Me, I dig a good story
Yeah, graphics now are super sexy, the sound is so well done you think someone is actually sneaking up behind you and the physics might actually make you feel bad when some poor baddy crumples to floor, but the stories man! What happened?! The new technology is rad, don’t hate, but I’m finding it a lot harder these days to get completely immersed into the experience due to the stories being really lame. Halo was sweet, but aliens attack humans, sacred artifacts blah blah blah, it’s been done. I wonder how many rabid halo fans’ heads just exploded. I remember when I actually cared about the characters and felt literally bad if one of them hit the dust (Eli Vance rest in peace my man.) Here are some games that I found amazing stories that kept me clicking until the very end.
Max Payne (2001) - An extremely gritty tale of a detective of the NYPD living the American dream with a beautiful wife and new born daughter until junkies hyped up on a new drug called Valkyr murder them, emotionally destroying Max. Max then transfers to the most dangerous undercover unit to hunt down those responsible for trafficking the drug, only to have his contact killed by an unknown assassin in the subway with him present. With his cover blown and being blamed for the murder of his contact, Max is a man with nothing to lose, chasing down leads and participating in some pretty disturbing showdowns.
Favourite quote: “You can push a man over the edge, but at some point he’ll start pushing back.”- Max Payne
Half Life (1998) - First PC game I ever really got into. This is the video game equivalent of the show Lost, because you can keep playing as much as you want but you never get any flipping answers to the biggest questions. The story itself is amazing; you are Gordon Freeman, a non-talking crowbar wielding beast who pushes a mysterious test subject into a really big machine which causes the Black Mesa (the laboratory you work at) incident. The fusion of the machine and test subject opens up a portal to a freaky world where creatures come from. You fight your way out of the complex, battling creatures and military trying to contain the incident. Very mysterious characters like the G-man make appearances just to keep you guessing. The G-man is the most unknown character in a video game, even if you are face to face with multiple times in the game. He calls himself your “contractor”, and that you are “open to only the highest bidder”. Interesting.
BioShock (2007) - Mainly the setting of this game makes it so unbelievably original and moving. An underwater utopia set in the 40s. Nice. Your character is once again not a fan of talking, but he does scream when his plane crashes in the ocean and he finds himself on his way down to Rapture, the massive underwater city made for only the best and brightest of the world to avoid all the insanity topside. Unfortunately, when you arrive it looks like the place hasn’t had a fresh coat of paint in a long time, and all the citizens are mutants going insane for genetic mutating material known as “Adam”, and for the counterpart that allows you to use it, called “Eve”. You run through this crazy place looking for Andrew Ryan, the creator of the city, to get some answers meanwhile fighting the mutant splicers, big daddies and little sisters all the while injecting yourself with plasmids that allow you to blast fire through your hands. Oh, it’s really scary too.
Favourite quote: “We all make choices in life, but in the end our choices make us.”- Andrew Ryan.
I’m not saying I think games with not so hot stories are awful, you can have some blasts in them, but a plot which seriously engrosses you makes it all the better.