The Stack

So, after a month and a half of secrecy, I’m starting to tell people about this blog. It’s got to be the case that a lot of blogs are started and abandoned with a mere handful of posts, and I didn’t want to suffer that embarassment here. But I’m convinced by now that I can fulfill the terms of the Oath, and that the only embarassment in the offing is that which I forge for myself through my words.

So, welcome, reader! I hope reading about someone else playing videogames helps to stave off the boredom of your workplace or classroom or wherever you’re reading this. Feel free to leave comments, because I derive a sense of personal validation from that, and it’s been a little sad seeing “Comments(0)” at the head of every single post.

Given the effort that I devoted to getting the right analog stick to work in this game, the results are disappointing. It seems that the game is treating my custom bindings as on/off switches, like a keyboard, rather than as analog values. When on foot, you can’t turn carefully. You’re either turning or you’re not, and that’s all there is to it.

Fortunately, this doesn’t usually make a difference. The left analog stick works fine, and that’s the one you use for steering vehicles. Since there’s no chance that you’ll skid and flip over when you’re on foot, fine movement is less crucial then. It becomes somewhat more important in a firefight, because you use the right stick for aiming your weapon, but I’ve managed to muddle through a third of the game with awkward aiming. I find that I can afford to take a few seconds to adjust my aim if I’m only facing two or three assailants, and if I’m facing more than that, I can usually just put my gun away and get in a car. (Not necessarily to flee; used correctly, automobiles are the deadliest weapons in the game.)

But the second-to-last mission in Portland (the first of the three islands that comprise Liberty City) makes this impossible. The goal of this mission is to protect your friend 8-Ball, an explosives expert, as he plants a bomb on a ship that serves as a rival gang’s headquarters. You’re given a sniper rifle to eliminate the sentries guarding the ship, and a safe vantage point to do it from. But you have to do it fast: the moment you fire the first shot, 8-Ball goes charging in, trusting you to dispatch any threats before they kill him. It’s nigh impossible to aim quickly and accurately enough with a gamepad.

Fortunately, there’s another option. After failing the mission three or four times, I tried aiming with my trackball mouse. The mission became all but trivial.

Now, GTA3 was clearly designed for the PS2 and only grudgingly ported to the PC. But even when a game prefers a console, I prefer a computer, mainly for three reasons: finer graphics, greater ease of modding, and wider range of input devices. This game reminds me that this last point isn’t just about choosing the right device for a game: different subsections of a game can have different needs. Still, I have to admit that this is a case of the PC version solving a problem that the PC version caused in the first place.

The last several hidden packages I’ve found were hidden in a way that I failed to mention in my previous analysis: they were on top of things that are normally above eye level. This is another technique that’s only possible in a 3D engine. In GTA1‘s top-down view, anything on a rooftop is in plain sight.

The nice thing about hiding things this way is that, in addition to removing the item from view, it automatically turns it into a climbing puzzle. If it’s above where you normally go, it must be difficult to get up there.

Some will disagree with my calling this “nice”; not everyone is a fan of platformers. But personally, I’m pretty keen on the gimmick of modelling one type of game inside another, and this game is a good example of why: the fact that it’s inside a GTA alters the way that the platform game can be approached. In one memorable instance, there was a hidden package actually visible on the rooftop of the Liberty Pharmaceutical building, which I couldn’t find any way to climb up to at all. The only way I managed to get there was to drive a car up the steep and narrow stairs to an elevated train station (all but wrecking the car), driving around on the tracks above the city, and then accelerating off the side of the tracks, plunging in a steep arc onto the rooftop I wanted. The best thing about this is that the failed attempts got me some good Insane Stunt bonuses.

