True To Its Roots Edition
Despite my insistence last week that I wasn’t done with Dragon Age, I found it difficult to really get into my second playthrough of the game, which is surprisingly in keeping with my BioWare experience. No one really considers Mass Effect or KotOR to be particularly linear but I find that the consistently pre-programmed framework for their games makes the internal deviations an insufficient carrot to dredge through the similar structures just to experience. Philosophically, I want to see what else the game offers, but practically I can’t seem to drum up the motivation.
Which, in this case, is okay since I have… other diversions. I’ve been playing a little bit of World of Warcraft here and there, though the physical realities of playing a PC game limit the amount of time I can realistically invest in it. Which may sound strange considering my console playing hasn’t really slowed since I became a father—at least not as far as number of days in which I turn on a video game machine. But the sleeping-baby-on-lap configuration that works passably for holding a controller is untenable with a keyboard and mouse. Mostly my few hours here and there have been devoted to clearing out my quest log (and level grinding in the process). Some of this has meant taking a pragmatic approach to quest abandonment which was something I was loathe to do in my first foray into the game. If a quest went green (low XP) I would still venture out and complete it for the pittance just to say I had cleared it. With nine months of perspective on it, I don’t feel the same sense of disgrace from quitting on a quest that doesn’t offer me much in the way of net rewards.
Since at this point, being about level 53/54, I’m approaching the endgame of the original content there are only a handful of locales that are of any particular interest to me from a leveling perspective and since I’m not playing long enough to bother with guilds or any of that kind of multiplayer aspect of the game like instances (although I think those are possibly my favorite parts of WoW, when they work out), this is probably it for me. It’s still enjoyable but I’m really getting the sense that I’ve gotten all of the single player fun out of the game that I’m ever going to get which means that for me to play WoW with any kind of gusto again I’d have to find someone or several someones who wanted to play, maybe even starting over from the beginning, and go through it with them. I had a dream this past week that I actually talked my wife into playing it with me. Reality notwithstanding, it was a really pleasant dream.
The other games I dipped into were courtesy of Goozex, although the principal one was Left 4 Dead 2 which I admit was sort of a non-Goozex-y acquisition despite them being pivotal. They have this new “Get it New” feature which allows you to trade in a greater number of points than you’d ever spend on an actual trade to get the game shipped still-in-shrinkwrap from Goozex or one of their partners (I got mine from Amazon.com). Since I had a backlog of points and nothing I really wanted to spend them on, I decided to spring for L4D2. Even after doing so I still managed to have some points left over to request Silent Hill: Homecoming and Infamous though only the former arrived in time for this post.
But I was talking about Left 4 Dead 2. There’s a weird dichotomy in my mind when it comes to this game. On one hand, everything that they did with it is welcome and smart, resulting in the game being quantitatively superior to the original: Melee weapons, the continuous narrative through the campaigns (such that L4D ever really manages), additional firearm types, new items, new special infected, etc. All good. My favorite adjustment from the original game though is that the campaigns don’t necessarily follow the formula established by the original in which you played through four chapters which were basically zombie-infested obstacle courses and then hit the chapter five finale where you would briefly fight through to a radio, call for a rescue and then fight a ceaseless horde of zombies for 5-10 minutes until the vehicle arrived, board and watch the credits roll. L4D2 doesn’t diverge that much but it does have a campaign where instead of waiting for rescue to arrive you have to collect gas canisters to fill up a car in order to escape (it’s a bit of a stretch realism-wise, but still fun) and a campaign in which you travel across an abbreviated map and then turn around and leave from the third saferoom through the entry door and work your way back through to the beginning, only this time in the midst of a raging monsoon (as an aside, does it feel a little early to have a game set in New Orleans feature a flood scenario so prominently?).
There is no other way to describe L4D2 than as an improvement over its predecessor. I know you feel the “but” coming: The problem is that there is just something about it that doesn’t quite capture the je ne sais quoi that I found in the original. Maybe it has something to do with the characters L4D2 uses: The original rolled up so many standard zombie movie archetypes into Bill, Francis, Louis and Zoey that it felt somehow right. The conceit of the game is that you’re playing a b-movie zombie flick and having those kinds of expectations met by the survivor characters brought that to life. L4D2 can be lauded for trying to develop its own identity but dang it, I need those stereotypes or else it feels too much like a game—this might as well be re-skinned as an action-oriented Resident Evil or Dead Rising game if it isn’t going to draw on the media it attempts to pay tribute to. And frankly I think a lot of the additions are things that really didn’t need to be there: Melee weapons are kind of a must but I don’t know why they have to replace the pistols; most of the new firearms are minor variations on the originals (there are now three or four types of shotguns and about as many automatic rifles, plus a better sniper rifle, an improved pistol that can’t be dual-wielded, etc). Other than the grenade launcher they don’t feel like they offer a whole lot other than back-of-the-box-bullet-point “variety.” Even the new special infected aren’t truly all that compelling compared to the original four, though I’m sure playing in versus mode as the infected will be more interesting than Hunter, Hunter, Smoker, Boomer, Hunter, Smoker, Hunter, Hunter, Boomer OH HEY FINALLY I GET TO BE THE TANK.
