E3 2011: The Top Five PS3 Games for Artistically-Inclined Gamers to Anticipate: Part 2&3: Team Ico Games

I have to admit that I didn't play too much of either Ico or Shadow of the Colossus when they were released in 2001 and 2005, respectively. I can't quite say why, but I was playing fewer video games at the time and probably busy with things like college, Nietzsche and drinking. I did, however, read about them. Since their releases, the legends have grown about these two games and I've been itching to get my teeth into them ever since. In September, after a 5-month delay, Sony will be releasing an HD collection with both games in an effort to tide over fans until the release of Team Ico's next game, The Last Guardian.

The games each have a plot, but it is not the focus. Ico was meant to be a typical "boy meets girl" story, and in many ways, it is. Ico is a boy born with horns who becomes outcast from his small village (much like Oblio in The Point). He is locked away inside a castle where he attempts to free Yorda, a young girl in danger from an evil queen. Shadow takes the opposite tract, moving from imprisoned romance to wandering solitude. Translated literally from the Japanese as "Wanderer and the Colossus," the game follows a young man who must wander the world killing large "colossi" to save the life of the woman he loves. These games, however, are not about story.

Lead designer Fumito Ueda and Team Ico explicitly aimed for a minimalist, lonely and whistful atmosphere for their games, ones that leave story to the side and focus on emotion. The upcoming Last Guardian, which centers around the relationship between a mountain boy and a gigantic dog/bird hybrid, seems to continue this trend. Fans of Ueda's games describe them as dreamy and engrossing, and I can say that, even from an outsider's perspective, I can feel the spell. While I've read some fantastic peices on these games, I don't want to get too much into the mindset of interpreting them before I've even begun. I'm looking forward mostly to the feeling. The more I look at screenshots and videos, the more I feel the desire to spend a month or so in some dusty tundra in an unnamed foreign land, cooped up in small shack with a howling wind and only these games to keep me company. They seem to demand to be played with minimal distraction. I'll leave you with these images. I feel they are more fitting for a group of games that seem more to want to leave an impression, a felt sense, than to entertain or excite the intellect.

 

As a bonus, check out the Japanese box art for the re-releases of Ico and Shadow via VG247.com. Very cool. The Ico and Shadow of the Collosus Collection will be out in the United States on Playstation 3 September 27th. The Last Guardian is TBA 2012.

E3 2011: The Top Five PS3 Games for Artistically-Inclined Gamers to Anticipate: Part 1: Papo & Yo

E3 2011 has come and gone, and with it a whirlwind of information on upcoming video games and consumer electronics, all of it filtered through the corporate mouthpeices of game companies, with snippets from the nerds whose work keeps them talking. The main focus of E3 is on huge commercial productions like Call of Duty 37, Halo 16, 3D Playstations and novelty consoles from Nintendo. Along with these chest-thumping endeavors, though, is the feeling of the new, the novel, the changing, The Future. Even for ideas and promises that won't see fruition or that will clearly bomb, E3 has a largesse for optimism, freely imbuing anyone who follows it with an excitement for what is to come. It is with this mind to seeing how gaming is changing and how it can be changed that I begin this list. I wanted to highlight a few games, some big, most small, that I'm most looking forward to.

Papo & Yo

In Braid, Jonathan Blow sought to create a game whose mechanics directly related to and deepened its themes. The game garnered heavy praise and I personally enjoyed it thoroughly; it was also  one of the few that my girlfriend got hooked on. However, serious critics gave Blow a good deal of flack, claiming that it failed to properly achieve its aim, that the connection was lacking between thematics and gameplay. I tend to agree with them. The poetic level introductions set up a decently mature storyline and we were told, both in-game and through promotion, that the gameplay mechanism of time manipulation was meant to serve as a philosophical correlary to the story. Press square. Reverse character motion. Induce reflective moment. When I actually played the game though, it felt like a very clever platformer/puzzler with a beautiful aesthetic that was enhanced by the story set-up. The reflective part never really came into the equation for me.

In hearing about Minority Media’s first full game, the upcoming PSN download Papo & Yo, I’m wondering if we have a new shot at Blow’s dream, a game that does emotional depth through its gameplay. I’m guessing it won’t turn the gaming world on its head, but the possibility is still exciting. Despite its shortcomings, Braid was still a fantastic game head and shoulders above most, and if Papo & Yo feels even half as fresh, it’ll be worth the price of admission.

