The Path Of Corn, or the Box Of Orange

If you ever get the chance, going through a Corn Maze is surprisingly fun. Please keep in mind, however, that while it is quite easy to get through as long as you have your map, the moment you forget where you are, you will become forever lost. Suddenly, the sky will darken, your flashlight will slowly lose it's power, and your attempts to figure out where you are will be limited by the fact that the only landmarks you can find are "Corn" and "Corn."

Also, you won't be able to hear the sounds of people looking for you. The only thing you'll be able to hear is the noise of the corn whispering to you, as you wonder why the stars have vanished from the sky.

Instead, you can decide to be a more stay-at-home type, and enjoy the fruits of The Orange Box. Portal is a very good game, although it's not quite as good as you may have heard. Over half of the game is devoted to gradually teaching you how to play the last few levels, and the puzzles stop getting any harder right when you've finally gotten the hang of things. Also, the game's dialogue is amusing, but it's hardly the laugh out loud comedyfest that most reviewers claim it to be.

Again, the game is good, but if it hadn't been packaged with the rest of the Orange Box, I would have wanted more for my money.

After you get done with that, there is the allure of Team Fortress 2. So far, my accomplishments have been limted to fixing things so that I no longer had to jump in place to use my special weapons, and following around strangers and shooting them with a health ray. Soon, I hope to add "Shooting people in the head," to this list.

PAX 2007: Your Demo Sucks

Pheonix Wright had already left PAX by Sunday afternoon, in order to engage in a tedious amount of backtracking. Luckily, Miles Edgeworth was more than ready to prove that he is made of sterner stuff.

And yes, as fun as PAX was, there were some things to find objectionable about it. Most of these were the audience participation part of the show, where people wandering the exhibition hall were suddenly grabbed by burly men, and forced to play demos for card games of varying collectability. Still, such tragic occurrences can teach a person a lot. For example, I walked away with a newfound wealth of knowledge about how not to present a demonstration of a game.

- Promising to teach a game in five minutes is just a bad idea. For example, I was taught that in the Hero Card System, your character has a thing, a thing, and another thing. You can play three things a turn, and three identically named things that modify these things. Then, remove three things, and your turn ends. Logically, this easily lends itself to games based around metaphysical dream combat, stealing treasure from orcs, and hacking the planet.

- Lying about how a card game works just confuses everyone. The Ultimate Fighting System presents a card game with a host of rules, most of which were only revealed to the players halfway through the game. On paper, this makes the game a bit easier to digest on the players. In reality, the people involved may very well feel like the game they're playing has an infinite number of rules... especially when rules that would have altered the game from the beginning are not announced until after it ends.

- If a collectable card game is not going to give away a free demo deck after the game ends, there is no damn reason why both players' decks should be as boring as humanly possible. As far as we could tell, World Of Warcraft: The CCG is a dull game with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Worse, we realized this within the first ten minutes of a game that took half an hour to finish.

The last game especially seemed weak when compared to The Spoils. There, the demonstration of it was well run, with an able description of how to play in the beginning, with no crucial rules left out. The games goals were adjusted downwards, so that the players could get back to the convention. And afterwords, the players had a nice, tournament legal deck of cards to keep... and add to, of course.

Buried In A Cheap Cardboard Coffin

When we weren't looking, Cheapass Games died.

Admittedly, the current claim is that Cheapass Games is only hibernating. However, it's employees have moved on, James Ernest is designing games for other people, and Toivo is no longer collating.

I'm not sure what lead to this state of events, my three theories are:

1- At it turns out, people would rather pay 300% more for cool plastic widgets. The evidence for this can be found in the catalogue of "James Earnst Games," an imprint of Cheapass games that specialized in full-color card games, including previous hits like Give Me The Brain, and Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond. And while Killing Doctor Lucky was fun in black and white, the Paizo company has determined that it would be even more fun to do so in glorious Technicolor. (Paizo being the company that has licensed certain Cheapass Games assets. Perhaps I'll finally get a nice copy of Spree.)

