Summer Slump

So I’ve been in a bit of a summer slump. I’m not entirely sure why, but for the first time in awhile games ceased to engage me. I generally find the summer drought to be a wonderful time to catch up on my giant and ever growing backlog. For whatever reason, every time I perused my list this summer, I found nothing I really wanted to play. Just about every game on the list is a game of at least some note; otherwise I wouldn’t have put it on the list. I just didn’t feel like playing games. There are probably several reasons for this, but I think a large part of it was a general disinterest in most of the games I did play this summer.

The slump seemed to start after I finished Chronicles of Riddick, which is when I started Fallout 3. Fallout 3 is, as far as I can tell, a vast improvement over almost every gameplay mechanic I had a problem with in Oblivion. The leveling system is straight forward and doesn’t require micromanagement, the combat system is much less awkward, and the VATS is a wonderful way of blending real time combat with turn based strategy. With generally hilarious results I might add. Still, it has utterly failed to captivate me for a few reasons I’ll get into once I actually put a few more sessions into playing it.

After that I started playing Majora’s Mask with the Vintage Game Club. This game resulted in a whole hell of a lot more discussion than Alpha Centauri ever did, but it seemed that everyone grew to loathe the title more and more until we were left with around six people that actually finished the game. I came to realize why it is the black sheep of the franchise. Not because of the time limit, it really is a non-issue once you learn how to slow time down less than an hour into the game. It’s because most of the game feels like a rushed and uninspired mess. There is a general lack of polish that often lead to bad game design and, of course, user frustration. That might be a little harsh, but considering the high standards that Zelda and the other Nintendo franchises are always held too, it’s easy to condemn a game that is merely average, especially when it so shortly followed Ocarina of Time.

Moving right along, I played inFAMOUS. The game was fun, but the entire time I just kept thinking I’d rather be playing Crackdown. I love the “sand box with awesome powers to exploit” style games, but inFAMOUS ended up feeling more like a glorified shooter without enough entertaining abilities. Don’t get me wrong, there were tons of abilities to use, but there were only about three or four you actually needed for almost all situations.

Don’t even get me started again on the Gears of War 2: Road to Ruin DLC. On the plus side, it seems like most of the online multiplayer has finally been ironed out. Now I’ve found myself getting owned from lack of experience rather than lack of latency, which is very refreshing.

I also played House of the Dead: Overkill for a couple hours, but that was almost a non-entity considering how fast I plowed through the main story and how much faster I lost interest.

The reason I think my slump in gaming and subsequent slump in blogging was caused by a bunch of games I didn’t really like is because of the last two games I played. ‘Splosion Man and Red Faction: Guerrilla. Both of these games are quite spectacular and helped to reinvigorate my interest in playing. ‘Splosion Man is a charming little sidescroller reminiscent of N+. There is only one button, which causes you to explode. It’s basically jump, but you can do it up to three times. This hardly prevents the game from becoming brutally complex and difficult though it ramps up at a slow enough pace to not be a major turnoff. The game really shines in co-op, the possibilities increase tenfold by adding what is essentially a second set of explosions to the mix. With proper timing you and your partner can reach heights far higher than you ever could alone. ‘Splosion Man also sports a style very reminiscent of that wacky ‘90s cartoon Freakazoid, which naturally is hilarious.

Red Faction: Guerilla is the other game I played and is a perfect example of the “sand box with awesome powers” type game that inFAMOUS failed to be for me. As a player you don’t even have super powers, unless you count being able to tear down skyscrapers with a sledgehammer, but everything they allow you to do is hilarious and most importantly fun. The game is also absolutely gorgeous. I often found myself just looking up to see the constant motion of the Martian sky. I have no idea how open world games keep getting bigger and prettier with every new one I play, but I’m all for it.

Anyway, that pretty much sums up the last couple months of my gaming exploits. I suppose it doesn’t look like month of a slump considering I mentioned seven games, but I spent a fraction of what I usually do and as you are well aware, wrote a fraction. I hope to end the blogging slump by writing about whatever cool shit I do at PAX next weekend, but since I no longer have a laptop this might prove to be more difficult. At the very least, I am now very much looking forward to trying some new games, something I haven’t felt since the end of June.

It came from the FETID WATERS!

Maybe I didn’t give House of the Dead: Overkill a fair shot, but light gun rail shooters, or whatever they are called (first person rail shooters according to Wikipedia) haven’t seemed to offer anything new since I first played Area 51 in some bowling alley when I was 9. After playing through the main storyline, a feat that only took two hours, I think I am fairly safe in my assumption. I only even considered Overkill after hearing a few of the bloggers I like raving about it earlier this year. Now that I think about it however, all the praise I do remember hearing was not about the gameplay so much as the over the top characters and purposely clichéd scenarios.

This brings up an interesting point. When can a games’ presentation and style be enough to keep players interested? That is essentially what successful action films like Transformers 2 do. Anytime you hear someone say, “Well, I didn’t watch it for the story” you can rest assured that they watched it for something else (hopefully the mindless action or visual effects and not Megan Fox in slow motion). The same applies to games that people don’t play for the story, but are there any games people play just for the story? Off the top of my head I can think of several games I grew tired of near the end, but finished for the story, but only one that I grew tired of fairly early on and trudged on solely for the story.

