Gaming Weekend: Intricate Elegance Edition
Unlike most Gaming Weekend posts, I didn’t actually play the game I want to talk about in the technical sense. I suppose you can count painting miniatures as part of the game (I do) but it isn’t the same as rolling the dice. But I spent more time over the past week thinking about and peripherally involved in Blood Bowl than almost anything else so I figure it qualifies as being what’s on my mind the most this week.
What’s striking to me about Blood Bowl is that it’s one of those games that has a mechanic I struggle with. Specifically the blocking mechanic involves just a few too many variables for me to really get a handle on: Essentially you have two models each with a Strength attribute. When they are in adjacent squares, you can throw a block on the other. Blocks are handled by rolls on special six sided dice included in the game with various results. There are potentially unpleasant results in a third of the possible outcomes; in a game where one missed roll means your entire turn is over that’s tough odds. Typically Strength attributes are equal: When that’s the case you roll a single block die and simply accept the results. If the blocking plater has more Strength than the defender you get to roll two block die and choose the result you find most preferable. If the blocking player has more than double the defender’s Strength, a third die is added to the rolls (which is statistically very, very unlikely to result in an unwanted outcome).
Since most of the Strength attributes in the game are clustered around threes and fours, the principal strategy comes from the judicious use of block assists: Each player has an area of influence in adjacent squares. When a player has a teammate adjacent to their target when they attempt a block, that teammate provides a +1 Strength bonus for assisting the block. This is cumulative as well, so if you surround an opposing player on all sides, the blocking player Strength is augmented by +7 (almost certainly a three-die block). The trick is that in order to assist, a teammate can’t be adjacent to any other opponents simultaneously.
In practice these aren’t quite as complex as they sound but they are sometimes as difficult, for me, to determine quickly by looking at the board. The problem comes down to an overwhelming number of variables that I have a hard enough time sorting out in my simple brain when the play is right in front of me but when I have to visualize the possibilities to plan my actions, it’s almost guaranteed that I’ll overlook something critical, which is why I rarely win Blood Bowl games.
But as I planned my upcoming Blood Bowl league this week, I got to thinking about how much I appreciate intricacy in my games. Part of why I love Blood Bowl so much is precisely because it’s complex and the interactions are difficult for me. It feels like skill when I successfully engineer a Blood Bowl play versus something like Monopoly where much of the game is luck or at the very least “influenced chance.” It extends to all types of games I enjoy: Even games like Overlord have a certain intertwined system within it where you have to, by the end of the game, manage a variety of tasks and co-ordinate an increasing number of resources as smoothly as possible to really succeed.
I used to think that video role-playing games were my favorite type but as I’ve gotten older and found myself growing more and more frustrated with Japanese-style role-playing games I wondered what was going on. The epiphany I had this week was that jRPGs were, in the 8- and 16-bit eras, the most intricate game types you could find. By my disposition they were the ones I gravitated toward. But as video games matured the intricacy of RPGs branched out into other styles and jRPGs remained fairly static in terms of having a sort of arbitrary intricacy that lacked elegance: They felt on-rails like they had become more enamored with their brand of expository storytelling than they were with maintaining a sense of depth across their core mechanics.
I tried my hand at Crisis Core for a bit this weekend and found it to be so clumsy and smug with it’s random interface elements and mindlessly busy gameplay that amounted mostly to pounding on the X button and I thought, “This isn’t elegant, it’s just overwrought.” I contrasted it to Jeanne D’Arc, Blood Bowl, Overlord and even Lost Cities which all have a central conceit that facilitates a sense of accomplishment by being beautiful with their complexity rather than just crowding a hackneyed system with a bunch of needless layers of abstraction and inexplicable variables so it can make some false claim to testing a player’s dexterity or strategy. I find games I hate are typically ones that don’t start from a place of saying, “Here’s something that would be fun to play with” but that start by saying, “This is something we want to tell or say or explore as a concept.” Indigo Prophecy fell into that trap. Crisis Core ruined itself for that reason, and I wish it wasn’t so but every jRPG I’ve played with one exception since Final Fantasy VII has been exactly the same.
The Games List
- Overlord – I’m finding myself happier playing this game than any I’ve experienced probably since The Orange Box or BioShock. I’ve definitely enjoyed other games but like last fall’s standouts, Overlord manages to scratch an itch I didn’t even know I had. I even found myself spending several hours working my way through the Dungeon mini-game and mining Lifeforce to work on beefing up my equipment. Granted, some of that was inspired by a series of catastrophic failures in the Dwarven mines but it’s a testament to the basic premise of the game that these little optional distractions are engaging enough to keep me entertained for most of the weekend. I actually made fairly significant progress despite getting stuck on the Golden Hills level and the little choices you can make seem intriguing enough that I almost regret the autosave feature because I’m curious about the alternative paths. I haven’t decided yet if I enjoy the game enough to re-play it, but if there ever was a candidate for a second trip through, I think this game would be it.
