An Early-Adopter's New Year's Lament

I'm a gamer. I really like gaming. Had I my druthers, that's probably how I'd spend much of my time. Unfortunately, life's just hectic enough that It's hard for me to justify long sessions of killing aliens anymore. For those who don't keep up with such things, 2008 was a hell of a year for video games...well, for the Xbox 360 anyway. There's Dead Space, Grand Theft Auto IV, Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, Mirror's Edge, Prince of Persia, and Fable 2 just off the top of my head. This can account for literally hundreds of hours invested in putting a permanent butt-print in a favorite chair.

Here's the thing: I actually own all these games. If ever there was a sign of waste, this is probably it. Of all these games, I've had little chance to get very far in any of them. They're all critically-acclaimed. Seriously, everyone seems to love these things. Then there's me. I'm not sure I like most of these.

Dead Space threatens to actually scare the poo out of me. I scare pretty easily as it is, and I usually try and avoid games of this sort, but there was such a great ad campaign that I forked over the cash for a pre-order. I made it through the first level with clean undies, but only just. Games should be fun. Excitement can be fun. Fear is scary...and not fun for me. One may ask, "So, Chris, if you scare so easily, why would you get a game specifically designed to scare its players?" I'd reply with a shrug and a sheepish "I dunno." Dead Space is a technically great game that does exactly what one of its genre should, I just don't find a great deal of amusement in it.

Grand Theft Auto IV just isn't my kind of game. In my childhood fantasies, the heroes were always good and the villains were always bad. That's really all there was to it. That's why I was such a huge fan of Superman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles--they were good. The thrust of GTA has always been that the player is a bad guy waging war on worse guys. An anti-hero, if you will. Being good by comparison was never really an ambition of mine. Video games are an effective extension of my imagination, of my fantasies, and I'm too good to play a bad guy. GTA4 does everything right. It has some great technology to draw the player into the universe. The voice-acting is top-notch. I've been told there's even a great story. It's a game with virtually everything I want, with the nagging detail of making me a quasi-villain. One could ask the same question as above, and that person would get a similar answer.

Fallout 3 is just not a pretty environment (what, with all the nuclear...umm...fallout). This was my first foray into the Fallout universe, so I didn't have the same nostalgic expectations as many others just as I didn't really know what I was getting into. There was a lot of hype, and the developers were the same people behind one of my very favorite games, so what could go wrong? In a word, the game is ugly. Sure, everything is rendered well and character animations are some of the best I've seen, but it's all so ugly. Most games pride themselves on having rich, vibrant worlds full of life and discovery. Fallout 3 is a barren, nuclear wasteland in which the big discoveries are burned out homes and multi-headed super mutants. Yay? The gameplay is great, the characters are fun, and the story is engrossing, but running around in the world is so damned depressing.

Gears of War 2 earns more praise than most of this list, but I still have some problems. Gears 2 boasts some of the best writing I've ever experienced in games and the most poignant cutscene ever made. Unfortunately, only some of the writing was really that good. Some of it sounds very much like my creative writing...which is still firmly entrenched in the seventh grade. Aside from the one beacon of awesome, the cutscenes are fairly mundane--fun and gory, to be sure, but mundane. The gameplay is solid and very nearly usurps Halo's title as best-controlling-first-person-shooter. The story, for what it is, is good. Dom's search for his wife, Maria, is heart wrenching with an amazing payoff. It is that detail alone that saves my opinion of this script. There's a lot of fun to be had (not even counting multiplayer) and I'm happy with my purchase, but I'm expecting more from Gears 3.

Mirror's Edge. Oh, my goodness, Mirror's Edge. The previews for this game literally made my heart race a bit. A game about free-running (parkour, for you nitpickers)! There is a sense of speed in this game unmatched by anything else I've seen. The complete lack of heads-up-display is as refreshing as the gameplay. In the first few seconds, I sensed that this would be a paradigm-shifting experience, something that would finally push the platforming genre into more respectable territory. I was about half-right. Of nine missions, the first four-and-a-half are exactly what I wanted: frantic problem-solving while jumping from rooftop to rooftop while being hunted by an implacable enemy. The emphasis was on evasion. Starting part way through the fourth stage, the emphasis shifted to combat. Faith, the main character, kinda sucks at combat; she's much better designed for the earlier evasion tactics. This shift made what started off as a contender for the "Chris' Most Favoritest Gaem Evar!!1!one" title into a game threatening to edge out Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden for "Most Controller-Breakingly Frustrating Game Ever Created by Satan." This so could have been something great, but it now rests on my shelf, likely never to be completed.

Prince of Persia is good. I love the new art style. It's a good re-imagining of the franchise and an intriguing springboard into the inevitable sequels. It's the combat system that holds this game back. For all its fluidity and gradual learning curve, it's a little lame fighting just the one enemy at a time secure in the knowledge that it is impossible to die. Literally. Impossible. There's an achievement to be earned for not dying much, but that's not a big motivator for me. It's fun, but feels too idiot-proof for me to really get excited over. I'm not sure that's a bad things per se, it's impossible to please everyone, but it took me too far out of the game world to care as much as I need to to remain focused.

Fable 2 is probably the biggest disappointment. It's one of the few games that seemed it would actually live up to its own hype machine. Fable 2 occurs in a world which is noticeably and permanently affected by the player's actions. That's a huge step for gaming. Many games nowadays have multiple endings, but they're finite, specific conclusions. Fable 2 has nearly limitless possibilities with thousands of nuances that will make every player's experience unique to that one's decisions and style. I was very, very happy when I got my copy at last. I jumped right in and powered through the first few quests, bought property, flirted, farted, got married, and purchased my first home. I was having a blast. Then I got a quest that I couldn't figure out how to complete. I needed to bring someone to a place, but the person wouldn't follow me. I went to the quest-giver for a hint, but he wouldn't talk to me. I turned to the Internet for a hint and found that I was one of the relatively few who got stuck in a game-ruining bug. Because of the way the save files work, it was impossible to retrieve my character. The ten hours or so I spent building this persona are lost forever and I have nothing but frustration to show for it. Okay, I can do this, I can start over. I made a new character...and got stuck in another game-ruining bug! I've done some reading and I know where all the really bad bugs found so far are, but I can't play anymore. I can't stand the thought of playing a game with the ever-present threat of ruining my experience.

So, what's the moral of the story? I have no idea. I was looking at my game shelf thinking of what I wanted to play and saw all my brand-new games...then pulled out an old one. There are a lot of people in the industry working themselves into a lather over how many huge games dropped this year. There were a lot of big games, but I don't really like many of them. I think I'm officially off the early-adopter bandwagon. After hundreds of dollars spent on new games, I spend most of my time playing my 2-4 year old titles.

The realization that hundreds of dollars of potential awesome sits inert on my shelf is depressing and frustrating. I don't really have a pithy ending to this one. This is really just to vent a bit. More snarkiness to come, I'm sure.