A few months back I also read a column in the paper where the writer was taking her daughter and friends to see Harry Potter for a birthday jaunt. The kids, 10 ish, were all nonplussed that the 2D screening was sold out and vetoed the idea of seeing it in 3D, preferring to wait for the next 2D. So if kids don’t like it, 20 and 30-something men don’t like it, who does? I certainly don’t.

Living in London the past few years, time and again I was keen to see a film, then found out it in 3D. This meant that all the central London cinemas, the ones I tended to frequent, would be showing it in 3D. Suburban cinemas would offer it in 2D, or have alternate screenings, but they weren’t generally my beat.

Sure, I’d vaguely enjoyed the 1950s throwback theme-park ride of having stuff thrown at me in Final Destination 3D and I definitely enjoyed Avatar at the IMAX, but the IMAX is the only cinema in London that is properly designed for 3D. And even there I had my reservations: I don’t like the extra equipment required (the glasses), there’s always some blurring of the image on the periphery, and there’s always the chance of eye-strain and headaches. This is even more of a problem if you already have poor eyesight; my mum, for example, is a big cinema-goer, for but 3D glasses along with her problematic vision just don’t work; it hurts.

After moving out of London to Sussex, at least the local Odeon would do alternate 2D and 3D screenings of the big releases proffering this tedious, desperate gimmick. Give me a big screen with a crisp 2D HD image anyway. A big screen and the latest in reproduction and projection technology is a joy, a reliably immersive experience that doesn’t need the muddying of trying to project in 3D in a cinema that was never designed for it, and expecting the punter to don the glasses – effectively put an extra barrier between you and the image. Even Peter Jackson looks uncomfortable here checking Hobbit shots wearing both 3D glasses and reading glasses (“It’s all good,” he says, unconvincingly). All the while enthusing about the wonders of shooting in 3D with the new Red Epic camera and saying “If I’d had the option to shoot The Lord of the Rings in 3D I certainly would have done it.” I am so glad he didn’t.

Alongside the passion of these evangelical technologist filmmakers – Jackson, Cameron, Lucas, Spielberg, who love their new tools, new toys – film distributors either genuinely believe that 3D is “added value” that will save the cinema trade in the face of on-demand home viewing (legal or otherwise), or are just so caught up in the machinery of capitalism that they’re deaf to punters’ cries. The argument is that “this is what people want”; I’ve read that so many times before though, even in other contexts, like the question of supermarkets’ over-packaging of foods. But it really isn’t what people want – it’s just what they’ve come to accept as the norm after they’re been bludgeoned by enormous marketing budgets.

Even mediocre mainstream film can prevail, financially, if it’s marketed heavily enough. You see the poster on billboards and bus-sides, you see the promo or trailer on telly and online, over and over, you see ads in mags and papers. It features a few sexy stars; it’s a sequel to another film you saw, so you’re already engaged with the brand; it comes on at your local cinema, where there really isn’t much choice. It’s a Friday night out you don’t have to think much about. You apathetically pay the extra £2 or whatever for the 3D specs. You get a headache. You moan about it on Facebook to your friends, or you mention how pointless the 3D was in your IMDB user review.

Seriously, I adore the big screen experience, I love the whole package of going to the cinema. My mind is full a lifetime of memories of walking off the grubby pavement, pushing open the cinema doors, being met by the scent of popcorn, leaving behind the real world, the bustle, the traffic, your own concerns; entering the darkened room, getting absorbed by the flickering light of the image, being immersed, forgetting your own concerns for 90 minutes. And although I like an intelligent film with a decent narrative, I’m also a fan of action, and fascinated by the aesthetics and technologies of VFX. But I just will not pay for 3D at the cinema, for an uncomfortable experience predicated on a gimmick, a gimmick that served its time in the 1950s when people were being lured away from cinemas by the wonders of newfangled TV, in a similar way to how we’re being lured away now by big-screen TVs and on-demand movies.

