Khaaaan! Edition
My wife, gentle saint that she is, practically had to force me to go to KublaCon this weekend. I recognize the incongruousness of that but the explanation is pretty straightforward: Cons are expensive. We’ve been pinching pennies quite a bit (understand that I’ve played all the games I’ve played this year to date based on Goozex trades excepting the purchase of Fallout 3 and the rental of Resident Evil 5) so my only resource to attend Kubla this year was a tax refund check. When it came time to decide whether or not to pre-register, I balked because I kept thinking about all the things that smallish amount of cash could buy for the baby. Nik eventually coaxed me to commit to one full day at the con so I would at least have the chance to go considering I missed DunDraCon for similar reasons.
Then she realized that she had finals coming up the week following Memorial Day and decided she wanted me as far out of her hair as she could get me so she more or less demanded that I attend a second day. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go, but I wouldn’t have a room, I’d have to pay full price for the weekend pass, drive back and forth across a bridge and I just felt like it wasn’t a “pure” con experience. I grumbled and fussed but she was pretty adamant that due to her schedule and the fact that the arrival of our child would probably preclude any con trips for at least a while, this was likely my last chance to experience one for a bit and it should be taken advantage of, even if it wasn’t some version of ideal.
I’m sure the irony is not particularly thick to note that it was one of my better con experiences.
I love the full-weekend cons with two night hotel stays and supposed game-all-night sessions but to be honest a lot of times those shared vacations end up being exercises in scheduling. It’s less “Gamer Paradise” and more “Executive Administrative Assistant Boot Camp.” You’ve got between four and nine people usually, all who have different eating, playing and shopping schedules and you’re trying to coordinate what games you can get in with who needs to be where by when and at what point you can squeeze in sufficient meals for everyone. It’s pretty exhausting and in the end I think a lot of the gaming sputters and putters along excepting maybe one big—usually pre-planned—event.
This weekend however we simply arrived each day sometime in the morning, sat down and played until people began drifting away. Each session was adjusted for how many people were available and interested and those who were engaged in other activities were welcome to stop by for a short while and join us or simply chat until their next game. As a result I got in more gaming than any con I can recall and it was all great, great fun.
I thought the one disappointment was going to be that with the inclusion of my restricted budget I wouldn’t have much in the way of funds for the dealer’s room. That turned out to only be partially true since the real setback was that I went in wanting to find a fun Zombie-themed game to buy and the ones I found were low rated and badly reviewed on BoardGameGeek.com. The game that was recommended, Last Night on Earth, was nowhere to be found in any booth. However, I did manage to get an incredible dealer’s room score as I found unlicensed Blood Bowl blocking dice at the Chessex booth and managed to find the last matched set (black on green). So for less than $10 I walked away with what I felt was a huge DR coup. There was really no way to count it as anything but a huge success.
- Talisman
I was basically sold on Talisman after my first play, but this second game—now, you’ll have to temper this statement with the understanding that I won—sealed it as a great title. Thom, Aaron, Carl and I played a complete game with the Dungeon expansion. I drew the Dark Cultist character which we quickly decided was a viciously overpowered class unless you recognized it as a threat early and spent plenty of time stomping on it to prevent it from working its way up. The way the game typically works is that you have a Craft (basically magic) and a Strength (melee combat) rating. These ratings are added to a D6 roll when in combat, for example against a monster you encounter. When you defeat a monster you receive its card as a trophy and you can trade in trophies whose ratings add up to 7 or more to boost your own corresponding stat. The Dark Cultist is vile because in addition to the typical battle/trophy/advance cycle, each successful combat earns you a roll on the table of evil gifts which can be anything from a piece of gold to, 1/3 of the time, a stat boost. Basically I determined early on that my strategy would be to fight as often as possible and keep rolling on that table. Once I realized the Dungeon had the most combat opportunities I built up a little in the first region (the board’s outer ring) and then dove in. I spent most of the game running down the dungeon, fighting anything I could.
