Glowing Faces Edition
Turns out, I’m pretty forgiving of games. It makes sense, I suppose, since with a few key exceptions at any given moment my preferred activity is playing some sort of game. That being the case, I believe most games have at least some redeeming feature. It’s actually difficult for me to think of a game that I simply loathe, that I can’t stand to play. Even one of my least favorites, Monopoly, does have some redeeming characteristics.
I don’t really think of myself as an optimist; but somehow with games I’m always looking for something that I can latch onto as the thing that makes it worth my time. The amount of time is certainly variable, but I truly want every game I play to offer me something.
Of course, when you play as many games as I do, you’re bound to find some stinkers and I’m opinionated enough to lay into a game I dislike. But I think unlike some people I really try to find the silver lining. What’s odd is that usually I learn what games I like by what I find myself searching for opportunities to play, and in return I discover which games I don’t care for by noting which games I always seem to omit from my mental checklist of possibilities. Presented with a three-hour block of spare time and a stack of games including Animal Crossing DS, Syphon Filter for PSP, Dead Rising for Xbox and BioShock for PS3 I might tell myself that they all sound good but realistically I will play the Xbox or PS3 game 10 out of 10 times because AC got tedious for me and I couldn’t stand Syphon FIlter’s control scheme. I haven’t played either in literally years and yet I don’t get rid of them because I still tell myself I want to enjoy them.
This is basically the long way of me explaining why I put almost eight hours into Too Human, when the truth is I can’t remember a game I actively disliked this much.
- Dead Space
I came to a peculiar realization while playing Dead Space this week. While in the film world a movie that features, as a key selling point, the wanton dismemberment of undead alien creatures and the accompanying buckets of blood would probably be classified on that fact alone as a horror flick, in modern video games grotesque representations of violence are so commonplace, so mundane across genres that there is no such thing as a horror game based solely on the extremity of that violence. Even a game like Dead Space with it’s copious blood and severed limbs (oh, the severed limbs that fly) can’t elicit a sense of dread on that fact alone.
I can easily argue that the classification of a movie as “horror” simply because it gives the special effects crew a workout and the corn syrup/red dye industries a tangible profit increase is flawed itself, but that’s not really the point. What I’m saying is that if Dead Space were a film, it would be easily shelved in the Horror section at Blockbuster video. But as a game that people have somehow lumped in the survival horror oeuvre, it lacks a true sense of manufactured fear.
Well, actually that’s not entirely true. What really happens is that Dead Space gives up on trying to scare you about a quarter of the way through. Usually the scares in the early game come from the sense of the unknown and from a heavy reliance on startling you with jumping alien attacks accompanied by sharp instrumental jolts on the soundtrack. It’s kind of a cheap thrill, but in fact the game is much better described if you call it a “thriller” rather than a “horror.”
I’m not sure how prepared I am to say that I’ve played two original-IP, non-sports titles from EA in the last few weeks and very much enjoyed both of them, but my evaluation of reality indicates this is in fact the case. Dead Space’s two major sins are that Isaac Clarke is a silent protagonist which makes him creepy and uninteresting (why even give these mute serial killers a name? It hints at characterization which is demonstrably absent) and that the designers missed a lot of opportunity to create a more vivid sense of terror and atmosphere. Basically once you’ve finished Chapter 1 you realize how the game works and you begin to anticipate it’s intentions. If you walk into a room, for example, and there are dead bodies already there and a lot of ammo is lying around, you’re probably going to get ambushed by the creatures that reanimate dead bodies into zombies. It’s predictable and the foe of tension and atmosphere is predictability.
It reminds me of something that the both the first Condemned and F.E.A.R. games did very well which was that they went ahead and didn’t throw enemies at you in nearly every corridor and behind every door. By emptying the space a little they were able to build tension and keep you guessing. It is very effective to walk into a room that looks like it should be an ambush and have nothing happen. You’re instantly on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Dead Space’s idea of a surprise is to ambush you in that room and then when you think you’ve killed all the zombies, it just sends six or seven more, a more literal interpretation of surprise that crushes a non-existent effort to evoke a mood.
But just because Dead Space could have been something else doesn’t mean what it really is lacks merit. Truth is, I’m having a lot of fun playing the game. The controls are essentially Resident Evil: Now With Functioning User Input. I can understand a lot of the grousing about RE5 since it hit shelves a quarter of a year after this game and I think the anachronistic controls in Capcom’s game were thrown into extra relief by Dead Space (and, to a lesser extent, perhaps Gears/Gears 2 as well). Here we have thematically similar games with comparable gameplay mechanics. In one, you have all the trappings of a modern title, in the other you have janky old-school control restrictions. RE5 apologists tried to say the limited control scheme was necessary for the tension and fear present in the game. That rounding choruses claimed the game was anything but terrifying, and the fact that the less onerous human interface present in Dead Space—also not necessarily unsettling—illuminates the subterfuge and strongly hints that there are factors outside the realm of input characteristics that contribute more to visceral response.
