November 30, 2010 scottcjones 14Comments

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“You like what you like.”

That’s a phrase that Vic and I often repeat to one other while shooting the show. We say it on camera. We say it off camera. The only other phrase that even comes close to being repeated as often: “Let’s stop here for coffee.”

“You like what you like,” of course, is shorthand for saying, “I am not going to go out of my way to understand StarCraft II, or Civ 5, or Gran Turismo 5. Yes, they are all well-made games. Yes, smart people made them. Yes, I admire those people. They worked very hard. Good for them. And yes, there are people out there in the world who are dying to play Gran Turismo 5. Also: good for them.

“But that does not mean that I am suddenly going to develop a taste for, say, the Gran Tursimo series, a series that I have despised for many years because of its lifeless, bloodless worlds. I am not going to hoist a game onto my shoulders and carry it around the stadium for a victory lap simply because 1. the rest of the world is doing so, and 2. I am supposed to follow suit.

“Because, in the end, on my death bed, as I am breathing my last breath and no doubt trying to get in one last game of Angry Birds 14 on the iPhone 11.5GSVX, when it’s all said and done, all I can do is like what I like.”

Here are the 10 games that I liked in 2010.

10. Vanquish (Sega, Platinum Games, 360/PS3)

I know! Trash. The dialogue is horrid. None of it makes a lick of sense. And it celebrates the most filthy habit in the world: SMOKING. DEAR KIDS: DON’T LISTEN TO THIS GAME. DO NOT SMOKE. IT IS NOT SEXY. SMOKING IS THE NUMBER ONE CAUSE OF NONSENSICAL GAMES. Regardless, I loved Vanquish. Shinji Mikami’s games speak to me. He is my Sid Meier. Though Fumito Ueda would actually be my Sid Meier, if only he made more games. Sliding like Rickey Henderson between a mech-beast’s legs in slow motion while peppering its mech-crotch with futuristic fire power thrilled me enough to make me forgive and forget the rest of the game’s horse shit.

9. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (Eidos, Crystal Dynamics, XBLA/PSN)

With her ever-shrinking pair of shorts and ridiculously oversized mamms, this anachronism–she was practically left for dead on the side of Game Industry Highway a few short years ago–continued her campaign for relevancy with this superb game. My first impression, sexist as it is, was that the long distance, overhead perspective would diminish my fun, since I would no longer be able to, you know, see as much. Yet after the opening level, after sniffing out treasure the way my mother sniffs out bargains at Wal-mart, and solving puzzles–some of the best puzzles of the year in any game–and leveling up, man alive, did this game ever get its hooks into me.

8. Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions (Activision, Beenox, 360/PS3)

Fact: I could give a rat’s ass about super heroes and super hero games. But if I have to spend 15 hours in someone’s virtual tights, that someone without a doubt would be Spider-man. His versatility, in the air and on the ground, along with his Borscht Belt “zingers” make Superman, Batman, et al. all look like brooding bores. The art style, the first-person boss fights, and the constant channel surfing between dimensions–Amazing, Noir, 2099, and the symbiote-infected Ultimate–all effectively distracted me from the fact that I was basically hitting light attack and heavy attack buttons over and over again. Well done, Beenox.

7. GoldenEye 007 (Activision, Eurocom, Wii)

Never having been a Bond man, I loaded up the do-over of the 1997 classic with the lowest of expectations. The original game probably should win some sort of award for Worst-Aging Classic Game of All Time. There’s a reason why it’s hasn’t received a Perfect Dark-style XBLA makeover, and that reason is because it’s terrible. Yes, it was great in 1997. But trust me, your memories outstrip the actual experience.

The do-over and I, like Bond and Vesper in Casino Royale, did not get off to a good start. We bickered back and forth through the first few stages. It wasn’t until I’d finally ditched the Classic Controller in favor of the nunchuck-Wii remote control scheme that this game and I fell madly, passionately in love. No game in history has ever delivered the stealth/fisticuffs/mow-them-all-down trifecta as well as this game does. Though I kept waiting for GoldenEye 007 to betray me at the end, just as Vesper does to Bond, it never did. As soon as the credits rolled, I immediately started playing it again. It’s that good.

6. Bayonetta (Sega, Platinum Games, 360/PS3)

I know! More trash! This time, it’s not Shinji Mikami but his cohort Hideki Kamiya who is to blame-admire (blamire?) for this stylish nonsense. Bayonetta managed to make even less sense than Vanquish did–no small feat–yet it was more exciting to play. I had no fucking idea what was going on in this game approximately 70-percent of the time. No joke. See if you can make sense of any of it by watching this. What made this game so remarkable was that it starred a witch with long, magic hair that can occasionally be turned into a hair-dragon. Which describes exactly zero other games in videogame history. And for that, Hideki Kamiya, I salute you. Pro Tip: Keep pressing buttons and jaw-dropping, amazing shit will continue to happen. Which, if you think about it, is really what videogames are all about.

[Five thru one of my like-what-I-like selections are on deck. I’ll post them in a day or so. -Jones]
November 11, 2010 scottcjones 9Comments

>Had a couple of reviews appear in The Onion’s A.V. Club recently. First up: God of War: Ghost of Sparta.


