Tunnels of Doom

It was touch-and-go there for a little while. The addiction had reached fever pitch and when the initial dosage was no longer cutting the mustard, I went looking for new flavors to tame the beast. Even those dark passages held no escape from the burning light and eventually I had to just close my eyes and fall backward, letting faith in stable hands stave my hungers.

I’m back on the wagon though, tentatively. I think I’m more constrained now, a little older, a little wiser. I mean you start with gamerscore chasing and the next thing you know you’re wiping bits of demo disc off your greasy shirt front with model-paint smeared fingers and picking polyhedral dice from your undershorts as the family you once loved retreats from you like an oncoming hurricane. If nothing else, you can’t maintain the pace very long.

Yet gaming is sort of my thing so while I occasionally have to reset the blitz, fall back into a 3-4 and give the opposing line a false sense of security, eventually I bring the house again.

The big change I made was that after the demise of $60 a Month, I made a bald-faced liar out of myself and stopped the program. It wasn’t just a fiscal adjustment, I simply couldn’t find enough to keep my mind engaged. Trying to spend a steady amoun on a hobby that ebbs and flows is interesting as an exercise but in practice it boils down to setting interesting things aside in favor of a new distraction whose merit is mere freshness.

So I dipped my toe by combing through my stack of shame and dragging out a few titles that had been lost in the trampling rush of The Next Thing and here’s what I found:

• Oblivion - I went back and started a fresh character with the sole purpose of finally completing the Thieves Guild quest which had glitched out on me in my previous effort. It is, I think, the best overall narrative in the game pulling slightly ahead of the Assassin’s Guild questline. I realized as I played why I love the whole world and the way Bethesda executes on the idea of the semi-sandbox RPG. I also realized that I would never go back and play through the expansion quest that I paid good money for because the spoils it may yeild are nothing to the agony of suffering through an entire quest I can’t bring myself to even want to explore.
• Eternal Sonata - After I finished with Oblivion (and I really had to put a strict cap on it: Finish Task X, quit the game), I was still in the mood for some role-playing style games so I tried on ES for a bit. It’s every bit as beautiful as I remember and I wasn’t far in so I started over. The combat is elegant but, like most Japanese-style RPGs, it’s not so elegant that I don’t find it eventually tiresome. Especially since these games, and ES in particular, tend to cluster repetitive enemy types within a single area you have to spend an amount of time in. I can handle a dozen or so similar fights but when you start stretching into the triple-digits with combat versus the same two foes that unfolds identically every time except it becomes slightly easier as your level ramps up, I go looking for a blankie and something soft to lay my head on.
• Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - This was one of the first DS games I picked up and I played it extensively without having played a Castlevania game since I think Castlevania III on the NES. It was new to me then and I did a lot of things wrong as a result. Since then I’ve played Symphony of the Night, Rondo of Blood and was just waiting to try this again with a bit more XP. It’s even better now.
• Fallout 3 - I rented this because having touched on Oblivion again I was feeling the shine return, but was unwilling to let Cyrodiil consume me yet again. Next best thing? Oblivion’s post-apocalyptic younger brother. Having played maybe twenty minutes of the original Fallout without a manual and no patience to devote to unraveling its mysteries (at the time) the long way. Thus I entered Fallout 3 with only my gamer’s preconceptions of the game as a dark comedy role-playing game often hailed by the community. I was instantly struck by how somber the game is. Oblivion can’t exactly be accused of having a great sense of humor, but that’s okay for a game that doesn’t purport to not take itself seriously. To be fair, neither does Fallout 3, but my expectations were somewhere else. It is, by all accounts, Sci-Fi Oblivion, so from that angle it’s exactly as delicious as I hoped it would be. I was a little disappointed that though I rented the PS3 variant it took no discerable advantage of the hard disk, still, I enjoyed almost every minute of my time with it. I made sure to avoid the main quest as much as possible and ended up having Nik pick up the full game for me on eBay so expect to hear more about this one.
• Geometry Wars 2 - In my absence I had lost all but one of my top spots from my Friends List so I tried to earn back the titles. I was… unsuccessful. It’s a game that requires practice I hadn’t put in, you see.

