Tunnels of Doom

There was a point in the last week or so when I thought I might actually have a chance to be leveled appropriately for the new Cataclysm content on the day it came out. Granted, this would have been a strictly technical appropriateness since the new zones of Mount Hyjal and Vashj’ir are theoretically 78-82ish and there was a chance I’d make it to 78. Realistically you’d want to be level 80 though and I knew that wasn’t going to happen, despite my very calculated efforts to level as efficiently and quickly as possible.

In the end I made it to level 75 last night as people were out shivering in the cold waiting for midnight releases to buy the game which was pretty good (three high level dings in about a week considering the relatively limited amount of time I can put into the game) so I’m reasonably sure that by the time I scratch together the real-world money to buy the expansion I’ll be sufficiently max leveled. What I felt was a more impressive feat was that I also picked up Artisan Flying for my (discounted!) 4,000 gold. I guess you could infer from this that the Auction House madness I engaged in as of last update worked although it wasn’t as easy as making that initial run and then sitting back watching the gold roll in. In fact I did almost all of my leveling in Borean Tundra (minus the 74-75 span which I’ll get to in a minute) specifically so I could stay near Warsong Hold and its ready access to the Orgrimmar Zeppelin because I had a circuitous route around the zone that would allow me to make semi-regular stops back in Org to babysit my auctions, offload the new acquisitions on the AH and also pick up the Cooking and Fishing dailies. I prefer to do the quests rather than actually level either profession the regular way because frankly I find fishing in particular to be vindictively boring and both daily quests offer not only some reasonable currency and XP rewards but profession skill bumps as well.

I had thought that I’d end up making the bulk of my cash via the big ticket items I had: Pristine Black Diamonds, stacks of Hardened Adamantite Bars I’d been laboriously creating, etc. In the end I found that selling lots of lower end stuff was far more reliable and profitable: I offloaded a bunch of linen stacks, Thorium Bars, Fel Iron Ore and other comparatively easy to come by items for a much higher profit margin simply because it moved quickly and without any price compromises or re-listing fees. I knew it would be a learning process but I had hoped to be pleasantly surprised with a few set-it-and-forget-it massive sales and that wasn’t really the case. The good news is that I’m getting better at it fairly quickly and even after spending all 4,000 of the gold I had almost as soon as I earned the last copper piece I spent the next hour or so before I logged off for the night wrapping up some quests so I could move on to the next zone and I had made nearly 200 gold in just that short span so hopefully by the time I get to level 80 I’ll be ready for Grand Master Flying.

So speaking of that last zone: After I finished up in the Borean Tundra, which I liked very much, I went to Dragonblight to drop off a go-talk-to quest and I remember thinking that my stay was going to be brief because the place hadn’t really impressed me when I did my initial flyover for the exploration achievement. I think for one thing I didn’t get the sense that this was such a key location in Northrend because the one complaint I have about it is that it’s listed as a level 71-80 zone which is a huge span comparable for non-starting areas only to the old pre-Cataclysm Barrens (I think that went from level 10 through 25) and perhaps Hellfire Peninsula in Burning Crusade which is technically listed as 58-70 but as more or less a starting zone I think is kind of stretching it to say there’s much of anything to do there beyond maybe level 66. It’s likely that Dragonblight is similar in that saying it’s a level 80 zone is pushing it a bit but the key is that while HP was super imposing the first time you enter what with the Pitlord fight going on right as you come through the portal, once you get over to your faction’s hub, it’s basically like any other zone with the only other really imposing areas (like the crystal in the northwest with all the elites wandering around it and the Pools of Aggonar with it’s ridiculously aggravating boss) being tucked well away from common travel paths. Dragonblight, by contrast, has you cruising through clouds of brawling dragons if you’re on a flying mount as well as having region after region that is packed with high-aggro mobs so that riding through it feels like hitting wave after wave of hostility. It felt on initial inspection like a high-level questing area and one that I thought was strange because I assumed the Icecrown Citadel was where everyone would rush as soon as they got close to level 80.

But I’m glad the quest progression lulled me into staying because I may have missed the Wrathgate cinematic that happens after you complete the Veteran of the Wrathgate questline (mercifully it never requires any grouping) and it was really something cool that I had heard about but mistakenly assumed was kind of Feat of Strength-like in that if you missed it the first time through you were just out of luck. It was also nice to have seen it go down after having read The Shattering because a lot of the early conversations in that book reference the debacle at the Wrathgate and it was kind of mysterious to me what the big deal was. I found it strange that if you followed the Venomspite quests as well as the Agmar’s Hammer and Wyrmrest Temple lines you ended up kind of being responsible for everything that goes down, even though the survivors seem to be fairly certain of your heroism in the whole ordeal.

The cool thing about Dragonblight is how much story is packed in here. From meeting with the Dragon Aspects in Wyrmrest Temple, to actually seeing Ysera asleep in the Emerald Dragonshrine to the quests around the bones of Galarond, it’s all just very cool and absorbing. One thing that really sucks as far as what I’ve read indicates is that apparently the next “Act” in WotLK comes to a head in a quest called Battle for the Undercity which Cataclysm has made obsolete and is now removed from the game. Since I only made it to the point where I could even try it the day before it got removed I never had a chance to see this part and never will. I recognize that Blizzard is doing a progressive thing with Cataclysm that involves changes to previous content and as such some things are going to be affected in a permanent way but it’s little details like this that kind of don’t sit quite right with a latecomer. I mean, I can get past the fact that since I never leveled an Alliance character I won’t ever see the original Stormwind from vanilla WoW. But something like removing a quest which everybody seems to agree is awesome and part of what made Wrath so well received less than two years after it was made available feels like punishment for not staying current on the game.

Then again I hate to admit it but from their perspective it’s kind of working on me since I’m now fairly determined to catch up to Cataclysm and stay on top of it enough that I don’t have to miss anything cool like that again. Nefarious!

Now we come to the part of the year where I ramble incessantly about World of Warcraft because it’s the primary non-critical topic occupying my mind these days. It’s a state of being I know will not last, because history tells me sooner or later I’ll get my short attention diverted to some other gaming-related topic like Blood Bowl or Assassin’s Creed or GURPS or whatever but for now you have to suffer my meandering and ill-informed thoughts on Blizzard’s MMO. Or, I suppose, you don’t. You’re under no obligation to read these posts to completion. As I keep saying, I’m not the boss of you.

