No, really

Wait. Hear me out. Yes, the first few missions are terrible. Yes, the combat is weird. But once you get past those niggles, Alpha Protocol is one of the best modern RPGs, rivaling even Mass Effect.

I'll explain why.

The characters are fantastic

Alpha Protocol's char?acters are wonderfully over-the-top and a hell of a lot of fun to interact with. There's SIE, the machine gun-toting mercenary lady who gets hornier the more you threaten to kill her. There??'s Sis, the silent emo girl assassin. 

And best of all, there's Steven Heck. Played (of course) by Nolan North, Heck is a real piece of shit. In a fun way. When you first meet him, he's torturing a guy, threatening to make him drink bleach. After a few minutes, you realize why he's torturing the guy: Heck forgot where his keys wer??e, and his vic?tim remembered. 

Heck is a terrible, terrible man, and he's also one of the only people you can trust in the game.? Which is fu?ckin' great.

The sense of humor is amazing 

Take a close look at this screenshot. Alpha Protocol has a stats screen, but it doesn't track how many people you've killed or nonlethally taken down. Instead, it tracks the number of orphans you've created, and the total medical bills of the people you beat the shit out of.

The marketi??ng positioned this game as Jason Bourne meets 24, but it's actually a lot more charming than tha??t.

The combat is amusingly broken

The combat is not good. Nobody would ever say that. But at a certain point, its own brokenness becomes fun. If you're a stealth player, you can get upgrades that turn you completely invisible for, like, a minute at a time. If you're a gunman, you ??can become a walking death machine by the third mission in the game. Once you get certain upgrades, what little challenge the game initially had just vanishes into thin air. But as a result, you feel like a sort of hilarious, bumbling god. 

It's great.

Fun moral choices

You meet a shady fucker at a meetup. Do you shoot him, accepting the ri?sk that he just might be shady and not actually an enemy agent? Or do you spare him, but put yourself at risk of an ambush?

A terrorist plan?ts two bombs in a museum. One will kill a friendly NPC you may have romanced. The other will kill fifty faceless NPCs you will never meet. Which one do you disarm?

Which of the various operatives and madmen you meet will you ally yourself with? Whi?ch organizations do you want to help, and which do you want to tell to ??go fuck themselves?

Most fun of all, w?hi?ch ending do your choices lead you to?

Multiple endings

I planned on playing Alpha Protocol as a suave dude. The kind who doesn't kill. The kind who romance??s the dangerous redhead. The kind who plays both sides against the middle, and tries to make everyone? happy.

I ended the game with all of my friends dead except for Steven Heck, the psychopath ?I never trusted. The dangerous redhead betrayed me. I'd slept with SIE, but she left shortly after. I let my friendly handler, Mina, die, because I didn't want to let the bad guys get away??.

So instead of getting my happy, sex-filled ending, I floated ??off into the sunset in a boat driven by a madman, with the corpses of people I cared about in my wake.

It was awesome!

Alpha Protocol has three different endings, and each of those endings has a shitload of variety depending on who you befriended a??nd who died. 

Yes, not all of Alpha Protocol's story branches are fully formed. Yes, just like KotOR 2 and New Vegas it's apparent that Obsidian bit off more than they could chew. Yes, it's not the mo?st polished or well-balanced game in the world.

But, goddammit, it's got heart. It's got charm. It's got this beard:

The post Alpha Pro?to??col is as good as Mass Effect and if you disagree you are wrong appeared first on Destructoid.

The rest are ruined

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild may have ruined open world games for me.

Why? Because it'?s so goddamned good, it reveals the f??laws in nearly every other open world game ever made.

Here are a few things Breath of the Wild do?es that absolutely dunk on other open world games.

Incredible Difficulty Balancing

I?t's really, really, really hard to balance an open world game. You seemingly have tw??o options.

Firstly, you could make the entire world totally flat, and have everything level up with the player so that they're always getting basically the same experience, difficulty-wise. This ensures that the player never gets super frustrated, but also means the player never quite feels a sense of true growth --?? the game is effectively holding them by the hand, making sure they never get too far ahead or behind in the difficulty curve.

Secondly, you could ignore the player's power level and just fill the world with a bunch of enemies of varying difficulty. Some are really difficult to kill; some are really easy. This is tricky, because if you make the difficult enemies too difficul??????????????????????????t, then you've essentially created a soft barrier for the player that they cannot progress beyond. In other words, your?? open world game just got a little less open, because it's functionally impossible to get past certain areas unless you've leveled up.

Breath of the Wild opts for the latter option, and executes it more skillfully than any other game in recent memory. The world is filled with a variety of different creatures to fight, and their attacks and abilities are very clearly telegraphed. Often, stronger enemies are primarily different because of their behavior, not because they take and deal more damage.

A lizalfos is scary not necessarily because it can kill you in a few hits, but because it's so goddamn fast that it might chase you down if you try to retreat. A horde of bokoblins guarding a skull chest may not seem like a big deal, but if you really want that chest, you'll be committing yourself to fighting a sma??ll army. And since a?ll the enemies in the game are fairly lethal, you may regret that decision very, very quickly.

There's another reason the difficulty curve feel?s s?o amazing, though:

There's No "Levelling Up"

While you obviously get more powerful and/or hardy as you go through the game (either by tu??rning in spirit orbs, getting Divine Beast abilities, or picking up better gear), there is not a massive difference between how Link behaves at the beginning of the game versus how he behaves at the end.

The difference between beginning-of-the-game-L??ink and end-of-the-game-Link has far less to do with the number of heart containers he has or the loot he's got, and far m??ore to do with how you as the player have learned to deal with different enemies types and environmental hazards. You learn how to parry guardian blasts. You learn how to time your dodges to open up the enemy to a flurry. You learn that anything fiery can be instakilled by an ice arrow, and vice versa.

Link doesn't level up. You level up.

The whole world feels open to you, because once you know how to deal with certain types of enemies -- oh shit, it's a flying ??guardian, I should wait for it to get close and hit it in the eye with an ancient arrow -- your heart containers and loot almost become of secondary importance.

And if you are worried about your loot, the game offers a beautiful balancing mechanic. Since enemies drop their weapons when they're stunned, and since stronger enemies have stronger weapons, you can engage in a beautiful risk/reward choice: should I go after the moblin with the kickass broadsword?

He could kill me in one hit, sure...but if he doesn't, if I can just do enough damage to knock that broadsword? out of his hand, then suddenly my damage output will quintuple. I'll be able to hunt down other moblins and get better shields and weaponry, which could help me kill the stone golem, which could help me get a shitload of mon??ey, which I could use to buy a house...

You, the player, are the most important thing in Breath of the Wild. Not you??r ge??ar. Not how many skill points you have and how many abilities you've unlocked. Just you, and your knowledge.

True Nonlinearity

Nearly everything in Breath of the Wild is optional.

That, in itself, is revolutionary.

There is an unfortunate philosophy among many game devs that if they worked really hard on something, then the player must see it. That, if? the player didn't experience something, then it is inherently wast?ed work.

Breath of the Wild proves this philosophy is kinda bullshit.

You don't have to beat any of the Divine Beasts. You don't have to solve a single puzzle in the game if you don't want to. You don't even need to get the frigging Master Sword.

And as a result, you make the game what you want it to be.

I beat two Divine Beasts and got sick of thei??r associated puzzles, so I went straight to Hyrule Castle. I didn'??t feel like fighting all of the guardians protecting it, so I put on my Zora armor and swum up a series of waterfalls, skipping literally all of the combat leading to the final boss fight. Then I challenged Ganon and, because I was underequipped, nearly died a half-dozen times.

But I didn't. I killed Ganon. I beat the game. And despite having "missed" half of the major scripted content, I felt incredible -- like I'd taken my destiny into my own hands and decided, no; for me, it was more fun, more interesting, to fight Ganon with only half of the divine abilities the game offered. It made me feel smart to put on a swimsuit and skip the gauntlet of deadly g??uardians rather tha?n plow through them like Aragorn.

Most  games would have forced me to fight through those guardians. Most games wouldn't even unlock the final boss until I'd defeated all of the divine beasts. But because Breath of the Wild didn't, my experien?ce with the final boss wa?s tense, and funny, and heroic.

And, shit -- if you need more proof that Breath of the Wild's nonlinearity is beautiful design, just look at the speedruns.

More Does Not Equal Better

Your average AAA open world game is so stuffed with Things To Do that they can get seriously overwhelming. Upon opening your map, you??'ll be shotgun blasted with dozens of little icons just begging to be cleaned from the map. So, you do. You patiently move from icon to icon, doing whatever little mini-mission is required to complete that mission and remove the icon from the map. If?? the missions are short and well-designed, maybe you'll do a bunch of them in a row. And after a few hours, maybe you've managed to clear a half-dozen icons from the map...which still leaves, like, three hundred more icons. At this point, you either decide one of two things:

1. Fuck it -- I'm just ignoring the??se goddamn ?things and playing the main story.

2. Well, I'm a completionist. I guess this is my life now.

Though this kind of design can keep you engaged and tickle some lizard part of your brain, is it really fun? Or is it just addicting? Does it just appeal to the OCD part of our brains that wants the map to?? be clean and tidy and organized?

Breath of the Wild does everything it can to dissuade this type of play. The ingame map works the exact opposite of every other open world map: rather than being filled with icons that you need to clear, the map is completely blank and you fill in the icons. Did you find a grove of hearty durians that you want to remember? Place a stamp. Did you see a shrine in the distance and you don't want to forget about it? Place a marker. Do you want to find all the Korok seeds out of some unfortunate sense of completionism? You can do that, but all you're going to get for a reward is a literal piece of shit.

