Tunnels of Doom

As discussed last weekend, my moving escapades have piled loads of work upon me. As a result, gaming gets pushed into these little time corners during unpacking breaks and stolen moments before exhaustion overtakes me when I should be in bed. On the bright side, the long weekend was productive and aside from a few remaining tasks that don’t have nearly the urgency of, say, “re-assemble bed,” we’re mostly settled in.

Of course part of my organizational efforts centered around the entertainment unit which is disappointingly awkward in set-up and presentation due to a fireplace we have in the new apartment. Ideally I’ll end up mounting the TV above the mantle and getting a smaller unit for the components off to one side, but that’s going to require some investment that I can’t afford for at least a couple of weeks (moving expenses drained my available money). To console myself I bought a new XBLA game, Lost Cities, and spent a couple of hours digging into it yesterday.

Basically the game is like a multiplayer solitaire with a scoring system that creates a risk-versus-reward mechanic out of each play. There are five colored columns and numbered cards for each going from two to ten. When you place any card on a column you spend twenty points to start, minus the value of the card. Each subsequent card played must be higher but not necessarily sequential and adds that face value to the the column total. So if you play a two you start with -18 points; then if you play a 5 you have -13 points and so on. Once you reach 10 you can’t play any further and that column is locked. That means the base value for a full run (2 through 10) is 35 points, but there is also a bonus for playing eight or more cards in a single column (giving back the start cost for an available total of 55).

The trick is that each column can be started with modifiers which increase the value for each played card. You can use up to three modifiers (granting 2x, 3x and 4x respectively) but they also add another 20 points to the starting cost. So a column with two modifiers starts at -40 but you get 3x for each card played. In the same example the two played on a double modifier would result in -34 column score (-40 plus 2 x 3 = 6). Adding the five would grant you another 15 points for -19.

Each player is attempting to build the same basic hand and the strategy comes in mostly from discarding: You can spend your turn discarding an unused card but it goes face up above the column with the matching color and can then be drawn instead of a card from the community draw pile, which is always face down. So even if you can’t use that extra white modifier, if you discard it you may be giving your opponent exactly what they were hoping for.

Each round is extremely quick; rounds end when the community draw pile is exhausted and there are only thirty-odd cards to begin each round making for less than twenty turns for each player. You can extend this a bit by drawing cards from the face-up column discard piles but eventually the other player will exhaust the pile and the round ends. Each game is three rounds with the points being cumulative from round to round, which means even if you get a bad draw one round it doesn’t automatically mean you’ve lost since you still have a couple more rounds to make up the difference.

I’ve only played against the CPU and while the AI is reasonable the strategies it employs are pretty obvious. As a whole the game has a fun and addictive quality but I do wish it had just a little bit more depth; a few specialty cards that altered the standard flow of the game (like allowing you to reset a column gone awry, possibly with a penalty like dumping those cards directly into the column discard pile, for example). As it is the main strategy is to find the colors you have the most confidence in, boost the column with modifiers and then concentrate on them until they get big points. You also learn to add totals that equal twenty or more pretty quickly since if you can’t make up the starting cost for a column you don’t want to even go there.

I think my biggest complaint so far (and this may change once I dip into the online mode) is that it doesn’t feel like it was worth the 800 points ($10) it costs. It’s more a $5 game based strictly on the single player mode which I like but I don’t see myself sinking hours and hours into the way I did with Symphony of the Night or Puzzle Quest. Still, it’s a great compliment to other XBLA games like Carcassone and Catan for board game nerds like me and something I’d buy just to show support for developers who release these kinds of titles.

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The weeks-long process of moving even the relatively short distance we have in store is a taxing one. I’ve moved often enough to understand this but this particular event involves contracted labor; I’ve hired movers to help me. In the past I’ve either handled most of the moving myself or had a few friends or family members assist. Those cases have a more flexible set of pre-move requirements, since time isn’t as much of a factor on the day itself. Now that each hour costs me $50, I feel it necessary to be not merely ready to move but imminently prepared for any contingency.

This requires a certain focus of attention which in many ways preempts my hobbies, even gaming. As an example I have had my consoles packed since the weekend was half over, meaning that any games I played on those systems were played early in the week and at the start of the weekend. I usually find a chance to get some mileage on games Friday and Saturday morning but that time was instead spent attending to cardboard puzzles, tape guns and black Sharpies. This left most of my attention on handheld games, and even those opportunities were scarce.