Anyway, WoW.

My steady progression toward 70 continued as I dinged level 69 mostly by following a very cool and very long quest chain through Shadowmoon dealing with the demise of Gul’Dan and the complicated efforts to retrieve something called the Cipher of Damnation. It’s such a well put-together progression that I was really hoping it wouldn’t peter out as so many other chains have by suddenly springing a group quest on me but two quests before the end and sure enough it drops a group on me. You know, I have absolutely no problem with WoW including group quests but I think it would be great if Blizzard was a bit better about A) demarcating questlines so the story was a little easier to follow without the aid of (awesome and super-useful but arguably unnecessary) sites like wowhead.com and wowpedia.org and also, B) identifying if a particular quest is in a chain that will sooner or later require a group. It gets pretty frustrating to have to constantly bail out on interesting lines so I can go level elsewhere for a while until I’m strong enough to come back and solo the rest of the chain.

I will say though that the Cipher of Damnation line contains one of the most frustrating and annoying quests I’ve yet encountered in WoW: “I Was A Lot Of Things…” It’s sort of a reputation grind (only without any rep): it basically is a blocker quest which allows the NPC to open the rest of the chain quests only it has nothing really to do with the story being addressed in the rest of the line. And oh my is it annoying. Essentially you have a group of neutral mobs patrolling a smallish region with medium respawn timers and a ton of aggro mobs with short respawn timers who prefer to attack the neutrals. You need the neutrals in order to transform a teeth-grindingly rare node in the region into a gatherable object so you’re trying to do several things simultaneously: Protect the neutrals from the aggro mobs, look for the elusive nodes and then hope there is a nearby neutral so you can get the gather. You only need ten of the gathers but because the aggro mobs respawn like crazy, the nodes are tough to come by and the neutrals are never where you need them to be it becomes a real test of patience. The whole thing is made worse by the fact that the neutrals can easily get caught in AoE attacks and will turn aggro on you as well which means you end up having to just kill them and restart their timer in the ultimate futility exercise. It took me well over an hour and a half to get the requisites and by the end of it I was about ready to go back and PvP the questgiver just on principle.

Regardless, I eventually made it to 70 by running around and doing quests from Shattrath City in the Terokkar Forest and the Auchindoun region. They weren’t quite as awesome as the stuff I found in Shadowmoon but it was good enough to get me to 70 and then I was able to hit up Quel’danas to get the achievement for vanilla WoW exploration. Almost as soon as I landed in Quel’danas I left, because the dailies there were sort of overwhelming and annoying for a newly minted level 70 and I noticed that I had a 10-day Wrath of the Lich King trial waiting on my account which I immediately activated and headed up to Northrend to check it out. I went to the Howling Fjord first and found it kind of uninspiring but then on one of my Auction House runs back to Orgrimmar I noticed the Borean Tundra zeppelin and gave that a shot instead. Much better in terms of leveling for 70s in my opinion. With only a few days I abandoned leveling for a bit and focused on exploration after I dropped (painfully I might add) the 500 gold on Cold Weather Flying and spent the better part of three days flying over Northrend to get the world explorer achievement and the spiffy “the Explorer” title, which I bear proudly.

Curiously around this time patch 4.0.3a came out and dropped The Shattering on everyone as part of the ramp-up to Cataclysm and I noticed that in an effort to get new players caught up for the expansion they dropped the price on all the older titles so you can get them all for only $40. It benefited me since I was able to buy WotLK for only $10 and it really wasn’t a hard decision to make, I had been waffling about what to do once the trial ran out anyway, leaning mostly toward going ahead and buying Wrath even at the $40 price. So yeah, here we are.

As of now I’m level 72 and while I’d love to ding 80 before Cataclysm comes out, I don’t think it will happen. Well, frankly there are six days left and it would take a herculean feat of dedication (and frankly irresponsibility) to make eight levels in under a week. So I’m probably not going to do Cataclysm until it’s been out for a bit which was the plan all along although now I’m thinking (depending on available funds) it may happen much sooner than February.

What’s kind of curious to me is that this rapid push toward Cata has gotten me thinking about what’s really motivating me in the game right now because as much as I keep thinking I want to slow down and attend to several little side projects I keep thinking about like soloing old dungeons and leveling a new profession and working on the Death Knight I felt I simply had to roll once I had Wrath installed, when it comes down to it I find myself doing only one of two things when I play: Leveling as fast as I can and trying to earn enough gold to pay for Artisan riding which would give me a fast-flying mount. What I finally came up with for why this is the case is that no matter how much I like my main, I can’t shake the feeling that he’s not representative of what I really want to be doing in the game. At this point he’s nearly sixty levels higher than my next-highest level toon (not counting the DK) and I think ultimately what I’m trying to do is just get a max level character so I can settle him into a routine of dailies and/or gold generation so I can go back and focus on trying to find the character I really want to be. I don’t think (anymore) that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that especially since I’m still having fun leveling this content for the first time but it does come with a sense of impatience because it’s pretty well established from everything I’ve read that maxing out your first character is much, much harder than subsequent attempts.

Amusingly what has frustrated me the most in the last couple of weeks has been the most trivial of matters: I had a set of pauldrons I got off a random mob drop which were vastly improved, stat-wise, from my previous set. The problem was they were ugly as sin. I mean really, really hideous. I probably picked them up when I was level 68 and I carried them around for a few days because I couldn’t stand the sight of them. Finally I couldn’t justify having the means to better stats and not using them. But of course since I didn’t get any more shoulder drops and I’m saving every copper I can for Artisan flying I had to wear those dippy looking things for five levels. Finally I found a new set last night which aren’t spectacular but at least don’t bring shame on my family name by their very presence. I also replaced a very good (and rather expensive when you take into account the gems I bought for it) helmet I’d been toting around since Zangarmarsh primarily for aesthetic purposes. I can’t decide if the designers of the game use the visual element of the gear as an incentive or if they have some other, more nefarious purpose in mind. I know I’m not alone in sort of caring about how my avatar looks: I don’t need to be perfectly matched but it does irk me when I end up with a gaudy blue helmet, green-and-black boots, a purple chestpiece and red gloves. Ultimately I end up tolerating it because from a game perspective I care more about being effective in combat than in looking cool but I can’t deny that appearance makes a difference especially when deciding whether to voluntarily upgrade (via the auction house) or not.

