Tunnels of Doom

As a topic both near and dear to my heart as well as something I was in serious need of considering more closely, I watched the discussion initiated by Penny Arcade over the appropriateness of buying used games with great interest.

Obviously, my purchasing habits are in fact part of the problem being described by the game publishers where secondary markets like GameStop’s ubiquitous used selection and trade services like Goozex enable me to continue gaming and in fact keeping up more or less with the state of the hobby in the present tense without succumbing to a tide of expenses. In the past year and a half my activity level in the hobby has cooled considerably (life events and all that) but I’ve managed to play all the way through a number of titles and sample a few oddities as well with only a few token purchases here and there being of the sort that the publishers would record in their tabulated account books. Without these secondary markets, that wouldn’t have been possible.

The question presented here is a valid one, however. Is this sort of thing acceptable? Is it ethical? It’s necessary for me to seriously consider these questions in this context because if the answer is negative, it represents a call to action.

From what I can gather the two camps rally around the following philosophical justifications which, mind you, don’t have much in the way of refutable weakness. They simply are the rationales in play and you can cast your lot with whichever aligns with your personal ethos. The pro-secondary market person says, “If I didn’t have the cost-effective alternatives available to me, I wouldn’t bother. Therefore I represent the non-consumer anyway, outside the target market, who never will contribute to the industry directly anyway.” The anti-secondary market person says, “If you receive entertainment value from something that was produced by creative and technical minds, you owe those people your direct support from an ethical standpoint.”

As I said, neither is particularly wrong and you can’t really argue the face value of either. However, you can sort of eliminate the whole discourse if you can believe the basic tenet of the pro-secondary market position. This is critical because the thesis here is that if you got rid of Goozex and eBay and GameFly and GameStop’s used games—let’s say all game content was seamlessly DRM protected and digitally delivered—these individuals would simply stop playing games. Theoretically the entire industry (we have to leave retail out of the conversation for the sake of the point) would see no noticeable shift in supply or demand. After all, as far as publishers are concerned, secondary market customers represent zero revenue for them. Likewise, the support from those individuals is, if you accept the fact of their abandonment of this sort of entertainment if they cannot control the price structure, non-existent. There can be no ethical dilemma here because the support received by the industry from the supportive consumers is at 100% currently, the secondary market is fundamentally no different from the wide base of non-gamers who never spend a red cent on any games or gaming-related paraphernalia.

The problem is, logic suggests that’s not true at all. For one thing, hardware manufacturers would be impacted: It’s certainly possible some secondary market devotees also get their gaming hardware used, but I’d be shocked out of my penny loafers to find the used hardware market represented even a fraction of the install base for any given platform whereas I’d not be the least bit surprised to find that the percentage of individuals who play any given game for an hour or more without buying the full retail product is well into the double digits. The other issue is that I suspect most gamers who utilize the secondary market are in fact very much like me in that they want to play a lot more games than they can reasonably afford at full retail prices but that doesn’t mean they aren’t willing to pay MSRP at least occasionally. On one platform I can think of at least eight titles I’ve purchased new from retail off the top of my head in the past four years, and there are probably a few more I’ve forgotten as well. Now that’s nothing compared to the number of games I’ve played that I acquired on the secondary market, but the reality is that if there were no Goozex or rental stores I’d perhaps play that handful of games that I picked up on Christmas or from the occasional splurge and nothing else.

Of course the tricky element to this is that maybe that’s not true at all and if there were no way for myself or others like me to engage in cost-management for the hobby, we may very well choose instead to disengage from the hobby (as is threatened by the pro-secondary market position) only in this case the damage to the industry as a whole would not be insignificant but would in fact represent a dramatic shift downward as all these so-labeled leechers suddenly stopped buying hardware, peripherals, and yes, even software occasionally.

