Gaming Weekend: Round Edition
I’ve had an eclectic weekend, gaming-wise. I picked up a couple of new DS games, finished off a 360 title, tried some demos, started an old classic I never quite made it all the way through and revisited an XBLA game I had nearly forgotten about. I also found out who my next Warhammer opponent is going to be and started thinking about a new role-playing mini-campaign I’d like to write up so hit the jump for all-over-the-map fun.
Spherical Silliness
I admit that I missed the Katamari Damacy bandwagon when it went ’round on the PS2 the first time. This was not exactly due to lack of interest but by the time the game hit my radar it was already difficult to find. It should be noted that I often have a weird obsession with experiencing sequential entertainment in order. For example, some people will pick up a movie sequel even if they haven’t seen the first because a friend says, “You don’t need to see the original to understand the second one.” I never believe people when they say this. Likewise when We Love Katamari was released I avoided it because I hadn’t played the first one. I know it’s silly especially for a game like Katamari which has limited if any storyline, but whatever it is that made me avoid Dreamfall for the XBox because I hadn’t played The Longest Journey applied to Katamari.
Anyway, Katamari ended up slipping so low on my list that it was effectively put on indefinite hold until I heard about Beautiful Katamari for the 360. For some reason if a new game comes out for a console I’m currently fixated on, the sequel/original weirdness no longer applies, which is why I had no problem playing Oblivion despite having never played Elder Scrolls I-III. OXM has a demo of Beautiful Katamari on their cover disc this month so I checked it out.
I think I understand what all the hype is about. The game is ridiculously fun and yet there is no discernible reason why it should be. My wife remarked when I showed her the game that it was the silliest thing she’d ever seen. “You just roll a ball?” she asked. I could only answer in affirmative around a wide grin. She watched me play the painfully short demo a couple of times. I asked if she wanted to try. She made a show of being reluctant about taking the controller, but I noted that she didn’t fight it very convincingly. I also noted that as she played she laughed between comments about how dumb the whole thing was. The next day I was finishing up a gaming session and about to turn off the XBox. “Wait,” she said.
“Oh, did you want to watch a DVD?” I asked. She looked a little sheepish.
“No… I wanted to play the rolling game,” she confessed.
It took me a while to stop laughing long enough to load the demo for her.
Spherical Silliness, Part Two
One of the two new DS titles I picked up from Goozex this week was Kirby Canvas Curse. I confess that while I bought, played and enjoyed New Super Mario Bros., I traded it in fairly quickly because I felt that it didn’t have much in the way of lasting appeal. And beyond NSMB, the other couple of DS platformers I’ve tried have been pretty forgettable. But I kept hearing raves about how Kirby used the stylus control scheme to such wonderful effect and I felt like my DS library was getting full of puzzle and strategy games so I put it on my list for the sake of diversity.
I’ve only played through the first world but so far I’m very glad I picked it up. Aside from Trauma Center, this is the best use of the touch screen controls I’ve yet encountered. It amazes me how well they can incorporate platforming elements with indirect controls in a way that feels natural and remarkably fresh, which was something that NSMB lacked. Sure, it was a very capable platformer but it would have been just as capable in 1993 as it was last year. I admired the retro vibe but to a certain degree it could have been billed as “Super Mario World: The Lost Levels.” Kirby Canvas Curse does a lot of the same stuff we’ve seen a million times through various iterations of Sonic, Mario, Metroid and so on but it has yet to feel anything like a game I’ve played before. So far it’s just been very nicely done.
Other Portable Quests
The other game I picked up from Goozex is Meteos which I like quite a bit but I suck pretty badly at it. I did make it through the linear story mode but I don’t know what I did to deserve it other than just survive until the computer decided it had enough. I also played more Planet Puzzle League and it struck me how the games are very similar in control structure except Meteos you pull the pieces up and down and PPL you go side to side. Except when you think about it, you hold the DS sideways for PPL and regularly for Meteos so when you get right down to it, the controls are basically identical. It just seems strange.
I also put in a few more tries on a surgery that has me stumped in Trauma Center but wasn’t ever able to find the magic touch to finish it off. I think if I go ahead and use Healing Touch I could pull it off so I’ll have to try that next weekend, if I can pry myself away from Kirby long enough to pop it back in.
Finally, I logged some serious time on Puyo Pop Fever. It’s not terribly hard to remember why the game captured my attention so back when it was Kirby’s Avalanche on the SNES but Fever has a few quirks to it that Avalanche didn’t (like Fever Mode) which I don’t quite understand and haven’t bothered to look up online. To the best of my understanding they give you a pre-designed combo opportunity and a couple of pieces to get a super garbage dump going on your opponent but I don’t know what triggers it nor do I usually see the starting move fast enough to make it count. Also, if ever a game screamed for the sideways PPL-style treatment, it’s this game. The squashed version they put on the top screen is miserably small and has zero touch screen input that I’m aware of so it could be a bit better but for a handful of Goozex points, who’s really complaining?
Okay, I guess I am. So hey, Atlus: How about a sequel with side-orientation and WiFi support? Sound okay? Great, let’s make it happen.
Couch Games
I wasn’t all about the DS this weekend, either. I checked out the Ace Combat 6 Demo (boooring), and I tried the trial versions of Wing Commander Arena and Bomberman Live. I thought Wing Commander Arena was okay, but there seemed to be very little reason for it to be called Wing Commander (or even be set in space for that matter) so I don’t think I’ll be dropping the cash on that one. Bomberman Live was cool but I don’t know any friends who are into Bomberman so until someone on my Friends list gets into it, I’ll pass.
