May Games and Collecting Things

There are more bad games about Pac-Man than there are good. Like, a lot. Trust me, stick with the classics, Pac-Pix (which shouldn't even be a Pac-Man game), Pac-Man Championship Edition and the four-player, arcade hit, Battle Royale. Does anyone care about how Pac-Man is doing with the "challenges of being a teenager"?

I've been playing a lot of Batman: Arkham City the last few weeks, in the very spare moments that I have between house work, child rearing and spending time with my wife. Now that it's summer, we are outdoors a little more, coping with the "challenges of being" allergic to nature with a four year old.

I might still say that this is the best comic book based super hero game of all time. Besides that, this game has it's hooks in me for collecting items and unlocking content that I really don't even care about. Only Crackdown can compete for time with all it's tiny orbs floating around the city. I must have them all in these games. If someone ever figures out DLC that's just fresh locations for collecting stuff, I might be a little less likely to stop at 7-11 for an eclair as often as I do. Seriously, someone just go back Halo or Gears of War and drop some artifacts, dog tags or little pretty flowers in the maps and I might have my games planned out for the rest of the summer.

Stick Man Golf 2 is also competing on iOS with You Don't Know Jack for the winner of the award for Game Most Played At Work While SOL Testing Is Going On. Standards testing for technology support staff is a huge game of sit and wait. You're bored out of your mind and want something to do, but you just hope it doesn't have to do anything with testing the overly tested kids and stressed out teachers.

My son is in love with the Wii U Nintendo Land and Warioland: Shake It. He's quite good at playing the Pikmin game in Nintendoland and loves repeating one level over and over again. Sometimes he even asks me to play because it's so fun. Now we just need a full on Wii U game for it and we'll both have fun playing that one together. And of course I'll need extra time to make his dinner, clean up a bit and catch a breath. I really don't know how people with WoW accounts and two kids make anything happen in their lives. More power to you all.

Mass Market Gaming Getting Stale

bcullers brought over DarkSector last night for the 360. As he started talking about it, he immediately brought up gameplay references like Gears of War and Army of TWO (which is a Gears of War wannabe in it's own right). We shared a sad laugh about yet another Gears clone and then we both said, "Well, if it works..."

It was something I hadn't thought about playing Army of TWO. Instead of the whole time playing the game with an angry cloud over my head because the gameplay in it wasn't original, should I have been more focused on what new things the game brought to the table instead of what it didn't? I'm not sure what other things like that exist in the world like this. When I buy a new game, unless it's a sequel, prequel or derivative IP, I want it to be genuine and different. Music is a possible comparison if you really like music and not a genre. Books too. But I think with games I always want the next game of that genre to fix the things that were broken in the last game.

I think, overall, I find it really hard to not reference other games when playing a new one. Unless it's a game like Katamari Damacy for the PS2 or Brain Training for the DS, your getting a game that is specifically set in a genre (football, driving, FPS) and there is little you can do to differentiate it from it's members.

But most of the games I own (and keep) I like very much. So getting a new game with elements of my old ones should be comforting. But I want new experiences from gaming constantly. I don't want another Gears of War game with a different set of characters, voices, and graphics. I don't want another Forza Motorsport that touts more cars and tracks. I want new experiences and games that make me think in a different perspective. Having sold on eBay Mass Effect (a mediocre space RPG) and Army of TWO (a clone of another game), I can tell my purchases are going to start getting far and few between and overly scrutinized.

A new hope in gaming recently is Penny-Arcade's The Greenhouse. This is a game related comic-drawing duo that has it's hands also in charity work, game expos, and now with Greenhouse, independent game developers. Not much has been said about Greenhouse other than right now it's a platform to release their new game (another hand) "On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness". But I wouldn't mind starting to play games on a PC or Mac if meant getting really good content.

Gears of War: Your Dead to Me (Online)

I'm never playing Gears of War online again.

I've played it the last couple nights with some friends, most of whom I've met online in Gears. But when we first met, it was good.

With todays online games, you're completely at the mercy of the developer. You bought their game and now they have the means to do whatever they want to it. Early on, Gears had a few glitches that people used to break and, while at first it was annoying, it was pretty bearable. It wasn't until they tried to fix the game with it's first mandatory update that the game started to go downhill. They did stop the glitching, which people quickly found new ones, but they also altered other things. Things that made the game seem completely different.

When you have a game that exists in such a vast sea of 1st person/3rd person shooters, the smallest details not only make or break the gameplay, but change the core feeling of a game.

Imagine buying a car and then one day you get in it and see a note that Honda came by and took out your sunroof because it leaked, changed the idle setting, took the window tint off, and changed the color of the interior. It all still works. Somethings are better. Somethings are just different. And sometimes I don't like different.

