JXE Streams: ‘Façade’ celebrates 10 years of awkward sexual advances

Façade turns 10 in July. Archaic as Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s interactive drama is after a decade, it remains one of the most distinctive experimental video games ever made. Even with scores of dramatic indies and more technologically advanced games filling the intervening years, Façade remains discomfitingly human. The premise is simple: you walk into a couple’s apartment for a dinner date. They are on the verge of complete relationship collapse. Whatever happens next — what you talk about, what you do — is entirely in your hands as the artificial intelligence reacts. It’s like Siri via Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We’re going to revisit Façade to see just how awkward it can get on JXE Streams starting at 3:30PM ET/12:30PM PT.

Tune into this post or Engadget.com/gaming to watch us play through Façade. Want to participate in the seminal interactive drama? Watch at Twitch.tv/Joystiq starting at 3:30PM ET/12:30PM PT to chat with us as we play.

Make sure to follow us on Twitch to know whenever we go live!

[We’re playing Façade in 720p streamed via OBS.]

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‘Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’ is a tale of revenge

In Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, a human bomb sank the dreams and private military corporation of Big Boss, the central figure in Konami’s stealth franchise. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain continues where we saw the Boss last: hospitalized and disfigured by the bomb blast. The soldier has lost an arm in the chaos and his body has been invaded by over 100 foreign bodies — a mixture of human teeth and shrapnel — but the incident seems to have damaged something far more critical: his psyche.

Big Boss’ physical transformation leads to changes in his motivation as well. Somewhere between 1984, where The Phantom Pain begins, and 1995, where we meet a rookie soldier named Snake (a genetically-altered clone of the Boss) in the MSX title Metal Gear, Big Boss becomes the franchise’s primary villain.

For two days, with a preview build of The Phantom Pain in hand, I tried to uncover the Big Boss’ secrets and attempt to learn how a good soldier can go bad.

The Phantom Pain has a slow open. Acting as both a reminder of Big Boss’s ordeal and a tutorial, the game’s protagonist awakens gaunt and feeble after a nine-year coma. He struggles to reactivate his long dormant muscles, spending the majority of the introduction on his belly. It illustrates how far the soldier has fallen from an all-powerful military leader to a weak man struggling to evade danger.

His powerful persona returns after the intro (and after some time has passed) as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain leads players to an open-world region of Afghanistan. Imagine a series of large installations, like the one found in Ground Zeroes, surrounded by desert and you’ll have an idea of how the map in The Phantom Pain works. It’s a massive play area, engulfed in sand, riddled with wildlife and terrorized by the Soviet army.

Big Boss — back to form and outfitted with an intricate mechanical arm that can be used as a weapon — quickly establishes himself, alongside familiar franchise characters Revolver Ocelot and Kazuhira Miller, as the leader of a new private military corporation known as the Diamond Dogs. A gun-for-hire in the region, Big Boss helps locals fend off the 1980s-era Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by eliminating their commanding officers, destroying their equipment and generally sowing dissent through the desert.

The structure of missions in The Phantom Pain is similar to previous games in the series, specifically Peace Walker and Ground Zeroes. Players are given a slew of missions, some listed as primary story objectives and others as optional Side Ops. Completing Side Ops can be critical if your aim is to make Big Boss’ life slightly easier. When he arrives in Afghanistan and holds Soviet soldiers hostage, for example, Boss quickly realizes he doesn’t speak the language and can’t extract any useful information from the enemies. In an early Side Ops mission, however, Big Boss can capture and recruit a translator, allowing the protagonist to interrogate adversaries for details on enemy positions, special items and more.

The majority of the missions feature simple core objectives. Nearly all of them follow a similar pattern of “Go to place on map; destroy target; get out alive.” More story-focused missions offer flavor by way of Metal Gear-level crazy cutscenes, but the objectives tend to bleed together. What you’re doing isn’t the focus; it’s how you’re doing it.