Frankly I’m deeply cynical when the likes of Scorsese and Herzog, filmmakers who’ve garnered respect for intelligent filmmaking, not mere popcorn fare, come out with 3D projects (Hugo Cabret and Cave of Forgotten Dreams respectively), and sing the praises of 3D in interviews. These guys may be iconic, but they’re still aging professionals who have to play the game if they want the studios and producers to back them, to fund them, so they can keep working and keep earning a living. And those studios are backing 3D, and are proffering them the latest 3D equipment. Said equipment may have come on in leaps and bounds, but so what if punters don’t appreciate the end product? Do the punters’ opinions really not matter at all. Money might talk, but, you know, people do too, and when they’re polled, they don’t generally seem to feel that 3D does add value.

Oh, and to take my sceptical cynicism a bit further, remember many of the studios are these days part of mega-corporations that include consumer technology arms, eg Sony Pictures Entertainment, and its subsidiary Columbia Pictures. And what does Sony sell? 3D BluRay discs, 3D BluRay players and 3D televisions.

Still, despite venting all that dismay and cynicism, I’m still hoping Jackson can change my mind when he transports us back to Middle-earth.

The sumptuously realised landscape of Skryim

Delving deep into the ruins of the Dwemer – The Elder Scrolls’ long-dead “dwarves” – reminds me of some of the time I spent exploring Moria in MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO, 2007; Moria pack 2008). I was inspired to play LOTRO by my love of the LOTR feature films, created by Peter Jackson and his innumerable talented collaborators. In those films, I always wanted to see more of the dead dwarf city of Moria, so I joined friends (from the heinously addictive MMORPG World of Warcraft) to explore it. It was interesting to see how a parallel creative team had visualised this iconic environment, and then some.

So Skyrim’s Dwemer were kind of brass-and-magic steampunk technologists, which is a nice twist on the basic Tolkienian interpretation of dwarves as miners and engineers. Plus, well, the Dwemer are actually “Deep Elves” and not dwarves at all – just short-arses compared to giants.

In the era of Skyrim, the denizens of the deep, subterranean Dwemer ruins, are the Falmer, a kind of mutant strain of elf who are not unlike how the goblin inhabitants of Moria were envisaged in the films. Bethesda’s creatures are blind, and have a symbiotic relationship with giant insects, who serve as watchdogs and companions as well as stock, it seems, their shells providing the Falmer with materials for both armour and furniture. It’s a nifty, albeit basic, version of underground farming.

Fictional agriculture
Though I must say here, having recently done my annual Christmas LOTR movie marathon, the Skyrim world, despite how sumptuously detailed it may be, still annoys me in one of the ways that the world of the LOTR films annoys me. There’s simply not enough industry, and considering it’s a faux-early Medieval, agrarian culture, there’s specifically not enough agriculture and food production.

Calories are the building blocks of any civilisation. (Check out Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel for more on this theory.) But think of Middle-earth, as envisaged by Jackson and co. Beyond the cute idyll of the Shire, there’s no evidence of food production, no arable fields, no crops, and virtually no cattle.

Whiterun in Skyrim. Or is it Edoras in Rohan?

The Rohan capital of Edoras (a clear influence on the design of Skyrim’s Whiterun) would be surrounded by productive fields, much like a medieval town. Likewise Minas Tirith: it’s the biggest population centre seen in the films, but it’s surrounded by what? Barren planes. I know there’s a war on, but there would be evidence of the infrastructure of agriculture at least. Field boundaries, farms, grain storage etc. There’s simply nothing. It’s a massive oversight for the credibility of the films, if, like me, you enjoy the world-building that goes into fantasy fiction.

The world of Skyrim is better than that of the LOTRO films, as there are dozen or so farms, watermills and windmills scattered about the region. But it’s all pretty small-scale. Sure, smallholder farming does – still – produce much of the food in the real world, so it’s not that the farms are smallholdings that’s the problem, it’s that they’re microholdings. Their “fields” are little larger than urban back gardens. In total, the whole region of Skyrim appears to have around two acres of land producing grain. What do all these people eat? I know they’re manly northern types but they can’t just live on game, it’s just not viable for feeding fixed populations. And everywhere you go, there’s cheese.

