Tunnels of Doom

The demise of E3 is regularly trumpeted as imminent, foregone or perhaps in some cases past tense. In any case some variant of it forges ahead roughly every 365 days so I presume that these discussions are moot. And while there appears to be a unanimity about the appropriate level of hype associated with the event, somewhere between rhetoric and action exists a sheet of ether made from what I call oppositium, whose sole purpose is to flip the outcome 180 degrees from the stated intent. So while journalists talk cool and lean back, nonchalantly saying “Oh, it’s just E3, no big,” what comes out of their mouths in a shrill, girlish squeal is “OhmygoshE3ohmygoshEEEeeeeThreeeeee!!”

No news that perforated my filter struck me as particularly noteworthy. There are going to be sequels to big franchise games, which I suppose qualifies as news similar to the way they throw the sunrise and sunset times and tide reports at the end of the weather forecast as though it were some kind of pertinent information. Also, I guess Xbox Live’s Dashboard is now designed by Apple and Nintendo? The revamp is… good? They spent the first couple of years excising the active user hostility from the first iteration, so this reset will be, um, new. And then there are the additional details about games we already anticipated which reinforce their imminent awesomeness. I don’t know, I felt a remarkable lack of interest in the press coverage considering the highlight of the show seemed to be a concert by The Who exclusively for media types which had, at best, a peripheral connection to Rock Band but unless Harmonix is prepared to send Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey over to my house to jam with me, this comes across as audience pandering; the ultimate schwag.

Meanwhile my actual gaming gets narrower in scope while the depth expands beyond the oceanic floor level, deep into the crevasses of near singular obsession. Whoever thought it was smart to put a lunatic OCD-targeted turn-based dungeon crawler on an easy-to-use hand held device that lists, among its key feature set, at-will clamshell hibernation mode—well, they didn’t take into consideration the impact it would have on my particular mind. Etrian Odyssey II goes with me everywhere. I steal moments between meal bites to search a wall for secret passages. I adjust inventories at red lights. In the time it has taken me to write this sentence, I’ve gained three experience levels.

EOII has a mechanic where enemies that are visible in the dungeon view (as glowing orbs; the graphical presentation of the 3D environment is more suggestive than representative), called FOEs, move through the dungeon in particular fashions. They may patrol a set course, or they may fly over areas you cannot pass. Or, in some cases, they may stand still or move very little but when you get within range they attempt to follow you and engage you in combat. FOEs are disastrously overpowered enemies. I accidentally read a spoiler that indicated there are at least 24 floors to the dungeon (probably more) and I’ve reached all of the fourth. However, my principal party members are hovering around level 17 and to date I’ve only been able to handle a singe FOE. Perhaps this indicates something about my choices in skill allotment as I advance, but I routinely handle the random encounter creatures at higher floors without even manual intervention (viva the L button Auto key) in less than a full turn. I suspect the FOEs are designed to be moving obstacles more than actual level-specific opposition.

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I mentioned last week that I was anticipating the arrival of my newest Goozex score, Etrian Odyssey II. I had been hankering for a dungeon crawler, something like a PC role-playing experience perhaps along the lines of Oblivion. Depth, you know? I don’t want to wander too far into a tangent already, but I keep trying these Japanese-style role-playing games and aside from the tactical ones, I find them insufferable. I guess I’m the one who changed and not the games (though my recent stint into FF VI suggests the games themselves are a bit different as well) and maybe it’s just that the “real-time battle systems” turn me off, perhaps explaining why the tactical variants aren’t as painful. But considering the fact that turn-based RPGs are outnumbered by real time variants something like 60 to 1, it strikes me as not surprising that I was feeling like it was a game type I wanted to re-connect with again.

Anyway, Etrian Odyssey II. I wish I knew where to start. The game itself has gotten pretty strong reviews, and yet it’s something that I suspect will fly far beneath most gamers’ radar. It works a lot like older PC dungeon crawlers. It’s turn-based, although the pace can be particularly brisk if you choose, so each step you take in the dungeon counts as a turn. Encounters are, for the most part, random although you do have a gauge that indicates the likelihood of an attack on the next turn. It’s not precise, but it does give a pretty good indicator of when to heal up if necessary. And there are a few enemies that are visible, usually boss-type creatures. These can occasionally be circumvented and usually avoided by judicious retreat. But a huge part of the game is the cartography, which is where most of the game’s DS functionality comes into play. Since it’s turn based you can avoid a Foe (the visible boss creatures) and mark your map to note its location for later. The mapping options are surprisingly robust all around, and enjoyable enough that they’ve somehow managed to make me go back to drawing maps by hand and I’m happy about it.