That game is Yakuza, one of the last few remaining decent franchises of the once great Sega. I played through it last Thanksgiving after it gathered a bit of a cult following in the U.S. and almost immediately grew tired of its combat. The game has a decent sized city to explore among other things, but as far as gameplay was concerned, you were either running errands from place to place or brawling. Sadly, the combat wasn’t nearly as deep as a game this focused on it needs to be. Still, even with my early disinterest with the combat Yakuza’s intricate gangster family storyline had me intrigued enough to continue mashing Square, Square, Triangle for another six hours…. I’m kind of a sucker for gangster movies, and I’d never really seen a compelling one about the Yakuza. Who would have thought I’d find it in a video game? Take that Ebert!

Anyway, I’m guessing the reason I could only come up with one game on a whim is because this doesn’t happen that often and honestly, it really shouldn’t. First off, games generally have terrible stories. More importantly however, they tend to have at least ten hours of play in them while only telling a few hours of story. Games have to captivate with interesting play mechanics first, otherwise you might as well just go consume some other form of storytelling.

I wonder how long the critics who liked Overkill actually played it? I can totally see what they were raving about, Brainy Gamer sums it up perfectly. Yet after two hours, I had seen and played enough. It was a fun two hours, especially the parts I played with a friend, but the ridiculous humor and style wasn’t enough to hold me for long. In defense of the critiques I’m referring to, none were official reviews of the game as much as comments in passing about what they liked about it. If forced to talk about lasting power I imagine everyone would say something a little different. Or maybe I’m just way off base here and people still like first person rail shooters, while the excellent parody of over the top horror movies of yesteryear was just icing on the cake.

Either way, I kind of want to add, “Motherfuck” to my collection of commonly used swear words now.

Epic Fail

As some of you may know, Gears of War 2’s online play had a bit of a rocky start. The matchmaking took forever to work, certain weapons didn’t function properly, the amount of known exploitable glitches was just astronomical, and the every match lagged like the host was on Mars. Still, one thing I could praise it for, no matter how faint, was it’s interface. So why exactly is the new deleted chapter, “Road to Ruin”, setup in the most unintuitive and convoluted way possible? They could have just used the tools they already had, the ones that are already in use within the same game!

To summarize, Epic released a deleted section from the game and included all the previous downloadable multiplayer maps in a bundle last week. I assume the maps were just added like normal, but the deleted scene is now selectable as a new part of the first layer of the menu. Now, in addition to Single Player, Multiplayer, Horde, and whatever else, there is one that just says Deleted Scene. The little description on the right says something along the lines of playing a previously unreleased chapter in the campaign alone or with a friend. This makes me think it’d take me to another menu allowing me to choose if I wanted to play single player or co-op. Instead, it let me choose my difficulty and dumped me right into a video of CliffyB discussing the chapter. Once I actually got into the game I was immediately shown a cutscene followed by a choice between playing through the section stealthily or the regular way of guns a blazing. Once these crucial parts of the chapter were over and done with I was finally able to invite Slevin to join and play with me. That means in order to play co-op with a friend; the friend has to miss the opening scene and isn’t allowed to weigh in on whether or not he wants to play stealthily or not.

Who the hell play tested this thing? They could have just as easily used the same exact system for starting a regular co-op game for this. It is already created and on the freaking disc! It isn’t over yet though, it gets worse. On our first playthrough we both started up the chapter in order to see the opening and we both picked insane. I then invited Slevin to join my game so he left his. After finishing the stealthy way, which I’ll hate on in a minute, we decided to replay it the other way. Being the achievement whores that we are, we figured we’d do it on Casual just to check it out and to get an easy 25 points. Before Slevin had made the game I had already restarted on Insane just to see if the guns blazing route was through the same area. It was, but when I left it to join Slevin’s game on Casual it left my difficulty on Insane. In the regular co-op campaign before the match starts, both players are allowed to pick their difficulty. It can be different, which is a pretty awesome feature, but since no lobby exists for the deleted chapter, I figured only the host picked the difficulty. I guess this is not the case because I got absolutely wrecked playing it the second time on what was supposed to be Casual. Am I crazy or is that the most ridiculous method for choosing the difficulty that you’ve ever heard? In order to pick a different setting from the host you have to start your own game with the difficulty you want, then abandon it and accept the hosts invite.

I never thought a games freaking start menu would be bad enough for me to write almost a page long rant, but good god was this frustrating. To make matters even worse, the stealth method of play is the most retarded gameplay addition to the Gears universe since the car that only had enough power to move OR run a spotlight. It firmly established for video games what I have always believed about deleted scenes in movies. That is, they were deleted for a reason! The stealth mechanics consisted of not getting within smelling range of the Locust and waiting for a gap in their fixed patrol routes. A couple times there would be a “cause a block to drop and distract a large group of enemies” puzzle, if you can call it a puzzle, and once there was an alternate route. That was it.

I don’t know what happened to Epic, but they went from being one of my favorite shooter developers to being a company that makes be question their intelligence on a fairly regular basis. Between the way Unreal Tournament 3 was handled and the shitfest that was the Gears 2 launch, I wonder what anyone at that company is thinking. This deleted scene just tops it all off. It isn’t really a big deal, but if you are going to charge money for something, you might as well apply the good resources you’ve already developed to it. The whole thing was just handled unimaginably bad and there is absolutely no reason for it. Come on guys!