Tunnels of Doom

This week I played fewer games than I sometimes do, fixated more on a handful of titles rather than flipping around from game to game. The result is a deeper look into some current addictions and a perhaps surprising reaction to a demo for a game on my anticipated short list of March purchases that has me running back to the drawing board.

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A queue of PSP titles that had been sitting in my Goozex requests list dropped into my mailbox over the weekend and since most of the home console games I’m playing now felt a little stale, I spent a lot of time hunched over the portable PlayStation. I did manage to squeeze in some non-PSP gaming as well, but to see my thoughts on the controversial Manhunt 2, initial impressions of Jeanne D’Arc and thoughts on Flash games, forge ahead.

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My wife bought me an Xbox Live Vision camera for Valentine’s Day (well, I think it was for Valentine’s Day… she also bought me a new pair of boots so I’m not sure whether they were both gifts or if one was just her being nice) that I attempted to put to good (?) use this weekend. I also wrapped up a great PS3 game, discovered a great puzzle title on XBLA and considered the value of multiple goals in simple, casual-style games.

Want to know more? It’s all below.

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The way that visual media has been intertwined with accompanying audio is like a dense ivy growing over a chain link fence. In theory, they could be separated, but the realistic mind will admit they are functionally singular. I find this fascinating because while we enjoy activities that involve a single sense (music, books), somehow there is a presentation format of the generated or filmed motion picture that it seems cannot be acknowledged without some sort of auditory component.

I suppose it has to do with the motivation of the medium. With books or music the experience is internal, abstracted by design to create a (allow me to borrow a modern phrase for an old concept) user-generated experience. However the explicit and external descriptions presented by film, theater, games, even music performed live is reliant on spectacle and for that to be effective we have, long ago, determined that accessing multiple senses is most effective at captivation.

But we don’t even really notice the distinction any longer, except maybe when it is absent. A filmmaker can create a certain tension by excising the soundtrack from a scene, for example. What I find interesting though is that it has become such an integral part of this type of media that it often fades to the background in deference to the principal visual aspect. Which is why so many games that have captured people’s attention lately are interesting because they take that sort of secondary audio element and push it to the forefront and come up with something that effectively narrows the gap between performer and audience.

Of course, this is principally true in the world of games.

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After a couple weeks there in January where I posted hundreds of Achievement Points, the recent arrival of the PSP and the PS3 has made my pursuit of gamerscore wane a bit. And while I certainly played 360 this weekend, I didn’t do so with score-boosting as a motivation. As such, I played just to play and… well, it was kind of nice, really. I also got some more play time in on the PS3 and began to see the difference in design philosophies between “grown up” kiddie games and games that are actually for kids.

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There was a point this weekend where I was almost ready to give up. Making the long-anticipated plunge into the land of HD was becoming too much of a hassle. But I’ve been nothing if not patient. For years I’ve seen the beautiful HD sets and thought longingly about how great it would be to have one to display my video games in all their potential glory. A few extra days of irritation is but a drop in the bucket.

Finally, at the tail end of my weekend, I went and picked up my new TV. 46″ Samsung LCD with 1080p capability. I also purchased a new TiVo that supports High Def, I worked with Comcast to get an HD-capable receiver, I bought HDMI cables for my XBox and I picked up a PlayStation 3. It was a lot of money to part with in one weekend, but the end result is a home theater system that has gone from “old and busted” to “new hotness” in very short order.

Probably the most contentious purchase of the lot was the PS3. I ended up with the 40gb version, which does not have PS2 backwards compatibility. That’s kind of a sore spot because there are a few PS2 games I’d still like to play. But my main motivation for getting a PS3 was the Blu-Ray player, surprisingly enough. It’s not that I’ve tossed my hat into the Blu-Ray ring over the competing HD-DVD format, but I’m not that interested in re-buying a bunch of media all over again. However, I do rent movies quite a bit and I’d like the option to rent HD movies where available. And I can’t say I didn’t appreciate the price-reduction brought about by the feature-slashing Sony did late last year. Besides, since my primary interest was in Blu-Ray and most standalone players are as expensive if not moreso than the PS3 itself, it made some sense to go with the game console.

So it’s not perfect but I am hanging onto my old and perfectly functional PS2 which I can use to play any Silent Hill 2 or Persona 3 I want to, but I tend to focus on newer games as a general rule anyway so I actually don’t think I’m missing much, just kind of disappointed that such an obviously welcome feature had to be cut to make the thing semi-affordable.

Also, it may or may not be interesting to note that the purchase of the PS3 has cemented my console decisions this generation: I won’t be picking up the Wii until/if it gets down around the $100 price range. It’s not that I don’t have any interest in Nintendo’s console, but the few games I am curious about don’t offer enough to compel me to pick it up at the current price level. Also, I had all three consoles last gen and while I spent a lot for both the Xbox and the PS2, I felt like I got plenty of mileage on them for my money. I also bought a GameCube after only one price reduction and while I don’t feel like I was gypped in any way, I also think I could have held out until it was $100 or so, played all the games I wanted to play for it and been ultimately better off. So in an effort to live and learn, it seems like the Wii is shaping up to have a similar library by the time it’s all said and done, I’ll wait and play all my Super Mario Galaxies and Metroid Prime Corruptions somewhere down the road when everything is dirt cheap.

In any case I’m now rocking in full high def gaming glory, and I actually played some games in-between dropping all that money.

