Filing Edition
Classification is a tricky business although one I know humans in general have a difficult time resisting. Causing stumbling awkwardness the whole time is the regular occurrence of things which either defy classification or force the labels to grow ever more specific. It’s like trying to assign genre labels to your iTunes library: Is Primus “Comedy Music” or “Rock”? It seems a bit pedantic to create a genre called “Funk-Influenced Alternative Psychadelic Rock with Comic Lyrical Themes.” It depends also what your intended purpose is: If your efforts are focused on grouping you may find that while Johnny Cash is often stuck in “Country” music, you may find (as I do) that lumping him with Faith Hill and Garth Brooks feels like an affront to the man in black.
Which is all why the discussion of what qualifies someone as a “gamer” or “hardcore” has felt sort of forced or irrelevant to me. People seem to have a hard time classifying even themselves, and yet they take umbrage to the notion of those they deem unworthy encroaching on their preferred labels. I do find it fascinating to watch people struggle to accept the truth of their perceptions when presented with hard evidence that subverts it; more often I find humor when aggro youths demand credentials for someone’s self-proclamations. They’re like tiny gamer hall monitors, patrolling hallowed halls without pondering the footfalls of their predecessors, mired in the present as if it were the only thing of relevance.
Even in those cases I try to avoid the obvious scorn. It speaks no better of me to challenge them with qualifications that extend beyond their chronology permits. After all, no one expects that anyone born in the 1970s would have seen as many black and white films as one born thirty years prior. The only catch is you want to be cautious speaking with authority on cinema if you don’t have at least a passing knowledge of pertinent historical films. And in any case a touch of humility—an endangered quality on these here Inter-connected Nets—is appropriate: There is always someone with experience and context of greater breadth and depth than your own, you can lay a bet on that.
You quickly reach a point trying to compare similar enthusiasts where you’re forced to fabricate ludicrous sounding faux-words like “hardcasual” which have neither meaning nor legitimate applicability to any known human. The factor most of the classification-obsessed ‘net denizen overlooks is that classifying humans is trying to draw bead on a moving target, especially when you’re discussing leisure. Assuming an activity is preferable to some other activity, you can be relatively confident that a person will engage in it when presented with the opportunity. Given heaps of delicious, creamy chance, they will dive in and lather themselves with it as long as possible. Restrict that access and they will pine for it, wish that they could devote more time to its pursuit but likely won’t forsake it. You can say that someone who finds work commitments too taxing to engage in, say, regular golf games is not a “golfer” based on some arbitrary equation measuring games played divided by time. I have to question whether the distinction holds value; self-identifaction in this case feels like the test and the answer sheet stapled together.
- Magic: The Gathering
I played a few more matches during lunch breaks. Somehow I ended up with two extra 30-card color decks, black and green, giving me six possible combinations. So far I’ve tried Blue/White, Green/Blue and Black/White. Blue/White was probably the most effective pairing although I felt in every game that the key factors were Aaron’s black cards dealt a lot of direct damage and curiously provided him life in many cases but even more significantly the Free Decks are very mana heavy. I tend to go pretty light comparatively speaking in terms of basic land: I’d rather use alternate sources if possible and while it’s annoying to have a hand full of cards you can’t play, I find it to be infuriating to draw nothing but mana-generating land when you really need something useful to stop the bleeding.
Where the Magic action really took off was Monday night. Somehow we all managed to forget to bring anything interesting to play so we spent the whole of game night swapping back and forth with Magic matches and engaging in a couple of three-player matches as well. I had finally settled on a bruise deck (Blue/Black) which allowed a reasonable amount of denial combined with an acceptable creature set and some alternative/direct damage sources in case some weenie horde overran my forces. It’s the kind of deck that seems to either dominate or lose mid-length matches because it doesn’t grind into a standstill but if the cards aren’t hitting in the right order (there are a lot of hand discarding spells included which don’t help much past the early game) it can be a case of drawing for the one card in the deck that can solve a problem.
