Games Played in 2013 #1: Resident Evil 4

A New Year’s Resolution of mine is to write more. To help this along, I’m going to write some stuff about any game that grabs me enough to finish in 2013 - the only rule is that I won’t bother if I’m reviewing it elsewhere, because that would be wholly pointless.

So, my first of these: Resident Evil 4. Actually, that’s a slight lie - I completed it in December 2012, but it gives me a running start in any case. There are some games that everyone raves about and looks pityingly at you if you admit to never having tried them. While I still have that dishonour for any Zelda game, I can now get rid of the Resident Evil 4 zombie-monkey from my back.

And I must say, as is often the way when you pick up a game which is actually almost pushing retro now, first impressions were painful. Resident Evil 4 is 7 years old, and at times it really shows. Leon - the rugged protagonist with the suspiciously unmoving side parting and the charm-ectomy - moves with all the stilted grace of a zebra trying to moonwalk, and aiming a gun in front of you sees the targeting reticule darting round the screen, meaning you constantly need to twitch the analogue stick to shoot on target. And there’s more: the awkward menus, the weird handling, the fact that unlike every other modern game that puts a gun in your hand, it inexplicably puts the trigger on the face buttons rather than, y'know, the handily placed trigger at the top of the pad - they all add up to an inaccessible experience in 2013. And forget about multi-tasking: Leon will resolutely only do one thing at a time - moving and shooting simultaneously are completely beyond him (which is fair enough, I suppose - put an M16 in my hand, and I doubt I’d be doing pirouettes while shooting cans off a wall 100 feet away).

Which may sound like a meandering way of saying ‘this game is of its time, and shouldn’t be played fresh in 2013’, but I persevered based on the glowing praise of friends, and discovered a lot to like. Surprisingly, it’s the awkward feel which often leads to truly great moments: if the aiming reticule worked like every other game, taking out a bunch of slow-moving, shambling zombies would be child’s play. As it is, the inability to move and shoot causes you to waste a whole bunch of bullets over the 14 or so hours the game takes to complete, and they’re often hard to come by, forcing you to get up close and personal with a knife (which, true to form, Leon also handles with all the precision of a surgeon having checked out on his last day taking voluntary redundancy because of a crippling squeamishness to blood). It’s a tense games at times, as you get increasingly frantic with your shots as a group of zombies moves in, and all the more satisfying when your shots come off - through luck or skill. Memorable moments, aplenty.

The plot is so ludicrous it’s barely worth even mentioning - not so much a B movie as a D or E film. Something about rescuing the president’s daughter who has been captured by things which… well, they’re not quite zombies, but they may as well be, except sometimes their heads pop open with weird tentacle things. It’s full of cameo appearances from equally ridiculous characters, who I assume I would know all about if I’d played the previous games. They all talk in the kind of Hollywood film chatter you’d expect from someone who had only read about films in a magazine a couple of years ago and was trying to imitate the style from memory. After a heavy bout of amnesia.

But I could list all the games I’ve played with good plot and writing without even reaching double figures, so that's forgivable. Overall, it should be obvious that I quite enjoyed it, and it’s the first game to grab me until I finished it in quite a while. But I will end on this note:

When you spend half the game battling to make Leon move with any urgency at all, how on Earth does he pull this off in a cut-scene late on?

Bastard kept those moves quiet.

Which company will throw the first social media Prescott Punch?

This article originally appeared on Wired.co.uk, but it seems to have been lost during a redesign - which is weird, as my other work for the site still lives on. In any case, it's saved here for posterity.

In a week where a 17-year old is arrested for tweeting first and thinking later, it’s safe to say we know human beings have limitations: we’re frequently grumpy, insulting and spontaneously angry. So why do we expect public figures and companies to effortlessly rise above their instincts?

I remember hearing Gyles Brandreth talking about his time as an MP, and commenting about how deeply members of parliament loathe the average voter, especially during election canvassing time. He recalled making nice with people he’d normally go out of his way to avoid, and nod along passively as they discussed matters they barely understood with infuriating passion. Of course, given Mr Brandreth lost his seat in 1997, he only had to endure two campaigns (and only one successful), and was telling the story in his usual flamboyantly embellished style.

