I've been having 2 solid red-letter months of gaming. I haven't had this much fun since Okami.

Wipeout Pulse

Coinciding with the North American release of Wipeout Pulse, nearly two months after it arrived in the Europe, I finally attained 100,000 loyalty points with Assegai, my initial ship of choice. Plus, I clocked over 30 hours of gameplay (actual racing time, that is, not time waiting around for the game to load or messing about with menus).

I like the idea of the loyalty system in Pulse, that sticking with the same team will unlock new ship skins, but what's happened to me is that I've gotten so used to using Assegai, so accustomed to how it handles, that now, when I try to use another team, I literally can't handle it! I crash into walls non-stop and make the most awkward turns and it just doesn't feel right. Now, if I ever want to get good with another team, I have to unlearn most of those 30 Assegai-centric hours and relearn with... I don't know... Mirage maybe.

I've spent a long time looking at the relative stats of the different ships and found that Assegai is the only ship that really satisfies what I'm looking for: mild concern about speed, less concern about shields, mostly concerned about a balance in handling and acceleration. No other ship provides that to any satisfaction. It looks like I'm not alone in this preference either, as for the first while at least, Assegai dominated the loyalty board on wipeout-game.com (now it looks like Pirahna has taken the lead). Soon, Harimau will be released, but it has identical stats to Assegai, minus one point in handling. What's the point of releasing a ship that's inferior to an already existing one? I'm still curious to try it out and see.

Also coinciding with the NA release, and my maxing out on loyalty, is the release of the Wipeout Pulse download packs and the big upset surrounding the fact that Sony is charging solid-cash-money for them. I was a bit dismayed initially to find out that the packs weren't free, but not outraged as many gamers were on wipeoutzone. I mean, I'm more than able to afford the packs--it's only a couple of pounds each after all. Video games are a luxury for all of us. By no means are they a right, and there's nothing wrong with being required to pay for luxuries. (Sure, there's the argument that Sony is a huge greedy corp. that needs no more money. However, Sony is, after, making games to make money--not for charity.)

What I think was most upsetting about the whole event was the initial silence of Sony, not letting people know ahead of time that the packs did in fact need to be purchased. No wonder gamers felt betrayed, having been given no hints at all that they'd have to pay for the Pulse packs, and having had the awesome free Pure packs as a precedent leading them to further assume that the Pulse packs would also be free. What seems to be adding to this frustration is how complicated it is for gamers who are willing to pay for the packs to actually buy them: they have to be living in the right region and be in possession of a credit card (although my UK debit card is working just fine on the PSN) and have a PC with Internet access, etc.

In any case, I have two download packs so far, and they've been a welcome addition to the game. (I think the weekly release of the packs--rather than, say, monthly--somewhat makes up for the fact that you have to pay for them and that we waited so long in the dark to find out the score surrounding them.) I like the new ships, and the new tracks integrate nicely into the look and feel of the whole game, adding just a bit more play-life to the game.

If Pulse was the only game I'd played so far in 2008, that would have been good enough, but it gets better.

God of War and God of War II

I got these two games over the winter holidays, and they've provided me with about 18 hours of action, adventure, narrative, and mythology. It's been great to have a couple of games with solid storylines, having been playing mostly Wipeout and Tekken and Virtua Fighter for the past year, yet I still find I clock more game-time with these repetitive, replayable games--rather than the linearly-progressing games. (These days, I don't have the patience to replay a long adventure game through a second time--even if there are more unlockables and incentives--if I already know how the story will unfold. But, contradictorily, I will fight over 2000 matches in Virtua Fighter to unlock everything for one character. Or race thousands of Wipeout races to unlock every last skin. Weird.)