Speaking of the AH, I’ve been hoarding gems I found from mining runs since the beginning of the game because they’re both useful in some Blacksmithing recipes and because I kept thinking that I might someday want to do Jewelcrafting and it would be a bummer to have to go back and re-mine all those low-level nodes. But as my bank slots kept filling up with more and more gems that were just sitting there “just in case” I finally broke down and decided to put them toward my fast flying mount by selling them. Of course I didn’t want to undertake a venture like that blind so I went over to Curse.com and heaved a big sigh and installed Auctioneer plus a metric ton of other AddOns.

So why the sigh? Because AddOns, as supremely useful and excellent as they can be, are also an enormous pain in the neck. They require a lot of babysitting and usually the more useful they are the more customizable they are as well which almost always means there is a learning curve. For example, the ArkInventory bag replacement AddOn allows you to categorize your bag via certain set criteria (useful for not having to waste time manually sorting your bags) but where it’s really powerful is that you can create your own custom criteria using a set of formula rules. But naturally you have to figure out the syntax for these rules which involves things like learning to write “tooltip(Spell Power, mana per 5) and equip() and soulbound()”. Granted, it’s awesome once you get it set up the way you like but the process of tweaking and modifying and researching and doing incremental adjustments to every aspect of the game from interface to maps to money generation to quest tracking can take literally hours. Practically speaking that entails spending time in game but not actually playing the game and instead fiddling with it. Maybe some people like this, but I don’t. But ultimately it’s necessary if you want to achieve certain specific goals (like improving your field of vision or maximizing your XP/hour or, in my case, improving my revenue from the sale of gems without doing a lot of painstaking research).

So I loaded up my bags with gems and trundled off to the Auction House to try and make a bunch of gold. I tried to be as savvy about it as I could. In addition to using Auctioneer to ensure I was pricing my stuff to sell but still setting it so I’d make as much money as possible, I also avoided flooding markets and I tried to stay clear or mostly clear of markets that already had a lot of listings. For example if I saw that Azerothian Diamonds were selling for 25 gold each and there were only three or four listed, I’d go ahead and list all four of them I had on hand at 2.5% below the lowest offering. However if I went to sell some Shadowgems and noticed they were selling for just a few coppers more than vendor price at the lowest and there were fifty or sixty listings, I’d either set them aside and decide to come back later to check the price or I might drop one or two on there at a middle market value as an experiment just to see if perhaps they were commonly listed but sold quickly and could potentially still net some profit once the lowballers were snatched up and all that was left was my reasonably priced offerings. Occasionally I’d do something like that but perhaps set the bid amount competitive with the low prices and ratchet the buyout price much higher with the notion that if someone was a stickler for the bargain I could at least get some movement on the products but if the need was more pressing they might be inclined to pay closer to what I really wanted just to not have to wait.

In a way it was a lot of fun. I’m no economist by any stretch of the imagination but it never fails to amaze me how many sub-games WoW manages to contain within the context of a larger system. I’ve played lesser games that more or less mimic the complexity (often not even as well) of the Auction House economy and that’s all they do. Never mind the role-playing, social, competitive, storytelling or co-operative aspects you also get with WoW.

Anyway, this was all done shortly before logging off for the night last night; I’m hoping the next time I have a chance to log in I’ll have a mailbox full of riches waiting for me.

On a random whim a couple of weeks ago I picked up another WoW trial activation and hopped back into Azeroth for a few days. I had forgotten that in my last foray earlier in the year I had never quite made it to level 60 and in the week or so that I fiddled I found an interesting questing zone (Western Plaguelands) and worked my way up to level 59 with about 75% of the XP I needed to hit 60. I could tell that this time the short trial hadn’t been enough to quench my thirst because I was really bummed that I hadn’t made it to the original game’s level cap. Like, really, really bummed.

So in spite of having told myself I was taking a break on spending any kind of money on video games for a while (which, other than a few bucks here and there in shipping and handling for Goozex trades, I actually haven’t spent any money on games I’ve played in probably a year) I decided to relent and bought a 60-day game card and a copy of The Burning Crusade. My theory is that pre-paying for a couple of months at a time will force me to re-evaluate regularly if this is something I want to continue with so I avoid the situation where I cancel a subscription after the fact of spending a month (or several) not getting my money’s worth.

Now I know I said late last year in my earlier trial venture back into the game, “…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… and go through it with them.” In a sense this is true but not I think because of the reasons I assumed at the time. See, this time around I’m finding myself energized by solo questing because I’m exploring Outland in the Burning Crusade content and it’s new and different and I’m taking a slightly different approach in that I’m taking the time to read the quest logs, to try and understand the stories being told via the questlines. Specifically, I’m trying to follow those lines through to their ends instead of picking and choosing whatever seems to be the easiest to complete.

The reason I still feel like I need to find some friends online is simply that WoW was designed to be played socially and so often I find questlines stall on me because some of the progression starts to require small groups or leads to instances which when approached at the proper level require group approaches. But while designed with this in mind, Blizzard seems to have been very careful not to exclude solo players and it’s not like there isn’t plenty to do by your lonesome in the game. What I think I meant before and what I understand now is that in a way part of what I want out of the game is that sort of group play dynamic.

Historically this has been kind of a struggle for me. I love playing online games, but matching online schedules and game windows with my friends has been very little hit and a whole lot of miss. In this case, the problem remains but there are theoretically also plenty of people who I could team up with and play whom I don’t necessarily know in real life. But it’s a tough proposition. I know there are a lot of other people playing WoW right now who have work commitments, families and limited time, so I should be able to find people in the same boat who will be very understanding, but also there’s the fact that I’m very green at the game (even at level 68) especially in terms of group/instance/raid play where it counts. Just as a quick example, I play a tanking class but I use a DPS build and gear for leveling so in a group I’m kind of disappointing and redundant to most other people.

