Tunnels of Doom

Despite my insistence last week that I wasn’t done with Dragon Age, I found it difficult to really get into my second playthrough of the game, which is surprisingly in keeping with my BioWare experience. No one really considers Mass Effect or KotOR to be particularly linear but I find that the consistently pre-programmed framework for their games makes the internal deviations an insufficient carrot to dredge through the similar structures just to experience. Philosophically, I want to see what else the game offers, but practically I can’t seem to drum up the motivation.

Which, in this case, is okay since I have… other diversions. I’ve been playing a little bit of World of Warcraft here and there, though the physical realities of playing a PC game limit the amount of time I can realistically invest in it. Which may sound strange considering my console playing hasn’t really slowed since I became a father—at least not as far as number of days in which I turn on a video game machine. But the sleeping-baby-on-lap configuration that works passably for holding a controller is untenable with a keyboard and mouse. Mostly my few hours here and there have been devoted to clearing out my quest log (and level grinding in the process). Some of this has meant taking a pragmatic approach to quest abandonment which was something I was loathe to do in my first foray into the game. If a quest went green (low XP) I would still venture out and complete it for the pittance just to say I had cleared it. With nine months of perspective on it, I don’t feel the same sense of disgrace from quitting on a quest that doesn’t offer me much in the way of net rewards.

Since at this point, being about level 53/54, I’m approaching the endgame of the original content there are only a handful of locales that are of any particular interest to me from a leveling perspective and since I’m not playing long enough to bother with guilds or any of that kind of multiplayer aspect of the game like instances (although I think those are possibly my favorite parts of WoW, when they work out), this is probably it for me. It’s still enjoyable but I’m really getting the sense that I’ve gotten all of the single player fun out of the game that I’m ever going to get which means that for me to play WoW with any kind of gusto again I’d have to find someone or several someones who wanted to play, maybe even starting over from the beginning, and go through it with them. I had a dream this past week that I actually talked my wife into playing it with me. Reality notwithstanding, it was a really pleasant dream.

The other games I dipped into were courtesy of Goozex, although the principal one was Left 4 Dead 2 which I admit was sort of a non-Goozex-y acquisition despite them being pivotal. They have this new “Get it New” feature which allows you to trade in a greater number of points than you’d ever spend on an actual trade to get the game shipped still-in-shrinkwrap from Goozex or one of their partners (I got mine from Amazon.com). Since I had a backlog of points and nothing I really wanted to spend them on, I decided to spring for L4D2. Even after doing so I still managed to have some points left over to request Silent Hill: Homecoming and Infamous though only the former arrived in time for this post.

But I was talking about Left 4 Dead 2. There’s a weird dichotomy in my mind when it comes to this game. On one hand, everything that they did with it is welcome and smart, resulting in the game being quantitatively superior to the original: Melee weapons, the continuous narrative through the campaigns (such that L4D ever really manages), additional firearm types, new items, new special infected, etc. All good. My favorite adjustment from the original game though is that the campaigns don’t necessarily follow the formula established by the original in which you played through four chapters which were basically zombie-infested obstacle courses and then hit the chapter five finale where you would briefly fight through to a radio, call for a rescue and then fight a ceaseless horde of zombies for 5-10 minutes until the vehicle arrived, board and watch the credits roll. L4D2 doesn’t diverge that much but it does have a campaign where instead of waiting for rescue to arrive you have to collect gas canisters to fill up a car in order to escape (it’s a bit of a stretch realism-wise, but still fun) and a campaign in which you travel across an abbreviated map and then turn around and leave from the third saferoom through the entry door and work your way back through to the beginning, only this time in the midst of a raging monsoon (as an aside, does it feel a little early to have a game set in New Orleans feature a flood scenario so prominently?).

There is no other way to describe L4D2 than as an improvement over its predecessor. I know you feel the “but” coming: The problem is that there is just something about it that doesn’t quite capture the je ne sais quoi that I found in the original. Maybe it has something to do with the characters L4D2 uses: The original rolled up so many standard zombie movie archetypes into Bill, Francis, Louis and Zoey that it felt somehow right. The conceit of the game is that you’re playing a b-movie zombie flick and having those kinds of expectations met by the survivor characters brought that to life. L4D2 can be lauded for trying to develop its own identity but dang it, I need those stereotypes or else it feels too much like a game—this might as well be re-skinned as an action-oriented Resident Evil or Dead Rising game if it isn’t going to draw on the media it attempts to pay tribute to. And frankly I think a lot of the additions are things that really didn’t need to be there: Melee weapons are kind of a must but I don’t know why they have to replace the pistols; most of the new firearms are minor variations on the originals (there are now three or four types of shotguns and about as many automatic rifles, plus a better sniper rifle, an improved pistol that can’t be dual-wielded, etc). Other than the grenade launcher they don’t feel like they offer a whole lot other than back-of-the-box-bullet-point “variety.” Even the new special infected aren’t truly all that compelling compared to the original four, though I’m sure playing in versus mode as the infected will be more interesting than Hunter, Hunter, Smoker, Boomer, Hunter, Smoker, Hunter, Hunter, Boomer OH HEY FINALLY I GET TO BE THE TANK.

I’m not saying I’m about to run back to the original game and trade in L4D2 because it sucks, but it’s strange to find myself saying that for once I got more than I really expected from a sequel and yet somehow what I really wanted was less. A friend of mine also picked it up so hopefully I’ll have a chance to play some co-op/online soon and maybe that will change my tune a little.

The other new game I got was Silent Hill: Homecoming. Originally I had put the game on my wishlist because I have a habit that dates back to the year 2000 of expecting to play every SH game that comes out, despite it being more or less unwarranted since basically the original (a testament to how much I loved that game). For whatever reason I decided to do some research on Homecoming and found out that it actually got semi-decent reviews despite there being some nitpickers out there fixating on points I thought, once I learned what they were, seemed mostly unfounded. So I decided to give it a shake.

Now, my experience with Silent Hill games past the original on the PS1 is that, excepting Silent Hill 3, I play the first half dozen hours and then find something about them so infuriating that I turn them off and never return. Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill: Origins, and Silent Hill 4 were all this way and even 3, which I eventually finished, had to be completed in two discreet playthroughs because I gave up on the game halfway through the initial run. I still own a copy of the Xbox port of SH2 that I “intend” to finish one of these days.

Ready to hear what is probably going to be my undoing with Homecoming?

Save points.

Would it seriously kill developers to make games save-anywhere? Would it ruin the experience somehow? Okay fine, you’re going to make me find a save point. Whatever, you can be cro-magnon if you wish. Now, how about putting them a wee bit closer together than two and a half hours apart? Sorry, Silent Hill, but I’m not 16 anymore. I have a life. I have a job. I have a child. I can’t be expected to devote two and a half hours to your game every time I want to play it and I have zero inclination to re-play long sections of it until I get that magic block of time that lets me advance. And no, I’m not going to go on a 15 minute backtrack to the previous save spot, especially when you’re going to throw endless enemy spawn points en route. I was so infuriated with the game on Saturday morning as I had gotten up to attend to a fussy baby and was using the game to keep myself awake while I rocked her back to sleep. What I had intended to be a maybe 45-minute diversion ended up being a marathon session as each new room, each new area opened up without a stupid save point and the further I went the less inclined I was to just turn it off even though I knew that was the smart thing to do. When I reached the police station and got to the second boss in a row with barely any exploration (and therefore very few health items) in between, I realized that I had no reason to believe there would be a save point waiting for me even if I was able to defeat the boss and I was wasting twenty minutes restarting at the arbitrary pre-cut scene check point with every humiliating defeat (on the “Normal” difficulty by the way). So yeah, I turned it off. We’ll see if it gets a second chance (history suggests no).

But that does bring up the second gripe I have which is that even though Homecoming tried to fix the historically worst part of Silent Hill games—the combat—it’s still pretty crappy, relying mostly on broken dodge controls and attack animations that you can’t interrupt plus everyone’s favorite survival horror cliché: Ammunition scarcity. Bah.

Lastly, I’ve been playing Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time for a few weeks now but I’ve had a hard time figuring out a way to talk about it in Edition because, well, it’s really not a great game and I’m not even 100% certain why I’m still playing it. My best description is that it’s “stupidly compelling.” Deconstructing the basic simplicity of a Mario platformer into a turn-based role-playing format sounds kind of cool and interesting on the surface, but I don’t have any experience with the previous Mario RPGs so my lack of nostalgia makes me view the combat with a kind of baffled “what is the point of this” incredulity. Fortunately I pushed through the tedious opening tutorial section and by the time you retrieve Baby Mario and Baby Luigi (don’t even get me started) the game takes on a kind of Mario-meets-Zelda vibe in terms of the dungeon puzzles and, unlike Silent Hill, it has liberally spaced save points that allow the game to be chunked almost perfectly into bathroom-visit sized portions. Look, I’m not saying I’m proud to be playing the game, I’m just saying that I am.

