Author: Jeremy Voss

Musician, wanna-be writer, suburban husband and father. I'll occasionally tweet from @couchshouts. You can find me on XBL, PSN and Steam as JervoNYC.

the first few hours – Tiger 13

Have I written here about my history with the Tiger Woods series?  I know I’ve written about each game I’ve played (see: the Tiger tag), but that’s not quite the same thing.

I’m not a golfer, and it wasn’t really something I watched on TV.  I suppose I only started paying attention to golf when Tiger Woods started kicking ass and becoming some sort of force of nature, and, well, it’s exciting to watch legends at their peak, doing things that no mortal man can do.  I wasn’t alive for Babe Ruth, and I didn’t pay attention to Wayne Gretzky’s career, but Tiger Woods was here and now and only a little older than me, and he was fundamentally changing the sport, and it was legitimately exciting to see.

But I never got into videogame golf until 2002 or so, and that was probably because there was a demo for a Tiger game on the OXM disc for that particular month, and I was bored and figured I’d give it a try.  And 2 things occurred to me almost instantly after I fired up the demo – (1) the game was really fun, and (2) I was really good at it.  And it was nice to be really good at a game, as opposed to just good enough to get to the end.  I bought Tiger Woods ’02 shortly thereafter, and found it a marvelous experience in a multitude of ways – it filled long, boring afternoons; the fantasy courses were a pleasant change from the real-world courses; the Tiger Challenge was a novel take on the career mode; I could listen to my own music instead of the game without missing anything important; and, most importantly, the career lasted long enough to get me through those endless summer months where nothing was coming out.  And, as I said before, I was really good at it.  And so the Tiger games became the annual franchise that I cared about and looked forward to.  Some people have Madden; some people have Call of Duty; I have Tiger.

Well, I had Tiger.  Ever since the console switch in ’06, the new Tiger games have struggled mightily to reach their potential.*  Each year has been one disappointment on top of another, and I’ve started to lose hope.

So when I say that I don’t think I hate Tiger Woods 13 yet, it’s probably a good sign.  Well, let me put it another way – I don’t want to strangle it to death, the way I did with 12.

My biggest grievance against Tiger 12 was how completely out of my hands the game felt at times, especially with regards to the putting game.  I was missing putts left and right, with no discernable reason why.  If the game at least explained what I’d done wrong, I suppose I could understand – but there was no such feedback.  It felt arbitrary and unfair, and while golf (the sport) is frequently unfair, at least that’s just physics and your own skill letting you down.  In 12, the putting game boiled down to getting lucky on an invisible coin toss, which is unfair in the sort of way that makes my eyes bleed.  (The game’s big innovation last year was the inclusion of the Masters, which didn’t really matter to me one way or the other.  It’s nice that it was there, I suppose, but the game went out of its way to kiss the Masters’ ass, which was also probably a good way for EA to distract its customers from the sad trajectory of Tiger Woods’ actual professional career.

The big innovation in Tiger 13 (as there must always be one new thing) is the new True Swing mechanism, or whatever it’s called.  (I ought to know, at this point – you have to press the A button no less than 4 or 5 times before you’re actually playing golf, and I suppose they advertise the name of the swing on one of those splash screens, but my ADD is such that I’d rather look at my iPad in the interim.)  The success of your swing depends on the accuracy and the tempo of your left thumb ‘s movement.  This isn’t totally new –  the last few games showed you how close your thumb moved in a straight line, too – but this tempo mechanic is very interesting and feels a lot more responsive.    It applies to the putting game as well, and while it does take a little bit of getting used to, it does make some intuitive sense at the very least, and so when I whiff a putt I know understand why – it’s usually because I get impatient and push too hard on the upswing, thereby sending the ball off the green entirely.

My big grievance of the moment, then, is the chipping game.  This never used to be a problem.  And I don’t really often end up in the sand off the greens all that much, so it’s not really that big a problem in the grand scheme of things.  Still, though, there’s a major discrepancy between where the game tells you the ball’s going to land, and where the ball actually ends up (which is usually well past the hole, and then ultimately off the other side of the green, so you have to do the whole damned thing again).

As for the rest of the package; well, there’s the Tiger Woods Legacy mode, where you play as Tiger as a 2 year old in his backyard, launching chip shots into a swimming pool, and other assorted important touchstones of the Tiger Woods mythos.  It’s not particularly engaging, and it’s also a little weird, and the more I think about it the more it comes off as some sort of PR strategy towards repairing the Tiger brand – making him human again, making him a little kid again, before the utter collapse and everything that ensued afterwards.

