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November 23, 2013

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Pretending to Shoot People in the Next Generation: CoD Ghosts

Last week marked the release of the Playstation 4, and the beginning of a new gaming console “generation”. Because I’m painfully susceptible to the consumer frenzy of a capitalist society, I pre-ordered a PS4 the day it was put up on Amazon. And then somehow, through a series of events that I should have exercised better control over, I ended up buying all three first-person multiplayer shooters released as launch games for the PS4: Call of Duty: Ghosts, Battlefield 4, and Killzone: Shadow Fall. Don’t judge me. The launch lineups were weak.

Realizing that I’ll probably spend too much time playing all these goddamn shooters, and that this has become as much of a video game blog as a sports blog, I thought I’d take a look at all of the ways you can pretend to shoot other people in this brave new generation of gaming. Starting with Call of Duty: Ghosts.

First off, a confession: I like Call of Duty. The overwrought, dumb story lines of the modern Call of Duty games are right up my alley. From helping a protagonist of the series detonate a nuclear weapon in the skies over Washington D.C. in Modern Warfare 2 to escaping a Russian prison and implicitly assassinating Kennedy in Black Ops to watching the Eiffel Tower collapse and then storming a resort in a bizarre mechanized suit in Modern Warfare 3, the series has always been ridiculous enough to keep my attention. When it comes to the plot of video games, I subscribe to “the stupider, the better” and Call of Duty never disappointed.

The designers of CoD Ghosts watched the trailer to Gravity just like everyone else.

But hardly anyone–not even me–plays Call of Duty for the single player campaign. The real reason that millions of people like me keep going back to the series, year after year, is the online multiplayer.

It’s hard to explain why Call of Duty works in a way that most other online shooters don’t. It’s nicely polished, but not terribly balanced. The graphics left something to be desired even in the 360/PS3 era when compared to the Battlefield, Killzone, Halo, and even Medal of Honor installments on the same platform. Assets are re-used in every new game, and only a handful of the maps are really good. But somehow it all comes together in a package better than all its imitators.

In Call of Duty: Ghosts, you can control a dog with a tablet computer.

Various sources of Norse Mythology tell the story of the Battle of the Hjadnings. The tale is somewhat different depending on the text, but the general details are the same: the daughter of a Norwegian chief, is betrothed to another Norwegian nobleman. The two men are good friends, but something goes wrong: Loki plays a trick on them, one of them is intoxicated with a potion, or a rumor of pre-marital intimacy between the daughter and the nobleman drives them apart. The nobleman is still in love with the daughter, even though their marriage is in jeopardy. Because the nobleman is a character in a viking legend, he doesn’t solve this problem by sitting down and talking with the chief. Instead, he kidnaps the daughter and takes her to an island. Naturally, the chief gathers up his warriors and attacks the island. The daughter meets the chief and tries to mediate because, despite the fact he kidnapped her, she still loves the nobleman. Because the chief is also a character in a viking legend, he doesn’t listen to his daughter and starts a huge fucking battle on the island.

The concept of the “einherjar” in Norse Mythology draws from similar concepts, and was featured in the Valkyrie Profile series, which would be meaningful if anyone played Valkyrie Profile games.

The battle goes on all day, and many people are killed. But at night, all the dead are brought back to life to fight again the next day. The reason for the warriors’ resurrection differs depending on the version of the tale. In one version, the chief’s daughter brings them back with magic but can never save them. In another, the magic that drove the chief and the nobleman apart is so strong that it keeps them fighting even after death. But no matter the reason, the battle is destined to go on forever until Ragnarok, or the Christianization of Scandinavia, depending on who you ask.

Call of Duty multiplayer is the Battle of the Hjadnings writ to a modern age. Twelve players are dropped into a small battleground. They run at each other, or hide out in a corner, or get up onto the highest platform on the map and pull out a sniper rifle, which is basically the most annoying thing they can do. Shots are fired. Players go down. The killcam reveals just how things went wrong. It’s often total bullshit. But no one is out of the game long. They are resurrected almost immediately to rejoin the battle. Players rack up killstreaks, bringing in helicopters, rockets, drones, and even dogs controlled with tablet computers. It becomes a barely measured chaos that doesn’t even begin to resemble real warfare. It’s the mythologization of battle, always repeating until the end of days. No death. No real consequences. The comparison to the eternal battles of the Norse myths isn’t something lost on the developers, either, as the top killstreaks in Ghosts are satellites bearing the names “Odin” and “Loki”. These names also has something to do with the single player campaign but there’s a good reason I would rather ignore everything in the story:

And that reason has nothing to do with dogs keeping watch in tanks.

It’s impossible to think about the meaning of Call of Duty without examining its problematic nature. On the surface, the game appears to be a reverent ballad to militarism and unbridled war. In some ways, the Pentagon couldn’t ask for a better recruiting tool than Call of Duty. From playing online, I know it’s immeasurably popular among middle school and high school kids. I’ve never been one to think that violent video games spark violence, as human history has been full of violent media and entertainment and the conditioning effect of that media is questionable. But the usefulness of propaganda is clear, and it’s easy to view Call of Duty as so pro-Army that it would embarrass even Robert Heinlein.

Yeah, if you finished Black Ops you know what I mean.

This is especially true of the single player campaign in Call of Duty: Ghosts, which as usual informs the arenas and aesthetics of the multiplayer. Prior Call of Duty campaigns were not nearly as blatant throughout. The Modern Warfare series at least played at an anti-war message, casting the villains as the hawk generals, mercenaries, and nationalists on both sides of a U.S./Russia conflict. The Black Ops series particular had bizarre, schizophrenic politics that seemed to jump all over the map even more than the storyline of the games themselves. The anti-American villain of BO2, for example, is practically Luke Skywalker to a U.S. Empire. Motivated by genuine atrocities committed against him by the U.S, he is consistently outsmarting an enemy that has every advantage over him. His heroism is only undermined by a few brutal actions, none of which are demonstrably worse than anything the player characters have done throughout the Black Ops series. You could easily cut two–maybe just one–short scenes from the story line and turn it into an incredibly subversive piece on par with Spec Ops: The Line.

Ghosts provides nothing as interesting. It contrives an implausible future war between the United States and a federation of South and Central American states that somehow casts America as the scrappy underdog, despite training dogs to be controlled with tablet computers. This, of course, means that you are fighting a huge army of Spanish-speaking invaders who are pouring across the American southwest. And its best line of defense is a massive wall that has been erected to keep this Hispanic horde from U.S. soil. You might say that it is…borderline offensive.

This is the literal border wall of COD: Ghosts that protects the American/Mexican border.

Even though you play as either the Ghosts or the Federation in the multiplayer, none of the truly problematic elements transfer over. The character models are whatever the players have customized, with some modifications based on the map, and the Federation suddenly speaks American English for some reason. Since I played a few hours of the multiplayer before I even touched the campaign, this initially gave me hope that the Bad Guys in the campaign were somehow not analogues for illegal immigrants. Perhaps they were mercenaries trained from a young age by merciless American corporations or something. I don’t know. Anything other than what we got.

Even though it is devoid of the bizarre and unnecessarily inflammatory trappings of the single player campaign, the nature of the multiplayer game itself can be called into question. Like the ancient tale of the Battle of the Hjadnings, it celebrates the glory of battle and could be read as stripping war of its innate horror in favor of high-adrenaline thrills. If anyone joins the Army to shoot at real people because of how much they love to shoot at fake people, that’s one person too many. The sad truth is that we’re already well past that point.

I don’t usually spend much time on this end of killcams, unfortunately.

Of course, that’s not going to stop me from playing Call of Duty. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite. But one of the benefits of being the audience to any media is that we can choose to interpret, or misinterpret it, as we choose. There’s nothing I can do about the popularity of Call of Duty. Each game will sell millions, and influence millions of people whether I play it or buy it or not. Gamers will continue to flock to the series, like dogs under the spell of a tablet computer. The only thing I can do is offer a different interpretation.

