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.