Confessions of a Gamer Wife

Happy New Year!

2011-01-07T07:52:00.000-08:00

Every New Year's Day, Ben and I sit down and evaluate the past year, then use those evaluations to set goals for the next. Confessions of a Gamers Wife scored really high in my 2010 Evaluation and I regret that the project came to a screeching halt as soon as I tried to throw a couple other activities into the mix. I started an etsy site with my amigurumi creations and have had so much fun working on it and learning a new craft. I have a lot of work to do on that project, too, as Christmas did a number on my etsy shop (ohnoitsjess.etsy.com)

I don't regret the time spent on that project. I just wish that I could do everything more quickly...or I wish that I had more time each day. But I am pleased with how much I was able to do last year and I want to see CoaGW continue. I don't want to make a resolution that's impossible to keep like I did last year when I exclaimed that I would stop watching all reality television. If there were a reality television program in which people had to see how long they could keep their resolutions to win a million bucks, I would most certainly have been the first one voted off the island. So in an effort not to disappoint myself, but also continue CoaGW into 2011, I've decided to give myself a little slack on each entry....they don't need to be three page essays every time. I can blog a bit more casually about gaming experiences I have and what it's like to be married to a gamer while occasionally taking extra time to write a Good Piece when the mood strikes.

I don't have a new game to discuss this first blog post of the new year, but I can relate the Christmas drama that always unfolds for this poor, poor gamer's wife every year. What does a gamer's wife buy for her husband when he pre-orders every game he wants? Plus, even when I do buy him games, I've grown tired of giving him a small pile of identically shaped game boxes. Console years have been good to me. He remembers past Christmases as the “PS2 year” or the “Nintendo DS” year. Those good gamer wife moments are a couple brightly lit bulbs on an otherwise dud strand of attempts to surprise and match my husband's eerie ability to find me just the perfect Christmas gifts every year. This year I didn't fail him as much as offend him and it's all because of the World of Warcraft. I hate that world. Oh, how I hate it so.

I knew it was coming. The Expansion. He would mention it occasionally, feeling out the situation. Treading lightly. I would brush it off with a joke or an eye roll. Then he called me from work one day and I knew things were getting more serious. “Hey, some people at work are betting that you got me the game for Christmas and that's why you won't let me buy it. I told them there's no way you would ever buy me that game.” I too-quickly replied, "You win the bet! I'm not buying that game." I would not, could not, buy that game. But I think he was disappointed to have heard it stated so definitively. I have always been one person who gets him exactly what he wants for Christmas. What he wanted for Christmas was the special edition World of Warcraft expansion that was quickly selling out on Amazon, an observation not-so-coincidentally made the same day as that phone call.

He talked me down, as he always does, with rationalizations, usually monetary in nature. He wouldn't buy new games if he only played WOW. As usual, I grew tired of the subject and eventually said, a bit too loudly, perhaps, “Do whatever you want! Buy it if you want it!”

So he did. And so did my mother.

My mother also enjoys pleasing people at the holidays by granting them their gift wishes and she does not have the WOW stigma that I have. For some reason it didn't occur to me or to Ben that anyone else would ever buy that game for him. Oops. So he found himself with not just one copy of the game, but two. It occurred to me that I could play with the second copy, but that thought, like a gnat brushed quickly off my arm before it barely tickled a hair, was brief. Instead the second copy was returned to the Best Buy from whence it came and I was stuck with another extra large box on a shelf and a husband glued to his computer.

In fairness, he doesn't get to play WOW nearly as much as he would like. And he plays a bit more than I would like which is a compromise and that, everybody, is what marriage is all about.

Maybe my first game review of the new year will be Gran Turismo, since the gaming gift I did get Ben this year was a pretty new racing wheel. Racing games are like Ben's hot bubble bath after a long day at work.

He will certainly have many long days at work in the new year as he prepares for that next Madden launch. Somehow high-speed turns around a track helps him unwind. I plan on taking slow, cautious, responsible turns in my new ride, a Christmas present for us both, but mostly me. I call our new gunmetal gray Mazda 5 micro minivan the Mom Bullet and it is loaded with explosive hugs and an aux jack.

Happy New Year everybody. Thanks for your support of this project last year. It really meant a lot to me.

How Halo: Reach is not like my new favorite game, Start the Party

2010-10-19T08:47:00.000-07:00

There are supposed to be four seasons per year, but in our family there are five. We squeeze an extra season in between Summer and Fall and it's called Birthday season. Birthday season begins September 1st and continues through mid-October with some after effects reaching into November which, incidentally, is when it actually begins to feel like Fall here in Central Florida. Birthday season is a cherished time of year for us Burbanks. We like surprising each other with just the right gifts, fancy cakes, birthday decor, and all manner of celebratory events. September through the first week of October is like one unending birthday party.

I'm sorry, but Halo: Reach entered my life in the middle of Birthday season and, unfortunately, the game was a bit of a party pooper. Ben and I did play one evening. I created my character, which was, of course, the most enjoyable part of my gaming experience. I liked choosing my logo and the teal and white color scheme that donned my spiffy spacesuit. But then the sci-fi jibber-jabber started and I got the glazed eye that Ben knows so well where I'm staring at the screen but no information is actually registering in my brain. He filled me in on the mission and controls, but I think I distracted him because we accidentally lost the rest of our Halo team and it took a while to figure out where they were. We found our team near a dark, empty station which we explored. Then we went back outside and shot at some monsters, though I mostly hit ostriches, my fellow teammates, or nothing at all. Then I'm not sure what happened. Either there was a bug in the game or we couldn't figure out what to do next, so we quit, never to play it together again. I did try Halo on my own once. I repeated everything Ben and I had done the previous evening and then got stuck, again, at the same exact spot. I had far too many birthday plans swirling through my head to spend too much time figuring out how to continue through the game. Also, due to the crazy influx of game launches that somehow always coincides with Birthday season, there were several games that entered Ben's life that were more alluring to him, (Civilization V, Final Fantasy XIV, Dead Rising to name just a few) so he didn't put on the Halo: Reach pressure when I needed it.

Birthday season always brings an influx of video games into our household. Ben starts shopping for his own birthday sometime around March of each year even though his birthday isn't until late September. He is continuously scouring the internet for release dates and if a game happens to have a release date within plus or minus two weeks of his birthday, he sends me a link to it so that I'll know. Subtle.

He is difficult to shop for, mostly because he either gets everything he wants anyway or because I'd have to be a Computer Science major to understand what he needs. I have to import games from Japan or price compare computer parts or bid for obscure toys on Ebay. Birthday shopping for Ben is not for the faint of heart. To make matters worse, all of his friends and family are even more clueless than I am about what to get him for his birthday so they contact me for ideas. I end up giving away all my best birthday gift ideas, which leaves me empty handed.

This year, though, he bought the whole family a present for our collective Birthday season. The present was the PS Eye, a camera hooked to the PS3 with remotes you use as controllers that track your body movements, much like the Wii but with newer technology – improved responsiveness and better graphics. I rolled my own eye at him when he brought this one home, but had to take my eye rolls back when he popped in the demo for a game that was not only fun and silly and cute, but had an appropriate and timely title: Start the Party, my new favorite game.

Start the Party is a party game that involves mini games like in Warioware but less confusing, a bit like Mario Party but way more fun, and it comes complete with an adorable Little Big Planet-like aesthetic. With childlike delight, I whacked moles, swatted at bugs, nudged baby birds into their nests, and disabled advancing robots with my remote control. Ben said he hadn't seen a game make me giggle like that in a long time. Appropriately, he bought me Start the Party for my birthday.

I only experienced about 30 minutes, total, of Halo: Reach, so I don't really have much to offer by way of review. I guess the lack of review IS my review. Still, in an effort not to have Halo: Reach END my online reviewing party, I will conclude this very belated blog post by describing how Halo: Reach is not like Start the Party.

Start the Party: I never stopped smiling. Halo: Reach:I never started.

Start the Party: Offers many possibilities for dick jokes. Halo: Reach: Usually just involves calling your opponents dicks over a headset which I watched my brother do several hours per night throughout his high school career.

Start the Party: On an obscure planet you shoot at cute metal robots. Halo: Reach: On an obscure planet you shoot at ugly running monsters.

Halo: Reach: Offers me ostriches and Nathan Fillion. Start the Party: Offers me the chance to pretend pick my nose and draw horns and a mustache on Ben's face.

Halo: Reach: I get lost. Start the Party: Ben loses. Ba-da-bum!

I can't blame Birthday season entirely for my lack of game play. I have actually played several video games this past month that I heartily recommend. Chime is everything I want a video game to be, all wrapped into one pretty-sounding package. We've had several fun family game nights with the the PS3's version of Wii Sports, Sports Champions, especially the archery and ping pong games. Turns out I'm as bad at simulated ping pong as I am real life ping pong. Sad. I'm always a sucker for iPhone games like Zynga's Word Scramble Challenge. I fuss about people wasting their life away on WOW, but I could easily rack up hours playing word games on my iPhone.

Birthday season is coming to a close. The days feel crisper and the perfect pumpkin sits on my bookshelf awaiting its imminent carve. My birthday was one of the best ever, even though I turned a truly dreadful number. I was completely spoiled. I look back with very fond memories of my twenties and look forward, with excitement, to the next decade ahead. All our birthday festivities were a success. Ben got his long-awaited Chuck E Cheese birthday, lots of video games and an awesome toy dinosaur transformer that our son wanted so badly he climbed the dresser for it, toppling the dresser, the dinosaur, himself and my favorite vase. (All parties involved are fine). My son enjoyed his own birthday party almost as much as he enjoyed everyone else's. I even pulled off a cute Under the Sea themed birthday cake for his second birthday party despite the near cake-tastrophe of 2010.

Birthday season may have distracted me a bit from my game assignment progress, but I am back now - older, wiser, and ready to Restart the party.

My next game assignment makes me nervous like trying a first hit of cocaine might. I'm being forced to play Frontierville. I may be a bit scared of its addictive properties, but I will try it, sacrificing myself for journalism. If you don't hear from me in two to three week's time, please come drag me out of the frontier. Thanks, and enjoy your Autumn!

50 Cent Blood on the Sand Reminds Me I'm a Dork

2010-09-17T13:41:00.000-07:00

The year was 1990. I wore thick glasses, a red polo shirt, long, multi-colored striped shorts and an ill-advised perm. I was seated in front of a jelly-soaked PB&J, a-day-too-old banana that had smelled up my lunch bag and the rest of its contents: the saran wrapped pile of chocolate chip cookies, a bag of Fritos and a carton of chocolate milk, all of which contributed to the thirty pounds of extra chunk around my everything. On my side of the table sat two or three of my white friends. On the other side of the table sat three black kids in my class. Our school was purposely desegregated, but the kids, for the most part, segregated themselves anyway - not for any actual reason - just out of comfort and code. I was ten and I was involved in a minor racial skirmish, though, at the time, I'm not sure I realized that the argument had anything to do with anything other than musical preference. The debate? New Kids on the Block vs. MC Hammer.

I'm not saying that these two groups epitomized the racial divide in the country at the time. Looking back now, they both actually seem to bridge the racial gap more than divide it. But that day, in the school cafeteria, it was NKOTB vs. the MC, dorky pop-loving us vs. way cooler rap-loving them. Racial awkwardness is a different beast when you're ten. It is subtle. Less electric. More innocent, yet distressing because of how ignorant it is. I soon discovered that I should have kept my musical tastes to myself. I learned that day what being a “white girl” was like. I felt like a stereotype. I suddenly wished that I wasn't in love with New Kid Jonathan Knight and that his poster did not grace the ceiling over my bed.

I don't remember what the argument was like or what we were attempting to achieve with the debate. Was our goal simply to recruit more fans to our side of the table? All I know is that I lost that popularity contest. My side did not win.

I have felt awkward, dorky, and “white” since then, but it wasn't until I popped in 50 Cent Blood on the Sand that I felt all three at once and with such potency. Perhaps that is the ultimate superpower of this era's African American rap stars. They have the power to make a middle class southern white girl feel like the lamest person alive.

Like most school cafeteria fights, the premise of this game is pretty dumb. The rapper 50 Cent is in an unnamed Middle Eastern country where he has played a concert. Afterward, he visits the concert promoter looking for the $10 million he's owed (That much?!?). To 50 Cent's chagrin, the concert promoter no longer has the cash. The concert promoter is “persuaded” to pony up some method of payment which turns out to be a diamond and pearl encrusted skull he happens to have lying around (of course!) However, the moment 50 Cent has the skull in his very large hands, it is promptly stolen by a paramilitary gang. 50 Cent and a buddy then decide to do whatever they have to do to get it back. Tell me that doesn't sound like elementary school. Someone promises to give someone their lunch money, the kid comes to collect and the lunch money has mysteriously disappeared so the kid gives up a Twinkie in payment which a gang of other kids promptly steals. It's silly.

The game is a third-person shooter – my first. I'll have to post a video of me playing this game so you can really get a feel for the hilarity of it. Remember, my playing will be terrible in the video, but nothing like when I first started. Me playing this game today is about 500-diamond encrusted skulls better than my first attempts and that is really sad. You know the feeling you get when you show pictures of yourself as a kid to a friend and you get around to your adolescent stage and remember how completely hideous and awkward you were? And you know how physically and emotionally uncomfortable it is to see those pictures again and remember how it felt to be that person? And you know how you definitely don't ever want your friend to get a glimpse of you looking that way so you hide those pictures real fast....then maybe burn them after? That's how I think both Ben and I felt watching me play this game.

First of all, I couldn't even make 50 Cent walk forward. It was the most ridiculous thing to witness this pit bull-of-a-man walk up a staircase sideways because I can't figure out how to make him look straight ahead. One joystick controls his movement, the other joystick controls the camera, or where he is looking (also what you end up seeing as the player). I could make him move forward and backward just fine, but I couldn't physically get the hang of looking around! I can't describe in words the silliness of me playing this game. Ben inverted the controls for me after a while which helped a little bit. Still, most of my time in the game was spent staring at the ceiling or the floor while Middle Easterners shot and launched hand grenades at me.

Since the third-person bit was difficult to master, the shooting bit was nearly impossible. I aimed my gun based on some nonexistent vantage point I created in my imagination, all the while completely forgetting that the little white x in the middle of the screen was there for a reason. Then, when I actually remembered that I should use the x to aim, I didn't seem to have the dexterity or subtlety of hand movement required to aim the x on my target! It took me a good 30 seconds or more to get the x on my target and, by that time, I was dead. So...I can't look where I'm going, I can't aim, and I didn't know until Ben told me three playing sessions in that I could hide to heal myself and that I could just run at the guys and fight them in hand-to-hand combat to avoid some of the shooting altogether.

If the real 50 Cent could have only seen what a bumbling idiot his likeness had become under my control. He had lost all street cred, that's for sure. (Is that the “whitest” thing I could ever say? I don't even know. How sad is that?)

It is appropriate that this game is a third-person shooter, because that's how I feel when I think about myself at ten years old. I feel like I'm looking at myself as an outsider. When I talk about that girl, I think in third person; I'm an older, wiser narrator telling someone else's story. The way I play this game is completely reminiscent of the way I dealt with those elementary school gangs of kids who bullied or teased or argued with me all those years ago. Avoid eye contact so they don't notice you. Stare at the ceiling or stare at the floor, but whatever you do, don't let your eyes meet theirs. Blend in. Walk along the perimeter of the crowd. Send your braver buddy in first and follow her lead. If you have to cry or heal, hide behind the first wall you see. Run away. Figure out a plan of attack, grit your teeth and run at them head-on when they aren't expecting it.

Face-to-face confrontation has never gone well for me in or out of the game. To prove just how stereotypically white I am, while studying abroad in England, my friend and I met a British man named Richard and his best friend, Simon (That really was their names. Wow, the stereotypes-come-to-life abound in this post!) Richard was a history buff and a medieval weapons expert, a trained sword-fighter. I remember one day, while visiting Richard in his tiny village somewhere near Nottingham, he took us to the local pub where we drank pints of ale and then headed out behind the pub where we found a pile of metal helmets and swords. Right there in the small, dirt and grass parking lot of this English pub, Richard gave us a sword-fighting lesson. I learned all the moves pretty well and was enjoying myself. But then he said he was going to fight us and we needed to use our defensive moves against him. The moves I had so perfectly learned just minutes before disappeared at the sight of a sword swinging at my head. Not only did I forget the defensive moves, I lost the ability to move my body.

That's exactly what happened to me when playing this game. I practiced aiming. I practiced shooting. I knew I had to go hide behind a particular wall and then run towards the shooting tank. But then enemies started streaming out of the tank and shooting at me and I locked up. I'd forget which button did what. I'd forget to look where I was going. I'd run in circles and lose sight of the tank. I'd run at the guys and forget to hit B in time to complete the Counter-Kills.

I may have had a million reasons for liking the New Kids on the Block better than MC Hammer, but they didn't occur to me at that lunch. I can debate like crazy with you. Just give me two hours and let me write out my arguments that I will then read to you...or let you read...to yourself. Otherwise, I'll just stare at you while my face turns red and I get sick to my stomach. Then I'll remember what I was going to say halfway through math.

Video games and school lunchrooms exist in a strangely similar plane. Entering their hyper reality, you can escape a bit from authority and explore boundaries, your own and other's. In everyday life, it isn't acceptable to demand payment in diamond skulls or mow down gangs of people with a hum-vee or launch grenades at foreign tanks. I'm not a tough, fearless, cussing, gun-wielding rap artist, but this game lets me pretend that I am for a little bit. You have so little freedom in school to figure out what other kids are all about and figure out who you are and how you're going to treat and interact with other people. Places like the bus or the cafeteria were not always the most comfortable, pleasant places, but they were oftentimes the most educational places where you could try out behaviors you might not want your parents to know about or behaviors that were unusual or foreign to you. The result was not often nice. In the lunchroom, kids could get away with calling people mean things, stealing lunch money, creating the grossest possible food combination and then daring their friends to eat it. In 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, you can get away with insane violence, bigotry, foul language, and greed. If parents only knew what you did and what you discussed at lunch, they probably wouldn't let you go to school. And if they saw what you were doing in this game, they probably wouldn't let you play it.

Still, Ben told me I needed to practice playing 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand because I would need to improve my shooting skills and learn how to look where I'm going in order to play my next game, Halo: Reach, a first-person shooter. My perspective is about to shift...or maybe it already has. It's coincidental that I'm moving from a third person shooter to a first person shooter because that's the transformation that occurred for me while playing 50 Cent and thinking about those days back at Orange River Elementary. Most times I look back at that ten-year-old girl and feel like she's someone else, a character in a movie I've watched a thousand times. But when I look inward, shift back to my first-person perspective I know that I am still that intimidated, awkward girl, the “cracker” I was referred to so often by my classmates.

After all, I'd play a Jason Mraz album way before I'd put on 50 Cent.

What the arcade game Final Fight and other late1980's beat 'em ups taught me about friendship

2010-09-02T08:02:00.001-07:00

My Final Fight adventure would have cost me 22 quarters in an arcade. Surprisingly, Ben would have cost us nearly as much! Turns out, Final Fight sucks quarters indiscriminately.

The first time Ben and I sat down to play Final Fight I pepped myself up by talking smack to my husband.

“You ready to get beat, loser? You ready for my shirtless fatty Haggar to beat your effeminate, pretty-boy Cody down?”

“Hon, this is a co-op game. We're playing together against the bad guys. Not against each other.”

“Oh right. Co-op.”

Competitiveness runs through my veins like Carl Lewis. It's my default setting. I can quickly get behind a sports team just to see whether they win or lose. Too many hours of my life have been spent cheering on Casey on Top Chef or the nerdy couple on The Amazing Race or Jeannine on So You Think You Can Dance. I will actually stop to root for Miss Florida in the Miss America pageant. I live for awards shows.

But unlike the characters on Final Fight, I'm multi-dimensional. While I am competitive, I also really want to make other people happy. I remember when I was about five or six and my family was on a boat trip.I was bored and my Dad said he'd play a game of Memory with me. I placed all the red and white marbled cards face-down on the table in the boat cabin. The whole time we were playing, the boat lightly rocking in the river's chop, I was feeling a bit tortured by a dilemma. I didn't know who I wanted to win the game. Of course I wanted to win because winning feels good and winning would make my Dad proud of me. But I also adored my father. I didn't want him to ever feel disappointed or sad about anything. I didn't want him to have to lose, either. I wanted us both to win! Towards the end of the game I started purposely picking up mismatches so I'd lose. I remember my Dad asking me if I was letting him win and I said yes. He told me he didn't want me to do that. He wanted me to try as hard as I could because having fun and challenging yourself was what really mattered, not who won.

