Reverse Viral Marketing Shuryuken!

I am constantly amazed at just how susceptible I am to word-of-mouth advertising. Having never grown up playing Street Fighter, I barely gave notice when the game's latest iteration released last week. But with Adam cooing over every hi-res hadoken, I find myself lusting after it. It's like McDonalds: you know you'll be in pain after that double cheeseburger, but you can't help but want it anyway.

To be fair, Street Figher IV is a game I should enjoy. I've lost days playing Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur, and Street Fighter IV contains a surface game that I can really see myself sinking my teeth into. But as I found with Disgaea DS, there is a such thing as a game that is too deep, and I fear the beasts and creatures that lurk below the surface game. Street Fighter is an amazingly layered game, and while it is possible to play - and enjoy - its topmost epidermis, those who plunge into the game's core emerge a transcended being. I fear that to be competitive online will involve my inevitable journey to the center of Street Fighter IV, and it is a journey I hesitate to embark on. Yet, I doubt I will be content playing the game without at least attempting this odyssey.

Still, I've managed to stay competitive in both Halo 3 and Call of Duty: World at War, two titles notoriously difficult to get into as a novice. Perhaps there is hope for me in Street Fighter IV...

Damn you, viral marketing.

-- Mike

»»  read more

Kanbei, I wish I could quit you...

There's a magic to the Nintendo DS that I've only just become reacquainted with, one that is fundamentally ineffable but undeniably palpatable. I can't help but feel satisfied when I sit back and fire the system up. Granted, part of this may be that I've been incredibly selective with the games I've purchased for it, cherry-picking only the most acclaimed games that I'm sure will interest me and avolding the shovelware that publishers seem to excrete into the system's library. Believe me, those titles are legion. But even while playing a title that fails to live up to my expectations, I still can't deny the simple happiness the system brings me. There's a quality to the system that transcends gameplay. Everything from the weight and feel of the DS Lite to the system's interface just seems right. In an age where the most competitive hardcore gaming system has a lifespan of less than a year, there is something to be said about the quality of the DS. It has become a name that promises satisfaction no matter what game you're playing. I'm almost glad that my 360 died to rekindle my love affair with this handheld.

I happened to chance upon a copy of Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, and I can only wonder why I've let this title sit on my backlog for so long. I've been a huge fan of the Advance Wars series since the original landed on the Game Boy Advance, and Days of Ruin has reminded me of why I love the series. It is a game whose balance is nearly unquestionable, turning each battle into a precise chess game of deployment and strategy. To be fair, there's little variation to the main game equation. Each battle is essentially a war of attrition, the winner ultimately decided by the number of cities each player controls. Control more cities and you control more resources, which means you can bring more and bigger guns to the fray. Yet, the game avoids simply becoming a question of numbers, or even unit quality, as even an army of mighty War Tanks outmaneuvered by players (or AI) clever enough to sneak a weak but mobile infantry unit into the enemy HQ, or deadly artillery and rocket batteries rendered inoperable due to cut off supply lines. Too bad I'm usually on the receiving end of this.

My only qualm is the decidedly generic turn the franchise seems to be making. Advance Wars has always been over-the-top, its characters charicatures of real-life cultures and figures, from Stalin Soviet Russia to Imperial Japan. The modern-day fighter jets of Red Star would face off against the WWII-style prop planes of Yellow Comet, while a cartoonish stereotype of a Japanese commander squeed over the victory of his somehow still-competitive airforce. However, the distinct character that the franchise launched with seems to have eroded in each iteration.

As the art style and story became increasingly generic, so has the commanding officers and factions. One of the great things about earlier Advance Wars games was the variation that came with using different commanding officers. These commanding officers would have specialties, such as proficiencies in certain types of weather or with certain types of units, that would allow players to approach missions from completely different styles of play. One of my fondest memories from Advance Wars: Dual Strike was using Sonja's superior transports and infantry troops to wage a guerilla war against what might be described as a relatively modern tank army. CO proficiencies make a return in Days of Ruin, but in the form of an area of influence that radiates from a command vehicle that ferries your commander, making any portion of your army outside of this area a relatively generic army no different from the enemy. Luckily, Days of Ruin is so well-balanced that almost any strategy is possible if executed correctly. Still, I miss watching imperial troops with comically antiquated vehicles and technology beat back fighter jets and tanks that look like they belong in Battlefield: Bad Company. It's come to the point where I don't even care who I'm playing as anymore. All I know is that I'm red, and there's some blue guys over there, and I should probably blow them up in the most proficient way possible.

Still, Halo's proven that well-done red versus blue can deliver an outstanding game, and Days of Ruin follows in that tradition. It's a great game overall, and one that's sucked up much of my free time this week. I just miss my Kanbei. I wish I could quit him...

-- Mike

»»  read more

I lose myself in your sword...

Predictably, I've fallen out of love with Disgaea DS. As I stated in my previous post, the game is simply deep to a fault. It is a min-maxer's playground, rife with opportunities to tweak characters in pursuit of optimal performance, from re-creating characters with better starting stats and stat growths to dungeon crawling in order to level a sword. It's a great concept, but one whose depth I find repulsing.

To be fair, one does not need to delve too deep into the game's cavernous character development system. In fact, one NPC in the game's main lobby area exists for the sole purpose of reminding the player that game may be completed with a minimal amount of understanding about what exactly is going on. Yet, aside from Disgaea's cute anime-style story, I simply don't find the game engaging enough to heed that lowly NPC's warning. I hope that doesn't cause him to have an existential crisis.

The main issue here is the combat system. Disgaea DS introduces some very interesting concepts that help to keep combat interesting. The most notable of these are Geo symbols - power ups or debuffs that affect the units standing on the particular colored tile the symbol happens to be resting upon. These symbols are far from static, capable of being moved to another color to affect different tiles or destroyed to unleash devastation unto units unfortunate enough to be standing on the symbol's spaces. While many of the campaign's battlegrounds have made minimal use of Geo symbols, item dungeons often introduce extremely complex levels that force the player to develop strategies to adapt to these power-ups, and even include levels with enemies only able to be defeated using a chain reaction of destroyed Geo symbols. This allows the player to approach each battle as an open-ended puzzle game, creating multiple possible strategies and a truly mind-boggling level of replay-value.

Yet, this level of understanding takes a large amount of time and devotion, and the game offers little to those unwilling to make such an investment. Without the use of Geo symbols, the game's core combat mechanics are bland, with relatively uninteresting level designs and little space for character customization off of the battlefield. One of the joys of the Final Fantasy Tactics Advance series was the development of truly unique characters through inventive combinations of job skills. With weapons governing most of the skills available to each character, there is little difference between my Samurai and my Centurion or my Ninja and my Battler aside from stat growth and aesthetics. This leaves me relatively uninvested in the characters and teams I bring to each battle. In a game that seems to demand constant combat for the sake of grinding, I find this to be a deal-breaker.

Disgaea's interesting narrative and over-the-top, anime-style presentation will most probably be enough to motivate me to complete the game. But that won't be for awhile. For now, I miss my all-purpose Gladiator-Dragoon and stealthy Sniper-Fencer waiting for me on my Final Fantasy Tactics A2 cartridge.

-- Mike

»»  read more