I’m not saying I’m about to run back to the original game and trade in L4D2 because it sucks, but it’s strange to find myself saying that for once I got more than I really expected from a sequel and yet somehow what I really wanted was less. A friend of mine also picked it up so hopefully I’ll have a chance to play some co-op/online soon and maybe that will change my tune a little.
The other new game I got was Silent Hill: Homecoming. Originally I had put the game on my wishlist because I have a habit that dates back to the year 2000 of expecting to play every SH game that comes out, despite it being more or less unwarranted since basically the original (a testament to how much I loved that game). For whatever reason I decided to do some research on Homecoming and found out that it actually got semi-decent reviews despite there being some nitpickers out there fixating on points I thought, once I learned what they were, seemed mostly unfounded. So I decided to give it a shake.
Now, my experience with Silent Hill games past the original on the PS1 is that, excepting Silent Hill 3, I play the first half dozen hours and then find something about them so infuriating that I turn them off and never return. Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill: Origins, and Silent Hill 4 were all this way and even 3, which I eventually finished, had to be completed in two discreet playthroughs because I gave up on the game halfway through the initial run. I still own a copy of the Xbox port of SH2 that I “intend” to finish one of these days.
Ready to hear what is probably going to be my undoing with Homecoming?
Save points.
Would it seriously kill developers to make games save-anywhere? Would it ruin the experience somehow? Okay fine, you’re going to make me find a save point. Whatever, you can be cro-magnon if you wish. Now, how about putting them a wee bit closer together than two and a half hours apart? Sorry, Silent Hill, but I’m not 16 anymore. I have a life. I have a job. I have a child. I can’t be expected to devote two and a half hours to your game every time I want to play it and I have zero inclination to re-play long sections of it until I get that magic block of time that lets me advance. And no, I’m not going to go on a 15 minute backtrack to the previous save spot, especially when you’re going to throw endless enemy spawn points en route. I was so infuriated with the game on Saturday morning as I had gotten up to attend to a fussy baby and was using the game to keep myself awake while I rocked her back to sleep. What I had intended to be a maybe 45-minute diversion ended up being a marathon session as each new room, each new area opened up without a stupid save point and the further I went the less inclined I was to just turn it off even though I knew that was the smart thing to do. When I reached the police station and got to the second boss in a row with barely any exploration (and therefore very few health items) in between, I realized that I had no reason to believe there would be a save point waiting for me even if I was able to defeat the boss and I was wasting twenty minutes restarting at the arbitrary pre-cut scene check point with every humiliating defeat (on the “Normal” difficulty by the way). So yeah, I turned it off. We’ll see if it gets a second chance (history suggests no).
But that does bring up the second gripe I have which is that even though Homecoming tried to fix the historically worst part of Silent Hill games—the combat—it’s still pretty crappy, relying mostly on broken dodge controls and attack animations that you can’t interrupt plus everyone’s favorite survival horror cliché: Ammunition scarcity. Bah.
Lastly, I’ve been playing Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time for a few weeks now but I’ve had a hard time figuring out a way to talk about it in Edition because, well, it’s really not a great game and I’m not even 100% certain why I’m still playing it. My best description is that it’s “stupidly compelling.” Deconstructing the basic simplicity of a Mario platformer into a turn-based role-playing format sounds kind of cool and interesting on the surface, but I don’t have any experience with the previous Mario RPGs so my lack of nostalgia makes me view the combat with a kind of baffled “what is the point of this” incredulity. Fortunately I pushed through the tedious opening tutorial section and by the time you retrieve Baby Mario and Baby Luigi (don’t even get me started) the game takes on a kind of Mario-meets-Zelda vibe in terms of the dungeon puzzles and, unlike Silent Hill, it has liberally spaced save points that allow the game to be chunked almost perfectly into bathroom-visit sized portions. Look, I’m not saying I’m proud to be playing the game, I’m just saying that I am.