Which leads back to the ethics question because what it seems to come down to is whether partial support is ethical enough for a consumer like myself who does, in fact, take advantage of many creative and talented development teams’ work without direct compensation. I mean, I can see from Mike and Jerry’s perspective how that could feel untenable since they don’t just gain leisure value from the work of game designers and producers but they earn a living off the back of that industry. For myself, though, I’m just not sure I can work up enough sympathy for an industry that has painted itself into a corner with the soaring costs of development and then tried to surreptitiously pass those poor judgments along to the consumer with inflated retail prices across the board, only dipping into casual economic brackets once the game has earned “Greatest Hits” status or whatever (basically reached a critical mass for initial retail revenue and now require broadening of the fanbase to secure audience for the inevitable sequel).

And for what it’s worth, secondary market devotees do have to take some concessions for their thrift: One thing that may perhaps surprise you is that I’m all in favor of things like THQ’s one-time codes to reward shrinkwrap purchasers. Give the early adopters some special gifts, I say. I have no problem with value-adding to full price purchases so long as they don’t represent a crippling of the core game. In fact, perhaps the biggest conscience-easing exercise I can take is to imagine what would happen if some publisher did decide to include, say, a download code that provided, say, the game’s final chapter—available only to the first person who bought that copy of the game. I would not play that game. Should all game publishers engage in similar tactics, I would simply walk away from the industry. I believe this would be detrimental to the industry as a whole: As frugal as I am with my hobby activities, I do support the industry in my own way, at my particular level of comfort. Publishers are free to decide they don’t care to retain me as a customer. I won’t take it personally, I’ll just take my disposable income somewhere else.

I really don’t envy people who get paid to review games when open-world titles hit their assignment queues. Having been slowly working my way through Red Faction: Guerrilla for the last couple of months, I can say that trying to digest a game like this in a couple of days would be frustrating at the very least. I mean, I’m certain that you could get the basic idea of the game in that time, playing enough of the different mission types to meet the requirements for advancement from sector to sector and then hitting the mandatory story missions but most of the reward that I can find from open-style games comes from the make-your-own-fun interludes. Which is to say there is perhaps significantly more interest in these types of games from my perspective in not pursing the story, which for a story hound like myself is an odd thing to consider.

Red Faction’s hook is in it’s destructible environments or, more specifically, in it’s destructible buildings. I guess earlier incarnations of the franchise focused on level geometry deformation but the planet in Guerrilla is static, it’s the structures that you can shape in this case. And by “shape” I mean “pulverize.” Since it’s a huge part of the game I might as well get out the way the talk about the building destruction. On the positive notes, destroying buildings is a lot of fun. I mean, practically every weapon you get is basically a building knocker-downer. I guess there are an assortment of machine guns and pistols and laser rifles but honestly I barely ever used them. It’s far more effective to topple a building on a squad of enemy troopers than it is to try to pick them off one by one, plus most of your key destructive devices like explosive charges, rocket launchers and sledgehammers are infinitely more powerful than the piddly guns you find around so early on I decided, “why bother?” Anyway, most of the missions practically demand that you knock something or several somethings over anyway so if the pesky bad guys get crushed while I’m doing my job, so much the better. You also get access to some heavy vehicles including sturdy dump trucks and the ever-thrilling walkers (very reminiscent of the Power Loader from Aliens) which are good at crushing building supports. The physics engine behind the building is cool in that the chunks of cement and metal you blast, knock and bash off of the structures feels solid and real and unlike some other examples I’ve seen of destructible environments the structures feel sturdy as if you really needed all these explosives and heavy machinery to take them down as opposed to, say, a well-aimed belch.

The bad part about the building destruction is that the sense of heft the physics engine conveys is undermined by a faulty series of calculations that permits unrealistic loads can be borne by certain supports which often leads to these strange looking half-destroyed buildings that have no right in the world to remain standing but float in disbelief-defying air while you circle the remaining scraps looking for the one bit of frame that inexplicably holds the thing aloft. Also there are too many cases where certain key support bits have been given additional damage-absorption capacity by the engine algorthims such that you can whack away at them but they won’t fall even though you know it would bring the whole house crashing down. It’s annoying to instead have to go around slapping away at flimsy exterior walls until a specific damage amount has been done and the engine allows the building to finally fall. The last thing is that while knocking over walls is sort of the raison d’être, there are only so many rationales for flattening the Martian landscape they can come up with so eventually you start to laugh at the euphemisms the NPCs use for “bring down a building.”

