Gaming Weekend: Creeping Horror Edition
Well. That was a weekend.
It started with a ruthless cold that had me miserable enough to stay home from work on Wednesday (which is actually my Friday, as far as work weeks are concerned). Thursday I was still feeling pretty rough and while I was doing better on Friday, I didn’t actually get back on my feet until Saturday… at which point my wife was sick and spent most of her day in bed.
Between all this downtime I got some serious gaming in (and quite a bit of not-so-serious gaming as well). I was aided along the way by a couple of post-birthday shopping trips to unload a bunch of gift cards I’d received (some were from Christmas as well), and a deal that changed the gaming landscape a bit.
The PSP Gambit
When my brother-in-law took a job offer that required a lengthy commute (which he was at least able to share with his wife), he decided to pick up a PSP to help pass the time in the car. Well, apparently he decided that sleeping was a better way to pass the time and he ended up not using the PSP very much at all. When he heard I was in the market for a PSP, he offered to let me use his. Actually he offered to let me have it, because he’s a generous guy that way. I prefer to think of it as an indefinite loan because he refused to take any sort of compensation for it, but either way the end result is that I now have a PSP in my possession.
Since I had planned to buy a PSP, I’d been saving up my gift cards from the recent gift-giving season and the only thing that had so far prevented me from acquiring a PSP Slim was the fact that I couldn’t find the basic Piano Black bundle, which I vastly prefer to the more expensive (and inexplicably gaudy) alternatives.
What my brother’s kind gesture did, effectively, was allow me to repurpose those funds toward more games rather than a gaming system. So I went game shopping. The first thing I did, earlier in the week, was use a GameStop card to pick up a couple of games as achievement fodder for the gamerscore challenge I posted about last week. One was Gun, which turned out to be a pretty decent game. It’s an open-world third-person shooter set in the wild west, so essentially it’s Grand Theft Horses. I actually found myself really enjoying it, especially for a game I got just to rack up some easy points.
The other game I got was a $3.99 copy of Madden 06 because supposedly you’re able to get all 1,000 points without much effort. The reality is that you can get the points readily, which means there is no actual test of skill involved, but I can’t say that getting those points is devoid of effort. The biggest achievement in the game is a 400 point whopper for going through 30 years in Franchise mode, which can be done via simming the whole season. It sounds good but the truth is that the simulation aspect is pretty hands-on and requires constant attention, not to mention the fact that the process is quite time-consuming. The only good thing about being sick is that I really had nothing better to do so I was able to force myself through the arduous process but I must admit that it was hardly what I’d call fun.
In the end it was kind of a waste anyway since one of the participants in the challenge apparently has no job because he posted an 8,000+ boost in the first week while I was plugging away at my 3,000 point hike and feeling pretty proud of it. At this point I’ve essentially given up on the competition since it would end up costing me more than $100 to acquire the games I need to earn as many points as the leader which would negate the point of the whole thing.
Anyway, once it became clear that the gift cards were free to use as I wanted, I went back to the store and picked up Tomb Raider: Anniversary and Guitar Hero III for the 360 and Silent Hill Origins for the PSP, which is not bad at all considering I had to buy them all brand new.
Silent Hill Origins
Surprisingly this is the game that made the biggest impression over the weekend: I got completely absorbed into this very quickly. It really highlights the marvel that is the PSP hardware. The game itself is standard issue Silent Hill, very reminiscent in both graphics and set up as Silent Hill 2 (which I own but still have yet to complete). But the execution, perhaps because it’s on such an intimate bit of machine especially if you take the game’s advice and play without lights and wearing headphones, is so remarkable that I had a hard time putting it down and trying the other new games I picked up.
I never tried Silent Hill 4. I know enough to understand that it was a departure, but I’ve heard mixed reviews with some thinking it was wonderful and others finding it mightily disappointing. I know I’ve complained often about the slow start to Silent Hill 2 and how hard a time I have getting involved in it, despite a desire to enjoy it, but I was able to delve into SH3 and thought it was pretty solid though not as affecting as the original PS1 classic.
