Fail Edition
For the second time since I acquired one, my Xbox 360 flashed the well-known Red Ring of Death. I had been playing The Force Unleashed and for the last few sessions there had been some sort of static in the graphics output. Initially I chalked it up to a crummy game or a weird issue with the disc but didn’t worry about it too much since the game was still playable.
The screen did lock several times which was a bummer but it wasn’t until after one of these locks and I kicked the power button to restart it that the boot up logo sequence had the static glitching that I became concerned. After all, one game being messed up is hardly unexpected considering 90% of all my games have come second hand. But there is something more going on when a system-level operation exhibits some sort of aberrant behavior.
Sure enough I finally got a lock and when I went to reboot it I saw the E 74 error message. I went immediately to Microsoft’s Xbox support site and followed their gimpy troubleshooting steps which included restarting the console (again) and disconnecting peripherals. After doing that I got several instances of the memetic Ring followed by a couple more E 74s and finally I had to accept that it was going to need to be replaced.
So I’m lacking a 360 for the next month or so while I get mine replaced; the biggest drag about the whole thing is that all the games I’ve picked up that I’ve had backlogged for a few weeks now were 360 titles. I had nothing waiting in the wings for DS, PSP or PS3 that hadn’t been back burnered for months or more. So for now I’ll have to try to get back into Jeanne D’Arc or Disgaea or Etrian Odyssey II, but I did head fairly quickly over to Goozex and put a few PS3 titles on there, hoping they would be enough to keep me distracted until I can get what I must now fully concede is my platform of choice back in working order.
- Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
It’s hard to say more about this game since I only played a 20 minutes or so before my 360 died while playing, but I am still locked at the frustrating battle against the Star Destroyer.
I did have a chance to reflect on how odd the Force is presented in various Star Wars fiction. Depending on who is writing the script for whatever you’re experiencing the Force seems like a sort of unweildy mysticism not unlike telekinesis or ESP, or it can be an all-powerful magic comparable to the sort of mind- and matter-bending arcana showcased in high level Dungeons and Dragons games. I mean, in A New Hope Luke’s big achievement in Force usage is making what amounts to a difficult golf putt. In ESB Yoda looks like he’s trying to bench press a Volvo when he lifts an X-Wing out of the swamp and moves it a few yards. Now we have dude from TFU who is single handedly facing squadron after squadron of TIE Fighters and dragging a Star Destroyer out of the sky. Kind of makes you wonder why the Force can do that but it can’t let Darth Vader pluck the location of the Rebel base out of thin air for one or at the very least out of Princess Leia’s head.
Maybe he was distracted from dealing with Death Star technical support or something. - Age of Steam: Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico Expansion
I had to get up early on Saturday morning to get some gaming in, which isn’t actually that unusual since I often get up early on the weekend to play some games before Nikki emerges from her slumber looking for some breakfast. But this time since I had very little in the way of video games to play I got up extra early to drive out to Thom’s place to play some board games.
He had Age of Steam all set up with the southwestern themed expansion and map, which essentially adds a herd of cattle to the resources and removes the new city option. Also, the land is entirely flat and featureless with no rivers or mountains so you can actually stretch your money further.
I did significantly better this time out than I did in the earlier game at KublaCon; up until the end I was step-for-step with Thom on the VP track. What tripped me up in the end was that I spent a lot of the early game building short tracks between cities and avoiding the cattle altogether so when we got to the point where we were adding our track totals together Thom outpaced me by far by virtue of having maxed nearly all of his builds from Round 1 on.
A couple of things stood out to me from this second session. One was that I finally grasped one of the key elements of the game which is that in some ways it is a race to the six-locomotive stage. The faster you can get to the point where you’re running goods their maximum distance the more likely you are to be a contender. The second is that money is a strange beast in the game because it is of vital significance in the early stages where a lack of it will end your game before it has begun, but late in the game it’s almost an annoyance because you can easily get to the point where your income outpaces your ability to spend it. Since money has no impact on the final scoring, you end up getting into silly bidding wars with opponents for the first turn just to feel like you’re using the cash in some way.
I think not just because I did better this time around but more because I understood what the game was trying to do, I liked it even better than I had originally. I’m not sure the cattle element of the expansion added a ton of value to the game, and I still think the game shares a bit in common with Dominion (which we also played) in that the set up of the game is a significant factor in determining how fun that session will be. It feels noteworthy that I’m now interested in trying as many of these scenarios as possible to determine which are the most enjoyable. - Dominion
I’ve now played enough solid games of Dominion to definitively state the following: First, I like the game more than I originally thought I did and second that I would be interested in owning a copy of it. However, I think the beginnings of the system I’ve discussed in the recent past to avoid any serious gaffes in terms of card selection would begin with chronicling the ten stacks over several sessions and effectively rating each one.