The combat in Red Faction is acceptable, there’s a crude cover system that is kind of comical since all the chest-high walls fall over within five minutes of entering the sector but like I said most of the time you’re just flattening barracks and office complexes with all the bad guys inside anyway. The vehicle driving is pretty much universally terrible: The game renders the Martian landscape like an establishing shot from Deliverance, lacking much in the way of paved or even straight roads. You spend a lot of time fighting the floaty, terrain-beholden car controls as you careen up the sheer faces of rock walls in an attempt to get where you’re going. It may not surprise you that the missions that gave me the most trouble were the ones where you had to return a stolen vehicle to a safehouse within a specific time frame.

The basic structure is that for each sector you visit there are a number of Guerrilla actions you have to perform in order to decrease the evil empire’s control value on the region. Once the control is low enough you can perform the story missions (there are a total of 20), about three in each sector, to liberate the area. The Guerrilla actions are both fixed-position and also radioed in as you bumble around Mars which kind of bothered me. One thing I get very sick of in open world games is unsolicited missions. GTA IV was terrible about this with various cronies calling me incessantly to come take them on dates or hang out with them or get into mischief or whatever the mini-mission was at the time. At least Red Faction doesn’t punish you with loss of character respect or trust or what have you and they will in fact re-broadcast the mission later on if you miss it the first time, but it’s still annoying to be en route to one activity and be told there is another, more pressing activity you should be doing right now. Excuse me, is this open world or is it not?

In any case the missions aren’t particularly novel: You’re either holding a position against a certain number of enemies, trying to kill or destroy a certain number of enemies within a time limit, trying to knock down a building with a specific kit within a time limit, driving a car back to a safehouse within a time limit, rescuing some hostages, ambushing a convoy, tailing someone and stealing their delivery or manning a mounted gun on a destruction raid. There are plenty of collectibles as expected as well and there are non-mission activities that can result in decreasing the sector control, such as destroying key enemy structures and buildings. There is also a morale system related to the citizens of the sector that influences how they perceive your Red Faction organization. This is used to inspire you not to kill innocents and, also, not to die. The only penalty you get for dying is a small hit to the sector morale. For the most part I never really had to babysit any of these values, my base approach to each new sector was to hit all the stationary Guerrilla missions, blow up all the key structures and then do all three story missions back to back. Sometimes story missions unlock other Guerrilla actions as well, but by doing everything I was able to get all available unlocks and afford their upgrades before the final mission, so it seemed like a solid strategy.

The story missions are a bit better in terms of variety and intrigue, the plot of Red Faction is pretty thin: You’re a new recruit in a resistance movement trying to force the local militarized corporate overlords off the planet. There are some twists involving a gang of raider-type savages who have a macguffin called the Nano Forge but for the most part it’s predictable and straight forward. It would have been nice to see the creativity of the story mission structure explored in the standard missions as well, though. One has you running around a town under artillery fire trying to collect key pieces of data and supplies before the place is razed. Another involves you leading a huge, aggressive army of enemy troops on a chase through the sector as you try to knock out their jamming signal towers within a time limit and before your truck explodes. Overall the game (and its achievements) aren’t affected by the difficulty setting so there’s very little reason not to set it to casual and enjoy the limited damage most enemies can do to you. The game isn’t difficult but like many open world games it does have its frustrating moments so you’ll appreciate the leg up.

Thankfully there is a checkpoint system in the missions but most aren’t long enough to take advantage of it, and while the map has a pathing option, the rally points are limited to “civilized” areas on main roads so if you’re trying to mark an out-of-the-way location you’re basically sunk, plus the algorithm isn’t too hot anyway, frequently giving least-efficient paths especially where destructible structures like bridges and overpasses may still be standing. I guess the map code has no awareness of which possibly impassable routes are still viable.