Mmm, cheese

More cheese...

So where are the large herds of cattle?

Skyrim smallholding, outside Whiterun

About enough to feed a family. But nothing to take to market.

Jeez. I know. I’m a bit obsessive. Sorry, but this is something that’s been nagging me for years about the LOTR films, LOTRO and now Skyrim. When so much creative thought and energy goes into producing these elaborate fictional worlds, with so much eye for detail when it comes to the design of the wood carvings in a longhouse, or the contents of some shelves, or the armour worn by random characters, or the autumnal colour of the birch leaves, or the dash of a fox, it’s a shame the same attention to detail isn’t applied to life’s more basic practicalities.

Daniel Etherington

Thoughts on Skyrim part 1, Running with Mr Foxy, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 2, Twitchy gaming, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 3, Plan it, or organic?, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 4, Giving voice, can be found here.

You told me that two months ago! Change the record already!

Skyrim is at the forefront of the evolution of the (single player) role-playing game (RPG), that much is evident. Though in many ways it’s both stifled by its adherence to RPG conventions and by its own ambition. Arguably, today’s technology cannot cope with the demands of a game this complex, notably in “temporal” terms, with the progression of time, via the narrative threads, not being entirely smooth, while many non-playable characters (NPCs) keep on offering you the same lines of dialogue, despite your progress. But then such basic practicalities presumably have tight budgets: there are, after all, hundreds, even thousands of NPCs in the game.

The game’s voice acting is something that’s been criticised. We’re at a point in the development of the videogame where, finally, voice acting is improving, after years of cringe-worthy border-line incompetence. Games like Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (2010) or the Uncharted games are benchmarks for better voice-acting in games, but they are also titles that are much overtly filmic, hewing closer to film narrative structure, and focussing on just a few main characters, where any weakness in dialogue and voice acting would be really in-your-face. Skyrim, on the other hand, features a mute hero (you), then the abovementioned slew of NPCs. So it’s perhaps unfair to malign the voice-acting of Skyrim in comparison to that of Uncharted etc. There are a few NPCs who play bigger roles, and these are voiced by big name actors.

It’s funny the first time you hear Max Von Sydow’s distinctive tones, and he does a reasonably job given some of the hokey stuff he has to say. Indeed, some of it almost sounds poetic.

You may wonder why an actor of such distinction would appear in a game. Well, he may not be aware of how culturally important such products are these days, or even their commercial significance, but if you’re 90-plus, still keen to earn, a few days in a recording studio can’t be a bad option. Ditto for Christopher Plummer, who, like Von Sydow, was born in 1929. More and more big name actors are doing game voice work these days anyway; just look at the Grand Theft Auto series, which has a roll-call that includes Samuel L Jackson, Dennis Hopper, Ray Liotta, Kyle Maclachan, Iggy Pop, Ricky Gervais and, er, Phil Collins among many others.

Repetitive brain injury

The voice work of the lesser-known or unknown actors who are called on to voice multiple characters isn’t that bad, either. Indeed, a lot of the voice acting is adequate, given the context. It just suffers increasingly as your in-game hours mount up, and certain elements remain static.

The game has something called “Radiant questing”, which means it takes on board your choices, decisions, movements, etc to alter NPC interactions and create semi-randomised quests. However, even with the Radiant innovations, the game still can’t accommodate your development as a character, and your sense of progress is frequently quashed. So for example, every time I visit the Riverwood trader (who I’ve invested with, so I can sell him all my junk), he and his sister thank me for something I did for them several game weeks, or months, earlier. That’s fine, I’m warmed you’re grateful, but maybe you could just say “Hi” now rather than going on and on about that “claw”!

It’s these nuggets of dialogue you get from NPCs you have frequent contact with that become excruciating. Given the amount of dialogue a game like this has, it’s understandable that Bethesda have to draw the line somewhere. However, when the dialogue itself is grammatically clunky to start with, it particularly grates, eg when every bloody vendor has this same line (though spoken by difference voice actors) of rum English: “Some may call this junk, me I call them treasures.” Plus, well, why are some of the Nord adults voiced by Scandinavian actors, when all the Nord kids have broad American accents? It’s adequate, but there is still room for improvement, so the game’s voice-work matches the sophistication of, say, its environments.

