Tunnels of Doom

Following Bayonetta there was a lull in the flow of games for a little bit which, frankly, I sort of welcomed after Capcom’s weird-heavy bullet ballet destroyed my capacity to evaluate a game rationally. Considering I was waiting for some newer games to be made available from Goozex and there was an indeterminate wait inherent in that endeavor, I decided to brave the video store once again and managed to procure a copy of Uncharted 2.

I was pretty positive a couple of years ago when I played the original Uncharted and it quickly became the one game I played following my acquisition of a PS3 that sort of felt like it was welcome in my home for reasons other than its Blu-Ray drive. I’m not sure it should have been such a surprise then that if I really, really liked Uncharted, I absolutely adore Uncharted 2. For all my grumbling about video game stories and their lack of really executing on their potential, I sometimes forget that the standard gameplay-interrupted-by-cutscene format can be—when done right—a very effective way to tell an immersive story. I can think of few more shining examples of this than Uncharted 2. In truth, Uncharted 2’s compelling 10-hour tale is more richly realized, more exciting and more completely enjoyable than any movie I’ve seen in a year. This is no longer just what Tomb Raider should have been, this is what the last Indiana Jones film should have been.

The basic formula from Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is nearly unchanged. The controls are the same, the gameplay is more or less identical, but where the original was content with a smaller story and a more limited take on the concept, Uncharted 2 busts out of its conceptual arena with smart, dynamic moments that always feel like you are the hero of this action/adventure movie. The already astounding graphics of the original look even better, with just the right amount of stylization to avoid the uncanny valley and a voice acting dialogue combination that I swear could be up for some kind of oscar or emmy if such things were applied to video games. It’s not that anything feels particularly noteworthy, it’s that it doesn’t feel noteworthy. It wasn’t until hours into the game that I even stopped to consider that someone was writing and then acting the banter between the characters. What it kind of comes down to is something I can best describe as game chemistry. The writers, the voice talent, the animators, the engine and level designers all hit not just on their individual high notes but on a collective, harmonious high chord so that the game feels cohesive and does more to draw you into the action, the world and the adventure than any single element could alone.

Nearly all my complaints from the first game are addressed: The action and gameplay varies much more than before, the puzzles are more devious but not obscure or frustrating, the enemy AI is improved making the combat more exciting and the companions don’t feel as much like dead weight. Speaking of companions, I also have to point out that Uncharted 2 makes masterful use of the AI buddy since, when you think about it, it’s difficult to tell a story or make a character develop if they’re exploring someplace in solitude. Maybe this is why Lara Croft’s personality is still impossible to describe (due to lack of development) some eight or nine games in. There are very, very few moments in Uncharted 2 where Nathan is going it alone, though you’re never meant to babysit some idiot accident-prone AI doofus.

So yeah, I liked the game. It does look like it’s going to drift off course into a silly supernatural hokum-driven mess toward the end of the second act but it mostly corrects itself and it even addresses the most head-scratching element of the series (namely the genocide Nathan commits on the mercenary thugs) as the game’s antagonist whispers venomously to a pistol-wielding Nate, “How many men have you killed? Just today?” It’s a minor jab that doesn’t really undo the fact that Nathan is twice now responsible for a widespread massacre, but it does mean the writers of the game recognize that the gameplay elements play a part in the reality of the game’s story (which isn’t always necessarily true in video game writing) and the casualness with which Our Hero approaches murder—even justifiable homicide—is actually a part of his character. I loved that.

The only other miniscule quibble I have is that the game, for as taut and engaging as its story is, could have easily made it less guided and allowed for some player choice to impact the outcome of the game, even if just at the end. Still, I appreciate the genius of making what is a playable movie and I don’t think everything has to be BioWare, but it is the strength of the medium, you know?

Coming Soon

So having spent a week or so completing Uncharted 2 that leaves me just a couple of games left from 2009 that I wanted to finish and fortunately both of them arrived late in the week from Goozex (after all): Assassin’s Creed II and Borderlands. I also got Red Faction: Guerilla which looks pretty interesting so I guess I’ll lump that one in there as part of the mandatory research I need to complete before I can do my “Best of 09″ rundown. So far I’m no more than a couple of hours into any of the games but my initial assessments are that Assassin’s Creed II picks up the awesome right where the original AC left off (both literally and metaphorically), Borderlands is visually stunning but strangely not as engaging as I expected it to be and Red Faction is Borderland’s opposite being a game I had very few hopes for that I’m surprised to find I can’t wait to get back to. My intention was to do them in AC2, Borderlands, RF order since the first two are more likely to retain their value if I get through them quickly but I’m thinking I may swap the latter two just because I’d rather knock over a bunch of martian buildings than do MMO-style fetch and kill collection quests in an FPS. Expectations are funny things.

With a minor lull in my flow of fresh games, I resorted to rentals which I felt was justified because I had a long weekend set up ostensibly out of necessity but the proximity to my birthday was let’s just say highly suspect. I went to the store in hopes of getting Uncharted 2 which I desperately want to play but struggle to find rationale to support either a purchase or even a trade at 1,000 Goozex points since I suspect it is similar to the original which is to say maybe nine hours long and possessing little to no replay outside the multiplayer which I doubt I’d ever even attempt. Sadly they didn’t have a copy of Uncharted 2 so I settled on Bayonetta.

Listen, no one can reasonably accuse me of being blindly devoted or even especially enticed by products coming out of Japan. Like any nerd there are bits of Japanese culture that have trickled down to me that I have found exceptional like Cowboy Bebop or Unagi, but I’m hardly the guy wearing the Bubblegum Crisis T-shirt and importing copies of Final Fantasy XIII demos so I can play them “as they were meant to be heard.” However, I am a gamer with a respect for the culture of games so when the notoriously stingy reviewers at Japanese video game rag Famitsu give a game 10/10, I make a mental note.

If you want to skip a long diatribe about Bayonetta, let me summarize it for you here at the top: The only thing Famitsu giving the game 10 out of 10 signifies is that those magazine writers and editors are absolutely nuts. Really just complete loons. Not only because they put Bayonetta on par with what they consider to be the best games of all time but because they clearly experienced the same game I did and didn’t even dock half a point for having the most stupidly inane and incomprehensible storyline ever presented from one human to another in any medium which I can only interpret to mean they—Lord have mercy—must have actually liked the plot of Bayonetta.

Let me try and outline Bayonetta’s “story” and be aware that I wish I could say this was spoiler-free but I honestly couldn’t tell you which parts of the story are significant enough to qualify as spoliers, so you’ll have to trust that no matter what I say, you will be surprised by the story, though probably not in the way you might appreciate: A woman awakens after a 500 year long sleep at the bottom of a lake at which point she may or may not have killed a young boy named Luka’s father in front of his eyes. She spends what I presume to be roughly 25 years making alleged mafia ties and cozies up to an arms dealer who may or may not be a demon with a penchant for breaking the fourth wall while the young boy grows up to be a journalist of some sort. After an encounter with a woman who seems to be nearly as combat-capable as she, our heroine sets off on a journey to find something or find herself or… well, it’s never entirely clear. But she does wind up in a city that may or may not be the center of the universe as far as the cosmic powers are concerned and we learn that Bayonetta may or may not be the last of a line of witches who may or may not have been responsible for the steady decline of society for the last 500 years. Using the investigative subtlety of a molotov cocktail she fights hordes of creatures who may or may not be angels from heaven but whom also may or may not be paradoxically devious and vile. Anyway she comes across a little girl who may or may not be her daughter and/or may or may not be herself in a younger incarnation and they eventually wind up confronting the CEO of a company—that may or may not be a front for a private military whose funding and firepower outpaces that of the global superpowers—who may or may not be Bayonetta’s father. And then things get weird.

But okay, Bayonetta is hardly the first game to have a ridiculous plot. In a way, the ceaselessly indulgent storytelling could be viewed as a stylistic choice and honestly you can’t say the game isn’t consistently over-the-top so it’s never disingenuous. It’s certainly not my cup of tea but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t win me over a little bit by the end; after about a dozen chapters of deriding the game I started to simply shrug in bemusement at the game’s gleeful narrative excesses. “Oh, that statue/tower is actually a rocket ship? Sure, why not?” Et cetera.

Where the game stumbles is that it applies this gluttony to every aspect of the game, not just the plot. It’s like they had a design meeting toward the beginning of development and they were just brainstorming ideas and throwing them up on the whiteboard as they were shouted aloud. The problem is that at no point in the ensuing months and years did they get rid of a single idea from that board. The “no concept left behind” is present in the character design (glasses! beauty mark! ribbons! british accent! magical clothes made of hair!), in the systems (upgrades! alchemy! hidden collectables! combos! mini-games! quick time events!), in the presentation (full motion video cut scenes! slideshow/ken burns cut scenes! in-engine cut scenes! map screens! menu screens!) all the way up through the fact that the game has like 15 endings (faux ending! surprise twist ending! post fake credit-roll ending! post real credit-roll ending! unnecessarily long extraneous final dance sequence!). The quickest way to sum up Bayonetta is that it is exhausting.