You may be surprised – if you’ve made it this far – that I haven’t talked about the insane in-game purchase stuff.  A lot of reviews went out of their way to really nail EA to the wall over this – how over half of the courses are hidden behind a pay wall, and how you can pay real money to power-level your character and all the rest of it.  Yeah, it does disgust me, sure.  But to be honest, I haven’t really hit any of those obstacles just yet.  (To be even more honest, I’ve really only played the first 2 full 18-hole rounds in the career mode, which (I felt) was enough to let me know how the game felt in my hands.  I might also add that I went -8 in my first round, and -6 in my 2nd, which included some horrendous 3-putts but also a fantastic eagle from 150 yards out.)  I haven’t yet entered my Online Pass code yet, and I don’t yet know if that will make a difference as I get farther into the career.  As it happens, you can still buy courses (or, rather, playtime on courses which are still locked for general use) with in-game currency that you earn through play, so I’m hopeful that as long as I pay attention to my stash, I won’t run into any problems.  (Rest assured, though, that I’ll scream VERY LOUDLY if I do.)

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* Ranking the Tiger games would be its own column, one which I’m not prepared to get into at this very moment.  But I’d break the rankings in half, anyway, between the Xbox 1 and the Xbox 360.  As I said above, the games on the original Xbox were incredibly fun, approachable, and intuitive, and they featured tons of fantasy courses (some of which were fucking insane), and it was not uncommon to bomb 400 yard drives and get holes in one on Par 4s, and while they weren’t super-gorgeous, they certainly got the job done.  The move to the current console generation was, shall we say, a bit rough; ’06 was a fucking joke.  Off the top of my head, I’d put ’03 at the top of my overall list, and I’d probably put ’09 at the top of this generation’s run; ’09 looked great (not just in terms of graphics – the fonts looked really good, too), and they hadn’t fucked with the controls too much.

The Anticlimactic Return of the Subway Gamer

The thing about the new iPad is that, for all its awesome qualities, it’s not something I feel 100% OK about using on the subway.  First and foremost, there’s been lots of reports lately about iPad thefts in the subway system, and while I’m generally a very careful subway passenger, you can never be too careful.  Furthermore, my iPad is wi-fi only, which makes playing stuff like Draw Something or Words With Friends impossible.  Lastly, the new iPad is, well, not as portable as an iPhone; and so the act of making swiping gestures occupies more physical real estate and makes you look a little sillier, and tilting the thing is not a particularly subtle act, and so the basic thing to come away from this is that if you’re trying to not draw attention to yourself on the subway, don’t use your iPad to play games on it.

So, then, the gaming that I do with it is mostly spent either at home or during idle hours at work.  (Hours = 5 minute bursts.)  This change in venue is worthwhile, though – it means that I’m 100% focused on the game, rather than trying to also maintain my balance on a crowded train or what have you.  And any excuse I can get to gaze upon that retina display without being interrupted is something I’ll gladly accept.

Here, then, are some quick impressions of everything I’ve bought since I picked up the new iPad a few weeks ago, in chronological order of purchase.

Zuma’s Revenge HD – I’ve played this on the iPad and the iPhone, and it’s more or less ruined the iPhone version for me as a result.  Not that the iPhone version is bad, but the screen is so goddamned small in comparison, and I find it much harder to be accurate with my fat fingers flying all around the screen.  The game itself is still the same ol’ Zuma, so it’s familiar and colorful and fun, although I’m not that big a fan of the soundtrack or voices.  (iTunes)

Waking Mars – This had been getting some rave reviews, and so I felt compelled to pick it up, sight unseen.  I’ve not yet spent enough time with this one to have something noteworthy to say about it, but I’m flying to Chicago in a few weeks and this will be at the top of my to-do list.  (iTunes)

Azkend 2 HD – I was somewhat of a fan of the first one, and the promise of HD graphics made this an easy impulse purchase.  But I have to admit that I’m a little disappointed in this one, mostly because it’s really, really difficult – unfairly difficult, right off the bat.  It’s not a hard game to play conceptually, but some of the first few objectives are frustratingly difficult to achieve, mostly due to the unfairness of the random tile selection you’re given.  I’d stay away until a patch addresses this, although who knows if such a thing is even in the works.    (iTunes)

SpaceChem Mobile – See Waking Mars, above.  People had been talking about this game for what felt like eons, so I felt compelled to buy it.  People have also said that it’s the sort of game that can make you feel really stupid, and I’m inclined to agree, which is why I haven’t played more more than the tutorial, which left me just as confused as I was when I loaded it up.  (iTunes)

Draw Something  – Chances are pretty good that if you’re reading this, you probably already own this, so there’s not much for me to explain.  My favorite part of the game is being able to see both how people draw, and how people guess, in quasi-real time.  This has actually come in handy in terms of drawing clues – you can use that quasi-real time nature to “animate” your drawings, which is awesome to see.  (iTunes)

Angry Birds Space – See Draw Something, above.  I think I’d played all of the previous Angry Birds games to death, and didn’t really think there’s be much to offer in a new game, but it can’t be overstated enough how fucking brilliant  the new gravity mechanic is, and how devious  the resulting puzzles have become.  Speaking of overstating, this looks absolutely incredible on the iPad’s retina display.  (iTunes)

rComplex – Another in the “endless runner” genre, a genre that I’m quite fond of, actually, and while it’s got a rather nifty graphical look to it, I’m not really finding it all that interesting to play.  (iTunes)

