Tunnels of Doom

Christmas time can be curious for someone like me who is accustomed to buying his own toys. I figure that I work long hours to earn this money so while I certainly have financial obligations to meet, I also sort of owe it to myself to buy some fun stuff every once in a while. The purpose of $60 a Month is to maintain a steady stream of enjoyment without busting the bank but what do you do when you anticipate getting a pile of gifts in a few weeks?

In this case you’re about to see that without spending any more of my budget than is strictly necessary, I end up not really having much to report. A letdown from Gameznflix doesn’t help and ultimately the most exciting stuff happens outside the scope of $60 a Month with the gifts I received. Still, it’s not a big deal: It just means January will be epic.

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In Part I I detailed the games I played this year. It’s not strictly necessary to read that list to understand what I’m doing here, but it may be useful if you see something omitted because I only pulled games for these awards from that list. After all, how can I comment or recognize a game I never played? So before you get upset, check the list and make sure I played it. If I missed a game you thought was fantastic this year, feel free to send me suggestions.

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She saved the largest box for last, which meant that in her mind it was the “best” of the lot. It looked like a shoebox and honestly I thought it was actually going to be shoes, and I was pretty excited about it. Last year my wife got me a pair of shoes for Christmas and it was a great gift: The kind of thing I’d hate to buy for myself but I was really pleased with what she’d picked out for me. It was, in fact, a shoebox but the box was for a women’s brand so I was less excited about it actually being shoes. As I dug into the box, its contents obscured by tissue paper, I realized suddenly what it had to be.

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You can’t say it was a bad year for games. This year, for me especially, was a banner gaming year and even though my best tabletop/role-playing gamer friend up and bailed on me early in the year I managed to play a ton of games.

As we approach the end of the year, it’s time to evaluate some of the games and look back on what transpired and single out some titles that were exceptional in some way or another. Since there was so much gaming (especially video gaming) I’m splitting the posts into two parts: Part I is where I break down what I played this year and Part II will be the actual awards. You might think of this as an uber-Gaming Weekend.

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The laser-focused attention to Mass Effect earlier this month has given way now that I’ve put that opus behind me, and I’ve been left looking for something to fill the void. Instead I’ve found sustenance in smaller morsels of a wider variety.

Of course no discussion of this weekend could be complete without mentioning The Darkness, which I finished in a pretty single-minded push Friday morning. I mentioned the game briefly a few weeks ago and I wasn’t terribly positive about the game at the time, but after finishing it I have a slightly different take on it. The bottom line is that as a plain shooter, it fails. The enemy AI is pretty transparent, the weapons aren’t terribly interesting and the level design is kind of messy and repetitive. But The Darkness succeeds in crafting a pretty intriguing pulp-y tale (which favorably tips its hat to its comic book roots) and the mechanics introduced by the Darkness powers are wonderfully executed.

I said before that the ramp-up of the Darkness powers feels wrong and I stand by that statement. The problem is that the game is most fun when you’re using the powers and you don’t even get several of them until over three-quarters of the way through the game. Once you do get all the abilities the desire and rationale behind using standard firearms almost disappears which is actually wonderful but then the game throws a ridiculous curveball at you right near the end putting you in a situation where you are literally unable to use the Darkness. It’s not that you lose the powers or anything. You still have them, you just can’t use them and the lights that prevent you from activating them are—for the only time in the entire game—unable to be destroyed.

What The Darkness suffers from primarily is its inability to recognize what makes it fun. Wandering around in the dark (which, by the way, the method they used to encourage you to work in as close to total darkness as possible while not unhinging the game with, you know, forcing you to play on a black screen is quite brilliant) and using cool powers to try and comprehend the strange series of events that propel the plot forward is wonderful. Doing pointless fetch quests, navigating an overly simplistic overworld that somehow manages to be obtuse at the same time, hunting for lame and uninteresting collectable garbage and suffering through the flawed shooting mechanics is not fun and yet the ratio is about 40:60. Which means that not even half the game is the parts that make you want to play.

