#48 -- "Saints Row: The Third" Reviewed | * * * ½

ONE QUICK THING: A more complete version of this review, and all our other downloads, can be found on our new domain: http://www.ghostlittle.com/

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". . .a super-deformed, weaponized-speedball that knows the difference between good and evil."

There has been serendipitous fun in videogames for more than 25 years. Beating The Legend of Zelda in one sitting is serendipitous fun. Running through a grand prix cup in Super Mario Kart with the always-tiny cheat is serendipitous fun. Juggling a velociraptor with a quad rocket-launcher in Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is serendipitous fun. Doing backflips off the highway median in a stolen Yakuza sportscar in Grand Theft Auto III is madness and all-consuming and fun. These things are special because we discover them within a defined, but easily violated, set of rules that the videogame has laid out before us (. . .rules like gravity). This madness becomes ours and becomes true, golden escapism. Even if we are told somebody else discovered that exact same bar of gold, it's never theirs, it's ours. As far as we're concerned, dad invented speedruns when he accidentally beat Super Mario Bros. in 1989 in eight minutes.

Saints Row: The Third was probably made by a covenant of college students that spent a lot of time avoiding responsibility for their actions in Liberty City, probably the GTA3 version, and they learned where serendipitous fun came from, challenging us now with the question: "Why brew our game from anything that isn't instinct, projected?" That's freedom -- not being given the ability to do anything and told to find your fun, but rather anticipating what people will want to do with the dark materials given to them.

For example, Skyrim (Oblivion texture-mod out of 4) is a game that tells you to go anywhere and do anything but is honestly too nervous to admit it's 95% inventory-management, physics-breaking, menu-surfing, and loading screens draped in neat concept art. If you spend that much time scrolling through a fucking menu, Skyrim, maybe your game is missing direction and focus! The game is Zork and a Google image-search of Norway + "Game of Thrones." Skyrim is fantasy for somebody that's never stood on top of a mountain or actually ever drunk mead. It's made from honey.

Alternatively, SR3 is a hyper-real, super-deformed, weaponized-speedball that knows the difference between good and evil. It knows the barricades commonly set up inside videogames to keep us away from fun and it blows them up with gigantic gunpowder casks. SR3's interface ought to win a Nobel Prize for chemistry (between a human and a machine). Its menu-work extends as far as Summon → VTOL or Mission → Go. It is game-science and that science is too tight! It packs all the stickiest, ickiest, dankest fun into a bowl without a stick or stem in sight.

This game is kind of inside our brains, circa 2002. It's GameGenie: The Game. What was random is now a game. What was formerly secret to all but the inquisitive is now a game. What were formerly videogame war-stories usually reserved for hushed whispers at an arcade and shouted declarations in college dining halls are now part of a game, this game, Saints Row: The Third. Did you find rampaging around in a tank in Grand Theft Auto more fun than the missions? That is part of this game. Did you have fun playing with your corpse's ragdoll physics in Unreal Tournament? That is part of this game. Did you hate the elongated travel sections in Red Dead Redemption that seemed to bookend every mission and you were forced to repeat them if you fell off your horse? Those are not part of the game.

Saints Row: The Third has trimmed the fat. This is the leanest steak you've ever eaten. It's not the most tender and it doesn't have a fine hollandaise-sauce drizzle but it's served with mash potatoes and a red wine that's so good that it'll make you believe in God, so fuck you, here's your 14 oz. Porterhouse, if you wanted something else, you must be kidding yourself.

The gunplay is: SHMUP-perfect. The run-and-gun third-person shooter has resurfaced, reminding us of how much we loved Jet Force Gemini and Max Payne.

The driving is: Burnout on ice with studded caterpillar-treads. There's a strange clickity-clack friction when driving the really fast cars around the city and the acceleration is controller-grippening, so the moment you start to feel out of control, it's likely you'll crash. It won't really matter. You'll be back up to full-speed and crashing into a guardrail in the next 30 seconds.

The graphics are: A brand-new box of crayons, points still sharp, paper unpeeled. An entire village of tiny people worship the crayons and color inside the lines flawlessly, creating a milky, high-definintion utilitarian presentation with no loose threads.

The story is: Grand Theft Auto: The Animated Series. It airs at 11:30pm on Sundays on Cartoon Network. It starts with skydiving and ends with an assault on a helicarrier and never once does it wink at the camera.

Perhaps the most notable point for SR3 is the way the game changes if you play as a male or female character, or rather, no matter which you chose to play as, you don't really play as either. The character was written as a gender-neutral badass -- sassy and uncaring and invincible, a power-fantasy that talks and walks like a twenty-one year old with a bottomless bank account and every cheat code activated. Within all of this though, the character is genuine and downright friendly, like God on vacation. When you play as a guy, he's a goofball, and when you play as a girl, she's the same goofball. This is kind of jarring at first glance. It's so strange to watch because being a woman has no bearing whatsoever on the character's actions, which almost never occurs in a videogame. It's so far removed from how characters in any medium -- videogames or otherwise -- are created that we have to give it praise. Obviously, there was one script written for the main character that you play as, and there are seven different voice actors giving seven different readings of the script, which you can chose from when you customize that main character after the tutorial. There are three male, three female, and one zombie-voice. The readings differ only slightly but the lines have to always fit with the other characters' recorded dialog that they're speaking to and acting against, so by default, the character is defined by traits that have nothing to do with gender. When you're playing as a male, it's not as noticeable, because brash male leads that eat guitars, shoot off guns, and ignore all the ladies' fawning, like all us man-dudes do, are more common in games, and nobody comes up to him and say, "Shit, son, you are the human-male! I acknowledge your masculinity, for it is vibrant. Too much so, sometimes, brother. I miss your scent."