Still, it would be amazing if this wasn’t true of all politicians on some level: they are only human, and as humans we don’t half spend a lot of time silently bemoaning half-wits in our heads. But politicians aren’t the only ones that common wisdom dictates must be super-humanly pleasant. Take a look at any company’s Facebook page, and you’ll invariably see a bunch of entitled, rude and pushy consumers threatening to withdraw their custom over the mildest offence. I’ve seen 'fans' moaning about late deliveries, no money off coupons and even not winning a competition as if they’d just had a company badmouth their mothers.

This is universally met with friendly platitudes from the company, asking for more details to help (or at least soothing words to placate in the case of competitions), showing all the patience of Job. This is enabling behaviour, creating more whiners hoping for freebies, or just some attention: a kind of social media Münchhausen syndrome. Counter intuitively, the ‘nicer’ the brand, the more rude their customers seem to be. The squeaky wheel gets the grease for sure, but there's so much that it's become a slipping hazard.

And here’s the thing: although in the early days of social media marketing, expert, personalised and public customer service was seen as something unique and amazing (Zappos, a shoe company since bought by Amazon were early trailblazers in this field), it’s now everywhere and expected. Which brings me onto a surprising home truth: people actually quite like it when the mask slips and public figures act like a normal person, with anger, wrath and bile.

Just ask John Prescott. During Labour’s 2001 election campaign, Prescott - a former amateur boxer - threw a left hook at a protester who had egged him at point blank range. The media howled and the Tories demanded Blair sack his Deputy. A poll later discovered that the punch actually did him no harm, with the majority of the public approving of his actions - or rather his sharp reactions.

Given Prescott is not a southpaw, he’d have very possibly broken his victim’s jaw if he’d thrown a right hook. Lucky he struck with the left: a hospitalised voter may not have played out as well in his Hull East constituency, where he still polled 64.6% of the vote 22 days later. At the very least he probably wouldn’t have called his 2008 autobiography “Pulling No Punches”. Prescott continued as Deputy Prime Minister, and entered the House of Lords nine years later.

Another story springs to mind, attributed to then AFC Wimbledon chairman Sam Hammam. The story goes that Hammam was confronted by an angry fan shouting about the awful performance he’d just watched, and screaming that it wasn’t worth the cost of him coming every week. Hammam allegedly responded by tearing up the fan's season ticket, and writing him a cheque on the spot. I can find no reference to this online, but while we can question its veracity, it clearly has a natural appeal as a story. The moral? It’s better to ditch whiners, complainers and moaners than to try and fake your way to keeping them. And these people are often bluffing anyway: no doubt the fan came back and bought a new season ticket, tail firmly between legs. Do you believe an irate social media user when he vows, all in caps, never to buy a product ever again? Me neither.

While writing this article, I also discovered Dick’s Last Resort - a chain of American restaurants that intentionally dish out rude and abusive service from their staff. It wouldn’t have become a chain if on some weird level, people didn’t like having their napkins thrown at them by someone trained to show guests fierce disdain. Doubly so when it's directed at their fellow diners.

So far, no big companies have told any of their whining customers where to stick it (hint: not a Facebook comments box) as far as I can tell, but surely it’s only a matter of time. We saw a step in this direction a couple of weeks ago when @o2 responded to a tweet telling them to “suck dick in hell” with “maybe later, got tweets to send right now”, which playfully rose above it, and predictably generated much kudos across the internet. We do occasionally see public figures give as good as they get to their trolls online, but it’s harder to do that as a company’s social media guru without autonomy and the knowledge that you’d still have a job without the niceties.

We will see a change in attitudes to online customer service at some point, but just as the current ‘customer is infallible’ approach was pioneered by small start-ups, it won’t be a big company that takes a chance and lets fly. No doubt it’ll be a spindly backbencher of a brand, rather than a heavy-weight peer, who throws the first left hook online. How the world reacts will define whether it becomes a single assault or a Facebook wide brouhaha.

