pardon the cobwebs

I would say that there's no excuse for the absence of posting here over the last month, but that's not entirely true - there are several valid excuses I could come up with, and I'm sure I could make up a bunch as well. 

But here's the deal:  the last entry here talks about my failure at Starcraft 2.  Since then, here's what I've played:

• Madden 11.  I've always been one of those long-embittered 2KSports football fans who hated Madden and EA and everything it stood for.  But Madden won, of course, and if you have a serious jones for videogame football, it's Madden or bust.  And, as it happened, I started getting inexplicably excited for football season to start, and this year's Madden got good reviews, and I had some credit on Amazon that was burning a hole in my virtual wallet, and so there it is.  I've played about 10 or 11 games in my Franchise, which is set on Rookie difficulty, mostly so that I could get all the Achievements I cared to get as quickly as possible.  FUN FACT:  It is almost impossible to get the "Return 2 kicks for TDs with the same guy" Achievement on Rookie difficulty, because the opposing team is so terrible that they almost always go 4 and out, and you're lucky if you get to return just one kick - the one that leads off a half.
   
• Lara Croft & the Guardian of Light.  It's pretty good for what it is, and I imagine it would be a ton of fun if the online co-op ever got turned on.  Unfortunately, I think I've played all I'm ever going to play of this one, because now that Halo Reach is out I'm not sure that anyone will care enough to go back to this. 
  
• Mafia 2.  I actually did prepare a blog post for this; I had taken a sick day right after it arrived from Gamefly and accidentally/inadvertently finished the whole game in about 10 hours.  Here's what I can salvage:

Sometimes you can tell, just from the first 5 minutes of play, if a game was cared about in development.  After all, in today's ADD world, where developers have the balls to charge you to participate in a "beta", 5 minutes might just be all you get, and so it's probably a good idea to put your best foot forward (while still keeping the big guns for later in the experience).  Sometimes it's painfully obvious - the frame rate might be shitty, or the controls might be clunky and unresponsive.  Or, perhaps, it's just that certain areas of the game received more attention than others - sure, things explode pretty good, but the dialog and the voice acting both feel like first drafts; or, the driving model is responsive, but the combat sucks.

Mafia 2 was cared about.

But that doesn't make it a great game.

I was out sick yesterday, and I convalesced by playing the entirety of Mafia 2 (and, also, something else that I am not at liberty to discuss, wink wink nudge nudge).  And when I was going to sleep, I started thinking about how I would write about it, and I had this really well-written opening paragraph all set out, which was going to reference both this Joystiq article about how venerable games industry analyst Michael Pachter thought that Mafia 2 would probably be unprofitable, and this very well-written Rock Paper Shotgun review, which (among other things) made the salient observation that comparing Mafia 2 to GTA4 totally misses the point, and how Mafia 2 really needs to be compared to Mafia 1.

•  Anyway, yeah, there wasn't much to talk about after I finished Mafia 2.  It is a bland experience in an otherwise beautiful world.
  
• Professor Layton & the Unwound Future.  This just arrived in the mail on Monday, and... it really bums me out that I don't like these games anymore.  And the reason why I don't like these games anymore is because the puzzles, i.e. the reason why this game exists in the first place, have a tendency to be poorly written.  They can be unfairly difficult.  Or, most egregiously, they can only be solved with a walkthrough, and even then, the explanation for a puzzle's solution is obtuse or unclear.  The story is interesting, though, at least.
   
• Mass Effect 2: Shadow Broker DLC.  This is kind of a big deal, if you're a Mass Effect nerd.  The nuts and bolts of the DLC are pretty much just more combat, with a cool little vehicular chase scene (with the requisite shitty controls); so in that regard it's nothing special.  But from a story perspective... wow.  The ending of the DLC seems to be a pretty big deal, in terms of the ME universe, and yet the fact that a lot of ME2 fans might not see it would indicate that it won't really have that big an impact on ME3, which is kind of a bummer.  Anyway - if you're an ME2 fan, it's highly recommended.
  
• Batman: Arkham Asylum.  I got excited for the sequel and decided to give this another playthrough.  And it's still as good as it was the first time.

