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Feet Firmly on the Ground
By Corvus | June 6, 2008
This is not my Round Table post, but I am going to talk about a character’s relationship to their environment. The character is Hayden Tenno. The game is Dark Sector. I rent one game a week from a local store and if it’s good, I move it up in my Gamefly queue. If it’s not, I remove it from the queue.
Here’s my two second review if you don’t feel like reading the rest of the post: After a single short play session, it is highly unlikely that I will ever put Dark Sector back into the 360.
The game follows the path of an American special ops agent through a fictional crumbling Soviet-bloc country. He has congenital analgia, which means he cannot feel pain. How someone who cannot feel pain managed to survive the rigorous training needed to become a field agent for the CIA is beyond me, but… whatever. It actually turns out to be fortunate for this waifish young man that he suffers from this disease because it keeps him from going mad with pain when the biological compound he’s exposed to begins to mutate his body…. well, his right arm anyway.
During the game’s training mission, Hayden is blissfully mutation free and whining to his handler over a com-set that he doesn’t want to be here and that he has a headache. I don’t know enough about congenital analgia to know if that even makes sense. The handler gives him a stern pep talk about explosives, protective injections and apple pie, so off Hayden goes to fulfill his patriotic duty. There is no health bar on the screen. Evidently Hayden not only is immune to pain, but can shrug off damage by taking a short breather from getting shot. You do, however, get small HUD icons letting you know details about ammo status and available weapons.
The only really interesting thing about this segment of the game is that it is rendered in a mono-chromatic style.
Hayden moves down a linear path through a building, taking advantage of ample cover, shooting at heavily armored Soviet soldiers. Take note that when I say “taking advantage of ample cover” I actually mean “standing behind things obviously placed in the environment for him to stand behind.” Also take note that I didn’t say “crouch.”
The only really interesting thing about this segment of the game is that it is rendered in a mono-chromatic style. Not until Hayden has been infected do you see the world in full color. I found this to be a remarkably powerful means of communicating the heightened perceptions Hayden acquires along with the infection. The other distinctive thing about Hayden’s infection is his acquisition of a biologically generated glaive.
It should be noted that Hayden is not graced with an historically accurate glaive. It’s really too bad, because carrying about such a cumbersome pole arm would explain much about Hayden’s inability to crouch… or jump.
Instead, he’s gets one of those glaives featured in that fine piece of historic cinema–Krull. The glaive is a thrown weapon that always manages to return to our hero’s hand, boomerang-like, after every toss. I’m fine with this fantasy convention, I really am.
A glaive is an awesome range weapon for the agile fighter to wield. It brings to mind Xena the Warrior Princess’s near mystical control over her chakram (an historically inaccurate depiction of an historically accurate weapon). It also brings to mind Lucy Lawless jumping around in slow motion. That’s something Hayden can’t do at any speed–jump. He can, upon occasion, vault one of the shorter bits of cover provided for him to stand behind. But jump? Oh no, that’s outside this field agent’s skill set.
Imagine Super Paper Mario for a moment. When you flipped into 3d for the first time, it was amusing to suddenly think about how the franchise’s 2d world worked with an extra dimension. Picturing the narrowness of the earth (I now see Mario’s world as a giant ring with a flat outer edge), imagining how difficult is must be to avoid people you owe money to when you see them on the street… Anyway, Super Paper Mario used this conceit to amusing effect, providing some delightful and unexpected level design.
Dark Sector splashes a bunch of shiny shaders on things and plays nice tricks with light rendering in a vain attempt to try and distract you from the fact that the world is essentially a 2d path wrapped around levels built with an impressive number of polygons. Hayden is a lumbering tank, riding along a predetermined rail. He’s like Juggernaut on his way to a steakhouse. Only, Hayden’s not a tank. He’s a skinny emo g-man with an immunity to pain, an $80 prop-replica from Krull, and a government issued sidearm. Oh sure, you can pick up and use better weapons briefly, but they’ve been keyed to lock up within a few minutes of being handled by an infected person. So they’re really more dangerous than useful as Hayden goes through an excruciatingly long animation of discarding the inert weapon while the enemy soldiers continue to shoot at you.
You know what my strategy would be if I were Hayden? I’d duck. Then I’d look for a good vantage point. Then I’d jump and climb my way to that vantage point. Then I’d sneak around and pick off my opponents one by one. On my terms. Now if I were Arnold Schwartenegger, I’d do what the game requires you to do–I’d walk into the fray, picking my shots carefully and delighting in the fact that my bio-glaive was capable of decapitating people. I’d probably even have something witty prepared to say when this happened. Something like, “It looks like General Badistov lost his head.”
So what I’m trying to get at is that the relationship between Hayden and his environment does not, at all, match the character presented to us. And this complete and total disconnect between gameplay and story proved nearly impossible for me to overcome.
Tagged:dark sector, environment, relationships. | 2 Comments »
June 6th, 2008 at 8:51 am
One of my favorite recent moments in Stalker is similar to the monochrome trick: when approaching one of the labs you have to investigate, the screen begins to gradually tint gold and black, until it looks like a frame from the film. At the same time, there’s a humming/whistling ambient sound that gets louder and louder.
It’s never explained or referenced, and it vanishes soon after, but it’s a wonderful tool for building tension and atmosphere.
June 6th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Well now, turns out the reviews were right, I kind of wish they weren’t though =/
I still remember when this game was being hyped to no end when announcced *sigh*
Anyways, the only thing interesting about the game seems to be the unique disease the protagonist suffers but I’m guessing that it isn’t particularly important (at most it’s a way of explaining why the character just shrugs when shot)