Divinity: Original Sin 2 and the Rewards of Doing One Hard Thing Right

There will never not be a market for a solid RPG.

I recently played indie RPG megahit Divinity: Original Sin 2. I went through it front to back, spending over 90 hours (Normal/Classic difficulty). It'd be a pity to expend so much time if I didn't get a blog post out of it.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 (or DOS2 as I'll call it) is really the ideal of the indie aesthetic. It feels like it's a product of actual humans, and it clearly wants to deliver one pure, special, niche experience. It's a big, weird game that's made a bajillion dollars. It doesn't care about any of the rough edges, as long as it follows its vision purely.

And there are rough edges. There are long periods of time where DOS2 feels like a gigantic clump of rough edges awkwardly glued together.

Let's dive in. It's a big, weird game that's made a bajillion dollars. Plenty to say about it.

In my bag, I have an ancient sword, an arrowhead, panties, a bowl, and wood chips. Any one of them might end up necessary. Never ever drop anything. 

What Is DOS2?

It's an enormous, turn-based, story-heavy fantasy RPG with a lot of gameplay and long, very difficult, involved battles. It's a tough game. It's got a lot of wild multiplayer options, though I'll be focusing on single-player stuff. It took me over 90 hours to play, and I skipped a lot of quests.

You don't need to play the previous game to enjoy it. It takes place in a different era or something. I tried to play the previous game, but I got totally stuck because I didn't notice a button hidden behind a ham.

What Does DOS2 Do Well?

I have to start out with the best thing about DOS2, the thing that really makes it compelling: It has turn-based fantasy combat that is actually exciting. The battles are long (1-2 hours), unpredictable, and have an epic feel to them. They are very cool.

I really need to emphasize how remarkable this is. I've been following the RPG genre since the beginning, and I think it's really important to acknowledge what an accomplishment the battles are. It's some next-level stuff.

What Are the Rough Edges?

Every other single thing.

Seriously, I went through the entire game with wood chips in my pack. If case I needed them to craft a stick or something. Jesus Christ, I'm basically 9/10 of a God. Just let me have the stupid stick!

What Is the Story?

This game has tons of writing. Many, many words.

The side quests and the storylines of your companions are reliably well-written and interesting. I enjoyed them.

The main quest is something-something-invasion-of-horrible-monsters-something-something-disorder-in-the-heavens-something-something-become-a-god. I tried to keep track of the story, thought I understood it, and I guess I didn't. I'll get back to that.

What Is the Design Aesthetic?

The general design aesthetic of DOS2 is: If anyone had an idea, any idea at all, it went into the game. The idea won't always be properly developed once it was in, but it will be there.

There's a full crafting system, so I tried to use it. I collected every recipe and material I could find. At the end of the game, I couldn't make anything better than what I could buy at the store with my infinite money.

There's an item identification system. No matter what the game, this is always just busywork.

There are plenty of bugs, still, which gives hardcore RPG gamers that extra exquisite bit of challenge. As of this writing, it's almost impossible to talk to a character who is walking around. You click and nothing happens. It's maddening, which adds to immersion.

And there are many, many unique spells and abilities. You can teleport characters around the battlefield, which is really cool. You can teleport lava onto the battlefield and then teleport enemies into it, killing them instantly and utterly making moot everything else about the battle system, which is less cool. Then your enemies can teleport you into that same lava, which ...

Design tip: Don't put stuff in your design which instantly makes every other aspect of the design unimportant.

There are, again, many spells and abilities. Or, there are ten abilities that are good and that will enable you to progress in the game, and 90 weak abilities that will leave you utterly stuck ten hours in.

This is important.

I love going through these screenshots and seeing how clogged everyone's backpacks get with irrelevant crap. It fills me with resolve: My next game will have only relevant items in it. I'm ditching a lot of junk items.

Another Brutally Punishing Game

DOS2 is very much in the game design tradition of "Make a game super-hard, give almost no information about what abilities are available or what are viable paths to take, expect the player to do a ton of research online, and go f*** yourself."

This game is just plain too hard early on. Based on what I saw in reviews/forums, loosening up the difficulty in Chapter 1 would increase overall customer satisfaction a LOT.

Saying something like this is just inviting abuse. There is a portion of RPG fans who react with rage at any suggestion of removing features or relaxing difficulty, no matter how reasonable the request. But it's still true.

The number of builds that will enable you to escape the first chapter are very limited. It's very easy to end up needing to restart 10 hours in. The advice online for early game builds is scattered and, I found, often very bad.

Seriously, Google "Divinity: Original Sin 2 Builds" and sink into the rabbit hole. Bear in mind, when you see a list like "12 Most Uber-Awesome DOS2 Skills," that article was probably generated as fast as possible to score easy clicks off a hit game, is badly considered, and is lying to you.

(Real talk for normal players: Summoning is very strong. The spells Conjure Incarnate, Power Infusion, and Raise Bone Widow will carry you through this game. Teleportation is also fantastic. Using it to pull the enemy boss right in front of my fighters was my single favorite part of the game.)

There are tons of players who love this aesthetic. RPG fans are gluttons for punishment. A lot of them just want a game to hurt them sometimes. (Or all the time.) A small portion of them will pounce on you if you ever suggest some bit of abuse in an RPG is a mistake (no matter how much it totally is).

It drives me nuts, personally, but it's the big aesthetic now.

The battles tend to devolve into utter, unpredictable chaos. It's pretty awesome.

Rough Edges With Rough Edges

DOS2, for me, still had plenty of bugs, quirks, and stuff that felt half-baked. To show what I mean, here is my summary of how my game ended. At this point, I'd played for over 90 hours and was really ready for it to end. I think, once a player's given you this long, you need to wrap things up in as respectful a way as possible.

I go through a long series of puzzles, some of which are really finicky and require noticing lots of little things. I use a walkthrough. Otherwise it would have taken me forever to search through all those little cubbyholes and boxes and bookshelves for what I needed. (The "Put the painting on the altar" puzzle, in particular, needed more time in the oven.)

I get to the final battle, a multi-hour two-phase cluster-f. As is normal, the entire battlefield becomes covered with fire and spell effects and I can't see where any of the characters are.

I'd already dug into Settings to find the key that makes outlines of all the characters visible, so I use that. Because there are so many characters, however, sometimes to target a specific foe in a crowd I have to zoom in and rotate the camera for a minute to find a few pixels where I can select the enemy.

(God help you if you click wrong, or you'll use your best ability to obliterate an ally. A confirmation dialog when you aim an arrow at your tank or the ground would be welcome.)

