How many shots did I take?

Yesterday, a little after noon, I walked down to the Game Stop and bought a used copy of Crackdown. What with Crackdown 2 nigh on top of us, I thought maybe I should get around to playing the first one so I could compare and contrast. (Assuming I get around to playing the sequel before three years pass.)

Today, at a little before noon, I have the game 2/3 completed. I’d estimate I spent 16 of the last 24 hours playing Crackdown. Also, I played D&D for about 4 hours in there. Zero of those hours were spent in sleep, or in gainful employment.

As I looked over my shoulder at 8:00 a.m.  and noticed that full-on daytime had arrived without even texting, I realized that electronic games are my “alcohol.”

Metaphorically speaking

I don’t really care for alcohol. I was raised in a tee-totalling house, so it was never around, never discussed. Happily, no particular guilt or religious spectre haunts my post-prohibition life. But in my formative years, I just never learned to like alcohol, or think it was cool.

As an adult, I have learned to participate in drinking it. It’s like the way you play volleyball at picnics. You don’t expect to be good at it, or even try, really. You just go out on the lawn and be a good sport for 20 minutes.

Part of my issue with recreational alcohol is that I can’t think straight.  I am fond of thinking, and after a couple of beers, it gets hard to concentrate. I like concentrating! So instead of getting tight to loosen up, it instead has a reflexive effect. I fight the fog to regain equilibrium. I’m a good sport for 20 minutes, though.

I’ve been drunk, for like, an hour. Then I sober up. The End. That’s how I do it. I’ve never had a hangover. Never had a DUI. Never had one of those stories where I did something I’d regret later.

But this morning, I had the godawful, “What did I do?” experience that everyone who overindulges feels.

I’m bleary and sluggish. Can’t think straight. Ghostly agility orbs rush toward my face. Listen, Crackdown is a fun game. A distilled, little bitty superhero sandbox game. And it’s probably even better in moderation.

“Sir, please step out of the Agency SUV.”

Every time I do this, I tell myself,  “I can’t pull this crap any more. This was a terrible idea. This is going to kill my body rhythm for two days.  I’m not doing this again.”

And then next time I get a decent game, I do it again. Like the old black rum.

Maybe… maybe I will wait on Crackdown 2.

Red Dead Attention

Round here at the Bar Q Ranch, we got a saying about Red Dead Redemption: “You can’t make an omelette without accidentally killing a few townsfolk.”

Other things you can’t do without accidentally killing a few townsfolk:

• stop a domestic violence dispute
• get into a duel
• board a stagecoach
• mount your horse
• call your horse
• leave your rented room

Just trying to figure out which button to press to sit down to play poker has led to inadvertent shootouts. But then you pay off your bounty like a Wild West indulgence and go back to accidentally killing the guy whose wagon got robbed.

Once I mastered the control scheme though, the game became a dream. Albeit, a dream with some niggling QA problems.

Horrific as it may seem, I haven’t played GTA IV. But I’ve played III, Vice City, and San Andreas, and I like this version of GTA best of all.

I wouldn’t have called those games “crowded” before, but the sparse landscape and straightforward missions were implemented so beautifully.

Other Impressions:

The writing and voice acting was excellent. I’ve read some people that  found the conversations on the trail boring, but I’ve never been so attached to exposition in a game. I was involved the whole time, annoyed when something made me miss dialogue.

Even the incidental dialogue was good, and varied. After playing for 30 hours, you hear some repetition, and if you play poker long enough, you will want to start a fight from hearing the same lines over and over. But it was all believable and enjoyable.

The ability to do bad things unknowingly was a little frustrating. When you try to play a good, honorable guy, but board a stagecoach on the wrong side and become a wanted wagon-jacker — there’s a little bit of a switcheroo. Fortunately, the designers made the consequences light.

Some parts of the game were never explained well enough. I got shot in several duels after I’d marked the guy up like a one-man tic-tac-toe game with no decent feedback explaining what I’d done wrong. And although the stats didn’t reflect it, the most “m******f*****!” moments occurred trying to lasso and/or hogtie anybody. So frustrating.

I became genuinely attached to John Marston. Playing the aftergame is less fun without him. Jack’s squeaky voice is much less satisfying.

The game is even fun to watch. My brother-in-law comes over to play, and my wife and I enjoy spectating. My wife even started playing after watching me for so many hours. Now that’s a winner of a game right there. It doesn’t compromise on the shooting and riding and badassery, but still has SO appeal? More of those, please!

The unfunnest game

I’ve reached the point in FF XIII where I’m fighting a giant bulbasaur boss monster, and about 10 minutes into the fight it kills me, which means I have to start over, which means I probably won’t start over.

Boss fights are curious mini-games tucked into nearly any other kind of game. Whatever other kind of game you were playing–racing, rpg, fps, twitch, hell, someone’s probably tried to to insert a boss battle into Klondike–at theoretically dramatically appropriate moments, a solo opponent of significantly greater difficulty appears in the game, and you must defeat it to continue.

Bosses come with their own strategies and patterns that are unlike the strategies and patterns you’ve learned to employ so far in a game. And the way you learn these new patterns, (which you will not be using again, so their mastery is siloed into a singular 5-minute portion of the game), is by failing a few times.  No matter how far you proceeded into the battle, your penalty for failure is starting all over again.

In short, a boss fight is a fairly difficult mini-game inserted into a larger  game that prevents your progress in the larger game until you play it correctly. And I hate them.

