Never Rememer, Never Forget

So I told you about my trip to Plan-N-Trade the other day where I bought a couple old Nintendo games (see last post). While there I saw that they had a copy of Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance II. This was worth noting because it's an uncommon game, and the price was reasonable. Long story short I got it with the intent of playing the co-op game with my friend. I'll post on the details our adventure later.

Like a Video Game Maze

Like a Video Game Maze

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The Game Boy... err Man

When I was a kid I didn't have a Game Boy, which I thought was a grave injustice. A lot of my friends had one though and I spent a good amount of time playing theirs. Most of that time was spent playing Super Mario Land, mostly because everyone had it and most of the other games sucked. When I met my wife she told me she had an old game boy that had belonged to her and her brothers and when I expressed interest it and she dug it out of their basement. She had a few good games like Metroid II and a few bad ones like Spider Man, but one game she didn't have was Super Mario Land. This surprised me since like I said before, everyone had it.

So fast forward a few years to yesterday when I got a hankerin' to brows for some classics at my local Play-N-Trade. They didn't have a great selection but they had a few I was interested in. I ended up getting Ken Griffy Jr. Presents Major League Baseball for the SNES and Super Mario Land. KGJPMLB is a really fun baseball game from '94 that one of my friends had. It's everything that a baseball game needs to be, lots of fun with little complication. It was nice to buy a SNES game, it's been a long time since I picked up a new one.

Anyway, so this morning I got up from a 6 hour LOTRO bender (my trail subscription is up tomorrow) and sat down for a little classic Game Boy action. If you've ever played SML you know what a great game it is, really an example of hand-held game design done right. Now I never beat the game as a kid. In fact I don't think I ever got past the third world because things got unfamiliar after that. World 4 has a Chinese theme with bamboo in the background and kung foo guys jumping around. Its really weird how uncharacteristic this game of a typical Mario game. It definitely doesn't take place in the Mushroom Kingdom. The worlds (or I guess lands) are: World 1 Egypt, World 2 Water World with Aliens and Robots, World 3 Easter Island, and World 4 China. I was surprised to find that World 4 is the last one. The game culminates with a flying shoot-em-up level and a two part boss fight. Then you save Daisy (This is the game that she comes from) and the credits roll. So that's it. I beat in an hour the game that kicked my ass my entire childhood. High score 276080 bitchez.

I can see where I would have had trouble as a kid, the game is challenging. I found... holy shit I just played it again! Sooo much fun! OH Daisy! Anyway the game is pretty hard but for me this was entirely because my hands are no longer child-size and I was playing it on my Game Boy Advance SP. If you don't know, SP stands for "really fucking small." The other thing is that the control feels a bit loose or slippery which can make a hard performer even herder. Like controller throwing harder. I found myself unexpectedly falling off of ledges and saying things like "no fucking way", and "that's fucking bullshit". I'm pretty sure I didn't say those things back in 1989. I'm not saying the control is bad, it's just not Super Mario World precision. Kind of like how Disney Land isn't a cool as Disney World. I also got an occasional feeling of bad hit detection but then, it IS a tiny screen so who knows.

Did I mention there are shooting levels? So cool. OH Daisy!

Relaps

I gave the 360 a rest this week and played some good old PS2. Three games that I abandoned but would like to finish: Dirge of Cerberus, Odin Sphere, and Okami. Two of those, DoC and OS, I don't think I ever will finish mostly due to the frustration factor. DoC gets a bad rap. A lot of people would say that it sucks but I don't think that's fair. The problem is that it came out at the tail end of the platform's life but looks like a launch title. It's not a bad game, it's just that it's a Square game that isn't great. Expectations were high and it was unprepared to meet them. So now in October of 2009 when I play it I find myself wondering why I'm spending my time on it. My biggest beef with the game is the stupid-awkward control scheme. A shallow game like this should be easy to pick up. I shouldn't have to spend a couple hours re-internalizing the buttons. If you're unfamiliar with the game let me break it down for you: Left on the d-pad uses an item and Right on the d-pad cycles through your items. Enough said.

