Uplink 1
The Devil May Cry Issue
May 2005
Contents:
• Opening Manifesto
• Devil May Cry 3
• Half Life in Retrospect
• Half Life 2
Opening Manifesto
Greetings to all, and welcome to the first issue of Uplink. We are a critical webzine of multinational culture – the broad spectrum from video, videogames, TV, film, music and much else besides – with a particular emphasis on videogames. While film and media studies are flourishing as never before, videogame criticism is still getting off the ground. Even today, there’s an unfortunate tendency to dismiss videogames as mere simulations of other, realer genres – something which makes about as much sense as treating Tolstoy’s War and Peace as a mere simulation of the Napoleonic War memoir.
The goal of this webzine is to remedy this situation. We want to provide a space for discussing – and critiquing – the social content of videogames and the multinational media. Today, no theory of the media culture can afford to ignore videogames. They are one of the hegemonic art-forms of the 21st century. In 2004, annual videogame sales were €33 billion globally, larger than the box office receipts of world cinema, and videogame aesthetics exerts a powerful gravitational effect on all the other branches of the media culture.
More to the point, videogames speak in unique ways to the urgent 21st century realities of post-Cold War geopolitics, neoliberalism, and multinational capitalism. The videogame culture is much more than just a reflection of those realities, it is also a profound meditation on such. It is the place where the workers of the global factory dream.
Perhaps the single most surprising feature of the videogame culture is its unruly plebianism. This is partly due to the technological revolution in computer and entertainment electronics technology, which has enabled videogames to mobilize animation, set-design, sound-tracks, scripts, performances, music, and much else from the digital archives of the world media culture. This revolution in the forces of aesthetic production occurred in lockstep with an equivalent revolution in the relations of aesthetic production: the rise of the division of multinational aesthetic labor. In contrast to the cinema, a field which, until the arrival of VCRs and digital video, required an expensive technical ensemble of operators, actors and technicians to stage and record each shot, videogames are created by small groups of specialized coders and designers.
For that reason, the gaming culture has significant affinities to the open source software movement, since both rely heavily on non-commercial forms of cooperation and dissemination. Just as open source community can create software which is technically superior to anything commercial providers can produce (e.g. Linux versus Windows), so too has the gaming community become a productive force in the field of videogame production, everywhere from game design and play-testing to mapping and coding innovations.
Adorno observed long ago that the total system, a.k.a. the world-market, oppresses individuals not just by making them alienated and isolated from each other, but also by compelling them to join in the false collectivity – the prefabricated identities of the consumer culture, which condemn people in advance to monstrous social roles they did not and would not freely choose. The videogame culture is one of the key places where those roles are not just reproduced, but also reappropriated and occasionally even resisted. It is where the power-lines of informatization, mediatization, globalization and multinationalization converge. In an age of widespread regression, which famously lacks a utopian project, the videogame culture offers indispensable clues of what a better world might look like.
– DRR
Devil May Cry 3
There’s no better way to open a Webzine on multinational culture than with an article on Devil May Cry 3, the latest installment of Capcom’s action-thriller videogame franchise. Designed for Sony’s Playstation 2 console, DMC3 is the sort of state-of-the-art action game which speaks volumes about where the videogame culture has been – and why it is so important to understand where it is going. Much of the credit for DMC3 belongs to Shinji Mikami, who spearheaded Capcom’s best-selling Resident Evil horror games, before pioneering the Devil May Cry series. As a rule, action games are often horribly disfigured by the most noxious sexism, militarism and xenophobia. DMC transcended the limitations of its genre thanks to ingenious scriptwriting, pulse-pounding action sequences, and an unusually clever plot twist: Dante, the protagonist, was half-human and half-demon. (For brief periods Dante can call upon his demonic powers, and while using this “devil trigger” can deal additional damage and wield special powers).
