Gonzo Pt 2 - Return of the Shark

I’ve torn up two other introductions to this piece already, so this is as good a start as any. I’m mildly drunk as I’m writing this (gonzo) and feeling rather quite ill – but I think it’s more to do with my intolerance to lactose than to any real level of alcohol poisoning. Then again, what do I know, I’m feeling very stupid and ignorant right now which is probably less of a delusion than the regular brand of self satisfaction. I could probably power a small car off that thing – like that episode in the Simpsons with the inventor who is so proud of his Green Cred that he invented a car to run of his own satisfaction. Yeah, I could be that guy, but not right now because my stomach is reminding me that I’m mortal and my throat has a minty taste in it that is making me feel like retching.

And I’ve blown my lead on 2:44 am post-drinking un-wellness. Thompson would be proud. And honest to goodness, after finishing that sentence I just rushed off to the bathroom in a fit of nausea.

So – videogames. Sexy, Sexy Leigh Alexander mentioned over twitter just the other day how tired she was of talking about, writing about, thinking about, even playing videogames. And I must confess to a brief spell of the same – except that I’m not over writing about them, which has become more and more fun as I’ve gone along, while still somewhat being less excited about playing them (or some of them at least). Probably a fair bit to do with how much fun it is to write in the Gonzo style, and while done poorly it is massively self-indulgent, when good it’s great. In this follow up to my first (moderately well received) Gonzo piece I had thought to go deep gonzo in some serious game from the recent past. L.B. Jeffries (Hey L.B., we need to drink together some time!) of the Banana Pepper Martini’s blog and the moving pixels blog, gently directed me in the direction of Braid which I would be more than happy to do except I don’t want to spend the money (This is not a hint for someone to buy the game and gift it to me – that has already happened far too often in times past and I really don’t think that sort of thing should be encouraged. Or at least I should not be encouraged in that manner – it’ll just delay the onset of the ruthless urgency to find gainful employment that I know has to come soon).

My next thought was Fallout 3. But that’s almost too easy a target for batshit insanity, so I thought I’d pass. Also I don’t really like Fallout 3, so any excuse will do. I also briefly considered Bioshock, because it’s a pretty decent game (I also owe Michael Abbott a game review for it – but that’s neither here nor there) and seemed to possess enough of the requisite chin-strokey seriousness that a gonzo style dive piece would benefit from in its subject. It’s certainly long enough to generate some hilarious anecdotes that I’m sure could benefit enormously from a bit of hyper-inflation and dramatic retelling from the first person. However, like Fallout 3, I didn’t really enjoy Bioshock all that much – certainly not to the same extent as many, many fellow game bloggers. Actually, on second thoughts, maybe that’s a decent enough reason in itself – perhaps it’s a way for me to get into the game from a different perspective, or to vilify it and explain why as I seem to recall it didn’t manage to live up to the hype for me. How much was hype affecting me the first time I played it? I’d hazard a guess quite a fair lot actually. Hype, as a target in itself, is probably more than well overdue of a seriously trippin’ expose piece.

But maybe not right now. The third game I thought of and which I’m probably most inclined to actually pursue is Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time. Yes, the classic game which just received a rather iffy reboot/sequel recently, because it seems to me that game has been praised quite a bit and often without much of a clear articulation of what’s so great about it… but then, that’s not even really the point of a gonzo piece is it? It’s not supposed to praise a game, nor to analyse (unless you had a marvelous experience with it and there’s a great story to tell). It’s more about mulling over and relating to a reader as intimate a sense of the experience as can possibly be rendered unto text. It’s a skill I feel I’m getting a little better at and even if I’m not noticeably improving, like I said, it’s still hella fun. There’s a reason Thompson stuck to it like some suitably sticky metaphor.

So my last idea was to do something on Spore, that procedural wunderkind that sprung from the mental loins of Will Wright. Spore is crazy. Sharkbite & Powershot crazy. The amount of soft-core Sporn creatures out there is truly staggering, but unless I want to feel the wrath of the EA Banhammer I think I’ll stay away from them. But I do think that making a landshark and walking around eating other procedural monstrosities could be fun, if only for a while. And the procedural music in Spore is pretty awesome too – there’s a post in me about that, somewhere. Actually, if it had come out early enough, and if I’d played it, it could seriously have gone into my thesis for an extra 1,000 words over my limit, just because it’s so close to this imaginary ‘ideal’ that I had for videogame music. The fact that the music in particular didn’t exactly make massive waves in the industry is not a very encouraging sign. Still, if a company wants to hire’s me (even freelance/contractor style) I’d be happy to write you a paper on why the music was so good. Hell I’ll probably end up doing that for free before long, David Carlton just finished Spore and was looking for more posts on the game. And I’m a sucker for any guaranteed readers something’ll get me.

