In order for a story to be considered good, it needs good characters. If the characters are relatable and well-written, then you can hook the audience regardless of how absurd the situation is. It's well known that video game writing tends to be mediocre to god-awful. There are many theories as to why this is, but let's not kid ourselves, it's because video game characters tend to be completely unlikable and unrelatable. Most video game characters nowadays are space marines.

Now having a space marine character doesn’t automatically make that character bad or uninteresting, but chances are if he’s a space marine you’re not trying to make that character emotionally compelling, you’re trying to make him “cool”. To most game writers, cool means showing no emotion, wearing monster truck sized power armor, and shouting a lot. It’s impossible to care about these characters because they have no visible character arc, they don’t grow or change, and they’re just shouty men that take orders from some equally grizzled and “bad-ass” commander. I simply can’t stress this enough, you can’t write a good story without a good protagonist, and as long as unlikable assholes like Marcus Fenix are the stars of the show, game narratives will never evolve past “aliens are bad, people are good.”

In order to create a memorable character, and by extension a memorable story, the character needs to be relatable in some way or, failing that, the audience needs to care about the protagonist and what he’s doing. He needs a personality, emotions, and motivations more involved and personal than “because my commander told me to and I can’t think for myself”. It’s easy to point out who are the well-written characters, but it’s more difficult to explain why, but that’s exactly what I’ll be doing. I have four examples of game protagonists who I find interesting and I’ll be attempting to explain why they’re interesting over the next few paragraphs.

Ezio Auditore da Firenze

Game? Assassin’s Creed II

Who is he? The son of a fifteenth-century Florentine banker who becomes an assassin after his family is betrayed and executed.

Why is he an effective protagonist? Ezio is the kind of character that game writers should strive for, because he’s very cool and he actually shows emotions. Ezio has a sense of humor and can be sad, angry, happy, scared, or annoyed depending on the situation. You know, like one of those things we call a human being. His mission to stop the Templar conspiracy is motivated by more than just a sense of justice; his quest is also one of revenge for his family. It makes his mission more personal and he’s a more relatable character because of it. Yes, Ezio is an assassin. But that doesn’t mean can’t show emotions or act like a human, and his emotions don’t make him any less bad-ass. We’re talking about a man who leaps from 30 story buildings and stabs people in the jugular with retractable blades hidden in his gauntlets. Ezio is a way cooler character than Marcus or Chief in spite, and indeed because of, his emotions. He’s relatable and he has just enough flaws like his womanizing tendencies to keep him from being a Mary Sue, which make him and his game more interesting than Johnny Space Marine and his game “Shoot the Aliens 3: The Aliens Strike Back”.

Alan Wake

Game? Alan Wake

Who is he? A well-known writer of mystery novels who suffers from writer’s block and goes on a vacation with his wife. Soon after he arrives, his wife goes missing and he has to battle dark forces to find her.

Why is he an effective protagonist? The key thing that makes Alan Wake a good protagonist is he’s a normal person. He isn’t a soldier; he isn’t a secret agent or an assassin or a superhero. Alan Wake is a writer, a normal profession compared to other video game characters and one that makes him instantly more relatable than a supersoldier like Master Chief. Because Alan is a normal person, he has problems that normal people have. He’s an alcoholic, his relationship with his wife is strained, he is suffering from a horrible case of writers block, and he’s irritated by his fans and the paparazzi wherever he goes. He wants a vacation to get away from it all, which is a feeling that everyone has had at some point in their lives. He’s somewhat sarcastic and unnecessarily mean to his friends and wife at times, but you can tell he genuinely cares about them when something bad happens. Alan is an example of a character that pretty much saves what would be an otherwise preposterous plot. The events happening around him could never happen, and yet the strength of the character and his personal quest for love and redemption keep the player gripped to the story and the people in it.

Tim

Game? Braid

Who is he? A mysterious young man who is on a quest to rescue a princess.