Aside from the turn-based aspect and mapping, there is also a clever class and advancement system: You earn experience for random encounters in keeping with the genre standards, but there is no accompanying financial reward. At least not directly and certainly not assuredly. Instead you get various trophies from certain critters you’ve vanquished, which can be sold for an almost universally paltry sum at the town shop. They then charge exorbitant prices for the goods you value. Meanwhile the experience points accumulate as you’d expect, and after a particular cache of them has been accumulated you level up. Except unlike most RPGs, the leveling process isn’t gifted, with automatic generosity in terms of extra HP, magic and attribute bonuses along with maybe some sort of tech tree. I mean, there is a tech tree unique to each class and you can choose how to progress within it, but you get either a skill or a single trait bonus. Each level.

Let me put it another way: In order for your Medic to earn the Revive skill, which brings a character back from 0 HP, you need no fewer than six level advancements which provide no additional bonuses to combat or defensive capabilities. It’s this kind of treatment of a player that gives the game its reputation for being punishing (check a few reviews to see what people think about it) but it feels so much to me like the older games that had little patience for sissy gamers who wanted to step into the game as a minor deity and exit the game as something analog to the champion of the universe.

There was a time when I spent a whole summer on a dungeon crawler, fighting and re-fighting my way through sections getting satisfaction from the minor victories. There is so much about those halcyon days that is captured in this game, and it is just what I wanted. The platform makes it compatible with my adult life, the anachronism makes it feel like something that maybe shouldn’t even exist in these times. I want to find the person responsible for this game and give them a hug. Of course I’d quickly end the embrace and clear my throat, offering a firm handshake instead. There are appearances to maintain, after all.

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Gamers will probably agree that there is no single perfect game. A few dedicated folks might pick chess or go or perhaps poker as the only game they care about, but gamers are sort of defined by their interest in the scope of games as a whole. Without that purview into games, the hobby loses some of its intrigue. What emerges, instead, is a contextually perfect game. This is the art of playing the right game at the right time, and it’s also about finding the ideal game for the individual gamer within a range of games that share mechanics or styles or themes.

I had a chance to play Ticket to Ride multiplayer on XBLA over the weekend with Doctor Mac. It was Saturday afternoon, my wife was sleeping off a headache and I was looking for something to pass the time. I had been playing a variety of demos and picking my way through GTA IV a little but I wasn’t really into it the way I had hoped I’d be. When Doctor Mac hopped online and asked if I was interested in playing something, I suggested TTR and before I knew it we had worked through seven games in a row. I’ve played the TTR board game many times, and I’ve owned most of the tabletop products at one time or another. I’ve also played a lot of the web-based PC version on Days of Wonder’s website, so this should have been just another TTR session. But for a lazy Saturday afternoon, with voice chat on my couch and a new player experiencing the game for the first time on the other end of the line, it was exactly what I was looking for in a game at that moment.

Perfection, I realized, also comes when elements of a game meet a particular gamer’s needs. I’ve spent plenty of time in the past few weeks talking about Blood Bowl and after last week’s matches I started thinking about why I’ve been so much more consistently intrigued by Blood Bowl than other Games Workshop titles. It’s not that I’m better at it than other games, I’m a consistently terrible BB player. And it isn’t that the game itself does any one thing so much better than other titles. What it comes down to is that it has the perfect confluence of complexity, strategy, mechanics and hobby elements to scratch my particular itch.