This game, though, I don’t know. It may have just the sort of weird confluence of elements to give me that Silent Hill experience I keep thinking is possible on modern systems. I do know that playing the game last night around 11:00 pm with all lights off downstairs except the stove light, headphones on, glued to the little handheld felt a lot like the absorptive experiences I’ve had with some of my favorite scary books to the extent that when I realized I had to touch the mirror and go into Silent Hill’s rusty parallel universe, I paused, compelled to complete the puzzle I was working on but apprehensive about the journey to get there.
If that’s not the workings of a high-quality horror game, I don’t know what is.
Assassin’s Creed
It wasn’t all PSP and gamerscore boosting this weekend, of course. I also made a concerted run at the end of Assassin’s Creed, finishing it in the wee hours of Friday morning.
My overall impression of the game is favorable, but I don’t think that means I misunderstand the complaints people have leveled against it. On one hand I don’t totally understand the repetitive complaints, especially since so many other games that people have praised are just as repetitive if not more so. I mean, you could correctly state that Halo 3 is nothing more than shooting one of maybe ten different enemies with minor variations on the theme so why isn’t that dull and boring but Assassin’s Creed is?
Part of the problem may be that Assassin’s Creed hides its gameplay a little less than some other titles. The whole conceit of the Animus is, as I mentioned before, kind of a game-within-a-game. As such the intel gathering portions are extremely game-y and very much rooted in the kind of action/effect tasks given to you in older video games like Zelda (“complete this dungeon to get item or weapon X”). There isn’t much world-building going on when everything is a construct within which to execute the various play options available to you: Crowds exist to offer random obstacles (including specialized obstacles like beggars, thugs, vigilantes and guards), buildings exist to give you things upon which to climb, missions exist to give you activities to execute. It’s like complaining that Saints Row or GTA is repetitive because all you do is drive around and perform missions where you kill people, blow stuff up or run shady businesses.
So obviously I don’t really have a problem with all that, and what made it so that I would have carried on even if I found it repetitive is the intriguing storyline. What I didn’t expect was the head-scratching brain bender that serves as the game’s conclusion which may warrant its own Spoiler Alert at some point. Suffice to say I didn’t exactly dislike the ending, but that may be because I can’t say with any certainty that I understood a lick of it either. I even went and found a website that claimed to reveal the details about the game’s conclusion and while, after reading that, I found it made a modicum of sense (in the “we didn’t bother with an ending because this is just the first game in a series” kind of way), I still don’t think I should have been required to surf around just to understand what I’d just seen and experienced.
The Other Games
- Guitar Hero III – I’ll say this for Neversoft’s reign-taking turn at the popular franchise: They didn’t shy away from making it the shredmaster’s playground. This game is relentlessly difficult. I started up on Medium because after all the guitar games I’ve played recently I don’t really find that much enjoyment in Easy any longer. And there I am in the first block of songs on Medium doing quick hammer-on runs, complicated chord-to-flourish patterns and long stretches of sixteenth note gallops. It’s relentless. The song selection is wonderful but the interesting thing is to notice where Rock Band and GHIII overlap, like with Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” and The Killers’ “When You Were Young.” It’s interesting because the note tracks take sometimes wildly different approaches and I think, when you get right down to it, I prefer Harmonix’s idea of how a song should be “played” on a plastic guitar. And for the record, I’m in the “Guitar Hero boss battles suck” camp.
- Tomb Raider: Anniversary – I don’t know if I ever completed the original Tomb Raider. I know I finished TRII, but the first one I played and enjoyed but I seem to recall it being a rental that I didn’t have time to complete. As such I think a lot of the nostalgia and “oh, wow, look what they did with that part” moments are completely lost on me. Still, I’m a sucker for puzzle-y adventure spelunking and while I was as disappointed in the later Lara adventures as everyone else, I think the core game remains enchanting. If, however, this game were released without all the earlier adventures before it today I bet it would be at best a middling success. It’s fun, but it just doesn’t have a particularly stand-out set of game features to make it a top-tier game. It may be heretical to suggest, but we have plenty of female protagonists these days, and there are lots of games with somewhat similar concepts at play (Assassin’s Creed comes to mind) that do more interesting things and aren’t saddled with the sort of old-school style linearity TR embodies. I’m not saying it isn’t good, I’m just saying it relies a lot on nostalgia.