Ghost Of Sparta’s plot is more of the series’ highbrow trash. Typical of all God Of War games, the mythological milieu gives this installment a faux erudite patina. Though you’re merely banging away at two buttons, the series’ genius is that you forever feel like you’re doing something of grave importance, something that would make a ninth-grade English teacher proud.”


Read the rest of my words–the A.V. Club limits me to a miserly 400, so there aren’t too many more to read–here. One commenter took issue with my use of the phrase “faux erudite patina.” My feelings on this matter:

1. It makes me happy that people are not only reading my reviews, but also reading them closely enough to take issue with my phrasings.

2. I think “faux erudite patina” accurately describes my experience with the series–the GOW games have always come off as smarter than they actually are–but I can see the commenter’s point. This phrase would probably merit at least an eight out of 10 on the Douche Scale, with one being least-douchiest and 10 being maximum-douchiest.

Still, I’m standing by my phrase. It’s probably the most interesting string of words I’ve written all year. Just look at the way those vowels and consonants crash into one another! Whee! Say it aloud a few times. Faux. Erudite. Patina. See? It’s already starting to grow on you.

My second more recent review for The A.V. Club was for the Kinect. A sample:

“In its worst moments, Kinect doesn’t feel like a better way to play—it’s more like a barrier between you and the game. Instead of drawing gamers deeper into the experience and making things more immersive, actions like navigating gameplay menus or pausing a game—simple actions that gamers take for granted—suddenly feel complex and needlessly obtuse. At these moments, veteran gamers will pine for the poetic certainty of an old-fashioned button press.”

Read the rest of it here. In typical A.V. Club fashion, one commenter dings me a second time for my previous use of “faux erudite patina” in my Ghost of Sparta review. Bravo, sir. Brah. Vo.


One comment did get my ire up. A guy–well, I’m assuming it was a guy–left a comment saying that he wishes two things would happen. One: That the A.V. Club learn how to review games critically. And two: That the A.V. Club stop reviewing games altogether.

The not-so-subtle subtext here: That I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. That I do not know my ass from a hole in the ground.

To you, sir, I say this: I do in fact know my ass from a hole in the ground.

Of course, these sentiments are commonplace on message boards and comment threads. I’ve read them before. I’ll read them again. People are always informing me that I am terrible at my job.

That simply is not true.

For some reason, gamers–more so than movie lovers, or TV fans, or book readers–perpetually feel that they are born not only with the toolset required to write and speak critically about games, but that they are also born with the inherent god-given right to review games.

No matter how well one writes, or how well one articulates something about a game, there will forever be be an army of salivating, semi-delusional jackals out there waiting to let you know they could have done your job exactly one million times better than you have done it.

To those jackals, I say: I hear you. And I love you.

I once felt the way you do.

And trust me: You. Are. Wrong.

Irrefutable proof that you are wrong: If you could do my job one million times better than I’m doing it, you would be doing it instead of informing me that I am terrible at it.

Now please enjoy this complimentary box of faux erudite patina.
November 2, 2010 scottcjones 13Comments

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The defining moment of E3 2010? It was dapper Don Mattrick at the Microsoft press conference announcing that everyone in attendance would receive a free Xbox 360 Slim. We shrieked like guests on Oprah–myself included (I know!)–then went home and wrote very nice things about Microsoft–well, most of us wrote nice things–and waited patiently by our mailboxes for our shiny new Slims to arrive.

Looking back, this moment was not the act of largess it appeared to be at the time, but rather Microsoft’s diabolical way of slipping the media and the industry at large a collective mickey. Slims-for-everyone made us all feel a bit groggy and starry-eyed that day. We walked out of that press conference, back into the blazing L.A. morning, feeling pretty kindly towards Microsoft. As if struck by a sudden, extreme case of amnesia, no one–not one of us–was grousing about Microsoft’s wool-pulling fiasco from the the previous year. I am referring, of course, to gaming’s greatest hoax: The Great Milo Hoax Of E3 2009.

Slight digression: As a boy my parents once took me to the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York. It was a miserable, miserable day. It was all old fucking plows and cotton gins and cider-making paraphernalia and gift shops and shit. I believe there was a display titled “The History Of Ribbon Candy.”

The only thing of any interest to me was a display of a creature known as the Cardiff Giant. The Cardiff Giant was–or rather, is (he’s still there)–a petrified, ancient giant. He hailed from a now-extinct race of giants. His corpse was discovered in the 1800’s by two workmen digging a well.

As my parents wandered off, I stayed behind and studied the giant. I initially felt like phoning the media–HELLO CBS THERE IS A DEAD GIANT UP HERE AT THE COOPERSTOWN FARMERS’ MUSEUM PLEASE DISPATCH YOUR FINEST REPORTERS IMMEDIATELY. And then I began to look a little more closely at the giant.

According to the Farmers’ Museum pamphlet, a man named George Hull had the giant carved out of a 10-foot block of gypsum in the 1860’s. Then he had it buried in the ground on the exact spot where he knew workmen were scheduled to dig a well.