2- Game Designer James Earnst's obsession with games where you bid for resources. For every The Great Brain Robbery, there seemed to be a Bleeding Sherwood, or a Jacob Marley, Esq.. I own some of those Bidding Games, and I can tell you that the only one I could ever convince people to play a second time was The Big Cheese. And that's because The Big Cheese could be played at a restaurant, while waiting for the pizza to come out. I do not imagine my experience is atypical.

3- My demographic cannot keep a business alive. Perhaps there was something else involved in the company's demise other than low sales, but given that Secret Tijuana Death Match never sold out of it's initial 5,000 copy print run, we can conclude that it was at least a strong factor.

At least the dream of James Ernest lives on. Unspeakable Words is a fun card game by James Earnst, where you try to gain 100 points by spelling out words. Every angle in the letters you use earns you a point, and the more points you make makes the word more likely to drive you insane. (Which potentially leads to a number of skipped turns, unless optional rules are used. Optional rules always make me wonder how fully a game was play-tested.) Sanity is measured by thirty neat little C'thulhu tokens, which could easily have been represented by pennies instead. I don’t know if the game has legs, but the first few play-throughs have been enjoyable enough that I’m tempted to snap up my own copy.

Alternatively, you can play Stonehenge, a board game with five different ways to play. James Ernest suggests you play a game that involves bidding on things.

Played: Kingdom Of Loathing

This month began with Narraptor revealing his addiction to Leveling. It's only proper that it ends with my own tearful confession.

I've been playing Kingdom Of Loathing off and on for over a year now. It's a free web based game, where your tiny stickman adventurer boozes, eats, and kills their way across the kingdom. Eventually, you climb up to the naughty sorceress' tower, kill her, and jump into a portal leading to heaven. Then, you start the process all over again, but with one of your previous abilities permanently added to your new level one character. There are a few differences, but the second verse is pretty damn close to the first. Also, the thirteenth is pretty much the same as the last twelve, but my character is a lot better at making mixed drinks than he used to be.

There ought to be a sane reason I still play this. World Of Warcraft kept me around long after it had lost it's luster, just from the co-operative gameplay and it's financial simulation aspects. Meanwhile, Kingdom of Loathing is a very solitary experience if you don't hang out on the forums, and it's marketplace might be robust, but it is also painful to use.

Then again, they try to include new content every Tuesday, usually based around enriching the lives of lower level players. This certainly beats the content drops of WOW, which hit once every four to five months, and 90% of it is designed solely for the top 10% of the players.

Played: Arkham Horror

Game On!

I recently finished a game of Arkham Horror. This counts as a victory, as previous attempts ended when one or more participants suddenly realized that they actually hated the game, and would run off screaming.

Arkham Horror was originally designed in the '80s, when the quality of gameplay was judged solely by how many cardboard tokens were crammed inside the box. There are tokens representing life, sanity, cash, clues, monsters, portals to other dimensions, free passes to avoid being sucked back into these portals, good magical sigils, bad magical sigils, horror, terror, closed doors, the numbers one through three, and "The Button". If you get bored with that, you can play around with the baker's dozen of card decks, or the character sheets for the players and the elder god that's trying to break into the world and eat its cookies.

Everyone at the table plays a group of god-fearing 1920's archetypes, running around town and putting paid to the tentacular ner'do'wells that keep popping up around the place. Eventually, your goal is to jump into portals leading to various lands of dread, survive two random encounters there, and then turn off the portal by reading a book at it or shooting it down. In other words, it's exactly like the way I ran Call Of Cthulhu when I was in high school, right down to the importance of keeping a stick of dynamite with you for special occasions. What this has to do with horror is anyone's guess, because a Will -2 roll is only so unnerving, even when it's backed up by the threat of losing your last brain token and being sent to the asylum for the fifth time.

