Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Games Criticism Is Broken!

Lately my time has been sparse, not because of any writerly activities. No, I’ve had the ill fortune to be playing Mass Effect 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2 at the same time, two very different, very good games that the critical apparatus surrounding video games has treated very differently.

Assassin’s Creed 2, for example, is a flawed masterpiece, a great game with some serious flaws and plenty of hype to live up to. The critical apparatus, that is to say Metacritic and the collective consciousness of the enthusiast press, seemed to see it as such, commenting on its refinement of play and loyalty to the original. There were plenty of gushing, mindless reviews, sure, but scroll down far enough and you’ll see some constructive comments and accurate criticisms of what is a great game with issues that wants to be more. Destructoid sits at the bottom of the list with an incredibly negative and nitpicky review, inexplicably enraged at fun and desperately asking us to like them, but that’s Destructoid. Assassin’s Creed 2, through some miraculous alchemy, managed to get through the lens of games criticism largely intact.

No such luck for Mass Effect 2. Just as hyped as its partner in sequelage, Mass Effect 2 has been warped beyond belief by the critical apparatus of gaming media. A quick look at Metacritic’s collected reviews put the lowest review score at 75%. What’s more is that this review is the only one to do anything other than gush about the epic, fluid game play. Reading through Mass Effect 2 review summaries is like listening to a marketing department vomit, a slough of almost unintelligible comments about nebulous concepts that really don’t offer anything other than the direction of a thumb.

Which sort of defeats the purpose of criticism, robbing it of context and offering it up in a vacuum. If Mass Effect 2 was solely interpreted through these reviews it would be nothing short of amazing, but as I played it I couldn’t help but feel as if it was irreparably pared down from the vast offering that was the first game. At 30 or so hours I’ve only found two options for each class of gun, and while they do certainly feel different from one another it’s still pitifully little, considering how long the game is. I find myself using one power over and over again in combat, and while the ability to change ammo mid fight is nice it’s largely a matter of matching the kind of bullets I’m shooting to the color of the bar over an enemy’s head. That’s not really what I consider challenging or interesting combat.

And the game is possessed of some of the most profound grind that I’ve ever seen, even more than the first Mass Effect. Somehow they’ve managed to make loot-seeking even more time consuming while removing loot from the game. Scanning planets, a necessary evil to both progress in the game and improve your gear, is the single most tedious activity I’ve ever carried out in a game. And that includes riding wyverns from place to place in WoW. At least that offered me some cool visuals. Let me break down just how absurd and out of place Bioware’s system is.

Step one: fly your little ship to an itty bitty planet and press A. Now the planet is big! Next, press Y to make a target appear over the planet. Now hold the left trigger to make your control vibrate slightly and display some shifting EKGs representing the heartbeat of various natural resources hidden somewhere on the planet by the Na’vi. Drag your little cursor around the surface with your analog sticks now, watching the meters to see if they’ll shift at all. Tediously maneuver to them to find a reasonably sized heartbeat and press the right trigger while still holding the left. You’ll be rewarded with a slight increase in resources, assuming you found a well sized pulse. Congratulations! Now do it forty more times. Oh, and after you’ve pulled the right trigger enough you’ll have to fly back to a fueling station, possibly in another system, and buy some more probes. Oh, and fuel. You’ll have to buy fuel constantly, just for moving across the map. So space exploration and resource gathering not only require time, but they require in game resources. The effect is less one of enforcing making tough decisions about your money and more one of endless tedium, enforced every time you want to improve your equipment or the Normandy. And you’ll be doing this a lot, trust me. Certain upgrades require absurd amounts of resources, and others require existing upgrades to be purchased so that additional resources can be spent for the purchasing of additional upgrades. By eliminating your inventory Mass Effect 2 has added in the worst shopping and gear progression system I have ever seen in a game. Ever.