I've struggled with competitiveness my entire life. It has affected my friendships, my schooling, my hobbies, and my business decisions – sometimes in positive, and sometimes in negative ways.

I've been making things lately. Inspired by a few very creative, productive, inventive, and brave people I know, I decided it was time to focus on creating, showing, and possibly selling the things I make. I have to stave off the jealous twinges I get when I see other people's work in stores or at festivals or hanging on museum walls. I have to force myself to stop comparing my work against anyone else's and just enjoy the process of making things and sharing those creative moments with my son and husband. But that can be difficult for me....either because of competitiveness or insecurity.

The video game community has really brought this to my attention. I recently played several independent games suggested to me by a friend and reader of CoaGW. I'll speak about those games in depth another time, but what struck me while playing the indie games and what often impresses me most about the independent gaming community of developers, artists, programmers, writers, and designers is their willingness to support each other, share with each other, and advise each other in order to further the art and craft of video game development. I so deeply want to emulate their behavior, to embrace other creators and artists, share with them, learn from them, and support them rather than compete with them.

At the same time, I know the competitive nature of business and video games are a big business. Video game developers must share my struggle. I've seen it in the recent iPhone development gold rush. Two developers have the same idea for a game. One gets the game out more quickly than the other. One receives accolades and millions of dollars, the other quits or tries to somehow find a way of improving upon the original. I saw it in my own small business. I felt the constant pressure to be the best, the feeling that one mistake with a customer could affect your business's ultimate success or failure. Competition can lead you to be the best you've ever been and can make you feel like you could crash to your death at any moment should you make one wrong move.

Final Fight, one of the first of these arcade beat 'em up games of the late 80's, early 90's was one of those originals that set off a chain reaction of a dozen copy cat versions: X-Men, Spiderman, Ninja Turtles, etc. For anyone who has never played Final Fight, the game is a side-scrolling beat 'em up in which the mayor of the city, Haggar, a former professional wrestler, his daughter's boyfriend, Cody, a martial arts master, and Cody's sparring partner, Guy, tear through the big city fighting a street gang who has kidnapped Haggar's daughter, Jessica (THE perfect name for a game made in the 1980's...I can vouch for that!). The goal is to fight your way through Metro City's many districts to retrieve Jessica and hopefully bring an end to the city's crime problem.

Ben and I played on arcade sticks and I pretty quickly learned Haggar's fighting moves, although I didn't master the jump-kick until the end which is a shame, because that move is essential! Ben refers to these games as bro-op, and I can see why. It really does seem like an adolescent boy's ideal way to spend a roll of quarters. Pretend for a while that you're the toughest guy in the city, beating up bigger hairier men to save the blonde damsel in distress with your best friend by your side. You pick up whole turkeys and giant hamburgers for your vigilante characters to consume to restore their health. I can see the appeal. Plus, for being so old, the game's graphics are big and pretty impressive, the controls easy to master.

After about an hour of A and B button mashing while watching my muscle man punch and kick people of all shapes and sizes, I started to glaze over a bit. The game doesn't present much variety. But I hung in there and we beat the game and returned Jessica to the muscular arms of her father and her boyfriend.

One thing that separates Final Fight from many of its copies is friendly fire. I once asked my parents what friendly fire was. Their answer made me feel sick. I couldn't imagine a worse reason for a soldier to have to die. Wrong place, wrong time. An accident at the hands of one's peer. I guess that's what happens when you are surrounded by people trying to learn how to shoot machine guns and blow things up.

When Ben and I started playing Final Fight,Ben said that we'd need to communicate about who we were going to go after so we didn't get in each other's way. He warned me that we could punch and kick each other and accidentally deal damage. “Friendly fire,” he called it. I quickly realized what he meant. I kept forgetting what his character looked like! When six dudes rush at me simultaneously, I tend to start punching and kicking with wild abandon. Sometimes Guy or Cody got in the way...especially when I figured out the jump-kick timing and got a little jump-kick happy.

I played a little of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and X-Men knockoffs of Final Fight that didn't allow the main characters to accidentally inflict damage on one another. Strangely, I missed the friendly fire. I mean, not being able to accidentally hurt each other was certainly one less thing to worry about, but that worry was what made Final Fight interesting. In a real fight, you would have to watch out for your friend. You would have to make sure your buddy was out of the way before throwing the enemy across the subway car. You'd need to make sure you weren't going to land on your buddy while performing a crazy body slam on the bad guy. The times when I did accidentally punch or kick Ben's character were some of the funniest of the game. And sometimes Ben had to sacrifice a little health so that I could get in one last deadly blow to the enemy.

In any venture you need your friends alongside you. You need people to support you, get your back when you're ganged up on, carry on the fight while you put in another quarter. Sure, you might have to share the burgers and turkeys when you'd rather eat them all yourself. Your poor fighting might bring down your partner's game for awhile and vice versa. You might compare your scores to your partner and occasionally wish you'd done better than them. You might even get caught up in a little friendly fire along the way, But this is a bro-op! You need each other, because there are way too many giant men running at you at once. Because there's a pretty girl in trouble who needs your help.

Learn from Final Fight. Avoid an accidental punch to the gut through communication and care, and when you accidentally and inevitably whack your friend instead of the other guy, say you're sorry and keep fighting your way to that final boss...together.

Next game: TBA

Bayonetta for PS3: Final Review

2010-08-18T20:00:00.000-07:00

Perhaps if I were to unleash some temporal witch power on it, my situation would suddenly improve. - Bayonetta

I've tried that trick before, Bayonetta, and it has been known to work. I refer to my “temporal witch power” as PMS, though, and my husband is on to the excuse, so it's not as effective as it used to be.

Bayonetta...you are every woman, like Oprah, only you shoot angels rather than talk about them.

No, I take that back. Bayonetta is more than every woman. She's the woman who walks into a party and makes everybody stare. She's the woman with the inappropriate outfit on – the kind of outfit that makes other women whisper and makes men stupidly gawk. She's the mysterious, bitchy woman other women secretly want to be like, but also fear. She's smarter, stronger, and sexier than anyone else; she's manipulative, powerful, fearless, feisty, witty, and bold. She makes men look pitifully immature and idiotic, especially that Luka guy, the one that looks like Viggo Mortenson with the unfortunate looking homecoming-queen up-do hairstyle.

Bayonetta is a witch who fights angels. Such fodder for feminist analysis!

But, really, Bayonetta is the reason to play Bayonetta, despite the fact that she represents a cocktail of potentially offensive female stereotypes based on myriad male sexual fantasies. This is the first character-driven game I've played....a game with a character that's intriguing when the plotline isn't. Bayonetta's special abilities make the game interesting when most of the game mechanics seem typical; run around, find objects to smash, and fight things. The game becomes fun when you make her run on walls and ceilings and realize you no longer know which way is up. The game becomes satisfying when you learn the dozens of fighting moves she can perform using her hair and her shoes and all those fancy weapons Rodin dives into the inferno to obtain for her. The game becomes compelling when she can slow time to kick angel butt or cross bridges before they crumble. The game becomes beautiful when Bayonetta shapeshifts into a butterfly with every double jump. The game becomes goofy when she blows kisses at doors to make then open or when she catwalks like Giselle while shooting angel heads out of the sky.

While playing Bayonetta I've also been reading Y The Last Man, a graphic novel written by Brian K. Vaughan which is about how women carry on after all males on the Earth die....except for the one spared man and his male monkey pet. Between Bayonetta and Y The Last Man I've had women on the brain and, geesh, we're a complicated bunch. We want to be so many things simultaneously. While I bristle at Bayonetta's overt sexuality mixed with her brazen attitude, she makes me think about the tightrope women walk between the realm of angels and witches. We want to be both and we want to be neither and we don't really know which one men prefer, either. Is Bayonetta the ideal woman? Someone not afraid to fight, who wears nothing but her own flowing hair, who wants to hang out with Rodin in the bar but still has those quirky glasses to show she's not just street smart, but book smart, too? Can you take Bayonetta home to Mom?

Love her or hate her, she's interesting, and it's a good thing because the rest of the game really isn't. I had to read the plot on Wikipedia to actually understand what was happening and I'm still not sure I get it. From Wikipedia, if you're curious:

The title character is a witch who shapeshifts and uses various firearms, along with magical attacks she performs with her own hair, to dispatch her foes. She awakens after a 500 year sleeps and finds herself in an unfamiliar area with no memories of who or what she is. Over time, she begins to remember what caused her current predicament. 500 years before the incident that caused Bayonetta's memory loss, there were two factions preserving the balance between darkness and light in the world—the Umbra Witches, who are followers of darkness and their counterparts, the Lumen Sages, are followers of light. The factions shared two distinct treasures, the 'Eyes of the World' that were separately named the 'Left Eye' and the 'Right Eye', which they used to oversee the just passage of time. Both factions mysteriously disappeared from Vigrid under unknown circumstances. Bayonetta still has an ornate piece of jewelry which contains a small red gem, and believes this gem is the 'Left Eye' of the 'Eyes of the World'. While searching for the "Right Eye", she often receives flashbacks that make her remember what caused her current predicament.

She fights a bunch of virtues (bosses) only to discover that her Dad is the ultimate bad guy...another interesting Freudian choice.

All of this leaves me with one question. Where is my chick flick video game? If Bayonetta is Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider, where is my Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy? If you equate movies to video games, where's the romance? Where's the historical drama? Where are the romantic comedies? (Maybe Monkey Island counts?)

I want Pride and Prejudice in video game form. I'm not sure what the game play mechanics of Pride and Prejudice: the Videogame would be quite yet, but as soon as I figure it out, I demand that someone make it. I'm tired of heaven and hell, elves and dwarves, slimes and amulets. Stereotypes be damned! I need a good chick flick game. Any suggestions?

Alas, Ben describes my next game, Final Fight (arcade), as a "Bro-op," which sounds like the opposite of a Chick Flick game. We will be playing the whole game together, though, so that should be fun. We're going to count how many quarters it would take for me to beat the game in an actual arcade. How much money, do you think?

Bayonetta for PS3: First Impressions

2010-08-08T20:57:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen this game, take a look. This is one of the prettier scenes I've come across:

Some old Greek quote I read once states, "He who suffers much will know much." This video game project has shown me the truth of that statement. I had to suffer through God of War III so that I could know what to do when faced with hordes of nasty enemies and quick-timer events. I had to suffer through Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2 so I could know that there is worse sexism in video games than this. I had to suffer through all those puzzle games to appreciate Bayonetta's ease of exploration. I had to suffer through Dragon Quest's strange religious angel story so that I could….endure another?

OK…so maybe the word "suffer" is a bit hyperbolic. It's not like I'm being forced to sit through every episode of Two and a Half Men or American Dad. That would be suffering. This is just “a single-player third person 3D action game” in which “the player controls a witch named Bayonetta, and, using both melee and long ranged attacks, complex combo strings, and multiple weapons, is encouraged to explore ways to dispatch angelic enemies with as much flair as possible.” (Wikipedia said it better than I ever could).

So not exactly torture. Still, I've definitely begun to notice that each video game experience builds upon the next. My video game "vocabulary" is growing! That may not be enough to make me really enjoy playing every type of video game, but it does make my gaming experiences continuously easier. For me, easier means more enjoyable. So far (albeit, on easy mode)I haven't gotten lost or stuck and I haven't allowed the enemies to frighten me or stress me out because I know from past experience that the enemies are not as impossible to beat as they appear.

Bayonetta is like a "babe" version of God of War III, but with prettier, more interesting cut scenes, fewer obnoxious puzzles, and little extra artsy details that make Bayonetta a lot more fun for me than God of War III. However, if Bayonetta had been my second game assignment, like God of War III was, I don't think I would have enjoyed it at all – proof that my past suffering has aided my present experiences. Still, I could have SWORN I played three hours of Bayonetta, but my save file shows I have only played a little over one hour. How time can slow so dramatically while I play video games is beyond my comprehension.

There was an exact moment in my academic life when I realized I could no longer coast. In other words, school had always come pretty easily for me.Writing papers was an almost robotic exercise of finding a thesis and writing its subsequent five paragraph essay. My goal as a student was to figure out exactly what the teacher wanted and then give it to them. Easy. I coasted on that for many years (with a few math bumps along the way). Then I met a professor I desperately wanted to impress and he wasn't so easily satisfied with my work. First, I had a really hard time figuring out what he wanted, exactly, and second, his expectations were a lot more difficult to meet, not to mention, exceed. I could no longer coast by on shallow answers, facts ripped off from other people to suit my purposes, and generalized responses formulated from other people's opinions and my own brief summaries of them. I had to think...the kind of thinking where you can feel your brain inside your skull. I had to find an angle no one else had thought about and then I had to analyze and critique and research the heck out of it.

I have reached that same point in this project. I have worn out the easy gut responses to these video games. I can't fall back on the I-hate-puzzle-games/this-game's-story-sucks/I-suck-at-playing-video-games/turn-based-fighting-is-pretty-boring-unless-I-can-name-my-party-after-famous-basketball-players discussions any longer. They've become worn. They're done. I actually have to figure out what Bayonetta is really about a what I actually think about it. What makes this game different from other games? Why is it worth (or not worth) playing? Would I want my son to play it someday? Would I ever want to play it again? Why, exactly?

And discovering the answers to those questions while finding an "angle" is a lot harder to do…and more time consuming.

To make matters more difficult, some games have been really easy to discuss...something about the game will sort of hit me and I will feel inspired to write about some particular element. Nothing has really jumped out at me about Bayonetta. I have tried to recollect the first time I laid eyes on this game because that was the most fun I had with it. I remember Ben calls me in from the other room. He says I need to see this crazy game. I remember the impact that tall, black-jumpsuit-strutting, long red-streaked pony-tailed Bayonetta made on me when she first appeared on the screen. She struck a model's pose, then hip-waggle-walked around , gun pointed straight ahead. Bayonetta is one of the most powerful, dangerous female images I have seen on a screen and she was staring me down from behind her surprising thick-framed glasses. Then, as I watch Ben play, this woman turns into a purple ethereal butterfly when she jumps. She shoots bullets from her gun-boots. She bludgeons a bunch of creepy angels. Then, through some crazy witch-magic her jumpsuit is actually made out of her hair. This game is crazy! My instant impression was both, wow, she is mesmerizing and, wow, she is disturbing! Is she beautiful or is she...off? Her neck and face are a little funky but her body is female perfection. I can't quite place her accent and I can't tell if she's a model of female empowerment or the embodiment of every female stereotype every created - from the sexy librarian to a whip-wielding dominatrix to the ultimate Bitchwitch.

In short, I haven't figured out this game's angle yet and I'm not sure if it has one. Bayonetta exists somewhere in between”This game is awesome and interesting!” and “What the heck is going on and why is her hair swirling around her naked body?!”

So far, this is what I've decided. Best thing about Bayonetta? The loading screen that lets me practice fighting moves while I wait. Thank you, game, for keeping me busy during loading times. I hate to wait and you have occupied me during those dangerous times when I want to turn off the console. Worst thing about Bayonetta? I'd have to say Enzo. He's a stupid character with an obnoxious accent and a filthy dirty potty mouth.

Speaking of potties, I wonder sometimes if I want to have another child. Going back to the idea of suffering, I've gleaned all this parenting wisdom and experience with Jhonen, my first and only child. If I don't have any more children it's like those temper tantrums and sleepless nights I endured and all the crazy methods I adopted for dealing with it all will be wasted. Let's face it, by the time I figure out how to avoid/solve any of my parenting dilemmas, he's usually already on to the next! Speaking of Jhonen, this is the first game I've played since God of War that I really don't want him to watch. Will I ever want him to watch this game?

I haven't decided yet. Give me a little more time to play....and to think.

Dragon Quest IX - Final Review

2010-07-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

I had the same problem writing about Dragon Quest IX that I had playing Dragon Quest IX. I was in too big a hurry. I had too many other things on my mind. As the cliche goes, I had a hard time stopping to smell this game's roses.

Birthday season approaches. From September until the end of the year, it is nothing but birthdays and holidays, just about one event a week. Ben and I take birthday/holiday season very seriously. We start celebration plans and gift lists months ahead. This year, my best friend's wedding is thrown into the mix and I have become a frenzied and obsessive toast-writing, dress-shopping, perfect-gift-finding, and budget-bludgeoning madwoman. My Dragon Quest IX mission to kill the Wight Knight has not been of the utmost concern to me. But in this time of impending nuptials and birthdays, my sappy side is oozing. Even Dragon Quest IX made me sentimental.

I went through most of this game like a lonely tired soldier. The game moved forward like a dutiful trudge. The fat strategy guide sat limp in my lap; it helped me go through the motions. I played sleepy-eyed and dreary, only perked up by the occasional skirmish with a Teeny Sanguini or Cruelcumber. I progressed, but the journey meant nothing to me.

I played through Angel Falls by myself and, although I didn't hate playing it, I didn't care about playing it which might even be worse. I didn't know why I was playing it besides completing the mission I had set out for myself.

Then one night Ben sat down next to me and watched me play. We started discussing the game and what I should do next. He showed me things I could do that I had never noticed before. We laughed at my poor sense of direction. He encouraged me to slow down and pay attention. Most importantly, he showed me how to recruit a party, meaning I could make new characters that would play with me and fight with me and go with me wherever I went.

Jhonen was sitting on the bed with us and I asked him what I should name my first character. He looked at me, thought about it for a second and then said, “Jhonen?” I laughed and almost cried a little because it was such a sweet response. “Yes! That's the perfect name!” So I made a little martial artist named Jhonen with some awesome green hair. Then I created another character, a mage, and asked Ben what I should name him. He said, “Beans.” Perfect. I made my mage tall with no hair and amazing healing abilities. Then I made a tiny girl warrior with pink pigtails named Leelot. My family was complete. Suddenly I was having fun! I felt connected to the Dragon Quest world. I felt like I could successfully fight that Knight. And seeing that adorable foursome walk around together while my real family foursome lazed around together made me so happy.

I feel very fortunate that I haven't endured many truly lonely times in my life, but I do remember how those times felt. Loneliness makes you feel disconnected from the world, it makes you go through the motions to reach goals you don't care much about. I remember that detached, hopeless feeling and it sucks. I know that weddings are often flashy displays of canned phrases, cheesy music, bad banquet food, and outrageous expense, but they are also one of the few times when people come together to celebrate love and commitment and devotion and hope for the future. Weddings are an opportunity for two people to say to the world, “This is who we are, this is what we've decided for ourselves, and we are thankful that you are here to support us in that decision.” I have trouble with the idea of people being "blessed." I have trouble with the concept of having a "soul mate." I have trouble believing in angels. But I do believe that committing your life to loving other people based on knowing them so completely that you love them despite (and sometimes because of) their faults can save you from the dreaded loneliness - the kind of loneliness that makes you trudge through life like it's a duty instead of a joy. Strangely, Dragon Quest IX reminded me of that and I'm grateful it did.

Dragon Quest IX also showed me that I can play and might even enjoy playing RPGs, I just don't like to play them alone. Ben and I are thinking about playing through Final Fantasy XIII together, only instead of him playing while I watch, I'll play and he'll watch. The man doesn't always have to wear the pants in the video game playing family. Right, ladies? Speaking of ladies in pants, my next game assignment is Bayonetta for PS3 – a game that features a hot lady in hot black leather pants. Watch out, boys. I'm gonna kick serious butt in seriously high heels....heels that shoot bullets.

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies for NDS - First Impressions

2010-07-23T20:42:00.000-07:00

If we lived in an actual puzzle game and your character needed to put my character to sleep to, I don't know, steal my car keys or grab the bag of Cape Cod Sea Salt and Vinegar Kettle Chips from my clutched fist or something, there are four ways your character could do it.

1. Wait until around 12:45 am and then come into my bedroom and rant about video games. Take your pick from the following tried and true options. You could discuss the history of any video game developer and its current financial status. You could recount the back story of any game franchise's major character. You could go to our video game shelves and find both the English and Japanese versions of a game, then come in and compare box art.

2. Put any of the following on television: The Hudsucker Proxy, History Channel, anime that is not in some way overly-adorable, any made-for-TV movie.

3. Give me, on average, two and a half glasses of red wine, any type will do.

4. Make me play Dragon Quest IX.

All of these methods have been tested and are proven to put me to sleep in no time. Just ask my husband.

I've managed to eke out about an hour of game play thus far. It has taken me four sessions. It seems about 15 minutes of playing Dragon Quest IX is all I need to prepare me for a big ole nap.

I'm not sure yet why that is. Maybe it's because I have been a little extra busy lately. I haven't been able to find the time to actually start playing until late at night, so maybe I have gone into the game already sleepy. I'll try and remedy this Dragon Quest apathy a bit in the next few days. Since this seems to be slacker week, though, I thought I'd write the rest of this review using as few full sentences as possible and mostly just post pictures.

