Tunnels of Doom

I had a chance to play some non-video games for the first time in a while this past week. A friend from out of town came and infiltrated a local board gaming group that meets in the vicinity of my work so I obliged a two-birds-one-stone deal and swung by after work. They were wrapping up a game of Race For the Galaxy when I arrived and while I was a tad bummed that I didn’t get a chance to play, I didn’t have to wait long.

There was an odd timing issue with some of the other attendees so we opted for a shorter game and settled on Regenwormen, which is the Dutch version of Pickomino. It’s a dice game at heart, with each turn’s play mechanics resembling Yahtzee where you roll a bunch of dice and select a like group to keep. The idea is to get the highest total possible and claim tiles with values that range from 21-36. When you claim the tiles you stack them; opponents can steal your tiles by rolling their exact value but since you stack them they can only steal the top tile which makes stacking a sort of protective measure.

What’s exciting about the game is that the scales tip dramatically since people who don’t make qualifying rolls both lose their top tile and eliminate the highest remaining tile from contention. Combined with the steal mechanism, people who shoot out to an early lead often find themselves struggling to restore their early game glory later on when people start swiping their tiles (it’s often easier to stop on a matched value and steal than push for a better tile and risk losing the entire roll).

Later in the week my wife and I returned from a dinner and realized the majority of our friends had gone away for the weekend so we settled in for a quiet night and pulled out Carcassonne: The Castle. Having played so much Carcassonne on XBLA since the last time I gave The Castle a shot I was surprised at how some of the core mechanics had been changed for the enclosed two-player variant. For example, you score all of your unfinished units at the end of Carcassonne while you need a special tile to do that in The Castle. I think it actually works to the latter game’s favor since it encourages in-game scoring (I lost a lot of points because I underestimated how quickly the game’s end was approaching at about the three-quarter mark). I also think the limited expansion area forces each player to be a little more aggressive in how they place each tile; in vanilla Carcassonne you can easily end up concentrating on a remote corner of the expanding playfield, dropping roads and monasteries for quick, small scores. If your opponent(s) don’t mind you incrementally bumping your score they may ignore you and focus on their own castle building elsewhere. In The Castle, you can’t presume your strategy won’t be interrupted by someone else, even inadvertently.

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The most shocking thing about Grand Theft Auto IV isn’t the ubiquitously referenced ultra-violence and winking misogyny on display. Rather, the most shocking thing is that for once Rockstar has lived up to their potential in crafting a game that does several unexpected things at once and the result is, for better or worse, an example of what a game can be in terms of interaction, narrative and socially conscious (and therefore relevant) satire.

I noticed it first when I found myself not adhering to my typical GTA playbook. Since GTA III I’ve basically started each game with a saveless rampage where I try to use the items readily available early in the game (usually a handgun, baseball bat and cars) to wreak as much carnage as I can muster. I do this mostly to get it out of my system but also to get a sense for how the Police AI in the game responds to my actions. Call it a warm-up for later in the game when I’m trying to avoid causing more havoc than necessary while I accomplish missions that have me setting fire to buildings or chasing down rival faction heads with a garbage truck. After I get arrested or killed in these pre-game excursions I usually re-load and start in on the game the way most people would.

In GTA IV I never got to the point where I wanted to wreck stuff just to see what the cops would do to me. In fact, even as I began playing through the missions and managing the game’s unexpectedly intriguing social standing system I found myself not playing as if I were in a criminal sandbox simulator where everything goes. I paid the tolls. I stopped at certain red lights (or at least waited for the cross traffic to clear). I avoided random confrontations with pedestrians. In effect I played the game the way the character was written, as a reluctant villain rather than an overt thug.

