I’ve noted that my gaming habits are, shall we say, sporadic. In that I can’t maintain my devotion to a single game for very long before hopping over to some other new fangled game that’s grabbed my attention - occasionally I get wrapped up in some older game that I missed. Rare is it that I beat a game, rarer still is my ability to master a game - to understand every nuance.
The following is a list of games that I’ve played in the last 4 months or so. This is for my own record keeping, more than anything else, but feel free to have a looksee and provide some commentary.
World of Warcraft - Burning Crusade. Blizzard, in his marketing savvy, sent me an invite to try the new expansion set for 10 days. I liked WoW, but I didn’t love it. It’s limitations are genre limitations and as such I don’t find it particularly appealing. I like games that immerse me in their own reality, that tell me a story and provide meaning to the actions I’m performing - at least in games with zero difficulty (as in 99% of RPGs out there). Difficulty requires SKILL - most RPGs require no actual skill but time-investment, this cannot be conflated with difficulty.
As with most mmo’s WoW doesn’t immerse me in their world, it reminds me how head-smackingly retarded my world is. I don’t like meeting complete stranger’s avatars and completing quests with them unless the quests are compelling and interesting journies in and of themselves. WoW, however, is a chat client with repitious amusement built on to it - as are most MMO’s. It’s a time sink that rewards you for expenditure of your time. The only skill one can develop at the game, per se, is efficiency at churning up the levels. One could potentially argue that PvP presents some skill development, but the behaviour for most classes in PvP environments is almost entirely deterministic - there are a tiny-handful of uniform “right” ways to play your class or character and they become blatantly obvious from the get-go.
I played a Draeni warrior. Namely because I’ve never had a WoW warrior and wanted to play one of the new races. Blood Elves lacking a warrior class made the Draeni (more or less the Protoss repackaged for the Warcraft setting - made to look like a Protoss-Klingon love-child).
I enjoyed the quest structure for this character significantly more than my previous attempts. The quest overlap was sufficient that as long as I kept my bearings I could constantly be working away at one quest or another as I moved from area to area - without a signficant amount of involuntary back-tracking. A quest that was a sort of spritual “vision-quest” was especially innovative and showed up the skills of some creative content developer.
Lord of The Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. Remember what I said about immersion? I want to be taken to Middle-Earth. I want to see every hill, dale, valley, river and tree that Tolkien conjoured. I want to see this world I have suspended in my imagination made manifest, if only virtually so that I may journey across and through it as one of the free-people. So, a compelling story-line is at best, icing on the geographical cake. This works to Turbine’s advantage in my case, since telling any sort of interesting story is almost entirely impossible in MMORPGs given the limitations presented by the format (NPC’s assign quests to all player characters, all quests are uniform from player to player - so NPC’s can’t go anywhere or do anything interesting unless instanced, quests are almost entirely variations on a theme of 4 quest archetypes - the difference being the names and power-levels of the objects involved etc). The quests in the game make sense and play very much like the side-adventures told in the Lord of the Rings books, one doesn’t need as much justification because the lore of the setting is well understood. WoW lacks that deeply and richly developed backdrop to suspend player’s disbelief - making an analogous quest in LotRO understandable but seemingly contrived in WoW.
As for skill use and development, it’s truly only seen in PvMP - an aspect of the game I thoroughly enjoy and see great potential in once it’s fleshed out a bit more. The lack of Monster Play kinships seriously hurts the development of a tightly-knit and cooperative Monster Player community - something that will become ever more critical to success for the servants of Angmar. In monster player, players must coordinate their respective classes and maintain the security of their keeps from the roaming hoards of Free People’s eager to steal back their bastions.
I have a lifetime membership for LotRO so I imagine it will be where I turn to if I want my MMO fix.
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion This game is HUGE. It’s as big (or bigger) than virtually any MMO you could name (except EvE Online) but it’s a single player game. This thing is EPIC. Unlike an MMO where you’re forced to create multiple characters if you want to enjoy all the different skills and abilities - you can do everything imaginable with a single character. No more standing there doing the “attack-ready” animation and suddenly keeling over, your attacks have actual in-game physics. Arrows fly in arcs, you can dodge projectiles by moving your character (rather than relying on some random dice-roll).
Oddly, however, I’ve abandon it more or less. Primarily because of the unfathomable depths. It’s like swimming out into the ocean under a fog. You know there’s an island out there, everyone’s told you, but when you swim out beyond being able to see the shoreline, you swim back for fear of being swept out to sea. This game could literally take a year or more to explore fully, and unlike MMO’s it’s not because the XP handouts are fewer and further between - just the sheer variety of content is staggering. There’s already two expansions and more planned - not to mention the tonnes of player-made modifications.
