Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Snipe Snipe!

I’m on top of a building, far from my target. I’m staring down the scope of my rifle, a Barrett fifty cal. Unlike most Barretts in video games this one is set up the way Barretts are in the field, stationary, stabilized by some sort of theoretical gel layer. It also has unlimited ammo, for some strange reason, but hey. It’s a video game.

I’m prompted to wait patiently for the correct conditions, which context clues like flags and urgency in the voice of my spotter will inform me of. These clues will tell me when it is time to shoot my weapon, eliminating my lone target. After that I’ll need to use my tools properly so that I can resolve the issue before moving on to the game proper. In the game proper I won’t be a sniper anymore, though. I’ll have to hold my breath to aim straight. My gun will be malleable again and I’ll be prompted to run between shots.

I will no longer be a sniper. I will be moving quickly from place to place, sharp-shooting when I can. I won’t be patient. I won’t be able to be patient. The rest of the game will be one made dash towards freedom. This is the way most games are.

Most games treat sniping as a battle of reflexes rather than one of patience. In Borderlands it’s a matter of rapidly moving from target to target, pulling off flawless headshot after flawless headshot. In Call of Duty’s laudable multiplayer it’s a matter of picking a shot and then running madly after you make your kill, shifting position to avoid killcam retribution.

Even though some games occasionally do make sniping feel like the patient hunt that I understand it to be even games with “sniper” in the title are usually little more than reflex games for shifty loners. But there are a few games that break the mold, games about patience and consideration, and I’d like to honor those games in this segment.

1 – Call of Duty 4 and Call of Duty 6 – Spec Ops

Most games want you to feel invulnerable during single player missions. Call of Duty 4 is especially guilty of this, often lending you hundreds and hundreds of allies during combat, endlessly streaming from some unknown font into battle beside you. But Call of Duty 4 does something bold midway through the game. After the first twist, the necessary death you have to endure, it puts players through their paces in one of the most harrowing missions in video game history: the sniper mission.

For the first time you’re told to hold your fire. For the first time avoiding a kill is the better tactical decision. Running and gunning is not an option. Shots have to be carefully chosen, rules of engagement selected painstakingly. Failure to consider your circumstances thoroughly enough is tantamount to suicide. And even though it all resolves in a fairly traditional gun battle, following a “meh” puzzle sequence that I began the article with, Call of Duty 4 offered up a remarkable sniping experience, one that was every bit as harrowing as you’d expect. Outnumbered, outgunned, you can’t be a font of violence and expect to survive. You have to play it smart. You have to choose your battles if you want to live.

Call of Duty 6’s spec ops had some missions in this vein as well, all the more impressive for the fact that they’re shared experiences. Creeping through snow capped peaks and Chernobyl fields with a friend is so much more fun, and while the levels are challenging they’re more rewarding than the entire meticulously designed single player campaign. Call of Duty 6 deserves a lot of criticism for riding on the coattails of its predecessor, for muddying an excellently balanced multiplayer system with an excess of bells and whistles and completely mistreating their consumer base with absurdly priced expansions that provide, at best, a handful of additional play scenarios that seem to favor only the most rapacious of players.

But the developers, as terrible as many of their choices were, deserve plenty of credit for creating co-op missions that allow players to play through some of the best sniper missions in video game history as part of a tandem pair. Creeping through the woods, carefully picking your shots while whispering harshly to your friend over your microphone, praying you won’t be noticed. Call of Duty 6 delivered handsomely on this front, and has some of the best sniper-specific game design I’ve ever seen.

2 – S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Stalker (spelled without periods from here on) is a mess of a game. It sports a realistic shooting game, frustratingly so. Guns completely lose their accuracy at a certain point, iron sights and scopes failing when you try to engage past your weapon’s effective range. Late in the game players finally acquire some decent sniper rifles and suddenly the game shifts completely. Where once running and gunning from piece of cover and choke point to piece of cover and choke point was the order of the day suddenly carefully selecting the way you want to engage enemies and moving forward based on those choices becomes the best way to play. Once you get your hands on a Dragunov and a handful of bullets the game becomes a calculus of how to engage each group of enemies at range.