The Battle of the Hjadnings was a tale of eternal glory to the ancient Norse, but it was also a tale of everlasting sorrow. It is war as a meat grinder, unconcerned with the lives of its soldiers. It is war without meaning, repeated endlessly, with new live bodies to replace the fallen. Even the worst chickenhawk in modern America would have to admit that the prospect of dying every day, watching your own death through the eyes of your killer, then being resurrected to fight again is seriously fucked up. As such, the vision presented by Call of Duty multiplayer shouldn’t be seen as anything to aspire towards. Anyone who plays Call of Duty should realize how horrible war is, because it leads to nothing but death and computer-controlled dogs.

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Malcolm Pierce

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November 16, 2013

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Baseball, Video Games

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Experiences in Old Sports Games: High Heat Baseball and Dogme 95

In 1995, two Danish filmmakers by the names of Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg got together and decided to do the most Danish thing possible, which was to write a manifesto about film making. The Dogme 95 Manifesto (which roughly translates to “The Manifesto of My Dog”) detailed a new philosophy of film, which wasn’t really all that new because it was largely just French New Wave on steroids. Once the manifesto was complete, von Trier and Vinterberg followed up by doing the second most Danish thing possible, which was to use government subsidies to fund films based on their manifesto.

This is the third most Danish thing possible.

Along with the manifesto, von Trier and Vinterberg developed a “Vow of Chastity”. I am tempted to list the restrictions imposed by the Vow of Chastity but there are 10 or 11 of them, depending on how you read them, and they all work towards the same goal. Dogme 95 seeks to strip film down to the mere act of capturing light and sound on 35mm film, and remove all other trappings of cinema. No period pieces. No genre films. No special effects. No non-diagetic sound. No props. No fancy lenses, placed lighting, or even tripods.

Without tripods, the Dogme 95 adaptation of War of the Worlds told the story of a day-long picnic on the lawn of the Moesgård Museum.

I don’t know how in the mid-1990s a couple of talented filmmakers could have stumbled into the trap of Realism that other art forms had clawed their way out of decades, if not centuries, before. A backlash against mainstream cinema was understandable, but Dogme 95 didn’t just throw out the baby with the bathwater. It launched every other baby on Earth into the sun and boiled the oceans in the hopes that bathwater could never be created again.

If I let myself, I could probably write this entire post about Dogme 95. As theory and thought experiment, it’s an interesting set of concepts. But like raising a child for eighteen years without human contact to see how their mind develops in a vacuum of language, Dogme 95 is better left to theoretical discussions and never applied in the real world. It constricts a filmmaker from using the massive potential of film as an art in the name of achieving objective realism. In the realm of video games, I’ve mentioned in my reviews for Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling and Sensible Soccer that I don’t think that absolute objective realism is a noble goal. The same is (mostly) true of film, and I think at least Lars von Trier has come around on this point of view based on the last decade or so of his films. Just off the top of my head, the only part of the Vow of Chastity that Melancholia follows is that it is shot on 35mm film, and if Dogme 95 were written today I can almost guarantee that it would require the use of digital video rather than film.

Okay, let’s face it, they were probably just doing the fourth most Danish thing possible: trolling the shit out of everyone.

But what does any of this have to do with sports video games?

In 1998, 3DO released High Heat Baseball for the PC. 3DO is probably better known for their ill-fated console, the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, rather than their later publishing efforts. And there’s a good reason for this. The 3DO console had all sorts of problems, but it was an interesting attempt to jumpstart the CD era of gaming, as well as an experiment in console funding that sought to undercut the licensing fees of Nintendo and Sega. The games published by 3DO following the console’s failure were almost universally bad. Remember Cubix? Battletanx? GoDai: Elemental Force? So many Army Men games that the words “army” and “men” stopped having any meaning in the years between 1999-2002? The only really good games that 3DO published were Might and Magic titles acquired from New World Computing and, of course, the High Heat series.

Sadly, in 1999 the naming conventions of video game websites and publications reached their zenith with GamerzEdge and we will never see those halcyon days again.

High Heat Baseball was a mixed bag upon its immediate release. It had the unfortunate distinction of arriving in the wake of the early Triple Play games published by EA. By the end of its life, the Triple Play series became something of a joke, but ’97 and ’98 were absolute revelations in sports game presentation and features. They didn’t play the best, and they were plagued by Early Playstation Graphics Syndrome but at the time they were absolutely something special. That wasn’t the only thing working against 3DO, though. Just months before High Heat, Acclaim released All-Star Baseball 99 for the N64. Like Triple Play, All-Star Baseball 99 looks so dated that it might as well be carrying a beeper. But, again, at the time it was amazing. You wouldn’t believe it from looking at it today, but the graphics outclassed anything on the market. See also NFL Quarterback Club for the N64.

“The high resolution graphics of NFL Quarterback Club don’t just move the chains…they’re off the chain!” – GamerzEdge

So the odds were stacked against High Heat Baseball and it honestly didn’t do itself any favors. It didn’t have flash or glitz. The learning curve was far more drastic than the pick-up-and-play Triple Play franchise. It was missing the management aspects that were present in the Hardball series, and that’s without getting into the very early days of the Baseball Mogul franchise. But High Heat did have one thing going with it: beyond the graphics, beyond the menus, and beyond the half-hearted presentation, it played a game of baseball better than anything on the market. The variety of hits was unparalleled. The AI was better than the competition. The interface was simple, but it produced results that felt like baseball.

Except I refuse to believe that Kyle Farnsworth ever threw a pitch slower than 90 mph.

The series diverged briefly in 1999 and 2000, with High Heat Baseball 2000 and Sammy Sosa High Heat Baseball 2001 respectively. The PC game continued to evolve as a nuanced simulation while 3DO simultaneously released godawful arcade-style Playstation games under the same name. The 2001 Playstation installment (of course named High Heat Baseball 2002) was the first decent console version of the series, and was followed up with a good PS2 port. For the next couple years, development was primarily focused on the PS2, with ports to the Xbox and Gamecube for the final installment, High Heat Baseball 2004.

All of the good High Heat Games (read: not the early Playstation ones) had one thing in common: they played great and they looked terrible.

We have replaced Scott Rolen’s forearms with tied-off socks full of oatmeal. Let’s see if anyone notices!

This brings us full circle, back around to Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, and Dogme 95. Even fans of Dogme 95 would have to admit that it produces ugly cinema. 35mm film is finicky stuff and it doesn’t always play nice with natural sources of light. And that’s without even getting into capturing sound or lack of music or any number of restrictions that makes Dogme 95 films rather somewhat unpleasant.

Now, I’m not about to claim that High Heat Baseball is the Dogme 95 of video games. That’s ridiculous, as High Heat actually has graphics and sound, even if they’re terrible. If there is any Dogme 95 of video games, it’s roguelikes without tilesets that use ASCII symbols for visual representations and PC speaker for all (if any) sound.

C’mon, let’s be honest, you have to be a little autistic to understand this interface intuitively.

Nevertheless, the High Heat philosophy comes from the same place as the Dogme 95 philosophy: strip out the extraneous production value, focus on the fundamentals. The broadcast presentation of Triple Play or the “high resolution” of All-Star Baseball don’t lend anything to how their relative games actually play. And, I suppose if you want to be reductive about everything, visual effects, props, lighting, and any number of other things don’t truly lend anything to the storytelling of a film. If a stage play can convey a story, then a film can do the same without all the trappings of a film. Rogue is playable on an ASCII terminal and a lot of people have spent a lot of time playing as an @ symbol in a field of punctuation.

Well thanks to this game I just remembered Chuck Knoblauch’s career and got really depressed.

Of course, like Dogme 95, High Heat Baseball didn’t last. This wasn’t the fault of the High Heat developers. 3DO went under, and if anyone is to blame it is the people behind those god damn Army Men games. Even if High Heat was a huge fiscal success–and it wasn’t–it couldn’t possibly be enough to keep the entire publisher afloat.

But that’s not to say that High Heat and Dogme 95 didn’t leave their marks. The echoes of Dogme 95 can, naturally, be seen in the later works of von Trier and Vinterberg. But also in the later work of Harmony Korine, an American and one-time Dogme director himself, and mainstream/indie crossover master Steven Soderbergh. The minimalism is tempered with the ridiculous rules falling by the wayside. Meanwhile, Sony’s MLB: The Show has felt largely like a spiritual successor to High Heat, providing realistic scores, impressive hit variety, and a brutal learning curve. But for The Show, good game play doesn’t come at the cost of washed-out colors, marionette players, and presentation that never quite left the original Playstation era. The Show has been a fantastic success, reviewing consistently well and selling better than a console-exclusive sports game should. More than that, it’s become one of the best reasons for baseball fans to continue to buy Sony hardware.

