This Crappy Controller

Level Warp.

2007-03-10T18:31:00.000-08:00

Wow. My last post was five days ago? Really??

I guess I shouldn't be that surprised--I haven't had a ton of time to play Dragon Quest VIII, much less write about it. As I recall, I had two sessions of maybe 90 minutes each.

The first session was a deliberate goof-off thing: I had captured a new creature that seemed pretty powerful and thought I'd have a run at the Level C Monster Arena championship.

And now it occurs to me I haven't told you anything about the Monster Arena yet, which is probably for the best, but alas unavoidable now. The Monster Arena mini-game is this area you stumble across after you've been playing for a while; when you do, a surprisingly hairy-chested man gives you bounties on three monsters, one of which you've probably already encountered, one of which you're about to encounter and the final one you run across about four or five hours down the road. If you capture all three, you open up the Monster Arena miniquest where you pit a team of those three monsters against three teams of three monsters in rapid succession. If your team beats those three teams, you get a price and you're allowed to compete at the next highest, more difficult, level. Because the three creatures you're given bounties for are pretty wimpy, you're encouraged to go find other monsters wandering the countryside. If you can beat them, you'll recruit them to your team.

This, plus the assorted treasure chests, provides more incentive for you to wander the countryside, and, timed where it is in the game, retrack your steps looking for monsters you'd encountered in the landscape. (In DQ8, the majority of your monster fights are randomly generated, but there are a number of monsters wandering around by themselves that you can avoid or attack, and it's these that you can recruit for your team.)

Me being me, I completely misunderstood the location of one of those three monsters so I didn't unlock the Monster Arena minigame until much later in the game than I'm sure the designers had calculated. This was good thing because by the time I'd opened it, I knew the location of two or three strong recruitable monsters and had a pretty powerful team right out of the gate. My group battled their way up from G to E without any trouble, and barely squeaked through D which hairy chested Mario assured me was the hardest group to beat. Actually, C went on to kick my ass and so I put the monster quest aside until I encountered a wandering dragon early in my Wednesday session... It was good enough to soundly beat Round C, but Round B, the penultimate set, was a bunch of mean bastards, and I barely made it to the second team in Round B before savagely beaten.

This set up the situation for the rest of that Wednesday session--wandering around the landscape on a sabrecat, fighting random monsters, finding treasure chests, and looking for recruitable monsters. It was only another thirty minutes of play or so, but it was pretty breezy and I finally turned it off as much out of annoyance at my own laziness as anything.

The second session on Thursday was, alas, more serious as I decided to go back into the Dark Ruins where my characters got killed. To my surprise, I battled to the bottom of the dungeon without too much trouble, mainly because I was willing to have all my characters throw out their top spells and bring the beatdown. I was hoping the bottom of the dungeon, which promised a showdown with the Big Bad, would just be a coattail of a level--the kind of thing that had happened twice in the past where my party confronts the villain, he mocks them and then teleports away laughing, and some new area of the map is opened up.

Nope. It's probably not the end of the game (I'm right at fifty hours, which is how long it takes people on the Internet to finish Dragong Quest VIII, but if there's one thing I've learned about my ultra-tard playing abilities is however long it takes people on the Internet--I call them "liars" for short--to finish, that's about two-thirds of the time it takes me to finish. If DQ8 is really fifty hours on a relatively quick play, I'll finish the game at about the 75 hour mark) but goddamned if I wasn't stuck fighting a laughing, annoying uber-boss who could split into three and fuck my party up big time. Remarkably enough, right as I was running out of everything, I beat his first incarnation, and the next two within five minutes later. I wanted to breathe a sigh of relief, but I knew better: I don't recall encountering this in American games--I'm sure it happens--but Japanese game developers love the two-stage end boss. Sure enough, the dude rises up, says more stuff, laughs some more (I gotta give it up to the designers of Dragon Quest VIII; you have to push a button to move past each box of dialogue, which is handy if you have to run for a pee or a sandwich or something. In this scene the villain laughs at you for a solid minute at which point you have to push a button, then he continues to laugh some more, and then you push a button, and then he laughs even longer and heartier and more annoyingly. It was so in-your-face I had to laugh.) and then, as is the Japanese end-boss want, turned into a giant winged demon and proceeded to beat me stupid. Because he got two insanely powerful attacks per round, one of which would shock half my party, and the other of which would brutalize any given party member, I was mincemeat in about eight minutes.

And then, thanks to the generous nature of DQ8, I was reborn in a church having lost no more than half my gold and having gained several thousand experience points. Unfortunately, I was out of time for the day, to say nothing of all the rare one-use only magic items I broke out in my attempt to beat his ass.

So that's where things stand. I haven't played since Thursday; I doubt I'll play until Wednesday; and once I do, I'll have to decide what I'm going to do. Currently, I'm leaning toward hitting GameFaqs and really looking in-depth at the stuff I can create with my alchemy pot. I've done a pretty good job avoiding it, and creating various items based on the hints I've found around the game, but there just aren't enough of them and I'm not getting any younger.

I don't like the idea of wandering around having random fights just to level up, but I don't see any other choice since I'm not strong enough to beat that boss in my current state. The main problem is my heroes are leveled up enough that while the fights are quick, the payoff is low, and it's gonna take forever for me to level up. Ideally, there'll be a section of the map I've missed where the monsters are just tough enough that I'll get good XP (yes, that stands for Experience Points) and can have my group bump up a level or two. That, plus manufacturing a rare item or two might make enough of a difference.

I certainly hope so; not only do I still want to play Yakuza, but those copies of Front Mission 4 came in and Mr. No-Willpower ordered GTA: Vice City Stories from Amazon today. This puts my to-play list at NINETEEN games. If I can get three or four of those games before God of War II goes on sale (hell, before it becomes a Greatest Hits title), that'll be a remarkable triumph of willlpower on my part.

Nobody To Blame But....

2007-03-05T14:48:00.000-08:00

Myself, of course. After posting on Saturday about how I felt relatively ahead of the curve on Dragon Quest VIII, I went and got my party killed in the dark ruins yesterday.

Dying in DQ8 isn't a big deal, other than if it happens it's usually because you deserved it. There's several ways to get out of any particular fight, and for a mere pittance you can buy an item that'll jet you back to a place where you can safely heal up. Yesterday, I noticed that my party was running kinda low on health and magic points but thought, "Ehhh, I'll make my way to the stairs at the end of the screen and then transport back." Sure enough, exactly twenty seconds later, a group of dog riding skeletons, orchid-headed priests, and a blood mummy or two arrived to slaughter me wholesale.

When you do die, you're resurrected in the last temple you visited, and stripped of half your gold: like I said, no big deal, particularly since the game has several banks where you can store your cash and avoid such a penalty if you get taken down. What stings is knowing that if I'd listened to myself, I wouldn't have lost any anything, except the time it would've taken me to retrace my steps. Of course, with video games the only true currency is time.

Which is the source of my ongoing ambivalence about video games in the first place--why do I continue to fritter away a currency which I have in such short supply? Answers like "fun" certainly come to mind, but sometimes I worry it's because while a triumph in a video game is almost as gratifying as a triumph in real life, failure in a video game is hardly as crushing as its real life counterpart. Maybe someday in the future, when people do something stupid and get themselves killed, they'll be able to wake up in a hospital with half their money gone, but that's still not the case today.

I Know What I'm Playing Next.

2007-03-03T18:35:00.000-08:00

First: three posts in one day? Yes. My original plan had been to post on the other blog, but work was such an evil, baying, scrote-biting leech I knew I wouldn't have the wherewithal to write anything that required critical faculties. For better or for worse, this is the blog I go to when I just want to write.

Second: I know why there was an underlying thread of anxiety in my previous thread about the length Dragon Quest VIII: I know what game I wanna play next.

I've had the opposite problem over the last several games, with DQ8 coming more or less out of the blue to save me as I looked to the end of Bully with something like panic. Like any good junkie, I fear having a string of the good shit run out, not just because it means I have to go through withdrawal pains but, worse, it means that maybe it's time I seriously think about kicking.

