Free fall freefall

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Going by the demo, which may be a dangerous thing to go by, Mirror’s Edge is pretty good. Not perfect; the tutorial segment leads you by the nose, without telling you how to do what it wants you to do, or what you did wrong when you don’t, then screams at you and forces you to start all over. As if the game weren’t hard enough.

Beyond that, I can see the difficulty they had in winnowing down the controls and clarifying what the player is able to do. The business with marking everything important in red is hackneyed, but clever in a desperate sort of way. It is intuitive, especially in how the color mirrors Faith’s gloves, and I suppose that’s all that matters in the short term. You can feel the band aids bulging, though. And it does make it just a touch more gamey. Still, I know how hard it is to illustrate these things, and how late the solutions tend to come.

I’m also impressed how they manage to continue the recent trend of strong woman protagonists without radiating that creepy Josh Lesnick aura or feeling like they’re pandering. Faith is a pretty good, no-nonsense lead, not unlike Alyx in Half-Life 2 or a Chell with a smidge of personality. Actually, now that I’m on the subject — I seem to say this about any comptently-designed Western game, and I’m not sure how I feel about that — it feels pretty Valveish. So does Bad Company, the other DICE game I’ve been playing, so maybe it’s just them. Those Swedes do tend to know what they’re doing.

And, yeah. Okay. I’m sold on this. The slight Gibson storyline is okay. Not sure they need the enemies; more videogame nonsense, and I don’t see what they have to do with the game’s themes. I wonder if those were at EA’s suggestion. Combined with the stunts, they give it a bit of a Jet Set Radio vibe. Except with free vertigo.

I had been noticing how, in other first-person games — like Bad Company, for instance — whenever I fall off a high ledge, my stomach quickly rises to my throat, the way it does when you watch a projection of a roller coaster. Except in this case, I feel like I’m legitimately about to die. So… I’ve been having an experience here.

EDIT:

Amandeep: the thing with the enemies in mirror’s edge –
i think up until pretty recently the game wasn’t going to have a gun or anything.
now i think there…is one, right?
and you do have to shoot shit.
i’m pretty much dead convinced that that came as some kind of order from on high at ea.
Me: Yeah, you have to shoot things.
It doesn’t fit at all.
Being able to punch guys and run away from them… okay, that… sort of makes sense, I guess.
Though it’s stll a bit awkward.
I mean, I don’t see the point of enemies. Your enemy (and friend) is the environment.
Amandeep: yeah, as recently as a couple months ago they were saying: no enemies, it’s going to be basically like portal.
Me: But if you’re going to have random bad guys after you, then a passive solution feels most natural.
Yes!
It feels like Portal.
Well. Jet Set Portal.
The Legend of Jet Set Portal.
Amandeep: the red stuff is fairly new too, i think.
before they were going on about how there’d be no hud elements whatsoever except a tiny little reticule pointing up in the center of the screen to keep you from getting dizzy.
Me: Oh. Well.
I guess I’m pretty observant, then.
These are the only things about it that I don’t like.
The red stuff… okay. It feels a bit Ubisoft, you know?
It’s not offensive. It’s just… a bit… duh.

Now I’m Down In It

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Amandeep: wait so
isn’t “kinda i want to” sort of uh
specifically about being gay
Me: Is it?
Amandeep: this just occurred to me
Me: Wait, let me take a look at this.
Amandeep: i’m not sure of what i should do.
when every thought i’m thinking of is you.
all of my excuses turn to lies.
maybe God will cover up his eyes
Me: Okay. Yeah, there’s some ambiguity about the pronouns and the exact naure of his transgression.
The simplest reading is… well, it’s an early version of Closer.
Actually.
From across the way?
Is he some kind of weird Rear Window stalker?
Amandeep: i mean, the thing is that there are all these weird FORBIDDEN LOVE kind of overtones
Me: Sitting alone in his apartment, lusting after some woman across the way?
It’s really ambiguous.
Amandeep:
actually
this could be from the perspective of like
a rapist or something
Me: Yeah.
Amandeep: which is a much creepier reading
but seems equally valid
Me: Stalker-rapist.
Amandeep: what’s the price i pay.
i don’t care what they say.
i want to.
Me: Man.
Yeah.
I actually like that interpretation.
Though the gay one is interesting.
This is such an open-ended song.
“I want to do something transgressive! And I feel ambivalent about that!”
So many possibilities!
Amandeep: hahaha
“I want to do something transgressive! And I feel ambivalent about that!”
Me: So let’s assume the stalker-rapist interpretation for the moment.
Me: Now consider the early version of the song.
Amandeep: yeah
Sent at 4:40 PM on Thursday
Me: That’s kind of a brilliant combination.
I’m going to just assume that’s what the song is about, specifically because that’s the original arrangement.