A tent was erected over the giant’s “discovery site.” Hull and his partners charged the public the then-exorbitant price of 25-cents-per-peer to peer at their discovery, a price which they promptly doubled to 50 cents two days later once they realized that demand was greatly outstripping supply

P.T. Barnum immediately made an offer to buy the giant for 50K. The giant’s owners said, in so many words, “Go screw.” So Barnum had his own fake giant made. He put it on display in New York and publicly declared that Hull’s giant was a fake, and that his fake giant was the real giant.

Hull and his partners weren’t about to let Barnum get away with this. So, in 1870 they took Barnum to court and sued him for calling their fake giant a fake giant. After a cursory investigation, both giants were revealed as fakes. In the end, the presiding judge ruled that Barnum could not technically be sued for calling a fake giant a fake giant.

Meanwhile, all parties involved–Barnum, Hull and others–made scads of cash on these fake giants, thanks in no small part to the one thing hucksters, fast-talkers, and telemarketers have relied on since the dawn of civilization: the never-fail gullibility of the general public.

I peered through the rickety fence surrounding the Cardiff Giant and thought, What a damn fool I was! How did I ever think, even for a second, that this giant was real? Of course giants are not real! In the same way that Batman was born out of his parents’ murders, I swore in that moment to never be duped this way again. Yes, from that day forward, I, Scott Jones, would lead an utterly duped-free existence.

On that muggy August day in Cooperstown, New York, my greatly advanced degree of cynicism was born. Never again would I sit in awe before magicians performing magic on television. And Tooth Fairies, Sasquatches, and E.T.’s? Santa Clauses, Easter Bunnies, or that that kid Mikey from the LIFE cereal commercial died when he combined Pop Rocks with Coke?

The Cardiff Giant killed them all.

Or, at least I thought he had.

A few days ago, while enjoying my full-blown, fully adult, and totally cynical life, I caught wind of this Charlie Chaplin-cell phone phenomenon thing. I Googled it. I watched the old woman, who resembles my long-dead alcoholic Aunt Clara, as she passes through the frame chatting excitedly into what appears to be a bona fide cell phone.

I thought, as did many of you, “MY GOD IS THIS EVIDENCE OF TIME TRAVEL? Has this woman transcended time and space and, while doing so, remembered to bring her cell phone with her?” (Something that I personally forget to do approximately 19-percent of the time whenever I leave the house, let alone leave my entire era.)

It’s silly, yes. But for a few, brief, and pretty glorious seconds, it was fun to believe. Well, maybe not believe; “believe” is far too strong a word. It was fun to “entertain” the notion. I like the sound of that. Yes, I entertained the notion for a few seconds that time travel was actually possible, that this overweight woman in her jaunty hat and ill-fitting dress was actually a savvy time traveler from another dimension.

And then–poof–reason, sanity, good sense and my old friend cynicism came rushing back in.

Which brings me back to E3 2009.

I was attending the Microsoft press conference on a painfully early morning in May. Beatles Rock Band was coming out that year. Oh, look! Paul and Ringo are here. Then Steven Spielberg made a cursory appearance. But somehow upstaging both Spielberg and the remaining Beatles was Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux and his “friend,” Milo.

Milo was a diminutive kind-faced boy who lives inside your TV screen. Peter cued a short film–which should have been my first clue that a duping was in the offing–showing his virtual boy interacting with a real woman. The live woman and the virtual boy appeared to be having an actual conversation. The boy seemed to hear her, and she seemed to hear him. Then the woman drew a picture on a piece of actual paper, and somehow fed it into the top of the TV where Milo received the paper in his virtual world.

WHAT ALCHEMY IS THIS? I thought. WHAT WIZARDRY? WHAT WITCHCRAFT? COULD THIS BE THE WORK OF SATAN? REVEAL YOURSELF, SATAN!

No kidding. I thought all of those things. Except for the satan parts.

My jaw, quite literally, hung open, something which I had assumed was only a cliched expression. I walked out of the press conference on unsteady legs, unsure of what I’d just seen. Milo was all I could think about, or talk about, or write about for the rest of E3 2009.

Later that day, a handful of writers got the chance to talk to Milo firsthand. (Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them.) “What was it like?” I asked, as if they’d just returned from the future. Responses, for the most part, were disappointingly measured. No one, it seemed, had experienced anything even remotely approximating the degree of interaction that the woman had experienced in Peter Molyneux’s press-conference video. “There’s something kind of fishy going on with Milo,” one writer quietly said to me. There was, he explained, a Wizard Of Oz-feel to the Milo demonstration, as if there was a wizard behind the curtain, pulling Milo’s strings. I assumed he was speaking in metaphor until I talked to a few more people who’d chatted with Milo and discovered that there was an actual curtain at these demonstrations, behind which no doubt secret bullshit was going on.

Then, as quickly as he had arrived, after becoming the biggest E3 sensation of all time, after making me walk around on wobbly legs for three days, after making me wonder and hope and open my heart again, Milo vanished.

He hasn’t been seen since.

This year, Microsoft made no mention whatsoever of Milo. Instead, they set their phasers to stun by throwing free Slims into our laps, then sent us on our merry way. The saddest part? It worked. It fucking worked. All we could talk about after E3 2009 was Milo and Project Natal. After E3 2010, all we could talk about was who got one and who didn’t.

Well played, Microsoft. [Insert slow-clap sound effect HERE.]

