61 Frames Per Second : aliens

F**k Your Future: Mirror’s Edge, Blade Runner, and the Future City

John Constantine — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The image above is a little bit of Deus Ex 3 concept art from Eidos Montreal, the crack design team who broadened our sexual horizons with Fear Effect and taught us that controlling sociopathic murders is boring as sin with Kane & Lynch. I can imagine the dialogue between the artists and producers when this image was submitted for approval:

"What do you got for us today, concept artists?"

"Check dis!"

"This isn't Deus Ex! This is just a screencap from Blade Runner with the guy from Deus Ex 1 smoking in front of it!"

"I'm fired aren't I?"

"No! It's perfect! That’s all these nerds want anyway."

I kid. There is no Deus Ex without Blade Runner, after all. While its influence isn’t quite on the level of Aliens, Blade Runner’s vision of a nightmare cityscape in the far-flung-but-familiar future is a close second. Its towering super-skyscrapers and dank alleyways are the aesthetic meat of beloved games like Shadowrun and Snatcher, but you can also see them in mid-period Contra, Flashback, Abe’s Odyssey/Exodus, and even recent blockbusters like Mass Effect. Then again, it’s not just games. Syd Mead’s Los Angeles has been the template for depicting the urban landscape of the future in all media for close to twenty-five years.

I’ve been curious for awhile now as to what the next popular conception of the cityscape is going to be. The Blade Runner type came on the heels of the ultra-slick Logan’s Run-style, cities of spires all white and sterile that typified science fiction from its 1950s heyday through the 1970s. This may not be the most academic logic in the world, but since sci-fi literature gave us our Future City model post-WWII, and sci-fi film bore its successor, I’m looking to videogames to create the next archetype.

If you’ve been reading 61FPS regularly, you probably won’t be surprised to hear me say that I think Mirror’s Edge features the most likely model for tomorrow’s City of Tomorrow. Edge’s nameless city has the same whitewashed sterility that was the hallmark of the 60s/70s future city but twists the model by coating it in streaks of primary color and keeping the architecture familiar. The buildings, subway stations, and shopping centers recall today’s Montreal but with a consistent modernist bent. Edge’s dystopia is also a recent institution. The story constantly reminds the player that the totalitarian government responsible for the city’s current shape hasn’t been in power long, and so the omnipresence of architecture-as-construction-site provides a fine narrative metaphor: you play behind the future city’s façade of perfection. Whether or not this model fully captures the zeitgeist of 2008 and beyond remains to be seen, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing Edge’s city more often then Blade Runner’s, especially in games, going forward.

Note: Forgive my hate against Eidos Montreal. Yeah, Fear Effect and Kane & Lynch suck, but they made Soul Bubbles. They’re alright.

(Link: Gamereactor via Kotaku)

Related links:

The Three Stigmata of The Halcyon Company: Philip K. Dick Comes to Games
Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True
Trailer Review: Mirror’s Edge
The Eternal Question: Why Is Super Mario Bros. Fun?
Ceci N'Est Pas Une 1-Up: The Surrealist Future of Postpunk Gaming

The 61FPS Review: Dead Space

John Constantine — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

1986 bore witness to one of gaming's watershed moments, an event whose profound impact on the medium is still seen today, in games released every week. Protagonists, game worlds, sound effects and art direction; there is no facet of design that this single creative work hasn't influenced. It isn't The Legend of Zelda or Metroid. It isn't Out Run, Adventure Island, Kid Icarus, Bubble Bobble, or Castlevania. It isn't even a videogame.

The gaming legacy of James Cameron's Aliens cannot be overstated. Ignore all thirty games actually based on Aliens and consider the past twenty-two years of gaming as a whole. Syd Mead's art and designs cover every game from R-Type to Halo 3. H.R. Giger's titular xenomorph is mirrored in hundreds of enemies, even beyond Contra. The film's group dynamics and character archetypes are the template for almost every squad-based shooter ever made. And the forbidding labyrinth of colony LV-426 has defined entire genres, particularly the first-person shooter. This movie is the womb of the space marine, modern videogames' essential lead. Aliens made many, many games what they are.

