Properly Calibrated

If I’m looking to vent some pent-up energy or frustration I usually pull out the Rock Band 2 (and the headphones, we live in an apartment) and whale on those for a while, but yesterday, I pulled out the Wii Sports and whaled on some bowling pins instead. Less setup time, and just as satisfying. I bowled a 241 and I can’t play most songs on Hard drums in Rock Band, so perhaps the self-reinforcement is also a factor.

I’m in a bit of a dead area right now in terms of new games. I played an assortment of demos recently, with nothing really feeling worth a hot $60. I’m waiting for Red Faction to drop a little; it definitely feels worth $40. This is not an interesting paragraph.

More Fallout. Finished up Point Lookout; final verdict: essential. I would recommend that any Fallout purchaser buy Broken Steel (the Whoops-Here’s-The-Real-Ending Patch) and Point Lookout, Skip The Pitt and Anchorage until you can find that 2-in-1 expansion disc used for $8 or so.

The main quest isn’t terribly long, but there are 2 other quests that rival the main one in length — one of which is downright Lovecraftian, and requires the player to do my least favorite activity — crawling through levels of sub-sub-sub-basements, fighting countless ghouls. My grizzled rifleman is much more at home on the range than the dank cavern. This was the first expansion that has actually hindered my sleeping on a couple of nights. Hard on the ol’ nerves.

Also hard on the nerves: Half-Life 2. I busted out The Orange Box in a third or fourth attempt to get going on it again (played it a few years ago on PC). The overwhelming emotion: dread. Dread for the nonstop chase sequences. Dread for the helicopters. Dread for that one last-stand scene with the turrets. Dread (with extra dread sauce) for the night-time village sequence with the sprinting headcrab zombies. That game is somehow far more intense when you know what obstacles await you. In the day and age of play-at-your-own-pace open-world games, the nonstop action-chute of Half-Life is downright rattling.

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Assassin’s Creed continues to be interesting. Even though the entire game essentially boils down to …

• Run Around
• Assassinate Guards
• Fight Guards
• Collect Flags
• Pickpocket Dudes
• Assassinate 1 Important Dude Every Two Hours Or So

… it’s still reasonably fun to do all of the above. I’ve discovered that I can just avoid the sidemission types that I find distasteful (Informants and Collect These Flags In A Circle). Granted, there aren’t many choices to begin with, but I’m okay with just pickpocketing, interrogating and eavesdropping my way to success.

I haven’t mentioned it here yet, but I love Fallout 3. I was previously a fan of both the Fallout series and the Elder Scrolls, so when Bethesda made the new Fallout, I was in Best Buy on opening day, buying the Vault-Tec lunchbox (which, by the way, included an awesome concept art book and an equally awesome Nuka-Cola bottle opener.)

Since then, I’ve bought all the DLC. The Pitt, Anchorage, Broken Steel. Last night, right before I was headed to bed, I saw that Point Lookout was available.

Dang it.

I loaded up, fired Fawkes (nice guy, but keeps stealing my XP) and hopped on the dilapidated riverboat for Point “Coney Island By Way Of Louisiana” Lookout.

The framerate was just a touch funny walking through the opening wharf area, which stood out to me against Fallout’s normal high levels of polish. However, another polish-related problem almost caused me to assassinate my TV with my controller. Allow me to elucidate.

The wharf is a burnt-out waterside fair. Nearby, there’s a giant mansion on a hill. Smoke is billowing from the roof. I headed that way (burnt-out skee ball machines give me the creeps).

Now, I need to complain about this, but I’ll do it without spoiling anything. I head for the mansion, to find that there is [DUDE] needing me to help protect him from [GUYS]. Said [GUYS] attack in packs, and do insane amounts of damage. I was a high roller back in the DC area – here I’m getting 20% of my health taken away with every [ATTACK] from a [WEAPON].

It takes a while to get through all the [GUYS] to protect the [DUDE], climaxing in a pretty serious battle where I laid some mines down for extra protection.

The fight finishes. I run past my mines. One explodes (?!). I take damage. [DUDE]’s lousy AI triggers that I must then be a HOSTILE.

[DUDE] proceeds to shoot me, repeatedly. I stand there, helpless and pissed off that I didn’t think to save (and the game didn’t autosave) at any point since I first entered the mansion. A nerve-wracking 45 minutes or so, down the drain. Thanks bunches, Bethesda.

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My PS3 has primarily become my demo machine. The paltry 20GB drive on my XBox (not getting the Pro: mistake) is bursting at the seams with DLC, with about 700MB to spare — just enough to download the X-Blades demo. X-Blades appears to be about a scantily-clad, double-sworded, triple-ponytailed Olsen twin who shoots fireballs. X-Blades feels like a fictional game that exists inside a movie — perhaps in a peripheral scene where “gamers” are portrayed, perhaps by someone oily. I’m going to stop writing about X-Blades now.