The game is already enough about creeping and choosing your battles. But once you get some solid sniper rifles it becomes even more severe in the way it asks player to dictate their pacing. While the play is still far from perfect, with horrible enemy AI, bugs abounding and incredibly punishing late game scenarios that will consistently fuck up and force you to replay hours and hours of game play because of scripting errors, Stalker still sports one of the most interesting and intense open world sniping experiences I’ve seen. The painfully conservative resource management that the game enforces at certain moments, paired with unforgiving enemy AI and constantly shifting deadly terrain forces players to make choices about where and how to fight.

It forces players to think about their relative position to their enemies, their cover and their visibility. It forces players to consider range and accuracy and all the other factors that games normally ignore. It forces players to carefully choose each shot, and there’s no better shorthand for the behavior that Stalker encourages than the word “sniper.” Sure, it’s far from perfect, but its twin requirements of stealth and caution make it one harrowing experience, especially as you wander deeper and deeper into the ruined city.

3 – Far Cry 2

It’s been a while since I’ve praised Far Cry 2, hasn’t it? It’s not that I don’t love Far Cry 2 anymore. Far from it. It’s just that I’ve been distracted. Baby, you gotta know I still love you. Because there’s nothing quite like the feel of scouting an enemy position, watching them cycle in and out of range and carefully choosing the order you’re going to engage targets in. There’s nothing quite like the tension as you manually work your Springfield’s bolt to take down a squad of enemies with five perfectly placed shots. There’s nothing quite so satisfying as the execution of a perfect ambush in the African savannah.

See all the technical issues that Stalker has? Are completely absent from Far Cry 2, which remains, I think, the best open world game ever made (apologies to Brutal Legend, which kind of fails as an open world game in comparison). Far Cry 2’s technology works great, and even when it doesn’t it seems to improve the experience rather than destroying it. The occasional physics glitch, a necessity in a game like Far Cry 2, adds a bit of humor to an otherwise stark and unforgiving world. And that’s the worst I’ve run into in over one hundred hours of play.

Far Cry 2 immerses you in your character’s skin through this masterful weaving of well designed tech, minimalist UI and, at least at harder difficulties, pathetically human frailty. On my current playthrough I’ve been working on beating the game on the hardest difficulty setting, and each time I rush into battle I find myself being gunned down mercilessly. The way I win? By carefully selecting my shots, drawing enemies out and patiently waiting in my vantage point until I’ve got my opponents winnowed down enough for me to finish them off up close.

The conservative ammunition reserves Far Cry 2 forces upon players, along with other relatively strict supply limits on higher difficulties, makes choosing how and when to fight an absolutely critical decision to make. And, all too often, the best way to fight is by choosing a good vantage point and pulling out your high powered rifle.

Sure, the AI isn’t perfect, but the feeling of observing a camp, watching for enemy positions and, occasionally, searching madly for a sniper who may or may not give himself away with each carefully selected shot is still an intense experience, even with the occasionally terrible enemy behavior. And, for my money’s worth, there’s nothing quite like setting up shop on a hill and, one by one, picking off baffled enemies as they run about, horrified at what I have wrought upon them.

Does feeling this way make me a bad person? Probably. But there’s something deeply rewarding and satisfying about playing a game where your stealth and consideration are rewarded and your carelessness is punished severely. These games all champion this form of play, and for that they deserve recognition. So go on, play them again. They’re all old enough to be in the digital bargain bin, and they’ve all held up wonderfully, especially as sniping games.

Congratulations on Your Sweet New Chrysalis!

You’re a larvae of some kind someone saw on the side of the road today and we just wanted to say that your new chrysalis looks amazing. Seriously, we know you put a lot of effort into growing it and we just wanted to let you know that it shows. You look fantastic and Mary was wondering if you wanted to go out tonight or something. Just send us an email with your number and we’ll slide it her way.

Congratulations on Your Sweet New Chrysalis!

Congratulations Fed!

You’re a young up and coming FBI agent with nothing to lose and everything to prove. Ever since your dad was killed by a ghost during your childhood during a home invasion gone wrong you’ve dedicated your career to cleaning up the streets and removing the profound threat that is specters in America.

