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Posted on October 15, 2013
GTA V / Tomb Raider
Carol was away on Scholz-ladies cabin trip this weekend so I spent all weekend in front of the TV playing Grand Theft Auto V and Tomb Raider. Also eating sardines and watching Dredd, which I don’t do when Carol is around. Not because she exists only to forbid me from doing things and I can only have fun while she is gone (OMG FORESHADOWING) but because I’m a nice guy and I know how much I don’t want her to eat custard or watch shows about people with gigantic tumours, two vile things that she does. That seems like the reasonable give and take of two sensible people, albeit of different genders. Ooh, where is he going with this? Well, chicks, man.
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I’ve got 99 interesting features…
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Scowling cop, sassy prostitute and california beach babe sold separately.
“Man, fuck this shit” said Franklin. ABOUT EVERYTHING.
‘I just want a quiet life” lied Michael before losing his temper.
At least Trevor is honest. He’s fucking his life up and he knows it.
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So I enjoyed it. That’s what I’m saying. I’ll  return to the sandbox periodically to just dick around.
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Here’s what got to me though: chicks, man. Misogyny in a GTA title is a red herring, since it is an overtly misanthropic take on humanity in whatever timeframe it takes place. It satirizes everything we think of as good and glamourizes everything we think of as bad and makes us realise what chumps we all are. Good job Rockstar, we all have tremendous fun reminding ourselves how shitty we are. Women don’t get a pass on this, but no-one does, so that’s okay, right?
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The thing is; the women in the game who get more than single mission screen time, of whom there are few, are all the same single-note nag. I’m trying to think of all the female characters in the game. There’s an old friend of Franklin’s and Franklin’s ex girlfriend – both exist to bother Franklin to do something he doesn’t want to do. There’s Michael’s wife and daughter both of whom don’t want to do what Michael is doing. Trevor doesn’t have any women anchor/goads like that.
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My point is, GTAV is a game of broad caricatures, but at least there is variety in the male caricatures. All of the women who get screen time for any appreciable amount of time are a tween boy’s experience of women: they disapprove of everything you do and they stop you from doing what you want: women are a downer, women spoil your fun. 12 year olds who are like this are idiots, but at least its a passing thing. Men who live like this are Peter Pan emotionally-retarded fucking idiots. You may know someone like this or you may have seen them portrayed on TV – its a shitty blame-deflecting way of being a coward. “Waa, my mother-figure nagged me to do this and now I’m doing it and I blame her for me doing it… I’d have so much fun if it wasn’t for her… other guys get it? Right other guys? (Audience applause)”. Fuck off, Ray Romano. And when this is all you get in combination with the game’s in-keeping parody-misogyny… man, I’ve got to imagine that’s a harsh landscape if you’re picking up the controller and you’re a woman. And at 47% of the gaming population last year… that’s probably a lot of women. I don’t know how this game is polling with women, but you don’t make a billion in three days without some women buying this. But … fuck, I feel bad about it. It’s like having a super racist relative who thinks the world of you. You appreciate their generosity, you have a good time with them, you just cringe at how they act at chinese restaurants.
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Pretty much.
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There was a brou-ha-ha that you may have missed earlier about the reboot, which came about when someone got really offended because Lara Gets Beaten Up And Molested And Why Do Female Video Game Characters Have To Be Victims? It was brought to you by the same people who brought you the Mass Effect Allows You To Rape Aliens! controversy and the Grand Theft Auto Is All About Killing Prostitutes! controversy, (NPR currently has a story about GTAV that gasps “… there’s a strip club and you get points for groping the women.” Only half of which is true. “Points”, lol. An article in this week’s Time refers to the Tomb Raider series as starring a wasp-waisted impossibly large-breasted protagonist, again only partly true due to being so horribly out of date) i.e. these were offended people who hadn’t played the game yet and let’s face it, had no intention of playing the games they were unintentionally sales-boosting.
