Let's Talk About Last Week

The last seven days have been a typhoon of emotion for me, and for the goofiest possible reasons.

After about a week and a half in the incubator, USGamer published my fighting game article about the (somewhat) notorious 3rd Strike toll, ufcgym. They really liked it, those sassy USGamer editors; traffic looks like it was good, there were 20+ reactions to the story on the site, and comments were generally positive. I suppose it helps that I plugged it on the Facebook 3rd Strike pages and to my other FGC buddies, but I'm not above that.

Having not been published for over a year, it was pretty thrilling to be back at it after my little hiatus. Actually, it's always a bit of a jolt when you see your name attached to work that you're proud of, and this article was definitely something I was happy with. A bit more journalistic than my usual stuff, I actually didn't think it was going to be a very good fit for USG, but I'm definitely happy that they didn't see it that way. But things just kept getting better. EIC (and cool guy) Jeremy Parish paid me a hell of a compliment on Twitter and even followed me as the week went on (which is funny because I almost never do the tweets). Kat Bailey, the editor that I was working with for the story, was very encouraging for future stories. Keep them coming, she said.

So I gave it some thought, and pitched her a story that had been picking at my brain for months. After growing up as Catholic as a Catholic can Catholic, I decided to write a story about how hard it was to reconcile those beliefs when most video games treat organized religion --and specifically Christianity-- as antagonistic at best. It was sort of nebulous until I actually had some words down, but knowing that the Dragon Age games were a little more even handed and level headed with their portrayal of faith, I thought I had something there if I could get in touch with the BioWare guys. The editors dug it, and I was off to the races.

Blam. One in the can and another assignment ready to go. I rewarded my good fortune with a little eBay adventuring, finally pulling the trigger on a Master System game exclusive to Europe that I had been eyeballing for years (as the price steadily rose). Pride in a job well done.

So, there I was. 75% of this story pounded it out in an afternoon. A little back and forth with some PR reps from BioWare, and I was just waiting on an email with some questions answered. Slam dunk.

Then this happened.

I was sick to my stomach. The exact same story taking the exact same angle. While clearly written from the perspective of someone in his 20s (what I had written was definitely from the perspective of me in my 30s), it was close enough to a duplicate as there could ever be. Even using Final Fantasy X as a clear example. I was incredulous. I read it and reread it, beside myself with one part fury and three parts amazement. I talked it over with friends, and thought that the best move was to bail, even though I could have taken the Q/A with the BioWare writers and spun it into a straight interview. In good conscience, I just couldn't redo the same story and gamble on being accused of plagiarism.

This ate at me the whole weekend. Years ago, at another site I freelanced with, I would pitch stories that were frequently turned down only to have them wind up being written by an in-house staffer a month later. Since freelance games writers are more expendable napkins, I never called them out on it, just kept pitching them stories they would either mangle or rework for their own teams, and it pissed me off to no end. Now, this couldn't possibly have been what was happening, but those same feelings can't help but come back in a situation like this. I wrote back to USG to let them know what was up, and they were glad to accept a new pitch for March, but the wind got knocked out of me, so I didn't have anything off the top of my head to throw their way.

In the realm of huge deals, this is kind of low on the list. Our Jung-ian group think got the better of me, and some other writer someplace else had the same idea I had. Ho hum. I spent a good chunk of yesterday in a bar with a laptop trying to cook up some other leads, and I still have some work to do and inspiration to gather.

But, man, that Sega game can't get here fast enough.

Ahoy, January

Another year, another year. These things sure happen like clockwork, don't they? Life's been busy these past few months. Bought a house, taught a class, stopped writing, etc. Some of those things were fine. Others, less so. The whole house-buying thing was pretty stressful (like everybody says), but the payoff has been worth it. Sooner or later, I'll have a whole room to stash my stuff instead of pockets of space inside of a tiny apartment. Not being able to write, though? Pretty lousy, but let's not kid ourselves; I had a lot on my plate in the fall (and a lot more in the hopper now) and that can get in the way of writing for personal fulfillment, but I've been a little lazy these past few months.

