Category: the first few hours

the first few hours: promising, very promising

I put an hour into both XCOM Enemy Unknown and Dishonored last night, which is obviously not nearly enough time to give those games their proper due.  That being said, I am a firm believer that what a game shows you in its first 10 minutes is very often a good indicator as to the general quality level of the experience you’re about to embark on, and on that note, I feel pretty confident in saying that these games are looking very good indeed.

XCOM

Two things I should point out before I start:  (1) I am very intimidated by strategy games, be they turn-based or real-time, which also means (2) I never played the original XCOM games.  I am approaching this game as a recent convert to the genre, specifically because of the noob-friendliness of Firaxis’ own Civilization Revolution (which, in turn, got me into Civ 4 and Civ 5).  I have no allegiance to the original games.  What I’m interested in, then, is a compelling experience, and with an option to turn the difficulty down to the easiest setting (just so I can get my feet wet, and so that I can better understand how the game systems work without getting vaporized).

The tutorial walks you through each move; the first two missions still hold your hand a bit, but you have a bit more freedom to work with.  I managed to finish the first post-tutorial mission with everybody alive (though one dude got dinged up a bit); in my second mission, I lost a rookie and two other soldiers are in sickbay, out for at least 2 weeks with some serious poison damage.    (I have not yet renamed my soldiers, but I am already somewhat attached to my most powerful guys, and I can already see myself making sure they have the most cover at any given time.)

I am still intimidated once I’m on the battlefield, but in a way that’s a boon – my abundant need for caution at every turn also happens to be the proper way to play the game, and because the controls are incredibly easy and intuitive to use (I’m using a 360 controller, though I’m playing on the PC), I find myself getting more and more comfortable.  Even though there’s no greater feeling of dread that moving your guys into what you think is a proper cover position, only to see enemies suddenly appearing directly behind you.  Ordinarily I’d say this is a cheap shot, but the game never makes it feel unfair – there’s almost always a better vantage point that I should’ve seen, and in any event, this is war – people will die.

I love the in-between bits the most, I think.  I love looking at the base of operations (presented as if it were an ant colony, which is a useful subliminal reminder of that old saying about a boot stomping on an anthill), talking with my various departments, starting research projects, outfitting my soldiers, etc.  It’s elegantly presented and does a fantastic job of making you feel like you’re a vital part of the story.

DISHONORED

I am already enjoying the hell out of Dishonored even though I’ve died a lot in the game’s first hour.  Quite a bit more death than I’d anticipated, if I’m being honest.  My intention was to play as non-lethally as possible, but it’s not always easy to tell when you’re hidden in shadow and when you aren’t, and thus I’m forced to shoot and stab in order to escape, and since I’m still getting the hang of the controls, I don’t always escape.  I’m tempted to delete my current save and just start over from scratch, in an attempt to really make sure I understand what I’m doing and how the stealth mechanics work.

My terribleness at the game aside, I love everything I’ve seen thus far.  The art direction is quite stunning (even if some of the textures on the 360 are a bit blurry and pixelated) and the little of the city I’ve seen looks remarkable.  And I love how many hidden secrets there are, and how well the game rewards you for going off the beaten path.  There is remarkable detail in every corner of the world.

 

 

the first few hours: RE6

After all that, I didn’t take my own advice; home with a shitty stomach (as per usual), I’m now 5 chapters into Resident Evil 6.  Per Kotaku’s advice, I skipped around a bit and did 2 chapters of Leon, 2 chapters of Jake, and (at the time of this writing – late Friday night) I just finished 1 chapter of Chris.

So after 7 or 8 hours or so, here’s what I can say:  it’s not the gigantic turd I’d been led to expect; but neither is it hot shit.  It is a weird, frustrating mess, to be sure, but it’s also really ambitious, and I can certainly appreciate that they’re not just recycling the same old crap like other big-named franchises I could name.

