Uncharted 3 – finished

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m feeling a bit melancholy today. You see, last night I finished Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. That means I’ve got two years to wait for Uncharted 4 (assuming such a title exists, or will exist). UC3 will probably wind up being my personal “Game of the Year,” unless Skyrim *really* surprises me.

So, some final thoughts.

Without booting up Uncharted 2 for comparison, I actually feel like UC3’s gameplay mechanics were actually a bit jankier this time out. Part of that comes from the richness of the animation; it can make small movements more challenging than they should be. You know the drill: you have to climb a ladder but every time you move the analog stick you walk past it since the smallest step Drake will take is a bit too far.

This was’t as big a deal as it might have been for a few reasons. First is that Drake generally saves himself. If you nudge the controller and walk off a ledge, he’ll grab on. You have to actually jump off a ledge to fall. And even if you do that, UC3 is filled with invisible checkpoints and respawns are super fast so you can just try again.

Also, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for me. I love how cool Drake looks when he’s running through narrow passageways, bouncing off walls and stuff.

Honestly I play Uncharted for the narrative and the spectacle, not for precise controls or state-of-the-art shooter technology. Enemies are still bullet sponges (unless you go for the head shots) but ammo is plentiful. Some of the fancy stuff (eg grabbing a live grenade and throwing it back at the enemies) doesn’t always work that well. Drake was constantly hitting a wall with those live grenades and blowing himself up. I quickly learned that it was better just to dive for cover.

I really wish I’d never watched any of the preview coverage of the game, since a few of the best ‘set piece’ moments were totally spoiled by those. [SPOILER already spoiled by preview trailers] As soon as I got on to that big cruise ship I knew I was going to end up in the hold with the ship sinking, for instance.[/SPOILER]

That said, the sense of chaos and bat-shit craziness is amazing. Naughty Dog loves putting you on moving terrain. That’s all I’ll say about that. My jaw was hanging open an awful lot.

I generally play games on Easy these days, but I played Uncharted 3 on Normal and it was still really easy. That’s not a complaint, just an observation. I was glad I didn’t get too hung up since, again, I was playing for the narrative and wanted to keep things moving along. Frustration, for me, can ruin the pacing so easily.

I love these characters and I find that to be a particularly rare feeling in games. I know a lot of folks who love the characters in Mass Effect and Dragon Age but none of those ever resonated with me like Drake, Sully and Elena do. They’re like family! Chloe is back too, and she’s brought a friend.

One really curious choice is that Naughty Dog jumped ahead a few years (at least) between UC2 and UC3 and, well, stuff happened. Stuff that is referred to somewhat obliquely and never expanded upon. I want to know more! In a perfect world we’d get some awesome single player DLC mini-episodes that bridge the gap between UC2 and UC3.

I just adore this series. If I hadn’t already pre-ordered a Playstation Vita, I’d be pre-ordering one today just so I could play the Uncharted game it’s getting. When I finished my first play-through of UC3 last night, I sat through all the credits and then jumped into watching the featurettes included on the disk. Then my cursor hovered over the “Another round” campaign option.

But no, I need to clear my plate for Skyrim this Friday.

Please Naughty Dog: Put my fears to rest and announced Uncharted 4 already. I’ll carve out time in my 2013 fall schedule for you!

Lovin’ on games

Posted on by Nimgimli

Been a while, eh? I have to admit that Google+ has been my ‘blogging’ platform lately, but I had a hankering to get back to something a bit more structured. We’ll see how long that lasts. Anyway, here goes…

I’ve been playing electronic games since there’ve been electronic games to play, pretty much. OK I wasn’t in the MIT lab playing Space War! on a PDP-1 when it was invented, but I lived through the transition from mechanical pinball tables to Pong and from there on out, I was a “Gamer.”

We gamers can be a snarky bunch, and we love to argue and debate and proselytize almost as much as we like to play. In fact sometimes I start to get the feeling that actually playing the games comes second to talking about them.

Then every so often the stars align and I’m 12 years old again and staring at a TV screen that is somehow also a game, and a feeling of joy suffuses my spirit.