Last week, when Robson returned my copy of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance saying he just wasn't digging it, he mentioned that he threw on Yakuza after taking M:UA out of the playstation and immediately felt better. That and a comment I came across on the message boards while reading critical reception to DQ8 twanged a off-key, but heartfelt, note of desire.

The quote was this:

Yakuza / Ryu ga Gotoku - Play casino games, try to get the attention of women in hostess bars, go to the batting cages, or the special Sega store, play UFO catcher games, collect all manner of trinkets including stuff like men's cologne to help with the ladies, fight with everything from microphones to sofas to fire extinguishers, each having their own special attacks, help out homeless guys, find keys to coin lockers, shop at convenience stores and restaurants, get involved in any number of dynamic optional stories, etc.. It's like River City Ransom and Final Fight got married and decided to become a full-blooded action RPG with stats, money, dungeons and a battle system.

And it's worth pointing out--to my avaricious heart if no one else--that this review is clearly that of someone who played the original Japanese version. The U.S. release got much more mixed reviews (although looking around again on that message board, it seems a lot of regulars liked the U.S. version just fine).

It's an RPG that's also a fighting game, that's also a modern day Japanese gangster story! I don't know what flipped the little switch in my brain (actually, that's a lie, I do know: before DQ8, the RPG comparison had absolutely no positive heft for me at all) but now it's looking like it may, very soon, be my New Best Friend.

More of Everything: Dragon Quest VIII

2007-03-03T16:37:00.000-08:00

I'm just about to pass the fifty hour mark on Dragon Quest VIII, meaning I've played it for longer than Bully and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance combined. I wish I could tell you how much longer I'm going to be playing it, but I honestly have no idea how much plot is left to the game. I could be on the last leg of a fetch quest right before I go to fight the final boss, but there's a whole other island/continent I haven't even begun to explore.

I could've shaved at least five hours off those fifty if I didn't keep bucking against the game design: although the game frequently sends you out into the world with vague directions (like, "there's an old man in the Western Woods who can help you") the roads and landmarks are designed to lead you there if you don't run off in the woods and act like a 'tard. Unfortunately, I was raised to run off in the woods and act like a 'tard (only upon typing this did I realize how true it was) and so, whether through impatience or insecurity, I've struck out repeatedly for the corner of Fuck-All and Nowhere, despite knowing better: it was after I failed to find the proper entrance to the Western Continent, and had to consult a FAQ, that I grokked to the handholding via landmark layout approach. And I still went on to fuck it up and, in fact, feel confident I will go home after writing this and fuck it up all over again.

Y'see, there's this cat chapel that I came across right after leaving the casino town in mourning to get the magic mirror at, uh, Avignon? Avalon? Richard Avedon?, and, after asking a question or two and realizing that this wasn't the town I was looking for, I split.

Now, this cat chapel was placed there for a reason. Even a dumbshit like me knows that. But I assumed it was some later quest I would do on my way back, or maybe just a bit of lovely local color that would tie in with someone's backstory.

Nope. This chapel exists so that, if you do the subquest it's tied to, you get a nifty little beastmount that'll make your land travel go two to three times as fast. If I hadn't been a dumbass, my quest to the far-flung of town of Richard Avedon would've been markedly shorter and, since this game relies of random monster encounters for most of its action, markedly easier.

And how did I find all this out? By going back to that FAQ when, after completing the giant lizard hunting ground subquest you get in Richard Avedon, I was unable to find the above-mentioned Western Woods, the next step in my quest. Lemme tell you, I really worked my ass off trying to find this Western Woods--I have a fucking boat, mind you, and I sailed around the Western edge of that continent looking for a forest. And when I found it, I wandered through the ass-end of it, getting in 'tarded random monster fights and getting nothing for my trouble but some paltry gold and a painful leaking of my players' Magic Points. So, yeah. When I asked the rhetorical question that opened this paragraph, I originally was going to type, "I took the easy way out--I looked at a FAQ." But, really, I did it the hard way--running off in the woods and acting like a 'tard, but only after fucking sailng--and still had to check a FAQ. That's how I found out where to find the Western Woods and how to get a Sabrecat mount to get your ass around. Fuck.

FAQs probably deserve a post all their own in this blog of mine. Like most video gamers, I have a strong love/hate relationship with them: the only thing worse than not discovering something awesome in a video game because a FAQ tells you first, is being stuck forever on some god-damned stupid puzzle, design flaw, or misunderstanding between you and the designer *without* a FAQ to save your ass. Game designers, of course, know this, which is why the difficulty of puzzles have diminished over time and the number of cool, hidden easter eggs have grown. I expect that's only going to continue as video game playing demographic gets older and has less and less time on its hands but still wants cool, unexpected shit to pop up and surprise it. (Remind me to write about the Monster Arena sometime.)

And yet, that approach is also, to an extent, the antipathy of the old-school RPG from which Dragon Quest VIII is descended. Like a pen and paper RPG, the random monster battle is a vital component of the game. Sure, I'm wandering around like the map like a like an idiot, but I'm also gaining crucial experience points, leveling up, and finding the occasional valuable treasure out in the middle of nowhere. If the giant lizard hunt is any indication, I'm comfortably ahead of the level curve because I beat those lizards down without breaking a sweat.

And that's another reason why I suspect that the plot isn't over yet--I've heard this game has about 50 to 100 hours of gameplay to it. Since I'm not exactly doing a speedrun, I bet I'm going to clock in closer to 100 hours, even without doing the "make every item/beat every monster/open every treasure chest" route. That worries me becuase I like all the little sidegames, sub-quests and mini-what-have-yous but I don't want the game to become a chore. Unless it's structured well, that happens with games more often than not--I think they prefer to leave you oversaturated than leave you wanting more--and I worry that could really be the case with Dragon Quest VIII, since I'm already 50 hours into it and have no idea how much more they're going to string the story along. (Considering I haven't even finished the subquest that'll let me play roulette--or anything else--at the big casino, I'm thinking: a lot.)

On the other hand, they were smart enough to throw in the Sabrecats...even if I wasn't smart enough to discover them. Maybe there'll be the chance for me to actually have more of everything, without it feeling like too much of nothing.

Stronger Than Fiction.

2007-03-03T16:34:00.001-08:00

If you think my previous post, in which I spent several thousand years bemoaning my inability to cheaply buy games I will never have time to play, was a cry for help, consider this: about five minutes after I hit publish, I bought a new copy of Front Mission 4 off Ebay for nine bucks. Actually, to be fully honest, it was a dutch auction so I bought two copies.

(Why two? I... don't... know? I had some idea that I could flip the other purportedly new copy, either on Amazon, Ebay or at some shop that it might cover the money I spent on both games. This seems really, really unlikely, I know, but nothing screws up my inner compass like success: I flipped my second copy of the limited edition of Metal Gear Solid: Subsistence for enough money that it covered both copies and gave me a $50 profit. Weirdly, for a guy who's been buying comic books for over thirty years, I can count the number of times I engaged in such speculation in that market on the fingers of a single hand, and have enough fingers left over to flash the peace sign. If only such sound judgment would guide me with video games!)

Then, three days later, I found a used copy of God Hand for $11.95 at Streetlight Records. Provided that the scuffs seem as minor as they appeared in the store, this is a good deal. Even if I don't take to the high difficulty level of the game (I've read it's awesome but hard), I could flip it for a small profit on Ebay now. I suspect I may be able to flip it for a larger one later...

So, yeah. That's how Video Game Player: The RPG is going. I defeated dutch auction and it monster dropped two copies of Front Mission 4, and I completed the record store sub-quest for a God Hand reward. I've gained a +2 to Avarice and opened up the Difficult Fighting Game skill tree.

Next: some actual fucking talk about playing actual fucking video games.

Junkie's Blues Gets The Power-Up.

