No longer Sony's "Douchiest Move"

I am calling on Sony’s executives to admit their failure as human beings and avoid any more shame brought upon their families by committing ritual seppuku.

Honestly, after weeks of PSN being down due to Sony’s negligence by running an unpatched Apache server with known vulnerabilities.  You would think they would have audited their entire system for security flaws, but its all powerful Sony!

Today the news came out that the PSN password page had been hacked, allowing password resets to be completed with information that could be attained from the original breach.

If that wasn’t enough – Rockstar is claiming, with collaborating sources, the new firmware update which were meant to plug the original security holes is causing older PS3 models to overheat and brick.

Sony could really eat shit for this?  Especially if the rumors of Project Café (Wii2) are remotely true and Nintendo does come out with a hardcore gaming friendly console (E3 should shed some light onto this).  Users can only accept so much shit.

I will make a promise now – if a Sony exec does commit suicide using the Sony Move I will buy a PS3.  If the guy pictured below kills himself I’ll blow up my Xbox 360.

Claims he "just works there"

I just learned, four months later, that Andy Whitfield will not be reprising the title role in Starz’ Spartacus, and am kind of in WTF mode.  They couldn’t wait another fucking year for him to recover from lymphoma?  Unwelcome.

In other news, I can recommend Outland based on five minutes with the game.  That’ll be next on the agenda.  Trouble Witches Neo premium themes for the 360 both rock the shit, btw.

For SCIENCE!

You can find my review of the single player mode of Portal 2 here.

Portal 2 co-op mode consists of two robotic characters, Atlas and P-Body (pictured above), as they are prodded, coerced, and shamed by GlaDOS, the test operator, to complete numerous challenges in the name of science.  Like the rest of the game GlaDOS’ sterile and deadpan delivery of farcical information,  insults, and musings offer quick laughs for the players in between levels, and the pacing is similar to single-player: each chapter or “course” in co-op adds another mechanic you must master in order to complete the puzzle at hand.  

There are a lot of little features which aid in the co-op experience.  There’s a countdown timer so you and your partner can simultaneously activate switches, which eliminates the “do we go on 1 or on ‘go’” discussion.  You can mark targets so your partner can see which section of wall you’re talking about.  You’ll also collect fun but useless little gestures such as hugging your partner, throwing down some kung-fu moves, or playing rock-paper-scissors.

Camy and I finished the Portal 2 Co-op last night, and I liked the game, but not as much as I had hoped.  Shit was great and a lot of fun to play, but I wanted more, and from what I saw in the single-player game, Valve had more to offer.  I don’t mean just more levels (although that would be nice).  I mean more challenges, more tricks, more timing and the like.

To be fair, there were a few really nice and challenging puzzles with some tricky timing, but on a whole I didn’t think the game used both players in as much a capacity as it could have.  The bulk of the chambers often broke down into the players taking on one of two roles: the runner or the portal pusher.  You are forced to switch these roles throughout the level in order to succeed: one sets up portals so the other can get to a vantage, then the other throws down portals so the one can catch up.

A few levels did live up to my expectations of having both players be simultaneously active–one providing ‘hard-light’ bridges for protection from turrets while the other directed the characters’ path along a tractor beam, or another level where both players had to launch themselves through portals at the same time in order to complete the level.  When we toppled chambers like these, Cameron’s and my eyes were wide open as we turned to face each other, jaws hanging slackly at our shirt collars, hands raising from sheer intuition that a high five would soon follow.  These were the types of levels I hoped to see in the later parts of the game, but they never really came.

I am a huge fan of the Portal series and maybe my expectations were a little too high, but I wanted levels where both players needed to be in mid-air, firing portals for their partners to  launch through to reach two separate platforms in order to simultaneously throw switches and unlock the next piece of the puzzle.  For almost all of the chambers, the hard part was figuring it out and the execution was relatively easy. For the early puzzles that certainly is the way it should be, but the later puzzles should have followed the single-player’s level difficulty progression a little more closely.  I also wanted to see levels where the characters started on opposite ends of the level, forced to help their partner without being able to see them, working instead on audio cues or hand signals to find the solution.

Also frustrating is the fact that two of the achievements are based on having multiple friends with copies of Portal 2, including one which requires you to beat the co-op game and then join a new game with someone who has never played before.  Bullshit.