I’d lost track of the release date of Uncharted 3 so I was a little surprised when the UPS dude dropped it off (along with a cookie for Lola) yesterday. I wasn’t even that excited when I slid the disk into the PS3 later that night. Even though I’d really enjoyed (and finished — a rare event for me) the first two games, somehow the hype for #3 hadn’t really touched me.

And then I launched the game, and the Uncharted theme started to play and a few seconds later Drake and Sully were walking down a London Street, dressed to the nines, and I was hooked.

This blog post isn’t a review and I’m not trying to convince you that you should play Uncharted 3. There are plenty of reviews out there that you can read and decide for yourself. I’m just trying to remind you of what it’s like to truly love a game, warts and all. When’s the last time you felt that way? For me it’d been a little while. Maybe since Red Dead Redemption.

Uncharted, for me, is about story and chemistry. The actual gameplay isn’t all that special and in parts can actually be kind of clunky. But I am genuinely fond of the characters and I love how much work Naughty Dog puts into ‘throwaway’ actions in cut scenes. A tiny example… as the crew sits around a table trying to unravel a puzzle, Chloe (voiced by Claudia Black) throws out a possible answer. Drake (Nolan North) seizes on it as a good lead and the focus of the scene moves to him. But in the background we see Chloe fist-bumping with Charlie Cutter (Graham McTavish), her new beau and a new member of the team. A trivial action? Absolutely, but that’s kind of the point. It’s tiny details like this that make the experience transcend “video game cut scene” and become “interactive movie.”

If you hate interactive movies, that’s OK. There’re lots of games to play besides Uncharted 3.

In a way, I think the Uncharted series is the West’s answer to Final Fantasy. I play both series to get to the next chunk of story, and the stories in Uncharted are good enough to pull me through to the end of the game. That isn’t always true with Final Fantasy: as a Western series, Uncharted’s stories are much less obtuse than they are in a typical iteration of Final Fantasy, too. That helps keep me involved.

Before yesterday I’d been sitting on my hands, squirming in anticipation for Skyrim to release, but now I can’t wait for the work day to end so I can jump back into Uncharted 3. I can’t wait to see what happens next, and I can’t wait to see how Elena (Emily Rose) is going to factor into this episode’s adventure. I love these characters the same way I love Gandalf or Malcolm Reynolds. The fact that they appear in a video game is almost beside the point. Journeying through their adventures with them makes me happy. And making me happy is what games are (generally) supposed to do. [Qualifier to allow for the few ‘message’ games that are out there.]

Microsoft Wireless Speed Wheel

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last week on the day Forza 4 came out, I was poking around in Best Buy (a favorite way to kill time on my lunch hour) and I saw this weird U-shaped contraption in the same ‘end cap’ display case as Forza: The Microsoft Wireless Speed Wheel [MWSW]. My first thought was that it was just a prop for Kinect, like the plastic Wii steering wheel that you snap the Wii Remote into. Then I saw it was $60 and figured it had to be more. I was vaguely intrigued and more so when Scott from Pumping Irony mentioned he had one pre-ordered.

This week I was back in Best Buy and now they had an Xbox station set up running the Forza 4 demo with the MWSW. I gave it a whirl and it actually felt pretty good. Much better than I thought it would. I was in need of a bit of retail therapy anyway, and the next thing you know (OK truth? I had to go to 3 stores to find it in stock. Target had it) I’m the owner of a copy of Forza 4 and the wheel.

Last night I spent a few hours driving with it, and I continue to be impressed, but let’s get the bad news out of the way first. There’re no bumper buttons and no jack for a headset. I don’t care about the latter but it was enough to cause Scott to cancel his pre-order. I do miss the buttons; they aren’t used while driving in Forza but they are used while navigating the interface. Also in other parts of the game where you’d use the right analog stick to move the camera around…you’re out of luck. The Wheel has no analog sticks.