In short, this is the kind of game designed for fans of this kind of game. It seems enjoyable enough, but it's ultra-cooperative feel actually causes the game to drag in the end. You have a pretty good idea whether everyone wins or everyone dies, so why continue? Also, if your gaming opportunities are as limited as mine, Arkham Horror will have to compete with games that don't require players to remember when the Horror Meter causes the Terror Meter to rise, and exactly how big the Outskirts Stack can become before it causes the General Store to close up shop.

Played: Sam And Max: Season One

FOR THOSE WHO CAME IN LATE...

1: Lucasarts releases their latest adventure game, The Curse Of Monkey Island. The game announces that it has arrived to kick ass and take skeletal limbs, and it doesn't need another skeletal limb.
2: Blizzard cancels their own Warcraft Adventure game, reportedly because they didn't think it would be as good as Curse Of Monkey Island. (The story of Thrall's quest for kingship will eventually be told the way it was meant to be, by the intervention of high-level time travelers on the quest for mad lootz.)
3: Lucasarts releases Escape From Monkey Island. It disappoints.
4: Lucasarts cancels Sam & Max 2, so that they can concentrate more time on creating the ultimate Hoth experience.
5: Adventure games flee to Europe, briefly forming a light jazz ensemble with Cindi Lauper.

Cut to now. The company Telltale Games releases Sam And Max: Season One as a series of six 'episodes', released about once a month. Surprisingly, they keep to their schedule.

Reportedly, most of the changes that were made in later episodes were due to customer request. For example, nobody at Telltale Games ever thought that reusing the exact same jokes for the exact same items would ever get old. Also, their reaction to demands for better puzzles was fulfilled by making a joke about how simple most of the puzzles were. Also, a dying child used the Make-A-Wish foundation to insert a "Wardrobe Malfunction" joke into episode four, as one last act of spite against an unfair universe.

Each episode lasts about one hour longer that it ought to, mostly taken up by walking back and forth between Sybil's and Bosco's. There are some good jokes, and some decent (though easy) puzzles. Which is good, because the exceedingly simple game structure means that whenever you get stuck, you have absolutely nothing to do except to stew in your own frustration.

In short: Sam And Max won't hurt you, but it will disappoint. I'm not ready to blame polygons for killing the adventure game yet, but it's mighty tempting. I'll let you know after Season Two rolls out.

Played: Legend Of Zelda

Welcome to my first post in the new, redefined world of Canned Food And Shotguns. A world where my place in the lineup is in jeopardy. Hopefully, a letter writing campaign can save me from getting cancelled. Owing to our small readership, and my even smaller writership, many of these letters will have to come from an army of alternate identities. Some of these include "Czar," which was chosen back in the day that most video games allowed you to name the main character, but only if the name was four to six letters long. "Vainglory" came later, since it both communicates a sense of overweening pride, and also isn't likely to be already taken in most MMORPGS. These fictional characters will be defending my recent lack of presence with the kind of dedication that they show when strip mining an entire desert, or rekilling Gandling the Gandarian until he drops a nice hat. Other pseudonyms that will be defending me include "Neville," who possesses possibly the weakest British accent I have ever heard, and the random letters that adorn my name badge at work.

There is good news, however. I have now found a way to awake in the afternoon that surpasses even the Amazing Lordi Machine. It involves a device that actually shakes the bed with rage, while ringing an alarm that causes my eyes to weep tears of blood. These very tears prevent me from finding my way back to my own bed, leaving me no choice to remain awake. I am pinning entirely too much hope that this will prevent me from sleeping away an additional four to seven hours every day. According the flow charts I have drawn up, this will lead to a great increase in both productivity and the kinds of unproductiveness that fuel blog articles.

I finally beat the new Legend of Zelda, for example. I was inspired to do so after finding out that EB Games is randomly calling people who own it, and begging for their game back.

You play as Link, an eerily animated mannequin who has three facial expressions: Neutral, Mildly Amused, and Shocked. As you progress through the game, you will meet a number of people, and try to guess if Link actually likes them, of if he's planning on killing them in their sleep. If Link himself knows, he isn't talking.