The Hunger Games – Speaking of endless runners, this movie-tie-in was apparently co-designed by the guy behind Canabalt, so it’s not total crap.  That said, I haven’t found it particularly engaging, either, so, yeah.  It’s free, though!  (iTunes)

MotoHeroz / Bike Baron – Two totally different developers, but they both fill the Trials HD -shaped hole in my heart.  (Being that the sequel to Trials HD is arriving on Xbox Live in a few months, I’ll probably put these down in order to play the real thing.  But it’s nice to see other people making these sorts of motorcycle/platform games.  Motoheroz: (iTunes)   Bike Baron: (iTunes)

Hunters 2 – One for the upcoming plane ride, I think.  It seems to be some sort of turn-based strategy/RPG thing, which has its proper time and place in my life.  Looks pretty enough, though. (iTunes)

Swordigo – Super Mario meets Zelda, with ugly graphics but compelling gameplay.  I’ve had quite a bit of fun with this, although, yeah, it really could use a graphical upgrade.  (iTunes)

Fibble HD – So Crytek decided to make a casual iOS game that’s a weird hybrid between platforming, coin collecting and physics manipulation?  That also looks incredible?  OK!  (iTunes)

Madcoaster – Another endless runner, sort of, except with a roller coaster.  Takes some inspiration from Jetpack Joyride and Tiny Wings, too, in terms of its meta-game objectives (which help you upgrade your coaster, although to what practical effect is as yet a mystery to me).  (iTunes)

Rinth Island – I bought this mostly because it reminded me a little bit of the upcoming XBL platformer, Fez, which I am absolutely foaming at the mouth for.  This game isn’t quite at Fez’s level, but it’s still interesting and different from most other platformers I’ve played.  There are two different control schemes on offer, and both of them are kind of wonky, so your mileage may vary.  (iTunes)

Light the Flower – Chillingo’s latest reminds me a little bit of Helsing’s Fire, in that you’re manipulating beams of light in order to accomplish your goal.  In this case, you’re not vanquishing ghouls, but instead giving flowers much-needed light in order to grow.  Awww. (iTunes)

Chaos Rings 2 – I was kinda hoping that I’d have enough sense to not spend $20 on a turn-based JRPG that I didn’t even know if I’d like.  And yet, here we are.   These are the times we live in.  One for the plane, most likely. (iTunes)

In terms of other, non-gaming iPad apps, I’ve been enjoying the GarageBand app – which can do quite a lot more than I ever expected.  Zite is a really interesting newsreader that adapts its content to fit your preferences – it’s like a Tivo for your Google Reader.

compare/contrast: Tintin vs. Uncharted 3

Last week marked the DVD and On-Demand release of a whole bunch of films that the wife and I wanted to see in theaters but missed, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (which was pretty good), David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (which was OK), and The Adventures of Tintin.

I have no connection with the Tintin source material.  I recognized the cartoon character’s visage but never read the books, and my only interest in the film was that it looked amazing, and that it had a bunch of voice actors that I liked (Simon Pegg, Nick Frost) and that Edgar Wright had a hand in the script.  And, of course, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson considered this a passion project of sorts, and who am I to argue if two titans of film want to collaborate on something near and dear to their hearts?

The movie itself?  Kinda dumb, actually.  I mean, it looked incredible – it’s probably the best looking CGI film I’ve ever seen – but we had a lot of problems with it right off the bat.  Tintin looks like a teenager, but he lives alone and carries a loaded gun, even though he’s just a newspaper reporter.  (Indiana Jones never carried a gun!)  Tintin befriends a sea captain locked away in his cabin – this captain turns out to be, among other things, a serious alcoholic, and this is ostensibly played for laughs even though the depths of his cravings become somewhat ludicrous.  It’s also got the worst score that John Williams has ever written – I mean, it’s bad, to the point where it was literally distracting from the scenes it was meant to accompany.  (His scores have always been emotionally manipulative, but that’s usually the point.)  And the film doesn’t really end so much as kinda peter out, like a slowly deflating balloon.

It kinda felt like we were watching a videogame, to be honest.  And the more I picked up on that feeling, the more I realized just how similar Tintin was to Uncharted 3.

from inappropriatelyadorable.tumblr.com

(Amazing Nathan Drake pic via inappropriatelyadorable.tumblr.com.)

