PixelVixen707

Sometimes you just know. Not in the first hour, or the first half hour, but in the first two minutes that you’re about to hate a game. Not because it’s dull, or cheap, or broken. You know because it’s dead inside. No, I’m serious! It’s lifeless, millions of dollars of effort and pixelpushing shoveled into a hollow, heartless bomb.

I knew Fracture would stink, but I finished it anyway. The Journal-Ledger got an advance copy in the mail, and because I mocked it in my Fall Preview, I snagged it and brought it home. Around four on Saturday afternoon, while boyfriend Zach was at the bodega, I booted it and gave it a whirl. Maybe I’d find a cult classic. Maybe I could review this for October. Maybe I’d just kill people.

So how’d I know it would stink? Start with the story. It taps real-life flash points like stem cell research or the political split of our election-year nation - except any threat of a theme gets strained into mush, like so many other game stories. We bloggers sit around proselytizing and postulating on the greatness of our medium, yet time and again we get stuff like this that wouldn’t cut it as a comic book. And not that I have anything against comics, but even the pulp booby stories Zach keeps in his closet can keep their themes straight. (For example: the gimmick here is that you can move the ground. But that’s not a “fracture,” that’s an upheaval. Jesus.)

Get past the cut scenes and immediately you take charge of the kind of faceless, brainless grunt who’s so popular in shooters like this. And this is the definition of a snoozer shooter. Walk onto a map, take out scattered AIs who barely know how to duck, and keep moving. What starts as a test of tactics and dexterity reveals itself as the high-def version of picking up ants and squishing them, hundreds and hundreds of times.

But I kept playing. And here’s the thing. When my mind’s made up, I have to finish the game. I’m not obsessive; I haven’t finished plenty of games, either because they’re too long, or too dumb, or they’re MMOs and I’m sorry, I don’t care what the endgame of Lord of the Rings Online looks like. Sometimes I get bored. Sometimes something like Rock Band gets in the way.

But Fracture’s like watching a bad movie on cable. The first half hour’s not bad. The rest is exerable. But by then you’ve wasted so much time, you might as well double-down. And that’s how I got through the first act of this game. Zach was back, and he made me green pepper and jalapeno quesadillas to chow down. I kept my beer intake low so I could keep my aim steady. I blew up the Golden Gate Bridge - but all I got was a cut-scene.

I don’t remember much about act two, where you run around a research lab looking for a computer, or whatever. And by the way, I’ve skipped the one thing that got anybody excited about this game: you can push the dirt around. With a click of a button, you can make the ground rise in a hillock or sink in a rut. Elsewhere, mutant crab things tunnel under the dirt, and explosions make craters, and mini-bosses make spikes of rock shoot in the air or stomp their feet and send you reeling. It’s thrilling, once or twice.

By midnight I still hadn’t finished the game. Missed Tina Fey doing her Sarah Palin. Missed couch time with Zach. Missed bedtime with Zach, too. He didn’t bug me. He’s way past “Aren’t you coming to bed?” He can see when I’m slouched so deep that my spine is curved wrong and my hands are crumpled and I’m frowning, frowning hard, and angry, that it’s better just to let me finish.

Three AM, I was in the last act. There was nothing new, nothing harder, nothing going on, and I was absolutely begging it to end. The plot dropped me in Washington D.C. Mutants were blowing up the White House. Outside my apartment window, someone started breaking bottles against the wall and screaming “FAGGGOOOOTTTTT.” I felt cold, and realized the window was open and it was like fifty outside - Zach? Zach, dammit, close the window. I don’t want to pause. They’re shooting at me.

Disappointments keep coming even late in the game. The bad guys - and I apologize for sounding like a Republican - invade D.C. with a gigantic lumbering mech called, what else, the Dreadnaught. You get to take it on and bring it down, but you never get farther than running around its foot. The same few mutants keep piling on, and for a few fleeting moments I found myself losing faith in the entire single-player shooter genre, because can anyone explain how picking off these mutants is any better than playing Duck Hunter? Don’t say, “They can shoot back.” I thought our standards were higher.

Then we get to the boss fight. You could argue whether the last boss should tie up everything you’ve learned in the game into one final test - which is elegant - or throw you new curveballs, to stretch what you’ve learned in new directions. Fracture does the former, taking a boss-type you’ve beaten several times and giving him more juice, and your job is basically to pound him until he dies. His weak spots include a glowing green patch right over his groin, which you pound and pound and pound until it’s cracked and red. Did I enjoy that too much? It was so close to dawn I couldn’t tell.

It took a few tries, but I whupped him. I got my achievements, and I watched another crap cutscene about the fate of the world. I felt empty and worn. I rubbed my eyes, and splashed some water on my face. Great games get under your skin. You replay them under your eyelids when you doze off. You’re still lost in their worlds. But after a bad game, you switch off the TV and there you are, just sitting in a room.

The sun started rising as I climbed into bed beside Zach, and looking out the window I wondered what made me so stubborn, why I had to waste oh, half a weekend on this. And I realized: I spent that time looking for something - a glimpse of the passion that made them launch this project, a sign of the excitement they must have felt at the idea of making the ground quake or the fires rage or just making the sniper rifle reload feel just right. Some sign that the artists on the boss design tweaked the jumps and bad-assed the head and grinned when they first watched him stomp the dirt with deadly force. I wanted to find some sign of the love - the love of games, the love that kept people late at night, later than I was up playing it.

Maybe some of that’s in there. Buried. But I never found it.