Why is he an effective protagonist? At first glance, it would seem that Tim’s tale is just as simple as Mario’s, an uncomplicated journey to rescue a princess from a monster. But the difference is that Tim is a much different character than Mario, and his relationship with the princess is very different as well. Tim’s story is told through storybooks before each world that give insight into his personality and relationship with the princess. At the very beginning of the game, we learn that he made plenty of mistakes in the past that he’s not proud of and we learn that the princess left him because of these mistakes. We all have made mistakes in our lives, and I’m sure there are a few that we all would want to go back in time and fix. We can relate to Tim because his problems are ones that everyone has had to deal with. The connection between Tim and the player make the revelation of who Tim really is and why he’s looking for the princess much more sinister.

Solid Snake

Game? Metal Gear

Who is he? A tough secret agent who is constantly battling terrorist groups to keep them from using a nuclear weapon known as Metal Gear.

Why is he an effective protagonist? At first, it seems that the choice of Snake as one of gaming’s standout characters is a curious one. Is he not a deep voiced, cold, hardened soldier like Fenix or the Chief?

The difference between those two and Snake is that Snake has a character arc in the original Metal Gear Solid. He actually undergoes a major change. At the beginning of Metal Gear Solid, Snake is just as cold and unemotional as Fenix. We discover that he’s spent his recent days in the Alaskan wilderness to get away from people, and he’s only on this mission to stop a nuke from being launched. There’s nothing personal about the mission at all. However, as the game progresses, we start to see Snake form bonds with his allies Otacon and Meryl. So when Meryl is shot and captured, it raises the stakes a little bit for Snake, he starts opening up emotionally and he gets more involved. Later we learn that Snake was bred for killing by scientists, and it seems at first that he can’t escape that destiny. But by the end of the game, Snake has learned the value of human life from Otacon and Meryl, and he decides to give up his old life of war to spend it with the one he loves.

It’s kind of a shame that there were sequels. It kind of ruins the character arc.

On this episode Andreas and Ronnie discuss Hulu coming to PSN rumor, OnLive launch titles and pricing, new Playstation Plus details along with Blur, Crackdown 2, Medal of Honor, Prince of Persia and lots more in what we have been playing.



Right click to download
Subscribe: RSS - iTunes



News:
Family Live Plan
Playstation Plus Details
Hulu Coming to PSN
Farmville now on iPhone and iPod Touch
OnLive Pricing and Launch Titles


Games:
Prince of Persia
Crackdown 2
Blur
ABP
Alpha Protocol
Medal of Honor


Twitters:
@RonyDean
@RacingFreak
@TVandLust

Linkout.onPause.org
Email us: onCAST@onPause.org

Sponsors:
Audible - Get a free 14 day trial and audio book

Remember to subscribe on iTunes!!!

Considering you’re reading this fine blog, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you, as a gamer, have read many game reviews over the course of your gaming career. Many different reviewers have different criteria for what makes a good or bad game, but one of the most common ones is the concept of “replayability”, or how long you’ll be playing the game after you’ve beaten the single player mode. It frightens me that replayability is so important to so many people, because it’s actually hurting the quality of the games we play.

I completely understand why replayability is important to some people; the fact is that games are expensive. If you live in the United States, depending on your platform of choice, a brand new triple-A title can run you anywhere from 50-60 dollars. That’s not exactly cheap, especially when you consider the massive amount of quality games that are released every month. Staying up to date with the latest games can be very costly for the average consumer, so that consumer will want to make sure he gets his money’s worth, and that will certainly affect the games that consumer will purchase.

Obviously, developers want people to buy their games, so they’ll put in all sorts of content to insure that players will continue playing the game well after the credits roll. Some developers will put in a multiplayer mode, others will design achievements and trophies that require a lot of time and skill to obtain, some will add more difficulty modes. So how exactly is that hurting the quality of games? More content should be a good thing, but unfortunately, the above features aren’t the only things that developers will do to extend the replay value of their game. They’ll try to make the main game longer as well.

Perhaps you’re still confused as to why this is such a bad thing. Picture this, you’re in a town in the new RPG you just bought and you’re looking at your objective list. Your current objective is to go talk to the old wise man and get the key to unlock the next dungeon. Sounds simple enough, right? You walk over to the wise man’s house and discover that he gave the key to the dungeon to his friend that lives in the mountains. Now you have to traverse across the overworld all the way from the starting village back to the mountains, tediously grinding a bunch of enemies that you’ve battled before. You get to the friend’s house and he gives you the key. Now you have to make your way back to the dungeon, which was in the same forest the village. So you have to make the long return trip, battling the same enemies before you can finally enter the dungeon and continue your quest.

