Cool Story Bro

By Reach for the Sky

Despite the fact that the industry continues to churn out generic shooters by the bushel, I still like to think of games as an art form. Creating a game does, after all, require a level of creativity and skill not found an any random pedestrian. Even if I was suddenly infused with the technical capabilities of the world's greatest programmers and graphic designers, I wouldn't be able to crank out an award winner. without any creative touch or artistic expression, all I would be generating is a tech demo with no soul.

This is fairly evident in the games I've been playing recently. God of War 3 is incredibly fun in terms of gameplay, but I think what really separates it from its various imitators is its impressive presentation. It might seem strange to call a game that has you ripping people in half "artistic", but the art is there. The Chimera that had its snake-tail cut off had to be animated*. The characters getting their heads ripped off had to be voiced. The buildings being decimated had to be modeled. All details were added to convey a message, right down the pitch of the screams of the hapless enemy soldiers. Even the story was written well enough, I've certainly seen worse (and more successful) in the movie industry.

Splinter Cell: Conviction is very story-oriented**. It has all the pacing and intensity of any political thriller, particularly reminiscent of the Bourne movies. The game was fun enough, but the story captured my attention and held it to the end, a very rare feat of modern games (I'm usually either lost or apathetic half-way through. see: Halo, Gears of War, Call of Duty, etc.) The voice acting is pretty much the best I've heard since Half-Life 2.

MAG, on the other hand, has no story outside of "three military factions don't like each other". There's no single-player at all, which I find to be a massive weakness in gaming. CoD: Modern Warfare wasn't exactly Citizen Kane, but at least it tried with an interesting story (to its credit, it held me to the end, but for alternative reasons.) MAG makes no attempt. Here are some people we don't like. Use gun and bullets on them. It got old fast, and it didn't help that the gameplay wasn't exactly an attention grabber.

I understand, however, the need for objective scale. You can't take my word on everything after all. Here's a graph representing some rough sales figures of the three games. Keep in mind I have over 27 weeks of AP Stats experience, so you can be assured that it is completely credible.

*The Chimera, by the way, was not exactly designed to be a viable monster for movies and video games, but Santa Monica did a great job with it, easily the best design I've seen.

**Storiented?

Roses Note: How can one talk of Shooters without mentioning Command and Conquer Renegade?

EDIT: Reach: That reminds me of something. There's one point in God of War when Kratos is knocked off his feet and drops all of his weapons Metroid-style. They're splayed out in front of him, his massive cestus,his longbow, his human head/flashlight, and about a solid kilometer of chain-type weapons. It's actually quite funny to see all the tools that he supposedly keeps under his loincloth when not in use.