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Modern Warfare 2 was kind of a disappointment.

Well, let me be more specific. The single player in Modern Warfare 2 was kind of a disappointment.

As an overall package, MW2 is completely worth it. If you’re going to put any time into multiplayer, go buy it now. It’s so much more chaotic, and you have so many more options, plus new cool things you can use like the Riot Shield. It’s great.

But the single player…? I dunno.

The first Modern Warfare has pretty amazing. Not only did the game feature some of the best shooting mechanics ever, as well as that excellent quasi-RPG multiplayer, but the single player game was fantastic. Here was a game, that from the surface seemed like it would just be a kind of “fuck yeah” shooter, but did genius things with perspective during the plot to tell a fun story in a way that really made you think about things. The points most people would refer to is the sequence in the AC-10 gunship, and the HUGE PLOT TWIST when the bomb goes off. These sequences really do affect you. They were novel, new, and made a strong point to them. They were, dare I say it, innovative in some ways.

So I was expecting the same level of innovation from the Modern Warfare 2 single player. But they took the general “bigger, more badass” approach to the game. They looked at what was effective in the first one, and just did that like… every 2 levels. Which makes it devoid of almost any point, when it’s brought up again and again. Not to mention that it was no longer novel, since the first game did it. There wasn’t really any innovation there at all.
Still, I could have forgiven it had the plot not been extremely nonsensical. You feel like you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it in the first game, and you feel like what’s going on is not completely outside of the realm of possibility. MW2 is a game of supervillians, huge conspiracies, and so many things that they require you to buy as conceits that it just makes absolutely no sense. What’s worse, characters that died in the first game come back for no real reason, and it sets this precedent that none of the characters are actually vunerable, which removes all of the potential drama when you see one of them go down. You know, now, that Infinity Ward will have no problem with bringing them back in the next game anyway, so what’s the point?

I realize I haven’t mentioned “No Russian,” which was their “controversy” level. It hasn’t stuck with me at all. Maybe it’s because I’ve heard it analyzed to death on podcasts. Maybe it’s because, once I thought about the plot, your particular character being there and acting that way makes very little sense. Maybe it’s because there’s no repercussions for NOT being involved in it, so you can just follow along and keep your hands clean, making it devoid of the point they were trying to make. In any case, I really don’t think that level is effective in the way they wanted it to be.

That said, there are some really cool sequences in the single player. The level where you’re having to bunker down and defend a TGI Friday’s and a Burger King is almost surreal in its location, and pulls off that sort of “thinking about things” more that anything that was probably supposed to, for example. There are also some fucking awful sequences, like a point where you have to advance on the Whiskey Hotel, and there are so many people firing at you that it almost seemed like stupid luck that I made it through on the 40th try, since there was very little I could do to cut down on how much I was being shot.

As an overall package, the game is still amazing and a great value. I guess I’m just a bit let down by the single player. I had such high hopes. This was the first sort of “standard” shooter series that really, really got me involved, and it was because of that single player. After the passable but lackluster effort of Treyarch in World at War, I was ready for something amazing. I got that in the multiplayer and Spec Ops, but not so much in the single player, and that’s sad.

While I was off in the beautiful land of Arkansas, I had to have something to do! So I went to see a movie, that being Where the Wild Things Are, mostly because Fantastic Mr. Fox wasn’t showing yet and, on retrospect, I had heard lame things about Men Who Stare at Goats, and good things about this one, so I went for it. (Okay, that’s kind of a run-on sentence. Whee.)

Originally, I was kind of down on the film, based on the previews. It just looked like more CG crap to ruin a classic children’s story. But at some point, Essner pointed out that the movie was directed by Spike Jonze, which quickly made me interested. He’s the director of some of my favorite films, such as Being John Malkovitch and Adaptation. (And, apparently, writer on the Jackass movies, or so his IMDB page says, which kind of blows my mind.) Him being involved made it have potential. So I went to see it.

It was pretty good, but I left feeling like I missed something. The various monsters on the island that Max goes to obviously have connections to his real life that we get a glimpse of. Seeing as some of them share voice actors, it’s pretty completely clear that a connection is being made. However, perhaps because I was at an English conference, I was trying to put on my English Major hat and figure out the connections, and I didn’t quite pull it off during the first viewing. Some are clear. Carol is obviously a near-copy of Max’s social frustration and anger, for example, and the little goat dude is how Max feels ignored. I just didn’t get everything. I’m sure I would on another viewing. Still, it was nice to see a movie that had that kind of plan in place. It was obvious that the movie was written for adults who grew up with the book as kids. That was the focus. There were children in the audience enjoying it too, but that was really what as being pushed, it seemed.

