Homefront - angrish.

Last week I played Homefront with my friends. We do this occasionally when a new game comes out that’s garnered a lot of praise or one of us dusts off a relic they absolutely adore that the others haven’t seen. Since there’s usually at least three or four of us there when we do this sort of thing the controller tends to get passed around and most games will be finished in one or two sittings. After all, plugging 6-8 hours into a game each time tends to eat its way through most mainstream titles these days in short order. I’ve been contemplating giving Homefront the real review that it probably deserves, but I’ve been told (about thirty times) it’s primarily a multiplayer game and consequently I don’t have the full picture after sitting through the four hours of story mode we put up with. I’d argue that the fact I felt absolutely no urge what so ever to play multiplayer in a game that appeared to essentially be Modern Warfare 2 with slightly uglier environments counts as a point against it, but once again – didn’t try, not going to judge (too harshly).

What I am going to rip on is its story. Primarily because I don’t have much else to ramble about today and partially because I think its entered some sort of recursive loop in my mind; every time the game comes up and I recall people praising the story I grow to hate it a little more. However, I’d like to preface all this with the disclaimer that I don’t actually find all of it horrible, merely mediocrity of the blandest caliber. Oh, and by the by; spoilers. Though I don’t think I’d ever recommend the game to anyone regardless, so I’m not sure you should care.

The first thing I’m going to get out of the way is the premise. I’ve already bitched to my friends enough about this, so if any of them are reading they might as well skip the next several paragraphs because I’m now going to try and address the issues one by one. Really though, the whole thing is probably the most absurdly stupid idea I’ve ever heard of since an old friend tried to convince me the Star Wars prequels weren’t shit. Its twenty years in the future and North Korea has not only invaded the United States, but they control significant portions of the western coast. It’s actually implied that America was losing up until the end of the game. The major (note; on a single bridge) battle that you take place in and win is described as a potential turning point for the American forces. The list of increasingly incredulous things that had to happen in that twenty period span to bring us here is fairly long and mostly retarded.

I’d like to preface this with the note that North Korea currently has a population of 24 million people. They are smaller than Canada. And they did all this.

First it appears North Korea took back their southern friends while, I suppose, the rest of the world was busy looking the other way because it seems none of them cared enough to intervene – no, I don’t expect the UN to really take charge in these matters but it seems the entirety of NATO was just hung over or something. Honestly I’m just guessing on that account because literally no explanation is given at that point. Striding valiantly onwards from that promising note the Korean empire then proceeds to conquer Japan by simply threatening them – it’s worth mentioning that the Japanese have more people in their capital than the entire Korean nation. Furthermore NATO’s incredible hangover keeps them out of this match too, despite huge chunks of our economy and technology being tied in with them. It’s at that point the Korean empire starts taking land in the direction of Australia and New Zealand. For those of you wondering why the combined might of the entire common wealth backed by their allies in Europe didn’t pick up Korea and tear them bloodily in two at this point – well, all I can say is the party must have been a big one. The game sure as hell doesn’t bother to explain it.

The first sign of any sort of balancing factor made by the writers was to say the Middle East decided to go bottoms up and collapse utterly. This has made all oil basically just outright stop coming out of there and ground the massive military powers of the western nations to a halt. Now, it doesn’t actually provide any explanation for what the Korean tanks are using for fuel, so I’ve decided they run on the suspension of disbelief. I’ve had a friend try to defend this oddity by saying that Korea could’ve gotten some oil from other sources and allies only they have, but I’m not buying it for a number of factors. First, the second biggest reserve of oil is us (Canada if you hadn’t guessed), and we sure as hell weren’t selling to the Koreans. Secondly; everyone hates Korea – even the other half of Korea. And most importantly; they game doesn’t tell us anything. It’s just a giant plot hole they don’t bother to cover. NATO and the Commonwealth couldn’t get fuel despite having access to a huge supply within one of their own nations, but Korea was utterly unaffected. Even if there is a plausible reason to explain this away they didn’t care enough to give it to us, so I’m not letting that big of an issue slide without comment.