Dragon Age was brought to a state of completion last week, although that statement infers a sense of finality that is not strictly accurate. I brought the game to bore on an ending, one of several I’m told, and then I set about with another one of my six characters to try again. I won’t lie and say that there isn’t a strong element of achievement hunting that motivates me and I won’t further the charade by suggesting that I won’t rest until all achievements have been acquired. Suffice to say that having watched the epic 25-minute credits roll at the end of the first playthrough, I wasn’t prepared to say that the game held no further appeal to me.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend after I had wrapped it up discussing the things that BioWare does right and it occurs to me that Knights of the Old Republic really nailed the formula from a combat mechanic perspective with the whole pause/queue process and since then the tweaks they’ve implemented haven’t been what I’d call improvements. Dragon Age is probably the best, but the Combat Tactics are poor substitutes for strategic turn-based control (especially of NPCs) and the single-slot action queue is ridiculously restrictive. I suppose they’re trying to speed up the combat and make it feel more fluid and dynamic but honestly I spent more time in Dragon Age fussing in the menu screens than I did with KotOR simply because I had to do it incessantly to babysit characters whose Combat Tactics weren’t working as intended and because some functions needed repetitive interaction to make them useful (even basic actions like “drink a health potion when you’re dying” which is ridiculous).

Maybe I’m on a Fantasy kick, maybe it’s because of last week’s Game of the Decade discussion, maybe it’s just my inner bargain-hunter, but for some reason I decided to take advantage of some free trial period offers and reinstall World of Warcraft this past week. At first, once the tortuous three-day re-installation procedure was at last complete and I had showered until the water ran cold in an attempt to cleanse my body of that wicked ordeal, I logged in with my main character and awoke, as it were, right where I had left off back in March. The problem was quickly apparent: When you drift away from a game over the course of several weeks and then abruptly drop it off your radar for nine months, during which you go so far as to have a child, you forget what the heck was going on. I wandered around aimlessly, shocked that after dumping hours and hours into the game earlier this very year I couldn’t remember basic commands much less what all this stuff was in my inventory or which quest I was working on.

After about a half hour of this I logged off that character and returned later thinking about how I had installed the game again to try out the free Burning Crusade sample so instead of getting back onto my main I created a new character, a Draenei priest. I wandered around that starting zone for a little while but starting zones aren’t terribly interesting to me and typify my definition of the phrase “grind.” But I gave it about an hour and then logged out. The next day I came back and hit my main again, determined to at least sort out what I would do next if I decided to start playing again in earnest. So after a bit of wandering I ended up back in Orgrimmar and happened to upgrade my mount to a Swift version at the urging of an in-game letter from an NPC and finally decided to head up to Azshara as it had my nearest incomplete quest. Of course when I got there I realized I didn’t know where the quest was exactly and all my carefully assembled Add-Ons were lost in the uninstall. So instead of getting involved in a frustrating hunt I decided to just wander around a kill mobs for a little while (mostly Scalebanes), taking advantage of my XP bonus from being in a protracted resting state.

Curiously, I found myself actually having a really good time.

It shouldn’t be surprising because at its core WoW is really an enjoyable game, but I think what happens is that through its incredible density it becomes sort of overwhelming and it becomes very easy to lose your perspective in the swirl of professions and quests and guilds and grinding and instancing and auctioning. A friend of mine said when I first started playing almost a year ago “It’s a really good game if you can play it casually.” He said this with a marked note of sadness in his voice. The implication was that he wasn’t capable of having a casual approach and later he clarified that he had remorse for the amount of his life he had sunken into the game. More so than any other game I’ve played WoW encourages players to dissect the systems within it so that they cease to become enjoyable aspects of a rich game but they become routes to conquest in a struggle against a sinister foe. I’m not sure whether it’s the punishing in-game economy or just the endless gameplay fueled by regular infusions of new content but somehow I’ve never seen a game broken down so thoroughly into formulas and shortest paths.

I’m not even saying this from some lofty position as if I were somehow immune to it: I fell full on into the trap and I believe it is only my carefully nurtured cheapskate tendencies that allowed me to not tumble all the way through. Well that and the fact that I can’t stand being “stuck” in any game for very long without needing a lengthy reprieve. But that’s why the game is both so overwhelmingly compelling to a lot of people and why I gave it up after such a relatively short period of time. I’m pretty sure it isn’t in Blizzard’s best interest to encourage a more casual style of play; the more people who have an obsessive approach to the game the fewer people who are willing to give up their $15/month subscriptions. As for me, I’m happy to oblige Blizzard with the occasional toe dip into the game but my thin wallet will continue to prevent me from being a regular subscriber. Simply put I don’t play any single game enough to justify an annual expense of $180, not counting the price for expansion content.

I finished Dragon Age: Origins this week (next week’s Edition will cover it in greater detail) and while I enjoyed it for the most part I kept feeling like there were parts where it reverted back to standard fantasy provisions that we’ve seen over and over again and which, at this point, I think need to just be put to pasture for a while. Not all of these are specific to fantasy RPGs though I’m thinking of that subgenre specifically.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés, which shows that in some ways we’re still basically playing Dragon Warrior I. Plus I have to point out this page for the BioWare RPG Cliché Chart which is fun but also includes (allegedly) a response from a BioWare rep who kind of takes the whole thing a little too personally.

1. The Arena
   To clarify, it isn’t that I don’t understand why these clichés persist in role-playing games, especially video game RPGs which are typically very combat oriented. In the case of the ubiquitous area battles you can showcase your combat engine and fill up a couple of hours of game time having players hack and slash with the barest of necessary plot development. But for the role-player that lack of context mostly serves to highlight the basic flaws in your combat system. I rarely—perhaps never—play RPGs for their dynamic fighting mechanics, rather I play them in spite of often awkward combat because I like the stories they tell. When you surgically excise the latter I tend to sit there grinding my teeth as I nitpick the former.
2. The Perfectly Balanced Attribute System
   I don’t want Intelligence to factor into how effective my brutish half-orc is at finding chinks in opponent’s armor. I don’t want Strength to determine how many spellbooks my mage can carry. I don’t want Charisma to factor into how good my thief is at sneaking. It should be okay to have a borderline mentally retarded barbarian and a physically frail wizard and an unremarkable, forgettable rogue. Trying to discourage min/maxing in single-player games makes no sense to me, so let me ignore stats that don’t matter for my character class and stop trying to make me well-rounded. Of course the corollary for this is that every game needs to accommodate each class: I should be able to be just as successful as a magic user as I can be as a warrior rather than having to always be some kind of spell-casting, sword-wielding hybrid assassin.
3. The Hero is the Guy Who Does the Most Damage
   Combat is an integral part in a vast majority of video games. Video role-playing games are no exception. But RPGs have for too long eschewed the potential drama of the non-combat resolution. It’s a tired truism that no matter what dialogue options you choose, no matter how high your Negotiation skill, no matter how many non-violent solutions you can come up with, ultimately 99% of your interactions result in either you giving someone cash or services in exchange for goods or information or you hit them with various sharp objects until they stop moving.
4. There is Only One Way to Do It
   There are few things more infuriating in games than having obvious solutions to developer-fabricated problems staring you in the face but having to jump through the sorts of mind-reading hoops that adventure games used to be famous for because some level designer deems it so. This applies to large set-piece puzzles (see the Resident Evil example from this GameSpy article) as well as simpler activities like, say, opening chests. Even the ASCII-based Nethack allows non-thieving characters to access chests via a brute force approach, although there is the potential for breakable items within to be, well, broken. But this is the tradeoff to the alternative which is having a particular skill (rogues) or performing some sort of elaborate series of steps to locate the correct key. Some games have allowed for alternate actions like forced locks but often these inexplicably rely on the same skill as bypassing them. In a way this is the counterpart to the unbalanced attribute system: Let characters be specialized but then allow them to approach every given obstacle from their own unique perspective.
5. The Stationary World
   Few things make a world feel less living and vibrant than one which never changes. Then again, like the Uncanny Valley, the closer you get toward a world that feels like it has its own pulse, the more noticeable it becomes when everything about an environment exists to accommodate the hero of some epic story. Games with no night/day cycle, shopkeepers who never sleep but stand in the same spot for infinity waiting for the hero to come by and give them a single moment of purpose, NPCs who only ever offer a single scrap of information and then simply repeat themselves like malfunctioning robots, all these things can be lovingly rendered in the most visually striking HD but they utterly ruin the spell of a game.

I’ve been having fun following the Game of the Decade series over on Crispy Gamer, but I have to say that I’m baffled by the result of the first round which was handled by a hand-selected panel (I guess to avoid having the final results be little more than a popularity contest). The initial selections, including the four games added by the CG readership via popular nominations and then a vote-off, were pretty solid I thought. I won’t detail the whole list here but instead I’ll break down the results after the panel (Game Trust) narrowed it down to 32. I also like that they divided the field into four divisions just to keep it interesting.