Typical open world games are about cleaning icons off the map an??d, in so doing, conquering the map itsel?f -- exerting your control over it, so that even the very environment must kneel to your power and wisdom. In a sense, the map itself becomes another enemy to defeat.

Breath of the Wild, conversely, is about learning the environment and growing to understand and respect it. When playing, I didn't get that feeling where I looked at a map and sighed at all the stuff I'd have to do. Instead, I felt excitement rise up in my chest -- look at all of this unexplored territory I get to discover! Who knows what I'll find?

Holy Shit, You Can Climb Everything

Holy shit.

I'm sure are good reasons most other open world games don't allow this, but holy shit. If I ever play another open world game that doesn't let me climb up stuff, I'm going to be really disappointed.

 It Makes Weapon Breakage Fun

By making your weapons break, and by making their moment of breakage so utterly satisfying (that arcane shatter sound effect never gets old), weapon breakage -- a mechanic almost universally shrugged at by everyone who isn't a hardcore Far Cry 2 fan -?- becomes a satisfying p?art of the core combat loop.

You're not bummed when your weapon explodes. You're psyche??d, because you just stunned your enemy and did critical damage. Yo?u're excited because your weapon inventory now has a free slot. And if you ARE pissed off, then you've got even more reason to care about getting the optional Master Sword.

More d?unkworthy than any of these other features and design decisions, though, is one single, undeniable, absolutely ludicrous fact:

Somehow, This Is Nintendo's First Open World Game

What the fuck? How did they hit a grand slam right out of th?e goddamned gat??e?

Anyway, I'm sure I forgot a ton of miraculous things about this game. Feel free to add you?r own in the comments below.

The post How Breath of the Wild ??dunk?s on most open world games appeared first on Destructoid.

From the Golden Archives

_{[Originally published on Destructoid back in 2006! Some photos were lost/replaced, otherwise minor edits made. A Burch classic! For dumb people: this is satire - Niero.]}

3D-Rendered, big-buxomed women with identical blank stares do absolutely nothing for me. As far as I'm concerned, Lara Croft and the Dead or Alive girls could disappear from the face of gaming, and it wouldn't make any difference to me, because of one simple fact: They aren't Carmen Sandiego. Always outfitted in a bright red trench coat and matching fedora, Carmen has been one of the most enigmatic and prolific video game characters of all time: nothing is known about her apart from her name and occupation (thief), but she's starred in twelve games, three TV shows, and two planetarium movies. And I want to do her. I want to do her bad.

Here's why.

She's hot 

Just look at this picture of her. Carmen is living proof that mystery is sexy. She doesn't have to show a lot of skin (or any, in fact) to be attractive: that's a rarity, even among women that aren't computer game villains. She knows she's hot, but she doesn't give a rat's ass whether you do or not. She doesn't flaunt her sexiness, doesn't exploit her looks while pretending not to; seeing Carmen, you know that she got to where she is in the criminal underworld through hard work and intelligence, not her tits. I mean, it's one thing to cover yourself up, but have you ever seen both of her eyes? At the same time? Or, with a nonspecific skintone and an exotic last name like "Sandiego", can you even tell me where she was born? Hell, no. That's pretty goddamn mysterious. And pretty goddamn hot.

She's intelligent

I mean, could YOU ever find her? Considering I'm about fifteen years older, I could probably beat one of her games now, but when I was first aware of them---around 3rd grade or so---I couldn't complete a single one. Carmen hides her tracks, and she hides them well. She'll maybe leave a few clues lying around, just to tease you, keep you on the trail (Carmen likes the chase), but if she ever really wanted to, she'd disappear and you'd never see her again. It's obvious that only by her permission has she ever been caught, considering she i??mmediately esc??apes after being arrested.

It'd be difficult

Even if I get twenty clues from twenty different countries, I can't even find the chick. Can you imagine how hard it'd be to get inside her pants?

She's dangerous

Well, sort of. She's a criminal that hasn't ever killed anyone. Nonetheless, the whole crime aspect of her personality is pretty sexy; in the same way that shallow, superficial women are attracted to equally shallow and superficial musicians, lots of guys are attracted to danger---or, at l??east, the illusion of it. Dating Carmen would give you all the thrill of being a supercriminal, but without the threat of getting the death sentence if caught (Carmen steals, never kills) or being whacked by rival thugs (Carmen has no rivals). A relationship with Carmen Sandiego is basically the dating equivalent of a rollercoaster ride---exhilirating, scary, but ultimately safe. And with a blowjo??b at the end.

She has a heart of gold

Now, why does she steal all of this stuff in the first place? She doesn't seem to be using it---if she had a permanent home, it would have been found by now, and she's definitely not buying new clothes---and she may just steal stuff for the thrill factor, but, really, wouldn't that have grown old after 21 years? In reality, I think her motives are much more altruistic: she likes teaching children. In two decades, she's taught kids geography, reading, arithmetic, history, and trivia solely through her thefts. Now, you may ask, why does she have to steal in order to teach children basic school subjects? I'll tell you why. It's because she knows what kids really pay attention to. School? Eff that, nobody pays attention in school. But a high-profile robbery of a priceless artifact with some deliberately left clues and the promise of international fame for ?catching the thief? THAT is something kids will pay attention to. However selfish or greedy Carmen's exploits may seem, there's only one real reason she does any of it: for the children. And kindness is hot.

She's imaginary

So you don't have to put up with the crap you get fr??om regular girlfriends. She'll never cheat on me, she won't nag, she won't have annoying friends, and, perhaps most importantly she won't get irritated when I play videogames...she'll join in.

P.S. I would also like to point out that this post is tagged with the "Things Gamers Do" categor?y. A-hyuk-hyuk-hyuk.

The post I want to have sex with Carmen Sandiego appeared first on Destructoid.

Betrayal! Losing! How not to be a dick!

Video games (single-player ones, at l??east) teach you that you are the best, you are the only one who matters, you will always get more powerful, that your hand will be held, that you don't need to actually care ?about other human beings.

Board games teach you the opposite: you probably won't win, other people matter so you should probably be civil to them, you may have to do some work and think a little, you may have to be p??atient. Coincidentally, board games are becoming more inclusive and are a generally far, far more positive space than video games are right now. Wonder if there's a connection there.

You will lose

Apart from roguelikes, sports games, or the odd permadeath run, most every video game basically casts the player as an immortal god-being with time manipulation powers (or, in other words, Nicholas Cage from Next). If you fail, you can just retry what you did and do ??something else. While this structure greatly reduces the player's frustration, it also teaches them an implicit, deeply harmful lesson: that there is no such thing as true failure. That so long as you beat your head against a wall for a really long time, eventually that wall will break do?wn.

On the one hand, this is uplifting?? -- you're good enough! Just?? keep trying!

On the other hand: that's kind of an entitled point of view, isn't it? If you can do everything, then you deserve everything, and anything you can't do must not be your fault. The designers sucked. The mechanics were unfa?ir. Something.

Board games, on the other hand, make you lose damn near all the time. You can play Risk: Legacy with six people, but five of those people will lose every single game. You will lose at least half of your Netrunner matches. All the players can simultaneously win in Dead of Winter, but it's far more likely that all of them will lose.

Losing is a part of life. Failures (not just temporary setbacks, but failures) are an important part ??of the human experience. They make you re-examine what you did. They make you accept that the world doesn't exist just for your own pleasure. In many cases -- in the best cases -- they make you want to dust yourself off and play again.

Be cool to each other

I've played board games with people I've had drastically different sociopolitical philosophies with. They knew it. I knew it. And you know what? We just acted fuckin' cool about it. Yes, when he kills my knight in Arcadia Quest, I may be irritated, but I'm not gonna hurl slurs at him. I'm not gonna tell him to uninstall his game and go home. Why? Because he's a person. Because I??'m sitting across from him. I'm looking at him in his goddamned face. 

If I could make every League of Legends player who ever flamed anothe?r player into giving up the game to pla??y a board game with the person they'd flamed, I would do so immediately.

Knowledge is power

I sometimes root for Bond villains.

I mean, they're intelligent, they're passionate, and, most of all, they've planned some shit out. They're careful. Meticulous. And then everything they've built gets utterly d?estroyed by a drunken rapist who just kinda stumbles around until the villain's undergrou??nd base explodes.

In video games, you generally play as James Bond.

In board games, you generally play as the villain. More than that, you're actually rewarded for planning and sche?ming and thinking your way through stuff rather than blasting your way through it.

This is a much better life lesson th??an "improvise a lot, fuck shit up, and you'l?l do better than smarter people who actually use their goddamned brains."

People are the most interesting game mechanic

Werewolf is probably one of the best games ever made. Here is a list of things it does not have:

• an XP system
• multiple weapons
• a story
• varying objectives
• achievements
• a point system
• explorable locations
• stealth
• combat
• an open world

Here is a list of things it does have:

• People
• Lies (see also: people)

Human beings are more devious and surprising than any AI. Board games understand how to use humanity's na?tural interestingness, in combination with simple-yet-vague objectives ("convince the other players you are a werewolf! Everybody else, try to figu?re out who the werewolf is!")

Many popular board games (Werewolf, Coup, The Resistance) are all about using people, rather than systems.&nb?sp;

I've only ever played two video games that are interesting in the same way that Werewolf is. Trouble in Terrorist Town is basically werewolf crossed with CounterStrike. SpyParty is some??thing else entirely, but still deeply rooted in human deception and cleverne?ss.

