There aren't many franchises I keep tabs on, in fact I can probably name them on a hand or two (mine or yours, doesn't really matter), there are fewer still series that I approach with anything less than pure scepticism at announcement and without a litany of top-mark reviews and justifications for my interest before putting down hard cash. I've played my fair share of shitty games and shitty sequels, and wasted a lot of money in the process, so I feel justified in that respect. Every once in awhile though something comes along that makes me go a bit silly in the head – either through some nostalgic attachment to the franchise or because of of how interesting the game's premise sounds.

I feel that way about Rebellion's 2010 Aliens vs Predator game; I looked into it a little before release but mostly just went into it completely blind, I didn't even really wait for the reviews to come out; because I trusted the developer, and to a fair extent I believed their hype aswell. I trusted that Rebellion would make a great Aliens vs Predator game.

I was so wrong, so very, very, wrong.

My interest in the Aliens vs Predator games began in the early nineties, as a child catching scattered glimpses of the Jaguar AvP game (also by Rebellion) in issues of various Sega magazines of the era, but not really having access to a Jaguar (and having the monetary wealth of most 6 or 7 yr olds) there wasn't really much I could do other than be impressed by the look of the game.

My interest in the franchise didn't really develop properly till the release of the 1999 FPS Aliens vs Predator (I know what you're probably thinking, and unfortunately innovative titling for the AvP franchise has never been their strong suit). I'd seen Predator as a kid and been scared shitless, was ridiculously scared of xenomorphs, and loved horror, so immersing myself in the world wasn't too hard an ask. The game was simple enough even for a kid to play, with a sort of arcade-y feel to the levels; there was a little bit of story and a few simple cinematics, but you can mostly just rush through levels, most taking about 10 minutes, 30 minutes at most.



What really made the game was just how terrifying and brutal it could be at times though, whereas the Predator or Alien had fairly decent health and could hold their own in most fights the marine was pretty much dead meat walking. If you've played Aliens vs Predator then you'll probably have a fair idea of how difficult the marine campaign is, Aliens seem to respawn in seconds, bursting from the darkness to tear you to pieces (it literally can take just two or three swipes to die sometimes). As an adult it can be unnerving, but it's easy enough to push through to the objective, but as a kid it was terrifying - Xenomorphs bursting out vents, the ominous scuttling sound of a nearby facehugger, it was absolute psychological murder. That sort of experience really stays with you.

A year or two later came Monolith's effort – it's probably a good idea to point out at this junction that unlike a lot of franchises or series where they all come from one developer, Aliens vs Predator games have pretty much been made by whoever Fox feels like licensing the IP out to. That said, most of the Western FPS entries in the series have been Rebellion efforts, but there's also a Japanese arcade game based off the IP and I think atleast one strategy game aswell, rather bizarrely.

Anyway, back to talking about Monolith's game: AvP2 was very much a jump ahead both in terms of graphics and gameplay compared to it's predecessor, though released only two years later; it wasn't quite as scary as Rebellion's effort but offered a lot more in terms of story and atmosphere. You had three interconnected campaigns in which you played as the Alien, the Predator and the Marine. A xenomorph outbreak on a human colony leads to an infestation and loss of communication with the planet, a marine force is dispatched to investigate, whilst the predators are drawn in before the outbreak, during a hunt that goes awry.



In many respect it was a homage to Aliens the film, with touches of Predator throughout. It also, for me atleast, hit exactly right on the money when it comes to what makes a good game: strong story, solid gameplay mechanics and good graphics (for the time.) The scares weren't quite as good as in the original Rebellion game but the Aliens seemed more true to their film counterparts than they ever had in the original. It was the great mix of gameplay, story, atmosphere and homage to some classic films that made me really love the game, and has made it one of my favourite horror games, even to this day.

So you can imagine, I was FAIRLY excited to see this new game, given how scary the original AvP had been and the sort of Aliens/Predator/horror-mix template that AvP2 set down. I didn't even bother to wait for a review, it was £20 on Amazon pre-order and I went for it. Expecting greatness.

So then it came in the post, early one morning, and I felt a rush of excitement as I realised what it was. Unpackaged that bad boy, slipped the disc into the drive and sat through the mandatory 12 hour steam install as I bounced up and down on my chair in anticipation.

Loaded it up, got the menu, thought: this looks a bit stupid, but what the hell, menus don't make the game!

Started the marine game, but for some reason it wouldn't let me play, my marine wouldn't even get up.

Thought ok... day one bug on install from disc... is a little stupid, but no worries...

Did a little research, found the fix. Fixed it and started it up again, ready to play!

So finally I get into the game, the intro cinematics are short, don't really give much story, but that's ok – I felt a tingle of disappointment, this sort of isn't what I expected, but what the hell, bet it get's more awesome later on!

So I got into it, wasting a whole day as I plowed through the Marine singleplayer, stopping for bouts to try the Alien and Predator campaigns. There I was, blasting away for hours, not really sure how I was feeling but wanting to enjoy it.

Till suddenly it hit me: hang on a minute... this is a bit shit 0_o

And from there the curtain of illusion fell at an alarming rate, startlingly obvious questions suddenly flooding my mind:

Why isn't this scary?

Why do the marines all have the same faces?

When will that guy stop shouting 'watch your back, marine!'?

Why does the campaign only last a couple of hours and feel like a shoddily scripted series of multiplayer levels?

I realised what that undetermined feeling was that I'd been having ever since I started up the game: it wasn't just an aesthetic dislike or me being picky – the game was boring, poorly designed and generally underdeveloped as an idea, at times I felt more like I was playing half or quarter of a game hastily pasted together to get out the door rather than a full-game.



Granted I'll admit it was partly my ridiculously high expectation that led me to feel so disappointed by the game: I was expecting a game version of a cross-between the Aliens and Predator films; much like Aliens vs Predator 2 had felt back in 2001, but with a lot prettier graphics, and a whole host of new features to meet modern gaming standards, with a campaign that really lasted – or atleast felt as though it ended at the right time. What I got was a passible shooter with an Aliens vs Predator theme, that could be over in about six hours, which seriously felt like the Crystal Maze at times, what with the whole 'areas' thing they had going on: Basically each level had a theme, like Colony, Temple, Research Facility, etc, for the simple reason that the developers wanted to be able to cut each up to turn them into multiplayer levels, but because of how short the game is they ended up all packed together, so you end up with this weird crystal maze like experience where you jump from one themed zone to another within the space of five minutes!



...just, you know, minus Richard O'Brien :(



But what really depressed me about the game is that some of the hype had been true about the game - at times the atmosphere, the sense of being outnumbered and weak was there, it just got ruined five minutes later by something stupid. There's one bit in the game I really love, where you're forced inside the colony complex by the aliens and you bunker down with some marines, watching the shutters close overhead and the automatic sentries scan back and forth, only for those same marines to get brutally slaughtered moments later, leaving you all alone (sorry, spoiler!), but before this sense of isolation and oppression can be used to any real effect you're pushed on to a different level and it's lost.