And that brings us to yesterday, when my copy of Halo Reach arrived.

I'll have more to say on Halo as I get further into it, but basically:  it's Halo.  And, also:  I don't know if I like first-person shooters anymore.  Or, rather, that the third-person action genre has gotten so good that first-person shooters kinda feel a little antiquated.  As in:  how come I can't use cover?

FF13: The first 2 hours

The subtitle of this post should be: "or, Why I Didn't Finish Heavy Rain."

I didn't finish Heavy Rain, nor am I sure I ever will. To be fair, though, it's not entirely HR's fault; I moved to Brooklyn last week, and even though we've been settled in for the better part of a week, I still haven't really had that much free time. That said, the free time I did have was time I didn't really feel like spending playing HR. HR kinda needs to be played in a long, uninterrupted stretch, or else it loses its rhythm, which is what happened to me. Also, it falls into the uncanny valley way too often, it needs an actual English-speaking voice cast, and the script very much needed to be touched up by an English-speaking writer. That's really what hit the uncanny valley for me - not the graphics, but the stiff, stilted dialogue delivered by people who don't quite know how to pronounce certain words. Also, it felt almost a little too derivative of "Se7en."

Anyway. Final Fantasy 13 arrived in the mail yesterday, and God of War 3 will arrive next week, and so I'm not sure I'll ever get around to finishing HR anytime soon.

As for FF13. I should probably start by saying that I'm not really all that familiar with the Final Fantasy series. I tried (and failed) to document my playtime with FF7 last year (1, 2, 3); I also downloaded FF8 from the Playstation Network, although I don't think I've even installed it. And I played about an hour or two of FF3 (?) on the DS, and a little bit of FF7-Crisis Core on the PSP. But that's really the extent of it.

I understand, though, that FF13 is somewhat of a radical departure from its previous versions, at least in terms of its combat system and how relentlessly linear it is. So there's that.

Here's what I can say about FF13, now that I'm a few hours in and the combat system is starting to get a bit more expansive:

1. It's gorgeous. I'm playing the PS3 version, for whatever that's worth.

2. People weren't kidding around when they said it's linear. It's not just that you move in a straight line - it's that the straight line you move along is very, very narrow. I can appreciate that this very conscious design choice might make the game a little less intimidating for the FF noob; but just because I've never really played a FF game doesn't mean I've never played any game.

3. The combat system sounds a lot more complex than it actually is. At least at this stage.

4. Almost any Japanese-developed game has this weird idiosyncratic thing where every character has to be constantly voicing something, even if it's just grunting. And almost every female character's grunts and moans sound alarmingly sexual in nature, even if they aren't at all sexual in context.

5. It is basically the polar opposite of Mass Effect 2, which I am holding up as the gold standard for Western RPGs. (Whether that's true or not is not really the point; it's an amazing game, and it's still fresh in my mind.)

Most reviews have indicated that FF13 starts slow and doesn't really get going until 12-15 hours in. Which is a lot of hours that I might not necessarily have before GOW3 arrives. But I must admit that I'm kinda enjoying it so far. I have almost zero idea what's going on (and if I weren't playing the game with subtitles, I'd have absolutely no idea what a "fal'Cie" or "l'Cie" is; at least I know how they're spelled). But I'm intrigued. I think the last truly engrossing JRPG I played was Lost Odyssey; I'm hoping this will be somewhere near that ballpark.

Mass Effect 2: the first 5 hours

Let me say, right up front: I will do my absolute hardest to avoid spoilers. But let me also say that I'm almost positive that anyone who's reading this is either (a) a family member or (b) someone who's already playing the game themselves. If you fall into neither category, consider yourself warned.

And in any event, what I want to write about isn't really about the story, but rather the nuts and bolts of the gameplay. So let me get this out of the way: the opening 10 minutes of the game are as exciting, breathtaking and flat-out jaw-dropping as anything I've ever seen. And because the first game is now so fresh in my mind (having raced through it over the weekend), it was really easy for me to hit the ground running; the universe of the game isn't as intimidating as it might have been, and I feel like I understand my player's circumstances and the major players quite well. I'm not at all sure how someone who never played the first one would fare here.