This wouldn’t be a huge issue except that (unless I’m missing something) the Xbox 360 is stupid about having two controllers connected at the same time, without two Xbox Live accounts to go with them. Switching between Wheel and standard controller was a hassle, forcing me to constantly log in to my Xbox Live account each time I picked up the other controller. Eventually the system got so confused that the main display thought I was logged in but the pop-up ‘blade’ display [what do you call that?] thought I wasn’t.

I’m no Xbox 360 guru so if there’s a better way of handling this I’d love to hear it. I don’t mind setting down one controller and grabbing another between races if I don’t have to do all this logging in and out.

So that’s the bad stuff. The good? The wheel works really well when actually racing in Forza 4. I could hold a line nicely and my lane transitions were very smooth. At the end of each arm of the U, underneath, is a trigger. The right is for gas, the left is for brakes. There’s a D-pad on the tip of the left arm, used for shifting, and the face buttons are on the tip of the right, used for handbrake, clutch, look back and rewind. The game defaulted to a manual transition and I decided, for once, to stick with it. Shifting quickly came to feel natural; as you hold the Wheel your thumb rests easily on that D-pad.

How you hold the wheel doesn’t matter (in Forza at least). You can hold it up vertically or almost rest it horizontally in your lap. I thought my arms would get tired after a while but that wasn’t really a problem. Sometimes I’d rest the base of it on my lap while driving. You can also easily scratch your nose in the middle of a race…steering one-handed for a few seconds isn’t a problem using the wheel.

The wheel is heavier than you might expect it to be but that gives it some…inertia maybe? I think if it was any lighter you’d lose some stability. Eventually one hand started to cramp a little bit but I think that was due to my deathgrip on the thing during tense racing action. 🙂

According to the docs, the wheel can read pitch and yaw in games that require it to, so presumably it’d be a good controller in flight or space games too.

I do think Forza 4, or other games that have a simulation feel, would be a better fit than an arcade racer where you’re throwing your car violently into turns or ramming other cars off the road. The wheel feels like it’s better for finesse than for radical movements, and Forza 4 is a game of finesse. You rarely have to turn more than (total guesstimate) 20 degrees. Turning the wheel more than 90 degrees would feel really awkward.

As a test, at the end of the night I put down the wheel and picked up the controller and went back to Forza 4. Sure enough, my driving suffered. Maybe you’re better than I am, but I find in driving games my car tends to wobble a bit as I push the analog stick through the dead zone and then over-steer slightly as I leave the dead zone. I can correct of course but it doesn’t feel or look like real driving. With the wheel my replays look like there’s a person actually driving the car.

If you have a force-feedback steering wheel, I’m sure that’s going to be better than the MWSW. But for those of us without the room for a proper wheel and pedal setup, in my opinion the Microsoft Wireless Speed Wheel is a better alternative to driving with a standard controller.

D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter

Posted on by Nimgimli

A few weeks back I got into the beta of a new Facebook game, D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter. Since then I’ve been playing it off and on and I have to tell you, I’m feeling very conflicted about it. See the thing is, I dislike Facebook quite a bit, and even more so after the events of the last week or two. But I’m finding D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter to be a decent turn-based strategy game. Please Atari, make an iPad version, or a Google+ version, or a Kongregate version…let me play it somewhere other than Facebook!

Anyway, D&D:HON has you recruiting a party of 4 adventurers, including yourself of course, and heading off on grid-based, turn-based adventures. If your friends are playing, you can recruit their characters into your party for free; otherwise you can hire the heroes of strangers for increasing amounts of gold as you need higher and higher level characters. Going on an adventure costs you Energy, which replenishes over time. This is the $$ hook; you can pay to have your energy replenished if you’re having a grand old time playing. (You purchase Astral Diamonds which can then be used to do things besides replenishing energy. Stuff like resurrecting yourself…oh so very tempting when you die near the end of an adventure.)

The adventures themselves take place in a series of rooms and generally you have to kill the bad guys in the room to advance. Something there’ll be traps (bring a rogue to disarm) and sometimes there’ll be treasure chests. As you grow your character they learn various skills, and most of these skills can be used once per room (though a few can only be used once per adventure). Each turn a character can move, attack/use a skill, and use items. Some skills are also ‘free’ and can be used in addition to an attack. The basic gameplay is fun and hampered only by the fact that the game is built in Flash, meaning the interface is a bit cumbersome. I sure wish Flash would support right mouse buttons.

