Paid to Play


There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are willing to change and those who are not. People who are not willing to change do business the old-fashioned way, on old-fashioned hours and with old-fashioned rules. No going on Reddit or playing Flash games during work, keep your work and your hobbies separate, do your job the way we tell you to do it.

Those people are what I like to call stupid.

If you're alive and have once talked to another human being, you've heard the term "Facebook me" or "Google it", and that's not a coincidence. Both of those sites are massive money-machines, run by extremely smart people providing extremely smart services. Google is on top of the world (literally, it fought the Chinese government once), and Facebook is fast approaching. Two direct competitors, each forcing the other to innovate and pave the way for the future. What do they have in common though? Awesome work structure.

If you've ever been inside the Facebook offices, seen a video of what goes on in there or even if you've seen The Social Network, you'll know that the Facebook offices are not full of rules and regulations restricting you to your workspace and only allowing you outside during lunch hours. It looks like a really spacious college dorm room more than anything else, and that kind of comfortable atmosphere is proven to lead to higher productivity. After all, if you love your job, you want it to do well.

Google has the same thing going on. Here's a link with photos from both offices, and you can see that both of the offices are not what comes to mind when you think 'professional'. Google has a goddamn slide in their office. People are riding bikes around, or just sitting and talking, and someone's in what looks like a massive sound room just hanging out. Despite these places not looking like the epitome of usefulness, these are arguably the two most well-known companies of our day.

So, seeing that, why aren't all companies that deal in technology going for relaxing atmospheres like that? Obviously, most companies can't afford such massive, spacious offices, but that's not what it takes to create a relaxed atmosphere. Each day, Google has each engineer work 20% of their time developing their own ideas.  That's a fifth of their working time that they are allowed to take a break and develop something personally (which has led to the creation of several other Google-owned services, like G-mail). It seems simple, really: do things to make people like their job.

Dyn Inc., in Manchester, New Hampshire has taken this in and decided to do something about it. Being a software company that supplies Twitter, Twitpic and Wikia, their employees have to know computers. And if you know computers, guess what? You probably like games. After seeing that their attendance plummets yearly when a blockbuster game is released, they decided to add an extra day of paid time off so you can indulge in your videogaming.

Yeah, I know, right? How great is that?

Small steps like these can go a long way to showing your employees that you care about them and their hobbies. Allowing people free time to pursue what they personally want is a simple way to revitalize and refocus a person, and a lot of old-fashioned businesspeople could learn from these Google, Facebook and Dyn, Inc.

Nintendo 3DS Derives Deceitful Discernment


The recent release of Nintendo's 3DS has been met with, among gamers, generally positive attitudes. Being from Nintendo, not a lot of people doubted that it would be successful, and it has sold decently well (though I notice it's still stocked in almost every store I've been to). Right from the get-go, though, Nintendo has done what it can to cover its ass regarding the 3D functionality. They said that you should take a break every thirty minutes to avoid feelings of nausea or illness, and they have warned that children under six years of age should not play the 3DS as it might damage the development of their eyes.

Even though eye specialists have said that there are no harmful side-effects whatsoever to be concerned about, that hasn't stopped certain sources from conducting their own non-peer reviewed, half-assed, blatantly biased and defamatory "study" on how the 3DS affects people who play it. The Sun, an overseas newspaper/gossip paper, decided to get in on this 3DS-hating with their own shitty experiment, deciding to follow no guidelines whatsoever. If you read the link, you'll see that they fail to define anything going on (such as how much 3D is being used, what the baseline for human heart-rate of blood pressure is) and subject the fellow to playing the 3DS while doing different activities.

Yeah, in order to test the effect of the Nintendo 3DS, they have the person playing do other things.

I hope I don't have to explain why that immediately invalidates everything they claim to have discovered. Yeah, viewing 3D in a moving car makes pulse and blood pressure go up, and yes it causes nausea. So does just being in a goddamn car.

The conclusion they come to is that the longer you play the 3DS, the higher your heart rate and blood pressure will be, and they fail to take into account that they had the subject walk around and ride in a car while he played the 3DS. The link I posted (here, for convenience), has a satirical but also serious follow-up, in which they have one of their staff members go out and read The Sun while sitting, walking and riding in a car. I don't want to spoil it, so please give it a read, the results are great.

