Review: Final Fantasy XIII-2

As I write this, I'm 32,000 feet in the air over the Pacific, 7 hours in to a 14-hour flight from Washington D.C. to Tokyo. I'm bored, hungry, and my eyes have desiccated to the point where my contact lenses would be more comfortable if I replaced them with Wheat Thins. Also, there's some sort of Japanese youth sitting next to me who keeps falling asleep on my shoulder. I can't think of a better time or place to write down some thoughts about my latest Japanese RPG experience, Final Fantasy XIII-2.


Final Fantasy XIII-2 (FFXIII-2) is a direct sequel to Final Fantasy XIII, and follows the exploits of time-traveling schoolteacher Serah Farron and her post-apocalyptic boy-toy Noel Kreiss. Serah is the younger sister of Lightning, the protagonist of Final Fantasy XIII... because if you're going to make a direct sequel within an expansive RPG franchise, it's a good idea to take the game with the least interesting cast, and then make an entire game about the least interesting character among them.

Design: 4/5

One of the first things you'll notice about FFXIII-2 is that while its predecessor spanned three discs, it manages to fit onto only one. The perceptive gamer might identify this difference as a sign that FFXIII-2 contains a fair amount of recycled material, and in fact they would be spot-on. Final Fantasy XIII-2 begins with a beautifully rendered and fantastically directed extended cut scene, but this keen bit of cinematography starts to lose its impact when clips of it begin to reappear again and again later in the game. Moreover, the double-dipping doesn't stop with cinema scenes; a major mechanic of the game is time travel, meaning that you'll revisit the same handful of locations multiple times throughout your journey.

Most of the game environments are fairly interesting,
which is a good thing since you're going to see them way more than once.

Of course, repetition is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps the biggest complaint about Final Fantasy XIII was that it was painfully linear, and Final Fantasy XIII-2 goes to great lengths to break from this mold. During most of the game you can navigate freely through time and space via the Historia Crux (a glorified menu screen), and there's a passable number of secrets to be found by revisiting previous locations.

Unfortunately, I'm of the mind that most of the point of freedom in an RPG is side questing, and in this respect FFXIII-2 falls pretty short. Most of the available extracurricular activities are of the basic monster-hunting and fetch-quest varieties, and since the game doesn't have much in the way of loot, the primary rewards are "fragments", FFXIII-2's version of the requisite useless collectible. The end result is that only the most rabid of completionists would be compelled to finish most of these additional challenges.

Artistic: 3/5

As a direct sequel, Final Fantasy XIII-2 continues the aesthetic of its predecessor fairly closely and with few innovations. Perhaps the largest stylistic deviations are Noel and Caius Ballad (the game's primary antagonist), both of whom have sort of gypsy-slash-Native-American thing going. I suppose their look is meant to conjure imagery of a dying world dominated by a nomadic and tribal culture, but instead I kept pretending Caius was the teary-eyed Native American from the Keep America Beautiful commercial, and that he had finally lost his shit and decided to end all of existence.

It's really hard to take a villain seriously when he has feathers in his hair.

Although the visuals are largely harmless, the audio most certainly is not. Through much of the game your ears will be assaulted by Japanese pop/rock featuring frantic beats and over-the-top synthesized solos. Most of the time this soundtrack runs counter to the look and feel of the game at the time, to the point where you'll wish there was an independent volume slider for the music in the options menu. (There isn't one.)

Narrative: 3/5

As far as I can tell, Final Fantasy XIII-2 is about a girl whose fiancee (Snow Villiers) leaves on a selfless quest to find the truth about her missing sister; then while he's gone, she runs off with a mysterious visitor from the future to partake in an adulterous sexcapade through time and space. Of course, this sordid little drama is set against the backdrop of a much larger and far more hackneyed plot (saving the world from a villain who wants to end existence for bizarre personal reasons), but I think Serah's love life is the more interesting story here.