My play issues so far (I always have play issues in Magic because I’m just not that good at the game) have revolved around patience and my relative inexperience with permission decks. For example, I had a match where Thom was banging away at me with a 1/1 flier I couldn’t block who had been hit with two Holy Strengths bringing him to 3/5. I had an artifact that was capable of dealing 2 damage to it but no way to drop the enchantments. So I draw a 2/2 flier of my own which I cast but of course he has no reservation in continuing the attack since at best I delay the 3-damage-per-turn cycle by one round. So of course he attacks the next turn and I block, sacrificing one of my few chances to do any damage to the guy for a single turn reprieve. Meanwhile I’m holding Corrupt which deals damage to a creature or player equal to the number of swamps you control. At the time, I’m still waiting for my first swamp but of course the turn after I give up my flier I draw that land and realize that now I’m back to waiting for an opportunity that had already presented itself if I’d just been patient enough to take the damage and wait for the likelihood that one of my 12 salvation cards in a 60-card deck would come up. Those are way better odds than waiting for one of my other two fliers to hit the top of the library.
The experience angle comes in because I’m not used to having to hold off on playing cards I an afford so that I can potentially deny the opponent. I had a counterspell that worked only on creatures early in a game against Aaron. I had the requisite 2 mana (1 Blue, 1 colorless) but I also had a cheap creature I could play and, used to green and white, I played it. Doing so left me without sufficient available resources when he decided to play a basilisk-like creature that destroys any creature it deals damage to making it tough for a non-weenie deck like mine to maintain a consistent blocking strategy against. He plinked and plunked me for two damage at a time over the next dozen turns. When he finally defeated me I was forced to drop my hand and reveal the initial counter-creature card, now accompanied by its sole matching mate from the deck and a full on stops-anything counterspell card, all of which had gone unplayed because I hadn’t left untapped mana around to play them when they would have been of service.
We’re playing these matches as a tournament, trying in a relatively short period of time to taste a bit of all that Magic has to offer: Competition, pure level-field play, deck construction, drafting and progressive leagues. I’m not sure the formula I’ve set up is as viable or exciting as I hoped it would be, but I’m enthusiastic about the game again and happy that the financial investment is either nil or minimal, depending on how I feel each given week. - Resident Evil 5
One thing I find odd about RE5 is the way it unfolds from a user interface perspective. I remember watching The Fugitive remake with Harrison Ford back when it came out and my dad noted that the entire intro sequence involving the wife’s murder, the trial, the flashbacks and the sentencing occurs after a few of the credits and then suddenly, like 20 minutes into the film, the rest of the intro credits begin. It feels strange, as if the substance of what you had just seen was suddenly subverted into this “prologue” state. Resident Evil does the same thing only instead of credits, it’s tutorial-style details. Entire chapters pass before the game starts to reveal some of the key strategies for playing like stunning opponents with a single shot before using a melee attack to finish them off. Perhaps the instruction manual covers this in depth but as I’ve mentioned, I never use the things and couldn’t if I’d wanted to in this case anyway; Hollywood doesn’t provide manuals with their rentals.
Anyway, I finished the game and overall I’d say it wasn’t terrible although I thought some of the racial imagery was pretty uncomfortable and really unnecessary. A friend pointed out that RE4 used a lot of distorted religious iconology as a source for its creepiness, but I countered that there is an element of fear present in those images. Whether it be the mystical nature of robed and hooded inquisitors bearing their books telling tales of and holding sway over life and death or just the moribund sense conveyed by gothic trappings, I feel those elements hold a legitimate and common thread of genuine fear. To juxtapose that with ancient tribal cultures and a sense of reversion to the most base stereotypes of Africans as savage headhunters, as if those people should evoke the same sort of timorousness as gargoyles and candle-lit cathedrals… well, it feels icky.
