Something I’ve been wondering about lately is the idea of accumulated deaths.

I’ve been playing videogames since I was about 8 years old. The earliest one I can recall is a BASIC program called Hunt the Wumpus, which ran on an Osbourne 1 my dad had brought home to work on. Spanning this 26-odd years of game playing running up to the present, I am quite sure that I have died tens of millions of times, at least. Possibly over a billion times. (At least half of those to that goddamn Wumpus.) There’s no way to calculate the figure but it’s a really huge number. That’s how early games were, particularly the later insidious arcade quarter-eating monsters like Gauntlet, which were literally impossible to finish on one credit. Sadly, there’s no way for me to type /died and find out how many times I have been snuffed or shot or diced or corrupted or disintegrated or eaten by ghosts or beheaded or fallen to my death (that number alone!) or stepped into an ankle-high babbling stream in Lord of the Rings Conquest* or stared dumbly at the astonishingly rapid skeletonization of Dirk in Dragon’s Lair or trapped myself in my own pit in Lode Runner or flown off the track and into the abyss in Wipeout. As much as I would like to know it.

The reason I bring this up is related to my current fixation, Mirror’s Edge.

This game is, athwart any other criticism, pretty ballsy. It probably should not work. First-person acrobatics have always suffered from the basic core issue that you are trying to judge 3D distances drawn on a 2D television screen, with no sense of “self” that can be conveyed properly. 3rd person view gets around this issue somewhat by allowing the player to compare distances using the constant on-screen character as a reference. This has been taken as more or less a truism for a while now. Remember trying to jump across narrow planks in Half-Life? Not too fun, was it?

So it is with pleasant surprise that I can say Mirror’s Edge has largely conquered the problem. You can look down and see your legs and feet. Your hands piston in your lower vision as you sprint along the rooftops. A running roll throws the camera for a vertical 360º spin. There’s a subtle sway to head movements. All of this stuff is an effort to break away from the “turret-on-a-stick” style movement that is popular with shooters. It’s a shooter with no real shooting in it. Interestingly, the rare time you pick up a gun, all of this goes away and you’re stuck with an FPS on par with Fallout 3 (i.e. not very good), and it does indeed return to turret-mode in terms of movement. (Seems like a comment in and of itself, from the designers.) So for it’s ambition, it largely pulls it off, at least as much as can be expected considering the aforementioned issues with dimensions.

So while you are cruising along doing slides and tumbles and wallrun-kicking fools in your way, it’s a really good time. But then you get to these sections where the whole thing comes grinding to a halt. Philosophically, Mirror’s Edge is on the opposite end of the spectrum of user control from Prince of Persia. There are red visual cues in the environment, prolific at first but gradually fading as you progress through the game, until you are left with the barest of nods. The circle button (identified as “hint” in the game menus) will move your viewpoint in the general direction you should be heading. Sometimes. Sometimes it does nothing. Those certain sometimes tend to be when there are four guys with machine guns and sniper rifles firing at you. And of course, you can’t fight more than one at a time, really. Everything stops and you enter that Groundhog Day world of what will become many many violent deaths, many many retries of the same section, until you figure out the path that gets you moving again. You’re stuck because the “hint” either ignores your pleas, or even worse decides to work while you are running by throwing you off a catwalk (since it moves your head, thus your direction).

When I say “philosophically opposed to Prince of Persia” (which is 3rd-person, it should be noted), I mean in how it approaches the degree of control of the avatar versus the player. PoP goes with the concept of the Prince as Acrobat, Player as Director. You guide the Prince along and make timed “suggestions” as to his next move, but you aren’t really doing anything fancy to wallrun or ceiling-scuttle between iron fixtures; he just does it as long as you hit the (generous) timing window with the right button. ME is more like an old-school game. The Player is Acrobat and Faith is you (1st-person). You must become the expert, that is the game. It has speed-runs built-in.

So you die a lot.

And when that happens these days, I don’t feel like I have the patience for it any more. I mean, I do of course – I practically always come back at some point and beat the thing that’s been irritating me, but I don’t enjoy it as much. When I die 30 times in thrice as many seconds, I am more inclined to just shut the thing off. That happens to me in Mirror’s Edge. I didn’t used to do that.

Is it possible that decades worth of accumulated perishings have conspired to subdue my typical ruthless conquest of such things? It makes me think of that bit of conversation from High Fidelity: listening to years of crappy pop songs about relationships has to take its toll on your idea of how relationships work. Likewise, I wonder if there is a maximum rollover of Deaths for me, an ultimate figure after which something inside me will say No, I Have Died Enough Times, and then I will put the game down and stop my own heart with the power of my mind, in the exact same way that those dudes died in the Matrix even though they were just playing a fancier game with better controllers.