So there you have it… several weeks of gaming as I acclimate to a new job and a new schedule. These also don’t include the tabletop games (which have also been reduced of late) but I figure those will always be played more as time and participants allow rather than based on my own predilictions.

Listen, I’ve not neglected Tunnels of Doom out of some sort of vengeance. There is no animosity here. What happened is this: I found Kongregate and while before I would fire up Tunnels’ visual editor while I was away from my games as a means to remain connected to their sweet time-passing juice even when I lacked physical access to the fruit, I suddenly found myself in a position of either playing the games that occupied my mind or writing about them. Access and longing had forged a state of quantum superposition with a principle Einstein had not forseen: That when two states of a system overlap, other dependent systems collapse.

Actually, Einstein may have already talked about that. I’m not really a physicist, I’m just a gamer.

Ahem. Kongregate. Listen, Flash games are hardly new. Sites that feature a bunch of Flash games are established bedrocks of the online tapestry. And closed systems of imaginary rewards especially as relates to electronic games are also hardly unheard of. But Kongregate’s combination of a meta-game points system, user-submitted games and variety of titles makes it singularly compelling. Combine an accessible form of my favorite distraction, add an established addiction hook (see my year-long infatuation with XBLA Gamerscore points for reference) and add water. What sprouts, leafy and full, is a mind-gripping lock on my attention.

It would be one thing if the site contained just one or two games I liked. But the dangerous combination of tower defense titles, surprisingly rich old-school dungeon crawlers, strategic turn-based combat games, clever puzzle titles the likes of which you will never find on any PlayStation-branded device and the maliciously clever collectible card game tied closely to the already hostile points system and you have a place I can spend hours. And hours.

It’s not that Kongregate has no flaws, it certainly does. A plenteous selection of tower-defense variants and cookie-cutter platformers gives the site a certain redundancy and as cool as the collectible card game (Kongai) is in theory it’s implementation is by turns overwrought and too simplistic. But as something to do in lieu of make-myself-look-busy work and as a competitor with writing for my browser-time, it does it’s job well.

Too well.

I read The Alexandrian’s series on Dissociated Rules in D&D 4th Edition with interest. Among the points discussed in the longish series, Justin Alexander speaks about the mechanics of storytelling vs. role-playing in the context of 4th Edition. As a counter-example to what Wizards of the Coast is doing with the D&D franchise, he points to a storytelling system called Wushu.

Having never heard of Wushu before this, I read its description carefully and felt my imagination beginning to spin. I, too, feel that D&D 4th is primarily a tactical miniatures game although perhaps unlike Mr. Alexander I don’t really take it as some affront to the D&D brand. I happen to like tactical miniatures games and grafting a light narrative mechanic on top of them isn’t directly offensive to me. However, I also appreciate the story-heavy mechanics of the kinds of role-playing he and other 4th Edition detractors crave and reading about the far-afield Wushu principles was exciting.

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I love house rules. Obviously not all house rules are ideal, but the fact that games are analyzed closely enough and the nature of gamers trying to make their games suitable for their preferences is part of what makes gaming, especially tabletop gaming, so enjoyable.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the horror stories of house rules gone awry; I recently heard tales of a Blood Bowl league that implemented a complex series of sportsmanship house rules that went so far as to penalize players for not apologizing if they caused a casualty. Another Blood Bowl league I know of actually changed the rules for how a team’s Treasury is counted in such a way as to make a non-game-impacting feature game-impacting.

But generally speaking House rules can be great for adjusting broken rules that haven’t yet been officially updated and for customizing games. I’m always interested in hearing some house rules people come up with for their games. One that we use is in Pandemic, we always play with our hands face-up. For 40K 4th Edition we used to handle difficult terrain checks with an average dice (2-5 on a D6) instead of selecting the highest from 2D6.

