Tunnels of Doom

Following Bayonetta there was a lull in the flow of games for a little bit which, frankly, I sort of welcomed after Capcom’s weird-heavy bullet ballet destroyed my capacity to evaluate a game rationally. Considering I was waiting for some newer games to be made available from Goozex and there was an indeterminate wait inherent in that endeavor, I decided to brave the video store once again and managed to procure a copy of Uncharted 2.

I was pretty positive a couple of years ago when I played the original Uncharted and it quickly became the one game I played following my acquisition of a PS3 that sort of felt like it was welcome in my home for reasons other than its Blu-Ray drive. I’m not sure it should have been such a surprise then that if I really, really liked Uncharted, I absolutely adore Uncharted 2. For all my grumbling about video game stories and their lack of really executing on their potential, I sometimes forget that the standard gameplay-interrupted-by-cutscene format can be—when done right—a very effective way to tell an immersive story. I can think of few more shining examples of this than Uncharted 2. In truth, Uncharted 2’s compelling 10-hour tale is more richly realized, more exciting and more completely enjoyable than any movie I’ve seen in a year. This is no longer just what Tomb Raider should have been, this is what the last Indiana Jones film should have been.

The basic formula from Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is nearly unchanged. The controls are the same, the gameplay is more or less identical, but where the original was content with a smaller story and a more limited take on the concept, Uncharted 2 busts out of its conceptual arena with smart, dynamic moments that always feel like you are the hero of this action/adventure movie. The already astounding graphics of the original look even better, with just the right amount of stylization to avoid the uncanny valley and a voice acting dialogue combination that I swear could be up for some kind of oscar or emmy if such things were applied to video games. It’s not that anything feels particularly noteworthy, it’s that it doesn’t feel noteworthy. It wasn’t until hours into the game that I even stopped to consider that someone was writing and then acting the banter between the characters. What it kind of comes down to is something I can best describe as game chemistry. The writers, the voice talent, the animators, the engine and level designers all hit not just on their individual high notes but on a collective, harmonious high chord so that the game feels cohesive and does more to draw you into the action, the world and the adventure than any single element could alone.

Nearly all my complaints from the first game are addressed: The action and gameplay varies much more than before, the puzzles are more devious but not obscure or frustrating, the enemy AI is improved making the combat more exciting and the companions don’t feel as much like dead weight. Speaking of companions, I also have to point out that Uncharted 2 makes masterful use of the AI buddy since, when you think about it, it’s difficult to tell a story or make a character develop if they’re exploring someplace in solitude. Maybe this is why Lara Croft’s personality is still impossible to describe (due to lack of development) some eight or nine games in. There are very, very few moments in Uncharted 2 where Nathan is going it alone, though you’re never meant to babysit some idiot accident-prone AI doofus.

So yeah, I liked the game. It does look like it’s going to drift off course into a silly supernatural hokum-driven mess toward the end of the second act but it mostly corrects itself and it even addresses the most head-scratching element of the series (namely the genocide Nathan commits on the mercenary thugs) as the game’s antagonist whispers venomously to a pistol-wielding Nate, “How many men have you killed? Just today?” It’s a minor jab that doesn’t really undo the fact that Nathan is twice now responsible for a widespread massacre, but it does mean the writers of the game recognize that the gameplay elements play a part in the reality of the game’s story (which isn’t always necessarily true in video game writing) and the casualness with which Our Hero approaches murder—even justifiable homicide—is actually a part of his character. I loved that.

The only other miniscule quibble I have is that the game, for as taut and engaging as its story is, could have easily made it less guided and allowed for some player choice to impact the outcome of the game, even if just at the end. Still, I appreciate the genius of making what is a playable movie and I don’t think everything has to be BioWare, but it is the strength of the medium, you know?

Coming Soon

So having spent a week or so completing Uncharted 2 that leaves me just a couple of games left from 2009 that I wanted to finish and fortunately both of them arrived late in the week from Goozex (after all): Assassin’s Creed II and Borderlands. I also got Red Faction: Guerilla which looks pretty interesting so I guess I’ll lump that one in there as part of the mandatory research I need to complete before I can do my “Best of 09″ rundown. So far I’m no more than a couple of hours into any of the games but my initial assessments are that Assassin’s Creed II picks up the awesome right where the original AC left off (both literally and metaphorically), Borderlands is visually stunning but strangely not as engaging as I expected it to be and Red Faction is Borderland’s opposite being a game I had very few hopes for that I’m surprised to find I can’t wait to get back to. My intention was to do them in AC2, Borderlands, RF order since the first two are more likely to retain their value if I get through them quickly but I’m thinking I may swap the latter two just because I’d rather knock over a bunch of martian buildings than do MMO-style fetch and kill collection quests in an FPS. Expectations are funny things.

With a minor lull in my flow of fresh games, I resorted to rentals which I felt was justified because I had a long weekend set up ostensibly out of necessity but the proximity to my birthday was let’s just say highly suspect. I went to the store in hopes of getting Uncharted 2 which I desperately want to play but struggle to find rationale to support either a purchase or even a trade at 1,000 Goozex points since I suspect it is similar to the original which is to say maybe nine hours long and possessing little to no replay outside the multiplayer which I doubt I’d ever even attempt. Sadly they didn’t have a copy of Uncharted 2 so I settled on Bayonetta.

Listen, no one can reasonably accuse me of being blindly devoted or even especially enticed by products coming out of Japan. Like any nerd there are bits of Japanese culture that have trickled down to me that I have found exceptional like Cowboy Bebop or Unagi, but I’m hardly the guy wearing the Bubblegum Crisis T-shirt and importing copies of Final Fantasy XIII demos so I can play them “as they were meant to be heard.” However, I am a gamer with a respect for the culture of games so when the notoriously stingy reviewers at Japanese video game rag Famitsu give a game 10/10, I make a mental note.

If you want to skip a long diatribe about Bayonetta, let me summarize it for you here at the top: The only thing Famitsu giving the game 10 out of 10 signifies is that those magazine writers and editors are absolutely nuts. Really just complete loons. Not only because they put Bayonetta on par with what they consider to be the best games of all time but because they clearly experienced the same game I did and didn’t even dock half a point for having the most stupidly inane and incomprehensible storyline ever presented from one human to another in any medium which I can only interpret to mean they—Lord have mercy—must have actually liked the plot of Bayonetta.

