Press Fire to Start

 

 

We didn’t have a recommendation for the first week of January because we were in vacation and it’s the end of the year. Here however is the game which in our opinion deserves to be called “the game of the year”. Let the trumpets blow and the drums roll.

Press Fire To Start’s Game of the Year for 2007 is…

 

Portal

Director: Kim Swift

Developer: Valve Software

Release Year: 2007

Engine: Source

System: PC, XBOX 360, PS3

What It Is: A demonstration of how simple game mechanics can produce an enjoyable and complex gameplay experience, without sacrificing story.

Jeanne d’Arc

Director: Ken Motomura

Developer: Level 5

Release Year: 2007

Engine: In House

System: PSP

What It Is: One of the most user friendly Strategy RPGs in recent memory. Not to mention the top notch production values.

Right now, media ethics is a very hot topic. It’s not only about video game journalism. It’s about any kind of media. People who care for this kind of stuff propose that we promote something called “Media Literacy” as a solution to all our problems.

“Literacy”, as you all probably know, is the 10 point perk which allows you to read this thing. Nowadays it’s not worth that much since many people learn it in elementary school. “Media Literacy” is different though. It’s not about merely being able to read things in the written media, but it’s more about seeing media and understanding its messages as they are. It is a sort of Brecht-like approach to our interaction with the internet, TV, movies, newspapers and similar stuff. It’s about knowing what’s happening behind the scenes and not simply looking at the shiny images we are presented and grinning like a moron. Reading the first issue of Tintin is literacy. Understanding that it is anti soviet propaganda on the silliest level of absurdness is media literacy. It’s a very nice thing.

Of course, promoting media literacy is a sort of acceptance of ultimate defeat. In a way, media literacy is a means to determine if anyone in the media violates the ethics of the job and how they do so. In a way it is accepting that the media is everything it’s claiming or trying not to be. Or maybe it’s a sad acceptance of reality instead of defeat. The goal may be stopping all the wrong things the media is doing by breeding a media literate generation of humans and rendering the aforementioned unethical practices useless. After all, what media literate person can claim Halo 3 is the video game sensation of the 21^st century. Please…

The reason for all this is the existence of ethics, specifically media ethics, the source of which is journalism ethics. People who practice journalism are called journalists. Journalism, however, is not an easy thing to practice. This is why there are universities teaching it. Rules of ethics are usually important when a certain set of people are able to wield great power. As Spiderman’s uncle said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” These schools teach the responsibility needed to do the job. And it’s important since everyone would easily say the greatest power in this century is information. Journalists are merchants of information. They earn money for carrying pieces of information to society, and during that procedure they are perfectly able to modify or manipulate the information or create it outright. People act according to the information they possess. If you can control information, you can control people. And this, as no one can argue, is a great power. Therefore some rules are needed so that people do not exploit this fact.

Journalism ethics has three basic rules. Only two of them are important for the sake of this argument. These two are: Accuracy and Objectivity. And saying video game journalism doesn’t count as journalism at this point is akin to saying oral sex does not count as sex. So don’t do that.

Accuracy is about facts. Your story has to be truthful. Ideally it should contain the answers to the questions “what, where, when, who, why and how”. You have to tell the whole story. No fact should be omitted, for doing so would disturb the accuracy of the story. It is a journalist’s job to uncover reality. Rumors are not part of reality. A journalist can of course report on the latest rumors but they should be clearly labeled that way to separate them from facts. The job of an editor is also to check the written piece for its factual accuracy. Many organizations have “fact checkers” whose job is to make sure there are no factual errors in the story.

Objectivity is about the difference between opinions and facts. A journalist’s job is bringing facts to the reader. The reader then takes these facts and forms an opinion. Ideally, a journalist should express no opinions about the facts nor write the story in a way that it influences people into forming a certain opinion. Of course, journalists are free to express opinions too, but opinions and news should clearly be separated. In fact, many newspapers maintain entirely different staffs for opinion stories and news stories. This is not enough. Editors should make sure no opinions are presented in news stories.

