Tunnels of Doom

Next week is Pacificon (that’s ConQuest SF for the pedantic), and most of this week’s activities were somehow related to early prep for the full weekend of gaming mayhem that lies ahead. I’m still in a video game doldrum; the only games I seem to have any enthusiasm for are XBLA games. I had an opportunity to spend a few hours with any of my longer-form games at one point during the weekend and I stood in front of my shelf of games, many of them begging to be played, and found none of them held much allure. I think I ultimately watched a few minutes of the Silent Hill 2 intro—this marks roughly the 42nd time I’ve sat through it—and turned it off because my one rechargeable 360 controller battery was dying. I wasn’t exactly weeping and gnashing teeth.

We did end up having Thom and his wife Kelly over later in the week for games. He walked us through the introductory mode of Power Grid, which I felt was more of a tease than anything. Basically the game involves a bidding match to buy the best Power Station card (which is wholly subjective) followed by a resource management phase followed by a Monopoly-like land grab. The mechanics are a little awkward to understand abstractly at first, but once they click they have a remarkable balance of simple elegance and thorough representation. Sort of the opposite of Hillary Clinton? I don’t know, I’m not good with the political jokes.

What was teasing about the intro game was that at the point in the regular progression where the game opens up and the true beauty of your early game establishment is revealed, the game is over. Imagine playing Ticket to Ride and after drawing your hand up to twenty-five cards, someone claimed their first 8-point Destination Ticket completion and announced the game was over. I understand the theory behind giving new players a taste, and I understood that our guests were probably tired (not to mention we will most likely be playing the game again at the con) but I’m the kind of gamer where if I get into the flow of a session, my strategy begins to form like a gathering storm. Leaving that mindset unfulfilled is like shaking up a can of coke and setting it gently on the counter. I survived, you know? But I’ve been replaying the short session in my head for days now, wondering how it would have gone if I’d had one last turn or…

It’s a path that leads to madness. Also scurvy, which is the lesser of the two evils. Regardless, I suspect I will be not be sated until Friday at the earliest. In the interim I would advise a wide berth. Twenty yards or so ought to suffice.

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[Update, August 26th: Two days after posting this, I happened to re-visit GW's website and found that they had updated the Blood Bowl listings and now include boosters for some teams that actually make some sense in terms of how the teams are constructed for LRB5, including Undead. The main point stands, but I thought I'd be accurate in saying that at least they seem to be doing something, even if I feel it falls well short of the mark.]

All I want is a single model to round out my Undead Blood Bowl team. It’s not a tall order, nor an unreasonable one. However, my primary logical provider of this product, Games Workshop, is a sloppily run niche market company that can’t be bothered to cater to its customers and so I’m left with vitriol and empty hands.

At least I have a blog.

Look, I get it. Gaming has got to be a frustrating market for businesses that want to operate as legitimate enterprises and not labor-of-love charity organizations. Gamers are notoriously fickle, generally cheapstakes and loathe to part with their disposable income unless the purchase meets some ill-defined criteria whose formula cannot be deduced using modern mathematical principles. So yeah, game companies have a steep road to climb to financial success.

Big, important game companies like Palladium and TSR have struggled or failed because they attempt to either exert market muscle on a difficult to demograph clientele or they prostrate themselves on a core fanbase to keep them alive with guilt trips and puppy dog eyes. Small companies have risen meteorically based on fluke and fad, like Wizards of the Coast. Even sister industry video games have struggled to work within a customer base that is neither loyal and predictable nor malleable and excitable. Gamers tend to be skeptical, critical and yet habitual. So yeah, I understand to a degree why game companies might treat their customers with a bit of disdain.

What I don’t understand is a company acting like it’s allergic to certain types of paying customers. Games Workshop, publishers and rights-owners to several of my all-time favorite tabletop games, has squandered much of the good will it earned by associating itself with these products. I’ve already mentioned my general apathy toward their flagship products principally due to their hamfisted efforts to milk the few customers they can draw in dry. And now I’m losing the last ounces of respect I had for them because they can’t even manage the few games they’ve retained even a modicum of support for in a way that makes any sense.

This is strictly opinion, but I feel that GW’s Specialist Games line is their biggest asset. The squad-level games like Necromunda and Mordheim offer a brilliant intro to tabletop miniatures games without heavy investment and provide, due to their scale, a more manageable gameplay experience. The battallion- or fleet-level games of Warmaster, Battlefleet Gothic and Epic 40K provide a more robust strategic experience due to the wargame-style abstractions and the comparative simplicity of the hobby elements. Their more restrictive environment games, closer to traditional board games, like DungeonQuest and Space Hulk are some of their best overall products because they allow for a less fiddly experience that appeals to a wider audience while still giving ample opportunity in the hobbyist realm.