Finally it concludes with dramatic headlines as Korea invades and takes American cities one after another, ignoring the fact that if the populations are those cities banded together they effectively outnumber the entirety of Korea two to one alone. It goes without saying that despite the fact there’s an extremely hostile nation suddenly attacking its long time ally, Canada sits on its hands and refuses to help. The rest of the Commonwealth must take this as their cue because they follow suit until the very end of the game, where we hear a broadcast that they finally decided to lend their support. Y’know, after the American ‘underdogs’ had already turned the war around.

I’m not certain what the point of this story was. The exceptional lack of global assistance and seeming invincibility of the Koreans points to their writers trying to put Americans in the shoes of a third world country in the middle of genocide. That’s what the Koreans are practically doing by the way – they’re so hilariously over the top evil in this game that they’re killing people at random all over. There’s honestly a segment at the start in which a crying kid’s mother is shot in front of him and then the guards leave him to the body. Because that’s how to stop rebellions! Making as many martyrs per hour as you possibly can! Given how murderously effective the main characters are at cutting through the Korean forces it’s like they went to all this work so the players could simultaneously be the underdogs, unstoppable heroes, and hopeless victims all at the same time.

Now I guess I should lighten this up a bit by saying that the characters themselves and the dialogue isn’t actually all that bad. In terms of presenting the story they pile on the horrific atrocities one after another to draw an emotional connection with the players. Granted, it didn’t work with me because most all of them are as contrived, insane, or outright stupid as the premise so I was a bit distracted wondering how this got green-lit, but yes – I could easily see people being impressed by this. To consider it objectively, it’s probably these moments that are the source of all the praise. They’re there to get messages across and feel deep. No, none of the messages apply to any of the gamers in real life, but if you were ever considering genocide or using white phosphorus the game will let you know it’s bad. Very bad.

Looking back on the characters finds a small cast composed entirely caricatures or individuals who die before they get enough screen time for me to even remember their name, let alone long enough care about them. They weren’t bad though, it seems like they could have made them into something more if they had another, say, ten hours to work with. Aside from that I don’t really have much to say about them. There are really only three or four people you see enough to even remember, and two of them die within the incredibly short game. I didn’t even know all of their names until the end, and I’ve already forgotten the girl’s. You could call them all two dimensional, but I don’t think that’s really accurate. It’s more like they’re all the basic foundation you’d need for a proper story to grow into real developed characters – it’s just they died before any of that could happen and then the game ended. Great job screwing up your only good point in my books.

Lastly I feel like I should mention the length of the game. It seems like a lame last jab to throw out there after all the rest, but I find it important because I’ve heard the shortness used as an excuse. “Of course the story wasn’t as good as Half Life 2; it was only four hours long!” That just doesn’t work for me. Stating a failing in the game as a reason for why it shouldn’t be judged to suck doesn’t make sense in my mind. You can put me next to Michael Jordon and if I said “well of course I’m not as good! He’s HUGE!” it wouldn’t make me suck at basketball any less. But then again, maybe this is just a problem with people who’re defending it, not the game itself.

Ah well. I feel better now. And now that I’ve mentioned it I think I’m going to go play Half Life for a bit, get the bad taste out of my mind.

Chrome!

A short run today - I had the day off and nothing else has exploded so I'm running a bit low on news. Well, that's not entirely true; there's some phenomenally stupid political crap going on right now but I'm not too eager to turn this blog into a place for me to bitch about Canadian politics. For starters, I'd never have time for anything else, and frankly I don't think anyone else would even care. 

With that in mind I'm going to ramble about Chrome for a bit. I finally bothered to download the damn thing to replace the horrible sluggish pile of unused and hated toolbars that explorer had become. In terms of bothering to ditch I.E. I know I'm years behind the expected norm on the 'net. I had fallen firmly into the 'eh, who cares?' category and felt content to stay there for a while. It was only after seeing a few graphs to compare the average load speed between browsers that I decided to go from the very last place contender to the first and see if I would care enough to swap over. So I downloaded Chrome.