And then of course there is the sex. Not that Bayonetta is ever graphic beyond the level of, say, the TBS re-runs of Sex and the City. It’s certainly saturated with innuendo, sensuality and various flavors of eroticism, but it stops short of being explicit. Bayonetta herself is a character basically defined by sex from her costume being made of her hair which is also her weapon such that she functionally disrobes in order to execute her most potent attacks through her fetishist’s checklist (I originally mistyped that “checklust” which may be more appropriate) of character design elements like the glasses and accent and ubiquitous lollipop. In between she displays a strong dominatrix vibe with her “torture attacks” and spends a lot of her time during the hyper-stylized combat doing splits and hip thrusts and deep back bends.

Leigh Alexander, the Internet’s go-to girl for thoughts on girls in gaming, wrote a piece for GamePro indicating that Bayonetta is actually an empowering character because she is a strong female figure in games that doesn’t have to surgically excise her sexuality in order to be taken seriously. I appreciate the point, because I agree that characters can be both strong females and sexy at the same time, there are good examples in other, older mediums. I’d actually venture an opinion that the strongest female characters are as complete as real life strong women are, and that by definition must include their sexuality. But this is where Bayonetta stumbles, because she isn’t a complete character in that for all her laundry list of reasons why you’re supposed to find her sexy (and I don’t think that assessment is meant to be exclusive to guys), there’s no room left in there for you to find her interesting. Among her other dimensional handicaps, she lacks any real character flaws (and no, amnesia isn’t a character flaw). When all the belt buckles and disappearing costumes subside, Bayonetta is only sex and style. She isn’t identifiable because she’s a messiah in a tight jumpsuit.

Now lest you think I hated Bayonetta, let me say that it does have some strong points. The one aspect of Bayonetta that is actually engaging is the relationship she develops with the young Cereza who thinks Bayonetta is her mother. The emergence of Bayonetta’s maternal instinct is fun to watch and is certainly fertile enough fodder for an entire plot, one that I think would have been miles and miles above the fatigue-inducing madness that they went with instead. Somehow they even managed to make the relationship feel genuine, the one human thread in the entire story—not surprisingly the only one that really works. Also the game’s stylish action is satisfying and enjoyable most of the time although on the easier levels it feels less like you’re playing the game and more like you’re merely suggesting things to it, but that worked for me because I’m fairly useless when it comes to combo-heavy action games like this. And the biggest advantage of the kitchen sink method of game design is that there is never an opportunity to get bored due to the constant adjustment of the gameplay dynamic (fight scene! exploration! puzzle section! vehicle combat! mini-game!). It took me about a dozen hours to work through the campaign and despite the tiring chore of trying to make some kind of sense out of the tale, I never felt like I was dragging my way through the game.

So I can’t say Famitsu led me astray, exactly. Sometimes it’s good to experience things you might not otherwise try. I certainly don’t think the game is in the same area code as the top echelon of games and I can’t even give it a meek “Rent This” recommendation but I wouldn’t say I’m sorry I played it. But you know, now that it’s over, I really wish Uncharted 2 had been in stock.

While I may have taken a week or two off from posting in deference to the holidays and some necessary traveling, I did squeeze in a few games. It’s sort of my thing.

The newest title to grace my consoles has been Modern Warfare 2, which I picked up as sort of an ownership rental if that makes any sense. Honestly I had MW2 on my list of games to try from this holiday season but it wasn’t anywhere near the top of that list. I thought that I had acquired Left 4 Dead 2 early enough and removed it from any wishlists in time to avoid having it be a part of any gift-giving festivities but alas I did get an additional copy so I returned it to the store from whence it came only to discover that without any sort of receipt I had to accept the lowest sale price for the item and apparently in the few short weeks it has been on sale it has at one point or another gone for $39.99. Armed with less than a full retail game’s worth of store credit I had the choice of either spending some of my own money on the game I originally hoped to exchange the duplicate for (Assassin’s Creed II), buying something else like a World of Warcraft time card or going with one of the games they currently had on sale for the $40 amount. I nixed the first notion, my wife nixed the second (apparently I “stay up too late” when I play WoW, which interferes with my ability to tend to the early morning baby feedings that are distressingly common) so I went with the third option and grabbed MW2.

My plan all along was to play through the single player campaign and then trade the title to Goozex for the 1,000 points. I had few intentions of keeping the game because the multiplayer may be phenomenal but since my New Year’s Resolution is to be honest with myself I have to admit that I don’t play games to have the kinds of experiences that multiplayer gamers search for and I definitely don’t have the patience to wade through dozens of matches of slavering Xbox Live prepubescents hurling off-color slurs into their headset mics in vengeful falsettos on the off chance that I’ll have that magical match.

So I went through the campaign.

Long time readers may recall that I had lots of high praise for CoD4. I’ve heard by turns that Modern Warfare 2 is basically more of the same which one might interpret as A Good Thing but honestly I don’t think MW2 works even remotely as well as CoD4 did.

For one thing the narrative hook that CoD4 relied on was protagonist mortality. Among the most memorable and remarkable moments in any game of the benchmark 2007 was the slow radiation death experienced in gut-wrenching first-person about halfway through the game (sorry spoiler hounds, it’s been two years—you can still be impressed with it even if you know it’s coming). But I have to say, returning to that particular well pretty much undermined the impact of both the new instances of virtual death simulation and the original. It’s like movies with Hitchcockian startle-scares: It only works once. If you know it’s coming, you won’t be startled. Likewise once you know that basically any character whose shoes you don in Modern Warfare games could croak at any moment, you sort of expect it to happen or at least you understand that it could happen. It cheapens the experience and makes it as pedestrian as all the other deaths you experience in video games where you come right back and start over after the game over screen (or, increasingly in the current generation, a momentary reload of the last quick save or checkpoint).

I realize there were some people who grumbled that the death in CoD4 was sort of lame because CoD games are pretty challenging to begin with so you probably died a bunch of times before the death that actually “took,” which makes you wonder why dozens of flying bullets don’t do you in but radiation poisoning from a nuclear explosion finally does the trick. I ignored the criticism at the time because the impact was so forceful and the scene handled in such a novel way I was able to accept it. But after the third protagonist death in MW2 I started to see the point. In a lot of ways it is stupid that only the game’s pre-determined narrative decides when it’s okay to die.

Unfortunately, that’s not MW2’s only misstep. While the plot of CoD4 was sort of ridiculous and Jerry Bruckheimer-ish, it managed to stay compelling because it didn’t have to top itself. It was able to maintain enough of a grounding in plausibility to feel authentic in some key, fundamental fashion. MW2 is Big Dumb Action Movie all the way, complete with corny/serious dialogue, ludicrous Evil Master Plans and eye-roll inducing Shocking Twists. That doesn’t even take into consideration the snowmobile scene which I could easily forgive if it didn’t support the argument that Infinity War lost their minds with regards to the boundaries on suspension of disbelief.

It’s not that I hated MW2, one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to try to find good in the world: The trademark CoD set piece battles are still there and still provide some fun shooter goodness. They’ve mostly eliminated the infinite-spawning killboxes although there are still a few places where I found myself having to just hold the sprint button and hope my magical regenerating health held out until I reached the next checkpoint because if you don’t do it The Way the Designers Intended, you can plan to spend the next 30 minutes replaying the same section over and over. And I will concede that Infinity Ward still make the best looking realistic visuals around: Some of the lighting effects especially during the night fighting through a burning Washington D.C. are astounding. The downside of that is the action is frequently so frantic and the flow from cover point to cover point so forces you to fixate on relatively drab level details like desks and rocks, it’s easy to miss a lot of the remarkable artistry on display. If you don’t mind Dumb Action, MW2 is still a fun way to spend a half dozen hours.

The problem is that the bar was set for something amazing. Sadly there wasn’t enough progress made narratively—and I’d argue that envelope wasn’t even picked up, much less pushed—to make it a worthy successor to CoD4. Let me put it this way: It should have been called Call of Duty 4.5: Now With More Stupid.

Meanwhile, I finished Infamous (it was one of my New Year’s Resolutions) and unlike MW2 I wasn’t disappointed in the least. I said when I talked about it before that Infamous was like a comic book and that stayed true through the end, even as the story got a little convoluted and silly. I can forgive silly when it’s thematically appropriate and Infamous is right on that line of being silly to my 33 year-old self but still pretty cool to my internal 12 year-old self who, let’s face it, is the one running the show when it comes to me playing video games all the time.

Eventually the missions (especially the story missions indicated by the blue markers at the starting points) got longer but I still appreciated that the game maintained a very busy-adult-friendly pick up and play vibe throughout. Well, at least until the final boss fight which was infuriatingly difficult but just within the bounds of that rewarding box. Fighting Kessler was delightfully reminiscent of the boss battles from my youth in the NES/SNES eras: Full of trial and error, pattern memorization, finding weak spots, experimenting with the tools at my disposal. It was the best end boss battle I can remember in a very, very long time.