Let me try and outline Bayonetta’s “story” and be aware that I wish I could say this was spoiler-free but I honestly couldn’t tell you which parts of the story are significant enough to qualify as spoliers, so you’ll have to trust that no matter what I say, you will be surprised by the story, though probably not in the way you might appreciate: A woman awakens after a 500 year long sleep at the bottom of a lake at which point she may or may not have killed a young boy named Luka’s father in front of his eyes. She spends what I presume to be roughly 25 years making alleged mafia ties and cozies up to an arms dealer who may or may not be a demon with a penchant for breaking the fourth wall while the young boy grows up to be a journalist of some sort. After an encounter with a woman who seems to be nearly as combat-capable as she, our heroine sets off on a journey to find something or find herself or… well, it’s never entirely clear. But she does wind up in a city that may or may not be the center of the universe as far as the cosmic powers are concerned and we learn that Bayonetta may or may not be the last of a line of witches who may or may not have been responsible for the steady decline of society for the last 500 years. Using the investigative subtlety of a molotov cocktail she fights hordes of creatures who may or may not be angels from heaven but whom also may or may not be paradoxically devious and vile. Anyway she comes across a little girl who may or may not be her daughter and/or may or may not be herself in a younger incarnation and they eventually wind up confronting the CEO of a company—that may or may not be a front for a private military whose funding and firepower outpaces that of the global superpowers—who may or may not be Bayonetta’s father. And then things get weird.

But okay, Bayonetta is hardly the first game to have a ridiculous plot. In a way, the ceaselessly indulgent storytelling could be viewed as a stylistic choice and honestly you can’t say the game isn’t consistently over-the-top so it’s never disingenuous. It’s certainly not my cup of tea but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t win me over a little bit by the end; after about a dozen chapters of deriding the game I started to simply shrug in bemusement at the game’s gleeful narrative excesses. “Oh, that statue/tower is actually a rocket ship? Sure, why not?” Et cetera.

Where the game stumbles is that it applies this gluttony to every aspect of the game, not just the plot. It’s like they had a design meeting toward the beginning of development and they were just brainstorming ideas and throwing them up on the whiteboard as they were shouted aloud. The problem is that at no point in the ensuing months and years did they get rid of a single idea from that board. The “no concept left behind” is present in the character design (glasses! beauty mark! ribbons! british accent! magical clothes made of hair!), in the systems (upgrades! alchemy! hidden collectables! combos! mini-games! quick time events!), in the presentation (full motion video cut scenes! slideshow/ken burns cut scenes! in-engine cut scenes! map screens! menu screens!) all the way up through the fact that the game has like 15 endings (faux ending! surprise twist ending! post fake credit-roll ending! post real credit-roll ending! unnecessarily long extraneous final dance sequence!). The quickest way to sum up Bayonetta is that it is exhausting.

And then of course there is the sex. Not that Bayonetta is ever graphic beyond the level of, say, the TBS re-runs of Sex and the City. It’s certainly saturated with innuendo, sensuality and various flavors of eroticism, but it stops short of being explicit. Bayonetta herself is a character basically defined by sex from her costume being made of her hair which is also her weapon such that she functionally disrobes in order to execute her most potent attacks through her fetishist’s checklist (I originally mistyped that “checklust” which may be more appropriate) of character design elements like the glasses and accent and ubiquitous lollipop. In between she displays a strong dominatrix vibe with her “torture attacks” and spends a lot of her time during the hyper-stylized combat doing splits and hip thrusts and deep back bends.

Leigh Alexander, the Internet’s go-to girl for thoughts on girls in gaming, wrote a piece for GamePro indicating that Bayonetta is actually an empowering character because she is a strong female figure in games that doesn’t have to surgically excise her sexuality in order to be taken seriously. I appreciate the point, because I agree that characters can be both strong females and sexy at the same time, there are good examples in other, older mediums. I’d actually venture an opinion that the strongest female characters are as complete as real life strong women are, and that by definition must include their sexuality. But this is where Bayonetta stumbles, because she isn’t a complete character in that for all her laundry list of reasons why you’re supposed to find her sexy (and I don’t think that assessment is meant to be exclusive to guys), there’s no room left in there for you to find her interesting. Among her other dimensional handicaps, she lacks any real character flaws (and no, amnesia isn’t a character flaw). When all the belt buckles and disappearing costumes subside, Bayonetta is only sex and style. She isn’t identifiable because she’s a messiah in a tight jumpsuit.

Now lest you think I hated Bayonetta, let me say that it does have some strong points. The one aspect of Bayonetta that is actually engaging is the relationship she develops with the young Cereza who thinks Bayonetta is her mother. The emergence of Bayonetta’s maternal instinct is fun to watch and is certainly fertile enough fodder for an entire plot, one that I think would have been miles and miles above the fatigue-inducing madness that they went with instead. Somehow they even managed to make the relationship feel genuine, the one human thread in the entire story—not surprisingly the only one that really works. Also the game’s stylish action is satisfying and enjoyable most of the time although on the easier levels it feels less like you’re playing the game and more like you’re merely suggesting things to it, but that worked for me because I’m fairly useless when it comes to combo-heavy action games like this. And the biggest advantage of the kitchen sink method of game design is that there is never an opportunity to get bored due to the constant adjustment of the gameplay dynamic (fight scene! exploration! puzzle section! vehicle combat! mini-game!). It took me about a dozen hours to work through the campaign and despite the tiring chore of trying to make some kind of sense out of the tale, I never felt like I was dragging my way through the game.

So I can’t say Famitsu led me astray, exactly. Sometimes it’s good to experience things you might not otherwise try. I certainly don’t think the game is in the same area code as the top echelon of games and I can’t even give it a meek “Rent This” recommendation but I wouldn’t say I’m sorry I played it. But you know, now that it’s over, I really wish Uncharted 2 had been in stock.

While I may have taken a week or two off from posting in deference to the holidays and some necessary traveling, I did squeeze in a few games. It’s sort of my thing.

The newest title to grace my consoles has been Modern Warfare 2, which I picked up as sort of an ownership rental if that makes any sense. Honestly I had MW2 on my list of games to try from this holiday season but it wasn’t anywhere near the top of that list. I thought that I had acquired Left 4 Dead 2 early enough and removed it from any wishlists in time to avoid having it be a part of any gift-giving festivities but alas I did get an additional copy so I returned it to the store from whence it came only to discover that without any sort of receipt I had to accept the lowest sale price for the item and apparently in the few short weeks it has been on sale it has at one point or another gone for $39.99. Armed with less than a full retail game’s worth of store credit I had the choice of either spending some of my own money on the game I originally hoped to exchange the duplicate for (Assassin’s Creed II), buying something else like a World of Warcraft time card or going with one of the games they currently had on sale for the $40 amount. I nixed the first notion, my wife nixed the second (apparently I “stay up too late” when I play WoW, which interferes with my ability to tend to the early morning baby feedings that are distressingly common) so I went with the third option and grabbed MW2.

