Basement Gaming Digest
Everything I've posted here in the last month has been all work work work and ANYBODY who knows me knows that even at my most diligent and focused, I could easily be tagged with the moniker "lounge lizard." In an effort to provide fair and balanced coverage of my life, this evening I present you with a breakdown of my recent gaming endeavors and my related thoughts. I recommend a dry white wine, an aged Camembert, and a Richard Cheese vinyl as accompaniment.
Fable II
This game has easily been my most-played title since Christmas. I enjoy 3d adventure games but am often left with a feeling of "...and?" as the credits roll at the end. Fable really ties the adventuring life into the fantasy world with its system of economics and property management. For the first time I can recall, in-game money is not earned by riffling the pockets of the dead (including dead nonhumans, must we picture every fantasy hero slitting open the guts of every kill in best Greyhawk fashion?). Instead, it can be earned by performing various jobs, which offer increasing pay as their difficulty increases, as well as improving your character's reputation by demonstrating that in addition to being a violent mercenary, you are willing to contribute to the daily life of your town. Home ownership plays a role in the game as well, different homes providing either rent income or stat bonuses when you sleep in them. If you want to get very deeply into landlording, you can purchase upgraded furniture and customize a house. I found the options rather wanting as far as putting together a "look", but it is a handy system for allowing you to invest in your properties and sell them at a profit.
The game does feature plenty of monster-whacking but what kept me coming back rabidly was the slow devouring of every property on the map as pulse after pulse of rental income and shop profit gold was dumped directly into my coffers, including when you aren't playing the game. I love the idea of a hero having to spend a few days tending bar to finance his next big magic sword too, I think it adds a little poignancy to the standard "new town, new shops, buy new weapons, sell old weapons" formula.
Fallout III
If there was an award for Game of the Decade, I'd have to nominate Fallout 3. I have been a lover of the series since I was a kid playing the top-down PC games and being shocked and awed every time someone said "Shit" or paid for sex. The day I realized I could gun down a shopkeeper and scoop up his whole inventory will be with me until I die. I went into Fallout 3 with a lot of trepidation. After all, converting a game from turn-based top-down RPG to first person exploration shooter is a rather tall order. Adding to that, the game takes place in the ruins of DC, while the other series entries have taken place in and around California. We are basically talking about an entirely different civilization now. Both of these changes reeked of the publishers abusing a familiar title to push out a B-rate game with A-rate publicity.
SWEET GOD WAS I WRONG!
Fallout is one of the most visually beautiful games I have played. It portrays a blasted, apocalyptic landscape with a nigh-obsessive eye for detail. Wrecked houses have partial frames, on closer inspection there are splinters of wood and bits of appliance littering the ground around. There is none of the monotonous grey landscape present in some of the studio's earlier games such as Morrowind, nor the empty howling plotless wastes of Oblivion. The Fallout map contains 100 encounter areas and every single one contains something interesting. Some of the best ones have no connection to quests or plots. A mutant-infested teddy bear factory that has a hidden cache of drugs, or a decrepit car factory completely infested with a huge and unique species of mutant ant led by a gigantic ant queen tell their own little stories. This is a world gone wrong, plain and simple. I have never played a game that spent so much effort on immersing me in a fictional world. "But GTA IV!" you may cry, and I agree, immersion to the max. But GTAIV is just imitating the real New York City. Fallout is creating, and selling, the idea of a postwar DC Wasteland.
Gameplay is stellar, combat can be either shooter-style or RPG (I recommend the latter as ammo is somewhat scarce early on and the bad guys hit awfully hard later on). The main plot is somewhat brief (common to open-world RPGs) but very well-written and loaded with unique setpiece experiences. The sidequests are really the meat of the game, and there are dozens, plus a few "open quests" (kill evil people and collect their fingers for bounty, brainwash children and lead them to the slaver camp for cash, collect breakfast cereal to help zombies make crack, etc). My only complaint is that I hit the game's maximum level too quickly. While I can continue to gather money and equipment, I have all the most powerful gear in the game and my stats will not improve. To an extent, at this point, my explorations seem futile since I can no longer watch my character grow. However, I have more freedom to do things like shoot up a town wearing a nightgown and party hat, or take on Super Mutants with nothing but brass knuckles. This is a game that will stay fun as long as I want it to, and there are plenty of options to explore as an evil character if I get bored with my godlike powers.
