Today, we finish up our Vegas activities.

Another thing this mission highlights is the thrill of system/simulation-driven design. Every NPC in this mission has a set routine, and the player succeeds by recognizing those routines and exploiting them, either with disguise. Though he spoke about it in the context of Deus Ex, Mark Brown and Game Maker’s Toolkit did a great video on it here.

Today, we talk about one of the most legendary scenes in Kingdom Hearts 1:

I’ve talked about my feelings regarding how Kingdom Hearts’ combat feels more plausible than that of its sequels way back when I thought I was good at writing game reviews without scores. (Also, holy shit, that was two years ago.) Generally, the more like DBZ fight scenes become, the more I detached I get from the anime/game I’m watching/playing. There’s nothing wrong with those kinds of fights, and they look really cool, but they don’t have the same weight to me.

The other thing we really need to talk about is Kairi’s place in the game.
It’s really common in fiction for female characters to have a dramatically reduced level of agency in the story. Kairi is, unfortunately, not an exception to this rule. As we have seen, she spent most of this game as an empty shell, her heart locked inside of Sora’s for safe keeping.

But after fighting Riku possessed by Ansem, Sora frees her heart and allows her to finally take action. And when she’s able to, we see that she’s not just some fragile flower. She stops Donald and Goofy and absolutely refused to leave until she’s able to go back and save her friend, Sora. (Sorry, Riku) She restores his human form and is even able to use her light to knock back the heartless.

So when Sora doesn’t take her along because it’s “too dangerous” and she would “be in [his] way,” it is a little annoying. I understand the underlying reason is that we’ve already got an established party that’s gotten through the most of the game, but it does feel like some token effort could have been put in.

This gets even worse in the context of Kingdom Hearts 2, but I’m not ready to get into that just yet.

Today, we return to Vegas in order to have a party.

This mission is a great example of how Hitman uses it’s disguise system to create interesting scenarios. Each section of the level is governed by it’s own set of disguises. In a sense, you can treat each costume as a “key” to getting to a different part of the level.

Shame I screw up so bad that I kinda ruin it.

You know what they say: What happens in Vegas stays in body dumps!

Back when Hitman: Absolution came out, people (rightfully) got angry over some of the strange marketing decisions made. Most notable, was the reveal of The Saints, assassins in bondage suits who disguised themselves as nuns.

But as I’ve noted several times in this LP, a lot of that can be traced to Blood Money. In the birthday party mission, we saw both the guard who sniffed the used panties in the daughter’s room and the wife who slept with both the clown and the poolboy. The Christmas party played host to the senator’s son who routinely beat on the woman who sat next to him, and the female assassin sent to seduce 47. Here in Vegas, we bear witness to the strange behavior of some random man’s wife. And later, we’ll see another scantily clad female assassin attempt to kill our anti-hero/villain-protagonist.

To bring into focus all of progress we have made over the years, all of this was acceptable in 2006. Back when Blood Money came out, nobody really reacted to any of this stuff. This was just how games were. Absolution came out in 2012, only a few short years later, and got justifiably shit-panned for using a lot of this same imagery. It also had a laughable grindhouse style to go with it. As gamers, we came together and said that we expect more from modern games.

Fast forward to the modern era, and the new Hitman game eschews most of that questionable design decisions in favor of something more akin to the “International Man of Mystery” we see in both Codename 47 and Silent Assassin.

It’s only been ten years, but we’ve come a long way since then. It’s interesting to play games, because that’s where one can really see it.

Another episode in Mississippi, this time we go to murder a groom and his would-be father-in-law at a his wedding.

Like the birthday party in Episode 4, this is another small, but dense level filled with murderous possibilities.

On top of that the implications that the bribe is also the client adds a neat level of intrigue to the whole mission. Not much to say about it, but it’s at least worth noting.

Today, we get down and dirty in the swamps of Mississippi:

Back in the Mardi Gras mission (Episode 5: Part 1) I discussed the problem Blood Money has where guards exist in a binary. They either shoot you on sight or are completely unaware of any danger.

The other problem I briefly touched on with that is that the noise of one shootout is loud enough to attract the attention of more guards. So once a shootout starts, more guards will step up to the plate to take their turn at fighting 47. The noise from *that* fight attracts more guards, and the process continues until he’s slaughtered nearly every guard in the level.

The gunplay in Blood Money is already pretty poor, so when every single guard comes out to play, the game suddenly feels very punishing. One mistake and the player is using awful gun controls and slow reload speeds to take on mooks they are likely better equipped and absolutely more numerous.

It sucks, in other words. And there’s not much to do aside from eat shit or reload your save.

Let’s try this again….

