Feature: View to a Review

Ever since its humble beginnings in the late 1970s, the practise of playing video games has been long sneered at, with smug contempt, by every corner of the arts world. It is seen as adolescent (even though the largest market is the 21-30 age group), anti-social (because reading a book isn’t) and anti-cultural, lacking the intellectual integrity of more traditional art forms. And, without doubt, this reputation is justly deserved. Rather than emphasising the importance of imagination and artistic vision, mainstream games journalists are instead keen to push the soulless pursuit of technical perfection, at all costs, with little room for manoeuvre. The reasoning behind this, I believe, lies in the traditional scoring system that, over the years, has become institutionalised almost to the point of decree, suffocating the misfits, the outcasts and the occasional geniuses in the manner of a school exam paper.

When a game is reviewed, it is often scored on sub-scales which denote, with almost mathematical precision, the merits of a title’s component parts. ‘Graphics’, ‘gameplay’, ‘sound’ and ‘longevity’ are the usual suspects, apparently the main criteria by which any game should be judged, the reason we buy games; they look good, play good, sound good and last good (not, you may be thinking, because they are original, thought-provoking or artistic).

The most contentious of the big four is ‘graphics’ which, in the games industry, might as well be represented by a big, fat dollar sign. The reason one game looks better than another, from a technical point of view, is simply a matter of money - studios with greater cash reserves can employ more staff to work longer, no doubt using better equipment. As technology continues to advance and more realistic techniques are developed and utilised (such as post-processing, anisotropic filtering, anti-aliasing, real-life physics and lighting), the smaller studios will be forced to accept that, in review terms, their games will always be starting a few points behind.

Artistic divergence in the industry is seemingly frowned upon as a dangerous form of deviancy, chained to a bygone era, nothing more than a worthless distraction when a faceless marine can shine a light on swaying grass and cast a real-time, high-resolution shadow. Cel-shading - the bright, blocky, cartoon style of thick black lines and bold colours - is now an industry in-joke, a failed experiment, forced to hide its pretty face in niche titles.

Killer 7 - arguably the best-looking game on PS2

Meanwhile, games built around the Doom 3 engine are lauded as glorious landmarks of the highest order and presented as the pinnacle of the form’s achievement, reaping countless stamps of four-star saleability because, let’s face it, no-one makes five-star games anymore. All that games like Quake 4 and Prey achieve is corridors, corridors, and more corridors, metaphorical and physical; shiny, claustrophobic, silvery boxes with just enough room to circle strafe and absolutely nothing more (it wouldn’t be economical). Ten hours after the opening credits, you’re still in a corridor, trapped inside the maddening steel asylum, praying for the last cutscene, praying for the big thing with weak points on its back, praying for a release. If Prey were a film, it would be ten seconds of footage from Alien looped over and over and over for twelve hours. And not the chest-bursting bit, either.

Speaking of another primarily visual medium, if a film review were to discuss how the latest release looked, would it mention the image resolution? Of course it wouldn’t, it would measure the authenticity, the ambition and the artistry of the images. Modelling miles of corridor is none of these; it is simple, boring and artistically redundant. So why the high score for graphics? The only explanation is that marks are being awarded for the engine’s visual capabilities, but such an approach is akin to rating a camera, a pair of headphones or, sin of all sins, judging a book by its cover.

Prey - Look at all that gorgeous metal!

Two of the other common criteria under the microscope - longevity and sound - are almost as baffling. Firstly, whoever devised the idea of measuring a work of art by its physical size must, to say the least, have peculiar taste. Very few seven-hundred page novels are a Gravity’s Rainbow, very few hour-length records match London Calling and, as films go, for every Godfather there are ten Deer Hunters. With the costs of committed gaming remaining astronomically high, concerns regarding value for money are valid, however I assure you there is far more value in four hours of Metal Gear Solid 2 than Doom 3’s never-ending slog. Don’t misunderstand me here - I am the first to immerse myself in a hundred hours of each new Final Fantasy - just know that, if I commit time to a game, I should do so through want rather than need. In other words, I want to be lost in a different world, not eyeing the clock with a solemn frown, tallying the hours as they slip away.

Sound is the viola of the bunch - the member of the quartet that often finds itself at the bottom of the pile, ironically making the least noise, more often than not to make up the numbers. After all, what is sound but a few nice effects and the odd orchestral piece here and there? Technically, I suppose, it is, but string arrangements need orchestras and footsteps need studios - both of which cost money. Even more outrageous is when a game is complimented for having a good array of licensed music or high-quality voice acting, both akin to complimenting a film on its budget or an album on the cost of the recording studio.