But the fat cats who run the FBI haven’t been listening. Whenever you tell them about the dangers posed by spooks they just laugh it off and assign you to some low-level investigation of a murder that involved crossing state lines or some securities fraud that cost millions of people their jobs. But you’ve been doing so well lately that today they’re going to let you do your thing. You’re going to get a sassy, attractive female partner and you’re going to set out to the heart of the Chicago Public Library to investigate a series of mysterious events that have been troubling local authorities for months now.

People who read books about Elliot Gould or really any subject other than the White Sox have been getting beaten with bats pretty badly in the basement of the library. And while no one has died or been permanently injured covering up these incidences has become a thorn in the side of the city. So they’ll welcome you and your lady-partner with open arms, describing the kind of bat used in the incidents and the pattern of bruising, which will be consistent across all cases.

You’ll take careful notes the whole while, occasionally looking in a book about Al Capone to confirm your suspicions. Then, after a lengthy period of pen chewing and jotting things in margins you’ll get up from your desk, grab your partner and head to the library with your home-made ghost busting equipment.

It’ll mostly consist of jury rigged lasers powered by car batteries and a reinforced shoe-box covered in crucifixes, but you’re almost positive that, at least against Catholic ghosts, it should do the trick just fine. You’re also almost positive that the power pack for the laser back-pack won’t explode during use. All it did during testing was badly burn anyone who touched the un-insulated parts of it, after all.

When you arrive at the library you’ll wait patiently for the spook to appear, leaving a copy of The Untouchables VHS tape out on a table in the basement and hiding in a corner where you assume the ghost won’t notice you. After hours of patience and ignoring your partner’s sighs and her lamenting sleeping with her last partner you’ll finally be rewarded when an overweight, syphilitic ghost appears clutching a baseball bat. He’ll stare at the video cassette with rage in his eyes, completely oblivious to the tragedy inherent in the tape’s very existence.

Smiling at his foolishness you’ll step from the shadows with your laser back-pack on and point the emitter right at the ghoul.

“Mister Capone?” you’ll say. The ghost will look at you, baffled.

“Huh?” he’ll say.

“You’re under arrest!” you’ll shout, firing off a laser light show worthy of early Pink Floyd. Capone will be dazed by the lights, mostly because you’ll be shining them right in his face, and he’ll be driven back into the carefully placed shoe-box covered in crucifixes. When he touches the boxes he’ll begin to dissolve, releasing an unearthly moan that will chill you to the very bone and make your teeth hurt a little.

But it will only last a few moments. Then Capone’s form will be gone, his moaning face burned into the shoe box. Your partner will stand up, amazed at what she has witnessed, and when the two of you report back to FBI head-quarters her testimony will insure that you finally get the funding and recognition you deserve.

Things will be looking up for you, as long as you avoid sleeping with your new partner, which is probably going to be surprisingly hard.

Congratulations Fed!

Congratulations Failing Containment Unit!

Today you’re the containment unit on a spaceship’s reactor. You’re going to fail, bathing the crew in horrible radiation and forcing them to overcome personal and professional adversity in order to survive. Or try, at least. You’ll kill all of them except for the brilliant, overlooked, hot, Mexican female engineer, the black guy who is blind but concealed his blindness from recruiters so he could join the space-navy and this well rounded white slacker dude who doesn’t really have a personality. Even though white guy and Mexican-lady were going after the same promotion they’ll put their rivalry aside to fix the horrible mistake you’re going to make. And the painstakingly de-sexualized black dude? He’ll teach us a lesson about how people with darker skin tones and blind people can totally accomplish all the same shit that white middle class people with no real problems can, sometimes more.

You’ll teach us so much through your failure that it’ll be hard to get angry at you directly for killing eighty three people.

Congratulations Failing Containment Unit!

Congratulations on Molesting That Corpse!

Fame is a worthy goal. At least, in the minds of the disaffected loners who work in this office it’s a worthy goal. More functional men and women might consider the pursuit of fame above all else as a “petty” or “silly goal that will only lead to heartbreak. But you know what? Those people are chumps.

Those people don’t have what it takes to go into a graveyard late at night and dig up a corpse. They don’t have what it takes to rent a video camera and get their friend to film them while they do it. They definitely don’t have what it takes to edit and master that video and do a super classy voice over narration during the whole thing. And you can bet your ass and theirs that they don’t have the balls to put a corpse’s dick in their mouth.

