Gaming Weekend: I Wanna Rawk Edition
A large portion of the week was spent with a plastic guitar slung low over my shoulders as Nik and I powered through dozens of setlists in Rock Band 2. When I wasn’t involved in all that, I was relieved to find a tranquility in my pursuit of Puzzle Quest on the go, hunted a few more zombies (and some achievements), revisited a dystopian future, dabbled in another cutesy game, delighted in Facebook games, found frustration in XBLA titles, continued the drift away from WoW and hit the hobby circuit for some modeling and painting fun.
All the details follow.
- Rock Band 2
We picked up RB2 for Christmas but only played it a little because Nik was having some trouble early on with motion sickness from the scrolling of the note track. She’s since been feeling better so over the last week we’ve started playing quite a bit as our band, Moose LeGousse (it’s a long story). I play bass on expert and she plays guitar on medium and we both have a lot of fun.
As a game, RB2 is not significantly different from the original: Play songs to progress through a fictionalized version of a rise to fame. The difference is that in RB1 the primary progression track was Career Mode which was principally single-player. Multiplayer progressive was handled with Tour Mode which was sort of similar but rather than a progression through songs organized by difficulty level (as was customary from Guitar Hero’s structure) you played “gigs” which consisted of either individual songs, pre-set playlists, band-selected lists or randomized lists to earn cash and fans instead of points. The stars were still a factor but represented not just your success or failure in a gig but your potential reward (once you reached five stars you could only repeat the gig for additional point totals but not extra fans or cash).
In RB2 the Tour Mode is the only mode and you choose how many people will progress through it in your band, which can include human stand-ins. So you can easily play a single-player tour mode or you can set up a full band or just have core band members augmented by newcomers. What strikes me is that while this makes sense, the “unlocking” aspect of the game’s tracks is then woven into the Tour but not in the way I’d expect. Since there is a certain amount of player choice involved in how the Tour progresses, there isn’t as much of the mandatory bottleneck as they were able to achieve in RB1 (finish this song before you can play the next track). They do limit your overall progression by not unlocking new venues until you have a requisite number of accumulated stars and the appropriate staff and equipment, but functionally we’ve been able to tear through doing what we like without much problem opening up the next bottleneck gig.
I do like it overall, but I wish they would either get rid of the unlocking conceit altogether since it doesn’t really fit the game any longer or at least have a better control selection for the songs in the game. I could understand them allowing you to “spend” stars to unlock songs selectively but I also want to limit songs individually as well. Since random setlists pull from your entire catalog including downloaded songs, imported RB1 tracks and level-appropriate songs even if they aren’t unlocked you can easily get hammered by a song you don’t know, don’t care for or simply purchased but can’t play just because it’s in your list. I have the three Metallica tracks and I like having them but no one in my group can play them on our standard difficulties so having them is more of a literally costly threat than a benefit in standard Tour Mode. This seems broken. I also still wish the randomizer was smarter; we had a single song repeat four times in a two-and-a-half hour play session and we even had one song repeat twice in the same setlist. There are plenty of ways to work around some of these issues (a simple voting mechanism would be good as well) but for every one thing Rock Band 2 does right it still does something else wrong. I can’t complain too much since I’ve gotten probably 250 hours of quality fun out of both games together but I still feel like I’m waiting for the perfect version to come along. - Puzzle Quest
In a single week I managed to trade out my copy of PQ for the DS and acquire a copy for the PSP. I’m so glad I did this; the PSP version is the one I really wanted. It has regular D-pad controls, a nice, intuiative interface, crisp graphics and I have a game for my PSP I finally consider indispensible. My only complaint is that it does too much disk reading to load parts, even simple bits like animations but since it’s a turn-based puzzle game, it’s hard to complain about a little slowdown. I do have to wonder though if my decision to request Puzzle Quest: Galactrix for DS wasn’t a mistake now. - Left 4 Dead
Mostly my fevered Achievement addiction has subsided. But I still love unlocking those little devils and for a game like L4D, which has a huge replay component, the Achievements are vital to my continued enjoyment. Unfortunately I’m now down to a collection of tough ones which are either in need of other human players or some manner of circumvention. I tried to get the Man v. Tank Achievement using a trick from an online guide which suggested that, at a high difficulty level, you PK your teammates (which results often in an unintended bit of comedy where your character bemoans the loss of his companions as he pumps shotgun shells into their heads like some disassocaited Norman Bates type killer) then vote down the difficulty and face a tank alone since your AI companions will always shoot at the Tank.