Koopa Division

1. Metroid Prime vs. 8. Super Smash Bros. Melee
12. Animal Crossing vs. 4. Katamari Damacy
11. Ico vs. 14. Psychonauts
7. Shadow of the Colossus vs. 2. Super Mario Galaxy

I’m not a fan of fighting games because they’re either these super-precise skill matches that I don’t have the patience for or they’re lunatic button mashers with no purpose and Smash Bros. is the worst of the latter. I also happen to think that Metroid Prime is a pretty significant achievement in game design so the choice there is easy. I don’t have much of a preference between Animal Crossing and Katamari, both are quirky fun for a little while but as far as I’m concerned neither holds a candle to Metroid Prime so flipping a coin I’ll say AC. I realize that Psychonauts isn’t a perfect game and there is a lot of love out there for Ico but honestly I never really got much aside from frustration out of Ico and I still think Psychonauts is criminally overlooked despite its near universal critical acclaim. Since I think Shadow of the Colossus is far superior to Ico, I’ll go with Pychonauts and then let Shadow represent Team Ico’s output.

My picks for the next round:

1. Metroid Prime vs. 12. Animal Crossing
14. Psychonauts vs. 7. Shadow of the Colossus

Alucard Division

1. BioShock vs. 9. Portal
5. Grand Theft Auto III vs. 4. Resident Evil 4
6. Fallout 3 vs. 3. Half-Life 2
7. Batman: Arkham Asylum vs. 15. LEGO Star Wars

Portal narrowly edges out BioShock because I have zero complaints about Portal which is as well-crafted and complete of a video game experience as you’re going to encounter in this decade or any other to date while for all of BioShock’s strengths it does have some notable weaknesses. The true travesty present here is that Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem was given a reprieve and included in the initial round via community demand but then unjustly pitted against Portal of all things and, well, you have to admit that Portal has a decent shot of being the literal Game of the Decade. ED deserved a better fate. I find it hard not to grant RE4 the edge over GTA given that I simply prefer Resident Evil and survival horror over sandbox games, but I have to admit that other games this decade have improved on what RE4 did and the game itself was primarily great because it took a beloved franchise that was getting stale and brought it into modern times. Given what GTA3 did for gaming in general in the decade, it’s hard not to go with it. I grant Half-Life 2 the win over Fallout 3 even though I probably played Fallout more because at their foundation Half-Life 2 tells a better story (more effectively) than Fallout. Both have their gameplay issues, but Half-Life 2 is the superior game by a small margin. As for Batman vs. Star Wars? I don’t think either game deserves to be here, really. Batman is a great use of the license in a Metroid Prime-style game, while LEGO SW is a great use of the license in a simplified platformer. Neither game is particularly revelatory and both are strong for similar reasons, I give the edge to Batman just on the strength of the extraneous content—which both games have in spades—which in this case is more compelling.

My picks:

9. Portal vs. 5. Grand Theft Auto III
3. Half-Life 2 vs. 7. Batman: Arkham Asylum

Chocobo Division

1. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion vs. 8. Deus Ex
12. Plants vs Zombies vs. 4. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
11. Lumines vs. 14. Peggle
7. The Sims vs. 2. World of Warcraft

The biggest struggle I have in the whole competition is Oblivion versus Deus Ex. Now, I put hundreds of hours into Oblivion and absolutely loved it, but it is hard to say that it is a better contender for Game of the Decade than Deus Ex that was so ahead of its time for so many different reasons. From the FPS/RPG hybrid that would later come back in games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Borderlands (or even Fallout 3 and, in some ways, Oblivion itself) to the fact that you can beat the game without actually killing anyone plus a brilliantly realized story that is far and away better than most of the current crop of “story-driven” games, it really was and is something special. Though it saddens my heart, I have to turn my back on Oblivion and say Deus Ex is ultimately more deserving of the title regardless of what my personal feelings on the matter were. Plants vs. Zombies is cute but no match for KotOR, and Lumines verses Peggle is like saying “do you prefer Peanut Butter and Jelly or Peanut Butter and Jam?” I’ll say Peggle for no reason other than that I played it more so it must be better. I guess. And I doubt any game that didn’t have a very strong case for being the top when the dust settles has a prayer against World of Warcraft which, regardless of your opinion of the game or MMOs in general, has to be on the short list since it’s second only to Minesweeper and FarmVille as “Game You’re Most Likely to be Surprised by Who You Find Playing.”

My Chocobo Division picks:

8. Deus Ex vs. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
14. Peggle vs. World of Warcraft

Bo Jackson Division

1. Halo: Combat Evolved vs. 8. Soulcalibur II
12. SSX vs. 4. Gears of War
6. Advance Wars vs. 14. Left 4 Dead
7. Rock Band vs. 15. Battlefield 1942

Fighting games again? I think the original Halo is good for what it did: Bring FPS legitimately to consoles, so I suppose it’s mildly worthy but at best a long shot. I’d argue that God of War which Soulcalibur beat out brought more to the table as a GotD contender and could have even claimed the spot from Halo, but given the options I’ll grudgingly go with Master Chief’s flawed first appearance. I similarly dislike being asked to choose between a meh racing game and a meh shooter that was mostly just a testosterone overdose applied to Resident Evil 4 but since I passed on RE4 itself I’ll have to give Gears the nod here. Left 4 Dead is a terrible addition in my opinion since even though it had some cool ideas and I had a blast with it, it never stopped reminding me that it needed a sequel or a whole bunch of DLC or something to make it more complete. Advance Wars 2 was better than the original and Jeanne D’Arc was better than them all but I need to give a shout to my turn-based strategy homies so I’ll say AW takes the title. As for Rock Band vs. BF 1942, obviously Battlefield did a great service to modern gaming by paving the way for big multiplayer action games but I think the decade will be more remembered for its plastic peripherals cluttering living rooms around the world than for a game that maybe showed what was possible to the next wave of multiplayer developers. Rock Band gets the crown. All in all, though, I think this is the weakest division by far.

My final picks:

1. Halo: Combat Evolved vs. 4. Gears of War
6. Advance Wars vs. 7. Rock Band

The Final Four

There’s no need to break down the elite eight so I’ll skip ahead to the final four (as I’d vote it):

Koopa Division: Shadow of the Colossus
Alucard Division: Portal
Chocobo Division: World of Warcraft
Bo Jackson Division: Rock Band

I think the shame here is that Chocobo is so ridiculously strong with Oblivion, Deus Ex and WoW while Bo Jackson is so weak. By itself Rock Band is a remarkable achievement and one that I think if you had described to me in 1989 I would have salivated over. But just ten years later we were already seeing the kinds of things arcades were doing (or had done and still managed to fail to make money) and I would have thought, “Moving that concept into the living room? Yeah, I can see that.” For all Rock Band and Guitar Hero and the like have done to make the last decade memorable for fake plastic party rocking, they’re really not bringing anything to the media space that wasn’t already germinating there in some fashion before.

As part of the “Are Games Art?” debate, Shadow of the Colossus certainly (and deservedly) gets presented a lot as evidence supporting the thesis. For this reason it deserves its place here, but as a game it suffers for its art because a lot of the play is, let’s face it, pushing up on the analog stick to move you from point A to point B. It’s an inspiring piece of deconstructive storytelling and and an effective use of the medium to evoke a mood without resorting to a lot of the other-format borrowing that passes for the same in other development houses, which does a lot to (hopefully?) inspire others to follow. And frankly not enough games bother with things like mood and tone and pacing. Still, games are meant to be played and since playing Shadow isn’t as fun as talking about Shadow, it’s close but still the third place finisher.

The great thing about Portal is that in many ways it does what Shadow of the Colossus did without even relying on the last trope Team Ico employed which is the unplayable cut scene: They evoked a mood and told a story without beating the player with any of it. Some games seem to be written for the least attentive person the developers can imagine and practically go so far as to write on the walls of the dungeon/castle/office building/space ship/whatever something like “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE FEELING DREAD/TRIUMPH/TENSION/VICTORY/DESPAIR/WHATEVER NOW.” Portal, amusingly, does write on the walls but it writes atmosphere and it writes the seeds of stories and lets you fill in the blanks. Like a wonderful horror movie that doesn’t show you the murder but shows you the other characters’ reaction to finding the body, Portal shows you without telling you. Plus, they do so in the context of a joyous blend of physics tech display, puzzle gaming and mostly non violent first person action that is never not fun to play. Just when Portal feels like it might be wearing out its welcome, the game ends on one of the highest notes in gaming and completes the experience with the most satisfying and rewarding end credits yet. It doesn’t feel developed or designed so much as expertly crafted.

Yet, just when you think you can’t help but say Portal is the Game of the Decade, you have to think about World of Warcraft. The thing about WoW is that it isn’t particularly amazing. Like Rock Band it is more of an amazement to someone from twenty years ago than someone ten years back. Then again, what Blizzard does is rarely amazing in the sense that they’re breaking new ground. Rather, they take established settings and formulas and polish the edges until the whole thing is so glossy and smooth it creates a different kind of amazement more akin to “Why can’t everyone else make games this good?” The differences between WoW and Portal couldn’t be more broad: You have in one hand a tight, perfectly directed experience that wastes no single moment. In the other you have the most sprawling, staggeringly massive collection of high-quality content that could quite possibly never ever end. People who played the open beta of WoW are still grinding through instances and filling their social calendars with raids, happily immersed in a game that cost them $750 over the past five years to play. A rich RPG adventure to play through by yourself, an enviable social experiment to play with friends or to meet new people, World of Warcraft is really the antithesis of Portal in the same format.

