Tomb Dater: Picture Perfect

"Pretty," is what breaks the brief silence, one that takes place when the controller is in my hand instead of hers. I reply that yep, this is gorgeous. We both quickly agree that we're not talking about a 3D model of an English actress.

Tomb Raider was an expensive game to make, and it certainly shows. The lighting effects are pretty much perfect, and I bring those up specifically because I don't really give a shit about graphics one way or another until I find a quiet moment when the lighting gives me pause. The way the torch flickers on Lara's face. The moonlight on the icy northern edge of Tamriel. Lightning reflecting off of Batman's cowl. I'm not running anywhere, not killing anything. When I can sit and think and soak in the world around me, how it's lit has become something of a measuring stick for how I perceive a modern game's objective beauty. The brief moments of gleaming sunlight in between rainy mountain climbs and the occasional spelunking diversion are giving my wife and I a moment. Anyone with taste can tell you that graphics, ultimately, do not matter. But there's nothing wrong with taking a step back to admire them for what they are once in a while.

My wife, though, is fine with this superficiality -- at least right now (I think). I play a lot of video games, and she will occasionally watch me play them. Telling me how good they look to her passing eye is not uncommon. I liked that she was willing to make a comment on something I didn't really think interested her, so I wouldn't respond to her in the opposite when I would play something like Dragon Age: Origins (which I love, but come on. That game looks like shit). I'd like to think that by playing through this game, now in its final moments for us, that her standards are higher going forward. But the reality is that it doesn't matter to me as long as she's having fun. Which, recalling our time playing Wii Sports and its simple ball/cylinder character models, is still what she cares about most. It reinforces my stance on the matter, too.

We're close to the final confrontation with Mathias in the temple now, and she turns to me to inquire if The Last of Us is our next game together. Those standards look higher already.

I Could Sleep

As of 4:00pm EST, I will be on vacation for a week. This means that I'll finally have sufficient time to finish Etrian Odyssey IV and maybe start on Shin Megami Tensei IV. It will be saucy and nerdy. Also, I'll probably go to the Zoo.

Hopefully some book-writing will also continue as well since I'm narrowing in on a good method to finish things out. More news on this to come.

So, I suppose I'm saying that I might not post anything, but let's pray that Lara Croft's further adventures through Right of Passage Iisland are not further stymied so I can tell you all about it.

Your homework is to go to a comic book site --any comic book site-- and read about actual comic book news that comes out of the San Diego Comic Con. If you have to ask what I mean by this it means that you read far too much Entertainment Weekly.

EVOh Yes

So the internet is still aflutter over this past weekend's Evolution (EVO for short) fighting game tournament. That Hakan fight! That Justin Wong comeback! Waitadarnminute, someone ran the SFIV finals with Gen?! Priceless.

EVO has it really figured out, and you have to hand it to Mr. Wizard and the crowd he runs with for not only starting a fighting game tournament way back in the early 2000s when nobody was playing fighting games, but keeping it alive for when the genre would return en vogue. This has given EVO a unique opportunity to not only be a battleground for the biggest and best players, but also a sort of semi-conference for the non-competitive fan. Panel discussions take place. Dealer tables are on exhibition. Major game announcements. If you really dig fighting games, EVO is your annual summer pilgrimage to Mecca.

What I found most interesting this year was the unveiling of Ultra Street Fighter IV. While the internet at large knew that SFIV was getting another round of tweaks in the near future, I doubt that a lot of folks saw the addition of five extra characters to an already loaded game coming. I call that a nice package for $15 DLC, but I didn't used to think so. No, this kind of shit used to get my no-nos in a twist.

Here's why: Capcom, smarmy minx that it tends to be, is notorious for nickel and dime-ing its customers. When Street Fighter II was success, they made updates for it. When Resident Evil was at its height, they played the spinoff game until it was close to irrelevance. The point is, Capcom is a great company that has a history of not leave well enough alone. A further update to Street Fighter IV, now four years old on the console side, looks to be the same thing. Former Capcom employee and fighting game czar Seth Killian even said of the v.2012 update that they were done messing with the game, which (by no fault of his) turns out to be a bald-faced lie. So why flip sides and decide that it's a fine plan?

