Ride to Hell: Redemption - 20/20 hours

In the end, I got to 86% completion. I was almost tempted to go the whole way. If I'd gotten to 90%, I may have. That, I think, would have been too tantalizingly close for me to pass up, even in a game of this caliber. I have something of a fraught relationship with video-game doodad-hunting. Part of me hates it, because it is obviously a massive waste of time, but another, stronger part of me can't resist. What I usually wind up doing is deliberately ignoring that part of the game . . . unless there exists some way of making the process systematic, such as an in-game collectible finder or hint system, or a well-written guide.

Speaking of which, someone actually made a collectibles guide for this game. It truly is an astonishing age we live in. I'm not sure anything on the internet will surprise me any more.

You can find three types of collectibles. Paint cans let you paint your bike various different colors, which doesn't seem like much of a reward to me because the default colors are more than adequate, but I suppose that's actually a point in the game's favor (seriously, fuck you Fable 3 and your putting black dye into a DLC - IT'S THE MOST BASIC COLOR OF FASHION!)

Then there are two decks of collectible playing cards. Blue cards have pictures of the game's various levels, characters, and weapons - you know, pretty boilerplate video game optional swag. Red cards, however, featured pictures of what I can only assume are the creators of the game.

And that made me kind of sad. I know you can't tell much from a picture, but they looked like a pretty nice bunch of people, and something about the way many of them attempted ineffectually to adopt a badass-biker pose made them seem like a very relatable group of nerds. And that threw me into one of my pensive spirals.

What was it like to work on this game? There must have been passion there, and love. It must have seemed like an amazing thing, the opportunity to bring to life the romance and the danger of a storied criminal sub-culture. How cool it must have been, to sit down in front of a computer and render a kick-ass skull motorcycle, or paint the stark and rugged beauty of the game's southwest backdrops.

So, when did it go wrong? When did the dream of Ride to Hell begin to wither and fade? I worry that it might not have been until the reviews, that the team sent something to market that they were proud of, and it was only in the light of its harsh critical reception that they woke up and realized what they really made. I know that experience - pouring your heart and soul into a work of art, only to find that it holds no value for other people, because, at the end of the day, it simply isn't very good.

But then I think of this image:

And there's no way someone works on that (from what I understand about computer animation, that sequence must have taken hours, or even days to complete) and doesn't realize they are making schlock. I just don't understand this game at all. How did it get made? How did the makers' professional pride not rebel against what they were being asked to do?

The only thing I can think of is that there was no one person with a unifying vision of the game. That each group of people worked on their own tasks, and were either underfunded or rushed for time, and assumed that their mistakes, shortcuts, and placeholders would be cleaned up in a future version that never came.

I've said some unkind things about this game, and I don't regret any of them, nor do I think they were unjust. Nevertheless, I cannot look into the faces on those playing cards and wish them ill. Here's hoping that Ride to Hell: Retribution did not ruin any careers, and that the people involved get another chance to make something they can be proud of.

Ride to Hell: Retribution - 13/20 hours

So, I've finished the campaign, and . . . it's really not worth recapping. The parts of the story that are not incomprehensible are largely pretty dull. The quick and dirty - you work your way up the ladder of the Devil's Hand, killing Triple Six and King Dick to get to Pretty Boy, to learn two shocking facts - 1)Pretty Boy isn't really pretty, he's actually horribly scarred and got the nickname ironically, and 2)Pretty Boy is not, in fact, the leader of the Devil's Hand. He really works for Caesar, who wants your whole family dead.

Caesar is kind of a non-entity. He rants at you, but not in a very interesting way. His big secret is that he's Ellie's (Mikey's non-entity pseudo-girlfriend) father, and that he used to be in Retribution until one day, Jake's father made a bet with him to clear his debts, wagering Jake's mother as the stakes. When Toledo lost, he reneged on the deal, and Caesar has been hunting the family ever since (except for all those years he took off to run the Devil's Hand).