Important Glossary of Terms

  • Reading time:13 mins read

by [name redacted]

This is another unpublished article — ostensibly a glossary for the end of a “New Games Journalism” anthology edited by Kieron Gillen, friend to all woodland creatures. It was to have been published by O’Reilly Media; as tends to happen, there was a management change and the new guy was no longer interested in the book. At least I got paid… in a check composed in pounds sterling, that my bank refused to cash. Hm. Well, here it is.

As few of our readers are likely familiar with the intricate jargon involved in videogame writing, I have been asked to compile a list of common words and phrases found throughout this volume. Although some of these words may look and may even sound familiar, a wise traveler takes caution when straying into unknown land; even an innocent gesture may find you on the wrong end of a dagger or the wrong side of a jail cell. Before acting on any of the advice contained prior, and certainly before laying judgment on the claims put forth in this text, please study the following index and integrate its contents into your daily routine.

NOTE: It may help to copy these terms out on a sheet of paper, and to repeat them daily. For those culturally blessed with right-handedness, try writing the terms with your left hand for added practice and agreement between both of your mental hemispheres. For those accursed to live in a world not designed for their grasp, wield your pen alternately to those before you.

ART

A subjective form of communication that uses metaphor to suggest a vast yet implicit web of common understanding between two parties, often on a subconscious or an unconscious level.

Anathema to the Gamer.

AVATAR

In a videogame context, the in-game character or object that represents the player. In the cases where the avatar is anthropomorphic, it usually takes the form of a hyper-masculine adult male or a woman wearing three square inches of clothing. More recently, Japanese games have replaced the former archetype with an androgynous (or even hyper-feminine) male lead. This is all more comprehensible when you understand the intimate bond between a player and her on-screen persona. The player’s avatar becomes, in a sense, her closest companion on her lengthy journey through the gameworld. Especially in a modern 3D adventure, it is important to find an avatar whose ass the typical player will enjoy watching for hours at a time.

CAUSE-AND-EFFECT

Every medium is a study of specific properties of the human experience. Sculpture is a study of form; music, a study of tone. Videogames are a study of the relationship between cause and effect. That is to say: where videogames exist, experientially, is in the feedback loop between the player and the gameworld. The player acts upon the gameworld, and is given a response (or lack of one). This response then becomes the basis for further reaction. It is this ping-pong communication with one’s environment that defines the medium.

CONFLICT

The goals set before the player mean relatively little unless the player has opposition to overcome in order to fulfill those goals; any screenwriter or novelist could tell you that. This opposition might take the form of a snarling man with a mustache, a lack of communication between brothers, or a lingering sense of guilt over a past deed. Conflict is the manner in which opposition is addressed. In a videogame, the solutions to the above problems would be to stab the man with the mustache, to stab your brother, then to fire a laser-guided missile at your guilt. Metaphorically, perhaps.

ENEMY

In most videogames, violence is the major or sole source of conflict. As every videogame must sustain player interest for fifty hours or more, each requires an parade of weak and generically evil characters to kill. These are known as your enemies. An enemy can be easily discerned from a non-combative NPC in that any evil entity will hurt, kill, or infect the player’s avatar on contact.

This design philosophy has its roots in early drafts of the Christian Bible, in which Jesus preached social paranoia and an ethical code based in Darwinism. (These sections were later revised in part, from fear of alienating Southern Baptist ministers.) These teachings were later adopted as a social code during the Reagan administration, during which videogames initially flourished.

EXPERIENCE

In life, experience is accumulated through keen observation, trial and error, and persistence. A person’s accumulated experience is the context from which she can derive meaning from the events that make up her life, and from which artistic communication is made possible. Although these events will call on a limited number of templates, it is the way the elements are balanced that gives us each our unique perspective.

In videogames, experience is accumulated by exiting your town borders and stabbing bunny rabbits. You can tell how much experience you have gained by the numerical tally in your sub-menu. With enough experience, you will advance to the next level (of advancement) and possibly learn fire magic.

FREEDOM

Doesn’t exist. See Liberty.