- Call of Duty 4 – I picked it up again to play through more of the solo campaign on Veteran. I can’t tell if I wish I’d run through on the harder mode in the first place or if I’m glad I got to see all there was before subjecting myself to the near-masochistic requisite precision of Veteran. It’s not that it isn’t doable, the fact that my meager skills have advanced as far as they have is proof of that, but in Veteran it becomes more a matter of doing the right thing and doing it well and less about strength of will to survive the way it is on the lesser settings. It’s still a phenomenal game, but now that the thrill of online multiplayer is gone, I see this as the last stronghold before I ship the game off to some other lucky Goozexer who has yet to revel in Infinity Ward’s crown jewel.
- WipEout Pure – It’s strange how WipEout has been around for so long and yet, playing this PSP launch title, I had a hard time understanding why exactly. It’s not that the game isn’t fun, because it is in short doses, but I don’t know if I’m just misremembering or what but it feels almost exactly like the original WipEout I played on the PS1. As a launch title for that system. In 1997. I’m just saying.
- Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror – I only played a couple of tutorial levels, but I thought it was semi enjoyable. Mostly it did a great job as a testament to how badly the PSP needs a second analog stick.
- Puzzle Quest – At long last I finally confronted and defeated Bane. I can’t describe how much I enjoyed playing this game. I don’t know if I liked it so much that I’d play it again, on a different system, with a different character, but I’ll tell you this: After 1 day, 21 hour and 44 minutes of play time (my most played game of 2007 aside from Oblivion, which I didn’t capture statistics on), I’m thinking about it.
- Rock Band – Before I picked up GHIII, I put Rock Band back in for some more drum fun. I will say that The Outlaw’s “Green Grass and High Tides” is my least favorite song ever. The quick halftime beat that lasts most of the latter portion of the epic feels-like-sixteen-minutes song is brutal on the old leg muscles, especially when you’re trying to play while recovering from an illness. And the worst part is, it’s not even that great of a song.
- Golden Axe – Another gamerscore booster game, I actually liked this game a lot in the arcade back when I was a lad. It’s still a half-decent game, though nowhere near as good as I remembered. What struck me is how incredibly short it is. All those times I thought my $1.00 was getting me nowhere near the end when I made it to the Eagle level and it turns out I was almost there.
- Nanostray – I spent a bit more time with this game. It’s pretty good, actually, although like many shmups it’s intensely challenging. I didn’t realize at first that you could switch weapons. It’s got a surprising amount of depth for an obscure little DS shooter. Not a bad pickup I’d say.
- Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass – Most of my DS play was done during the interminable five hour stretch of Madden sim-grinding for the 1,000 points, and I didn’t do much of use in Zelda during that time, salvaged a few chests from the sea chart and fought off the annoying pirate chick. Still an excellent game that I’ll find time to finish one of these days.
- Planet Puzzle League – I honestly can’t decide if Geometry Wars or PPL should take the cake in terms of simple games that kept me coming back over and over last year. I think I may have put more time into GeoWars, but only by virtue of having it for six months longer than PPL. The Daily Play challenge is still my favorite little pastime when I have ten minutes to kill.
The Aftermath
Whoa. That was a ton of gaming. Interestingly, I was also scheduled for a Warhammer 40K game that got postponed due to (largely) lack of communication on my part and some errands that I had to catch up on due to me being sick for most of the week. So it could have been even more impressive.
I doubt next week will be so packed with gaming goodness, but you can bet I won’t have nothing to play. Good grief.