Friday afternoon tidbits

Here's hoping 2010 is off to a good start for everyone. It would be great if this was the last New Year's Eve we'll have to suffer those idiotic novelty eyeglasses, but somehow I don't see that happening. Alas.

-Like "a game that will make players cry," one of those long-sought measures of cultural legitimacy has been "game reviews in the New York Times." What more could you need for a seal of approval than coverage in the paper of record? Unfortunately, Seth Schiesel still seems to feel the need to grovel to the Times' august readership. His review of Dragon Age buries some good observations under so much hyperbole that an IGN editor might call it excessive. He calls DA "perhaps the best electronic game yet made," which is not to be confused with The Beatles: Rock Band, which was merely "the most important game yet made."

Look, I get where he's coming from. Long ago, I noticed that the more highly I praised a game, the more likely my editors were to tease it on the paper's front page. Sometimes I have to resist the urge to overplay a positive review for that reason, and sometimes I feel the need to explain why a negative or middling review of a big game might still deserve promotion. I can only imagine what incentives Seth has to try to convince his editors, and his readers, that this column is worth their time. But while I don't doubt his sentiments about Dragon Age, he sounds like he doesn't trust his readers to get it without so many adjectives.

Put it another way: I don't get the same sense of desperation for acceptance when Manohla Dargis goes nuts for Avatar.

-One of the good ones, Gary Hodges, has returned to write for a new site called GeekWeek, kicking things off with a 2009 year in review. He's joined there by some former Joystick Division bros, from back before that site went to shit (and, it should be said, became massively more popular). I'll be keeping an eye out for this one.

-I'm still enjoying reading about Modern Warfare 2's single player campaign, especially because it combines so much deft execution with so many idiotic ideas. Tom Cross has a great essay on MW2 at his personal blog, who rightly excoriates everything to do with the dialogue, storyline, and characterizations. And it's not that anybody played this game for the characterizations, but Tom's trenchant observation is that the game does seem to assume that we cared about Soap and Price the first time around.

(To be fair, though, on HBO's Generation Kill, which I assumed to be fairly authentic in its depiction of wartime, they say "Oscar Mike" just as much as they do in this game.)

-We talked about it a bit on the Brainy Gamer podcast, and now you can read Tom Bissell's piece on difficulty in Demon's Souls at Crispy Gamer. It's obviously an exaggeration to say, as I did on the podcast, that games weren't fun when I was a kid, but it's very much true that once you knew how to beat them, most of them took about 20 minutes to get through. All the replay value came from how hard they were to get through. You just had to keep throwing yourself at them over and over, maybe for months.

(And nothing about Demon's Souls sounds fair to me, not remotely. No pause? A guy who kills all the merchants, rendering your in-game currency useless? Higher-level players who can come into your game at any time and kill you? What the hell would make this game unfair?)

-I broke down and bought tickets for PAX East before early-bird pricing ended (you can still buy three-day passes for $50 each), so I will probably see a bunch of you there. I've never been to something like that before. I don't really know what to expect. Since it's in my hometown, I've been flirting with the idea of throwing some kind of pre-show bash the night before, but I don't know. Does anybody even show up early for these things?

Before anyone asks: no, you can't sleep on my couch.

To the weekend!

Draggin' age

Above: The author, after the game wiped out an hour of progress because he hadn't saved.

At long last, now that I've lost any interest in talking about it further, my review of Dragon Age: Origins is up at thephoenix.com.

I am pretty happy with the way this one came out. It is no fun to feel like the person on the outside, when everybody else seems to be loving a game that you just don't get. Fortunately, thanks in large part to your comments, I felt like I did come to a pretty decent understanding of the whole thing before I had to write about it. Even if that wasn't enough to change my opinion, it did help me to state it more clearly (and Krystian Majewski's Mass Effect essay was a big help, too). Dragon Age is such a big game that it's impossible to cover everything in 600 words and still make a point, but I feel like this one came close.

We are still in the thick of things, reviews-wise. All the whinging about Holiday 2009 delays is laughable in hindsight. This fall has turned out to be stacked. I feel pretty confident that I've already played my game of the year, but with Left 4 Dead 2, Assassin's Creed 2, and New Super Mario Brothers Wii all theoretically on the docket, that could change in a heartbeat. Now if only anybody would send me any of these games...