The trope of the demon has some uniquely benevolent cultural resonances in late-industrializing Japan, where semiconductor factories coexist side by side with the living memory of village animism and agrarian life. Significantly, the thin veneer of Christian eschatology in DMC and DMC2 is balanced by a properly postmodern ecology: Dante’s ultimate goal is to preserve the balance between the human world and the demon world (a.k.a. the balance between human society and Nature), as opposed to the catastrophic conquest or colonization of one by the other.
What makes DMC3 especially interesting, on the other hand, is its capacity to endow ecological forms with multinational content. Two narrative innovations make this possible. First, one of the incidental characters of DMC – Vergil, Dante’s estranged twin brother – is now Dante’s central antagonist. (The names are based on a real-life literary classic, Italian Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, where Vergil is the narrator’s guide to Hell). In DMC3, Dante must fight Vergil three times. Dante loses the first match, ekes out a draw in the second, and must win the third, lending an appropriate sense of rising tension and narrative closure to the storyline.
Second, DMC3 leverages its wealth of mythological forms – Greek and Roman myth, Northern and Western European theology, the Hollywood Roman Empire film (cf. Geryon, the missile-capable charioteer), and Indian mythology (Agni and Rudra) – on behalf of a specifically East Asian content. The opening cut-scene, for example, features a martial arts sword battle between two brothers, underneath a stylized moon – the combination of a classic John Woo trope (battling brothers) with the richly symbolic moon in Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion. Even Arkham’s first appearance is a covert nod to the wuxia drama – the mysterious emissary of the villain, who the hero is destined to meet again. During the more frenetic sequences, the East Asian media quotations pile up almost as fast as Dante’s shell casings.
DMC3 is especially interesting for what it says about contemporary East Asian geopolitics. Arkham’s tower, for example, is clearly modeled on the gothic corporate skyscraper, charged with the baleful energies of global speculation and the lingering memory of Japan’s disastrous real estate Bubble. DMC3 refunctions this stereotype into something new. This is revealed in an extraordinary cut-scene at the start of mission 8 (titled “A Renewed Fear”), where Dante literally runs down the side of the tower after barely surviving his first battle with Vergil. Along the way, he blasts his way through a cloud of flying demons, executing a series of mid-air stunts designed by renowned choreographers Yuji Shimomura and Ryuhei Kitamaru. The high point of the scene is a moment where he hurls his sword ahead of himself, at near jet-speed – the resulting air friction heats the blade red hot – only to run fast enough to catch it, an Olympic-level triple reappropriation of the Apollo moon shot, the Superman movies, and the martial arts thriller, all at once.
Intriguingly, traces of this multinational or East Asian aesthetic were already visible in DMC and DMC2, though mostly on the level of form. The Nightmare demon in the first DMC, for example, is a giant jello-like creature seemingly invulnerable to attack. To defeat the demon, players must hit a light-switch at the right time, rendering its heart vulnerable – the heart is depicted as a sparkling light-ball, straight out of some late 1990s discotheque. This is essentially an allegory of the multinational music culture as form.
The battle with the demon Nevan in DMC3, on the other hand, is an inspired allegory of multinational content. Nevan is a female vampire, surrounded by a whirling cone of bats, who deploys a spectacular series of electrical attacks. Though the obvious reference here is to the Hollywood horror film, there is a significant indigenous East Asian citation here, and that is the eerie, airmobile bats of mainland Chinese writer Can Xue’s Yellow Mud Street. Symptomatically, defeating Nevan requires more than just a mastery of moves and techniques, but also the use of Dante’s devil trigger. At the last second, Nevan will attempt to draw near to Dante, draining his life-force to replenish her own. The only solution is to either quickly escape (not always possible), or to transform into devil mode and counter-attack (always effective).
But nothing quite prepares the player for the cut-scene following the battle. Dante acquires a new weapon, appropriately named Nevan, which is both electric guitar and weapon – and promptly delivers a heavy metal guitar solo, replete with exploding fireworks and the obligatory kneeling strum. Later, the player can even wield Nevan’s sonic riffs as a weapon, resulting in uproarious in-game sequences of what can only be described as electric guitar kung fu. Whereas the Nightmare battle was staged on the grounds of musical consumption, the Nevan battle is staged on the grounds of musical production.