Moments like that sort of crystallised everything that was wrong about the game for me: it was a series of shoddily constructed scenes strung together with a passable plot which sped past you before you had time to think or feel anything, leaving it feeling like a dull and rather flat gaming experience. Not to mention the fact that any time you might start to feel as though you were claustrophobically cooped up for segments of the game you'd suddenly get pushed back outside again, killing any tension that might have been building up.

The game just left me feeling sooo.... underwhelmed.

Replaying it now I feel a lot of the rage I had for the game dissipate, only to be replaced by an apathetic reaction of 'meh' to much of the game. It's no great icon of gaming but it's not terrible either, it's just a generic shooter, with a few cool bits to it (the monorail and the synthetic combat troops stick in my mind as pretty cool ideas.) Otherwise it's a waste of a game.

I went into the game expecting a homage to some pretty classic films, what I found instead was a multiplayer shooter with a tacked on singleplayer game that really felt like a waste of money.

I guess this is what you get for being too over eager, and believing in hype.

So I picked up a copy of Michigan: Report from Hell not too long back and started playing it at a fairly piecemeal rate and having completed it I wanted to put down a few thoughts on paper (ok, on screen). Granted, it's not the sort of game many people will be playing now (kinda a bit late considering it came out 7 years ago) but what with my throbbing urge to find new things to add to my survival horror collection it felt appropriate a time as any to give it a try.

First of all for those who don't know Michigan focuses on a small American news crew as they react to their city being overrun by strange monsters; it's pretty much your standard horror film/game premise. What Michigan does differently is to make you play as the cameraman, rather than the lead, and have him film everything that goes on, deciding what he wants to film - whether to save people or watch them die just for better footage, or whether to sneak a peak at female characters undressing: - despite being the 'watcher' though the player is more often than not the one who has to respond first if something happens, for example, telling the reporter to shoot if they see a monster, moving through doors first or pointing out items of interest for the reporter so they can progress.



I guess I have something of a soft spot when it comes to Michigan's style of gameplay, though I was never really a huge fan of them at the time I do remember with some fondness the full cinematic videogames of the early nineties (Ground Zero Texas and Night Trap spring to mind), so the fact that Michigan emulates this style of voyeuristic gameplay, in which you're the watcher who's 'forced to act', does strike something of a chord with me.

The main things about the game that strike me as a little off are the 'points' system and the voice acting/translation.

The game has a simple three category system for determining the value of what you're filming, and if you can focus on something to film then it'll be one of the three:

Suspense
Immoral
Erotic

'Suspense' is pretty much just anything you film anything of important; I'm kind of assuming the names for these categories are poorly translated, since they kinda get the gist of what they mean but don't always make sense in the context of the game. You never really film any 'suspense' as such, and usually when you do film something and it comes under suspense it's just a point of interest (I fail to see how me investigating a photocopier could ever involve any 'suspense').

Immoral is more obvious, it's basically just any sort of underhanded or negative act you do in game. Watching a girl get chomped on by a monster or letting your reporter fall over a log because it would make good TV both fall into this category. Calling it 'Immoral' kinda gets to the point of what it is but still isn't a perfect description. It's basically anything which involves you ignoring your humanity just to get a good scoop, and characters will react to you differently dependent on whether or not you're underhanded about the way you film these things.

Erotic is, well, it's just basically being a perv. Looking in the women's locker room, checking out a lady in the shower, etc. Again, 'Erotic' kinda gets to the point but probably isn't the best description. 'Lurid' might be a better label.



As far as morality systems go I think it's interesting, morality systems are pretty standard in most modern games but weren't when Michigan came out, and I do like the idea that my choices in a game affect how characters see me, and I like the idea that the kind of journalism I go for affects how I'm viewed. That said, I do feel as though none of the categories have that much to do with realistic journalism. None of the categories really fit into a particular style of journalism, as Suspense or Immoral could both easily be spun for Tabloid or Broadsheet stories, and Erotic seems more like soft porn content than sleazy journalism.

I feel like a better approach would have been to have 'forthright journalism' – where you try to save everybody, do the right thing, and be honest with the story (like a videogame Anderson Cooper, and you better be ready to cry on camera!); 'underhanded journalism' – where you're willing to let people die for good footage, film fellow reports crying and generally emoting for the sake of footage, and be willing to spin pretty much anything to sell a story; and 'sleazy journalism' – where you basically just perv on female characters, collect gossip and any salacious information you find as you go along on fellow reporters and other characters and basically just ignore the main story.

I feel like maybe some of this was in the original Japanese version and it's just been washed away by the bad translation but I'm not sure; there is some pretty bad Engrish in this game, so it's a distinct possibility.

Speaking of which!

...the voice acting is terrible in this game -_-

Seriously.

Very, very bad.

Imagine a world in which horrific monsters stalk alleyways and backstreets, taking innocent victims under the cover of the night and devouring them whole! Into this put a band of heroes, forced to cope with the terrifying monstrosities that confront them as they desperately try to make their escape.

Enter the world of!

...RESIDENT EVIL.

Err, I mean, Michigan: Report from Hell.

Sorry.

It's hard to tell the voice-acting apart in these two sometimes.

Joking aside, the parallel is apt, though kind of sad. Given the number of years between the two games you would have thought translation and voice-acting standards would have improved, Michigan's actors are slightly better than RE's but they're just as wooden and incapable of expressing proper emotion, and this coupled with the pretty poor script makes a lot of the dialogue pretty unbearable at times.

We get lines like: “Art is Expression! Expression, I say.”

Which probably doesn't sound too bad really, then you realise it's said by the most annoying character in the entirety of games.

Brisco.

He permanently sounds like an annoying 7 yr old throughout the game:

http://youtu.be/iEOVd_6w0Io

-_-

Seriously, I will pay for quality voice-acting, aslong as I never have to hear anything that bad coming from a character's mouth ever again. Hell, even half-decent acting can't be that bad, I'd spring for that!

Anything is better than that ^^^

I guess in Michigan's case it's more a case of it being a small title, like Siren, that the publisher just shoved out the door to get a little extra cash and didn't really expect a huge amount of revenue from, so they didn't really bother to invest that much, but still, it detracts from the game. Something's lost with the lack of a proper translation.

Moving on...

One pretty cool aspect (though pretty much the norm for horror games these days) is the disturbing, thing-like monsters that inhabit the game, maybe it's more a personal thing that I think they're so cool but some of the designs are particularly horrifying. Being able to look at a monster and see a man's face on it's body or a twisted stub of an arm... *shudders*



It strikes me as good body horror anyway, even if the rest of the game falters somewhat.

