Gaming Weekend: Merry Edition
She saved the largest box for last, which meant that in her mind it was the “best” of the lot. It looked like a shoebox and honestly I thought it was actually going to be shoes, and I was pretty excited about it. Last year my wife got me a pair of shoes for Christmas and it was a great gift: The kind of thing I’d hate to buy for myself but I was really pleased with what she’d picked out for me. It was, in fact, a shoebox but the box was for a women’s brand so I was less excited about it actually being shoes. As I dug into the box, its contents obscured by tissue paper, I realized suddenly what it had to be.
The Gift Games
So my birthday is January 6th, right after Christmas. Yeah, I’ve gotten a lot of the “this is for both Christmas and your birthday” gifts. It’s actually okay with me, but this year my wife decided to jump the gun a bit (something she rarely—if ever—has done in the past) so I ended up with two games this year. For Christmas she got me Assassin’s Creed, wrapped in a shoebox to disguise its nature. For my birthday she bought me Rock Band. From a friend I got Contra 4 for the DS as a Christmas gift so, yeah. I’ve had some stuff to play.
Assassin’s Creep
The strange thing about Assassin’s Creed isn’t the much discussed or hinted-at storyline. I’m not entirely sure why Ubisoft decided to keep the plot of the game a secret the way they did but the weird part is how that plot works into the manner in which you control the game with a sort of puppeteer approach (they refer to it as such in the tutorials) that takes a bit of getting used to. Essentially, you play as a modern-day character who interfaces with an electronic device to control your ancestor’s actions. Fundamentally, you’re playing a video game as a guy playing a video game.
The abstraction that this introduces means that most controls are rudimentary and a lot of the game’s mechanics boil down to choosing the right context-sensitive action for a given scenario. As expected, this makes for some both impressive-to-watch action but it also can get frustrating since you don’t ever really feel like you’re completely in control. In practice the game is pretty similar to Prince of Persia as played through the abstraction filter I mentioned. It’s fun but you can tell that the designers were working to press the player through the story and not to present a series of skill-based challenges to overcome.
I suppose as the medium becomes more focused on delivering “interactive entertainment experiences” instead of raw games (which are being pushed to a separate space known as “casual games”) this will become more commonplace but I hope the vocabulary for narrative gets a bit better than we see in Assassin’s Creed: The way the world literally falls away once you deliver the killing blow to your marks so you can have an uninterrupted cutscene conversation with them as they bleed out is jarring and, I feel, rather unnecessary. Still, while I’m early in the plot it does intrigue me so I don’t forsee a problem pushing forward.
Contra 4
I love me some original Contra. I must have finished that game (usually with the 30 lives code) 200 times. I bought the XBLA game when it was released. I’d classify myself as a Contra fan. Of course, that doesn’t mean I love anything that has the name Contra associated with it. Most of the sequels I’ve tried but never really enjoyed the way I enjoyed the original. So I was intrigued but a little apprehensive about the new DS title Contra 4.
When my buddy gave it to me as a gift though, I was excited. I spent a fair amount of time with it over the course of the week and I have the following observations:
- It’s freakin’ tough. The Easy difficulty gave me a lot of problems although I did eventually conquer the levels it lets you play (it cuts out just as it gets good and tells you to play on a real man’s difficulty). The “Normal” level is so brutal I can rarely make it to the third stage and the Challenge modes unlocked by beating Easy are… well, let’s just say that’s no misnomer.
- It’s wonderfully designed. I adore the way they essentially follow the template set up by the original game and expand on it with some really clever levels that tell a simple little story without resorting to cutscenes or overt plot-setting.
- There is an exception to the above: The no-man’s land between the screens. I don’t know why no game tester didn’t pull them aside and say, “No. Do not have a portion of the screen be constantly invisible,” but the fact that they let it slide means someone didn’t do their job. It’s an atrocious, almost unforgivable design decision that, if I were the kind of guy who gave review scores to games, would be worth docking the game two full points over. It doesn’t break the game exactly, but it comes uncomfortably close, especially for a game that does so much else right.
- The fact that you can unlock the original Contra game plus Super C is fantastic. But please, please, please game developers: Stop making us unlock this kind of stuff! Include it as a bonus, yes a thousand times. But why should I have to beat the new game on Easy and then conquer four patience-trying Challenges just to play a game that’s been available since the 80s?