To clarify my point, when I say that the game manipulates you into thinking like a psychopath like Agent 47, I don’t mean that as a negative criticism of the game.
Hitman: Blood Money is trying to convey a certain experience to the player. That is, it is trying to make players feel like they are Agent 47, an extremely capable assassin who is able to think, plan, and execute a hit. He’s not against killing anyone, and will always find a way.
If they want to place you into that kind of headspace, they must then therefore make the player feel that they are okay with killing any one person in the level if it means making the job easier (or even if it doesn’t, as is often the case). People don’t tend to want to kill others whom they identify with. The targets, or even the random guards and civilians inhabiting the level, can’t be characterized in any way that would engender sympathy. Otherwise, some of us would have issues with killing them, and call afoul of the morality of their actions.
However, if they are given personality traits and backstories that are more disagreeable, then we can distance ourselves from them emotionally. This makes all of them much easier to kill in this little sandbox. Make no mistake, the assassinations are about as moral reprehensible as that the guy from Hatred. The difference being is the killing in Hatred was just done for controversy in schlock. Here, the act of killing is the almost secondary. The true thrill lies in the formulation of the plan, and experimenting with the game’s mechanics as you form that plan. 
The actual kill is little more than the punchline to a well set-up joke. So while the game dehumanizes the population to make it easier to kill, the killing isn’t the point. That’s why so many of the possible assassinations are grandiose in their scope, or provide provide some amusement in their absurdity. It’s not so much an assassination as much as it is the payoff to an elaborate and well-executed Rube Goldberg machine, as a reward for thoughtful and bold play.
I’m sure someone smarter than I has made a point similar to this, but it bears repeating nonetheless.

This next one is short, but I promise to make up for it.

It only occurs to me now, but they could easily solve that subtitle problem by just shifting the subtitles down into the black space under the cutscenes. They’re half-in and half-out of the shot.

One thing I should make a note of now, since it could cause some confusion: I can barely hear what’s going on in the game when I record.

The mic I use to record my audio is extremely sensitive. I’d ideally have a headset set up to pump the game sound directly into my ears, but I already have headphones in my microphone so that I can hear my own voice in case something happens to the recording.

I have my TV set to a really low volume to compensate. Generally, this causes no problems, and I would take the same set of actions regardless of whether I had sound or not. However, there are occasions, like when a guard is stopping me, that I can’t hear their warning. So I’ll keep doing what I’m doing despite the game waning me against it.

That guard stopping me… was one of those times.

Welcome to the party. I hope you remembered your chicken suit.

One thing I noticed about this mission after watching the tape is that the chicken suits serve an second purpose, other than just being a joke.

When you consider the massive crowd roaming this space, you realize that the designers needed a way to separate the NPCs that have an effect on the mission from the ones that don’t matter at all. It’s easy to do that with the police officers and the waiters, since they have their own uniforms and large exist on the outskirts of the crowd. You’ll see those guys in plain sight anyway.

But what if you need to make an NPC visible enough to spot and tail at a glance, like the diamond deliver guy. Well, a chicken suit that goofy and flamboyant stands out among the otherwise nondescript NPCs that are scattered about the area.

Or if you choose to not tail the delivery guy and instead look for Mark Pariah’s base on your own, then we need another type of chicken suit so that you can spot your destination once you’ve arrive. This is where the yellow chicken suits that the target’s guards wear come into play. Since they are only in the one building, their presence can tip off an observant player.

At the same time, we can’t have the actual targets blend into all the other chicken suits. I/O Interactive needed to give them their own color palate. This is why they have black chicken suits. As a bonus, they can use the crow motiff for a punny title.

And since this contract takes place during Mardi Gras, the player won’t even question the fact that these guys are all running around in chicken suits. It even adds to the charm of the universe that something so silly can just exist.

And thus, the iconic Hitman chicken suits were born…

And thus we begin one of the most well known and loved missions in Hitman: Blood Money.

This video talks a lot about one of the problems in Blood Money, and that’s how quickly guards are willing to open fire on you.

The guard’s in this game are almost binary. With very few exceptions, they are either fine with you or open fire without any sort of middle ground. You won’t notice it in most situations, since the player openly strangling a character in full view of another should cause alarms.

Entering and exiting a bar at Mardi Gras… isn’t one of those situations. You can argue (and I will fight you on it), that it could maybe be considered suspicious for someone to enter a bar. Even if that were true, that doesn’t warrant being shot on sight.

Even worse, one guard open firing will attract the attention of other guards. And as soon as you know it, you’re either dead, or causing the next St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

This would be solved if there were more states that guards could enter, like Suspicious (but not hostile), which could be cooled off over time.

It’s part of the jank that comes with the game. I love Blood Money, but there’s no denying that it has flaws.
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