I’m back to having fun with the game: The pre-Cataclysm content has been fun to mess around with even if I don’t anticipate getting that expansion until after it’s been out for a while, if then. It’s funny because I know I still have a lot of Wrath of the Lich King content ahead of me which in spite of it being older is still exciting to me and I’m thinking now if I stay with the game through Christmas (my 60 days expire on December 24th) I may “catch up” to Cataclysm sometime in late February. Considering I’m nearly four years late to the Burning Crusade party and one whole expansion cycle behind on Wrath, that’s not actually all that bad.

One thing that sort of eluded me in my previous forays to the game was the fun of the Achievement system. Old ToD readers will note that I was a huge fan of Xbox 360 Achievements but I think the unification of the quick-glance score made it hard for me to expand that devotion beyond the closed system. What I’m discovering about WoW achievements is that I care less about the arbitrary scores assigned to the requirements and more about what’s involved in getting them. For example, I’m one zone away from getting the entirety of Classic WoW’s world content explored (the holdout is Quel’Thalas, which requires level 70) and I have all of Outland explored. Granted Outland was a lot easier with the flying mount, but even just the process of wandering through all the zones so I could at least say I’d seen everything Blizzard had put together for the game was pretty gratifying. It really gave me a sense of how much work and care had been put into making all these distinct and interesting locales. Of course it was also nice to say I saw them all before Cataclysm hits and everything changes. Plus I had a surprising amount of fun exploring the Alliance zones like Teldrassil and Azyremist Isle since Hordies like me really aren’t welcome so it requires a lot of patience and some calculated risks.

In one moment of created fun I had one section of Teldrassil unexplored, it was a valley surrounded by impassable cliffs called Shadowglen. It’s the starting area for Night Elves and the only access point is a single road leading in and out which is guarded by a line of NPCs that are of a significantly higher level than I was at the time. I knew I couldn’t take down even one guard, much less five or six, but I really needed to step foot in that area so I could explore it and check it off my list. So I stood outside pondering the problem for a bit and a couple of very low level PCs came sauntering up the road. They stopped and looked at me, obviously wondering why a level 61 Orc was hanging around the entrance to their zone on a non-PvP server. There was this sort of awkward silence for a bit (Horde and Alliance can’t communicate directly with each other, the text is filtered into a sort of pre-specified gibberish). Finally I decided I was getting in there no matter what and I hoped I only needed to go far enough in to trigger the exploration event and that I could make it before I died. So, knowing full well that the other players couldn’t know for sure what I said, I typed “/yell For the Horde!” and ran past the PCs, up the road and into Shadowglen.

Of course the NPC guards aggroed on me immediately and began chasing me down, brutally draining my health bar but just before I keeled over I saw the little prompt come up “Explored: Shadowglen” and the map area filled in. I died laughing like a loon. I can only imagine what it must have looked like to those poor Alliance players.

And meanwhile I did accept a guild invite for a group called “DARK DESTRUCTION” which has worked out pretty well for me so far, although I still think the all-caps and generic heavy metal guild name lacks some of the appropriate irony. I spent a good portion of Friday night while my wife battled a nasty stomach virus she caught from me (I was out sick and feeling miserable—so miserable I couldn’t even play any video games which I use as an indicator of how sick I actually am—earlier in the week) running through an old dungeon called Deadmines with a kid who was trying to level a Paladin. S/he was level 11 and the dungeon is supposed to be for levels 17-20 so this person was really relying on me to save their hides, a job I didn’t really perform all that admirably. Granted at level 67 even the elite 20s in Deadmines are no match for me, basically regardless of how many of them I pull aggro on. But the game is sneaky in that threat is determined via a complicated scheme that takes into account how easily defeated a player is so it’s fairly easy when running an under-leveled player through an instance to have the monsters ignore the 800-pound gorilla and head right for the low-level guy, overwhelming him quickly. I learned through the exercise that I have a long way to go in practicing and learning how to tank before I’m ready to volunteer my services with any level-appropriate dungeons or raids.

The funny thing was that after running Deadmines for an hour or so (this was my first trip through it) we got to the main antechamber after many twisting mineshaft corridors and it opens up into this underground lake with a pirate ship in the middle. I remarked, “Wow, Goonies much?” To which my companion replied, “What’s that?” Now, I’m no Goonies afficcianado but I was kind of perplexed.

“You know, the kid’s movie from the 80s?”

It dawned on me why this might be a missed reference. “Oh,” I said, “you must be a young’un.”

“Yeah, I’m 13″ came the reply. I could only laugh and carry on.

So if you ask me how I spent my Friday night, I’d have to truthfully answer that I spent it playing video games with a 13 year-old.

I really don’t envy people who get paid to review games when open-world titles hit their assignment queues. Having been slowly working my way through Red Faction: Guerrilla for the last couple of months, I can say that trying to digest a game like this in a couple of days would be frustrating at the very least. I mean, I’m certain that you could get the basic idea of the game in that time, playing enough of the different mission types to meet the requirements for advancement from sector to sector and then hitting the mandatory story missions but most of the reward that I can find from open-style games comes from the make-your-own-fun interludes. Which is to say there is perhaps significantly more interest in these types of games from my perspective in not pursing the story, which for a story hound like myself is an odd thing to consider.

Red Faction’s hook is in it’s destructible environments or, more specifically, in it’s destructible buildings. I guess earlier incarnations of the franchise focused on level geometry deformation but the planet in Guerrilla is static, it’s the structures that you can shape in this case. And by “shape” I mean “pulverize.” Since it’s a huge part of the game I might as well get out the way the talk about the building destruction. On the positive notes, destroying buildings is a lot of fun. I mean, practically every weapon you get is basically a building knocker-downer. I guess there are an assortment of machine guns and pistols and laser rifles but honestly I barely ever used them. It’s far more effective to topple a building on a squad of enemy troopers than it is to try to pick them off one by one, plus most of your key destructive devices like explosive charges, rocket launchers and sledgehammers are infinitely more powerful than the piddly guns you find around so early on I decided, “why bother?” Anyway, most of the missions practically demand that you knock something or several somethings over anyway so if the pesky bad guys get crushed while I’m doing my job, so much the better. You also get access to some heavy vehicles including sturdy dump trucks and the ever-thrilling walkers (very reminiscent of the Power Loader from Aliens) which are good at crushing building supports. The physics engine behind the building is cool in that the chunks of cement and metal you blast, knock and bash off of the structures feels solid and real and unlike some other examples I’ve seen of destructible environments the structures feel sturdy as if you really needed all these explosives and heavy machinery to take them down as opposed to, say, a well-aimed belch.