So much has been said already about GoW that I'm sure I have nothing more to add to the discussion (although I don't care, because the blog medium lets us put our mundane and unoriginal ideas self-importantly 'out there', doesnt it?--and really, I know no more people are reading this than are reading my pen and paper notebook sitting on my bookshelf at home--so on I go on my isolated soapbox). Still, while I do find it enjoyable to play an anti-hero who embodies power and fearlessness, I don't really go for Kratos's over-the-top behaviour. Just calm down a bit, guy. He spends so long lusting after more and more power. He attains it. He's still not happy. Although he has it, he just doesn't get it, does he? I'm curious to see how GoW III plays out. I wonder if Kratos ever finally realises that jockeying for more power--at least of the type he's pursuing--has no end.

What I find most compelling about Kratos, and most frightening, is how creative and quick-thinking he is with his violence. He makes snap decisions to topple pillars on his foes, gracefully leap over an attacking enemy and decapitate him from behind, chain a creature and slowly tug-o-war it until it's impaled upon it's own spear. Imagine if that creative brilliance was applied to something other than killing? Now that would be frightening!

The Coke Side of Life

Which bring me to a brief aside about one of the most brilliant ads I've seen in a long time. I have to admit, I am usually very critical of Coke and its advertising attempts. I find it disgusting when it runs ads of animated polar bears and penguins drinking Coke. And its other campaigns that try to make the drink seem like a life-enhancing event, rather than fizzy, tooth-rotting, liquid sugar and caffeine, just leave me cold and disdainful.

However, the recent ad I've seen on Gamespot has really impressed me with its sending-up of pop-culture and its accompanying social message. Presented as though taken out of Grand Theft Auto, a tough-guy with shades and leather jacket squeals up to a convience store and, instead of robbing the place, grabs a Coke, pays for it and leaves. He then continues to give people Cokes, money, his jacket--recklessly racking up good deed after good deed the same way a GTA player racks up felonies.

I was just really impressed with the ad's combination of parody, audience targetting, and social message. Why couldn't there be actual games like this, where it's just as cool to save someone's life or help someone who's down and out, as it is to shoot them or slice them to ribbons? And I'm not talking about games like Zelda, or traditional heroic adventures, where you do save a princess, or even the world, but only after slaughtering hundreds of thousands of enemies (be they monsters or armed guards or whatever) with an entire armoury of equipment. I'm talking about games where you do good things, without having to do bad things (like killing) to get those good things done.

Some games do have elements of this, or consciously bring in explorations of morality, like Okami, Fable, and the game I am currently playing (but I'd still like to see much, much more):

Shadow of the Colossus

This game is awesome. No wonder GamesRadar can't shut up about it... When I'd initially read about SotC, I never thought I would like it: 16 boss battles and nothing else (well, that's not really true, because the game just gushes melancholic atmosphere from every orifice). No other monsters or anything. But the game has me mesmerized with the ethically questionable quest of the hero: slaughter 16 unique behemoths, minding their own business in an abandoned land, to save a single dying woman. The gamer's actions are even more ethically questionable than the hero's, because he or she controls the hero without any knowledge of his story or the woman's story. Who are they? Why should she be saved at the expense of the colossi?

But, it's a game, right? That's what you're supposed to do is play the game, right? The experience reminds me of those experiments where participants were asked to press a button to give electric jolts of increasing strength to an unseen person in another room, who would respond vocally to the shock (really, an actor). Many participants would continue to administer shocks causing evidently excrutiating pain, only because the administator of the test told them to keep going and ignore the cries and pleading of the person being shocked. Similarly, in this game, you go on killing colossus after colossus because that's what you're supposed to do. You may question why you're doing it, but you keep doing it all the same. Guilt may become a part of playing, which I find a fascinating dimension to the experience: I find it so tragic when a cutscene plays, showing yet another massive being so-slowly collapsing in death like some condemned building knocked down. But, again, you keep playing. Maybe you will get answers to your questions at the end... but what if they aren't the right answers? What if you don't get any answers? You can;t take your actions back, and will it have been worth the cost?

Whoa.. long entry. Guess I had a few thoughts on what I'd been playing lately and wanted to get them down. Now, I've got a dozen more colossi to render extinct.