When you select a mission, choose your gear and pick your buddy (more on this later), Big Boss decides at what time of day he wants to execute his plan. Infiltrating enemy strongholds at night has its obvious advantages: Darkness means low visibility and fewer guards roaming with a shorter range of view. But your visibility is also at a disadvantage. More than a handful of Soviet soldiers sitting in shadow surprised me as I made my approach, forcing me to drain the batteries of my night vision goggles. Nighttime also means more soldiers resting for the evening indoors, making things complicated when approaching villages with dozens of structures.

Daylight sneaking offers better visibility — for you and the Soviets. It’s easier to tag and track the movement of enemies from a distance with your advanced binoculars as they roam the desert landscape. But the blinding sunlight can put Big Boss in peril as he waits for his eyes to adjust to the light when transitioning from indoor structures to the desert exterior.

The day-and-night cycle and the game’s open-world, “approach from any angle” design gives players an immense sense of freedom and offers healthy mission replayability (you can replay old missions at any time from the main menu). The Buddy system also throws more variety into the mission structure. There are a number of assist characters you can select at the start of each mission. D-Horse can be used to traverse the desert quickly and can be used in stealth (Big Boss leans over to either side of the tamed animal and hugs its side to hide his approach). D-Dog can spot enemies and items in the world as well as distract and attack bad guys. D-Walker is a bipedal robot that Big Boss rides like a minecart that can run at a quick clip on its legs or plod along on wheels for a stealthier approach. Finally there’s Quiet, a quick and deadly sniper with a nonsensical fashion sense who can clear your path of any threat with her trusty rifle. Each character offers positive and negative attributes to varying play styles, whether you want to be a stealthy infiltrator or a blood-soaked warlord.

For stealth-oriented players, your aim during missions is to complete objectives and escape unscathed and unseen. Non-stealthy players, though a blasphemous approach for Big Boss, can have just as much fun. The Phantom Pain has a wide swath of deadly weaponry for Big Boss to utilize and gives players some extra reaction time, as previously seen in Ground Zeroes, by slowing time down slightly when detected. This gives players the time to choose, even when detected, whether they want to get aggressive. If things get too hectic, Big Boss can use his iDroid device (sort of a clunky PDA) to radio in for helicopter support. Helicopters can decimate the region with a hail of bullet fire or distract enemies by broadcasting ’80s pop music from its speakers. There’s something oddly entertaining about taking out a village of bad guys as a helicopter above blasts Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America.” You can also order a helicopter to drop a crate of supplies (you can select where to drop the crate, including on top of enemy heads!) or call in one of your buddies.

Mission notes only expand the story; they feed into The Phantom Pain‘s metagame. Similar to the PSP game Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Big Boss can recruit enemies into his army by using a device known as the Fulton Recovery System. Essentially, Boss hooks people, animals and objects up to a self-inflating balloon that flies away and lands back at his base (so long as the weather is clear). Back on base, a giant oil rig in the middle of a vast ocean, Snake can catch up with his aggressively recruited army and make changes to the organizational structure of the Diamond Dogs.

Looking at spreadsheets might not sound like entertainment, but I was quickly enthralled by examining the attributes of my new recruits and manually placing them in different units to expand my army and Big Boss’ abilities. The Research & Development unit, for example, can create key equipment for use in the field, such as Big Boss’ trusty cardboard box, and upgrades for your buddies. The Intel unit offers more information when Big Boss approaches cities, often pre-targeting enemies and notifying Boss of weather fluctuations (a surprise sandstorm in the middle of an intricate sneaking plan can take things south quickly). There are a handful of other units, but the key to it all is recruitment. I found myself specifically playing in stealth in order to capture and grow my army. There’s an additional incentive to the style, similar to Peace Walker.

Eventually you can form combat units and send them on missions for various rewards, like money or new recruits. Your army begins to grow from the inside and you can then take those resources you collect and expand the size and scope of your oil rig. At the end of my two days, my rig featured seven platforms ranging from medical to support all the way to a separate installation for captured animals (however, the zoo is more fun over function).

Though its structure is similar to Peace Walker, this is the first mainline and numbered game in the series that isn’t completely focused on narrative. There are none of those classic nearly 30-minute-long cutscenes; instead the game seems to intend for the player to craft their own stories through exploration in the open world. That doesn’t mean it always works. The story is disjointed, with most of the nuance tucked away in cassette tapes that players need to stop and listen to. The most drastic difference is how stoic Big Boss is.