GAMEPLAY

An objective term for the liberty allowed within a given gameworld; the things that a game lets you do, and therefore the elements that make up the player’s potential. Often misapplied to mean how a game feels to play – whether the jumping seems solid, whether attacking is satisfying. Those are mechanical issues. This is just about potential: what you can, hypothetically, do.

On an even keel with graphics, and far more important than sound or replay value.

GAMER

Creatures whose personal identity is rooted in a lifestyle built around videogames. Typically conservative, defensive, and isolationist in attitude – especially when it comes to videogames, especially the particular videogames in which they are most deeply invested.

Notable subspecies: Hardcore Gamers, Retro Gamers, Obscure Gamers, PC Gamers, Console Gamers, Fighter Fans, RPG Fans, Shooter Fans, Technophiles, Wilson’s Golden Band-Rumped Gamer.

GAMEWORLD

The artificial space given to the player to navigate, including all of its rules, logistics, background, and inhabitants – the way all of these elements cohere to form a tangible place – that’s the gameworld. Pac-Man’s gameworld is limited to an endlessly-repeating blue maze filled with ghosts who re-spawn in their central nest, corridors lined with cookies, and the occasional bouncing piece of fruit. Shenmue’s gameworld is a limited recreation of a mid-’80s Japanese suburb where you never have to eat, where the kids all want to wrestle, and where people actually know whether or not they saw a black car on the day that the snow turned to rain.

A gameworld is largely defined by the liberty allowed the player; its verisimilitude, however unrepresentative it might seem of the “real world”, relies mostly on not suggesting any more possibilities than it actually allows. Once the player starts to question why a reasonable option is unavailable to him – say, stepping over a line of police tape or walking down a corridor blocked off by an invisible wall – the illusion is shattered. In its abstraction, Pac-Man has a highly believable gameworld; few would question, for instance, why the player can’t merely jump over the maze walls.

GRAPHICS

A term used by gamers and game journalists to refer to the visual presentation of a gameworld. The implication is that boiling down a game’s appearance to an objective-sounding term will allow an easy (perhaps even numerical!) assessment of worth. Old games, like the original Legend of Zelda, have bad graphics. New games, like the newest car racing or Madden game, have good graphics. Unless they don’t map enough mips or buffer enough Zs, that is.

Alongside gameplay, one of the two most important review criteria.

INTERFACE

The means through which a player may interact with the gameworld. Interfaces have both a physical and a design component: physically, you have the means through which commands are entered (a control pad, joystick, power glove); by design, the player is given feedback through a display device. For example, the game tells you to hit “A” to open a menu. You press the “A” button on your controller. This brings up the menu, which gives you further information to inform future actions. An interface is the objective aspect of the cause-and-effect relationship between player and game. The subjective aspect is known as mindspace.

LIBERTY

Liberty is freedom within bounds. Or, perhaps, the illusion of freedom. According to most codes of ethics, a person has liberty to do much as he choose so long as he not negatively interfere with the liberty of another. As conscious creatures, we have the liberty to do whatever our psychology, our circumstances, our physical laws allow – which in the end is not very much. You can pick the 2% or the skim milk, but in a sense the decision is already determined by your nature, by every event of your life to that point however inconsequential it might seem, and by factors completely outside of your control (mostly relating to the liberty of others). Even your standing at the cooler door, making up your mind, is the inevitable outcome of prior events.

Though you may have no true freedom, you have full liberty to do what you will within the means and situation provided you. Though your decisions may objectively be preordained, you subjectively have the option to choose whatever path you wish. The same is true of every gameworld. Although Liberty City may allow you a broader scope of options than Pac-Land, both offer the same liberty within the narrow box handed you. If a game has strong verisimilitude, the bounds of your liberty will never occur to you and you will simply accept the world as it is given.

MECHANIC

In real life we have laws – physical laws, social laws, ethical laws. Instead, videogames have mechanics. In theory, mechanics exist to define the boundaries and establish the potential of a gameworld. In reality, ninety percent of all game mechanics exist to make one genre piece distinguishable from another.

MINDSPACE

On its own, a videogame is just a collection of code burned into an optical disc or some other storage medium. Videogames are, in a sense, pure ideas. There is no physical element to them. Further, a tremendous background of technology and service is required to experience a videogame. All of this investment exists to create an absorbing mindspace for the end player. The mindspace between player and game is where a videogame actually takes place; where a player serves as protagonist to his own gameworld experience, according to the liberties alloted him by the game mechanics. The greater the verisimilitude of the gameworld, the more easily a player’s mindspace is retained. Mindspace is the purely subjective component of the cause-and-effect relationship between player and game; the objective component is known as the game interface.

