Tomb Dater: An End Has a Start

Yes, this is coming a little late since we finished the game over a week ago, but bear with me, internets. I wound up having to teach a class this fall, and Life of Pi won't read and annotate itself, apparently.

The final hours (but not the Final Hours) of Tomb Raider's reboot were played with both the mentality and head of steam reserved for a Big Ten college fullback with his eyes on a pro career. Once my wife found herself engrossed enough into Lara Croft and co.'s plight to quell the whims of an angry demigod and ditch the Pacific island, the game was played in long stretches and with very little in the way of exploring. Clearly, she could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and if we stumbled across the extra tomb/ puzzle or two along the way, fine, but there was palpable interest in an English girl finder her swerve as opposed to digging up GPS receivers and Edo-era helmets and wallets. I hopped along with much enthusiasm.

The downside? Playing in shifts gave way to playing toward strengths. She liked exploring, not fighting, and when cadres of samurai and island mooks started to fill the screen, the controller fell quickly in my lap to be the enforcer I evidently am. I'm actually chalking this up as a minor gripe, all things considered, when I consider the grand scheme of things. Be with me here for a second.

In the early game, it was most obvious that the biggest hurdle for someone coming to modern, 3-dimensional gaming for what might be their first time (in this case, my wife) was dealing with both a controller with more buttons than they might be accustomed to navigating their fingers around and a second stick on it that gave limited, though fundamentally important, control of perspective. By themselves, this is a pretty high barrier of entry. Had their been no combat at all, even at its easiest setting, a neophyte to modern console game methodology would have plenty to do. Sure, this toothless experience would probably get boring after a few hours without any sense of threat, but it would still serve to kind of ease someone in to the Tomb Raiders and Uncharteds of the world. Part of me, in all honesty, is happy that games like this do exist in their way, if only for that kind of population. It would have to have a bigger hook than "run around and look at stuff" to keep someone like me interested, but I casually suggested to my wife that she play something like The Unfinished Swan if she were curious about a relatively combat-free experience. I guess I would have liked it if she became more accustomed to the combat now that we've decided to play a little of Uncharted 3 to prepare for The Last of Us (both at her suggestion), but just because I was the only one in the room racking up the body count doesn't mean that all of this wasn't a positive experience.

Until that let down of an ending. But outside of all of the fun we had with the game, the opportunity to play it together, and the fascination of observing someone that does not play video games as a regular hobby, I'll let the dopey "I'm not going home" denouement slide this time.

Your homework this week is to read Chris Kohler's damning of Final Fantasy (it's two worthwhile opinion pieces). REMEMBER: Your gut might tell you to disagree with him, but Kohler's arguments are sound. Don't be an internet dick and yell at him. If disagreement is what you want over discourse, you can head on over to just about any other website for their reactions.

To other things of note: first, and for whatever reason, this blog gets the most consistent traffic from Russia. To which I say "Привет, всем!" Second, and speaking of traffic, I got my highest hit count in months from my time playing Skyrim while listening to the jukebox of my subconscious. I'm about a third of the way through Bioshock Infinite, and I'm thinking I'll just list music that pops in the ol' noggin' whenever it comes up and make a series out of it. Then again, I might be a little too far along for that. The suspense!

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.

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.

Fury!

Do you want to know what I thought of Project X Zone? In all honesty, you probably don't. Regardless, GamesRadar has run my review of it, and the unwashed masses are particularly unhappy with what I've written if the comments are a fine sampling of our collective reasoning. My favorites are the ones that think that I don't exist. I guess, for all you know, I might not. Go ahead and collect the pieces of your blown mind. There's some on that chair across from you.

I don't really think I need to defend what I've written. Honestly, what's the point? I found it to be a shallow strategy game that looked pretty when it counted. If that's your thing, well, it's your cash, friend. I do like the fact that people are a little huffy about me wrecking PXZ's Metacritic curve, though. The internet gets pissed about anything, and I am the high priest of ruining your day because of it.

Except when they don't, and by that I mean today's homework: This spectacular write up of Christy Marx. You may not have heard of her, but she had a hand in shaping your childhood one way or another. Polygon has done a darn good job with their feature articles since they launched, most of them being insightful developer interviews or deep dives into the process of games that work and the evolution of projects that may never be released. Like anything you find on the internet, it isn't all riveting stuff. The ones that work, though, really work. Good on them for building such a back catalog of great content so soon into the site's life.

