Diplomacy finally got the overhaul it has badly needed ever since Rome: Total War. No longer are your diplomatic relations baffling and pointless, as in previous titles allies would betray the player’s faction for no discernable reason. Happily, the clans in Shogun 2 actually seem to act in their own best interests, which simultaneously makes the campaign AI predictable but much more formidable. Strategic alliances count for quite a bit, and the AI actively pursues their goals with laudable efficiency, which makes your allies incredibly important, especially when the player begins to butt up against larger, more powerful clans. The addition of the vassalhood system, which enables players to treat defeated factions as subservient allies, is a step in the right direction. Diplomacy, therefore, makes a huge impact in the options presented to the player in the course of the campaign. No longer is it mindless conquest with a damn-the-torpedoes approach, because in this title, your allies actually matter. I found myself becoming quite attached to some of them during the course of my campaign, and my eventual betrayal (for the sake of achievements as well as campaign victory conditions) was heart-wrenching in a way that few previous titles could hope to approach.

The latest entry does nothing but pleases Shogun fans.

Trade has been revamped as well. While Shogun 2 sticks to relatively the same system as Empire, each faction has control of certain necessary resources, and will often only trade with factions that have a resource they need. Securing the necessary items for a military (iron, warhorses, paper mills and wood) has an impact on how quickly or thoroughly a military is assembled. It makes strategic alliances even more important, and it makes the player keep a constant eye on their imports and exports. Keeping tabs on how many trade slots you have in your main port is also very important, as a lack of any one of these resources can seriously hamper a clan’s ability to develop beyond first-tier units. Added to this deepened role of trade is the threat from foreign influences, both in terms of social order and military dominance.  Another excellent addition to the game is the introduction of a “Black Ship,” a 54-gun Dutch carrack which randomly spawns and trolls the coasts of Japan. Taking the ship down is an extremely difficult task, owing to the massive crew count and deadly broadside, which can sink or rout a first-tier combat vessel with a single volley. Once captured, however, the Black Ship is an extremely potent addition to your naval forces, and the pursuit of naval goals is made much easier thereafter.

Combat is essentially unchanged, which is a good thing. The smaller number of available units in no way hampers the player’s flexibility of tactical deployments. In fact, it makes the development of armies simpler at first, becoming slightly more complicated once the campaign reaches a point where monk warriors, gun-powder-toting import units, battlefield ninjas, and heroic units are accounted for. It’s a very familiar system, and the game didn’t contain any of the maddening bugs that crippled the release of Empire. However, for as much noise as the developers made of the battlefield AI, it’s really not all that much different from before. It’s fairly easy to trick the Art of War-programmed enemies once you get the hang of how they work, and anyone looking for something with any degree of difficulty will be forced to turn the battle difficulty up to Very Hard or higher to be in any real danger of a crippling battlefield defeat. On campaign side, the AI has the tendency to spam certain units, and sometimes doing so at the cost of units which benefit from their clan’s placement. It is not unusual to see an army entirely made up of archers, for instance, or roving armies of five or six samurai units. These armies are easy picking for a player’s army of comparable size, and nine times out of ten the player will win an auto-battle against them, making the crushing of some clans the work of a few minutes.

Though the battles have been streamlined and the coding is bug-free, the combination of humdrum siege maps and bordering-on-ridiculous tactical flexibility – every unit, even dismounted cavalry and raw recruits can scale fortress walls with relative ease, and carry Molotov cocktail-like projectiles which they hurl against the gates to burn their way through, without the need of any specialized equipment – make siege battles a bit of a chore. And because of the aforementioned unit flexibility, there is little, if any, need for siege equipment until the later stages of the game, when the player’s clan is readying to assault Kyoto itself. Despite that, it does make an alarming difference in having a system that so fluidly moves between the static defenses to open warfare, and where in previous titles siege battles were generally a showcase for bugs, glitches, and maddeningly stupid AI behavior, in Shogun 2 your units will smoothly transition from charging through a fortress gate to attacking with verve. The same can be said for units who have scaled the walls or entered the fortresses by any number of means, and overall, the siege battles function as any other open-field battles. I cannot understate how impressive an achievement that is, and the smoothness of them more than makes up for any of their perceived flaws.

The art direction is one of the highlights of the game.

There was a lot of concern in the CA community over the introduction of so many RPG features in this title. Heroic units, a leveling system for your agents and generals, etc. Though I shared some of the concerns, the way the new features are handled is elegant, simple, and not nearly so overpowering as some players’ doomsday concerns. The leveling of your agents, generals and heroic troops are all handled in the same way, with customization trees shared by unit type and broadening your strategic options with each new level. Generals can be oriented toward man-on-man combat (making your general act more as a heroic unit than a general), tactics, or strategy. Even the choices presented within those boundaries are fairly open to customization.

As far as the multiplayer goes, Shogun 2 delivered much more than expected. Not only is there a cooperative campaign mode, something that players have been clamoring for since the series’ inception, but there are several unique multiplayer modes. Players can join a clan online and match themselves against other clans in a war over Japan, or they can go it alone in an avatar campaign, in which the player’s experience in the various modes of multiplayer award them with new unit types and goodies for the player’s avatar to don in battle. An impressive matchmaking service also assures that an avatar campaign player will never have his recruit-level army go up against a 20-battle veteran unit. It’s easily the most impressive and ambitious effort at Total War online play to date, and I don’t doubt that subsequent titles will follow this approach closely.

What makes it more irritating is that Dead Space 2 shouldn’t be the kind of game that has to rely on hordes of sheeple to be successful. Dead Space was a convincingly realized horror title, which impressively combined a solid science fiction premise with genuine moments of terror – something that hasn’t been done for a long, long time. In short, it was a game that should be able to stand on ground slightly more solid than the “so gory it’s way cool” premise.

