Come on. You know you want to read it.

• Left 4 Dead
  One of my Goozex trades that came in this week was this Valve-produced zombie game which I was really excited about when I initially heard talk of it, then cooled on considerably when I heard the initial reviews and impressions, but gradually found I could not resist, possibly due to my well-documented love of all things zombie.
  I guess I don’t know what I thought the game was; I’m not sure how many ways there are to interpret multiplayer zombie apocalypse game. But for someone who doesn’t always run lock-step with my gamer friends’ gaming habits multiplayer games tend to be either something I have to play with strangers (not something I tend to enjoy) or something that I have to maintain on hand for far longer than I tend to keep games in an effort to happen on a chance to enjoy. As a result, I can’t be sure how long I’ll have L4D, but at least they included the option to play solo.
  What is a little disappointing is that this is a game I think I’d really love if I had the social structure to play it the way it was intended, with three friends. The non-co-op mode displays the game in a sort of demo mode, but Left 4 Dead’s principal appeal is that it eschews a lot of the unnecessary exposition in favor of thrusting you into the middle of a zombie film with only your companions and a goal of making it to the next safe point. As a single-player game, this is good for people like me who enjoy zombie stories but largely temporary. Once I’ve escaped the zombies in each zone one time, there’s no need to retry unless I really want to improve my performance or something. Since the companion AI is designed to get you through only so much as the difficulty level suggests, there is no real sense of accomplishment other than “Okay, I can do that on this difficulty mode.”
  It’s pretty clear the highlight of the game is, instead, “Wow. We did it. That was close.”
• World of Warcraft
  I hit level 50. Now that I’m ten levels away from the max without paying for the expansions, I’m again confronted with the prospect of considering how long I intend to play the game. I doubt I’ll reach 60 before the next billing cycle so I’ll probably at least have my account active into the first week of April, but what then? Opting for Burning Crusade could keep the game going longer, but at $30 extra the benefit would seem to be a couple of new races to choose from (in other words, new characters) and some new content. As much as I enjoy the game though, I feel like—as with Left 4 Dead—my lack of regular multiplayer access is restricting some of the long-term enjoyment the game represents as a mere potential. Sure I could try to befriend a regular group via guilds and try to find people in roughly the same stage of the game as I am, but at some point it starts to feel like my best bet there would be to just race toward the current end game which means not just Burning Crusade and its $30 price tag, but also Wrath of the Lich King and its $40 entry point. $70 and a lot of trial and error to find a way to keep justifying a $15 monthly charge? No, I think not.
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
  As part of my ongoing effort to clean out my stash of handheld games, I picked up Phoenix Wright again to try and push through the last couple of cases. But as I played, I realized that while I like the game in a sort of abstract way (I admire their adherence to older point-n-click adventure tropes) I really don’t have a lot of actual fun playing it. It seems tedious, trial-and-error based and altogether too slow to be a really great handheld game. I want to like it more than I really do and since the game represents something I could be enjoying a lot more, I dropped it onto my Goozex list unplayed. Hey, I figure I can always re-acquire it if I start to miss it.
• Folklore
  Another title I’m fond of believing I enjoy more than I actually enjoy playing, I put Folklore back in the PS3. Maybe it’s the fact that thus far I’ve enjoyed a number of PS3 exclusives in a very disposable sense and I’m still looking for that game I want to hang onto, maybe it’s that Folklore bothers to try to be original in areas that normally get overlooked like theme, tone and structure as opposed to say, style or mechanics. Whatever the case, I’m sort of smitten by Folklore and yet I find it consistently gets dumped aside for something else.
  I think overall the problem is that as someone who has played hundreds of video games, I respect Folklore for marching to the beat of its own drum, but that respect is earned in spite of it being a fundamentally dull game. I like that it exudes melancholy where a similar game might be whimsical, I love that its story unfolds with separate interwoven lot threads focusing on two characters but you can choose how to see it unfold. I think its unabashed embrace of a grim tale with a heavy dose of fantasy to keep it just light enough as to not fall into depressing territory is wonderful but (and it’s a significant but) at the end of the day those things don’t make it fun to actually play. It’s still a collection-game brawler with questionable hit detection and an overly complex system of advancement.
  I haven’t yet decided that the game needs to hit the trade-in pile, but I’m on the cusp and I think if a couple of my other pending trades were to go through and deplete my stockpile of Goozex points, it would be out the door in a flash.
• Lock’s Quest
  A friend of mine at work showed me the online demo of the game. It’s a fun little tower-defense variant and we had some good times seeing who could get the furthest. Since we liked that so much we both decided to pick up the DS version and we were likewise simultaneously surprised to learn that the game you play in your browser is not the game you play in your DS at all.
  Which is not to say the DS game is worse in any way, in fact it is significantly richer and more multifaceted than the simple flash game that is really only slightly different from dozens of excellent Kongregate entries. In the DS version you actually control Lock, who is responsible for repairing your fortifications in real time and can also contribute by engaging the enemies (Clockworks) in combat. I’m very early in the game still but I’m impressed by the way the game stitches together elements of action RPGs, RTS games and Turn-Based Strategy by giving you the opportunity to prepare your defenses, manage resources and then get in and mix it up while the battle is raging. I do think some of the touch-screen controls are a bit hokey like the ratching slide move for certain rapid repairs and the special attack system which has you hitting randomly assigned progressive number sequences in order but they give the game a distinctive DS flavor that is starting to feel very familiar, not unlike hitting A to jump on an old NES game. In fact, while I realize the original Game Boy and even the Advance have dedicated fans, I’m prepared to submit that the DS is the system that will attain legendary status in terms of era-defining hardware not unlike the original NES or the original Sony Playstation. I, too, mocked the device when it was first unveiled and like millions of my fellow gamers and more than a few non-gamers, we have rapidly progressed from skeptical to intrigued to enchanted to irreversably converted.
  This funky little two-screened console is the real deal y’all.
• Blood Bowl
  I’m not sure what game we were supposed to play on our game night, but what we settled on was Blood Bowl. I carry my two top teams around in my car at all times so it was trivial to start the game once my friend learned of the access to materials I possessed. I played the Undead because I had the most up-to-date roster for them prepared, and I faced a team of Dwarves. I had previously worked these exact same dwarves to a 1-1 tie, but this time I managed to roll a double one on my accurate pass attempt right along the sidelines and ended up having no other opportunity to score. We ground it out to a two-and-a-half hour 1-0 game and while I think strategically I started off a bit rusty I was overall not to disappointed in my coaching.
  Obviously things could have gone better, but there was only one or two turnovers from coaching errors (failed blocks, fumbles, etc) and I used all my re-rolls including my free Brilliant Coaching roll which means I managed both the dice/re-rolls well and avoided unnecessary risks.
  What ultimately undid me wasn’t the risky pass to the end zone play but was just the resilience of the dwarves and my inability to get any fortuitous rank thinning with KOs or casulaties. I also may have disadvantaged myself by not playing all my Ghouls whenever I had the chance, but their lack of regeneration and pivotal role as principal offensive threat makes them difficult to field when the other team is receiving with good conscience. Typically I’m able to at least force one turnover and whenever I do I always regret not having more offensive options, but I struggle to decide whether the turnovers are made possible with the extra defender or if my inconsistent performance once I do gain possession is worth the price of admission.
  Oh, and this is sort of off-topic for the discussion immediately at hand, but relevant anyway. In case you hadn’t heard, they’re making a Blood Bowl video game.

