It only seemed appropriate to post an update to my tale of morality in Liberty City, given that Jeff is now dead. It’s also appropriate, this time around, to talk slightly less in the first person.

Once again, the player bumps into Jeff on the street – a small blue icon on the map. Niko bumps into him; he’s staring through a pair of binoculars at a house across the road. Niko is really unenthusiastic about meeting Jeff again, which I was pleased about. One trend that emerges throughout GTAIV is that whilst Niko has no hesitation about doing dirty work, that’s all very dependent on the reasons behind it. He’s angry that Brucie made him kill people simply because Brucie was hopped up on steroids, for instance; he’s less angry about crimes that fit within his moral spectrum.

Niko is really angry with Jeff. This made me feel somewhat relieved, if only because it felt like this was going to pan out a bit better. It turns out that Jeff has remarried (an instance of GTA’s somewhat liquid attitude to time) and is sitting watching his wife meet her ex. Of course, he’s decided this is a bad thing, and he wants Niko to kill her.

Niko’s having none of it, and gets quite angry with Jeff. Jeff starts yelling; Niko is “just like all the others“, it seems, and Jeff crosses the road to do the deed himself.

At this point, I’m thinking: is this where I get to kill Jeff, right? This is where Niko gets to demonstrate a wider spectrum of his morals.

And then a supercar piles down the street and runs Jeff over. He bumps over the windscreen, scattering the contents of his wallets, and lies splayed on the pavement. A lawyer-type leaps out of the car, gets on the phone, starts telling the police he’s had an accident. Jeff is still, splayed in the road.

Jeff has been killed in an accident appears, as a legend at the bottom of the screen.

I’m glad; I’m disappointed; I’m chastised. I’m glad he’s dead. I’m disappointed I didn’t get to kill him. I’m chastised for thinking about murdering a civilian.

The Jeff arc is a tiny, optional, three-mission plot in GTAIV, and I’m sure many players won’t experience it. I’m not sure it does much for the game’s misogynist reputation, which is something I am still sitting on the fence about – I have issues with some of its characterisation, for sure, but am not convinced of all the criticism thrown at the game. At the same time, it addresses an interesting issue that hasn’t really come up in the series (even in San Andreas, where it might have been an obvious fit): namely, the gap between criminals and civilians, and also more objective viewpoints of “good” and “bad”. The game is so heavily based upon subjective morals that it’s a really interesting shift of perspective.

Whilst the Jeff missions were presented as a real arc, rather than a series of disparate events, I’m still totally frustrated by the lack of freedom offered in the second Jeff mission, which was really quite unpleasant and made me genuinely angry. Still, I’m glad I played through to the end of the arc. For what it’s worth, there was a sense of closure.

Update: I mistakenly called Jeff “Phil”. No idea where that came from. My bad.

Jeff should be dead.

I met Jeff on the street. He was just a blue blip on my minimap, to begin with. I’d seen him around for a while, but I was now passing right by him, and I was on foot, so I thought I’d head over to see what the blip was all about. And then Jeff started talking, and he wouldn’t shut up.

Jittery, paranoid. Babbling about how his wife’s cheating on him. Kept calling her bad names – bitch, whore. Not cool. But I listen. Anyhow, Jeff wants me to follow her when she leaves the apartment one day, and see where she’s going. Seems like an easy buck, and if he’s wrong, he’ll be glad to know that, right?

So I pull up outside the apartment, and watch her leave. Red Feltzer coupé. Very nice. Tail her for a few blocks, and she pulls up at a café.

I head inside, see her talking to some guy. Smart, suit, smells like a lawyer or something. Anyhow, I keep my distance, a few blocks over, snap a few pictures on my phone. I mean, if Jeff knows the guy, this all might blow over, right? Can’t help but listen to them. And, sure enough, there’s nothing sinister – not yet, anyhow. Just her, talking to some guy she knows – work colleague, maybe – about how jittery and paranoid Jeff is. How it’s driving her nuts, she’s not sure what to do. No affair, no cheating. Just jittery, paranoid Jeff.

I message him the pics, and he flies off the handle and hangs up. Not exactly cool; let’s just hope it all blows over.

Jeff calls me in the night. I’ve just bought a suit for this interview I’ve got tomorrow, big-shot law firm. Need to look the part. Anyhow, I need some sleep, but Jeff’s just yelling at me, screaming, telling me he needs to see me. He’s in a parking garage near Roman’s new apartment.

Parking garages never bode well.

