Gaming Weekend: Dual Screens Edition
I must begin by apologizing for the silence on Tunnels of Doom this past week; a family emergency pulled me away from my normal activities for a time (inconveniently right as E3 began). But I didn’t spend the entire week or so in a bubble and I did play quite a few games during that time, and I also was able to somewhat follow the E3 brouhaha so expect an E3 impression post later and for now let’s talk about my week of sporadic gaming.
Because of the strange circumstances, it was actually easier for me to do my gaming portable-style so you’ll note a remarkable increase in DS titles mentioned here as opposed to the usual XBox 360 onslaught. I got some XBox action in there, too, but primarily it was all about the stylus in this supersized, seven-day Gaming Weekend.
And Then Some
It all started with a trade-in to Goozex: I sent off my once-beloved Guitar Hero II package for a glut of Goozex points. The primary reason I’m ditching GH is in favor of Rock Band. I’m sorry but the Stratocaster controller, the drum kit, the karaoke singing business and the online play and the fact that this game is actually being made by the original GH guys make any sequel to the original game mostly uninteresting to me. So I cleared the way and figured I’d earn myself some heavy points for trade-ins while I was at it.
With all that trading power I originally went straight for the 360 section as I am apt to do, but I found that especially with most of the decent games having long waits and now that I have GameZnFlix there wasn’t much I was really hyped about getting. So I instead opted for a slew of new DS titles and the first of them arrived early in the week: Metroid Prime Pinball. The next day I went over to GameStop to trade in some old hardware (the very last of my current crop of trade-in fodder) and got enough in credit to pick up Planet Puzzle League. The day after that I got a twofer in the mail with Trauma Center: Under the Knife and Puyo Pop Fever.
Then last night we were at my in-laws’ and my mother-in-law broke out her DS when she saw me playing Trauma Center (there’s a sentence that shows how well Nintendo’s marketing is working if I ever heard one) and we played a couple of rounds of her Tetris DS multiplayer and I also popped in her copy of Big Brain Academy for a bit. I put the most time into Planet Puzzle League and Trauma Center, but my thoughts and impressions for each new title I tried are below:
- Metroid Prime Pinball: I played some of the multiplayer at last year’s Gen Con with my buddy Lister. I love pinball and while video pinball isn’t always perfect, this game is pretty great. Given the choice between this and the wretched Metroid Prime Hunters, I’ll take this any day. I still haven’t quite figured out the multi-mission mode and I’m a bit sad that the shoulder button-based control scheme causes my hands to wear out quicker than I’d like but it does a great job at being both pinball and Metroid which is pretty much all you can ask from, you know, Metroid Pinball.
- Planet Puzzle League: I admit that I never played Tetris Attack, so PPL is all new to me. Some puzzle games I can pick up on strategies very easily, while others elude me. PPL eludes me, but it’s so darn well presented and offers so much variety in terms of game modes and options that I don’t care. This is the first puzzle game since Kirby’s Avalanche (see Puyo Pop Fever, below) that threatens to consume my mind whole but so far sheer variety and timing have kept it from ruining me. We’ll see how long I last.
- Trauma Center: One of the things I love about Phoenix Wright is the way that the protagonist you control is presented as an inexperienced and occasionally mumbling but never outright stupid character. Trauma Center’s Dr. Stiles is frequently portrayed as anywhere from mildly mentally handicapped to completely inept… and none of that has anything to do with your actual performance in the game. It gets kind of annoying especially since I’m also in the middle of Enchanted Arms which features an imbecile as a playable character so I’ve spent a lot of my gaming this week hearing about how dumb I am. But if you disregard all of that I think Trauma Center is the game that has so far been the most DS game I’ve played on the system yet. The way it uses both the dual screens and the stylus is flat-out brilliant. I really love this game but it frustrates me that it is so unforgiving. I’ve replayed even some of the early operations several times before getting them right and I’m only on stage 2-3 or something like that and I’m already woefully stuck. The good news is that the gameplay is so refreshing and fun that it’s not a chore to retry something but I think a selectable difficulty setting would do wonders for this game.