But this is not what I want to talk about.

I also don't necessarily want to talk about the graphics, and the combat, and the sound, and the voice acting, and the mini-games, and the differences between the first game and the sequel. I mean, I do want to talk about it, or at least acknowledge it. Suffice it to say, everything that was good about the first game is 100x better in the second game, and everything that sucked is gone. And if nothing else, it's probably the best looking game on the 360 right now; I'm having trouble coming up with something that looks better. But again, that's not what I want to talk about right now.

This is what I want to talk about: Mass Effect 2 is not an RPG. It is, rather, a role-playing game.

I had attempted, a long time ago, to articulate this distinction. I had just finished my first playthrough of Mass Effect 1, as a matter of fact, and was having trouble getting into Eternal Sonata.

I like Eternal Sonata, but I'm having a hard time really getting into it, and I think part of that is because Mass Effect was still running through my bloodstream. But more to the point - I don't really understand where the RPG is in Eternal Sonata, and to extrapolate that even further, I'm not sure there's a lot of RPG in most games that call themselves RPGs.

Unless I'm incredibly misguided, RPG stands for "role playing game", and I deem that to mean that my player character is something I have an incredible amount of control over - not just in terms of managing stats and armaments, but what they actually do. The problem is that the vast majority of RPGs that I've played really just have you managing stats and armaments - you're still doing what the game tells you to do, and your basic choice comes down to using magic or using swords.

And this is why Mass Effect 2 feels like such a revelation. There's no loot in the game. In the first Mass Effect, the inventory management system was a total mess; in ME2, there is almost no inventory to manage at all. You have a few guns, and you upgrade them not by leveling up and getting an arbitrary number added to their stats but by mining for supplies on uncharted worlds. There's no XP, either - at least, not in the traditional sense. You gain XP by completing missions, rather than by killing things. Which, when you think about it, makes the concept of "gaining experience" something literal.

This is important, I think. Look, I'm all for loot and inventory management and stat bonuses - that stuff is fun when it's done right, and picking up cool stuff is a pleasing reward, and this is why Borderlands was so successful for me even though there was absolutely no narrative to speak of. But it's also incredibly artificial, and it takes you out of the moment. The only time you need to look at a menu screen in Mass Effect 2 is if you want to save your game, or to look at your available missions in order to figure out what to do next. (You can still customize your character's armor and weaponry, should you so choose, and you do that while you're on your ship, in between missions. It's all about context.)

Not to make this analogy again, but ME2 feels a lot like GTA in space. There is a central mission path, which takes you all over the place, but you are free to pursue whatever else strikes your fancy whenever you like. The difference is that your character in GTA has a pre-scripted personality; you can do whatever you want, but ultimately you're really just guiding your dude from point A to point B. Your character in ME2, on the other hand, is very much whoever you want it to be, and the game goes out of its way to make that actually mean something. As in previous Bioware RPGs, you are an active participant in conversations, and ME2's new "interrupt" feature makes this experience feel even more visceral. You feel more connected to the people you interact with.

It's this sense of immersion that impresses me the most about ME2. I've barely scratched the surface of the game's story, but I'm already heavily invested in my adventure. I truly feel like the commander of a kick-ass, state of the art spaceship. And at this point, I could care less about inventory screens; I just want to go back to it and explore.

Weekend Recap: preparing for ME2

Not much to report this weekend, but here's what's what:

1. Finally finished my 3rd playthrough of Mass Effect 1, and picked up the Achievement for hitting Level 60. That's all I wanted to accomplish - hit level 60, and make sure that I could import my character into ME2 with all the stuff I wanted to be in place. (Which is somewhat ridiculous - my first playthrough was all light-side, my second playthrough was deliberately dark-side, which meant that my bases should have been covered. But I guess I wanted whatever perk there may be in hitting Level 60 with a light-side run.) I'm very glad I did so; I feel very much caught up on the story, which is as excellent as I remembered, and now my anticipation level for ME2 is off the friggin' charts; you don't need to hear about it. Very tempted to take some sick days in the immediate future.

