Snake? SNAAAAKE!

So, last night I went to a student stage production of Metal Gear Solid.

I say again: Last night, I saw a stage production of the original Metal Gear Solid.

Like, in a theatre.

I went (gobbling beer enroute) with the twin objectives of fulfilling curiosity and writing something funny about it for this blog.  Something like Charlie Anders’ review of the second Transformers movie, except not as good, because I’m not sure anything will ever be as good as that review.

I mean, how could this play not be the worst thing? The plot of MGS is a jangling gymnast that rolls back and forth and only makes sense on your 2nd playthrough. It’s also part tedious speeches and part bombastic action that wouldn’t work on a stage. The reason it works as a game plot is because the characters run over with personality, and you spend so long talking (or at least listening) to them that they claw their way off the script and into your head where they will squat for all time.

Now this play, it was bad. The actors weren’t projecting and any clever production (like Snake fighting a Hind-D that appeared on a projector) was way outweighed by scenes where costumed actors did nothing but act out cutscenes.

But I can’t write mad copy when the madness isn’t there. The audience were all familiar with the game in some respect and totally got into the show. The actors knew the game was camp and gave camp performances, peaking with an exceptional Psycho Mantis, not seen here. Here you’ll see a slightly less exceptional Revolver Ocelot. He loves to reload during a battle.

I’d gone to this show planning to write about how the actor playing Snake was beating my childhood to death with a rock, but it wasn’t that bad. Instead I got bored, and began thinking about how I’d produce MGS as a play.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

If you’re creating a stage adaptation of MGS you can’t just recreate the game on stage, because MGS is not just a story. It’s a videogame, an experience that you personally live through.

My vision of an MGS theatre production opens with Snake infiltrating the docks as normal, except Snake gets shot and killed. You then bring a spotlight up on the right side of the stage where sits Simon, a lanky 14 year-old nerd done up in a hoody and glasses, sat on his bed and clutching a pad. The way I see this play working involves perhaps 60% scenes from the game and 40% scenes from the suburban household where it’s being played.

Simon is the awkward teen who’s bought MGS on release day. He’s got his 2 litres of fanta and a microwave pizza. He’s fucking excited. Following Snake’s death in the docks Simon grunts, the lights go down on him and back up on Snake as the two of them attempt the dock infiltration again.

The moment Snake is through the docks and changes into his sneaking suit, Steve’s doorbell rings. It’s his best friend Iarla and Iarla’s girlfriend Sarah, who Simon has a crush on. Iarla and Sarah have a shitload of cider and want to get drunk. Gradually Simon wins them over to the idea of playing this game while they all drink, and that’s your set-up. As the trio progress through the game in one sleepless night, you get both the game and their commentary.

Except Iarla does go to sleep. He gets wasted and has a nap. The plot then becomes Simon and Sarah having this shared experience, and you get to do something with all that rhetoric and sexuality that chokes MGS’s second half. As you’re watching Snake’s pep talk to Meryl in the ladies’ toilets or Otacon lamenting his love of Sniper Wolf, you’re thinking about how this would effect Simon and Sarah.

Simon, whose teen mind knows no bounds in its adoration for Solid Snake, begins taking the legendary soldier’s advice and working up to making a move on Sarah. Sarah, previously having no respect for games or Simon, begins seeing Simon differently as he lives through Solid Snake. She watches him wordlessly overcome tension to sneak through room after room, figure out how to escape the prison cell and become genuinely scared to protect Meryl. She sees a new side to him.

The game ends as dawn comes up in the real world. As Snake and Meryl share a skimobile out of there, Simon and Sarah look at each other. A moment passes. You’re praying for Simon to say something, anything. This is where Iarla wakes up and takes Sarah home. The audience get the hint that a seed’s been planted, but no more than that. The audience have already had their ending, with Metal Gear Rex and the death of Liquid and Gray Fox.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it could work. Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll get to find out.