It’s true that I got a lot of good rolls (many 4s which granted me +1 strength), but even just getting a lot of gold and fate was a bonus and since I was still killing enemies and collecting their trophies it really didn’t take me long to outpace every other character on the board in terms of raw combat strength. I think by the time I reached the boss of the dungeon I was at 18 base STR and 14 base CFT, plus my additional item and follower bonuses I was fighting at 23 STR meaning my lowest possible combat roll in a Strength-based fight was 24. Note that the boss of the dungeon is STR 12 and he’s considered pretty ruthless.
Defeating the dungeon boss also allows you the chance to teleport to the endgame and skip a lot of the sub-questing that is necessary there. I ended up in the Crown of Command with maybe six 4+ rolls to make to wipe out the rest of the players. A few spells resulted in me having to make maybe 10 or 11 rolls but ultimately it was kind of inevitable, especially when a bad draw by Thom sent his charging character back to a previous region and reset his timer so he didn’t have enough Life points left to reach me before the Command Spell did him in.
It’s maybe not surprising that I did some research after the game and found that some people have done some whining on message boards about the beardy nature of the Dark Cultist and everyone agreed that if she came up again in a subsequent game there would be a strong incentive to rush her at the early stages of the game and try to force a mid-game replacement character to come out instead. And granted, it did help that I got some lucky draws and some fortunate rolls which was not how my game went the first time we played. But all told I’m still impressed at how much depth they were able to pack into a game that is so mechanically straightforward. Definitely a great way to start off the con. - Age of Steam
Some people are super ga-ga over rail games. I’m not exactly one of them although I do like train-themed titles. Strangely for whatever reason I have quite a few of them but they are among the least played games in my collection, excepting maybe Ticket to Ride because Nik is a big fan. I think part of the reason for the lack of passion about train themes is that it is so frequently used in games that could have anything as the metaphor. I mean, honestly, TTR could be about linking gophers to burrows or stacking books or building snakes. Even something like Station Master is more of a competitive logic puzzle than a game about trains, the fact that it uses passenger cars as a thematic device is mostly irrelevant.
Which is probably why I actually liked Age of Steam a lot more than many rail games, because it actually simulates the building of a railroad company and is almost more of an economic system game than anything else. Yet the fact that it uses tiles to build railways makes it feel very much like a significant and effective use of the conceit which is really refreshing. Essentially you have an abstracted, hex-based board with several cities populated by colored cubes that represent goods. Basically you’re trying to transport the colored goods to their matching city locations using as many of your owned rail paths as possible. It’s a little hokey that you would want to find the longest route to each city rather than the shortest, but it serves to provide you with an income rating which you use to gain cash to buy more rail tiles and ultimately populate the board. You do have expenses such as number of locomotives and shares sold which can give you additional routes and some much needed early cash respectively but basically the game is a matter of setting up your rail lines to take best advantage of the randomized starting layout.
I liked a lot of things about Age of Steam such as the way the random factors really only account for a small fraction of the game mechanics and most of the player input is purely skill based: Turn order is determined via bidding round, rail placement is completely voluntary and limited only by the number of legal tile types and cash is earned based on your ability to locate and expand to the correct cities in a profitable manner. Unlike many games that rely on card or dice mechanics, AoS puts your fate almost entirely in your hands while having just enough randomness that each game plays differently from the previous. That being said, there were some things about it I wasn’t so crazy for. One is that the game needs to either start players off with more seed cash or needs to adjust some mechanics so it isn’t quite so easy to go bankrupt (instant loss) in the first turn or two. You start with so little resources and you have base expenses you must cover that a very small amount of bad luck can put you out of the game before it has really begun and new players are especially susceptible. That’s something that could potentially put people completely off the game and that’s more than a shame, it’s a sign of a broken design. Another thing I wasn’t crazy about was the limited tile set. It felt like almost every player involved in the game was finding at least a couple of instances where the play they wanted to make was hampered by the selection of tiles while many of the ones that did exist felt very edge case in design like they might come up in only one of every ten games played.