Why to play Dragon Quest IX:

Grandiosity!

These guys! Could I possibly want to start fights just to see these amazing creations?

The music! (May be the very first non-music game I've played that I've actually wanted to turn UP the volume).

Maps! They look cool and aren't so big that I get lost.

Why not to play Dragon Quest IX:

Sort of awkward religious stuff!

Creepy old farmers!

The game's sleep-inducing nature! (Don't have a picture or video of that because I can't take pictures or videos while sleeping and because I haven't figured out what it is about this game that makes me so sleepy). Maybe the wandering about and chattering endlessly with neighbors? Maybe trying to figure out which staircase will actually lead me back to that darn magical tree? Maybe the lack of cute new outfits to select for my (Victoria's Secret) angel, Jexxy? Maybe picking up piles of sparkling cow manure to earn Evanescence....wait, that's a sort of mediocre band I don't care for....I mean, to earn Benevolessence?

I'm not sure yet. In any case, I think Ben loves me just a bit less this week. Especially when he watched me try to get Jexxy to walk on a curving path. My new goal for this game is to figure out how to get my angel to walk at an angle since I don't have the use of an analog stick.

What has my life become?

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge on PC

2010-07-16T14:37:00.000-07:00

I have been familiar with Monkey Island games since Ben and I met in college. Secret of Monkey Island was the one game, besides Mr. Driller (love!) that I remember watching him play and thinking maybe it's ok that he plays video games. I had never encountered a game that made me laugh (later I had a similar experience with Sam and Max games). I never felt particularly inclined to play Monkey Island, myself, but he would often play PC games on his laptop in bed or at his dorm room desk and I would overhear the plot and it would make me laugh. When I'd look over to see the game, I'd find it to look cute, too. A cute, funny pirate adventure story with voodoo and treasure and romance and humor? That can't be bad! Going into this assignment I was at least excited to actually pay attention to the story rather than simply overhear it in the background while trying to get through my college History of the Novel assignment, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. I have now played Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, the sequel to The Secret of Monkey Island, for two hours and am 26% of the way through the game. With those two hours of game play under my belt, I'd like to offer up a few alternative subtitles to Lucasarts, the developers behind this witty and whimsical game title:

Monkey Island 2: Would Play More If It Weren't Installed On Hubby's Computer

Monkey Island 2: Talk About Stuff, Talk To Stuff, Pick Up Stuff Then Use Stuff On Stuff

Monkey Island 2: Puzzles are like WHA?!?

Monkey Island 2: Makes Me A Cheater Cheater Pumpkin Eater

I haven't played a computer game that wasn't Bejeweled since my days on elementary school computers playing Number Munchers and Oregon Trail. OK, that's not true...I just remember my shortlived World of Warcraft experience....well, anyways....those four games pretty much sum up my experience with computer gaming. There's something a lot more geeky about playing games on the computer than on a console. Is that true or is that a strange prejudice? Why do I have that impression? Is it because most popular computer game titles end in the word “craft” and feature shaman and elves while popular console games tend to feature sports cars and boobs? In any case, I felt a little extra geeky going to the PC to play Monkey Island, though I felt like I had to kick Ben off his computer in order to play, which helped me stall a bit, since he is almost always sitting there when he's not at work. Now that he has an extra large desk next to his extra large television set with his extra large PS3, he is at his extra comfortable computer chair extra much these days. (By the way, those dang consoles get bigger and bigger and then the next version they put out they make “slim.” What's up with that? Just make the console slim to begin with, people! This original PS3 is so tall it's blocking the remote control sensor!) He says he's not, but he is. I mean, sure, he says hello when he walks in the door. He gets up to come eat dinner. Just kidding. It's not that bad, but I am very familiar with the squish sound the computer chair makes when it is sat upon.

I felt a little self-conscious sitting at his computer. Our computers are sort of sacred personal spaces....probably the only truly private zones in the house besides the bathroom when the door is closed....and I felt like I was impinging on his Man Cave as I played a game on his computer in his comfy office chair. Now I play with Jhonen during the day while Ben's at work. Jhonen sits in the secondary, much-less-comfortable office chair usually reserved for me while I sit in the captain's chair. Jhonen says, “Monkey I-Yand, Monkey I-Yand” and then points out the game's trees and clouds to me as I play.

Ben's first piece of advice to me regarding Monkey Island: 2 (MI:2) was to investigate everything, talk to everyone, and remember everything you see and everything they say. Wise words. That is pretty much all there is to do in the game. There is no possibility of death. There is no fear in this game but the fear of getting stuck. Basically, you just click on every item you come across, be it a ball of string, a pile of blank papers or a one-eyed cartographer. If you can pick the item up, do it. If you can ask a question, you ask it. Every cheese squiggle, alligator, and box may (and most likely, WILL) be useful to you as your character, Guybrush Threepwood, strives to find the treasure, Big Whoop, reunite with his love, Elaine, and put an end to the evil LeChuck once and for all.

(This video is a little sample of what the game's like. Go find someone to talk to. Ask whatever questions you want to ask them. Listen to their responses and try to figure out what you're supposed to do next. Important items are labeled for you, like the coffin you use as a boat to travel across the swamp).

Playing MI:2 is much like spending a weekend with my mother. She is Guybrush Threepwood. She walks around my house exactly like I have to make Guybrush Threepwood walk around the swamp or the inn or Mad Marty's Laundry Stand. First, she'll walk into our house and notice everything that has changed since the last time she was here. She remembers everything.

“That rug was there before, wasn't it? Why'd you move it?”
“I don't know. I just like it better here.”
“Oh. I guess I do, too. It helps brighten up this dark corner a bit. Have you ever tried it in that corner?”
“Nope.”
“Just wondering. Is that a new picture?”
etc....

She picks up stacks of pictures and rifles through them, stopping periodically to ask me about where I was in that shot or why Jhonen is making a certain facial expression in another, She reads my grocery list on the kitchen white board and asks me about my menu plan for the week. She peruses my bookshelves, picking up a book here or there to ask if she can borrow it or to read the synopsis. One might call her behavior nosiness. She proudly refers to her behavior as curiosity. In Monkey Island: 2, this behavior is completely necessary.

You absolutely must ask every single possible question and scour every inch of every surface of every ship and beach and swamp, pick up everything you can possibly pick up, and use your items on other items you cannot ever hope to progress. Guybrush Threepwood is plopped on this island with nothing but his witty dialogue and your ability to figure out what he's supposed to do. And I thought A Boy and his Blob's puzzles were tricky. Wait. Is this Mission Impossible: 2 or Monkey Island: 2?

Don't believe me? You think I'm dumb? Here is an example of what Guybrush Threepwood had to do to get a little extra money so he can charter a boat to get off the island (excerpt taken from someone's game walk-through on gamefaqs.com):

Go to the swamp and enter the voodoo hut. Get the string beside the skull on the small table. Now leave. Go to the beach and pick up the stick laying on the ground. Go back to Woodtick and head to the Inn. Look at Pegbiter's bowl and then pick up the Cheese Squiggles. Now, head to Mad Marty's. Walk up to the box and open it. Now use the stick with the box, then use the string with the stick. Use the Cheese Squiggles in the box and walk a short distance away. If you're far enough away, the rat will go to the box and nibble on the Squiggles. Deftly pull the string and the rat will be captured. Now open the box and pick up the rat. Head into the bar kitchen and plop the rat into the pot. Now, go out through the window and enter the bar proper. Ask about the stew, and Bernard will soon get fired and you get a job.

WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT SOONER?!?!

Wow. This raises puzzle games to an almost hilariously impossible level.

Which is what ultimately turned me into a big ole cheater-face. I almost always hate myself for doing it, but any time answers to trivia or crossword puzzles or word searches are printed within view of the questions or puzzles, I must sneak a peek. I always begin the puzzle with a hopeful heart and a fool's optimism. I proclaim to myself that this time I won't peek. This time I will solve the puzzle for myself. Using my brain. And I do try to do that for a while, but then five or ten minutes, I mean, hours, pass and I find that I have somehow turned the page upside down and accidentally saw the answer. Oops! In Monkey Island's case, I sort of “accidentally” found myself alt-tabbing to gamefaqs.com and those handy-dandy walk-throughs written by either robots or very hairy people who type from under mountains of empty Mountain Dew cans and beef jerky wrappers who possess way bigger brains, a lot more patience and even more acne than I have. God bless these people for being able to solve these puzzles and then for taking the time to write out exactly what they did so that cheater cheater pumpkin eaters like me can get 26% of her way through the game!

Ben's assignment was to play until I had to receive help five times. Turns out, I didn't really understand the assignment. I thought he meant that I should play until I required help from him.

I innocently bat my eyelashes at him.
“You mean I was supposed to refer to gamefaqs.com only on the rare occasion that I'd need a helping hand? You mean I wasn't supposed to read through each paragraph and do what it said? You mean it is actually possible to figure out that the way to get an article of Largo's clothing needed to make his voodoo doll was to go get a bucket I never noticed at all and then take it across the map to the swamp I didn't know was there and then fill the bucket with mud and then bring it back to Largo's room and “use” it on the door and then I should know to hide behind his dressing room curtain and wait for Largo to come in so the mud falls on his head and dirties his clothing? Of course! How stupid of me!”

I have mixed feelings about gamefaqs.com and cheater codes and even receiving help from Ben. I hate to do it! I really do. I don't like asking for help. If I need to lift a crazily heavy box I actually prefer to just do it myself than ask someone to help me. I know my limits. This game surpasses them. Luckily, the game is quirky and fun and laugh out loud funny (really!).

(Check out the questions you can choose to ask this fat governor dude. This game is silly in a really great way).

What's the alternative? Not play the game? Get stuck and give up? That's what would normally happen. After I finished the first section of MI:2, I did vow to try harder to only refer to gamefaqs.com when I really, really needed it. That worked for a while. I almost figured out how to get myself out of a locked jail cell by myself. I used a stick (which I cleverly found in my cell by pushing my mattress aside) on everything and nothing worked! After a brief peek at gamefaqs.com I discovered that I hadn't quite tried to use my stick on everything. Silly me didn't think using a stick on a bone would result in anything! However, I did take notice of the bone before I peeked at the website, so I am making progress. I may play a couple more hours of this game, with a little help from my imaginary, pimply, caffeinated walk-through writer friend, because I care about the story! Yay! Thank you, Monkey Island, for having a compelling story with great dialogue, funny voice acting, and clever writing. You did more for me than the author of Tristram Shandy. Even CliffsNotes couldn't help me cheat my way through that one.

Will I continue playing Monkey Island 2 or shall I start my next game assignment: play Dragon Quest IX (NDS) until I have defeated the Wight (sic) Knight. All I know about Dragon Quest games is they are extremely popular in Japan and they feature blue slimes shaped like chocolate chips. I will learn more soon enough. Until then, I have a Dragon Quest IX Game Manual, some gamefaqs.com, and a little eighteenth century literature to read.

Deathsmiles for XBox 360: Final Review

2010-07-10T21:33:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I just need to shut my mouth. Like when I argumentatively accuse someone of something and their response makes me feel like an idiot because I know they are right and I am wrong. I open my mouth to spit out a snappy comeback,then realize that I had better just shut my mouth before I say something even more stupid than I'd already said.

I've had several of those moments this past week. A few examples:

I complained to Ben that I never get a chance to work on my projects because I always need to have an eye on Jhonen. Ben said “what about this morning when you put your pictures in frames while I worked with Jhonen on his train set?” Oh yeah. Shoot! That made me shut my mouth. Then I complained because we didn't have any weekend plans and Ben said, “Well, tomorrow we're going to the mall and out to dinner and the next day we're going to the zoo. What else do you want to do?” Oh yeah. Dangit. I had to shut my mouth. Then I wrote a long blog post about how I don't like video games because of bad storytelling and irrelevant gameplay. Then I finally played Deathsmiles, a game I'd been hesitant to play for a over a week, and the stupid game made me shut my mouth, too!

I will explain with this brief digression:

This video game project is like eggs. I never really liked eggs much. I'd eat them occasionally, say, when I was at my friend's house to be polite or because I was really hungry and there wasn't much else to eat. As an adult I'd never make eggs at home. At restaurants I'd eat eggs, but only if they were in omelet form. I hated all other eggs, especially the runny yolk kind that sits on the plate like an angry cyclops. Then I decide one day that I need to experience all sorts of egg preparations out of fairness to myself and the wide variety of egg cooks in the world. Plus, my husband really likes eggs, so we could eat lots of eggs together. It could be fun! So I try eggs sunny-side-up and over-easy, poached and hard-boiled. I like some of them a little better than others, but still feel that the only egg-featured menu item I'd order would be an omelet. I begin to justify my lack of egg satisfaction by complaining about eggs and the people who cook them. I generalize that the reason I don't like eggs is because they aren't cooked masterfully enough. Eggs just haven't reached their full potential, I lecture with certainty. The next day, though, I go to a Waffle House where I am told to eat scrambled eggs draped in orange cheese. I dread the first bite, sure that I'll hate it. Then, with surprise and a bit of embarrassment, I realize that I like them. In fact, I would order those eggs again. They are Waffle House eggs! They don't exactly meet the criteria I had set forth in my previous lectures. They were greasy and salty, cooked by a man who looked a bit like an angry old cyclops, himself. Yet, I liked them! Those stupid Waffle House eggs made me shut my mouth.

Deathsmiles is Waffle House eggs.

Actually, it's a side-scrolling shooter game featuring french-maid costumed anime girls trapped in a gothic castl-y underworld. The girls must stop Sakura's father who is determined to get back to the “real world” through a portal he's found. Unfortunately, each time he opens this portal, demons are unleashed into this otherworld, making these girl's lives very stressful. You pick a girl to fight the crazy demons. I first chose Windia, a “wind user” and then Follett, a “fire user,” though I didn't notice much difference between their abilities. The girl, with a little help from her respective animal companion, shoots bullet streams and bombs at demon enemies who shoot their own bullet streams and bombs right back. Their bullet streams are much cooler than yours, but your bombs are much stronger than theirs.

You move through stages fighting various types of demons – from big green or burgundy eyeball monsters to lizard beasts to my all-time favorite game enemy of all time, a giant, demonic, nose-ringed cow named Mary. Even though the game is side-scrolling, enemies approach from both the left and right and you can shoot both directions by pushing “A” to shoot left or “B” to shoot right-a feature I'd never seen in a shooting game before. You also have the ability to target enemies specifically by pushing “A” and “B” together, but I didn't really get into that. I played the game on Ben's arcade stick and found that fun. Somehow playing on an arcade stick made the experience seem more special.

You can choose between several difficulty levels and you can push start to continue the game if you die, a feature I took full advantage of which seemed to disappoint my husband. Ben says that die-hard players will start over rather than continue through the level, but I am no die-hard. I thoroughly enjoyed the stress-free shooting experience. If I had been playing in an arcade, I would have lost several rolls of quarters on this assignment. I pushed the continue button about once a level.

The game isn't ugly and it isn't beautiful (there are a few exceptions on both counts...there were some pretty scenes of castles, forests, and a Haunted Mansion-esque ballroom and there was one hideous scar-face demon). There is a story, but it's really limited, and only comes to fruition at the very end, though I will say the game's endings were satisfying to me.

Other game highlights were the ingenious and strangely beautiful bullet patterns. They were pretty difficult to navigate, but in a fun and challenging rather than completely frustrating way. At times, lines of bullets obstructed my path, but one well-timed bomb button-press and I was good to go. If I couldn't continue through the game despite my deaths I would have probably grown frustrated, but after an hour I found that I died less frequently, which makes me think this game helps your skills improve with time. I played on the easiest level and was able to beat the game in about half an hour. Ben required me to play for a full hour so I decided to play through the game as another character to see how the story and gameplay differed. I also played in a different mode the second time....the mode was called something ridiculous like Black Mega Label or something. Either the Black Mega Label was easier than the other mode or I got better, because I had to push continue fewer times and got higher points the second time around. When I play again, I think I'll either try to play through Level 1 without ever pushing Continue like the die-hards Ben described or I will try out Level 2 to see how much more difficult it is.

Deathsmiles, a dialogue:

Ben: “ I think you are actually having fun right now!”
Me: “Yes! I actually am having fun. I think I like this game!”
Me: “Uh oh, I think I just like games that are easy and straight-forward, don't I? That is my problem with other games, isn't it?”
Ben: “Yep, that's the problem.”
Me: “I suck.”

Turns out, the real problem wasn't who prepared the eggs, although I still believe there are cooks whose eggs could be tastier if they paid more attention to the details and presentation. The problem is that I don't like eggs that are good for me. I like my eggs fattening and full of sodium. The greasy salty eggs go down just fine, but put chopped boiled egg in my Cobb Salad and I'm going to complain. I wanted to love A Boy and His Blob because it's adorable and charming and has a story that's much more “me” than demons unleashed in goth anime land or half-naked hoochie mamas playing volleyball. So what is wrong with me?

The answer:

Puzzles. Puzzles are wrong with me. And working hard while still losing. There's a confession for you. I hate puzzles. I hate working hard. I hate losing.

I want a game to make me feel good. I don't want to leave a game feeling worse about myself than when I started. That's why I like games that ease me into difficulty slowly, like entering a cold swimming pool. I prefer to wade in slowly and carefully, letting each body part get used to the cold before I move on to the next. I don't like to jump into the deep end. I know this game could get really, really hard. But unlike a puzzle game, shooting games can more easily provide varying levels of difficulty and I need that. If I'm being honest with myself about what I really want I'd say that I want a game to make me feel consistently mildly challenged. I don't want to feel like it's impossible for me to progress and would rather a game err on the easy side. I want to slowly and steadily improve my skills until I magically discover that I am able to play at a higher level of difficulty. This game is good at that. The game eased me into their frigid waters and now that my skin is used to the temperature, I think I will stay a while and enjoy myself! The game could even slowly make the water colder and I may not even notice.

Perhaps even more importantly, Deathsmiles didn't make me figure out where to go or how to get there. It was straightforward. There was an end in sight and a clear path to get there. When I reached the end (I LOVE to reach ends!) I was given the ending to the story and it actually made me feel something! When you defeat Sakura's father and one more giant demon thing,you get to decide if your girl goes through the portal, returning to her family or stays in that gothic world with her new friends. Choose your own story ending? I love that, too! I decided that Windia should go back to her family and the game shows you the happy family reunion. At some point the narrator questions whether Windia's trip to the underworld was worth it since she found herself right back where she was before while leaving her friends behind. Turns out, before Windia's trip to Demon Town, she was a sensitive girl, full of self-doubt who cried easily. Her battle and ultimate victory helped her feel strong and confident. I wasn't expecting to learn anything about Windia and was pleasantly surprised that the game bothered to give me that resolution.

Looks like my high-fallutin' mumbo jumbo writing talk from last week was a bit overstated. Turns out I really do appreciate excellence in storytelling, art, and game design, but when push comes to shove, I really just want in and out. I want my story in half hour increments, hold the puzzles, please. I should have loved A Boy and His Blob, that pretty, subtle, coddled egg sitting in its delicate little white ramekin. I expected to like it. I appreciated the look of it. Being pretty wasn't enough, though. I left the game still hungry. So I went to Waffle House and got me some scrambled eggs with cheese. I honestly liked Deathsmiles because it didn't have puzzles. It didn't make me feel like a failure, a quitter, or an idiot. I learned a lesson about myself this week and it was a hard (boiled-egg) lesson to swallow. I learned that my desire to win fast and feel good about myself sometimes takes precedence over having to work and think hard.

Ben has decided to test this new theory that I only like video games that are easy and straightforward with next week's assignment which is exactly the opposite - difficult and full of puzzles. My next game will be Monkey Island 2 for the PC. I have seen Ben play a Monkey Island game before and it is one of the few games I can say has a fun, well-written and laugh-out-loud funny story. In that respect, Monkey Island 2 should be a good test to see whether or not a good story can make up for difficult puzzles. If not, I'll not only have to shut my mouth. I'll have to eat my words, too.

More thoughts...

2010-07-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

I have three more thoughts to share related to my previous A Boy and His Blob post.

1. This weekend I watched one of my favorite shows, Sunday Morning. One segment discussed Steven Spielberg and George Lucas' love of Norman Rockwell. Two men who have successfully brought stories to life in a way that made their viewer's emotionally connect to their characters both admired Norman Rockwell, and rightfully so. Last year, the Orlando Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of Norman Rockwell's art. I worked as a docent for the exhibition and also came to appreciate Norman Rockwell's art. I discussed in my post, and some of you referenced in your comments, the difficult job game designers have of telling an interesting story while creating game play that integrates into the story that is somehow the perfect difficulty level - not too difficult, not too easy. I agree. That's not easy. After watching that segment on Sunday Morning about Norman Rockwell, though, I remembered talking about his artwork with kids. I remember how there were an almost infinite number of significant details in all of his paintings that helped tell a story. He had just one magazine cover, one page, in order to tell a story and encourage people to purchase the Saturday Evening Post. He had one week to come up with a concept and paint his cover and these were large oil paintings! Each painting tells a story. Every character has a vibrant and sometimes complicated personality. These characters don't move. People don't have to benefit of playing as these characters or hearing these characters speak. But if you look at one of Norman Rockwell's paintings, these characters are REAL and his stories are heartwarming, dramatic, funny, and engaging. If he can manage to tell a poignant story in one picture, a video game ought to be able to tell a poignant story in its 50 hours.

