Thoughts on Mass Effect

Mass Effect has been out for 7 years and yet somehow I have avoided any major spoilers about...well, everything. I went in blind - other than knowing that it was a space opera, and that the ending of Mass Effect 3 was contentious for some reason.

Boy, I reaaallly like this game. I feel stupid for waiting 7 years (7 years!!) to play it.

So, some themes that have come up in the first couple of hours:

I like the idea of humans being late-comers the space scene. It definitely puts Shepard in an interesting position - not the pawn of some gigantic empire, but not fighting against some evil controlling overlord either. It's nice to be sort of unimportant in the grand scheme, at least at first.

I do have a problem with this scenario though. Apparently, humans have quickly excelled within interstellar politics, and are demanding to be part of the council, which has existed 10-20 times longer than humans have been in space. I get the feeling I'm supposed to agree with the humans in the game, but considering that there are other space-faring races who have (a) been around longer and (b) probably understand the politics better but are still not in the council, it actually seems pompous to me. Specifically, it seems like a very USA-like attitude, the sort of exceptionalism that we really get behind. I hope that there is more complexity to this argument later in the game.

The three major alien races are a bit bog-standard unfortunately, although it's not all bad. For instance, the all female race is actually the most intelligent, longest lived, and most diplomatic species in the game. They were also the first to get into space. This is in contrast to the typical male-centric interpretation of sex-crazed man-eating green-skinned space ladies that I'm used to.

But then we have the typical Warrior Race (TM) and the Hyper-Intelligent Race (TM). It seems like the individual characters are treated with more respect than their stereotypes though, so that is good.

The soundtrack is fantastic - I love the mix of 80's space-synth tracks and the more orchestral tracks.

I'll be writing more about Mass Effect as I play further through it. Consider me a time travelling gamer from the year 2007, and enjoy my first journey through the series.

Assassin's Creed - initial thoughts

With the rise of the Xbox One, I've decided to finally catch up on some of the core 360 games that I never really got to when they were full price. I just got Assassin's Creed and played it for about 30 minutes this morning. I had no idea going in what the game is about except murder-fying people in a simulation, and getting lost in a crowd subsequently.

So far, I really like the premise of playing a simulation of an ancestral memory. It reminds me of York addressing the player directly as Zach in Deadly Premonition. When York talks directly to me as if I was some personality in his head, it makes me feel like an agent separate from the actual events of the game - which in essence I am, as the player. Same thing for Assassin's Creed: by addressing the fact that the whole game is a simulation, it makes me aware of the simulation and draws me in as a real actor in the following events.

I also like how they refer to the control scheme as Puppeteering. I just thought that was charming. I also like that the setting is somewhere other than  Space, The Old West, or Big City X.

Other than that, I have no idea what is going on. It seems a lot less like a bro-shooter kind of game than I'm used to, which is good. I prefer being a scalpel to being a chainsaw anymore. Maybe my age is showing.

Eft to Newt

Eft to Newt is a Twine game about being a talking, sentient Axolotl salamander, although this mechanical description doesn't really say anything significant about the game.

At one point, a living statue looked at me and said "Holy shit, a talking salamander!" At another point, I was captured by rogue government agents bent on evolving the human race based on salamander hormones or something. At yet another point I was eaten by a genetically engineered snake-like creature that dripped different colored ink from its claws and fangs. I learned quite a bit about the life cycle of salamanders in the mean-time.

It's disarming and genuine, and it wouldn't work as anything but a game. It's mythical in scope but practical in application, like living in a fairy tale as a side character.

It's very funny.

To say it has a branching narrative would be a lie - it goes beyond that. I imagine it more like the spokes of a wheel that move in completely different directions from the same starting point.

It has a lot of words, and it's going to take a while to read everything. Despite that, each playthrough is very short. Every ending is the "7th ending" which is just so charming and I don't know why.

I don't think I stopped smiling while I played this game, except for the weird mazey bit in the abandoned pen store. Even that was forgivable because of the strange stuff that happened there.

There is an option to "Consider going into baking professionally." I obviously chose this option.

Eft to Newt is about being different and finding empathy in unlikely places, and is very wonderful. If my thoughts about it are scattered, that's because the game is so varied. Despite this, everything strikes at the same theme.

It's available right now on Gum Road for exactly $2. Every dollar is going towards saving the Axolotl Salamander because Michael Joffe is an excellent person. You should read and play more of his stuff at his blog, Video Games of the Oppressed.

DISCLAIMER: I received this game for free as a review copy, I guess, but then I bought it anyway. So there.