Unfortunately the game is so well designed as a cooperative experience that I found it frustratingly difficult to even get across the street to where the Tank spawn was due to the presence of Hunters, Smokers and Boomers along the way. It only takes one Hunter pounce or one Smoker drag to wipe the party when you’re the only one left.
I think I’m getting close to either shelving this title or hitting up some random online stranger matches just to see how the multiplayer is; I hate to do either with a game I find myself so incredibly fond of but like Halo 3 and Team Fortress 2, my lack of Xbox-playing friends makes for some difficult multiplayer decisions. - Fallout 3
I’ve had some good luck with Goozex lately, offloading a bunch of tired games in favor of some new blood but I’m still waiting for some quick-cycle titles to come through since a couple of my recent acquisitions sucked up a lot of points and were games I intended to hang onto like BioShock and Left 4 Dead. With my copy of LittleBigPlanet arriving hopefully sometime this week, that’s 3,000 points on games I hope to like enough to hang onto for some time. So I started looking around for games I could dump in the meantime and after finally making a command decision to bail on Folklore, I looked at Fallout 3. Now, I like Fallout 3 but unlike Oblivion I didn’t find it so compelling as to have me waiting for DLC with a sort of ferver. I wasn’t even sure I was interested in any DLC but I was hanging onto the game because I was kind of interested in playing as a Bad Karma character. So to see where I stood on the game I popped it back into the PS3 and started a new game.
Immediately I recalled why I feel so completely torn about the game. On one hand, it’s exactly what I wanted: Oblivion SciFi. On the other hand, the game has a tone that is difficult to describe. It’s cynical. It’s grim. it’s permeated with a sort of uncomfortable misery that is wonderful for setting a tone and evoking a mood but, as a piece of entertainment, it’s difficult to actually enjoy.
I think what Fallout 3 comapres to is something like Schindler’s List. Obviously there is no historical significance to Fallout 3 but the analogy is that both are extraordinarily well-crafted examples of their mediums, but both are so dismal and emotionally raw that while you can’t help but categorize them as great achievements, they aren’t something you want to run out and re-experience. I don’t know that Bethesda was looking to create a game that was rich and full but ultimately too depressing to want to play over again, but that’s what they’ve done for me. I still struggle to give up the game but I feel at this point like it’s probably what I ought to do and if I ever feel like I simply have to play it again, do what I did with BioShock and re-Goozex the game on the other platform. - Attack!/Scrabble
It’s sort of tough to arbitrarily combine these games but since they’re Facebook apps they kind of have a natural grouping. I’m not sure at all what the interaction is between these games and Facebook itself. Obiously there is some kind of authentication API for your Facebook account but other than that they seem pretty much like standard Flash games which is why it boggles my mind that both these games are so ridiculously buggy. My overall experience with Facebook has been one of mild irritation so this is basically par for the course, but I can’t deny the appeal of playing Scrabble with my family in PBEM format nor the occasional work diversion that a turn in Risk/Attack! can provide. - Bionc Commando: Rearmed
As much as I like this game I feel like the facelift and update has created an unexpected sense that the game should be somehow more realistic than it is. Granted, the original game was hardly lifelike and practically zero game develpoment team that comes readily to mind puts realism at the forefront of a design document but a decade of FPS games and simulation battle titles has worn away a bit of the concessions we used to make to something like level design. For example, I’m stuck in Area 10 in Rearmed. The part in question has an overhang of rock which ends about where a pit of spikes is positioned under a platform that is itself covered in spikes. Jutting from the overhang, stretching over the double layers of spikes is a short platform and then just above it a full length platform. To get up there you have to swing out over the spikes being careful not to pull yourself all the way up into the spikes above, release in time to grab the platform under the overhang, then swing out from the short platform, again over the top level of spikes, release, turn in midair and grab the overhang at just the right spot to pull yourself toward it so you can finally fire your grappling hook up into the relative safety of the top platform.