2. Ben's Dad borrowed a copy of Up and I thought again about the experience of watching that movie and I thought about Pixar and just how incredible those artists and writers are. There are many computer animated movies out there, but what separates Pixar movies from the rest is not the beauty or technical mastery of their animation, but the characters they create and the way they tell their stories. Their movies have arguably the best writing being done in Hollywood today and Up has moved me more than any other movie I've ever watched in my life. Pixar realized the importance of quality storytelling and it has paid off. Animated "kid stuff" can be more emotionally engaging - simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting -and Up is proof. If I were going to make a video game adaptation of Up, I would be able to play as any of the characters and they would complete missions that were true to them or that helped retell the story. Fill in the blanks of the original - have my old man character blow up the balloons and tie them to the house. Let me fly the house. Give me flashbacks to the amusememnt park where I used to work as a balloon salesman and let me show Ellie around the amusement park. Let me become these characters and feel what they feel and do what they do. Put as much artistry and detail and sensitivity into the game as Pixar does in their movies.

3. Hot Tub Time Machine - Ben's July 4th plan was to sit around watching Hot Tub Time Machine and then light some sparklers in the backyard. My 4th of July plan was to create a culinary tour of America with party decorations and a nighttime fireworks spectacular with a picnic and dessert afterwards. So we did all of it (except Ben was spared the fireworks spectacular because of rain). I fell asleep halfway through Hot Tub Time Machine, after the part where four dumb, unfunny characters ended up in a dodgy ski resort's hot tub, all of them drunk, one of them threw up and they end up transported back to the 80's when they were young and having a lot of sex. I mention this movie to acknowledge the fact that there are movies with worse writing than most video games.

I'm certainly not saying I could write/design video games better. You don't see me trying to do it myself. But the industry as a whole, I think, could do with better writing and storytelling and maybe more creativity. Shooty-shoot and jumpy-jump games make sense in a Gallaga and Qbert world. Now that we're into film adaptations and 50 hour games, maybe it's time to adapt and invent completely new game play to suit those sorts of games?

A boy and his blob for Wii: Final Review

2010-07-02T20:14:00.001-07:00

I vaguely remember what it was like to learn to read. Reading came pretty easily for me, but I remember the way it felt to pick up a new book and try to read it for the first time. It was exciting, but challenging, since each new book presented a new set of vocabulary words, words I had never read before, words I had never even heard before. Playing video games evokes the same exact feeling for me and that got me thinking. Imagine if every time you pick up a new book, you had to learn how to read it first. That's how video games are to me. Is that how video games are to everyone or am I just not familiar enough with the vocabulary of video games to be able to pick one up and play it comfortably, the way I would pick up and read a book?

I find myself bringing up books a lot on this blog, which could be because I like to read and write so much and books are special to me. It could be because I have a bit of snobbishness about books in comparison to video games which is one of the main reasons why I started this project in the first place. I wanted to explore where that snobbery originates and whether or not it is fair. A Boy and His Blob, more than any other game I've played, kept making me think about books and I wondered why.. After a a lot of thought I find myself with much to discuss on the subject.

If Dead or Alive:Xtreme 2 were a book, it would be a trashy romance novel you read through while locked in your bedroom under covers where no one can see you reading it. If God of War were a book it would be a really bad novel adaptation of a cheesy 300-style Greek god action movie. Flowers would be read in a college fiction class as an example of what makes a great short story. A Boy and His Blob would be a Caldecott Award winning children's picture book. I couldn't get that out of my head while playing this game. Playing through this game was like playing in a beautiful children's picture book.

A disclaimer. I love reading books. I do not love playing video games. I am clearly biased, but I am trying to have a positive attitude while playing through these games and to be fair-minded while writing about them.

With that stated, books have elements that make them easily comparable to many, if not most, video games. Both books and video games introduce character, setting, and plot. They both often use dialogue, description, and narration to tell a story. They have protagonists and antagonists. They have drama, adventure, and humor. They have a beginning, middle, and end. Video games take an extra step, though, to include the reader in physical involvement in the story beyond reading, thought and imagination. Video games require the “reader” to become physically involved in the storytelling, which is what I love most about video games and what I hate most about them.

I love that I can make that little boy character hug his blob. I love that I can make him roam through the beautiful caves with their rays of light and trickling waterfalls. I love that I can choose to transform the blob into a trampoline to help the little boy soar into the sky or into a bouncy ball he can use to hop across water or into a parachute he can use to float in a colorful sunset. I love that the player of the game becomes the main character in a game. There is so much potential in that! I love the creative potential inherent in open-ended action and involvement.

One of my favorite books I owned as a kid was a choose-your-own adventure story. At the bottom of each page I could choose what the characters should do and the book had page numbers to flip to depending on my choice. I found it empowering to direct the story's plot and the character's actions and I thought it was amazing that the author could organize a book in a way that made choice possible. Video games have the potential to always give you, the “reader,” that feeling and that power, an ability that books can't generally provide. While books rely on a reader's imagination to make the story come to life, games have the gift of actual player participation. The game can show you the setting, the characters ,and the plot and the player actually enters into it. That ability is the ultimate in storytelling potential.

I love that this game takes advantage of that by using subtle details that help the story unravel and help you get to know the characters...at least a little bit. For example, the few words heard in the game are the boy's commands to his blob which is interesting because it calls attention to the importance of the boy's command over the blob and the blob's willingness to rush to the boy's commands. The lighting in the game helps tell you, the player, where to go. In one level, the blob is your light and you have to have him close to you so you can see. That detail subtly speaks to the fact that the boy may control the blob, but he also depends on it. When given charming and adorable characters, beautiful and interesting places to explore and a story about a blob who has landed on Earth and needs your help, who wouldn't want to actively, actually experience the world of A Boy and His Blob?

Video games have the power to engage so many more senses in a more physical way that books, but books have the power of a reader's imagination. For example, the reader can imagine how a character's voice sounds so there's not a danger of bad voice acting ruining the experience. In some ways, a reader's imagination is as freeing and empowering as a video game's ability to include the player in the story's action. Video games' greatest strength is also it's greatest weakness. I haven't played a lot of games, but from what I've seen, games and story don't coexist well; one always seems to get in the way of the other. They trip over each other, creating a lurchy, strangely paced experience for the gamer. A boy and his blob has all the elements of a great book and if I saw this children's book on the bookshelf, I would immediately pick it up to read it. I want to know the story! I want to get into this little boy's head and I want to befriend his blob right along with him. I am dying to travel wherever those maps lead. I want to investigate the boy's tree house and see what his house looks like. I want to ramble in the forests and jump up into the sky and fall down under the ground. I yearn to know why this blob is on Earth and whether it will find it's way back to Blobolonia. Even the black blob frog and bull villains are intriguing. All the elements for an unforgettable story are in place, but they don't seem to come together because the game's puzzles get in the way! I want to be compelled to keep playing just like any reader wants to be compelled to turn the page, but I'm not and that mystifies and frustrates me.

Part of me feels like A Boy and His Blob is successful as a puzzle game since the puzzles allow you to explore the world. For example, I have to figure out how to go down a hole but there are sticks blocking the path so I have to turn the blob into an anvil (which I called a power drill and Ben will forever tease me about that). Then I have to push the anvil down the hole, breaking the sticks. Then I discover that I must turn the blob into a parachute so I can float down the hole slowly and safely, careful to avoid the flying black blobs on the way. It's fun to figure out ways to utilize the blob to get where I want to go while getting to see this world. It reminds me of being a kid and having to be resourceful to get what I want. As a kid, a tree trunk becomes a table and a pile of leaves becomes a bed.. Then the other part of me is frustrated by the puzzles. Here's an analogy. It feels like I'm trying to read a book that requires me to complete a crossword puzzles before I'm allowed to turn the page. Sure, maybe the crossword puzzles have something to do with the story, but they aren't necessary to understanding the story and they slow down my reading of the story. They get in the way. Not to mention the fact that they're hard, sometimes so hard that I just want to quit reading, Why do I have to work so hard for my story? If I'm going to have to work hard for awhile, at least give me rewards for my effort along the way, because if I'm not going to be rewarded, then I'd rather just read a children's picture book version A Boy and His Blob. I'm sure I'd love it.

I only played through one and a quarter maps for about three hours and in that time I learned next to nothing new about the characters except that my blob could change into a wide variety of useful objects. The setting changed a bit, but not significantly. I learned nothing more about the plot. I was solving the puzzles just to get to another area that looks a bit like the area before it. That isn't good enough. That doesn't make a reader turn the page and it doesn't make me keep playing. If I'm going to work for it, I want something in return. I appreciate the details that I mentioned before. I am intrigued by the subtlety of the storytelling, but it might be too subtle.

Or maybe this is all my fault. Maybe I just play too slowly. If I played faster and solved the puzzles faster, then I could have probably gotten twice as far into the game and maybe I'd reach the rewards I'm looking for. I know that just when I was ready to quit playing Ben told me I had to play the next level because my blob is about to eat me to become a ball I then ride and that ball can go really fast. I was surprised to hear that news, because there was no hint that something new was about to happen and there hadn't been anything like that in my previous three hours of playing, but I turned the game back on and he was right. It was really fun! It was a bit of the reward I'd been looking for! So maybe my attention span is just too short. Maybe I got bored with the puzzles too fast. I don't know. I just think, if I read a book and I know nothing about the characters, or their setting or their story or why I'm reading about them within the first three hours of reading, I'm not going to keep reading. I don't think that's uncommon for a reader. Why is that uncommon for a video gamer?

Do I expect too much? Maybe I shouldn't expect to feel emotionally attached to my characters. Maybe I shouldn't expect well-written, compelling story lines. These are supposed to be games, right? I don't go into a board game expecting to be moved by the experience. I should just want to keep playing for competition's sake or for the sake of reaching the goal and enjoying the little challenges and tasks set before me. Maybe game designers are just trying to find new ways to make old tricks continually interesting by introducing beautiful settings and interesting stories. The game could just be a bunch of puzzles in a sterile environment, but these game designers bothered to create a great world for the puzzles to inhabit and charming characters to use to solve the puzzles. Maybe I shouldn't be complaining. Maybe I should be grateful!

I just feel gypped when I know that great storytelling in video games is possible and it isn't delivered. If you're going to provide me with a story, make it a good one. If you're going to add in characters, make them round characters that are interesting. If you're going to plop me into a world, give me a reason why I'm there and make the world believable. Why is that rare? Do video gamers really like killing things or solving puzzles or jumping so much that they can overlook bad voice acting, contrived plot lines and game play that has nothing to do with forwarding the presented story? Again, ir seems that when story and game play coexist, one always gets in the way of the other. Uncharted is the only game I've ever seen that has successfully reconciled the two. The game made the player part of the story while the story supported and gave the game play relevance and purpose. That's what I'm looking for.

Are these the rants of an ignorant gamer newbie? If so, let me know. I want to be wrong (just tell me I'm wrong nicely, please). I want to see games that are compelling because of great writing, believable characters, and great game design. In my college writing classes, my favorite writing professor taught his students there was not good or bad writing, only writing that is successful at what it set out to do or not successful. If I were to look back at the games I've played so far during this project, I would honestly have to say that Dead or Alive: Extreme 2 might actually be the most successful game of the bunch! The game's goal was to give me a bunch of bitchy girls with big boobs who play beach games. The setting, the characters, and the game play all worked to that aim and, honestly, all three elements were done well! And because it was a ridiculous, silly game, anything silly or ridiculous about the characters, setting, and game play worked!

I'm speaking like a judge on a dance competition TV show. The judges are always most critical of the most talented dancers who show the most potential. The judges are easy on the so-so break dancer with no formal training attempting to do a Cha-Cha, especially if the dancer manages to exceed the judges' already low expectations. It's the good dancers who suffer the harshest criticism. This game is a victim of it's own greatness. Of all the games I've played, A Boy and His Blob probably has the most potential to be a truly beloved, memorable, touching game and that makes me extra critical of it. Like I said, the game is charming and beautiful and nostalgic and subtle and something really special. I just can't say that it is everything it has the potential to be.

Let me exist in the story of the boy and his blob and make me compelled to keep playing it. Make me emotionally involved. Make me cry. That shouldn't be difficult. Even car commercials can make me cry. I know this boy and his adorable blob could, too. I really wish they would.

My next game might make me cry. With a name like Deathsmiles, I want to cry just thinking about having to play it. To be fair, I know absolutely nothing about this game except that Japanese anime French maid type girls grace the cover. Ben has told me that it is a side scrolling shooter for the XBox 360. Who knows? I mean, I just admitted that Dead or Alive:Xtreme 2 was the most successful game I've played so far. This project continues to shock me. Perhaps this Deathsmiles game will, too.

A boy and his blob for Wii: Initial Impressions

2010-06-29T15:12:00.000-07:00

A video that pretty well represents my experience playing this game. I elaborate below.

The video sums up my initial impressions of this game pretty well, so I won't blab about “blob” too much this go-round. I want to have plenty of material for my final review. I've played for a little over an hour so far. As the video shows, the game is really charming – one of the most charming I've ever seen. When I realized that I could make the little boy hug his blob, the game reached a whole new level of adorable. Then when my own little almost-two-year-old boy started calling our “Blob! Blob!” around the house and bouncing on the bed whenever the little boy in the game bounced on his blob-trampoline, the game's charm soared to even higher heights.

From my Pokemon Heargold and Flower reviews, you already know that cute stuff works on me. I can get interested in a game if the game is at least pleasant to look at. I sheepishly admit that I pick most products based mostly on their aesthetics whether it is a car or a dish towel, furniture or a computer. Whatever is most aesthetically pleasing is usually what I want, especially if it matches something I already have. Ben figured out that personality quirk of mine quickly. He is, for the most part, accepting and patient about it. The only times he gets really frustrated is when I rearrange all the furniture, neglecting to care whether or not he will be able to plug in and connect all of his various electronic belongings. Ben is much more practical and logical in his product preferences. Compromise is key with our household purchases, that's for sure.

Back to the game. Wikipedia describes it as a 2D puzzle platformer (one of these days I'll get that lingo down). The game is about a little boy who befriends a blob that has come to earth from its home lima-bean-shaped planet, Blobolonia. The blob transforms into useful objects like ladders, trampolines, balloons and parachutes to help the little boy explore the lush forested land outside his tree house. The blob comes to the boy whenever the boy calls him and it will stay put if the boy scolds him. Jelly beans are fed to the blob to make it transform (for example, a blue jelly bean turns the blob into a balloon). The transforming blob part is fun and there are signs that tell you which transformation to use, so the puzzles aren't as difficult as I had originally feared. Better gamers may not appreciate the constant help, but I did! There are also frequent checkpoints that save my game for me which is amazing. No terrible save catastrophes await me in this game.

Black blobs patrol the forests and kill you if you touch them. The kill is like a slow-motion faint which I find a bit disturbing, especially because, when I play, it happens often. There are spikes on the ground that can kill the little boy, too, and I frequently can't even tell they are there until he's in the midst of fainting. It doesn't feel good to accidentally “kill” this adorable child. It didn't help that the first time I played I'd just downed two adult beverages. It took me about nine tries to jump over one of the black blobs. I thought a couple drinks would loosen me up and help me jump better, but that was not the case. I'd like to blame the Wii controller, but I don't think I can. I admit it. I have a jumping problem. I'm just not good at jumping in video games; I jump too far or not far enough. It doesn't seem to matter what game I play. Sadly, a high percentage of video games require jumping ability which is, seriously, one of the main reasons I don't play more games.

The Wii remote and nun chuck is a bit of a change, though. They feel so different than all the other two-handed controllers I've ever used. I keep having to try every button, trigger and joystick to make the little boy successfully call his blob or drop a jelly bean or switch between transformation items. Then, since I've tried so many different buttons, I'm not sure which button actually worked so I face the same problem the next time. I'm glad that I at least don't have to aim the Wii remote at the screen much. Either my hands are too shaky or that Wii remote is too sensitive or something, but the select arrow doesn't go where my brain wants it to go. I have most of the controls down at this point and find that I am making my way through this game without too much trouble. I look forward to seeing what else this game has to offer in my assigned remaining two hours. So far not much has changed in the game. What you've seen in that video is about all I've seen in the past hour of play. Who knows. I might be staring at those trees and that white blob for two more hours, in which case, it's a good thing they're cute!

This game made me think a lot about video games - what I like and don't like about them - in a whole new way. I plan on discussing these video game thoughts, questions, and opinions in depth in my final review of this game. Until then, I have black-blob jumping and forest exploring to do. There are jelly beans and treasure chests to eat. “Come on, blob!”

2010-06-25T20:34:00.000-07:00

This week I have three similes to describe my experience playing Pokemon HeartGold:

Playing Pokemon Heartgold is like trying to save for a new car. Your old one isn't good enough, but in order to save enough money for a new one you have to get to your job which you can't do if your car doesn't work so you just have to keep fixing your old car, using up any money you could be saving for a new one. So you just put a few bucks at a time away hoping that one of these days you'll have saved enough for a better car. The game is all about ncremental advantages. It's about inching your way to a better position.

Playing Pokemon Heartgold is like going to the gym to lose weight. When you first start going it's painful and embarrassing, tedious and frustrating. But then you start to lose weight. Going to the gym becomes a numbers game. What will the scale say tomorrow? How many more minutes on the treadmill will result in how great a difference on the scale? Watching the numbers change and your body change, too, becomes exhilarating and entices you to keep going to the gym and keep losing more and more weight.

Playing Pokemon Heartgold is like knitting a scarf in Florida. The time spent might not actually be productive when you consider the end result, but it feels productive while you're doing it. Knitting a scarf and playing Pokemon require about the same amount of concentration and care - enough to get by, but best done while in the car or in front of the television so you feel like you're multitasking your time-wasting activities. It's something to keep your hands and brain busy and distracted. It's something to do. Plus, there are times when the scarf turns out to be surprisingly beautiful.

Pokemon. The Grind. The Numbers Game. The Mindless Addiction.

I played Pokemon for seven hours and 22 minutes. The first six and a half hours of gameplay was spent just trying to accomplish the goals Ben set out for me. Two revelatory moments made me play another voluntary hour after my mission had been accomplished. The first revelatory moment was when I received that gym badge which I will talk about in a bit. The second revelatory moment entails telling a little story.

I had reached my first gym after a countless number of battles while wandering the streets and grassy paths of Cherrygrove City and adjoining areas. I had learned to trap, trade, and battle Pokemon. I had learned my way around and had spoken to numbers of people who taught me many things about Pokemon. I had played for about three hours and was ready to be finished with this game, though I wasn't exactly sure what more I could say about it that I hadn't already said in my initial impressions review. I survived the many trainer battles in the gym and felt pretty prepared to beat this last trainer and find out my next game assignment. Then a level 14 Pidgeotto crossed my path and I realized that, not only was I NOT leaving this gym with a badge, I wasn't going to be able to get this badge without a lot more work. My Pokemon were ill-matched against these bird Pokemon to begin with and none of them were anywhere near strong enough to go against a level 14 Pokemon of any type. The only useful Pokemon I had was Doggy, the fire Pokemon Ben had traded me, and he had leveled so quickly that he had turned against me and was rudely ignoring my commands!

After I realized that I would not be earning my gym badge anytime soon, I pouted for a while and Ben suggested I buckle down and begin The Grind. By that he meant slowly, patiently, and strategically leveling the Pokemon I had while trapping more Pokemon and then leveling them. All the while I must find the best patches of grass with the strongest enemies to level as efficiently as possible and make sure that I gave my Pokemon the rest they needed even if that meant going back and forth between the tall grasses and the Poke Center. This was going to take some time. With an exaggerated sigh I set back out to wade in the grass and wait for enemies. I collected a bug type I named J.J. and a Pidgey I named Dwight (even though I realized later I should have named him Larry...get it? Larry BIRD? Oh well...maybe the next HootHoot I find). Ben hatched and traded Boozer and D-Wade for my Jameer and Gortat (a good trade, wouldn't you say?!?)

