Game Log - 4/28/2008

I did manage to get some gaming after all, though not much.

* Guitar Hero 2
While at my parents I set up my mom's new Xbox and we rocked out for a few minutes. What people say is right: Guitar Hero 2 on Hard difficulty is much harder than Rock Band's Hard difficulty. I need to practice.

*Condemned 2: Bloodshot
Got past the "shooting" stage that I was in. I was in the midst of a shoot out that I kept dying in, where enemies just kept spawning. Then, on yet another reload, I shot a few guys and a scripted event occurred to end the level. I don't really know what was different on that try compared to the others.

The subsequent level is back to quality bum beating form. The game still likes to throw parts at me that are significantly harder than what comes before or after. This causes me to get frustrated and quit, though usually coming back the next day is enough time between sessions to get me through.

That's all for the weekend. I might make an all-nighter of Condemned 2 tonight and try to finish it up. GTA 4 tomorrow!

Game Log - 4/26/2008

In the spirit of Stephen Totilo's Game Diaries on the MTV Multiplayer blog, I'll attempt to list what I played the previous day and give some quick thoughts on it.

* Condemned 2: Bloodshot

I'm about halfway through this now. The first few level I had a hard time with. I wasn't completely clear on the combo system, and like the first game, getting the timing down for blocks and hits can take a while. The most frustrating part is when you're bumrushed (literally) by more than one enemy. The combat system doesn't seem able to handle that situation. The best solution in that case is to simply let one of them attack the other and pick off the survivor.

The level I'm in now is a pure shooting level. I'm not entirely thrilled about it. The draw of the game is first person melee combat. The guns were originally there to offer what I felt to be a breather from the close combat, and almost a reward for progress. Beat your way through that level? Here's a gun and six bullets for some easy long range kills. But when the game becomes exclusively a shooter, the flaws in the mechanics become more apparent. There's no aiming reticle, so you have to aim down the sight to be accurate. Also, you have to find bottles of alcohol around and drink them so your aim is steady. It becomes more of an annoyance than anything else. I've read that most of the end of the game revolves around shooting instead of hand to hand combat, which is disappointing.

*The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

This game is really fun, I must say. Granted, the gameplay is exactly like Wind Waker on the Gamecube, but I'm starting to think that my problem with Wind Waker and Metal Gear Solid may just come down to the fact that the Gamecube controller sucks. It's clunky and the buttons aren't laid out in a way that makes it easy to reach with your fingers. Maybe it's just my hands. The Wii controls in Twilight Princess just feel a lot better to me. I can't really quantify it.

I wasn't sure about the more realistic art style they went with, but it's grown on me now. I can't help but think that Link looks like a young Shigeru Myamoto. With elf ears.

I finished up the second dungeon, couldn't figure out where I'm supposed to go next (north, but WHERE north?), and put it down. It seems easier than Wind Waker as far as combat and puzzles, but I don't mind that.

*Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Played for an hour during lunch at work and unlocked a new section of town to explore. The puzzles are still keeping me entertained, even the frustrating ones. I haven't been this happy about a game purchase since probably The Orange Box last year.

***

Unfortunately, family obligations mean I probably won't get to play anything until Sunday at the earliest. We'll see though.

A Curious Occurrence

I own a sleek Nintendo DS and a half dozen or so games for it. I had a lot of fun with New Super Mario Bros. and Tetris, but it's mostly been collecting dust since then. I bought Final Fantasy III for it but gave up on it after awhile. Recently, I've found reason to dust off the sleek handheld.

I was looking for a game to pass the time at work during lunch, and decided to pick up Professor Layton and the Curious Village. It's a great little puzzle game following the adventures of Professor Layton and his apprentice, Luke, as they try to solve various mysteries in the town of St. Mystere somewhere in Europe. The people of St. Mystere are pathologically obsessed with puzzles and brain teasers of various sorts, and they usually won't help you until you've solved a puzzle for them. They range from relatively straightforward to some that are true mind benders. Other puzzles are hidden around the game world, and there are also puzzles closer to the jigsaw variety, where pieces are scattered around the game and you find them in hidden places or get them for solving puzzles. I'm finding pieces of what appears to be a mechanical dog, and scraps of a painting. Not sure what it's a painting of yet.

The writing is excellent and there's quite a bit of voiceovers, which is rare for a handheld game. The art is a semi-cutesy 2D cartoon style. The town and characters are detailed and memorable, and the mysteries are interesting enough to keep me interested in finding out what happened.

It's great as a mobile game because you can do as many or few puzzles as you have time for (though you'll probably find yourself wanting to do more than you have time for if you're in a hurry). At home I have a 360, Wii, and PS2, so my gaming time is constrained as it is. Playing for an hour at work this past week has been a great way to get back into the DS. I was tempted to sell it, but the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog RPG from BioWare convinced me to hold on to it. I'm glad I did.

Your City Asplode!

Half Life 2 - "Follow Freeman" level


Call of Duty 4 - Charlie Don't Surf level

I don't know about other people, but I find urban combat settings in shooters to be among my favorite. There is something about being in a chaotic warzone, bullets flying, rockets propelling, soldiers yelling in the distance, that gets me much more excited than your standard corridors and rooms in most shooters. Perhaps it's the feeling of being a small part of greater battle that is exciting. The battles also feel much more desperate and frantic. Any moment, you could walk around a corner and see an army of foes approaching you. It's not like a battlefield in the 18th century where everyone rushes at each other across a field.

Some games like CoD 2 don't get that feeling right. Everything feels very self contained in that game. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (GRAW) and its sequel also didn't quite get the feeling right for me. The levels were too sterile. It was only your squad, occasional support, and Mexican rebels. There were no civilians, animals, or anything to make it feel like a living city. It may come down to something as simple as sound design. If I can hear shouting, gunshots, and other sounds of battle in the distance, like they're just over that wall there, I immediately like a level more than if they weren't.

A good non-game example is the end of the movie Children of Men, when Clive Owen's character runs through a battle in the refugee city looking for the baby. I couldn't find a good clip of it, but if you've seen the movie you know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, that's one way a game developer can make me like their game more.

Final Fantasy X Annoyances

I'm still really enjoying this game for all the reasons I listed previously. I have run into a few aggravating things about it though.