Which is all a long winded way of saying that I don’t really know what game exactly I’ll be putting on my wizard hat and cloak for, this coming week. Be sure that when this author does, however, it’ll probably be somewhat slapdash, substandard and of questionable literary merit.

Yeap, I’m pretty sure it was the milk that did it earlier because that lacteeze tablet I took has worked like a charm. Now I think I can go to bed and sleep until I wake up. Bloody hell it feels good not to have chills from suppressing the urge to retch.

In which I post my first ever review: Saints Row 2

So this is the first ever review I've done for any outlet, ever. It's not been published yet (will it? who can say.) so I thought I'd share it with my readers if for no reason other than this game is Batshit Effing Insane... if you want to employ Ben for a game review (will accept food or games as payment) feel free to contact me via email or blog comment.

Edit: This review is now live in it's final form here.

Saints Row 2 is set in a parallel universe from our own, in which gun fights and massive explosions are so commonplace as to become everyday for the inhabitants of Stilwater. The police bat nary an eyelid at your antics as you mow down pedestrians in a bulldozer, doing little to stop the brazen killings and wanton destruction. Choose your weapon of mass demolition. Feelin’ gangsta? Dual wield some Desert Eagle types. Feeling a bit in the mood for some Yakuza-style samurai executions? Borrow a sword from a friendly Ronin on a passing motorbike. He’s not a member of the Saints, so it’s okay to murder him. It’s apparently cool.

“What did you expect?”, quips my middle-aged, ‘west coast Latino’ accented protagonist after another kill. Having not played the original Saints Row, I didn’t really know what to expect. I wanted to create some kind of rationale for my female lead character, however, I wanted some pretense of a credible history to help explain why this middle aged woman had gone mad with rage and no longer seemed to identify other human as worthy of receiving their basic human rights. Let’s pretend that her kids were killed and, now that she has nothing to live for, decided to become a gang leader as a 30-something – your standard revenge story, yeah? So anyway, the start of my experience with Saints’ wasn’t a good sign that the rest of the game was going to be ‘all there’, nicely polished to perfection. After exiting the somewhat hit-and-miss character creator at the very start of the game, I was treated to an intro cut-scene with (surprise, fool!) no voice track. Ah, well played Volition - this must be some kind of trick to make it difficult for me because I’m just such a Pro. When it came time to bust out of jail by beating up a single doctor and a few guards, followed I might add by what has to be the worlds easiest/slowest jail-break ever, I didn’t really have any idea what in the world I was doing.

But that turned out to be actually rather okay.

This review is probably in danger of becoming a ‘how I learned to stop worrying about inconsistencies and start loving Saints Row’ review, so allow me to explain. If one were to focus on all of the strange goings on within the world of Saints Row you would have to conclude that, more often than not, it just doesn’t make sense. As in, none at all. Mow down ten to fifteen rival gang members on one street corner and then, inexplicably, there’s another bunch just round the corner, all fresh and ready to have a cap busted in their collective asses. The AI is pretty whacky at times too; I had some pursuers charge blindly off-road after me, only to promptly fall into and get trapped in an empty swimming pool. I’ve also seen retiree’s sitting on their lawns typing on their laptops, while two more laptops protrude at right angles from their thighs. Hmm. Pimps, casually strolling down the street with Yankee-doodle style feathers in their caps (and heavy jackets, in ‘the heat’ no less) turn on passing police cars and beat down their occupants like they were owed money. Double hmm. At a million points throughout this game I could barely restrain fits of hysterical laughter at the strange absurdity of one or other situation. And no one else seems to notice.