The game’s title is a thinly vield Spanportuglish mishmash that translates as Father and Me, a reference to creator Vaner Caballero’s experiences growing up with an alcoholic father in Colombia. The metaphorical stand-ins for father and son are a boy named Quico and his pet monster, Monster. I’m already endeared. The game’s adventures occur in Quico’s imagination as he attempts to escape the harshness of life in an unnamed South American favela. Monster tags along to help out on the puzzles and challenges that arise in Quico’s mind quest. Monster, however, is not as sweet as he seems at first: he is rabidly addicted to eating frogs and will sometimes  act so impulsively in his pursuit of more frogs that he screws up Quico’s pursuits. I’m not much for summary (and I’m summarizing from what I’ve read anyway), so I’ll leave the rest of the description to a quote from IGN:

In his mind Quico can adventure in a surreal world where he can move houses simply by pushing around cardboard boxes, or where he can tug magical ropes to make stairs raise out of the ground. It's semi-realistic looking in its presentation, but mixes in enough strange scenery and bizarre looking environments that playing it is akin to moving through a waking dream. It's striking.

Video games tend to be an insular, thematically slight medium in which much of the meaning that is explicit often refers back to other games themselves (I’m still looking at you Braid). Whoever observed that there are more books written about other books than any other topic would have something to say about the nostalgia binge of the last five years. In this light, it’s exciting to hear about an atmospheric, thematically ambitious game that not only takes on the typical, if excellent, triumverant of nostalgia, coming of age and fantasy, but does so with a clear consciousness of weighter issues, namely global poverty and the harm it wreaks on families. I’m not going to get into the possibility of game published on Playstation Network potentially implying methods of resistence to the neo-liberal order (a guy can dream can’t he), but I’m already seeing monstrous potential for this game to mix fantasy, personal emotion and political reality in stunning ways (pun intended). All it needs to do is be touching though, and I’ll love it just the same.

Why I Didn't Like The Tree of Life

WARNING: Spoilers Ahead

Period setting with overt Americana imagery. Check. Meta-cosmic themes that imply the transcendence of suffering through gratitude. Check. Beautiful cinemetography. Check. Famed director (and actors) whose previous movies I've loved. Check.

Terrence Malick's Tree of Life is a movie that I should love. To list its elements is to describe exactly what I would want out of a movie, a dream project to anticipate with adolescent, fanboy suspense. I should leave the theater feeling invigorated, alive, yet reflective and perhaps bitersweet, ready to both take on the world and find acceptance in its failings, to Appreciate my own existence in such a way that adds a skip to my step and a bit more compassion to my heart. So after having seen Tree of Life last night, I'm left wondering, what went wrong? Why didn't I like this movie?

I'll begin with the ending. The last twenty minutes, after the close of the main plot line, show a seemingly endless parade of loosely connected mini-segments filled with lush beaches, deserts, skyscrapers and the same edge-lit trees that fill the rest of the film. Each shot is beautiful. Each shot is a bit confusing. At first, I probed around in corners of my mind, trying to make sense of it. "What does the beach symbolize? Why are his older self and his child self both there? Isn't that the guy from his hometown?"  As three minutes extended into ten, I began to wonder if Mallick's "newest masterpiece" could go on forever, each fade-to-black followed by yet another image of some awe-inspiring landscape, another shot of Sean Penn seeming tired and nostalgiac, another nervous leaf again proclaiming the grandeur of existence. It was visually beautiful. It also felt like fluff. All I wanted was for it to end.

My problem with the ending mirrors my problem with the film as a whole: it is so thoroughly saturated with a sense of self-importance that it fails to realize the need to grab the audience and make them feel why it is so important. Twenty minutes in, during the dancing planets sequence, we hear a mother's heartfelt voice whisper over a shot of an ocean, "Light of my light" to her dead son. It could be powerful, but we've barely seen either of them yet, and so it feels like you're being sold on it. You are so beaten over the head with depth and importance, your attention made to focus so much on what a great film this is, that you can't properly think about the content of the film itself.  Between the (admittidely gorgeous) visuals, the in-your-face opera score that plays over much of the film, and the constant snippets of voiceover, much of it spoken in whispers, it often feels like you're watching a 138-minute advertisement for the film, rather than watching the film itself. I'm reminded of an episode from season two of the Simpsons, where Smithers takes a job as the announcer at a greasy racetrack ("Get ready for Action! Action! Action!"). Feeling awkward at the constant enthusiasm required by the position, he complains, "The people are already here, we don't need to keep hustling them like this, do we?"

To be fair, Tree of Life does have a lot going for it. The performaces are amazing, as are the shots (nearly every single moment is gorgeous), and it does have some genuinely touching and disturbing moments. I expected these things. But I also expected to be drawn in, moved, made to think- about the subjects that the film is about: the universe, our place in it, the connection between the personal and universal, the unarticulable power of life. Instead, I felt like the film wanted me to think about how awesome the film was for being about those subjects.

I could be wrong though. And the next thing I'm doing is seeing it again.