The first third of The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess introduces a decently sized cast of characters, a slew of different minigame events to keep things interesting, a simple but competent plotline, and the occasional reason to turn into a wolf. The last third of the game has none of those elements, but does throw in a multi-part fetch quest that opens up an even longer fetch quest. The middle third is where you while away the hours, happily collecting pieces of heart and glowing bugs instead of advancing the plot.

The game mechanics are enjoyable, with some strong caveats. Link leaps forwards whenever he damn well pleases, and doesn't care if you were only trying to get near a cliff ledge to get a better view. Their are two different styles of swordfighting. The first style involves attacks, parries, and a general sense of derring-do. Alternatively, you can just hit the A button whenever the "Hit the A button to instantly kill the enemy!" message appears on the screen. Almost all the bosses are puzzles, generally on the order of "Use the item that you just got on the thing you can use it on. Then hit a glowing eye with your sword." If the puzzle's too much for you, then you can talk to a magical hint-giving demon for advice.

Things do pick up right at the end, as you engage in a series of enjoyable battles against a foe that refuses to die without the maximum amount of drama allowed by law. Then, you'll be treated to an ending that is very... anime.

Dammit.

Today Is Not That Time

During the last blog post of Canned Food And Shotguns, we will break all of our rules with gusto. Until then, I suppose I'll have to endure these unnatural restraints. It's much easier to obey the common-sense laws of Canned Food and Shotguns. For example, we don't need a prohibition on using the phrase "Jump The Shark." A healthy desire to maintain our self-esteem is more than enough to keep that at bay.

So instead of meager excuses for late posting, I offer swagger and braggadocio. Last night, I ran a game of Unknown Armies with players who I can trust to outsmart me nine out of ten times, and the tenth time is usually because they forgot about an obtuse comment mentioned by one person three months ago in the middle of the night. Plots were hatched, mysteries were plumbed, and I managed an accent that didn't careen into "Not Even Close To Sounding British."

And do not let Narraptor fool you with his devious trickery! Even though I've burned out on almost the entire genre of wacky card games, I still enjoy Give Me The Brain. Games like Munchkin, Chez [EDITED BY BRAIN GREMLIN], and Gloom have not been so lucky. The gameplay for each of them is disturbingly similar. The first few times, you have to learn a set of rules that feels a touch more complex than it was meant to be, and made more so by some very vague definitions. Then someone plays a card that has new rules printed on it that take precedence over the ones everyone else has been playing by. The card's grammar and syntax are puzzled over, someone is hosed, and the game continues.

As familiarity with the set of cards sets in, you get down to the serious business of applying deep strategy to a game that doesn't have any. You start basing strategies on whether or not the Big Unfair Card you need will show up, and praying that the chaff that makes up half the deck ends up in someone else's hands. Then, everyone gets sick of the game and it's either time to pony up for a new expansion featuring more wacky cards (Do you think "Auntie Paladin" is funny? What's wrong with you?) or move on. Alternatively, someone in the group can get an official Munchkin T-Shirt that gives him bonuses in the game. That will bring the game to a much swifter ending, especially if alcohol is involved.

The revised edition of Give Me The Brain is another matter altogether. The rules are only as complex as they need to be, and each card has a sense of fitting into a fairly balanced whole. Six years of playtesting turned out to be just what the game needed.

Finally, I might as well expand on Guitar Hero 2. The game provides you with a mostly complete single player game and a good enough multiplayer mode. If you can put the two together, you'll end up with a complete game. Other facts of note:

Playing on Easy and Medium are easier than in the first game
Playing on Hard and Expert are harder than in the first game
There is no difficulty level in between Medium and Hard

A practice mode is included in the game, to help facilitate the endless replaying you'll have to do once your natural talent runs dry.

As I mentioned before, expect to play through all of Medium difficulty before you even touch the multiplayer game. If you want to unlock more than just a few characters and all the available songs, expect to plumb the mysterious depths of the fifth fret, and the best of luck to you.