Final Fantasy XIII-3 had better feature some sort of "moogle death camp"...
which I suppose would also be a good name for an all-metal Final Fantasy cover band.

Actually, I'm not compelled to complain too much about the plot, because it honestly makes no more or less sense than most other J-RPGs. What I do feel the need to complain about is Mog, Serah's cloying moogle sidekick. When it comes to moogles in Final Fantasy games, I can tolerate a few twirls of the pom-pom and the odd interjection of "kupo!", but Mog elevates cuteness to the level of a war crime. After 40 hours of listening to that fat little sack of pixie dust spout useless information in his annoying little baby voice, even an 8-year old girl would be driven to stuff him into her Hello Kitty backpack with a pile of rocks and hurl him into the nearest river.

Gameplay: 4/5

If you liked the battle system in Final Fantasy XIII (which I did) then you'll be happy to hear that this, too, is largely unchanged. The flow of battle is still controlled by switching between "paradigms" (pre-set combinations of character roles), with individual actions handled largely handled automatically. Thus, instead of controlling each party member directly as in most RPGs, the player acts as more of a conductor, leading the characters through the tempo and key changes of each battle. The primary difference in FFXII-2's battle system is that the third party spot is now filled with a set of monsters, chosen from your private collection. Despite the fact that collecting monsters is to RPGs what "Freebird" is to cover bands, this change does have the favorable effect of altering the paradigm strategy a bit, as each monster has a fixed role and thus not every paradigm combination is available.

The battle screen has a lot going on,
though fortunately the paradigm system lets you take more of a "big-picture" kind of view.

One of the reasons I like the paradigm concept (or perhaps we should call it the "paradigm paradigm") is that it allows for fast-paced and highly aggressive battles. Most encounters only last tens of seconds, and even boss fights may last only a few minutes. It definitely encourages one to pay attention, since even spending a few too many seconds in the wrong paradigm can leave your party in ruin. Fortunately, it's always possible to retry a battle, an option which I exercised on more than one occasion. Also, note that although AI-controlled combat is traditionally problematic, it is less of a issue here, since consumable items must be manually used, there's no magic points, and the characters' health is fully restored after each battle... so even exercising the poorest possible judgement, there's little in the way of lasting damage that a rogue AI can do.

Summary

Final Fantasy XIII-2 does a respectable job trying to take the reins from one of the worst outings in the Final Fantasy canon. While not outstanding by any stretch of the imagination, given its raw material, perhaps it's as good as it could possibly be.

For those of you who are interested, below is my "rating versus hours of gameplay graph" for Final Fantasy XIII-2, which I talk about more in this post.

Criticism, Video Games, and the Quest for More Data

Being graded is generally not a fun experience. If as a student you've ever done an art project or written an English paper, then you've probably had the experience of having one of your creative efforts dissected, examined, and then branded with an arbitrary alphanumeric grade. If your experience was like mine, a wholly subjective expression of your thoughts and emotions was relabeled with a "check" or "satisfactory", or some other, similarly meaningless accolade—and I'll bet it happened with all the empathy and ceremony of a life insurance actuary placing a dollar value on a human life.

Remarkably, despite most of us having shared this soul-deadening experience in our youth, as adults we don't hesitate to do it to other people all the time. Every day we find ourselves criticizing someone else's creative output, be it movies, music, theater, or restaurants. And don't even get me started if you're a teacher... all you people do all day is grade other people's ideas. It's sick.

Unfortunately, on some level we need all this criticism. Imagine you're trying to impress a hot girl on a first date... it's a big world out there, and without restaurant and movie reviews, dinner and a movie could end up being Olive Garden and John Carter. That's why I try to do my part in the video game world by mixing a few spirited reviews in with the rest of my inane ramblings. However, at all times I try to remain conscious of the dangers of attaching a numerical quantity to an inherently complex and subjective experience.

