Thoughts on Bulletstorm - Bulletstorm, the Shooter Form, and Wuxia Cinema: An Analysis

• Developer: People Can Fly, Epic Games
• Director: Adrian Chmielarz
• First Person Shooter
• Release: 2011-02-22 (US)
• Platforms: PC (version played), Xbox 360, PS3

Wuxia cinema is a genre of film that is a variant of the martial arts film. It typically focuses on a martial arts hero's adventure, usually in a melodramatic historical setting and often motivated by an honor code of some sort. In some ways, the genre's characters are analogous to gunslingers in the American Western genre. Stylistically, however, wuxia films of the last few decades have diverged from related genres in their elaborate and extremely extensive use of highly choreographed fight sequences, which often use some combination of complicated wire-assisted choreography, CGI effects, or slow-motion camera work. Its earliest examples date to the 1920s in China (e.g., The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple, dir. Zhang Shichuan,1928), and its fighting choreography style developed into its modern form in the 1960s (e.g., Dragon Gate Inn, dir. King Hu, 1967). Today, the genre is internationally popular with examples from Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000) and Zhang Yimou (Hero, 2002; House of Flying Daggers, 2004) becoming influential worldwide blockbusters.

The integration of lengthy combat sequences with a feature-length narrative is a problem that both wuxia cinema and certain video game genres, such as shooters, must tackle. Historically, the dissonance between narrative and combat in games has been troublesome, with jovial characters like Nathan Drake of Uncharted (dev. Naughty Dog, dir. Amy Hennig, 2007) discussing moral qualms and cracking light-hearted jokes before massacring hundreds of men. Ken Levine, director of Bioshock Infinite (dev. Irrational Games, 2013), brushed this issue aside by comparing it to the musical genre from film and stage:

The shooter part is [...] tricky because like you say it is kind of an odd thing, where all of a sudden all this combat's going on. I think of it sort of like musicals, you know - like you have this story and then all of a sudden everyone bursts out into song.

But this comparison neglects the non-literal function of the musicals' songs to express character development and motivation by controlling the audience's emotional reaction to the score. The music serves thematic, narratological purpose in a metaphorical, non-literal way and is thus necessary to understanding the text. In most shooters, no such essential meaning is created by each violent action required of the player. While the action sequences may convey a vague sense of tension or achievement in the player that is analogous to that felt by the avatar character, they rarely move beyond such simplistic identification.

Though the use of violence in a variety of films, such as the work of Quentin Tarantino, is instructive when considering its implementation in games, here we will focus on the wuxia example. A number of wuxia films have elegantly used combat as a non-literal, expressive tool that is essential to the films' thematic meaning. Take, for example, Zhang Yimou's Hero. The film recounts a variety of past occurrences from several subjective points of view. The elaborate, unrealistic fight choreography teaches the viewer of the unreliability of the narrative, while highlighting that the essential aspects of these memories may not be the historical veracity. Instead, emphasis is placed on the motivations for the fights, with the beauty serving as a stand-in for their nobility of cause. The fights inspire a sense of wonder and inevitability in the viewers, while also contrasting how such honorable actions have inherently contradictory aspects of beauty and horror. The viewers come to understand that these subjective tensions are the true story of a people's history. This construction of thematic meaning is similar to how music functions in the musicals of Levine's analogy, but it is a good deal more sophisticated than a typical first- or third-person shooter.

It is here that we come to Bulletstorm (dev. People Can Fly & Epic Games, dir. Adrian Chmielarz, 2011), which seemingly has tried to implement the lesson that wuxia teaches about meaningful, non-literal combat. Much as in a film like Hero, Bulletstorm's frequent combat sequences are outlandishly unrealistic and, in a sense, choreographed. While most shooters ask the player use the avatar to kill other characters, they typically do so in such a way that encourages optimization of killing efficiency. The best weapons available should be coupled with the safest tactics to ensure progression through the game via the quick elimination of enemies. Bulletstorm still asks for optimization of a sort, but it asks for the maximization of an arcade-game-like score. The score is increased by finding interesting ways to kill the enemies, such as through particularly gruesome wounds or combinations of various tools, such as environmental hazards and a lasso-like leash that the player controls. On the surface, this stylistic play initially seems more closely related to games like the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series (various devs. & dirs., 1999-2014) than to the most popular forms of shooters, such as the Call of Duty series (various devs. & dirs., 2003-2013), that Bulletstorm nominally calls its kin.

