Emotional Edition
I don’t want to oversell anything, so let’s get the caveats out of the way: Pregnant women can and will cry at the drop of the hat. The principal tear-jerkers for the last seven months in my corner of the world has been menu planning and food acquisition. Also, commercials. Still, in most cases I can evaluate the scenario and say, you know, if I were to amplify my emotional response threshold to, say, seventy weepowatts, I could totally understand getting worked up over these things. So I mean it in the most sincere fashion when I say that it is a testament to the resonance felt by soul-bearing humans that this video game trailer made my wife cry.
I’ve never finished Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, to my great shame. I own them both. They’re sitting here in my nightstand and across the room is a connected PS2 with a memory card containing partially completed save games. My lack of follow-through in finishing them is largely a product of my endless fascination with new and shinier things which is why I’m playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and not these modern classics. Honestly I could take or leave Ico. I fully grasp the enthusiasm it elicits but in terms of playing a game, I prefer Shadow.
E3 was last week, so I probably followed gaming news more closely than I typically do. I listened to the daily Listen UP podcasts and was happy to hear most of the positive buzz about games (largely sequels) that I’m interested in. Assassin’s Creed II, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Uncharted 2, Mass Effect 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Modern Warfare 2, God of War III, Brutal Legend, Scribblenauts and Alan Wake all sounded like they were shaping up very nicely. Of that list I think I’m probably the most excited about Left 4 Dead 2 and Assassin’s Creed II because I feel like I never got quite enough of L4D with the first title but had more or less exhausted the content it had. I griped last week about the very un-Valve like iteration but honestly I’m hanging onto the original now for nostalgia which is something I try very hard not to do, in the past seven days I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m actually ready for a full new game but the truth is I’m never excited about the prospect of spending $60. Meanwhile Assassin’s Creed was one of my surprise favorites from that wash of high quality titles a couple years ago which included the original Mass Effect, Halo 3, Orange Box, BioShock and others. I recognized its faults without allowing them to interfere with my enjoyment, I can very honestly say I’m ready for more.
Contrast that with Mass Effect which I pre-ordered and practically begged myself to love, but found it to be good but not actually fantastic. I’ll play the sequel because I have enough invested to want to know what they do with the story and I think Bioware has earned a bit of patience on my part. But while I dove into the original with my mind prepared to revel in hyperbolic praise, I’m approaching this one more cautiously, as if the rabies of disappointment might surge again through my blood.
- Legend of the Green Dragon
My friend Aaron introduced me to this modified Door game which is an adaptation of Legend of the Red Dragon which I had never heard of. Though my family had Prodigy back before the Internet was sort of synonymous in public parlance with the World Wide Web, it wasn’t exactly the sort of hardcore experience many of my contemporaries who discovered the breadth of their nerd roots earlier than I would look on with the sage nods of fellow war veterans meeting. As such most of my online activities in that era were limited to perusing message boards that debated the relative quality of Master of Puppets versus Ride the Lightning and looking up hints for King’s Quest V. So this is really my first experience with this type of game. Listen, you can judge me all you like but I’ve never played a MUD either. I got to some of these parties late, but I’m just as happy to eat cold finger food and drink flat punch in the aftermath.
Essentially it’s a turn-based RPG built around a loose social network. The installation server I’m playing on has very few participants so much of the PvP aspect seems lost on my experience so far. Overall the game isn’t what I consider traditional fun, in that it’s not terribly thrilling. The descriptions are very stock and repetitive and since it’s entirely text-based there tends to be a lot of skimming at best and flat-out skipping things the rest of the time. The bulk of the game centers around the allotment of Forest Turns you get per game day, which are based on real time so every four hours or so a new game day starts and your Turns refresh. You use these turns to search the woods for enemies that give you gold and experience. Occasionally you run across other random encounters which can be things like riddles and games which require or earn you other perks like gems and potions, but ultimately the game consists of hitting the button to search the forest and then hitting the “Fight” button until you defeat whatever creature it is you encountered. Once your turns run out, you head back to town, buy as much gear as you can afford and then log out until the four hours expire and you do it again.
I’d call it a nice diversion but hardly a barrel of monkeys. - Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
My affection for TFU is waning as I push toward the end game and not just because they’ve decided to recycle every level/planet you visit halfway through the game but also because they ratchet the frustration level up with cheap enemies that undo certain attacks. So you’ll be fighting along and suddenly there are a group of foes who can’t be lifted with Force Grip or you’ll find some guys who are impervious to lightning followed by some guys who can only be hurt by lightning. I understand the need to make this into a genuine game rather than just a long cut scene with a single win button but for all their effort to get you to use assorted combos and mix up your force powers feels very artificial. Ultimately I don’t mind that it is hard to defeat a Rancor monster but I don’t want freaking Jawas to give me trouble because all of a sudden they developed anti-Force shields. As a Jedi who should be growing in power I should feel more unstoppable as the game progresses, not less.