GTA IV has a remarkable way of placing you in this funhouse mirror of the US, drenched with an attention to detail that you might not expect even from Rockstar, and peppering it with game-based approximations of this character’s life that feel maybe not completely authentic but at the very least integrated with the rules of the world that has been created. The seasonings of smart dialogue, richly woven game elements (witness the wonder that is the new cellphone based in-game menu) and scalpel-edged satire make the stew that much more sumptuous. If you want to understand what Rockstar does right, compare and contrast the crass and subtlety-deprived Saints Row (a game I actually enjoyed) with Grand Theft Auto and you’ll find that Rockstar doesn’t back down from a biting remark or a juvenile in-game prank, but they’re smart enough to find the not-so-easy punchline rather than just resorting to the potty-mouthed shocker.

Not that GTA isn’t rude. It’s very much a game of excess, a parody of how stupefyingly obscene we all are that is reflected back to us through a lens of humor and escapism. No one is safe from the game’s sneering barbs here, and it is as it should be. But nearly hidden beneath the nose-thumbing swagger of the game’s obvious indifference to its own notoriety is a surprising humanity mostly shining from the superbly realized main character, Niko Bellic. He is a reluctant crook, a tortured murderer similar in some ways to San Andreas’ CJ but with more consistency and a more everyman quality. There but for the grace of God we all go, perhaps. The tone of the game feels spot-on as you understand Niko’s awe at the oddness of the city, it’s vulgarity and hostility. Casting the player as an immigrant is as smooth of a narrative decision as I’ve seen in game writing and design. It fits and it works because you feel alien in this world even as sometimes uncomfortably familiar as it is (to Americans).

The game isn’t perfect; technically it is maybe missing a few nice-to-have QA passes and gameplay-wise it hasn’t matured significantly since San Andreas since you’re still mostly chasing, fighting or fetching various things around the city. But I was looking for the title to be a step ahead in the evolution of Grand Theft’s signature formula. I didn’t expect an evolution in my concept of what a game could be.

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As discussed last weekend, my moving escapades have piled loads of work upon me. As a result, gaming gets pushed into these little time corners during unpacking breaks and stolen moments before exhaustion overtakes me when I should be in bed. On the bright side, the long weekend was productive and aside from a few remaining tasks that don’t have nearly the urgency of, say, “re-assemble bed,” we’re mostly settled in.

Of course part of my organizational efforts centered around the entertainment unit which is disappointingly awkward in set-up and presentation due to a fireplace we have in the new apartment. Ideally I’ll end up mounting the TV above the mantle and getting a smaller unit for the components off to one side, but that’s going to require some investment that I can’t afford for at least a couple of weeks (moving expenses drained my available money). To console myself I bought a new XBLA game, Lost Cities, and spent a couple of hours digging into it yesterday.

Basically the game is like a multiplayer solitaire with a scoring system that creates a risk-versus-reward mechanic out of each play. There are five colored columns and numbered cards for each going from two to ten. When you place any card on a column you spend twenty points to start, minus the value of the card. Each subsequent card played must be higher but not necessarily sequential and adds that face value to the the column total. So if you play a two you start with -18 points; then if you play a 5 you have -13 points and so on. Once you reach 10 you can’t play any further and that column is locked. That means the base value for a full run (2 through 10) is 35 points, but there is also a bonus for playing eight or more cards in a single column (giving back the start cost for an available total of 55).

The trick is that each column can be started with modifiers which increase the value for each played card. You can use up to three modifiers (granting 2x, 3x and 4x respectively) but they also add another 20 points to the starting cost. So a column with two modifiers starts at -40 but you get 3x for each card played. In the same example the two played on a double modifier would result in -34 column score (-40 plus 2 x 3 = 6). Adding the five would grant you another 15 points for -19.

Each player is attempting to build the same basic hand and the strategy comes in mostly from discarding: You can spend your turn discarding an unused card but it goes face up above the column with the matching color and can then be drawn instead of a card from the community draw pile, which is always face down. So even if you can’t use that extra white modifier, if you discard it you may be giving your opponent exactly what they were hoping for.

