Follow-Up Edition
My expectations are peculiar beasts. Take, for instance, the odd contrast in gaming to conventional knowledge regarding in the cinema world: Sequels are always inferior. I’ve so long held this to be true that in many cases that “knowledge” spills over into other media and I start reviling follow-ups without having any firsthand knowledge of their content. In truth, many video game sequels are actually better than their forebears. This actually makes a certain sense because many first efforts in games are technological and mechanical experiments such that sequels can be and often are more refinements than anything else. Many games don’t have the same onus as films or books to “recapture” some nebulous attribute of the original (in many cases a sense of surprise and freshness that, by definition, cannot be recaptured).
Logically, I know this and yet I find I regularly stumble when presented with an announced sequel as my first thought is often, “Here’s where they ruin it.” Some games don’t carry this burden and I think it has something to do with my appetite for more of some particular title or my sense that there is yet more to be done with the systems or stories presented. Dead Space, for one recent example, feels like a game they could easily do more of and I would welcome it due to the broad reach of the setting yet unexplored. On the other hand I have nothing but skepticism for the upcoming BioShock 2 because I can’t help but feel that the original’s story and progression were complete in that package, a tidy bow put on top. Could they have improved BioShock 1? Sure. Should they try to find a way to shoehorn those improvements into some narratively-questionable rehash? I’m not so positive.
The good thing about my expectations though is that I’m willing to allow them to be tested. This is how I end up playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Fable II which both seemed upon initial evaluation to be better than I had reasonably hoped they would be. It’s how I end up loving something like Portal or Mirror’s Edge. Of course, it’s also how I end up suffering through Haze and Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, but you get some bad with the good.
- Fable II
When asked, I say that I really enjoyed the original Fable on Xbox. This is not a lie, but the truth is I don’t really remember much about the game. I remember thinking it was quite good, I remember enjoying my time with it and I remember a few snippets here and there from the game play but beyond that my only real recollection is that I found a lot of stuff that was not in the game. Having picked it up on recommendation from an earlier print article in which Peter Molyneux overhyped his game (this was before I followed gaming news more closely) prior to completion. It didn’t exactly sully my enjoyment of the game, but it did color the experience. I know friends of mine enjoyed the game more who had not been so misinformed.
Clearly Mr. Molyneux learned a lesson from that initial misstep because I didn’t find anything in Fable II that was represented in earlier press absent in the final game. But where Fable the original was a good game that felt more or less incomplete given what you knew of the design intentions, Fable II is a complete game that shows where that design is flawed.
Actually, I can’t say the game design is flawed. As an action RPG adventure game, Fable II is quite a lot of fun. Some of the mechanical aspects like the companion dog, the avatar customzation, the social interactions with an AI-based world, the morality system, the combat and the experience/advancement structure are well realized and put together create something that is enjoyable to play. Which is why I’m having fun playing Fable II. But this doesn’t mean the game itself isn’t flawed. Because for every designer’s toy that is interestingly realized, there is a corresponding element that may be periphery to someone who is more concerned with exploring systems but very much serves to separate a classic game from an interesting experiment.
Take something as simple and basic as the setting for instance. Albion is a world without a soul, a setting without any sense of place or time or history or anything really to make it feel unique. It is the epitome of Generic Fantasy Setting, and honestly the more I play the more I realize that this is exactly what the original Fable suffered from that made it so forgettable. Even in games like Overlord that are generic on purpose for comedic effect, they manage to somehow put enough of their own spin to give it a sense of life and vibrancy. Fable II’s world is one I don’t care about, every genuine element in the game like romance and shopping and travel and employment feels exactly like what it is: A system, something exploitable and ultimately conquerable with enough patience or practice or even just the trial and error discovery of the “trick.” It is so disingenuous to reality that it serves the opposite effect all these real-world analogs are supposed to provide in that it actively removes immersion.