And there’s no option to say no. No conversation branch, no choice; I picked up the phone and I got landed with Jeff – much like when I wandered up to him and he threw me into a mission. Already, I’m sick of Jeff.

So I go to the garage, pull up inside, and there’s Jeff, jittering about, holding himself. Things aren’t good. “Jeff made a mistake,” he tells me, not realising that talking in the third person is a dead giveaway for crazy. Tells me his wife’s had an accident. What kind of accident, I say. Jeff shows me.

The body is in his nasty little hatchback.

I have met many bad people in Liberty City, but Jeff is the worst. Jeff is not a criminal. He doesn’t deal drugs, he doesn’t rob banks, he doesn’t traffic people. He’s your ordinary-decent-citizen. Jeff’s wife is blameless in all of this. And yet he killed an innocent, decent woman, for no apparent reason, and he keeps talking about her like that, and I can tell that Niko hates Jeff, and feels a bit sick, and I hate Jeff, and feel a bit sick.

Jeff gives me the car keys, and sits on the tarmac, crying. He wants me to dump the body.

I’ve never intentionally killed civilians. No joke. Maybe the odd auto accident, but no shooting. Everyone who’s died by my hand has been cop or crook – somebody who was shooting at me, or who would kill me later if I didn’t kill them now. Those are the rules, right?

Anyhow, Jeff is sitting on the pavement in front of me, and I’m thinking that I don’t want his phonecalls in the night, and I don’t want his guilt, and I don’t want him dragging ordinary, decent people into the kind of shit you shouldn’t even choose for yourself (and heaven knows I’ve tried not to), and I realise that a moral decision is presenting itself to me. And there’s only one moral decision I can make in Liberty City.

I pull out my piece and put three rounds into Jeff. He doesn’t even look up when I draw the gun, he’s too busy crying. Sure, he’s not well, but he’s also gone too far, and I don’t want to have anything more to do with this. He rolls back on the ground, must have hit him in head and torso. I hate, you Jeff.

A black-and-white lights up behind me; must have been prowling the parking garage. I leap into Jeff’s car and head for the river. Doesn’t take much ducking and diving to avoid the single patrol car and lose the heat. Now I’ve just got to dump this car and dump the body. He didn’t even put it in the boot; it’s lying around on the backseat, and I can’t avoid seeing it as I’m driving. Still gives me that lump in my throat.

Towards the river, must be barrelling along at about 40. I lurch off the road, head straight for it. It’s hard judging distance at speed, and I throw open the door a fraction too late, because rather than rolling out onto the grass, I end up leaping out above the water. The car goes headfirst into the river as I dunk myself in it.

New interview suit, soaked already.

Jeff’s dead. Jeff’s car’s in the river, along with Jeff’s wife’s corpse. Poor Jeff’s wife. Wish I’d never met him.

I clamber out of the river, and head for home; time to catch some sleep before the big interview.

My cellphone rings.

It’s Jeff.

Jeff should be dead. He was dead to me the second he showed me the corpse in the back of the Blista; he was deader when I shot him, watched him crumple. And now he’s on the phone to me again, like nothing’s happened. I can’t describe my anger; all at once, I’m furious.

And the city fades away and the game wells up over me and I want to scream at Jeff, and scream at Rockstar, and empty my pistol into Jeff, tugging on the joypad trigger again and again until the virtual gun clicks dry, so that he can never come back again, never hurt anyone again. I made a choice – a valid choice in the game world – and for the first time in this game it had no repercussions. I’d have taken any amount of heat just to put Jeff down. But the game wouldn’t let me. The game thought he deserved to live. Saddened, I turn the 360 off.

Grand Theft Auto IV is a wonderful game; it resists any tarnishing with terms such as “fetch quests” and “escort missions” by virtue of the solidity and coherence of world it presents. It rises above the stereotypes of previous games and attempts to create genuine characters, however simple or cartoonish. Few of them are truly evil, few of them can ever be redeemed; they all tread the awkward line between survival and violent death.

Jeff was different; Jeff was the first time that I’d met a character I (and, indeed, Niko – the player’s character) found distasteful. For the first time, the game gave me no choice but to take his missions the second I approached him or picked up the phone. I could have coped with Jeff if I felt like I’d had the opportunity to do something – anything – about him. The game gave me that opportunity, and took it away, and it shouldn’t have done that. Not if it wants me to take the “freedom” it offers me seriously.

