Extra Lives Read Online Free
Author: Tom Bissell
signatory) are as gripping as any fiction I have come across. But it cannot be a coincidence that every scene involving human emotion (confronting a mind-wiped android who believes he is human, watching as a character close to you suffocates and dies) is at best unaffecting and at worstrisible. Can it really be a surprise that deeper human motivations remain beyond the reach of something that regards character as the assignation of numerical values to hypothetical abilities and characteristics?
Viewed as a whole,
Fallout 3
is a game of profound stylishness, sophistication, and intelligence—so much so that every example of Etch A Sketch characterization, every stone-shoed narrative pivot, pains me. When we say a game is sophisticated, are we grading on a distressingly steep curve? Or do we need a new curve altogether? Might we really mean that the game in question only occasionally insults one’s intelligence? Or is this kind of intelligence, at least when it comes to playing games, beside the point? How is it, finally, that I keep returning to a form of entertainment that I find so uniquely frustrating? To what part of me do games speak, and on which frequency?
TWO
S o it begins here, in your stepfather’s darkened living room, with you hunched over, watching as a dateline title card—1998 JULY —forcefully types itself across the television screen. “1998 July”? Why not “England, London”? Why not, “A time once upon”? A narrator debuts to describe something called Alpha Team’s in medias res search for something called Bravo Team’s downed chopper in what is mouthfully described as a “forest zone situated in the northwest of Raccoon City.” Okay. This is a Japanese game. That probably explains the year–date swappage. That also makes “Raccoon City” a valiant attempt at something idiomatically American-sounding, though it is about as convincing as an American-made game set in the Japanese metropolis of Port Sushi. You harbor affection for the products of Japan, from its cuisine to its girls to its video games—the medium Japanese game designers have made their own. To your mind, then, a certain amount of ineffable Nipponese weirditity is par for the course, even if the course in question has fifteen holes and every one is a par nine.
A live-action scene commences in which Alpha Team lands upon a foggy moor, finds Bravo Team’s crashed chopper, and isattacked by Baskervillian hounds, but all you are privy to is the puppetry of snarling muzzles shot in artless close-up. To the canine puppeteers’ credit, the hounds are more convincing than the living actors, whose performances are miraculously unsuccessful. The cinematography, meanwhile, is a shaky-cam,
Evil
Dead–ish fugue minus any insinuation of talent, style, or coherence. Once the hellhound enfilade has taken the life of one Alpha Team member, the survivors retreat into a nearby mansion. You know that one of these survivors, following the load screen, will be yours to control. Given the majestic incompetence of the proceedings thus far, you check to see that the game’s receipt remains extant.
For most of your life you have played video games. You have owned, in turn, the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Genesis, the Super Nintendo, and the Nintendo 64, and familiarized yourself with most of their marquee titles. The console you are playing now, the console you have only today purchased, is categorically different from its ancestors. It is called the Sony PlayStation. Its controllers are more ergonomic than those you have previously held and far more loaded with buttons, and its games are not plastic cartridges but compact discs. Previous consoles were silent but your new PlayStation zizzes and whirs in an unfamiliar way as its digital stylus scans and loads.
It is 1997. The PlayStation was released to the American market one year ago. You missed this, having been away, in the Peace Corps, teaching English, which
Viewed as a whole,
Fallout 3
is a game of profound stylishness, sophistication, and intelligence—so much so that every example of Etch A Sketch characterization, every stone-shoed narrative pivot, pains me. When we say a game is sophisticated, are we grading on a distressingly steep curve? Or do we need a new curve altogether? Might we really mean that the game in question only occasionally insults one’s intelligence? Or is this kind of intelligence, at least when it comes to playing games, beside the point? How is it, finally, that I keep returning to a form of entertainment that I find so uniquely frustrating? To what part of me do games speak, and on which frequency?
TWO
S o it begins here, in your stepfather’s darkened living room, with you hunched over, watching as a dateline title card—1998 JULY —forcefully types itself across the television screen. “1998 July”? Why not “England, London”? Why not, “A time once upon”? A narrator debuts to describe something called Alpha Team’s in medias res search for something called Bravo Team’s downed chopper in what is mouthfully described as a “forest zone situated in the northwest of Raccoon City.” Okay. This is a Japanese game. That probably explains the year–date swappage. That also makes “Raccoon City” a valiant attempt at something idiomatically American-sounding, though it is about as convincing as an American-made game set in the Japanese metropolis of Port Sushi. You harbor affection for the products of Japan, from its cuisine to its girls to its video games—the medium Japanese game designers have made their own. To your mind, then, a certain amount of ineffable Nipponese weirditity is par for the course, even if the course in question has fifteen holes and every one is a par nine.
A live-action scene commences in which Alpha Team lands upon a foggy moor, finds Bravo Team’s crashed chopper, and isattacked by Baskervillian hounds, but all you are privy to is the puppetry of snarling muzzles shot in artless close-up. To the canine puppeteers’ credit, the hounds are more convincing than the living actors, whose performances are miraculously unsuccessful. The cinematography, meanwhile, is a shaky-cam,
Evil
Dead–ish fugue minus any insinuation of talent, style, or coherence. Once the hellhound enfilade has taken the life of one Alpha Team member, the survivors retreat into a nearby mansion. You know that one of these survivors, following the load screen, will be yours to control. Given the majestic incompetence of the proceedings thus far, you check to see that the game’s receipt remains extant.
For most of your life you have played video games. You have owned, in turn, the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Genesis, the Super Nintendo, and the Nintendo 64, and familiarized yourself with most of their marquee titles. The console you are playing now, the console you have only today purchased, is categorically different from its ancestors. It is called the Sony PlayStation. Its controllers are more ergonomic than those you have previously held and far more loaded with buttons, and its games are not plastic cartridges but compact discs. Previous consoles were silent but your new PlayStation zizzes and whirs in an unfamiliar way as its digital stylus scans and loads.
It is 1997. The PlayStation was released to the American market one year ago. You missed this, having been away, in the Peace Corps, teaching English, which
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