Consider:

  • Tintin has incredible visuals and features highly realistic motion capture animation; Uncharted 3 is one of the best looking games ever made and features highly realistic motion capture animation.
  • Tintin stars Andy Serkis, a ubiquitous presence in motion capture performances; Uncharted 3 stars Nolan North, who is arguably even more ubiquitous in video games than Andy Serkis is in CGI films.
  • Tintin is followed by his trusty sidekick, Snowy; Nathan Drake is followed by his trusty sidekick, Sully.
  • Tintin is a nice enough kid, but isn’t afraid to fire a gun; Nathan Drake killed over 700 bad guys in my U3 playthrough.
  • Tintin, in his search for a lost artifact, finds his way to an old chateau; Nathan Drake, in his search for a lost artifact, finds his way to an old chateau (although Drake’s chateau also has millions of spiders and is consumed by fire.)
  • Tintin then finds his way onto a gigantic ship, although I forget exactly why; Nathan Drake also finds his way onto a gigantic ship, and I also forgot why.  There are even parallel shots in both the movie and the game with the main character running along the ship’s sides.  (I’d find youtube video here, but I’m lazy.)
  • Tintin is involved in a plane crash in the middle of the desert; Nathan Drake is involved in a plane crash in the middle of the desert.  Mirages galore.
  • Tintin is involved in a chase scene in a Middle Eastern market; Nathan Drake is involved in  several chase scenes in Middle Eastern markets, although Drake is also pretty heavily drugged.

I could go on, but you get the idea.  I’m not suggesting that there was plagiarism at work; both the game and the movie were in development for years, and aside from Nathan Drake’s obvious inspirational debt to Indiana Jones, the two intellectual properties couldn’t be more different.  But the similarities were striking – not to mention the fact that despite the enormous technological prowess that went into making these two entertainments, they were both, ultimately, disappointing.

weekend ramblin’

Ever since I finished Mass Effect 3 last week, I’ve been in somewhat of a holding pattern as far as writing goes. Hell, I guess that extends to playing, too – I honestly haven’t been playing very much, aside from half a dozen apps on my “the new” iPad.

I suppose I should talk about the iPad, right? It’s my first venture into the iPad universe – when they announced the first one, I didn’t understand why it needed to exist, and when they announced the second one, I found it a bit more intriguing but felt I could wait until they hooked it up with a retina display. Which is what I’ve got, now. There’s no question that it’s a stunning bit of tech – say what you will about the sexiness of the Vita’s display, but when I first laid eyes on the iPad screen I was like Alex in “Clockwork Orange”:

Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.

Frankly, the display is so amazing that it kinda renders my iPhone obsolete, as far as game-playing is concerned. It’s so goddamned tiny in comparison!

The problem with the iPad, then, isn’t the device itself – it’s that there aren’t a hell of a lot of apps that really push the hardware. Sure, stuff like Infinity Blade 2 and Angry Birds Space HD look amazing, but Infinity Blade 2 looked great on my iPhone 4, too, 6 months ago (or whenever it came out). Honestly, the iPad game that’s taken up most of my time since I bought it is Draw Something, which – while fun and entertaining and frequently hilarious, especially given that each person’s drawings appear in real time, so you (the guesser) can watch the artist try to figure out how to draw their subject – is not exactly taxing the hardware. I think it’ll be at least 6 months before we start getting some serious business on the new iPad, and I’d imagine that a lot of iOS developers would be concerned about pushing the hardware too much and therefore alienating the owners of older hardware.

I don’t regret the purchase, though, by any means. There’s plenty to do on it as it is – my compulsive/impulsive nature means that I already had, like 100 apps for it when I first plugged it in – and there’s lots of cool music-making apps on it, too, which is partly why I was able to justify the purchase in the first place. It’s a gorgeous device and it’s everything I’d hoped it would be. If I’m disappointed, it’s that I was hoping it would somehow exceed my expectations and do some truly next-level shit right out of the gate – and I’m fully prepare to concede that I’m being a little bit unfair in that regard.

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What else, what else… I had a weird dream the other day where I was either playing or actually in the motorcycle gang in GTA4’s “The Lost and the Damned,” which was strange, since I never got particularly far in that particular bit of DLC. In any event, it caused me to pull GTA4 out yesterday afternoon and I jumped back into what appears to be the last few missions of “The Ballad of Gay Tony”. Time has not been kind to GTA4, which is a painful thing to admit. It’s just that, for me, Red Dead Redemption is a superior game in pretty much every way that matters – combat is far more approachable in RDR, for one thing, and the penalty for mission failure is a lot less devastating, which makes the overall experience a lot less frustrating. There’s no doubt that Liberty City is an absolute marvel of game design – I still love driving around and seeing what there is to see, and I especially love that the developers really understood New York City and its feel. Even if GTA4’s gameplay is antiquated at this point, it’s still got the finest open-world city ever designed. The city makes sense. It has personality. Every block is different – there aren’t any cookie-cutter building designs. You might get lost at first, but it wouldn’t be because everything looks the same. I fully concede that my status as a life-long New Yorker might bias me in this regard, but I must also acknowledge that it’s the only videogame that ever got New York City right.

