Tunnels of Doom

At last I pushed through the end of Fallout 3 and I think it’s safe to say I’ve had my fill of that particular title for the time being. Technically there is still another DLC pack (Mothership Zeta) but frankly I need a break. One last note I wanted to bring up about Fallout 3 before I stop talking about it for a good long while is that I’ve been considering the choice to adjust the scaling enemy model from Oblivion into the somewhat-scaled but also genuine pockets-of-danger approach Fallout takes. In Oblivion the whole world scales to your relative strength: As you become stronger the world around you grows stronger as well so you are consistently challenged. In Fallout it seems they do some of this: There seems to be a class type set in various locations (a dungeon containing Ghouls, or an overworld area that spawns mutated creatures for example) and within that class there are relative ranks (Feral Ghouls up through Glowing Ones or Molerats up through Giant Radscorpions for example). As you advance you see fewer of the lower level class instances and more of the stronger which allows the developers to have themes within various locations but still scale based on the player.

However, Fallout also has certain areas which always contain enemies either of a particular strength level or, at the very least, there are a few select locations where a particularly nasty enemy or set of enemies will always be, regardless of player strength (I’m talking mostly about Deathclaws and Super Mutant Behemoths, although even the scaled Super Mutant-heavy downtown area is a reasonable example). In both of my playthroughs I stumbled across these sorts of areas by accident before I was either powerful enough to put up a fight or supply-ready to engage the foe. On one hand I understand this decision: A lot of complaints were leveled at Oblivion for artificially adjusting the challenge level because it led to instances where tough dungeons were better to visit early on since a lot of late-game enemies were more resource-draining than low-level ones (especially in terms of Soul Shards once you started using magical weapons). Which means the scalable challenge level meant combat was fairly consistent with the exception of stronger enemies requiring extra combat overhead (like collecting Souls or performing alchemy/repair to replenish your equipment). Functionally you were always “slaying a dragon” whether it happened to be skinned like an Imp or like a Minotaur Lord.

The downside of the Fallout model is that I felt it actually discouraged me from exploring since there was a point at which you had to weigh risk vs. reward. There are a lot of cool hidden quests in the game, many of which are more interesting than the primary game quests that are almost always found either through the main questline or in populated towns, but finding them is almost exclusively for the bold of heart (and the hotkey-quicksave PC folks) since it requires taking regular risks of death especially in the rarely-autosaving overworld. The downside of the Oblivion model is that there are rarely combat-based triumphs in the game. Even named foes are typically scaled to your level so at no point do you feel accomplished for a Davidian takedown: There are simply no Goliaths.

I’m not sure what the correct balance is: MMOs like World of Warcraft simply allow overpowered characters to visit areas that are beneath them from a challenge perspective but this does limit the intrigue of some of the instance storylines: I can attest that running through Shadowfang Keep at level 40 or whatever with a level 80 Shadow Priest was exceptionally boring. Perhaps a system could be worked out where a simple challenge rating was assigned to each area which was always relative to the player’s level: Level 1 overworld sections and dungeons would consistently provide minimal or basic loot for a minimum level of effort and would never feature named or special foes. Level 5 sections and dungeons might be reserved for questline-specific encounters that always took a huge amount of planning and resources but faced you off with impressive bosses and paid out huge rewards in terms of loot.

Okay, let’s talk about other games for once.

After finishing Fallout I picked up Halo Wars again (since it’s borrowed and I want to give it back sometime before the end of the world in 2012). As I was playing it I started to get this uncomfortable antsy feeling. It took me a while to figure out what it was. In case you don’t know, I work in incident response for a group of engineers at a Major Internet Destination Site. What this means is that I’m given a limited amount of resources and a variety of tools which take up a varying number of those resources. Then all day long I’m presented with a sequence of problem notifications to which I have to determine the severity, take some sort of preliminary action and ultimately determine how to use the resources available to me (time, documentation, escalations, troubleshooting procedures) to put out what I determine to be the hottest fire. Basically, my job is an RTS. But rather than make my job really fun, what it does is make RTS games feel exactly like work. I use all the same mental techniques when playing Halo Wars that I do all week long and I caught myself feeling that oh-so-familiar sense of frustrated exhaustion and I dropped the controller.

No thanks, this is not how I spend leisure time.

I keep coming back to RTS games because I really enjoyed StarCraft and Age of Empires II but once I identified that these games are very similar to my work I was able to figure out that I stopped liking them right around the same time I started doing this type of thing for a living which means I’ve been scratching my head over why these games stopped appealing to me for a long time. At any rate I think I’m content to let the genre go for now.