Pokemon ROM Hacks and Mystery

I like to play games for a number of reasons - to be challenged, to explore something unknown, to connect with other people, to find comfort in familiarity. Pokemon falls strictly in the last category. It is possibly the closest thing I have to rosary beads, more of a habit than anything. Something to remind me of my childhood, my adolescence, my first job.

Recently I have been playing Pokemon: Liquid Crystal, a remake of the Crystal version based on Fire Red. If that doesn't mean anything to you, no fears. It's basically a fan remake of an older game based on a newer engine. It's like rewriting Beowulf with modern English, or remaking Robocop with CGI except not awful.

So it's a remake, but it's also ROM hack made primarily by one person, frequently updated for the better part of 6 years. That means that there are some...new features. For instance, the day/night cycle from Crystal returns, but as far as I can tell it's only visual. It has no real effect on the game. There are also new weather cycles based on the season it is in real life, which basically amounts to getting pelted with hail occasionally. It's also a lot harder than the original since the trainers have much stronger Pokemon.

The weird thing to me about this is that I play Pokemon like someone reading In Watermelon Sugar for the hundredth time: I know what's coming up, and that is where I find pleasure. But now I'm coming across unfamiliar paragraphs, slight changes of wording, and entirely new chapters. I have a good idea of what's going to happen, but it's always tinged with a feeling of slight strangeness.

Even worse, I haven't actually played the original Crystal, only the slightly older and inferior Silver version. So I don't know what's new to Crystal and what's new to the ROM hack.

All in all though, I'm enjoying it immensely. It's a lot like playing Pokemon for the first time, helped especially by the lack of full documentation or walk-throughs for the hack. The frequent updates also mean that any documentation I do find is probably out of date. It's a unique experience and I'm happy to have it.

SSX and distraction

SSX is a beautiful thing - SSX3 in particular is one of my favorite games to this day - the combination of insane stunts, adaptive music, and insanely long courses continues to be pleasing.

I knew that SSX on the Xbox 360 would not be the same before I even bought it. In particular, I knew that the courses were not linked together into one insane run like SSX3. But the first time I jumped out of that helicopter, and the massive beats of Foster The People's Houdini started playing, I had hope. When I failed and failed again to stick a landing and landed straight on my face, or careened off of a cliff into the abyss for the third time, I knew there was something special here. This game had me hooked.

And then it got weird. The "online" features of the game started to get mixed in with the offline features in confusing ways. Was that powerup placed by a person, or is it built into the game? Will I have enough currency to buy the boards I need, or will I need to buy some sort of DLC to finish the game in a reasonable time? Are these leaderboards local? Is it my neighborhood, or my friends, or everyone? I had no idea.

It threw me out of the zone - that sort of magical place that games inhabit when I'm not thinking about anything but the game.

I've noticed more and more games doing this - getting me into the zone before abruptly knocking me out again. Often it's things like DLC ads, or bizarre currencies that I have to buy with real money to avoid grinding. Sometimes it's just the question of "how much of this is supposed to make me spend money?"

It makes sense in a free to play game, sort of - you have to interrupt people's games so that they want to keep playing, and will pay you real money to do so. But in a game that I bought for $60, what's the point except to make sure I don't buy the sequel?

I really hate the free to play model personally, and I hate the idea that's it's leaked into games that I legitimately bought. Honestly it's one of the biggest reasons I've pretty much stopped buying AAA games - I think I bought maybe 3 last year, and none of them new.

I guess the lesson to be learned here is "don't interrupt the zone unless you want to piss people off." Or maybe just don't buy games from EA anymore.

Scoring in Stronghold

Stronghold is a game about being the highest position of authority in a castle - that means building the castle, assigning people to jobs, ordering troops about, and other things that a lord would do. In turn, it's also about making decisions on what to sacrifice - bigger rations to make people happier, or smaller rations to keep them from starving? High taxes to provide public services, or low taxes so people will come to the castle?

I've been playing through the campaign for the first time, and had to defend my people from a pack of hungry wolves. I was able to fend them off with archers, but lost a few woodcutters and hunters in the process. This made me feel bad, of course, but sometimes not everyone lives.

In the end, I was given a score, part of which was 10,000 points for not losing any troops. This surprised me, since I had lost peasants - but then I realized that even though wolves had torn apart a number of unarmed peasants, it didn't count against my score because I hadn't lost any archers.

The funny thing about scores is that they encourage certain behaviors and act as an implicit approval of those behaviors. The logical extreme of this scoring mechanism would be to never put my archers at risk, and use my peasants as fodder to stave off the attacks of the wolves. This is the opposite of what I would have thought - to use my archers and other military units to protect the innocent peasants from harm.

I suppose it's wrong to try and impose my modern morality on lords form the middle ages, but it certainly struck me as odd coming from a modern game.