Tunnels of Doom

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.

I can’t quite decide how I feel about the fact that I used Goozex to acquire the Fallout 3 Game Add-on Packs, which are basically discs containing the DLC extensions for Fallout. The discs themselves are no more expensive than the DLC if purchased separately (nevermind the MS Point tax), but since I got them from Goozex and they function identically to the DLC in that they install to your hard drive, I only need to possess the discs for roughly 55 seconds and then I can turn around and re-list them on Goozex at or near the exact point price I paid. My cost for $20 worth of DLC? $1 per disc and maybe $2.50 shipping on each to get them out the door. For the two discs currently in circulation, that’s $40 worth of game content for $7. My penny-pinching side does this little jig that looks like Gumby doing the Irish jig when I think about it, but my sense of justice kicks in simultaneously and makes me feel like I’ve gamed the system somehow and taken advantage of Bethesda’s good will in trying to get their add-on content out to the non-broadband-owning populace.

I guess my final judgement will be reserved for when I work my way through all that content. If it’s as solid as the Oblivion DLC was, I’ll probably feel a little guilty and try to make up for it by actually purchasing a copy of the next game they put out (Elder Scrolls V?).

I’ve pretty much been stuck back on Fallout 3 since I picked it up last week. I play mostly in short one or two hour bursts at night after my wife and baby have gone to sleep: Even with the sleep deprivation of having a newborn I can’t bring myself to retire for the night prior to the witching hour. And ultimately I find that my lifetime struggle with sleep as a constant interruption to my leisure activities has left me accustomed to operating more or less efficiently on a generous average of five hours sleep per night. Since the household tries to call it a night around 23:00 and I typically don’t have to wake up for the day until 08:30 at the earliest, that’s nine and a half hours for me to try and squeeze in a bit of shut-eye. If I doze through half of it, I feel more or less the same way I did before the birth.

Most of my efforts to this point have been focused on getting a character returned to the point at which I consider the game “fun” rather than “interesting.” Early stages in the game involve frequent trips back to whatever you establish as your home base to offload accumulated loot and repair the copious damage dished out by the wasteland’s various foes, and trying to advance in level so you can ultimately get some sort of reliable combat strategy going. Basically this means dumping points into some kind of combat or circumvention technique because you really can’t try to get through the game being a generalist. When I played through before I was a Small Arms expert who did massive damage in VATS with assault rifles and shotguns; this time I’m a stealth expert who can more or less one-shot-kill anything weaker than a Super Mutant Brute so long as I remain undetected in stealth mode before I fire. For the most part it doesn’t matter what weapon I use.

The rationale for this is to get to a point where I can appreciate the DLC, although I did run through Operation: Anchorage early on because I read somewhere that the loot was better served being acquired by a mid-level character. In many ways that was very true, and it in fact influenced the direction I eventually took my character. I thought the add-on was pretty cool, the snowy areas were a nice change of pace from the oppressive brownness of the rest of the game. I did think it felt a bit padded, like they had a pretty cool concept but they made each section of it longer than it really needed to be I guess so people who downloaded it felt like they got their money’s worth.

Anyway, the other game I put some significant time into was Picross DS. Basically it’s a puzzle game that owes a great deal to Sudoku but the resulting grids are treated as canvases for pixel art. Rather than determining a sequence of numbers within a set of parameters, the row and column heads describe a particular pattern of shaded coordinates. For example, a column may have the number 3 over it indicating that somewhere in that column there are three consecutive shaded cells. If there are two numbers, say 3 1, that means there are three consecutive shaded cells followed by at least one unshaded cell and then one shaded cell, all on that same column and in that order. From this you can deduce through process of elimination which cells are shaded and which are not. The result when you are done is some kind of pixelized art, not unlike a favicon in a browser tab. They start out simple at 5×5 but quickly get up to 18×18 and bigger which makes it much more difficult from a logic standpoint but the resulting pictures—which really shouldn’t be much of a reward at all but somehow totally are—are more intricate.

Before we get started this week, I need to bring your attention to a site: The Tunnels of Doom Tribute Page. Affirmative.

Anyway.