When you swap over to one of the female voices, it's a dramatic change. Your character becomes a woman that does not give any fucks about what she's doing and nobody ever acknowledges she's a she. She isn't entirely manly, but as we played and remembered back, we realized gradually that the male-version wasn't entirely manly either. They were both confident, well-adjusted, comfortable, and staggeringly balanced in how they carry themselves, credit to the writers and voice actors for delivering a character compatible with many faces. In the case of the women, it's a leap forward from the princesses, and the battle-hardened bad-girls, and the sopping piles of top-heavy softcore that the entertainment industry is blighted with.

For the female avatar in SR3, it isn't Girl Power, it's Person Power. She never goes into grandiose pontification about female-empowerment or male inadequacy, and that is empowerment in and of itself. There will be the occasional one-liner about chipping a nail during a gunfight, but that's not enough to derail the argument. This is a videogame character in what has eternally been a man's world -- in attitude, in practice, and almost exclusively in audience (but less-so recently, thank God) -- that does not mention the glass-ceiling she busted through to run a multi-national street gang. That's progress, folks! She isn't The Greatest Female Character In Games, but she is the best feminist icon in videogames since Alyx Vance in Half-Life 2. Outside of FemShep in the Mass Effect games, female characters in videogames are inherently FEMALE, meaning throughout the game, their symmetrical chromosomes will be commented on because they are not white Caucasian males. It's like whenever a Native American character shows up in games. He always sits cross-legged, and has a spirit guide, and a tomahawk, and a fringe-vest (T. Hawk, Turok, the guy from Prey, and Nightwolf, among others), and he is defined only by that building-block, Wikipedian-constriction.

The lady-lead in SR3 isn't defined by her femininity. She's defined by her leadership personality and her loyalty to her friends.

Certain publications have called out SR3 as the exact opposite to this. Edge-Online, in particular, a magazine that we respect a whole heckuva lot, particularly because they use the entire 1-10 scale (giving SR3 a 6 out of 10 in this case, which they defended with aplomb), reiterating in their review that the word "whore" is used ad-nauseum throughout the game, and thus, females are denigrated. In spite of this damnable, silly word, how does the protagonist -- for the sake of argument, female, in this case -- respond to these missions? Usually by blowing up helicopters, punching tigers, controlling the crisis, laughing at her enemies' disgusting insanity, and by being a leader that people know and respect because of her actions. She will defend her friends and conquer the city. She will run shit!

She feels no compulsion to prove anything, no compulsion to justify why she's a capable female-lead in an action game -- man's work. Nope, she doesn't verbalize, she just goes. Some might argue that calling a game female-empowerment because it's somewhat gender-blind is actually a bad thing. Wrong. Do people need any identity beyond anything but mere humanity to define themselves? Sometimes, kinda, yes, because we always need help from The Other to fill in the blanks about who we are as individuals -- we haven't quite gotten there in our videogame characters. Yet. SR3 is at least a step in the right direction though.

Do you remember in every action movie ever where a love-interest was shoehorned in because heavy-makeout is a base emotional reaction that people can identify with? Remember in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, that sort-of-boring British navy movie that you expected to be Gladiator On A Boat, but was actually closer to Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany reenacting My Dinner With Andre in the Galapagos Islands, and you didn't realize there was only one woman (with no dialog) in the entire movie until your friend sat up straight and said just that? 

"Dude! This boat's got more sausage than an Italian trireme! Where are all the wimmens at?!"

Suddenly, you realized that a wilting love-interest is an absolute waste in a lot of stories because all they do is reinforce gender stereotypes that "men are doctors" and "women are nurses," and that's just how shit is? A more advanced society would march on ahead of those draconian distinctions, indifferent to what superficially makes us different, gender, race, creed, and instead lets all people co-exist. The protagonist in SR3 can be a man or a woman, but s/he will always be a headstrong leader that doesn't wallow inside a macho-male compartment, or an overtly-feminine compartment, or a racial compartment, or nationality compartment -- all of which are options you can chose to create your avatar.

What began life as a cash-grab Grand Theft Auto clone has become one of the best feminist statements in videogames and in storytelling this year.

By ignoring restrictive tropes that normally weaken a person or a character, your mission is to kick ass in a city full of madmen. This game lets you summon a jet-bike to your side and fly around a city looking for boxes of inflatable sex-dolls. Whereas Grand Theft Auto has only hinted at these kinds of silly jokes in the past, SR3 is the cheat-sheet to videogames' evil that Rockstar (creators of GTA) coded into its games so your parents would see something that suspiciously looked like a bong, but was labeled as a "Hidden Package."

That piece of property you just bought in the Vice City slums looks an awful lot like a meth lab. No, man, it's a safehouse. No, in SR3, it's just a meth lab. It is. Don't fight it. We're passed apology and posturing and what a refreshing state it is. It's the revelation that the Wizard of Oz isn't a wizard, but he does have a vast network of shady contacts.

Why must we get out of the car to stand in the glowing circle to activate a mission? Because in GTA, we like to maintain some realism. There's a glowing fucking circle on the sidewalk, we abandoned realism about when we went on that 1000-person killing spree and didn't get the lethal injection. Ergo, in SR3, you don't have to stop your car, get out of your car, walk over to the glowing circle, and let the mission load. 

This is A Game That Goes. That's the highest praise that we can give a game. A Game That Goes never leaves you lost or leaves you belaboring why it was "designed" in a particular way. The moment you step out of your own brain and into a developer's brain is the moment the game stops going. A game can go while having a plot that's standing still, as long as you, the player, are propelling things forward -- Uncharted 2's (* * * ½ out of 4) Tibetan village is a great example of A Game Going slowly. Batman: Arkham Asylum (* * * out of 4) is A Game That Goes. There's never a time where you sit there, staring at your map, wondering: "This seems silly. Do they really want me to burn 20 minutes walking all the way back across the world?" Games That Go usually have no loading screens. Metroid Prime (* * * * out of 4) and God of War (* * * * out of 4) are Games That Go, making you promise yourself that you'll stop playing at the next save point, we just want to see what's over this hill. For all the wrong reasons, Final Fantasy XIII (* * out of 4) is A Game That Goes, only because it's stupid-easy, impossible to die, and leaves you desperate for a good chapter to finally show up. 