My plan all along was to play through the single player campaign and then trade the title to Goozex for the 1,000 points. I had few intentions of keeping the game because the multiplayer may be phenomenal but since my New Year’s Resolution is to be honest with myself I have to admit that I don’t play games to have the kinds of experiences that multiplayer gamers search for and I definitely don’t have the patience to wade through dozens of matches of slavering Xbox Live prepubescents hurling off-color slurs into their headset mics in vengeful falsettos on the off chance that I’ll have that magical match.

So I went through the campaign.

Long time readers may recall that I had lots of high praise for CoD4. I’ve heard by turns that Modern Warfare 2 is basically more of the same which one might interpret as A Good Thing but honestly I don’t think MW2 works even remotely as well as CoD4 did.

For one thing the narrative hook that CoD4 relied on was protagonist mortality. Among the most memorable and remarkable moments in any game of the benchmark 2007 was the slow radiation death experienced in gut-wrenching first-person about halfway through the game (sorry spoiler hounds, it’s been two years—you can still be impressed with it even if you know it’s coming). But I have to say, returning to that particular well pretty much undermined the impact of both the new instances of virtual death simulation and the original. It’s like movies with Hitchcockian startle-scares: It only works once. If you know it’s coming, you won’t be startled. Likewise once you know that basically any character whose shoes you don in Modern Warfare games could croak at any moment, you sort of expect it to happen or at least you understand that it could happen. It cheapens the experience and makes it as pedestrian as all the other deaths you experience in video games where you come right back and start over after the game over screen (or, increasingly in the current generation, a momentary reload of the last quick save or checkpoint).

I realize there were some people who grumbled that the death in CoD4 was sort of lame because CoD games are pretty challenging to begin with so you probably died a bunch of times before the death that actually “took,” which makes you wonder why dozens of flying bullets don’t do you in but radiation poisoning from a nuclear explosion finally does the trick. I ignored the criticism at the time because the impact was so forceful and the scene handled in such a novel way I was able to accept it. But after the third protagonist death in MW2 I started to see the point. In a lot of ways it is stupid that only the game’s pre-determined narrative decides when it’s okay to die.

Unfortunately, that’s not MW2’s only misstep. While the plot of CoD4 was sort of ridiculous and Jerry Bruckheimer-ish, it managed to stay compelling because it didn’t have to top itself. It was able to maintain enough of a grounding in plausibility to feel authentic in some key, fundamental fashion. MW2 is Big Dumb Action Movie all the way, complete with corny/serious dialogue, ludicrous Evil Master Plans and eye-roll inducing Shocking Twists. That doesn’t even take into consideration the snowmobile scene which I could easily forgive if it didn’t support the argument that Infinity War lost their minds with regards to the boundaries on suspension of disbelief.

It’s not that I hated MW2, one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to try to find good in the world: The trademark CoD set piece battles are still there and still provide some fun shooter goodness. They’ve mostly eliminated the infinite-spawning killboxes although there are still a few places where I found myself having to just hold the sprint button and hope my magical regenerating health held out until I reached the next checkpoint because if you don’t do it The Way the Designers Intended, you can plan to spend the next 30 minutes replaying the same section over and over. And I will concede that Infinity Ward still make the best looking realistic visuals around: Some of the lighting effects especially during the night fighting through a burning Washington D.C. are astounding. The downside of that is the action is frequently so frantic and the flow from cover point to cover point so forces you to fixate on relatively drab level details like desks and rocks, it’s easy to miss a lot of the remarkable artistry on display. If you don’t mind Dumb Action, MW2 is still a fun way to spend a half dozen hours.

The problem is that the bar was set for something amazing. Sadly there wasn’t enough progress made narratively—and I’d argue that envelope wasn’t even picked up, much less pushed—to make it a worthy successor to CoD4. Let me put it this way: It should have been called Call of Duty 4.5: Now With More Stupid.

Meanwhile, I finished Infamous (it was one of my New Year’s Resolutions) and unlike MW2 I wasn’t disappointed in the least. I said when I talked about it before that Infamous was like a comic book and that stayed true through the end, even as the story got a little convoluted and silly. I can forgive silly when it’s thematically appropriate and Infamous is right on that line of being silly to my 33 year-old self but still pretty cool to my internal 12 year-old self who, let’s face it, is the one running the show when it comes to me playing video games all the time.

Eventually the missions (especially the story missions indicated by the blue markers at the starting points) got longer but I still appreciated that the game maintained a very busy-adult-friendly pick up and play vibe throughout. Well, at least until the final boss fight which was infuriatingly difficult but just within the bounds of that rewarding box. Fighting Kessler was delightfully reminiscent of the boss battles from my youth in the NES/SNES eras: Full of trial and error, pattern memorization, finding weak spots, experimenting with the tools at my disposal. It was the best end boss battle I can remember in a very, very long time.

I highly recommend the game but I must admit my one minor quibble is that I wish the morality path-exclusive powers were more effective. I chose the Evil path partially because Arc Lightning sounded really cool but it’s utility turned out to be pretty limited. I mean, either way it was still fun to run around Bio Leeching random pedestrians because it suited my needs and I doubt I could have beaten the game on the Hard difficulty if I’d needed to be careful about my surroundings to maintain a Good karma level, but still. I want Evil to be, well, freakin’ evil and capable of near genocidal levels of mayhem and carnage. Still, it seemed like they were setting the stage for a sequel with the end of the game and I have no shame in saying I’m all over that.

The other thing I spent a lot of the break doing is playing iPhone games. I initially dismissed the iPhone in its original incarnation but like most things Apple does the iterations eventually caught up with the potential and I found my desire for a device that was a microcosm of my digital life—only persistent—to be increasing. So when the contracts for our old phones expired my wife and I used some saved cash and a generous Christmas gift of cash from my parents to get 3GS iPhones. One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to head over to the App Store to try and find some cool games.

It took me a while to find anything really interesting: I guess most of the games/genres I’m interested in are firmly in the paid-app realm and I’m enough of an iPhone newbie to not want to be saddled with lame software I dropped money for, even if it is mostly minimal investments. I did eventually find a few games, among them being a clever if not exactly perfect port of Nethack. Using tiles and mapping most of the game’s controls to gestures, it’s a cool little project but even though Nethack has never really worked very hard to be user-friendly, this version is particularly esoteric especially since players of the unix console version have to re-learn all the commands they’ve committed to memory as sets of gestures which work only most of the time when you want them to. I think a different interface would make it the game I played most on the device, but as is I’ve played it a handful of times and thought it was cool but mostly missed my terminal version.