I acquired a means of emulating software on my DS this week. Among other things this will afford me a chance to have the device I’ve long craved which is a portable emulator not bound by the commercial confines of re-releases. Rather than waiting for someone to finally put out a DS version of Shadowrun for the SNES, for example, I can simply emulate it directly from the original cart’s ROM. This is acceptable to me.

In completely unrelated news, I also had the opportunity to try out a few new DS games this week. One of them was Scribblenauts, which is a sort of action/platformer/logic/puzzle game in which you type in various nouns and very often those objects will simply appear on screen and you can use them to solve the various puzzles at hand. Some of the tasks are straightforward enough, such as “Get from point A to point B.” Your avatar, Maxwell, will then engage with these objects sometimes in surprising ways in an effort to achieve the goal. What is interesting is that the game doesn’t seem to be fixated on a single solution that it wants you to stumble across but rather shows some of the most obviously clever programming I’ve seen in some time such that it allows for creativity in your solutions. Objects act in a particular way but it’s really up to you how to combine those interactions to solve the puzzles. It does have its quirks, of course: Anything this ambitious would. The control scheme for Maxwell is entirely touch-based and occasionally a bit wonky so you end up failing a level due to unexpected behavior rather than ineffective problem-solving. Still, it’s an original idea that works exceptionally well and I find myself wanting to show it off to people.

I also checked out Peggle Dual Shot which is, you know, Peggle on the DS. It works pretty well and I appreciated that there are a number of control mechanisms so it doesn’t force you to use the stylus. I played through the adventure mode of Peggle for the iPod and found it to be entertaining enough; there is an option to unlock all the Peggle Nights content if you finish the adventure mode here. I’m not sure I’m going to be committed enough to finish the game again, and of course the locked content curse strikes again. I wish someone could explain the rationale behind locking box-advertised content on game discs, especially content that isn’t tied to game play. Obviously unlocking upgrades or experience-based abilities is kosher, but like Castlevania X or Contra 4 there is so little reason here other than to shoehorn players into some developer or (worse) marketer’s idea of how the game should be played.

Perhaps the most important DS game I took for a test drive was Blood Bowl. Originally my excitement level for Cyanide’s adaptation of the tabletop game was sky-high but when the launch date came and went without a sign of the Xbox (Live Arcade?) edition, I was left shrugging at the triumph of a PC variant. I don’t play PC-only games, being a Mac user, so I had to hope they would get around to my platform of choice eventually. I did note with some interest the PSP/DS handheld versions but 15 minutes messing with the DS one at a friend’s house wasn’t enough to coax cash from my pocket. It fell into that weird nexus of a game that I need more time than a quick fiddle will allow to determine if it’s the kind of game I can spend a long time with. Many turn-based strategy RPGs are like this with me: It takes me a couple of hours to get into it and from there I can decide if I want to dive in full-bore and ultimately spend dozens of hours playing. That’s a tough sell for a trial run though. So I had my opportunity and I can say that at this point I’m glad I didn’t make the plunge. On one hand I want to support Cyanide’s dedication to the game I love, but frankly it’s a pretty rough game in terms of visuals, interface and pacing. Blood Bowl is pretty ponderous by nature but it never feels sluggish while you’re playing on the tabletop. Blood Bowl on the DS though feels epic even in single player mode where the CPU plays through an opponents turn pretty quickly.

