John Zeitler

It occurred to me today that, on some subconscious level, I gravitate towards some pretty strange coincidences. For example: last night I started up my save file once more for Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, with the intent to try to finish it before starting heavily on coding projects. While thinking on this at work, I realized that I had finished the previous game in the series– the original Tales of Symphonia– in late summer and early fall of 2004, just before I (unbeknownst to me at the time) lost my job at GE.

It’s weird how stuff like that works out, huh?

Another new feature on the ol’ blog, folks. Rather than just report when a game’s done, I’m going to do a little writeup on what I thought about the game a day or so after the Clear notice. That way, I have something to write about, and you all are spared the horror of more inane cats-doing-something-cute Youtube bailout. So, let’s get this rolling.

There’s something to be said, I think, for being a couple years behind on one’s gaming.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was, in 2007, the first-person shooter. Other titles like Left 4 Dead and Resistance, were out, but the entire gaming world seemed fixated on COD4, mostly for the multiplayer. And I’ll be honest, I was interested. I had been planning to pick the game up in early 2008, before rumblings of misdeeds at Activision turned me off the company entirely for a couple of years. When I finished up Modern Warfare 2 last month, I figured it was time to let bygones be bygones and give the game a fair shot, particularly because– shock of shocks– MW2 was actually good.

As it turns out, the hype for Modern Warfare was entirely justified. The game certainly lost a little bit of its luster owing to the fact that I played its sequel first, but in all honesty it made me appreciate MW2 a little bit more as well. The improvements between the games proved that Infinity Ward really puts a lot of effort into the games each year or so, and isn’t just dumping the same code out over and over again. The thing is, though, those improvements are remarkably subtle. Someone not terribly versed in the tropes of FPS gaming might not quite appreciate the differences in the waypoint tracker, the aim-assister, or the enemy AI.

One of the biggest knocks against COD4 was the overarching importance of grenades. It even earned the game the memetic nickname “Grenade of Grenade 4: Grenade Grenade”. I have nothing to dispute this claim. Enemies seemed to chuck the little bombs at me with alarming accuracy, and it seemed like I needed to be practically on top of one in order to throw it back have it blow my arm off. More to the point, grenades weren’t terribly useful when I used them: tossing one into an enemy’s nest did nothing to thin their forces, and it sure as hell didn’t force them to break cover and become exposed. The only saving grace is that, unlike Halo, these grenades don’t stick to you.

Here’s the other thing, though: MW2 had one important advantage over its predecessor, and that’s the elimination of the infinite-enemy spawns. In certain choke points, enemy troops would relentlessly charge back into positions where I or the AI squadmates had just exterminated them, sometimes not even moments afterwards. It made advancing through these areas ridiculously difficult, as compared to MW2′s difficult-but-doable points. I can see where Inifnity Ward would have wanted to emphasize the death-or-glory valor of an SAS trooper or US Marine, but it introduces an element of inconsistency that’s really jarring. For 90% of the game, you’re taught not to go charging off on your own– your squad is there to back you up for a very good reason. For the other 10%, you’re expected to do exactly that, racing through stupidly-accurate enemy fire to get to the next unintuitively-laid out save-state checkpoint.

Now, it’s not all bad. The game has a reputation for being laden with awesome moments, and in all honesty that reputation is well-deserved. Storming a freighter in the opening mission is only the start; acting as the gunner in an AC-130 makes for an extremely cathartic experience as well. But the moment that is probably one of the most striking in the game is one that’s a bit of a mixed blessing: the mission “The Aftermath”, which takes place immediately after the detonation of a nuclear device in a Middle-Eastern city. In this mission, the player takes on the role of a US soldier whose evac helicopter was caught in the blast; you, as the soldier, watched the mushroom cloud blossom over the city not three minutes of real-time before (an acceptable break from reality, as anyone that close to a nuke going off would probably be blinded in the explosion). The player sees the burning wreckage of the city around him and crawls around, trying to move or escape. The problem is, though, that there is no escape. The character is basically the walking dead. After a few minutes of horrifyingly slow and lurching movement, the character collapses and the mission ends.

It’s hard to say whether Infinity Ward meant to make such a chilling statement with the mission. Certainly they intended to say something; the fact that they added the controversial “No Russian” mission into the sequel pretty much proves that they had something to say with that one. But there’s a difference, I think, between a game being recognized as a piece of art– hell, even a brief portion of a game– and developing a game specifically to be art. It puts the aphorism “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” in stark relief. Art, when it exists, is acclaimed by someone other than the creator. Declaring your own product to be “art” before anyone else has looked at it, I think, highly prejudices people against the product at the outset. It’s good to have goals, but keeping your expectations of how it’s going to be received to yourself is, in most if not all cases, a pretty good idea. Do I think “Aftermath” and “No Russian” are art? They’re artistic, they’re art-oid, but it’s hard for me to tell what’s art and what’s not. I don’t know art. I just know what I like.

I’ve been at this for far longer than I anticipated, so I’ll just sum up by saying that I liked Modern Warfare and MW2. MW2′s active multiplayer community and persistent-character level progression are fairly big draws as well, but I’ve never been terribly big on multiplayer, particularly in FPSes (the only genre I’m worse at in a “live-fire” situation is real-time strategy). I may go back to MW2 and play that on Regular (I had to drop down to Recruit owing to severe rustiness in FPSing; MW1 was played through entirely in Regular), but that’s a ways off. I have a ton more games to get through before that point, so we’ll see what’s next on the list.