Because it’s getting late and because this upcoming weekend is busy, here are some random, unedited thoughts that I’m just going to throw out there:

  • you can’t pause, which is ridiculous.  no reason for it.
  • there is a tutorial to keep you up to speed on how the QTEs work, but not one for how to manipulate your inventory so that, say, you can toss a grenade.
  • not scary.  at all.  the monsters aren’t creepy, and can also be a bit unintentionally funny at times (like the upside-down lobster-monsters in Chapter 1 of Chris/Piers).
  • the script is ridiculous; cliche after cliche; there is no context for anything.  things just happen and it’s unclear why you should be concerned about them.
  • if one character has something to tell the other character, they should have a very good reason for waiting to tell them besides “you wouldn’t believe me if i told you”, especially when they’re shooting monsters.
  • the melee controls are awful and inconsistent, and sometimes are hilarious; at least the AI looks ridiculous when they miss on their melee attacks, too, though.
  • i was super-addicted to the medallion hunting in RE5; consequently I’m looking at every nook and cranny in RE6, although I’m still missing some (which is annoying, especially when the game shows you one right before a door closes that you can’t open again); more annoying, though, is that the payoff is simply a text description for a story beat.  on the plus side, though, the environmental graphics looks great.
  • enemy placement is absurd.  the 2nd chapter of Jake’s story is in a dark snowy mountain pass with no visibility, which follows a sudden helicopter crash.  why are there enemies there?  hell, why are there LADDERS there?  that whole level is insane.
  • i’m fucking done with enemies who won’t die.
  • the game is remarkably inconsistent in terms of telling you how you’re doing.  some regular zombies die in one shot; other regular zombies take a whole clip to the face.  some regular zombies die with one boot stomp; other zombies will override your stomping animation and chew your face off.  and forget about boss monsters; there is absolutely no way of knowing if anything you’re doing is working or not.  if you stay alive long enough while pumping bullets in its direction, you may end up killing it; or you may get killed by a random zombie who’s suddenly spawned behind you, because the camera is terrible.

And yet, despite all this, despite how nonsensical the story is and how stupid the characters are, and despite the fact that I’ve wanted to give up on the game at least a dozen times today, I’m kinda still compelled to keep going.  I don’t know that I’ll end up finishing it, especially with XCOM coming out, but I kinda want to keep pressing on.  So we’ll see how that goes.

the first few hours: Borderlands 2

I really need to keep a notebook next to my bed.

I woke up this morning after a long Borderlands 2 session last night, and knew right off the bat that I was going to write a huge thing today.  I had this whole epic premise mapped out in my head – partly about what Borderlands 2 represents in terms of overall achievement in game design and what it is about open world RPGs that are so compelling and addictive, but also that there were three specific elements that a shooter needed to shine in order to be considered “successful.”  I know that one of these elements was graphics; I specifically remember that one of them wasn’t narrative (and I had a pretty convincing reason as to why such an important element in most games was not entirely the most important thing in a shooter); and I think that I made a distinction between the quality and variety of the weapons and the actual pleasurability of firing them.  I remember lying in bed, saying to myself, “I should really write this down so that I can put it in the blog later”, and then not doing that, and now, of course, I can’t remember what the 3 things were, and it’s entirely possible that this brilliant post of mine is now forever lost.

Anyway.  My earlier post this week about feeling like I hadn’t played enough of Borderlands 2 in order to write about it?  I’ve now played enough to talk about it.  I’m around 10 hours in with my Commando, and I think I just hit level 13 before I turned it off in order to come to the coffeeshop where I’m currently sitting and trying to remember what the hell I wanted to talk about.

Regardless of whether or not I can reclaim that brilliant premise I had in my half-awake state this morning, I can certainly say that I am of two minds about the game.

On the one hand, it does so many things really, really well.  The meta-challenges and the “Badass Rank” in particular are brilliant – the game tracks pretty much every single thing you do and how you do it, and so during every other firefight you’ll get a bonus for, say, setting 100 enemies on fire, and every time you achieve a new Badass Rank you get an opportunity to increase a certain stat – weapon damage, shield recharge, etc. – and so it’s constantly encouraging you to be incredibly thorough in how you explore the world, which is handy because (a) that’s how I like to play these sorts of games anyway, and (b) there’s SO MUCH GODDAMNED LOOT.   The designers have smartly done away with certain conventions such as fall damage and limited sprinting – you can fall off any mountain and run as far as the day is long and that’s just fine with me, thank you very much.

In a way, this game makes a very convincing argument that from this point forward, all shooters should be like this – open world, RPG progression, endless customization.  You’d never mistake Borderlands for Skyrim, obviously, but you can certainly see the resemblance between the two.