The main exception to the handheld-focused weekend was my newest Goozex acquisition, CSI: Hard Evidence. Make no mistake, this is a terrible, terrible game. It starts with the fact that they licensed the TV show, they attracted most of the principal actors to do the voices but they didn’t bother to license the show’s identifiable theme song from The Who. Instead they settled for a shoddy semi-sound-alike. As far as omissions go its hardly unforgivable, but it does provide an ill portent for what is to come.

It’s probably easier to explain what the game does right rather than listing the myriad of faults the game has. Principally the game works on the level of providing a reasonable immersion into the world presented by the show: Playing the game is mechanically similar to watching an episode. You have the initial crime scene, the evidence collection, the progression of suspects and the little flourishes in-between. At its core, there is a reasonably entertaining game. The problem is that the presentation is so wretched it derails the entire thing.

The faults are myriad. Graphics, especially character models, are atrocious. The game has lengthy load times even when switching between one poorly rendered screen and a simple menu. There are several moments of video captured from the show interspersed in the game… notably those quick-cut establishing shots of Vegas as transitions. But they have been so heavily compressed that they’re sub-YouTube quality and even then you have to sit through a loading screen before being subjected to them. Facial animations on the already hideous models are pathetic and characters in the game which are modeled from real actors have texture maps applied (which doesn’t help them look any more realistic) but game-only models lack the same detail and look like creepy talking mannequins.

None of which even addresses the gameplay problems. Fundamentally the issue is that the game leaves little room for error except where bad design introduces it. You can only use your tools in areas that they are required and even at that you are limited to “appropriate” tools so your given options are no more taxing than a coin flip in most cases, plus there is no penalty for making a mistake. The game would have been much, much more engaging if you were able to literally contaminate a crime scene with your failed efforts. That probably would have required the game to not be put on a strict rail and required the developers to showcase some programming skill, but you know, I’m a demanding consumer. The fact that the game could probably have been built with Flash in a weekend doesn’t seem to be a concern to anyone on the production team.

The worst part of all is the inexcusable porting job to the 360 where it almost becomes a mini game to try and decipher whether a particular selection menu requires the analog stick, the D-pad or is one of the rare instances where either are allowed. The game was obviously designed to be a PC game (complete with mouse cursor) but the stick sensitivity is all wrong for the 360′s controller and since 90% of the game is mousing around the screen looking for the cursor to light up and indicate that you can interact with something there, the majority of the game is a chore.

I’m not sure what I expected from a licensed game that has a Metacritic score of 49, but I guess I hoped that something OXM gave a 7.0 would have a few more redeeming qualities.

And I’m saying this as a guy who thought that Bullet Witch was “kind of cool, kind of.”

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I’ve grown wary of linear Japanese-style role-playing games. The last jRPG I played through was Dragon Quest VIII and while I enjoyed that game I did find it to be occasionally anachronistic in its strict adherence to tradition. I guess I kind of welcomed it for that but it certainly didn’t inspire me to rush out and play more jRPGs. As they’ve become more viable on my preferred console platforms, I’ve gravitated toward more Western-styled role-playing games like Oblivion and KotOR.

Which is why I don’t fully comprehend the brouhaha surrounding the recent drops of jRPG titles on the Xbox 360. It started with Eternal Sonata and got more significant in the eyes of the gaming press with Blue Dragon and most recently Lost Odyssey. It continues with the forthcoming Infinite Undiscovery which, naming misfortune aside, is supposed to make American gamers care for whatever reason and simultaneously convince Japanese gamers that the 360 isn’t a cultural pariah.

But while I’ve been burned too often since the release of Final Fantasy VII on jRPGs (most frequently by latter editions of that same series) to feel the same glee I once did on hearing a new Square Enix title was in the works, I may have lumped the whole genre together a bit hastily. Take for example the whim I followed recently to acquire Eternal Sonata. I played the demo a while back (actually closer to a year ago, when I detailed my impressions for the August 12, 2007 edition of Gaming Weekend) but it sort of slipped from my radar in the light of all the Fall madness that began with BioShock, a few weeks after I played ES’ demo.