Overall I enjoyed Red Faction. It’s not as engrossing as Assassin’s Creed II and while getting from point A to point B in ACII was typically as much fun as the place you were going, Red Faction is all about what you do once you finally get there. Some of the later unlockable weapons are very, very cool and the novelty of blasting buildings apart never really wore off for me. I would have liked a better plot maybe, and some more cleverness in the mundane game activities, but I put a fair number of hours into the game and still had enough left in me after the credits rolled to keep logging in looking for last minute collectibles and trying to find missions I’d overlooked (mostly radio-provided).

I should also mention quickly that I actually did play some of the multiplayer for Red Faction (which is rare enough) and it’s pretty decent, although I suck badly at online mulitplayer anything so it’s frustrating to consistently be waxed by unseen opponents. They have a backpack system for granting special powers like jetpacks and charge attacks and stealth that is kind of novel plus the whole destructible environments angle makes for some fun unexpected moments. I probably won’t devote a whole lot of time to it, but I’m sure I’ll try a few more matches and see if I get even a tiny bit better before I quit in frustration.

According to my records it only took me 20 or so days of play to run through Borderlands, which is about my normal pace for an RPG that I enjoy reasonably well. Of course, it took me more like 52 calendar days to make it through. I was thinking about this the other day, how my video gaming has diminished so significantly especially since my daughter—who somehow didn’t really hamper my gaming style in the first few months—became more active with crawling and interacting and such. Even though there are times when I get a tiny bit bummed that I don’t have a lot of time or money to devote to gaming (say 700 hours or $876.70 per year), I really have no complaints. Among other things I savor games a little more and since there were 32 some odd days in between various play sessions for me to contemplate Borderlands as I played it, I digested it better than I have some other games I’ve played quickly and discarded just as fast.

Borderlands is, as many others have noticed, a FPS MMO. Granted, it isn’t massively multiplayer, but it definitely follows the MMO structure and the main difference is the combat is real-time FPS as opposed to cooldown/semi-real-time third person like most MMOs. For people who don’t mind the MMO conventions, which I would say describes me, it’s not offensive in the least. The FPS controls are tight and the distinctive cel-shaded look makes playing Borderlands feel a lot like living in a graphic novel and I’m a huge sucker for that kind of thing.

The plot of Borderlands is tenuous at best, with you looking for a mystical Vault and in the process championing the underdogs (underskags?) of the planet against the oppressive bandits and mercenaries and greedy interplanetary corporations who want either to just be generically oppressive or generically greedy. You’re led around by a mysterious woman who contacts you via your communicator and never reveals anything significant about herself nor is it really explained why you blindly follow her instructions. My single biggest complaint with Borderlands lies here, in the indistinct narrative that ought to tie the game’s endless fetch questing together but actually turns out to be nothing more than one gigantic 30+ hour fetch quest, and not even one that has a satisfactory ending. If you come into this game looking for fulfillment in the story department, you’re going to leave sorely disappointed.

In a very real way Borderlands is all about the journey. It’s a grind game for grinders. The game narrows quickly into a cycle of fetch quest, new area, enemy encounter, loot management, quest turn in, lather-rinse-repeat. If you can’t stomach this sort of thing without a compelling plot to string you along, avoid Borderlands. I believe this is why people say Borderlands works best as a co-op game, because tedium is always more fun when you can make your own enjoyment with friends. I haven’t played co-op yet because for better or for worse I may not actively seek out grind-y games, but I’m not opposed to them so I finished the game all by my lonesome and felt reasonably happy most of the time doing it. Call it a quirk of my personality but as small and shallow as it is, I find enough reward in incrementally improving my kit to push me through even though I like to talk about how important narrative is to me.

To be fair, there is enough mystery in the sketchy plot to at least have curiosity be a minor factor in getting through to the end of the main quest, but toward that end it becomes clear that the dramatic moment you keep hoping for never will (perhaps never can) materialize. If you didn’t have as much fun as I was able to seeking out higher XP levels and slightly different (i.e. questionably improved) primary weapons, that may be the point the controller gets broken in frustration. For me, it was a disappointed shrug and then even after the game’s credits rolled I continued playing and achievement hunting for another 30-45 minutes.