Take the other GW game that I’ve spent a lot of time with, Warhammer 40K. Thematically, I actually prefer 40K: As much as I enjoy a good fantasy setting, I gravitate toward Sci-Fi when given the choice. It’s why I’ve never been much interested in Warhammer Fantasy Battles or Lord of the Rings. But 40K, once you move past the wonderfully rich setting, is in fact just a game. And as a game I find it to be somewhat clunky. Matches take too long and the rules are by turns too abstract and yet can be too methodical. From a hobby perspective the armies are too large and tedious to put together and paint. The barrier to entry is too high. It’s not a bad game, and I’ve enjoyed almost all the time I’ve spent with both elements of the game (hobby and play). Yet when you compare 40K to Blood Bowl…

Blood Bowl, to me, is a more enjoyable game. It’s constraints in terms of playing field and available tactics add a level of elegance I don’t think a larger, more loosely constructed game like 40K can ever achieve. Most of the complaints I have with 40K can be addressed with skirmish-level games like Necromunda (which I also prefer to 40K) but at root Blood Bowl is a board game which I think reigns in some of the more tedious facets of tabletop miniatures gaming. There are no concessions for awkward line-of-sight rules or clumsy measurements to be made for movement. You have spaces on a board, and strictly defined character options that (mostly) avoid beardy customization. Yet there is a tremendous level of flexibility in Blood Bowl as you create your teams from a vast list and engage in the hobby aspect at exactly the level that fits my comfort zone. I find it overwhelming and dull to slop paint on dozens of 40K troops and then vehicles, special units and commanders. Yet I have just enough patience to crank my way through 15 or 16 Blood Bowl models.

The final element to gaming perfection is the mood-based context. There have been times when I’ll play a game I don’t really think is that great because it’s the right kind of game for my mood. A good example is Blacksite Area 51. I played the game several weeks ago (before trading it away) because I was in the mood for a military shooter. I’ve been slowly working my way through Jeanne D’Arc because while I actually like it, I don’t think it’s the best tactical turn-based RPG I’ve played, it’s what I have on hand and it fills that niche for me. The curse of the gamer of course is that occasionally you’ll find yourself wanting to play something that either you don’t have or that you can’t reasonably play right then. This weekend I found myself really wanting to play an old-school style dungeon crawler. A few friends have been playing Etrian Odyssey II on DS, but I had to wait until I could find a trader on Goozex since I don’t have the cash on hand to go pick it up. Fortunately, gaming desires lead to determination; I manipulated my way to the top of the trade list for EO II and got matched by the end of the weekend. Next week I should have the game and a full report.

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Christmas 2006: I opened a gift from my wife, about the size of a book. Except, it rattled when shaken, and I was somewhat puzzled. To my delight, the package contained a box of miniatures, an Undead Blood Bowl team. Earlier that year, at a convention, I had stumbled across a sometimes difficult to find team booster pack for the Undead containing one each of the Undead types: A zombie, a skeleton, a wight, a ghoul and a mummy. The box contained three zombies, three skeletons and two each of the wights, ghouls and mummies which gave me a nice selection to start from. Before the end of the month I had them all primed and had begun painting.

I wanted to take my time with this team; before the Undead my only models were the Orcs and Humans that came with the boxed set and they were plastic. I had chosen the Orcs as my primary team and had managed to fill them out with a few extra models picked here and there from flea markets and bitz orders online. But they had been fairly hastily painted and I really wanted this team that I had specifically selected to look great. So I made slow early progress.

When we moved across town in the spring of 2007, our condo had a detached garage. At first I thought it was going to be great: I’d effectively have a dedicated area for painting and modeling. I even put a big gaming/work desk out there. The problem was, my focus shifted soon after we moved there. I worked a nasty grave shift for the first few months that left me with too little time with my wife to comfortably retreat to a man-cave when I wasn’t working or sleeping. By the time my schedule settled down I was absorbed in video games rather than tabletop games and the gaming area in the garage took on an out-of-sight, out-of-mind status.

In the last month, my focus shifted again. I started a Blood Bowl mini-league. A longer-form league is scheduled to start at the end of July, and it won’t accept unpainted teams. I was time to get serious about this team I had once been so excited about. So over the last few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time hunched over our dining room table, plastic cup of water in front of me, jazz playing on the stereo, applying coat after coat of paint to more than a dozen figurines. This weekend I finally finished the first 13 models (of 17 total) plus a grim reaper-looking guy from the Warhammer Fantasy Battles line that serves as my Assistant Coach and a Harpy that is acting as my team’s Cheerleader. The significance of the 13 is that it is enough models to field a complete league-ready team.

Overall, I’m happy with the results. A few of the models are significantly better looking than some, and a couple I might like to go back and take another shot at. But individually I think the quality is a step above the first team I finished, the Orcs. And it only took me a year and a half.

