Not Exactly Enchanting - WARLOCK: MASTER OF THE ARCANE

I initially wrote a pretty negative article about Warlock (surprising nobody). Obviously I'm not posting that one, but here's the short version: the gameplay isn't varied enough, the victory conditions aren't well-designed and are pretty buggy--the "summon an avatar" condition flatly refused to work during my game, as the gods' like/dislike meters wouldn't pass 99--and the sound design is INCREDIBLY grating.

The primary point of the original post, though, was that the game just feels small, and obviously when I say that I mean in comparison to Civilization. You can't make a turn-based nation-building game without laboring in the shadow of Civ, and then the Warlock team certainly made no effort to avoid the comparison when they cribbed Civ V's UI.

Maybe it's meant to be an homage.

So every negative point I made (apart from the awful sound design bit) ended up with "compared to Civ" at the end of it, which made me wonder if I was being unfair. Yeah, this game is smaller than Civ in basically every way. There's less variety in the victory conditions, there are fewer nation-specific unique things, there are fewer units with less advancement, there isn't a large group of interesting scenarios, there's a much thinner collection of growth mechanics, you have fewer ways to customize and fashion your own civilization... but it's not Civ, so maybe it shouldn't be expected to conform to Civ's scale and aspirations. It's a different game and maybe it's exactly the thing that the designers wanted. So how do I evaluate Warlock on its own merits, without the comparisons?

Frankly, I have no idea. I don't even know if it's something I should do. Here's what I do know: I didn't enjoy Warlock very much for a number of reasons, and at least some of that was because I played Civ V first and I kept thinking things like "Why on earth would they choose to do it that way when the same thing in Civ was so much better?" Also, now that I've played enough of both of the games to really "get" them, there's only one that I still play for fun... so maybe a game's competitors and external context actually do matter quite a lot.

The Same Thing Six Times - VVVVVV

My favorite part is all the tiny colored squares.

There's not very much game to VVVVVV. It feels a lot like Metroid but without all the weapons and abilities and boss fights, which sounds worse than it is. It's actually a reasonably fun experience which only overstays its welcome a little bit.
Its most memorable characteristic is its slavish devotion to that which came before. The chiptune soundtrack and many of the room names make it perfectly clear that the aesthetic isn't coincidental, making this roughly the eight millionth game in the last decade to bash players about the head and shoulders with its degree from the old school. Nostalgia is powerful, and it appears that developer Terry Cavanagh feels that it's a fine substitute for style and voice. Frankly, the whole experience feels a little barren because there is really absolutely nothing here you haven't seen before.
The game is executed well enough, but it's kind of hollow. There's not much of interest to say except that pixel art  (cheap and pragmatic as it may be) doesn't excuse you from creating some kind of visual design. There's no reason you can't have both!

Also, I'm mildly annoyed that it took longer to write this than it did to beat the game.

Suboptimally Subtitled: WARHAMMER 40K: DAWN OF WAR 2 - RETRIBUTION

I love cooperative games. In particular, I'm drawn to games in which planning has to take place extemporaneously, when there simply isn't time to discuss and each player has to try to predict their allies' behavior and execute the most complementary plan on the fly.

Well, I say "has to", but maybe that ought to be "should".

I've spent far more time playing Retribution's Last Stand mode than its single player campaign, which means that I've spent a lot of time getting matched up with two strangers for a rousing game of Smash the Eldar. The game is designed in such a way that no one character can be equipped to fight everything; some waves need strong armor-piercing strikes to penetrate the hulls of tanks and wraithlords, while some need area-affecting sprays to dispatch hordes of termagants and guardsmen. In order to be successful, your team of three has to select complimentary loadouts, each member filling in a weakness of the others.
Unfortunately, nobody actually does that.
You select your character and loadout before joining the matchmaking queue, which may be part of the problem. People decide that they're going to play a Space Marine Captain with a jump pack and a power axe before they even see their teammates, and they'll be damned if they're going to change that over a tiny thing like winning. Once you get matched up and everybody can clearly see that nobody on the team has brought a weapon capable of killing two enemies at the same time, it behooves somebody to make a change, but why do that when you can just stumble awkwardly through the first six waves and then be beaten to death by a hundred banshees? Really, isn't that the true essence of fun?

Bros in Spaaaaaace: WARHAMMER 40K: SPACE MARINE

Space Marine certainly knows its target audience.

To preface, I love Warhammer 40,000. I love the grimdark over-the-top ridiculousness of it. I love the fully automatic armor-piercing rocket launchers, I love the crazy magic Emperor god-king, and I love the audacious heavy metal scifi metal sensibilities of the setting. (That said, I don't exactly love Ultramarines, but for some reason nobody wants to make a game about cool Space Marine chapters like the Salamanders or the Sisters of Battle.) Obviously, a game purporting to be the most Space Marine-y experience to ever hit a TV excited me, but that excitement was tinged with a bit of caution after the stylish but resoundingly mediocre Dawn of War 2 games. Fortunately, Space Marine does faithfully deliver the experience. The Space Marines, Chaos Marines, and orks all feel right (particularly the WAAAAAGH!, which really shakes you to your core if you have a good sound system), and the game does a good job of communicating to you that you are an unstoppable genetically engineered killing machine, even if it does suffer from some tedium and a nearly terminal case of Last Boss Letdown Syndrome.

But what is this, some kind of blog where I have positive opinions about anything ever? Let's talk about the parts I didn't like!