The Difference Between Riot and Wrong

I haven’t really talked about the UK riots. Not because they’re not important and interesting, but because my Pocket Gamer workload has really picked up. I’ve been reading other people’s analyses, but haven’t had time to put my own thoughts to keyboard.

I suppose I could pretend I wanted to let the dust settle a bit. When the trouble first broke out in Tottenham, I was on a stag weekend in Nottingham. When I returned, some looting was about 10 minutes walk from my current house in Deptford. And now, two weeks on, it’s very much a distant memory.

Except in terms of the law and order backlash on the way as a result. Since Cameron came back from holiday to save the day*, we’ve seen the kind of tough talk that hardline Tories love. Labour have mimicked it in a slightly diluted form - the difference between the two parties, as ever, proving to be like Coca Cola and Coke Zero. They’re both bad for you, but one of them is less obviously so in the short term.

But what’s really interested me about the fallout is how the reactions of the leading figures in our government and capital city reveal a total lack of empathy. They can't contemplate the validity of socio-economic motivations because that isn’t what motivates them.

Let’s take a look at their responses to the idea that rioters were spurred on by financial and ideological concerns:

David Cameron:

“This is not about poverty, it’s about culture,” Cameron said. “A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities.”

Boris Johnson has…

“heard too much sociological explanation and not enough condemnation.”

Nick Clegg, who predicted riots if the Tories pushed through austerity measures a year before he joined the coalition, has also changed his tune, saying it's “ludicrous” to suggest that riots have anything to do with spending cuts.

Just as well they’re not sociologists then. Dismissing cause and effect mere days after an event is pretty dangerous.

I’ve also heard next to nothing in the mainstream media trying to justify the riots as linked to politics - the most widely touted press narrative I’ve observed is that some people are just bad, and need a good slap. Anecdotally, it’s depressing to see quite so many previously liberal people wishing for police crackdowns as soon as things get slightly scary, with water cannons, tasers and even live ammo being on many people’s must-have Christmas wishlists.

So why do our leaders feel the need to dismiss sociological justifications when nobody with serious influence was plugging them in the first place?

It’s no coincidence I chose Clegg, Johnson and Cameron to quote. You don’t have to look hard for records of their youthful indiscretions which look suspiciously like vandalism and the same lack of respect they’re accusing of the 2011 youth.

Nick Clegg on his arson of a priceless collection of cacti while on exchange in Germany, aged 16:

“We didn’t know what we were doing. We were teenagers, we’d drunk too much - frankly, we did behave appallingly, irresponsibly, criminally.”

David Cameron says he's “deeply embarrassed” about his membership of the Bullingdon Club, an elite Oxford University drinking society that deliberately trashes restaurants, and then lavishly pays for the damage on the way out. Boris Johnson used to be rather proud of his membership until people started to notice that condemning 2011 rioters for criminal damage was hypocritical even by his standards. George Osborne is also a Bullingdon alumnus, but is half way between Cameron and Johnson in his approach, neither boasting about it, nor apologising.

Did Clegg, Cameron, Johnson and Osborne vandalise people’s property because of poverty? Did they do it because they lacked a voice? Were they protesting austerity measures? Were they just plain bad?

No, no, no and probably not. And it’s because of this that I suspect they are unable to believe differently of others.

They’re happy to blame youthful inexperience for their own misdemeanors, but with Clegg 16, and Johnson, Osborne and Cameron aged 18-21 when they committed their vandalism, how can they be so hypocritical when looters in the 2011 riots are said to be as young as 9 - does youthful inexperience only count for those at expensive private schools and Oxford University?

Even more than the expenses scandal, even more than changes to the NHS and even more than the business with electoral reform, the political reaction to the riots has really underlined for me exactly how out of touch our elected officials are with 21st century Britain.

* As an aside: for all his myriad faults (and given I’m currently reading 'The End of the Party’, I think I’m putting that mildly) I can’t imagine Gordon Brown taking 3 days to return from holiday in the event of a national emergency