two demos

[egypturnash]

Tonight I got to see two demos on lediva's XBox360 that were from two opposite corners of video games. Bioshock and Space Giraffe.

Bioshock struck me as lovingly polished, the work of some people who've been making first-person shooters for a couple of decades. A lot of craft and love went into it. it is a fucking gorgeous piece of work, a pinnacle of realistic visual styling in the realm of the FPS. But unfortunately, it's still.. a first-person shooter. One that's sitting in the same place for me that GTA3 is: too damn close to reality, and all you have is a hurt button. The only interactions that seem to be available are 'avoid' and 'destroy'. And the loving detail of blood soaking into a corpse as you beat on it with your wrench makes it pretty clear which one the game is about. Ugh. Really off-putting. Then the demo ends with a trailer for the many ways the full game has to kill people.

Space Giraffe, on the other hand, is probably just as off-putting to someone raised on FPSs. But to me, it's pretty much the essence of video games. Turn off the mind and fall into a void of pretty colors and sounds. Stuff blows up but it's completely abstracted: weird shapes turning into pixel showers, to the accompaniment of a echoing electro-chunk or a 'moo'. When you die, a phone rings. I still don't know why, but it made me giggle every time and really not mind that I died. It doesn't make any sense, and yet it makes perfect sense. And damn, is it pretty. Screenshots do it no justice. Space Giraffe is also a lovingly polished piece of work from someone who's been turning out their style of games for quite some time.

If I'd already sunk the $300 into an XBox360, I'd be much more likely to give Jeff and Giles five bucks for Space Giraffe than to give the many people at Looking GlassIrrational 2K Boston fifty bucks for Bioshock. There's probably many more man-hours per dollar in Bioshock but ugh, I dunno if I could even play through it once. The moment it started throwing lovingly-rendered blood everywhere it really lost me. I'd get a lot more play time out of SG, that's for sure. Hell, if it was possible, I'd give him five bucks right now for a download of SG I could keep somewhere, and load onto a 360 when they're available cheap and used because they're last year's machine. Bioshock? Maybe I'll get an abandonware copy in a half a decade like I did with 'System Shock 2'. If there's a 'let's not simulate every drop of blood soaking into the carpet' patch.

If you have a 360 and like the kind of games I tend to point to, go download that Space Giraffe demo (if you haven't already) and give it a few goes. Maybe ten - I only played it a couple of times, and could barely begin to see the overlapping rhythms of the game. It's subtle.

Comments

[pete23.livejournal.com]

jeff minter ftw! ungulents over violporn:-)

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

I think there's room in this world for both Jeff Minter and Ken Levine's visions. ;-)

[pete23.livejournal.com]

and the crossover?

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

If there's ever one, I'd buy it! But for now I'll have to be satisfied with Introversion's Darwinia.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

If you get Xbox achievements on SG you'll see my icon art. ^_^ I understand the resistance to an FPS like Bioshock, but believe me when I say that it is among the best and smartest game of its kind. And it's hard to have a scary game about insane genetic monstrosities run amok without blood and gore! Any FPS that inspires hour-long discussions about the nature of law, government, and objevtivism has to be worthy of some respect. But at the game's core, it is very much an FPS, and that mechanic has to be something you really enjoy to be into the game.

[xyzzysqrl]

Huh, that's your art? Awesome. I was kind of wanting to use some of it as a gamerpic for playing on Live, but that doesn't seem likely to happen...

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Nice Shofixti icon ^_^ I doubt yak would protest if I passed you the high rez originals, I don't know how you'd get them into Live, though.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

See, I kept on hearing all this crap about how Bioshock was going to be the most awesome game ever - they did a great job promoting it, that's for sure. But then I watch it, and it's just. another. goddamn. fps. judging from the demo. Beautiful art but it felt like it's really all about HEY HERE'S A CORPSE! COME RUB YOUR FACE IN ITS GUTS!

There may be some thoughtful plot buried under all the blood and guts, but I sure as hell don't want to spend thirty hours wallowing in virtual Objectivist giblets to find it. I really found it to be unpleasant to watch for just the length of the demo, and can't imagine putting myself through the whole length of it, as viewer or even worse as the player.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Well, for FPS fans like me, it is pretty much the most awesome game ever, because it's got airtight design that relies on modular game elements and not just theme-park style scripting, a great plot, AI that adapts to what you do and what other enemies do, environments that you can use, a good stealth model, some very scary moments that rival the best horror games I've ever played, and so on.