Speaking of removing immersion, there is so much game-ness happening here that it literally has a disembodied voice telling you what to do and if that didn’t put the game on rails enough, there is a literal rail, a glowing trail of sparkles that guides you directly to what you’re supposed to do next. I can’t get over how distracting this is to someone who wants to feel like they’re stepping into another world, it chokes the very essence of role-playing out of the game by turning it into a paint-by-numbers with some optional side quests (ie, anything that you do outside of the glowing trail). I’ve had more compelling and immersive experiences playing fantasy-themed board games and that isn’t a compliment to the board games.
And the game is a mess interface-wise. The D-pad controls are apparently supposed to be contextual but they rely on ill-defined icons which sometimes appear innocent only to have very permanent effects on your inventory or social standings, other times they look nefarious only to be merely helpful and informative. Things lack a central coherency such as books that can be used as items to grant additional abilities being representatively no different than books that merely contain helpful information in the Cliff’s Notes in the info pane (a separate button press away). Not to mention that everything in the world is granted a series of stars like movie ratings which may mean they are better or more powerful but may also just mean the game developers liked them more since it is never actually explained anywhere in-game. On top of this you have an extraordinary amount of information about yourself in terms of what you’ve done and quantified values for gold earned, properties owned, quests completed and so on but you are curiously lacking direct access to useful bits of information like a numerical representation for how many bloody hit points you currently have. You know, considering all healing items in the game grant numerical healing values.
Maybe it sounds like I’m frustrated with Fable II. That’s not far from the truth. I said before that I’m having fun with the game, and I am, but Fable II wants me to like it more than I am able. It’s difficult to gauge how far into the game I am; it feels like the Glowing Trail of Win the Game is rushing me through it and though some of the diversions have captured a fair bit of my attention (the gambling mini-game Archstone in particular is quite well designed) I still sense that I’m going to start hitting the end game well before I feel I’m ready. Which is a strange thing to say considering how crazy I’m regularly driven by some of the aspects of the game. Somewhere at this nexus of frustration and engagement lies Fable II and it is in part the richness of the latter that amplifies the former. - Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
My other Goozex acquisition this week was this third-person Lucasarts title that I picked up mostly on a whim without knowing much about it. I felt like I’d been diving into a lot of dark and gritty fare lately with all the Dead Spaces and Gears of Warring and Resident Evils so I thought, yeah a fun romp in the ol’ Star Wars universe will be a nice change of pace. Turns out of course that Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (is it just me or is everyone really tempted to abbreviate that as S:TFU?) takes place from the Dark Side’s perspective so you spend a lot of time hacking through cuddly Wookies with angry lightsabers and flinging opponents into rock walls like the casual sadist you must be to weild the Dark Side in the SW universe.
Not exactly the happy rainbow counter-point I was sort of looking for.
Anyway, I only played a short bit of it before deciding my weekend project (other than cleaning out the room that will be a baby nursery in the near future I mean) was going to be Fable II and not this, but playing the initial chapter—as Darth Vader, actually, rather than the game’s real protagonist—was pretty fun. I do hope I find the time to sit down with this game and play through it; I have several other games arriving from Goozex in the next week or two as well so I’m going to be pretty backed up depending on how long some of them take to complete. Graphically it isn’t really phenomenal, especially in the cut scenes, although it looks pretty nice during the in-game action, I just think the premise of the game sounds better and better the more I see/play it. - BioShock
Prior to the arrival of Fable II and The Force Unleashed, I was back to dipping into my library for something to play and BioShock bubbled to the surface. The first thing I did once I picked it back up was turn the Vita-Chambers back on: Playing on the hardest difficulty is bad enough but having to reload a save every time you die is not what I’d call fun and certainly not worth the effort just for a Trophy.