The bggest complaint I have about the game is maybe a nitpicky one but something I felt detracted from an otherwise elegant and fun title: The presentation of the whole thing was really dull and lifeless. I suppose I would understand if the game was supposed to be scaled or realistic but the abstraction level seemed like it would have been much more closely served by a bit of visual pop in the design. The bland color selections on the board and the uninspired city hexes coupling with the paper marker sheets made for a feel like we were using the beta/test run version of the game with bits ordered off some ganeric gaming supply warehouse on the internet. I don’t mind some games lacking the sort of pop you might get from a top-tier game like Agricola but it kind of sucks to feel like you’re playing a demo game out of a $60 box. - Formula D
We started day two of KublaCon with the updated US version of the French game Formula Dé, cleverly renamed to Formula D. I never got around to trying the original European edition despite it being another of those popular-in-my-group titles that always seemed to get played when I wasn’t around. Now that I’ve had a chance to try it, I wish I’d made a stronger effort to get in on an earlier session.
The key thing about Formula D is that it plays as fun as it looks. For a visually striking game like Formula D, that’s pretty important since I think a lot of copies can be sold based on the “shoulder glance” effect where one might do a circuit through a convention’s open gaming area and see a big board with tiny race cars and a load of polyhedral dice and think, “Man I gotta get my hands on that.” Impressive titles like Twilight Imperium and Descent sell the same way but my experience with the former and the many anecdotal tales about the latter suggests that those don’t hold up as well as Formula D.
Mechanically the game works by giving each player a car marker on a large board with a number of lanes marked off by small spaces that create a racetrack. Each of the corners on the track are outlined in red and white and feature a number next to them which indicates how many rounds you have to stop within the turn area without damaging your car. Then each player receives a box which contains a cardboard table containing pegs which tick off aspects of the car like tire integrity, transmission, brakes and body. You also have a gear shifting mechanism indicating which gear dice you should roll for that gear.
And then you roll your gear die, move that many spaces, and try to be the first across the finish line. It’s easy to pick up but it’s pure joy to play because the simple mechanics create an unexpectedly realistic version of an actual race. The most exciting action happens in the turns, where you have to downshift and plan your entrance and exits appropriately or you risk serious damage to your car. But you also have to be a bit gutsy with your decisions or you’re likely to end up puttering along at the back of the pack for the entirety of the race.
Formula D also features a street racing option which is very similar except the tracks tend to have crazier features like jumps, switchback turns and many hard angle turns plus the cars are slightly different adding nitro abilities and each driver has a bit of a personality that adds a special ability like an attack that can damage opposing drivers or the ability to influence the corner negotiation a bit more. Our second game was a street race and we happened to roll Rainy on the weather check. What that did was force us to add a slide of three spaces to each move that included a corner spot. When you’re trying to keep from overshooting corners, three spaces is a huge liability. It was great fun as we smashed and bashed our way around the track, with me pulling a come-from-behind series of maneuvers to wrestle with Thom for the top spot only to finish first with the small caveat that I literally disentegrated across the finish line for a moral victory that was ultimately worth nothing as my ghost watched Thom limp in just behind me, raising the cup I should have possessed if I’d only rolled a 2 and not a 4. Of the new games I played at the con, this was definitely my favorite. - Warhammer Quest
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard Aaron say on a number of occasions that Warhammer Quest is his all-time favorite game. As such I’ve been searching for an opportunity to play it for probably a couple of years; Aaron and I share a lot of tastes in games and if this is something he loves it stands to reason I would enjoy it as well. It wasn’t easy getting the game together because it fell into that in-between stage at the con where people are waiting for their next events to start and looking for something interesting to play but also noting that the con is wrapping up and wanting to kind of keep their options open so they can experience as much of the festivities as they are able.
It was kind of a force of will that got the game off the ground and I’m pretty sad to say that it didn’t really go all that great. It’s hard after a single play to say if the game was the problem or if it was just a bad session or if it was just the atmosphere but it felt really rushed and forced and sort of like much ado about nothing.