In this case we had another winning group of cards with lots of strategic options but one of the more popular stacks was another new BoardGameGeek special: Envoy. Basically it costs 4 gold which is about middle of the road in terms of price but it provides you with +4 Cards at the cost of drawing 5 but having the player to your left choose one to discard. It draws a nice balance between slightly less powered cards like The Smithy and its flat +3 Card ability and an overpowered and overpriced card which might allow +4 or +5 Cards but would also probably have to cost as much as a Gold.
I did notice one other thing that had eluded me in previous sessions which was that the +1 Buy ability of some cards is typically a popular choice, but I noticed that whenever it is in play with a low gold count, so say you have 3 total gold but two buys, players tend to buy one higher priced item and then take the “free” copper as their second buy. This makes perfect sense in a way except that I noticed Aaron in our game on Saturday playing with fewer buys and avoiding the sort of throwaway purchase. The result was that he actively kept his deck size down and it permitted him several impressive turns where he was able to drastically extend his resource base through the judicious use of Festivals (+2 Actions) and Envoys (+4 Cards). Granted, he didn’t win because he missed the opportunity to begin stacking in VP cards, but I thought the strategy was interesting and one I hadn’t fully considered as viable.
I’m actually quite enthusiastic now for the forthcoming expansion, if not quite to the level as my anticipation for the Pandemic expansion due around the same time. The revelation I was granted on Saturday that the expansion also can be played without the inclusion of the base set cards further served to stoke the flame. - Awful Green Things From Outer Space
When I was a kid we used to go to my aunt’s house and they would pull out games to play with my parents and I was always shocked to find that in many cases the games would be brand new, still in the shrink wrap. It baffled me that they would have purchased something and not immediately come home and attempted to use it. Since then I’ve obtained a greater appreciation for how this works within the mind of a gamer: You see an interesting game either at a significant bargain or you get a specific play session scenario in mind and you pick it up hoping the opportunity to use it will present itself. Sometimes these opportunities come up, other times it takes months or even longer before you have a chance.
I’ve had my copy of Awful Green Things for literally years now and it hasn’t come up before because two-player games are sometimes awkward ones for me to arrange. Nik is a really good sport about playing games with me but she enjoys lighter fare overall, and she is not a big fan of learning games from rulebooks, vastly preferring to be taught by someone who is already familiar with the game. Most of my other gaming scenarios are either focused on group favorites like Blood Bowl, Magic, Pandemic and such or there are more parties involved in which case two player games are no longer an option.
Most Monday night game sessions are multiplayer but circumstances brought about an absence and I suggested to Thom that he and I give my long-neglected copy of Green Things a try. I’m simultaneously exuberant that I got the chance to finally try it and crestfallen that I didn’t experience the joy of this game sooner.
Essentially you have a board that represents your ship and a handful of crew tokens, each with a movement allowance, attack die rating and constitution. You then run around the ship picking up various weapons whose effects are randomized and try to battle back a growing tide of Green Things, played by your opponent, as best you can. Meanwhile the Green Things grow each round, eggs become babies, babies become adults or adults lay eggs. The weapons all have interesting properties in addition to their unknown effects and if the tide becomes overwhelming you can even attempt to abandom ship via the escape pods and/or set the ship to self-destruct. Which, of course, I did.
The silly tone of the game is a clever mask for some great strategic opportunities and the randomness of it gives it a nice replayability. We got in two games Monday night, once as each side, and I played again on Tuesday morning against Nik and loved each game of it. It may be somewhat difficult to co-ordinate a game like this, but I suspect I’ll be back to it rather quickly considering how much I enjoyed it.
Parting Shot
I’ve talked in the past about my cyclic interest in various activities or at least my interest in specific elements of my standard pastimes, however you choose to define it all. I’ve noted that there has been something of a decline in my dedicated gaming time over the last few weeks and where normally I’d chalk it up to the ebb and flow of my enthusiasm the interesting thing is that in this case it has been different. My passion for playing games has remained but I’m beginning to compartmentalize my time and avoid the “stolen moment” style of game play I have frequently relied upon to maintain a steady clip of gaming in spite of my growing responsibilities.
I’m beginning to wonder if this is a portent of the future of my gaming hobby as I prepare for the arrivial of my first child later this summer. I think pre-scheduled interludes of relatively short blocks of time (that is, two to three hours as opposed to half or full day devotions) are probably going to (eventually) be doable but I suspect that hollering “Hang on, I’m in the middle of an unskippable cutscene, I’ll change the baby when it’s over” is going to fly about as well as a steam locomotive. Monday game nights are likely to be on hiatus for a period of time immediately following the birth but I suspect they will return at some point, likewise conventions are probably out of the question in the present and near-future tense but sooner or later they will creep back in. I know this much: I’ve had life-changing events before and always found a way to do some gaming after making the appropriate adjustments. This just feels like yet another of those transitions, and at least this time, I’m ready for it.