I highly recommend the game but I must admit my one minor quibble is that I wish the morality path-exclusive powers were more effective. I chose the Evil path partially because Arc Lightning sounded really cool but it’s utility turned out to be pretty limited. I mean, either way it was still fun to run around Bio Leeching random pedestrians because it suited my needs and I doubt I could have beaten the game on the Hard difficulty if I’d needed to be careful about my surroundings to maintain a Good karma level, but still. I want Evil to be, well, freakin’ evil and capable of near genocidal levels of mayhem and carnage. Still, it seemed like they were setting the stage for a sequel with the end of the game and I have no shame in saying I’m all over that.

The other thing I spent a lot of the break doing is playing iPhone games. I initially dismissed the iPhone in its original incarnation but like most things Apple does the iterations eventually caught up with the potential and I found my desire for a device that was a microcosm of my digital life—only persistent—to be increasing. So when the contracts for our old phones expired my wife and I used some saved cash and a generous Christmas gift of cash from my parents to get 3GS iPhones. One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to head over to the App Store to try and find some cool games.

It took me a while to find anything really interesting: I guess most of the games/genres I’m interested in are firmly in the paid-app realm and I’m enough of an iPhone newbie to not want to be saddled with lame software I dropped money for, even if it is mostly minimal investments. I did eventually find a few games, among them being a clever if not exactly perfect port of Nethack. Using tiles and mapping most of the game’s controls to gestures, it’s a cool little project but even though Nethack has never really worked very hard to be user-friendly, this version is particularly esoteric especially since players of the unix console version have to re-learn all the commands they’ve committed to memory as sets of gestures which work only most of the time when you want them to. I think a different interface would make it the game I played most on the device, but as is I’ve played it a handful of times and thought it was cool but mostly missed my terminal version.

I also experimented with some free versions of paid software including a little number called DropZap Lite. It’s a familiar-feeling drop-the-bricks puzzle game that isn’t based on speed at all, in fact it could be described as turn-based. The blocks in this case are sized large to small and as you drop new blocks the other blocks in the same row and column are reduced in size by one level. Once they reach the smallest size, new blocks remove them and gravity pulls them down and the chain continues with each successive drop increasing the score multiplier. The Lite version allows you to progress through up to three levels (you move up a level whenever you clear 50 bricks) and try to beat your highest score. It’s quite fun though I’m not sure if the novelty would last long enough for a full paid version, even if it’s only 99 cents. (Note that as of this writing I’m not able to locate the Lite version on the App Store.)

My friend Jim turned me on to GeoDefense Lite, which is a path-based tower defense game with a Geometry Wars aesthetic. Being a fan of GeoWars and, to a certain extent, tower defense, it’s kind of right up my alley although I think I prefer the open TD variety. Still this one is pretty nice and I like that the upgrades are more than just stat-based but actually change the graphics and effects of the shots as well. I wasn’t crazy about the fact that there isn’t much information available about the enemy units (unlike, say, Desktop Tower Defense) and the placement interface is kind of frustrating as the location circle doesn’t seem to map to your finger location on the touch screen very well, but I was able to have fun with it once I got used to its peculiarities. The Lite version has several Easy and Medium levels; the paid app is $1.99.

Jim also talked about Song Summoner Lite long before I even got an iPhone of my own so I sought it out when I was a platform owner. It’s a turn based strategy role playing game in the vein of Final Fantasy Advance and in fact created by SquareSoft. The hook though is that it has a Monster Rancher like method of generating solider units for you based on the waveforms of your iTunes tracks. I’m not sure if it’s due to the app being the free version or it has something to do with my song selection or maybe just a quirk of the game engine but no matter how dynamic a song I picked the characters I generated were all fairly low ranked out of the gate; my friend confirmed that he had a similar experience and I believe he purchased the full game. I haven’t done much more in it besides the tutorial and playing with the soldier generator, but it’s a cool enough concept and it’s close enough to what I’m looking for in an iPhone game that I felt compelled to mention it. One bad thing is the full version is a pretty hefty $9.99, so I’d have to really love the Lite version before I felt okay with dropping ten bucks on a game for my phone.

I also checked out Atoms, which as near as I can tell is an exclusively free game. It reminds me a little of the pacifism mode in Geometry Wars 2: You drag your blue ring around the screen, avoiding the deadly red circles. Eventually the red circles change into green and they can be run into at which point they explode like bombs to clear out reds and earn you points. I think the familiarity comes from the passive, indirect method of combat. My main problem with Atoms is that it relies on you placing your finger directly over the play field which suggests that the most effective way to play the game is to be invisible, something I haven’t yet mastered but is one of my New Year’s Resolutions.

Probably my biggest surprise is that I’m playing iMobsters/Zombies, two games in a pantheon of Storm8 games that are very much like the Mafia Wars/Vampire Wars games that clutter everyone’s news feed on Facebook. I’m not interested enough to research which games came first but in any case they’re curious turn-based strategy/adventure games that are very similar to text-based adventure games of old. Basically you are given a handful of action points (all the games play the same, the only difference is the thematic metaphor) with which to execute quests with a simple button click. These quests provide some sort of experience points and a form of currency which you can exchange for income sources or equipment that makes you more effective at PvP combat (some of the equipment often cuts into your income with upkeep costs as well). The kick is the social aspect which allows you to join forces with other players to add them as an item carrier slot in your PvP attempts by linking your accounts into each other’s groups. Again, the detail is in the theme but the perpetuation hook is that the action points refresh based on a real-time countdown so you have to log in regularly to continue your XP grind. The games are also micro-transaction based so you can speed up your progress for a small fee based on some kind of loyalty points which are also given infrequently for various in-game actions.

It’s hard to portray why I’d be inclined to continue with what is, essentially, narrative-deprived interactive fiction. iMobsters makes a little more sense thematically and in execution than Zombies, which I’m playing basically because if it says or hints at zombies I’ll probably give it a long leash. My New Year’s Resolution is to lay off the zombiephilia a little bit. In either case though they’re not particularly compelling in a rational sense, it’s more that once you get started it’s easy to think they’re something mildly interesting to do with your hands when you experience some sort of lull. The fact that they can easily be played with one hand while doing something else, say, eating or rocking a baby to sleep probably plays a role as well.

I keep hearing that Facebook and mobile phones will shortly become the principal platform for video games and honestly I’m not the kind of person who gets all “nuh-uh!” about those sorts of predictions, but on a personal level that kind of thing will only work for my gaming habits if the games themselves offer something more compelling than what I’m seeing now. I have a hard time understanding why there aren’t more games along the lines of what you see at Kongregate on Facebook: Rich, clever experiences that maybe don’t rival the kinds of things you can get on consoles but offer a variety of depths and levels of sophistication. So far everything I’ve seen on social network platforms is the ultimate in casual. These iPhone games are a bit closer to what I’m looking for but a lot of them feel very much like early DS games where people are still trying to figure out how to leverage the platform without being gimmicky or trying to shoehorn experiences onto it that simply don’t fit.

It’s worth seeing where this goes, though, because I see a lot of potential around. And my New Year’s Resolution is to make sure I don’t miss the revolution.

Infamous (or inFAMOUS if you insist on using the game’s inexplicable capitalization scheme) has a weird feel to it. I read Tim Rodger’s Let’s Talk About Jumping piece—or opus as it may be—which is rambling and unfocused and contains a lot of drivel but did have an interesting point or two within (just like ToD!) one of which was that, in video games, moving should be fun. The sense of transporting your on-screen avatar in an interactive medium really needs to have enough raw power to be rewarding in and of itself. I suppose this could be accomplished via interesting visuals so you have cool things to look at while you move or it can be accomplished with an enjoyable movement mechanic. But the core of the point remains that games tend to have their own feel when it comes to movement. Some are smooth and gliding like Half-Life or Assassin’s Creed, some are harsh and plodding like Silent Hill or Castlevania. In some cases it works, in others it doesn’t or at least it fails to really add anything to the experience; occasionally a game will have a sort of incongruous movement feel but somehow work in spite of it.

I’m talking about Infamous again. There is a certain floaty, detached-from-reality sense that you get from navigating the world in Infamous. The animations are all relatively impressive and the controls are responsive but while the game is essentially a comic book it looks realistic enough that I expect a greater sense of heft to the physics. Which is not to say that Infamous fails Mr. Rodger’s fun-to-move test. Moving around in Infamous is fun, although while it shares a lot in common with both Crackdown and Assassin’s Creed, it isn’t quite as fun to work your way around the city as either of those games. It’s basically the main way in which Infamous developer Sucker Punch reveals their Sly Cooper past, because Infamous’ Cole Macgrath jumps almost identically to Sly. What’s even weirder than the weightless way you jump and fall in Infamous is the wall-climbing system which basically has you being somewhat sticky when you jump near or toward climbable surfaces. Considering this is the principal way you traverse the environment it makes for less fiddly controls in the sense that you don’t have to be super-precise with your jumps resulting in it being difficult to accidentally jump off a ledge. Which would matter if you actually got hurt from jumping off ledges, but like Crackdown you sort of roll with it instead which means when you actually want to jump off a ledge, you typically end up hanging from it or clinging to the side of an adjacent building while the assault rifle-armed enemies you wanted to escape use your buttocks as bullet bongos.

