This brief discussion on Rockstar Games and their use of generic conventions originates from a very intriguing comment found on our favourite website in the whole wide wo…web, Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Over there, my half-assed ass-essment of the company as “soulless” in my earlier post, On The Love Letter, was earnestly brought into question. The question is as good as any and the topic actually warrants a brief discussion.
This time, I am not referring to Rockstar Games as “faceless”, “insensitive” or “corporate”, although we have actually taken the company to task for that as well. Instead, I’m talking about their use of ethics and morals in their games. (more…)
Rockstar
On The Love Letter
I want to take the time to briefly celebrate the spectacular achievements of a minigame currently (and very, very deservedly) making the rounds in the video gaming blogosphere. The game in question is axcho and knivel’s Flixel game The Love Letter. (Go on, open the link and play the game right away. Do it! Just get back here once you’re done.) The Love Letter deserves to be played because it manages to grasp something of the Real ™, of the very nature of human interaction, in a way that is rarely observed in video games.
In addition, The Love Letter is also a little marvel of economy in design: Not only does it very convincingly, effortlessly and fluidly tie in a) setting, b) narrative exposition and c) gameplay to each other, it also manages to use them, co-operatively, in conveying to (and thus actually reproducing in) the player emotions such as pressure, hurry, constraint, annoyance and relief.
With an amazing absence of complexity to boot. We are talking about an itsy-bitsy one-room, one-button five-minute minigame about arriving late to school, finding a love letter stashed in your locker, and setting out to find whomever wrote it.
Super KISS.
Rockstar Will Be Rockstar
The hot topic of the week was Rockstar’s Tiger-like, sudden fall from PR grace. The boulder started rolling downhill on the 7th, when a thick and elaborate blog entry, “Wives of Rockstar San Diego employees have collected themselves” was published at Gamasutra. The post was a call to arms by the wives of Rockstar employees seeking to highlight the workplace injustices perceived to exist at the studio. The post gained considerable momentum in the press and ultimately produced a circulated internal response on the 15th.
But that’s not really all: Springing up like mushrooms after the rain, we have actually received a barrage of various reports more or less in accordance with the Rockstar wives’ complaints. To recap, we have already discovered the dazzling Red Dead Dedemption (on the left), very much awaited here at The Slowdown, to have had an extremely arduous development path. We have also heard how there are other issues afoot at Rockstar San Diego and how Rockstar quietly settled a telling class action suit with over 100 employees the April of last year.
In addition, we have read subsequent allegations of how Max Payne 3, in development at Rockstar Vancouver, is being similarly mismanaged. We’ve written about Max’s questionable Brazilian wax before, so you can consider that more fuel for the fire. Be as it may, yesterday, Rockstar finally officially responded, though in veiled and indirect fashion, to the swirling sea of speculation above.
Their weapon of choice: A series of wallpapers.
Red Dead Redemption
Earlier, I commented to Nabeel how I thought the earlier Red Dead Redemption debut trailer made the accompanying batch of screenshots redundant. I take that back.
Max’s Brazilian Wax
Max Payne 3 so far: The main character’s identity removed. The location, look and feel changed. The gameplay mechanics altered. The original voice actor, James McCaffrey, replaced. Multiplayer added. Max Payne 3, Rockstar promises, has “…Max as we’ve never seen him before, a few years older, more world-weary and cynical than ever” 1)Rockstar Press Release, March 23, 2009
Changed, changed, changed utterly. Let us go back in time for a moment, back to the year 2003, and seek to recall the scenes that made the most sense, made the most out of its thematic elements in the second instalment, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne: What about the part where Max escapes his sealed apartment block with the aid of some of its colourful inhabitants – or the lock-up bust, with Mona contained at the police station? Or the very beginning of the game, with Max waking up in the hospital, when you come face to face with the doctors and nurses?
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