This is an interesting position for me to be in. It seems that last week’s review of Avatar had some people wondering what movie I’d actually seen, since I didn’t instantly fall in love with Pandora, nor did I gas myself into oblivion to be reincarnated as a Na’vi.

…Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but still, a few folks at the Escapist thought I was mistaken in drawing a comparison between James Cameron’s latest money machine and a little film from last year called District 9. They further didn’t seem to get why I considered District 9 a better film, since it too is a sci-fi action drama with a message and a unique alien race never before seen by humans. I was going to fire up District 9 on the Netflix Instant Queue because I couldn’t think of a better way to spend an evening than streaming a film this good directly into my eye sockets, but someone very astute pointed out I’d already reviewed District 9 and while I haven’t given it the ICFN treatment, I’d just be repeating myself for the most part.

But you know what we haven’t had in a while? A cage match.

So let’s toss these two into the mix together and see which emerges victorious. I will attempt to remain as objective as possible for the benefit of all you Avatar fans out there.

Let Mortal Kombat begin!

I’ve been inspired to write the following due to Alex Macris’ latest Check for Traps feature on the Escapist. You can read it here. The Cliff’s Notes is basically that a GM in a tabletop RPG should be less of a directive storyteller, and more of an emergent one. That’s a great concept in theory, but it’s possible for some GMs to consider this an excuse to do no story work whatsoever and that, my friends, is a mistake.

Characters with no story to bring them together or drive them forward is like ribs without a spine. Now, as a food, ribs without a spine are mostly what you’re looking for. Lather those ribs in a delicious sauce and cook them just right so that the meat’s nice and moist rather than tough and dry, and you have yourself a delicacy for a discerning omnivore such as myself. But even in those ideal conditions, the end result’s a bit messy.

A less food-based example of what I’m talking about is Mass Effect 2.

For most of the game, you go from one hot spot in the galaxy to another, either picking up a new member of your crew or helping them with a personal matter to earn their undying loyalty (for the most part). This series of mini-stories is bookended with the whole Reapers/Collectors business, but the nature of the game leads one to believe that they’re more of a backdrop against which the characters grow, rather than being any sort of impetus for change or tension. If the plot had been more coherent or the threat more credible, we might have had a more full-bodied experience rather than a plate of (albeit tasty) character ribs.

When you have strong characters, the story holding them together should also be strong. However, it shouldn’t overwhelm the characters. I think that’s what Alex has been driving at in his last few articles. The guy behind the screen, the man behind the curtain, the puppeteer above the stage pulling the strings – it shouldn’t be all about them and the story they want to tell to the exclusion of everything else. Role-playing games involving more than one player should be collaborative experiences, with players bringing interesting characters to the table while the GM weaves their plots together and gives them something against which to struggle. That is unless you’re running a demo at a convention or something and just want to show off how cool this dungeon is or how that class works in comparison to that other class. Then you go straight for the mechanics and rules, and leave most of your story-telling and world-building and atmosphere-creating tools at home. I learned that one the hard way.

See what I mean here? Are you catching my drift? Or am I completely off my rocker because I told those kids to get off my lawn a bit too violently? Share your thoughts, Intertubes.

March Mayhem over at the Escapist is in its final round. For most of the competition I’ve been rooting for BioWare. However, last round Valve was up against Zynga, and after a tense period of back and forth, Valve emerged the victor. Now, it’s up against BioWare. It’s a very close competition, and since I’ve talked at length about BioWare in the past, let’s discuss the guy in the other corner.

Back in the late ’90s, Half-Life showed us that the protagonist of a first-person shooter didn’t have to be a hyper-masculine roided-out Space Marine. Instead, Valve slipped players into the hazardous environment suit of Dr. Gordon Freeman, theoretical physicist. The hero of this story is pretty much a bookworm, and only becomes legendary due to circumstance and the fact that his HEV suit can absorb bullets just as well as it does radiation. Perhaps the most distinctive thing about Gordon, though, is that he’s a mute protagonist through and through, and Valve doesn’t do any pre-rendered cut scene cinematics. Everything happens within the game engine and, for the most part, we are in control of Gordon the entire time things are happening. This allows the player to experience the action, terror and humor of Half-Life and its sequels without any sort of forced dialog or moral choices.