2007-02-26T15:48:00.000-08:00

I still can't decide if Best Buy is trying to kill me, or trying to save me. Today (and maybe today only?) they're having an absolutely absurd clearance sale of their videogames with items like:

1.99 PS2 187 Ride or Die
1.99 PS2 American Idol
1.99 PS2 ATV Offroad Fury 2
1.99 PS2 Bad boys Miami takedown
1.99 PS2 Beat down: Fists of vengeance
1.99 PS2 Beyond Good and Evil
1.99 PS2 Big Motha Truckers 2
1.99 PS2 Brothers in Arms
1.99 PS2 Champions of Norrath Realm
1.99 PS2 Conflict vietnam
1.99 PS2 Constantine
1.99 PS2 Frontmission4
1.99 PS2 Gauntlet the Seven Sorrows
1.99 PS2 GTA 3
1.99 PS2 GTA San Andreas
1.99 PS2 GTA Vice City
1.99 PS2 Jak 3
1.99 Ps2 Killzone
1.99 PS2 Legacy of Kain Defiance
1.99 PS2 Onimusha 2
1.99 PS2 Syphon Filter The omega factor
1.99 PS2 Test DriveEve of Destruction
1.99 PS2 The Matrix Path of Neo
1.99 PS2 Virtua Fighter 4 EVO
1.99 PS2 We Love Katamari
4.99 PS2 Jak 2
4.99 PS2 Jet Li Rise to honor
4.99 PS2 Katamari Damacy
4.99 PS2 Prince of Persia 3
4.99 PS2 Sly 2 band of thieves
4.99 PS2 Sly cooper
4.99 PS2 Star Ocean 3
4.99 PS2 Ultimate Spiderman
4.99 PS2 Wild Arms 4
4.99 PS2 X-Men Legends
9.99 PS2 Romancing Saga

Now, I left some of that stuff in there to show you how much crap is there (and believe me, there were tons more cheap awful game titles I cut) but there are also a SHOCKING number of good deals there and/or junk that I would gladly played and then resold at a wee profit. (With God as my witness, I would've paid seven dollars or under to get a copy of Big Motha Truckers 2 new.) And, as a fledgeling SPRG junkie, the idea of getting Front Mission 4 for 2 bucks and tax makes me want to weep. So, yeah, I was kinda tempted to pull an emergency sick day, and break out that Holiday Gift Card I got from B.B. And by "kinda tempted," I mean "I rung my hands and rubbed my forehead, and sweated like a junkie on detox."

Because for the last few months, I've been just as, if not more, addicted to buying video games as to playing 'em: I've got a stack of twenty-seven or twenty-eight games sitting on the side of my desk, and I'm sure some of 'em I'll never get to now. In the past, I've gotten the occasional killer high from my budget gaming habit (On a previous Best Buy clearance sale, I was able to score the first Hulk game for $4.99; not only did I enjoy the game, but I sold it for $6 two years later at a garage sale) but mostly it's the cheap quick fix, and the long shameful grind (at that same sale I sold a copy of Resident Evil: Code Veronica for a dollar less than what I'd paid for it two weeks earlier).

So even though I'm a pained junkie, I'm aware I'm also a junkie, and it's probably for the best that I'm here at work, making money, and not driving in the rain, from poorly stocked Best Buy to poorly stocked Best Buy in search of ten dollars worth of games.

(In fact? Wanna know what I really honestly truly only want out of that list above that's puffed up with sure-fire garage sale filler and amazon marketplace bait?

1.99 PS2 Big Motha Truckers 2
1.99 PS2 Champions of Norrath Realm
1.99 PS2 Constantine
1.99 PS2 Frontmission4
1.99 PS2 The Matrix Path of Neo
4.99 PS2 Jet Li Rise to honor

And which ones I would actually pay more than that super-low price for?

PS2 Frontmission4

Which means that no matter how many of those games I actually got, that would be the only game I'd really feel happy about getting.)

See that? The other games are all just shit I would get to have at a super-low price, or be able to trade. And, honestly, that's pretty much the same as most of the dozens of other middle-aged dudes driving to their Best Buys today: we're like sharks in the ocean, drawn by the merest drop of seal blood into a seething, restless blind-eyed searchingness. They think they want the bicycle tire, the suit of armor and the length of chain they devour, but really they just want that tiny spot of seal blood they can almost remember tasting...

More on this quasi-depressing topic as it develops. (Although, really, just between you and me, I'd rather be talking about Dragon Quest VIII.)

Chained to the Alchemy Pot: Dragon Quest VIII

2007-02-15T17:56:00.000-08:00

I put maybe twenty hours or so hours into Bully, maybe a bit longer, over the course of a month and a half. By contrast, I've clocked just shy of nineteen hours on Dragon Quest VIII and I've only had it a week and a half.

It's kind of an odd story how I ended up playing DQ8--someone had started a thread on a messageboard I follow about recommendations for an RPG to play and I hopped in and asked for advice. I'd actually gotten a kick of the RPG-lite touches on Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (an experience I've really passed over about on this blog, I suddenly realize) and have always felt a little bit guilty for not being a bigger fan of RPGs on the console: in theory, it's a style of game I want to support (they're heavy on the writing and the storytelling) but never actually take to. I tried a few minutes of Final Fantasy X-2 and loathed it, hated the hour or two of the first Xenogears that I played, and then there was the savagely dull time spent with Kingdom Hearts II....

But I've enjoyed the faux RPG-ness of Champions of Norrath, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, and certain demos like Front Mission 4, to say nothing of Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate (only my fear of having a time-suck RPG has kept me from installing Baldur's Gate 2 on my laptop). Considering how often I synch up with the average twelve year old video game console player in Japan, I couldn't figure out whether I just kept picking bad RPGs or I just hated them..

With this in mind, I ordered DQ8 from Amazon. It would be my way to finally find out how I feel about RPGs (at least on a console) since everyone who played RPGs praised it to the skies. (According to Wikipedia, the readers of Japanese video game magazine Famitsu voted it the no. 4 RPG of all time.)

Sadly for me, I love it.

Dragon Quest VIII is a huge sprawl of an RPG, in which you are a guardsman of a ruined king and a transformed princess hunt down the evil mage who destroyed your kingdom. At first, you're aided by a single henchman but as time goes on you add two more characters to your party. Pretty standard RPG stuff.

In fact, that's part of the appeal of Dragon Quest VIII--it's the epitome of standard Japanese style RPG, but with absurdly high production values and some of the best localization I've ever played. To catch the levels of stratification within your party, the game's adapters went with an all-Brit voice cast--your first henchman, Yangus, speaks in a delightfully thick Cockney accent, and the ruined king, despite looking like Yoda, sounds like a high-bred fop. (In fact, although the voicde acting is top-notch all the way around, Ricky Grover's voicing of the fat, faithful big-hearted tough guy Yangus puts the character in a lot of top five NPC lists. He's just a joy to listen to.)

That, and a dash of other incredibly high production values--the characters and monsters were designed by Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dr. Slump and Dragonball Z--make the game not just the RPG video game equivalent of comfort food, but the equivalent of super-quality comfort food feast: less a peanut butter sandwich, than a towering Dagwood Bumstead style sandwich made with pricey delicacies from Whole Foods.

Additionally, even though the game can be hard, it's almost always whimsical. You fight dancing devils in short pants, hooded shirtless muscle men who can distract you with their flexing, sentient bouncing bags with leering mouths and bouncing candies--Toriyama's designs so far are more Dr. Slump and less Dragonball Z, and that, combined with the cel-shaded animation, and a large number of silly side-quests and possiblities for character optimization, makes one feel like they're playing an ongoing anime series. It's closer to Harvest Moon than Final Fantasy, making it a nice continuation of the child-like time-wasting I indulged in Bully.

It has its drawbacks, of course. The game's action stems from its random encounters, and there are times when you just want to get back to the village, save your game and quit, but half to fight your way through teams of six monsters, over and over and over.... Also, playing the game for more than three hours at a time makes me feel headachey and over-stimulated, like I'd eaten a bag full of jellybeans. And although it's a huge open world with treasure chests, secret monsters, and hidden subquests, the lack of a detailed world map (I got one about seven hours in and it's ridiculously sparse) and the high number of encounters make that world too much of a chore to explore. (So far.)

But, overall, it's a stunning game, the kind of candy-colored time waster I'm tempted to send along to my ex roommates back on Paris Sreet, and I'm both delighted that I bought it and more than a little terrified. I have projects to take care of in the next few months--some big ones for other people, and a decent-sized one for myself, and it's already caused me to sabotage one gym visit.