About thirty seconds later explorer was dead in my mind and I was fiddling with the control to swap my favorites folder over. It turns out there's one hell of a noticeable difference. Also,Chrome looks sleek. Yes, it garners points for the fancy look design. I may be vain, but dammit, my shit will be fancy.

Pod-casts and DnD!

Good news everyone! The pod-casting equipment has been fixed! I get to consume even more of my friends free time producing meaningless material for the ‘net! Yaaaaaay!

No really, that’s not a joke; we managed to find a way to get the audio equipment functioning again. I’m still not entirely certain how it all works, but it’s at least recording at superb quality and the software is even moderately user friendly once the hardware stops dicking around. Honestly through our best guess as to how we fixed things is by invoking technomagical wizards to make everything flow into their current and apparently correct state.

Did you know that you can hear sounds out of a headset that’s hooked into the microphone jack? What; no you didn’t because you’ve never tried on account of the idea being utterly retarded? Well what a cheeky fool you are! Ho, ho, turns out if you have an advanced enough microphone it can even play sound too! Although only at a very low volume, just to increase the potential you’ll think you’ve gone insane upon hearing it. We also went through a small mountain of adapters and in the end resorted to throwing away a previously thought crucial part of our system, but at the end of the long struggle we – to our utter confusion – have prevailed.

Consequently we now have pod-casts back on the menu. Hurrah! We even put together all the recording required for the first interview last night. It’ll likely be completed sometime this weekend – there’s still a bunch of editing that needs to be done to make it run smoothly. The important part is past though and things are looking up for future broadcasts.

I have to admit making the entire thing proved to be a lot less stressful than I anticipated. Things started off a bit slow due to nerves all around, but by time we got into the latter half of the interview we had worked that out of our system and it was just becoming fun. The interview is broken up by the individual question topics using music as brief interludes to allow us to do it in something other than one enormous take. It might not be the sort of thing that we’ll keep doing in the future though; once we got comfortable with the notion of being recorded the conversation reverted back to its usual flow, which was what I’m aiming to capture in conjunction with whatever topic is at hand. I ended up missing some good parts because the microphone happened to be off. Thus I’ll be testing the idea of just keeping the microphone on and editing the whole thing after this Thursday where we intend to do a quasi-review of the truly classical movie Hobo with a shotgun. I’m just going to stuff us all in one room right after we’ve seen it, flick the microphone on and let people talk. If it turns out to be crap you’re liable to never hear of this again, but on the off chance things go well it’ll be the sort of thing I want to make a common if not weekly feature.

In related news; I managed to nick a decent secondary microphone for the video camera. After a brief hitch in connecting things we got everything working fine. We’re set to start recording soon and the weather seems keen to play along with us; it’s been the nicest week all year. Regrettably everyone’s conflicting schedules means we probably won’t be able to whip together a fight anytime soon, but the option isn’t going to go away. We just need a bit of patience and we’ll see what we can do. Earliest possible is picking an evening this weekend, but failing that we’ll probably have to fall back to the weekend after – if weather permits by then.

Furthermore I intend to sit down with Josh and do the type-up of our interview this weekend. As I’ve said it’s going to contain the same questions, so don’t go hunting for tons of extra tid-bits from it. It’ll primarily be used to fill in any holes Josh thought he made in the interview and to provide access to the world for those who can’t be bothered to download and listen to the full pod-cast – which looks to be timing in at around 34 minutes. With the success of the first interview it looks like we’ll be trying another one in the future, possibly focusing on the divergent areas of his world and the conflicts in them. It could all wrap neatly into explaining some small part of the history he’s compiled, which to explore fully would take an entirely separate pod-cast.

And now for something entirely different; WoW DnD Wossit Thingy.