And the manner in which most of the Force powers add onto the already fairly complex control scheme means that a lot of the “cool” stuff you can do is so specific in its sequence of button presses that I can’t possibly remember it all. Ultimately I look around for the heaviest thing I can lift and devise some strategy for getting enough time to pick it up and huck it at the biggest swarm of bad guys. I don’t see anything wrong with this, but the game does.
The juncture I’m at now (this may be spoiler-ish so if you care, stop reading this segment) I’m supposed to be Forcing a star destroyer to crash land, but of course they have to make it a QTE-style segment and they need to inject a bunch of annoying TIE Fighters as well. The problem is the QTEs are long and baffling and frankly don’t seem to work right. I had 45 minutes to complete the section this morning which gave me three 15-minute attempts and each one I ended up dying not out of incompetence but frustration and impatience because each section where I think I’m finally going to win results in me having to give up to fight the incoming fighters while the controls stubbornly refuse to yeild despite me doing exactly what they want. Since I just want to get on with it, I start trying to wipe out the TIE Fighters quickly rather than doing the patient, effective thing and I die.
If I weren’t nearly ready in every case to snap my controller in half already I’d find it incredibly frustrating. As it is, I reach that plateau and failure is actually welcome, the sweet kiss of virtual death releasing me from purgatory. In my estimation, games should never work this hard to make me hate them. - Magic: The Gathering
I made a command decision to move on to the next round, mostly so we could open some of our new packs of cards. I got some interesting stuff, but I had forgotten that Fifth Dawn (which is the set from which we purchased the boosters) was predominately artifacts. So I have some nifty colorless cards now which is helpful in a deck that tends to defy probability in its ability to get mana screwed. Equipment cards were a very spiffy mechanic I think so I’m glad in retrospect we went with this set.
After I updated my deck I got a couple games in aginst Thom and then he, Aaron and I played a multiplayer match. My first bout with Thom was a disaster as I got none of the mana I needed. The second game was a win but a close one as I drew the exact card I needed to stop the heavy bleeding from one of his flying creatures. At that point it was hist turn to succumb to mana problems and I basically took over where he left off, picking away at him with flying creatures. The multiplayer match was tricky, it lasted far longer than I expected. I ended up winning which was nice but I had a chance to finish Aaron off at one point about halfway through and I noted that doing so would leave me pretty vulnerable to a counter-attack from Thom so I passed on the chance. Of course Aaron’s deck is a life-giving one so he was able to build back up and last longer than Thom when all was said and done. He did have a chance to win considering he had played an artifact that caused direct damage if I wasn’t able to maintain either three or four cards in my hand. He also had a chance to deal direct damage if I played any black cards which I had in abundance. It was only fortune then that I had just enough to finish him off before he drew the next card which it turned out would have probably slid the tide in his favor. Considering I had been the target of early attacks I was pretty surprised to be able to pull off a victory, but it had all the elements you look for in a multiplayer game and ranks high on my list of all-time favorite matches. - Dominion
After Magic was over we pulled out Dominion and we played with the promotional card Black Market which creates a separate deck containing one each of all other unused cards in the base game. I can’t express how much of an improvement this one card made on my opinion of the game as a whole. We played two matches which were each fairly long for Dominion games, but they were the best ones I’ve experienced yet and it was the first time I really felt like I might want to own a copy of it to share with others. I still think each game’s card selection needs to be regulated somehow, but when you find a winner, the game shines.
Parting Shot
Emotional connection is not usually something I think about relative to games. But it is there, maybe on a more rudimentary level. Some things work for me because I connect them to a sense or a moment in time. An example may be Halo, which through three FPS adventure games retained my interest despite me having to pepper almost every conversation about the series with qualifying remarks. Each game had its own peculiar set of issues but by and large I’m a sucker for Sci-Fi shooter games so it wasn’t a shock that I enjoyed them it was more surprising that I cared about them.
And then when I heard about the next wave in Halo games that followed the conclusion of the Master Chief trilogy of Halos 1-3, I found myself equally astonished that I was heavily apathetic about it all. It turns out that my connection wasn’t to Halo as a backdrop or a mythology but rather to the tale of the central character. Halo Wars? Meh, just another RTS. Halo ODST? Meh, another cash-in for the multiplayer die-hards. And now they tease Halo Reach and I have to say that unless the game is somehow a prequel featuring MC, I’m probably not going to care about it either.
This is unsettling for me because I never really considered Master Chief to be much of a character to begin with. It’s really Cortana that gives the Halo games a soul (ironic since she’s supposed to be AI, I don’t have quite enough faith in the storytelling self-awareness at Bungie to suspect it could be intentional) but the interplay between the two—almost a romance, really—is compelling. And frankly it feels like the story has been told. I thought the end of Halo 3 wrapped it all up just fine and at this point I’m not really interested in seeing Halo as a franchise become diluted into a brand name Microsoft trots out a few times a year to boost sales. Or, to be more preicse, I can’t be bothered to care if that’s the direction they move.