This week I play a couple of new shooters, continue my quest to rid the world of zombies once and for all, play some handheld games including an exciting twist on an all-time classic, touch on a few odds and ends and wrap it up with a couple of tabletop games for Monday Game Night. Then I dissect the games I’m not playing and realize what makes me suddenly lose interest in a game I once loved.
But you have to hit the link to see it all.
I’ve been half-following the news coming out of GDC this year and among all the chatter I found a little slice of news that really bummed me out: The DSi may very well have exclusive titles. The reason this is frustrating is because I buy game hardware to facilitate use, not out of some sense of brand loyalty or for some nebulous potential. I bought an XBox after KotOR was released, I bought a 360 for Dead Rising, I bought a DS for Advance Wars and New SMB, etc. My intial thought when they announced the DSi was that it was interesting but ultimately irrelevant because my DS Lite works just fine and the additional features seemed more like nice-to-haves rather than pivotal upgrades. Cameras? No thanks, I have enough questionable quality personal-electronics-based photography equipment. SD card slot? Nice, but hardly necessary. Bigger screens? Again, nifty but not mandatory. And the exclusion of the GBA slot makes it significantly less attractive than the Lite to me because I still play GBA games.
But the fact that Nintendo seems willing to release games that won’t work on the Lite means that the potential exists for me to want both a DSi and an DS Lite (the latter being my defacto GBA player). I suppose the same effect could be achieved with a DSi and a Game Boy Micro but either way I’m looking at two systems. I was willing to step away from the Game Boy backwards compatibility but introducing a schism in the user base on the same basic hardware is just mean.
It occurs to me that if someone ever wanted to get me the best present ever they could get me something like a GP2X and load it up with emulators for NES, SNES, Game Boy, GBA, Sega Master System, Genesis, Game Gear, Turbo Grafx 16, Neo-Geo and MAME so I can move on past my infatuation with old school games knowing I have access to them without having to take the bitter medicine of “official channels.” If wanting that makes me a bad citizen in the gaming world, then brand me a traitor. I’ve easily dropped over $100,000 on games in my lifetime so maybe the consumer overlords will forgive me this one little lapse if I promise to keep doing my part to drive the industry on the front end of the cycle. Wanting to play Battletoads from time to time doesn’t stop me from buying the new Call of Duty games so cut me some slack here.
The weekend was principally focused on non-gaming activities and the week was fairly packed likewise; I’m not sure if you heard but we’re expecting a new member of the family late summer so my wife has a certain trump card on activities if she chooses to play it and it got some heavy use over the last seven days. This is not to be interpreted as a complaint, mind. When the woman carrying your child not on but actually in her person says, “Hey let’s go shopping for clothes that cover my changing body” you do not reply with, “No thanks, I’m going to kill this giant alien crab instead.”
You just don’t.
What you do instead is try to squeeze in a few games here and there, often late at night with headphones to allow her as much sleep as she can get.
Apologies for the meta post but I thought I should outline a few relatively minor changes to Tunnels of Doom. Obviously since a hiatus a few months ago I’ve gotten back into the swing of updating at least the Gaming Weekend column. It is seeming though that Gaming Weekend has become and indeed has been for some time the core feature of the site. It’s also increasingly misnamed so going forward Gaming Weekend will no longer be an active category nor will it be labeled as a specific named column. Instead Tunnels of Doom itself will be updated roughly weekly (my aim to to have them posted by Tuesday each week) with the gaming report that has been known to this point as Gaming Weekend.
I will maintain the post title “… Edition” convention and in fact the posts will be under the Edition category going forward. The rationale for this is simply to avoid the artificial column construct when the blog itself has become that column. ToD has always been a bit of an experiment to me, coming from my desire to write about games but no longer wishing to clog my personal site with the topic. My initial concept for the site was different from what it has become, and it’s fair to say that I’ll make further changes if they become warranted.
The one other small format adjustment is that I intend to try to improve the visual appeal of the site by including post images (like the one for this post). It’s probably not a huge change but ideally it will make the site look a little more interesting. And finally, the last change for now is that it will no longer be required to be a reigstered user to post a comment however, all comments will need to pass an approval step before being published. I get a lot of spam comments on ToD already and while I want to foster more conversation (and hopefully open commenting will allow that) I don’t have any desire to have to hand-prune spam comments that clutter the pages, I’d rather stop them before they become visible. This is actually the same as it has always been, but the lifted barrier to posting will hopefully mean once in a while I’ll actually approve a comment rather than just spam-mark an endless stream of bot account posted garbage.
Heads up on a cool promo Wizards of the Coast is offering: A free deck of Magic: The Gathering cards. Shipping takes 6-8 weeks, but… hey. Free Magic cards. Can’t beat that with a stick.
A large portion of the week was spent with a plastic guitar slung low over my shoulders as Nik and I powered through dozens of setlists in Rock Band 2. When I wasn’t involved in all that, I was relieved to find a tranquility in my pursuit of Puzzle Quest on the go, hunted a few more zombies (and some achievements), revisited a dystopian future, dabbled in another cutesy game, delighted in Facebook games, found frustration in XBLA titles, continued the drift away from WoW and hit the hobby circuit for some modeling and painting fun.
All the details follow.
For most of the week I found only pockets of time to play little bursts of games but starting with the weekend (marked by the end of a particularly onerous project) I had a fairly open schedule to plug away at a few of my current titles. I also picked at a few oldies to see if they were still goodies, tried to get my painting mojo back, decided I made the wrong choice of platform—surprising myself in the process—and played not one but two tabletop games.
The only way to know is to carry on.
Zombies invaded my 360 this weekend, plus I reach a WoW milestone, engage in some courtroom activities that soldify my position on virtual lawyering, pick up a game I can’t seem to latch onto, find out Lock’s Quest isn’t the game I thought it was and fall asleep playing a demo. Plus, my thoughts on what would make for a better MMO experience and more Pandemic than you can shake a stick at.
Come on. You know you want to read it.