Ubisoft shooter "Haze" puts on Cinematic Gameplay – and knew as a killer game about killer games
"Dunst", "true", "mileness", so in about something "Haze" can be translated. Or it means a cannabis variety. Both power in connection with the online for the PlayStation 3 eponymous ego shooter quite sense. After all, this is about psychopharmaca, sensory reductions – and by the way on the BlackWater scandal.
The cynical pramisse looks like this: State armies are no longer cost-effective in the world of "Haze". As a result, the Soldner and Rustungsverfirma "Mantel Global Industries" has established itself as an international – and apparently monopolistic – whose troops are booked by national governments for war assignments. "Consequently, the UN, NATO and many national armies were dissolved, and all activities for peacekeeping on coat surrendering private army."
Depending on the framework (and the game itself), how then military conflicts between two coat customer states are released and why had the whole thing "consequently" to the resolution of UN and NATO. The same naivitat, which reduces these institutions to their explicit military power, is also at the factory when the plot coat is a crude world vulnerwater.
Today, 2048, Robt a Burger War, in any Latin American country, and the coat troops are sent to skill. As a player, you get into the role of Shane Carpenter, a young coat-Soldner under the command of boss cynics and upper-utilitarist Sergeant Morgan Duvall. In this first half of the game – Father you change the pages, fights with the rebels against coat – you will be bombarded by the defendant coolness of his eventually the cliche-marines from "Aliens" modeled Soldermameraden and their empty political and ethically asking phrases: this is called Duvall several times to rationality, because "Emotion and Affections Are Just Chemical Reactions". Right at the beginning of the game, eyewitnesses, as he has a Soldner, the moral concerns about their approach aubert, of the helicopter – followed by a sermon over utilitarianism, and why he must be the only basic pramisse in the war: "IF YOU HAVE THE Choice to Save One of Two Comrades, You Save The One With The Bigger Gun!"
(An-) driven are the jacket troops from a substance called "nectar", a "food intelligence", the "visionary, target accuracy, speed and strong" of the Soldner. The soldiers are the work bees of coat, and the "nectar" is their jelly royale – not for nothing the black coat helmet carries a yellow strip as a visor, the uniforms bright yellow honeycomb on the shoulder – overhead, the honeycomb form is already found in the game menu and recycles clever to the name of the game concept determining the drug.
A slot: "Haze" is not a good game. It is just one of this conval ego shooter, the sinky game dump like in simulationistic aspects (like the tendered assault rifles, with which one can also bring to the finish at a few meters away, every eighth ball to the finish). The player also likes to find themselves in the situation to rush through Duster’s industrial scenarios and sometime in search of the exit on good luck to tune every black flat with his head – until some finally proves to be the longed-for staircase in the next level section.
The Cinematic Gameplay is standing ahead of the structuring instance, builds "Haze" as mostly random (Z.B. The defense of the rebelendorf against coat troops) stating script events. Really already succeeds only in a wonderfully farmed swamp landscape: surrounded by Gluhwurmchen, the – currently unarmed and coat has now been drowned – Hero by Moras and fog, over-creaking webs, and finds himself quickly pursued by solder troops, but never sure if he just experienced a hallucination.
Only the ubiquitous darkness and unrealiveness of the game introduces the movie feel here a leg. The conventional-free weapon arsenal of "Haze" is the quality of the game in the way: After all, we play here in a science fiction setting, and there is only one pistol, two assault rifles, a shotgun, a rocket launcher and the compulsory and Completely UNZUTS – Auber in a self-built script event – sharpener gun. Rectilinous Shooter Level like the abandoned hotel facility, which released the player to his own style, however, make a small part of the game.
The unique selling point of the game is not the originality of the plot, the cinematic atmosphere or the vehicle sections, which in the meantime seem to be missing in no shooter anyway. Not even the idea of the "nectar" and the resulting two quite different gaming styles – as a soil-standing rebel or just as a "nectar" junkie, especially online was allowed to provide the for exciting Deathmatches – to actually shape an outstanding game element. The trick of "Haze" lies in a side effect of the drug: "Nectar" not only influences the fighting of the coat soldiers. He not only carries the risk of overdose. "Nectar" also masks the perception, let the war show less bloody appear, the soldiers forget that they fight against genuine people.
"Nectar" is the flawed and intravenos administered violence, and the coat soldiers the final product of this targeted dulling. In a scene of the game – still in mantle uniform – we see a pair of rolled-up tarpaulins distributed on the ground until suddenly a "nectar disruption" on the display flashes, the perception flickers, and get off the plannes-tailored corpses. The Aalglat environment is at once corners and edges, blood spers to the worn witnesses of past battles, and that – already indispersible – comrades appear before this backdrop even cynical: "An empty hand is just one grip away from holding a weapon" , Duvall justifies the murder of civilians – an unpleasant allusion, considering the transit of the coat model company Blackwater.
Killer games and the dulling theory
It seems as a wool "Haze" the dulling theory as Christian Pfeiffer represented by video game opponents such as Christian Pfeiffer illustrated and discussed, even the side change in the playplot speaks for that. You start as a super-soldier, without perception of violence, "haze" starts as a game, as, yes: killer game, also diegetically. Due to the succinct change in the design, this prior trial becomes obvious, opponents die graphic, they are stobbing pain cries. New missions now let the player save the inhabitants of a small village from marauding coat troops, save people from deholettia opponents. The coat troops are exactly the variety of heroes, which is also torpered in "Gears of War" or "Halo", only that "Haze" now represents their fragility to the discussion now.
To make them opponents and to put their amoralitat to the pillory, a war recognition comes to other genre representatives. That’s – as well as the bees allusion in design details – subtle and clever. Especially the rather one-dimensional shooter genre usually comes out with simple black and white characters, of which the sowers are thoroughly acting amoral – like just cynical action heroes in the cinema.
Now to stimulate themselves on these cynical heroes and make them promptly to opponents, is fragwurrdig: too easy to read "haze" as a pladoyer for a classification of games that the genre in the low-hazardous danger on the one and realistic shocking (Anti) war games on the other side wants to divide. Thus, the designers play the representatives of the highest controversial – dulling thesis in the hands by putting a monument to their believeness. The opposite is the end of the game in which the victorious rebel drivers explores "nectar" use, "to give my people confidence". Game and realitate escape for a positive effect.
Such contrials are realized that computer games as a narrowner medium still stuck in the child shoes. Although there are already the gross masters of their subject, but game designers and specialists like Hideo Kojima or Warren Spector are still exceptions. In addition, such meta concepts are, of course, with the interactivity to be demanded by the medium: at "haze", the corresponding positions are restricted again – on prefabricated script events, without intervention or decision-making of the player. You do not have any possibility to give up "nectar" as a coat-soldner and thus more "realitat", more violence on the screen. The supposed discourse is prefabricated and denies the player participation. For which page "Haze" argues, remains unclear. Of course, only: "haze" is a killer game about killer games.