Originally, I thought the easiest way to mitigate grading errors would be to write my reviews using a symbolic representation of my ideas, a.k.a. "words". Then, even if I got my review grade "wrong", someone could read these "words" to see what I really thought about the game. But then I realized: who the hell wants to have to read things just to get information about stuff? No one, that's who.

DANG scores from my review
of Saints Row: The Third

So then I thought, maybe we just need more numbers. That's how I came up with the DANG rubric I typically use in my reviews, wherein I rate each game's Design, Artistic, Narrative, and Gameplay elements separately. Unfortunately, instead of making my review scores more reliable, this practice probably just makes them approximately four times more arbitrary. On the other hand, it does give my reviews with authoritative voice and pseudo-scientific air of your typical USA Today infographic.



However, since I'm (1) an applied mathematician, (2) not typically one to give up, and (3) generally incapable of outside-the-box thinking, I decided that the answer must be even more numbers. That's why during my recent slog through Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIII-2, I decided to record a separate rating for every hour of gameplay.

Figure 1: My rating versus hours of gameplay for Final Fantasy XIII-2.

Figure 1 is a chart of my ratings for the first (and probably last) 40 hours I played the game. Each bar represents my impression of FFXIII-2 for the corresponding hour that I played it, on a scale of one to five stars.

While to the untrained eye Figure 1 may look like an uninformative queue of green french fries, to me it's dramatic recap of my FFXIII-2 gaming experience, told through the sultry interpretive dance of the bar graph. I recall the game getting off to an unimpressive start, picking up a bit here and there over the first 10 hours. Just as I was beginning to feel optimistic, I entered the 2-star valley from 9:00-12:00, a desperate little trench dug built of inane side quests and my first trip to "Academia", a location in the game with pitifully weak enemies but a painfully high encounter rate. (The irony of how much I hated this "Academia" was not lost on me.)

The game picks up a bit again in the third quarter, as by that point you've earned a bit of freedom, and your characters have finally leveled up enough to withstand a stiff breeze without giving up the ghost. After this, we slowly lumber to the game's finale, which was tolerable enough to earn one last 4-star rating.  (The final 2-star entry corresponds to the extra hour wherein I attempted a few post-ending side quests, which succeeded in quickly cementing my decision to never play this game again.)

However, let us return to my original quandary re grading: does Figure 1 gives a more reliable indication of my opinion of Final Fantasy XIII-2's quality? For example, is it a better representation than a single score? I'll admit it's a bit more cumbersome than a few simple stars, but I kind of like the idea of a review having a time series of ratings... a "score vector", if you will.

If you like, I suppose you can always distill the data into a single number; for instance, the arithmetic mean of the points is around 3.07, and I suppose 3 stars is probably what I would give this game in a review. Incidentally, if you take into account that the standard deviation is about 0.67, it seems pretty unlikely that I'm too confused about my opinion (e.g. that deep down I really think Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a 1-star or a 5-star game.)

Figure 2: A histogram of the scores, along with a normal (Gaussian) distribution with the same mean and standard deviation. (For you stats folks out there, I'm aware of the issues of using a continuous distribution to represent data over a discrete sample space, but this is a video game blog, so let's not get too uptight about it.)

On the other hand, if you can resist the temptation to just take an average and be done with it, I believe there's a lot more interesting things you can do with this data.¹   For example, if you collected it across multiple people, you could get an idea of how much their opinions varied at different times in the game.  (With its "controversial" endings, I wonder what the distribution for the last few hours of Mass Effect 3 would look like.) Or, you could develop some statistical models (such as a hidden Markov model) for how the quality of video games evolve, and then try to use them to predict how long you could play a given game before you started to hate it. (Maybe we'll also do some principal component analysis for the hell of it, because I really start to lose my shit if I go more than 24 hours without computing the eigenvalue of something.)