First off, unskippable cutscenes. As I said before, I like the cutscenes in this game, but I've now run into a few boss battles that are preceded by 5 minute long cinematics that I'm forced to rewatch when my party gets killed. Sometimes you can hit a button to cut short some of the dialog, but the animations still play out. I want to get back to the fight, not rewatch the same thing over and over.

Secondly, and I hear this is common to JRPGs, are the boss fights that are far more difficult than anything you've previously faced. At one particular boss fight, I was completely wiped out in one turn. It was so fast and brutal that I thought it was one of those boss fights that you're actually supposed to lose. That hope was dashed when the Game Over screen floated before my eyes. The same thing happened later. That particular boss had three different forms. I powered through the first two forms, but the very first turn of the last form destroyed me. Now I have to play through all three forms again.

Part of the problem I think is that the game is very forgiving during most of the regular exploration/dungeon crawling monster encounters. You don't have to worry too much about what characters to use. Sure, some are better than others in different situations, but for the most part you can brute force your way through the random encounters. The harder bosses, however, require a deeper understanding of the various status effects in the game and the various abilities of your characters. The game doesn't explain what Zombie means. I guess it expects you to either know from the previous games, or look at the manual, which is what I did. It's frustrating to spend 30 minutes on a boss then die because you weren't aware that the Zombie status, which is normally a bad thing, is actually required to survive one particular attack.

So those are my main gripes with the game so far. I've fairly close to the end now, and I'm ready to find out how this quest wraps up.

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

I bought a Nintendo Wii from a gentleman in New York State. Paid $300 plus $10 shipping. Went out and bought Twilight Princess and component video cables. Hooked it up. Basked in the comforting blue glow of the disc slot. Gloried in my ability to get news and weather from my gaming console. Didn't play any Wii games, but put in my Gamecube games.

Wait, what?

I guess I'm weird, but I was excited to be able to finally see Wind Waker and Metal Gear Solid in widescreen. Wind Waker in particular looked gorgeous. It really makes me want to play it again, which is good since I never finished it in the first place.

The Wii has the original Legend of Zelda, Zelda II, Link to the Past, and Ocarina of Time available for downloading. I'm seriously contemplating downloading them all and starting from the beginning. I think it'd be very interesting to chart the evolution of the series over time. If I did so, I'd have to make sure I didn't get burned out on Zelda. But it could be fun.

My current plan is to finish Final Fantasy X this week and start Condemned 2. Then we'll see where we go from there. I get the feeling that if I don't finish Metal Gear Solid now, I never will. How much does that prospect bother me? Hmm…

Do I Have Any Idea What I’m Talking About?

In addition to the many I already have, I've recently developed a new insecurity.

You see, my first gaming console was the Sega Genesis. I didn't own another console until the Xbox 360. No Nintendo (of any flavor), no Playstation, no original Xbox. That's a massive gap in my gaming experience.

For a while I played exclusively on the PC. X-Wing, MechWarrior, Jedi Knight, Monkey Island, Half-Life, and Elder Scrolls were my entertainment of choice. At the same time I never played Starcraft. For Half-Life and Elder Scrolls, I didn't play these until the hype for the latest installments in the series was at full blast and I wanted to know what the big deal was.

This is mostly my fault of course. When my family had a Sega Genesis, I mostly played the Sonic the Hedgehog games. My parents didn't have the money or desire to buy me the latest releases, and eventually I grew bored with it. I read lots of books, and moved to computer gaming when we got our first IBM Aptiva desktop with Windows 95. I was still too young to be able to buy my own games, and even when my parents gave me an allowance I had to hoard it for weeks in order to buy something I wanted (which quite often was Star Trek action figures). Since I showed little interest in having another game console, my parents never bought me one.

Lately I've been trying to get caught up on older franchises on the console side of gaming, but it's a nearly impossible task. It's made slightly easier by services like the Wii's Virtual Console, so I don't have to track down and ancient game system and cartridges, but there's still the issue of time. New games are coming out all the time. There are thousands of older games I've missed out on. True, probably only a few dozen are worth playing, but that's still a lot of games.

Here's a handy list of some of the games and game franchises I've never played:

• The Legend of Zelda (any except Wind Waker and the first hour of Ocarina of Time)
  
• Just about every Super Mario game except Super Mario Bros.
  
• Most Final Fantasy games
  
• Every other famous JRPG out there
  
• Most of the famous western RPGs (Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, most of Fallout)
  
• Metal Gear Solid
  
• Anything from Blizzard except for the beginning of Diablo
  
• Deus Ex
  

And many others I'm sure I'm forgetting.

So, many times I feel unqualified to comment on something game related. I've read a LOT about these games, so I can point to what other people have said. There's a great series of posts at The Brainy Gamer about how Zelda might be improved for the future, and I did leave a comment on one of the posts, but I really couldn't contribute much because I hadn't played most of them. Kind of frustrating.

So to the one person a week who reads this: do I have any hope? Will I ever be able to hold court with the gaming cognoscenti?

Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy X, and Cutscenes (and Misc. Bits)

I've gotten through the first disc of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, and to be honest, it's been a struggle to get through. The game has no tutorial to speak of and simply throws you into a room with several guards and expects you to figure out how to either evade or incapacitate them. I was stuck in this first room for about an hour before I cried uncle and cracked open the manual. Only then did I learn that you can sneak up behind guards, choke the life out of them, and drag them out of sight. I suppose this is my fault more than the game's but I've grown to expect console games to show me how to play it. Mass Effect had much the same problem.

Once I managed to get out of the first room I was able to get a little more comfortable with the controls. But they strike me as incredibly clunky. You use the analog stick to move, but you either creep or run, and there's no smooth transition between those states. It's hard to know where the threshold between the two is. Many times I've been sneaking up to a guard, only to accidentally lunge forward, alerting him and everyone within a half mile radius to my location. It's frustrating.

The Metal Gear Solid series is known for its convoluted storyline told through extensive cutscenes. I don't mind cutscenes, but the ones in MGS are pervasive to the point of annoyance. When I finish one ten minute cutscene, get two minutes of gameplay, and then have to sit through another ten minute cutscene, I start getting frustrated. I just want to PLAY.