Just as notable, however, is the way Valve provides for the modding community. Both the engine of the original Half-Life and the Source engine used in its sequels are geared in such a way that anybody with the time, passion and knack for coding or rendering to approach a game based in them can bring their dreams to life. For example, there was a mod for Quake called Team Fortress that some enthusiasts ported over into Half-Life‘s engine, a project that became known as Team Fortress Classic. Emphasizing specialists working together instead of one lone gun-toting badass rushing in to claim all the glory, Team Fortress was one of the most played mods of the original Half-Life. So, when Half-Life 2 was re-released in a bundle called The Orange Box, fans were delighted to see the bundle included Team Fortress 2.

I could talk about the balanced gameplay, the fun aesthetic touches or the fact that the visual style reminds me a great deal of The Incredibles, but the important thing about TF2 is that there’s something for everybody. Still looking to be the rocket-shooting glory-hog? Play a Soldier. Interested in playing a healing class? Look no further than the Medic. Love setting things on fire? The Pyro’s for you. While the similar mechanics of all nine classes mean that anybody with even periphery knowledge of how to play an FPS can pick them up, truly mastering the nuances of a class can really enhance the experience for both the player and their team.

And then there’s Portal.

If Half-Life broke the mold when it came to first-person shooters, Portal pretty much disintegrated it when it comes to first-person gameplay, period. With a series of testing chambers and the omnipresent passive-aggressive presence of GLaDOS, Valve demonstrated that it wasn’t just violence that drives their games. Even more so than the physics or jumping puzzles in either Half-Life game, Portal is driven more by cleverness and outside-the-box thinking than straightforward shoot-em-up gameplay.

I’m not going to go into the politics or long delays or differences between console & PC versions at the moment, but rather I want to stay focused on Valve as game developers. They’ve really changed things over the years, and I look forward to what’s coming next.

Thank you for your attention, cake will be served immediately.

This week’s Escapist, “Bump In The Night,” is all about survival horror. Here is the article I pitched them for the issue, all about one of the best games of the genre I never played until I got married.

I think there are certain elements of true horror in games that, like in the film industry, have been left aside for torture porn and jump-out scares. Few games that carry the horror moniker truly get inside the head of the player and compel them to struggle to survive, let alone prevail, and instead toss handfuls of gore and jarring images at the screen. A game that understood the meaning of horror and holds up despite the passing of one console generation to another is a humble title for the GameCube – Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.

Instead of cribbing notes from more modern sources of horror such as Eli Roth or James Wan, Eternal Darkness reaches back to some of the more foundational writings of the genre, particularly H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe. The game, in fact, quotes Poe in the beginning, as we are introduced to Alexandra Roivas, a young woman whose grandfather Edward was murdered in his Rhode Island home. As the investigators have few answers, Alex begins looking around the mansion herself, and stumbles across a secret room containing, among other things, the “Tome of Eternal Darkness.” Upon opening this ghastly book, Alex is transported into the life of centurion Pious Augustus, who in 26 B.C. discovers one of three artifacts representing the essence of a powerful and old god-like being called an Ancient. As the player, you choose which Ancient corrupts Pious, setting up a conflict between the creature using the now-undying centurion as a proxy, and several characters throughout time including Alex who must stop the Ancient from ushering in a terrible age of eternal darkness.

