Blood Soaked Edition
For whatever reason a lot of the games I played this week were violent and bloody. I guess that’s not super unusual, glancing over my shelf of games I see a lot of M-rated titles there. But I like horror-themed games, especially zombies, so typically those feature a lot of splattering gore.
Then there is Gears of War, which I both picked up and finished during the week. As the first did, it features a lot of the sort of overtly gratuitous bloodshed that packs many shooter games, although Gears has a particular fondness for the ol’ ultra-violence with its chainsaw gibbing and such.
The curious thing to me is that as some of these games progress from relatively simple narratives and lightly graze the surface of something that resonates on an emotional level, they have this weird dichotomy that I think stunts the effort. I mean, it’s not impossible for something loud and brash to also transition into tenderness, but I think especially in the language of games it can be too surreal for you to be applying a power tool to someone’s groin in one moment and less than 60 seconds later you have a crescendo of strings following the caress of a space marine’s glove on his dying wife’s cheek or whatever. There is an air of insincerity that plays in this type of juxtaposition; where film directors have sometimes been able to use gritty, harsh scenes of brutality as counter-punches against scenes of innocence or longing, games are still too drenched in their comic book adolescence to locate that place.
I’m not saying I don’t appreciate the effort or that I’m unwilling to follow along through the awkward puberty of gaming narrative, I’m just saying that if people want this stuff to click, they need to consider more than just their cutscenes. As a matter of fact, when you think about how infrequently these shooter cutscenes (and I think Gears is a fantastic example of exactly what I’m talking about) make any sense whatsoever, a little passing nod toward context would go a long way to pushing past these bouts of voice cracking and patches of dubious facial hair that pass for genuine maturity.
- Gears of War 2
I don’t think I really talked about my initial play through of the first Gears of War because it pre-dated Tunnels of Doom by a few months. I played through the original co-op with a friend and then later got through to General RAAM on Hardcore difficulty by myself, where I eventually gave up because that final boss fight is stupidly impossible. My general impression of Gears was that it was dumb fun that was mostly a showcase for Unreal Engine 3. The biggest complaint I had was that after finishing the game, I couldn’t really explain to you what the plot was at all and then after going through again and trying specifically to discern the plot I realized it wasn’t possible to explain it because it didn’t exist as we define the word “plot” today.
I don’t know that I had higher hopes for Gears 2’s storytelling although of course I had heard the “announcements” and rumors that Epic had hired professional screenwriters and authors to work on the plot and make the sequel more meaningful for the world they were creating. The end result is that, yeah, it’s better but that’s kind of like saying that getting kicked in the lips is better than getting kicked in the crotch. It looks, from a player’s perspective, like the core of the issue is that the game isn’t built to serve the story, the story is written to serve the game. For example, at one point you enter a building and leave two of the four members of Delta Squadron behind to “guard the truck.” After wandering around inside for a bit, one of the left-behinds raidios in to say that the weather is turning bad and they have to get inside. So you finish exploring and you get… some data? A location? Anyway, some macguffin; at this point you need to head back to the truck where you get another radio call saying the weather, called “razorhail” is really heavy. The guys on the other end of the radio say they’re going to have to work their way through the razorhail to return to the truck. Meanwhile, you have to try and pick your way through a circuitous route that provides cover from the deadly hail in order to get there yourself. Except at no point does it matter that your teammates went inside and then came back out; by the time you get to the destination they’re back as well as if they’d never left. The whole sequence feels like it took place to provide a narrative—flimsy as it is—for the introduction of this environmental challenge.
It feels like nothing more than one of those writing exercises where you’re given several images or scenes devoid of context and try to construct a plausible narrative to tie them together. The results can be semi-interesting and possibly clever but are never genuinely compelling because they’re fabricated from a false set of corollaries. If instead of the level designers coming to the writers and saying, “We need to have them go through some killer ice storm here” the writers had gone to the level designers and said, “So the two halves of the team get separated here and while they’re picking their way through the bunker back to the rendezvous point, the weather turns sour with this vicious storm and they have to each go the long way around. Can you design the level to look something like that?” we would end up with a cohesive sense of progression that played out via the game’s action. Instead so much happens that doesn’t matter to what you’re doing it feels like watching the cutscenes is sort of wasting your time. But listen, it’s better than the original in which the final sequence takes place on a train which just happens to have a track that goes directly down into the enemy hideout which you conveniently load a bomb onto without ever previously being told about the bomb or actually being told the bomb is loaded. At some point you just find the train dropping into the bad guy’s backyard and you’re like “Woo! We showed them! Wait, what did we show them again?”
