That’s What She Said Edition
Let me describe to you a conversation I’ve begun to loathe that occurs in gaming circles: Someone says “I love playing video games, but I have this girl now and she doesn’t like games. What can I do to get her to play with me?” Now, the subtext of this feels an awful lot like “My girlfriend gripes at me for playing too many vids, how can I trick her into the hobby so she crawls off my back?” Perhaps that’s not always the case, but it’s hard for me not to cynically attribute that as the motivation. I can’t help feeling like most often the notion is that if you get your significant other hooked on the same hobby you don’t have to adjust your behavior to adapt to a relationship, you can adapt your relationship to your activities. Then the ensuing conversation describes the lack of understanding gamer guys have of the fairer sex better than I ever could as they generalize and stereotype so badly it borders on misogyny citing ignorance as fact along the lines of “Girls’ hand-eye coordination is worse than ours so that’s why they only like games with simple controls.” What’s frustrating is seeing this same thread repeated over and over again and no one notices that it keeps coming up because no one seems to have much luck with it: By and large girls who will play games probably already do and those who might play some games cannot be assumed to like any particular suggestion. After all, how could you recommend a game for a friend of mine if the only information I gave you was “he’s male”? In this case fellas, I hate to tell you, you actually have to get to know someone to know what they’ll like.
It’s madness.
Anyway, I played some games this week. Let me tell you which ones I liked.
I’m still working through Fallout 3. I went through The Pitt DLC because I was getting burnt on repeating stuff I’d gone through on my PS3 playthrough. I thought it was pretty well done, especially since the end of the questline does a clever bit of storytelling head fake and the morality that you may have assumed all the way through gets turned on its head a bit. I was a bit disappointed with the inclusion of Yet Another Arena Sequence although it worked contextually, it still feels so old hat that I would have preferred a more clever turn to advance the story at that point. I keep thinking back to this add-on and Operation: Anchorage and thinking that many people bought these at $10 each. I wonder if I would have felt happy to have spent that money and so far I’m not sure I would have. I think The Pitt came closer than O:A did, but I hope the next two add-ons have a greater sense of scope. Truthfully I’m afraid what I’m looking for—still—from Fallout 3 is something that rivals any of the Guild questlines from Oblivion and I’ve yet to see it.
Other than The Pitt I made plenty of progress in the game but I’m starting to feel fatigue. I hit Level 20 but I had installed Broken Steel so I blew past it. I do appreciate the new Perks that were added as some of them are cool and clever: Unfortunately the game is really built to have Level 20 be the pinnacle and at this point I’m so overpowered that for fun I decided to execute an NPC in the Citadel and had the entirety of the Brotherhood of Steel trying to drop the hammer on me. It did take me a couple dozen Stimpacks but I was able to decimate at least 20 Brotherhood warriors single-handedly and I wasn’t even using my nigh-unstoppable Stealth Kill technique either. So at this point I’m basically eschewing all loot unless I absolutely can’t pass it up (which is rare) and trying to collect the final few achievements before I get to what I really started this whole thing to see: The Broken Steel content. The good news is that I have a few games waiting in the wings for me to finish up with Fallout so there’s no reason for me not to power through.
Speaking of other games, I haven’t used my PS360 for anything but Fallout in the last few weeks but I have had cause to flip on the DS a few times. I’ve been doing the Picross Daily Challenge thing which is very similar to the Daily mode that captured me for a month or so a couple years ago in Planet Puzzle League. Actually the two games while being very dissimilar mechanically have a lot in common and that may be why I like Picross so much. But aside from that I also decided to try out The World Ends With You which was an action RPG that got a lot of positive buzz about a year or so ago.
How can I describe my experience with TWEWY? Have you ever had a movie or TV show that a lot of people you know and trust raved about, and then you finally get around to checking it out and you loathe it to the extent that you wonder if you made a mistake and watched something similarly titled but completely different from that which was recommended to you? That’s what it was like playing The World Ends With You. I can’t stand this game. Never before have I felt as vengeful on a developer as I did toward Square Enix and Jupiter after an hour with it. I’ve played some pretty rough RPGs in my day but never have I played something so overwrought and full of trying-too-hard faux hipness. It’s like a mashup of a My Chemical Romance video, anime fanfic written by a 13 year-old and patting your head while rubbing your stomach. The principal mechanic of doing flaily things with the stylus to approximate spell casting (called inexplicably here “pins”) while at the same time doing a kind of simplistic pattern matching on the D-pad to control the top screen is not just unweildy and awkward but downright rage-inducing. The game claims to take over control of the top screen when you stop doing it but it penalizes you for not playing its stupid ping-pong match focus shift and never tells you how to let it control the bottom screen character which is what you really need since the stylus input acceptance is so touchy that I wished I was back playing Puzzle Quest on the DS in the bed of a pickup driving through a minefield for a less frustrating, more user-friendly experience.