Dead Space works if you allow it to, that’s the real point. If you take your mind out of the room labeled “Notions, Preconcieved” and allow yourself to pretend you’re inside a scary, if somewhat campy, sci-fi gorefest it’s great fun. Note the chasm of truth that lies between “it works” and “it transcends” however. While Mirror’s Edge had me pretending I actually was a futuristic parkour courier and on the cusp of actually feeling a measure of truth to it, the closest I could get Dead Space was pretending I was an actor pretending to be a zombie-dismemberin’ space marine. - Too Human
I can’t exactly figure out who Too Human is meant to appeal to. I mean, it should be plain that Silicon Knights is capable of producing quality work: Legacy of Kain and Eternal Darkness alone create a particular pedigree. But this game… this game. Let’s just ignore the unending miles of invisible walls, the questionable graphics and the brain cleaving dullness of the combat system and instead focus on the pacing. At what point in the design review meetings did someone say, “You know what gamers want in an action game? A lot of walking.” Apparently their research indicated that what people really wanted from Too Human was more opportunity to press the left stick and watch their character animate. I mean, there are stretches of the game that are literally five minutes of uninterrupted walking at a measured pace (oh Baldur appears to be running, but this is a mirage concocted by your stimulation-starved mind, his actual speed is more literally described as “moseying”).
Which, I suppose, is sort of fitting since “press a stick and watch our canned animations run” is the functional executive overview of the design document. What difference really is there between pushing LS to walk for minutes on end and pushing RS to auto-attack for just as long? The game separates each combat encounter—which inhabit the realm of pure paradox in that they are simultaneously interminable and unforgivably brief—with long stretches of nothing. Here is the tragedy, in a nutshell: Dead Space could have used some breathing room on the action to allow the game’s more masterful construction and presentation to build a sense of anxiety while Too Human punctuates its action with endless expanses of nothingness that serve only to highlight the game’s complete absence of tone and soul.
Meanwhile the story, which is semi-intriguing in the elevator pitch version (“Norse mythology meets cyberpunk!”) is just as poorly presented. Eternal Darkness was able to get away with disjointed storytelling because the inherent madness implied by the Lovecraftian influence allows for a level of player confusion and the mystery behind it all means that being thrown headlong into the plot and letting the pieces fall into place slowly worked for the mood of the game. In Too Human the same techniques are applied but there is no such thing as asking “Who is this character? What is their relationship to my avatar? Why do I care about this?” when the plot is linear and the interactions are vital to give heft to the events unfolding. I don’t even think a detailed understanding of the original Norse mythology would help; the interactions specific to the game are ill-defined and therefore the cutscenes are the sort of semi-sensical drivel that may have passed muster in the 16-bit era. Maybe.
As you may have guessed, I’m not well enamored with the game. I do continue to play it though and I’ll explain why: Too Human offers exactly the same sort of game enjoyment experience as World of Warcraft, which is to say the combat can’t sustain your interest itself and the story is at best disposable but there is a sort of nerdy paper doll delight to the extensive equipment and skill tree customization features. It is fun to find new gear and weapons and fiddle with the MMO-lite crafting system mechanisms. Which means combat is engaging for a bit when you first update your swag because you get to see the immediate effects of your work. But the returns are diminishing. I’m about 1/3 of the way through the game and each new equipment upgrade makes combat fun again for a decreasing rate of time. Eventually I suspect no amount of gearing up will rejuvinate the stale action and I’ll be forced to abandon the game in favor of something I’ve already played. - Puzzle Quest
The biggest news I can relay about PQ is that, while I did play it a few times early in the week, I finally removed it from the PSP and put something else in. I feel like this is one of those games I’ll return to as time goes on, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: I have the new Puzzle Quest Galactrix coming from Goozex—hopefully next week—so maybe my addiction is only escalating. - Rock Band 2
The new guitar controller arrived early last week and we quickly got to work breaking it in. It works much better than the old one even to the extent that I can perform semi-admirably on songs that feature rapid repetitive strumming like Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle.” I’ve found that I’ve been playing Bass so long and so much that the few songs like PotUSA’s “Lump” and Dinosaur Jr.’s “Feel the Pain” that use bass chords really throw me off. Give me quick bass flourishes on single notes like Boston’s “Foreplay/Long Time” any day. Just to cement this indignity, Nik and I switched instruments on the aforementioned Boston track (one of our faves on our usual instruments) and we both did miserably, suggesting that practice does indeed help in these games. - MyBrute/AlphaBounce