The biggest thing I’m taking away from Gears 2 is that it is a series of incremental improvements over Gears 1. This applies not just to the storytelling portions but technically as well: Unreal Engine 3 games seem to be plagued by distracting texture pop-in. Gears or War 2 isn’t exempt from them, but it does use a slow-fade effect when textures are applied after the animations begin so they’re less distracting. I guess this is better? It seems like whatever development time was spent patching in the minor improvement could have gone into making the pop-in—like—not happen. There are also more varied activities, most of which are mercifully better than the horrendous driving sequences from the original game. I mentioned in last week’s discussion of Dead Space that sometimes these variances are overused and I think that is true here, you spend much less time doing the basic combat against Locust than I would like to see but at least mercifully there are a lot of variation activities (which I guess means there are a variety of varieties?) so no one thing gets repetitive.
That doesn’t stop some of them from getting annoying though: There is one section about halfway through the game in which you’re driving a tank thing with questionable controls and you’re forced via some eyebrow-raising contrivances to divert your path across a frozen lake. Of course as you do so the lake is getting peppered by mortar shells which punch huge holes in the ice surface that you must drive around and eventually cause enough damage that the entire surface of the ice disintegrates beneath you. It’s a tedious section because any mistake causes you to restart at the previous checkpoint which is (mercifully) just at the near edge of the lakeshore and yet you’re fighting not just the set up of the encounter (breaking ice all around you!) but also the clumsy controls that aren’t based on the skills you’ve been perfecting in the game to this point. It’s a miserable, patience-baiting slog and when you finally reach the other side, triumphant in your victory, you note there is a second lake just across a short peninsula you must also traverse only this time flying tanks land in front of you as well. I think game sections like this are part of an international conspiracy between game designers and manufacturers of replacement control peripherals. It’s the only thing that makes sense because I can’t imagine anyone thinks these exercises in controller-rending frustration count as anything in the same zip code as “fun.”
I’m not playing this game via co-op but I like that it offers drop-in co-op which I think Gears 1 lacked. I still find it odd that despite the obvious focus on the two-man fire squad organization and tactics, they don’t advantage of the scenario nearly as often as they could. There is a memorable sequence from the first game where one player had to use a searchlight to guide the other across a dangerous courtyard and there is one similar section in the sequel where players must genuinely co-operate to survive but compared to a game like Left 4 Dead where co-operation is built in to the game’s mechanics, this feels like opportunities were missed. - Dead Space
There isn’t much more to be said about Dead Space, I played it for an hour or so in order to complete the Maxed Out achievement which, as I predicted, took me until about Chapter 3 to accomplish on my third time through. I don’t think it has anything to do with the quality of the game that as the achievement marker blinked up I breathed a sigh of relief. I did really enjoy the game (both times) but having seen the same intro sequence that many times in only a few weeks… it was starting to wear thin as every awkwardly delivered line stood out like it was being delivered with deep reverberation and echo effects. Don’t get the wrong idea, the voice acting in the game is perfectly acceptable overall, but in rapid succession like that you stop hearing it for the story and start listening for other things.
I semi-reluctantly listed the game on Goozex; considering that site is the only thing keeping my supply of games fresh I can’t really afford to get too attached to titles. At a 1,000 point premium as I type this, when I start nitpicking Dead Space’s dialogue delivery, it’s time for it to get recycled into something new. - Left 4 Dead
I popped L4D back in the tray this week specifically because I noted that the Survival Pack was being offered for free download on XBLA. I read the description of it incorrectly though because I thought it mentioned two brand new campaigns. After a couple of weeks of bemoaning the need for online play vs. strangers to give the game extra legs I ultimately never gave in because the truth is that I do all my gaming now with a set of headphones blocking the grotesque sounds of gunfire and dismemberments from my wife’s sleep-deprived ears. Regardless of whom I’m playing with online I’d need to be able to communicate with them and as it stands my capacity for doing so is greatly diminished. So I’m hanging onto the game because A) I love it too much to part with (see above for why this is dumb) and B) I’m still holding out that Valve will drop some additional campaigns for this thing sometime soon.
Thinking this was exactly what I’d been hoping for, I excitedly gave it a run and was pretty disappointed to find out the pack is actually a title update that opens two of the existing campaigns for Versus mode (which I’ve never played and didn’t realize wasn’t as complete as co-op or solo in terms of campaign options) and adds a new multiplayer-only mode called Survival. Again, I’m not doing multiplayer right now so I didn’t get anything out of the new content, but while I had it on I did play through Death Toll for a little while. I didn’t finish because I died halfway through by virtue of being an idiot and caring more about achievement hunting than just playing the game; when I kicked the bucket I was a few steps from the safehouse and didn’t feel like going over recently tread ground all over again, a little bit later I just gave up and turned it off.
