Tunnels of Doom

his month I’m starting something new. It’s not drastically different but it will have an effect on the budget each month. So far I’ve been counting Goozex trades as being essentially free. At first I counted the shipping costs toward the budget each month but I felt that didn’t really apply because it opened the door to factoring in things like gas for a trip to GameStop or something that felt too anal retentive. So I started marking each Goozex trade as Method: Goozex, Cost: Trade.

But the truth is that Goozex charges a flat $1.00 fee for each game you trade in. For light-traffic traders it barely makes a dent; Goozex themselves often run “free trade” promotions and I’d guess an average Goozex user sends out only a game or two each month. But I’ve been sending a lot more than that out and receiving a significant amount in return. Since I’ve refilled my Goozex trade credits several times in the last few months I thought it was only fair that I start counting that toward the budget. So now each Goozex game will be listed as a $1.00 purchase regardless of points value just to keep things even.

Will the new rule change my budget-keeping abilities? Click on to find out.

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I think, strangely enough, this weekend marks the first gaming convention I’ve attended since Tunnels of Doom’s inception. I’m too lazy to dig through the archives to verify, but considering that ToD began in a period where my convention conscience (my buddy Thom) was out of the country, it seems likely. I say this is strange because before Thom left, him and I were getting to be pretty regular on the Bay Area convention circuit. Essentially our main stops each year were DunDraCon on President’s Day weekend and Kublacon on Memorial Day weekend with plenty of interest in ConQuest (Labor Day) as well. We even made a trip down to SoCal to hit Gen Con one year.

But without my con buddy, it was difficult to find the motivation to regularly attend. I almost hate to feel like his presence is required to make the trip but truth be told most cons for us are an excuse to escape to a gamer-friendly place away from home for a bit and play games with our group of friends and catch the flea markets, dealer rooms and maybe an event or two. Which is to say we typically don’t immerse ourselves in the official con-sanctioned games as often as we use their free play rooms and the time allotted to devote entire days or weekends to playing. I suppose considering that, it’s not as unusual that I’d eschew the cons when he’s not around.

So this year the group has slowly started to come back together with our center of gravity as it were back in action. But there has been plenty of upheaval recently and while we’re transitioning back into regular tabletop gaming, Kublacon crept up on everyone. As a way of easing back in there was no pre-planned room reservation or full weekend passes (for me anyway) but we did decide that we definitely wanted to play in the Blood Bowl tournament scheduled for Friday night and everyone was interested in going to the first-night flea market.

The Blood Bowl Tourney was run by people we didn’t know and they had some interesting ideas including custom pitches for each match with special rules on each. As I cynically expected the rules weren’t particularly balanced, often favoring bruiser teams with a lot of AV adjustments for extra carnage (which I can’t complain about too much; I played Orcs) but they were pretty clever in general and it seemed like they added a fun element of the unexpected. I felt a little bad for Thom since he ended up drawing matches against our buddy Aaron first round and then got matched up with me for round two meaning he only got to play against people he plays all the time anyway but I’ve never known Thom to turn down a game of Blood Bowl no matter who the opponent might be.

Afterward we made our way to the flea market where I picked up a couple of new games on the cheap and while I could have continued to shop it was extremely crowded with bargain-hungry gamers and there were only so many oversized elbows I was willing to take in the ribs before I had to hasten my exit.

Considering I only spent about six hours total at a four-day convention I felt like I had a good time. If nothing else it certainly whet my appetite for the con scene again and I expect ConQuest in September to be a much bigger deal.

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I spent most of the weekend playing games where you control either a villain or, at best, an antihero type. My three primary focuses were Grand Theft Auto IV, God of War: Chains of Olympus and Overlord. I found it interesting that each game had the same basic premise of casting the player as a less than heroic fellow, but all three go about it in completely different ways.

GTA, for example, casts you as a reluctant sociopath. Niko Bellic spends a lot of time bemoaning his lot in life, guilt-tripping his way through abhorrent actions and self-destructive behaviors but the freedom permitted by the game’s design dictates that it is a sort of phony-feeling character device. One review of the game I read questioned the way that Niko will, in one moment, berate himself for being a hired killer and in the next moment he’ll be offering to whack someone because they scammed a guy he’s just met. You can appreciate Rockstar trying to put a conscience on their protagonist, but in a game like GTA you end up having to suspend some disbelief in the character himself because the way he’s written and the way he acts under the player’s control is rarely consistent.

