November 19, 2010

By Michael Lowell

Sly 2: Band of Thieves
Playstation 2
Developed: Sucker Punch Productions
Published: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Released: September 14, 2004  (North America)

Note A: The Sly Cooper trilogy was just re-released on the Playstation 3. The series has a reputation for being some of the best platformers that nobody played. Let’s check in on that.

Note B: This review analyzes a game released during a previous generation. This review is not here to reflect player and critical reception at the time of the game’s release. It’s here to see whether those perceptions held up.

To understand where Sucker Punch got it wrong with Sly 2: Band of Thieves, you have to understand that it seemed like a hell of an idea in 2004. The industry was only three years removed from Grand Theft Auto III, and Rockstar Games firmly demonstrated their game was no fluke by repeating the success with 2002′s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.  Yeah, open-world wasn’t particularly new.  The world of computer role-playing had been delivering a brand of open-world for almost two decades, with Fallout and Ultima and a world of dungeon crawlers all sporting a major exploration element.  The difference?  Grand Theft Auto made open-world video games feel organic and alive; that non-player-characters and their low polygon counts were “leading real lives”, had “places to go”, had “errands to run”.  But what about console gamers?  Shit, for them, day became night.  Grand Theft Auto III changed the world of consoles.  Every developer was asking the question: “How can we capitalize on the success of Grand Theft Auto III?”  That’s how the slightly-conjoined universe of Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (a  bit of a swan song for the dreadful world of item-collection-based platforming) returned in 2003 with a sequel featuring a massive cityscape, automobiles to traverse it, guns to shoot their assailants.

It’s little surprise that a year after the release of Jak 2, the sequel to Sly Cooper’s platforming adventures received the same treatment. Both games were published by Sony and Sly Cooper was supposed to be the heir apparent to the throne of Crash Bandicoot, a series that sold millions during the late nineties without having to sweat.  Critics were thrilled with Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus but sales indicated consumers were not. The main criticism of that game was its length, as the game could be completed in seven to ten hours.  So why not kill two birds with a single stone?  In the way a role-playing game can have its “content doubled” by halving the amount of experience granted by kills, the mere act of getting to the next mission would require Sly to waltz around buildings and tip-toe by watchguards and dodge patrolling tanks and oh my God it will be awesome!  Grand Theft Cooper was a go.

The problem?  This is still 2004.  Nobody had quite wrapped their head around the open-world sandbox game…at least not those who were using Grand Theft Auto as their body of reference.  The sandbox game had grievous flaws that needed to be addressed.  Hell, they still do: How do you make level design interesting when you’re so busy hyping the size of your brand new game world?  You can’t.  If you’re developing the next Elder Scrolls game, you hype the grandeur of the locations the player will be visiting, not the positioning and location of hazards that make those places interesting to explore.  That’s why you add day-and-night cycles and wow audiences with “dynamic reflexive intelligence”.  You go bigger and more exuberant until you’ve finally fooled your audience into believing the smaller details don’t matter.   So let’s ask: What does Sly 2 do to become bigger and more exuberant in the absence of level design?

Well, it triples the number of playable characters.  Those two characters are Bentley the Turtle and Murray the Hippo, featured as supporting characters in the original game.  I can very easily explain the problem with this: You are designing a new platformer.  Platformers are at their best when the controllable characters display a level of acrobatic ability.  Sly Cooper does this and the game world is built for his strengths.  Hell, look at Mario in his three-dimensional debut.  Mario could triple jump, he could long jump, he could bounce off of walls, he could do backflips.  Mario could do all of these things that weren’t necessary in his less complicated, two-dimensional, side-scrolling affairs.  In order for level design to survive its new boundaries, Mario had to become a freak athlete.  His skill set had to become more complex.  His abilities had to be optimal within that open space.  Sucker Punch made the decision that their two new playable characters in their action-stealth-platforming game were going to be a turtle and a hippo.  That’s like designing the latest Assassin’s Creed game to chronicle the exploits of a man and his wheelchair.

This looks a lot more exciting than it really is.

In an attempt to distance themselves from any criticism that Murray and Bentley simply aren’t as fun to maneuver as Sly, Sucker Punch has loaded each of these characters with a diverse roster of abilities.  And just like in the previous game, these abilities are completely optional.  The player doesn’t acquire them as necessary, he purchases them.  And unless you want your platformer to become an intolerable item-collection endeavor similar to 2003′s Kya: Dark Lineage (a forgotten sixth-generation platformer that required the player to purchase critical items, amongst other grind mechanics), those purchases have to remain optional.  So the question is: Does the game grant the player incentive to purchase those abilities?  Not really.  Padding out the entire ability tree requires the player to grind for money.  The best way to acquire money?  Pickpocketing guards.  In these instances, it’s not about coins; it’s about collectibles.  The collectibles are worth a lot of money.  But these collectibles hinge on a drop rate.  In other words, the process of collecting money is no different than your girlfriend’s manic obsession with her favorite MMORPG.  In the pursuit of increasing access to the game mechanics, the player has to completely pigeonhole his playing experience.