On the other hand, the game has a bunch of weird quirks.  One of the game’s selling points is that it has eleventybillion guns, and even within the first hour you’ll find more guns than you can carry.   This is a problem, though, because your inventory is SEVERELY limited in the beginning (and is somewhat expensive to upgrade), and so you will almost always be struggling with what to keep and what to throw away.  The game smartly includes a system where you can tag stuff in your inventory so that you’ll automatically sell it when you get to a vending machine – but vending machines are few and far between.

And one of the more annoying problems with these guns is that reloading takes FOREVER.   The game addresses this by making reload time an upgradeable ability – and certainly I’ve begun to notice a difference as I’ve been sinking more and more points into improving that specific stat – but it makes the shooting of guns a pain in the ass, which is a somewhat significant problem in that shooting guns is all you do.

My brilliant reasoning for omitting narrative as one of the three most important qualities in a shooter is a bit murky now that I’ve forgotten how I’d phrased it, but in any event I think the point I was trying to make was that in almost every shooter (at least in terms of the single-player campaign), you are never driven forward by WHY.  Indeed, you are driven forward because of SPECTACLE and CRAZY SHIT BLOWING UP and because clearing out a room lets you enter the next room, which will be visually and spatially different than the room you’re currently in, and it’s fun to see new things.

In more specific terms, I have no idea why I’m doing any of the things I’m doing in Borderlands 2, even though I am compelled to do all of them, especially the optional stuff, because when I finish a mission I get XP and maybe a new shield or grenade mod or something.  Indeed, there are a few recurring characters from the first game, including this weird ghostly AI that has a direct line of communication with you, and I remember that there was a reason for that in the first game but it wasn’t particularly memorable, and I am similarly at a loss as to what she’s doing here.

And the thing is, it’s clear that a great deal of thought went into crafting the dialogue in this game, and the voice acting is pretty strong (if a little goofy), and there’s lots of funny bits all over the place.  But there’s a difference between snappy dialogue and a compelling narrative, and if there is a compelling narrative in this game I am yet to see it.  Let me say again that I’ve been playing for 10 hours already and when I’m done writing this post I’m going to head back to my apartment and play for another 10-20 before this weekend is through, and I’m looking forward to it, even though I have no idea where the story is going, and even though nobody (including me) seems to care.

too soon, too much

I’d love nothing more than to write a “First Few Hours” post about Borderlands 2, but, ironically enough, I feel like I haven’t played enough of it yet.

I mean, the whole point of a First Few Hours post is to specifically relay first impressions, gut instincts, surface-level observations about how the game looks, moves and feels, without getting into larger-scale topics like narrative and overall value.   And since Tuesday, I’ve played around 2 hours of Borderlands 2; my soldier is now level 7, I’ve killed a whole bunch of monsters and people, I’ve collected dozens of guns (and left dozens more where they lay, as my backpack is too small to carry them all), I’ve completed some challenges and cashed in some Badass Tokens (yielding results similar to Fallout’s “perks”).  I’ve also died a whole bunch, and I’ve run out of ammunition more times than I feel comfortable admitting.

About the only real thing I can definitively say at this point is that the game feels absolutely massive.  And I’ve only seen a tiny, tiny slice of it.

I think that once I get to Sanctuary, the first real town/hub, I’ll have a bit more to chew on.

In the meantime, iOS has been killing it this week.  Rayman Jungle Run is, sadly, not a port of Rayman Origins, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that from seeing the game in motion – it looks absolutely gorgeous.  Instead, it’s a one-button auto-runner, where your objective is simply to catch all 100 lums in a level.  It’s got a steep difficulty curve, but each level is so short that you hardly notice how many times you’ve died.  That sentence sounds like a slam, but it’s really not – it highlights the quick reloading and the addictive quality of the action.

Also out this week is The Room for iPad, which – thank GOD – is not based on the Tommy Wiseau “masterpiece” but is instead an absolutely gorgeous puzzle game.  It’s been compared to those “escape the room” flash puzzles that were all the rage a few years ago, but to me it reminds me a bit more of the adventure game Syberia, in that the puzzles you solve are less about making non-intuitive inventory combinations and rather about figuring out how to open locked doors using intricate mechanisms.  I finished Chapter 3 last night (each chapter is its own locked box), and I’m not quite sure how much is left, but I’m really enjoying what I’ve seen thus far.