Primarily, the characterization of the protagonist gives me pause. For those of you unfamiliar with the Warhammer 40,000 setting, let me lay out the big problem with a Space Marine protagonist: the Imperium of Man is an intensely xenophobic interstellar fascist theocracy ruled by the corpse of a guy who was kind of a dick when he was alive and the people in charge have no compunction about slaughtering their own subjects by the billion to accomplish even the least significant goals. A Space Marine is just a superpowered soldier for the Imperium, and even among Space Marines the Ultramarines are known for their extreme unquestioning orthodoxy and devotion to the literal wording of the Imperium's holy book, the Codex Astartes. I imagine the developers had some concern about presenting an outerspace ultraconservative hypernazi stormtrooper as a main character, so they decided to make the game about a different group of people entirely.

Haha, just kidding! That would have been pretty sensible, but what they did instead is make the protagonist, Captain Titus, completely unlike an Ultramarine without any explanation as to how he somehow became one of the most prominent members of the order. So if he's not an Ultramarine, what did they make him instead?

I tried to draw in a popped collar, but it was too hard so I gave up.

Honestly, he's kind of a bro.

Now, granted, the line between those two things is narrow in places. When Titus responds to every situation by yelling and charging forward to commit violence, we can hardly say that he's not being a good Space Marine. When he plants his feet and fires a massive automatic weapon into a horde of undifferentiated enemies who are racially evil or resolves a problem with a giant demon by punching it in the face while screaming, it may be OMGBRAHSOME but it's also the proper response to heresy. The divide becomes clear mostly during dialogue.

More than once during the game, a young Marine named Leandros will say to Titus something along the lines of "Hey, you know that book our order is universally famous for following? Maybe this would be a pretty good time to follow some of it." An Ultramarine would either just agree or explain how his plan really does follow the Codex, which is a book so long and vaguely written that you can use it to reinforce literally any course of action. Instead, Titus responds "NO BRO, RULES ARE FOR BITCHES, I'MMA DO WHAT I DO U KNO" and then jumps out of a spaceship with a jetpack on because he's an idiot. (And then he discards it immediately because argsohsad;fklaj.) At the end of the game, when Leandros correctly calls in the Inquisition because not only does Titus not act like an Ultramarine at all but also he has been displaying some very suspicious invulnerability to stuff for no reason, Titus gives him a little speech about how it's bad to follow the rules and narc on people and really he should just like be cool, be a bro. This shit probably sits pretty comfortable for the player at home who thinks that rules are just something the Man uses to keep him down, but for an Ultramarine it's all WILDLY out of character.

How did this guy get to be Captain of a company of Space Marines? I imagine him sitting in the barracks talking to girls on his cell phone while all the other Marines go about their strict regimen of praying, training, and praying, and then he interrupts them and asks if they want to go into town and score some skeech, and they don't even really know what that is because probably he just made that word up but like I bet it's either sex or drugs or sex and drugs and then he gets inexplicably promoted to captain. Maybe his dad bought the chapter a new Land Raider or something.

Really I just feel like the developers betrayed their premise here. Why would you make a game about Ultramarines and then have the protagonist act like he isn't one? Why not just make the game about another chapter (the Space Wolves, for instance) that doesn't care so much what the Codex Astartes says? Or, I guess, why not just write the dialogue a little better and have Titus reinforce his decisions with passages from the Codex? In what feels like an attempt to pander to a large and lucrative demographic, Relic has introduced a great big plot hole into the world and then expected us to happily identify with it.

Feel free to hit the comment thread if you are unable to restrain yourself from mocking me about getting mad over Warhammer lore.

Learning to Hate All Over Again: ZENO CLASH

We're jumping back to the bottom of the alphabet (all the way from W!) because I received a free copy of Zeno Clash. You may be shocked to find out that I didn't like it very much.

These versus screens are pretty slick, though.

The game commits a multitude of sins, but today I just want to talk about two fairly common narrative devices that Zeno Clash manages to completely foul up.

1) The Diegetic Tutorial. In these increasingly common sequences, a character (or, occasionally, delusion or sentient computer program) within the game teaches you how to play the game under the pretense of putting you through a training course. Now, I understand the desire to couch everything crunchy within something fluffy, to always ensconce a mechanic in a bit of story and flavor. Theoretically, relating every game concept through the fictional world aids immersion.
The problem with this is mostly that it causes frustration, especially if you're replaying the game. Many games rely on control conceits common within their genres, so tutorials are often completely unnecessary for experienced players; a person who plays first-person shooters regularly does not need to be told that W moves forward and mouse1 attacks. Worse, these sequences are far too rarely removed from the main game and often cannot be skipped. This all works against the intent because nothing breaks immersion quite like being compelled to scream "I KNOW HOW TO PLAY THE GAME, PLEASE LET ME PLAY THE GAME" at your screen.
These sequences really work best when they're not a part of the main game—perhaps behind a "Tutorial" option at the main menu—or when they can be skipped easily. The latter is trivial to implement: your instructor/sensei/evaluator/robot asks "Do you know how to X?" and then you answer in the negative to start the tutorial or in the affirmative to skip it. Zeno Clash, impressively, manages to screw this up even worse than most games. Not only is the tutorial a mandatory but thoroughly unimportant part of the main story, but (presumably to ensure that the game's Half-Life 2-style chapter structure doesn't let you skip past it easily) it's broken up into three parts that occur during three different chapters. And then, to really rub it in, the controls for the game are incredibly simple (yet somehow still frustratingly inconsistent*) and there's nothing in the tutorial actually worth learning.

