Syphon Filter Logan’s Shadow

Well, hello, there, kids. I see you’re playing Sony Computer Entertainment’s Syphon Filter®: Logan’s Shadow on your PSP machine. Fine-lookin’ game, that.

Review of Syphon Filter: Logan’s Shadow
by X-34 minus 5R1-6X36

Approximate hours played: 4-5


You know, I have a little story that may just pertain to that game. Would you like to hear it? Allrighty. Well, then, gather ‘round, children, and let me tell you a tale from waaay back in the olden days. Yep, I’m talkin’ about the 1980s: a time when a bunch o’ boys from Illinois, callin’ themselves “REO Speedwagon,” made music that found its way many a Walkman; when no schoolkid’s lunch was complete without one o’ them newfangled “juice boxes,” and when a man named Clancy captured America’s imagination with tales of spies, guns, and politics.

No, dagnabit, I am NOT talking about actor Clancy Brown, who has appeared in such films as Blue Steel, Starship Troopers, and the little-seen made-for-TV effort Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation! An underrated performer, I agree, but not the Clancy to which I refer. Now shut yer trap, boy, and listen.

The Clancy fellow I’m talkin’ about was a writer. Wrote these big ol’ novels with hundreds and hundreds of pages – so thick you couldn’t fit ‘em in a ‘frigerator, let alone yer pocket. We’re talkin’ BIG books here, kids. You know how they got so big? I’ll tell you: jargon. That’s right: Mr. Clancy didn’t care much for story, or character development, or any o’ those other things that more highfalutin writers like to use. That stuff didn’t take Mr. Clancy very far – that kind of stuff was for sissies, that’s what Mr. Clancy said. No sir, he knew how to write a book: pack that sucker with military, pseudoscientific, political, espionage, and technical jargon of all kinds. That way, the stuff Mr. Clancy was writing about – mostly top-secret military operatives so tough that they made the Navy SEALS, Green Berets, and Air Force Pararescuemen look like petticoat-wearing third-graders; and who toiled in the employ of government divisions so highly classified that even the President himself had plausible deniability of their existences – would, according to Mr. Clancy, seem all the more real. And he’s got somethin’ there: if you present a whole lot of really minute details, right down to the serial numbers on an Armenian-made rifle, then, well, the story surroundin’ those details don’t seem so important, do it? So what if the books read like technical manuals? There was no arguing the details.

Hush up! I’m getting’ to the part about the videogame! Kids today. No patience at all.

Well, Mr. Clancy, it seems had found a successful formula. So successful that some o’ them big Hollywood moneybags decided to make a coupla movies outta his books. Had some big-time actors in ‘em, too. Nod bad movies, if you ask me, but they packed too much dang story into ‘em.

That didn’t faze Mr. Clancy none, and he found that his way of tellin’ stories worked pretty good for comic books, too, and, yes, for your videogames. Soon, lots of people were writin’ stories like the kind that Mr. Clancy wrote. One of these fellows is a gentlemen by name of Greg Rucka, who seems like a decent sort, and who wrote the story that your Logan’s Shadow is based on. Yes, you heard me right – these videogames don’t just come out of nowhere; they come from stories sometimes. And some of those stories are just like the ones Mr. Clancy tells: full of tiny little details and maybe not so concerned with narrative – or with its videogame equivalent, gameplay.

You may not know too much about politics now, so you certainly don’t know anything about politics during the 1980s, but lemme tell you, we sure had a lot of enemies then. Most of ‘em had some kinda brownish skin, and they did things like hijack military boats and grunt brusquely. Like I tell you, videogames don’t come outta nowhere – they come from real life; or, if you like, real life as filtered (Syphon-filtered! Get it?) through the ideas of Mr. Clancy and all those people who copied him. You play this Logan’s Shadow game, and you might not know there was a difference between the 1980s politics and today’s politics. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Like I said, it’s all about the details.

As I’m sure you noticed, Syphon Filter is rich on the little details. You got yer machine guns and their precise ammo capacities; you got your several different types of grenades and the exact parabolic arcs which they describe when hurled by your main character, Logan; you got your four different types of night-vision, or infrared, or what-have-you-type of goggles, so that you can pick out all kinds of different – yep – details in your computer-generated environments. You noticed that, right?

I bet you also noticed how that focus on detail translates into the moment-by-moment operation of the game, didn’t you? How you have to hit about seven buttons anytime you want Mr. Logan to do something like crouch or run or, heaven help us, select an item from his personal arsenal? Did you also notice how Logan always wears a scowl on that mug of his? That’s what you call accuracy, my young friends. You try bein’ a top-secret operative and see if you don’t scowl all the darn time.

What’s that you say? You find this game boring? You little whippersnappers don’t even know what boring means! You think the limited color palette of steel-blue and steel-gray is boring? You think the endlessly repeated one-man-against-a-brown-skinned-army scenario is predictable? You think that the constant switching between weapons, accessories, and armor slows down gameplay? You think that the fact that the music cues appear to borrow heavily from the rumbling, would-be ominous themes used in interstitial advertising for the “Spike” and “Speed” channels is mind-numbing? Just because the only path through a given narrative space happens to coincide with the one and only path that Logan must take to complete a given “mission” – you think that’s dull, noncreative story plotting that doesn’t give the gamer much to do besides near-blindly follow the blinking yellow arrow in the interactive map which resides in the screen’s lower left corner – a feature which, by the way, has become such a staple of these types of games that, just once, you’d like to see the designers challenge themselves by electing to leave it out, thereby granting the gamer a higher degree of autonomy? You think that the cut scenes, with their jargon-riddled, scrolling-print messages from secretive and potentially two-faced high-ranking government bureaucrats are all-too-familiar narrative scenarios that represent a kind of “gameplay by numbers” that dedramatize any sort of emotional involvement you may have felt from playing this rather monotonous game?

Well, I’ll be hog-tied and dunked in buttermilk! You kids have no respect! I don’t care if you happen to be correct – that’s no reason to disrespect your elders, or, for that matter, that ain’t no reason to disrespect Sony Computer Entertainment, the venerable Syphon Filter gaming franchise, Mr. Greg Rucka, and even the honorable Mr. Thomas Clancy himself, whose legacy you are bespoiling with your accursed griping!

I ain’t even gonna finish my story for you young ‘uns! Now, excuse me while I go read the operator’s manual for the FV4034 Challenger 2 main battle tank.
Harumph.