Don't get me wrong. One of my primary motivations for completing a game is to find out what happens in the plot of the game. Unless I'm replaying a portion of a game several times, I don't skip cutscenes. They're rewards for getting through a portion of a game and serve to further motivate me to continue. The problem is when the game forgets that it's a GAME and not a movie. This is Metal Gear Solid's problem. It wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that when I actually get to play, it's an exercise in frustration for me. The irony is that the story is pretty good. Espionage, double-crossings, and sudden twists are the name of the game, and it makes me interested to know what happens next. I'm just losing interest in playing to find out.

The other annoying thing is that there are sequences that require you to backtrack through areas you've already been. I basically had to replay the entire game at that point in order to find a weapon for a boss fight. Later, while looking online, I found that doing so wasn't strictly necessary, but that was what the game told me to do. Backtracking through levels of a game is a sure way to make me not want to continue playing.

On the other side of the coin, Final Fantasy X has been a wonderful experience. I think I'm about ¾ of the way through, and as my first extended experience with a Final Fantasy game, it's been great. The characters are interesting, the story has drawn me in, and the gameplay itself is great fun. My experience with JRPG's is limited, but I find FFX's sphere grid to be more interesting than Enchanted Arms' or Eternal Sonata's boring method of leveling up. You're constantly leveling up as you play, therefore making each play session feel rewarding. The puzzle sections are a nice diversion, though it would have been nice to have them more integrated in the rest of the game rather than keeping them in certain sections only.

Cutscenes in FFX are spread out pretty evenly. They can be long, and they've occasionally devolved into melodrama, but the excellent gameplay between them makes me far more tolerant of them. It uses a mixture of in-game engine and pre-rendered cutscenes. The pre-rendered ones are gorgeous, and are truly a nice reward at the end of an extended series of dungeon crawls. Every time I see one, I want more, but the game wisely keeps them special by not overusing them. I don't know if this applies to every Final Fantasy game, but it's certainly effective in this one.

In other gaming news, I finally finished Gears of War's campaign. I started from the beginning and beat it on Hardcore difficulty with help of a few people online, then played through Insane mode with the help of yet another. The game is much easier, and consequently much more fun, when you have someone playing with you. I even went a few rounds online, but as expected it didn't really suck me in.

I also picked up Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 again. The developers released a new set of co-op missions for download, so decided to try them out. I forgot just how difficult those co-op missions are. Once I found a group of good people to play with, it was a great time. Those missions really require coordinated teamwork. Strategy is essential. The only problem is that strategy can only be formed by playing a mission several times in a trial and error fashion to figure out what needs to be done. It's still immensely satisfying to beat those missions.

Finally, I received Condemned 2: Bloodshot in the mail. The first game was a terrifying experience, and I'm looking forward to the sequel. I'm going to try to hold off on it until I finish FFX though. As for Metal Gear Solid… I want to finish it. I want to know what happens next. But I won't be surprised if it enters my pile of unfinished games. And will I even give Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 a try? Stay tuned.

Shadow of the Colossus - Final Thoughts

A month since my last entry! Well, I can assure you that I did finish Shadow and have a few thoughts on it. Some spoilers lie ahead.

The ending was as tragic and bittersweet as I expected, though there was a small glimmer of hope at the end. One interesting thing it did was give me control of the character during moments that most games would leave exclusively to cutscenes. While the outcome is set in stone as far as I know, there's a moment where you're being pulled down into a vortex. The game gives you control, and lets you desperately fight to stay alive as you're inexorably pulled toward your fate. It was a powerful moment, because I thought I could actually win and be reunited with my love. Sadly, this was not the case.

The battle with the final colossus was a truly epic experience. It was far larger than any of the others, and just getting to it was a harrowing, heart-racing experience. It probably took me around two hours to figure out how to beat it. Now that I know how it's done, it probably wouldn't take very long at all, but it required lots of trial and error at multiple steps to figure it out.

I suppose I have to mention Agro, the horse. It had previously been spoiled for me that he died a rather unexpected death, so while I was sad when that moment occurred, it didn't have as much impact as I'm sure it did for many other people. What I didn't know, however, was that he wasn't actually dead! When he limped back into the temple, I was truly elated.

One thing I was a bit disappointed in was that, even though there were a couple moments of interactivity, the ending was told mostly through cutscenes. I think I'm starting to get tired of the traditional cutscene in games, and hopefully I'll put my thoughts down in writing sometime soon.

Next post will be about my experiences with Metal Gear Solid, and that'll tie in with the cutscene thing.

Shadow of the Colossus - I feel so sad

I've been thinking about the fact that I feel bad about killing the colossi and how other games haven't really elicited this sort of response from me. When I'm playing I feel pretty gloomy. There are fun moments of course, but in some ways it's like watching a gloomy movie. Movies like A History of Violence are entertaining, but they're not particularly cheery either. You feel kind of sick watching some parts of it. More extreme examples are Requiem for a Dream or Schindler's List. Those are both all around dreary movies. You're more likely to say "It was a good movie" than "I liked it." I mean, who likes Schindler's List? Shadow of the Colossus is the same way. I feel like I'm watching a tragedy unfold before my eyes, but the difference is that I'm causing it to happen. I'm so selfish and grief-stricken at the loss of my love that I'll do anything to bring her back, even at the cost of my soul. I'm not passively watching people spiral into oblivion. I'm sending them there myself. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's as bad as Schindler's List, but I think A History of Violence is a better analogue.

The monsters are getting more and more difficult to take down, and it's truly becoming an exhausting experience. While it took me around 3 hours to beat the first eight, the last two took me nearly two hours to bring down. This contributes to feeling down when I play the game. At the end of the battle there's no elation, just relief that it's over. I noticed in the first eight that the difficulty levels were all over the place. Some went down quickly, while others took longer, so perhaps an upcoming battle will be more straightforward than the last couple. When I turn the game off I long for something sunny and happy to watch or play. I really need to find a Wii so I can play Super Mario Galaxy...