As-is, the platforming can’t carry an entire game.  Sucker Punch places a lot of hope that mini-games and beat ‘em up sections can.  It’s a mixed bag.  Bentley’s “special ability” is hacking, which plays out in a series of run-and-gun shooting missions.  Think of these sections as some crazy compromise between Doom’s off-the-wall level design and Geometry Wars’ simple combat.  The problem with these sections is that they’re way too easy.  Remember, this is supposed to be “entertainment for kids”.  While the rest of the shoot ‘em up genre has been taken to its logical extreme with the bullet hell shooter, Sucker Punch wasn’t going to complicate things.  Needless to say, it suffers as a result.  As far as Murray is concerned, his specialty is kicking ass.  Once again, too easy.  The issue with combat in The Thievius Raccoonus was the game’s emphasis on stealth; being spotted by any animal with a firearm usually meant that you were going to take damage.  In a game where you could take a maximum of three hits before perishing (and more commonly one or two), that was a big issue.  In response, nothing has changed except for the addition of a life bar.  Sucker Punch chose the absolutely least-interesting route in making fisticuffs more forgiving: They simply increased the margin for error.  (It’s important to note that this also significantly harms any stealth incursions, since any mistake can simply be responded to with brute force, because “Hey, I have a life bar.  I’ll regain that health in a little bit.”)

Perhaps most aggravating?  Even as technology progressed and the game worlds in the Grand Theft Auto series grew bigger and bigger, there was never much of an issue in knowing where to go.  When the world layouts grew too complicated, Rockstar Games adjusted.  When Liberty City was redesigned as an archipelago in 2008′s Grand Theft Auto IV, the developers designed destination markers that were accompanied by an optimal traffic route.  This optimal route would be displayed in the minimap.  For starters, Sly 2 doesn’t even feature a minimap.  Period.  So how do you know where destination markers are located?  By repeatedly switching to your binoculars.  There’s a very big problem with that: Destination markers can be obscured by buildings and the environment.  And this game is in love with the Z-axis, whether you’re climbing the highest perches of aging statues or navigating city streets flanked by towering complexes.  And while destination markers will still display themselves when you unequip your binoculars, the destination markers will eventually fade out, requiring you to constantly use your binoculars in order to re-acquire your target.  “Obnoxious” would be rather disingenuous in describing it.  This is bad enough when you’re playing as Sly Cooper.  Now imagine trying to dissect your “optimal road route” with Bentley or Murray, who don’t have access to the chutes, ladders, and high-wire act that allows Sly to traverse the environment.

Navigating Sly Cooper’s universe is a hell of a lot more complicated than it looks.

And somehow, Sly 2 still weathers its issues and plays alright.  In the complete absence of level design is very good mission design, which uses the Super Mario school of philosophy (radically change the playing field from level to level and convince them you’re not employing a series of cheap gimmicks) and runs with it.  The mere act of navigating Sly Cooper through the various overworlds is still enjoyable.  In the total absence of level design, the platforming mechanics still work.  The camera isn’t perfect, but the controls are still tight.  As far as the implementation of the design is concerned (how well designs and concepts were converted into code), there’s really not a lot to be disappointed with.

But you know, I’m beginning to notice a trend with promising-but-ultimately-disappointing titles: Alpha Protocol delivered on real role-playing and screwed up everything else.  Enslaved: Odyssey to the West was a giant escort mission where your escort was infallibly intelligent.  These disappointing games always seem to effectively accomplish what they’re not expected to.  So dare ask: What does Sly 2 get right?  The video game aimed at children delivers one of the most intelligently written, humorous, and dark storylines you’ll find in a platforming game.  Sly Cooper is as much a badass as any of his assailants and the struggle between good thieves and bad thieves (portrayed as far more urgent than it was in the predecessor) comes to its logical conclusion: A band of buddies torn apart by the rigors of every anthropomorphic man and woman they had to cut down.   That’s at least worth some points on the review scale, and if anyone ever takes a break from playing Call of Duty so he or she can yell at you for playing “kid games”, shove this game in their face and tell them to shut the fuck up.

All of these minor victories and solid disappointments can be surmised with a single series of missions: During the later half of the game, you have to conduct a series of train robberies.  Rather unsurprisingly, these missions are literally on-rails.  They require you to move one car a time to the front of the train.  They require you to analyze the layout of each car.  Each of these cars can easily play on their own motif.  One car can require the player to jump from safe zone to safe zone.  Another car can require the player to hide in the shadows until it’s safe to make a run for it.  Sly 2 spends all its time introducing us to new playable characters and new abilities and gigantic overworlds and the series of missions featuring well-designed levels is easily the most entertaining part of the entire game.  That is, what The Thievius Raccoonus already accomplished with a degree of success.

So there you go.  Know how politics is all about the money?  How winning basketball is all about defense and rebounding?  Sly 2: Band of Thieves is an open-world take on Sly Cooper’s brand of action-stealth-platforming.  That is, an action-stealth-platformer without level design.  And guess what?  Good platforming is all about level design.  The act of successfully stripping level design from the platforming equation would have been some incredible achievement.  Sucker Punch tried and half-succeeded.  That ain’t good enough.

2 out of 5

(Games rated two-out-of-five will appeal to their target audience. But against the body of work produced in this forty-year-old medium? Against that copy of Beyond Good and Evil sitting on the rack for eight bucks? Yeah, it has issues.)

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Special Thanks To:

IGN’s Screenshot Gallery for the Pretty Renders

By Michael Lowell

January 7, 2011

Why Your Internet Boycotts Don’t Work

Fuck your internet boycotts.