I also experimented with some free versions of paid software including a little number called DropZap Lite. It’s a familiar-feeling drop-the-bricks puzzle game that isn’t based on speed at all, in fact it could be described as turn-based. The blocks in this case are sized large to small and as you drop new blocks the other blocks in the same row and column are reduced in size by one level. Once they reach the smallest size, new blocks remove them and gravity pulls them down and the chain continues with each successive drop increasing the score multiplier. The Lite version allows you to progress through up to three levels (you move up a level whenever you clear 50 bricks) and try to beat your highest score. It’s quite fun though I’m not sure if the novelty would last long enough for a full paid version, even if it’s only 99 cents. (Note that as of this writing I’m not able to locate the Lite version on the App Store.)

My friend Jim turned me on to GeoDefense Lite, which is a path-based tower defense game with a Geometry Wars aesthetic. Being a fan of GeoWars and, to a certain extent, tower defense, it’s kind of right up my alley although I think I prefer the open TD variety. Still this one is pretty nice and I like that the upgrades are more than just stat-based but actually change the graphics and effects of the shots as well. I wasn’t crazy about the fact that there isn’t much information available about the enemy units (unlike, say, Desktop Tower Defense) and the placement interface is kind of frustrating as the location circle doesn’t seem to map to your finger location on the touch screen very well, but I was able to have fun with it once I got used to its peculiarities. The Lite version has several Easy and Medium levels; the paid app is $1.99.

Jim also talked about Song Summoner Lite long before I even got an iPhone of my own so I sought it out when I was a platform owner. It’s a turn based strategy role playing game in the vein of Final Fantasy Advance and in fact created by SquareSoft. The hook though is that it has a Monster Rancher like method of generating solider units for you based on the waveforms of your iTunes tracks. I’m not sure if it’s due to the app being the free version or it has something to do with my song selection or maybe just a quirk of the game engine but no matter how dynamic a song I picked the characters I generated were all fairly low ranked out of the gate; my friend confirmed that he had a similar experience and I believe he purchased the full game. I haven’t done much more in it besides the tutorial and playing with the soldier generator, but it’s a cool enough concept and it’s close enough to what I’m looking for in an iPhone game that I felt compelled to mention it. One bad thing is the full version is a pretty hefty $9.99, so I’d have to really love the Lite version before I felt okay with dropping ten bucks on a game for my phone.

I also checked out Atoms, which as near as I can tell is an exclusively free game. It reminds me a little of the pacifism mode in Geometry Wars 2: You drag your blue ring around the screen, avoiding the deadly red circles. Eventually the red circles change into green and they can be run into at which point they explode like bombs to clear out reds and earn you points. I think the familiarity comes from the passive, indirect method of combat. My main problem with Atoms is that it relies on you placing your finger directly over the play field which suggests that the most effective way to play the game is to be invisible, something I haven’t yet mastered but is one of my New Year’s Resolutions.

Probably my biggest surprise is that I’m playing iMobsters/Zombies, two games in a pantheon of Storm8 games that are very much like the Mafia Wars/Vampire Wars games that clutter everyone’s news feed on Facebook. I’m not interested enough to research which games came first but in any case they’re curious turn-based strategy/adventure games that are very similar to text-based adventure games of old. Basically you are given a handful of action points (all the games play the same, the only difference is the thematic metaphor) with which to execute quests with a simple button click. These quests provide some sort of experience points and a form of currency which you can exchange for income sources or equipment that makes you more effective at PvP combat (some of the equipment often cuts into your income with upkeep costs as well). The kick is the social aspect which allows you to join forces with other players to add them as an item carrier slot in your PvP attempts by linking your accounts into each other’s groups. Again, the detail is in the theme but the perpetuation hook is that the action points refresh based on a real-time countdown so you have to log in regularly to continue your XP grind. The games are also micro-transaction based so you can speed up your progress for a small fee based on some kind of loyalty points which are also given infrequently for various in-game actions.

It’s hard to portray why I’d be inclined to continue with what is, essentially, narrative-deprived interactive fiction. iMobsters makes a little more sense thematically and in execution than Zombies, which I’m playing basically because if it says or hints at zombies I’ll probably give it a long leash. My New Year’s Resolution is to lay off the zombiephilia a little bit. In either case though they’re not particularly compelling in a rational sense, it’s more that once you get started it’s easy to think they’re something mildly interesting to do with your hands when you experience some sort of lull. The fact that they can easily be played with one hand while doing something else, say, eating or rocking a baby to sleep probably plays a role as well.

I keep hearing that Facebook and mobile phones will shortly become the principal platform for video games and honestly I’m not the kind of person who gets all “nuh-uh!” about those sorts of predictions, but on a personal level that kind of thing will only work for my gaming habits if the games themselves offer something more compelling than what I’m seeing now. I have a hard time understanding why there aren’t more games along the lines of what you see at Kongregate on Facebook: Rich, clever experiences that maybe don’t rival the kinds of things you can get on consoles but offer a variety of depths and levels of sophistication. So far everything I’ve seen on social network platforms is the ultimate in casual. These iPhone games are a bit closer to what I’m looking for but a lot of them feel very much like early DS games where people are still trying to figure out how to leverage the platform without being gimmicky or trying to shoehorn experiences onto it that simply don’t fit.

It’s worth seeing where this goes, though, because I see a lot of potential around. And my New Year’s Resolution is to make sure I don’t miss the revolution.

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 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.

Having depleted my supply of fresh games by mid-week—a feat which required the completion of Bionic Commando, an act I can wholeheartedly recommend you avoid at all costs—I was presented with the choice of either trying Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise again or trying to defeat the desert level in Valkyria Chronicles for the dozenth time. I went with Valkyria Chronicles and it took me another three tries to finally clear the level but I did manage to progress at last, some five months after I first attempted the challenge.

My problem in strategy games, and this includes non-video games like Blood Bowl or Warhammer 40K, is that I think my overall strategies are sound but I lack the calculative ability to plan accordingly for chance. Since almost every game simulates the uncertainty of strategic combat by including some sort of randomized element, I find myself regularly tripped up when the inevitable misfortune that is inherent in these games strikes. Let me give you an example from Valkyria Chronicles: In the briefing before the desert level they indicate that you may want to bring some long-range snipers to help clear the path for your foot soldiers’ approach. There are even two unit spots on an outcropping in the deployment map which are perfect for sniper units. So I dutifully deploy my snipers and start the match. During the round I use a command point to select a sniper and draw a bead on an opposing scout’s head and fire, which should result in a kill. Instead due to random chance the shot misses.