It wasn’t just DS mania this week, I also returned to the well quite a bit for Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers, including a brief stint of online play versus Dr. Mac. Once again I was disappointed to discover that co-op, while making a pretty strong resurgence in the last few years, is still regularly fumbled by game devs. Let me spell it out as clearly as I am able: What I really want, 99% of the time, is online co-op versus the computer. Anytime a game offers a co-op mode but does not Live-enable it, I get stabby. Still, the game is enjoyable and playing online with one of my oldest Magic partners was wonderful (even if baby + Live = ill communication). I did lose both matches and Doc told me I should check out the black and green elf deck as it appears to be the Ranked match deck of choice. Since I’m trying to unlock 100% of the available cards, a feat which requires winning 17 matches with each deck, I decided to make that one my next project. The trouble is, I must be a terrible Magic player because I had to try half a dozen times against various different AI decks before I could make the deck work right. I can see it’s point: It contains a large number of relatively cheap Elf creatures and then a couple of spells which provide boosts for each Elf in play topped by a creature who generates 1/1 Elf tokens for every Elf spell cast. When it works you can easily end up with a board covered in 1-3 mana cost creatures that are anywhere from 5/5 through 10/10, often with Forestwalk and other useful effects. The trouble is, it has a gaping weakness in that it contains few or no flying creatures or defenses relying on getting its combo out so the opponent has to sacrifice his fliers as blocking fodder to keep from getting waxed. But the deck isn’t fast enough to get there without being pummeled by low cost flying creatures while your low cost Elves get locked up by some inexpensive defenses. I did finally defeat the all-green AI deck but it wasn’t easy since in some case that deck’s creatures can benefit from the cards that make the green/black work. I’m not sure how long my patience will last if I’m winning one in every six matches… times 16.

When I last compiled my Top 30 Games list, I put Bionic Commando at number 14. Obviously that classic NES game stuck with me so it was basically a given that I’d be involved with the resurgence they tried to fabricate for the franchise recently. Bionic Commando: Rearmed for XBLA was a well-executed re-imagining of the original game although I felt in some cases like they had turned what had been merely an interesting mechanic into a gimmick with all the challenge rooms and extra frills. I was less enthusiastic but still intrigued by the full 3D update but I requested it from Goozex anyway with a shrug and a “What the heck?” I managed to get through a couple of hours of the game and so far it’s not terrible but it does suffer somewhat from Capcom Writing Syndrome which is to say the writing plays double-dutch with the line between campy fun, uber cheese and eye-rolling hackery. But listen, I’ve ploughed through Lost Planet, Dead Rising and countless Resident Evil games so I can cope if the game itself is enough fun. The jury remains out, but so far I’m a bit concerned that a lot of the mood and feel of the 2D platformer seems to be absent.

And lastly I finally got around to re-acquiring Fallout 3 (on 360 this time) because I always felt like I had somehow missed the boat a little on that game. I mean, an Oblivion-like game in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting? How was that not a perfect fit for me? Which isn’t to say I didn’t like it, but when I played through it I felt very frequently depressed like the setting was just too oppressively bleak. Perhaps it’s becuase the game’s supposed dark sense of humor didn’t do enough to dull the edges or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I played through as a do-gooder so the contrast of my righteousness with the general anarchistic tone of the game was too much after a while. Whatever the case, I always meant to go back and play the game some more but never was really able to get into it. And eventually the 1,000 Goozex points it represented were more important than the potential for additional playtime so I traded it off. Now that I have it back I’m realizing that part of it was just the original level cap and the closed, end-of-story conclusion to the main questline. The game offers so much OCDRPG excitement with its leveling system that capping it off felt like punishment and the inability to continue to roam the game world after the end game was enough to sever my interest. Now that I’m back in and up to level 8 already I can feel the Oblivion-like spell being cast and the calluses worn by familiarity with the grim plot have done much to soothe my sense of despair so I can get down to just enjoying the play. It is a credit to Bethesda that they were able to coax that much visceral response from the game, it’s just a shame the response was largely negative. One other reason I have the game in my possession now is that I also have copies of the expansion content arriving presently from Goozex so I can extend the experience a little and see what stuff I missed because I chose early adoption and a competing platform.

Maybe you’re not aware but I have this other site out there in the ether which ostensibly chronicles the non-gaming portions of my life. Life, in this case, that has experienced a substantial sequence of changes since last we spoke and yet I have yet to update that place, content to let spiders move in and a cozy blanket of dust to settle. But I’m here and I’ll be honest with you, if the people who watched that other hamlet knew I was here with you instead of there with them they would probably be pretty peeved. I’m not sure what kind of measures they might take exactly, but I’m guessing they would wave their tiny virtual fists and attempt to hurt me in the only way anyone knows how to in this modern age where the physical proximity required for an actual beatdown is an endangered thing like Bald Eagles and honest Rock n’ Roll: De-friending and un-following on social networks. The joke will be on them, of course. Only you and I know that my true measure of worth is in fact my Gamerscore and they can’t affect that, now can they?