Friday afternoon tidbits

Some thanks are in order. First, to everybody who suggested gaming blogs last week, thanks for some excellent suggestions, and some new reading material. And second, I'm really appreciative of the thread that developed on the Dragon Age post earlier in the week. I still can't say I like the game, but I understand it much better now, and can say that I have more respect for what it sets out to accomplish. (Undermining that statement in 3... 2... 1...)

-The best blog post I've read this year is Krystian Majewski's three-part dissection of the interface problems in Mass Effect. In exacting detail, and with illustrative screenshots, Krystian pores over the numerous bad decisions, both large and small, that make playing Mass Effect such a trial. Upon reading this series, I realized two things:

1. Dragon Age's interface is a marked improvement over Mass Effect's.
2. Dragon Age's interface is still terrible.

BioWare seems to value neat-looking menus, status indicators, and icons over useful ones. And the fact that you will eventually learn what all these things mean, and how to use them, does not mean that they are done right in the first place, or that you are not wasting lots of time getting to that point. The menus are a special kind of hell, though I have to think they'd be much easier to navigate with a mouse. Obviously, many people can get past this and enjoy the high-level stuff that BioWare does so well. But an increased emphasis on interface design could only result in more people getting into these games. That would be better for everybody.

-The crew at Gamers with Jobs are such sharp and perceptive writers that when they go wrong, you can almost hear the needle scratching off the record. Sean "Elysium" Sands writes in "A Dirge for the Sinking Ship" that gamers are inadvertently hastening the demise of high-quality, original games by making stupid demands and engaging in silly boycotts. Elysium himself admits to an "unfocussed rage," which is something of an understatement. I think I understand his sentiment, but his logic is baffling.

The linchpin of his argument is that people who complain about day-one DLC in Dragon Age are shortsighted and greedy. Certainly nobody would argue that the game, as it shipped, is lacking content. That's part of why people are upset, I think. You just spent $60 on a new game, thinking you'll settle in for 50 hours or so, and within about 5 hours of play an NPC is hitting you up for actual money. I am not outraged by this, but I think gamers are well within their rights not to buy it, and to let the company know why. That's how the market is supposed to work.

Elysium's larger, self-defeating argument is that if we want to avoid a future with crippled retail products and day-one DLC, then we are obligated to... buy day-one DLC. Well, I don't buy that. Publishers aren't stupid. The way to ensure more games like Dragon Age is to buy Dragon Age. The way to ensure more DLC is to buy DLC. And for the dubious efficacy of things like boycotts -- especially half-hearted ones -- it does work when gamers make their voices heard. The infamous horse armor from Oblivion is the go-to example of stupid, overpriced DLC, and what happened there? There was an outcry, Bethesda responded, and future add-ons were more fairly priced and offered a greater value.

Nearly all of the examples Elysium points to as games we'll be missing out on in the future -- remember, the future after we haven't bought Dragon Age DLC -- are strange ones. Mirror's Edge was a fine idea but a bad game. Ghostbusters was all right, nothing special, and hardly an example of what I'd call a risky game. Brutal Legend was inspired, but a mess. The Riddick remake was great, but it was a remake of a commercially successful title, which tells me that they've already sheared that sheep as much as they're going to.

And then -- Dead Space? Uncharted 2? Fallout 3? Borderlands? We're afraid there won't be more games like these? These are all huge hits. They're all packed with great content on the disc, full experiences in themselves, with some optional DLC if you're into that sort of thing. I guarantee you that we will be seeing more games like these. And if the concern is that we'll only be seeing games like these, which is to say sequels to these games, well, some of them are sequels already. Besides which, these are all games that have come out in the past year, not long-forgotten relics of a more creative era.

There is something to the argument that the à la carte model prohibits systemic support for smaller and riskier projects -- there are so many niche cable television channels today because subscribers have so little choice in which ones we get, so we end up pooling our money for all of them. But a simple look at the state of independent games, especially through digital distribution platforms like Steam, would seem to put the lie to that, too. Anyway, I'd really recommend you read the piece and the top-notch comments thread that follows. Many great points have been made on both sides.

-This is making the rounds. And it is very funny.



Happy weekend!

Dragon Rage

Above: Finally, somebody had the balls to make a hot mage.

Every so often, maybe once a year, there's a game that stymies me. Often, this game is made by BioWare. The current culprit is Dragon Age: Origins. Before we get to the opinion part, first I want to lay out some facts.