That evening I battled my brains out. Literally. I felt like I had no brains left after all those battles. I called it quits for the night and closed the DS. On my way to turn off the bedroom light while holding the closed DS in my left hand, my right hand collided with the top of the DS and the game popped out! Like any mature adult woman would do, I screamed loudly, “NOOOOO! I HATE video games!” Ben's response was, “You should have saved. That was your fault.” This exchange is very similar to other moments in our household. Like the time I reached into the 400 degree oven with my bare hands to pull out a cookie sheet simply because I hadn't thought about putting on oven mitts first. Typical Jess screech: “Ow! Ow! Ow! I hate ovens and myself!!” Typical Ben response: “Why didn't you put oven mitts on first?”

So Ben went to sleep next to me while I seethed in bed for a little while trying to decide if I should sleep, too, or if I should get up and re-level my Pokemon. I was determined to finish up this game as quickly as possible, so I returned to The Grind going to bed more satisfied after Carmelo reached level 16, high enough to probably beat a level 14 Pidgeotto in the morning. I snuggled up with my dog and my blanket and happened to glance over at the baby monitor only to see that it was not on. I knew that Jhonen was teething and, therefore, prone to wake up in the middle of the night crying. I got up and turned the monitor on, then returned to bed. About ten seconds later, as if I were a master of telepathy, I heard Jhonen's wails over the baby monitor. I groaned and heaved myself back out of bed, then turned off the monitor so Jhonen's cries wouldn't wake up Ben. I found my way down the dark hallway to Jhonen's room where he sat up crying in his bed. I pat his back for awhile until he fell back to sleep, then went back to my bed to try and get tired and comfortable. I'm about to fall asleep when I look over and see....you guessed it....the baby monitor was off.

Suddenly I knew what Pokemon was trying to tell me. That Pokemon World is just like our own darn world. These Pokemon are just like us. And the way we play Pokemon games mirrors how we live our own lives. It sounds ridiculous, but it's true.

With that breakthrough in mind, I will now return to my three similes.

Playing Pokemon Heartgold is like going to the gym to lose weight. It's that good old Number Game. Life's all about number games. Credit scores. Diminishing car payments. Salary raises. School years. Wedding anniversaries. We mark our lives and measure our successes with numbers, amazingly arbitrary numbers at times, but we don't mind because it's a way to make sense of things. Numbers give us something to look forward to and a way to organize the years and days and seconds. Watching numbers inch towards their goal is exciting and reaching the desired number is even better. In Pokemon, it is ludicrous how exciting it is to watch your Pokemon reach higher and higher levels and you are richly rewarded once you have reached certain ones. Sometimes you have to work hard for those numbers. You have to metaphorically sweat and ache to try to get those numbers on the scale where you want them. Sometimes those numbers creep along at a maddeningly slow pace and then you learn you just spent the last 45 minutes in the wrong patch of grass.

Which brings me to the fact that playing Pokemon Heartgold is also like trying to save for a new car. You can work and work for hours and days and years for small, incremental advantages hoping that, eventually, the hard work pays off and you reach that desired number (or gym badge). Then, in between all this hard work, you're faced with other distractions that slow you down. Pokemon has many of these distractions (in the game, they are called “features”). Throughout the game you're trying to catch Pokemon and level and evolve and breed in order to get to the gyms and earn all the gym badges while also talking with friends and professors and family (your Mom is there to encourage you in the game and save money for you since she doesn't trust you to save for yourself...tell me this isn't like real life). In the midst of all that, though, you have to go shopping at the Poke-Mart. You are forced to make small talk with boring strangers. You get telemarketing style phone calls. Then there are the little obnoxious moments that happen to me all the time in both the game and in my life. These are moments like walking up the stairs, realizing I have left something downstairs, going downstairs, and then having to go back up again. In the game I was constantly walking up a ladder and accidentally pushing down and going back down the ladder. This happens with doors, too. I walk in the door and somehow accidentally end up back out the door. In the game I tried to battle with my friend, Jack, through a wireless connection and we ended up inexplicably disconnecting several times. It was just like playing phone tag or having a bad cell phone signal or losing an important email.

(An Example of Small Talk)

As I mentioned in my final review of Retro Game Challenge, the more obstacles you encounter and the more you have to struggle to attain a goal or to get a win, the greater the reward and the better the feeling of satisfaction. Something happened when I earned that gym badge. I got that gym badge in my hot little hands and realized that I wanted to keep playing! I received rewards I felt that I'd earned. Not only that, I had grown attached to my Pokemon roster. I felt like the coach of an actual basketball team, trying to make all my little Pokemon reach their full potential to make my team the best they could be. I was making plays and training my players. I was pulling players who weren't doing well and substituting better players. I felt actual pride in my Carmelo when he leveled up and evolved.

It sounds stupid, but I was talking to a friend who casually plays this game, too. I told her that it took me a while to get into this game and she said, “me too, but then I earned that first gym badge and I was hooked.” For some reason, I had the same exact experience. With the gym badge comes lots of money, lots of experience points, and your traded Pokemon stop disobeying you. Rewards like this work on people in real life, too. I don't see Ben for a good portion of the year because he has to help get Madden NFL football games on store shelves by a certain date. Every year is hard and annoying and then the game gets out and he gets time off and bonuses and sometimes raises and promotions and the rewards help to make up for the hardships...mostly....

Not only does the game reflect life, but I noticed that the way I play this game as opposed to how Ben plays this game says a lot about who we are as people, too! I mentioned before how Ben told me I couldn't be mad at the game because I forgot to save. He later told me that he saves after every battle. What?? That seems crazy to me, but it doesn't surprise me that it doesn't seem crazy to him. While I'm reaching into the oven barehanded, Ben avoids reaching into the oven, period. He will drive a mile out of his way so as not to have to make a left-hand turn. If he feels like he's getting the sniffles he will gulp down two gallons of orange juice. He is careful, almost to a fault. He is methodical. He doesn't get lost. He doesn't stress out about what to name each Pokemon. He just names them all Doggy which he finds both efficient and amusing. He'll play in whatever way is most sensible or whatever is most funny. This is how he plays Pokemon and it is how he is in his day to day life.

I, on the other hand, plunge along trying my hardest to do everything right, getting impatient when I do something wrong, but not wanting to quit because I set a goal for myself and I want to see it through. Keeping my Pokemon happy is of utmost importance to me and watching them do well keeps me going in the slow times. I loved learning about the different types of Pokemon and traveling around the cities just like I love to meet different types of people and travel all over the world. I enjoyed the art style and the aesthetics of Pokemon. I couldn't wait to see what new type of Pokemon I'd have to battle next. It was fun to explore that world.

I mean, it may seem sort of obvious that whatever we do will somehow reflect who we are. This game struck me as particularly reminiscent of life in a way that completely surprised me because, on the surface, it seems like a silly “kid” game. Just like we are who we are and we play Pokemon like we play Pokeon, we also like what we like. Playing Pokemon is like knitting. It is something that fills the time. In my last review of this game, I spoke about all my gaming prejudices and why I feel like some games are a waste of time and some aren't. After playing this game, I think it all comes down to liking what you like. Some people think running marathons is amazing. I think it sounds like torture. Some people want to be comedians. I think standing up in front of people and trying to make them laugh sounds like the most terrifying thing you could ever try to do. Some people like Halo and some people like Guitar Hero and some people like Barbie's Horse Adventures and some very odd people like all three. I like puzzle games and music games. We like what we like and we fill the time we're given however we think best to fill it.

We have a certain amount of time here in Our World and we spend it in purposeful, beautiful, heart-shattering, earth-improving moments and we spent it on Facebook and on the toilet and in bed and going up and down stairs and we spend it knitting and learning guitar and playing Pokemon. We train, we travel, we meet new people, we set goals, we watch the hours pass, we evolve, we level up. Sometimes we fail and sometimes we're rewarded for our success. This sounds lofty for a Pokemon game, but I think the game desires to be lofty. To quote the game intro, “On your travels, we hope that you will meet countless people and, through them, achieve personal growth. This is the most important objective of this adventure.”

I hope that for myself, too, and for all of you.

(Go, Old Kurt! Go! You gotta love Old Kurt.)

Will I play this game again? I think so! I'm not addicted to it. I have lots of other “knitting” to do: writing these reviews, taking care of my own little-boy-Pokemon, cooking dinners for my family, and teaching kids about art at the museum. But I wouldn't mind traveling to Pokemon World now and then. Like the game says, there's a world of people to meet.

I might even bump into myself while I'm there.

Or maybe I'll bump into a boy and his blob! My next game assignment is to play three hours of a game called a boy and his blob, my first Wii game. The box art promises a cute white blob friend who will help me "battle baddies and bosses through 40 puzzle-packed levels" in "a tale of friends, heroes and...jelly beans?" Stay tuned! It could be delicious.

Pokemon Mission: Accomplished

2010-06-23T19:24:00.000-07:00

Due to a headache (surprisingly, not Pokemon-induced) I'm not going to post my final review tonight as planned. There's so much to write about! It's crazy! So I'm just going to announce that I have successfully traded three Pokemon, four of my Pokemon are level ten or higher, and today I earned my first gym badge. I have much to tell about my time in Pokemon World, but for now I will just brag like a proud kiddie pageant Mom about her very first Pokemon, Carmelo. He was once but a tiny Chikarita, newly trapped. Just look at him now. A level 17 Bayleef with a Razor Leaf attack that can make a wild Rattata faint in just one hit. (Sigh) They grow up so fast.

Look for my final review (wordy, but a goody) in the next day or two! For now, my Pidgey, Dwight, needs leveling. Off to Azalea City!

Pokemon Heartgold: Initial Impressions

2010-06-19T21:16:00.000-07:00

My brother and I are eight years apart in age. When he was obsessed with yo-yos and Power Rangers, I was obsessed with jazz band and boys. When he was collecting Pokemon and pogs, I was collecting yearbook signatures and college application forms. In some ways I thought of him more as a son than as a brother. I have trouble remembering what interests he had at what age, but I know that he was a Pokemon fanatic. I remember, in particular, a poster he had hung in his bedroom. The poster pictured row after row of labeled Pokemon creatures. I remember being really impressed with my brother because he had learned the names of every single one of the Pokemon on the poster. I also remember being annoyed with the marketing of Pokemon products to my brother. The Pokemon tag line, Gotta Catch 'Em All should have really been, Gotta Buy 'Em All because that's what my brother really wanted to do. Posters and cards, plush toys and video games, he had to collect all the Pokemon paraphernalia. Pokemon was like the McDonalds of toys. They wanted to make kids stuff their fat faces with Pokemon products and then beg for more. Because of that, I've always been a little anti-Pokemon, other than thinking some of the creatures on my brother's posters were cute.

While we were dating in college, Ben bought a Pokemon game because it was really cheap and because he thought buying it would be funny. He has a really sick love of purchasing things he thinks are gross or stupid or at least so gross or stupid they're funny. The half empty box of stale, green-colored-cream filled Shrek Twinkies are one example of a joke purchase. The picture on the side of the box is what really secured the sale:

Like those Shrek Twinkies, most of Ben's joke purchases end up photographed, tweeted about and then relegated to a shelf where they'll sit until we move again and I make Ben purge. Occasionally the joke purchases actually see some use. He bought a pair of really gaudy red and yellow flowered swim shorts as a joke once and they have, since, become his main pair. He allocates very little time for clothes shopping and I think he feels he put in his quota of swim trunk shopping time already so he just wears the gaudy ones. A few times the joke purchases have surprised him by not actually being as terrible as he had expected. He bought the game 50 Cent Blood on the Sand as a joke and I think he actually ended up playing it a lot and liking it! Pokemon is a rare example of a joke purchase that turned into one of his favorite purchases of all time. That $13 Pokemon Ruby game purchase created a lifelong Pokemon fan. (or should I say, addict?)

My brother and my husband both love this darn Pokemon World. How is it possible? What is it about these bizarre little creatures with their equally bizarre names and their evolutions and inexplicable need to battle each other that is so appealing? In order to discover the answer to this question, I will have to delve into this Pokemon World for myself like an undercover secret agent. It's like an episode of Alias over here. In order to infiltrate this Pokemon World I am going to have to compromise my moral code. I'm going to have to play a stop-and-talk-to-everything game...the kind of game I've carefully avoided these past 29 years. I don't have the patience ot the interest in playing games where you have to stop and talk to every Tom, Dick, and garbage can you come across. It's especially infuriating when half the things you stop to talk to just want to give you a bunch of small talk. “Hi Jess! Don't you just love Pokemon? Your Chikarita is so cute. I wish I had one.” Thanks, lady, for taking up 10 seconds of my life. I still have a tree and a mailbox to talk to before I hand this mystery egg over to Professor Oak and you have not provided me with any useful Pokemon hints or given me any free potions or antidotes. Thanks a lot.

Also: can I become so engaged in collecting and naming Pokemon that I don't mind playing the run-around-a-town-to-complete-a-pointless-mission sort of game? Can the Pokemon's cuteness be enough to get me to overlook those dreadful battles? I can't find anything interesting about slowly taking turns hitting and being hit by attacking enemies. It's like watching chess on TV. It has to be the most boring thing about any video game and yet so many video games are like that. Why? I also want to find out what the goal of this game is. Is there ever an end? Can I like a game that is never-ending? I tend not to. Also, why do I have all these game prejudices? Why is it that I can play Picross, Lumines, and Guitaroo Man for hours and not consider it a total waste of my time like I do so many other games? How will Ben and I play this game together? I hear something about trading Pokemon, but I'm an hour in and I only have one and I barely know how to play. This game is one big time suck! And why are Pokemon games named after the contents of a jewelry box (emerald, ruby, diamond, silver, gold, etc.) These are just a few of the questions I will try to answer on this undercover operation. Fifty-seven minutes in Pokemon World has not yet provided these insights.

That aside, this game has some temptations that might turn me into a double agent. Pokemon is easy to play (relief!) I have already completed my first mission with great success and, as a result, I have been awarded a Pokedex with which to keep track of all my Pokemon encounters. The Pokemon and the little villages are cute and fun to discover. Pokemon World is an imaginative and relatively charming world, despite being completely silly. I find myself laughing a lot at the dialogue in this Poke-centric world. Humans and Pokemon apparently co-exist, but it seems that humans in this World are completely obsessed with Pokemon. Pokemon are all these people talk about. You can just walk in and out of stranger's houses and all they'll do when you walk in is tell you about how to keep your Pokemon happy or how to help your Pokemon evolve by being extra nice to it. It's like if we all suddenly had lots of dogs and all we talked about were our dogs and all we do all day long is keep our dogs happy or train our dogs to be the fiercest fighters and then fight our dogs against other dogs. Our dogs go with us wherever we go and we only carry things around with us that will help our dogs in case they are sick or tired or need something to help them fight better. Speaking of which, my dog could be a Pokemon. I mean, look at her!

The best thing about this game is the ability to name everything. I love naming things. I could name things all day long. I've decided to name all the people and Pokemon in this game after famous basketball players. So far, I have one Pokemon, a Chikarita, named Carmelo and then there's Kobe, the villain boy desperate to become the best Pokemon trainer in the world. For some reason, this really cracks me up. The cuteness of the Pokemon and my interest in naming them will hopefully keep me going through those long nights of unthinkably boring battles and missions.

Is Ben hoping Pokemon will be my gateway drug to other, more grown up RPGs like Final Fantasy? I imagine him in the dark hallway outside our bedroom door. He sneaks a Pokemon Heartgold DS case out from under his dolphin embroidered I Heart Florida joke T-shirt and whispers, “Here, little lady, give it a try. Don't worry. This one's on me. I think you'll like it.”

So far I've avoided dabbling in games like this like I've avoided dabbling with cocaine. I've seen what Pokemon does to people and have found it best to steer clear. But I have a duty to perform here, people. I have questions to answer. I have a Chikarita to battle against a Rattata! Go, Carmelo! Go!

If you don't hear from me in a week's time, start to worry. In the meantime, I have Pokemon gyms to infiltrate and Pokeballs to fill.

Retro Game Challenge for Nintendo DS: Final Review

2010-06-16T06:03:00.000-07:00

I promised that I would write a new post as soon as Retro Game Challenge for the Nintendo DS had any substantial impact on me. When I chose the word impact, I intended it to mean “a forceful consequence" or "a strong effect” as used in the sentence, “the game had an important impact on my thinking.” Then I arrived at game two, stage three, the Ninja Robot Haggle Man challenge where I have to clear level four without dying. I now know that "impact" was the correct word to use, but the more appropriate meaning of the word, in this case, is found in the dictionary as follows: “the striking of one body against another.”

In the thesaurus I found three similar words that may be even more appropriate to describe my experience:

Contact – the physical coming together of two or more things - as in level 4 little blue enemy guys continuously coming together with my little blue Haggle Man and killing him after playing through the first three levels completely unscathed. Why, level four? WHY?

Bump – an impact as from a collision – as in the collision of my Haggle Man and challenge three. I played challenge three for about 75% of the car ride from Deltona, Florida to Atlanta, Georgia and never cleared it.

Slam – a forceful impact that makes a loud noise – as in the sound a DS Lite makes when being thrown across a car.

Yes, this game made impact. The third stage and I had a head-on collision and my Haggle Man did not make it out alive. (The DS, luckily, proved impervious to my assaults.)

To use the previous definition of the word impact, this game did have an impact on me. It taught me that old games are hard!

I expected Afterburner Climax to be difficult for me as it did not involve a plastic guitar or colored blocks. Then I played it and, although I was terrible and didn't know what I was doing, I somehow beat that game. I still can't quite believe it. The game was just really forgiving. Then I heard I had to play God of War III and I thought there was no way I'd be able to play that game, especially after I saw the hordes of skeleton beasts. But then I cracked my fire-whip a few times and BAM, before long my God hands were slapping high fives and giving out nanny-nanny-boo-boo waggles at those panty-wetting she-skeletons! The God of War puzzles got me a bit stuck, but that was mostly because I just didn't care enough about the game to solve them, not because I couldn't eventually solve them if I tried hard enough.

Then I arrive at Retro Game Challenge, a game that featured cute children playing old arcade-y games. I thought to myself, "This is great! I can do this! It's going to teach me to play video games just like Arino is going to teach little Clover!" The game was all so silly with its crazy demon head and its game geek magazines and its pro-tips and cheat codes and its cheesy diologue and then...oh Sh$t I can't play this F#$%ing game!! What the f#$%?!?

I already admitted to you that Ben played one of the challenges for me, but I didn't want that sort of cheating to become too regular an occurrence. I figured I'd let him get me to the next game and then I'd hopefully sail through a few challenges before things got really super hard. That did not prove to be the case. Determined to beat RTG on the long ride to Atlanta, the first hour went by quickly. I was glad to have something to entertain me. Then the second hour came and went and I noticed Ben beginning to laugh at me. I was starting to nervous-jump a little higher than normal. Towards the end of the second hour I had slammed the DS shut a few times, putting it in my lap for a moment to do some deep breathing exercises. By the third hour my eyes were stinging and the DS was almost in as much mortal peril as my poor little Haggle Man was in level four.

After that third hour Ben was telling me to put the DS away and try later when I could calm down a bit. I refused to stop. These level four enemies were not the boss of me! I could DO this! Knees up around my chin, my blazing red eyes wide and crazy, I clutched the DS like Kratos clutched his bloody swords. The more agitated and intense I became, the worse Haggle Man performed! I tried again and again, Ben chuckling anxiously, my Mom hiding in the backseat, Jhonen pretending to sleep. Finally, I chucked the DS across the car; My Retro Game Challenge road trip experience giving new meaning to the term road rage.

I had to stop playing. Haggle Man had defeated me and I had defeated my Haggle Man. I had failed. These old games are hard.

The failure had more bite than normal because I actually do like this game, especially Ninja Robot Haggle Man. In that game, you are dropped into a stage with several raised platforms with lots of lettered and differently-colored doors. You can go in and out of the doors to either hide from enemies or kill enemies. If you go through the doors in alphabetical order, the doors will change color to match the previous letter. Same-colored doors open simultaneously, allowing you to kill multiple enemies at once. After a certain number of enemies are killed, you face a boss. The boss from that stage becomes the enemies of the next stage. It's fun, but it's hard!

I think I failed because, unlike Clover, Arino, and my own Grand Master, Ben, I wasn't playing these difficult games in the eighties. When games were at their hardest, Ben and other little Charles in Charge watching, scrunch-sock or Jams short-wearing boys and girls were mastering them. They say the younger you introduce kids to a foreign language the better their chances of fluency. Well, as I've mentioned in previous posts, video games have a language all their own and I'm getting a really late start at learning it.

However, like little Clover, I have my own Arino to help me learn. While playing this game, it was fun to imagine that the boy and girl were little Ben and little Jess hanging out in my childhood living room playing these games. I've always liked to look at old pictures of Ben as a kid and imagine him playing with Transformers and reading comic books and talking about video games. I don't know if he would have given a girl (gross!) the time of day back then, but if he did, and we had been friends, I bet he would have been the patient, kind video game coach that he is today. I saw it firsthand this evening.