Maybe the lesson is this: spectacle isn’t everything, but strip it away and you’ll see that it can be pretty important.

Oh dear god look at the graphic design on this menu. It’s like they’re trying to hide Randy Johnson’s identity with the word CPU but nothing can truly hide Randy Johnson’s identity.

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November 9, 2013

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Video Games

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Experiences In Old Sports Games: Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games

I’m not sure if there is any subset of the sports video game genre more maligned than the Official Video Games of The Olympics. Football games may be stale in the age of Madden. Wrestling titles may be gloriously dumb. Horse racing games may be completely impenetrable to everyone except one Japanese kid who does nothing but watch VHS recordings of triple crown races. But none are as bad as video games based on the Olympics. No matter who develops them, they are always buggy, awful looking messes with controls that range from awkward to borderline war crimes.

I was just thinking that there weren’t enough video games about shooting guns.

The exception to this rule is Track and Field, an arcade, home, and Game Boy classic. Even Track and Field is merely good for its time. It has held up about as well as an NES controller used to play Track and Field. Like all video games based off the Olympics, it was nothing more than a minigame collection with frustrating input issues. Unlike the games that came afterwards, however, it at least had decent graphics and didn’t feel rushed out the door to beat a close deadline and make a fast buck.

There has been an Official Game of the Olympics for twenty years now and they have all been terrible. The license has been passed around to a number of developers, starting with U.S. Gold, which somehow is neither a United States company nor a company specifically formed for releasing video games based on the Olympics. U.S. Gold had released a number of unlicensed Track and Field-esque games prior to acquiring the license, and produced official Olympics games from 1992-1996. For the 1998 Winter Games, the license was picked up by Konami, makers of Track and Field, who promptly squandered all their good will with Nagano Winter Olympics ’98. I actually played Nagano Winter Olympics ’98 for the N64 and as a result I am a carrier for a previously unseen form of hepatitis.

There’s NagaNO way I’m going to play a game with graphics like this again.

Eidos took over the license for the 2000 and 2002 games, and farmed out development to Attention to Detail, a studio best known for Cybermorph for the Atari Jaguar and for stretching the meaning of the phrase “best known for” to its absolute limit. After Eidos came Eurocom, which has a track record of remarkable mediocrity for a number of decades. They couldn’t solve the Olympics Video Game problem, so 2k Sports took a crack at it in 2006.

Despite the publisher pedigree, Torino 2006 was particularly godawful. Development returned to Eurocom, now under the banner of SEGA for 2008 and 2010. Finally, the license was farmed out to SEGA Australia for London 2012, which won a gold medal for being damned with faint praise as various websites called it the best official Olympics title but still gave it middling-to-poor reviews.

This image is a good example of how male and female athletes are objectified in different ways but I’m too distracted by the hideous logo of the 2012 Olympics.

Along with its predictably terrible standard Olympics video games, SEGA actually did something interesting with the license and developed a second series of titles exclusively for the Nintendo Wii and DS. Leveraging the legacy and long history of SEGA and Nintendo, in 2008 they released the first Olympics game that could actually get anyone excited about an Olympics game: Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games.

Jumping hurdles in denim overalls? Really? This is why the Chinese don’t take Americans seriously.

Of course, people weren’t excited about yet another sports-themed minigame collection on the Wii, they were excited because this title represented the first crossover between the universally-beloved Nintendo mascot, Mario, and the still-beloved-on-parts-of-the-internet-I-avoid SEGA mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog. For years, Mario and Sonic had been virtual rivals of a sort, as they starred in the flagship games on Nintendo and SEGA platforms. Putting them in the same game was a landmark event for people who care too much about video games. There was even a sort of thematic relevancy to the mascots joining together in an Olympics themed game, as the Olympics have often served as a kind of neutral ground, where geopolitical enemies can meet up and engage in peaceful competition.

For a notable exception to when countries did not put aside their differences, see the 1980 Moscow Olympics co-sponsored by Atari.

But the real meaning of Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games goes much deeper than that. This isn’t a game about just sports or mascots or the commonalities of nations. This is a game about the decline of the Japanese game industry. This is a game about hopelessness.

First off, as we all know, Sonic the Hedgehog represents death. He always has. There’s no reason to re-examine that point, as it was so eloquently proven in the acclaimed 2009 article “Gotta Go Fast: Sonic, Tails, and the Rapid Approach of the Inevitable End”.

They say that it is certain that “death” comes. They say it and overlook the fact that, in order to be able to be certain of death, Da-sein itself must always be certain of its ownmost nonrelational potentiality-of-being not-to-be-bypassed. They say that death is certain, and thus entrench in Da-sein the illusion that it is itself certain of its own death. – Sonic Adventure 2, quoting “Being and Time” by Martin Heidegger

With that out of the way, let’s examine the core concept. Mario, a rotund Italian man, is set to compete in a series of athletic events against Sonic, a anthropomorphic hedgehog whose defining attribute is his running speed. Granted, over the past few years Mario had found himself participating in a number of sports–golf, tennis, baseball and basketball–but he’s really no match for Sonic at any Olympic activity that requires speed or agility. This is an analogy to the growing disparity between Japanese and “western” game industries.

Mario represents the Japanese game industry. At one point he was the biggest thing in the world. Mario games were the gold standard of console titles. Now, he’s doing the same thing he’s always done but found less success in a more competitive, broader world. There are still plenty of great Mario games, and great Japanese games, but they’ve been overshadowed and the business model hasn’t caught up with the rest of the world.

And now like Japanese games, everything in Mario has cat ears.

Sonic, on the other hand, represents the western game industry. I realize “western” is a somewhat senseless distinction founded in sketchy outdated categorization, but off the top of my head I can’t think of a better term for the parts of the game industry scattered about North America and parts of Europe. Sonic was a character designed to appeal to audiences in these “western” territories. His character aesthetic and especially his “attitude” is founded in what adults thought American boys liked in the 1990s. The same can be said of a large portion of the western game industry, which has thrived despite (or perhaps because of) an obsession with continuing to blatantly pander to the tastes of American boys. Of course, as someone who purchased both the new Call of Duty and Battlefield games, perhaps I’m just hurling rocks straight through the walls of my glass house.

I don’t even know which Call of Duty game this screenshot is from and I have played all of them since Modern Warfare.

Of course, Mario and Sonic aren’t the only playable characters in the game. A variety of faces from both franchises make up the roster of playable characters. Now, to anyone who has played at least one spinoff Mario game, all the Nintendo choices will be recognizable. Mario has built up a regular supporting cast over the last decade-plus and they’re mostly inoffensive. But take a look at the SEGA side and suddenly everything gets confusing. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Robotnik/Eggman and then shit starts to get dicey. I had to go to the List of Sonic the Hedgehog Characters Wikipedia entry to figure out who any of the other strange animals were. And let me tell you, it is absolutely terrifying how much effort has been put into the various Wikipedia entries for Sonic the Hedgehog characters.

Waluigi is the least legitimate Mario character on the roster and if you don’t think something as ridiculous as Waluigi deserves to stick around you can just get out.

On one hand, the diverging paths of the Mario and Sonic series, which led to a mostly reasonable cast of Mario characters and some very questionable decisions regarding Sonic characters, seems to undermine the theory that the two are counterposed representing the Japanese and Western game industries. The Sonic series has gone off of the rails, and by that I don’t mean that SEGA is considering a Sonic/Train Simulator 2014 crossover entitled Sonic Derailed. Though if you told me that was a real game I would probably believe you. Sonic introduced a dumb as hell antihero called Shadow the Hedgehog, started Dragonball-style super saiyan bullshit, gave Shadow his own game with guns, had a hedgehog/human romance for some terrible reason, released a Bioware RPG, and then Sonic became a werewolf because there was no way to dig the hole the series was in any deeper without striking werewolf coal. Meanwhile, Mario is still going relatively strong. Cat Mario notwithstanding.