I do not want to give the impression that I am not in love with this game, because I am.  I just felt that it ended too soon.  Not all of the game mechanics of the single player were introduced (I’m looking at you, white gel), and we never saw Wheatley!  Without spoiling the single-player experience, Atlas and P-Body were referenced by him.  I have a feeling that all of my complaints will be rendered obsolete when some DLC is dropped, but this should have been included in the retail game to give players the full experience of what Portal has to offer.

The game as a whole is incredible.  The physics based, mind-warping puzzles are certain to thrill the most jaded players.  The single-player is a gleefully tough challenge to take on, and the co-op is a nice augment to the game even though it feels incomplete.  I can’t recommend this game enough, and not just so I can increase the player population and nab those last two cheevos. If all you are really looking forward to is playing with a friend, however, you may want to wait and see if/when the inevitable DLC adds a few more courses for you to test yourself on.

What are you looking at?

I am not going to have spoilers in this review.  I will discuss the first five minutes of the game, the feel of it, and some general information about mechanics, but nothing that will ruin any surprises.

If you haven’t played Portal, then stop reading right now and go play it – it’s on Steam for $9.99 or XBLA for 1200 MS points, and it takes less than 3 hours to play.  I’ll wait for you.

OK, you’re back?  If you didn’t like Portal then you will not like Portal 2--but if that’s the case you probably also gain most of your pleasure from sodomizing farm animals, so why don’t you get back to that.

Now let me remove Valve’s well-endowed virtual penis from my mouth and start the review.

There. Its out.

As Portal 2 begins, you find yourself playing as Chell (the same orange jumpsuit clad prisoner from the fist Portal) in an Aperture Science holding cell, where you have been kept in suspended animation for much longer than “safety regulations” allow, and where you may now suffer from a little case of major brain damage.  You seem fine, however, as the game brings you through its tutorial.  The tutorial is thorough enough for a reanimated caveman to understand: “look at the ceiling by using the right thumbstick,” “look at the floor using the right thumbstick,” etc.  It does this like it does everything else, though–with a coy wit, lampooning a multi-national corporation which strives for a safe and happy work environment while pushing the boundaries of weapons research and SCIENCE!

The tutorial also introduces you to Wheatley, an AI sphere (pictured above) who is voiced by Stephen Merchant (co-creator of The Office among other things).  Wheatley directs you through the beginning levels and makes appearances throughout the game.  Merchant’s voice work is the perfect accompaniment to the playful script.  His Bristol accent and self-deprecating style of humor are really engaging, and help Wheatley stand out as more than a run of the mill glowing eye sphere. Merchant’s work is so good that I often had more concern for missing his lines than I did for solving the puzzle at hand.

I found myself cruising through the first four chapters of Portal 2 with considerable swiftness and had started to think myself quite clever.  I had gone back and replayed the original Portal a few days earlier, so I thought that maybe I was a little bit in the zone as well.  The game introduces new mechanics early on, such as a springboard that hurls you in the air and new cubes that can deflect and redirect a laser beam, but the first few chapters feel like just an extension of Portal, the major difference being that the testing chambers are now run down with age–-broken turret robots litter the hallways, flora grows wildly on the walls.  This decay adds a little more character to the environs, but, while they are a departure from the crisp, pristine testing chambers of Portal, they still give the feeling of  being constantly watched.  The early game felt like Portal, tasted like Portal, and smelled like Portal;  I was at home and I was happy.

This is actually a picture of my room. I have been to busy playing Portal 2 to clean-up.

Then chapter 5 happened.

And it turned out I was not that clever.  This is where the ‘2’ part of Portal 2 kicked into gear.  Again, no spoilers, but shit gets real.  The possibilities of the game expand immensely, and the puzzles, well, they start to get tough.  It is almost as if the first four chapters were the re-creation of the original game the way it should have been, an appetizer, and the last six chapters were the sequel we’ve been waiting for: the entrée.

The latter puzzle’s new mechanics of ‘hard light’ bridges, tractor beams, and gels make you think waaaay outside the box to complete their puzzles, so much so that the basics can get completely overlooked.  I literally spent fifteen minutes contemplating how to get across a pit, only to realize, “Shit, I can just portal across.”

These levels have an altogether different feel to them than those at the beginning of the game.  Instead of a linear progression toward the exit, you are often forced to travel back to the beginning of the level in order to get access to something you need to progress further.  This is done in a surprisingly fluid and unannoying way by virtue of the portal gun.  You can obviously move around the map easily, but it is also easy to get back to where you were without having to trounce through the entire level again.