Partly related to objectivity is independence. The independence of a newspaper is its guarantee of objectivity and truthfulness. Therefore, advertisements should clearly be separated from the main body of the story. You cannot, for instance, change the logo of your newspaper to look like the ExxonMobile logo as an advertisement even if your stories are not biased in favor of that company, because simply doing so would create a nasty question mark in the minds of your audience. A question mark about your truthfulness and objectivity.

If you think about it even for a second, video game journalism today totally ignores these rules. You often see factual errors in news reports and reviews. More often than not, rumors are presented as actual news. News headlines almost always contain hidden opinions or cynical remarks, which to many game journalists seem like a good way of showing off their wittiness. No one seems to wonder why real journalists don’t do this kind of thing.

And how many times have you seen your favorite video gaming site totally skinned in that new AAA title’s colors with several previews describing how awesome that game is?

Sure, AAA titles from big companies attract more attention than the indie title from some unknown company, but that’s neither the journalist’s problem nor the reader’s. By giving more exposure to the bigger game, these journalists cause the death of the smaller fish in the sea and act as the right arm of the bigger companies. This might be in the best interest of the magazine or website in economical terms, but economical dependence on an outside source is hardly proof of your independence, objectivity or accuracy.

What should the journalist do if he has no other choice but violating these rules? Well… the journalist should quit his job. If all journalists do that, the firm grip of corporations over media have no choice but loosen up. Of course this happens if the journalist cares about being truthful, objective and independent in the first place, or in fact, if we are talking about journalists at all.

Because I think we are not. And this is at the heart of the problem.

You cannot really blame these people for not acting according to the ethics of journalism the same way you cannot blame a faith healer for not acting according to the tenets of the Hippocratic Vow. A faith healer can perfectly choose not to help save someone’s life just because he doesn’t like the color of his eyes. This would be a very immoral choice, but it would not be ethically incorrect simply because the faith healer is not a doctor and therefore not bound by the rules of being a doctor. He never learned the importance of those rules. He never thought about the philosophy behind the rules. Therefore you also cannot expect him to act like a doctor.

And because he is not a doctor, he cannot violate their ethics just like a coconut cannot commit murder. In the rare cases a coconut causes the death of a person we don’t call the event “a murder”. We call it “accident”.

The so called game journalists today are not really journalists. Most of them didn’t study it at all. Quite many of them have trouble writing coherent sentences in their own language.

They are not journalists. They are kids. Fans of games who have just grown up a bit and are now earning money by writing down their schoolyard conversations. They are doing okay because they know more about games than most other journalists, but that’s it. Similarly my cat knows more about being a cat than me but that doesn’t mean she should write about the subject in a magazine.

Some video game journalists stay really true to these ethical rules purely by instinct and write really well because of a thing called talent. What can I say? They should not take offense. I guess with enough cats running across enough keyboards, you’ll eventually get a good article about Halo 3 (only monkeys write Shakespeare).

What video game journalism needs most is journalists and some really serious websites or magazines which take the ethics of journalism seriously. This is the first step towards building a reliable and functional games press. We should simply thank these guys for what they did so far and find a way to replace them with proper journalists somehow.

DANIEL: You know Fasih, we’ve recently pointed out how the PC is a far superior platform to any console when it comes to first person shooters…

FASIH: We have?

DANIEL: … and so I thought that in the interest of fairness we should also mention other types of games where the two platforms see eye to eye. Like racing games.

FASIH: Right. Are you sure you…

DANIEL: I thought we could take the PC’s biggest racing franchise, Need for Speed, and compare it to…

FASIH: Burnout.

DANIEL: I was going to say to its console version…

FASIH: Nah, that wouldn’t be fun.

DANIEL: Okay. Burnout. Now in the new Need for Speed…

FASIH: Did you know that they removed the crash mode in Burnout? There is something called stunt mode instead, in which you drive around the city freely and smash into cars, jump from ramps, roll in the air, smash through billboards, and drive on the wrong side of the street very fast to reach a target score in a time limit. If you’re fast enough, you can chain these stunts together into combos, and the best thing is that you can do this cooperatively in multiplayer for maximum mayhem.