The only other thing I can think to comment on is probably the linearity of the game. I can't really make the reporter go where I went or check out rooms I want, I just follow them and then point out the obvious clue or tell them there's a face-eating monster stood behind them. Seems a shame. A little more control over which doors the reporter opens, where things go, would have been nice. It is very linear in that sense, which on top of the fact your crew sound about 5 years old makes finding clues seem a bit like spotting the obvious at times.

Finishing the game gives you a little more depth to the story, though the European version doesn't make it obvious, reading up on the game has shown me that there's a lot of replay value (if you can stand the voice acting), as each level has a range of different cinematics to get with various characters, aswell as objects of interest to go back and look for. There's also multiple costumes to select and some sort of Dance Club extra... yeah, it's sort of typical Japanese survival horror really.

The ending, or atleast the lead upto the ending, gives you some idea of what's going on before everything hits the fan but not enough to explain everything away. I think the main thing that sticks with me about the game is just the terrible voice-acting …which is kind of sad really.

An interesting idea though, if poorly executed at times.

Horror games don't always do well, it's a hard genre to make work just right; unlike, say, racing games or action games where aesthetics and atmosphere are secondary to the mechanics horror is all about atmosphere; a game can be great horror but have piss-poor mechanics or vice versa have great mechanics and play well but not really feel very scary. Just having an axe-wielding murderer in your game doesn't instantly make it good horror. You have to carefully craft the experience so the player feels like they're really a part of the world and feels as though they really are in danger if you want to create really good horror – which, needless to say, is difficult to do.

For awhile atleast, the PS2 provided the right sort of space for these types of games to flourish, a mix of the right sort of technical capacity and a sub-set of developers morbidly inclined enough to want to scare people silly. The result was a slew of really successful horror games - many of them from Japan - that really defined the decade, including, but not limited to, the likes of the Silent Hill, Fatal Frame and Siren series', and it's Siren I want to talk about today.



The original Siren game - or Forbidden Siren as it's called in Europe - was an exemplary piece of survival horror, it took the familiar premise of survivors trapped in a zombie apocalypse and added realism, depth, challenge and atmosphere to create a really innovative horror experience, atleast for the really diehard survival horror fans. For some however it was a very troubled and problematic game.

I remember Siren being one of those games that if you had no interest in survival horror or Japanese games it might easily have passed you by, it wasn't really at the top of anybody's list when it came out, obviously got some attention but not a stack, and the reviews for it seemed to be a mixture of praise for the atmosphere and hysterical ravings about the terrible control system and overall frustration the gaming experience produced. For a long time I was on the fence about buying it, anybody who's read the Amazon customer reviews of the game will probably understand why, reaction was extremely mixed from consumers, some saying it was ok but didn't work that well, others complaining that it was just a shit game and broken and a small but very vocal minority lauding it as one of the best pieces of survival horror in years. Now, I'll be honest, I probably sit somewhere very close to the last group, (obviously I wouldn't be writing a retrospective if I didn't think it was worth it!), but at the same time I can appreciated how flawed and frustrating the game is at the same time.

So what does the game do well?

In brief: It makes the player feel helpless, it creates a good sense of atmosphere and has a very weird and unnerving narrative.

One of the first things that strikes you playing through Siren, especially in a darkened room, is the atmosphere. It has touches of what made Silent Hill so great - the dull oppressive atmosphere, the all-consuming fog, the feeling of being watched (even when you aren't sure there's anyone to watch you). From the way environments look, to the way enemies seem to pursue you relentlessly, to the sounds, everything seems to fit about the atmosphere, even the way your character moves so uselessly and the fragility of your character, all add to your sense of helplessness.



Predominantly Siren relies on a 'sneak and avoid' mechanic, with the player able to engage in combat but discouraged from it by their limited health and stamina and the relative ease with which the Shibito (the game's zombies) can alert fellow shibito to your presence and swarm you. Instead the player must creep around in the dark in a variety of indoor and outdoor locations, looking for ways to proceed and then searching for the clues that will help them move onto the next stage, all while evading detection. Metal Gear Solid it's not, but you do get to feel as though you're always on the outside looking in, not in control, not really capable of doing much other than hiding and sneaking. Even when you do finally get a gun you hardly feel like Rambo.

Part of what makes it work so well is just how much you're made to feel as though you're really as helpless and weak as an ordinary person would be in some sort of zombie apocalypse. When you hold your weapon up to attack you move sluggishly - like somebody not used to fighting; when you run you tire easily; when you're attacked you die after a few blows (for some characters even just one or two blows). And though these aspects will undoubtably annoy some (something I'll come back to later), they all help to add to the sense of who you are within the game – a weak and helpless character. I guess those last few points are more aspects of how well the game immerses the player, but it's obvious a ridiculous amount of time has been put into helping the player relate and feel like the ordinary people they play as, which itself helps sustain the game's atmosphere, and atmosphere is key to the game.



I have mentioned the sense of helplessness you feel as you play, and the sense that you never really feel completely in control (particularly since Shibito can't die permanently so you have no real way of permanently removing the threat they pose), but a lot of what permeates Siren's atmosphere is more subtle. For example the Shibito are unpleasant to look at and the strange noises they make are almost inhuman but they aren't scary by themselves, infact they're easily handled most of the time, it's only in conjunction with the complicated control system, the relative difficulty and cryptic nature of the puzzles that you need to progress and the drab, dark feel of the world you inhabit that makes them scary. The way that the music unnerves you as you slowly creep round a Shibito, waiting, carefully watching till you see a gap in their patrol pattern and take your chance. In this sense it's not so much one thing that makes Siren's atmosphere work but everything in concert that really makes Siren scary.

Probably a minor point but worth mentioning in addendum anyway is that the plot also has some really innovative aspects to it, relating to the cause behind the events of the game. Without giving too much of the plot away, what you do find out about the cause of it all is seemingly more like something from a Lovecraft horror story than a modern horror game, and not only adds to the sense of originality about Siren's story but also adds a unique sci-fi twist to the story - which you really don't expect in a zombie game!

So what doesn't the game do so well?

Probably the most obvious negative is the game's abysmal English language track, which really does sound like it was done by a bunch of people who've never acted before – many of them with obviously very English accents, and little or no attempt to seem Japanese. The translation itself doesn't seem dire, just poorly acted, and the end result detracts significantly from the sense of immersion – I really can't stress how much this is the game's one biggest flaw, everything else seems potentially forgiveable but the awful voice-acting really does take so much from the atmosphere. The voice acting is especially punishing at times because hearing certain lines read you get the sense that in the original Japanese slight intonations and aspects of character motivation were being conveyed which are all but lost in the 'omg I just left drama school and got my first acting job' style dub.