I’m not sure Borderlands is the sort of game I’m dying to get DLC for, nor am I sure I’ll revisit it anytime soon. I’m not trading it away right off, I know that. I’m going to let it sit on the shelf for a bit and see if I get the itch to come back to it. Also, I keep hoping someone on my friends list will magically decide to pick it up (again?) and ask me to do some co-op with them. I have other games to play in the meantime, and it wasn’t so spectacular that I can’t bring myself to pry it from the 360′s disc tray, but for a gaming OCD like myself, especially one with an undying love of beautiful cel-shaded graphics, Borderlands almost accidentally hit a lot of my weak spots. Like a boss with glowing orange “shoot me here” areas, I came down pretty easy as a result.

I’ve been trying to organize a monthly game day since earlier this year. It hasn’t been wildly successful as I had hoped, but considering the amount of tabletop gaming I get done under normal circumstances, anything is an improvement.

This past weekend was the second one I’ve managed to organize; each game day has its own theme and this one was space-themed games.

Star Commander

My buddy Thom brought Star Commander along and we played it first. It’s a card-driven resource management game with a light space theme (the metaphor could easily be anything: Pirate ships, truck driving, etc.) where you attempt to build a complete set of cards by wrangling the key resource in the game, which in this case is crew members. Each ship type has a set number of crew that it can hold (and indeed needs to have in order to win the game). You pay sufficient crew cards to purchase the ships (10 for a scout ship, 20 for a cruiser, and so on) and then play additional crew to staff them up. Essentially it takes 20 crew to buy and then staff a scout for example.

The trick is that you can shuttle crew members between the ships in your fleet so you can use crew from one stocked ship to stock or help buy another. The idea is that eventually you must purchase and staff a full fleet of ships (two of the scouts plus a cruiser, a dreadnaught and a base) in order to win. But of course the whole while your opponents are doing the same as well as trying to slow you down by attacking your ships with missiles and lasers. There are counter cards to the attack ones, like evasions and shields, plus defensive ships have a chance to fight back if they aren’t destroyed early so combat can be a risky proposition. And of course there are a number of special cards that allow certain rules to be changed like spies which permit non-combat destruction of ships with the help of a sabotage card and convoys that help you protect your most valuable ships.

I ended up winning the game in spite of it being my first time playing, mostly due to the fact that when given the opportunity late in the game one of my opponents didn’t attack me but focused on someone else instead, claiming a higher percentage chance of victory. It may or may not have been a valid tactic but in any case it allowed me to continue drawing to find the last crew card I needed to fill the base and win.

Overall I liked Star Commander; the open-ended combat system was novel and fun in a modified War kind of way, and the turns were quick enough to avoid having the game drag too much. However, I had a few key complaints that prevented me from really loving it. One was that I felt the card distribution in the deck was off: There were too many times where people sat around for five to ten turns just waiting for a crew card to show up, staring at a handful of fairly useless combat cards. Meanwhile, you can’t actually attack without a mandatory Engage card which were also frustratingly rare. Since you needed one or the other to really do anything useful, it felt like there should have been more of each. It seemed like very often people in Crew card droughts would draw an Engage card and pick a fight with someone just because combat was a good excuse to empty cards from your hand and you got to draw back up to 7 once the combat was over. We did find out toward the end of the game that you can replace your hand on your turn for a whole new one once per game, but that didn’t seem like enough to really counteract the poor card balance.

The other complaint was that the crew level was marked by having the ship card cover up the higher crew levels on a thin board that represented your fleet, except the boards were prone to bumping and if the card shifted it was easy to forget how much crew had really been on the ship. A simple solution to me would have been to stack the (copious) Crew cards under or near the ships which would have allowed them to be audited later. I also wish there had been some more thought put in to the theme which as I mentioned was pretty exchangeable. The closest they came was the shields/fire system/laser combo in combat, but it certainly wasn’t an integral part of the game or even the combat system. Maybe something along the lines of specific maneuver cards or a sense of putting the ships in a formation for the purposes of convoys might have helped.

