FLAPJACKS: So I hear you’ve been talking about the Dead Space games a lot lately.
ME: Well, yes.
FLAPJACKS: I hope you have touched upon the most important thing, which is that Dead Space 3 is terrible.
ME: I didn’t think it was that bad –
FLAPJACKS: Yes, because you are a wriiiiiiiteeeer and therefore it is all about your precious story. But even you have to admit that Dead Space 3 is an awful, awful game.
ME: Well, I did kind of snicker when you came to those little step-ups where Isaac could clearly just clamber over were it not for Impassable Wall Fiat, so he had to use his magic telekinesis to make a tiny ladder appear and then climb up the five-foot-high ladder.
FLAPJACKS: Yes, that was very stupid. But you forget that vast chunks of the game are just the same six rooms, repeated over and over again. There is The Room That Always Has Baddies In It, The Room That Usually Has Baddies In It, The Corridor, The Other Corridor, The Room That Intersects With The Corridor (And Usually Has Baddies In It), and The Elevator. It got so that I could predict from exactly which stupidly obvious air vents the baddies would pop out from and try to stab me.
ME: I will concede that the game was much more repetitive in its level design than the first two Dead Space games, sure.
FLAPJACKS: Good. Will you also concede that the level design, in addition to being repetitive, is usually stupid? I mean, stupid in the way that calls attention to its limitations. Like, for example, the “puzzles” where the solution is literally painted on the wall right in front of the puzzle itself. It’s like the designers wanted to shout at you “YOU ARE A DUMB.”
ME: I preferred to think of that as password encryption being so hardcore in the Whateverth Century that the only way to truly hack it was to go totally analog.
FLAPJACKS: If that were the case, then why didn’t they just rely on the magical Doors Which Only Unlock When It Is Time For The Game To Let You Go There? I mean, in the previous games, they at least always bothered to come up with explanations for why that shit was happening. “Hold on, Isaac, I am going to hack that shit remotely so you can go through” as opposed to “welp, new objective, go that way, doors magically work now.”
ME: Those silly future people!
FLAPJACKS: Or the “electrical engineering” puzzles which were literally just “can you move both of your joysticks at once – okay then you can pass” challenges. Or the puzzles where the voiceover message of Dead Person Twelve tells you exactly what you have to do. Were the previous Dead Space puzzles too hard for some people? Who were these people? Were they just drooling all over their controllers and throwing a fit when that was not enough to win the game?
ME: Speaking as a true PC gamer in his opinion of consoleheads and Call of Duty players, I have to admit that is a distinct possibility.
FLAPJACKS: And the weapon crafting! Who wasted their time on this? You tinker for a bit until you get the guns you already know are good! “Oh, so if I do this and this, I get the pulse rifle with the grenade launcher? Why would I need anything else, then?”
ME: Well, that’s not fair. In the first two games, there was no gun that had stasis built in to its regular firing effect and which effectively put you in god mode for ninety percent of the game because when you shoot things and put them into slow motion, Dead Space gets hella easier in a hurry. Also, in the first two games there was no chain lightning gun. Did you play with the chain lightning gun?
FLAPJACKS: No. Why?
ME: Because the chain lightning gun hits everything at once. It kills the first guy and then does damage to all the rest of the guys. If you up the damage enough you can generally clear entire rooms with one shot. Also, you give it stasis so it also puts them in slow motion so you can stomp to death anybody who didn’t die from the first shot.
FLAPJACKS: So your point is that they invented a new gun for total no-skill twinks.
ME: Yup! I played it through on hard level and it was… not hard at all.
FLAPJACKS: And then there were the microtransactions!
ME: I do not believe for one second you spent any money on microtransactions for this game, mostly because anybody with even a tiny amount of gameplaying skill would never, ever need to spend money on microtransactions for this game.
FLAPJACKS: Well, no. But I am offended they exist!
ME: That’s fair. Did you also want to complain about how fighting against humans with guns made it seem like a Gears of War clone?
FLAPJACKS: No, that bit was not too bad. It was a nice change of pace from fighting the same six zombies again – and I mean “the same six zombies,” because swapping out the babies-with-tentacles-that-shoot-at-you for dogs-with-tentacles-that-shoot-at-you does not make for new zombies in spirit – especially when I had to fight the zombies and the Scientologists with guns at the same time. That was practically the only challenging part of the game. I think, in total, there was about six minutes of it.
