Tunnels of Doom

Infamous (or inFAMOUS if you insist on using the game’s inexplicable capitalization scheme) has a weird feel to it. I read Tim Rodger’s Let’s Talk About Jumping piece—or opus as it may be—which is rambling and unfocused and contains a lot of drivel but did have an interesting point or two within (just like ToD!) one of which was that, in video games, moving should be fun. The sense of transporting your on-screen avatar in an interactive medium really needs to have enough raw power to be rewarding in and of itself. I suppose this could be accomplished via interesting visuals so you have cool things to look at while you move or it can be accomplished with an enjoyable movement mechanic. But the core of the point remains that games tend to have their own feel when it comes to movement. Some are smooth and gliding like Half-Life or Assassin’s Creed, some are harsh and plodding like Silent Hill or Castlevania. In some cases it works, in others it doesn’t or at least it fails to really add anything to the experience; occasionally a game will have a sort of incongruous movement feel but somehow work in spite of it.

I’m talking about Infamous again. There is a certain floaty, detached-from-reality sense that you get from navigating the world in Infamous. The animations are all relatively impressive and the controls are responsive but while the game is essentially a comic book it looks realistic enough that I expect a greater sense of heft to the physics. Which is not to say that Infamous fails Mr. Rodger’s fun-to-move test. Moving around in Infamous is fun, although while it shares a lot in common with both Crackdown and Assassin’s Creed, it isn’t quite as fun to work your way around the city as either of those games. It’s basically the main way in which Infamous developer Sucker Punch reveals their Sly Cooper past, because Infamous’ Cole Macgrath jumps almost identically to Sly. What’s even weirder than the weightless way you jump and fall in Infamous is the wall-climbing system which basically has you being somewhat sticky when you jump near or toward climbable surfaces. Considering this is the principal way you traverse the environment it makes for less fiddly controls in the sense that you don’t have to be super-precise with your jumps resulting in it being difficult to accidentally jump off a ledge. Which would matter if you actually got hurt from jumping off ledges, but like Crackdown you sort of roll with it instead which means when you actually want to jump off a ledge, you typically end up hanging from it or clinging to the side of an adjacent building while the assault rifle-armed enemies you wanted to escape use your buttocks as bullet bongos.

That’s not really a genuine complaint—it’s more observational—since you eventually get the sense of how it works and you can sort of compensate. What is more of a real gripe is that for a super powered guy, Cole is kind of a slouch in the combat department early in the game. It’s not that combat isn’t fun, because it is, especially if you like electrocuting dudes in the head (a lot of dudes). But it is remarkable to me that I die so incessantly since, I mean, I can flip cars over and survive a 25-story drop to the pavement. Somehow concrete and terminal velocity is not a problem but AK-47 snipers six blocks away are serious problems. I’ve gotten to the point where I only really engage my foes when there are cars around because the cars are reasonably-sized targets from the distance I prefer to rumble and if I hit them enough they explode and at least knock down these assault rifle savants long enough for me to spin on a heel and run like an electricity-wielding sissypants. I’m playing the game through on the Evil path (Infamous being right there in the title) so I’m hoping once I get the Arc Lightning ability I can approach these fracas with more confidence but even upgrading my combat powers hasn’t done much to make me the unstoppable killing machine I aspire to be.

Strangely enough my favorite thing about the game so far is the pacing which is—hardy-har-har—lightning quick. The side missions take typically less than five minutes to complete and even the longer story missions are only 10-15 minutes in length and almost universally the missions don’t require a lot of unnecessary traipsing around the city: Your destination is typically only a few feet from the mission start point. As a guy who has suffered through dozens of Grand Theft Auto traveling tours, this is most welcome and is a stark contrast to the laboriously protracted sessions mandated by Silent Hill: Homecoming which you will note I did not play this week. I can drop into Infamous for twenty minutes while I rock the baby to sleep at 4:30 am and get two or three missions knocked out. Historically I’ve been the kind of person who prefers the deep dive where I can sink in and savor a game experience, but until my daughter is old enough that she can’t be relied on to need some kind of manual intervention every 2-3 hours, surface level games are going to be my favorites.

Aside from Infamous I dipped a few more times into WoW, wrapping up the last of my free trial account time. I got to thinking a bit more about what I had said last week regarding what it would take for Blizzard to get a regular subscription from me and I think I really nailed it when I supposed that finding a way to engage the multiplayer aspect would have to be the key. I don’t know that I’d have to get my existing friends interested in WoW, even having the opportunity to play enough to make in-game friends would probably be enough to encourage me to stick more closely with the game. Appointment gaming (especially online) is something I haven’t ever been able to effectively establish but then again my luck with coordinating real-life friends with virtual interests has been extremely limited. This is, in fact, kind of the largest stumbling block in my gaming hobby: I’ve occasionally been able to coordinate tabletop gaming appointments and from time to time I’ve had very short-term success with some online gaming (say, enough to finish a few co-op games online or have a handful of multiplayer sessions with friends) but we’ve all tended to drift into and out of the various games at different rates and times and platforms. In my blissful imagination I am better able to forsee the gaming trends of my peers and/or rally the game-playing members of my extended social circle into some kind of unified front of entertainment. Back in reality, I almost never ask anyone to play with me because I’m haunted by scenarios that never took place in which my requests for companionship were met with unblinking stares, icy and judgmental.