The Dead Space 2 example is hardly the worst, and it’s definitely not the first game to have a profoundly stupid marketing department, but it sticks out, to me, simply because there’s no excuse for it anymore. The average age of a gamer nowadays is 34. That’s the average. That means that for every pimple-faced fifteen year old playing Halo after school there’s a forty or fifty year old muting him on Xbox Live after work. These are people with jobs, families, mortgages. People with cars that weren’t bought secondhand and facial hair that they shave because it’s too thick and not because they think it’ll grow back thicker afterward. And in between the two extremes are the vast majority of gamers; twenty-somethings whose tastes and skills evolved from Nintendo and Sega, college students or dropouts or post-grads, the guy behind the counter at Burger King to the guy spending his dwindling income on bus rides and train tickets to get to the interviews for that first real job.

And you’re telling me that the very best idea that the Brass Hats at the marketing department was to appeal to our inner prepubescent rebellious youth? Give me a break. We deserve better. With the insane amount of money that developers shell out for marketing, even they deserve better. Each game varies, of course, but estimates usually come in around 30-50% of the total budget goes to advertising and marketing.

Thankfully, not every ad campaign centers around a fourteen year old mindset, though there are certainly franchises out there whose success is based on little else. I wish it was as simple as saying “for every dreadful commercial there’s an awesome one” but it’s not that easy. But there are good ads and good ad campaigns. Too Human knocked it out of the park with its archeological crossover faux-documentary, The Goblin Man of Norway, which was released quietly, on a simple blog post on Silicon Knights’ website with an embedded link to a completely artificial site for “The Norwegian Film Institute.” In the elegantly filmed three-part documentary, geologists, folklorists, and archeologists discuss the implications of a centuries-old mechanical “goblin” found by scientists studying glacial melt patterns. It was never, to my knowledge, given a wide release, either through the internet or on television, but it sits there, linked from Silicon Knights’ site for anyone to stumble upon and be duped, if only for a moment or two. It’s worth watching for the artistry alone, and it’s a far, far cry from “Your mom hates Too Human.”

The difference between these two examples is one of outlook. Whoever was behind the fake film, he or she was obviously someone who gave a shit, whereas the only impression I can get from Dead Space 2’s commercial is one of laziness and apathy. Silicon Knights could have easily spent their marketing budget on explosion-riddled commercials and adrenaline-pumping gameplay footage overlaid with third-party accolades. I’m sure there were a few of those, inevitably. But sitting here, 3 years after, and I still remember how cool the Goblin Man documentary is.

Halo 3 had similar TV spots. Old veterans from the battles portrayed in the game give emotional reflections on their experiences like an episode of Frontline, in an artfully lit museum that celebrates humanity’s survival from the Covenant threat. There were a good half dozen of them at the least, and every single one was hauntingly atmospheric and gorgeously filmed. The franchise has since included live-action ads for every subsequent release. They might be a bit overwrought at times, and Halo as a whole tends to take itself a little too seriously, but there have seldom been more arresting TV spots.

In an age where people are ever more superficially connected to one another, where a single tweet or status update can potentially reach hundreds of people at a time, there really is no excuse for viral marketing being such an underground, backdoor, or overlooked ad strategy. All it takes is one or two people seeing The Goblin Man documentary and linking it to a few friends before the entire thing takes off, and spreads by word-of-mouth and click-of-link. And if those ads end up captivating gamers two or three or five or ten years on, how is that wasted?

This is further compounded by the sheer difficulty of gauging how effective an ad actually is. There are polls, sure, but polls are tricky and complicated beasts at the best of times. Trackbacks and retweets can be collected, website hits can be counted and all in all it adds up to an astounding amount of raw information which, on its own, means very, very little. Raw data must be sorted out before an estimation can be made as to how many of those hits/etc lead to a game purchase. And that’s not even a fraction of the whole story, with so many different distribution services and re-releases and used game stores and the like, it further complicates matters. Then there’s the franchise dominance of the industry as a whole that likely leads to gamers simply buying a game without ever visiting the main site or researching reviews which gets in the way of a marketing strategists pretty little picture of advertising effectiveness. I’m sure a marketing student or professional will tell me that there are iron truths to marketing strategies and that the your-mom-hates-it demographic is a hugely sought after corner of the gaming market, but for my money, I’d rather be treated to a little piece of art than a thinly veiled attempt to look cool. Show me something cool, don’t just tell me that you are.

Of course, nothing is simple here. Games are getting more expensive, and it’s unlikely that that trend will reverse any time in the near future (unless publishers can find a way to change their approach to the industry entirely… but how likely is that?). The simple fact is, with the extreme cost of licensing fees, music licensing, voice-acting and the ever-increasing cost of producing the kind of graphics that gamers demand, publishers have to ensure that their game will sell, otherwise there’s no point in producing the game. That means that they spend exorbitant sums of money to ensure that the general gaming public knows that their game exists and goes out to buy it.

Dead Space 2 isn’t quite getting their money’s worth. So to the publishers: fire your marketing director, and hire someone who doesn’t think that gamers are all perpetually thirteen years old. Because if gaming ever steps out of the peach-fuzz shadow of adolescence, it’ll be because the industry takes itself seriously.

I wish I had more space here to go truly in depth with this, because I’ve overlooked or deliberately avoided topics that are definitely worthy of attention and discussion, but if I were to do that, the article would simply be too long. Feel free to have a go at me in the comments. What are your favorite commercials or ad campaigns? How do you go about researching and buying games?

The opinions expressed in this article are that of the writers and not necessarily that of GamingBolt.com

I say most rather reservedly. Expansions themselves seem to be getting confused for full games now, with entries like Halo 3: ODST and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood blurring the lines – at least, cost-wise – between full-length game and expansion.

It was largely the advent and popularity of digital distribution services that led to this change. Why spend resources on making a worthwhile expansion when a developer could make an extremely cheap (that is not to say lacking in quality) short tag-on adventure and price it in such a way that they reap more money than a big, unwieldy, time-and-cost consuming expansion? Not even that is something to worry about, since most developers are canny enough to make the expansions worth the four or five dollars they charge for them.

But there are some of them – even released by otherwise quality developers – that are aggravatingly indicative of how stupid developers seem to think gamers are. Most aggravating of all is the release-day DLC.