Essentially the game is Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: The Miniatures Game. It reminded me of a GM-less D&D minis run and several of the players remarked that it was very, very similar to Descent. Each player gets a pre-generated character and a mini and are placed on a dungeon tile with a plastic doorway connector piece at one end. Each turn players move their MA, explore the next section of the dungeon which is placed based on the drawing of a random dungeon card from a deck and then an event card is drawn which is often monsters or treasure or traps. You make rolls on the same Games Workshop table they use for everything (basically matching Weapon Skills to hit and rolling weapon strength minus armor value for Wounds) and occasionally use a special power or two.
It wasn’t a bad game, and the way the dungeon tiles unfolded into a randomized board was pretty clever; I thought Carl’s invective that Talisman was a “much better game” was a touch harsh but I did have a clear view of the engineering that went into the platform he stood upon where he cast down this decree. It falls into that weird middle ground games sometimes do where temporal contemporaries like DungeonQuest have a greater air of exclusivity and have carved their niche more thoroughly into a gaming landscape while games that can benefit from the trails blazed by these titles, nodding in that appreciative but aloof masculine fashion toward influence, surpass in some maybe small but ultimately significant way. After the game was over Thom and Aaron agreed that a part of the joy of the game was a longer campaign in the system (we had no such opportunity as we basically party wiped minus the hasty, yellow-bellied exit of Thom’s Chaos Warrior) where players can gain levels, return to town to restock and delve into further lairs. I wouldn’t mind an opportiunity to explore that sort of sequence but for a pick-up-and-play game I can think of others, even similarly themed and matching some base mechanics I’d lean toward in the future. - Block Mania
Since Dave and Carl had planned on an afternoon 40K match, Thom, Aaron and I decided we would try another round of the recently discovered hit Block Mania. There were three major developments in this game:- We discovered a rule we had misunderstood in the second play on Game Night a few weeks ago which was the Defensive Firing phase. We had initially assumed this was an opportunity for non-phasing players to take their licks against opponents so we set up shop with heavy ranged weapons like missile launchers in our own windows and plinked away at the other blocks at a rate of once per phase regardless of our phasing status. Closer inspection suggested that it was much less of an offensive opportunity and more of a strictly defensive step to try and keep Blockers from camping next to your guys and taking pot shots.
- We came across a previously missed note about utilizing the Shopping Mall and Armory squares to stock up Blockers with additional gear. This drastically changes the utility of some Blockers (since now all Blockers are at least capable of carrying equipment) and makes combat a generally more unpredictable endeavor.
- We finally grasped the function of the various transportation options and became less reliant on the pedway and ground floor to traverse blocks.
The base result of this was a game that felt more like what I think the designers had in mind and I felt like it was a superior game as a result. The one mechanic that is both a singular source of fun in the game but also incredibly frustrating if you happen to be the affected player is the collapse mechanism. Thom was fairly visibly annoyed when late in the game, after basically running away with the victory, a fire (that he had started) in his block began a chain reaction which ultimately crumbled his whole board. It’s like this: For each square that receives a Structural Damage marker in a turn, you roll 1D6+SD Markers to try and beat a 6, with a 6 being a collapse. Collapsed squares the add Structural Damage to the three squares immediately above left, above and above right, which then get their own rolls.
What often happens (this is what did me in the last time we played before the con) is that a single collapse will result in a series of three rolls in which, say, two are collapses. What that means is that wherever those two collapses share an adjacent square above them, that square rolls twice typically at 5+ to save vs. collapse and then again at 4+ to save vs. collapse. It’s awesome because it means that, as you would expect, the more lower levels cave in the more likely the upper levels will weaken and crumble as well. It’s terrible because it means that one or two bad rolls and you just have to sit there and watch almost helplessly as your block falls apart. I felt bad as Thom rolled and rolled and rolled seeing his odds of having the chain stop before it hit the penthouse levels dwindle and wondered what rule (house or official) could be implemented to avoid the sort of bad luck catastrophe that can grind a game into the “rarely played” shelf if it happens frequently enough. I suppose you could cap the number of collapses per turn or set it so that only one roll can ever be made per square… which come to think of it makes too much sense for it not to actually be the rule.