- Puyo Pop Fever: Back in the day, like around 1997, there was a game that the guy who would eventually become my brother-in-law had on his SNES. It was called Kirby’s Avalanche and I still don’t remember how that game got dragged out of the closet because this is squarely within the N64/PSOne era here. But somehow it was getting a lot of play on his TV around the time that I started dating his sister. I’m pretty sure the game actually even belonged to my younger brother-in-law, but somehow the group of us that was hanging out at the time latched onto the game in a big way. And we’re talking about a lot of folks who aren’t necessarily very gamer-y either, including at least a half dozen girls (some of whom were there because of relationships, some not). And every single one of us was deeply hooked on this game. I didn’t know at the time that it was just a repackaged version of the old Sega game Puyo Puyo, but ever since I’ve had a huge soft spot for the game. Puyo Pop Fever is a perfectly serviceable version of the game but I was a little disappointed in how small the screen is and how it doesn’t take advantage of the extra real estate provided by the two screens. I haven’t played much of this one yet so I’ll have to reserve any kind of final judgment for later.
- Tetris DS: I only played a couple of rounds of “Standard” on single-cart multiplayer so my experience with the game is severely limited, but I hope there is an option to turn off two features that have really been ruining Tetris in many recent iterations: The drop shadow that shows where the piece will land and the infinite spin that lets you continue to move pieces long after they’ve hit the stack. Considering that lining up pieces quickly—before they reach the stack—are the primary game mechanics, those “helpful” additions have really soured the feel of the game. I think they can be fine as an off-by-default option for lower difficulty levels or rookie players, but they shouldn’t be standard as far as I’m concerned.
- Big Brain Academy: Admittedly I’ve been slow to adopt any of the brain training games because, well, they look kind of dull. I was pleasantly surprised that I found myself enjoying this game but it did annoy me a little that the test you take to determine your ranking (brain “weight”) randomly determined the minigame used to measure each aspect of your score. It makes the practice mode kind of frustrating because you can practice a specific game in a specific category until you get really good at it and then take the test only to find out it threw you one of the other games in that category. I suppose that theoretically the skills involved are the same regardless of actual mechanics but I find that some of the games just irritate me for whatever reason (often due to execution like the memory game that doesn’t require you to remember exactly what you saw, just which of several options were included on the board at all) and I’d rather have the option of selecting how it tests my skills.
By the way, it never ceases to amaze me how capable a device the DS is: The multiplayer, the WiFi, the graphics and sound, the interface… it’s just such a consistent pleasure to use. Now all I need is a better case to hold my games: The case for my DS holds three (plus one in the DS itself), but I have 11 games now (well, 12 if you count both my wife’s copy and my copy of Animal Crossing) so I’m carrying the extra games around in a small tupperware container and that just doesn’t have the cachet I’m looking for.
At Last, a Breakthrough
On the 360 front my gaming was mostly limited to some XBLA stuff and a bit of progress on some older games. I did play some more Enchanted Arms, but I decided I’d had enough of Crackdown and shipped it back to GameZnFlix. It’s kind of amazing how great that game was but how short it lasted. For a game that was ostensibly in the same vein as Grand Theft Auto, I can’t imagine their longevities being any more dissimilar: I played GTA San Andreas for several months and probably could still pop it in and have plenty more to do in it. After all, I never finished the story mode. In many ways I think Crackdown was more enjoyable but there is something to be said for making a game that feels worth $60. And as for the orb hunting, which many people say is what makes the game worth playing after the initial ten hours or so it takes to clean out the city, I got all but 25 of the Agility Orbs and gave up. No way am I going to scour that much virtual real estate looking for a handful of stupid orbs that don’t even do anything for me anymore since my Agility stat is maxed.
