Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Please Keep Your Mouth Closed During!

Back in the mid nineties something hilarious happened. Video games developed the technology to articulate some fairly fine human gestures. Objects in the world and elements of character models could suddenly move in a way that mimed real action. Hands could grip things, objects could interact with objects, all sorts of crazy pie in the sky things. And game designers, in their eagerness to push the envelope, decided to do something incredible: they decided to make people’s mouths move during in-game cutscenes.

The end result was less spectacular than we might’ve hoped. Deus Ex, Half Life: Opposing Force, Rune. All of these games featured highly articulated three dimensional models with moving mouths. These games, while fantastic to play (critics almost universally in the first case, in the latter cases it’s kind of a gray area, but bear with me), had some pretty hilariously bad cutscenes not because of their dialogue, but because of the decision to render them in-engine where the lips of speaking characters moved so that they might resemble, kinda, what was being said at the time.

And yet, for the most part, we didn’t care.

I was playing through Rune: Classic, recently released on Steam. In one of the game’s introductory cutscenes one of the villains, some guy with a weird old Viking name, is shouting at the main character’s dad, who also has a weird old Viking name. His mouth moves up and down like a puppet’s, while his eyes remain still. It looks almost like a pumpkin, cut in twain, has had a joint added into the middle of it, and that joint is being used to open and close his mouth.

It’s bad. Hilariously bad. But I’m still playing Rune: Classic. And I’m enjoying it, more than I have most other games I’ve played recently. Because god damnit, it’s doing things that are different and interesting and a little bit fun. Actually, a lot fun. When you cut off a goblin’s head, that feels good. When you light a zombie on fire with a flaming axe, that feels good too. I could do with fewer rock crabs and tentacle barnacles, sure, but for the most part the game’s just a masterful piece of old school design and it’s a pleasure to step back into one of the more distinct third person action games that I remember from my high-school years.

And it’s a testament to the gameplay that I’m willing to ignore haphazardly the designers utilized the graphics available to them at the time. I mean, I can’t ignore them completely: I’m not sure I’m capable of doing that. That would be like not noticing a beautiful woman missing a leg. But the graphics, the clumsy, haphazard graphics rooted in one very distinct period of time, aren’t offensive. Nor are they making me not want to play. They’re just present. A part of the overall experience. And the design itself is good enough that I don’t really care.

There aren’t too many titles that I can say the same for nowadays. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations did some weird stuff with faces that I disregarded because of the quality of its core play (which was assailed by other, more pressing offenses in my opinion) and games like Supreme Commander 2 have done goofy stuff and been well enough forgiven for the quality of their play. But for the most part my complaints are running in the opposite direction.

Games are all too eager to skullfuck players with the latest in eyecandy without the slightest concern for designing enjoyable play or attempting some new mechanic or approach. It’s a sad state of affairs when the most financially viable properties have the words “Call of Duty” in the title and do absolutely nothing new with each iteration, while occasionally even taking tiny steps backwards with their design choices (WHY CAN I NO LONGER LEAN IN MULTIPLAYER GAMES?!). And I find these choices, or fundamental lack of choices, far more conspicuous than weird visuals. If a game isn’t fun to play, I’m going to be a lot more dismissive of it than if it looks weird.

You can see a trend in this direction as retro games, or games with relatively simple visual motifs, are produced for a fraction of the cost of other games and do quite well for themselves. Consider, if you will, Quantum Conundrum. QC isn’t a looker by contemporary standards, nor does it have the ingredients to be a AAA blockbuster. But the game is generating a great deal of hype thanks to a keen, original design and the enthusiasm of some mouthpieces of the indie games marketplace. And I’m sure it’ll sell quite well: with a reasonable price tag and an original package surrounding its energetic gameplay, I’d be quite surprised if it didn’t.

On the other side of the equation, you’ve got Spec Ops: The Line. Money is pouring out of Spec Ops’ publisher to get people to buy it, with commercial spots bombarding anyone who watches TV on the internet, and the game is gritty to the max with oodles of blood and gore and other visual spice for “the kids” to enjoy. But the gameplay sounds about as generic as can be and, to be frank, I know for a fact I’m going to skip it, especially with its hefty major release pricing.

I’m far, far more likely to sit down and play one of the indie RPGs collecting dust on my hard drive, or to try to get through the old Penny-Arcade RPGs before Zeboyd releases the final installation of On the Rain Slick Precipice of Eternal Darkness. Hell, I’m more likely to sit down and play through Rune than I am to try one of these samey-looking shooters with cover based gameplay, because at least Rune is doing something that I can’t get anywhere else. If I want a cover shooter, I can just play Gears of War. And Gears of War looks good, even if it’s just looking good with weirdly proportioned homoerotic dudes in football pads.

It often feels like we, as gamers, are taking several steps back each time we’re shown an important new lesson. Bioshock’s fantastic storytelling hasn’t echoed through the industry, nor has Modern Warfare the First’s structural awareness. But our unconscious minds still seem to scream that play is the important thing: that a game can look odd or off and still be good and be worthy of our attention. We can ignore JC Denton’s flapping gums, damnit, so long as we can still sneak around and shoot darts and guards. If a game is good enough, we won’t care how it looks. The reverse can’t really be said.