Ultimately, though, we have to recognize that this is a SEGA game, and they probably think that Sonic is still doing perfectly fine. Maybe in some ways it is. I’m willing to acknowledge that Tyler Perry movies aren’t made for me, that I don’t have the patience for Kazuo Ishiguro, and that there’s a whole new era of adolescents who think they’re being edgy by watching the twenty-billionth season of South Park. Maybe I’m just not the audience for Sonic. Or maybe SEGA is using this game as a self-critique, realizing that it has fallen into the same dark path as so many Western developers, pandering to the point of insanity.

Or maybe I’m just making shit up.

Nah, I wouldn’t make shit up. Not about Sonic the Hedgehog.

Posted by

Malcolm Pierce

Posted on

October 23, 2013

Posted under

Baseball

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The Beltran And The Sea

Carlos Beltran was and outfielder who hit from both sides of the plate with a Marucci maple bat and he had gone fifteen years now without taking a ring. This was not for lack of effort. In the first six years he been in Kansas City where he learned to regard their logo, a crown, with a certain sense of irony. But after six years he traveled to Houston then New York then St. Louis and he proved his worth every October. But each year he would come home with his fingers bare.

In his first years in baseball he was really very fast. He stole bases and went stood out in centerfield. He was so fast that he flattened Mike Cameron with just his running speed. But now he was an old outfielder. His knees were crooked and his arm ached when he pulled it back for a throw. Everything about him was old except the crack of his bat which was the same tenor as a thunderclap and was bold and undefeated.

“Carlos,” Miller said to him as they climbed the stairs of the dugout. “I could go out there with you. We’ve won some games.” Beltran had taught Miller about baseball and the boy loved him.

Beltran looked at him with confident eyes. “If you were my player, I’d take you,” he said. “But you are Matheny’s and there are match ups.”

“He hasn’t much faith.”

“I know,” Beltran said. “But haven’t we?”

They sat on the bench and many of the other players made fun of Beltran. Others looked at him and were sad. The successful players of Boston and St. Louis already won their rings and displayed them in glass cases with wooden plaques and now only looked to add to their glory.

“Carlos,” Miller said. “Can I get your batting gloves for you? If I cannot play with you, I would like to help in some way.”

“You brought us here,” Beltran said. “You are already a man.”

“This is your sixth post season series in St. Louis. Do you think that is a lucky number?”

“Six is a serious number,” Beltran said. “How would you like to see me bring in a ring dressed out with six hundred diamonds? Think perhaps I can?”

“Keep your bat warm, old man,” Miller said. “Remember we are in October.”

Keep my bat warm, Beltran thought. He hoisted the maple stick on his shoulder and, swinging it back and forth with a certain menace, he stepped onto the field. There were other players at other positions stretching and sprinting on the grass and Beltran could hear the roar of the crowd cheering for them but not for him. Beltran stopped in in the on deck circle and waited.

Beltran watched as Matt Carpenter faced the pitcher. Lester was left-handed but Beltran was ready.

This is the World Series. Beltran’s at-bat will be only one at-bat in all the at-bats that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other at-bats to come will depend on what Beltran does in this at-bat. It had been that way all year. All of baseball is that way.

He had no mysticism about baseball though he had played it for so many years. Most players had superstitions. Beltran had facts. He did not wear a phiten necklace because of its magnetic properties but because its color gave his eyes a certain comforting warmth. He did not eat an entire chicken before each game for luck but to be strong in October for the truly important home runs. He did not tap his bat to hear its sound as a ritual. It was a science. The sound of a good bat is different than the sound of a bad bat. Beltran did not use a bad bat.

Carpenter fouled a pitch back towards the on deck circle. The ball rolled towards Beltran. He knelt down and picked it up.

“Baseball,” he said. “I love and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.”

Beltran would have liked to come to the plate with a man aboard but the next pitch retired Carpenter. It was a cutter out over the plate and Carpenter should have taken hold of it for a drive but this was baseball. Baseball is a game of skill and a game of luck. The wind always blows harder in your face than at your back. Beltran knew that better than anyone. But he did not dwell on that.

After fifteen seasons without a ring Beltran knew he was not a lucky player. It was good to be lucky. Ryan Theriot was lucky. Pete Kozma was lucky. It was better to be exact. Every at-bat is a new at-bat. When the luck came Beltran ‘s way he would be ready for it.

Beltran stepped to the plate for the first time in a World Series game. He would not be defeated.

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Malcolm Pierce

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October 20, 2013

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Experiences in Old Sports Games: Not Tony La Russa’s Ultimate Baseball

I’m late on making this post because I threw out what I wrote last night. The subject of my post was going to be Tony La Russa’s Ultimate Baseball for the Commodore 64, both because I can’t stop picking baseball games and because I was using the post as an excuse to rant about Mike Matheny.

See, for a long time I disliked Tony La Russa. In 2000, he started Rick Ankiel against the New York Mets in the NLCS, giving him a little-needed second chance to implode. In 2001, he brought in Jeff Tabaka to face Lance Berkman and it arguably cost the Cardinals the division. I realize it was foolish to get so hung up on a single bad move, but using Tabaka there may still be the single worse bullpen call I’ve ever seen (bringing in Boggs on May 30 of this year comes close). So after 2001 I was done with La Russa and couldn’t wait for him to leave. Of course, he didn’t leave, the Cardinals won a shit-ton, and my hatred of La Russa lessened all the way to the point that I finally want him back.

This is the 17th result for a google image search for "Jeff Tabaka", which says everything about his career and also the result of bringing him into that game.

This photo of Lance Berkman is the 17th result for a google image search for “Jeff Tabaka”, which says everything about his career and also the result of bringing him into that game.

Basically, the post I had written up Thursday night was only half about Tony La Russa’s Ultimate Baseball. I discussed how it innovated the presentation of fly balls within the game. Rather than render every hit as a ground ball, or use a shadow texture to indicate the height of the ball, the interface marked the spot the ball would eventually land. This made fielding much easier, and allowed for a greater variety of hit types. This innovation and the fantasy draft, like the bullpen innovations of Tony La Russa himself, was imitated by everyone who came afterwards and is now a standard part of the genre.

Tony La Russa also innovated the use of the conga line on the basepaths.

The other half of my post was about how I missed La Russa, and how sick of Mike Matheny I was. This was coming off games 4 and 5 of the NLCS, in which he put on a bad managing clinic. It was like watching Denise Richards in The World is Not Enough: the performance was so terrible that if I wanted to teach someone how to be godawful, it would be shown in class on day one. However, after last night I just couldn’t go through with the post.

Denise Richards could play a nuclear physicist in the same sense that Matt Adams could play shortstop.

It’s not because my mind has changed about Matheny. I still think he’s lost out there and carried by a very talented team and front office. Most managers are. But it seemed light the pinnacle of Being A Spoiled Cardinals Fan to put down so many words about the manager’s mistakes on the same day that the team advanced to the World Series. My team is about to appear in the fourth World Series out of the last ten, and I wasn’t about to write a post critical of the team while that was happening.

Yeah this looks like the face of a guy who would make the ~1,500 words I wrote on Thursday completely meaningless.

So in place of the post I was going to put up yesterday, I’m just going to end on a picture of Adam Wainwright and Carlos Beltran celebrating a World Series trip together, posted on twitter by Beltran’s wife, @ivanalenin.

Even if you hate the Cardinals, you should be cheering for Beltran to get a ring. He’s arguably the best post-season hitter of all time, and while he shouldn’t need to bolster his Hall of Fame credentials, the truth is he’s going to need as much help as he can get.

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October 12, 2013

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Experiences in Old Sports Games: Sensible Soccer

Is there anything more insufferable than citing to a dictionary? Using the dictionary to make a point is not only obnoxious, but it demonstrates a failure to understand the mutability of language. The very idea that some book somewhere can be more accurate in the meaning of a word than either the person using the word or the person interpreting the word is frankly absurd. At best a dictionary can be helpful in mitigating or preventing confusion between the signifier and the signified, or maybe preventing an unscrupulous friend from winning a game of Scrabble, but using the dictionary to prove a point is just horrendous. It’s the worst thing you can do. Outside of felonies, of course. Most felonies are probably more reprehensible than citing to the dictionary. That said…

There are two dictionary definitions for the word “sensible”. The first, and probably the one that most readily comes to mind for the American reader, is “having or showing good judgment.” The second definition, which Google calls archaic (and Google knows everything, including the kind of pornography you watch), is “readily perceived”. You probably haven’t heard the word “sensible” used in this context Typically, one would use the word “perceptible” instead, despite the fact that it’s a better use of the word. Sensible = sense-able: able to be sensed. Like catch-able, as in a whole lot of baseballs hit towards the Cardinals outfield this season that fell in for hits.