Huntsman

In the black and sugar-coated spirit of Halloween*, a game idea:

What I’m proposing is a kind of occult Swat 4. Let’s call it Huntsman. Each level is you arriving on the scene of a monster sighting- vampires at the hospital, werewolves at a wedding, banshees in a bank, etc. By the time you get there the locale has been sealed off by the authorities with a mass of civilians still inside, and you (and your team?) are sent in to hunt down the disguised creatures and kill them.

Same as Swat 4, finishing the mission in Huntsman is only half the fight. The real game is in choking down all that foggy tension and the immersive, restricting first-person perspective and carrying out your mission with minimum of bloodshed.

But in Swat 4 you’re always struggling to fit shoes that’d be better occupied by some unblinking automaton. The ideal Swat agent would be a robot programmed by the book, a machine capable of carrying out the specific tactical procedure for any situation with laser-guided accuracy and animal reflexes. I’m envisioning something more emotion-driven.

First of all, the monsters are disguised as the regular people. While Swat 4’s core was in breaching and subduing of individual rooms in a haze of tear gas, Huntsman would be about walking into a room that could explode into violence at any moment and calmly sniffing it out. That could be as simple as approaching each civilian, one by one, and spraying them with essence of garlic, or it could be as difficult as watching their body language and asking them questions.

Maybe the room’s clean, and you tell everybody to stay right where they are before moving deeper into the building. Or maybe as you’re working the crowd the monster panics, drops its disguise and lunges at you while your back is turned. Or maybe you decide the four people in the room are civilians, leave, then go running back at the sound of screaming and find the room empty but for three bloodied corpses.

The second feature of Huntsman for players to consider and master is that of panic. As long as the situation remains calm the civilians will cooperate and your steely hunter can go about his business methodically. But the moment civilians start panicking a level will get exponentially harder. In a mad crowd the monsters can move about at will, the screams of victims will mingle with screams of terror and you’ll have to keep ice cool when civilians start running at you (maybe they want to ask you something, maybe they want to wrestle your weapon off you). The movement of any civilian towards you will naturally reduce your whole investigation of their character into a single second spent measuring their speed and gait to determine whether they’re really a monster, whether you’re about to receive a mauling and whether you shoot.

Keeping the crowd calm in the first place might be a matter of walking instead of running, tagging civilians with brightly coloured bracelets once you’ve decided they’re ‘clean’, or dragging your suspects off to basements or other secluded places before you shoot them. Dragging the mood of a room back down once panic has set in is harder. Maybe you’ll have to give away a weapon, slap some sense into someone or tell someone in a gravelly voice to shut the fuck up if they want to get out alive (though if they’re close enough to losing their shit any of these might push them over the edge).

Give the game multiplayer and give it a final level set in some rich kid’s Halloween party and you’ve got something I’d give a toe to play.

* I am NOT writing this late. For your information, if I still have makeup left on my face it’s still Halloween.

Most Destructables

With the coming of Red Faction: Guerilla and Battlefield 1943 it seems the games industry is starting to wrap its excitable, sweat-slicked hands around destructible 3D environments.  I’m genuinely excited about the development of this tech over the next decade. Here are my ideas for games centred around it:

BAD DAY JOB

You play a undernourished man with thick glasses and thinning hair as he progresses through a series of mundane workplaces with increasing real-estate values. Level 1 sees you as a dishwasher in a roadside pie shop, level 2 puts you as a clerk in a gas station, in level 3 you’re a salesman in a used car dealership, and so on. Control scheme is third person and weighty, similar to Dead Rising.

You’re given 60 seconds at the beginning of each level to run around manipulating it how you see fit (collecting and moving items, activating elements within the environment to create traps), and after this 60 seconds your boss announces that he’s going for a coffee and that “you’re in charge for the next five minutes”, whereupon he leaves the level. In a running joke, this is when the establishment immediately comes under attack by vandals ranging from gangsters to drunks to rampaging animals, all of which can and will cause damage to the place. Damage done is measured in dollars and displayed prominently at the top of the screen. These enemies never come after you directly, though getting in the way of attack animations will knock you down.

