Gaming Weekend: Stuffed Edition
I spent the Thanksgiving weekend out of town and away from my home consoles which might have meant that I spent a lot more time than usual with my DS. Well, technically that is true but honestly it wasn’t like some DS marathon. We only went from the Bay Area to Seattle which is a pretty short two hour flight and while we were there we spent a lot of time out on the town and doing touristy things which didn’t work so well for gaming.
Not that I think any of that is particularly bad. Sometimes even avid gamers could use a break, and I enjoyed mine. However, I did slyly work a couple of bookend days onto my travel schedule so I got several days worth of game in between packing and travel prep and chores to make up for a week’s worth of vacating the house. So even though the time off was long and full of friends and good food, I packed a normal weekend’s worth of gaming into an extended time frame.
Thoughts on Mass Effect, DS on planes and other public places, gaming Gameznflix and more below.
Two Point Oh
So. Mass Effect. I mean, you know. Mass Effect. This is sort of the game that, had I not broken down last year and picked up the 360 then, would have clinched the purchase now. BioWare did such an incredible job with Knights of the Old Republic that I’m willing to pretty much play anything they do sight unseen. But Mass Effect was certainly not an unknown quantity. I’ve been following the news about this game for a couple of years and itching to have a chance to play it.
What you may not quite gather from reading the reviews—which are remarkably positive but often tinged with exception language: “however,” “although,” “despite this,” and so on—is how similar this game feels to KotOR. That’s not meant as an insult but I think many reviews I’ve read overlook the sense of familiarity present in the structure, the conversation systems, the presentations and the way the game treats the player if you’ve put a significant amount of time into KotOR. Granted, there are a lot of differences (not all of them great): The combat system is often maligned in the ME reviews and I think that’s a little unfair. The basic problem with the combat is that it doesn’t work the way it looks. Frankly, it looks like it should play out like Gears of War but in truth it’s not that at all. But it isn’t KotOR’s “set it and forget it” style, either, and I think that was a mistake. And honestly I don’t see why, after playing CoD4 multiplayer, they couldn’t have made either a Gears-esque shooter with role-playing elements or just stuck with KotOR’s style. The hybrid they ended up with appeals, I think, to neither action gamers (especially in light of the other aspects of the game) nor does it appeal to turn-based role-playing enthusiasts.
Even someone like me, who enjoys both styles, finds it awkward. And while we’re on the topic of awkward, let me just say that the opening 30 minutes or so are exceptionally awkward. With no real tutorial and only the most basic of helps that are essentially meaningless out of context, you’re basically left to discover on your own what all of the icons, stats, indicators and controls are for. As an example, I still don’t know if you can change your squad leader in Mass Effect the way could in KotOR. On top of that there is a lot of confusing exposition that seems important but doesn’t immediately make sense all of which serves to give the game a somewhat disappointing (or you can use the word “poor” if you prefer) first impression.
However.
If I remember correctly this was the case with KotOR as well, and like the elder space opera BioWare game, Mass Effect grows on you if you give it half a chance and endears to you with its striking attention to detail, its wealth of optional sidequests and its cleverly considered world. Here’s a small but telling example: You know how in most SF games that aren’t licensed properties you have various races of aliens? Well in those games you find quickly that other alien races are pretty dull in groups because each race is given a sort of defining characteristic and all members of that race adhere to it like a fly on duct tape. In Mass Effect each race does have a certain racial disposition, but within that framework there is a wide array of individual personalities and motivations brought to vivid life by some of the most effectively subtle facial animations (especially remarkable for aliens!) and top notch voice acting.
I’m taking my playthrough of the game slowly; I did the same with KotOR and thoroughly enjoyed the 40 hours I sunk into the Star Wars universe. I’ve already played nearly eight hours and I only just now got off the Citadel with my ship so I have I think at least another ten or fifteen hours left in the game. I’m playing as kind of a middle-of-the-road character morality-wise, and I’m not sure I’m compelled enough to play through again with different choices. I always meant to go back and do KotOR as an evil character but I never got around to it so perhaps the same will be true for this game, but I keep hearing that it’s a shorter experience so perhaps with less of a mountain to climb I’ll be more inclined to attempt the hike a second time.
“Hey!”
I’ve already talked some about Phantom Hourglass in Gaming Weekend but I did want to bring up a point that I haven’t seen dealt with elsewhere which is the DS’ infrequently used microphone as a gaming input device. Mostly I’m aware of a few games that use it like WarioWare and the amusing but extraneous “Objection!” and “Hold it!” commands in Phoenix Wright but Phantom Hourglass is the first game I’ve seen where using the mic is really mandatory to progress in the game.