2) The Lure of the Unknown. It's common in many different media for creators to attempt to pull the audience into a story by starting them with insufficient information to understand the earliest events of the plot. The author hopes that the mystery will entice the audience to stick around, wondering "Who's that man? Why does he have a gun? Whoa, where'd that robot come from? Wait, am I in the wrong theater?"
Sometimes this works beautifully, but frankly I think it fails more often than it succeeds. Frequently it ends up looking amateurish and driving the audience away because they have difficulty identifying with characters who are strangers and caring about situations that they know nothing about.
Even in the cases where it works, though, it's vital to open the information valve pretty early on. Regardless of their quality, enigmas grow stale quickly if not hydrated with a little bit of insight now and again, and this is where Zeno Clash fails in a way that seems almost malicious. This mysterious woman that travels with us, what's her story? Who is she? How do the Corwids survive long enough to grow into adults if they're so single minded about things that they never stop to eat? How did ANYONE not immediately know Father-Mother's "secret"? What happened to the gun I was carrying? Why can't I just sneak back into town myself? Who could possibly have thought that ending was a good idea? All these questions and more, Zeno Clash boldly refuses to answer.
Seriously, there is a woman with you in nearly every scene in the game and the only thing you learn about her is her name. Why did she decide to hang out with you? What drives her? The game's only response is a resounding "Who cares? She's not actually a character! We just needed some reason for the protagonist to slowly divulge uninteresting memories."

*You press Spacebar while walking sideways to step out of the way of enemy attacks, but this only works if your hands are empty. If you're holding a weapon, Spacebar throws the weapon instead. Several times during the game, you are expected to fight charging enemies who can only be damaged with weapons, but if you try to dodge to the side when they charge you all that happens is you throw your hammer at them and then get flattened. Brilliant design decisions, guys.

To Conclude the Interlude

The other half of that thing I posted last time, once again mostly to justify my time expenditure.

Holiday Tidings

Happy Easter from PAX, bitches!

Also, I'm sorry about all the profanity. If my mother read my blog, she would be appalled.

Interlude

This isn't really the point of this blog, but I've been working on this for a little while and it's the reason I haven't posted anything recently, so I present my video tutorial on Blood Bowl, a very excellent game indeed:

The next proper update will be about the copy of Zeno Clash that I got for free during the Steam Christmas sale. It should be coming soon(ish).

Trial By Style: WHO'S THAT FLYING?!

PEWPEWPEWPEW

Yeah, it's that game. You fly around, you shoot stuff, you get weapon upgrades, you shoot more stuff, you fight interesting new enemy types, you shoot more stuff, you are challenged to the very limit of your abilities, and then you shoot more stuff. I hope you really enjoy holding down the fire button.

MediaTonic tried to differentiate their little shooter from the rest of the vaguely spaceship-shaped pack by giving it a generous measure of style. It has significantly more story than most games of its genre (in that it has any at all), given in the form of the wisecracking space-robot protagonist's testimony at his own trial with the game levels representing his recounting of his heroic deeds. The story is pretty humorous and frankly the presentation of the whole thing is quite slick, so the question is: Can sharp delivery counteract mechanical flaws?

As I hinted before, there's only slightly more gameplay in this thing than there are punctuation marks in its title, but I'm a sucker for a bit of good writing and clever humor. Who's That Flying?! provides some of that (in addition to a couple of cheap Uranus jokes, and I'm not too good for those either) in addition to attractive art and a couple of pretty slick animations of your character forming a baseball bat out of pure energy and then bludgeoning a monster to death with it. The end result is that I played this game for 90 minutes or so, when I probably wouldn't have gotten past 10 without the flash and the amusing story. Clearly, I find presentation to be a very compelling feature in a game, and it will drive me to continue playing even if the gameplay itself isn't terribly fun. (It is however worth noting that I didn't find it compelling enough to get all the way through the game.)

Come to think of it, I've also purchased games a few times based on their presentation before being sure that I'd enjoy the gameplay. But, as I wrote when talking about Apocalypse, I'm also willing to forgive flawed presentation when the gameplay or mechanics are compelling. So in the end, all I've really proven is that I have low standards, I'm willing to put up with a lot, and I am absolved of guilt for all my complaining because all those games that I don't like must be really, truly awful.

Context Insensitive: THE WITCHER 2

First of all, The Witcher 2 is a vast improvement over the original. The dialogue is (sometimes) better, the combat is (largely) smoother, and the story line is (legitimately!) more intriguing. I say this only as proof that I do actually like some video games. It does not figure in to the larger point being made.

THE LARGER POINT BEING MADE

Geralt of Rivia displays his all-consuming torch fetish.