Let’s just say that it’s easier to have an errorless streak when you don’t get to a lot of baseballs.

All of this bullshit has to do with our many definitions of the word “sense”. “Sense” is a goddamn ridiculous word in the English language. It has a ton of meanings. We talk behind the back of the Eskimos about how many words they have for “snow” and, meanwhile, the Eskimos give us all sorts of shit about how many concepts we lump into the word “sense”. Sense can mean perception through one of the major functions by which humans (or other animals) receive external stimuli–sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste. Sense can also denote a meaning given to other words and concepts. It can refer to conscious awareness or rationality (i.e.: after cheering for the Cubs for ten years, the man developed some common sense). It has a separate meaning in the realm of math that I’m not even going to explain because Fuck Math.

The Swedish cover of the film “Sense and Sensibility” uses two different words, and can (roughly) be translated to “Emotion and Reason”, destroying the cleverness of the title and also highlighting the problem with the English word “Sense”.

Most importantly, however, is the following meaning of the word “sense” as a verb: “to understand or be aware of (something) without being told about it or having evidence that it is true”. That’s straight from the Merriam-Webster site if you care, which you shouldn’t because citing to the dictionary is basically a war crime.

Essentially, the word “sense” can both refer to the faculties through which we receive perceivable evidence–our five senses–as well as the gut feelings we get which have nothing to do with those faculties. Think of the term “common sense”. What is common sense? It’s not facts. It’s not truth. It’s not anything we can back up with any evidence that our senses can provide us. There was a time when it was “common sense” that an unmarried woman living alone who had no children was a witch. There was a time when it was “common sense” that people of a certain skin color were somehow not actually people. There was a time when it was “common sense” to stop eating fat because fat caused people to become overweight. There currently exists a time where it is “common sense” for a whole lot of people to take antibiotics for influenza even though that is entirely counterproductive for most everyone except MRSA fetishists.

Once again I bring back the black box to stress just how important it is for you never to image search “MRSA fetishist”.

Let’s bring this all back around. Because English has no clue what to do with the word “sense”, the word “sensible” has two contradictory meanings. And this week’s game is Sensible Soccer.

Unfortunately “Club Teams” does not allow you to take a wooden cudgel to Man U.

Sensible Soccer was released in 1992 and followed up with a sequel in 1994 called Sensible World of Soccer, which received a number of sequels up until 1998 when the creators tried to move the game to 3d and ended up destroying it in spectacular fashion. The first game was ported to almost every system known to man, including something called an Acorn Archimedes which I almost refuse to believe actually existed. The rest of the series was confined to home computers and the Amiga. I’m sure to some people, exclusivity to the PC and Amiga is actually a selling point, but this meant that the audience of the game was somewhat restricted and the series ended up as something of a cult classic. But there’s no doubt that the members of that cult were completely devoted.

In some ways, Sensible Soccer isn’t the most accessible game to start with. The controls are simple, and easy to pick up. But the game doesn’t take it easy. The action is fast paced, but it also attempts to simulate the difficulty of maintaining ball control. Sharp turns with the ball aren’t impossible, but they have to be carefully managed or the ball will drift away from your player. It requires quick reflexes and careful control in a way that very few sports games before or after have really attempted. As such, it’s more of an arcade title rather than a simulation. If I wanted to be reductionist, I would compare it to a fighting game in that it strips away a lot of bullshit to expose the skill of players, especially in multiplayer matches.

Moving my hand off the controls to take a screenshot basically means fucking up.

The first thing that anyone notices about Sensible Soccer is the name. Because we are so comfortable with the second use of the word “sensible” it sounds ridiculous. It gives us the idea that the game is somehow a rational interpretation of soccer: a conservative and even-handed adaptation of the game that appeals to a person who wants to balance their budget or find a pair of shoes that can be worn comfortably for eight hours or has decided that they need more fiber in their diet. As if that wasn’t strange enough, the game is anything but “sensible”. As I noted, it’s fast paced and can be chaotic for a first time player. It is full–perhaps even bloated–with teams, options, and features. It was one of the earliest series to include massive, multi-year franchise control.

I’m pretty sure the Euro Superleague is also the only thing that can save Greece from falling into chaos right now.

But if we look at the other definition of “sensible” the pieces fall into place. Sense-able Soccer. Soccer that feels so real it’s like you can smell the grass, hear the shrill sound of the whistle, and feel the cold shackles of a freedom hating, un-American country that enjoys the sport of soccer.

Of course, that isn’t the greatest literal description of Sensible Soccer, which is more of an arcade title than a sim. On its face, Sensible Soccer doesn’t accurately represent the game of soccer–not in the way, for example, Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling strives to replicate the so-called game of bowling. But if anything can be proven by the failures of Brunswick Pro Circuit, it’s that realism is not necessarily a good thing. In fact, realism may actually detract from a correct portrayal of a sport. Abstracting elements of the sport out to simpler, faster paced gameplay elements may actually represent the sport more accurately. It’s effectively the same reason that quarters in Madden are shorter that fifteen minutes. Because Madden plays faster than real football, shortening the game provides more realistic results. A faster, more frenetic soccer represents how soccer fans view the sport better than detailed simulation.

So could someone please explain what the guy in the blue hat is supposed to be wearing? I can’t see it as anything but a black one piece swimsuit and blue thigh-highs.

The word sensible has two separate and very distinct meanings. One describes a rational approach based on gut feelings that are probably just dictated by the subconscious whims of society (thanks for Common Sense, Tom Paine). The other describes a visceral experience, informed by the faculties by which we can actually observe the world. How do you reconcile this? Well, if you want to read way too much into it–and I usually do–this is informed by the way in which people are willing to ignore facts in favor of their opinions. Whether it’s death panels, the percent of the budget spent on foreign aid and food stamps, or what exactly the Fourth Amendment protects, people are quick to assume that their gut feelings–their common sense–are just as valuable as actual, perceptible facts. If sense (common) = sense (perception) then clearly that twinge you get in your stomach that lets you know that Obama is either stealing your guns or reading your e-mail is true. Right?

Now, maybe that isn’t just a problem with English. I’m sure confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance are everywhere. Nevertheless, English is fucked up. Fortunately, Sensible Soccer isn’t fucked up. It’s a pretty fun game. There’s an Xbox 360 port out there that is pretty faithful if you want to check it out without going through the hassle of setting up Amiga/DOSBox emulation. Just don’t put too much thought into the name.

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Malcolm Pierce

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October 5, 2013

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Experiences in Old Sports Games: Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling

Bowling is such a weird sport. It’s barely even really a sport. It’s more of an activity. Calling bowling a sport is almost like calling pinball a sport, Then again, there are people who unironically use the world “e-sports” to describe Starcraft and DOTA/League of Legends so that particular hair has been split so many times that it would give a beautician a heart attack.

What makes bowling so strange is that it’s almost exclusively a secondary activity. When most people go bowling, they don’t really want to bowl. It’s an excuse to socialize, hang out, eat crappy food, and drink beer if they are over 21 or bowling at an establishment that cares more about cash payments than state IDs.

I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who enjoys bowling. It’s just a thing to do. If you’re not rich enough to go yachting, not coordinated enough to go dancing, and not addicted enough to shoot up heroin in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, you and your friends go bowling. Nobody likes it, but everyone tolerates it well enough. At least that’s been my experience.

Never trust anyone who is genuinely enthusiastic about bowling.