Then there's the control and action system. For the most part the control system is alright, it's not the slick relatively free movement of games like RE4 or Dead Space but it's not tank controls either, it's quick enough that you can mostly do what you want, without failing miserably. That said there are moments when it can be quite rigid and relatively unresponsive, not so much because it controls poorly but because it's not that flexible and the game itself is relatively unforgiving if you don't manage to press buttons at the exact moment you need to. A good example of this is the way you can climb up some ledges, now the animation for this is fairly slow and laborious and basically involves your character catching hold of the ledge, then slowly lifting themselves up; not so bad you'd think, and when you're in a safe environment it's perfectly fine, but it becomes annoying once the game gets dangerous and you're either running from enemies or trying to avoid their attacks.

When you do try to grab a ledge the animation starts and it takes several seconds to complete, now obviously, like I've said, this is ok when you're safe but when you're being chased or attacked by an enemy it becomes particular unforgiving, because no matter how hard you mash buttons your character really won't climb any faster and will more than likely get knocked down or killed if you're not quick enough – this coupled with the fact characters die after relatively few hits (compared to characters in most games) means the controls feel frustratingly slow at times. Attacking is similar, with very rigidly animated attacks, sometimes you can catch an enemy off-guard but if you don't time your attacks just right it's very easy to find yourself dying because of how inflexible the controls are.

The problem in both instances is that, more often than not, you can see attacks coming or react quicker (like in the instance of trying to climb a ledge to escape an enemy) than the controls themselves will respond; the game gives you no ability to 'hurry' certain movements or to choose between making full attacks and just defensive attacks to push an enemy away. So it ends up feeling quite frustrating.

The game also has problems in terms of difficulty and the continue system. These aren't so much weaknesses in the sense that they were poorly done but more than they seem to favour a more old-fashioned style of 'trial-and-error' gameplay that modern gamers are less comfortable with – and in some respects it's vaguely reminiscent of the punishing trial and error 'fumble around until you find what you need to progress' style gameplay of a lot 90's console games. You sometimes know what you need to do to progress, but often you're looking for random items that can be combined to somehow help you to proceed, which, combined with how weak your character is, how difficult they are to control, how limited items are, how loose the continue system is and the fact Shibito get back up again real soon after you put them down, can lead to some 'awfully' frustrating moments. And when I say 'awfully' I mean incredibly frustrating.



This is especially true in some of the later stages – atleast one of which has a very tight time limit (undisclosed within the game), where you're often assailed by multiple foes, some of whom may be armed with deadly rifles. Have I mentioned they're ridiculously accurate with said rifles and one-to-two shots will kill most characters? Yeah, it's that hard. Much like with the atmosphere, what makes Siren so frustrating is not so much one single aspect of the game but the cumulative effect of all the different aspects of the gameplay that make it so frustrating – indeed, much of what makes it a really good piece of horror and excellent survival horror is also what makes it so frustrating to play and potentially unappealing to the vast majority of gamers.

Siren's a flawed game in some respects but it's also an excellent piece of horror, I can't help but feel that putting the control, continue and difficulty problems aside the only thing that really mars the game, the EU release atleast, is the god awful vocal talent, everything else, though terribly punishing, is atleast forgivable. I know I'll be playing the game for years to come ...just maybe on mute a whole lot ; )

That is the question.

Whether it tis... ok screw that, I won't bore you with a bad Shakespeare joke! XD

But I thought I'd ask the question which seems to be getting more and more pertinent in gaming today:

Do we really need to shoot stuff?

Really?!?

Games for a long time have covered a variety of subjects and activities – from puzzle solving, to sports, to fantasy, to waging wars long since fought and even household chores and pastimes. From it's humble beginnings gaming has expanded out to allow players to adventure, to explore, to hunt, to shoot, to fight, to play, to make decisions and, most of all, to win.



One of the most dominant genres of gaming (atleast as far as the last decade or so is concerned) has been shooters, and a lot of the biggest games of the last decade or so have been shooters in one form or another, and even before the rise of mainstream gaming games where you did shoot were pretty big.

So it's obvious enough that shooters are enjoyable and have wide appeal, but do we need to shoot things to enjoy ourselves? Is that the best way of feeling in control or is it just the 'in' thing at the moment? Will we move forward to a time when shooters don't dominate, where you can play a game like Fallout or Skyrim and never have to face a single threat armed...?

It's an interesting question, with plenty of scope for expansion, but for this piece I really just want to concentrate on that central question of whether or not we really need to shoot or to kill in games to enjoy stuff. Could we see ourselves playing forty hours of a game with no violence, with no destruction or murder? If yes (and without a doubt there are already games like that and people who've spent those hours), could we ever see a game like that becoming the year's best seller and biggest hit?

At this point in the industry, technologically and culturally, I doubt it, but who knows, maybe in the future things will change. If we look at the way games have evolved they've evolved alongside the hardware and technology at work behind the scenes, as what you could create on-screen became more realistic and as more people got involved, the industry (sort of) started to clean it's act up, so for example a lot of the low-polygon obviously skimpy outfits that developers could have put their female characters in in the pursuit of *cough* realistic character portrayal earlier on became less acceptable as the thing on screen started to look more and more human. So too a lot of the more unrealistic aspects of game mechanics have been pushed aside as more and more realism has crept into games.



A good example of this would be to look at old school gaming icons like Mario or Sonic: in the days of 8-bit/16-bit games a plumber who runs around brick landscapes escaping into pipes and fighting turtles that throw boomerangs, or a blue hedgehog that curls up into a ball to go super fast so he race through levels to stop an evil, mad scientist whilst collecting rings made sense (some sense); the art was simplistic, the gameplay simplistic, so we didn't really apply real-world expectations to it - Not like we would of today's games anyway. Think about it, could you imagine a super-realistic game today being released that revolved around the concepts in play in either Sonic or Mario? Perhaps with 8-bit or 16-bit graphics we might not think about it too much but with realistic graphics we'd probably start to question the surreality of what we were watching/playing.

So game culture has changed with the times, we expect a lot more reality from games today than we did 15, 10 – even 5 years ago, because of that shift in culture and technology. Games that 5 or 10 years ago were ground-breaking and looked amazing now pale in comparison to much of what's available today. In short: the gaming world changes very quickly, so just as it's true shooters are big today it's just as possible that something else will take over from them tomorrow.

I think it's important at this junction to point out that although shooters are a big thing, and a very dominant part of the industry, it would be grossly unfair to the rest of gaming, gamers and developers, to say that everything revolves around shooting, killing and destroying things – despite what some elements of the media may believe. Even when a game does involve a lot of shooting and killing it doesn't necessarily end up being what defines the game, more often than not the shooting just fills the gap between story, the 'action' in-between the narrative.



Most of us tend to just take the shooting aspects for granted and instead concentrate on the story or themes at play – for example do we think Mass Effect 2 is a shooter? Do we remember it for the gunfights scattered throughout the game? Because there were a lot of those; no, we remember it for the dialogue, the story and the sense of morality that intertwines much of the game.