Bulletstorm is not the first shooter to center its premise on score maximization through killing technique, but it does notably diverge from past attempts. The Club (dev. Bizarre Creations, dir. Martyn R. Chudley, 2008), for example, attempted something similar, in which a score was maximized by maintaining a combo meter that only stayed active if a consistently quick pace of killings was maintained. This sort of score-earning structure, however, largely results in the same sort of optimization motivation that a standard, narrative shooter encourages. The player both scores well and progresses through the levels by quickly and safely eliminating all enemies. The aesthetic effect is the same old vague sense of tension and achievement. Bulletstorm achieves something different from previous score based shooters by asking the player to improve killing style rather than killing results. In this way, the combat becomes choreographed, with the player acting as a choreographer with the assistance of the the game's list of possible combos.

This style-optimization goal is further removed from result-optimization through several related design choices. The points scored by the player serve a secondary purpose of being a currency that can be used to purchase new abilities for the various weapons. Most of these weapons and abilities, however, are side-grades rather than upgrades, and points are accumulated quickly enough that all options can be easily afforded in a short amount of time. The abilities therefore serve primarily to increase the player's repertoire of moves available during fight "choreography" rather than to strengthen the player such that progress can be made.

The function of the leash is the second major design choice that encourages thought about the aesthetics of the kill. Notably, it is the one "weapon" that is incapable of directly damaging an enemy. Instead, the leash provides the opportunity to manipulate the positions of enemies such that environmental hazards, melee attacks, or weapon fire can be more elegantly combined in the enemies' destruction, especially when the melee kick attack is combined with the leash for more precise enemy positioning. Further, time slows for all game elements except the player avatar when the leash is in use, allowing complicated combinations of attacks to be executed while the leash and kick rearrange the enemies. The types of kills that these mechanics encourage are not the optimal kills from a purely narrative or game progression stand point; they are typically more complicated, riskier, and slower than a more standard direct confrontation of weapon fire would be. Our choreography of the combat therefore shifts our interpretation of the game and introduces new ways of relating to the game's characters.

The characters and narrative interact with these mechanics in a number of interesting ways. On the surface, the plot of Bulletstorm is fairly typical of other shooters in that an action hero player-avatar, Grayson Hunt, must defeat the bad-guy, General Sarrano, before escaping the war zone. Hunt, in command of a small squad of soldiers on board a small spaceship, initiates the plot by drunkenly attacking the spaceship commanded by Sarrano, Hunt's former commander, to attempt revenge for Sarrano's past actions. This attack results in both ships crashing to the planet below, killing most of Hunt's crew, except for his friend Ishi, who is maimed and converted to an unfeeling cyborg during an interrupted surgical procedure. The two soldiers, along with a woman named Trishka that they meet along the way, hunt down Sarrano hoping to defeat him and to use him to get back off the planet. The planet itself is an apocalyptic, abandoned amusement-park city, with several aggressive and monstrously deformed species of inhabitants that make up the bulk of the combat enemies throughout the game.

