Gaming Weekend: Transition Edition
In the Parting Shot last week I mentioned a phenomenon I refer to as a gaming cycle. It’s where my interest in particular aspect of the gaming hobby, which I participate in on a pretty broad level, shifts from being my primary focus to make way for a different aspect that is taking its place. Last week I mentioned it mostly as a sort of trivial aside, describing the general method by which I approach a range of activities that fall under the same banner that holds a broad appeal.
But I noticed more sharply the shifting of the cycle during the week that followed as what has been a year-plus fixation on video games as my primary focus began to wane. Even as recently as last week I had assumed the new interest in tabletop style games was a minor priority re-alignment but over the course of this week I found myself leaning more toward activities that didn’t involve a controller. Not that I didn’t play any video games, but as I found myself wrapping up some of the last few games that had really commanded my attention recently I was putting less effort into finding something to replace them and focusing more on using the additional time to paint miniatures or research campaign settings.
Part of it is the typical doldrums of the occasional lull in highly anticipated video game titles. At the end of the last installment of $60 a Month I listed a number of upcoming games I was interested in. Re-reviewing those titles I realize that the only games I’m genuinely excited about are Space Invaders Extreme, Bionic Commando Rearmed and D&D 4th Edition. Even of those, I’m unlikely to buy Space Invaders for full retail price as it seems much more likely I’ll Goozex trade for it and Bionic Commando is a downloadable title. Which means my primary purchases for the month of June are likely to be, for the first time since I started $60 a Month, principally non-video games.
I view this as mostly academic. I don’t really mourn for gaming sub-genres or styles that aren’t really holding my interest very strongly for a period of time. History indicates they will come back around again but what I find interesting is the other thing I mentioned last week which was that I’d never had a means of cataloging my various phase shifts before. I wonder if, due to a forced introspection from a weekly activity log, a certain equilibrium might be achieved.
The List
- Carcassonne: The Castle – One of the things that makes me prefer this variant over the original Carcassonne, despite their surface-level similarities, is the constraint provided by the castle walls. Where Carcassone can get a bit out of hand as people develop on some remote corner while everyone else fixates on a different area, The Castle gently nudges you into interacting with the other player. This is where the real fun of the game enters the equation because merrily constructing the perfect house or tower in one remote corner is fine, but trying to out-maneuver someone to control a 20-point road is a challenge that has few equals.
- Rock Band – Nik and I continue our quest to finish Band World Tour mode with our two-man band, The Most Gross. At one point she picked up the wireless Guitar Hero III controller leaving me with the official Rock Band one, which after six months of use is now so inaccurate that it was actively causing us to perform less than we were capable of. So Nik took matters into her own hands and picked up a used wired X-plorer guitar for significantly less than a newer model or one with fancy features would cost. And it works so much better. It’s a shame really because if not for the strum bar on the Rock Band guitar I would prefer it in every way to the GH version(s). But there is only so much punishment I can stand from that flappy thing before it starts to actively suck the enjoyment from the game.
- Overlord – I finally wrapped this game up over the weekend, and like most people who played it I felt a sense of sadness that more people had not experienced the game. I admit that the ending did leave me a little disappointed as an abrupt shift in tone cast all your previous actions into a particularly moralistic light rather than taking the more challenging (for the writer) but consistent path and turning the whole game into a brilliant send-up of role-playing games. There is a clever nugget of an idea within the conversations that occur regardless, but it isn’t explored enough to make up for the missed opportunity and in any case the game as a whole is pretty brilliant. I only hope someone is wise enough to greenlight a sequel to correct the few minor flaws in the game—very small but consistent visual hiccups, some dicey minion controls in a few areas, lack of an in-game map—and get the writing just so. That game, were it to ever exist, might be enough to build the buzz so enjoyed by other, dare I say lesser, games.
- Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1 – I may have been a little harsh in my original dismissal of the game. I still would prefer a more ponderous pace to the combat; there were too many times in my playthrough that I would miss an opportunity to even attempt a block because I was busy trying to co-ordinate my own attacks. And I maintain that the price point is excessive considering the game is not complete in itself for your $20 meaning the final product will run you $80. And it’s not that I don’t even think the individual episodes are entirely unworthy of $20, it’s just that my comfort level would go up so significantly if they only knocked $5 from the tag and essentially asked for a standard disc-based game (priced accordingly) that happened to be delivered in chunks over the Internet. In this case it feels like I’m paying a surcharge to be a part of some grand experiment and for an organization that I typically felt was squarely in the “one of us” camp in terms of disdaining money-grubbing tactics by game publishers, it now seems that when the tables are turned even they can’t escape the siren song of suckling a few extra greenbacks from the teat of gamers’ wallets. I’m not sure that leaves much hope for the rest of us going forward.
- Blacksite: Area 51 – Having finished Overlord and Penny Arcade, I stared at my shelf of games wondering what to play. Of course there was GTA IV but I still struggle to find the proper motivation to return to it. So I thought I’d pick up this one and give it another shot to see if it was worthy of the spot on the shelf or if it needed to find purchase on my Goozex Offered list. I think what disappoints me most about this game is that the demo was so flawlessly paced that when you actually sit down and play this and realize the slice for the demo is situated well into the game’s progression so none of the things I thought were surprises are actually new by the time you get there, you realize the game has no concept whatsoever of suspense. And I don’t expect a shooter to be presented like a survival horror game, but at least games like F.E.A.R. and Half-Life should have suggested to future developers that there is value in pacing your game a certain way, especially when the atmosphere you’re trying to create is one of impending doom. Blacksite misses every opportunity to provide some sort of atmosphere and instead settles on stupidly skippable firefights, idiotic AI, political commentary devoid of inspiration and bland, obviously linear level design. Just as I was forming this negative opinion on it, it froze and locked up my 360, sealing its fate.
