I did not know I needed a 10,000ish word, high-minded write-up on Vin bloody Diesel's videogame but here we are. Butcher Bay is a great game and this was a great read.
Hell yeah. This game has always stuck out to me as something bizarrely out of place, and I always am surprised it's not held in higher regard. It's one of the few games from that era I actually had the desire to replay, and I did, enough times that I heard every quoted line in this post spoken aloud as I read them, and know them to be verbatim and correct. That's all in spite of [or maybe because of?] the fact that I have never seen any of the Riddick movies or know anything about the setting beyond this game. From the strange regenerating health system [which I still think is one of the best of its kind] to running around catching moths to turn them into cigarettes like a little kid in high-security prison, it's a truly unique experience.
I do want to push back a little at the idea that it was an uncontested novelty at the time, though. Games like 2002's Splinter Cell, the Thief series including Deadly Shadows [earlier in 2004], Deus Ex and Invisible War [2003], and even the MGS games really pioneered the narrative-heavy sneaking-around-a-hostile-location... not genre, I guess, but vibe, as the kids say, and despite only half of those being first-person, I think that's more important of a definition than FPS. Though I guess if you played it on the original Xbox before Halo it would hit different, as they say.
As far as the wider themes, I have to mention that I found it very interesting that the biggest game last year, by a pretty wide margin, was a game from a Chinese developer that seems pretty openly to be about getting Strong as Fuck so you can violently overthrow the Celestial Government and ends with you rejecting the imposition of control from the Absolute Highest Authority by retaining your intact Self. Maybe you're right, and it's just easier to sneak subversive themes into videogames that also happen to kick ass and be fun. You certainly catch a lot of devs trying to cut that corner.
Thanks for the perspective! You make a very good point about Butcher Bay's contemporaries from the early 2000s — Deus Ex and Thief in particular are favorites of mine, and I'll talk more about their own approaches when I inevitably end up writing about them. Butcher Bay (including the 2004 version) certainly benefited from engine tech that ran laps around UE1 and Dark Engine, although I think Starbreeze's then-cutting-edge rendering and top-notch voice direction are why it stands out from a presentational standpoint. MGS has a similarly cinematic character, though, which I hadn't considered. Come to think of it, I'd kill to see a Kojima-directed Riddick game.
I did not know I needed a 10,000ish word, high-minded write-up on Vin bloody Diesel's videogame but here we are. Butcher Bay is a great game and this was a great read.
Hell yeah. This game has always stuck out to me as something bizarrely out of place, and I always am surprised it's not held in higher regard. It's one of the few games from that era I actually had the desire to replay, and I did, enough times that I heard every quoted line in this post spoken aloud as I read them, and know them to be verbatim and correct. That's all in spite of [or maybe because of?] the fact that I have never seen any of the Riddick movies or know anything about the setting beyond this game. From the strange regenerating health system [which I still think is one of the best of its kind] to running around catching moths to turn them into cigarettes like a little kid in high-security prison, it's a truly unique experience.
I do want to push back a little at the idea that it was an uncontested novelty at the time, though. Games like 2002's Splinter Cell, the Thief series including Deadly Shadows [earlier in 2004], Deus Ex and Invisible War [2003], and even the MGS games really pioneered the narrative-heavy sneaking-around-a-hostile-location... not genre, I guess, but vibe, as the kids say, and despite only half of those being first-person, I think that's more important of a definition than FPS. Though I guess if you played it on the original Xbox before Halo it would hit different, as they say.
As far as the wider themes, I have to mention that I found it very interesting that the biggest game last year, by a pretty wide margin, was a game from a Chinese developer that seems pretty openly to be about getting Strong as Fuck so you can violently overthrow the Celestial Government and ends with you rejecting the imposition of control from the Absolute Highest Authority by retaining your intact Self. Maybe you're right, and it's just easier to sneak subversive themes into videogames that also happen to kick ass and be fun. You certainly catch a lot of devs trying to cut that corner.
Thanks for the perspective! You make a very good point about Butcher Bay's contemporaries from the early 2000s — Deus Ex and Thief in particular are favorites of mine, and I'll talk more about their own approaches when I inevitably end up writing about them. Butcher Bay (including the 2004 version) certainly benefited from engine tech that ran laps around UE1 and Dark Engine, although I think Starbreeze's then-cutting-edge rendering and top-notch voice direction are why it stands out from a presentational standpoint. MGS has a similarly cinematic character, though, which I hadn't considered. Come to think of it, I'd kill to see a Kojima-directed Riddick game.
Vin Diesel
as
Good-Actorman