- The double power-up system in the Normal difficulty setting is nothing short of sheer genius. Basically you have two power up slots that you can switch between (you lose your activated power up if you die but you hold onto the reserve one) and when you collect the first power up of a given kind you get the weapon mostly as it appeared in the original Contra. If you have that power up equipped and you collect a second identical power-up, you get the super mode that you can see in the Easy mode (all power ups are super on Easy). And the super power ups are radical.
Rock Band
The principal thing you should understand about Rock Band, before you spend your own money on it, is that it’s not really a housemate-friendly game. The desire to crank the volume on your entertainment system when you play is strong, for one thing. But the other thing is that the peripherals themselves make a certain amount of noise: You’ll be actively singing (probably badly), clacking the keys on the guitar (mercifully the strum bar doesn’t click the way it does with the Guitar Hero controllers, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely quiet) or, most significantly, banging wooden sticks on hard plastic surfaces.
Since I do a large majority of my gaming at night after my wife has retired to bed, this is not an optimal circumstance. As a result I’ve spent most of my time so far playing Solo mode with the guitar which is the least onerous of the three bundled options.
Which means I can primarily compare Rock Band to Guitar Hero. As such, it holds up pretty well. One thing I noticed is that because the song list has to accommodate more than just the guitar, there are some songs like Faith No More’s “Epic” that frankly aren’t that fun to play in a strictly guitar setting. The verses especially at the beginning of the song are long and mostly just vocals and drums. I appreciate that some songs are going to be focused more on the “whole band” dynamic but in Solo mode it just feels a bit dull.
Overall the song list is pretty strong but there seemed to be fewer surprise gems. In Guitar Hero II, several songs or artists that I typically don’t care for happened to be really enjoyable to play like Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend” or My Chemical Romance’s “Dead!” On Rock Band the songs that I wasn’t familiar with or that looked at first glance like they might not be great ended up being pretty much ho-hum. There are a few gems here though (for guitar): Surprisingly one of the most fun is Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” which, even though I like me some Metallica well enough, was never one of my favorite songs. In Rock Band it’s a blast to play through.
I did play a few songs co-op with Nik on guitar while I played the drums and I found it to be fun if a bit frustrating since the hit detection feels less forgiving than on the guitar half, but some of that could have been inexperience combined with the fact that I started on Medium difficulty without any practice. Later in the weekend I had a few minutes to play one gig’s worth of songs on the drums and it got a bit better but the bass and notes get missed more frequently than I’d prefer for reasons I haven’t quite figured out yet.
Overall the quality of the whole box is impressive, and the create-a-rocker thing is wonderful (and should have been included in Guitar Hero. II.) although I did get bitten by a hiccup on my guitar controller which has a faulty red button but only on the high frets. It certainly doesn’t interfere with the game but I am going to report it and hopefully get a replacement because I would like to take full advantage of the guitar’s features.
Anyway, it was a very merry Christmas for me, and there were a few more games I messed around with. I hope your Christmas was merry as well.
Other Games
- Nanostray – I don’t remember where I heard about this game, but it was cheap on Goozex and available so I picked it up. I only played it for about half an hour but it’s a fun little game that is 3D but plays like a standard top-down shmup. As with most games of this type, I died. A lot.
- Planet Puzzle League – On Christmas eve we had some friends over. I got to talking about good DS games since my buddy just picked up a DS Lite and I showed him the multiplayer on this game for a bit. He seemed to really enjoy it so I may have another convert.
- Puzzle Quest – I finally—finally—achieved level 50 and now I just need to make the final push to the end of the game. Now that I’ve removed all my XP-gaining equipment, I’m finding I don’t have that much good loot. Everything was so focused on upping my level and stats that now I wish I’d spent a bit more money on the shops and less on buying stat increases.
- Scene It: Lights, Camera, Action – We picked up this game for some friends and played it on Christmas Eve. It’s not a bad game but I did think the interface was somewhat lacking and used too many terms that fit the metaphor more than worked on an HCI level. As a result we stumbled around a lot trying to figure out what we were doing. Also, I found that using the standard controller was much more forgiving than the included buzzer controllers (the main buzzer control hardly gets used anyway, which I found curious). Oh, and just for the record: I pwn at Scene It.