The bad part about the building destruction is that the sense of heft the physics engine conveys is undermined by a faulty series of calculations that permits unrealistic loads can be borne by certain supports which often leads to these strange looking half-destroyed buildings that have no right in the world to remain standing but float in disbelief-defying air while you circle the remaining scraps looking for the one bit of frame that inexplicably holds the thing aloft. Also there are too many cases where certain key support bits have been given additional damage-absorption capacity by the engine algorthims such that you can whack away at them but they won’t fall even though you know it would bring the whole house crashing down. It’s annoying to instead have to go around slapping away at flimsy exterior walls until a specific damage amount has been done and the engine allows the building to finally fall. The last thing is that while knocking over walls is sort of the raison d’être, there are only so many rationales for flattening the Martian landscape they can come up with so eventually you start to laugh at the euphemisms the NPCs use for “bring down a building.”

The combat in Red Faction is acceptable, there’s a crude cover system that is kind of comical since all the chest-high walls fall over within five minutes of entering the sector but like I said most of the time you’re just flattening barracks and office complexes with all the bad guys inside anyway. The vehicle driving is pretty much universally terrible: The game renders the Martian landscape like an establishing shot from Deliverance, lacking much in the way of paved or even straight roads. You spend a lot of time fighting the floaty, terrain-beholden car controls as you careen up the sheer faces of rock walls in an attempt to get where you’re going. It may not surprise you that the missions that gave me the most trouble were the ones where you had to return a stolen vehicle to a safehouse within a specific time frame.

The basic structure is that for each sector you visit there are a number of Guerrilla actions you have to perform in order to decrease the evil empire’s control value on the region. Once the control is low enough you can perform the story missions (there are a total of 20), about three in each sector, to liberate the area. The Guerrilla actions are both fixed-position and also radioed in as you bumble around Mars which kind of bothered me. One thing I get very sick of in open world games is unsolicited missions. GTA IV was terrible about this with various cronies calling me incessantly to come take them on dates or hang out with them or get into mischief or whatever the mini-mission was at the time. At least Red Faction doesn’t punish you with loss of character respect or trust or what have you and they will in fact re-broadcast the mission later on if you miss it the first time, but it’s still annoying to be en route to one activity and be told there is another, more pressing activity you should be doing right now. Excuse me, is this open world or is it not?

In any case the missions aren’t particularly novel: You’re either holding a position against a certain number of enemies, trying to kill or destroy a certain number of enemies within a time limit, trying to knock down a building with a specific kit within a time limit, driving a car back to a safehouse within a time limit, rescuing some hostages, ambushing a convoy, tailing someone and stealing their delivery or manning a mounted gun on a destruction raid. There are plenty of collectibles as expected as well and there are non-mission activities that can result in decreasing the sector control, such as destroying key enemy structures and buildings. There is also a morale system related to the citizens of the sector that influences how they perceive your Red Faction organization. This is used to inspire you not to kill innocents and, also, not to die. The only penalty you get for dying is a small hit to the sector morale. For the most part I never really had to babysit any of these values, my base approach to each new sector was to hit all the stationary Guerrilla missions, blow up all the key structures and then do all three story missions back to back. Sometimes story missions unlock other Guerrilla actions as well, but by doing everything I was able to get all available unlocks and afford their upgrades before the final mission, so it seemed like a solid strategy.

The story missions are a bit better in terms of variety and intrigue, the plot of Red Faction is pretty thin: You’re a new recruit in a resistance movement trying to force the local militarized corporate overlords off the planet. There are some twists involving a gang of raider-type savages who have a macguffin called the Nano Forge but for the most part it’s predictable and straight forward. It would have been nice to see the creativity of the story mission structure explored in the standard missions as well, though. One has you running around a town under artillery fire trying to collect key pieces of data and supplies before the place is razed. Another involves you leading a huge, aggressive army of enemy troops on a chase through the sector as you try to knock out their jamming signal towers within a time limit and before your truck explodes. Overall the game (and its achievements) aren’t affected by the difficulty setting so there’s very little reason not to set it to casual and enjoy the limited damage most enemies can do to you. The game isn’t difficult but like many open world games it does have its frustrating moments so you’ll appreciate the leg up.

Thankfully there is a checkpoint system in the missions but most aren’t long enough to take advantage of it, and while the map has a pathing option, the rally points are limited to “civilized” areas on main roads so if you’re trying to mark an out-of-the-way location you’re basically sunk, plus the algorithm isn’t too hot anyway, frequently giving least-efficient paths especially where destructible structures like bridges and overpasses may still be standing. I guess the map code has no awareness of which possibly impassable routes are still viable.

Overall I enjoyed Red Faction. It’s not as engrossing as Assassin’s Creed II and while getting from point A to point B in ACII was typically as much fun as the place you were going, Red Faction is all about what you do once you finally get there. Some of the later unlockable weapons are very, very cool and the novelty of blasting buildings apart never really wore off for me. I would have liked a better plot maybe, and some more cleverness in the mundane game activities, but I put a fair number of hours into the game and still had enough left in me after the credits rolled to keep logging in looking for last minute collectibles and trying to find missions I’d overlooked (mostly radio-provided).

I should also mention quickly that I actually did play some of the multiplayer for Red Faction (which is rare enough) and it’s pretty decent, although I suck badly at online mulitplayer anything so it’s frustrating to consistently be waxed by unseen opponents. They have a backpack system for granting special powers like jetpacks and charge attacks and stealth that is kind of novel plus the whole destructible environments angle makes for some fun unexpected moments. I probably won’t devote a whole lot of time to it, but I’m sure I’ll try a few more matches and see if I get even a tiny bit better before I quit in frustration.

According to my records it only took me 20 or so days of play to run through Borderlands, which is about my normal pace for an RPG that I enjoy reasonably well. Of course, it took me more like 52 calendar days to make it through. I was thinking about this the other day, how my video gaming has diminished so significantly especially since my daughter—who somehow didn’t really hamper my gaming style in the first few months—became more active with crawling and interacting and such. Even though there are times when I get a tiny bit bummed that I don’t have a lot of time or money to devote to gaming (say 700 hours or $876.70 per year), I really have no complaints. Among other things I savor games a little more and since there were 32 some odd days in between various play sessions for me to contemplate Borderlands as I played it, I digested it better than I have some other games I’ve played quickly and discarded just as fast.