Take Fable III, a critical and popular success that also happened to be fun as hell. On release day, the game released with a fairly large collection of stuff, but available through the store were a few other bits and bobs. Some content was given away for free, some of it was available only at cost. Like black dye. Nobody has yet been able to convince me that programming black – or pink – dye into a game that is so jam-packed with relatively unnecessary content necessitates charging players for it. They charged us for it entirely because they knew that players would pay for it, even in a state of moral outrage.

Factor in the cost of the black dye, the pink dye, the Industrial Knight outfit, and a few weapons packs it adds up to about 10 dollars or so. So a $60 game, not a collector’s edition or anything like that, ends up costing around $70. Then, when the additional quest content is released, it’s another single payment of $5-10. Which brings the cost up to $80. This is without regard for any meaningful lore-changing or story-affecting content, and without the cost of pre-order. Eighty bucks. For a single game.

It’s subtle nickel-and-dime stuff that I find questionable. It’s not the quality of the content that bothers me, it’s how piecemeal it comes in release. Was forcing players to pay for the dye pack, of all things, necessary? It can’t cost any more to produce, and the instant download meant that the entire thing was already coded into the game, and buying the dye just unlocked it within the game. The same was unfortunately true of the first expansion DLC release: the quest under Bowerstone. It, too, was an instant download, which again meant that it was already included in the game, so the content didn’t need an extra two weeks of tweaking or coding to get it released, it was just waiting for gamers to play the game long enough to forget that they had paid $60, and were willing to shell out another few bucks.

When Dragon Age: Origins released, if you paid an extra $15, you could purchase the Collector’s Edition, which on top of having a few physical treats (a very pretty map of Ferelden as one of them), or the Digital Deluxe Edition, which didn’t come with the map but came, instead, a short quest, called “Warden’s Keep.”  The quest was something totally superfluous but (I’m told), fun. Fine, I don’t mind missing out on a two or three hour quest in a game that generally clocks in at around 40 or so hours to begin with. But the biggest annoyance was that the quest is constantly shoved in your face. A waving merchant stalked you in your camp every night, and I imagine the warden, as well as the rest of the party, was kept up at night by the guy’s gigantic glowing exclamation point that never went away. MISSING CONTENT HERE. BUY IT FOR FIFTEEN DOLLARS.

It begs the question as to what we are entitled to when we spend $60 dollars. Are games to be strictly delineated by genre? Will a first-person shooter longer than 9 hours list those hours as additional content? Should games release single-player and multi-player portions separately? How about an RPG just gives the player a basic set of armor and weapons and forces them to pay a dollar here, a dollar there, to unlock even the option of using the rest?

That is not to say that any of the above games are bad (quite the contrary), and it might all sound ridiculous or look like absurdist bitching, but these are legitimate concerns. The more comfortable gamers get at buying things that by all rights should be covered with the original purchase cost, the more developers are going to exploit it. The more shit is going to be held back from us with our games, the more we’ll have to pay for separately, as we inch toward games that only release half their content at a time.

I don’t want to wait five years and find out we’ve all been sucker punched.

There was one game, though, released in 2008, that took a rigorous approach to the source material. The game wouldn’t be about Vikings and their vulgar raids, but rather the player would be in control of the recently resurrected god Baldur, set in a technologically advanced civilization in humanity’s distant past, the Norse gods are cybernetically enhanced humans in control of a large corporation, which controls every facet of human’s lives. It was called Too Human.

Released on the heels of one of the coolest and most intriguing guerilla marketing campaigns in video game history (which included a fascinating faux-documentary about scientists finding the centuries-old body of a mechanical goblin, one of the chief enemies of the game, in a glacier in Norway http://www.norwegianfilmcommittee.org/en/home.html), the game was full of promise. The demo showcased a unique and fun combat system, wonderfully integrated mythology through the level design, cutscenes, character models, and enemies and seemed to be the kind of game that would stick with a player until far after he was done playing.

Too Human was, at its inception, intended to be a trilogy. The games would cover the bulk of Norse mythology in its fancy new cybernetic digs, from the beginning of Ragnarok all the way to the end. From a storytelling perspective, it got quite a lot of it right. Baldur’s return is met with uneasiness among the rest of the Norse gods, who are innately aware that his return bodes ill; in the Eddas, his return is the first sign of the imminent apocalypse. The other gods were equally well-crafted. Thor was what could be expected for Thor; he was muscular, bearded, terse, and carried a very large hammer. Freya was beautiful, mysterious, and powerful. Heimdall was a watcher-god who projected power and confidence, even in the face of grave dangers. Valhalla, filtered through the game’s idea of it being a large corporation, was well designed, even if the effect came off as a bit stodgy and ostentatious (one might expect the drinking halls of heaven to have more of a lived-in feel, and maybe a bit more mead-stink). There were also elements of unapologetic poetic beauty, like when the player character died and a blind, teched-up Valkyrie would descend from the heavens to carry the corpse into Valhalla. Add in a lot of nods and references to other facets of Norse mythology, such as the world-tree Yggdrasil, the Norns, and even a little known pseudo-god/talking head Mimir, who in the mythology guarded the well of knowledge. All were, of course, filtered through the odd mix of future-tech and vague social commentary, which meant that Yggdrasil was a cybernetic network where the NORNs (Non-Organic Rational Nanosystems ) lived, and Odin was ODIN (Organically Distributed Intelligence Network ).

If the idea of a game where the player takes control of a Norse god on the eve of Ragnarok doesn’t sound awesome enough, it also had the distinct advantage of having one of the most intriguing villains of all time as the main antagonist. Loki, who in the Eddas was an irredeemably entertaining but frustratingly enigmatic pseudo-god, starts most of the shit in the game. Upon his escape from prison (he’s trapped under Yggdrasil, with adder venom dripping onto his forehead for eternity – at least as far as eternity gets before the world ends), he immediately begins to collect allies – giants, goblins, and even other gods – in his war against the Aesir. This is where Baldur, and the other gods, have to come in to club him into submission. Though his characterization, at least in the first installment, is somewhat banally villainous (there’s none of the enigma, as in the source material), there remains enough of a mystery about him to be intriguing, and his escapades, as long as they’re viewed above some of the stodgy missions that they elicit, are entertaining and drive the story along as a brisk pace.