Of course, that could easily be as much a product of my white guilt as anything else, which is why I prefer to abruptly alter the subject to discuss another point of criticism: The plot. Resident Evil suffers, as an entity, from its own internal legacy and baggage. Since each individual chapter is hardly capable of making sense individually, the stretch placed on credibility to get them all to work together as some sort of cohesive arc would require it to be made of fibrin. Re5 includes a Library element which contains a 64-slide History of Resident Evil plus progression through the game unlocks dossiers on many of the game’s featured characters and significant locations or concepts. The result of all this is at least a novella’s worth of mostly dry text which still manages to require the reader to consult outside resources to provide context to some of the most entangled events or terminology. This is simply too cumbersome at this point.
Each game seems to start out with a series-initiate-friendly approach, but somewhere along the line they can’t seem to help themselves from layering in heaping gobs of mythology and “shocking” revelations which are shocking to no one since not a soul remains who remembers all these characters and relationships from games released in 1999 or earlier. Some people called RE4 a reboot to the series but it was really more of a necessary modification; most of the real baggage on the narrative hung there, fastened like hooks through straining flesh just out of sight. In RE5 that weight is carried front and center starting from about Chapter 4. I’ve attempted the “but” sentence here four times, trying to explain why I toil along with each numbered iteration of the series despite these complaints being legitimate as far back as RE3. The logic is limp and thin even to my own eyes. I dislike what that may reveal about me. Maybe I should surrender my hope that each new installment can wrest control back from madness, but then I hear things, on the wind, and I return to my labor. - Half-Life 2
I’m stuck without a new game while my Goozex trades stumble for the first time in almost two years of being a pretty regular trader so I’ve been dipping back into my library of games to pick through a few of those titles I meant to put more time into but never did. I actually played quite a lot of HL2 but I keep meaning to play it through a second time so I can grab a few achievements I missed initially and also so I can solidify the plot and events in my mind in optimistic preparation for Episode 3.
I saved the last time at the chapter heading for “We Don’t Go to Ravenholm…” which was one of my favorite parts of the game on the first run through but it follows immediately after my least favorite part, “Water Hazard.” I don’t know what it was about that stupid airboat that drove me so batty but the level seemed to drag on and on… each time I felt like I reached what had to be the conclusion I’d find another locked gate I’d have to battle my way through. Fortunately this time I felt like I was either having a really “on” day or perhaps my skills have somehow improved, but sections which gave me fits initially were done with minimal fuss this time around.
Laughably the part I found the most difficult was that weird achievement where you find the singing Vortagaunt. The path to him is lined with a not-insubstantial stretch of radioactive waste and it’s found just after a fairly dangerous encounter with a boss-like helicopter so my first few attempts were futile efforts to see if I could outrun the radiation damage I was taking. Eventually I managed to collect enough health and suit energy to just make the journey. I collapsed with zero health just as the alien came into view and cried with anguish at my misfortune only to watch the achievement unlock as the screen washed over with red. I have no idea what’s up with the easter egg because I didn’t live long enough to investiagte it, but I got the 3 points or whatever and I guess that’s good enough for me. - Tomb Raider: Anniversary
I wanted to like this game as much as I liked Legend, but I don’t know if it’s the nostalgia factor that I don’t possess because I was a bit late to the TR franchise, playing more TR2 than the original or if it’s that the game itself stumbles where Legend soared. I can’t really tell I just know that each time I pop Anniversary into the tray I get sort of depressed trying to navigate levels that feel padded and arduous and seeing how contextless the early games were. Say what you will about the series’ inability to grow and evolve, at least they began to give Lara some semblance of personality and construct something that resembled a narrative later in the series. I’m not sure that Crystal Dynamics would have ever had the stones to retconn something as bold as a series of threads that might tie back to the current incarnations somehow but not doing so showcases their ill-placed reverence for a game that may have worked in the early 90s but even with flashy graphics and some level design updates, could have used a more cleverly choreographed pace.