I might well have been better off if I hadn't liked Dragon Quest VIII, to be honest. But I take some comfort in knowing that chances are good that no matter how long I play it, there aren't going to be a lot of other RPGs as good as it. My best hope now is that the game will be so good it'll spoil me for others of its ilk.

And if not? Well, at least I'll once again be in line with my twelve year old Japanese brethren.

2007-02-12T10:00:00.000-08:00

This here is what we in the industry like to call a "test." Feel free to disregard now.

Childhood's End.

2007-02-12T08:52:00.000-08:00

And suddenly, just like that, Bully was over.

I figured once the "wronger" side of the tracks opened up, the end was near, but suddenly I was on the last mission of the game, running around in a sillier version of the riots at the end of GTA: SA, and then out the other side, watching the credits roll. I wasn't ready.

The game doesn't really end, of course--you get to go around and do all the side missions you might have missed, kiss the girls and guys you might not have kissed, and loaf around Bully style, and I thought I'd spent a week or two doing just that. But after collecting the remaining three photos for the yearbook, I popped the game out of the PS2 and looked to one of the new games I'd compulsively ordered online despite my tremendous backlog. (More on that later.)

I haven't written off Bully--just the other day, I found online the list of guys you can kiss, and I'll be damned if I'll put the game away until Jimmy's kissed 'em all--but I worry that, despite my writing that (and believing it), it may be a while before it ends up back in play. GTAIII is the only sandbox game I continued to play for any duration once I ended.

True, a few times I booted up GTA:SA (because I still hadn't scored with that crazy martial arts chick) but it was disquieting and odd. I'd shoot some hoops or wreck some cars while waiting in between dates, but, sounds of gunfire aside, it felt far too much like when I go home to visit my Dad in Humboldt County: I find myself nostalgic and unsettled, surprised by how small and how quiet everything feels. I had C.J. shoot hoops in his old neighborhood and he looked lonely and alone, an old fart trying to figure out why it all feels different when absolutely nothing's changed. I don't want that to happen with Bully, but I worry it's gonna be the same. I'll boot up Bully, send Jimmy in search of Cornelius, or a frisbee, or a butt to pinch, and suddenly he'll be the kid who went away to college and came back the next summer, slightly skeevy in his cocky dedication to do everything (and everyone) he couldn't do the first time. And I think I'll maybe be able to handle that for about two hours before I shudder, turn off the machine and find a new game. As with life, so with art.

But it was a nice childhood while it lasted.

Bullish on Bully....

2007-01-27T17:58:00.000-08:00

Yeah, still playing Bully every now and then. I think I'm inching my way closer and closer to completion of the game (I'm close to 70% which is usually where the GTA games start wrapping up), and the closer I get, the slower I move. Thursday night, for example, I spent maybe six hours of game time mowing lawns. Sure, it made me a ton of cash, but I already had a ton of cash. I think I did it because I could, and then, after it was done, I found the button that turns on the sprinklers in the park and I felt really happy.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Bully's short game days (you pass out at two a.m. so you better be safe in bed by then) keeps the player from trying to blow through the whole experience in a week, and currently I'm pretty glad about that. When I first started the game, I admit, I was pretty nonplussed by it--as my wife put it, "It just seems like you're doing boring things, not interesting things. At least in San Andreas, you were doing stuff that was interesting."--and I had plenty of other games I was chomping at the bit to get at.

But now, as the game continues to open up more back roads and areas (just past the wrong side of the tracks there's an industrial park that's, like, the wronger side of the tracks) and adding more little minigames and toys and errands, I find myself thinking that Bully is much closer to a Childhood Simulator than I originally thought. Just like when you're a kid, the thing you're doing may look like nothing at all to the person watching, but to you, the person doing it, it's interesting--maybe because it is nothing at all. There's this weird low-key zone I get into while playing Bully that has nothing to do with speed runs, or enemies, or completed missions; where I decide to, for example, play a video game at one of those standalones scattered around town, or get my hair cut a completely different way and dress up like an old school punker. It does feel, almost, like childhood to me, because one thing you realize about childhood once it's gone is that you will never have that much free time in your life again, even if you try. And what's truly fascinating to me--what might be a great essay that I hope someone gets around to writing someday soon--is how Bully takes so many of its cues from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (clothing options, sports minigames, girlfriends to win) and yet is such a different game. I think it's precisely because of how the game trains you to see the world--the worldview of the game, I guess. In GTA:SA, there's lots of interesting things to do but I was always kind of restless in doing them, squirrely: I kept trying to get to the next area, unlock the next thing, find the next girlfriend. It felt like there was so much to do, I had to do it all. (And then, just like in real life, once I did everything I could, I ended up in the casinos playing cards all the time.) By contrast, Bully does a great job of teaching you to lower your expectations, to not expect so much. By the time, you finally get off the campus and get into town, it's pretty underwhelming. That's it? I thought. This is all there is to do?

And yet, when I started playing Bully again, coming back to it after beating Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, thinking I'd just knock off the rest of the game in a day or two and shelve it, I found the game kept doling out more and more bit by bit, expanding its repertoire very discreetly. The dreaded jobs I'd been avoiding--paper boy, lawn mower--were neither hard nor stressful. I started exploring, just because I could, and one day, in what I guess was the early Spring of the game, I went for a swim around the lake just because I could, walked out onto a beach and got in a fistfight with a pirate. That was pretty cool, but when I later maneuvered out onto a bunch of cliffs, lost my balance and caught myself on a ledge, that was even cooler. All those hours you spend walking around by yourself as a kid (in my case, out in the woods somewhere) because that's it, that's all there is to do, are an invaluable essential component to who you are. When you have a private little adventure, something where you almost tumble and tear up all your clothes but don't because you catch yourself on the ledge, that contributes some fundamental sense of who you are, and who you are in the world, without it being a lesson that someone's trying to teach you or that you're trying to teach someone else, those types of experiences are incredibly valuable and necesary when you're a kid, and having an experience just like that in Bully is odd and satisfying and sweet and a little sad. And great.

So yeah, if someone had told me a month ago Bully was a kind of childhood simulator, I would have thought they were absurdly over-evaluating the game. But it seems right to me at the moment. Explore. Watch the stars come out. Run home before it gets too dark. That's it. That's all there is to do.

Press X to Continue.

2007-01-04T09:36:00.000-08:00

I stopped posting about six months ago because I was pretty sure I was going to stop playing video games: somebody lent me a copy of Guitar Hero and I thought that'd be it. I'd put the PS2 into storage, focus on my writing, and that would be that.

Playing video games may or may not be anathema to writing. I still haven't decided. I do in fact know several writers who flat-out told me to stop playing video games and just get to work. As Brian K. Vaughan recently wrote, "'writer's block' is just another word for video games."

On the other hand, I know other writers who not only play video games, but nowadays, plot their stories while playing video games. (In fact, wasn't it Brian K. Vaughan himself who told me that he and Brubaker talk out plots while playing on X-Box Live?) And to muddy the waters further, 2006 was the year I got my highest paid writing gig ever... writing for video games.

In turn, the writing gig, combined with a bunch of pre-holiday clearance sales, put me even thicker in the video game playing woods than I'd been before. The "just played" list covers, I think, everything I played during those six months, but not everything I bought during that period: for that, you have to combine it with my "to play" list and then add the ten other games I didn't add to that list (Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, The Godfather, Max Payne 2, State of Emergency 2, True Crime: New York City, Gun, Total Overdose, Marc Ecko's Getting Up, Cold Winter and Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner, if you must know, and all of those were bought on clearance--I paid as much as twelve dollars for a game, and in a few cases, as little as three).

(And if you're keeping track, that's 23 console games purchased in slightly more than a six month period, not counting the two PC games and whatever you want to call Gametap.)

That's a lot of video games--in fact, I bet I could refrain from purchasing or renting another console game in all of 2007 and not suffer from a lack of games to play. Although I'm really over-dramatizing it, that puts me in a potentially dangerous position for the year: if I don't have the discipline to shoal up time for my writing, video games could, as they have in the past, flood those swampy lowlands I call my downtime. Because as much as I pretended otherwise, it wasn't my familiarity with video games that got me the writing gig last year: it was a familiarity with the source material and all the years I've spent writing that landed me that gig and helped me nail it. Writing a monthly column for over nearly eight years was invaluable. Playing video games during that time was negligible.