As we saw in Hero and other wuxia films, consideration of choreographed combat in a subjective, non-literal sense can reveal aspects of character perspective and motivation that may not be immediately apparent from a surface level interpretation of this rather standard plot. Indeed, Hunt's character development is fairly nuanced. Prior to his falling out with Sarrano, Hunt held a highly skilled, difficult, and important position as the leader of his squad. His self-worth was reaffirmed by society and peers through his work performance. But upon defecting from his position under Sarrano's command, he was made aimless, grasping at meaning through an ill-conceived quest for revenge. By resorting to alcohol, he creates a surrogate for his lost mechanisms for creating self-worth. He drinks because his skills as a soldier are of no further value in his everyday life. Increasingly, he his seen as incompetent by squadmates, which Ishi continually reiterates once they are on the planet. The artistic killing, then, acts as an escape and restatement of self-worth for Hunt. It now functions for Hunt much like the alcohol does; it is an ecstatic release that brings past achievements back to the present, affirming Hunt's value to himself. Hunt seems to recognize this aspect of his skills. In Act 4, Chapter 3, he gleefully shouts, "Badoom! Killing as an art form!" Ishi notably is unable to recognize the aesthetic achievements of Hunt's kills, perhaps partially because of Ishi's new cyborg form, but, luckily for Hunt, time slows during these kills, providing a respite from Ishi's criticism. (We might also read this divide between Ishi's and Hunt's perspective as a small statement on the valuation of non-technical skill in society. Ishi fails to see value in the beauty that Hunt can create with his combat skills.) By positioning the player as choreographer of Hunt's maneuvers, Bulletstorm is able to leverage the escapist nature of many video games as a way to induce empathy with Hunt's need for a way of dealing with his changing position in society.

It is hard not to also read Bulletstorm as a statement about how its genre can function as art (recall Hunt's exclamation: "Killing as an art form!"). It seems to want its audience to consider whether games can achieve the same level of meaning through combat that wuxia cinema has, or whether we must resign ourselves to brushing it aside as Ken Levine's statements seem to suggest. From the outset, Bulletstorm calls explicit attention to the common trappings of its genre and its own position as part of that lineage. In the midst of the earliest tutorial segments which introduce the standard controls of all modern FPSs, the dialogue ramps up to a hyper-masculine, crude, violent, and ridiculous register - an obvious pastiche of the similar language presented with deadpan sincerity in series such as Call of Duty. The game even threatens to continue in that direction, soon dropping the player into a flashback in a far more conventional FPS setting, complete with military-esque dialogue and a colorless office building setting, before it aborts that thread and brings us back to the bizarre planet on which Hunt is stranded.

That planet is a giant caricature of popular shooters. Within the narrative, it was once a resort planet, practically one giant amusement park. We see the abandoned rides, entertainment devices, and concession stands everywhere. All are either non-functioning or functioning in a pointless way, like the newsbots who spew news to no one. It is a visual metaphor, suggesting the state of this genre - a defunct amusement that longer functions in a useful way. (Yet this planet is also full of gorgeous set pieces, perhaps suggestion its aesthetic potential.) The savage enemies that Hunt and Ishi encounter are mutated humans that once lived on or visited the planet, and now fall into three distinct factions. These factions seem to be playing out their own shooter-game amongst themselves, as they can frequently be seen to be fighting amongst themselves. Their fighting is chaotic, inelegant, and perhaps without any purpose, in stark contrast to Hunt's ability to move among them through the use of highly choreographed fighting.

Other shooters, such as Spec Ops: The Line (dev. Yager Development, dir. Cory Davis & Francois Coulon, 2012), have questioned how a shooter can function thematically as art. But while Spec Ops merely points a finger at the questionable aspects and potential failures of the form, Bulletstorm suggests a way forward. By suggesting the use of stylized combat to functionally create meaning, much like the way that combat functions in wuxia cinema or song functions in musicals, Bulletstorm creates a cohesive thematic depth that exceeds that of most of its peers. Perhaps it doesn't go far enough, however. In the late levels of the game, Bulletstorm seems desperate to increase its difficulty in line with the typical difficulty curves of other shooters. It does so by throwing large number of enemies at the player, requiring more optimally and quickly executed kills and thereby removing much of the aesthetic freedom that it built up so carefully throughout the game. Perhaps if the Bulletstorm had committed just a bit more fully to its central conceit, eschewing any attempt at a typical difficulty curve or a sequel-bait ending, it might have drawn a bit more critical attention and had a bigger impact on the state of the genre. Nonetheless, it remains one of the most important formal experiments in the shooter genre to date.

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For reference, a (probably incomplete) critical bibliography of the Bulletstorm discourse follows. If you can point me to other discussions, I would love to include them.

