everyday gamer

A little more than a week out from E3 means several things for this blog – that it’s time to start writing in it again and that it’s time to make some bad, ill-informed E3 predictions!  However before we get to the predictions, a couple of tidbits sloshing around in my head that were unfortunately not substantive enough to merit their own entry.

Street Fighter IV: Championship Mode

While there wasn’t too much in terms of character balance changes (that feature will almost undoubtedly be reserved for the next incarnation of the game), the new Championship Mode introduced in the latest Street Fighter IV patch is phenomenal.  The mode is divided up into multiple grades and it mimics the conditions of actual SFIV tournaments – blind character select, multiple rounds, and a payout at the end for winning the tournament.  The entry-level tournament tier you’re placed into is Grade 3 (G3) with the opponent challenge is more or less analogous to normal ranked matches – meaning Sagats and Flowchart Kens aplenty.  With each successful win, you’re awarded Championship Points (CP) which contribute to your overall Grade Points (GP).   When you accumulate enough GP, you eventually progress through the classes of each Grade till a certain threshold when you are then promoted to the next Grade – and that’s where the fun really begins.  When eventually reach G2 (and reaching G2 is an inevitability – there is no point degradation in G3), the first thing you notice is the sad fact truth you are no longer winning anymore; in fact, you’d be lucky to be winning half as much as you were in the previous Grade.  Competition is tremendously disparate and the players are noticeably better: I considered myself competant and played maybe ten games before I was able to squeak out a victory.  Currently I’m at about 2750 GP, most of which was fueled by second and third round butt kickings, but I’m still having a ton of fun running with the tournament folks and their 8000+ GPs.  And even though I still lose a lot, I do feel that I’m adapting to the heightened level of competition.

WoW Patch 3.1 and Ulduar Raiding

The other majority of my gaming time has been spent playing World of Warcraft (of course) and raiding Ulduar with my guild on Gorefiend.  So far, we’re doing pretty well and we’re currently working on the final boss in the instance before we start working on the hard modes and Algalon the Observer (coined by Blizzard as the Destroyer of Raids).  Most importantly however is the fact that I’ve been working hard on the video footage for our first successful kills for the guild, going so far as to even make a YouTube Channel comprising of most of the video work I’ve done.  I intend on editing the hard-mode footage when we get there so there’s certainly still a lot work that needs to be done and there’s plenty of room for improvement.  Stuff to look forward to!

Blizzcon 2009

This year I was again fortunate enough to be able to attain tickets to this year’s Blizzcon convention in Anaheim, California.  As with last year, we booked the hotel and flight months in advance, even before we even knew of when tickets were going on sale.  Thankfully with some dilligence and a new and improved ticket purchasing system, we were able to get tickets to the show floor.  It’s still astounding that even though the convention tickets are 25% more expensive this year (due to the extra convention hall for exhibits), the first batch of tickets still managed to sell out in a mere thirty-three minutes.  Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising with tickets on eBay already going at 300% markup.  Still, I look forward to spending time with my fellow Blizzard fans, regardless of how rabid (and possibly unkempt) they are.

And that’s it for now.  E3 Predictions forthcoming!

Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve written one of these.  Call it a minor hiatus or a busy streak or whatever you will.  But never fear, games have been played.  A lot of the newly fan-translated Mother 3, courtesy of the fine folks at starmen.net.  Oh, and a little game by the name of LittleBigPlanet.  But that’ll get its own entry later this week.  Sorry guys!

It’s very interesting how Nintendo of America continues to spite its Mother fans by not releasing the fan-beloved Earthbound.  It’s a beloved franchise in Japan.  There aren’t any translation issues to be had – it’s had an American release.  It has a rabid fanbase in the United States.  And it’s already been rated by the ESRB.  NOA President Reggie Fils-Aime has stated that Nintendo always needs make sure that releases are timed in order to keep the momentum of their consoles going.  But at times, it seems like NOA doesn’t even want to acknowledge the existence of the series: Earthbound was included as one of the in-game demos for the Japanese version of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and not the American version.  Because of this, many feel that the Japanese-only Mother 3 will never see an American release.  Which is precisely why a bunch of fans took matters into their own hands and translated the ROM for the fans.