Project Natal turned out to be lame. They changed its name to “Kinect.” It does not let you feed real paper to a virtual boy who you can be friends with, as Microsoft once promised it would do. From what I can tell so far, now that Kinect is here in my living room, it’s a futuristic device capable only of misunderstanding my voice commands and allowing me to steer a virtual raft by jumping up and down.

These are definitely not the droids I was looking for.

The larger question here is this: As gamers, why aren’t we vein-popping-from-our-foreheads angry about this? Why haven’t we excoriated Microsoft for this shameful display of smoke and mirrors? Why aren’t we storming Microsoft headquarters with pitchforks and torches and chasing Bill Gates into the old windmill?

Imagine Nintendo announcing next year that the Wii 2–the Wiiii–will be powered by actual rocks from the moon. Imagine Sony showing up at next year’s E3 and saying that their new hardware has a special graphics chip inside which will allow gamers to finally experience the sensation of what it feels like to eat four slices of great pizza while receiving a deft, high-speed handjob from Mila Kunis.

Any promise, any claim, no matter how outrageous, can be made. It’s a post-Milo world. We just live in it now.

Bullshit has been foisted upon gamers practically since the dawn of the medium in the form of doctored screenshots, broken promises, terrible games, and a steady, constant stream of misinformation. That wee cynic who was born on the boring grounds of the Farmers’ Museum so many years ago wants to slap you all across your collective faces and say, “Wake the fuck up, people. We can’t allow these jag-offs to get away with this shit anymore. We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

But the gamer inside me? The same person who so desperately wanted to believe in the Cardiff Giant? The one who wanted to believe in Milo and the Charlie Chaplin cell-phone lady and televised displays of magic? Honestly? That part of me will forever be down for a decent hoax. That part of me will always be here waiting, bracing myself, ready to believe the unbelievable.

Yes, we’ve had our hearts broken before. And, yes, without fail, our hearts will be broken again.

Yet, as gamers, we hope.

Because gamers, for some inexplicably fucked up, totally unreasonable reason, have the biggest hope tanks in the world.

We hope, and we hope, and we hope. Then we hope some more. We read the day’s news, and we hope. We load up a new game, and we hope.

And when something once again fails us? (And it will.) When another promise turns out to be empty? When we’re confronted with yet another Milo?

Put a few gratis Xboxes in the mail.

Or you know what? Don’t. Either way, Xbox or no Xbox, we’ll just be out here, hoping that at least some games are good, hoping that some of the news doesn’t turn out to be another Cardiff Giant.

Man.

What a pack of beautiful fools we are sometimes.
October 26, 2010 scottcjones 5Comments

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It’s that time of year. Time when I see the Fed Ex delivery man more than I see my imaginary girlfriend. Time when I am literally buried beneath a gamevalanche–that’s an avalanche of games, people–and the rescue team won’t be deployed until December at the earliest. Time when my wrists are sore, my thumbs ache, and my right eye twitches involuntarily–it’s doing it now, even as I type this–because I have stared at my television for a thoroughly unhealthy number of hours in a row.

That time.

Fact: It is not uncommon for me to require an eye exam each January because of all the high-definition damage I do to my retinas in October and November.

Some numbers: I have spent at least 40 of the last 48 hours gaming. Here’s a fly-by of what I’ve seen: Fable 3, Vanquish, the new God Of War on the PSP, Rock Band 3, Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, Divergent Shift and X-Scape on the DS, Sonic The Hedgehog 4: Episode 1, Costume Quest, Def Jam Rap Star, random iPhone games like Naughty Bear and Angry Birds Halloween, and, inexplicably, just because I had a strange hankering for it, a few rounds of Star Fox 64 on the Virtual Console. While you’ve been eating, sleeping, or playing with your kids or pets, while you’ve been talking to your Uncle Bill on the phone–hi, Uncle Bill–or re-reading a Nicholas Sparks novel, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, I have been gaming.

I now pronounce you Man and Game. You may kiss the Game.

My couch has retained a lawyer in the name of taking out a restraining order against me. Sample of the courtroom proceedings in Jones Vs. Couch: “Mr. Jones, my client claims that you routinely farted into him, with the number of farts often exceeding 20 farts per day. Do you deny this, Mr. Jones? And remember, you are under oath.”

Me: [I shoot a how-could-you-betray-me look across the courtroom at Couch.]

That photo up above? That’s a shot of the coffee table in my living room. Whenever I run out of square footage on the table, my only option is to go vertical. So what rises up before me is a kind of relief map of the holiday gaming season. It literally becomes a mountain range of discs and game boxes, instruction booklets and peripherals. Like strata in a geological dig, good games tend to stay near the top of the mountains (Vanquish, Dead Rising 2, Kirby’s Epic Yarn) while the bad games (Medal Of Honor, The Force Unleashed 2) sink to the bottom, never to be seen again until I get the chance to clean up this godforsaken mess at the end of the year.

It’s no wonder that my girlfriend is “imaginary.” (Which is only slightly less terrible than “inflatable.”)