I said back then that Eternal Sonata was beautiful and I can say now that after putting several hours into the full game, it is hardly just to use common adjectives like beautiful to describe the game’s graphics. They art style is practically an ode to Paul’s sensibilities and they have a colorful, vibrant life to them that reminds me of how video game worlds used to be portrayed. This is a dream world loosely based on the precepts of our physical plane but stylized and brightened and infused with a sort of raw joy that makes me want to stare at them for hours. They may be my favorite graphics on any game to date.

As a game Eternal Sonata is deliberately paced which can easily be interpreted—correctly—as saying “the game moves slowly.” But while a ponderous pace occasionally drives a game out of my console’s disc tray, I don’t mind it so much thus far. There is a fittingly dream-like quality to everything that happens in ES, and the drifting, meandering progression seems almost like a conscious design decision that works well in the game’s context.

Beneath the beauty and calm of the game’s surface is a melancholy tone that works as a counter-point to the otherwise child-friendly presentation. That balance is perfectly reflected in the combat mechanic where you’re provided with both a sense of carefully executed strategy and a pressure to move and react quickly under time constraints. The use of shadow and light in the combat arena is fanciful and welcome, the monster designs are nearly as sharp and arresting as the main character designs… in all it’s a game that makes a fabulous impression.

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It was kind of a lark, the way I picked up Folklore for the PS3. I was adding some stuff onto Goozex for trade-in (my collection has grown so unwieldy I’m forcing myself to part with games I love but haven’t touched for months which is resulting in an influx of available points) and in my perusals of the listings my eye caught the game. I had been fairly interested in the game prior to its release but it was one of those offhanded “That might be cool” things since at the time I didn’t have the hardware to run it. Then it hit stores and the reviews started coming in, essentially a collective, stifled yawn.

When it caught my eye on Goozex it was more as a “oh that looked interesting, I guess there’s no harm dropping it on my list” and when I received it in the mail last week I got it on the same day as Call of Juarez, a 360 game I’d been eying since its release last summer. True enough, I popped in Juarez first but after a couple of levels I wanted to check out all the new stuff I had and I powered up the PS3 and fired up Folklore.

I mostly didn’t put it down for the rest of the weekend.

Folklore reminds me a lot of another semi-underrated game I liked, Kameo: Elements of Power. Both have a sort of Japanese style only as seen through a European lens and many of the concepts and game mechanics are similar. You have a whimsical world full of vibrant colors, imaginative character designs, monster/weapon collection, huge boss battles and some decent but mildly flawed action controls. But where Kameo had a disposable and largely unremarkable story, Folklore has a compelling mystery plot and an atmosphere that curiously slides from dark to lighthearted and back again. Themes of death and mourning are integral to the game and while most of the Folks (which serve both as foes and collectible weapons) are variations on fantasy standbys, their design is inspired more by the likes of Brian Froud and his darkly comic style.

The most significant problem with the game is its storytelling mechanisms, which reminds me a lot of games like Final Fantasy VII where there are moments of fully voice-acted CG but those often bleed into strange graphic novel-like silent cutscenes with no interactivity and word balloons for dialogue and then there are the conversation menus with mostly static character models where you click through lines of text and occasionally select a topic to discuss. The whole thing feels like its being presented in this awkward manner. My impression really comes down to it feeling cheap and unfinished or at the very least rushed. It’s not unbearable, but it probably contributes to the tepid reaction the game got and I wonder if this might not have been a better game with a better reception if they’d just rendered out all the story sequences.

Aside from the story and atmopshere, the game itself offers a rich tapestry of monster collection, if that’s the sort of thing you enjoy. You certainly have no dearth of options in this milieu, consisting of everything from the ubiquitous Pokemans to the obviously titled Monster Hunter, but Folklore does it as good as any. They do have a unique method of physical acquisition which requires that you assault the creatures until they enter a sort of submissive state at which point you can press R1 to latch onto their exposed Id (that’s the game’s word, not mine; they seem more like souls to me but calling them such wouldn’t jive with the game’s premises). To actually bring this Id into your possession you must use the Sixaxis function by jerking the controller upward, like yanking on the reigns of a bridle. When this doesn’t result in knocking your own teeth out it has a satisfyingly interactive feel to it. You can also expose several Ids at once and hold the R1 button longer to gather in a number at a time in exchange for an XP bonus, the act feels like nothing shy of wrangling, casting you in the unusual but not unwelcome role of “morbid fantasy cowboy.”

Which, I think, would also serve as an excellent moniker for Rock Band’s World Tour mode.

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