But no one game has ever gone as far in recreating the Aliens experience — allowing you to enter a dilapidated, abandoned science-fiction world full of monsters hunting you from the shadows — as EA Redwood Shores' Dead Space. The Ishimura and its broken, dimly lit passages, the bloodthirsty and relentless necromorphs spawned from the ship's dead, the weapons you wield as Isaac Clarke (pulse rifles, flame throwers); even the dissonant score is lifted straight from the film.

And the gameplay follows Aliens' episodic structure precisely: at the start of all twelve chapters in Dead Space, you are instructed to go to a place, locate that chapter's MacGuffin (a machine that needs fixing, a creature that needs killing), eliminate a specific obstacle and survive a constant and seemingly unstoppable, unpredictable threat aided only by limited supplies and unreliable supporting characters.

Dead Space's premise and aesthetics aren't the only things on loan. The game's third-person shooting and adventuring are straight out of Resident Evil 4, but Dead Space improves on every aspect of that classic. RE4's great advancement in combat was enemies who responded dynamically to gunshots; shoot a zombie in the leg and it falls down, shoot it in the arm and it drops its weapon. Dead Space makes this surgical gunplay its focus: the only way to defeat its disgusting monsters — who are, admittedly, less Aliens and more The Thing — is to remove their limbs. So the majority of encounters are exercises in precision, and each new enemy type offers a tense moment of strategizing.

Dead Space's greatest evolution over Resident Evil 4, though, is its environmental challenges. On the surface, Dead Space's puzzles don't seem to deviate from RE4's find-the-key-then-flip-the-switch approach, but in execution they become wonderfully distinct. One scenario half-way through the game finds you manually jettisoning a gigantic meteor into space (the Ishimura is a "Planet Cracker," a ship that gathers huge chunks of planetary mass and space debris to process for raw materials). Four tethers hold the office-building-sized rock; you have to sever them in zero gravity. Two are in plain sight, so you jettison yourself across the room and quickly disable them. But two others are labeled as objectives on your holographic map. (Menus and maps are projected in front of the player, so you're never pulled out of the action for anything. It's the game's most original piece of design and you should expect to see it imitated by many others in the future.) The map indicates that they're outside of the room, and that's when it dawns on you that you'll need to go into the vacuum of space, crawling over the surface of the meteor, to find the remaining tethers. There's no prompt, no tutoring voice telling you exactly what to do. In oppressive isolation, you have work out the solution on your own. Dead Space transcends its influences in moments like these, becoming more than the sum of its borrowed parts.

So, as an interactive entertainment that works to recreate a very specific experience, Dead Space is an incredible success. In its graphics, audio, controls and design, the game is a paragon of quality. Few games are this beautifully and carefully considered. But Dead Space falters as a narrative. Its story (about an alien artifact that transforms human beings into genocidal monsters) is as derivative as everything else in the game, but devoid of the creative spark that enlivens the play and setting. The few human characters that populate the story are just as shallow; both the plot and cast end up as little more than facilitators for the action. The game would have worked better with you completely isolated: no human contact whatsoever, a lone engineer sent to fix an a ship adrift in space, up against insurmountable odds. I'd hope for the sequel to take this tack, but given EA's support of the game with all sorts of multimedia — a comic series and animated movie are already available — meant to enhance the narrative alone, I doubt it will happen.

The story isn't bad, per se, just beside the point. Dead Space is a flawlessly constructed ride, a digital suit for you to wear that lets you go to a place, see and do things, that you could never do. King Aliens has birthed a shrieking prince. Go play it.

