Tunnels of Doom

I spent the Thanksgiving weekend out of town and away from my home consoles which might have meant that I spent a lot more time than usual with my DS. Well, technically that is true but honestly it wasn’t like some DS marathon. We only went from the Bay Area to Seattle which is a pretty short two hour flight and while we were there we spent a lot of time out on the town and doing touristy things which didn’t work so well for gaming.

Not that I think any of that is particularly bad. Sometimes even avid gamers could use a break, and I enjoyed mine. However, I did slyly work a couple of bookend days onto my travel schedule so I got several days worth of game in between packing and travel prep and chores to make up for a week’s worth of vacating the house. So even though the time off was long and full of friends and good food, I packed a normal weekend’s worth of gaming into an extended time frame.

Thoughts on Mass Effect, DS on planes and other public places, gaming Gameznflix and more below.

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I didn’t play as much Xbox this week as I might have otherwise. After all, there is a Call of Duty 4 addiction I need to feed happening here. But unfortunately my Xbox broke, 347 days after I purchased it. Now, in this case it wasn’t the typical Red Ring of Death but an E 74 black screen of death. Either way, the system was shot.

I’ll spare you the details for now, but it took me until Thursday to get it fixed so I didn’t really get that much gaming in during the week unless you count a few hours spent playing Phantom Hourglass, which counts but is hardly significant compared to the time I would have dumped into CoD4 had I been able. Also it was one of those things were I could have really used the stress relief because I had a rough week, but it was made better when Thursday my wife surprised me with a “feel better” gift of the Messenger Kit which is the little keyboard thingy that snaps onto the bottom of a 360 controller.

As far as the Xbox is concerned, it works and that’s all I care about. I did an in-store replacement and ended up with one of the newer Pro models that has the included HDMI port and comes bundled with Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Forza Motorsport 2. The console itself is an improvement over my other because it is generally quieter and the drive is less obnoxious. It’s not exactly what I’d call a total success, hardware-wise, but it is what MS should have shipped in the first place.

I’ll tell you this much, the Messenger Kit is a very nice piece of hardware but after using it all weekend I can say two things for certain:

1. When you don’t have the Messenger Kit, every time you have to use the text-input interface in the Dashboard, it’s really painful.
2. When you do have the Messenger Kit, text input becomes a delight and yet you realize that (probably due to #1) there just aren’t that many instances where it becomes necessary.

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My experience with online multiplayer games, especially shooters, has been what I’d describe as uneven. I enjoy playing the games and while the irritating people who populate… well, the world, if you want to get right down to it—they annoy me but no more than the folks at, say, the grocery store annoy me. What stumps me is that while I adored Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament, since then I’ve had a hard time enjoying that type of experience for any sort of prolonged period. Sure, I enjoyed Halo 2 for a while and I had some fun with CS on the original Xbox then more recently I’ve put some time in on Halo 3 and a touch of Gears but by and large despite the fact that I play quite a few shooters, I tend to avoid the online modes.

My reasons for this aren’t well-defined, but it has something to do with intimidation coupled with a general lack of skill and an odd quirk of my patience that provides a near indefatigable capacity for refining my play as I progress through a story mode but a quick onset of boredom if I don’t accelerate through the n00b-to-vet transition online readily. Somehow it seems a certain game needed to come along that fit my mindset completely and I’m now wondering if Call of Duty 4′s curious blend of role-playing and online shooter is not exactly that game.

Read on for more thoughts on CoD4 plus some achievement chasing/score padding and a few other odds and ends.

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Spoiler Alert ought to come with no qualifying remarks. The title itself is, one would hope, sufficient to frighten off anyone who has yet to experience a game and wishes to do so untainted. But in just this one special case, it is worth noting particularly that the less you know about Portal before you begin the better your experience will be. It is precisely this revelation that has made the wonder of Portal so maddening: Once you’ve been pulled into its wonderful, twisted little world it can be all you want to talk about and yet you feel inclined to refrain, out of deference to those who have yet to dive into the Enrichment Center.

Swooping to the rescue is Spoiler Alert, here to provide a safe haven for the Portal initiates to discuss what has become the buzz of the gaming community.

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The risk inherent in seeking out the “critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful” product is that sometimes critics, being immersed as they are in whatever they critique, find delight in something that is perhaps otherwise flawed merely because it is different. Movie critics are like this a lot: The artsy foreign snoozers a normal person couldn’t sit through will entrance them because it simply dares to break the mold of the medium in some—possibly flawed—manner.

I want to believe that video game critics have something more to offer than your average dork with a PlayStation and a Live account, something like a sense of history and a genuinely discerning eye. This hasn’t always been my experience, but I continue to give them the benefit of the doubt because if nothing else game reviewers and journalists tend to have a broader perspective on games and their relative scores and sales than most casual market observers. So when something that everyone seems to love sells terribly, it strikes me as interesting.

My first experience with Psychonauts, the late-gen original Xbox game from Creative Director Tim Schaefer, was less than overwhelming. But as I sat down this weekend with a short lull in the holiday gaming deluge, I found myself being slowly won over by a clever, cute and ceaselessly charming little game that all the critics loved (88 metacritic score) but no one bought (one report suggested it sold under 100,000 copies despite the critical acclaim).

Oh, and I did some other stuff this weekend, too.

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