My friend recommended MyBrute to me as a sort of addictive online flash game. I gave it a shot and while I like the art style, I found the random nature of it to be too automatic. It’s potentially intriguing if you get higher up and your character has more options available to it, but the daily limit on matches makes it feel like a lot of work for not much reward. On the other hand, I did find via the same site a game called AlphaBounce which I enjoyed a lot more. AlphaBounce is Arkanoid with some role-playing elements built around the game, not unlike the Puzzle Quest treatment of Bejeweled. I’m not sure why this process of bolting-on narrative elements to abstracted game concepts appeals to me so, I think it’s because a childhood full of fun and interesting game mechanics was teased with an equal number of box art stylings and cabinet decor that hinted at a greater level of narrative depth than any developer wanted or could insert into the game. I can think of few better uses for our expanding processing resources than to use them to refine the tried-and-true abstractions of our youth into something—dare I say it?—gripping. - Catan/Ticket to Ride
A rare opportunity to play some online games with a friend presented itself last week. Unfortunately we hadn’t really arranged for the experience so neither of us had any disc-based games with strong co-op elements so we settled (hurr…) on Catan and TTR. I confess that despite generally being ambivalent on the best of days about any sort of voice communication, I like the sort of shared-activity telephone call that erupts from online gaming on Xbox Live. If only the fidelity of the headests were a little more tuned, I mean. I don’t know if it’s my own particular voice articulations or what but I’m constantly having people in real life, standing with their ears attached to heads that are under four feet from my voice-hole, saying, “What?” to my every utterance. I guess I’m a low talker or something? In any case the Live headset struggles to consistently transmit my speech in a discernable way so when it works, it’s genius and exactly the sort of reason I love games (I would describe gaming as both my ideal form of solitary entertainment activity as well as my preferred social lubricant). When it doesn’t, it’s kind of like playing War with a guy on the other end of the bus. - Castlevania X
I pulled Puzzle Quest out of the PSP in order to play something else. What that something was, I hadn’t determined. I settled on Castlevania X because Disgaea felt like it was going to need more of a commitment than I had in me, Jeanne D’Arc has fallen into that neverland where I have intentions in returning to a game I’ve drifted away from but I can’t remember what was happening and I don’t want to go back and start over nor do I want to struggle to recall what I need to do next. So Rondo of Blood it was. I think my chief complaint with a lot of the post-Symphony of the Night Castlevanias is that it feels like you miss out on a lot of the thrill of the game if you aren’t willing to either replay the game many times or work with a strategy guide from the outset. For something like SotN on XBLA, I might be willing to go the strategy guide route. But a handheld title? Yeah, no thanks. So I stumble through the best I can but I never really feel like I finish them because I can’t sustain my interest enough to play them repeatedly until I get it “right.” I enjoy the games a lot and I think Rondo, especially the updated version on the Castlevania X disc, is perhaps even better than SotN which I thought was brilliant. But considering the volume of these kinds of games I kind of get the impression that having Castlevania X is enough to last me forever as long as I don’t give in and actually guide my way through it.
The exception, I guess, would be if someone actually released a Castlevania game that really did something different. Rondo basically perfected the formula that started in Castlevania III and Symphony gave us the non-linear pathways mechanism which has lasted into the current GBA/DS-heavy institution. You will note that Rondo was relased in Japan in 1993; Symphony in 1997. Given that the series debuted (in Japan) in 1986, you might think we were due for a series refresh any day now.
Consider my breath held. - Phantasy Star II
Something occurred to me this weekend as I sat in the emergency room with my pregnant wife who was there to make sure the abdominal pains she was experiencing weren’t an indication of something wrong with her or the baby (they weren’t). I considered that times like those, the interminable waiting periods every human must endure occasionally, are actually kind of my worst opportunities for gaming. I should have been able to carve out a hunk, two to three hours easily, on old school RPG Phantasy Star II because I had literally nothing else to do. But the fact was that presented with that opportunity, I found myself unable to get comfortable and unable to stay engaged. I played for about 3o minutes before I had to shut it off because it wasn’t keeping me awake and it wasn’t providing me any real enjoyment.