For the time I’m content to grind for experience, reputation and trade skills on the occasional basis but I think WoW represents for me more of an ideal, one which I may be found from time to time to be actively pursuing, rather than a viable candidate for anything resembling a commitment. I’m not convinced this is a bad thing.

I may have given the impression last week that I disliked Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time. That was disingenuous. It’s the kind of game I’m able to have fun with in spite of myself, which is wholly independent of the game’s inherent quality. I’m not typically the kind of person who shies away from “kiddy” games just because they’re colorful or silly or targeted at an audience younger than I happen to be.

I don’t feel silly playing M&L:PiT because it’s sort of juvenile, I feel silly because I honestly can’t figure out why I keep going back to it as my portable game of choice. It is fun, like I said, I’m just not sure why. On the surface it’s very simple and when you dig deeper… well, it’s still very simple. The only thing I can postulate is that it scratches an RPG itch without demanding any real commitment from the audience. Unlike even Chrono Trigger which has a certain degree of narrative investment you have to accept in order to enjoy the game (I’m using it as an example because of its age, not because M&L stacks up against it in any useful way), this game lets you sort of have fun with a game that toes the line between 16-bit era role-playing and Zelda without taking a single thing seriously. If you like the kinds of games being streamlined here it won’t serve as a replacement for any “real” genre title, but I can’t find fault with the magazine version considering that’s sort of the essence of handheld gaming in my estimation.

Despite my insistence last week that I wasn’t done with Dragon Age, I found it difficult to really get into my second playthrough of the game, which is surprisingly in keeping with my BioWare experience. No one really considers Mass Effect or KotOR to be particularly linear but I find that the consistently pre-programmed framework for their games makes the internal deviations an insufficient carrot to dredge through the similar structures just to experience. Philosophically, I want to see what else the game offers, but practically I can’t seem to drum up the motivation.

Which, in this case, is okay since I have… other diversions. I’ve been playing a little bit of World of Warcraft here and there, though the physical realities of playing a PC game limit the amount of time I can realistically invest in it. Which may sound strange considering my console playing hasn’t really slowed since I became a father—at least not as far as number of days in which I turn on a video game machine. But the sleeping-baby-on-lap configuration that works passably for holding a controller is untenable with a keyboard and mouse. Mostly my few hours here and there have been devoted to clearing out my quest log (and level grinding in the process). Some of this has meant taking a pragmatic approach to quest abandonment which was something I was loathe to do in my first foray into the game. If a quest went green (low XP) I would still venture out and complete it for the pittance just to say I had cleared it. With nine months of perspective on it, I don’t feel the same sense of disgrace from quitting on a quest that doesn’t offer me much in the way of net rewards.

Since at this point, being about level 53/54, I’m approaching the endgame of the original content there are only a handful of locales that are of any particular interest to me from a leveling perspective and since I’m not playing long enough to bother with guilds or any of that kind of multiplayer aspect of the game like instances (although I think those are possibly my favorite parts of WoW, when they work out), this is probably it for me. It’s still enjoyable but I’m really getting the sense that I’ve gotten all of the single player fun out of the game that I’m ever going to get which means that for me to play WoW with any kind of gusto again I’d have to find someone or several someones who wanted to play, maybe even starting over from the beginning, and go through it with them. I had a dream this past week that I actually talked my wife into playing it with me. Reality notwithstanding, it was a really pleasant dream.

The other games I dipped into were courtesy of Goozex, although the principal one was Left 4 Dead 2 which I admit was sort of a non-Goozex-y acquisition despite them being pivotal. They have this new “Get it New” feature which allows you to trade in a greater number of points than you’d ever spend on an actual trade to get the game shipped still-in-shrinkwrap from Goozex or one of their partners (I got mine from Amazon.com). Since I had a backlog of points and nothing I really wanted to spend them on, I decided to spring for L4D2. Even after doing so I still managed to have some points left over to request Silent Hill: Homecoming and Infamous though only the former arrived in time for this post.

But I was talking about Left 4 Dead 2. There’s a weird dichotomy in my mind when it comes to this game. On one hand, everything that they did with it is welcome and smart, resulting in the game being quantitatively superior to the original: Melee weapons, the continuous narrative through the campaigns (such that L4D ever really manages), additional firearm types, new items, new special infected, etc. All good. My favorite adjustment from the original game though is that the campaigns don’t necessarily follow the formula established by the original in which you played through four chapters which were basically zombie-infested obstacle courses and then hit the chapter five finale where you would briefly fight through to a radio, call for a rescue and then fight a ceaseless horde of zombies for 5-10 minutes until the vehicle arrived, board and watch the credits roll. L4D2 doesn’t diverge that much but it does have a campaign where instead of waiting for rescue to arrive you have to collect gas canisters to fill up a car in order to escape (it’s a bit of a stretch realism-wise, but still fun) and a campaign in which you travel across an abbreviated map and then turn around and leave from the third saferoom through the entry door and work your way back through to the beginning, only this time in the midst of a raging monsoon (as an aside, does it feel a little early to have a game set in New Orleans feature a flood scenario so prominently?).