• Richard Clark used Bulletstorm as an example of an indefensible depiction of violence. As one can probably guess from my discussion above, I strongly disagree with this interpretation.
• The same author took a similar view in an opinion piece at Gamasutra.
• Craig Wilson notes the relationship (archived version) between Duke Nukem Forever's (dev. 3D Realms, Triptych Games, Gearbox Software, & Piranha Games; dir. George Broussard, 2011) ostensible style and the mechanics of Bulletstorm.
• G. Christopher Williams discusses whether Bulletstorm sufficiently telegraphs its irony and camp elements to warrant a serious interpretation that relies upon them.
• In comments made prior to the release of Bulletstorm, Gus Mastrapa observes that it could potentially function in a way akin to film's Starship Troopers (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1997). 
•  Over at The Mediocrity Codex, a piece discusses Bulletstorm's emphasis on score. I don't think this reading goes far enough. It identifies how Bulletstorm kinda pulls the rug out from under the concept of score, and in doing so reveals how standard FPSs work, but the author never notices that in doing so the aesthetic potential of the game is liberated.
• Most mainstream video game review websites wrote about the game, and the ensemble took a generally positive stance toward the game. Though their commentary is typically fairly shallow, they represent an important record of social opinion toward the text.

Thoughts on Depth Hunter - A world devoid of meaning

• Biart
• Simulator, First Person Shooter
• Release: Jan 18, 2012 (US)
• Platforms: PC

Some projects feel as if they were created without purpose or direction. They stumble along with no idea how to achieve their goals, because their goals never really existed in the first place. To my great disappointment, Depth Hunter is one such title. As a diving game (or is it a shooting game?), it had a unique niche of the gaming world to explore; it sadly left it empty.

Depth Hunter touts itself as a "Spearfishing Simulator." This is sort-of true; you always have a spear gun with which you can shoot fish underwater, which you then attempt to haul in by managing the tension on the line. This is trivially easy if the fish is within about 8 meters and impossibly difficult outside of that. The problem is that there is no real reason to kill these fish. The game has a campaign mode of sorts, in which you are placed in the water and given tasks to complete. These tasks come one after another without context; you will be told to kill two fish of a certain species and then you will be told to kill as many fish as you can with a certain time frame. Sometimes, the tasks aren't fishing related at all. The player might have to find certain "treasure" objects on the sea floor or photograph a certain number of moray eels. The photography tasks are particularly bizarre; the player must find a correct angle that changes an on-screen number to 100% before the screen capture will count. All of these tasks take place over two of the game's three locales.

In short, the campaign lacks direction, which makes it astoundingly uninteresting and painfully boring. It injects arbitrary tasks into the player's exploration of the game world, seemingly because it is undecided as to whether it wants to be a linear, goal-oriented game or an open-ended, environmental-exploration driven game. It therefore does neither well, despite having ample opportunity to do something unique with either. By injecting a goal-oriented game mode, it suggests a narrative and character for the player. Indeed, the players boat sits on the surface of every level. I was profoundly disappointed that I could not get out of the water and into the boat. Aside from the potential as a fast-travel mechanism or a place to change your loadout like you would expect for a simulator, it would have allowed the game to create a real character motivation. The game could have, for example, given the player a back-story to motivate the tasks; that narrative could have uniquely explored any number of subjects, such as the economies of traditional fishing cultures, the impact of tourism, or even just a competitive sport-related theme. But the game does nothing, and the tasks appear pointlessly.

One might note, however, that a narrative is not essential to a game. In a game-world, the environment itself might construct meaning and engagement. And it very well could have here. A fully realized ocean environment could provide more than enough content. It could act in an educational fashion, for example, elucidating the mysteries of reef environments or the perils that they currently face. Alternately, the game-world could simply create wonder in its audience with a truly beautiful, detailed, interactive world. Before beginning my playthrough, I hopefully recalled the under-appreciated Mini Ninjas (dev. IO Interactive, dirs. Jeremy Petreman & Henrik Hansen, 2009), a narrative action-adventure game that sometimes slows to encourage calm wonder at the beautiful, stylized environment as the player-character floats slowly on rivers while fishing. Such moments are not attempted by Depth Hunter.