The flip side of this multinational cosmopolitanism is micropolitical sophistication. DMC3 is refreshingly free of the noxious sexism, racism and homophobia which pervades so many action games. Not only is Dante the smooth, stylish visual antithesis of the cliched muscle-bound behemoth, but the game is saturated with homoerotic motifs – the most famous is an extraordinary scene in DMC, where a magic sword pierces Dante through the heart (fortunately, his half-demon heritage turns out to render him immune to this attack), which is the only way he can unlock his true powers. To be sure, the gore-splattered involution of patriarchal violence is one of the enduring themes of post-WW II Japanese mass culture, visible everywhere from Kurosawa’s Yojimbo to Shinya Tsukamoto’s Iron Man (1988).
DMC3 takes this theme to a new level, by integrating this involution into the plot-line of the battling brothers, thereby fusing micropolitics with geopolitics. Put another way, whereas the final showdowns in DMC and DMC2 featured vaguely Western villains facing off against Dante’s East Asian persona, DMC3 depicts an internal power struggle within East Asia itself.
This sheds light on the issue of DMC3’s unusually challenging game-play. Many reviewers have noted that the difficulty level of the game is extraordinarily high, and may frustrate gamers with limited or developing skills. This is true, especially in the early going (e.g. the level 3 boss battle), though there are two caveats here. First, the design of the game does allow players to automatically replay each level over again, accumulating as many magic items and health potions as they need (the secret mission on level 9 is especially lucrative). Second, the game-play is scrupulously fair. Some games are button-mashing affairs, requiring nothing more than the ability to press the “action” button fast enough. Not so with DMC3, which requires players to master Dante’s running, jumping and dodging skills. According to an apochryphal story, when one of DMC’s designers was asked how players could beat the game, he responded, “Become a better player”. In many other games, this would result in horrible frustration, but DMC3’s control system is smoothly responsive, seamless and as much of a joy to operate as to behold. Whatever DMC3 loses in initial play-through value is more than compensated by replay value.
On closer examination, however, Capcom’s design decision turns out to be far from capricious. Most games come with an optional difficulty selector, allowing players to choose between “easy”, “normal” and “hard” versions of the game. As it turns out, the “normal” level of the US version of the game is actually the “hard” level of the Japanese version. Put another way, Capcom deliberately made the game more difficult for US players. This is geopolitics masquerading as game design. East Asia is gleefully paying back an economically senescent, politically demented and militarily overextended US Empire in the latter’s own mass mediatic coin. The unspoken message: “So you Americans think you’re so tough? Prove it.”
Interestingly, the specific trigger for this motif was the legacy of DMC2, a subpar sequel which was justifiably criticized for its all too easy game-play, weak script, and unconvincing horror movie citations (including demonically possessed tanks and helicopters, which are just as silly as they sound). DMC2 was, in a word, the watered-down or Americanized version of DMC. Fortunately, the director of DMC2, Hideaki Itsuno, more than redeemed himself in his work on DMC3. The game’s final showdown is a true mini-epic in its own right, consisting of two battles in one. The first battle takes places against Arkham, a jello-like creature vaguely reminiscent of the Nightmare, who summons legions of his followers to hound Dante. Midway through the battle, Vergil arrives and joins in the fight against Arkham – not out of any love for Dante, but because Vergil underestimates his brother, assuming that he can always dispatch the latter with ease. The final showdown against Vergil is a sight to behold, and will push the player to their limit and beyond.
This suggestive allegory of an East Asia which closes ranks against a non-indigenous neoliberalism, but which must ultimately come to grips with its own inner demons – is reconfirmed by the opening tag of DMC3, a brief sequence where Dante launches a ferocious kick at the camera. The camera falls to the ground, its lens cracked, and Dante utters, “Sweet dreams.” Goodbye, US Empire, hello EU and East Asia.