Borderlands is, as many others have noticed, a FPS MMO. Granted, it isn’t massively multiplayer, but it definitely follows the MMO structure and the main difference is the combat is real-time FPS as opposed to cooldown/semi-real-time third person like most MMOs. For people who don’t mind the MMO conventions, which I would say describes me, it’s not offensive in the least. The FPS controls are tight and the distinctive cel-shaded look makes playing Borderlands feel a lot like living in a graphic novel and I’m a huge sucker for that kind of thing.

The plot of Borderlands is tenuous at best, with you looking for a mystical Vault and in the process championing the underdogs (underskags?) of the planet against the oppressive bandits and mercenaries and greedy interplanetary corporations who want either to just be generically oppressive or generically greedy. You’re led around by a mysterious woman who contacts you via your communicator and never reveals anything significant about herself nor is it really explained why you blindly follow her instructions. My single biggest complaint with Borderlands lies here, in the indistinct narrative that ought to tie the game’s endless fetch questing together but actually turns out to be nothing more than one gigantic 30+ hour fetch quest, and not even one that has a satisfactory ending. If you come into this game looking for fulfillment in the story department, you’re going to leave sorely disappointed.

In a very real way Borderlands is all about the journey. It’s a grind game for grinders. The game narrows quickly into a cycle of fetch quest, new area, enemy encounter, loot management, quest turn in, lather-rinse-repeat. If you can’t stomach this sort of thing without a compelling plot to string you along, avoid Borderlands. I believe this is why people say Borderlands works best as a co-op game, because tedium is always more fun when you can make your own enjoyment with friends. I haven’t played co-op yet because for better or for worse I may not actively seek out grind-y games, but I’m not opposed to them so I finished the game all by my lonesome and felt reasonably happy most of the time doing it. Call it a quirk of my personality but as small and shallow as it is, I find enough reward in incrementally improving my kit to push me through even though I like to talk about how important narrative is to me.

To be fair, there is enough mystery in the sketchy plot to at least have curiosity be a minor factor in getting through to the end of the main quest, but toward that end it becomes clear that the dramatic moment you keep hoping for never will (perhaps never can) materialize. If you didn’t have as much fun as I was able to seeking out higher XP levels and slightly different (i.e. questionably improved) primary weapons, that may be the point the controller gets broken in frustration. For me, it was a disappointed shrug and then even after the game’s credits rolled I continued playing and achievement hunting for another 30-45 minutes.

I’m not sure Borderlands is the sort of game I’m dying to get DLC for, nor am I sure I’ll revisit it anytime soon. I’m not trading it away right off, I know that. I’m going to let it sit on the shelf for a bit and see if I get the itch to come back to it. Also, I keep hoping someone on my friends list will magically decide to pick it up (again?) and ask me to do some co-op with them. I have other games to play in the meantime, and it wasn’t so spectacular that I can’t bring myself to pry it from the 360′s disc tray, but for a gaming OCD like myself, especially one with an undying love of beautiful cel-shaded graphics, Borderlands almost accidentally hit a lot of my weak spots. Like a boss with glowing orange “shoot me here” areas, I came down pretty easy as a result.

I’ve been trying to organize a monthly game day since earlier this year. It hasn’t been wildly successful as I had hoped, but considering the amount of tabletop gaming I get done under normal circumstances, anything is an improvement.

This past weekend was the second one I’ve managed to organize; each game day has its own theme and this one was space-themed games.

Star Commander

My buddy Thom brought Star Commander along and we played it first. It’s a card-driven resource management game with a light space theme (the metaphor could easily be anything: Pirate ships, truck driving, etc.) where you attempt to build a complete set of cards by wrangling the key resource in the game, which in this case is crew members. Each ship type has a set number of crew that it can hold (and indeed needs to have in order to win the game). You pay sufficient crew cards to purchase the ships (10 for a scout ship, 20 for a cruiser, and so on) and then play additional crew to staff them up. Essentially it takes 20 crew to buy and then staff a scout for example.

The trick is that you can shuttle crew members between the ships in your fleet so you can use crew from one stocked ship to stock or help buy another. The idea is that eventually you must purchase and staff a full fleet of ships (two of the scouts plus a cruiser, a dreadnaught and a base) in order to win. But of course the whole while your opponents are doing the same as well as trying to slow you down by attacking your ships with missiles and lasers. There are counter cards to the attack ones, like evasions and shields, plus defensive ships have a chance to fight back if they aren’t destroyed early so combat can be a risky proposition. And of course there are a number of special cards that allow certain rules to be changed like spies which permit non-combat destruction of ships with the help of a sabotage card and convoys that help you protect your most valuable ships.

I ended up winning the game in spite of it being my first time playing, mostly due to the fact that when given the opportunity late in the game one of my opponents didn’t attack me but focused on someone else instead, claiming a higher percentage chance of victory. It may or may not have been a valid tactic but in any case it allowed me to continue drawing to find the last crew card I needed to fill the base and win.

Overall I liked Star Commander; the open-ended combat system was novel and fun in a modified War kind of way, and the turns were quick enough to avoid having the game drag too much. However, I had a few key complaints that prevented me from really loving it. One was that I felt the card distribution in the deck was off: There were too many times where people sat around for five to ten turns just waiting for a crew card to show up, staring at a handful of fairly useless combat cards. Meanwhile, you can’t actually attack without a mandatory Engage card which were also frustratingly rare. Since you needed one or the other to really do anything useful, it felt like there should have been more of each. It seemed like very often people in Crew card droughts would draw an Engage card and pick a fight with someone just because combat was a good excuse to empty cards from your hand and you got to draw back up to 7 once the combat was over. We did find out toward the end of the game that you can replace your hand on your turn for a whole new one once per game, but that didn’t seem like enough to really counteract the poor card balance.