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So my group has now merrily sauntered through a chunk of what I planned last time. They visited the tower and poked around – the sneakier one of them found the broken stones leading to the basement but didn’t pry them open. No, they proceeded to Raven Hill (the other town) first. On the way I opted to roll and see if they’d be mauled by random undead due to the lovely nature of the forest and they got the lucky ticket. However, I decided to try and rope in something with the random attack that would be relevant to the rest of the story – mostly because they took for bloody ever to kill the damn undead and I didn’t want to waste a whole night without anything important happening. To this end I stuck a mage/warlock robed bloke up on a hill next to them when the undead sprung their little ambush. Once again armed with the finest subtlety known to man I ‘hinted’ that the big spooky cloaked figure might be on the side of the undead – in particular by having him wing a big old flaming boulder at the group when they were getting an edge against the skeletons, which really shouldn't have been too hard. I mean, it's multiple paladins and a crazy ass half berzerk elf, I expected the undead reaction to equate roughly to this:

Such wasn't going to be the case. Anyways,for his trouble mister cloaky-figure (No, he’s never going to get a name) caught a knife in the stomach. He’s not going to die from it, but I doubt he’ll ever return on screen alive. I was thinking I could use him as one of the few mages that Ramklin had managed to actually empower, including the possibility that some might be splitting off from him and trying to gain power in the forest all on their own. He may have to appear as a corpse somewhere to nail that point home.

Tonight I’m due to push the story along further and I figured I’d flesh it out here instead of just winging it. They only just reached Raven Hill at the end of the last game, so they’ll need to make inquiries and whatnot, stumbling about like heroes do when they don’t have a big red arrow pointing to the target that needs smashing, but really all that’s there is some facts about what Ramklin might be up to. I’m going to try and use Vhanis to nudge them back on the path to the first town (Darkshire) before the night drags on too much. As I think I mentioned last time they’re due to get assaulted on the way back – just outside of the town actually. The attack is going to come from the direction of an old abandoned church and graveyard off to the south. It’ll be made up of worgen running in their general direction and be heralded by arcane looking glows in the distance, and the sound of explosions.

Its here I want to introduce the idea that Ramklin is empowering people. The worgen are simply in flight. It’s another unintentional escape of worgen that Ramklin would’ve caught and stored in the church cellar, which got out when he tried to test a couple new mages against the beast. Their fighting ability proves effective if utterly uncontrolled and prone to blowing up everything rather than the target. Should our band of heroes go to the church directly they’ll find two empowered individuals dealing with a few mangled worgen that couldn’t escape fast enough. The mildly crazy people in question are going to have to have some sign that they were artificially made that way – the idea I currently have is just arcane glowing veins. It’s not very creative and I’m still thinking on something better, but that’s the fall back. They’ll attack our band with very explosive but uncontrolled magic should they see them. Ramklin himself will be on top of the church – the roof of which will be half collapsed. He’ll be on a gryphon to explain how the hell he got up there, and it’s through the hole in the roof that he will have blasted open the cellar below. Presumably he left his protégées down below before doing this. Should our group kill the crazy mages he’ll throw some rather nasty magic at them in retaliation. I want it to be clear that any of them taking him on alone would be suicidal.

Incase they can’t think of a way to drive him off he’ll either blast them enough that the smoke covers them from view and he leaves, or he’ll have a fit of rage at the deaths of his coven-members and the gryphon will spook and fly off with him stuck on it. Not terribly dignified, but who needs that when you can reduce some one and everything within ten meters of them to a smoking crater? Either way, the goal of the scene (even if they just fucking bolt the second they see Ramklin) is to have them go back and find the bodies of the empowered mages and identify the markings that distinguish them from other people, furthermore allow the NPC Vhanis to go “Why that doesn’t look good! This shouldn’t be happening to normal mages!”.

Once again; subtlety. My finest attribute.

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That’s the plan for now anyways, we’ll see how badly they can mangle it in a single night. ‘Till next time.

Oh, rage day. How I love these.

