Princely Edition
Gaming this week was sparse, especially following the mania that was KublaCon week. I didn’t exactly burn myself out of gaming but we’re getting toward crunch time with the baby preparations plus I’ve felt in some ways like a lot of my entertainment gaming has been disappointing in a narrative sense lately so I went back and read a few books to try and scratch the itch for good storytelling.
Frankly I like getting story from games more than I maybe should. It’s pretty self-evident that game stories are well behind the sophistication curve from other media formats, but honestly my imagination can be really well served even in a mediocre story as long as I can insert myself into the plot. Games provide that dynamic element that I crave, but sometimes yeah I get burnt out on Saturday Morning Cartoon quality writing. It usually doesn’t last too long and it only takes one decent game to make me believe in interactive storytelling again, but after Prince of Persia (see this week’s Spoiler Alert for a rundown of how bad that one got), Fable II, Kane & Lynch, Resident Evil 5 and Half-Life 2, I just had to get a decent story into my head.
The good news is that so far Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is tolerable plot-wise and we’re planning on starting a short series of Traveller RPG adventures on Monday nights which should give me that interactive fiction boost I’m looking for. In the meantime you probably aren’t going to have 6500 words to read this week. I’m all about the “everybody wins” scenario.
- Prince of Persia
There wasn’t a lot of gaming this week for a variety of reasons, but when I did have a few hours to string together I spent them wrapping up Prince of Persia. I won’t get into the ending here, I’ll cover that later in this Edition with a Spoiler Alert, but I did want to spend a few minutes talking about the combat in the game which I mentioned last time in terms of how sparsely featured it was. Which remains true throughout except the long stretches of freerunning are really preludes to the boss battles which lie at the end of each area and serve as the climax of each realm.
The bosses themselves are kind of a mixed bag. The Hunter, being I guess ironically a speechless, roaring creature more like some sort of beast, is pretty dull and easily dealt with due to his straightforward approach. He is functionally a stronger version of the regular corrupted foes you encounter throughout the game’s platforming areas. The Warrior is a little better since he can’t be directly injured but I have to say I found the battles with him to be frustrating because typically they involved backing yourself into a corner, waiting for him to approach, then strafing around and just jamming on X until you get to the QTE that allows you to push him. They should have been extremely short battles but the excessive blocking and unblockable attacks combination makes them lengthy and, frankly, dull since it’s a tactical positioning battle rather than a real combat. And don’t get me started on the final segment which requires you to position him just so on one particular spot on the map, followed by a bizarre sequence in which you win literally by not doing anything but essentially waiting for a counter to expire. It’s truly odd.
The Alchemist was better still but mostly his levels were the key draw with some of the more interesting designs and challenges. At least the Alchemist himself had a personality and an intriguing backstory but they really squandered the potential story of a fallen Auhra by making it sort of a casual remark made by Elika and not exploring it further. The boss that really stood out was The Concubine, whose realized character and interesting injection into the Prince/Elika’s flirty dynamic worked very well. Plus her battles were peppered with interesting illusion aspects including a cool puzzle-like moment toward the end of the final confrontation. So I suppose if you did them in the right order you could have the game work in a sort of progressive way, although the fights with Elika’s father that were interspersed throughout were disappointing as was the final battle. And part of the eneven nature of all this is the combat mechanics which I think really needed to be progressive. In most third-person action games you gradually get better as you progress and since PoP uses a sort of open world… well, not environment exactly but at least a sort of chin tilt toward openness, they can’t count on you to have anything by the time you reach a given point. Honestly I would have preferred that the powers you activate from collecting the light seeds do something other than fire up the plates scattered around the platform sections or at least that they’d incorporated the plates into the combat somehow. The sections leading up to each boss confrontation (when they can in fact be sure you have a particular set of abilities are thrilling, but they overdo the work by making them long strings of these ability pairs instead of using them in a more organic way. - Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Once you get past the introductory level where you walk Darth Vader through a series of unfortunate (for them) encounters with Wookies, you take control of Vader’s padawan (or maybe there’s a different name for evil Jedi apprentices? If not, I nominate something darker sounding, like ‘padlok’) who is a personality-deprived individual with the requisite droid and hot chick in his posse. From this point the actual game begins, marching you through a series of environments as you use the dark force powers to toss Greedos and robots and stormtroopers around, hit them with lightning and basically have a lot of fun being a right miscreant.
Yet the game struggles to remain as great as the initial indicators might suggest because it consistently breaks its own rules and the rules of the Star Wars universe (insert George Lucas stamp of approval joke here) by having “normal” enemies block or resist or ignore certain force powers. The combo system is clunky and the camera fights you way too much of the time. The core of the game is fun and I’ll probably work my way to the end, but it’s not going on any best-of list. - Conquest of Paradise
My favorite thing about CoP is that it has exploration, conquering and historical strategy in a relatively briskly paced board game. Our typical time window on Mondays is two hours once you factor in the end of my shift and the beginning of Thom’s, and many civilization games would barely be set up in that time but we made it through CoP with time to spare.
