Gaming Weekend: Tyranid Attack Edition
This weekend was marked by a lot of catch-up sleeping, some social interaction, a bit of physical activity (ie exercise) and some long-neglected household projects. Essentially, all those things I typically push aside in favor of playing games. But fortunately all was not lost and despite the yawning emergence of a rough, sketchy life like a bear from a hybernation I did manage to squeeze in a bit of geek.
Was it a Mix-Up?
Somehow GameZnFlix ended up sending me a copy of Rainbow Six: Vegas. I’m not entirely sure how that happened because I don’t remember really putting it on my queue. Now, I do have a lot of games on there and not all of them are games I’d classify as titles I’m really eager to play. Why rent them, then? Because several of them offer some kind of silly ancillary benefit like a badge on 360Voice or some interesting Achievement possibilities (which doesn’t necessarily need to read as “easy points” but could probably be translated as such without losing the overall spirit of the phrase).
Now, universally these games are pretty low on the queue list, below the titles I actually crave and set to be affronted by “cutsies” from forthcoming titles lurking in the Coming Soon bay. It is possible that nestled among them are a few titles I didn’t expect to be arriving such as the 19th Ubisoft Tom Clancy branded modern military shooter of slightly varying perspective and mechanical focus. After GRAW and Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six’s mostly first person tactical shooter felt like such a minor deviation from the standard of games I already owned or finished that I had very little interest. Couple this with a less than stellar demo experience and, well, I don’t know what would have possessed me to rent it.
When the email confirmation of the delivery arrived I called GnF immediately to ask what sort of trick they were playing on me by sending a game I wasn’t interested in. To their great credit they didn’t really give me any flack. They did display some doubt that they would have shipped a game I didn’t request and a later clarification brought to light the fact that nearly my entire queue is suffering from a “short wait” problem where none of the games are available right this second. I suppose, in retrospect, that I could have put RS:Vegas very low on my list figuring it wouldn’t hurt to play it eventually and it just happened to be the only thing that they had lying around to ship me even though I wasn’t expecting it until sometime in mid-2009. GnF offered to defer my next billing cycle by two weeks to give me time to straighten it out which I thought was very generous since I wasn’t even sure they had done anything wrong.
I actually did play the game through the first (non-Vegas, I might add) level. It’s okay, and plays pretty much like I expected as a cross between Gears of War, GRAW and Splinter Cell. That certainly doesn’t mean it’s bad, but there was a lot of deja vu when playing the game and, as with many Ubisoft military titles, I could tell there was a story being told but it was presented in a way that made me not really want to pay attention. It usually goes like this: Helicopter ride, yadda yadda political dynamite, look at the pretty graphics, yadda yadda get in get out, when do I get to play again, yadda yadda tangoes and alpha bravo indigo. Then there’s usually some guy who looks and sounds like some kind of general who yells at me and I don’t care and eventually I end up back in a helicopter to repeat the cycle.
So I thought it was a bit better than the demo which isn’t saying much but I’ll be dropping it in the mail as soon as possible.
My other GnF game arrival was Marvel: Ultimate Alliance which was one of the very first games I played on my 360 back in November as a rental from a Hollywood Video store. I always meant to revisit the game but never did for whatever reason. Now that I have a lot more 360 gaming under my belt it’s kind of odd to be back playing this fairly dull-looking game that, despite it’s ugliness, has a lot of fun gameplay to offer.
It’s sort of billed as a role-playing game but the default settings basically eliminate all RPG elements from the game. I found it much more enjoyable to turn off the automatic leveling aspects and do a bit more micro-managing. Beyond the settings, my overall impressions of the game are favorable but there are a few things I think are weird. For one thing the fact that there is so much downloadable content that isn’t cheap is a bit strange. I don’t know for sure but I imagine that the fact that you can buy The Hulk for $5 suggests that doing so is the only way to play as that fairly significant figure in the Marvel canon. This disturbs me. Also the fact that the game offers so many playable characters but seems to steer you toward picking a) a set of heroes to play through the game with and stick with them and b) selecting those heroes who share associations in the existing universe lore. By encouraging you to use the New Avengers or the X-Men or the Fantastic Four they kind of limit some of the fun. I know you can create your own teams (and I did, with Wolverine, Spider-Man, Iron Man and The Thing) but they don’t seem to provide the immediate benefit of using pre-configured groups.