Depth Hunter is too poorly realized to pull off any of these things. The few types of fish in the world have even fewer behaviors. Big creatures (manta rays, sharks, moray eels) don't react at all; they swim in a fixed pattern or sit stationary. Small fish either swim back and forth or swim away if approached too close. It's good that they swim away if you get close, because the models and textures aren't particularly detailed or convincing. They are far better than the repetitive, plastic-looking ground textures, though, which are decorated by the same piece of coral thousands of times. The whole art design is just far too simplistic for the environment it tries to capture, so none of it works. Perhaps if it had attempted a more stylized design, such low detail could have worked, but the game attempts a veneer of realism that clashes with what it actually achieves. Couple that with the total lack of interactivity, and there is simply no content in the environment to drive the game.

Ultimately, I suspect that Depth Hunter was conceived as a something like a tech demo for its game engine, and that no one really thought about how the game should function. Its disparate elements (spearfishing, photography, explorable underwater worlds) never cohere, and none is done well enough to be anything of note on its own. I applaud Biart for taking an uncommon premise to production, but that is about the only praise I have to offer. I wish a game would really run with the underwater exploration conceit; sadly, Depth Hunter does nothing but botch it.




Technical note: I hate having to discuss mundane software issues, but it's worth noting that Depth Hunter validates your serial number on every start up. About a quarter of the time, however, it seems to fail, at least on my machine. I'm not sure if this is some sort of broken, local check or if it is trying to connect to the developer for validation, but it is annoying nonetheless. Restarting the game usually corrects the problem, at least until the next time it goes awry.

Thoughts on Auralux - Minimalist Real-Time Strategy and the Importance of Opponents

• E. McNeill
• Real time strategy
• Release: Unknown, out now.
• Platforms: PC (version reviewed), Android

Auralux is a study of sorts. It is an experiment, like Eufloria before it, in the most basic mechanics that define a real-time strategy game; it attempts to boil the genre down and show us how it works. There are no tech trees here, and there is certainly no grand historical context for a setting. There are no control groups, and you will not need to memorize scores of hotkeys. Auralux simplifies in the extreme: one unit, one command, plain primary colors against black.

The one unit at your command is a simple dot, and the one command they accept is a move command with the cursor. These are produced at capturable, sun-like spheres (your production "buildings") laid out in geometric patterns to comprise a game map. Red, green, and the player's own blue each begin with one sphere on every map. When a dot encounters a dot of another color, they annihilate each other, and if many are tasked on an enemy or untaken sphere, they enter it to capture it. With more spheres, more dots are produced. Capturing all of the spheres on map means victory, and there are 24 maps of varying sizes and difficulties waiting to challenge the player. The complications are few and far between: Sometimes spheres can be upgraded to produce more dots, and the player has the option of playing in a high-speed mode. There also seems to be a population cap on the larger maps; I found this slightly disappointing because it is an extraneous rule in a highly simplified system. It is likely a necessary feature, though, to ensure smooth functioning on a variety of systems.

It's easy to see how this setup relates to more standard RTSs. Micromanagement has been (mostly) eliminated, so all decisions are of the strategic, macromanagement variety. At any given moment, you have only the decision of where to commit your units. They can stay to defend or move to attack an enemy, or they can be invested in an unoccupied or upgradable sphere. The former actions comprise the combat aspect of RTSs, the latter is a simplified economy. The game becomes interesting because this reductive version of the RTS formula still leads to familiar, if smaller, versions of common RTS tactics, strategies, and battles. It calls attention to the types of balance that make such games successful, and it allows us to see how they function in great detail. For example, difficulty in Auralux is controlled largely by the starting positions of the three colors. In developing a successful tactic for a given map, the player must develop a way to balance the organization of the map before the other colors gain too strong a foothold. It quickly teaches the player the different ways that positioning can affect game balance.