To be honest, though, the most fun writing I had during the first half of last year was writing this blog: bitching about the games I was playing, thinking about the mythos of the game I was playing, just blathering about what games to read next. I don't know how it was to read (which is almost never a good sign) but it was a lot of fun to write.

So, yes. For now, I think, more of This Crappy Controller in 2007. If I can't keep video games from overwhelming my writing time, maybe I can join them two of them together, like hostile convicts in a chain gang, and sent them loose over the lowlands together.

Save Points

2006-06-17T16:59:00.000-07:00

Oy. We were dogsitting this last week and barely got any sleep--I think I logged about six hours a night at best and four at worst--which conveniently robbed me of the willpower to do anything more productive than GTA:LC. This means that I've progressed quite a bit further in the game and yet probably won't be able to tell you much about it.

I've made it to, Staunton Island, the second island, for example, and I'm mortified by how little of it I remember: tons of stuff around the safehouse from GTAIII, sure, but after it's all gets pretty foggy. In a way, this makes playing the levels more challenging. On the other hand, a lot of these levels don't need any help in the challenge department. They're more than sufficiently rough, particularly missions with the first-person-rail-shooter perspective: it doesn't matter if I turn the inversion-look option on or off, I still end up pointing up to the sky when I'm trying to lower my gun sight and vice-versa.

Not that I can really talk: when I first hit Staunton Island, I spent a ton of time just driving around, looking for hidden packages, stealing cars for a garage that'd pay me, won a few streetraces. It must've been at least three hours before I even attempted the first mission. I'm sorta bummed they didn't throw in any gmabling minigames a la San Andreas since there's a casino on Staunton, but I'm also glad I don't have to exercise, or buy clothes or shoot hoops, to be honest.

And the game quality seems a little higher overall--or maybe my expectations have finally drooped sufficiently. Danny Mastrogiorgio, the guy voicing Fred Flinstone/Tony Cipriani, has grown on me over time with some of the line readings in his scenes being utterly convincing or amusing. The guy doing Donald Love (the same actor who plays Finn on The Sopranos? Huh!) is also quite good. And the chatter from the passerby is funnier than it's been in a while, probably because it's making fun of start-up gibberish from 1999 and I've been hearing more of that stuff now in 2006. ("www dot we're all going to be rich dot com!") And I'm relieved that even this far into the game (30% or so), dying is never that much of an inconvience, leaving me to try all the stupid stuff I want. (My favorite so far has been accidentally lobbing a grenade at oncoming police and blowing up a traffic jam of nine cars more-or-less immediately. I was the ony person to survive the debacle, and only because I had full health and a bullet-proof vest when it happened.)

So, yeah. Better than I initially thought. But will I enjoy it as much once I catch up on my sleep and my brain starts working again? I almost hope not--I've got a lot of stuff I wanna do this summer--but I'll keep you posted.

Turning Points.

2006-06-10T00:16:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I was pretty sure that was going to be it. Guitar Hero was gonna be the last video game I was really gonna mess with, everyone would move on to the next-gen consoles, the only games released for the PS2 would be games for kids and tards, and I'd be done. Video gaming, I shun thee!

Then GTA: Liberty City Stories came out for the PS2.

I'd managed to dodge a bullet about a year ago when I almost convinced myself that buying a PSP would be great for my honeymoon. (I know, I know. It's like a crack addict convincing themselves the best way to redecorate the house would be to go buy some crack. "New curtains? Hmmmm. Hey, I know! How about some crack?") The idea of my new wife leaving me as soon as we got back from our honeymoon kinda put the kibosh on that plane. I also knew having a portable video game console would kill my commute time which is one of the few times I still read books and stuff. And finally, I told myself, "Ehhh, GTA. I'm pretty much over it. I've completed all three games--what more do I need?" (And by completed, I mean finished 89-92% of any given game...) When I read a few months ago that financially buggered Take Two would be releasing the PSP game for the PS2, I said exactly the same thing.

[Cut to Jeff dashing into a Best Buy on Wednesday so he can pick up the game and hurry, hurry, hurry!]

So. GTA:Liberty City Stories is a real turning point for the GTA series on the PS2. Not matter what you might say about the two games after GTA III, each one tried to radically expand and deepen the game environment, creating a larger and more specific sense of place for each game. Each game introduced more RPGish elements to each series to give you a greater sense of connection to your character. And each game excelled in giving you name actors and a surprisingly sophisticated critique of American culture through its storyline and radio stations.

From what I've played of the game so far, GTA:Liberty City Stories gives you a generic GTA game on a PS2, the first in five years. And while there are things I love about that (I missed GTA III's ersatz pop songs, as well as its classic musical station--and it's arguably just as much fun trying to find the damn hidden packages as it is to complete your missions), it's the first time where the radio spots have felt rough, the jokes have fallen flat, the game has looked genuinely ugly, and where the lead character feels like a spitballing of previous game characters. In GTA III, Tony Cipriani, voiced by Michael Madsen, was a minor character, a Tony Soprano parody who perpetuated horrific violence to please his never-shown Mother. In GTA:Liberty City Stories, Tony is voiced by a new non-famous actor (which is good because Madsen's line readings were for shit in the original) and given a character model that looks like Tommy Vercetti with 20% more five o'clock shadow. In fact, because of the voice and the character model, I've taken to calling the character "Fred Flintstone," which is somehow much more satisfying (in a way that would take at least one Harvey Birdman, D.A. episode to explain).

So, really, GTA:Liberty City Stories is a possible turning point in the franchise's history. If this game is a hit on the PS2 at its budget price, will Take Two and Rockstar go back to the well and revisit Vice City and parts of San Andreas with similarly generic sequels? If it makes them a lot of easy money, why wouldn't they?

It probably sounds like I don't like GTA:Liberty City Stories but really, that's not the case. I've waited five years for a GTA game with a Bollywood soundtrack--us PS2 owners have to live with the soundtrack Rockstar gives us--and I've had great fun driving around looking for hidden packages, appalled at how much of the cityscape is still burned into my brain from hundreds of hours of play years ago. Being able to go through Liberty City on a motorcyle which cuts down on all the time spent hopping in-and-out of your vehicle to get power-ups, packages or what have you, is also keen. And the missions are, currently, blessedly short, annoying rather than truly ball-breaking (although I don't know if I'd say the same thing if I hadn't found the bullet-proof vest early on).

Also, remember that new wife I mentioned? Well, when I first started playing GTA III, I hadn't met her yet. So there's something odd and snaky and neat about revisiting Liberty City in the home we've made together, alll these years later. Motorcycles aside, life in Liberty City hasn't changed much, but my life has. And I can't even begin to tell you how much I'd rather it was that way than vice-versa.

Here I am, Being A Fool.

2006-06-04T20:35:00.000-07:00

Testing, in other words.

Please disregard. Thanks.

The World On Eleven.

2006-05-08T16:26:00.000-07:00

Through machinations I shall not begin to explain, I've ended with a borrowed copy of Guitar Hero for the PS2 for the last 36 hours. And for most of those hours, I've had little numb patches on the tips of three fingers. The challenge of my upcoming days off will be not playing the game until the arm falls off.

Now, I suck at rhythm games, no matter how much I like them in principle--Space Channel 5, Parappa The Rapper, Dance Dance Revolution, the six seconds I spent playing Amplitude--and Guitar Hero is really, at its heart, just a rhythm game... albeit one with a fancy peripheral and a clever attitude. (In fact, I may have ended up playing Guitar Hero at precisely the right time, the night after School of Rock was shown on broadcast TV. Jack Black, with his hilariously enthused savoring of all things "rock," is the perfect unoffical muse of Guitar Hero and if there's one step the otherwise-savvy game misses, it's allowing the player to rock out with a chubby, hyperkinetic faux-Black avatar. (Unless he's one of the two unlockable characters, but I don't think he is.)