It turns out that in this installment, Geralt has become a mute pacifist who can only communicate through Morse code signaled via igniting and extinguishing torches with his crazy witcher magic. Well, either that or he's hoping to distract the guards with the medieval equivalent of a lightswitch rave. (Strangely, Geralt does not suggest that you use this ability to spontaneously generate fire at no cost to obviate combat by simply burning the guards alive as soon as you see them.)
For those who haven't played the sequence, Geralt is attempting a prison break armed with only a crude wooden club and the glistening abs of a young Brad Pitt. He instructs you to be sneaky for no reason at all--the guards are complete pushovers even on the highest difficulty, which is quite embarrassing considering their armaments and numerical superiority--and then you creep around in the shadows and stealth bludgeon people for a while. While sneaking, you can extinguish and, for some reason, reignite the torches on the walls from a distance, although once again there is no real impetus to do so as it doesn't seem to affect the guards' (in)ability to see you at all.
Unfortunately, in a bit of brilliance that I can only attribute to nobody on the development team ever having played this section of the game, the control for toggling the torches is the left mouse button. You may recognize this as the button used for combat in every video game since the beginning of time including this one, leading to scenes such as the above in which Geralt refuses to fight and instead treats the enemies to an impromptu magic show.
Overloaded controls are increasingly common in games, owing in large part to the fact that the modern video game protagonist needs to be able to shoot, swordfight, toggle running mode, sprint, reload, sneak, stick fiber optic cables under doors, juggle, converse fluently in ASL, crouch, pick his teeth, jump, double jump, spin jump, fire the grappling hook, spin double jump, switch fire modes, change weapons, enter his inventory, use his quick slots, combo skills together, and arm wrestle while modern video game console controllers only have like 8 buttons. Some overloading has to occur in certain cases.
However, "on a keyboard" is not one of those cases. With 40 or 50 buttons at my disposal, there's really no reason for four different functions to be assigned to any of them. Even so, most context-sensitive control schemes are perfectly reasonable, which is part of what makes the other cases* so bewildering. In many cases we could just blame shoddy portsmanship and developers being too lazy to change the control mappings from the XBox, but the Witcher 2 came out on PC first (and in fact, as of the time of this is post, it's PC exclusive). In that light, the decision seems inexplicable. So why would CD Projekt do it this way?
Hell if I know. Maybe they're performing some sort of Polish ritual magic that draws its power from the annoyance and alienation of their fans. It would certainly explain some of their other dubious behaviors.




*Rainbow Six Vegas 2 comes to mind here. "Look under the door stealthily with fiber optic wire" and "fling the door open in such a way as to alert everyone in the room and start a big firefight" are on the same key and actually occur in the same context (looking at a door). The only difference is in the angle of your head: look down just right and you peek under the door like a super spy, or look two pixels above that to perform some Rambo moves instead. Once again, one wonders how something like this made it to the finished product. Was there no QA at all?
Addendum: Crap. Now I'm going to have to think of something else to be upset about when I get to that game.

You Didn't Say the Black Magic Word: THE WITCHER, concluded

I intended to make another short video showcasing a montage of the most outstanding moments of the first few hours of the Witcher for this update, but I found it surprisingly difficult to get myself to play any more of the thing. More than once I sat down to play the Witcher, hovered my cursor over the button, and then... you know, games of Blood Bowl need playing, and probably I could catch up on Parks and Recreation, and really I ought to update my blog but wait first I'd have to play the Witcher CRAP BACKPEDAL MAYBE I SHOULD GO FOR A RUN. (If you know me, you know that the very idea of me choosing to run on purpose is a sign of some serious extinction-level desperation.)

So why?
Clearly I think that the game is pretty crummy. More specifically, I have a particular affinity for presentation and writing, and this game... well, I heard that the developers had released an update for the game with an improved script and voice acting and I thought "Oh, that'll help me get through it!" Imagine my disappointment when it turned out that that's the version I was playing already.
But that's a pretty vague and shallow reaction, so I sat and had a good hard think about why, exactly, this game is so repugnant to me. The first thing that came to mind was that it overreaches, by which I mean that it tries too hard to deliver things of which it is incapable. There's tons of dialogue, but the writing is significantly subpar, and the plot as far as I've gotten is pretty weak. The game has cinematic pretenses, but its "actors" lack the articulation (both vocal and generally in the face region) to deliver performances sufficient to make the camera work anything but distracting. In addition, it follows the regrettably common trend of video game graphics in an attempt to make things look as realistic as possible, which always ends up looking bad a few years hence. The game tries and tries and tries, but it doesn't seem to have the resources to accomplish even one of the things it's attempting. So is that it? Am I driven back by all the unfulfilled ambition?
My regular readers (both of them!) will remember that I actually rather like overambitious games. There's obviously a difference between the two, though: the unfulfilled ambition of Apocalypse really has more to do with its technical execution--a lack of polish in the implementation of ambitious ideas--while the failures of the Witcher are of a decidedly more mundane sort. Really, the things I've been talking about at which the Witcher fails are perfectly ordinary: have your voice actors speak in the way that primary speakers of the language speak, write a script that doesn't make the reader groan audibly more than once a minute, design a control scheme that doesn't make it feel like your character is fighting while immersed in cold peanut butter, etc. The failures of the Witcher are less in the camp of "failing to execute grand ideas" and much more in the neighborhood of "basic incompetence". We've all seen basic incompetence before, though. Hell, I'd say that X-Com Enforcer is worse than this game in every way, and I still managed to compel myself to boot that up more than a couple of times.
I wish I had a good answer. Frankly, I just don't know exactly what it is about the Witcher that repels me so. Honestly, there may even be a perfectly good game in there somewhere, but if not even one element of it is going to show up within the first hour, then I simply haven't got the time for it, certainly not with well over a hundred games left in the queue.

And so it is that I say a fond and eager farewell to Geralt of Rivia and his world of combat pirouettes and steely-eyed female cyborgs longing to be human. Hopefully I'll have a better experience with the next game, which is... oh, hell.

In Witch I Express Distaste For A Thing People Like - THE WITCHER

PREFACE: I swear, I actually really like video games. I do. I play them because they are fun and I enjoy them. It is just an unfortunate coincidence that the bottom of my Steam games list has been largely games that I do not enjoy because they are terrible.

Today's update is something a little different. Instead of reading about how I didn't like the Witcher, you get to watch and listen to me not liking the Witcher. It's a Christmas miracle!

Watch me in HD so you can really appreciate the graphics that look like they're from 1998!

SPECIAL DIRECTOR Q&A:

That video is really long and I don't want to watch it. Is there a small portion that I can watch to get the gist?