So which game best defines the decade?

In the end I have to say World of Warcraft. “Game of the…” discussions are about the past and I don’t think any game better defines the last ten years than an epic online fantasy that tapped into both the social appeal and the human disconnect that may best describe the early 2000s in the years to come. While Portal may be a better game from a critical standpoint and it better represents where I hope games are going, it’s hard not to say that WoW matters more and that it is a better representative for what game developers and game players accomplished this decade.

Now we just have to see if the CG readers agree.

I appreciate what BioWare is doing. Generally, I mean. What I’m saying is that those people are doing Good Work, capitalized and everything. But the one thing I find lacking from their experiences is a sense of player-driven character. Or, frankly, character at all. In Dragon Age they’ve gotten better about not merely offering you the Good Dialogue Choice, the Bad Dialogue Choice and the Greedy Dialogue Choice such that you can’t always readily identify which is Good and which is Bad (making them more genuine in terms of conversational decisions) plus there are other nuances like sarcasm, sincerity, dismissal, disapproval and other non-agenda items which can push the conversation forward. This is certainly a step in the right direction and quite a feat from a writer’s standpoint, but what I feel is left out is the character-based option.

Sure I could decide my character is really sarcastic and always choose the snarky retort but what happens when I’m in a situation that my character would treat differently? During the character creation portion I would have liked to have seen a section that allows me to define, for the sake of the game system, what I intend my personality to be. The BioWare Way, as it were, I think hopes that you’ll create your character from the choices you make with each dialogue tree but I find so often that the attributes I want to project on my avatars aren’t reflected in the choices because when I think about characters I imagine them with a level of nuance that isn’t possible with a handful of possible phrases.

It’s easier for me to think of BioWare games as super elaborate Choose Your Own Adventure novels than role-playing games. At least with games like Oblivion or even something along the lines of Portal where the silent or mostly silent protagonist is essentially a blank canvas I can ascribe certain traits to the character I’m inhabiting and nothing about the game works to dismantle that, but when presented with a dramatic choice in those games I have at most my extracurricular imaginings to provide the emotional context because events happen or not. In Dragon Age and its ilk I’m being given the illusion of influencing the event via my choices but these almost always boil down to some sort of binary decision. It is more compelling to me to imagine the sense of betrayal and outrage my character in Oblivion felt after finishing the Thieves Guild questline in Oblivion, even if it is never borne out in-game, than it is to be given the option to casually lie or impertinently gloat about my actions with the Urn of Sacred Ashes to the helpful scholar. I wanted to have my character be remorseful about it because I was remorseful about having done it. I chose to lie to him because it allowed me to maintain my illusion but in the effort to provide characterization BioWare stunts role-playing by accident.

I have another complaint about Dragon Age, but it’s less esoteric: The Codex system in the game is deeply flawed because you can’t scroll through the codex headings without marking each one as read as you scroll down but they don’t populate within the topic headings via any particular order so while you can tell which topics have unread entries, it becomes increasingly difficult to locate which entries are new once they begin scrolling off the pane which is quickly (I have like 250 Codex entries at the 40 hour mark). Factor in the way that not every Codex update adds a new entry as some merely update existing ones, and I quickly get to the point where I want on an intellectual level to stay abreast of the data being presented, in large part because it’s expertly presented and incredibly exhaustive world-building which I appreciate, but on a practical level I simply can’t. It’s one thing to spend a good 25% of your limited available gaming session time reading fictional history books, it’s another to double that amount because you spend twice as long searching through texts you’ve already read trying to figure out what’s changed.

In related real-life news, the baby has regressed from her earlier pattern of sleeping most of the way through the night and now wakes up most mornings around 04:00 and generally refuses to be put back to bed, insisting that she sleep only while being held. Since it feels particularly dangerous to try and hold her while I sleep myself, I’ve taken to using the Xbox as my means of staying awake until around 07:30 or so when my wife gets up for the day (often after having been up until two or three trying to get the baby to sleep in the first place). As such my console gaming time has been pretty significantly elevated from 6-8 hours per week to perhaps twice that, even if it means I’m doing so in a semi-fugue state of half consciousness and involves some careful and frequently uncomfortable contortions to hold the controller such that it doesn’t touch or disturb Sleeping Beauty. What suffers as a result is my handheld gaming time which I used to put in occasionally between various parental tasks or any stolen moment of downtime but now I’m so tired most of the time that when granted a ten minute reprieve I sort of sit slouched low in whatever chair is available and stare unfocused into the distance and make this sound at a low volume: “Uhhnnnnnhhh….”

The only time I do play DS or PSP is during my daily restroom break which means I play almost exactly 12 minutes a day. I got a little bored of New Super Mario Bros. so I decided to give something altogether different a try and I picked up Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword and played through the first couple of missions. I think I detailed my struggles with the Ninja Gaiden reboot (up through Black and including Sigma) before but suffice to say that I liked the idea of the new game but the execution was broken as far as I’m concerned because—and I realize I risk having whatever tiny scrap of hardcore gamer cred I possessed stripped by saying so—games that are so difficult that they require the sort of practice you might devote to learning a new marketable skill defeat the point of gaming. There was something distastefully elitist about Ninja Gaiden that made me effectively boycott the sequel but I thought that a DS game might be different considering the perception of the DS market. It turns out the game is better than the console game(s) on which it’s drawing its inspiration and, like Resident Evil: Deadly Silence, it is impressive to consider what they were able to fit onto a DS cart. Still, though, the controls are kind of imprecise to the extent that I feel less like I’m playing it and more like I’m learning to sew by murdering some fabric with a knitting needle.

It basically involves drawing various lines across the enemies that appear on the screen which is supposed to represent sword slashes. In truth it’s a clever solution to the control problem for a console-style game on a handheld, but the execution on something like this would need to be so much more precise which, honestly, I think could be solved by simply slowing the game down. Maybe this is heresy but I think games that are fast because the processors they run on are fast sort of misses the point of game design which—call me crazy—should be about what’s fun. I know everyone flipped out about how fast Sonic was after years of ponderously paced NES games but to me that didn’t make Sonic fun it just made it a tech demo. Mimicking things flying by so fast that you can’t make them out is interesting I guess but as with real life, when things whiz by or when something happens too fast for you to really react, it’s not an experience people relate with the adjective “enjoyable.” I’d prefer to have Dragon Sword move slower, not turn-based slower but at least slow enough that you could make the sword swipes precise and have them matter in terms of things like placement, direction and technique. Flailing on the touchscreen with the stylus is fun for a short period of time, but all action-y games that use the stylus end up feeling distressingly similar which is why I lean toward games that at least offer the chance for me to play with the D-pad.

Having depleted my supply of fresh games by mid-week—a feat which required the completion of Bionic Commando, an act I can wholeheartedly recommend you avoid at all costs—I was presented with the choice of either trying Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise again or trying to defeat the desert level in Valkyria Chronicles for the dozenth time. I went with Valkyria Chronicles and it took me another three tries to finally clear the level but I did manage to progress at last, some five months after I first attempted the challenge.

My problem in strategy games, and this includes non-video games like Blood Bowl or Warhammer 40K, is that I think my overall strategies are sound but I lack the calculative ability to plan accordingly for chance. Since almost every game simulates the uncertainty of strategic combat by including some sort of randomized element, I find myself regularly tripped up when the inevitable misfortune that is inherent in these games strikes. Let me give you an example from Valkyria Chronicles: In the briefing before the desert level they indicate that you may want to bring some long-range snipers to help clear the path for your foot soldiers’ approach. There are even two unit spots on an outcropping in the deployment map which are perfect for sniper units. So I dutifully deploy my snipers and start the match. During the round I use a command point to select a sniper and draw a bead on an opposing scout’s head and fire, which should result in a kill. Instead due to random chance the shot misses.

At this point the strategically sound thing would be to return the sniper to a safe position and continue moving the rest of my units according to my original battle plan, but my original plan assumed the death of that scout. Instead of accounting for the possibility that the sniper couldn’t hit the target (which, let’s be honest, was a 250 yard shot indicating he’s playing it pretty fast and loose with the whole “sniper” moniker) I now feel compelled to spend another command point on the sniper, move him onto an exposed bluff edge of his vantage point and try again. Success in these strategy adjustments is largely irrelevant because the net result is typically undesirable—in this case the opposing snipers surrounding the now-dead scout easily retaliate and kill my sniper meaning I had to use a third command point to send someone over to recover the wounded unit, a fourth to call in reinforcements and a fifth to bring the reinforcements into position since they were starting from the base. So in essence a one command point action ended up costing me five to recover from.

Valkyria Chronicles is an excellent strategy game because it doesn’t funnel you into its preferred way of doing things in an unnatural way. Obviously there are certain key strategies that will make individual levels easier to clear than if you run off on your own and load your deployments with half a dozen engineers or whatever. But it compensates for this by making each individual decision significantly more relevant than a handful of key ones as seen in other turn-based strategy games like Final Fantasy Tactics. The benefit of this is that it provides greater freedom for solving the game’s problems your own way; the downside is that you can make a lot of seemingly small mistakes before you realize you’ve gotten yourself in too deep to recover. When matches can take up to an hour or longer even without burying yourself one grain of sand at a time, it can be pretty frustrating to not necessarily know how things are going until you’ve invested a lot of time in a lost cause.