Grant Tourismo 4 This is as close to a racing RPG as we’ve got. The true driving simulator still hooks me to this day. If there were to be a game I would choose to master, this would be it. No matter how long I practice with various vehicles and tracks there always seems to be a massive window for improvement. Originally, I thought I was just god-awful at the game - but when I viewed a few super-Asians having a go at the local EB at the GT 5 demo - I felt a little better about my virtual-driving ability.
I would like to get the racing wheel attachment. I’m sure it’s pretty reasonable now that it’s totally useless except for oddball GT fans like myself who still play their PS2.
Tourist Trophy This is another racer made by Polyphony - makers of Gran Tourismo. This time it’s motorcycles. This threw me for a loop after having played GT for hours prior to dropping the TT disc in. Again, superb on every level. The amount of depth to this game, it’s a driving RPG all it’s own.
New York Times Crossword DS I play this game on bus rides and any short wait when I happen to have my DS with me. It’s great - over 1,000 NYT cross words on a tiny cartride. No surprises here really. A slightly lower price would’ve been appreciated. Hopefully they’ll release these regularly, possibly with thematically connected puzzles or simply the ability to download new puzzles.
Puzzle Quest This was one of those games I got solely because I’m a Penny Arcade reader (the list of games I purchased on the green-light from Tycho is growing rapidly). It’s a pretty compelling game. You match stuff in rows of 3+ by shifting it vertically or horizontally. However, there’s an RPG element involved - so every puzzle is adverserial. The “players’ take turns matching jewels, skulls or coins to perform various game effects or to store up mana to cast spells.
It’s a smart system that allows players to take on comparatively over-powered creatures by relying on their puzzle-mastery rather than character statistics. For those like myself, who aren’t particularly skilled at the puzzles, your character can easily gain levels to face down creatures that you can’t beat by puzzle fighting alone.
Odin Sphere This is a game I cannot play - not because it is bad, very much the opposite, it is exquisite. This is a game I need to sit down and play by itself, I can’t be distracted with other games whilst running through the arenas, planting seeds and vanquishing my foes. The art is a stunning, hand drawn affair coupled with great music and sound design as well as compelling button mashing game play. It’s an RPG beat’em up in the same way Castlevania SOTN was a platformer RPG. This is a master piece for the platform and one I shall relish when I can intently play it for weeks.
Front Mission 4 This game is seriously underrated. I’d love a next-gen sequel with upgraded graphics and expanded unit customization. I’ve always had a penchant for tactical games - mainly because I love chess but am horrible at it. You control wanzers, everyone else would call them mechs. You play round after round of grid-based tactical combat (think table top game on a grid) you use the money to purchase new mech’s and parts and use the XP to purchase new abilities and stat-bonuses for your pilots. The story is surprisingly involving, much more than it really needs to be. The graphics, considering this was a relatively early entry to the PS2 foray, are quite good.
Defcon Another game with briliantly elegant design. The idea is simple, you control a given nations strategic nuclear armament, airforces and navy. You manipulate these things using a world map drawn in ultra-cool vector console graphics. It makes you feel like you’re 300 feet below ground in a steel-encased bunker. The sub-title to the game is “everybody dies,” which reflects on the overall strategic implications of the game, total nuclear warfare is the idea - so everyone loses, the winner is simply the person who loses the least. One need not launch a single nuclear weapon to win the game, in fact being overly aggressive with the ICBMs can expose massive vulnerabilities and result in complete obliteration of your populace. The AI is sneaky, effective and frustrating in its ability to outwit you. This is Wargame taken to the videogame conclusion. Although multiplayer centric, I imagine the AI would give even the savviest player a run for its money.
Dungeon Runner Dungeon Runner is NCSoft’s answer to “What if I don’t have the time to spend on an MMO?” This is the Diablo II meets WoW with some ribald humour thrown in for good measure. It has that frantic, click-fest action-RPG gameplay of Diablo with the questing/leveling/grouping gameplay of WoW. Quests are designed to be finished quickly and overall the game play is supposed to play like a much faster-tempoed WoW. I find I actually like Dungeon Runner more than WoW. The best part of Dungeon Runner is that it’s free (www.dungeonrunner.com) You can pay to use the ultra special end-game items and to get other niceties - that gradually become more and more valuable as you become more powerful.