There is no other way to describe L4D2 than as an improvement over its predecessor. I know you feel the “but” coming: The problem is that there is just something about it that doesn’t quite capture the je ne sais quoi that I found in the original. Maybe it has something to do with the characters L4D2 uses: The original rolled up so many standard zombie movie archetypes into Bill, Francis, Louis and Zoey that it felt somehow right. The conceit of the game is that you’re playing a b-movie zombie flick and having those kinds of expectations met by the survivor characters brought that to life. L4D2 can be lauded for trying to develop its own identity but dang it, I need those stereotypes or else it feels too much like a game—this might as well be re-skinned as an action-oriented Resident Evil or Dead Rising game if it isn’t going to draw on the media it attempts to pay tribute to. And frankly I think a lot of the additions are things that really didn’t need to be there: Melee weapons are kind of a must but I don’t know why they have to replace the pistols; most of the new firearms are minor variations on the originals (there are now three or four types of shotguns and about as many automatic rifles, plus a better sniper rifle, an improved pistol that can’t be dual-wielded, etc). Other than the grenade launcher they don’t feel like they offer a whole lot other than back-of-the-box-bullet-point “variety.” Even the new special infected aren’t truly all that compelling compared to the original four, though I’m sure playing in versus mode as the infected will be more interesting than Hunter, Hunter, Smoker, Boomer, Hunter, Smoker, Hunter, Hunter, Boomer OH HEY FINALLY I GET TO BE THE TANK.

I’m not saying I’m about to run back to the original game and trade in L4D2 because it sucks, but it’s strange to find myself saying that for once I got more than I really expected from a sequel and yet somehow what I really wanted was less. A friend of mine also picked it up so hopefully I’ll have a chance to play some co-op/online soon and maybe that will change my tune a little.

The other new game I got was Silent Hill: Homecoming. Originally I had put the game on my wishlist because I have a habit that dates back to the year 2000 of expecting to play every SH game that comes out, despite it being more or less unwarranted since basically the original (a testament to how much I loved that game). For whatever reason I decided to do some research on Homecoming and found out that it actually got semi-decent reviews despite there being some nitpickers out there fixating on points I thought, once I learned what they were, seemed mostly unfounded. So I decided to give it a shake.

Now, my experience with Silent Hill games past the original on the PS1 is that, excepting Silent Hill 3, I play the first half dozen hours and then find something about them so infuriating that I turn them off and never return. Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill: Origins, and Silent Hill 4 were all this way and even 3, which I eventually finished, had to be completed in two discreet playthroughs because I gave up on the game halfway through the initial run. I still own a copy of the Xbox port of SH2 that I “intend” to finish one of these days.

Ready to hear what is probably going to be my undoing with Homecoming?

Save points.

Would it seriously kill developers to make games save-anywhere? Would it ruin the experience somehow? Okay fine, you’re going to make me find a save point. Whatever, you can be cro-magnon if you wish. Now, how about putting them a wee bit closer together than two and a half hours apart? Sorry, Silent Hill, but I’m not 16 anymore. I have a life. I have a job. I have a child. I can’t be expected to devote two and a half hours to your game every time I want to play it and I have zero inclination to re-play long sections of it until I get that magic block of time that lets me advance. And no, I’m not going to go on a 15 minute backtrack to the previous save spot, especially when you’re going to throw endless enemy spawn points en route. I was so infuriated with the game on Saturday morning as I had gotten up to attend to a fussy baby and was using the game to keep myself awake while I rocked her back to sleep. What I had intended to be a maybe 45-minute diversion ended up being a marathon session as each new room, each new area opened up without a stupid save point and the further I went the less inclined I was to just turn it off even though I knew that was the smart thing to do. When I reached the police station and got to the second boss in a row with barely any exploration (and therefore very few health items) in between, I realized that I had no reason to believe there would be a save point waiting for me even if I was able to defeat the boss and I was wasting twenty minutes restarting at the arbitrary pre-cut scene check point with every humiliating defeat (on the “Normal” difficulty by the way). So yeah, I turned it off. We’ll see if it gets a second chance (history suggests no).

But that does bring up the second gripe I have which is that even though Homecoming tried to fix the historically worst part of Silent Hill games—the combat—it’s still pretty crappy, relying mostly on broken dodge controls and attack animations that you can’t interrupt plus everyone’s favorite survival horror cliché: Ammunition scarcity. Bah.

Lastly, I’ve been playing Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time for a few weeks now but I’ve had a hard time figuring out a way to talk about it in Edition because, well, it’s really not a great game and I’m not even 100% certain why I’m still playing it. My best description is that it’s “stupidly compelling.” Deconstructing the basic simplicity of a Mario platformer into a turn-based role-playing format sounds kind of cool and interesting on the surface, but I don’t have any experience with the previous Mario RPGs so my lack of nostalgia makes me view the combat with a kind of baffled “what is the point of this” incredulity. Fortunately I pushed through the tedious opening tutorial section and by the time you retrieve Baby Mario and Baby Luigi (don’t even get me started) the game takes on a kind of Mario-meets-Zelda vibe in terms of the dungeon puzzles and, unlike Silent Hill, it has liberally spaced save points that allow the game to be chunked almost perfectly into bathroom-visit sized portions. Look, I’m not saying I’m proud to be playing the game, I’m just saying that I am.