Ben bought Jhonen the new Toy Story 3 game for the PS3. Jhonen brought him the game case and said “Buzz Show!” Ben played it for him for awhile and Jhonen seemed to like to watch Woody jumping onto a train and riding his trusty horse, Bullseye. Then Ben let Jhonen play as Buzz Lightyear. I was trying to write this review at the time, but I couldn't stop watching Jhonen trying to play this game. First, he tried every button and seemed to really like rotating the joystick best. I watched his face as he began to realize that he was controlling Buzz Lightyear's movements. He started to explore. He ran Buzz in circles. He ran Buzz into a rock. He got stuck...and then unstuck! He was learning to play and he's not even two years old.

He will surely be fluent before we know it. Yet I wonder how his skills will differ from the gaming skills of those 1980's kids who grew up with Ninja Gaiden, Contra, and Mega Man (games Ben tells me are really hard.) I don't know enough to speak with any real conviction, but it seems that perhaps slick marketing and sales figures and must-have-new-features and amazing 3D graphics have watered video games down a bit in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. Still, I watched Jhonen learn a lot tonight. He learned about cause and effect. He learned about problem solving. He learned about hand-eye coordination. Plus, he connected in a new way with Buzz Lightyear, his very favorite character.

Tonight I learned that beating hard games is satisfying. The harder the challenge, the more satisfying the win. I didn't have many wins, but the ones I had felt good. I can only imagine how good a cleared stage three of Ninja Robot Haggle Man would feel!

Speaking of challenges, my Game Master Ben has given me my next game assignment. The fun and coincidental part of this assignment is that, like Clover and Arino, Ben and I will be playing together! I will be playing Pokemon Heart Gold while Ben plays Pokemon Soul Silver, both on the Nintendo DS. I have been challenged to get four Pokemon to level ten, perform at least three trades, and collect the first gym badge. Sounds so romantic.

I wonder what sort of impact Pokemon will have on me. I already know how dorky I felt just now, writing that I have to collect a gym badge in a Pokemon game. The Pokemon games are possibly nearer and dearer to Ben's heart than I am, though, so I'd better just hope that this next game assignment has a positive, rather than negative, impact on my marriage.

Retro Game Challenge for Nintendo DS: Initial Impressions

2010-06-11T21:59:00.001-07:00

Retro Game Challenge synopsis: My child character is challenged to complete stages in various game parodies of old Nintendo games from the 1980's. The game is based on a popular Japanese television show. The premise of the show is that a guy named Arino must play video games, despite his being a poor video game player (appropriate!). According to the game manual, Arino, “having been utterly defeated by his friends in every 'current-gen' multiplayer game, longed to become a gaming master. His obsessive desire for complete dominance in the gaming world spawned a digitalized version of himself in his Nintendo DS (huh?)...and he began to haunt gamers around the world with retro game challenges.” The premise is goofy, but eerily relevant to this blog and my Grand Master Ben's own game challenges for me! In the game, Arino becomes a 1980's era kid again to help my kid character play through the challenges. Each game comes complete with its own game manual and even Game Fan Magazines that you can read to get gameplay tips.

I remember my very first video game I ever played pretty well, though I can't remember the actual title of the game. It, too, was a handheld game, played on its own special device - the little console being what I remember most vividly. The console was yellow and black, sleek and shiny and aerodynamic, shaped like the little jet sprites that once jerked across its squarish screen. A silver toggle lever moved you, the little green triangle at the bottom of the screen, right and left. I think there was a button or two for shooting. Red and green jet-like figures fly at you and shoot little colored dash missiles at them while racking up as many points as possible. It was my Dad's toy, but I played it as much as he did. The reason I remember the game so vividly, though, is because of the accident.

My Mom was driving me somewhere – probably to dance class or the mall or something. I was playing this game as we drove and I was doing really well, probably the best I'd ever played, though I was having a hard time seeing the picture because it was sunny and I had to keep the screen shielded by a shadow. Then the shadow disappeared and I couldn't see any longer and I got shot down. Game Over. I was really mad at the sun and really wanted to know my score because I was pretty sure that, even though I'd died, I may have still beat my previous high score. Problem is, I couldn't see the number. I begged my mother to read me the score. She said, “I can't read the score right now. I'm driving.” But I wouldn't let it go. So I started whining and pleading until she gave in. She took the game from me and tried to shadow the screen with her hand to see my score and that's when we rear-ended the car in front of us. Everyone was fine. There's no real tragic ending to the story. I think it was just a little fender-bender. I just know that I felt really guilty for whining at my Mom to see my score and I remember that video game being the source of our car accident.

I have written and rewritten this first game review for Retro Game Challenge (RGC)and I can't seem to focus on any one theme for this post. Maybe the problem is just how completely different this game is from my last assignment. RGC is decades and oceans separated from the beach babes and beach boobs of Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2. That game was a very focused experience whereas RGC is about a lot of different things. This one game is really eight different games all based on eight other games, all of them being completely different types of games with several challenges I must complete within each game. Add to all that the time travel, the crazed Game Master Arino, the kids and the breaking of the fourth wall and I'm feeling as scattered writing about this game as this game is scattered. So far I have started writing about portable gaming, arcades, meta-fiction, early gaming, gaming magazines, top-down shooters, platformers, parodies, and Japanese television programming. No one topic feels right. So far nothing has really struck me as being more or less important than anything else in this game. Maybe the problem is simply that this game is really difficult. Unlike Dead or Alive, I can't fake my way through mini-games and then go shopping and buy sunglasses for my girlfriends. I actually have to beat each challenge or I can't continue. I can see why Ben is having me play 5 hours of RGC. I have spent 2 hours on it already and have just recently reached the second game. Ouch. How can you review something you can't play?

Or maybe the writer's block is the result of a guilt-ridden 1980's little-girl-gamer still hearing the car crunch sound in her ears after these two long decades since The Accident.

My initial experience with RGC was sort of a series of accidents. I was shocked at how well I did on the first few stages of the first game, Cosmic Gate, a Galaga clone. My first challenge was to clear five levels without getting a Game Over and I only had to try twice to clear the stage. This was what young Arino said to my character, Clover:

Who me? No way! I shut off the power switch proudly. I would end the evening's gaming session feeling good about myself. Then I remembered that I hadn't actually quit the game properly. Oh well. Shouldn't be a problem. I mean, surely the game saved my cleared stage. I had already moved past stage one and received my stage two challenge, so I'm sure I'll turn on the game tomorrow and it will let me begin my second challenge(successfully warp twice). Doubt about my save gnawed at me as I tried to sleep. My curiosity burned and I turned the DS back on. Sure enough, the game had not saved my cleared stage. My victory was so short-lived! Not only that, but to get back to that first stage I had to sit through a ton of blah-blah dialogue and push the A button fifty times before I could try to clear the stage again. I never know how to turn off a game. When I put the DS to sleep Ben yells at me. He always thinks I'll let the DS's battery die and lose my saves. Now, the one time I decide to turn off the DS as he repeatedly asks that I do, I lose my save.

I had no choice. I replayed the first stage and beat it handily and went into the next stage nervously. I didn't think I was understanding the whole warp concept. I read the game manual. I read the fan magazine content. Somehow I still wasn't sure I knew what I was doing. Turns out I didn't. I played stage two for an hour and fifteen minutes and got so frustrated I decided to go back and reread the warp tips. Turns out I was warping incorrectly!. I return to stage two, angry with myself for being such a careless reader. I went back and cleared it on my first try. Stage three was easy. I just had to shoot down a giant asteroid to get 15,000 bonus points which I managed to do on my second attempt. But then...already two hours into the RGC and only one game in, I am informed that my final challenge in Cosmic Gate would be to earn 200,000 points. I hadn't been paying close attention to my point totals so I had no idea if I had been getting anywhere close to 200,000 in my previous attempts. I played through as far as I possibly could. I took care to kill the boss guards before I killed the boss Insektor (the game's enemies) which I had learned from my Game Fan Magazine would earn me extra points. I tried to shoot down as many darn asteroids as I could. I played with as much focus and determination and care as possible. I got 44,000 points. I gave up, (although I was careful to quit and save properly this time). Again I wondered, how am I supposed to review a game I can't play? Even more to the point, by not having played difficult video games since my own 1980's childhood, is the learning curve too high? Can I muster the dexterity, master the timing, remember the controls and instructions long enough to get better at playing video games?

Not sure how to answer these questions, I went whining again. This time I whined to my own Grand Master and said, “Help! I don't think I can pass this stage yet.” And just like Young Arino, Ben was encouraging and patient and showed me how. In other words, we cheated. He played the fourth stage for me.

I have since moved on to the second game in the challenge: Robot Ninja Haggle Man, a parody of Mega Man. I have passed the first stage and am, again, a bit stuck on stage two, though thus far I have avoided any major accidents. Tomorrow I head off on a road trip to Atlanta – our first road trip since Jhonen was born. Again I will find myself playing a handheld video game in the car and will have to learn from my childhood mistake and try not to beg the driver (Ben) to look at my DS screen to help me figure out how to pass my next challenge (clear three stages without letting the Haggle Man fellow utilize his Chinese stars). For the sake of my husband, son, and mother's sanity, I will also try not to whine when I can't figure it out. Not whining for help may just turn out to be the biggest challenge of all.

Look for a focused and thoughtful review of this game in a few days. For now, I'm too dazed by the difficulty and confused by the instructions. I'm moving through this game in slow motion while bracing for an impact.

And when it makes an impact, I will be sure to write about it.

Pancake Art!

2010-06-08T14:07:00.000-07:00

My first attempt: Afterburner Climax
(It's supposed to be a jet crashing into missiles over a bunch of flames. Use your imagination.)

My God of War III Logo: (ignore the chocolate syrup lettering...it got the runs!)

My favorite: Flower

Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2 for XBox 360: Final Review

2010-06-08T13:02:00.000-07:00

(Pancake art honoring Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2 and my friend, Alex, Ben's DoA college gaming compadre, and also the one who introduced me to pancake art through Jim of Jim's Pancakes.)

Dear Diary,

What is wrong with this game and what is wrong with me for liking it?

I imagine the moment Ben decided to make me play Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2. (dream sequence sound) He sits slumped at a computer, stroking his beard (extra thick at the moment thanks to the looming Madden deadline). Suddenly he bolts upright in his $800 super-extra-ergo-dynamic computer chair and with an I've-got-it! pointer finger thrust into the air shouts out loud, “Flower didn't seal the deal? Fine! I'll prove to her that she can like playing the very game she hates the most!!” A maniacal laugh is heard from deep within his dark and evil lair (otherwise known as his cubical at EA) and continues for nigh on three minutes until the guy two cubes down throws a snack-table Twinkie at him over the cubicle walls and he stops to feed.

I don't usually like to ignorantly and blatantly hate things. I find it a real turn-off when people vehemently dismiss things before they can get a chance to understand them. But there are two things I will sheepishly admit to ignorantly hating and those are World of Warcraft and Dead or Alive games. I bitched freely and at great length about both before giving either one of them a try. I admit it. Two years ago, while on bed rest, pregnant with our son, I thought it would be sort of funny to get a World of Warcraft account. Ben was into the game at the time and there was some deal those marketing wizards over at WOW headquarters had concocted to get him to open more accounts by giving him a special cape or boots or something and faster leveling...something dorky like that. In any case, I thought it would be funny to utilize this forced downtime to experience World of Warcraft. I made a character (definitely, by far the best part of the game and also the best part of DoA), a hunter dwarf I appropriately named Bedrest who quickly befriended a boar I named Slippers and a white bear I named Pillow. This experience is for another post entirely, but what I'm getting at is that I tried it. I still didn't like it too much, but I tried it and I can speak badly of the game without as much guilt now and I can speak well of certain things about the game when my pride will allow me to.

Now I have been forced to play two hours of Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2, the sequel to the game I used to find Ben and his college friends playing while we were still dating. Boys, I will tell you from experience that playing this game in front of your girlfriends is not the best way to woo her. The problem isn't that we women actually feel that jealous of these animated breast-women. We are smart enough to know that any girl who is 5 feet 9 inches and 117 pounds with size G boobs would look like a blow up doll that hasn't been inflated yet. The problem is that you are playing it and maybe you aren't smart enough to know that. Maybe you find these animated boobs with legs more sexually attractive than you find us. Does the game prove that girls with melon chests and shapely butts are really what guys desire? It must, right? Or it wouldn't have been made and it wouldn't sell copies. I mean, who exactly is the audience for this game, anyway? The audience could be teeny-bopper girls who want to listen to the cheerful pop music and shop for cute bathing suits. If so, why the bouncing boobs and gratuitous butt shots? Are there really men who can stand all the gift-wrapping, shopping, and friendship political maneuvers for any significant length of time?

When I first played this game, I was just as disgusted as I remember being when I watched my then-boyfriend and his friends play this game for hours in college. The game makes women look like catty, superficial, selfish sex-pots who want nothing more from life than presents and a pool. Watching my boyfriend playing this feminist nightmare of a game, I got angry at him in a huffy, boys-are-so-gross sort of way and wrote the game off. Now, eight or so years later, I have played it for a decent amount of time and realized that I was playing for the boobs, too! And for the shopping and the gift-wrapping and the friendship buying and the pool games...all of the game's excessive and addictive and ridiculous and sexually over-the-top qualities.

Maybe I played it for the same reasons that I watch the Housewives of Orange County and listen to Justin Timberlake. Maybe I played it because there's a shred of sad truth behind the depiction of women in this game. I mean, Girls Gone Wild exists because a guy wanted to make it, but also because the girls were more than happy to bare it all for the camera. Whatever the reason, I played this game last night for an hour and forty minutes straight when I didn't want to play Flower for longer than 45 minutes at a time. Unlike God of War where each ten minutes felt like ten days, this game flew by. When I decided to stop playing DoA, it was only because it was nearly 1am and because I was tired of losing at volleyball. Playing this game and enjoying it came at a price. I hated myself in the morning. I felt cheap, like I had had a one night stand with a slutty girl. Worse than that, if the slutty girl happened to be “turned on” in my living room someday I'd probably play her again. What had I become? What was wrong with me?

I think I need to do some deep psychoanalysis to try and figure out the answers to these questions. I will silently psychoanalyze as I describe some details about the game and how it's played. First off, the intro says everything you need to know about what the game is superficially about. It's about soft-porn set to sugary pop music. It's camera angles down girl's bikini tops or up girl's tiny skirts. It's girls striking sexy poses in the sand and writhing around on lounge chairs by the pool. It's two girls sharing one ice cream cone. Besides that, the game is sort of like soft-core porn meets The Sims meets WarioWare. OK, that might not really be an accurate description - I don't know much about soft core porn, The Sims or Wario Ware...but you get the idea. You spend about a third of the time on each aspect of the game - the sexies, the character customizing, and the mini games.

First, you pick a girl out of the eight international stereotypes available to you. I chose Kokoro, the Japanese stereotype, because she plays the piano and likes the color orange (unlike one of the girls who liked “milky pink.” Gross. No one could ever like that color). Then Kokoro and I were paired up with Lisa, her new best friend. Lisa shows you around the island the first day. After that, each day is pretty similar to the next and you can fill it with whatever activities you'd like. For example, when you wake up in the morning you can choose to relax by the pool or go shopping in one of the many shops where you can purchase items for yourself or for your friends. The rest of the time you can enjoy a number of sporting activities, namely volleyball matches (which, I assume is supposed to be the main thrust of the game, although I did not play the friendship politics well and ended up with no friends for a long segment of my two and a half hours of game play, so I didn't end up playing much volleyball). You can see a video of Kokoro and her friend, Tina, playing below. Make sure to sit through until the end. It's worth it to see the crazy undulating water balloon boob action Kokoro mentioned in her diary entry.

The other games didn't rely on having a best friend, so that worked in my favor, although I played all the mini games so badly that this also grew tiresome. I was especially terrible at the jetski racing. Ben watched me play and said he was going to make me play a game called Wave Race at some point but that he didn't think that was a good idea after what he had just seen. Even Kokoro knew she sucked. She hunched over on her jetski, shook her head, and said, “I'm no good at this.” I knew how she felt.

I was only marginally better at the pool hopping game. I was able to make it two thirds of the way across the pool once. The pool-hopping mini-game consists of multiple colored floating blocks that form a bridge across the pool. You have to push the corresponding colored button at just the right time so your girl can hop across the blocks to the other end of the pool. I had to pay a little extra for the best mini-game. When I saw the ticket for sale at the Zack of All Trades I couldn't resist. It was a ticket to the Butt Battle. After I had purchased my ticket (for a whopping 150,000 Zack dollars!) the game said, “You can now enjoy butt battle.” I enjoyed the game saying that to me even more than I enjoyed the butt battle itself. The game was not disappointing, but my actual butt-battling skills were. You can see a butt battle for yourself here as Kokoro battles Kasumi.

I spent the rest of my evening in the casino playing Roulette, Poker, Slot Machines, and Blackjack (the best one). I also enjoyed picking out and receiving gifts from Zack each night. Speaking of gift giving, it took a lot of gift giving to get anyone to like me. I made a mistake of dumping my ultra-slutty initial friend, Lisa, in favor of a cool Russian or German chick named Helena. Then I accidentally re-gifted one of Zack's gifts to her and she sent it back to me! The next day I woke up and Helena had left the island! After that it was like I was a leper. All the girls blackballed me. No matter how many gifts I gave these girls they wouldn't be my friend. I courted Christie for awhile simply because I'd already sent her a bunch of gifts and didn't want the expense to go to waste, but she was a ferocious bitch and I had to quit trying. I took an instant liking to the southern girl, Tina, because she liked iced coffee and had a cute southern accent. I overlooked her American flag bathing suit and questionable helmet hair cut. First I tried to give her an iced coffee, but I didn't see her until the evening and by then my iced coffee was warm! It was tragic. After that I made sure to give her all the things she liked as promptly as possible. An RC car. A yellow airplane toy. An orange watering can. Finally, on the fourth day I presented her with a perfect box wrapped in blue (her favorite color) and tied with matching blue ribbon for which I paid many Zack dollars. Inside the box was some fried chicken and apparently it was tasty because after that, she said she would be my friend! I finally had myself a volleyball teammate. Although we never actually won a single volleyball match, the controls were intuitive and I managed to hit the ball many more times than I expected to. And Tina ended up being a pretty good volleyball player!

While playing this game, the craziest thing happened. Kokoro and I began to meld! I suck at playing video games so she sucked at racing her jet ski. I was indecisive and wishy-washy choosing friends which kept Kokoro from having a volleyball teammate. I was too cheap to buy lots of gifts from the outset, so Kokoro didn't have any friends for two hours of the game. I was afraid to play the pool games so she started gambling all night! Kokoro was suffering for my shortcomings! Watching her sad situation unfold reminded me of high school and a particular pool party I once attended. It was my birthday and I had a new pink plaid bathing suit, one of those with the triangle-shaped bikini cups and matching boy short bottoms that were trendy back then. Just a few months ago I saw a picture of me in this bathing suit at this pool party and felt sorry for my then-self wondering whatever possessed me to wear that suit in public. Like the girls in this game, I didn't quite fit in my bathing suit. Sadly, the effect of my too-small suit was not as flattering for me as it is for them.

I remembered playing volleyball at the high school party, too. In this case, the effect was exactly the same as it was for Kokoro in the game. I missed just about every shot until my team lost. Then I remembered that while at this party I was mostly trying to impress and get the attention of one particular guy I'd loved forever. Like his video game equivalent, Zack, he gave me a great birthday gift, a thoughtful gift, nicely wrapped. But what I secretly knew, like Kokoro must have known, is that he would have done the same for the other girls at the party had it been their birthday. Zack gave Kokoro a present every night before bed, but you know he gives all the girls presents every night. What I really wanted from that guy at the party was his undivided attention and affection and he couldn't give that to me. And finally, the one thing that saved me from my bad bathing suit, my disappointing volleyball game, and my lack of boyfriend was my best friend. In the game it was Tina, in real life it was Sara. Just like in the game, I needed a best friend to get through the pettiness, the drama, the sporting events, and the bad clothing choices of my high school days. When I was alone, I was in trouble. With her, I could laugh my way through those awkward, depressing, disappointing high school moments.