Between adventures you can wander around town by clicking from building to building. There are shops, a recruitment hall, and your own house where you can see your achievements and get a free daily gift. You also get a handful of gold every day just for logging in…more each day up to 5 consecutive days, then it rolls over back to 5 gold for day 1.

You can have multiple characters and each one has his or her own energy pool, which is a nice touch. There’s no way to trade items between characters (or with other players). You can, of course, gift your friends with stuff in typical Facebook fashion.

At level 10 you’re able to create your own adventures and share them with other players. If you want to level quickly there are plenty of adventures designed by other players to give you an “I WIN” button and help you advance. Using just the game-supplied adventures will keep your leveling speed pretty low, as fits the whole D&D license (IMO at least). In fact it can be a challenge to keep a positive cash flow if you’re hiring adventures to head out with you.

Anyway, it’s a Facebook game, but that means it’s free to try. I don’t really play Facebook games these days, but I’ve been making an exception for Heroes of Neverwinter; that must say something about the title. It’s probably an easier game if you have lots of friends playing, but playing ‘solo’ is definitely viable, at least for as far as I’ve gotten. Check it out!

DC has a new home

Posted on by Nimgimli

Hey folks,

I moved this blog to a new ISP today. If you’re seeing this post, you’re seeing the site at its new home.

I’m sure -something- got broken, so if you notice any bugs, I’d appreciate it if you left a comment.

Game endings: is it me or do they suck?

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I finally finished Resistance 2 this weekend. It was a really fun ride right up until the end. The end, I felt, was annoying as hell and I couldn’t wait to get through it.

Which felt really familiar to me. And thinking back, it seems that with any kind of action-based game (FPS or 3rd person action-adventure stuff) I always get annoyed at the end. (And keep in mind I don’t finish many games so maybe I’m just finishing the wrong ones.)

I can’t decide if my problem is due to me, or due to game designers. It might just be that once I “feel” the end is near I start thinking about the next game I’m going to play, so I get in a hurry to finish the one I’m currently playing and so anything that trips me up starts feeling like an annoyance rather than a challenge. I also always get into the “I just want to finish this before going to bed” trap and suddenly it’s 2 am, I’m dead tired and cranky and making stupid mistakes.

Or it might be the designers always feel like they have to add 1) a big “surprise” twist at the end of the game, which is so expected now that it isn’t the least bit of a surprise and 2) one big hoopla fight designed to challenge the players one last time.

I hate the twist…it’s become such a trope. Y’know, the whole game you’re fighting to get into the castle tower and you finally get there and “Oh no, the evil wizard left his minion behind and now he’s in the castle dungeon. Retrace your steps!” Or a favorite alternative is “Yay I killed the ultimate bad guy…game over? NO! He’s reborn in a more powerful form! Fight him again!”

And the hoopla… the reborn boss can kill that bird with the same stone. Other hooplas are a sudden absence of checkpoints or a new twist to the gameplay that changes everything around. For instance the end of Halo when it turns from a shooter into a driving game. In the case of Resistance 2 it was a series of 3 domes you had to travel through. As you entered each one you got locked inside and had to wait for the big bad to tear it apart to get at you. Said big bad is impervious to your weapons and easy to avoid (stand in the center of the dome) and he takes a LONG time to destroy the domes. I spent that time petting the dog since the game literally didn’t require my attention at all. Between the domes you have to fight and dodge insta-kill hurled debris, and if you die, you have to start before the first dome – no checkpoints. Then the very very end is Halo-like… traverse a crumbling installation before the timer counts down and blows everything up.

I don’t really play games for the challenge, which probably is why the endings are so annoying when that spike in challenge is probably appreciated by many players. Plus I always have more games that I want to play than available time to play them, so I like my games shorts and intense, so drawn out endings always dilute the experience for me.