In the meantime, I think I'm going to keep recording these hourly ratings and other kinds of data as I play, and continue thinking about fun and unnecessarily convoluted ways to use them. If you have any interesting ideas, I'd love to hear them.

___________________
¹ I'm aware that some people believe one should write "these data" instead of "this data". I'm also aware that some people are pretentious assholes. (Although I'm careful never to say "your dildo".)

How Much Fun Can You Fit in Your Pants?

We're well into 2012, and so far this year I've been largely silent on the Interwebs. The reasons for my little unannounced hiatus are (1) I've been working on a very time-consuming side project (which recently died a graceless, bureaucratic death), and (2) at some point a naked little person burst out of my wife like a tiny stripper jumping out of a cake made of uterus. Between these two things, I've barely had time to play my USDA-recommended 20+ hours of video games a week, much less take the time to write about it.

Those of you with children of your own know that the whole birthing and postpartum process involves spending a lot of time in hospitals and doctor's offices. The father/husband gets stuck on the boring end of this deal; unlike my wife who was constantly occupied by interesting things like weeping, breast feeding, and trying to heal a body that was nearly ripped in twain, my job was basically to sit around and "be supportive".

Originally, I was actually looking forward to a little waiting-room down time, provided I could find a way to somehow replace "being supportive" with video games. Back in October when I finally ditched my hated Android phone and got an iPhone 4S, I was optimistic about its possibilites for mobile entertainment, especially considering that I hadn't owned a portable gaming system since the Game Gear.

However, there's one small problem with the iPhone as a portable gaming system: it sucks. Without a joystick or buttons, touch-screen gaming on the iPhone feel less like "fun" and more like the kind of gross-motor-control tests you would give a recent severe stroke victim. Accordingly, iPhone titles have barely more depth than your mom's favorite Facebook game; in fact, every time I play Angry Birds, I half expect to be told that in order to unlock the next level, I first need to help one of my friends with their virtual barn raising.

Compared to eating tainted Taco Bell, Chrono Trigger
on the Nintendo DS is a much safer way to travel
through time and space while sitting on the toilet.

"But wait," I can hear you Apple fanboys say, "the iPhone has all sorts of great options for the serious gamer! There's even a port of Chrono Trigger, the best SNES role-playing game of all time!"

For anyone with this point of view, I propose the following experiment. First, dig your old SNES out of the attic, dust it off, and play the original version of Chrono Trigger. Then, try to play the iPhone port. If you manage to make it more than 15 minutes without trying to grind your thumbs off in an electric pencil sharpener just to end the frustration of using the "virtual joystick", then you are likely some sort of deeply disturbed masochist who hates him/herself. (If you didn't... well, let's hope your new lack of thumbs doesn't turn you into a deeply disturbed masochist who hates him/herself.)



My frustration with iPhone gaming got so bad that one of the days we were at the hospital—under the pretense of bringing my three-year-old son to the museum—I literally escaped from the postpartum wing, drove to Best Buy, and bought a Nintendo 3DS and the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. (I also had to shell out another 20 bucks to secure my son's discretion regarding my illicit purchase, by way of a DVD of Kung Fu Panda 2.) Although it may have been an impulse buy, the contrasts between the iPhone and an actual portable gaming system were so glaringly apparent, I have had no regrets. (In fact, the next day, I went on Amazon and ordered the DS version of Chrono Trigger.)

The biggest thing that Nintendo does right is realizing that just because a platform is small doesn't mean that the gameplay has to be. Rather than limiting the scope of content or your ability to interact with it, the DS keeps the gaming experience mobile and lightweight in other ways. For example, most games allow for both touch-screen/stylus and gamepad controls, and the system can be quickly suspended and resumed simply by closing or opening the device. It's as though Nintendo is saying to me, "I know you're busy, but you do have time to eat this big, delicious steak if you just cut it up and take small bites." By contrast, the iPhone basically hands you handful of raw hamburger and tells you not to hurt yourself.