Assassin’s Creed was one of the first games I bought on the 360 (yes, I bought mine late) primarily because of the incendiary trailer. I played it for a handful of hours, performing the meager handful of mini-missions again and again (and again), until I reached one where a fellow wanted me to run in a large circle, collecting a specified number of banners in a specified number of seconds. In a world that was already copy-and-pasted to hell and back, now this? The developers lost me. Grand Theft Auto never required Niko to drive around the city collecting icons. Some lines shouldn’t be crossed.

That said, Assassin’s Creed is more beautiful than GTA (and most other games) and is proving to be the perfect type of game to play for an hour or three — just until the repetition sets in, at which point it can be set aside for another month.

I also played the Killzone 2 demo today — finally. I like the cover system a lot — not being able to see (mostly) when you’re crouched feels proper. The controls are slightly wacky; the X and Y axis acceleration feels like a strictly gaussian curve - bizarre amounts of acceleration, and too dead in the middle.

But neither of those sentences make for entertaining writing, so how about this: the Helghast bad guys are the most indescribably generic masses of grey-black Video Game Material possible, and they live on the most indescribably generic planet I have ever seen. How is Helghan an alien planet? It looks like the Every Shooter Video Game Planet. Helghan (the demo, anyway) is all piping, concrete, steel, facemasks, dirt, and testosterone.

Also, when shot in the head, the Helghast’s helmet comically pops off into the air, every time. It’s a bizarrely out-of-place moment in what otherwise is a Totally Serious Video Game. I appreciate it, I think.

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Have you tried the bowling training in Wii Sports?

There are 3 tiers of training: clearing splits (no fun), “spin control” (bowl around obstacles to hit single pins; very fun), and something I believe is called “power throws”. We’re here to talk about the latter.

In “power throws”, you bowl once against a standard 10-pin “rack” (or whatever the term is). Then another row of pins is added, and you bowl against a 15-pin rack. Then another pin is added … you get it.

Eventually you’re hurling yourself across the living room, attempting to squeak out just a little more power in order to demolish a sea of bowling pins — the last level maxes out at 91 pins.

This is beautiful. It’s exactly what I want to do in sports simulation games, whether it’s Wii Bowling or Tiger Woods. I love the extra modes that just barely warp reality into a wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if scenarios.

I want a bowling lane that is a sloped embankment. I want to bowl underneath a windmill, putt-putt style. I want to hit my drive over a river of lava. I want to play baseball on an absurdly narrow field, or one with rolling hills. I want to play tennis on a 3-on-3 wide court.

I’m just saying.

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My Wii says I’m 56. It’s accurate; inexplicably, the insides of my elbows are sore today. Probably from overswinging the Wiimote during Baseball.

Clearly, I’m millions of units sold late to this realization, but still: within the confines of some of the most simplistic, limiting games ever made, the Wii manages to feel liberating. Also, water is wet.

Wii Sports Golf is a tease - a maddeningly imprecise (don’t flick your wrist, ever) preview of what could be, just out of reach. I suppose the entire platform is a tease, but all of that unrealized potential comes into sharp, cruel focus with Golf. What I’m saying is that I now want Tiger Woods 10 (with Wii Motion Plus). They’ve got me.

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Thousands of spam comments ago, I wrote here. I’m going to attempt to do so again.

My original effort ground to a halt when I promised you, the (likely) non-existent reader, a categorical rundown of Mass Effect’s myriad rough edges. I believe my mistake was in believing I would do the necessary legwork to squeeze out anything more than stream-of-consciousness notes.

So, let’s you and me be straight here. I’m not gonna do research. I’m not here to chronicle; I’m here to jot.

And so:

Two days ago, I fully accepted my role as Husband, and did what any Husband does at least five times in his life: I bought an expensive exercise machine. For generations, Husbands have prostrated their slightly well-fed bodies before fantastical beings of iron and rubber, wallets and egos upheld in submission. Throw money at it, and wish for blessings in pectoral form.

Look, I bought a Wii, okay? I spent $400 total MSRP for a 3-year-old piece of hardware that was outdated 3 years ago. (Nintendo are geniuses.)

I bought it for EA Sports Active. I tried the 20 Minute Heap Of Failure Introductory Workout two days ago and my shoulders are still sore. The thought of a 30 Day Challenge weakens my already-sore knees. I tremble before my bland, flabby avatar.

I don’t know where this road will head, but at least the object gathering dust is small, white, and plastic, instead of giant, black, and metal. I don’t have a garage, anyway.