That’s not really a genuine complaint—it’s more observational—since you eventually get the sense of how it works and you can sort of compensate. What is more of a real gripe is that for a super powered guy, Cole is kind of a slouch in the combat department early in the game. It’s not that combat isn’t fun, because it is, especially if you like electrocuting dudes in the head (a lot of dudes). But it is remarkable to me that I die so incessantly since, I mean, I can flip cars over and survive a 25-story drop to the pavement. Somehow concrete and terminal velocity is not a problem but AK-47 snipers six blocks away are serious problems. I’ve gotten to the point where I only really engage my foes when there are cars around because the cars are reasonably-sized targets from the distance I prefer to rumble and if I hit them enough they explode and at least knock down these assault rifle savants long enough for me to spin on a heel and run like an electricity-wielding sissypants. I’m playing the game through on the Evil path (Infamous being right there in the title) so I’m hoping once I get the Arc Lightning ability I can approach these fracas with more confidence but even upgrading my combat powers hasn’t done much to make me the unstoppable killing machine I aspire to be.

Strangely enough my favorite thing about the game so far is the pacing which is—hardy-har-har—lightning quick. The side missions take typically less than five minutes to complete and even the longer story missions are only 10-15 minutes in length and almost universally the missions don’t require a lot of unnecessary traipsing around the city: Your destination is typically only a few feet from the mission start point. As a guy who has suffered through dozens of Grand Theft Auto traveling tours, this is most welcome and is a stark contrast to the laboriously protracted sessions mandated by Silent Hill: Homecoming which you will note I did not play this week. I can drop into Infamous for twenty minutes while I rock the baby to sleep at 4:30 am and get two or three missions knocked out. Historically I’ve been the kind of person who prefers the deep dive where I can sink in and savor a game experience, but until my daughter is old enough that she can’t be relied on to need some kind of manual intervention every 2-3 hours, surface level games are going to be my favorites.

Aside from Infamous I dipped a few more times into WoW, wrapping up the last of my free trial account time. I got to thinking a bit more about what I had said last week regarding what it would take for Blizzard to get a regular subscription from me and I think I really nailed it when I supposed that finding a way to engage the multiplayer aspect would have to be the key. I don’t know that I’d have to get my existing friends interested in WoW, even having the opportunity to play enough to make in-game friends would probably be enough to encourage me to stick more closely with the game. Appointment gaming (especially online) is something I haven’t ever been able to effectively establish but then again my luck with coordinating real-life friends with virtual interests has been extremely limited. This is, in fact, kind of the largest stumbling block in my gaming hobby: I’ve occasionally been able to coordinate tabletop gaming appointments and from time to time I’ve had very short-term success with some online gaming (say, enough to finish a few co-op games online or have a handful of multiplayer sessions with friends) but we’ve all tended to drift into and out of the various games at different rates and times and platforms. In my blissful imagination I am better able to forsee the gaming trends of my peers and/or rally the game-playing members of my extended social circle into some kind of unified front of entertainment. Back in reality, I almost never ask anyone to play with me because I’m haunted by scenarios that never took place in which my requests for companionship were met with unblinking stares, icy and judgmental.

For the time I’m content to grind for experience, reputation and trade skills on the occasional basis but I think WoW represents for me more of an ideal, one which I may be found from time to time to be actively pursuing, rather than a viable candidate for anything resembling a commitment. I’m not convinced this is a bad thing.

I may have given the impression last week that I disliked Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time. That was disingenuous. It’s the kind of game I’m able to have fun with in spite of myself, which is wholly independent of the game’s inherent quality. I’m not typically the kind of person who shies away from “kiddy” games just because they’re colorful or silly or targeted at an audience younger than I happen to be.

I don’t feel silly playing M&L:PiT because it’s sort of juvenile, I feel silly because I honestly can’t figure out why I keep going back to it as my portable game of choice. It is fun, like I said, I’m just not sure why. On the surface it’s very simple and when you dig deeper… well, it’s still very simple. The only thing I can postulate is that it scratches an RPG itch without demanding any real commitment from the audience. Unlike even Chrono Trigger which has a certain degree of narrative investment you have to accept in order to enjoy the game (I’m using it as an example because of its age, not because M&L stacks up against it in any useful way), this game lets you sort of have fun with a game that toes the line between 16-bit era role-playing and Zelda without taking a single thing seriously. If you like the kinds of games being streamlined here it won’t serve as a replacement for any “real” genre title, but I can’t find fault with the magazine version considering that’s sort of the essence of handheld gaming in my estimation.

Despite my insistence last week that I wasn’t done with Dragon Age, I found it difficult to really get into my second playthrough of the game, which is surprisingly in keeping with my BioWare experience. No one really considers Mass Effect or KotOR to be particularly linear but I find that the consistently pre-programmed framework for their games makes the internal deviations an insufficient carrot to dredge through the similar structures just to experience. Philosophically, I want to see what else the game offers, but practically I can’t seem to drum up the motivation.

Which, in this case, is okay since I have… other diversions. I’ve been playing a little bit of World of Warcraft here and there, though the physical realities of playing a PC game limit the amount of time I can realistically invest in it. Which may sound strange considering my console playing hasn’t really slowed since I became a father—at least not as far as number of days in which I turn on a video game machine. But the sleeping-baby-on-lap configuration that works passably for holding a controller is untenable with a keyboard and mouse. Mostly my few hours here and there have been devoted to clearing out my quest log (and level grinding in the process). Some of this has meant taking a pragmatic approach to quest abandonment which was something I was loathe to do in my first foray into the game. If a quest went green (low XP) I would still venture out and complete it for the pittance just to say I had cleared it. With nine months of perspective on it, I don’t feel the same sense of disgrace from quitting on a quest that doesn’t offer me much in the way of net rewards.

Since at this point, being about level 53/54, I’m approaching the endgame of the original content there are only a handful of locales that are of any particular interest to me from a leveling perspective and since I’m not playing long enough to bother with guilds or any of that kind of multiplayer aspect of the game like instances (although I think those are possibly my favorite parts of WoW, when they work out), this is probably it for me. It’s still enjoyable but I’m really getting the sense that I’ve gotten all of the single player fun out of the game that I’m ever going to get which means that for me to play WoW with any kind of gusto again I’d have to find someone or several someones who wanted to play, maybe even starting over from the beginning, and go through it with them. I had a dream this past week that I actually talked my wife into playing it with me. Reality notwithstanding, it was a really pleasant dream.

The other games I dipped into were courtesy of Goozex, although the principal one was Left 4 Dead 2 which I admit was sort of a non-Goozex-y acquisition despite them being pivotal. They have this new “Get it New” feature which allows you to trade in a greater number of points than you’d ever spend on an actual trade to get the game shipped still-in-shrinkwrap from Goozex or one of their partners (I got mine from Amazon.com). Since I had a backlog of points and nothing I really wanted to spend them on, I decided to spring for L4D2. Even after doing so I still managed to have some points left over to request Silent Hill: Homecoming and Infamous though only the former arrived in time for this post.

But I was talking about Left 4 Dead 2. There’s a weird dichotomy in my mind when it comes to this game. On one hand, everything that they did with it is welcome and smart, resulting in the game being quantitatively superior to the original: Melee weapons, the continuous narrative through the campaigns (such that L4D ever really manages), additional firearm types, new items, new special infected, etc. All good. My favorite adjustment from the original game though is that the campaigns don’t necessarily follow the formula established by the original in which you played through four chapters which were basically zombie-infested obstacle courses and then hit the chapter five finale where you would briefly fight through to a radio, call for a rescue and then fight a ceaseless horde of zombies for 5-10 minutes until the vehicle arrived, board and watch the credits roll. L4D2 doesn’t diverge that much but it does have a campaign where instead of waiting for rescue to arrive you have to collect gas canisters to fill up a car in order to escape (it’s a bit of a stretch realism-wise, but still fun) and a campaign in which you travel across an abbreviated map and then turn around and leave from the third saferoom through the entry door and work your way back through to the beginning, only this time in the midst of a raging monsoon (as an aside, does it feel a little early to have a game set in New Orleans feature a flood scenario so prominently?).

There is no other way to describe L4D2 than as an improvement over its predecessor. I know you feel the “but” coming: The problem is that there is just something about it that doesn’t quite capture the je ne sais quoi that I found in the original. Maybe it has something to do with the characters L4D2 uses: The original rolled up so many standard zombie movie archetypes into Bill, Francis, Louis and Zoey that it felt somehow right. The conceit of the game is that you’re playing a b-movie zombie flick and having those kinds of expectations met by the survivor characters brought that to life. L4D2 can be lauded for trying to develop its own identity but dang it, I need those stereotypes or else it feels too much like a game—this might as well be re-skinned as an action-oriented Resident Evil or Dead Rising game if it isn’t going to draw on the media it attempts to pay tribute to. And frankly I think a lot of the additions are things that really didn’t need to be there: Melee weapons are kind of a must but I don’t know why they have to replace the pistols; most of the new firearms are minor variations on the originals (there are now three or four types of shotguns and about as many automatic rifles, plus a better sniper rifle, an improved pistol that can’t be dual-wielded, etc). Other than the grenade launcher they don’t feel like they offer a whole lot other than back-of-the-box-bullet-point “variety.” Even the new special infected aren’t truly all that compelling compared to the original four, though I’m sure playing in versus mode as the infected will be more interesting than Hunter, Hunter, Smoker, Boomer, Hunter, Smoker, Hunter, Hunter, Boomer OH HEY FINALLY I GET TO BE THE TANK.

