Tunnels of Doom

Before we get started this week, I need to bring your attention to a site: The Tunnels of Doom Tribute Page. Affirmative.

Anyway.

I acquired a means of emulating software on my DS this week. Among other things this will afford me a chance to have the device I’ve long craved which is a portable emulator not bound by the commercial confines of re-releases. Rather than waiting for someone to finally put out a DS version of Shadowrun for the SNES, for example, I can simply emulate it directly from the original cart’s ROM. This is acceptable to me.

In completely unrelated news, I also had the opportunity to try out a few new DS games this week. One of them was Scribblenauts, which is a sort of action/platformer/logic/puzzle game in which you type in various nouns and very often those objects will simply appear on screen and you can use them to solve the various puzzles at hand. Some of the tasks are straightforward enough, such as “Get from point A to point B.” Your avatar, Maxwell, will then engage with these objects sometimes in surprising ways in an effort to achieve the goal. What is interesting is that the game doesn’t seem to be fixated on a single solution that it wants you to stumble across but rather shows some of the most obviously clever programming I’ve seen in some time such that it allows for creativity in your solutions. Objects act in a particular way but it’s really up to you how to combine those interactions to solve the puzzles. It does have its quirks, of course: Anything this ambitious would. The control scheme for Maxwell is entirely touch-based and occasionally a bit wonky so you end up failing a level due to unexpected behavior rather than ineffective problem-solving. Still, it’s an original idea that works exceptionally well and I find myself wanting to show it off to people.

I also checked out Peggle Dual Shot which is, you know, Peggle on the DS. It works pretty well and I appreciated that there are a number of control mechanisms so it doesn’t force you to use the stylus. I played through the adventure mode of Peggle for the iPod and found it to be entertaining enough; there is an option to unlock all the Peggle Nights content if you finish the adventure mode here. I’m not sure I’m going to be committed enough to finish the game again, and of course the locked content curse strikes again. I wish someone could explain the rationale behind locking box-advertised content on game discs, especially content that isn’t tied to game play. Obviously unlocking upgrades or experience-based abilities is kosher, but like Castlevania X or Contra 4 there is so little reason here other than to shoehorn players into some developer or (worse) marketer’s idea of how the game should be played.

Perhaps the most important DS game I took for a test drive was Blood Bowl. Originally my excitement level for Cyanide’s adaptation of the tabletop game was sky-high but when the launch date came and went without a sign of the Xbox (Live Arcade?) edition, I was left shrugging at the triumph of a PC variant. I don’t play PC-only games, being a Mac user, so I had to hope they would get around to my platform of choice eventually. I did note with some interest the PSP/DS handheld versions but 15 minutes messing with the DS one at a friend’s house wasn’t enough to coax cash from my pocket. It fell into that weird nexus of a game that I need more time than a quick fiddle will allow to determine if it’s the kind of game I can spend a long time with. Many turn-based strategy RPGs are like this with me: It takes me a couple of hours to get into it and from there I can decide if I want to dive in full-bore and ultimately spend dozens of hours playing. That’s a tough sell for a trial run though. So I had my opportunity and I can say that at this point I’m glad I didn’t make the plunge. On one hand I want to support Cyanide’s dedication to the game I love, but frankly it’s a pretty rough game in terms of visuals, interface and pacing. Blood Bowl is pretty ponderous by nature but it never feels sluggish while you’re playing on the tabletop. Blood Bowl on the DS though feels epic even in single player mode where the CPU plays through an opponents turn pretty quickly.

It wasn’t just DS mania this week, I also returned to the well quite a bit for Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers, including a brief stint of online play versus Dr. Mac. Once again I was disappointed to discover that co-op, while making a pretty strong resurgence in the last few years, is still regularly fumbled by game devs. Let me spell it out as clearly as I am able: What I really want, 99% of the time, is online co-op versus the computer. Anytime a game offers a co-op mode but does not Live-enable it, I get stabby. Still, the game is enjoyable and playing online with one of my oldest Magic partners was wonderful (even if baby + Live = ill communication). I did lose both matches and Doc told me I should check out the black and green elf deck as it appears to be the Ranked match deck of choice. Since I’m trying to unlock 100% of the available cards, a feat which requires winning 17 matches with each deck, I decided to make that one my next project. The trouble is, I must be a terrible Magic player because I had to try half a dozen times against various different AI decks before I could make the deck work right. I can see it’s point: It contains a large number of relatively cheap Elf creatures and then a couple of spells which provide boosts for each Elf in play topped by a creature who generates 1/1 Elf tokens for every Elf spell cast. When it works you can easily end up with a board covered in 1-3 mana cost creatures that are anywhere from 5/5 through 10/10, often with Forestwalk and other useful effects. The trouble is, it has a gaping weakness in that it contains few or no flying creatures or defenses relying on getting its combo out so the opponent has to sacrifice his fliers as blocking fodder to keep from getting waxed. But the deck isn’t fast enough to get there without being pummeled by low cost flying creatures while your low cost Elves get locked up by some inexpensive defenses. I did finally defeat the all-green AI deck but it wasn’t easy since in some case that deck’s creatures can benefit from the cards that make the green/black work. I’m not sure how long my patience will last if I’m winning one in every six matches… times 16.