NARRATIVE

The manner in which a story is told. In film, narrative is a facet of editing and framing. In a videogame, narrative comes from playing. Asteroids does have a story, as far as it has a narrative. It happens to be a story of a lone space ship and its ultimately doomed goal to clear the space around it of dangerous space rocks. The particulars come in the telling – that is, in the playing. How long the ship lasts, how well it does, what close calls it has, are all up to the player.

The greater the scope of liberty allowed a player, the more undefined the narrative.

NPC

A non-player character is an actor on the stage who is strictly controlled by the script, rather than by a human mind. In effect, an automaton placed within the gameworld to give it the appearance of population outside the player. Sort of creepy. Generally considered distinct from an enemy, in that NPCs are given the illusion of personalities and lives of their own, whereas enemies only exist to be evil. NPCs are typically a barrier to verisimilitude, in that both by nature (as living props) and by technological limitation, they will never behave in a completely believable manner.

PLAYER

Life is but a stage, and we are all players.

POTENTIAL

latent possibility. The greatest achievement of verisimilitude is the suggestion of endless potential within a given world – the sense that anything could be out there, that you can do anything you want, that a miracle is just around the corner.

VERISIMILITUDE

The illusion of reality, which in most cases is achieved through not giving the audience cause to question the reality at hand. Postmodernism gets some of its kicks though turning verisimilitude on its head and bringing conscious attention to the seams of a given work. On its own terms, though, this is just another level of reality, with its own layer of verisimilitude. For a work to succeed, we need to believe in it somehow, even if that belief is a belief that we shouldn’t believe in it at all.

Different from suspension of disbelief, as with enough verisimilitude disbelief won’t even enter the picture.

VIOLENCE

The only important form of videogame conflict, violence involves the malicious harm of, or the intent to harm, another being. Violence can be overt and physical; some figures like Mohandas Gandhi more broadly interpret it as any negative effect, however inadvertent, one person might suffer at another’s hands. Jean-Paul Sartre sees human communication itself as a form of violence; merely by interacting with another, we cause damage on some level, for both parties. Given that the entire nature of videogames is a study of communication, perhaps this says something.

Videogame violence is of a literal variety: one character brandishes a blade, and attacks the next. Oddly, although violence both forms and resolves nearly every videogame conflict, it is rare that videogames explore the repercussions of violence. Ethically, it is perfectly fine for the player to shoot ten thousand soldiers in order to save a single comrade, because the enemy soldiers are not real. They have no lives, no personalities, no bearing on the gameworld. They are simply evil incarnate, much like the “Communists” and “Terrorists” of American history. Perhaps intrinsically, the only force that matters in a gameworld is that of the player, and if the player is to continue feeding quarters, or is to feel generically satisfied with his fifty-dollar purchase, a videogame must encourage the player to feel not only justified but victorious in his actions. This is the state of videogames today.

Special thanks to Tim Rogers, Brandon Sheffield, Shepard Saltzman, Andrew Toups, Amandeep Jutla, Thom Moyles, James Freeman Rinehart, and Christian Culbertson.

Still waiting for red

  • Reading time:5 mins read

aderack: Just because it’s right in front of me as I type this. I… the DS thing. The Sony guy. The DS outselling the PSP by FOUR TIMES, and furthermore selling more than every other console PUT TOGETHER. Gimmick. Limited appeal.

… Yeah. Don’t need to talk about it really. Just observing.

I’m kind of surprised, on a level, that people have started to notice the obvious. It doesn’t often happen. I mean. With the DS being the only interesting system out there now and certainly the most interesting thing since the Dreamcast, with Sony completely missing the point with the PSP, with the DS bringing in people who’d never been interested in videogames before…