Let’s say that getting the key from the man in the mountains and getting back to the dungeon took you about an hour. That’s an hour of your life you just wasted. The plot didn’t progress at all during that hour, and there weren’t any new or interesting locations to visit because you had already been to the mountains before. All getting that key did was waste your time. That my friends, is what we call “filler”, in this particular example, it was of the fetch quest variety. Developers will put this pointless crap in their games all the time, and for some bizarre reason gamers are willing to put up with it if only to increase gameplay hours. I’ve gathered a few examples of games that were worse with the filler than they would have been if they simply cut the crap and made the game a little bit shorter.

Alan Wake

This is actually the game that got me thinking about this subject, but let’s get one thing straight, I LOVED Alan Wake. The story was fantastic, the atmosphere was chilling, and the game had some truly remarkable set-pieces. When I was reading the reviews for this game before I purchased it, I noticed that one of the most common complaints was that the game was too short, only about 7-8 hours of gameplay. But when I bought the game and finished it, I left thinking that it went on for too long. Alan Wake had plenty of great moments such as the rock concert and the finale, but Remedy knew that people would complain about the game being short. So they filled it with lots of running around in the dark woods, which got a bit repetitive after a while. There was one moment that sticks out in my mind, and I’ll try and be vague to avoid spoilers, but Alan was walking down a well lit tunnel to avoid the monsters out in the forest, when all of a sudden, he got a call from his friend asking him for help. So Alan leaves the tunnel. What should have been a simple cutscene turned into another opportunity to run around some more repetitive woods. The little moments like that added up, and I bet that Remedy could’ve cut out about an hour of filler to make a much more engaging experience.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Twilight Princess is the longest Zelda game by far; it took me about 72 hours to beat my first time through. In case you’re math stupid, that’s three days. Three days is quite a long time to spend on one game. But is it a coincidence that Twilight was also by far the weakest in the series? It’s true that Twilight Princess was the longest Zelda to date, but it wasn’t because it was an epic rollercoaster ride; it was just padded with so much filler. Did anyone seriously enjoy running around as a wolf, searching the land of twilight for stupid bugs? Or how many enjoyed taking time out of slaying monsters and exploring a grand world to go fishing to hunt down some stupid yeti? It was like three hours in before you even got to the Forest Temple. Where were you in those three hours? In the incredibly boring home village herding goats. Let me repeat that, three hours. Herding goats. You know how long it took Ocarina of Time to get to its first dungeon? About ten minutes. Which one is remembered as being the greatest achievement in video game history?

Sonic Unleashed

The most tragic use of filler to date, it turned what could’ve been a glorious return to form into a horrible monstrosity, and the worst Sonic game to date. Sega seemed to get everything right at first, Sonic moved at blistering speeds, the graphics were beautiful, and they actually decided to program it properly. But unfortunately, some thick-headed moron decided that people wouldn’t want to play a short game that’s just running. So what happened? You know exactly what happened! Scientifically proven to be the very antithesis of fun and joy, the Werehog’s levels were hour long levels of terrible combat and uninspired platforming. Everything about the daytime Sonic stages, the great level design, the speed, the amazing graphical quality, was absent from Sonic’s lupine counterpart. These leviathans of awful could last anywhere from 1-2 hours. But if that wasn’t enough, Sega put in even more filler in the form of collectable medals that were required to gain access to the game’s levels, à la Super Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie. But the thing about the levels in Mario 64 and Banjo is that they were open-worlds that required slow movements and exploration. Sonic’s stages are completely linear and he moves at unimaginable speeds, so they didn’t put very many medals in his stages. Nearly all of the bloody things are in the Werehog’s levels, meaning that you would often have to play them multiple times and search every nook and cranny of every terrible level just to gain access to the next beautiful Sonic stage. I don’t know about you, but I would much rather pay $60 for a two or three hour long game that’s just the Sonic stages as opposed to the twenty hour failure we ended up with.