2. Dabbled a tiny bit in Dark Void, which is, for lack of a better word, janky as all hell. It doles out Achievements like crazy, though, perhaps as an incentive to continue slogging through it. That being said, I will probably just send it back to Gamefly tomorrow morning; ME2 will take up all my available time anyway, and I don't feel like I need the Achievements that badly. (I hit 50K; that's enough.)

And so what did you play this weekend?

Darksiders / Bayonetta

Finished Darksiders this weekend, and after that I played as much Bayonetta as I could, before it started driving me completely insane - this was right at the beginning of Chapter 5. And then I gave Brutal Legend one more chance, and crammed in a bit more Mass Effect (1).

But first things first. Darksiders is, for lack of a better word, solid. (Which is ironic, considering the constant screen tearing.) It's got a simple but effective combat system, some interesting and challenging puzzles, a wide variety of environments to explore, and a story that was just engaging enough to keep me motivated through the end, with one of the best set-ups for a sequel I've ever seen.

That said, it's so derivative that it borders on litigious - as you've no doubt heard by now if you've been paying any attention to its reviews, it's basically the dark Zelda game that Nintendo will never make, with the Portal gun thrown in, for some reason. So it feels somewhat uninspired - it has a great story set-up, but it doesn't really do anything special with it. I said before that there are a wide variety of environments, but they're not really particularly interesting; there's a lot of dead space to cover in between combat arenas and puzzles, which gets tedious. (You do eventually get a horse, but it can only be ridden in certain areas, and you don't get it until you're already at least halfway through the game.)

Still, it's certainly worth a rental; if it's derivative, at least it's stealing from the right places.

Bayonetta, on the other hand, is pure, distilled lunacy. Picture Devil May Cry as a perpetually horny, unintentionally racist teenage boy that's taken 3 tabs of LSD followed by 20 cans of Red Bull and you begin to approach Bayonetta's plane of existence. Unfortunately, I don't do drugs anymore, and I'm not very good at games like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden, so after getting my ass handed to me repeatedly at the beginning of Chapter 5, I came to the realization that no amount of curiosity as to what could possibly happen next was going to outweigh the frustration of not being able to kill whatever the hell was trying to kill me. I'm not entirely sure how what I'd already seen could possibly be topped, even though I've been assured that each chapter gets even more insane. Oh well; my loss.

I had lent Brutal Legend to a friend of mine, but his 360 died shortly thereafter and so I got it back. I'd been meaning to give it another shot; I felt terrible that I couldn't get into it, as if it were somehow my fault, and being that the game is so short I figured I might as well try to get through it. But you know what? It's not my fault. I hate the Stage Battles. I hated them when I was first learning how to play them, and I hate them now, long after I'd forgotten what the hell I was supposed to be doing. Everything else about that game is fantastic - even the side missions, as repetitive as they are, are fun enough. But GODDAMN I hate the Stage Battles. They are totally unintuitive; the controls are absolute garbage; I get no feedback as to how I'm doing or why I won or lost. I'm so bummed.

And so, then, I'm trying to finish my third playthrough of Mass Effect before ME2 shows up next week. I don't know that I'll ever get up to Level 50, as I'm still 80,000 XP short, but that's not really the point; I just want to make sure that I can start my first playthrough of ME2 with the right story elements in place.

Progress

The quest for 50K is going much better than I'd originally anticipated; I've got 6 weeks to get 327 points. I'm pretty sure I can get that relatively quickly from Assassin's Creed 2, with an assist from Left 4 Dead 2. So, hooray for that.

This past weekend was a little weird, gaming wise, but when I think about it it actually worked out to my advantage. The weekend's primary goal was working on music, but every once in a while I needed a break, and so I'd dive in to something on the 360; and since I'd finished Modern Warfare 2's campaign already, I didn't feel pressured to pick one thing and finish it.

I keep grinding away in Forza 3; I kinda messed up and bought the wrong car for an upcoming race in the Season Play mode, and so now I'm just going through tournaments in an effort to make that money back. I can't remember if I made the analogy here or in an email, but here goes anyway: Forza reminds me a lot of the Tiger Woods games, in that there's an absolute ton of stuff to do, a lot of which I've already done in previous versions in the franchise. On the flip side, Forza 3 does not in any feel like it's treading water, the way the Tiger games have for the last few years.