Two things, really: a little honesty and a whole lot of common sense, which are two things that I appreciate more than bagels and coffee in bed. Capcom has not been on its best legs over the past few years, and the last week has shown it. A company restructuring is taking place, and US senior VP Christian Svensson opted to resign amidst the round of layoffs. That could mean a ton of things, but my personal favorite close-to-the-truth conjecture is that lots of past passion projects for the company (like an under performing Darkstalkers rerelease) just didn't pan out like they thought they would, and a company rejiggering will halt development of extensions of those projects, like oft-rumored sequels. It's sad, but that's business. Plus, larger developers and publishers have to get some things finished for the new consoles that are going to drop by the end of the year, so they don't really have a lot of time and money to toss around.

Case in point, this tweet by Street Fighter series producer (and loveable kook) Yoshinori Ono:

I don't have R&D budget and staff who they're just only make USF4.RT @MC_Odd: @warmlettuce Are you secretly working on a SF V for next gen?
— Yoshinori Ono (@Yoshi_OnoChin) July 15, 2013

Straight from the horse's mouth, the company just doesn't have the cash or staff to make a full sequel to one of their largest franchises. Still sad? Sure, but again, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Still, they are throwing resources at updating a four year old game, and it will fundamentally change it. All characters will have tweaks to their move sets, and five new characters (even though 80% of them are taken straight from another game) drastically alters the landscape of any fighting game, especially if even one or two of them is accepted as tournament-level competitive by the fan base. To me, this is a sign that the developer is going through some hard times, but they haven't turned their back on their customers. Sure, it still seems a little dumb from a casual perspective that they're adding on to a game that will be five years old when Ultra finally arrives, but from a different perspective, Ono's transparency buys him a little bit of good will. At least from me, anyway.

Today's homework is for you to read The Psychology of Steam's Summer Sale over on the The Psychology of Video Games (which is a website I've only become familiar with recently). I was just having a conversation with a friend about the horn of plenty that Steam becomes when the weather turns oppressively hot. This turns out to be eerily timely. Stay tuned for more Tomb Dater later this week. I think so, anyway...

Booze Quest

Yesterday, I decided to hunker down and play the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn beta. That's way too much name to type out. From now on, you should just know what I'm saying when I say it.

Anyway, after all of that complaining on how difficult it was to start it, I felt like I should really put the work in to find out if it's worth it. Normally, I probably wouldn't do that. I don't have limitless time to fight with beta keys and sign-ins and other hooey. I've got enough stuff on my plate, and plenty of other games to keep me busy. ARR, though, is all part of Square Enix's fascinating larger character study; they are a company struggling to maintain their greatness by fits and tantrums of quality coupled with many a foot-shooting. They're the complex antihero that has become as difficult to love as it is to hate. I used to think they represented the Lucasfilm of the gaming business for their incessant need to replicate and repackage their goods while strip mining the nostalgia of their faithful. But for as much goodness that's produced and then how promptly they plant their collective head back their ass, I'm starting to think that they're the industry's Don Draper. I'll have to give it more thought.

So, naturally, I decided to play ARR drunk.

It was fitting. After all, the first few times I toyed with the beta, I didn't really get very far and, frankly, it was all very same-y. Pretty as it is (and it really is), the early going isn't that far removed from the structure of MMO mainstays like Warcraft: lots of fetch quests, plenty of "kill five of these" missives, a few dungeons, etc. For some reason, I must have felt the need to spice things up with a bottle of vodka and impending Monday morning shame. It certainly wasn't bad when I was playing it before, so it wasn't like I was going to have a lousy time. With my history of boozing with other MMOs has proven that I don't make the best team decisions, either, so even though it was a calculated move to try to enhance the experience, I knew that it wasn't such a great plan overall. Oh well, whatever.

