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Look! It Moves! #93: The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Crysis

I was in the mood for a big, explode-y Hollywood SF blockbuster this weekend, but since there were no new ones on release, I decided to sate the craving by playing CRYSIS 2 instead.

Look! It Moves! #93: The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Crysis

First Person Shooters are pretty much the video game equivalent of the Hollywood Blockbuster now, with all the downsides that entails.  They're expensive to produce, they're hyped to the skies with a massive marketing budget, the main audience is teenage boys and the product tends to be increasingly generic.  The gameplay is usually the same and studios have begun hiring Hollywood screenwriters to handle the dialogue and make the scenes hang together.  The stories are worth considering because the same narrative impulses fuel not just movies but also comics on top of games.  So now we have John Milius on HOMEFRONT, David Goyer and Howard Chaykin contributing to CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS and respected Science Fiction author Richard K. Morgan scripting CRYSIS 2.

The makers of the CRYSIS series seem to be out to make the series the Rolls Royce of FPS games.  The series isn't original, but the games so far seem to refine almost everything common from every other successful FPS game and distilled it into the gaming equivalent of a fine aged whisky, including running them through a fuck-off proprietary graphics engine that's reputedly one of the most detailed and advanced out there.  The first CRYSIS game, which came out in 2007, became semi-legendary for being so graphically demanding that it could only be played on high-end computers.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHLEbuj5x6Q[/youtube]

CRYSIS 2 brings the game to the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 on top of the PC and also refines all the FPS elements of the most popular shooter games of the last decade: the run-and-gun tanking of HALO and CALL OF DUTY, the stealth play of SPLINTER CELL and METAL GEAR SOLID (including being guided by a geek scientist that everyone finds annoying) and makes the setpieces bigger and crazier, with the game actually requiring you to think strategically rather than just run-and-gun, all wrapped in an apocalyptic post-911 New York City where you make your way from the Financial District and work your way uptown, alternately killing PMCs and armoured squid aliens through Bryant Park, the Public Library, Grand Central Station, Time Square and finally Central Park, which has become airborne as Central Parks tend to do when aliens invade.

Look! It Moves! #93: The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Crysis

I suppose the game developers feel the need to have a coherent story in the single-player campaign, hence getting a British Science Fiction author and screenwriter like Richard K. Morgan to script the game was considered import, and even getting microbiologist and Canadian Science Fiction author Peter Watts to write the novelization was seen as a big deal, especially to the fans.  The reviews have generally dismissed the story as generic and many gamers tend to skip the story scenes altogether to get to the shooting.  I'm often fascinated by the stories behind shooter games when they decide to put some extra effort into it.  After all, the HALO games spawned a series of novels that were on the New York Times Bestsellers List, where Eric Nylund's storylines imbued the Master Chief with an inner life.  Like HALO, you play a silent, faceless soldier in armour, though in CRYSIS 2, the armour looks like a bionic gimp suit.

The most memorable FPS games tend to create their own unique atmosphere, which might also end up as their main (not always intentional) existential theme.  The CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE games create the sense of being a grunt fighting through seemingly endless war and BLACK OPS tries to introduce a new wrinkle by making the hero the long-suffering pawn of a Cold War brainwashing conspiracy plot being jerked around by forces beyond his ken.  HALF-LIFE has you playing as the last free man, an armoured physicist who has become a freedom fighter with a revered reputation you find rather bewildering.  HALO has you playing as a cybernetically-enhanced supersoldier whose only purpose is to fight, without which you just go to sleep, waiting for the next battle, where everyone around you dies but you will always survive to keep fighting.  BULLETSTORM has you play a drunken space pirate dickhead in a playground of murder, which would explain your creating increasingly elaborate and sadistic slapstick ways to kill mutant thugs rather than just simply shoot them.  What sets CRYSIS 2 apart here is the sense of existential desolation that's openly acknowledged in the story.  You get a hint of that in HALF-LIFE 2 and the HALO games, but this is the first time the game is really about being this suit whose sole purpose that blows through hundreds of enemies.

Look! It Moves! #93: The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Crysis

The following are SPOILERS to the hero's arc, but do people really care that much about the game story in a FPS at this point?

In CRYSIS 2, you play Alcatraz, a faceless and voiceless US Marine who gets mortally wounded just as he enters New York City and is rescued by Prophet, the soldier who wears the gimp suit.  Prophet puts Alcatraz into the suit because he has been infected and thus doomed, and shoots himself to break the suit's link with him so that it can bond with Alcatraz, entrusting the latter with finishing the mission of saving New York from the alien infestation.  For the rest of the game, Alcatraz has to fight through not just aliens but PMC troops who want the suit and think he's Prophet.  Alcatraz also sporadically gets flashbacks from Prophet's memories of battling the aliens and trying to work out the nature of their infection.  By the time Alcatraz gets into a medical scanner, we discover that his initial wounds were so lethal that he would be dead without the suit propping him up.  That throws up the question of whether Alcatraz is already dead and it's really the suit that's pushing forward, having been imprinted with Prophet's memories and drive to complete his mission.  The endgame is to sacrifice himself by throwing himself into the maw of the alien artifact that's set to release the spores that would infect every human once and for all, since the suit has been collecting, analyzing and accumulating alien tissue from every fight, creating an antidote to the infection.  But the epilogue finds the suit still intact, Alcatraz still wearing it, but with Prophet's mind also inhabiting the AI mainframe, telling him neither of them gets to die just yet.  There are other alien hives that need fighting, setting up the sequels.  In the end, the suit is inhabited not by one dead man but two. That you will get to play in future installments.

Look! It Moves! #93: The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Crysis

I was impressed that this much thought was put into justifying the conventions and mechanics of the game.  The story really is about the suit that you play, and Morgan's script addresses head-on the existential notion of existing merely to fight, which is, after all, the whole rationale of the game.  He provides you with a reason the hero will still be around for you to play in the next installments. It's rather reflexive and meta, the closest to a kind of postmodernist self-awareness a mainstream blockbuster game is probably going to get.

And of course, if you don't care, you can always just skip over the cutscenes and get on with the bang-bang-shooty-shooty.

For more thoughts about writing and adaptations, I highly recommend reading this interview with Peter Watts about writing CRYSIS: LEGION, the novelization of CRYSIS 2.

I am but an empty gun at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK!  IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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