My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

So naturally i was first in line at my local cinema to see G.I. Joe: Retaliation because I love GI Joe and I love movie sequels with colons in the title. Well, I say “first in line,” but more accurately there was in fact no line. I am not sure why people will line up for stupid Spider-Man movies where Peter Parker goes out hunting for revenge but not for awesome movies about G.I. Joe. This seems rather silly to me.

So anyway the movie starts with the G.I. Joes rescuing a “defector” from North Korea, which given that they are supposed to be like this international strike force as per the first movie is a little odd, but if someone is going to defect to The Regular Old World, I guess they would do it from North Korea because that entire country is basically crazy. The Rock (the movie says he is Roadblock, but he does not speak in rhyme even once in this movie, so I am just going to say he is the Rock, much like how in the first movie Brendan Fraser was a G.I. Joe for some reason and they never explained it, but at least the Rock makes more sense because, come on, he is the Rock) has special fence-melting gauntlets which melt the fence and the Joes sneak in and rescue the North Korean defector from North Korea, which… I guess technically that makes him an “attempted defector” rather than a defector, right? Anyway, they rescue him, and then Flint (who is played by a boring guy I don’t remember) points out as they leave that he replaced the North Korean flag with the Yo Joe flag, because Flint thinks secret missions are for wussies.

continue reading "YO JOE AGAIN"

THE EASTER BUNNY DIED FOR YOUR SINS

(Illustration by Bagram Ibatouilline, from The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate Camillo.)

FLAPJACKS: So everybody I know is putting up red equals signs on Facebook to show that they support gay marriage.
ME: Why red?
FLAPJACKS: It is the colour of love?
ME: It’s also the colour of anger, danger, stop signs, and retired assassins who are Bruce Willis. What was wrong with rainbows?
FLAPJACKS: I think maybe the guy who started it was all “well, rainbows are too political. But everybody likes red!”
ME: Or maybe he figured American conservatives who consider themselves red-staters would be tricked into supporting gay marriage this way.
FLAPJACKS: That is not the best plan I have ever heard.
ME: For a Facebook campaign it is basically genius-level thought. I mean, come on, it’s Facebook. Politics on Facebook is less advanced than online competitions involving Doritos.
FLAPJACKS: In fairness, Doritos are more important than civil rights to a surprising number of people.
ME: A surprising number of bad people.
FLAPJACKS: Your point being?
ME: I don’t know. Something about Doritos, probably.
FLAPJACKS: Anyway, I was reading that Facebook activism is bad because it makes people think that they are doing something to help a cause when they are actually, in fact, doing next to nothing.
ME: I, too, have heard that.
FLAPJACKS: But I have a theory, which is that that theory is completely wrong.
ME: Elaborate.
FLAPJACKS: Well, people are, for the most part, useless good-for-nothing assholes.
ME: Wow, this theory got dark in a hurry.
FLAPJACKS: Can you prove that I am wrong?
ME: Well, definitive proof –
FLAPJACKS: Right. So we accept that presumption. Moving on, because people are useless, the theory that people are being dissuaded from helping with a cause by internet activism is crap, because – and this is the important bit – they never would have done anything anyway. I posit that the number of people who really would have gone to protest marches or helped with community organizations or written letters to their elected officials or any of that, but instead did not because they were presented the option to express their support instead with an image macro on a social media website of some sort, is in fact very close to zero. Or, if you prefer, just zero. Straight-up zero.
ME: I don’t know that that is accurate. Given that people do tend to follow the path of least resistance, like rivers –
FLAPJACKS: Rivers have use.
ME: I reiterate: you’re awful dark today.
FLAPJACKS: I broke your wok.
ME: Oh. Well, in any case – wait, how do you break a wok?
FLAPJACKS: The handle came off.
ME: But it was bolted on.
FLAPJACKS: It came off!
ME: Anyway. Given that people tend to follow the path of least resistance, I think the argument that zero people are dissuaded from true activism because of slacktivism is probably erroneous. There must by definition be some people who would have done something more substantial, who were dissuaded because of the option to instead express themselves with a cause-oriented lolcat.
FLAPJACKS: But at what point do we say that the effect is de minimis?
ME: That’s a law term. I’m impressed.
FLAPJACKS: I was watching Boston Legal reruns last week. But anyway, I think activists are, by nature, shit-disturbers. And shit does not get disturbed on the internet. If they had had internet in the 1960s, Rosa Parks still would’ve sat down at the back of the bus.
ME: The front of the bus.
FLAPJACKS: What?
ME: Rosa Parks sat down at the front of the bus. Because black people had to go to the back of the bus. If Rosa Parks had been at the back of the bus it would not have been activism so much as “what normally happened.” Don’t you remember “Sister Rosa” by the Neville Brothers?
FLAPJACKS: My main takeaway from that song was that they really wanted to thank Sister Rosa.
ME: Look, I’m not going to get into the dynamics of bus-sitting, racism and how the two intersected in 1960s Alabama, because I am not Wikipedia and Wikipedia is a thing. And I agree that activists are shit-disturbers. But the point of the slacktivist theory is that social media activism provides the illusion of shit-disturbing, because your Uncle Morris who acts like it is fifty years ago gets offended when you post your “I CAN HAZ GAY MARRIAGE” lolcat on Tumblr, and you feel like you have disturbed shit when you have really done nothing.
FLAPJACKS: I get the illusion argument. I just don’t agree with it, because people recognize when something is something and nothing is nothing.
ME: Aha, and now we turn the cynicism angle back to my side, because people all too frequently don’t realize that and treat their Facebook actions like they are real life, because they know you can get fired for being stupid on Facebook so they assume that all actions on Facebook have consequences.
FLAPJACKS: Yes, but those people are stupid, whereas activists – well, activists can be stupid too, but there is a difference between idealistic stupid and disengaged stupid. Your argument doesn’t depend on how kids who thought KONY 2012 was a real thing that had meaning, because anybody who would have given a damn in any other circumstance was able to figure out that the campaign was being run by weird people who had a history of doing dick and all about the issue. I saw more of that on Facebook than actual Kony posts. Which is why I said de minimis. Well, that and I wanted to lawyer you back for once.
ME: And I was duly impressed.

