All of our friends are dead. – 1/1 – Henry Arrambide
We play, we push, we want to finish the game. We kill what’s thrown at us, chase whatever goals are fed to us no matter how little sense they make. Use what mechanics are given to us, because they’re all that we have within the game, all that we can do to survive, push forth, make sense of things. It’s satisfying, destroying whatever stands between us and our end – every little pop or crumble as our foes burst into blood and fail before us – we did that, we accomplished that. Sure, it was only in the context of this game, only inevitable considering there is no ultimate game over pushing us back to the start – all we can do is move forward. The game wants us to - we can choose to just stop, but it's too damn appealing. We want to beat and conquer this…thing before us, and in the end what does that even mean? You still have your real world debts and duties at the end of the day. I highly doubt having all the achievements in Modern Warfare 2 will somehow fix that. The question that it boils down to is why? Why do we play? Not just why do we play All of our friends are dead, but games in general. That's something only the individual can answer.
Easy to learn, tricky to master, pickup and playable – I think the best games aren’t the ones that ask you to take fifty hours of your time and invest in their intense dictionary of terms and rules. WRPG’s suffer the most from this, feeling to me as if they lack any real structure outside their shell of DnD derivatives. That’s another rant. A game should be accessible from the start, laying out the core rules in the first ten minutes or so, and then allowing the player to work from there. Length shouldn’t be an issue – granted that there can be games which cut themselves short and length is a glaring problem – but in the big picture, a 6 to 10 hour game shouldn’t be a problem when executed well. You can comeback with your knowledge of the rules, apply them better, have fun. Speed running, or just a lazy afternoon; if done well a great game can be played for almost ever. Mega Man and Contra still hold water today; Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest (not counting the fabulous remakes which change the rules and make the games playable again), not so much. There has to be a lasting friction - a feeling that you, the player, are actually doing something within the game world.
In a way, I guess this is going to turn into a small review of Spiderman: Web of Shadows, a game I was forcing myself through when a friend recommended All of our friends are dead. Web of Shadows avoided the flaw of investment – it doesn’t ask the player to hold out and follow its rules. Spidey is given a weight to his controls that makes you feel like you’re slinging a person through the air – each swing and shot has a momentum to it that’s just right. The game isn’t about mashing the swinging and the jumping, but controlling it, limiting it and using it properly. The character is a vehicle, a real superhuman machine. Mission accomplished. For all intents and purposes – do not play Web of Shadows. That momentum is wasted by a game that asks you to use that avatar to follow markers from point A to point B, collect 2000+ tokens littering the land, fight with a needlessly complex albeit fun combat system – through the same three mission types a million times over for ten hours too long. All in the most awkward graphical detail. You will be seduced by Spidey and then tricked into doing his chores. Web of Shadows was a game so in tune with its physics and how the player interacted with their avatar – yet totally unaware of how to make the avatar interact with the world. Mario runs and jumps, so let’s place him in an environment where the floor is glass which will shatter at any small application of pressure – now walk twenty miles to the right without making even a crack in that damn glass. I guess it had something to do with the development team, or the fact that it was under the Marvel license. Someone cared about that game in the start before every other interest vested in the game mandated that it had to contain Wolverine and be finished at a certain date - so Wolverine was awkwardly thrown in, and the missions, rather than well structured, became filler and padding that added length to the game.
In a way, I guess this is going to turn into a small review of Spiderman: Web of Shadows, a game I was forcing myself through when a friend recommended All of our friends are dead. Web of Shadows avoided the flaw of investment – it doesn’t ask the player to hold out and follow its rules. Spidey is given a weight to his controls that makes you feel like you’re slinging a person through the air – each swing and shot has a momentum to it that’s just right. The game isn’t about mashing the swinging and the jumping, but controlling it, limiting it and using it properly. The character is a vehicle, a real superhuman machine. Mission accomplished. For all intents and purposes – do not play Web of Shadows. That momentum is wasted by a game that asks you to use that avatar to follow markers from point A to point B, collect 2000+ tokens littering the land, fight with a needlessly complex albeit fun combat system – through the same three mission types a million times over for ten hours too long. All in the most awkward graphical detail. You will be seduced by Spidey and then tricked into doing his chores. Web of Shadows was a game so in tune with its physics and how the player interacted with their avatar – yet totally unaware of how to make the avatar interact with the world. Mario runs and jumps, so let’s place him in an environment where the floor is glass which will shatter at any small application of pressure – now walk twenty miles to the right without making even a crack in that damn glass. I guess it had something to do with the development team, or the fact that it was under the Marvel license. Someone cared about that game in the start before every other interest vested in the game mandated that it had to contain Wolverine and be finished at a certain date - so Wolverine was awkwardly thrown in, and the missions, rather than well structured, became filler and padding that added length to the game.
There’s that connection between the player and the avatar, the avatar and the game-world, and thus the player and the game-world, which is so rarely utilized in gaming. There’s multiple levels to work with that could really be used to effectively tell a tale in ways no other medium could – and that’s what the best games do. Not push us through cinematic choke points of text and dialogue so burdened with references to outside works of philosophy or literature which render personal interpretation null – all while making us play an entirely different game between cutscenes in which the mechanics of the game are totally divorced from otherwise in-universe rules. No, you want what the player does to feel like it has some weight in the world, make the player question not only what his avatar is doing, but why he is doing those actions with his avatar.
All of our friends are dead is by no means the best game ever, but it is a damn fine exercise in these mechanics. Pick it up, learn the rules, execute everything. Wonder what it all means. The game wants you to think about it – so get to it. Give it a shot.
En ruin twist and tumble, forget the smell of home
No soil beneath our footsteps, no marrow in the bones
Listen at us will you? Share with us your head
Do hide behind the iris...as all of our friends are dead.
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