This makes bowling a difficult sport (or activity) to translate into a video game. It isn’t particularly fun on its own, and its entertainment value is usually entirely dependent on the people who you are bowling with. Video game golf carries similar baggage, in that the game is often more about socializing than playing, but there is far more appeal to virtual golf. Golf fans can appreciate the replication of real world courses, and there are at least a number of high-profile golf tournaments that can be leveraged into a game. Bowling alleys, on the other hand, all look alike. And unless you can somehow get the smell of stale nachos to waft out of your Xbox 360’s cooling vent, there is nothing about the ambiance that a video game can replicate.

Cook, Serve, Delicious! should have been a bowling game.

The best bowling game ever made, by far, is Wii Sports. Not because it pays any attention to detail or makes any attempt to accurately portray the game. It doesn’t. Rather, it successfully simulates the social aspect of bowling. It turns bowling into a party game, which is what bowling has always really been. Bowling and Wii Sports are both something to do in the background, with family or friends, while talking and eating and having a good time that only tangentially has anything to do with the game you’re playing. And that’s fine. Hell, the bowling in Wii Sports may have single-handedly supported the entire Wii Console. It was the best part of Wii Sports (Tennis being a close second) and Wii Sports was everything to the Wii.

Where Wii Sports succeeded, someone had to fail. Someone had to think that an accurate simulation of bowling was a good idea. Someone had to misunderstand the appeal of the game, and strive to impart every aspect of bowling except the discomfort and horror of wearing someone else’s shoes. And someone had to think that the best platforms for this game were the PS1 and N64. And so we are brought to this week’s game: Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling.

Go to your happy place, amorphous bowler.

Brunswick Circuit Pro is another product of the late, somewhat great folks over at THQ. It’s not surprising that THQ keeps showing up as I go through these games. THQ is responsible for many high quality games, but has a history of misguided ambition and questionable decisions in chasing the mass market. Recently, this was their undoing as they bet their company on a conceptually terrible Call of Duty clone Homefront and the frankly bizarre uDraw peripheral.

The uDraw sought to respond to the needs of a chronically under-served audience, people who wanted to play video games using a Wacom tablet. These people realized the faults of the controller and the mouse/keyboard and had spent years wishing for a better option, like a tool designed exclusively for drawing and digital art. Now, I don’t own a uDraw, but I have at least heard that it is reasonably well-designed hardware. For its price, apparently it worked quite well. Unfortunately for THQ, the only people who wanted to hook up a tablet to their video game consoles all either owned Wiis and were desperate for anything that didn’t require waggle to play or worked at THQ. The PS3 and Xbox 360 uDraw tablet was a disaster and so many uDraw devices were manufactured, left unsold, and liquidated in bankruptcy that the tablets are now a secondary currency throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

THQ had it coming for releasing this promotional image, showing two girls enjoying a video game where the objective is to clean floors.

Like the uDraw, Brunswick Circuit Pro is a product designed for an audience that doesn’t exist. It wants to be the Madden or Fifa of bowling, except that unlike football or “football”, if someone wants to go bowling they don’t have to lower themselves to a blocky n64 representation of bowling. They can just…go bowling. There are bowling alleys everywhere, and in my experience they’re not usually packed.

Reports from near death experiences indicate that right before the heart stops, the patient often sees the phrase “Welcome to fabulous Akron, Ohio.”

I hesitate to go into much detail regarding the gameplay of Brunswick Circuit Pro because it is about as generic as possible. Pick a trajectory for the ball, then two meters pop up on the screen for power and accuracy. You want to stop both of these meters in the green to keep the ball on target. Variations on the dual power/accuracy dynamic has been around forever, and it’s nothing special. I don’t mean this as a knock on Brunswick Circuit Pro specifically. This is a control scheme well implemented in a bowling game. The fact that the entire game can be boiled down to the same mechanic used for kickoffs in Madden is mostly an indictment of bowling itself.

This game could actually be pretty deep if the words were switched around to read “Build the Capitol — With Capital!”

Despite my criticism, I will say that Brunswick Circuit Pro is faithful to my experiences bowling, which have taught me that no matter how well you think you hit the pins, two or three will always stay standing. Yes, there are factors to consider like spin and hook that would solve this problem and these factors probably make sense to the kind of people who would appreciate Brunswick Circuit Pro. As for me, I learned early on that I had my best success at bowling when I threw the ball relatively slowly, in an awkward fashion that probably would have destroyed my wrist if I attempted to do it on a regular basis. I never did attempt to do it on a regular basis because it made me look like an idiot and I had enough of that outside of bowling.

The only way to see worse crowd animation is to watch a Braves home game.

Not only does Brunswick Circuit Pro attempt to faithfully recreate bowling as a sport rather than a social activity, but it also features the names and likenesses of a number of famous bowlers. That’s right; there are exist people who have some right to be called famous bowlers. This isn’t a joke. These aren’t characters from “The Big Lebowski”. They are real human beings who have made a career out of bowling. Their names include such luminaries as Mike Aulby, Parker Bohn III, and one real motherfucker named Johnny Petraglia.

THIS BASTARD RIGHT HERE.

Let me tell you about Johnny Petraglia. I started up an exhibition match against this jerk. Don’t know why i chose him. Maybe I subconsciously knew what was coming and I hate myself. After I was done, I looked him up and found out that Johnny Petraglia was a loyal promoter for Brunswick products for decades, so maybe I picked the absolute wrong opponent. But keep in mind, I set the game to rookie difficulty. This was my first time out. I was just getting used to the controls. Most games have some sort of learning curve. Brunswick Circuit Pro has this:

This is the worst thing to ever happen to me in an alley and I’ve lived in South Central Los Angeles.

As you can see, Petraglia obliterated me. He was Carlos Beltran and I was an AJ Burnett fastball. I didn’t stand a chance as he threw eight strikes and manages splits on every other frame. Now, as I understand competitive bowling, this is how it usually goes. Strikes are common. Scores routinely reach into the 200s. That’s fine, but again it speaks to the misguided motivation behind Brunswick Circuit Pro. Who the hell wants to wants to play professional bowling? There’s little variation of outcome in a bowling match where strikes are expected.

Ultimately, Brunswick Circuit Pro is a failure because it doesn’t understand why people bowl. It represents the fundamental mistakes that THQ would make over ten years later, resulting in its demise. From Homeland to uDraw, to the Red Faction series, which stripped out literally everything that people liked about Guerrilla, THQ seemed to fail to comprehend why people enjoyed video games. And it can all be traced back to a day when they believed that anyone actually wanted to go bowling.

Fuck you too, Petraglia.

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Malcolm Pierce

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September 24, 2013

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A Modest Proposal: The Three-way Tie

Currently, the St. Louis Cardinals lead the National League Central by two games over the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds. Due to the latest turn in Uncle Bud’s Wildcard Ride, all three teams are guaranteed to make the playoffs, but only the division winner will automatically advance to the NLDS. The other two will play in a single Wildcard game to reach the division series. With the division coming down to the wire, everyone wants to talk about the worst-case scenario–or the best case scenario if you’re a Braves or Dodgers fan–a three-way tie that forces the NL Central teams into a brutal series of single game showdowns.

I have a better idea for resolving this potential problem. I think that everyone can agree that the Braves and the Dodgers are the real bad guys here, so how about we show some Central solidarity and solve this problem with some creativity.

One game. Three teams.

How is this possible? Well, to quote the classic 1997 film Air Bud, “Ain’t no rules say a dog can’t play basketball.” Each team will face both of their opponents in a single game. Each team will get a full nine innings on either side of the ball. It just won’t be at the same time.

Instead of halves, each inning will be divided into thirds. Home field and batting order will be determined by record against the other two teams. Best record plays at home, bats last. Second best record will bat in the middle third of the inning. Worst record will bat first.

Currently, the Cards have a .526 record against the Pirates and Reds, the Pirates have at .514 record against their opponents and the Reds have a .457 record. So the game would take place in St. Louis, Reds would bat first, then Pirates, then Cards. The Pirates pitchers would throw to the Reds batters in the first third of the inning, the Cardinals pitchers would throw to the Pirates batters in the middle of the inning, and finally the Reds pitchers would face the Cardinals batters. This way, each team faces one another. The team pitching would always bat in the following third of an inning, and then get a third of an inning to rest.