I was surprised to find that when my daughter was born and I had several weeks at home for paternity leave, I was actually able to play a number of games. I had fully expected to have to spend so much time… I don’t actually know what I thought I would be doing, really—soundproofing the shared walls in our apartment perhaps—but that wasn’t the case. Instead I found that a lot of caring for a newborn involves sleeplessly sitting. Now, it isn’t always the case that both hands can be completely free, for example to hold a controller, but the opportunity presents itself often enough that I found myself playing far more often than I ever thought I could.

Among the titles at my disposal were Mirror’s Edge, whch I completed again (this time on the 360) and then spent a few extra days working through some of the time trials which I found almost as enjoyable as the story mode. I’ve heard it said that time trials are in fact what the game should have been as they strip the crust of occasionally questionable combat away and leave the tender parkour-flavored center behind. Being a sucker for narrative and context, I can’t say that I explicitly prefer the time trials to the game itself, especially since the narrative in ME is a cut above the typical senseless excuses-for-action that passes for video game storytelling most of the time. However, I can recognize the inherent appeal of a game mode that takes the most fun aspect of the play (as opposed to the entire experience) and distills it, letting it age until sharp with a full bouquet.

I also dipped my toes into Chrono Trigger for the DS. I keep telling myself that I played the game in its original SNES incarnation and I know this to be true in that a copy of the game existed in my childhood home and I had a save file on it. My memory told me I had actually played through it and loved the game for all it was worth but that memory has never been my greatest asset and honestly before the DS port crossed my doorstep a few weeks ago I couldn’t have told you much about it except that it had a main character named Chrono who I had renamed Klive in my earlier playthrough(?) and there was, at one point, a sword-weilding frog. Playing the game via DS during various lulls in baby-related action and also (pardon the TMI) on the can, I recognized most of the sequences of the early game: The Millenial Fair, the faux chapel, the trial, the introduction of Lavos, the jetbike race. These all came back to me as if from the cold storage lockers of my memory but the game itself is so far recessed in the crevice of my mind that it’s like playing an entirely new game whilst suffering from unending deja vu. It’s not entirely unpleasant.

For a time I had moved from Mirror’s Edge back into Fable II, which had been my game of choice prior to the Xbox crash a few months back. It wasn’t the easiest thing to dive into after an absence due to the game’s occasionally overwhelming demand for full attention. I suppose the game can be played more or less on the rails as a straighforward experience but while I’m not always a completionist I do like to experience as much of what a game has to offer as can be reasonably expected. In this case much of the side questing, social interaction, exploration and minigame playing requires a lot of unstructured faffing about if you’re playing without some sort of cheat guide. I’m definitely not above hint books or FAQs, but a game like Fable seems to have enough built-in help to make it most unnecessary so long as you can keep your game plan at or near the front of your mind. As such, taking a quarter of a year off between activities is not really the way to go.

I abandoned Fable II when my wife persuaded me to rent the new Batman: Arkham Asylum game. The startling thing about B:AA is that it not only manages to successfully translate a comic book story (and a pretty competent one at that) into a video game, but it also manages to do what has yet to be accomplished to date which is make a Metroid-style game work in third-person 3D. What makes Arkham Asylum stand out most remarkably though is that developers Rocksteady really captured what is cool about Batman. I think it’s easy for game designers to focus on the combat prowess of Batman and ignore the “World’s Greatest Detective” aspect of the character. Heck, the comic book writers forget this aspect just as often. It’s not forgivable, I’m just saying it’s so easy as to be almost expected. But in Arkham Asylum the intellect of Batman comes through clearly and helps make the experience transformative as opposed to, say, putting a Batman skin onto Devil May Cry. The combat isn’t what I’d call sublime although it does have a particular charm and it fits the character well; what’s more effective are the tightly integrated stealth aspects of the game which are never clumsily mandated but actually provide a clear benefit. I would have liked to have seen a few more upgrades and gadgets and the final boss battle is a bit disappointing but I finished the game in under a week and then proceeded to plough through the (very welcome) continuation mode to complete the Riddler puzzles. There was little left to accomplish when I returned the game, but I still felt I could have happily spent more time in its world. Consider that my endorsement.