ME: Okay. So I am going to concede all your arguments. Okay?
FLAPJACKS: So I win?
ME: Not precisely. I will cheerfully admit that as a game, Dead Space 3 is ill-thought-out as compared to the first two games, which were… let’s say “competent” or maybe “workmanlike,” because they weren’t really inspired per se.
FLAPJACKS: Excuse me, but not just anybody can come up with “zombies in space” except the writers of Mass Effect and Halo and…
ME: But you’re getting away from my point, which is this: Dead Space 3 isn’t a great game, but it’s still a pretty good story – yes, I can see you getting ready to draw out that word sarcastically, but it’s true. It’s a pretty good adventure story that you happen to be playing along with. And I enjoyed it on that basis, and I particularly enjoyed it because Isaac Clarke is not a douchebag.
FLAPJACKS: Why is that so special?
ME: Because most video game protagonists are douchebags! Nathan Drake from Uncharted is a quippy, smart-aleck douchebag. Kratos from God of War is a roiding douchebag. Ezio Auditore is badass, but he is also undeniably douche-adjacent at the very least. Guy From Far Cry 3 is an entitled preppy douchebag who learns the Simplicity of Native Life, which is the only possible way he could go even douchier. And so forth.
FLAPJACKS: And your argument is that Isaac is not a douchebag?
ME: In the first game, Isaac is in desperate self-denial that his girlfriend is dead – like, “actually sort of crazy” levels of self-denial because he blames himself for encouraging her to take the mission that gets her killed, which lets the evil alien thingy take advantage of his mind. In the second, he has literally been totally crazy for the last three years as a result of surviving the first game. In the third, he is withdrawn from the world and just totally wants to give up on everything as a result of surviving the first two games. Douchebag characters would just be all “whatever, here are some awesome one-liners about shooting limbs off of dead people.” The most Isaac can manage is mild sarcasm whenever life is more difficult because now he has Fetch Quest #80 to do before he can save the universe again. The rest of the time, he is painfully earnest, because he is going through the valley of the shadow of death in real-time and he knows it. Isaac Clarke is a guy who gets traumatized when he has to kill the guy who betrayed them all to the baddies and stole his girlfriend, because Isaac is a good dude.
FLAPJACKS: I like this dichotomy you have set up and look forward to the list of Good Dudes in video games. And also the inevitable jokes about Bad Dudes.
ME: Right. And that’s why, even though Dead Space 3 is a mediocre game, I didn’t mind, because so long as Isaac is a good dude, I am willing to stick around for the ride. Good dudes are the ones whose stories you want to follow. That’s why we all played The Walking Dead even though it was about ten times less of a game than DS3 was: because Lee was a good dude too. From what I hear the new Tomb Raider has Lara Croft being a good dude too, so I’ll probably play that.
FLAPJACKS: Are we allowed to call her a dude?
ME: “Dude” became gender-neutral about ten years ago, dude.
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Am I to take this as subtle confirmation that Flapjack is a woman?
I submit that Nathan Drake is “a quippy, smart-aleck douchebag” in the same way that Peter Parker is. That is to say, he’s someone who’s pretty much terrified (because look at the crazy shit he’s doing) and he’s cracking jokes because the other choice is to scream in terror the whole time, and that’s not a survival strategy when guys with guns are hunting for you. I haven’t played the games in a little while, but from what I recall, he genuinely cared for Sully and Elena. He even cared about Chloe, even in places where, to be honest, he had no reason to, because she’d basically just sold him out as a survival strategy. You don’t have to have a psychotic break to be a good dude.
Oh, but the guy from Far Cry 3 is, decidedly, a douche.
@Sisyphus: And so are all his friends, which is a bit worse because, well, they’re way more talky, and you’re supposed to care about them.
Game designers don’t need to spend time making you care about you, you’re you and we can assume you don’t want you to die. Making you care about your friends and/or the game world depending on the stakes, that’s the hard part.
ME 3 did this in spades. I stopped playing the game for an entire week because I didn’t want to break up with Miranda.
This is why I play Viva Pinata. Fewer nightmares, and most of the pinatas are pretty good dudes.
I would point out that there is a difference between “not minding” a game and “this is a good game.” Isaac Clarke IS a good dude, and on that basis I become more offended, not less, when his good story isn’t married to a good game. Especially since it was pimped as a AAA title they expect to get the full sixty bucks for.
