Here there be dragonflies

Because we constantly interact with each other, we often forget that human beings are absurd, freakishly huge creatures. Of course you and I and any four-year-old can reel off the names of a dozen or so animals that are even larger, but that's misleading. The earth is inhabited by trillions upon trillions of animals, and almost none of them grow larger than our own hands. These creatures inhabit a world we can barely recognize, the objects we find familiar made exotic by the transition of scale, and yet their lives have drama and tension more than equal to our own. Deadly Creatures successfully sets up this atypical viewpoint, but falters because its narrative and gameplay adhere strictly to a human perspective.

You might expect a game about a tarantula and a scorpion to look like a National Geographic special, but Deadly Creatures eschews the crisp brightness of magazine shots in favor of a muted palette more reminiscent of the Metroid Prime series. The comparison seems even more apt in light of the almost alien character the desert landscapes take on, not just because of the changes in scale but also because of the variability of orientation. Deadly Creatures doesn't just put you in a scaled-up version of a pickup truck; it forces you to explore that space using every conceivable surface as a floor. The game also seems to share Metroid Prime's obsession with ruins, though here they are scaled down. The leftovers of human civilization — a cast-off boot, a broken lawn gnome — have become the homes of your dangerous enemies.

The comparisons go deeper than the aesthetics. Deadly Creatures comes across as a game of exploration, using the tiny grubs like Metroid Prime's copious power-ups to encourage you to see everything it has to offer. While it lacks something in variety, this approach fits relatively well with the game's fiction. Additionally, Deadly Creatures loves to return you to previously-visited areas with new abilities that allow you to take alternate routes across and out of them.

Where this comparison begins to break down is in the way the game tries to guide the player towards goals. Metroid Prime makes the player a dynamic actor in a relatively static world and lets him go where he will, his access limited only by the abilities he has acquired. While the player is not exactly free to choose his objectives, the motif of restricted access makes them feel like an organic part of the game's intrinsic fiction. Deadly Creatures artlessly blocks off particular exits with clouds of flies in an effort to push the player along in a set story arc.

The story itself is the most obvious example of the game's key failing, because it concerns human beings operating with specifically human motivations. Billy Bob Thornton and Dennis Hopper do a wonderful job with voice roles that simply don't fit in this game. What does buried treasure have to do with a tarantula and a scorpion? The game never bothers to make this clear, but it gives the player objectives that force him down a path towards confrontation. The goals may bee sensible to me, as a player who understands what the human characters are saying, but it's not clear why the deadly creatures of the game would choose to do these things. Unlike in Metroid Prime, the game's goals are not organically integrated into its universe. Here, the fiction of the narrative seems to be fundamentally divorced from the intrinsic fiction of the game world.

This also comes into play with respect to combat. The tarantula and especially the scorpion fight with a few simple attacks and elaborate (motion-based) finishing moves reminiscent of God of War. While motion detection is not ideal for some of these, the core mechanics of combat are suitably engaging. The problem is that they are repetitive, and this is a problem not only because stinging a rat in the brain stops being interesting around the fifth time you do it, but also because the number and organization of the enemies conflicts with the game's intrinsic fiction. Combat is too frequent, your enemies attack in waves, and they never attack each other. There is no recognition here of the dangerous line predators tread with respect to energy expenditure, or the flight instinct that protects most prey. Even the weakest beetle is always up for a fight. Nor is there any consideration for the idea that territorial spiders are not going to attack as an organized body, and even if they managed it they would be at least as likely to attack each other as the nearby scorpion. No, the heroes of Deadly Creatures must fight their way through an army of opponents in exactly the same way as you could see in any standard 3D brawler. The encounters and enemy AI are informed by human sensibilities, right down to the heartbeat sound that warns you of low health.

The game posits that the deadliest creature is man, and so the scorpion, at least, must confront him. Of course, arachnids are actually rarely endangered by direct encounters with humans, because they mostly have the good instinct to hide. Deadly Creatures breezes past this reality, and discards essentially everything worthwhile in its combat system, so that we may end the game on a low note with a boss battle marred by nonsensical mechanics and out-of-place toilet humor. Even if I'd found it funny to sting a guy on the nuts one time, repetition would have drained the exercise of its joy.

If geography is a matter of scale, then our absurd dimensions must deny us many of the world's most amazing vistas. They exist at a size we cannot reach, in a world we can barely begin to experience. Deadly Creatures walks up to the edge of that vast uncharted space, gazes longingly upon it, and then spins on its heel and returns to the map of tried-and-true conventions. The game turns its back on the powerful fiction implied by its setting in order to embrace a story about humans, enemies that operate with human sensibilities, and objectives that make no sense for its protagonists. Deadly Creatures does not ask the player to be a scorpion or a tarantula, it asks the player to be a dude on a couch controlling a scorpion or a tarantula, and that is how a fantastic idea becomes a merely passable game.