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According to my to-do list, the next must-play GOTY contender is Max Payne 3, which doesn’t come out until mid-May. Yikes. Tiger Woods 13 comes out this coming Tuesday, and I will play it because that’s what I do, but I’m no longer as enamored of that franchise as I used to be. Ever since the current generation of consoles came along, that series has lost its way – the games on the original Xbox were insanely addictive and goofy and fun as hell, even if they weren’t truly groundbreaking on the graphics side. As the series has embraced realism, though, it’s lost a lot of what made it truly engaging on a primal level. So let’s just say I’m keeping my expectations suitably lowered for this year’s edition.

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I went back to KoA:Reckoning yesterday, just to see if some time apart from it would make a difference. (I hadn’t played it since before Mass Effect 3 came out.) It’s still pretty mindless; I don’t know that I’m ever going to finish it, beyond just pecking away at it during slow periods in the release calendar.

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Hopefully there’ll be a new Couchcast this week, schedules permitting.

Mass Effect 3: the ending, and what comes next

[I’m doing my damnedest to keep MASS EFFECT 3 SPOILERS to a minimum, but you know how these things go.]

I finished Mass Effect 3 very late last night.  It wasn’t my intention, necessarily, but I’d finished every other side quest I could find and there wasn’t an easy place to stop.

I’d been trying to live in a spoiler-free world regarding the game for the last 6 months or so, but I also spend a lot of time on the internet, and so it was impossible to ignore the controversy brewing about the game’s endings.  I didn’t know why they were upset, or how many of them were out there, or if it was even something to take all that seriously, being that there’s a riot goin’ on over the internet at pretty much any given time.

And anyway, I wanted to see the ending for myself.  (My “galactic readiness” was somewhere in the low-to-mid 60%, but my strength was in the mid 4000s, high enough to get the best endings.)

As it happens, I saw my chosen ending at around 2:00 in the morning, after a 6 hour marathon, and as such I’m probably not in the best shape to discuss why it’s a terrible ending or why Bioware needs to change it.  I’m not entirely sure they do need to change it, anyway.  I made my choice after what felt like 30 minutes of hemming and hawing, and when I finish this post I’m probably going to head back to my apartment and fire up my last save just to see the option I almost picked instead.

It was a tough choice, there’s no doubt about it.  It was absolutely the toughest choice I’d made in the entire series, especially since none of the three options were terribly appealing, and also since I was exhausted and forgot what the choices actually were for a little bit there.  But it would’ve been silly to hope for a “happy” ending – in a series where millions and millions of people/creatures died over the course of a years-long galactic war, having an Ewok dance party would’ve been stupid.

In any event, it wasn’t a cop-out, which (to me) is what’s most impressive.  Even in spite of the fact that it’s a literal deus ex machina.  I did what I did and the war ended, and it hurt a little bit, as it should’ve.

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I’ve read in a few places that even though the trilogy is over, Bioware isn’t done with the Mass Effect franchise, which is good.  I don’t want to leave this world they’ve created.  They’ve created one of the most compelling sci-fi universes in any medium, and there’s a lot more to be seen and done.  But there are some game things that need to be addressed.

For one thing, is there any game franchise that would benefit more from L.A. Noire‘s amazing facial tech than Mass Effect?  As it stands right now, all of the otherwise excellent dialogue sequences are hampered by robotic facial expressions and the occasional strange, unconnected wandering around by a speaking character.  (This happens a lot in The Old Republic, come to think of it.  In fact, some of the wandering-around animations might be identical.)  Better facial tech would go a long way towards making these characters feel even more real than the script allows them to be.

I might also add that a lot of the optional crew conversations in ME3 – the ones where you finish your mission and then wander around the Normandy – were almost exclusively of the pep-talk variety.  Everybody’s feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders, sure, but I felt like I was having the same conversation with 12 different people.

The quest system was more than a little messed up – at least as far as the optional side stuff went.  For one thing, picking up side missions by overhearing conversations in the Citadel just felt lazy.  Secondly, the quest system never updated itself, so it was hard to know what you’d actually found and what was ready to turn in.  At one point, I’d kept a notebook on my coffee table so that I could keep track of what I was doing.  This seems insane, given that the game has a built-in quest log already.

One of the things I liked in ME2 was that not every side mission involved combat – sometimes it was just exploring an environment.  As far as I could tell, there was only one (1) mission like that in ME3, and it was a neat change of pace (even if it felt like a puzzle idea that only got half-baked), and I wished there was more.

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My big dream for the next console generation is for a mega-hybrid RPG combining the sci-fi world and strong character development of Mass Effect, the wide-open expanse and the sense of discovery of Skyrim, and the true open-world freedom of GTA.  You put that together with a truly kick-ass graphics engine (idTech5? UnrealEngine 4?) and maybe a multiplayer component worth a damn and  you’ve got yourself a monumental work of art.  Make it so.

decisions, decisions

I’ve been wanting to talk about Mass Effect 3 all week.  I’ve had 1000 different things to say, at varying times, covering wide swaths of opinion and analysis and bitching and fanboy swooning.  I’ve also had a hellaciously busy schedule, and what free time I’ve had has been spent playing instead of blogging, hence the recent radio silence.  Apologies, etc.