Anyway, not really singling out Resistance 2 on this…it was a pretty good game overall, and it’s no worse in this ending respect than many other games I’ve played. And now I can play Resistance 3!

Gaming console, motion controlled mis-adventures

Posted on by Nimgimli

So here’s my cluster-f**k story of getting Kinect to work in our living room.

Over the past few weeks I’ve finally accumulated a Tri-Mount ($30) and a Nyko Zoom ($30). I became aware of both of these gadgets back during E3 but now they’re finally on the market. So today I was ready to set everything up when Angela made sad eyes at me because I was going to take away “her” Kinect (set up in the office on my old launch 360). So it was off to Best Buy to purchase another Kinect sensor.

Good news? $25 gift card if you buy a Kinect this weekend, and they now come with a code for the full version of Child of Eden. Bad news? Another $150.

Screw-up #1 is that my TV is too fat for the Tri-Mount to fit on. But just very slightly too fat. The Tri-Mount has a long screw fixture that you use to adjust the thing. We disassembled it and pulled the ‘tongue’ out just a tad farther and hot-glued it there and it now fits on the TV. Hopefully it’ll hold because it’s just a friction fit. When set up right you can tighten up the screw assembly to ensure a tight, secure grips.

So I set everything up, including attaching the Zoom, moved the coffee table and fired up the Xbox. Things were going OK until Kinect tried to look down at the floor and reported it couldn’t see it. Huh? I tried again. Same thing. I think that, because the Tri-Mount is so hyper-extended backwards, the Kinect is back so far that, with the Zoom (which is essentially a wide-angle lens, as far as I can tell) attached the top of the TV (and/or the Playstation Eye, which sits in front of and below the Kinect) is blocking the line of site of the Zoom.

Here’s the kick in the teeth part, though. So with nothing left to lose I remove the Zoom and guess what? Since the Kinect is now so far back…there was enough room in the living room for it to calibrate, if I stand right against the couch. /facepalm

So the good news is I have the thing setup. I have no room for leaping about but nor do I have any interest in that. I wanted it for voice commands, mostly, and whatever else they put into ‘core games’ that I can do sitting down. I played 3 rounds of a demo of Fruit Ninja Kinect to re-assure myself that flailing around in front of the TV is still not fun.

The other good news is that I fired up the PS3 and grabbed a Move controller to make sure that was still working. Popped in The Shoot since it was handy. And re-assured myself that the Move is still a blast to mess around with. I have that cheap-o Pistol thing and it turns The Move into a really fun light-gun game. Really fun for a few minutes anyway.

I still think a good old controller is the best way to play video games for anything more than 15 minutes, unless your goal is to get some exercise. But I’ll enjoy talking to the Kinect and will continue to dabble with the Move now and then, so at the end of the day it’s all good.

However, Microsoft really needs to work on making the Kinect small-room friendly. Or just make a voice-only model.

Dear Gamestop: This is why I hate you

Posted on by Nimgimli

OK fair is fair… I didn’t like Gamestop before today. I definitely have a bias against the company. Today was just one example why.

So Scott has been talking about Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga, and I caught the fever from him and wanted to give it a go. Problem was, Best Buy didn’t have it in stock. Against my better instincts, I headed to Gamestop’s website. Found the game on the site, and checked availability at local Gamestop stores. As I’m writing this, the site says it’s available, new (I specified) at the 4 nearest stores. Actually looking now, it says it’s in stock at the nearest 40 stores. Which seems unlikely, but I didn’t got past nearest 4 at the time.

The Gamestop in Sudbury, MA, used to have (the last time I was in there a couple years ago) a young hipster working at it that was fine to do business with. So I headed there first. Unfortunately it was closed for some reason. Now Irene blew through here a few days ago so maybe it had something to do with that; I dunno. Maybe it’s just shut down. Anyway, OK, there’re 3 other stores on my list.