Shadow of the Colossus, Part 2

Well I'm about six monsters into the game now and I think I've got the format of the game down. It's basically a puzzle game. The puzzle is how to get on to the creature in the first place. The first monster was simple: just walk up to it and start climbing. The rest haven't been so simple. It's usually involved getting the creature to lower a limb. Occasionally I've had to bait it to attack me, dodge the attack, then quickly climb up the weapon or limp before it pulls up. A couple of times I've been unable to figure out what to do. When this happens, the game gives hints. So far there's a general hint, then if I'm still running around not getting anywhere, the hint gets more specific. I don't mind this much since I prefer to progress through the game instead of wasting time not getting anywhere. In once instance the hint was something that, to me at least, was not obvious or intuitive at all. In other cases, I'm able to figure it out and feel good about myself.

The fights themselves are still always tense and exciting. However, I still feel somewhat bad once the fight has been one. I have noticed though that the creatures are starting to attack me first more often, and that because of this I don't feel as bad when they finally go down. But then I wonder, has news of my exploits spread to the other creatures? Are they using a good offense as their defense? Then again, the flying creature that I had to kill in mid-air didn't bother me at all until I shot it with a bow and arrow. I imagine that would piss most people off.

I'm mostly okay with the controls at this point. My main source of frustration now is that sometimes when climbing the beast they're unresponsive. Depending on where on the creature's body you are, it will try to shake you off. Depending on how hard it's trying to do this, my character can do nothing but cling valiantly for his life. Since there is a limited time in which I can hold on, I've run into situations where once I grab on to the beast I can't go anywhere because it's shaking too hard. So then I plummet to the ground, usually surviving the fall, and have to start from the bottom all over again. I guess this is a realistic game mechanic, but when I have one blow left to kill it and then get shaken off, I get frustrated.

All in all though, I'm enjoying the game. I've been playing it one or two monsters at a time, since the fights tend to be kind of exhausting. There are sixteen monsters in all, so I still have some ways to go. There are no hints yet as to the motives of the disembodied voice that's tasked me with killing these beasts. I'm looking forward to finding out what's going on there.

Shadow of the Colossus, Part 1

After a lot of creative rearranging, replugging, and tidying up, I got my entertainment setup all arranged with the shiny new PS2 and the Gamecube I got for free a while back. Everything seems to be mostly working, but my TV is out of inputs, so I can only have the Gamecube or PS2 plugged in at a time, not both. I definitely want a new TV.

I was housesitting my parents' house this past weekend, so when I bought the PS2 I was down in St. Mary's County. I hooked it up to their TV to make sure it worked. I also tried playing Shadow of the Colossus for a few minutes. It actually didn't work at first. Insanely long load times, graphical glitches, and lock ups greeted me when I tried to play. But after looking at the disc and wiping off the strange goop I found, it seems to be working perfectly so far. Serves me right for buying the game use.

I've heard a lot about this game, almost all of it good, so I was anxious to see how it goes. When the game loads a cutscene plays showing the main character riding his horse through a treacherous cliffside path and approaching an incredibly long bridge while a rather haunting but beautiful musical score accompanies it. After loading a new game, the cutscene continued and my character wound his way into a sort of temple. He got off his horse, and then picked up something from it that I hadn't noticed at first. I realized it was the body of a woman. He carried her to what looked like an altar then cried out for the attention of some god or mythical being. The god, whose name I can't remember, answered and basically asked what this guy wanted. The hero answered that he wants the woman's soul returned to her. I guessed that meant she was dead, and that this hero was in love with her. The god said that it was impossible for mortals, but since the hero happens to be carrying a special sword, it might be possible for him. All he has to do is destroy the colossi roaming the land. There is a statue in the temple for each one. The hero agrees to do so, but the deity warns that there will be a price to pay. The hero says it doesn't matter and goes on his way.

At this point I'm guessing that this quest isn't going to end well. The god speaking to the hero has a rather creepy sounding voice. The way he spoke about the colossi seemed vaguely sinister and he seemed to be using the hero to serve his own ends. It's just a feeling I have, and we'll see how it turns out. Perhaps the deity is one of the colossi, and is seeking to destroy the others for his own ends? We'll find out, I guess.

After the cutscene ended, I was given control of the main character. Right away, I hit a snag. The direction the camera moves is, by default, inverted from the direction it moves by default on the 360. Pushing up on the analog stick made the camera go down, instead of up like I'm used to. I was able to change this in the options, however. The controller itself took a bit to get used to. It's significantly smaller than the 360's controller, and I felt like my hands were too close together. By the end of my time, however, I was more accustomed to it.

After a tutorial that felt rushed, I found myself facing my first colossus. It was a hulking beast with hooves almost twice my height and it wielded a massive club. It was pretty magnificent to behold from a distance. It shook the ground as it walked and created gigantic cracked footprints int he earth. As I ran towards it I realized just how huge this thing was. Unfortunately, I found myself starting to wrestle with the controls. The control scheme is different from any other game I've played before, so I had a hard time remembering how to jump, climb, and grab on to things. The main portion of the game seems to be climbing these giants and attacking their weak spots until their dead. I basically got trampled to death a few times because I couldn't figure out how to climb up the beast's body. After several tries I started to get the hang of it. There's a meter that shows how strong my grip on the beast is, which helped my realize when I was about to get shaken off. I also found a few platforms on the beasts back which I was able to climb onto to get my bearings.

Climbing this thing was pretty exhilarating once I figured out the controls. I found its first weak spot on its leg and slashed away at it with my sword, and after that was able to climb higher. In some ways it seemed like a giant, furry, walking building. It had hair that I could use to climb, but it also had the aforementioned platforms to use, along with what almost looked like carved stone. It's final weak spot was directly on top of its head. I climbed its fur all the way up and started attacking it. It actually managed to shake me loose and I fell all the way to the ground again. I thought I was dead but I somehow survived. I climbed back up and dealt the final few blows, bringing it crashing to the ground. A mournful piece of music began playing, and I actually felt a little bad about killing this thing. It hadn't done anything to me, I just ran up to it and started slashing away at it. I've heard of people saying they didn't finish this game because they couldn't bring themselves to kill the remaining colossi. I can already understand why.

The whole tone of the game so far is mournful and subdued. The hero is obviously grief stricken from this gir's death, and he's traveled far to get to the temple. The music is sad and mournful. The color scheme so far is washed out browns, yellows, and some greens. It's not a cheery landscape to ride across.

So that was my first hour or so with Shadow of the Colossus. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to play more. I'm not sure how many colossi I have to kill. Maybe eight to ten in all. I know I've read the number somewhere, but the exact number escapes me at the moment. Here's hoping it's a fun quest.