I still find the interminable cut scenes to be far too frequent and lengthy. It would be one thing if the story was rich and nuanced (which I believe it could be, considering the scope of the setting and the number of available characters) but instead the writers/designers chose to focus on a small handful of inexplicably underdeveloped personalities and ramble through a story that is neither intimate and personal to the characters nor broad and epic to the conflict. It’s an odd thing and for a guy who generally finds something compelling in game stories, it’s weird to find myself just wanting to get to the “good stuff.”

The problem with life behind the curve as described a couple of weeks ago is that occasionally events will conspire to leave you with practically nothing to play. In this case the games on my watch list that I’m most willing to spend my few remaining Goozex points on are not being offered at the moment and I’m lacking enough purchasing power to push myself up in the curve (for example, to request slightly newer, higher-priced items). So I purchased my first retail game this year (not counting gifts) and went out and bought Dragon Age: Origins, which is how I spent my gaming weekend.

My first problem with Dragon Age is that there are six different background stories to choose from and I couldn’t decide which one I wanted to pursue from the terse descriptions of each on the character creation page. So I made six different characters and decided I would try all of them. When all was said and done I went with the first character I made anyway (City Elf Rogue) but my progress has allowed me to begin to view that as a partially regrettable choice as I keep thinking back to the other characters I left behind as I forge ahead. My intention, taken for what it’s worth given my time availability these days, is to play enough of this game to earn all available achievements so in theory I will have to work through the game at least once more and probably put some time in on a third character as well (at least leveling to 20). That’s plenty of opportunity to try some other characters but I do worry that I may not have the motivation for continued play that I had with Bethesda’s recent epics and may instead end up with Mass Effect syndrome.

Granted none of that is a problem with the game, it’s actually of a player issue and even then you can hardly fault a game for being too interesting. Which isn’t to say Dragon Age is perfect, but the problems it has are relatively few and minor at that. Graphically the game is strangely unimpressive. It lacks some of the striking visuals of Mass Effect but then again it also doesn’t have as many of the glitches that game suffered from; more to the point the look of everything is sort of drab and uninteresting. It’s one thing to be the wild-hair-and-unlikely-clothing of most Japanese style RPGs but the other end of the spectrum seems to be this sort of sepia-toned blah that too many western RPGs think is “gritty” or whatever. My position is that if you’re going to have hyper-realistic graphics that ooze banality to give a sense of environmental oppression you need to fix stuff like articulation in the hand models and beards that clip through breastplates. I’m just saying, I had no qualms with the visuals in World of Warcraft because while imperfect they were stylish and frequently beautiful.

The other thing that stands out to me about Dragon Age is the fact that it has gone back to the Baldur’s Gate/KotOR style of dialog tree where your character doesn’t speak the actual lines and you select exactly what you want to say from the textual options presented. I think I preferred Mass Effect’s “gist wheel” system that allowed conversations to flow more smoothly, especially since all of Bioware’s games are about 75% conversation. There’s something oddly disconnected about having what amounts to a one-way conversation with someone despite them reacting to your telepathic interjections. Still, it’s one of those concessions to interaction you have to tolerate when you’re into games as a broader entertainment medium.

What I really appreciate about Dragon’s Age is that it feels very much like the kind of Saturday afternoon Dungeons and Dragons sessions from Jr. High, perfectly capturing that kind of classic fantasy setting where everything is just as you expect it to be and the “innovative twists” that set it apart are a sprinkling of semi-adolescent grit: Extra blood, political intrigue, adult themes. It’s hardly amazing, but for whatever reason it hits the spot.

My other project has been New Super Mario Bros. for the DS, which I played a couple of years ago when it was more contemporary. The recent buzz/fuss about the Wii version of NSMB included a lot of what I thought was revisionist history where people were saying they disliked the DS version for being soulless or other such digs that I presumed would have been leveled at the game during its launch window if there were any honesty involved (which I don’t expect much of really when it comes to gaming press types). So I had to re-visit the game to see if—even in hindsight—the critiques were valid. On second playthrough I guess I can kind of see what they’re saying: It certainly isn’t on the same level as SMB3 or Super Mario World, but it isn’t soulless or unenjoyable by any stretch and in fact I’d say it’s biggest flaw isn’t in the parts that really matter like level design (somewhat spotty in the difficulty curve but overall fun) or the mechanics (the few minor additions and improvements are welcome and even add to the fun) but in the relatively minor element of new power-ups. The super mushroom is fun but ultimately kind of useless since it can fairly readily be wasted if you encounter a pipe or passage that you can’t fit in just after you pull it from your inventory. The mini-mushroom is similar: It’s actually detrimental to use it since it’s really a tool and not a power-up (like a power-down I guess?). I also dislike how the game makes value judgments on which power-ups are preferable in terms of which it puts into your inventory slot: I’d almost always prefer a fire flower over a blue turtle shell, but I don’t have a choice.

With my completion of Fable II this past week I officially caught up with the glut of Xbox titles I had acquired from Goozex mid-summer before my Xbox broke. Granted, not all of those games ended up being completed (notably Kane & Lynch which I found to be tedious) but in any case I’m now kind of in a semi-looking phase where I do have a few games I could play so I’m not dying for something new but nothing that is on my plate presently really has me excited so if something better came along, it wouldn’t be unwelcome.

Let me back up before I get into the post-Fable realm and talk a bit about Fable II. I can summarize the game thusly: It offers you plenty of opportunity to engage in a wide variety of largely uninteresting role-playing activities. Fable II is a big game that feels very small, and by that I mean the way the game is divided up into various regions set apart by loading screens and existing in no kind of cohesive whole (i.e. there is no world map per se nor would it matter a lick if there were). As a result each region feels like a self-contained mini-sandbox in which there are a lot of things to do but once you start classifying your available activities you realize they boil down to four fairly simple categories and each activity is just a riff on one of them. The categories are: Fight Stuff, Social Interactions, Tracking and Numbers Fiddling.

The Fight Stuff part is where most of the questing lies and you also encounter random enemies as you travel around the various regions. The game’s combat isn’t bad necessarily but it isn’t good either and I found that for the most part you can win nearly every battle by spamming on your most powerful attack, be it ranged (Skill), melee (Strength) or magic (Will). Since specialization is wholly unnecessary I would flip back and forth depending on which weapon or spell I had acquired most recently and once you can afford the level 5 Inferno spell there is little reason to use anything else especially if you combine it with a low-level time spell first to allow the Inferno a chance to charge without taking too much damage. The variety and finesse of the combat system is cool in theory but in execution it seems like it’s appeal lies principally in the effectiveness of the game engine’s animation system and, well, let’s just say that animation shouldn’t be Lionhead Studios’ top bullet point on the resume.

But you will have to fight a lot to make it through the main story so the best I can say is that it’s never frustrating, just a little tedious so you more or less learn to ignore it as you go through. On the other hand the second category of Social Interactions is frequently frustrating especially without a strategy guide since the in-game cues are almost universally—and perhaps intentionally—vague to the point of near uselessness. Trying to figure out what people want from you so you can get what you want out of them is time-consuming and irritating and almost never yields enough reward to be worth the effort. In the end the bizarre AI logic of NPC interactions simply becomes too much to deal with especially if you decide to change your demeanor halfway through the game or you take a series of inconsistent actions for a short time for whatever reason. I found that as I tried to pull myself off my initial Saintly path I would perform some evil deed in the presence of others and end up with characters who had big loving hearts floating over their heads screaming and running in terror from me, blending sound bytes that suggested they wanted to flee from me and yet marry me at the same time. But again, none of it really matters except as a novelty.

The third thing you can do is Tracking, by which I mean wandering around either following the ubiquitous Glowing Trail which leads you exactly to your next destination as determined by the AI (making the games relatively low number of fetch quests dead simple but also completely pointless) or you can head off the GT track and look for “other stuff.” The other stuff is usually treasure but there is also an easter egg hunt using Gargoyles that you can engage in if you wish. I can’t really say one way or the other whether this stuff is really fun since my own inclination to engage in this type of trivial game-hours padding is directly proportional to my enjoyment of the game’s other merits (for example I did a lot of orb hunting in Crackdown and flag hunting in Assassin’s Creed because I liked those games but I certainly didn’t find all the jumps in Burnout Paradise and I didn’t bother with the collectibles in The Darkness). If hunting stuff down is your thing, you’ll enjoy this. For me, I found the simple act of walking around to be too awkward to have much patience for it: Fable II’s camera is sloppy and the run controls make you a clumsy, ill-controlled train wreck so I found myself following the GT whenever I needed to physically traverse an area and using fast travel as much as I possibly could.