Even with an FPS like Battlefield 3 the shooter element often comes second to the team elements or to the competitive elements – we don't sit around thinking intently about what we actually do when we pull the trigger or how 'killed' somebody is once they've been shot, we just think about beating them. We think about our killstreaks, our place on the leaderboard, how well we're winning – in short even in shooting games it's not really the shooting that's key, it's integral to our enjoyment, yes, but no less or no more so than psychics or aesthetics.

This may sound like something of a cop-out considering the whole point of this piece is the relevance of shooting in games - as if just not being conscious of something within a game simply makes it disappear but it's not that so much, rather, it shows that even in games where you do spend a lot of time shooting and killing people it's more about the story or themes that surround the gunplay than the actual gunplay. Which is probably why a game like Bodycount can fail so miserably, because there's nothing beyond the gameplay other than a flimsy plotline.

What does this say about shooting as a mechanic? That really it's only a tool for creating a sense of involvement and engagement with the virtual world and not a end unto itself, showing again that it too may find itself relegated to a niche in gaming someday, should technology advance far enough. Perhaps shooting as a mechanic then is shorthand for player interactivity, it's well-known that people have loved playing out wars, chasing down bad guys and engaging in gun battles, and that sells, so why change anything? It's like exploding barrels in videogames or unrealistic depictions of women, it's not so much that the industry doesn't know it could move on from the misconceptions of the past but that there's that sense of inertia about change, because if they do step too far out of those pre-established conventions and norms they'll feel as though they're taking risks, even when it's not really a risk. Without somebody leading the way it's often easier just to stay exactly where you are.



That said, lots of games do challenge that 'gunplay is necessary' convention, often finding very profitable (albeit relatively small) niches within the industry. Games like Amnesia, Super Meat Boy and Limbo prove that shooting isn't everything – and indeed, that even having weapons isn't everything. Adventure games are also a good example of a niche of games that shows that shooting isn't everything.

A number of larger titles, aswell, eschew violence completely in favour of good writing, puzzles and a general sense of challenge. Portal being a good example of this, keeping to some conventions yet breaking others: it's First-Person, and you do 'shoot', but you're shooting a portal gun, not a weapon, it's practically harmless and only use is as a means of transportation. The game became a success because it was intelligent, funny, and challenging, and it and it's sequel went on to be massive hits. Showing that it's not so much how destructive you can be in a game that makes a game successful but how interesting, how intelligent, how creative the developers can be that creates interest and a desire to play.

Nobody would look at Mario or Kirby games and declare them likely to lead to homicidal rampages (well, I say that, but there are a few people crazy enough to...), neither really contains anything near real violence or shooting yet they sell millions. True, it could be argued they represent the more 'family friendly' side of gaming, so they're more likely to appeal to casual gamers or people who buy games with little or no idea of what they're actually buying but they still represent a portion of gamers who are quite happy not to shoot things, even if they aren't particularly 'hardcore' about their gaming interests.



Still, though, those sorts of games don't tend to bring in the mature audience – and by mature I don't necessarily mean older but rather the gamers looking for an experience, for something new; looking to be intellectually challenged while they play. If I had to say anything hinted at the way games may go in the future then I'd have to say Heavy Rain is probably it, ignoring for the moment the game's failings.

Heavy Rain focuses more on the relationships between the characters, the evolving story and the tension created by the events on-screen (much like a movie or tv program might) to draw the player in. It's more involved, more intelligent, and more engaging than a regular game and doesn't rely on shooting to achieve it; ofcourse it's also kind of fails in some respects – seriously, who want's to press a button to say 'Jason!' or cook meals for a kid? Elements like these remind us why fantasy games have done so well – because they allow that escape. Heavy Rain succeeded despite it's failings as a game (the lack of choice at times and often mundane gameplay aspects) because it appealed to a side of gamers that most shooters can't satisfy, it appealed to people who wanted to play a (relatively) ordinary person.

Though I wouldn't class Heavy Rain as a great game it was fairly original – I won't say completely original because plenty of games have done different aspects of what Heavy Rain tried to do in the past and succeeded, Heavy Rain just managed to do all that in one game. It's achievement was more that it set out to be different and to show that games that were different could be successful, regardless of how dominant some types of games may be.



Which brings me back to what I think is at the heart of the 'to shoot or not to shoot' question: what it is to be a 'games player': Most importantly that's wanting to enjoy yourself, wanting to be somebody else and experience new worlds and new stories. Sure we want to battle evil aliens across the surface of moons or mow down rows of gangsters in old America, but we also want real-life stories, stories that remind us of our own lives but are more exciting. Games have become generally popular not only because they entertain or tell stories but also because they empower the player in ways that a reader of a novel or a watcher of a movie isn't.

Shooting has been one of the go-to mechanics when it comes to gameplay, one of the easiest ways to interest players, but like all things within gaming as the technology evolves and games become more sophisticated it too may find itself relegated to a niche - or atleast garnering less of the limelight - as games mature.

Perhaps the future of innovation lies more with digital distribution than anything, since it frees up developers from having to worry about the cost of putting something on a disc and shipping it round the country (or world) perhaps we'll see more innovation digitally as innovation becomes less risky. Afterall it's not so much that games without shooting haven't existed before or haven't succeeded, but that there's never been that sense that that's where the industry is going. A sign usually predicated by the slew of copycat games that pop up as 'less creative' developers try to capitalise on the success of others.

For now atleast I happy to play the myriad of shooters out there, but I'm hoping we'll get more from games in the future, more experiences, more stories, more innovation.

I typically tend to write about big issues in gaming, long-running trends or themes about gaming as a whole but from time to time it's interesting to take a step back from modern gaming and examine some forgotten gems of classic videogaming.

System Shock 2 is one such game.

As a retrospective piece I won't go into too much detail about the history surrounding the game or it's creation (most of which can be found online anyway), but rather I'll talk about what made System Shock 2 an enjoyable game – and indeed still makes it enjoyable to play today, aswell as what it didn't do so well.



Probably one of the most fundamental aspects of bringing a game to life and making it feel real is having a good storyline, one that sits well with the gameplay mechanics, doesn't feel too forced or contrived but at the same time doesn't feel too apart from the enjoyment of the game, something System Shock 2's storyline does pretty well.

Simply put: A global corporation is looking to advance it's own agenda, and so, in agreement with the military sends a joint scientific/military expedition into the deepest reaches of space with newly developed faster-than-light technology, only for something to go horribly wrong when it gets there. You play the part of a soldier put into cryogenic sleep at some point after the initial incident and must fight your way through the creatures that have taken over the ship and try to save what's left of the crew, and the ship, and find some way home to Earth.

Ofcourse, it's not as simple as that.

There's a lot more going on, to do with the initial incident that starts it all off, the organisms that take over the ship, the hostility of the ship's AI to its own crew and the over-arching malevolence that hang over everything that happens in the game, all the way upto the final showdown.



