Thoughts On: Video Games

Musings on a few things, collected.

Just beat Mass Effect. (Sci-fi RPG by Bioware for the 360.) It is very awesome in a number of effects. It is a Western RPG, which gets a lot of points right there. (Boo FF!) Also, it is in space, and has a sweet plot. (Mostly, sometimes.) And you can wander off the plot at any time to rumble around unexplored planets with a tank.

The tank has jump jets.

It has problems, though. The inventory system was created by a devil, from hell. In your inventory, items are listed linearly, divided by item type: so there's one list for pistols, another list for armor, etc. This isn't so bad, though it can get annoying when you have fifteen pistols and are looking for the best one to equip. Same with upgrades (little doo-dads that you can tack onto items to make them work better/fire radioactive rounds/etc) - they're listed linearly, which can be a pain once you have a fair variety of them lying around, but, again, isn't utterly unbearable.

The single worst aspect of the game, though, has to be the selling interface. One can sell items to merchants, of course - but here, items aren't divided by type. So every time you want to sell an item, you must scroll through every item you own. They're sorted from lowest-level to highest, which can help a little, but it also breaks up item types (level 4 sniper rifles are in one part of the list, then much further down are level 5s, then further yet are level 6s...) making it hard to sell a particular item. And - well, the latest Pokemon games (to cite an example from a rather different RPG) also suffered from linear inventories that were annoying to deal with, but at least they provided various options to scroll through the list swiftly. (There was a wheel you could spin, and when you selected an item to move it through the list, it scrolled twice as fast as normal.)

Mass Effect slows down when you're scrolling continuously.

But seriously, it's a great game. If you can try to avoid the shopping interface, you can have an immense deal of fun. Gameplay ranges from conversation - diplomatic or aggressively rude, depending on your playstyle - to close-range gunfights, with your party armed with pistols, assault rifles, shotguns, or sniper rifles, each customized by your whim, to Force "biotics" duels
that slam enemies into walls or over cliffs. And there's the tank sequences, of course. A skilled player (indicating myself humbly) can readily destroy enemy bases from a third of a kilometer away with the mighty tank cannon.

And, um... there's actually more than that. (You think that run-on sentence was long? It could be longer!) So hey! It's fun! If you like shooting people with guns, or with tanks, or talking to people, then maybe you should have a look.


I'm still playing Halo 3 occasionally. Online only - my brother and I beat the campaign inside and out, and so I don't think we'll be doing any of that for a while. There's an online ranking system, giving you experience for each match won, and "skill" for doing well in certain, more restrictive gametypes. It's an interesting incentive - alongside the online stat-tracking system at bungie.net, which records every kill and death and lets you review them in agonizing detail, it keeps me more interested than the multiplayer otherwise would be.

Oh, also, there's a mute option. The world being what it is, I've gotten very fast at activating it.


Fire Emblem 10, the fourth game in the series released in the US (and the fifth one I've played - hooray for ROMs) is pretty good. If you are crazy and/or obsessive compulsive, as of course I am. The general Fire Emblem formula is still present: Turn-based, small-scale strategy, leading a group of five to twenty characters (chosen from a larger pool) into battle to gain experience, loot, and glory. There's a plot, which isn't amazing but still amuses my brother and I. stab

There are some major changes, though. Most dramatic is the new "Battle Save" system - reminiscent of Intelligent System's other franchise, Advance Wars*, it allows you to save at any time in battle. Fire Emblem has traditionally been infuriatingly hard because defeat at any point in a chapter/mission required a restart to the very beginning of that chapter. (And there are a lot of ways to meet defeat.) Battle Saves change that, salving defeat's sting. It can still be quite hard, as some missions have objectives that require a fair bit of strategy to fill, and you can put yourself in a very tight spot by Battle Saving after you've made a terrible mistake, but it really does change the feel of the game. Technically, Battle Saves are only available in Easy and Medium difficulties, but as Hard is locked until you beat the game once (did I mention that this is the longest Fire Emblem game ever made?), it's not really an issue.

A more negative change is the disembowelment of "support conversations." Around in one form or another since at least Fire Emblem 4, support conversations allow you to let characters that have been together in a number of battles bond, giving numerical bonuses in combat and some rather amusing dialogue. A few of them, especially those involving the lead characters, can lead to slightly different endings, as the highest level supports represent true wuv.

Aww.

Fire Emblem 9 changed this somewhat - in previous games, characters had to stand next to each other for many turns in a row until the opportunity to "support" was given. No longer! This was changed to simply require that they be in the same battle together, making things a lot more sane. But FE10 went too far. The amusing conversations? Gone! The significant bonuses: Gone! Now there's a table of supports available for each character, allowing you to pick and choose pairings. There's no conversation and the bonuses have been decreased significantly. The soul of the thing is gone.

It is pretty good, I guess, but that annoyed me.

Other, shorter thoughts:

- Super Mario Galaxy seems neat. Got it as a Hanukkah gift the other night, will probably start soon.

- Bioshock remains creepy, and my father remains incompetent in playing it. (No offense!)

- Team Fortress 2 is much more amusing than I'd found it earlier! Lag is annoyingly omnipresent compared to Halo 3, but it's still pretty neat. And my brother got paid the greatest compliment of all: after a killing spree as a spy disguised as a member of the enemy team, a fellow with a Midwestern accent complained, "We've got to kill that spy camping in the corner. He's ruining the damn game!" What better praise than to be damned by your foes?

- The world is too big! It crashed our computers.

Wow, that was longer than I expected. It should be all (my video gaming stuff) for the month. Don't count on it, though!

*Advance Wars is actually the continuation of a series that was first released in Japan for the "Famicom" (NES), but I really don't care.