As a natural response to giving up on Halo Wars—which isn’t a bad game by the way, it’s just not for me—I settled on The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay as my next effort. I played the game for several hours over the weekend and honestly I didn’t really find it to be particularly fun. I wish I could describe my reasoning for more or less disliking the game but I find it to be remarkably difficult considering every complaint I have about the game could also be leveled at another game I’ve played only in those other cases I enjoyed the game in spite of the issue. For example, take the clumsy first-person beat-em-up sections: I played all the way through Condemned: Criminal Origins and it had even more frustrating first-person brawler elements as a core game mechanic and I found a way to finish that game. Then there is the awkward stealth elements which have no game elements to indicate your success or failure at remaining hidden (not to mention the bad guys can just decide to flip on their flashlights if they like) but then again I really enjoyed Call of Duty 4 and it had an even worse section of forced stealth and no real indicator of how well hidden you were. And then there is the frustrating gun combat which is made worse by the fact that the enemy AI is wildly inconsistent (they are dumb as bricks but they all have the most incredible aim and a sort of sixth sense for where you are on the map) but it’s hard to complain when I finished Bullet Witch and thought it was actually kind of fun.

The only thing I can really think is that I just don’t have any sort of connection at all with the character or setting. I watched about 45 minutes of Pitch Black in the background at some social gathering, edited for network television, a few years ago and that’s about it. I don’t actually know why I’m supposed to care about Riddick and maybe that’s part of the problem: The game could simply be written for people already familiar with the franchise and I just don’t fit the target audience. Or maybe it just comes down to a combination of the various elements making for a poor game, I can’t be sure. One way or the other I’m having a hard time feeling like I want to return to the game. On the bright side I swapped Halo Wars with my friend for his copy of Halo: ODST which at the very least sounds like my cup of tea.

Let me describe to you a conversation I’ve begun to loathe that occurs in gaming circles: Someone says “I love playing video games, but I have this girl now and she doesn’t like games. What can I do to get her to play with me?” Now, the subtext of this feels an awful lot like “My girlfriend gripes at me for playing too many vids, how can I trick her into the hobby so she crawls off my back?” Perhaps that’s not always the case, but it’s hard for me not to cynically attribute that as the motivation. I can’t help feeling like most often the notion is that if you get your significant other hooked on the same hobby you don’t have to adjust your behavior to adapt to a relationship, you can adapt your relationship to your activities. Then the ensuing conversation describes the lack of understanding gamer guys have of the fairer sex better than I ever could as they generalize and stereotype so badly it borders on misogyny citing ignorance as fact along the lines of “Girls’ hand-eye coordination is worse than ours so that’s why they only like games with simple controls.” What’s frustrating is seeing this same thread repeated over and over again and no one notices that it keeps coming up because no one seems to have much luck with it: By and large girls who will play games probably already do and those who might play some games cannot be assumed to like any particular suggestion. After all, how could you recommend a game for a friend of mine if the only information I gave you was “he’s male”? In this case fellas, I hate to tell you, you actually have to get to know someone to know what they’ll like.

It’s madness.

Anyway, I played some games this week. Let me tell you which ones I liked.

I’m still working through Fallout 3. I went through The Pitt DLC because I was getting burnt on repeating stuff I’d gone through on my PS3 playthrough. I thought it was pretty well done, especially since the end of the questline does a clever bit of storytelling head fake and the morality that you may have assumed all the way through gets turned on its head a bit. I was a bit disappointed with the inclusion of Yet Another Arena Sequence although it worked contextually, it still feels so old hat that I would have preferred a more clever turn to advance the story at that point. I keep thinking back to this add-on and Operation: Anchorage and thinking that many people bought these at $10 each. I wonder if I would have felt happy to have spent that money and so far I’m not sure I would have. I think The Pitt came closer than O:A did, but I hope the next two add-ons have a greater sense of scope. Truthfully I’m afraid what I’m looking for—still—from Fallout 3 is something that rivals any of the Guild questlines from Oblivion and I’ve yet to see it.

Other than The Pitt I made plenty of progress in the game but I’m starting to feel fatigue. I hit Level 20 but I had installed Broken Steel so I blew past it. I do appreciate the new Perks that were added as some of them are cool and clever: Unfortunately the game is really built to have Level 20 be the pinnacle and at this point I’m so overpowered that for fun I decided to execute an NPC in the Citadel and had the entirety of the Brotherhood of Steel trying to drop the hammer on me. It did take me a couple dozen Stimpacks but I was able to decimate at least 20 Brotherhood warriors single-handedly and I wasn’t even using my nigh-unstoppable Stealth Kill technique either. So at this point I’m basically eschewing all loot unless I absolutely can’t pass it up (which is rare) and trying to collect the final few achievements before I get to what I really started this whole thing to see: The Broken Steel content. The good news is that I have a few games waiting in the wings for me to finish up with Fallout so there’s no reason for me not to power through.

Speaking of other games, I haven’t used my PS360 for anything but Fallout in the last few weeks but I have had cause to flip on the DS a few times. I’ve been doing the Picross Daily Challenge thing which is very similar to the Daily mode that captured me for a month or so a couple years ago in Planet Puzzle League. Actually the two games while being very dissimilar mechanically have a lot in common and that may be why I like Picross so much. But aside from that I also decided to try out The World Ends With You which was an action RPG that got a lot of positive buzz about a year or so ago.