They even have stepped down the right path with their Living Rule Book concepts. If they don’t want to actively support these products with their company time and effort, that’s okay, as long as they allow the game to flourish naturally with a community-driven model. And in part they have with community-driving games like Blood Bowl (which is what this is really about). Yet in a time where Intellectual Property notions and theories are being challenged regularly with variations on the idea of idea ownership I can’t begin to fathom why GW thinks they have to tightly reign the product that they’ve essentially handed off to the community to run. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

Basically Blood Bowl in the present tense is managed by the Blood Bowl Rules Committee, a group who works on revising the LRB. They are selected from the community and they democratically collate the results of playtests and rules discussions into something that works like actual rules modifications to improve the game as a whole. Which is great except that the community en masse is stifled by GW’s draconian demand for ultimate IP control. Like I said before, I get why GW ended up in this position what I don’t understand is why they don’t open their minds enough to see the value of trying something new.

Let’s take an example: The BBRC has voted unanimously to add three new teams to the next edition of the rules. Most of the teams are revised legacy teams from older, way outdated versions of the game. Most of them add great new dimensions to the existing game dynamic and yet there is a roadblock: GW won’t approve the addition of new teams without official models to support them and they won’t order new models to be created unless their market research can predict a minimum sales that Blood Bowl figures don’t meet. So there exists this set of limbo teams that everyone who plays the game and cares about it wants, but can’t be added because the rights holders have deemed it unprofitable.

I can’t explicitly fault GW’s reasoning here: Running a business is running a business and like I said, I can sympathize with their positions. But there seems to be a simple answer which will solve most if not all of the principal problems facing the game today: Develop a simple and extremely cheap if not free licensing system to allow alternative modelers to create and sell official Blood Bowl support products. Instead of making sites like Shadowforge and Impact! Miniatures circumvent the rules, give them an affordable way to step in and take the reigns. I’m no businessman but I can smell opportunity and there are companies that are already doing what GW doesn’t want (cannibalizing figure sales with unlicensed alternatives) so why not get a small cut of the action, earn some goodwill with the fans and perhaps give the game a chance to build an audience with a greater range of support than you yourself are willing to give?

As it stands you can’t order single models for any Blood Bowl team from Games Workshop and since the team designations in the licensed boxed sets are woefully outdated for two or more editions back (and arguably unsuitable even then) you have no option other than resort to alternative model providers, the secondary market or overpurchasing. They’ve completely gutted their support so that booster packs are disastrously rare and don’t even get me started on the miserable range of Star Player models that represent perhaps a quarter of the complete list. What this means is that the only way to create a full 16-player Blood Bowl team from official Games Workshop models is to either buy two boxed sets (leaving you with 22 players which in most cases still isn’t the correct combination of positionals as dictated by the team list and at best is eight models more than you’ll ever need) or hope that, again, a secondary site like BBFigs.com can fill in the blanks by reselling GW models.

Your IP is either something you stand behind or it’s a wasted opportunity: Right now GW is treating Blood Bowl and the whole Specialist line with indifference that I can only translate as a wasted opportunity. So what’s it going to be, Games Workshop? More customer ill will and more head scratching about why your company hemorrhages customers? Or out of the box thinking that can actually improve the profit margins that seem to be the only language you speak these days?

Running out of new ways to talk about stale things is maybe not a challenge more creative or clever writers have to surmount. But I’m writing a weekly column about the games that I play and while I’m reasonably content sometimes to focus on a handful of games for a period of time, it makes coming up with interesting commentary that isn’t dreadfully repetitive tough.

So rather than re-tread Blood Bowl strategies or discuss my Etrian Odyssey II progress, I’ll talk about a game I don’t even fully own: Braid. It was one of those titles whose ill-conceived title stems from some artsy interpretation but lacks descriptive punch and yet is spoken of with a particular connotation that more or less creates a conceptual bookmark in my mind. If my brain were del.icio.us, it might be tagged with “check_out_maybe.” So I see the ads on XBLA this weekend while I’m playing some GeoWars 2 and the flag is raised in the back of my head and I decide to drag myself away from my obsession long enough to give it a whirl.

I knew only that it had “positive buzz” going in. The demo is fairly significant in available content, but the game itself is clearly designed to be an exploratory experience which is something that may work in an artistic sense but as something that is designed to inspire me to spend money I’m not sure it’s effective. I can say that as a post-modern throwback-slash-genre interpretation, it’s interesting. I can also say that as an overall package it’s demonstration content is uneven to the extent that your individual criteria are going to be the deciding factors on whether or not you pull the trigger on this game.

For example, there is a particular elegance to most of the game’s presentation. The smoothly shifting watercolor aesthetic of the backdrops and the quiet, introspectively lilting music is fresh and exciting. Meanwhile, the pixely-looking cartoon design of the game’s characters is cute, but contrasts sharply with the backdrop and while one or the other would be fine with me, the combination is unpleasant. Likewise the game’s referential sense of humor and youthful presentation doesn’t gel in any ready way with its knife’s edge of pretentiousness in the story elements. Even the gameplay with it’s elegantly designed puzzles but awkwardly integrated and purposefully sketchy tutorial/hint system feels painfully unbalanced.