So after that trip-down-memory lane psychoanalysis I can conclude that this game is strangely about more than soft-core porn. It's about friendship and loyalty. It's about having fun and feeling sexy. It's about being stupid and ridiculous and funny and silly. It's about giving a girl a cabbage in the hopes that she'll be your friend and then her replying by saying, “no thanks, I'm busy right now” while doing a strange Egyptian-style strip tease in a thong. How can you hate that? It happens to be about boobs, which is weird and maybe unfortunate, but actually adds to the zany, excessive vapidity of this game. By the end of my two hours I wanted to go buy a new bathing suit and listen to girly pop music. I wanted to lay by the pool like Kokoro and pretend that when I apply suntan lotion (because “a geisha must protect her skin.”) red and pink hearts will emanate from my flawless skin, too.

Two nights ago I played this game with my husband of five years. I don't know if he secretly likes to see the girl's boobs bounce or if he thinks the sex stuff is ridiculous or maybe both, but it doesn't matter because we had so much fun laughing at this stupid game for two hours straight when we both should have been sleeping that I realized something. Even though I'll never look like these girls in a bathing suit and even though I stink at playing sports, I'm the only girl that gets presents from Ben. I'm the girl he picked out of all the other girls in the world and that's the gift I'd always wanted. Boys playing this game in front of your girlfriends or wives, listen up:

Every girl has a little bit of DoA:Xtreme 2 inside them, whether we like to admit it or not. We want to feel sexy and desirable. We want to have so much confidence that we can dance on the beach in a bathing suit. We want to win the games at the pool and look hot playing volleyball instead of awkward. We want to be easy to befriend and daring enough to hop on a jetski or to butt battle...well, maybe not butt battle...but you get the point. We girls might not all look like Kokoro, but just know there's a Kokoro inside each one of us. If you can manage to make a girl feel like Kokoro and make sure she knows you wouldn't secretly eye up Tina or Lisa or Christie on the beach when she's not looking, you'll get the girl. And to all you Kokoros out there, make sure you've got Tina nearby to pick you up when Zack gets you an RC car instead of the iced coffee you were hoping for.

OK, it's time to get out of the pool and head to the arcade where my sun-starved husband has no doubt been hiding while I've been lounging on a raft getting skin cancer. For my next gaming assignment I'm going back to school: a little video game history lesson in the form of Retro Game Challenge for the Nintendo DS. I'll be playing revamped video game classics....games I'm sure to play poorly, but have been told I must play for at least five hours.

I will face this Retro Game Challenge with Kokoro's confidence and pride. I will sign off with the phrase Kokoro repeats to herself every night before bed. “Good job today, Kokoro!”

Good job today, Jess.

Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2 for XBox 360: First Impressions review written in the form of my character's diary entry from her 1st day on Zack Island

2010-06-06T09:21:00.000-07:00

Dear Diary,

OMG!! My first day on Zack Island was crazy!!!!! I have a new BFF!!! I don't remember her name, but she is totally amazing. She showed me all over the island today and we went shopping for, like, hours. She's really nice to me AND she's not as pretty as me. Plus, my boobs are way bigger so I think this friendship could really work out. She showed me the accessory shop where I could have purchased an “adorable hat” for 300,000 yen, but I decided to get myself some orange sunglasses since my favorite color is orange!!!! I even got my sunglasses gift wrapped in orange paper and ribbon so it's totally like a gift to myself!! I love this island!!!!Then we went to buy new bathing suits and I ALMOST got this awesome bikini where each side of the bikini top had a handprint on it like someone had just grabbed my boobs. How funny is that?!? But I decided to get a green one with little boy shorts since I'm not a hoebag like the other bitches here. We looked at stuff at this weird store called Zack of All Trades. I could have bought this thing called an Xbox 360, a tea set, or a cabbage? WTF?!? And I was like, omg, get me out of here! This place is gross! And my friend said we should go race our jet skis and I was like, yeah! But then when I got on the jet ski I was like, whoa, I have to drive it myself?!? I don't know if I can drive one of those things! And my friend said, just do it, here's how to drive it and then she showed me this chart for like 2 seconds and then took it away and I was like, hey wait, I didn't get a chance to read it yet, but it was too late. I was already on the jet ski. I was so mad that I tried to run my friend off the track. Then I tried to follow the arrows and go around the race track the way she was, but I just kept swerving all over the place and it was totally embarrassing so I said, eff this I'm going to the beach where I can lay in the sand in my hot bathing suit! I tried to get my jet ski stuck in the sand, but I was disqualified first. WHATEVER!

After the race I wanted to go swimming, but they had another race in mind. Lame! It was a race where we had to hop across the pool on colored blocks and I said, no way! My boobs will totally fall out of my top if I jump and the other girls said, even better! So I tried to jump across the pool on the blocks, but I only made it onto one and then I fell in the pool!!1!!!

Then they made me play volleyball and I was like, enough with the sports puh-leaze! But they said, come on Kokoro. Just play with us. So me and my friend were on one team against this girl with white hair named Christie and her purple-haired sidekick I forgot her name. They were so nasty. Their boobs were gyrating in circles and it was so weird. I've never seen boobs do that before. I think it distracted me from playing volleyball well because I kept missing the ball and my friend got so mad at me. She told me to get it together and I was like, WHATEVER! Have you seen this girl's boobs? And she was like, mine do that, too. Don't yours? And I said no, but then I looked down and my boobs were doing it, too!!! There must be something strange about Zack Island that makes boobs gyrate in perfect undulating circles!!! So we lost. BUT after that I got to tour a bunch of hotels and that was fun. I picked out the Seabreeze hotel because I can watch the fish swim through the glass floor IN MY ROOM!!! Then I lost a ton of money gambling in the casino. But it's ok because I have a ton of money!! Woohooooo!!!

That's all for today, diary. I'm worn out from all that shopping and those stupid races and stuff. Plus I'm exhausted from anger. I tried to get my orange sunglasses so I could wear them and they made me give them away because I gift wrapped them!!! WHATEVER!! So I gave them to that bitchy girl Christie because I thought maybe I could buy her friendship.

I hope I meet some boys tomorrow. I don't understand. It seems like there are only girls with really big boobs here. I wonder who that Zack guy is and how long I'm going to stay on his island because I don't know just how many volleyball matches I can take. At least I can go shopping and every store plays music from the soundtrack of that Sweet Sixteen show on MTV. That's so AWESOME!!! Ok, more tomorrow. Byeeeee!

Flower for PS3: A Review

2010-06-04T05:24:00.000-07:00

Push and hold any button. A flower appears, golden and glowing. A single petal blows away from its bulb and sweeps me off on a journey. A gorgeous, treacherous, illuminating journey.

I had a banyan tree in my front yard as a kid. We grew up together, that tree and me. Today, when I visit my childhood home, the tree is different. It is wider and fuller and taller, and maybe even wiser. I used to sit in one of its perfect natural nests and think about what the tree has seen in its many years and what it will see when I'm long gone. Trees hold a fascination for me because of their age, their steadfastness. Nothing is sadder than a stump. Unlike trees, flowers aren't known for longevity. Fittingly, the game developers, no, I should probably say, the artists who created this game used flowers to represent the natural world's fragility and vulnerability to mankind's destruction.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, which I will probably do a lot this post because, for some reason, I thought this game was much smaller than it turned out to be which is why I planned to only write one post about this game. Now I find myself with much too much to talk about and no real coherent way to organize it all. I guess those many fragments of thoughts floating about in my head reflects the game itself – the many petals loosely strewn together, flitting through space on the breeze, searching for meaning, for organization, for life, for survival, for perfection. This review may have to be like the branching of the banyan, like those lilting, wayward flower petals.

The game starts in an apartment room. All you can see is a table in front of a window. Out the window you can see the dreary, anonymous city which I didn't immediately recognize as Japanese, but which takes on a more and more distinctive Japanese flavor as the game progresses. A drooping flower in a pot sits on the table and you select it. Direction is determined by the tilt of the controller. Otherwise, the only other control is to hold any button down for forward motion.I sigh with relief after God of War's button-mashing. Very simple. The opening text tells you to relax and enjoy which I was definitely looking forward to after my God of War terror-fest.

Ben has given me three very different games so far, not just in content or difficulty, but in their very purpose. Afterburner Climax is a video game that plays like a toy: you have a goal, you obtain a skill, and you better that skill over time to attain your goal, much like mastering a yo-yo trick or like learning to play a mean game of tennis. God of War III felt like an interactive movie, like a form of entertainment meant to immerse and involve you in a story. Flower feels like art. Ben knows that, for me, art is almost like religion. I am pretty sure Ben's hope with this game was to say, “Look here! Video games can be Art , too!" He probably thought the pretty flowers that light up like fireworks couldn't hurt, either.

And he was right. The illuminated flowers did not disappoint. This game captures the sensual qualities of flowers, including sound and touch.(if smellovision existed, I'm positive they would have used that, too!) Technicolor flower petals sway, glide, and shimmer in the wind and the sunshine, qualities of motion and light vividly captured. The closest comparison I can make to playing this game is riding Soarin' at EPCOT in Orlando, Florida. On the ride, you sit in chairs suspended from above. The chairs lift into the air, your feet allowed to dangle. In front of you is a screen so big you can't see anything beyond it in your periphery. From your faux-paragliding viewpoint you “soar” over iconic California scenes of mountain peaks, sandy beaches, city skyscrapers, and orange groves (I take it back, smellovision DOES exist....Mickey Mouse pipes in the smell of oranges as you pass over the groves). It is my favorite ride at any theme park. The soaring feeling, the beautiful scenery, and the powerful yet peaceful music...I could ride all day! While playing this game I kept thinking of that ride and realized I'd rather soar over the scenery in Flower. I wanted to be one of the colorful, swirling flower petals gathering a rainbow-like stream of petals behind me. As I played, I could almost feel the wind blow and imagine the sweep of the grass across my feet.

Then there's the sound. If you can imagine what a flower sounds like the moment it blooms, that is what the game sounds like. I would recommend that everyone experience the game if, for nothing else, than to look at and listen to it. There is an entire musical side of this game that I haven't even talked about yet. Every time your petals pass over a flower, it blooms and makes a musical sound: a tinkling chime, a percussive clink, a round earthy stringed pluck. As you play, you take part in a composition – a musical conversation between the game's score and your own percussion solo.

But Flower wasn't all roses and sunshine. It was easy to poo-poo God of War – an excessive, macho-machine of a game probably made mostly to make more money for the God of War franchise. It is harder to criticize this pretty little game. I will have to, however, as this was not completely the idyllic experience I'd hoped for. To Ben's dismay, I couldn't get the hang of the controller tilting. At times I felt like I was on a Nascar track rather than in a lovely rolling meadow. Around level six I'd had quite enough of the controller tilting, back-pedaling, swerving, diving, and disoriented petal swooping. This is one of those cases where I hate to criticize the game's controls when the problem probably lies more with the "controller" herself. Still, the game play annoyed me. I found it really difficult to navigate and control my speed. I would go too fast and miss the flowers and have to double back. Then I'd try to go slow and my petal moved at a snail's pace.

Then there was the problem of getting lost. I knew from God of War to follow blinking lights and pay attention to camera movements, but sometimes I would forget to pay attention, then get stuck flying around in circles looking for any clue that could tell me what to do next. The game doesn't let you save or go back within a level. Like I said, around level six I lost my patience. The flowers, struggling to survive in the shadows of steel girders and towers, became even more difficult to find among the dimly lit pipes that snaked like streams through a jagged, rocky, post-apocalyptic, electrified wasteland. I found myself so completely disoriented and without a glowing light or flower in sight that I found myself saying the F word a lot and that F did not stand for “flowers.” Because of Level Six, a game that took Ben an hour and a half to beat took me about four hours.

My frustration with this game was worse than Ben thought possible. Why had the game made me so frustrated? I think it's because I took the game's opening words seriously. I really had hoped to relax and enjoy it. I didn't want to have any trouble playing it. The game was so pretty to look at and listen to that I didn't want to find and fly over a million flowers and I certainly didn't want to become completely lost, confused, and hopeless. Then I thought about it. When did I get angry and lost and frustrated? When the flowers were all but destroyed and the world, too, had become dark and desolate and hopeless and lost. The medium reflected the message and that's what makes this game more than a toy, more than just entertainment. That's what makes this video game art.

The only other critique I have about the game relate to the game's length. Each level is just too long. I would be just as, if not more satisfied with my experience if it had been half as long. I wanted to keep going because I knew there would be a payoff in the end, but the constant flower-finding wore on me. In some ways I'd probably just prefer if Ben played it while I watched.

I do appreciate that it is a game, though. I wouldn't want it to just be an animated film. I think that the fact that someone plays this game as the flower is powerful and adds layers of meaning to this piece that are interesting. Not only is this piece a work of art in its beauty, its simplicity of design, and its message, but by functioning as a game it becomes like a work of performance art. I could imagine sitting down to experience this piece in a museum. Ben says he wants a video game to make him cry someday. I think when he said that he meant that he wants to see a video game with a story so well written and a game so well done that he is moved to tears. This game isn't quite that, but it is certainly moving and I feel bettered for having seen and played it -not so much because of the heavy-handed environmental message, but because of the game's ending.

At the end of this game those hundreds of delicate, fragile petals come together to form one giant blossoming tree, strong and resilient like my childhood banyan. Nature and man learn to coexist. The world takes on its color again. Even the credits reflect this idea, while adding another layer of meaning. In the credits, the player collects flowers labeled with the names and titles and special thanks symbolizing the coming together of individual talents to make something strong and long-lasting and beautiful. Play through the credits. It's worth it.

Okay. Enough of this artsy-fartsy stuff. Time for some boobs! At least that's Ben's opinion since my next game assignment is to play two hours of Dead or Alive: Beach Volleyball for the Xbox360, a game I have always not-so-affectionately referred to as "The Boobie-Boob Game." I guess that's what I get for complaining in any way about Flower. But I will be strong and resilient like that pink blossomed tree. I will bounce from game to game with gusto - like a volleyball bounces over a net, like large and perky animated breasts bounce in a skimpy bikini top!

God of War III for PS3: Final Review

2010-06-01T06:23:00.000-07:00

Trial by fire - by which the guilt or innocence of the accused is determined by subjecting them to a painful task

God of War III for the PS3 was my trial by fire, quickly determining my guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt. I've been found guilty of hating most things about video games and I'm guilty of being terrible at playing them. Ben, otherwise known as judge and jury in this trial, knew that I needed to face this game. He wanted me to encounter everything I fear and despise about video games head-on in the hopes that I'd learn a lot in the process. The good news in this trial is that I bravely faced my fear and loathing for 2 whole hours, 49 minutes and 22 long seconds and learned some important lessons about video games along the way... Bad news is, I never want to play this game ever, ever again.

In this final review of God of War III, I will enumerate the qualities I hate about video games and how this game made me face them. Then I will respond to each hated quality with a lesson learned because I faced them.

I hate to be scared. Ben doesn't think this game is scary, but it is. I actually threw the controller at him once and forced him to fight a horrifying snake woman. I played those nearly three hours in an almost constant panicked state. My shoulders probably felt like the tree-mountain-titan's shoulders looked – hard as stone. My fingers cramped they were so tense. I don't think I blinked once during game play. After each gaming session I felt like I'd just gotten off a treadmill, not a couch. I faced swarming zombie skeletons, dark fiery caves with giant lurking monsters, wavy arms that rose out of the rocky cave-bottom and tried to kill me. Everything I encountered was dark, angry, and murderous set to a soundtrack of timpani rolls and blaring brass. The scenery was unpleasant to look at and my character was an ugly dude. If I'm going to look at something for long periods of time, I'd prefer them to be a little more attractive. This game gives you no relief from doom and gloom, danger and violence - at least not in the first three hours.

Lesson Learned: I learned in College Fiction class to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. Assume he or she knew what they were doing and that everything in the story was there for a reason. Each comma placement, every word carefully chosen. Applying the same principal to video games, the God of War developers certainly successfully set a mood and created a world that creeped me out and made me feel like I really was in a long and seemingly endless battle. Congratulations, guys. I may not like that kind of "story," but you did make me feel something and that's more than I can say for other video games I've played.

I also learned that the hordes of enemies may look scary, but really aren't that bad. They may have scared me in their sudden and unexpected appearance, but they almost always surprised me in their quick and relatively painless deaths. I learned that if I just stay calm and keep hurling my whip at them,they'll all die eventually.

I hate fighting and killing games. Killing things gets boring. The mechanics of the fights seem tedious to me. I don't care how many times you change up what type of gross beast I have to fight next, I'm still just repeatedly pushing square and that just seems like a waste of my time.

Lesson Learned: I may still think fighting and killing in video games is tedious, but I don't think it's as difficult as I did before. This game made mekill lots of different things in lots of different ways. The game told me exactly what buttons I had to push to use certain weapons. Plus, I learned all about Quick Timer Events thanks to the fighting in this game. A quick timer event is a game mechanic where the player pushes certain buttons in a particular order to make a video show up. You have control of the game in that you have to push the buttons when the game tells you to, but you don't really have control of your character anymore once you've pushed the button correctly. In this game, quick timer events were used to kill big boss creatures. I would have to hit the bad guy many times with my whips or swords until a flaming circle appeared. I'd push the circle button and then Kratos would jump on the creature's back and cut off one of it's heads and then a flaming triangle would appear. I'd hit the triangle button and Kratos would stab the creature in the back and so on until the creature was dead. This gameplay mechanic allows for impressive fight scenes without me actually having to do the impressive fighting which, I suppose, is preferable although having to hit the buttons seemed stupid. Just show me a video of Kratos killing the thing if that's what you want to do. I don't need to push buttons to stay engaged. Which reminds me...

I hate when games make you do things just so you have something to do. This game was really guilty of that. I remember having a long conversation with Ben about my ideal video game. My idea was a Chipmunk Adventure-esque hot air balloon travel game in which the character would have to find important cultural icons on a global scavenger hunt. Ben's response was, “sure, but what's the game?” And I replied, “oh yeah.” I hate games that should really just be movies. God of War III would make a fine movie. It has a story I could probably get into if the game would just be a little more forthcoming with the plot. The character could be interesting if I could find some reason to care about him. The places and gods could be cool to see if they weren't so ugly. But no. The story is told really slowly and with cheesy, clunky dialogue. In the meantime you have to mash the circle button to make Kratos open a door, hold R1 a million times to open a million treasure chests, solve nearly impossible, convoluted puzzles for the sheer ability to proceed to yet another puzzle. I am fine with solving a puzzle, shooting a bow and arrow, moving a cart filled with rocks, flying to faraway platforms, and climbing never-ending tangled vines to unseen destinations if, in the end, it seemed like there was a reason for doing any of those things. In this game, and many games that I dislike, it seems like you just have to do stuff so that the game can function as a game instead of as a movie.

Lesson learned: By having to complete all these useless tasks I learned how to complete these useless tasks! I figure Ben has games planned for me in the future that will require me to be able to climb, run, push, fight, fly, jump, and solve puzzles. This one game contains just about every game mechanic possible and it makes you do each one a LOT. I got pretty good at double jumping up to a higher rock or navigating my way over tangled vines or along narrow ledges. I know it was hard for Ben to watch me learn. At one point he said, "oh my god, just go right." I was TRYING to go right! Kratos just wasn't going where I was telling him to go!

Not only did I practice making Kratos do what he needed to do, I started to understand how to get around in a 3D environment by following the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle motion) of the camera as it pans. I learned to look for out-of-place items in an environment because those would often tell me what I should do next. I learned to smash boxes to gain information or obtain magic or experience or strength. I started to find and follow what Ben refers to as “visual clues.” I learned that part of what makes me hate video games is that I don't know their secret language – the little things that gamers have learned to notice and respond to.

I hate not knowing where to go or what to do next and I like to have clear goals and definitive ending points.

Lesson learned: This game hit on both of those things in interesting ways. First of all, you never really know where you're going in this game or why. There are no maps showing you where you are. No stage maps to tell you what level you're on and what level you're trying to get to. Kratos is on a mission to overthrow the Gods of Olympus to free the people from the God's oppressive rule. That's about all you know, it seems. You just keep going and find new gods to fight and new places to fight in along the way which forced me to play longer because I was eager to discover where I was going to go next(and eager to get to a save point!) And although there was no map to tell you where to go, the game wouldn't let me stray far from Kratos' intended destination which made this game a good transition into other more exploratory 3D action-adventure games to come. I really have a hard time when a game is open-ended and I have the freedom to go anywhere I want. I get lost easily and have a bad sense of direction. I tend to wander aimlessly, getting more and more frustrated the more and more lost I become. I was relieved that this game wouldn't let me go where I shouldn't go. I usually had a path to follow. As long as I followed the blinky lights, I could generally tell where I should be even if I couldn't tell why I should be there.

I hate solving puzzles. I really do.I don't like to admit that I hate solving puzzles because not liking them makes me feel unintelligent and unintellectual. It seems like the smart, nerdy people I tend to love and befriend all like to solve puzzles. They think solving puzzles is a fun way to challenge themselves. To me, though, puzzles are torture devices meant to make me feel like an idiot. I'd rather avoid them. This game was full of them.