The story also derails a bit at times since the criss-crossing branches of the plot don’t ever quite meld into something cohesive enough to elicit that “Whoa, cool!” moment that I felt it could have offered, but it at least falls into the positive category of video game storytelling. One thing it does have which I think could have been even more effectively exploited is a real sense of tenderness. The scenes with the main character’s girlfriend Jenny can be remarkably poignant and the epilogue of the game reaches this plateau as well. It’s a small part of the game that feels almost accidental in its casual inclusion but is something that is perhaps served by that sense. Unlike games such as Indigo Prophecy or even Mass Effect that work really hard at fabricating a sense of intimacy, The Darkness achieves it almost in part because it doesn’t try.

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I finally finished my first play-through of Mass Effect over the weekend, topping out at around 30 hours. But I’ve talked at great length about Mass Effect and I swore I’d no longer subject you to my ramblings on the subject. So aside from putting the finishing touches on that experience, I also picked up a couple of other games that had slipped through the cracks in the last half-year of game-release mania, the most significant being NCAA 08.

You should probably understand that I’m a pretty big fan of football. Effectively, I appreciate the college game more: There is more at stake in terms of the game being played at the college level so the athletes try harder, plus the sheer number of teams and players means the talent pool is diverse and many, many teams are forced to win on the strength of actual teamwork versus a few individual overachievers. Which is not to say that star players do not exist in that framework, only that their potential impact is curiously mitigated and amplified.

The problem is that I never attended the sort of university that fields a football team you might watch on a Saturday afternoon in the fall so my attention and devotion is loose. I follow Cal because they’re local and I like their coach; I follow Texas A&M because I lived in College Station, TX for a short time and it is my friend’s alma matter; I follow Mizzou because I’ve begun buying my dad season tickets to their games as gifts; I follow some new underdog each year because I happen to catch an impressive game from them early in the season. But I don’t really have “my team.”

Contrast this to the NFL, which contains two teams I like very much (the 49ers in the NFC and the Chargers in the AFC) but also has a lot of problems as a league and a game. And consider also that I’ve been a 49ers fan since the womb and I recall learning the game by watching telecasts from my dad’s lap (asking a steady stream of irritating questions, I’m sure) among my happiest childhood memories.

I can’t say for certain that these discrepancies make August more confusing than it ought to be, but I have my suspicions. It breaks down like this in the video football arena: I want to prefer the college game because it aspires to capture a pure game essence embodied by the way college football is played anyway, but without a legitimate emotional attachment that I can feel by leading the 49ers (no matter how pathetic they may be in real life) to Super Bowl dynasty status.

In past years—and it’s been at least two years since I last picked up an EA football game with the intention of seriously playing it because I get weary of the roster-update pace of change in those titles—I’ve always made a point to play both Madden and NCAA. Contrast, I tell myself, and compare. I have come away from that exercise dizzy because I can’t readily reconcile the fact that I’ve almost always preferred Madden with the concept I have that I should like NCAA more.

So this time I skipped the whole hassle entirely. I waited for a few months for one thing, although the key is to not wait too long and both lose interest in the year’s game due to offseason indifference and eliminate any possibility of getting buyback or trade value from a game whose sequel is due presently. The other thing I did was only acquire the game that I was most interested in and make sure it was the game someone else I knew had and would be interested in playing with me. Since Doctor Mac is a big NCAA player of late and the college scene was more intriguing to me as a concept, I went with NCAA and pretty much vowed not to bother with Madden this year.

So far (one game into my Cal Dynasty), my only major complaint is that the menu interface is a confusing mess of menus and sub-menus with some kind of forced metaphor of a college foyer that doesn’t work. My minor complaints are few so far, although I was disappointed that the game doesn’t look significantly better than NCAA or Madden ‘04 looked on my original Xbox. Perhaps I’m having selective amnesia with the fidelity of those earlier games, but I recall the move from the PS1-era engine to the PS2/Xbox-era engine as being an eye-popping adjustment. Granted, the relative horsepowers of the Xbox and the 360 are probably less drastic than PS1 vs. PS2, but at the same time I know that the 360 is capable of some impressive graphics even by adding some small tweaks like more dynamic lighting and filters.