The inbuilt bias towards wealthier companies is only half of the problem, however, given the extent to which in-game sound is currently viewed as nothing more than elaborate, slightly pleasant but ultimately inessential window-dressing. To reviewers I say this: where would Deus Ex’s chilling atmosphere have been without its concave techno minimalism? Where would any of the Silent Hill Games have been without Akira Yamaoka’s brutal noise assault? Though the answer is not quite “nowhere”, it is certainly a case of either “elsewhere” or “anywhere”.

The fourth and final yard stick for assessing a game’s merits in traditional games journalism is the concept of gameplay. What this means in reality is not, “How enjoyable/fresh/exciting is the game?” but, rather, “Does the game have any technical faults?” If the answer to the latter question is “no”, the gameplay is considered perfect and, in the case of any errors, reviewers appear to work backwards from the top score. Dodgy camera? Minus one. Bad collision detection? Minus another. An absence of detachable limbs and breakable crates? Simply unforgivable.

Rather than rewarding creativity, ingenuity, risk-taking and originality, this negative approach punishes games according to a remarkably narrow-minded, almost Puritanical, petty set of guidelines: “I don’t care if I was forced to question my own existence,” complains the critic, “because, without a quick turn button, I had to rotate my character manually.” This, in another lifetime, might also have been my assessment of Silent Hill. Thankfully, it wasn’t.

Lacking the open-minded input of constructive criticism, films might still follow straightforward, chronological plot lines, all books would have a beginning, middle and an end and songs would have a chorus to every verse. This is an especially pertinent issue in a games industry where critics are relied upon more than in any other art medium, where games cost ten times as much as a cinema ticket and where the cost of failure is thus higher than the reward of ten great successes. Tellingly, the closest the games industry has got to a Lynch is Suda 51 who, without wishing to sound disrespectful, is more ‘Blue Monday’ than Blue Velvet.

By basing their reputation on not upsetting casual players, games journalists are being deconstructive and, ironically, restricting themselves. Scores out of ten have taken on a kind of concrete, mythological symbolism; seven out of ten has, almost without fail, come to indicate an average game, while eights are reserved for shallow, good-looking titles, six is for film tie-ins and console strategy games, five and below is for any company not likely to take offence and the hallowed perfect score, reserved for console mascots, is almost always met with murmurs of discontent: “But how can this game have got a ten? There’s some sound clipping on level eight near the east side of the waterfall.”

Gears of War - another "great" game...ugh

What I propose (and what I attempt to practise in my own reviews) is a policy of less structure, less maths, less negativity, fewer trivialities and a greater spread of scores. If a game is well-produced but worthless as a work of art, it deserves a three or four, not an easy eight. Conversely, if a game reinvents the wheel before crashing spectacularly, a six is more appropriate than a two. Games which make an important artistic and/or cultural statement should be rewarded with the maximum score (I’m thinking along the lines of Thief, Resident Evil, Grim Fandango, Final Fantasy VII, Deus Ex, Half-Life, Silent Hill 2, Operation Flashpoint, Fahrenheit or Killer 7, to name a few) rather than ones which do everything well enough so as not to be at fault (Freedom Fighters, Black, Splinter Cell, Halo). Also, it is crucial to note that not being fallible is a far cry from being infallible and, even more importantly, that developers and publishers will continue to churn out such wearyingly safe titles if they cannot help but witness such glowing approval.

The quickest way for the games industry shed its image as the boyish, pimply, confused cousin of music, movies and literature is to no longer tolerate the derivative and unmotivated menace that has plagued the industry for so long, instead embracing the weird and the wonderful rather than the type of shallow, proto-fascist bilge legitimated every time Gears of War earns a gold star. The most effective vessels for this sea change are the yellowing keyboards of games journalists around the world who, with the right motivations and the right intentions, can change the way we play games forever and, finally, put an end to that debate.

Feature: The Art of the Anti-game

Unlike almost every other cultural medium (literature, art, music, film), displeasing the recipient in a video game is regarded as an unacceptable fault, essentially a sign of weakness on the part of those responsible. The problem lies in the perception of the role video games have to play in society. To many, the clue is in the name, with the purpose of a game to please, to entertain and to occupy, acting as a pleasant distraction from the bad-tempered adrenalin rush of modern times.

However, while respected musicians have indulged in noise and drone, celebrated authors have streamed their conscience to great acclaim and revered movie makers have delighted in not making sense, few (if any) video games have ever been successfully recognised or applauded for being deliberately bad, clichéd or difficult. There are many examples I could cite for the purposes of this essay, but the two I will discuss are a pair which I believe to be among the most important anti-games - Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Silent Hill 4: The Room. The former is essential because it was heavily criticised yet still regarded as instant classic, but for all the wrong reasons, while the latter is even more impressive as an example of the type of game which knowingly makes off-putting design choices, almost purposefully inciting derision purely for thrill of being perceived a failure.