I feel like I have to mention the child actor for Max. He does a good job, but damn, he’s creepy. There’s something about the expressions he has that is unsettling. It’s like he’s acting younger than he really is. I think that’s a deliberate choice on the part of the filmmakers, though. He’s supposed to be holding on to this playful, childish childhood while his life gets more serious, and he runs away into his imagination. It’s not hard to figure out why Max would feel out of place, and why other people would have a hard time interacting with him. It’s just kind of odd that you feel very little sympathy for him, or at least I didn’t. I bet children would, but I was often going, “You stupid kid, you’re going to get yourself killed!” Maybe I’ve got too much parental instinct wanting to get out.

In any case, the visuals did come together in a significant way, and the story is something worthy of looking at and attempting to break down. This is completely a movie for adults, and I did really like it. I’ll have to watch it again when it hits DVD sometime to fully grok it, though.

I’ve noticed something. I’ve been beating a lot more games since I got Gamefly.

I mean, I don’t think the amount of games I’m playing has really increased that much. I bought a TON of games before Gamefly. I still buy quite a few. But suddenly, when I get a game from Gamefly, I beat it. I do that thing where I go “okay, this weekend, going to knock this out so I can send it back” and play all the way through stuff. It’s… kind of weird.

I think a lot of it has to do with a lack of investment in the game. For example, take the game I just talked about the other day, Bound in Blood. There were sections of that game with many sidequests. Had I bought that game, I would have felt compelled to do them, which would have, perhaps, led to me getting bored of the game before I finished it. Since it was a rental, however, I did things like screw myself out of achievements, skip significant side missions, and so on, and I just shrugged and kept going. I plowed through it and had a good time, and it ended before I got bored.
I do this in almost all Gamefly games, and shockingly, I complete them. It’s actually kind of cool.

There’s probably something I can learn about my attention span from paying attention to that, one would think. There’s also probably something I can think about applying to the way I play the games I DO buy. Mainly the idea that optional content is a trap, and that I shouldn’t do it because then I’ll get bored! Maybe. The main quest or whatever should stand on its own anyway, right? It is the main quest, after all. I’ve already kind of clearly decided that I’m no longer a gamer who wants long games, so why do I make them longer on myself? I shouldn’t. I should just play through and not worry about missing things or anything else. Just play play play.
Play.

Various podding casts mentioned, when it came out, that Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood was actually pretty damn good. I wasn’t sure what to think. Brer liked the first one, but while I bought it for like 10 bucks, I never played it. Essner did, though, and said it was overwhelmingly mediocre. Would the sequel (which was actually a prequel) actually be any good? People said so. I rented it from Gamefly, like I now do, to check it out.

Honestly, it was pretty great. I wouldn’t say $60 great, but if you like Westerns, it’s at least $40 great. It was a fun all the way through.

A large part of that is due to the fact that this is a game that actually pays attention to the story, and gets it pretty right. The story is about these three outlaw brothers (one of which is a priest who doesn’t actually do any fighting) and their characters are set up in a very realistic way. They aren’t the most complex people in the world, but you really buy them throughout the story, and that makes it a lot of fun. Thomas and Ray, the two playable characters, banter constantly while they fight, and while it does repeat more than it should, the banter is very endearing, as they do the sibling rivalry thing during fights.
“You can’t hit shit, brother!”
“Shit ain’t what I’m trying to hit!”
They’re just cool people like that. The story itself is not… great, but it’s handled in a smart way. It is honestly just an excuse to get Ray and Thomas into classic Western setpieces and have them murder tons of cowboys and sometimes indians. It works, though.

The shooting, as well, is pretty darn good. Ray and Thomas both have different specialties in guns, and you can pick who you want to use on every level. Ray can dual-wield pistols, kick open locked doors, and throw dynamite. (Which works, kind of unrealistically, like grenades in most shooters, but eh, it’s fun.) Thomas gets extra zoom on rifles, uses a lasso to reach high places, and can use a bow and throwing knives for silent takedowns. (but what’s the fun of stealth, hm?) You can pick which brother to use on every level, but you’re actually kind of penalized for switching it up. There’s achievements for playing all the way through with one brother or the other, and it’s much harder to keep both brothers’ guns upgraded at the same time.