Not surprisingly, the game plays a lot like Earthbound.  But there’s something innately endearing about a five old Japanese RPG that plays a lot like the 22 year old Dragon Quest.  And it has everything to do with the quirky sense of humor that has always existed in the series and has somehow remained intact through the fan translation.  Self-deprecating inanimate objects?  Hilariously deadpan dialogue from serpentine ally?  Random Mr. Saturn antics?  Sexually ambiguous and uncomfortably awkward situations?  Mother 3 has them all.

Kudos to the the starmen.net folks for translating this wonderful game for everyone.  Kudos to Shigesato Itoi for another great Mother game.  And please keep them coming, Mr. Itoi – you are greatly appreciated.

I suppose it’s very telling that my series of Spore entries have been spaced out as such.  I haven’t been writing about Spore because I haven’t really been interested in playing it as of late.  To be frank, I agree with Chris Kohler’s assessment that it’s a little boring.  That’s not to say that Spore is a bad game.  It very much isn’t.  But in that vein, I know exactly who the intended audience of the game is: the same mainstream audience that has snatched up Wii Fit and Wii Play by the truckloads.  The same audience that enjoyed The Sims and would enjoy playing with their customized creatures in the simplified game archetypes.  Even then, there’s nothing wrong with that as more gamers playing games is still a good thing overall.  It’s just not my cup of tea.

It’s interesting to find that the complexity that was so absent in the first four phases of Spore is almost overbearingly present in the final phase of the game.  In a sense, the preceding evolutionary phases act as a tutorial for the Space phase.  The main problem comes from the fact that whereas the other phases were simply the previous phase with a twist, the space phase seems to be a total disco inferno.  There is a hell of a lot going on in this phase, whether it be meeting aliens, defending against space pirates, establishing trade routes, abducting wildlife, terraforming planets, etc., some of which could happen concurrently.  This is a good thing for players who can deal with the more developed sense of micromanagement.  However, I just don’t see the mainstream finishing out the phase – as I mentioned before, Spore might be too smart for many of us.  They’re more likely to open up the Creature Creator and start a new campaign.

To me, the ability to create and share content via the Creature Creator is where the strength of the game lies.  When EA produces an expansion for Spore (99.9999% chance they will), a natural extension of this might be to extend their powerful tool by introducing a framework for user-created scenarios a la LittleBigPlanet, which would go miles as far as keeping the players interested in Spore.  Wishful thinking, though.

The end of the Creature phase signals the beginning of the Tribal Phase and the finalized look of the creatures used as avatars for subsequent Spore sections. The creature phase is used to demonstrate the beginnings of animal pack mentality such as hunting and socializing.  In actual execution, the phase is very similar to a single player MMO.

The Tribal phase begins with a cute cinematic of the creature gaining sentience and raising a stick in triumph, signifying the inclusion of culture into the history of the creatures’ evolution.  Spore takes what was built in the previous phase and meshes it with a rudimentary Real Time Strategy (RTS) game. The strict adherence to simplicity present in previous phases is present in this iteration as well: The end goal is to establish the creature as the dominant species on the planet by via declaring war, entertaining other tribes, or a mixture of both.  The tasks are facilitated again by the creature creator, this time with the addition of wardrobe with each article of clothing giving a bonus to gathering, combat, social skills, or a combination of any two.  Ultimately, that simplicity limited the development of the phase and it again felt like a glorified tutorial as I quickly played my maracas, flutes, and digideroos to global dominance and the Civilization phase.

