G-pinions

Being out of town with nary a console to enjoy can be torturous at times - Okami and my PS2 sit tragically in my travel bag, silently hating me for not having found the time and place to enjoy them properly. And I silently hate Tom, for getting the obscene pleasure of playing Okami when I cannot.

I'm also sad to hear that Mario Basketball doesn't live up to the relatively decent standards of the Nintendo sports line. Only having my DS with me at the moment, I'm starting to see a fairly large gap in the systems library. As many brilliantly addicting pick-up-and-play games as there are, I find myself thirsting for a more linear, narrative adventure to sink my teeth into and I'm coming up empty.

After preparing every ridiculous dish under the sun and exhausting every game mechanic Cooking Mama had to offer, it was recently relegated to the time-out pocket in my DS bag. I popped in Trace Memory, a long-owned, never-explored budget DS purchase of mine, hoping for some kind of GAME I can actually PLAY through. You know, play a level, get a feel for it, fight a boss character/situation/fire of some regard, and see the end credits before you know it. Instead I'm tasked, as a girl of thirteen, with finding the memories of a ghost boy on an island where my deadbeat father may or may not be. Really, I should have expected at least two of those things looking at the cover, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.

*Begin tangent*
Really, when did fucking adventure games get so damn unmysterious? What happened to the Myst-influenced era of exploring, when you would wander around a creepily quiet locale clicking on anything that looked remotely out of place? Now it's all "The gate looks like it's missing a gear." And then you walk the only way you can walk, a path dead-ending with a nice blatant view of said color-highlighted gear. I'm already wandering why the creepy sea captain is allowing a thirteen year old girl to wander an island (with the word Blood in the name) alone, at least let me find a goddamned gear by myself. Phew.
*End tangent*

These types of experiences are just hard to ingest as a Western gamer, unless they have the wit and originality of a Phoenix Wright. I'm glad to see Bioware getting into the DS racket, but where are our Indigo Prophecys, our Okamis even? There are so many great adventure games with unique game mechanics; now that we've explored back and forth what the DS can do, why not build a special story with that in mind?

I'll buy Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin like every other red-blooded DS owner, but I tired of the last one without the enjoyable replayability of SoTN (collecting a finite dropped soul from each enemy type is not the same as badass random weapon drops, for the record). New Super Mario Bros. is also missing that special spark somehow, and I have little reason to take it out of the Pocket of Relegation these days after having beaten it and grabbing a few extra coins. While the Idiots' Guide to Being a Girl would probably keep me busy for a few hours, it just won't do it for me in the long run. Final Fantasy remakes don't do it for me either, though Contact looks like an RPG I'll actually want to play.

As much as the PSP more and more resembles a slow-motion car wreck, I'm missing it's special brand of games that may as well be on a TV screen - I would kill a man for a Daxter, Syphon Filter, or even Pursuit Force on my DS right now. Maybe the PSP is a better choice when you're on vacation and can only bring one portable system, and the DS has it's place set on the train between home and work/school/fleeing the state?

All that said, I will definitely be buying Clubhouse Games next week. I'm just bitchy.

Man, games can be super frustrating, eh? I typed that Mario Hoops review yesterday with anger spewing from my ears. After playing through the first 24 matches with relative ease, I all of a sudden hit one of those ultra cheap walls that makes video games a chore to play. In Hard Rainbow Tournament Extra I had to play against a trio of Square ringers. It was an impossible match. I mentioned yesterday that the game played like a 1 on 3 obstacle course. That's because your teammates literally do nothing. They don't play defense, they never use items, and they stand still on the offensive end. Frustrating at first, but this became infuriating in the last match.

I hate when video games cheat. The reason this last match was so hard is because the computer players could do things that I couldn't. Though I was using Diddy Kong, who is "Speedy," I was decidedly slower than anyone on their team. Not only could they recover any loose balls with ease, they could step in front of me whenever I tried to score. That just flat out sucks. So I wrote an angry review and sent it back to Gamefly as soon as I got home. I don't put up with cheap game design.

And then I realized that this is becoming a trend for me. Just about every game I've gotten from Gamefly has been returned in anger. Saint's Row, which I haven't written about because it's not worth the effort, caused a similar brain aneurism. Smooth sailing for the most part ruined by one ridiculous mission. It wasn't particularly hard, but it was boring. It was the last mission in the Los Carnales rivalry. I had to shoot down an airplane. Shouldn't be that hard, especially since I had limitless rockets, but it was annoying. There were people stationed around the plane to save the escaping bastard and they had rocket launchers too. So I would drive around for a bit before I got blindsided by some guy on a roof 200 meters away. Why was this so annoying? The mission starts on the other side of the city, about 10 minutes away by car. I only played this mission a few times before I got tired of it. Why would anyone want to drive across the city over and over again? Is that considered fun?