The big console game this weekend was Marvel Ultimate Alliance, which I played through the end of the story mode. I liked the game quite a lot but I found a few things frustrating. One is any section with a fixed camera. The Galactus stage, as impressively imposing as it was, was annoying because my primary character was a heavily pumped up Iron Man whose Plasma Discs were unfairly powerful but ineffective in fixed-camera stages due to the aggravating difficulty in aiming the shots when you can’t look where you want to. I also didn’t care for the arbitrary limit on Gear and the fact that you couldn’t see the benefits of the newly dropped Gear items so you had to generally risk selling off a superior item to make way for something new, just to check what it was.
I also noted that near the end of the game when my party characters were powerful enough to handle pretty much any opponent I would get annoyed by the volume of generic and repetitive bad guys that did little but slow down my progress. Often I found that I could just run past them with little consequence to get to the next significant encounter. But the problem there is that almost all of the optional side quests involve laboriously peeking into every nook and cranny on each map which I found to be less than thrilling most of the time. And finally I was a bit disappointed with the overall graphical quality of the in-engine stuff. The cutscenes looked great (and I would have liked to see a few more) but anytime they did a close-up of an in-engine model it looked rather nasty.
But don’t get me wrong, I liked the game a lot. I thought the combination of a beat-em-up with role-playing elements worked very well and the story was sufficiently epic and did a good job touching on most of the Marvel universe. I’m kind of on the fence about the use of DLC especially since some characters I would have loved to play with (specifically The Hulk, Magneto and Venom) were for-pay DLC only and I’m not about to fork over that kind of cash for a rented game’s extra content. I guess they had to make the add-on stuff attractive enough to encourage people to buy it but I think I would have preferred some of the more obscure characters be unlockable via DLC and make the price a bit lower. Like maybe have a two pack of Blade and Deadpool for $2.50 or so. That way fans of those characters can get them but your average comic book fan doesn’t feel gypped because a significant hero is missing from the game.
Anyway, I’d love to see a sequel with some more next-gen models and a slightly better DLC scheme. I was thinking it would be incredibly cool though if they made a follow-up that checked your save file from the first game to determine which optional quests you had completed and that impacted which missions you played in the second game. Especially since the ending makes such a big deal out of the “future” you’ve set into motion and all that. I think in general developers don’t take enough advantage of the user-specific content that can be exploited via save games and sequel interactions.
But enough about Marvel Ultimate Alliance.
On the XBLA front, at least as far as games I actually played, I spent even more time with Geometry Wars: I can’t help feeling like one of these days I’m going to have a breakthrough and go on a tear where I last long enough to get the 10x Multiplier and 9 Lives Achievements which I believe will also predicate my Survived 500,000 Achivement and my first 1,000,000 point game. So far I’m still hovering around 500,000 total points but once you lose that initial multiplier streak after your first death, the rest of the game goes downhill pretty quickly. And my deaths often feel completely avoidable so I keep trying.
Elsewhere on the Arcade I was looking through my list for something random to play that wasn’t of the Robotron school of game design and I noticed Alien Hominid HD, which I hadn’t played since I finally beat the end boss after… oh… two million attempts. I noticed that there was an extra Achievement for beating the game on Easy mode (I had gone through on Normal or Medium, whichever they call it the first time) so I played through again. I kind of wish I’d known about Easy before because it’s much less frustrating which ultimately makes the game more fun. I still can’t get over how much I love Dan Paladin’s art in this game, though. More games need to feature that kind of signature, hand-drawn stylistic element.
Gaming Unplugged
So after all that the only other gaming-related occurrence this weekend was the reveal that my next 40K opponent will be an Eldar player so I’m once again facing an opponent I’ve never seen on the battlefield before. I haven’t heard back from him yet so I don’t know when our match will be but I’m thinking I need to make some changes to the army list this time around. My Dreadnaughts typically do very well for me and really aren’t all that expensive points-wise so I may add a second one to the roster. Also my cursory examinations of the Eldar suggest they have some powerful anti-vehicle capabilities so I’ll probably unmount my basic troop squads and as much as I love the Raptors they get cut down every single game so I’m going slower this time and replacing them with either a Havoc squad or just more marines. I’d like to drag out the Defiler but my Daemon Prince already draws enough fire and the ordinance cannon on the Defiler costs a lot of points so I’ll probably leave it out.
The only other change I can think to make is to possibly drop the Terminators from their status as a retinue for the DP and make them a regular Elite unit and possibly mount them in the Land Raider instead of having it be a standalone Heavy Support. That might free up the DP enough to use his Daemonic Flight ability to have him serve as a functional Fast Attack unit since I’ll be without one of those.
And finally, after all the Marvel Ultimate Alliance I played, I got to thinking about comic cook-style stories and I began formulating an interesting plot in my mind. Since I still have a desire to put GURPS 4th Edition through its paces I sketched out an outline and figured it would take four or five sessions to go through and so I’m planning on running it as an online game via Skype using GURPS 4th once I get the details ironed out. Since there ought to be room for a large team I may open the game up to a bunch of people, too. If I decide to go that route I’ll post campaign details here when I get them going. Stay tuned.