I soothed my loss after returning Batman by purchasing Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers on Dr. Mac’s recommendation from XBLA. I’ve attempted a few video incarnations of M:tG and have generally enjoyed them although none have ever really captured the full appeal of the tabletop CCG. I suppose Magic Online would be the exception but I don’t want to pay for virtual cards any more than I want to pay for physical ones so that option isn’t an improvement over the expensive but addictive game I grew attached to almost 15 years ago. Duels is sort of a compromise between Magic Online and a stand-alone game: It doesn’t attempt to obfuscate the game in any way like the strategy action game on the original Xbox did, but it doesn’t provide the full Magic experience because a key element of the game—deck construction—has been neatly trimmed away. It is nice to have a genuine game of Magic playable vs. an AI opponent if, like me, you find tabletop matches to be difficult to come by. For that reason alone I feel confident in my purchase of the game, which was only about $10 anyway. And it is true that the pre-constructed decks are solidly built and reasonably effective, plus as you win single-player matches with them you unlock additional sideboard cards that can be added or removed as you like which is a nice nod to deck construction. Still, I’m not sure that adding a full deck constructor and allowing completely customized decks from the relatively small pool of cards the game offers would cannibalize Wizards’ profits from other venues. I can even imagine a scenario in which they steadfastly refused to offer additional cards as DLC making the XBLA realm a small standalone subset of the game at large, but by providing a taste of the full range of activities unique to Magic you both entice new tabletop players and give those of us who long for a re-connection to an unfeasible activity enough to stay warm in the long winter of adult responsibility.

When presented with an opportunity to play games, I either seize it or I do not. In some cases, as of late, not wins out with a greater frequency and the explanations behind this are laborious and, for our purposes, irrelevant. Let’s make the most of the time we have, hmm?

I was sent a replacement for my inflicted Xbox a couple of weeks back, though I’ve had a relatively mild interest in determining if it is my previous unit—now restored—or if it is in fact an entirely new device masquerading as “mine.” In any case the box didn’t escape the cross-country transit unscathed as the gaping hole in the faceplate attests. I understand they sell these things—colored, decorated, airbrushed, what have you—separately, in a nod toward some sort of customization. But since this product sits in my living room along with my other consumer electronics and not in my bedroom plastered with posters of sports heroes and rock stars, littered about with discarded socks and other telltale signs of adolescent inhabitence, I can’t find value in fastening a small mural of Master Chief or Lara Croft to it. And I’m certainly not about to pay money to replace something that wasn’t broken when I sent it in. My principles are firm, but my reward for them is this broken hinge that now looks like a big hole in my Xbox.

Strangely, when I re-acquired my console my first instinct wasn’t to put The Force Unleashed back in the tray to finish up the game I had been working on just before it decided to flash its merciless red gaze upon me. Instead I put my replacement copy of Mirror’s Edge in and began working through it again. I’ve already done this once in 2009, on the PS3, but I picked up the 360 version for cheap on Goozex and once I put it in to test the functionality of the disc in order to provide feedback I found I could not cease from carrying it through to the end. I still cry in anguish every time the miserable Esurance-ad cut scenes kick in, rending my garments and crying to the heavens asking why they couldn’t have done these sequences in-engine, but the rest of the time I smile contentedly and execute my first person parkour with simple-minded glee.

What really surprised me was that this second-pass game took my attention away not from games I had placed on the back burner for lack of hardware accommodation but that it even drew me away from the PS3 crush I had been working on since just before the return of the Xbox I had finally acquired a copy of Valkyria Chronicles. Sometimes you can see a game and just say confidently, “I’m going to love that.” Valkyria was like that and I was spot on. The canvas/sketched/anime art style is sublime, the intricate turn-based strategy action is incredibly compelling and the maps are clear enough to avoid frustration but open enough to allow for individual strategy and style to be exercised. It’s really something. My only complaint is that it is very story heavy and laden with rambling cut scenes which, while beatuiful, are very jRPG-ish and mostly unnecessary. There isn’t anything wrong with them, mind you, the voice acting is tolerable and the dialogue is trite but inoffensive, it’s just that they are multitude and except in rare cases mandatory before you can unlock the next action sequence. As such I find myself waiting to play the game until I have a solid block of time to devote to it, and such blocks do not exist in my world at the moment. A shame really.