Before I get off on a tangent that no one wants to hear about but me, let me just express that this is why I love games with dense rulesets. The implicit complexity in these sorts of systems allows for discussions of things like abstracting randomness into a knowable state. What you’re looking for is like a reduction in the culinary sense: You need just the essence, the most aromatic and distinctive elements. Add copious heat and stir, then apply. - Dominion
The first time I played Dominion I thought it was an interesting game that felt like it should really shine if the rounds were randomized. Basically you have ten different cards with a stack of copies each arranged in the play area. These cards, as well as Victory Point cards and Treasure cards are each worth a particular amount. Players start the game with an assortment of VP and Treasure which they use to buy cards from the play area. All cards in your hand are discarded at the end of the round and when you run out of cards to draw you reshuffle. Some of the cards you can buy are Actions, others are Attacks. You may play one Action and execute one Buy per round, unless an Action grants more of either. Some actions also grant gold value in addition to played Treasure cards.
Functionally the game then becomes a deck building game, like someone mechanized Solomon’s Draft using multiples of particular cards. Since Dominion comes with more than ten possible card options, each game can play differently depending on which cards you use. Cards like The Thief is an Attack that allows you to force other players to reveal cards off their draw decks and permits you to steal any Treasure you come across. Other cards like The Moat permit you to prevent one Attack by revealing The Moat from your hand.
It most of the pre-set scenarios, the cards are evenly balanced: Attack cards like The Witch and The Thief are tempered by trashing options (the ability to get rid of unwanted cards by permanently discarding them) and Moats. Buy-boosting cards like Marketplace are carefully inserted alongside other complimentary and counter cards. But for gamers like me, pre-set scenarios are only fine when I’m first learning a game. I prefer to either design my own or use randomized setups. For example, other than the travel edition which has a limited randomizing option, I haven’t played with the suggested Catan setup since I think the very first time I played.
What Dominion struggles with is working in that context of randomized scenarios. Because the pre-set collections are properly tuned, the game plays really well when it’s banging on all cylinders. Our first match at the con had a Moat, a Witch and a lot of interesting Buy phase options. It was random, but it meshed together. The second game however had a Thief, at least four trashing cards and no Moat. So it became a was of Thieves as everyone struggled to buy enough of them to be able to play and just hoped they would be able to swipe sufficient Treasure to have some effective Buys. I got out of the rat race early and focused instead of non-Treasure card acquisition but it wasn’t easy esepcially since even without the loss of Treasure you still ended up down two to six cards from your draw pile per turn due to everyone (more or less) playing a Thief when they could.
The only thing I can think that would help the game might be to have “sets” in the random generation where certain draws require another card to be non-randomly added to the scenario or where a particular card pre-empts another from being included. It would be a tricky thing to put together unless you were either meticulous in your playtesting or ridiculously familiar with the game, but avoiding the clunker rounds where everyone kind of looks at each other like, “Why are we doing this to ourselves again?” might be worth the effort. - Pandemic
We rounded out the con with a session of Pandemic, because whether I like it or not this is one of our group’s signature titles.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love Pandemic. The problem with the game is that I’ve already playtested the expansion which isn’t due until later this year (there are some rumors that it could hit as early as next month but I doubt we’ll see it in stores until probably August at the earliest). In a way, playing the early version of On The Brink sort of broke the base game for me.
The problem comes in the form of a certain familiarity with the game that simply comes naturally after dozens of plays. If you play with other people who are also comfortable with the game you start to get to the point where your roundtable discussions go like, “Well, we haven’t seen ‘One Quiet Night’ or ‘Resilient Population’ so I’m guessing one of those is coming in the next round, even if we do get an Epidemic we can avoid the Outbreak by sending the Medic over to the black region and let the Dispatcher move someone else to Red if we avoid Sao Palo in this next draw.” The progression of the game loses some appeal when the calculations start to feel like second nature. True, it’s still a challenging game and sometimes randomness makes victory tough if not impossible. But it feels at this point like victories and losses are based on the setup rather than player actions because we’re all so competent at the game now that it represents no additional challenge than the randomness which is even becoming a smaller factor as we develop a sort of peripheral awareness of how that chance is likely to impact the game.