If you watch for one minute starting at about 41:45 you'll get a pretty good idea of what's going on.

PS: If you don't watch the whole thing, you're dead to me. Also, you AND your +1 will be removed from the admission list for my birthday party. I'm tracking your IP address and I know who you are.

Will there be a part 2? If so, will it be more or less boring?

There will probably be a part 2. Despite all my complaining, I am not going to give up on the game completely because of a bad tutorial area. I may wise up and omit the boring parts instead of trying to cover them with witty soliloquy to make it shorter, though.

What is the name of that piano piece?

Hell if I know!

Your voice is so masculine and beautiful that I want to marry you. Where should I send my proposal?
EDIT: I am no longer accepting proposals. Some of them were really gross. You guys are sick.

Developing An Obsession With Balls: WORLD OF GOO

I still remember the first time I felt it. The jungle was steaming and fetid; sweat poured from my brow. It had been days since I'd seen civilization. I had evaded snarling, snapping fauna and woven carefully through a labyrinth of discarded explosives, remnants of some territorial conflict long past. I was tired and injured, all that remained of my mission--my comrades had all fallen to razor-fanged beasts. or enemy soldiers--but I couldn't stop now, not when the target was so close... to say nothing of the treasure. All that gleaming gold, stolen from the island's inhabitants, just moldering in his coffers. Soon, I thought, it would be moldering in mine. Another explosion dragged me from my reverie back into the real world. The target, right in front of me! The training kicked in, and I attacked. I'll never forget the look on his face.

Racist and inaccurate. A dangerous combination.

Obviously, I was victorious. But as I said, this was when I first felt it. Boss beaten, fruit collected, and that's me winning, but... that percentage on the save file screen. That's not 100%. I won, right? So... where are all my percents?
And there it was: The Pull. Where are all my percents? Where indeed. I suppose I'd better go find them.

The Pull is a powerful force, and it really warped my World of Goo experience. Let me pose a question: What is the difference between...

	and		?
A		B

You might have answered "an adorable little flag". Well, aren't you clever? Clever and WRONG, that is.

Okay, well, obviously there's a little flag in one picture and not in the other. So not wrong, really, as much as incomplete. But that's similar. Whatever, you're still an asshole.

Probably.

ANYWAY, the point is that the flag represents more than just the flag. It also represents anywhere between five and a thousand minutes of my time. How so? Well, in World of Goo you earn the little flag for completing a level with some exceptional distinction, such as an exceedingly low clear time or an extraordinary number of sentient goo balls rescued rather than gruesomely smelted into scaffolding material. It's a fun little bit of additional difficulty, the sort of thing that you ought to be congratulated for achieving. So what does the game call it?

"Obsessive" again? Why is everyone always calling me that?

Alright, I'm being openly mocked, but whatever. There's a thing to do here, so clearly I'm going to do it. But why?

The Pull

What drives gamers to chase that hundredth percent, that last green question mark, or that final well-hidden coin of some ridiculous color? It could be a sense of accomplishment. It could be a desire for some kind of positive reinforcement, a class of weirdos and misanthropes grasping desperately for any kind of approval. (Gamers are inherently bad people, right? We're still doing that, aren't we?) The point is that I spent three entire days trying to sketch out a compelling bit about why I felt driven to spend hours doing just a little bit better in these levels instead of simply completing the game, and I came up with precisely nothing. I don't understand it at all. Maybe the deep secrets that drive compulsive behavior in human beings are slightly beyond the scope of my stupid blog about my inability to stop buying video games.

Of course, when I put it that way, it suddenly becomes clear that those secrets are precisely the point of the whole endeavor.

Steam Sez...

Bloody hell. Must be strong....

<Shocking, Uncharacteristic Negativity>: X-COM ENFORCER

Would you believe I didn't like this game? Hold on, let me get you a screenshot.

Okay, NOW do you believe I didn't like this game?

You know, for all the things Interceptor does wrong (such as replacing the delightful tactical combat with the worst TIE Fighter game in the history of galaxies far far away), at least it's actually an X-COM game. Enforcer, on the other hand, is a run-and-gun adventure in which you shoot crummy looking aliens with crummy looking guns while a scientist yammers incessantly at you in an infuriating fake lisp. Imagine that in your brain for a second.
Are you imagining it?
Pretty terrible, right? Okay, now make it half as fun as you're thinking and you'll probably be pretty close to what playing X-COM Enforcer is actually like. Your character is slippery, there's very little feedback from the environment, everything looks lousy even when you adjust for the graphics tech of the time, and the whole game seems to take place at arm's length, constantly denying you any chance to get personally involved.

Gee SB, why don't you tell us what you really think?
Okay: I HATE YOU. Almost as much as I hate the scientist in this game. He has officially earned a spot on my Most Hated Video Game Characters list, right between Navi and that motherfucker from Excitebike. God, what a dick.
First of all, he has some incredibly cliche narration. Whoever wrote this guy's dialogue just took notes while watching every 80s movie about science nerds. Secondly, the lisp is really grating and he goes out of his way to include S sounds in his sentences. He can't just ask you to defend the lab from the aliens; no, it always has to be "THTOP THOTHE INTHIDIOUS OUTTHIDERTH FROM THMASHING MY THIENTH TO THMITHEREENTH!" Finally--and somehow I find this even more annoying than the gratuitouth lisping--he speaks in that awkward stilted manner so commonly reserved by lazy Hollywood writers for geeks and nerds. For example, one of his first lines of the game is "The invaders are drawing closer by the nanosecond!" While this is technically true, I can't help but note that THIS IS NOT HOW PEOPLE TALK AND WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH "SECOND"? IS "SECOND" NOT SCIENCEY ENOUGH FOR YOU OR SOMETHING?