DANIEL: That sounds… pretty cool. I mean, for, uh, illegal racing, which Need for Speed no longer features. In the new ProStreet we are completely legal…

FASIH: Oh, Burnout is very legal too. You have to have a driver’s license in order to play the game. You can even put your own photo onto it. I totally endorse the usage of the driver’s license. In Burnout, whenever you commit some kind of horrible traffic crime it gets recorded on your driver’s license so that you can show it to everyone and brag about it. Did I also tell you when someone takes you out, you are practically able to send them a photo of you telling them your personal opinion about the incident in universal sign language?

DANIEL: Uh… that does sound pretty cool. But I was talking about Need for Speed: ProStreet. We’re off the streets now, racing in closed circuits…

FASIH: Ah. Now I understand. It’s professional racing. Yeah. Like Gran Turismo. Did you know Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2 had 721 different cars from 80 different manifacturers racing on 51 different real life tracks? That is, if you don’t count the reverse versions of the same track. And the driving model is so realistic that Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear had almost the same time in game with a Honda NSX on Lacuna Seca as in real world. By the way, the Top Gear test track will be featured in the new Gran Turismo game along with Top Gear episodes as downloadable content. So you’re saying Need For Speed is THIS kind of game?

DANIEL: Hmm. Not really, no. I mean, we have, uhm, 55 cars, but most of them seem to be Mazdas or Nissans. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Uhm. You race in what the game calls “Race Days”, typically on airports or some such. Most of the tracks are made up.

FASIH: So it’s professional racing then?

DANIEL: Well, no, not really. There are all these kids in hip hop clothes and this constantly talking DJ who really, really likes you.

FASIH: I don’t like DJs in any game. In Burnout he tries to give you useful zen advice like: “They say speed isn’t everything… they are wrong”.

DANIEL: Well, there’s this cool, uh, AI in the announcer in Need for Speed ProStreet, where he comments on the race depending on what just happened. It almost really gives you the impression that he understands what’s happening. Like, for instance, when you’re last in the race, he will say “Where’s my man Ryan Cooper? He must be having a bad day!”, and, like, when you’re first place, he says, “There’s my man Ryan Cooper! Watch him go!” So it’s like, uh, yeah, context-sensitive. I think.

FASIH: Oh, that’s very cool. Sort of like a friend inside the game huh? Very nice. So even if you don’t have any friends, you can just talk to the announcer. Good. Burnout doesn’t have anything like that. Instead you can call your friends to your city with just one button press and they will arrive without any delay or change of interface or anything. Sometimes my friends join and I don’t realize they did until one of them lands on me with his car. It’s a sort of Burnout hug we have. So I guess… this is bad… sort of. It breaks your car. When someone lands on you, you see your roof slowly bending downwards and your windows exploding outside. It’s horrible. You have to go to the repair shop again.

DANIEL: Speaking of which, Need for Speed ProStreet now features a damage model! When you brush along the rail on the side for instance your hood cover will sometimes stand up, or the trunk will open. Also, you’re kind of going slower, and between races you have to pay money to repair the damage.

FASIH: Money? You have to pay money? This is horrible. The only money in Burnout is the money THEY have to pay because of the damage you cause. You do go to the repair shop but it repairs your car instantly even if you fly through at full speed. Which is very useful because you crash all the time, and when you crash your car sheds parts and twists in slow motion, turning into an accordion on wheels.

DANIEL: Sometimes I land on my roof.

FASIH: Yeah. But don’t worry. Crashes are part of racing. It isn’t fun if you don’t crash. And you will crash because you never feel your hand leaving the accelerate button. And when it’s not fast enough, which is almost all the time, you push the turbo button, or nitro button, or whatever it is that makes the screen shake and the the car shoot giant blue flames out of the exhaust ports and go so fast you get tears in your eyes just looking at the screen. Right?

DANIEL: Uh… right. We have that too! It’s nitrous oxide which you can, uh, inject and then the camera goes a little bit farther away from your car and I guess you go faster. In the last Need for Speed, NO2 was recharging over time. Now you have two charges and that’s that. I, uh, I guess that’s realistic. I mean, it isn’t like in Gran Turismo where nitrous usage wears out your engine, or in Burnout where I guess you still get burnout points for driving on the wrong side of the street…

FASIH: I don’t think it’s Nitro in Burnout. It’s more like mana. For the uninitiated, mana is a sort of blue liquid which allows you to throw fireballs. And appearently in Burnout it is produced by doing extremely dangerous things while driving. Like smashing through objects or launching your car into the air towards oncoming traffic and flipping it. This way your burnout meter fills up and you can go very fast for an eternity. You can even steal your opponents’ burnout bar by rubbing your car against theirs or by bumping into them, which makes them flip out of the road and crash in flames.