Madden and NCAA frustrated me, and were quickly returned, because they were bad. They played like five-year-old games. Why are people wasting their time on these poor imitations of a great sport? I have no idea. Battle for Middle Earth got sent back because the control scheme was ultimately broken. Call of Duty was shipped back because they didn't understand what war was all about or how to properly code artificial intelligence. All of these games reached a point on my tolerance meter where I simply could not take it anymore. All of these games were poorly designed. They relished in frustrating gamers rather than create a riveting gaming experience.

I am enjoying Okami a lot more as I get deeper into the game. This is good game design. You don't have to make cheap missions to artificially extend the life of a game. Okami has a good story and varied gameplay mechanics that make it a pleasure to experience all it has to offer. Not every game is created by developers so in love with gaming. Not every developer is talented enough to make something like Okami in the first place. It just makes it hard to go back to substandard games when I am playing through a masterpiece like this.

Thank God for Gamefly. I can't imagine how pissed I would be if I was stuck with Mario Hoops or Call of Duty 2 in my permanent collection.

I can say with 100% certainty that Japanese people in general and the people who work at Square specifically know absolutely nothing about American Basketball. Whereas other Mario sports titles take the basic essence of the sport they are parodying and add appropriate Mario-themed elements, Mario Hoops 3-on-3 does not even resemble the sport it is modeled after. I know my first complaint about this decidedly average title should be about the actual gameplay mechanics, but I just can't get over the screwy version of basketball on display here.

First, and most baffling of all quirks, the court looks exactly like an NBA court. Since the rules are drastically different, wouldn't it have made more sense to change this around? For instance, there is still a half court line located right where you imagine such a line would lie. In real life, this acts as an invisible boundary. If you are the offensive team, once you cross the half court line you are not allowed back to the other side. In Mario Basketball, it just acts as pretty decoration. You can straddle the line like a cowboy if you choose; it isn't going to affect anything on the court. With no backcourt violation or 10-second penalty, it makes that line seem just silly. Taking away these violations is akin to taking away faults in Mario Tennis. Needless to say, Mario Tennis is a great game and did not change the tried and true rules of the game.

There's also a three-point line in Mario Basketball even though there aren't any three-point shots. Come again? It doesn't matter if you make a dunk, an all too common over-the-shoulder sling, or a full court bomb, it's all worth the same. So what's the point of having a three-point line? Since you don't get three points for making a shot from behind it, is it even fair to call it that? "Daisy got hit with a spiny shell just outside that arbitrary arc thingy."

Mario Basketball doesn't actually have any rules. I know you hippies out there hate the idea of rules at all, but I like them. Rules in sports are very important. They keep the game balanced and fun. In Mario Basketball, you just run around willy nilly, trying to get by whomever is guarding you however you can. Obviously, hitting someone with a banana peal should be fair game in any Mario title, but goaltending? Double Dribbling? Does it really make the game more fun to play this as if you are a mentally deficient turtle? It just gets so boring after awhile.

Basketball purists look at the NBA right now and shake their head. ESPN is the most important sports invention of all time. It has single-handedly changed the way every sport is played - because it rewards flash over substance, the NBA has turned into a high-flying dunk-a-thon with no fundamental team play. All you see in the NBA are ridiculous dunks and big guys taking ill-advised three pointers. Mario Basketball does emulate this part well enough, except without three pointers in the game all you have is mascots driving to the rim. There is no skill to shooting at all, so if you're a big enough daredevil to take the outside shot you just have to pray it goes in. Every possession in Mario Basketball plays like a 1-on-3 obstacle course to get to the hoop. Gets kind of tedious after awhile, you know?

Scoring is done with coin blocks. By default, if you make a basket you get twenty points. But there are coin blocks on the ground as well; you can dribble on top of them to up how many points you get per basket. This is an interesting twist. You have to decide if you want to score a lot of low scoring baskets, or try to up your bank for the big payoff. It is quite fun hitting a 73-point shot at the buzzer to win. It's not exactly fun actually accumulating all these coins, but I do like scoring a lot in one go. In the hands of a competent developer, (such as Camelot who has seemingly mastered these Mario sports games), this could have been really fun. As it is, it's the only bright spot in a rather dull game.