The other complaint was that the crew level was marked by having the ship card cover up the higher crew levels on a thin board that represented your fleet, except the boards were prone to bumping and if the card shifted it was easy to forget how much crew had really been on the ship. A simple solution to me would have been to stack the (copious) Crew cards under or near the ships which would have allowed them to be audited later. I also wish there had been some more thought put in to the theme which as I mentioned was pretty exchangeable. The closest they came was the shields/fire system/laser combo in combat, but it certainly wasn’t an integral part of the game or even the combat system. Maybe something along the lines of specific maneuver cards or a sense of putting the ships in a formation for the purposes of convoys might have helped.

Sector 41

A few months back I took my daughter to a flea market being held at a game store within reasonable driving distance. I picked up a couple of games while I was there, none of which I had heard of but I gave them a shot just because they were bargains and looked interesting. Sector 41 was apparently developed by a local guy and Thom had actually participated in the testing of the game early on.

Basically it works like this: You set up a grid of 81 tiles that represent the titular Sector 41. Each player has a mothership tile that moves along one edge of the grid, one or two spaces per turn. On the mothership are three scout vessels which can be deployed to search the sector by flipping over the tile as you land on it and, depending on the type of tile, either continuing your move or ending your turn. There is also a mechanic-based token called the Wanderer who starts in the middle of the board and is moved by the current player to an unexplored tile to help speed the exploration of the sector along (Thom said the Wanderer had been added since he tested the game, probably in response to feedback that the game was in desperate need of a faster pace).

The point of the game is to search for ore-producing planets marked with numbers that contain the desired resource called Glynnium. The numbers indicate how many resource tokens appear on that planet. Each player then struggles for dominance over the planet (and the resource) by using the explored tiles and a mechanic called space folding that allows the mothership to skip lateral movement for a turn in favor of pushing the tiles in its current stack forward, pulling the furthest tile back to the near edge. The player who ends up with the most Glynnium wins.

Where the game really works is in building the sense of space exploration, with all its likely hazards, pitfalls and serendipitous chance, and conveying the sense of competition between warring mining companies trying to race to find but also cleverly outmaneuver their rivals to emerge as the victor. Exploring is always fun and the space folding mechanism makes for some really amusing and interesting strategies.

Here’s where the game lacks: Primarily the production of the game is flawed in that it can’t be played without a reference sheet. There are dozens of tile types and many of them do some unusual things but they are represented on the tiles themselves by an often abstract or indistinct illustration and nothing more. Constantly having to check the manual to determine what each tile does is tedious and unnecessarily slow when the problem could have easily been solved by including the tile effect text on the tile itself. It may not have looked quite as nice, but it would have made it much more playable.

The second issue is that combat in the game is boring. As in, barely worth bothering with boring. Sure, it can be strategic, but literally the attacker always wins, no matter how many defenders there are. Since there is no risk vs. reward element, and the end result is typically a matter of replacing an occupying explorer with your own, often combat goes back and forth for turns while players use a combination of combat and space folding to wear each other—that is, each player—down until someone gives up. That sort of design should never make it out of the planning phase. This is curious to me as well since the box I got came with a space-age looking dice that isn’t used anywhere. I assumed there may be some alternate rules somewhere that allowed combat to be a bit more intriguing but why it wasn’t included in the base game I can’t fathom.

In the end, I won this game as well, largely due to several fortuitous Glynnium deposits being close to my starting position and the fact that Thom and Aaron spent a large part of the mid-game playing cat-and-mouse over a stash of the resource in their adjacent corners. It’s one of those games that I find myself very much enjoying while I play but as soon as the game is over I want to grouse about some of the dumber design decisions. I think it bugs me that it’s so obviously flawed when it has the potential to be really good.

Race to the Galaxy

With time running short toward the end of the day, I broke out Race which I play about once a year. The problem with it is that it’s the kind of game that you really need to play a bunch in order to have the flow work well or you have to have everyone playing be at about the same comfort level with the rules. Since I’m typically playing with people who are much more familiar with it than I am I almost always feel flustered and behind, like I’m holding up the show. I never get enough chance to develop a strategy and when the game is over and points are being counted I often feel lucky to have any VPs at all, sometimes even wondering how I managed to get as many as I did.

I doubt I’ll ever play it often enough to memorize the cards or get enough of a standard strategy to know what to look for if my starting world is X or if I draw Y early in the game but it would be nice if I were at least familiar enough with the basic play so that if people wanted to add the expansions I didn’t practically tremble in fear because I can barely handle the base game.

As it was I found it amusing that everyone else playing was remarking how different the game was without the expansions they had become accustomed to and I was thinking they all needed to slow down so I could have a chance to figure out what my next move was going to be.

I still had fun—no matter what I really do like the game—but Kristi won by a very large margin mostly due in part to her getting a VP combo going far earlier than anyone else as we scrambled trying to get some resource production in place. I think a good time was had by all.

Looking Ahead

I think the second Game Day was successful overall. We got three games finished in about six hours including time for pizza and rules explanations for a couple of the games which is a good rate I think. Next month I’m planning for fantasy-themed games: I would really like to have my Talisman minatures painted for that but I also have Runebound and DungeonQuest as fallbacks. Meanwhile there are plenty of fantasy games I haven’t tried or only tried once like Warhammer Quest or Descent. Ideally someone coming next month will have something like that they want to bring and if I don’t get to play Talisman with painted minis, I can at least try something new.

My game playing time has noticeably decreased. As such, it took me the better part of three months to finish Assassin’s Creed II, where I finished the original plus spent an additional order of magnitude of time fiddling around and hunting for flags and whatnot in perhaps a single month. It would not, therefore, be a stretch to estimate that it’s currently taking me about six times as long to get through games. But, I am still playing.

Immediately after finishing ACII, I was treated by my wife to BioShock 2 which I ran through as fast as my current spare time allowances will permit. I thought it telling that both games were sequels to games released in 2007, which I also played in close proximity to one another, and that I had very specific expectations for each sequel going in.

Assassin’s Creed

Upon my initial completion of the first game in the series, I said this, “My overall impression of the game is favorable, but I don’t think that means I misunderstand the complaints people have leveled against it.” It was mild praise for a game that, at the time, I felt deserved a very soft thumbs-up. Of course I continued to mess around with it, doing the sort of post-completion achievement hunting I typically reserve for my top tier games, and later commented, “I never would have thought that a game I was sort of on the fence about would have this long of legs…” In the ensuing years I’ve come to recall the game far more fondly than I think I expected to when I first played it. In fact, looking up those old impressions surprised me somewhat at how tepid I was toward the game.