The post Things video games need to learn from board games appeared first on Destructoid.

From death threats to disappointment, we'd all be better off if we stopped assuming the best from games

When Hello Games announced a minor delay for its much-anticipated game No Man's Sky, the team received death threats.

When Kotaku so much as reported on the delay, its staff also got death threats.

This is obviously a huge goddamned problem with a variety of contributing factors (the anonymity of the Internet, the entitleme?nt of gamers, geekdom's ongoing manchild problem), but I'm going to focus on a small one with many othe?r far-reaching consequences:

We get way too excited about games ??we haven't played yet.

Fuck it, let's do this in list format.

Getting super-hyped about a game makes you enjoy it less when you actually play it

You know what's a pretty goddamned good game? Fable. You know what got a lot of shit for being a bad game? Fable. 

Why? Because it was hyped too much.

We've all had this experience with every other medium, I'm sure: your friend tells you that a movie is MIND-BLOWING, so you see it, expecting to have your MIND BLOWN, but then it turns out it'??s just QUITE GOOD and so you feel DISAPPOINTED.

I mean, if we're being honest here, what's the upside of getting insanely hyped for a game? It on??ly makes it easier for us to get disappointed.

Hype makes us all assholes

This is a petition to remove the Washington Post's review of Uncharted 4 from Metacritic because it is too negative. While there are legitimate reasons for?? this complaint (the Post's review didn't include any score, but the outlet provided a 40/100 appraisal f??or Metacritic), the vast majority of the comments surrounding it are drenched in bile.

This is Videogamer.com responding to the flames it received for its Uncharted 4 review. The review was (1) pretty positive and (2) released before any of the furious commenters could have p??ossibly played the game.

Why? It's probably not because all of the angry commenters legitimately care about the well-being of Naughty Dog's self-esteem. It's not because the people who signed that petition are worried Naughty Dog might have Met????acritic-reliant monetary bonuses from Sony. 

They were, like so many other angry commenters on video game reviews, upset for one simple r??eason: they were really, really looking forward to a game, and they were furious at any reviewer who might kill their buzz.

I saw this kinda thing all the time when I reviewed games. People like this don't necessarily defend a game because it's good. They defend it because they want it to be good. They want the real game to match the game they've invented in their minds, and they will attack anyone who prevents them from playing that ima??ginary game. 

Hype makes us waste money

If there's one truly broken thing in the games industry, it's that?? marketing budgets are directly tied to pre-order numbers. If you can't snag a ton of pre-orders before your marketing campaign begins, your publisher won't give you the money you need to mount an effective campaign at all.

As a result, it is in the publisher and the developer's best interest?? to hype up their game as har??d as humanly possible. To sell you as hard as they can without stretching the truth too far. 

If you've ever been dissatisfied wi?th a game you pre-ordered -- if you've ever lamented the gullibility that led you to spe??nd ninety bucks on a crappy collector's edition -- then hype is to blame.

Hype is stupid and we're all stupid for buying into it

When was the last time you played a game that ever really delivered on its hype? Like, ever? I don't mean a game that came out and was pretty good??. I mean a game that came out and met, or exceeded, your lofty expectations.

My guess is that it's been a while. Why? Because, though the majority of games marketing tells us that all upcoming games are goddamned incredible, the vast majority of hyped-up games are fucking fine. Watch Dogs looked incredible during its E3 reveal. Then the game came out and it was...fine.&n?bsp;

Destiny was fine. 

L.A. Noire was fine.

Spore. BioShock Infinite. The Division.

Not great. Not horrible. Fine.

But because they're just fine -- because they don't leave the scars of spectacularly awful games -- we forget our quiet disappointment upon loading up Watch Dogs and finding out it was basically just Assassin's Creed with a larger use-button radius.

So, inevitably, the next E3 comes around, and we see a trailer for a game that looks utterly amazing and mind-blowing, and we get our hopes up, and then it comes out and we suddenly remember, oh, right -- most games aren't utterly amazing and mind-blowing. They're fine. People are sending death threats to developers and reviewers over something that's a little bit better than okay.

And then we immediately forget all that the moment ??we see another shiny trailer, because that's what the hype machi?ne demands of us. And we buy in, nearly every damned time.

Now, I'm not saying we should meet every new game announcement with nothing but snark and cynicism, but maybe we could just calm the hell down a little bit. Maybe, instead of shouting "THIS GAME WILL BE AMAZING" and throwing shitfits when it gets delayed, we could instead draw upon our years of experience with games that are just fine and instead think, "I ?hope this game will be good," or "This game will probably be okay but I'm willing to be surprised."

It'd result in fewer ??goddamn death threats, if nothing else.

The post Why we should stop getting hyped for ??upcom?ing games appeared first on Destructoid.

Some of Overwatch's characters are exactly what you'd expect, and that's good.

Overwatch has many characters. Some are superintelligent gorillas armed with lightning guns. Some are world-renow?ned DJs who can cure people with the power of music. Some are peppy, time-travelling Royal Air Force pilots.?? Some are huggable climatologists who stab people in the face with icicles.

And some are cowboys who say things? lik??e, "it's high noon."

Many of Overwatc?h's characters are surprising, origi??nal, and weird. Some are not.

This is a good thing.

A little while back, some designers from Wizards of the Coast talked about the overall tone of Dungeons and Dragons. The vast majority of people who play D&D do not, by and large, take it very seriously. We make jokey characters with shitty personalities. We fill the whole experience with silliness and in-jokes and we're far more likely to talk about the length of our Dragonborn's clitoris than we are to cry over the death of an important NPC. The actual Dungeons and Dragons lore takes itself very, very seriously...but the rest of us kinda just l??augh at it and do our own thing.

The thing is -- Wizards of the Coast knows this. It's known this for decades. And what's more, it knows the lore must take itself seriously so that we can make fun of it. If D&D were full of vibrant characters and jokey stuff and actually acknowledged how silly it was, there wouldn't be any room for us -- the players -- to be creative and goofy and fill the void made by the stereotypical, po-faced lore. Its generic nature is what allows for wonderfully crazy shit like The Adventure Zone to exist. If Dungeons and Dragons were intentionally fu??nny, then it would ?be far worse.

Or, to put it a simpler way:

You need an Abbott to balance out your Costello.

Overwatch, and its few stereotypical h??eroes, are proof of this.

I absolutely love Overwatch's characters. I love that D.Va is a pro gamer who was recruited to jump into a mechsuit and fight robots. I love that Symmetra is an autistic scientist who wants to make the world a better place, whether the rest of the world likes it or not. And the reason I get to love them so much is because they share a universe with a guy named Reaper who wears a skull mask and says thi?ngs like, "DIE, DIE, DIE." It's characters like Reaper, and McCree, and Genji that allow the rest of the cast to really stand out. They give us something simple and familiar to grab onto -- a character safety blanket -- so that the rest of the cast can feel more special.

Not only that but, much like in D&D, some of the more cliche characters' seriousness has allowed the audience to have a great deal of fun with them. Reapernames wouldn't exist if Reaper weren't the most obvious expression of the Cool Gothy Badass stereotype. You wouldn't have incredible fanart like this if Reaper were a complex and multifaceted character. McCree's smoky delivery of, "it's high noon" is probably the most traditional Cowboy Thing imaginable, but it's also a whole goddamned meme unto itself for similar reasons. 

Additionally -- and this is a great strength of Overwatch's writing across the board, not just within its more stereotypical characters -- the dialogue is not annoying. Characters don't really make capital-J Jokes, and they don't say anything particularly bizarre that would draw your attention more than it ought to. Battle dialogue, especially battle dialogue in multiplayer games, needs to be frictionless. It needs to convey information, do so concisely, and, above all, not be fucking annoying.

I'm probably more guilty of this last sin than anyone. Much of the battle dialogue in Borderlands 2 is filled with ca?pital-G Goofz, which can make it extremely irritating when you hear the?? same line twice. My bad.

Overwatch, thankfully, doesn't have this problem. Lines like "justice rains from above," "I've got you in my sights,??" or "it's high noon" don't blow anyone's pants off in and of themselves, but they convey a bit of character (Pharah cares about justice, evidently, which is why she doesn't say "death from above"), they're informative without being distracting, and, while they aren't particularly badass or funny, they aren't goddamn??ed annoying. 

"Not goddamned annoying" is a pretty good -- if cynical -- three-word review of Overwatch's characters in general. Yes, they may occasionally be cliché, but those cliché characters or lines of dialogue are actually what make the more unusual, unexpected parts of the game really work. Blizzard clearly wants us to play Overwatch for hours and hours, and to talk about it with our friends, and to s?hare stories about it?? online. Through their intelligent use of stereotypical characters and dialogue, it has more or less ensured that.

The post Ove??rwatch: The benefits of unsurprising characterization appeared first on Destructoid.

Because we're not

_{[Publisher's Note: This was an early-access article from our subscription program, now released for free as Overwatch is out. Leaky benefits! Thanks to our patrons. -Niero]}

I have never been a hero in a video game. Ever.

I've been told I'm a hero, though. Literally hundreds of times. I have accomplished heroic feats -- putting oneself in significant personal danger for the sake of reducing ??harm to other??s -- exactly zero times.