I just wonder why it’s not available in more colors here.
ajutla: It’s funny as hell.
aderack: It’s… weird. They’re figuring it out on their own, and with only about half a year of lag. Maybe that says something. Like people are getting fed up.
ajutla: You can only play videogames because they are videogames for so long.
aderack: I mean. A couple of years ago, I don’t think I’d see people mocking the Sony guy the way they are now. You’d see Sony claiming the PS2 was the first Internet-compatible home console, and no one would call them on it. Even though, say, Sega had just launched Seganet. And PSO was only a few months away. And the Dreamcast wasn’t even the first, either.
ajutla: The big thing that characterized this generation for me was people noticing the rot starting to set in. Just–nothing really happened. And people realize this.
aderack: Maybe the stage is getting ripe for the Revolution. Especially since it’s supposed to be priced under $200 at launch (last I heard), compared to the 360 and PS3 — which, if you’ve not noticed, are selling in bundles that go past $1,000. And it’ll have the same DS thing going for it, it looks like, versus the PSP of the otther two systems. Also, the other two are almost indistinguishable, while the Revolution should stand out.
ajutla: To be fair, I’m pretty sure that $1,000-plus 360 bundle assumes you’re buying every launch game that will be available, even the ones no one is sure will be available yet. Still.
aderack: Yes. Still, the standard bundles are around $700.00. That’s the only way to buy the system from some retailers. It’s just — holy shit. Who wants to invest that much in a fucking game console?
ajutla: IT’S BECAUSE IT’S AN ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM NOW.

…except they’ve already done that before.
aderack: But no one will use it for anything other than playing videogames and maybe watching DVDs if they don’t have any better player.
ajutla: The psp/DS thing suddenly becomes very ironic with that idea in mind.
aderack: Oh. Yeah.

I guess Kutaragi got the wrong message when, for, like, a YEAR after the PS2 was released in Japan, the best-selling application for it was The Matrix. And people used it mostly as a DVD player until around the time the other two systems came out. It’s not because that’s what people want from a game console; it’s because there weren’t any cheap DVD players in Japan at the time.
ajutla: Right.
aderack: And the PS2 filled that gap.
ajutla: The thing is. Kutagari / Allard / et al have the idea that videogames are over. In a sense. And that you can build this big box. That you put your videogames in. And your other entertainment, too, while you’re at it.
aderack: Because the market’s stagnating, so they need to lean on other things until it magically recovers.
ajutla: And the market is stagnating because they’re leaning on other things.
aderack: Or more simply because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.
ajutla: That too.
aderack: They’re not really interested in videogames; just in being in the videogame business. And so fair weather friends and all…

Compared to people who are doing this for a business because, well, it’s what they do. So they have a vested interest. Not that Nintendo doesn’t have its own problems to address…
ajutla: It’s kind of telling that the most interesting feature about the Revolution, right now, is that you can play old games on it. Nintendo is looking forwards by looking backwards.
aderack: Making all of history current. That strikes me as important. The way that all of cinema is “current”, in a sense. Especially thanks to things like DVD and the recent restoration trends.
ajutla: Yeah. Videogames fade away. So you forget that you’ve FUCKING played most games before.
aderack: It’s a step toward, really, finally establishing just what the fuck videogames are and what they have to say.
ajutla: It solidifies things; it’s creating a critical mass–like, here, this is Videogame (1984-2005). It’s pointing that way.
aderack: Right. The first real state of the industry address.
ajutla: The design philosophy behind the psp is…sort of entirely the opposite of this. Right down to the UMD thing. The thing could have taken mini DVDs, you know. But. You should buy everything again. Always.

Texas Gunfire

  • Reading time:7 mins read

Doom is very different in philosophy and design from modern FP shooters.

Doom is built like a console game. Heck, Romero idolizes Miyamoto. Commander Keen came out of a demo that he and Carmack whipped up for Nintendo, showing how to implement the scrolling from Super Mario Bros. on a PC (which, I guess, was a feat at the time). Howard Lincoln yawned. The Texans made their own game.

Quake is, indeed, more the prototype for the modern shooter. It’s also kind of boring in comparison — at least, for me. Here they paid less attention to actual design; more to just getting a 3D engine up. That, and getting Trent Reznor involved. I mean, they already had a template with Wolf3D and Doom. Quake was just technology. They filled in the blanks with gray textures and asinine Lovecraft references. It feels like they were bored, doing it — as well they should have been, I guess, since that’s not what they cared about anymore. And this was about where Romero started to flake out, too. Whether the rise of Superprogrammer was the cause or result of this, I don’t know.

Doom isn’t concerned with being a first-person shooter as-such, since the genre didn’t exist at the time. Instead, it is an attempt to rework the rather barren Wolf3D into as vibrant a design as possible. To do something substantial with the concept, if you will. It’s kind of the same leap as from Quake to Half-Life, because it’s the same mentality at work.

Doom’s console sensibility extends from its controls (as with Wolf3D, it’s made to be played without a mouse; the mouse only really enters when you have a Z axis to worry about) to its level design and (as someone noted) pacing, to its monster designs, to its set pieces and its idea of secret areas and items.