It’s the game itself that slows it down. Billed by Silicon Knights to be an original mix of RPG elements on an Action core – which is itself problematic, since there are dozens of other games, most notably the Fable and Legend of Zelda series, that embody that ideal – it was largely manifested in a control-stick based combat system over a series of never-ending improvements to your armor and weapons. If a player makes it for more than one solid progressive hour (that is, not an hour of constantly dying and respawning) in an unchanged suit of armor or with the same weapon, he either doesn’t know how to alter it or is incredibly stubborn. Weapons and armor fall from the sky with a regularity that is frightening, and ultimately irritating. A player can spend time and effort on getting a full-suit of matching armor that adds defensive or offensive bonuses, only to find pauldrons or a cuirass or greaves that not only trump the full suit, but also look ridiculous in comparison with the rest of the armor. It’s a frustrating time-sink in a game that should have a much faster pace. So it was a mixed bag, mixing the most boring elements of the RPG genre (and lacking the depth of other games’ armor/weapon combinations) with a combat system that was best described as simply unique, and it’s no surprise that it hasn’t been adapted by other games.

The game largely embodies the idea of a spectacular failure. Though there was some seriously awesome conceptualization, the execution as wobbly and inconsistent. Reviews were polaric; some reviewers raved, some hated it, and few were anywhere in the middle. The end result seemed to be that every single element of the game that was good had a caveat: the combat system started off being fun, but soon became endlessly repetitive and eventually outright boring; the level design was fantastic and intricate, but it was showcased in a cleverly-conceived-but-poorly-executed camera control scheme, which gave the player no direct control of what they were seeing and when; the cutscenes were stylish, but found a weird niche that occupied the area between a John Woo and a Zack Snyder film – there was a whole lot of unnecessary slow-motion and characters belting out bombastic lines with unironic intensity.

But if any game deserves a sequel, it’s Too Human. The meat and bones of Ragnarok have yet to be touched, and for my money, there are few contemporary retellings of Norse mythology that have come so achingly close to capturing the mournful spirit of the source material. The game certainly has an enthusiastic following – the Silicon Knights message boards are still buzzing, and at E3 fans eagerly awaited to see if SK’s announcement had anything to do with Too Human: Rise of the Giants. It didn’t. But if SK can drag Rise of the Giants out of the same development hell that plagued the first installment, and most importantly, listen to the criticism of fans and critics, the sequel could be a spectacular installment, and finally get the attention that the franchise ultimately deserves.

And if you haven’t played it, there’s no excuse: SK released the game for download on Xbox LIVE, and is available for around $20.

Zombie games are an empowerment of that ideal, more so than any other medium’s take on the subject. We actually get to test our survival against the agents of assimilation by reverting to the persuasive power of an automatic shotgun. There are a plethora of games that have come out that exploit this, too. Resident Evil, of course, the original games of which are still some of the most frightening and tense survival-horror games the industry has produced, Dead Rising, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, Killing Floor, the awesome over-too-soon chapter “We Don’t Go To Ravenholm” in Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead all tackle the undead in their own ways. Some consist of shuffling undead, some are populated with rage-driven infected, and others are the weird fallout of biological experimentation, or the result of alien parasites or any other source, which are all pretty much ridiculous.

Perhaps, out of all of these games, the ones that show their strings more than any others are the ones that are intended to be cooperative. Namely, the Left 4 Dead franchise. Billed as the ultimate survival-horror/zombie-horror experience, it pits up to four players (or eight, if you play versus) against hordes of infected and a few boss infected, with specific and damaging special abilities. The game is well-designed, with great lighting effects and map-building, intelligent AI, and the whole thing was designed to be played cooperatively, which is something that the majority of game designers seem content to ignore nowadays.

But the problem with Left 4 Dead isn’t that it’s a bad game – far from it – but that it is merely the best representation of a game genre which hasn’t come close to the survival fantasies that a ten year old could create. At its roots, the game is deeply formulaic. Go here, along this route. Yes, the AI will choose different times to send hordes, from different directions, and the ammo dumps will be in different places, and the tank will spawn somewhere around here, but you can’t be certain exactly, but that’s not quite enough. Most of the fun in playing Left 4 Dead happens through the people you’re playing with, if they die in a humorous way or if they, for some reason, keep getting targeted with extreme prejudice by the jockeys.

All of this makes for an endlessly replayable experience, and it’s even better when you’re playing Versus against a clever opposing team, but as good as the game is, you can’t help but see the strings. There isn’t a single Left 4 Dead player that hasn’t, at one point, thought “Man, you know it’d be so cool if…” followed by something awesome. It’d be awesome if we had to make our own safehouses, and we’d have to find nails to board up this hardware store, or if we could booby-trap the car before we set off the alarm (that, though, would require an AI change, so the horde would actually charge the car, and not go immediately for the survivors, even if they’re six floors above the damn thing), or, or, or.

The problem with Left 4 Dead is that it was designed to give a tense, fun, and replayable experience. In order to make it tense, fun and replayable, the designers, every step of the way, chose to go the safe route. Players couldn’t become infected; they were immune, because if a player got infected, it might make that player annoyed. The designers found that players often as not chose to go the same route at the early stages of development, so they took the choice away from us in order to make that single route as good and fun as it could be. They made sure that ammo dumps occurred, while still being random, at predictable intervals so players would always know that they weren’t far away from replenishing their supply. They made predictable set-piece choke points in every few levels, in order to give the players something to be tense about. They made it so that the damage we take isn’t really harmful, unless it’s overwhelming. Nicks, scrapes, cuts and bites – even direct gunshots from our teammates – are brushed off like it’s nothing a couple of bandages and a bottle of pills won’t fix.