Each round is extremely quick; rounds end when the community draw pile is exhausted and there are only thirty-odd cards to begin each round making for less than twenty turns for each player. You can extend this a bit by drawing cards from the face-up column discard piles but eventually the other player will exhaust the pile and the round ends. Each game is three rounds with the points being cumulative from round to round, which means even if you get a bad draw one round it doesn’t automatically mean you’ve lost since you still have a couple more rounds to make up the difference.

I’ve only played against the CPU and while the AI is reasonable the strategies it employs are pretty obvious. As a whole the game has a fun and addictive quality but I do wish it had just a little bit more depth; a few specialty cards that altered the standard flow of the game (like allowing you to reset a column gone awry, possibly with a penalty like dumping those cards directly into the column discard pile, for example). As it is the main strategy is to find the colors you have the most confidence in, boost the column with modifiers and then concentrate on them until they get big points. You also learn to add totals that equal twenty or more pretty quickly since if you can’t make up the starting cost for a column you don’t want to even go there.

I think my biggest complaint so far (and this may change once I dip into the online mode) is that it doesn’t feel like it was worth the 800 points ($10) it costs. It’s more a $5 game based strictly on the single player mode which I like but I don’t see myself sinking hours and hours into the way I did with Symphony of the Night or Puzzle Quest. Still, it’s a great compliment to other XBLA games like Carcassone and Catan for board game nerds like me and something I’d buy just to show support for developers who release these kinds of titles.

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The weeks-long process of moving even the relatively short distance we have in store is a taxing one. I’ve moved often enough to understand this but this particular event involves contracted labor; I’ve hired movers to help me. In the past I’ve either handled most of the moving myself or had a few friends or family members assist. Those cases have a more flexible set of pre-move requirements, since time isn’t as much of a factor on the day itself. Now that each hour costs me $50, I feel it necessary to be not merely ready to move but imminently prepared for any contingency.

This requires a certain focus of attention which in many ways preempts my hobbies, even gaming. As an example I have had my consoles packed since the weekend was half over, meaning that any games I played on those systems were played early in the week and at the start of the weekend. I usually find a chance to get some mileage on games Friday and Saturday morning but that time was instead spent attending to cardboard puzzles, tape guns and black Sharpies. This left most of my attention on handheld games, and even those opportunities were scarce.

The main exception to the handheld-focused weekend was my newest Goozex acquisition, CSI: Hard Evidence. Make no mistake, this is a terrible, terrible game. It starts with the fact that they licensed the TV show, they attracted most of the principal actors to do the voices but they didn’t bother to license the show’s identifiable theme song from The Who. Instead they settled for a shoddy semi-sound-alike. As far as omissions go its hardly unforgivable, but it does provide an ill portent for what is to come.

It’s probably easier to explain what the game does right rather than listing the myriad of faults the game has. Principally the game works on the level of providing a reasonable immersion into the world presented by the show: Playing the game is mechanically similar to watching an episode. You have the initial crime scene, the evidence collection, the progression of suspects and the little flourishes in-between. At its core, there is a reasonably entertaining game. The problem is that the presentation is so wretched it derails the entire thing.

The faults are myriad. Graphics, especially character models, are atrocious. The game has lengthy load times even when switching between one poorly rendered screen and a simple menu. There are several moments of video captured from the show interspersed in the game… notably those quick-cut establishing shots of Vegas as transitions. But they have been so heavily compressed that they’re sub-YouTube quality and even then you have to sit through a loading screen before being subjected to them. Facial animations on the already hideous models are pathetic and characters in the game which are modeled from real actors have texture maps applied (which doesn’t help them look any more realistic) but game-only models lack the same detail and look like creepy talking mannequins.