Anniversary reminds me in some ways of Resident Evil 5 (although it’s not an apt comparison because at least Anniversary has the saving grace of being able to claim semi-legitimate ignorance) where it works after a fashion but in a world where it’s competition (in this case Uncharted and maybe even Prince of Persia) exists, it needs to be the game raising the bar not falling well short of it. Assuming of course, you subscribe to the theory that series whose belts span the circumfrence of multiple titles ought to remain in the forefront of the genres they helped define. - Rock Band 2
During a session of our Tour mode I suggested a new idea I thought might make Nik more comfortable with a gentler slope into Hard difficulty than the game itself provides. “How about trying bass on some easy songs in Hard mode?” I asked. She agreed.
We ended up playing about five songs that way, in Free Play so we didn’t mess up our fan counts. I could tell after about the third one that she was struggling and by the time I asked, “One more?” it was pretty clear that she wasn’t having fun anymore. It’s frustrating to me not because I demand excellence from her but because I understand that the game hits this wall which, even as a lifetime game player, I found awkward to hurdle. For a game that could be the ultimate party/karaoke replacement, it’s ridiculous to carve these artificial chasms into the progressive modes that serve as barriers for a game that—intentional or not—is friendly to the non-enthusiast.
If they decoupled the progressive mode from the meta-game elements that appeal broadly to owners of the game (narrative advancement, which is part of the wish fulfillment engine the game sort of relies on for propulsion, not to mention the paper-doll system which is tied into the money mechanic which is solely available in the progressive mode) it wouldn’t matter. That their design decisions have led to a hyper-enjoyable core game and also served to choke that delight at pivotal junctures suggests something unpleasant about their understanding of what people want from their product and what fun really is. - Gears of War 2
Probably my last visit into GoW2 involved me trying to get through the first ten Waves in Horde mode. There is an achievement there, for one thing, but also I thought Horde was enjoyable but needed an actual party to be truly enjoyable past the first half of the Waves (there are 50 total).
Turns out, the Waves get really difficult at about #8 for one player. So what was supposed to be an hour or so to bang through the last three Waves to get the achievement ended up being three hours of frustrated angst as I tried to coordinate what usually ended up being the last four or five Locust with my sense of self-preservation and my dwindling ammo supplies.
There are two choke points in the Day One map, up on the balconies, where you have a cover wall and no access from behind so you can kind of survive there for some time. This is especially helpful against the excessive number of Maulers who start in around Waves 8 or 9: They can’t clear cover but their shields make them time-consuming (and bullet-consuming) to take down. I found it easier to wait for them to get up to the wall and then pick them off with shots to the foot with my pistol. Naturally this worked great until Wave 10 when Bloodmounts showed up, since they can clear the wall. It took more tries than I care to admit to figure out that the mounts are more dangerous than their riders and a couple of shotgun blasts was usually sufficient to take them down, leaving the rider and his pea-shooter to deal with later.
I finally did clear the tenth Wave and promptly shut the game off, actually feeling a greater sense of accomplishment than I did from completing the campaign mode. I think it really solidified the sense I had that I was finally “done” with the game. - Nethack
I had my best game ever last week, I played as an Orc Barbarian so I had poison resistance which means eating food is rarely dangerous (as it is apt to be otherwise). Plus, being a strong melee class helps significantly when you can plough through the Gnomish Mines without ever needing a healing item.
What I did wrong ultimately was grab a cursed katana from a pile of bones and instantly wield it (forsaking my nice uncursed +0 two-handed sword because I found a shield). My other option was a short sword and 1D10 damage is far better than 1D6. I had found the vault early in the game via a teleport trap but I had to drop my cash and follow the guard out. When I finally found a pick-axe I spent hundreds of turns wandering the low levels of the dungeon looking for a way to uncurse my stupid sword. Doing that, of course, clears out most of the monsters so by the time I found a way to try to uncurse myself, I prayed at the altar and got unlucky: It uncursed my splint mail (which I hadn’t realized even was cursed) and not my sword. Two turns later I was weak from hunger and tried in vain to make it deeper into the dungeon so I could kill some food.