One thing I did was open up Geometry Wars for the first time in several months and lo and behold, I earned a couple of new Achievements! I thought I would be stuck at 30 points on that game forever, but I figured out a couple of (probably obvious) tactics for some of the more hectic moments that really elevated my game allowing me to survive 250,000 points and get a score of over 500,000 at long last. In fact I think my final high score (which jumped me in the Friends board over my buddy Venom for the first time since he downloaded the game) was in the 60X,XXX range. The Achievement I was really trying for was the Multitastic one where you get a 10X multiplier, but the closest I ever got was 7X. I can only last for so long because I run out of bombs any time those aggravating little red horseshoe guys with the shields appear or when the snake guys do their swarm-around-you attack. I just haven’t figured out how to survive those particular foes without nuking them.
Granted, 600,000 is pretty much nothing when you consider that the leaderboard is packed with fools owning scores in the 100 million range, but I figure if I’m doing better than my friends then at least I have that.
I also sat down for a few hours and mowed my way through what felt like a million levels in Gauntlet to get the Game Master Achievement (by finishing level 100). The problem with Gauntlet, like so many other quarter-munchers, is that once they give you the option to add credits by simply pressing a face button, it’s just an endurance test. There could almost be a fun game in there if some of the level designs were a bit more puzzle-like, but mostly they’re just packed with enemies that you can’t kill fast enough to feel much like a hero and require patience to blast your way through.
Come to think of it, most of my gaming on the 360 was all about squeezing out a few extra Achievements from games I’ve already played quite a bit of: I finally went back and got the easy “EMP 20 lights” Achievement in Splinter Cell: Double Agent because I got an offer for it from Goozex; I put some more time in on Lego Star Wars II getting the elusive 80% Achievement; I picked up a couple more points by buying some of the helpers I hadn’t checked out before in Viva Piñata and I finished off Tomb Raider: Legend then went back and started re-doing the levels on the hardest difficulty as well as working on Time Trial mode. One thing I’ll say about Time Trial in TR:L is that they give you just enough time. You literally have to be on the move almost constantly or you’ll run out of time. And forget about trying to figure out a puzzle, you have to already know the solution and just be executing the entire time.
As I mentioned before, I mostly got TR:L so I could get ahold of Tomb Raider Anniversary when it comes out as DLC for Legend, but I was happy to find myself getting sucked into Legend all over again as I played it through. The way I did it was by using a Rewards FAQ only (so not a step-by-step walkthrough per se) because I really wanted to get 100% completion but I didn’t want the experience to be boring. I did find it somewhat surprising how open-ended they left the story and here we are almost two years later and no sequel is yet in sight. I thought the game engine was perfectly acceptable (if not remarkable by the standards set by some recent games) to have at least put together another set of missions that kept the story going by now.
And finally I played plenty of Carcassonne with my wife. She’s really starting to get a hang of the cutthroat aspect of the game where you can overtake your opponent’s castles an roads or throw a wrench in their plans with some ill-placed pieces. It helps to play the game enough to more or less memorize what kinds of pieces there are. At this point I can identify when a scoring opportunity is lost due to the tile configuration and the available tiles in the deck, but I haven’t gone so far as to memorize how many of each type there are. Give me a few more weeks, I’m sure I’ll get it down eventually.
We Do So Love the Trains
I also got a chance to play a couple of rounds of Ticket to Ride. First of all my wife and I tried out the 1910 expansion to the original TTR which adds just a nutty number of new tickets to the game plus the much-appreciated “Most Completed Tickets” bonus that I first saw in the Marklin edition. It didn’t matter in our game because we tied on number of tickets but we discovered that with the extra options of the 1910 expansion, at least when you’re playing the Mega-Game variant, it’s entirely too possible to pull tickets in your first pre-game set that exceed your number of available cars.
We also taught the game to my in-laws with the Europe version, which I’m generally against because it adds too many new rules to be as readily grasped as the regular US version. Plus the very European naming convention for the cities and the general lack of familiarity with the region makes it significantly more overwhelming than the original for new players. But they seemed to pick up on it okay and other than a late-game mistake that had my father-in-law pull an ill-advised ticket it was a very close game that I won by less than five points.
That’s an awful lot of gaming for one week, but we really needed the distractions. I was also supposed to have my first 40K match against the Tyranids in my new campaign but I had to postpone so hopefully by next week’s Gaming Weekend I’ll have a rundown of how that went.