This hasn’t ruined the game for me, certainly. I’m a huge Mass Effect fan and I went into this game with an open heart and the highest of hopes. But it is a huge, central part of the game which is unbelievably broken and unacceptably bad considering the time and effort that went into producing the game as a whole, and it’s something that reviewers don’t seem to be talking about at all. The game they’re reviewing you’d swear that you progress naturally through the game and simply acquire resources as needed throughout the central campaign. The game I’ve been duped into playing has just as much pointless and fiddly shit as the old Mass Effect, but instead of being able to access the menus that were so conveniently part of my menu before I now have to access them through a set of consoles, none of which are ever where I want them to be. Want to equip that new piece of armor you just found? Tough shit, you’ll have to find the wardrobe console and then adjust a set of sliders (why god why sliders?) until you find it among Mass Effect 2’s many hideous options.

To be perfectly clear, however, the core game itself is tremendously fun. Shooting aliens in the face is perennially enjoyable, and to say anything else would be a foul and evil assertion. The addition of ammo, which I initially hated, has grown on me, although I do often find myself wishing for deeper pockets. Sure, you just have to run over some corpses to get more ammo, but it forces you to leave cover and eliminates the “epic firefight” feel when getting more ammo is simply a matter of running around looking for glowing shit. It’s nice, and indeed important, that each shot counts in Mass Effect 2, but the ammo system cries out for fine tuning. In fact, most elements of this wonderful game do. And this isn’t even that big a deal. Games are often shipped in pieces, begging for post-release patches and fixes for broken content. Fallout 3, a great game, had to be patched to keep certain NPCs from committing suicide in Megaton, for example. It’s not at all odd to see something like Mass Effect 2 come out a little bit underdone, wanting for fine tuning. What’s odd is that critics, people who are supposed to comment on what’s wrong in games, criticize them, specifically, aren’t talking about the problems that Mass Effect 2 has. Instead they’ve heaped praise upon a game that could be great with just a little more work and some intelligent commentary from the people who are paid to offer up just that but is, as it stands, just good.

So the failure is shared. Mass Effect 2’s design team could’ve (and should’ve) found and fixed a lot of the clunky issues during testing. Many of the features, such as planet scanning and transit as well as ammo, could have benefited tremendously from minor tweaks or simple removal. And many of the reviews could have discussed the game in the context of both its hype and its many, many problems as well as its many successes. The game does so much right, offering up an interesting and diverse cast of characters (except Jacob) and forcing you to relate to them in order to succeed, expanding the Mass Effect world so that it has more than five inhabited planets and one big ass space station and allowing you to feel that your choices have actual impact on play by showing the long term effects of decisions made in the previous game. It’s easy to get bogged down discussing all those great things you love in a game as well and lovingly crafted as Mass Effect. But when it’s your job to inform us about the quality and consistency of the snake oil we are about to be purchasing you need to nut up and find and analyze the flaws in the games you’re telling us we absolutely need to buy.

The enthusiast press has long functioned as an extension of marketing. Some companies, like Sony, take it even further, directly funding and creating websites to hype their products while professing independence from corporate culture, but it seems like these measures are mere formalities of late. EA and Activision can reliably expect the press to review their triple-A titles with gushing praise and little concern for any of their major flaws. It’s not an issue with the industry so much as with the critical apparatus adjacent to it. If films and books were reviewed in such a way people would dismiss them as cultural garbage as well, but for games this sort of treatment isn’t just accepted, it’s expected. If a triple-A title is criticized fans will come out of the woodwork to defend it as if commenting on the state of the emperor’s dress was tantamount to treason.

Games are making big strides towards becoming accepted as a mature means of storytelling by the cultural mainstream. Inch by inch games like Bioshock and Fallout 3 are displaying the amazing narrative potential games have, but it won’t do us one whit of good unless we fix the culture surrounding games so that it permits intelligent discussion about the thing we all love so much. Sites like Gamepro and IGN do far more damage to games as an art form with their treatment of games like Mass Effect 2 and Modern Warfare 2 than a thousand games like Dante’s Inferno, and they’ll have no incentive to fix their methods if we keep on reading their trite. So rise up, gamers, and fill the Crispy Gamer shaped hole that now sits in all of our hearts. Fill it with intelligent and reasoned discussion of games. Discussion of both their methods, their goals, their successes and even their failures.

