You're not the boss of me:Gears Of War 2, Rise of the Argonauts & Brothers in Arms 3

When did boss battles go from being a means of ramping up the players experience to culminate in a hopefully satisfying use of the skills learned, to being game-breaking punishments?

Boss battles come in a gazillion different forms ranging from escaping ever-increasing hordes of enemies in a ever-decreasing area (COD 4), to a big alien dude you shoot stuff at its weak spots to make it roll over and die (Lost Planet). Shadows of the Colossus is an example of a game made of nothing but boss battles as the player finds way to attack an kill massive creatures, all with unique weaknesses and behaviors. All of these games create these battles organically withing the story, using them as storytelling elements to drive to plot as well as engage the player.

Gears of War 2 has one of the worst boss battles I have ever played, to the point that I actually quit playing. The battle is not only achingly repetitive and tiresome, it actually breaks the immersiveness of the game and violates the physics engine. Facing the locust villian Skorge, the player has to avoid grenades, falling rocks, explosive "tickers" and finally, massive wood columns that Skorge chainsaws through, causing them to topple.

Directly on the player.

Even if they are behind the column when it starts to fall.

I screamed cheap at the screen more than once because the developers were so unrelentingly lazy making this game that they broke the gameplay in order to make the battle more difficult. This is unacceptable. Gears 2 is a mediocre rehash of the first game at best and its makers are clearly resting on their laurels.

Rise of the Argonauts uses the same engine, as does Brothers in Arms as Gears 2, the Unreal 3 engine. Epic has often been labeled as the only developer capable of manipulating the engine to its fullest (including a lawsuit from Silicon Knights) and I am starting to get an inkling why. They are the only ones who don't try to make the engine do something its not good at. Of the the three Epic games made on the engine, they are rely on tightly controlled, small,linear environments surrounded by lush, but unreachable, visuals. Rise, Brothers, Mass Effect, etc etc, use the engine to create massive environments where you can usually go to what you can see. This engine is not made to do this, resulting is massive amounts of texture pop-in, frame-rate issues and general glitches. It makes one wonder if other developers were sold a bill of goods on the capabilities of the engine, specs that Epic itself does not have the engine do, only to have it fall short.

Rise of the Argonauts, in direct comparison to Gears 2, is receiving an entirely unfair critical drubbing compared to Gears, which I consider to be an inferior single-player game. Rise has a compelling emotional plot that drives the player forward. It does exhibit a lack of final polish in its animations, voice work and gameplay, but overall the game is fun and tells a great story. It seeks to engage the player emotionally rather than viscerally, using Mass Effect inspired dialogue trees and some very clever writing. Any fan of Greek myth should rent this game. It too has a boss battle that frustrated the snot out of me but I finally beat it, because I wanted to see what happened next. I didn't care with Gears 2. Argonauts also has babes in it, which is nice. I beat Rise of the Argonauts in 2 days of non-stop play, I liked the game that much.

Brothers In Arms 3 also draws the player in emotionally, asking us to invest in the characters, including a "Previously on..." cutscene that shows the first two games. Using a linear layout, like Gears, BIA drives the player and their squad forward against the German defenses.Reasonably smart AI (other than when it runs down the middle of the street rather than following you through back yards) drives the squads and they follow commands well. The control scheme is smart and intuitive and the cover system allows the player slightly more protection from the hail of bullets.

Satisfying and challenging without being stupidly difficult, BIA 3 is fine game that deserves more attention than it is getting from consumers. I am looking forward to beating it soon.

The Evolution of Narrative:Gaming and the language of film

As with any burgeoning artform, game developers over the last 20 years have made their stumbling baby steps towards maturity of the art. Narrative, until recently (and with a few notable exceptions) has long taken a backseat (or no seat) to gameplay. The many constraints of the hardware and software capabilities until recently have precluded developers from exploring narrative (outside of text based games like Zork) as the challenges in just making a game run as a finished piece of code and be fun is daunting enough. However, with ever expanding technology in both hardware and software, and the maturity of over twenty years as an industry, gaming has finally begun to stretch its legs in terms of what can accomplished within the art.

I believe that interactive gaming is the next step in narrative and easily the most immersive. However, like any other maturing form of expression, gaming has come to consider other artforms as the mold on which to base itself, rather than seeking to create something the is unique unto itself. In this case, the language of film and terms like "cinematic" are now tossed about as identifiers of pedigree. Like the comic book industry, gaming is turning to Hollywood screenwriters to pen the storyline of a game as well as seeking ways to implement the visual language of film in the storytelling. While this in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, it can lead, as it has in comics, to a turn away from the strengths of the form to become something that is less than the sum of its parts (ie. decompressed storytelling).

The language of film has developed over the last century to become a short hand in the public unconscious and this can only serve, if used well, to immerse the player deeper into the world. The greatest strength of cinema is the ability to elicit emotion, an area precious few games are able to reach. To use the visual vocabulary of film without understanding how that language developed does developers a disservice as it creates built-in limitations. By imitating the image without understanding the intent meaning is lost.

As an example, during the recent GDC conference, Canadian developer Silicon Knights previewed their new game "Too Human". While the development history of this game has been controversial and public, the gameplay demonstrated looked solid. While previewing the gameplay, the phrase "the language of film" was used multiple times, and to their credit, moments in the game gave credence to the developer's intent. Not having played the game I can only comment on the brief moments I saw but what struck me was the use of "standard" film shots in much of the cinematics (ie. establishing shots, over the shoulder dialogue scenes etc). While refreshed to not see the spastic camera moves of many cinematics (ie. Devil May Cry) it was strange to see a locked off panning shot, which established the epic locale as a character entered the area.

Had this been a live-action film of the same fantasy environment it would have been a matte shot, panning off a digital painting to a holdout area for the live action to be place, shot against a greenscreen and/or partial set. In real world terms, if the same shot was used to show a character stepping into a cavernous area, the camera would physically be on a crane or a skycam, limiting its mobility. Such limitations do not exist in the digital world and by copying the staging of a shot without understanding the reality of it, the developer does the game a disservice.

Should developers go camera crazy and move the digital camera around spaces that would be impossible in the real world? No, as this would destroy any verisimilitude necessary to immerse the player. Developers need to come to understand why a shot exists in a film before emulating it in the game. Once understanding the intent, they can begin to create a new language, combining the emotional dynamic of film with the unlimited potential of digital imagination.

Only then will gaming truly become a narrative force.