The Pentagon misjudged this one – Extermination

[It’s time for another guest post! For this one I am happy to welcome for the first time Ian Mathers, fellow Singles Jukebox writer who I have been writing alongside for 14 years at this point. You can also find Ian on tumblr and twitter.]

There’s lots to be said (and lots has been said) about the experience of playing through a shiny, bells-and-whistles AAA newly-released, rapturously received video game that feels like a cultural moment everyone’s having. But there’s also something to be said for idly picking up something you’ve never heard of from the bargain bin, maybe even at the same time you’re grabbing that big name release, forgetting about it for months and then pulling it out when you’ve run out of other things to play. There’s even something to be said for ‘playing’ that game without, technically speaking, picking up a controller at all.

Let’s back up for a minute. Video games as a social thing have a rich history, from arcades to preteens shouting slurs over the internet while shooting at each other, but there’s a number of less designed or intended ways to hang out while playing video games. For those of us who’ve never kept up with consoles, sometimes that means spending hours hanging out with a friend while they play a video game and you… consult? Just like the shotgun position on a roadtrip, second banana during a single-player game has some important responsibilities – you’re the one who has enough breathing space to notice that your friend needs to reload their gun before the next enemy pops up, or drink that health potion NOW, or that their combo meter just charged, etc. I’m sure for some (maybe more devoted gamers than I) this would be a frustrating way to spend an afternoon, but especially for games I find too intimidating to play at first (anything from Resident Evil 4 to the Soulsborne games), a day of shooting the shit and downing some beers while shouting “behind you!” at the right time can be more satisfying than either playing the game solo or just watching a playthrough on YouTube or Twitch.

During the early 2000s I’d often spend that kind of time with my friend Joy; during the university days we both had too much free time and not enough responsibilities, and we (by which I really mean she) played through the aforementioned RE4 and earlier games in that series, Silent Hills 3 and 4, the Fatal Frame games (fuck those games, incidentally, from the core of my easily-startled heart) and whatever else she had sitting around. And one day, that was a game I hadn’t heard of before or since until I saw Iain asking whether anyone wanted to write about it: Extermination.

And hoo boy do I have memories of Extermination.

It’s not like we were survival horror novices, and we’d never genuinely hit a point in, say, a Resident Evil game where we found ourselves screwed on resources. But this janky, awkward, generically scripted game about (deep breath) the world’s most gormless special forces dude who volunteers to go check out “John Carpenter’s The Thing, but also it’s in the water!” because he knows that his dead best friend’s girlfriend who he’s sworn to protect is working on that particular research station even though she doesn’t want to see him because she blames him for her boyfriend’s death (this is… not compelling as it plays out) found us regularly in situations where either the game wanted us to kill these very tough monsters that use lots of resources or we just couldn’t figure out the other option. This culminated in a point that (judging by the synopsis on wikipedia) was pretty close to the end of the game, where the only save that didn’t involve replaying hours of frustrating gameplay found us stuck somewhere deeply infected, almost totally bereft of ammo, battery power and healing, and with enemies we just couldn’t beat or elude after hours of trying.

So we gave up. And maybe because of that (you always wonder about the one that got away), and because no matter how much Joy and I would MST3K the cut scenes and get frustrated at the aiming and the way even the most distinctive and effective additions to the formula could be maddening, that all added to something that was both more horrific (and less pleasant) and more like a genuine struggle for survival than most of its genre. Like having the infected water and increasingly prevalent piles of goo start to actually damage you and not just infect you if you become infected, and having that state be a dire danger that requires extremely limited resources to fix it, for example.

Spending many long minutes with a drastically reduced health bar and constantly draining health, scrambling to find vaccine and a medical bed to fix it while the near invisible puddles you’d run through lunge up at your approach and something that’s partway between an Umbrella Corp. experiment and your buddy from the recon team you were sharing a cut scene with an hour ago is forcing you to wildly try and shotgun that glowing orb they’ve sprouted so they don’t decapitate you… a little clunky or not, it was memorable.

You’d finally machinegun a big purple monster off the water tower you thought it was trying to infect, only for the water tower to explode and the content form into a giant spiked bludgeon aimed at your whole team… but this is outdoors, in Antarctica, in winter, so it freezes in place before you can react. The first time you realize they weren’t kidding about your special rifle being modular, as you strap a flamethrower to the underbarrel… and then realize you’ve got to save battery power to actually save your game, not just do all the other stuff you need it for, game advancing stuff.

So was Extermination any good? It’s hard to say, in fact it’s hard for me to say much other than that it was clearly harder than RE4, which surprised us. To me it feels like perfect remake territory; some interesting ideas and indelible moments, but also lots of basic quality of life improvements to make and whole chunks of the game (the dialogue!) that could and should be scrapped and redone. If it had been sold to us as some sort of flagship title, I think we would have been disappointed. But $10 from the discount bin? That’s value for money.

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Top of the charts for week ending 9 June 2001:

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