Tunnels of Doom

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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For the second time since I acquired one, my Xbox 360 flashed the well-known Red Ring of Death. I had been playing The Force Unleashed and for the last few sessions there had been some sort of static in the graphics output. Initially I chalked it up to a crummy game or a weird issue with the disc but didn’t worry about it too much since the game was still playable.

The screen did lock several times which was a bummer but it wasn’t until after one of these locks and I kicked the power button to restart it that the boot up logo sequence had the static glitching that I became concerned. After all, one game being messed up is hardly unexpected considering 90% of all my games have come second hand. But there is something more going on when a system-level operation exhibits some sort of aberrant behavior.

Sure enough I finally got a lock and when I went to reboot it I saw the E 74 error message. I went immediately to Microsoft’s Xbox support site and followed their gimpy troubleshooting steps which included restarting the console (again) and disconnecting peripherals. After doing that I got several instances of the memetic Ring followed by a couple more E 74s and finally I had to accept that it was going to need to be replaced.

So I’m lacking a 360 for the next month or so while I get mine replaced; the biggest drag about the whole thing is that all the games I’ve picked up that I’ve had backlogged for a few weeks now were 360 titles. I had nothing waiting in the wings for DS, PSP or PS3 that hadn’t been back burnered for months or more. So for now I’ll have to try to get back into Jeanne D’Arc or Disgaea or Etrian Odyssey II, but I did head fairly quickly over to Goozex and put a few PS3 titles on there, hoping they would be enough to keep me distracted until I can get what I must now fully concede is my platform of choice back in working order.

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I don’t want to oversell anything, so let’s get the caveats out of the way: Pregnant women can and will cry at the drop of the hat. The principal tear-jerkers for the last seven months in my corner of the world has been menu planning and food acquisition. Also, commercials. Still, in most cases I can evaluate the scenario and say, you know, if I were to amplify my emotional response threshold to, say, seventy weepowatts, I could totally understand getting worked up over these things. So I mean it in the most sincere fashion when I say that it is a testament to the resonance felt by soul-bearing humans that this video game trailer made my wife cry.

I’ve never finished Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, to my great shame. I own them both. They’re sitting here in my nightstand and across the room is a connected PS2 with a memory card containing partially completed save games. My lack of follow-through in finishing them is largely a product of my endless fascination with new and shinier things which is why I’m playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and not these modern classics. Honestly I could take or leave Ico. I fully grasp the enthusiasm it elicits but in terms of playing a game, I prefer Shadow.

E3 was last week, so I probably followed gaming news more closely than I typically do. I listened to the daily Listen UP podcasts and was happy to hear most of the positive buzz about games (largely sequels) that I’m interested in. Assassin’s Creed II, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Uncharted 2, Mass Effect 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Modern Warfare 2, God of War III, Brutal Legend, Scribblenauts and Alan Wake all sounded like they were shaping up very nicely. Of that list I think I’m probably the most excited about Left 4 Dead 2 and Assassin’s Creed II because I feel like I never got quite enough of L4D with the first title but had more or less exhausted the content it had. I griped last week about the very un-Valve like iteration but honestly I’m hanging onto the original now for nostalgia which is something I try very hard not to do, in the past seven days I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m actually ready for a full new game but the truth is I’m never excited about the prospect of spending $60. Meanwhile Assassin’s Creed was one of my surprise favorites from that wash of high quality titles a couple years ago which included the original Mass Effect, Halo 3, Orange Box, BioShock and others. I recognized its faults without allowing them to interfere with my enjoyment, I can very honestly say I’m ready for more.

Contrast that with Mass Effect which I pre-ordered and practically begged myself to love, but found it to be good but not actually fantastic. I’ll play the sequel because I have enough invested to want to know what they do with the story and I think Bioware has earned a bit of patience on my part. But while I dove into the original with my mind prepared to revel in hyperbolic praise, I’m approaching this one more cautiously, as if the rabies of disappointment might surge again through my blood.