A Kingdom For Keflings
This is a really random Live Arcade title that's been floating around for some time now. I heard a few reviews here and there but generally didn't pay it much mind. I idly watched a trailer for it earlier in the week and realized it was a Settlers (the PC series, not Of Catan) -style build sim. Interest piqued, I downloaded the demo. Ten minutes later I downloaded the full version. This is an excellent low-key, just plain fun building sim. You have to command little knee-high gnome dudes called Keflings to build themselves a city. As a giant-type guy, you are far more effective at tasks (chopping trees, hauling ore, etc) than the Keflings but you can only be in one place at a time. As you advance in the game and your production chains get more complicated (trees into the storehouse, stockpiles of lumber hauled into the sawmill, hewn planks hauled into the contractor's, plans stockpiles hauled to the woodcarver's, carved wood hauled to the magic shop, etc etc) you have to take more of a personal hand in managing your resources as there aren't enough workers to do everything for you. It plays a bit like Warcraft sans combat. You build your structures piece by piece and assemble them like legos. It sounds simplistic, and it is, but that doesn't stop it from being fun. It's the kind of game that you pretty much can't help but win if you play with patience, and I've always had a soft spot for those. Not every game needs to be Devil May Cry.
Chrono Trigger
A DS port of the PS1 remake of the classic, classic SNES RPG from Square. This is a masterful rendition of the game because it keeps all the graphical refinements and added animations from the PlayStation version but eliminates the crippling load times. The game can take advantage of the DS' dual-screened nature by placing all the menus and interface on the bottom screen, leaving the top free for map and combat graphics. However, for the purist faithful, you can also play with a 90% original control scheme in which the bottom screen only displays a fraction of combat information and there are no touch controls active. A rock-solid RPG with fun characters, an interesting plot, and twelve different endings, this is the perfect handheld game. It's easy to make it from one save point to the next in roughly ten minutes but things stay interesting enough to make it worth playing for hours on end. I would highly recommend this game to any RPG fan and/or DS owner.
Left 4 Dead
I can't say much about this game that hasn't been said elsewhere. A horror shooter that actually has decent controls and seems to be designed around providing a fun experience. A clever system that all but forces players to cooperate (and thus far a responsive online community) and a wicked AI that changes the stages every time you play. It stays scary, it stays challenging, and it stays fun. My only complaint is that the game only has four one hour long stages. I'm hoping, along with the fan community, that downloadable content is released soon featuring another stage or two (and maybe a couple bonus weapons or new enemies). This is an excellent buddy co-op game or a fun post-work online stress vent. I'm not sure how fresh in my mind it will be at this time next year but it's certainly justified the cover price and it's the first zombie game with the feel I've been looking for. Resident Evil games always feel like they're punishing me for playing, this one manages to keep the same low player health and scarce resources during key scenes while also offering frequent refills in between. The bottom line is the same, you can't kill them all, you just try to escape, but in Left 4 Dead I feel both more like a victim and more like a hero. In Resident Evil I often just feel like I'm trying to crawl into the Japanese developers' heads and figure out what they were thinking when they wrote a given stage.
Street Fighter IV and House of the Dead: Overkill are coming out soon and I have preorders on both. I'm excited for both of them, much more for Street Fighter. I actually bit the bullet and ordered a limited edition (and, according to reviews, amazingly high quality) arcade stick for Street Fighter. It actually works with all 360 games that don't need a second joystick, which includes all the fighting games (such as my own favorite, Soul Calibur 4) and most of the Live Arcade titles (TMNT 1989, Gauntlet, Castle Crashers, Golden Axe, etc). I'm really very excited to see some of my older games gain new life at the hands of a new input device. I got very attached to the arcade experience in college and was quite dismayed when Playland was shut down. It will be nice to bring that back into my life, and if it works out well I'll set my sights on a MAME arcade stick for my computer to play all my emulators on.
I've mostly been gaming in one or two hour spurts in the evening as a break between my cleaning projects and bed. Too much of my time is still being taken up by dorking around on the internet doing nothing, but I've definitely seen a decrease in that since I sold off so many games and thinned the fat on my collection. To my pleasure, I've often found myself pausing to get up and do something useful like clean up my car or organize a shelf of clothes before coming back to the game. I have a lot of time off as I wait for my security clearance and it's nice to watch myself spending it both on work and leisure.