What makes this game so much more enjoyable for klutzes like me is its play balance. Guitar Hero has a variety of settings, from extremely easy to very hard, as well as components like a "star power" bar, that allow the desperate to battle their way through a song, and experience the joys of unlocking new songs, while still giving a sense of accomplishment (and finger blisters). So far, replay comes from the desire to nail a song and not feel like one is completely wretched, but I admit that playing the opening chords of "Smoke On the Water" has an appeal all its own. The game also compels by virtue its short playing time: not only is it possible to play a round in four minutes, approximately the amount of time it takes for a spouse to check their makeup, but currently it's impossible to play for longer than twenty minutes at a time. The last is particuarly helpful, as I found myself growing bored when I found myself doing at all well (and sometimes even when I wasn't). Despite my recent appreciation for cock rock, I must still have enough of my new wave lyrics-dominated mindset to find the guitar solos in "Iron Man" as mindless as when I was in my teens. How mindless, and yet mindful, one has to be to make their way through even the lowest I.Q. Black Sabbath song! I really wonder what becomes of one's mind after playing the stuff for a living.

I also wonder what I'm going to do with regard to this game--I'm not going to keep a loaner for months on end, but I can't buying it, either. For some (probably those who can coax their friends and/or wives into playing), Guitar Hero is a no-brainer purchase. But for me, this game is the perfect rental (all the more frustrating that you can't rent it anywhere) and my brain looks forward to getting some work done soon.

Wait a minute. Reverse That.

2006-05-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

So I rented Kingdom Hearts II from Hollywood Video (a combination of two choices from my interior poll and if there's one thing this, Final Fantasy X-2, La Pucelle Tactics and most of Culdcept has taught me, it's that I'm not a console RPG man. All I seem to care about when the PS2 is on is eye candy and mashing buttons--and it's the former reason I figured I would be into the Final Fantasy games. Remember all those commercials for FFVII on the Playstation? That was all eyecandy.

But goddamn, are Square (makers of the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts) RPGs tedious. (And this is coming from a Metal Gear Solid junkie!) It's just button after button of boring speech balloons just so you can then be rewarded with a cut scene of people talking! And Kingdom Hearts II in particular has atrocious "acting"--a character will say something and then 30 seconds later, wave his arms about expansively.

Now, I'm not Kingdom Hearts II's perfect audience, it should be admitted, as I'm neither a nine year old boy or a twelve year old girl. But my fond memories of the Disney games on the Sega Genesis (Quackshot!) made me excited about the idea of these games, particularly when the reviews accentuated how perfectly the classic characters were captured.

And I'm a sucker for high concept, so when I started KHII not as Sora, protagonist from the last game, but Roxas, a kid who looks like Sora who's haunted by mysterious dreams in the strangely wistful sunset world of Twilight Town, I was down with the idea. Kingdom Hearts II takes a strangely Matrix: Reloaded approach to its opening scenes, as the hero occasionally finds himself in dilemnas that he can't quite get out of before the screen is occluded by television static. It's annoying and meta, so I should be all over it, right?

Wrong. The whole damn thing is dreary, droopy and slow, with minigames so dull they were probably plucked from educational software. Additionally, there's not a Disney character in sight, except for Roxas's dream flashbacks to the first game. But even by the time Donald and Goofy came on board (about four or five hours into the game), it was too late. I didn't care--I just mashed my buttons through the fight scenes, mashed my buttons through the dialogue scenes, and went and peed during the cut scenes.

By the time I stumbled on the game's horrifyingly robust gummi ship editor (with which you can costumize a battleship to a creepily OCDish degree for later arcade sequences), I realized my priorities and the game's priorities couldn't be farther apart. With a day left to play the game, I returned it to the video store and then beat MGS:Subsistence again. Whatever Kingdom Hearts II's priorities were, they weren't my priorities. And this is probably the case with RPGs in general--although I wish I could admit otherwise, I just don't care about the spreadsheet approach to customization and character building. That I played all of Champions of Norrath (and not even online!) and nearly none of Final Fantasy X-2, shows that my heart lies elsewhere--with God of War, probably.

Next: Can I have a video game blog without video games?

The Thing That Follows The Thing.

2006-04-25T17:54:00.000-07:00

I've done no reading on this but let's say there are two types of video games: open and closed games.

An open game, like the majority early video games, never end. They go on and on and the best you can do is, I dunno, roll the score over. Pac-Man is an open video game. Asteroids is an open video game.

Closed video games have endings. Metal Gear Solid is a closed video game; you can win. Closed video games may offer incentives so that you replay them, but it's not that awesomely sisyphean experience where the game never gives ground. You can master Pac-Man, can play for as long as you want, but you can never beat Pac-Man. Those ghosts will never turn to you and go, "Okay, okay! Jesus, enough already!"

In either closed or open video games, you spend a lot of time dealing with The Thing, and knowing that you're going to be dealing with The Thing that follows The Thing. You're gunning down a ton of guards, but on the next screen is a Boss so you better save some ammo. If you position yourself partially behind a shield, you can shoot at the invaders as they go by.

Honestly, I'm not sure how good I am at dealing with The Thing that follows The Thing. Strategy? Too much thinking! Just lemme run around and make crashing noises! (And this is why I was a little ahead of the curve with GTA III, having loved precisely the same sandbox thing with GTA Uno. GTA III was all about ignoring your immediate objectives and doing cool, immediately gratifying stuff.)

I'm balking about how this actually (and depressingly) also describes my approach to life, so maybe I'll get into that in another entry. The point of this entry was to talk about how, now that I'm wrapping up MGS:Subsistence, I have to deal with the Thing that follows The Thing: what video game do I play next? Or do I finally grow some stones and drop video games altogether?

The interior poll currently runs: 30% drop video games; 20% Guitar Hero; 15% Kingdom Hearts II; 10% Star Wars Legos; 5% Baldur's Gate II on my PC; 5% Amplitude (bought it used in Half Moon Bay, which was also supposed to be an entry all its own); 5% Shadow of the Colossus (which Joel said he'll loan to me); 5% Resident Evil 4 again; and 5% walk to Hollywood Video tomorrow and rent what's there.

(Some notes on those delicately honed statistics: Guitar Hero's rating would be higher if 6 minutes of Amplitude hadn't reminded me how retarded I am with rhythm games; Star Wars Legos would have been higher (and I would have played it much, much sooner) if they hadn't taken such a long fucking time to release it at Greatest Hits prices; Baldur's Gate II would be much, much higher if I wasn't resistant to playing video games on my PC; Amplitude would be lower if I hadn't sold off a bunch of my old favorite games; and dropping video games would be much higher if I had more backbone or I could lie to myself more easily. As it is, that option is probably even lower than the cited 30%.)

Can I Get a Fuck Yeah?

2006-04-24T10:54:00.000-07:00

It's a shame my wife hates watching me play video games, because she's my good luck charm. Yesterday, as she sat on the couch, too ill with a stomach bug to resist, I played through the last three motorcycle frog sequences, and then the rest of the game.

And at the end of it, after waiting through the closing credit sequence (Konami, for the love of God, this is my third time seeing it, please lemme skip it) and the Ocelot blabbity-blab, my rating screen came up stamped "Kerotan" (Japanese for "frog.") I turned to Edi and yelled, "Wooo! I did it! Fuck, yeah!"

I'd gotten the Stealth Camo.

Edi looked at me hopefully. "So that means you're through, right?"

I looked at her, and tried to fake a placating smile. "Kinda?"

Ten minutes after she left the room, I fired it up.

The Stealth Camo is a funny thing since it's an item, like the thermal goggles, that you keep in your stuff inventory, as opposed to with your camo. I thought this was a little odd, but it makes some sense in terms of how the game handles it. You're invisible while you've got it equipped, but bumping into someone immediately unequips it, making you vulnerable. It also forces you to make some strategic choices--if I want to equip the thermal goggles (which allows me to pick important targets or objects out of the landscape), I have to make sure I'm in a secure position first.

But, on the other hand, having the Stealth Camo as an object means that you can use any special camos you've taken from beating the bosses in endurance mode or health mode or whatever the hell it's called (it's when you take out the boss with a non-legal weapon like the mk22). So, for example, I can use the Moss camo with the stealth camo equipped and regain my endurance as long as I'm in sunlight. Better, if I wear the spirit camo I picked up from the Sorrow, nobody can hear my footsteps and I can run around with greater impunity. Yesterday, I made it from the first screen to the boss fight with Ocelot in about twenty minutes, which is obscenely fast. If I snipe The End early on in the game, I can see myself clearing the halfway point (the boss fight with him) in, I dunno, 45 minutes?