I'm also still running around in GTA4: BOGT, which is making me love the original GTA4 a little less. The game just feels dated; not in its story or setting, but in its actual gameplay mechanics. Combat feels incredibly clumsy, and the game is just brutally punishing if I fail a mission - I lose cash, armor (if I had it) and ammo (which doesn't get replenished), plus time keeps moving forward so if I had something I wanted to do at a certain time, I probably don't get to do it if I have to keep doing a mission over and over again. Saints Row will never be confused with GTA in terms of story and emotional resonance, but in terms of having fun and not being endlessly frustrating, it's not even really all that close anymore. The Houser brothers are starting to make a little bit of noise about GTA5; I know there's tons to think about in terms of making a great GTA game (story, setting, dialogue), but I would suggest that they also add some refinements, if not a complete overhaul, of the way the game is actually played. Let us recharge our health; let us have mid-mission checkpoints; let us not be punished so harshly for failure.

I'm starting to get really excited about 2010 Q1; specifically, Mass Effect 2. And it occurred to me that I never finished my 3rd playthrough of ME1, so I decided to give that a bit of a whirl. As it happens, I'd stopped playing near the end of the last DLC they released; said DLC was more or less a glorified combat tutorial, which is arguably the least successful aspect of the original game. But whatever - I turned down the difficulty and plowed through the last few missions and got 100 Achievements for my efforts, and then I saw where I actually was in the story, and then I decided to call it a day. (If you're familiar with the first game, I'd just gotten off the Citadel and hadn't yet started those first 3 long missions you get in order to advance the story; in other words, I'd have a looooooooong way to go.)

And then, in a bit of idle panic, I downloaded the Torchlight demo from Steam, just because I'd heard it was good and I was curious to see if my aging PC could run it. The short answer is yes, it can, and shortly thereafter I'd purchased the full version and now I'm totally hooked.

This week: Assassin's Creed 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and the God of War Collection for PS3.

Finally, I want to give a shout out to Pandemic Studios, who very well might be getting shut down today. Mercenaries was one of my favorite games on the original Xbox, and Star Wars Battlefront was a lot of fun, and even Destroy All Humans! was worth a few chuckles. I'm hopeful that Saboteur will at least be a fine farewell from one of the more ambitious developers out there.

Mass Effect; PS2 Price Cut

I was insanely busy last week and so I wasn't as on top of the news coming out of GDC as I wanted to be, but GDC isn't really a news-generating event as much as it is a conference for game developers (I think that's why they call it "Game Developers Conference"). That said, there were a few companies touting their wares, and while most gamers are probably foaming at the mouth over Modern Warfare 2, the games I was most excited to hear about were Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2.

I'm not even sure there was any specific ME2 news, other than some leaked shakycam footage and the revelation that it will feature faster loading times (which (in my opinion) has been the only really consistent problem in Bioware's console RPG catalog - KOTOR and Jade Empire were annoying in that regard as well). But Mass Effect was part of 2007's holy trinity of awesome (alongside Bioshock and Portal)*, and I sunk around 50 hours over two (2!) playthroughs, and the thought of a new and improved sequel started getting me giddy...

...and now I'm sorta playing it again, for the third time. I've not really been able to really sit down and dig in, though, since I've been busy; I raced through the first planet and am kinda speeding through the first visit to the Citadel, and I'm even skimming through conversations. I don't have any particular agenda this time, either, except to keep the story fresh in my mind and hopefully hit level 60.

My original write-ups on my old GS blog (#1, #2, #3, #4) are pretty badly written, but they provide some context.

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Sony announced yesterday that they were dropping the PS2's price point to $99, and lemme tell you - I'm sorta considering it. There's a handful of PS2 games that I'm kinda bummed I never got to play - FFX, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, the first two God of War games, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few others - and $99 for access to the PS2's gargantuan library is pretty tempting, I must admit.

* I still can't quite believe that Mass Effect, Bioshock and Portal all came out in the six-month period. And to think that Super Mario Galaxy was also in that mix? Jesus Christ. I defy anyone to say that there was a better year in gaming than 2007.