Which brings me, I guess, to the parts of the game that confused me. None of them particularly detracted from the experience, but I just found them odd.
The game has this entire “buy new guns” system where you collect money from dead enemies and from taking bounties and stuff and then can go to stores and buy weapons. There are maybe 10 classes of weapons in the game (Bow, Classic Rifle, Heavy Rifle, Classic Pistol, Quickshooter, Volcanic Pistol, and so on) and then on each of these classes, they have a rating, from Rusty (so it would say Rusty Quickshooter) to Superb. Enemies don’t start dropping guns rated higher than Rusty until right near the end of the game, so if you want better weapons, you need to go buy them.
However, I don’t see WHY you’d need better weapons. The upgraded versions of the guns seem barely different if at all. I couldn’t notice the difference between a “Prime” Classic Pistol and a “Rusty’ Classic Pistol, really. Granted, even some of the pistols didn’t seem all that different. Sure, it takes a little less time to reload a Quickshooter, and a Hybrid Gun holds 9 rounds, but they’re very small differences that don’t actually FEEL different. You’ll pick a class of pistol you like, certainly, but it doesn’t seem like a significant choice, and you never feel like you’re getting that much of an advantage for going out of your way to collect money and upgrade guns.
The other weird thing about this game is a lack of co-op. This is a game where 95% of the time you are playing alongside the other brother, controlled by the AI. Now, the AI does a good job, and will kill enemies and feel like a help and not a hindrance, but it just seems like a no-brainer to let someone else pick up the controller and play along. I assume it didn’t happen because that is probably a whole lot of work to make work, but man, this game has Deathmatch multiplayer stuff. I would have much, much rather seen them put the money they spent on that into giving this game co-op. I’d probably have bought it from Gamefly if it had that, because it is really fun.

Still, none of these things ruin the experience at all. This is a really fun little Western game, and completely worth your time to play. Surely it’s dropped to a reasonable price if you want to pick it up, or you can just rent it like I did. You will have a pretty damn good time. It’s certainly made me interested in whatever the little team that put this out is doing next.

I thought I would elaborate on the throw-away line yesterday about the BlazBlue soundtrack. I’m really quite addicted to it, and honestly I don’t know exactly why. It’s completely the same sort of hard rocking crazy guitar solo stuff that was in Aksys’s earlier games, like, say, Guilty Gear. (Okay, maybe this is a more appropriate example, but, you know… Bridget. Less Than Three.)At the same time, I don’t know. I find it oddly compelling.

Granted, it meets my requirements for a good game soundtrack like this. It is incredibly upbeat, constantly giving off energy. I can totally picture myself playing the game the moment I hear it. It screams “action.” I’m moving about the campus, having imaginary fighting game battles all the damn time now. Which is fun enough.
It’s also just so… weird, kind of. I mean, it takes a song called “Oriental Flower” and it turns it into this. It’s almost humorous when it gets off of that opening and into the bulk of the song. It takes some really fucking weird kind of vision to create something like that. I don’t know. It just seems hard to imagine any sort of metal-y song having anything to do with a flower. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe flowers are really hardcore.
Maybe Brutal Legend has almost given me an ear for this kind of music. Or maybe it’s just the whole “fighting game battles in my head” aspect that cannot be discounted or belittled here.

Anyway, I’m listening to it pretty well non-stop at the moment. So I suppose I recommend it. It’s just kind of a weird thing for me to recommend, I suppose.

I had heard some great things about BlazBlue. Second coming of fighting games! (Okay, less that. That was Street Fighter IV.) A really, really great and unique game! I was really tempted to buy it and try it. But no, I told myself, that would be a waste. Then I got Gamefly, and rented it. Now I’ve tried it.

Gods, it is just so complex.

I mean, I don’t know. I turned the game on and tried to play, and it seemed like nothing I was trying to do actually DID anything. I would hit buttons and my character would fly about the screen in odd angles, but never seeming to attack or anything, and just generally being ineffective. I picked another character, and the same thing happened. I just had no idea what I was doing at all. It was completely obtuse: normal fighting game knowledge only barely prepares you for this game, if at all. None of the button mashing I normally do to figure out how things work was working.

So I turned off the game, frustrated.

Then people on twitter were like “You need to watch the tutorial DVDs!” I worry about a game that requires watching long tutorial DVDs in order to be comprehended, but I pulled them up on Youtube nonetheless. I was immediately further demoralized. These videos show some really, really advanced shit. They talk about deep strategy where I was still needing to figure out how to, you know, attack people. I scoffed at the whole thing. “Ridiculous. Over-complex. But that’s music’s good.”
So I looked up some music on Youtube, and was listening to this track, which I think is pretty great, and I go “okay, I’ll give it another shot.”