Yes, part of me is thinking of playing it through one more time as a speed-run, to see if I can get a super high ranking. I'd say "God help me," but, really, God help Edi, in that scenario.

The Final Grind?

2006-04-20T21:43:00.000-07:00

I've been away for the last few days, so no MGS. Tonight, though, after meeting my writing deadline, I sat down and turned on the PS2. I wasn't particularly excited about it, either, as it was time for (shudder) Motorcyle Frog Hunt. I'm very indecisive about how to approach the sequence. Before the Shagohod showdown, I decided to take a very cavalier "If I thought I hit it, I hit it" attitude to the whole thing. After all, if I don't hit them all, I'll have to (*shudder*) replay the whole thing through.

Nonetheless, the first sequence after the Shagohod, I missed the frog three times in a row--very clearly, no doubt about it. After the third time, I turned the console off in disugst and decided to do something more productive with my life, like read video game fora.

Sigh. Maybe I'll give it just *one* more try...

The Holiday After the Holiday.

2006-04-18T09:04:00.000-07:00

I'm tearing through MGS:Subsistence, although with an absurdly high body count. At a little over seven hours of play, I'm at the motorcycle screens which are really the ultimate challenge of this playthrough--nailing the frogs on these screens is absurdly hard, and it's imperative I save at every single screen so I can replay them through if I have to. The shagohod sequence sucks up an inordinate amount of time as well. (The last time I played through the sequence where I'm on foot firing on Volgin while Eva circles around on her motorcycle and "assists," Eva kept running over me repeatedly. Stupid Eva.)

Still it's not impossible to imagine wrapping up the entire game in less than ten hours altogether. And there were a number of small triumphs (blowing up the Hind, drowning myself on the Sorrow showdown, and finally getting a stealth win on The Fury, which was absurdly easy once I gave up on the whole "ooo, I'll headshot him with the tranq sniper rifle in his big glass head" and took the far easier and effective "gut shoot him with the MK22 repeatedly" approach) along the way. Combined with the Infinite Ammo Facepaint, it's been a fun playthrough.

On the other hand, if I don't get that stealth camo? Again? I will throw my PS2 off the fucking roof.

I have to come up with something to write for the newsletter and pronto. I've been thinking about reworking this diary into something even more absurd than it already is...I'm sure I can up the absurdity with no problem, but can I make (or keep) it funny? Or would it just become too pathetic?

Bad Timing.

2006-04-16T10:18:00.000-07:00

It's Easter Sunday, and when I sat down to write this, I thought I'd riff about the idea of easter eggs in video games. Maybe a list of my favorites in video games or (more likely) my favorite ones in the Metal Gear Solid games. Or maybe even some musings (if they could be found) about how Easter is the only holiday associated with video games because of the term easter eggs, and how there's something faintly apt about that, since one of the main additions of video games is being able to come back after you've died. (Which is also why if you asked me to pick the best video game movie ever made, I'd pick Groundhog Day.)

But instead--and this is a train of thought I'll never be able to fully reconstruct so I'll just jump in--I was thinking about Metal Gear Acid (or Metal Gear Ac!d as they would like us to call it). MGA, as you probably know, is a series of games currently only available for the PSP that are collectible card games set in the Metal Gear universe.

You know what collectible card games are, right? Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and of course, Magic: The Gathering, the multi-million dollar card game invented by a bunch of Seattle gaming guys who realized if you took the game of hearts, combined it with marbles, and used illustrations from Frank Frazetta paperbacks, you could create a potent form of Nerd Crack.

Anyway, Hideo Kojima, who's become more aggressively exploitative of the Metal Gear brand since forming his Kojima Productions as a separate subdivision within Konami, decided he very much wanted to expand into a bunch of other potentially lucrative ventures with the brand--comics, card games--and the common theory seems to be that getting a virtual collectible card game on the PSP might be a good way to get a toehold in the actual field itself.

So I haven't played either of the MGA games (getting a PSP would render me incapable of getting any reading done on my commute or at my lunch hour, which are more or less my last areas of leisure reading altogether) but I've read reviews, overviews, interviews, and I realize the big flaw with the games is that they mimic the form of a Metal Gear game--you're Snake, and the computer is your opponent, and you use cards that represent skills or tools Snake would have as well as cards you've captured from previous enemies against the skills and tools of your opponent--rather than mimicking the form of playing a Metal Gear game.

In my version of Metal Gear Acid, you and your opponent would each be trying to construct the most efficient game of Metal Gear Solid, and you would play cards that would disable your opponent's game, and vice-versa. So, for example, you would play the Cool Boss card, which is when you come up against a boss in a Metal Gear Solid game and they've got some great visual hook, and then play that with a Cool Fight Card, which is when the action is really fun and enjoyable. This would give you the very hard-to-beat Cool Boss Fight combination, like in MGS:3 when you fight The End, or the fight in the hydro chamber against Vamp in MGS:2.

But wait! Your opponent lays down the Interminable Cut Scene card and the Endless Back Story card, and suddenly it's like, I dunno, that whole lead-in to the Fatman fight scene, where King Whiny has to tell you that he actually does have two working legs, and he faked his injury so people would feel sorry for him and dismantling the last bomb will be his chance to, blah-blah-blah-blah, please just die already.

See? Just like playing a Metal Gear Solid game. You'd have little cards like Cool Techno-Babble that could be thwarted by cards like Overabundance of Techno-babble, or cards which have weaknesses only to other cards (nothing kills that Romantic Flirting card like the Endless Back Story card).

Anyway, that's my Easter gift to you, Kojima-san: a collectible card game that could really recreate the experience of playing Metal Gear! May you use it to make millions!

Howzabout that?

2006-04-14T22:23:00.000-07:00

This morning, I had about thirty-five minutes before I left for work and I looked over at the PS2, and thought, "Nahhhhhh, better not." Then I did a few other chores for a while and when they were through, I had about fifteen minutes before I had to leave and I thought, "Okay, what the hell..."

And this weird thing happened, which I will now, God help you, relate.

There's a sequence in MGS:Subsistence where you climb this ladder in a silo, emerge in some mountain peaks and make your way through a few screens of patrolling guards while trying to avoid being spotted by the patrolling Hind helicopter. (Considering this is the early '60s, it's probably not a Hind but that's what it looks like to me.) It's kind of a pain-in-the-ass set of screens, to be honest, because it's always hard for me to get by without being spotted. If I try to sneak through, I always get caught by the helicopter as I grapple with some guard. If I try to snipe my way through, somebody always ends up behind me unloading their clip into me, even though they're coming from a direction where I killed everybody off. And then I get caught by the helicopter.

It kinda sucks.

Anyway, on this brief little fifteen minute sequence before work, I end up on the screen where the helicopter first does its fly-by and it's not there. Instead, there's a lone guy in a flying crane bucket which is really, really weird. Not that there's a guy in a flying crane bucket--those guys pop up earlier in the game--but that there's one guy floating there when there's supposed to be a helicopter circling overhead.

Really, really weird.

Anyway, I snipe this guy which sets off the alert and soon the hills are crawling with guards and I snipe them, too, and it's pretty much Jeff's version of Metal Gear Solid which always tries to be sneaky, and always ends up with my guy standing on the bodies of dozens of slaughtered guards. I fight my way through the screen, get to the next screen, check the clock, save the game, leave for work. And in the car, I realize why I got the guy in the flying crane bucket and not the helicopter.