Because the fights are so long and tough, you can save in the middle. This is good because the battlefield has lots of different elevations, and the game is constantly telling me my arrows can hit targets that, when I fire them, get blocked by the terrain.

My characters die constantly in the final fight, so I use scrolls to resurrect them. (I feel like DOS2 provides resurrection scrolls as a crutch to not have to balance fights fairly.) I eventually surround the boss with summoned monsters and pummel him to deadness.

Now I get to decide how to remake the world/Heaven/Universe. I've made an effort to follow the plot up until this time, and it seems like I can fix a lot of problems by ascending to Godhood. The game explicitly tells me I can do this to fix the world.

I talk to my companions, who I have all helped out to the maximum extent. They urge me to ascend to Godhood. One of them, who is in love with me and who I have totally made out with, practically begs me to ascend. Everything in the game so far has been pushing me to ascend to Godhood.

I ascend to Godhood. Flashy cutscene.

Then I am on a boat with my companions. I talk to them. They all totally hate me now! My girlfriend reacts to me with disgust. One of them says she'll kill me if she the gets the chance. What the hell!?!??

Come on, Divinity: Original Sin 2! I can't have a tiny bit of satisfaction? I played you for over 90 hours! Throw a dog a bone!

So many battles end with the play area a sea of spell effects. Figure out the key/button that shows outlines of character ASAP.

My Final Takeaway

Again, I must stress, the RPG combat in this game is some of the best I've ever seen. The fights are long but really satisfying when they work right. A lot of the writing is really good. The production values are great. Definitely worth a try if you love old-school RPGs.

But honestly? In the end I was tired. Even the shortest battle takes a while, and I was avoiding conflicts just because I was exhausted with the game. The fighting works great, but overall usability needs a lot of attention.

I won't be getting any DLC or sequels unless things change a lot. I'm glad I had this experience, I really am, but I don't need more of it.

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If you're intrigued by giant indie RPGs with epic stories and tough, unpredictable fights, you can try Avernum 3: Ruined World on Steam. Then nitpick our game the way we nitpicked this one. It's only fair. News about our work and random musings can be found on our Twitter.

Does Your Video Game Have Too Many Words? (Yeah, Probably.)

TLDR.jpg (Also note: This gigantic lore-lump is just for choosing your character's sex.)

"Too long. Lose half."
"Which half?"
"The half that you don't need."
- Their Finest

My whole career has been based on writing very story-heavy games, with lots of words. Our company, Spiderweb Software, is small. We can't afford fancy graphics, so we have to rely on words. Interesting, quality words.

We're currently remastering the series with our most loved story and our bestest words. We also finished a new series, which had a lot of words which I suspect weren't as good because it didn't sell as well. Now we're planning a whole new series, and we need to figure out how many and what sort of words to cram into that.

We have a lot of decisions to make, so I've been thinking a lot about words in games. I have made a number of observations.

For Reference

A decently sized novel contains about 100,000 words. The Bible contains about a million words.

My wordiest and most popular game, Avernum 3, which I am now remastering, had about 200,000 words. At its release, people talked about how very, very, many words it had. Yet, by current standards, it is very terse.

In comparison, one of the best-written RPGs in recent times, The Witcher 3, had about 450,000 words. For The Witcher 3, "best-written" means "One really good storyline and many, many other storylines that were basically OK." (To be fair, I think the Heart of Stone DLC was really well-written.)

The word bloat continues. While Divinity: Original Sin had a mere 350,000 words, Tyranny spent 600,000 words telling the story of how you became the word's most evil middle manager, on a bold quest to try to tell apart the game's 73 factions.

And this is positively tongue-tied next to Torment: Tides of Numenara's 1,200,000 words. I admit I am curious about what story is so gigantic and epic that it requires 3 times more words than The Lord of the Rings. I will never find out, as there is nothing that will tempt me to play a game with 1.2 Bibles worth of text.

This is me playing your RPG lol.

Vogel's Laws of Video Game Storytelling

1. Players will forgive your game for having a good story, as long as you allow them to ignore it.

2. When people say a video game has a "good story," what they mean is that it has a story.

3. The story of almost all video games is, "See that guy over there? That guy is bad. Kill that guy." This almost never leads to a good story.

For reference, this is how to get me to read the text in your RPG.

Observations About Words In Video Games

1. For a while, there was a big demand for games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment. That is, old-school icon-based RPGs with big stories, told in lots and lots of words. Early hits, like Divinity: Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity made a lot of money off this demand. Sales of later games in this style, like Tyranny and Torment: Tides of Numenara suggest that this pent up demand has largely been satisfied.

2. It's really easy to make words. Really, really, really easy. Any writer with half a grain of skill can spew out 500,000 like it is nothing. And if that writer's fingers get tired, an intern with aspirations of authorhood will chip in 100,000 more. And when that intern passes out, you can let your Kickstarter backers add words to your game and they’ll pay you for the privilege.

3. No, really, think about that last point. People will pay you to be able to write for your game! Adding words to your game has negative cost! Think about this the next time someone tries to use a giant word count to sell you a game.

4. The secret of great writing is not adding words. It's cutting them. You can almost always improve your writing by slashing chunks out of it and refining the rest. However, as game development is done with limited budgets and limited time, this editing process almost never takes place.

5. When a writer gets famous, they stop being edited. This is why the fifth Harry Potter book is 900 pages in which only like two things happen. This is also why, when a game in 2017 is written by a Big Name and has a script with one bajillion words, most of those words are going to be pretty boring.

6. There are well-written games. Fallout: New Vegas and Witcher 3 are solid. I remember Baldur's Gate II and Planescape: Torment were all right, but I played those 20 years ago, and there may be a lot of nostalgia in play there. (For me and almost everyone else.) Planescape was cool, but I definitely remember blasting past a lot of text just to get through it.

7. Sturgeon's Law is in play here: "90% of everything is crap." For every Planescape: Torment, where they had a cool setting and story idea and really put the time in to write good text and have it interface with the gameplay well, there have been nine other games where they just threw up a bunch of Tolkein-light Kill-that-Bad-Guy stuff and hoped it stuck. It didn't.

8. Having lots of lore in your game is OK. Some players really love lore. But then, a lot of players really don't. I think it's best if you try to keep your lore separated a bit from the significant game text, like Skyrim putting the stuff in books you could easily ignore. World of Warcraft quest windows did this perfectly. All of the lore was in one lump ("You mean dwarves like to dig mines? WOAH!"), and the actual text of the quest ("Kill 10 goblin toddlers.") was broken out of it so you could digest it quickly.