My experience is that there are two basic kinds of house rules: There are those that are developed in response to awkward game situations (like the difficult terrain check which was instituted after several games where entire units were rendered useless because of several turns with 2″ or less movement) and there are those that are developed from consideration of how to improve the game. Most of the latter are, like the sportsmanship rules from the Blood Bowl league that I heard about, complex sets of rules designed to accomplish a specific function. I personally think the sportsmanship rules are ridiculous and actually counter to the enjoyment of a game but the beauty of house rules is that they are by definition voluntary. If you don’t like a house rule, find a different house to play in or make your case to ditch them.

I’ve developed my own sets of house rules in the past, some more successful than others. Currently I’ve been thinking a lot about Blood Bowl and, as with most consideration-based house rules, the concepts stem from issues I have with the existing rules. Indulge me as I think out loud about them.

1. MVP - The current MVP rules has a random player chosen from each team at the end of the game earning 5 Star Player Points for being selected the MVP. The problem is that this player is frequently unworthy of earning those points because they spent the game KO’d or (if you play using the LRB strictly) even dead. But I understand that if you gave 5 SPP to the legitimate MVP, which would probably be the player who earned the most SPP via other means, you’d end up with certain players advancing very quickly. Catchers, for example, would be particularly prone to rapid advancement due to their propensity for scoring.

   I have two proposals for this, both with their strengths and weaknesses.

   House Rule #1: Lower the MVP bonus to 2, make it a “real” MVP. Basically you take the player who earned the most SPP in the match and give them the MVP which would award an additional 2 points rather than the current 5. In the case of a tie you would break tie by order of SPP-awarding activity: TD, Cas, Cmp, Int. The benefit here is that it makes more sense, the downside is that it functionally boosts TDs to a 5-SPP action, especially on lower-scoring teams like Undead and Orcs.

   House Rule #2: Adjust eligibility restrictions. We already play with the house rule that the MVP can’t be dead or induced, but I’d say the restrictions could be better implemented. Eligibility rules would probably have to be extensively playtested but a good starting point (I think) would be to say a player is Eligible if they: Scored a TD, made a Cmp or Int or inflicted a Cas or they participated in every drive (ie they were not injured or left in reserves and did not miss a KO roll). The benefits of this are obviously that the chance that someone who was at least reasonably considered valuable are drastically increased without directly affecting the perceived or practical value of scoring actions while the downsides are that there could be instances where a team has no eligible players. I’d argue that a team that has no eligible players doesn’t deserve MVP, but I can also understand the counter-argument.

   As a corollary I’d suggest in either case that an additional rule be implemented to better help teams guide their development over long leagues: At the end of the game a coach may remove 1D3 players of their choice from eligibility. In addition, any number of Assistant Coaches will add +1 to the roll for a maximum of four players that could be removed from eligibility.

2. Touchback - There was a comment thread on NAF recently that discussed the way in which a ball bouncing due to lack of successful AG rolls to catch would result in a touchback. The scenario is that a ball scatters toward the midfield line on the initial scatter roll, where it ends up targeted at a player with a low AG on the line (for example). That player misses the catch roll and the ball scatters again, this time going over the midfield line and causing a touchback, where any player on the receiving team can have control of the ball without making a roll.

   Obviously from an abstraction perspective this is kind of tough to swallow. It would make more sense if a ball was considered in the air up until the moment when a player was permitted to attempt to gain control of it, at which point it was considered in play. This could certainly result in situations where a ball could start on the opposing half of the pitch from the receiving team, but practically speaking since the receiving team acts first, this is a minor setback at best.