I’m not saying I’m about to run back to the original game and trade in L4D2 because it sucks, but it’s strange to find myself saying that for once I got more than I really expected from a sequel and yet somehow what I really wanted was less. A friend of mine also picked it up so hopefully I’ll have a chance to play some co-op/online soon and maybe that will change my tune a little.

The other new game I got was Silent Hill: Homecoming. Originally I had put the game on my wishlist because I have a habit that dates back to the year 2000 of expecting to play every SH game that comes out, despite it being more or less unwarranted since basically the original (a testament to how much I loved that game). For whatever reason I decided to do some research on Homecoming and found out that it actually got semi-decent reviews despite there being some nitpickers out there fixating on points I thought, once I learned what they were, seemed mostly unfounded. So I decided to give it a shake.

Now, my experience with Silent Hill games past the original on the PS1 is that, excepting Silent Hill 3, I play the first half dozen hours and then find something about them so infuriating that I turn them off and never return. Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill: Origins, and Silent Hill 4 were all this way and even 3, which I eventually finished, had to be completed in two discreet playthroughs because I gave up on the game halfway through the initial run. I still own a copy of the Xbox port of SH2 that I “intend” to finish one of these days.

Ready to hear what is probably going to be my undoing with Homecoming?

Save points.

Would it seriously kill developers to make games save-anywhere? Would it ruin the experience somehow? Okay fine, you’re going to make me find a save point. Whatever, you can be cro-magnon if you wish. Now, how about putting them a wee bit closer together than two and a half hours apart? Sorry, Silent Hill, but I’m not 16 anymore. I have a life. I have a job. I have a child. I can’t be expected to devote two and a half hours to your game every time I want to play it and I have zero inclination to re-play long sections of it until I get that magic block of time that lets me advance. And no, I’m not going to go on a 15 minute backtrack to the previous save spot, especially when you’re going to throw endless enemy spawn points en route. I was so infuriated with the game on Saturday morning as I had gotten up to attend to a fussy baby and was using the game to keep myself awake while I rocked her back to sleep. What I had intended to be a maybe 45-minute diversion ended up being a marathon session as each new room, each new area opened up without a stupid save point and the further I went the less inclined I was to just turn it off even though I knew that was the smart thing to do. When I reached the police station and got to the second boss in a row with barely any exploration (and therefore very few health items) in between, I realized that I had no reason to believe there would be a save point waiting for me even if I was able to defeat the boss and I was wasting twenty minutes restarting at the arbitrary pre-cut scene check point with every humiliating defeat (on the “Normal” difficulty by the way). So yeah, I turned it off. We’ll see if it gets a second chance (history suggests no).

But that does bring up the second gripe I have which is that even though Homecoming tried to fix the historically worst part of Silent Hill games—the combat—it’s still pretty crappy, relying mostly on broken dodge controls and attack animations that you can’t interrupt plus everyone’s favorite survival horror cliché: Ammunition scarcity. Bah.

Lastly, I’ve been playing Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time for a few weeks now but I’ve had a hard time figuring out a way to talk about it in Edition because, well, it’s really not a great game and I’m not even 100% certain why I’m still playing it. My best description is that it’s “stupidly compelling.” Deconstructing the basic simplicity of a Mario platformer into a turn-based role-playing format sounds kind of cool and interesting on the surface, but I don’t have any experience with the previous Mario RPGs so my lack of nostalgia makes me view the combat with a kind of baffled “what is the point of this” incredulity. Fortunately I pushed through the tedious opening tutorial section and by the time you retrieve Baby Mario and Baby Luigi (don’t even get me started) the game takes on a kind of Mario-meets-Zelda vibe in terms of the dungeon puzzles and, unlike Silent Hill, it has liberally spaced save points that allow the game to be chunked almost perfectly into bathroom-visit sized portions. Look, I’m not saying I’m proud to be playing the game, I’m just saying that I am.

Dragon Age was brought to a state of completion last week, although that statement infers a sense of finality that is not strictly accurate. I brought the game to bore on an ending, one of several I’m told, and then I set about with another one of my six characters to try again. I won’t lie and say that there isn’t a strong element of achievement hunting that motivates me and I won’t further the charade by suggesting that I won’t rest until all achievements have been acquired. Suffice to say that having watched the epic 25-minute credits roll at the end of the first playthrough, I wasn’t prepared to say that the game held no further appeal to me.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend after I had wrapped it up discussing the things that BioWare does right and it occurs to me that Knights of the Old Republic really nailed the formula from a combat mechanic perspective with the whole pause/queue process and since then the tweaks they’ve implemented haven’t been what I’d call improvements. Dragon Age is probably the best, but the Combat Tactics are poor substitutes for strategic turn-based control (especially of NPCs) and the single-slot action queue is ridiculously restrictive. I suppose they’re trying to speed up the combat and make it feel more fluid and dynamic but honestly I spent more time in Dragon Age fussing in the menu screens than I did with KotOR simply because I had to do it incessantly to babysit characters whose Combat Tactics weren’t working as intended and because some functions needed repetitive interaction to make them useful (even basic actions like “drink a health potion when you’re dying” which is ridiculous).

Maybe I’m on a Fantasy kick, maybe it’s because of last week’s Game of the Decade discussion, maybe it’s just my inner bargain-hunter, but for some reason I decided to take advantage of some free trial period offers and reinstall World of Warcraft this past week. At first, once the tortuous three-day re-installation procedure was at last complete and I had showered until the water ran cold in an attempt to cleanse my body of that wicked ordeal, I logged in with my main character and awoke, as it were, right where I had left off back in March. The problem was quickly apparent: When you drift away from a game over the course of several weeks and then abruptly drop it off your radar for nine months, during which you go so far as to have a child, you forget what the heck was going on. I wandered around aimlessly, shocked that after dumping hours and hours into the game earlier this very year I couldn’t remember basic commands much less what all this stuff was in my inventory or which quest I was working on.

After about a half hour of this I logged off that character and returned later thinking about how I had installed the game again to try out the free Burning Crusade sample so instead of getting back onto my main I created a new character, a Draenei priest. I wandered around that starting zone for a little while but starting zones aren’t terribly interesting to me and typify my definition of the phrase “grind.” But I gave it about an hour and then logged out. The next day I came back and hit my main again, determined to at least sort out what I would do next if I decided to start playing again in earnest. So after a bit of wandering I ended up back in Orgrimmar and happened to upgrade my mount to a Swift version at the urging of an in-game letter from an NPC and finally decided to head up to Azshara as it had my nearest incomplete quest. Of course when I got there I realized I didn’t know where the quest was exactly and all my carefully assembled Add-Ons were lost in the uninstall. So instead of getting involved in a frustrating hunt I decided to just wander around a kill mobs for a little while (mostly Scalebanes), taking advantage of my XP bonus from being in a protracted resting state.

Curiously, I found myself actually having a really good time.

It shouldn’t be surprising because at its core WoW is really an enjoyable game, but I think what happens is that through its incredible density it becomes sort of overwhelming and it becomes very easy to lose your perspective in the swirl of professions and quests and guilds and grinding and instancing and auctioning. A friend of mine said when I first started playing almost a year ago “It’s a really good game if you can play it casually.” He said this with a marked note of sadness in his voice. The implication was that he wasn’t capable of having a casual approach and later he clarified that he had remorse for the amount of his life he had sunken into the game. More so than any other game I’ve played WoW encourages players to dissect the systems within it so that they cease to become enjoyable aspects of a rich game but they become routes to conquest in a struggle against a sinister foe. I’m not sure whether it’s the punishing in-game economy or just the endless gameplay fueled by regular infusions of new content but somehow I’ve never seen a game broken down so thoroughly into formulas and shortest paths.

I’m not even saying this from some lofty position as if I were somehow immune to it: I fell full on into the trap and I believe it is only my carefully nurtured cheapskate tendencies that allowed me to not tumble all the way through. Well that and the fact that I can’t stand being “stuck” in any game for very long without needing a lengthy reprieve. But that’s why the game is both so overwhelmingly compelling to a lot of people and why I gave it up after such a relatively short period of time. I’m pretty sure it isn’t in Blizzard’s best interest to encourage a more casual style of play; the more people who have an obsessive approach to the game the fewer people who are willing to give up their $15/month subscriptions. As for me, I’m happy to oblige Blizzard with the occasional toe dip into the game but my thin wallet will continue to prevent me from being a regular subscriber. Simply put I don’t play any single game enough to justify an annual expense of $180, not counting the price for expansion content.

I finished Dragon Age: Origins this week (next week’s Edition will cover it in greater detail) and while I enjoyed it for the most part I kept feeling like there were parts where it reverted back to standard fantasy provisions that we’ve seen over and over again and which, at this point, I think need to just be put to pasture for a while. Not all of these are specific to fantasy RPGs though I’m thinking of that subgenre specifically.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés, which shows that in some ways we’re still basically playing Dragon Warrior I. Plus I have to point out this page for the BioWare RPG Cliché Chart which is fun but also includes (allegedly) a response from a BioWare rep who kind of takes the whole thing a little too personally.