@Mark Temporis: Well, there’s your problem. You were dating someone from the second game, you silly. Don’t you know that only people from the original Normandy count? Go and get with Liara the way God intended. And if not Liara, there are two other perfectly cromulent aliens.
@Mark Temporis – I assume you’re talking about the Far Cry 3 dude. In which case, I completely agree. The conversations between him and his girl friend, where he starts in on how he’s actively making decisions and this is something they’ve been working on…eh! When you’ve been taken prisoner by a psychopath and have to escape the island he rules with an iron fist IS NOT THE TIME to work on your relationship! That is not couples therapy time! That was the moment when I went…”Wait…I’m not supposed to be taking these characters seriously, am I?”
@Mark Temporis
Ironically, I found Miranda to be one of my most hated characters. I was actually disappointed for a bit when she survived the suicide mission in my game. It might have been because of the way I played, but in any case the way Miranda treated everyone was inexcusable.
I guess that speaks to the depth the characters in ME were given.
I’m glad I’m not alone in thinking one of the strengths of Dead Space is the character of Issac, which is weird when you consider that he spent the entirety of the first game making nothing but inarticulate sounds of anger and pain.
Like, okay, this will probably sound kind of dorky, but one of the more genuinely moving moments in the series is in DS2 right near the end, when you’ve gotten into EarthGov and Issac is clearly fucking exhausted, and the Nicole that’s been harassing him the entire game gives him one final ultimatum, tell her why he keeps clinging to this crazy vision of her that has at SEVERAL points now tried to kill him and he tells her that it’s because that’s all he has left of her and if he lets that go then she’ll be gone for good, and just the way he says it is fucking heartbreaking.
And then she tries to kill you again and this time Issac’s just had enough of this shit and so you fire a contact beam into your own brain’s glowing weak-point to blow her up.
Do we need to have the Far Cry 3 argument again?
Of course, the BIG FC3 issue is that just when I’ve learned to compensate for the arrow arcing, I get Crysis 3 where it doesn’t.
Well, I was going to use my free EA game for the Simcity debacle to get Dead Space III… until I read this. I guess it`ll be NFS: Most Wanted.
Also, boy were they ever generous, letting us pick Plants vs. Zombies or Bejewelled 3.
I submit that Nathan Drake is “a quippy, smart-aleck douchebag” in the same way that Peter Parker is.
Yeah, no, not really. There’s a very valid reading of the Uncharted games where Drake is a self-destructive, barely functional sociopath who is faking the lion’s share of his useful human interactions, because he’s a voluntarily self-deluded orphan who never learned to engage with the world on an adult level and instead is the star of his own self-created pulp-drenched escapist fantasy. It’s why he can kill seven hundred people per game with guns, explosives, and his bare hands while still laughing and quipping the entire time; his personal monkeysphere tops out at maybe eight people.
More like twenty
Peter Parker in his ideal platonic form is someone who wants to be a douchebag, but knows that if he does, god will reach down from heaven and kill his uncle again.
Fuck every mass effect romance option for not being the option to date wrex.
Also a douchebag? Spyro the Dragon.
Corvo Attano (from Dishonored) isn’t a douchebag, or at least doesn’t have to be. If you play clean-hands or just not kill the main targets, even the antagonist Daud points this out. With the heart-thing I found myself reluctant to kill guards until I knew their life story.
“There’s a very valid reading of the Uncharted games where Drake is a self-destructive, barely functional sociopath who is faking the lion’s share of his useful human interactions, because he’s a voluntarily self-deluded orphan who never learned to engage with the world on an adult level and instead is the star of his own self-created pulp-drenched escapist fantasy.”
There’s an equally valid reading of Star Wars where the rebellion kill millions of innocent technicians, janitors, and contractors when they blow up the Death Star, making them responsible for a horrific large-scale atrocity that we’re being tricked into cheering them on for. I don’t give that one a lot of credence either.
Seriously, I know it’s funny and all when Yahtzee talks about Drake being a racist mass-murdering psychopath but suggesting that is an actual “very valid” reading of the character strikes me as pretty reaching. Yes, I’ve played the games. I’m no more swayed by the argument now than I was the first dozen times I heard it. Or is the idea that we’re supposed to feel sorry for the pirates, bandits, mercenaries, war criminals, and other people who keep showing up to try and kill Drake when he manages to kill them instead? If the problem is “but he kills so MANY people!” then I’m afraid the ultimately unsatisfying answer there is “yes he does, because it’s a video game and people aren’t going to pay $60 for an action shooter where you fight a dozen people throughout the entire thing.”
