Spoiler alert for a number of 2010's games including: Halo Reach, Mass Effect 2, Deadly Premonition,
God of War III, Heavy Rain, and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

People don't sign up for a "Suicide Mission" unless they firmly believe the situation has a solution. They could be holding out for a Hail Mary: a once in a lifetime long shot that blows up the Death Star and saves the galaxy (until the sequel comes out). They could be faithful believers in the adage "the Good Guys always win", biding their time until they are saved by a deus ex machina.

Or they could be deranged. 2010 gave us plenty of deranged heroines, heroes, and anti-heroes.

Gamers despise one thing above all else: the 'Game Over' screen. It is associated with the cost of failure as well as the monetary cost of inserting more coins, and the time spent getting to that point. Ever since games started using characters to drive the action, the 'Game Over' screen has been synonymous with the death of the character, or inability to attain a goal within a time limit. The act of ponying up more cash in order to continue playing a game was something a kid with limited coins did with heavy heart, especially when faced with contrived 'cheap deaths' in arcade games (like those bats in House of the Dead, or the **** boss rush at the end of X-Men Arcade). Often this is a mark of shame; the dog from Duck Hunt laughs at you mercilessly, Mario breaks the fourth wall and looks directly out of the screen seemingly questioning the competence of Player One, in Resident Evil the screen just states: "You are Dead." It comes as somewhat of a surprise that games are now challenging these conventions, and they're doing so with mainstream games (in addition to awesome budget titles).



When you reach a certain level of 'Badass', everyone wants you dead. Should anyone succeed in even coming close to that goal, it only makes you angry. Because of this, Kratos reaches a form of 'Badass Immortality' where nothing can kill him. Kratos is not one to grow old and retire from his permanent job of ass-kicking, so he solves a variant of one of the oldest riddles: "Can God make a rock so big even He can't lift it?" (except replace 'God' with 'Kratos', and 'make a rock so big he can't lift it' with 'be so badass that he can defeat himself').

Kratos' 'suicide mission' is to take on the head honcho of the Pantheon. Fighting Zeus is ill-advised. Kratos' victory against Ares in God of War seemed like something that was barely achieved, and when it was done, he cast himself off a cliff to celebrate. When that didn't take, he lived long enough to get backstabbed (figuratively, though he was stabbed) by Zeus. When Kratos finally gets his pulpy revenge, he realizes that there's nobody stronger than Zeus (save Kratos himself). With the help of a brief QTE, he makes his last act in the game. An act that says "Hey, Zeus! This is how you stab a guy!"

While God of War III ends neatly by 'finishing' the trilogy and 'killing off' Kratos, it's done largely in the form of a cutscene. Yes, there's a brief button mashing sequence, but the event is not as effective since the player is uncertain what action they're performing. The previous bit is fantastic (the ending of the Zeus fight), since it is driven by the player's rage and determination, but since Kratos' last act is intended as a surprise, the button presses aren't as effective as, say, the endings of MGS3 or 4. This level of determination and player's will behind each button press is evident in several key sequences in Sony's other big beginning of the year title: Heavy Rain.

While the actual story of Heavy Rain is full of larger holes than Kratos' body at the end of God of War III, it did have some great ideas it toyed with. The best way to describe Heavy Rain is that it's the videogame version of a choose your own adventure book, except sometimes the book is being violent shaken in front of your face and you have to yell out a page number or you die. Some choices are designed to stress you out and others are designed to make you stop and think very hard. One of the playable characters, Ethan Mars, has been handed the short straw and finds out quickly that nearly every playable sequence he's in he can end up dead. The more times he tries to save his own skin, the further he gets from the truth about where his son is being held captive. If you avoid these challenges, fail the challenges, or simply don't do enough to triangulate the location, the last challenge is incredible.



The game tries its best to paint Ethan Mars as a caring father who would go the distance to save his son, and then spends the rest of the game asking "How far is that?" Cutting off his finger is disturbing, but nothing he'd die of, and it's not like he's a character in a shooter (I'd like to see an FPS where the character gets his trigger finger cut off). Being electrocuted or shot is certainly fatal, but these can be avoided by rapid response to on-screen prompts. Same goes for driving against traffic, but the final challenge is something that isn't a "quick! press the R1 Button!" style of challenge. It is certain death, a poison that allows you to 'win the game' but at the cost of the character's life. You can stand there and contemplate the choice, but it comes down to the player's input.

