Oh Man I Needed This

Man, gaming news and personal news I want to blog about has been bone goddamned dry these past few months. No one's being a jackass that needs to be put in their place, no games have come out to rant OR rave about, and nothing's happened to me that I really want to talk about.

Then comes this little gem. For those of you who no likie clickie, that there is an article about how former members of the game company Free Radical blamed the utter failure of their big PS3 exclusive Haze on not fully understanding the PS3 hardware at the time. This is hard for me to do, because Free Radical did the Timesplitters games which are genius, incredibly well done, and some of the only FPS's I would consider owning on a console. They're one of the good guys, or were until Haze was released. Haze gave them a dick-punching from whence they never truly recovered, and you know what? Serves 'em right. I'll explain why.

Haze wasn't fraught with technical glitches. It wasn't graphically uninpressive, although the flamethrower looked like shit. It didn't have a terrible framerate or shitty particle effects or lack of physics or clipping issues or missing textures or any of that. Haze wasn't absolutely savaged in the gaming press because of any technical issues at all. It was torn limb from limb because it was an absolutely boring, derivative pile of shit. It was clearly Free Radical trying to give the PS3 their Halo, and it showed. To be fair, Haze featured a very clever, if obvious, twist midway through the game. Your main character, a be-armored space marine charged with rooting out jungle guerilla bad guys and mainlining superdrugs starts to see that the bad guys might not really be so bad after all and he may be on the wrong side. Thereafter you start shooting the Busy Bee Men instead of staring out the other side of the helmet.

It would have been a novel idea had they followed through or thought about it at all, but they didn't. Your armored, drugged up Bee Marines should be nigh unstoppable armored terminators, and switching over to the guerilla side should have changed the gameplay completely, forcing you to be more sneaky and smart since you're (supposedly) weaker. They didn't care about doing any of that though. They were much too busy trying to ape Halo and Gears of War in any way they could, and THAT'S what lead to Haze being a pile of shit. It wasn't a dense programming interface that said to a room full of seasoned professionals "We are actively going to make a game where we eschew all creativity in favor of making an FPS featuring armored people with the same tired pistol, machine gun, shotgun, flamethrower weapon selection. We are going to do our very best to introduce no new gameplay concepts whatsoever in a genre that is already saturated to its limit. We aren't going to even make it a third person shooter with a cover system, even though even that at this point would be boring and derivative. We are however, going to go out of our way to include a mandatory vehicle section even though everyone on earth hates those. Our goal is to knock off and sell out just as hard as we possibly can, all the time, every hour on the hour. Why? Because Sony dropped a truckload of money at our door and said 'we would like a Halo too please', so we are going to 'me too' all the way to the bank". No, you Fallen Angel Fuckwits, had you the balls and the good common sense to actually include something different and interesting in your game, the struggle with the PS3 dev kit would have mattered little.

Shortly thereafter, Free Radical was bought for a song and absorbed by Crytek, makers of the impossibly beautiful Crysis games. Consindering the turn they took with Haze, that's really the perfect place for them. This way, they can make gorgeous yet creatively bankrupt games for all three platforms that sell marginally well until the end of time. Never again will they have to strain that pesky little imagination muscle.