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In late October, an earthquake ranking at over six on the Richter Belmont Scale issued forth from snowy Niigata Prefecture, north of Tokyo. In Ueno, a hundred and some kilometers away, to whence I had been translated following a series of events involving the past, the present, and the future, four Flaming Lips albums and nothing more fell off a CD rack containing more than six hundred CDs. The building shook like God, or else the Asakusa Raijin, had smacked it on the balcony-bearing side with a cricket bat.
More earthquakes came, a handful at a time. Up in the north, they derailed a bullet train -- a historical first -- flattened houses, and collapsed sections of highways. Sony would later offer relief to earthquake victims by auctioning off several dozen PSP units and then donating the proceeds (amount of money donated over the retail value, that is) to the relief charity fund. It was a very Sony thing to do.
When the first earthquake hit, I was lying in a futon in an apartment in Senzoku, the famed red-light district of Asakusa, near Ueno, in Minowa City of Taito Ward in old Lower ("Shitamachi") Tokyo. My skin was pink from taking a dip in a public bath where legendary samurai Miyamoto Musashi had been trapped and left for dead four hundred years ago. In Musashi's case, he busted out of the wooden doors of the bath and took down the two hired thieves with a toss of a large Japanese ryo coin. In my case, I got stopped at the door by the old woman with a pink barrette who runs the place, and told the story of Musashi, the story I already knew, while my fingers itched and I longed to get out onto the street and buy a Coca-Cola from a vending machine. I then went home and played Ace Combat 5 on PlayStation2. I think that's the game I spent the most time this year playing. Honest to god. I think I played it more than Final Fantasy VI or even Dragon Quest VIII. I don't know why. If you count the amount of time I let its title screen sit while I made udon, then I spent approximately as much time playing Ace Combat 5 this year as I did using the bathroom. And that's not a euphemism.
I certainly played it a lot more than Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I'm not sure, really, what happened with that game. That's not meant to indicate that I think the game is some kind of failure. Well, on some levels, it is. On many levels, it's great. The voice-acting is amazing. The writing shows now restraint when flinging around words as large and difficult to pronounce as "motherfucker." I swear, I never would have imagined I'd hear a black man with a gun scream "motherfucker" in the first hour of a videogame. I remember when Megaman said "Damn it" in Megaman X2; it felt so awkward. How we've grown up so. This game would make my eventual play-through of the English Metal Gear Solid 3 feel wrong. In that game, Snake's voice is all wrong. He gives the wrong intonation. He says "crap" when any self-respecting American soldier in the 1960s was getting paid to say "shit."
I played through and beat Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a game named after a fictional state and a real-life tectonic fault line responsible for real-life earthquakes that destroy real-life baseball stadiums and bridges in California, like an envelope-stuffer stuffs envelopes. I sped down those highways like every car I drove was on fire. The only moments I feel as though I had to myself involved being dead lost early on in the adventure, pedalling a BMX bicycle up the freeway until my on-screen avatar was thin enough to be called "holocaust" and rich enough in stamina to kick the Tour de France in the balls. I could jump over buses, for god's sake. It was great.
The rest of the game was just mission-mission-mission. I'm not saying this is a flaw of the game. It's just that I played it like I was getting paid to do so. I beat the shit out of it, to put it simply. I was watching end credits after just twenty-nine hours.
The game did a little something to make me want to do this, you see. First of all, it was solid. It was solid enough to warrant beating. Second of all, it starts with our hero wearing a wife-beater and baggy jeans, riding a bicycle. Yet the back of the box clearly shows a hero who looks like Puff Daddy before he was P. Diddy, holding two gleaming forty-five-caliber pistols and standing in front of a private jet in what looks like a velvet jumpsuit, many gold chains, and dark sunglasses an intelligent man can only describe as "fly." I wanted to become this hero. Eventually, I did. I then had little use for the game.
I guess I crave a multiplayer aspect of some sort. I don't know. Or I guess maybe I wanted more. I don't know what more I wanted than a guy, high on marijuana, popping into an apartment littered with pizza boxes, screaming "Heads up, motherfucker," and braining a dude with a baseball bat just because that dude sells crack. I don't know what more I wanted than a videogame with Samuel L. Jackson as a character. I guess maybe I wanted all the stitches to be sewn a little more tightly.
There's a lot being said about how this game is different from other Grand Theft Auto games, how the hero is "not an evil person." He's just a guy whose mama was killed, so he came back from his early retirement, his attempt at life away from "the hood," to attend her funeral. That's really nice. Yet, not ten seconds into the game, after the cops frame us for a murder, we're standing in our neighborhood, and we can punch a prostitute in the face until she's bleeding all over the sidewalk, and we're rich with her money.
All of the prostitutes carry pistols in this game. That's clever. I suppose it's to stop people from killing so many prostitutes after having sex with them in a pimped-up automobile. You don't actually even need to do that, ever, because you can eat food. I ate only vegetarian. Sometimes I ate not at all.