I will start with the notable absence of a pod-cast or post in the last couple days, just to get the drab details out of the way before I get into what I actually want to talk about. It turns out all my fancy expensive pod-casting equipment decided to not work last Sunday and no amount of mad fiddling could get it to agree with us. The frustration of this was compounded by the fact that we have made the same equipment function perfectly in the past, but merely forgot what horribly convoluted combination of settings was required to make it all run properly. After several hours of trying we gave up in defeat and thus nothing was posted. I'm going to spend the next week trying to get those settings back, but if I fail utterly we'll either do a work-around involving a video camera or just proceed with the type up alone.

H'okay onto the rage.

I recently ran across an article pointing to a post made on the Bioware forums concerning one of their recent games; Dragon Age 2. To be brief the game is a medieval setting Role Playing Game that has you control a tiny band of heroes as they saunter about saving the world or rescuing some one. The goal of the game is frankly secondary - it's one of the side features that's gained the spotlight in this debate. In an attempt to expand the dynamic of the game Bioware implemented a romance system. Your main character could interact with many or all of the members of your band and engagement them in a romantic relationship. This varied slightly depending on their games I believe, but that once again isn't the point. The point revolves around one's capacity to make those relationships homosexual. You can make your own character male or female and regardless of that choice can still pursue any of the available members in your group.

It's worth stepping back at this point to note this is actually a secondary feature. It's not even one of the main selling points of the series unless you categorize it as apart of the 'good characterization' that Bioware is frequently praised for. It does, none the less, remain only a single facet of that feature.

It appears some one has a serious issue with this being present in the game. Of course, this being the Internet I don't mean they hosted a protest or anything, but instead they've brought it up in a long and actually quite well written and polite post on their main forums. It's available here in full. His point centralized around not so much that homosexuality is bad (though he makes special note to say he personally finds it disgusting), but that by including it in the game Bioware is neglecting the majority of the fans. He then goes on to start quite estimates and percentages on how many male straight gamers and homosexuals play the game respectively. He blatantly state he's just ball parking these and that he has nothing to back up his number, nor even attempted to do any research, but feels confident enough that he's correct to base his entire argument around it.

Frankly I'm not actually going to pick apart his estimate that 80% of Bioware fans are male and straight, or his tendency to create arguments out of illusionary facts, because everyone does that. It's just part of being human it seems. No, what concerns me is the jump in logic he makes. It's an enormous leap, that I'm sure many people reading this will have already seen despite my deliberate vagueness. The basis of his argument is that it only makes good business sense to make a game entirely for the majority of the fans because making it for the minority (He places homosexuals at 5%) would lose them sales. At no point does he ever sit back and examine in detail the likelihood that any of those "80% male straight gamers" simply don't care in the least that there's an option for homosexual relationships in the game.

He seems to be of the belief that since he is male and straight and found the homosexuality and attemps to make the game 'all-inclusive' a negative trait that the 80% who fit the first two attributes will agree with the latter. There's no reason, no logical branch to step out on to make this connection. There's nothing, absolutely nothing to support this claim. Yet he holds to it like a flag. He even goes so far as to say, I quote;

---"I've seen many complaints about weak characters and weak story. That is also my complaint and I believe stems entirely from trying to be "all-inclusive". By trying to appeal to so broad of audience, you've left a game in which many people are disappointed."

'Many'.

There's no numbers, there's no research. There's nothing that he can point to in any kind of statistical sense that prove that Bioware made a bad decision by including this. There isn't even any sort of numbers he could pull up to try and prove that there's more gamers seriously upset by this than there are Homosexuals happy with its inclusion. There simply isn't anything at all.

Even still, that's not what makes me angriest. It's the quality of his post and the politeness of the way he phrases all this. It's like he's trying to carefully explain something painstaking clear to those who just don't understand. He's obviously a person who's used to reasoned and well stated arguments with a clear intention of not simply stating an opinion but convincing the opposing side. So how the hell did he miss one of the largest and most outrageous assumptions I've ever seen in an argument outside of politics? What caused the massive break in simple reasoning? How did a mind that meticulously examined several issues and made pointed counter arguments to them before they were even raised fail to notice that it's standing on thin air?

The irritation I feel is perhaps only outweighed by the bafflement.