Sometimes the outcome is inevitable (and unenviable) as Noble Team learned this past fall. Sometimes a suicide mission is exactly that, and nothing can be done to change what happens. When this is the case, survival is not the priority, but a secondary objective. Surviving is something you do 'long enough'. Long enough to ensure others escape safely, long enough to give all humans a fighting chance, long enough to learn a lesson in humility and honor. Naturally I'm not talking about the multiplayer. Halo Reach tore down the 'lone wolf' feel of some of the other Halo games and built in its place a sense of teamwork. While this didn't affect the gameplay all that much (Halo has always had cooperative play), it established character interactions that were more significant than what in the past boiled down to a space marine talking to his inner computer monologue. So when you are eventually stripped of each teammate, the isolation is palpable.

Unlike the previous examples, Noble Six's death doesn't come at his own hands, though his actions do place him squarely on the path to his demise. The ending is fantastically done. Knowing that he is stranded, has no backup, and no chance to survive (make your time), he does what any marine (celestial or terrestrial) would do: stand his ground and fight. As the player you control his last moments, and when he is overpowered you feel it. Running out of ammo and switching to the pistol before finally being run through by an energy sword. This is game over. Your character is dead, but their death means something more than a means to fill the empty coffers of your local arcade. Your character's death is an accomplishment.

Noble sacrifices can sometimes come from the most ignoble, as anyone who has beaten Enslaved will tell you. While I played through the last third of Enslaved, I discovered my mind had likened it to the second half of Beyond Good and Evil, albeit from Double H's perspective. There's the tech-savvy attractive female, the big strong oaf, and the pig. Pey'j could not be further from Pigsy, but I couldn't help but draw the connection. Pigsy is a self-aggrandizing, friendless hermit who holds grudges and knows the ancient art of the cock-block, and in spite of his short-comings, he grows on you. He's a fairly affable character in Pigsy's Perfect 10, and it's impressive to see how far he's truly willing to go just to make a friend. Once he's met his new friends in Enslaved, it's disheartening to see how far he goes to keep them. His loyalty paves the way for one of the best endings of the year.



Loyalty can also be used to build a stronger, more cohesive team as demonstrated by Mass Effect 2. Shepard's mission is explicitly stated as being a "suicide mission" to him as well as any crew member he recruits, yet still they hurtle themselves at the shadowy dangers that lurk across our galaxy, despite the risks. Without loyalty, the Normandy 2's crew would surely die. Yet you can still "win" even if everyone dies. If Shepard dies, Joker delivers the bad news, but the menace (of ME2) is thwarted. You cannot carry over a gamesave from ME2 to ME3 in this instance, but you can if Shepard lives and other crew members perish. Some will say that you only "win" if everyone is still alive at the end of the game, but that cheapens the characters' sacrifices if they die to save the galaxy. Afterall, you could beat Mass Effect leaving Wrex's corpse on a nuked out Vermire if you didn't see eye to eye with the Krogan, why shouldn't you say you beat Mass Effect 2 if Tali died on the approach to the Collector base, or Garrus died holding off hordes of Collectors while you dove through a closing door?

Millions of light years from the bombastic space opera of Mass Effect 2 is the little budget title that could, Deadly Premonition. While it starts with a simple murder investigation, things soon get weird. Well, okay, it starts weird. That's part of the game's charm, it's surreal in a bad daytime television meets B-movie horror way that no other game has done. The same game that brings us the "Sinners" Sandwich also brings us one of the most intense sequences in the finale of the game. Without revealing too much, York has the choice of shooting three people, one of them being himself. The "correct" choice ends up being the path that seemingly leads to suicide. His death is a metaphorical one, and through that action he is reborn as his true self. We are not greeted with a 'Game Over' screen, we are rewarded by putting our trust in the game.

2010 sucked to be a 'Game Over' screen. When the plot of a game calls for us to put aside preconceptions about the forces governing video games and just experience the story for what it is, we follow with curiosity. More games are challenging the validity of these rules that have stood in place for so long, and I welcome it. I enjoyed 2008's Prince of Persia in spite of the flak it caught for the removal of Game Overs, it remained challenging and fluid and engaged me from start to finish. We are only now coming to terms with how to address death, a permanent death, within the context of the medium. If we are used to dying and respawning and reloading saves, how does death make an impact on the story? By giving us deranged lunatics on suicide missions.