I bought a Playstation 2

Yup, I went out this weekend and bought me a shiny silver PS2. Along with that, I also picked up Final Fantasy X and XII, Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, Killer7, and Shadow of the Colossus. I also have coming in the mail Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, for the Gamecube. I've wanted to try out the Metal Gear Solid games for a while, along with some of the other franchises I've missed over the years, so I plunked down the money and am on my way to not-quite-retro gaming bliss. Can you believe I was still in high school when the PS2 came out?

In other news, I recently completed Tomb Raider Anniversary, the remake of the original Tomb Raider. It was fun, but it was interesting seeing how the series has come since it first started. Most of the levels revolved around a hub room, with several rooms branching off. To solve the main hub room puzzle, you had to solve the puzzles in the other rooms first. Tomb Raider Legend was much more linear. You enter a room, solve a puzzle, then go to the next room and solve its puzzle. Anniversary (and I guess, by extension, the original Tomb Raider) felt much more contrived and "game-ish." It didn't bug me too much though. They also dropped some hints that linked Anniversary's story with the story that began in Legend and, I assume, will continue in the recently announced Tomb Raider Underworld. There was also an unexpected but welcome bit of character development.

I honestly don't remember how this played out in the original game, but in Anniversary Lara doesn't kill any body until near the very end of the game. She kicks the crap out of folks a couple times, but comes short of taking their life. Near the end, though, she finally has to kill a man to continue on her quest. After she does, she realizes what she's done and is horrified, and tries to wipe her hands off. She can't wipe the blood off though. They really nailed her animation and facial expressions when all this is going on. Contrast this with Tomb Raider Legend, where the first enemy she meets is a faceless mercenary she casually guns down. I'm wondering if they'll touch on this in the next game.

Anyway, my plan now is to try Shadow of the Colossus and write about it here as I go along. Once I finish that I'll start on Metal Gear Solid, and then maybe Final Fantasy X. I don't want to play all the games in each series in a row or else I'm liable to get tired of them. It should be interesting.

An Hour With World of Warcraft

My sister has been having persistent issues with WoW such as Blue Screens of Death, crashes to the desktop, etc. At this point I think it has to do with the particular combination of hardware in her computer, since no amount of software updates have managed to take care of it. The annoying thing about them is that the problems never seem to happen immediately. My sister plays for an hour or more, and then it will suddenly crash. It's hard to test if my ministrations have had any effect. A few days ago, I went over to her house to take another crack at the problem. Instead of trying some things and then leaving immediately, I decided to try playing and see if I could reproduce the problem. The added bonus to this was that it kept me from having to help my sister with frantic preparations for a Christmas party the day after.

My sister has commented on the fact that I seem to know a decent amount about the game even though I had never played. This is because of the massive number of gaming sites I read. I'm bound to pick things up as time goes on. I've also learned things just listening to my sister talk about the game. But as with any game, you have to play to really be able to talk about it. At least now I can say I've played it.

I rushed through the character creation process because I just wanted to get in and start playing. I chose to play as a Tauren, a race that looks like a bunch of Minotaurs. I pretty much chose them because I had never heard of them while reading things about the game. Since I rushed through the screens, I missed the part that let me choose my class, so I ended up being a straight up warrior. My guy had a big two handed hammer on his back, which I figured I could live with. After a short, though unskippable, cutscene describing the Taurens, I found myself in the middle of a small village made up of tents with various merchants inside. Guards wandered around, along with other new and low-level characters like me. In front of me was another Tauren with far more elaborate clothing than what I was wearing. He also happened to have a gold exclamation point floating above his head. I figured that this meant I could talk or interact with him in some way. I was right, and he gave me my first quest!

As far as RPG quests go, this was about as stereotypical as you could get. Bring back seven feathers and seven of something else from the creatures wandering the nearby plain. I don't remember what they were called, but it doesn't really matter. The first thing I think is "Why seven?" Is that a special number? Why not ten? Or fifteen? It seemed somewhat arbitrary. So I go forth from the village, ready to pillage the countryside. I encounter my first creature and attack. My first encounter with combat in the game was less than satisfying. The animations were relatively simple, and there was no sense of weight or impact when you hit your foe. It seemed to be somewhat turn based since I would attack, then the creature, then me again, and so on. He fell beneath the blows of my hammer nonetheless and I searched its corpse for the items I needed. Yay, a feather! But not the other item I needed (I can't remember what else I was supposed to find). But I did get a couple cracked eggs! So I needed to kill more than just seven. I understood right away that this was a grind. Keep killing hapless monsters until I get what I need and, hopefully, level up in the process.

Eventually I killed enough creatures to get what I needed and headed back to the village. The guy was pleased and let me choose a piece of armor for myself. It seemed like a pretty good upgrade, and he had another quest for me. Kill ten cougars and bring back their furs! Ugh. Ok. So I went and did that. At one point my health was somewhat low, and a person with a higher level druid character wandered by and healed me. I thought that was nice of him. He had nothing to gain by it as far as I knew. I brought back the required number of furs and got another piece of armor. I was given a new quest to go find a missing woman who had wandered from the village.

Instead of following through with that right away, I started exploring the village and selling the various bits of crap I had accumulated from my monster massacre. I was able to get a few nice weapons. I also saw several characters wandering around with the gold exclamation point floating above their head, so I got a few more quests. There was another kill this many of that quest, but one person wanted me to deliver a package to a town to the north. Another person wanted me to go speak to a hermit to begin my rite of passage in the tribe. So I had a few options available to me now. I started off after the missing woman and found her nearby at a well. I walked back to the quest giver, but apparently I didn't read carefully when I was talking to her and was supposed to give him a pitcher of water. So I walked back to the old woman, got the pitcher, and walked back and delivered it.

The first couple of quests were less than inspiring, but once I finished the missing woman quest I started to get sucked in more. I began looking for the village to the north to deliver my package. While wandering the countryside I killed random beasts that I encountered, many of them more formidable than what I had encountered previously. I learned how to use some spells to help me out, and it was a real rush to take out a level 7 monster with my level 2 Tauren. I started gaining experience and leveling up. After delivering the package and selling more stuff, I started to finally notice what it was about the game that makes it more of a lifestyle for some people. Getting new gear and money for each quest was nice. The rewards were immediate. The little jingle and animation that played when I leveled up became something I looked forward to. The quests were short and relatively easy to accomplish, at least up to that point. I started thinking to myself "one more quest" or "one more monster."