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There was a point during the match where I could have pretty much ensured a tie. It was about midway through the first half of my Blood Bowl game for the quickie league I organized pitting my unpainted and untested human team (The Mungborough Misfits) against Dave’s orcs (Orktown Aggravators). One of my catchers had the ball with the second catcher pacing him down the sideline for protection. The only one of the Aggravators that offered any sort of obstacle was a lone, outnumbered linebacker who sat there just to give me a tackle zone to dodge out of. Instead I sent in reinforcements for the block and took him down, giving me nothing but open green to the end zone.

The distance was a bit more than I could cover in a single turn, even with the catcher’s eight movement points. So I pushed it (GFI). And I pushed it again, only this time I rolled the hated one. So I used a team re-roll, and I got another one. Granted, the odds were very low of hitting a one on two consecutive rolls (about 2.8% according to these 40K Leadership test odds) but what I didn’t even bother to consider was that I didn’t actually need to Go For It because there was no Orc, other than the one I’d already knocked over who had a very outside chance of influencing the play on the next turn, that could have caught me. And I had plenty of remaining safe moves to build a cage and ensure a score a turn later if I’d exercised a little patience. I fully blame my own miserable coaching skills, but a small part of me has reserved a sliver of contempt for my lack of experience with any type of team that wasn’t slow and strong.

The three teams I’ve played the most are Orcs, Dwarves and Undead. That includes opponents, but other than two matches using borrowed Elves, agility-based strategies have been laughable. Even those Elf teams were a little different because the name of the game in Elf vs. <insert bruiser team here> is avoidance. The humans, on the other hand, look on paper like they have some hitting ability as well. The truth is that the human team is supposedly well-rounded with no particular strength or weakness. The problem with that is the game actively punishes middle-of-the-road teams who have no specialization because so many other teams load their arrangement toward a particular strategy. It leaves the jack of all trades, master of none role as effectively limp: The humans for example aren’t quite strong enough to play a blocking-heavy game nor are they quite agile enough to play a speed or ball possession game [1].

All of which had me contemplating the role of humans in fantasy-based games. Whether the setting is futuristic or not, the division of races in most of these games usually has humans serving as the base-line and riffing on that main theme to create the flavor for the other beings. Call them Elves or call them Vulcans, they are still more elegant, refined and graceful with longer lifespans and more angular features than humans. I understand that as a fictional device it is necessary to provide a frame of reference for characters. Very few people can relate to a Gelatinous Cube player character, for example. But in so many of these cases humans are included in games or fiction seemingly to provide only for comparison’s sake. The interesting part is exploring the possibility of having special night vision or strength that no man could hope to wield.

So I have to ask, why are humans included at all? I have a human Blood Bowl team because it came with the boxed set and while the metal minis are significantly cooler than the plastic pieces that come with the box, I’m not sure I’d be inclined to spend $50 on a set when there are other, more interesting options. The question remains even for games like Oblivion or Shadowrun, why would you want to play a human? Unless the conflict between humanity and the other races is pivotal to the narrative (see Mass Effect), they strike me as far less interesting than the alternative. I wonder if there is merit to the idea of creating a world where humans are not the “standard” race or if, because of our nature, such a feat would actually be impossible.

1. This is actually a bit misleading for the purpose of the argument. Actually the thing is that humans aren’t adept enough at the agility game to be a true counter to a bruiser team nor are they quite hard-hitting enough to put the hurt on a lightning quick skill team like Skaven or Elves. Instead I presume they have their own strategy that involves a little from column A, and a little from column B. This is where my own poor coaching comes into play for not knowing where to draw the distinction, but my point, I think, stands.

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I guess I figured there would be more gaming last week. I had some time off work, I had ample enthusiasm and somehow I ended up doing gaming related activities more than playing games. I recall now that this happens when you’re focused on tabletop gaming. A lot of time is spent building campaigns, painting, modeling, planning, organizing, preparing, reading, testing and generally doing everything besides actually playing so that the limited time available to play the games goes as smoothly as possible.

It’s certainly not un-enjoyable. I particularly enjoy the artistic satisfaction that comes from painting and modeling miniatures. And there is a certain part of my brain that finds the continual battle for proper organization to be unexpectedly soothing when you consider how much of a slob I am under other conditions. For example I spent a good portion of yesterday morning printing out various summaries for Blood Bowl rules and creating portable dugout templates and arranging them neatly in a binder with the LRB and copies of my team rosters. Would I ever happily spend that much time organizing my financial statements? Highly unlikely.