Boycotts used to have meaning.  A part of human history wrote its damn legend with boycotts.  You ruined them.  That is, the internet ruined them.  The internet now empowers anyone with a cause to write that crappy mission statement and post it on the internet.  You don’t even have to fight for your own cause.  That’s what those millions of anonymous faces are for!  You just declare your intentions and let others fight for them.  So today, society boycotts biodegradable potato chip bags.  Huh, why?  Because they’re too loud.* The internet boycott has gone so unchecked that boycotters now have the gall to criticize other people and products for being annoying.

What, you thought video games wouldn’t earn the boycott rancor?  Hah!  Gamers will swear vengeance on reviewers who low-ball a review score and destroy a MetaCritic-driven narrative of “THTA AWSUM GAME THAT JUST CAEM OUT!!1″  You expect gamers to conduct a responsible and rational boycott?  To understand that you pick and choose your battles?  That modern boycotts are a megaphone for word-of-mouth in today’s twenty-four-hour news cycle?  Yeah, they didn’t think about it.  They won’t.  Thus, the “I’m boycotting Call of Duty 9″ audience has left a very pathetic paper trail; a paper trail worth examining.  Let’s use that paper trail to explain why video game boycotts suck, the ones that “succeeded” have sucked, and how you “boycott” a video game.

To explain that, we’ll start in 1992.  But why?  The public hasn’t caught a glimpse of broadband internet.  Hell, America Online hasn’t even made its rise to power.  What, you think people needed the internet to swear vitriol upon a video game?

See, Digital Pictures Inc. (and it’s okay if you’ve never heard of them) released a game by the name of Night Trap for the Sega CD.  What the hell is a Night Trap?  That depends on who you ask.  If you asked anyone who played the game, you’d know it is one of the worst video games ever produced, the crown jewel in the industry’s pathetic attempt to embrace the full-motion-video game genre.  Everyone else?  Well, they had their own idea.

According to a 1993 Associated Press news article, the goal of Night Trap was “to prevent a gang of black-hooded killers from capturing scantily clad sorority sisters [aged from teen to tween] and using a neck drill device to drain their blood.”  Sound scary?  Not if you played the game, filmed on a budget that didn’t include actual money.  In the documentary Dangerous Games, Digital Pictures Inc. C.E.O. Tim Zito asserted that Night Trap was an example of deliberate camp.  In other words, the final product was so intolerable that the company had to market the game as camp, in the way 2006′s god-awful Japanese horror game Necronesia was localized in the United States as the “so bad it’s good” Escape From Bug Island.

So what does Night Trap tell us about boycotts?  In that year of 1993, Night Trap earned the ire of the most powerful and visible force in human history: The United States government.  Apparently, select members of the Democratic Party needed to distance themselves from a sagging economy that would wreak havoc on the blue team during the 1994 mid-term elections.  So what became the smoke screen?  Video games!

In a hearing before the Governmental Affairs subcommittee on regulation and government information, Sens. Joe Lieberman, Herb Kohl and Byron Dorgan took turns respectively characterizing [Night Trap] as “junk,” “trash” and even “child abuse.”

These comments came after the senators had screened a 30-second snippet in which, to quote John Burgess’s report in The Washington Post, “three black-suited assailants enter a bathroom, grab a young woman wearing a flimsy nightgown, then attach a long, hooked device to her neck to suck out blood.”  The clip led many of the evening’s TV news reports, replete with anti-video-game-violence commentary spawned by Sen. Lieberman’s earlier observations on the product: that it was set in a sorority house, where the object was to hang women on meat hooks.  “These games teach a child to enjoy inflicting torture,” said Lieberman.

Opinion Piece from Tom Zito, CEO of Digital Pictures, Inc., published in The Cedar Rapids Gazette, December 22, 1993

If you think the modern perception of gamers and their Cheeto-crusted clothing is unfair, wait until you get a load of 1993.  One half of the American console gaming market was dominated by Nintendo, a company still maligned by a perception that their games are for “kiddies”.  The other half was dominated by Sega, who stole a swath of the Nintendo market share by convincing an older audience their product was edgy.  In other words, “kiddie games for teens and nerds”.  In other words, “Don’t defend this vile filth, kids.  I’m the adult in the room and I know what I’m talking about.  You’re violent miscreants and the world needs to know it.”  And without a global communications device (oh say, the internet) to tell Joe Lieberman that he needs to shut the hell up, politicians became the message and the authority on the topic.  Thus, Night Trap had it all!  From pedophilia to rape!  The message was as unopposed as one could dream for: “This game is violent, inhumane, and shouldn’t be on any retail shelf in this country.”

Night Trap wasn’t Mortal Kombat, the other product that drew the wrath of the government that year.  Mortal Kombat was what it was: An average fighter that used excessive violence to draw attention its way.  It became a cultural statement by doing so.  Night Trap was a game that nobody had played.  Leading into the 1993-1994 hearings that would admonish the entire video game industry and lead to the formation of the Electronic Software Rating Board, Night Trap had moved 100,000 copies in the fourteen months since its release.  Even by 1993 standards, that wasn’t much to gawk about.  The week after Night Trap became national news, it sold 50,000 units.  It would eventually and comfortably sell out its initial print run of 250,000 copies.*

So think about it: A political circus declared that a video game was child pornography.  This message was completely unopposed.  As a result, sales of the video game doubled.  So I ask boycotters: What the hell do you think “YOU’RE PERVIOUS GAEM’S KICKED ASS BUT IM LETTIGN EVERYONE NO IM GONA BOYCOTT THA NEXT ONE” is going to accomplish!?  In a game journalism news cycle that thrives on volume, boycotts are a godsend.  It’s true!  Never shutting up about a video game is a pretty good way to boost sales!  It doesn’t matter how negative the publicity is.  That’s why Electronic Arts organized a fake religious-themed protest against their own Dante’s Inferno video game.* That’s why Acclaim infamously offered to pay for the funerals of those willing to place a Shadowman 2 ad on the tombstone of their newly-deceased!* Why?  Because trolling the internet works in real life, too!