So I'm never going to play Gears again until they make it work like it should. Which would involve way more than Epic is prepared throw at a two year old game. It's too bad too, because Gears is a universe that I really like and look forward to playing future versions. And reading the novel in August.

Digital Distribution: Kill Games More Slowly

Back in the heyday of the SNES and Genesis, you either purchased or rented a game and knew if it sucked in the first 10 minutes of inserting the cartridge and flipping the power on. It was cut and dry.

Today we live in the age of digital distribution. We still, for the most part, buy games from a store, but now gamers are fancy to updates, add-ons, and bug fixes. This is like when value meals were first created at McDonald's. You think your getting more, but really your just getting crap.

Gears of War is the best example of crap delivered to you online. The retail game was excellent. It was the Big Mac of games for the Xbox 360. It sold billions and billions of copies. I played it through, beginning to end, three times (damn that online Achievement system!). The problem was that the online game wasn't quite perfect. People found ways to cheat, exploit and generally ruin a perfect game.

This is where digital distribution kicks in. Epic Games knew they would be able to fix anything wrong with the game after it sold 10⁴³ copies. They tested the game I'm sure. But no one can possibly see how a game will be manipulated in the hands of Cheeto-powdered fingers hopped up on Mountain Dew.

Now getting it's second dose of content Thursday, June 18th. More Achievements and a fix to the way you run. Come on. The way you run? Yeah. Actually it's a fix to the first fix. A fix that the game didn't even need. Doesn't that seem like something that should have been covered well before the game was released. That's like tweaking the formula for Coke. Or re-releasing Star Wars with scenes that, back while shooting, weren't possible.

Gears of War is going to continue to stay in it's case. Why? Because the developers over-handled their product. They couldn't leave "pretty damn good" alone.

You know who should do some over-handling? Microsoft. It's broke. Fix it.

Gears Maps and Catan

Two big things happening in my gaming life today: 4 new Gears of War maps and Settlers of Catan hit Live today.

Gears has been getting pretty stale lately. I haven't been playing it online but once a week, tops. These new maps will breath some life back into a game. Or more like resuscitate. That patch cause some major pulmonary damage.

Catan, on the other hand, is single handedly the best table top game I've ever played. Thought it does only beat Magic: The Gathering out by a thin thread-like hair. Where Magic is like Pokemon, Catan is like Othello. The rules don't change. There's nothing more to buy. And the gameplay changes depending on who your playing against.

So good-bye $20. At 800pts a peice, these downloads are going to quickly deplete a 1600pt Live card.

Zelda vs. Gears vs. Wolves

As much as I wanted to plow knee deep into Zelda, online gaming has kept me only ankle deep, occasionally jumping out and getting into the cool waters of Gears of War.

I thought I was mostly done with the game. I had beaten it on "normal". That's pretty much where I'm drawing the line at most games. And with Gears, the huge amount of hard time I had getting into a ranked match made it even more frustrating. But never under estimate the power of peer pressure. With Cullers and Mike online, there is that small sense of familiarity. A hint of Halo 2 lan parties (and Perfect Dark and GoldenEye and NBA Jam). Those are powerful memories.

I can get into gaming with strangers, but the whole mating process is tired and is very repetitive. Say your "hello"s, plop into a map, hope MrFancyPantx doesn't split of on his own close range with a sniper rifle, and then you can think about sending a friend request.

I did that all throughout Perfect Dark and I absolutely loved my crew. It was diverse and we did spend a lot of time talking instead of plotting. It was relaxed. We were casual gamers. Good casual gamers. But after a couple of months, well, any game, you just can't stand playing it anymore, as you peek out from behind your Super Dragon to look at the likes of Gears players. It's like another country where they speak their own language.

I know that Zelda is sitting back there. I've waited a long freakin' time to play as grown-up Link. I was put off a little bit by the wolf form, knowing I had Okami in the PS2. As soon as I started running around as Link the Big Bad Wolf, I knew that beautiful white Okami was just waiting for me; a game that had completely fleshed out the 3rd-canine-perspective genre. Gladly it was over almost as soon as it started.

Finished: Gears of War

I can't believe I finished the game this quickly. I'm not sure how much time it took, but I started playing on Saturday and finished Tuesday night. I ate the game up.

A quick review? This game is like Black and Halo 2 put together with a touch of Splinter Cell.