Now, let’s forget the fact that it is utterly impractical to have spike pits inside your bunkers to begin with. Let’s just focus on the fact that I, as an infiltrating combatant, am one of the very few people in the game world with one of these bionic grappling appendages. Which means that the herculean feat it takes me to get up to the platform above is theoretically supposed to be exercised by the standard foot soldiers patrolling the base. I’m just envisioning Gerald the Footsoldier having to use the restroom on the fourth floor and trying to decide if it’s really worth it to brave the spike pit again or if he should just use the dumpster out by the ammo depot again. - Alien Hominid HD
I suppose technically I didn’t play this since I went to fiddle with it again for the first time in probably a year or more and it required a title update. I executed the update and suddenly the game loaded to a grey screen. I could see the main menu briefly when I hit the Guide button, but it was never responsive to actual imput. I hope that Microsoft has some sort of policy for this kind of thing because if they want digital distribution to happen they need to make sure this is never a problem for thier customers. In this case I’m not to worried about it since I was mostly finished with the game but if this happened on something like Carcassonne or even Bionic Commando, we would have issues. - World of Warcraft
I think my total playing time last week was under one hour; I ran around Orgrimmar for a bit before heading over to The Swamp of Sorrows and The Blasted Lands region for some exploration and, frankly, something new to do. I have plenty of quests to take care of but the game has hit that tedium point and while part of me wants to reach 60 before the next billing cycle, at this rate I won’t make it and I’m definitely cancelling in the next two weeks. I think I’ll have until about April 7th to play but even then, 9 levels in 22 days is kind of a lot since each new level is taking longer than the one before. I’m not too emotional about it, as I said last week I enjoyed the game, but I can’t say I’m not a little relieved that it didn’t command my every waking moment the way I feared it might. - LittleBigPlanet
I only had a couple of hours to play at the tail end of what I’ve come to consider my Gaming Weekend period (Tuesday morning through Monday night) so this is entirely impression-based, but initially I found the game to be quite charming. The sackboy characters are endearing and expressive plus the whole aesthetic is perfectly comfortable while being imaginative. The comparisons to something like Super Mario Bros. are fairly ready: Take common and identifiable elements and give them a fantastic spin to create a universe that is not necessaily laden with exposition but suggestive of enough to capture the imagination. It’s 8-bit design without the inherent limitations dictating decisions and the result is an intentionally whimsical experience that doesn’t feel like it has to try too hard.
I do find the semi-3D to be a little awkward: Since the game is rendered in 3D it seems they couldn’t stand to have an actual 2D plane to play in even though the game is by design a 2D side scrolling platformer. But instead of trying to deal with the complexity of a full 3D space either they have a 2D plane with three distinct levels of depth. Which is actually fine and good in the level create mode where L1 and L2 move your cursor forward and back through the distinct planes, but when you’re playing the platforming game you have to actually navigate these planes via an awkward set of auto-shifting jumps (jumping from a foreground layer to a background layer is supposedly automatic although I’ve found it not especially reliable). So far (just into the second creator curator’s realm) it hasn’t really been a massive problem but depending on how tough the levels get, it could become a big annoyance.
I had a chance to try the LittleBigContra community level for Stage 1 and found it to be cute and well-made but, and this is kind of what I’m afraid will be characteristic of the player-made levels, it really isn’t that fun. As an homage or a fun art project it’s fantastically well done. As an actual level you might want to play, it suffers because the physics and the nature of the universe that is so marvelously presented in the game’s own context breaks apart when you try to make it something that it wasn’t meant to be. I think for all the fun people can have trying to do what seems natural and create something specific, what this game excels at is allowing people to participate in its own narrative. That is to say, rather than spending time building Contra levels or making an homage to the Saw films (as another level I played did) the best thing a level designer could do would be to create the best LBP level they could.
Model Citizen
As predicted last week I was able to motivate myself into doing some painting and modeling work; I constructed a team of Lizardmen for Blood Bowl, created a zombie Orc and a few pure-bone Skeletons for my Undead team plus I got a few more colors on my long-neglected Elf reserves and got started on my Talisman figs, hoping that I can have them finished someday soon so I can finally try the game out. It looks like the best of the bunch so far is going to be the Orc zombie but the female Elves are still pretty good looking, I just need to do a lot of retouching on the weekend’s work. But retouching is good; it means there was initial painting done.