No, the real way to get rich in this game is to kill crack dealers. These bastards will pull a gun on you if you so much as rub shoulders with them in the street, so yeah, it's killing time. And they tend to be loaded. Should you not touch them, and instead approach them for friendly conversation, they'll ask if you want some crack, like crack dealers do in real life, and if you say no he gets pissed and pulls a gun on you. If you say yes, well -- he still gets pissed and pulls a gun on you. This is because CJ -- that's the hero's name -- has a sarcastic way of saying yes. He ain't no fool. He ain't going to smoke crack.
Even though he's already doing weed.
Yeah, yeah, I'm nit-picking. I like doing that, though: no, the world of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is not free. It is "uninhibited." In this world, this real world I inhabit, should I so choose, I could remove my black steel Hohner Pro Harp E harmonica from my pocket, clench it in my fist, and bludgeon a random tan-faced schoolgirl. I don't do this, however, because I'm not that kind of guy.
I discussed this with Hideo Kojima. Spoke he: "Few people are that kind of guy."
Spoke he further: Grand Theft Auto is not a masterpiece so much as it is a culmination of bold new ideas, available directions for game design that no one was taking, yet someone had to.
It's already a given -- just as viewing people from a second-floor window probably inspired the third-person view in most three-dimensional action games, living and breathing in this real world most likely inspired many of the ideas that go into Grand Theft Auto -- you can walk, you can take a bus, you can fly a plane, you can sky-dive, dude, you can even eat fried chicken if you want to, and you can also totally punch hookers and shoot police officers. You can tell Grand Theft Auto was thought up by testicle-possessors; I remember an improvisational acting class I took once in college: the midterm exam involved a telephone on a table. You pick up the telephone and talk for ten minutes. No male could finish the exercise without a mention of "the money," "the gun," or "the rotten son of a bitch."
What the future needs, spoke Kojima, and agreed me, is some developer to take the initiative, and look at what Grand Theft Auto is doing best (this is to assume, correctly, that it's doing pretty much everything right), and make a game that focuses on tightening these elements, rather than merely mimicking the idea of "go anywhere, do anything." (You know what they say about a copy of a copy: it's fuzzier than the original.)
So here's what San Andreas does right:
Scope. It has a nice scope, varied missions, lots of locales, interesting people, interesting characters, and interesting situations. When you play quickly these especially shine. By approaching anyone wearing green in the Los-Angeles-inspired town, you can ask them to join your gang-party. Based on your reputation, they will either reject or give you a hearty "fuck yeah." It's especially odd to try to steal a motorcycle by reflex, only to notice the man you elbowed off is a member of your gang. You ask him to join you, he is all too enthusiastic about doing so, and then you ride away on his bike. He trots after you, shooting at police officers for no reason, getting you in trouble. If you play it the right way, and get four party members, and hop in a car, you can ride around initiating turf wars in something that feels pleasantly kind of like a simulation. I liked these turf wars more than perhaps any element in the game. Yet once you leave Los Angeles, they're gone.
. . .
That's the best thing about San Andreas. It's scope. The dynamic nature of its world, with tunnels and sewage ditches to launch motorcross bikes off of.
The problem with the game is that there's just so much of it. Anyone who tells me that it's all "put to use" by hidden packages should damn well know where they can cram their "hidden package." Sure, a certain volume of game-map is required so that our cars have streets to blaze down. Still. It's too much. At points.
The arcade games in the convenient store, for example -- they're boring. I can understand that their simplistic charm might addict some gamers dumb enough to forget that the videogame surrounding the videogame they're playing, within a videogame, is much more entertaining.
"Playing basketball" in your neighborhood is like some kind of joke. You're just pressing a button and throwing a ball, which sometimes hits the hoop. You can "get good" at it, though what's the point?
And all throughout, there are marks begging for polish. Still with the movement problems. Still with the aiming problems. Still with the fuzzy logic, the slapped-together mission progressions, the limp-as-a-wet-noodle explosion sounds.
**
A Rockstar producer whose name I don't remember because they're those kinds of guys, guys not to put their names out on everything, or care if people remember their names, said that the state in the game is called "San Andreas" and the cities are called by names that differ from "Los Angeles," "San Francisco," or "Las Vegas" because those cities were not designed with videogame adaptations in mind. I suppose that's as good a way to put it as any.
I appreciate that what Rockstar is doing with Grand Theft Auto will be, in the end, recognized as rather ironically selfless; they are merely violently purging the queue of "ideas for things that can be done in a three-dimensional game." By the time they're done, enough game designers on both sides of all oceans will have played all of the games to completion. Individual gameplay elements of Grand Theft Auto games will form a pallette that game designers of the future use to make more creative things.
Hideo Kojima is quick to discuss that "liberty" is more important in game design than "freedom." CJ, the protagonist of San Andreas, is something of a blank slate, despite all his spelled-out family troubles. The player scribbles all over CJ, and for the most part immensely enjoys himself. However, the idea of a "fully customizable alter-ego" took a mortal wound in the train-wreck that resulted in the death of the dreams of virtual reality. We generally play videogames out of a desire to be entertained by something like a movie we move at our own pace. It's the control that gives us the thrill; it's the simple fact that we are in control that draws us to the game in the first place. Being in complete control is less fun than being only a little in control, as Metal Gear Solid shows us with each installment. (In the same way, playing "Risk" on a computer ensures that less people get screamed at than would if you played with a board.)