Several generations of the Roivas family

Eternal Darkness has a minimal UI, keeping the screen from being too cluttered as you explore the game’s four locations at various points throughout history. Your life, “magick” and sanity meters only appeared when they were being affected. The player quickly begins to associate the different colors of the meters – red, blue and green, respectively – with the three Ancients and their minions, and must quickly learn how each affects the other. Ulyaoth, whose purview is over the soul, powers his minions through magick but is vulnerable to physical confrontation. Chattur’gha rules the body, making his pawns potent in a direct scrape but susceptible to mental assault. Xel’lotath reigns supreme in the realm of the mind and pushes the boundaries of one’s perceptions of reality through her servants, but must succumb to magickal assaults. Each has a color, a distinct personality and a unique appearance, but all three of them hate the neutral yet powerful fourth Ancient, Mantorok, whom the player’s characters come to represent whether they want to or not.

The spell-casting system of “magick” is one of the unique features of the game. Instead of giving the players direct instructions on how to use the runes discovered in various places and times, the player must experiment with the runes in what amounts to sentence construction. Basic spells involve three runes: the name of an Ancient which sets the spell’s “alignment”, a “verb” that describes what the player wants to do – summon, absorb, etc – and a “noun” that instructs the spell as to its target. Enhancement or “power” runes can expand a spell to five or seven runes, but the important part of the spell is its alignment. Trying to attack a minion of Xel’lotath with a physical spell isn’t going to work as well as the opposite. However, a spell aligned with Ulyaoth will do the trick nicely. Remembering this sort of thing on the fly as undead minions lumber towards you can make for a harrowing experience in and of itself. There’s also an option to discover the right rune to represent Mantorok.

On a story level, the common threads woven between the disparate lives of the dozen or so characters in Eternal Darkness drew them and the player into the dire and seemingly hopeless web of machinations of the Ancients. Well-written stories for each character coupled with excellent voice acting showed us mortal beings who found themselves struggling to maintain their sanity in the face of horrors from beyond the stars. And the insanity was not limited to the game’s side of the screen, because every so often, the game would quite directly remind the player that they are not entirely in control of what is happening to them with the use of the game’s infamous Insanity Effects. This innovation was so singular that Nintendo patented it.

Gamers often maintain a distance between themselves and the content of the game with the knowledge that they, ultimately, are in control of the events unfolding on the screen. Eternal Darkness broke through that barrier directly into the fear center of players’ brains. In addition to horrifying visions the characters see, witnessing a character’s head explode upon attempting to cast a healing spell or finding them walking across the ceiling when previously they were on the floor, the game occasionally poked holes through the fourth wall, by turning down the volume complete with a generic TV volume meter (a move guaranteed to blast out your eardrums if you were unprepared and tried turning up your TV in response), turning off the screen entirely or giving a false GameCube error screen. It’s not entirely uncommon for the player to echo the character’s panicked cry of “THIS ISN’T HAPPENING!”

Ellia, one of the game’s dozen characters.

Since Eternal Darkness, there have been few games that really got into the head of a player. Silent Hill 2 is often touted for the same sort of atmosphere and storytelling as Eternal Darkness, but when it comes to this sort of immersive survival horror gameplay, the list is pretty short. Survival is, after all, more than just fighting off wave after wave of zombies. Who are we when we emerge on the other side of such an experience? How do those events change us? Good survival horror should address those questions as well as “how many zombies can you kill in three minutes?” or “how many different ways can you kill zombies?” Killing zombies will always be fun in games, but few games balance that fun with sheer terror, let alone madness.

Horror is about more than just gore. Games, as a storytelling medium, should ideally be about more than complicated physics engines and shameless sex appeal. Horror games, then, should aspire to rise above the slavering hordes of the undead chasing down a trashy blonde with big tits. Alex Roivas may be an attractive blonde, but she’s also smart, not a marathon runner, and pretty reasonable and stable, at least when she first arrives at Edward’s mansion. Like James Sunderland of Silent Hill 2, she is pretty much alone in a haunted place slowly losing her grip on her sanity as she delves deeper and deeper into the mad secrets of the Tome of Eternal Darkness. We’re taken right along with her on this downward spiral, rather than observing from a distance. We want to maintain her stability because it’s the stability of our experience as well, and we want her to survive because we want to see how it ends. If that isn’t immersive storytelling, I don’t know what is.