For one, the game just drools charisma. We all can rattle off most of the monsters in Super Mario Bros. and Zelda. We know Brinstar like the backs of our hands. There is a certain iconography even to the level design: even if on a cursory glance it might not stand out as anything special, it bores into the consciousness just as well as a cheep-cheep or a zoomer. Everything is placed preciously, exactly because there is no template to fall back on.

And, as we know, there is a certain subconscious pacing built in, for how the game introduces concepts. You run to the right, jump up and hit the flashing object overhead. It makes a chime sound and a coin pops out. You’ve clearly done something well. You hit another block and a mushroom appears. It must not be harmful, unlike the enemy you either ran into, jumped on, or jumped over a moment before, as it comes out of a block like the one which rewarded you with a chime a moment before. When you touch it, you grow. Since you’re bigger, you can more easily reach the platforms above you. You try jumping and can break the bricks. Keep going right and you hit a pipe. Then two enemies. Eventually a pit. Then a fire flower. Then a koopa troopa.

And. So on. It all sounds simple, yet so few people get it right. And since it’s supposed to be invisible, so few people notice on a conscious level when it’s missing.

Doom does this, yes, on a mechanical level. Yet it does something else, too. It paces the atmosphere. I maintain that the best part of Doom is episode one (the Shareware episode) of Doom 1. After you leave the manmade environments, where something has gone really awfully wrong, and enter the abstract flesh-tents of Hell, the game has pretty much blown its wad (pun very much intended). Then the game just becomes about shooting, and I don’t much care for it. Episode one has a certain stress to it, however. You wander the station, looking for something to restore your ailing health. The lights go out. You hear snarls in the distance. You know something’s out there — but where?

And then there are just so many hidden passages. You never know what wall might open, and how. Or what you might find (like the Chainsaw). It’s kind of like Zelda, again. Often you can see things in the distance, or through windows, that you just plain can’t access through normal means. This gets you exploring.

The whole mindset that the game creates, with all of this — the mindset that it asks for — is different. It’s more introverted. More careful. The game is as much about exploration and generally owning the gameworld as it is about blowing shit up.

There’s a certain balance here, from level to level. Just study how things are laid out. It’s no mistake that the shareware episode is the best; after all, it’s the one that id needed to be good, if anyone was going to register.

>How would you say the modern FPS has deviated from this Doom mindset? And starting where, exactly? Doom II? Duke Nukem 3D? Quake?

I don’t know. I became disgusted with the whole degenre around the time of Q3 and UT. I like what I’ve seen about HL2, from this distance. It reminds me of, uh, Myst.

Quake’s probably a good place to start. Or maybe you could begin with all of the knockoffs of Wolf3D and Doom, which used the same engine yet didn’t do anything interesting with it. They helped to pollute the mindspace a bit, I bet, and distract from the reasons why Doom was as excellent as it was.

Quake’s the landmark, though, for all the obvious reasons. I mean, it led the way, from Quake to Quake II to Quake III, to a technology-oriented philosophy. It doesn’t matter what you do with the engine; it just matters what the engine does. Throw in a few rules and some network code, and you have a game.

I’m oversimplifying to an insulting degree, I realize. On the one hand, the whole multiplayer thing, although it appeals to me in NEGATIVE INCREMENTS, meaning a piece of me dies every time the subject comes up, has attained something of the same distinction that a versus fighter has in comparison to a sidescrolling brawler. It’s a place to show skill and piss on other people (even more so than with a fighter, for various reasons), and if that’s your kind of thing, there are a lot of excellent games to help you vent that testosterone.

On the other, you have the Half-Life-inspired movement toward using the form for a more holistic experience — expanding on exactly the part of Doom that the Quake thread gave up on. Halo sits on this end, mostly — though a little more to the right, toward Quake, than HL. If you were to count Metroid Prime as a FPS, it would be about as far to the left as possible.

>Masters of Doom says that Quake’s formative years were sort of the epitome of development hell. […] Carmack was going off into his abstract, workaholic computer world and Romero was becoming increasingly arrogant and was slacking off more than usual. The end result, then, was a Doom clone where the engine was designed independently of the levels, which were designed independently of each other, which is why they’re so goddamned bizzare and incongruous.

Yeah! I remember that, now. I guess that’s whence came Daikatana.

For my part, I did enjoy Quake at the time. It’s not half-bad. It’s just — it leaves me empty.