Mario Kart Junkie

I had a few days to kill between GameFly games, so when I had some free time I actually had to choose what I wanted to play instead of just unthinkingly turning on whatever rented game I had. Because time is money, ya know? Most times my choice was Mario Kart Wii.

Now, I've long ago filled up my scorecard thing with gold on the single player, so I always play online with strangers. One of the few games I do this with, I might mention. Probably because there's no voice chat and it's free. The system they've put in place for online Vs. matches is pure genius and pure evil, however. Everyone starts at 5000 points. You gain points by winning, lose points by losing. Do well in a match with people with more points than you and you gain even more points (and vice versa).

I'd made my way up to 7000 and hovered around there for a while when it came out. I got mad when I dropped below that nice round number, and I felt good about myself if I kept above it. Lately I've been hemorrhaging points. I dropped to 6000 and felt mostly apathy, feeling like nothing I did would make me stop losing. But then I won a lucky one and gained over a hundred points. My brain got excited and told me that if I just do that a few more times I'll be back on top in no time!

And this is where we realize I have a problem. I hear that gambling addicts go through something similar. They focus on their big wins and how good it makes them feel while ignoring the misery of the losses. Now, I'm not sure it's quite the same, since in online Mario Kart, the house won't win in the end, will it? But do I suffer through the game cheating and attacks on my self esteem by connecting my sense of self worth to a number? No. I'm through. No more Mario Kart for me.

Well, maybe just one more game.

Red Dead Revisited

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was essentially finished with the main storyline of Red Dead a couple days ago, when the progress-meter was at about the 70% mark. I'm not going to spoil the plot, but suffice to say that after you defeat the last boss, the story essentially becomes this weird sort of drawn-out and annoying episode of Lassie. I'm not kidding, you'll see when you get there. Then there's one more minor boss battle at the "actual" end of the plot, which left me saying "huh? that's it?" as the credits rolled.

Still, it's a really excellent game, and worth your time to check out. As I was playing along, I made a list of noteworthy things I did or saw:

• Saw better scenery, sky, and weather effects than almost any other game I can think of... but also realized that they haven't mastered the technology for animating women's clothing yet.
• Spent all my money on the best horse in the game, only to find I already had that horse.
• Spent all my money on an upgraded gun, only to find the same gun on a dead guy 30 seconds later.
• Survived dozens of bullet wounds, but died instantly upon touching ankle-deep water.
• Spent roughly half of the in-game money I earned just to unlock new places to save the game from.
  
• Played through half the game before figuring out how to fast-travel, then hardly ever used it since a) it's cumbersome and slow, and b) watching the scenery go by is so cool.
  
• Picked more flowers and skinned more animal carcasses than I care to count.
• Watched enough cutscenes to make at least three westerns.
• Gave up on the in-game challenges once I reached level 5: "Kill two cougars with a knife."
  
• Killed about 500 bad guys with a gatling gun, which was surprisingly tedious and non-fun.
• Saw two NPCs "doing it".
• Lassoed a hooker from off a porch, threw her on my horse, rode over to the tracks, dumped her in front of an oncoming train, and got an achievement for it. Yup, it's a Rockstar game.
• Drove my cat crazy whenever I made my character whistle to summon his trusty horse.
• Accidentally drove my trusty horse over a cliff to its death... but not to worry, just whistle and his identical clone will come running up so you can hop on (?!)
• Ran errands for an infinite number of NPCs who each promised to advance the plot (but hardly ever did).
• Got stuck on world geometry when trying to run through a door into a gunfight, and died (happened to me a lot).
• Pressed the wrong button and accidentally drew my gun on a lawman or bystander, thus turning me into a wanted criminal (this happened a lot too).
• Played a cow-herding minigame that was surprisingly well done.
• Saw an NPC grabbing a horse penis.

A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

I was spurred on to play Heavy Rain because of some reviews that said it was a new kind of game that really just needed to be experienced. "Interactive Drama" was thrown around a few times, I believe. Let me back up a bit though. I played, and found a lot to like, with the developer's previous outing Indigo Prophecy. What you're asked to do in the two is similar. Walk around and find clues, then participate in quick time events while your character does things behind your button presses. Indigo Prophecy had the same problem with this that God of War does, I ended up focusing completely on what buttons I need to press next that I barely register what's happening in the "background" which is the entire story. Thankfully Heavy Rain makes the button prompts and controller gestures much less intrusive and it leads to a much more enjoyable experience.