It was at that point that I stopped.

I had quickly grasped the interface and gameplay mechanics, and it was slightly disturbing to see how little time it took for the game to sink its hooks in my brain. I've had this happen with a couple games in the past, and they usually kept me up into the wee hours of the morning. I didn't think my sister would appreciate me hanging out in her basement all night. So I walked away wanting more, which is what I suppose the game's developers were hoping for. I have no intention of setting up my own account. I can't see myself paying every month to play a game. However I can now say I spent some time playing the game, and came away with mostly good impressions. It was an interesting experience.

Story and Character Driven Gaming

Six weeks since my last post. I'm really going to try harder to do this more often. Seriously, it's pathetic that I can't force myself to sit down and write something.

Lately I've been playing games that are heavily story driven. There are what might be considered more traditional types of games such as Tetris or Pac-Man, which are driven purely by their gameplay mechanics. If you move up the scale slightly, you have games like Super Mario Brothers or Sonic the Hedgehog. A wisp of a plot is there, but often you'll only find it by reading the manual. As you keep going up the scale measuring relevance of plot to the game, you start getting into games like Assassin's Creed and at the farthest extreme are games like Half-Life and Knights of the Old Republic. At this far end the story is developed simultaneously with, or even before, the gameplay. These tend to be the kinds of games I gravitate towards.

A lot of games that have recently come out try for a cinematic experience. Call of Duty 4's sole goal seemed to be to place the player into an intense and almost overwhelming action movie-ish war scenario in a modern setting. In my opinion, it does this almost flawlessly. The game starts with a coup in an unnamed Middle Eastern country that you view from the first person viewpoint of the deposed leader. It ends in slow motion, with the player dramatically (melodramatically?) taking out the coup's mastermind. In between is urban warfare, a nuclear blast, and heart pounding stealth action. It's a relatively short and self contained story. It's short enough to truly feel like an interactive action movie where you get to play the hero.

Games like Half-Life might be better compared to a TV show. There are over half a dozen games in the Half-Life universe. Some are part of the "main" story while others tell peripheral stories from other viewpoints. All of them take the time to develop their characters over time. I'm not a huge fan of most of what's on television, but of the shows I do enjoy, part of what I like is how the main characters are fleshed out over time. In some ways they become like old friends who you've grown to understand over time. Long series, or long games like those in the role playing genre, feel like this. Like other forms of fiction, you start to care about these companions and grow concerned about what happens to them. This is obviously something that's different for every game and every player, but for many the reason they keep playing is to find out what happens next to these people. An example from my own experience is a scene from Half-Life 2: Episode One.

At the beginning of Half-Life 2 you meet Alyx Vance, the daughter of Eli Vance. Eli Vance is one of the scientists you encounter in the original Half-Life. She's tough, smart, and funny. Notably, she's not hyper sexualized like most games portray women. In Episode One she becomes a valuable companion as you make your way through the game. She's highly effective at taking out enemies with you, she makes comments about the situation that are alternatively funny and insightful, and she cares about what happens to you. Up to this point, every sidekick I had ever been stuck with in a game usually did more harm than good. They tended to make me want to kill them myself rather than continue on with them. This was not the case with Alyx. She was someone I enjoyed having around. About 1/3 of the way through Episode One you and Alyx escape from an enemy installation on a train. As the train starts moving Alyx realizes that the car you're in is filled with caged humans who have been reduced to blind, insane slaves. There's a loud noise, the lights go out, and the train derails. When the lights come on, you're at one end of the train and Alyx is at the other. The cages have fallen over and the slaves are mindlessly screeching and screaming. Alyx is pinned beneath one of the cages with a slave biting and clawing at her face. You have to make your way to the other end of the car and pull the cage and its screeching contents off of her so she can climb out. There's an opening in the side of the car, and you climb out with Alyx following behind. Ahead is a door leading away from the area. You start moving towards it.

"Hold on a second."

Hmm? I turned around. There's Alyx, the zombie slaying badass who's accompanied me through a dozen or so hours of game, slumped against the wall and visibly shaken by what's just happened. A shriveled, screeching, shell of a person just tried to kill her, and she was helpless to do anything about it. I felt bad for her. This digital character, whose only link to reality is the voice actress and the person used to model her face, was someone I cared about and wanted to look after as much as she did for me. I wanted to comfort her somehow and was frustrated at the fact that the game had no way to allow me to do this. I rarely get attached to characters in a 90-120 minute movie. It happens slightly more often in TV shows, but it's still not common. Somehow a game was able to wring out genuine emotions from me other than frustration or the excitement. This is the kind of experience I want from all of my games.

I'm not saying that I ignore games like Tetris. Games that rely solely on gameplay are great and are among my favorites. But I'm a huge proponent of the idea that games can also tell meaningful stories about real people. For the most part, the primary driver of most games is violent conflict. Whether it's a first person shooter like Half-Life or an intricately plotted RPG like Mass Effect, the primary gameplay is combat. I'm hoping that within the next five years or so we'll see games that at least present other options as resolutions to problems, or make them the only options. No guns allowed. Storytelling in games is still in its infancy, and as the medium matures I'm hoping that developers and designers come up with novel ways of using games to present an interesting narrative. Where's the gaming equivalent of Forrest Gump or A History of Violence? Hopefully we'll see it soon.

Testing Posting from Microsoft Word

Supposedly you can post from directly within Word now, so that's what this is! Neat!

Why I Love Half-Life

The latest installment in the amazing Half-Life series is out as part of The Orange Box from Valve. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is the continuation of the story from Half-Life 2: Episode 1, which was a continuation of Half-Life 2. Silly naming convention, but the games are awesome.

I love how the games have the consistent goal of making you feel as if you're in your own action movie. What makes this work for me is the perfect choices they make in where to put music. All the games have these memorable moments in particular that stand out because of the awesome action music that starts at just the right time. In HL1 it was your first firefight with the soldiers. In HL2 it was the beach assault on Nova Prospekt right after you gain control of the antlions. In Ep1 it was when you and Alyx mow down zombies with shotguns in the hospital. In Ep2 it's the final part of the turret vs. antlion battle when the Vortigaunts show up. I love the more traditional scores from many games such as Elder Scrolls and Halo, but Half-Life's sparingly placed techno beats elevate those moments to true action hero awesomeness.