I can’t blame the game, because this happens all the time: On airplanes, car rides, waiting rooms, trains… I can get through a bit of a puzzle game or put a few minutes together on something meatier but anything with a reaching narrative I find oddly difficult to sink into. And let’s go ahead and loosely define “reaching narrative” as anything more than, say, Super Mario Bros. - Lock’s Quest
I spent a couple of days sick last week, which is probably why there was a lot of Dead Space/Too Human progress being made but no sign of Pac-Man Vs. or Magic: The Gathering. But Monday I finally remembered to grab my copy of Lock’s Quest so my co-worker and I could try the Vs. mode. Let me say this: I’m not ridiculously thrilled with the single player game because it feels very much like an RTS which I realize is the point but, as I’m sure I’ve detailed before, I’m not so good at on-the-spot management. Unlike traditional PC-based RTS games where speed of selection and resource maintenance are the orders of the day, Lock’s Quest demands that you manage structure maintenance and combat at the smae time. Both varieties offer similar challenges of controls that are capable of what the game asks but for whatever reason fiddly enough to cause the exact amount of brain disconnect to overload my primary systems.
Vs. mode is really no different except that against another human opponent, the rigidity of the mission structure presented on some level from a mission designer which demands a particular strategy or at best a set of strategems is stripped away. The order of the day is reaction based on a stream of input. I guess it’s just the way I think but when I’m trying to discern what someone’s motives are or were (like the faceless “Jerk who designed this stupid mission”) I need time to consider it. When I’m responding to what I perceive to be a series of reciprocal responses, it feels like interplay and I don’t worry so much about what their overall plan of attack was supposed to be, I assume the adage is true that all battle plans last until the first bullet is fired.
Or in this case, the first clockwork hits the fortifications. I really, really enjoyed the game we played. I’m so early in the single player campaign that I didn’t have much frame of reference for the advanced units available as the rounds progressed, but I was able to hold my own long enough to get to the third or fourth round. I believe this was the first multi-cart DS game I’d played and it’s pretty impressive what they can accomplish on the little devices. We have plans to play additional games in the future so while I was thinking that I might not ever get around to the campaign mode and wondered if it was time to consider listing it on Goozex, it finds new life in multiplayer. I kind of love it when a game can do that. - Block Mania
So, this week’s game night featured a 22 year-old Games Workshop board game based on the Judge Dredd universe.
Yeah, I know.
But here’s the crazy thing: It’s a really fun game. I say that like I’m shocked but the truth is that Games Workshop used to make really great board games. It kills me a little that they seem to have arrived at the conclusion they can only be successful with their core line of miniatures games. For all I know that could be empirically accurate, based on years of market research. From a gamer’s perspective, it bites because their board games are rich and vibrant and their miniatures games are muddled and mismanaged, but they do seem to pay the bills.
Still, I mean, Judge Dredd? A friend of mine likes JD though which is why he picked it up in the first place, and like I said above, I’ll pretty much play anything once. The thing I like about the game is that it doesn’t try to shoehorn the license all over the game. It’s called Block Mania because each player gets a hive-like Block, which are essentially small cities in a single high-rise building. Gangs of thugs roam the Blocks and the idea is to get your gangs to wreak havoc on opponents’ Blocks while keeping your own defended and secure.
It’s tile-based for the most part with a pretty simple core combat mechanic based on 1-or-2D6 rolls and some modifiers depending on the tile. They have some neat systems for things like fires and bombs, plus structural damage and collapsing Block sections. Like many of these old GW games it’s fairly epic in length, so much so that we didn’t even reach the final phase of the game where the cards you draw each turn to help build your Block and ravage your foes’ flip over and represent the incoming sweep of the Judges restoring order to the Blocks. But it was a hoot and a holler all around, especially after the first 20-30 minutes when we had finally encountered nearly all the circumstances and edge-case scenarios so we could stop flipping through the book in Rules Lookup Phase.
It was so good that I’m fairly certain we’ll pick it back up next week and see if we can make it through an entire game, and I’m really looking forward to it.
Parting Shot
In case I wasn’t clear, I wasn’t finding a lot to like about Too Human. After I wrote the intro and the list section on the game I decided to pick it up again and see if I pressed on a little more if maybe—maybe—I could find the motivation to just get through to the end. That’s when, in the bowels of a generic brown-colored derelict space ship I found a cyber-well and entered cyberspace, exited almost immediately and wandered through the drab ship fighting enemies and having my annoying talking-severed-head sidekick (oh, to be making that up) drive me insane with repetitive inanity. Suddenly I flash back to the original well and find out basically it’s all been a dream. Not the whole miserable experience of playing the game, just the previous 30 minutes.
I decided right then, if I want to wander through brown spaceship corridors in a game that’s messing with my head I could just be playing Dead Space, a game I actually like. So I pulled Too Human out of the tray, listed it on Goozex and shoved it onto my shelf, thoroughly disgusted. Sorry, Mr. Dyack, I gave you a shot because you made one of my favorite games of all times. This one wasn’t for me. I hope to heaven it was for somebody because I heard you wanted to make three of these turds. Wake me up when you decide to go back to what you’re good at and make Eternal Darkness 2.