Tunnels of Doom

A large portion of the week was spent with a plastic guitar slung low over my shoulders as Nik and I powered through dozens of setlists in Rock Band 2. When I wasn’t involved in all that, I was relieved to find a tranquility in my pursuit of Puzzle Quest on the go, hunted a few more zombies (and some achievements), revisited a dystopian future, dabbled in another cutesy game, delighted in Facebook games, found frustration in XBLA titles, continued the drift away from WoW and hit the hobby circuit for some modeling and painting fun.

All the details follow.

(more…)

For most of the week I found only pockets of time to play little bursts of games but starting with the weekend (marked by the end of a particularly onerous project) I had a fairly open schedule to plug away at a few of my current titles. I also picked at a few oldies to see if they were still goodies, tried to get my painting mojo back, decided I made the wrong choice of platform—surprising myself in the process—and played not one but two tabletop games.

The only way to know is to carry on.

(more…)

This week I shockingly play more WoW, finally get around to the Mirror’s Edge demo, try Halo Wars’ demo, get sucked further into the Puzzle Quest trap, save the world yet again and rediscover a game I keep thinking I’ll break free of eventually.

One thing I didn’t do was play Flower. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to try it but I don’t understand why Sony doesn’t have the same policy as Microsoft for their downloadable games and mandate a trial download. I can’t say I’m universally happy with the game trials on XBLA (I’m looking at you, online-multiplayer-only HD Street Fighter II) but at least there is something there for you so you can make informed decisions. Unlike full game purchases that can be rented or are ubiquitously reviewed, some of these little games fall through the cracks. I think especially for something like this game that has some unusal elements, it feels like such a risk to drop $10 on something that you may not care for. I don’t know about you but my gaming budget is ultra thin these days and I don’t have the patience for stupid marketing decisions. So way to go, Sony. You just cost yourself $10.

(more…)

The unplanned hiatus from Gaming Weekend updates may or may not be coming to an end. Blocking out time to write up my gaming activities used to be simply a matter of taking an hour or two out of my lenghty and typically dull Sunday shift and writing up what I’d done. But after switching jobs last fall, I don’t work on Sundays anymore, my shifts are rarely dull and my weekends are shorter. Granted, Gaming Weekend was always sort of clumsily named since I would discuss what I played through the whole week, but once my gaming downtime was no longer a reasonable time to discuss my gaming uptime, it became a matter of taking time out of gaming to write about… gaming. It seemed counter productive.

Still, I miss my regular forum to evaluate what I’ve been playing so I’m thinking of making a more concerted effort to discuss what rattles around my skull on the topic of games. We’ll see how it goes. For now, I’ll try to cover the highlights of what I’ve been up to for the last little bit. Catching up, if you will.

(more…)

I love house rules. Obviously not all house rules are ideal, but the fact that games are analyzed closely enough and the nature of gamers trying to make their games suitable for their preferences is part of what makes gaming, especially tabletop gaming, so enjoyable.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the horror stories of house rules gone awry; I recently heard tales of a Blood Bowl league that implemented a complex series of sportsmanship house rules that went so far as to penalize players for not apologizing if they caused a casualty. Another Blood Bowl league I know of actually changed the rules for how a team’s Treasury is counted in such a way as to make a non-game-impacting feature game-impacting.

But generally speaking House rules can be great for adjusting broken rules that haven’t yet been officially updated and for customizing games. I’m always interested in hearing some house rules people come up with for their games. One that we use is in Pandemic, we always play with our hands face-up. For 40K 4th Edition we used to handle difficult terrain checks with an average dice (2-5 on a D6) instead of selecting the highest from 2D6.

My experience is that there are two basic kinds of house rules: There are those that are developed in response to awkward game situations (like the difficult terrain check which was instituted after several games where entire units were rendered useless because of several turns with 2″ or less movement) and there are those that are developed from consideration of how to improve the game. Most of the latter are, like the sportsmanship rules from the Blood Bowl league that I heard about, complex sets of rules designed to accomplish a specific function. I personally think the sportsmanship rules are ridiculous and actually counter to the enjoyment of a game but the beauty of house rules is that they are by definition voluntary. If you don’t like a house rule, find a different house to play in or make your case to ditch them.

I’ve developed my own sets of house rules in the past, some more successful than others. Currently I’ve been thinking a lot about Blood Bowl and, as with most consideration-based house rules, the concepts stem from issues I have with the existing rules. Indulge me as I think out loud about them.