The final aspect is Numbers Fiddling which means doing various mini-games in order to increase your stats. This is the shopping stuff, the job system, gambling mini-games and real estate manipulation. Some of it is okay: The gambling mini-games are reasonably fun for a short time and a couple of the jobs are interesting for a minute or two but of course Fable II wants you to do all of it to excess and it wears its welcome out quickly. What’s especially annoying is that a lot of these systems are tied into the other game elements in small but significant ways such as trading being largely dependent on your social standing with the merchants only, again, it’s not always completely clear why an NPC is having a particular sale or opening up a given option. It generally easiest to try to get everyone to like you but then again you can also make everyone fear you and get similar or in some cases preferable results. When it’s all said and done it hardly matters since you can get more money than you’ll actually need pretty quickly and the only real reason to engage in furthering your financial or experience needs is just to speed up the rest of the game or earn a few achievements.

If it sounds like I hated Fable II, it’s partially because in a lot of ways I should have hated it. Aside from the base problems listed above the main story arc is cliched and fairly drab plus it suffers from limp characterizations of the principal NPCs and has one of the worst ending sequences of any game since BioShock. Actually, BioShock has a downright revolutionary and brilliant ending compared to the eyebrow-raising dud that Fable II fizzles into. Which all adds up to an awful lot of negativity about the game. Somehow, in spite of itself, Fable II does manage to remain just interesting enough to be playable. The first 30-45 minutes of the game are wonderful, a cheeky sense of humor runs throughout which somehow works to match the tone to the game’s breezy gameplay mechanics and while each individual activity can be broken down into a larger recurring category individually there is an awful lot to try and plenty of options to play around with. I could never go so far as to recommend the game but if you liked the idea of Oblivion but found it too stiff and serious and felt it was so wide open as to feel rudderless you might find that Fable II is more your speed. For everyone else I’d probably say stay away—but, if you’re determined to play it, don’t be surprised if you find yourself shaking your head a lot and saying “ooookay…” but also not putting the controller down. I know exactly where you’re coming from.

Having finished Fable II I was left more or less with Bionic Commando as the only Xbox game left in my stash that was yet (mostly) unplayed. So I decided to pop it in and give it a go. Up front I need to make clear that this game in no way should be considered good. The flaws aren’t always immediately obvious, though. You can certainly pinpoint the game’s corny dialogue and sort of labored storyline but—hey—this is a video game, after all. As much as I’d like to say it was the exception, we all know it’s really the rule. Beyond that though it’s hard to tell what Bionic Commando is really doing wrong. The controls aren’t great, relying on contextual actions more so than dedicated mappings but they are responsive and precise which is an improvement from some other Capcom games this generation (I’m looking at you, Dead Rising). The level design isn’t bad although it does get repetitive once you start returning to Generic Post-Apocalyptic Street Scene or Generic Craggy Canyon for the second or third time. The combat doesn’t completely suck despite the enemy AI being lackluster and the enemy varieties being ridiculously limited. No, for the most part the game is what I’d classify as moderately above average in every sense that games usually get measured.

What’s really the most off about Bionic Commando is the nebulous sense of cohesion and—let me try to avoid too much irony here—purpose. In the end there really is no need for this game to be doing so much of what it does. It doesn’t need to have such a convoluted backstory; why not just try to build a narrative from the original NES game’s loose story and re-imagine it in 3D much the way Rearmed re-imagined it again in 2D? There isn’t any purpose to Spencer (the protagonist) to be the reluctant super-hero especially since the overwrought plot depends on him being decidedly not unique in his bionic capabilities. There just isn’t any logical or even gameplay reason to make checkpoints separate from save points or to have six or seven sections where you have to swing from “mines” which are really just balloons over frustratingly non-instant-death water. The contrivance of the pockets of radiation that create the linearity of the levels are unnecessary, the length of the game is far beyond what’s needed. I could go on. The point is they took a half-decent game and made it crummy by trying way too hard to make you think the game is more expansive or deep or clever or interesting than it was ever going to be. The bottom line is that the original NES game was fun because it was simply an enjoyable game: It was a platformer with a singular unique mechanical twist and that’s it. It worked on just that level. Rearmed understood that, I can’t fathom why Grin missed the mark so badly.

Aside from the Xbox games I also dipped back into Kongregate a little for reasons that I’m not completely clear on. I had shied away from the site for a while after I changed jobs because it’s very addicting but not the best thing in the world to be doing when you’re supposed to be earning your paycheck. I’ve mostly kept it to break times and off-hours this time around but I’m prepared to exit the site again if it gets out of hand. The game I spent the most time with was Toss the Turtle, which is a sort of physics toy/maze/puzzle/upgrade thing in which you launch a cartoon turtle out of a cannon and try to see how long you can keep him going. Aside from a loss of momentum which can be combated by maneuvering the turtle toward springy obstacles, using various bits of equipment like rocket packs and nukes, or shooting him with your gun to juggle him upward, you have to contend with various spiky obstacles that halt your progress immediately.

I was able to earn the 3,000,000 feet achievement after several hundred tries and I thought I’d share how I did it in case you were stuck the way I was: First, you need to upgrade to the tank, the missile and the golden gun. This is not an easy feat in itself but it can be done with a bit of patience. I found it helps to upgrade each step of the way rather than try to save up for the top model since each increment drastically increases your average launch distance to the extent that it boosts your payout per launch exponentially. Once you have the top gear, start by buying a chest bomb (you’ll need to do this for each and every launch; don’t worry $2,000 will start to be meaningless) and then fire the turtle upwards at about a 45° angle. He should soar up past the top of the screen into space about an additional 700 ft before hitting the pinnacle of the arc. Wait for him to come down and bounce twice: The first time he’ll bounce back up over the top of the screen, use this time to set up the cursor an inch or so above the bottom edge and just slightly offset to the right from being vertically aligned with the arrow at the top. On the second bounce he’ll get up toward the top but won’t actually disappear. As he’s on his decent wait for him to get into your crosshairs; the color of the background sky when this happens should be roughly twilight (between 800-900 feet). Then shoot him with the golden gun. This should send him flying back up over the vertical limit by about 1,200 feet. Let him fall and bounce twice again, making sure to only shoot him when his bounce momentum doesn’t carry him out of the screen’s range and repeat until you’ve used all 10 bullets.

It’s unlikely that at this speed you’ll hit any spikes but if you do your chest bomb will save you once. I was able to make it over 2,000,000 feet with a single clip in the golden gun and no chest bomb. The next 1,000,000 feet are a little harder, but at 2 mil you can relax a little: The payout is so high at this point that each time you don’t make it you can just load up on nukes and try again. I’d recommend not bothering to actually use the nukes until you’ve amassed at least two dozen but you’ll be surprised how fast you can pick them up when you’re earning over $100K per launch. To get the last million feet I used my last bullet from the golden gun to send the turtle over the screen and then hit the missile to get his momentum going a little more horizontally. Then I let him bounce maybe four times before I hit the nuke button. The reason is that at this speed you can’t really react quick enough to avoid the spike mines attached to the balloons so you have to more or less just angle your bounces around them. They tend to cluster about 75 feet, 150 feet and again at 700 feet so with four bounces post-nuke you ought to avoid them most of the time. Also if you get lucky and hit an ammo clip return to the two-bounce-shoot pattern until all the bullets are gone again. The biggest pitfall to avoid is waiting too long to drop the nuke: There is a delay between when you press the button and when the nuke effect actually takes place, if your momentum is too low or you have a spiked wall or something in front of you it may not be the quick save like the missile can be. If you want to ensure you don’t get to like 2,950,000 and then splatter on a bed of spikes you can also save the missile: Theoretically you don’t need it since it doesn’t propel you far enough to really make a significant difference in your overall total and may be better used as an emergency bail out. The biggest thing is to let your cash pile build up to a level your comfortable with (I decided on $1,000,000) and make sure to buy as many nukes and a new chest bomb after every unsuccessful run. My second best effort happened on a round I forgot to buy the chest bomb and I made it to 2,460,000+ feet before I found a spike balloon. If I’d remembered to visit the shop I probably could have saved myself 30 minutes.

There are, aside from the usual minor variations and exceptions that prove the rule, two ways for self-sufficient adults to play games: One can either be particularly selective about which new titles to pick up on or near launch day using previews, reviews and any number of buzz-tracking social mechanisms to determine potential enjoyment from an upcoming or newly released game or one can intentionally trail the release curve in order to maintain a steady diet of sub-retail priced software. Budget will play a significant role in either path, but I submit it is impossible to choose the lower-priced path without at some level playing a bit of a waiting game.

Obviously I fall firmly into the tail of the curve camp, using Goozex close to exclusively for new titles and supplementing occasionally with rentals or, rarely, a new game either as a gift or an uncommon purchase. As seen in the $60 a Month series, I have occasionally had the resources to spend extra money on games and that includes newer releases from time to time. But at heart I’ve always been more of the kind of person who plays quickly through as many titles as I can and that means I have had to make peace with sometimes missing out on the gaming zeitgeist. But it occurs to me that all you really miss out on by staggering your release time-frame backward six to twelve months is that sense of being “in” with other gamers who are all clamoring about the latest and greatest. BioShock is just as good now as it was two years ago and, conveniently, it sells new for at least 75% less than it did then but you won’t be party to the wave of exuberant glee that rippled through the subculture with it’s “Would You Kindly” mania.

