Venusberg | Lodged in the teeth of modernity

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

But, ironically, one of the most expensive games in recent history -- "Half-Life 2" -- with a production budget of more than $40 million -- went out of its way not to hype the name talent that lent its voices to the biggest PC game of 2004. Included in the cast are Lou Gossett, Jr., Robert Guillaume, and Robert Culp -- but there's no indication of that on the game box, on the official Web site, or even in the marketing assets or advertising. In fact, the credits don't roll until the very end of the game, a destination only visited by the most skilled gamers who, presumably, weren't influenced by voice talent when they rushed out to buy the sequel to the "best PC game of 1998."

No disrespect intended, but I can't help but feel that "Contains the voices of Lou Gossett, Junior, Robert Culp and Eli Vance" would, as a box sticker, have had in my admittedly unscientific model a far smaller positive impact on sales than using the same space for a blazon reading "Shooty bad alien faces yes!"

Speaking of Half Life 2, Valve have released the playing stats for Episode 1, harvested (with a Combine harvester. Ha, I kill me) from their Steam system. In a week when it turned out that - surprise surprise - Apocalyptic Christians have no respect for privacy - this raises questions about the harvesting and storage of this data - I'd be a bit concerned if someone found out just how many times I killed Lara Croft during my spectacular failure to grasp Tomb Raider; I'd look like Fred West.

That aside, there is some interesting info in here. Apparently completion rates are lowered by people who restart without getting through the credits sequence, but have only 47% of players really persevered through the admittedly highly repetitive tour-guiding episode of "Exit 17"?

Unfortunately, it did not collect some of the statistics I want to read. Like how many times are players zooming in on Alyx Vance's face, then repeatedly turning their flashlight on and off? How many times does the average player hit a downed dropship with a crowbar to make its limbs jiggle before it stops being cool? How loud did microphones record cries of "No, Barney, let's not do that. Let's all run across in a single heavily-armed group, before the Combine can bring in reinforcements. You multitool". How many times has a zombie been set aflame just to try to work out what it's screaming? How much treacherous speculation has been entertained as to whether Roberts Culp and Guillaume will stay hale and hearty long enough to record voices for all three episodes? All these and more...

So, how far up the obsession curve are you (I'm a bit disturbed to find myself not just in the upper quartile but the upper sesqupidile, or something to that effect)? What statistics would you like to see measured? And, most importantly, are you one of the crazy people playing it with DirectX 7?

On a related topic, the release of Prey will mark a tipping point when there are more Native American characters in computer games than there are actual Native Americans.

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