Odin Sphere is an entirely different situation. It's an excellent game made for (and I mean exclusively for) a particular subset of hardcore gamers. I can't imagine a casual player with this game, I have a feeling the meeting would be brief and unpleasant for all involved. Odin Sphere is a game in which every facet of your game play experience is a challenge. I have a feeling that if the designers could have made it harder for you to hit the power button on your console they would have. I think I'm working myself up for a full blown review/rant but that can wait for a future post.

Lets move on to Legend of Zelda.... I mean Okami. Zelda is a great way to describe the game. It's a bright colorful world where you run around, fight some things, solve some puzzles, repeat. Here I have something worth playing through to the end. It's designed well, it's moderately challenging, and there isn't anything tedious I have to spend an inordinate amount of time on. So yeah, I guess I'll be playing Okami this weekend.

New Temptations

Downloaded the demos for Lucidity and Shadow Complex, two recently released games for XBLA. I got to play them for all of 5 min before I had to go to work. Oh and also a tower defense game called Defense Grid which I played for about an hour. I've been feeling a new XBLA purchase coming on. The barriers to acquiring downloadable games is frighteningly thin. I can, on my couch, simply keep pressing the A button and I will receive games. I don't have to move my right thumb more than a fraction of an inch, let alone get up and find my credit card. Scary. It's really surprising that I haven't given M$ more money than I have. I like to think it's a testament to my iron will and thrifty nature but that thought seems pretty suspicious. I don't know what else could it be?

Why is October the Tenth Month?

Doesn't "oct" mean 8? That's always bothered me.

So I've been playing Fallout 3 mostly with small doses of MvsC2 and Monkey Island. I've gone through two play sessions of LOTRO now, both of which being multi-hour affairs. The second one I actually played with a friend. He had some characters on other servers but not the one I was playing on. You can't switch servers without paying a fee so he didn't want to do that. I didn't want to start over and play through the "intro" levels a week after playing though them the first time. I convinced him to play a new character on my server. So in actuality our time together was spent IMing while he went through the bullshit opening stuff and I walked around doing fetch quests. I never actually saw his character. Wheee.

These are the kind of multiplayer online hassles that I like to avoid by... well... not playing with other people. I remember as a youth a group of us doing a kind of gymnastics just to get a one on one game of Star Craft going. This was the time of dial-up so there was lots of hanging up and reconnecting and then disconnecting to use the phone to call the other guy to try to figure out why it wasn't working. These experiments always degraded into one volunteer running back and forth between houses to relay messages like some WW2 soldier running cable under enemy fire. It's amazing to think about all the physical activity and in-person social interaction that those early online games created.

Now we have a much more advanced infrastructure on which to place our virtual meetings. The games however seem to have a level of complexity that requires just as much work to create a satisfying online experience as it did back then. I'm not saying that I've never had fun online; I have, even with strangers. It's just that these experiences have never measured up to the feeling of playing in the same room with someone else. Over the years I've had tremendous fun playing "same couch" with people, even games that aren't multiplayer. I have particularly fond memories of tag-teaming RPGs like Final Fantasy 3 or Earth Bound, one person controlling and the other drawing maps, or taking notes, or flipping through guides, or just being there! How about four-player Goldeneye in a dark basement all summer, or hot-seating Soul Caliber 2 between 6 rowdy drunks until the early mourning hours? What about three friends buying Guitar Hero 2 and deciding not to sleep until they had played through it? You just can't get that from online play.

So I guess I'm whining. Online play does have its merits, particularly the ability to get large groups together in a short about of time... provided it's a popular game. This topic is timely because a good gamer friend of mine is moving back into the area and I'm looking forward to a return to the long sessions of beer and slaughter we used to indulge in.

Oh, and LOTRO isn't half bad really.