Eternal Darkness doesn’t just set us up against slavering hordes of the undead with a selection of blunt, sharp and loud objects to fend them off. It sets up a situation that pulls is in, drives us forward and leaves us wondering how we made it through to the other side. The game becomes more than a mere simulation and serves as a medium for the invocation of primal fear. So few games since have tapped into that sort of emotional and psychological response because marketing trends seem to indicate that this sort of experience, singular and powerful as it may be, isn’t what the majority of gamers are looking for. The wide-spread critical acclaim of Eternal Darkness and its die-hard fans can’t compare to the masses clamoring for the next Halo game, at least in terms of spending power. Shooting or bludgeoning zombies over and over in various arenas is simpler than setting up a situation where facing a single creature can be a pants-wetting experience, and while it might be unfair to call the fans of the former sort of game “simple”, the evidence seems to speak for itself. As much as I will admit to enjoying blasting legions of shambling corpses, there are times when my brain cries out for something more, some immersive storytelling, an experience that means something. Eternal Darkness fits that bill perfectly, and when my brain starts making those noises I’m likely to play it again. The uninitiated player would hopefully find it to be a unique and unforgettable experience … if they survive.

Behold, Failure Fantasy Part 2! Also, cruise over to Epixaricacy for more details on one of the games I’m about to discuss.

So I’ve taken some time to talk about bad protagonists in Final Fantasy games. What, you might ask, are examples of good ones?

I’m glad you asked me that, conjectural reader.

Zidane Tribal (Final Fantasy IX)

With the exception of Amarant, that random amalgamation of muscles and hair on the left of the pictured box art, most of the characters in Final Fantasy IX have depth, emotion and plausible relationships with the people around them. Garnet, the female lead, isn’t an insufferable whiner or completely vain. Vivi is perhaps the most adorable destroyer of worlds in any of these games (unless you count Lulu’s collection of plushies from the following game) and Steiner shows us just how badass a normal guy can be when tossed into these sort of situations. As much as I could talk about them, though, and the plethora of good things I have to say about Freya Crescent, this is about the main protagonists, and in this case, it’s cat/monkey boy Zidane.

He’s not the best main character in the history of gaming, but he’s very nearly a messiah in relation to his two predecessors. From the start, Zidane’s charismatic and fun, from his lecherous gazes at passing women to his interest in both theater and music. Even when the plot begins to twist and turn back upon it self, Zidane never really loses sight of who he is and what he wants to be. In fact, it’s one of his greatest strengths – no matter what someone tells him about ‘fate’ or ‘destiny,’ he is determined to be his own person. Instead of relying on his friends to get him through his most trying time, he actually attempts to forge ahead on his own, rather than endanger them. He shows more consistency and dimension than his previous counterparts, which to me puts him head, shoulders and tail above them.

Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI)

Zidane reminds me a bit of Locke from this game. In fact, I could discuss any of the characters from Final Fantasy VI at length, because the roster of characters from the game each have unique traits, importance to the plot and dimensions that make the more people than pixels. However, again, I must remain focused on the main hero of the game, or heroine in this case. Terra was the first female protagonist to come to a Final Fantasy game, and to this day, she remains my favorite.

While the game starts her as both an amnesiac and under the control of the game’s villainous omnicidal clown, Terra is quickly revealed to be a compassionate, sensitive and intelligent young woman. Unlike some of the other protagonists I’ve mentioned in other games, as soon as the veil of enemy control is lifted from her, she becomes introspective and self-aware, growing as a character and becoming more comfortable and confident in both herself and her friends. Her arc is well-plotted and executed without major fault, and this consistent and realistic growth adds to her appeal as a cypher for the actions and attitudes of the player.

This player, at least. Most of the opinions I’ve ventured here are purely subjective. Feel free to discuss them at your leisure and fling poo at my cage. However, when compared one against the other in terms of character growth, motivations and appeal, I hope you can see why some of these protagonists succeed while others are complete and total failures.