I’m going to keep playing, but every time my phone rings, I’ll pray it’s not Jeff, and if it ever is Jeff, I’m going to remember what I want to do to him – and why I want to do that to him – before I hit “reject”.

It’s been linked up all over the place, but I may as well link it again: the Guardian are running Gamecamp, a one-day unconference about games and play, on the third of May, and I’m going to be there, cooking up some nefarious quiz-shaped entertainment with some of the usual suspects such as Dan, James, Lee, and a few others.

Obviously, it being an unconference, everyone attending is encouraged to talk, and I’m working on thinking up a session – but about what, I have no idea. Or perhaps I have too many. I’m hoping to do something along the lines of tight criticism – something detailed and focused. And I’m not sure what sort of games to talk about yet. But I’ll work something out, and I’m looking forward to what the other participants will bring.

Like most events suffixed -camp, it’s going to sell out fast. Tickets are available from Monday April 21st. If you’re interested in coming, good luck getting one. It’ll be fun to see you – and if you’re interested, I’ll gladly corner someone for a game of Lost Cities…

Spotted in Eurogamer’s review of Rez HD:

Back in the day we said of the original: ‘When Rez eventually turns up cheaply it will become indispensable, but until then it’s a luxury.’ Xbox Live Arcade is, then, our modern printing press: digital distribution transforming the expensive and exclusive into the affordable and inclusive.

Emphasis mine. I liked that quite a lot.

I’ve been meaning to talk about EA’s Skate for a while.

Skate is a wonderful game. Whilst the Tony Hawk games plough ever-deeper furrows of furious button-mashing combos, EA decided to go for a more “realistic” route with their skateboarding game. The controls are the most obvious example of this: rather than using buttons to correspond to moves, they use the analogue controls on the board to correspond to the rider’s body: the left stick is your body, the right your feet; the two shoulder buttons are two hands.

To Ollie, you flick the right stick from neutral, to down, to up. To kickflip it’s neutral to down to up/left or up/right. To manual – rolling on only the front or rear set of wheels – you have to find a sweet-spot on the right stick and not move it to neutral or an extremity; as in life, it’s a balance problem. Here’s a more detailed look at the “Flickit” trick scheme.

Couple that approach with a somewhat heavier gravity than Hawk ever had, and you end up with a wonderful simulation of skateboarding. It places the focus not on huge chain-combos (a “videogamey” aesthetic if ever there was one) but on simple, stylish maneuvers that look cool. It’s very satisfying to pull off a simple flip-to-grind, as long as the line is good and you look good doing it. All of a sudden, the focus shifts from points, to just how good you can look navigating the city (a fictional hybrid called “San Vanelona”).

So far, so good. But for me, the most interesting thing about the game is what happens when the game breaks out of the console and into the world.

In order to capture stylish runs and painful bails, EA included an impressive video editor, which makes it easy to alter film-processing and speed effects to mimic the immediately recognisable skate-video aesthetic.

And these videos can be shared with friends. And not just by forwarding them over Xbox Live; no, you can shoot a video in-game, and then – from your console (PS3 or 360) – upload it to the web. EA have a dedicated site for this, called Reel. Like any Web 2.0 product, Reel is still in beta (perhaps giving it a more “authentic” feel), and it effectively functions as a miniature Youtube for the game.

Here’s a short clip of a through-flip hosted on Reel. You can see some of the film effects in play. And remember: this clip was made in a videogame, uploaded from a console, and now exists as an embedded flash movie on a webpage, with the potential to be tagged, commented, and linked to.

And EA really want people to use this. If you look at the Achievements list for the game (Achievements being a way of rewarding players for impressive, or unusual behaviour in-game), you can see that amongst the usual score and skill challenges, there are achievements for uploading videos and photos, and even one for getting at least 20 people to view your video on the web.

Think about that for a second: you get an achievement for the behaviour of other people who aren’t in the game-world at the time.

I find Skate exciting because it’s a prime example of a game that understands Generation C; it allows players to share game-information outside the game – and in a manner that is so much more easily referenced, due to it having a permanent link – just as they share movies, photos, and blogposts. Other games that “get” this include Halo 3, which lets you upload and share screengrabs, movies, and even custom game-rules (although you can only view screengrabs online), and the Project Gotham and Forza games, which have a very detailed photo mode; here’s some of my virtual photographs from PGR3.

It’s also great to see EA understanding the ethos of the real-world skate community. Skating has always been a community with a huge user-generated aspect; bootleg and home-made skate videos have been a huge part of the scene, and so to attempt to digitally recreate the community (and not just the activity) is a really interesting move.

