Gaming Weekend: The Khan of Cons Edition
I think, strangely enough, this weekend marks the first gaming convention I’ve attended since Tunnels of Doom’s inception. I’m too lazy to dig through the archives to verify, but considering that ToD began in a period where my convention conscience (my buddy Thom) was out of the country, it seems likely. I say this is strange because before Thom left, him and I were getting to be pretty regular on the Bay Area convention circuit. Essentially our main stops each year were DunDraCon on President’s Day weekend and Kublacon on Memorial Day weekend with plenty of interest in ConQuest (Labor Day) as well. We even made a trip down to SoCal to hit Gen Con one year.
But without my con buddy, it was difficult to find the motivation to regularly attend. I almost hate to feel like his presence is required to make the trip but truth be told most cons for us are an excuse to escape to a gamer-friendly place away from home for a bit and play games with our group of friends and catch the flea markets, dealer rooms and maybe an event or two. Which is to say we typically don’t immerse ourselves in the official con-sanctioned games as often as we use their free play rooms and the time allotted to devote entire days or weekends to playing. I suppose considering that, it’s not as unusual that I’d eschew the cons when he’s not around.
So this year the group has slowly started to come back together with our center of gravity as it were back in action. But there has been plenty of upheaval recently and while we’re transitioning back into regular tabletop gaming, Kublacon crept up on everyone. As a way of easing back in there was no pre-planned room reservation or full weekend passes (for me anyway) but we did decide that we definitely wanted to play in the Blood Bowl tournament scheduled for Friday night and everyone was interested in going to the first-night flea market.
The Blood Bowl Tourney was run by people we didn’t know and they had some interesting ideas including custom pitches for each match with special rules on each. As I cynically expected the rules weren’t particularly balanced, often favoring bruiser teams with a lot of AV adjustments for extra carnage (which I can’t complain about too much; I played Orcs) but they were pretty clever in general and it seemed like they added a fun element of the unexpected. I felt a little bad for Thom since he ended up drawing matches against our buddy Aaron first round and then got matched up with me for round two meaning he only got to play against people he plays all the time anyway but I’ve never known Thom to turn down a game of Blood Bowl no matter who the opponent might be.
Afterward we made our way to the flea market where I picked up a couple of new games on the cheap and while I could have continued to shop it was extremely crowded with bargain-hungry gamers and there were only so many oversized elbows I was willing to take in the ribs before I had to hasten my exit.
Considering I only spent about six hours total at a four-day convention I felt like I had a good time. If nothing else it certainly whet my appetite for the con scene again and I expect ConQuest in September to be a much bigger deal.
The Games
This week was a huge one for games so strap in; there’s a lot to cover.
- Blood Bowl – Considering that the one thing I have yet to get fully organized after our move a month ago is my tabletop gaming stuff, it’s kind of amazing I was able to get any kind of team together at all. I was terribly unprepared upon arrival, but I managed to pull an event-appropriate team together using my trusty Orcs dubbed the Pickaxes. My first match was on a “marshy” custom pitch against a nice guy from Arizona named Scott. He put out a team of Dwarves and we both expected a long slog through the game since the soft ground lent a special +1 AV bonus and a -1 MV penalty. We trudged back and forth with him scoring in the first half at long last thanks to a hilarious hail mary pass to basically no one but the ball ended up in the end zone so all he had to do was get someone there and it was 0-1. In the second half I rallied to tie the game with a couple of effective cages to protect my Blitzer streaking down the field. I think the halftime addition of my Troll helped some too as he was able to draw enough attention and hit enough linesmen to free the space necessary to get a slow-moving guy down the pitch. Since it took both of us an entire half to score, we settled on a 1-1 draw.