It turns out that "enhancing" it wasn't even necessary, because by the time I was done with it, I was having a good time playing ARR. Good enough, even that I have some post-beta test sadness that lead to my searching for message boards this morning, which is also pretty rare. The odds of me shelling out fifteen clams a month to play it when it actually releases are still pretty long, but it's shaping up to be a pretty decent MMO for guys like me that don't often play them any more.

This praise revolves around the smart uses of classes in the game. Instead of picking a class when you roll a character initially, you can change your class --called jobs in Final Fantasies-- on a whim as long as you've unlocked it with a short quest and have a weapon in your inventory that's appropriate. Want to be the chief damage dealer? Pull out those brass knuckles. Does your group need a damage-soaking tank? Equip your sword and shield. You can generalize or specialize how you see fit, as long as you know up front that all classes start at the bottom at level 1.

But that's what I found most fun. I created a catman Pugilist initially. Since this is a beta and I really only like solo playing these games (counterproductive to a lot of content for stuff like this, I know), I wasn't really planning on trying any multiclassing because I just wanted to tear through the story content. After a few hours of doing just that yesterday, I took the plunge and picked up some Gladiator (tank) gear to see how it worked. Since you don't do quests over again that you've already completed, I had a darn good time figuring out the most efficient way to power level Fuglypants' into a respectable fighting state without them. If you're savvy with ARR's various monster hunting and open group battle opportunities, it took very little time to go from a low level chump to a character that parties could rely on to sponge up damage when necessary. I never really go for crafting abilities in these games (the time I spent mining copper in Warcraft are hours that I'll never get back), but I'm kind of psyched for the next beta phase to roll around so I can give armor forging a shot.

But there's certainly a downside to this, and it's my chosen ark of gaming choice. Great as it is to play an MMO on my huge beautiful television, it's just not made to be played effectively with a game pad. Exploring and fighting are fine at low level; your shoulder buttons help cycle through decks of commands, and it's serviceable, if anything. Communicating, though, is a nightmare without a keyboard. I was in a dungeon last night with a group of players that I couldn't effectively plan tactics with because I was hunting and pecking at letters on the PlayStation's dashboard keys. Lucky for me, these weren't particularly involved dungeons, but when I step back and look at the larger picture, it feels as though playing on a console is great if you like soloing, but PC will be the platform of choice for those that play well with others.

So yeah. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. I'm already sick of typing all of that, but not quite sick of the game. Next time: sober (maybe)!

Tomb Dater: The Hour of Power

"Alright. It's been an hour or so. I think I'm done."

It's a common refrain, now; the steam whistle to end our shift on the island. It's a paraphrase, on her part, for "this was fun, but I have other things to do. It's time for me to do them." At first when we began the game, it was routinely followed up with the permission to keep playing if I wanted, and that I didn't need to wait for her if I was enjoying it. But that wasn't the point, I would reply, and, eventually, she stopped suggesting it. Now, it's a precedent. If Tomb Raider would be played by a wife and her husband, it would be done so in roughly one hour chunks.

Her side of things is perfectly logical: she reads every night before bed. Often times, it's either preceded or followed by something streamed from Netflix on a tablet. While we don't have children, getting home from work, working out, and cooking/ eating dinner leaves little time for a singular activity when there are daily routines that people prefer to keep. Gaming like this is still relatively untested for her, and judging by our television-watching habits, there are still other things that she would rather be doing over adventuring in the jungle with an early 20th century machine gun. Last night, it was three episodes of Archer that took precedent over immediately starting TR after having something to eat.

My side of things is unreasonably skewed: this is straight up insane. Of course I'm enjoying myself, because this is my thing. If you're having a good time, why not just keep playing? There are tombs to raid here. If I were doing this whole thing solo, I would have finished the game twice over by now. After coming home from work, working out, and cooking/ eating dinner, too, my preferred pastime involves a controller in my hand. Aren't we sharing this?

Of course, none of that was said aloud, because that would be a dick thing to do. I have a feeling that she's well aware of my thoughts, though, but this gave me something of a pause a couple of weeks ago after our first few times firing it up. Playing it this way is causing some reflection on how I ingest games and how I feel about them. This blog, I suppose, is part of that, but the understood agreement that we're enjoying this game on her timetable has been nothing but a positive. A frustrating positive sometimes, sure, but I'm beginning to take away a far richer experience for it.