“But mikey lowelz WE NEW THAT!!1  ITS DUM TOO BOYCOTT GAME’S!”  It’s very possible you knew that.  But we needed to clear up why the video game boycott can never work.  Now we can discuss the internet-driven video game boycotts that have already occurred.  And we can now explain where boycotters screwed up on a game-by-game basis.

In September of 2008, Electronic Arts released Spore.  If you gave a passing shit about video games that year, you heard about it.  It was the work of Sim City creator Will Wright, a ten-year-development cycle promising the ultimate god game.  Famous game designer?  Check.  Long development cycle that often leads to “polished” products?  Check.  Game with mass appeal akin to The Sims?  Check.

To that point, computer games had been getting their ass kicked for roughly half-a-decade.  There was sentiment that Spore could be the beginning of a renaissance for the platform.  There was one problem: People whine about 2011′s Activision-Blizzard.  They had nothing on circa-mid-aughts Electronic Arts.  Medal of Honor was a dime-store, tactical-shooting prostitute before Call of Duty made it trendy and the Madden franchise was exploiting the benefits of an exclusive Electronic Arts licensing agreement with the National Football League.  That is, the franchise stagnated after Madden 2004 became a legitimate Game of the Year candidate.  The Electronic Arts catalog of lousy products was about to feature a weapon in the war against software piracy: Digital rights management.

It was the newest crazy from an industry that believed and believes it can stop unauthorized copies of their software.  The digital rights management issues with Spore had a special catch: For many years prior, the complaints about digital rights management was the isolated realm of hardcore gamers.  The best-selling games in the history of the platform (Myst, Starcraft, The sims) featured few restrictions on how the product could be used.  Spore was the first major, hyped-to-hell release that inflicted digital rights management on a large casual audience.  A whole lotta people who had no idea “what a DRM was” would have to call up Electronic Arts and ask why this “cracked version of Spore” was a better product than the one they purchased.

“Cracked version” is the key to understanding where consumers got their video game boycotts wrong.  Without understanding the ramifications, “cracked version” became the way that opponents of Electronic Arts measured their success in harming Spore’s sales.

Since September 2nd when Spore first appeared on BitTorrent, it has been downloaded a little over 500,000 times across various BitTorrent sites according to our most recent statistics. This download rate exceeds that of any other pirated game in history, and in a week or two from now it will be the most pirated game ever on BitTorrent.

As a comparison, Crysis, one of the best-selling PC games of this year has only been downloaded 420,000 times since it was released in November 2007. The Sims 2 currently holds the record for the most pirate downloads. There are no accurate stats for this game, since it was released long before we started tracking downloads, but we estimate that approximately 1 million copies have been downloaded.

TorrentFreak.com, “Spore: Most Pirated Game Ever Thanks to DRM”; September 13, 2008*

That mistake set the precedent for every following video game boycott.  The purpose of a boycott is to state that you have a moral or ethical objection to one or more factors involved in the creation, distribution, or consumption of a product.  These objections are so significant that you can live without this product.  In doing so, you generate sympathy to your position and force a change in business practices by creating an economic backlash to the boycotted product.  Got it?  Gamers didn’t.  Video game boycotts wouldn’t be measured by profit margins or sales tallies.  They would be measured by downloads.  Forget that pro-piracy advocates have long argued downloads don’t necessarily constitute a lost sale.  In the twisted world of video game boycotts, the consumer decided that creating millions of unauthorized copies of the product would generate sympathy to their position.  Riiiiight.

The moment gamers decided it was okay to boycott products by “downloading them”, they lost.  When you’re dealing with video games, you don’t get margin for error.  “Video games are for children and nerds.  Why waste your time getting worked up about them?”  That’s how non-gamers think.  If you’re going to be passionate about the product, you have to pick the right battles.  You have to make sure your message is a good one.  Well, the internet is a funny thing.  Watched the most recent American protest rally?  It’s ten-thousand people with a hundred-thousand agendas.  Anti-war protests will become one man’s epic staging ground for the legalization of pot.  There’s no organization and no way to control the message.  The internet is the same way.  Nobody can centralize the message and explain that “boycotting by downloading” is a terrible idea.

So you know what happens?  The majority of human beings can’t comprehend the nuances of software piracy.  They can’t understand that software piracy rates in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia and Russia and China are being used to argue for stricter software laws in Western Europe and the United States and Japan, the parts of this planet with the lowest software piracy rates.  These people just know that software piracy is evil.  So what do you think happens when you download a video game because “the company is a bunch of assholes”?  The outsider audience says, “Well…you just didn’t want to pay for the game.  Period.”