Demo Watch

I picked up a couple of PS3 demos this week, although I admit that what I was looking for was something interesting for the PSP. I find the PSP hardware incredibly attractive and a joy to play for the most part (I’m conveniently leaving out FPS’) but as of yet I haven’t found anything on the system that really stands out as indespensible. I did have the R-Type Tactics demo still hanging around so I gave that a whirl. At this juncture I think PSP is sort of defined by its Tactical RPG library: Jeanne D’Arc, Dungeons and Dragons Tactics, Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics, Warhammer 40K Squad Commander, etc. So it takes something really special to rise above the crowd and R-Type Tactics doesn’t. It’s not bad in the sense that it doesn’t work, it’s just sort of dull.

Speaking of dull demos, one of the PS3 titles I downloaded was F.E.A.R. 2 and, well, it put me to sleep. I enjoyed the first game for the most part and said at the time that I would play a sequel. Except I assumed the sequel would be at least as interesting as the original. It still tries too hard to be scary but now they have to contend with a degree of familiarity that meant I kept waking up, running endlessly into a corner while some scary voodoo was happening behind me like a Tim Burton bedtime story. I turned it off because I was afraid it was going to try to scare me into a coma.

But all was not sour in the demo game this week; I also picked up the Valkyria Chronicles demo and… well. This is an absolutely gorgeous game. Now I’m a sucker for cel-shading and while the trailers make it looks cel-shaded and that’s a good thing in my book, the truth is that it’s so much better looking than that. They do a sort of oil-on-canvas effect that makes the visuals look like some sort of painting. It’s really stunning. What surprised me was that a game with this much visual flair also has room to be an interesting take on an unexpected genre: It’s a turn-based tactical RPG but it has elements of FPS built in becuase you control each unit individually within the parameters of your “turn.” Imagine if each character’s turn in Final Fantasy Tactics were executed in first-person and you sort of get the idea.