9. Humor is very hard to write well. It is also one of the most enjoyable things to read. If you can make your game genuinely funny, people will love it forever. (The actual gameplay of Psychonauts was only B-, but people LOVE that game because of how funny it is.)

10. The ultimate goal of writing in a game: Have it be good enough that getting past the gameplay to reach the writing is your goal. Your writing should be the REWARD. If your writing is something the player has to slog through to get to the game play, there is too much writing.

You have my UNDIVIDED ATTENTION.

Physician, Heal Thyself

Every game I've ever written has had a lot of words. Some of those games, my fans really loved the words. Some of them, not so much.

My goal for my next series is to use fewer words, but to make them as light and interesting and funny as I can. I want words to be the reward, the thing that pulls people through the story. I am dreading this, because, again, writing something good and short is way more work than writing something dull and long.

In the meantime, I am remastering my old Avernum 3, with its pokey little 200,000 words. This means giving those words an editing pass. A lot of my time is spent chopping out extraneous words and revamping what is left to make it smoother, easier to read, and, whenever possible, funnier. If the new version has more words than the old version, I've done something wrong.

For a long time, I sold games with a lot of words. Now there is a lot more competition in that space, and words are super-cheap. I need to try to sell good words. Even if I never make a nice, dank meme, in this crowded market, you need to get every little advantage you can.

Yes, It's a Game. They're ALL Games. STOP ARGUING.

Yes, in fact, I do have Know Your Meme bookmarked. Why do you ask?

I've been taking a long break playing through the dozens of unplayed indie games in my Steam queue. My biggest surprise was that all of my favorite experiences were what I privately call Storytelling games: Games with minimal gameplay, that mainly exist to tell a story.

You've been hearing about them for months. Gone Home. Stanley Parable. Papers, Please. (In my opinion.) To the Moon. Amnesia: Machine For Pigs. Storytelling Games really broke big in the last year.

But it's still the Internet. There is no conversation so interesting and new that someone won't break in and try to derail it into a pointless argument. So ...

Stop arguing about whether a game is a game or not. It's a useless distraction. STOP IT.

Why?

When someone says, "That isn't even a game," they are actually saying something else.

One. It's Impossible to Define What a Game Is.

No, seriously. Try it. Whatever definition you come up with, half of everyone else will disagree. The other half will instantly poke a ton of holes into it.

We're talking art here. Getting a firm definition of anything is impossible.

Consider Big Fish Games, a hugely successful publisher of casual games. Think of it as Steam for your grandmother.

Have you looked at casual games lately? One of the biggest categories on Big Fish Games is Hidden Object Games, which is exactly what it sounds like. "There is a squid somewhere on your screen. Click on it."

This is an activity that doesn't involve pwning a dozen robotorcs while cycling through a dozen hotkeyed abilities at top speed, so plenty of hardcore gamers wouldn't consider it worthy of the lofty title of "Game." But Big Fish Games does sell games. You can tell because they have "Games" right there in their name.

(Of course, whenever anyone says, "That isn't a game," it's just thinly disguised bragging about how awesomely hardcore they are. Whatever the filthy casuals are doing over there, it doesn't deserve to be lumped in with the cool kid stuff we do.)

Personally, I think a Hidden Object Game barely even counts as an "activity." But it's still a game, and if a Hidden Object Game is a game, everything is.

A screen from the delightfully aggressively named Witches' Legacy: Hunter and the Hunted. Now click the squid. Click, it, DAMN YOU! CLICK IT!

Two. Dividing Games Into Games and Not-Games is Useless.

I mean, why would you even want to come up with categories like Game and Visual Novel and whatever? It wouldn't do any good, as everyone has a different idea of what a game is.

You know something? I've decided that I don't think simulators should be considered games. Gone Home is like a Hidden Object Game, so it's a game, but Call of Duty is a war simulator, so it's not a game. So there! (Drops mic.)

What did you think of that last paragraph? Do you think I sounded like a crazy person? Well, that's how YOU sound if/when you say Gone Home isn't a game.

Coming up with different ghettos to stick games into doesn't do any good, and it keeps us from doing what's really interesting: Talking about the works themselves.

Three. You Really, Honestly Can't Come Up With Something Better To Talk About, Seriously?!?!?!?

This is a time of wonders for gamers. 2013 saw the release of a huge number of fantastic, innovative, and ground-breaking titles, on the indie and AAA level. It was a year of delights. Even games I had a lot of problems with were still super-fun.

We should be spending out precious and limited time talking about the games themselves. What they did right. What they could have done better. What is still technically or budgetarily impossible for them to do. (The last one is a really important, under-discussed topic.)

That someone could be greeted with all of these delights and all they can do is pick a semantic argument? The art form is growing fast now, guys. It's way, WAY too early to start pigeonholing things yet.

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As always, we're still on Facebook and Twitter.

Tomb Raider, Torture Porn, and Looking For an Audience That Exists

Someone thinks this will arouse you.

So let's talk, months late, about the recent Square Enix Tomb Raider reboot, which I played on the PS3.

First off, let me say that it's a really well-made game. Excellent production values. Flat but reasonable writing. Fun gameplay. Enjoyable combat and puzzles. Environments that are neat and worth exploring.

I have to make it really clear before I get into the mess: This is a good game, and the people who made it should pat themselves on the back.

And yet, one simple decision, one minor choice of tone and content, blows the whole expensive thing up.

Here's the thing. Yes. Tomb Raider was a hit, kind of. It sold millions of copies.

But this Tomb Raider is the newest game in an iconic franchise, with brilliant design and top-rate production values. Of course it sold a lot of copies. It just wasn't the hit it could have been, and, more importantly, it wasn't the hit Square Enix needed it to be.  This is a phenomenal shame.

I think it's obvious why it didn't perform.

Yes, this is a lake of blood and rotting human flesh. Alas, the game does not contain soap.

First, About the Bewbs

I have no problem with using sex appeal to sell games. As of this writing, I've spent the last several weeks listening to females in my acquaintance wax rhapsodic about Benedict Cumberbatch and Thor. They can let me have an athletic young archaeologist/grave robber in a tanktop.

However, here is the first rule of Sex Appeal: If you want to make something sexy to sell it, it has to be sexy.

This game is meant to be an Indiana Jones-style romp, with a sense of lightness and fun. I mean, watch Raiders of the Lost Ark again. (This is never not a good idea.) This is a movie full of gory death and violence and Nazi melting faces, but it's still FUN. Look, Spielberg is a true master, and I don't expect everyone to pull off the miracle of getting this tone right, but you have to come closer than Tomb Raider did.