Your job is to fend the interlopers off using anything and everything you can find (fire extinguishers, plates, chairs, cars), again drawing parallels with Dead Rising but with the twist that anything you break gets added to the dollar ticker at the top of the screen. Let the place get too wrecked before the boss comes back, it’s game over.

SCORCHED EARTH

I know there’s already a game called Scorched Earth. Shut that smart mouth of yours.

A large scale team game in the vein of Battlefield (potentially just a new gameplay mode for it), Scorched Earth has one team trying to conquer a base, building or area as another team defends it for a set amount of time. The more ruined the objective gets, however, the less points either team gets for winning. Therefore when a team looks like it’s going to win the losing side has to decide whether they keep fighting or focus on doing as much structural damage as possible. Certain key targets on each level (documents, fuel silos, docked submarines, whatever) count for far more than simple structural damage, so both teams will have to keep an eye on them.

Mainly I like the idea of doing all your fighting with an eye for where each rocket and grenade will end up if you miss, and the defenders making their last stand by taking cover behind the very thing the attackers want. A lot of clever tactics could come into play here.

MACHINE TERROR

A co-op game most closely related to Gears of War 2’s Horde mode but inspired by Holy Invasion Of Privacy, Badman!, this has a team of players defending the factory they work at from increasingly powerful waves of robots that arrive at timed intervals. The robots will keep coming until the humans are dead. There is no stopping the robots. There is only temporarily wedging the vice as it slowly closes on your fleshy testicles.

The robots can’t be harmed by the cutting lasers, simple explosives and pistols you’re equipped with (though you can use these to get their attention), so instead you have to take them down using the environment. Valid tactics might include crushing robots with falling masonry or pillars, taking out the floor or bridge they’re walking across, knocking them into pits or anything you can dream up. The goal isn’t necessarily to destroy the robots, just to keep them from being a threat. Bury them, trap them, tip them over, whatever you can manage to keep your team alive.

What I like about this last idea is that you’re dooming yourself with the methods you’re employing. Eventually there will be no roofs or bridges to bring down, the pits will be full, rooms will be sealed off and welded shut with furious robots inside (“NOBODY BLOW A HOLE IN THE WALL”) and you’ll have nothing to do but go scrambling over piles of rubble and twisted industrial machinery as the robots close in on you.

I guess you could have a rescue ship show up after a set amount of time, but where’s the fun in that?

Incidentally, I really cannot wait for games to get good at 3D liquid physics. Any of these ideas with the added feature of gargantuan dams and pipes waiting to be broken and levels designed around the concept of flooding would be the absolute best thing.

Rhythm’s Action

Game idea! Do you ever choreograph scenes from imaginary films in your head while you’re walking somewhere and listening to exciting music on headphones? Everyone I know with a Y chromosome and half a pulse does. There’s definitely a game in there. Here’s what I’m thinking:

Take a third person action game with fighting, running, climbing and jumping segments. Plot’s unimportant. Make it about some scrawny guy who’s just spent ten years in Neo-Tokyo studying the art of dance-fu, and returns home with a pair of fat headphones and a burning desire to clean up his town. Make the levels short, maybe three to four minutes long, and build them like time-trials. Your goal is not just to make it from A to B in the shortest time, but to discover new routes and shortcuts for subsequent playthroughs.

A level might look like this: Boss gangster is taunting you from the roof of a bar. You have to make your way through all his goons in the car park, go around the alleyways behind the bar to the fire escape, climb up that and then beat his ass down.

The game would ship with, say, 20 real-world songs ranging from dance to hip-hop to rock, one for each level, and the action would be tied in with them. Whether a punch hits hard or soft, and whether a block simply deflects damage or automatically initiates a counter is dependent on whether the button was pressed in time with the beat. The goal for the player is for play to become metronomic. Instead of a dodge or evade button the player instead has a ‘dance’ button, which doesn’t increase the player’s combo but when tapped in time with the beat will stop the combo from fading. When pressed in tandem with the corresponding direction on the analog stick the dance button also causes the player to weave out of the way of incoming attacks.