Kojima's favorite example of "liberty" versus "freedom" in a videogame comes at the end of of the first Metal Gear Solid; when the cybernetic ninja is in the jaws of the giant robot and the super-soldier player-character is aiming the rocket launcher, a moment of subtle game beauty occurs: the ninja is talking about his sister, and growing up in Africa; we view this through the crosshairs of a Stinger missile launcher. We can aim up and down. However, when we press the "fire" button, our in-game avatar speaks as though with gritted teeth: "No -- I . . . can't!"
What we need, then, is a polished role-playing game with the minutely detailed scope of a Grand Theft Auto game and a hero who is too fleshed-out and realistic a person to steal a car. And judging by the fact that the same, dirty-faced fat Japanese man was standing outside the only import shop in Akihabara playing the demo of San Andreas for four days -- well. It looks like it might be a Japanese company who takes a stab at this.
Know this: Japan's gaming bible-magazine Famitsu scored Grand Theft Auto: Vice City 10, 9, 9, 9 this year. They so, so rarely give out 10s, and devout fans of the magazine scream up a fury when a 10 is given out. I suppose in this case it was fitting; it heralded the Japanese realization that Western game design sensibilites can hit as well as miss.
This is no excuse, however, for certain American magazines to call Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas "THE BEST GAME EVER," even if they follow that capitalized, cover-printed capsule review with a question mark in parentheses. Come on, we're adults, here.
I'm not going to complain about this. Forget it. I'm not going to say a word about how game critique seems unable to differentiate between "much bigger and longer than the previous installment" and "THE BEST GAME EVER."
***
Where will Grand Theft Auto go after this, however? That's an excellent question. As much as I'd suggest a Flash-Gordon kind of old-timey-science-fiction-inspired metropolis (call it Grand Theft Auto 20XX, go ahead), I'm certain that won't get made, because it would offer limited possibilities for licensed music, and no self-respecting gamer racing a hoverbike down a street lined with mirror-shiny buildings is going to believe that in the year 20XX, everyone listens to oldies.
**
I remember something I read in a science-fact book when I was four years old, the morning I was in a car accident that resulted in my right eye popping out of my skull, the reason I wear glasses now, and get called "Harry Potter" by random Japanese schoolgirls. It also left a fat scar down the middle of my forehead.
It said in the book that "the average human brain driving a car down a city street takes in more information per second than the most powerful computer!" I thought about this, then, and the conclusion of the thought was that this was amazing. I thought about this today, and my conclusion was "Duh." The driving human when I was four years old saw road signs, heard traffic updates on the radio, talked to a passenger. Now, we have cellular phones. Dashboard navigation systems. Now, I'm an "adult." A lot of things go through my mind. The average Pentium 4 desktop system doesn't have to worry about that married woman it's seeing is going to find out it's going to a party with a credit-card-salesgirl with the same first name and a different last name.
I applied this to music once in band practice. I said that AC/DC's "Have a Drink on Me" represented spare thinking because of its air-holes. In that opening riff, you can hear dead air between guitar-pickings. Even in the middle of the song, there are tiny instants of silence through which the listener can breath. Modern rock seems to be an impenetrable wall of sound. Where there is no drum or shredding guitar, there is reverberating bass.
"What will music sound like a hundred years in the future? Will people drive down the highway listening to wailing fax machines?"
***
I said something funny, in October. I just remembered it now. I was talking to Drew Cosner and Nick. They both teach at schools. I write magazine columns and articles, and never get paid. So they make fun of me. They chide me for not having money, they rib me, even. I told them like this:
"The words you speak to your students vanish. Especially in Nick's case. You're teaching kids. They absorb those foreign words and forget about them. Me, I write things down and they show up alongside my picture in various magazines. I go to bed in a cardboard box, a train station, or a woman's house every night with a promise that I'm going to see that same nightmare:
"'A man, hands on his hips, watching his footing carefully, navigates a landfill in the year 30XX. His companion hangs back, picking up and inspecting objects. The man comes across a taped-up box that weighs some fifty pounds. Yes -- it's the same box you keep telling me to move out of the closet you don't even use, anyway. My box. Full of magazines from England in which I write, monthly, about game design culture shock generated between Japan and the West. The man crouches. One of the two suns in the sky begins to set, staining the world red. The man reads my column, knowing my name as he reads it. He nods at the parts where the words are clever. He smiles when the words make funny turns of phrase. Soon, he senses his companion's shadow looming up behind him. He closes the magazine and sets it on top of the box, looking skyward and smiling. Then he asks, facing forward, a question of the person behind him, as the world begins to shake, sending discarded cans and bottles clinking with yet another slight earthquake.
"'What's an Xbox?'"
"His companion answers, in a high squeal, 'hsepoihj[saojf]pajwe[fpqhrg[ja]pe pqrt]pquw t]iq'\rpog.;j \wq0;tmiq
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[next: november]
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