This game deals with some dark, heavy stuff. Sure there's the mundane, everyday actions that people have complained about having to walk your character through, like shaving or making dinner. But you also encounter suicide, depression, serial killers, drugs, etc. I felt like I was watching a decent movie that I might have seen before but couldn't quite remember how everything ended up. Several characters are very well fleshed out and feel as real as any in a movie. The private eye, Scott Shelby, was my favorite. He's noble and a bit worn down by all his years.

There are some minor technical issues that attempt to get in the way of my enjoyment of the game, like the too close camera and wonky walking controls in tight spaces. But the overall feel of the game is fantastic. It's depressing sometimes, but it mostly feels real and alive. The story is very linear but you're given a few points where you can make it deviate a little. It doesn't seem to be enough to make me want to play through it again, but I'm about 3/4 of the way through. We'll see how I feel after I finish.

You shot 1153 pounds of meat

I told Dave I would write a blog post about Red Dead Redemption. I don't usually get worked up about unreleased video games, but something about the preview videos for RDR grabbed onto my brainstem strong enough for me to actually preorder it, which is something I hardly every do. Something about the footage of players riding through the high-poly-count southwest desert stimulated the same neurons responsible for my obsession with Fallout 3's wasteland, I suppose. Turns out that preordering was a smart move, since Amazon gave me $25 worth of kickbacks... thanks, Mister Bezos!

Anyway, I was all fired up to write down my thoughts on this game, but then I heard this Giant Bomb podcast and decided it would be a lot easier to make you go listen to that instead. I agree with pretty much everything said therein, which saves me a lot of typing.

I especially agree that the designers almost throw the whole world open for you to explore a little too soon... in fact, it was only from listening to the podcast that I realized I had skipped a huge part of the tutorial because I didn't visit the correct NPC before I went running off across the desert. In my several hours of playtime to date, I have barely made a dent in the main plot. That's because I've been too busy just riding my horse across the countryside, checking out the HDR-illuminated scenery and doing little random side quests. I'm probably missing all kinds of stuff, but it's still a lot of fun.

We were talking about this over low-quality Chinese food yesterday, and a pretty useful analogy was put forth: Remember playing Oregon Trail on the Apple II in third grade? Of course that game was a lot simpler than Red Dead, but it still had an end goal and a whole series of steps required to reach it... and all anyone ever remembers about it was how much fun it was to hunt buffalo. To me, RDR has the exact same thing going on: I'm sure I will eventually get around to making forward progress, but at the moment it's too much fun just messing around in the world. "Shoot coyotes and earn Master Hunter achievement" ranks pretty high up on my to-do list for Memorial Day weekend.

Come to think of it, not only is Red Dead a sandbox game, but when you are running around in the desert you are literally in a sandbox. Did I just blow your mind?!

Requiescat in Pace

If you put the Assassin's Creed 2 disc in your Xbox 360 and don't touch it for a while it plays a cinematic intro video that acts as sort of a trailer for the game. It shows Ezio sneaking into a masquerade in Venice and assassinating a rich dude in the midst of a crowd of people. It looks fantastic and gets you ready to play the game. Unfortunately, the rest of the game doesn't look quite as good, even in cutscenes. Faces especially, looked a bit off in the actual game. But never mind that, this game is all about moving around the city undetected and dropping in for the kill.

This sequel picks and chooses elements from the first game to abandon or include. The excellent terrain traversal animations are still around. You just push the control stick in a direction and Ezio figures out how to get there for the most part. The same four or five types of tasks that you had to do over and over in the first game are gone. Because of this, I never got bored playing through the game. But the story missions that replace them aren't that impressive. I often found myself running off to kill a dude on the other side of town just because somebody told me to. The story wasn't really engaging enough for me to remember why I was doing this. I just liked traversing and killing.

Honestly, I waited too long between finishing the game and writing about it, but I have in my notes that there are "lots of new features, some work, some don't." None of the new techniques will hold you up. Meaning I didn't run into a situation where I wanted to stop playing because of some stupid unskippable task that made me mad.

One annoying thing that stuck around from the first game is that you walk by default. To run, you have to hold down the right trigger. Since I was running 90% of the time it was really annoying (and eventually painful) to have to hold it down all the time. Luckily I remembered my trick from the last game. I posted this on Twitter about it:
The only way to play Assassin's Creed 2: always running.

So I liked the game overall. I complained about the forgettable story earlier, but that's just the day to day missions. The whole story of Ezio losing his family, seeking revenge and looking for answers is sort of neat. Especially the ending.