Vic and I have an acronym that we use during this season. It’s A.B.G.: Always Be Gaming. No matter where we are, no matter what we’re doing, this time of year it’s essential that we constantly game. A.B.G. means making sure that your portables–DS, PSP, iPhone, iPad–are charged and ready to go if you’re going to be away from your consoles for a few hours. A.B.G. means starting a download via PSN before getting into the shower, so the download will be completed by the time you’ve finished washing. It means waking up in the morning and turning on the 360 before you’ve had your coffee, while it’s still dark outside–these days the sun doesn’t come up in Vancouver until 7:30 or so–just to squeeze in a few more levels, another boss, another power-up, or more experience points.

Always Be Gaming.

Always.

I can’t believe this is my fucking life. Man!

See what happens when you stay in school, don’t do drugs (well, except for that one time) (and that one other time), and eat your vegetables, kids? You get to have an insane job.

Cue the “Don’t Stop Believing” song.

You know the one.
October 26, 2010 scottcjones 1Comment

>A few short days before Crispy Gamer suddenly stroked out, pooped itself, and went to website heaven–R.I.P., old girl–I met a man who had recently done a stint behind the counter at a New York City-area GameStop. As he told me his tales of woe, I began to write them down, hoping to turn the stories into a much larger piece for CG.


Once CG gave up its ghost, I figured there was no reason for this story–which felt important to me–to die along with it. The result: a massive seven thousand-word piece that my friend, writer and editor Susan Arendt, agreed to publish in The Escapist Magazine.


Susan helped trim the story down to a more manageable size, then came up with the idea to split the story into four smaller sections and run it over the course of four weeks. She also urged me to change the pseudonym of the protagonist from “Peppy Hare” to “Ben” (another good call, SA).

Whether Peppy/Ben is dealing with irate moms, learning the fine art of “gutting duty,” schooling kids in Super Smash Bros., or putting a stop to budding criminals, his stories consistently offer cool, oddball insights into videogame culture.

A sample:

Gamers on message boards constantly say – and yes, they typically write the following in caps – ‘HOW CAN THEY SELL AN OPEN COPY OF A GAME AS NEW WTFFFFFFF GAMESTOP SUX BALLZ?’ The answer from GameStop’s corporate perspective is this: Gutting keeps shrink to a minimum. Definition of shrink: Customer theft. Irrefutable fact: If you put an empty box on the shelf, there is no incentive whatsoever for a thief to steal it.”

Now that the fourth and final section has been published in TEM, you can read the whole damn thing, in its entirety, right here.

Also: Peppy/Ben, I promised to split my paycheck for the story 50-50 with you. So please come to the window to collect your much-deserved winnings.

And if anyone else out there has a story that you’d like me to tell, you know where you can find me.

One last: follow Susan on Twitter. She’s the best.
October 20, 2010 scottcjones 10Comments

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On a recent brisk Vancouver afternoon, while shooting our review of Medal of Honor for the show, Vic and I got into a heated Crossfire-style debate over the merits of turning real-world conflicts into armchair entertainments.

We hadn’t planned on doing this. Our original goal was to have a semi-lucid conversation about the game’s multiplayer modes. But suddenly, there we were, doing something neither of us expected to be doing.

It was awkward. It was uncomfortable. But it was real, and necessary. And not completely unenjoyable.

Vic posits that building a virtual experience, as Medal of Honor does, around up-to-the-minute news headlines helps expose gamers to issues that are currently going on in the world, that these virtual experiences can be didactic and enlightening and fortifying, and, finally, that games need to start attempting to work with, or at least wrestle with, this kind of trickier, more mature material if they are ever going to get anywhere. (I think that’s a fair approximation of Vic’s points. Vic: If it’s not a fair approximation, kick me underneath the desk. Yes, we sit across from one another, just like in old-time detective movies.)

I heard Vic. He made some good points. But I don’t agree with him.

Not because I enjoy disagreeing with Vic–which I do (oh, how I do)–but because I can’t get behind what he’s saying. Games, at this point in time, are simply not equipped to offer any sort of mature commentary on, or virtual approximation of, what’s happening in Afghanistan.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that I fucking even know what’s going on in Afghanistan. Yes, I read the papers and watch the news. From what I can gather from the media, it’s an arid pit of death, misery and despair of epic proportions. Awful, nightmarish shit happens there on a moment to moment basis. Your own soldiers, it seems, are far more likely to kill you by mistake than anything else. Sad, complex dramas play out each day–dramas that are throughly unique to this conflict.

What happens in EA’s Medal of Honor, I’m 100-percent certain, has absolutely nothing to do with what is actually happening there.

Nothing.

At all.

Let’s face it: At this juncture, videogames are unfortunately still only capable of reducing complex, happening-now experiences to one or two-note entertainments. Which is what Medal of Honor is: a tepid one-note reduction of a complex, painful, fucked-up-beyond-belief story that is so base and lowbrow that it’s not an honor at all but an insult.

You can’t take all of this fucked up shit and turn it into a high-resolution shooting gallery and put a $60 price tag on it.

You can’t.

Worse still, if you’re in the mood to shoot brown-skinned people wearing turbans–or “towel-heads,” as one of our neighbors so affectionately called them when I was growing up–this is the game for you. EA’s best customers, I’d imagine, are the people who show up to protest the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero. Hand out some Medal of Honor demos down there, EA. I’m sure those people will find your game thoroughly entertaining.