None of which even addresses the gameplay problems. Fundamentally the issue is that the game leaves little room for error except where bad design introduces it. You can only use your tools in areas that they are required and even at that you are limited to “appropriate” tools so your given options are no more taxing than a coin flip in most cases, plus there is no penalty for making a mistake. The game would have been much, much more engaging if you were able to literally contaminate a crime scene with your failed efforts. That probably would have required the game to not be put on a strict rail and required the developers to showcase some programming skill, but you know, I’m a demanding consumer. The fact that the game could probably have been built with Flash in a weekend doesn’t seem to be a concern to anyone on the production team.

The worst part of all is the inexcusable porting job to the 360 where it almost becomes a mini game to try and decipher whether a particular selection menu requires the analog stick, the D-pad or is one of the rare instances where either are allowed. The game was obviously designed to be a PC game (complete with mouse cursor) but the stick sensitivity is all wrong for the 360′s controller and since 90% of the game is mousing around the screen looking for the cursor to light up and indicate that you can interact with something there, the majority of the game is a chore.

I’m not sure what I expected from a licensed game that has a Metacritic score of 49, but I guess I hoped that something OXM gave a 7.0 would have a few more redeeming qualities.

And I’m saying this as a guy who thought that Bullet Witch was “kind of cool, kind of.”

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I’ve grown wary of linear Japanese-style role-playing games. The last jRPG I played through was Dragon Quest VIII and while I enjoyed that game I did find it to be occasionally anachronistic in its strict adherence to tradition. I guess I kind of welcomed it for that but it certainly didn’t inspire me to rush out and play more jRPGs. As they’ve become more viable on my preferred console platforms, I’ve gravitated toward more Western-styled role-playing games like Oblivion and KotOR.

Which is why I don’t fully comprehend the brouhaha surrounding the recent drops of jRPG titles on the Xbox 360. It started with Eternal Sonata and got more significant in the eyes of the gaming press with Blue Dragon and most recently Lost Odyssey. It continues with the forthcoming Infinite Undiscovery which, naming misfortune aside, is supposed to make American gamers care for whatever reason and simultaneously convince Japanese gamers that the 360 isn’t a cultural pariah.

But while I’ve been burned too often since the release of Final Fantasy VII on jRPGs (most frequently by latter editions of that same series) to feel the same glee I once did on hearing a new Square Enix title was in the works, I may have lumped the whole genre together a bit hastily. Take for example the whim I followed recently to acquire Eternal Sonata. I played the demo a while back (actually closer to a year ago, when I detailed my impressions for the August 12, 2007 edition of Gaming Weekend) but it sort of slipped from my radar in the light of all the Fall madness that began with BioShock, a few weeks after I played ES’ demo.

I said back then that Eternal Sonata was beautiful and I can say now that after putting several hours into the full game, it is hardly just to use common adjectives like beautiful to describe the game’s graphics. They art style is practically an ode to Paul’s sensibilities and they have a colorful, vibrant life to them that reminds me of how video game worlds used to be portrayed. This is a dream world loosely based on the precepts of our physical plane but stylized and brightened and infused with a sort of raw joy that makes me want to stare at them for hours. They may be my favorite graphics on any game to date.

As a game Eternal Sonata is deliberately paced which can easily be interpreted—correctly—as saying “the game moves slowly.” But while a ponderous pace occasionally drives a game out of my console’s disc tray, I don’t mind it so much thus far. There is a fittingly dream-like quality to everything that happens in ES, and the drifting, meandering progression seems almost like a conscious design decision that works well in the game’s context.

Beneath the beauty and calm of the game’s surface is a melancholy tone that works as a counter-point to the otherwise child-friendly presentation. That balance is perfectly reflected in the combat mechanic where you’re provided with both a sense of carefully executed strategy and a pressure to move and react quickly under time constraints. The use of shadow and light in the combat arena is fanciful and welcome, the monster designs are nearly as sharp and arresting as the main character designs… in all it’s a game that makes a fabulous impression.