Sector 41

A few months back I took my daughter to a flea market being held at a game store within reasonable driving distance. I picked up a couple of games while I was there, none of which I had heard of but I gave them a shot just because they were bargains and looked interesting. Sector 41 was apparently developed by a local guy and Thom had actually participated in the testing of the game early on.

Basically it works like this: You set up a grid of 81 tiles that represent the titular Sector 41. Each player has a mothership tile that moves along one edge of the grid, one or two spaces per turn. On the mothership are three scout vessels which can be deployed to search the sector by flipping over the tile as you land on it and, depending on the type of tile, either continuing your move or ending your turn. There is also a mechanic-based token called the Wanderer who starts in the middle of the board and is moved by the current player to an unexplored tile to help speed the exploration of the sector along (Thom said the Wanderer had been added since he tested the game, probably in response to feedback that the game was in desperate need of a faster pace).

The point of the game is to search for ore-producing planets marked with numbers that contain the desired resource called Glynnium. The numbers indicate how many resource tokens appear on that planet. Each player then struggles for dominance over the planet (and the resource) by using the explored tiles and a mechanic called space folding that allows the mothership to skip lateral movement for a turn in favor of pushing the tiles in its current stack forward, pulling the furthest tile back to the near edge. The player who ends up with the most Glynnium wins.

Where the game really works is in building the sense of space exploration, with all its likely hazards, pitfalls and serendipitous chance, and conveying the sense of competition between warring mining companies trying to race to find but also cleverly outmaneuver their rivals to emerge as the victor. Exploring is always fun and the space folding mechanism makes for some really amusing and interesting strategies.

Here’s where the game lacks: Primarily the production of the game is flawed in that it can’t be played without a reference sheet. There are dozens of tile types and many of them do some unusual things but they are represented on the tiles themselves by an often abstract or indistinct illustration and nothing more. Constantly having to check the manual to determine what each tile does is tedious and unnecessarily slow when the problem could have easily been solved by including the tile effect text on the tile itself. It may not have looked quite as nice, but it would have made it much more playable.

The second issue is that combat in the game is boring. As in, barely worth bothering with boring. Sure, it can be strategic, but literally the attacker always wins, no matter how many defenders there are. Since there is no risk vs. reward element, and the end result is typically a matter of replacing an occupying explorer with your own, often combat goes back and forth for turns while players use a combination of combat and space folding to wear each other—that is, each player—down until someone gives up. That sort of design should never make it out of the planning phase. This is curious to me as well since the box I got came with a space-age looking dice that isn’t used anywhere. I assumed there may be some alternate rules somewhere that allowed combat to be a bit more intriguing but why it wasn’t included in the base game I can’t fathom.

In the end, I won this game as well, largely due to several fortuitous Glynnium deposits being close to my starting position and the fact that Thom and Aaron spent a large part of the mid-game playing cat-and-mouse over a stash of the resource in their adjacent corners. It’s one of those games that I find myself very much enjoying while I play but as soon as the game is over I want to grouse about some of the dumber design decisions. I think it bugs me that it’s so obviously flawed when it has the potential to be really good.

Race to the Galaxy

With time running short toward the end of the day, I broke out Race which I play about once a year. The problem with it is that it’s the kind of game that you really need to play a bunch in order to have the flow work well or you have to have everyone playing be at about the same comfort level with the rules. Since I’m typically playing with people who are much more familiar with it than I am I almost always feel flustered and behind, like I’m holding up the show. I never get enough chance to develop a strategy and when the game is over and points are being counted I often feel lucky to have any VPs at all, sometimes even wondering how I managed to get as many as I did.

I doubt I’ll ever play it often enough to memorize the cards or get enough of a standard strategy to know what to look for if my starting world is X or if I draw Y early in the game but it would be nice if I were at least familiar enough with the basic play so that if people wanted to add the expansions I didn’t practically tremble in fear because I can barely handle the base game.

As it was I found it amusing that everyone else playing was remarking how different the game was without the expansions they had become accustomed to and I was thinking they all needed to slow down so I could have a chance to figure out what my next move was going to be.