   The biggest situation I can see this affecting is if a ball scatters out of bounds from a missed catch which, per the rules, would result in the ball being tossed back in by the crowd. But I think all this would do is prevent coaches from placing No Hands (or functionally equivalent) players in the wide zones because it is probably not reliable enough for the kicking team, even with the Kick skill, to plan on a throw-in on the kickoff; you’re still far more likely to end up with a touchback.

Feedback, as always, appreciated.

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The Marriott is a nice hotel. Not a super-swank hotel, but a nice one. I’m sure the non-convention guests at the hotel found the overall caliber of the environment a little less than they expected or hoped for what with herds of sweaty gamers waddling through the hallways and covering every available flat surface with assorted chits and dice and stacks of strangely decorated cards. For one such as myself, casting a gaze across the terrain and declaring myself among kindred, it was an experience matched by only a handful of previous conventions.

A huge part of my enjoyment was based on the pre-planning that went into the weekend. Unlike my previous convention schedules, I had determined weeks in advance that there were certain events I was certain to participate in. These both dictated the flow of the activities as well as ensured that some games would get played. In contrast, earlier events had been based on “gentleman’s agreements” in which we would lay fantastical stratagems woven into narrative tapestries which would be promptly unwoven by the twin calamities of attending wives who disfavor certain game genres and the Dealer’s Room whose treasures often foist urgent demands on our playing schedule.

Now we had framed particular activities into obligations and it made the difference in a marked manner. I confess that there could have been a better time designation: Both Thom’s Friday night Blood Bowl game and my own Saturday evening Arkham Horror session were set to start right at or before the dinner hour which made the attending wives unhappy. But that’s a mistake that is easily corrected next time. Likewise my own game could have been more artfully selected; I’ve played enough of Arkham Horror to know how it goes, but my month-prior refresher solitaire game was not enough to provide my aging brain the fuel it needed to run a game correctly. I suppose having an entire table of new players made the point relatively moot, but on the very unlikely chance that any of those players reads this: I’m sorry. Please don’t base your opinion of the game on my running of it. It actually takes much longer and is much more balanced when you play it right.

Next time I think I’ll be sure to play a game I understand thoroughly (such a feat is, I suspect, practically impossible with Arkham whose vengeful complexity is both part of its charm and its greatest weakness). As a rookie convention game master I’m delighted to have had the experience if only to get a chance to learn from my mistakes. Next time I’ll be running something more akin to Catan Card game or Werewolves.

My most pressing delight for the weekend was that I was able to play some games I’d really been looking forward to: Blood Bowl tournament, many rounds of Pandemic, Arkham Horror, Power Grid, Race For the Galaxy. I’m not sure this would have been possible without the pre-planning steps we took. And as a secondary thrill I was able to make some exciting purchases: I came away with a new copy of Werewolves (the old copy had been the victim of water damage on some critical cards at a Werewolves party) plus the New Moon expansion for it; Nik found a copy of Zombie Fluxx; I also picked up Race For the Galaxy and a bunch of new dice for various Blood Bowl purposes. As a secondary bonus whose delight cannot be properly expressed, I also returned home from the con to find my NAF Blood Bowl Block dice waiting for me in the mailbox. I was skeptical about the yellow-blue color scheme but they turned out really sharp and it will be great to have an extra, non-white pair so I can keep them separate from my opponents’.

It’s sometimes hard for me to enjoy the moments of my life as I experience them. I found several times during the weekend I could sense the fun I was having like a film enveloping the surface of my body. It was unfamiliar but sublime and I wanted it to last and last.

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Next week is Pacificon (that’s ConQuest SF for the pedantic), and most of this week’s activities were somehow related to early prep for the full weekend of gaming mayhem that lies ahead. I’m still in a video game doldrum; the only games I seem to have any enthusiasm for are XBLA games. I had an opportunity to spend a few hours with any of my longer-form games at one point during the weekend and I stood in front of my shelf of games, many of them begging to be played, and found none of them held much allure. I think I ultimately watched a few minutes of the Silent Hill 2 intro—this marks roughly the 42nd time I’ve sat through it—and turned it off because my one rechargeable 360 controller battery was dying. I wasn’t exactly weeping and gnashing teeth.