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It was kind of a lark, the way I picked up Folklore for the PS3. I was adding some stuff onto Goozex for trade-in (my collection has grown so unwieldy I’m forcing myself to part with games I love but haven’t touched for months which is resulting in an influx of available points) and in my perusals of the listings my eye caught the game. I had been fairly interested in the game prior to its release but it was one of those offhanded “That might be cool” things since at the time I didn’t have the hardware to run it. Then it hit stores and the reviews started coming in, essentially a collective, stifled yawn.

When it caught my eye on Goozex it was more as a “oh that looked interesting, I guess there’s no harm dropping it on my list” and when I received it in the mail last week I got it on the same day as Call of Juarez, a 360 game I’d been eying since its release last summer. True enough, I popped in Juarez first but after a couple of levels I wanted to check out all the new stuff I had and I powered up the PS3 and fired up Folklore.

I mostly didn’t put it down for the rest of the weekend.

Folklore reminds me a lot of another semi-underrated game I liked, Kameo: Elements of Power. Both have a sort of Japanese style only as seen through a European lens and many of the concepts and game mechanics are similar. You have a whimsical world full of vibrant colors, imaginative character designs, monster/weapon collection, huge boss battles and some decent but mildly flawed action controls. But where Kameo had a disposable and largely unremarkable story, Folklore has a compelling mystery plot and an atmosphere that curiously slides from dark to lighthearted and back again. Themes of death and mourning are integral to the game and while most of the Folks (which serve both as foes and collectible weapons) are variations on fantasy standbys, their design is inspired more by the likes of Brian Froud and his darkly comic style.

The most significant problem with the game is its storytelling mechanisms, which reminds me a lot of games like Final Fantasy VII where there are moments of fully voice-acted CG but those often bleed into strange graphic novel-like silent cutscenes with no interactivity and word balloons for dialogue and then there are the conversation menus with mostly static character models where you click through lines of text and occasionally select a topic to discuss. The whole thing feels like its being presented in this awkward manner. My impression really comes down to it feeling cheap and unfinished or at the very least rushed. It’s not unbearable, but it probably contributes to the tepid reaction the game got and I wonder if this might not have been a better game with a better reception if they’d just rendered out all the story sequences.

Aside from the story and atmopshere, the game itself offers a rich tapestry of monster collection, if that’s the sort of thing you enjoy. You certainly have no dearth of options in this milieu, consisting of everything from the ubiquitous Pokemans to the obviously titled Monster Hunter, but Folklore does it as good as any. They do have a unique method of physical acquisition which requires that you assault the creatures until they enter a sort of submissive state at which point you can press R1 to latch onto their exposed Id (that’s the game’s word, not mine; they seem more like souls to me but calling them such wouldn’t jive with the game’s premises). To actually bring this Id into your possession you must use the Sixaxis function by jerking the controller upward, like yanking on the reigns of a bridle. When this doesn’t result in knocking your own teeth out it has a satisfyingly interactive feel to it. You can also expose several Ids at once and hold the R1 button longer to gather in a number at a time in exchange for an XP bonus, the act feels like nothing shy of wrangling, casting you in the unusual but not unwelcome role of “morbid fantasy cowboy.”

Which, I think, would also serve as an excellent moniker for Rock Band’s World Tour mode.

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After trying demos for both of this year’s licensed major league baseball games, I came away feeling that 2K’s “innovative” control mechanisms were egregious and contrary to what I look for in a baseball game. So when I went to the video store to find a game to rent (realizing as I did so that there has been such a shortage of worthwhile titles released this month I’ve experienced a whopping two new games since February) the alternative title, MLB 08 The Show for PS3, was going to be in my shortlist of possible rentals.

Ultimately it came down to dark and violent horror-tinged brawling with Condemned 2 or mild and inoffensive computer-assisted baseball simulation with The Show. I left the decision up to my wife and she heartily recommended the relative tranquility of sports.