I know it’s getting to be a malfunctioning victrola but I can’t help but feel like either I’m doing something wrong or I’m approaching the problem incorrectly: I have plenty of gamer friends, many of whom I assume are into the same sorts of games as I am but somehow I’ve had an incredibly difficult time finding even semi-regular multiplayer games that don’t involve potty-mouthed 13 year-olds from Ohio who like to squeak 50 Cent lyrics into their headsets. - Puzzle Quest: Galactrix
My impression of Galactrix after a very short stint with it last week was pretty positive aside from the control scheme. After a solid week of playing it before bed, in between activities and during all manner of down times I can say my opinion of it has diminished greatly.
Here’s the problem with the game: The basic versus mode where you switch off turns on a shared board is still fun. But where this constituted the vast majority of the gameplay in Warlords, it takes a backseat in Galactrix to the mini-games which mostly center around the broken and frustrating mining game. Mining is basically the same as the trapping mechanism in Warlords where the board represents a puzzle and you need to try to solve it except trapping involved a static quantity of pieces and a knowable series of moves that could be discerned with cleverness or at least trial and error. Since mining forces you to pull pieces from beyond the board’s edge, the element of random luck creates an environment of utter angst wherein your only recourse is to wait out the game’s built-in hint and hope it does something useful. That the hints themselves only lead you to success a few percentage points more regularly than you can do with mindless guesswork you’ll forgive me if I cry foul on a mode the computer itself can’t figure out.
If it were just the mining that sucked as a standalone portion of the game, well… pfft. Whatever. But mining has been laid into a integral role in the game as it serves to provide you with the highest return for materials that are directly transferrable into the game’s currency which is necessary for purchasing ships and upgrades. Plus, the materials themselves are required in specific amounts and configurations for crafting, which is the sole means of circumventing the shopping interface. Basically they’ve positioned the worst part of the game in such a way that you have to do it and you have to do it all the time. Don’t tell me it’s made better by not full-on punishing you for failure as you can still walk away from a mining mission where you didn’t meet all the requirements with some materials. That may be true, but asteroids that are the targets of these hated asides require a refresh period so you have to regularly tap pointless asteroids in order to get back to the ones that have what you want. Forget about the fact that you don’t want to do it at all in the first place because it just isn’t fun.
I never felt like Warlords was fighting against me to have fun. Since I started playing Galactrix it feels like the game is punishing me for playing it: There was a bit of a learning curve with Warlords but Galactrix has practically no curve, it’s like a sheer cliff face where the game throws everything it has at you at once and seems to dare you to untangle some sort of action plan from it. I find myself wandering through the galaxy map trying to find something reasonable to do next all the while wondering why simple actions like checking my ship’s inventory have to be done in specific locales (space stations) rather than just with a press of the Select button or something. Sure you can follow the quest mode’s flashing exclamation points and question marks, but the path they lead you down doesn’t assist with your ability to parse the game’s internal language like Warlords did, it pushes you into situations you can’t handle with soulless, sadistic indifference.
I’m inclined to weep as I type the phrase, “I’m actually sort of hating Puzzle Quest.” - Catan Dice/Lost Cities
Nik and I played several rounds of a couple of simplistic favorites during the week; mostly we stuck with Catan Dice but we did play a round or two of Lost Cities as well. My favorite thing about Catan Dice is the way the game deceives you into thinking it isn’t strategic when in fact the richness of it’s possible approaches rivals that of some more complicated looking games. My favorite part of the design is really in the impressive balance achieved by the point values for each individual score node on the sheet which surprisingly takes into consideration not just the comparative difficulty in rolling and correctly and not wasting any turns but values the difficulty of the rolls as well. Cities are notoriously tough because they allow for only one spare die; the genius is that you have to plan and make decisions before you can take advantage of fortuitous rolls: Sometimes that extra road you put in to stretch to the city can make all the difference while nothing is more frustrating than three rock and two hay on the first roll with no road-connected city.