1. The Arena
   To clarify, it isn’t that I don’t understand why these clichés persist in role-playing games, especially video game RPGs which are typically very combat oriented. In the case of the ubiquitous area battles you can showcase your combat engine and fill up a couple of hours of game time having players hack and slash with the barest of necessary plot development. But for the role-player that lack of context mostly serves to highlight the basic flaws in your combat system. I rarely—perhaps never—play RPGs for their dynamic fighting mechanics, rather I play them in spite of often awkward combat because I like the stories they tell. When you surgically excise the latter I tend to sit there grinding my teeth as I nitpick the former.
2. The Perfectly Balanced Attribute System
   I don’t want Intelligence to factor into how effective my brutish half-orc is at finding chinks in opponent’s armor. I don’t want Strength to determine how many spellbooks my mage can carry. I don’t want Charisma to factor into how good my thief is at sneaking. It should be okay to have a borderline mentally retarded barbarian and a physically frail wizard and an unremarkable, forgettable rogue. Trying to discourage min/maxing in single-player games makes no sense to me, so let me ignore stats that don’t matter for my character class and stop trying to make me well-rounded. Of course the corollary for this is that every game needs to accommodate each class: I should be able to be just as successful as a magic user as I can be as a warrior rather than having to always be some kind of spell-casting, sword-wielding hybrid assassin.
3. The Hero is the Guy Who Does the Most Damage
   Combat is an integral part in a vast majority of video games. Video role-playing games are no exception. But RPGs have for too long eschewed the potential drama of the non-combat resolution. It’s a tired truism that no matter what dialogue options you choose, no matter how high your Negotiation skill, no matter how many non-violent solutions you can come up with, ultimately 99% of your interactions result in either you giving someone cash or services in exchange for goods or information or you hit them with various sharp objects until they stop moving.
4. There is Only One Way to Do It
   There are few things more infuriating in games than having obvious solutions to developer-fabricated problems staring you in the face but having to jump through the sorts of mind-reading hoops that adventure games used to be famous for because some level designer deems it so. This applies to large set-piece puzzles (see the Resident Evil example from this GameSpy article) as well as simpler activities like, say, opening chests. Even the ASCII-based Nethack allows non-thieving characters to access chests via a brute force approach, although there is the potential for breakable items within to be, well, broken. But this is the tradeoff to the alternative which is having a particular skill (rogues) or performing some sort of elaborate series of steps to locate the correct key. Some games have allowed for alternate actions like forced locks but often these inexplicably rely on the same skill as bypassing them. In a way this is the counterpart to the unbalanced attribute system: Let characters be specialized but then allow them to approach every given obstacle from their own unique perspective.
5. The Stationary World
   Few things make a world feel less living and vibrant than one which never changes. Then again, like the Uncanny Valley, the closer you get toward a world that feels like it has its own pulse, the more noticeable it becomes when everything about an environment exists to accommodate the hero of some epic story. Games with no night/day cycle, shopkeepers who never sleep but stand in the same spot for infinity waiting for the hero to come by and give them a single moment of purpose, NPCs who only ever offer a single scrap of information and then simply repeat themselves like malfunctioning robots, all these things can be lovingly rendered in the most visually striking HD but they utterly ruin the spell of a game.

I’ve been having fun following the Game of the Decade series over on Crispy Gamer, but I have to say that I’m baffled by the result of the first round which was handled by a hand-selected panel (I guess to avoid having the final results be little more than a popularity contest). The initial selections, including the four games added by the CG readership via popular nominations and then a vote-off, were pretty solid I thought. I won’t detail the whole list here but instead I’ll break down the results after the panel (Game Trust) narrowed it down to 32. I also like that they divided the field into four divisions just to keep it interesting.

Koopa Division

1. Metroid Prime vs. 8. Super Smash Bros. Melee
12. Animal Crossing vs. 4. Katamari Damacy
11. Ico vs. 14. Psychonauts
7. Shadow of the Colossus vs. 2. Super Mario Galaxy

I’m not a fan of fighting games because they’re either these super-precise skill matches that I don’t have the patience for or they’re lunatic button mashers with no purpose and Smash Bros. is the worst of the latter. I also happen to think that Metroid Prime is a pretty significant achievement in game design so the choice there is easy. I don’t have much of a preference between Animal Crossing and Katamari, both are quirky fun for a little while but as far as I’m concerned neither holds a candle to Metroid Prime so flipping a coin I’ll say AC. I realize that Psychonauts isn’t a perfect game and there is a lot of love out there for Ico but honestly I never really got much aside from frustration out of Ico and I still think Psychonauts is criminally overlooked despite its near universal critical acclaim. Since I think Shadow of the Colossus is far superior to Ico, I’ll go with Pychonauts and then let Shadow represent Team Ico’s output.

My picks for the next round:

1. Metroid Prime vs. 12. Animal Crossing
14. Psychonauts vs. 7. Shadow of the Colossus

Alucard Division

1. BioShock vs. 9. Portal
5. Grand Theft Auto III vs. 4. Resident Evil 4
6. Fallout 3 vs. 3. Half-Life 2
7. Batman: Arkham Asylum vs. 15. LEGO Star Wars

Portal narrowly edges out BioShock because I have zero complaints about Portal which is as well-crafted and complete of a video game experience as you’re going to encounter in this decade or any other to date while for all of BioShock’s strengths it does have some notable weaknesses. The true travesty present here is that Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem was given a reprieve and included in the initial round via community demand but then unjustly pitted against Portal of all things and, well, you have to admit that Portal has a decent shot of being the literal Game of the Decade. ED deserved a better fate. I find it hard not to grant RE4 the edge over GTA given that I simply prefer Resident Evil and survival horror over sandbox games, but I have to admit that other games this decade have improved on what RE4 did and the game itself was primarily great because it took a beloved franchise that was getting stale and brought it into modern times. Given what GTA3 did for gaming in general in the decade, it’s hard not to go with it. I grant Half-Life 2 the win over Fallout 3 even though I probably played Fallout more because at their foundation Half-Life 2 tells a better story (more effectively) than Fallout. Both have their gameplay issues, but Half-Life 2 is the superior game by a small margin. As for Batman vs. Star Wars? I don’t think either game deserves to be here, really. Batman is a great use of the license in a Metroid Prime-style game, while LEGO SW is a great use of the license in a simplified platformer. Neither game is particularly revelatory and both are strong for similar reasons, I give the edge to Batman just on the strength of the extraneous content—which both games have in spades—which in this case is more compelling.

My picks:

9. Portal vs. 5. Grand Theft Auto III
3. Half-Life 2 vs. 7. Batman: Arkham Asylum

Chocobo Division

1. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion vs. 8. Deus Ex
12. Plants vs Zombies vs. 4. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
11. Lumines vs. 14. Peggle
7. The Sims vs. 2. World of Warcraft

The biggest struggle I have in the whole competition is Oblivion versus Deus Ex. Now, I put hundreds of hours into Oblivion and absolutely loved it, but it is hard to say that it is a better contender for Game of the Decade than Deus Ex that was so ahead of its time for so many different reasons. From the FPS/RPG hybrid that would later come back in games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Borderlands (or even Fallout 3 and, in some ways, Oblivion itself) to the fact that you can beat the game without actually killing anyone plus a brilliantly realized story that is far and away better than most of the current crop of “story-driven” games, it really was and is something special. Though it saddens my heart, I have to turn my back on Oblivion and say Deus Ex is ultimately more deserving of the title regardless of what my personal feelings on the matter were. Plants vs. Zombies is cute but no match for KotOR, and Lumines verses Peggle is like saying “do you prefer Peanut Butter and Jelly or Peanut Butter and Jam?” I’ll say Peggle for no reason other than that I played it more so it must be better. I guess. And I doubt any game that didn’t have a very strong case for being the top when the dust settles has a prayer against World of Warcraft which, regardless of your opinion of the game or MMOs in general, has to be on the short list since it’s second only to Minesweeper and FarmVille as “Game You’re Most Likely to be Surprised by Who You Find Playing.”

My Chocobo Division picks:

8. Deus Ex vs. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
14. Peggle vs. World of Warcraft

Bo Jackson Division

1. Halo: Combat Evolved vs. 8. Soulcalibur II
12. SSX vs. 4. Gears of War
6. Advance Wars vs. 14. Left 4 Dead
7. Rock Band vs. 15. Battlefield 1942

Fighting games again? I think the original Halo is good for what it did: Bring FPS legitimately to consoles, so I suppose it’s mildly worthy but at best a long shot. I’d argue that God of War which Soulcalibur beat out brought more to the table as a GotD contender and could have even claimed the spot from Halo, but given the options I’ll grudgingly go with Master Chief’s flawed first appearance. I similarly dislike being asked to choose between a meh racing game and a meh shooter that was mostly just a testosterone overdose applied to Resident Evil 4 but since I passed on RE4 itself I’ll have to give Gears the nod here. Left 4 Dead is a terrible addition in my opinion since even though it had some cool ideas and I had a blast with it, it never stopped reminding me that it needed a sequel or a whole bunch of DLC or something to make it more complete. Advance Wars 2 was better than the original and Jeanne D’Arc was better than them all but I need to give a shout to my turn-based strategy homies so I’ll say AW takes the title. As for Rock Band vs. BF 1942, obviously Battlefield did a great service to modern gaming by paving the way for big multiplayer action games but I think the decade will be more remembered for its plastic peripherals cluttering living rooms around the world than for a game that maybe showed what was possible to the next wave of multiplayer developers. Rock Band gets the crown. All in all, though, I think this is the weakest division by far.