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My character in Mass Effect specializes in pistols & sniper rifles. I picked up a High Explosive Ammo upgrade at one point, which increases damage something like 400%, but also allows for far fewer shots before overheating (Mass Effect’s replacement for ammo clips).

Packed onto my sniper rifle (which only allowed 1.8 shots per overheat cycle anyway), it becomes a small howitzer. A sniper rifle with a 6-foot explosion radius means many instances of Geth flying through the air while disintegrating into char. Pure comedy.

I finished Mass Effect last night just barely under level 50 (which would have garnered me an achievement, oh well). The story arc gets an A+ for pacing; the Last Segment Of The Game is very clearly defined, and allows you plenty of space to finish up your side-quest list before heading off to the final battle. (Compare to: Fallout 3, where I didn’t realize I had entered TLSOTG until it was too late.)

While the main quest & storyline were clearly given every bit of polish they deserved, almost everything else in Mass Effect has the distinct feeling of being unfinished in one way or another. I have a list. I’ll write about it tomorrow. Today, though, nothing but praise.

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Spent a couple of hours knocking out some secondary quests for Mass Effect. Saved a few dozen lives, came to terms with my horrific military past, that sort of thing.

Spent some time on the planet Ontarom finding some scientists. Turns out they were at the map marker labeled “Underground Facility.” That map, it never lies.

Let’s be clear here: I’m all about modularity in construction. If prefab houses wouldn’t get egged in any typical American neighborhood (and if typical American contractors knew how to build them), I’d be the proud owner of an aluminum and plate-glass box. Apparently the builders in Mass Effect think similarly, as OuterSpaceCo Inc. appears to offer one model of Above Ground Dwelling and one model of Underground Dwelling, both with one choice of layout, complete with semi-permanent crate-themed interior decoration.

Speaking of things that BioWare probably would have finished if they’d had the time and/or inclination (you’ll notice that there are a lot of these):

I had previously thought Eletania’s monkey colonies were pushing the parallel envelopes of crazy and lame, but Onteron has topped them with its native herd of — wait for it — horses with arms. I don’t know how else to describe it. As I remember it, they were essentially normal horses, but with human-like vestigial arms growing out of their general shoulder area. Two arms, kind of hanging there. I decided to dub them Tardicorns.

The game HUD also bracketed them with a “Talk” prompt, as if I could converse with these proto-magical creatures. Unfortunately, either BioWare glossed over the Tardicorn conversation tree in favor of polishing the voice acting (a completely acceptable decision), or Tardicorns are just jerks who like to ignore perfectly friendly spacefolk.

I smushed one on accident when I backed the Mako out of their valley. Can’t say I felt guilty. Stupid Tardicorns.

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A few more hours of Mass Effect today. It’s so good that I haven’t even taken time off to attempt another futile run at a Geometry Wars 2 achievement. I haven’t even popped in Burnout Paradise and fantasized ways to smush DJ Atomica with my car.

Now that I’m back on the main quest line for a bit, things have gone back to being tight, well-written, and polished. So what if there were monkeys on Eletania — there are survivors, warships, creatures, and plot-points galore on Feros. However, although this game may be getting on in age, I’m still averse to spoiling the plot for my incredibly modest readership, so I’ll describe my latest impression in more general terms.

Knights Of The Old Republic was, for better or worse, nothing more than a Star Wars game, and I say this as an incredibly loyal twentieth-century Star Wars fan. The story may have been set thousands of years in the past, but renaming the R2 unit and throwing on an extra leg does not a new galaxy make. KOTOR was a Star Wars story, and the Star Wars canon, is (to put it lightly) somewhat fleshed out already.

Mass Effect is different. It’s 100% new and original, and after playing this far, I’ve seen creatures and been told stories that would have never meshed with the Star Wars universe. The detail given to every species, planet, and scientific justification is Firefly-esque in its level of tender, loving care.

Mass Effect has a completely game-optional Codex, explaining all sorts of completely game-optional details. You may never read the Codex, but it’s there, available. I appreciate little details like that, just like I appreciate being able to steal every piece of silverware off of a dining room table in a Bethesda game. An uncompromisingly fleshed-out universe can be that extra bit of genuine spirit that can make a game really be something.

It’s important to note here that fleshing out a game is not the same as padding it. The Mass Effect codex is flesh. The monkeys? Marsupial, module-stealing padding.

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I’m 11 hours into Mass Effect, and then this happens.

DISCOVERY: The monkey does not have the module.

I’m running around a valley, pressing A at lethargically plodding semi-elongated space monkeys on the planet Eletania (in the Hercules system), trying to find the module that one of them apparently stole from the downed satellite at which I had also just finished pressing A.

DISCOVERY: The monkey does not have the module.

Monkeys?

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