Analogy Hour: Why I like Stealth Games.

I like stealth games for one reason: Controlled excitement. The key word: Controlled.

Sure, we all love the moment in any good action game when the killblitz kicks into megadrive and your flaming car engine rockets off the top of the roaring puma’s head as your dick starts shooting over one billion rounds a second, all the cartoonishly oversized enemies around you exploding in the furious bulletstorm tornado of a million perfect simultaneous headshots as the killcounter soars upward like a babellian temple to your bloodstained glory.

Yeah, we all love that. But if action games are a sweaty bearded man living on the rooftops surviving only on shots of adrenaline, then Stealth Games are his younger, slightly disapproving brother, living in a classy hotel with bloodstains in the closet. Occaisionally Stealth hears Action clattering away over the rooftops above him, the scream of a thousand sirens following his footsteps as he screams WHERE IS THE BACKUP and jumps for a motorcycle he’ll never reach in time, and rolls his eyes. Boys will be boys, he mutters softly, before returning to the New York Times.

You get the feeling that Stealth is a pretty classy guy. A sense that Stealth is going to kill people with style, or not at all. He’s a murderer, yeah, but at least he goes out and reads over the collected works of tolstoy in front of a roaring fire after the mission. Sometimes Action dive-rolls in through the window to visit him, gives him a hearty slap on the back and tell him he needs to relax, get out a little. And sometimes they do something together, sure, and it’s a fun enough time, but it’s not really what Stealth is into. Action doesn’t really seem to get what he’s about.

See, within every well-dressed suit-and-tie man is a giant sweaty bearded one, just waiting to come out. Stealth hates to admit it, but he’s as addicted to adrenaline as his brother. It’s just that, like everything else about him, it’s concealed. Action would never understand the kind of high you get when every single detail goes exactly according to plan. When he’s done his homework, planned his way through every possible route and conseqeunce, and manages to kill a man in a perfect position, exactly right, completely undetectable – well, he wants to pump his fist and scream and jump around like nobodies business. But he plays it smooth, keeps quiet, walks away from the scene of the crime. Only nerves of steel stop him from grinning like a lunatic. Adrenaline is coursing through his veins like partygoers at Mardi Gras, his heart-rate’s pulsing like a dance floor, but he just walks smoothly away without a whisper of his guilt. By the time the ambulences and police and idiot guards are gathering around the body, every one of them screaming WHO HAS DONE THIS, he’s dry-cleaning his suit and carving up a luscious steak at a classy hotel. It is then – and only then – that he permits himself the only outward sign of his ecstasy. A single small smile, at a job well done.

“Christ, you need to get laid.” Action grunts.

Jack McNamee is a guy who likes to write things about games sometimes. Things like the thing you just read. He hasn’t quite got the hang of by-lines yet. Ahem.

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About Jack McNamee

In the third year of a game design course in Queensland, Australia. Thinking a whole lot about games. Scrabbling desperately against the oncoming future.
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7 Responses to Analogy Hour: Why I like Stealth Games.

  1. Veret says:

    Is analogy hour a recurring thing? Because it needs to be a recurring thing. This is awesome.

  2. JackShandy says:

    It will be, friend, it will be. Next up, I believe, will be RPG’s.

  3. Sel says:

    This.

    Is.

    Beautiful.

    Even if I play stealth games for completely different reasons, I’m going to cite this one instead from now on because of how beautiful it is.

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