I’m strictly concerned about it as a performance issue, of course.

Thing is, when I play Bionic Commando: Rearmed – which is downright fucking mean with it’s design – I mentally give it a pass, because it was always that way. That’s how lots of games were back in the NES days, and the remake is very accurate. But I wonder if that idea has to go away, that idea of 1 True Path vs Endless Deaths, or at least become somewhat less popular. The non-deaths of PoP didn’t really bother me. Certainly I can’t be alone in thinking that there should be room for more games that have something other than Your Destruction (or my favourite variant, You Are Dead And The Earth Is Doomed) as the inevitable fail-state?

* Just once, that one, actually.

Some tidbits and updates have bubbled up from the just-finished PlayStation Day event put on by SCEE, across the pond in Yurop-land. Most of these are shamelessly cribbed from the rolling Eurogamer liveblog, which is always my choice for such things because their writers are an amusing combination of bored and British.

• the games shown were LittleBigPlanet (now due in October, a 1-month bump); Resistance 2 (Insomniac never slips dates, due in September); Killzone 2 (bumped for the dozenth time, now coming February 2009, which would suck hard if R2 wasn’t there, and now that I think of it R2 is probably the reason); SingStar and Buzz PS3 (yawn); Motorstorm Pacific Rift (no longer “2″); Mirror’s Edge (somewhat surprising); and Echochrome
• some worldwide sales numbers: 34 million PSPs, 10.5 million PS3s, and 127 million PS2s out there
• they say they have 8 million signups for PSN, which is actually quite shocking if true (on 10.5 mil sold??)
• Home is not ready yet, re-iterated “autumn” release; say their commitment to the project “has not wavered”. Whatever. Wake me when you ship something, you gits.
• big demo of R2 in action, work-in-progress stuff; lots of details about the “battles within battles” philosophy of 60-man multiplayer (opposing squads); major community features, lots of emphasis on the co-op campaign; some rewards and levelling-up for proper teamwork
• another big demo of Motorstorm Pacific Rift, which uses Hawaii as it’s inspiration; lots of environmental tweaks, resistance from vegetation, water cooling your engine, shit falling on your car, volcano hazards, mudslides – basically the island is now an enemy unto itslef; more aggressive AI, lots of repetition of the word “brutal”; double the tracks of the original and splitscreen mode (finally!)
• the Mirror’s Edge demo sounded similar to the earlier private demonstration, I’m still quite curious about this one (see my earlier post); 1st-person acrobatics is a pretty ballsy idea for a game (EDIT – see bottom of post for video link)
• some crazy cross-promotional competition for Gran Turismo 5: Prologue called “Nissan GT Academy”, whereupon you compete online for 7 months and them are possibly invited to partake in the famous 24-hour Dubai race; launches on PSN May 23rd, no idea if it’s UK-only or what
• some boring sales stuff about blu-ray (“How awesome is it? So awesome.”)
• some equally boring stuff about BD-Live, which still strikes me as lame net-connected CD-ROM bullshit from 1999, but whatever
• some stuff about PlayTV which I will not discuss because I can’t have it here, and am bitter
• PSP GPS stuff (signage in Europe sucks, which leads to large sales of TomToms)

… aaaand that’s about it.

No Wipeout HD, booooooo! Where the fuck is it?

(Edit – holyshit, this Mirror’s Edge video is really striking.)

The concept is parkour again, like Assassin’s Creed but faster-more-intense. Also the game has a refreshingly modern/near-future setting, something of a rarity these days. Players act as “runners”, a sort of specialized insurgent messenger in a dystopian state of pervasive electronics monitoring. All the stories I’ve read about the presentation emphasized the hyper-real camera movement and particular avoidance of guns or shooting on the player’s part. Assume versions for the 360 and PS3.

Cavalli expresses a wish to keep Mirror’s Edge from the same stupid overhype that AC was subjected to, and then goes on to tell us that it’s a strong contender for game of the year. Which is… incongruent, let’s say. I have to admit I’m pretty intrigued. The game looks quite unique in setting alone… the only thing that comes to mind is The Matrix. Very shiny and polished. If they get the camera movement right it could be really fun – the best parts of AC were the free-running flights from the guards.

(Note to Sony: send these developers your headtracking stuff. Would be a nice feature for this title in particular.)