Thoughts on Skyrim part 1, Running with Mr Foxy, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 2, Twitchy gaming, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 3, Plan it, or organic?, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 5, Falmer and farmers, can be found here.

Did this person deserve to die? Dunno, looks cool though

Here be spoilers. And dragons.

Deciding who to side with in the Skyrim civil war isn’t the only difficult decision you have to make in the game. At one point, you’re also put in a position where you have to choose whether to kill a major character. It’s a character who has helped you, but has a dreadful history. It’s also a character who’s voiced by the same actor who gives voice to Mario, Luigi and co.

It’s a fascinating situation, as it touches on fundamental ethics, and the differing approaches we have to notions of justice. Should justice take the form of punishment? Or is rehabilitation possible? Or, to look at it another, arguably more religious way, should the response to violent crime be vengeful or is there the possibility of forgiveness and trust? It comes down to the question of whether you think someone can change, or whether personality is innate and fixed.

Getting in character

Such decisions put me in a position I find very interesting, as playing a complex game like this works on different, distinct levels. Do you try to act “in character”, or “out of character”? In character, do you want to be an adventurous sort, but also someone who does the right thing? Or, out of character, do you want to explore every inch of the map, obsessively, and get your money’s worth (and then some) from doing every quest.

The whole matter of whether or not you kill the “Mario” character … look, trying not to be spoilery here is silly. I’m talking about the dragon Paarthurnax ok … He was once very evil but isn’t now. So in game, and in character, I’m prepared to trust him. But out of character, the whole matter has annoyed me, and made me question my whole approach to the game.

Although Skyrim is nominally an open world game in which you’re free to explore and play in the “sandbox”, this can not only result in narratives tangles (like I discussed in part 2), it can also chivvy you in the direction of the excellent Elder Scrolls wikis (here and here). Which in turn can result in you having access to an endless array of pieces of information: which can help you plan ahead, if you’re prepared to think out of character, or they can be total spoilers, if you’re trying to play in character.

The game is awesome if you let your personal story – your personal engagement with the world of Skyrim and with the game’s main narrative – develop organically, but conversely you may wish you’d planned ahead, if, as in this Paarthurnax situation, you’d know that your earlier decisions would culminate in this troubling choice: to go old school, Old Testament, fundamentalist on his ass, or be liberal, New Testament, forgiving.

Philosophisiing with Paarthunax

Moral maze. Or mess

Although the game features major moral choices like this execution scenario, it doesn’t have a broad moral mechanic built into the gameplay, unlike, say, the Fable games, which are loosely comparable in their RPG elements and fantasy settings. In the Fable games, your very persona evolves or mutates depending on your actions, and in Fable III (2010), your decisions as ruler have a tangible effect on the very environment, with neighbourhoods either prospering or becoming slums, for example.

In Skyrim, however, you can get away with being both the hero, saving the world from an apocalyptic demise, and doing some pretty heinous things, being a vampire, a rampaging werewolf, a cannibal who takes health from the bodies of the fallen, or embarking on crime sprees for the Thieves Guild or the Dark Brotherhood, a grim bunch of death-worshipping assassins.

I tend to approach these games with the notion that the hero should be broadly virtuous, and because I find stealth-type gameplay dull, I tend to either ignore or kill the thieves and assassins. But that hasn’t stopped me accidentally doing some pretty morally dubious stuff, like cannibalism, or murdering people at the behest of the Daedra, the series’ perverse demigods who visit Tamriel (the continental setting of the Elder Scrolls) to toy with humanity.

The only system the game has to manage criminality involves fines or bounties on your heads, and that’s only if you’re caught with stolen goods, or caught in the act of killing a citizen, or a little bit unruly with your use of dangerous magic in a built-up area. It’s a morally interesting, though also somewhat bewildering, as there are grey areas. Indeed, the whole civil war context is arguably one massive grey.