In the end, you kill him and ride off into the sunset with Ellie. The only really laughable incomprehensible thing that happens is during Pretty Boy's level, when you have to go to a mine to acquire  a bike from a miner, and all these random blue collar guys are heavily armed and have an irrational hatred of bikers (also, the one that speaks to you has a southern accent, throwing this game's geography into complete confusion - I was certain, once I saw the redwood forest level that Dead End was in southern California, between Las Vegas and Barstow, and the game was sending you around the state without telling you - but then again, that may well be the case, and you just happen to run into a transplant from the south. It would not be unprecedented - you run into a Russian German lumberjack in the redwood forest).

The only other real surprise is that there are no more awkward sex-scenes (although, according to the quest menu, I missed "rescuing" a woman in the graveyard level - classy). Like much else about this game, I'm not sure I understand the reasoning. Maybe they thought they needed the "sex" to draw people in, but by the time the endgame came around, people would be hooked on their gripping tale of betrayal and revenge.

A part of me pities this game. Long stretches of it don't make any sense, but I think what they were trying to do was make Jake into a hillbilly James Bond. There are flashes of this - at one point, when you are running from the police for some reason I can neither remember nor bring myself to care about, you jump over a helicopter with your motorcycle. It's a completely over-the-top, but unironically cool action-movie moment. Unfortunately, it was performed by Jake, and Jake is kind of a tool.

Jake tortures prisoners, kills both cops and civilians (though, I guess, those miners and power plant workers were heavily armed), casually violates his word, and just generally appears to have no personality, moral code, or interests. The only even moderately distinctive thing about him is his relationship with women, and the women in this game are . . . not good.

The random "rescue girls" fights . . . are best not thought about, in that they manage to both be horribly offensive, and also highly weird. If I bend my brain the right way, I can just about grasp their twisted misogynist logic - they serve to build Jake up as a paragon of masculinity. Jake is chivalrous towards the ladies, defending them from the uncouth and violent advances of unworthy slobs (always through violence, of course), but he is not a neutered "white knight" or "nice guy." The chicks totally want to bang him afterwards, because he's a super-sexy biker man.

The fact that this utterly dehumanizes and objectifies the female characters, making them look like they were written by aliens whose only knowledge of earth women derives from the comments section of a pornographic video (but not the video itself, because, seriously the sex is ridiculous), is incidental. After finishing the game, I don't think the script is malicious towards women, but I also don't think it could be clearer that it only cares about men. The sex is there to make Jake cool - a wish-fulfillment audience surrogate.

And it fails, hard. Instead of making Jake look sexy, it makes him look like the sort of person who will take time out of his all-consuming revenge quest to have sex in grimy back alleys or graveyards or mansions-turned-charnel-houses with women he's only barely met and whose names he doesn't know. Maybe that gets a "so what" or "sounds like a typical dude," but the mechanics and writing ensure that this usually goes down in the middle of a fire-fight, when lives are at stake, and insofar as Jake has a personality at all, his love-life makes him look like a scatter-brained dork whose common sense, code of honor, and basic survival instinct can all be overridden by his testes.

I find that kind of tragic, you know? It's like, tearing down women to build up a man, that's sexist and horrible, but at least it makes sense as a goal. It's something a terrible person might actually want to do. Tearing down women to make your main character into an incoherent buffoon? That betrays a lack of self-awareness that borders on the pathetic.

So, what about the women Jake does not sleep with? Honestly, I'm surprised there are any. The first half of the game set up my expectations in such a way that I thought for sure that the writer was constitutionally incapable of introducing a woman in a context other than sex. I can't say, I'm pleasantly surprised, though, because I think I'd have found the surreal nature of that alternate universe so ludicrous that its sexism would have become a curiosity to gawk at.