Saints Row: The Third is A Game That Goes. There's no load-time longer than 10 seconds. There's little to no slog or recovery time if you die. Getting around the city isn't a twenty-minute chore and it often earns you money and discovery. Upgrades are drip-fed to you like morphine and Red Bull, and the story is episodic and silly, holding you with sturdy talons as it approaches its mad-cap zenith, so if you giggled at the first skydiving sequence, you'll lose your shit when the soundtrack for the final mission kicks in.

Maybe the shock-value that the SR3 ad-campaign has been promoting has worn off on us -- we've been running around acting like maniacs in open-world games for a decade. Adding zany shit like floppy purple dildos, gimp-suits, furries, farts in a jar, Japanese game-show parodies, and a 3:1 ratio for citizens to attack-helicopters isn't validations, it's just the game catching up to gaming impulse. Those are such minor parts to the game that we feel icky about how the package is being misrepresented. The game is A Fool, shouting the truth, not for the rest of the players on stage, but for the audience's benefit. It knows everything, it has all the answers, it carries all the keys, and it exists in all worlds, digital or otherwise, doing The Dougie back and forth across The Line, and teaching it to anybody brave enough to ask.

We're back to even. Now get back to work and try to create a game that can make us cry. It's been almost twelve years since Final Fantasy IX.

* * * ½

(out of 4)
[#5 of The 9 Best Games of 2011]

Recommended related reading:

[The Hunger Games | * * *] by Ghost Little and Doberman

[ExciteTruck | * * * *] by Ghost Little

[Jane Eyre (2011) | * * *] by Ghost Little

[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter | @GhostLittle_WTF

#45 -- "Dark Souls" Reviewed | * * *

ALSO,ONE MORE THING: An updated version of this review, and all of our other reviews, can be found on our new official site: http://www.ghostlittle.com/ No ads, no Google bullshit, just content. [Dark Souls Review]

". . .a digital-fantasy hero-simulation for humans."

You gamble at all times in Dark Souls. Every second is a calculation. Sometimes slow, sometimes instantaneous. There can't be a thoughtless moment. You dip into your life experience, tapping every knowledge font for details that will keep you sharp and alive, always learning, always ready to gamble again. It's not the punch, or even hitting the canvas that hurts, it's getting back up. Every time, you're gambling. You might try to convince yourself otherwise to force yourself to take that next step through an unexplored, and nonthreatening, doorway. In time, you might become arrogant, a giant id-ball, lashing out at enemies that you've seen a hundred times, your intimacy with your Drake Sword's speed and reach climbing to instinctive levels, and you might persuade yourself right then that you're safe. You might think that you've accounted for every detail. 

You take things for granted and when that happens one too many times, you're sucker punched. You always have something to lose. The odds were slim, but they were always there, right?

Step 1: Become comfortable with that idea that there is never a sure thing. You'll need to face that not very far in. Real, tangible loss is always one misstep away. Dark Souls takes from you, "the player" -- as an extension of taking from you, "the character," the very avatar you've created and seen through two-story demons, jailbreaks, giant crows, and infinite deaths. You have a lot of dying to do in Dark Souls. And a lot of coming back to life. And a lot of dying again. It's going to hurt. You, the player, are quite literally gambling with your own human time. You could lose hours of progress. Highly-digital, and highly-tangible -- progress. If you don't like that, you can give up. If the rules seem unfair, you don't have to play. If you think this is going to make you too miserable and the despair is too much you, you can walk away. If you think the reward isn't worth the risk, leave.

If you think you can find a similar reward being given out for less effort, go. Before you leave though, ask: What are you really here for?

It's like World of Warcraft if Blizzard wanted to lose money. It isn't cheerful, it's bleak. Nice things to look at are common prizes in Dark Souls. You can't cash them in for armor or regenerating health, but you, human, can enjoy the view. A long time ago, games would occasionally have very good graphics in the first level, then you would move into the middle levels where the artistic drudge live, and then, as a reward, if you can get very far into the game, you'll get to see some pretty insane graphics in the last few levels, especially for the sprites and pixels. This sensation, simply feeling safe for a moment and gawking at some new scenery, returns in Dark Souls after a 20 year hiatus, and you can sigh for a second or two and admire a sunset view over the Anor Londo cathedral. Funny, time doesn't move here. As pretty as it is to you, something is extremely fucking wrong and that's effective audio-visual emotional manipulation. This isn't a fantasy at all. What the fuck were we thinking?

Ah, but there is triumph to be won in this not-a-fantasy world. The spare music reminds you that the apocalypse has most likely already come and gone. The blighting forces that caused the kingdom's fall might have come and gone too. The demonic empires built on the conquered land's corpse have come and gone. Only the most wicked survivors remain. Only the strongest creatures, tested by natural selection, and the meanest scavengers, surviving off of the dead, and the immortal ghosts, haunting every field and castle, remain. You're going into this land and you're going to fight them. You are an undead and you are cursed to keep coming back to life. When you come back to life, you get one chance to get back to where you died to collect the souls you dropped during your previous death. You will have to cut through the revived monsters again to reclaim your body, and if you die on your way back, you will lose it all. 

Souls are the only currency in the game and allow you to buy statistical upgrades, spells, keys, and equipment. Be thankful that that's all the game takes from you upon death. Be thankful that the game has woven logical context into your avatar's infinite un-life. It is assumed that you will die and that revival is an even meaner punishment. 