We did end up having Thom and his wife Kelly over later in the week for games. He walked us through the introductory mode of Power Grid, which I felt was more of a tease than anything. Basically the game involves a bidding match to buy the best Power Station card (which is wholly subjective) followed by a resource management phase followed by a Monopoly-like land grab. The mechanics are a little awkward to understand abstractly at first, but once they click they have a remarkable balance of simple elegance and thorough representation. Sort of the opposite of Hillary Clinton? I don’t know, I’m not good with the political jokes.

What was teasing about the intro game was that at the point in the regular progression where the game opens up and the true beauty of your early game establishment is revealed, the game is over. Imagine playing Ticket to Ride and after drawing your hand up to twenty-five cards, someone claimed their first 8-point Destination Ticket completion and announced the game was over. I understand the theory behind giving new players a taste, and I understood that our guests were probably tired (not to mention we will most likely be playing the game again at the con) but I’m the kind of gamer where if I get into the flow of a session, my strategy begins to form like a gathering storm. Leaving that mindset unfulfilled is like shaking up a can of coke and setting it gently on the counter. I survived, you know? But I’ve been replaying the short session in my head for days now, wondering how it would have gone if I’d had one last turn or…

It’s a path that leads to madness. Also scurvy, which is the lesser of the two evils. Regardless, I suspect I will be not be sated until Friday at the earliest. In the interim I would advise a wide berth. Twenty yards or so ought to suffice.

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[Update, August 26th: Two days after posting this, I happened to re-visit GW's website and found that they had updated the Blood Bowl listings and now include boosters for some teams that actually make some sense in terms of how the teams are constructed for LRB5, including Undead. The main point stands, but I thought I'd be accurate in saying that at least they seem to be doing something, even if I feel it falls well short of the mark.]

All I want is a single model to round out my Undead Blood Bowl team. It’s not a tall order, nor an unreasonable one. However, my primary logical provider of this product, Games Workshop, is a sloppily run niche market company that can’t be bothered to cater to its customers and so I’m left with vitriol and empty hands.

At least I have a blog.

Look, I get it. Gaming has got to be a frustrating market for businesses that want to operate as legitimate enterprises and not labor-of-love charity organizations. Gamers are notoriously fickle, generally cheapstakes and loathe to part with their disposable income unless the purchase meets some ill-defined criteria whose formula cannot be deduced using modern mathematical principles. So yeah, game companies have a steep road to climb to financial success.

Big, important game companies like Palladium and TSR have struggled or failed because they attempt to either exert market muscle on a difficult to demograph clientele or they prostrate themselves on a core fanbase to keep them alive with guilt trips and puppy dog eyes. Small companies have risen meteorically based on fluke and fad, like Wizards of the Coast. Even sister industry video games have struggled to work within a customer base that is neither loyal and predictable nor malleable and excitable. Gamers tend to be skeptical, critical and yet habitual. So yeah, I understand to a degree why game companies might treat their customers with a bit of disdain.

What I don’t understand is a company acting like it’s allergic to certain types of paying customers. Games Workshop, publishers and rights-owners to several of my all-time favorite tabletop games, has squandered much of the good will it earned by associating itself with these products. I’ve already mentioned my general apathy toward their flagship products principally due to their hamfisted efforts to milk the few customers they can draw in dry. And now I’m losing the last ounces of respect I had for them because they can’t even manage the few games they’ve retained even a modicum of support for in a way that makes any sense.

This is strictly opinion, but I feel that GW’s Specialist Games line is their biggest asset. The squad-level games like Necromunda and Mordheim offer a brilliant intro to tabletop miniatures games without heavy investment and provide, due to their scale, a more manageable gameplay experience. The battallion- or fleet-level games of Warmaster, Battlefleet Gothic and Epic 40K provide a more robust strategic experience due to the wargame-style abstractions and the comparative simplicity of the hobby elements. Their more restrictive environment games, closer to traditional board games, like DungeonQuest and Space Hulk are some of their best overall products because they allow for a less fiddly experience that appeals to a wider audience while still giving ample opportunity in the hobbyist realm.