Boss Fights I’ve Liked

That’s a bit effusive. I don’t hate them per se. I enjoyed the pudding out of Shadow of the Colossus, which was a game of boss fights. It was good and fun, even though I had to consult the Internet on how to play the back half of the game because I didn’t have the patience after running wildly and dying repeatedly, unable to discern how to flip the colossus over onto its back so I could climb the nearby cathedral of trees and leap into its mouth and stab it in the special spot on the underside of its tongue. Six times. Ok, maybe I’ve got issues with SotC too. But I liked it.

Boss fights in World of Warcraft are fun too. They are fun because you choose to engage them, and they do not impede your progress when you choose not to. This is excellent implementation.

But Most of the Time They Suck

When I don’t like it is when I’m playing an entirely different sort of game, something exploratory and adventure- like y Legend of Zelda, and I’m expected to shift gears into puzzle/twitch mode after five seconds of tense introductory music. And I can’t continue with the game I was enjoying until I’ve bashed my way through the mini-game I hate.

I enjoy a good rant, but I also need to offer a solution after I’ve complained for 500 words. In this case, however, the solution has already been implemented, thanks to every gamer’s friend, Shigeru Miyamoto, who added the “Super Guide” to New Super Mario Bros. Wii. This feature plays the game for you if you die too much, neatly solving the problem. I want it included in every game with boss fights. Because I would turn it on, go get a sandwich, and come back when the fun starts again.

I understand I’m not everybody, and the mastery of boss fights appeals to many gamers. But Square, who puts an enormous amount of detail into their story lines,  has learned that some players might want to skip their beloved cut scenes, and they have a mechanism for that. It can’t be too far of a leap to understand that  the story-oriented among us might like to skip an occasional combat scene as well.

It might help more of us get to the end of the content after all.

Final Fantasy XIII — delayed!

My FFXIII xbox bundle arrived yesterday, but I haven’t even had time for a tedious unboxing video. We leave for a 3 week vacation to Italy tomorrow, and today I’ve been food poisoned by a fast food company I won’t besmirch directly, but rhymes with “flarby’s.” All the last-minute things I was going to do have been commuted to “lie on the bed and moan.”

I will myself to be better tomorrow though, because as Socrates said, “Illness of the body is debilitating, but illness while trapped on a plane is like, hell. Seriously.”

Try to play some games while I’m gone, ok?

Random House fights encroaching obsolescence

Smart, smart, smart. Just as they’ve done with movies, Random House has launched an in-house group to sell story to video game makers. They’ll hand you a plot, a setting, and characters. Game makers just fill in the fiddly bits.

I don’t think print books will obsolesce, but my best guess is that they will become sadly niche. Most would-be dinosaurs hunker down and hope the asteroid will maybe decide not to hit the planet. Good for RH on thinking like a mammal.

Side note: The company they’re launching the effort with is Stardock, whose CEO, Brad Wardell, had fine insight on what makes a AAA game. The more I learn about Wardell, the more I want to learn.

Semper Ubi sub Ubi

Especially when you invite hackers to pants your servers. Because you don’t want to leave your dangly bits in the wind.

I am awful, awful sympathetic to publishers trying to avoid piracy. This is not about fat CEOs lying around on bags of money. This is about people’s jobs y’unnerstand.

There’s an ecosystem here, and it goes like this: The more that people pay for games, the more money there is to make more games. Yes, lawful consumers make the rich richer, but these richers like money so much, that if you give them even an inkling that they can make MORE, then they’ll try to do it. And this particular class of richers makes money by providing you with things they hope you’ll like and pay money for.  This is your standard-issue virtuous circle.

The obverse is also true: the less people pay for games, the less inclined anyone is to try to make money on games.

I’m not unsympathetic to pirates either. You need a better way to sort treasure from trash than the glassy-eyed “journalism” that most games outlets purvey. And above-average game studios are prolific — nobody I know has the money to stay abreast of every great game on the market. And, there is a certain roguish charm to the best hacks, damn their outlaw hides.

But let’s ignore people who smoke hundred dollars bills on the backs of their yachts, and the big-britches scriptkiddies. For just a minute. Let’s focus on the middle of the curve.

A game of any decent size employs 50-100 people. Those 50-100 people just want to make good games for a living. Every time someone pirates a game, it’s a small, but direct threat to those 50-100 people, and the potential for those numbers to grow.

Now listen, I’m a pretty committed cheapskate. But I’d be real, real sad if my desire to play a game for free or to prove my pr0we$$ cost anyone a job. Even a game company who tried going commando as their latest anti-piracy scheme.

Silver Lining indeed

Gamasutra, among other places, tells us that Activision has shut down the King’s Quest sequel via lawyergram. I’m sure they have some complex, legal, business-derived reason to do this:

Online-based development team Phoenix Online Studios has canceledThe Silver Lining, its long-in-production King’s Quest sequel, following a legal threat by franchise owner Activision.

It’s probably necessary, but this is one of those rare situations where the simple answer (“Shut it down!”) is the worst one. In the same amount of time it took them to deliberate and issue this relatively polite cease-and-desist, they could have worked out some alternative that would have earned them love and praise, and would have made their CEO, Bobby Kotick, who just delivered a candid keynote speech at DICE,  appear to have the regular number of human faces.

The good news, the complete upside, is that The Silver Lining development team is a passionate, semi-functional studio. If I were an outsider with a bag of money, looking to get into iPad game development tout suite, I would be Skypeing these people approximately yesterday. I would be surprised if someone weren’t already moving on this.