My goal is to work on a wishlist for games to cut down on impulse buys. I plan on lowering my budget but not eliminating it entirely. However, I would like to focus it on games like Fable and Fallout that I wanted for a long time, tore into eagerly, and found utterly satisfying, more than the random crap I often bring home because "it looks fun." There's a Blockbuster for that, and many of them have demos online too. I want to get better about only collecting games I really want to play.
Fable II
This game has easily been my most-played title since Christmas. I enjoy 3d adventure games but am often left with a feeling of "...and?" as the credits roll at the end. Fable really ties the adventuring life into the fantasy world with its system of economics and property management. For the first time I can recall, in-game money is not earned by riffling the pockets of the dead (including dead nonhumans, must we picture every fantasy hero slitting open the guts of every kill in best Greyhawk fashion?). Instead, it can be earned by performing various jobs, which offer increasing pay as their difficulty increases, as well as improving your character's reputation by demonstrating that in addition to being a violent mercenary, you are willing to contribute to the daily life of your town. Home ownership plays a role in the game as well, different homes providing either rent income or stat bonuses when you sleep in them. If you want to get very deeply into landlording, you can purchase upgraded furniture and customize a house. I found the options rather wanting as far as putting together a "look", but it is a handy system for allowing you to invest in your properties and sell them at a profit.
The game does feature plenty of monster-whacking but what kept me coming back rabidly was the slow devouring of every property on the map as pulse after pulse of rental income and shop profit gold was dumped directly into my coffers, including when you aren't playing the game. I love the idea of a hero having to spend a few days tending bar to finance his next big magic sword too, I think it adds a little poignancy to the standard "new town, new shops, buy new weapons, sell old weapons" formula.
Fallout III
If there was an award for Game of the Decade, I'd have to nominate Fallout 3. I have been a lover of the series since I was a kid playing the top-down PC games and being shocked and awed every time someone said "Shit" or paid for sex. The day I realized I could gun down a shopkeeper and scoop up his whole inventory will be with me until I die. I went into Fallout 3 with a lot of trepidation. After all, converting a game from turn-based top-down RPG to first person exploration shooter is a rather tall order. Adding to that, the game takes place in the ruins of DC, while the other series entries have taken place in and around California. We are basically talking about an entirely different civilization now. Both of these changes reeked of the publishers abusing a familiar title to push out a B-rate game with A-rate publicity.
SWEET GOD WAS I WRONG!
Fallout is one of the most visually beautiful games I have played. It portrays a blasted, apocalyptic landscape with a nigh-obsessive eye for detail. Wrecked houses have partial frames, on closer inspection there are splinters of wood and bits of appliance littering the ground around. There is none of the monotonous grey landscape present in some of the studio's earlier games such as Morrowind, nor the empty howling plotless wastes of Oblivion. The Fallout map contains 100 encounter areas and every single one contains something interesting. Some of the best ones have no connection to quests or plots. A mutant-infested teddy bear factory that has a hidden cache of drugs, or a decrepit car factory completely infested with a huge and unique species of mutant ant led by a gigantic ant queen tell their own little stories. This is a world gone wrong, plain and simple. I have never played a game that spent so much effort on immersing me in a fictional world. "But GTA IV!" you may cry, and I agree, immersion to the max. But GTAIV is just imitating the real New York City. Fallout is creating, and selling, the idea of a postwar DC Wasteland.
Gameplay is stellar, combat can be either shooter-style or RPG (I recommend the latter as ammo is somewhat scarce early on and the bad guys hit awfully hard later on). The main plot is somewhat brief (common to open-world RPGs) but very well-written and loaded with unique setpiece experiences. The sidequests are really the meat of the game, and there are dozens, plus a few "open quests" (kill evil people and collect their fingers for bounty, brainwash children and lead them to the slaver camp for cash, collect breakfast cereal to help zombies make crack, etc). My only complaint is that I hit the game's maximum level too quickly. While I can continue to gather money and equipment, I have all the most powerful gear in the game and my stats will not improve. To an extent, at this point, my explorations seem futile since I can no longer watch my character grow. However, I have more freedom to do things like shoot up a town wearing a nightgown and party hat, or take on Super Mutants with nothing but brass knuckles. This is a game that will stay fun as long as I want it to, and there are plenty of options to explore as an evil character if I get bored with my godlike powers.