The first of these lucky ladies is Suzi, a stripper. She has information about King Dick, but she is not at the strip club where she works (ironically, making it the one non-combat area of the game that does not have half-naked women just wandering around). You first meet her at her house, where her obnoxious ex-boyfriend is pounding on her door and threatening violence. So, you beat the crap out of him and his friends, he flees, and . . .

She does not have sex with you. Instead, she grabs her shotgun, hops on the back of Jake's bike, and tells you to follow him. You steer the bike through a chase-mission, and she wields the gun, culminating in her shooting her ex. Which, you know, is not great when it comes to female representation, but is at least something. At last, here is a female character with an agenda outside her pants, someone who acts like she lives in a crime-genre video game and is willing to mix it up with the boys. Yes, she is introduced as a damsel in distress, but she eventually takes matters into her own hands, and in the end, Jake has a supporting role in her plan.

So, what happens next? If you guessed, "she gives him the information while the two stand over the body of her asshole-ex in true crime-drama fashion," . . . ha, ha, ha, very funny. The correct answer is that she gives him the information back at the strip club, while wearing pasties and a thong and giving Jake a lap dance "on the house," because, of course, why not? (The only worthwhile aspect of this scene is that it finally puts a nail in the coffin of the "are the fully-clothed sex scenes a result of prudery or cheapness" question).

The next non-sexed female character is Brandy, who has some sort of vague, but important job as Pretty Boy's lieutenant/appointments secretary. She seems competent, has a British  accent, and sends Jake on the ill-fated mine side quest (and I know it's massively inappropriate for me to comment on the details of a woman's appearance, but it bears saying - she is notably, um . . . top-heavy. Even by the standards of this game. I don't know if it's a special model, or if it just looks that way due to the outfit she wears, but it definitely looks like she could be tipped over by a stiff breeze).

So what's offensive about her? Nothing specific. All she really does is have big boobs, condescend to Jake a little (because she's British, see), cheat him out of 250$ and then disappear once Pretty Boy shows up. She obviously must be a pretty important member of the Devil's Hand if she's entrusted with giving out missions and being the guardian of Pretty Boy's location, but she is for some reason exempted from Jake's rampage of revenge. Granted, it would have been pretty damned sickening for Jake to enact violence on the only woman thus far who has not been all over his schlong, but, I dunno, maybe he could have spared her life because his code does not let him harm a woman. It still would've been sexist, and I almost certainly would have complained about it, but at least it would have been resolution. As it stands, Brandy is merely an obstacle, a prop in a conflict between two men - you know, the people who really matter.

I like to think that Brandy rode off when she saw which way the wind was blowing, becoming an unlikely and divisive feminist icon when she started her own biker gang and began a reign of terror across the American Southwest until, one day, her empire came to a tragic and bloody end after a botched attempt to storm into a NASA research lab and hold the scientists there at gunpoint until they developed a carbon-fiber bra.

The third woman is Gemma. At first, her story has the familiar markers. She has the same model as one of the orgy "pros," her husband has something Jake needs to complete a quest, and he treats her like shit. That's this game's formula for sex. The only difference - when you meet her, Gemma is falling-down drunk. I'll admit, I was actually pretty worried. I hoped the game wouldn't go there, but I couldn't be sure (a tip for any aspiring writers out there - that's how you can tell your story may need to brush up on its feminist credentials). Luckily it didn't. For all his other bad qualities, Jake isn't a rapist (feel free to use that as a box quote, makers of Ride to Hell). If he'd done it, I'm not sure how I'd have reacted, but "ballistic" would probably be a good start (in fact, I'm just going to go ahead and amend the challenge rules - if the main character is a rapist, that's an instant disqualification).

Jake, does, however, raise the bottom of her bottle while she's drinking. As a result, she quickly passes out from drunkenness, and Jake can steal her husband's motorcycle in peace. So, you know, he's an asshole.

Finally, there's Ellie. Sigh.

