The Escapist Issue #148 Now Available

Escapist Magazine continues to churn out new content, with the 148th issue featuring another set of five articles. Included amongst them is one about sex appeal in video games called “A Wink is as Good as a Pixelated Nipple”:

“What about Mass Effect?” the Lovely Brunette said. “Or those people who hook up through games like World of Warcraft?”

Mass Effect has a fun storyline, shiny galaxy and great music. Plus, you can sleep with aliens. Good times. But for all its Starflight-y charms and xenomorph-lovin’ hype, it’s as sterile and robotic as Pacman.

My experience of Mass Effect was of climbing a vast conversational tree and finding nothing at the top. As in so many other games over the years, from King’s Quest to KOTOR, the relationships were an exact calculus of button-pushing – “if I click this, then this, then this, she’ll take off her Star Trek costume!” Not that I didn’t click. It’s sex with a blue-skinned alien. Normally takes $50 worth of paint and a Real Doll to get that far.

And another about (the lack of) difficulty in video games called “Hard Times”:

The results of the entryist movement have been mixed. Compare what happens when you say “Knights of the Old Republic,” which practically beat itself, and “Deus Ex: Invisible War,” which was nigh impossible, in a room full of gamers. Fine-tuning difficulty remains problematic for developers. While it may have been satisfactory for System Shock 2 to sell 250,000 units in 1999, sales numbers like that in today’s development environment would be disastrous. So while Bioshock plays similarly to SS2, it’s far more forgiving if you’re not an experienced first-person gamer. Ken Levine was famously quoted as telling the team he wanted his grandmother to be able to complete it on “Easy.”

Which is all well and good, but there’s a problem with entryism: No one appreciates the top end, since everyone follows the path of least resistance. If “Grandma Mode” is available, hardcore gamers are more likely to waltz through the game than attempt a harder difficulty. There’s no point to putting yourself through a tougher experience if the end result is the same. Fundamentally, the entryist movement has failed – the bottom level has been lowered, but the top level, the level at which games were originally designed to be played, has been weakened in turn. In short, Mass Effect is not Planescape: Torment.

Actually, I still play many games on the hardest difficulty without any sort of incentive to do so. Anybody else find themselves cranking up the difficulty for no reason other than to receive a greater challenge?