It's an FPS, but another FPS the way the Who are just another rock band. It's obviously going to be a game within the confines of its genre, Ken Levine and co. never denied that it's a FPS at its core. They're not subverting or reinventing the genre (really, Bioshock is a refined and perfected update to System Shock 2) that was never their goal. I can't really put it across how much better it is than most every other FPS I've ever played, if you already dislike FPSes. Much the way that I can't convince someone who simply doesn't like heavy metal how good Mastodon is. They are "another heavy metal band", one among many thousands, but they're the best.

[xyzzysqrl]

To be honest, the "don't kill this" button... results in one of the most heartfelt and touching endings for Bioshock there are.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

That's why I need to play the game twice. Gotta save all the Little Sisters!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It has one? All I saw in the demo was KILL KILL WRENCH BLOOD KILL GUN KILL PSYCHICBLAST KILL.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Right at the beginning of the demo, you see a Little Sister (the backbone of the economy of the game, they gather the psychic/genetic raw material that everyone uses for their powers) peering at you; there's a dozen or so of them throughout the game, you can choose whether to harvest them of their genetic material to make yourself more powerful, killing them in the process, or save them at great cost to yourself.

[pyro.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose you've ever played Rez? I think you'd like it quite a bit.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yes, I did. *grin*

[pyro.livejournal.com]

Aye, I figured you would have! I still have to.

[ysabel.livejournal.com]

I <3 Rez and my Rez vibrator.

[kajarainbow.livejournal.com]

Yeah, realistic violence and gore has always bugged me. Even back in the days of the Nintendo 64--this James Bond game (Goldfinger I think) horrified me with the faces people would make as they died and, well... even with those chunky graphics it was just too real for me.

I like blood, though, by itself. It's violent ways of extracting it that bothers me.

That's just one of many reasons FPS's don't really appeal to me. (There are others, such as a first person perspective far more chunky and impossible for me than real life's first person perspective.)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

More and more I'm finding myself sounding like a Concerned Mother with regards to stuff like this. Except I've personally felt these things chipping away at my soul as I play them.

There's a fuzzy line of abstraction and violence. Some kinds of video-game violence, I'm all for. But wallowing in something as up-close and personal as this? This is not good; this is not something we should be pouring this much money into. This is not an experience we should have so readily available for purchase. This is training in shutting off sympathy and becoming a homicidal maniac.

[shizouka.livejournal.com]

Bioshock has so far reminded me OF system shock 2. a lot of the gameplay is the same. Audio logs, PSI options, radio messages, even the skill/gene implants from special bonus (adam).

It had lots of plot twists, lots of things that were fun. I will try playing it later a different way... though I was hoping for a lot more creepyness in the audio logs like in SS2..

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It's a lot of the same people, and was promoted pre-release as 'the spiritual successor to System Shock 2'.

Which, you know, made me think it would be an interesting experience that would overcome my general distaste for FPS games. Until it started showing how really repulsive the things it makes you do are. Fuck that. I have enough trouble relating to people as is. I don't need something like this giving me another visceral, experiential lesson in dehumanization.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

From playing through Bioshock, a complaint might be that it's SO similar to System Shock 2 that you can even make comparisons to different levels in SS2 and Bioshock, and many of the game elements are identical (hacking turrets, security systems, vending machines, psychic powers) just more refined. Splicers in BS and the Many in SS2 do/say very similar things, Andrew Ryan is the Shodan role, and so forth.

But if you want an example of a more revolutionary, less-violent FP game, that game is Thief. If you play it on Expert, the victory conditions specfically state that you can't kill anyone, and in some levels you're not even allowed to knock anyone out. It's hardly an FPS, since the only shooting you do is with arrows, and on expert that consists of shooting noisemaker arrows to distract guards, and water arrows to douse torches. But it does take the FPS model and flip it upside down, where the goal is to acieve your objectives completely unnoticed.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

As it so happens, I've been playing Thief on and off the past week. On 'expert' because I know damn well that's how I'm going to play a game like that anyway.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

YAY You rule. ^_^


(I envy anyone playing Thief for the first time, there are moments in the Thief games that are really not duplicated anywhere else in gaming)

[shizouka.livejournal.com]

I hate to be a downer, but thats... Thats Tempest 2000 with super lights and sound stuff added in. I remember the game. o.o;

to me, it seems a bit of the same thing, a rehashing and repolishing of an older game.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

*shrug* I liked it. I was afraid, from the screenshots, that it'd be exactly that, but I found it has very different rhythms. It's another game in the very small genre of 'web shooter', which I think constitutes about ten games ever; it certainly has its roots in Tempest - but it's very much its own thing.