But you do. And after you send that tape in to The Network tomorrow you’re going to explode like a bottle of acid on some crazy bitch’s face. They’ll receive it today and all the executives will watch it together in a conference room, which is normal and par for the course for Network executives.

“This man belong in prison,” one of the Network executives will say.

“I love it!” another Network executive will say, completely misunderstanding the previous Network executive. “Maybe we could get some other necrophiliacs in with him and make it a new reality show?”

“I think that could play pretty well,” a third Network executive will chime in.

A fourth Network executive will vomit into a trash-can, disgusted at the people around her.

“I’ll see about freeing up some funding and talking to some officials in various states,” a fifth Network executive will announce.

“Are you okay?” a sixth Network executive will ask the fourth Network executive.

And just like that you’ll be pulled out of your prison cell and dropped on to the TV, where you’ll place eighth in rankings and last a season and a half, enduring the horror that is cancellation just before you thought you were going to get a pardon for being such an awesome dude. C’est la vie.

Congratulations on Molesting That Corpse!

Congratulations Bizarro Superman!

Life isn’t so bad for you, really. You’re a little bit of an ugly mug, but you’re hung like a horse and you have no qualms about using your incredible powers for evil instead of holding them back constantly to do some weird, abstracted version of good. You live fat off your super villain status, robbing banks and taking people hostage for incredibly large ransoms which you then invest in shorting sub-prime mortgages.

Briefly put, evil is a very profitable business for you and you engage it expertly, if a bit bluntly. But you’re always compared to your “successful” good half. You’d try killing him, but that never works out. And you’d try outdoing him with charitable donations, but for some reason people are a lot more excited about saving jet airliners than they are about Pakistanis left without food and shelter receiving aid because of your generosity.

As a result you spend most of your days miserable, staring out across your jungle paradise wishing just once something would go your way. Well today is your lucky day.

Today an incredibly violent Amazon princess from beyond the stars is going to crash-land in your jungle (this shit happens in the world you live in constantly, so that isn’t the exceptional part). This Amazon princess is going to carve a swath of destruction through the piece of land you call home. Since you like your home this isn’t going to sit well with you, and you’re going to flip shit and fight her.

But she’ll be hot. Like, really really hot. Jordana Brewster at the start of her career hot. And while you grapple you’ll develop an incredibly huge erection. The Amazon princess from beyond the stars will see how big your junk is and her interest will be piqued. She knew she was in for some surprises on this planet, but she’d never expect to find something as weird and exotic as your dick (It’s kinda bent. You are Bizarro after all).

She’ll look in your eyes and see that burning itch to hate fuck the living shit out of her and she’ll plant a nice big kiss right on your deformed face.

What follows will be the best relationship either of you have ever had. And while we can’t see past this day and, ergo, can’t see just what will come for the two of you in the future, it’s fair to say that whatever it is will be pretty...bizzaro!

Also, it’ll involve some pretty incredible sex which will be more than a little weird to watch.

Congratulations Bizarro Superman!

Congratulations Swarm of Bats!

Today you’re the incorporeal intelligence governing a swarm of ravenous bats. Some would say that you’re some kind of sonar bullshit or something, but we all know the truth. Bats have a hive mind, and today you’re it.

You’re going to be super into it, too. First you’ll wake up and make the bats huddle together for warmth and poop upside down. It’s going to be fantastic and for the first time your life you’re going to be happy with the morning routine you’ve stumbled upon. You’ll even get a few of the bats to have upside down sex, which a fantasy you’ve always had. Living vicariously through them will be kind of bittersweet, but more than that it’ll be edifying. You’ll look at them and see ways you could potential make upside-down cave sex work.

Then you’ll get the bats to fly around the cave a little and catch bugs. You’ll also get a few of the bats to think about fruit idly for a while before deciding that it’s too bright outside and that they’d rather not go there at present.

Then the bats will settle in for nap-time, again at your discretion.

After naptime you’ll direct the bats in their nightly terrorizing of cavers. You’ll make them swarm around the cavers’ heads and dive at them and bite at them and generally make the cavers’ day unpleasant. You’ll even kill a few of them, which will make the bats really happy because bats are kind of dicks.

All in all it’ll be the most active day you’ve had since you entered this coma, and it’ll change your whole outlook on the situation you’re in which is medically considered life.

Congratulations Swarm of Bats!