Traveling between puzzles becomes a puzzle in itself, though, sometimes requiring you to use tools in the puzzle you just completed to advance.  You feel like you really are lost sometimes.  There were times when I had no direction and no idea of where I should be heading.  The puzzles themselves obfuscated the path to completion to a much greater degree than those in the original Portal.  In the original if you saw a bit of “portal-friendly” wall in an odd space you knew you were using that shit – in Portal 2 not so much.

This image would make sense if you played the game.

Portal 2 has been the most fun I’ve had all year (and yes, I have gotten laid this year).  Its about 8-10 hours long, which may seem short but there is no bullshit.  There isn’t one point in this game when I said, what the hell was that waste of time for? I literally have no complaints.  I was going to complain that the loading screen comes up a bit too often, but once the more difficult puzzles started to kick in it was a great respite from the brain-twisting action.  The graphics are great, the sound and music are amazing, the voice-over is pristine, the gameplay is incredible, and it lasts.  As I was playing last night trying to get achievements I was still struggling with some puzzles I had forgotten or even redoing puzzles that I did remember, but was still amazed I even figured them out in the first place.

I have no doubt that Portal 2 will win Game of the Year.  It’s just that good.

All of our articles contain images that were shoplifted from the internet.  We make no implied or direct claim of ownership or authorship of any of them.

Miyamoto-san certainly thinks they are.

I decided I hated Roger Ebert after he made his now infamous assertion that video games were not, and never could be, considered art. It seemed so obvious to me that he was wrong (and a pretentious dick, to boot) that I never really stopped to consider the question.

Merriam-Webster defines art as:

“the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”

Beauty and emotional power, huh? What is emotional power? Is that what you’re feeling when you spike your controller on the ground in rampant disgust? Hey, it’s ok, we’ve all done it. Or maybe you haven’t, in which case don’t judge, don’t judge.

I recently considered Ebert’s comments again while planning out the first installment of B Button Cancels, the one you’re reading right now. Are video games art? It seemed like a softball of a question if I’d ever heard one, something to cut my editorial teeth on (plus I’d get to trash a famous critic, too–heyo). But I soon hit a snag. I realized that, by Merriam-Webster’s definition, one could consider a whole subset of novels and movies, not to mention games, as non-art–which couldn’t be right, could it? Where does one draw the line between something created for beauty and emotional power and something created for fun and entertainment? What is emotional power? Is it when you smile after watching the bad guy get his, in the end? Is it when you turn away from what you’re watching in horror? Or is it something more subtle, like the feeling of permanence and majesty that the Palazzo della Signoria conveys?

I think that most summer blockbusters like Transformers, or shitty novels that you chide yourself for reading but read anyway, are meant to produce emotions. Yes, they entertain, but they’re designed to entertain by creating emotions. It would be a sorry slasher film indeed that didn’t bring you forward in your seat to say, “What are you doing? Don’t fucking go out there, are you out of your mind?” You say that (or I do at any rate) because you are afraid. Ideally, you identify with the character and the fear you feel for them translates into fear for yourself. You experience the hero’s victory, in the end, as victory for yourself.  It’s called transference.  If you don’t believe me, look it up.  In other words, entertainment media are doing psychological work for you.

We're helping you cope with the terror of modern existence, mothafuckah!

Can they, then, be said to be art? Or are they merely tools, the equivalent of a massage chair for your psyche? Contrast them with works that are clearly Art with a capital A, that are meant primarily for beauty or emotional power, such as the film version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall or James Joyce’s Ulysses, both of which might entertain to an extent but are more focused on making you think, reveling in the minutia of their own artistry, creating catharsis and so on. We might say that these things are more profound, that they are deeper and that there is more too them than there is to Speed 2: Cruise Control.

It would be difficult to say that some films and novels, not to mention albums and so on, are art and that others are not. At that point you’re arguing about the quality of one thing over another, whether or not it succeeds in being beautiful or emotionally powerful. The film 300 is very beautiful indeed, one of the most visually striking movies I’ve seen, but it is not a very profound film, and although profundity wasn’t part of Merriam-Wesbters definition, I think we intrinsically agree that it is exactly what makes a movie or a novel become “Art,” the sense that it reveals a truth.

Saying that is of course not a far stretch from quoting Keats, and I feel confident in saying that if that’s the case, we’re on the right track. So let’s add profundity to our definition. What I would say is this: all of these things—movies, novels, and I will now include games—if they were created primarily to be beautiful, emotional powerful, or profound, qualify under the net of art. The rest are merely entertainment. How’s that? Too easy, right? Too easy.