I haven’t yet absorbed much in the way of the commentary, the crowd or the other small details as I’m still trying to get my bearings around the game play. I do wish it was easier to check the routes at the line (I think it was just a trigger or button in earlier games) and as usual playing defense is annoyingly dangerous. But I do like that they don’t let you play really sloppy (you simply must set your feet before you throw or you can kiss that QB rating good-bye) and I saw a couple of animations that looked nicely placed and smoothly executed. Historically Doctor Mac has pwned me in online football, so I doubt that his two-month head start on NCAA 08 will make a huge difference since I was destined for defeat anyway. But I think I’ll try to advance at least a bit further before challenging him.

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The problem with chronicling your game playing is that, occasionally, you run into a game that demands your undivided attention. This makes weekly logs of game time prone to repetitiveness, but rest assured I will soldier on.

Essentially this week has been almost entirely devoted to Mass Effect. I’ve spoken already about some of the ways in which Mass Effect does not always work very hard to convince you that you aren’t playing a game, but the more you play—and I’m roughly 20 hours in with a significant portion of the story left to go as I savor the experience via extensive investment in the side quests—the more of these illusion-shattering moments arise.

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It seems like a tough mission: Two highly anticipated AAA titles in the same month and only my usual $60 budget to acquire them both. I planned ahead a bit last month by putting down a pre-order for Mass Effect and having a decent carry-over, but that meant that I was going to have to be crafty if I wanted to pick up the month’s other must-have, Call of Duty 4, and not bust my budget.

Read on to see if I pulled it off.

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I spoke about Mass Effect last week in mostly positive terms. The early game doldrums quickly fade into enchantment and that’s remained true thus far, even as I put another five hours into the game and advance only a small step forward in narrative.

What I like about the game is what I liked about KotOR, essentially: This is a feat of writing that presents itself within a framework of interaction which, even if that interaction were excised, I’d feel compelled to experience. What I mean is that if you took the story Mass Effect is trying to tell me and massaged it into a graphic novel or a regular novel or a movie or a TV miniseries or whatever, I’d want to be a part of it. KotOR captured the magic of Star Wars far better than anything else had since Return of the Jedi in 1986 and likewise Mass Effect captures the magic of an entirely new science fiction setting better than anything since Firefly.

But what Mass Effect doesn’t do well, and this is where you start to find the line between those who are willing to work for a portion of something that they value, is present it’s non-narrative aspects as cleanly as possible. I already discussed my disappointment with the combat mechanics and that really doesn’t dissipate with time. But beyond that there are many other small elements that add up to a game that frankly you have to really want to play. I think it’s worth it because BioWare writes a mean story, but if things like insanely inconsistent checkpoint placing, wildly awkward vehicle controls and an exploration system that looks more impressive and daunting than it actually is detract from your ability to enjoy a plot then you may find yourself struggling to stick it out.

To me, those things are somewhat secondary. I’ve played plenty of marginal games that had a nugget of joy buried within them that I’ve learned how to compensate for developer misguidance: I can learn to save more frequently and I can adjust to poor controls. But what does manage to reduce my enjoyment is the level to which games continue to speak their own sort of game-language in which layers of abstraction are presented with conceits owning no one-to-one translation with real world activity. In some cases approximation is perfectly acceptable: Leveling up and applying skill points to represent experience and a gradual improvement over time (the act of obtaining veteran-ness). But many tasks have been “gamed up” to the point that they cease to be engaging. Hacking or circumventing security is often prone to this with mini-games replacing anything that might be contextually appropriate and, typically, it’s no fun. Pipe Dream didn’t really have a place in BioShock even though I did a lot of hacking (my motto: “Never Pay Full Price”) and Mass Effect’s security override is essentially Simon Says which I didn’t even like as a kid in the 80s.

Like Penny Arcade, I nitpick because I care, but when you find yourself presented with the opportunity to commit genocide and your party members act like well-scripted shoulder-angels and shoulder-devils, the details are as far from your mind as Eden Prime from mother Earth.

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