She's useless. She gets kidnapped. She puts everyone in terrible danger by not revealing her relationship to Caesar, because hanging out with Mack and Mickey "felt like having a real family" (although I seem to recall that from Mack's perspective, the feeling is not mutual, so that's kind of sad). I wrongly predicted that Jake would sleep with her, but it turns out that she is presented as borderline-infantile, because in this game, if a woman is not a total sex-pot (but don't get the wrong idea about Ellie, she's still "hot") that must mean she is a perfect virginal princess . . .

And you know what? Fuck it. This game is sexist as hell. Avoid if possible.





What?! Seven hours to go?

Damn.

Ride to Hell: Retribution - 6/20 hours

I probably shouldn't admit this, but I am kind of getting into this game. I mean, it's tedious and offensive, and I'd rather be playing just about anything else, but I have a high tolerance for tedium,  its ineptness blunts its neolithic political attitudes, and I really can't play anything else right now. I think it's because the game gives me a goal, and is easy enough that I'm making steady progress towards that goal - it's enough to get me into that weird "I can defeat this" trance that, in a better-made game might kindle an obsession.

It makes me think - what is the measure of a bad game? People call Ride to Hell: Retribution the worst game of all time, but what does that mean? I've played games that just simply didn't work. You'd start the game and be flying a spaceship or something, and then you'd almost immediately die, and nothing in the game would explain what you were doing wrong or how you could prevent it. Then there's games with no detectable connection between effort and reward, where things seem more or less random. And, of course, there are games with no plot or story at all, just a not-especially compelling activity, presented without context. Is Ride to Hell really worse than a sloppily programmed shovelware game?

I don't want to give the impression that I'm defending it, mind you. It's just, it reminds me a little of Battlefield Earth. It's a terrible movie, one many would call the worst of all time, but if we're being brutally honest, it's not even close. It's unmistakably bad, but the only reason it can be so memorably awful is because it possesses a basic core of technical competence. Take the acting, for instance. Every bad movie is accused of having bad acting, but the main leads of Battlefield Earth are among the best at their craft and it shows. After all, what are John Travolta, Forest Whittaker, and Barry Pepper able to do that I cannot that ensures they are cast in Hollywood movies and I write a gaming blog while working the night shift at a hotel?

For one, they can say their lines with conviction, and without stumbling or stuttering. For another, they know how to move in a natural-seeming way while facing the camera and staying in frame. Those are the very basics of film acting, and while neither myself nor Mr Travolta can say the phrase "man-animal" without sounding like a huge dork, at least he can make it sound more or less like human speech. Similarly, say what you will about the directing, but at least the camera was pointed at things the audience might actually want to see (compare - Manos: Hands of Fate). And the script is, of course, justifiably notorious, but you could never have had the experience of shouting, "what the hell are you doing, plugging your enemy into a high-tech learning machine, you are so stupid!" or "how the hell are those cave-men flying those planes" if it hadn't been able to convey that that was what was going on (compare - the script of Ride to Hell: Retribution).

Which is really just my long-winded way of saying that there is a certain set of skills which separate a professional from an amateur, and, if you're trying to find the worst example of any sort of art (be it movies, books, or video games), no professional product is going to make the bottom of the list, so long as amateurs are in contention.

That's why I think Ride to Hell draws so much heat - it is clearly the product of professionals, and as such, screws up in ways that amateurs could only dream. Take the driving physics. One thing I learned from the Portal commentaries is that programming a working physics model is really hard, so the fact that you can ride the bike and not pass through other vehicles or terrain (or, for that matter, bounce off them and get launched hundreds of feet in the air) means that someone, somewhere had an impressive set of programming skills. And it is only because they were capable of making a physics engine that doesn't implode in the first five seconds that we are able to experience a motorcycle that drifts like a shallow-drafted boat (and the mission where you steal a gas tanker is like piloting a gondola over slippery ice).

Or the shooting. The bizarre and sometimes frustrating contrast between virtually ineffectual body shots and instantly deadly headshots would not be quite so noticeable if your gun did not typically shoot where you were aiming it.

