I’m not a fan of absolutes, and expressions of genius are all too often made without thinking. That being said, I would find it very difficult to disagree with anyone who wanted to say that Portal 2 is, without exception, the best video game ever made.
And if someone else were to suggest that games like Portal 2 and L.A Noire, this year’s two biggest and most lauded video game releases, were showing up Hollywood’s money-grubbing lack of vision, I’d probably point them briefly in the direction of last year’s Inception, this year’s Source Code and a handful of other gems, but for the most part I’d have to agree.
The last film I saw at the cinema was Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Of course I’d have to agree.
At first glance, Valve Software’s Portal 2 is a sophisticated physics-based puzzle game. The player has a gun that can shoot out portals and sustain two of them at a time.
For example, place a portal on the ceiling and a portal on the wall. Walk through the wall portal and fall out of the ceiling. Or place one on the floor, and one on the wall. Drop through the floor and hurtle out of the wall with the same acceleration you had when you fell through the initial floor portal.
Already it’s an interesting mechanical system, but Valve, like Pixar, are a company with a strict philosophy – no matter how sophisticated the technology, the story and gameplay always come first. You are thrust into the shoes, or “Long Fall Boots”, of Chell, the game’s silent protagonist.
Waking up in a relaxation suite in the ruins and rubble of the Aperture Science facility, you meet Wheatley, a bumbling spherical robot on rails played by British comedian (and co-writer of The Office and Extras) Stephen Merchant.
Wheatley guides you through the destroyed facility, and his bumbling idiocy re-awakens GladOS – the malevolent, passive-aggressive, science-obsessed super-computer who was the main villain of the first game, voiced by Ellen McLain.
Lord Acton said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and while he probably didn’t have gigantic silicon intelligences in mind at the time, Portal 2 is at its core a Douglas Adams-esque meditation on that idea.
The three-act structure of the game’s story is masterfully executed, with each character playing a striking and important role. But without a lot of lateral thinking, you will be mown down by robot machine-gunners, frizzled to a crisp by laser beams or drown in poisonous goo.
Mastering it is not a matter of lightning-fast keyboard skill; what’s needed to solve the game’s often fiendish puzzles is brain power, as well as a certain degree of mental resolve in shrugging off GladOS’s regular discouragement.
Team Bondi’s Australian-made L.A Noire is an exceptionally ambitious game. Set in post-war Hollywood, you play as Cole Phelps (performed by Aaron Staton, best known as Ken Cosgrove from AMC’s Mad Men – many of his fellow Mad Men cast members make appearances in the game too), a straight-arrow LAPD detective thrown headfirst into a corrupt and crime-filled city.
The game’s plot is inspired by novels like James Elroy’s L.A Confidential and benefits from a new facial motion capture technology called Motion Scan, in which 32 cameras perfectly capture an actor’s facial performance from every angle. That technology is crucial to the gameplay, as most of it relies not on running and shooting, but on telling whether or not a character is lying and questioning them accordingly.
Body language, the movement of the eyes and subtle facial shifts help give you vital clues. It’s incredibly frustrating when you get things wrong: your mistakes affect the outcome of the case. But so do your successes, and getting the information you need out of a suspect is fantastically satisfying.
Another wonderful source of frustration comes directly from the story: having to deal with the corruption and bureacracy of the police force in the first person is an eye-opening experience.
The game spans over a perfectly recreated and astoundingly large section of 1947 Los Angeles, and is as meticulously art-directed as any of the films it references.
That’s not to say L.A Noire is flawless. There’s a telephone operator that you have to call several times who has a voice like a chain-smoking crow that’s learn to speak – and you have to sit through about two minutes of her flat dialogue every time you pick up the phone.
The facial technology is incredible, but otherwise the graphics haven’t improved since GTA IV – hair still looks like people are wearing strange mats on their heads, and bodies still move a little oddly.
There’s also a fiendish amount of aliasing – a phenomenon in video games where hard edges look jagged and stepped.
But despite its flaws, L.A Noire is an experience to rival the best HBO television series - the facial technology works on the back of the scope and talent of the cast, and the grace of the game’s script.
It’s not a masterpiece – but in many ways it’s something more exciting: It’s invented, or re-invented, a whole new genre of games and paved the way for future masterpieces.
Many people will be reading this and sneering. Those of another generation will remember video games as pixelated bip-boop coin-eating machines, and many of mine will immediately think of Halo, Gears of War and Fantasy Dragon Quest Lord World of Slayernating style plap – paper-thin storylines devised as a way of getting the player to the next level of shooty gameplay in a derivative world of visual cacophony.
Of course, it would be easy to draw Pirates 4 as a counter-argument here – this is a film with a paper-thin storyline devised to get Captain Jack Sparrow to each new of level of swashbuckling cacophony. And you don’t even get to play it.
Both mediums – films and video games – clearly have their merits. They each have their masterworks and they each have awful summer blockbusters. But while one – film – is arguably at an extremely low point in its cycle, the other seems to be rising out of its dark ages.
In both mediums, masterworks are a rarity: games of the quality of Portal 2 and L.A Noire come along just about as often as films of the calibre of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Chinatown.
The question is whether the frequency of those rare masterworks will continue to decline on the silver screen, and whether the game industry will be smart enough to pick up the slack.
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