DANIEL: Yeah, or that. So if you want realistic nitrous, I guess you’re better off with Gran Turismo, and if you want completely unrealistic fun, I guess you should go for Burnout, but if you don’t want EITHER of those, uh, yeah. I guess that’s the general theme here, then. Need for Speed fills that gap in between absolute realism and arcade racing fun. I mean, it’s a logical thing to do, filling that gap, right?

FASIH: Hm? What? Sorry I wasn’t paying attention. I was trying to complete some cooperative racing challanges with a few of my friends here. We have to jump over each other’s cars for at least 10 times in 2 minutes. Then maybe we will try the cooperative drifting challenge. I don’t know. I might just go for a marked man too, in which you have to go from one point to another in the city and evil cars are trying to take you out no matter what. Or maybe just plain PvP with some people. I really don’t know. It is hard to decide. Burnout is a horrible game.

DANIEL: That sounds… fun. Need for Speed has this… this racing mode where… where you go in a circle, and the first to finish the circle, uh, wins. Also, there’s a rhythm game called drag racing, where you have to hit a certain key to shift gear whenever your rpm is just right.

FASIH: Oh… So it’s just like Rock Band. Only without the guitar and Highway Star from Deep Purple…

DANIEL: Uh. Yeah. So… maybe racing wasn’t such a good idea. Let’s start over. Let’s talk about…

FASIH: Beat ‘em ups?

DANIEL: Uh…

FASIH: 3rd person action games?

DANIEL: Uhm…

FASIH: Survival horror?

DANIEL: Well…

FASIH: Japanese rpgs?

DANIEL: Maybe…

FASIH: Take your pick!

DANIEL: Fuck this! I’ll go play Civilization!

FASIH: Revolution?

Mass Effect

Director: Casey Hudson

Developer: Bioware Corp.

Release Year: 2007

Engine: Unreal 3.0

System: XBOX 360

What It Is: An ambitious attempt to redefine action-rpg. One of the best sci-fi themed RPGs ever made.

Before enumerating each and every thing that’s wrong with so called video game journalism today I would like to tell you a story. It may or may not have anything to do with video game journalism. The moral of the story is yours to discover.

This story is not about Jeff Gerstmann.

Once upon a time in a land named after a bird so fat that it’s earthbound, there was only one video games magazine, which was named after the company who produced probably the most enduring computer hardware ever. It was published by people who imported said computer into that land. It was serious. Its tones were a mixture of black and white and boring.

Then came a fat guy who was named after a sort of blade and decided to publish another magazine. Now the fat man knew that only kids owned this computer in this land, however popular that computer was. And all kids cared about were games. “So,” he reasoned, “how about making a magazine dedicated entirely to games?”

That was a good idea. That would sell. Yes. Only one problem: How would he find journalists or computer experts who specialize on games? Games, being an activity exclusively designed for children, were naturally played and therefore known by children only. Surely no journalist would spend his time engaged in such a pointless activity.

Therein lay the solution to the problem. Why not hire kids as writers? Surely some of those kids are studying at a university or a high school, institutes which usually make literacy a requirement for their students.

Together with these literate kids and a logo stolen from a famous German magazine, the fat man quickly set up an office and published the magazine. When he did this, many people thought it was a crazy idea. Professionals thought it was a joke and their opposition didn’t even take notice of the magazine. It was doomed to fail.

When the sales number started to trickle in, it was quickly understood that the magazine was a smash hit. And soon it turned into a cultural phenomenon. As a magazine written and published by gamers and for gamers, it was infinitely more likable than the official tones of the other magazines. Everyone was happy. The readers felt like they were talking to their friends. The writers were writing about the things they love most. It was a perfect match, the stuff of dreams. The rare mixture of amateur excitement and the innocent aspiration to become proper journalists produced a unique voice that was instantly likable.