Most recently, I've been playing Overwatch, which I enjoy a lot. The character designs are great, and the fast-paced shooter action lands in a sweet spot between Team Fortress 2 and MOBAs that I really, really like. But the game, and much of the ancillary material around it, persists in referring to its characters (and by extension, its players) as "heroes." And that kind of rubs me the wrong way, because the core gameplay of Overwatch isn'??t about heroism. Heck, it's not even about loyalty to a faction or ideology, since you can ha??ve "good" and "evil" characters on the same team.

Overwatch is about getting into a group, beating the shit out o?f your enemies, dying a lot, leveling up, and having f?un. Which is totally fine. It's just not at all heroic.

Heroism is about putti?ng something at risk to help someone else. Donating a kidney. Jumping on a grenade. Running into a burning building. It is not, generally speaking, about committing context-free viole??nce for the promise of a reward. And yet, that's what nearly every video game under the sun would have us believe -- that by Killing All The Bad Guys, and Getting All The Quest Rewards, we are "heroes." We aren't! We're mercenaries! If you give us a few skill points, or a new weapon, or a fistful of credits, we'll do damn near whatever you ask us to.

I love playing Destiny with my friends, but every time some po-faced NPC talks about how heroic we are, I can't help but think: Man, I wish I could do something heroic! I've pulled off some exhilarating last-minute revives during the King's Fall raid, sure, but I wasn't doing that because I love my bros, or be?cause I want to save the galaxy or whatever -- I was doing that to get some goddamned 320 drops.

??Here?? are some legitimately heroic mechanics you could put into a video game:

• In a permadeath co-op game, the ability to sacrifice oneself and all your accumulated loot and experience to save your partner from death.
• When your friend dies, you can go to the afterlife and fight to free them. If you die while in the afterlife, your character is deleted.
• There are no level restrictions on gear but if you gift a piece to another person, it becomes soulbound and belongs to them forever.
• You can donate loot or experience to save an NPC from being killed in a quest.

You may notice that these mechanics (A) sound incredibly not-fun by most conventional definitions of t??he wo?rd, and thus (B) are nowhere to be found in any big budget game. Save one, that is.

You may be familiar with Dr. Wasteland, the famous medic in DayZ. The dude will risk life and limb -- remember, DayZ has permadeath -- to find and help newbies who desperately need medical assistance. If you can get in contact with him, even if you'??re planning on betraying him, he will go out of his way to find and save you. Even a game where a single false move means that all of your (extremely rare) gear disappears. Even in a game where everyone is out to betray everyone else. Eve??n in this Cormac McCarthy-flavored zombie apocalypse, Dr. Wasteland goes out of his way to help people.

That is heroic. Sadly, it??'s also the only exampl??e of legitimate heroism I can think of in video games.

Films, movies, and comics are pretty good and indulgent hero fantasy, but when it comes to taking selfish acts and spinning them into statements on heroism, video games take the cake. Games, with their leveling systems and constant achievements and virtual pats on the back, are really good at convincing us ??we're heroes when we haven't really done anything at all. We get stronger, we get skill points, and we get the congratulations of virtual people when we clear out a wolf den. They tell us that we're great, that we've Made a Difference. That we are the center of the world. That we are the Chosen One. That by blowing away dudes in hoodies, we're making New York City a safer place.

This is dishonest. This is irritating. This is a? trap.

Granted, it's a trap that a few really great games have avoided. The entire Saints Row series revels in the fact the protagonist is a selfish sociopath, and as a result is the single funniest franchise in games. Dark Souls doesn't give a shit about the player's role in the story, and never tries to claim what you're doing is anything even remotely close to heroism. Even indie darling 1001 Spikes, wherein you try to defeat dangerous dungeons to prove to your absentee adventurer dad that you're better than him, implicitly admits that we play games for the joy of proving our superiority rather than helping our fellow ma??n.

These are game stories that do not coddle us. They don't pat us on the back. They tell us that we may not be heroes, but what we do still has meaning. They tell us that the world is complicated and being a good person is difficult. Their stories may be brutal. Their stories may be unkind. But they are honest.

And being honest about?? yourself? Being true to what you want, and who you are, and not demanding credit for something that doesn't deserve it? Now that's actually kind of heroic.

The post Let’s stop pretending we’re heroes appeared first on Destructoid.

Despite, and because of, how fun they are

I have a few friends who play The Division. Every once in a while, I'll ask th??em if they're playing it. Yeah, they'll say. I'll ask if it's gotten fun yet. Nah, they'll say. I'll ??ask them if they're gonna stop playing.

"Maybe," they say. "Maybe when I reach max level?."

In other words, they were willing to give up hours upon hours of their lives to something they didn't actually enjoy doing, simply be?cause they enjoy how it feels to grind.

That is goddamn terrifying.

Look, first things first: I enjoy grindy games. I got to level 60 in WoW. I reached max level with every character in Borderlands 2 (in addition to, uh, writing it). Every time my light level increases in Destiny, I feel ?a surge of excitement right at the base of my skull.

So when I say that leveling systems and scheduled rewards and mandatory grind scare me, it's not because I think those things aren't fun. Quite the opposite, in fact -- I'm scared because those things are so fun.

So, I'm playing the new Hitman, and I'm really enjoying it. There's only one problem, though (well, to be totally honest, there are several problems, chief among them the fact that there's no time scrub in a game that's all about waiting? and patience and completely fucking you over the second you alert a single guard): in order to unlock new items and weapons in the massive Paris stage, I have to reach a certain, I dunno, "Hitman Level."

In order to increase my Hitman Level, I need to replay the Paris mission over and over and over again, doing slightly different things each time: kill the stylist and hide his body in this playthrough, then push the target into the Seine river in that playthrough, then collapse a skylight on him in another?? play?through.

In theory, this is not a bad idea. The Paris stage is gigantic and full of seemingly countless assassination possibilities. It'll be another couple of months until the next episode is out, giving me an entirely new murder-y sandbox to play around in. These challenges were surely designed to make me really engage with the Paris mansion on a deep level, rather than just blaze my way through it and not pay attenti?on to any but the mo??st obvious solutions.

Initially, I explored the space and found all kinds of things I'd never known about: hidden chandelier kills, good closets for hiding bodies, different escape routes. After a couple of playthroughs, though, I realized I wasn't playing for the joy of exploration and discovery. I was playing to tick achievements off a list and watch a progress bar get hig?her so I could finally get my hands o??n a goddamned remote mine. Even though I should have enjoyed the actual act of exploring the manor and learning more about the map, I found myself irritated. Bored. Focused only on the reward, rather than the path to getting said reward.

If you've ever heard Chris Hecker's 2011 GDC talk "Achievements considered harmful?," this development may not be surprising to you. In this talk, Hecker argues that tons of sociological experiments have shown that overly rewarding people for doing a task will not only make them measurably worse at completing that task, but will also make them start subconsciously disliking the task and caring only ?about the reward. When we get a cookie for doing our chores, we don't think of our chores as something meaningful -- we think of them as the stupid bullshit we have to go through in order to get the cookie.

Is it any surprise, then, that jokey sort-of-parody games like Cookie Clicker or Clicker Heroes have gotten so wei?rdly popular? Could it be that a decade of games about scheduled rewards and leveling up and XP bars and stat-centric character "improvement" have taught us to care more about the upward numerical tick of our character level than the actual gameplay we have to go through to get that level?

Which brings me back to The Division. 

Again, I haven't played the game myself, but my friends who play it talk about how the game is addictive, but not good. That they care about the loot, and the character upgrades, and the random drops, but that they aren't enjoying the actual, moment-to-moment, bullet spongy, hoodie-shooting gameplay experience. I can relate to this. I didn't like Destiny very much when I first played it (though I do now, thanks to the social components and the King's Fall raid), but I stuck with it for far longer than I otherwise would have because of that grind -- those numbers had to get bigger. Those progress bars had to get filled. Even though there was very little drastically different about my early-game Destiny experience and my late-game Destiny experience, save for some stat changes and a few extra abilities (and the raids, which are arbitrarily gated off by level and gear restrictions anyhow). I didn't enjoy Destiny -- I was doing literally the same exact thing over and over but I spent hours on it, because I was doing the exact same thing over and over while getting regularly scheduled rewards for doing so.

In many ways, prog?ression systems are a tried-and-true design choice that can convince the player that they haven't been spending dozens of hours d??oing the exact same thing. 

I don't mean to suggest that these systems aren't fun. They are. But they're fun in a way that seems to bypass rationality and directly tickle the lizard parts of our brain. One part of me enjoys the flashing lights and dings and feels a quiet, unenthusiastic satisfaction the entire time I'm playing, and that part of my brain overwhelms and silences the other bits?? of my brain that want to turn the game off and play something better.

In other words, games like this kind-of-sort-of control your?? goddamned ?mind.

(This argument will sound familiar to anyone who's heard any of Jon Blow's talks about World of Warcraft or other similarly grindy games.)

But, like -- growth is good, right? It feels really good to know, as you play a game, that you're getting stronger at it in some way. That you're getting better at it. One should feel, after putting many hours into a game, that they are better at it. Progression systems are just a quicker way?? to effect that feeling in the player.

But are they necessary in making the player feel this way, or are they just an easier shortcut that gets you out of having to design a game actually based around skill and personal improvement? Spelunky doesn't need any form of leveling or character growth, because you, as the player, have to get better and think faster and strategize more and internalize the game's rules. Ditto for, say, The Witness, or Monaco, or Left 4 Dead, or DayZ. These games have such clean, solid core designs that scheduled rewards or character growth would be irrelevant. Sure, these games could totally include leveling systems -- "kill five v??ampires in the jungle and you'll unlock more items in the shop!" -- but they don't need to. They're not about arbitrarily telling the player that they're amazing when they haven't actually had to fail and improve.