The bottom line is this: If you’ve got something serious or important or profound to say, about the war in Afghanistan, or anything else for that matter, a videogame at this moment in time is the absolute last medium you should attempt to say it in.

Re-watch Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. The locale was different–Iraq, not Afghanistan–but I learned more about the type of horse shit soldiers deal with in the Middle East from that three-minute, claustrophobic barracks fist-fight scene–you know the one–than I did from Medal of Honor in its entirety. I learned more from watching Jeremy Renner’s character shop for fucking cereal than I did from Medal of Honor in its entirety.

Look at M.A.S.H. I watched that show religiously when I was kid. I saw how the soldiers lived, in their impossibly flimsy canvas tents. (Which seemed flimsier still whenever bombs would fall on their unit.) Sure, there were plenty of good times between B.J. and Hawkeye and Hot Lips and Colonel Potter, and their never-ending quest to foil nemesis Frank Burns. But there were lots of terrible, shitty, god-awful times, too. Choppers would suddenly arrive in droves at least once per episode carrying the dead and the wounded. Watching doctors exchange quips and barbs and zingers, and flirt and insult one another, all while being elbow-deep inside the chests of dead or dying soldiers tells you volumes about the human condition, and about how people endure and survive these sorts of beyond-hellish circumstances.

Games can’t possibly hope to enlighten us in these ways. They will one day–oh, they’ll enlighten us in ways that we can’t even imagine, trust me–but right now, they can’t.

They can’t.

How puny Medal Of Honor seems when you hold it up next to Oliver Stone’s Platoon, or Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, or Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, or HBO’s The Pacific, or Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” or Wolff’s “In Pharaoh’s Army,” or Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird.”

How puny. How small. How pathetic.

Man, I am all for pushing the envelope, for seeing games do things that they’ve never done before, for making me feel things that I’ve never felt before. But when a game set in a fictional post-apocalyptic wasteland–I’m talking about Fallout: New Vegas now–has more nuance and subtext and depth and intelligence than a game about the war in Afghanistan, and can evoke emotions ranging from heartbreak and anger to frustration and exhilaration, that’s a grave, grave problem that needs to be addressed, and right quick.
October 13, 2010 scottcjones 5Comments

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It was Canadian Thanksgiving here last week. Which was strange, because no one really seems to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving. All the shops and restaurants and bars and poutine vendors are open, like any other day. The post office and the banks are closed. But otherwise, it’s a day off for people, little more.

I met Thumb-Blaster for breakfast at the White Spot on West Georgia Street. White Spots are the Canadian version of Denny’s, only less cheery. They smell vaguely of bleach and depression. Strippers and old people eat here. Everything on the menu is incredibly cheap. Thumb-Blaster and I both got huge piles of cheap, terrible food for less than $10.

The project T.B. is currently working on includes a significant multiplayer component. So he witnesses, in a very tangible way, what building multiplayer does to a development team. At best, it sounds like a nuisance. At worst, it sounds like a time and energy sink-hole, a Kafka-like act of futility and despair for the people working on it.

T.B., despairing a little, asked me why game reviewers inevitably subtract points from a game’s review score if multiplayer isn’t part of the package. “Faulting a game for not having multiplayer is like faulting a movie for not being in 3-D,” Thumb Blaster said. “Imagine a movie reviewer saying, ‘This movie was really great, but since it is not in 3-D, I’m docking it a couple of points. Next time, MAKE IT IN 3-D, YOU DOPES.”

T.B. had a point. Remember BioShock? (How could you forget? I seem to refer to it in almost every post on this goddamn blog.) Nearly every review across the board fawned over the game, but at some point included some variation on the following disparaging sentence: “There’s no multiplayer in the game, which seems like a missed opportunity.”

The fact that BioShock 2 included multiplayer–you asked for it, you got it, reviewers!!!!!!!!–is one of those things that will pain me until the end of my days. It is complete and utter shit. No one is playing it. No, not even the reviewers who asked for it apparently can be bothered to play it. And the people who worked on it? They’ve probably have either hanged themselves, or gone insane, or now manage a Borders in Pittsburgh.


While leafing through the October issue of Game Informer, I found a short interview with Ken Levine, who is given the bulk of the credit for making the original BioShock so terrific. (Note: He had little to nothing to do with BioShock 2.) The question put to him by the writer was this: What is Irrational’s approach to multiplayer in BioShock: Infinite?

“Our approach hasn’t changed,” he says. “Every game we did prior to BioShock had a multiplayer component, and I don’t think it mattered. It always came out of a request of a marketing department.

“If you look at multiplayer, either you are going to do something that’s profound, or you’re wasting your time. Absolutely wasting your time. Because what are people going to do? You’re going to have a couple thousand people play it for a few weeks, then they’re going to go back to the great multiplayer games [like] Call of Duty, Gears of War, Halo, Left 4 Dead.

“My feeling always has been if there is an idea that is organic to the product and is profound and is going to move people and excite people and really add a dimension to the product that is not just good for the product but stands on its own as a game, then you do it. If you don’t have that, you don’t do it.

“At this point, we haven’t made a determination about whether or not we have something that’s profound enough, or what exactly our thinking is here.”