In Round Two I got matched against my buddy Thom playing Pro Elves in the “Bloodweiser Bowl” where the free-flowing beer made for easy KO recovery via ale that modified STR (+2), AG (-1) and the addition of the Boneheaded trait. But it also flowed in the stands so each drive added a cumulative total to the kickoff table, ensuring a Pitch Invasion event at some point. Now, Orcs aren’t well matched against Elves in terms of scoring anyway unless you can get some key casualties early but I was keeping it pretty close into the second half where the kickoff modifiers finally caught up with me; when we hit the Pitch Invasion Thom’s +2 FAME to each roll left me with three of my eleven players not Stunned. Let’s just say a team of Pro Elves has little trouble scoring against two Orcs and a Troll with no teammate nearby. Eventually we ended with a 3-1 score in favor of the Elves, but I could have made it a little closer with a late score had I not botched a key dodge roll and fumbled at the goal line. Such is Blood Bowl. - Catan Dice - Despite not having a super-favorable impression of the game the last time I played it, I found the North American version on sale in the Dealer’s Room at the con and had to pick it up for $12.00. We played a half game waiting for the Blood Bowl Tournament to start and as I suspected the game is much better with fewer players who are already familiar with the rules. It’s also a good game to play as a side-game or while you’re doing something else (in my case creating a team sheet for Blood Bowl) because each turn is fairly quick and you don’t need to pay that much attention to what your opponents are doing.
- Lost Cities – While I only played Blood Bowl and Catan Dice at the con itself, I did get a few board games in with Nik over the weekend. We played a round of Lost Cities and while Nik did outscore me drastically in Round Two I ended up with a really good score thanks to a 68 point round three. She also showed me an easier way to count up the score that makes me miss the video game version less; I still have to say that my biggest flaw in the tabletop version is the lack of a deck counter since I’m consistently miscalculating how many turns I have left to play the cards in my hand.
- FBI – I picked this one up as a flea market purchase and Nik and I tried it out last night. It’s a card game with a Race For the Galaxy-lite style turn determination mechanic: Each player chooses a numeric card from their “arrests” to bid and the highest number plays first. The catch is that the arrests are either positive or negative and while bidding a negative is a good way to miss playing first, it also represents innocent civilians and counts toward your final score. Where the game breaks down a bit, at least with two players, is that the player who goes last takes both their turns in sequence (the turn order is First In, Last Out) so with only two players you either get to make the first arrest or you get two turns in a row which is sometimes preferable. I wasn’t that impressed with the game on the first try but I would be interested in trying one more time with more players to see if the strategy changed or if it was more exciting; another issue with only two players is that it’s pretty easy to forsee how each turn is going to play out ahead of time and a big aspect of the game is trying to predict which criminals will be left from each of five stacks by the time your turns roll around.
- Final Fantasy VI Advance – Oh yeah, there were video games this week. I picked up this port of FFVI (or Final Fantasy III to non-pedantic North Americans) because I really loved it on the SNES and I’m fairly certain that like most Final Fantasy games, I never made it all the way to the end. After playing for about three hours or so I began to realize that I’ve been operating with the memory that FFVII was my all-time favorite Final Fantasy game but after getting into this one I think it’s actually a superior title. Obviously it’s getting to the point where whichever I’ve touched most recently is seeming like the better game but in terms of characterization, pacing and combat mechanics I can’t find much at fault with this game. Even though I recall VII as being enjoyable, I also remember interminable Metal Gear Solid-like cutscenes and a fairly ho-hum battle system, especially in the early going. My plan for this game is to pick away at it a little bit at a time. The port is strong enough that it has a quicksave option and there’s never been much of a rush in a Final Fantasy game so I think I can get the 80 hours or whatever in small doses if I stick with it.
- Kingdom Hearts – A game I was pretty excited about prior to its release years ago, I never got around to it and while I tried to rent it a couple of years back I ended up getting the wrong disc from Hollywood Video and was never able to straighten out the situation, settling on some completely different game in the end. So I snatched it off Goozex and put an hour and a half or so into it. It’s kind of a difficult concept to sell once you get past the initial tantalizing tagline of “Disney meets Square” and so far my complaint is that it starts even more slowly than most Square Enix titles. So far I’ve fought a boss-like creature in some dream or other that felt like it was mostly impossible to lose and I’ve done a fetch quest for a fellow villager whom I may be expected to recognize but since I’ve lost interest in most Final Fantasy games that followed VII, I can’t place her. The concepts seem intriguing but the controls are pretty weak and I have half a dozen epic games on my plate right now so it may be another year before I get around to this one or it’s possible I may give it another hour and if it doesn’t catch me by then I’ll re-list it and give up. So far I’m not compelled enough to drop everything else I’m working on for this.
- Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters – I enjoyed Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction on PS3 a few months ago but felt like it was kind of a waste of my PS3 gaming time since it was mostly a generic platformer with some cute but not essential touches. My thought process was that maybe it was the context: I’m maybe not looking for a kid-friendly platformer on a next gen system when there are Eternal Sonatas and Orange Boxes and Ninja Gaiden Sigmas to play. Then after the pure joy that was God of War on PSP I thought maybe another handheld action game would be the ticket. I can’t say there is really anything wrong with Size Matters in the sense that it has good graphics, nice sound and a competent presentation. But for whatever reason the gameplay is really kind of boring me to tears. The level designs are nowhere near as inspired as those in Tools of Destruction, the story still has that expectation of franchise familiarity to it and the controls are as frustrating as God of War’s were precise. I don’t hate it as much as I find it sad and disappointing; I think I want to like the series much more than I really do and it’s kind of a bummer to find something with as much potential as these games possess come up just short enough to prevent me from getting into it.
- Rock Band – I finally pulled out the peripherals from their packed-away boxes and sat down in a couple of sessions to play some new tracks I downloaded. I was really happy with playing the bass on Muse’s “Hysteria” but I struggled like crazy with the wide-ranging vocals on the same song. I also realized that despite citing “Simple Man” as one of my favorite Lynyrd Skynyrd songs, I really don’t know the lyrics very well at all. With all the talk now of Guitar Hero IV adding additional instruments Rock Band-style, it’s getting more and more difficult to not focus on the things that Rock Band needs to improve upon since it’s getting to where you can speculate or wishlist-check things for GHIV based on experience with Rock Band. Most pressing I think is a need for either an overhaul of Band World Tour or a comparable story-based mode that doesn’t suffer from the same shortcomings. I noticed that what my friends and I want more than anything is a rewards-based means of selecting our own playlists. We usually slog through setlists and songs we don’t really care about just to unlock new options to create our own sets and like this week we occasionally get to where we just want to pick which songs we play but don’t have any of those left in BWT, so we cut out and do vanilla local multiplayer instead. It’s a shame because I’d much rather play with a purpose but I hate having to force myself to do stupid songs like “Train Kept a-Rollin’” just to get what I want.
- Overlord – I put some serious time into this game over the weekend, finding that familiar state with games I get unexpectedly hooked on where I want to keep playing it but I also don’t want it to be over too soon. At this point I have all four minion types and have unlocked what I think are all the main locales in the game. There’s quite a bit left from what I can gather by checking the Achievements list and the in-game open mission descriptions but with as fast as I burned through to this point I see only a week or two at the most before I wrap it up completely. My favorite thing about the game is the pitch-perfect blend of silliness, satire and homage on the story/tone side and the compelling mixture of action, strategy, puzzles and role-playing on the gameplay side. My least favorite thing is the lack of inspiration in the design of puzzles and levels. I complained last week about the absence of an in-game map; there is a rough paper map included in the game box but it seems almost like a design feature to make you stumble through twisty, circular maps trying to figure out where to go next or how to get back to a place you just visited. And there is an over-reliance on puzzles where you’re given access to minion type A and you have to figure out how to use them to get access to minion B so you can pass a specific obstacle. I’d prefer to have universal or near-universal access to all types I’ve unlocked and face more creative puzzles that let me decide how to tackle them. But the quibbles are minor; I’m not sure what made this game get so badly overlooked but I hope enough people bought and enjoyed it to warrant a sequel; I think a second pass to iron out the few kinks in the formula would make for an instant classic.
- Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth – An original Xbox game I played several years ago on a rental lark, I really enjoyed the game at the time. I always meant to go back and finish it since I had to return the rental before I could make it through, now I grabbed it from Goozex for a song and have the opportunity. I played through again and found it just as well presented (though you really start to appreciate the difference next gen graphics and especially HD make in your gaming experience the longer you play them between visits to the past); it’s one of those games that doesn’t quite fit into my current gaming schedule since it works best when played late at night in the dark and I do almost all my console gaming in the morning on weekends, focusing on handhelds before bed. Still, it’s another game in my increasingly long list of queued up titles so maybe by the time I get to devote some serious time to it things will have swung back and I’ll be putting time in later, after my wife goes to bed.
- Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1 – I enjoy the Penny Arcade comic, and I think that in general Jerry Holkins/Tycho Brahe is one of the best, most astute writers the game industry has, up there with Leigh Alexander, N’Gai Croal and Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw in terms of honesty and analysis of games and gaming culture. Plus, he’s really funny. Penny Arcade (or maybe just Tycho, it’s tough to tell) also seems to have a shared sense of taste in games as well, leaning toward role-playing or adventure titles or at least games with something new and unique to say or an interesting story to tell. So when they started talking about a pseudo-Lovecraftian RPG/adventure game written by Tycho with art by Mike Krahulik I figured it was going to be right up my alley. I downloaded the full game with only a cursory stab at the free trial and while it indeed has a lot of what I hoped for from the game, it’s lacking a a couple of key areas.
First though, I think reviewers are struggling to find the appropriate context in which to frame their reviews. PA has been consistently brutal with much of the mainstream gaming media and, let’s face it, the industry as a whole. Putting themselves in the line of fire like this is pretty bold though not, I don’t think, brazen. They’ve further compounded the problem by going with an episodic formula, a curious hybrid game style and an atypical delivery mechanism. Reviewers don’t seem to know if they should review it like a simple little XBLA/casual title or a full retail product, something that is envelope-pushing or what. For my part I think the game is exactly what it seems: An ambitious experiment by some people who have strong opinions on what gaming is and what it could or should be.
As an experiment, it’s not a failure by any means. The game is well-written and visually attractive so I’d say that for Holkins and Krahulik they can consider themselves successful. Gameplay-wise, though, it’s just “off” enough that it made it hard for me to push Overlord aside in RSPD’s favor. For one thing, the combat is hard. The real-time elements make it a confusing spaz-fest trying to get to the right character, decide how to approach the combat, react to the opponents using the block mechanism, execute the special moves… generally speaking it has a framework that when you imagine the written description you can say, “Yeah that sounds fun,” but when you sit down and have to play it feels frustrating and out of place for the context. I think even if they’d only slowed down the pace by half again as much to give you more time to plan ahead and react or if there was a turn mechanism along with the real-time (think Blue Dragon) it could have been more fun to play. It’s hard to know where to place the blame but my initial impression is that the concept was sound it was the execution that came out flawed so whether you feel that’s Hothead’s fault or Penny Arcade’s, the result is a game I ought to and want to enjoy but seems to put in an effort to keep me at arm’s length.
Parting Shot
You may notice what isn’t on the list above: GTA IV. I was discussing this with my brother-in-law and saying how every time I start to get into it there is something that keeps me from finding the level of compulsion that I got from earlier entries. It’s not that GTA does anything wrong, in fact it fixes so much of what the previous games didn’t do very well it feels weird not to find myself glued to it. We speculated that it was either that we had franchise fatigue and were hoping for more “new” stuff to keep us entertained or the one thing they didn’t fix was the one thing that was ruining it for us: The lack of checkpoints in missions.
He described the last mission he played in which he had actually accomplished the entire thing and only needed to drive his companion back to a destination. Along the way he hit a squirrelly turn and slid into a gas station, blowing himself up and failing the mission. At the same time I find myself at a spot where I can either do two combat-heavy missions that I’ve tried several times each or keep trying to meet my job interview appointment which I miss because it’s far enough out that I have to turn down several “hang out” requests from my various contacts and lose their approval or accept them and miss the interview. It’s the kind of social conundrum that may sound intriguing but in practice is just annoying. But we both find ourselves much less forgiving of the game’s fewer faults.
I’m not really complaining; I have more than enough games to keep me occupied so I don’t feel like I blew my one chance at entertainment on a game I don’t care for. And it’s very likely that I’ll pick it up soon enough and play to another roadblock. But with people like my wife’s uncle who loved the previous games but lacks a next gen system pushing to come by and check it out because he feels like he’s missing something, it’s hard to explain why I’m letting it collect dust for a week while I focus on a year-old game and a port of a SNES game I put sixty hours into once upon a time.