contribution

Script: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Note: I am honoured to announce yet another contributor to Playthroughline! John Keefe is one of my fellow authors at The Editing Room and when I asked him if he wanted to abridge a game, he set his sights on Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. I'm not a fan of Lord of the Rings, so thank Ilúvatar someone else tackled this game. Please enjoy his glorious contribution and if you'd like to read more, there's further thoughts from John below.

-- Joannes

Shadow of Mordor proves just how spoiled we are as gamers. It was not so very long ago that any game with even a whiff of movie tie-in was utter crap, that "open world" was just code for "big and padded," where story came to you in walls of text and combat involved two buttons for attacking and one for a dodge. Fast forward to the glorious future of 2014, and Shadow of Mordor has fixed all of those problems and yet somehow feels weirdly B minus.

Script: Red Dead Redemption

Note: I'm pleased to announce that Playthroughline has laid claim to another contributor. The inimitable Ed Smith first came to my attention with his sublime takedown of Watch_Dogs. When I asked him if he would like to contribute a Script, he kindly and voraciously put one together for Red Dead Redemption. His work makes for a great addition to Playthroughline and there'll surely be more from Ed in the future! Below you can read his extended thoughts on Red Dead Redemption and how it compares to BioShock Infinite, which he announces in the first sentence.

-- Joannes

Red Dead Redemption has a lot in common with BioShock Infinite. Both games have something to say. Their remarks are obvious, and directed, adolescently, at a nebulous entity you could only really refer to as "the system," but still, they each have higher narrative ambitions than most big-budget videogames. And ultimately, they are both ruined by the mechanical systems that they are tied to.

Script: The Last of Us

Note: Craig has already contributed two scripts to Playthroughline and last week he pleasantly surprised me by coming out of left field with one on The Last of Us. You may have noted that I only tackle PC games, so this addition marks Playthroughline going multi-platform! My humble thanks to Craig for widening my horizon for me.

-- Joannes

After a while of reading and writing parody scripts, you get used to one central concept: there are flaws and there are flaws. Which is to say, almost any piece of media can be picked apart to reveal plot holes, stupid character behaviour, unlikely coincidences and so forth. Maybe even extensively. But for every flaw, the question must be asked: does it matter? Sure it's a flaw, but is it a flaw that actually makes the experience any worse?

What I'm trying to say is that The Last of Us may actually be perfect.

Script: Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

Last time I was here, doing a short script for the first Max Payne, I mentioned that I had a stock rant about linearity in games but wasn't going to bring it up because Max Payne provides a poor example. Now, however, I'm dealing with Max Payne 2, which fits much better, so hold on while I get this bee out of my bonnet. For a long time now, linearity has been regarded as something of a gaming sin. And there are certainly reasonable arguments to be made against it. After all, interactivity is supposed to be gaming's thing. If you remove player freedom and exploration, force the player to follow explicit directions every step of the way, you might as well just be watching a movie, right?

Script: Max Payne

Hello, people visiting Playthroughline! My name is Craig and I'm an author of abridged scripts on The Editing Room, where Joannes’ movie parodies are published. Joannes has kindly allowed me to contribute a Short Script to his site, and I have chosen the classic third-person shooter Max Payne. I was originally going to use this space here to go through one of my recurring video game rants, to be specific, a defence of linear gameplay. After all, games don't come much more linear than Max Payne. But the thrust of that particular rant is the idea of tight narrative focus, and in abridging Max Payne, one thing I realised was that "tight narrative focus" is not a term you'd use to describe it at all. If it were to focus on its story, it'd probably last about half an hour. Instead it rambles, inventing an endless series of feeble justifications for action set pieces which have nothing whatsoever to do with the central story. The restaurant fire, the robbery of the Charon, the parking garage showdown, the hotel drug deal, all of these things and more could be lifted right out and you'd hardly notice the difference.

And the more I thought about it, the more this little diatribe changed its topic to the bewildering question: why in the world do I like this game so much?

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