Don’t let me try to suggest that this is an easy state to maintain. If you care at all about gamer culture (as I do) then you find it hard to resist the siren call of the holiday release season and it’s slew of tempting, tasty titles. My Goozex requests queue looks like a laughably improbable list of the here-and-now: Borderlands, Uncharted 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Demon’s Souls, Brutal Legend, FIFA Soccer 10, Dragon’s Age: Origins, Assassin’s Creed II. Collecting all these games in the next few months would cost me hundreds of dollars or thousands of Goozex points (I have neither). However, I have a back log of games from earlier in the year or even before that which I can acquire for a small amount of cash or trade: Saints Row 2, Call of Duty: World at War, Velvet Assassin, Prototype, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Overlord II. By the time I finish those, the crop that are sitting unfilled on my wishlist will probably be played out by the early adopters and ready to move on to their next thing, giving me access to my next in line.

The other effect of this is that I end up weeding out games I thought might be interesting but don’t hold lasting appeal to me outside the context of their launch hype. Street Fighter IV was once on my list but has since been dropped, for example. It can be had for dirt cheap now, but aside from the nostalgic push it had in my mind when SF4 was buzzing on every forum, there isn’t enough desire left to bother. The ancillary benefit is that I avoid $60 mistakes.

The idea of $60 mistakes came up this week as I was finishing Halo 3: ODST. I borrowed the game from a friend on Monday and played through it over the course of the week in short, maybe 1-2 hour chunks each night. I finished it Friday night which means all told the game was maybe 10 hours but I’d peg it more at about six. I’m not suggesting it was a bad game; on the contrary I liked it better I think than the trilogy-concluding Master Chief game from two years ago. But considering I had no inclination to a) play it again or b) engage in the online component, I have to say that if I’d spent $60 on launch day the way I did with both Halo 2 and Halo 3, I’d have been pretty bummed right about now.

I know some people get up in arms about the brevity of some single-player campaigns these days and I’ve even grumbled on occasion about certain games that were either obviously rushed or were incomplete but in truth I like that there are games out there like Uncharted and Halo 3: ODST that provide a few hours of entertainment and don’t demand more than I care to put into them. As I said I prefer to play a lot of different games a little bit as opposed to probing every nook and cranny of a few so games that are get-in-get-out are actually kind of welcome. I’d rather a game leave me wanting more than artificially pad its time-to-completion with repetitive sections.

Which is part of what I appreciated about ODST. At no point did it feel padded or repetitive, it had a story to tell and it told it using a nice blend of familiar mechanics and fresh adjustments. As usual, it was a Halo game that felt a bit like I wasn’t being let in on all the nuances of the story and only part of the problem seemed to come from the lack of subtitles on the in-game chatter. There is a weird disconnect with what I perceive to be competence on Bungie’s part to write a good story and a persistent difficulty in telling that story effectively in the context of gameplay. I mean, I got the gist, but I never really cared that much. Fortunately Bungie also makes a good shooter from a strict game perspective and there were plenty of enjoyable set pieces and fun times.

Since I finished ODST Friday night I had to find something from my archive to fill the rest of the weekend and I settled back into Fable II. I’m not sure why I keep drifting away from that game and coming back but I think it has something to do with a degree of analysis paralysis that plagued me a bit in other games like Oblivion and Grand Theft Auto where, when presented with a lot of options, I end up dithering around trying to get my bearings for so long that I end up feeling like I’ve played the game for hours and made zero progress. Some games combat this by at least offering a sense of achievement if not necessarily forward movement: Oblivion did this well. GTA and Fable on the other hand feel like they end up at a point where I say, “Enough, I’m just going to try to tear through the story missions because I’m getting too wrapped up in treasure hunts and side-missions.” At least with Fable II it allows you the option to just press on for the most part where other games—GTA IV especially—hounded me so much with background noise that eventually I gave up entirely.

I find it also helps me at least to sometimes go and grab an achievement guide or a walkthrough online not to make the play easier but to give me an ordered list of steps I need to take to accomplish certain tasks. For example in Fable I wanted to ultimately do the marriage action but as with almost everything in Fable II it’s a very fiddly process and rather than stumble through it for several nights in a row (remember I’m only playing an hour or two at the most per night these days) I was thankful to have step-by-step instructions to get me to where I wanted to be. Presented like that it’s actually pretty straightforward but sussing it out yourself isn’t intuitive.

I do notice about Fable II that, like it’s predecessor and like many, many games with morality systems, being Good is kind of a pain in the neck. It requires more patience, more finesse in combat most of the time, more ridiculous side-questing and more of the sort of upkeep tasks to keep everyone happy. Players who chose in these systems to go Evil almost universally get more devastating combat options, less concern about NPC happiness which translates into fewer annoying fetch quests and the like and the only price you pay is a sense that the game is preaching at you a bit. There is a point in Fable II where you’re taken out of the normal flow of the game for a time and you’re forced to take some actions that increase your corruption level. It occurred to me as I played it that my parallel narrative—the one that runs in my head alongside any game with the remotest amount of depth—could very easily accommodate this moment as a sort of breaking point: The once noble hero, loved and respected throughout the land, had a Bad Experience from which he returned changed. He’d now seen and done things—dark things—and his mind was splintered. His ultimate quest still burned in his soul, but his methodology shifted.

Whether by sharp turn of design or nefarious punishment (depending on your perspective) Fable II doesn’t allow you to do what Fallout and other PC-style games do and make arbitrary saves which you can stack up. Your choices are more or less permanent in the game and I’m so used to being a goody two shoes or at worst a noble thief that I’m reluctant to push into the wicked side of the scale on my first (and likely only) playthrough. On the other hand, the story that is represented by the opportunity does compel me and honestly I’m having a hard time really truly having fun as it stands. Maybe going Evil will turn the experience around for me a little. I can even see how it will happen: Following the return from the harrowing trial the next step in the Hero’s journey is to visit a prototypical wretched hive of scum and villainy. Where once he might have found the place repugnant and in need of salvation, he’s surprised to find that the disaffection he’s been feeling since he came back ebbs here in this place where ladies of the night coo from darkened alley and ruffians gamble idly in the filthy streets. He doesn’t mean to stay long, just take care of his business. In a moment of weakness he gives in to the temptation of an alluring harlot and finds himself robbed. A potent blend of righteous anger, guilty self-loathing and shameful vengeance leaves the whore dead on the end of his blade. Where once he might have looked at the scene as if disconnected from his body and run to the temple for pleading penance he instead stares coolly down at the stiffening corpse and feels a strange sense of peace. He decides to linger.

Ahem. Anyway.

I also played a little bit of Left 4 Dead in between ODST and Fable II which doesn’t bear a lot of mention but I did want to point out that there was a title update waiting when I launched the game for the first time in several months and found that the most noticeable change after the patch was installed ended up being that the in-game achievement tracking mechanism was broken and it no longer recognizes my previously unlocked achievements. It does somehow remember the counts for the cumulative ones and of course the achievements themselves are unlocked in my profile, but the utility of Valve’s in-game progress tracking is undercut with what I have to presume is some sort of bug. I’m largely over L4D at this point anyway, mostly just waiting for the sequel to drop. I was going to do some achievement hunting but this freaky bug makes me wonder if achievements are even working now.

At last I pushed through the end of Fallout 3 and I think it’s safe to say I’ve had my fill of that particular title for the time being. Technically there is still another DLC pack (Mothership Zeta) but frankly I need a break. One last note I wanted to bring up about Fallout 3 before I stop talking about it for a good long while is that I’ve been considering the choice to adjust the scaling enemy model from Oblivion into the somewhat-scaled but also genuine pockets-of-danger approach Fallout takes. In Oblivion the whole world scales to your relative strength: As you become stronger the world around you grows stronger as well so you are consistently challenged. In Fallout it seems they do some of this: There seems to be a class type set in various locations (a dungeon containing Ghouls, or an overworld area that spawns mutated creatures for example) and within that class there are relative ranks (Feral Ghouls up through Glowing Ones or Molerats up through Giant Radscorpions for example). As you advance you see fewer of the lower level class instances and more of the stronger which allows the developers to have themes within various locations but still scale based on the player.

However, Fallout also has certain areas which always contain enemies either of a particular strength level or, at the very least, there are a few select locations where a particularly nasty enemy or set of enemies will always be, regardless of player strength (I’m talking mostly about Deathclaws and Super Mutant Behemoths, although even the scaled Super Mutant-heavy downtown area is a reasonable example). In both of my playthroughs I stumbled across these sorts of areas by accident before I was either powerful enough to put up a fight or supply-ready to engage the foe. On one hand I understand this decision: A lot of complaints were leveled at Oblivion for artificially adjusting the challenge level because it led to instances where tough dungeons were better to visit early on since a lot of late-game enemies were more resource-draining than low-level ones (especially in terms of Soul Shards once you started using magical weapons). Which means the scalable challenge level meant combat was fairly consistent with the exception of stronger enemies requiring extra combat overhead (like collecting Souls or performing alchemy/repair to replenish your equipment). Functionally you were always “slaying a dragon” whether it happened to be skinned like an Imp or like a Minotaur Lord.