I think a huge plus factor, again, was the lack of load times and cut scenes. I just kept playing and playing because I never had any real visual cues that a chapter had ended and another one started. It would be like reading a book with no chapters, you'd wouldn't quit until you got tired and fell asleep. The action is almost non-stop. There are few times where you find yourself walking down sections of map where absolutely nothing happens. But I think that was intentional. It did help set the mood. In a factory setting, Wretches would be climbing in the ceiling and under the floors and bang on doors make noises to creep you out. In the Locust hive caves, steam vents would burst and rocks would fall. I wouldn't quite say it was on Resident Evil 4's level, but I did jump in my skin once or twice. There is always something to make you not put the controller down. I did notice that whenever the characters used their radios, they would be forced to walk slow. I'll assume that's where they hid the loading. Faux cut-scenes. Nice.

Graphically, this game is gorgeous. It's like playing a pre-rendered movie. Things were, at some times, a little too shiny though. And some shadows, especially on the character's faces where a little patchy. But zoom up on a COG's muscles and you can see skin texture and veins. Actually you can see it far away as well because the engine never layers the textures as you get closer to save memory. And there is no texture drop-in as you quickly spin around a corner and take off down the road.

The sound was probably the biggest issue technically. There were a lot of times I could hear someone talking, usually a Locust, and they would be no where to be seen. And I mean loud like right-next-to-you loud. It was usually a dead give away I was either coming up on them or they were following me. And this problem must have carried through to the collision detection because I once, just once, shot a guy standing on the other side of a doorway. His gun poked through and that was last "poking" he ever did, if you know what I mean.

Of course you don't.

And again, like in Splinter Cell, I got so caught up in the game that I would black out on parts of the story. The last level takes place on a train and I had no idea why I was there and what the point of the mission was. I really should have remembered in GoW because I felt the game was so short. But dying a lot in a few sections must have been long enough to forget with my short memory. I know one thing, trying to figure out how to kill the last boss made me remember that opening dialogue from the Ops character. I know I have to "dump the data". Shut up about it already and tell me how to kill that big ass Locust! I don't think cut-scenes would have helped, just have the characters talk about it the mission more while they run around in the non-action places. If we want games to be more theatrical, let the characters talk a little more (just don't do it a lot of you keep dying in the same section, note above).

The last level was probably the most difficult part of the game. It was really the only time in the game that they gave you something specific to do but didn't say you had to or could kill the big ass dude guarding it. I must have died 25 times trying to figure that very last section out. There was so much going on that you had to test out lots of things to figure out what you needed to do. But it also felt really old-school. Something that was so hard to do that once you did it you were immediately surprised (and proud).

As for the controls, well, they could use a bit of touch up. After seeing how easy it is to use cover in Rainbow 6: Vegas, using the A button to get behind cover feels cumbersome and tacky. Having to hold down the left trigger in R6, it made it feel tense and sweaty like being behind cover should be. The A button had moments when it wouldn't work. You had to be just at the right place at the right speed to use cover quickly. And then there is the way you could run up to cover and hit A about 10ft back and you slide up to the cover faster than you were running. Handy? Oh yes! Makes sense? Not really. A barrel roll up to cover doesn't work, but sliding does?

And the weapons could have been mapped to the buttons a little better. Changing guns is fine to have mapped to the d-pad, but grenades should always be a secondary button somewhere. I never used the left bumper for locating my guys (a crappy directional circle with no distance indication). Put the grenades there. Because half the time my team would just heal themselves miraculously and I wouldn't have to bother with doing it myself. Halo must have spoiled me with always available grenades.

But now that I'm done, I'll definetly go back and give the harder settings a try and try to find more of the dog tags. I've only got 12 of 30, so they must be really well hidden. I also started playing multiplayer last night and immediately found a good crew. Hopefully I have some friend requests waiting for me at home and we start up again. First impressions are that people tend to play it like Halo. But using the game's duck and cover mechanics should prove pretty beneficial. Though I'll still probably suck balls.

Friendly Reminder

Last night, while playing NFSU, I got a little reminder in the form of a telephone call on why I was playing that old game in the first place.

As if summoned upon me by some higher power in Redmond Washington, EB called to remind me that there was going to be yet another game that I would soon own and be incapable of playing. My collector's edition of Gears of War was in.

How timely.

All of the sudden I realized that playing a game 4 years old was not of my choosing, but out of necessity. As if I was frozen in a lab and awoken in a time where all I had were ancient relics of a console era long past. The controller felt dusty. The graphics seemed from 1980-something. I was sitting there, a shell of a gamer.

It's only a few more days until I can official call the post office to track my package in the system. Had I really gotten the address wrong? Did some repair tech see the mistake made by Customer Service and get a free, albeit broken, 360? Would I really have to stare at a game I spent $10 extra on to get the collector's edition really sit on a shelf?

Oh how the body aches.