– DRR
Half Life in Retrospect
“Gordon Freeman in the flesh... or rather, in the hazard suit.” – The Administrator, Epilogue of Half Life (1998) PC videogame.
One of the most interesting paradoxes of the 3D videogame is its relationship with the broader media culture. Even the most mundane game cites an astounding array of multinational forms, ranging from scripts and icons to musical samples, sound-tracks, animation, performances and video clips. Yet videogames are not simply quotations of other branches of the media culture. They must be judged on the basis of their own unique aesthetic field. Videogames must be playable, in the same sense that movies must be watchable, music must be listenable and texts must be readable. This puts onerous demands on game designers, who cannot simply copy developments in other sectors of the media culture. In fact, such copying is one of the biggest reasons for the production of substandard games. The limit-point of even the most interesting sports game, simulated civilization, or adventure tale is the actual sports event, historical document or work of fantasy literature, and the better the original model, the worse the copy is likely to come off.
This has a significant corollary, in terms of the ever-increasing wealth of technological means available to videogame designers. Most people assume that this abundance would make it easy to product a quality game. Yet just the reverse is true. The greater the development of the forces of aesthetic production, the greater the pressure these exert on the relations of aesthetic production. Videogame designers must balance game flow with player motivation, skill challenges with replayability, single-player forms with multiplayer forms, sound-tracks with musical settings, and scripting with voice acting, to name just a few issues. If even one of these elements fails, the aesthetic experience of the entire game comes to a crashing halt.
What this means is that quality games must excel on a number of levels, all at once. A case in point is Valve Software’s legendary PC videogame, Half Life (1998), one of the canonic texts of the 3D videogame culture. Half Life was created by Valve Software, a firm founded by three former Microsoft executives, who cashed in their stock options in the mid-1990s and started their own company. Half Life’s storyline is the alien invasion of a secret military base – one of the bedrock narratives of Cold War science fiction. The player experiences the game through the eyes (and ears) of Gordon Freeman, a recently-minted Ph.D. who has arrived for his first day on the job at the top-secret Black Mesa Research Facility. Unfortunately, during Freeman’s very first experiment, things go haywire, and aliens begin to teleport into the base, spreading death and destruction.
But what transformed this hackneyed cliche into one of the greatest works of art of the late 20th century was the intervention of science-fiction and fantasy writer Marc Laidlaw. Originally hired by Valve to tighten up the game’s script, Laidlaw turned the trope of the Cold War alien invasion on its head, creating an allegory of a predatory interstellar neoliberalism which literally and figuratively overwhelms the US Empire’s military-industrial complex. Laidlaw’s script also depicts the creation of a new type of class solidarity between Freeman’s fellow scientists (read: global professionals), friendly security guards (read: factory-workers) and even benevolent aliens (the Administrator’s mysterious employers), who must fight for their survival against the death squads of the US Empire, as well as villainous neoliberal aliens.
What Half Life did which no other game had done before was to bring the disparate elements of the 3D videogame into compositional balance. Not only does the game mobilize a wide variety of multinational forms, it transforms these latter into new types of multinational content. One example of this is the game’s wonderfully astute array of geopolitical puns. The title logo of “Half Life” transforms a radiological signifier into a global symbol, by the replacement of the letter “a” by a stylized version of the Greek lambda symbol. (Intriguingly, the lambda serif looks remarkably like the Chinese ideograph for “human being”). A similar pun is at work in the name Gordon Freeman – an offhand reference to the Freeman militia movement of the mid-1990s, and a canny reappropriation of the ideology of Rightwing survivalism. The chimerical “Black Mesa” base, supposedly set in Arizona, is another such pun: the name is a pointed reference to the real world struggle of the Dineh Indians for their ancestral lands in Arizona.
This creativity extends even to Half Life’s skeletal animation system, partly borrowed from the animation industry. The designers created a morbidly hilarious visual representation of the player-character’s demise. If the end was especially violent, players get a glimpse of Gordon Freeman’s skull, one eye still in its socket – a piece of gallows humor worthy of James Whale’s Frankenstein.