Parting Shot

I was reading up a little on phasing, a MMO trick they’re beginning to use to show some sort of change in the game world. One of my complaints about MMOs like World of Warcraft is that while they possess a particular magic in terms of drawing you into the kinds of worlds you enjoy from other computer role-playing games in ways you can’t with a solo adventure. But, unlike those single-player games, the world has to be sort of static so everyone can experience the same thing regardless of when they join. So my understanding of phasing is that certain areas have two separate sets of characteristics: One for the “default” and another depending on what circumstances are true for the player. So say there is an empty town and as you advance through a certain questline you obtain an orb that allows you to see ghosts, when you return to the town it is suddenly populated by ethereal figures going about their regualr business. Both versions of the town always exist, what you see is only dependent on what the game thinks you should be seeing there, so you get the illusion of a dynamic world.

I like this approach but I was thinking that even then it’s pretty limiting because you only ever get minor, mostly cosmetic changes which is a big drawback compared to games like Final Fantasy VI almost 15 years ago which was able to drastically alter the landscape of the entire game world at one point or something like Fallout 3 where a whole town can be destroyed and its inhabitants displaced. So it occurred to me that one solution to this would be to take advantage of another limitation in the MMO game design: The separate servers or realms.

Consider this: Instead of selecting a realm to play on you simply join a game. It’s an MMO, populated by other characters, with the minor difference that there is sort of a level cap to the other PCs. Because rather than having all low-level players and higher level players inhabiting the same realm, the realms are level specific, focused on level blocks. For example, you could have the opening realm consist of characters level 1-15. At level 10 you have the option to explore, say, a particular dungeon instance to defeat a boss-type character. You can continue to grind to 15 but once you reach that point you can no longer gain experience from any of the game’s creatures. So you defeat this boss character and perhaps during the encounter the boss (maybe some sort of giant) smashes your starting town to bits. You finally defeat him, gain the rewards and are then transported to the next realm, populated by characters between levels 10 and 25 only in this realm, that starting town is just a smoking pile of rubble. Also, of note, the giant-boss is completely extinct in the second realm: Obviously, he has been defeated.

Since generally speaking you only care to play with people who are doing roughly the same types of things you are, it allows both a changing game environment and a more normalized play experience since you can’t do things like have ultra-high level characters “run you” through dungeons. When I gained the achievement for Shadowfang Keep in WoW, for instance, I followed a level 80 priest through and didn’t engage in combat once. Which is kind of  a shame since it looked like a cool instance. Such things would be impossible if the highest level you could be for any instance or encounter was the realm max, and it would probably help with game balance as well. If designers knew they only had to keep adding new realms to keep players interested, they wouldn’t have to “find” areas on the world map for them to play in.

It’s possible this sort of thing already exists in another game, but my limited experience prevents me from being sure if this is a great idea or something someone already tried. If they haven’t tried it yet, though, someone better get on it.

My avoidance of WoW was based principally on two things one being that I love deep role-playing games and often get caught up in them, devoting hours and hours to their conquering and the other being that I’m married and I like being married. Presented with a game that offered what some might suggest is the epitome of the former I feared for the fate of the latter should I ever involve myself in a game like this. There are other secondary factors, such as my general distaste for wasted expenses so a game that carried a monthly fee would demand to be played often to maintain its relative value. It was just a safer course to steer clear.

But then a couple of weeks ago I went ahead and signed up for the 10-day trial, and after receiving a little money for my birthday, I bought a copy of the boxed game. What changed was simply this: I realized that relatively speaking I have spent much greater amounts of money on less entertainment value and the only thing keeping me from possibly enjoying a good game was the irrational notion that the product itself was capable of some sort of nefarious assault on my sense of responsibility and reason. After the $60 spent on Fallout 3 which was a decent game, a game I might describe as being good, I spent about two weeks playing it before putting it down and putting the odds of re-visitation at about 1 in 16. The entertainment to expense ratio there is high. Determining that it was myself who had to take responsibility for my actions regarding balancing hobbies and pastimes with family and life obligations made it easier to decide that no game can ever be at fault if my wife is unhappy because I’m too busy playing games to spend time with her. Ultimately if I can’t keep it together with this game I’m at risk for not keeping it together with any game. My wife is wonderfully patient and understanding about my silly, juvenile hobbies but if I ever push the limits I would need to scale back the entire activity and not blame it on one specific element.

Also, I have an exit strategy.