The various sounds are part of the experience. When I heard the suit's Geiger counter go off in this latest episode, a big grin appeared on my face. The weapon sounds are instantly recognizable, as are many of the voice actors and other sound effects. The Halo games have many familiar sounds throughout, but they don't give me that warm fuzzy feeling that Half-Life does. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but it works wonderfully in my case.

So overall I guess a big part of what makes Half-Life such a favorite of mine is the audio experience. You can tell that they've spent a lot of time on that portion of the game.

The other part of what makes these games amazing are the characters. Valve has spent a considerable amount of time on the AI and character animations for the people who accompany you through the Half-Life 2 saga. They also have amazing voice actors to give life to these characters. The original Half-Life had pretty good enemy AI for the time, but nobody accompanied you throughout the game. Through all of the Half-Life 2 games, there are recurring characters that you grow to care about. In Episode 1 especially, the character of Alyx is the best AI companion I've ever had in a game. She's written very well, and is genuinely helpful when battle hordes of zombies and soldiers. After a rather horrifying experience, she stops and almost breaks down. It made want to give her a hug and tell her everything will be fine. No other game has made me emotionally invested in my AI companions. The other characters are also interesting, and while not all of them are likable, they're all memorable. Episode 2 has at least two gut wrenching scenes involving these characters.

Anybody who calls themselves a gamer needs to play these games.

Teh Haloz 3

Well that was an incredibly short lived streak. Oh well.

I finished Halo 3 today, a little over a week after getting it. This time I played on Heroic difficulty, and it was challenging but overall a fun experience. It was definitely more of the same, but that didn't bother me. There were new weapons that took some getting used to but nothing that really surprising. Story spoilers now commencing...

Storywise, the trilogy was wrapped up pretty well. There were many nice nods to the first game that made me glad to have played it instead of just jumping in to this first one. The first two games had you stopping Halo rings from firing, which would have wiped out all sentient life in the galaxy. This game finally let a ring fire, though it had a much more localized effect. You're finally able to kill a robotic being from the first and second game who alternately helps and hinders you throughout all the games. The grizzled sergeant finally meets his end. The Flood is stopped, and the Covenant defeated. Pretty much every story thread was dealt with in some fashion.

Some of the problems still remain. Backtracking still makes a few appearances, and once again there are few audio options, so it's easy to miss dialog while playing. There are subtitles during cutscenes, at least. The difficulty level fluctuated pretty wildly at times. Some areas were a breeze, even on Heroic, while some areas were incredibly tough. During these parts I got the sense that these had been designed to play through on Coop as opposed to single player. In the last third of the game there are two massive battle tanks called Scarabs that you have to take down. This took many tries and I was only able to beat it through a great stroke of luck. It would have been much easier if I had had even one person playing with me. Having a full team of four players would have been a breeze.

I'm not sure what else to say about it. It was fun, which is the most important thing. I hope that I can play through it on Coop one day, but I doubt that'll happen.

Teh Haloz 2

As of tonight I'm three for three in my contiguous days of writing goal.

My overall feeling toward Halo by the time I was finished playing was that it felt like work. It did have some good things about it, but I doubt I'll ever pick it up again. Once I was finished with that, it was time to move on to Halo 2.

My first reaction to Halo 2 was that the graphics were MUCH better than the original. I've always found it fascinating that when a new console comes out, the graphics on the first generation of games for that system often don't look much better than the latest offerings on the previous console. However, if you jump ahead a few years and see how the games are looking, you'll see that there is an enormous leap in quality and overall graphical shininess. Developers just need the time to figure out how to unlock all that power. Halo 2 proved this handily.

The biggest difference I noticed right away was the introduction of dual wielding. One handed weapons could now be held in both hands, instantly doubling your firepower. The trade off is that you're unable to use grenades. I had trouble adjusting to using both triggers on the controller to fire, so after a short time i gave up using it and switch to the tried and true weapon and grenade formula from the first game. I was forced to switch back to dual wielding at the first boss battle. An enemy on a jetpack flits around a large room while two holographic copies do the same. The problem with the copies is that they do just as much damage as the real one. After several tries I realized that I simply wasn't doing enough damage in the time I had. Plus, the enemies were also dual wielding and were doing too much damage to me in a short time. After deciding to dual wield myself, it took a few more tries before I was successful. Once a new race of enemies called the Brutes were introduced I found myself using dual wielding again much more often. The Brutes soaked up bullets like a sponge and there weren't enough grenades to go around for everyone, so dual plasma rifles became my preferred method of exterminating them once i ran out of explosives.

The second, and biggest, change from the first game is that the story switch perspectives between the Master Chief and a character known as the Arbiter. The Arbiter is a member of one of the Covenant races that you spent the first game slaughtering. The story of Halo 2 is more complex than in the first game, and much of this is accomplished by the fact that you now see the enemy Covenant from their own point of view. The Arbiter and his race are eventually betrayed by the Covenant's leaders and end up joining human forces. While this made the story of Halo 2 more interesting to me than Halo's, the story broke down near the end. The perspective switched suddenly back and forth between the characters and I had trouble knowing where exactly I was. The Arbiter levels were actually easier to follow than the Master Chief's. In the last third of the game I thought that the Master Chief and the Arbiter were on different parts of the Halo ring world. Later, through Wikipedia, I found that the Master Chief was actually on a Covenant city-ship. The levels at the end finished abruptly and felt like there was more to do than I got to play. Then there was the sudden end to the game itself. This didn't bother me much because Halo 3 was of course coming out the next week, but I can see why people playing it when it came out would be upset. The game didn't end, so much as just stop.

Playing the Arbiter was fun at first, but I soon came to dread the levels played as him because they usually involved fighting the Flood. It was obvious that they weren't as hard as the first game, but they were still a downright annoying enemy to have to deal with. It wasn't until late in the game that Master Chief had the (dis)pleasure of dealing with the Flood. The one good thing about these levels is that the Arbiter had a kick ass energy sword that dispatched swift death to the Flood, and all other enemies as well. It almost made up for the frustration of dealing with them in the first game.