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Gaming this week was sparse, especially following the mania that was KublaCon week. I didn’t exactly burn myself out of gaming but we’re getting toward crunch time with the baby preparations plus I’ve felt in some ways like a lot of my entertainment gaming has been disappointing in a narrative sense lately so I went back and read a few books to try and scratch the itch for good storytelling.

Frankly I like getting story from games more than I maybe should. It’s pretty self-evident that game stories are well behind the sophistication curve from other media formats, but honestly my imagination can be really well served even in a mediocre story as long as I can insert myself into the plot. Games provide that dynamic element that I crave, but sometimes yeah I get burnt out on Saturday Morning Cartoon quality writing. It usually doesn’t last too long and it only takes one decent game to make me believe in interactive storytelling again, but after Prince of Persia (see this week’s Spoiler Alert for a rundown of how bad that one got), Fable II, Kane & Lynch, Resident Evil 5 and Half-Life 2, I just had to get a decent story into my head.

The good news is that so far Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is tolerable plot-wise and we’re planning on starting a short series of Traveller RPG adventures on Monday nights which should give me that interactive fiction boost I’m looking for. In the meantime you probably aren’t going to have 6500 words to read this week. I’m all about the “everybody wins” scenario.

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My wife, gentle saint that she is, practically had to force me to go to KublaCon this weekend. I recognize the incongruousness of that but the explanation is pretty straightforward: Cons are expensive. We’ve been pinching pennies quite a bit (understand that I’ve played all the games I’ve played this year to date based on Goozex trades excepting the purchase of Fallout 3 and the rental of Resident Evil 5) so my only resource to attend Kubla this year was a tax refund check. When it came time to decide whether or not to pre-register, I balked because I kept thinking about all the things that smallish amount of cash could buy for the baby. Nik eventually coaxed me to commit to one full day at the con so I would at least have the chance to go considering I missed DunDraCon for similar reasons.

Then she realized that she had finals coming up the week following Memorial Day and decided she wanted me as far out of her hair as she could get me so she more or less demanded that I attend a second day. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go, but I wouldn’t have a room, I’d have to pay full price for the weekend pass, drive back and forth across a bridge and I just felt like it wasn’t a “pure” con experience. I grumbled and fussed but she was pretty adamant that due to her schedule and the fact that the arrival of our child would probably preclude any con trips for at least a while, this was likely my last chance to experience one for a bit and it should be taken advantage of, even if it wasn’t some version of ideal.

I’m sure the irony is not particularly thick to note that it was one of my better con experiences.

I love the full-weekend cons with two night hotel stays and supposed game-all-night sessions but to be honest a lot of times those shared vacations end up being exercises in scheduling. It’s less “Gamer Paradise” and more “Executive Administrative Assistant Boot Camp.” You’ve got between four and nine people usually, all who have different eating, playing and shopping schedules and you’re trying to coordinate what games you can get in with who needs to be where by when and at what point you can squeeze in sufficient meals for everyone. It’s pretty exhausting and in the end I think a lot of the gaming sputters and putters along excepting maybe one big—usually pre-planned—event.

This weekend however we simply arrived each day sometime in the morning, sat down and played until people began drifting away. Each session was adjusted for how many people were available and interested and those who were engaged in other activities were welcome to stop by for a short while and join us or simply chat until their next game. As a result I got in more gaming than any con I can recall and it was all great, great fun.

I thought the one disappointment was going to be that with the inclusion of my restricted budget I wouldn’t have much in the way of funds for the dealer’s room. That turned out to only be partially true since the real setback was that I went in wanting to find a fun Zombie-themed game to buy and the ones I found were low rated and badly reviewed on BoardGameGeek.com. The game that was recommended, Last Night on Earth, was nowhere to be found in any booth. However, I did manage to get an incredible dealer’s room score as I found unlicensed Blood Bowl blocking dice at the Chessex booth and managed to find the last matched set (black on green). So for less than $10 I walked away with what I felt was a huge DR coup. There was really no way to count it as anything but a huge success.

