Back To Basics

What's up, four years of my life? How you doin'?

As of the 15th, Amazon declared my original order of Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition officially lost, and the good natured and helpful people at Amazon customer service (all of whom have long and completely unpronounceable names, as per Indian tradition*) have done a great job of getting me a new one – no sarcasm. They had me re-order the game with a much faster shipping option, then waived the cost and held onto my original, much lower Black Friday payment.

*Here’s an ironic sidenote: Fallout 3 was not released in India because the game contains mutated cows called Brahmin, which is the same name applied to a class of Indian religious scholars, as well as the fact that cows are considered holy in Hindu culture. Basically, imagine if there was a video game in which you could interact with wandering naked mutant Jesuses with stark erections, and their name was “The Holocaust Was Greatly Exaggerated” – that’s kind of what Fallout 3 is like over there. But even though the game I wanted is considered sacrilegious, Amazon’s Indian customer service reps still rendered impeccable service. Keep that in mind when you read the next paragraph.

So before we even begin, Amazon, I’m sorry for calling you out last week. You truly are the best in your chosen field. If you were a building, you would be the White House. If you were a spaceship, you would be Serenity. If you were a sandwich, you would have bacon.

While I wait for my new game to arrive, though, I’ve still been desperately trying to catch up on the video gaming I’d been putting off until the break. To fill up some time I rented the newest Halo game, Halo 3: ODST, because in spite of my mixed feelings about the Halo franchise I was still desperate to shoot something in the face.*

*On an even geekier note, ODST features the voice acting talents of Nathan Fillion of Firefly as well as Tricia Helfer of Battlestar Galactica, and their characters are romantically involved. This marriage of lead characters from my two favorite shows (and the potential half space pirate, half Cylon offspring it could produce) gives me the same sort of squealing, girlish rapture as Twilight does to the prepubescent and the prepubescent at heart.

I played through ODST surprisingly quickly, and when it was over I wondered if video games have been getting shorter as they continue to get more expensive. I’m serious – the end of ODST came after a couple of evenings’ worth of play, whereas I sank an entire summer into beating Super Mario 64 when I was a kid. I literally played Super Mario 64 like it was my job and it took me three months to beat, and now they’re charging $60 for a game I can finish in a couple of days? Was I just really stupid as a kid, or are video games actually getting shorter?

To find out, I fired up my Nintendo 64 and played some Perfect Dark, a video game that had more or less dominated my life all throughout middle school both in terms of the hours I spent playing it and the more plentiful (and infinitely more embarrassing) hours I spent writing fan fiction about it. I remember pouring a solid month into beating the game on its easiest difficulty as a child, and so I went back and started playing on the hardest difficulty, just to see how far I’d come and what had changed.

Enemy artificial intelligence has not come too far in the nearly ten years since Perfect Dark. About the biggest advancement is that enemies today throw grenades.

You see, in the violent video games I played when I was growing up, I very quickly learned that the best way to take out a posse of guards was to shoot one of them at a distance and then retreat around a corner and wait for the rest to blunder around the corner in pursuit, one by one, at which point I would calmly murder them one by one. Keep in mind that I learned this ice-cold commando tactic well before I learned my multiplication tables.*

*That said, I still don’t know most of them now.

When I try that in a newer game like ODST, however, enemies throw volleys of grenades at my hiding spot, forcing me to run out and slaughter them on their terms as opposed to at my leisure. Dicks. That’s about the biggest tactical advancement they’ve made.

Story in video games remains trivial and stupid, but now it’s trivial and stupid in a different way. Perfect Dark’s story existed mainly to link together several interesting locations in which to shoot people, but it included hallmarks of the craft such as flying cars, a clone of the president, and an alien named Elvis. It was scanty and stupid, but it really didn’t interfere with the fun too much.

The storyline for the Halo series, on the other hand, is honestly more complex than the Bible, in spite of the fact that it had the benefit of being written by ten or so people who spoke the same language over the course of five years. I looked up the complete and chronological storyline of the entire Halo series – games, books, short films – the other night, and while I still don’t have half a clue what’s going on, I can tell you that the franchise features not one but two omniscient ancient alien races, a military history more varied than Guam’s, and a half dozen or so artificial intelligence constructs with divergent motives and personalities. While back in the day video games had too little story, now they’ve got so much that you’re lucky if you even know why you’re shooting the people you’re shooting at any given time.

Despite the advancements that are, at best, limited, whether a game is running on my XBox or my Nintendo 64 doesn’t take any of the fun out of shooting guards in the face. One system just makes it look prettier than the other.

Still, I hope my new copy of Fallout 3 gets here soon, because I’m looking forward to some more aesthetically pleasing violence.

Truman Capps drinks a lot of Amaretto and Coke to silence the screams of all the guards he’s killed over the years.