Jumping farther isn’t the only way that the vehicles affect the platforming. Suppose you want to get on top of a wall. It’s just a little too high to jump onto, and there’s nothing at all nearby that you can climb onto and jump from. In a conventional platformer, you’d just be stuck until you found a special tool or powerup provided for the specific purpose of getting on that wall. GTA3 doesn’t provide a special tool of this sort, but it has a general-purpopse physics engine. If you need to jump from higher ground, you can just drive a car to the wall and jump onto its roof. Still too high? Make a staircase out of a car, a minivan, and a delivery truck. These are not controlled special cases, either: the components of the staircase are always available. Conventional platformers can’t afford to allow general solutions like this because they rely on limiting the player’s access to locations to keep the game ordered. But in GTA3, the platformer elements are an optional tangent to the game, so the developers have no reason to prevent you from figuring out your own solutions. This, it strikes me, is a major source of GTA3‘s much-lauded freedom of action: because it provides many things for the player to do, it doesn’t have to care enough about any one of them to need to exert control over it.

I haven’t even yet touched on the aspects of GTA3 that tickle the pundits: the violence, the amorality, the corruption of the youth, etc. This is because I’m looking at the game as a player, not as a pundit, and as a player, these issues aren’t particularly interesting. Even if games of this sort desensitize children to real violence (which has not been proved to my satisfaction), they are unlikely to have such an effect on me, a grown-up gamer with a healthy appreciation for the difference between games and reality. ¹Reality doesn’t have save points. Approximately three decades of gaming have, however, pretty effectively desensitized me to violence in games. After Doom and God of War and so forth, the combat and assassination missions in GTA3 just don’t seem notably violent to me. The fact that you can kill innocent bystanders, without consequences in most cases, is a little unusual, but not unprecedented. The fact that it’s happening on a backdrop that resembles my neighborhood might provide a bit of a frisson if I were paying much attention to the scenery during firefights.

But there is an aspect of the game that’s starting to make me uneasy: the juxtaposition of violence with ethnic stereotyping. I suppose this has been part of the game all along, part of the juvenile humor in the random comments of passersby, but it wasn’t so visible at first. The first gang encountered in the game is the Mafia, and they’re presented as more of a generic mobster stereotype than an Italian stereotype. ²For example, they’re never seen jumping on goombas. But as the easy courier missions end and the combat missions come to the fore, I’m seeing more of the Latino and Chinese mobs, usually through crosshairs. They’re shown to be ridiculous caricatures, and then you kill them.

It’s funny that this didn’t bother me in GTA1. Perhaps it’s because all of the dialect humor in GTA1 was delivered through text in textboxes, which makes it seem less part of the gameworld. It’s also worth noting that I’m not bothered in this way by games, such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein or the various Indiana Jones games, that feature Nazis as caricatured German stereotypes which you kill. Nazis are something of a special case in our society.

Ultimately, the designers of the entire GTA series are going for shock value here, as elsewhere in the game. Paradoxically, this means there’s no real reason to be shocked. If this mock-and-slaughter stuff wasn’t considered socially offensive, then we would have cause for alarm.

I said that I’m playing GTA3 “in earnest” now. When I was still wrestling with hardware issues, I knew I wasn’t going to bother saving the game, so I didn’t try to make progress. I just explored a little, found a few hidden packages without trying, drove at whatever speed I pleased, and quit when I felt like it. Now, things are different. I don’t quit without first heading back to the hideout to save the game. When I explore, it’s because I’m looking for something. When I drive, I’m attentive to either safety or time, depending.

This makes a big difference to the feel of the game, even when I’m not actively on a mission. The more focussed I am on what I’m doing, the less I’m soaking in the game’s ambience. The thing is, I suspect that the way I was playing it at first is more like the way most of the game’s fans played it. Just enjoying the experience without “lust for result”, either finishing it after a matter of months because they played it so much that they eventually played it all, or not even getting that far but going on to the next sequel when it was released. Is this a better way to approach the game? Maybe. I do intend to take things kind of easy while I can, enjoying the simulated sunsets and so forth, because I anticipate the later missions requiring more attention.