When I got there I was fainting, knew I wasn’t able to pray, and couldn’t one-hit the wolf in my single turn of waking so I died while helpless. In the tournament I ended up with the 6th place score from all that but it was incredibly frustrating to have a Stupid Death when things were really going my way.
Stupid Nethack.
Demo Watch
- Valkyria Chronicles
I played through the demo again this weekend. Twice.
I discussed the game a little with Nik, who is a good sport about holding conversations that revolve around a hobby she barely cares about and aspects of it that don’t interest her in the least. I was lamenting that it seemed like Valkyria Chronicles, being probably the game I’m most anxious to play at this point, is feeling like a game that won’t be available on Goozex for a long time. Despite almost universally positive reviews, it’s got all the trappings of one of those “everyone who played it loved it, too bad only like ten people did” kinds of games. Those kinds of games are the ones that are tough for a guy like me to get ahold of since I’m relying on trades to supply me with fresh games. No one can trade out a game they don’t have.
The good news is that it’s already down to $45 new from some online retailers and I’ve even seen it as low as $35 from some used vendors. If I don’t wait too long I can probably pick it up for somehwere between those two prices and dump it back into Goozex for the full 1,000 points.
The problem is my new budget structure which certainly does not include $60 a month for games anymore makes that a slow slog and practically a race with Goozex to see who can get me the game in the longest amount of time possible.
In the meantime I’m not above replaying the one Skirmish mission in the demo over and over. That one simple level alone is enough to make me want to hug Sega and all the developers, I fear rampant fanboyism is on the horizon, only as close as my access to the game itself will allow. - Space Invaders Extreme
I’m not ready to say that Space Invaders Extreme is as good of an update for a classic game as Pac-Man Championship Edition is/was. However. The core mindset that made PM:CE successful is on prominent display in this game. The key to updating a title that practically everyone over the age of 18 has played at some point is to make sure the core of what made the original game fun is intact while adding enough new elements to make it feel like a progression rather than a cash-in. Since the original Space Invaders was essentially a ponderously paced vertical shooting game, it could be tempting to update it into something that feels more like Ikaruga. But this title sidesteps that by maintaining a comparatively leisurely tempo only adding additional chaos on the periphery of the principal mechanic. The result is something identifyable and yet fresh.
I admit the visual stylings are a bit more hectic than I’d like; Pac-Man: CE caught the right balance between stodgy classicism and blazing modernity. Space Invaders Extreme gets close but just overshoots. When I start quibbling aesthetic minutiae I think it’s safe to say I have little to complain about. I’m currently in an awkward stage with my MS Points where I have too few for reasonable purchases but too many to go spending a full packages’ worth to pad into a useful sum. As a result the game is out of my reach for the time being, but if I had a Short List, it would already be on it, bumped directly to the top. - Pixel Junk Eden
After hearing them rave about this game on Listen Up for weeks, I finally decided to check out the demo. Maybe I didn’t go into it with a fair mindset but the abstract nature of the game and it’s sort of meandering pace really turned me off to it. I futzed around with it for about 15 minutes and felt myself getting actually hostile toward the game and its creators for building something so pointless and uninteresting. I turned it off in an effort to salvage both my mood and my karmic goodwill. - Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection
Even though I have a Genesis collection for the PSP, which is actually a preferable way for me to play classic or retro games, I investigated this particular catalog because it contains Fatal Labyrinth which is a console-based rogue clone reportedly along the lines of Nethack. I have two reservations about picking up this title: One is that many of the games featured here are replicated on the PSP and the other is that when it comes to retro/classic games, I’d rather have them bundled in as convenient a package as possible. This is what handheld gaming excels at, why take that away from it?