I, in my avaricious pursuit of the stealth camo the previous time through, really couldn't have cared less about the Infinite Ammo Facepaint ("IAF"). It was just something I got because I wanted to do the trick that got you the IAF--this whole complicated hoobity-doo about finding and trapping a secret animal in the game and keeping it in your inventory all the way to the end. But as it turns out, the IAF is pretty fun because nearly anything listed in your weapons inventory you have infinite amounts of as long as you have the facepaint on. So you've got infinite mousetraps, for example, which I spent five minutes spreading all over this one screen to catch an absurd number of birds, rats and snakes. You've got infinite girlie mags, which I spent ten minutes dropping all over this one weapons lab so I could see soldiers and weapon scientists crouch over with anticipation and exclaim "Wow! This is my lucky day!" And you've got infinite TNT, which I've spent well over thirty minutes spreading across various screens and then detonating. You can plant forty packages of TNT through a screen and then set each charge off one after the other, launching a dead body through a complete obstacle course if you're clever enough. (I'm not, but I did get one body to bounce three times, which is my personal best.)

So on this one earlier base screen, after I'd bumped off all the guards, I blew up all the warehouses, all the oil drums, and, just to see if it would blow up, the helicopter on the landing pad in the corner. I am happy to report it did indeed blow up which I enjoyed and then forgot completely about.

Four boss fights and approximately twenty screens later, I got a lone guy in a flying crane bucket instead of a really annoying helicopter, all because of some goofing around I did I couldn't even remember. How cool is that? Little touches like that are what keep me the video game equivalent of a black lotus eater...

Please, Sir, May I Have Another?

2006-04-13T19:59:00.000-07:00

So, yes, like a dumbass, I'm playing through Snake Eater/Subsistence again. I'm really booking through it, though. I just finished fighting The End and have put in, by this point, I dunno, four hours maybe? The frogs are the goal, of course, so everything else is really secondary. I'm not worrying about accumulating any stealth kills either, so I'm just plowing through the boss fights as much as possible (unless like, in the case of the End, they're just pure chewing satisfaction.)

So, halfway through the game in about four hours. There is maybe, a super-slight chance that there was one frog I missed the first time around, as the location didn't seem familiar to me. But either way, I'm going to get through this game and get the stealth armor if it kills me. I've got a green felt-tip pen and a printed list of the frogs and I'm checking 'em off one by one.

Ironically, when I bought Subsistence, I thought I'd be spending all my time playing the Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 games, but the emulation on the first game is driving me crazy--I would think that it'd be a "save anywhere" game but I've only had one successful save point in the game and no matter how far I get past it, i can't save again. Really god-awful annoying, and since everyone on Gamefaqs is too busy playing the online component, there are no FAQs about it.

In one of my posts, I alluded to the fact i've played MGS:Subsistence and Resident Evil 4 through multiple times each, and that there was a reason for that. One reason, of course, is that they're really enjoyable games that add little rrwards at the end that add value to another playthrogh. But the real reason is I'm deeply ambivalent about video games.

I've received advice from two professional writers in the past to get rid of the video games. "They're time wasters," they each said to me, in one way or another. And I'm not disinclined, of course, to disagree. I have creative endeavors of my own that I'd like to pursue and yet, when it comes down to it, unless I'm staring a hard deadline in the face, I'll boot up the video game and spend a few hours of my week chipping away at it.

If there is anything insidious about video games, it's not that they make kids violent, or promote tolerant attitudes toward drugs and alcohol (or whatever conclusion is being reached by a conservative study this week). It's that video games allow you a degree of creative interaction with a piece of art that can supplant the feeling of creative work. I mean, it's far from a perfect replacement--it might be more like methadone to the heroin of creative work--but it's a lot easier. Video games require participation at a level far less than that of creative work, and while it provides far less reward, if you're a lazy type of person that doesn't really believe in end-rewards, video games can really do the trick.

So part of the reason I keep replaying those games is out of some weird loophole I've created for myself, that these games are going to be the last games I buy or play this year. They're really good games, but even if they weren't would I still be playing them over and over, continuing to cheat myself?

I really don't like to think what the answer to that would be.

Fuck!!

2006-04-12T11:17:00.000-07:00

I didn't get it. Again.

Like A Liveblog But Not....

2006-04-12T11:08:00.000-07:00

I'm fond of the end credit song of MGS: Subsistence, actually. But you can't skip past the fuckin' thing and all I want to know is whether or not I got the fuckin' stealth camo or not....

And then there's that post-edit credit sequence, where the voice actor playing Ocelot tries his damnedest to come up with new inflections for the word "yes," which is the beginning of 90% of of each of his sentences....

I'll let you know what happens in about two minutes....

Fingernails; Meet Pliers

2006-04-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

Remember how just yesterday I was talking about hunting frogs in MGS: Subsistence and referring to it as "fun?" I rescind my adjective.

I've spent the last sixty to ninety minutes trying to re-hit those last few frogs--to positively confirm that I nailed each of them in the motorcycle sequence and get myself that stealth armor and of course I'm arguably even worse at it on my first playthrough.

All the pre-Shagohod chase sequences were pretty easy. It's the post-Shagohod stuff that's killing me, to the point where I'm almost positive I was high when I convinced myself I hit it the first time around. I've spent the last twenty minutes trying to hit this one frog on a rock while flying over a hill and being shot at--it's absurdly Sisyphean, and it's kind of driving me insane. Part of the annoyance is that if I miss the frog, I have to reboot the system and reload from the opening screen.

So, yeah, fun? I think maybe there's another f-word I should have used instead.

So Close and Yet...

2006-04-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

I just finished a nearly perfect run through Metal Gear Solid: Subsistence the other day. For ultra-competitive overachieving gamer geeks, that has a very different meaning than the way I'm using it. For them, it means finishing in the fastest time with the highest ranking without setting off an alarms. For me, it means doing and getting the coolest stuff with a minimal amount of hassle and a maximum amount of fun.

The Metal Gear series, despite having at least one or two sections in every game guaranteed to drive you apeshit, are actually very pro-fun. So for those of us who want to earn bonus goodies like the Infinite Face Paint and the Stealth Camo, we don't have to finish in a certain number of hours with a limited number of saves and no alarms--we can just try to hunt down secret animals and find and shoot frog coin banks. Yes, in the middle of all the cold war rhetoric, epic monologues about death and battle, and boss fights, you can play mini-Pokemon.

Unfortunately, I did not, somehow, catch them all--there are 64 frogs spread throughout the game and you don't know until you finish if you missed once. And, apparently, I did. Chances are good that I missed one of the frogs during the high-speed motorcycle chase sequences, where you have shoot frogs jammed into corners and stuck on top of stop signs while being ridden around all over the place and shot at.

Do I:

(a) reload those sequences? (I saved all of them separately)
(b) replay the whole game all over, making careful note to hit every, single fucking frog?
or
(c) give up and move on?

I'm inclined to say (a) since if I choose (b), I'll be burnt out on the game and less likely to play again with the stealth camo. There's no point in winning the stealth camo if you're not going to use it, after all.

As for why I don't choose (c) (but probably should), well, that's a story for another post. But I do think it does have something to do with why I've played MGS: Snake Eater and Subsistence (Subsistence is essentially the director's cut of Snake Eater) through at least four times, and Resident Evil 4 no less than three times. Considering I'd be hard-pressed to think of a game I finished more than once in my entire life (I think I finished both the Japanese and American versions of Tenchu, but I'm not sure that counts), and those two have happened in the last year, I think there's more to it than coincidence.

Welcome.

2006-04-11T08:45:00.000-07:00

This Crappy Controller is a spin-off from my regular blog. Because even when I'm not playing them, I'm thinking about video games--and more than willing to write about them--a lot. My hope is that if I have a place where I can write about them at length, I'll feel compelled to keep a healthier balance of material on the other blog.

But this is blogging at its most onanistic--and I think there are some interesting reasons for that, which I hope to get into as the blog goes on--and I'm trying to honestly write it as if I was sending an email to a friend who shared absolutely 100% of my exact tastes and absolutely wants to hear my thoughts about Metal Gear Solid: Subsistence in excruciating detail. And not just "MGS: Subsistence fails in its attempts to recreate the atmosphere of the Cold War precisely because the single-player console video game is the ultimate refuge of the apolitical" type stuff. But also "I sniped The End in MGS: Subsistence before the boss fight with him, and it was fucking cool!" type stuff.

If this was a D&D blog, in other words, a lot of the entries would be about what my fourth-level thief did. For better or worse, it's what I most want to write about. Maybe if we're lucky, I'll be able to figure out why as time goes on.