Grade: B

Previous 61FPS Reviews:

LOL
Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen
Metal Gear Solid IV
Ninja Gaiden 2
Grand Theft Auto IV
Wii Fit

Aliens and Games and TV, Oh My: The Jace Hall Show

John Constantine — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Videogames, they’re played on televisions. Well, they’re played on computer monitors too, but those have all but turned into televisions in recent years, right? Right. Of course, 61 Frames Per Second has been pondering and expounding on the relative merits of televised programming based on and about videogames of late. As our very own Amber Ahlborn made the point the other day, videogame television aimed at avid players is typically schlock ridden garbage, marred by a need to come off as both cool enough for the cool kids and geekily informed enough to appeal to the really cool kids. Amber’s spot-on in saying that the best game television is on the internet. When it comes to quality, the comedic characters created by Yahtzee and the Angry Video Game Nerd are joined by the first truly successful preview/review show, The 1up Show. Ryan O’Donnell and Jane Pinckard found the winning formula of scripted dialogue, personality and informed journalism lacking in every other attempt at the form, and O’Donnell has kept it strong for three years running.

The golden rule of entertainment is that when you make something that works, someone is going to imitate you on the quick. Until today, I had all but forgotten about the recently launched The Jace Hall Show, relegating to the section of my brain labeled “Mildly Interesting Things N’Gai Croal Wrote About and Failed to Hold My Attention Oh Look Metroid Fan Fiction”. For anyone unfamiliar with the name, Jace Hall is the founder of Monolith Productions (creators of F.E.A.R. and Condemned: Criminal Origins) and has been a significant player in the games industry for over a decade. I watched my first full episode of the show today because Hall was visiting Gearbox for a look at both Borderlands and Aliens: Colonial Marines. The show’s slick production works well and its premise of sneaking quick looks of games still early in development – the pilot had a-sneeze-and-you’ll-miss-it look at Duke Nukem Forever – is a novel hook. But it’s hard not to notice its attempt to mimic The 1up Show’s casual tone and the similarity is a little off-putting. The coverage is there, but it still needs a personality of its own to thrive.

You can catch the whole first season here on Crackle.com or on your Xbox 360 via Live Arcade.

Related links:

Video Game TV: Can It Ever Be Good?
Yahtzee Says, Support Your Local Independent Developer (He’s Right.)
Video Game Television the Canadian Way, Eh?
Horrors That Time Forgot: GamePro TV
Game Over, Man: Aliens – Colonial Marines Penned By Battlestar Galactica Writers

Game Over, Man: Aliens - Colonial Marines Penned By Battlestar Galactica Writers

John Constantine — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

They’re still far from release, but Gearbox is saying all the right things about their Aliens game. After revealing Colonial Marines in late 2007, the much loved developer behind Half-Life expansions Blue Shift and Opposing Forces have made it their mission to craft the perfect interactive sequel to James Cameron’s opus, not just another cash-in on the abused Alien franchise. Early screens betray an almost fetishistic love of Aliens, its forbidding environments awash in Cameron’s trademark palette of sterile blues and grays. The proposed gameplay also channels the film’s tense action, with group tactics based more on securing rooms than running and gunning. Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford’s announcement that Colonial Marines is being scripted by Battlestar Galactica’s Bradley Thompson and David Weddle is one more signifier of the game’s potential quality.

Bringing on Thompson and Weddle is more than just bringing on some recognizable talent. Battlestar Galactica’s strength as a dramatic work is its terse, loaded dialogue, character interaction that manages to inform personality as much as it propels the show’s grand narrative forward. The tone they bring to BSG is ideal for the bleak militarism of Aliens, but it remains to be seen if they can adapt their deliberate style to a medium that requires extreme freedom in narrative flow to be successful. Nothing will ruin this game's atmosphere like constant cutscenes.

Personally, I think Colonial Marines is one of the most exciting games coming out in the next year. Thompson, Weddle, and Gearbox just need to remember that they mostly come out at night. Mostly.

Our thanks to Joystiq and Shacknews for spreading the word.

Related links:

Along Came a Gamer: James Patterson and Authors in Games