The one game that has been able to squeeze into my frantic schedule which involves a lot of preparations for my forthcoming offspring is the DS version of Chrono Trigger. I played the original back in my SNES days and found it delicate and succulent then though it somehow could not remain rooted firmly in my mind and I fear I may never have reached its end. It has found a welcome home on the DS and the fact that they’ve approached it without an excess of intervention, what I call the anti-Lucas approach, leaving the original intact unless you wish to add some minor additions via a “plus” mode. The one positive facet of having the game slip from my memory is I can play it with the barest of recollections, like deja vu, and am experiencing it almost entirely fresh as if it were the first time.

I realize I’ve been absent for a few weeks, but for one thing there hasn’t been a whole lot of gaming to speak of and for another many of my endeavours have prevented me from writing about what games I have gotten in. I’m not making promises about any sort of triumphant return here, but if I find a moment to compose a new Edition I surely will.

In the meantime I felt I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a most excellent find I have run across: A re-coded version of this site’s namesake, Tunnels of Doom Reboot. It’s written in Java so it cheerfully runs without any modification on Windows and Mac (and I presume any X11 environment with the appropriate Java libraries installed). I haven’t had more than maybe 30 minutes to play with it but I can say that it captures the spirit of the original game nicely and has some cool updates as well. I had a handful of minor issues with it, for one on my fairly newish MacBook Pro it suffers from some input lag. ToD is a turn-based game so that’s not too terrible but it is a little annoying. Also the lack of any obvious in-game tooltips or control descriptions means you kind of have to play—at least at first—with the included PDF manual open.

Enjoy!

Kyle Orland of Games For Lunch likes to say, when presented with a cinematic or cut scene that depicts action, how much he would rather be playing such an exhilarating sequence as opposed to just observing it. It’s a valid point. Ostensibly we—the game players—are here to simulate action-packed sequences via inpt methods, somehow a game that has to show you something cool because it cannot allow you to perform it seems like it missed a key point somewhere. I think the rule of thumb is that you can get away with pulling players out of the driver’s seat for short periods if you need exposition because even games that specifically set out to include conversational elements into the mechanics often struggle with a decent implementation, but if there is something that needs doing, you’d better find a way for the players to get involved.

I’m obviously thinking about this because I’ve been playing Metal Gear Solid 4 this week and as such I have a lot of downtime to think about the nature of cut scenes and non-interactive sequences considering I’ve put about 10 hours into the title and I’d be surprised to find that a full half of that actually required me to have my hands on the controller. Oh, and giving me a couple of buttons to push to change the camera angle or to flash some indistinguishable memory jog from a previous game now and then doesn’t count, Kojima. Just saying. There are times when these mental exercises are all I have to sustain me as the game I’m supposed to be relaxing with wallows self-indulgently in its own cleverness and awkward drama. During the game’s many interminable loading screens it anachronistically directs the player to make sure to take a 15-minute break once every hour. I find this amusing as the game itself has made quite sure to enforce this policy strictly.

But back to cinematics. I’m beginning to really appreciate the storytelling devices employed by games like Dead Space and BioShock where the story takes place via essentially the same mechanism which is like a radio drama acted out over the top of the essential game action. Sure it necessitates solid voice acting but honestly it really shouldn’t be as hard to come by as it seems from a lot of the PS1 era games that gave voiceover work in games its bad rep. Meanwhile you can avoid a lot of unnecessary game resources spent on elaborate animation renders, the player doesn’t get bored. There are two wins in this situation and no losses.

Please don’t think I’m one of these gameplay purists who disdains cut scenes on their basic premise thinking story is the unwelcome nuts in my oatmeal cookie of a game. Quite the contrary. But like films that have to stop everything and grind to a halt for 15 minutes so they can spell out to the audience what’s happened and what’s about to transpire, the premise of narrative entertainment has been butchered in the execution, and there are few patrons sufficiently famished to buy those awkward cuts.

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