Feeding into this is the atmosphere the game creates, from the sense of loneliness you get from never really meeting another person properly and only hearing people stories after the fact, to the way enemies or even ghostly apparitions will seem to just 'pop-up' at times, to the whole feel of the ship being that something 'isn't right' – from the robots that blurt pleasantries out at you as they attempt to kamikaze detonate themselves right next to you to the nonsensical announcements by the ship's AI to the status of the amenities or events happening on the ship in the near future.

Sound design aswell plays into this, I have to say System Shock 2 has some of the best sound design I've experienced in a horror game bar the early Silent Hill games or the Siren series, it's hard to define exactly what makes it so creepy but the combination of long silences, little music and the noises adversaries make really add to the atmosphere of the game. Your character spends most of the game silently listening to the audio diaries of dead crew-members recounting their experiences on the ship, which is itself unnerving. There's also the sounds your enemies make – the way the most common enemies, the hybrids, won't shout abuse or grunt, but will instead (in distorted or broken English) ask you to kill them or tell you to run before they see you – it's the sense of conflict between what you hear and what they're doing that makes it so disturbing, because you don't expect somebody trying to kill you to warn you or to tell you to run.

These are probably two of the most obvious aspects about what made the game so enjoyable, but also integral was its ability to fuse role-playing game mechanics of the day with those of a first-person shooter.

Typically in first person shooters of the era you'd walk around, pick up some guns (of increasing size usually), shoot some bad guys (also of increasing size), pull some switches (these usually stayed the same size, but could change appearance) and then you'd end a level. Around this would sit the story – either through text or cutscenes, but essentially the mechanics were this simple.

Typically in role-playing games you'd spend a lot of time walking around, talking to other characters, battling monsters, then levelling up and using fixed classes to assign those skill points to work your way up a particular skill tree. The systems at play weren't as advanced as they are today, and you didn't have the kind of 'skill overlap' that a lot of modern RPGs have moved towards in recent years (Skyrim, for example). Instead you'd usually pick a class and work your way up it, often with some choice about which powers/skills to have and what order to get them in.

In System Shock 2 both these mechanics were merged together, resulting in the structured narrative of a FPS (and a fair amount of the button pushing aswell) with the choice and class levelling system of an RPG – so the warrior, mage and healer, classes typical of a fantasy RPG were replaced with the Marine, the OSA operative and the engineer. It meant an FPS with much more depth but also an RPG with a much faster pace and more action than people were used to.



Also worth mentioning is the random mechanic at work behind the gameplay, typically in FPSs there are a certain number of enemies in a level and therefore so much ammo in a level, enough, maybe more than enough, for you to kill them all. In System Shock 2 levels were typically designed with a set number of enemies already in place, with set patrol patterns, but if these were killed new enemies would spawn (or more accurately be respawned) to replace them. So instead of a system with fixed ammo counters, and levels that could be cleared, the player would continually have to watch for new enemies popping up (usually behind them).

Ammo and items were handled in much the same way, typically each level had a certain amount of items stashed in predetermined spots but with the possibility that a downed enemy would be carrying something. What heightened the tension even more was the fact that whatever you did pick up from an enemy usually wasn't that much (usually a small amount of cash or a simple item.) so you spent a lot of the game desperately trying to scrounge up supplies from stashes around the ship to protect yourself and progress.

If you've played RE4 or Dead Space – or more obviously, Bioshock, then this kind of system is probably pretty familiar to you, each of these runs on something similar, though minus the random enemy element in the case of the first two. This system was especially important because of the amount of backtracking required in System Shock 2, the ship was split up into reasonably realistic (for a sci-fi game anyway) areas of a spaceship, most of which you had to make repeated return journeys to to get everything you needed.

Probably the best way to describe what works well with System Shock 2 when it does work well is to compare it to a continuous game of cat and mouse, with you always at odds with the game, and seemingly winning some moments then potentially losing disastrously at others. Though a lot of what happens in the game is pre-determined there's enough random elements to keep you on your toes, sometimes you'll feel you've bested the game and are managing to survive well, only in the next moment to have to use up almost all your ammo and find yourself struggling to survive again.

In a sense, this is what the game does so well, it makes you a survivor, it tells you a story while stopping every couple of minutes to scare the hell out of you or remind you that you're only human and can still die easily.



So onto the bad, huh?

Probably one of the least appreciable aspects of System Shock 2 to the modern discerning gamer would be the graphics, they've aged horribly. In some respects it doesn't really matter – System Shock 2's strength lies in the atmosphere it creates, from the sounds around you, the way enemies can appear at random behind you, to the quality of dialogue and voice-acting in the audio logs you pick up, as such even today System Shock 2 is still a remarkably enjoyable game, but most people will still look at it and think 'ugly'.

To be fair, they'd be right, time hasn't done any favours to the visuals of System Shock 2, and in retrospect a lot of things visually could do with a touch-up. Notably so is the lack of individuality or identity to any of the crew members of adversaries you meet – much of the game's horror derives from the fact you're killing former humans, many of whom were forced to become monsters, and there are even several notable examples in the audio-logs of crew members who've changed or been altered. Yet you never see any of these, atleast not recognisably so, which seems like a fault.

The same's true of the few still living people you meet, and the corpses you stumble upon, as a kid playing the game and seeing corpses hung from the ceiling with expressions of sheer agony and horror cut across their faces was horrifying, even to this day the nihilism that underlies much of how the crew died is striking, the sense of hopelessness you get from seeing a man collapsed in a corner dead with a gun at his side, or a crew woman lying amongst a cluster of bullet-ridden container crates with a blood pooling around her is really powerful.

Still, the fact that you spend much of the game learning about how a small number of crewmen and women desperately spent their last few days alive trying to evade the force overcoming their ship, leads me to wonder how much more impact the audio recordings would have had if you'd went from listening to somebody talking to normally to finding them hung from the rafters or with their brains blown out in a holosuite. I can't help but feel some sort of individual identity to these corpses and to the few living characters – or even the hybrids, would have added more to the sense that these were real crew members, especially since each audio log carried a small picture of the crew member who recorded the report - imagine what effect it'd have to listen to a man recounting numerous mundane logs, only to later find them swinging from the ceiling.



Ofcourse, this is very much the benefit of hindsight (and superior hardware for that matter), in today's games we're used to having character who look like people and not blurry, blocky masses. For it's time System Shock 2 did have decent enough graphics, even if by today's standards they wouldn't do so well.

Another big negative is that, although the story itself is pretty solid and the elements well-balanced through the course of the game some aspects come across as a little derivative, I guess it's probably safe to talk about this without spoiler tags (you don't need them for 14 year old games, right?) but I'm mainly talking about the enemies, and maybe this ties into what I've talked about above but some of the enemies, especially later in the game, aren't that well-designed or imaginative.