How can I describe my experience with TWEWY? Have you ever had a movie or TV show that a lot of people you know and trust raved about, and then you finally get around to checking it out and you loathe it to the extent that you wonder if you made a mistake and watched something similarly titled but completely different from that which was recommended to you? That’s what it was like playing The World Ends With You. I can’t stand this game. Never before have I felt as vengeful on a developer as I did toward Square Enix and Jupiter after an hour with it. I’ve played some pretty rough RPGs in my day but never have I played something so overwrought and full of trying-too-hard faux hipness. It’s like a mashup of a My Chemical Romance video, anime fanfic written by a 13 year-old and patting your head while rubbing your stomach. The principal mechanic of doing flaily things with the stylus to approximate spell casting (called inexplicably here “pins”) while at the same time doing a kind of simplistic pattern matching on the D-pad to control the top screen is not just unweildy and awkward but downright rage-inducing. The game claims to take over control of the top screen when you stop doing it but it penalizes you for not playing its stupid ping-pong match focus shift and never tells you how to let it control the bottom screen character which is what you really need since the stylus input acceptance is so touchy that I wished I was back playing Puzzle Quest on the DS in the bed of a pickup driving through a minefield for a less frustrating, more user-friendly experience.

I can’t quite decide how I feel about the fact that I used Goozex to acquire the Fallout 3 Game Add-on Packs, which are basically discs containing the DLC extensions for Fallout. The discs themselves are no more expensive than the DLC if purchased separately (nevermind the MS Point tax), but since I got them from Goozex and they function identically to the DLC in that they install to your hard drive, I only need to possess the discs for roughly 55 seconds and then I can turn around and re-list them on Goozex at or near the exact point price I paid. My cost for $20 worth of DLC? $1 per disc and maybe $2.50 shipping on each to get them out the door. For the two discs currently in circulation, that’s $40 worth of game content for $7. My penny-pinching side does this little jig that looks like Gumby doing the Irish jig when I think about it, but my sense of justice kicks in simultaneously and makes me feel like I’ve gamed the system somehow and taken advantage of Bethesda’s good will in trying to get their add-on content out to the non-broadband-owning populace.

I guess my final judgement will be reserved for when I work my way through all that content. If it’s as solid as the Oblivion DLC was, I’ll probably feel a little guilty and try to make up for it by actually purchasing a copy of the next game they put out (Elder Scrolls V?).

I’ve pretty much been stuck back on Fallout 3 since I picked it up last week. I play mostly in short one or two hour bursts at night after my wife and baby have gone to sleep: Even with the sleep deprivation of having a newborn I can’t bring myself to retire for the night prior to the witching hour. And ultimately I find that my lifetime struggle with sleep as a constant interruption to my leisure activities has left me accustomed to operating more or less efficiently on a generous average of five hours sleep per night. Since the household tries to call it a night around 23:00 and I typically don’t have to wake up for the day until 08:30 at the earliest, that’s nine and a half hours for me to try and squeeze in a bit of shut-eye. If I doze through half of it, I feel more or less the same way I did before the birth.

Most of my efforts to this point have been focused on getting a character returned to the point at which I consider the game “fun” rather than “interesting.” Early stages in the game involve frequent trips back to whatever you establish as your home base to offload accumulated loot and repair the copious damage dished out by the wasteland’s various foes, and trying to advance in level so you can ultimately get some sort of reliable combat strategy going. Basically this means dumping points into some kind of combat or circumvention technique because you really can’t try to get through the game being a generalist. When I played through before I was a Small Arms expert who did massive damage in VATS with assault rifles and shotguns; this time I’m a stealth expert who can more or less one-shot-kill anything weaker than a Super Mutant Brute so long as I remain undetected in stealth mode before I fire. For the most part it doesn’t matter what weapon I use.

The rationale for this is to get to a point where I can appreciate the DLC, although I did run through Operation: Anchorage early on because I read somewhere that the loot was better served being acquired by a mid-level character. In many ways that was very true, and it in fact influenced the direction I eventually took my character. I thought the add-on was pretty cool, the snowy areas were a nice change of pace from the oppressive brownness of the rest of the game. I did think it felt a bit padded, like they had a pretty cool concept but they made each section of it longer than it really needed to be I guess so people who downloaded it felt like they got their money’s worth.

Anyway, the other game I put some significant time into was Picross DS. Basically it’s a puzzle game that owes a great deal to Sudoku but the resulting grids are treated as canvases for pixel art. Rather than determining a sequence of numbers within a set of parameters, the row and column heads describe a particular pattern of shaded coordinates. For example, a column may have the number 3 over it indicating that somewhere in that column there are three consecutive shaded cells. If there are two numbers, say 3 1, that means there are three consecutive shaded cells followed by at least one unshaded cell and then one shaded cell, all on that same column and in that order. From this you can deduce through process of elimination which cells are shaded and which are not. The result when you are done is some kind of pixelized art, not unlike a favicon in a browser tab. They start out simple at 5×5 but quickly get up to 18×18 and bigger which makes it much more difficult from a logic standpoint but the resulting pictures—which really shouldn’t be much of a reward at all but somehow totally are—are more intricate.