So, what do you say we clean out some cobwebs? Like last January, here's a brief list of what I played these last few months in order of which I can remember them:

Catherine: See, the funny thing about Catherine is that I really wanted to play it, but I never wanted it in my house. The marketing for the game was a little on the salacious side, mostly having to do with the cover art it's accompanied promo materials. Now, my spicy wife is not a judgmental person and I'm certainly no prude, but even though I knew that the game wasn't that pervy from everything I heard about it, I never jumped that hurdle. Lucky for me, I have friend that will buy any video game if it's cheap enough, and he loaned me a copy of it roughly eight months ago. So, yeah. The irony that I never wanted to buy it because I though it might be sleezy never mattered because it sat firmly in my home for close to a year unplayed is not lost on me.

This same friend loaned me a stack of other games in October, so in an effort to clear the backlog of stuff that I didn't actually own, I bum rushed through all of them between December and last week. Of them, Catherine was the undisputed champ. A great, complex puzzle game and goofball anti-dating sim rolled into one, it was the unholy union of two genres I don't really care about made into something kind of brilliant. Sadly, it was the last of this round of borrowed games that I went through, so I forced myself to ratchet down the difficulty to Easy so I could finish it, but this might also wind up being the rare video game that I end up buying anyway because of how unique the whole thing was. I'm all talk, so we'll see about that, but still. I call that a good recommendation.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: This is Catherine's counterpoint in just about every way. An action game made by Platinum set in the Metal Gear Solid universe, it is both absurdly precise in its combat and stupidly verbose in everything else; a combination that made me want to turn it off for good more than once. Still weirdly satisfying until right at the end of the game which featured a final boss that was close to being another deal-breaker. I get that action games like this, especially ones made by the mad scientists behind Bayonetta and Godhand, want you to have intimate knowledge of their systems and mechanics and be able to prove that with a challenging final encounter. What I don't get is the spike in difficulty from tough-but-fair to do-this-right-the-first-time-or-tough-shit. This was a late night that should have been an early evening. To me, Platinum's games have always been like a glass of wine: I'll drink one if it's in front of me, but I'll never order it myself. Revengeance is a stupid name, but it was an ok game. And I'm Platinum-ed out for a while.

Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes: Is there any way to make Master Miller shut up? This is a serious question.

Tales of Graces F: Holy shit. This game was actually pretty good, and nobody is as shocked as I am. For all of the flak I can throw at JRPGs, this wound up being a good time. FULL DISCLOSURE: I skipped probably 85% of the cutscenes, and during the ones that I did let play I was probably fiddling with Spotify or something, so this might have played a significant factor in my enjoyment, but fun is fun. I didn't wind up completing the post-game epilogue before giving it back to my pal, and I kind of regret it. That's ok, though, because...

Dragon Age: Inquisition: Pretty much the first game to come out for current-gen systems that I couldn't wait to buy, it was my sole purpose for the month after it was released. My first run clocked in at some big dumb number like 85 hours, but being a nutcase, I cranked up the challenge to Nightmare and started over immediately after finishing with a new character so I could get that equally dumb platinum trophy. Truth time: I was a little underwhelmed, even after all of that.

Ok, I loved The Gaslight Anthem's breakout album, The '59 Sound. It was unquestionably the best record I had heard that year, and I eagerly awaited everything that came after it. Of course, nothing will ever come close. Being the first album I had heard from the band, and something of a renewal of my vows with the fickle mistress that is post punk, it was everything that I needed in my musical life without knowing it. Great works of art blindside you that way. Their next album, American Slang, went noticeably mid-tempo. This wasn't a bad choice, but it wasn't exactly what I was expecting, and ultimately wound up being a letdown because it didn't re-bottle that lightning from the previous record. Everything they've released since has been a mixed bag of genius and garbage. Would I feel this way if I had heard Handwritten first? I can't say. Dragon Age: Origins, then, was my '59 Sound. It came out at the tail end of a particularly great year as far as my personal gaming tastes are concerned (Street Figher IV! Borderlands! Demon's Souls, for God's sake!), and was so consuming that I spent hundreds of hours digging through every square inch of content. Dragon Age II has gotten a lot of poop on the internet for being a lesser game, and it definitely was. But, like American Slang, it did its own thing for better or for worse. There are certainly things to hate about it, but there was that much more to love. DA2 is not a terrible video game, but it would never have filled the hole in my heart for more of the exact same thing --which I know that I don't really want anyway-- no matter how astounding it could have been.

Inquisition, then, is actually that kind of astounding. The characters are great, the world is bafflingly big, and the whole things is stunning to look at. But the magic isn't there anymore; at least, not like it was. Still a great game by most means, and I certainly have the hours put into it to prove that I must have enjoyed it somehow.