That said, there are many games that do character growth really well, in ways that?? don't seem slightly creepy or lazy. These games tie growth into the core of the game and make that growth a strategic, risky, important decision.

Every upgrade in XCOM is an incredibly difficult decision (in terms of which upgrade you get, how much that upgrade costs, what you could be using those resources on other than that upgrade, which soldier you give the upgrade to, etc.) that could totally bac?kfire and resu?lt in permanent consequences for you and your entire crew.

Ditto for the Dark Souls games, in many ways -- character creation is SO important (and yet ignorable, as any SL1-runner can tell you!), and souls are SUCH a precious commodity, that your character growth is an important and earned part of the entire Souls experience. It??'s not just A Thing That Exists To Make You Feel Good.

Or you can take Hyper Light Drifter, which doesn't have a lot of long-term consequence to it (you have unlimited respawns upon dying), yet still manages to make its sole upgrade system interesting and worthwhile. Many abilities you can buy, from multi-dash to bullet reflection, are different rather than better. You still hav??e to think and ?improve on your own, rather than relying on the leveling system to improve for you.

Often, though, leveling systems are not used very well, which is a problem when they've become so damned ubiquitous. The new Mirror's Edge game locks basic freeru?nning?? movements (turning 90 degrees, rolling, swinging from poles) behind XP unlocks. Every single open-world game is now required to have at least one skill upgrade path, lest players get too much freedom, too quickly. While gating things behind XP is actually a really good way to slowly introduce and tutorialize new concepts to the player (imagine getting all your WoW skills ??the second you made your first character), it often harm??s both the games themselves, and the playstyles of the people playing it.

To go back to Chris Hecker's talk again, I mentioned that giving external rewards fo??r completing a task (such as giving you a level-up for killing a hundred orcs) makes you worse at completing that task in the future. I can't speak for everyone, but I've certainly noticed my own playstyle reflect these findings.

When playing Far Cry Primal, my heart wants to be an explorer -- someone who takes in the surroundings, goes slowly, and focuses primarily on taking out baddie outposts. I want to feel like a humble stranger in the game's world. Because of the incredibly dense upgrade systems, though, I can't ever feel truly immersed in the world because I'm so goddamned busy trying to chase the next item on my to-do list. I've gotta get some rare southern dust, and skin a badger, and rescue a captured villager. I'm so obsessed with filling up all my progress bars that I'm often not looking at the gorgeous world ahead of me, and instead scanning the horizon for a particular kind of glowing rock. I'm not really in the moment. 

So, what do we do? I dunno, man. I've got no conclusion, save to say that?? I hope we get fewer games that rely on upgrade trees and XP and leveling and ??grindable loot to be fun. 

Now I'm going to go play Dark Souls III for twenty hours.

The post Leveling systems scare the crap out of me appeared first on Destructoid.

But it's okay. Most people are wrong about this.

Most sandbox games treat their open ??worlds like pornographic films tr??eat story.

Despite the fact that games like Assassin’s Creed or Grand Theft Auto bill themselves as sandbox experiences, the actual ope??n-world activities -- the stuff that’s supposed to justify the need to schlep across dozens of city blocks to get anywhere that matters -- are usually half-hearted, obligatory affairs. Collect these feathers (for no reason). Rob a convenience store (for no benefit).

There are The Quests -- linear missions that actually had effort put into them, the stuff that you are actually there for -- and The Open World itself. Tooling around Los Santos won’t change damn near anything about your experience in the Grand Theft Auto V's story missions, and, apart from a few unnecessary weapon upgrades, farting around in a historical animus recreation has nothing to do with your plot-mandated assassination missions.

There are very, very few open-world games that actually wring meaningful gameplay out of their sandbox environments. But of those that do, Red Faction: Guerrilla is the absolute best.

Despite being a massive and lengthy nonlinear game, Red Faction: Guerrilla is beautifully focused. The main plot is about strategically blowing up buildings. The side missions are about strategically blowing up buildings (or enemies). The open world is about driving around looking for a quest, when -- oh, hey, there’s an important Evil Government building on the side of the road. I should strategically blow it up.

But why would you blow up that building on the side of the road? Well, apart from the fact that doing so will get you valuable scrap (your main currency), you need to destroy a certain number of Evil Government buildings to reduce their Evil Governmental Control over a location. Only once you’ve sufficiently lowered the Evil G?overnment’s control can you access the story missions.

More than that, the Evil Government buildings are really goddamn fun to blow up. These locations can be destroyed however you want, and all represent their own unique, interesting gameplay scenarios. Can you blow up this build??ing crawling with troops before they blast you to shreds? Can y??ou detonate these gas towers without getting caught in the explosion?

Compare this to something like Grand Theft Auto V. You’re walking around on the beach, and you see a convenience store. As Grand Theft Auto is presumabl??y an experience about be?ing a criminal, you're impelled to think "Oh, I should probably go in and rob that place."

So you do. And it’s p?retty dull. You get, like, twenty dollars for your troubles. And then the cops show up. They chase after you. And then you escape, which is almost fun. Then when you go to buy a gun with the stolen cash, you realize twenty bucks doesn’t get you much. So you go onto a story mission where they give you all the guns you need anyway. And, at the end, you get way more money than you’d ever get doing the open-world bullshit. That allows you to buy a gun that’s a bit nicer, but doesn’t really change anything about how you play. So you just decide to do the story missions and only fart around with open-world stuff once you get bored (because, obviously, you can’t actually explore the open world during a mission or you'll insta-fail). Your actual interaction with the o??pen world is now limited exclusively to whatever happens as you drive from one quest marker to another. Which isn’t much.

Meanwhile, in Red Faction: Guerrilla, you’re running around, trying to destroy an enemy bunker with nothing but your sledgehammer because you’re out of remote mines that you haven’t been able to afford more of because you blew all of your scrap on a thermobaric rocket launcher, but WAIT, there’s an ammo chest over there, so you sprint toward it as an enemy takes cover behind it and unleashes a salvo of machine gun fire. When you reach ??the chest, you whack the fucker in the head so hard he goes flying, and you grab the rocket launcher ammo. Since the bunker's northwest corner looks damaged, you ??decide to weaken its southeast corner, so you let the rocket fly, but it blows up a couple of explosive barrels you didn’t realize were there, and the chain reaction takes out the entire bunker and you with it. So, you’re dead. But at least you took down the bunker and can now complete the next story mission.

And you’re really looking forward to this story mission, see, because it’ll either be a cute one-off action sequence (drive this car really fast while mortar fire rains down on you!), or it’ll be something so nonlinear that you have the option to approach the situation however the?? hell you want.

That’s the other? thing about most o?pen-world games: they’re not really that nonlinear  when it comes to how you go about completing their main story missions. The latter-day GTA games have gotten more and more strict about what you can or can’t do before you insta-fail. Meanwhile Assassin’s Creed never really gives you the tools to perform anything?? more than a handful of predetermi?ned death blows.

Because of Red Faction: Guerrilla’s incredible destruction tech, however, you have a myriad of different ways to deal with most of the missions -- my personal favorite? of which tasks you with assassinating a group of Evil Government Jerkwads who are meeting on the fifth floor of a skyscraper. Now, sure, you could storm up the stairs and machine gun the bastards to death, but that’s not the most effective -- nor the most fun? -- strategy.

Maybe you’ll sneak in and use your nano rifle to vaporize each successive floor, so the bad guys fall to their deaths while still inside the building. Maybe you’ll climb onto a nearby c??rane, nano-vaporize the westmost face of the building, and fire a thermo rocket into the hole so that it obliterates everything inside the meeting room. Maybe you’ll toss a bunch of remote mines onto your truck, then drive it into the first floor of the building and hit the detonate button, bringing the entire goddamn building down. Or, since you know the bad guys will flee to their vehicles the moment you attack, maybe you plant the remote mines on their vehicles, take a couple of pistol shots a??t them to get them good and scared, wait for them to enter their getaway ?vehicles, and then detonate the remote mines.

Meanwhile, in GTA V, you’ll fail a mission for merely driving too far away from y?our mission objective.

There are a lot of good open-world games. Metal Gear Solid V, many of the Far Cry games, and Shadow of Mordor all come to mind. But even these games have been unable to reach the heights of Volition’s underrated, admittedly ugly Red Faction: Guerrilla. It’s an open-world game that actually uses its open world, and allows for all ma?nner of personal expression when it comes to how you blow up your targets.

Also, it’s a really intense metaphor fo??r the war on terror. So, there’s that.

The post Red Faction: Guerrilla is the best open-world game ever and if you disagr?ee you are wrong appeared first on Destructoid.

Now move on, already

With Hotline Miami 2 recently released, I realized I am really, really tired of games that belong in its genre. When I say "genre," I refer ?not to "action games" or "indie games" or even "violent games," but a subtler, more hypocritical classification: I'm referring to videogames that criticize violent videogames and their fans, while still being violent videogames.

Hotline Miami. Far Cry 3. Games that turn a mirror on th??e player and say, "lo??ok at you! Look at how much you love simulated, throwaway viole?nce, you absolute monster! Let me rub your nose in how gross you are...by filling your screen with lovely, lovely violence!"

There are much better ways to deal with violence in videogames, and they don't invol??ve?? hypocrisy.

Most games are hor??rifying ?celebrations of violence and empowerment that prioritize aggression over compassion, and competition over empathy.