As much as this minimalist approach amplifies the strengths and subtleties of RTS games, it also, perhaps to Auralux's detriment, highlights weaknesses. People have always railed against strategy game AIs, and nowhere is AI weakness more apparent than here. In a way, perhaps by accident, this is an interesting commentary on the weakness of RTS games compared to other genres. Unfortunately, however, Auralux fails to adequately explore the impacts of AI opponents because it has only one type, and that type is not sophisticated enough. An AI that fails to implement or defend against flanking moves is hardly an AI worth discussing; an attack away from the front lines always catches the AI off-guard here. This severely undermines the emergent complexity of the game, and reduces the game's power to illuminate strategic mechanics. It means that difficulty and complexity of planning are functions only of uneven starting positions and army sizes - important aspects, but rather uninteresting. I would have loved to see some way of tweaking the AIs or even the ability to pit different AIs against each other.

Auralux has another major omission with regards to opponents. The game is single-player only, despite the importance of multiplayer to games of this ilk. I'm sure this was a practical decision, arising out of the constraints of making a low-budget, one-developer game, but it nonetheless remains a glaring omission. Without it, the game is small, short, and limited in its ability to explore the genre. We can only wonder about the possibilities it could have offered.

In a way, Auralux thus becomes a puzzle game. With such constancy in the opponents and their flaws, the player must sleuth out the correct set of moves that the AI can't deal with without destroying each other. Perhaps any sufficiently simplified game system becomes something that we would identify with a puzzle game.

So where does this all leave us with Auralux? There is no doubt that it is a polished game with a very interesting take on familiar mechanics. And I'd be remiss if I failed to mention it's lovely sound design, with spheres pulsing with the music as a battle creates a randomized melody, all emphasizing the rhythm of the gameplay. As a whole, Auralux is enough of an exploration of the genre to leave me interested in further experimentation, but the game's inability to delve deeper because of its lone, primitive AI and lack of multiplayer means that it is inherently flawed. In a game that searches for how complex strategy emerges from simple gameplay rules, an inability to provide an opponent with which to create that complexity is an unforgivable limitation, even given the game's considerable strengths.

Update: See the comments section of this post for a response from the developer of Auralux.

Thoughts on The Great Gatsby for NES - Packaging as Art and the Expextations of Gaming

  

• Charlie Hoey, Pete Smith, Dylan Valentine, Michael DiMotta
• Platformer
• Release: 2011
• Platforms: PC, Mac

Sometimes, it's difficult to know where the packaging ends and the art begins. Are the original frames of paintings intrinsic to their presentation, or are they merely containers? Are the liner notes part of the music? Is the packaging part of the game? The Great Gatsby for NES demands that we answer these questions if we are to discover its worth. 

In 2011, the game's website popped up and went viral on the internet. The main page on the website contains a flash applet. After apparently loading an "NES ROM," a simple, 8-bit-style platformer with the title "The Great Gatsby" appears. The packaging (i.e., the website) adds more details, though: it provides elaborate "scans" of the "original" NES manual and packaging. A photo of an NES cartridge also appears, and the website states that it is a prototype game found at a garage sale. Of course, all of this is a fiction; the game is an original creation written in Flash (and even open-sourced).

Evidently waiters walk on the windows at Gatsby's house?

The game itself is simple. It is a pixel-perfect representation of mediocre, early platformers. We have a setting and list of characters derived from the namesake novel, but none of the plot or development. Our protagonist, Nick Carraway, throws his hat at flappers and drunks while bounding from platform to platform with the precision of the best platformers of the 8-bit era. The setting of the novel is captured perfectly, with a moody-blue color palette and a gorgeous, melancholy score. But the game as a whole lacks motivation or purpose, as Eric Lockaby noted. Indeed, one of the first characters that we encounter in the game is Owl Eyes, who, as in the book, marvels that Gatsby's books are real. They are not empty of their pages or content, as we might expect from the superficial nature of his parties and home. This, perhaps, is the key to understanding the game.