And, also, the long-awaited Lili is out, though I haven’t yet played it.  And Horn, from the people who made The Meadow, received a hefty price drop this week, so I picked that up too.

Tonight, I may give Torchlight 2 a try – if I can pull myself away from either Borderlands 2 or my iPad.

the first dozen hours: Sleeping Dogs

It’s times like these where I’m glad that I’m not a professional game writer, because then I’d have to be a bit less wishy-washy when describing my experience playing Sleeping Dogs.

On the one hand, I greatly admire what it’s trying to do.  It’s true that the number of GTA clones has decreased considerably in recent years, but even so, there are still 2 directions that most of these open-world games seem to take – there’s the batshit crazy direction, best personified by the excellent Saints Row 3, and then there’s the serious, thoughtful, contemplative direction first explored in GTA4 and then in Red Dead Redemption.   Sleeping Dogs, to its tremendous credit, is aiming for something serious here – or, at least, is doing everything it can to avoid being unintentionally funny, which is a verydifficult thing to do when you have Chinese accents peppering a game meant for ‘Murican audiences.  (There are too many YouTube-able instances of prominent American celebrities/sports stars/newspeople saying stupid shit like “ching chang chong” as a shorthand for Chinese for me to link to here, but I’m sure you get the idea.)

It also brings a lot to the table in terms of gameplay.  First and foremost, it’s probably got the best melee combat we’ve yet seen in an open-world game, and while it’s not quite as good as the recent Batman games, it’s still great fun.  (By the same token, some of the fights are quite difficult, which can be frustrating – but when you do win a fight, it’s all the more satisfying.)

And enough can’t be said about the open world itself.  Hong Kong, even if it’s fictionalized, is an exotic and unique locale for this type of game – or, indeed, any game, really – and the city is incredibly well-designed and is a lot of fun to explore.  If I were to make a Top 10 Best Open World Cities list – and I very well might, when the next generation of consoles launches and I need to do a current-gen wrap-up –  I’d probably put this in my top 3.  It’s that good.

But where there’s a sandbox, there is also jank, and Sleeping Dogs has some very strange jank.  Not the usual jank, where there’s bugs and broken AI and shit – more like inconsistent game design.  Without spoiling anything, your player character is an undercover cop, and you will be performing missions for both the police and the gangs you’ve infiltrated. After each mission, you receive performance grades that reflect how you did for both factions.  Now, here’s where this gets weird; regardless of which faction you work for, you will get docked points for the police faction if you do anything wrong – if you shoot a civilian hostage while aiming for the bad guy behind them, if you crash your car into a civilian vehicle during a chase even though the civilian car drove through an intersection, if you happen to run over a streetlight.  And yet, during the missions, you are not only beating up thugs, but you can brutally murder them by, say, impaling them on a pallet of swordfish heads, or by breaking an aquarium with their face, etc.  Indeed, you get rewarded for such brutality.

There’s also a bunch of weirdness in the story – it feels like certain scenes may have been edited out without smoothing over their rough edges.  Characters suddenly appear out of the blue and yet interact with your character like they’re old, trusted friends.  A wedding takes place out of the fucking blue.  And then there’s the character of Winston’s mother, which I can’t talk about without spoiling it, except to say that it is SUPER FUCKED UP and your character seems more than willing to help her do the things she does.  Which, as a cop, he should maybe not do.  Is all I’m saying.

I have no idea how far along I am in the story, but I’m enjoying myself for the most part, and it’s certainly worth a look if you’ve got some free time.

3 is a magic number

It’s been very quiet here since the last podcast; honestly, there’s not been a hell of a lot to talk about.  If I were a professional games writer, I’d find stuff to post, but I’m pretty sure that those of you who find your way to this corner of the internet aren’t looking for hot scoops.

I’ve been in a rut, basically.  The initial wave of iPad euphoria has subsided, and I’m no longer buying every game that comes out.  (Well, I did buy Lost Winds 2 yesterday, but haven’t played more than the first 20 seconds of it.)   There are plenty of good-looking distractions to be found in the App Store, to be sure, but I am craving a meal, not a snack.  Or maybe I’m just waiting for the iOS ports of Walking Dead and Botanicula to show up.

