Tunnels of Doom

Welcome to the final installment of $60 a Month! It has been one year of budgeting and cataloging my gaming purchase habits. Rather than expand on the budget for July and continue the exercise for another year, I thought I would recap the experiment, try to catalog some of the lessons I learned and draw some conclusions about what it means to be a gamer with a budget. As enjoyable as I’ve found the project, I think it is time for it to come to a close before it wears out its welcome.

Before we go further, let’s examine some statistics from the last twelve budget-conscious months:

• I acquired 95 games in the first year, for an average of just under eight games per month.
• I traded away 54 games over the course of the year, averaging four and a half trades per month.
• I earned $43.47 in money by recycling, earned $118.47 in gaming-related cash to add to the budget and used $40 worth of gift cards.
• My total budget, including $60 per month and the additional funds listed above, came to $921.94.
• I spent $876.70 on games in twelve months.
• My average monthly expenditures was $73.06. My average budget was $76.83.
• My total amount carried from one month to the next was $241.93, for an average of $20.16.
• The 12-month difference between available budget and amount spent was $45.24… in the black.

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A large portion of the week was spent on the road, as they say. I was unplugged in most of the usual senses: I didn’t even check my email from Wednesday afternoon until Monday morning. That may be the longest I’ve gone without digital communication since high school. I did intersperse a few Twitter text messages in there; it’s not like I traveled back in time. But being away from it all meant, among other things, that my typical games were not accessible nor were the people I engage to play them.

I did squeeze in a game of Blood Bowl last Monday night, at a pizza parlor no less. It was a hasty ordeal organized in a clandestine manner with comically ancient technologies (telegram) but necessary if I wanted to retain my streak of league games. I didn’t win, but I did manage to draw a tie. So far the (undead) Spoilers seem to be slow out of the gate and only their tenacity to fill the available roster spots late in the second half allows games to be close. I need to get better at not playing “down” since I frequently lose the coin toss and give up an early touchdown; the best I’ve been able to do is identify a need for fewer squishy players I’m afraid of losing on defensive drives. Specifically I need to stop loading the defensive line with Regeneration-less ghouls. We’ll see how this week’s game pans out armed with that insight.

The one thing I did have on my travels was my DS filled exclusively with Etrian Odyssey II. If you want to understand why I continue to marvel at how engaged I am with this game, you must comprehend that I expected to be this enraptured by hard-hitting next gen titles like Grand Theft Auto IV and Mass Effect. What we’re comparing to, essentially, is a game that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Pentium (one) PC in 1996 that has transitional animation (that is, only the key frames) and consists almost exclusively of menus. I really have a hard time putting it down.

I reached the 2nd Strata over the weekend, playing on the plane and in the hotel room on mornings while I waited for my companions to wake from their sleep. The palate swap to autumn colors in this stage of the game was enough to force a tiny squeal of glee from deep in my chest. The unwitting passenger in the seat next to me was forced to glance at the screens and saw me almost slavering for the chance to unleash my mad cartography skillz on a new floor of the labyrinth. He immediately asked to be re-seated, and I barely noticed he was gone.

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The demise of E3 is regularly trumpeted as imminent, foregone or perhaps in some cases past tense. In any case some variant of it forges ahead roughly every 365 days so I presume that these discussions are moot. And while there appears to be a unanimity about the appropriate level of hype associated with the event, somewhere between rhetoric and action exists a sheet of ether made from what I call oppositium, whose sole purpose is to flip the outcome 180 degrees from the stated intent. So while journalists talk cool and lean back, nonchalantly saying “Oh, it’s just E3, no big,” what comes out of their mouths in a shrill, girlish squeal is “OhmygoshE3ohmygoshEEEeeeeThreeeeee!!”

No news that perforated my filter struck me as particularly noteworthy. There are going to be sequels to big franchise games, which I suppose qualifies as news similar to the way they throw the sunrise and sunset times and tide reports at the end of the weather forecast as though it were some kind of pertinent information. Also, I guess Xbox Live’s Dashboard is now designed by Apple and Nintendo? The revamp is… good? They spent the first couple of years excising the active user hostility from the first iteration, so this reset will be, um, new. And then there are the additional details about games we already anticipated which reinforce their imminent awesomeness. I don’t know, I felt a remarkable lack of interest in the press coverage considering the highlight of the show seemed to be a concert by The Who exclusively for media types which had, at best, a peripheral connection to Rock Band but unless Harmonix is prepared to send Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey over to my house to jam with me, this comes across as audience pandering; the ultimate schwag.

