Gaming Weekend: Completion Edition
I try not to let my… ahem… fascination with Xbox Achievements color my game playing too much. But the truth is that beyond just the inexplicable delight I find in watching my gamerscore rise, I find myself ceaselessly lost in such statistical marvels as the Badge Calculator from 360Voice.com and other data tracking services that make similar use to the public profiles your Xbox presents when connected to the Internet.
Don’t ask me why this sort of meta-information about a time-passing activity like video games could entrance me so, I have no excuses. But whatever the cause, I occasionally find myself doing things I might not otherwise in the name of earning those cursed Achievements and their associated points. I’m talking about things like playing Alien Hominid HD twice or putting far more time into Rumble Roses XX than it deserved. On a different platform, these ideas wouldn’t cross my mind. When there are points involved, it doesn’t seem so crazy. Well, not until after the fact. Perhaps this is what drug addicts feel like? All callous carpe diem when the sun has set and a reflective flood of self doubt each morning? If so, I am thankful my addictions are focused on fringe forms of entertainment and not more destructive pursuits.
A Last Stop in Rapture
When I finished BioShock the first time I did so on Medium difficulty and I got the “bad” ending because I harvested all but one of the Little Sisters. Unfortunately, doing that prevents you from getting several Achievements. Additionally, I played through without the aid of any guides so I missed some audio diaries and weapon upgrades and stuff. Since I wanted to see the “good” ending anyway, I played through the whole game again this weekend using a guide for the audio diaries and armed with a few tidbits of info I got on how to earn the last few points I was missing.
I have to say that even though I did it “backwards” and rescued the Little Sisters on Hard difficulty which results in less Adam overall, I didn’t have too much trouble finishing the game. In fact I found that I had a lot of Adam left over at the end because I didn’t really focus on getting all the Plasmid upgrades. The game has a strange mechanism for balancing out the lack of Sister-based Adam in the form of “gifts” bestowed by one of the game’s main characters which don’t make the amounts equal but it’s hardly the “make do with half the Adam” that I expected.
In any case I wrapped it up and got all the remaining Achievements which marks the first time I’ve “completed” a game legitimately. I did earn 1,000 points from King Kong which wasn’t a bad game but I confess that I picked it up just for the points because you get them all just by playing through the game once. That it turned out to be fairly entertaining was more serendipity than anything else. I also have more than 1,000 points in Oblivion, but some of those have come from the Shivering Isles expansion so I haven’t yet completed all of the main game quests nor the SI Achievements. I still can’t explain it, but the sense of satisfaction is profound.
As for the endings, I did like the “good” ending far more than the “bad” one, but both are painfully brief and in either case I wonder how they intend to execute any sequels without creating another Rapture, like a sister city or something. Some people have said the ending doesn’t detract from the overall quality of the game and agree but it bothers me that a really solid conclusion could have elevated an already remarkable game into something that surpassed nearly all other experiences I’ve had playing video games. As it was it felt more conventional—in terms of video games—than any other part of the game.
Having finished all the game had to offer (there are rumors of a third ending, but I’ll just look for it on YouTube, I’ve sort of run out of desire to play the game a third time), I dropped it onto my Goozex profile and it got snatched up within the hour, as I expected. It looks like the 1,000 Goozex points it earned me will be going toward Saint’s Row and Ninja Gaiden Black so I’m excited to get those sometime soon.
Did I Misremember the First?
Another game I wrapped up this weekend is God of War II. It really pains me to say this but I kind of hated this game. It strikes a strange dissonance in my memory of the first game to have had a more or less unenjoyable experience because for the most part the sequel is difficult to distinguish from the original. Everything from the first is still there, but somehow it seems like the weak spots of the first game have been amplified and in some cases brought to the forefront.
It’s all little things that add up. The game is laden with puzzle sections. I know there were puzzle bits from the first game but in this one they seem needlessly obtuse and not fun as I remember them being before but annoying. It’s the detail things, like the way visual cues to interaction options are inconsistent: Some things that can me moved sparkle or have obvious handles on them while others don’t. Occasionally you’ll be presented with something that seems like it needs to be used but there is no indication as to how or when that use will come into play. There were so many times that I got frustratingly stuck for lack of a clue not just how to proceed but even where to begin. Near the end of the game my leash on the game’s frustrations got so short that I practically GameFAQ’d my way through it just to see the end because I lost patience for replaying sections to try and figure out boss patterns or environmental riddles.