I love this sentence so much, that I think anyone who crabbed about the lack of multiplayer in BioShock should be forced to read it once a day for the rest of their lives: If you look at multiplayer, either you are going to do something that’s profound, or you’re wasting your time.

Go ahead. Read it again. And again.

Thumb-Blaster and I ate our syrup-soaked pancakes in silence. I noticed that there were no windows in the restaurant. It was midday outside, but inside it was gloomy and damp, as if the whole building was submerged at the bottom of the ocean. At a nearby table, an old man let out an overly dramatic, Big Daddy-like yawn…
October 6, 2010 scottcjones 5Comments

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There’s a lot of naturally occurring downtime during our Reviews on the Run shoots. Lots of low-brow joking–the lower the brow, the better. Lots of playful insults. Lots of toilet humor. And, apparently, lots of spontaneous dancing.

What I neglect to remember sometimes is that all of this is being filmed.

The editors pieced together this montage–without my permission, of course–which I believe is something of an homage to the closing dance number of the Academy Award winning film, Slumdog Millionaire.

And yes, when I am trying to insert my index finger into my clenched fist, the clenched fist is something of an homage to a butthole.

September 16, 2010 scottcjones 7Comments

>My friend John Teti has a website which he uses as an aggregator for the various writings he does for various publications. (Bookmark it, if you haven’t done so already. John’s one of the best writers I know.) Taking a page from the J. Teti playbook–this isn’t the first time I’ve stolen a page from you, sir–I’ve decided to also post links to the stories I write during spare moments away from the show. Last week my review of Halo: Reach appeared in The A.V. Club. Here’s a sample:


The original Halo was many things—space opera, technical achievement, irrefutable proof that first-person shooters on consoles didn’t have to be mediocre—but above all, the first game was a love story between a 7-foot-tall super-soldier and a tiny blue virtual woman. Within seconds of seeing each another, Cortana asks the Master Chief if he slept well during his cryogenic sleep. “No thanks to your driving, yes,” he quips. She smiles, cocks her head, and says, “So you did miss me.” For the remainder of the game, these two flirt and banter like a new-media version of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

The new Halo: Reach doesn’t have a single relationship—or for that matter, a single moment—that displays this kind of relatable humanity. Instead, it gives us a squad of anonymous super-soldiers who, over the course of the game, literally disappear inside their own hyperbolic armor.”

Read the rest of the review here. Better still, read the lengthy, sometimes clever, sometimes cruel, but consistently funny comment digression below the review. (290 comments so far and counting.) I’m telling you, these are the finest comment threads in the world, bar none. I love-hate you all.

This was not an easy review to write. Writing a review for a game that perpetuates a beloved franchise, as Reach does, is always challenging. I did not like the game. (I’ve liked each successive game in the series markedly less than the game that preceded it.) And trying to articulate why I’ve grown cold towards the Halo zeitgeist, which seems to still be cresting even as I type this–note the extraordinary number of perfect scores on Metacritic–was no small task.

The review went through two drafts, neither of which sat well with my editors. I promised to deliver a third, mind-blowing draft to their desks–well, virtually to their desks; they’re in Chicago, and I’m in Vancouver–first thing the next morning. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about the review. What exactly was I trying to say here? I realized I wasn’t alone in bed that night. Self-doubt, that old cold-handed witch, had gotten under the covers with me.

Part of me, if I’m going to be completely honest, wanted to quit in this moment. I wanted to say, “Get someone else. Because I can’t do this.” I love looking back on a piece of writing, and seeing it once it’s completed. But the process itself? The actual casting-of-the-sentences? The searching-for-the-right-words? It’s messy, and ugly, and it can be, at times, a downward spiral into self-doubt and misery.

But I couldn’t quit. It was far too late for that. After you’ve pushed out two drafts, and the editors are anxiously awaiting a third, you’re in, the way that mob guys are in in the movies.

After a sleepless night–yes, my soul was searched; I rifled through it several times, in fact–I got out of bed at 4:30 the next morning. I put on some coffee. I sat down at my desk and stared mindlessly at the blinking cursor.

Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink.

Empirical fact: A cursor blinks at approximately the rate of a slightly accelerated heartbeat. Whoever decided to make them blink at this annoying pace deserves to be seated next to pop sensation Justin Bieber for the duration of a transcontinental flight.

Vexed with self-doubt and anxiety, I did what I always do whenever I feel this way in my life: I completely vex myself with even more self-doubt and anxiety. I accomplished this by ditching my earlier draft entirely. Everything, every word I’d pulled out of myself so far: gone.

It was just me and cursor now–blink, blink–and a vast expanse of virtual white space.

Game on, fucker, I thought.

I wrote a sentence that didn’t make me want to throw up on my shoes. I looked at it for a few minutes. I figured out a way to make it better. Then I wrote a second sentence that I didn’t mind too much. Then a third.

I could already feel, at this early moment, that the review was moving in an entirely new direction. What I was saying, or at this point, still trying–and hoping–to say, was dramatically different from the previous drafts. I had a different kind of feeling in my stomach. It wasn’t an entirely terrible feeling. I suddenly recognized what that feeling was: It was hope. I felt hopeful, goddamn it. I felt hopeful that things could still turn out OK for this review, and more importantly, for me. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll come out of this shit-hell OK after all, I thought.