Or the level design. I have to wonder if the levels would seem quite so repetitive and overly long if the designers had not been able to make backgrounds and set dressing that actually looks like what it's meant to be.

Or the sexism. Honestly, if it weren't for the relatively realistic and detailed animations, there would be no way to even tell that Jake was the sole male participant in a gratuitous mostly-lesbian orgy.

I was going to do a full recap, but it would take too long and would not be very interesting. So, I'll just hit the "highlights"

Dr Blotter is a terrible hippy stereotype. You torture him with the exhaust from your bike.

Naomi is Colt's girlfriend, and as far as I can tell, the only named black character. Naturally, you "pump her for information." The mission is called (and I'm not making this up) "Damsel in Undress."

While storming a drug farm (and later, while fighting through a grimy back alley), Jake finds the time for random and inexplicable sex scenes.

Near the end of the drug farm, you find a film projector that projects, onto a nearby wall, a still photo of a naked female ass. My theory that they were simply too cheap to do nudity in the sex scenes is looking good.

"I'm here to wipe my ass with the Devil's Hand." I may not have mentioned it, but the Devil's Hand is the name of the rival gang, and that was a real line of dialogue.

At the beginning of the Meathook missions, you rescue a guy named Farley from getting beat up by a gang of thugs. He immediately challenges you to a race for reasons that are never explained.

After the race, Farley and Jake are chased by the Devil's Hand for no apparent reason (that's a bit of a running theme in the game), and Farley rides on the back of Jake's bike. And, maybe it's due to the way the game has primed me to expect a sex scene whenever you rescue someone, but I feel like Farley x Jake is the best romance in the game.

In the series of arena fights leading up to Meathook, you fight a guy named "Mother Trucker," who is described as "liking to pound flesh" and who's "packing a load" for Jake. I'm sure the innuendo was intentional, but I can't quite figure out what it was trying to accomplish. The fact that MT calls Jake "pretty boy," only serves to confuse matters.

The rank 2 illegal boxing champion is "Selvan the Destroyer." Make of that what you will.

Meathook talks in a very muddled way about honor. I think he tries to taunt Jake about the fact that when he and his gang killed Mikey and left Jake for dead, Jake . . . didn't die? (honestly, I have no idea what point he was trying to make).

After the fight, Meathook is assassinated by Greasy Steve before he can say anything - leading to a cutscene between Steve and a hitherto unseen higher up that is inexplicably filtered through the soft-focus of a cheesy boudoir photo. Also, we learn that the big boss is "Pretty Boy."

So, over the course of this project, I've discovered a new pet peeve - cut scenes that follow a successful mission by telling you that you failed in the mission's apparent objective. So it was, that after catching up to Greasy Steve, I found that he got away, and that I would have to get further information from his girlfriend, "Blonde Girl" (that's actually what she's called for at least the next ten minutes).

I couldn't even tell you what happens next. You have to fight your way through a mansion (where they've been hiding a mansion in this shit-hole town is not explained) and, Claudine (Blonde Girl) is there because of a concert or something. And after the fight, you meet up with Claudine, and 3 women, "Pro 1," "Pro 2" (who actually looks exactly like Naomi) and some unnamed 3rd character (although, whatever she's called, it couldn't possibly be any more degrading than "Pro#"), and have a big-ol' plot-irrelevant, fully clothed orgy. And, because this game can never be non-exploitative, it makes sure to tell you that Claudine and the others continue the orgy after you've gone (if I were being flippant, I'd say this means Ride to Hell passes the Bedchel test, but I feel guilty even for thinking it).

I'll wrap this post up by saying something positive - some of the art direction in this game is genuinely pretty good. The town of Dead End looks a lot like one of those shitty half-abandoned desert towns you can often see driving through the southwest. Greasy Steve's motorcycle is customized to look like a WWII fighter plane, and it actually looks pretty cool. The shop menus look like those fly-by-night mail-order advertisements you sometimes see in old magazines. With the exception of duplicate Naomi, all the named characters are visually distinct (although, I may be wrong about some of the other female characters too - Naomi just stands out because she's the only black character I've seen).