They even have stepped down the right path with their Living Rule Book concepts. If they don’t want to actively support these products with their company time and effort, that’s okay, as long as they allow the game to flourish naturally with a community-driven model. And in part they have with community-driving games like Blood Bowl (which is what this is really about). Yet in a time where Intellectual Property notions and theories are being challenged regularly with variations on the idea of idea ownership I can’t begin to fathom why GW thinks they have to tightly reign the product that they’ve essentially handed off to the community to run. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

Basically Blood Bowl in the present tense is managed by the Blood Bowl Rules Committee, a group who works on revising the LRB. They are selected from the community and they democratically collate the results of playtests and rules discussions into something that works like actual rules modifications to improve the game as a whole. Which is great except that the community en masse is stifled by GW’s draconian demand for ultimate IP control. Like I said before, I get why GW ended up in this position what I don’t understand is why they don’t open their minds enough to see the value of trying something new.

Let’s take an example: The BBRC has voted unanimously to add three new teams to the next edition of the rules. Most of the teams are revised legacy teams from older, way outdated versions of the game. Most of them add great new dimensions to the existing game dynamic and yet there is a roadblock: GW won’t approve the addition of new teams without official models to support them and they won’t order new models to be created unless their market research can predict a minimum sales that Blood Bowl figures don’t meet. So there exists this set of limbo teams that everyone who plays the game and cares about it wants, but can’t be added because the rights holders have deemed it unprofitable.

I can’t explicitly fault GW’s reasoning here: Running a business is running a business and like I said, I can sympathize with their positions. But there seems to be a simple answer which will solve most if not all of the principal problems facing the game today: Develop a simple and extremely cheap if not free licensing system to allow alternative modelers to create and sell official Blood Bowl support products. Instead of making sites like Shadowforge and Impact! Miniatures circumvent the rules, give them an affordable way to step in and take the reigns. I’m no businessman but I can smell opportunity and there are companies that are already doing what GW doesn’t want (cannibalizing figure sales with unlicensed alternatives) so why not get a small cut of the action, earn some goodwill with the fans and perhaps give the game a chance to build an audience with a greater range of support than you yourself are willing to give?

As it stands you can’t order single models for any Blood Bowl team from Games Workshop and since the team designations in the licensed boxed sets are woefully outdated for two or more editions back (and arguably unsuitable even then) you have no option other than resort to alternative model providers, the secondary market or overpurchasing. They’ve completely gutted their support so that booster packs are disastrously rare and don’t even get me started on the miserable range of Star Player models that represent perhaps a quarter of the complete list. What this means is that the only way to create a full 16-player Blood Bowl team from official Games Workshop models is to either buy two boxed sets (leaving you with 22 players which in most cases still isn’t the correct combination of positionals as dictated by the team list and at best is eight models more than you’ll ever need) or hope that, again, a secondary site like BBFigs.com can fill in the blanks by reselling GW models.

Your IP is either something you stand behind or it’s a wasted opportunity: Right now GW is treating Blood Bowl and the whole Specialist line with indifference that I can only translate as a wasted opportunity. So what’s it going to be, Games Workshop? More customer ill will and more head scratching about why your company hemorrhages customers? Or out of the box thinking that can actually improve the profit margins that seem to be the only language you speak these days?

Running out of new ways to talk about stale things is maybe not a challenge more creative or clever writers have to surmount. But I’m writing a weekly column about the games that I play and while I’m reasonably content sometimes to focus on a handful of games for a period of time, it makes coming up with interesting commentary that isn’t dreadfully repetitive tough.