Playing with the then-unnamed On The Brink expansion earlier this year brought the game back to that sensation of awe that made it so special to begin with. Since then, it’s all I’ve wanted to do with the game.
I do think I would like it more if we began focusing exclusively on the six-epidemic challenge and/or forced ourselves to not just cure all the diseases but eradicate them all as well. It’s a slightly hokey challenge because it’s only truly difficult if you don’t happen to draw the Medic, but it would I think still add a wrinkle to where you had to avoid a loss from deck-out which, at this stage, is rarely a threat. - Prince of Persia
Obviously there was a lot of board gaming this week. I consider that to be a very good thing. But when I was playing vids, I was pretty much latched onto Prince of Persia. As a bit of background I played through Sands of Time on the original Xbox and loved it, but like many people when I saw the Prince of (Linkin) Park as they reimagined it for the sequel, I bowed out, opting to keep my sense of context intact when it came to the original game.
So essentially there is a core of fandom in me for the series, although I don’t have a full regiment of experience under my belt. I guess Ubisoft’s gambit at a series “reboot” naming it simply Prince of Persia instead of something like Prince of Persia: Back in the Sandals or Prince of Persia: Check Out My Funky Headscarf paid off because I was convinced enough at its departure from the angsty action-oriented prince of Sands of Time Vols. II and III to give it another go.
Now, the PoP isn’t as wonderful as, say, Mirror’s Edge. For one thing, the parkour/environmental platforming elements are stone simple because, unlike Mirror’s Edge, there is only one way to do it. And executing the movements is a matter of hitting the right button within a huge window of opportunity. For another, combat is kind of limp in that it’s not really consistent with the Prince’s other motions while he’s scampering around like a monkey across dangerous cliff faces. A lot of the fighting involves blocking, waiting for a window to strike and then executing God of War-style combos. It’s not bad, especially since there is very little of it comparatively, but it always feels like it slows the game down. The developers even understand this and make it so that each non-boss enemy has a period of time while they’re materializing out of inky black ribbons (“corruption,” the game tells us) in which if you can navigate the platforming leading up to it quickly, you can hit it once before it spawns and avoid the fight altogether. Add in the fact that most of these enemies can be given what amounts to a ring out victory where you combo them to the edge of their platform and then get an execution cut scene, it’s like the game wants you to know that it put the fighting in here so you had an excuse to carry a sword, but it totally gets that you want to go back to jumping around in all these cool caverns and clock towers and ruined palace structures.
But never mind all that. PoP hums with a certain vibrancy. I can scarcely express how thrilled I am to see the graphical horsepower available to modern gaming systems put to use in an artistic way, generating a style rather than another few inches of purchase on the vertical conveyor climb toward photorealism. It’s not that Prince of Persia is cartoony or cel-shaded or anything, but like Valkyria Chronicles and Street FIghter IV and Mirror’s Edge it has it’s own style that looks intentional and not accidental. The game presents its loose story via a few of your typical cutscenes but it also has the Prince accompanying a Princess Elika whom you can interact with occasionally by hitting the left trigger. This is entirely optional but serves to build the characters in a way that isn’t precisely natural but is at least more cinematic than the sort of forced and stilted between-levels “banter” that passes in most games. The problem here is that while the Prince and Elika are generally likeable they aren’t all that believable with their overly Americanized personalities and voice acting. It’s a small step, but a welcome one. - Magic: The Gathering
The tournament continues, although slowly. I’m now pushing the newer rating system as the principal scoring mechanism since our booster packs have arrived and we’re mostly waiting around for a few of the scheduled matches to take place. It’s always a challenge in longer-form competitions to accommodate the less active participants without actively punishing those who are enthusiastic. - Fable II
I only played a little more Fable II because once PoP arrived I was stuck on it. But before I got distracted I did manage to fight the first reasonably boss-like foe in the game and I have to say I’m a little disappointed that so far there haven’t been more of these sorts of challenging fights. I can’t help but wonder if the one button combat system shows its seams when it is asked to draw a player into a more intense scenario.