As an aside, it seems like most games adjust difficulty by either A) Making your character easier to kill, B) Making enemies more difficult to bring down or C) Giving enemies a greater advantage. So either you’re suddenly less resistant to their attacks or they make stronger attacks. Or your enemies have a greater tolerance for punishment and/or your attacks do less damage. On rare occasions enemies will actually be better in some way, such as having improved AI but usually advantages given come in the form of simple numbers: You get to try to fight off many more foes than in the lesser difficulty settings. I bring this up because BioShock is the first game I can recall that does all of it: By the time you crank the game to the hardest setting you seem to take maybe six hits to drop, your foes take dozens even from powerful weapons and there are a slew of splicers pouring out of every new area that I don’t recall being as densely populated. Even if you didn’t have to wait 40 seconds to cancel out and reload the latest save each time you died, a shorter 6-10 second process would rapidly get tiresome because I die so much. Using the Vita-Chambers also allows for attrition battles since every hit you inflict stays when you warp back to the nearest life pod so you can pummel some difficult foe with your wrench for 6 or 8 lives if you want, emerge victorious, save ammo and probably still save some time from the drudgery of save/fail/reload/retry cycle. I thought on first playthrough that the Vita-Chambers kind of cheapened the experience but I’m backing off my original contention considerably.
Anyway, I made it through the plastic surgery area which I still think is the weakest “level” of them all. Later areas are much better at building the world of Rapture into something dynamic and vibrant, although I’ll say this, the development of Dr. Steinman and his descent into madness via the audio diaries is pretty effective and creepy.
I imagine I’ll slowly pick my way through the game now that I have this copy saved for posterity. Being very familiar with the plot I don’t need to blast through in one sitting, I can revisit it the game from time to time when I’m in the mood. - Condemned 2: Bloodshot
I finally sorted out the shipping issue with the Goozex trader: He had some half-hearted excuse about some friends having problems. I sympathize with that to a degree but I fail to really grasp why that meant that he couldn’t either drop me a note and say, “Hey the game is going out late due to personal issues” which I would have had no problem with or, you know, he could have just dropped off the game real quick and been done with it. It only takes a maximum of 30 minutes to grab the game and destination address and run down to the post office; even if you have to wait in line.
Whatever went wrong I eventually got it and tried to be amicable in the resolution (it took me submitting negative feedback on the 16th, two full days after the recommended 14-day waiting period, before he even touched base with me) but it was annoying that a game I had requested mostly to fill the gaps between titles I was far more interested in like Fable II, Valkyria Chronicles and Prince of Persia could get matched. Because of the delay I now have Fable II, PoP is on the way plus I have The Force Unleashed and Kane & Lynch waiting in the wings now as well. I would have rather spent the last couple of weeks playing Condemned 2 instead of BioShock and Half-Life 2 again. So it goes.
One of the principal reasons why I wanted C2 to be sort of a filler game is because I didn’t have high expectations of it. I sort of enjoyed the first one which is to say I thought it had enough interesting elements to be interested in seeing what they would do with a sequel, but I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to play it. C2 fixes some of the basic flaws in the combat system by making blocking a bit more forgiving and incorporating some pseudo-quicktime events and damage-boosting combos into the attack sequences so you can take down even tough opponents a bit quicker. Unfortunately they’ve already squandered some of the goodwill they banked from the first half of the original game by diving into the mind-twisting supernatural already (I finished the first chapter in order to provide the Goozex feedback). We’ll see how it goes, I just don’t know how quickly considering all these other games that are piling up. - Nethack
In spite of my growing preference for Wizards, I spent most of the week flipping back to Barbarians and Valkyries because I realized that my ability to have a solid game as a Wizard is dependent on the random spawn to start me with good gear and the first few levels to provide enough easy-to-takedown cannon fodder that I can advance in level quickly so I’m suitably sturdy when I start having to face enemies that can hit me back. That’s asking a lot from a randomly generated game that is famous for giving you exactly what you need to die and not the other way around.
Barbies and Valks on the other hand are much tougher in early game and, especially in the Barbarians’ case, poison resistant which means they can eat pretty much anything and not have to worry about it. I’m still terrible at the game, regularly dying from a strong case of the Stupids. (“Hey, I just got beat up by the Gnome Lord, instead of resting to heal or heading back up to identify some of these weapons, how about I #dip my sword into this fountain and, oh look. An endless stream of snakes. And for really good measure, I’ll be standing on a fountain which you can’t engrave onto so I’ll just die in two turns.”)