That does not sound crazy to most people.  After all, computer gamers have developed an impressive reputation for being spoiled and elitist.   For boycotts involving computer games, it would be incumbent on boycotters to prove they were not elitist.  That their actions may seem misguided but their intentions were honest; that people could relate to their message.   I mean, the fervor against Spore at least looked good on paper.  “Corporate behemoth” meets “game-crippling security restrictions”.  Nine months after the release of Spore, the people who believed in the video game boycott as an arbiter for change were going to piss any and all sympathy away.

Valve’s co-op-oriented first-person shooter Left 4 Dead was released in November of 2008, and while it wasn’t the first shooter to play the “me versus the endless horde” motif, it was a welcome change from a genre in cahoots with a tactical shooter fetish.  Left 4 Dead’s roster of straight-forward weapons, straight-forward monsters, and emphasis on level design invoked a lot of similarities to Quake and Doom.  A large swath of idiots overlooked these strengths and took offense to the meager cast of weapons and items.  For a first-person shooter audience that had become increasingly accustomed to weapon rosters with all brands of uselessness (Halo) and weapon rosters featuring five of the same weapon (Call of Duty), the lack of filler in Left 4 Dead was interpreted as “half a game”.  That is, “not a finished product”.

Valve informed its audience that they shouldn’t be worried.  And Valve was worth believing.  The company continues to sport the best post-release support of any video game developer outside of Irvine, California.  Left 4 Dead would continue to get support from the developer, whatever that support may be.  Valve also has an erratic history of getting their products to the public in a timely manner.  One only needs to look at Half-Life 2 and its always-delayed single-player content.  So yeah, the sequel to Left 4 Dead came as a surprise.  You know, the one that would be released in November of 2009, twelve months after the original title.  Console gamers had long conceded their favorite games were prone to a one-game-a-year production model.  This wasn’t news to them.  But the computer gaming audience used to getting years (and even decades) of replay value from the best that the personal computer had to offer?  Oh boy.  Time for computer gamers to act irrational and stupid.  The video game boycott was pointless to begin with, but the boycott of Left 4 Dead 2 marked the moment that no rational gamer could ever take a boycott seriously.  Fittingly using Valve’s beloved Steam digital distribution service as its staging ground,* the Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott became so.

When I heard that Microsoft and Valve had announced Left 4 Dead 2 I said to myself, “Hey, that’s cool. A follow-up to a hit videogame is about as surprising as a sunrise but I’m always up for a little more zombie-shootin’.” Good news, right?

Not necessarily. It seems lot of people were unhappy about the announcement, which they see as a betrayal of Valve’s “promise” to support Left 4 Dead with new content, and over 3000 of them have joined a new Steam Group called L4D2 Boycott (NO-L4D2), complaining about everything from Valve’s lack of commitment to Left 4 Dead to the new game’s overly colorful “visual aesthetic” and crappy fiddle music.

- Andy Chalk of The Escapist, “Valve Fans Form Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott Group”; June 3, 2009*

The Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott was built on the premise that they were not purchasing another Left 4 Dead game until Valve gave the players additional content and support.  That itself exists on the premise that the boycott leaders and supporters bought the game with the expectation of additional content.  That the boycotters had become passionate enough about Left 4 Dead in the absence of this content would indicate elsewise.  How do you think console gamers viewed that?  The major console online gaming service is the pay-to-use Xbox Live.  “Wait.  Are computer gamers complaining that they did not get free content to play on their free multiplayer?”  In 2007, gamers were boycotting products because of concerns with corporate strategy.  In 2009, gamers were boycotting products because “the game is too colorful” and “we didn’t get our free popsicle”. Computer gamers had upgraded their status from “spoiled and elitist” to “are you nutcases out of your fucking minds?”

Public perception kicked the shit out of the boycotters.  Game journalists™ kicked the shit out of the boycotters.  And then Valve kicked the shit out of the boycotters with one of the most brilliant public relations plays in modern video game development history.  In September of 2009, Valve paid out-of-pocket to fly the boycott leaders to the Valve studio.* You know, to explain that human beings existed behind that evil Valve facade.  And forty-five guilt-ridden days later, the boycott leaders pussied out.

We have accomplished everything we can on our manifesto. We’ve been dealing with Valve ever since our group started, then we met them in-person and now we’re at the point of concluding our discussions. Our goal wasn’t to steer people away from L4D2, it was to get Valve’s attention and have them support original L4D. We succeeded and that’s where our mission ends; nothing more or less.

Boycott co-leader “Agent of Chaos”, announcement on the Steam L4D2 Boycott page, October 13, 2009*

The Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott screwed a lot of people.  Namely, “anyone who ever wanted to raise concerns about a game development decision”.  This would prove quite ruinous to the computer gaming community in the following twelve months.  Electronic Arts’ status as “Most Evil Game Publisher” was being usurped by Bobby Kotick’s Activision-Blizzard.

The personal computer releases of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in November of 2009 and Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty in July of 2010 were cause for alarm.  Modern Warfare 2 lacked support for “dedicated servers”, the term given to the user-hosted servers long preferred for playing first-person shooters on the personal computer.  All games would be played through a new service called IWNet, literally a port of X-Box Live to the personal computer.  Starcraft II lacked the ability to play the game over a Local Area Network, the preferred method for playing real-time strategy games in any competitive or tournament setting.