ME3 is a hard game to talk about without spoiling; certainly my podcast co-host gets almost violent if I even hint at a spoiler without inserting proper precautions, so just know that there may be spoilers to come.  In fact, I suppose I might as well just tell you where I am, so that (a) you can judge for yourself if I’m ahead of you or not, and (b) you can see why I’m treading water a little bit.

I think I’ve been playing for around 16-18 hours, but from the little I’ve heard about the game’s structure, I’m probably only at the end of what would be considered Act 1.  (I’d also say that a good 5-7 hours of my playtime has been me just wandering around the Normandy, which is as close to a virtual “home” as there’s ever been in a videogame.)

(MILD SPOILERS AHEAD)  My current mission, the one I’ve been trying to avoid confronting, involves me going to the Krogan homeworld to wipe out the genophage once and for all.  I’ve been dawdling because the mission involves me making perhaps the most difficult choice I’ve had to make in the entire franchise.  If you’ve gotten to this point, you’ll know what I’m talking about; if you haven’t, well, it’s a doozy.  All the different races hate each other (and with good reason), and in the midst of my trying to form a very fragile alliance/treaty, I’ve basically been asked to perform the ultimate backstab, a backstab that I could conceivably get away with without it getting back to me.  My reward is the enduring friendship and scientific/military support of this particular race (and, obviously, the loss of the race I’d be backstabbing); and vice versa.  Being that the ultimate enemy here is the Reapers, I feel obligated to set myself in the best possible position to take them on, and so this opportunity to get the Salarians on my side feels rather crucial, even though it goes against my deepest beliefs as an ethical, rational human being.  I have to believe that the game is set up so that you can “win” regardless of which option you choose, but FUCK.   (END SPOILERS)

The game’s got problems, too.  I don’t want to parrot this week’s Giant Bombcast too much, but they bring up a number of valid points:  a lot of the side mission stuff is poorly conceived (i.e.,  picking up missions simply by overhearing conversations), and poorly executed (the mission log does a terrible job of letting you know if you’ve picked up a missing item, or who you need to give it to, so you often spend a lot of time just wandering around the Citadel hoping that some idle NPC will have an action reticle on them), and the planet scanning stuff (always a problematic feature in this franchise) is now so stripped down that it seems unnecessary, basically.  (Bioware’s strengths have never been with the side stuff, and TOR is no exception, either, but ME3’s side stuff is particularly weak.)   I’ve also run into a number of weird bugs, sometimes where my AI companions refuse to move, and other times where enemy turrets become impossible to destroy – I’ve had to restart a few missions more than once, which is frustrating.

I haven’t touched the multiplayer.  I want to, both because it sounds kinda interesting and because I’m wanting to increase my Galactic Readiness Rating at all costs (including playing the iOS Datapad thing, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the crafting stuff in Old Republic, actually).  But my focus is primarily on the single player – as I imagine it would be with most hard-core ME players, who’ve been in it for the long haul.

Despite its problems, I love this world.  I love the fiction.  I love the characters.  I love my Shepard, and I love that it’s been my Shepard for the last 5 years.   I’m glad to be playing it; but I wouldn’t have minded if they gave it a little more time to cook.  There are elements of this game that feel rushed (as noted above); there’s also certainly the obvious mass marketing ploy to get this game into the hands of new players, which I understand from a business perspective but which still stings a bit, as a hardcore player who’s been here since the beginning.

More on this to come, as well as a bunch of words and thoughts about Journey, which really does deserve its own post.  The short version – it’s amazing.

the first few hours: SSX

When I was a teenager, I became somewhat obsessed with the Elektra record label.   At some point, I guess I’d noticed that a lot of my favorite bands were on Elektra, and then I noticed that a bunch of albums that I’d been listening to had consecutive catalog numbers, which (I presume) meant that they all came out one right after the other.  Which was kind of cool, in a nerdy sort of way.  In my dreams of future rock stardom, I wanted to sign with them – they obviously signed the bands that I liked, and I wanted them to like me.

(The music industry being what it is, I must admit that I was surprised that there was still an official Elektra website to link to when I typed the previous paragraph. )

In my 20s, my allegiance to Elektra switched, rather dramatically, to Thrill Jockey.  Two of my favorite bands (The Sea and Cake, Tortoise) were TJ mainstays, and my hero, John McEntire, seemingly had his hands on almost the entirety of their catalog.   TJ was the epitome of cool, and I must admit that there was a time when I thought about moving to Chicago just to be near it.

Now that I’m in my mid-30s, I could care less about record labels.  I’m not in a band anymore, and the little music that I’ve managed to make these days has been made with the intention of eventual sale.  I don’t need a label to get my music heard; I can stick it on the internet and be done with it.