Many of these changes, on their own, aren’t damaging. In fact, taking each of these examples on its own seems laudable. It’s good that designers have the annoyance of the player on their mind, because so often it gets ignored, and a game comes out that’s been lazily designed and is so full of flaws that it’s damn near unplayable until the third patch comes out. But a real problem occurs when you take them all at the same time. Left 4 Dead was, if you’ll excuse the pun, playtested to death. Anything that could annoy the player, anything that could ruin the supposedly immersive experience or leave a player at the mercy of a griefer or might ruin the pace of the game was removed. What was left is a fun, replayable, sanitary and safe experience.

It’s an irony I find at once both amusing and irritating. I don’t want my zombie game to be safe, I want it to be dangerous. I want designers to explore new ideas within the genre, try to take the ideas that any gamer would have after a session of L4D and implement them into a game that we truly haven’t seen before. One of the keys to the George A. Romero zombie universe is that nowhere is truly safe. Yet at the end of every 12-15 minute level in L4D, there’s a safe house there, waiting for us. It’s stocked with magic-fix medkits, all the ammo you could ever need, fancy brand new guns that never jam and can be reloaded by a complete novice with robotic precision – every time – without regard to the psychological situation of the players. Sure, the facial animations change with the context, but without it having an effect on the gameplay, what’s the point? It isn’t exactly like things like that haven’t been implemented into games before, it’s simply that were it implemented in Left 4 Dead, it might annoy the player.

I’d rather be annoyed than bored. I’d rather be so frustrated that I put my fist through my monitor and leave the room in a rage than be comfortable with the fact that I’ve pinpointed the strong areas of the map with such precision that I barely need to use a medkit, even on the hardest difficulty setting. I want to be scared, I want to be lost, I want to be on my last few shells and not know that there’s a perfectly safe, well-stocked area just around the corner that never exhausts its ammo supply. I want to rummage through cupboards in a dangerously exposed house covered by a friend with a single bullet and a baseball bat only to find shotgun shells that don’t match the gauge of the one I’m holding.

What I really want is a game that doesn’t expect the players to make it through. I want it to be so hard that when players talk among themselves, saying “I made it three hours into that game before I starved to death,” is an impressive way to end the first playthrough.

We’ll never get there by making the game experience as safe as Left 4 Dead. Designers, take some risks. Talk yourself through your own survival plans and talk to your friends about theirs. Go through the practical implications of it, and next time you hear some pimpled 17 year old pitching an idea for a game that’s “like Oregon Trail, but with zombies,” do us all, and the industry, a favor, and listen to him. It might just become the greatest game ever made.

I’m sure I’m being specifically incorrect here, mixing up what’s tradable with what’s only unlockable et cetera but the fact is, Team Fortress 2 is one of the best examples for showcasing the trend toward associating repetitive gameplay with artificial rewards. If you’ve ever seen the Call of Duty player boasting about the third time he prestige-classed with whatever weapon or kit that he prefers. Or if you’ve seen the servers in many games advertising it’s specificity toward earning the players specific achievements. Or if you’ve seen a person who played Dead Rising for 72 hours to get the 52,000 zombie-kill achievement only to trade the game in the next day, because he was done with it.

Part of this trend is the inclusion and wild popularity of achievements. A reward that’s tangible only to advertise your effort at getting it. Sure, the idea of achievements is solid: you get rewarded for certain acts in a game. But it’s the byproduct, the waste excretions, the fallout that’s irritating. Achievements may have started off with the idea of alerting a player when they’ve done something cool and recognizable, but it has evolved to the degree that it’s only impressive if a player has unlocked all of the fifty achievements in the game. So the player spends an extra 27 hours of play-time to make sure he plays through the game alone on Legendary, or spends three days on each achievement-oriented server to make sure he’s circumvented all the witches without alerting any one of them. Or done something else, or something else, or something else.

And so the achievements merely become goals, and along with those goals, a market develops around them to facilitate the player earning – I use the word loosely – those achievements. And when that happens, doesn’t it make the achievement worthless? It’s like saying you’ve beaten Half-Life 2. Congratulations, Nub, you were supposed to. It’s just another part of the experience that is expected, rather than earned.

Even when certain games recognized the trend, and tried to avoid it by making their achievements “secret,” a three-second google search reveals each of the achievements and what to do to get them. There are entire blogs that are set up to facilitate the achievement-farming mentality, complete with step-by-step or video-demonstrations.

Strategy Guides have been common since even before the Nintendo 64, sure, but that argument only discounts half the trend, because a strategy guide will only tell you that in order to unlock prestige-class three for the M-16, you need to get however many kills you need to get it. It can’t do it for you.

The sad part is it’s now the industry itself that’s fuelling it. It’s not just a lazy group of gamers who really want to have all the achievements, it’s the industry recognizing that a gamer will spend twenty extra hours playing their game in order to triple or quadruple-prestige, or to get all the hats, or to earn the achievements for a hundred trades.

And I’m sure there are some people out there who take the argument that it’s done merely to give the player more of a customizable experience. And that’s true to a point, sure. A lot of the upgrades in TF2 do vary the gameplay and give the player more options for cracking the enemy team’s defenses, but so many more of them are absolutely meaningless exercises in facilitating addiction: you’ll play the game longer if the developers spend three extra hours of coding time to give you something that ticks upward on a status bar every couple of minutes.

It’s a scary thought when $60 games are sustained by using the exact same strategies that Facebook games use. Call of Duty? It’s just Farmville with guns, but way more expensive, and built for mindless instant-satisfaction. Instead of farming.

These are all extremely valid points. Chances are, taking an average gamer’s last ten game purchases, at least nine if not all ten of them have been, in some way, related to a franchise. And if not, chances are the game purchased will be part of a franchise. Anything that rises even tremulously above mediocrity is likely to get a franchise treatment in some respect.

The legacy, impact, and overall importance of franchises thus far is unimpeachable. They have ensured the steady growth of the industry, simultaneously attracting new generations of gamers while keeping those of us who grew up alongside it happy.

But there’s rot at the heart of the empire. The problem is stagnation, and stagnation comes from a variety of different places.

