Gaming Weekend: A Little Something New Edition
I finally finished my first play-through of Mass Effect over the weekend, topping out at around 30 hours. But I’ve talked at great length about Mass Effect and I swore I’d no longer subject you to my ramblings on the subject. So aside from putting the finishing touches on that experience, I also picked up a couple of other games that had slipped through the cracks in the last half-year of game-release mania, the most significant being NCAA 08.
You should probably understand that I’m a pretty big fan of football. Effectively, I appreciate the college game more: There is more at stake in terms of the game being played at the college level so the athletes try harder, plus the sheer number of teams and players means the talent pool is diverse and many, many teams are forced to win on the strength of actual teamwork versus a few individual overachievers. Which is not to say that star players do not exist in that framework, only that their potential impact is curiously mitigated and amplified.
The problem is that I never attended the sort of university that fields a football team you might watch on a Saturday afternoon in the fall so my attention and devotion is loose. I follow Cal because they’re local and I like their coach; I follow Texas A&M because I lived in College Station, TX for a short time and it is my friend’s alma matter; I follow Mizzou because I’ve begun buying my dad season tickets to their games as gifts; I follow some new underdog each year because I happen to catch an impressive game from them early in the season. But I don’t really have “my team.”
Contrast this to the NFL, which contains two teams I like very much (the 49ers in the NFC and the Chargers in the AFC) but also has a lot of problems as a league and a game. And consider also that I’ve been a 49ers fan since the womb and I recall learning the game by watching telecasts from my dad’s lap (asking a steady stream of irritating questions, I’m sure) among my happiest childhood memories.
I can’t say for certain that these discrepancies make August more confusing than it ought to be, but I have my suspicions. It breaks down like this in the video football arena: I want to prefer the college game because it aspires to capture a pure game essence embodied by the way college football is played anyway, but without a legitimate emotional attachment that I can feel by leading the 49ers (no matter how pathetic they may be in real life) to Super Bowl dynasty status.
In past years—and it’s been at least two years since I last picked up an EA football game with the intention of seriously playing it because I get weary of the roster-update pace of change in those titles—I’ve always made a point to play both Madden and NCAA. Contrast, I tell myself, and compare. I have come away from that exercise dizzy because I can’t readily reconcile the fact that I’ve almost always preferred Madden with the concept I have that I should like NCAA more.
So this time I skipped the whole hassle entirely. I waited for a few months for one thing, although the key is to not wait too long and both lose interest in the year’s game due to offseason indifference and eliminate any possibility of getting buyback or trade value from a game whose sequel is due presently. The other thing I did was only acquire the game that I was most interested in and make sure it was the game someone else I knew had and would be interested in playing with me. Since Doctor Mac is a big NCAA player of late and the college scene was more intriguing to me as a concept, I went with NCAA and pretty much vowed not to bother with Madden this year.
So far (one game into my Cal Dynasty), my only major complaint is that the menu interface is a confusing mess of menus and sub-menus with some kind of forced metaphor of a college foyer that doesn’t work. My minor complaints are few so far, although I was disappointed that the game doesn’t look significantly better than NCAA or Madden ’04 looked on my original Xbox. Perhaps I’m having selective amnesia with the fidelity of those earlier games, but I recall the move from the PS1-era engine to the PS2/Xbox-era engine as being an eye-popping adjustment. Granted, the relative horsepowers of the Xbox and the 360 are probably less drastic than PS1 vs. PS2, but at the same time I know that the 360 is capable of some impressive graphics even by adding some small tweaks like more dynamic lighting and filters.
I haven’t yet absorbed much in the way of the commentary, the crowd or the other small details as I’m still trying to get my bearings around the game play. I do wish it was easier to check the routes at the line (I think it was just a trigger or button in earlier games) and as usual playing defense is annoyingly dangerous. But I do like that they don’t let you play really sloppy (you simply must set your feet before you throw or you can kiss that QB rating good-bye) and I saw a couple of animations that looked nicely placed and smoothly executed. Historically Doctor Mac has pwned me in online football, so I doubt that his two-month head start on NCAA 08 will make a huge difference since I was destined for defeat anyway. But I think I’ll try to advance at least a bit further before challenging him.
The Web Games
I had the occasion to play a couple of flash-based web games in the last week that I thought I’d share because I enjoyed them both immensely (probably more than I should, considering my productivity). One is The Last Stand, which is mostly a shooting gallery game but one I have a soft sport for since it features zombies and has a fun little Oregon Trail-style mini game between rounds with a nice risk/reward mechanic. I was able to advance through all twenty levels of the game without too much trouble, but I can see how a few strokes of bad luck might change the outcome.