- Arkham Horror – I volunteered to run a game of AH at ConQuest SF, coming up Labor Day weekend. Since it had been a little while since I played it, I decided to break it out and refresh myself on the rules. Of course no one else was around at the time so I ended up trying the solitaire mode and I found it actually fairly enjoyable. The temptation in solitaire games is to fudge things in your favor; it’s almost like you wonder what the point of playing something by yourself is if you’re only going to lose. But it turned out that AH has so many things happening at once on any given turn, typically I didn’t need to fudge because I would unintentionally benefit myself by forgetting some Rumor effect or I’d overlook the Ancient One’s universal influence rule or something. I also realized that the name of that game if you want any real chance is to make a beeline for a Blessing which allows you to roll successes on a 4+ instead of 5+. In a game where almost every check you make has some kind of negative modifier, that can mean the difference between living and finding success, or dying and having to start with a new character. In the end I wasn’t able to seal enough gates to keep the Ancient One from waking, but even though he had 12 points worth of damage and an attack that would have wiped me out the first time he had a chance to use it, I prevailed. I had 14 combat dice to roll and six clue tokens for re-rolls plus one re-roll provided by exhausting my whip for a total of 21 dice to get 12 successes. I got the last success with my final re-roll.
- Pandemic – We went to my buddy Thom’s house last night for some games and he broke out Pandemic. Like Arkham Horror the game is a bit unusual in that it’s co-operative among the players as you’re fighting against the mechanics rather than each other. Essentially there are four diseases that are spreading across the globe. As members of the CDC you’re tasked with stopping the spread by fighting back in the most heavily affected cities, searching for the cures to each disease and working together to stop the spread despite an accelerating rate of infection as time goes on. The mechanics are impressively elegant and the players are given just enough power to make the game seem possible, even though by necessity odds have to be very much against you in co-operative games or they wouldn’t be much challenge/fun. You can even vary the difficulty since one of the randomized events is an epidemic which places a new occurrence of heavy infection on a city you may not have been paying attention to and you can adjust the number of those that occur each game. I had a ton of fun playing this game and I think if I were to find it at a reasonable price I would definitely have to pick it up.
- FBI – I finally had a chance to play this game again with more players. What a difference. After multiple rounds with both four and five players I can definitely say the game is fairly fun but two players shouldn’t even be an option. I still wish there were a second printing of the game that removed the hideous artwork and ugly card design in favor of something a little more appropriate but mechanically the game is intriguing enough to keep us at it for a couple of hours.
- Pikomino – Toward the end of the night we had to give Regenwormen another round. As usual the tables were turned many times and in the end I lost but I did (finally) end the game with some points on the board (one). I did note one thing which was that the Dutch version Thom has contains painted wooden dice. They feel pretty nice and look attractive but his are worn and shabby looking and I have to wonder why they didn’t go with a more traditional (and wear-resistant) dice construction with a game whose principal mechanic is rolling the dice over and over again?
- Professor Layton and the Curious Village – I love the whimsical art style and goofy humor in this DS-based puzzle game. And by puzzle game I mean that literally: It’s nothing more than a loose narrative laid atop some classic and some new-to-me brain teasers. It does have a fairly clever adventure game element but the vast majority of the game is finding new people or environmental objects to tap with your stylus and initiate a new puzzle. The game makes great use of the touch-screen controls and the challenges are much harder than I originally anticipated. The game freely gives away the secret to brain-teasers: They are almost always an impossible scenario with an obvious answer provided you approach the problem with the correct perspective. My only issue so far is that the brain power required to advance in the game makes it a poor before-bed choice which is typically where my portable gaming goes. There’s nothing like self-induced insomnia due to intense concentration on, say, matchsticks.
Parting Shot
I mentioned above that this month could be the first in which I spend most of my monthly gaming budget on non-video games. The biggest target in my sights is obviously D&D 4th Edition. But as of this writing the books have been available for several days and I have yet to pull the trigger. Why?
Part of it is that as fascinated as I am by the rules changes, I don’t have a regular D&D game. I got a reasonable amount of use out of my 3.5-edition Player’s Handbook, mostly due to a semi-regular run through of The World’s Largest Dungeon (which ended very prematurely due to scheduling conflicts) but I wonder if this purchase wouldn’t be mostly curiosity. Of course there’s always the option of finding a game to join or starting one of my own, plus the various con games and such so it’s not like I’d never use it but the timing is less about need and more about intrigue-based desire.
Which is really the question: How often do tabletop gamers make purchases with no other intent than some gossamer future game in mind? Video games are so rarely multiplayer-only that typically those purchases are rooted in instant gratification. But unless you have gamer roommates or a dedicated gamer for a spouse, it seems like most tabletop purchases end up being “I’d like to try this some time.” Considering this, is it any wonder that most of my tabletop purchases happen at conventions?