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

Space Giraffe : Tempest :: Ikaruga : Xevious

*smirk*

Don't be fooled by the vector graphics and similar basic mechanic. There are strategic layers to Space Giraffe that just aren't in Tempest.

Perhaps it'd be more appropriate to say

Space Giraffe : Tempest :: Street Fighter Alpha 3 : Yie Ar Kung Fu

because, yeah, both the latter games have the subtle theme of "dudes punching," but if you try to play something highly technical like SFA3 with the same techniques as you do an early fighter game, you're gonna miss out on 99% of the game play and end up like the poor dweebs from Official Xbox. :)

In short, you don't talk to Minter, man! You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet-warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll... uh... well, you'll say "hello" to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you. He won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say, "What's your score?"... I mean I'm no, I can't... I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's... he's a great man. I should have been a sexy goat scuttling across meadows of tall green grass...[/silly]

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

It's a really REALLY good repolishing. ;-) Torment is just Ultima with more stuff, Alpha Centauri is just Civ with more stuff. But it's the smaller decisions that makes games great.

[shizouka.livejournal.com]

I guess I'll have to wait till it comes out for the PC to try it, I kinda liked tempest2000, and fun dancy bleepy games do appeal to me.

Its just that when companies just reuse stuff. Ie: Strike commander (vs Total Annihilation) my expectations go up a bit. I don't want it to just be relabeled and rehashed. I've seen too much of it in hollywood, would rather it not be in any games I play.

Makes me appreciate the archaic arcade games more and more...

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

Check this out, Peg... Jeff Minter's on Livejournal as well!

http://stinkygoat.livejournal.com/

Re: Makes me appreciate the archaic arcade games more and more...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yep - I've been reading it for a while! The glimpses into his development process were pretty interesting.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

I gave Bioshock a complete pass, so it's been interesting seeing other people's experience with it. (In short, my experience is "FPS = I spend the entire game walking back and forth between the same three rooms and never realizing that I'm not getting anywhere new." I can't navigate first-person 3D without a physical body.)

Space Giraffe was really love-hate for me, though.

On the one hand, it's utterly beautiful. I could watch it for hours. The sound, and the twiddly shiny things, and the spinning twitching reflex-loop with the fingers...

But on the other hand - I can't figure out what I'm doing in it. At all. It's so shiny, and so sparkly-contrail-glowing-swirling that I haven't really got a clue what's interactive and what's just eye candy. How do you play it? How do you recognize what's actually "real," in the sense of "a game-object"? (And can it be taught? Because I really want to love a game so pretty and so far from stylized hyper-real killing.)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I haven't had a chance to dig deep into SG, just a couple of plays on Julia's 360; I don't think any more time with it is coming soon unless Minter releases a version for hardware we actually have, or I find a used 360 for fifty bucks once it's last year's console.

Picking out the game objects from all the swirly is clearly one of the crucial skills for this game. I dunno. I didn't have problems with it in my few plays of the demo, but I only got to level 10 or so. And there are times I describe my body as basically being a support system for a massive visual cortex, for recognizing patterns and cycles and either observing them or tuning them out. SG does seem to ramp the effects up as it goes on, so maybe just playing up to the point where this breaks down for you, and then repeatedly attacking the levels right on your threshold of seeing would train you in this particular kind of vision?

Vision can be trained. My animation training has given me the ability to detect a single frame of film that's printed twice - 1/12 of a second rather than 1/24. I couldn't do this when I was a kid, but I picked this up somewhere along the way in the years of looking intensely at How Things Move.

[arakinuk.livejournal.com]

Have heard really good things about SG, and I was delighted to find I'd played one of the developer's earlier programs "Revenge of the Mutant Camels" (this back in my Amiga days I believe).

I do enjoy Bioshock, although it was hyped quite a bit (that said, I fully bought into the hype and have a fragile-as-glass-cheap-resin Big Daddy model to show for it).

One of my favourite (recent) games has to be The Longest Journey. The point-and-click adventure had quite a lovely story line. Then there's The Lost Vikings on the PC (and later the GBA) which was a sublime little puzzle adventure.