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Some people have tried to identify the division that exists between Rock Band and Guitar Hero. More than identify, really, it’s like a deliberate enumeration of the subtle variances in design philosophy that drive each game. Somehow these people are mostly trying to apologize for Guitar Hero III in a world where Rock Band exists by pointing out the ways in which Guitar Hero shouldn’t be compared.

But frankly the games are going to get compared, even without the insider history of Red Octane and Harmonix nor the press-based quasi-feud that has each sniping at the other. The similarities are too great to ignore and with that level of ready comparison, gamers and gaming enthusiast press alike are going to engage that debate. The funny thing is, the debate is hardly worth having because in nearly every respect, Rock Band emerges as the victor.

I played quite a bit of both games this weekend, and a couple of the things that I noticed:

• There are a handful of songs that appear in both games, like The Killers’ “When You Were Young” and Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen.” It’s interesting to see how each developer handled the songs differently because it really makes you appreciate the value that the note tracking design has on the enjoyment of the game.
• One of the things GH apologists try to claim is that their game has a different focus on being all about casting the player as a guitar virtuoso so they tend to favor single-note strings over chord progressions. I guess the idea is that it looks more impressive to play a bunch of individual notes really fast than it does to play a handful of chords in a specific pattern. The end result is that Rock Band’s approach to making note tracks is superior both in realism and, interestingly, the part where it really counts: Fun.
• Another side effect of Guitar Hero’s approach is that the difficulty of the game is more harsh and ramps up faster than Rock Band and even earlier GH games. Some of the earliest songs on medium contain the kinds of triplets, quick hammer-on trills and heavy blue-button use normally reserved for more difficult setlists later in the progression.
• This difficulty, shockingly enough, does not translate into “more fun.” Like playing on Expert in Guitar Hero II, it becomes an exercise in testing your will more than in enjoying the fantasy of playing music.
• The limited customization of the characters, the limited number of characters to begin with and the ho-hum presentation of the concert footage is really disappointing in Guitar Hero. I know they have a new developer but considering this is ostensibly a sequel and Rock Band is a new product, being outpaced on customization options by a n00b franchise is pretty inexcusable.
• Whomever though the mandatory boss battles should be a part of the solo tour mode in GH should be fired with predjudice. They aren’t fun, they don’t add anything to the game, they serve as unnecessary roadblocks to the basic gameplay (which is the reason for entry to begin with) and other than the final “Devil Went Down to Georgia” adaptation, the battle parts aren’t familiar enough or even good enough to want to play to begin with. I don’t mind the idea of competitive battling this way, but it’s such a fundamental departure from the main game mechanic that it should have been left to it’s own mode and excised from the main game entirely.
• The one thing Guitar Hero really has going for it is the controller. It’s still not ideal; I’d like the detachable neck piece to sit more tightly in its connector so it has zero wobble room and I wish it was a little bit bigger. Plus the smaller buttons higher on the neck in the Rock Band guitar are a really welcome feature. But Rock Band’s guitar has other problems like a toggle switch that gets in the way, a whammy bar that feels too loose and an unreliable strum bar. The problems with the RB controller far outweigh GH’s minor annoyances where it matters most: During the game, so the ideal solution is to play RB with the GH guitar.

The end result of all this is that even if you left out the wonderful drum modes, the engaging multiplayer modes and the singing element, on a guitar-game versus guitar-game merit, Rock Band still wins because Harmonix seems to have made fun their utmost priority and that’s something Neversoft forgot when they were trying to ape the magic of the earlier GH games.

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Well. That was a weekend.

It started with a ruthless cold that had me miserable enough to stay home from work on Wednesday (which is actually my Friday, as far as work weeks are concerned). Thursday I was still feeling pretty rough and while I was doing better on Friday, I didn’t actually get back on my feet until Saturday… at which point my wife was sick and spent most of her day in bed.

Between all this downtime I got some serious gaming in (and quite a bit of not-so-serious gaming as well). I was aided along the way by a couple of post-birthday shopping trips to unload a bunch of gift cards I’d received (some were from Christmas as well), and a deal that changed the gaming landscape a bit.

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I signed up for one of those Old Spice Gamerscore Challenges run through the 360 Voice site. In this case it was instituted by some folks on Goozex’s forums and the reward is a $100 Best Buy gift card, which isn’t shabby. The competition is measured by the greatest gamerscore increase over the course of the tournament time frame (through the end of January).

As such it has been a mad rush to accomplish as many cheap and easy achievements as possible: You can interpret that as 15 people racing around trying to wrap up games like TMNT, King Kong and other launch titles created before developers had a clear idea of what could be done with the system. Since there is $100 on the line, I figured I’d join the reindeer games. As such, this week is going to feature a strange mishmash of questionable games and some other, more substantial stuff. I should also mention my birthday was yesterday so there are some new developments present and forthcoming as well.

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She saved the largest box for last, which meant that in her mind it was the “best” of the lot. It looked like a shoebox and honestly I thought it was actually going to be shoes, and I was pretty excited about it. Last year my wife got me a pair of shoes for Christmas and it was a great gift: The kind of thing I’d hate to buy for myself but I was really pleased with what she’d picked out for me. It was, in fact, a shoebox but the box was for a women’s brand so I was less excited about it actually being shoes. As I dug into the box, its contents obscured by tissue paper, I realized suddenly what it had to be.

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