It pisses me off that gossip magazines can get away with doing such biased, prickish things without getting any backlash at all. Likely, they'll have higher sales and the 3DS will suffer a little because the folks at The Sun who did this study are completely clueless as to how to actually carry out an experiment. Or they did this on purpose, and they're just assholes.

Heavy Rain, Heavy Story, Light Impact


There will be Heavy Rain spoilers. Because I love spoiling shit for people more than anything else in the world.


If you own a PS3, or know someone with a PS3, or keep up with videogame news at all, chances are you've probably heard of a game called Heavy Rain. Since the announcement of the PS3, Sony and developer Quantic Dream have backed it as a mature game for adults and for those who care about advancing videogame as an art form. Particular attention has been paid to the story, which was one of the major selling points. It was to be a game that blended the line between cinema and videogame, with a story for the ages.

Scott Shelby, one of the playable characters
(Source)

In the department of graphics and visual style, this game succeeded and that's not up for debate. The characters and environments look authentic and appropriately rain-soaked (it's always raining in Heavy Rain, by the way), and sometimes even you yourself feel waterlogged. Heavy Rain managed to overcome something called the uncanny valley, something that many games and toys fall prey to. Basically, the uncanny valley is where things that look almost human go to die, like marionettes or toys of babies. The faces and, very importantly, the eyes of the character models in Heavy Rain have a discernible source of life behind them, giving the illusion that something is going on in their brain. This is flaunted during loading screens, where the character you'll be taking control of looks around in silence. Characters look sad, hopeful, thoughtful, distressed and a wide range of other emotions, and it really helps set the mood.

When it comes to the promise of a heavy story, Heavy Rain is certainly no slouch in the premise. For the last few years, a city has been tormented by a killer who has been nicknamed The Origami Killer, due to his habit of placing an origami figure in the hands of his victims. The killer kidnaps young boys in public and they stay missing for 4-6 days before turning up dead. One of the characters you play, Ethan Mars, has his son kidnapped and he must find his son before he turns up dead as well.

With a premise like that, the story is ripe for drama, heartbreak, love, terror and a number of other things. Heavy Rain attempts to deliver on all of these and it has a mixed amount of success. To start with the good, holy shit fight scenes. The game has numerous battles, both hand-to-hand and gunfights, that follow very intense choreography. The game is controlled by QTEs (quick-time events) that require button presses at different points, and that determines your triumph or failure in certain tasks. With this method of control, the game can have a lot going on and not risk enemy AI or player choice ruining the set piece. The fistfights are amazingly intense, and most of them left me sweaty-pawed and bolt upright.

Ethan Mars, father of the latest Origami Killer victim
(Source)

It's when the game tried to get into heavier things like death, sadness, love and sex that things begin to fall apart. No matter how much life is behind the eyes of the characters, kissing never looks quite right. Most games don't show lip-to-lip kissing, because that's something that is almost impossibly difficult to animate. Many of Heavy Rain's intimate scenes are made almost laughable because they attempt to depict it head-on, without anything in the way. It comes off as two people touching lips and not doing much else, which ruins the mood.

There are several points in this game where characters (could possibly) die, and I played through a few times with some different scenes to get a feel for what it's like to lose a main character. It all comes down to the delivery of these deaths; Quantic Dream simply didn't cast the right group of voice actors. QD is a France-based studio, and they chose to set their game in America. That's all well and good, but when a small child is drowning and begging for help in a perfect American accent, it kills the mood to have a little French kid run to and fro searching for help. Similarly, Ethan's son (pre-kidnap, of course) doesn't sound happy enough at his happiest or sad enough at his lowest point. Some of the voice actors are simply excellent, like Ethan himself, and it really ruins the sense of immersion and suspension of disbelief to hear accent breaks so often with other characters.

Going back to the point of main characters being able to die, there were some scenes that, at the time, felt absolutely filled with danger, which had me gripping my controller tighter than one should grip a controller. As it turns out, many of these scenes pose no danger at all. In one of Ethan's trials to save his son, he is tasked with killing a man. No matter how you approach this, It leads to being chased through the house while being fired at with a shotgun. It is possible to be shot (barely making you fumble, though) but it's not possible to die, even if you set the controller down and fail every button prompt.

