Gaming Weekend: Lasses and Locomotives Edition
Finally some tabletop gaming to write about, as well as more video games, a discussion on “girly” games and a Gamerscore milestone. Hit the jump!
When My Train Comes In
I played a couple of train-themed tabletop games this weekend. For the Independence Day barbecue we celebrated at the In-Laws I broke out our copy of Station Master and taught it to my wife’s sister, her dad and an uncle-by-marriage. Having never played the game with that many people it was kind of a new experience for me as well. I still don’t think I quite understand the optimal strategy for that game, despite having played it at least a dozen times. Something I was doing seemed to be working for a while since after a slow start I launched ahead as the number of trains dwindled but I made some powerful enemies and a passenger relocation card on the very last train plus a handful of negative carriages and a maxed out passenger count that forced me to lower the score on an already negative train I had a huge number of chips on dropped my score by a whopping 88 points just before the end. I wound up in fourth place but I came away thinking the game, while possible to play with as few as two players, is much better the more people you get involved.
Last night my wife and I broke into the 1910 expansion for Ticket to Ride (the USA version). Basically all the expansion does is add a slew of new Ticket cards and reprints the colored train and Tickets in a larger, more human-hand-accessible size. We played the Mega Game variant that uses all 69 possible Tickets and requires that you draw five and keep three to start with. It went pretty well but we quickly discovered that having that many Tickets, especially since it adds a lot of new long tracks, gives one a much higher chance of pulling an impossible combination on your first set. For example, my wife’s Tickets included both the 19-point lower US route (LA to Miami I believe) and the 20-point Canadian route plus a requisite third card that she simply didn’t have enough cars to finish. She still ended up beating the socks off me (partially due to a silly oversight I made by not hooking over to Boston on my way south to New York City) by scoring both high-point value routes, but neither of us got to enjoy the spoils of the most-Tickets-completed bonus that we first saw in the Marklin version.
Add a K, Won’t You
My Goozex-traded copy of Tomb Raider: Legend arrived just in time for the weekend and since I had already played quickly through the story line on the original XBox when the game first came out I spent some time with GameFAQs going carefully through the levels to gather all the hidden rewards. I’ve completed three of the four missions plus the Croft Manor and probably could have gone through the whole game but I made myself focus attention on some rental games since I actually own TR and can finish it at my leisure.
Speaking of rental games, I finished the campaign in Crackdown which is as short as people say if not shorter. I’d heard it could be completed in a week and I’d say if you don’t count the in-campaign orb hunting I did it probably took me less than six hours to beat all the gang bosses. I did call the “twist” ending very early on but I was terribly disappointed that they didn’t do any sort of hidden bonus missions involving that plot device. I would have thought it a no-brainer to have you shoot your way through the tower. I mean, there really should be some kind of point to it besides just climbing up to the top and jumping off to get that weird sense of virtual vertigo.
I put a bit more time into Enchanted Arms as well, finally getting to some non-tutorial battle sequences. I’m now hip-deep in a classic JRPG puzzle/quest thing where I need to collect four tickets by finding and talking to the right people. I’m still kind of on the fence about this game: The combat is actually fairly interesting so far and there is enough character to the setting to make me want to know more about it, but the characters are so one-dimensional it’s painful: If I have to get beaten over the head for the entire forty hours about what a screw-up Atsuma is, how totally hawesome Toya is at everything and how uncomfortably obsessed Makoto is with Toya I don’t think I’ll be able to finish. Can a brother get some character development over here?
