Two things combined recently to make me think... The first of those was the incoming Commercially Approved Romance Day this Saturday and the second was, to me more exciting, PS-Plus new content day when I get my monthly influx of new games.
The convergence made me think... is there really a difference between a first date and buying a new game?
You're meeting someone for the first time, maybe you've seen pictures of them, heard recommendations from friends or family... and now you're taking the plunge yourself.
You've made some outlay in effort or money and now is the fateful moment when you work out if they will is going to be the one you spend all your time (and money) on... or is it time to give it an incorrect email, a barely believable promise to "load you again soon" and a quick trip into town to exchange them.
So, with that in mind I've decided to list off a few of my most memorable first gaming dates, the ones that have stuck with me for the right reasons... or, first, the wrong ones.
The Date That's All About Them - Yakuza 4
This was actually the one that really inspired this article... Having survived the first couple hours the game itself is passable but my God, it was touch and go whether I'd last to that point.
The problem with Yakuza 4 is it combines a few of my all time least favourite intro/tutorial "features" all into one frustrating mishmash.
It has the jarring fourth-wall breaking tutorial moments when a random person runs up to the main character in the street and explains something for apparently no reason at all "Hey, I've given you a memo, you can read memos in the menu!". It has fights where you have to perform moves in a time limit without really clear instruction (I still don't know how some of them work) and, worst of all, you hardly get to actually DO anything...
Whether it's the hint conversations, excruciatingly long unspeedable cutscenes or terrible scripting you lurch from one section to another feeling like you're trapped in a choose your own adventure book, hours of reading interspersed with a few minutes of picking a page.
At one point the start of a video explained how there were two undesirable members of an opposing clan in your friendly Yakuza's club. You knew, with total and utter certainty, you'd be going there to beat them up, but it then took another 10+ minutes of clunky, slow paced cutscene filled with the bleeding obvious and the unnecessary before you could make your way to the club (With lots more cutscenes to look forward to when you get there.
When you're mentally shouting "shut up, just SHUT UP" then it's the sign of a bad date.
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| In the time it took this cutscene to run he could smoke 42 cigarettes. |
The Date With The Demands - Gran Turismo (all of them)
Nobody is ever going to suggest Gran Turismo is a bad game, in fact in dating terms it usually succeeds in being love at first sight thanks to some of the best crafted intro sequences of any games... but it's a date that also wants lobster, champagne and a Mercedes before the second date...
To get anywhere in Gran Tursimo you have to get a specific licence, and receiving them is, at a conservative estimate, 912 times harder than the game itself with a series of arbitrary rules that aren't used anywhere else in the entire series. Logical racing rules but... if I don't need them for the actual game, why do I need them for the tutorial?
To sum it up, allow me to dictate the standard GT player's thought process when doing the licence tests.
"ARG, dammit, no, no, no, NO! You *$%^ing, )!*£ing, cheating %!"£! Why can you bump into me and knock me off the road but if I touch you I'm disqualiARG! $%%£^"!!! But he braked in front of me, not again! GET AWAY FROM ME... ok, where's the missiles?"
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| Get used to it... |
The Date That Left You Waiting - Assassins Creed III
This pains me to write, because I love Assassins Creed (there's more on the series later), but AC:III has the worst start to a game I've ever played. Ever. It's so bad I may never replay the game because the thought of fighting through it fills me with dread, weariness and near kicked-puppy levels of sadness.
The game, as all previous ones had done, marketed itself with it's main character, you saw Connor leaping over rocks, sliding under tree roots, arrowing deer and hatcheting cougars. The sudden switch from the cool, calm and conniving Ezio felt exciting and interesting, the feeling you'd see an assassin of a totally different kind.
So, when the game started and you were a middle aged English white man, it felt a bit weird but, ya know, lets roll with it. So you did, and you rolled, and you rolled and you rolled... until you were the video gaming equivalent of Sisyphus' Rock on a sofa.
Mission after mission passed while playing as the totally unknown and unadvertised Haytham Kenway until finally I think I yelled out loud "when do I get to be the tomahawk guy?!". At that point I was doing everything just because the game told me, with no interest, no emotional buy-in and by then next to no actual will to do it.
Finally, the world's longest tutorial mission finished, you checked your stats and whoa.... apparently you'd completed 3 of the 12 sequences already, a quarter of the game's missions gone by and you had no connection at all to the game's "main" character, the plotline or even the game itself.
But hey, never fear. Now you'd battled wearily through somebody's fevered idea of how a game should start you did at least now get to PLAY the game, right?
Wrong. It was at that point the game flung Sequence 4 at you, which comprised entirely of tutorial missions for the stuff that only Connor does (collectibles, hunting etc). You'd now played a third of the game's Sequences and all you'd done was played a tutorial. You didn't really care about Haytham or Connor (a feeling that lasted) and you had no real idea of plot...
It was at that point you realised what Assassin's Creed III really was. Ubisoft were sick of us taking them for granted, so were going to show us the dreary, time sapping carelessness we COULD expect if things were done badly, just to make us realise just how good the previous games had been.
I fought my way right through not only AC:III but it's expansions too (even worse) just because I'd bought Season Pass. By the end I felt I truly knew what it must be like to be stuck in a loveless marriage just for the sake of the children... and now AC:III had gone to college, maybe it was time to make it sleep in a different room.
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| "I don't get it Haytham, why are we still doing the missions?" "I don't know, Charles. I simply don't know..." |
The Date That's Six Dates - Dragon Age: Origins
Ah, that moment when you find someone who doesn't just give you one first date, but lots. Every time you meet them it's something brand new and it's like meeting for the first time all over again.
Dragon Age: Origins was that person, while most games bore you on replay as you speed your way through the now easy and well known tutorial you could start DA:O over and over without getting the same experience twice.