And that's completely fine.

(So long as the game, and the audience, know that that's what is?? going on.)

We all -- to some extent or another -- are aware that the art and media we engage with can often be full of shit. We often love our art for being full of shit! I love Doctor Who, and it's one of the most full-of-shit television shows of all time! It champions optimism and mercy without ever approaching anything even remotely similar to a real-life dilemma, and -- so long as you know that's what it's doing -- it's a?? perfectly fine bit of escapism.

And so it is with violent videogames. Yes, it's really, really weird that you run around massacring orcs because They're The Bad Guys, and it's even weirder that we were more excited to massacre them in Shadow of Mordor ???;specifically because they felt more human. They felt like people with lives and backstories and that made it ;way more satisfying to slice their heads off what the fuck.

But! It's escapism. It's full of shit, but it's full of shit in a way that is decidedly fun and effective. Should we ask greater questions about why Shadow of Mordor is fun, and consider how its fun-ness might be inexorably linked to racism and classism? Absolutely. Should we stop playing Shadow of Mordor and paint everyone who enjoys it as an enormous pile of human w?aste? Of course not.

Or, to quote Anita Sarkeesian: "It is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects." (A quote that, if more pe?ople actually listened to, might have resulted in a w??ay goddamn calmer gamer culture over the past few years.)

So, it's okay to e??????????????????????????njoy sadistic, weird, violent bullshit, so long as?? all parties involved know that that's exactly what they're doing.

The o??nly real problem, to me, is when that bullshit star?ts pretending to be about something else.

Going back to Shadow of Mordor -- which was unquestionably my favorite game of last year -- I loved the over-the-top violence and the multitude of horrific things that you could do to your enemies. I distinctly did not love the story that tried to morally justify those things. The story of Talion's vengeance, and how justified he was in killing all those orcs because they are inherently "vile, savage beasts" (again, you should really read Austin Walker's article), is kind of nonsensical. It gets the player from A to B, sure, but it never stopped feeling weird for the game to paint Talion ??as a hero with one brush, and then allow you to decapitate an orc who is defined by a very human, relatable fear of fire moments la??ter.

But we've heard this argument before, rig??ht? Ludonarrative dissonance, blah blah blah. We've heard this argument so much, in fact, that it spawned an entirely new genre of games: the Violent Games That Criticize Violence And People Who Enjoy Violence genre.

Anyone who has played Hotline Miami will remembe?r the constant, enigmatic questions posed to the player by its cast of animal-faced murderers.

"Knowing oneself means acknowledging one's actions."

"You like hurting people, don't you?"

"You're not a nice person, are you?"

"Do you like hurting other people?"

On its surface, these questions -- questions t?hat many games pose to their players -- are deep, interesting queries.

Functionally, though, they do noth??ing but jab an ac?cusatory finger at the player. You fucking caveman, they shout. What's wrong with you? Why do you like this horrible, violent pornography?

The answer to these condescending questions is simple: because these games are fun, and you know they're fun, and you spent hours and hours and hours of development time making sure I'd find them fun.

These games never broach the actual social or biological reasons we find violence entertaining. Evolutionarily, it's to our advantage to find violence more stimulating and interesting than other aspects of the human experience, because a failure to find violence noteworthy can result in our deaths. Culturally, there are reams and reams of academic papers on violence as a (chiefly male) expression of worth and power that can often poison the aggressor almost as much?? as their ?victim.

These games don't address that. Far Cry 3 says you like violence because you're a racist, simple-minded tourist (or at least, you have no problem taking on the role of one because, as a player, you're so eager to get to the murdering that your avatar is meaningless). Hotline Miami says you like it because you're kind-of-sort-of-bad-person-I-guess-but-maybe-not-really-I-don't-know. Spec Ops: The Line suggests you've just never given?? any thought to what the hell you've done as a player of games.

These games chastise the player for enjoying consequence-free violence, right before offering them a smorgasbord of beautifully rendered, lovingly visceral consequence-free violence (Spec Ops less so, as it actually gives a shit about the choices you made in the story. Additionally, it forbids the player from being as graphically sadistic toward his or her enemies as FC3 and Hotline Miami).

This is kind of weird, right? This is a hypocritical way of? having your cake and eating it too -- of pretending you're making a grand statement about violence, without actually saying anything of note beyond -- bizarrely -- blaming the player for buying your game.

If a game truly cared about exploring violence and its consequences, wouldn't it bake that into its game systems? XCOM, to me, is a greate?r treatise on violence and death than any of the other games I've mentioned because its systems force the player to make real, consequential, dynamic choices about the value of life. Should I put my elite assault trooper into the path of a crysalid if it means that he'll be able to save two or three civilians? Is it worthwhile to use my rookie to draw a sectoid's fire, just so my sniper can get a shot off? How much do I care about "winning" versus being a good person? What is the actual, financial cost of a human being?

XCOM, while seemingly just a silly game about marines fighting aliens, directly engages with these questions in a way that the Hotline Miamis and Far Crys of the world never do. ??(And what's mo??re, they do it without relying on gore for spectacle's sake).

The answer for that is, perhaps, obvious: because it's hard. Because to do so is expensive, and means you're making a mechanically complex game in a time where it's easier and che?aper and often more profitable to make simple games.

But if you're going ??to make a simple game that casts the player in a simple, hyperviolent role, why pretend to be an exploration of violence when your game mechanics obviously aren't? Why not go the other direction?

Why not celeb??rate the fact that you're, to be br?utally cynical, kinda full of shit?

That's what Borderlands 2 was about -- from my perspective, at least. (It should probably go without saying, but a TON of people worked on Borderlands 2, and though I wrote about 90% of the dialogue, that dialogue makes up a comparatively small percentage of the overall Borderlands 2 experience. I can only speak for myself, and my ??own frame of mind when I worked on the game.)

Early on, after the player kills a few psycho bandits, I had Cl?aptrap comment on the battle:

"Minio??n! What did you DO?! Those people had LIVES, and FAMILIES, and -- nah, I'm totally kidding. SCREW those ??guys!"

As a joke, this line of dialogue isn't great. It's too long, its punchline is obvious, and it's just plain not all that funny. But nonetheless, this was a line I found myself coming back to as a thematic touchstone for the series as a whole. Yes, you are a murderer. Yes, you only exist to kill people and rob their corpses so you can kill more powerful things and rob more shiny stuff from their corpses. But it's all bullshit, so don't sweat it. Don't forget that you're being kind of a murderous antiher??o, but have fun with it! It's entertaining to be a murderous antihero. Don't pretend you're something that you're n?ot (a hero), but don't beat yourself up over your antiheroism -- revel in it.

There was a bit of internal worry about casting the player as such an amoral mercenary, but by making the bad guy an even bigger asshole, and by surrounding the people with (hopefully) charming, equally amoral good guys, everything basically turned out okay. We didn't, to my recollection, get any letters about how horrific it was to play as an antihero -- if anything, people seemed to enjoy that Borderlands?? was so jovially ??honest with its players about what it was and what it asked them to do.

Saints Row works for exactly the same reason. The first two Saints Row games can often veer toward the horrifying, as the player upholds "values" like loyalty (which manifests itself in the player brutally murdering Julius, the founder of the Saints who rats on them in an attempt to bring peace back to Stillwater) and justice (which sees the player kidnap an unarmed woman, lock her in the trunk of a destruction derby car, and trick her boyfriend into ramming her to de??ath as a means of avenging one of their fallen comrades).

But Saints Row 3 and 4? The games where the franchise fully accepted just how batshit insane its players, characters, and world are? God damn, those are some good fucking videogames. Yes, your only method of interaction with civilians sees you punching or bludgeoning or shooting them. "Fuck it," the game says -- "let's incentivize that kind of behavior by making civilians drop health when you kill them." The moment Saints Row stopped trying to make serious statements about anything was the moment it reached its full potential. It accepted its own ludicrousness, and?? in so doing became the most honest videogame ever made: you play like a psychopath in these games, so we'll cast you as a mass-murderer and have everyone talk about how hilariously fun it is to be a mass-murderer. Fuck it, we'll make you president because you were so good at being a mass-murderer.

Sure, the Saints Row games aren't "deep" (except for the fact that they totally are?, tha?nks to their treatment of sexuality), but they're honest. Their messages, s??uch as they are, match up perfectly with their mechanics.

In my dumb, ex-game-dev opinion, XCOM and Saints Row represent the two best ways of actually tackling violence in games. Either build yo??ur systems around violence and its consequences -- actually force your players to answer questions of morality and power for themselves --  or just throw up your hands and create a world where the ??player can have fun being a total piece of shit. Above all, just be honest in what you're doing -- don't pretend your game is about How Bad Violence Is when it's really about How Awesome Pixelated Blood Looks.

The post Lots of games are morally bankrupt, we get it appeared first on Destructoid.

There used to be dinosaurs in Brooklyn

[Ed. note: El Great Burcho published this on February 2007. It's one of our Golden favorites.]

No, I'm not being ironic, or corny, or funny. Neither am I drunk, stoned, nor under the influence of outside forces requiring me to like the Super Mario Bros movie anymore than I already do.

I simply wish to inform you, the reader, as to the reasons why it see?ms to get an undeservedly bad vibe from the gaming community at large, and why we should all treat it with a hell of a?? lot more respect than we really do. 

Do y??ou think you're prepared for how long this article is? going to be?

You have no idea how long this article is going to be.