Throughout the months of trailers leading up to the release of MGS2 we were treated to more than enough shots of the Playstation 2’s unofficial mascot, Solid Snake, cavorting aboard an oil tanker in the Hudson River. However, when the game was released, Snake was only playable for the first fifth of the game (the section included on the pre-release demo), before the player was suddenly burdened with a young, blonde, androgynous, idealistic and sentimental protagonist by the name of Raiden. This was a stroke of genius for so many reasons, the most notable of which was the deliberate exclusion of the reason many people may have bought the game in the first place.

Tough, masculine and oh so heterosexual, Snake was as formulaic a hero as you might expect to find in any cheap and cheerful action game/movie/book. He was Slash, Jack Ryan and John McClane all rolled into one, definitely cool and definitely male; all the men wanted to be him, all the women wanted to be of him. Raiden, on the other hand, was more of a Ziggy Stardust or a Travis Bickle - unsure, awkward and unwanted - and rapidly became the most loathed character in videogame history.

And all this from Hideo Kojima, the industry’s bright light and the one who could not stop sounding off about why he loved Bond films, why everyone loved Snake and why games should be more like movies. And then, when everyone had their backs turned and was relieved to be approaching the end of the game and the end of Raiden, he plunged in the knife, turned it into a movie, complete with half-hour cutscenes, nonsensical plot developments and thousands of lines of radio dialogue heaped on top of one another, pushing the player’s patience to breaking point. “You made your bed”, he whispered, “now lie in it”.

The game was also infused with a unique blend of magic realism that many found off-putting, featuring a vampire, a fat guy on rollerblades who plants bombs (called Fatman), the return of a ninja character and, perhaps most significant of all in videogame terms, a physicallyunattractive female character. The hairy, crop-topped, treacherous Olga was such an affront to video game convention that, even today, she remains the only significant character of her type that I can recall.

In such a conventional setting (New York, terrorists, presidents, guns, bombs, gore), Kojima crafted a masterpiece of an anti-game heretofore unmatched which, despite being critiqued as much as it was praised, still managed to earn tremendously high review scores. Why? Simple - because it is Kojima and because it is Metal Gear Solid.

Not knowing what to make of it, critics loved it through gritted teeth and clenched fists, no doubt skipping most of the later cutscenes, longing for original’s simplicity but knowing that, because of all the features and first looks and interviews and exclusives, to slam the game would have been akin to smacking a small child. MGS2 was their baby - they had brought it up and unleashed it on the world - so the perceived faults were overlooked as minor teething problems, a man’s mind stretched too far for its own good, an honest mistake. In reality, he duped us all, critics and fans alike, by being antagonistic and successful, proving once and for all that a game could be great by not being fun.

The case of Silent Hill 4: The Room is not so clear cut as MGS2 because, by their very nature, Silent Hill titles exist as anti-games to an extent; they are short, unfair, disturbing and mature, avoiding survival horror clichés like the plague (or should that be like the T-Virus). However, where the first three games in the series were each an example of meshing playability with the unpleasant, SH4 attempted to be unpleasant aesthetically as well as structurally. By the time the third game had garnered the series more reserved praise and an even more limited market, the developers clearly realised they had room to experiment like never before.

With the dark, brooding atmosphere and intellectualism remaining firmly intact, Team Silent took it upon themselves to really screw with your mind, breaking more taboos than any carrier bag or shard of glass ever could. Instead of looking for new ways to be controversial, they scoured video game archives for the various techniques and methods which infuriate conventional gamers, often driving them to give up on a game entirely.

I’m talking about a limited inventory system (where ten bullets use up as much space as a golf club), excessive backtracking, respawning enemies, mixing first- and third-person perspectives, limited save points and, perhaps the most unforgivable offence of all, invincible enemies. Apart from some backtracking, none of these things appeared in previous Silent Hill titles, so the obvious question is, “If it ain’t broke, why try to fix it?” The answer, though, is an effortlessly simple one of the Piperian variety: “Because we want to.”

When Lou Reed made Metal Machine Music, he wanted to piss people off. He was rich, talented, famous and admired, but he chose to do that which is so often frowned upon: he went pretentious. In SH4 it was no different; Team Silent must have tired of experimenting with light, texture and sound in order to assemble as unpleasant an atmosphere as possible and, instead, indulged themselves in the forbidden fruit of video game development - the noble art of the deliberate mistake.