This would be a good time as any to talk about Double Fine’s outrageously successful Kickstarter campaign, but that isn’t where I was going with this.  Frankly, this whole music label prelude has nothing to do with anything, other than that by this point next week, I will be fully involved with 3 EA-published games – KoA: Reckoning, SSX, and Mass Effect 3.  I can’t really remember the last time something like that happened, and especially with EA, a company that I’d taken great pains to actively loathe for a long, long time.  But here we are, and I suspect I’m not the only one in this position, either.

Sooooo, anyway, yes.  SSX.  My first must-play title of 2012.  I was madly in love with both Tricky and SSX3 on the original Xbox, and the wait for a good sequel has been interminable.  Indeed, the wait for a good snowboarding game in general has been interminable – I don’t think I’ve played one since Amped 3, and that game was more memorable for its cutscenes than its actual gameplay…

I’m torn, is the thing.  On the one hand, it’s really nice to have SSX back in my life.  The game looks and sounds great, and it’s got a number of awesome features – the online functionality is super-slick (as is the entire EA Autolog initiative), and there’s tons to do, and it’s fun as hell.

On the other hand, I suck at it.  I don’t remember being this bad at previous SSX games.  I am constantly fucking up, left and right, restarting runs over and over and over again, to the point where frustration leads to resignation and logging off.  I’m progressing through the career mode slowly but surely, but I feel like it’s because the game is overly generous in its post-race awards.  And I’m not really sure what it is I’m doing wrong, except that I haven’t unlocked the good equipment yet, or something.  I am consistently 2nd or lower in races, and in trick events, there are times when I’ll look up to see my AI opponents with 1,000,000 point leads before I’ve even started my first jump.

So it’s a little frustrating, especially since I really really want to love it to pieces, being that I dearly love the franchise and I really want to enjoy the tons of content on the disc.  Practice makes perfect, I suppose, but maybe I’m just too old.

further adventures in Amalur

I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older and my hand-eye coordination isn’t what it used to be, or if it’s that I just don’t have the enduring patience that I used to have, but I’m finding that I’m no longer compelled to finish games that I’m not enjoying.  I used to be obsessive about this, spending hours and hours playing games that had stopped being fun shortly after the opening cut-scene, just so that I could get Achievements, or just to have said that I’d finished it, or (worst of all) because there wasn’t anything else I felt like doing.

Whatever the reason, I’m most likely done with both Final Fantasy XIII-2 and The Darkness 2.  I’d already put some quality time into FFXIII-2, and even sorta enjoyed myself in spite of its ridiculousness, and so I don’t feel badly about giving up on it.  (I’d put it down a week or two ago; my current quest involved me going to previous areas and looking for hidden objects, which didn’t sound terribly compelling, especially since I couldn’t explain why.)  As for the Darkness 2, well, I think it’s just straight-up shooter fatigue.  The art style is really remarkable, the story was moving in an interesting direction, and it puts enough of a spin on traditional shooter mechanics to make it compelling, but at the end of the day I’m still just shooting monsters in dark corridors, and I’ve done that before.

And so it happened that I was home sick yesterday, which was as good a time as any to devote some serious time into Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, which is yet another game that I’d been having a tough time sticking with.  As noted a few entries ago, I’d dabbled in it for a few hours, but there wasn’t really anything terribly compelling about it, and I couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed in it, considering the named creative talent on the box.

I’m now around 15 hours in, and my dude is somewhere around level 18 or 19 or something.  (I can’t remember; it doesn’t matter.)

I will concede that the game does have some addictive qualities – this is certainly one of the best combat systems in an action RPG that I’ve ever played – and there’s lots and lots of loot, and the crafting systems (of which there are many) yield some pretty kick-ass rewards (i.e., almost everything I’m currently wearing/wielding is something I made, salvaged from stuff I picked up along the way).

Addictive though it may be, it’s still serving something that feels, for the most part, inconsequential and derivative.  The game’s outdoor environments are nicely varied (and are pleasantly reminiscent of Fable)*, but the indoor environments are just as reused and revisited as those in Dragon Age 2, which is saying something indeed.   The voice acting is fine, but the script is dull and charmless, and I am constantly skipping over conversations because they never, ever matter.  The quests themselves are pretty much all of the fetch variety, anyway.  I’m not playing the game for the story, in other words – I’m playing because the combat is fun and I get lots of treats.

In any event, this is probably all moot, as 2012’s first must-play just arrived at my desk.  I don’t know how much SSX I’ll get into tonight (as my wife and I are going to try and finish the last few episodes of Mad Men), but that’ll be occupying the majority of my playtime for the foreseeable future – at least until Mass Effect 3 shows up.

___________________________________
*  Before I turned the game off last night I entered a totally different environment, one which had a lot more in common with Road Runner cartoons and the Mexico of Red Dead Redemption than the foresty areas of Fable.  So that’s something to look forward to, I suppose.

CouchCast: 022212

Very pleased to present the first-ever CouchCast!  While I figure out how to get it on iTunes, feel free to listen and download.