Congratulations on Having Sex With a Vortegaunt!

It’ll be less a vortegaunt and more a plush vortegaunt toy as sold on Valve’s merchandise store. And you’ll less have sex with it and more rub your penis against it until you ejaculate. And it won’t be consensual either. If the vortegaunt could speak it would be screaming rape at the top of its lungs. But you’re lonely and too tired to meet women and it’s around and remember the horrible thing its kind did at Black Mesa? It deserved this.

Oh boy, did it deserve this.

Congratulations on Having Sex With a Vortegaunt!

Congratulations on Sleeping with Inigo Montoya!

You’re part of a very small subculture of women who grew up with the film The Princess Bride and developed a strange Electra complex for Mandy Pitinkin’s character in the classic subversive fantasy tale, Inigo Montoya. His drive, his friendship and his willingness to aid others all made him into your ideal lover and you’ll have spent most of your life trying to find men who reasonably synthesize those qualities you find so remarkable in Pitinkin’s portrayal of Montoya.

But you realize that he’s simply a fictitious character and that you’ll never find a real life Inigo Montoya to sweep you off your feet, into his car and out of your pants. As such you’ve spent a lot of time dating sexually aggressive Spanish guys who enjoy fencing, of which there is a staggeringly large number. Your incredibly high level of physical beauty will allow you to be extremely choosey, exclusively dating this very small group of men for the entire decade of your life through which you’ve been sexually viable.

But it cuts both ways. Most of these men have been so aggressive that they’ve either raped or date raped you during the time you spent together. Because you have trouble confronting people you even vaguely equate to father figures due to your abandonment issues this will have led to a large number of people bragging about raping you in the fencing community and your sister becoming an aggressive, talented and fairly wealthy criminal prosecutor.

She’ll have spent most of her adult life putting the various men who have taken sexual advantage of you behind bars, an exhausting and time consuming task that will earn her the ire of the Spanish consulate and a number of shipping companies with ties to your various rapists. She’ll be celebrated by a number of women’s rights groups and develop some high profile friends in the activist community.

That’s why you’re going to be greeted tonight by Mandy Pitinkin dressed in his original Inigo Montoya costume (which he, of course, keeps hermetically sealed normally) at your door. He’ll say your name, passionately kiss you and sweep you off your feet and into your bedroom to take full advantage of both you sexually and his delightful wife’s pass to enjoy himself for the night. It will be the single most enjoyable sexual experience of your life, even though he’ll be way older now and Inigo Montoya won’t have had a slight gut in your fantasies.

When you wrap your arms around him, still glowing, you’ll feel as if a chapter of your life has ended victoriously. Burying your face in his back you’ll breath his scent in deep, knowing it’ll all be over tomorrow and that the memory of this night is all you need to stop fucking really irritating Spanish guys.

Congratulations on Sleeping with Inigo Montoya!

Congratulations on Marking Your Territory!

You and your brother have been at this for years. When you were kids you used to do it every day, but as time went by and the distance grew greater you’d always expected the contest would fade. It hasn’t. You’ve never stopped marking one another’s property with your urine and you likely never will.

Today you’ll break into his home while he isn’t there and urinate on his possessions selectively. You’ll take great care not to get a single drop of pee on his wife’s side of the bed, to mark the correct toothbrush, and to coat the bowflex in your urine. Then you’ll depart without any unwanted traces.

You’ll be home in time to see your son return from school and ask him how his day was. He’ll frown as you fix him a sandwich with your freshly washed hands, discussing the way girls confuse him. You’ll chuckle affably and tell him that that will never change, taking great care to smell each piece of kitchenware before using it on your son’s food.

Your brother knows how much you like to cook, after all.

Congratulations on Marking Your Territory!

Congratulations on Being Voted Dirtiest!