When I last compiled my Top 30 Games list, I put Bionic Commando at number 14. Obviously that classic NES game stuck with me so it was basically a given that I’d be involved with the resurgence they tried to fabricate for the franchise recently. Bionic Commando: Rearmed for XBLA was a well-executed re-imagining of the original game although I felt in some cases like they had turned what had been merely an interesting mechanic into a gimmick with all the challenge rooms and extra frills. I was less enthusiastic but still intrigued by the full 3D update but I requested it from Goozex anyway with a shrug and a “What the heck?” I managed to get through a couple of hours of the game and so far it’s not terrible but it does suffer somewhat from Capcom Writing Syndrome which is to say the writing plays double-dutch with the line between campy fun, uber cheese and eye-rolling hackery. But listen, I’ve ploughed through Lost Planet, Dead Rising and countless Resident Evil games so I can cope if the game itself is enough fun. The jury remains out, but so far I’m a bit concerned that a lot of the mood and feel of the 2D platformer seems to be absent.

And lastly I finally got around to re-acquiring Fallout 3 (on 360 this time) because I always felt like I had somehow missed the boat a little on that game. I mean, an Oblivion-like game in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting? How was that not a perfect fit for me? Which isn’t to say I didn’t like it, but when I played through it I felt very frequently depressed like the setting was just too oppressively bleak. Perhaps it’s becuase the game’s supposed dark sense of humor didn’t do enough to dull the edges or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I played through as a do-gooder so the contrast of my righteousness with the general anarchistic tone of the game was too much after a while. Whatever the case, I always meant to go back and play the game some more but never was really able to get into it. And eventually the 1,000 Goozex points it represented were more important than the potential for additional playtime so I traded it off. Now that I have it back I’m realizing that part of it was just the original level cap and the closed, end-of-story conclusion to the main questline. The game offers so much OCDRPG excitement with its leveling system that capping it off felt like punishment and the inability to continue to roam the game world after the end game was enough to sever my interest. Now that I’m back in and up to level 8 already I can feel the Oblivion-like spell being cast and the calluses worn by familiarity with the grim plot have done much to soothe my sense of despair so I can get down to just enjoying the play. It is a credit to Bethesda that they were able to coax that much visceral response from the game, it’s just a shame the response was largely negative. One other reason I have the game in my possession now is that I also have copies of the expansion content arriving presently from Goozex so I can extend the experience a little and see what stuff I missed because I chose early adoption and a competing platform.

Maybe you’re not aware but I have this other site out there in the ether which ostensibly chronicles the non-gaming portions of my life. Life, in this case, that has experienced a substantial sequence of changes since last we spoke and yet I have yet to update that place, content to let spiders move in and a cozy blanket of dust to settle. But I’m here and I’ll be honest with you, if the people who watched that other hamlet knew I was here with you instead of there with them they would probably be pretty peeved. I’m not sure what kind of measures they might take exactly, but I’m guessing they would wave their tiny virtual fists and attempt to hurt me in the only way anyone knows how to in this modern age where the physical proximity required for an actual beatdown is an endangered thing like Bald Eagles and honest Rock n’ Roll: De-friending and un-following on social networks. The joke will be on them, of course. Only you and I know that my true measure of worth is in fact my Gamerscore and they can’t affect that, now can they?

I was surprised to find that when my daughter was born and I had several weeks at home for paternity leave, I was actually able to play a number of games. I had fully expected to have to spend so much time… I don’t actually know what I thought I would be doing, really—soundproofing the shared walls in our apartment perhaps—but that wasn’t the case. Instead I found that a lot of caring for a newborn involves sleeplessly sitting. Now, it isn’t always the case that both hands can be completely free, for example to hold a controller, but the opportunity presents itself often enough that I found myself playing far more often than I ever thought I could.

Among the titles at my disposal were Mirror’s Edge, whch I completed again (this time on the 360) and then spent a few extra days working through some of the time trials which I found almost as enjoyable as the story mode. I’ve heard it said that time trials are in fact what the game should have been as they strip the crust of occasionally questionable combat away and leave the tender parkour-flavored center behind. Being a sucker for narrative and context, I can’t say that I explicitly prefer the time trials to the game itself, especially since the narrative in ME is a cut above the typical senseless excuses-for-action that passes for video game storytelling most of the time. However, I can recognize the inherent appeal of a game mode that takes the most fun aspect of the play (as opposed to the entire experience) and distills it, letting it age until sharp with a full bouquet.