The downside of the Fallout model is that I felt it actually discouraged me from exploring since there was a point at which you had to weigh risk vs. reward. There are a lot of cool hidden quests in the game, many of which are more interesting than the primary game quests that are almost always found either through the main questline or in populated towns, but finding them is almost exclusively for the bold of heart (and the hotkey-quicksave PC folks) since it requires taking regular risks of death especially in the rarely-autosaving overworld. The downside of the Oblivion model is that there are rarely combat-based triumphs in the game. Even named foes are typically scaled to your level so at no point do you feel accomplished for a Davidian takedown: There are simply no Goliaths.

I’m not sure what the correct balance is: MMOs like World of Warcraft simply allow overpowered characters to visit areas that are beneath them from a challenge perspective but this does limit the intrigue of some of the instance storylines: I can attest that running through Shadowfang Keep at level 40 or whatever with a level 80 Shadow Priest was exceptionally boring. Perhaps a system could be worked out where a simple challenge rating was assigned to each area which was always relative to the player’s level: Level 1 overworld sections and dungeons would consistently provide minimal or basic loot for a minimum level of effort and would never feature named or special foes. Level 5 sections and dungeons might be reserved for questline-specific encounters that always took a huge amount of planning and resources but faced you off with impressive bosses and paid out huge rewards in terms of loot.

Okay, let’s talk about other games for once.

After finishing Fallout I picked up Halo Wars again (since it’s borrowed and I want to give it back sometime before the end of the world in 2012). As I was playing it I started to get this uncomfortable antsy feeling. It took me a while to figure out what it was. In case you don’t know, I work in incident response for a group of engineers at a Major Internet Destination Site. What this means is that I’m given a limited amount of resources and a variety of tools which take up a varying number of those resources. Then all day long I’m presented with a sequence of problem notifications to which I have to determine the severity, take some sort of preliminary action and ultimately determine how to use the resources available to me (time, documentation, escalations, troubleshooting procedures) to put out what I determine to be the hottest fire. Basically, my job is an RTS. But rather than make my job really fun, what it does is make RTS games feel exactly like work. I use all the same mental techniques when playing Halo Wars that I do all week long and I caught myself feeling that oh-so-familiar sense of frustrated exhaustion and I dropped the controller.

No thanks, this is not how I spend leisure time.

I keep coming back to RTS games because I really enjoyed StarCraft and Age of Empires II but once I identified that these games are very similar to my work I was able to figure out that I stopped liking them right around the same time I started doing this type of thing for a living which means I’ve been scratching my head over why these games stopped appealing to me for a long time. At any rate I think I’m content to let the genre go for now.

As a natural response to giving up on Halo Wars—which isn’t a bad game by the way, it’s just not for me—I settled on The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay as my next effort. I played the game for several hours over the weekend and honestly I didn’t really find it to be particularly fun. I wish I could describe my reasoning for more or less disliking the game but I find it to be remarkably difficult considering every complaint I have about the game could also be leveled at another game I’ve played only in those other cases I enjoyed the game in spite of the issue. For example, take the clumsy first-person beat-em-up sections: I played all the way through Condemned: Criminal Origins and it had even more frustrating first-person brawler elements as a core game mechanic and I found a way to finish that game. Then there is the awkward stealth elements which have no game elements to indicate your success or failure at remaining hidden (not to mention the bad guys can just decide to flip on their flashlights if they like) but then again I really enjoyed Call of Duty 4 and it had an even worse section of forced stealth and no real indicator of how well hidden you were. And then there is the frustrating gun combat which is made worse by the fact that the enemy AI is wildly inconsistent (they are dumb as bricks but they all have the most incredible aim and a sort of sixth sense for where you are on the map) but it’s hard to complain when I finished Bullet Witch and thought it was actually kind of fun.

The only thing I can really think is that I just don’t have any sort of connection at all with the character or setting. I watched about 45 minutes of Pitch Black in the background at some social gathering, edited for network television, a few years ago and that’s about it. I don’t actually know why I’m supposed to care about Riddick and maybe that’s part of the problem: The game could simply be written for people already familiar with the franchise and I just don’t fit the target audience. Or maybe it just comes down to a combination of the various elements making for a poor game, I can’t be sure. One way or the other I’m having a hard time feeling like I want to return to the game. On the bright side I swapped Halo Wars with my friend for his copy of Halo: ODST which at the very least sounds like my cup of tea.

Let me describe to you a conversation I’ve begun to loathe that occurs in gaming circles: Someone says “I love playing video games, but I have this girl now and she doesn’t like games. What can I do to get her to play with me?” Now, the subtext of this feels an awful lot like “My girlfriend gripes at me for playing too many vids, how can I trick her into the hobby so she crawls off my back?” Perhaps that’s not always the case, but it’s hard for me not to cynically attribute that as the motivation. I can’t help feeling like most often the notion is that if you get your significant other hooked on the same hobby you don’t have to adjust your behavior to adapt to a relationship, you can adapt your relationship to your activities. Then the ensuing conversation describes the lack of understanding gamer guys have of the fairer sex better than I ever could as they generalize and stereotype so badly it borders on misogyny citing ignorance as fact along the lines of “Girls’ hand-eye coordination is worse than ours so that’s why they only like games with simple controls.” What’s frustrating is seeing this same thread repeated over and over again and no one notices that it keeps coming up because no one seems to have much luck with it: By and large girls who will play games probably already do and those who might play some games cannot be assumed to like any particular suggestion. After all, how could you recommend a game for a friend of mine if the only information I gave you was “he’s male”? In this case fellas, I hate to tell you, you actually have to get to know someone to know what they’ll like.

It’s madness.

Anyway, I played some games this week. Let me tell you which ones I liked.

I’m still working through Fallout 3. I went through The Pitt DLC because I was getting burnt on repeating stuff I’d gone through on my PS3 playthrough. I thought it was pretty well done, especially since the end of the questline does a clever bit of storytelling head fake and the morality that you may have assumed all the way through gets turned on its head a bit. I was a bit disappointed with the inclusion of Yet Another Arena Sequence although it worked contextually, it still feels so old hat that I would have preferred a more clever turn to advance the story at that point. I keep thinking back to this add-on and Operation: Anchorage and thinking that many people bought these at $10 each. I wonder if I would have felt happy to have spent that money and so far I’m not sure I would have. I think The Pitt came closer than O:A did, but I hope the next two add-ons have a greater sense of scope. Truthfully I’m afraid what I’m looking for—still—from Fallout 3 is something that rivals any of the Guild questlines from Oblivion and I’ve yet to see it.

Other than The Pitt I made plenty of progress in the game but I’m starting to feel fatigue. I hit Level 20 but I had installed Broken Steel so I blew past it. I do appreciate the new Perks that were added as some of them are cool and clever: Unfortunately the game is really built to have Level 20 be the pinnacle and at this point I’m so overpowered that for fun I decided to execute an NPC in the Citadel and had the entirety of the Brotherhood of Steel trying to drop the hammer on me. It did take me a couple dozen Stimpacks but I was able to decimate at least 20 Brotherhood warriors single-handedly and I wasn’t even using my nigh-unstoppable Stealth Kill technique either. So at this point I’m basically eschewing all loot unless I absolutely can’t pass it up (which is rare) and trying to collect the final few achievements before I get to what I really started this whole thing to see: The Broken Steel content. The good news is that I have a few games waiting in the wings for me to finish up with Fallout so there’s no reason for me not to power through.

Speaking of other games, I haven’t used my PS360 for anything but Fallout in the last few weeks but I have had cause to flip on the DS a few times. I’ve been doing the Picross Daily Challenge thing which is very similar to the Daily mode that captured me for a month or so a couple years ago in Planet Puzzle League. Actually the two games while being very dissimilar mechanically have a lot in common and that may be why I like Picross so much. But aside from that I also decided to try out The World Ends With You which was an action RPG that got a lot of positive buzz about a year or so ago.

How can I describe my experience with TWEWY? Have you ever had a movie or TV show that a lot of people you know and trust raved about, and then you finally get around to checking it out and you loathe it to the extent that you wonder if you made a mistake and watched something similarly titled but completely different from that which was recommended to you? That’s what it was like playing The World Ends With You. I can’t stand this game. Never before have I felt as vengeful on a developer as I did toward Square Enix and Jupiter after an hour with it. I’ve played some pretty rough RPGs in my day but never have I played something so overwrought and full of trying-too-hard faux hipness. It’s like a mashup of a My Chemical Romance video, anime fanfic written by a 13 year-old and patting your head while rubbing your stomach. The principal mechanic of doing flaily things with the stylus to approximate spell casting (called inexplicably here “pins”) while at the same time doing a kind of simplistic pattern matching on the D-pad to control the top screen is not just unweildy and awkward but downright rage-inducing. The game claims to take over control of the top screen when you stop doing it but it penalizes you for not playing its stupid ping-pong match focus shift and never tells you how to let it control the bottom screen character which is what you really need since the stylus input acceptance is so touchy that I wished I was back playing Puzzle Quest on the DS in the bed of a pickup driving through a minefield for a less frustrating, more user-friendly experience.