About seven or eight years ago, after I first landed a full-time job at the place I'm at now, I decided to go through Final Fantasy X for something like the third time. On off days from the gym, I would get home promptly at 5:30, cook something easy to eat in front of the TV, and play it until it was roughly 12:30 or later. That was 7-8 hours of playing, a binge by most accounts. As I grew older and gained a few more responsibilities it diminished, but I'll still play roughly 3-4 hours of games on any given night unless I've got plans. To me, this amount of time isn't unreasonable because gaming is probably my chief hobby. Forcing myself to curb that, at least for this one specific game, by roughly a third is difficult. But stepping back and looking at the numbers is giving me some perspective. There have been evenings where I've hopped into bed and read more, or watched more movies, or even done some drawing -something I haven't done consistently in years. The limitations placed upon one activity have reignited interest in others. That can only be a good thing.

As far as TR itself is concerned, it's not for the setting and tone alone do I keep making Lost references. By playing the game for only an hour or two a week, I've found that I'm taking it in like episodes of a great series. I'm always wondering who or what is behind the Bermuda Triangle-like trappings of the island as well as the motives of its inhabitants. When we finish a session playing it, I want to go back to it as soon as I can, but not because that's my routine, but because in measured amounts I remain fascinated by all of it. Outside of TR, I'm finally playing Borderlands 2. It's a good game; far better than its predecessor, too (which I liked a lot). But I'm going through it in heaping spoonfuls and not manageable bites, and I'm just not psyched to get home and turn it on, no matter how much I like it when I finally do. I used to think that it was because Borderlands 2, or any other game was just, well, any other game. Playing games every night to completion and moving on to the next one was my routine.

I guess I need some common refrains, too.

Tomb Dater: Quick Death

Like the timed press of a yellow face button when being forced off a cliff, my shared marital adventures with the Tomb Raider reboot was saved, and seemingly at the last possible second. After last week's post, it really looked as if the universe had righted itself and that all video game playing in my home was again squarely in my hands. But behold my bemusement when she suggested that we turn on the Wonder Machine and get back to the faux-Lost episode that Sorority Croft has found herself in. I suppose that makes the title of this particular post a bit on the misleading side.

But it's not. We need to take a quick second to talk about that Thing That Everyone Hates (today's, anyway), and by that, I mean quick time events, or QTEs. Now, I'm sure that you, the God of War/ Shenmue/ any-other-action-game player that you happen to be, are quite familiar with the concept of the dreaded QTE. Something happens onscreen, usually of the more "cinematic" variety, and a button prompt breaks any sort of fourth wall the game may have built to explicitly tell you that you should press this button to get that result. Think about when your bald, screaming Greek butcher hops to a cyclops' shoulders. If you're not mashing that O button, well, that singular eyeball isn't going to tear itself out now, will it?

The QTE has had quite the bell curve of popularity and acceptance since its widespread gaming infection in the late 1990s (yes, they've been around in one form or another since much earlier). It became the de facto way of "playing" a cut scene not too long ago, which caused many players and games writers to kind of throw up their hands. Other criticisms leveled against them are that they crash the momentum of action sequences, making a breakneck pace grind to a halt while you look at your controller in bafflement. Personally, I find them obtrusive and irritating, especially in games like Tomb Raider where they pop up out of seemingly nowhere and lead the game to a failure state.

This has become a shared problem, which is why I'm bringing this up. The wife, she hates them with an almost impressive passion. She walks through a jungle and a wolf pins her down. She guides Lara over a bridge, and a thug pushes her over. For someone that hasn't been playing games and isn't used to seeing these things, it's a bullshit bait and switch. I've already espoused the problems with the uninitiated learning the combat mechanics. Couple that with the a looming threat of death if you don't hit a button, or sequence of them at the right time and things can be pretty aggravating.