So rather than re-tread Blood Bowl strategies or discuss my Etrian Odyssey II progress, I’ll talk about a game I don’t even fully own: Braid. It was one of those titles whose ill-conceived title stems from some artsy interpretation but lacks descriptive punch and yet is spoken of with a particular connotation that more or less creates a conceptual bookmark in my mind. If my brain were del.icio.us, it might be tagged with “check_out_maybe.” So I see the ads on XBLA this weekend while I’m playing some GeoWars 2 and the flag is raised in the back of my head and I decide to drag myself away from my obsession long enough to give it a whirl.

I knew only that it had “positive buzz” going in. The demo is fairly significant in available content, but the game itself is clearly designed to be an exploratory experience which is something that may work in an artistic sense but as something that is designed to inspire me to spend money I’m not sure it’s effective. I can say that as a post-modern throwback-slash-genre interpretation, it’s interesting. I can also say that as an overall package it’s demonstration content is uneven to the extent that your individual criteria are going to be the deciding factors on whether or not you pull the trigger on this game.

For example, there is a particular elegance to most of the game’s presentation. The smoothly shifting watercolor aesthetic of the backdrops and the quiet, introspectively lilting music is fresh and exciting. Meanwhile, the pixely-looking cartoon design of the game’s characters is cute, but contrasts sharply with the backdrop and while one or the other would be fine with me, the combination is unpleasant. Likewise the game’s referential sense of humor and youthful presentation doesn’t gel in any ready way with its knife’s edge of pretentiousness in the story elements. Even the gameplay with it’s elegantly designed puzzles but awkwardly integrated and purposefully sketchy tutorial/hint system feels painfully unbalanced.

A lot of online forums are lamenting the $15 price tag, which has itself fostered a backlash, one that may or may not have ulterior motives. Personally, I see it as just another in the game’s list of see-sawing pros and cons. Like I said, it becomes intensely personal. Either $15 for a platformer is repugnant and it wouldn’t matter if you were paying for the best platformer ever, you’d be morally opposed to the act, or you have no problem with it because you rationalize that $15 is still $45 cheaper than some alternatives. Either the art design is acceptable or the weirdly incongruous graphics are a deal-breaker. I don’t know how you can quantify something like this.

So listen, I didn’t buy it. I’m intrigued, for sure. I’m the kind of person who can overlook some strangeness in a game to find the chewy center that lies beneath. I’m playing Etrian Odyssey II, after all. And I’m putting hours and hours into it. But something about the nexus between the game’s odd choices and its price and its hyperbolic critical acclaim… I dunno, it wasn’t enough to push me over the line. Any time a game polarizes this way, I almost feel like I need to just stand aside. Maybe eventually it will be part of some XBLA Best Of promotion for $5 or something and I’ll catch up with it then. Meanwhile, I have something less controversial to play. Something I’m still more likely to enjoy.

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My 360Voice bot-blog has been griping at me for weeks as I’ve left the 360 unattended in favor of Etrian Odyssey and Blood Bowl pursuits. I was already thinking, “Maybe I should log on this weekend and just see if anything interesting is going on.” When I gathered a couple of new names from a forum I frequent to add to my Friends List, it was a done deal already so the announcement of Geometry Wars 2 being released can’t really be blamed in full.

What I can blame GeoWars2 for is my lack of sleep through the weekend and an onset of OCD-like symptoms that have me twitching and scheming to get a few more minutes in on various game modes like Pacifism and King.

Bizarre has done some interesting things with the Geometry Wars brand/franchise since the Retro Evolved game for XBLA became an early contender for best of show on the platform at launch. Some might persuasively argue that until the release of Oblivion and Dead Rising, it was the best next generation game period. I’m not saying I’m one of those people making that argument, I’m just saying they might have a case. Evolved was a sublime example of the kind of game console gamers wanted on their living room consoles. It was simple, harkening the old Atari 2600 era, but with a fresh feeling aesthetic and a rudimentray use of the Xbox Live platform features (the scoreboards I mean) that lent validity to the whole endeavour. The ribbon that tied the whole thing into a package suitable for delivery was the game’s in-session difficulty curve and obfuscated inner workings.