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The falling action

Most games, even particularly interesting ones, are hamstrung by the fact that they end too soon. I don't mean that the gameplay itself ends too quickly; indeed most games would be served by chopping out a few hours. What I'm talking about here is that the story gets cut short. Whether RPGs, shooters, or brawlers, the finale of most games goes like this: climactic boss battle, short non-interactive cutscene, The End. Sometimes the short cutscene gets replaced with a long one, but the basic pattern is widely accepted. This hurts game narratives because it forces the player to assess the implications of the game's climax while almost entirely outside of the game world. It is left to the player to imagine what the world of the game is like after, and while this occasionally fits a narrative design it does not always do so. Fallout 3 reached a positively manic climax with Liberty Prime's assault on Project Purity, then dove right into an abrupt (and almost inexplicable) closing sequence. The recent downloadable content, "Broken Steel", feels like an attempt to add a real denouement to the Enclave arc, and in this it largely succeeds.

Most quests in "Broken Steel" differ from those of the main game in that they are essentially devoid of meaningful moral choice. The events of the add-on represent a single infiltrator's actions in a military campaign, and as such most of its quests amount to extended dungeon crawls. While a number of new and extremely powerful enemies appear across the Wasteland, none of them take the form of Enclave soldiers — the new Hellfire Trooper is not significantly more effective than his compatriots — and when this is combined with the elevated level cap, the effect is a slow reduction of tension throughout the adventure. Sure, things can get a bit hairy during some segments (particularly the harrowing encounter with Reavers in the Presidential Metro), but every time you face the Enclave they feel weaker than before. In the final act of the add-on, I infiltrated the Enclave's mobile base and single-handedly took down their elite Sigma squad in the space of a few seconds. Things never really got any harder after that.

Broken Steel doesn't have any grand finale to match that of the main story, but that's not the point. The new content isn't about a heroic charge against overwhelming odds to conquer a fortified position; it's about stomping bugs. There's no new antagonist to confront, nor even an old one, as the new segments don't seem to notice if you let Colonel Autumn live. All you have are progressively less dangerous firefights, gradually easing off the pressure until you demolish the Enclave's last stronghold with fire from the sky.

The accessory quests don't add much in the way of gameplay or new areas, but they do allow the player to consider the non-military impact of freeing Project Purity. Notably, the Wasteland still has problems — cleaning up the water didn't immediately eliminate the widespread contamination, mutation problems, or raiders. Solving some of those problems simply created new ones: now the challenge is to ensure that the distribution of the pure water goes smoothly. These quests don't really have much in the way of interesting moral choices, but they help put the player's earlier decisions in perspective, allowing him to reflect on the implications of the choices he made earlier.

The weakness of "Broken Steel" is that it has little to offer beyond violence. The quests are mostly straightforward battles, and allow none of the flexibility inherent to some of the main game's more interesting missions. The player can't side with the Enclave, or even use his powers of persuasion to help destroy his enemies from within. The only choice the player can make is to shoot or die, and while that approach has its uses it's unfortunate that players who take advantage of the full range of character customization available in the game aren't rewarded with interesting alternative routes to victory.

The impression one gets from interviews is that the developers at Bethesda believe players reacted negatively to the fact that their game ended. For me, at least, this wasn't the case at all. It wasn't that Fallout 3 ended, but how it ended that felt unsatisfying. The assault on the purifier didn't feel like a personal triumph, the conclusion of the adventure came as a surprise, and the in-universe reason for ending it was contrived and ridiculous. After the events of "Broken Steel", however, I feel like the game could have stopped without any trouble. The powerful weapons and increased level cap slowly deflate the tension of the narrative throughout this episode, and the final crawl through the Enclave's mobile platform feels like the player's expression of personal dominance over their military engine. Despite its weaknesses, this aspect of "Broken Steel" is quite welcome: it makes the player feel like the story really is at a conclusion, by moving the end of the game away from the climax of the story.

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Go for the Overkill

While many publishers have largely decided to approach the Wii by speeding up their casual-game assembly lines, Sega has started to position itself as a go-to source for more adult fare on the friendly little console. This is the strategy behind the upcoming first-person shooter The Conduit, as well as the already-released games MadWorld and House of the Dead: Overkill. MadWorld was blessed with a striking cel-shaded art style and gameplay that had the potential to use the Wii remote in really interesting ways. So it's perhaps surprising that Overkill, a light-gun game that holds the Guinness record for most swearing in a video game, turned out to be so much better. There is a phrase in the previous sentence that tells you why that happened.

Of course, spewing F-bombs in a game is not a guarantee that it will become a great experience, but that's not the point. Overkill's amazing proliferation of profanity is important as an indicator of what the developers were trying to do and how they succeeded. The entire design of the game is meant to evoke memories of the bloody, profane, and ridiculous B-movies of yesteryear. And it does, from the moment you see an ammo-draped stripper dancing behind the credits. The soundtrack, dialogue, and obvious continuity (and projection) errors are all reminiscent of the bad old movies, as are the posters that designate each of the playable chapters. Even the bosses serve as a sort of parade of monster archetypes from these flicks. Of course, this is all unbelievably crass, and you'll only like the game if you can find it at least as hilarious as it is revolting.