Somewhat further afield, Half Life’s voice-acting pays homage to the underground radio industry, courtesy of Bay Area radio artist Harry “Hal” Robbins, who provided a series of alternately witty, biting and chilling lines for the non-player characters (the radio transmissions of the enemy soldiers are especially compelling). Half Life’s game’s character-system, borrowed from text-based role-playing games, was modified to make a subtle political point: the death squads Gordon Freeman battles are universally white, while his fellow scientists include the occasional African American. Half Life’s sterling sound-track borrowed freely from the acoustic vocabulary of late 1990s hip hop and techno, e.g. the bass line of its opening theme song is a falling half-step, the signature musical motif of Kool Keith’s Dr. Octagon (1996). In many places of the game, the sound-effects are so good that players must use their ears to survive.
Half Life also contains a number of remarkable and self-reflexive quotations of globalization. One of the symbols of the Black Mesa base is a rectangular area map of the world, embossed with the transparent Black Mesa logo. During one sequence, the player-character has to launch a satellite into orbit, causing a rotating 3D hologram of the Earth to appear in the control room (this is accompanied by a spine-tingling sound-track). In effect, the 2D representation of the world has become a 3D symbol.
Perhaps the two greatest contributions of Half Life were its texture designs and game-play. Rather than design a graphics engine (the basic software which renders 3D environments) from scratch, Valve licensed an engine from id Software and focused on creating specialized textures for the game – everything from metal corridors and office ceilings to exploding walls, pools of water, desert landscapes and wrecked buildings. These visuals are never overdone or distracting, but are carefully targeted to the specific phase of the storyline.
Half Life is a textbook clinic on interactive game-play. Each sequence flows logically into the next, while cleverly scripted in-game events obviate the need for unnecessary exposition. The combat sequences are challenging, without being arduous or unfair. The game-world sustains the narrative even when a specific level doesn’t work as well as it should (for example, the problematic jumping puzzles on Xen). Fellow scientists and security guards communicate key information to the player-character, while opponents work in teams, forcing players to be quick on their feet and creative in finding solutions to problems. The result was an unprecedented degree of narrative immersion, worthy of a blockbuster cinema production.
Half Life also contributed heavily to the development of an open source gaming community. Historically, the videogame culture has always had close affinities to the information culture, everywhere from open source software to the politics of the “information commons” or electronic public space. In the age of the Web, these affinities turned into permanent links. Starting with id Software’s 1993 shareware classic, Doom, fans began to create entire Web-communities based around popular videogames, featuring everything from downloadable modifications (so-called “mods”) of the original game to level and strategy guides. Unlike other gaming companies, id was extraordinarily supportive of the mod community, and encouraged the distribution of freeware mapping and design tools. In short order, gamers began to create their own non-commercial versions of maps, monsters, player models, game items, sound-effects, and eventually entire levels. While the results were occasionally amateurish, the resulting diffusion of skills drastically accelerated the process of play-testing and game design.
With the advent of Half Life, gamers finally had the necessary tools to create full-fledged game narratives. One of the immediate results was the rise of multiplayer spin-offs of Half Life, e.g. Counter Strike and Team Fortress, games which continue to rank among the most popular multiplayer forums on the Web. Perhaps the true beneficiary of this revolution, however, was the aesthetic category of game scripting. As ever larger numbers of gamers began to create their own game-worlds, ever larger numbers of ideas, techniques and innovations spread from one mod to another.