Maybe I should play The Sims next. It’s on the stack.

So now I’m playing GTA3 in earnest, attempting to make progress and saving the game when I do. I’ve completed several missions for Luigi, one for Joey, and one for a stranger who called a payphone, as well as found 7 of 100 “hidden packages”.

I’m not sure yet if I’m going to try to find all 100 hidden packages. It certainly appeals to me as a completist, but I never completed equivalent tasks in the first two GTAs. On the other hand, it’s kind of different here. The previous games, with their unvarying top-down perspective, were more like 2D games. Not that they were really 2D: there was definitely a height factor, no less so than in GTA3. But the fixed perspective made it possible to hide things only in the same ways that 2D games hide their secrets: by putting them offscreen (or outside of where the screen will normally be), by concealing them with foreground scenery that blocks the player’s view (and thus the player’s view of the player character when getting them), by putting them under objects that the player has to destroy, or, most commonly in these particular games, by putting them in plain sight but behind a barrier, with a difficult-to-find route past the barrier. The first two of these techniques depend on properties of the 2D third-person view: if you could see through the PC’s eyes, things that are offscreen or behind the foreground would be in plain sight. Thus, they seem artificial, and can even break immersion by drawing attention to properties of the game engine that are not properties of the game world. When games started going 3D, one of the big revelations was that secrets could now be hidden in more natural ways, because the moving camera allowed things to be in plain sight from some locations but not others. Thus, in GTA3, it seems like most of the hidden packages can be found by walking behind or inside structures that you otherwise don’t have much motivation to explore that thoroughly.

This last point is one of the main reasons for having collectibles in a game in the first place: to encourage the player to explore the environment thoroughly, maximizing what they see of the designers’ carefully-sculpted world. Every significant landmark in GTA3 seems to have exactly one secret package as a reward for visiting that landmark. If this is consistently true, then it should be easier to find them all than in the first two games, where they were just kind of scattered at random.

Acting on the advice of many, I finally gave up and bought a different PSX-to-USB adaptor that has a better driver, one that allows me to arbitrarily reassign axes. Such devices are not expensive, but still, it rankles, because I didn’t really want or need a different adaptor. In terms of hardware, my new adaptor can’t be very different from my old one. Both devices take the same kind of signal, and produce the same kind of signal. All I really needed was a better driver. The driver for the new device was available for free download on the web, but Windows wouldn’t allow me to use it with the old adaptor.

I know very little about Windows device drivers, and less about USB, but presumably the two devices send some kind of signature that lets the USB host figure out which device it is. So it should be possible to hack the new driver to work with the old device by changing the signature it looks for. But figuring out how to do this would have involved more work than it took to earn the money I used to pay for the new adaptor.

Anyway, at least I should be able to play GTA3 properly now.

So, I gave Throne of Darkness another go. I’m out of the dungeon and into the final castle, but things there are slaughtering my party regularly. I think I’ll have to have another crafting spree before I can make any more progress, and maybe go back and slaughter some creatures along alternate paths for more XP and crafting supplies.

Since I’ve run out of interesting things to say about the gameplay, let me talk about the graphics a little. I mentioned before that I bought this game primarily on the basis of the screenshots on the box (which is a poor way to make purchasing decisions, but hey, it was cheap). The thing I liked was mainly the texture of the objects. Items have engraving-like detail, and magic items are tinted in various colors depending on their enhancements. It’s especially striking now, coming from a stint of Guitar Hero, which uses heavily stylized 3D. The Throne of Darkness style is a good example of what 2D graphics can do better.

All of which makes me wonder what they were thinking when they made the crudely cel-shaded cutscenes. Nobody’s perfect, I suppose.

After practicing by replaying some of the earlier songs to get higher ratings and more unlocks, I finally beat “Bark at the Moon”. Guitar Hero is officially off the stack. I’ll probably play with it some more and see how far I can get on Hard difficulty, but I doubt I’ll ever finish it at that level.