For one thing, popularity is not a gauge for quality. Popularity does lead to income. Income leads to the ability to make better games in the future. For a franchise to remain popular, it has to strike a balance between its nebulously defined “core elements” and the demand for something newer, shinier and more exciting. Mess up one game, and it could kill the franchise.

It’s a tricky catch 22, that the power gained by a franchise is illusory because the franchise has its hands tied down by its own popularity. The longer a franchise maintains itself on its original ideas, the harder it will be to change them. It’s a system that allows perpetually repetitive franchises to flourish, while simultaneously allowing any newer, less polished games that have no franchise association to wither on the vine, despite (or because of) the new ideas it brings to the fold.

As good as some indy games are, they can’t compete with any of the big hitters. Despite having some of the most insanely fun and addictive elements, they are seldom recognized as anything other than games to occupy our time with while we wait for the next Mass Effect to come out. Because of their limited appeal (and even more limited budget), it falls on the shoulders of competitive franchises to attempt to do new things. For example, it takes a game with the pedigree of the Battlefield franchise at its back to challenge Call of Duty on the modern warfare FPS front, something that an indy developer wouldn’t have a hope of attempting.

It is unfortunate, because of some of the most fun and interesting games are ones that remain under the radar to the average gamer. Mount and Blade took an old and familiar formula – fantasy role-playing – and used a unique and clever combat system to make it rise above its competitors. One of the main reasons few gamers are familiar with it is simply because the game looks hokey. Characters are blocky and the graphics look like they were straight out of the turn of the century. The stand-alone expansion, Mount and Blade: Warband added new factions, new weapons, and new multi-player modes and while it’s not perfect, the game is, for my money, more fun and replayable than either Dragon Age or Fable. It’s ambitious, clever, and fun… but it’s not a recognized franchise, and so nobody plays it.

That is perhaps the worst part of the franchise-dominated industry. While it’s not protocol for a publisher who owns a particular franchise to discourage indy games, the effect is the same as if they did. The fact that only franchises have the marketing power to put their name out there practically ensures that all but a few annoyed gamers will tend to stick with what we know, and what we see. Indy developers can’t compete, because we as gamers laud so highly the well-known names and faces of franchises, we tend to prioritize our purchases accordingly. Why spend twenty dollars on an indy game that might be crappy when we could save it to buy Black Ops?

It all adds up. The marketing power, the popularity, the investment of the time and money it takes to make a quality game all rest with the franchises. They dominate the industry so thoroughly that we, the gamers, are more than willing to spend $60 a pop for a game that carries the title of a franchise we enjoy. But imagine what the price for Fable III would be if they didn’t pay for a commercial to air every thirty seconds. How much money did Activision pay Kobe Bryant and Jimmy Kimmel to appear in their latest (admittedly very cool) commercial for Black Ops? Maybe the price of those games might drop five or ten dollars.

What needs to happen – and this is something that we, as the perpetuators of the industry, have the power to change – is the dethroning of the franchise state of mind. We need to make it clear to distributors that, while we’re willing and able to pay inflated prices for games that, let’s face it, we’ve already played, we’re much more interested in what games could be, instead of what they are. Let’s try to get distributors to throw a little extra money at side projects in between their big releases. Instead of getting a new Call of Duty every year, let’s wait two years, with a short, inexpensive experimental shooter in between. Activision can certainly afford it. How awesome would it be for the script quality of any Bioware epic to be put behind a game based on the clever mechanics of something like Mount and Blade?

Short, experimental games made by companies that have the power to distribute could find a willing market for them. They could even be included, through Xbox Live marketplace downloads or some other such distribution vehicle, in that publisher’s next big game; first-edition games could come with a download code for a one to three hour investigation into the potential fun of a shooter set in World War I. If it proves popular, a full game might be made, and a new franchise born. If it doesn’t, then that company has saved themselves the time and money of attempting a full-length game that might prove to be a doomed concept.

With the power and the influence that franchise publishers have, there’s really no excuse for this not to be happening already.

Let’s make it happen.

Bioware is a consistent user of sliding-scale morality charts. While they’re not quite as simple as Fable’s Good and Evil orientations, the result is, generally, the same. Knights of the Old Republic has the Light and Dark side scales, and Jade Empire offers the ways of the Closed Fist or Open Palm. While the ethics of each side are supposedly deeper than simple good and bad, the result is that charitable, helpful acts are rewarded with Light Side/Open Palm points and violent or apathetic acts are awarded Dark Side/Closed Fist. It can be aggravating, especially when trying to follow, for instance, the Way of the Closed Fist from the perspective of it being a pragmatic, fight-oriented philosophy (several of the Closed Fist NPCs tell you that it goes beyond simple good guy/bad guy stuff), and waffling around somewhere in between because the game doesn’t emulate the writing. Choices are presented in simplistic, polaric terms: the character can help a villager pay off some debt, or the character can murder the villager. Far too few of the encounters in Jade Empire offer the kind of interesting dichotomy that the dialogue seems to present.

The same can be said for following the Dark Side; though characters in-game constantly talk about a deeper thread than simple acts of douchebaggery (especially with Kreia in Knights of the Old Republic II), you can’t seem to be a true follower of the Dark Side without being as stupidly and ignorantly violent as the game allows you to be. It’s disappointing, then, that the nuance of the writing doesn’t exactly reflect in the nuance of the mechanics.  Mass Effect does a better job of it, but it’s still not quite perfect. Paragon or Renegade are the options as presented, and while it is a bit more clever than previous Bioware installments, it still boils down to Renegade = Asshole, Paragon = Annoyingly Kind.  Bioware has always been strong in writing, and though the plodding morality hasn’t improved much in terms of character nuance, the choices that you make based on your alignment deeply affect the game itself. It serves to underscore the idea of action manifesting itself in consequence. But if you think about it, if actions inherently carry unforeseen consequences, why the need for a morality bar at all? It seems rather redundant and arbitrary then, whether you decide to charm people or intimidate them, if the actions themselves carry much more cathartic weight.