At this point the strategically sound thing would be to return the sniper to a safe position and continue moving the rest of my units according to my original battle plan, but my original plan assumed the death of that scout. Instead of accounting for the possibility that the sniper couldn’t hit the target (which, let’s be honest, was a 250 yard shot indicating he’s playing it pretty fast and loose with the whole “sniper” moniker) I now feel compelled to spend another command point on the sniper, move him onto an exposed bluff edge of his vantage point and try again. Success in these strategy adjustments is largely irrelevant because the net result is typically undesirable—in this case the opposing snipers surrounding the now-dead scout easily retaliate and kill my sniper meaning I had to use a third command point to send someone over to recover the wounded unit, a fourth to call in reinforcements and a fifth to bring the reinforcements into position since they were starting from the base. So in essence a one command point action ended up costing me five to recover from.

Valkyria Chronicles is an excellent strategy game because it doesn’t funnel you into its preferred way of doing things in an unnatural way. Obviously there are certain key strategies that will make individual levels easier to clear than if you run off on your own and load your deployments with half a dozen engineers or whatever. But it compensates for this by making each individual decision significantly more relevant than a handful of key ones as seen in other turn-based strategy games like Final Fantasy Tactics. The benefit of this is that it provides greater freedom for solving the game’s problems your own way; the downside is that you can make a lot of seemingly small mistakes before you realize you’ve gotten yourself in too deep to recover. When matches can take up to an hour or longer even without burying yourself one grain of sand at a time, it can be pretty frustrating to not necessarily know how things are going until you’ve invested a lot of time in a lost cause.

I still find the interminable cut scenes to be far too frequent and lengthy. It would be one thing if the story was rich and nuanced (which I believe it could be, considering the scope of the setting and the number of available characters) but instead the writers/designers chose to focus on a small handful of inexplicably underdeveloped personalities and ramble through a story that is neither intimate and personal to the characters nor broad and epic to the conflict. It’s an odd thing and for a guy who generally finds something compelling in game stories, it’s weird to find myself just wanting to get to the “good stuff.”

The problem with life behind the curve as described a couple of weeks ago is that occasionally events will conspire to leave you with practically nothing to play. In this case the games on my watch list that I’m most willing to spend my few remaining Goozex points on are not being offered at the moment and I’m lacking enough purchasing power to push myself up in the curve (for example, to request slightly newer, higher-priced items). So I purchased my first retail game this year (not counting gifts) and went out and bought Dragon Age: Origins, which is how I spent my gaming weekend.

My first problem with Dragon Age is that there are six different background stories to choose from and I couldn’t decide which one I wanted to pursue from the terse descriptions of each on the character creation page. So I made six different characters and decided I would try all of them. When all was said and done I went with the first character I made anyway (City Elf Rogue) but my progress has allowed me to begin to view that as a partially regrettable choice as I keep thinking back to the other characters I left behind as I forge ahead. My intention, taken for what it’s worth given my time availability these days, is to play enough of this game to earn all available achievements so in theory I will have to work through the game at least once more and probably put some time in on a third character as well (at least leveling to 20). That’s plenty of opportunity to try some other characters but I do worry that I may not have the motivation for continued play that I had with Bethesda’s recent epics and may instead end up with Mass Effect syndrome.

Granted none of that is a problem with the game, it’s actually of a player issue and even then you can hardly fault a game for being too interesting. Which isn’t to say Dragon Age is perfect, but the problems it has are relatively few and minor at that. Graphically the game is strangely unimpressive. It lacks some of the striking visuals of Mass Effect but then again it also doesn’t have as many of the glitches that game suffered from; more to the point the look of everything is sort of drab and uninteresting. It’s one thing to be the wild-hair-and-unlikely-clothing of most Japanese style RPGs but the other end of the spectrum seems to be this sort of sepia-toned blah that too many western RPGs think is “gritty” or whatever. My position is that if you’re going to have hyper-realistic graphics that ooze banality to give a sense of environmental oppression you need to fix stuff like articulation in the hand models and beards that clip through breastplates. I’m just saying, I had no qualms with the visuals in World of Warcraft because while imperfect they were stylish and frequently beautiful.

The other thing that stands out to me about Dragon Age is the fact that it has gone back to the Baldur’s Gate/KotOR style of dialog tree where your character doesn’t speak the actual lines and you select exactly what you want to say from the textual options presented. I think I preferred Mass Effect’s “gist wheel” system that allowed conversations to flow more smoothly, especially since all of Bioware’s games are about 75% conversation. There’s something oddly disconnected about having what amounts to a one-way conversation with someone despite them reacting to your telepathic interjections. Still, it’s one of those concessions to interaction you have to tolerate when you’re into games as a broader entertainment medium.

What I really appreciate about Dragon’s Age is that it feels very much like the kind of Saturday afternoon Dungeons and Dragons sessions from Jr. High, perfectly capturing that kind of classic fantasy setting where everything is just as you expect it to be and the “innovative twists” that set it apart are a sprinkling of semi-adolescent grit: Extra blood, political intrigue, adult themes. It’s hardly amazing, but for whatever reason it hits the spot.

My other project has been New Super Mario Bros. for the DS, which I played a couple of years ago when it was more contemporary. The recent buzz/fuss about the Wii version of NSMB included a lot of what I thought was revisionist history where people were saying they disliked the DS version for being soulless or other such digs that I presumed would have been leveled at the game during its launch window if there were any honesty involved (which I don’t expect much of really when it comes to gaming press types). So I had to re-visit the game to see if—even in hindsight—the critiques were valid. On second playthrough I guess I can kind of see what they’re saying: It certainly isn’t on the same level as SMB3 or Super Mario World, but it isn’t soulless or unenjoyable by any stretch and in fact I’d say it’s biggest flaw isn’t in the parts that really matter like level design (somewhat spotty in the difficulty curve but overall fun) or the mechanics (the few minor additions and improvements are welcome and even add to the fun) but in the relatively minor element of new power-ups. The super mushroom is fun but ultimately kind of useless since it can fairly readily be wasted if you encounter a pipe or passage that you can’t fit in just after you pull it from your inventory. The mini-mushroom is similar: It’s actually detrimental to use it since it’s really a tool and not a power-up (like a power-down I guess?). I also dislike how the game makes value judgments on which power-ups are preferable in terms of which it puts into your inventory slot: I’d almost always prefer a fire flower over a blue turtle shell, but I don’t have a choice.

With my completion of Fable II this past week I officially caught up with the glut of Xbox titles I had acquired from Goozex mid-summer before my Xbox broke. Granted, not all of those games ended up being completed (notably Kane & Lynch which I found to be tedious) but in any case I’m now kind of in a semi-looking phase where I do have a few games I could play so I’m not dying for something new but nothing that is on my plate presently really has me excited so if something better came along, it wouldn’t be unwelcome.