You’ll receive the award early this afternoon from an anonymous man in a suit. He’ll call you by name and hand it off to you with a pair of tongs, taking great care to avoid touching you in any fashion. After that he’ll issue a brief statement of thanks and depart the bus, vanishing in a crowd a few minutes later.

You’ll be baffled until you read the single word “Dirtiest” on the trophy. You’ll be wearing your cutoffs, a visibly displayed thong and a white tee shirt stained with sweat and what we assume is semen. At that point it’ll all make sense and you’ll nod to yourself as you continue to look around the bus, considering the potential of various travelers as sexual partners.

Congratulations on Being Voted Dirtiest!

Congratulations on Getting Into Her Panties For a Night!

You’ve been chasing after Becki for a while now. She’s a sweet young girl who lives a few doors down from you and she’s just the kind of almost-dyke found on liberal arts college campuses across the nation that you find so mouth wateringly gorgeous. She’s also nice and approachable, instead of kind of bitchy, so it should come as no surprise that you’ve been after her crotch since the day the two of you met (orientation.)

But there’s a hitch. Becki’s niceness comes at the cost of her being a genuine, caring human being who likes to know people before sleeping with them. Since you’re double majoring in math and philosophy this is a serious problem. It’s not at all abnormal for people to walk away from you as you’re in the middle of a statement about continental philosophy or pi or some other boring anecdote that you’ve tried to jam into the conversation to prove just how smart all those fucking AP classes made you.

As a result you’ve been conversing with her furtively and stalking her a lot. Tuesday this stalking with culminate in your being in her room “studying” with her and her roommate. Her and her roomie will leave for a quick bathroom break and you’ll toss the room in traditional mathematician fashion, finding and donning a pair of her panties in record time.

Once those cotton wonders are wrapped around your junk you’ll be on cloud nine. You’ll pose in front of the room’s full length mirror, nodding at your reflection and smiling suggestively. That is, until Becki and her roommate reenter.

There will be a heartbeat where all of you just stare at one another, waiting to see who will make the first move. It’ll be as if a mystical wizard cast a freeze spell upon you and the panties were the spell focus (you also play Dungeons and Dragons – strike two). Unfortunately the spell will be broken when her roommate leaves the room in disgust, saying “Fuck this,” under her breath and walking away.

Becki, however, will shock you, demurring over to you and kissing you passionately. It turns out she’s into weirdly aggressive stalkers, which would ordinarily be strike three, but Becki is far from normal.

The two of you will engage in a brief whirlwind romance until she gets to know you better. Then she’ll have pity sex with you before leaving your room without speaking and avoiding you for the next week and a half. Come second semester she’ll transfer to a new dorm to avoid seeing you quite so often in passing and by third semester your asinine personality and total lack of sexual prowess will become something of a running joke with her and her friends.

Congratulations on Getting Into Her Panties For a Night!

Congratulations on Contracting a Gold Rush Era Disease!

College can be a difficult place for many people. The combination of newfound independence, unprecedented access to the opposite sex and a total lack of knowledge of how to take care of yourself can form a heady elixir transforming even the brightest young man into a nattering dipshit with an eagle tattoo and a stupid hat.

Luckily you’re fairly grounded, having spent most of your youth male modeling and reading Proust, so you won’t go the douche bag route due to the sudden and unexpected interest from members of the opposite sex. Instead you’ll be one of those students so woefully prepared for life that they cannot take care of themselves one bit. We all know the type, the students who does laundry so rarely that a rat crawls into his hamper and dies, the roommate who stops brushing his teeth and ends up with a mouth full of wood come second semester.

Nothing that bad will happen to you. You’ll simply acquire an anachronistic disease long since wiped out in civilized society thanks to your total lack of hygene. It could be rickets, cholera or tyhpoid. It might even be dysentery!

We’d tell you more, but we’d hate for you to read this, take care of yourself and avoid catching the disease, effectively making us liars. We do want you to know, however, that doctors will be shocked, amazed, and thrilled that you’ve acquired such an easily treatable and previously annihilated disease, because doctors are boring and get their rocks off on shit like that.

Congratulations on Contracting a Gold Rush Era Disease!