Advertised as a deterrent to software piracy (and in the case of both products, it did little to stymie it**), the removal of these features were a consolidation of control over how the consumer could use his product.  It would force all traffic through the company’s exclusive online service.  The online service would discourage modmaking (a proven way to extend the shelf life of a video game) by requiring that online service to “sign off” on any modified code.  Unless the modmaking can be accomplished with a developer-created editor, it’s not getting to a multiplayer mode.  The online service could be used as leverage against sanctioning bodies who wanted to use competitively-played video games as a business venture.  The online service could be as a means of planned obsolescence, where companies can pull the plug on classic multiplayer titles even when demand is still hot.  (At the time that Microsoft pulled the plug on Xbox Live support for Halo 2, several thousand players were playing the game.)  And if any zealous gamers chose to emulate the online gaming service, the publisher could inflict legal action as necessary.

The outrage over Modern Warfare 2 and Starcraft II were valid.  Not because Bobby Kotick adopts animals from the shelter so he can run them over in the parking lot.  Not because they wouldn’t be able to play the game at the internet cafe.  The pissing match over Left 4 Dead 2 was a product quality issue; the fight over Activision’s products was a consumer rights issue.  On the expert opinion of business majors who never conducted an intelligent thought in their lives, Activision-Blizzard was deciding they could increase their profits by creating an inferior product; creating a product that gave the publisher more control over the computer code; creating a product that allowed the publisher to “protect their intellectual property”.

Is this the narrative the Call of Duty and Starcraft fans played?  Pfft.  What did they go with?  “OMGS WAT R U DOIGN BLIZZERD I PLAYDE STARKAFT WHEN I WAS 12 YEAR’S OLD ON LAN AN I ZERG RUSHT MY FRIEND’S A$$HOLE WIT MY PENISLISK AN NOW U RUIN LAN PLAY.”  And if Facebook and Twitter haven’t already taught us, no one really gives a damn about your “cool story” moment.  Gamers completely missed the point.  They would continue to miss the point when Electronic Arts proudly announced that the personal computer iteration of Bad Company 2 would include the dedicated server support that was missing from Modern Warfare 2.  That’s good?  The dedicated servers would have to be rented by an Electronic Arts-approved third-party vendor.  That’s bad.

You can bet games journalism™ had a field day with this.  They were able to paint together four facts: The online petition of a quarter-million-strong demanding the return of LAN play in Starcraft II,* the 100,000-strong petition demanding the return of dedicated server play in Modern Warfare 2,* the screenshot of a Steam-based Modern Warfare 2 boycott group and their insatiable first-day fetish for the game,* and the incredible sales of Modern Warfare 2,* which turned the Call of Duty franchise into the biggest yearly video game event in the history of the medium.  Game over, guys.  Game over.

The fight against Spore was the moment the video game boycott failed on an ethical level.  The retribution against Left 4 Dead 2 was the moment the video game boycott failed on a hearts-and-minds level.  The backlash to Modern Warfare 2 and Starcraft II was the moment boycotts failed on an intellectual level.  The boycotts didn’t work and they damn-well won’t work now.  So you probably want to ask: “Can you show me an example of consumer leverage that altered a major business decision?  One that will work in the future?”  I can.

Santa Monica, Calif.-based Activision Blizzard just put that question to many of its customers. In a post earlier this week on its Battle.net forums, the game developer informed players of its popular Starcraft and World of Warcraft games, among others, that they would soon have to use their legal monikers when chatting about their in-game exploits on its forums.

…

As of this morning, 74 pages of comments follow that post. The ones I’ve read don’t seem too positive about Blizzard’s move. Typical reply, from “Marine71″: “What an awful idea. Who comes up with this trash? Seriously. What happened to you, Blizzard?”

Other Battle.net threads debating the move dwarf that: On the World of Warcraft “General Discussion” forum, the argument now runs nearly 2,000 pages long–and that’s only for North American users.

Even think tanks have gotten into the debate: The Center for Democracy and Technology’s Sean Brooks decried Blizzard’s move in a post titled “Blizzard Looks To Chill Forum Speech with Real ID” on the Washington nonprofit’s blog.

Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post, World of Warcraft users blast Blizzard’s ‘Real ID’ rule; July 8, 2010*

Guess what happened?  After several days of on-and-off pissing matches, company president Michael Morhaime called off the plans.  Why?  Let’s understand something about pre-orders: The video game industry uses pre-orders a very good indication of how much inventory retailers will need.  In the case of Blizzard titles, which don’t require word of mouth to sell and attract substantial first-day buys, it’s very important.  Video game sales tracking website VGChartz followed the carnage.  In the week during or following the RealID fiasco declined by nearly a quarter.

Data acquired from Americas VGChartz’ pre-order sales charts.*

Because of a boycott?  Because of your impassioned Battle.net forum post where you outline that Blizzard used to make awesome games but they suck now?  Nope.  People cancelled their accounts and pre-orders.  They didn’t threaten.  They did.  They didn’t make Steam groups, they didn’t write miles and miles of “cool stories”.  They acted as shareholders and pulled out money from their investment.  Spontaneously and without organization.

And that’s what you do.  You’re always welcome to say “I’m not buying this game because of X”.  You can make those intentions clear and then you ignore the game.  You shut up about it, you don’t give the game any attention, and you ignore it.  And then when the game comes out, you go find another game to play.  And then you gush about that new game.

And guess what?  If you don’t like this article, boycott it.  I won’t mind the free publicity.

Return to the main page.