Add to all of this the fact that at heart the game is a top-down brawler in basic function and provides very little in the way of tactical combat and the mixture of RPG elements (off by default) and action punch-em-up makes me seriously wonder to whom this game was targeted. Which isn’t to say I don’t enjoy it, but I find myself puzzled by it.
My other observation is that, generally speaking, when you compare Marvel Comics to DC Comics I think you find that Marvel has the better overall staple of heroes. I mean, after Superman and Batman your DC Comics A-listers dwindle quickly. Wonder Woman maybe deserves a mention, as might Green Lantern, but beyond that you have… The Flash? Green Arrow? Aquaman? Please. But while Marvel’s staple of characters with books named after them are impressive, their stock of compelling villains is pretty shy. Perhaps it is because Marvel is so fond of pitting its heroes against the same smaller set of villains, but it seems like that most truly interesting Marvel villains are ambiguously evil. I’m talking about your Deadpools and Venoms and Magnetos and the scores of mutants we’ve seen flip-flop from one side of the Xavier fence to the other. Other than Dr. Doom, the rest either seem like rip-offs or are frankly just kind of lame. This is really brought to light when playing Marvel: Ultimate Alliance when Joker-clone and all around uninteresting dweeb Arcade gets a full mission/level series treatment. Really? Arcade?
Anyway, I also played a bit more Planet Puzzle League, made some progress in Trauma Center (including a bizarre but exciting bomb-defusing surgery… which, if you haven’t played the game, don’t even ask but if you have: !!!) and tried out the Bomberman Live trial. I’ve never been a real Bomberman convert despite trying various iterations of it over the years and Live didn’t really manage to express to me what I’ve been missing. There was also some Carcassonne vs. my wife in there and some attempts at Geometry Wars that didn’t yield much but served to cement that I’ve graduated from the ~150K Consistency club into the ~300K Consistency club. Since I can now survive 250K semi-frequently I think it’s just a matter of time and figuring out how to live through the snake swarms and red horseshoes without using the bombs that will get me the elusive 10x Multiplier and 500K Survival Achivements.
Battle For Sector 5
The big event this weekend was the 40K match with my Chaos Space Marines vs. a Tyranid Hive Fleet. Round one of our progressive campaign had me attacking the Tyranids head on. Now the background on 40K and me is that my buddy Thom got me into the game so a couple of years ago I invested in the beginnings of an army and started pitting myself against his regular Space Marines in fairly regular weekend matches. After some time another friend of mine joined in with his Necron fleet and we had some fun matches. Eventually we kind of drifted away and into more role-playing and board games during our sessions but I’ve always wanted to get back into it.
Well Thom now lives thousands of miles away so I was thinking my chances of playing against normal people (ie anyone who isn’t 12 or works at a GW store) were slim. Then I get invited to join this campaign and I jumped at the opportunity. But of course it’s been well over a year since I last played and I’m more than a little rusty. Not to mention the fact that I’ve only ever played against armies that have similar high saves as I do and comparable point-per-model costs.
That’s the long way of saying that I wasn’t prepared for the numbers crush of the ‘Nids nor was I ready for their heavily assault-based style.
Now granted I made a lot of tactical mistakes which is probably going to be common until I get a bit more broad experience. I realized playing my match yesterday how finely tuned my army is to defeat Space Marines and nothing else. So, some tweaking of the army list is required. But also I just didn’t command my troops that impressively. For one thing I decided to hold my Obliterator Cult out to use the Deep Strike ability. On one hand, it worked because I managed to use them to score some Victory Points and eliminate the ordinance cannons that were peppering my soldiers with no hope of reprieve. But it also took the highly effective but slow moving Oblits out of the rest of the match by placing them too far away from the main action. Also I mounted all my troops which was fine except that ‘Nids aren’t as stymied by vehicle armor as I expected and the Rhinos that work so well to add speed to my army against Necrons and Space Marines were mostly point-sinks that still couldn’t compare to the inherent zip of the Tyranids.
My last primary mistake was rushing them to get my strong melee combatants (like the Daemon Prince) into close combat quickly. Against similar foes this works in my favor because sometimes the Chaos powers can tip the scales in my favor (invulnerable saves and so forth) but versus the sheer mass of bugs dying to give me what I was asking for, it was a disaster.
By the end of Turn 5 I was toast with only a partial squad of locked-in CSMs and my too-far-to-help Obliterators so I conceded the match. But I had a great time and the guys were really cool to play with so I’m very glad I joined the campaign and I look foward to the next round. Fortunately since I was the attacker I didn’t lose any ground but I didn’t gain any either so we’ll see how R2 goes.