Lost Cities on the other hand is a bit of a mystery. My typical strategy is to play colors my opponent seems to be discarding and generally try to just play the lowest card in my hand each round. The bad part is that even doing that can lead you into an early round exit if you play up to break even before the low cards come up in the deck and you’re stuck cycling through cards while the other player racks up points unhindered. It seems like some people like to watch for what unfolds across the table and try to horde all the potentially valuable cards in that stack; I don’t mind the strategy I just can’t figure out how they manage to have that much room in their hands since I typically feel like I’m operating two cards too short even when my hand is full of cards I intend to play. - Nethack
A friend of mine put up a Nethack scoring page that auto-tracks the scores on any machine with the proper patch compiled in and gave me an account on his machine. So for the last week I’ve been taking a few turns here and there between tasks at work. It’s gone pretty well since I’ve gotten about a dozen games in during that time. Of course, saying that suggests I’ve played a lot but that would indicate to me that you don’t know how bad I am at Nethack.
It’s interesting to me to note that I even like Nethack. By all accounts I shouldn’t since it has everything I hate about games as core features: It’s totally random with very little sense of consistent progression within the randomness, it’s obtuse and complex just for the sake of being complex and it has possibly the worst interface known to humanity. And yet, so help me, I inexplicably love the thing to death.
I have often thought that it wouldn’t take some enterprising person with just some time on their hands to create a decent immersive interface for the thing, even just a hand-drawn first-person tile set wouldn’t be out of the question I don’t think. Sadly the best we have is the 2D tile versions that frankly don’t really help with the game’s awkward human interface engine. But whether you think the input scheme is acceptable or not, it feels important to me to continue to play Nethack if for no other reason than to remind myself that games didn’t used to be built with the intention of having people finish them.
One thing that frustrates me about Nethack is the reliance the game has on mystery. I appreciate the risk/reward element that is introduced when you are in a tight spot and you have an unidentified potion in your inventory which may be exactly what you need, but the fact that everything you pick up is shrouded in uncertainty means that in a lot of cases items simply go unused because they do fall into that “Well I’ll try it if things get hairy.” Consistently I see the breakdown of my inventory after the game is over and see half a dozen things that could have been helpful if I’d only known what they were. I know this is part of the game but I think if they even had 25% of the items exist as known quantities it wouldn’t change the feel of the game too much but would prevent some of the aggravation inherent especially in the early game. - Magic: The Gathering
I spent some time thinking about what my friends and I could do with the free Magic decks we picked up last week. I also broke out my boxes of assorted other cards, mostly from the Ravnica and Kamigawa blocks, and tore apart the random decks I had constructed in those since I could no longer remember their formats so I have a nicely sorted set of cards. My idea was that I could probably use the free deck as a sort of pre-constructed thing for a few rounds and see how it did. Then I thought it would be fun to start adding in controlled amounts of additional cards from our existing collections to slowly build the decks over time into something meaner.
I’m not sure how well realized the idea was but just as a test Aaron and I played a match between our two-color free decks without any modifications. I played my Blue/White and won mostly by virtue of having a very Flyer-heavy set of creatures which ultimately he couldn’t counter with his Black/Green combo. We looked through several of the packs later on and noted that there seemed to be only a couple of combinations in each colored 30-card set. It seems like they tried to focus on each color’s strengths so Green had either mana generation or creature hordes, Black was either graveyard manipulation or creature denial, White had healing in one set or tapping control in the other and so on. I did feel like the decks were kind of basic land heavy and artifacts were really underrepresented but overall I think they were decent starting points and I’m still trying to refine my tournament structure so we can use them for exactly that purpose. - Talisman
If you want to attract a lot of attention in a room full of gamers, I recommend pulling out a copy of Talisman. We’ve been playing with (or more accurately among) the Yahoo! Board Gamers Group on Monday nights for several months now and we may get a few people per week who stop by and check out our game selection or engage in a brief conversation. But last night as we played Talisman with the newly released Dungeon expansion we had a dozen or more people stop by and not just once but we had people drifting by all night long checking progress, relaying memories of earlier editions of the game and asking questions about the new Fantasy Flight version and it’s expansion.
I’ve been trying to play this game since I picked it up over a year ago (actually I got the third edition and for Christmas I received the expansion that brings it in line with 4th plus the Reaper expansion). I still haven’t played on my copy of the game, but having some experience with it was really all I wanted. What surprised me the most about Talisman was how incredibly straightforward it is. Contrasting it with some of our recent games like Marvel Super Heroes, Block Mania and Galaxy Trucker, it felt like Talisman was just a simple board game in the most classic sense of that term: Roll a die, move that many spaces around the board, do what the sapce says. In most cases you draw a card and you use your stat plus a die roll against the opponent’s same stat and a roll of their own. Even the more advanced mechanics like Praying or Followers are handled in very straightforward manner without a lot of complicated systems.