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Don’t get me wrong, Lara gets the shit kicked out of her. A lot. By bad guys, by gravity, by the weather.  A better title for the game would be “Young Woman Whimpers In Pain After Harrowing Near Death Experience”. But she’s certainly not a victim. She’s Wolverine with a ponytail and a home counties accent. She gets impaled, shot, beaten  and keeps going. You may spend half of one level with Lara clutching her broken ribs and making terrified little noises when she moves – but goddamn it, she gets the job done. It’s not quite whimpering, because she isn’t feeling sorry for herself, but damn; her terror/exertion breathing does a better job eliciting sympathy than almost all the scripted dialogue in any other game.
God, quit making her so sexy!
I also wanted to check it out because it was written by Terry Pratchett’s daughter, and I have enough fondness for his books that I’ll check it out just for that. The writing is nothing like TP, of course, but it really was modestly decent. Square Enix writing can tend to be a bit over the top if someone doesn’t rein it in. The plot of the game is that young, aspiring archaeologist Lara has joined up with a Discovery Channel-type voyage with an assholey academic in search of a lost kingdom. The ship wrecks, and she and the survivors wash up on an island that it turns out is full of very dangerous nutters. So kind of like Far Cry 3. A lot like Far Cry 3. Except this isn’t a sandbox game, really, so there is no self-managed break or pause in the game. The castaways can’t leave (christ, tropical islands with mystical properties are a great plot device, aren’t they?) because something controls the weather and Lara puts herself through the wringer trying to sort that out so they can leave. Across this story, Lara goes from someone who sorrowfully has to kill her first meal on the island to a stealth-murder machine who leaves a mile wide trail of bodies in her wake. It doesn’t change who she is, it just puts the means in her hands and a compelling reason to do it. There is character growth, not just changing the world to a more suitable place for that character (Hi GTA V!).
The gameplay is a lot like Assassin’s Creed (AC and Far Cry 3 were both developed at Eidos Montreal’s crosstown competitor Ubisoft Montreal – makes you wonder who the fuck is crawling around Montreal at night) especially the puzzle climbing. But really it is a lot simpler than AC’s puzzles. Part of the reason for this is that it isn’t a sandbox – so there are finite pieces to the puzzle. In AC, you can end up with so much environment that you aren’t sure what is relevant. the upside of it being a linear game rather than a sandbox is that it is A) prettier and B) has neat cinematics and great scripted sequences. Normally these are a pain in the ass, but there is enough of a timing game built into them that I really didn’t mind them. Lara has a bunch of weapons, most useful of which is the bow, which can be used to manipulate the environment. Close combat is a little frustrating because the camera doesn’t center well, meaning you are often trying to dodge someone right in front of Lara that you can’t actually see. The many gruesome ways people die in the game usually makes it worth it to do a little melee, but the piece de resistance death scenes happen if you don’t time event buttons correctly during scripted scenes. Good god, some of them are grisly.
I don’t want to give away the solution to this particular map, but it involves climbing, for bloody ages.
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There was a brou-ha-ha that you may have missed earlier about the reboot, which came about when someone got really offended because Lara Gets Beaten Up And Molested And Why Do Female Video Game Characters Have To Be Victims? It was brought to you by the same people who brought you the Mass Effect Allows You To Rape Aliens! controversy and the Grand Theft Auto Is All About Killing Prostitutes! controversy, (NPR currently has a story about GTAV that gasps “… there’s a strip club and you get points for groping the women.” Only half of which is true. “Points”, lol. An article in this week’s Time refers to the Tomb Raider series as starring a wasp-waisted impossibly large-breasted protagonist, again only partly true due to being so horribly out of date) i.e. these were offended people who hadn’t played the game yet and let’s face it, had no intention of playing the games they were unintentionally sales-boosting.
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Don’t get me wrong, Lara gets the shit kicked out of her. A lot. By bad guys, by gravity, by the weather.  A better title for the game would be “Young Woman Whimpers In Pain After Harrowing Near Death Experience”. But she’s certainly not a victim. She’s Wolverine with a ponytail and a home counties accent. She gets impaled, shot, beaten  and keeps going. You may spend half of one level with Lara clutching her broken ribs and making terrified little noises when she moves – but goddamn it, she gets the job done. It’s not quite whimpering, because she isn’t feeling sorry for herself, but damn; her terror/exertion breathing does a better job eliciting sympathy than almost all the scripted dialogue in any other game.