The point is, considering how maligned games still are as medium, Skyrim is remarkable for featuring such thought-provoking moral and ethical elements. How often to you think or feel anything like this coming out of a comparably mainstream feature film? This alone highlights how mature, and even superior, mainsteam gaming can be compared to mainstream cinema these days.

Daniel Etherington

Thoughts on Skyrim part 1, Running with Mr Foxy, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 2, Twitchy gaming, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 4, Giving voice, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 5, Falmer and farmers, can be found here.

Like all games developed by Bethesda, Skyrim is buggy as all heck. Some of which is comical initially, but it does start to get a bit annoying when you’re going about your business in town and there’s a dragon, half buried in the ground, twitching.

In Fallout: New Vegas, the main quest chain – the main narrative – is broken almost irreparably at one point (if you’ve played it, I’m referring to the sequence involving a presidential speech on the Hoover Dam). There doesn’t seem to be anything as bad as that in Skyrim, but there any plenty of exasperating entanglements. For example Markarth, one of the game’s main towns, is a right shambles after you do one quest chain.

Long and the short, you investigate a series of killings. After being implicated, you’re incarcerated in a mine, which you subsequently escape. You’re then pardoned by the Jarl (ruler), but his guards didn’t get the memo, apparently, and will keep trying to re-arrest you or attack you. Plus you can’t embark on the quests that will allow you to buy a house in Markarth.

There are plenty of “solutions” online, but sneaking around, following X conversation with Y guard, and then killing only Z guard in the hope that it may or may not fix a major glitch is lame. One of them half sorted it for me, but come on Bethesda – playtesting shouldn’t really stop with release on a game as elaborate as this. Aftercare people, aftercare. Let’s have some more patching. So I can buy that house.

Tangled web

Things really do get tangled up. That’s arguably one failing of these remarkable Bethesda open-world RPGs – Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas. On the one hand you’re encouraged to explore, fighting your way through new caves or forts or underground complexes you may find. But on the other hand, said locations may be involved in quests you subsequently pick up, meaning you’ve pre-empted something, and the game may not be able to handle it. So for example, I found a sword – Red Eagle’s sword – or was it a book? I can’t remember, but both ways, you get a quest to discover a secret. Which you then do. Then the game may let you discover the sword again, or a couple of duplicates together, and it’ll give you the quest again, even though you’ve already completed it. On numerous occasions, quests bug out and get stuck in your quest log: “Unlock the secret of Red Eagle’s tomb”; “Help the people of Haafingar 6/5″ etc.

The main narrative thread of the game involves saving the world from an ancient dragon called Alduin, the “World-Eater”, who has mysteriously reappeared. The secondary narrative thread, however, is a civil war.

Basically, Skyrim is a province of a great, but diminishing, empire. A faction in Skyrim, the Stormcloaks, is rebelling, determined to achieve self-determination and religious freedom for the Nord people of the region. Which initially sounds all well and good, noble in fact, like so many heroic, freedom-fighter narratives – Spartacus or Braveheart and suchlike. But as the game develops, the plot thickens. You meet Imperial soldiers and loyalists, who seem decent sorts. You spend more time with Stormcloaks, and Stormcloaks sympathises, who harbour some pretty off sentiments, such as their racism. This is particularly directed towards certain elves. There’s a strong racial tension in some parts of Skyrim that have become home to Dark Elf (Dunmer) refugees.

The Imperials are also involved with elves, but this time the haughty High Elves (Altmer), whose own war of succession resulted in them having a strong, some would say, controlling, influence over the Empire. The Altmer Thalmor faction seem particularly dubious, and are hated most of all by the Stormcloaks. They’ve always been rude to me, I’m happy to hate them too.

On top of all that, there’s another faction in the west of Skyrim, people of the Reach who call themselves the Forsworn. These people are descended from Bretons, another ethnic group. While the Nord might feel subjugated by the Empire, the Forsworn harbour similar sentiments about the Nords. They vow to achieve self-rule, taking back “their” city of Markarth from the Nords. Wheels within wheels. And demonstrating a political complexity that some may find surprisingly complex for a videogame.