CouchCast: 022212

UPDATE:  The CouchCast now exists on iTunes!  Search for “Shouts from the Couch”, or just click on this link:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/shouts-from-couch-couchcast/id505138918

long overdue

Once again, I apologize for the lack of posts of late.  There’s a good reason for that, though – we were finally going to be launching the first-ever CouchCast this past week, and I wanted to have some stuff to talk about there.  Alas, we got held up at the last minute, and since I’m not sure when we’re going to be able to reconnect, I might as well get some of this stuff out of my brain.  Consider this a transcript of a solo podcast.

[cue “What Have You Been Playing?” music]

Old Republic:  My bounty hunter finally hit level 40.  And I was all excited to FINALLY start using my custom-build speeder, after spending hours and hours power-leveling my crafting skills just to be able to gather the materials to make it, only to find that the cost of training to use the damned thing is more money than I’ve ever had over the entire course of my playtime.  So, that was a little discouraging.  Also, Hoth is very white and boring to walk around in.  I ended up revisiting my level 3 Jedi, who I’d abandoned in the Jedi Temple for almost a full month – I quickly got him halfway to level 8, but I’d forgotten how goddamned SLOW the default walk speed is in that game.  Good grief.

Twisted Metal:  Does nostalgia matter?  And is it fair to judge a game based on your first 5 minutes with it?  I’ve never played the original games, and the only other David Jaffe game I played was God of War, and I preferred God of War 2 (and wasn’t he off to other things by that point?).  In any event, the game isn’t for me.  I watched the opening cutscenes (which looked like Sin City outtakes), and for someone new to the series, it felt a little distasteful for me to be excited about playing as a homicidal maniac.  I finally got into some actual playtime, and fought with the controls for 5-10 minutes, and turned it off and sent it back to Gamefly.  I will admit that I probably should’ve spent a little time getting used to the controls before writing it off completely, but it also would’ve been nice for the controls to have made sense (and also to have been in any way related to the way most driving games have been controlled for the last 5 years).  I also gather that the game is a lot more fun playing either online or with friends on the couch, but since I was renting it I didn’t have a code for an online pass, and there’s absolutely no way that my wife would be interested in playing with me.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning:  I am trying very hard to give a shit about this game, but it’s just not doing anything for me.  Everything about it feels borrowed and unoriginal.  I can’t get over how much it looks like Fable – but it should also be noted that Fable hasn’t looked good in years.  The inventory UI is bulky and cumbersome, which is a pain in the ass since there’s a TON of loot that needs to be dealt with.  I don’t really give a shit about the story, and the quests feel generic and contrived.  The best thing about the game is the combat, but if that’s all there is to this game, then, well, ugh.

Final Fantasy XIII-2:  It’s not like I can take FFXIII-2’s story seriously, either, since it’s completely insane.  A more interesting question to me, though, is wondering if it has any idea how ridiculous it is.  It goes out of its way to have the characters emote over every little plot development, but then it has Mog, one of the most annoying characters ever created by man – possibly more annoying than Jar-Jar Binks, for fuck’s sake – this flying little marshmellow beast who incessantly adds “Kupo” after every sentence like a nervous tic.  And I’ll be honest – one of my new favorite things to do in the game, now that I’ve unlocked this ability, is to throw this little thing off of every cliff I can find.   So, yes, it’s completely batshit insane and I have no idea what’s going on or why any of it matters, even though the characters go out of their way to explain what’s happening in every cutscene (of which there are dozens) – and yet there’s something utterly compelling about it, and I find it hard to stop playing.  The combat system is still as engaging as it ever was, and considering how much of it there is, that’s a good thing.  I’m a little stuck in the story right now, though, and as such I’ve found my attention wandering.

The Darkness II:  I’ll be honest – I liked the first Darkness game well enough, but didn’t really have any plans on playing this sequel.  I’m not even sure why I put it on my rental queue, to be honest.  And yet I did, and I got my copy on Friday, and while I’m only 2 hours in, I’m totally hooked.  The art style is fantastic – I don’t recall the original game having this quasi-cel-shaded look to it, but it looks great.  The gameplay is fun, fast and sometimes frantic – I’m fighting with the controls a little bit, but (to be fair) it’s a bit more complicated than just running and gunning.

Oh, and I gave the Mass Effect 3 demo a spin, which was maybe not the best idea.  I think I’d rather just wait for the full, final experience.

Most of what I’ve been playing lately, though, is on my iPhone – which is especially handy now that my gadget lust fot the Vita is peaking.  I’m way overdue for a Subway Gamer column, so let me just quickly run down some of what I’ve been playing:

  • Triple Town
  • Zen Pinball
  • Pinball Arcade
  • Fairway Solitaire
  • Ghost Trick

Those deserve a column of their own, but the short version is – yes, you should be playing them.  All of them.  Both pinball games in particular are outstanding, although they make me want an iPad because the iPhone screen is very small.