Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Why 'Devil May Cry' And 'Burnout Paradise' Make Me Feel Lonely, In GameFile

It's fun playing new games, but having to keep secrets sure makes playing them feel solitary.


My video game January is not like anyone else's video game January anywhere on the planet. And to prove it, all I need to do is look at the map and find Chubb Lane.


Chubb Lane is a stretch of road in "Burnout Paradise," the open-world racing game that is coming out January 22. The game's publisher, Electronic Arts, sent me an early copy of the finished game last week. It was in a box, in shrink-wrap. I popped it into my PS3, made sure that my console was hooked up to the Internet so that all my records would be saved onto the worldwide leader boards, and I started driving.


I think it was on Friday when I drove over to Chubb Lane on the western half of Paradise City. I drove from one end of the road to the other in 52.10 seconds. Then I activated the "Burnout" Showtime mode, which sent my car hurtling through traffic, racking up points, in dollars, for the amount of damage I caused: $2,647,250 to be exact. My speed and damage performances were new world records. More oddly, they were original world records, displacing ... nothing. I set them first, as if I were Neil Armstrong setting the long-jump mark on the moon. And several days later I still have the records. I think that's because no one else is driving on Chubb Lane. Not yet.


The gaming life of a video game reporter is a bit strange. You get games early. You play them when no one else is around. You have to play by some odd rules. And while nothing about it is painful or worth complaining about, it is odd in ways that many gamers probably don't realize.


For example, I learned that people don't understand why I would have two PlayStation 3s at home next to the TV in my living room. Last week the gaming blog Kotaku posted a photo of my desk and a photo of my game room at home (here's a link, though be forewarned that it has a lot of images).


Some other blogs picked this up, and a conversation started. Some wondered why I would have a standard-definition TV but two PS3s. I have a good reason.


I don't have the fancy TV because I'm not that interested in getting one right now. I have two PS3s for the same reason I had two Xbox 360s in my home over the weekend: Video game reporters need two versions of any console, one that plays games that are on store shelves and one, often referred to as a "debug," that plays games that aren't out yet. If a book reviewer wants to read a book early, they can get the publisher to send them a galley copy. It might lack a finished cover or not have an index, but it's still a book anyone could read if they found it lying around. Movie studios sometimes send out a DVD screener of a film. The DVD will play in any standard player. But the game companies send discs that you need a whole other machine to play. The machines are the same in form, but they are coded differently.


One of the PS3s in that picture on Kotaku has within it a review copy of "Devil May Cry 4." The second Xbox 360 I brought home for the weekend ran a preview copy of the Xbox 360 role-playing game "Lost Odyssey." When I played the latter game, lots of programmer text appeared in the margins of my TV, some of it in Japanese, some of it graphing and clocking the performance of the game. That is how I know that it took 15.036 seconds for one battle in the game to load up and 20.352 seconds for another. The finished copy of the game won't display that.


A gaming reporter who gets a game early has to follow certain rules. The copy of the February 28-slated PlayStation Portable game "Patapon" I was sent in December can't be reviewed until next month. My copy of "Burnout Paradise" has a few restrictions.


It's my early copy of "DMC4," though, that's the doozy. The game came with a two-page letter as well as an in-depth chart that indicates what I can't talk about and when I can't talk about it. According to the letter, for example, I can't talk about certain weapons used by the game's hero, Dante. According to the flowchart, I could only talk about the game's first four missions prior to December 31, and the game's first 10 missions between now and the day the game comes out, February 5 (well, I can also talk about missions 13-15, according to my letter, only "with guidance from [the] anti-spoiler calendar"). This seems fair. The company provided me this copy of the game quite early, way back on December 12, so keeping quiet about some of the game's secrets seems perfectly reasonable. What's more curious is that the anti-spoiler calendar has requests for me to avoid divulging certain elements through February 29, which is two full weeks after the game is released. Even then they don't want the game's final two missions discussed at all "except in an official complete strategy guide."


Usually the agreements I sign in order to play games early set release-day restrictions. If there are any assumptions about what I will reveal in the end, they are just that: assumptions. But the "DMC4" letter makes it clear what the game's developers would like the conversation about their game to involve in the weeks following its release and what they want to stay a surprise.


I've been distracted from getting to those late levels and the super-hidden stuff in "Devil May Cry 4" because of the "Burnout" disc in my other PS3. My experience in that game, as I set the initial world record in road after road, has been strangely lonely but also fun. "Burnout Paradise" is designed to be a social racing game. The English development studio, Criterion Games, has created a smooth few-button-press system for getting anyone who is online also playing the game to join you in your city without ever pausing the game. Once a friend is in, you can then drive with them, race them, smash into them or simply do your own thing while a scoreboard in the upper-right-hand corner tallies who in the city currently has landed the most jumps, played chicken the most with oncoming traffic and a bunch of other stats.


I've played "Burnout Paradise" for a few evenings in the past six days, and not once did I randomly find anyone else playing the game online. That will change. And I'm sure others have played, since their names appear on the map that displays high scores for some roads. But much of Paradise City is currently ruled by me. No one has stepped up to challenge my marks. I have the damage record on Hudson Avenue, a mere $40,150 of mayhem. That's paltry. But that's the only way I can dominate, by playing an online game when no one else is playing it.


Lonely online games and charts full of secrets. These are the stories of my video game January. It may be the slow season, but it's full of unusual gaming experiences for me.


Recent video game coverage from MTV News:


The maker of the Xbox role-playing game series "Fable" reveals that he stole money from his grandmother to get his video game habit going decades ago. That's just one of more than a dozen memories shared by game developers and journalists who responded to our request at the Multiplayer blog to share their first memory of playing video games.


"Star Wars" characters cross over with the combatants of "Soul Calibur" and inspire us to play six-degrees-of-separation for video games. One reader of the Multiplayer blog finds a way to connect Bugs Bunny with Hillary Clinton, who both have appeared in games.


The first-person-shooter puzzle game "Portal" proved to be a surprise hit last year and has inspired widespread gamer praise for its theme song, its "weighted companion cube" and its one-liner, "The cake is a lie." But should it spawn a sequel? That question provoked a strong reaction, not a totally favorable one, at Multiplayer. (MTV)

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