The reason the demo holds no genuine value for me is that it only allows you to play a handful of games you’ve probably already played. I’m not sure what this tactic is supposed to truly accomplish compared with an alternative strategy like a full version of the game with a 30 minute timeout or something. In any case it has saved me the hassle of trying to figure out if it’s worth buying or trading for the title: Without a reasonable demo of the one title I’m curious about I can’t make an informed decision.
Parting Shot
After almost two years of being an active member of Goozex the last couple of weeks have been pretty disappointing. I guess considering how well things have gone otherwise it can’t be helped that some trades just won’t go smoothly. But I can overlook the fumble with Fable II since it was an understandable issue, what has me steamed is the trade for Condemned 2.
The game was supposed to ship on the 1st. Clearly, it didn’t because the shipping confirmation came in sometime around the 5th or 6th. And even then, the tracking number was inputted incorrectly so I’ve had no way to tell what’s going on. But given that it was a minor mix-up, I’d be willing to overlook all that if the game had actually arrived in a timely manner. Yet a full seven-day week past the confirmed ship date and I don’t have the game. Every excuse I can fabricate for this trader (Mother’s Day postal traffic, slow transit) hasn’t been able to explain the exceptional slowness of the trade and even if it did, it doesn’t change the fact that I shouldn’t be skirting the 14-day timeout period before marking the game as unshipped because he didn’t get it out at the agreed-upon time.
Two things about this raise my ire: One is that I checked the trader’s feedback history and while it’s all positive, he does have several comments that say “Game came in good condition but I wish it had shipped on time.” To me this indicates he’s got a pattern going here of taking his sweet time to ship games out. Why? Because the second issue is that there is no recourse for recipients within Goozex’s system. This trader has no incentive to not push the edge of the process because Goozex doesn’t allow feedback granularity that can provide even basic wrist-slaps for not being a good community member. Your feedback options are:
- Positive: Everything was good
- Positive: Package quality not great, otherwise fine
- Neutral: Component issue, missing case
- Neutral: Component issue, missing case and/or manual
- Neutral: Insufficient postage
- Negative: Disc unplayable
- Negative: Disc broken
- Negative: Game not received in 14 days
- Negative: Wrong game
- Negative: Received pirated/illegal game
This has been raised as an issue before on the Goozex forums. The problem is that I don’t see many instances where the “Neutral: Insufficient postage” would be used and the whole of the Neutral group is sort of questionable. At the very least it looks like they tried to set Neutral to be the “Yeah I got the game but it wasn’t quite what I hoped for” option and yet it doesn’t have the sort of useful feedback that can help other traders know who to avoid dealing with nor does it provide an acceptable punishment for being a bad trader. In this case I’d like to see one that is “Neutral: Game shipped late” at the least and probably also something like “Neutral: Package quality compromised.” I’ve received games that looked like they were put through the washing machine and while they may technically play, it’s a bummer to have to provide beneficial feedback when someone else obviously isn’t taking care of their stuff.
The specific problem in this case is that unless the game doesn’t arrive in the next two days (and I’m guessing it will) I’ll have no choice but to claim the game was shipped properly, which it wasn’t. I suspect this person has been doing this long enough to understand that loophole exists and either keeps the games longer so s/he can continue to play them even after being matched (the benefits of this aren’t immediately apparent but it can be useful to list a game as available for trade even before you’re ready to give it up since the faster you get on the list the more expedient the matching is; the one- or three-day shipping limit is designed to prevent people from buying a new game, listing it immediately, getting matched quickly and then rushing through it before they ship it off) or simply procrastinates. I may be sympathetic to procrastinators but when a slacker like me can get it together enough to ship games on time, my patience wears thin.
With Goozex apparently doing nothing to discourage this, the community as a whole suffers and relief is nowhere to be seen.