pretty obvious that Nintendo has built up a reputation as a creator of family-friendly consoles and a publisher of kid-friendly or otherwise casual games. Perhaps they've done this at the expense of the hardcore audience, and maybe that was a mistake, but right now I think they're better off trying to maintain the audience they have, rather than attempting to steal hardcore gamers away from Xbox and Playstation. If this means advertising the 3DS as a console for non-gamers, so be it. The people who were somehow offended by these "I'm not a gamer" commercials probably weren't Nintendo fans anyway.

Happy Halloween! Have Some Spoilers

Halloween is here, and Hurricane Sandy has passed my home, leaving it at least 99% intact. Meanwhile, I haven't much to write, since I already posted this week. So maybe I'll do what a lot of other bloggers do and comment on the news.

Where do I start? Well, Assassin's Creed III came out yesterday... for consoles. For some reason, PC players have to wait until November 20. Suddenly I feel like a second-class citizen. No doubt, if asked about this, the publishers would mutter something about piracy. But even if they were being sincere, I'd have no sympathy for them, since they've already gotten more money than they likely deserve.

Remember when I mentioned Assassin's Creed III in my tirade against the entire concept of pre-ordering video games? I can't shake the feeling that you've all let me down, since the game has broken Ubisoft's pre-order records. I can see why this might happen; it's a highly anticipated sequel in a popular franchise. Furthermore, by offering a "season pass" for upcoming downloadable content at a modest 25% discount, Ubisoft was clearly doing its best to make "buy it now and ask questions later" sound a lot less crazy than it is. But it's still crazy, especially when Ubisoft refuses to release a playable demo.

And then there's news that the game will feature microtransactions (which, in this case, seems to mean trading real-life money for in-game currency which may or may not provide players with an unfair advantage in multiplayer matches). The same people who pre-ordered the game at full price without even trying it first, and then pre-ordered a bunch of DLC packs without even knowing what they would contain, probably won't be able to resist partaking in this final moneygrab... that is, unless they very quickly become disappointed in the game after they've played it.

The critics' reviews are mostly positive, of course, but when the game's ending was (predictably) uploaded to YouTube as early as two days before the official release date, a lot of potential customers found at least one reason not to buy the game. Some fans of the series, even without taking the time to play through this final act, seem to be upset about how the story turns out, and there are plenty of comments along the lines of "wow, that sucked, I'm so glad I didn't spend $60 on this."

For the record, I haven't watched the video below in full, because I might yet decide to play this game (once all the reviews are in and a bribe-free consensus on its quality has been reached, once the price has dropped to a reasonable level, and perhaps once there's some kind of special edition for PC with all that silly DLC included). Needless to say, however, it does contain spoilers.

The conclusion of Desmond Miles' story arc has prompted not only a lot of complaints, but also some comparisons to the ending of Mass Effect 3... which, by the way, was poorly received, largely because the game's multiple endings were so similar. (The video below explains the frequent jokes about the different endings being the same except for the choice of color.)

From what I've heard, Assassin's Creed III doesn't have multiple endings, and the reasons that some people hate its singular ending are accordingly much different. Although (as I've pointed out) I haven't watched the ending myself, it sounds like part of the problem is another ridiculous plot twist out of left field. In a way, this isn't surprising. When a story like that of the Assassin's Creed series relies so heavily on plot twists and cliffhangers, two things happen. First, the story ends up feeling too random or inconsistent, usually after some "grand-finale" plot twist employed in a last-ditch effort to truly surprise players; second, the writers get so attuned to raising questions and leaving things unresolved that they forget how to answer all those questions without resorting to some stupid cop-out.

The one constant here — besides, of course, each game being the conclusion of a trilogy — is that hardcore fans of each franchise felt cheated. After sinking so much money into a series, that hurts.

A similar thing happened recently with Halo 4, whose ending wound up on YouTube a couple of weeks ago, despite the game's official release date of November 6. Microsoft has been scrambling to take the videos down for obvious reasons, and it looks like they've been somewhat successful, because I can't seem to find a high-quality version. (The videos below, which I found and embedded in a playlist, are likely to vanish soon.)

An allegedly sub-par ending, combined with the most banal and corny tagline of all time, has drawn a lot of laughs at the expense of this futuristic shooter. (An Ancient Evil Awakens? Seriously? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that was a cliché long before the Halo 4 marketing team got a hold of it.) I'm not sure if I can fully grasp just how good or bad this ending is, because I haven't played a Halo game since the second installment, but some fans were upset about it. (Perhaps too upset, considering that, with Halo 5 and Halo 6 supposedly in the works, it's not really an ending at all.)

Ultimately, none of this really matters, as long as the bulk of the gameplay is enjoyable... at least, that's the theory. But video game sequels are almost always advertised as continuations of a story, with cinematic trailers featuring minimal gameplay footage. Perhaps the assumption is that we already know what the gameplay is like, since we played the previous game, or that we shouldn't need to ask about the gameplay because any product with a sufficient amount of hype is worth pre-ordering, no questions asked. In any case, the result is a game advertised on the basis of its plot, and purchased primarily by owners of the previous titles, who want to know how the story ends. A bad ending, therefore, is pretty hard to ignore.

So how does the industry avoid disappointing fans with bad endings? Simply to write better endings might not be the answer; that's easier said than done, and the quality of an ending is ultimately a subjective thing. (A vocal minority, at least, will always complain, no matter what.) I think a better solution is to stop making so many sequels — to create more stand-alone games to be judged on their own merit rather than allowing so many new releases to ride on the hype generated by their predecessors — and, by extension, to stop making games that end in cliffhangers in anticipation of sequels that haven't been written. They should stop deliberately writing stories that span multiple games, thereby forcing players finish an entire trilogy (tetralogy, pentalogy, hexalogy, etc.) to find out if the final "ending" to a given story arc is any good.

They won't listen to me, though; cliffhangers are a fantastic way to make money.

In other news, Painkiller: Hell & Damnation is out today. Unfortunately, given that it's just about the newest game on Steam, it hasn't joined the rest of the Painkiller series as part of their Halloween Sale. That's not really a big deal, though, since they've set the standard price at a reasonable $20 instead of jumping straight to $60 regardless of quality like most publishers/developers do.