@ascendance
Hey! We can pick any game out of the EA catalog…
As long as it’s one of 8 games that no one really wants.
*record scratch*
EA finds fun ways to drag out the level of ‘wtf’ on this whole SimCity thing. Also I find it ironic that as a make good for upset customers… they offer ME3. 🙂
Seriously, I know it’s funny and all when Yahtzee talks about Drake being a racist mass-murdering psychopath but suggesting that is an actual “very valid” reading of the character strikes me as pretty reaching. Yes, I’ve played the games. I’m no more swayed by the argument now than I was the first dozen times I heard it.
I didn’t mention racism, Yahtzee, or sympathy for the victims at all. I’m talking about how the games themselves play around with that interpretation, particularly in the third one with the multiple disturbing revelations about Nate’s childhood. I’ll refrain from spoilers, but everything you learn about Nate in that game forces a serious reexamination of the past two. It’s a lot like the interpretation of Batman where he’s mentally frozen at the age he was when his parents died.
Yeah, it’s a video game and as such you fight dudes, but there’s always something off about any kind of narrative where your main character murders hundreds of people without really reacting to that. There’s a good dose of that with the earlier Tomb Raider games as well. Max Payne dodges that by virtue of being a series about the main character’s psychological disintegration, and by the protagonist not being a wholly reliable narrator. Max is, by the terms of this post, an interesting exercise; he is distinctly a douchebag but he would very much prefer not to be.
I’m not arguing that Nate Drake isn’t a douchebag, for the record. I mean, I don’t think he’s close to the top of the “video game douchebag protagonist list.” Compared to someone like Ezio Auditore who, at the player’s behest, can go on an hours-long guard murdering spree followed by a light sprinkle of “those goddamn minstrels” so long as you keep the civilian murder threshold below the “get kicked out of the Animus” radar. Sure, you could always say that’s just Desmond fucking around in the simulation, but the Animus is supposed to be some super genetic memory quantum leap thing, so it’s fair to say that everything that doesn’t get you kicked out, including that time you spent an hour in a haystack pulling guys inside to make a corpse-stuffed clown car, is historically valid.
If you think “oh, this guy’s a douchebag” then okay, I’m willing to accept that’s a valid interpretation, I can see how someone arrives there. Barely-functional sociopath? Sorry, I’m still not buying it. Yes, I’ve played the third one, I know what you’re talking about. I think that the intention was definitely “hey, here’s something that sheds new light on who Drake is,” but I think that then saying “he’s a closet sociopath who’s faking his way through everything” is a very valid interpretation is reaching.
Yeah, Drake’s a genial enough guy that I wouldn’t put him near the top of the list, particularly since that list has guys like Marcus Fenix or Kratos or outlaw-mode John Marston on it.
The disconnect between Drake’s behavior under player control and Drake’s actions in cutscenes, though, is what fascinates me. In the first two games, yeah, you have to chalk it up to video game logic; it’s a game, you shoot mans, and that’s why the Uncharted universe has a bottomless supply of well-armed discount mercenaries with no sense of self-preservation.
In the third, though, you’ve got the plot point that Drake’s entire self-image is a really comfortable lie he came up with as a kid to make himself feel better about his awful life. And it did.
Thus, all those warning signs, like Elena or Chloe or Sully pointing out that there’s really no reason to continue to pursue the relic du jour and Drake brushing them off, Drake’s complete lack of a reaction when Lazarevic accuses him of being as big a monster as he is, his off-again/on-again thing with Elena where she can’t really understand him or his motivations, or that whole museum heist from the start of the third game aren’t just the assorted weirdness that crops up from under-imagined video game plotting: it’s Drake having a bad case of antisocial personality disorder.
(And yeah, I should’ve been more specific than just “sociopath” in the first place. I looked it up and I was misusing the term.)
That doesn’t make the games any less fun for it, naturally, but it’s an interesting reinterpretation of the games’ storyline. Nathan Drake is a story he tells himself to make himself feel better about being an orphan, and because all those nameless mercenaries are just extras, there’s no reason to think twice about killing them.