You are being encouraged to learn how to die. But what is death in videogames, or in Dark Souls, specifically? And who is really dying? And is that a bad thing? You are getting all of death's benefits and so few of its negatives -- you're basically a dhampir.

In an odd twist, you are bound quite intrinsically to your avatar's emotions because you suffer consequences. When you overcome, ya'll overcome. When you suffer, ya'll suffer. By comparison, in other games, consequences to your actions as a player are only loosely linked to your avatar. In Zelda, if you fall in lava, you lose 1/2 of a heart and are teleported twenty second back in time to the last solid ground you'd been standing on.

That is what lava does.

That is not what lava does!

Zelda lava has ceased to be lava. It has become negative-1/2 heart.

What you see in Dark Souls is what you see. You see monsters. You see you. You are you in Dark Souls, and you are learning to be a videogame hero. It is a digital-fantasy hero-simulation for humans. It's like Assassin's Creed: The Movie: The Game. If you, person, wandered up a hill and saw a zombie with a sword and a shield, you would be fucking terrified. You, human, would die hundreds of times before gathering the bravery and skill to subdue even the simplest monster. You, human, would not be able to pick up a plasma rifle and start shooting aliens, and therefore, by comparison, nearly every other videogame is a fucking liar. There are things in Dark Souls that are confusing because an Eternal Dragon at the base of an ashen lake would not spin a yarn for an insect like you -- he would accept your unquestioning servitude though. There is mystery surrounding the purpose of the Sunbro covenant for a reason.

Nintendo frequently states that Link is a silent protagonist through which you can enter the kingdom of Hyrule and you ostensibly become Link, boy adventurer on a quest to save the princess. Again, that is a fucking lie. If you were really Link, you would be eaten by child-eating plants two seconds into the Great Deku Tree. You also wouldn't tolerate Ingo abusing Epona. You would wait for night and slit that motherfucker's throat in his sleep. You would also have half of Kakariko Village out to kill you because they too are semi-dead fantasy characters in a medieval setting and people die of starvation and tapeworms every fifteen seconds in medieval settings.

It is the videogame equivalent of the Bubonic Plague, except you keep getting sick and keep coming back to life and everybody hates you for that. Dark Souls is closer to a truly non-fantastic fantasy, if you're interested. Here, fairies don't stop to tell you: "Hey! Listen!" Fairies fuck your soul out!

That is what Dark Souls is. It's the real Legend of Zelda, a Grimm fairy-tale, as read by Stephen King during his cocaine-withdrawal years. Everything has vile definition. Everything that was once just one word, and not scary, is now two words, and out to give you venereal diseases. Dogs are 'Poison Dogs.' Gargoyles are 'Bell Gargoyles.' Dragons are 'Gasping Dragons.' Giants are 'Dung Giants.' Demons are 'Centipede Demons.' Fire-spider Centaur-lady is (fucking) 'Chaos Witch Queelag.' She secretes magma constantly.

Every animal in Dark Souls looks like it was raised on a diet of raw meat and poisonous razorblades. Look, if God took some time off and backpacked around Europe and smoked a bunch of salvia while studying discarded concept art from an unfilmable, pre-Frighteners Peter Jackson movie, and then decided in a drug-laced miasma that He wanted to make a new planet populated by those irradiated slaughter-animals, you still wouldn't even be close to the stinking, rotting, pestilent evil found in Dark Souls' creatures. No, those animals would first have to go through a thousand years of thermonuclear war and inbred fucking amongst the species, develop complex religion, and then pray to their new, gnarled deity to open a portal to another dark plane, where every living thing's evil counterpart dwells in jealous and hatred. Those mega-malevolent animals, birthed from eggs made of raw dark matter, are the things you'll be fighting in Dark Souls, goatees and all.

There is no map in Dark Souls, no easy teleporting, no pause button, and no excuses for getting in over your head. You'll die because you're stupid. You'll win because you're shrewd. You won't need a map because you'll know every nook in every level -- you'll have run to each one for safety to set up your ambushes. You won't want to teleport because it will deprive you of souls you could be collecting. The game is fair because the rules apply to the monsters the same way they apply to you -- both sides can parry and riposte, get pushed off cliffs, activate traps, and nobody can pause the game. 

Desperation is the greatest aphrodisiac -- at any given time, you will be either dead or horny when playing Dark Souls. Slaying a monster after he has killed you a dozen times is the grim satisfaction that accompanies stealth-stabbing an adult grizzly bear that's been guarding an elephant gun on an island ruled by the oppressive Emperor Elephant -- once you have the elephant gun, you want the grizzly bear to be alive again and you also want to find an elephant to shoot. Every challenge in Dark Souls is a new door that you want to kick in. Have you ever kicked in a door? It's almost impossible in this day and age.

Dark Souls does not give a fuck about the years between 2000-2010. That whole decade never happened. Some people talk about how, "Oh, I always wanted to make my movie about 'Subject: X,' but the technology wasn't there," or, "I wasn't mature enough at that point in my life to do the subject matter justice." With this in mind, somebody quite obviously walked up to the Dark Souls developers at FromSoftware in 1996 and said, "The N64 is going to make 3D games a reality. Also, the Internet's a thing." They'd comply, struck by a golden light emanating from The One True God, and retreat for four years to develop a game on those two tenants and their mid-90's understanding of fantasy role-playing games. Then they descended in a bathysphere into their Swiss bank-insured, crush-depth ocean vault, and they threw the Dark Souls design document inside. There, it waited, and FromSoftware went on to make the maddeningly underachieving Armored Core series, wherein cardboard boxes shaped like mecha throw colorful electric-streamers at one another.

In 2011, they retrieved the design document and made the game exactly how they had always wanted, now that the technology had caught up. They do not care about your post-9/11 Obama administration videogame sensibilities and anxieties. They're as Japanese as fuck-all.