I next headed to the Gamestop at the Framingham Mall. I walked in, two clerks behind the counter. One, who I’ll call Alpha Clerk, was finishing up with a customer. The other, Beta Clerk (I’m naming him that because he constantly deferred to the other, and asked him whether he should take a break) very politely said “Can I help you with something?” OK, so far so good. I tell him yup, I’m looking for Divinity II for the Xbox 360. He starts looking it up. I told him it was actually Divinity II, the Dragon something Saga. He says “Oh? Dragon Age?” I say no, that’s just the sub-title. No biggie, mis-communication.

While we’re chatting a kid comes in and goes up to Alpha Clerk. He asks if they have Madden 12. The clerk instantly responds with “Did you pre-order?” The kid says no, he didn’t. He’s looking a bit crestfallen. Alpha Clerk gives him a cruel smirk [OK I may be imagining that part] and says, “Oh, hmm, let’s see if we have any extra.” Beta Clerk pipes up saying “We got hundreds of copies in.” Alpha Clerk glares at his co-worker (who, I suspect, was pretty new) and says “NOT FOR PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T PREORDER, WE DIDN’T.” Beta Clerk hangs his head and goes back to looking in the computer for my game.

Alpha Clerk grudgingly sells the kid a new copy of Madden 12, and then asks him if he’s pre-ordered Call of Duty 3 yet. Y’know, the game that comes out in November, and here it is the end of August. The game that is a military shooter, very much NOT like the sports game the kid just bought. The kid looks a little confused and says no, he hasn’t. “Well are you going to play it this year?” asks Alpha Clerk, as if the only way this kid will get a copy of Call of Duty 3 THIS YEAR is if he pre-orders TODAY. Kids says “Uh, I dunno…” and I lose track of that conversation because my clerk has found Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga for me!

He tells me it’s $27 used. I know from the website that it’s $30 new. “I don’t want used.” I tell him, “Do you have a new copy?” Beta Clerk looks at me as if I just refused a fistful of $100 bills and a date with a promiscuous supermodel. He looks again and says “No, sorry we don’t.”

I say “OK thanks” and start walking out the door.

“Wait,” he says, “Let me look for one thing.” I stop, he peers into his computer some more. The other clerk, the Alpha Clerk, comes over, gregarious as can be and says “Did someone mention Divinity II?” and I said yeah. Beta Clerk asks him if he’s played it and he says, “Divinity II is like Fallout. You don’t play it so much as experience it.” I groan inwardly as Alpha Clerk says “What are you doing?” to Beta.

“Looking to see if any of the other stores have a copy.” says Beta. “We have it!” says Alpha. “He doesn’t want used.” says Beta. “Oh, you’re not going to find it anywhere new” says Alpha. “It’s a discontinued SKU.” Beta gives up looking for me. I say “The website said you had it. It said a few stores around here have it.”

“That means nothing.” says Alpha.

“Fine,” I say, turning to walk out, and add “Typical Gamestop, I should’ve known better.”

“What do you mean by that!?” says Alpha. I tell him my thoughts on Gamestop’s policy of doing whatever it can to sell used copies of games rather than new. He protests with “We have every new game that comes out!” I don’t mention that he was just fussing at a kid for not pre-ordering Madden 12. I say “Forget it, this is what I expect. The website says you have it, you say you don’t.”

“The website is run by a completely different company!” he says, and he’s getting louder and madder at this point. “We have no control over what they tell you. They don’t make that game any more; it’s not available anywhere.”

“It’s cool.” I say, and he adds “Maybe you can order it direct from the website.” and I say “I’ll just get it from Amazon.” I step out of the door onto the sidewalk, where I pull out my phone and do just that. I spring for the $4 for overnight shipping and of course don’t pay sales tax. It’s close to a wash, but I will have to wait until tomorrow. OTOH I could’ve saved myself an hour of driving around.

So what did I learn?

Either the clerks were deliberately not selling me a new copy of Divinity II (doubtful) or the website was wrong. I really wish Beta Clerk had gone through with checking other shops nearby, because if none of them had new copies of the game, that shows a real screwy policy on the part of the website. Worst of all is the website offers a “Pick up at the store” service. I’m sure if I’d used that, once I got there they would’ve tried to sell me a used copy.

