I visited a friend of mine the other day. I walked into his house and instead of initiating the dialog for the story mission — we were going to see Pirates of the Caribbean, but there would be options in the dialog tree for Bridesmaids or Thor — I started going through the drawers in his kitchen. There had to be a junk drawer somewhere. A ha! Sure enough, I found 43 cents in loose change. I also scored some batteries, a ball of string, a screwdriver, and a roll of masking tape that I could sell next time I went to the store.
I found a key in there as well. Once I’d cleared the spare change out of the other drawers in the house (another 87 cents), as well as taking some jewelry from his wife’s jewelry box (score!) and changing into a nicer pair of pants I found in his closet, I tried the key on various doors. I eventually got into his garage. I found a bunch of tools, as well as some lumber and cloth. I did’t take the lumber since it just took up too much weight in my inventory. The entire time he was watching me, waiting for me to initiate dialog.
I understand why computer RPGs do this, and it’s a convention as old as the genre itself. The level designers have made cool locations full of nooks and crannies that you have no reason to visit, much less admire. So they sprinkle rewards around to encourage exploration. It’s part of the economy, and it makes gameplay sense. But the trade-off is that it damages world building and character development. In The Witcher 2, for instance, I can get into a groove where I’m digging on a town’s layout, and where people live, and what they do, and how they hang out and talk to each other. But the moment I open someone’s personal chest and help myself to what’s in there while he looks on? That’s the moment I’m back in yet another computer RPG. Furthermore, my Geralt in The Witcher 2 would never do something so petty as steal stuff from people. But the developers don’t acknowledge this decision I’ve made about the character I’m playing. What’s more, they punish me if I make this decision.
Looting friendly homes in an absurd RPG convention and it needs to stop. Bethesda’s games finally woke up to the fact that it’s odd to pick through someone’s possessions, so they put into their games ownership over items and whether or not people see you taking their stuff. It’s a crucial part of their world building, which allows for the concept of crime. It helps character development since it finally gives thief characters something to do beside pick pockets and disarm traps. And it also makes it harder to play otherwise solid RPGs like Dragon Age, The Witcher, Neir, and Divine Divinity.
Well, I signed on to do five of these Nethack diaries, and this is the fifth, which is good, because in order to find new things to complain about I’d have to keep playing the game.
I’m kidding, of course. There are a lot of things I like about Nethack. It’s fun to imagine how thrilling it must have been to college students in 1987, clandestinely passed around on floppy disks or played on a library terminal. The immaturity of the Internet and absence of Google would have made knowledge of the game’s countless spoilers a rare commodity, to be drunkenly shouted by one engineering student to another in crowded small-town bars with lenient carding policies. Gorgeous coeds would get into yowling, hair-pulling catfights over who deserved to fellate the most proficient Nethack player.
I could be romanticizing things a bit. My own first exposure to roguelikes was Nethack’s predecessor, Hack, which I acquired on a Fred Fish disk for my Amiga in high school, long before I discovered beer or coeds. I played it endlessly, dying in more ridiculous ways each time, never really getting the tiniest grasp on how anyone would actually go about winning the game. But then I had an excuse: I knew one other guy who played it, he was as clueless as me, and we had no way to learn about the game other than trial and error. In 2011, all the secrets of Nethack are at my fingertips online, but I still don’t know how to win. I’ve played without spoilers for so long not out of some kind of hyper-morality, but just because Nethack spoilers put me to sleep. I’m certain that interest in playing a game and interest in learning a vast range of counter-intuitive facts that are, for all intents and purposes, separate from the game itself, are two different interests. While some people may have both of those interests, I don’t. And thus, I will never win Nethack.
While that was fine for me in high school, in my old age, I’m less patient with this random, mysterious, goofy game that will kill you on a whim. Maybe I’m distracted by all these coeds and beer.
Rally racing is a terrible idea. Whose idea was it to go fast over, like, gravel? And dirt and mud? You can’t get any traction on that stuff. Your car slides. And sometimes there are rally races in snow. Snow! Can you believe it? That’s the stuff people ski on. It’s the worst place in the world to go fast. When people have footraces and baseball games where it’s snowy, I’m pretty sure they bring out big snow melters to clear the track, or whatever it is you do to get snow out of the way. But not in rally racing. In rally racing, it’s like they intentionally want you to drive on snow. It’s like they go to whole countries full of snow, such as Finland and Aspen.
After my ongoing love affair with Shift 2, I was a bit worried that I’d be tapped out in terms of racing games. But the kind of driving you’re doing in Dirt 3 is really its own beast. It’s loosey-goosey enough for things to go wrong from time to time. The above video illustrates perfectly the difference between actual racing and rally racing, and the difference between Shift and Dirt. If the above had happened while I was playing Shift 2, I’d go straight to “restart race” in the pause menu. But in Dirt 3, it’s just another thing that can sometimes happen on the way to the finish line.
By the way, I blame the elephant grid for what happened in that video. Stupid elephant grid.
In LA Noire, there are a couple of points where the game flirts with what must be one of the most maddening aspects of crime, and something you rarely see in pat episodic TV shows: sometimes you can’t know who committed a crime, because people lie and evidence doesn’t always tell the whole story. Unfortunately, LA Noire pulls its punches in this regard. It only dabbles in contrived ambiguity so it can set up a later reveal.
If I thought documentaries were real movies (they aren’t), it would bring to mind Paradise Lost, a pair of fascinating documentaries about the 1993 murder of three children in West Memphis, Arkansas. There’s a bit of an agenda behind director Joe Berlinger’s movies (the first made in 1996, the follow-up in 2000), but he doesn’t let it get in the way of telling the story and leaving you as unsatisfied as you should be. Probably the best cinematic example of this is David Fincher’s chilling Zodiac, an icily detached dramatization of the search for a serial killer in the 70s who (spoiler!) was never caught. I would have loved to have seen a little of that uncertainty and helplessness in LA Noire.
Most recently, I stumbled across an Australian movie called Noise, starring no one you’ve ever heard of and not to be confused with an American movie called Noise, starring Tim Robbins. To this day, I have no idea how the Australian Noise made its way into my Netflix queue. It just showed up one day and I had the good fortune to start watching it without knowing whether it was a horror movie, a romantic comedy, or a documentary (which isn’t a real movie anyway).
Noise is an unsettling experience from the opening scene to the final shot, but it’s an unforgettable study of how a crime unfolds and resolves, told from the perspective of a victim and a police officer, and the community they inhabit. It’s creepy, stylish, as unmistakably Australian as Picnic at Hanging Rock, genre bending, and flat-out unforgettable. For better or worse — you may very well hate it — it’s one of those movies that will bounce around inside your head as sure as the ringing in your ears after a gunshot.