The first level of the game was surprisingly tough, but overall the game felt easier than the first. I was playing on Normal difficulty, and it brought back the satisfaction that I had been missing while playing Halo on Easy. The challenge was there, and there were parts where I got stuck, but it once again felt fair. There WAS a way to get through the tough battles as long as you had the skill and didn't mess up. It wasn't just luck that was propelling you through the tough parts. There were new weapons to master and each had their tradeoffs. I often found myself returning to old favorites from the first game, but I found uses for just about all of them.

There was much less copy/paste level design in this game than in the first one, though it was still there in spots. It had few open areas for the kind of open ended "arena" type battles that the first game had. Hallways leading to rooms leading to hallways seemed to be the more prevalent level design choice in this game. There was more variety to the levels though, and for the most part I didn't find myself getting bored with each level like in the first game.

Overall I had more fun in Halo 2 than Halo. I'm apparently in the minority, but the improved graphics, variety in levels, switch in perspectives, new weapons, and tweaked difficulty level all combined to make Halo 2 an overall better experience for me. Except for the storytelling, just about every aspect of the game was an improvement on its predecessor.

I think I've decided to hold off on talking about Halo 3 until I actually finish it. So.. until next time.....

Teh Haloz

I'm going to try to write something here every day if I can, even if I'm not feeling particularly inspired to do so. I figured I'd start with my limited experience with the Halo craze that has been rekindled with the release of the third installment.

I bought my Xbox 360 in December 2005, about a month after it launched. It was my first console since the Sega Genesis. In the couple of years before buying it, I had begun to get more interested in computer games and had built a high end gaming PC. I had also started reading various gaming websites like Joystiq and Shacknews. Information about the new Xbox was starting to come out and I closely followed all of it. This was more because of the constant flow news about it rather than any great interest on my part. The Wii and Playstation 3 were still a year away from release.

Between my time with the Genesis and 360, my time with game consoles was mostly limited to kiosks in stores and occasional encounters with friends' consoles. I missed out on the Dreamcast, Saturn, N64, Playstation 1 and 2, Gamecube, and the original Xbox. When Super Mario 64 came out with its newfangled three dimensional graphics, I had a very hard time figuring out the controls when I tried the game in stores. My first "real" experience with a console since the Genesis was when my boss let me borrow his Xbox, along with the game Halo.

I of course knew about Halo. It was Microsoft's flagship title for the Xbox. I suffered through the massive hype train that steamrolled through everything for the launch of Halo 2. The first day sales statistics for Halo 2 ($125 million!!) were burned into my brain simply because I read it everywhere. It was largely irrelevant to me though because I didn't own an Xbox and had no particular desire to.

One day, for reasons I don't remember, my boss brought in his Xbox that he had bought for his grandson. During lunch a group of us hooked it up to a projector and took turns playing. My boss told me he had never gotten comfortable with the controls, and as I attempted to play I could understand why. I had spent the past few years playing first person shooters on the PC with a keyboard and mouse. Playing with two analog sticks on a handheld controller was like trying to learn a foreign language. Despite that, I managed to have fun, and asked to borrow the Xbox for the night. That night saw several hours of me struggling to get comfortable with the controls and fighting for my life against hordes of aliens bent on my destruction. It wasn't anything life changing for me, but it was fun. Fun is the important thing, after all.

In December 2005 I found that the hype about the Xbox 360 had won me over. The games looked fun and the features of the console itself were cool, so I found myself at the local Best Buy three hours before it opened so I could secure myself a place in line. They had 15 available that morning, and I was number 8 in line. I believe I walked out with Call of Duty 2 and Kameo: Elements of Power as my first steps into the next-gen video game world. A few months later I had finished with those games and was smack in the middle of the post-launch release draught. There being nothing else I was interested in at the moment, I decided I may as well pick up Halo. It felt like one of those games that you have to have if you own an Xbox. Halo's Master Chief is to Microsoft what Mario is to Nintendo, for better or worse.

I began playing from the beginning again. It was still fun, but as I got farther in the game I found myself not being pulled in as much as I had hoped. Everything about the game felt solid and the battles were satisfying, but I didn't spend moments at work or in the shower thinking about the game. Around this time I believe Oblivion came out and promptly grabbed hold of all of my gaming time. Around a year later I picked Halo up again from where I left off and got far enough to run into the infamous repetitive copy/paste level design. I didn't get too worked up about it but it was painfully obvious. The build-up to the Flood was well done. Seeing the bodies of alien enemies piled up in a hallway with their bright blue blood smeared all over the walls, then watching the recording of the human marines vainly try to fight this new enemy was a highlight of the game. Eventually, though, I began to reach a painful conclusion: fighting the Flood was not fun. The tiny small forms that swarmed you were annoying, the exploding form that spewed the aformentioned tiny forms were aggravating because the explosions killed me instantly, and the melee fighters were frustrating because they moved fast and did an incredible amount of damage.

Before the Flood showed up I had been fighting the alien Covenant forces. The comical Grunts, quick Elites, and shielded Jackals complemented each other with their different fighting styles. Battles were intense but immensely satisfying in victory. Tossing plasma grenades and using the Covenant's own plasma rifles in open ended battles was a visceral experience, and while I tended to die often I never got frustrated or felt like the game was being unfair. Battles never played out the same way twice in replays because the enemy AI was generally very good. The Flood, however, felt like dumb pixels whose only advantage was sheer numbers. They swarmed in vast numbers and the game got to the point where it lost the Fun. I set it down.

Fast forward to about a month ago. The Halo 3 hype was (and still is) at full steam. Having just finished BioShock and having no other games to occupy my attention, I decided to once again see what the fuss was about. I started from the beginning again but blew through it on the easiest difficulty. I noticed that the battles were far less satisfying. They were too easy. The Flood were more manageable but were still aggravating. As I got further in the game the cookie cutter level design became even more prevalant. Overall the game just felt like work on this playthrough. I did finish though. I made a more conscious effort to follow the story, but the game didn't do a very good job of telling it. I got the gist though.

This is taking far longer to write than I thought, so I will continue tomorrow. Halo 2 and 3 will be discussed!