Whew. Sorry for the outburst. I think a big part of my tremendous distaste for Interceptor and Enforcer comes from my respect for the earlier entries in the series. If crappy games have a beloved franchise attached to them, it's so much worse than them just being crappy games in a vacuum; imagine, if you will, an alternate timeline in which the Sonic the Hedgehog team ruined that beloved franchise by producing a terrible game with mechanics only barely related to its namesake. It is not only that they have produced garbage, but that they have besmirched what came before, in effect going back in time and stealing some of  the wonder from our remembered childhood selves.
Truly a horrifying concept. Let us all give thanks that we do not live in a world where such an atrocity has happened over and over again with terrible clockwork precision for like 15 years.

Recipe for Disaster: X-COM INTERCEPTOR

Excessive cursor ghosting is the only fun you have to look forward to.

Enjoy it while you can.

5 cups Least Interesting Bits of X-Com With all the Pretty Sprites Excised
1 Space Station Made of FOUR ENTIRE POLYGONS
1 Reasonably Amusing "I Brake For Sectoids" Bumper Sticker
3 tbsp. Worst Parts of the Old X-Wing Game
1 Total Refusal to Run Gracefully on Modern Hardware
8 gal. Mediocrity

Mix dry ingredients in a big, crappy bowl. Rub Mediocrity all over body until rash forms. Then throw the rest of it out, or whatever. Nobody cares.
Disappoints 8.

Alternate recipe: Place large iron bucket over head. Bang bucket with wooden spoon for three hours or until unconscious. Easily as fun as playing X-COM Interceptor.

Pictured: Worst part of game.

Also pictured: Best part of game (the bumper sticker).

Addendum: It is thoroughly ridiculous that you have to lead your targets so much. You are firing lasers over a distance of kilometers. THIS IS NOT SCIENCE.

Playground for the Xenocidal Imagination: X-COM APOCALYPSE

I have now written two posts about X-Com games without saying a single useful word about the series, so let me address this: I love X-Com. I love tactical combat and I love shooting aliens and I love base building and I even love managing the supplies of a massive international defense force down to the very last rifle shell. (Can you believe my friend Mike calls me a "spreadsheet gamer" like it's a bad thing?) The second game is almost as good as the first, owing to it being almost exactly the same game. The fourth and fifth unfortunately failed to recapture the magic or indeed be fun to play at all (more on that in the next few posts). And the third?

The third is one of my favorite games of all time.

It's not a perfect package. X-Com Apocalypse is buggy and frequently feels unfinished, but that owes more to the incredible ambition of the developers than to any lack of skill on their part. While the scale of the story is much reduced, confined to a city instead of patrolling an entire planet, the scope of the project itself is much greater, for it aspires to that most noble of video game qualities: simulation.

What's so great about simulation?
That's a stupid question.
What's great about simulation is the way that it puts the narrative into the hands of the player. While only some games come with a riveting prepackaged story about saving princesses or fighting dragons or committing genocide on indigenous populations, every game has a narrative built from the actions of the player. Even Super Tecmo Bowl!
In many games, the developers' story and the player's narrative overlap tremendously due to linear plots and a tight system of triggers and responses. This is usually because some developer worked really hard on the story you guys and dammit you WILL see all the witty dialogue he wrote and all the cool explosions he scripted. In other, better games, however, the developers spend less time rigidly defining a path for the character to create and instead simply do their best to simulate a world in which things behave as you expect they might and the player can build his own solutions. Of course, the really beautiful things happen when the player doesn't account for everything and his solution goes horribly awry.

With my small, primitive brain, I cannot imagine the sort of thing you are describing. Can you provide several examples?
You're in luck, in fact. And I appreciate your honest apprehension of your own mental capacity.
Imagine for a moment that you're fighting some guys in a parking garage. Some alien guys. Now imagine that you've brought the heavy artillery, grenades and rocket launchers and whatnot because you are very serious about making some alien paste. Explosions are tearing through the place, bodies are flying, and because it's a game you're not thinking about the structural damage you're doing; after all, the roof is held up simply by the programmer's declaration that it exists at that height.
Except here, in this simulation, where it's held up by the columns that you're destroying. And before you've really grasped what's happening, the roof collapses. You sit agape in shock as your best soldiers are crushed, but then you get the message that all the enemy units have been killed and you think "Well, I just discovered a new Plan A," and you've got a fun story to tell your friends (which you totally have because you're not some kind of horrific socially-maladjusted misanthrope).
Or maybe the government agency that controls your alien-busting budget gets infiltrated by outsiders and your funding gets cut. With no plot hook leading you around by the hand, what will you do? Perhaps pull a Robin Hood and take from the rich (everybody else) to give to the poor (yourself)? Entirely of your own volition, you become a shadow organization raiding underworld crime syndicates for cash to mount sporadic assaults on the secret alien shadow government, and that is an awesome story--far more awesome than the one the developers put in, and a big part of that awesomeness is the fact that you came up with it.

And that's really the crux of it. The story you invent is always going to be better than the one that's in the game, because it fits you. It's what you wanted to see, what you wanted to think of. It's the same reason that the movie monsters are scarier when you don't see them. And your story, the story you want, is the story that the developers are putting in when they create that simulation, that real little world for your mind to play in.

It Ain't Hamlet: X-COM TERROR FROM THE DEEP

Approbatión: A Play in Three Acts

Act One: Incrédulitie
"Hey, is this just X-Com but bluer?"

