Gaming Weekend: Unnecessary Subtitles Edition
This week I divert my $60 a Month plans from their original course, find a game I love that I maybe could have played months ago, get grouchy again about Gameznflix and play some handheld games in sporadic bursts so short you might swear I wasn’t even playing at all.
Is It the Quest, or Is It More in the Puzzles?
I realize that October was meant to be the Month of Orange Box and indeed I spent the weekend jonesing to run down and pick up a copy. Unfortunately, October is a busy month for the budget (there are a few birthdays—including my wife’s—as well as my wedding anniversary) so it was frugal for me to hold off until some other time on a $60 purchase. It was semi-torturous but I had a new Gameznflix title to keep me occupied until I played it for an hour and realized it wasn’t going to last me very long so I found myself looking for something else to keep me busy.
What I found was that Puzzle Quest: The Challenge of the Warlords had quietly been launched on XBLA this week.
PQ is one of those games that I frequently see as it is launched and think, “That looks good, I’ll have to check that out.” But by “checking out” what I mean is that I should note the price and assign my interest level in the game a value and compare the two as a measure of determination about the viability of a purchase. Puzzle Quest for the DS ran about $35 which I felt, at the time, was too high. It sounded intriguing but I wasn’t sure it was the kind of game that justified premium handheld pricing. I figured it would drop in price eventually and I’d grab it when it was under $20 (my interest level assessment).
I knew it was coming for XBLA, I just didn’t know when. The race then became whether the DS could be had for under my mental price cap before the Live Arcade version hit. Well, I never saw it for less that $29.99 but I did see it on XBLA for $15 so I knew I had to grab it. Granted, that puts my $60 a Month plan into some flux, but I’ll have to deal with that at another time, in another column. Anyway, Puzzle Quest.
The root of the game is a pairing of somewhat western-style RPG (that is, strictly Tolkien-esque fantasy trappings) with a puzzle game as the primary action mechanic. The common criticism is that the puzzle aspect is, effectively, Bejeweled although having only played that particular title a few times I associate the gameplay with Jewel Quest which my wife and I played for months (and continue to play, as you’ll see in a bit). The fundamentals don’t change because you’re swapping two tiles on a grid to make matches of three or more, but I thought Bejeweled lacked a sense of purpose other than to make the voiceover guy go, “Excellent!” in his deep voiceover-guy growl. Jewel Quest had a stupid narrative but augmented the gameplay with decisive tasks and challenges.
Puzzle Quest makes them both look like toddler games.
The way the role-playing elements work in the context of a puzzle game is that the colored tiles you match correspond to four different magic pools which are used to cast spells. It’s not unlike Magic: The Gathering’s mana system and in fact I am prone to referring to this magical power as mana. So those colors relate to an elemental power type (Yellow = Air, Green = Earth, Blue = Water, Red = Fire) which roughly correspond to the type of spell you’re casting. Also on the board are Purple tiles (XP) and Gold tiles (uh, gold) plus the all-important Skull tiles. As is typical in RPGs you get XP and gold for winning matches as a reward, but matching the XP and Gold tiles during the game adds to that total as well.
But the point of all this is that you play each match against another foe, who is using the same board you are. The object is to match skulls (which work like an attack) and cast spells to drain your opponent’s life to zero. But the trick is that all this XP and gold you’re earning by winning these matches goes to leveling up your character and buying equipment which can improve your performance in the battles. You can increase your Battle statistic, for example, which makes your attacks (Skull matches) do more damage by default, or you can increase your Fire stat to give yourself Fire resistance, extra red magic power at the start of the match and a boost in output from matching red tiles.
What makes the game challenging is that you’re using the same board as your opponent and taking turns, so sometimes a move you make will open up a devastating subsequent move for your foe. It adds an extra layer of strategy that is compounded when you factor in that matches of four or five tiles (which are sometimes difficult to come by) grant you an extra turn. Those extra turns can sometimes mean multiple attacks in a single turn which, if you’re clever, can mean the tides of a battle can be reversed.
And all of that just scratches the surface: The game features a sprawling overworld map, companions that can add bonuses to certain kinds of combat, optional quests, a citadel you can build that allows you to engage in mini-games that allow you to create your own items, train mounts, research spells from captured creatures and there is actually a functional if not spectacular story typing it all together. Quite honestly, I should have reconsidered my valuation of the game: Puzzle Quest is well worth $35. Put it this way: I’m maybe halfway through the game and I put 20 hours into it already since Wednesday evening. Granted, this was a pretty mellow weekend in terms of other activities, but unless you count Jewel Quest (I didn’t have stat tracking turned on while I was playing it so I can’t say for sure; the same applies to GeoWars although I don’t think it’s so much time invested as number of games played in that case) is the most time I’ve spent with a single XBLA game. I’m pretty hooked on it and I’m glad I picked it up.