It's not enough to salvage the game, or even elevate it to "notionally playable," but it is something.

Ride to Hell: Retribution - 1.5/20 hours

I'm a bit disappointed by this game. I came into it with a certain amount of build-up. This was a 16 metascore game. A game that some have called the worst of all time. A game my friends maniacally laughed at the prospect of me playing. So, I was expecting a catastrophe. I was expecting the cardinal sins of gaming - unskippable cutscenes, escort missions, unforgiving difficulty combined with a stingy autosave. I was expecting a game that would punish me for daring to play it.

Instead, Ride to Hell: Retribution is merely kind of crummy. Granted, it boasts an impressive brand of crumminess. One might even say that it has mastered the art of crumminess. There is no aspect of the game that is untouched by failure, and in the hour and a half that I've played it, I've seen nothing whatsoever to recommend the game, but the controls work. The autosave works. And I have not yet encountered anything that makes me want to throw away my controller with frustration.

I think the best way to describe this game is "sub-par." Imagine, if you will, that there is an objective minimum standard for video game quality. A line, above which, you can say (for example) "the voice acting isn't great, but it's good enough." The remarkable thing about Ride to Hell: Retribution is that every single aspect of the, game, when taken out of context and considered on its own, is one or two steps below that line.

The voice acting is bad, but in a game with exciting action, it would be forgivable. The melee combat is dull, but you'd overlook it in a game with an interesting story. The music is annoying, but you'd just turn it down if there was literally any reason whatsoever to play this game.

Even the game's sexism is second-rate. Ride to Hell: Retribution is completely sexist. If I were to give it a grade for its representation of female characters and awareness of gender issues, I would give it an F. Yet, in the first hour and a half, at least, I haven't seen anything particularly hateful. The game treats women in an incredibly shoddy manner, but it doesn't seem like a diatribe against women (unlike, say, certain parts of Grand Theft Auto V), nor does it make fun of its female characters - it "merely" objectifies them to a ludicrous degree.

So, I can't even really muster up any significant outrage about this game. The game literally treats women as collectible power-ups (and I do mean literally - there is a line in your overall progress bar that tracks whether on not you've slept with all the available women during a particular mission), yet the game itself is so damned crummy that a serious reaction to this feels disproportionate, like resenting a cloud. The best way to describe it is thus - what if every part of the script that featured a female character was accidentally replaced by some poorly written erotic Ride to Hell fanfiction? How would you even notice? (Answer - the women would actually take off their clothes).

 The game starts with a confusing montage. I think the point is to show off different aspects of the gameplay and perhaps foreshadow aspects of the story. You shoot some bikers with a turret, threaten a guy with a gun, get in a fist fight, and I think it ends with the main character, Jake Conway, being discharged from the army.

It all happens so fast that I couldn't really say. Before you know it, you're in a town, and you meet Mack, who is some kind of Santa-looking biker mentor, and Mikey, Jake's brother. They have a brief and pointless conversation while watching TV, where Mack hints at (but for some reason, does not directly explain) some kind of trouble between the biker gangs, but this is so vague that Mikey doesn't believe him.

Mikey runs out and Jake follows him, whereupon, after a brief chase scene, the two have an improbable heart-to-heart while riding down the street on separate motorcycles. This mainly concerns Mikey's relationship angst with a college student named Ellie (I'm calling it now - Jake will sleep with her), and it's very strange because Mikey is written as if he's a twelve year old. I don't remember the specifics of his problems, except that he is insecure about some really basic social interaction.

While chatting, Mikey and Jake are accosted by some thugs, lead by Anvil, a big, muscular jerk with a penchant for unsettling animal cruelty (or at least, talking about it). The two characters get on their bikes and flee.