Let me back up before I get into the post-Fable realm and talk a bit about Fable II. I can summarize the game thusly: It offers you plenty of opportunity to engage in a wide variety of largely uninteresting role-playing activities. Fable II is a big game that feels very small, and by that I mean the way the game is divided up into various regions set apart by loading screens and existing in no kind of cohesive whole (i.e. there is no world map per se nor would it matter a lick if there were). As a result each region feels like a self-contained mini-sandbox in which there are a lot of things to do but once you start classifying your available activities you realize they boil down to four fairly simple categories and each activity is just a riff on one of them. The categories are: Fight Stuff, Social Interactions, Tracking and Numbers Fiddling.

The Fight Stuff part is where most of the questing lies and you also encounter random enemies as you travel around the various regions. The game’s combat isn’t bad necessarily but it isn’t good either and I found that for the most part you can win nearly every battle by spamming on your most powerful attack, be it ranged (Skill), melee (Strength) or magic (Will). Since specialization is wholly unnecessary I would flip back and forth depending on which weapon or spell I had acquired most recently and once you can afford the level 5 Inferno spell there is little reason to use anything else especially if you combine it with a low-level time spell first to allow the Inferno a chance to charge without taking too much damage. The variety and finesse of the combat system is cool in theory but in execution it seems like it’s appeal lies principally in the effectiveness of the game engine’s animation system and, well, let’s just say that animation shouldn’t be Lionhead Studios’ top bullet point on the resume.

But you will have to fight a lot to make it through the main story so the best I can say is that it’s never frustrating, just a little tedious so you more or less learn to ignore it as you go through. On the other hand the second category of Social Interactions is frequently frustrating especially without a strategy guide since the in-game cues are almost universally—and perhaps intentionally—vague to the point of near uselessness. Trying to figure out what people want from you so you can get what you want out of them is time-consuming and irritating and almost never yields enough reward to be worth the effort. In the end the bizarre AI logic of NPC interactions simply becomes too much to deal with especially if you decide to change your demeanor halfway through the game or you take a series of inconsistent actions for a short time for whatever reason. I found that as I tried to pull myself off my initial Saintly path I would perform some evil deed in the presence of others and end up with characters who had big loving hearts floating over their heads screaming and running in terror from me, blending sound bytes that suggested they wanted to flee from me and yet marry me at the same time. But again, none of it really matters except as a novelty.

The third thing you can do is Tracking, by which I mean wandering around either following the ubiquitous Glowing Trail which leads you exactly to your next destination as determined by the AI (making the games relatively low number of fetch quests dead simple but also completely pointless) or you can head off the GT track and look for “other stuff.” The other stuff is usually treasure but there is also an easter egg hunt using Gargoyles that you can engage in if you wish. I can’t really say one way or the other whether this stuff is really fun since my own inclination to engage in this type of trivial game-hours padding is directly proportional to my enjoyment of the game’s other merits (for example I did a lot of orb hunting in Crackdown and flag hunting in Assassin’s Creed because I liked those games but I certainly didn’t find all the jumps in Burnout Paradise and I didn’t bother with the collectibles in The Darkness). If hunting stuff down is your thing, you’ll enjoy this. For me, I found the simple act of walking around to be too awkward to have much patience for it: Fable II’s camera is sloppy and the run controls make you a clumsy, ill-controlled train wreck so I found myself following the GT whenever I needed to physically traverse an area and using fast travel as much as I possibly could.

The final aspect is Numbers Fiddling which means doing various mini-games in order to increase your stats. This is the shopping stuff, the job system, gambling mini-games and real estate manipulation. Some of it is okay: The gambling mini-games are reasonably fun for a short time and a couple of the jobs are interesting for a minute or two but of course Fable II wants you to do all of it to excess and it wears its welcome out quickly. What’s especially annoying is that a lot of these systems are tied into the other game elements in small but significant ways such as trading being largely dependent on your social standing with the merchants only, again, it’s not always completely clear why an NPC is having a particular sale or opening up a given option. It generally easiest to try to get everyone to like you but then again you can also make everyone fear you and get similar or in some cases preferable results. When it’s all said and done it hardly matters since you can get more money than you’ll actually need pretty quickly and the only real reason to engage in furthering your financial or experience needs is just to speed up the rest of the game or earn a few achievements.

If it sounds like I hated Fable II, it’s partially because in a lot of ways I should have hated it. Aside from the base problems listed above the main story arc is cliched and fairly drab plus it suffers from limp characterizations of the principal NPCs and has one of the worst ending sequences of any game since BioShock. Actually, BioShock has a downright revolutionary and brilliant ending compared to the eyebrow-raising dud that Fable II fizzles into. Which all adds up to an awful lot of negativity about the game. Somehow, in spite of itself, Fable II does manage to remain just interesting enough to be playable. The first 30-45 minutes of the game are wonderful, a cheeky sense of humor runs throughout which somehow works to match the tone to the game’s breezy gameplay mechanics and while each individual activity can be broken down into a larger recurring category individually there is an awful lot to try and plenty of options to play around with. I could never go so far as to recommend the game but if you liked the idea of Oblivion but found it too stiff and serious and felt it was so wide open as to feel rudderless you might find that Fable II is more your speed. For everyone else I’d probably say stay away—but, if you’re determined to play it, don’t be surprised if you find yourself shaking your head a lot and saying “ooookay…” but also not putting the controller down. I know exactly where you’re coming from.

Having finished Fable II I was left more or less with Bionic Commando as the only Xbox game left in my stash that was yet (mostly) unplayed. So I decided to pop it in and give it a go. Up front I need to make clear that this game in no way should be considered good. The flaws aren’t always immediately obvious, though. You can certainly pinpoint the game’s corny dialogue and sort of labored storyline but—hey—this is a video game, after all. As much as I’d like to say it was the exception, we all know it’s really the rule. Beyond that though it’s hard to tell what Bionic Commando is really doing wrong. The controls aren’t great, relying on contextual actions more so than dedicated mappings but they are responsive and precise which is an improvement from some other Capcom games this generation (I’m looking at you, Dead Rising). The level design isn’t bad although it does get repetitive once you start returning to Generic Post-Apocalyptic Street Scene or Generic Craggy Canyon for the second or third time. The combat doesn’t completely suck despite the enemy AI being lackluster and the enemy varieties being ridiculously limited. No, for the most part the game is what I’d classify as moderately above average in every sense that games usually get measured.