So, perhaps inevitably, neither do you. And when you start to accept the inanity of this world, you start to realize that Volition have actually made a really, really decent GTA clone. Granted, it is just a GTA clone – you’ll find little that’s ground-breaking or genre expanding in Saints 2 – however it still manages to be quite fun, even intentionally humorous at times. Much of the situations and dialogue skate the thin line between taking the piss and treating the slaughter of (literally) hundreds of rival gang members somewhat seriously. When one of your Saint brethren, upon seeing a stripper, remarks “Damn those are nice boots!” it’s genuinely quite a funny moment. It’s also hard to tell whether the developers fully appreciated the irony of setting a mission during a funeral – by that point so many others have been slaughtered in your ambitious gang-advancing rampage that caring about the funeral of just one person seems incredibly nihilistic. It’s like mourning the death of a Nazi prison camp guard in the middle of the holocaust – yes they were indeed a person too, but remind me again what the difference was of this person from all the nameless masses that went before, and why you don’t care about any of them? I assume it was supposed to instill some dramatic tension, however it once again comes over as just another ‘WTF???!’ moment, for better or worse. Maybe by this point you’ll be like me and stuck somewhere between genuine horror, and laughing at how hilariously B-grade it has all become. Well actually, who am I kidding, it’s probably deliberately B-grade, and I guess that’s part of its charm. Again, take it too seriously and the flaws really start to show; switch off your brain for a bit and it’s quite passable as fun.

Key to the joy of Saints is that it runs almost constantly at the full 60 frames per second, or near enough to not notice. Even when the police-car you’ve hijacked smashes into some pursuing officers and explodes in a flurry of sparks and the High Def propagation of super-advanced particle systems, the Xbox 360 keeps chugging along. A note should be made about the quality of the world that has been created by Volition – there’s no loading between city sections and generally it presents an adequate level of detail.

Difficulty is rarely an issue. For some select occasions you are given infinite ammunition for your weapons in the interest of being able to kill all those pesky Brotherhood gang-bangers from up town without having to pop into a corner store and buy some more bullets. In the end it hardly matters that there is always more of them than you as generally nothing short of an RPG to the head will kill you. Try standing on a grenade, and watch as the hilarious, Havok powered rag-doll physics kick in. Get blown high into the air, and tumble to the ground. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and keep on keeping on, like some kind of insane Duracell bunny for videogames. There’s also some pretty neat full-screen effects similar to what you get in Call of Duty 4 when a grenade goes off in your face – it will make your vision and hearing go all dull and fuzzy. Alternatively, get sprayed by a cop with a bottle of mace and watch as your eyes water, distorting the screen into waves. May I suggest you remedy the situation with a prompt shotgun to the face? The guy had it coming, by the way, apparently all the cops in Saints are crooked. There’s a story here about a big corporation having the city in their pocket, etc, etc, nothing particularly experimental is going on, but if you want to ‘stick it to them man’ Saints Row 2 certainly gives you plenty of opportunities to say ‘Fuck You’ to the establishment. One side mission sees you spending some time spraying feces from a septic truck around an area of the city inhabited by corporate high-fliers. Not my favorite mission-type; that spot is reserved for ‘trail blazing’ in which you drive around on a quad-bike, while on fire, blowing up conveniently placed barrels of gasoline, car, people. Yes that really is the type of game this is.

One last thing of note, and actually one of the better aspects of Saints, is the in-game radio (again, unconcernedly riffing on the whole GTA series) which has a bunch of fantastic songs from some genuinely big-name bands. Hot Chip, MGMT, Does it offend you, Yeah? and Panic at the Disco are all on the radio and there’s a bunch more from other styles of music on the reggae, rock and 80’s stations. Quite a surprisingly solid selection however Volition have clearly chosen quality over quantity for Saints, as there’s only about 8 or 10 songs for each station.

Let me sum up the game by using the character creator as an example – it’s really, really great for some things (pimps, ho’s and awesome cornrows) but it is also quite, er, average when it comes to others – specifically any non-black Gangsta that you can make. The Asian fellow that my younger brother sculpted is rather so-so, and my own Latino momma… well let’s just say she doesn’t look much like a momma. So why did they bother including the creator then? I think Volition would have been better served to stick with the GTA style single type of protagonist approach (think Tommy Vercetti in Vice City) or narrow down the choices to a small number of more appropriate characters. Thankfully, like the rest of the game, it gets better and via the magic of in-game plastic surgery you can change anything and everything you didn’t like about your character.

One last addendum: the game is, how shall I put it, “buggy as all hell”. I have heard story after story of glitched up missions, weird behavior generally and a couple of more serious crash bugs. Still, my verdict stands – if you don’t mind some brainless mayhem, Saints might be a game you could learn to love.