So I boot the game back up and pick Carl Clover, because I like his song. And suddenly, I realize the DVDs were actually effective. I suddenly understood what I was trying to do. I mean, I wasn’t great at it, but I was pulling off combos. I was making some rudimentary versions of Carl’s combo loops that he can pull off with his sister. I was beating the computer. Impressively, the videos did what it was supposed to!

Then I sent it back to Gamefly.
Why?
Well, if I had to watch tutorial videos just to understand it, there’s NO WAY IN HELL I am getting my friends to ever touch this game for more than five minutes. Besides Jonathan, sometimes, none of them are going to be willing to invest the amount of time required to comprehend this game. BlazBlue is completely a commitment, not a game. I felt like, at least, Guilty Gear could be played on a mashy level with some amount of effectively, but this game? Not at all. There’s no casual enjoyment of this game. It is all hardcore.

So it’s not really useful to me. But good on it for existing. There has to be a core fanbase that is obscenely happy with this game. And hell, if I could get it for like 20 bucks or something, I might pick it up again and see if I can figure out Carl Clover further. But really, there’s so very little reason to train with it when I’m never going to have competition, so back it goes.

In stark contrast to Scribblenauts, we have Batman: Arkham Asylum. This is another game that came in from Gamefly, and I was excited to play it! So excited that I immediately lost an entire weekend playing through it from start to finish in like… 3 long sessions. It was that good.

The developers made so many good decisions in this game. Putting it in one small area instead of all over Gotham makes the whole world seem much more alive and much more full-featured. They got great voice actors for everyone, mostly people from the Animated Series, which was a great choice. They figured out pacing perfectly, and though the game is basically made up of small “minigame” sections (Hand-To-Hand combat, Stealth Takedowns, Detectiving, Scarecrow sequences, etc) they switch up so fast and so often that they never feel old. Seriously, the brawling combat is the best example of this. If you look at it, like seriously take a look at it? It’s not really that fun. It’s very button-mashy. It’s not deep. But you don’t do it enough in a row to feel that. They keep it from you so that you don’t realize it’s not all there. This goes for the rest of the “minigames” too. Very long sequences of any of them would be really annoying, but the game keeps you from having to do them. Even when you have a one time minigame, such as a sequence where you are trying to evade Killer Croc, it still changes up what it is doing throughout the sequence to keep you from getting bored. It knows its weaknesses, and has designed the game around them. It’s just really intelligent that way.

The plot is… the plot. It’s not the best Batman story ever? But it’s fairly solid, and again, having competent voice acting in there really makes a difference. I was never really drawn forward by the plot though. It was more the spectacle of the whole thing. The game is just constantly holding carrots out in front of you. You know another of sequence X is going to come up, or you’re going to meet a new Batman villain soon, because it’s alluding to it, and you have to keep going to see it. Even deaths keep you going, because there are so, so many unique death messages. Whatever villain you’re fighting at the time comes up on a black screen and taunts you for your failure. It’s great.

There are some things that bother me, but they’re really nitpicks, places where the game trips slightly, but doesn’t really fail. For example, you’re constantly getting new Bat-gadgets to deal with things. You have this explosive gel to blow up weak walls, but you can only blow up walls you can reach. What if you want to blow up a far-away wall? Well, then you get a three-part grappling hook and pull the wall down… what? It makes no sense. The first time I saw a far away wall, I said “Well, I’ll just cover a Batarang with explosive gel and throw it at the wall.” If I could think of that solution, Batman could, because he’s the fucking Batman, and why would he be tiring himself out by pulling down a wall, anyway? It’s just kind of stupid.
There are a few other things like that. But it’s nothing that would stop you. It’s just a really odd decision someone didn’t think all the way through.

Anyway, I can’t recommend Arkham Asylum enough. I mean, it’s not a super-long game, and I really think the “challenge” modes offer absolutely no appeal, so you’d probably be safe renting it. But it’s such a perfectly crafted game you at least have to play it. The fact that it’s a licensed game just makes it even more crazy that it’s so good from beginning to end, because it is. It is clearly one of the best games of the year.

So everything you’ve heard about Scribblenauts? All of it is pretty well true. You can make God fight Cthulhu and a Giant Squid. You can create just about anything you can think of, and have it do something. Everything looks all scribbly and neat. There’s all these puzzles.

You also can’t control any of it worth shit.

Seriously, who the hell put all this work into this game, making all the items work, rolling with the idea, and then made it control like ass? You have to do everything with the touch screen. Everything. That means any time you tap on something you may be 1. Moving Maxwell, the character you control 2. Firing a gun or attacking 3. Picking something up or 4. Moving an object around the environment. If you need to do one of these in particular, like, say, attacking the person who is about to kill Maxwell, good luck! The game just guesses what you want to do, so Maxwell might just bound forward into danger, or off a cliff, even if you have wings or a jetpack, because it didn’t realize you wanted to fly over the gap, it just assumed you wanted to jump into it.