Decisions, decisions

Anyway, frankly, I found the choice about who to side with nigh-on impossible – until I’d finished the main narrative thread of the game, and decided I really had to get embroiled in the secondary thread. I thought, ok, I broadly agree with a fight for self-rule, and the Thalmor are so-and-sos, so I went to see, Galmar, right-hand man of the rebellion’s leader, Ulfric Stormcloak. He was hardly welcoming, and those old bigotries arose again in our chat – problematic when I’m playing a Redguard character, from a different ethnic group again.

Furthermore, the game doesn’t seem to be able to handle the parallel narratives very well. So, despite the fact that I’d met Ulfric and Galmar on several occasions, and even chaired a peace negotiation for them, they don’t seem to remember me. Or remember that I’ve just, well, saved the world (the culmination of the main narrative thread). These games are so sophisticated, but still not sophisticated enough. Sure they offer you an open world, but while the physical space can be explored freely and fluidly, the ‘temporal space’ cannot.

Daniel Etherington

Thoughts on Skyrim part 1, or Running with Mr Foxy, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 3: Plan it, or organic,  can be found here.
Thoughtws on Skyrim part 4, Giving voice, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 5, Falmer and farmers, can be found here.

Who shot Mr Foxy?

Finally had a chance to cane The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim over Christmas. I’m a big fan of these games from Bethesda Softworks, and the past few years spent many an hour in the grim of adventure in the elaborate fantasy world of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), or the retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic environs of Fallout 3 (2008) and Fallout: New Vegas (2008; published by Bethesda, but developed by Obsidian Entertainment).

After playing a lot of Fallout 3, I wrote a long-ish feature about it here. I’d planned to write about Skyrim in a similar manner, with one long-ish summary, but it got too long. So I’m breaking it up into a series of posts.

A work of great beauty

Skyrim is a game of great beauty. Just wandering the elaborate environment is a thrill if you’ve been observing the development of gaming landscapes the past 30 or so years. It’s a looooong way from the visually static fantasy realms of The Hobbit (1982) or Lords of Midnight (1984), which were my formative C64 fantasy adventure gaming experiences, though with its Tolkienian, cod-”Dark Ages” (you always have to use that term in inverted commas these days) and early medieval trappings its very much in the same cultural vein.

So here's me aged 13 or so, in Lords of Midnight, "Looking north..."

For those moments of great beauty, examples include: standing, at dawn, on top of the Throat of the World, the highest peak in the game’s titular mountainous northern realm (think pseudo-northern Europe, circa 5th century). Then there’s wandering along a waterway, watching salmon leap up a waterfall. Or exploring hot springs, picking flowers and chasing butterflies. Yes, chasing butterflies. You can collect their wings to make potions.

And here's me, a lot older, looking east in Skyrim

Personal connection

My personal favourite, however, has to be the incidents where you’re running through the woods or valleys when, suddenly, there’s a kind of barking pant and a fox joins you, loping alongside you for a few dozen yards*. This resonates with me on a particularly personal level as I had a comparable real-world experience that has always stayed with me.

Running with Mr Foxy

In 1991 or thereabouts, I attended a fantastic rave held by Spiral Tribe in the Dongas, an ancient site partially obliterated by the construction of a stretch of the M3 outside Winchester. As the rave wound up after dawn, I was still all full of adrenline – yes, just adrenaline, I was both very fit and somewhat ascetic through the rave era – so I started to run ran home. This took me past the Iron Age hill fort of St Catherine’s Hill.