Hit the jump for a prepared dosage of ci??nematic excellence, complete with screencaps of my favorite bits.

The special effects.

You've gotta give them credit where credit is due: while the blue screen shots are very easy to spot with my older, wiser, not-eight-years-old-and-therefore-prone-to-believe-everything-I-see-in-a-movie-is-real eyes, the FX shots have so far managed to stand the test of time. Whether we're talking about the CGI shots (like, say, Koopa and Mario disintegrating between both worlds at the very end) or the practical puppetwork (the Goombas), it's hard to complain about the quality of how the effects themselves were pulled off. Hell, nine years later The Mummy even ripped off the "face in th?e sand" effect seen ab?ove.

Bob Hoskins as Mario.

Complain all you want about Luigi's lack of mustache, but you can't deny that casting Bob Hoskins as Mario was a stroke of genius. He nails the accent, and manages to make a well-developed character out of what was essentially written as a two-dimensional cartoon. In case you didn't know, Hoskins -- who also played badass Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit -- is one of the most versatile British actors still alive today. For God's sake, the man played Iago in Othello, and he had the balls to play a fatass, Italian plumber for a children's movie. And evidently, he didn't even know that Super Mario Bros was based on a video game: after already accepting the job, he went home and told his son, who promptly went apeshit and showed daddy the video game??. I can only assume tha??t by this point, it was too late for him to back out of the film.

The girl who plays Daisy is really cute.

Look at her. Pouty lips, big eyes, hot eyebrows...she's like my dream girl,? except not cheating on me with a 24-year-old guitarist from an underground Emo band.

Gave John Leguizamo his start.

 I think this is a goo??d thing. Regardless, he wasn't bad as Luigi, and this is the film tha??t allowed him to make the jump from standup comic to big-screen actor. Granted, it only took a couple of years for him to make the same jump in the exact opposite direction, but you get my point.

Mario does some actual goddamn plumbing.

Mario, the plumber, is actually doing some plumbing that doesn't involve jumping into a pipe. Until Superstar Saga, this was the only evidence we had of the fact that Mario occasionally, you know, works.

Political satire.

In case you can't read, the poster behind Koopa reads "KOOPA THE ENVIRONMENTALIST," and he's holding a chainsaw. It's not exactly Jonathan Swift, but you have to admit that, it's pretty clever viewed in the context of a kids' movie.  In changing Koopa from a king to a president, whilst keeping all of his fascist traits, the writers simultaneously made the film (A) more accessible, and (B) more socially relevant. Plus, we get a lot of cool-looking "VOTE KOOPA" posters, complete with pictures of Dennis Hopper? kissing babies. Come on, it's pretty cleve?r.

It taught us Super Mario's last name.

It makes sense that their last names would be Mario, considering you don't usually classify siblings by the first name of the most popular ?one (e.g., my sister and I are not "The Anthony Siblings") -- but nobody really put two and two together until the movie did it for us. Mario Mario and Luigi Mario. Say what you will about the canonicity of the film, many fans (myself included) still accept that Super Mario's last name is the same as his first. You can reject everything else about the film, but this aspect of it has still endured over the years.

The set design.

Sets like those in Super Mario Bros really make me miss the 90's: it was a time when CGI was too expensive and risky to use in great quantities, thus requiring the use of practical sets and special effects. Honestly, look at that city; it's only used in about two scenes, but it's extremely, extremely detailed on a Blade Runner kind of level. Neon lights, huge crowds, big buildings...after films like Mario Bros and Dark City, this kind of set w??orkmanship doesn't exist anymore. 

The Goombas.

One of the main critiques of the Mario Bros movie during its release was that it was too scary and adult for kids, but too silly and childish for adults. While I loved the flick as a kid, I can now see what those reviewers meant: the Goombas are pretty fucking creepy. They're about nine feet tall with heads the size of my fist, they never speak in anything but guttural gibberish, and their faces are WAY too expressive. The Goombas are a case of special effects done too well: despite the limited surface are??a of their faces, the Goombas are capable of expressing pretty much every emotion known to man. This is kind of cool, but also kind of terrifying. I'm not even sure if this is necessarily one of the movie's good points, but it bears mentioning nonetheless.

Some of the dialogue is pretty funny.

Not knee-slapping hilarious, but clever:

Luigi: That’s incredible. There used to be dinosaurs inBrooklyn?

Mario: Don’t get excited, Luigi. There used to be Dodgers, too.

Radio: Be on the lookout for two aliens…

Luigi: What, now we gotta deal with aliens, too?!

Mario: Luigi, we’re the aliens!

Luigi: We are?

(Mario nods)

Luigi: Woah, cool!

Spike (pointing at Koopa): Fascist!

Iggy (also pointing at Koopa): Oppressor of the proletariat!

Koopa (pointing at himself): Guy in charge.

Anthony Anderson's first big role.

I kid, I kid.

The most unintentionally slow chase scene ever filmed.

While most of this list is filled with genuinely great things about this movie, even I can't ignore how bad the sewer chase scene is: after rescuing some kidnapped girls from the Goomba lair, Mario and the hostages grab a mattress and proce?ed to surf down the frozen sewer pipes, at which point they are pursued b?y the Goombas. I don't know why, but the way the chase is filmed makes it feel as if the characters are moving at roughly two miles an hour -- and sadly, it's the major setpiece of the film (I used to have a glow-in-the-dark-poster depicting this scene). It's hard not to watch the scene and laugh at how utterly unexciting it is, but therein lies the film's accidental genius: you just laughed at how bad the chase was! You are unintentionally enjoying yourself! Ha! 

The evil granny.

She comes out of nowhere and doesn't really fit?? the tone for the rest of the movie, but at one point Mario and Luigi are mugged by a cattle-prod-wielding granny who shrieks, "I WANT KOOPA KOINS! I WANT KOOPA KOINS!" She's only around for about ten seconds before Anthony Anderson throws her into traffic, but the granny remains one of the more memorable (and sadly, one of the most well-developed) characters in the film.

The grossest prop/character ever designed.

When Koopa took over, he de-evolved the previou?s Mushroom ??King into his primordial state of fungus.

Ew.

The entire plot is actually a tweaked version of Hamlet. 

The old Mushroom King (King Hamlet) is de-evolved (killed) by King Koopa (Claudius), and it's up to an inexpe?rienced hero (Mario/Luigi) to restore balance to the kingdom by avenging the king. Daisy is Ophelia and Spike and Iggy are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Except, you know, nobody dies. 

Mario and Luigi's leisure suits.

Lookin' gooooood.

"BOB-OMB!"

Mario stands on a bridge, weaponless and defenseless. King Koopa stands across from him, armed?? with a flamethrower. What does Mario do? He takes out the small windup bomb given to him by the old,  fun??gi-fied king and proceeds to wind it. Koopa squints, trying to see what he's doing. Suddenly, the realization hits him:

"Bob-omb."

At this point, everyone in the city sees what Mario has in his hands, and they proceed to FREAK THE FUCK OUT. Cars crash, people trample each other in an effort to run away, and chaos generally ensues. All based around a small black ball wea?ring plastic Reebok shoes (seriously, the Reebok logo is on the Bob-ombs shoes. ??I'm not posting a capture of it, you'll have to look for yourself). There isn't a kid alive who saw the movie and didn't want one of these.

Dennis Hopper actually signed up to play a giant, evil lizard.

And I haven't the slightest idea why. Did they lie to him and say he wasn't going to have the silliest hairdo ever put on film? Or did they fail to mention that he spends an entire scene up to his neck in mud? I don't get it, but it's damn entertaining to watch one of the guys who starred in Easy Rider shoot fireballs at a mustachioed Shakespeare?an actor.

This waiter.

He's at the very beginning of the movie. WORSHIP HIS MULLET AND YE WILL FIND TRUE ENLIGHTENMENT.

Yoshi!

The inclusion of Yoshi is pretty damn cool. He shows up about halfway through the third act,which is when most movies choose to stop introducting new characters. So, if you're a fan of the games, you've been looking for references, waiting for your favorite characters, and so on -- by the time Mario and Luigi don their trademark costumes, you assume that we've already gotten all the Mario characters we're gonna get. But, who is that small, chained dinosaur in Daisy's cell? It's Yoshi! How cool! And he has at least one of his abilities from the game (his long tongue), and he actually uses it to help Daisy (he trips up Koopa's bitch of a wife and helps Daisy escape)! Of course, he gets stabbed in the throat soon after he does so and we never see him again, but i?t's still the thought that counts. 

The "meteorite bluffing" scene.

At the very end, when Mario and Koopa face off, we've been led to believe that the meteorite piece Daisy keeps as a necklace is the most important item in the movie: by reuniting the shard with the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs,  the universe's two parallel dimensions will merge and Koopa will be able to take over Earth. Koopa has it in his ?mouth and all seems lost, until Mario bitchslaps him in the back of the head an??d Koopa drops the rock to the street below.

Mario, knowing that he has to give Luigi time to make it to the rock, decides to bluff. He takes off one of his shoelaces and holds it in his hand, pretending that he is actually holding Daisy's meteorite necklace. "You wan??t the rock? Come and get it!"

This scene is cool for two reasons. Firstly, it shows that Mario is a pretty smart sonofabitch. Secondly, it allows the viewer to avoid the annoying cliche where the hero and the villain fight over a small, precious object, constantly trying to balance their desire to kill one another with their desire to get the object back. Considering Mario ??and Luigi are in two different places at the film's climax, Mario's decision to bluff allows the viewer to be worried for both characters at the same time: if Mario actually had the rock, we wouldn't care about Luigi, and if Luigi had it, then there'd be no reason for Mario and Koopa to fight. From a screenwriting point of view, Mario's bluff is actually a pretty clever way of avoiding cliche and keeping the suspense up for both protagonists.

