From the Shadows Edition
This week I play a couple of new shooters, continue my quest to rid the world of zombies once and for all, play some handheld games including an exciting twist on an all-time classic, touch on a few odds and ends and wrap it up with a couple of tabletop games for Monday Game Night. Then I dissect the games I’m not playing and realize what makes me suddenly lose interest in a game I once loved.
But you have to hit the link to see it all.
- Shadowrun
I wrote this about Shadowrun back when it was more or less relevant, around the launch window: “Basically, Shadowrun offers races with different attributes, tech and magic upgrades that allow players to do relatively unusual things like have limited flight, healing, teleportation and so on…” The point at the time was that the game producers were upset over the relatively poor review scores and were saying they deserved more credit for advancing the genre.
At the time my only experience was with the demo, but now that the game goes for a few hundred points on Goozex I finally decided to give it a shot. So what’s the truth about the innovation in Shadowrun?
There is none.
I also said back in June of 2007, “The PnP game is/was great because it blended the two [SciFi and Fantasy] so well, but [FASA Studio Head Mitch] Gitelman doesn’t seem to be saying he did everything exactly right, he’s trying to say this is something you can’t get anywhere else…” Once you experience the entirety of the game, it becomes clear how utterly false Gitelman’s view of his game really is. Functionally, it’s a Counter-Strike or Quake mod: A skin and a few tweaks to an existing product. The strengths of the Shadowrun license are completely squandered on this game because you could replace Trolls with—whatever; high-tech mech suits. Swap the elves with ninjas and Trees of Life with porable medical stations or any of a million other fluffy explanations for the game mechanics. They aren’t new concepts. Fortunately you don’t have to have originality to have quality, those two aren’t mutually exclusive. But you do have to execute with what you have, creating from scraps and bits something that trancends the pieces.
The bottom line is that a Shadowrun game could exist within this engine, but it would require several things that are absent from the game as it stands now. Firstly, it would need some sort of narrative. The “RNA Corp has an artifact to protect and we need it” is not enough to express the flavor of the Shadowrun world. I’m not even saying it has to be single-player necessarily but some adjustment to the structure so that it felt like a scenario and not a “match” would go a long way. Another thing is some sort of real sense of progression. I realize Call of Duty 4 came out after Shadowrun but Deus Ex was doing RPG elements in FPS games well before, so there’s no reason some of the tech and magic in the game couldn’t have been made just a little less easily obtained and more powerful while, perhaps, forcing some sort of commitment from the player. Swapping generic, universally-accessible “powers” between three ability slots is clumsy, uninteresting and narratively bankrupt.
Listen, I don’t hate Shadowrun. As a Counter-Strike clone, it’s reasonably fun… for a bit. But it carries the name Shadowrun and from that it has a legacy to live up to. Its deadly flaw is that it dares to demand notice based on its license and then fails in every way to make the license significant. That is functionally equivalent to “Die Hard: The Text-Based Adventure Game,” and for that the game deserves the obscurity it languishes in. - Left 4 Dead
The curious thing about Left 4 Dead is that it seems to be one of those games that people agree is deeply flawed and yet it does so much right at the same time that it bypasses the typical arguments about quality. For example the four campaigns, being roughly equal in length and depth and using the same sort of—for lack of a better phrase—tricks, are masterfully created. I mean there really isn’t a bad one in the bunch. But the problem is that there are only four, which isn’t even a problem except that those are the only options for play and you can’t help but want more.
I’ve seen other people on forums and such complain that there aren’t enough weapon types (I’m not exactly sure what people are hoping for here, unless they want flamethrowers and rocket launchers which I think would sort of press the boundaries of believability; most gamers probably think they could handle a shotgun or an assault rifle if necessary in the case of a zombie outbreak but I have a hard time swallowing some regular joe schmoes with anti-tank weaponry) and clamoring for more game modes or different special zombies. But the key in that is the notion not of “fix the broken problems” but “give us more!” I’m not suggesting that those who enjoy the game ought to be happy with what we have, but it does feel odd to rail against a game that is, by all accounts, superb because its quality doesn’t come in great heaping shovels full.
Criticism is like this sometimes: You find a product deep and laden with content most of which is fair to middling and the complaints are that they should have streamlined the content into something richer but with less breadth; then something refined and narrow like Left 4 Dead comes along and the cries for greater scope are deafening.
In any case, I’m still enjoying the game but I’m running out of solo achievements to carry the game’s appeal forward (I just picked up the “Safety First” one this weekend which requires no friendly fire during a complete campaign). I’m hesitant to start the path toward possible madness that is versus play, but I think I’m getting to that point where my interest will be sustained only by such potential trauma or, barring that, some sort of DLC. - Puzzle Quest
One of the bits of genius about PQ is the devilish combination of luck and skill that makes the game nearly impossible to master. Because Bejeweled ultimately relies on the refresh gems that drop from the top to do so in some sort of pattern (your ability to manipulate the board is less pronounced than in other puzzle games), there are times in the basic format where you have to make your only match and hope something good falls down. The difficulty is even more severe in PQ where you take turns with an opponent and you have to attempt to control not just what you hope will fall but what could potentially fall. If there is a +5 skull gem at the bottom of the vertical stack you’re clearing, you’d better be pretty confident that you could survive if two stacked skull gems dropped down and offered your opponent an attack opening.