A lot of online forums are lamenting the $15 price tag, which has itself fostered a backlash, one that may or may not have ulterior motives. Personally, I see it as just another in the game’s list of see-sawing pros and cons. Like I said, it becomes intensely personal. Either $15 for a platformer is repugnant and it wouldn’t matter if you were paying for the best platformer ever, you’d be morally opposed to the act, or you have no problem with it because you rationalize that $15 is still $45 cheaper than some alternatives. Either the art design is acceptable or the weirdly incongruous graphics are a deal-breaker. I don’t know how you can quantify something like this.

So listen, I didn’t buy it. I’m intrigued, for sure. I’m the kind of person who can overlook some strangeness in a game to find the chewy center that lies beneath. I’m playing Etrian Odyssey II, after all. And I’m putting hours and hours into it. But something about the nexus between the game’s odd choices and its price and its hyperbolic critical acclaim… I dunno, it wasn’t enough to push me over the line. Any time a game polarizes this way, I almost feel like I need to just stand aside. Maybe eventually it will be part of some XBLA Best Of promotion for $5 or something and I’ll catch up with it then. Meanwhile, I have something less controversial to play. Something I’m still more likely to enjoy.

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My 360Voice bot-blog has been griping at me for weeks as I’ve left the 360 unattended in favor of Etrian Odyssey and Blood Bowl pursuits. I was already thinking, “Maybe I should log on this weekend and just see if anything interesting is going on.” When I gathered a couple of new names from a forum I frequent to add to my Friends List, it was a done deal already so the announcement of Geometry Wars 2 being released can’t really be blamed in full.

What I can blame GeoWars2 for is my lack of sleep through the weekend and an onset of OCD-like symptoms that have me twitching and scheming to get a few more minutes in on various game modes like Pacifism and King.

Bizarre has done some interesting things with the Geometry Wars brand/franchise since the Retro Evolved game for XBLA became an early contender for best of show on the platform at launch. Some might persuasively argue that until the release of Oblivion and Dead Rising, it was the best next generation game period. I’m not saying I’m one of those people making that argument, I’m just saying they might have a case. Evolved was a sublime example of the kind of game console gamers wanted on their living room consoles. It was simple, harkening the old Atari 2600 era, but with a fresh feeling aesthetic and a rudimentray use of the Xbox Live platform features (the scoreboards I mean) that lent validity to the whole endeavour. The ribbon that tied the whole thing into a package suitable for delivery was the game’s in-session difficulty curve and obfuscated inner workings.

Obviously some of the “rules” of Retro Evolved are knowable: Multipliers occur at geometric sequence points starting at 25 with a ratio of 2, weapon changes occur every 10,000 points, extra lives are awarded at 75,000 point intervals and extra bombs at 100,000. But what is only surmized or perhaps supposed is the other less tangible elements: Some games it seems the waves that spawn from the board corners are heavily favored to one enemy type or another. Sometimes gravity wells (those hated foes that draw in other enemies until they nova into rapidly-moving clusters) appear within the first 10,000 points, other times they don’t appear until well past the first extra life. The explanations for these discrepancies are largely superstitious, but the fact that they are observable but not capable of being realistically charted makes them exciting, an element of randomness.

Add to that the fact that wepon changes cycle through only two options once you advance beyond the basic shot so you may stick with a favored cannon for minutes on end while other times you may find yourself flipping rapidly as probability allows and your score multiplier increases the milestone rate. Since some enemeies are subjectively easier to hit with one weapon or another, the game seems to intentionally introduce a certain arbitrary chaos into each session such that you want to keep trying “just one more time” to find that perfect storm of chance and performance that equates to a high score mark.

But since then the development team have opted for a more well-defined experience. I first heard about the “Geoms” concept when reading reviews of the Wii and DS exclusive Geometry Wars Galaxies, where each destroyed foe drops a temporary pickup that can be collected to various ends. In Retro Evolved 2, the Geoms are now the score multipliers and their ubiquity allows the scores to reach new stratospheres for good players, especially since the multipliers don’t reset with each life the way they did in the original Retro Evolved. Likewise, the sequel has five new game modes in addition to the basic Evolved game which are all enjoyable although a couple like King and Pacifism are clear favorites. But curiously those modes are those that are furthest removed from the predecessor’s gameplay: They drastically alter the rules of the game and, in Pacifism, almost create an entirely new mechanic.

I played Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved on 76 different days. I don’t have any measurable or accurate statistic to indicate how many hours went into each daily session; some were lengthy stretches others were quick one-or-two game stints. But it is listed as my most-played Xbox 360 game ahead of Oblivion; while Oblivion may have it beat in hours (something like 200 total hours went into that epic) I wager that given the additional 24 days I fired up GeoWars, it’s probably in remarkably close contention especially when you think that a standard game of GeoWars takes under five minutes beginning to end. I don’t know that this sequel has what it takes to match that level of interest perhaps because they’ve made such efforts to clarify what a game of GeoWars is. I don’t mind their efforts, but perhaps I prefer to project my own perspectives into that abstracted space, and lacking some of that ability, it becomes just another game.

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