The game and its website, it seems, are expressing that empty feeling that occurs between expectation and delivery. Everyone that played games during the 8- and 16-bit eras knew it. The packaging for expensive games showed gorgeous, exciting illustrations while promising complex game mechanics driven by narrative purpose. Gaming had such potential! More often than not, however, the games were primitive and purposeless. The games were a novel and fun use of technology, sure, but ultimately most were empty of procedural purpose that could give them meaning and deliver on our expectations. Here, the player is asked to recall those feelings by viewing the artificial packaging materials and playing the game that does not live up to them. The use of The Great Gatsby to recreate this feeling is a brilliant choice. The novel itself deals, among other things, with how society's perceptions and superficialities shape our lives. It uses memorable symbols that are often simple objects (e.g., possibly empty books, a billboard ad) intrinsically devoid of meaning but that are imbued with purpose by the characters and the narrative. How appropriate, then, that this game about missed expectations is full of these symbols but never uses them with purpose.

Such an evocation of the disappointment with gaming in a particular era immediately suggests comparison to modern gaming. The game may be asking us to remember that recognition of untapped potential and wonder if we still experience it today. Could we adapt a classic novel today, and have the gameplay give it purpose? Has (or will) gaming had (or have) its The Great Gatsby or Citizen Kane? In an era where game advertising budgets number in the millions of dollars, we must wonder if the pre-rendered trailers we see on TV are the modern equivalent of those exciting pictures on the covers of NES boxes. In The Great Gatsby for NES, we don't really know Nick Carraway's ultimate goal, and we don't seem to know our goals with interactive media, either. The fact that a simple platformer and its website can evoke these feelings and questions make it a quite interesting work of interactive media, and a game well worth playing.

Thoughts on DLC Quest

• Going Loud Studios
• Action, platformer
• Release: Nov 2, 2011 (US)
• Platforms: Xbox 360 (XBLA), PC (version reviewed), Mac

In cinema, short films are a remarkable variation on the medium that allow for themes to be explored concisely and in isolation. The same is true for short stories in literature. In games, however, players far too often criticize titles that fail to consume many hours of the gamers' time. DLC Quest, however, stands an excellent example of a "short game," showing the error in judging games based on play time. It artfully exploits its medium for satire, and it uses every moment that it spends with you to its very fullest.

There is no shortage of motivation in this narrative.

DLC Quest takes the hyper-commercialization of the video game industry as its theme. As a satire on gaming itself, it is fitting that the game takes the form of 2D side-scrolling platformer, perhaps the most prototypical of video game types. The player takes control of a pixelated main character, and motivation for the game is provided, quite literally, by a princess kidnapped by a bad guy. The format immediately evokes comparison to games like the Mario series and the differences in their business models. The game's humor and gameplay really comes to the forefront when the player first tries to move, only to realize that there are no features to this game other than moving to the right. Soon, we stumble upon a shopkeeper who reveals the game's conceit; we must collect coins to buy fictional DLC.

There is no need to discuss the individual DLC. Each is itself a humorous take on real DLC packages that are sold all of the time, and many highlight the importance of aspects of video game design often taken for granted (such as sound design). They are slowly revealed as the player explores the colorful, expansive level. There is no real difficulty here. Rather that creating the frustrated tension that arises from danger and difficulty in other games, DLC Quest creates tension through mild frustration at missing features. The catharsis, of course, is the humorous reveal of the DLC you eventually earn. These events are punctuated by "awardments," little acheivements (like Steam acheivements or PSN trophies) that seem entirely arbitrary. The game pulls no punches in poking fun at the Pavlovian motivation that drive so many games - there is no shortage of coins to collect and awardments to unlock in this world. Ironically, some of these, like the coins, manage to poke fun at meaningless collectibles on another level by actually being essential to the gameplay of this title. It is a clever device indeed.

DLC Quest never overstays its welcome. In less than an hour, the game has been exhausted. But that is when the game reveals its greatest irony of all: the game was great fun despite the paucity of DLC and features. Many recent high-profile indie titles have been held of as examples of art in gaming, but perhaps we should also be looking at DLC Quest when considering such topics. Like the greatest short films, it is perfectly edited to use its entire running time in the service of its themes. Its gameplay and the charming humor of the simple narrative work together seamlessly to fully exploit the gaming medium so as to create the satire. The game is both enjoyable and insightful. In short, DLC Quest works wonderfully.

UPDATE (2013-04-17): DLC Quest now features an additional story campaign. This update is not part of what is discussed above, and, indeed, I feel that the padded length actually reduces the effectiveness of the conceit.