I also picked up Guitar Hero II one last time. I decided to trade it in to Goozex for a couple of reasons: One is that I’m converting to Rock Band when the time comes. For all the fun I had with Guitar Hero I felt like that once I reached a particular level the challenge became more of a frustration than an enhancement to the game so while I haven’t had as much fun with a game a I did during my run on Medium, once I got into Hard and Expert the game felt like a chore. But dropping $90 on a game that lasted only a week or less didn’t seem right so I pressed on. My thought process is that I can keep buying $60 song packs (that is, Guitar Hero sequels) and playing them through on Medium or I can get a similar game that has other elements (drums, bass, singing). The other reason to do it now rather than later when Rock Band is more imminent is that I wanted to get the ball rolling in case I had a hard time finding someone who would be satisfied with my particular copy of the game. I used quite a few of the stickers on the guitar and I threw away the original box the whole thing came in so I wasn’t sure if that would break the deal with some traders. It turns out the first guy didn’t seem to care so it didn’t matter, but I was trying to be forward-thinking. Anyway, I nailed the 300K achievement just before I packed the whole thing away and sent it out via UPS and felt like I had gotten my money’s worth out of the game (especially considering the $50 trade-in credit I was getting from Goozex).
Finally, I spent some more time in the XBLA: I tried the trial version of Missile Command. The graphical improvements are kind of nice, I guess. I remember really liking this game on the Atari 2600 for some reason, but it’s extremely boring now. I know it’s only $5, but it just isn’t worth even that. Free download? Anyone? My wife and I played some more Carcassonne; she’s getting better despite the fact that I’ve played enough against the computer to earn the 5,000+ points across all games achievement. The only achievements I have left are the ones you have to actually sign on to XBox Live and play against strangers to get, so maybe I’ll practice up on the harder difficulty levels through the week and by next weekend perhaps my confidence will be high enough to permit me to subject myself to crushing defeat at the hands of an eight year old.
The net result of all this activity is the breaking of the 10,000 point mark in my Gamerscore. I know it means absolutely nothing but I’m strangely proud of the accomplishment.
A Vague Discomfort
One of my original three GameZnFlix.com rentals was Fuzion Frenzy 2, which I hated. Its replacement, which arrived this week, was Rumble Roses XX. Rumble Roses is a game I didn’t have a lot of familiarity with but I saw a few of my XBox Live Friends had played it and thought I’d give it a shot more or less sight unseen. I guess in hindsight I should have looked into it a little more because I wasn’t really prepared for what it was.
Essentially the game is half of a wrestling game and the other half is a lonely-guy pseudo dating sim. I gathered from my limited exposure to the game before I popped it in the disc tray that it was a wrestling game featuring only women. Since this is a video game I assumed they would be uncommonly attractive and probably unrealistically busty but I don’t think I was quite expecting the level of devotion applied to the character models.
But let’s start from the beginning. As a game, Rumble Roses XX is kind of a mess. It has one of the worst in-game tutorials in recent memory in that instead of a diagram of a controller with the buttons labeled appropriately it breaks down the controls into a series of textual descriptions of possible actions and game elements. Selecting one of these descriptions explains the controls behind it and then cuts to a short looping video that shows what that action might look like in the game. The problem is that there is zero interactivity and the descriptions aren’t detailed enough. Through trial and error I was able to discern that there are only a handful of buttons used and mostly the actions you perform are context-specific so if you attack an opponent with X from the front you do one thing, if you attack an opponent from behind with the same button something slightly different happens.
What the tutorial really fails to do is explain anything beyond the sketchy outline of the in-match controls as far as how you actually play the game. I tried looking over the Achievements list to see if that would give me an indication of what I was trying to accomplish. It gives a 10-point achievement for becoming a “Singles Champion” for each character but there is no place where it explains how one goes about pursuing that goal. Reading GameFAQs I discovered that you have to defeat each other wrestler in a one-on-one match and be on a four-match win streak and then a championship match will become available in the Arena location, but there is no real ladder progressive option and choosing some match locations will pick tag team matches seemingly at random. I was able to limit it to head-to-head by choosing street battles every time (which curiously also changes the format of the fights from a generic pin-match wrestling to something much more like a standard fighting game complete with health meter), but of course the championship match must take place in the Arena as a regular wrestling format battle.