In addition to the aforementioned changes, the men and women at Konami opted to deconstruct that which they had created: the Silent Hill cliché. Along with the lack of save points (normally there is one around every second corner), they removed the flashlight and the radio (akin to taking herbs out of Resident Evil titles or summons out of the Final Fantasy series), removed the choking darkness and much of the legendary mist and even set the game outside Silent Hill; to all intents and purposes, it wasn’t a Silent Hill game.

As a result, it was arguably an even greater anti-game than Kojima’s glorious spectacle because, unlike MGS2, it actually angered gamers as much as, if not more than, it set out to. “Roll out the 6/10!” cried the video game world, “Its Silent Hill, folks, but know as we know it.” What they meant to say was that The Room was Silent Hill, but not as they wanted it. The nurses, the lead pipes and the stuttering hiss of radio static had become the norm to such an extent that the slightest whiff of variety was a crushing disappointment.

What most critics didn’t count on was the fact that, as well as collapsing the foundations of their own, strenuously-established reputation, Konami wanted SH4 to be known as the game where the even best in the business could prove to be fallible. In doing so, they successfully galvanized anticipation ahead of the series’ next-generation debut - the arena where the series will surely thrive - without anyone the wiser. And anyway, everyone who bought Silent Hills 1, 2 and 3 would have bought the game anyway, so the risk factor was minimal all along.

Was it cynical ploy, a cheeky shot of revenge on behalf of the anti-game, or neither? You decide.

Music: Brit Awards 2007 (Part 2)

Four correct guesses out of twelve. Two worthy winners out of twelve. There is thus only one conclusion: Musically Sound is better than the British music industry.

On another note, I will try to ensure that follow-up features are not posted two months after the relevant event. Some would say it's the effort that counts, but they probably work for rival blog #945456748.

In future, Musically Sound promises to be much more punctual with it's witty and informative two-part pieces, widely known to offer insightful and cultured debate regarding key events in the...[end]

Music: Brit Awards 2007 (Part 1)

One of a number of music awards shows believing itself to be the industry standard, the much-maligned Brit Awards are apparently undergoing a resurgence. At least that's what we're being told; to trained ears, it simply means that more money is being poured in to promote a show that, devoid of any particular identity in the post-Britpop era, has really struggled to attract a decent share of viewers in the noughties.

Last year's show was a minor improvement (mainly due to Chris Evans' short-lived comeback) and, with the return to a live setting in 2007, the organisers are clearly aiming to revisit the show's more controversial years. In other words, they'll get Russell Brand to call someone a cunt just after nine and try to break the viewer complaints record. Cynical it may well be, but it's about time we had something to talk about.

This year's list of nominations is about as interesting as can be expected, although the dreaded MOR curse could strike and, if potent enough, has the potential to engulf every category. Here's hoping Lightbody and co. have a quiet one...

In typically investigative fashion I've decided to offer some predictions: who should win in every category and who will win in every category. Hopefully I'll be able to report back in Part 2 with the smug conviction that I'm one step ahead of the British music industry. If I get them all wrong, mind, I'll chew up this article, spit it out and duly commit it to burn for all eternity in Musically Sound's long-forgotten archives. The horror! The horror!

British Male Solo Artist
Winner: James Morrison
Shoulda: Thom Yorke

British Female Solo Artist
Winner: Lily Allen
Shoulda: Nerina Pallot

British Group
Winner: Arctic Monkeys
Shoulda: Arctic Monkeys*

British Album
Winner: Arctic Monkeys
Shoulda: Amy Winehouse

British Single
Winner: Take That
Shoulda: Lily Allen*

British Live Act
Winner: Muse
Shoulda: Guillemots

British Breakthrough
Winner: James Morrison
Shoulda: Lily Allen*

International Male
Winner: Jack Johnson**
Shoulda: Justin

International Female
Winner: Beyonce
Shoulda: Christina

International Group
Winner: Scissor Sisters**
Shoulda: Flaming Lips

International Album
Winner: Gnarls Barkley
Shoulda: Gnarls Barkley*

International Breakthrough
Winner: Gnarls Barkley
Shoulda: Gnarls Barkley*

It must be noted that some of these have been made under duress due to the limited selection. For example, other than Arctic Monkeys the choices for best British group are Kasabian, Snow Patrol, Muse and Razorlight.

A special mention should go to Oasis who will be getting a lifetime achievement award for an album they released thirteen years ago. There's nothing like a bit of superstition is there chaps?

* indicates a reluctant choice
** indicates a win by default (only one to give a shit)