In my last post I was talking about the maturity of gaming as a medium, and now this week's Aberrant Gamer is about maturation, too. It's a rated-M week here at SVGL, I guess!Anyway, check out the column. I wonder, sometimes about "rated mature." Do you think the necessity of including teens and kids in the gaming audience results in an intentional avoidance of maturation for certain elements of games? I mean, we all know what the ESRB says -- M-rated games aren't for kids, period. But neither are cigarettes, and yet there was Joe Camel and stuff, designed to attract young people to the product when they're older (or not).
After all, if games were really, squarely "adult," would they still be "cool" to new generations of hip punked-out kiddoes?
Of course, just because we had a really grown-up game wouldn't mean that we couldn't also have kids games, family games and traditional games at the same retailer. But it makes one muse a bit on the balance of culture versus commerce, don't you think?
In other news, the more I play Devil May Cry 4 the more impressed I am with it. I can really appreciate how, in a field where everyone seems to be trying to mindfuck you, it never aims to be anything more than an action video game. It even seems to lampoon its own hyperbole at times. It's enjoyable to play something that knows what it is and is unpretentious about it, doesn't try to take itself too seriously.
You play through half the game as Nero, and then switch to Dante and essentially revisit the same areas, and a lot of people think that kind of thing is a cop-out. Hey, Castlevania fans, they coulda at least flipped it upside-down, right? But what you get from the game is that Capcom quite admirably maximized their resources and made the most of the options they had.
I said in my review that the game is beautiful, but that's not really doing it justice. I'm not sure if I've ever seen graphics like this in a game, though admittedly I'm not playing every damn thing there is out there right now. The level of detail in the scenery is just absolutely amazing, and the textures are incredible. Big, big kudos to Capcom, because I just can't imagine the kind of artistry it takes to do that. That kind of polish characterizes the entire game, too. The voice acting is actually pretty wonderful; Nero's got a real genuineness about him.
You've got the fourth installment of a stable franchise, and the first in the new console generation. You can empathize with them for not taking any real huge risks -- and DMC4 isn't drastically different, fundamentally, from the previous installments. But they took all the energy they might have otherwise put into overhauling the formula or trying to top themselves, and used it to tone up every little facet of the game. So while there are really only a handful of major game areas and a limited number of monster types, and while the second half of the game is essentially "same thing, different character," it's still impressive -- they studiously perfected the elements they did have, rather than go for more elements polished to a lesser extent.
That's not to say there's no innovation -- the things Nero can do are absolutely awesome, and there are sort of special melee sequences you can initiate with bosses (and some regular monsters) by doing the right thing at the right time. And Dante has an awesomely variant weapon rotation, also, so it feels familiar, but fresh at the same time. DMC certainly may not be the most thought-provoking, innovative, dignified or ground-breaking franchise out there -- but DMC4 is high, high quality stuff, elementally. Utterly solid, at least, and pretty much watertight. This is how a blockbuster franchise sequel ought to be done, so take note, film world.
Oh yeah, and by the way, the much-maligned PS3 install is no damn big deal -- jeez, just go get a sandwich or something and then come back -- and totally worth it. There's barely any loading time at all, and with that sheer volume of detail, that's rad.