Maybe they’re two different companies…I don’t care. What I know is that the website offers the service of checking inventory at stores. If they can’t do that reliably, they shouldn’t offer the service. If they got this 1 store wrong, ok, that’s a glitch. But if the game is really not available new anymore, why does the site claim that the 40 closest stores have it in stock. That’s not a glitch; that’s deceit. And just being in that store for 10 minutes was enough to get me angry about how they push pre-orders on people constantly. Beta Clerk was actually very polite and tried his best to be helpful, but Alpha Clerk had the attitude I always expect from Gamestop.

Maybe if their store wasn’t 4/5ths full of used merchandise, they’d be able to keep some inventory of older new games on-hand, eh?

In the end I’m glad, though. As annoying as the ordeal was, it meant I didn’t break my Gamestop boycott, and in retrospect, that’s worth waiting a day for the game. I really don’t want to support that company if I can help it.

[Update: After sleeping on the event, and talking about it on Google+, I do think I was needlessly harsh on the store clerks in this post. The clerk who helped me really did try to help me rather than just blowing me off and saying “We don’t have it.” And the other clerk… well, as much as he annoyed me I’m sure he was just following the script that corporate tells him to follow.

I still hate the company and its policies, but the two guys working in the store weren’t really at fault of doing anything other than obeying the rules their superiors gave them to follow.]

Rift half-birthday celebration

Posted on by Nimgimli

Why hello there blog…how have you been, besides lonely and neglected?

So apologies for the 5 week gap between posts here. I attribute it to two things. The first is Google+ where I, along with the usual suspects plus a bunch of new quasi-friends, have been having lengthy and interesting discussions about games. Google+ allows for a real conversation and it feels like the perfect place for ‘been thinking about’ posts that don’t really need to be saved forever. I, and many others, have found it’s a much better place to hold a conversation than in blog post comments, for reasons I don’t quite understand. I’ve just observed this to be the case.

Second, I’ve been playing a ton of Guild Wars. Not end-game Guild Wars, but the the base game. It’s a 6 year old game and I don’t think I have much to add to the abundance of content that’s been written about it since launch. I’m really enjoying it, but I don’t need a whole blog post to tell you that (even though I wrote one anyway).

But Rift is holding a half-birthday event and I decided to return to the game and see how things have changed. That spawned all kinds of thoughts about MMOs and persistence of playing and how to go back and have fun and why MMOs seem to have a lighter and lighter grip on me these days.

The good news is that my ‘main’ character (who was a whopping level 25 when I returned) didn’t have his soul points reset since I last played. It took me a few minutes to figure out the main skills he (a bard, basically) uses and get into a pattern of firing them off. I have a 2nd role that I haven’t even looked at. Some of my other characters did have their soul points reset and, man, I just didn’t want to do the homework to remind myself of what was what, and figure out what had changed. It just felt like work to me.

So off I went with my bard into those dingy woods aptly named Gloamwood. Gloamwood isn’t any more populated now than it was when I quit, and rifts that open generally just get ignored unless a high level type comes upon one and decides to seal it. Otherwise you can stand there for 10 minutes waiting for help and never see another player, so if it isn’t feasible to solo it, you may as well skip it. We used to wait much longer than that for spawns in EQ, but these days wasting 10 minutes of my precious free time is out of the question.

The event, or maybe the latest patch, has us collecting Dragon Tears, or Dragon Pearls, or Dragon Something, from these things that look like a mutant plant bulb. These are intended to be group activities since they have a huge amount of hit points. But there’s an interesting mechanic at play here… the longer it exists in the world, the easier it is to kill (it gets an ever-increasing debuff that increases the damage your attacks do). A few minutes after the things have spawned they’re easily solo-able. I’m hoping this mechanic will get spread to regular Rifts, perhaps based on population in the immediate vicinity of the Rift. It’s a shame that Gloamwood, on my server at least, is just PvE Questing at this point.

In spite of these grumblings, I was having some fun back in Rift, and then I got a couple of quests that sent me into an instance. Instance meant grouping. Now there’s that new Dungeon Finder I could have used, but see above re: learning my souls and builds. I really didn’t want to join a random group of strangers and be screamed at for having a stupid build. I dislike being screamed at… my skin is thin and I get very angry very quickly.