Dragon Age was brought to a state of completion last week, although that statement infers a sense of finality that is not strictly accurate. I brought the game to bore on an ending, one of several I’m told, and then I set about with another one of my six characters to try again. I won’t lie and say that there isn’t a strong element of achievement hunting that motivates me and I won’t further the charade by suggesting that I won’t rest until all achievements have been acquired. Suffice to say that having watched the epic 25-minute credits roll at the end of the first playthrough, I wasn’t prepared to say that the game held no further appeal to me.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend after I had wrapped it up discussing the things that BioWare does right and it occurs to me that Knights of the Old Republic really nailed the formula from a combat mechanic perspective with the whole pause/queue process and since then the tweaks they’ve implemented haven’t been what I’d call improvements. Dragon Age is probably the best, but the Combat Tactics are poor substitutes for strategic turn-based control (especially of NPCs) and the single-slot action queue is ridiculously restrictive. I suppose they’re trying to speed up the combat and make it feel more fluid and dynamic but honestly I spent more time in Dragon Age fussing in the menu screens than I did with KotOR simply because I had to do it incessantly to babysit characters whose Combat Tactics weren’t working as intended and because some functions needed repetitive interaction to make them useful (even basic actions like “drink a health potion when you’re dying” which is ridiculous).

Maybe I’m on a Fantasy kick, maybe it’s because of last week’s Game of the Decade discussion, maybe it’s just my inner bargain-hunter, but for some reason I decided to take advantage of some free trial period offers and reinstall World of Warcraft this past week. At first, once the tortuous three-day re-installation procedure was at last complete and I had showered until the water ran cold in an attempt to cleanse my body of that wicked ordeal, I logged in with my main character and awoke, as it were, right where I had left off back in March. The problem was quickly apparent: When you drift away from a game over the course of several weeks and then abruptly drop it off your radar for nine months, during which you go so far as to have a child, you forget what the heck was going on. I wandered around aimlessly, shocked that after dumping hours and hours into the game earlier this very year I couldn’t remember basic commands much less what all this stuff was in my inventory or which quest I was working on.

After about a half hour of this I logged off that character and returned later thinking about how I had installed the game again to try out the free Burning Crusade sample so instead of getting back onto my main I created a new character, a Draenei priest. I wandered around that starting zone for a little while but starting zones aren’t terribly interesting to me and typify my definition of the phrase “grind.” But I gave it about an hour and then logged out. The next day I came back and hit my main again, determined to at least sort out what I would do next if I decided to start playing again in earnest. So after a bit of wandering I ended up back in Orgrimmar and happened to upgrade my mount to a Swift version at the urging of an in-game letter from an NPC and finally decided to head up to Azshara as it had my nearest incomplete quest. Of course when I got there I realized I didn’t know where the quest was exactly and all my carefully assembled Add-Ons were lost in the uninstall. So instead of getting involved in a frustrating hunt I decided to just wander around a kill mobs for a little while (mostly Scalebanes), taking advantage of my XP bonus from being in a protracted resting state.

Curiously, I found myself actually having a really good time.

It shouldn’t be surprising because at its core WoW is really an enjoyable game, but I think what happens is that through its incredible density it becomes sort of overwhelming and it becomes very easy to lose your perspective in the swirl of professions and quests and guilds and grinding and instancing and auctioning. A friend of mine said when I first started playing almost a year ago “It’s a really good game if you can play it casually.” He said this with a marked note of sadness in his voice. The implication was that he wasn’t capable of having a casual approach and later he clarified that he had remorse for the amount of his life he had sunken into the game. More so than any other game I’ve played WoW encourages players to dissect the systems within it so that they cease to become enjoyable aspects of a rich game but they become routes to conquest in a struggle against a sinister foe. I’m not sure whether it’s the punishing in-game economy or just the endless gameplay fueled by regular infusions of new content but somehow I’ve never seen a game broken down so thoroughly into formulas and shortest paths.

I’m not even saying this from some lofty position as if I were somehow immune to it: I fell full on into the trap and I believe it is only my carefully nurtured cheapskate tendencies that allowed me to not tumble all the way through. Well that and the fact that I can’t stand being “stuck” in any game for very long without needing a lengthy reprieve. But that’s why the game is both so overwhelmingly compelling to a lot of people and why I gave it up after such a relatively short period of time. I’m pretty sure it isn’t in Blizzard’s best interest to encourage a more casual style of play; the more people who have an obsessive approach to the game the fewer people who are willing to give up their $15/month subscriptions. As for me, I’m happy to oblige Blizzard with the occasional toe dip into the game but my thin wallet will continue to prevent me from being a regular subscriber. Simply put I don’t play any single game enough to justify an annual expense of $180, not counting the price for expansion content.