The problems start with the packaging. When I picked up the box and turned it over, I saw three pictures of Lara Croft covered with mud, filth, and blood. It's gross. Not sexy. Also, ewwww.

This doesn't stop when you're playing. The game is full of gratuitous gory bodies and chopped off limbs and cannibalism and tortured corpses. Set aside that this is the most obvious, cliched way to depict the evil cultists that serve as your foe. It's excessively gross and boilerplate, but that's not even the real problem. 

Warning: Do not look at this image.

OH! GOD! OH! ACK! NO!

Tomb Raider is violent. Like Saw movie murder porn excruciating to watch violent.

Sure, Lara brutally kills hundreds of evil guys. It's a video game. We can kinda sorta live with that, though I really wish they'd come up with a more clever solution. Instead of killing ten guys and then ten guys and then ten guys in a series of boilerplate shootouts, I wish they'd had a way to have there be far less killing but for it to require more care and cunning. 

(The Ellie boss fight from The Last of Us should be played by all designers for a perfect example of how this can be done. Also the Mr. Freeze fight from Batman: Arkham City.)

But that isn't even the problem.

Tomb Raider has lots of Quick Time Events ("Press the triangle button now FAST or die! Ha! You suck!"), which is already unfun design. They are really tricky and fast, which is even more terrible. And when you fail (and you will, a lot), you will see Lara die in a really horrible way.

You will see Lara, for example, have her throat ripped out by wolves. Be hacked with machetes. Have the neck impaled on a wooden stake. Swim through a lake of blood and rotting human flesh.

When you die, we're not talking about the camera cutting away and you hear nasty sound effects and get to imagine the gruesome thing that just happened. No, when that bad guys strangles her, you will see it lovingly animated, no detail lost as the life slowly drains from her eyes.

Gamers are inured to this sort of horror. It's time for a reminder that most people aren't.

This is what fun looks like.

The Finest Game Critic Working Today

Talk show host Conan O'Brien does a series of segments for his show called Clueless Gamer. In them, Conan, a self-professed non-gamer, tries out the hot games. Watching a civilian come face to face with all the bizarre design choices we've all trained ourselves to take for granted is a humbling and educational existence.

They're also hilarious.

It's real game criticism, the sort we need, the sort that doesn't shrug our shoulders and let us get away with lazy crap. (His Grand Theft Auto V segment does an awesome job of getting at what works and doesn't work about the series. I wish so much they'd had him play the torture mission.)

The Tomb Raider segment is particularly informative.  Jump to 6:00. Watch the gruesomeness. Listen to the audience reaction. Listen to what Conan is saying. "Don't let it happen again." "This is a nightmare."

This is what the game industry is selling. This is what we're proffering to people as Art. The problem isn't that Normal Humans see us as creepy sociopaths. The problem is that it's hard to argue they're not right.

The Real Problem

Kurt Vonnegut wrote, about writing, "Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia." This is brilliant advice. Don't try to write for too many people at once. It will just dilute your work.

So who is Tomb Raider written for?

Is this game for people who want to ogle a young, attractive woman? Hey, I don't categorically oppose using attractive people to sell product. I'm as intrigued by a sexy assembly of polygons as the next guy. 

But I have a hard time getting into my "Hey, that's sexy!" headspace when the woman I'm supposed to ogle is being constantly horribly mutilated and coated with filth. I don't want to ogle her. I want to give her a sweater.

Is this game for people who want a rollicking Indiana Jones style of adventure? The sort of thing promised by the name "Tomb Raider"? Then bear in mind that most people who want to explore catacombs and look for treasure may also have a small tolerance for watching young women being strangled in long, lovingly animated segments.

Is this game for young women who desperately want to play a game with a protagonist who, in some way, reminds them of themselves? Like, say, my daughters. My seven year old was playing a little World of Warcraft the other day, and she asked me, exact quote, "Why are all the pandas boys?" My family wants games with women in them, and we spend money.

Well, I won't let my seven and eleven year old daughters get within a thousand miles of Tomb Raider. Pity. They might have become lifelong fans of a series that wouldn't give them perma-nightmares. 

Is this game for young dudebros who grew up watching Saw and other torture porn and get off on a bit of the old ultraviolence? Well, I get e-mail from these kids all the time. They will only rarely play a game where they control a female character. I think they're afraid they'll catch the gay.

So I'm really trying to think who this otherwise terrific game is being aimed at. Apparently someone who's saying, "I want to spend my leisure time watching a young, talented woman being repeatedly tortured and mutilated. But I also like puzzles!"

Hope For the Future

It's a real shame because, I must again stress, there's a terrific game in here. If you can look past the gruesome (and many people can), Tomb Raider is a ton of fun.

I've read that a sequel is in the works. I really hope so. If I can get through it without needing therapy, I'll totally buy it. My little hope? Man, I would love to play it (or parts of it) with my kids. I hope it works out.

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Another good analysis of the game is at Errant Signal. And, as always, we're still on Facebook and Twitter.

Quick Late Review: Mass Effect 2.

(I'm going away on vacation, so I wanted to dump everything in my brain while it's still there. I have to stop writing games sometimes. Working on Avadon is making my brain melt.)

I played Mass Effect 2, of course. Bioware. Have to play. And I really, really liked Mass Effect, warts and all.

Mass Effect 2 is a lot of fun. The new action-based combat model is simple and fast-paced, so the action, while a little repetitive, is always fun. And the game conclusively shows that there is no problem that can't be solved by going from one end of a corridor full of crates to the other. The player characters are a little dull for a Bioware game, but they're fine. (Morden and Garrus are cool.) I suspect that there's just too many of them, so the interestingness got spread a little thin. I missed Morrigan.

But, as much as I enjoyed it, there was one thing that really bugged me. Bioware has said that Mass Effect 3 will be a bit lighter in the subject matter, and thank God.

So there's a woman in your party named Subject Zero. She is harsh and obnoxious and crazy and I wished I could throw her out of the airlock while covered in hurting fire. Like all of the other allies, there's an quest you can do to win her loyalty.

So I accept it, and we go to this abandoned research base. It turns out, Subject Zero was, while a child, subjected to horrible experiments to give her psychic powers. You learn, in blucky detail, how many other children were taken there and killed in other experiments that seem deliberately reminiscent of the work of Josef Mengele.

You also learn that this base was built by Cerberus, a pro-human organization that you work for.

You do learn, for what it's worth, that after Cerberus built the base they went a little rogue before all of the child-murdering started. As if that makes it better. Which, no. When you find out that your bosses helped start the Holocaust, it doesn't matter if they're a little bugged by what happened later. It's still, you know, bad.