Madison Paige, journalist and friend to Ethan
(Source)

Now, that's not to say that Heavy Rain is not a fun game, because that's far from the truth. I beat it in three sittings, and went back and forth between scenes to see alternate outcomes. It's paced wonderfully and while it isn't afraid to present you with hard choices, or go into daring territory (a shower scene with actual boobies!), it falls short of what it promised. Heavy Rain is a good game, a strong game and an experience everyone should have and support. It's a tentative step in a new direction, so of course it won't be perfect. It shows where improvements have to be made, and I applaud it for trying. I'll take an original game over Call of Duty any day.

Bioshock 2: Memorable Moments and Final Thoughts


Once again, there will be quite significant spoilers about (potentially) both Bioshock games, so read at your own risk.


After one final, long sit-down with Bioshock 2, I made it to the end. Mostly it was a game of shootin' dudes, and shoot dudes I did. Shoot and shock and burn and hypnotize, confuse, cover in insects, beat down, et cetera. The very first thing I took away from Bioshock 2 was, "Damn, that felt good."

A number of significant refinements have been made to the core shooting mechanics, addressing exactly the problems I had with the first game's action. The actual act of aiming is much smoother and much easier to manage; you'll never find yourself spinning about while trying to find exactly who's shooting you.

Subject Delta is also a physically more capable fellow than Quiet McUn-named from the prequel. In the first Bioshock, for some baffling reason, you could not hold your Plasmid hand and gun hand up at the same time, even though they were two separate hands. Now that you can have a Plasmid going while you shoot, you can provide back-up fire by covering your ass with plasmids while you reload a larger weapon, such as a shotgun or a grenade launcher. On top of that, you're also blessed with a melee attack, which comes in handy to stop charging enemies or just show those fuckers who's boss around these parts. Gunplay is handled much better in Bioshock 2 than previously, and that makes it a much more fun game.

Around the end of the game, you're put into the body of a Little Sister to free yourself from the restraints that Sophia Lamb has put you into to wait for you to die (with an acknowledgement to Vita-Chambers, saying that you need to die naturally else you be revived). Inhabiting this Little Sister, you see the world in a different way. Rapture is a city on a decades-long trip of decay. Leaks have spring everywhere, corpses and blood litter the ground. Big Daddies are in algae-covered diving suits, toting drills that are soaked in gore.

One of the instructional posters
 seen by a Little Sister

But you, through the eyes of a Little Sister, are in a giant, royal ballroom. Everything is cushioned in bright crimson velvet, the walls lined with ornate sheet. Big Daddies are, quite literally, knights in shining armour. They are plated with extremely detailed and beautiful golden suits. There are posters everywhere, detailing a Little Sister's lifestyle. "Good girls always harvest!", referring to jabbing a needle into a corpse and then drinking the blood.

This struck me as amazingly sad. Wandering around a city I had spent fifteen hours in, knowing what a complete shithole it was, and then seeing it through the eyes of what is essentially a re-purposed and brainwashed human being. The whole idea is really hit home when you see statues of Subject Delta that depict meetings with characters you have had and the choices you made. Regardless of whether you killed the person, or spared them, the Little Sisters saw it as the 'right thing', looking up to you as their literal Daddy. "Subject Delta meets Dr. Gil," and then it showed Delta strangling a snake, a reference to original sin. In reality, I had actually electrocuted a defenseless, insane man while he begged me for his life. An act that was clearly, purely terrible and selfish had resulted in the Little Sisters erecting a mental memorial to commemorate how amazing I was.

There's more to the sequence that just that, but I really do recommend that you pick up Bioshock 2 if you can. I think it tops its predecessor in nearly every way, and you owe it to yourself if you want a game with some heavy-hitting themes and consequences. I'm going to cut it short here because I feel like I'm rambling on, but Bioshock 2 is a game that I won't soon forget.

A Tale of Two Cities


A few of you, if you are gamers, may remember a title called 'Bioshock' that came out in 2007, though I didn't get around to it until 2009. It could have been the delay in my playing it that stopped me from enjoying it, or it could have been that all of the hype and awards it received made me think it to be something that it simply was not.

FROM THIS POINT ON, I WILL PROCEED TO SPOIL THE FUCK OUT OF BIOSHOCK ONE AND TWO, BY THE WAY.

Bioshock was lauded and hailed as one of the finest games to have ever been released, a masterpiece in story and gameplay with the most emergent playstyles of any FPS game to ever grace this earth, ever. It won Game of the Year and scored near-perfect on every site it was reviewed on. My first exposure to Bioshock was non-gameplay render of the thing. Maybe you remember: some guy tries to take a little girl, gets drilled in the tummy by a diving suit monster, and then throws bees at swimsuit man's face.