I don’t want to give the impression that there is nothing flawed about PQ, though. The nature of the puzzle game mechanic is that to a certain extent luck plays a factor: You simply can’t plan for what new pieces will fall from beyond the top of the grid so occasionally you’ll get waxed because a normally good move results in your opponent getting exactly what he needs for some zillion-point combo. It can be frustrating to lose because your AI enemy was the recipient of a bit of serendipity. Also, most of the boss characters you face rely more on cheap tactics than anything else. In fact, it can feel at times like “tougher” enemies really means “cheaper.” Occasionally it feels like the old immature frustrations surface and you can swear the computer is cheating. This is never more true than when you have the move hint arrow turned on and every move you make sets up a super destructive combo for the AI. How convenient. The problem is solved by turning it off, but it still feels often like the computer has more “luck” than you, particularly in the boss fights. Since bosses also have access to spells and abilities that you won’t get for a long time if ever, this can get really annoying. The other mild gripe is that the item forging and spell researching mini-games can be really trying because they don’t involve any AI opponents but demand that you gather a certain number of matches of a particular type without running out of available moves. I don’t know enough about the game theory of the Bejeweled mechanics to say for sure, but it seems to me like it’s possible to be dealt a bad board and be doomed to fail from the start. In those cases there is no option to restart if things look bad, you have to push through to the end. Nothing irritates more than having one more type of match to achieve and losing out because a bad drop took away your plans.
Oh, and the most minor gripe of all: What’s with the subtitle on the game? “The Challenge of the Warlords”? Not only is it stupid sounding, but it has nothing to do with the game. Nothing. Completely extraneous.
The Rest of the Junk
By comparison, everything else I played seems dull and pointless next to Puzzle Quest. But there were some games and I’m going to tell you about them.
- Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland – I confess that this was on the Gameznflix queue just so I could work on my “Launch King” badge on 360 Voice. But I also like Tony Hawk games for the most part so I figured, why not? Well, it turns out you can’t go back in time with Tony Hawk. I played Project 8 and thought it was pretty okay (I ended up trading it to Goozex) but this game is ugly and annoying by comparison. It really annoyed me that I couldn’t figure out the wall flip based on the moronic and cryptic in-game description, but I only have that and a couple other tasks to complete before I reach 100 points and can send it back.
- Phantasy Star Universe – I’m really starting to hate this game. I beat the first chapter boss by finally figuring out how to use healing items in my inventory (have I mentioned that the menu system is flat out awful in this game?) but the reward was a chapter end that resulted in… the intro cinematic all over again? I guess they’re going for an episodic feel, but it makes me want to cut myself emo-style. In order to get the 100 points I’m looking for I need to beat two more chapters and I don’t think I can do it. I’m going to pop this game in one last time and see if the beginning of Chapter 2 suddenly lessens the pain of playing but I have a feeling it will be in the mail by Tuesday.
- Halo 3 – I spent some more time playing multiplayer which I’m enjoying. It’s much more fun when I’m playing with VENOM HD so unless I get some more friends that make it fun I’ll probably only drag this game out when he’s online. I’m still looking for someone to rock with through on Legendary co-op, though. Mmm… co-op.
- Jewel Quest Expeditions – My wife loves Jewel Quest. She played the heck out of it on Xbox and when I saw they had it for the DS, I had to get it for her for her birthday. It was only $20 and I bought her a bunch of other stuff, too, but it had to happen. We played a little of it vs. mode while waiting for a doctor’s appointment and it was just okay. I guess it was the single-cart multiplayer that made the options very limited but it felt short and cheap and neither of us could figure out why whoever won had done so. I’m prepared to give it a few more shots but I have a lot of better games to play on my DS and it makes me glad the game wasn’t $40 or something and had prevented me from buying some other things for her that I did.
- Kirby’s Canvas Curse – I’m still stuck on the last world in this game, but I had my DS on me all weekend so while we watched TV and stuff my wife would occasionally slip away to make a snack or whatever and I’d power on Kirby to try and find some of the coins I missed in the early levels on my first run-through. There is one in World 1-2 I can’t get to but I’m determined to avoid looking up the answer online. I decided I’ve gotten too reliant on GameFAQs.
- Yaris – I’m not quite sure what to make of this game. It’s a free XBLA title that is very, very clearly a marketing gimmick for the new Toyota Yaris, which is some hatchback sedan thing. It’s the one with the really surreal TV ads where the car has like these big guns and stuff that grow out of the engine block or whatever. The game is a sort of racer/shooter thing, kind of like a hybrid rail shooter? It’s as surreal as the commercials but with crappy controls and no clear reason to be playing other than that it’s free and it has the 200 achievement points available. It’s not terrible in the sense that it’s buggy or stupid, it’s just that it isn’t good and it’s so clearly a gammerical (not unlike the Burger King games from a couple of Christmases ago) you feel a little dirty playing it.
- Geometry Wars – I feel silly even mentioning this game any longer. I play it now and then maybe once or twice to kill some time or to do something while I try to decide what “real” game I’m going to play next. 1Up Yours called it a “palate cleanser” game a while back and that’s exactly what it is. I basically have no hope of grabbing those last 70 points so I play it just because it’s fun and quick and who knows, maybe one day the stars will align and I’ll have one of Those Games.
Demo Watch
I only played one demo last week, Clive Barker’s Jericho. I was kind of psyched for this game when I first heard about it but this is one of those games that the demo actually kind of hurt it. For one thing, the demo takes place well into the game and instead of just dropping you in and letting you wonder what’s going on with everything, they give you this sort of overview thing that gives away a lot of the early game in a cheesy and flippant manner. Then when they do give you the reins, the game is just a sort of generic horror-themed FPS that didn’t really impress me. I’m not sure I ever had this on my must-buy list, but it’s barely even a must-rent now. I’ll have to wait for the final reviews to see if the story carries it through (I am a fan of Clive Barker’s writing) but at the moment, it’s slipped way down on my list of games to watch.