I actually took a pass on weekend work this week, but more will come soon, hopefully. Some Tomb Raider was played last night, and we'll get back to talking about it tomorrow or Monday.

Tomb Dater: Part One

My wife rarely plays games. While there were some brief drunken hijinks that occurred just after our Wii purchase, they're starting to feel like a thousand years ago now that the world sits on the eve of an E3 that will really show the mettle of Sony and Microsoft's new hardware (we hope). The Tomb Raider reboot, though, had my lady's interest curiously piqued. I am not a traditional TR fan. For as good as the games may have been at one point, I've always had a hard time being pandered to as a male with an anatomically impossible main character. I'm not going to launch into a tirade or prove how enlightened I am as a male gamer, but I can honestly say that Lara Croft never really did it for me. My main squeeze, though, saw things a little differently. A tomboy, my wife seems to have looked at TR's main character as a respectable tough chick, one that the video game industry just didn't have enough of. This isn't an uncommon response to the Croft character, it seems, and from what I know of my wife's taste in action, tough chicks are the only chicks that matter. I can get behind that.

So a pact was struck that we will play the game together. It took a little time to get started; having really no interest in purchasing the game we decided to rent it over a weekend and blast our way through it just after launch. Since it's the beginning of June, you can rightly assume that it didn't happen that way. Long story short, though, we finally happened on a copy the other night and began playing it, incrementally, as a two parts of a romantic whole. One of them gets bored very easily. Over the next several days (weeks?), you will be the happy recipient of its documentation.

We decided to start the game with the combat set to the Easy setting, which is something I rarely do as a seasoned player, but it made perfect sense for our overall enjoyment. She, after all, sort of sees the game as something of an interactive movie from what I can surmise (which, so far, it is), so the thought of further frustrating herself with difficult battles was off the table from jump street. I am totally behind this. As a non-gamer, I want her to have a good time and, hopefully, find the experience enjoyable enough to play something else with me in the future or to ultimately seek out games that will interest her down the road. Realistically, my hopes aren't exactly sky high for that outcome, but I at least want the two of us to go through this game front to back together, and if less challenging enemy throwdowns are part of that, then that's A-ok.

Besides, I knew for a fact that this wouldn't be the real challenge for her anyway. After about the first ten minutes following the intro cut scene, it hit her in the face like brick wall: the player controls the camera, and the game expects it of them constantly. While, to be fair, the first 30-45 minutes involve Lara haplessly wandering through a cave in a straight line, the few puzzles found inside of it make it necessary to adjust the camera to see the full extent of the environment, something that you and me may be keenly aware of after years of dual-analog controller handling, but frustrating for her to wrap her head around. "This must be irritating for you," was a phrase she would occasionally repeat when stumped about our next course of action. I'm not going to lie, it did a little, but I'm sympathetic. I'm aware that I've been at this a long time, and I just try to imagine my mother, or an uncle, or anybody else that isn't conditioned to knowing the right stick will swing their perspective around as they see fit and get it. I'm pretty sure that this will still be our biggest hurdle going forward, but I'm optimistic that if she gives it some time, eventually it will just click. She's a smart lady.

I've often thought about this scenario over the past few years. Not necessarily with my wife, but with anyone not programmed with the knowledge of how to necessarily move your hands on a controller with 15 buttons and two analog sticks in concert with what's happening in front of you. Like, say, if you transported Gunpei Yokoi from 1975 forty years in to the future and told him to play Uncharted. I doubt he'd be able to hang, and he was a certifiable genius, so I wouldn't expect people today unaccustomed to several years of this kind of gaming to be able to jump right in, either. Often, my wife would tell me that current-, and even recent-past gen controllers simply had too many buttons. It intimidated her, and rightly so. This is why Nintendo made a gold mine off of Wii Sports; they simplified the control so that everyone could play. I can't help but agree with the fact that overcoming the Fear of Many Buttons is is a large barrier of entry for modern game consoles, and I'm very happy with my lady's mustering of courage so that she may overcome this obstacle to play as, from what we can tell early, a tough chick. A hell of a start, I'd say.