About “Bark at the Moon” as a boss monster: Looking back at the last set of songs, it strikes me as unfortuante that the hardest of the hardest songs has a title that’s a verb phrase in the imperative rather than a noun. The same set has songs titled “Frankenstein” and “Godzilla”. Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to be able to say “Yeah! I finally beat Godzilla!”? Even “Cowboys from Hell”, also in the same set, is more fitting.

Like those songs, “Bark at the Moon” is about a monster. Is it deliberate that the final set is mainly monster songs? Is it coincidence? Or is it just that the kind of band that does really difficult guitar riffs tends to be the kind of band that writes songs about monsters?

On an unrelated note, in a recent editorial in Newsweek, Stephen Levy says that the Guitar Hero gameplay experience is “no different from other experiences made virtually accessible by the computer, from being a World War II sniper to playing golf like Tiger Woods.” The gaming-as-fantasy fallacy again! But then, judging by the anecdotal evidence Levy presents, perhaps it’s not a fallacy. Maybe I’m just atypical. Perhaps imitating the real experience really is the central thing for the people who play Call of Duty or Tiger Woods PGA Tour, games which don’t appeal to me particularly. And perhaps the people who become really obsessed with Guitar Hero, who aren’t satisfied with finishing it at Medium difficulty like me, are doing it to feel like they can play “Bark at the Moon” like Ozzy does. I’ve said that the rock star fantasy isn’t essential to enjoying the game, but maybe it’s essential to getting the most out of it.

Levy also asks:

“…by bestowing the rewards of virtuosity to those who haven’t spent years to earn it, is it dumbing down musicianship? If a teenager can easily become a make-believe guitar hero, does that mean he won’t ever bother to master the real thing?”

For once, a videogame is being blamed for inspiring teenagers to not imitate it in real life. Leaving aside the question of whether fewer teenage guitarists might not be a bad thing, my contact at Harmonix points out that the game could easily have the opposite effect. Even if the game reduces the proportion of guitarist wannabes who go through with learning to play for real, it may be making up for it by producing more guitarist wannabes. In other words, there have got to be people who assumed that they could never play a guitar until they tried it in the game and realized that the skills were accessible after all. Pure speculation, of course, but so is Levy’s comment. I know I can report a similar experience with a different game: Slime Forest convinced me that I could actually learn to read Japanese. A couple of years later, I’m still learning, but I haven’t given up.

The songs in Guitar Hero are divided into six levels of increasing difficulty. The highest level is unavailable on Easy mode, so when I unlocked it on Medium, I didn’t know what to expect. The first four songs turned out to be difficult, but not too difficult — I managed to scrape through them all on the first try, albeit missing a lot of notes in the process. Then came the infamous “Bark at the Moon”.

I had heard about this song. It recently made a list of the top 20 videogame bosses. This seemed humorously incongruous when I read about it, but now I understand. It has that bosslike order-of-magnitude-harder-than-anything-else-you’ve-faced quality. The very first thing it throws at you is a rapid alternation between the lowest and highest notes you can play, which involves muscles I haven’t used in a long time. I assume it’s even worse on higher difficulty levels.

It’s been two days since I got that far, and I haven’t successfully barked at the moon yet. Partly this is because I can’t try again immediately after a failed attempt. Not because the game won’t let me, but because each attempt is wearing enough on the hands that I need a break. The game in general is tiring, to the point that I wonder if I’m holding the controller wrong, but not to this degree. (I have experimented with alternate postures a little, such as holding the controller in my lap and playing the fret buttons like a piano keyboard, but these always prove to be more awkward than doing it the right way.)

On my last attempt, I got all the way to the final solo, which, due to its unfamiliarity, I played badly enough to bring the audience all the way from the green zone on the rock-meter down to booing me off the stage. The end result: 99% completion. 99%. I think the final note was actually on the screen.