Mind you, I'm not saying the 3DS is perfect. In fact, nearly everything that's good about it is a feature of the previous system, so there's little value added. The biggest new feature is the glasses-free 3D, which—while pretty cool for the first five minutes or so—is guaranteed to cause cluster headaches in anyone not willing to surgically sever the hemispheres of their own brain. (I'm hoping it's this effect that explains Nintendo's ailing market performance.)

I'm also not saying that I hate the idea of video gaming on the iPhone altogether. I realize that many, many more people own an iPhone than will ever own a Nintendo DS or a PlayStation Vita, and it's a good thing that we're getting all these people to play more games. Hell, I'll even admit that some of these games—limited as they are—can be quite good, and are often elegant in their simplicity.

I just wish that developers and publishers would take the success of the iPhone as a platform and use it as an opportunity to elevate the depth and quality of mobile games. I'd love for someone to design a great RPG—say, something of Dragon Quest quality—specifically for the iPhone. You know, something that makes Chaos Rings look like the steaming pile of monkey excrement it really is, and preferably takes longer to beat than the 20 minutes demanded by Infinity Blade.

Until that happens, though, it looks like I'll just have to bring two handheld devices with me everywhere I go. (*sigh*) If this keeps up, I may need to get one of these for my bathroom.

Review: Saints Row: The Third

This week, we’ll be reviewing Saints Row: The Third. For those of you who have never played a Saints Row game before, let me describe the experience. Thrust into a crowded and hectic metropolis, you are immediately, overwhelmingly, and very deeply troubled by your surroundings... not only by the celebrations of violence, depravity, and avarice all around you, but also by the fact that these behaviors are encouraged, and even rewarded. Eventually, though, you begin to lower your inhibitions, and as you gradually chip off piece after piece of your previously virtuous soul, you begin to realize... my gods, this may be the most fun I’ve ever had. In other words, it’s a lot like vacationing in Las Vegas.

Design: 4⁄5

As was the case for its predecessors, Saints Row: The Third (SR3) could easily be written off by the uninformed as a pale imitation of a Grand Theft Auto game. True, it’s a mission-based sandbox game in an urban setting (the fictional metropolis of New York City Steelport), wherein most of the gameplay consists of stealing cars and killing people. The thing that sets Saints Row apart is that it does right nearly everything that GTA does wrong.

For example, let’s say you “borrow” a particularly awesome sports car from a passing motorist. In GTA, I might park that car at my apartment and never drive it, for fear that it might get destroyed and lost forever. In SR3, I’ll likely take that same car and pimp it out with sweet rims and a ridiculous paint job, after which I’ll jet around the city at 100 miles per hour as I gleefully mow down pedestrians, and then end my killing spree by Thelma and Louise-ing it over the nearest cliff. (Don’t worry, I have a parachute.) Then, magically, the destroyed carcass of my favorite death-mobile magically appears in my garage, and is quickly and easily repaired. It’s not very realistic, but it sure is fun.

In this reality, the Saints are bigger than the Beatles... which I suppose by the transitive property also makes them bigger than Jesus.

However, before you sprint out the door with wallet in hand, I should note that pretty much every praiseworthy feature of SR3 was already present in the first two games. From a design point of view, there’s not much the game does different or better than its antecedents. In fact, in their zeal to re-capture and expand upon the devil-may-care sandboxy freedom of Saints Row 2, the designers of SR3 may have made it a little too consequence-free, to the point where the difficulty and pacing of the experience really suffers. When last I checked the definition of “gameplay balance”, it said nothing about acquiring an infinitely-respawning attack helicopter with unlimited ammo within the first hour of gameplay.

Artistic: 3⁄5

The aesthetics of Saints Row: The Third are—simply put—good enough. No more, no less. For as much as the game goes out of its way to inundate you with its endless parade of bizarre characters, zany costumes, and scores of dildos, the overall ambiance of Steelport feels pretty blasé. (Wait... is it “dildoes”? Let’s check Merriam-Webster... ah, it seems that both are acceptable.) As I drove around the city, most of the scenery tended to blend together, and I rarely knew (or even particularly cared) where I actually was.