Act Two: Infuriatión
"HEY, THIS IS JUST X-COM BUT BLUER!"

Act Three: Acceptanc...ión
"Well hey, this is X-Com! Just bluer."

(Alternate joke: I briefly considered reposting the first X-Com post and just coloring the text blue, but I decided that it was probably too large for such a simple joke.)

In Which I Fictionalize The Events Of A Disastrous Playthrough: X-COM UFO DEFENSE

What follows is a journal discovered in the burned-out husk of a large underground base and sent to us via time machine from the dark, distant future... THE YEAR 1999!


Jan 1, 1999
Dear Diary,
My appointment as the head of the new division became official today. They're already displaying a flagrant disregard for my authority, though: they're calling it X-COM instead of Cleansers of Lethal Off-World Nemeses. See, that's better because when the aliens show up I can call a briefing and give all my agents their instructions and then say "It's time to send in the CLOWNs!" which is hilarious and that's just good for morale. 
There are no good puns involving the name X-COM. I spent four hours last night trying to to come up with one.


Jan 3, 1999
Dear Diary,
The equipment and personnel arrived yesterday. I tried to help the guys move it in, but missiles are really heavy. I feel like my supervision really improved their efficiency, though.
My agent requisition was a little strange. When the crew roster came through, it looked like almost all of my agents were Asian: Gunther, Isao, Kenji, Takashi, and two named Tsuji. Imagine my surprise when they all turned out to be blond white guys. Weird.


Jan 4, 1999
Dear Diary,
First contact today. I've dispatched the team in the Skyranger to investigate an alien crash landing. I don't know exactly what will happen, but something tells me my guys will be coming back any minute now carrying huge armfulls of alien technology.


Jan 4, 1999     
So I might have been too optimistic. Apparently the aliens have plasma weapons or something? It was hard to tell what Tsuji was saying because so much of his jaw was missing.
He's kind of melodramatic.


Jan 21, 1999
Dear Diary,
After thorough review of the footage from the Skyranger's camera and study of the effects of alien weapons on our erstwhile comrades, our R&D division declared that we are, to use their technical vernacular, "well and truly fucked". When I asked why we don't just kill the aliens and take the plasma guns if they're so great, one of the scientists responded that it would be like a caveman killing a U.S. Marine with a dull spoon in order to steal his rifle. I have instructed the men to regard this as a personal challenge.


Feb 3, 1999
Dear Diary,
Second contact did not go any better, despite my radical and unorthodox engagement strategy. On the up side, somebody actually managed to gut one of the aliens with his standard issue dull spoon and in doing so scavenge a plasma weapon. On the down side, only the Tsujis survived. You know what they say about omelettes and dead guys, though. I've sent a request to a few world governments for their top soldiers to refill our ranks.


Feb 11, 1999
Dear Diary,
It's getting pretty weird in here. Seven recruits arrived this morning from the Colombian consulate. They're all blond and three of them are named Tsuji. Must be a popular name in South America.
No matter! The science guys have made some break-throughs with the alien tech, and it looks like next time our visitors arrive they'll be in for a rude surprise.


Feb 18, 1999
The aliens were less surprised than I hoped. They launched an attack on Mumbai and I sent in our squad armed with new weapons based on the alien tech. Unfortunately, the aliens also had new weapons based on alien tech, as well as the ability to lay eggs in humans to turn them into shambling monstrosities. Oh, and some kind of super grenades.
We believe the population of Mumbai is now roughly 200. It is probable that this number contains no humans.
I attribute this failure to a lack of vision on the part of my squad leaders. When I showed them the plasma spoon, heralding it as the newest innovation in our war against the outsiders, they were reluctant to bring it into the field. I tried explaining that it would be the obvious way to take advantage of the extensive spoon-gutting drills we've been doing for the last month, but they would not be moved.
I can't believe Tsuji called it "fucking moronic". I made him put an entire dollar in the swear jar.


Feb 19, 1999
The radar team tells me that we've got a lot of large ships bearing down on us. They must have tracked the Skyranger back from Mumbai. It looks like they've finally realized what a threat my leadership and ingenuity pose to them! Either that or they're after our devastating weapons technology. Well, they can have the plans for the plasma spoon WHEN THEY PRY THEM FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!


April 13, 1999
They took my hands.
Little gray bastards.
I am to be reinstated as head of X-COM as soon as I've finished getting used to these prosthetics. Of course, the crew is almost entirely new, as most of my people were killed in various horrible ways. I am assured they are the best of the best.
That sounds kind of familiar.


April 29, 1999
Finally back on duty. Lots of new faces around the the base. Something about these people seems so strange, but so familiar. It's disconcerting, but it might just be side effects from all that head trauma.


May 3, 1999
Dear Diary,
Today we scored an uncharacteristic but inevitable victory. A UFO was shot down in the suburbs of Brussels and when I sent a team to investigate the site they discovered alien survivors. A brief firefight ensued, ending with Tsuji's discovery that the aliens don't seem to understand staircases. They know how to ascend but they can't seem to get back down. The men were able to trap them on the second floor of a building.
The science team wanted to wait and see how long it takes them to starve, but Tsuji got impatient. I am told that just before throwing a scavenged alien grenade through a second story window, he remarked "This ought to be a blast." When he got back to base, I made him put an entire dollar in the steely action quip jar.


