Gaming Weekend: Back to the Boards Edition
I had a chance to play some non-video games for the first time in a while this past week. A friend from out of town came and infiltrated a local board gaming group that meets in the vicinity of my work so I obliged a two-birds-one-stone deal and swung by after work. They were wrapping up a game of Race For the Galaxy when I arrived and while I was a tad bummed that I didn’t get a chance to play, I didn’t have to wait long.
There was an odd timing issue with some of the other attendees so we opted for a shorter game and settled on Regenwormen, which is the Dutch version of Pickomino. It’s a dice game at heart, with each turn’s play mechanics resembling Yahtzee where you roll a bunch of dice and select a like group to keep. The idea is to get the highest total possible and claim tiles with values that range from 21-36. When you claim the tiles you stack them; opponents can steal your tiles by rolling their exact value but since you stack them they can only steal the top tile which makes stacking a sort of protective measure.
What’s exciting about the game is that the scales tip dramatically since people who don’t make qualifying rolls both lose their top tile and eliminate the highest remaining tile from contention. Combined with the steal mechanism, people who shoot out to an early lead often find themselves struggling to restore their early game glory later on when people start swiping their tiles (it’s often easier to stop on a matched value and steal than push for a better tile and risk losing the entire roll).
Later in the week my wife and I returned from a dinner and realized the majority of our friends had gone away for the weekend so we settled in for a quiet night and pulled out Carcassonne: The Castle. Having played so much Carcassonne on XBLA since the last time I gave The Castle a shot I was surprised at how some of the core mechanics had been changed for the enclosed two-player variant. For example, you score all of your unfinished units at the end of Carcassonne while you need a special tile to do that in The Castle. I think it actually works to the latter game’s favor since it encourages in-game scoring (I lost a lot of points because I underestimated how quickly the game’s end was approaching at about the three-quarter mark). I also think the limited expansion area forces each player to be a little more aggressive in how they place each tile; in vanilla Carcassonne you can easily end up concentrating on a remote corner of the expanding playfield, dropping roads and monasteries for quick, small scores. If your opponent(s) don’t mind you incrementally bumping your score they may ignore you and focus on their own castle building elsewhere. In The Castle, you can’t presume your strategy won’t be interrupted by someone else, even inadvertently.
Other Games
- Grand Theft Auto IV – Early in the weekend I found myself with time to play some games and an odd disinterest in GTA. I was stuck on the “No Love Lost” mission, unable to control the mandatory motorcycle well enough to consistently keep pace with the mission’s target and typically outgunned on the few occasions I did make it to the park where they ambush you. So I complained to my wife that the game wasn’t really drawing me in the way other sandbox games and even previous GTA titles had been able to. Eventually I relented and fired it up to try the mission “one more time.” This time I didn’t worry about trying to shoot the target off his bike initially and concentrated on sticking with him and getting to the park. Previously I had been staying on the bike during the ambush, thinking the bikers would flee if I didn’t stay mobile. This time I decided to just ensure I stayed alive as long as possible. Turns out the bikers don’t run and once I wasn’t hobbled by the bike and was able to take cover, I cleared the mission readily.
It all proved that my real problem with GTA and IV in particular is that in a game where so much is open and free to you, I ultimately want to experience the story and when I get bogged down on a tough mission it’s even more frustrating than getting stuck in almost any other game. It’s like I have so many options of things to do but the one thing I want to accomplish is giving me problems. Frustration sets in. Fortunately once I got out from the roadblock, I had a hard time putting the game down for the rest of the weekend. So the game is still excellent, it just has an inconsistent difficulty level that I find occasionally insufferable. - Lost Cities – I can’t stop playing this game. As much as I enjoy GTA and for as many other games as I have waiting their turn, I keep coming back to it. I have every intention of picking up the tabletop version the next time I see it for sale, I like it that much. Hopefully next week I can find one of my Live Friends who has it to give the multiplayer a try because I think I may be coming to my threshold for the single player mode (the AI is too predictable after 50+ games) but the game itself has not yet worn its welcome away.