Meanwhile my actual gaming gets narrower in scope while the depth expands beyond the oceanic floor level, deep into the crevasses of near singular obsession. Whoever thought it was smart to put a lunatic OCD-targeted turn-based dungeon crawler on an easy-to-use hand held device that lists, among its key feature set, at-will clamshell hibernation mode—well, they didn’t take into consideration the impact it would have on my particular mind. Etrian Odyssey II goes with me everywhere. I steal moments between meal bites to search a wall for secret passages. I adjust inventories at red lights. In the time it has taken me to write this sentence, I’ve gained three experience levels.

EOII has a mechanic where enemies that are visible in the dungeon view (as glowing orbs; the graphical presentation of the 3D environment is more suggestive than representative), called FOEs, move through the dungeon in particular fashions. They may patrol a set course, or they may fly over areas you cannot pass. Or, in some cases, they may stand still or move very little but when you get within range they attempt to follow you and engage you in combat. FOEs are disastrously overpowered enemies. I accidentally read a spoiler that indicated there are at least 24 floors to the dungeon (probably more) and I’ve reached all of the fourth. However, my principal party members are hovering around level 17 and to date I’ve only been able to handle a singe FOE. Perhaps this indicates something about my choices in skill allotment as I advance, but I routinely handle the random encounter creatures at higher floors without even manual intervention (viva the L button Auto key) in less than a full turn. I suspect the FOEs are designed to be moving obstacles more than actual level-specific opposition.

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I mentioned last week that I was anticipating the arrival of my newest Goozex score, Etrian Odyssey II. I had been hankering for a dungeon crawler, something like a PC role-playing experience perhaps along the lines of Oblivion. Depth, you know? I don’t want to wander too far into a tangent already, but I keep trying these Japanese-style role-playing games and aside from the tactical ones, I find them insufferable. I guess I’m the one who changed and not the games (though my recent stint into FF VI suggests the games themselves are a bit different as well) and maybe it’s just that the “real-time battle systems” turn me off, perhaps explaining why the tactical variants aren’t as painful. But considering the fact that turn-based RPGs are outnumbered by real time variants something like 60 to 1, it strikes me as not surprising that I was feeling like it was a game type I wanted to re-connect with again.

Anyway, Etrian Odyssey II. I wish I knew where to start. The game itself has gotten pretty strong reviews, and yet it’s something that I suspect will fly far beneath most gamers’ radar. It works a lot like older PC dungeon crawlers. It’s turn-based, although the pace can be particularly brisk if you choose, so each step you take in the dungeon counts as a turn. Encounters are, for the most part, random although you do have a gauge that indicates the likelihood of an attack on the next turn. It’s not precise, but it does give a pretty good indicator of when to heal up if necessary. And there are a few enemies that are visible, usually boss-type creatures. These can occasionally be circumvented and usually avoided by judicious retreat. But a huge part of the game is the cartography, which is where most of the game’s DS functionality comes into play. Since it’s turn based you can avoid a Foe (the visible boss creatures) and mark your map to note its location for later. The mapping options are surprisingly robust all around, and enjoyable enough that they’ve somehow managed to make me go back to drawing maps by hand and I’m happy about it.

Aside from the turn-based aspect and mapping, there is also a clever class and advancement system: You earn experience for random encounters in keeping with the genre standards, but there is no accompanying financial reward. At least not directly and certainly not assuredly. Instead you get various trophies from certain critters you’ve vanquished, which can be sold for an almost universally paltry sum at the town shop. They then charge exorbitant prices for the goods you value. Meanwhile the experience points accumulate as you’d expect, and after a particular cache of them has been accumulated you level up. Except unlike most RPGs, the leveling process isn’t gifted, with automatic generosity in terms of extra HP, magic and attribute bonuses along with maybe some sort of tech tree. I mean, there is a tech tree unique to each class and you can choose how to progress within it, but you get either a skill or a single trait bonus. Each level.

Let me put it another way: In order for your Medic to earn the Revive skill, which brings a character back from 0 HP, you need no fewer than six level advancements which provide no additional bonuses to combat or defensive capabilities. It’s this kind of treatment of a player that gives the game its reputation for being punishing (check a few reviews to see what people think about it) but it feels so much to me like the older games that had little patience for sissy gamers who wanted to step into the game as a minor deity and exit the game as something analog to the champion of the universe.

There was a time when I spent a whole summer on a dungeon crawler, fighting and re-fighting my way through sections getting satisfaction from the minor victories. There is so much about those halcyon days that is captured in this game, and it is just what I wanted. The platform makes it compatible with my adult life, the anachronism makes it feel like something that maybe shouldn’t even exist in these times. I want to find the person responsible for this game and give them a hug. Of course I’d quickly end the embrace and clear my throat, offering a firm handshake instead. There are appearances to maintain, after all.