My fear was that adding the power of a Hollywood celebrity as the lead’s voice would alter how Big Boss interacted with others. Kiefer Sutherland’s Snake speaks, but certainly picks his moments. Gone are the days of Snake’s two-way radio conversations we hold near and dear to our heart and replaced by a series of returning voice actors that talk at you rather than with you. Here’s hoping that Sutherland spouts out some Kojima brilliance later in the game like “La-li-lu-le-lo” — a codename for Cipher (and The Patriots), the central organization within The Phantom Pain that Boss is investigating. Although the game isn’t completely lacking in linear narrative, it’s just far different from any other modern, mainline game in the franchise.

At its heart Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a revenge story. Big Boss is looking for a punching bag; he needs someone to blame for taking nine years of his life, destroying his army, killing his allies and taking a piece of his body. In what may very well be his final entry in the series, legendary creator Hideo Kojima gives us a protagonist bent on destroying his adversaries after suffering great loss. There seems like little Big Boss won’t sacrifice to be victorious, but as we help him establish his power in The Phantom Pain, we create a future enemy that will terrorize the world of Metal Gear Solid.

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Major League Gaming finals head to New Orleans in October

The Major League Gaming World Finals, featuring championships for Dota 2 and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, will be held in New Orleans at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center from October 16th to the 18th. The 2015 MLG Finals boast a prize pool of more than $500,000, and it will be the organization’s 100th live event (that’s some nice timing). MLG, founded in 2002, is the longest-running eSports organization in existence and it’s awarded more than $13.5 million in prize money across a range of games over the years. A General Admission pass for all three days of the Finals runs $50, or snag a Dota 2 or Advanced Warfare VIP pass for $200 each. Pro gaming fans, purchase tickets in the MLG store.

We are happy to announce MLG’s 100th event; the MLG World Finals October 16-18 in New Orleans! Info here-> http://t.co/axYaTX4uB9

– MLG (@MLG) June 8, 2015

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Source: MLG

‘Fortnite’ would be a fun game, if it weren’t so complex

When Fortnite started teaching me how to build a fort, its gentle tutor voice told my pickaxe-wielding warrior to never forget this simple rule: Remember to make a door. When you build forts in Fortnite — in addition to about a billion other activities — you want to make durable fortifications protecting a glowing portal from ravenous zombies that want to destroy it. That fort is no good if you can’t get out of it or re-enter it to make improvements on the fly. Still, Fortnite creator Epic Games doesn’t appear to follow the game’s own advice. While a brilliantly simple, edifying puzzle of collaboration and creativity lies within, it’s buried beneath myriad layers of confounding busy work and mechanical complexity. Right now, Fortnite doesn’t have a door.

Playing Fortnite at a private event ahead of E3, I had trouble determining what the game was all about. Not for a lack of details, though. The problem was more that the game is comprised only of details. When you start playing on your own, you’re told that you’re joining the Storm Chaser resistance. Then you’re promptly given your own personal island that’s set adrift in a spacey void. On the island, you build new facilities like barracks or factories, which in turn open up resources and soldiers.

Fortnite sings when you’re collaborating on a team of four players.

These soldiers, broken up into different classes like ninjas and mechanics, are then used in missions you take on from a whole different expanding map adrift in yet another spacey void. Then you control those characters in strangely unpopulated arenas that look like Stephen King settings by way of Loony Toons. These bulbous suburban towns, forests and shallow caves are where you fight those zombie hordes and build forts.

Density is a problem that Epic seems to be aware of. Even after the lengthy tutorial breaking down all of these different elements, we were encouraged to play on our own for more than an hour before being grouped into a four-player team to try out Fortnite‘s co-operative play. After that, though, I was still flummoxed by how everything interacted with everything else. If I complete a mission, what resources am I actually building up to grow my island? How does that open up the mission map? How do I actually level up any characters I’ve unlocked? What’s the difference between a 1-star ninja and a 5-star ninja? Fortnite is hardly the first game to overload on complexity at the beginning, but its endless menus and items and information slices feel like distractions from the actual act of playing in the field.