As I ran down the adjacent Plague Pits Valley – you can see why I engage with games like this given the environment I grew up in – a fox ran alongside me for a while. It was one of those magical moments of engagement with the natural world, and one this Skyrim experience echoes. Indeed, Skyrim presents a remarkable facsimile of a elaborate, organic world, packed with flora, fauna, diverse geologies and whatnot. Though you have to allow it a bit of creative license, as some aspects of its natural world bear no relation to ours sense, eg leafy plants really do not readily grow in caves devoid of sunlight…

* Some suggest that if you follow a fox, it will guide you to special items or new locations, but the only time I tried that he took me to the top of a cliff, then seemed to lose his inclination, so I’m not sure yet. Sounds like a great idea though, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was true.

Daniel Etherington

Thoughts on Skyrim part 2, Twitchy gaming, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 3: Plan it, or organic, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 4, Giving voice, can be found here.
Thoughts on Skyrim part 5, Falmer and farmers, can be found here.

So I’ve finally got round to playing Resident Evil 5. I was always a fan of the series, even though I’ve experienced its frustrations – for example, I gave up with Code: Veronica (2000) as, with the save point I had, I didn’t have enough ammo to take out a boss. Resident Evil 4 (2005) seemed to be taking the series in a new direction, away from the old dark house/zombies theme that had dominated, but more significantly it revised how you control the character by fixing the camera over the shoulder (comparable to say Gears of War) and by introducing context-sensitive controls. It wasn’t like the game was free of the series’ other familiar constraints and frustrations (notably how Capcom arrange saves and inventory management), but it felt fresh – well, if that can be said for any game in a series about zombies, viruses and parasites.

So even though the demo of Resident Evil 5 (I’m on Xbox 360) had put me off due to the awkward control scheme, I finally succumbed to giving it a whirl when a friend leant it to me. The control system felt just as bloody awkward as when I’d first played that demo 18 months or so earlier. But, I dunno, I kinda got into that old RE vibe, and got into the story – involving evil corporations continuing their experiments into bioweapons, with a new generation of viral mutagen called “Uroboros“.

You can’t fault Capcom for the doolally combination of horror and satire in their games. So I stuck with it, and played most of it, but really started tiring of the boss battles. It’s not that they were that hard per se, but the control system, plodding movements of your character, hellish irritating habit of reloading or healing so slowly you get thumped by the boss midway through your action if you’re unlucky, they just started getting plum annoying.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a long history with the particular vein of frequently Japanese game design that structures levels about explore/fight/sub-boss/explore some more/fight some more/OTT boss, from numerous other Capcom titles in the RE, Devil May Cry and Onimusha series, as well as others like Nintendo’s similarly structured Metroid games.

I love a lot of those crazy bosses, though possibly more just because I love monsters, always have, right back to a childhood of poring over Ray Harryhausen and Doctor Who. What I have less love for is the process of fighting them – running around, finding the weak spots, biding your time etc.

These conventions, in tandem with the absurdly awkward control scheme on RE5, just feel outmoded these days. Along with an over-dependence on cut-scenes, an inability to skip cuts scenes and the inability to just save anywhere. EDGE magazine, among others, were going on about how such things should be a default part of game design years ago.

Uroboros Aheri

So yeah, playing on normal (I’m old, gimme a bread) I got to chapter 6 – the final chapter. Took care of the Uroboros Aheri boss, with a degree of irritating but not too much difficulty. Most of all, however, I was just a bit bored – knowing these games, I could sense I was nearly at the end, and now I’d just have a load more cut-scenes and some more boss action. In this case, that involved a Uroboros mutated version of that pompous old twat Wesker (die properly already!), who’d been popping up in the game in his greas from The Matrix.

So I just put the game aside. Couldn’t be arsed. Just couldn’t be arsed. I might return to it when I’ve got a quiet hour to fully learn the pattern required to beat him. Though I know already what’ll happen: I’ll get a bit wound-up by the fight, I’ll crack it, I’ll beat him, and it’ll be an anticlimax. That final boss battle in games built around these conventions always is. Gimme something with a bit more emotional pay-off, like in the campaigns of Halo: Reach or COD4: Modern Warfare or in Heavy Rain (which was highly charged emotionally, despite its bugs and convolutions), instead of this old-fashioned blah. Being told you’ve saved the world isn’t enough; any significant sentiment the narrative might have built up is just killed by the inherent irritation of tediously conventional final boss battles.