Ugh.

Seriously, I wanted to like this game so bad. But when I have to replay a level multiple times not because I couldn’t solve it, as I came up with a solution on the first try, but because the game’s controls cause me to fuck my solution up again and again? Well, then I get angry and unhappy.

I’m very glad I rented this game. It’s worth doing that, just to fuck around with for awhile, but man, it just does not have any staying power at all. Maybe in the sequel they’ll make it control worth shit. Then it might be something to look forward to.

I got it in my head that, for Halloween, I was going to run a one-shot Call of Cthulhu game! I don’t really know why. I didn’t have any experience with it. But hey, I bought the book, and I schemed, and I planned, and on Wednesday, Jonathan, Spaeth, Essner, and Ben all played my little campaign.

The story I planned was based in 1920’s Arkham for ease of writing and familiarity for everyone, since we’ve all played so much Arkham Horror. I constructed a story about a Mask I made up and a creature called a Dream Sucker, which was sort of like a mosquito made of light that sucked out creativity until you sort of ended up like a robot. By a coincidence, all the players get infected by these beings, and had to work together to stop them.

The game wasn’t scary at all. We’re like… the least serious roleplayers on earth. And while sometimes I wish we’d get serious and do something serious, I wouldn’t trade the fun we have for that. We were laughing the whole damn time at stupid jokes, stupid decisions, etc. Jonathan’s character broke into a guy’s house, and then left a note with his name an address. Ben constantly attempted disguises and critically failed, causing us to invent crazier and crazier ways where he was MORE like his normal self in his failed disguises. Spants tried to pull guns on everybody, and Essner used his character’s “mentor, Dr. Phillip Rochester,” as the reason for every single thing he did. It was really quite ridiculous, in an awesome way.

From a planning standpoint, though, I feel like I succeeded pretty well. There were several points where I guessed what everyone would decide to do perfectly, and had notes for just such an occasion. I made a physical puzzle involving mocked-up card catalog cards, and while it stumped them for awhile, they all said it was a good puzzle. Which was good! Puzzle-making isn’t easy. I was glad that worked out.

But yeah, overall, a very fun time. I stayed up too late, perhaps, what with me being all old and going to bed early nowadays, but staying up for some fun once and awhile isn’t so bad, is it? I didn’t think so. I made a puzzle, drove someone insane, and laughed so hard I probably kept people up. That sounds like a good night to me.

You should go and play this right now, and then come back. It’s called Small Worlds. It’ll only take you, what, 10 minutes? 15? It’s really cool. Leave the sound on. Play it. Then we’ll talk.

—

Played it? Ready for spoilarz? Alright then.

This is a really damn good art game. It has a theme that it’s playing on in multiple different ways, and I think it’s effectively open to other interpretations than the one I am going to give you, which is just… neat. I love the art game movement.

Basically, I feel like the theme is that of an expanding world, and what that means. So often, in all of the areas, you start off in a very serene kind of setting, when zoomed in, but as you explore, the camera pulls back, and as the camera pulls back you see more and more of what it actually is. You start in what seems like a Space Station of some kind. A pretty space vista. Then you pull out and see the destruction and isolation and whatnot. In the same way, a winter wonderland slowly turns into a nuclear winter wonderland, and a cave turns into the innards of a horrible monster, etc.

However, the game doesn’t just stick to that mechanic to prove it’s theme. It also uses gameplay itself to push that forward, which I think is beyond excellent. The moment when you realize that you have a goal, and aren’t just exploring to explore, when you find that first little power block? The world of the game expands there. Suddenly, so much more of what you’re seeing has meaning. It’s a search for those blocks. What it means changes, much like how what you are viewing changes when you pull the camera out.

The ending, too, supports a final kind of thesis. After accomplishing your goal, you realize it was for nothing. Everything you thought was significant disappears: The music, the little dude you were controlling… all there is is a sun. Your quest, your existence was insignificant in the bigger picture. When you zoom out far enough, everything changes.

Yeah. I really liked this one. It used gameplay EXTREMELY well to make its point. Some art games, like, say, Today I Die, are neat, but the gameplay is not, you know, necessarily the important part of the experience, even though it is there? You could watch a video of someone playing Today I Die and probably get as much out of it as if you played it. I don’t think you can separate the gameplay from the whole idea and experience of Small Worlds. I like it for that.

Hopefully you at least thought it was neat, hm?