Winner of the three team game takes the division, then the team with the second most runs gets home field advantage for the play-in game. Given that each team has to outscore the other two to win the division, everyone will be equally motivated, even though each team’s batters are facing a different opponent than their pitchers. The only problem that could theoretically come up is if in the bottom of the ninth the Pirates are winning, the Cards are batting, and the Reds are pitching to preserve the Pirates lead with no interest in the outcome of the final third of the inning because they’ve already lost the division.

In this very unlikely situation, the Pirates will just have to hope that the Reds pitcher will be sufficiently motivated to become the first player to record a save for an opposing team because, hey, that’s pretty historic.

So let’s do it. Save some time. Three teams. One game. Twenty seven half innings. Baseball.

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September 24, 2013

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Experiences in Old Sports Games: NBA Jam

Legend has it that basketball was invented on a rainy day in the December of 1891. At the time, James Naismith, a physical education teacher and aspiring medical doctor, was teaching at a Massachusetts YMCA when the idea struck him. He had just attained the age of thirty, and being that life expectancy was far shorter at this time, he had begun to suffer a terrible midlife crisis. He’d taken up the opium pipe, he had spent the last of his cash on a sleek red soft-top horse, and now he was reconsidering future medical career. His mind was full of wistful thoughts of his childhood dream of becoming a great actor, dashed by Federal law preventing the exhibition of Canadians upon a stage.

It was this shattered dream, his professional training, and the need to make enough quick cash for his next horse payment that led to the development of the game that would be his legacy. Basketball, a sport played by actor-athletes, requiring both the skill to accurately lob a ball and the talent to pretend to be injured. Each match would appear to be decided by the players on the court, but the outcome would ultimately be controlled by the referees, allowing Naismith, who hand-picked the refs, to profit from the burgeoning sports betting industry without appearing suspicious.

I can’t believe there is literally a picture of James Naismith with a ball in one hand and a basket in the other.

Basketball was a hit at the YMCA, where a number of boys had been seeking a socially acceptable outlet for their theatrical talents. The game spread to classical repertory companies, art schools, and even theatrical prep academies across the country. Professional squads, barnstorming and hustling from town to town, turned massive profits and soon consolidated, like the WWF, into a National Basketball Association. This brings me to this week’s game: NBA Jam.

NBA Jam, a 1993 release in arcades which was followed up by ports onto almost every conceivable home console, is one of the most successful sports games of all time. It didn’t just make it big across multiple platforms, but also helped spawn an entire genre: the ridiculously over the top arcade sports game. Sure, we had Base Wars before NBA Jam, and even NBA Jam owes a debt to its predecessor Arch Rivals, but the idea of taking a sport and distilling it down to the most simple actions, then cranking those actions up to Michael Bay levels originated here. Without NBA Jam, we would have never seen NFL: Blitz, The Bigs, NHL Hitz, or the only good argument I’ve ever seen for owning a Kinect, Diabolical Pitch.

In NBA Jam, the number of actors allowed on the court per team is lowered from five to two. This services multiple purposes. First, it is a function of NBA Jam’s origins as an arcade game. With only four actors on the court at any given time–two per team–each one can be controlled by a different person standing at the arcade cabinet. A four player arcade game can generate twice as much revenue as a two player game, and the idea of having every single participant in the basketball game controlled by a human was appealing. Second, it limited the number of sprites on screen, allowing a level of detail in the players that was fairly remarkable for 1993.

Wow, it really looks like a horribly monstrous version of Patrick Ewing.

Like all video games, NBA Jam was a product of its times. In 1993, the United States was still reeling from the hangover after the raucous party that was the 1980s. In my post about RBI Baseball, I referenced the singular focus on individuality that was mocked by the simplification of the game of baseball. NBA Jam does not subvert that fixation, but rather embraces it. Basketball ceases to become a team performance, and rather focuses on the acting skills of two players. But this isn’t about the way that media downplays collaborative effort in favor of individual performances. This is about something else.

Known for signing the North American Three Point Agreement, President William Jefferson Clinton was fond of sinking the three pointer from down town, if you know what I mean.

Known for signing the North American Three Point Agreement, President William Jefferson Clinton was fond of sinking the ball from downtown, if you know what I mean.

On February 28, 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms commenced a raid on the Mount Carmel Center compound, home of the Branch Davidians religious sect. The raid resulted in a siege of the compound that lasted almost two months, captivated the American public, and ended in a massive fire that killed the majority of the Branch Davidians, including their leader David Koresh. The Waco siege was a particularly unusual chapter in modern U.S. history, and set the stage for everything from the entrenchment of the survivalist ethos to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. It was also the unconscious inspiration for NBA Jam.

To understand the relationship between the Waco siege and an arcade basketball game, we have to start at the beginning. Specifically, with the Branch Davidian religion. Branch Davidianism is a sect of a sect of a sect of a sect. They broke off from the Davidian Seventh Day Adventists, which based their teachings off of a two book series (entitled Shepherd’s Rods) by the reformist Victor Houteff. The Davidian Seventh Day Adventists were, naturally, a sect of the Seventh Day Adventists, which themselves are the largest sect of the Adventist protestant movement.

This image of the siege is the very first google image search result for “Waco”, which really sucks for a town with a rich history like that other time it exploded just last April.

Adventism has its roots in the teachings of William Miller, a mid-19th century preacher who taught that the return of Jesus was just around the corner. Miller’s downfall was like that of so many similar men, in that he gave a precise date to the second coming–October 22, 1844–and when it didn’t happen most people rightfully stopped taking him so seriously. Some, however, decided to cut Miller a bit of slack and give him the benefit of the doubt. Jesus didn’t come back on October 22, 1844, but that didn’t mean he didn’t start getting ready. Essentially, the remaining Adventists decided that William Miller had the right date, but that it wasn’t the date of Jesus’s return but rather the day he started packing his bags to eventually return.

See, my son, I told you that satan does not have a kickin’ rad rear projection TV like I do. …what? He has a plasma?

Now, as we all know, Jesus doesn’t have to worry about having a variety of daywear and eveningwear on his journey back to Earth, so he isn’t packing his bags with clothes. Rather, he’s filling his luggage with souls. And the reason he is taking his time is because he wants to make sure he takes along the right souls. This process is known as “Investigative Judgment”. Seventh Day Adventists are big into Investigative Judgment, which has led to a conservative mindset among the movement. They also have returned to celebrating the Sabbath on a Saturday, but that makes perfect sense because it makes NCAA Football players heathens rather than NFL players.

Salvation up front, party in the back.

The Davidians shared the belief in the Investigative Judgment, but specifically diverted from the mainstream Seventh Day Adventist movement by embracing the importance of prophecy, vegetarianism, and, later, disclaiming Israel as the pre-Millennial kingdom. Meanwhile, the Branch Davidians differed from the Davidians by moving up the date of Jesus’s judgment to 1955 and, for a time, incorporating some unexpected feminist teachings into the religion. Unfortunately, all the good–or at least pleasantly radical–stuff was stricken from the religion and upon the death of Lois Roden, who was their leader throughout the late 70s and early 80s. The majority of the religion was taken over by David Koresh, who banned the feminist teachings of Roden and turned the Branch Davidians into a run-of-the-mill crazy survivalist sect led by a run-of-the-mill charismatic who wants to be Jesus except without all the Teaching Good Things and instead Molesting Underage Girls.

NBA Jam is basically to basketball what Branch Davidianism is to mainstream Christianity. The rules and customs of the sport have been filtered through a number of iterations. Basketball evolved into NBA Basketball, which was forced into the two-on-two format NES game Arch Rivals, which, like the splintering of the Davidians into the Branch Davidians, transformed into the madness of NBA Jam.

And then everyone caught on fire.

That’s it. That’s the punchline.

I was lazy with this one because I’m still playing too much Grand Theft Auto V and watching near-playoff baseball. Also fuck trying to get a Sega Saturn emulator working, that’s just a time sink. I’ll be back with a real post next week, I promise.