The bike driving is not very good. It could be worse - your bike mostly goes where it's pointed, but there is no sense of mass or momentum. If you run into something, you mostly just glance off and slow down. You can also fight with enemies while on the motorcycle. You do this by getting close to an enemy, doing a quick QTE, and then watching an endlessly recycled animation (this varies based on your equipped melee weapon, but the default unarmed animation kind of looks like a slap fight).

Then the game does something that kind of bugs me. You "win" the mission, and escape from your pursuers, only to jump to a cut scene where Jake and Mikey are prisoners to a rival biker gang. Their leader is "Meathook," who has an unidentifiable accent. In this scene, we learn that "Retribution" is the name of Jake's biker gang, in addition to the name of the game. And the reason this whole thing is happening is because Mikey is wearing his dad's old biker jacket.

The point of this scene is to set up the motivation that will drive the plot by killing Mikey and leaving Jake for dead. It is pretty ineptly done, and there is no real tension or pathos. It ends with a black and white, slow-motion replay of the murder and subsequent beating, that I think is supposed to be affecting, but winds up looking kind of silly.

You then jump forward an indefinite amount of time, and Jake resolves to get revenge. He starts by tracking down Anvil to a seedy motel. Because there is no minimap and the quest markers are easily missed, I wound up wandering into a parking lot where I see a man harassing a woman. I intervene by beating the crap out of the guy and then it instantly jumped to a sex scene. It was actually quite jarring.

The sex scenes are non-optional (although, I learned, in retrospect, that I could have avoided it by not rescuing the woman), but they bear only the most tangential and distant relationship to erotica. If you've ever played Dragon Age, you're probably familiar with that game's ridiculous sex scenes, where the characters tumble around in bed while wearing generic rpg underwear. Ride to Hell takes this one step further, and leaves the characters fully clothed. As in, they didn't change their outfits at all, while pantomiming various sex moves.

It's kind of surreal (especially the next sex scene, about 15 minutes later, with Sarah, who was wearing a mechanic's jump suit). My theory is that each character in the game only has a single model, and that the scenes aren't modest so much as they are cheap. They are also set to porn music. I could be more specific, but there's no point. Imagine what porn music typically sounds like - whatever you're picturing is probably not far off.

It was kind of shocking when this scene ended and it became apparent that it had no plot relevance (because I didn't realize at the time that I had just found a collectible power up).

To wrap this up, Anvil runs away from the motel, taking shelter in a brewery. I can't get in until I meet Sarah, a mechanic who talks like a 20s gangster, whose husband is a drunk who has the brewery keys and also stole her wedding ring. I beat the guy up and recover both, and she rewards me with sex (I mean, why not, revenge against a criminal gang is important, but what is Jake supposed to do, put his whole life on hold?) Then I take a short detour to meet Tyrell Jones, a rogue military officer who makes me beat up his men before he'll sell me weapons.

Then I go back, chase Anvil through the brewery and down the road on a motorcycle, until I shoot him off his motorcycle. He tells me the next story goal (chasing down Meathook's illegal boxing ring), and I am let loose in the town of Dead End, and that's where I stopped.

My verdict - tedious, but it has not yet made me want to gouge out my eyes.

Ride to Hell: Retribution - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

About the Game

It's time for revenge! Jake Conway has just returned home from Vietnam when his younger brother is brutally murdered by a rival biker gang called “The Devil’s Hand”. Set in the outlaw era of America's Sixties, Jake takes on anyone or anything standing in the 
way of his bloody revenge fest - on bike, on foot and on fire. Join the Retribution!

Key Features

• High-speed combat - Whether on foot or on bike, you'll be using melee and firearms to enact your revenge! 
• Customize your ride - Choose from a variety of decals, paint jobs, and body parts, and hit the road with your very own unique hog. 
• Rock and roll experience - Explore the roaring sixties, a time of anarchy and free love as a man with no rules.

