Gaming Weekend: Makeup Assignment Edition
The unplanned hiatus from Gaming Weekend updates may or may not be coming to an end. Blocking out time to write up my gaming activities used to be simply a matter of taking an hour or two out of my lenghty and typically dull Sunday shift and writing up what I’d done. But after switching jobs last fall, I don’t work on Sundays anymore, my shifts are rarely dull and my weekends are shorter. Granted, Gaming Weekend was always sort of clumsily named since I would discuss what I played through the whole week, but once my gaming downtime was no longer a reasonable time to discuss my gaming uptime, it became a matter of taking time out of gaming to write about… gaming. It seemed counter productive.
Still, I miss my regular forum to evaluate what I’ve been playing so I’m thinking of making a more concerted effort to discuss what rattles around my skull on the topic of games. We’ll see how it goes. For now, I’ll try to cover the highlights of what I’ve been up to for the last little bit. Catching up, if you will.
- World of Warcraft
This has been my biggest game-time activity and I’m enjoying the heck out of it. Like any super-complex, ultra-deep game there are a myriad of small aspects that cluster together to make the whole thing enjoyable and keep me coming back: The stirring music, the fantastic art design, the gripping advancement system and the compelling diversity in play activities depending on your choices both at character creation time and during the game’s progression. Naturally there are a host of annoying little nitpicks as well. I find the group content to be among the most exciting in the game but I find it incredibly difficult to coordinate effectively with other players. The guild system seems both mechanically and socially overwrought and ad hoc grouping features are laughably primitive (why can’t I use the Looking For Group menu to select any group quest, instance/dungeon or general zone leveling I want?). It is actually related to this difficulty in finding groups that I’m frustrated that some arguably key class-specific quests require group activities. Perhaps if I had joined the game near the beginning it would have been different but with most people being more interested in expansion and end-game content at this point in time, it’s hard to find people who care enough about Razorfen Kraul to run through it and help me get a set of armor that is now almost certainly inferior to what I’ve cobbled together on my own.
Still, the game has far longer legs than I expected and I’m even enjoying some of my alt characters quite a bit. Curiously, I don’t have many female alts rolled up but I find it simultaneously amusing and disheartening that whenever I play as my female Human Rogue, I get a lot of unwarranted attention from other players. Of the alternate characters I have, I find the Tauren Hunter to be perhaps the most fun to play maybe because the pet factor means I can be sort of my own little group. But I also enjoy the powers and abilities the Hunter class get early on and the Tauren/Hunter combo makes for a solid match, lore-wise. I’m strangely unimpressed with most of the Alliance characters I have; I suppose my Gnome Mage would be a minor exception. I just can’t help feeling like the Mage thing is fun, but I’d kind of rather be doing it as an Undead or Orc. I guess I just like the Horde better. - Puzzle Quest
I think because PQ: Galactrix was recently getting a lot of press prior to release and there was a flash-based demo online I started thinking about the original game again. It could also be because I have the Bejeweled Add-On in WoW so whenever I making those epic flights around the game world I’m playing Bejeweled and I can no longer play that game without wishing it were PQ. So I dragged out the XBLA version I had, briefly considering the expansion I didn’t realize had been released but ultimately rejecting it due to it’s price point. I’m playing through as a different class and I think the differences are not pronounced enough to truly matter; since you end up learning most of the useful spells from creatures anyway, you can basically end up with the same set regardless and maybe I’ve been playing WoW too much but I wish there were some more distinguishing characteristics between them.
It occurred to me clearly enough while playing that, with the crimson-hazed fever of achievement addiciton more or less behind me now, Puzzle Quest has enough merit on its own to continue playing regardless of whether you’ve “beaten it” or not. I also have thousands of Goozex points saved up so I requested a DS copy and it should arrive shortly, giving me the opportunity to play it while flying around Azeroth instead of the clever but woefully inferior Bejeweled. - Marvel Heroes
At my work they organize a weekly board game meet up Monday nights. A couple friends and I have tried to attend as many as we can, since Blood Bowl night has sort of faded. We’ve played several games in the last couple of months including Shadows Over Camelot, Race for the Galaxy, Nuclear War, Pandemic and Gheos. But a couple of weeks ago I finally had a chance to play a round of Marvel Heroes that has been neglected on my shelf for a number of years. Being a Fantasy Flight game I kind of expected it to be dense like Arkham Horror but it’s actually deceptive in its accessibility. The core mechanic is pretty simple, basically a streamlined take on Warhammer 40K’s hit dice and the team mechanic works pretty well. What I liked the most was that it is competitive but even with the goal orientation being largely individual you don’t get that sense of waiting around for someone else’s turn to finish so you can finally play; every player represents the potential villains for any given encounter so even on someone else’s turn there is something to do and they do some clever things with arch-nemeses that give certain players a greater role in some off rounds. We played it as a two-player game so it wasn’t quite as rich of an experience on that front as it could have been but it was easy to see how clever the system was.
I also took on an interesting project a couple of weeks ago. I was looking around at the games I had that I wasn’t really playing and noticed that I own a huge number of DS and PSP games, most of which I haven’t touched in months. But a lot of them were ones that I classified as games that I meant to get around to. So I decided that I would play each of them for a minimum of 15 minutes and any of them that I was just as glad to turn off as keep playing would get listed on Goozex. It turns out that for as much as I wanted to like games like Nanostray, Hotel Dusk and Twisted Metal I was more or less unfazed when I picked them up again. So I shipped out a load of games (further increasing my stash of Goozex points that I can’t seem to use up as fast as I earn them) and I have another stack of games on the fence, like Phoenix Wright which I’m close to completing but can’t quite play long enough to get over the hump.
What struck me most about the experiment was that I found that I don’t have a lot of desire for the most part to amass a large collection of console games. If I’m not actively playing something on a console I’m usually content to trade it for something I’m going to want to play. But on handhelds, I tend to cling more tightly because my thought process suggests that while I may not want to sit around and play a given title, I may want it in the middle of a plane trip or something and if I give it up, I won’t have it. This is especially true with games that are more endless like Mario Kart or Bubble Bobble. Although, to be fair, Bubble Bobble on the DS has a terrible slingshot mechanic using the touchscreen that removes almost all sense of fun from the game.
That one may have to go.