Company of Heroes Arguably the best strategy game ever made. This game is every WWII nerd’s dream. This is one of the first RTS games I’ve ever played wherein usage of real-world tactics is actually effective. Instead of divining the best way to accomplish something using the internal mechanics of the game, I can actually use my understanding of the real world and apply it to making tactical decisions in the game. It is flabbergasting how basic strategic manuevers such as flanking, encirclement and entrenchment have little to no effect in RTS games. Not so in CoH. For anyone who watched Band of Brothers and wanted a video game based on it - this is it better than you could’ve hoped for.
Civlization IV Civilization is the Citizen Kane of videogames. Sid Meier may not be Wellesian in temperament but he shares that singular genius that produced this game, and the similar inability to move past it to create equally compelling titles. Civilization IV fixed a lot of my grievances with CIV III and brought it more in tune with the crown jewel of game design that is Civ II. The problem one faces, as a veteran Civ player is that each successive iteration reduces the difficulty to encourage a wider base of players. Civ III was, after a bit of experimentation, disasterously easy to figure out the economic models and exploit to a player’s content. Civ IV brings back that challenge - which is good. Great game, as always.
Galatic Civilization II: Dread Lords Probably one of the best 4X games ever built (my heart still holds some fondness for Pax Imperia (a little known galactic 4X that was crushed under the oppressive weight of Master of Orion II). Galactic Civilizations distilled a lot of the great aspects of previous space empire games without becoming Master of Orion III (which I liked but recognized as hideously complex). It’s quirky sense of humour and simple interface are compelling but I actually miss the complexity of galactic empire games and am finding this dumbing down of them to be frustrating. I want my 4X games to give me headaches with the quantity of data I have to manage. Make me pull out the spreadsheeting apps and I might be happy.
Guild Wars I can’t believe I didn’t get into this sooner, clearly people out there think like I do when they’re playing MMO’s. They asked themselves, “Why should we make players dependent on each other to advance the game? That’s kind of dumb because most players are shitwizards.” The also asked themselves, “Wow, MMO games have outrageously slow combat and overly punitive systems with little or no non-trivial choices to make, why don’t we design intransitive relationships for characters by creating scarcity in ability points?” Okay, so maybe they didn’t think the latter - but something along those lines. Guild Wars has all the cool bits of MMOs (socialization, persistent world, lots of fellow players to be verbally abused by) AND all the cool bits of offline RPGs (compelling narrative, intriguing character advancement, manipulable world) as well as none of the shitty aspects of MMOs (relying on cockmongers to help you with quests, massive expanses of territory to traverse to do anything, random spawning pools of mobs which drop shit 9 times out of 10 (unless you’re actually looking for shit, and then they drop something else)) It looks amazing too - this game came out 2 years ago and still looks better than most MMO’s out there.
Neverwinter Nights 2 I eagerly awaited this title. I had a gay old time with NWN with it’s D&D adventuring. NWN 2 is exactly what you’d expect. The actual core mechanic, being a translation of D&D 3.5, remains unchanged. As such the game had to add bells and whistles to “innovate” and just kicked up the graphical capabilities up a notch. Tycho said he wasn’t going to touch the title until the bugs were worked out - I second that. I’ve put the title aside until a completely smoothly functioning version is playable. I also realize that this is one of those infinite games - this could theoretically, as long as you still kept having fun, be the last game you ever buy. I want to play other games and until a really interesting module comes out I’m going to sit on my copy (the Planescape: Torment NWN2 conversion is definitely something I’ll keep an eye out for).
Final Fantasy XII This is a great game, I intend to sit down and beat it some day…only I have Final Fantasies VII, IX, X and X-2 to get through as well. Although FF VII was my favourite console game of all time, no other Final Fantasy has been able to capture me in the same way, I don’t really understand why though I think it has a great deal to do with god-awful art direction since then (I love Yoshitaka Amano’s art, and admittedly the stuff since VII looks neat - it’s just not steampunk enough for this man)
I just realized that’s a pretty ridiculous list of games, and I didn’t include Pokemon: Diamond, Mario Kart DS, Metroid Hunts, Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy XI, Final Fantasy Tactics, Myth II, Myth III, Rainbow Six 3, Doom 3, Medieval II: Total War.
Despite the above list’s enormity there are quite a few games I’d like to play but likely never will and they are: Lineage II, Rainbow Six Vegas, Resident Evil 4, Elder Scrolls IV: Knights of the Nine, Geometry Wars, Knights of the Old Republic II, Rome: Total War, Command & Conquer 4, Sword of the New World, Sam & Max, Hotel Dusk, and many many others.
There also remains a list of games that I’m determined to play but either haven’t gotten around to or they haven’t come out yet and they are: Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, Burnout: Dominator, Psychonauts, Tabula Rasa.