Naturally my strongest game of the week came on Friday when I was a Barbarian on about the seventh level of the dungeon. I had found a Chaotic Altar so I could check my #pray status and identify the BUC (Blessed/Uncursed/Cursed) status of my items, I had about 8,000+ points and felt like I was well on my way to going deeper into the dunegon than I had before. But I ran out of time so I detatched the screen session and figured I’d pick it back Monday. Sunday night/Monday morning before my shift the power went out in the building that houses the server I play on. Nethack doesn’t save games when the power is interrupted so when I got in later that morning, my game was gone. As I told a friend, Nethack always finds some way to screw you. - Magic: The Gathering
The tournament I mentioned last week swung into full action with all five participants getting at least a couple of games in. What I realized about halfway through the week though was that the scoring format we were using wasn’t going to work. I had initially set it at 12 matches each against any player as long as you didn’t play a single opponent more than six times. But looking over the chart I built on Wednesday or Thursday revealed that there was no way it was going to play out unless someone deprived themselves of one or more matches. Aaron and I talked the possibilities over for quite a while before we realized that it was important to consider a couple of things that the format I had originally put forth didn’t:- One of the players, Thom, doesn’t work with the rest of us. He does stop by fairly regularly for Monday game nights, but of the other four tournament players, only Aaron and I really attend game night as well.
- Of the other two players who don’t meet on Mondays, Martin is old friends with Thom. They don’t see each other that often due to geographically disparate locations, but they could arrange a meet if they put their minds to it. The other participant, Jim, however, works an early morning shift while Thom works nights and the two of them are at best distantly acquainted. The chances of them meeting up outside of a designated game time is slim.
- Having five players means the number of matches must be a multiple of five that also happens to be even. So I couldn’t add a single match to the 12-game schedule because 13 x 5 = 65 which is an odd number of matches. My only recourse was to add two additional matches for a total of 70.
- Some players in the tournament were, by virtue of being either more active gamers or having more forgiving schedules for Magic matches, capable of playing more matches than others.
So I added the extra two games but I also set about trying to figure out a better system. Blood Bowl league rules have a fairly clever system in place to sort all this out wherein each match allows a team to advance their total team value based on the progression of the players which is an integral part of the league mechanics. So you play more games, your team gets better, your team value goes up. But then when you play against a less developed team, you compare team values to get a differential that influences your pre-game boost power. For example, if you play a fresh team against a squad of veterans, you may get enough resources to buy several Star Players, perks like Apothecaries and “cheats” like player cards which can alter the rules in certain situations. This doesn’t always completely level the playing field, but it does help in some significant ways.
Unfortunately the reason this is difficult to achieve in Magic is that comparing Magic decks is difficult at best and there aren’t a lot of great equalizers in the game. My initial thought was to implement some sort of rating system that was match volume independent but so far my efforts have come up with a lot of interesting solutions that have some fairly gaping holes in them.
Parting Shot
I generally despise the Playstation.Blog because of its pandering pro-marketing tone. I also pretty much loathe Major Nelson’s blog, too, so I’m guessing that speaks many more volumes about me than either of them. But sometimes these self-aggrandizing ad posts makes me pause long enough to go “Wha..?” One such example.
I think what strikes me about this is how it reads like a developer giving a pitch meeting to executives. The whole tone is very “Here’s why this will make you scads of dough, sirs.” It’s like a checklist of features and name-dropping inspiration touchstones. What kills me is that, I mean, this is me. And, you know, zombies. The title of the game alone should be enough to get me to buy it. But instead the more I read about it the more I thought how much this is probably going to suck. Smash TV with zombies? Levels lifted from classic zombie flicks? Characters that are essentially direct ripoffs of the Left 4 Dead cast? I’m not saying it sounds bad but where exactly is the creativity? It’s like a video game vogue Powerpoint presentation. Slide 1: Dual-stick shooters. Slide 2: Zombies. Slide 3: Nostalgic film references. Slide 4: Lifted elements from other popular genre games. For pete’s sake they spend half the article talking about the wonders of environmental hazards. Really breaking new ground there, aren’t ya guys?
I try really hard not to be too jaded and cynical. Gaming culture has enough cynics. But c’mon Sony. You have to give me something to work with here.