The odder design choices in Dark Souls can be answered by the statement: "Because otherwise you won't learn anything."

Why does it feel like I die in three hits? Why do you take all my money and experience points from me when I die? Why don't you explain what the fuck I'm supposed to do? How do I get around this? Why didn't you tell me that pit was bottomless? Why does my guy move so slow? Why does my guy suddenly move fast? Why does that guy's shortsword swing faster than my claymore? Why are the guys down that way really strong and the guys up that other path are weaker? Would fire be effective against that slime-demon? It's likely that rat will poison me, won't it? I need to get across this lava, who mentioned fire-immunity a while back? Okay, these guys are metallic, they'll be weak to lightning. I'll lure these fire-spitters out, find a bonfire, revert to human, kindle, equip magic-resistant armor, and summon a fellow adventurer from the spirit world (read: Internet) for some help with this boss.

You've arrived. This is your brain. You might have forgotten about it. It'll help you overcome challenges.

Dark Souls is the best survival horror game since Resident Evil 4. It is the best dungeon-crawl since Diablo II. It is the best RPG since Mass Effect 2. It is not a game about hover-skating over swamplands and fly-swatting werelizards, and therefore it is superior to all of The Elder Scrolls games. It has the bleakest world since The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (the adult-Link part). If it were an ice cream flavor, it'd be Jalapenos n' Clams n' Vodka. It has the best creature design since Final Fantasy IX. It has the most intense boss fights since Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. It's basically the closest we'll ever get to a 3D Castlevania game (pre-Symphony of the Night design-style). It has the most, "Oh, wow, the exit drops me right out here, I know where I am," --moments since Devil May Cry. It has the casual, slow-motion gore of God of War and the blow-for-blow combat of Soulcalibur II. You'll want to run from certain enemies on-sight, just like you did in God Hand. You'll want to take risks and master your fears, just like you did in Twisted Metal II. Dark Souls has the sit-and-stare / beauty-is-its-own-reward feel of Okami and the, "Yeah, well, I didn't give up, and I found a way," sensation that we thought had gone out of us a long time ago.

Only when you're made entirely fucking miserable can you see just what you've got in you. It's a will to win. It's a hatred of losing. Suddenly, you're braver. You're confident. It's not a gamble. You can't lose because you'll always get back up. There's no doubt. The fight won't ever be over, not until you win, and not until you've taken Dark Souls for all he's worth. You don't know how to die.

* * *

(out of 4)

Recommended related reading:

[The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask  |  * * * ½] by Ghost Little

[Final Fantasy IX  |  * * * *] by Ghost Little

[LittleBigPlanet  |  Z E R O] by Ghost Little

[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

 

-- Ghost Little and Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#33 -- "Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus" Reviewed | * * *

ALSO,ONE MORE THING: An updated version of this review, and all of our other reviews, can be found on our new official site: http://www.ghostlittle.com/ No ads, no Google bullshit, just content. [Sly Cooper Review]

"If The Thievius Raccoonus were a real eBook, its marked-down $99.99 price would crash the Amazon servers, this all after a 52-week stint as a bestseller with a sticker price of $firstborn."

The best videogame in the world is a mixture of Red Bull, vodka, smelly ink, velvety poetry, half of those good notes a jazzman isn't playing, and that one girl across the room. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus is several of these things, retold as a music video. It is the best piece of fan fiction that you wrote based on your favorite Saturday morning cartoon, as edited by Paul Krugman. A lot of the time, you're re-enacting Walt Disney's bold, visionary remake of Shigeru Miyamoto's 1996 platformasterpiece Super Mario 64, and the rest of the time, you're Scotch-taping your older sister's cheap scarf to your lower back and waving a lacrosse stick, shouting: "Broken glass! Broken glass is the gift for the man who has everything!"

The point of Sly Cooper is to steal things you've stolen before but never had a good reason to -- until now. Now, you have a good reason to steal everything.You want to steal things because it's humanity's greatest thrill. You're not Robin Hood in Sly Cooper (you're a raccoon named Sly Cooper in Sly Cooper) but you do rob from deserving people. There is no doubt that you're smarter and craftier than they, so there ain't no doubt that you know the true, deserved value of what's formerly theirs and now futurely [sic] yours. It's a continuous thievery slip-and-slide. Some people go to the gym for no particular reason. Sly Cooper doesn't go to the gym; he erodes villains' treasure hoards. Sly Cooper is a wide river full of gambling boats, each owned by a bully, and your job is to leap from one to the next, deep silhouette illuminated sharp against the moon, until you stop having fun -- that will never happen! You get to bring your friends with you, who are your stuffed animals -- a Nobel Prize-winning tortoise and a carnival cotton-candy hippo -- come to life. 

Games will often handcuff you to an umbrella, whereas Sly Cooper gives you a line of Arrakean Spice to snort and a bunch of houses to break into. Nothing in Sly Cooper is experimental anymore -- everything in Sly Cooper was experimental when you were a young kid, like when you were trying to talk yourself into trapping a live fox with a box, a stick, a jar of Skippy, and lightning-quick reflexes. Sly Cooper is made of powerful magnets. Nothing in the game is haunted by ghosts, friendly or otherwise. The music in Sly Cooper sounds like the album that George Clooney's Ocean's 11 character, Danny Ocean, would sheepishly ask his krav maga sensei to get him for his birthday -- on vinyl. The level design is akin to the moment you gazed at the ceiling during the first family wedding that attended when you were five, wondering how much weight the chandelier could hold and not wondering if anybody could ever have a chance of spotting you. Sly Cooper is sweet, juicy, filled with fun seeds for spitting now, and sticky fingers for un-sticking (and re-sticking) later. It's basically a watermelon. If you like laughing at jokes, you'll like Sly Cooper, because all notions of modern comedic structure becomes outdated when you see a raccoon in blue flirt with a gun-toting fox on a Parisian rooftop. No joke, staring at Sly Cooper's expansive vistas is identical to the sensation an archeologist gets when he punches his hand straight into an ancient Egyptian statue's stone chest and removes a ruby the size of a black bear's brain. "It was a fake," he nods at the wrecked statue. "But this stone belongs in a museum."