In any case I finished the fight and then went back to town and decided to finally part with some of my cash earned from taking pretty much any job I came across and working it to the five-star level and bought out pretty much one of everything vendors were selling. I didn’t see any sort of encumberance system (one of the few things Fable II doesn’t have a system for) so it made no sense not to have as much as I could afford. I think I dragged my feet about pressing forward and ultimately didn’t protest too loudly when Prince of Persia swept in because the next step in the progression is an Arena sequence. I haven’t even started the process but my experience in Fantasy Arenas is that they are usually showcases for the combat system as as I alluded to above, I’m not sure Fable II’s can withstand that sort of scrutiny. - Kane & Lynch: Dead Men
The last of my recent Goozex blitz was this odd third-person shooter title that I think was elevator pitched as Heat: The Video Game. Unfortunately, Heat: The Movie was a brilliant piece of cinema and Kane & Lynch is a scholcky bit of nihilistic escapism that falls squarely into that grey zone between truly bad games and flawed games that had a lot of promise. There is something interesting that could have been done with K&L, but the developers decided at every possible junction to choose the path less intriguing. I’m not going to fire it out just yet, I have too many other games crowding my schedule to eject something because it didn’t grab me in the first 45 minutes, but when I come back around to this title (and I will come back to it last, intentionally) you better believe it will have a leash so short it constitutes a choking hazard.
Parting Shot
I played Indigo Prophecy. More accurately, I let Indigo Prophecy play itself while I watched and occasionally did something that it told me to do and sometimes pretended like it had some influence on the game’s outcome. My problem with that game is the same problem I have with Dragon’s Lair: It’s impressive to watch, but it’s not interactive. It requires interaction, but that is not the same thing. I could understand how people who aren’t able to weild words like physical weapons might get confused about this. To a certain degree all video games can be reduced to a sequence of correct button presses culminating in a visual cue that you have succeeded. What makes a game fun is both the discovery of the sequence and the merging of sequence to visual stiumulus: When an enemy reacts in a way you don’t expect and that forces you to alter your input pattern, the correctness of the sequence has shifted and the result is a sense of accomplishment.
Anything other than that is Simon Says. I’ve seen Simon Says on a keychain.
Why someone would think that a keychain game is suitable for a AAA PS3 title sounds intriguing is beyond me. You want to know why they spent so much time on the graphics engine for Heavy Rain? Because that is the only compelling component of the game. When you can experience exactly as much enjoyment from a game by watching YouTube spoilers as you can from actually paying $60 and dropping 15 hours of your life into it, some link along the chain is weak, as if it were made of bread.
Unlike some people, I don’t have a central nervous system malfunction everytime a game developer implements a quick time event. I think that involving players in expository elements is not necessarily a bad thing for a medium that is, by definition, interactive. I do think that making failed QTEs instant death is a flawed mechanical design decision, but their mere existance is not abhorrent. What is unacceptable is thinking that it substitutes for more immersive forms of gameplay. There are elements in many QTEs especially as they appear in games like God of War where they serve to elaborate on a more granular sequence (to initiate a finishing move for example). Games like Tomb Raider Legend where they are inserted to act as a nod toward interactivity in what would otherwise be a perfectly agreeable fully controlled sequence are not as great. But building an entire game out of it is frankly unforgivable. It may have flown when Dragon’s Lair needed to stand out in the arcades with it’s phenomenal “graphics” but them wings are clipped. The plane is grounded, son. We can actually create similarly impressive visual showcases to Don Bluth’s cartoons that are fully responsive to user input nowadays. Trying to pull one over on audiences with some fancy motion capture behind a call-and-response drill exists in that void between art and participation. It’s insincere. It’s misrepresentation. It’s paint by numbers. And it’s moving backward.