In the meantime, I’d been kinda tooling around with my backlog.  Finally finished Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, which was a bit dumb.  I mean, it had been dumb for quite some time – I think I ultimately spent over 30 hours in there – but towards the end I just wanted to finish the final boss and be done with it.  I still have at least 20 side quests to finish but I do.  not.  give a shit.  The narrative – to the extent there is one – was boring and uninspired and in any event I couldn’t skip past it quickly enough.   I kinda feel bad for 38 Studios, who are going through some pretty serious money problems; wait a minute, what am I saying?  I hate Curt Schilling.  I feel bad for the non-Curt Schilling people of that company, let’s put it that way.

And I also decided to give up on Tiger Woods 13.  There used to be a time when the Tiger games could easily fill the slow months of the release calendar, but not so much these days.  I appreciate that they’re still making adjustments to the controls, but I can’t help getting annoyed when my perfectly lined-up putt curves away because of some arbitrary stat math.

And yeah, I guess I was also one of the million people who ended up buying Minecraft on XBLA, even though I’d never played the PC version – indeed, I never wanted to play the PC version.  That much freedom is intimidating to me; I have no idea what to do.  (This is is also why the Hitman games tended to scare the hell out of me, too.)  I spent an hour or two with it last weekend; I was pleasantly surprised at how accessible it was, but I’m still not sure I’m going to do very much with it.

This is all to say that yesterday’s releases of Max Payne 3 and Diablo 3 were big fucking deals for me, and I’d guess that if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably either at work, or just taking a break from playing those games.

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I fired up Max Payne 3 first.  I don’t recall how long I played for; I know I finished the first two chapters.

Gut reactions:

  • It’s probably the best-looking game Rockstar’s ever made, especially with regards to the lighting engine – everything is super-crisp and colorful.  This is also probably the best use of that Euphoria physics/rag doll system first seen in GTA4 and later used to marvelous effect in Red Dead Redemption – when you kill people, man, you fuck them up.
  • It’s really remarkable how well they’ve managed to both keep the game feeling fresh while, at the same time, staying true to the iconic features of the original games – the pills-as-powerups, the bullet-time, the noir.  A lot of this has to do with Rockstar’s incredible confidence in its cut-scenes.  Ever since GTA4, those mid-mission story beats started becoming real treats to watch – the dialogue’s always been great (if a little heavy-handed at times), but the scenes themselves became very cinematic – the camera was always in an interesting place, the motion-capture work was expressive and clear, and the characters themselves were engaging and entertaining.  I never found myself impatient and wanting to skip past a scene, the way I do with almost every other game out there.  Anyway, my point is that when the cutscene is over and Max is back in my hands, it still feels like the original games did – even though it’s got a lot of new technology behind the scenes.
  • If there’s one thing that’s a little off to me, it’s that I’m playing this game on the Xbox360.  I played the first two games on the PC, and the mouse and keyboard always felt intuitive and easy to use.  I also played the ports of those games on the Xbox, and the shift to the controller never felt quite right.  That not-quite-right feeling shows up here as well, which is somewhat of a bummer.  Bullet-time – the defining feature of this franchise – is activated by pushing in the right thumbstick, which is not at all intuitive and, if anything, makes it more of a pain in the ass to use.  On the PC, bullet-time was both super fun to watch and useful from a strategic perspective, but here I find myself using it just because I want to see it, not because I need it.
  • Haven’t yet touched the multiplayer, although it looks interesting.  Will try to give that a good look over the next few days, in between breaks from the campaign.

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As for Diablo 3… well, honestly?  I’m a little bummed.  I played for around 5 minutes last night – long enough to see that the weird latency/lag issues that I had in the beta a few weeks ago were still present in the retail release.  This is especially weird since my PC uses a wired connection to my router.  I haven’t yet tried tweaking the graphics settings – I wasn’t sure if this was a CPU issue or a lag issue – but I know that other people are experiencing similar problems.

I’m debating whether or not to install it on my MacBook Pro; the Mac is mainly for music and writing, and I’m a little afraid of
installing such a distraction onto that machine.  But, then again, if it runs better there…

No matter.  My plan is to focus on Max Payne 3 for the time being, and then, hopefully by this time next week, Blizzard will have solved some of these issues and the experience will be smoother.

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.

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.