EDIT:
I guess what I’m saying is that boss battles mess up the tempo of the experience. You’ve been cruising along exploring and fighting lesser enemies, the game’s narrative unfolding at a reasonably consistent pace. Then – bam! – a boss battle forces a graunching gear change, stalls the narrative. Game designers talk about flow, that feeling you have when you’re in the zone, focussed, progressing at the perfect pace. Boss battles arguably utterly destroy your flow.

The reason Party Chat’s been banned was supposedly something to do with cheating – with friends in Party Chat on calling out positions in ranked matches or dead friends reporting positions in Search and Destroy mode. Or something. Was it really that common in COD4: MW? I guess it was common enough for the developers and publishers to take action. Shame. Aw well.

I couldn’t find this online anywhere, so here’s a full list of the Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer modes, and whether they support Party Chat:

Team Deathmatch – No
Mercenary Team Deathmatch – Yes
Free-for-all – Yes
Domination – No
Ground war – Yes
Demolition – No
Sabotage – No
Headquarters Pro – No
Search & Destroy – No
Capture the Flag – No
3rd Person Team Tactical – Yes
Hardcore Ricochet Search & Destroy – Yes
Hardcore Team Deathmatch – No
3rd Person Cage Match – Yes
Team Deathmatch Express- No
Mosh Pit – No
Hardcore Ricochet HQ Pro – No

When I saw  The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and the scenes involving Moria, one thing that struck me was – if Moria was such a major kingdom for the dwarves, how come the door was so small? I’ve read The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and the Silmarillion, but my Tolkien knowledge was still a bit patchy. Serious fans could probably have told me straight away. That’s because the Fellowship entered through the West-gate, aka the Doors of Durin, aka the Hollin Gate. And that wasn’t the main, original gate. The dwarves began constructing Moria from the east, from Dimrill Dale, which is adjacent to Lothlorien. The first, main entrance to Moria is therefore the East-gate, or Dimrill Gate.

One of the reasons I got into playing the excellent MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online was because I wanted to see more of Moria than is seen in the films. So one exciting thing was reaching the First Hall – the oldest area of Moria the dwarves mined – and exiting Moria through the Dimrill Gate for the first time. Now that’s a proper door, and you could actually imagine it accommodating the necessary trade traffic etc to support a vast underground kingdom like Moria, or Khazad-dûm as it was originally known, the Dwarrodelf.

Screengrabs from games never really get across the atmosphere of a place, but the artists of Turbine, the developers of the game, have done incredibly work. Although Peter Jackson and his team created some of the best, most epic cinema ever with the films, and artists over the years have visualised Middle-earth with great skill and imagination (notably the estimable Alan Lee, who was a major influence on Jackson’s vision for the films), one thing I’m enjoying about the game is just how comprehensively it can create a detailed, populated Middle-earth and hopefully will continue to do so all the way to Minas Tirith and on into (*ulp*) Mordor.

Dr J Russell sent me this link to a blog entry entitle Console Cakes!, where the blogger has rounded up a load of pictures of cakes shaped and iced – with varying degrees of skill, to varying degrees of success – to look like games consoles, and even a few arcade cabinets. The best one is probably this Nintendo Wii:

Which was bloggged about over here. I do not approve of things like “Use Betty Crocker yellow cake mix” (when you’re this inventive, why not make a cake mixture properly?), but the results are certainly fun.

The first blogger also provides a link to here. A much higher standard of icing-craft here, with some fab Mario-themed cupcakes, and better still an elaborate Katamari cake.

The unique, distinctive Katamari games have inspired all sorts of craftiness – costumes, knitted items, soft toys, and hybrids of the above, but the baking is rather funky – and edible (ish, food colourings are by and large thoroughly nasty things. I found some of them even carryied health warnings about the potential detrimental effects of their E-numbers when I was looking into doing coloured icings for a cake course).

I am slightly disconcerted to find myself linking to blogs on Sanriotown, the Hello Kitty official site, though.