A Kingdom For Keflings
This is a really random Live Arcade title that's been floating around for some time now. I heard a few reviews here and there but generally didn't pay it much mind. I idly watched a trailer for it earlier in the week and realized it was a Settlers (the PC series, not Of Catan) -style build sim. Interest piqued, I downloaded the demo. Ten minutes later I downloaded the full version. This is an excellent low-key, just plain fun building sim. You have to command little knee-high gnome dudes called Keflings to build themselves a city. As a giant-type guy, you are far more effective at tasks (chopping trees, hauling ore, etc) than the Keflings but you can only be in one place at a time. As you advance in the game and your production chains get more complicated (trees into the storehouse, stockpiles of lumber hauled into the sawmill, hewn planks hauled into the contractor's, plans stockpiles hauled to the woodcarver's, carved wood hauled to the magic shop, etc etc) you have to take more of a personal hand in managing your resources as there aren't enough workers to do everything for you. It plays a bit like Warcraft sans combat. You build your structures piece by piece and assemble them like legos. It sounds simplistic, and it is, but that doesn't stop it from being fun. It's the kind of game that you pretty much can't help but win if you play with patience, and I've always had a soft spot for those. Not every game needs to be Devil May Cry.
Chrono Trigger
A DS port of the PS1 remake of the classic, classic SNES RPG from Square. This is a masterful rendition of the game because it keeps all the graphical refinements and added animations from the PlayStation version but eliminates the crippling load times. The game can take advantage of the DS' dual-screened nature by placing all the menus and interface on the bottom screen, leaving the top free for map and combat graphics. However, for the purist faithful, you can also play with a 90% original control scheme in which the bottom screen only displays a fraction of combat information and there are no touch controls active. A rock-solid RPG with fun characters, an interesting plot, and twelve different endings, this is the perfect handheld game. It's easy to make it from one save point to the next in roughly ten minutes but things stay interesting enough to make it worth playing for hours on end. I would highly recommend this game to any RPG fan and/or DS owner.
Left 4 Dead
I can't say much about this game that hasn't been said elsewhere. A horror shooter that actually has decent controls and seems to be designed around providing a fun experience. A clever system that all but forces players to cooperate (and thus far a responsive online community) and a wicked AI that changes the stages every time you play. It stays scary, it stays challenging, and it stays fun. My only complaint is that the game only has four one hour long stages. I'm hoping, along with the fan community, that downloadable content is released soon featuring another stage or two (and maybe a couple bonus weapons or new enemies). This is an excellent buddy co-op game or a fun post-work online stress vent. I'm not sure how fresh in my mind it will be at this time next year but it's certainly justified the cover price and it's the first zombie game with the feel I've been looking for. Resident Evil games always feel like they're punishing me for playing, this one manages to keep the same low player health and scarce resources during key scenes while also offering frequent refills in between. The bottom line is the same, you can't kill them all, you just try to escape, but in Left 4 Dead I feel both more like a victim and more like a hero. In Resident Evil I often just feel like I'm trying to crawl into the Japanese developers' heads and figure out what they were thinking when they wrote a given stage.
Street Fighter IV and House of the Dead: Overkill are coming out soon and I have preorders on both. I'm excited for both of them, much more for Street Fighter. I actually bit the bullet and ordered a limited edition (and, according to reviews, amazingly high quality) arcade stick for Street Fighter. It actually works with all 360 games that don't need a second joystick, which includes all the fighting games (such as my own favorite, Soul Calibur 4) and most of the Live Arcade titles (TMNT 1989, Gauntlet, Castle Crashers, Golden Axe, etc). I'm really very excited to see some of my older games gain new life at the hands of a new input device. I got very attached to the arcade experience in college and was quite dismayed when Playland was shut down. It will be nice to bring that back into my life, and if it works out well I'll set my sights on a MAME arcade stick for my computer to play all my emulators on.
I've mostly been gaming in one or two hour spurts in the evening as a break between my cleaning projects and bed. Too much of my time is still being taken up by dorking around on the internet doing nothing, but I've definitely seen a decrease in that since I sold off so many games and thinned the fat on my collection. To my pleasure, I've often found myself pausing to get up and do something useful like clean up my car or organize a shelf of clothes before coming back to the game. I have a lot of time off as I wait for my security clearance and it's nice to watch myself spending it both on work and leisure.
My goal is to work on a wishlist for games to cut down on impulse buys. I plan on lowering my budget but not eliminating it entirely. However, I would like to focus it on games like Fable and Fallout that I wanted for a long time, tore into eagerly, and found utterly satisfying, more than the random crap I often bring home because "it looks fun." There's a Blockbuster for that, and many of them have demos online too. I want to get better about only collecting games I really want to play.