The "de-evolution gun" is just a spray painted Super Scope.

Cool, huh? 

Awkward pre-9/11 use of the World Trade Center towers in a destructive capacity! 

Eeeeeeeesh. Moving on. 

The sheer number of references to the video game.

Including, but not limited to: Bertha the fish, Kuribo's shoe, Bullet Bill, Thwomp, Mushroom Kingdom, Toad, Yoshi, the Koopa Kids, Boom-Boom, Wigglers, Snifits, Fry Guy, Ostro, Bob-Omb, Mario and Luigi's use of the peace sign, the mushroom powerup, the climax's recreation of the end boss fight from Super Mario World, Koopa Troopas, and Goombas.

And people complain that the movie?? isn't faithful enough to the video game. Come on.

The "let's make a sequel" ending. 

If there's a more depressing type of ending than the "please let us make a sequel" cliffhanger, I don't know what it is. When Daisy, clad in super-hot battle gear kicks open the door to Mario's flat and declares that "I need your help," the movie joins the ranks of The Italian Job and Serenity as one of tho??se films whose hypothetical sequel had great potential that was never realized. 

So, there you have it. If you've already seen the movie, I hope you have a new  appreciation for it. If you haven't seen it, I hope you do. It's great for nostalgia value, if not??hing else. 

The post Why the Super Mario mov??ie is an underappreciated masterpiece appeared first on Destructoid.

Ten Reasons Mike Haggar Needs to be the Next President of the United States

[Another gem from Destructoid's Golden Archives, this our most popular story of April 2008]
As you’ve no doubt been following the prospective U.S. presidential nominees, you must be asking yourself several questions: Who should I vote for? Which candidate does Destructoid back? In these rough and troubled times, who is a gamer to support?
As always, we have you covered. We at Destructoid are absolutely pleased and honored to announce our official support for the one candidate whom we believe best represents the ideals and morals of the gaming community: Mike Haggar, former mayor of Metro City.
What do you need to know about this leader of men? Why will Mike Haggar propel this country to greatness? Hit the jump, dear citizen, and prepare to be Haggar-ized.
Ten Reasons Mike Haggar Needs to be the Next President of the United States
1. Mike Haggar was the mayor of Metro City
Metro City is a town of violence, corruption, and various other types of skullduggery. The police force is either absent, apathetic, or on the take. The inner city is filled with prostitution. Drug trafficking. Kidnapping. Murder.
What kind of man would voluntarily run for office in such a city? What breed of man would resist the urge, the ever-powerful urge, to run from a city of pain and anguish? Who would be strong enough to stand up to crime once and for all -- not through war, but through politics?
Mike Haggar is that man.
Mike Haggar saw the decay of Metro City, and instead of idly standing by while innocent people suffered and died, Mike Haggar ran for mayor. And, running on a platform of decreasing the city’s skyrocketing crime rate, he won. Mike Haggar is a man of his word: shortly after taking office, the crime rate in Metro City dropped by 23%. While certain analysts have attributed this sudden drop to Haggar’s social reform and welfare program, others chalk it up to Haggar’s “punch criminals in the dick�attitude toward crime.
2. Mike Haggar takes the law into his own hands
Working within the system is all well and good, but, occasionally, the time comes when a true man must do something more. Getting your daughter kidnapped by the Mad Gear gang leader is one of those times.
When Jessica was kidnapped by the Mad Gear gang in an attempt to strong-arm Haggar into drafting more crime-friendly governmental policy, Haggar got angry. He was not content to just let Jessica’s friends (Cody and Guy) go after her: Haggar went after the bastards himself. It takes a lot of balls to set aside your mayoral duties for a couple of days when asses need kicking, but Haggar has never been one to lack balls.
It especially takes balls to knowingly take on the biggest gang in the city armed with nothing but your (admittedly large) fists, and a heartful of vengeance. But not only did Haggar single-handedly take out the entire Mad Gear gang and rescue his daughter (anyone who tells you that Cody and/or Guy helped in any way are not only lying, but most likely supporters of Hillary Clinton), he also eliminated the gang that took their place -- the Skull Crossers -- a few years later.
Haggar doesn’t take crap from criminals, and he’s not afraid to tackle (literally) the big issues by himself. Honestly: could you ever imagine President Bush going straight to Afghanistan and suplexing Osama Bin Laden? No? Haggar could do it.
3. Mike Haggar knows the price of redemption
Haggar spent the first forty years of his life as a professional Street Fighter. Though his exploits were never chronicled in any of Capcom’s beloved fighting games, his official autobiography mentions, in great detail, the period of his life when he competed in underground fighting rings. It also bears mentioning that Mike Haggar’s autobiography is 100% true, and cannot be disproven under any circumstances.
The Saturday Night Slam Masters series, apart from having one of the coolest titles ever, details Haggar’s early years as a pro wrestler/bare knuckle fighter. Though Haggar fought for a noble cause (after his wife’s death, he was forced to raise little Jessica by himself), he eventually developed a distaste for the brutal violence of the fighting ring. On his 41^st birthday, Haggar decided to call it quits. He knew that violence, while entertaining and absolutely exhilarating to participate in, was not the only thing in life. He wanted change. He wanted justice. He wanted redemption for all of the bones he’d broken and all of the people he’d hurt.
Many politicians today speak of vengeance and war and hatred without knowing the true price of the violence they wish upon others: Haggar suffers from no such hypocrisy. Haggar knows the high cost of violence, and he would never wish it upon others unless they really, really deserve it, or if he is bored.
4. Mike Haggar remains faithful to a dead wife

The details and exact date of the death of Haggar’s wife are unknown. What is known is that Haggar raised their daughter Jessica into a fine woman, and Haggar never once remarried. Haggar is a man of principle, who values fidelity above all else �even if one of the parties in the relationship is dead.
Considering Ridy Giuliani has a lot of support for the 2008 nomination and he’s been married three times, why not support a guy who is exactly the opposite?
5. Mike Haggar is frequently plagiarized
Not only did Randy “Macho Man�Savage steal Haggar’s stage name (“Macho� and signature pose (lifting a loved one atop his shoulder after a victory) after Haggar left the underground wrestling circuit, but Jesse Ventura more or less based his entire life off the exploits of Michael Haggar.
Nine years after Haggar, former wrestler, was elected mayor of Metro City, Jesse “The Body�Ventura, former wrestler, was elected mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. Coincidence? We think not.
And yet, it speaks to Haggar’s endless humility and mercy that he has never once chosen to pursue legal action against these frauds: Haggar believes there are too many pressing issues in the world to worry about a few wrestlers stealing his persona.
6. Mike Haggar proves that age ain’t nothin�but a number
The above picture was taken when Haggar was 60 years old. A similarly-aged Solid Snake could never hope to look that good.
He was 40 years old when he retired from underground wrestling. When he took down the Mad Gear gang, he was 46. He destroyed the Skull Cross gang at the age of 50, and continued to mentor upcoming fighters right up to his 63^rd birthday.
If you can show me another 46-year-old who can destroy an entire unit of organized crime all by his lonesome, I’ll eat a bucket of live scorpions.
7. MUSTACHE
8. Mike Haggar wears his belt like a man
Look at that. Who wears their belt like that? Men who have some ass-kicking to do, that’s who.
Consider the average belt. Its purpose is to hold your pants up, correct? Well, what holds up the belt? Some belt loops? A weak, little, metal buckle? Mike Haggar refuses to put his trust into such flimsy materials. Mike Haggar knows that the only thing that can ever truly keep Mike Haggar’s pants up, is Mike Haggar himself. Instead of keeping his belt tightly against his midsection, Haggar loops it around his entire torso. The only way Haggar’s pants could ever fall is if someone managed to injure Haggar’s torso, and such an event is a scientifically proven impossibility.
9. Mike Haggar is basically a Bizarro version of Zangief
To quote Wikipedia:
“Despite his background as a former Street Fighter, Haggar never actually appeared as a playable character in the Street Fighter games, although the two series take place in a shared fictional [sic] universe. Instead, a Russian wrestler named Zangief appears in Street Fighter II, using similar moves to Haggar. The two characters had been described as rivals, despite never being playable in the same games. Zangief even has a spinning version of Haggar's pile driver.�/i>
Haggar has personally refused to comment on either the subject of his mysterious absence from the Street Fighter games, and his alleged rivalry with Zangief. Such a rivalry likely did not develop as a result of likeness rights (as mentioned earlier, Haggar is a lenient man when it comes to those who copy him), and, as such, remains a bit of a mystery.
However, some speculate that the rift between Haggar and Zangief may have developed due to Zangief’s political affiliation: as Haggar is obviously 100% American, he may have been deeply offended by Zangief’s active participation in the Russian Communist party.
But why would Haggar get so upset over the political opinions of a fighting combatant? Why would he take Zangief’s communist background so harshly? There is only one explanation, and we at Destructoid consider it our journalistic duty to divulge it:
ZANGIEF AND HAGGAR ARE BROTHERS. 
Think about it. Twin brothers, possibly separated at birth, pursue the exact same pr?ofessions in their early lives despite being half a world away from one another. Two buff, hairy wrestlers with almost identical fi??ghting styles. Perhaps Haggar and Zangief’s first-ever meeting took place at the