Further to John’s excellent post about Steubenville and rape culture over the weekend, my good friend Shannon is running an Indiegogo campaign to fund her creation of classroom materials designed to teach kids from a consent-culture perspective, which will upon completion be distributed for free online.

So, put your money where your mouth is, guys. This is a chance to put money towards something that actually has a shot at creating real change.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

I originally wasn’t sure if I wanted to write about the Steubenville rape trial; I imagined that everything I want to say on the subject would be pretty obvious, and it’s not exactly a fun topic of conversation. But my wife pointed out that the people who need to hear most about the subject are the ones who are least likely to listen to the people currently talking about it. She specifically asked me to write about it, and I trust her judgment.

The first thing that stands out about this whole event is how bizarre the media reaction has been. For those of you unfamiliar with the trial, or the events leading up to it, a group of teenage football players at a party repeatedly raped a teenage girl who had passed out. (They may also have drugged her drink, which would suggest premeditation, but that was not proven.) They took photos and videos of themselves in the act, posted them to their Twitter and Facebook feeds, and shared photos and recordings of the act. They were confident at the time that their coach (who was something of a legend in the local sports scene) would be able to make the issue “go away”. Instead, two of them were charged with, and convicted of, rape. (There is currently a grand jury deciding whether further indictments need to be handed down, as well as possible civil suits that are yet to play out.)

Many people, particularly news reporters, have attempted to portray the two young men as remorseful. They point to the way that  both broke down in tears at their sentencing, their apologies to the girl after sentence was passed, and to the consequences to their futures (both were tried as juveniles, and will be doing a remarkably modest amount of jail time given the severity of their crime. But they are now registered sex offenders, which will follow them for the rest of their lives.) The victim, and the effects of being raped on her life, have not come up much in the national conversation as conducted by the 24-hour news networks. (Except for the accidental reveal of her real name by Fox News.)

I can’t see any of the remorse that CNN saw in these boys. They didn’t break down in tears at what they’d done; they broke down in tears when it became obvious that they weren’t going to be able to get away scot-free with the horrific crime that they joked and bragged about. They aren’t foolish young boys who made a mistake; they are cruel, arrogant, callous, self-entitled brutes who assaulted a young woman and assumed that their connections within the community rendered them immune to the consequences of their actions. I don’t believe them to be irredeemable, but I think the first step in making them decent human beings is confronting them with the truth of their actions and their attitudes and not letting them justify themselves. This is not a time to give them sympathy. This is a time to hold their ugliness up to a mirror and let them see it.

The victim, on the other hand, deserves all our sympathy. Some of the worst elements of this case have involved the treatment of the victim, not just at the hands of the media but at the hands of the public. Much of the commentary on the Internet has revolved around what the victim “should” have done to avoid the rape–she “should” have avoided underage drinking, she “should” have dressed more modestly, she “should” have acted in a way that didn’t “incite the boys’ hormones”–all of which colossally misses the point. The point is that every human being has the right to an expectation that being vulnerable, whether due to circumstances or decisions, should not be taken as an excuse for predation. One blogger stated that the boys were “helpless” (his post has apparently been taken down) to avoid having sex with the victim when she was in that state, and that she should be ashamed of herself for putting temptation in their way. Rape is the only crime to invite this kind of spurious asshole logic. Nobody says to a stockbroker, “You got mugged? Well, you were walking through this neighborhood dressed all rich, and you even paid cash for your drinks at that bar! Frankly, someone as poor as your attacker had no choice but to steal your wallet.” Nobody insists that Richard Ramirez was the real victim, because those women should never have let themselves be alone with a man knowing that some of them are serial killers who are pathologically unable to avoid killing when they can get away with it.