I finished Dragon Age: Origins this week (next week’s Edition will cover it in greater detail) and while I enjoyed it for the most part I kept feeling like there were parts where it reverted back to standard fantasy provisions that we’ve seen over and over again and which, at this point, I think need to just be put to pasture for a while. Not all of these are specific to fantasy RPGs though I’m thinking of that subgenre specifically.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés, which shows that in some ways we’re still basically playing Dragon Warrior I. Plus I have to point out this page for the BioWare RPG Cliché Chart which is fun but also includes (allegedly) a response from a BioWare rep who kind of takes the whole thing a little too personally.

1. The Arena
   To clarify, it isn’t that I don’t understand why these clichés persist in role-playing games, especially video game RPGs which are typically very combat oriented. In the case of the ubiquitous area battles you can showcase your combat engine and fill up a couple of hours of game time having players hack and slash with the barest of necessary plot development. But for the role-player that lack of context mostly serves to highlight the basic flaws in your combat system. I rarely—perhaps never—play RPGs for their dynamic fighting mechanics, rather I play them in spite of often awkward combat because I like the stories they tell. When you surgically excise the latter I tend to sit there grinding my teeth as I nitpick the former.
2. The Perfectly Balanced Attribute System
   I don’t want Intelligence to factor into how effective my brutish half-orc is at finding chinks in opponent’s armor. I don’t want Strength to determine how many spellbooks my mage can carry. I don’t want Charisma to factor into how good my thief is at sneaking. It should be okay to have a borderline mentally retarded barbarian and a physically frail wizard and an unremarkable, forgettable rogue. Trying to discourage min/maxing in single-player games makes no sense to me, so let me ignore stats that don’t matter for my character class and stop trying to make me well-rounded. Of course the corollary for this is that every game needs to accommodate each class: I should be able to be just as successful as a magic user as I can be as a warrior rather than having to always be some kind of spell-casting, sword-wielding hybrid assassin.
3. The Hero is the Guy Who Does the Most Damage
   Combat is an integral part in a vast majority of video games. Video role-playing games are no exception. But RPGs have for too long eschewed the potential drama of the non-combat resolution. It’s a tired truism that no matter what dialogue options you choose, no matter how high your Negotiation skill, no matter how many non-violent solutions you can come up with, ultimately 99% of your interactions result in either you giving someone cash or services in exchange for goods or information or you hit them with various sharp objects until they stop moving.
4. There is Only One Way to Do It
   There are few things more infuriating in games than having obvious solutions to developer-fabricated problems staring you in the face but having to jump through the sorts of mind-reading hoops that adventure games used to be famous for because some level designer deems it so. This applies to large set-piece puzzles (see the Resident Evil example from this GameSpy article) as well as simpler activities like, say, opening chests. Even the ASCII-based Nethack allows non-thieving characters to access chests via a brute force approach, although there is the potential for breakable items within to be, well, broken. But this is the tradeoff to the alternative which is having a particular skill (rogues) or performing some sort of elaborate series of steps to locate the correct key. Some games have allowed for alternate actions like forced locks but often these inexplicably rely on the same skill as bypassing them. In a way this is the counterpart to the unbalanced attribute system: Let characters be specialized but then allow them to approach every given obstacle from their own unique perspective.
5. The Stationary World
   Few things make a world feel less living and vibrant than one which never changes. Then again, like the Uncanny Valley, the closer you get toward a world that feels like it has its own pulse, the more noticeable it becomes when everything about an environment exists to accommodate the hero of some epic story. Games with no night/day cycle, shopkeepers who never sleep but stand in the same spot for infinity waiting for the hero to come by and give them a single moment of purpose, NPCs who only ever offer a single scrap of information and then simply repeat themselves like malfunctioning robots, all these things can be lovingly rendered in the most visually striking HD but they utterly ruin the spell of a game.

I’ve been having fun following the Game of the Decade series over on Crispy Gamer, but I have to say that I’m baffled by the result of the first round which was handled by a hand-selected panel (I guess to avoid having the final results be little more than a popularity contest). The initial selections, including the four games added by the CG readership via popular nominations and then a vote-off, were pretty solid I thought. I won’t detail the whole list here but instead I’ll break down the results after the panel (Game Trust) narrowed it down to 32. I also like that they divided the field into four divisions just to keep it interesting.

Koopa Division

1. Metroid Prime vs. 8. Super Smash Bros. Melee
12. Animal Crossing vs. 4. Katamari Damacy
11. Ico vs. 14. Psychonauts
7. Shadow of the Colossus vs. 2. Super Mario Galaxy

I’m not a fan of fighting games because they’re either these super-precise skill matches that I don’t have the patience for or they’re lunatic button mashers with no purpose and Smash Bros. is the worst of the latter. I also happen to think that Metroid Prime is a pretty significant achievement in game design so the choice there is easy. I don’t have much of a preference between Animal Crossing and Katamari, both are quirky fun for a little while but as far as I’m concerned neither holds a candle to Metroid Prime so flipping a coin I’ll say AC. I realize that Psychonauts isn’t a perfect game and there is a lot of love out there for Ico but honestly I never really got much aside from frustration out of Ico and I still think Psychonauts is criminally overlooked despite its near universal critical acclaim. Since I think Shadow of the Colossus is far superior to Ico, I’ll go with Pychonauts and then let Shadow represent Team Ico’s output.