The game fits its target well because the on-rails light-gun game is a second-tier entertainment these days anyway, long surpassed by the greater freedom afforded in first person shooters. Overkill embraces this heritage, relying on its scoring system to enhance the replay value (although the "director's cut" expands the game also). The Wii's graphical limitations aside, the enemy models are noticeably ugly and low on polygons, and while this may not have been intentional it slots into the overall aesthetic anyway.

This isn't to say that Overkill doesn't have any brains (the zombies mutants need something to eat, after all). It's certainly aware of how crass it is, to the point where one of the characters (who previously unleashed a hilariously chauvinistic tirade against the game's female protagonist) offers a cursory feminist critique of the game in the closing scene. One could also read a little commentary on the history of the genre into the episode that takes place in a carnival. Light-gun games are, after all, the progeny of midway amusements, by way of the arcade, something you can also find in the carnival episode. Overkill keeps its commentary light, however, mainly aiming to evoke our memories of films we'd be embarrassed to admit having watched. The game knows that we know those movies were terrible in every way, and if it's trying to make a point beyond that, it isn't trying too hard.

MadWorld evokes memories of a particular movie: The Running Man. A whole city has been transformed into a bloody amusement called DeathWatch for... somebody, and the protagonist, Jack, must kill his way through the other competitors in order to stop the evildoers who arranged the whole mess. Like Overkill, MadWorld aims to get laughs out of the absurdity of its violence and an accompanying commentary track. MadWorld, unfortunately, never really gets going and even if it did it hasn't got a coherent destination.

The key problem with the gameplay is pacing. Overkill has a tremendous advantage in that its on-rails structure means that the developers can completely control the tension and the player's viewpoint at all times. This has its downside — once a player has "learned" a particular area it can get boring — but it also keeps the action going almost constantly. MadWorld, however, is a series of open areas in which the player can roam freely. This allows him to control his experience to some degree, but it also means that the player can feel somewhat directionless. Local shortages of enemies force the player to move, but in many levels enemies and interesting locations are clustered rather than evenly spaced. As a result, the player sometimes wanders aimlessly and can stumble into stretches where there just isn't enough to do. The scoring system exacerbates this problem by generally keeping players in these arenas for too long, allowing even its over-the-top violent antics to become repetitive and tiresome.

That explains how MadWorld falters as a game, but it also collapses as an idea. The cheesy visuals of Overkill contribute to its overall aesthetic intentions, and the black-white-and-red cel shading of MadWorld seems like it will do the same, targeting violent comics. But while Overkill dispenses with reality almost immediately and starts taking its story in more and more bizarre directions, MadWorld keeps itself firmly under the top, embracing lengthy cutscenes where people look shocked or frightened in freeze frame as various characters painstakingly explain the history of DeathWatch and the ordinary, workaday motives of the rich men who have organized it. Oh, they did it to make money, who could have guessed.

MadWorld doesn't even surpass its inspiration. Decades have passed, so now we have a lot more blood and dismemberment, but do we have a lightning-slinging opera singer wearing technicolor armor? MadWorld eschews incongruous beasts like Dynamo, instead giving us exactly what we expect from a game like this. The bosses always are and appear every bit as dangerous as Jack himself, and most of them are huge, violent monsters who can happily survive having an arm chainsawed off. It's surprisingly conventional, and even a little cowardly.

This extends to the concept of DeathWatch itself. The Running Man has a virtue in that it points the finger at its own audience: a totalitarian government organized the events, but the people watching, cheering, and wagering on the murderous game show were very clearly us. The rising popularity of MMA and the recalibration of football broadcasts as celebrations of the hard hit are evidence that the thirst for violent sport is as great now as ever. The target is there, and MadWorld's bloody excess and sportscaster-like commentators are like a loaded gun aimed right at it, so it is almost infuriating that the game never pulls the trigger. The Running Man at least afforded the possibility of an uncomfortable moment, when the viewer attempted to reject the idea that he was like the spectators in the film and then realized he'd just spent 90 minutes cheering on bloody murder too. MadWorld goes to some effort to assure its player that ordinary people are victims, only the jaded rich think murder is sport, something about pharmaceutical companies, blah blah blah. The reality Jack is every bit as brutal and disgusting as the thugs and aristocrats he's opposing, and he is us. You could do something powerful with that, if you were so inclined. MadWorld's developers apparently weren't.

House of the Dead: Overkill succeeds because it takes its every weakness and makes it serve the overall aesthetic. It's a relatively ugly game built on an unpopular mechanic that's linear by its very nature, and it works magnificently because of the B-movie horror context. MadWorld has every advantage over the other game when it comes to artistic style and gameplay mechanics, but like its directionless players it simply loses its way. It's not just that it doesn't commit; the game doesn't even seem to know what it could commit to. Overkill seemingly aims lower than MadWorld, but because it is built into a coherent aesthetic experience, it hits higher.

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