At first it was simply a “blow out the candles” thing where you can lightly blow on the mic to douse a candle and open a door or something. It’s silly enough to be blowing on your handheld but when the big-eared enemies that require you to shout into the mic before they cower and become vulnerable to your attacks showed up, I got nervous. See, a lot of times I play my DS at home but I also play in public occasionally and I wonder about the wisdom of incorporating these kinds of elements that strongly into the gameplay. I played Zelda for nearly the entirety of the flight back from Seattle and the whole time I was concerned that I would run across a moment where I needed to yell at my machine in order to continue playing and I was pretty sure that at that point I’d have to close it up and read a book or something.
I’m just saying, for a portable device, they either assume a certain level of public comfort or they figure that people screaming at their little consoles on the subway (and not in the typical gamer “Oh that is so cheap!” fashion) is a good way to start conversations and sell units via word-of-mouth. But then again, considering how welcome people who talk loudly on their cell phones are despite the ubiquity of mobile communication, I think you’d be more likely to get punched in the neck than help sell another DS.
Gaming Gameznflix
So I finally figured out the secret to getting decent games from Gameznflix: Ruin your ROI. See, this whole time I was thinking that I needed to get the most games to come in a month to maximize my monthly fee, so the best idea was to put low demand games all over the queue and make sure they were shipping my next game as soon as the got the previous one. And to an extent that works except that when you fill your queue with low-demand games, you end up getting a steady stream of garbage because low demand games are so for a reason.
Instead what I found is that if you reduce your queue to a smaller size full of only games you really want to play and you send in games you have, that’s when you’re put into a holding queue similar to the one Netflix uses all the time. So I put The Darkness on my queue months ago but I only received it when I sent in all three games I had and nothing left on my queue was available. That meant that instead of skipping over me for the next crummy game low on my list, GnF had to wait until something I wanted came in and then they saw me sitting there game-less and they shipped my top game to me.
Frankly it’s a stupid system but now that I understand it, maybe I can make it work for me. The downside is that what I have to live with is going for longer stretches of time with fewer than my maximum number of games on hand. At the moment that’s no big deal but come summer when nothing is available and I’m stuck in a queue waiting for some dork to finish Grand Theft Auto IV so I can play it, it may not seem so insignificant.
The Rest of the Stuff
- The Darkness – Oddly I found myself trading off between this and Mass Effect until ME really sunk into my psyche. The Darkness isn’t a great game: At best it’s a competent horror shooter that falls somewhere between Prey and F.E.A.R. in terms of execution and enjoyment. It tries hard to create a specific atmosphere and rarely succeeds, but it doesn’t totally fail either and I’m finding myself intrigued by the story. I’m not sure yet if the early part of the game where you play in NYC is the bulk of the game or if it is more of a prologue to the section I’m in now, but while I appreciate variety, I’m missing the urban locations at the moment and feeling like they could have paced the Darkness power advancement a little better.
- Earth Defense Force 2017 – It’s a stupid, small game that I kind of half enjoyed. It feels very old school and the insanely corny voice acting and dialogue reminds me of old NES games that were poorly translated from English but had a certain naive earnestness that you couldn’t help but find endearing. The action is simple and repetitive which is kind of a bummer because with some even cursory depth I think it could have been a really enjoyable game but as it is I find it charming but dull.
- Call of Duty 4 – I’m rapidly losing whatever edge I may have had and spent my few rounds on Monday struggling mightily to stay above the 1:1 kill/death ratio line. I’m somewhere around level 32 and I think that I may not have the patience to play through to even a single prestige mode. It’s still my favorite multiplayer game of the year, but bear in mind that I have yet to pick up Team Fortress 2 and I also haven’t found a consistent group of people to play with and this game begs for coordinated team-play.
- Puzzle Quest – I’m not sure why but all my progress since I brought the new Xbox home has been wasted because of an error with my game authentication (on this game and Catan only for whatever reason). I played enough to advance to the same level I’d been pushing toward for a week but when it comes to role-playing action, it’s hard to choose even the wonderful Puzzle Quest over Mass Effect.
- Planet Puzzle League – I’m still being fairly consistent with the Daily Play modes and at this point PPL may be contending with GeoWars and Oblivion for the biggest time sink of the year. My only complaint is that I wish I knew someone else as entranced with the game as I am to play local multiplayer with because my WiFi experiences have been varied at best and other than Daily Play I’m running out of enjoyable times to be had vs. the computer. The real joy is in playing garbage mode with items against other players in the same room… and that’s an experience that has been hard to come by.
- Catan – I only played a quick game to fix my authentication but it pretty much cemented how much more I appreciate Carcassonne. Catan is fine but the board game is enjoyable for the expansions and scenarios, none of which are available on the XBLA version as yet.
- The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass – I got stuck at a part in the Temple of the Ocean King which is sort of the game’s gimmick and it’s biggest flaw. I understand what they were trying to do but for a game where so much of the rest is undiluted joy, the timed backtracking of the Ocean King dungeon feels like a gnarly triple-pimple on the face of a supermodel.