Gaming Weekend: Tribal Edition
Some weeks my efforts to maintain a steady stream of new titles pay off handsomely: I’ll spend the weekend pulling new games from the mail like pulling grapes from a vine. As my wife commented a couple of weeks back when this payoff was in effect, “It’s like Christmas every day for you with all this mail-order gaming.” However, the stars can also align such that I go for a weekend with practically nothing new at my disposal. Such was the case this weekend and the circumstances conspired to send me dipping back into some older titles I mean to complete and looking forward to the weeks ahead.
Mitigating Factors
Of course the other aspect of a fairly lightweight Gaming Weekend is that, lacking a shiny new game that compelled me to play, I ended up spending some time enjoying the waning days of summer. Like, outdoors. With other people. When I wasn’t doing that, I had various other activities and appointments to manage and for the most part it seemed okay to have mostly older titles to play since there wasn’t that much time regardless.
What I did play a lot of was Zuma. I think one of the qualities that makes for an addicting game—at least one that I find addicitng—is for it to be challenging in such a way that I feel like I could almost master it if only I didn’t make stupid mistakes. This was the case with Geometry Wars where I may have varying degrees of success from game to game but the thing that makes me try just one more time is that I see the error of my ways after the fact. I find myself saying, “Okay, that’s where I should have used the bomb” or “Oh, you fool! From now on I’m never going to try and outrun the red horsehoes.” It’s the way a game can convince me that the only thing standing in the way of ultimate victory is my own skill and, more importantly, that I can readily identify what I’m doing wrong.
Zuma is like this because part of the game especially in the later levels involves getting the flow of marbles to stop as soon as possible. There are two reasons for this: One, you’re rewarded for stemming the tide with a recession of the marble line and two it slows the progress for a while immediately following the rollback. The other reason it has to be fast is that there is a point of no return especially in the later levels where the mere act of firing marbles into the stream to make matches will send you that much closer to death. If you delay too long in getting the tide to stop even the rollback won’t be enough to keep you alive until you can clear the board. A good way to stop the stream early is to get chains, where each consecutive ball fired makes a match. These yield progressively higher points but, predictably, it isn’t always possible to make a match with either of your currently available marbles. But in levels where you can see the entry point of the maze most or all of the time, the temptation is to wait for something you can match just to keep the chain going.
It’s a risky strategy because if you wait too long you let yourself get to that point of no return I mentioned before. But if you don’t wait at least a little you’ll often end up throwing a chain extension opportunity away prematurely. So I catch myself making these little adjustments to my strategy depending on how well the waiting game goes. If I lose a chain I didn’t need to because I was impatient, I’ll vow to wait until the stream get to point X on the track before getting rid of a marble color I can’t use; if I die on a level because I was too interested in extending the chain to notice my imminent doom, I’ll give myself time limits on how long I can wait (no more than four second this time) and so on.
I think it’s safe to say it keeps me coming back.
Misc
The other game I played quite a bit of was Viva Piñata, in which I’m determined to earn all 1,000 points. I only have two more Achievements to go but they’re both rather tough ones: I need the one where you play for 50 hours total and I think I have like nine more hours to go, plus I need the 100,000 coins achievement and a big part of my strategy for some of the other achievements was using the hunter to gather the piñatas that were a huge pain in the neck to acquire by the usual means of attraction and residency requirements. This was especially true when it came to Master Romancer awards which don’t actually require you to romance anything, just have seven of one kind of piñata in your garden at once. So for things like Horstachios that have like eight romance requirements, I just hunted them all down (at 5600 coins a pop). Since the expense was high I burned through a lot of my stash of coins and while you can recoup a decent amount of the investment by selling them off, it still takes a toll on the ol’ wallet.
So now I’ve worked my way back up to 50,000+ coins but it’s kind of slow going at this point since even without hunting a lot of the valuable piñatas require heavy investments to attract. There are a couple of pretty easy-to-get piñatas that are worth a decent amount but you’re usually looking at 1,000 to 2,500 at most so at this point it’s kind of a race to see which will happen first: The cash or the time played.
I think I’ll end up hanging onto this game even once I “beat” it; I can imagine coming back to in the future and it’s one of the few games that Nik will actually sit in the same room while I’m playing because she likes to watch the little romance dance movies when I get new ones.
Speaking of Nik, her and I had a little downtime while we helped her mom look after a house they’re renovating here in town. We brought our DS’ and played a little more Planet Puzzle League versus mode. We also played some Fluxx (version 2.1) at a friend’s house Saturday evening and even though it’s not specifically game-related I thought I’d point out that she actually started reading the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 comic books I’ve been collecting. Granted, she grumbled the whole time because she doesn’t like comics, but I think her desire to know what happens to Buffy et al after the end of the show (which she recently re-watched) trumped her lack of familiarity with the format.
But It Didn’t Work Out
The one game I did get new this weekend was Battlestations: Midway, which I thought looked like a really cool WWII strategy game and so I plopped it on my Gameznflix queue (note the new capitalization: They redesigned their site and their logo so it doesn’t have the weird Z fetish any longer). Unfortunately the game was miserably boring and overly complicated while managing to remain utterly shallow. It’s kind of just a general mess that I think had some potential but was wasted by trying to be too many things and not doing any of them particularly well. Even the tutorials were excruciating. You know how in most training modes they direct you to do something like, say, press A to jump? Then they may have a voiceover guy explaining that pressing A will make you jump and blah blah blah but if you catch on quickly and you just press A before he finishes with the spiel it cuts him off and assumes you’ve figured it out?
Yeah, in Battlestations: Midway, you have to listen to a painfully slow talker go through the whole explanation (sometimes of really obvious things, or things that are only slight variations of what they’ve already covered) and then wait a few more seconds before the textual summary of what he just said appears on screen and only then can you press the one button or whatever to confirm that you got the picture. And then guy starts talking again. And there aren’t just one or two of these tutorials, there are a seemingly endless supply of them and they are each more dull and boring than the last. But they’re kind of necessary because the game has a lot of commands and odd control or interface elements, none of which are really fun or useful. I sent it back right away, so it almost didn’t count as a rental.
In any case I have two more weekends before Halo 3 hits and I expect to be getting a few more games in the interim although unless something unexpected happens with my Gameznflix queue I doubt any of them will really capture my attention. My post-work gaming activities during this week are probably going to be focused on finishing VP and making room for a run at wrapping up either Oblivion or BioShock next weekend.
I should also point out that I finally sent Enchanted Arms back to Gameznflix and put it on my Goozex requests list since I do want to finish the game but it’s too epic to warrant occupying a whole slot on my queue especially considering how often I’ve been in the mood to play it of late.
It Warrants Only Passing Mention
I suppose I ought to also mention that I finished Condemned: Criminal Origins over the weekend. I only had about two hours left to go and the ending was pretty disappointing. I suppose the ending was pretty much standard for video games, but that’s not to be construed as a compliment or even an excuse. With all the extended in-game cutscenes they foist upon us while we’re in the middle of playing, why do the final moments always feel rushed and strangely apologetic? If any time is right for dragging on the narration, the end of the game is it.
I liked the game okay, though I eventually turned the difficulty down to Easy because I was getting frustrated with all the dying due to the block mechanism being so touchy. I sort of understand where the designers were going with the combat system but frankly blocking is not the most exciting thing in the world and when it doesn’t work smoothly or intuitively, I can’t abide for its failings to mean I can’t progress in the game.