May 9, 1999
Dear Diary, 
Things are going incredibly well! Our interceptors have been downing alien ships by the dozen all around the continent and a scientist was just in my office informing me that his team has managed to reverse-engineer the propulsion system from the craft that crashed in Brussels. I don't know what that means, but it sounds sciencey enough to inspire great confidence! I'll have to remember to give that guy a raise. I think his name was Tsuji.


May 10, 1999
Ever since my extended medical leave due to no fault of my own, I've been having a strange feeling about my crew. Something's... off. Unfortunately, on my way down to the records office to have a look at the crew rosters, I was waylaid by sirens and a series of explosions that rocked the base and collapsed the corridor. I was able to dive into a room before getting more than a little bit crushed. Looks like somebody's living quarters. And I guess I'm trapped. I suppose I ought to get comfortable.


May 10, 1999 again
Okay, I'm incredibly bored. The signs on the bunks indicate that this room belongs to Tsuji, Tsuji, Tsuji, Tsuji, Tsuji, and Tsuji, and I've noticed something kind of strange. Maybe it's just all that head trauma, but I think it's pretty weird that none of them have any playing cards or chocolate stashed in here. Can you believe it? I've turned this place upside down and all I've found is Tsuji's PDA. I briefly considered poking through it just for something to do, but I respect his privacy more than that.


May 10, 1999 some more
So Tsuji's PDA is pretty weird. First of all, the only game on it is solitaire. Who plays solitaire? Second, there's no phone numbers or anything. That's weird, right? Finally, his entire message history is just texted pictures of, like, weird triangles and numbers that kind of look like the longitude and latitude of this facility.
They might be codes to a PS3 game.
You know what, don't judge me, diary. You're a book. Anyway, he'll understand. Who could withstand this kind of boredom for more than twenty-eight minutes? I'm not superhuman, even if I do have awesome robot hands.


Still May 10, 1999
Somebody has been digging through the rubble for several minutes now. I can hear them, but they're not responding to anything I yell, not even requests for identification. I fear that they may not be friendly. I'm starting to think those explosions weren't routine equipment failure at all. Whoever reads this: You must find and protect the schematics for the plasma spoon! If a weapon so devastating were to fall into alien hands, they'd be unstoppable!
Speaking of alien hands, it sounds like they're getting close. I'll have to hide this somewhere. I only hope someone human can discover it before it's too late. Hopefully Tsuji survived and he'll come back for his PDA. He seems like a trustworthy guy.

Tangled Up In Red: ZEN BOUND 2

Zen Bound 2 is a game in which you climb metaphorical trees made of knowledge and self-discipline by slowly wrapping rope around hand-crafted wooden figures while gentle tinkly meditation music plays in the background.

It's so relaxing that even these Lunesta butterflies are having trouble staying awake.

This is a game in which the calming atmosphere is clearly the developer's first priority, and that decision suffuses the entire experience, from the opening menu to moment you hit the exit button.

To truly explain the effect that this game has on me, I must first tell a story. Recently, I lived briefly with a fellow who spent a large amount of his free time playing Modern Warfare 2. I never actually went in his room, but that did not prevent me from hearing the sound that I usually associate with MW2 players: nonstop screaming childish rage. "FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING BITCH! YEAH, WHY DON'T YOU HACK SOME MORE YOU CHEATING FUCK? AAUURRRGGHH, FUCK A DOG!" (No, really.) On more than one occasion, it got so loud and brutal that I couldn't help but comment to my other roommates that so much anger over anything, much less a mediocre FPS, was just stupid. How ridiculous. How immature.

But now I think I get it. Why? BECAUSE ZEN BOUND 2 IS THE MOST INFURIATING GAME I HAVE EVER PLAYED.


The objective of the game is to paint the little wooden figurines by wrapping a rope around them. How does that work, you ask? Hell, I don't know. Maybe the rope is made of paint or something. I can tell you what it sure as hell isn't made of: ROPE. Sometimes it slides frictionlessly off of the figure, and sometimes bits of it stick to the thing like glue.

What? WHAT?!? ARRRGGH ROPE DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY

But no, it's not just made of some kind of magic paint. It's some kind of quantum uncertainty strand, a bizarre material that can arbitrarily perform the impossible as long as doing so will really piss me off. It bends at right angles (as seen above), it stretches and  squeezes illogically, and on one occasion it actually caused a spontaneous breakdown of the figurine's structural integrity and slid right through it like it was made of water instead of wood. I didn't manage to get a screenshot of that because I was too appalled at the audacity of it. Until that moment, the "rope" had been teasing at me, picking at my patience and prodding at my temper, but this... this was a declaration of war on all that is good and decent. "Physics?!?" The rope cried incredulously. "Man, FUCK your physics." And then it was on.

To complete a level, you must wrap the rope around a nail pounded into the figure. The nail becomes active as soon as you paint 70% of the figure, but you don't get full completion credit until 99%. For an obsessive-compulsive nerd expert gamer like myself, anything less than full credit is no credit... and the rope knows that. As soon as that little nail lights up, the rope leaps for it, and if I let them within fifteen feet of each other the game will exclaim eagerly: "Hey, good work on that SILVER MEDAL! Want to try again FROM THE BEGINNING?"

INFURIATING.

Hidden beneath the calm surface of this game is a monster. It lulls you, provokes a sense of calm with its new agey faux Eastern zen facade, and then as soon as you're off your guard it pounces, latching onto you like some kind of psychic vampire. It drains you, slowly sucking out every last bit of patience and dignity, until every illogical twist of the rope has you screaming at the monitor, spraying foam-flecked apoplexy over this tiny wooden figure and its ridiculous paintjob. The game's title is simply the first in the string of lies it uses to draw you in; it's really only bound to make you rage.