Sly Cooper is a tuxedo-justice dispensary. Black, white, creased, and styled alongside infinity. The only motivation to play the game is to keep stealing, which is the snappy glee of scraping ugly paint off of an old house you were just told: "Take it, it's yours, it's not worth anything. Never was, never will." With heavy gloves, Sly Cooper encourages you to rip creeping vines off of the old thing, a house that should have probably been torn down back around the turn of the century. There's no confusion over what needs to be done. The game employs straight-line logic and it's damning that anybody could have considered that shaky wandering is more fun than snatching up every glass-cased treasure in a museum's corridor.

No doubt you're wondering at this point if you could ever be uncomfortable while playing Sly Cooper. The answer is a predictable, convincing: "No." The answer isn't hard to reach. You don't raise your voice to declare it because the conviction in your heart convinces the doubters in a nanosecond. They won't doubt you ever again. They just won't. Sly Cooper doesn't cause you to lose sleep. It's a hunt for keys. It's 36 doors that you want to open. You will be powered by intrinsic compulsion and you've missed that feeling. Here is a game that has no business being so charming. In fact, if you had one-tenth of one percent of Sly Cooper's charm, you could lean against a wall at a senior week keg party, watch a girl across the room reciprocate her dream-boy's four-year crush, wait for her to catch your eye, and you'd ask in simple street-clothes seduction: "Wanna make out?" And she would want to make out. First though, she would rip off the other guy's dick with her bare hands to show how serious she is.

Jumping from place to place in Sly Cooper is a type of short-range parachuting that couldn't exist in reality. Attacking enemies in Sly Cooper is whacking flimsy plants with a glassy flute made of bamboo that might break at any moment but doesn't. You'll do a lot of sneaking between vivid spotlights and stalking cartoon prey in Sly Cooper, a specific action you will become so practiced in that you'll stay up all night to write a screenplay pitch for James Cameron titled Predator Babies, insisting that you do all motion-capturing and snarly, purring voice-work yourself to maintain the creative vision. Nothing is uncomfortably animated in Sly Cooper, nothing is drawn incorrectly. There's a part near the end involving Chinese fireworks in a snowy pagoda when breathing in primary colors has become so easy that you want to don't think you can go back to breathing oxygen. The sky blows up, you punch a panda, and there's no doubt in your mind that your ancestors will be proud.

If The Thievius Raccoonus were a real eBook, its marked-down $99.99 price would crash the Amazon servers, this all after a 52-week stint as a bestseller with a sticker price of $firstborn.

* * *

(out of 4)

Recommended related reading:
[F-Zero GX  |  * * *] by Doberman
[Final Fantasy IX  |  * * * *] by Ghost Little
[LittleBigPlanet  |  Z E R O] by Ghost Little

[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

-- Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#26 -- "LittleBigPlanet" Reviewed | Z E R O stars

". . .a pretentious, private elementary school compressed into a hyper-concentrated videogame form. It's the most indifferent game of all time."

Kids, put your fingers in your ears, daddy's home, and he got the tip of penis clipped off by a cigar-cutter.

How, and why, would we allow this asparagus-scented game whose original title, we assume, was: Circumcision II: The Dick-Clippening, a piece of entertainment whose box-art displays a cuteness so violent that it violates the Geneva Convention, to get some playtime? Playtime that would lead to an over-abundance of dong-to-blade closeness? Because it was free. 

You could not pay us to play this game. We've never walked out of a movie. We've never turned down a free drink. We go outside when it's sunny for one good reason. We turned off LittleBigPlanet after 3 levels. 

LittleBigPlanet is Hipster: The Videogame. It wears its tasteless, unslightly goofiness pinned to it's tight denim dude-capris. The game has such an overabundance of stuff and yet it is so indifferent to every ounce of stuff within it. None of it is there for a reason. It's like owning a massive dictionary whose best feature is that: "at least the pages don't stick together because of errant spurts of semen across the paper." As far as we can tell, the object of the game is to collect bubbles on a 2D plane with a beanie baby that jumps like a drunken kite brought to life by black sorcery. As you collect things, you can then customize levels that you and your indie band, "UkuFAILe," designed on Sunday instead of finding a drummer. For your band. Get a fucking drummer for your band, LittleBigPlanet! You need rhythm. You have none. 

It's terrible. It's insulting. It's a pretentious, private elementary school compressed into a hyper-concentrated videogame form. It's the most indifferent game of all time. You can see the pride-boils popping on it's skin. As far as LittleBigPlanet is concerned, it, like Sarah Palin, can do no wrong, and the people that are fans of it can do no wrong. The game controls toddle like a stubborn mule with a bout of irritable bowel syndrome and a blue ribbon from the Wyoming State Retard Rodeo. 

LittleBigPlanet is a guy and the girl he wants to kiss -- him on ukulele, her on milk-jug -- playing Led Zeppelin covers at a burger joint; because they couldn't book time on a street corner. It's shit masquerading as confidence for the talentless mouth-breathers. It was designed to give morons hope. Dipshit dubstep fans in Brooklyn that "modded" their older sister's original Gameboy into an ashtray will love LittleBigPlanet. 

The visual aesthetic of LittleBigPlanet is that of the activity room in a Presbyterian Church basement. Go explore the emotions God cursed your souls with, children! The 2D side-scrolling gameplay itself has the personality of a 7 year-old introvert. Problem is, we must admit that LittleBigPlanet possesses the best reason to play a game: "no good reason," and we like games where the game is its own self-propelling compulsion. The reward for playing the game is more game to play, but playing LittleBigPlanet though is like chewing tin foil. There's always that feeling in the back of your head that because you're playing this game, a husband is forcing his wife to get a third abortion. 