I’m going to assume that Spore’s fourth phase mimics Civilization, despite never having played a single Civilization game in the series.  In that regard, I very much looked forward to the new phase of the game only to find that my past game decisions as a friendly, herb-devouring, socially adept but retarded-looking antlered bird creature put my civilization on the path of religious zealotism  (Yeah… I don’t really see the connection).  The goal of the game this time was to extend the influence of my nation throughout the planet, beginning with my freshly thrown together mess of a car equipped with French horns, organ pipes, and a Zen gong exerting its religious hegemony on a nearby spice mine.  This was followed by yet another session of begrudgingly throwing together random objects in the creature creator to create buildings for my city.  Yes, I said begrudgingly – designing so many creatures, vehicles, and buildings was extremely tiring and overwhelming for me at this stage of the game and I really wanted to move on as quickly as possible.

The actual meat of the Civilization phase consisted very simply of me building as many faithmobiles as possible and rushing my neighbors in early RTS fashion.  My weapons of choice however weren’t explosives and bombs but rather words and faith delivered via a singing holographic projection of my creature.  There’s a bit of suspension of disbelief at work here as the cartoony visual of bombs vs. psalm didn’t really do it for me, but the holographic of my bird creature was a laugh-out-loud moment.  In any case, the cycle of building vehicles and taking over cities continued a few more times until I was presented with a cutscene indicating that I now had access to flight technology and was presented with another creator!  Ok, seriously now.  Despite my clear irritation, it was at this point that the game took an almost inexplicable turn into the realm of non-casual gaming: the introduction of flight into my game for whatever reason multiplied the difficulty of the game many times over and the other large empire on my planet was soon at my doorstep dropping bombs on my city with its swarm of not-so-friendly airplanes.  Ugh.

My solution to this problem was rather unorthodox:  After 3-4 failed attempts to fight the aggressors off, I opted to try establishing a trade route.  “Ok, they’re not attacking me.  Now we’re getting somewhere!”  After a set time of commerce, I was given the option of buying out the city I was trading with.  So I did.  And then I received a message from my former enemy asking for an alliance of which I gladly obliged to.  And then the phase ended.

Err..what?  Was it seriously that easy?

The Cell phase comprises of roughly the first 20 minutes of Spore.  It begins with the design of your single celled organism in the creature creator.  You start off by designating yourself as a carnivore or herbivore and then you get to spend a little bit of time in the Creature Creator although you’re a bit limited in what you can do to your little blob since additional body parts need to be unlocked.  Afterwards your cell is thrust into a very beautiful version of freeform Pacman where the goal is to basically eat as many of the correct colored pellets (green for plant, red for meat) as required to sprout legs and advance to the next stage of evolution while avoiding the predators and essentially “tricking” out your creature with numerous new body parts you’ve attained.  While the actual body parts you can get in this phase don’t really have an effect on the rest of the game, it does serve as good practice in using the Creature Creator and preparation for the Creature phase and other later stages. In that regard, the Cell stage is set up sort of like a tutorial and once you play it through once it becomes trivially easy.

Once you actually get the power to add legs to your organism, the Creature phase begins.  The game archetype at this point shifts from a 2D version of Pacman to a 3D Pacman-meets-World Of Warcraft game where the goal is to become a dominant species in the planet via social (dancing, singing, posing) or not-so-social (uh..eating other species?) means. As reward for being an herbivore in the first phase, I was presented with a rainstorm-creating ability that helped me on the social track a bit more. As you befriend or devour more creatures in this phase, you get additional body parts to utilize in the far more fleshed out Creature creator.  What’s particularly interesting in this phase is that there is nothing stopping you from doing a full on creature redesign. You can even start becoming the opposite diet designation if you so choose.  However, the end goal in this phase remains befriending or devouring the other species.

Once I filled up my DNA bar, my retarded bird-like creature with antlers was headed to the Tribal phase.  Overall, I liked this phase a bit more than the Cell phase because there was a semblance of complexity present.  Which is a bit of a stretch in itself since it’s basically just “kill” or “dance/sing/whatever” on demand.  Final verdict of the creature stage: underwhelmingly fun.

That’s it for now.  Next time: the Tribal and Civilization stages!