Is this worth even playing? Not really. Because it requires two copies of the game to play multiplayer, it's going to be a real pain to get any legitimate competition going. And the one-player experience is just tired. Either the computer is slow and easy or fast and incredibly hard. There is no in-between. Using the touch screen to play basketball is also anything but intuitive. The whole point of the NDS is to take away normal control frustrations and make games that couldn't have existed anywhere else. Mario Basketball does not encompass either of these ideals.

Erp... I just realized it was a bad idea to write about this game right after lunch. Better end this quick or I may have to go home early. Wait a second...

I thought it would be a good idea to start talking about all the new releases every Monday. What's the point of gaming without new games, right? As I'm looking at the schedule for this week, though, I am a bit horrified. I haven't even heard of most of the games coming out this week. I decided before looking at the schedule that I would do a weekly release list, though, so I'm sticking to my guns. It's funny that all the big games come out at the end of the year, and yet here we are in October and there's nothing but who dat crap. Oh well, on to the games that no one cares about.

Star Trek Encounters - I'm kicking off this week's release slate with STE because it's one of the few games I actually know something about. I had a really great appointment with Bethesda at last year's E3. It was actually the best appointment I had with any developer at the show. This was when I talked to the producer of Oblivion and found out, once and for all, that Oblivion is lacking RPG elements because Bethesda didn't want to make an RPG. It's so nice knowing that I was right. Anyway, for all the fun I had in talking with Bethesda, I had to put up with one very bad thing: a seemingly endless presentation of STE. It started cool enough. The producer started talking about how this would be the definitive Star Trek experience. Now, I've never seen so much as an episode, but I love definitive things. This was going to have all the vehicles, all the different aliens, all the captains and all the other crap. Sounded pretty cool. I assumed it would have some RPG elements where you control Captain Kirk directly. You'd be able to set up relations with other species, order Spock to do nasty things with Worf, and all the other crap Star Trek fans dream about at night.1 Turns out, you can't do any of that awesome stuff. You just fly around in the Enterprise attacking shit. Boring!

NHL2K7 - I am fan of sports. In fact, I am listening to ESPN radio while I write this. I know all about the baseball playoffs even though I haven't seen a single game this season. I know more about the NFL than people who are paid to watch it. I have derided American basketball just like every other bitter white guy. And yet I have no idea who won the Stanley Cup last season. While watching football with my buddy yesterday, a man who bought an HDTV just to watch ESPN in High Def, I brought this up. He didn't even know who won. He thinks it was Tampa Bay. I'm thinking Buffalo was involved somehow. Either way, I assume we're both wrong. Coming on the heels of that riveting hockey conversation is some new hockey game. I have no idea what's new this time around and I don't really care. NHL '95 is still the best hockey game ever made. The more realistic these sports games become the less fun they are. Developers are simply not talented enough to offer a realistic interpretation of the games. Madden '07 was a travesty. It's just not fun seeing a poor imitation of the real thing. I think I'm in a really tough position over here: I'm a hardcore gamer and a diehard sports fan. Because I know the real thing so well, I judge the video games against those. And I judge the games against other video games. They don't hold up. I find it hard to believe anyone who loves sports and games can love sports games.

Mercury Meltdown - I first heard about this game five minutes before starting this column. However, the box art is pretty cool. You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but anything if fair game when the PSP is involved. MM looks like some cool puzzle game. Since this is a PSP game, hence I can carry it around with me (if I owned the system), I can only assume it's a blast. Other than Snood 2, has there ever been a bad portable puzzle game? It's just not possible. It's like making a bad game with dinosaurs. You have to actually try to put crap on a disc to mess up something so easy. Without knowing anything about Mercury Meltdown, I am confident enough in my box art judging to recommend this full-heartedly.

Stacked - Another PSP game! What a week! However, this is not a puzzle game so it will suck. The biggest problem with this game is that it could have been interesting. I mean, it's called stacked. It's on the "adult" handheld system. Shouldn't it be about breasts? With a name like Stacked it should either be a bunch of breast related mini-games or just a well-endowed main character running and bouncing. I bet there's a developer out there that is just pissed some poker game stole this title. Even worse, because some irresponsible developer used this name for such a lame title, there can't be a video game based on that awful Pamela Anderson show. Oh the travesty! You could have controlled Pam! Virtual Pam stacking books (I think she worked in a bookstore...) while trying to avoid the creepy guy ogling her from across the room. Now that would have been entertaining.