In-game, you can't distinguish purpose from bullshit, nor objective from something far-off in the background that looks like a handlebar mustache on a falcon. Seriously, dude, why? People will shout: "there doesn't need to meaning behind this, it's just goofy for goofy's sake!" YouTube is goofy for goofy's sake, child. We laugh at it because its hilarity comes from the certifiably asinine -- but we don't sit down and watch YouTube for hours on end. We don't go to the British Diorama Museum to relax after work. We don't want to see the British Diorama Museum's Curator's YouTube channel. This is like wandering a Girl Scout's arts and crafts fair and every fifth step, you have to lube up another lead musketball with dark molasses, and shove it into a different orifice. It will poison you. It will poison your brain!

There are four buttons devoted to emoting or smiling and two buttons devoted to moving your arms. Just, moving them, ya know. It's exactly as we've feared. They've successfully simulated the act of operating an instant messenger client with nobody on the other end.

The game has no imagination. There is no need to simulate the feeling of playing with your childhood action figures (your "guys," as you referred to them (seriously, you did, don't be embarrassed (it's not embarrasing, LittleBigPlanet is embarrassing)). There's no simulation required, no need to simulate giving them your personality and then having them run through an imaginary world while a stern adult lectures you. That in and of itself is already a simulation. No, wait, it's better than simulation because it's imagination! Don't get all childhood-meta. Spike Jonze tried to do that in the Where The Wild Things Are movie and look where it got him. . .

. . .actually, that was a pretty decent movie. Not important. Imagination, yeah, uh, you can do this without a PlayStation 3. You should have already had these experiences in life -- when you were fucking six! Shit, you can still do it right now if you really, truly have to! Don't let our hatred for LittleBigPlanet stop you, and in fact, it should encourage you. Run down to a craft store and lay down $12 for pipe-cleaners, cardboard, felt, and a Nunchuck-Michelangelo. You don't have to be embarrassed to do those things, and if you are, distilling these hands-on activities into videogame form is not the answer you're looking for. 

At least when you played with your own action figures back in the day, you could huck them across the room if they missed the jump. Imagination lives in your head, not as a PSN handle out there on the Internet with every other fuckskull that got a free copy of the game after the network went down. We cannot imagine paying $60 for this game. We would not recommend it to adults, because if they think this is fun, they have no good childhood memories of actual fun -- and should probably get their meds balanced if they think this is going to displace the memories of broken beer bottles hurled at them when they were young -- and we can't recommend it to children because their imaginations shouldn't be nurtured in a digital world. 

And kids deserve tighter 2D control than this. Shame on you for not telling them that it exists! Go download your child a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 on the Wii Virtual Console right now. Let them pick apart a Japanese idiot-savant's imagination for a while, shut off the Nintendo, and see where their creativity goes when you give them good role models instead of the conduit to the social media videogame clusterfuck that is LittleBigPlanet.

z e r o

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#22 -- "Killzone 3" Reviewed | * ½

"It's just your gun occupying Killzone's world. If the gun was a more fun person to pal around and goof off with, then this would be acceptable. . ."

Put down your vaporizer and that bottle of Quaaludes, we're going to deconstruct concept of "winning" at online videogames. Killzone 3 does not do this. It does not win at offline videogames either. It's the expensive chew-toy that your dog perpetually ignores because it's spiky and it makes her gums bleed. It mashes its terrible haircut, let's say, for example, a weave, into a discolored biomass. Interacting with this world is a joyless affair.

There is no instance of satisfaction. It comes close at a few moments, and for that, we'll give it a point. It looks pretty, the artistic design shining much brighter than the best modern movies, especially Avatar, the high-water mark for the uninformed and the vanilla-bean flavor for people that have io9 bookmarked. For that, again, we'll give it a point, but only half of one because the game sucks at letting you admire the scenery on your own terms. The issue, the repeated issue, is that this is a very accurate depiction of what a science-fiction war on a hostile planet would be like. War fucking sucks, at least for you, non-binary-brained sentience.

There's got to be a very schizophrenic checklist behind modern first-person shooter design. The developers' priorities are strange as all hell. They must have a scenario writer, some art directors, and a trillion-trillion testers, all stitching together what they make, hoping the thing won't tear under a watchful critic's gaze. The problems with the FPS genre, and its ongoing misdirection, is that its developers assume "go" is the only word worth putting money into. If you aren't running, blasting, or running to where you can start blasting again, you're wasting your publisher's rendering money. 

Unless the story demands that you "go" at all times, making that your only command dehumanizes the urgency. What drives a gunfight? Urgency. Who do we play as? A human being. Watching a marathon is not exciting because that's only 1/10th of a human being running down the road. Watching a guy that train for a marathon, run it, puke, finish in 108th place, and then goes back to building birdhouses, proving that he could indeed run the marathon with the right humanity and commitment, that gives you excitement and urgency in the race. It makes every footfall a thrill.  

Rocky is about a guy that we know should not stand a chance. Killzone 3 is a person we're just meeting, an opening band that nobody has heard of. Their music is okay. We won't look them up on MySpace later.

You never occupy the character in Killzone 3. It's just your gun occupying Killzone's world. If the gun was a more fun person to pal around and goof off with, then this would be acceptable, but see our earlier paragraph for the counterpoint: you're in a war in space where the odds are stacked against your character and stacked double against you, the player. The Helghast (baddies) want to kill Sev (you), but the game wants to kill you even more. Like a bad Vegas magician, it assumes that it's mystifying enough that you won't care that it's sleight of hand. It is not.