I also dipped my toes into Chrono Trigger for the DS. I keep telling myself that I played the game in its original SNES incarnation and I know this to be true in that a copy of the game existed in my childhood home and I had a save file on it. My memory told me I had actually played through it and loved the game for all it was worth but that memory has never been my greatest asset and honestly before the DS port crossed my doorstep a few weeks ago I couldn’t have told you much about it except that it had a main character named Chrono who I had renamed Klive in my earlier playthrough(?) and there was, at one point, a sword-weilding frog. Playing the game via DS during various lulls in baby-related action and also (pardon the TMI) on the can, I recognized most of the sequences of the early game: The Millenial Fair, the faux chapel, the trial, the introduction of Lavos, the jetbike race. These all came back to me as if from the cold storage lockers of my memory but the game itself is so far recessed in the crevice of my mind that it’s like playing an entirely new game whilst suffering from unending deja vu. It’s not entirely unpleasant.

For a time I had moved from Mirror’s Edge back into Fable II, which had been my game of choice prior to the Xbox crash a few months back. It wasn’t the easiest thing to dive into after an absence due to the game’s occasionally overwhelming demand for full attention. I suppose the game can be played more or less on the rails as a straighforward experience but while I’m not always a completionist I do like to experience as much of what a game has to offer as can be reasonably expected. In this case much of the side questing, social interaction, exploration and minigame playing requires a lot of unstructured faffing about if you’re playing without some sort of cheat guide. I’m definitely not above hint books or FAQs, but a game like Fable seems to have enough built-in help to make it most unnecessary so long as you can keep your game plan at or near the front of your mind. As such, taking a quarter of a year off between activities is not really the way to go.

I abandoned Fable II when my wife persuaded me to rent the new Batman: Arkham Asylum game. The startling thing about B:AA is that it not only manages to successfully translate a comic book story (and a pretty competent one at that) into a video game, but it also manages to do what has yet to be accomplished to date which is make a Metroid-style game work in third-person 3D. What makes Arkham Asylum stand out most remarkably though is that developers Rocksteady really captured what is cool about Batman. I think it’s easy for game designers to focus on the combat prowess of Batman and ignore the “World’s Greatest Detective” aspect of the character. Heck, the comic book writers forget this aspect just as often. It’s not forgivable, I’m just saying it’s so easy as to be almost expected. But in Arkham Asylum the intellect of Batman comes through clearly and helps make the experience transformative as opposed to, say, putting a Batman skin onto Devil May Cry. The combat isn’t what I’d call sublime although it does have a particular charm and it fits the character well; what’s more effective are the tightly integrated stealth aspects of the game which are never clumsily mandated but actually provide a clear benefit. I would have liked to have seen a few more upgrades and gadgets and the final boss battle is a bit disappointing but I finished the game in under a week and then proceeded to plough through the (very welcome) continuation mode to complete the Riddler puzzles. There was little left to accomplish when I returned the game, but I still felt I could have happily spent more time in its world. Consider that my endorsement.

I soothed my loss after returning Batman by purchasing Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers on Dr. Mac’s recommendation from XBLA. I’ve attempted a few video incarnations of M:tG and have generally enjoyed them although none have ever really captured the full appeal of the tabletop CCG. I suppose Magic Online would be the exception but I don’t want to pay for virtual cards any more than I want to pay for physical ones so that option isn’t an improvement over the expensive but addictive game I grew attached to almost 15 years ago. Duels is sort of a compromise between Magic Online and a stand-alone game: It doesn’t attempt to obfuscate the game in any way like the strategy action game on the original Xbox did, but it doesn’t provide the full Magic experience because a key element of the game—deck construction—has been neatly trimmed away. It is nice to have a genuine game of Magic playable vs. an AI opponent if, like me, you find tabletop matches to be difficult to come by. For that reason alone I feel confident in my purchase of the game, which was only about $10 anyway. And it is true that the pre-constructed decks are solidly built and reasonably effective, plus as you win single-player matches with them you unlock additional sideboard cards that can be added or removed as you like which is a nice nod to deck construction. Still, I’m not sure that adding a full deck constructor and allowing completely customized decks from the relatively small pool of cards the game offers would cannibalize Wizards’ profits from other venues. I can even imagine a scenario in which they steadfastly refused to offer additional cards as DLC making the XBLA realm a small standalone subset of the game at large, but by providing a taste of the full range of activities unique to Magic you both entice new tabletop players and give those of us who long for a re-connection to an unfeasible activity enough to stay warm in the long winter of adult responsibility.