I had a lot of fun playing the game. The zappy zappy was good. But that quest really put a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the game, and this isn't like God of War, where the story is only a vague backdrop for the hacking. Bioware is known for story, and they took a seriously wrong step here. If you want to cover this sort of material, fine. But treat it with respect, don't just make it a little side quest meant to make things all edgy, and certainly don't expect the player to continue to support the organization that created the horrors in the first place. As someone who sometimes takes games seriously as an art form, it's embarrassing.

Also, if you are forced to have these yahoos on your ship, "helping you", asking for favors, and bugging you with their issues, you should always have the option of feeding them into the mass-energy reactor. Hey, your ship has to be fueled somehow.

(And hey, Bioware, still love you, right? Let's not let this little tiff interfere with our deep and lasting relationship, OK?)

God of War 3: The Anti-Art.

I just finished God of War 3. Having absolutely loved God of War 1 and 2, there was no way I wasn't going to play the next (last?) game in the series. And, since I was playing it while the whole Roger-Ebert-Games-Aren't-Art thing was bouncing around teh Internetz, I couldn't help but view the game through that prism.

First, I have to say that the game is a lot of fun. Nothing beats the God of War series for providing an experience of non-stop, visceral ass-kicking. The game was cool throughout, all killer no filler, and the graphics and production values were predictably gorgeous and expensive.

But what really kept striking me as I was playing it was how it was the perfect example of what I call Anti-Art.

What do I mean by this? Well, I think that something is functioning as art if it connects with you and stimulates your thoughts and feelings in a complex way. And, by complex, I mean summons feeling more complicated than, "Ahhh! I'm scared!" or "Whee! I'm excited!" or "Arrr! I'm angry!" You'll have to meet me halfway on this definition. Better minds than I have been defining Capital-A "Art" for several thousand years. I think the above should give an idea of what I'm trying to get at.

Anyway. I call God of War 3 Anti-Art because not only does it not try to create any such feelings in the player, but it goes to great effort to prevent anyone from feeling anything when playing the game more complex than "Arrrr! Hit! Hit!" The story exists not to engage the player but to alienate him or her (Who am I kidding? Him.), so that nothing distracts from full appreciation for the carnage. If you are the sort of player who cares about story, God of War 3's story is designed to make you ignore it.

And this isn't an accident. I think it is, on some level, the purpose of the design from Step 1.

(Some spoilers for the game are ahead, I suppose, although God of War 3 really can't be spoiled.)

So What Is This Game About, Anyway?

The God of War games are Greek mythology on speed and shrooms. You play this guy named Kratos. He's a Spartan. He wants revenge on the Gods. In particular, he wants to kill Zeus, his father. He wants revenge because ...

OK, you got me. I played the first two God of War games a few years ago, and I can't remember what he wants revenge for. He killed his wife and child in a berserk rage, once, and I think he blames Zeus for it, or something.

The point is that God of War 3 never, in the game or the documentation, says exactly why the main character wants revenge. I think that this little detail is remarkably telling. (It doesn't matter if they made it clear in a game released five years ago. This stuff has to be repeated in The Now.) Revenge plots can be very emotionally compelling. They really connect. People tend to have an innate sense of justice, and a desire to see a wrong righted is a really easy way to suck someone in. But ONLY if we know the crime that is being avenged!

Without that, what the game gives us is a character who staggers around, bellowing his desire for revenge. I swear, every cutscene goes, "Hi, Kratos!" "I want revenge! Hack hack hack!" "Urgh. (Die.)" And, without purpose, we are only enacting the mind-boggling violence in the game purely for its own sake.

The Chopping. And the Sawing. And the Intestines.

And, oh Lord, the violence. You press in the joysticks to simulate gouging a character's eyes out with your thumbs. You saw a god's legs off (plenty of blood and bone shards jutting from stumps) for his boots. You rip out a titan's stomach and he holds his intestines in his hands. You snap Hera's neck for, as for as I can tell, no reason at all. The result of your destruction of the Gods is unbelievable death and destruction on the world's surface. These actions are interspersed with the hoarse gruntings of what must be one of the simplest and most unlikeable protagonists in gaming history.

So if you are, like me, a story-guy, what you have is someone doing unbelievably horrible things for entirely nebulous reasons. What, apart from the action, is there for my mind to grab hold of? The parts of the game, like story and character, that normally contain the "art parts" are so shriveled and gross that you can't get anything out of them. Leaving the cool hacky parts.

Kratos is a horrible person wreaking unbelievable havoc, and you are controlling him. You are the one doing all these things. This alone is enough to alienate anyone halfway sane. It certainly prevented me from lowering my psychic boundaries and ever identifying with any character in the story, even for a moment.

"How Dare You Say What I Do or Don't Relate To?"

Of course, just because I can't relate to the game doesn't mean other people won't. Fair enough. But I will express one unfounded opinion.

Kratos is nothing but a pure expression of self-hatred and mindless, sociopathic violence. I know there are people out there who can really relate to that. But if you are really into that and can go, "Yeah, that's totally me!" I might humbly suggest that spending a lot of hours feeding and reinforcing that might not be entirely healthy. Just sayin'.

And the Ending

So at the end of the game, you've killed most of the Gods. You have had to rescue Pandora from a labyrinth, so that she can open her magic box and give you a weapon to kill Zeus. Your desire to save Pandora to atone for killing your daughter is a plot point. This might have been a good fig leaf for the sociopathy, but then Kratos sacrifices her to kill Zeus and she dies. So, that.

Then, after a huge, epic (really fun, don't forget the gameplay is really fun) boss fight with Zeus, your foe almost dies but gets up again and you get sent into this gorgeous, super-trippy sequence where you explore this dark black outerworld and relive everything you've been through and then you meet the ghosts of your wife and child and they hug you and there's some tender words about forgiveness. Then you find Pandora's Box and open it yourself and learn that the weapon you need to kill Zeus is Hope. You had the power inside you all along. Also, Love is the Fifth Element.

So I'm playing this, and it's really cool, and I'm thinking, "Sure. It's a little late, but there's a little humanity here. Something I can sort of accept. Maybe this isn't going to be all horrible and ..."

Psych! Sucker! Then you leave the dream world and kill Zeus by smashing his face against a rock, bones cracking, blood spraying all over the camera, in a sequence as visceral and unpleasant a bit of violence as ...

OK. I think you get the point. (Video here. Go a minute in. NSFW.)

So What's Your Point?

I have to state again, I had a lot of fun playing God of War 3. It was really cool, once I figured out to, emotionally, hold it at a great distance. Nobody does this sort of gameplay better. And, while I wasn't thrilled with the violence, and I wouldn't let my daughter play the game until she was nine or so, I'm not immediately against it. I'm no anti-game zealot, and I never will be.