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My expectations are peculiar beasts. Take, for instance, the odd contrast in gaming to conventional knowledge regarding in the cinema world: Sequels are always inferior. I’ve so long held this to be true that in many cases that “knowledge” spills over into other media and I start reviling follow-ups without having any firsthand knowledge of their content. In truth, many video game sequels are actually better than their forebears. This actually makes a certain sense because many first efforts in games are technological and mechanical experiments such that sequels can be and often are more refinements than anything else. Many games don’t have the same onus as films or books to “recapture” some nebulous attribute of the original (in many cases a sense of surprise and freshness that, by definition, cannot be recaptured).

Logically, I know this and yet I find I regularly stumble when presented with an announced sequel as my first thought is often, “Here’s where they ruin it.” Some games don’t carry this burden and I think it has something to do with my appetite for more of some particular title or my sense that there is yet more to be done with the systems or stories presented. Dead Space, for one recent example, feels like a game they could easily do more of and I would welcome it due to the broad reach of the setting yet unexplored. On the other hand I have nothing but skepticism for the upcoming BioShock 2 because I can’t help but feel that the original’s story and progression were complete in that package, a tidy bow put on top. Could they have improved BioShock 1? Sure. Should they try to find a way to shoehorn those improvements into some narratively-questionable rehash? I’m not so positive.

The good thing about my expectations though is that I’m willing to allow them to be tested. This is how I end up playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Fable II which both seemed upon initial evaluation to be better than I had reasonably hoped they would be. It’s how I end up loving something like Portal or Mirror’s Edge. Of course, it’s also how I end up suffering through Haze and Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, but you get some bad with the good.

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Classification is a tricky business although one I know humans in general have a difficult time resisting. Causing stumbling awkwardness the whole time is the regular occurrence of things which either defy classification or force the labels to grow ever more specific. It’s like trying to assign genre labels to your iTunes library: Is Primus “Comedy Music” or “Rock”? It seems a bit pedantic to create a genre called “Funk-Influenced Alternative Psychadelic Rock with Comic Lyrical Themes.” It depends also what your intended purpose is: If your efforts are focused on grouping you may find that while Johnny Cash is often stuck in “Country” music, you may find (as I do) that lumping him with Faith Hill and Garth Brooks feels like an affront to the man in black.

Which is all why the discussion of what qualifies someone as a “gamer” or “hardcore” has felt sort of forced or irrelevant to me. People seem to have a hard time classifying even themselves, and yet they take umbrage to the notion of those they deem unworthy encroaching on their preferred labels. I do find it fascinating to watch people struggle to accept the truth of their perceptions when presented with hard evidence that subverts it; more often I find humor when aggro youths demand credentials for someone’s self-proclamations. They’re like tiny gamer hall monitors, patrolling hallowed halls without pondering the footfalls of their predecessors, mired in the present as if it were the only thing of relevance.

Even in those cases I try to avoid the obvious scorn. It speaks no better of me to challenge them with qualifications that extend beyond their chronology permits. After all, no one expects that anyone born in the 1970s would have seen as many black and white films as one born thirty years prior. The only catch is you want to be cautious speaking with authority on cinema if you don’t have at least a passing knowledge of pertinent historical films. And in any case a touch of humility—an endangered quality on these here Inter-connected Nets—is appropriate: There is always someone with experience and context of greater breadth and depth than your own, you can lay a bet on that.

You quickly reach a point trying to compare similar enthusiasts where you’re forced to fabricate ludicrous sounding faux-words like “hardcasual” which have neither meaning nor legitimate applicability to any known human. The factor most of the classification-obsessed ‘net denizen overlooks is that classifying humans is trying to draw bead on a moving target, especially when you’re discussing leisure. Assuming an activity is preferable to some other activity, you can be relatively confident that a person will engage in it when presented with the opportunity. Given heaps of delicious, creamy chance, they will dive in and lather themselves with it as long as possible. Restrict that access and they will pine for it, wish that they could devote more time to its pursuit but likely won’t forsake it. You can say that someone who finds work commitments too taxing to engage in, say, regular golf games is not a “golfer” based on some arbitrary equation measuring games played divided by time. I have to question whether the distinction holds value; self-identifaction in this case feels like the test and the answer sheet stapled together.

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