An Interview with Stephen Lea Sheppard

Photo by Dan Siney
 

This month we did a little mini-interview with Stephen about his gaming credentials, just so you know what kind of professional you’re dealing with.

Vice: Have you always loved video games?

Stephen Lea Sheppard: Yes, ever since I played the first Super Mario Bros., but my tastes have changed over time. Originally, I liked twitchy platformers, because I started playing video games at a young enough age that I couldn’t read, so anything with text was useless to me. Then, later on, I acquired a taste for RPGs. As time’s gone on, though, while I still love great characterization and intelligent storytelling, I’ve lost my taste for exposition, and now I once again prefer games where I don’t interact with the world primarily through menus.

Any favorite games?

I think my favorite video game of all time is still Chrono Trigger. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night might be a runner-up. Or possibly Mass Effect (reviewed in this issue). However, since I think quantitative ratings are stupid, I’m disinclined to devote much time to deciding which are the best out of all the great, vastly enjoyable games I’ve played.

How long have you been playing regular RPGs? What are your faves?

I got into RPGs when I was 14. My two favorites are White Wolf’s Mage: The Ascension, which is discontinued, and White Wolf’s Exalted, which I now have the privilege of working on.

Were you into Dungeons & Dragons before you played the Harris role on Freaks & Geeks?

I was into role-playing games long before I played Harris, but I was never really into D&D as such. I played it, but mostly because that was the main game available at the time. The first RPG I got into, in ninth grade, was Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0.

What are your basic criteria for a good video game?

“That it be well made” is a basic criterion for a good video game, but it’s also a basic criterion for, say, a good cabinet. Or sandwich. “That it be fun” is a tautology. Moving past simplistic statements like that, I find that so many different things call themselves video games that nothing applies to all of them. What could I say that would describe all of the following: Chrono Trigger, flOw, Geometry Wars, Katamari Damacy, Mass Effect, Orange Box, Panzer Dragoon, Soul Reaver, SSX3, Super Mario World, and Tower of Goo? Most have compelling characterization, but some don’t. Most have tight, responsive controls and polished gameplay, but some don’t. Most have great soundtracks, but some don’t. Most are technically impressive, but some aren’t. I’m pretty good, at this point, at noticing that I’m enjoying a game and figuring out why I’m enjoying it, but creating a list of criteria for good video games is beyond me.

OK, phew! Thanks, Stephen! Now on to the reviews.




TONY HAWK’S PROVING GROUND
Publisher: Activision
Platform: Xbox 360

This game feels so tired. Playing it is a chore. Skateboarding has never been something I care about, but on the other hand, I really love EA’s Skate demo. Ebert maintains that a movie isn’t about what it’s about, but about how it’s about it. I believe the same applies to games. Disinterest in a subject often isn’t enough to turn me off if the play is good. This play isn’t. This is an nth-generation sequel with years of feature creep heaped upon a once solid but now rotting foundation. Games like this exist in every genre and I know them when I see them.

If there were less of it, if it were more focused, I might like it better, but as it is, for every fun thing there is to do in this game, there are at least two annoying things I need to do to unlock more fun. Exploration would be great, if only the city unlocked more quickly. Building one’s own custom skate-park thing would be cool, if only the pieces unlocked faster. Learning new moves would be neat, if only I had some idea of where I should be putting the skill points. Whenever I actually start to like a part of this game, it makes me stop doing that part and go off to do something else I’ve no interest in. It’s like MMO grind.

And there’s one part I really hate: the design for the player character. All the faces are these weird, jowly, puffy-cheeked things with Fred Durst expressions. They’re not just ugly; I find them aesthetically offensive. They’re from a whole school of art design I can’t stand. There’s not a single face I like in the bunch and, as a result, one of the few elements of this game I do like is watching the player character rag-doll around the landscape whenever I blow a trick, accompanied by sickening bone-snapping sound effects. Schadenfreude is a vice of which I’m not proud.

Lack of compelling play plus lack of compelling characters equals lack of interest on my part. I just don’t want to play Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground anymore.