What was born, in the pre-dawn light of British Columbia, what was cajoled into life by bad coffee and an iota of hope, is the review that appears on the A.V. Club website. (And in print this week in select urban areas.) Trust me, it’s infinitely better than the original drafts.

The moral of the story is this, kids: Become doctors, or lawyers, or Indian chiefs. Because this writing bullshit? This is no way to fucking live, man.
September 7, 2010 scottcjones 15Comments

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Before leaving for work in the morning, my dad was in the habit of writing out lengthy lists of chores that he wanted me and my brother to complete that day. He always signed his lists with the same two ominious words, always in capital letters: THE BOSS.

Bosses are frightening beings. They can make you do things that you wouldn’t normally do, like wear a dumb uniform, and say strange things like, “Welcome to Chili’s!” Bosses also have the power to tell you that you can’t go home yet even if you want to go home, because, as they will explain, “There is still more work to do.” Worst of all, bosses can take money away from you with another pair of words that is even more terrifying than THE BOSS. Those two words are: YOU’RE FIRED.

Maybe this is why I’ve always adored boss battles in videogames. It’s a chance for me to dole out some well-deserved karmic payback for all those mustachioed middle managers who told me that I couldn’t go home, that there was still more work to do, and, oh yes, please wear this dumb hat while working or else I will take money away from you.

Bosses–the virtual kind–have technically been around since a screen-filling mothership first appeared in the fifth and final level of Phoenix, an obscure 1980’s-era arcade shooter. The first boss encounter I personally can recall with any clarity is Bowser in Super Mario Bros. I remember getting to the end of that white brick and lava level, and seeing this heavily pixellated lizard standing in front of me, and thinking two things: 1. WHAT THE SHIT ASS HELL IS THAT? and 2. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BEAT IT?

So began two long, dramatic decades of boss encounters for me. I’ve confronted bosses in Contra III: The Alien Wars (ROGUE TURTLE WITH A BEES NEST LIVING ON IT!), Super Metroid (RIDLEY!), Doom (CYBERDEMON, NOOOOO!) and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (DESERT WORM THING!). A fantasy that I’ve actually had on several occasions: I imagine all the bosses in all the games getting together once a year, maybe in a nice resort like Sandals, and sitting in a room, trying for the life of them to understand how the hell this Scott Jones person keeps beating all of them, year after year after year. “Enough is enough!” Bowser says, pounding one of his lizard fists on the table. “THIS STOPS NOW!”

Yet my beloved boss battles seem to be on the decline in recent years. Gamers, at least most of the gamers who I talk to on a routine basis, seem to be tired of dealing with this artificial ramping-up of difficulty in a game’s final moments. Worse still, as evidenced by the lackluster boss fights I’ve seen so far this year, game makers seem to be growing increasingly tired of making them.

Boss battles have, very sadly, become fill-in-the-blank exercises in tedium. Same way that old movies always ended with the image of two people kissing or a cowboy riding off into a sunset, games still insist on ending with a boss battle of some sort. I’ve finished an unnatural amount of games so far in 2010. But could I tell you who, or what, I fought in the final moments of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Bayonetta, Alan Wake, or even the vaunted God of War III?

I could not.

And that’s a problem.

What I do remember, in each case, is a flurry of noise, and hyperbole, and melodrama, and CG. All of which was designed to give me a sense of closure, to make me feel powerful, and to let me know that I have arrived at the end of a very great experience. Like a Vietnam flashback, I can recall vague explosions, and amorphous, oversized creatures coming into view. And I remember frustration–lots and lots of frustration.

Yet, more than frustration, I remember feeling irritated and pissed off in these final moments. Instead of having a ball in what should be the game’s dramatic crescendo, most of the time I recall thinking, Goddamn it all, will this thing just fucking die already, and let me get on with my life. All that stood between me and a hard-earned rolling-of-the-credits of an uneven 8 to 15-hour experience was this big, stupid, bellowing, nonsensical creature with a multilayered health bar spanning the screen. Not once did these creatures, or the moments they were providing me with, give me closure, or make me feel empowered. I didn’t walk away with any sort of fist-pumping, woo-hooing satisfaction. Strip away the explosions, and the hyperbole, and the CG, and what you’re left with is a dated game design trope.

The fight with Fontaine/Atlas at the end of BioShock, to my mind, is the tombstone at the end of the boss-battle era. After one of the most consistently inventive and evocative experiences I’d ever had, Irrational Games/2K Boston ended the whole fucking thing in the most banal way imaginable: with a dull, unsatisfying boss battle. That milquetoast fight against Fontaine/Atlas still irks me. Even the eerie beating you dole out to Andrew Ryan’s smug face with a golf club would have made for a bolder, more unsettling, and more appropriate ending to BioShock.

I’ve written the epitaph for this virtual tombstone: “Here lies the body of the boss battle. It lived a good life. In the end, its multilayered health bar finally ran out. Rest in peace. 1980-2007. P.S. Yes: It’s really dead this time.”

The larger question then becomes: As games grow more complex and nuanced and mature, how do we end them?

I’ll take a stab at answering that question in an upcoming post. Wish me luck.