The song list has a bit less goofy fun and a bit more angry metal and arrhythmic guitar wanking than I care for. That said, it's the only licensed rhythm game made that doesn't force you to play A-B-C, making me more than willing to forgive songs like Yes We Can. I've even made my peace with Freebird, since the last song I'd want to play is the last song that I have to play.

As an added bonus, the vocals in Killing In The Name Of are performed by a man who only pretends he can't sing.

Phoenix Wright: A-Button Attorney

Phoenix Wright is no Freelance Police.

In the gaming press, reviewers for all platforms have fallen hard for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. To many of them, the game heralds a promising future for the long dying point-and-click adventure genre.

I am not a professional game reviewer, so upon reaching chapter four of Phoenix Wright I made the decision to trade the game in for credit. My research suggests that slogging through to chapter five may have finally opened up some semblance of actual play, perhaps even game, but that would have required pressing the A-button through more than 50 screens where the only text displayed was "...". I only suffered through as much as I did because it takes a long, long time to come back from Japan.

Phoenix Wright isn't so much a game as it is an electronic story told in sparely parsed sentence fragments. One critic on the 1Up podcasts likened it to Encyclopedia Brown. Considering I never liked those books either, I believe the comparison is apt.

Unlike a traditional point-and-click adventure, where your interactions with the environment are based on the icons or commands you choose, the pointer in Phoenix Wright is limited to one function depending on the scene. In investigation scenes, it is used to look. (Lacking a sensitive cursor, these scenes are the most frustrating, as it's impossible to tell if the object you touched is an individual item or part of a larger whole. Touching a desk lamp may prompt a message about the desk. Is the lamp part of the desk or did you miss and touch the desk instead?) In dialogue scenes, it is used to scroll from one sentence fragment to the next.

The pointer can also be used to slowly move about the limited locations in the game. Given the static two-dimensional environments, you'd think you'd be able to jump from the front gate of a movie studio to the trailer in lot B, but no, that requires going through the gate to the main path, taking the left branch, entering lot B and going into the trailer. That may not seem like much, but considering the puzzles in the exploration segments of Phoenix Wright involve going from location 1 to location 2, picking up item A, and making your way back to location 1, it quickly sucks all the joy out of tapping a stylus on a plastic screen.

Another difference between Phoenix Wright and a real adventure game is the lack of dialogue trees. The entire experience is basically text on rails. Puzzles cannot be solved until all the relevant text has been read. For example, in order to prove a lamp was bought at a certain time you have to go through a deposition twice, fail to find any contradictions in the witness' statement after pressing him at every turn, and allow your character to faint so he can be visited by a psychic vision of his former employer. She then tells him to look at the back side of the receipt you've been trying to submit as evidence for the last 30 minutes, at which point it can finally be put into play.

The impossibility of skipping to the chase makes the court sequences especially tedious. Testimony is presented once, and you have to click or tap your way through all of it (with the sound off, because every letter and punctuation mark is accompanied by a beep which cannot be turned off). Then it is presented again for rebuttal, and you must press the witness on every line of dialogue to get the full story. This leads to miscellaneous outbursts by the judge, the prosecuting attorney, and the court. A not-so-hypothetical scenario:

Phoenix Wright: Objection!

Phoenix Wright: I submit this evidence to show that my client is awesome!

Maya: ...!

Edgeworth: ...!

Judge: ...

Court: ...

Witness: ...?

Admittedly, I may have been setting myself up for disappointment, as I expected the game to involve some semblance of realistic detective work or melodramatic courtroom drama. Instead, during a trial to prove someone's innocence, I found myself getting a witness sentenced for murder. But no matter how much leeway I was able to give the setting, I could not forgive the writing. Phoenix Wright has been praised for its great sense of humor, and this reputation is completely undeserved.