I still had fun—no matter what I really do like the game—but Kristi won by a very large margin mostly due in part to her getting a VP combo going far earlier than anyone else as we scrambled trying to get some resource production in place. I think a good time was had by all.

Looking Ahead

I think the second Game Day was successful overall. We got three games finished in about six hours including time for pizza and rules explanations for a couple of the games which is a good rate I think. Next month I’m planning for fantasy-themed games: I would really like to have my Talisman minatures painted for that but I also have Runebound and DungeonQuest as fallbacks. Meanwhile there are plenty of fantasy games I haven’t tried or only tried once like Warhammer Quest or Descent. Ideally someone coming next month will have something like that they want to bring and if I don’t get to play Talisman with painted minis, I can at least try something new.

My game playing time has noticeably decreased. As such, it took me the better part of three months to finish Assassin’s Creed II, where I finished the original plus spent an additional order of magnitude of time fiddling around and hunting for flags and whatnot in perhaps a single month. It would not, therefore, be a stretch to estimate that it’s currently taking me about six times as long to get through games. But, I am still playing.

Immediately after finishing ACII, I was treated by my wife to BioShock 2 which I ran through as fast as my current spare time allowances will permit. I thought it telling that both games were sequels to games released in 2007, which I also played in close proximity to one another, and that I had very specific expectations for each sequel going in.

Assassin’s Creed

Upon my initial completion of the first game in the series, I said this, “My overall impression of the game is favorable, but I don’t think that means I misunderstand the complaints people have leveled against it.” It was mild praise for a game that, at the time, I felt deserved a very soft thumbs-up. Of course I continued to mess around with it, doing the sort of post-completion achievement hunting I typically reserve for my top tier games, and later commented, “I never would have thought that a game I was sort of on the fence about would have this long of legs…” In the ensuing years I’ve come to recall the game far more fondly than I think I expected to when I first played it. In fact, looking up those old impressions surprised me somewhat at how tepid I was toward the game.

I knew it had some issues, but I also felt after the fact like I was one of the few people who really enjoyed AC for what it was as opposed to loathing it for what it wasn’t quite able to be. Above all I think I really enjoyed the plot of the game, a wild mixture of conspiracy, history, speculative fiction, political intrigue, alternate history, mysticism and religious revisionist lunacy that scratched hard on an itch I wasn’t even aware I possessed. Sure it had either a boldly untidy epilogue or a sloppily lazy one, but it was somewhat thrilling to have a game set in ancient Jerusalem of all places. Say what you will about the storytelling in games, but this is at the very least a singularly creative vision being presented as a mass market game which simply must be admired if you care at all about video game writing.

So the sequel was a foregone conclusion but I admit to being pretty disappointed when I learned they were skipping ahead to the late fifteenth century and introducing a new central protagonist. I mean, let’s be clear here: Assassin’s Creed II is a game that could have jumped off the narrative rails in a extremely messy and tragic fashion. Almost inexplicably, though, it doesn’t. In fact, the introduction of Ezio Auditore da Firenze is an unmitigated success in part because he’s similar enough to Altair so as to not be too jarring but he allows for a greater depth of character without having to deus ex machina some silly explanation for why the stoic Altair suddenly has a sense of humor. Which is not to say that Ezio is yet a fully realized character, for large segments of the game narrative he is primarily glum and simply bitter with the quest for revenge that sets him on his path, but he is still a step up from the previous game. And meanwhile there are plenty of well-crafted secondary characters that are in this case actually memorable and since the entire assassination sequence is all part of a singular plot as opposed to a late-breaking macguffin hunt as in the first game, there allows for plenty of moments of dramatic tension and adversarial development.

In fact nearly every single element that made the original AC enjoyable is intact and the rest of the game is polish and shine to the point of sparkling brilliance. Crowd interactions are better; the controls are improved; side quests are better defined; assassination quests are better and more varied; collection tasks are contextualized and more enjoyable; the travel systems are welcome and functional without spoiling the feel of the open world; the plot is more cohesive and engaging; even the combat is slightly improved, although it still usually devolves into waiting for a guard to begin his striking animation and then hit the counter button. It is the collection of improvements on a game already ripe with Good Ideas but somewhat hasty execution that makes ACII one of my favorite games in recent memory.