Previous Play Time

0 hours

Prior Experience

This is another game I'd never heard of, but I was repeatedly warned that it's terrible. I also watched a review that ripped the shit out of it. I probably should have gone in "fresh," but I had a morbid curiosity about it's incredible 16 metascore.

Expectations

Honestly, I expect to hate it. I've yet to see a single defender of this game, and some of the things I've heard make me more than a bit uncomfortable. It's weird, because 60s biker gangs are not something that has been done in the open-world crime genre of games, so there's a part of me that thinks the game's premise sounds kind of interesting, and I'm generally an optimist who likes to keep things positive, but the consensus surrounding this game is so unanimous that I don't have a lot of hope.

Portal and Portal 2 - 20/20 hours

I finally have a serious complaint about the Portal games - commentary mode is kind of a pain in the ass. There are basically two problems with it. 1)The game doesn't give you accurate information about how many commentary boxes are left to find (they are numbered, but the numbering scheme is per area, not per chapter, and not every area has them - something I did not figure out until doing the last chapter of Portal's commentary). 2)You cannot save in commentary mode, which means that you have to do an entire chapter in one go.

Nonetheless, I learned some interesting things from the commentary. Like the fact that when you place portals opposite each other, there are a maximum of 9 reflections, or that Wheatley was originally slated to be six different spheres.

But I suppose the biggest thing I learned was a theme that kept getting repeated - that the reason the games so often feel like a psychological experiment is that it is the result of a process of psychologically experimenting on the playtesters. Frequently, puzzles were made easier or more difficult by subtly changing the layout or set-dressing of a chamber. It's really interesting to see how my perception of reality is influenced by factors I'm not even consciously aware of.

The other interesting thing I learned was that the portals played havoc with basic physics simulation. This surprised me, mostly because I hadn't thought about it, but if I had thought about it, I would've thought that transporting something through a portal would have simply been a matter of deleting it in one location and loading it in another, but apparently, the physics have to work through the portals and it required some clever programming to make it happen.

That seems strange to me, that creating a simulated teleportation device can cause the simulated laws of physics to break down, much the same as a real portal device would break the real laws of physics. Then again, I could be misunderstanding the basic nature of the problem.

Glimpsing behind the scenes of Portal just deepened my respect for the games, and despite basically just repeating them a second time, I didn't really get bored with them at all. Which is interesting, because they are as linear as it's possible to be. It goes against my normal gaming instincts - I usually prefer games that are open-ended, or have a lot of choices, or at the very least have enough side-activities that I don't have to do everything in the same order.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. There are books I've read a half-dozen times, and they've never changed. There are some movies that get better when you know how they end. There's no reason a video game can't simply tell a good story without also being a fully-realized virtual world.

Anyway, in case it's not obvious -  I highly recommend these games.

Portal and Portal 2 - 10/20 hours

It's strange - ordinarily, I feel like a game should ideally last between 20-30 hours. It usually takes a bit of time for the world's details to sink in, and then a little more time to wrap things up while the game is still a preoccupation. Too short, and I can't really get into it; too long and I lose interest. The Portal series, clocking in at 10 hours, should probably feel too short.

And it kind of does. I want more Portal. Navigating 3-dimensional space, solving puzzles, being insulted by GLaDOS - I could do that forever, probably. Yet I don't really feel "cheated." The Portal games are short, but they don't have an ounce of fat on them. There's no padding, no busywork to stretch out the play-time.

I can respect that. As much as I might want double (or even triple) the Portal, I can't say with certainty that it wouldn't have worn out its welcome eventually. The creators must have felt that there wasn't more game to be had, and they didn't want to force the issue. It's kind of a bummer, but at least I got 10 hours of near-flawless gameplay out of the whole thing.

From here, I have a couple of options. I could try and complete the challenge maps, or explore Portal 2's co-op mode, or I could replay the games with the commentary turned on. I think I'll go with the last, primarily because I'm intrigued. I will often watch movies with the commentary track on, but so far I've never encountered a game with this feature.