- God of War: Chains of Olympus – I’m actually loving this game. For as much as I felt God of War II was something of a disappointment, I feel exactly the opposite about this by-the-numbers portable re-visitation. Maybe it’s just the handheld novelty that works for me, but I’m finding its pacing, level design and controls to be pitch-perfect. It’s not different enough from previous series entries to say it does anything particularly exciting but it’s exactly what I wanted from this title on this platform. I’m roughly six and a half hours in and not yet at the end (though it feels as if I’m very near it) so either I’m taking a leisurely pace or the reported five-hour play time was exaggerated, but either way I don’t feel slighted (having not paid for the game but received it as a Goozex trade may be helping there). I’d perhaps be tempted to play through a second time on a harder difficulty level, too, assuming the game doesn’t take a narrative or game play nose dive in the final moments.
- Mega Man Anniversary Collection – I somehow missed this re-packaging of ten early Mega Man titles on one Xbox disc back in the original Xbox days but as soon as I heard about it I knew I needed to give it a shot. I only played through Mega Man 2 (my favorite from the NES era and also because I had recently played through the original game on the Powered Up remake for PSP) but it took a couple of hours. My only complaint about the package is that it inexplicably doesn’t allow you to quit to the menu from any point and the save feature works exactly the same as the old password save system (at least in MM2) so that rather than saving from your actual spot you save from the game’s nearest checkpoint. In the case of Dr. Wily’s castle, that’s at the very beginning. I made it to the final boss and had to shut it down to attend to other business. To say I was displeased to find I would have to re-do each castle segment all over again is an understatement.
Demo Watch
In my stint of “I don’t wanna play GTA” I looked for something new to take the place should my GTA-aversion be permanent and as such I downloaded a bunch of recent demos from the PlayStation Store that I’d been neglecting to try. Most were titles I’m glad I demoed before making an ill-advised purchase.
- Echochrome – I had such high hopes for this game. It’s art design is sensational with its minimalistic line art and smooth presentation, but I have to say I practically abhor this game. The premise is actually incredibly intriguing with its warped perspectives and potentially sublime mechanical ruleset. It’s exactly the kind of mind-twister that I ought to like but instead I found it frustrating and grating. For one thing, I hate—hate—the way that it doesn’t apply its own “mysterious laws” consistently. For example, you’re supposed to be able to form new pathways by orienting disconnected pathways so they appear to be adjacent from the camera’s perspective. Except this only works when the designers wanted it to which means you can’t use your creativity to solve the puzzles, you have to figure out how the developer wanted it done. And I might be okay with that except one of the laws is designed so that holes your artist’s model avatar drops through and spring pads that make him jump will result in a platform transition so long as they appear to be on the same vertical plane. The problem is the perspectives are fiddly by design, and the controls are horrifically imprecise in a game where they have to be spot on for it to be any fun. I can already tell that later puzzles will require speed and dexterity as well as spatial recognition and I’m not interested in getting to that point in a game where early puzzles are already hampered by awkward controls. So great idea guys, but terrible execution. I hope it sells well enough to warrant a sequel so you can fix the problems.
- The Bourne Conspiracy – I don’t miss Matt Damon’s likeness but while I thought the premise was clever and the execution was better than I expected for what they seemed to be attempting, I ultimately decided it was too much like a long series of quicktime events. I tolerate QTE on games like Tomb Raider and RE4 where it’s rare and I think it works in a game like God of War where it’s a pivotal mechanic in some move execution (though I wish someone would come up with a better method of indicating the right button to press without flashing a graphic that depicts the literal button; talk about tossing a rock through the fourth wall). But in all those games it’s a secondary function and the primary mechanic is more fun. Here it’s like Indigo Prophecy where even the combat is a bunch of QTEs and I don’t think I have the patience for what amounts to a modern Dragon’s Lair.
- Haze – I literally fell asleep during the demo. It’s bland, the Haze effect is less interesting and less original than the bullet time effect from F.E.A.R. and the enemy AI is limp. I hope the demo was just not a good showcase for the final product because as it stands, I have lost all interest in the game where at one point I had pretty high hopes for it, even considering a day-one retail purchase. Now it looks like it will be lucky if it finds its way onto my Goozex request list.
- Dark Sector – I actually rather hated this game and its demo. It looks like Gears of War and plays like a clone, but it has floaty, ungrounded controls and a tedious combat mechanic. Plus I got stuck early on facing a gate that was locked tighly by a glowing chain. I did everything I could think of to open that door, destroy that chain or circumvent it however I could and it simply wouldn’t happen. After fifteen minutes of mounting frustration I shut it off and deleted the demo. I have zero desire to ever give it a second chance.