When they first showed up in the game (which I can't even properly recall since it's been so long since we started it), I caught myself mumbling aloud, "they're still doing these?" It was legitimate surprise. I really thought the mounting distaste for these things would remind developers that games don't need these anymore. Sure, they were fine for a moment, but that moment passed. Yes, that's just my opinion getting the better of me, but poop on a game that requires me to hit the shoulder buttons and a direction to jump off a flying bat (or whatever) when I was just doing back-flipping slices with my giant chain swords a second ago. Most of the time, this stuff just doesn't make any sense. Then again, Kingdom Hearts sill exists in the state that it's in, so I guess I'll never get what I want.

Ok, I know that I've been ragging on TR in all of these pieces so far, and that may not seem fair for a game that, really, I dig with a shovel. I'd like to remind you again that these have simply been my observations of having played portions of it with my wife, the ungamer. Sooner or later, some gushing will happen, I'm sure of it.

Your homework for the day is Gamasutra's feature article on the ethics of free-to-play games. It's a thinker. Also somewhat timely since my earlier piece on the recently-released Tekken Revolution.

Tomb Dater: The Handover

On Thursday, we hit the proverbial wall.

Earlier that morning, a message was sent to my main squeeze while we were at work. It simply read "Tomb Raider tonight." It was not a question, but it wasn't me being forceful, either, just my very direct way of gauging here interest at this point since we'd barely even brought the game up in conversation in roughly a week. She was agreeable to some pre-weekend jungle adventuring, but that alone didn't answer the question.

The telltale sign was when we actually played it. She was content to pass the controller to me to kick things off, which included about ten or fifteen minutes of tooling around so we could become readjusted to the control scheme. I screwed around in the village section for a little bit trying to figure what to do next, and after a brief cut scene that rewarded us with a climbing ax, we raided our first tomb, and were greeted with the first of the game's fun little physics puzzles. Nature, the cruel minx that it is, decided it was time for me to take a quick break, so I relinquished the controller to my lady and promptly hit the can.

When I returned a few minutes later, I was a little saddened by the controller falling back into my lap right away. I played a little while longer, mostly just messing around in the environment before moving Lara further into the story and on toward a bad guy-infested radio compound. After a few fights with the island-dwellers that stood guard there, I tried to hand the reigns back over. "No. I don't like the fighting," she said. And with that, it was clear that The Great Experiment was failing.

So what happened here? My first reaction is that, well, she's not a gamer, and my earlier thoughts about neophyte players having a hard time navigating the complex controls of a 3D action game were right on the money. While I'm sure she'd be better with some practice (she even joked about it a few minutes after turning down another turn), the barrier for entry was found to be a little too high, and she had become discouraged. Part of that may be due to a person's individual personality, I guess, but it's not unreasonable to surmise that the older people get, the less likely they are to put forth that much effort into something that they do with their personal time unless they're immediately good at it. I probably wouldn't want to spend an entire day playing hockey if I was just taught to skate and shoot the puck that morning.

Should I blame Crystal Dynamics, or one of the console manufacturers (we were playing it on 360, incidentally) for this? I'm going to say no, but with some reservations. Tomb Raider is a very well known property, and every entertainment industry from comics to television to film try to use reboots of franchises as assured ways of attracting people unfamiliar with their larger concepts. While I don't necessarily find the game hard (especially, again, because we're playing on the lowest difficulty setting), if Tomb Raider's primary motivation was to attract new people into the larger realm of video games, it could have been much simpler. But it isn't. If anything, this TR is meant to cater to both a casual and hardcore crowd, at least I thought it would. Apparently, this casual crowd is bowing out early.

Of course, the possibility exists that she just doesn't like playing the game, which is pretty feasible. I'm going to politely suggest again that we give it another shot sometime this week, but Lara and me are walking that tightrope.

Your homework --which will be from now through the next 12 months-- is to download and listen to Retronauts Vol. III Ep. I, which is now loose upon the internet. I hope you contributed to its Kickstarter campaign, but even if you didn't, you're still able to reap the benefit.