In time every single writer developed his own voice. The magazine itself became a symbol of rebellion for all the young people. They weren’t only supporting video games, they were supporting heavy metal, too. At one point they gave out a huge poster of a heavy metal band which was founded by the pissed off former lead guitarist of yet another, slightly more important heavy metal band, the name of which was interestingly stolen from a magazine. Soon fans were gathering to host their own heavy metal/video game events, while other magazines were trying to imitate the success.

An epidemic of similar games magazines started, each with their own interpretation of the rules of journalism. None of their writers were journalists. And soon each of those writers thought they knew best.

Now all these magazines, including our friendly heavy metal one, were using the ever popular percentage system to rate games. Each writer was strict in his own way. But being gamers, each of them had different tastes. After all, there wasn’t a clear cut method to reviewing games. It’s not like this is an exact science. No one graduated from a games school, or come to think of it, a school of journalism. So opinions varied as readers who are now called “fans” rallied behind their favorite writers.

Then something very weird happened. Somebody released a game in that country named after a fat bird. It wasn’t the first game released there, but it was surely the biggest and the most expensive project. This historical strategy game, named after a sort of knife, occupied three times the space of an average game at the time, used a very popular game engine, was designed by a team of visual artists, and for all intents and purposes it was pure, unplayable crap.

This game was reviewed in all the games magazines. Naturally everyone expected a different score from each and every magazine. But the weird thing here was that the game not only received favorable reviews from everyone, but also the exact same score. What did this mean? Did the writers finally come up with a unified theory of game reviewing?

A closer inspection revealed that the texts of each and every review were identical down to the tiniest typo. For a moment, it was eerie and mysterious. But the magazines were content. Their bank accounts and owners just grew fatter.

What followed was even bigger disarray. A game which all the writers in the magazine hated would receive a high score from the reviewer of the same magazine. Writers would either call each other names, or claim illogically that it was all decided in unison. Fans started digging trenches, calling each other and their favorite authors “fanboys” and claiming their magazine was the best.

Still the heavy metal magazine had the most fans in the middle of this game journalism circus. Then they did something unthinkable. They reviewed a new game released by a famous company. And they gave it a perfect score of 100 percent. There was an uproar. Again people pointed fingers, and called each other names. The editor of the magazine, though, was very calm. He said, “Yes, we think this game is perfect. That is why we gave it 100 percent. If we are not going to give that 100 to any game, what’s the point of having the percentage system?” It was a valid question and perhaps an honorable thing to do.

The silly thing happened when the same company released an even better game later. And because that game was clearly better, everyone was confused. What would they do? They thought for a long time. And they came up with a great idea.

The review score of this new game was 101 percent.

The rest was a blur in which other magazines used a variety of systems based on 200 points, 150 points, 10 points, letters of the alphabet, different number of stars, joysticks, LEDs, disks and pumpkins.

Until the whole thing collapsed when everyone lost interest. No one trusted the magazines anymore.

Today the same country has very few game magazines, and everyone says: “Reviews don’t mean anything. Real gamers play the game and decide for themselves.”

I know this doesn’t make any sense. But I hope that the importance of these events will be made clearer during this series of articles.

This story is not made up. It’s all true. Some of these things already happened on a global scale as well.

I am still waiting for the first game to receive 101 percent on site indexed by Metacritic.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

Director: Amy Hennig

Developer: Naughty Dog

Release Year: 2007

Engine: Uncharted Engine

System: PS3

What It Is: The first installment of a new, more serious series from the creators of smash hits such as Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter

IF Arcade: Pac-Man

Director: Adam Cadre

Developer: Adam Cadre

Release Year: 2001

Engine: Z-Code

System: PC

What It Is: The text adventure adaptation of the famous arcade game.

Due to Daniel’s trip to Dublin and my academic calendar being crowded there were no articles this week.

But don’t worry. We’re not dead. We’ll return next week.

Trilby: The Art of Theft

Director: Ben Croshaw

Developer: Ben Croshaw

Release Year: 2007

Engine: AGS

System: PC

What It Is: A surprisingly nice 2D sneaking game with a retro vibe.