Morrowind vs. Portal

We’ll end on a comparison of two seemingly incomparable games that actually serve to prove my point very nicely. You can purchase both The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and Portal for twenty dollars each on Steam right now. So which one is more worth your money? Morrowind is a massive RPG that can take away sixty hours of your time if you let it, and Portal is a fun little action-puzzler that will only take you two. At a first glance, it would seem like Morrowind is the better deal, simply due to the amount of game you’re getting for your dollar. But Morrowind is one of the most broken games I have ever played. The combat simply doesn’t work, it looks hideous, and the journal system is the single worst objective list in any video game ever made. I couldn’t stand five hours of that game, let alone sixty. I’ve heard that Morrowind eventually gets really good, but I’ll never know simply because I can’t put up with its broken rubbish. Compare that to Portal, sure it’s only two hours long, but those two hours have been masterfully designed, expertly paced, and brilliantly written to make sure that the player is never bored or frustrated. Can you imagine if in Portal you constantly had to backtrack to get to new testchambers? Or if there was some sort of pointless hub world to make it longer? In my opinion, Portal is a better game than Morrowind despite, and partly because of, its short length. It doesn’t overstay its welcome and never bores you. I understand that you can’t really compare an RPG to a puzzle game properly, but the point is I enjoyed my time with the shorter, more focused game than the longer, more flawed one.

If you took one thing away from this article, children, I would want it to be this: sixty hours of gameplay sounds great in the advertising, but if you can’t fill those sixty hours with interesting gameplay scenarios than you may as well not waste the player’s time and cut it down to two. Gamers and developers have become far too concerned with the length, not the quality, of video games. The quality experiences are the ones that you remember most, not the longest ones. I think many developers and gamers would do well to remember that.

Best Buy has Blur for the PS3 and 360 on sale right now for $40, on top of that you can print off this coupon found here to get it for only $20. K-mart is also selling Blur this week for $40 and the coupon works there too.

After the crazy long E3 week Ronnie and Andreas do a freestyle podcast searching the net live as they look for news stories. For what games they have been playing its Splinter Cell: Conviction and onLive.



Right click to download
Subscribe: RSS - iTunes



Twitters:
@RonyDean
@RacingFreak

Linkout.onPause.org
Email us: onCAST@onPause.org

Sponsors:
Audible - Get a free 14 day trial and audio book

Remember to subscribe on iTunes!!!

Some big news for us Halo fans Bungie has just announced that FireFight will be returning in Halo: Reach! This trailer that they released shows off the new game mode (FireFight 2.0) along with new weapons, Covenant and levels. Watch it after the jump!

And on our final E3 edition of onTopic Craig, Andreas and Ronnie discuss what all happened at the Nintendo (3DS, Zelda and Kid Icarus) and Playstation (Move, Twisted Metal and InFamous 2) press conferences.



Right click to download
Subscribe: RSS - iTunes

Sony has finally revealed what we hope to be the final release date of Gran Turismo 5. The release date that they showed is... November 2nd!

Valve has just announced that Portal 2 will be coming to the Playstation 3! You can view some screen caps we took of the first in-game footage after the jump!

Update: Added the Trailer.

Sony has just revealed that Playstation Move will release September 19th in America and will cost $49.99 for the motion controller only.

Guerrilla Games has just revealed that Killzone 3 will be fully supported by Playstation Move at launch February 2011. Once the video comes online that they showed off at the press conference we will update this post!

On this episode of onTopic Andreas, Craig and Ronnie discuss the Microsoft E3 press conference (Kinect, Fable 3, Black Ops mad MGS Rising) Ubisoft press conference (Child of Eden, Assassins Creed Brotherhood, Ghost Recon and Driver) along with the EA press conference (Bad Company 2, Medal of Honer and Sims 3.)



Right click to download
Subscribe: RSS - iTunes

Well it looks like all the rumors are true because Microsoft has announced that a Xbox 360 Slim has been in production and starts shipping "this week!" This 360 is smaller then the current one, runs quieter and will come with a 250 GB hard drive along with built in wifi 802.11n.