Special Thanks To:

IGN’s Screenshot Gallery for the Pretty Pictars

Additional Viewing:

The Digital Pictures Inc. documentary “Dangerous Games“, a multi-minute retrospective on the government backlash to Night Trap.  (Yes, the company made a documentary to defend their game.  That doesn’t diminish the educational value.  It’s worth watching.)

By Michael Lowell

January 7, 2011

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 (Reviewed on PlayStation 3)
Developer: Ninja Theory
Publisher: Namco Bandai Games
Release Date: October 5, 2010

Look, I make a conscious effort not to shit all over game development studios.  Game design is tough and thankless work.  But apparently, British-based Ninja Theory is engaged in trench warfare with Obsidian Entertainment to determine which game developer can move the highest up the food chain while accomplishing the least.

Ninja Theory’s first major release was 2007′s Heavenly Sword, and “hyped to hell” would be disingenuous in describing the pre-release cycle.  The hype train should have been a warning.  You didn’t hear much about the combat system.  You heard all about the cinematic experience.  “Look at the beautiful colors!  Look at the Oriental architecture!  Look at our non-traditional, red-haired female protagonist!  She’s almost properly dressed!  And Andy Serkis is doing some voice acting!  You know, the guy who played Gollum in Lord of the Rings!  Buy our fucking game!”  And then everybody found out why Heavenly Sword was hyped as a cinematic experience: It was a prettier, shorter, more straight-forward, less-replayable iteration of Dynasty Warriors.  And if your game can be discussed on the same level the Dynasty Warriors franchise, you seriously fucked up.

And as the story goes, nobody bought Heavenly Sword.  Some did, but not enough to justify the planned trilogy.  So certainly, Ninja Theory was going to learn from their mistakes and gamers wouldn’t be fooled again.  Three years after the release of Heavenly Sword, Ninja Theory emerges from their cave and gives us Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.  And what do we got?  A colorful take on the “post-apocalyptic universe” motif dominated in modern mainstream gaming by the Fallout series; a storyline drawing its inspiration from Chinese literature; a strong-willed, red-headed female sidekick; and a main protagonist voiced by Andy Serkis.

Son of a bitch.  Ninja Theory fooled us again, didn’t they?

Earlier in 2010, Heavy Rain became a sleeper hit by convincing consumers that crappy game mechanics are perfectly fine if you “play video games for their storylines”.  Apparently, these titles are usurping a market once dominated by Japanese Role-Playing Games, which won their market share by convincing consumers to overlook the terrible combat systems and buy into the genre as a storytelling arbiter.  But even JRPGs required a modicum of thought, forcing players to lay the occasional firestorm into a couple of ice dragons.  In the era of “dumbed-down video games”, Enslaved is some fierce accomplishment.  Not many video games have brought together mechanics from so many different genres and strangled them senseless in the name of “telling a story”.

It can be partially summed by your early-game crusade to capture a robotic dragonfly.  Your female compatriot Tripitaka (quite possibly a rejected Nariko model from the Heavenly Sword development cycle) is pretty good at the computer hacking thing and a flying scout would be the perfect tool for apocalyptica.  It’s your job as unwilling accomplice “Monkey” to chase one down.  After a pointless, soul-less, skill-less goose chase, you’ve earned yourself a new weapon.  Trip will use the dragonfly to front the player overviews of monsters, hazards, and how to reach Point B.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Batman: Arkham Asylum demonstrated that kicking ass can be a hell of a lot more fun with a second set of eyes, where you could get the run-down on a corridor before even stepping foot in it.  But see, the player never actually uses the dragonfly.  It’s a conduit for cutscenes.  You know, “telling a story”.  If there’s a turret, if there’s landmines, if there’s a weak point, the game will tell you if it’s important.  It’s not your decision to make, because apparently, you are stupid.

Don’t want to believe that’s the way the developers felt about the players?  Look at the core of the action-platforming sequences.  They’re best described as “Gears of War and you ain’t got a gun.”  In these particular scenes, you need to guide Monkey and Trip through the environment, which are typically laced with dull metal constructs that inflict death.  Sound tough, right?  Well see, Trip can create a temporary diversion, a decoy.  In other words, Enslaved actively restricts players from thinking outside of the box in the name of “telling a story” and one of its core components is a series of cover-shooting-based puzzles.  Pathetically simple cover-shooting puzzles where the greatest threat to the player is trial-and-error.  All to go with pathetically simple puzzle mechanics where the greatest threat to the player is sheer boredom.  Apparently, Ninja Theory was too scared to push forward with the potential of the puzzles, too scared to make their audience use their brain.  (Not that the use of intelligently-placed sentry turrets stopped Portal from becoming a smash hit or anything.)

So what is supposed to be the selling point of Enslaved?  Though this statement is rather disparaging to the exploits of Naughty Dog, the platforming in Enslaved is best comparable to the Uncharted series, another set of story-heavy, cover-shooting-oriented platformers.  Well, Uncharted controls very well.  Uncharted preyed on every bad experience you ever had with crappy three-dimensional platformers, where you always felt at risk  that the game would let you down with sloppy controls or bad collision detection.  Uncharted asked the player to “feel out” for available platforms, using Nathan Drake’s visual cues to determine the correct path.  And sure, the climbing sequences were on rails.  But you could always hit the circle button and forfeit Nathan Drake’s existence.   Enslaved is the platforming equivalent of driving while drunk.  And in Enslaved, there is no amount of button-work that will get Monkey to splatter himself on the ground below.  And even when you confront one of those “the platform is crumbling” moments, the player can order out for pizza before needing to make his way to safety.  Nothing about Enslaved’s platforming elements make the player feel insecure.  Nor does the introduction of a “cloud” (think hoverboard) do anything to help this, an inclusion in a number of platforming segments that’s barely even worth a mention.

