On video game criticism - 4 of 4
In the days before rhythm games required you to splash out on dance mats and plastic guitars, Enix and 989 Studios produced a dance-sim that has stood the test of time. Released in 1998, Bust-a-Groove (PS1), at its core, is essentially a game where you tap predetermined buttons in time with the game’s soundtrack. However simplistic this sounds, the game piles on so much fun and charm, that it ranks as one of my favourite games of all time.
From its opening moments, the game’s presentation screams 90’s popular culture: with its scratch-mixed samples and quick video cuts, one can be transported back to a time when MTV actually played music and wasn’t clogged up with reality shows about dopey teenage girls. Over-the-top voiceovers and bright colours immediately suck you in, and convince you that you’re about to play a fun game. …
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There are few videogames that struck a chord with me like Bethesda Softworks’ sublime Fallout 3. The game is stunning both in terms of its ambitious scale, and its unique and bizarre mythology. Though Fallout 3 is set a few hundred years in the future, in the post-nuclear wasteland surrounding Washington DC, its character and tone screams 1940s-kitsch, with paraphernalia from the era strewn across the game world.
The 1940s feel is reinforced by the game’s soundtrack which comprises oddly sentimental Big Band tunes, jazz numbers and vocal groups. The music is played on one of the Wasteland’s many radio stations, Galaxy News Radio, presented by ‘Three Dog’ a tireless DJ ‘fighting the good fight’ to ‘bring you the truth, no matter how bad it hurts’. Three Dog reminds me of Super Soul, the blind DJ from the achingly underrated existential road movie Vanishing Point (1979), whose role, like Super Soul’s, is to act as narrator and commentator on the development of the story. It’s an odd feeling when you’re wandering around the maze of disused subways with no ammo trying to creep stealthily past a group of Feral Ghouls and the Andrews Sisters are blaring from your TV. Another group that features prominently on the soundtrack is the Ink Spots, and it is because of Fallout 3 that I had to buy their compilation album Jukebox Memories when I saw it for sale in Alnwick’s famous Barter Books. …
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At first glance FEZ an indie, 8-bit styled, 2D platform game, but when you look at it from another angle, it’s still an indie, 8-bit styled, 2D platform game,. but when you look at it from ANOTHER angle, it’s a puzzle waiting to be solved, for the joy of solving it.
There are a lot of indie platformers floating around in the gaming ether. The best of them have some kind of hook to draw us in, and often, because of the limited resources possessed by most indie developers, this hook will often be something mechanically simple by design, but intuitive and complex in execution. Super Meat Boy has insane platforming action and superb level design, Braid has time-bending and logic-breaking puzzles, and FEZ has the discovery of the true physical nature of the universe - sounds simple enough.
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There’s a part about half-way through BioShock where you’re forced to assume the role of a temporary hitman of sorts, scouting out local denizens, introducing a weapon to the back of the head, and snapping a photo of the corpse.
The photo isn’t just for proof that your dirty deeds have been completed. No, this whole façade is for the spectacularly lunatic artist Sander Cohen, who’ll grant you access to the area you need to be in if you help him complete his masterpiece: an astonishing statue, centre-stage in a theatre, co-functioning as a thoroughly disturbing frame for photography of the dead. This is the sort of sick, warped world that BioShock portrays so exquisitely…
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