This is rape culture, the idea that women are responsible for policing their sexuality because men are incapable of doing so. It’s dehumanizing, misogynistic and misanthropic; it demands an impossible standard of perfection from women, blaming them for the actions of others by suggesting that rapists only assault women who violate the unspoken rules of conduct that govern our society. Likewise, it infantilizes and dehumanizes men, suggesting that they’re incapable of acting with any kind of good judgment or ethical behavior and there’s no point in expecting it of them. It argues that men are nothing more than mindless animals, driven by their lusts, and it’s up to women to avoid anything that might be construed as “leading them on”. It’s a standard no woman can possibly meet, and it allows the worst of men to get away with their crimes secure in the belief that a silent crowd exonerates their every action.

It stops one person at a time. It is up to men everywhere to stand up and say, “Hey, guess what? I don’t think with my dick. If I can do it, you can do it. If you can’t do it, then maybe it’s not so much that ‘men are helpless against their hormones’ and more that you’re just an asshole.'” It’s up to all of us to say, “No, sorry. If your friend passed out drunk, then it’s your duty as a human being to keep her safe, get her medical attention if necessary, and get her home. ‘Not raping her’ is actually below the minimums of human decency, and ‘raping her’ is below even that.” It is up to all of us to find a better standard for the treatment of women, and hold each other to it.

That’s what I think about the Steubenville rape trial. Hopefully, it came across as really obvious to you. If you said, “Geez, does this really even need to be said, let alone talked about at this much length?” I’d be thrilled.

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.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

This is a picture my mate Jason Hinchcliffe took of me recently at the quarterly Toronto boardgaming convention playing Virgin Queen:

(That’s me over on the left – managing to stay around “not too fat” but unfortunately it is going on top. Stupid aging.)

This was my fifth play of the game (four in person and one via the VASSAL engine). Virgin Queen is a very, very long game. When I say “very, very long,” I mean a full play of it, with experienced players, takes anywhere from six to ten hours. Virgin Queen is deeply asymmetric – each of the six powers (Spain, England, France, the Ottomans, the Holy Roman Empire and the Protestants) has their own strengths and weaknesses, special rules and unique victory conditions. It is a stellar example of wide-open game design because there are simply so many things you can do: go to war, of course, but there is also ways to earn points through religious conversions, piracy, exploration, arranging state marriages, patronizing the arts and sciences, spying and assassinations, and so much more.1 Every power is carefully balanced against the others: the Turks spend most games dividing their time between naval battles with Spain and land battles with the Holy Romans, while the English explore, set up colonies, and generally want the Protestants to do well (but not too well), and France just wants to earn a lot of points in a hurry before it gets the crap kicked out of it by everybody else.

Virgin Queen is epic in a way most games can’t be – not just because of its length but because the game wisely uses that length to become immersive. I was brought into “serious” boardgames when I was young, which means the late Eighties and early Nineties, and I played Avalon Hill and Games Workshop boardgames that had heft – games like Britannia, Fury of Dracula, Diplomacy, Republic of Rome and of course the granddaddy of all super-gaming, Civilization (i.e. the one Sid Meier drew inspiration from for his mega-enormous computer game series, and which eventually spawned a decent boardgame spinoff of its own after several false starts). These were “you aren’t going anywhere soon, are you” types of games, but by their very nature they made you want to stick it out – simply because the longer you play a game, the more you care about it. Not necessarily winning, but seeing it through to the end. It becomes a simulation-esque experience – you inhabit your power or country or character as if you were in the middle of an epic RPG session, because assessing your risks and strengths isn’t just about board-reading in a game such as this – it is about knowing the table, reading your fellow players. And it might be hard to set up a session, but it’s always worth it in the end.