None of which changes the fact that the wrestling in the game simply isn’t that deep. The moves are pretty repetitive and while the character models look good, the animations often don’t and controlling your attacks mostly depends on moving the left stick in a specific direction while pressing one of two buttons (X for basic attack and Y for grapple attack). But some moves are far more effective than others because they add to your opponents’ Humiliation meter (I’ll come back to that topic) which can be used to essentially end the match as soon as it is full. Other than the street fights which require only a select number of easily executed and powerful moves to win easily, the wrestling matches offer only a longer battle with the temptation to get creative which mostly results in just getting your moves reversed and your character pummeled.
Where the game really gets odd is in the non-combat arenas where you use money earned from winning contests to buy outfits and assorted goodies from a store that you can use to deck out your wrestler, engage in some truly creepy minigames and generally make yourself feel like a huge pervert. This pervy voyeurism manifests itself in various ways and unfortunately it permeates the game in nearly every aspect somehow or another so that you really can’t completely escape it. From the photo shoot options to the humiliation meter in matches to the punishment system of one match variant that has losing combatants forced to wear the costume of the winner’s choice and engage in some kind of semi-harmlessly degrading activity like jumping rope or doing the limbo, there is a constant sense that the game is trying very, very hard to remind you that you’re playing a game featuring attractive, well-endowed virtual girls targeted at a male audience.
What I don’t quite understand is why this game is what it is but stops where it does. I don’t have a problem with a game featuring nothing but female characters. I don’t have a problem with these characters all being improbably good-looking. But I can’t quite understand why this couldn’t be enough to make a game that might appeal to actual girls as well by making them attractive but not uncomfortably sexualized. You can even make them sexy without turning off female gamers but Rumble Roses XX goes beyond that point to the extent that I can’t see very many girls being anything but repulsed by the way it treats its characters.
What’s most offensive to me in fact is that the whole game has a kind of suppressed fetishistic fantasy vibe that gives it a veneer of phoniness. It goes so far as to basically reward you for good performance by allowing you to put your virtualized lust object avatar into progressively skimpy outfits and—I’m not making this up—pats you on the back by giving you the option to increase their bust size. There is no pretext for this aside from titillation. There can’t be. And yet that’s the extent of it. It never goes forward and just does what it clearly wants to which is offer blatant sexuality in the guise of an interactive game. I wouldn’t even have a problem with that; I don’t think it would be my cup of tea, but at least it would be honest about what it was doing. The fact that it can’t decide whether to be a wrestling game, a fighting game or just a virtual playground for horny teenagers sort of proves my point. If you’re going so far as to offer an entire mechanic where you beat your opponent until they blush and cower and beg for mercy that opens the door for a super-powered victory, why not just offer the option to rip off their top or bend them over the knee for a spanking? It’s so inherent in the subtext that its exclusion feels like a snickering, begrudging nod to puritanical ideals so out of place that it reduces the game to insincerity.
I didn’t hate Rumble Roses XX. As a wrestling game, once the flaws of the tutorial were forgotten from trial-and-error experience, there was a halfway interesting fighting/wrestling hybrid lurking in there, needing only to be fleshed out (ignore the pun, if you will). As a competitor to the DOA Extreme Beach Volleyball series for leering loners it’s distasteful and dishonest, however, which sours not only what it actually is but also what it could be. As a rental, I kept it for a day and played it for a few hours and felt like I’d given it more attention than it deserved, but I sort of wished there had been some kind of compelling reason to keep playing because I did somewhat enjoy body slamming a cowgirl onto the concrete without having to memorize a forty-six page list of complex moves. Then again, I do have Dead or Alive 4 coming in a couple of weeks so maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised by the accessible control scheme there in spite of my expectations which will make up for Rumble Roses unsettling unevenness.
Or maybe I’ll just spend another weekend hoping my wife doesn’t come downstairs while I’m playing and force me to explain what she’s seeing on the screen. Again.