Skate has been almost universally praised, but it doesn’t feel like it’s done as well as it could have. That’s a shame, because in many ways, it’s one of the more innovative “major league” titles of last year. For the reasons above, I thought it was worth bringing to the attention of the many people interested in this terrain who don’t necessarily play console games.

Crackdown seems so unremarkable to begin with. A large city; free-roaming run, gun, and drive action; roughly-stereotyped gangs that need taking down. That hint of cel-shading isn’t enough to lift it in your opinions.

And then you start to level up, and the game unveils its true majesty. When that comes, it’s hard to say: perhaps it’s when you turn to face a carful of Los Muertos thugs and just pick the car up, with them in it, and hurl it off a bridge. Perhaps when you leap from one ten-storey building to another, raining death from above on casual gang members. Perhaps when you stop “playing” the game, and take the time to go for a run.

Like San Andreas before it, Crackdown allows your character to level up abilities; but unlike San Andreas, Crackdown takes the physical limits of your character well into superhero territory. And when that happens, the city that is the game’s playscape transforms.

From street-level, it seems perhaps bland, stereotyped; it doesn’t have the instantly familiar locations (as Dan Hill points out in a marvelous City of Sound post) that Rockstar is so capable at creating, and is perhaps harder to navigate as a result. But as your agility increases, the streets fade away as you spend more of your time on the rooftops. From above, everything makes so much sense; it’s a much higher-rise environment, full of windowledges and awnings, offering handholds to reach you to the skies. And then the traditional structure of the city falls apart. No longer is it delineated by roads and pavements, and obstructed by buildings; the buildings themselves become the fabric, as you leap from roof to roof, impervious to the regimented town planning below. In so many ways, it’s Grand Theft Parkour : like the traceur, your agent deconstructs the urban environment, remaking it in a shape he prefers.

I can’t help but call to mind this Frieze article about the Israeli Defence Force, describing the process by which they (literally) deconstruct the city in order to move through it, ignoring existing paths to create their own. Through that, the soldiers gain…

a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.

And, of course, that’s exactly the sensation Crackdown generates – the feeling that you are no longer moving through the city, but that you are moving the city around you.

It’s then that the other subtleties of Crackdown rear their heads. The fact there’s no traditional meet-a-guy-and-get-a-mission-structure – it’s all radioed in to you, meaning you can ignore it from the get-go; whilst completing the missions will earn you experience on the way, the city is truly free-roaming from the start. The mini-map, initially perhaps too small, too clumsy, pales into insignificance as you become more agile; a far better perspective on your destination can be had from scaling the nearest tower block.

And, of course, there’s no better way of playing about in an unfamiliar city than with a friend. Crackdown supports a co-operative mode, and it’s a real treat: almost entirely lag-free, with the whole city to roam in, it captures the joy of playing with someone else perfectly. Alex and I spent a good hour of the demo charging around the city to absolutely no end, taking it in turns to set up piles of cars to perform ludicrous stunts, and charging about over the rooftops looking for fun “lines” and new challenges. Like I said: fun.

Crackdown will shift a lot of copies when it’s released later this month, because it includes a free invite to the Halo 3 beta. Hopefully, Halo fans will take the time to play the game they shelled out for, because it’s shaping up to be very fine in its own right. Whilst perhaps not as polished or slick a game as Rockstar’s classics, it refines the urban-sandbox genre – mixing in the athleticism and playfulness of Spiderman 2 and Hulk: Ultimate Destruction – and stands strong in its own right. Crackdown encourages – and, to be honest, demands – to be played. And isn’t that what games should be about?

This is the first an (hopefully) recurring series on Infovore, in which I write about, well, great gaming moments in whatever I’m playing at the time – current or otherwise. Let’s hope I can keep it up…

Guitar Hero was my favourite game of 2006. No question of that. A wonderful, empowering, hugely satisfying experience that cried out to be played for the sake of it. The sequel, released at the end of last year, is at least as good. It suffers by not being the first, not having the wonderful new-ness the first game brought to the market, but it’s more attractive, more polished, has much better note-detection, and a swathe of new features.

And, finishing it for the first time this morning, it brought my first “great gaming moment” of this year.

Before we go on, a note on the slightly altered structure of GHII. To progress through the game, you play gigs of songs; complete a whole gig and you can move on to the next set of songs at the next venue. Obviously, they get progressively harder. In GH, it was only necessary to complete either four or five (out of five) in the set, dependent on difficulty level, in order to progress.