Right now, Fortnite doesn’t have a door.

Playing actually feels pretty awesome, although it’s not totally unencumbered. The missions on hand at the demo played out in three phases. First, you wander around the primary-colored landscape looking for a purple portal and then you have to protect it with a fort. Treasure chests with pre-built weapons and items are hidden around the maps, but most of your resources are built by gathering materials.

No matter what character you’re using, they have an indestructible stick for beating open trees, rocks, buildings and anything else to gather raw resources. See a dump truck? Hit it with your stick and collect some scrap metal. Want all the bricks in that post office down the street? Keep hitting it. All this Minecraft-ian beating gives you goods to build new tools — a pickaxe lets you gather things faster; a sword is good for defending the portal — as well as a variety of walls, stairs, traps and platforms for a potential fort.

Surprise! More video game zombies.

Building this stocked larder felt needlessly laborious given how fun and frantic the third phase is. Once you’ve got the goods, you can start building a protective structure around your portal and the ease of selecting different parts really sparks your inner pillow fort master. If you’ve got the stash to do, you don’t have to build a simple four walls with a roof around the portal; you can make a whole series of interlocking fortifications with stairs leading nowhere and multiple layers of walls to protect from raiding zombies. That’s what happens during the third and final phase: You “activate” the portal and waves of slimy beasts swarm toward it and you have to kill them all as a timer ticks down. Just like everything else, your fort is destructible, and your enemies will beeline for whatever’s most vulnerable. Dancing between rebuilding downed walls, attacking and trying to heal, Fortnite feels like a happy meeting between Bob Vila and tower-defense games like Plants vs. Zombies.

Played alone, these missions felt slow and plodding, but they came alive when playing on a team of four.

Played alone these missions felt slow and plodding, but they came alive when playing on a team of four. Sharing resources and seamlessly throwing together a fortress with teammates added an exciting sheen to the familiar play styles Fortnite has mashed together. The game also gets much harder. Epic threw our team into a high-level mission that we simply couldn’t get past even after the developer unlocked advanced weapons like an extra-durable guitar for walloping zombies. Despite our failure, it was still enjoyable to hop back in and start building a whole new set of fortifications with the team. The only problem was that after that fun collaboration ended, it was back into the layers and layers of menus, going through the plodding business of leveling up characters and expanding the island.

Epic made games long before its primary business was selling tools for other people to make games with, and its strength was simplicity. Unreal and Gears of War were alternately about the pleasures of speed and weight as viewed through a gory fantasy version of squirt gun fights. Launching yourself around Unreal‘s sci-fi maps felt liberating compared to other shooting games while Gears of War‘s plodding firefights where you slammed into cover were wonderfully grounding. Fortnite‘s fort building, while more complex by its very nature, still evokes an appealingly simple pleasure like those games.

Right now that pleasure is hidden behind a wall of clutter. Epic’s game is far from done. Not on hand were more expansive fort building and player-versus-player modes. In fact, many smaller features were still absent. While male and female versions of character classes were in the game, some, like the ninja, were only available as men because the alternates were still incomplete. There’s time to streamline and clarify Fortnite between now and its release later this year, and even afterward as the free-to-play game evolves with its audience. Epic just needs to remember that the audience has to find a way into the game if they’re going to play long enough for it to evolve.

[Images credit: Epic Games]

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Recommended Reading: Russia’s professional trolling agency

Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology and more in print and on the web. Some weeks, you’ll also find short reviews of books that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read.

The Agency
by Adrian Chen
The New York Times Magazine

There’s a super-secret group of internet trolls in Russia that’s causing problems not only online, but also in US cities. The so-called Internet Research Agency caused a ruckus in Louisiana last September with fake reports of an accident at a chemical plant — reports that eventually made national news. To find out more about the organization, Adrian Chen took a trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, in April and found himself in the group’s crosshairs.

[Image credit: Shutterstock]

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