I knew it had some issues, but I also felt after the fact like I was one of the few people who really enjoyed AC for what it was as opposed to loathing it for what it wasn’t quite able to be. Above all I think I really enjoyed the plot of the game, a wild mixture of conspiracy, history, speculative fiction, political intrigue, alternate history, mysticism and religious revisionist lunacy that scratched hard on an itch I wasn’t even aware I possessed. Sure it had either a boldly untidy epilogue or a sloppily lazy one, but it was somewhat thrilling to have a game set in ancient Jerusalem of all places. Say what you will about the storytelling in games, but this is at the very least a singularly creative vision being presented as a mass market game which simply must be admired if you care at all about video game writing.

So the sequel was a foregone conclusion but I admit to being pretty disappointed when I learned they were skipping ahead to the late fifteenth century and introducing a new central protagonist. I mean, let’s be clear here: Assassin’s Creed II is a game that could have jumped off the narrative rails in a extremely messy and tragic fashion. Almost inexplicably, though, it doesn’t. In fact, the introduction of Ezio Auditore da Firenze is an unmitigated success in part because he’s similar enough to Altair so as to not be too jarring but he allows for a greater depth of character without having to deus ex machina some silly explanation for why the stoic Altair suddenly has a sense of humor. Which is not to say that Ezio is yet a fully realized character, for large segments of the game narrative he is primarily glum and simply bitter with the quest for revenge that sets him on his path, but he is still a step up from the previous game. And meanwhile there are plenty of well-crafted secondary characters that are in this case actually memorable and since the entire assassination sequence is all part of a singular plot as opposed to a late-breaking macguffin hunt as in the first game, there allows for plenty of moments of dramatic tension and adversarial development.

In fact nearly every single element that made the original AC enjoyable is intact and the rest of the game is polish and shine to the point of sparkling brilliance. Crowd interactions are better; the controls are improved; side quests are better defined; assassination quests are better and more varied; collection tasks are contextualized and more enjoyable; the travel systems are welcome and functional without spoiling the feel of the open world; the plot is more cohesive and engaging; even the combat is slightly improved, although it still usually devolves into waiting for a guard to begin his striking animation and then hit the counter button. It is the collection of improvements on a game already ripe with Good Ideas but somewhat hasty execution that makes ACII one of my favorite games in recent memory.

I was cautiously optimistic heading in and came out dazzled and more ravenous than ever for the next installment.

BioShock 2

The obvious contrast is that while I liked Assassin’s Creed back in 2007, I loved BioShock. In my non-ToD review I summarized it thusly: “It is a phenomenal work of game design. It unequivocally ought to be experienced at least once by every gamer.” I even placed it at #11 on my (still shamefully unfinished) revised top 30 games list. That’s just outside of the top ten games all time for me. The original BioShock was so good in fact that I played it through three times in spite of the fact that it had several key missed opportunities within it, the most notorious of which was the tragically rote final boss battle. I almost never play shooters through a second time, much less a third.

But, like many, I was highly skeptical of a BioShock sequel. The first relied in so many ways on being a specific place and time, telling a particular tale in a certain way and I didn’t think it could be recaptured. In fact, I wasn’t even sure it should be tried. After all, unless you were to re-make the first game with a more robust morality system and an improved finale, there wasn’t a wide selection of places to go with a sequel but down. Or so I thought.

The good news is that BioShock 2 doesn’t trample all over the accomplishments of the first. Quite wisely the developers didn’t fall into the M. Night Shyamalan trap of trying to one-up the twisting turns of the original narrative and instead crafted a competent revisit to a strangely beckoning dystopia. Cast in the role of a Big Daddy, the game touches in a lot of ways on themes from the original game, still pushing you into the midst of an ideological war that you don’t seem to have much personal stake in. The new antagonist who takes the reigns from Andrew Ryan, Dr. Sofia Lamb, is similarly arrogant and smarmy in her radio interactions with the silent protagonist, Subject Delta. The game deals more explicitly with the origins of the Big Daddies and the Little Sisters and the nature of their queer relationship, which is interesting although it smacks of the kind of explanatory discussions peripheral to a central work that are reserved for the devoted diehard fans and could largely be taken or left by the casually interested. It also runs the risk of ruining the mystique of such elements although in this particular case I didn’t find anything to be particularly midichlorianesque. Mercifully.

And as a matter of fact, BioShock 2 does improve on many of the gameplay elements from the original: Hacking is a downright joy compared to the Pipe Dream mini-game that was awkward and out of place in the first game. The selection and progression of the tonics and plasmids are excellent as are the new additions to the old standbys. The additional weapons are nice, too, as is the dual-fisted plasmid/firearm combination granted in favor of the either/or mechanism of the first game. By far the best gameplay addition is the protection sequences where you can adopt a Little Sister, find a body capable of being harvested for Adam and then set her to it. This brings a wave of Splicers running and your task is to guard the Sister while she laboriously collects the necessary material. It’s a better replacement for the challenging Big Daddy fights from BioShock 1 (those are still there but less intense as you can stand fairly well toe-to-toe with a single dive suited foe) since you can control the environment a little and scout for possible access routes to place traps.

However, despite these incremental steps forward, there is something that feels a bit mundane about BioShock 2. While Assassin’s Creed II’s comprehensive polish created a game that went beyond just fulfilling the promise of the first or became what the original strived to be, BioShock 2 provides at best a return to a happily familiar setting, like returning to a park you played in as a child. Sure, there is some reminiscent joy to be had there, but it will never touch the cherished memories you have.

What I think stands out about this is that if there had been no 2007 somehow and these games were the first in their respective series my opinion of them would have likely been completely flipped: AC would be the one coasting in toward the top ten of my all time games and BioShock would be an interesting, if slightly flawed, game I played around the same time. What a difference a sequel makes.

I guess I decided to take a longer break than I intended. Partially this is due to my very limited gaming time (even video gaming) such that it took me almost three months to complete Assassin’s Creed II. But I should have a recap up shortly. In the meantime I direct you to this page detailing the differences between the original TI99-4A Tunnels of Doom theme and the reworked version from the ToD Reboot project. Pretty cool stuff.

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.