Speaking of Blood Bowl, I did get one match in against Thom, as an inaugural match for my brief time-based league, TRMBBL. Thom is starting a year-long league in August using the standard rules and I wanted to get in a short pre-season to give people a chance to fiddle with their rosters and get their teams up and painted before the real league began. Thus was born TRMBBL and the first match was Thom’s Cleaveland Browns versus my half-painted Deadmonton Dirtnaps. Both teams are bruisers (the Browns are Orcs, the Dirtnaps are Undead) so we expected a long slugfest. And we got one. Of course I rolled garbage all day long (viva the mighty 3 on 2D6) so I barely got any advancement at all other than the random MVP at the end.

I also didn’t execute very well. The final score was 1-0 in favor of the Browns, but I imagine I could have stopped the initial drive that resulted in the score if I’d been a bit more defensive minded. Granted I’d never played with the Undead before so I was sort of learning as I went, but getting into a position where a Skeleton has to dodge and push it twice on a Blitz just to attempt a two-die defender chooses block on the ball carrier who can score at will if any of those tough rolls goes south is poor planning. Very poor.

Still, it was good times and surrendering a couple of Fan Factor for pitting an unfinished team against a completely finished one was sufficient motivation to get some more paint on my guys. I even stopped at a game store after the match and picked up some white primer so I could finish priming my Necromunda gang and get my sweet Undead cheerleaders and assistant coach worked on. So despite the apparent dearth of game playing, I did a good amount of general gaming. I only wish desire and effort had some sort of positive effect on dice rolls.

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In the Parting Shot last week I mentioned a phenomenon I refer to as a gaming cycle. It’s where my interest in particular aspect of the gaming hobby, which I participate in on a pretty broad level, shifts from being my primary focus to make way for a different aspect that is taking its place. Last week I mentioned it mostly as a sort of trivial aside, describing the general method by which I approach a range of activities that fall under the same banner that holds a broad appeal.

But I noticed more sharply the shifting of the cycle during the week that followed as what has been a year-plus fixation on video games as my primary focus began to wane. Even as recently as last week I had assumed the new interest in tabletop style games was a minor priority re-alignment but over the course of this week I found myself leaning more toward activities that didn’t involve a controller. Not that I didn’t play any video games, but as I found myself wrapping up some of the last few games that had really commanded my attention recently I was putting less effort into finding something to replace them and focusing more on using the additional time to paint miniatures or research campaign settings.

Part of it is the typical doldrums of the occasional lull in highly anticipated video game titles. At the end of the last installment of $60 a Month I listed a number of upcoming games I was interested in. Re-reviewing those titles I realize that the only games I’m genuinely excited about are Space Invaders Extreme, Bionic Commando Rearmed and D&D 4th Edition. Even of those, I’m unlikely to buy Space Invaders for full retail price as it seems much more likely I’ll Goozex trade for it and Bionic Commando is a downloadable title. Which means my primary purchases for the month of June are likely to be, for the first time since I started $60 a Month, principally non-video games.

I view this as mostly academic. I don’t really mourn for gaming sub-genres or styles that aren’t really holding my interest very strongly for a period of time. History indicates they will come back around again but what I find interesting is the other thing I mentioned last week which was that I’d never had a means of cataloging my various phase shifts before. I wonder if, due to a forced introspection from a weekly activity log, a certain equilibrium might be achieved.

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Unlike most Gaming Weekend posts, I didn’t actually play the game I want to talk about in the technical sense. I suppose you can count painting miniatures as part of the game (I do) but it isn’t the same as rolling the dice. But I spent more time over the past week thinking about and peripherally involved in Blood Bowl than almost anything else so I figure it qualifies as being what’s on my mind the most this week.

What’s striking to me about Blood Bowl is that it’s one of those games that has a mechanic I struggle with. Specifically the blocking mechanic involves just a few too many variables for me to really get a handle on: Essentially you have two models each with a Strength attribute. When they are in adjacent squares, you can throw a block on the other. Blocks are handled by rolls on special six sided dice included in the game with various results. There are potentially unpleasant results in a third of the possible outcomes; in a game where one missed roll means your entire turn is over that’s tough odds. Typically Strength attributes are equal: When that’s the case you roll a single block die and simply accept the results. If the blocking plater has more Strength than the defender you get to roll two block die and choose the result you find most preferable. If the blocking player has more than double the defender’s Strength, a third die is added to the rolls (which is statistically very, very unlikely to result in an unwanted outcome).