FFXIII-2: the first hour

It occurs to me that there are quite a few reasons why I feel pathologically compelled to play as many new games as possible these days.  Certainly there’s a desire to be able to “take part in the conversation”, as it were.   It also gives me something to talk about here, and I’ve not kept it hidden that I’d like to turn my experience in blogging here into something more professional (although I recognize that (a) I’ve got a long way to go as far as that’s concerned, and (b) it’s not like professional gaming journalism is a hot racket).

But I think there’s a more fundamental reason at work here, and it’s that while I’ve always been a huge fan of videogames, I also had a rather gigantic gap in my playing resume.  I started with an Atari 2600, but never had any of the Nintendo machines of the 80s.  My little brother – 6.5 years younger than me – had a Sega Genesis, and we both played the hell out of that, but after that I was totally out of the loop.  I never owned a PS1 or a PS2, nor did I own an N64 or Gamecube.  After I graduated college, one of my best friends bought a PS1, and we spent a lot of time playing the Oddworld games and Crash Bandicoot, and I suppose it was at that point that I caught the bug again.  My girlfriend (at the time) bought me a Dreamcast, and after that I started turning into the man you see before you.

[I feel like I’ve said all this before.   I probably have.  I’m too lazy to search the archives.  I’m in a reflective mood today; indulge me.]

Anyway, I bring this up because I’m playing Final Fantasy XIII-2, and I feel bad about it.

You’ve gotta understand – I never played the early, “classic” FF games.   As I said the other day, I’ve downloaded FF7, 8,  and 9 on PSN out of obligation (and I’ll probably download 6 at some point, too), but with the exception of the 10-15 hours I put into FF7 for a blog feature that never quite went anywhere, I’ve not touched them.  I bought the PSP-only FF7: Crisis Core, but didn’t get more than a few hours in without putting it down.  And I think I put a few hours into the remakes of the early titles on the DS, but – again – I couldn’t really stick with it.

I came to FFXIII as a noob, ultimately.  But the point is:  I showed up for it.  I deliberately played the PS3 version, because I wanted the best experience.  I wanted something gigantic and epic for my PS3, too, since I hardly ever use it for gaming, and I’d figured that the first HD FF experience would be something special.

I was wrong.

FFXIII had a fun combat system and gorgeous visuals, absolutely.  It was also relentlessly linear – which I didn’t necessarily mind, because I was overwhelmed by the incredibly annoying cast of characters and the utterly nonsensical story, a story that could generously be called “convoluted”.   I finished the game, eventually, because I wanted to be able to say that I finished a Final Fantasy game, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasurable experience.  At the time, I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d finally fallen out of love with JRPGs, or if it was simply that FFXIII was just a shitty one.  But the general consensus from FF fans was that FFXIII was a shitty game, and that made me feel a bit better.   [I still sometimes feel like if I’ve had a bad time with a game, it’s somehow my fault.  I genuinely thought that I was somehow to blame for not understanding how to play the infamously awful “E.T.” on the 2600.]

Point being, SquareEnix knew that FFXIII was a disappointment, and supposedly FFXIII-2 is a direct response to what everybody hated about the original; it’s more open-ended, it refines an already great combat system into something even  better, it adds dialogue trees (sort of) – it’s catering to what it thinks the West wants.  The problem is that these characters are still annoying, and this story is still stupid.

An hour isn’t enough time to form a valid opinion – I know that.   It took me 40 hours of FFXIII before I started having “fun”, and your guess is as good as mine as to why I felt compelled to spend 40 hours playing something that wasn’t (besides the aforementioned compulsion to finish a Final Fantasy game).  But an hour is enough time for the developer to introduce the story and the characters and get the player acclimated to what’s about to happen, and HOLY SHIT I don’t care.  The dialogue is awful, and I genuinely feel bad for the voice actors, most of whom do a really good job with truly terrible lines.  The characters are ridiculous.  There’s really no other way to put it.  I don’t like any of them, and it’s certainly not because they’re emoting at every single moment.  (Seriously – do they need to insert every grunt and gasp and voiced utterance?  It’s bizarre.  Not even movies include that much sonic detail; it’s terribly distracting.)

And yet, after all this, I’m sure I’m going to keep playing through the weekend (except for the Superbowl, of course – go Giants!), and probably right up until next week’s Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning, which I am legitimately looking forward to.  I am a whore.