Wow... and all this time I thought the Golden Arches were excessively suggestive signage.

On the other hand, there are some nice touches. The menu and mission completion screens are pretty sharp, and the characters are rendered in a slightly cartoonish style that meshes well with the overall feel of the game. To be honest though, I’m not sure how much it matters, as Saints Row is really all about gameplay. I had a blast playing the first game more than five years after it came out, even though visually it looked like it came out ten years ago.

Narrative: 3⁄5

If the Saints Row: The Third experience is not really about aesthetics, then it is also not about narrative. What passes for a plot is basically a hodgepodge of quirky characters and bizarre situations, topped with enough sexual references to make Hugh Hefner blush. Granted, the quirky characters are really quirky, with the cast including such weirdos as a homocidal luchador, a tracheotomied pimp with an auto-tuned electrolarynx pimp cane, and Burt Reynolds.

Unfortunately for this guy, grenades now come in an easy-to-swallow gel-cap.

However, the zaniness factor is so extreme that it runs contrary to a deeper, more spiritual underlying theme of the game: being a complete and total badass. I’ve always enjoyed the simplicity of purpose of the unnamed protagonist (known simply as “the Boss”) of the Saints Row games. He’s not some complex antihero with a troubled past and a heart of gold; rather, he’s a remorseless sociopath whose only motivations are money and power. It’s a Zen-like approach to mayhem that fits perfectly with the violent sandbox genre. Unfortunately, it takes a bit of a back seat this time around, such that by the time you’ve finished SR3, the Boss has spent so much time wearing ridiculous costumes and cracking wise that his essence of pure malevolence has gotten lost somewhere in the shuffle.

Gameplay: 4⁄5

At its heart, Saints Row: The Third strives to be purely and unabashedly fun, and its commitment to this goal is evident in its gameplay. Even something as simple as driving around the city is immensely fun, as the game consistently apprises you of statistics like how much time you’ve spent driving in the wrong lane or when you’ve bested your longest stunt jump. Combat is even more fun, as the Boss can deal death using a variety of weapons, explosives, and melee attacks, in a fast-paced run-and-gun style that has been scientifically proven to be way more awesome than that pussy cover-based nonsense.

For those of you who don’t like driving, there’s an unlimited supply of disposable helicopters.

The fact that SR3 builds upon such a winning formula makes its few gameplay issues especially frustrating, like the aforementioned pacing issues. After a thrilling start, the game slows to a crawl with a seemingly interminable series of tutorial and mini-game introductory missions, and then races ahead at such a breakneck speed that by halfway through the game you’re essentially invincible, able to summon tanks with your cell phone and rain down aerial drone strikes like a demigod. Even after jacking the game up to the highest difficulty level, I more or less sleepwalked through the last third of the story missions.

Summary

When it isn’t preoccupied with trying too hard—or not hard enough—Saints Row: The Third shines with some entertaining missions and riotous gameplay, and so fans of the series will probably be satisfied. However, given how labored the sophomoric humor is at times, and the fact that little has been improved over previous games, newcomers may be better off just dropping $20 for the Saints Row / Saints Row 2 combo pack instead.

By the way, I wasn’t kidding about the parachute. The Boss never leaves home without one.

Game Over: On Video Games and Death

The heart of the holiday season is a wonderful time of year: the Christmas lights are up, there’s a spirit of goodwill in the air, and the stores have finally cleaned up nearly all of the discarded blood and teeth remaining from Black Friday. It’s a magical time, one that makes you want to grab a mug of egg nog, curl up by a roaring fire, and write an unnecessarily morbid blog post.