Since most of the Strength attributes in the game are clustered around threes and fours, the principal strategy comes from the judicious use of block assists: Each player has an area of influence in adjacent squares. When a player has a teammate adjacent to their target when they attempt a block, that teammate provides a +1 Strength bonus for assisting the block. This is cumulative as well, so if you surround an opposing player on all sides, the blocking player Strength is augmented by +7 (almost certainly a three-die block). The trick is that in order to assist, a teammate can’t be adjacent to any other opponents simultaneously.

In practice these aren’t quite as complex as they sound but they are sometimes as difficult, for me, to determine quickly by looking at the board. The problem comes down to an overwhelming number of variables that I have a hard enough time sorting out in my simple brain when the play is right in front of me but when I have to visualize the possibilities to plan my actions, it’s almost guaranteed that I’ll overlook something critical, which is why I rarely win Blood Bowl games.

But as I planned my upcoming Blood Bowl league this week, I got to thinking about how much I appreciate intricacy in my games. Part of why I love Blood Bowl so much is precisely because it’s complex and the interactions are difficult for me. It feels like skill when I successfully engineer a Blood Bowl play versus something like Monopoly where much of the game is luck or at the very least “influenced chance.” It extends to all types of games I enjoy: Even games like Overlord have a certain intertwined system within it where you have to, by the end of the game, manage a variety of tasks and co-ordinate an increasing number of resources as smoothly as possible to really succeed.

I used to think that video role-playing games were my favorite type but as I’ve gotten older and found myself growing more and more frustrated with Japanese-style role-playing games I wondered what was going on. The epiphany I had this week was that jRPGs were, in the 8- and 16-bit eras, the most intricate game types you could find. By my disposition they were the ones I gravitated toward. But as video games matured the intricacy of RPGs branched out into other styles and jRPGs remained fairly static in terms of having a sort of arbitrary intricacy that lacked elegance: They felt on-rails like they had become more enamored with their brand of expository storytelling than they were with maintaining a sense of depth across their core mechanics.

I tried my hand at Crisis Core for a bit this weekend and found it to be so clumsy and smug with it’s random interface elements and mindlessly busy gameplay that amounted mostly to pounding on the X button and I thought, “This isn’t elegant, it’s just overwrought.” I contrasted it to Jeanne D’Arc, Blood Bowl, Overlord and even Lost Cities which all have a central conceit that facilitates a sense of accomplishment by being beautiful with their complexity rather than just crowding a hackneyed system with a bunch of needless layers of abstraction and inexplicable variables so it can make some false claim to testing a player’s dexterity or strategy. I find games I hate are typically ones that don’t start from a place of saying, “Here’s something that would be fun to play with” but that start by saying, “This is something we want to tell or say or explore as a concept.” Indigo Prophecy fell into that trap. Crisis Core ruined itself for that reason, and I wish it wasn’t so but every jRPG I’ve played with one exception since Final Fantasy VII has been exactly the same.

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I think, strangely enough, this weekend marks the first gaming convention I’ve attended since Tunnels of Doom’s inception. I’m too lazy to dig through the archives to verify, but considering that ToD began in a period where my convention conscience (my buddy Thom) was out of the country, it seems likely. I say this is strange because before Thom left, him and I were getting to be pretty regular on the Bay Area convention circuit. Essentially our main stops each year were DunDraCon on President’s Day weekend and Kublacon on Memorial Day weekend with plenty of interest in ConQuest (Labor Day) as well. We even made a trip down to SoCal to hit Gen Con one year.

But without my con buddy, it was difficult to find the motivation to regularly attend. I almost hate to feel like his presence is required to make the trip but truth be told most cons for us are an excuse to escape to a gamer-friendly place away from home for a bit and play games with our group of friends and catch the flea markets, dealer rooms and maybe an event or two. Which is to say we typically don’t immerse ourselves in the official con-sanctioned games as often as we use their free play rooms and the time allotted to devote entire days or weekends to playing. I suppose considering that, it’s not as unusual that I’d eschew the cons when he’s not around.