What’s really the most off about Bionic Commando is the nebulous sense of cohesion and—let me try to avoid too much irony here—purpose. In the end there really is no need for this game to be doing so much of what it does. It doesn’t need to have such a convoluted backstory; why not just try to build a narrative from the original NES game’s loose story and re-imagine it in 3D much the way Rearmed re-imagined it again in 2D? There isn’t any purpose to Spencer (the protagonist) to be the reluctant super-hero especially since the overwrought plot depends on him being decidedly not unique in his bionic capabilities. There just isn’t any logical or even gameplay reason to make checkpoints separate from save points or to have six or seven sections where you have to swing from “mines” which are really just balloons over frustratingly non-instant-death water. The contrivance of the pockets of radiation that create the linearity of the levels are unnecessary, the length of the game is far beyond what’s needed. I could go on. The point is they took a half-decent game and made it crummy by trying way too hard to make you think the game is more expansive or deep or clever or interesting than it was ever going to be. The bottom line is that the original NES game was fun because it was simply an enjoyable game: It was a platformer with a singular unique mechanical twist and that’s it. It worked on just that level. Rearmed understood that, I can’t fathom why Grin missed the mark so badly.

Aside from the Xbox games I also dipped back into Kongregate a little for reasons that I’m not completely clear on. I had shied away from the site for a while after I changed jobs because it’s very addicting but not the best thing in the world to be doing when you’re supposed to be earning your paycheck. I’ve mostly kept it to break times and off-hours this time around but I’m prepared to exit the site again if it gets out of hand. The game I spent the most time with was Toss the Turtle, which is a sort of physics toy/maze/puzzle/upgrade thing in which you launch a cartoon turtle out of a cannon and try to see how long you can keep him going. Aside from a loss of momentum which can be combated by maneuvering the turtle toward springy obstacles, using various bits of equipment like rocket packs and nukes, or shooting him with your gun to juggle him upward, you have to contend with various spiky obstacles that halt your progress immediately.

I was able to earn the 3,000,000 feet achievement after several hundred tries and I thought I’d share how I did it in case you were stuck the way I was: First, you need to upgrade to the tank, the missile and the golden gun. This is not an easy feat in itself but it can be done with a bit of patience. I found it helps to upgrade each step of the way rather than try to save up for the top model since each increment drastically increases your average launch distance to the extent that it boosts your payout per launch exponentially. Once you have the top gear, start by buying a chest bomb (you’ll need to do this for each and every launch; don’t worry $2,000 will start to be meaningless) and then fire the turtle upwards at about a 45° angle. He should soar up past the top of the screen into space about an additional 700 ft before hitting the pinnacle of the arc. Wait for him to come down and bounce twice: The first time he’ll bounce back up over the top of the screen, use this time to set up the cursor an inch or so above the bottom edge and just slightly offset to the right from being vertically aligned with the arrow at the top. On the second bounce he’ll get up toward the top but won’t actually disappear. As he’s on his decent wait for him to get into your crosshairs; the color of the background sky when this happens should be roughly twilight (between 800-900 feet). Then shoot him with the golden gun. This should send him flying back up over the vertical limit by about 1,200 feet. Let him fall and bounce twice again, making sure to only shoot him when his bounce momentum doesn’t carry him out of the screen’s range and repeat until you’ve used all 10 bullets.

It’s unlikely that at this speed you’ll hit any spikes but if you do your chest bomb will save you once. I was able to make it over 2,000,000 feet with a single clip in the golden gun and no chest bomb. The next 1,000,000 feet are a little harder, but at 2 mil you can relax a little: The payout is so high at this point that each time you don’t make it you can just load up on nukes and try again. I’d recommend not bothering to actually use the nukes until you’ve amassed at least two dozen but you’ll be surprised how fast you can pick them up when you’re earning over $100K per launch. To get the last million feet I used my last bullet from the golden gun to send the turtle over the screen and then hit the missile to get his momentum going a little more horizontally. Then I let him bounce maybe four times before I hit the nuke button. The reason is that at this speed you can’t really react quick enough to avoid the spike mines attached to the balloons so you have to more or less just angle your bounces around them. They tend to cluster about 75 feet, 150 feet and again at 700 feet so with four bounces post-nuke you ought to avoid them most of the time. Also if you get lucky and hit an ammo clip return to the two-bounce-shoot pattern until all the bullets are gone again. The biggest pitfall to avoid is waiting too long to drop the nuke: There is a delay between when you press the button and when the nuke effect actually takes place, if your momentum is too low or you have a spiked wall or something in front of you it may not be the quick save like the missile can be. If you want to ensure you don’t get to like 2,950,000 and then splatter on a bed of spikes you can also save the missile: Theoretically you don’t need it since it doesn’t propel you far enough to really make a significant difference in your overall total and may be better used as an emergency bail out. The biggest thing is to let your cash pile build up to a level your comfortable with (I decided on $1,000,000) and make sure to buy as many nukes and a new chest bomb after every unsuccessful run. My second best effort happened on a round I forgot to buy the chest bomb and I made it to 2,460,000+ feet before I found a spike balloon. If I’d remembered to visit the shop I probably could have saved myself 30 minutes.

There are, aside from the usual minor variations and exceptions that prove the rule, two ways for self-sufficient adults to play games: One can either be particularly selective about which new titles to pick up on or near launch day using previews, reviews and any number of buzz-tracking social mechanisms to determine potential enjoyment from an upcoming or newly released game or one can intentionally trail the release curve in order to maintain a steady diet of sub-retail priced software. Budget will play a significant role in either path, but I submit it is impossible to choose the lower-priced path without at some level playing a bit of a waiting game.

Obviously I fall firmly into the tail of the curve camp, using Goozex close to exclusively for new titles and supplementing occasionally with rentals or, rarely, a new game either as a gift or an uncommon purchase. As seen in the $60 a Month series, I have occasionally had the resources to spend extra money on games and that includes newer releases from time to time. But at heart I’ve always been more of the kind of person who plays quickly through as many titles as I can and that means I have had to make peace with sometimes missing out on the gaming zeitgeist. But it occurs to me that all you really miss out on by staggering your release time-frame backward six to twelve months is that sense of being “in” with other gamers who are all clamoring about the latest and greatest. BioShock is just as good now as it was two years ago and, conveniently, it sells new for at least 75% less than it did then but you won’t be party to the wave of exuberant glee that rippled through the subculture with it’s “Would You Kindly” mania.

Don’t let me try to suggest that this is an easy state to maintain. If you care at all about gamer culture (as I do) then you find it hard to resist the siren call of the holiday release season and it’s slew of tempting, tasty titles. My Goozex requests queue looks like a laughably improbable list of the here-and-now: Borderlands, Uncharted 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Demon’s Souls, Brutal Legend, FIFA Soccer 10, Dragon’s Age: Origins, Assassin’s Creed II. Collecting all these games in the next few months would cost me hundreds of dollars or thousands of Goozex points (I have neither). However, I have a back log of games from earlier in the year or even before that which I can acquire for a small amount of cash or trade: Saints Row 2, Call of Duty: World at War, Velvet Assassin, Prototype, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Overlord II. By the time I finish those, the crop that are sitting unfilled on my wishlist will probably be played out by the early adopters and ready to move on to their next thing, giving me access to my next in line.