The fascinating thing about the experience, for me, was that the ugliness was so sustained, so pure and undiluted. A lot of people worked on God of War 3, smart people. They must have realized, at some point during the years working on the game, what they were making, and the effect it was likely to have on people.

When people consider games as an art form, they tend to ask three questions: Are They Art? How Should That Art Affect People? Will They Only Affect People in the Old Ways, or Are Their New Untapped Ways For People to Connect With Video Games?

They should also realize that not everyone welcomes the idea of a game as an artistic statement. It is, in fact, possible to purge art from your game, to attempt to intentionally repel players from everything but the sporting aspects. Maybe Art is stupid. It wasn't something I expected. In some cases, it might even be a good idea. But, I confess, I tend to hope for more.

How I Saved the Gaming Industry Overnight By Being Awesome

There's a web site out there called RPG Codex. They write about me a lot, sometimes even kindly. There is something they said about me recently that I wanted to respond to. Not to criticize, but to comment on. I think there are things to be learned about Indie gaming and game development in general. (Emphasis mine.)

In ten years, Jeff Vogel - the man behind Spiderweb Games [sic] - has released an impressive eleven games... or the same game eleven different times if you want to be a hater. Through the 2000's Jeff released Avernum 2-6, Geneforge 2-5, Nethergate: Resurrection and Blades of Avernum.

If there's anyone who owes his success to the "just make a sequel" methodology, it is Jeff Vogel. While the professional studios fail left and right, Jeff has somehow or another managed to chip out a tiny niche market for himself. And pretty much only himself. He's nestled into it now and is well and truly quite snug.

Updating little if anything of his games over the past decade, Jeff has simply added story and new locations to explore. He's changed some bits and pieces as he goes of course but the core technology has almost always remained consistently the same. The graphics too. In any other genre this would be a death knell but when it comes to RPGs, it seems the shittier the graphics, the more chances there are of having more interesting role-playing elements.

There's a lot I can say about this, but I'm most interested in the bit about how I have not changed my core technology in ten years. And you know something? They're exactly right. In fact, my "core technology" is so rough and low-budget that I am embarrassed to call it "technology." I still use it year after year. And yet, somehow, during the last decade, my fan base and profits increased dramatically.

If you asked me why I used that same old clunky game engine and why I am still using it, I would give this answer: Because I am really smart and cool and awesome. And if more people emulated me, the game industry would not be near so messed up.

Now, mind you, I don't write the same game again and again. That's like saying an author who wrote ten books wrote the same book each time because they are published using the same paper and ink. Did I write a whole-new story? Then it's a whole new game.

But it's gotten to the point where a company is expected to be ashamed for using the same engine for more than one title and a few DLC packs. The Gold Box games and the Infinity Engine are rare exceptions.

This is such an astonishing waste of resources. When I start a new game, I spend 3-4 months rewriting the worst or most dated part of my engine, and then I take that old (but solid) engine and make the coolest story I can with it. It's a small company. Our resources are desperately limited. Thus, I don't spend time remaking things that already work. If my wolf icon looks good, why make a new wolf icon just for the sake of making a new one? Instead, I focus on the story, the one thing that truly needs to be all new and excellent.

And the big companies, who make AAA games with these amazing awesome big-budget engines? They should re-use more of them! The Dragon Age engine is very cool. Make ten games with it! And not just piddly Dragon Age DLC either. Make games that are cyberpunk, horror, science fiction, fantasy in a new setting. The budgets will be much lower, and that makes it easier to take risks. And use the same dragon model. It looks really sweet. And, once the engine is a drained husk (in, say, five years), then spend a lot of money making a new one.

(And, while I'm dreaming, why not use that engine to make more, cheaper, shorter games. Games short enough that people could actually reach the ends of them. I think part of the reason Portal and Braid are so lauded is that they're short enough for normal people to see the end.)

And if more assets are reused, there will be less work for the artists, coders, and testers to do. They just add to each game the assets and features that specific title needs. Which means that they might be able to spend less time in the crushing permanent crunch mode that burns most developers out young.

Most people will dismiss this idea out of hand, saying that I don't know anything about the realities of the business. And they are probably right. I'm just a dumb, little nobody. But I am running a profitable game company. But Electronic Arts and Activision (the company that owns Blizzard!) are losing bazillions of dollars. Development studios have been closing left and right. Games are crazy expensive to make and burn developers out. Massive layoffs are endemic.

Spiderweb Software, on the other hand, have seen sales drop about 10% during the big recession, but we're still comfortable and quite profitable. And I'm supposed to be ashamed of my business model? Pish!

And, in some ways, the industry is moving slowly in my direction. Once, in the heady early days after Doom came out, every company had hotshot coders who wanted to write their own 3-D engine. These days, companies wisely just license the Unreal engine or whatever. Now it is common to license graphics engines, sound engines, video engines, physics engines. Reusing old resources in new games is already the right strategy. I just take it to the natural extreme. Others should follow my worthy example.

And, in the long run, I don't think gamers will really care if three games use the same dragon model.

So thanks to RPG Codex for the press. I will address their comments about how hardly anyone else does what I do in a future post, because I have something to say about how awesome it is to have competitors.

The Great Scrabble Controversy of 2010!

So yesterday the Internetz reported that, in some places, the rules of Scrabble would change to allow proper nouns. Gaming geeks like myself were completely outraged. Many flecks of spittle hit many monitors. Then the dust cleared and it began to appear that we had all been played in a careful bit of PR. Which is all to the good.

But why would it be such a terrible, terrible thing to allow proper nouns in Scrabble? It's a nice exercise in Game Design 101, methinks. Try answering the question for yourself. Go on. I'll wait. I'm sitting right here, chin in my hand, listening to the White Stripes and waiting for you.

OK. Got your answer? Well, here's mine.

One. In games, the ability to determine whether a move is legal or not is kind of a good thing.

When you play Scrabble, you first point at your dictionary and say, "That is the dictionary" and then you had a foolproof way to settle any argument about whether your awesome play of "quitzwij" gets 80 points or not. Sure, your dictionary might suck and not always approve of words you are SURE are correct, but at least you have a final arbiter.

But what if proper nouns are allowed? Well, there is no single authoritative dictionary of proper nouns, and there never will be. Thus, there is, like, no hard and fast way to determine what you are ever allowed to do in the game. This isn't a way to get people to play a game. It's a way to get people to argue.