What I like about this is that if you use your imagination to abstract the battle you can kind of see it unfolding with mana gathering being representative of opponents feeling each other out and trying to look for weaknesses or gain the upper hand; skull matches would be like taking advantages of openings that were left.
I’m playing this time as a Druid; my first playthrough on XBLA was with a Knight and I found the game to fall somewhere on the easy side. Curious how the different classes really impact the game’s difficulty, for me. I played as a Wizard in my short time with the DS version and lost a lot of battles due to the relative difficulty in surviving with lower HP and no healing abilities. The Druid is a solid middle ground; her built in healing ability gives me the chances I need to win by attrition most of the time, but the expensive Battle skill progression and low starting value makes damage dealing a challenge. - Namco Museum DS
I won’t lie, I picked this title up from Goozex solely for the inclusion of Pac-Man Vs. which I believe originally came on the GameCube and required the GBA link cables to play. Essentially it’s multiplayer Pac-Man where each person gets a chance to play Pac-Man with other humans controlling the ghosts. The initial Pac-Man player is selected at random and they attempt to score points as in the regular game. Meanwhile the other players each get a ghost and their success at stopping the protagonist awards them with points, stolen from that round’s Pac-Man player. The catch is that while the Pac-Man player can see the whole maze, the ghosts see only their relative position on a black background and on the top screen of the DS a 3D pathfinding screen shows their immediate surroundings.
It plays out a bit like hide-and-seek but the back-and-forth tradeoff of the Pac-Man player makes it an exciting challenge to try and test your Pac-skills against smarter than AI opponents. If you’ve played enough Pac-Man you’ll know that one of the principal factors that can keep you alive is that the ghosts never reverse their direction, so if you end up behind a computer ghost on a straight passage you don’t have to fear that ghost will suddenly whirl on you and take a life. Human opponents are not so predictable and it alters the game enough to make it feel really fresh. I think a combination of this game and Pac-Man Championship Edition would be something really special, but I’m happy enough with the fact that this game exists and allows Vs. to be played on a single cart.
The rest of the inclusions aren’t bad, straight arcade ports of Galaga, Galaxian, original Pac-Man, Xevious, Dig Dug II and a couple of other forgettable early 80s games. The best on the cart aside from Vs. is Dig Dug II, which kind of surprised me because I’ve played plenty of Dig Dug but it was never really a favorite of mine. The sequel is a fair departure, injecting a string puzzle element as it replaces the vertical digging with island settings that can be sectioned off and dropped into the ocean below. You still have your trusty pump gun to pop the bad guys but there are so many of them you need to use the jackhammer ability to pull the rug out from underneath them if you want to succeed. I guess I missed it in the arcade, probably because I wasn’t ever very fond of the original, and I’m not sorry at all to have a portable version of it now. - Lost Cities
I only played one game of this in between other activities but I still drag it out once in a while because, aside from being one of the more enjoyable and short-form board game reproductions on XBLA, it has a couple of achievements that I feel are able to be accomplished only by playing enough matches to destroy probability and the right draw or the perfect storm of events comes together. A huge part of this is that the achievements are terribly specific, such as playing 3 multiplier cards, winning the round with over 150 points and winning the match. One or two of those criteria is bad enough but all at once requires a sort of brute force method of accomplishment. - Blood Bowl
Aaron and I spent Monday Game Night finishing last week’s Elf vs. Skaven match. As predicted I lost because my defensive capabilities are terrible. There was a moment where I may have been able to score after he tied it midway through the half which I think would have left him without enough time to rally another score. Instead, I discovered that I still struggle with the strategy on an AG-heavy team. I think the cage technique, which involves surrounding your ball carrier with tackle zones, is a sound strategy but with a team that struggles to resist blocks and clear holes via offensive blocking, it leaves a little to be desired. I feel like my reliance on running cages down the sidelines and passing the ball to the catchers as soon as possible is costing me points I should be able to make.
I did manage to get a Thrower an additional skill so I’m hoping that the inclusion of Sure Hands will allow me to feel a bit more confident in letting the catchers run their routes downfield while the thrower advances the ball until the opponents close in and she can make the pass. Sadly this approach would require using the whole field and my squishy little elves tend to need help defending themselves as well as requiring a gang-tackle approach to offense. Combined with a tendency toward losing players to the Dead and Injured box as the game wears on, I’m somewhat back to where I started. That place being “Loserville.” - Magic: The Gathering
I had only a little bit of time after we finished the Blood Bowl match so I suggested we play a bit of Magic. I found a deck in one of my Fat Pack boxes that I couldn’t remember anything about. Curious, I decided to give it a shot. In the first game I lost miserably due to the tri-color deck (green/red/blue) not producing any of one color mana (green). The second game was better, but I was still unsure on the deck’s construction so I began by trading blows with Aaron and I pushed it one too many turns as the pattern I thought was emerging suddenly closed as he was able to bring out a 4/4 Trample creature. After that I never really drew anything that would help me.