The parasitic lifeform which overcomes the ship in it's hybrid stage is quite interesting, but the later stages doesn't look so great. The premise being that these parasitic organism are born from eggs – in what seems like a pretty clear homage to the facehuggers from aliens, and then attach themselves to a human host through their nervous system. Not only this, but at a certain point the hosts/remaining crew of the ship become little more than potential biomass for the parasites and so are recycled into towering monsters of flesh and while this is interesting - and very scary on more than just visible level (as a monster literally made up of people should be) - in the game it doesn't come across so well. Like with the hybrids and the crew members, the rumbler (as the creature's called) doesn't really have much definition or presence, and though you can see human faces across it's mass (very unsettling when you realise) everything's too blurry and blocky to have the kind of impact it should have.



The annelids also seem pretty unimaginative, they're little more than worms (as the name might suggest). I imagine if System Shock 2 was made today really interesting things could be done with the Annelid design to make them look like more than just worms, but that's pretty much what they look like, space worms. Or space spiders, in the case of some of them. I guess in the case of all of these it's more about how much developers were held back by the technical limitations of the day than anything else, but still if I had to point to anything that strikes me as off about the game it's the way you can go from fighting genuinely creepy hybrids or crazy robots to fighting blurry flesh monstrosities or space worms and space spiders.

Perhaps that's just me though.

All things said System Shock 2 still strikes me as a really powerful piece of science-fiction gaming, and indeed a powerful piece science-fiction storytelling, and did some pretty revolutionary things for a 1998 game, at a time when games themselves weren't that well developed as a medium.

I doubt System Shock 2 is everybody's cup of tea, but those of us interested in getting their horror fix whilst getting a sci-fi one at the same time whilst also being treated to solid gameplay mechanics, atmosphere and a powerful story, System Shock 2 is still something to be experienced, just, you know, try not to think about the space spiders too much.

In the last generation or so of consoles character design has become increasingly important in games, not just in the sense that characters need to be well-designed to be appeal to players but also in the sense that player choice in the matter has become increasingly important. The steady improvement in the capabilities of gaming hardware and the increasing potential profitability and cost of modern games has meant an increasing desire by developers to create games you really want to play and enjoy, and a big part of having a game you want to play is having a character you want to play as.

Why do either appeal to us though?

For the most part, static characters (the term I'll used to refer to characters who can't be altered by the player either in sound, appearance or action) appeal to us because they offer a fantasised image of the sort of person we want to play as, so typically they're heroic, attractive and well-built men or pro-active, attractive and sexualised women. It's debatable whether we truly want either, but those are the kinds of static characters that dominate.

In terms of flexible characters (the term I'll used to refer to characters who can be altered) it's about the ability of us to create a character who we feel comfortable with and even attached to. Customisability only works if you have a certain degree of choice though – being able to choose from three faces and two hairstyles makes creating a character more interesting but it doesn't really allow you to make a unique character that you feel is yours, which is what a lot of players want. Players tend to feel that the more choice there is the more unique and attached to them their character is - hence why so many online games offer customisable characters and then charge for extras to help make your character more 'unique', because they know some people want that level of individuality in their character.



But why choose either of these? Afterall what's the point in having character choice? Why do we want to character design over say background element design or scenery design in a game...? For example, why can I choose what the Dragonborn looks like in Skyrim or Commander Shepard in Mass Effect, but not 'Random Villager 1' or 'Random Space Tourist 1'? Why can I choose what my character looks like in ME but not what colour my ship is, or what design it is?

It's important to point out that it'd be wrong to argue we wouldn't don't want to affect these things in games if we could, because we would, if the amount of bile the internet spews up after each new game is released shows us anything then its that there are definitely people who would love to control every little aspect of a game - tweak bits, change others, or generally shape the game in the way they want to. No, it's not so much that we don't want that but that compared to other aspects we'd like choice over or for the game's developers to get just right, it's less important, choice can always be sacrificed for the sake of a better game. We'd rather have a solid game with static characters and a set backdrop than one where you can change background elements but nothing makes sense.

I dare say a AAA title where you had the chance to play it through and switch styles as you did so (Sci-fi to Western, to Post-Apocalyptic, to Fantasy, for example) would be massively popular and a cult classic (if they could get it to work,) mainly because people would love the ability to choose the sort of game they were playing as they played and to switch at will.

The problem is however, in order to create such a game, if we're talking a AAA title that is, it would require a lot more effort than most games do at the moment, and given the high investment cost of making videogames in general (AAA ones anyway) it's just not feasible at this point in time. Not to mention the complexities of realising the concept, getting the script to flow, and creating an engine that could handle background and setting changes on the fly with ease.

So in theory we could have a game where we control everything, but for the most part that isn't what interests people, what we want most is a story, a good story - with good characters, that entertains us. Control over the world, the elements within it, and our own character, is secondary to that enjoyment, and for that reason developers haven't really pushed it as important, because they know in a stand-off between having lots of choice in a game but poor gameplay or having a static storyline with static characters that's done really well, people will choose the later.



It's the same reason why, when we do get the chance to choose, it's focused more on foreground elements – like your character, your actions, your team members, than on background elements – like, say, for instance what random townsfolk look like or what colour horse is most common in the in-game world (one random background element there). The background elements in a game are important to us, and indeed affect how we feel about the game, but we'd much rather have interesting foreground elements or choice over those foreground elements than choice over the background.

Imagine if you started a game, but instead of getting to design the character you have to play as you did get to design 'Random Villager 1' or some other ancillary character you'll see only once or twice. You'd feel cheated, you'd think it was stupid and probably think it made no sense, primarily because it's not something that would affect us much in the game and it's the elements of a game that we experience the most that interest us and that we want some degree of control over, not the random background elements.

It's probably stating the obvious to say this but when we play games it's really all about us: we're what matters to us. We want control over the elements closest to us in game just as in real-life we want control over the things most important to us, because those things affect us the most – afterall you're going to be playing your character the whole game, so if you think he/she's ugly then it's going to annoy you a lot more than say a character you run into once in the game being ugly, because of how much time you'll spend relatively with each.

So to summarise so far: For the most part we get the sorts of choice we get in games at the moment because people do want choice, but games developers can't give complete choice yet, so instead they attempt to offer a compromise and let the player customise certain aspects of their character and keep others static, because of the increased workload choice gives us. Not all developers do though, a lot of games, possibly still the majority of games, followed a fixed story, with static characters, foreground and background elements, either because it's simpler or because they know they can do that better.

Which leads us to the question of why?

Why choose a static, fixed, character over one the player can alter? What are the benefits and drawbacks?

For the most part having static characters is simply an expression of the effort it takes to make games, it takes effort to make a character but it takes more to give player's choice, so having a fixed character is simpler. It also means a character can have a specific, fixed personality, which helps when you're trying to write a good narrative – if you know how a character is motivated, how they'll act then you can know how the people around them will react, potentially giving your game more realistic characterisation and dialogue and improving the chances people will enjoy it.