Virgin Queen is also somewhat special in that it is not only a long game but a long card-driven game. Card-driven games are traditionally a subset of wargame (although VQ is not a wargame, really, even though it is published by GMT, probably the foremost wargame publisher still going strong); the idea is that you have a hand of cards, and those cards are both events and also action points, and generally – depending on the game – you play a card each turn for either action points or the event or sometimes both at once. Twilight Struggle, the current #1-ranked game on Boardgamegeek, is a card-driven game, and although it is classified as a wargame it really bears a lot more similarity to many area-control Euros because instead of using the cards to move around your armies, you’re instead using them to gain influence around the world as either the USA or USSR.2 But I don’t think that’s why Twilight Struggle is the voted-best game on BGG; I think it has that honor because card-driven games are also, in and of themselves, immersive. Whenever you play a card, you are effectively re-writing history in your side’s favour – either using the event so that it helps you as much as possible (or hurts you as little as possible – a core element of many CDGs is that sometimes you have no choice but to play a “bad” event), or refusing to play it and instead get points. “No, there will be no invasion of Czechoslovakia today. I am going to use those points to firm up Soviet influence in India instead.” (Personally I think 1989 is actually even better at doing what Twilight Struggle does than TS does it, but that’s a bit of a minority opinion.)

The combination of card-driven mechanics with an epic game just makes Virgin Queen all the more enthralling; you just don’t notice the time rolling by until somebody checks their watch and you realize you have been playing this game for four hours already and you’re only just wrapping up turn two. That’s the sign of a great game, to me.

(Also I was France and I totally won for the first time.)

1. England earns VP every turn that Elizabeth I remains unmarried. [↩]
2. And it is three hours long so it is also fairly epic in its own right. [↩]

I’ve been reading a bunch of people complaining that Bioshock Infinite might not re-define the first-person shooter experience. You know the drill: every time a new FPS game comes out, you get the same old litany:

• “I don’t get to make any real choices and all of the in-game choices I get to “make” just ultimately result in either the same thing happening in a different way, or a different cutscene at the end”
• “I’m so sick of doors that don’t open and why can’t I go explore off in the directions they don’t want me to explore”
• “Every game has a pistol and a rifle and a grenade launcher and a BFG, why can’t I get different weapons”
• and of course “why can’t this be more like System Shock 2?”

And all of this misses the point. An FPS might not be a full-on rail shooter, but it’s still about going through the steps of a story; the very nature of an electronic game outside of a full-on-free-form game like SimCity (back when SimCity was not shitty, as it has apparently become) demands a relatively linear progression. Even sandbox GTA-style sandbox/action games have linear progressions built into them – it’s just that the main story has its linear progression while the side stories and one-off-events have their own, and you can bop around the various timelines as you like but you’re not going to get to skip stuff as a rule. The ultimate expression of this, of course, was Telltale’s Walking Dead game, which was excellent and also barely a game in any meaningful sense (it was much more of an interactive movie than anything else), but so long as the writing was rock-solid, who cared that your gameplay was relatively minimal?

Of course, an FPS offers more gameplay than The Walking Dead does, but ultimately ninety percent (at least) of the gameplay in any FPS is tactical – shooting battles. That’s why you play a first-person shooter: to shoot things. The weapons in any given FPS will generally be the same – in function if not form – as they will be in others, because there’s really only a limited number of ways to shoot things with guns (or magic staves, or whatever). Generally when something really neat comes out that breaks the mold for “types of guns available,” it will become a focal point of that game’s play (like the gravity gun in Half-Life 2). And then it will get copied by other games (like Dead Space with its Kinesis module). But this is good! Because when I play an FPS, I want to shoot things immediately and get into the story. I don’t want to learn HOW to shoot the things. I want to point the gun and shoot at them.

And yes, System Shock 2 was a genius piece of work, but it is to modern first-person shooters as Lord of the Rings is to fantasy novels – its influence (multilateral gameplay, an experience/skillbuilding system in an FPS, superb writing) spreads deep into modern design and everybody will always, on some level, feel that any other effort comes up short. Whenever somebody bitches about how they don’t make games like System Shock 2, it just feels like they’re saying “and why wasn’t that play as good as Hamlet?”

I play first-person shooters in order to shoot things. If I can shoot things in an enjoyable fashion, then the game is good. BulletStorm is probably my favorite FPS of the last few years because it wisely decided to take a new tack with first-person shooting – e.g. turning stunt shots into sport and also into character advancement – but also because it awarded me points for shooting baddies in the nuts, or grav-stomping guys into the stratosphere, or bouncing them into lava with explosions. Because that was fun, and made the stupid achievements every game seems it must now have into something actively meaningful. But mostly because it gave me points for shooting baddies in the nuts. Not every FPS has to be a genre-bending exploration of philosophy. Deus Ex: Revolution is not inferior to Deus Ex because you can’t choose the ending. (It is inferior because a single choice you make halfway through the game can render the game effectively unwinnable.) BioShock is not inferior to System Shock 2 because the moral choices you make are effectively all but meaningless. (It is inferior because you get built-in respawn points, which is silly.)

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t want our first-person shooters to be as good as possible. But a solid FPS is not to be sneezed at, especially when most people haven’t played it yet.