A few examples: There is a character named Mrs. Oldbag. She is old, and she calls everyone "whippersnappers." Your assistant insists on calling you "Nick," even though that is not your name. You begin the game defending your friend Larry Butz--nickname, "Hairy Butz"--and later interrogate a nerd stereotype named Sal Manella. A man named Redd White is CEO of Bluecorp. April May...I could go on, but to sum it up, a sample of dialogue from the game:

Phoenix Wright: He couldn't handle the truth!

Compare that to this random soundbite from the first episode of the finally revived Sam & Max series, which is now finally a series, and unlike Monkey Island does not disappoint:

Sam: I think I've done enough pumping for one dream.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, is not a modern incarnation of classic point-and-click gameplay. At best, it is the first point adventure game.

/played

This picture says 11 depressing words. Also, I'm not wearing any pants.


That's over a week's vacation in the land of Azeroth, where Dave Chappelle fought David Hasselhoff, for only $250. Not a bad deal, assuming the trip didn't ruin my craving for experience points forever.

I have invested a lot more time (though for a lot less money) in other games, but don't regret the hours I logged in high school on Civilization, the "one more turn nights" with Civ II and Heroes of Might and Magic 3 in college, playing through Diablo, Diablo, Diablo, Diablo II, Diablo II, Dia...and countless Neverwinter Nights modules of varying degrees of tedium and design flaws. I am only mildly perturbed at Disgaea, not myself, for going out of my way to max out my favorite characters over the course of 92 hours only to learn that the game had two more stages left. My brain likes gaining XP and doing inventory management.

At least, it used to. I am not normally one to wax existential while running up character levels, but the realization that things only got worse after hitting level 60 (for those of you not in the know, people will arrange their schedules to get together groups of 40 people and run through the same 4-hour dungeons every weekend, all in the hopes that the final boss might drop the right color hat you need to complete your outfit...except you won't get it until you've logged enough "Dragon Kill Points"--no joke--with your guild, and even then it might be stolen by one of your paladins because the Internet is full of fuckwads) really made me think about whether maxing out any more fighters, priests, or magic-users had a point. I've reached the level cap in dozens of other games, why bother with this one? For that matter, considering my lifetime RPG kill count, do I really need to put up with Troggs?

A tangential observation: I've noticed that while rats in Oblivion are too stupid to realize how many of their kind I have felled in other games, there are no spiders. Either some other hero cleansed the world of them in previous Elder Scrolls or my reputation precedes me. There are giant webs in all the caves, but no giant spiders to make them. Yeah, that's right. You better hide, fuckers.

I think if WOW was a typical RPG and had an ending, burnout and wondering what the hell I was doing for the last year and a half wouldn't have plagued me. I would have made it to the end and kept playing until it was time to move on to something else, just like any other game. What the game needs is an ending cinematic at level 40. Gain ten levels in Treadmill Vale and open a gate to the Horse Dimension of Horseia. Defeat Horsephestra solo and gain the ability to steal and ride one of her young back to Azeroth. The game is now fully open to you and your travel time is increased. High-end content and regular add-ons are there for as long as you want to pay.

Ideally, you wouldn't have to get off your horse to pick up plants or kill guys either. Blizzard--king of game balance via limited function! As was pointed out in a recent CGW podcast, there was mounted combat in Ultima Online. Please note that I've been lazy in italicizing game titles, so that's sarcastic emphasis added.

As it stands, I see WOW as one long GTA ambulance mission with a special hat at the end and an even worse save system.

But that's all over now. I made the peon cry and cancelled my subscription. Interestingly, they don't delete your characters when you leave. Lodz springs eternal. There's also a hard sell in the form of pull-down menus that beg you not to quit. "Don't want to pay by credit card? Call us at..." "Lost your girlfriend? We've partnered with eHarmony.com to..." Among the options under "Reasons For Living" are addiction (to WOW, not, presumably, meth or EQ), military service, and Will of the Forsaken Nerf.

I am am proud to write that I was not so into the game to correctly parse that phrase immediately. I thought it was some sort of l33t philosophy.