Game On

Game On

So, maybe I am a bit bloodthirsty. Maybe I do enjoy peering down the barrel of a weapon pointed at a bad guy, gleefully pulling the trigger and watching him splatter all over the place. Perhaps I might be a bit too fond of rolling a fragmentation grenade into a room full of no-goodniks and listening to the explosion and the screams.

I like it. It gives me a strange kind of pleasure that's missing in the rest of my life.

Of course, my dear reader, I'm talking about playing a computer game. The very idea of actually doing those horrible things in real life is completely preposterous.

I am a fan of what's called FPS video games. The FPS stands for First Person Shooter. It's a variety of video game where you see the action on the game screen as if through the eyes of the hero, and what he sees is what you also see. Generally there's the snout of some kind of weapon in front of you plus an aiming point for that weapon. As you walk around (or crawl or crouch or ride a hang glider) the viewpoint varies. When you click your left mouse button the weapon fires and, if you've aimed correctly, a bad guy gets shot. And who are the bad guys? That depends on the game. In some games he's a enemy soldier, perhaps a Nazi. Or maybe an alien. In others he could be a member of an opposing combat team. Lots of times the bad guy is one of a pantheon of monsters, their ferocity and ugliness only limited by the game programmer's imagination. In a “normal” game of this type it's common for the enemies encountered early in the game to be easier to kill or overcome than those you have to kill later in the game. In lots of games of this type you encounter “bosses” or particularly tough opponents at the end of each “chapter” of the game. Some of these bosses require you to do special things to kill them. Others just require lots and lots of hits from your weapons to bring them down. Most of them are real pains in the behind.

The latest in the series of these games which I've completed is named “Far Cry”. It won some awards as being the action adventure game of the year a few years ago. It's pretty straightforward as far as these games go. Your main enemies are mercenaries, with the occasional genetic monster thrown in for spice. What was great about this game was that it was played in a background of islands. You could swim from island to island or steal a boat. You could walk pretty much anywhere on each island and the bad guys could be almost anywhere. And if they saw you, they'd start hunting you, circling around behind you, using cover and working together. They could be incredibly tough.

You started out early in the game by getting a pistol and that's what you used to overcome your first mercenary enemies. You then could upgrade your weapon with one of the ones the enemies had dropped. You eventually had choices from your original pistol to a bigger pistol, several varieties of machine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles with multiple-power scopes and eventually, hand-held rocket launchers. You could even use a machete for some incredibly bloody close-in work.

As you would play and encounter baddies, you would be killed yourself many, many times. This was normal and expected. You had to learn the techniques of besting your adversaries and those techniques would vary and change as the game progressed. You learned a lot of them by getting killed. A lot.

Some of the enemies you could shoot from a long distance away with the sniper rifle (good for clearing guards in towers). Others you could sneak up behind and shoot in the back (strangely gratifying). Still others required the John Wayne approach where you just ran into the group of enemies and started shooting them down. And hoped you'd kill them all before you were, yourself, done in. This melee approach was lots of fun and I used it from time to time.

Each chapter of the game gave you more information about the back story and what you were actually trying to achieve, vis-a-vis the adventure you were playing through. There were evil scientists, varied groups of mercenaries who ranged from pretty stupid to doggone dangerous, monkey-hybrids and other freaky cloned animal hybrids who were fast, loud and vicious as hell. Each chapter brought you closer and closer to the masterminds and ultimate biggie who was behind most of the nastiness.

The sound work on this particular game was extraordinary. You could hear the mercs talking amongst themselves or swearing at you as they attacked, the water sounded like water when you swam or waded in it, the leaves rustled when you walked through them. And the mutant creatures who were trying to kill you would growl and roar and scream and scare the living be-jesus out of ya. That was usually when you were quietly sneaking down some dark, dismal hallway in a underground fortress on one of the islands. There were occasions where my hand would shake so much from one of those growling attacks from the rear I could hardly aim my mouse hand and push the button to kill the beast. I got killed a lot from those son-of-a-guns.

During play you had a couple of meters you kept one eye on. One was your health, one your stamina and one your armor. When you would run or when you held your breath underwater your stamina would decline. When you took hits from an enemy, your armor would go down to zero. Then your health would decline to zero also. At that point you'd die. Sometimes it'd take a bunch of shots to finish you off, sometimes only one. That depended on what you were getting hit with. You could get hit with a lot of pistol shots and still keep fighting. But one shot with a rocket and you were toast. You could find first aid packs laying around that'd restore your health and you used them as you found them. Sometimes the enemy would shed his armor when he was killed and you could add that to yours. You could also find scads of ammo laying around for the various weapons you might be carrying.

During a few of the chapters of “Far Cry” I found myself getting very frustrated. I'd be getting killed over and over and over again trying to achieve some goal. And one of the peculiarities of this game was that you couldn't just save the game at any point like a lot of games let you do. Saves would only occur where they were programmed and they liked to establish them just after a big battle. And you didn't know exactly where those save points would be. You just had to keep playing until you achieved one of them. I grew frustrated enough I installed a cheat on this game whereby I could do an “instant” save pretty much anywhere in the game. I don't consider this a cheat, really. It's just a feature that “should” have been in the game from its inception. And it helped. A LOT.

I always chuckle when I read reviews of games I'm contemplating buying. They always say something like, “A good 10-12 hours of playing time.” Ha!

A good 4-6 weeks of playing time is more like it for me! Of course I'm not fanatically playing 10-12 hours a day and eating in front of the computer like a teenager might do. For me it's more like an hour or two here and there. Plus you have to realize that I'm not a 15-year-old kid with the reflexes of a king cobra any more, either. Those kids might be able to mow down dozens of mercs in a single burst of machine gun fire precisely aimed. I gotta see the buggers first, try not to flinch as they start shooting at me (or attacking from a dark corner with claws and humongous fangs) and click the fire button as fast as I can with my old, stiff fingers.

But then again, I'm not really in a hurry, am I? The baddies can wait.

I gave a little thought after finishing “Far Cry” recently as to the issue of violence in video games leading to violence in real life. You read about so-and-so having gone nuts from playing violent video games and then going out and performing some violent act. The media loves to paint all gamers with the violence-leads-to-violence brush. I just want to go on record here and now as saying I do NOT subscribe to that conclusion. I've NEVER been tempted to take a shotgun (or a rocket launcher, for that matter) and gun down anyone in real life. Never! It's never even crossed my mind. Apparently I, along with the 99.9999% of people who play these games are EASILY able to differentiate between pixels of light on a video screen and flesh-and-blood folks.

But, of course, it's the .0001% that grab the headlines.

Wanna know something? Most of those nut jobs would have done that or something similar even without the addition of a video game in their lives. They were doing actions like that long before the advent of those games. Maybe the pundits attributed the abnormality of those individuals in those days before violent video games to some other external stimuli. It seems like the “explainers” want to point their fingers at something, doesn't matter what.

My question is, why don't we just accept the fact that a tiny minority of us are nuts from the get-go and let it lie?

I do wonder though, from time to time, in the dead of the night... Am I having too much fun playing those games? Do I get too much of a visceral thrill from plugging a baddie? Am I grinning like an idiot too much as I survey the carnage I caused to the enemy?

Am I a candidate to climb a bell tower somewhere with a high-power rifle in hand?

And sometimes I wonder.