Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

Are there any games that you’ve ever dismissed because of a fatal flaw, a bad review, or generally negative vibes only to return to it, weeks, months, years later and realise how brilliant it actually was? I’ve played my share of titles by now that I once relegated to my mental bargain bin, and they’ve surprised me. I was sceptical about a game like Restaurant Empire 2, at first, but to play it and experience a business sim that I wouldn’t have touched had it not been a review gave me access to a game I enjoyed far more than I thought I would have (said review is here).

At first, I laughed at Mirror’s Edge. Parkour? Cartoon-anime woman? Briefcases and red highlighting? You’re having a laugh, DICE, I said to myself, smug in the knowledge the game would be completely ridiculous and sell poorly.

Then I downloaded the demo.

Never have I been so excited to purchase the full game after playing the short demo that popped up one day on Xbox Live. I flew. I jumped. I slid, and I ziplined, and I couldn’t express the utter joy that was playing the demo. It was technically a tutorial, but I played it five times in a row, simply to enjoy the fluidity of movement and the wonderful soundtrack. Then I bought the full game, and I became even more exciting.

Visually, it was nothing short of breathtaking. The urban vista spanned miles in every direction, white surfaces glowing in the unrelenting sun. You could almost feel the weather, the sound of wind whistling past your face, as you looked down at the road beneath the skyscrapers you so relentlessly bounded between, and you could see your feet. Let me emphasise this again. You could see your feet. FPS titles fail hard in my eyes when I feel like a floating gun. Not here. I saw my hands, my torso, my legs, and not only when I picked up a gun. The gunplay was effortless, a simple addition that had no real place in the game, and though it made you drop the weapon simply because it stopped you advancing in most situations (needing your hands free to climb and so forth), it was rare that I ever would. The fact that there was no depth, no complexity to picking up a gun and flinging bullets at the various masked governmental antagonists coming your way, liberated the experience.

“This is such an amazing game,” I said.

“You’re an idiot, and you’re wrong, this is terrible,” said the majority of the gaming public.

I stumbled, that week. I thought it was so original that even the people who couldn’t appreciate Psychonauts but could at least appreciate Bioshock would love Mirror’s Edge. I’m no elitist, and I’m by no means saying that anyone who didn’t love Mirror’s Edge is a fool and deserves to be ridiculed. I’m just torn by the fact that there were people out there who saw a game, published by EA of all people, that completely broke the first-person genre into little pieces, and dismissed it as bad. What were you looking for, from the title, if not innovation? Yet, these same people will complain about the similiarities of Pro Evolution Soccer and FIFA ’09.

Assassin’s Creed was another title that people tagged as “repetitive” before even picking up the controller. I’m fully aware it had about six different types of missions, but so did GTA IV and no one thought to call Rockstar North out on that. Why? Because any more than six would have been too thinly spread in terms of time spent developing the mechanic of each individual task and obstacle, and too little would have been something akin to lying brain dead with the odd achievement popping every fifteen to twenty minutes.

Creed was not about repetitive gameplay, it was about the engine, the concept, and the proof that yes, you could render an entire city at once, it was just a case of getting around to it. The physics, the narrative… so many things went right with that game, and yet the one thing that went wrong was just so game-breaking. They could’ve fluffed a lot of aspects, but damn, the missions? Some of us played MMO titles, and we’re used to the grind. We relish the grind, the satisfaction from a game making us work for our rewards, and not in a Ninja Gaiden way, more of a “kill ten thousand rats for one bone” way. But some don’t, and those people are, by and large, the people who’ll be spending money on your summer blockbuster. Think about that.

While you’re at it, go play Mirror’s Edge. I’ll wait.

Mainly because the main story is ridiculously short.