• This game has apparently been in development for at least five years.
• I never heard of it before about two weeks ago.
• I cannot look at a message board or Twitter stream without drowning in praise for the game, along with in-depth discussions of tactics.

So all those things are true. Dragon Age is sitting pretty with a Metacritic score of 91 for the PC, 89 for the PS3, and 87 for the 360. Obviously this is not just a good game, but one that people are passionate about. Folks have been waiting for Dragon Age, and now that it's here they are embracing it and laying wet sloppy kisses on its cheeks. And, like the guy who shows up to the wedding in a polo shirt and jeans, I could not feel more out of place.

Let's start with an admission: I am not a smart man. Oh, I know some fancy words, and I quote only the most highbrow cartoon shows,* but when it comes to mastering new systems and making long-range plans, I am less than useless. It might be stubbornness more than anything. When my party gets wiped out in Dragon Age, my usual response is to rush right back into the scrum, pressing the "attack" button more forcefully this time. This is obviously not the way you are intended to play.

But how the hell are you supposed to play? The game doesn't teach you. It lets you unlock a lot of powers and abilities, and it explains what those activities do in the most obscure and inscrutable of ways. This doesn't seem to be a problem among interfriends, whose earnest discussions about aggro and pulling are both easy and free. I, well, I don't know what these words mean in a practical sense. People and video games who employ them so casually do not make it easy to find out.

I want to enjoy the big-picture stuff that makes Dragon Age so appealing. Sword-and-sorcery is not my favored domain, which leads to a dilemma: One one hand, it's lazy and unfair to criticize a game for its genre. You wouldn't criticize Madden for being a football game, or Call of Duty for being a military shooter. On the other hand, if you didn't like football games or military shooters, what could convince you that those were better-than-average examples of their types? It's okay not to like a genre or a style of game, but not to damn them for existing.

Even so, I was cruising along with Dragon Age for a little while, not loving it or even really enjoying myself, but at least progressing. Then, when my party got wiped out at one point, I selected the default continue option. I didn't even read the menu; I just hit A when it came up. I think it said something about loading my last save, or last checkpoint, but whatever it said, I expected to start back at the area I'd entered most recently. I certainly did not expect to be transported back in time about an hour, before I'd accepted several quests and finished one or two others. Suddenly I was back in the middle of a pitched battle I'd easily won the first time through, and for some reason my party no longer seemed up to the task. We were getting slaughtered. And some significant progress was lost forever.

This is the kind of thing that's a dealbreaker for me. I can see how the depth of a complex RPG like Dragon Age can appeal to other people, even if it doesn't appeal to me. What I don't understand is how a game that can make that egregious and basic an error is supposed to make me want to join the club. The same thing happened in Mass Effect: I reached a part I couldn't seem to get by, but because of the checkpoint and auto-save system, as well as the quest structure, I couldn't leave the area, either. I must have thrown myself at it a dozen times. Finally my choice was either to start a new game or give up. I gave up, and spent several weeks afterward smoldering, especially as I read all the glowing chatter about the game online.

Ultimately I'd be quite happy to live and let live if I didn't have to review the game. I want to believe that it might be valuable for some readers to get the perspective of a non-RPG guy, but that seems kind of stupid on its face. Whose interest does it serve for me to write a review that says, essentially, "Hell if I know?" The angle will have to be the high barrier to entry and the dedication required to wring enjoyment from the game -- dedication I lack -- but it doesn't necessarily feel fair to slap a low-ish number on there. It feels definitive, and if there's one way I know I don't feel about Dragon Age, it's definitive.

*"Since we're all going to die, I feel there's one more secret I have to share with you. I did not care for Dragon Age."
"What?"
"Did not care for Dragon Age."
"How can you even say that?"
"Didn't like it."
"It's like the perfect game!"
"This is what everyone always says."
"Explain yourself. What didn't you like about it?"
"It insists upon itself. It takes forever to get into it, I... You know, I can't even finish it. I've never even finished the game."
"How can you say you don't like it if you haven't even given it a chance?"
"I have tried on three separate occasions to get through it, and I... I have no idea what they're talking about. It's like they're speaking a different language."
"The language they're speaking is the language of tactical role-playing, something you don't understand."
"I loved Final Fantasy X. That is my answer to that statement."
Cf.