It occurred to me the other day that if I had to choose a single concept or idea that most defined video games, it would be death. (A glass-half-full kind of person might say their major theme is “life” but it’s fair to assume that I tend to view my glasses as fairly empty.) Throughout most of their 40-year history, video games have been utterly consumed by the topic of death. It’s an obsession that continues to this day, and for someone like me who has played a lot of video games, I can’t help but believe the experience has affected the way I think about mortality.

Consider Pac-Man, an iconic arcade title virtually synonymous with video games. To a 1980’s adolescent, Pac-Man was more than a game; it was a spiritual experience. For a mere quarter, one could witness the birth of a hero, thrust into a brutal and uncaring world full of angry phantoms and energy pellets... and then, like an acne’d guardian angel, shepherd that hero through his transient existence to an imminent demise. It was an entire life, start-to-finish, in a box. Like real life, there was no escape, no bargaining, no loopholes... only survival. (Even the most talented angels among us—those who made no mistakes—would eventually reach the infamous split-screen level, and could proceed no further.) From the moment you touched that start button, Pac-Man was doomed.

Revenge.

While many classic games like Pac-Man reinforced the sentiment that death is inevitable, at least they allowed us a modicum of control over the timing of our passing. By contrast, there were a number of far less merciful games that taught us that death was savage and unpredictable, ready to descend upon us at any time and for any reason. Perfect examples of this sadistic mentality were Sierra games like those of the King’s Quest and Space Quest series. In the real world, leading causes of death are things like heart disease and vehicular accidents; in these games, leading causes of death included (but were not limited to) honeybees, playing alien slot machines, genies, buying bargain-priced robots and/or spaceships, prematurely eating custard pies, and ignoring trash cans. (Believe it or not, I did not make any of those examples up.)

Did you enjoy the movie Groundhog Day? If not, then Space Quest probably isn’t for you.

Of course, as much as video games are about your own death, they’re also about other people’s deaths. Just as no man can make his proverbial omelette without sacrificing a few eggs, no plumber can rescue his princess without systematically murdering scores of anthropomorphized mushrooms. During my lifetime of gaming, however, there seems to have been a general philosophical shift in this regard. Games used to be about survival, or rescuing the princess, or defeating some sort of world-threatening evil. From a moral perspective, atrocities such as Link’s genocide of a entire species of rock-spitting octopuses were unfortunate but necessary consequences of the pursuit of these greater goals. (Plus, I needed the rupees.)

Rumor has it that when they made Friday the 13th for the NES, they couldn’t decide between this “Game Over” screen and the alternative, “You die alone and unloved. No one mourns your passing.”

Now, though, many games are less about fundamental life-or-death struggles, and more about killing as many things as possible. Sure, Halo, Gears of War, or Call of Duty might pretend to have plots wherein some person, place, or thing has to be saved from some other person, place, or thing, but really the epic battle between these seemingly arbitrary nouns is simply a venue for bathing oneself in as much gore as possible. At least, I assume that’s the point, since I’m constantly being encouraged to “frag” enough people and get enough “killstreaks” during each “deathmatch” to maintain a respectable “kill/death ratio”, presumably so I can feel good about myself when I’m at home sitting on my throne made of infants’ skulls and drinking a chalice of baby seal blood.

I wonder how this shift is affecting the viewpoints of the next generation of gamers. To be honest, I worry they might be missing the point. Let’s say I’m playing an online and I witness a 12-year-old kid (with clearly absentee parents) brutally executing 20 people with a sniper rifle, only to throw a verbal hissyfit when the bell finally tolls for him in the form of a rocket launcher to the face. I want to say so many things to this kid, like “I’m sorry son... but it was just your time,” or, “hey, war is Hell,” or, “sometimes bad things happen to good Modern Warfare players.” But I’m afraid he just won’t get it, because unlike me, he didn’t have to grow up watching Pac-Man die.

So instead, I tell him, “Look, it could be worse... at least you’re not playing Space Quest.”