1. MVP – The current MVP rules has a random player chosen from each team at the end of the game earning 5 Star Player Points for being selected the MVP. The problem is that this player is frequently unworthy of earning those points because they spent the game KO’d or (if you play using the LRB strictly) even dead. But I understand that if you gave 5 SPP to the legitimate MVP, which would probably be the player who earned the most SPP via other means, you’d end up with certain players advancing very quickly. Catchers, for example, would be particularly prone to rapid advancement due to their propensity for scoring.

   I have two proposals for this, both with their strengths and weaknesses.

   House Rule #1: Lower the MVP bonus to 2, make it a “real” MVP. Basically you take the player who earned the most SPP in the match and give them the MVP which would award an additional 2 points rather than the current 5. In the case of a tie you would break tie by order of SPP-awarding activity: TD, Cas, Cmp, Int. The benefit here is that it makes more sense, the downside is that it functionally boosts TDs to a 5-SPP action, especially on lower-scoring teams like Undead and Orcs.

   House Rule #2: Adjust eligibility restrictions. We already play with the house rule that the MVP can’t be dead or induced, but I’d say the restrictions could be better implemented. Eligibility rules would probably have to be extensively playtested but a good starting point (I think) would be to say a player is Eligible if they: Scored a TD, made a Cmp or Int or inflicted a Cas or they participated in every drive (ie they were not injured or left in reserves and did not miss a KO roll). The benefits of this are obviously that the chance that someone who was at least reasonably considered valuable are drastically increased without directly affecting the perceived or practical value of scoring actions while the downsides are that there could be instances where a team has no eligible players. I’d argue that a team that has no eligible players doesn’t deserve MVP, but I can also understand the counter-argument.

   As a corollary I’d suggest in either case that an additional rule be implemented to better help teams guide their development over long leagues: At the end of the game a coach may remove 1D3 players of their choice from eligibility. In addition, any number of Assistant Coaches will add +1 to the roll for a maximum of four players that could be removed from eligibility.

2. Touchback – There was a comment thread on NAF recently that discussed the way in which a ball bouncing due to lack of successful AG rolls to catch would result in a touchback. The scenario is that a ball scatters toward the midfield line on the initial scatter roll, where it ends up targeted at a player with a low AG on the line (for example). That player misses the catch roll and the ball scatters again, this time going over the midfield line and causing a touchback, where any player on the receiving team can have control of the ball without making a roll.

   Obviously from an abstraction perspective this is kind of tough to swallow. It would make more sense if a ball was considered in the air up until the moment when a player was permitted to attempt to gain control of it, at which point it was considered in play. This could certainly result in situations where a ball could start on the opposing half of the pitch from the receiving team, but practically speaking since the receiving team acts first, this is a minor setback at best.

   The biggest situation I can see this affecting is if a ball scatters out of bounds from a missed catch which, per the rules, would result in the ball being tossed back in by the crowd. But I think all this would do is prevent coaches from placing No Hands (or functionally equivalent) players in the wide zones because it is probably not reliable enough for the kicking team, even with the Kick skill, to plan on a throw-in on the kickoff; you’re still far more likely to end up with a touchback.

Feedback, as always, appreciated.

(more…)

The Marriott is a nice hotel. Not a super-swank hotel, but a nice one. I’m sure the non-convention guests at the hotel found the overall caliber of the environment a little less than they expected or hoped for what with herds of sweaty gamers waddling through the hallways and covering every available flat surface with assorted chits and dice and stacks of strangely decorated cards. For one such as myself, casting a gaze across the terrain and declaring myself among kindred, it was an experience matched by only a handful of previous conventions.

A huge part of my enjoyment was based on the pre-planning that went into the weekend. Unlike my previous convention schedules, I had determined weeks in advance that there were certain events I was certain to participate in. These both dictated the flow of the activities as well as ensured that some games would get played. In contrast, earlier events had been based on “gentleman’s agreements” in which we would lay fantastical stratagems woven into narrative tapestries which would be promptly unwoven by the twin calamities of attending wives who disfavor certain game genres and the Dealer’s Room whose treasures often foist urgent demands on our playing schedule.

Now we had framed particular activities into obligations and it made the difference in a marked manner. I confess that there could have been a better time designation: Both Thom’s Friday night Blood Bowl game and my own Saturday evening Arkham Horror session were set to start right at or before the dinner hour which made the attending wives unhappy. But that’s a mistake that is easily corrected next time. Likewise my own game could have been more artfully selected; I’ve played enough of Arkham Horror to know how it goes, but my month-prior refresher solitaire game was not enough to provide my aging brain the fuel it needed to run a game correctly. I suppose having an entire table of new players made the point relatively moot, but on the very unlikely chance that any of those players reads this: I’m sorry. Please don’t base your opinion of the game on my running of it. It actually takes much longer and is much more balanced when you play it right.

Next time I think I’ll be sure to play a game I understand thoroughly (such a feat is, I suspect, practically impossible with Arkham whose vengeful complexity is both part of its charm and its greatest weakness). As a rookie convention game master I’m delighted to have had the experience if only to get a chance to learn from my mistakes. Next time I’ll be running something more akin to Catan Card game or Werewolves.

My most pressing delight for the weekend was that I was able to play some games I’d really been looking forward to: Blood Bowl tournament, many rounds of Pandemic, Arkham Horror, Power Grid, Race For the Galaxy. I’m not sure this would have been possible without the pre-planning steps we took. And as a secondary thrill I was able to make some exciting purchases: I came away with a new copy of Werewolves (the old copy had been the victim of water damage on some critical cards at a Werewolves party) plus the New Moon expansion for it; Nik found a copy of Zombie Fluxx; I also picked up Race For the Galaxy and a bunch of new dice for various Blood Bowl purposes. As a secondary bonus whose delight cannot be properly expressed, I also returned home from the con to find my NAF Blood Bowl Block dice waiting for me in the mailbox. I was skeptical about the yellow-blue color scheme but they turned out really sharp and it will be great to have an extra, non-white pair so I can keep them separate from my opponents’.

It’s sometimes hard for me to enjoy the moments of my life as I experience them. I found several times during the weekend I could sense the fun I was having like a film enveloping the surface of my body. It was unfamiliar but sublime and I wanted it to last and last.

(more…)

Next week is Pacificon (that’s ConQuest SF for the pedantic), and most of this week’s activities were somehow related to early prep for the full weekend of gaming mayhem that lies ahead. I’m still in a video game doldrum; the only games I seem to have any enthusiasm for are XBLA games. I had an opportunity to spend a few hours with any of my longer-form games at one point during the weekend and I stood in front of my shelf of games, many of them begging to be played, and found none of them held much allure. I think I ultimately watched a few minutes of the Silent Hill 2 intro—this marks roughly the 42nd time I’ve sat through it—and turned it off because my one rechargeable 360 controller battery was dying. I wasn’t exactly weeping and gnashing teeth.

We did end up having Thom and his wife Kelly over later in the week for games. He walked us through the introductory mode of Power Grid, which I felt was more of a tease than anything. Basically the game involves a bidding match to buy the best Power Station card (which is wholly subjective) followed by a resource management phase followed by a Monopoly-like land grab. The mechanics are a little awkward to understand abstractly at first, but once they click they have a remarkable balance of simple elegance and thorough representation. Sort of the opposite of Hillary Clinton? I don’t know, I’m not good with the political jokes.

What was teasing about the intro game was that at the point in the regular progression where the game opens up and the true beauty of your early game establishment is revealed, the game is over. Imagine playing Ticket to Ride and after drawing your hand up to twenty-five cards, someone claimed their first 8-point Destination Ticket completion and announced the game was over. I understand the theory behind giving new players a taste, and I understood that our guests were probably tired (not to mention we will most likely be playing the game again at the con) but I’m the kind of gamer where if I get into the flow of a session, my strategy begins to form like a gathering storm. Leaving that mindset unfulfilled is like shaking up a can of coke and setting it gently on the counter. I survived, you know? But I’ve been replaying the short session in my head for days now, wondering how it would have gone if I’d had one last turn or…

It’s a path that leads to madness. Also scurvy, which is the lesser of the two evils. Regardless, I suspect I will be not be sated until Friday at the earliest. In the interim I would advise a wide berth. Twenty yards or so ought to suffice.

(more…)

Running out of new ways to talk about stale things is maybe not a challenge more creative or clever writers have to surmount. But I’m writing a weekly column about the games that I play and while I’m reasonably content sometimes to focus on a handful of games for a period of time, it makes coming up with interesting commentary that isn’t dreadfully repetitive tough.

So rather than re-tread Blood Bowl strategies or discuss my Etrian Odyssey II progress, I’ll talk about a game I don’t even fully own: Braid. It was one of those titles whose ill-conceived title stems from some artsy interpretation but lacks descriptive punch and yet is spoken of with a particular connotation that more or less creates a conceptual bookmark in my mind. If my brain were del.icio.us, it might be tagged with “check_out_maybe.” So I see the ads on XBLA this weekend while I’m playing some GeoWars 2 and the flag is raised in the back of my head and I decide to drag myself away from my obsession long enough to give it a whirl.

I knew only that it had “positive buzz” going in. The demo is fairly significant in available content, but the game itself is clearly designed to be an exploratory experience which is something that may work in an artistic sense but as something that is designed to inspire me to spend money I’m not sure it’s effective. I can say that as a post-modern throwback-slash-genre interpretation, it’s interesting. I can also say that as an overall package it’s demonstration content is uneven to the extent that your individual criteria are going to be the deciding factors on whether or not you pull the trigger on this game.

For example, there is a particular elegance to most of the game’s presentation. The smoothly shifting watercolor aesthetic of the backdrops and the quiet, introspectively lilting music is fresh and exciting. Meanwhile, the pixely-looking cartoon design of the game’s characters is cute, but contrasts sharply with the backdrop and while one or the other would be fine with me, the combination is unpleasant. Likewise the game’s referential sense of humor and youthful presentation doesn’t gel in any ready way with its knife’s edge of pretentiousness in the story elements. Even the gameplay with it’s elegantly designed puzzles but awkwardly integrated and purposefully sketchy tutorial/hint system feels painfully unbalanced.

A lot of online forums are lamenting the $15 price tag, which has itself fostered a backlash, one that may or may not have ulterior motives. Personally, I see it as just another in the game’s list of see-sawing pros and cons. Like I said, it becomes intensely personal. Either $15 for a platformer is repugnant and it wouldn’t matter if you were paying for the best platformer ever, you’d be morally opposed to the act, or you have no problem with it because you rationalize that $15 is still $45 cheaper than some alternatives. Either the art design is acceptable or the weirdly incongruous graphics are a deal-breaker. I don’t know how you can quantify something like this.

So listen, I didn’t buy it. I’m intrigued, for sure. I’m the kind of person who can overlook some strangeness in a game to find the chewy center that lies beneath. I’m playing Etrian Odyssey II, after all. And I’m putting hours and hours into it. But something about the nexus between the game’s odd choices and its price and its hyperbolic critical acclaim… I dunno, it wasn’t enough to push me over the line. Any time a game polarizes this way, I almost feel like I need to just stand aside. Maybe eventually it will be part of some XBLA Best Of promotion for $5 or something and I’ll catch up with it then. Meanwhile, I have something less controversial to play. Something I’m still more likely to enjoy.

(more…)

My 360Voice bot-blog has been griping at me for weeks as I’ve left the 360 unattended in favor of Etrian Odyssey and Blood Bowl pursuits. I was already thinking, “Maybe I should log on this weekend and just see if anything interesting is going on.” When I gathered a couple of new names from a forum I frequent to add to my Friends List, it was a done deal already so the announcement of Geometry Wars 2 being released can’t really be blamed in full.

What I can blame GeoWars2 for is my lack of sleep through the weekend and an onset of OCD-like symptoms that have me twitching and scheming to get a few more minutes in on various game modes like Pacifism and King.

Bizarre has done some interesting things with the Geometry Wars brand/franchise since the Retro Evolved game for XBLA became an early contender for best of show on the platform at launch. Some might persuasively argue that until the release of Oblivion and Dead Rising, it was the best next generation game period. I’m not saying I’m one of those people making that argument, I’m just saying they might have a case. Evolved was a sublime example of the kind of game console gamers wanted on their living room consoles. It was simple, harkening the old Atari 2600 era, but with a fresh feeling aesthetic and a rudimentray use of the Xbox Live platform features (the scoreboards I mean) that lent validity to the whole endeavour. The ribbon that tied the whole thing into a package suitable for delivery was the game’s in-session difficulty curve and obfuscated inner workings.

Obviously some of the “rules” of Retro Evolved are knowable: Multipliers occur at geometric sequence points starting at 25 with a ratio of 2, weapon changes occur every 10,000 points, extra lives are awarded at 75,000 point intervals and extra bombs at 100,000. But what is only surmized or perhaps supposed is the other less tangible elements: Some games it seems the waves that spawn from the board corners are heavily favored to one enemy type or another. Sometimes gravity wells (those hated foes that draw in other enemies until they nova into rapidly-moving clusters) appear within the first 10,000 points, other times they don’t appear until well past the first extra life. The explanations for these discrepancies are largely superstitious, but the fact that they are observable but not capable of being realistically charted makes them exciting, an element of randomness.

Add to that the fact that wepon changes cycle through only two options once you advance beyond the basic shot so you may stick with a favored cannon for minutes on end while other times you may find yourself flipping rapidly as probability allows and your score multiplier increases the milestone rate. Since some enemeies are subjectively easier to hit with one weapon or another, the game seems to intentionally introduce a certain arbitrary chaos into each session such that you want to keep trying “just one more time” to find that perfect storm of chance and performance that equates to a high score mark.

But since then the development team have opted for a more well-defined experience. I first heard about the “Geoms” concept when reading reviews of the Wii and DS exclusive Geometry Wars Galaxies, where each destroyed foe drops a temporary pickup that can be collected to various ends. In Retro Evolved 2, the Geoms are now the score multipliers and their ubiquity allows the scores to reach new stratospheres for good players, especially since the multipliers don’t reset with each life the way they did in the original Retro Evolved. Likewise, the sequel has five new game modes in addition to the basic Evolved game which are all enjoyable although a couple like King and Pacifism are clear favorites. But curiously those modes are those that are furthest removed from the predecessor’s gameplay: They drastically alter the rules of the game and, in Pacifism, almost create an entirely new mechanic.

I played Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved on 76 different days. I don’t have any measurable or accurate statistic to indicate how many hours went into each daily session; some were lengthy stretches others were quick one-or-two game stints. But it is listed as my most-played Xbox 360 game ahead of Oblivion; while Oblivion may have it beat in hours (something like 200 total hours went into that epic) I wager that given the additional 24 days I fired up GeoWars, it’s probably in remarkably close contention especially when you think that a standard game of GeoWars takes under five minutes beginning to end. I don’t know that this sequel has what it takes to match that level of interest perhaps because they’ve made such efforts to clarify what a game of GeoWars is. I don’t mind their efforts, but perhaps I prefer to project my own perspectives into that abstracted space, and lacking some of that ability, it becomes just another game.

(more…)

A large portion of the week was spent on the road, as they say. I was unplugged in most of the usual senses: I didn’t even check my email from Wednesday afternoon until Monday morning. That may be the longest I’ve gone without digital communication since high school. I did intersperse a few Twitter text messages in there; it’s not like I traveled back in time. But being away from it all meant, among other things, that my typical games were not accessible nor were the people I engage to play them.

I did squeeze in a game of Blood Bowl last Monday night, at a pizza parlor no less. It was a hasty ordeal organized in a clandestine manner with comically ancient technologies (telegram) but necessary if I wanted to retain my streak of league games. I didn’t win, but I did manage to draw a tie. So far the (undead) Spoilers seem to be slow out of the gate and only their tenacity to fill the available roster spots late in the second half allows games to be close. I need to get better at not playing “down” since I frequently lose the coin toss and give up an early touchdown; the best I’ve been able to do is identify a need for fewer squishy players I’m afraid of losing on defensive drives. Specifically I need to stop loading the defensive line with Regeneration-less ghouls. We’ll see how this week’s game pans out armed with that insight.

The one thing I did have on my travels was my DS filled exclusively with Etrian Odyssey II. If you want to understand why I continue to marvel at how engaged I am with this game, you must comprehend that I expected to be this enraptured by hard-hitting next gen titles like Grand Theft Auto IV and Mass Effect. What we’re comparing to, essentially, is a game that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Pentium (one) PC in 1996 that has transitional animation (that is, only the key frames) and consists almost exclusively of menus. I really have a hard time putting it down.

I reached the 2nd Strata over the weekend, playing on the plane and in the hotel room on mornings while I waited for my companions to wake from their sleep. The palate swap to autumn colors in this stage of the game was enough to force a tiny squeal of glee from deep in my chest. The unwitting passenger in the seat next to me was forced to glance at the screens and saw me almost slavering for the chance to unleash my mad cartography skillz on a new floor of the labyrinth. He immediately asked to be re-seated, and I barely noticed he was gone.

(more…)