- Rock Band – There was an impressively epic series of Rock Band sessions this week. On Thursday night we had dinner with some friends and played at their house for an hour or two. Then Friday we had a gang of people over at our place and rocked for another couple of hours or more and finally last night Nik and I settled in to work on our two-man Band World Tour with the intent on finally getting all the way through the mode. I played a bit of everything during the weekend, still mostly singing (gah, I’ll never understand how I got stuck with that particular role) but a long stint on drums Friday night and of course I’m doing bass in the two-man band (The Most Gross). I find bass is actually among my favorite activities, perhaps moreso than even drumming because while certain songs are really dull, it frequently has parts that suit what I enjoy most about Guitar Hero and Rock Band which are complex patterns of single notes (versus complex chord structures or rapid strumming).
I find it rather amazing that the amount of time I’ve put into the game has been spread over six months now and while there have been lulls it’s the game I’ve probably stuck with for the longest period of time outside Geometry Wars. Even Oblivion, which I put at least a couple hundred hours into, was concentrated in a few months of obsessive play. Harmonix’s dedication to dropping new content on a steady basis is certainly a contributing factor and while I’m pretty picky about which songs I buy, I’ve spent at least $30 on additional tracks. On top of a nearly $200 game, mind you.
And for the record, “Moving in Stereo” is awesome, as it should be. - Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII – I borrowed this game for the weekend thinking it might be enough chance to hook me so I could finally decide to leave it on my Goozex Reqyuest queue. Man am I glad I never took the plunge. I can’t say enough bad things about the game, from the sleep-inducing cut scenes and pretentious presentation to the ridiculously contrived combat mechanics. It’s a game that is a series of contrived obstacles: It really wants to be like Advent Children, a chance to show off the CGI rendering skills but they decided to go the “game” route so they threw some minimal interaction into the fun vacuum and shipped it. I realize this isn’t a proper JRPG but I think that I’m officially done with the direction Square Enix has taken the Final Fantasy franchise (other than, perhaps, the Tactics series) and if Persona 3 doesn’t hook me the way I think it may, I could find myself completely uninterested in that style of game going forward.
- Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories – Another game I borrowed for a few days, I only played it for half an hour or so and it was perfectly serviceable on the PSP (as I’m finding most games as long as they don’t require FPS-style movement-and-camera controls) but with GTA IV sitting there unplayed I couldn’t really justify spending that much more time with this.
- The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass – Most of my handheld time this week was spent on TPH, which I think I kind of just needed a break from earlier this year. It’s a really good game but the repetition in it means it could have been half as long and possibly twice as good as a result. But the happy accident is that having set it down for so long the drudgery has worn off and it feels reasonably fresh again. With Jeanne D’Arc becoming frustrating (more on that in a second) and Final Fantasy VI being pushed out this week due to the fear of FF-overload, I may have opened Pandora’s Box a bit by getting back into this.
- Jeanne D’Arc – After level grinding for a bit I decided to tackle a challenge that had proved too formidable before and found all my effort to level up had done very little to improve my ability to emerge from the battle. I can’t decide if I love the fact that the game involves very little grinding or if the fact that its presence in the game is largely irrelevant turns me off. In any case I suppose I need to give up the dream on this optional side mission, but the game has frustrated me so much that I’m likely to take a break from it for a bit and focus on Phantom Hourglass instead while I wait for my distaste to subside.
Parting Shot
I find my gaming moves in cycles. While I always play games across the gamut, I tend to prioritize my time depending on circumstances and current levels of interest. By reading Tunnels of Doom it may be easier to monitor these priority levels: Early Gaming Weekend entries were typically video game-only affairs with only the occasional dabble in other styles. Recent entries have had more board games and tabletop miniature games (though less large scale stuff like 40K: As much as I love the game in setting and general feel, I find that after four years with the game, it’s basically exhausting). At some point, perhaps shortly after D&D 4th Edition is released later this month, you may see a renewed emphasis on role-playing.
The point is that my interest in gaming runs such a large gamut of game types and styles it’s practically impossible to give them all the level of attention I might like to. As a compromise I drift in focus from one class of game to the next, allowing for forays into whatever presents itself as time allows. I try to let this process be organic: An unexpected invitation to a game of Command and Colors may spark a sudden interest in strategic board gaming for a while; the purchase of a new sourcebook might inspire a new role-playing campaign; a fun event at a con could prompt me to pull some skirmish-level figures out of the closet and organize a game or two.
What’s strange is that I haven’t had a means of tracking these cycles in the past. The institution of Tunnels of Doom, and specifically Gaming Weekend, shows what’s on my mind at set intervals so you can see the development of new obsessions and watch others fade over time, only to return at a later date. I don’t know how interesting this is to other people (judging by the server logs, not very), but I find it enjoyable to monitor this progression. I only wonder if others approach gaming in a similar fashion or if people tend to segment themselves into niches and remain there for extended periods of time. I’d be interested in finding out.