That assessment I don’t have much to disagree with, though I’ll say that I don’t really give much of a second thought to Drake’s lack of a reaction when Lazarevic tries the “we’re not so different, you and I” gambit because Lazarevic is a no-fucking-around war criminal, like they want his ass at the Hague war criminal. If I were Drake the most I’d do is roll my eyes at someone like that because come on, that is a weak sauce play right there.
That Drake is, if we take video game logic at face value, unusually good at killing lots of dudes that still doesn’t make him a monster because at no point in the Uncharted series does Drake kill someone who wasn’t trying to kill him first. He doesn’t even do the Han Solo/Malcolm Reynolds thing where he shoots first/kicks someone into the engine, if you get killed by Nathan Drake then frankly it’s your own goddamn fault.
I’d say Drake’s big overarching motive, which becomes increasingly apparent as the series progresses, is vindication. Throughout the games, you’re right about this, his friends keep telling him “man, are you sure this place even exists?” and then they usually move on to “all right fine, we believe you but that’s enough now, you don’t need to keep going,” but he does need to keep going. If you want to tie it into the backstory we get on him in the third game, look at it this way; Drake knows about the power of a comforting lie. He knows because he’s done that before.
So he could just say “Yeah, I cracked the secret code to the long lost city of Wherever, I don’t need to prove it or anything because I know I’m totally right,” but he’d always have that little nagging feeling in the back of his head that he doesn’t know he’s totally right and his self-assurance could just be another lie he’s spinning to make himself feel better. I think that’s his motivation…he doesn’t really want to be the guy who’s bragging and spinning bullshit without anything to back it up, and so now whenever he has the chance to see this stuff all the way to the end so he can go “See? I told you it was real!” he gets, yeah, a little obsessed.
Isn’t it possible to get through most of Uncharted–certainly the most recent installment–without killing everyone? The melee in the third was a great option, and I simply snuck up on many people and choked them until they passed out. I never checked their pulse so can’t confirm they were still alive, but just wanted to point out Nathan Drake doesn’t have to kill everyone.
I wouldn’t have called him a douchebag in the first place, but I’m not sure I know what a douchebag is, exactly. Is it sort of like the difference between porn and erotica, which people can’t seem to define but know when they see?
I get that feeling. I think Drake verges on the cocky side of things, to be sure, but he ultimately cares deeply about the people around him. Though I still can’t see what he sees in Elena. Maybe Cole McGrath from the second inFamous is a good example; I remember giving up that game because his character felt so different from the first game (among several other reasons, not the least of which was the Fire v. Ice characterization, which I found grating).
To some people, Peter Parker is an awesome wisecracking superhero. To some people Peter Packer is a snarky dickbag who doesn’t need to keep up a running commentary as he beats up the Shocker again.
Video game character Nathan Drake tosses out quips and wisecracks as he kills people. This is, as stated, a bit at odds with cutscene Drake who generally isn’t doing the constant running quip thing but more the “oh shit, this is bad” thing. To some people, and I can understand this, it’s going to give Drake both something of a split-personality tone as well as making him come across as something like a flippant douche as he shoots a bunch of mercenaries in the face. Also Drake’s character model has the sort of look that a lot of people associate with people they consider douchebags…I think it’s the hair.
It’s pretty clear that Drake cares about the people close to him, we just really only see less than a half dozen of them throughout the game whereas we see approximately 600-700 people who want to shoot him in the face, so it skews the perspective a bit. I think Drake, like a lot of people, has his blind spots and that’s why his relationship with Elena is all over the place…because hunting down these lost cities and treasures is important to him in a way she doesn’t understand but makes perfect sense to him, but like a lot of people he’s oblivious to the fact that it’s not obvious to her and/or is bad at articulating his reasons.
As for Drake and melee: you can sneak up and melee dudes, though I’ll point out that when you do that Drake has a tendency to snap peoples’ necks. Of course, again, these are people who are trying to kill him so that’s somewhat forgivable, if a bit grim. As a counterpoint, though, you can look at the opening sequence of the second game where Drake and his pals are breaking into the museum and the designers very explicitly go out of their way to show Drake using non-lethal melee takedowns and sleepy darts on the museum guards because those guys aren’t trying to kill him and are just doing their jobs.
The new Tomb Raider game is fantastic. Very immersive, good controls, and great writing. Highly recommended.
Dr. C
[…] A guy I know wrote an interesting post earlier this year about Dead Space 3, and the current tendency in mainstream games to have main characters who aren’t just generic, but who are actively unpleasant. […]