GHII roughly sticks to that, but with a twist: it only lists four songs in the group. When you complete the final song necessary to progress, the camera lingers on your gig, and the audience start chanting, demanding an encore. And the game ask you if you want to give them one. Of course, you click yes, and wait for the game to load a song that’ll be a complete surprise to you.

It doesn’t really affect how the game plays, but it adds to the experience – of being a rock god – so much. So: to return to my story.

The greatest moment in the game is the final encore. It’s the final gig. You’ve shredded your way through four hellish solo-heavy songs, playing a special gig at Stonehenge. And the crowd start clamouring for an encore. But this time around, they’re not chanting indecipherable words, oh no.

It’s quite clear what they’re yelling.

“Freebird! Freebird!”

They want you to play Freebird.

And up pops the game. “The audience are demanding Freebird! Will you give it to them?”.

You hit Yes.

“You’re really going to play Freebird?”

Yes.

“You’re definitely sure about this?”

Yes. Got to love the game’s sense of humour.

Practice mode, Guitar Solo i is what you’re looking for, says the loading screen. It turns out that it’s not lying.

“If I leave here tomorrow…“. I stand in my living room, tapping out that wonderful acoustic first section, as hundreds of little computer people wave their lighters in the air. Crudely rendered they may be, but it’s a magical moment.

And then the tempo picks up, and the shredding begins.

It’s all over only a few minutes later. The grin is still on my face; it’s a hectic, exciting series of solos that rattle your wrists. As I write this, that grin is returning to my face, honestly.

It’s the most majestic pay-off. Two games, and seventy-odd songs later, the audience inside my PS2 are clamouring for one last song. They know exactly what song they want to hear. And finally, I can play it for them. That one moment – that’s Guitar Hero II in a nutshell: charming, exhilirating, a masterpiece of challenge-and-reward.

I have to go now. I can hear the crowd calling again.

I’ve got an article in a free supplement inside this week’s New Statesman. The PDF is available to download from that link – sadly, the HTML isn’t online yet. Still, it’s a cracking supplement – a nice range of content, very colourful, and a real departure for the NS. I’m on pages 28-30, if you’re interested – a biggish feature about where the British games industry might be going in the next few years, and the various challenges it presents. Quite challenging to write about the games industry for a more lay audience than usual; it’ll be interesting to see if the conclusions in the article hold up.

The answer may lie not in next-generation hardware, but in next-generation business models. For example, the British games industry emerged in the 1980s from the constraints that had previously beset the industry. At that time home computers, such as the BBC Micro or ZX Spectrum, were built to a budget, with limited power, developed for and by self-taught coders, often working alone. Now, there is a resurgence in popularity of games for very limited platforms: handheld consoles, mobile telephones, interactive TV and web browsers. And when developers have to work within tighter constraints, new ways to make and sell games – especially for smaller development firms – emerge.

Download the supplement if you’re even vaguely interested.

Plug time! I’m going to be running a panel discussion at GameCity in Nottingham next Friday. Entitled “Tom Armitage Is In Control” (I swear, not entirely my idea), it should be an interesting chat with some folks developing for modern consoles and using – or making – innovative input devices. The blurb from the site runs thus:

The latest generation of consoles show just how far games technology has come since the 1970s. At the same time, the input devices we play games with have barely changed in three decades from those old sticks and paddles. Is that lack of change due to a lack of creativity? Or a fear of the new? Right now, controller design is a hot topic – games such as Guitar Hero are driving a resurgence in peripheral-oriented titles, and Nintendo has revolutionised the way we think about input devices for consoles with its DS and Wii. What does the future hold? What are the challenges ahead for gamers and developers alike? This panel discussion will discuss these questions, and more.

Should be fun, I hope. And I might be around in the evening doing more fun things with Guitar Hero (which might include, but are not limited to, playing Godzilla on Expert). If you’re coming along, drop us an email.

From the second page of this interview at Eurogamer with him today:

If all we do with the power of next gen hardware is increase our poly counts we’re doomed. We have to use that power to create new gameplay experiences – up the simulation level… find new ways to exploit physics… create more interactive worlds than we could dream of before… create virtual actors that can do more than run and shoot.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes (even if the Gabe Newell/Richard Garriott school of game production has its merits, too). It’s a cracking interview – and today’s only the first part… so be sure to check back again tomorrow.