It’s actually a sort of characterization that works better in God of War. Since Kratos is such a bloodthirsty savage by design, his combat tells you most of what you need to know about the character: Anyone who jams a blade onto an opponent’s neck and yanks the body away is not the kind of guy you take to prom. But the story portions of the game is where his hint of humanity is revealed and the internal struggles that he endures through each game are highlighted precisely because they provide a startling contrast between what you come to understand about him through waves and waves of dismembered, brutalized foes. Where GTA tries to get the player to experience the turmoil inherent in the character through several remarks and a number of either-or scenarios (kill this person or let them live) and allows you to behave in a fairly responsible manner for a time, eventually you’ll encounter a mission where you have no choice but to bump off someone who may not exactly deserve it.

The difference is simply in the fact that while God of War is on a rail and can therefore manipulate the experience, GTA has to balance the open, almost role-playing elements with a scripted narrative and the two don’t always mesh cleanly together. And then there is Overlord, where the whole “you are the bad guy” thing is a device used primarily for comedic effect. Overlord is, at root, a sort of strategic fantasy action puzzle game (hi, adjectives!) but while it is often compared to a game I didn’t play, Pikmin, the whole conceit in this case works because it serves to complete the theme which is mostly a light send-up of your typical fantasy tropes. And in truth you aren’t exactly the nefarious boot-stomping psycho you might expect: You’re essentially the malevolent racist dictator who enslaves humans to free them from the influence of the other fantasy races like Halflings and Elves. I’m not far enough in to be sure but I imagine that there is some opportunity for subtext here that is missed, perhaps intentionally, just to keep things breezy. It would be pretty easy for the game to descend into the kind of darkness that would have made it even less accessible than it already is.

Since games are so good at wish fulfillment and fantasy exploration it makes sense for them to occasionally cast the player as the antihero. Even some characters in games who are true heroes at their core are at least presented on the surface level as, at best, chaotic neutral types (Marcus Fenix from Gears of War springs to mind). It is interesting though to watch as developers who may already struggle somewhat with the perceptions of their industry try to find the right tone to take with games where you ask the player to be something less than the classic “good guy.”

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The graphics in Grand Theft Auto IV are vastly improved over the previous generation’s iterations. This stands to reason: The Xbox 360 and the PS3 have more powerful graphics capabilities. But GTA is still, subjectively, a pretty ugly game. Compare it to something like Gears of War, Call of Duty 4 or Heavenly Sword and it becomes clear that eye-popping visuals are not Rockstar’s strong suit. Some may say, that’s cool, they’re more interested in the experience than the graphics.

I doubt many people have a problem with that. GTA conveys a sense of place (and time, as evidenced by Vice City and San Andreas) and IV does such a phenomenal job at getting the details right that it’s not difficult to overlook the lack of eye candy in favor of the overall “feel.” It’s also highly likely that the sheer number of things going on in any given scene requires the graphics engine to scale back a bit to handle everything they want to show.

But for Rockstar’s obvious perfectionism, it seems a bit strange that they would consistently make graphical compromises with their flagship game. And what’s even more bizarre to my mind is that they have a very powerful artistic style closely tied to their products that they could draw on to solve the problem, but they fail to do so with each new iteration.

The style I’m referring to is the striking flat-shaded line art that graces the game covers and has done so since the original GTA III. Each successive title uses the same basic premise with minor stylistic adjustments, up to and including IV. And most significantly, each style evokes the mood of the game and looks great.

Since most graphically striking games rely on detailed textures and heavy bump maps to achieve their photorealism, it stands to reason that cel-shaded or heavily stylized games are less taxing on a system and therefore easier to produce. GTA games already have a smooth, attractive style associated with them, so why settle for the half-cocked “realism” of the engine they use?

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I had a chance to play some non-video games for the first time in a while this past week. A friend from out of town came and infiltrated a local board gaming group that meets in the vicinity of my work so I obliged a two-birds-one-stone deal and swung by after work. They were wrapping up a game of Race For the Galaxy when I arrived and while I was a tad bummed that I didn’t get a chance to play, I didn’t have to wait long.

There was an odd timing issue with some of the other attendees so we opted for a shorter game and settled on Regenwormen, which is the Dutch version of Pickomino. It’s a dice game at heart, with each turn’s play mechanics resembling Yahtzee where you roll a bunch of dice and select a like group to keep. The idea is to get the highest total possible and claim tiles with values that range from 21-36. When you claim the tiles you stack them; opponents can steal your tiles by rolling their exact value but since you stack them they can only steal the top tile which makes stacking a sort of protective measure.

What’s exciting about the game is that the scales tip dramatically since people who don’t make qualifying rolls both lose their top tile and eliminate the highest remaining tile from contention. Combined with the steal mechanism, people who shoot out to an early lead often find themselves struggling to restore their early game glory later on when people start swiping their tiles (it’s often easier to stop on a matched value and steal than push for a better tile and risk losing the entire roll).