Thoughts on Homefront

• THQ, Digital Extremes
• Action, FPS
• Release: Mar 15, 2011 (US)
• Platforms: PC (version reviewed), Xbox 360, PS3

Homefront is an encapsulation of the problems that plague many video games. While it has the polish and technical prowess of a top of the line, AAA gaming experience, it falls totally flat due to its inept conception.

The single player campaign finds the player's character, an American pilot, captive to the Koreans, who have invaded and conquered much of the United States in Homefront's near-future setting. Soon, however, he teams up with a resistance group, with whom the player endeavors to throw a wrench into the Koreans' plans by unleashing a whole lot of violence. As implausible as the premise sounds, that is not the game's problem.

Nor are the graphics. The game is powered by the Unreal Engine 3, and the developers have managed to adapt it to beautifully render some lovely, open, outdoor landscapes. Because the game centers around a American resistance movement, the setting is is a battered version of suburbia. The battlegrounds are neighborhood streets, the aisles of large abandoned stores, and the open spaces of parking lots and sports fields. It is a competent representation of the premise the story puts forward.

The control and mechanics work adequately as well. The gunplay holds it own with titles like Call of Duty, and there is no shortage of weapons with which to experiment.

So why does the single player campaign fail so totally? The answer lies in the story and how the gameplay was used to convey that narrative. These choices are at odds with the game's strengths. The appeal of the implausible premise and setting is the novelty of fighting for a world that attempts to be the some one that the player lives in. One gets to see the destroyed suburbia, and those fighting alongside you are normal, scared people like yourself. A game that makes the most of these strengths would allow the player opportunities for exploration of the environment, perhaps by providing multiple possible routes to achieve objectives. Such a game would develop the characters; their back stories would provide motive for the fighting while exploring how terrible situations change people. The prejudicial tension between Americans of Western European descent compared to those of East Asian descent given the invasion of Koreans could provide fascinating plot points to be explored.

Homefront, however, does none of these things. The gameplay is linear to a fault. There is frequently one path forward, and that path is always highly scripted in both time and space. You cannot climb a ladder or crawl through a hole until the characters with you go first, and, even then, you will simply press a key that tells the game to do the crawling or climbing for you. You cannot explore the neighborhoods that you must fight through. Only one path forward will be allowed, so there will be no opportunity to look in abandoned houses, stores, or other scenery. It is all merely a backdrop. The other characters, too, are merely a backdrop; though they fight alongside you, they are shallow, undeveloped shells of characters. The main group consists of a tough black guy, a scared woman, and a featureless, techy Asian. Each is an empty stereotype that is present only as a nod to diversity, and none contributes to the story. With no characters to care about, a world that feels tiny despite its large size, and no freedom to accomplish anything, it is very hard to care much about the game as a whole. As a result, there's not too much fun to be had, and there's nothing interesting to think about, either.

How about the multiplayer? It is highly derivative of the Battlefield series. The maps are pretty decent, and the different game types are standard of the genre. Homefront mixes things up a bit with the introduction of "Battle Points." These points are earned by doing things like killing enemies or achieving objectives. Then they can be spent on vehicles (tanks, trucks, etc), accessories (flak jacket, RPG, etc), or special abilities (like deploying a drone). This adds a touch of new strategy, but in practice it doesn't work too differently from just spawning the items at intervals. The vehicles seem underpowered in this game, and I think much of that issue arises from the non-destructible environment. In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, for example, a tank can force it's way through a flimsy wall or fence; in Homefront, on the other hand, the tank can do nothing to a flimsy fence and is thus easily trapped. This renders the use of vehicles fairly uninteresting. As a whole, the multiplayer can be enjoyable, but it is clearly inferior to several other games.

As a whole, there is much to learn from Homefront. Despite its high production values, it makes numerous mistakes in its construction of gameplay mechanics and its botched attempt to create an interesting narrative. Further, it has no idea how to combine that narrative with those mechanics, so each fails completely and separately. One can have some fun with Homefront, so perhaps players that simply want a different FPS to play will find enjoyment. But, ultimately, it's a shallow and unfullfilling experience.