Obviously some of the “rules” of Retro Evolved are knowable: Multipliers occur at geometric sequence points starting at 25 with a ratio of 2, weapon changes occur every 10,000 points, extra lives are awarded at 75,000 point intervals and extra bombs at 100,000. But what is only surmized or perhaps supposed is the other less tangible elements: Some games it seems the waves that spawn from the board corners are heavily favored to one enemy type or another. Sometimes gravity wells (those hated foes that draw in other enemies until they nova into rapidly-moving clusters) appear within the first 10,000 points, other times they don’t appear until well past the first extra life. The explanations for these discrepancies are largely superstitious, but the fact that they are observable but not capable of being realistically charted makes them exciting, an element of randomness.

Add to that the fact that wepon changes cycle through only two options once you advance beyond the basic shot so you may stick with a favored cannon for minutes on end while other times you may find yourself flipping rapidly as probability allows and your score multiplier increases the milestone rate. Since some enemeies are subjectively easier to hit with one weapon or another, the game seems to intentionally introduce a certain arbitrary chaos into each session such that you want to keep trying “just one more time” to find that perfect storm of chance and performance that equates to a high score mark.

But since then the development team have opted for a more well-defined experience. I first heard about the “Geoms” concept when reading reviews of the Wii and DS exclusive Geometry Wars Galaxies, where each destroyed foe drops a temporary pickup that can be collected to various ends. In Retro Evolved 2, the Geoms are now the score multipliers and their ubiquity allows the scores to reach new stratospheres for good players, especially since the multipliers don’t reset with each life the way they did in the original Retro Evolved. Likewise, the sequel has five new game modes in addition to the basic Evolved game which are all enjoyable although a couple like King and Pacifism are clear favorites. But curiously those modes are those that are furthest removed from the predecessor’s gameplay: They drastically alter the rules of the game and, in Pacifism, almost create an entirely new mechanic.

I played Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved on 76 different days. I don’t have any measurable or accurate statistic to indicate how many hours went into each daily session; some were lengthy stretches others were quick one-or-two game stints. But it is listed as my most-played Xbox 360 game ahead of Oblivion; while Oblivion may have it beat in hours (something like 200 total hours went into that epic) I wager that given the additional 24 days I fired up GeoWars, it’s probably in remarkably close contention especially when you think that a standard game of GeoWars takes under five minutes beginning to end. I don’t know that this sequel has what it takes to match that level of interest perhaps because they’ve made such efforts to clarify what a game of GeoWars is. I don’t mind their efforts, but perhaps I prefer to project my own perspectives into that abstracted space, and lacking some of that ability, it becomes just another game.

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Welcome to the final installment of $60 a Month! It has been one year of budgeting and cataloging my gaming purchase habits. Rather than expand on the budget for July and continue the exercise for another year, I thought I would recap the experiment, try to catalog some of the lessons I learned and draw some conclusions about what it means to be a gamer with a budget. As enjoyable as I’ve found the project, I think it is time for it to come to a close before it wears out its welcome.

Before we go further, let’s examine some statistics from the last twelve budget-conscious months:

• I acquired 95 games in the first year, for an average of just under eight games per month.
• I traded away 54 games over the course of the year, averaging four and a half trades per month.
• I earned $43.47 in money by recycling, earned $118.47 in gaming-related cash to add to the budget and used $40 worth of gift cards.
• My total budget, including $60 per month and the additional funds listed above, came to $921.94.
• I spent $876.70 on games in twelve months.
• My average monthly expenditures was $73.06. My average budget was $76.83.
• My total amount carried from one month to the next was $241.93, for an average of $20.16.
• The 12-month difference between available budget and amount spent was $45.24… in the black.

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