We have been posting a bunch of Kinect news over at our other blog www.KinectFans.com, this blog will cover everything about Microsoft's Kinect. Go check it out!

Bungie has released a trailer today of the first in-game gameplay for Halo: Reach's singepleayer. The trailer shows off the enhanced singleplayer graphics, lots of enemies on the field along with space combat. Check it out after the jump!

I think this has got to be some of the coolest news to come out of E3 so far. DICE has just revealed that they are working on an upcoming expansion pack for Bad Company 2 set in Vietnam. The DLC contains 4 new maps, Vietnam specific weapons, vehicles along with new trophies and achievements.

The DLC is set to release Winter 2010 on 360, PS3, and PC

Peter Molyneaux has just confirmed that Fable 3 will release at the end of the year; October 26th. We will update this post with the trailer once it goes live.

Update: Added the trailer:

Microsoft has just announced at E3 2010 that all the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops DLC will launch first on Xbox Marketplace... How much money did Microsoft have to pay?!

Andreas and Ronnie talk about Max Payne and Portal 2 delay, Motorstorm Apocalypse announcement, Rock Band 3 instruments revealed along with Red Dead, Splinter Cell, Carcassonne iPad, Lost Planet 2 and loads more.



Right click to download
Subscribe: RSS - iTunes



News:
Halo 3 Outsells PS3 Games
Mac Payne Delayed… Again
Portal 2 Delayed : (
Telltale Working on Back to the Future and Jurassic Park Games
Rock Band 3 Instruments Revealed
Sonic Adventure and Crazy Taxi Coming to PSN and XBL
Medal of Honor Beta Coming July 5th?
Fallout: New Vegas Pre-order Bonus
Motorstorm Apocalypse Announced FTW!!!
Bad Company 2 Onslaught DLC Coming June 22nd!
Crysis on GTTV
Red Faction on GTTV
DJ Hero 2 Announced
Guild Wars 2 Looks SICK
Another Mortal Kombat game….
Deus Ex: Human Revolution Trailer - Too much brown?
XCOM Trailer


Games:
Red Dead Redemption
Splinter Cell Conviction
RC Plane
Carcassonne
Lost Planet 2


Other Stuff:
Sign up for Crysis 2 Beta
iPhone 4 Images


Twitters:
@RonyDean
@RacingFreak

Linkout.onPause.org
Email us: onCAST@onPause.org

Sponsors:
Audible - Get a free 14 day trial and audio book

Remember to subscribe on iTunes!!!

Ronnie and Andreas discuss Infamous 2 on upcoming Game Informer, HULU coming to XBL rumor, Portal 2 event canceled and lots more in the news section, and for what they have been gaming its 3d Dot Game Heroes, Red Dead Redemption, Resident Evil 4 iPad and Angry Birds.



Right click to download
Subscribe: RSS - iTunes



News:
Coming to Xbox LIVE Marketplace
Infamous 2 Announced
Guitar Hero Warriors Revealed
Lord of the Rings Online Free to Play This Fall
Call of Duty: Black Ops no co-op campaign
Next Red Faction Trailer on GTTV
NATAL Compatible with Sonic Free Riders
Rumor: HULU Coming to XBL
DC Universe Online Releasing in November
Portal 2 E3 Event Cancelled
Sonic Adventure and Crazy Taxi Coming to XBL
Sony Announces 10 PSP GO Game deal
Red Dead Redemption Outlaws DLC
Company of Heroes Free Version


Games:
Red Dead Redemption
3D Dot Game Heroes
Resident Evil 4 iPad
Angry Birds


Twitters:
@RonyDean
@RacingFreak
@TVandLust

Linkout.onPause.org
Email us: onCAST@onPause.org

Sponsors:
Audible - Get a free 14 day trial and audio book

Remember to subscribe on iTunes!!!

Crazy sale going on right now over at Amazon you can get the Nintendo Wii for $149.99 a savings of $50 bucks! This deal also comes with free shipping. Why are you still here reading this?!? You should be over there buying one before they stop the deal!

Link to the Wii