My final picks:

1. Halo: Combat Evolved vs. 4. Gears of War
6. Advance Wars vs. 7. Rock Band

The Final Four

There’s no need to break down the elite eight so I’ll skip ahead to the final four (as I’d vote it):

Koopa Division: Shadow of the Colossus
Alucard Division: Portal
Chocobo Division: World of Warcraft
Bo Jackson Division: Rock Band

I think the shame here is that Chocobo is so ridiculously strong with Oblivion, Deus Ex and WoW while Bo Jackson is so weak. By itself Rock Band is a remarkable achievement and one that I think if you had described to me in 1989 I would have salivated over. But just ten years later we were already seeing the kinds of things arcades were doing (or had done and still managed to fail to make money) and I would have thought, “Moving that concept into the living room? Yeah, I can see that.” For all Rock Band and Guitar Hero and the like have done to make the last decade memorable for fake plastic party rocking, they’re really not bringing anything to the media space that wasn’t already germinating there in some fashion before.

As part of the “Are Games Art?” debate, Shadow of the Colossus certainly (and deservedly) gets presented a lot as evidence supporting the thesis. For this reason it deserves its place here, but as a game it suffers for its art because a lot of the play is, let’s face it, pushing up on the analog stick to move you from point A to point B. It’s an inspiring piece of deconstructive storytelling and and an effective use of the medium to evoke a mood without resorting to a lot of the other-format borrowing that passes for the same in other development houses, which does a lot to (hopefully?) inspire others to follow. And frankly not enough games bother with things like mood and tone and pacing. Still, games are meant to be played and since playing Shadow isn’t as fun as talking about Shadow, it’s close but still the third place finisher.

The great thing about Portal is that in many ways it does what Shadow of the Colossus did without even relying on the last trope Team Ico employed which is the unplayable cut scene: They evoked a mood and told a story without beating the player with any of it. Some games seem to be written for the least attentive person the developers can imagine and practically go so far as to write on the walls of the dungeon/castle/office building/space ship/whatever something like “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE FEELING DREAD/TRIUMPH/TENSION/VICTORY/DESPAIR/WHATEVER NOW.” Portal, amusingly, does write on the walls but it writes atmosphere and it writes the seeds of stories and lets you fill in the blanks. Like a wonderful horror movie that doesn’t show you the murder but shows you the other characters’ reaction to finding the body, Portal shows you without telling you. Plus, they do so in the context of a joyous blend of physics tech display, puzzle gaming and mostly non violent first person action that is never not fun to play. Just when Portal feels like it might be wearing out its welcome, the game ends on one of the highest notes in gaming and completes the experience with the most satisfying and rewarding end credits yet. It doesn’t feel developed or designed so much as expertly crafted.

Yet, just when you think you can’t help but say Portal is the Game of the Decade, you have to think about World of Warcraft. The thing about WoW is that it isn’t particularly amazing. Like Rock Band it is more of an amazement to someone from twenty years ago than someone ten years back. Then again, what Blizzard does is rarely amazing in the sense that they’re breaking new ground. Rather, they take established settings and formulas and polish the edges until the whole thing is so glossy and smooth it creates a different kind of amazement more akin to “Why can’t everyone else make games this good?” The differences between WoW and Portal couldn’t be more broad: You have in one hand a tight, perfectly directed experience that wastes no single moment. In the other you have the most sprawling, staggeringly massive collection of high-quality content that could quite possibly never ever end. People who played the open beta of WoW are still grinding through instances and filling their social calendars with raids, happily immersed in a game that cost them $750 over the past five years to play. A rich RPG adventure to play through by yourself, an enviable social experiment to play with friends or to meet new people, World of Warcraft is really the antithesis of Portal in the same format.

So which game best defines the decade?

In the end I have to say World of Warcraft. “Game of the…” discussions are about the past and I don’t think any game better defines the last ten years than an epic online fantasy that tapped into both the social appeal and the human disconnect that may best describe the early 2000s in the years to come. While Portal may be a better game from a critical standpoint and it better represents where I hope games are going, it’s hard not to say that WoW matters more and that it is a better representative for what game developers and game players accomplished this decade.

Now we just have to see if the CG readers agree.

I appreciate what BioWare is doing. Generally, I mean. What I’m saying is that those people are doing Good Work, capitalized and everything. But the one thing I find lacking from their experiences is a sense of player-driven character. Or, frankly, character at all. In Dragon Age they’ve gotten better about not merely offering you the Good Dialogue Choice, the Bad Dialogue Choice and the Greedy Dialogue Choice such that you can’t always readily identify which is Good and which is Bad (making them more genuine in terms of conversational decisions) plus there are other nuances like sarcasm, sincerity, dismissal, disapproval and other non-agenda items which can push the conversation forward. This is certainly a step in the right direction and quite a feat from a writer’s standpoint, but what I feel is left out is the character-based option.

Sure I could decide my character is really sarcastic and always choose the snarky retort but what happens when I’m in a situation that my character would treat differently? During the character creation portion I would have liked to have seen a section that allows me to define, for the sake of the game system, what I intend my personality to be. The BioWare Way, as it were, I think hopes that you’ll create your character from the choices you make with each dialogue tree but I find so often that the attributes I want to project on my avatars aren’t reflected in the choices because when I think about characters I imagine them with a level of nuance that isn’t possible with a handful of possible phrases.

It’s easier for me to think of BioWare games as super elaborate Choose Your Own Adventure novels than role-playing games. At least with games like Oblivion or even something along the lines of Portal where the silent or mostly silent protagonist is essentially a blank canvas I can ascribe certain traits to the character I’m inhabiting and nothing about the game works to dismantle that, but when presented with a dramatic choice in those games I have at most my extracurricular imaginings to provide the emotional context because events happen or not. In Dragon Age and its ilk I’m being given the illusion of influencing the event via my choices but these almost always boil down to some sort of binary decision. It is more compelling to me to imagine the sense of betrayal and outrage my character in Oblivion felt after finishing the Thieves Guild questline in Oblivion, even if it is never borne out in-game, than it is to be given the option to casually lie or impertinently gloat about my actions with the Urn of Sacred Ashes to the helpful scholar. I wanted to have my character be remorseful about it because I was remorseful about having done it. I chose to lie to him because it allowed me to maintain my illusion but in the effort to provide characterization BioWare stunts role-playing by accident.

I have another complaint about Dragon Age, but it’s less esoteric: The Codex system in the game is deeply flawed because you can’t scroll through the codex headings without marking each one as read as you scroll down but they don’t populate within the topic headings via any particular order so while you can tell which topics have unread entries, it becomes increasingly difficult to locate which entries are new once they begin scrolling off the pane which is quickly (I have like 250 Codex entries at the 40 hour mark). Factor in the way that not every Codex update adds a new entry as some merely update existing ones, and I quickly get to the point where I want on an intellectual level to stay abreast of the data being presented, in large part because it’s expertly presented and incredibly exhaustive world-building which I appreciate, but on a practical level I simply can’t. It’s one thing to spend a good 25% of your limited available gaming session time reading fictional history books, it’s another to double that amount because you spend twice as long searching through texts you’ve already read trying to figure out what’s changed.

In related real-life news, the baby has regressed from her earlier pattern of sleeping most of the way through the night and now wakes up most mornings around 04:00 and generally refuses to be put back to bed, insisting that she sleep only while being held. Since it feels particularly dangerous to try and hold her while I sleep myself, I’ve taken to using the Xbox as my means of staying awake until around 07:30 or so when my wife gets up for the day (often after having been up until two or three trying to get the baby to sleep in the first place). As such my console gaming time has been pretty significantly elevated from 6-8 hours per week to perhaps twice that, even if it means I’m doing so in a semi-fugue state of half consciousness and involves some careful and frequently uncomfortable contortions to hold the controller such that it doesn’t touch or disturb Sleeping Beauty. What suffers as a result is my handheld gaming time which I used to put in occasionally between various parental tasks or any stolen moment of downtime but now I’m so tired most of the time that when granted a ten minute reprieve I sort of sit slouched low in whatever chair is available and stare unfocused into the distance and make this sound at a low volume: “Uhhnnnnnhhh….”