I was cautiously optimistic heading in and came out dazzled and more ravenous than ever for the next installment.

BioShock 2

The obvious contrast is that while I liked Assassin’s Creed back in 2007, I loved BioShock. In my non-ToD review I summarized it thusly: “It is a phenomenal work of game design. It unequivocally ought to be experienced at least once by every gamer.” I even placed it at #11 on my (still shamefully unfinished) revised top 30 games list. That’s just outside of the top ten games all time for me. The original BioShock was so good in fact that I played it through three times in spite of the fact that it had several key missed opportunities within it, the most notorious of which was the tragically rote final boss battle. I almost never play shooters through a second time, much less a third.

But, like many, I was highly skeptical of a BioShock sequel. The first relied in so many ways on being a specific place and time, telling a particular tale in a certain way and I didn’t think it could be recaptured. In fact, I wasn’t even sure it should be tried. After all, unless you were to re-make the first game with a more robust morality system and an improved finale, there wasn’t a wide selection of places to go with a sequel but down. Or so I thought.

The good news is that BioShock 2 doesn’t trample all over the accomplishments of the first. Quite wisely the developers didn’t fall into the M. Night Shyamalan trap of trying to one-up the twisting turns of the original narrative and instead crafted a competent revisit to a strangely beckoning dystopia. Cast in the role of a Big Daddy, the game touches in a lot of ways on themes from the original game, still pushing you into the midst of an ideological war that you don’t seem to have much personal stake in. The new antagonist who takes the reigns from Andrew Ryan, Dr. Sofia Lamb, is similarly arrogant and smarmy in her radio interactions with the silent protagonist, Subject Delta. The game deals more explicitly with the origins of the Big Daddies and the Little Sisters and the nature of their queer relationship, which is interesting although it smacks of the kind of explanatory discussions peripheral to a central work that are reserved for the devoted diehard fans and could largely be taken or left by the casually interested. It also runs the risk of ruining the mystique of such elements although in this particular case I didn’t find anything to be particularly midichlorianesque. Mercifully.

And as a matter of fact, BioShock 2 does improve on many of the gameplay elements from the original: Hacking is a downright joy compared to the Pipe Dream mini-game that was awkward and out of place in the first game. The selection and progression of the tonics and plasmids are excellent as are the new additions to the old standbys. The additional weapons are nice, too, as is the dual-fisted plasmid/firearm combination granted in favor of the either/or mechanism of the first game. By far the best gameplay addition is the protection sequences where you can adopt a Little Sister, find a body capable of being harvested for Adam and then set her to it. This brings a wave of Splicers running and your task is to guard the Sister while she laboriously collects the necessary material. It’s a better replacement for the challenging Big Daddy fights from BioShock 1 (those are still there but less intense as you can stand fairly well toe-to-toe with a single dive suited foe) since you can control the environment a little and scout for possible access routes to place traps.

However, despite these incremental steps forward, there is something that feels a bit mundane about BioShock 2. While Assassin’s Creed II’s comprehensive polish created a game that went beyond just fulfilling the promise of the first or became what the original strived to be, BioShock 2 provides at best a return to a happily familiar setting, like returning to a park you played in as a child. Sure, there is some reminiscent joy to be had there, but it will never touch the cherished memories you have.

What I think stands out about this is that if there had been no 2007 somehow and these games were the first in their respective series my opinion of them would have likely been completely flipped: AC would be the one coasting in toward the top ten of my all time games and BioShock would be an interesting, if slightly flawed, game I played around the same time. What a difference a sequel makes.

I guess I decided to take a longer break than I intended. Partially this is due to my very limited gaming time (even video gaming) such that it took me almost three months to complete Assassin’s Creed II. But I should have a recap up shortly. In the meantime I direct you to this page detailing the differences between the original TI99-4A Tunnels of Doom theme and the reworked version from the ToD Reboot project. Pretty cool stuff.

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.