One of the most extraordinary examples of the power of open source gaming is the work of Neil Manke, a independent modmaker based in Canada, who is unaffiliated with any game company. Manke’s They Hunger (2000-01) trilogy (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Rest in Pieces, and Rude Awakening, respectively), an epic set of maps for the Half Life engine, revolutionized 3D map design and scripting. While Manke’s achievement is far too complex to summarize here, it’s worth pointing out three of They Hunger’s most significant innovations. These include (1) outdoor sequences, (2) sophisticated game-scripting, and (3) level design combining first-play with multiplayer genres. One of the key limitations of Half Life’s graphics engine was its inability to depict realistic outdoor sequences. The game designers evaded this problem by restricting the game environments to stark desert landscapes, void of vegetation. Manke created extraordinary outdoor scenes, by relying on lighting (in particular, the use of moonlight) and drawing heavily from the horror film and suspense genres. The dialogue and sound-track are superb, pacing the occasional scratches and howls of animals in the underbrush with periods of tense silence, shattered by the chime of a church bell or the hoarse cry of a zombie.
Manke displayed equal ingenuity with regard to game-scripting. With the help of a world-class set of fellow designers, coders and modelers, Manke counterpoints a variety of jumping and leaping puzzles with an endless variety of scenery and textures. In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, players must navigate shifting lava pits, explore zombie-infested lava tunnels, drive a realistic train along a track, and outwit carnivorous fish in a lake. In Rest in Pieces, the scripted sequences range from exploding television sets to artfully-constructed ambushes, as well as radio broadcasts and tape recordings. These sequences are often nested within each other: the morgue sequence, for example, where the player accidentally resurrects one of the skeleton zombies, involves three separate script-events.
One of the most interesting aspect of Manke’s work is its reappropriation of multiplayer and single-player forms. Typically, single-player maps are a unilinear experience – the player must overcome a given set of obstacles and opponents, before moving on to the next map. Multiplayer games are played on a single map by a group of players, and generate wild, unpredictable and exceedingly intense forms of game-play. While Manke’s maps are designed as single-player experience, they quote, cite and pastiche a wide range of multiplayer forms. By a combination of scripted events, scenery and monster placement, Manke fuses multiplayer density with single-player precision.
Manke’s monster designs and melee weapons are particularly ingenious. Players are confronted with three new opponents, and armed with three new tools to combat those opponents. The first new creature, fleshless skeleton-creatures, are a witty rewrite of Half Life’s alien drones. They complain about how cold they are, intoning “So much flesh…”, “Flesh-creature” and the hilarious non sequitur, “Sssooo-faaaa” (i.e. sofa). It’s difficult not to conclude that the skeletons are, basically, alien couch potatoes. By contrast, the second new monster type are the linebacker-sized Frankensteins unleashed by the zombified Dr. Franklin – “Franklinsteins”, as it were, which are dead ringers for the Hollywood monster of the same name. (Manke gives us a broad hint, by draping Dr. Franklin's lab with cinema-worthy electrical effects) The third new monster, the Hand, it is simply an undead, severed hand, a quotation of the horror film which can be traced all the way back to The Thing from the Addams Family TV series.
Significantly, each of these monsters are linked to the three new melee weapons which replace Half Life’s signature crowbar – the umbrella, the service wrench, and the garden spade. The umbrella is associated with the interior of the police station, while the wrench is associated with machinery – specifically, the car in the shop, as well as the gears of the underground switch-room. The garden spade, for its part, is associated with underground tunnels. The three new monsters are similarly grounded in symbolic places, which are closely connected to specific types of corporeality. The skeleton-creatures are linked to the morgue, that is to say, the dissection of bodies. The Franklinsteins are linked with laboratory products, i.e. dead body-parts which have become living creatures. Meanwhile the hands are linked with the roof or vertical crawlspaces.
In the case of the umbrella, the mediating bodies in question are those of the security forces, headed by the malign Sheriff Rockwood (and opposed by the few remaining non-zombified officers). The wrench, on the other hand, seems to point to the bodies of tool-using or technical personnel. These run the gamut from the mad Dr. Franklin and the frenzied skeleton-creatures, who both wield electricity as their weapon or tool of choice, to the friendly scientists and Alfred. Last but not least, the spade signifies the literal and figurative gravedigger, i.e. the sole figure capable of outmaneuvering the twitchy mobility of the Hand while countering the brute materiality of the Franklinsteins. This gravedigger can be nothing less than the body of the player-character – the reflexive body of the horror fiction writer.