MASS EFFECT
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Platform: Xbox 360

The team behind Mass Effect believes that going faster than light is really fucking cool, and the first time you show it, the music should swell—music done on synthesizers—and it should be a huge spectacle. Remember all those reviews of Superman Returns where people talked about coming out of the theater and feeling 12 again? Mass Effect is like that for me, except without the looking back on it a week later and thinking, “Actually, it was a bit crap.” It returns me to a time when Asimov’s death was still news, Kubrick was still alive, Lucas hadn’t lost his mind, there were two Ringworld novels and no Halo games, people still thought about both the Cold War and Star Trek, and the full impact of the Challenger explosion on NASA’s operations hadn’t really sunk in.

Mass Effect is smart. It’s billed as space opera but I think that’s misleading. Space opera brings to mind Star Wars. Mass Effect is less sci-fi, more SF. Its Wikipedia entry talks about a prophecy and something called Dark Space, and that’s simultaneously true and wrong. Dark Space is just what the characters call the space between galaxies. It’s not important. The “prophecy” was made by scientists looking at archaeological evidence—I would never even have thought to call it a prophecy myself. More recent ad copy talks about how your character, Commander Shepard, is tasked with stopping the armies of the rogue Specter agent, Saren, and that’s misleading too. Shepard is tasked with figuring out what Saren is doing and why he went rogue. It’s not a game about playing a plucky hero saving the galaxy from the forces of the dark lord; it’s a game about a military investigator charged with apprehending a traitor. And, OK, yeah, it’s almost that other thing by the end, but the game earns it.

Even the “magic” is absent mysticism—biotic characters have brain implants that let them interface with technology for manipulating a fifth cosmological force, which is also the setting’s justification for FTL. This is a real force, which current scientists call “dark energy” because they don’t quite know what it is. The same early promos that threw around terms like “Dark Space” also used the term “dark energy” to refer to biotics, because everyone knows if you’re writing an epic about heroes saving the galaxy from evil, sticking “dark” on the front of a bunch of nouns makes it better. Yet in the finished game, “dark energy” is only used once or twice, in the bits that explain how once scientists figured out what it was, they started calling it “mass effect” instead. This is not a game that tries to be cool by sticking “dark” in front of words.

In terms of other games, Mass Effect reminds me of two: SunDog: Frozen Legacy and Chrono Trigger. I don’t need to explain what Chrono Trigger is, because if you don’t at least know it by reputation, you’re a philistine. Like Chrono Trigger, Mass Effect has an engaging narrative, an awesome soundtrack including an end-credits song that left me grinning from ear to ear with how well it fit the moment, and a large cast of genuinely likable, non-annoying characters. Like Chrono Trigger, the moment I finished Mass Effect I thought, “I want to play through it again, right this minute.”

SunDog is a game I played often on an Atari ST, back when I was 12. It dates from 1984, which means it’s only one year younger than me. SunDog’s play mechanics involved switching between a guy with a gun, to a guy driving a car, to a guy piloting a spaceship with a car inside it, all of which Mass Effect also has. Furthermore, while in the car or the ship, the player could explore the vehicle’s innards and tool around a galaxy with a bunch of different solar systems. It felt like being in a science-fiction story. While I was playing it, 11 years after it came out, it beat the hell out of any game that was new at the time.

Over the years since playing SunDog, I’ve spent a lot of time imagining what a remake would be like. That remake has become my Game I’ve Always Wanted. (I think all gamers have one of those in their heads.) So now that Mass Effect has come along and is the SunDog remake, only with better everything and all the best traits of Chrono Trigger, it’s no surprise that I’m willing to overlook all its faults.

And oh boy, does it have a lot of faults to overlook. Texture pop. Inconsistent frame rate. The inadequate auto-save. The lack of in-game demos. The inventory system. The unavoidable instant-death attack thresher maws sometimes use.

But screw it. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was released in October 1997, which means Mass Effect is the most fun game I’ve played in over a decade.