Sure, each individual house could then come up with a stack of books and have them be the source of all legal proper nouns. An Atlas. An encyclopedia. An almanac. But there are several problems with this. First, that's offloading a lot of design work on the players, which is lazy and sucks. Just saying, "Grab a dictionary" is infinitely more reasonable. And, second, it makes validating a move far more time-consuming. Looking something up in the dictionary? Fast. Looking up one name in in eight books, less so.

Two. There are too many proper nouns, so there are too many legal plays. Just about any short combination of letters with a vowel or two is a name for something SOMEWHERE.

Here's an exercise. Go to Google and just generate a short random word with a vowel or two. Search for that random word and see what you get. For example, I literally slapped the keyboard to generate "Jihnu". I searched for it, and found several people with that name.

Amazing! Before, J, I, H, N, and U would have required thought to play. But the magical alchemy of this rule change have transformed those letters into 15 points of gold! And I didn't even have to, like, know anything.

Having a puzzle where every answer is correct takes a bit of the fun out of doing puzzles.

Three. It completely changes the nature of the game. Maybe you like the newer game, maybe not. But it worked extremely well for decades as a game of strategy and grammar, and objecting to completely reworking it is entirely understandable. At this point, you can accuse me of hating change. Well, once a game has reached a certain status and omnipresence, it shouldn't be changed unless the change is a clear, unarguable, huge improvement. Want a game where you get points for thinking up city names or whatever? Good for you. Invent it.

But, as I said, it looks like this is just a big misunderstanding and a PR bonanza for the Scrabble people. Which is good, because now we can focus on rules to classic games that should be changed.

My favorite? The Income Tax space in Monopoly. That's the one where you pay $200 or 10% of the value of all your holdings. Which means that the space invites you to grind the game entirely to a halt while you haul out an adding machine and add and subtract and carry the two and figure out exactly how much money your position is worth. Who still thinks that adds to the fun?

But my favorite part about the Income Tax space? The rules specifically say that you aren't allowed to figure out how much 10% is before you decide to pay $200 or 10%. Here's a game design tip I'll give you for FREE. If a design element requires you to place rules on what a player is allowed to think, you might want to reconsider it.

Why I Won't Get An IPad

As a big Mac-head since the early days of forever ago, I was really interested in the iPad, Apple's next Machine To Change Everything. I don't currently actually own a laptop. I wanted to get my own personal, shiny Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy, take it to coffee shops, and use it to do design work on my games while all the losers looked on in envy and awe.

Because, at that size and price, I expect a computer. And thus, I can't by it. Because of this little chain of logic.

If a computer doesn't have a fully functional web browser, it's not worth buying.

A fully functional web browser needs to support Flash.

The iPad does not support Flash.

Ergo, no.

Now, I don't care whether Flash is good or devilspawn and whether so much stuff (games, Hulu, etc) should be running on it. The fact is that Flash is a big thing, and I want the things it runs.

But I love my new iMac, and it's not even broken, so Apple is still OK by me. It's just that they seem to think bigger iPod Touches are the future of computing, and no, I don't think so. Versatility makes technology complicated, but it also makes it awesome.

Another Nerd Sounds Off About Avatar!

(This article contains some spoilers about Avatar. And, since you've already seen it, it doesn't matter.)

A week after everyone else on the planet, I finally managed to take some time off from writing games to see Avatar (original name: Jake Sully Versus the Hippies From Space). I saw it projected on a flat surface, as opposed to in 3-D, because I am very old.

I agree with the conventional wisdom: The movie is super pretty. The plot and writing are a bit dopey, and the characters are cardboard. But, ooh! Shiny! It's fun enough to be worth seeing.

But whenever anything is seen by that many people and worms its way into the culture, it's fun and worthwhile to get all nitpicky and start digging into it ...

1. This io9 article, about how movies like Avatar are big First Worlder White Guy Wish-Fulfillment Fantasies, it perfectly designed to make the Internets explode with rage. The article is also kind of on target.

Look. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that surviving in a jungle wilderness, full of hostile creatures and food you have to hunt down yourself, is tricky. This is true whether you're in the Amazon or on Pandora. And I don't think I or anyone reading this could master the environment and learn everything you need to know AND learn the language AND master a whole new BODY in 30 days. Or 30 years. The life of a tribesman is hard, yo. Saying otherwise is clueless and condescending.

I, personally, would be too busy being eaten by a snake.

You can call me politically correct for saying this if you want. I will comfort myself with the fact that I am completely and obviously right.

But that's not to say that I think Avatar is all right-wing. Exactly the opposite ...

2. The Onion AV Club had an awesome article about how, no matter what you think of the plot or CGI, the movie Avatar pulls its weight by being so awesomely politically subversive.

Make no mistake. Those bloodthirsty marines (well, ex-marine corporate mercenaries, not that any of those exist in real life) and soulless corporate drones we're rooting against are there to represent us. They're out there shooting the natives and doing anything it takes to bring back the Whateverium, and the people back home couldn't give less of a crap. The movie gets us to cheer while they (we) are killed or kicked off in chains. It gets us to see ourselves as the bad guys. It's amazing what you can get away with when you're James Cameron.

I think the most fascinating thing about Avatar is the way it gets us to realize, in our bones, that the Na'vi will never, ever want to be us. They will never buy all that we're selling. I mean, they'd like some schools, and yeah, the medicine is nice, but we will never remake them in our own image. No price is high enough for them to let us have their Plotpointium.

It's a subtle point, and I doubt it will register much with many people. (Ooh! Shiny!) But it did make me think. I love our country, and our culture, and the Constitution and the principles we try to live by, even if we sometimes do our best to ignore them. And yes, it's OK for us to try to sell our ideas to other people. The whole story of human progress is the story of competing ideas.

But pick a country, say, Afghanistan. They have their own cultures and traditions and ideas, millenia old. And a lot of people there would rather die (or kill) than give up their idea set, no matter how tempting elements of ours might be. Avatar provides a nice reminder that some (probably most) people will never want to be us, no matter how much we offer in return. Of course, the movie really stacks the deck by making Pandora this hippie paradise with floating mountains and glowy flowers and crap like that, instead of an endless expanse of desert or rocky, inhospitable crags, but this actually kind of doesn't change anything. Living in a cruddy place doesn't make you any less attached to your fundamental worldview.

Not that the other cultures wouldn't like our goods and services, I'm sure. Medicine would be nice, thanks.

3. So the hot blue CGI boy and the hot blue CGI girl went and did it under the big, magical soul tree. OK, fine. But where were the other couples who went there to make out? Was that a privilege reserved for the chief's daughter? That's a pity, because that scene would have been a thousand times better for me if we were also hearing dozens of blue couples having rough, wild, noisy, awesome jungle sex in the background.