So. Anyway. The game. The interesting thing about WoW is that, as a sort of role-playing enthusiast, the game has some elements that I really like but I can’t say it’s the best RPG I’ve ever played. What I do like about it is the sense of artistic style that has been meticulously applied to everything. I’m not a huge fan of the Blizzard house style, but its consistency helps to build the world and that’s pretty pivotal to a game like this. Also, as probably most role-players would, I appreciate it’s depth and scale. I have little to compare this game to since the only other MMO I’ve spent any time with is Eve Online and it’s, you know, space so it’s bound to feel gigantic. But I’ve played console and standalone PC games set in space and gotten similar senses of scale, what I haven’t had before is the sense of what they really mean when they say Massively Multiplayer. The starting area is big enough that it feels like a decent sized chunk of the best game I have to compare it to, Oblivion. You step beyond that and realize that the first demarcated area (I guess they’re called Zones) is probably a third of the size of Oblivion’s world. There are probably 15 of these zones. On one of the three contents.

And it isn’t just the map that’s big. The skill trees are expansive. The item lists are ridiculous. The number of quests available is dizzying and on and on. I keep comparing it to Oblivion because I’m familiar with that game and until I tried WoW it was the most expansive game world I’d ever encountered. It’s interesting to me that Blizzard didn’t really try to hide this expansiveness: Compared to Eve, for example, you spend a lot of time in WoW traveling from place to place. Early in the game you have two options: Hoof it where you need to go or, if you want to go home, use your Hearthstone which once per hour can pull you back to your designated home base. Walking speed isn’t painfully slow or anything but it’s certainly time consuming to trek from one end of the zone to the other during fetch quests. Later it appears you can grab speed-boosting mounts and I recently achieved the point where I can use a for-pay service to fly you from one visited spot to another. Even in Eve which has you traversing long stretches of space in something approximating real time you can set destinations and engage autopilot. But to a guy who is used to fast travel in Oblivion or even the uninterrupted travel options of games like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, it’s strange.

So far 98% of my time has been soloing, which is basically playing WoW as if it were a standalone single player RPG. As this type of game, it’s perfectly enjoyable. However, I have encountered my first dungeon which is designed for multiple players and herein lies a bit of the problem. Generally speaking I’m not a huge multiplayer gamer, while I do love cooperative games, I’ve had a lot of bad experiences trying to play with strangers so I avoid versus modes and tend to wait until the rare occasion when I have a friend in the same place and time to do any kind of multiplayer gaming. Being late to the WoW party, most people I know who play the game are unlikely to want to fiddle around in a low-level dungeon helping me get through it and my other option is the undesireable prospect of finding similarly-leveled strangers to join up with. Thus far I’ve merely avoided the problem and moved on to other activities but I do wonder if I’m missing a key element of the game by doing this. On the other hand, these types of dungeons sound like they require a certain level of knowledge and practice to execute that I most definitely do not possess.

What kind of amazes me about the game and in fact highlights my largest complaints thus far is that even with the depth and breadth of content is how rote most of the actual gameplay remains. The diversity of the quests in their integration is wide but their actual classification is the same as almost any other game: Fetch, destroy, delivery, hunt. That they separated out the dungeon dive into a different class of quest isn’t really significant in my estimation. When you get to combat is basically a hybrid of Diablo and Warcraft: Select the unit you want to attack and then use your powers, which have a cooldown period typically, in the most effective order. It’s not unenjoyable by any stretch but somehow it feels a bit discordant to have such a rich experience punctuated repeatedly by a simplistic core mechanic.

The whole dynamic of the game is fascinating in its design: The foundation of it is light, almost casual. Sure there is a particular intensity to the game’s volume but because the class restrictions limit your exposure to that mass unless you want to know about that which doesn’t apply to you, it’s easy to burrow your vision into a tunnel. You can play with a series of simple solo missions for a very long time and have fun doing so. However the developers seem keen to have incorporated a higher level game that is almost a different beast entirely into it so that the hardcore crowd that is willing and ready to devote endless hours to the game can have something of their own. What I don’t know is how smooth they’ve made the transition so people who enter the game just checking it out can ease their way into that richer experience. Depending on who you talk to, they may have made it silky smooth.