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Malcolm Pierce

Posted on

September 19, 2013

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Experiences in Old Sports Games: Grand Theft Auto V

All sports games are divisive. Either you are a fan of the sport and its digital representation, or you find them utterly boring. And no sports game is quite as divisive along these lines as the golf video game. To most people, the idea of virtual golf is duller than than the pain of a lingering bruise. But to others it is a joy, if not an obsession. These players range from folks who enjoy a drunken game of Golden Tee at the bar, to the fans of EA’s Tiger Woods series, and finally to the madmen who still play Links. Capturing this audience is difficult, as there are only so many ways to distinguish a new golf game from those that came before. This brings me to this week’s game:

This is the only game I’ve played since Tuesday so this is the game you’re going to get.

In 2013, Rockstar Games released its first foray into the highly competitive golf market with Grand Theft Auto V for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Rockstar was previously known for its work in revolutionizing the world of virtual ping pong with Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis as well as the wildly successful bowling title, Episodes from Liberty City. However these were just warm-ups for the Scottish developer as they prepared to tackle the national sport of their homeland.

Thank God no one is sensitive about racism towards the Scottish because this picture. This picture.

The name Grand Theft Auto V originates from a phrase in the Doric dialect of Old Scots, “graend ‘heft otta V”, which refers to a very specific set of circumstances in the game of golf, when the ball is removed from play on the green (the “graend ‘heft”) by an otter or other woodland creature (the “otta”). This permits the golfer to take another swing from the “V”, which was the ancient equivalent to the golf tee–a v-shaped piece of wood used to hold the ball on the first drive that was in fashion before industrialization allowed for the mass production of proper tees. Up until the invention of otter traps, this phrase was common parlance on the Old Course at St. Andrews.

“Aye! Ye baill gyan missin’. Looken like a graend ‘heft otta V, taik ‘er back.”

Aye! Nah again!

As demonstrated by its choice of title, Grand Theft Auto V seeks to return the sport of golf to its Scottish roots. Unlike in the United States, where golf is considered s port of privilege, only open to the wealthy, in Scotland it is considered a far more egalitarian affair. Some of the most famous courses in the world, including the aforementioned St. Andrews, are open to the public. There are several government-owned courses with subsidized fees that are accessible to everyone.

To further its goal of the democratization of golf, Grand Theft Auto V allows you to play as three characters from across the spectrum of social privilege. Rather than provide a selection of real golfers, these three golfers–Michael, Franklin, and Trevor–are fictional. Michael is a retired, wealthy man. The kind you would expect to see on the golf course. Franklin is an African-American of limited means, and Trevor is white trash incarnate. In St. Louis, we would call Trevor a hoosier but anywhere else that’s just going to sound like he’s from Indiana. St. Louis is weird about the word “hoosier”. I don’t think Trevor is from Indiana.

Franklin enjoys a day on the golf course.

Back in the Nintendo 64/Playstation 1 era, the days of games like Waialae Country Club: True Golf Classics, only including one golf course was acceptable. However, for a 2013 release, the inclusion of only a single 9 hole course was rather disappointing. This may be a reflection on Rockstar’s Scottish view of golf. Rather than offer a variety of locations, which would be available to a jet-setting celebrity or CEO, Grand Theft Auto V encourages a laser-like focus on a single local course.

The location, in this case, is the fictional city of Los Santos. This is likely a licensing issue, as representing the existence of the course in any real city would pose a risk of brand confusion with any real course within that city. This may be disappointing to hardcore golf fanatics who have grown accustomed to the realism of the Tiger Woods series, but it’s not without reason. The specific layout of golf courses are protected from duplication or adaptation by the International Links Protection Agreement of 1998, which states that any recreation–physical or otherwise–of a protected property must be approved by a joint panel of judges selected from the U.S. judiciary, the Scottish Court of Session, and the International Court of Justice. EA, with its long-running series, has been willing to draft the necessary petitions and pay the necessary bribes, but Rockstar chose to forgo the hassle for its first attempt at a golf game. Incidentally, the poorly drafted definition of “links” in the 1998 ILPA is also the reason very few video games directly use the phrase “hot dog”, and instead use the generic “processed sausage”.

Two German diplomats had to die to make this possible. Don’t ask which ones.

The gameplay in Grand Theft Auto V is simple, and like Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis easy for a beginner to jump into. The game automatically suggests the club, trajectory, and desired strength for each swing of the club. These suggestions aren’t perfect, and if you want to get under part, you’ll have to learn to tweak them, but they do just fine for the first time on the green. There’s also some light RPG elements, as each character levels up as you play. Swings can increase your strength, and running from hole to hole has a chance to increase stamina. Diving into the water hazards can also increase lung capacity, presumably allowing your golfer to yell “FORE!” with greater power.

In Grand Theft Auto V, golf is a surprisingly brutal sport.

As you’ll note in the screenshot above, Grand Theft Auto V fills the background of the golf course with virtual buildings. Unlike most sports games, however, GTA V supplements its rather simple gameplay with the option to explore the area surrounding the course. You can walk your character off of the course and into the city. You can go through the streets on foot, in a car, or in a number of aerial vehicles.

The purpose of this side activity is twofold. First, it adds depth to a golf experience that can take less than thirty minutes to complete. Second, it gives context to egalitarian theme that persists throughout the game. In exploring the various neighborhoods within a short distance of the golf course, the lines between the wealthy and the poor become blurred. Within a few seconds, you can pass between mansions and slums, construction sites and beaches.

GTA V represents a message from the shores of Scotland to the heart of the United States: Golf is for everyone.

Franklin continues to enjoy golf, and doesn’t want you to look at what’s in the background of his picture.

Now that I have horribly shoe-horned GTA V into the theme of this blog, I’ll write quickly what I think of the real game, as I have been surprised by just how much I’m enjoying it. I didn’t come into this year, or even this month, with much excitement for GTA V. Games like the Saints Row series, Sleeping Dogs, Just Cause 2 and Infamous had all progressed the open world action genre so much that I wasn’t sure if I wanted another GTA. I didn’t even particularly like GTA IV, though I can’t say for sure how much of that was due to a sluggish opening act and a lack of mid-mission checkpoints. Then I watched a trailer for GTA V, found out Tangerine Dream was working on the soundtrack, and heard some of the boasts about the size and scope of the game. I realized I had to play it, if only to keep up with the zeitgeist and to see how in God’s name it ran on the current, outdated consoles.

Turns out, GTA V is a pretty great game. In a lot of ways, it is more of the same, the radio/TV attempts at humor are oddly dissonant with the themes of the rest of the game, a female protagonist would have been nice, and there are some undeniably problematic issues that shouldn’t be ignored. But the formula has been refined to a point. The city and the countryside are gorgeous. And maybe for the first time since Vice City the storyline missions are actually fun to play.

Something has gone incredibly wrong.

Most remarkable, though, is how GTA V feels like an attack on itself and the forces that created it. Five years ago, Rockstar Games tried to dramatically chang its formula, reeling in the silliness of San Andreas and focusing on a more personal storyline about the cyclical terror of violence with GTA IV. The game was a huge success, but complaints about nagging side characters and the dissonance between the story and the typical GTA player’s desire to rampage around the city abounded.

Like Michael in GTA V, Rockstar wanted to move on from a life of creating mayhem and do something different. But mayhem is what is expected of them, and it’s the one thing that the world thinks they are good at. So they are dragged back in. The silliness is back. Mini guns, blimps, gas cans, drug trips, and exploding smartphones. But GTA V doesn’t thank its fans for pulling it back in. Rather, it forces the player to think about how awful it all is. The world of GTA V is full of vile, unlikable people. None more than Trevor, and literal embodiment of what fans want Rockstar to make. His character lives like every GTA player acts outside of missions. He is violence for violence’s sake. But he is also a pathetic sociopath, and the commentary couldn’t be clearer. You don’t want to play as Niko Bellic or John Marston, whose characters make you question your desire for indiscriminate violence? Then you have to be Trevor, and Trevor ain’t pretty. He’ll drag you, and Michael, and Franklin, and Rockstar itself into the darkest of places, where you’ll wish your cousin could give you a call to go bowling.

So maybe you should just stick to the golf course.

The Redbird Menace

Sports, video games, and sports video games

Author Archives: Malcolm Pierce

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Experiences in Old Sports Games: Sensible Soccer

Experiences in Old Sports Games: Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling

A Modest Proposal: The Three-way Tie

Experiences in Old Sports Games: NBA Jam

Experiences in Old Sports Games: Grand Theft Auto V