Perhaps to top it all off, the game has a Halo 2 cliffhanger ending tacked onto a story that is far, far less compelling than that of the original.
I can’t say that I never enjoyed myself playing God of War II, but my overall opinion of the game is at best very mixed and truthfully I hope they work on more than just the visuals for the inevitable PS3-based God of War III.
So Close
My last Achievement-obsession is Viva Piñata which I had two more Achievements remaining entering the weekend. I managed to earn the “Get 100,000 Coins” one by pestering Seedos and selling pretty much every Piñata that dared take up residence in my garden. I also used the cheap method of attracting a lot of Tafflys and Newtgats (which just requires you to have some readily available plants) and then cheaply transforming them into much more valuable Redhotts and Salamangoes for 2100 and 2800 coins, respectively.
My last challenge is to play for 50 hours and I’m having a hard time figuring out how much more time I have to go. My best estimates based on the idea that a day/night cycle is 12 minutes suggest that I still have 13 hours left to play. That’s pretty discouraging since I’m kind of running out of interesting things to do in the game. There are still some piñatas that I’d like to make residents that I haven’t managed to finish up (Roario, Elephanilla, etc.) but even that doesn’t sound like 13 hours of good times. It’s kind of strange but I wonder if the game would have been as enjoyable to me without the Achievements. I was thinking about picking up the DS version when it’s released but I guess these next 13 hours will be a good indicator of how much I like it when I’m not working toward some specific goal.
Other Notes
There were a few other games that made appearances last week:
- Oblivion – I actually put Oblivion back in and finished up my Dark Brotherhood quest character. I thought that questline was probably my favorite in the game so far, but I haven’t finished the Thieves Guild due to a bug and Shivering Isles due to laziness. With BioShock out of the way for next weekend and Viva Piñata being a grind from here on out, I may make my way back and just start over the Thieves guild with my assassin character or work through some more Shivering Isles.
- Enchanted Arms – I traded for the game from Goozex and sent back my copy from Gameznflix. Almost as soon as I did so I ran up against a boss I’m having a lot of trouble with. After ten or so losses I checked a FAQ and it suggested a completely different party line-up than I had been using so I’ll have to do a little work to get the right golems and then I’ll give it another shot, but I remember this now about JRPGS: They’re usually either really easy or annoying difficult, sometimes from one battle to the next. Consistency? Anyone?
- I keep trying to make progress in Zuma, Geometry Wars and Aegis Wing in between my bouts with “deeper” games, but in all cases I’m hopelessly stuck up against my skill level and getting kind of annoyed about it. Zuma in particular threatens to unhinge my mind.
- I got a copy of Civil War from Gameznflix that was completely unplayable and kept giving me the white “Please Insert this Disc into an Xbox 360 Console” error. I shipped it back and decided not to report it because I don’t care enough about that game to waste any more shipping time on it. Meanwhile I sent Enchanted Arms back last Friday and didn’t get the receipt confirmation until Saturday. The service on Gameznflix continues to deteriorate and after their recent site “redesign” that did nothing to address their serious usability issues and a dismissive response to my customer service request about it, I’m becoming increasingly disenfranchised but unsure about what my options are. How much begging does someone need to do to convince Netflix to offer video games?
- The only DS action that really happened last week was about twenty more minutes put into Trace Memory which I’m still not convinced is a good game. I’m so early into it that I feel badly for being critical, but I thought that the days when games demanded we invest into them before they brought out the hooks were over. The same rules apply as with movies and novels and other narrative entertainment: You need to capture the audience early. I think this applies even moreso to games which often request or demand dozens of hours of investment. I haven’t given up yet but it’s not making me want to keep trying so far.
- It’s not really DS related but I am playing on my DS: Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. This is my potty game because I tend to play it on the toilet, which I realize is too much information. Still, this game is really growing on me a lot and I think I’m slowly starting to realize what my brother was talking about. And here’s an interesting thing: I’m only a couple of hours into it and I’m already having a hard time remembering some of the events and locations. I wonder if this wasn’t maybe a game that I played by trading off lives with a friend and did something else while it was no longer my turn like reading comic books or something. Stuff like the foggy forest where the Master Sword is hidden: It’s so distinctive both in graphical effect and atmosphere that you’d think it would have stuck with me.