I think I need to dig through the boxes I have and try to make some sense out of them, even if it means dismantling some decks and just making new constructed decks for Guildpact block play. I also realized that most of my past deck construction has been along the lines of “use the best cards I can find.” After playing a bit with, of all things, a P-Deck that was designed around the use of stacking enchantments (Magemark) I’m now thinking that these new decks really ought to have some sort of thematic approach because it’s been surprisingly unobvious to me until now that Wizards designs their cards with that in mind.
I’m a little slow. - Haze
My late-week arrival was the last thing I played before my arbitrary end-of-week cutoff point. The game bears the name Free Radical, which is the studio responsible for, in part, GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark and the Timesplitters series, all of which I enjoyed to various degrees. Haze is similar to those games in certain respects: The aesthetic is a sort of stylized realism and the pace of the combat feels familiar. It’s a little difficult to try and describe the minute details that compose the feel of a shooter, the distinctions between the mechanically identical games from Quake to Half-Life to Halo to GoldenEye to BioShock to Deus Ex to Call of Duty and so on. In this case the best thing I can think to portray the feel of Haze is that it has a grounded lightness to it. Call of Duty, for example, is pretty gritty and realistic with a sense of existence in the game world; but contrast that with Half-Life where you really just feel like a floating camera with a gun attached because movement is too fast and fluid to convey any sense of being connected. Haze feels connected with lots of camera sway and thick gravity effects but the guns are insubstantial and there is a breezy quality to the way the effects are presented or the number of shots it takes to down an opponent on Normal difficulty.
The bigger issue with Haze is the presentation of the game’s plot. It reminds me in part of F.E.A.R. which was hammy with its attempts at immersion, ultimately lending to a greater sense of both confusion and apathy in terms of the broader story context: Because you’re meant to be just a grunt on the ground, even a significant grunt, it’s hard to care about the bigger picture when you have radio chatter feeding you the story in your ear while bad guys are shooting at your face. In the face vs. ear scenario, the face threat tends to draw the attention. I had the same problem with a lot of Halo and Haze tries very hard to elicit comparions to Halo.
Of course the problem is, at least on first impression, that Haze is vastly inferior to Halo. The Nectar system which is supposed to give you an edge is a thinly veiled anti-drug parable and yet curiously it is so far presented as The Way To Go. Which is to say when you use R2 to inject Nectar, the game suddenly becomes enjoyable and you feel more like Master Chief. When it predictably wigs out and you start being unable to discern friend from foe or you lose the ability to use it altogether it feels like the game is punishing you for playing it.
I realize it already sounds a bit like I don’t like Haze, and that’s not entirely true. As a matter of fact, whether because I’m in the mood for a good shooter campaign right now and it’s the closest thing I have or because the game has actual merit, I’m enjoying my time with it and feeling like I’m enthused to get another chance to play. I guess if you crave Filet Mignon long enough, eventually ground chuck will suffice.
Parting Shot
Let’s talk for a moment about games that aren’t on the list above. For one thing you may notice LittleBigPlanet fell off my list already. The truth is I’m pretty sure it’s getting traded already. I discussed it last week in depth but the truth is it just isn’t my cup of tea the way I hoped it would be. I have committed myself mentally to pushing through the rest of the tutorials and at least giving level building a decent shake before I sent it packing, but if that doesn’t feel like it makes the game for me, I fear it has little to offer at this juncture.
I also didn’t include World of Warcraft, although technically I did log on for a few minutes. Occasionally a game will get this treatment from me: An initial burst of affection and genuine enthusiasm only to suddenly decline sharply at a seeming random point. Closer inspection reveals the drop in interest to be not random at all but based on the point where I recognized something about it that flipped my switch into the off position. As an example when I realized that I would never, ever be done with my Warhammer 40,000 army my interest dipped dramatically. The fact that I couldn’t keep up with the modeling and painting aspect while staying ahead of the rules updates and codex revisions meant I was doomed to a continual treadmill of adjustment for something that I ultimately enjoyed but only so far as it felt like an accomplishable goal. With WoW that revelatory point was when I recognized that my resistance to the notion of buying additional expansion content to supplement my monthly service fee was going to forever limit the enjoyment cap I could have. Reaching Level 60 even just to say I did it would only further deepen the wound that was represented by Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King.
I suppose you could classify that precipice of sustained interest that overlooks the rapid descent into apathy as “the value-loss proposition peak.”
Lastly I decided not to include Attack! and Scrabble Facebook games on the list. I still played them but there is only so much you can say about Risk and Scrabble so let’s just say I continue to play and enjoy them although I still wish the code were a bit more stable.