Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, July 24, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Toy Story 2 Meets Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone! The first Ratchet & Clank game was very big hit at Paris House. Dave had bought it on the recommendation of a sales clerk at the Metreon after describing the sort of games he and the household liked most: A cute fun game with high playability with an emphasis on exploration and puzzles. (Paris House was a Sonic and Super Mario household with a Metal Gear Solid and Madden Football console.) And that aptly described R&C which hooked all of us in, so much so that I looked online to Metacritic to see why it wasn't regarded as a top classic. Metacritic gave the game an 88, and loaded the score with lots of reviews in the low 80s, even though the blurbs of those reviews said things like: "A veritable masterpiece almost worthy of the stout Italian [Mario] himself," and "It is [...] head and shoulders above anything else currently available on the Playstation 2." (A review which Metacritic assigned the 70 rating.)It's not surprising: a lot of gamers and game reviewers eschew "cute" games. A lot of lip service is given to Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario games (and God help me, I actually knew how to spell Miyamoto's name on my own--I just went to Google to doublecheck the spelling) but the stuff is embarassing to a lot of American gamers. Playing GTA3 or Madden or a first person shooter is perfectly acceptable, but the Net is filled with dismissals of console RPGs as too cartoony or cutesy (no matter how complex the gameplay is), and you'll read a lot of embarrassed admissions of addiction to a game like Animal Crossing--embarrassed because of its childishness. Thank God, Paris House was filled with people in the early 30s and late 20s who had no qualms playing the awesome Super Puzzle Fighter Turbo until all hours of the night. And Ratchet & Clank, although a solo game, had a similar level of devotion. It was a shooter, it was a puzzle game, it had RPG elements, it had racing levels. I never finished the game thanks to an insanely frustrating final boss level but I had fun right up until then. Ratchet & Clank 2 came out while I was in the process of moving out of Paris House, and so I got the slightest taste of it until recently when Dave lent me his copy. I found myself sitting down to start playing it in earnest with a glow of anticipation. R&C2 had actually gotten better reviews from the gaming press--much more openly glowing--and everyone in the house had seriously loved it. So I was a bit baffled to find out I initially didn't like it much. I kind of had that feeling when I played it back in December, but chalked that up to the "all-packing! no-time!" final days of moving out. This time, however, I was overworked, exhausted and in serious need of that placidly active state video games put me in--a state where I recently found myself playing and enjoying less widely acclaimed video games (howdy, Red Dead Revolver! What's new, Hulk?) And yet...the camera control seemed worse than the first game. Clank was entirely absent from the action. The environments were pretty but repetitive and the weapons, while new, seemed to offer nothing new to them. There was also dogfights in space, exactly the sort of thing that had made me put Mace Griffin down, never to pick it up again. It seems almost impossible that a guy who grew up watching Star Wars wouldn't like playing video games with dogfights in space. It seemed impossible to me anyway, until the third time through the first dogfight in R&C2 where I found myself frustrated and bored. (I'm sure there's a good explanation for this, and I think it might involve my unwillingness to buy a joystick for my PC, but I can save it for another time.) But I kept playing because I really didn't have anything else in the household and I needed to decompress--God help me, when I get stressed out, I unwind by picking up a joystick and going "Zap! Zap! Zap! Zap! Zap! Zap! Zap!" And then at some point--I think about seven or eight hours into the game, R&C2 really began to grow on me, and now, right around hour 13, I'm really enjoying it. I've even had some more dogfights and liked them. And around the time of the giant robot battle on the visibly curved planetoid, it kind of sunk in why the game was good and why I had been frustrated with it (apart from the camera). The big concept in games these days is the "sandbox"--an open environment where one can go anywhere and do anything, a la GTA 3, usually working alongside a more conventional misson-based structure. Those and stealth games are my favorites, and the first Ratchet & Clank game had a lot of sandbox-like play without being truly open (in R&C you go back to the same environments again and again with new weapons and gadgets that open new areas, but it's all pretty contained--at best you have several different areas to pick from at a given time). The second R&C2 is less sandbox and more what I would call "activity book." It's not "go anywhere and do anything;" it's "keep playing and we'll give you new games to play." While this was somewhat true of the first game, it's hugely amplified for the second. I was initially frustrated by how tight a rein the game kept on information: I could never see more than one planet ahead; I didn't have a lot of different choices as to where to go next; and the plot was openly farcical and the objectives vague, much more so than the first game, leaving me with little idea why I was doing what I was doing or when it would be over. But last night when I had lost the plot and wasn't sure where to go to get the new gizmo that would open up the levels I needed, I ran around and rooted for crystals in the desert. When that was done, I mined raritanium out in the dunes. By the time I was done, I had figured out my next step. And if I had wanted, I could have gone back and done again any of a number of minigames initially completed. R&C2 also takes an idea to expand replayability from the first game--at the end of R&C, you can purchase upgrades to your weapons (with a currency hidden throughout the game) and then replay the game--and works it right into the heart of the gameplay: if you use a weapon long enough, it upgrades itself. So you find yourself using the weapons that you may not initially like, or may not be the best weapon for the challenge at hand, just to see what the cool upgrade might be: I didn't care much for the anti-gravity glove, but the mini-nuke it upgrades to? Very cool. So the longer you play the game, the more enjoyable it becomes. The traditional two-part carrot that comprise most video games (mindless twitchiness plus desire to see what's next) gains the third carrot modified from the RPG (how can I upgrade myself next?) and a potentially more powerful fourth: what game do I get to play next? What's the next page of the activity book? That Ratchet & Clank 2 caught me when I was at my most lackadaisical about video games, and after I was less than initially impressed, ranks it pretty high in the pantheon of good games for me, and may even point the way to another branching path for the quickly developing future of video games in general: it'll be interesting to see if or how other games (like, oddly, the new Mortal Kombat game) take and develop this concept. posted by Jeff Lester | 5:48 PM | |
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