The other game is the much-lauded Desktop Tower Defense which is like another flash title I played some of earlier in the year only without the “map” conceit so you create the maze with your actual units. It’s addicting, fun and occasionally maddening but I recommend it strongly if you’re looking for a half hour to kill.
Other Games
The rest of the stuff:
- Mass Effect – I finished the game at around the 30 hour mark. I thought I had completed more of the game than I did (I missed the ‘Completionist’ achievement) but I don’t feel like I missed all that much. I do regret a few of the decisions I made in the final sequence which I think changed the outcome of the game in a way I would have preferred to save for a second playthrough, but overall I was impressed with how satisfying the end was. I did take a break just before the final mission to wrap up some side quests which I think may have broken the pacing of the game somewhat, so in my second play through I intend to skip a lot of the side quests and maybe that will result in a more taut experience, but I certainly don’t regret playing the game the way I did. It’s not game of the year material (which is a little sad) but it’s certainly a great game that I would recommend to most people.
- Project Sylpheed – I only played for a few minutes to determine if the disc from Goozex was kosher enough to offer my feedback, but I like the aesthetic to the game’s characters and I know a lot of people knocked the complex controls, I kind of dig them for that. Anyway, this will probably be my shelf-sleeper since I’m shedding my Mass Effect addiction and trying on a new one with NCAA, but maybe it will catch me by surprise.
- Bust-a-Move DS – I picked this up for some commode play because despite my affection for Zelda I have a hard time finding the ideal time block to invest in that game and although Planet Puzzle League has been my go-to short form game this year, I do need the occasional break from it now and again. The touchscreen alteration to the basic gameplay of previous Bust-a-Move titles is both fun and fresh as well as irritating and frustrating. The controls are mercifully solid but they still feel like they could have thrown a bit of error correction in there (maybe as a toggle difficulty switch?) to prevent spastic hand movements from derailing a session, but at least they tried to incorporate DS-specific elements into a game that’s existed in about 700 different forms through the years.
Demo Watch
Burnout Paradise. I confess to being a Burnout n00b. Racing games are, for me, strange beasts. On one hand I rather enjoy racing around in virtual cars but on the other hand I have two distinct problems with the kinds of games that tend to permit this sort of activity:
- I don’t know anything about real cars and I don’t really care to, so super sim-based games of the Gran Turismo or Forza vein get pretty dull.
- I’m a terrible virtual driver and I frequently crash any and/or all video game vehicles I encounter, including the “uncrashable” ones like in Mass Effect (yes, I was able to roll the Mako several times).
So a couple of things happen: I skip a lot of racing games since they either fall into that super-realistic camp or they focus solely on the arcade-y lap tracks which I’m terrible at. Either way, I usually don’t look to racing games as my first choice when acquiring games. The exception is in totally fanciful racing titles like Mario Kart. On the occasion where I do pick up a racing game (like Ridge Racer 4, PGR2 and PGR3) I usually find myself playing them for a week until I hit the invisible wall where I can no longer realistically improve and the remainder of the game is car or tuning acquisition that I find uninteresting since it appeals more to a gearhead than someone like me.
But I’ve always operated under the assumption that someone could make a driving game I really liked and I may have missed it already because I’m so poor at choosing which games will be right for me.
Thus, I skipped Burnout for a long time because it was interchangeable with the Need for Speeds and Test Drives and whatnot that I ignore year in and year out. Well, I heard about one Burnout game and it’s crazy Crash Mode concept and thought it sounded interesting but mostly in that Stuntman sort of “rental-only” kind of way. And I never got around to it. Then I started hearing about Burnout Paradise after this year’s E3. The open world thing sounded intriguing. Their approach to online play was novel. So yeah, I got intrigued.
The demo hit last week so I checked it out and well, in a word, it’s awesome. The game’s fixation on speed and it’s delight (rather than annoyance) with crashing makes bad video game drivers like myself instantly comfortable with the lunacy of the game. You’re actually rewarded when you plough into some schlub sitting at a stop light with a cool cutscene and a dramatic slowdown. The search-n-reward aspect of the open world means it feels a lot like playing GTA only without the cops coming to get you or the clunky on-foot controls. Obviously the demo doesn’t give the fullest sense of the game’s extras but I get the impression that tweaking to get your car’s torque just so is probably not a big factor here.
I had to cut the demo short as I had other things to attend to, but I really, really enjoyed what I played of it and I intend to give it some more time and maybe I’ll put it on the short list for January $60 a Month fodder.