This isn't an even trade -- the game doesn't experience joy, so its cruelty only hurts you, the person, and when you outsmart it, it's you outsmarting the game, not the enemy. It feels like cheating somebody that doesn't care if they lose. When you poke the A.I. and lure it into a moronic chokepoint, it's pointing out a flaw in programing, not demonstrative of your tactical prowess. The object of the game is to throw dice and grenades at your scenario, and only when these things are in balance will we be granted victory. We believe that there was a way the game was "supposed to be played" in the developer's mind but the five or ten factors required for that "deliberate" vision for gameplay never arrive simultaneously. When the graphics are clicking, the A.I. is hung up. When the guns are reporting correctly, the levels are bland. When the story is getting interesting, it's quite literally happening on the other side of the planet.

There are constant problems with you clashing against the A.I. It's clear that great care was made to turn this battlefield into a visual clusterfuck of chaos, as good battlefields should be. Everything erupts in masses of dust when they explode. Small gunfire rips up cover. Plate glass is shattered when you spray bullets everywhere. Enemies reel, spraying oozy blood under gunfire. This does everything right. And it is entirely negated by the A.I. The enemies are smart. In fact, they're so smart, they realize that they can win instantly by killing you and only you. There are dozens of other soldiers on your squad, wielding what must be large bullhorns that fire dead hornets -- they can't kill a goddamn thing. 

Your opponents will kill you though. Every one of them. They know where you are at all times, they know the instant you're out of cover, they could shoot the fleas of a dog's back at 300 yards, and they know you're the only person that matters. You're the King and they're an entire opposing chess set. They're 16 queens. It's imba. 

They can blind-fire from cover, which you can't do. They can shoot through dense smoke without a dip of accuracy, which you can't do, because your senses are attached to your analog meatbag. They can shoot prone from their stomachs, which you can't do. They have infinite ammo, they can take 2 of your shots to the head (one to knock off their helmets, one to bisect their heads horizontally at the nose). We have to assume they don't have fuzzy gray filter that sluffs over their vision when they're nearing death like you do, because they fight just as hard and shoot just as flawlessly when they're one bullet from the reaper.

They have no fear. They do not panic and they cannot be taken by surprise. The last man in an enemy squad, armed with a light assault rifle and with three bullets in each of his knees, will run and dive from cover to cover. He doesn't care if you have a electric bolt-rifle, a weapon that combines the powers of Ahab and Thor into gun-form. Come on, Killzone 3, don't try to give me a story of human drama and then make my "human" enemies efficient, artificial, efficient, artificial, efficient, artificial pieces of robotic code. At least the enemies in Vanquish were robotic because they were, ya know, robots, and their fearlessness was tonally correct. This is the final immaturity in videogames. Tonal inconsistency. We only remember smiling twice while playing: 

When we first used the sniper rifle. Popping heads makes the same sound as knocking a bully off a bicycle with a water balloon filled with tree bark.

When we first used to northern-lights gun. It's the gun from District 9. It hits dudes in the chest with 1.21 jigga-watts of aurora borealis.  They explode outward with an acid-tipped whipcrack into green fog. It does have a charge mode where you hold a button to juice the fucker up, which is the oldest, most empowering feeling in games that makes you shout: "Get ready to ride the #FEARNADO, you Swedish pole-smoker!" Keiji Inafune invented this hold-charge way back in 1991 for Mega Man 4 as you primary weapon. You get to use it once or twice in Killzone 3. Brava, Killzone 3. 

The rest is using goddamn terrible guns with shitty recoil against a team of hateful game developers. They made strange design choices, putting you in a realistic / fictional war to fight that endless army of videogame soldiers. 

We've run out of patience. The game is a perfect example of everything wrong with shooters right now. It plays it safe, it's overly familiar, the things that go wrong are where the emulation of successful franchises falter, the movement "weight" is self-defeating as an attempt at realism because the artificial intelligence is insufferably artificial, the pacing is like a bad science museum tour with your younger cousin, the online leveling system makes people indifferent to playing the game, comfortable grinding their character rather than participating in a game. This grind puts players in the mindset that: "As long as I'm in the game, I'm progressing." There's no need for them to adhere to design or logic when they're always winning a little and your enjoyment hinges entirely on their ability to behave in an expected way.

Videogames are escapism for all but they're puzzles for some. For a majority, merely owning and playing is all the escapism they need. Merely interacting over the Internet with others, if only to ruin your good time, if only to run around with a shotgun like a blinded  cyclops, if only to snipe you from half a map away, racking up 5 inconsequential kills, but ruining the map balance -- that's happiness to them. It's like a toddler understanding that she can say, "No," realizing she can effect the world and elicit a reaction. The rest of the people in the world know that "No" is indeed a word that you can say, one of many, and they don't want to play that game but to the toddler, saying "No" over and over is the greatest part of her day. There's an entirely functional language that online FPS players are ignoring in favor of regressing to infancy.

In closing, the story is crude, focusing on scenery-chewing villains that never do your player-character any actual harm, falling short of any sci-fi gravitas because Mass Effect 2 (* * * * out of 4) already exists. The on-rails sections have no impact because Sin & Punishment: Star Successor (* * * out of 4) already exists. The guns feel like they're set to "stun" not "extinct" because Bulletstorm (* * * out of 4) already exists. Killing somebody in online deathmatch gives no sense of accomplishment because the person we're shooting doesn't care if they win, lose, or die, and because Goldeneye, Unreal Tournament, and Halo 2 (n*o*s*t*a*l*g*i*a out of 4) all already exist. 

 * ½

(out of 4)

Recommended related reading:
[Dark Souls  |  * * *] by Ghost Little and Doberman

[Final Fantasy IX  |  * * * *] by Ghost Little

[F-Zero GX  |  * * *] by Doberman


[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

 

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF