All the details follow.

• Rock Band 2
  We picked up RB2 for Christmas but only played it a little because Nik was having some trouble early on with motion sickness from the scrolling of the note track. She’s since been feeling better so over the last week we’ve started playing quite a bit as our band, Moose LeGousse (it’s a long story). I play bass on expert and she plays guitar on medium and we both have a lot of fun.
  As a game, RB2 is not significantly different from the original: Play songs to progress through a fictionalized version of a rise to fame. The difference is that in RB1 the primary progression track was Career Mode which was principally single-player. Multiplayer progressive was handled with Tour Mode which was sort of similar but rather than a progression through songs organized by difficulty level (as was customary from Guitar Hero’s structure) you played “gigs” which consisted of either individual songs, pre-set playlists, band-selected lists or randomized lists to earn cash and fans instead of points. The stars were still a factor but represented not just your success or failure in a gig but your potential reward (once you reached five stars you could only repeat the gig for additional point totals but not extra fans or cash).
  In RB2 the Tour Mode is the only mode and you choose how many people will progress through it in your band, which can include human stand-ins. So you can easily play a single-player tour mode or you can set up a full band or just have core band members augmented by newcomers. What strikes me is that while this makes sense, the “unlocking” aspect of the game’s tracks is then woven into the Tour but not in the way I’d expect. Since there is a certain amount of player choice involved in how the Tour progresses, there isn’t as much of the mandatory bottleneck as they were able to achieve in RB1 (finish this song before you can play the next track). They do limit your overall progression by not unlocking new venues until you have a requisite number of accumulated stars and the appropriate staff and equipment, but functionally we’ve been able to tear through doing what we like without much problem opening up the next bottleneck gig.
  I do like it overall, but I wish they would either get rid of the unlocking conceit altogether since it doesn’t really fit the game any longer or at least have a better control selection for the songs in the game. I could understand them allowing you to “spend” stars to unlock songs selectively but I also want to limit songs individually as well. Since random setlists pull from your entire catalog including downloaded songs, imported RB1 tracks and level-appropriate songs even if they aren’t unlocked you can easily get hammered by a song you don’t know, don’t care for or simply purchased but can’t play just because it’s in your list. I have the three Metallica tracks and I like having them but no one in my group can play them on our standard difficulties so having them is more of a literally costly threat than a benefit in standard Tour Mode. This seems broken. I also still wish the randomizer was smarter; we had a single song repeat four times in a two-and-a-half hour play session and we even had one song repeat twice in the same setlist. There are plenty of ways to work around some of these issues (a simple voting mechanism would be good as well) but for every one thing Rock Band 2 does right it still does something else wrong. I can’t complain too much since I’ve gotten probably 250 hours of quality fun out of both games together but I still feel like I’m waiting for the perfect version to come along.
• Puzzle Quest
  In a single week I managed to trade out my copy of PQ for the DS and acquire a copy for the PSP. I’m so glad I did this; the PSP version is the one I really wanted. It has regular D-pad controls, a nice, intuiative interface, crisp graphics and I have a game for my PSP I finally consider indispensible. My only complaint is that it does too much disk reading to load parts, even simple bits like animations but since it’s a turn-based puzzle game, it’s hard to complain about a little slowdown. I do have to wonder though if my decision to request Puzzle Quest: Galactrix for DS wasn’t a mistake now.
• Left 4 Dead
  Mostly my fevered Achievement addiction has subsided. But I still love unlocking those little devils and for a game like L4D, which has a huge replay component, the Achievements are vital to my continued enjoyment. Unfortunately I’m now down to a collection of tough ones which are either in need of other human players or some manner of circumvention. I tried to get the Man v. Tank Achievement using a trick from an online guide which suggested that, at a high difficulty level, you PK your teammates (which results often in an unintended bit of comedy where your character bemoans the loss of his companions as he pumps shotgun shells into their heads like some disassocaited Norman Bates type killer) then vote down the difficulty and face a tank alone since your AI companions will always shoot at the Tank.
  Unfortunately the game is so well designed as a cooperative experience that I found it frustratingly difficult to even get across the street to where the Tank spawn was due to the presence of Hunters, Smokers and Boomers along the way. It only takes one Hunter pounce or one Smoker drag to wipe the party when you’re the only one left.
  I think I’m getting close to either shelving this title or hitting up some random online stranger matches just to see how the multiplayer is; I hate to do either with a game I find myself so incredibly fond of but like Halo 3 and Team Fortress 2, my lack of Xbox-playing friends makes for some difficult multiplayer decisions.
• Fallout 3
  I’ve had some good luck with Goozex lately, offloading a bunch of tired games in favor of some new blood but I’m still waiting for some quick-cycle titles to come through since a couple of my recent acquisitions sucked up a lot of points and were games I intended to hang onto like BioShock and Left 4 Dead. With my copy of LittleBigPlanet arriving hopefully sometime this week, that’s 3,000 points on games I hope to like enough to hang onto for some time. So I started looking around for games I could dump in the meantime and after finally making a command decision to bail on Folklore, I looked at Fallout 3. Now, I like Fallout 3 but unlike Oblivion I didn’t find it so compelling as to have me waiting for DLC with a sort of ferver. I wasn’t even sure I was interested in any DLC but I was hanging onto the game because I was kind of interested in playing as a Bad Karma character. So to see where I stood on the game I popped it back into the PS3 and started a new game.
  Immediately I recalled why I feel so completely torn about the game. On one hand, it’s exactly what I wanted: Oblivion SciFi. On the other hand, the game has a tone that is difficult to describe. It’s cynical. It’s grim. it’s permeated with a sort of uncomfortable misery that is wonderful for setting a tone and evoking a mood but, as a piece of entertainment, it’s difficult to actually enjoy.
  I think what Fallout 3 comapres to is something like Schindler’s List. Obviously there is no historical significance to Fallout 3 but the analogy is that both are extraordinarily well-crafted examples of their mediums, but both are so dismal and emotionally raw that while you can’t help but categorize them as great achievements, they aren’t something you want to run out and re-experience. I don’t know that Bethesda was looking to create a game that was rich and full but ultimately too depressing to want to play over again, but that’s what they’ve done for me. I still struggle to give up the game but I feel at this point like it’s probably what I ought to do and if I ever feel like I simply have to play it again, do what I did with BioShock and re-Goozex the game on the other platform.
• Attack!/Scrabble
  It’s sort of tough to arbitrarily combine these games but since they’re Facebook apps they kind of have a natural grouping. I’m not sure at all what the interaction is between these games and Facebook itself. Obiously there is some kind of authentication API for your Facebook account but other than that they seem pretty much like standard Flash games which is why it boggles my mind that both these games are so ridiculously buggy. My overall experience with Facebook has been one of mild irritation so this is basically par for the course, but I can’t deny the appeal of playing Scrabble with my family in PBEM format nor the occasional work diversion that a turn in Risk/Attack! can provide.
• Bionc Commando: Rearmed
  As much as I like this game I feel like the facelift and update has created an unexpected sense that the game should be somehow more realistic than it is. Granted, the original game was hardly lifelike and practically zero game develpoment team that comes readily to mind puts realism at the forefront of a design document but a decade of FPS games and simulation battle titles has worn away a bit of the concessions we used to make to something like level design. For example, I’m stuck in Area 10 in Rearmed. The part in question has an overhang of rock which ends about where a pit of spikes is positioned under a platform that is itself covered in spikes. Jutting from the overhang, stretching over the double layers of spikes is a short platform and then just above it a full length platform. To get up there you have to swing out over the spikes being careful not to pull yourself all the way up into the spikes above, release in time to grab the platform under the overhang, then swing out from the short platform, again over the top level of spikes, release, turn in midair and grab the overhang at just the right spot to pull yourself toward it so you can finally fire your grappling hook up into the relative safety of the top platform.
  Now, let’s forget the fact that it is utterly impractical to have spike pits inside your bunkers to begin with. Let’s just focus on the fact that I, as an infiltrating combatant, am one of the very few people in the game world with one of these bionic grappling appendages. Which means that the herculean feat it takes me to get up to the platform above is theoretically supposed to be exercised by the standard foot soldiers patrolling the base. I’m just envisioning Gerald the Footsoldier having to use the restroom on the fourth floor and trying to decide if it’s really worth it to brave the spike pit again or if he should just use the dumpster out by the ammo depot again.
• Alien Hominid HD
  I suppose technically I didn’t play this since I went to fiddle with it again for the first time in probably a year or more and it required a title update. I executed the update and suddenly the game loaded to a grey screen. I could see the main menu briefly when I hit the Guide button, but it was never responsive to actual imput. I hope that Microsoft has some sort of policy for this kind of thing because if they want digital distribution to happen they need to make sure this is never a problem for thier customers. In this case I’m not to worried about it since I was mostly finished with the game but if this happened on something like Carcassonne or even Bionic Commando, we would have issues.
• World of Warcraft
  I think my total playing time last week was under one hour; I ran around Orgrimmar for a bit before heading over to The Swamp of Sorrows and The Blasted Lands region for some exploration and, frankly, something new to do. I have plenty of quests to take care of but the game has hit that tedium point and while part of me wants to reach 60 before the next billing cycle, at this rate I won’t make it and I’m definitely cancelling in the next two weeks. I think I’ll have until about April 7th to play but even then, 9 levels in 22 days is kind of a lot since each new level is taking longer than the one before. I’m not too emotional about it, as I said last week I enjoyed the game, but I can’t say I’m not a little relieved that it didn’t command my every waking moment the way I feared it might.
• LittleBigPlanet
  I only had a couple of hours to play at the tail end of what I’ve come to consider my Gaming Weekend period (Tuesday morning through Monday night) so this is entirely impression-based, but initially I found the game to be quite charming. The sackboy characters are endearing and expressive plus the whole aesthetic is perfectly comfortable while being imaginative. The comparisons to something like Super Mario Bros. are fairly ready: Take common and identifiable elements and give them a fantastic spin to create a universe that is not necessaily laden with exposition but suggestive of enough to capture the imagination. It’s 8-bit design without the inherent limitations dictating decisions and the result is an intentionally whimsical experience that doesn’t feel like it has to try too hard.
  I do find the semi-3D to be a little awkward: Since the game is rendered in 3D it seems they couldn’t stand to have an actual 2D plane to play in even though the game is by design a 2D side scrolling platformer. But instead of trying to deal with the complexity of a full 3D space either they have a 2D plane with three distinct levels of depth. Which is actually fine and good in the level create mode where L1 and L2 move your cursor forward and back through the distinct planes, but when you’re playing the platforming game you have to actually navigate these planes via an awkward set of auto-shifting jumps (jumping from a foreground layer to a background layer is supposedly automatic although I’ve found it not especially reliable). So far (just into the second creator curator’s realm) it hasn’t really been a massive problem but depending on how tough the levels get, it could become a big annoyance.
  I had a chance to try the LittleBigContra community level for Stage 1 and found it to be cute and well-made but, and this is kind of what I’m afraid will be characteristic of the player-made levels, it really isn’t that fun. As an homage or a fun art project it’s fantastically well done. As an actual level you might want to play, it suffers because the physics and the nature of the universe that is so marvelously presented in the game’s own context breaks apart when you try to make it something that it wasn’t meant to be. I think for all the fun people can have trying to do what seems natural and create something specific, what this game excels at is allowing people to participate in its own narrative. That is to say, rather than spending time building Contra levels or making an homage to the Saw films (as another level I played did) the best thing a level designer could do would be to create the best LBP level they could.

Model Citizen

As predicted last week I was able to motivate myself into doing some painting and modeling work; I constructed a team of Lizardmen for Blood Bowl, created a zombie Orc and a few pure-bone Skeletons for my Undead team plus I got a few more colors on my long-neglected Elf reserves and got started on my Talisman figs, hoping that I can have them finished someday soon so I can finally try the game out. It looks like the best of the bunch so far is going to be the Orc zombie but the female Elves are still pretty good looking, I just need to do a lot of retouching on the weekend’s work. But retouching is good; it means there was initial painting done.

One thing I haven’t yet figured out is how I’m going to paint the Lizardmen. I’m pretty psyched about the team overall; they seem like a fun set to play. I do need to look for a suitable Kroxigor model to really fill in the team, but I have to worry about the models I already have first. An obvious idea would be to pick a real lizard and use them as a color guide, but it turns out most real lizards have very drab color palates in dull greys and browns to blend in better. It’s usually only in the close detail that anything impressive emerges. I may have to fictionalize it a little bit but I don’t really want to repeat my color sets too much; I already have green-skinned Orcs with red uniforms, green uniformed Undead (with a wide variety of other tones), purple uniformed Elves and a human set that will probably eventually be blue uniforms. Lizardmen don’t really have uniforms but I’m wondering if a sort of albino lizard theme might be kind of cool.

Parting Shot

Last week on the Listen Up! podcast, Garnett Lee was discussing Amazon’s new trade-in service and the fact that Toys R Us was planning a similar program. The conversation was in context with how this would impact GameStop, who lives and dies by used game sales, but during the talk Garnett expressed his ignorance of Goozex but went ahead and suggested that Amazon offering trade-ins would spell doom for Goozex. Now I forgive the ignorance but I have to make sure that it is at least said that Goozex has nothing to fear from Amazon’s trade-in policy any more than they do from GameStop. Retail trade-ins are not in competition with Goozex because Goozex specifically works to counter-point the low-return of retail trades. By necessity retail shops must buy low and sell high while Goozex’s model is to create equality giving literal market value for each game (thus popular, rare or new games are worth significantly more in Goozex trade credit than even their dollar amount may be, and especially more than the lowball dictated by retail trade). What this means is that while that game you bought last Tuesday and beat already is maybe worth $30-35 from GameStop, which you cannot turn into another new AAA title without additional funds from your wallet, Goozex allows you to find someone who did the exact same thing with a different game that came out last week so you can trade and experience both games for the price of one. The complexity is a little more conditional, but the concept is there and the point remains that while retailers may call their activities trades, they’re actually engaged in a modified returns policy while Goozex is facilitating community trades.

Then this week’s episode of the same podcast contained a discussion on DLC, which lead to a broader conversation about digital distribution. This got me thinking about intangible software and I realized that as much as I generally hate owning physical media, it’s actually pretty important to me, especially with games, because of the way I play them. I can forsee a future where all games are digitized and transferrable over broadband not unlike iTunes but before that time gets here I still need to be able to have some assurance that I won’t be setting myself up for obsolescence; it’s one of the reasons why I have no interest in a game like Warhawk or in the Xbox Originals line of products, because while I can probably live with Catan and Gauntlet going away if I ever upgrade to an Xbox 3, I don’t want to think that I can’t at the very least trade my copy of Dead Rising for a newer game down the road. I realize it’s this very dynamic that game manufacturers want to avoid but in my particular case the only outcome of not having a secondary market channel is that I’ll simply buy fewer games.

Curiously then, I find myself sort of pulling for retail channels to stem the tide of digital distribution or at least digital-only distribution. Which is odd because I don’t have a lot of love for retailers to begin with. It occurs to me that what I really want is digital distribution where the cost savings of excising retail channels are passed on to the consumers and where the long tail didn’t become a factor in pricing because I want my patience to have tangible results (ie, not having to pay relatively premium prices for older media simply because there is no reason not to continue to charge whatever the market will bear with no inventory constraints). Since that is highly unlikely I’m stuck wishing for an antiquated method to survive simply because it affords me the opportunity to limit my relative financial investment compared to the amount of entertainment I can consume. I did some math using last year’s $60 a Month coumns and discovered that from October 2007 to June 2008 I spent $490.88 on video games, which is a lot for 21 transactions. However from those transactions I played 53 games which makes my average cost per game $9.26 for that period. When you consider the base price for an XBLA/PSN game is $10, that means that including AAA and other full retail titles, I managed to work my average cost per game below the level it would have been if I’d just played DLC games. That’s not something I could do in without physical copies of games.

The only way to know is to carry on.

• Left 4 Dead
  I played an awful lot of this game through the weekend. It’s curious because while I very much enjoy it, it hasn’t captured me in that sense that every spare opportunity is spent firing it up and playing just a little bit. Excepting a stretch on Saturday morning where I pushed through several campaigns in a row, I typically play only if I have the requisite hour to make it through a whole campaign and then once I’m through I usually move on to something else for a bit.
  I fiddled around some with the difficulty settings and let me tell you that even on Easy mode the game isn’t exactly a cakewalk but when they say “Expert” they aren’t kidding around. I suppose it’s possible to do better in a mode like that when you have human-controlled teammates instead of the AI, but on lower levels the AI is perfectly competent yet in Expert the nonstop flood of brutally challenging enemies, even the standard Infected, are too much for them. It’s one of those games that as you progress through the difficulty settings finds new and ruthless ways to hamper you: It’s not enough that the zombies are tougher, it’s not even enough that their numbers are significantly increased. It’s still not sufficient that they swarm more frequently and that the special zombies (Boomers, Tanks, Smokers and Hunters) appear much more regularly but on top of all this, each individual hit from an Infected causes 10 points of damage to your 100 point health allotment. Contrast this with the one-HP ding per swipe on Easy and you can see where it isn’t call Expert flippantly.
  I’m working now to see if there is any way I can find some other people I know to play with because as much as I enjoy the game, the multiplayer structure reminiscent of Counter-Strike is limiting from a single-player standpoint: The four campaigns shipped on the disc are all good, but reaching the point where Achievements are not coming readily any longer has removed some of the luster from the lather-rinse-repeat cycle of playing them over again. With no discernible difference between each character and little to no desire to play with the unwashed masses, my interest is fading and I’m not ready for that to happen just yet.
  One other minor note, I appreciate the sound design and voice-over work in the game but I have to say that the gunfire in the game is ridiculously loud. Since sound is a key component to the game to alert you of impending danger, I haven’t been able to find a suitable volume on my TV that allows me to play as intended without making my whole neighborhood feel like they’ve stumbled into a warzone and the audio controls don’t have the granularity to adjust specific elments of the audio aside from music and everything else. It has forced my hand and made me sit up close to the television so I can use headphones, a configuration that is both an improvement and a disappointment: Immersion and gameplay wise it’s much better, but comfort wise it lacks and I find myself face first in my TV screen with headphones wondering, “Why am I not playing this on a PC? It sure feels like a PC experience…”
• World of Warcraft
  Friday night was one of my worst experiences yet with WoW and it started simply with a guildmate inviting me to tank for Maraudon, an instance in Desolace. My past instances have been some of the highlights of WoW so I initially jumped at the chance. Unfortunately Maraudon is also a fairly high-level instance in the original game world (so it’s late-40s, early 50s level) and, being level 51, it was going to be in that “doable but challenging” area. Unfortunately that also meant that we needed the full compliment of roles and group members: 5-man with a tank, a healer and several dps. Naturally there were only three of us in the guild online and we spent what felt like an eternity trying to get it together. Once we did get a group going, we were plagued with drop-outs and miscues and half-wipes until we finally tried to get a higher-level player to simply run us through and s/he turned out to be a righteous pain, demanding we pay gold so s/he could respec and getting “bored” and bailing after maybe 15 minutes.
  All told it was several hours of frustration and annoyance from which I emerged with only a little bit of XP and practically no useful loot. Approaching the original content level cap has me thinking that after this coming month in which I fully expect to hit 60, I’ll probably take a break and put a hold on the account. With my next step being further investment and my general enjoyment of the game waning, I think it’s the right thing to do. I’ve had a lot of fun with it but I’m starting to get fatigued and the creeping sense of guilt over paying for something I don’t want to sink every waking hour into is beginning to be the writing on the wall that it’s time to back off. If nothing else I can say that WoW has opened me to the idea of MMOs and it inadvertently recharged me for gaming in general (I hadn’t realized how much of a doldrums I was in until I got excited about WoW and noticed it was the first game in months I had been truly into) but I’m not so invested in it that I’m reluctant to drag myself away. I think in general I’m not a very sentimental gamer: I play most games as long as I find them fascinating and then have little problem stepping away or renewing the resource to get something new (see all the trade-ins and Goozex stuff). Note that I do not particularly collect video games. That being the case, there’s no way I’m going to collect game subscriptions.
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance
  I’ve gotten back into reading comic books lately, thanks to and with the help of a friend from work who is kind enough to bring his weekly purchases to me once he’s finished reading them. Because of this my interest in super hero games has also ramped up and I decided to try MUA again after not touching it for probably over a year to see how it held up.
  Truthfully, I couldn’t get back into it. I tried on a couple of occasions but neither time was I able to get past the initial sequence with Wolverine, Spider-Man, Captain America and Thor. I don’t think it was that the game had suddenly gotten dull or uninteresting but somehow I couldn’t remember the details of the controls and couldn’t be bothered to look them up. MUA is, I guess, one of those games that works once but after you’ve worked through it there isn’t enough there to keep you coming back. Or at least not enough to get me to come back.
• Ico
  I’ve had this game for some time now and it was picked up from Goozex as part of my efforts to touch on some of the high points of earlier generations. Unfortunately while I enjoyed Shadow of the Colossus early on, I’m having a hard time penetrating the thought process behind Ico. Obviously these are games designed to evoke mood even while feeling more or less familiar (especially to long time gamers) but both games are plagued by ponderous cutscenes and stretches of gameplay that are so mood-focused that, I hate to say it, are frankly boring.
  I don’t need my hand held through most video games but the difference between me tolerating the slow bits of Shadow and not Ico is that even when there is something useful to do in Ico, I feel like I’m trying to play charades over the phone. At least in Shadow the lack of obvious tutorial content was compensated by making the process of discovery and trial and error rewarding. In Ico the few small triumphs I’ve had give me the impression that I’ve just figured out the door I was knocking on has been unlocked the whole time.
• Lock’s Quest
  I only played a short amount of this game, which I enjoy but findit wants to keep me at arm’s reach. The pacing in the combat sections feels off somehow; I like the real-time strategic elements but some of the battles I’m fighting now require my manual intervention (that is, I have to get out and fight myself) and the hectic “I-need-to-be-in-several-places-at-once” vibe reminiscent of PC RTS games captures my least favorite element of those titles. Still, whenever I start to get into a battle or a series of strategic configurations, I’m thrown back into a long sequence of slow-talking cutscenes and ultra-light RPG fussing. I can see the balance the developers were trying to strike with this game and I admire them for it, but so far I can’t help feeling like they narrowly missed the mark.
• Puzzle Quest
  Once again I returned to PQ on the DS only… I think I made a mistake. I went with the DS version because overall I prefer the DS to the PSP. The reason is simply that the DS is a legitimately portable device while the PSP is a nifty little system that just happens to be portable. The distinction lies in the difference between having my DS on me frequently in case I have a few minutes of downtime and playing my PSP as if it were just another home console that I could feasibly take with me if I were interrupted for some reason. This being the case I thought that what I wanted was Puzzle Quest in the most portable format possible. It turns out though that the design decisions that went into PQ on the DS are not what I’m looking for at all.
  For reasons that are exclusively related to comfort, I find that playing stylus-based games make the DS feel more like the PSP: That is, a home console capable of convenient mobility but not precisely a handheld system. Thus it comes down to the games to make the DS feel portable: Contra 4, New Super Mario Bros., Mario Kart DS all feel very portable. Phantom Hourglass, Planet Puzzle League and Animal Crossing all feel like regular console games you can pull out and play pretty much anywhere. And I like both, it’s just that it takes a particular devotion to a game to engage it with the stylus and while I’m okay with that for certain titles, I’m not looking for that from Puzzle Quest. I have a much more attractive version that I can play if I want to settle in and play some PQ. What I want is something I can play a bit in the restroom or in line at the bank or on an airplane and that means I don’t want to have to fiddle with a stylus and the touchscreen.
  What baffles me is why they decided to avoid giving DS players the option to play any other way. It’s not like they couldn’t have done it, but in fact on the DS the game feels sort of rushed and sloppy. All the interface elements are disappointing and the lack of options to customize your game to suit you is at best laziness. I think what I was really looking for is a PSP version so my inclination is to re-list the DS copy on Goozex and try a swap-out for the other version.
• Marvel Heroes
  We tried another round of this game with three players and all told I thought it was a better game. We did play with a particular scenario that made the villians much more difficult to handle, especially since we seemed to draw Mastermind headlines nine times out of ten and the scenario allowed villains to use two scheming abilities instead of just one, plus their Master Plan cards were part of the victory condition so they came out every opportunity. Where this really impacted the game was that it felt to an extent like you were almost better off not troubleshooting so you couldn’t give your opponent a chance to advance his Master Plan.
  But three players did make the story track more of an interesting dynamic and having two pools of villain cards to pull from for each Troubleshooting action was beneficial to preventing the heroes from steamrolling every encounter. Unfortunately the scenario also had us shuffling the team nemesis cards so no one ended up fighting against the villain they normally face and I felt like the game had been specifically balanced to work against its designated foe; as a result my Marvel Knights team was facing Magneto, against whom they had little luck, while Aaron’s X-Men fought Dr. Doom and because of his odd combat “ability” which is actually a detriment (Doom cannot choose dice boosting as a Scheming action) had a lot less issues than Spidey and co. versus Magneto.
  In any case Thom’s Fantastic Four/Magneto combo won handily, earning over the set 25 VPs and managing to complete the secondary victory condition of completing the Master Plan. I like the game still, but I feel like there are too many grey areas not covered explicitly by the rules and certain mechanical constructs like Supporting Characters, Archnemesis and Resource Cards are either awkwardly applied or improperly balanced especially with the flavor of the game. Occasionally it feels like you’re actually participating in a comic book story, but there are too many situations where I think we felt like the game was getting in the way of the theme.
• Attack!/Scrabble
  The other things I discovered last week were Facebook games, especially Attack! (Risk) and Scrabble. I’ve been playing Scrabble with my dad and, separately, with my wife while I’ve had a few games of Attack! with a friend from work. Both are kind of buggy and prone to weird annoyances but it’s nice to have a play-by-email solution that is sort of extended into my online network as opposed to trying to convince people to visit a specific place to acquire a specific piece of software to use. I used to play chess on a site called It’s Your Turn but since it was a destination you had to want to go to in the first place, once someone let it fall out of their daily surf rotation it was easy to lose your game partners. Facebook is at least a destination for general contact; the games aspect is just the part I’m most interested in and it works because everyone else is just there anyway.
• Blood Bowl
  I played another match against Aaron, this time my Elves versus his Lizardman team. The final score ended up being a little closer than the game really was, his 3-2 victory suggests I put up more of a fight than I was able to muster. He was rolling incredibly well when it came to armor and injury rolls so I would have actually lost a Blitzer had it not been for the Apothecary I induced and I ended up only able to field seven players for most of the game including I think the entirety of the second half.
  The Elves are an interesting team because unlike the Wood Elves who are clearly built to take advantage of their agility right out of the gate with dodging Catchers and the superb Wardancers, vanilla Elves are a team that starts with potential and little else. The base blitzers are superior, skill-wise, to the High Elf variants but as useful as Side Step is, I’m not sure it matters when the lower starting AV means they are more likely to die or suffer injury before they have a chance to really improve.
  AG 4 is, undoubtedly, a significant statistic considering what most of the non-blocking die rolls represent in terms of succeeding in the game. But when you consider that Elves STR 3 make them only effective at blocking Stunty or Titchy players alone and their 7 AV puts them at a serious disadvantage unless they can evade the opponent’s blocks you’re looking at a team that really, really needs to dodge a lot. And unlike, say, AG 4 in terms of picking up the ball which is certainly necessary at some point, dodging is potentially deadly regardless of AG. Turnovers are a bummer but they don’t have the opportunity to cost your league team upwards of 110,000 gold and possibly a lot of invested time and effort in advancement.
  In any case I was able to execute enough to (finally) get a few more advances including a couple more guys with dodge and a lineman who now has AG 5 which I figure will mostly come into play as a means to dodge into one tackle zone without altering the target number. Still not quite as reliable as the re-roll, but useable more than once per turn so better for those seemingly regular occurences where I have to dodge from one covered square into another several times just to clear out of the scrum.
• Geometry Wars 2
  As I mentioned above I like Left 4 Dead but occasionally I find myself powering on the Xbox and the realizing I don’t have enough time to get through an entire campaign so I move on to something else. On one occasion I picked up GeoWars 2 again and played through a bit of Pacifist because it’s still the mode in which I can’t achieve top score on my Friends List and I also fiddled a bit with Sequence mode because it seems like that has become the principal mode to me in GeoWars 2. It’s a little odd because the game that comprised the entirety of the original title is probably my least favorite (well, maybe excepting Waves) of all the modes in the sequel. It’s impressive that a game I played probably more than any other in terms of longevity and continued interest has since been eclipsed in terms of preference not just once but several times over. Kudos to Bizarre; they know how to make a semi-casual twin-stick shooter, I’ll tell you that much.

Model Behavior

I did intend to work on some painting and modeling stuff over the weekend but I had a splitting headache all day Sunday and squinting at tiny figs seemed too intense for my disposition. However, a friend gave me a bag full of assorted minis and with the recent resurgence in Blood Bowl play, I suspect more model-based shennanigans are forthcoming.

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.

Bitterness aside, here’s what I was up to this week.

• World of Warcraft
  My Orc Warrior is up to level 47 and I feel like I’m getting to the point where I’m mostly interested in just reaching 60 so I can roam relatively freely through the Old World. I’m realizing in large part that my moment-to-moment enjoyment of the game is dependent on how much I like the zone I’m grinding in; currently I’ve selected The Hinterlands which I basically hate both in terms of quests and terrain/mobs so it hasn’t been a huge joy this last week to play. Contrast that with the Hillsbrad Foothills, Desolace (well, most of it) and The Athari Highlands all of which I spent a lot of time in and loved the game all the while. I also find that profession grinding is a curious thing because I understand how it is supposed to progress with you as you level but it seems like I’m either doing one or the other in this level range. I took almost two nights off of XP advancing in order to push Blacksmithing to 200 because the only reasonable item I could craft that would give a skill bump each time required a load of iron, which I had previously assumed as a lower-level ore and was selling for huge profits on the Auction House. Realizing I needed it, I had to go back to lower level zones and run through collecting Iron Ore.
  I’m also looking forward to the next billing cycle (which is how I’m thinking of the game since I’m determined to cancel my account just before I burn out on it rather than let it sit there payed for but un-played) and realizing that unless I catch the leveling fever with one of my alts, I’m not sure how much longer I’ll stick with the game once I hit 60. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intrigued by the expansion content but in addition to the subscription the two of them together amount to another $65-70. I could obviously spread this over a few months but I’m curious to know how much actual enjoyment they add to the game. Enough to keep me paying the fee for a bit? Or so much that I regret the purchase?
• Magic: the Gathering
  Since some of my gamer friends now work in the same department as I do, we occasionally take a lunch break to play a quick game or two. Even though I don’t have the funds to maintain an updated library of cards, I have enough to build a few decks and it’s a great lunchtime game: Rich enough to scratch my gaming itch but quick-playing enough not to get us fired for spending the whole day playing on company time. We’ve been playing mostly Tournament P-Type which is essentially long form sealed deck, where you start from an agreed-upon pool size (usually one starter and two boosters although for a while they were selling that amount of cards in special one-box Tournament Packs) and build a 40-card minimum deck and score your deck by the number of cards in it and the leftovers called the sideboard. You always play for ante in P-Type although when you win you can choose a card from the sideboard instead as long as it is of equal rarity (basic land for basic land, uncommon for uncommon, etc). Since your deck grows when it wins, your deck score increases as well. There are handicapping rules and some more specifics about handling ante disputes as well although we usually omit those in favor of friendly, casual games.
  Mostly I’ve been playing with a white/red/green enchantment deck from the Ravnica block. It actually is a very effective design when it gets going since the block contains Magemarks which stack enchantments onto enchanted creatures. So a few weenies, a few low-cost enchantments and you have a cheap yet burly army. The problem of course is that you can get into a situation where you don’t have enough enchantments to beef up your creatures or you don’t have any creatures to cast those spiffy enchatments onto. Which, with my shuffling and luck, it precisely what happens almost every time.
  I keep thinking eventually I just won’t have the patience for Magic any longer, but the truth is the core game mechanic is really just fun and while the cost structure built into the game keeps me at a respectful distance, I can’t help but dip in over and over, more than a little wistful at what could be.
• Pandemic
  The other game we play at work sometimes is Pandemic and we’ve gotten a few games in recently. The curious thing about Pandemic is that while it relies quite a bit on luck (that opening setup phase can define the course of the game and the configuration of Roles makes a difference too), if you get a group of experienced players together it starts to feel like there is no real sweet spot for challenge versus bad luck. With five Epidemics a veteran trio of players can win seemingly seven or eight out of every ten games. With six, the outcome feels almost entirely random based on what the roles are and how the setup goes. We even tried a two-player six Epidemic game and really had no chance at all.
  It seems to me like there should be a mode in which you have to eradicate (not just cure) all the diseases as well. That way you can play three players but have the deck loss condition become a serious risk factor and make some of the early game decisions become less clear cut: Do we send the Medic sweeping through those last few cities to eradicate that color or do we hope we have a chance to get back to clear it out later so s/he can focus on something a bit more presently threatening? I guess what I’m really hoping for at this point is an impending release of the expansion.
• Puzzle Quest
  After replaying some of PQ on XBLA I decided that I’d played the couch version enough and what I really wanted was a handheld copy I could take with me and play in a sort of more casual mode. So I requested it from Goozex and got it rather quickly. I’ve played quite a bit of it since; it really is an excellent on-the-go game. I don’t know if it’s just because I played hours upon hours of the XBLA version but I struggle a little with the interface. The touchscreen thing is full of intriguing possibilities and I typically don’t mind using it when it offers something to the game. But in this case thre’s no real reason for it to be the only means of interacting with the game board and it’s a little sensitive so I’ve done a dozen or so mis-moves by being a little sloppy with the stylus. It’s not a big deal but between that and the fact that the suggest-a-move thing seems designed to set up the CPU for these devastating cascade attacks and wild 14-turn 4-of-a-kind combos but has no obvious way to toggle it off, I feel like it’s approaching the stripped down shareware version of the game I originally loved. For the time being its portability trumps its minor annoyances, we’ll see how it goes after a few more plays.

Demo Watch

I downloaded the Mirror’s Edge demo probably months ago but never got around to trying it so on a lark I fired it up and played through the tutorial and story demo. I have to say the game demos very well. I liked the sense that Assassin’s Creed gave during the free-running portions but I admit to being skeptical about that sort of thing in a strictly first person game. Mercifully the game plays much better than I expected it would and while I could tell that the combat portions could potentially get annoying (of course they couldn’t just make a fun game where you had to execute sweet parkour moves in first person without guns and stuff) it was enough to have me drop it on my Goozex queue.

The other demo I checked out was Halo Wars on the 360. My relationship with RTS games is similar to what I have with fighting games: I’ve played quite a lot of them, maybe even a surprising amount, considering that I’m no good at them and really can’t say I like them all that much. There is something about both types that appeals to me, but my frustrations with them don’t allow me more than a sort of surface level enjoyment that in a lot of ways is contrary to how I play all other types of games. With RTS my problem is generally that they boil down to prioritizing and organization games. Your key skill is the ability to manage and delegate enough so that you can keep a steady stream of backline infrastructure building while you macro-manage the assault and defensive campaigns against your foe(s). But I don’t operate that way: I always try to play the games such that I build the maximum allowable force with full upgrades and then leave my base behind and walk this unstoppable juggernaut into the enemy lines, crushing everything in my path.

Most RTS games allow this sort of approach to work for maybe five or six levels and then you have to start fending off skirmish waves while you’re progressing and you have to employ zerg rushes, calculate upgrades based on specific need, keep hero units alive but utilize their abilities… it becomes too much for my pea brain to process and I end up getting ground down until I can’t take anymore. Halo Wars isn’t really different in that it is still an RTS from the standpoint that I’m terrible at it and thus it feels like other genre titles I’ve played. I do admire the way they were able to shed the legacy of the keyboard/mouse control scheme and create something that is wholly comfortable in a console setting. I suspect your ability to gain abject joy from it will depend on how well you can divorce yourself from the pedigree of the past and to a greater extent, how much the subject matter entices you to play. I like Halo, I’ve enjoyed all the FPS games and think the backstory is relatively intriguing but I don’t know if yet another space war is enough to convince me to play a genre that exhausts me, no matter how well it fits into its intended space.

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.

• World of Warcraft
  This has been my biggest game-time activity and I’m enjoying the heck out of it. Like any super-complex, ultra-deep game there are a myriad of small aspects that cluster together to make the whole thing enjoyable and keep me coming back: The stirring music, the fantastic art design, the gripping advancement system and the compelling diversity in play activities depending on your choices both at character creation time and during the game’s progression. Naturally there are a host of annoying little nitpicks as well. I find the group content to be among the most exciting in the game but I find it incredibly difficult to coordinate effectively with other players. The guild system seems both mechanically and socially overwrought and ad hoc grouping features are laughably primitive (why can’t I use the Looking For Group menu to select any group quest, instance/dungeon or general zone leveling I want?). It is actually related to this difficulty in finding groups that I’m frustrated that some arguably key class-specific quests require group activities. Perhaps if I had joined the game near the beginning it would have been different but with most people being more interested in expansion and end-game content at this point in time, it’s hard to find people who care enough about Razorfen Kraul to run through it and help me get a set of armor that is now almost certainly inferior to what I’ve cobbled together on my own.
  Still, the game has far longer legs than I expected and I’m even enjoying some of my alt characters quite a bit. Curiously, I don’t have many female alts rolled up but I find it simultaneously amusing and disheartening that whenever I play as my female Human Rogue, I get a lot of unwarranted attention from other players. Of the alternate characters I have, I find the Tauren Hunter to be perhaps the most fun to play maybe because the pet factor means I can be sort of my own little group. But I also enjoy the powers and abilities the Hunter class get early on and the Tauren/Hunter combo makes for a solid match, lore-wise. I’m strangely unimpressed with most of the Alliance characters I have; I suppose my Gnome Mage would be a minor exception. I just can’t help feeling like the Mage thing is fun, but I’d kind of rather be doing it as an Undead or Orc. I guess I just like the Horde better.
• Puzzle Quest
  I think because PQ: Galactrix was recently getting a lot of press prior to release and there was a flash-based demo online I started thinking about the original game again. It could also be because I have the Bejeweled Add-On in WoW so whenever I making those epic flights around the game world I’m playing Bejeweled and I can no longer play that game without wishing it were PQ. So I dragged out the XBLA version I had, briefly considering the expansion I didn’t realize had been released but ultimately rejecting it due to it’s price point. I’m playing through as a different class and I think the differences are not pronounced enough to truly matter; since you end up learning most of the useful spells from creatures anyway, you can basically end up with the same set regardless and maybe I’ve been playing WoW too much but I wish there were some more distinguishing characteristics between them.
  It occurred to me clearly enough while playing that, with the crimson-hazed fever of achievement addiciton more or less behind me now, Puzzle Quest has enough merit on its own to continue playing regardless of whether you’ve “beaten it” or not. I also have thousands of Goozex points saved up so I requested a DS copy and it should arrive shortly, giving me the opportunity to play it while flying around Azeroth instead of the clever but woefully inferior Bejeweled.
• Marvel Heroes
  At my work they organize a weekly board game meet up Monday nights. A couple friends and I have tried to attend as many as we can, since Blood Bowl night has sort of faded. We’ve played several games in the last couple of months including Shadows Over Camelot, Race for the Galaxy, Nuclear War, Pandemic and Gheos. But a couple of weeks ago I finally had a chance to play a round of Marvel Heroes that has been neglected on my shelf for a number of years. Being a Fantasy Flight game I kind of expected it to be dense like Arkham Horror but it’s actually deceptive in its accessibility. The core mechanic is pretty simple, basically a streamlined take on Warhammer 40K’s hit dice and the team mechanic works pretty well. What I liked the most was that it is competitive but even with the goal orientation being largely individual you don’t get that sense of waiting around for someone else’s turn to finish so you can finally play; every player represents the potential villains for any given encounter so even on someone else’s turn there is something to do and they do some clever things with arch-nemeses that give certain players a greater role in some off rounds. We played it as a two-player game so it wasn’t quite as rich of an experience on that front as it could have been but it was easy to see how clever the system was.

I also took on an interesting project a couple of weeks ago. I was looking around at the games I had that I wasn’t really playing and noticed that I own a huge number of DS and PSP games, most of which I haven’t touched in months. But a lot of them were ones that I classified as games that I meant to get around to. So I decided that I would play each of them for a minimum of 15 minutes and any of them that I was just as glad to turn off as keep playing would get listed on Goozex. It turns out that for as much as I wanted to like games like Nanostray, Hotel Dusk and Twisted Metal I was more or less unfazed when I picked them up again. So I shipped out a load of games (further increasing my stash of Goozex points that I can’t seem to use up as fast as I earn them) and I have another stack of games on the fence, like Phoenix Wright which I’m close to completing but can’t quite play long enough to get over the hump.

What struck me most about the experiment was that I found that I don’t have a lot of desire for the most part to amass a large collection of console games. If I’m not actively playing something on a console I’m usually content to trade it for something I’m going to want to play. But on handhelds, I tend to cling more tightly because my thought process suggests that while I may not want to sit around and play a given title, I may want it in the middle of a plane trip or something and if I give it up, I won’t have it. This is especially true with games that are more endless like Mario Kart or Bubble Bobble. Although, to be fair, Bubble Bobble on the DS has a terrible slingshot mechanic using the touchscreen that removes almost all sense of fun from the game.

That one may have to go.

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.

The List

It’s short this week because I think I suffered a bit from some post-con game fatigue and also I spent a lot of my potential gaming time doing more hobby-type things than actually playing. There are a couple of things coming up that may influence the List in coming weeks, although I can’t predict whether it will be an expanding or a contracting influence: First is the release of Viva Piñata 2 which Nik is interested in and the second is a schedule I’m working on to better track my daily activities. Currently I feel like I have more time for gaming than I actually spend gaming because I’m not sufficiently planning ahead, but it may be that when I work out the schedule I find I can’t spend as much time on it as I even do at this point.

• Blood Bowl – I entered my Elf team into the league, primarily due to a low league-night turnout and a lack of desire to play my Undead team against a familiar opponent when there are so many other teams in the league I’d still like to play against. I lost badly to Thom’s Orcs, though it could have been closer and a more satisfying loss if I’d understood a little better how to play Elves. It’s remarkable how different it is to play a high AG team opposed to a ST-based team; conditioned response-style plays like plugging up TZs with random linemen becomes a foolish move but it’s so second nature with tougher teams that I didn’t realize until close to the end of the first half how many of my players were ending up on their butts because they weren’t playing to their strengths. I anticipate that my second match with the Wildcats will be a bit better but I also speculate that it will be quite a few more games before I work out some of the base strategies to employ and become a legitimate threat.
• Pikomino – Nik and I played a round of this and I was again struck by how different this game is as a two-player affair compared to playing with three or more. The lack of steal opportunities I think makes the biggest difference; one thing I like about the game with more players is how insecure any lead is. It’s possible with two players to get enough of a lead to essentially secure the victory, something that just isn’t possible as you add more players.

Hobby Corner

I spent a large portion of Saturday engaged in the preliminary steps of getting a set of models finished: Priming, basecoats, sanding. I settled on a basecoat technique for my Van Saar Necromunda gang, basically a greyish blue color with a thin blue wash. It’s still not exactly what I envisioned in my head, but it’s pretty close and with these models I think the devil is going to be in the details, not the big sections of color.

I also sanded, assembled and primed my Elf reserves (two Catchers and two Linewomen) plus I glued some counter-weights into the existing Catchers’ bases since they were prone to tipping. I hope to get those basecoated this week sometime and ideally I’ll have them completed and based in two weeks. Why two weeks? Because I’m hoping that will be the amount of time I need to save up for my next purchase/project: I’m planning to buy a set of female humans from Shadowforge which I’ll use to round out my plastic humans from the boxed set into a complete co-ed Human team. I’m also eying the Heresy Ogre model from Impact! Miniatures as the Big Guy on that team and I think when all is said and done they’ll be pretty cool as a group.

My last partial project was a blister pack of Shadowrun Lone Star figs I had picked up a couple of years ago at GenCon in a flea market. I found them and thought I’d go ahead and get them sanded, assembled and primed while I had the primer out. Unfortunately I hadn’t looked close enough previously to note that the Ral Partha Shadowrun figs were probably more like 25mm scale than the GW-standard 28mm so they can’t be mixed. It’s not a problem per se, it just means I’d need some additional RP Shadowrun models to ever make real use of them and to the best of my knowledge, they aren’t being produced anymore. I guess I know what I’ll be looking for in my flea market scourings from now on.

Parting Shot

Having a bit of a chance to sit back and reflect on Pacificon, I think one thing I could have done better would have been to specifically plan the events and schedule around a realistic eating regimen. If I had one regret about the whole event it was that I wasted more time than I would have liked with between-schedule lag times that weren’t filled with pickup games and hasty meals that took more time than they should have considering they weren’t planned.

I’m already looking ahead to DunDraCon, so I’m thinking one thing that I’m interested in is making sure my GM’d games are set into better slots as well as (and part of this is based on my current schedule-everything mindset) ensuring there are set times for eating and bracketing those with either time to play random games or specific events I want to attend.

Another thing I’m thinking is that I lost a lot of time due to exhaustion based on some difficulty I had sleeping. Both nights at ConQuest I retired from the common areas fairly early but then lagged around the hotel room unable to sleep and then didn’t get enough rest so I didn’t get rolling the next day until about mid-morning. Some of the blame I can’t really pinpoint; I just had a hard time sleeping in that hotel room. But I think also my biggest motivator Saturday morning was a scheduled Pandemic game so I think scheduling games a bit earlier would be a good way to ensure I get the gaming in instead of assuming there will be time to play all the games I want.

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.

The List

• Blood Bowl – Despite the three-game marathon impending on Friday night I still attended League night Wednesday although I only helped Thom out by playing his Human team against his own Goblin team. Ironically I finally defeated Thom fair and square and it wasn’t even with my own team. In an effort to save my pride I played him first on Friday night with the new female Elf team against his Ogres and emerged once again victorious proving that at least some of the time I can actually conquer the Everest that is Thom in Blood Bowl. My next two games against a nice guy named Jeff’s High Elves and Aaron’s Dwarves weren’t so hot but I made costly early mistakes because we were trying a bit to rush through the games so we could make it to the flea market that started just six hours after the tournament began.
  My final impression after three games with the Elves is that they are a fun team to play especially because they offer so many chances for spectacular plays. With easy dodging, agility-based skills and high movement rates, they make for an enjoyable counter-point to my usual “hit anything that moves” style. Having to try to dance around the pitch was a trip, but not an unwelcome one.
• Zombie Fluxx – Nik found this for me and purchased it without consulting me. I’m glad she did, and it shows how well she knows me. I love zombies and Fluxx is a great game that I think gets overlooked a lot in our gaming group because it’s pretty arbitrary and we tend to gravitate toward themed games that offer a lot of strategic opportunity. I don’t know how strategic you can get with Fluxx, but the zombie theme certainly works well in this context and I had a lot of fun playing it with her. The minor Fluxx formula revisions add a much needed spice and the art is hands-down fantastic. A great pick-up.
• Pandemic – I already knew that Pandemic was a fun game but it wasn’t until Thom’s scheduled Pandemic blow-out that I really fell in love with it and began to understand why it has captured the gamer world’s attention so quickly. The co-operative nature of it is rare enough to make it feel unique and I already enjoyed that aspect of it, but playing with a group of people I met for the first time over the game made me realize it’s a great ice-breaker game since you’re forced to interact (contrast that to a game such as Magic: The Gathering where you may play against a stranger but never really engage them in any meaningful way). I also discovered how well balanced the game is to make it so that a group of competent players can manage the four-epidemic threshold handily but struggle with advancing the difficulty to five epidemics. We managed to win our three initial games though one came on the last possible turn and frankly we cheated by misunderstanding a rule about how city cards could be transferred from one player to another. But then we shuffled the participants a bit and won a five-epidemic game without cheating and it felt pretty good to do so. I hope Z-Man games gets the next printing shipped out soon, my only complaint about the game at all was how the buzz surrounding it focused primarily on how difficult it is to find and only secondarily how fun it is to play.
• Dados – Thom, Nik and I were compelled to test this beta version of a game when they offered us a free copy to play and provide feedback. It’s basically a bidding/trick-taking game with dice mechanics instead of cards. You get 36 dice and roll them four at a time placing each one onto one of 24 face-down tiles arranged in a grid. Once there are two players’ dice on a tile the tile can be claimed by any player in lieu of rolling on their turn provided their dice value is greater than any other players’. The catch is that the tiles are a gamble: Some provide heavy bonuses to the scored value (the base is the total value of the dice on the tile) others reduce the value or modify it in some other negative way. Then there are a few special tiles which are kept until later in the game and can be played to influence the game.
  Overall I thought it was a pretty fun game except it was billed as a light strategy game and I don’t think you can have a game with that many random elements be considered strategy. It’s more of a calculated risk game. It doesn’t diminish the game’s value, it’s just that I came in expecting one thing and found it to be something else. So I guess when the game is published we’ll all get free copies. Hey, if nothing else it should come with 144 six-sided dice, so you can’t go wrong there.
• Pikomino – While Thom and Carl played a quickie version of Legends of the Old West in the lobby, Nik and I tried out our new copy of Pikomino purchased in the dealer’s room. It’s something of a different game when played with two people because stealing is more difficult with fewer options on top stacks. We also scored significantly higher as a result of being more prone to stacking rather than being stolen from. It’s still a fun, casual game though and I’m glad we picked it up.
• Arkham Horror – So this was the game I had volunteered to run. It was a popular choice on the sign-up sheets, but I felt quickly that as a first-time game master I got in over my head. I hadn’t refreshed on the rules recently enough so I fumbled through game mastering it without playing and inadvertently ran an abbreviated session by running a Mythos phase between every single player’s turn. It did accelerate the game rather profoundly which was probably for the best since I had stupidly scheduled it right at dinner time on a busy day where we really needed a dinner break. The game started at 17:00 and ended about two and a half hours later and while the new-to-the-game players seemed to have a good time (they ended up winning by defeating the Ancient One in combat) I regret somewhat that they didn’t get a really good sense of how the game actually plays out.
  We also had to run a second game which I wasn’t involved in (but was managed by a devoted AH enthusiast so it let a few extra people play without really needing my attention) and there was some confusion trying to get another full copy of the game with the King in Yellow expansion. Aaron came through in the end but it was a little frustrating to have the second group getting antsy and testy with me because there wasn’t enough player space. I felt like I was being blamed for having so many people sign up, which was ridiculous but everyone ended up playing and having a good time anyway so it worked out in the end.
  After the first set of games I set it back up and we waited for Thom and Carl; they joined Nik, myself and another new acquaintance. We played correctly this time and the game lasted several hours which I think were enjoyed by all. We had several chances near the end to win but Thom ended up devoured three times in the course of the game and was really unlucky with his Other World Encounter card draws which directly lead to a confrontation with the Ancient One that… didn’t go as well as the previous game’s. Carl forged through the impossible odds till the bitter end anyway and I guess it serves as a small consolation that we were able to generate 35 successes out of a needed 60 to win.
• Power Grid – Sunday morning I got in on a full-fledged game of Power Grid. As I suspected I enjoyed it much more than the introductory seven-city teaser and found it to be a fascinating light simulation of economics as well as a grand strategy game. My biggest complaint is still in the decision to use paper money and one-dollar increments instead of something more manageable (like base $5 increments or money chits as in Arkham Horror). Not because I have some weird aversion to paper, but because in this context it isn’t exactly fast and easy to calculate or distribute the appropriate funds. Still, it’s a minor quibble and I very much enjoyed playing.
• Race For the Galaxy – This was my “big” convention purchase and while there wasn’t time to play it at the con, Nik agreed to join me in a game once we got home. Race is one of those games that’s frustrating to explain because it involves a lot of concepts that aren’t easily distilled into a single sentence and everything is kind of interconnected. When I’m teaching a game I prefer to start with base mechanics, build out to a general flow of the turn progression and then cover objectives. I usually let exception cases and special events wait until they show up mid-game and cover them then to avoid confusion. Every once in a while though you get to a game like Race where none of that works: There are no base mechanics, the mechanics are dependent on the turn progression. But it’s hard to teach turn progression because that is dependent on the phase selection mechanic. And even once you get to that point, every card in the game is practically an exception event; add to that the fact that the design of the game is great provided you already understand the game premise and just need an easy reference, but the myriad of icons and subtle distinguishing characteristics make it a poor self-teaching game so the first few hands of it feel like you’re playing a card game in a different language.
  Despite the challenge of teaching it, Nik won the game so I guess it went better than I thought it was going. I’m not sure that she’s dying to play it again, but hopefully my assurances that it makes more sense the more you play it were resonant and she’ll humor me with at least a few more rounds before we move back to something she’s more comfortable with.
• Bionic Commando: Rearmed – Despite all the board gaming, I did also sit down for a few minutes and play through the cursed Stage 9 boss. I don’t know why I had such a mental block against that guy; he was a re-tread from an earlier boss I defeated on my first try. But somehow I couldn’t pass him. I finally made it happen and then promptly got humbled by Stage 7. I like that the game retains its sense of challenge even though they’ve instituted a save system that prevents you from having to backtrack. The original game was conquerable but hard, this game feels the same way even if they’ve granted nods to the busy adult gamer who can’t sit for extended sessions to play a game in a single sitting.

Hobby Corner

I’m still in search of a suitable Ghoul model to round out my Undead roster and now that I’ve gotten enough Elves done to field a base team I’m starting to look to the future for my next projects. I need to save up some money so while I do that I have a Necromunda team to decide on a paint scheme for at long last, I have four reserve Elf models to finish and I need to get that final Ghoul for the Undead. But after that? Here’s what I’m considering:

1. Human Blood Bowl – I have 11 plastic human models: Two Throwers, two Catchers, two Blitzers and five or six Linemen. As hinted at last week I’m thinking of ordering the Shadowforge Female Human team to round out the roster with five more Line(wo)men and two each of additional Catchers, Blitzers and Throwers. Granted the Throwers would be extraneous since you can only have two on your roster, but the theme of the team would be co-ed Blood Bowl so I’d probably end up using one of the female Throwers anyway. I also saw that Impact! Miniatures has a great Heresy Deathball Ogre model that I’d like to pick up instead of using either Morg ‘n’ Thorg or a GW Ogre. I actually like the Heresy models so much I’d love to pick up enough for a full Ogre team, but they’re pricey models ($15 a pop) which would make a full regiment of six like $90. I do like the official GW Human models and the set comes with a full compliment of 16 which is vastly improved over the other official sets, but since I’m buying models to fill out a set I already own, I can’t justify the cost difference: Buying the Heresy Ogre and the Shadowforge females is the same collective price as the GW Human set sans Ogre. So yeah.
2. Dwarf Blood Bowl – Some Blood Bowl tournaments require official GW BB models. I have an official Orc team and an official Undead team but my Elves are obviously unofficial and if I add the Shadowforge and Heresy/Impact! models to my Human team that makes them unofficial as well. I’d like to have a third official team to choose from bringing my total to a nice round five, but in a testament to the sorry state of the Specialist line, the cheapest any team gets is $60 because you have to add boosters at a minimum. The teams that look most likely to work with as little additional expense (and that I’d be interested in owning or playing at this juncture) are Vampires, Dark Elves and Dwarves. I settled on Dwarves as my pick among those because I like the models the best and because I think it would give me a nice cross-section of the major fantasy races (Elves, Humans, Dwarves, Orcs, Undead/Other). My $60 would get me 10 Blockers, two Runners, two Troll Slayers and two Blitzers which is 16 players but I’d have to pony up another $35 to get the Deathroller should I choose to build in that direction. Still, it’s somewhat better than the Dark Elves which, for $60, gets you seven Linemen, two Witch Elves, four Blitzers and two Throwers which aren’t even part of the LRB5 team listings so they have to be used as either Runners or Assassins… I’m not sure what they expect you to do about the other option since no models technically exist for either. I guess that’s where you’re supposed to dip into the WFB line and pick up Assassin models for $10 a pop adding another $20 to the total. Sigh.
3. Pirates/Gunslingers – Aaron picked up the Warhammer Historicals rulebook for pirate skirmish battles and it got me all intrigued about painting some pirate squads. Foundry has some marvelous miniature sets for just such a game and while I’d have to see the rules before I decide which set to pick up, I think the prospect of this kind of game is even more intriguing than Legends of the Old West and I have to say I’ve been on the razor’s edge of buying a posse of gunslingers for a minimum of three years now. I have some ideas in store for how this might go down, but a gang of fun historical minis, a gang of Necromunda SciFi minis and plenty of Blood Bowl teams to choose from… well, that sounds like I’d be ready for fun no matter what.

Parting Shot

The one part of ConQuest I felt could have been better this year was a general sense of organization. They had to contend, I concede, with a strange hotel layout but I’d argue that other than the Hyatt where they hold KublaCon, few hotels are really meant to have this much related activity in one central location. Most conventions have less wandering around and seeing what’s happening than gaming cons and since few are big enough to sell out massive convention centers the way GenCon or PAX are, they have to make due.

But the situation wasn’t helped by having the dealer’s room offset from what seemed to be the con’s focal point: The board/war/miniatures game area. Also tucked over in that side hallway was the small open gaming area and the role-playing room which meant that a lot of the impromptu games had to be organized in high-traffic hallway areas or the common room off the main lobby. It’s not that the non-conventioneers were problematic but I think it’s difficult to run an effective RPG if you have to contend with gawkers and passerby. I think my experience is that ConQuest is generally more board- and wargame friendly while DunDraCon has a bigger RPG/LARP contingent and Kubla goes full force with the miniatures. All are always represented, but that seems to be the focus shift.

But aside from accommodation challenges, there was a sense that I don’t usually get from DunDraCon or KublaCon that the organizers… didn’t. There was a lot of times where I’d ask a volunteer where or what something was and they’d fix me with a blank stare before giving a vague wave and a cryptic reply. When I asked a staffer where my Arkham game was being held she said, “You kind of have to wander around and find it.” That’s not really my idea of great planning.

I also felt from a game master’s perspective that there wasn’t a lot of support provided to me. I asked someone what to do since there were more signups than my game allowed. The best response I got was a shoulder shrug and a “Try to work it out if you can. Do you have an extra copy of the game?” Listen: The game is $60 so no, I don’t have an extra copy. I was able to find one, but I had to do that on my own. No one came by to check on my game after the first five minutes and no one was around when it was over to collect my game master’s sheet. I was never made aware what the purpose of the sheets were anyway except someone said, “So we can keep track.” Of what, I never became privy.

It was really the little things that stuck out to me: The flea market was laid out in a tight circle with relatively narrow aisles between the outer tables and the inner. Con flea markets are almost always frustrating affairs, especially for mostly meek, smaller geeks like myself but this was so much so that I never seriously felt like I had a chance to make a purchase. I didn’t even attend the second night’s market. Even things like the signage with it’s arrow-adorned logo that contrasted with the intentional arrows meant to guide guests to registration and other key locations—a holdover from two years ago when I last attended ConQuest—showed lack of foresight and planning.

I rank the Con as one of my top gaming experiences overall, but I think there is definitely a lot of room for improvement.

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.

The List

• Blood Bowl – After four straight wins I was finally taken down a peg by the new member of the league whose Chaos Dwarves ground me to a tie. I went ahead and purchased a fourth Ghoul for the team, despite not having a model to represent him, just to have something to do with the extra cash I had lying around. Despite my rapid turnaround in fortune (this marks six straight matches without a loss after two opening defeats), I remain in second place. And I’ll say this: The first place team is Thom’s Orcs who:
  1. Have yet to be defeated.
  2. Have yet to be scored upon.
  3. Are +13 in Casualties.
  4. Have three games in hand on my team.
  5. Still manage to be five points ahead in the standings.

  At my current pace I’ll finish the season with 77 points. If Thom is completely shut out of his next six games, he’ll still only be eight points behind that.

• Power Grid – I think my favorite part of the game is the supply and demand mechanic for resource pricing. I do kind of wish they had chosen a more accommodating physical element besides paper money, but the fact that prices fluctuate as the game progresses and also in reaction to people’s purchasing decisions is genius. I’m definitely looking forward to playing this one again.
• Sorry! Sliders – We played some more of this with a four-player configuration and a long, three-section track. It’s still fun but like many manual dexterity games and games aimed at younger audiences it’s losing it’s magic rapidly. I probably have one more session left in me in the near future before I’d need a long break on it.
• Bionic Commando: Rearmed – My only real video gaming forays of late have been in XBLA territory and this is my single-player title du jour. I’m impressed continually with how well they managed to maintain the delicate balance between staying true to the sensibility and feel of the original while masking its very present flaws in ways that make this remake not just a new skin on an old game but actually fulfills the promise of what that aging title could have been. It’s impressive work.
• Ticket to Ride – My multiplayer gaming was also XBLA-based as I picked up the Europe expansion for the game and played a couple of rounds with Dr. Mac. I like how TTR has the kind of light strategy mechanics that really allow it to stand out in an online format: You don’t need to fully pay attention during other player’s turns as their play process is of no consequence, only the final result. I understand why Days of Wonder has taken to making each new variant (Marklin, Europe, etc) unique with its own feel and flow, but it does frustrate me a little that bits that work well in one edition won’t always even be included in later games making them less like revisions and more like new twists on the base game. I would like to see something that really tries to be the ultimate edition of the game incorporating the best mechanical elements from all the variant games. It would be nice if they used the online format (like XBLA) to allow you to customize the maps and game mechanics a little in an effort to see what people prefer.

Hobby Corner

I finished my Shadowforge female elf Blood Bowl team just in time for PacifiCon so I plan to use them in the tournament Thom is running Friday night. It will be interesting to see how that goes since I’m so used to playing bruiser-style teams and the elves are… not. As for the models themselves I think I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. I used nothing but static grass for the bases and I think I would have made a few adjustments in how I handled the overall process along the way (I still have four extra models that won’t get used unless I enter them in a league at some point so I will yet have a chance to experiment with them) but overall the results are okay. I mostly just tried to do justice to the wonderful models themselves which are really well made. So kudos to Shadowforge; unfortunately the only other teams they have model sets for are Dark Elves (too close to regular elves to be my next team), Orcs (already have some orcs) and Humans. I’m now very tempted to buy a team of the humans to make a male/female team using the plastic models that came with the boxed set, but there are two reasons I might not want to do that. One is that it would give me an over abundance of models where some were drastically overshadowed by others. The other reason is that I actually like the GW human models (at least the metal ones) so I’m not sure double-dipping in the Shadowforge line would be as great if I weren’t specifically compensating for the repugnant “official” line.

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.

The List

• Blood Bowl – I played through two more matches. Winning both, I’ve now put together three straight wins and a five-game set of zero defeats if you include the two earlier ties. But, listen, only one of those five games was against Thom. That’s not meant to take anything away from my other opponents, but in his 15 games to date he’s 10-1-4 so he’s clearly the most dominant coach. He’s also the player I personally have the most trouble with. However, I have been having more success in general because of lessons I’ve learned. I’m more comfortable with my Undead team now, I know how to avoid setting myself up for failure. Saturday’s game against Aaron’s Lizardmen was my most significant win thus far: I was playing an unknown team who may have had significant advantages in terms of speed and strength in some cases and I still came out on top 3-1. It easily could have been closer, but just breaking the two-TDs-per-game barrier was signficant to me.
• Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 – The per-game-mode leaderboards are what are inspiring most of my dedication to the game at this point. The fact that someone else on my Friends List has a higher score on a couple modes drives me crazy and my obsessive pursuit of regaining the crown has me up late at night. Certain modes are clearly my strong suits while others have a maddening ability to mock me: Almost without fail every time I think, “Hey, this is shaping up to be a pretty good round,” I make a series of preventable mistakes and cost myself a lofty perch on top of the leaderboard. It’s possibly petty to care, but competition isn’t something I normally experience so when I do I guess it’s just for the best that it comes in arenas where there are virtually zero consequences.
• Etrian Odyssey II – I’ve slowed my progress some mostly due to fewer instances of downtime in the past week or so. I did finish a couple of non-story quests and earned some items I already had for my troubles.
• Sorry! Sliders – I spent some time at Thom’s house on Saturday night while my wife had a girl’s night at our place. Of course we played some Blood Bowl but after Aaron left we tried out his new dexterity game, Sorry! Sliders. Basically you take some customized Sorry! pieces that have ball bearings in their bases and you slide them along these cardboard tracks in a kind of curling/bocce variant. There are quite a few variations but my clear favorite was one that had a hole cut in the center just big enough to accept a single piece. A shallow ring around the cutout scored you your choice of either 4, 5 or 6 points. Points are awarded by moving mini Sorry! pieces along a vertical track toward a Home location but they have to enter Home by exact count.
  Since the center cutout was a Sorry! event that forced your highest scoring track piece back to the starting position but the ring around it was almost a guaranteed Home, it had a remarkable risk/reward dynamic that the other variants, despite being enjoyable, lacked. We played for about an hour and a half and while not the kind of game Thom and I usually gravitate toward, we had a lot of fun with it.

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.

The List

• Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 – Most of my time with this game was spent with a purpose. That’s kind of unusual for a GeoWars game, but as I alluded to above, the game has a different feel to begin with. It’s always trying to give you a goal. First it was unlocking all the game modes. I don’t know if it’s merciful or disappointing that they’ve chosen to be generous with their progression speed; you can obtain access to the full game in under an hour. After that I was trying to bump the other guy on my Friend’s List who had the game from the top spot for each mode. I was 66% successful. Finally I was trying to get some achievements and I think I wrapped up most of the easier ones. Others, like Wax Off and Treaty will take a little more effort. I like the game, don’t let me distract from that fundamental truth. As far as a complete package, I think this sequel is more of a whole game than the original. But it’s also twice as expensive and nothing that it offers achieves that zen of familairity meets originality from the predecessor which means it may be a better game, but I hesitate to call it an improved experience just yet.
• Blood Bowl – I played a match against Dave on Wednesday. When last I played him, during the trial league we played through the end of June and first part of July, we drew a tie in Orc vs. Undead. Against the humans he trounced me soundly and left the team basically unplayable what with all the injuries and deaths. So I was apprehensive going into this match. Fortunately it seems that at least some of my recent strategy evaluations have improved my coaching skills somewhat; I was finally able to secure a full-fledged victory.
  Granted, I may have used a couple of my skills incorrectly (Piling On requires the skill user to be placed prone which I forgot to do), but I think that by and large I can’t point to anything I did wrong nor anything I did especially right, I just didn’t make dumb, exploitable mistakes for once. I guess it made all the difference. One thing I did notice is that I won the coin toss at the beginning of the game which allowed me to receive first. I almost botched my chance to take a first half lead but I managed to pull it out in Turn 8 with some sports-movie heroics; either way it seemed that controlling the ball for most of the opening drive was a great way to put Dave back on his heels.
• Etrian Odyssey II – I’m still slogging my way through the 2nd Strata; my two-party system was a bit of a bust since I end up wanting to keep certain characters on board at all times. I’m finding the Beast class to be superior in direct damage at an earlier stage than the Ronin which is kind of a bummer since I’ve had the Ronin as a key party member since the outset. But the Beast also fills in for the Troubadour in terms of FOE manipulation, if only the XP-boosting passive skill from the Troubadour had some sort of analog elsewhere. I’m finding the Alchemist to be a curious stumper. He has incredible potential but in most random encounters he’s largely useless because I don’t want to bother boosting his STR or giving him powerful melee weapons. Yet his elemental damage is occasionally necessary for certain resistant or high defensive enemies so I tend to only need him around on occasion. That seems like a poor excuse for using a precious spot on my 5-man adventuring team.

Hobby Corner

Spent more time working on the female elves over the weekend, getting a few coats of skin highlights and some base color on the larger areas of the uniforms. I’m struggling a little because my basic technique is to paint lighter colors first so I don’t have to multi-coat them over a dark basecoat. But when it gets down to putting the edges on the dark color, I have to be careful not to bleed over the skin tones. This means I need a fine paint brush and a steady hand. I burn through brushes like mad because as soon as they get a little used they no longer hold their tip as well and they become useless for what I’m trying to do. At $4 a pop that’s not very economical. I’ve already committed on these figs but I think I may go for a whole different approach on my next set of models. Not only is this method costly and furstrating, it’s excruciatingly slow as well. With less than three weeks to go before I want to have these done, I don’t need a plodding technique on top of my already crazy perfectionism.

Parting Shot

I received a disc containing a 10-day trial for World of Warcraft. In the mail, AOL-style. I appreciate that the game is so incredibly popular and Blizzard wants to do whatever they can to attract people who might not yet be hooked on playing the game to give it a shot. But I have to wonder if this sort of marketing is really effective. I’ve occasionally considered giving WoW a shot but I know that one of two outcomes are likely: I’d become obsessed with it and get myself into trouble for spending too much time with a game or I wouldn’t care for it and end up incurring monthly fees on a game I don’t play.

Given this overt attempt to appeal to a greater base however, I’m unlikely to ever try the game at all now. AOL disc spam used to make me insane, even if WoW is the best game ever and the thing I’ve needed to make my life complete, their co-oping of this onerous tactic has lowered their standing in my mind to the point where I can’t in good conscious even support a publisher who behaves this way. I can only assume they got my address because I subscribe to some game magazine or in some way identified myself as a gamer. That being the case, I can’t imagine a gamer being unaware of WoW to the point where they’d see a disc in the mail of all places and say, “What’s this? Maybe I should check it out.” If I’m a gamer and I haven’t already tried WoW I don’t think there’s any way a disc in hand is going to be the sudden burst of convenience that pushes me over the edge. The fact that Blzzard thinks otherwise is enough to convince me in the exact opposite direction.

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.

The List

Short and sweet like the last few weeks. I’d blame the travel more adamantly, but I doubt it would ring particularly true.

• Blood Bowl – I played against Aaron’s Dwarf team which was interesting. He threatened to score very early (especially for a “slow” team) and while I was able to delay him for a few turns, it wasn’t enough. He was getting really excellent die rolls so I can’t pinpoint any specific strategic thing I could have done differently except that, as noted above, I placed all three of my ghouls on the starting defensive line and left two zombies sitting in the Reserves box. I need to learn to prepare for the situation at hand and not what I wish it were. In the end I managed to clear the pitch enough to score but I left enough time at the end of the second half to permit a last ditch effort to score. I was saved only by two botched dodge rolls so it could have been a 1-2 loss as easily as it was a 1-1 tie.
  I can’t help but feel like there is an untapped vein of strategic gold that I need to locate to help push me past this hump of close-game-tie-game outcomes but I have yet to determine what it is or even what it relates to. I’ve made incremental improvements in my game just by sheer volume of experience in the last few weeks. Maybe I need to have an opportunity to play more teams outside my familiarity range or maybe I need to play with teams that lend themselves to different strategies to break the mental deadlock, I’m not sure. My window for such a change may be opening soon enough.
• Etrian Odyssey II – By the time I reached Chimaera, he was a little disappointing. Not that I didn’t have to work a little to get past him, but it certainly wasn’t as troubling as some of the lesser FOEs have been (Stalkers, for example). I did raise in skill and ability high enough to handle the Furyhorns on Level 2 but it wasn’t until I had a fairly impressive run through and got my Ronin’s Force skill active that I could at last live long enough to defeat a single Stalker.
  Meanwhile I’ve found that the Beast character class is rapidly becoming one of my favorites; it offers most of the long-term benefits of the War Magus and the FOE interrupts of the Troubadour while maintaining a powerful front-line presence. I’ve carried the Troubadour and Beast together for the last few hours of play since I have the Troub’s Divinity XP-boosting at Mastery level and I want the Beast to catch up with the rest of us. So far the strategy has paid dividends, but meanwhile I’ve left some of my other characters in the dust.
  Anyway, three weeks, 2nd Stratum and 7th Floor. I now know there are 30 floors in presumably six Strata so my initial estimates to complete the game are not that far off.

Hobby Corner

Gaming may have been necessarily light due to the weekend trip, but when we returned I found the Shadowforge female elf Blood Bowl team I had ordered was waiting for me. I wasted no time in getting the base team (11 players) assembled and primed and I picked up a striking bottle of purple paint for their uniforms as well as some replacement flesh tones (since my old ones were miserably dried out and goopy). I don’t know how long it will take to get the team into operational condition, but I hope to enter them in the Friday night tournament at ConQuest SF which is in 25 days. I guess it will be a race to the finish.