That was because DA:O doesn't just have one intro and tutorial, instead it has six, and even then one differs depending on whether you chose a male or female character. Some games let you create a character but would end up with you playing the same missions, DA:O let you do something altogether different and all of them, without exception, we're immersive and really made you care for your character.
They all laid the foundations for your character that meant even though all the origins arrived at the same point at the end, they were reaching it for very different reasons.
Even though the game that followed did change some aspects depending on your origin you wouldn't want to play it every day, but it still had replay value above and beyond almost anything else.
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| Take your pick... |
The Date You Know Everything - Fallout 3
Like a date with someone you've known your whole life, Fallout 3 took the stance you can never start learning too early.
When you start the game, you're are in the process of being born, picking your sex, age and even looks at the most logical time, the very first minutes of your life...
If that wasn't enough, you don't just jump into adulthood, the tutorial keeps on with its real life theme with learning to move and interact as a baby, taking the first steps into adulthood at 10 by learning to interact with others and fire a BB Gun and finally getting your characters attributes.
Even that final part wasn't as simple as picking points from a list, but instead (as a teenager) you were given an aptitude test of personality based questions (the kind that make up far too many "what *insert item* are you" tests) which then give you skills based on your answers.
This meant when you finally had to run from the Vault into the Nuclear Wasteland you were totally invested in your character, this wasn't some already formed lump of pixellated meat... this was you, and you were going to find your Dad, the first face you ever saw in your "life" and the man who guided you to this point.
Fallout games might have their problems (full disclosure, I rage quit New Vegas after my Companions kept going wrong and running off...) but the one thing they give you in abundance is connection. The world of Fallout becomes so ingrained that if you're anything like me you can't hear 50s music anymore without looking out for mutants...
Fallout games aren't just games, they truly are surrogate and vicarious lives, ones you feel a part of from the first moments.
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| Knowing what you'll look like at 20 when you've only just been born is a bit freaky... |
The Perfect Date - Assassins Creed II
Unless you've just skipped to the end you'll know Assassins Creed III is my most hated intro of all time. Part of my unhappiness stems from just how exquisitely crafted the intro to AC:II was. I am opening myself up to ridicule here but I think the intro for this game was sheer perfection in all aspects... a brave claim I do understand, so let me explain.
An intro/tutorial needs a few things. It needs to guide you into the game without holding your hand too tight. It has to give you a connection with your character. It has to set down the plotline and, to be an acting luvvie, give you the motivation to play. AC:II does this in spades.
After a short baby sequence we are dragged back away from the main character of the game, Ezio, for a quick run as the secondary protagonist, Desmond. However, unlike AC:III this isn't long and ponderous and is a needed scene setter, you are, after all, playing as Desmond even when you're playing as Ezio...
Thankfully though it is short, just a quick sneak, run, fight and climb before you're back in an Animus and back into the body of Ezio, and here is when the mastery begins.
Exio isn't an already well trained fighter (Mass Effect/DA:O) he's just a cocky, womanising, party boy Italian who's getting into trouble the moment you become him, about to start a streetfight over the honour of a woman (or if he has anything to do with it, dishonour).
From here on out during the tutorial you learn everything you need to know to play the game organically, you learn to fight in the streetfight, you learn to move while running away, you learn to heal by fixing up injuries from the fight, you learn freerunning from chasing your brother...
Rather than feeling like the game is holding your hand and telling you gameplay simplicities it's almost hands off, leaving you doing things because you need to and want to, not just because the game tells you to.
Which brings me on to the greatest factor of AC:II, the motivation. Throughout the first few missions we're introduced to mechanics by the rest of Ezio's family, his two brothers, sister, mother and father. These aren't missions given to us just so we learn how to do something, they're simple, even mundane, life chores like carrying a box, collecting feathers or delivering a letter. In some games this would feel boring, but they're perfectly weighted, never taking too long and never repeating, so you're constantly learning new things and meeting new people. By the end of the missions, you know the game, you know Ezio and you've not just met a family you're part of it.
You've seen Ezio's good and bad side, you've felt his love and dedication to his family, you are intricately tied into him and the life he's so happy in and, in turn, you feel happy in...
Then it happens. Just as you're getting comfortable it all gets ripped away, and you don't just feel for Ezio, it's almost a visceral feeling in yourself as well. You see three of those family you'd connected to hanging from the gallows for something they didn't do, one a child. You're on the run, chased and persecuted, half your family dead, your friends and home lost, your life intrinsically changed.
Yes, it's all just a character on the screen but it has been crafted so well that you are invested, totally.
In just a single sequence of missions (1 of 14 including DLC) they have you, hook line and sinker. It's taken you next to no time at all to go from having no clue who Ezio is... to caring not only about him, but the remainder of his family as well.
Just that one simple series of quests has set the scene for not just one, but three games, and you're never short of motivation in any of them. Every moment comes from that initial setup, where you don't just play the games for the sake of the game, you play it because you care just as much as Ezio about his crusade.
That is why this is the best gaming entrance I've ever played, because for me it's perfect. Nothing is stretched out, nothing feels contrived or left out and it is possibly the most important part of why Ezio Auditore da Firenze is one of the greatest video game characters of all time in my mind.
I didn't liken this to a date at first, instead I'll finish with it. This wasn't a first date, it was the start of a relationship, long term, deeply caring and, even when things later may have had their dodgy moments, the start you could always think back to with a smile on your face and rediscover the passion.
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| I'm Ezio Auditore da Firenze, and you'll learn to care about me in a shockingly short time. |
Andy is becoming an expert in first impressions having made a near inexhaustible amount of bad ones in his time. If after reading this you still felt like getting a coffee sometime why not follow him on Twitter or Facebook?
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