This is mostly irrelevant to me, I think. I don’t have any plans to extend my subscription beyond the initial one-month offering included in the boxed game. That doesn’t mean I won’t at some point return to the game, but now that I’ve broken the seal, so to speak, I’m inclined to try some other genre offerings rather than settle on the first one I try. Hey, at $20 for a month of play it’s practically a bargain from the $60 next-gen 14 hour “experiences” I’ve been focusing on. I’m thinking next month I may use the last of my birthday cash to try the newly released City of Heroes Mac port. Curiously enough the thing keeping me most from latching onto World of Warcraft as my game is that the setting and world are derivative of a property that I don’t have a ton of interest in to begin with. Frankly I like Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons well enough but I’ve never been as drawn to fantasy as a foundation as I am to futuristic/SF settings and Warhammer (anyone who says Blizzard hasn’t borrowed liberally from Games Workshop is delusional) is something I’ve zero inclination toward. Now, if Bilzzard ever released World of Starcraft… well, best not to dwell on that too much.

I’m back on the wagon though, tentatively. I think I’m more constrained now, a little older, a little wiser. I mean you start with gamerscore chasing and the next thing you know you’re wiping bits of demo disc off your greasy shirt front with model-paint smeared fingers and picking polyhedral dice from your undershorts as the family you once loved retreats from you like an oncoming hurricane. If nothing else, you can’t maintain the pace very long.

Yet gaming is sort of my thing so while I occasionally have to reset the blitz, fall back into a 3-4 and give the opposing line a false sense of security, eventually I bring the house again.

The big change I made was that after the demise of $60 a Month, I made a bald-faced liar out of myself and stopped the program. It wasn’t just a fiscal adjustment, I simply couldn’t find enough to keep my mind engaged. Trying to spend a steady amoun on a hobby that ebbs and flows is interesting as an exercise but in practice it boils down to setting interesting things aside in favor of a new distraction whose merit is mere freshness.

So I dipped my toe by combing through my stack of shame and dragging out a few titles that had been lost in the trampling rush of The Next Thing and here’s what I found:

• Oblivion – I went back and started a fresh character with the sole purpose of finally completing the Thieves Guild quest which had glitched out on me in my previous effort. It is, I think, the best overall narrative in the game pulling slightly ahead of the Assassin’s Guild questline. I realized as I played why I love the whole world and the way Bethesda executes on the idea of the semi-sandbox RPG. I also realized that I would never go back and play through the expansion quest that I paid good money for because the spoils it may yeild are nothing to the agony of suffering through an entire quest I can’t bring myself to even want to explore.
• Eternal Sonata – After I finished with Oblivion (and I really had to put a strict cap on it: Finish Task X, quit the game), I was still in the mood for some role-playing style games so I tried on ES for a bit. It’s every bit as beautiful as I remember and I wasn’t far in so I started over. The combat is elegant but, like most Japanese-style RPGs, it’s not so elegant that I don’t find it eventually tiresome. Especially since these games, and ES in particular, tend to cluster repetitive enemy types within a single area you have to spend an amount of time in. I can handle a dozen or so similar fights but when you start stretching into the triple-digits with combat versus the same two foes that unfolds identically every time except it becomes slightly easier as your level ramps up, I go looking for a blankie and something soft to lay my head on.
• Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow – This was one of the first DS games I picked up and I played it extensively without having played a Castlevania game since I think Castlevania III on the NES. It was new to me then and I did a lot of things wrong as a result. Since then I’ve played Symphony of the Night, Rondo of Blood and was just waiting to try this again with a bit more XP. It’s even better now.
• Fallout 3 – I rented this because having touched on Oblivion again I was feeling the shine return, but was unwilling to let Cyrodiil consume me yet again. Next best thing? Oblivion’s post-apocalyptic younger brother. Having played maybe twenty minutes of the original Fallout without a manual and no patience to devote to unraveling its mysteries (at the time) the long way. Thus I entered Fallout 3 with only my gamer’s preconceptions of the game as a dark comedy role-playing game often hailed by the community. I was instantly struck by how somber the game is. Oblivion can’t exactly be accused of having a great sense of humor, but that’s okay for a game that doesn’t purport to not take itself seriously. To be fair, neither does Fallout 3, but my expectations were somewhere else. It is, by all accounts, Sci-Fi Oblivion, so from that angle it’s exactly as delicious as I hoped it would be. I was a little disappointed that though I rented the PS3 variant it took no discerable advantage of the hard disk, still, I enjoyed almost every minute of my time with it. I made sure to avoid the main quest as much as possible and ended up having Nik pick up the full game for me on eBay so expect to hear more about this one.
• Geometry Wars 2 – In my absence I had lost all but one of my top spots from my Friends List so I tried to earn back the titles. I was… unsuccessful. It’s a game that requires practice I hadn’t put in, you see.

So there you have it… several weeks of gaming as I acclimate to a new job and a new schedule. These also don’t include the tabletop games (which have also been reduced of late) but I figure those will always be played more as time and participants allow rather than based on my own predilictions.