The core of the game is exploring sea hexes with a mechanically elegant system: You have five “knots” to explore nearby hexes and for each one you draw a random tile which has the number of knots on one side and either an open sea or an island icon on the back. If you find an icon you draw the tile and place it on the board and if not you use the token to mark the open space. Knots can be from zero to three, but if your total for the exploration surpasses five you get lost at sea and miss the next exploration phase. Beyond that there is a build phase in which you can add villages to your controlled islands or build tiles with canoes to connect your territories, warriors or colonists among other units. Combat is a simple matter of lining up the battling unit markers and rolling a D6 trying to hit 4+ for each opposing unit.
It’s very streamlined but there are plenty of strategic elements so don’t think it’s simplistic, on the contrary it’s a very rich game that just happens to have pretty seamless design. Thom won the game mostly due to heavy stock-up of Art & Culture cards which provide Victory Points and in many cases some other benefit. A good sign the game works well: We had only one instance of combat (and then it was against a pre-populated island territory) but we all clearly wished there had been more time so we could have gotten to “that part of the game.” I think we’ll definitely play this one more.
Spoiler Alert: Prince of Persia
So you spend the entire game of Prince of Persia following/leading Elika around, trying to put the genie back in the bottle after her grief-stricken father revived her with Big Boss Ahriman’s Evil Mojo™ and threatened to undo the world in the process. So you succeed in your mission, defeat Ahriman, send the princess back to the Jail Tree and she seals the big bad away and collapses, dead, as it should be. After all, wasn’t it her life that caused all this in the first place?
The credits roll as you carry her corpse down a pathway which I thought was an incredible, moving end to the game. Except, like many bad endings in history, the writers don’t know when to quit. Instead of weeping over the necessity of sacrifice or coming to terms with Elika’s demise or even using her death as an impedus to change himself, the Prince, now back in the player’s control, looks across the plain at four shining trees. Uh-oh.
At this point I figured out what was going on and I executed the end game sequence but I was just confirming my fears. Sure enough, you cut down each tree, re-open the temple gates, return to the Jail Tree, cut it down, collect the Master Light Seed, walk back to Elika’s body, and…
Revive her.
Just like her father, whom you had to defeat.
Just like Ahriman, who you worked the whole game to stop, wanted and needed to return.
Just like the biggest fool, the most unheroic moron in the history of narrative stroytelling would do.
The key problem with this is that is makes the game itself feel like a farce. Why did I defeat all those corrupted baddies, you ask yourself. Why would I even do that? I didn’t want to do that! But you had no choice. To see the end of the game and earn the last achievement signifiying that you did in fact “finish it,” you had to do the only thing you could and act like a simpleton. There was an opportunity there I suppose to create an actual choice: Throw a box that asks, “Do you want to save the princess?” perhaps. Make the player live the choice. Force them to decide whether they want the game to end and be the “hero” or allow them to be as stupid as the Prince in their idea of the story and rescue her against all logic. But they miss that opportunity and present the ridiculous end in the context of it being more of the game. In this case, it’s like WarGames: The only way to win is not to play.
Why this really sucks is obvious: You either finish the game as designed and feel like you’ve wasted your time on a circular narrative or you refuse to play and let the game tell you in effect that you can’t decide your fate unless you find the power button. In a lot of ways it mirrors the entire philosophy presented in the game. I complained last week in Parting Shot about the Dragon’s Lair/Simon Says method of game design and Prince of Persia is actually barely distinguished in this manner. You don’t so much play the game or control the Prince as you respond to the game in the way it demands. This is true in most of the platforming, in all of the fighting and then it turns out even in the narrative. It’s curious that they chose to structure the game as if it had all these choices you could make because at the end of the day the last thing you ever have in Prince of Persia is choice.
Except the choice not to engage in it’s recursive excerise, which is the choice that I reluctantly have to recommend that anyone who hasn’t played it make. Because honestly, it just isn’t worth your time.
Parting Shot
On one hand, I’m incredibly excited about Left 4 Dead 2. I mean, I really love L4D and I’ve been wanting more for months now. But I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that Valve decided to go with a full retail release sequel rather than expanding the original game via DLC. And I’m guessing I’m not alone.
Frankly the biggest downside of Left 4 Dead is the limited number of campaigns. I thought it would be okay, after all, most people only played a handful of maps on games like Counter-Strike, right? And for the most part it is okay but there is a part of me that understands that I’m really only ever going to enjoy L4D single-player. I may play an occasional Vs. match against strangers but I don’t want to pay for a gaming PC and none of my friends focus multiplayer games on consoles. Generally I’m fine with this reality but in a game like this where you can either have encounters which come from playing with unpredictable human opponents or you can have experiences which are crafted by developers and spring to life from the game’s engine and settings. Left 4 Dead accomplishes both, which is great and praiseworthy, but it has a limited bank of the latter and I’ve made so many withdrawls the coffers are bare. I hoped for at least one small infusion and instead I realize I have to switch providers entirely. Effectively it’s what I wanted, but it’s given to me gruffly and without compassion, leaving me dangling question marks at the ends of my statements of thanks.