Needless to say, I was intrigued.

Now, I don't know why I took so long to get around to it, but I didn't like what I played. The controls were twitchy and inaccurate, as if the guns were an afterthought to the exploration. I could deal with that, to an extent, but the actual structure of the game is what turned me off. Every quest in that game is a fetch quest. "Would you kindly pick up this bee honey? Would you kindly construct a rocket? Would you kindly take some pictures?"

At the halfway point, it's revealed that you are a clone engineered to respond to "Would you kindly", which is a bomb-ass twist and it's extremely clever, forcing you to re-examine how you play the game. Unfortunately, the 'big bad' is killed in a cutscene, and then your friend basically says, "OOH I'M ACTUALLY THE BAD GUY MWAHAHAHA" and then you get a secret code to give yourself free will.

Now, this poses two problems. One, now that your 'friend' is the big bad, what's to hate? The game did an amazing job of making you really care about Atlas and his campaign against Andrew Ryan, so you find yourself very challenged to really start to hate him. Two, now that the "Would you kindly" trigger is taken away from your character, you have absolutely zero reason to keep playing. The entire story was driven by "Would you kindly" and the fact that you had literally no choice in the matter, but now you're expected to suddenly hate your BFF and continue without your trigger word? It was a poor choice in the story, and I had to slug through what I consider to be one of my top five worst gaming moments.

It's truly a shame, considering that the city and history of Rapture is so beautifully and artfully captured. Without nothing other than one single look, in the first five minutes of the game, you know that Rapture was a once-prosperous secret city that went to shit. The cardinal rule of writing is "Show, don't tell" and Bioshock is the only game that could have had me simply wander around and really want to experience it.

A Little Sister with her Big Daddy
(Original Picture)

That brings us to Bioshock 2. Some people call it a hasty cash-in to make a quick buck on the Game of the Year, and they wouldn't be entirely wrong. Businesses exist to make money, whatever that takes, but I wouldn't call it hasty. It's clear that a lot of thought and love went into this project, but it was inevitable that the magic of first laying eyes upon the desecrated city of Rapture wouldn't be captured again. Instead, we're treated to something very different: playing as a Big Daddy, originally something that you sought to destroy in Bioshock 2's predecessor.

Subject Delta, you're called. A free-thinking prototype Big Daddy, capable of making your own decisions . As opposed to being a nameless man thrust into Rapture, you now play as someone who was a resident from the beginning. As you progress, you meet people who know exactly who you are, people who have different opinions on you. One of the more unique things of being a Big Daddy, aside from the suit and Rivet Gun, is being able to adopt Little Sisters and protect them.

In Bioshock 1, your exposure of Little Sisters was limited to the five seconds before you fought a Big Daddy and then purifying them (or ripping a slug from their insides and killing them). As Subject Delta, Little Sisters take to you for care and protection, giving the Save/Kill choice some real emotional meaning, rather than acting as an arbitrary Good/Evil karma choice. As you move and explore with Little Sisters, they react to things you do, and it really hits you to have a Little Sister demonstrate just how fucked up Rapture truly is.

I remember the exact moment that I realized how horrific the city is: I had electrocuted an enemy and then beat him to death with my drill. As his corpse lie twitching on the floor, my Little Sister exclaimed, "Look daddy! He's dancing, he's dancing!"

This young girl, who could not possibly be older than six, with no concept of life or death, of sadness or of right and wrong. To her, seeing people mauled, shot and burned to death was part of life, and then her duty was to extract the blood from corpses and give Big Daddies ADAM, a mutagen. People told you how wrong this was in the first Bioshock, but seeing it firsthand, taking part in this twisted ritual, gives you insight that you simply did not have before.

While Bioshock introduced us to the Utopian-turned-dystopian society, and gave us a history of what caused the wondrous city to fall, Bioshock 2 acts as a more personal epilogue; the story of one man, cast out and exiled by all of Rapture, trying to find his original Little Sister and doing whatever it takes to get her back.

Bioshock 2 is a far more emotional experience than its predecessor, undermined by the very fact that its setting is so beautiful in its destruction. Subject Delta's quest for Elenore is one of sacrifice and dehumanization of a thinking mind, but also one that is too often overlooked in favour of what's going on outside of Delta's mind, rather than what is happening to Delta.