4. Actually, rooting against the marines did creep me out a little bit. I just finished watching the truly awesome Iraq war miniseries Generation Kill. I didn't always like the marines in that, but I sure was rooting for all of them to live.

5. I'm not sure what will happen in the years after the movie ends, but I strongly suspect that the words "orbital bombardment" will be involved.

6. Science fiction wanker note. If you want to see how similar storytelling ground was covered in a superior way over thirty years ago, track down a copy of The Word For World Is Forest by Ursula K LeGuin. Damn fine book.

There. More words written about Avatar. Obama saw it, so it must be worth the effort.

Review: Secret Of Monkey Island, Special Edition.

I used to, in a prior century, be an absolute fiend for adventure games. I loved Infocom more than anything. I would spend three or four months trying to solve a game like, say, Zork II, going at it again and again, trying absolutely every little thing, so that I could have the joy and satisfaction of solving it without degrading myself by getting a hint. Months.

Wow. I was a dope.

It hurts me deeply to say it. But. Is there a genre of computer game that suffered a faster, harsher, and more deserved downfall than the adventure game, with its obscure, illogical puzzles and its total lack of hesitation about stopping you stone cold because you didn't notice some 2x2 pixel detail on the screen?

I don't want to spend too much time kicking a genre when it's down. It has already been taken to pieces better than I ever could here and here.

But adventure games are not dead. Now the flame is kept alive almost solely by Telltale Games, makers of the Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit, Tales of Monkey Island games, not to mention Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People. Good for them. It's a lonely vigil. (By the way, I've played Seasons One and Two of Sam & Max. Good games. Lots of fun, as long as you grab a hint any time you're stuck for more than fifteen minutes.)

Although my feeble old brain lacks the patience to bang away at adventure games like I used to, I do get the occasional nostalgic urge to play one for old times sake. And since The Secret Of Monkey Island is a classic which I managed to avoid playing, I jumped at the chance to play the Special Edition on XBox Live.

My review: If you hold down the 'X' button for a few seconds, the game gives you a hint. Do this every time you're stuck for more than fifteen minutes, and you'll have a fantastic time.

Longer version: It's extremely funny. It comes with an awesome feature where you can press a button to toggle between the original version of the game and the new spiffy version, which never stops being cool. Some of the puzzles are really ingenious. And, if you go too long without pressing 'X', it will remind you of everything that was horrible about adventure games.

An Example. (Warning! I am about to reveal the answer to a puzzle!)

So there's a fish on a dock. There is a seagull next to it. You need the fish, but you are afraid that, if you reach for it, the seagull will peck you. So you have to scare the seagull away.

This seems like it should be easy. You see, at this point in the game, you are carrying around a shovel and a sword. And I personally may be no pirate hero, but I assure you that I could use either of those items to scare away a seagull. Because, you know. Sword.

But that isn't the answer. You see, the board the seagull is standing on is loose. Note that there is no visual cue that the board is different from any other board. You need to walk around the dock until you hit the sweet spot and lift the board and knock the seagull away. Of course. The puzzle is solved by wandering around randomly. And hoping you step on the correct spot.

Getting stuck and needing to beg for help on something like this makes me feel angry and stupid. In any game, any bottleneck along the lines of "Be clever or be stuck here forever." is iffy design, at best. So now I mainly play games where the puzzle is how to get past the monster at the end of the hall and the only thing I have in my inventory is a big, big gun.

How Smart I Am ...

I needed about six hints to finish the game. Usually the hint just drew my attention to the door or little screen speck I missed. Playing the game in my TV instead of a monitor and moving the cursor around with a joystick instead of the mouse only makes it harder to find that vitally important hotspot that's about the size of an ant's booger. So be warned. You're gonna spend a lot of time staring.

But I shouldn't let this just be some big rant about adventure games. Monkey Island is really funny, most of the puzzles are neat, and it's a chance to sample gaming history.

But if you stop having fun, even for a moment, lean on that 'X' button and don't be ashamed. Every adventure game should have that feature. What do the developers care if I finish the game quickly? They already have my money!

I Want To Play Awesome, Fun People Full Of Awesomeness

I had one of those gaming epiphanies the other day. I get them every so often, but I can usually lie down in a dark room with a wet washcloth on my head and make them go away. But not this time.

Here's what I decided. I don't mind if a game like Final Fantasy or Grand Theft Auto gives me a fixed character and tells me my story without letting me choose anything important about it. I'm cool with that. I can still have a lot of fun. But ...

I will no longer play any game that makes my character an insufferable, fun-hating prig.

This first started getting on my nerves with Grand Theft Auto 4. In this series, you're supposed to be this crazy criminal dude running around and doing wild, crazy things, right? Total adolescent power fantasy stuff, right? Well, instead, you play Niko Bellic, a tormented Serb with a dark past whose issues have issues. He's a grim guy. He hangs out with his cousin Roman, who is obsessed with drinking, gambling and strip clubs. And trying to not get too bogged down in his cousin's freaky drama.

After about 20 hours, I realized that I wished I was playing Roman. He had more fun.

Then the first downloadable content for GTA 4 came out. The Lost and the Damned. It's about biker gangs, so that's gonna get crazy, right? Well, your character is the responsible, business-oriented, goal-focused member of the gang, constantly berating your wild, devil-may-care superior. I instantly loathed myself.

Last week, I tried out Lost Odyssey, a huge RPG for the XBox. It's a gorgeous game, really pretty and high budget. But you play this (wait for it) grim, tormented immortal who never smiles or has fun or does anything to lighten up his joyless trudge through eternity. And, early on, you meet this immortal girl, and she's really hot and she wears shirts with no backs and flirts with you. And what's just about the first thing you try to do?

Punch her.

Seriously. She pokes fun at you and you take a swing at her and she jumps away. And what the hell? I want to spend 40 hours maneuvering this douchebag? It seemed like a neat game, but I'm sick of playing games where I hate the dude who's always in the middle of the screen.

Know what game I loved? Final Fantasy X. (Warning. Spoilers for a 75 year old game ahead.) In it, you play Tidus, who is a SPORTS STAR who gets to make time with HOT, MYSTICAL BABES, and who loves to laugh. And sure, you eventually turn out to not exist and dissolve, but sometimes that's the price you gotta' pay to have a good time, amirite?

(If you watch the video I linked to above, the awesomeness starts at 2:00.)

So there. That's my pet peeve. I have enough self-loathing in my regular life, without loathing my imaginary self too. I have two small kids. Jesus, let me have fun SOMEWHERE.