Must be this tall to ride.

The problem with that assertion is that we’re making blanket generalizations about what something was intended to be. In other words, sometimes things are art that were not meant to be art. First example: cave drawings from Lascaux, France. These bad boys were not meant to be emotionally powerful, they were meant to perform magic, fucking magic, things like increasing the population of animals in the woods out back. The same could be said for a whole host of primitive idols and tokens. In fact, the whole history of human art is grounded in superstition and religion, not beauty and emotion. Like Speed 2 or Gears of War, these things were tools. So is Notre Dame de Paris. It brought heaven to earth, was a gateway to paradise, convinced the people living in little huts in the village nearby of how insignificant they really were compared to the majesty of God. Call that beauty and emotional power—and it is—but it was meant to do work, as well.

I'm just looking for a bathroom? Do you speak English? Eeenglishh?

Let’s take the prototypical adventure yarn, the type of thing you could easily convert into a blockbuster film or a blockbuster video game: Homer’s Odyssey. It’s about a man trying to get home to his wife, and on the way he is beset by war, horrifying monsters, battles of wits; goddesses come to his aid; he enacts bloody revenge in a cathartic final scene. It’s all there. Can we really say that’s not art, when we say that Shakespeare (also full of action and adventure, btw) is? I can tell you right now that the only thing the Odyssey is missing that Die Hard isn’t is a German going through a plate glass window.

Of course, no one would say that the Odyssey isn’t art. You can probably find papers written in every century since the moveable type printing press first made a few copies, analyzing its merit and themes. But no one writes papers about Transformers. And if we can prove that Transformers is art than that should stand in for all the shitty novels and movies out there (not to say that it’s shitty, I quite like it, but to generalize). I’ve already established, with our cave paintings, that we can understand as art things that were not originally intended as art, so let’s put aside our need to ask if the film was meant to be art or entertainment or any other thing. Is it beautiful? Well it’s lead actress certainly is, but beyond that I would say that all the animators who worked on it would certainly hope you thought so. Is it emotionally powerful? Certainly: we feel fear, excitement and relief when we see it, or the first time we do at any rate. Is it profound? Well, probably not, but let me at least establish that it has an attempt at profundity, which is to say, at least one kind of theme that is meant to resonate as truth.

This asshole's whole thesis is based on me.

Transformers is about two rival clans, the Autobots and the Decepticons, who are at war. War, mind you–something we can all relate to, am I right?  They’re fighting over a piece of technology called the All-Spark which is capable of vast acts of power and creation.  Whoever gets it will control the universe, or at least the fate of their race.  Man (in this case bot) is trying to put himself above the gods–same shit Aaron tried to pull with his golden calf.  So we can throw hubris on the menu.  And what is it the Decepticons use to hide their true forms, so they can insidiously invade human civilization? Cell phones and fighter planes, of course.  The All Spark might as well be a nuclear weapon; text BOOM to 54277 to arm that shit.  Is there an implication in this film that our own technology could enslave or destroy us? I think there is, and whether or not it’s profound, it’s at least there.

So: I can accept that The Da Vinci Code (film or movie) is art, if you can. Even if you can’t, actually. Any such work of fiction attempts to reveal some kind of truth through metaphor or do some kind of emotional work for the viewer/reader, or be awe-inspiring or majestic. Even heavy-handed Full House episodes where Danny Tanner kindly goes into Deej’s room to explain the moral at the end qualify quite nicely.

However (and you thought I was finished!) none of that necessarily applies to video games–because of one of Ebert’s defenses, actually.  What he says is so obvious that we might at first be confused, because the video games we think of today are such a far cry from Pong.  He points out that an:

“obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. [Someone] might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.”

I would say that Ebert is half-correct, but half is in this case enough to give us pause. We probably wouldn’t consider the baseball game that we attend to be art, in the sense that we consider the paintings on the Sistine Chapel ceiling to be art. But he’s half-incorrect, too, as most of us know.  A game that is a representation of a story does not cease to be a game. How could it? Narrative and gameplay are so closely entwined in so many titles now that almost any given one contains elements of both games and stories.

So: just what the hell is a video game, exactly?

It’s a far more fundamental question, and one I will address in the next installment of B Button Cancels.

All of our articles contain images that were shoplifted from the internet.  We make no implied or direct claim of ownership or authorship of any of them.