My picks for the next round:

1. Metroid Prime vs. 12. Animal Crossing
14. Psychonauts vs. 7. Shadow of the Colossus

Alucard Division

1. BioShock vs. 9. Portal
5. Grand Theft Auto III vs. 4. Resident Evil 4
6. Fallout 3 vs. 3. Half-Life 2
7. Batman: Arkham Asylum vs. 15. LEGO Star Wars

Portal narrowly edges out BioShock because I have zero complaints about Portal which is as well-crafted and complete of a video game experience as you’re going to encounter in this decade or any other to date while for all of BioShock’s strengths it does have some notable weaknesses. The true travesty present here is that Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem was given a reprieve and included in the initial round via community demand but then unjustly pitted against Portal of all things and, well, you have to admit that Portal has a decent shot of being the literal Game of the Decade. ED deserved a better fate. I find it hard not to grant RE4 the edge over GTA given that I simply prefer Resident Evil and survival horror over sandbox games, but I have to admit that other games this decade have improved on what RE4 did and the game itself was primarily great because it took a beloved franchise that was getting stale and brought it into modern times. Given what GTA3 did for gaming in general in the decade, it’s hard not to go with it. I grant Half-Life 2 the win over Fallout 3 even though I probably played Fallout more because at their foundation Half-Life 2 tells a better story (more effectively) than Fallout. Both have their gameplay issues, but Half-Life 2 is the superior game by a small margin. As for Batman vs. Star Wars? I don’t think either game deserves to be here, really. Batman is a great use of the license in a Metroid Prime-style game, while LEGO SW is a great use of the license in a simplified platformer. Neither game is particularly revelatory and both are strong for similar reasons, I give the edge to Batman just on the strength of the extraneous content—which both games have in spades—which in this case is more compelling.

My picks:

9. Portal vs. 5. Grand Theft Auto III
3. Half-Life 2 vs. 7. Batman: Arkham Asylum

Chocobo Division

1. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion vs. 8. Deus Ex
12. Plants vs Zombies vs. 4. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
11. Lumines vs. 14. Peggle
7. The Sims vs. 2. World of Warcraft

The biggest struggle I have in the whole competition is Oblivion versus Deus Ex. Now, I put hundreds of hours into Oblivion and absolutely loved it, but it is hard to say that it is a better contender for Game of the Decade than Deus Ex that was so ahead of its time for so many different reasons. From the FPS/RPG hybrid that would later come back in games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Borderlands (or even Fallout 3 and, in some ways, Oblivion itself) to the fact that you can beat the game without actually killing anyone plus a brilliantly realized story that is far and away better than most of the current crop of “story-driven” games, it really was and is something special. Though it saddens my heart, I have to turn my back on Oblivion and say Deus Ex is ultimately more deserving of the title regardless of what my personal feelings on the matter were. Plants vs. Zombies is cute but no match for KotOR, and Lumines verses Peggle is like saying “do you prefer Peanut Butter and Jelly or Peanut Butter and Jam?” I’ll say Peggle for no reason other than that I played it more so it must be better. I guess. And I doubt any game that didn’t have a very strong case for being the top when the dust settles has a prayer against World of Warcraft which, regardless of your opinion of the game or MMOs in general, has to be on the short list since it’s second only to Minesweeper and FarmVille as “Game You’re Most Likely to be Surprised by Who You Find Playing.”

My Chocobo Division picks:

8. Deus Ex vs. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
14. Peggle vs. World of Warcraft

Bo Jackson Division

1. Halo: Combat Evolved vs. 8. Soulcalibur II
12. SSX vs. 4. Gears of War
6. Advance Wars vs. 14. Left 4 Dead
7. Rock Band vs. 15. Battlefield 1942

Fighting games again? I think the original Halo is good for what it did: Bring FPS legitimately to consoles, so I suppose it’s mildly worthy but at best a long shot. I’d argue that God of War which Soulcalibur beat out brought more to the table as a GotD contender and could have even claimed the spot from Halo, but given the options I’ll grudgingly go with Master Chief’s flawed first appearance. I similarly dislike being asked to choose between a meh racing game and a meh shooter that was mostly just a testosterone overdose applied to Resident Evil 4 but since I passed on RE4 itself I’ll have to give Gears the nod here. Left 4 Dead is a terrible addition in my opinion since even though it had some cool ideas and I had a blast with it, it never stopped reminding me that it needed a sequel or a whole bunch of DLC or something to make it more complete. Advance Wars 2 was better than the original and Jeanne D’Arc was better than them all but I need to give a shout to my turn-based strategy homies so I’ll say AW takes the title. As for Rock Band vs. BF 1942, obviously Battlefield did a great service to modern gaming by paving the way for big multiplayer action games but I think the decade will be more remembered for its plastic peripherals cluttering living rooms around the world than for a game that maybe showed what was possible to the next wave of multiplayer developers. Rock Band gets the crown. All in all, though, I think this is the weakest division by far.