So this year the group has slowly started to come back together with our center of gravity as it were back in action. But there has been plenty of upheaval recently and while we’re transitioning back into regular tabletop gaming, Kublacon crept up on everyone. As a way of easing back in there was no pre-planned room reservation or full weekend passes (for me anyway) but we did decide that we definitely wanted to play in the Blood Bowl tournament scheduled for Friday night and everyone was interested in going to the first-night flea market.

The Blood Bowl Tourney was run by people we didn’t know and they had some interesting ideas including custom pitches for each match with special rules on each. As I cynically expected the rules weren’t particularly balanced, often favoring bruiser teams with a lot of AV adjustments for extra carnage (which I can’t complain about too much; I played Orcs) but they were pretty clever in general and it seemed like they added a fun element of the unexpected. I felt a little bad for Thom since he ended up drawing matches against our buddy Aaron first round and then got matched up with me for round two meaning he only got to play against people he plays all the time anyway but I’ve never known Thom to turn down a game of Blood Bowl no matter who the opponent might be.

Afterward we made our way to the flea market where I picked up a couple of new games on the cheap and while I could have continued to shop it was extremely crowded with bargain-hungry gamers and there were only so many oversized elbows I was willing to take in the ribs before I had to hasten my exit.

Considering I only spent about six hours total at a four-day convention I felt like I had a good time. If nothing else it certainly whet my appetite for the con scene again and I expect ConQuest in September to be a much bigger deal.

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I spent most of the weekend playing games where you control either a villain or, at best, an antihero type. My three primary focuses were Grand Theft Auto IV, God of War: Chains of Olympus and Overlord. I found it interesting that each game had the same basic premise of casting the player as a less than heroic fellow, but all three go about it in completely different ways.

GTA, for example, casts you as a reluctant sociopath. Niko Bellic spends a lot of time bemoaning his lot in life, guilt-tripping his way through abhorrent actions and self-destructive behaviors but the freedom permitted by the game’s design dictates that it is a sort of phony-feeling character device. One review of the game I read questioned the way that Niko will, in one moment, berate himself for being a hired killer and in the next moment he’ll be offering to whack someone because they scammed a guy he’s just met. You can appreciate Rockstar trying to put a conscience on their protagonist, but in a game like GTA you end up having to suspend some disbelief in the character himself because the way he’s written and the way he acts under the player’s control is rarely consistent.

It’s actually a sort of characterization that works better in God of War. Since Kratos is such a bloodthirsty savage by design, his combat tells you most of what you need to know about the character: Anyone who jams a blade onto an opponent’s neck and yanks the body away is not the kind of guy you take to prom. But the story portions of the game is where his hint of humanity is revealed and the internal struggles that he endures through each game are highlighted precisely because they provide a startling contrast between what you come to understand about him through waves and waves of dismembered, brutalized foes. Where GTA tries to get the player to experience the turmoil inherent in the character through several remarks and a number of either-or scenarios (kill this person or let them live) and allows you to behave in a fairly responsible manner for a time, eventually you’ll encounter a mission where you have no choice but to bump off someone who may not exactly deserve it.

The difference is simply in the fact that while God of War is on a rail and can therefore manipulate the experience, GTA has to balance the open, almost role-playing elements with a scripted narrative and the two don’t always mesh cleanly together. And then there is Overlord, where the whole “you are the bad guy” thing is a device used primarily for comedic effect. Overlord is, at root, a sort of strategic fantasy action puzzle game (hi, adjectives!) but while it is often compared to a game I didn’t play, Pikmin, the whole conceit in this case works because it serves to complete the theme which is mostly a light send-up of your typical fantasy tropes. And in truth you aren’t exactly the nefarious boot-stomping psycho you might expect: You’re essentially the malevolent racist dictator who enslaves humans to free them from the influence of the other fantasy races like Halflings and Elves. I’m not far enough in to be sure but I imagine that there is some opportunity for subtext here that is missed, perhaps intentionally, just to keep things breezy. It would be pretty easy for the game to descend into the kind of darkness that would have made it even less accessible than it already is.

Since games are so good at wish fulfillment and fantasy exploration it makes sense for them to occasionally cast the player as the antihero. Even some characters in games who are true heroes at their core are at least presented on the surface level as, at best, chaotic neutral types (Marcus Fenix from Gears of War springs to mind). It is interesting though to watch as developers who may already struggle somewhat with the perceptions of their industry try to find the right tone to take with games where you ask the player to be something less than the classic “good guy.”

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