Fable, of course, has its own wonderfully fun approach to good and evil. In this case, story and dialogue choices are left out of the mix, and the game relies on giving specific actions a moral weight. Theft, murder and other nefarious acts earn the player Evil points, and helping villages, taking Good quests from the Guild earns you Good points. Each of the hundreds of possible actions that you have carries with them a moral element that manifests itself on your character’s body. An evil player will grow horns, have red glowing eyes and scorches the earth underfoot, whereas a good player will develop a halo wreathed in butterflies, and a healthy glow to their skin. Your appearance, then, dictates how you’re treated by villagers, city officials, and guards. A player walking around in burnt-black plate armor with glowing eyes and horns will send villagers running for their lives, taking cover behind desks and boxes, and will cause guards to ominously warn you not to mind your manners, please. A Good player has the opposite effect, and will also cause little kids to follow you around. That element is perhaps Fable’s most clever addition, in that the NPCs don’t interact via stale, replayable dialogue options but rather in more natural ways. It subtly indicates the annoying, pestered nature of the Hero better than many other games, and it gives the player the option to sacrifice children to a diabolical devil-cult. It’s disappointing that the sequel didn’t carry this idea much farther. The core of the game is still there, with actions carrying a moral weight, but, unlike in Mass Effect, your previous character has a very stale, unchangeable impact on the world as a whole. Fable II also stretches your suspension of disbelief by giving the character, good or evil, the same rather flimsy main quest. It’s hard to believe that a character who would willingly murder every NPC in Bowerstone and a character who would go out of his way to help those same people with anything they need would have the same goal.

Not all games with an ethical lean contain a scale, however. The Witcher represents morality in a cold, pragmatic sort of way. Each action has a consequence, and those consequences manifest themselves in surprising ways. Geralt, the player character, is not rewarded for performing acts of heroism, nor is he necessarily punished for acts of wickedness. As the game progresses, in fact, it’s hard to tell at all what constitutes a heroic act over a wicked one, and as such, the game itself makes a stand on morality. There is no good, and there is no evil, there are just actions and consequences. The consequences are sometimes surprising and sometimes not, but no one can argue that they don’t have a deep effect on the story itself, in minor or major ways. Toward the beginning, Geralt is given the choice to fight off a group of Elven freedom-fighters (or terrorists, depending on which way you lean), or to allow them to take a load of weapons with them. Choose to leave them be and later on an underworld contact you must find has been killed by those very same Elves, who are now more efficiently armed and have become bolder. Fight them off, and you ruin the chance that another NPC has of making peace with them. It’s a complicated situation, and each action has its own justification. The Witcher abounds with these kinds of choices, which serves to make the player hyper-aware of their role within the boundaries of the world. Witchers themselves might be neutral, but when you’re faced with a friendly NPC of yours getting murdered in the streets because you didn’t intervene, it casts a new light on the cost of neutrality.

There are other games that don’t seem to deal with morality, but simply by allowing players certain choices, morality is thrust upon them. Strategy games like The Creative Assembly’s Total War series offer the player the chance to massacre or enslave the denizens of conquered towns, which turn even the most cheese-eating of sissies into Machiavellian dictators in a few turns. The Sims is another good example, with players undoubtedly turning to torturing some of the created people within hours of exploring the game. Building a pool around a very tiny square where the unfortunate Sim had been standing (the hapless Sim, of course, being deathly afraid of drowning), walling up another one inside a room with no doors, windows, or restroom, or manipulating neighbors into riotous feuds are all part and parcel of a Sim player’s common repertoire. No penalty is given in-game, no restrictions are levied against the player, they simply experiment with the freedom the game offers. Grand Theft Auto is an easy target (as are most of the open-world, sandbox type games that are the clones of Grand Theft Auto), because, while it doesn’t necessarily reward the player for perpetrating acts of extreme violence, it doesn’t necessarily penalize players, either. And there’s a certain catharsis from mowing down sidewalks full of civilians or causing a daisy-chain of explosions from the thirty-car pileup you’ve engineered. The achievements don’t hurt, either.

So what does it all mean? Are game designers out there trying to show us the error of our ways and tacitly tell us to go to church more often? Or is morality simply another element in a long line of developments that allow designers to tailor an experience to a specific player? Certainly, there’s an angle of replay value; gamers want to find everything that they can in a game, and if that means three or four replays then that means a player will be more open to the DLC when it comes out. But maybe there’s more to it than simple commercialism. It’s the kind of thing that, in the long term, help to elevate games as an artistic medium, rather than a simple module of brainless entertainment.

Uwe Boll wouldn’t be such a monstrous blight on the cinematic world if he made his own movies. If he was writing his own stories and filled them with creepy, pseudo-fetishy imagery and released them on the German people, nobody would notice and nobody would care. But what makes Uwe Boll so aggravatingly incompetent is that he makes movies out of video games. And he makes them with such a poor idea of what he’s doing that it’s a slap in the face of fans and games on the whole.

The bigger problem is, Uwe Boll isn’t the only reason video game movies are bad.

It would be nice to blame it all on him, and don’t get me wrong, he is one of the major reasons most adaptations are terrible, but he’s not completely at fault. The problem is return on investment: video game movies are made with the attitude that a built-in fanbase already exists, and a suitable, money-making percentage of those fans will go to see the movie on opening weekend. At this point, quality doesn’t matter because most of the gamers will have already seen the movie before word of mouth begins to say that the movie isn’t worth watching. The producers then cackle evilly, twist their mustaches and count their money. Theoretically.

There is a new problem now, though, that since most of the game-movies have been unforgivably bad, the built-in fanbase is so skeptical that opening weekend returns will not be enough to cover the cost of making the movie. And so the producers find ways to spend less money on it, while still giving the movie just enough to look good in a trailer, to convince the fickle fanbase that the movie is worth seeing. Toss in a couple of bogus lines from made up news sources (next time you see a commercial for a bad movie, try to see where the reviews are coming from – a lot of time if it just says “ELECTRIC” or “A MUST-SEE” or “THE BEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR” it’s probably from a studio-planted review) and push the budget away from special effects, hiring decent actors or writers or directors and toward saturating media with ads, and you have the formula that most studios follow when it comes to making game-movies.