My final picks:

1. Halo: Combat Evolved vs. 4. Gears of War
6. Advance Wars vs. 7. Rock Band

The Final Four

There’s no need to break down the elite eight so I’ll skip ahead to the final four (as I’d vote it):

Koopa Division: Shadow of the Colossus
Alucard Division: Portal
Chocobo Division: World of Warcraft
Bo Jackson Division: Rock Band

I think the shame here is that Chocobo is so ridiculously strong with Oblivion, Deus Ex and WoW while Bo Jackson is so weak. By itself Rock Band is a remarkable achievement and one that I think if you had described to me in 1989 I would have salivated over. But just ten years later we were already seeing the kinds of things arcades were doing (or had done and still managed to fail to make money) and I would have thought, “Moving that concept into the living room? Yeah, I can see that.” For all Rock Band and Guitar Hero and the like have done to make the last decade memorable for fake plastic party rocking, they’re really not bringing anything to the media space that wasn’t already germinating there in some fashion before.

As part of the “Are Games Art?” debate, Shadow of the Colossus certainly (and deservedly) gets presented a lot as evidence supporting the thesis. For this reason it deserves its place here, but as a game it suffers for its art because a lot of the play is, let’s face it, pushing up on the analog stick to move you from point A to point B. It’s an inspiring piece of deconstructive storytelling and and an effective use of the medium to evoke a mood without resorting to a lot of the other-format borrowing that passes for the same in other development houses, which does a lot to (hopefully?) inspire others to follow. And frankly not enough games bother with things like mood and tone and pacing. Still, games are meant to be played and since playing Shadow isn’t as fun as talking about Shadow, it’s close but still the third place finisher.

The great thing about Portal is that in many ways it does what Shadow of the Colossus did without even relying on the last trope Team Ico employed which is the unplayable cut scene: They evoked a mood and told a story without beating the player with any of it. Some games seem to be written for the least attentive person the developers can imagine and practically go so far as to write on the walls of the dungeon/castle/office building/space ship/whatever something like “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE FEELING DREAD/TRIUMPH/TENSION/VICTORY/DESPAIR/WHATEVER NOW.” Portal, amusingly, does write on the walls but it writes atmosphere and it writes the seeds of stories and lets you fill in the blanks. Like a wonderful horror movie that doesn’t show you the murder but shows you the other characters’ reaction to finding the body, Portal shows you without telling you. Plus, they do so in the context of a joyous blend of physics tech display, puzzle gaming and mostly non violent first person action that is never not fun to play. Just when Portal feels like it might be wearing out its welcome, the game ends on one of the highest notes in gaming and completes the experience with the most satisfying and rewarding end credits yet. It doesn’t feel developed or designed so much as expertly crafted.

Yet, just when you think you can’t help but say Portal is the Game of the Decade, you have to think about World of Warcraft. The thing about WoW is that it isn’t particularly amazing. Like Rock Band it is more of an amazement to someone from twenty years ago than someone ten years back. Then again, what Blizzard does is rarely amazing in the sense that they’re breaking new ground. Rather, they take established settings and formulas and polish the edges until the whole thing is so glossy and smooth it creates a different kind of amazement more akin to “Why can’t everyone else make games this good?” The differences between WoW and Portal couldn’t be more broad: You have in one hand a tight, perfectly directed experience that wastes no single moment. In the other you have the most sprawling, staggeringly massive collection of high-quality content that could quite possibly never ever end. People who played the open beta of WoW are still grinding through instances and filling their social calendars with raids, happily immersed in a game that cost them $750 over the past five years to play. A rich RPG adventure to play through by yourself, an enviable social experiment to play with friends or to meet new people, World of Warcraft is really the antithesis of Portal in the same format.

So which game best defines the decade?

In the end I have to say World of Warcraft. “Game of the…” discussions are about the past and I don’t think any game better defines the last ten years than an epic online fantasy that tapped into both the social appeal and the human disconnect that may best describe the early 2000s in the years to come. While Portal may be a better game from a critical standpoint and it better represents where I hope games are going, it’s hard not to say that WoW matters more and that it is a better representative for what game developers and game players accomplished this decade.

Now we just have to see if the CG readers agree.

I appreciate what BioWare is doing. Generally, I mean. What I’m saying is that those people are doing Good Work, capitalized and everything. But the one thing I find lacking from their experiences is a sense of player-driven character. Or, frankly, character at all. In Dragon Age they’ve gotten better about not merely offering you the Good Dialogue Choice, the Bad Dialogue Choice and the Greedy Dialogue Choice such that you can’t always readily identify which is Good and which is Bad (making them more genuine in terms of conversational decisions) plus there are other nuances like sarcasm, sincerity, dismissal, disapproval and other non-agenda items which can push the conversation forward. This is certainly a step in the right direction and quite a feat from a writer’s standpoint, but what I feel is left out is the character-based option.

Sure I could decide my character is really sarcastic and always choose the snarky retort but what happens when I’m in a situation that my character would treat differently? During the character creation portion I would have liked to have seen a section that allows me to define, for the sake of the game system, what I intend my personality to be. The BioWare Way, as it were, I think hopes that you’ll create your character from the choices you make with each dialogue tree but I find so often that the attributes I want to project on my avatars aren’t reflected in the choices because when I think about characters I imagine them with a level of nuance that isn’t possible with a handful of possible phrases.