So it was either research a build and make sure I understood how it worked, and then use the Dungeon Finder to do these quests, or skip the quests. I skipped them. But knowing I was skipping the really interesting parts of the game made me glum.

Honestly the most fun I had was going back to Silverwood and participating in events there. I’m high enough level that my bardic healing was a boon to other players, and I still have a quest to kill some of the event bosses over there. I’m not sure a level 25 was always welcome but I stuck to the major events and tried not to step on any toes.

I also grouped randomly with someone in Gloamwood for some low-key PvE questing, and that was a lot of fun, too.

I see Rift 1.5 is going to have some kind of solo and duo dungeons added, and maybe those will solves some of the malaise I feel about missing the best parts of the game. (And to be clear, this malaise I feel is not limited to Rift…it applies to all MMOs I’ve tried lately.)

Or maybe I should go back to playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where I get to experience all the best parts without the worry of some 15 year old punk hurling insults at me for doing it wrong. Or Guild Wars, where my army of heroes is always ready to stand by my side, with never an epithet hurled.

Journalists vs Gamers: Why do we sometimes disagree?

Posted on by Nimgimli

This week Bastion came out on Xbox Live. The previews and early game journalist reviews for the game were crazy positive, but among my friends it isn’t quite as popular. Some of them like it (I personally like it a lot) and some of them don’t. There’s nothing all that unusual about that; but the ‘pros’ seem to be pretty universal in their love for the game.

This reminded me of a conversation from many years ago. Back in the olden times, when we had to use a donkey-wheel to power our computers, I was one of the editors at Strategy Plus Magazine. My fellow editors and I were talking about the disconnect between us and the readers when it came to unusual games. What we decided (or at least, what I remember us deciding… this was 15 years or so ago) was this:

Game journalists look at a ton of games. Some they play for a bit, some they preview, some they just see over the shoulder of their co-workers, and a very few they actually review, but every month they get exposed to dozens of games. And let’s face it, a lot of games aren’t all that original. One military FPS is pretty much like another. Not for hard core enthusiasts who’ll drill into details and demonstrate why his or her favorite is better, but from a casual observer (like the journalist who isn’t assigned to the game) they can all start to feel the same.

So when a quirky or unusual game comes along, it really stands out. Since it stands out, a lot of journalists will check it out; they’ll make time to play it even if it isn’t in their beat. And since it’s something different, they’re going to tend to like it, assuming it is at least a decent game. For them, it’s a breath of fresh air. It’s a sweet crunchy apple handed to them in the middle of the annual Doritos Tasting Marathon. Everyone loves Doritos but if you’ve been eating nothing but Doritos for a long time, an apple is going to seem amazing to you.

For those of us shelling out $50-$60 for every game we play, and who play 4-5 games a month, we might not feel like these games are ‘generic’ at all. If you only play Call of Duty you might not realize that most military FPS are brown, y’know? So we might see a lot more games as being unique than the journalist who looked at 25 games this month does.

And this is why I think Bastion is getting so many rave reviews from the journalists. It doesn’t take a lot to make a game stand out. In this case, it takes a gravelly voiced narrator and a colorful art style. I do really like Bastion a lot, but the actual gameplay isn’t really all that unique, is it? The aesthetics feel fresh and unique, and that has been enough to get the journalist’s attention and to stimulate different parts of their gaming taste buds.

There’s nothing nefarious going on; game journalists are people too, y’know. But I do think this is why so many of us wind up basing purchases on word of mouth, or ‘amateur’ bloggers who have gaming habits more along the lines of those of us who only see a few games every month.

And I think you can apply the same theory to movie reviews, too, but in all honesty I almost never read movie reviews so I may be off base.

One more time: I like Bastion a lot. This isn’t an anti-Bastion post. I’m using Bastion as a tool to talk about the occasional disconnect between people who’re given games to look at as their jobs, and those of us who have jobs so we can buy games to look at.