The Show is what I guess a good baseball simulator should be. It captures the feel of watching a major league baseball game on TV pretty admirably while allowing you to have some influence on the outcome. I realize that suggests that you don’t actually play the game in its entirety which isn’t precisely true, but while you are given control of the key players and moments in the game, it’s difficult for me to shake the sensation that the outcome of my actions are based exclusively on a series of algorithmic computations in which my button presses serve to, at most, seed some random entropy into the calculation.

Logically I know this is functionally true for all games, but The Show wears its skirt higher and less is left to the imagination.

The way the interaction is supposed to take place works quite well when it comes to pitching. When defense comes into play the interface struggles a bit since the computer selects the player you will have direct control over who is not always the player you would either pick or that you want. As a result you react with a certain concept in your mind about what you need to do only to realize, four times out of ten, that you’ve just sent your shortstop out into center field because you assumed that the ball dribbled down the third base line would be attended to by the third baseman. Likewise throws don’t always execute as you expect and sometimes you’ll miss easy plays because the input for throwing uses two separate mechanisms simultaneously which are sometimes at odds with each other for which should be employed resulting in, say, a sharp grounder to the second baseman who stands calmly in place after fielding the ball while the opposing catcher meanders idly over to first base several minutes later.

Batting has its own share of frustrations; even swiping the slider as far toward n00b-friendly forgiving as it will go, the timing window is punishing and the guess pitch mechanic is more meta/mini-game than actual factor in the game’s outcome. Unfortunately the standard baseball video game problem still persists: The only sure-fire way to score a decent amount of runs is to start slapping longballs over the fence. Manufactured runs are far less common than they appear in a real baseball game and frustratingly difficult to achieve against a CPU opponent that hasn’t been explicitly nerfed via sliders. The result is a game that looks quite good, plays passably and simulates a game that almost but doesn’t quite actually exist.

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It was a fairly special gaming weekend as it marked the first return to game-days of old now that my good buddy Thom has returned from his overseas jaunt. He parked himself on our couch for a couple of nights and we spent two days playing an assortment of games ranging from multiplayer handheld titles to non-competitive card games to some old standby board game titles to two player XBLA selections. I also put a wrap on one of my recent casual addictions, put some extra time in on a couple single-player PS3 titles and lament the XBLA DRM glitch that prevented me from sharing one of my favorite Arcade titles of last year with Thom, whom I feel is the epitomy of the game’s target audience.

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This week I play fewer games, but pepper in some board game action, get telecharger crapscasino blackjackjouer a la roulettetop casino en lignejeu flash roulettela règle jeu roulettejeux de casino comjeu pc casinogagner casino en lignelocation jeux casinowww jeux de casinocasino video pokerslot machine gameplay blackjack onlineblack jack orchidtelecharger casino gratuitesjouer a la roulette gratuitementfree crapsslots machinesjeu loteriejeux slots gratisbonus pour casino 770video poker gratuitsla roulette en lignebonus casino playtechcode bonus casino770blackjack gamblingblack jack bootswww casino cafetariawww grand casinocraps en lignele casino gratuites sans téléchargementrussian roulettejack black benjeux casino a telechargercasino black jackdownload slot machinecasino le jeusalles de jeuxcasino vente en lignetelechargement gratuites casinojeu de hasardles meilleurs casinos en ligneblackjack onlinecasino bonus de bienvenusjeux video poker gratuites ,jeux video sur xbox de poker,jeux video pokercasino de baccaratcasino machine a sous gratuitesonline black jackplay keno game online down and frustrated with Ninja Gaiden Sigma and wonder why I’m being preached to by Army of Two. I also dip into some demos and much more.

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I spent half of the weekend being sick, which in some cases would mean extra gaming time but this particular flu made me mostly want to sleep. I did play some games in the earlier half of the week however including a new title I rented and I made some progress on a bunch of handheld titles I’ve had piling up plus I finally part ways with a divisive game I happened to enjoy quite a lot and I ruminate on the curious state of playing a game just because it’s already in the console.

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