It’s easier for me to think of BioWare games as super elaborate Choose Your Own Adventure novels than role-playing games. At least with games like Oblivion or even something along the lines of Portal where the silent or mostly silent protagonist is essentially a blank canvas I can ascribe certain traits to the character I’m inhabiting and nothing about the game works to dismantle that, but when presented with a dramatic choice in those games I have at most my extracurricular imaginings to provide the emotional context because events happen or not. In Dragon Age and its ilk I’m being given the illusion of influencing the event via my choices but these almost always boil down to some sort of binary decision. It is more compelling to me to imagine the sense of betrayal and outrage my character in Oblivion felt after finishing the Thieves Guild questline in Oblivion, even if it is never borne out in-game, than it is to be given the option to casually lie or impertinently gloat about my actions with the Urn of Sacred Ashes to the helpful scholar. I wanted to have my character be remorseful about it because I was remorseful about having done it. I chose to lie to him because it allowed me to maintain my illusion but in the effort to provide characterization BioWare stunts role-playing by accident.

I have another complaint about Dragon Age, but it’s less esoteric: The Codex system in the game is deeply flawed because you can’t scroll through the codex headings without marking each one as read as you scroll down but they don’t populate within the topic headings via any particular order so while you can tell which topics have unread entries, it becomes increasingly difficult to locate which entries are new once they begin scrolling off the pane which is quickly (I have like 250 Codex entries at the 40 hour mark). Factor in the way that not every Codex update adds a new entry as some merely update existing ones, and I quickly get to the point where I want on an intellectual level to stay abreast of the data being presented, in large part because it’s expertly presented and incredibly exhaustive world-building which I appreciate, but on a practical level I simply can’t. It’s one thing to spend a good 25% of your limited available gaming session time reading fictional history books, it’s another to double that amount because you spend twice as long searching through texts you’ve already read trying to figure out what’s changed.

In related real-life news, the baby has regressed from her earlier pattern of sleeping most of the way through the night and now wakes up most mornings around 04:00 and generally refuses to be put back to bed, insisting that she sleep only while being held. Since it feels particularly dangerous to try and hold her while I sleep myself, I’ve taken to using the Xbox as my means of staying awake until around 07:30 or so when my wife gets up for the day (often after having been up until two or three trying to get the baby to sleep in the first place). As such my console gaming time has been pretty significantly elevated from 6-8 hours per week to perhaps twice that, even if it means I’m doing so in a semi-fugue state of half consciousness and involves some careful and frequently uncomfortable contortions to hold the controller such that it doesn’t touch or disturb Sleeping Beauty. What suffers as a result is my handheld gaming time which I used to put in occasionally between various parental tasks or any stolen moment of downtime but now I’m so tired most of the time that when granted a ten minute reprieve I sort of sit slouched low in whatever chair is available and stare unfocused into the distance and make this sound at a low volume: “Uhhnnnnnhhh….”

The only time I do play DS or PSP is during my daily restroom break which means I play almost exactly 12 minutes a day. I got a little bored of New Super Mario Bros. so I decided to give something altogether different a try and I picked up Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword and played through the first couple of missions. I think I detailed my struggles with the Ninja Gaiden reboot (up through Black and including Sigma) before but suffice to say that I liked the idea of the new game but the execution was broken as far as I’m concerned because—and I realize I risk having whatever tiny scrap of hardcore gamer cred I possessed stripped by saying so—games that are so difficult that they require the sort of practice you might devote to learning a new marketable skill defeat the point of gaming. There was something distastefully elitist about Ninja Gaiden that made me effectively boycott the sequel but I thought that a DS game might be different considering the perception of the DS market. It turns out the game is better than the console game(s) on which it’s drawing its inspiration and, like Resident Evil: Deadly Silence, it is impressive to consider what they were able to fit onto a DS cart. Still, though, the controls are kind of imprecise to the extent that I feel less like I’m playing it and more like I’m learning to sew by murdering some fabric with a knitting needle.

It basically involves drawing various lines across the enemies that appear on the screen which is supposed to represent sword slashes. In truth it’s a clever solution to the control problem for a console-style game on a handheld, but the execution on something like this would need to be so much more precise which, honestly, I think could be solved by simply slowing the game down. Maybe this is heresy but I think games that are fast because the processors they run on are fast sort of misses the point of game design which—call me crazy—should be about what’s fun. I know everyone flipped out about how fast Sonic was after years of ponderously paced NES games but to me that didn’t make Sonic fun it just made it a tech demo. Mimicking things flying by so fast that you can’t make them out is interesting I guess but as with real life, when things whiz by or when something happens too fast for you to really react, it’s not an experience people relate with the adjective “enjoyable.” I’d prefer to have Dragon Sword move slower, not turn-based slower but at least slow enough that you could make the sword swipes precise and have them matter in terms of things like placement, direction and technique. Flailing on the touchscreen with the stylus is fun for a short period of time, but all action-y games that use the stylus end up feeling distressingly similar which is why I lean toward games that at least offer the chance for me to play with the D-pad.