This need for timing would extent to non-violent actions, too. Climbing, jumping, sprinting, all of it would require rhythm and pacing to keep the combo up and the avatar’s actions smooth and strong. Now, environments and enemies wouldn’t be designed around the concept of four button presses for each bar of four-beat timing. The trick in any given sequence would be in squeezing in button-presses where possible and learning what moves your character has (long jumps, slides or convoluted throws) which require you to stop pressing buttons for a beat or two.

Solos and breakdowns in the song would, naturally, require the player to be involved in some kind of exceptionally dramatic setpiece to keep the combo going.

The point of the combo would be in unlocking new ways through the level. The higher the combo gets, the more your character gets into the music and leaves his human limitations behind. After 60 seconds of flawless play perfectly timed kicks will cause enemies to crumple like paper, but they’ll also break the locks off wooden doors. By 90 seconds your jumps will have gained a good sixteen inches in height, more than enough to get your fingertips up on previously inaccessible ledges. Your goal with any level is to find the single path that’ll let you chain the whole thing from start to finish, turning it into an acrobatic, ass-kicking music video.

Game idea! When you’re walking somewhere and listening to exciting music on headphones, you choreograph scenes from imaginary films in your head, right? Everyone I know with a Y chromosome and half a pulse does. There’s definitely a game in there. Here’s what I’m thinking:

Take a third person action game with fighting, running, climbing and jumping segments. Plot’s unimportant. Make it about some scrawny guy who’s just spent ten years in Neo-Tokyo studying the art of dance-fu, and returns home with a pair of fat headphones and a burning desire to clean up his town. Make the levels short, maybe three to four minutes long, and build them like time-trials. Your goal is not just to make it from A to B in the shortest time and with a minimum of pain, but to discover new routes and shortcuts for subsequent playthroughs.

A level might look like this: Guffawing, liquored-up boss gangster is taunting you from the roof of a bar. You have to make your way through all his goons in the car park, navigate the alleyways behind the bar to get to the fire escape, climb up that and finally beat his ass down.

The game would ship with, say, 20 real-world songs ranging from dance to hip-hop to rock, one for each level, and the action would be tied in with them. Whether a punch hits hard or soft, and whether a block simply deflects damage or automatically initiates a counter is dependent on whether the button was pressed in time with the beat. The goal for the player is for play to become metronomic. Instead of a dodge or evade button the player instead has a ‘dance’ button, which doesn’t increase the player’s combo but when tapped in time with the beat will stop the combo from fading. When pressed in tandem with the corresponding direction on the analog stick the dance button also causes the player to weave out of the way of incoming attacks.

This need for timing would extent to non-violent actions, too. Climbing, jumping, sprinting, all of it would require rhythm and pacing to keep the combo up and the avatar’s actions smooth and strong. Now, environments and enemies wouldn’t be designed around the concept of four button presses for each bar of four-beat timing. The trick in any given sequence would be in squeezing in button-presses where possible and learning what moves your character has (long jumps, slides or convoluted throws) which require you to stop pressing buttons for a beat or two.

Solos and breakdowns in the song would, naturally, require the player to be involved in some kind of exceptionally dramatic setpiece to keep the combo going.

The point of the combo would be in unlocking new ways through the level. The higher the combo gets, the more your character gets into the music and leaves his human limitations behind. After 60 seconds of flawless play perfectly timed kicks will cause enemies to crumple like paper, but they’ll also break the locks off wooden doors. By 90 seconds your jumps will have gained a good sixteen inches in height, more than enough to get your fingertips up on previously inaccessible ledges. Your goal with any level is to find the single path that’ll let you chain the whole thing from start to finish, turning it into an acrobatic, ass-kicking music video.

For some reason I can’t get the mental image of Rocketbilly Redcadillac from the PS2’s Gungrave: Total Overdose out of my head as the protagonist. He looks like this:

Kinda low-res, so have some cosplay instead.

Yeah!!