Also, generally speaking there are conventions about what makes a good hero, developers know that players generally want to play attractive, athletic, sexually-stereotypical characters, so they stick to these sorts of character outlines and make someone that (potentially) most people will enjoy playing as, although like with choice this has it's own set of problems.



Typically with your standard hero if your character seems too bland you're not going to enjoy playing as him/her as much. When developers create a character it's always a balancing act between making them generally interesting enough that they'll appeal to as many people as possible but also making them unique enough that they seem real and don't seem bland and too stereotypical. Making a static character is not as time-consuming as giving the player choice about their character's identity but it does throw up it's own set of problems related to how players feel about the character they're playing as.

Character design is it's own double-edged sword in many respects, because just as you create a character which interests some people you'll disinterest others, and vice versa, though obviously it's not an even split; you also have to contend with player apathy – it might not be that players hate a character or love a character but that they have no emotional reaction at all to a character and just find them forgettable, which in it's own way can be worse than a character provoking a negative reaction, because atleast if a character is hated it's a reaction and it's something that makes them memorable.

Isaac Clarke for example from the Dead Space series is a good example of this at work, in the first game his lack of voice and character allows him to be a vessel for the player to put a bit of themselves, that character void is something we subconsciously fill almost automatically. Therefore we're more indifferent to Isaac in Dead Space because he has no real character. Fast forward to Dead Space 2 and we can have more of a reaction to Isaac, because he now has his own personality and we can therefore get a firmer grasp on the type of person he is, we can love/hate his accent, think he talks too much or not enough, etc. Giving him a voice also creates the opportunity for us not to like that voice.

Looking at series like Uncharted, Duke Nukem, Gears of War, all these franchises have characters we're familiar with, and can have a particular reaction to. This helps attract us to a game if they're the sort of character we like, but can also put us off a game if they're not, but it's about identity, the clearer a reaction we have to a game – love or hate, the easier it is for us to decide whether or not we want to play that game, and thus put money down on it (which at the end of the day is what its all about) and having static characters helps in that regard.



Mass Effect is also worth mentioning in passing here, though it is mostly a game about choice it does attempt to bridge the two worlds of static and flexible characters by giving players the choice of customising or just going with the standard male or female Shepard. So in a sense you can choose to be unique or go with a pre-packaged model. It's not exactly the same thing, because Shepard is still a pretty flexible character but it's a compromise between the two.

So why choose flexible characters? Why allow the player to make their own character?

The clearest benefit is that as the player gets to choose who their character is they're more likely to enjoy playing as them, they're also more likely to actually remember the character after they finish the game rather them just being a blur. Also, getting to create your own character can be a satisfying experience, from just getting to design their face, to the type of character creation you get in games like Skyrim where you choose their appearance then get to train them up in the sort of skills you want.

If playing games was simply about being, say, a knight or an archer then we'd probably wouldn't have the level of choice we do in games, this ability to mix and merge skill sets and be two or three things at once. Part of what we enjoy in games is having rigid, fixed, structure to a game, but also part of what we enjoy is the freedom to make decisions, and the more choice we have over our character and the way we play the happier we are generally.

Choice allows us to create who we want but it comes with its own set of problems. Most obvious of which is that typically games where you do get to affect the type of character you play typically involve the player having a more distant relationship with their character – in Skyrim for example, your character never speaks, never properly interacts with other characters like a person does, so there's no rapport. You're simply told things and they reply to you as if you've spoken, which can lead to a disconnect, even if you feel a sense of connection with your character's appearance.

Ofcourse it's also true that not everybody cares about feeling connected to their character, for some just having a character look the way they want is enough, but for true connection with the character it means something is lacking – in much the same way that many characters from 90's videogames lacked a sense of character, despite having a fixed appearance and identity, because they never talked so they never felt properly human to the player.



Player freedom is always an issue in character design choice and often games can offer a 'restricted' type of freedom in order to maximise the benefits and downsides of static vs flexible characters. Simply put, in restricted freedom games the more choice a player is given the more is taken away in other respects, with choice streamlined in favour of a more 'semi-choice' option. Open choice often means losing out in terms of realism or characters not interacting as fully because of the effort it requires on the part of the developers, so instead some developers pick and choose which elements are static and which customisable. A good example of this sort of compromise is again Mass Effect, where you can change your character's appearance to a large extent and aswell as make choices about your actions and dialogue, but once you've decided their gender their voice is static and the plot largely predefined (aside from a selection of plot points - choices which, even so, don't alter the missions you're given or the order you do them in.)

In this sense Mass Effect gives you some choice - over what order certain missions are done, over your character's appearance and behaviour (and thus NPCs reactions to them) but at the same time keeps things fairly structured – despite being able to play the game numerous times and with differing outcomes (and effects in ME2) the events that happen, when they happen and how they play out (regardless of dialogue choices) remain fairly static.

The benefit of this is that you get a character who in most regards is fairly structured, like a regular, static character; which means you can have NPCs who react in a particular way to him/her and he can react back, adding to the drama, which really isn't as possible with a silent character. It's more work (more dialogue choices inevitably mean more dialogue and so more voice-acting) but the plus side is this sort of structured character can have more dramatic impact, they're less like simply a slot to put things in and more like an individual, and thus somebody you'll likely remember after you finish playing.

This generation of games especially seems to have more than it's fair share of generally attractive male action heroes and sultry temptresses, who just about seem to hit all the right keys – Resistance 3, Dead Space 2, Assassin's Creed, inFAMOUS, are all good examples of games where the games have characters that all seem pretty middle of the road, sure they're unique in their own way but they're generally attractive and bland enough that everybody can like them. They're attractive on a general level, they're too broad to be really appealing characters.



On the other side of the coin though there's games which stress character creation – like Fallout 3 and Skyrim, characters in these games tend to lack something in terms of charisma, afterall neither games involve talking characters, or particularly emotive characters, so you tend to be stuck with characters that look the way you want, can interact they way you want with the world but don't really seem to engage with it properly – atleast not like real human beings do.



Whether or not a static character or one who one you choose yourself is better is a difficult question to answer, primarily because at the end of the day it's an issue of personal preference. I've written before about character identity, including on the silent protagonist as a character, and as with that, for some people having a silent protagonist in games like Half-Life and Fear makes people feel even more invested in the character because they don't feel as though they're having a character they find annoying forced on them. They can fill the void with their own sense of character. For others though, me among them, this lack of characterisation, this void, signals more about a lack of identity in the hero, and thus a problem rather than a plus.

In the same sense character choice provides us with a chance to fill that void with a sense of ourselves but it still leaves something to be desired with it comes to a truly inspirational character, flexible characters often don't have the strength of character that a static character does, though vice versa, fixed characters can often seem bland, too broad to really have character if they're not done well. For some the first is preferable, for others the second.