Later in the week my wife and I returned from a dinner and realized the majority of our friends had gone away for the weekend so we settled in for a quiet night and pulled out Carcassonne: The Castle. Having played so much Carcassonne on XBLA since the last time I gave The Castle a shot I was surprised at how some of the core mechanics had been changed for the enclosed two-player variant. For example, you score all of your unfinished units at the end of Carcassonne while you need a special tile to do that in The Castle. I think it actually works to the latter game’s favor since it encourages in-game scoring (I lost a lot of points because I underestimated how quickly the game’s end was approaching at about the three-quarter mark). I also think the limited expansion area forces each player to be a little more aggressive in how they place each tile; in vanilla Carcassonne you can easily end up concentrating on a remote corner of the expanding playfield, dropping roads and monasteries for quick, small scores. If your opponent(s) don’t mind you incrementally bumping your score they may ignore you and focus on their own castle building elsewhere. In The Castle, you can’t presume your strategy won’t be interrupted by someone else, even inadvertently.

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The most shocking thing about Grand Theft Auto IV isn’t the ubiquitously referenced ultra-violence and winking misogyny on display. Rather, the most shocking thing is that for once Rockstar has lived up to their potential in crafting a game that does several unexpected things at once and the result is, for better or worse, an example of what a game can be in terms of interaction, narrative and socially conscious (and therefore relevant) satire.

I noticed it first when I found myself not adhering to my typical GTA playbook. Since GTA III I’ve basically started each game with a saveless rampage where I try to use the items readily available early in the game (usually a handgun, baseball bat and cars) to wreak as much carnage as I can muster. I do this mostly to get it out of my system but also to get a sense for how the Police AI in the game responds to my actions. Call it a warm-up for later in the game when I’m trying to avoid causing more havoc than necessary while I accomplish missions that have me setting fire to buildings or chasing down rival faction heads with a garbage truck. After I get arrested or killed in these pre-game excursions I usually re-load and start in on the game the way most people would.

In GTA IV I never got to the point where I wanted to wreck stuff just to see what the cops would do to me. In fact, even as I began playing through the missions and managing the game’s unexpectedly intriguing social standing system I found myself not playing as if I were in a criminal sandbox simulator where everything goes. I paid the tolls. I stopped at certain red lights (or at least waited for the cross traffic to clear). I avoided random confrontations with pedestrians. In effect I played the game the way the character was written, as a reluctant villain rather than an overt thug.

GTA IV has a remarkable way of placing you in this funhouse mirror of the US, drenched with an attention to detail that you might not expect even from Rockstar, and peppering it with game-based approximations of this character’s life that feel maybe not completely authentic but at the very least integrated with the rules of the world that has been created. The seasonings of smart dialogue, richly woven game elements (witness the wonder that is the new cellphone based in-game menu) and scalpel-edged satire make the stew that much more sumptuous. If you want to understand what Rockstar does right, compare and contrast the crass and subtlety-deprived Saints Row (a game I actually enjoyed) with Grand Theft Auto and you’ll find that Rockstar doesn’t back down from a biting remark or a juvenile in-game prank, but they’re smart enough to find the not-so-easy punchline rather than just resorting to the potty-mouthed shocker.

Not that GTA isn’t rude. It’s very much a game of excess, a parody of how stupefyingly obscene we all are that is reflected back to us through a lens of humor and escapism. No one is safe from the game’s sneering barbs here, and it is as it should be. But nearly hidden beneath the nose-thumbing swagger of the game’s obvious indifference to its own notoriety is a surprising humanity mostly shining from the superbly realized main character, Niko Bellic. He is a reluctant crook, a tortured murderer similar in some ways to San Andreas’ CJ but with more consistency and a more everyman quality. There but for the grace of God we all go, perhaps. The tone of the game feels spot-on as you understand Niko’s awe at the oddness of the city, it’s vulgarity and hostility. Casting the player as an immigrant is as smooth of a narrative decision as I’ve seen in game writing and design. It fits and it works because you feel alien in this world even as sometimes uncomfortably familiar as it is (to Americans).

The game isn’t perfect; technically it is maybe missing a few nice-to-have QA passes and gameplay-wise it hasn’t matured significantly since San Andreas since you’re still mostly chasing, fighting or fetching various things around the city. But I was looking for the title to be a step ahead in the evolution of Grand Theft’s signature formula. I didn’t expect an evolution in my concept of what a game could be.

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I spent the whole month anticipating the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. But that still left 28 days in between for me to fill up with… what? I had some extra funds from last month’s lean times, but was it enough to carry me through almost a whole month and still have the cash for my anticipated full-priced retail purchase?

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