For a person who salivates at rulebooks that rival some of the most exhaustive tomes found on any subject, huge hulking behemoths that could be weapons if wielded by the proper hands, there was something that felt very pure about playing Talisman. It’s not as good of a game overall as DungeonQuest, it lacks some of the charm inherent in a FRPG-lite such as RuneBound and it doesn’t offer the kind of strategic richness you can find in something like Shadows over Camelot. Still, the simple construct made for a night of smooth play with only maybe four rules lookups and we managed by virtue of not having to fuss with complex actions to burn through a full game in about two hours.
The bottom line is that I’m now really glad I bought the game and I’m going to be happy once I finish painting all the miniatures and have a chance to play on my own set. Which I hope will be soon.
Demo Watch
Dishwasher: Dead Samurai – I heard about this game about a year ago when it debuted at the indie developers conference that I think runs in parallel with GDC. It got a lot of buzz for it’s clever art style and old-school sensibilities. After playing through the demo I can say that: Yes, it does have a clever art style and yes, it does feel old school. But I can also say that it’s basically Alien Hominid Goes Super Emo and that at least AH played the old school stylings pitch-perfect, reminding us why games like Contra and Blaster Mater were cool and fun. Dishwasher reminds us why hokey game mechanics and sloppy controls made Bad Dudes and Strider suck.
Flock – Friday’s Listen Up podcast had them raving about the pseudo puzzle game Flock which falls into the category of “Games with Messy Control Schemes Masquerading as a Game Mechanic.” You play an alien saucer that tries to scare farm animals across a map and into a tractor beam within a specific time limit. The way it works is that your saucer “scares” the animals so they push away from you sort of like the green squares in Geometry Wars. The problem with this is that it’s really imprecise and fiddly by design because if they gave you, say, a ring indicator that suggested when you were in range of an animal to scare them you would never have to worry about the game. So instead it feels kind of arbitrary and the animals react clumsily to your herding attempts. Eventually they give you a lift and a depress beam so you can manipulate the environment which is where the puzzling part comes in and… well… yeah. It’s okay, I mean I like the sort of hand-stitched, stuffed animal aesthetic to it and it has a kind of catchy Old MacDonald-meets-Danny Elfman vibe that is really cute but the demo is pretty long and when it was over I read the hard sell page and it said something about 86 levels. I thought, “I would not want to futz with this game for 80 more levels.” So I politely turned it off.
Parting Shot
I was mulling over the circumstance in which I find myself, surrounded by gamers and yet struggling to find many opportunities for online multiplayer gaming. At first I was frustrated, thinking how ridiculous it was that we all have these network-connected boxes sitting in our living rooms and how as busy adults this technology ought to be allowing the sort of interactions that we once took for granted as kids with nothing but time on our hands to fit neatly into schedules we might otherwise find too dense for even sufficient oxygen. It’s difficult to avoid being cynical about the sort of marketing messages being sent when you observe first hand that connecting in this way is sort of dependent on people using other communication techniques to carefully co-ordinate the platform on which this shared virtual experience will be built. Sure we can all sit around on PSN or the Xbox Dashboard, but that’s hardly a seamless fit into the gaps of our interactions. What you need is not just hardware-equipped fellows, but those with enough shared taste and resources to collect similar software titles as well so you have, like, something to do.
But before long I realized the problem, as is so frequently the case, may lie with me instead. I’ve talked already about how I’m a consumer of games, mostly untethered by nostalgia and able to pry myself away from games that I’ve had for short periods of time if that’s what’s necessary to create more schedule space for something new and different. I certainly don’t bemoan the occasional epic foray but I like the experience of games and find little value in a sense of mastery over their every nuance. I imagine this creates in me a rapidly moving target that my companions may find to be too frenetic to ever really draw bead upon. I think this explains why an opportunity for some real gaming with a friend finds us playing Ticket to Ride of all things and the few moments of actual multiplayer in the last year has been restricted to one or two mostly underwhelming sessions in GTA IV and some text chat in WoW that didn’t even have my friend and I in the sapce virtual location, separated by thousands of computer-generated miles.
If I wanted to have a long-distance conversation with a friend, I have plenty of real friends scattered across the country I could find on IM or with the telephone, so thanks Modern Digital Communcation for bringing a sense of distance to my friendships that are actually closer in physical proximity than they are in-game.
Then again, I quit WoW a few weeks later because I got bored of it. See what I mean?