The other effect of this is that I end up weeding out games I thought might be interesting but don’t hold lasting appeal to me outside the context of their launch hype. Street Fighter IV was once on my list but has since been dropped, for example. It can be had for dirt cheap now, but aside from the nostalgic push it had in my mind when SF4 was buzzing on every forum, there isn’t enough desire left to bother. The ancillary benefit is that I avoid $60 mistakes.

The idea of $60 mistakes came up this week as I was finishing Halo 3: ODST. I borrowed the game from a friend on Monday and played through it over the course of the week in short, maybe 1-2 hour chunks each night. I finished it Friday night which means all told the game was maybe 10 hours but I’d peg it more at about six. I’m not suggesting it was a bad game; on the contrary I liked it better I think than the trilogy-concluding Master Chief game from two years ago. But considering I had no inclination to a) play it again or b) engage in the online component, I have to say that if I’d spent $60 on launch day the way I did with both Halo 2 and Halo 3, I’d have been pretty bummed right about now.

I know some people get up in arms about the brevity of some single-player campaigns these days and I’ve even grumbled on occasion about certain games that were either obviously rushed or were incomplete but in truth I like that there are games out there like Uncharted and Halo 3: ODST that provide a few hours of entertainment and don’t demand more than I care to put into them. As I said I prefer to play a lot of different games a little bit as opposed to probing every nook and cranny of a few so games that are get-in-get-out are actually kind of welcome. I’d rather a game leave me wanting more than artificially pad its time-to-completion with repetitive sections.

Which is part of what I appreciated about ODST. At no point did it feel padded or repetitive, it had a story to tell and it told it using a nice blend of familiar mechanics and fresh adjustments. As usual, it was a Halo game that felt a bit like I wasn’t being let in on all the nuances of the story and only part of the problem seemed to come from the lack of subtitles on the in-game chatter. There is a weird disconnect with what I perceive to be competence on Bungie’s part to write a good story and a persistent difficulty in telling that story effectively in the context of gameplay. I mean, I got the gist, but I never really cared that much. Fortunately Bungie also makes a good shooter from a strict game perspective and there were plenty of enjoyable set pieces and fun times.

Since I finished ODST Friday night I had to find something from my archive to fill the rest of the weekend and I settled back into Fable II. I’m not sure why I keep drifting away from that game and coming back but I think it has something to do with a degree of analysis paralysis that plagued me a bit in other games like Oblivion and Grand Theft Auto where, when presented with a lot of options, I end up dithering around trying to get my bearings for so long that I end up feeling like I’ve played the game for hours and made zero progress. Some games combat this by at least offering a sense of achievement if not necessarily forward movement: Oblivion did this well. GTA and Fable on the other hand feel like they end up at a point where I say, “Enough, I’m just going to try to tear through the story missions because I’m getting too wrapped up in treasure hunts and side-missions.” At least with Fable II it allows you the option to just press on for the most part where other games—GTA IV especially—hounded me so much with background noise that eventually I gave up entirely.

I find it also helps me at least to sometimes go and grab an achievement guide or a walkthrough online not to make the play easier but to give me an ordered list of steps I need to take to accomplish certain tasks. For example in Fable I wanted to ultimately do the marriage action but as with almost everything in Fable II it’s a very fiddly process and rather than stumble through it for several nights in a row (remember I’m only playing an hour or two at the most per night these days) I was thankful to have step-by-step instructions to get me to where I wanted to be. Presented like that it’s actually pretty straightforward but sussing it out yourself isn’t intuitive.

I do notice about Fable II that, like it’s predecessor and like many, many games with morality systems, being Good is kind of a pain in the neck. It requires more patience, more finesse in combat most of the time, more ridiculous side-questing and more of the sort of upkeep tasks to keep everyone happy. Players who chose in these systems to go Evil almost universally get more devastating combat options, less concern about NPC happiness which translates into fewer annoying fetch quests and the like and the only price you pay is a sense that the game is preaching at you a bit. There is a point in Fable II where you’re taken out of the normal flow of the game for a time and you’re forced to take some actions that increase your corruption level. It occurred to me as I played it that my parallel narrative—the one that runs in my head alongside any game with the remotest amount of depth—could very easily accommodate this moment as a sort of breaking point: The once noble hero, loved and respected throughout the land, had a Bad Experience from which he returned changed. He’d now seen and done things—dark things—and his mind was splintered. His ultimate quest still burned in his soul, but his methodology shifted.

Whether by sharp turn of design or nefarious punishment (depending on your perspective) Fable II doesn’t allow you to do what Fallout and other PC-style games do and make arbitrary saves which you can stack up. Your choices are more or less permanent in the game and I’m so used to being a goody two shoes or at worst a noble thief that I’m reluctant to push into the wicked side of the scale on my first (and likely only) playthrough. On the other hand, the story that is represented by the opportunity does compel me and honestly I’m having a hard time really truly having fun as it stands. Maybe going Evil will turn the experience around for me a little. I can even see how it will happen: Following the return from the harrowing trial the next step in the Hero’s journey is to visit a prototypical wretched hive of scum and villainy. Where once he might have found the place repugnant and in need of salvation, he’s surprised to find that the disaffection he’s been feeling since he came back ebbs here in this place where ladies of the night coo from darkened alley and ruffians gamble idly in the filthy streets. He doesn’t mean to stay long, just take care of his business. In a moment of weakness he gives in to the temptation of an alluring harlot and finds himself robbed. A potent blend of righteous anger, guilty self-loathing and shameful vengeance leaves the whore dead on the end of his blade. Where once he might have looked at the scene as if disconnected from his body and run to the temple for pleading penance he instead stares coolly down at the stiffening corpse and feels a strange sense of peace. He decides to linger.

Ahem. Anyway.

I also played a little bit of Left 4 Dead in between ODST and Fable II which doesn’t bear a lot of mention but I did want to point out that there was a title update waiting when I launched the game for the first time in several months and found that the most noticeable change after the patch was installed ended up being that the in-game achievement tracking mechanism was broken and it no longer recognizes my previously unlocked achievements. It does somehow remember the counts for the cumulative ones and of course the achievements themselves are unlocked in my profile, but the utility of Valve’s in-game progress tracking is undercut with what I have to presume is some sort of bug. I’m largely over L4D at this point anyway, mostly just waiting for the sequel to drop. I was going to do some achievement hunting but this freaky bug makes me wonder if achievements are even working now.