One thing I haven’t yet figured out is how I’m going to paint the Lizardmen. I’m pretty psyched about the team overall; they seem like a fun set to play. I do need to look for a suitable Kroxigor model to really fill in the team, but I have to worry about the models I already have first. An obvious idea would be to pick a real lizard and use them as a color guide, but it turns out most real lizards have very drab color palates in dull greys and browns to blend in better. It’s usually only in the close detail that anything impressive emerges. I may have to fictionalize it a little bit but I don’t really want to repeat my color sets too much; I already have green-skinned Orcs with red uniforms, green uniformed Undead (with a wide variety of other tones), purple uniformed Elves and a human set that will probably eventually be blue uniforms. Lizardmen don’t really have uniforms but I’m wondering if a sort of albino lizard theme might be kind of cool.
Parting Shot
Last week on the Listen Up! podcast, Garnett Lee was discussing Amazon’s new trade-in service and the fact that Toys R Us was planning a similar program. The conversation was in context with how this would impact GameStop, who lives and dies by used game sales, but during the talk Garnett expressed his ignorance of Goozex but went ahead and suggested that Amazon offering trade-ins would spell doom for Goozex. Now I forgive the ignorance but I have to make sure that it is at least said that Goozex has nothing to fear from Amazon’s trade-in policy any more than they do from GameStop. Retail trade-ins are not in competition with Goozex because Goozex specifically works to counter-point the low-return of retail trades. By necessity retail shops must buy low and sell high while Goozex’s model is to create equality giving literal market value for each game (thus popular, rare or new games are worth significantly more in Goozex trade credit than even their dollar amount may be, and especially more than the lowball dictated by retail trade). What this means is that while that game you bought last Tuesday and beat already is maybe worth $30-35 from GameStop, which you cannot turn into another new AAA title without additional funds from your wallet, Goozex allows you to find someone who did the exact same thing with a different game that came out last week so you can trade and experience both games for the price of one. The complexity is a little more conditional, but the concept is there and the point remains that while retailers may call their activities trades, they’re actually engaged in a modified returns policy while Goozex is facilitating community trades.
Then this week’s episode of the same podcast contained a discussion on DLC, which lead to a broader conversation about digital distribution. This got me thinking about intangible software and I realized that as much as I generally hate owning physical media, it’s actually pretty important to me, especially with games, because of the way I play them. I can forsee a future where all games are digitized and transferrable over broadband not unlike iTunes but before that time gets here I still need to be able to have some assurance that I won’t be setting myself up for obsolescence; it’s one of the reasons why I have no interest in a game like Warhawk or in the Xbox Originals line of products, because while I can probably live with Catan and Gauntlet going away if I ever upgrade to an Xbox 3, I don’t want to think that I can’t at the very least trade my copy of Dead Rising for a newer game down the road. I realize it’s this very dynamic that game manufacturers want to avoid but in my particular case the only outcome of not having a secondary market channel is that I’ll simply buy fewer games.
Curiously then, I find myself sort of pulling for retail channels to stem the tide of digital distribution or at least digital-only distribution. Which is odd because I don’t have a lot of love for retailers to begin with. It occurs to me that what I really want is digital distribution where the cost savings of excising retail channels are passed on to the consumers and where the long tail didn’t become a factor in pricing because I want my patience to have tangible results (ie, not having to pay relatively premium prices for older media simply because there is no reason not to continue to charge whatever the market will bear with no inventory constraints). Since that is highly unlikely I’m stuck wishing for an antiquated method to survive simply because it affords me the opportunity to limit my relative financial investment compared to the amount of entertainment I can consume. I did some math using last year’s $60 a Month coumns and discovered that from October 2007 to June 2008 I spent $490.88 on video games, which is a lot for 21 transactions. However from those transactions I played 53 games which makes my average cost per game $9.26 for that period. When you consider the base price for an XBLA/PSN game is $10, that means that including AAA and other full retail titles, I managed to work my average cost per game below the level it would have been if I’d just played DLC games. That’s not something I could do in without physical copies of games.