Rest in Pieces is saturated with such reflexive tropes, ranging from the doctor's offices, which are named after the real-life members of Manke’s programming team, to the scene in Dr. Franklin's laboratory, where scanned facsimiles of the team members’ heads are on display in bubbling vats of electrical fluid. There is one particularly uproarious sequence, when we meet Alfred, Dr. Franklin's assistant, who evidently received his Ph.D. in the field of deadpan humor: “Thank God you’re normal,” he says, smack dab in the middle of the zombie-infested insane asylum, “Everybody else here seems to be out of their minds.” Explaining that the zombies were created by a contaminant in the city water supply, he adds: “It's something that can bring anyone, alive or dead, to some intermediate state of half-life.” Half Life is indeed one of the few games capable of engrossing players for hours on end, but Manke pays the ultimate compliment to the original, not by imitating but by transcending it.
– DRR
Half Life 2
No discussion of Half Life would be complete without a brief mention of Half Life 2, Valve’s sequel to their 1998 classic. Half Life 2 is an honorable sequel, though not the quantum leap forwards many were expecting. The visuals and acoustics shine, the facial expressions are close to cinema quality, and the G-man continues to delight. Yet the basic problem is the lack of a compelling storyline. Half Life transcended the Cold War blockbuster, but when all is said and done, Half Life 2 is just another alien invasion movie. Like most alien invasion movies, it’s not hard to unearth the skeletal remains of the WW II drama beneath the glossy veneer of the Information Age.
The villains, the so-called Combine, are essentially interstellar Nazis, bent on looting the Earth of its ecological wealth. The 1940s atmosphere is amplified by City 17’s gorgeous Eastern European architecture, as well as the Expressionistic contours of the alien citadel – basalt towers, giant gear-like structures, bulky metal plates, baroque television sets, and the like. The problem is, we’ve seen all this before, in science fiction movies dating back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
There are also certain issues with game-play. The shotgun, for example, shows up far too late in the game, while the driving sequences become repetitious. One of the fundamental design principles of the 3D videogame is that movement trumps visuals: no matter how visually impressive the surrounding environment, the intensity of the game experience is defined by the moving objects to which the player must react (this is the secret of the Serious Sam games, which are worthy of an Uplink issue all their own). This is the secret of the ant lion sequences, which are some of the most effective and entertaining sequences of the game, and a clever reappropriation of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers in an ecological turn.
Also worthy of note is the game’s other major innovation, the gravity gun. Taking advantage of Havok's capable physics engine, the gravity gun allows fairly large objects to be moved around with relative ease, adding a whole new dimension of interactivity to the game. One minor quibble: to be a true melee weapon, objects captured by the gravity gun ought to have been rendered semi-translucent. Most console games have a feature which renders architectural columns or other local features which might block the player’s view temporarily semi-transparent, permitting seamless game-play.
Whereas Barney’s reappearance as a secret agent for the resistance, Dr. Kleiner’s pet headcrab, Lamar, and Alyx all provide welcome dashes of humor and creativity, other changes are less welcome. The radio transmissions of the soldiers in Half Life were eerily authentic and chilling, but those of the Combine soldiers are merely robotic. The screams of the zombies are especially overwrought and tedious – at the very least, one would have expected an occasional non sequitur, on the model of Manke’s zombies. Finally, the identity-politics of the game are underdeveloped. While the Vortigaunts are now friendly and on the side of the resistance, they have no real role in the storyline, dashing the possibility of the interstellar solidarity movement hinted at in the closing moments of Half Life.
The game’s true significance will probably lie in the tools it provides to mod makers, who finally have a state-of-the-art graphics engine and a much more sophisticated scripting engine to work with. All in all, Half Life 2 is a promising midstream innovation – but it’s up to the modmakers to make good on that promise.
– DRR