At 8:02p, I completed “Game Over”, the final mission of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on the Xbox 360. This is the first game cleared in 2010. Forty-nine games remain to be cleared for the 2010/50 challenge.

Back in December I went over my impressions of the demo for Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers. It had been a little harsh, I realized, but at the same time I was aware that there was a good game underneath the flaws. This week, its $5 price tag as part of the Xbox Live Gold Deal of the Week caused me to go back and re-examine my position. At a most basic level, customizable card games face big problems of balance when being translated to electronic versions. I’d mentioned last month that the lack of deck creation could reasonably be accepted in the name of balance, but at the same time I wished for a way to tweak decks. I also complained about the game’s pacing, citing the obtrusive “go/no-go” timers as annoying and inconsistent.

To address the first point, something that isn’t conveyed well at all in the demo is that winning victories with each of the preconstructed decks earns you cards for that deck’s sideboard. You start with two decks available, also, and can earn whole new decks by defeating opponents in the campaign mode. While you still don’t have the ability to pull off a complete deck recreation, you can drop cards that don’t perform up to your personal spec and replace them, provided you’ve earned the requisite sideboard cards. A point that is also worth considering is that each of the preconstructed decks is, if not explicitly, presented as an exemplar of the different styles of deck philosophy. The default deck offered is a green-fattie deck, relying on taking some early hits to build up mana and bringing out heavier creatures. Considering I was able to use this to rip the first opponent to shreds (earning the achievement for dealing 20+ points of damage to an opponent in a single turn), I’d say it’s a decent example of the deck type. The second opponent’s white-weenie deck (focusing on overwhelming opponents with lots of cheap creatures, some with flying) gave me a little trouble until I remembered how to counter it. My only complaint about decks now is that multi-color decks seem to be woefully underrepresented in the primary game and campaign opponents.

As for the second point, yes, the pacing is a serious problem. The timer mechanic, in theory, sounds good, but it goes by too fast in some cases, and is completely unnecessary in others. The game is, on the other hand, smart enough to know when to skip the attack and block phases of a turn. So, then, at least for single-player, skipping unnecessary uses of the timer– such as the “end of turn” mini-phase– when the player has no playable cards in his or her hand makes sense, but is inexplicably not there. I can see why you would want to keep that functionality for multiplayer situations, where making your opponent think you’re always holding a Counterspell or Disenchant card is vitally important, but in the solo campaign maintaining the timer serves no purpose but to annoy the player.

In my play sessions, though, a new issue has come up, and that’s DLC. An expansion pack was made available, and runs $5 (equal to the game’s cost at the time of this writing). However, there’s a free DLC pack labeled almost identically, intended for players who are not going to buy the expansion, allowing them to play against opponents who have. This is patently ridiculous. The non-paying support for the DLC cards should have been included as a title update, not as a second, confusingly-named and optional DLC pack. (This also highlights a major beef I have with Microsoft refusing to slipstream title updates in with new purchases from the Marketplace, but that’s a different issue.) To add insult to injury, the only other paid DLC for the game takes the form of useless reskins of the in-game tabletop or characters, or the now-expected, never-purchased Dashboard Themes and gamercard pictures. Adding in a few more optional decks for a buck or two here and there would have been a nice touch and hewing a little closer to the original model of the game, with the strict proviso that the DLC decks were as balanced and well-constructed as the standard ones.

My opinion of the game hasn’t changed all that much. If you’re reading this past the end date of the sale, the $10-15 spent on the game is put to far better use on a booster pack or three, or if you’re a new player, a preconstructed deck and dues to the local game club where you can learn the ropes. However, for the $5 of the Deal of the Week price and ignoring the expansion DLC, Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers becomes a much better value, especially if you’re interested in learning your way around a few new deck types. It’s no replacement for the cardboard crack, of course… think of DotP as electronic methadone.

Today went well.

I mean, today went really, really well. Specifics will have to wait, sadly, but I suppose it’s always nice to be told, in no uncertain terms, that I need to give myself more credit. Still, I think it’s a dangerous thing. I mean, a guy could get used to hearing that, and who knows what kind of trouble that could cause. Like, maybe, self-confidence. That’s a disaster worthy of the National Guard right there.

I have a particular relationship with winter. I happen to love the season, but it is doing its best to dissuade me of this affection. Case in point: for the longest time I was able to survive the snow and cold without suffering more than the occasional discomfort of soaked gloves. However, the last couple years, I’ve been getting progressively worse instances of dry skin on the backs of my hands. My sister has graciously provided me plenty of lotion with which I can remedy, if not prevent, this situation. Of course, every time I really need to apply lotion, I’m doing something where having the substance on my hands would be extremely inconvenient, or more likely damaging to the project– like, for example, painting miniatures.

So, in keeping with this weekend’s nerdity, I have the Burning Hands spell… it’s just, well, not quite the one in the Player’s Handbook.

Er, wait, I think we have a misunderstanding. You know, role-playing? D&D, dice, Cheetos, you know, role-in’?

…no? Well too bad, that’s what I’m doing tomorrow.

I have to make this quick, for obvious reasons. The power went out literally within minutes of my getting home. Tomorrow had better improve.

I’m not feeling so hot right now, boys and girls, so I have to keep this entry relatively short. One thing I do want to say, though, is that my decision to stop playing DDR in the house years ago, though at the time born more out of laziness than a conscious effort, is bearing a lot of fruit. For example, the metal pad looks very nice as a wall decoration.

Oh, and there’s that whole “socializing” thing, but who really cares about that?