The fact that this isn’t the same way that graphic novels, books, or TV shows are handled could be because, as Roger Ebert would argue, video games cannot aspire to art like those other mediums can. Maybe there has yet to be a game-movie that has been good enough to change the Hollywood dynamics. There have been a couple of times we’ve come close, though. Like the game or hate it, a Halo movie might have done enough to earn the genre some respect. It was to be produced by Peter Jackson, who made New Line Cinema boatloads of cash from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and directed by Neill Blomkamp, who directed last year’s awesome District 9. With Peter Jackson leading the way, Neill Blomkamp directing, and D.B. Weiss as one of the chief writers (Weiss is now a co-writer on an upcoming HBO adaptation of A Game of Thrones) Halo was set to be a huge blockbuster and could have been enough to earn the genre some respect. The problem? Peter Jackson asked for more money. Going from the original already-generous budget of $80 million to $150 million was too much for Fox, who pulled their funding from the project and effectively ended the chance for a movie.

Does any of this really matter? With some games, the storytelling and the gameplay are weaved  so tightly together that porting the story over into a different genre, be it book or film, would be losing one of the primary elements of the story. It would be like trying to reduce The Godfather into a radio play; it might even turn out to be excellent, but it’s not all that it can be. Halo might have fit the bill for an easily transferable story, but something like Half-Life 2? Even Mass Effect, while it remains one of the most cinematic games ever made, would struggle to truly translate the game experience to film, since so much of the game is determined by player choice. A choice made by studio executives and a handsome but vacuous actor wouldn’t exactly pack the same emotional punch.

The fact is, despite what you may hear from Roger Ebert, video games have become a storytelling medium that is unique to itself. It’s like trying to translate a foreign language by using exact word-for-word replacements. You end up with “All your base are belong to us.” Translations of the events of a game can’t even come close to capturing the entire experience, and it tends not to be story that draws players, but the experience.

It would be an easy argument to make that stealth-action is going the way of the dodo. One needs only look at the newest Splinter Cell title, Conviction. The heavy stealth element and sneak-focused mapmaking have given way to missions centered on smoothly kinetic action pieces. The new Sam Fisher is more Jason Bourne than the aging, acerbic agent we’d known in the past, and though the game carries with it recognizable elements such as Michael Ironsides’ character-defining voice work, the game typifies the changes that more and more franchises seem to be adopting: the mixing of genres with a heavy emphasis on quicker, more impactful gameplay.

It would be unfair to say that Splinter Cell has abandoned its core principles; the stealth is there should the player feel like employing it. But the game is clearly balanced toward the much more viscerally satisfying headshot-chain that Fisher can only bafflingly employ after beating up an unfortunate guard. Gone are the rewards or punishments for collateral damage – Sam is off the grid with no one looking over his shoulder and has the world to save. The end result is fun, decently written, competently executed stealth action game, as long as the word “stealth” is used only in the most liberal sense.

Splinter Cell isn’t the only series that incorporates faster and more brutal combat into the experience. If the E3 live demo is any indication, the Metal Gear series is doing much the same. Instead of a chain of headshots, though, the designers have implemented a hi-tech looking sword to enable the player to easily hack through groups of guards on the way to fight the inevitably over the top boss battles. The core conceit here is that the player can finely manipulate the angle of each chained slash, resulting in grotesquely severing limbs and leaving finely ground chunk of guard strewn across the battlefield.

I’ll admit, this new weapon sounds fantastic. It could change the nature of bladed combat in every title in the future, replacing button-smashing, combo-centered and increasingly outdated –looking and –feeling melee combat (The Force Unleashed serves as a perfect example of dated melee combat). But it does raise a small question: does this mean the end of Metal Gear’s stealth core? Why even attempt to hide if a quick speed burst and a few right-stick swings can leave behind a room of sticky blood and chunks of guard? It certainly doesn’t lend itself well to hiding bodies in a locker, unless the player is given a mop and bucket along with the sword.

The Assassin’s Creed series perfectly argues in favor of evolution over abandonment. Stealth is as important an element as in the first Splinter Cell titles, but it’s much more cleverly implemented. Instead of hiding in shadows and striking in small, precisely lethal ways, the character hides in plain sight, masking his intent by moving with crowds or above unassuming guard’s heads. While the game makes no claim to realism as the first of Sam Fisher’s outings (the ability to kill guards at will with no exceptionally dangerous reaction from the cities tends to kill the attempt at realism), the game makes great strides in helping to lift stealthy titles out of the shadows, out of the woods, and out of the secret underground nuclear silos. It is a perfect hybrid of action and stealth without heavily favoring one over the other; one player may carefully plan and execute his target with laudable finesse, just as surely as another may willfully hack his way through waves of guards to cut down his target in a bloody public execution. Try doing something similar in a Metal Gear title and it would earn a quick trip to the morgue.

Another title treads on the same line. Batman: Arkham Asylum mixes a fun and simple beat-em-up mechanic along with an agonizingly unforgiving weakness to firearms – even when Batman is roaming the hallways of Arkham with his fully upgraded armor, inmates armed with guns represent a significant threat to him, just as surely as the Joker’s steadily evolving Batman countermeasures impede his freedom of movement through the asylum. More classic in structure and mechanic than Assassin’s Creed, Arkham Asylum is another example of how stealth and action can combine to create a completely riveting experience that suffers none of the weird unbalance as a stealthless Sam Fisher.

Just as I’ve argued that survival-horror games no longer exist in the strictest sense of the definition, I would make the case that stealth-action has evolved into action-stealth. It is not a bad thing by any means, so long as unique titles keep coming out that combine the mechanics in such diverse and pleasing ways. But even as I was beating up some bad guys to earn enough badass points to shoot six more in the face, I lamented the end of Splinter Cell as a game that rewards patience and precision. Whether Metal Gear will suffer the same fate remains to be seen, but I for one hope it’ll lean more toward stealth than has been indicated thus far.