The only time I do play DS or PSP is during my daily restroom break which means I play almost exactly 12 minutes a day. I got a little bored of New Super Mario Bros. so I decided to give something altogether different a try and I picked up Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword and played through the first couple of missions. I think I detailed my struggles with the Ninja Gaiden reboot (up through Black and including Sigma) before but suffice to say that I liked the idea of the new game but the execution was broken as far as I’m concerned because—and I realize I risk having whatever tiny scrap of hardcore gamer cred I possessed stripped by saying so—games that are so difficult that they require the sort of practice you might devote to learning a new marketable skill defeat the point of gaming. There was something distastefully elitist about Ninja Gaiden that made me effectively boycott the sequel but I thought that a DS game might be different considering the perception of the DS market. It turns out the game is better than the console game(s) on which it’s drawing its inspiration and, like Resident Evil: Deadly Silence, it is impressive to consider what they were able to fit onto a DS cart. Still, though, the controls are kind of imprecise to the extent that I feel less like I’m playing it and more like I’m learning to sew by murdering some fabric with a knitting needle.

It basically involves drawing various lines across the enemies that appear on the screen which is supposed to represent sword slashes. In truth it’s a clever solution to the control problem for a console-style game on a handheld, but the execution on something like this would need to be so much more precise which, honestly, I think could be solved by simply slowing the game down. Maybe this is heresy but I think games that are fast because the processors they run on are fast sort of misses the point of game design which—call me crazy—should be about what’s fun. I know everyone flipped out about how fast Sonic was after years of ponderously paced NES games but to me that didn’t make Sonic fun it just made it a tech demo. Mimicking things flying by so fast that you can’t make them out is interesting I guess but as with real life, when things whiz by or when something happens too fast for you to really react, it’s not an experience people relate with the adjective “enjoyable.” I’d prefer to have Dragon Sword move slower, not turn-based slower but at least slow enough that you could make the sword swipes precise and have them matter in terms of things like placement, direction and technique. Flailing on the touchscreen with the stylus is fun for a short period of time, but all action-y games that use the stylus end up feeling distressingly similar which is why I lean toward games that at least offer the chance for me to play with the D-pad.

Having depleted my supply of fresh games by mid-week—a feat which required the completion of Bionic Commando, an act I can wholeheartedly recommend you avoid at all costs—I was presented with the choice of either trying Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise again or trying to defeat the desert level in Valkyria Chronicles for the dozenth time. I went with Valkyria Chronicles and it took me another three tries to finally clear the level but I did manage to progress at last, some five months after I first attempted the challenge.

My problem in strategy games, and this includes non-video games like Blood Bowl or Warhammer 40K, is that I think my overall strategies are sound but I lack the calculative ability to plan accordingly for chance. Since almost every game simulates the uncertainty of strategic combat by including some sort of randomized element, I find myself regularly tripped up when the inevitable misfortune that is inherent in these games strikes. Let me give you an example from Valkyria Chronicles: In the briefing before the desert level they indicate that you may want to bring some long-range snipers to help clear the path for your foot soldiers’ approach. There are even two unit spots on an outcropping in the deployment map which are perfect for sniper units. So I dutifully deploy my snipers and start the match. During the round I use a command point to select a sniper and draw a bead on an opposing scout’s head and fire, which should result in a kill. Instead due to random chance the shot misses.

At this point the strategically sound thing would be to return the sniper to a safe position and continue moving the rest of my units according to my original battle plan, but my original plan assumed the death of that scout. Instead of accounting for the possibility that the sniper couldn’t hit the target (which, let’s be honest, was a 250 yard shot indicating he’s playing it pretty fast and loose with the whole “sniper” moniker) I now feel compelled to spend another command point on the sniper, move him onto an exposed bluff edge of his vantage point and try again. Success in these strategy adjustments is largely irrelevant because the net result is typically undesirable—in this case the opposing snipers surrounding the now-dead scout easily retaliate and kill my sniper meaning I had to use a third command point to send someone over to recover the wounded unit, a fourth to call in reinforcements and a fifth to bring the reinforcements into position since they were starting from the base. So in essence a one command point action ended up costing me five to recover from.

Valkyria Chronicles is an excellent strategy game because it doesn’t funnel you into its preferred way of doing things in an unnatural way. Obviously there are certain key strategies that will make individual levels easier to clear than if you run off on your own and load your deployments with half a dozen engineers or whatever. But it compensates for this by making each individual decision significantly more relevant than a handful of key ones as seen in other turn-based strategy games like Final Fantasy Tactics. The benefit of this is that it provides greater freedom for solving the game’s problems your own way; the downside is that you can make a lot of seemingly small mistakes before you realize you’ve gotten yourself in too deep to recover. When matches can take up to an hour or longer even without burying yourself one grain of sand at a time, it can be pretty frustrating to not necessarily know how things are going until you’ve invested a lot of time in a lost cause.

I still find the interminable cut scenes to be far too frequent and lengthy. It would be one thing if the story was rich and nuanced (which I believe it could be, considering the scope of the setting and the number of available characters) but instead the writers/designers chose to focus on a small handful of inexplicably underdeveloped personalities and ramble through a story that is neither intimate and personal to the characters nor broad and epic to the conflict. It’s an odd thing and for a guy who generally finds something compelling in game stories, it’s weird to find myself just wanting to get to the “good stuff.”

The problem with life behind the curve as described a couple of weeks ago is that occasionally events will conspire to leave you with practically nothing to play. In this case the games on my watch list that I’m most willing to spend my few remaining Goozex points on are not being offered at the moment and I’m lacking enough purchasing power to push myself up in the curve (for example, to request slightly newer, higher-priced items). So I purchased my first retail game this year (not counting gifts) and went out and bought Dragon Age: Origins, which is how I spent my gaming weekend.

My first problem with Dragon Age is that there are six different background stories to choose from and I couldn’t decide which one I wanted to pursue from the terse descriptions of each on the character creation page. So I made six different characters and decided I would try all of them. When all was said and done I went with the first character I made anyway (City Elf Rogue) but my progress has allowed me to begin to view that as a partially regrettable choice as I keep thinking back to the other characters I left behind as I forge ahead. My intention, taken for what it’s worth given my time availability these days, is to play enough of this game to earn all available achievements so in theory I will have to work through the game at least once more and probably put some time in on a third character as well (at least leveling to 20). That’s plenty of opportunity to try some other characters but I do worry that I may not have the motivation for continued play that I had with Bethesda’s recent epics and may instead end up with Mass Effect syndrome.

Granted none of that is a problem with the game, it’s actually of a player issue and even then you can hardly fault a game for being too interesting. Which isn’t to say Dragon Age is perfect, but the problems it has are relatively few and minor at that. Graphically the game is strangely unimpressive. It lacks some of the striking visuals of Mass Effect but then again it also doesn’t have as many of the glitches that game suffered from; more to the point the look of everything is sort of drab and uninteresting. It’s one thing to be the wild-hair-and-unlikely-clothing of most Japanese style RPGs but the other end of the spectrum seems to be this sort of sepia-toned blah that too many western RPGs think is “gritty” or whatever. My position is that if you’re going to have hyper-realistic graphics that ooze banality to give a sense of environmental oppression you need to fix stuff like articulation in the hand models and beards that clip through breastplates. I’m just saying, I had no qualms with the visuals in World of Warcraft because while imperfect they were stylish and frequently beautiful.

The other thing that stands out to me about Dragon Age is the fact that it has gone back to the Baldur’s Gate/KotOR style of dialog tree where your character doesn’t speak the actual lines and you select exactly what you want to say from the textual options presented. I think I preferred Mass Effect’s “gist wheel” system that allowed conversations to flow more smoothly, especially since all of Bioware’s games are about 75% conversation. There’s something oddly disconnected about having what amounts to a one-way conversation with someone despite them reacting to your telepathic interjections. Still, it’s one of those concessions to interaction you have to tolerate when you’re into games as a broader entertainment medium.

What I really appreciate about Dragon’s Age is that it feels very much like the kind of Saturday afternoon Dungeons and Dragons sessions from Jr. High, perfectly capturing that kind of classic fantasy setting where everything is just as you expect it to be and the “innovative twists” that set it apart are a sprinkling of semi-adolescent grit: Extra blood, political intrigue, adult themes. It’s hardly amazing, but for whatever reason it hits the spot.

My other project has been New Super Mario Bros. for the DS, which I played a couple of years ago when it was more contemporary. The recent buzz/fuss about the Wii version of NSMB included a lot of what I thought was revisionist history where people were saying they disliked the DS version for being soulless or other such digs that I presumed would have been leveled at the game during its launch window if there were any honesty involved (which I don’t expect much of really when it comes to gaming press types). So I had to re-visit the game to see if—even in hindsight—the critiques were valid. On second playthrough I guess I can kind of see what they’re saying: It certainly isn’t on the same level as SMB3 or Super Mario World, but it isn’t soulless or unenjoyable by any stretch and in fact I’d say it’s biggest flaw isn’t in the parts that really matter like level design (somewhat spotty in the difficulty curve but overall fun) or the mechanics (the few minor additions and improvements are welcome and even add to the fun) but in the relatively minor element of new power-ups. The super mushroom is fun but ultimately kind of useless since it can fairly readily be wasted if you encounter a pipe or passage that you can’t fit in just after you pull it from your inventory. The mini-mushroom is similar: It’s actually detrimental to use it since it’s really a tool and not a power-up (like a power-down I guess?). I also dislike how the game makes value judgments on which power-ups are preferable in terms of which it puts into your inventory slot: I’d almost always prefer a fire flower over a blue turtle shell, but I don’t have a choice.