I took a break from games for a little over a week after it was over and I obtained the platinum trophy to ponder it. I wondered if this was indicative of something larger. Is this it, I would posit. Is the thrill really gone? Of course I went back, but the older I get, the more this gives me pause. It's hard to be as excited for new experiences as I was as a younger man, and I have become more interested in preserving that which gave me pleasure a lot more often than I used to. The fact that I'm still regularly playing Third Strike every week with friends (gentlemen's game that it is) is proof of this all of these years later. For now, it's nice to know that I'll always have interesting things to play, whether they're new games that come down the line or old stuff that will rekindle my interest in the medium. There's comfort in that.

I've been forcing myself to play through Resonance of Fate over the last week or so on the recommendations of the internet as a whole. It is not without its problems, but I think that, now in its final two thirds, I've hit enough of a stride that I get why people like it. It's the kind of RPG I would have been all over about 10 years ago. Now, it's a bit of a chore, but I'm finding myself perversely happy that games like this still exist. This past weekend, my friend and I met and exchanged the usual stack of games that we've finished, and now I have Shadow of Mordor, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and Darksiders II waiting for me when it's finished. I'm not expecting any of them to really blow my hair back, but hey.

It's a new year. You never know.

Summoning

Last night, after much hemming and hawing, I finally began to play Shin Megami Tensei IV. Why the long wait since I mentioned starting it July? Mostly because I'm an idiot, apparently. I only wanted to play through the introduction and found myself, four hours later, finally tearing myself away from it because the 3DS battery was giving me the blinking red Morse code of "turn it off and go to bed." Even now, several hours removed, I want to run right over to my handheld wonder machine and get back to demon fusing.

That's not a feeling I get very often anymore. I find that it's probably because I'm getting older and have had enough video game experiences at this point that very little surprises me. So why the strange excitement to play (and, therefore, expound upon) SMTIV? Maybe I'm like Don Draper and only like the beginnings of things (in that non-infidelity sort of way), I guess. Everyone likes new games that they just start, I suppose. But when I think about it, and remember my mindset last night, it seems as though this new(ish) 3DS JRPG is scratching an itch that I've been having for months now.

Myself, I'm something of a lapsed JRPG apologist. For years I would defend them to anyone whom would listen, and if you took a peak at my library of games, you'll probably find a 60/40 ratio of this specific genre vs. a mishmash of everything else. But the vast majority of them are from the PS1-PS2 era --something of an Eastern role playing Age of Fire. It represented the better part of 10 years of my life where I was learning how to clearly identify the aspects of what made video games good and bad. Nostalgia aside, the trajectory of qualities I appreciated in the games within the genre has followed a slow, steady descent that's basically hit a subbasement sewer system in this current generation. Am I saying that gameplay for a JRPG these days is necessarily bad? No, I enjoyed playing Eternal Sonata and Final Fantasy X-2 on the merits of their combat alone. But as the last 10-15 years have gone by, the writing commonly found in these games began to bottom out, and as I get older, I cannot, in any way, justify sinking the time required to play one of them with a story that basically talks down to me. I have felt this way since finishing Final Fantasy XII; not the best, or even most compelling plot in the series, but it was one told in such a way that my intelligence and good taste weren't insulted. Since then, it's been a rapidly drying sea of pandering idiocy.

2009, then, was the year that I basically threw in the towel. BioWare released Dragon Age: Origins, which finally gave me the interactive storytelling I never knew I wanted, and Atlus published FromSoft's Demon's Souls --perhaps my favorite game of this generation-- that stripped away what had felt like unnecessary bullshit for years. Both were meaty, satisfying experiences from different sides of the RPG continuum that, essentially, ruined the traditional Dragon Quest/ Final Fantasy need that fueled not only a large chunk of my video game buying, but almost embarrassingly bigger chunks of my free time.

Last night, as I am wont to do around this time of year, I had a serious jones to play some Final Fantasy XII, but I can't; my (second) backward-compatible PlayStation 3 died on me about a year ago, and I'm stuck looking at around 50 games that are basically doing me as much good as a pet rock. Because I couldn't think of anything else to do with myself, in went SMTIV, and back came the memories. It was a tidal wave that I don't want to stop, and at this point, my expectations for the rest of the game are so high that it can only possibly let me down.

But it's only been about 4 hours, so who knows? Either way, I'm more excited to find out than I have been in years.

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.