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Gamers will probably agree that there is no single perfect game. A few dedicated folks might pick chess or go or perhaps poker as the only game they care about, but gamers are sort of defined by their interest in the scope of games as a whole. Without that purview into games, the hobby loses some of its intrigue. What emerges, instead, is a contextually perfect game. This is the art of playing the right game at the right time, and it’s also about finding the ideal game for the individual gamer within a range of games that share mechanics or styles or themes.

I had a chance to play Ticket to Ride multiplayer on XBLA over the weekend with Doctor Mac. It was Saturday afternoon, my wife was sleeping off a headache and I was looking for something to pass the time. I had been playing a variety of demos and picking my way through GTA IV a little but I wasn’t really into it the way I had hoped I’d be. When Doctor Mac hopped online and asked if I was interested in playing something, I suggested TTR and before I knew it we had worked through seven games in a row. I’ve played the TTR board game many times, and I’ve owned most of the tabletop products at one time or another. I’ve also played a lot of the web-based PC version on Days of Wonder’s website, so this should have been just another TTR session. But for a lazy Saturday afternoon, with voice chat on my couch and a new player experiencing the game for the first time on the other end of the line, it was exactly what I was looking for in a game at that moment.

Perfection, I realized, also comes when elements of a game meet a particular gamer’s needs. I’ve spent plenty of time in the past few weeks talking about Blood Bowl and after last week’s matches I started thinking about why I’ve been so much more consistently intrigued by Blood Bowl than other Games Workshop titles. It’s not that I’m better at it than other games, I’m a consistently terrible BB player. And it isn’t that the game itself does any one thing so much better than other titles. What it comes down to is that it has the perfect confluence of complexity, strategy, mechanics and hobby elements to scratch my particular itch.

Take the other GW game that I’ve spent a lot of time with, Warhammer 40K. Thematically, I actually prefer 40K: As much as I enjoy a good fantasy setting, I gravitate toward Sci-Fi when given the choice. It’s why I’ve never been much interested in Warhammer Fantasy Battles or Lord of the Rings. But 40K, once you move past the wonderfully rich setting, is in fact just a game. And as a game I find it to be somewhat clunky. Matches take too long and the rules are by turns too abstract and yet can be too methodical. From a hobby perspective the armies are too large and tedious to put together and paint. The barrier to entry is too high. It’s not a bad game, and I’ve enjoyed almost all the time I’ve spent with both elements of the game (hobby and play). Yet when you compare 40K to Blood Bowl…

Blood Bowl, to me, is a more enjoyable game. It’s constraints in terms of playing field and available tactics add a level of elegance I don’t think a larger, more loosely constructed game like 40K can ever achieve. Most of the complaints I have with 40K can be addressed with skirmish-level games like Necromunda (which I also prefer to 40K) but at root Blood Bowl is a board game which I think reigns in some of the more tedious facets of tabletop miniatures gaming. There are no concessions for awkward line-of-sight rules or clumsy measurements to be made for movement. You have spaces on a board, and strictly defined character options that (mostly) avoid beardy customization. Yet there is a tremendous level of flexibility in Blood Bowl as you create your teams from a vast list and engage in the hobby aspect at exactly the level that fits my comfort zone. I find it overwhelming and dull to slop paint on dozens of 40K troops and then vehicles, special units and commanders. Yet I have just enough patience to crank my way through 15 or 16 Blood Bowl models.

The final element to gaming perfection is the mood-based context. There have been times when I’ll play a game I don’t really think is that great because it’s the right kind of game for my mood. A good example is Blacksite Area 51. I played the game several weeks ago (before trading it away) because I was in the mood for a military shooter. I’ve been slowly working my way through Jeanne D’Arc because while I actually like it, I don’t think it’s the best tactical turn-based RPG I’ve played, it’s what I have on hand and it fills that niche for me. The curse of the gamer of course is that occasionally you’ll find yourself wanting to play something that either you don’t have or that you can’t reasonably play right then. This weekend I found myself really wanting to play an old-school style dungeon crawler. A few friends have been playing Etrian Odyssey II on DS, but I had to wait until I could find a trader on Goozex since I don’t have the cash on hand to go pick it up. Fortunately, gaming desires lead to determination; I manipulated my way to the top of the trade list for EO II and got matched by the end of the weekend. Next week I should have the game and a full report.

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