So we’re left to combat.  It’s roughly similar to what players got in the Onimusha franchise.  It’s straight-forward, it’s not very complicated, and it’s not very fluid.  That’s not necessarily a horrible thing, but it only works if you stack the difficulty against the player.  Onimusha’s solution was to draw from the survival-horror playbook, forcing the player to conserve his items.  Enslaved’s orgy of health drops and checkpoints are so numerous that, like most of the game, combat ceases to have any difficulty at all.  And just like Heavenly Sword, it’s incredibly Captain Obvious when it comes to combat strategy.  If an enemy has shields, guard break them.  If it fires projectiles, dodge them.  This wouldn’t be so bad if combat had any semblance of structure, where crowd control means something.  (Of course, given how disoriented the camera can become during combat, it’s probably a good thing the player doesn’t have to worry about his backside.)  Ninja Theory tries to add some depth with an upgrade tree, but it falls victim to “decision-making without the consequence”.  You’ll earn more than enough currency to acquire nearly every bonus skill, anyway.  Ranged weapons don’t make it any more fun, either.  It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about the shooting elements or the game’s scattered rail-shooting scenes; the last decade of quality console-shooters is a carbon copy list of games that have done shooting better than Enslaved.

It’s simply maddening.  Every game mechanic in Enslaved feels like it has a safety net attached.  What other video games will restrict your run speed to build a more dramatic moment?  So that jamming the analog stick forward will force Monkey to walk side-by-side with her lady friend to soak in the words coming out of her mouth; to restrict the player to a jog because the current environment features no threat to the player?  The game is actively pre-occupied with being an “experience” and all of that combat and platforming is designed to be filler.  Well, Half-Life 2 was an experience.  Braid was an experience.  Uncharted 2 was an experience.  All of those games were pretty fucking fun.  Enslaved isn’t suffering from technical maladies, it’s just a game design process gone wrong.

Look at Enslaved’s beautiful game world.  Purely from a graphical standpoint, it’s an absolute change of pace from Call of Brown: Brown Ops, with blues and greens and bright colors and all that shit.  It’s quite similar to the art direction in Mirror’s Edge, which used muted elements in contrast with bright colors. And even though it’s the undisputed high point of Enslaved, it lends nothing to making the game fun.  For all the color, there’s no contrast.  It’s because of this art style that every climbable object has to twinkle in the sun, for fear that player would be at a complete loss in where to go next.  It’s because of this art style that mission objectives need to be overlaid with icons.  It’s because of this art style that Ninja Theory felt the need to include a combat upgrade that outlined color-coded states of aggression for enemies.  You know, because metal-bots-on-metal-backgrounds is tough to discern.  But even beyond that, the Enslaved universe is begging to be explored.  Ninja Theory wanted this game to be an experience, right?  It seems like they built this beautiful game universe and had no idea where the fuck to go from there.  It’s like they thought players would be so enamored with the initial impression of the environment that they wouldn’t care if it wasn’t interesting to explore.  Where are the environmental cues that sold the worlds featured in Metroid Prime and BioShock, where the player could learn more about the game world simply by examining a statue?  Those games effectively empowered players through exploration.  (Yes, freedom of exploration can do that.  Particularly ones where the entire environment is out to destroy you.  Hold your tongue.)  And what does Ninja Theory opt to do with the post-apocalyptic future of tomorrow?  Scatter the game’s currency throughout its hollowed walls and sprawling overgrowth.  And if anything makes me more curious about the fate of a destroyed world, it’s item-collection mechanics.  Yay.

Want to hear the one thing that Enslaved does right?  The game, after all, is a giant escort mission.  And we know how much people love those!  Well, Trip doesn’t do dumb shit.  She doesn’t run off and get herself killed.  If she dies, it’s totally your fault.  You could probably count the video game industry’s list of tolerable escort missions on a single hand.  Of course, it’s not a good thing when the best thing you can say about a video game is “it doesn’t fuck up escort missions”. Which makes it a shame that Ninja Theory was really set on this “telling a story” thing.  So don’t expect any cooperative play in your tandem-oriented, escort-mission, action-adventure platformer.  Or did I just siphon your remaining interest in playing this game?

I guess Enslaved can be surmised as such: It’s an open-world game without the exploration or freedom.  What’s that mean?  The philosophy of open-world titles like Fallout: New Vegas and Red Dead Redemption is that they can commit themselves to a master-of-none mantra by making exploration and an open-ended mission structure their biggest selling points.  Enslaved weaves a whole host of various genres together and doesn’t do them properly.  Then it confines them to a single set narrative and doesn’t do anything interesting with them.  Why?  Because this game was made for people who “play video games for their storylines”.  And I’m sure that will comfortably explain how come Ninja Theory has been commissioned to develop and create the next title in the Devil May Cry franchise.

Wait, what?

1 out of 5

(Games rated one-out-of-five have problems. Big problems. Unplayable? Possibly not. But even the target audience won’t find much to like.)

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Special Thanks To:

GameSpot’s Screenshot Gallery For The Pretty Pictars