Lesson learned: God of War III forces you to figure out puzzles or you simply can't keep going. Since I had to progress in order to write about this game I had to solve at least a couple of these puzzles, though I had to have Ben's help with many of them. Even he admitted that the puzzles in this game were annoying. The puzzles went something like this: you figure out that you must free someone stuck behind a bunch of brambles. Then you run around the area for awhile, often jumping or vine-climbing looking for any sort of clues, usually in the form of blinking lights. The picture below is a good example. The R1 on the screen tells me that box has something in it I need. There's a wheel in the picture that I know I have to use in some way, probably to raise or lower a door somewhere else. The blinky light there alerted me to the wheel's presence. That cart with the rocks in it came from another room. I have to figure out where I need to push the cart so that I can use it, but I haven't figure out where that is yet. Luckily, that fire next to me is a save point (hurray!) so I can come right back here at another time since I am tired of trying to solve this puzzle now. Solving these puzzles takes a long time and, like I said before, there doesn't seem to be much of a reason for solving the puzzles other than to get me to the next annoying puzzle in this dark and dreary underworld. The lesson learned here, I guess, is that I can force myself to figure them out eventually, although I will still hate every minute of it. There is, I suppose, a modicum of satisfaction gained by solving them, even if I still wish the reward for my efforts was more than the ability to keep walking through Hades.

I hate when I require Ben's help to accomplish something. That goes for moving heavy furniture, fixing a broken toilet, or deciding which outfit to wear. It's not that I don't think of Ben as my partner, as someone there to help me through life's trials, big or small. It's just that I want to know that I can do things for myself. I want to be prepared for whatever life throws at me. In this case, life threw impossible-to-solve-puzzles and a snake monster at me and that was more than I could take. If I were to ever play this game again, I would have to have Ben by my side. And I suppose that's a good lesson learned, too. Some trials are just too difficult to face alone. I'm lucky to have an able-bodied and able-minded partner to turn to when I'm scared or in trouble, whether it's a clogged toilet I have to fight or a swarm of zombie skeletons.

Although I don't see myself playing this game again, at least not without Ben, I am glad he made me play it. I feel like a barrier has been lifted. I feel able to move on to just about any game with a little less fear and a little more controller practice. I think Ben feels bad for putting me through this difficult trial. The next game seems like the complete opposite of God of War III and I can't say I'm sorry about that. I could stand to play something relaxing and beautiful for a few days to make up for Kratos' ugly scar-face and his band of hideous titan friends.

God of War III, can I have a timpani roll please?

Game assignment number three: Flower on the PS3 (mission is to beat the game). If I can beat a spider-horse water monster, I'm pretty sure I can beat a game called Flower. I guess we'll see.

Project Side Effects

2010-05-28T19:42:00.000-07:00

I've just had my first blog related cooking incident. I used the nervous energy I'd pent up playing God of War III and watching this terrible Orlando Magic game by whipping up a batch of banana bread. While writing my first GoW3 post I didn't hear the timer go off and, although not ruined, my bread could have been WAY better. Instead of blaming myself or even the blog, I think I'll blame the Celtics. They deserve it more.

God of War III for PS3: First Try

2010-05-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

Afterburner Climax,my first game assignment, had gone so well that I felt confident and ready to move on to game number two. Then I heard that the next game would be God of War III and I deflated a bit. A game title with the words God and War in the title frightened me. And when I turned the game on my fear turned to outright terror. The voices of an angry-sounding choir accompanied by screeching violin tremelo warns me that this game is no joke. The title screen graphic is a close-up of a scary face streaked with red warpaint his eyebrows deeply furrowed in an expression that I realized must have matched my own. I'm worried, but I play.

Opening credits bleed across the screen; fiery red gods meld into sword-wielding killer gods, then into fire-bearded gods stabbing and thrusting wide, jagged blades, that become scenes of gods with lightning and chains, tornados and whips. This is a bad, bad place and I don't want to go there. Mr. Scary Face appears again; his eyeballs angrily roll in their sockets, then stop and stare right at me. My heart starts pounding the same way it used to at slumber parties when a friend would suggest watching a horror movie. What was Ben thinking with this game? Was it revenge for making him watch My Best Friend's Wedding?

Just then a video scene begins and I have to focus. I want to try and follow the story. I have never paid any attention to a story in a video game which is something I want to address with this project. I don't know if the narrator was speaking too quickly or what, but I didn't really catch the details. From what I can gather, some God (I think?) named Kratos (spelling?) is avenging something or other. Whatever happened, he's seriously pissed. I think some bad monsters moved into town and started a rival God-monster mountain across the street from Mount Olympus. Zeus and the gang are not pleased. Us good gods have to get rid of these gigantic mountain beasts before they take us out. Just as I'm getting into the story and seeing the first glimpses of the sort of corny looking, but at least familiar Greek gods, I feel my chair rumble and I remember that this is not a movie. I'm going to have to do something with that buzzing controller now. And before I can even pick up the controller, a MOB of creepy skeleton creatures appear and surround me zombie-movie style. I quickly gather that I am this red god guy (I didn't catch his name) and I have a fiery whip to use against them. To my surprise, I manage to wipe out that first skeleton mob pretty handily with some crazed, nervous button mashing.

Then I discover my next obstacle. I don't know where to go. I'm in a clearing surrounded by logs and trees and stuff. I see that I have wings, but I can't seem to use them. I've seen Ben handle this situation. There's always some way out. I just need to stay calm so I can figure it out. Circling the perimeter, I notice that an R1 sign pops up near a certain log so I go up to the log and my red guy tries to lift it. I notice a new flashing O which means the circle button needs to be pulsed. I pulsed about fifty times and he still couldn't lift that toppled tree. Finally, out of frustration and kind of as a joke, I put the controller in my lap and mashed the circle button with satirical zeal. Of course, the character then lifted the tree. That's what it takes, game? They are going to make me work for it. Geesh!

The camera pulls back and I see that my guy is walking on a tree-mountain monster's shoulder. A large blue horse beast emerges from the tree-mountain monster's bicep and begins bludgeoning me with his spike and drill legs. I find myself hanging precariously from, I can only assume, the tree-mountain monster's armpit. I swing my fire whip like no fire whip has ever been swung before, but this horse beast remains unphased. As the camera sweeps around I get a better glimpse of this monster. He is actually a tarantula-horse made of water with spiky drill legs that spews water out of its giant toothy mouth. I whip the thing in the face a bunch and stab him in one of his spiky legs, but it is not enough. I die. Although the spider-horse fighting is tiring and a bit tedious, I figure I'd better try again. I do a little bit better the second try, but the horse beast prevails again. I decide to surrender to my little pony and the game, at least for today. Forty-two minutes of game play and I can't get past even one monster. If this is Spartan difficulty, I hate to see what Chaos is like. I need help. I need Ben. I need a nap.

Afterburner Climax for the XBox360: Final Review

2010-05-27T17:13:00.000-07:00

I have bad knees, bad hand-eye coordination, and bad depth perception, which made Elementary P.E. really fun for me. I quickly learned, as a kid, to skulk in the far back corner of the recess field orbiting a tether ball around its pole in an effort to look busy. During forced kickball or flag football games I used similar avoidance tactics. Stay alert in order to avoid contact, move around a lot, stand as far outfield as possible where the ball is least likely to come near me. I found that those same tactics (and same embarrassments) also came into play in Afterburner Climax for the Xbox360 on Xbox Live.

Ben knows that my talents do not lie in the areas of sport, arithmetic, or video games, and took it somewhat easy on me this first game by choosing something accessible enough to pick up and immediately start flying, but obscure enough to not wound my pride. He could have picked Nintendogs, after all. At first,I was surprised at his choice. I'd never heard him discuss this game and it had a strange name. What the heck is an Afterburner Climax, anyway? But I dutifully picked up that controller and faced the imminent humiliation, tentative but determined, like the chubby kid I used to be, waiting in line to kick the kickball...poorly....and publicly.

Unlike with kickball, I felt driven to succeed at this game – at least to succeed long enough to write something about it. So I flew. I flew over the game's glimmering gray-blue oceans, through the Sega-blue skies Ben has always spoken of so fondly, and into the actually breathtaking volcanic islands with their fiery-glinted skies, their orange and black smoke billows. It took me three sessions with the game before I could avert my eyes from my jet long enough to enjoy these landscapes, but I improved enough that I could, and it was worth it. After my first 15 minute gaming session, my score was somewhere around 60,000. Three sessions later, my final score in the game was 378,690 and I had completed all stages in both Arcade and Scoring modes (I'm so proud that I was even able to figure out that there were two modes, though I couldn't tell what was different about them. They seriously seemed identical).

What initially upset me the most about playing this game was that I didn't think it would ever be possible for me to tell when my bullets and missiles were actually hitting something. In my first review I spoke of the button-mashing technique that I thought would be the secret to success. By the third session, though, I'd realized that technique was actually ineffective. It was like hurling a basketball at a basket willy-nilly and blind-folded. I could throw all day and not actually make a single basket. Although I was constantly shooting my gun and my missiles, I wasn't actually hitting anything!

So, again, I reverted to my fifth-grade self and used avoidance tactics. By avoidance tactics, I mean I started rolling. I rolled the hell out of that jet (which, to the credit of the graphics, gave me a bit of vertigo!) Miraculously,when I rolled around and around in circles, missiles didn't hit me! I tricked those sucker missiles! And when I was forced through the tiny mountain valleys or that dreadful, impossible tunnel and rolling wouldn't work, I just winced, held my breath and restarted my way through it. Eventually, I learned to get pretty good at avoiding the hurtling objects which ultimately gave me a little time to focus on targeting and shooting.

Although I've never once competed in team sports, I have recently discovered that I enjoy watching them, especially basketball. And what amazes me most about basketball players is their ability to pay attention to the million little movements going on on the court so that they can almost instinctively act and react with perfect timing so that the ball goes where it's supposed to go when it's supposed to go there. I think that ability would be helpful in Afterburner Climax, too. If I could just manage to keep an eye on my armor graph, my climax bar, and my life count while also avoiding the yellow missile streaks, the red bullet streams, the helicopters, planes and jets and those damn mountains and STILL remember to hit that climax button at the right time, then maybe I could get pretty good at this game. As it was, I almost completely forgot to ever hit the climax button and, when I did, it was often by accident when my left pointer finger slipped and hit it...not the first time a girl climaxed because of an accidental, but well-timed finger slip. (Too far? I can't seem to stop myself with the climax double entendre!)

You know how I asked in my first impressions whether or not there were any good planes? Well, I got my answer about halfway through the game when the green-fonted “friendlies” appeared. When the "friendlies" first appeared it brought me back, yet again, to P.E. when I realized that not only would my poor playing affect me with public embarrassment and physical discomfort, but it would affect my teammates hoping for a win. I didn't need this extra pressure, game! It's hard enough to avoid slamming into the ground (seriously...the GROUND) much less worry about killing my friends. However, my greatest sense of accomplishment while playing this game came when I managed to purposefully target an enemy instead of one of my “friendlies”. I got that bad plane in my sights, hit the target missile button twice (I think I need to hit it twice to target and fire, but am not actually certain as I usually just repeatedly mashed that button), and shot down the bad plane instead of the good plane. Success! It was like an expert pass across the court resulting in the game-winning two-point jump shot. I was proud.

A few stages later I saw end credits appear. End credits?? I was reminded of George W. Bush in front of that plane in 2003 pronouncing “Mission Accomplished.” Was I being lied to? Was this a trick? This mission couldn't possibly be accomplished! But, no! I saw the map and I had played through all of the stages! Not only did I beat the game, but I even received two medals, one for “missed with 300 missiles in one game” (whatever that means) and one for “cleared the game.” I unlocked four achievements, too!

I watched that final celebratory video clip with a great feeling of accomplishment as my pretty blue, red, and tan Super Hornet landed on the runway. I chuckled when I heard the last line of the game, “Enjoy some R & R. You've certainly earned it.” Unfortunately, I can do no such thing. I have game number two waiting for me. Seeing as how I just tried counting how many games Ben actually has in his collection and decided to quit counting at 500, I better keep on keeping on. As Afterburner Climax taught me, just keep rolling and shooting and laughing and you might just find yourself at the end credits or scoring those final game-winning points despite yourself.

Game two: God of War 3 for the PS3

Afterburner Climax for the XBox360: Part One

2010-05-25T12:52:00.000-07:00

Game One: Afterburner Climax for the Xbox360
First impressions written in bullet list format to memorialize the bullet streams into which I continuously flew my fighter jet.

Recap of my first six seconds of game play:

1.Selected jet (I can always get behind an attractive paint job. Chose the Hornet with blue and orange stripes. Choosing the color of the plane or car or elf's hair or shoes or hat will always be the most entertaining part of any game for me. I can pretty much guarantee you that).
2.Admired the pretty scenery and sky and mountains.
3.Swerved pretty new jet into side of one of those mountains.
4.Overcorrected and swerved into opposite and then adjacent mountains.
5.Pulled up and flew directly into red bullet stream.
6.Veered into giant missile.
7.Took a nosedive and burst into flames.
8.Jet disappeared in a haze of black smoke.
9.Controller-cum-vibrator (pun intended) informed me with its violent shake that my jet was beyond repair.

Times during my first fifteen minutes of game play when I wanted to just turn off the Xbox360:

1.At the Main Menu. I really don't appreciate all the choices afforded me in modern video games. I just want a "play" button. How am I supposed to decide which mode I want to play in when I don't even know what the game is about yet?
2.The fifth time I crashed my jet within 25 seconds of game play. I can't seem to distinguish between missiles, bullets, bad planes, and good planes(are there any good planes? Am I the only one? If so, why?)I think the game tried to explain my mission to me in the first 30 seconds, but I wasn't paying attention.
3.After reading and then rereading three more times what the Climax buttons do and still not really understanding because:
a. I don't really care that much. I figure using climax (the ability to slow down time in order to lock onto multiple targets at once)is the least of my worries considering I can't even seem to stop my jet's constant ricocheting between mountain ranges.
b. The explanation is written poorly.
C. I'm so caught up in the sexual innuendo I can't concentrate.
4.When I realize that I still can't tell, in my wild button-mashing frenzy, if I'm actually hitting anything. And, worse, when I realize I may never be able to tell.

How I got through my fifteen minutes of game play without quitting

1. Laughed at myself. No one can make it through that much crash-and-burn by getting frustrated. It really was comical. As Ben said, "you can't go over it you can't go under it...oh..no...you just went through it..."
2. Just kept mashing. I mashed those buttons and spun that joystick ad nauseam...literally...I wanted to puke.
3. Remembered the assignment. If nothing else I pride myself on being a good student. Just knowing that I'd have to write about my experience reminded me in my weak, loser moments that I needed to pay attention and keep going because, gosh darn it, I had a job to do!

The reason this project is good:

1.I played for 15 minutes and didn't quit despite the fact that I wanted to about every 30 seconds.
2.Yes, my husband said after watching those 15 minutes that I was “pretty much straight-up terrible” at playing video games. Still, I think he really enjoyed watching me try.
3.Even after 15 minutes I could tell I was improving and even managed to Climax a few times! And that's more than can be said for a lot of women.

(Final game review of Afterburner Climax to come in the next day or two. Stay tuned!)

Project Note

2010-05-25T11:36:00.000-07:00

I debate whether I should write one long review encompassing my entire experience or if I should write several posts as I play with one final review at the end of my time with the game. Any opinions? I don't like too much time to pass between posts, but I do want the posts to act as reviews. I think I will start by writing one post about my initial experience playing a game and then write one final review. We'll see how that goes first. Also, I know someone had trouble getting a comment to show up on the blog. I may have fixed it, but am not sure. If you have trouble commenting, would you let me know?

Marriage the Game: Earning Points and Leveling Up

2010-05-24T07:33:00.001-07:00

Sitting at the dining room table in the house I share with my husband, Ben, and my nearly two-year-old son, Jhonen, I have within view two flat screen plasma televisions, both hooked up to DVR recorders. Next to one TV is a PS3 and a PS2 (the slim, black version...we have an original PS2 and a bubblegum pink Japanese version, too), and an Xbox360 all of which can be played in surround sound. The other TV connects to two computers, one is a PC my husband uses as his primary programming computer and the other serves as an arcade hard drive holding archived games. A giant arcade stick with customized buttons sits next to another Xbox360 and a piano keyboard my husband uses to compose music on his computer. Then there are the shelves. Shelves and shelves and shelves that are burdened with Ben's game collection that ranges from Ace Attorney to Pikmin to Zelda. Shelves of old consoles with names like planets from a kid's science fiction story: Saturn, Genesis, Dreamcast, Super Famicom. Then there's the elephant in the (dining) room: the giant blue plastic bin that bursts with those consoles' cables, controllers, and other gaming device paraphernalia. Bongo drums. DDR mats. Virtual On Twin Sticks. Each portable gaming device iteration and their corresponding cases and lights and chargers. Ugh!

Look around my house and it's immediately evident that I am a gamer wife.

When we met, Ben claimed that he didn't play games much. He also told me he doesn't cuss and he definitely “fucking” lied about that one, too. I figured it out quickly, though, and forgave him when he could mysteriously afford to buy Grand Theft Auto, but not lunch. The reason I could overlook it was that he had a passion for video games, a philosophy about video games, if you will, that attracted me. I correlated my passion for books and writing to his passion for video games and video game developing. Video games weren't just a mindless way to pass the time for Ben. Video games were works of art. They were entertainment as well as a creative outlet. His outlook helped me overlook the fact that I considered video games to be a general waste of time and a distraction from the things in Ben's life that I thought should be a higher priority, namely, me!

Here we are ten years, five wedding anniversaries, and one child later, and he still collects, plays, and makes video games. This element of our lives doesn't appear to be going anywhere. I hear Ben say he's going to hang out with Jhonen so I can have some time to myself. Then I hear the TV remote clicks and Mario's “woohoo” and I cringe wondering why Ben couldn't read Jho a book or play outside or build a tower with blocks instead (not that he doesn't ever do those things...it's just not always his first inclination). I'm not the sort of gamer wife who has “lost” her husband to World of Warcraft or that year's Madden or anything like that. He honestly doesn't even get the time to play games with much frequency these days. Instead, the video game industry is sort of like another member of our family. We talk about its ups and downs, its history, its future. The video game industry is like the husband's-obnoxious-best-friend-character in a comedy movie who I may not have to like, but I do need to learn to live with.

I am a gamer wife who sort of hates video games, but who loves my husband.

Now that Ben and I are parents, I see that I need to come to terms with Ben's passion for video games before the difference between his love of them and my, well, tolerance (and sometimes lack of tolerance) for them, becomes a problem. Don't get me wrong, I spent my fair share of time playing games as a kid. My Dad bought me an Atari and bag of Atari games at a neighbor's garage sale when I was eight and I loved to play Frogger so much that I learned to play left-handed after I broke my right arm in a bicycle accident. I remember playing one of the Super Mario games sitting on a beanbag chair at my best friend Sara's house in fifth grade. (The ice level was my favorite.) My Mom would yell at me to look out the window at the beautiful mountain scenery and “quit playing that stupid Gameboy already” on family road trips to North Carolina. And in those memories I can see the appeal video games must have had for Ben where the world of Final Fantasy was probably a lot more interesting than the world of Deltona, Florida, where video games could be an escape from family arguments or something to do with friends that didn't include being outside in the Florida heat. Still, I hear President Obama tell American parents to take away those video games and get kids outside or reading books and I find myself torn because I agree with the president, but I live with Ben.

Looking for a project to get me writing again, Ben said, joking, “You should play, then review all of my video games.” Laughing, I waved him off with, “I can barely turn on the PS3, much less make it more than 15 minutes into any of your games.” And although that's true, I couldn't keep from giggling to myself every time I considered the project idea. Something about it amused me and I couldn't get it out of my head. Maybe playing through and reviewing Ben's games would help me like video games more, or at least help me see what he sees in them. It would certainly give us a lot to talk about. Knowing that video games will probably be a part of my son's life, I might as well learn how to play them a bit. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right? It might even be fun, and funny, for people to read about my casual encounters with hardcore games.

After discussing the logistics with Ben, we've decided that at least 52 games, averaging one per week would make sense since I am pretty busy and I do want to give a game a decent amount of time so I can give a proper review, though I'm telling you right now that I can't imagine wanting to play some of these games long enough to even get through the tutorials. He picks which games I play and in what order. He is already concocting the list of games in his head. I think he might enjoy coming up with my assignments even more than he enjoys watching me attempt to play them.I will review my impressions of each game and my experience playing each game. In return, he will owe me a trip to an art museum of my choice and a couple romantic comedies (though he doesn't know about that yet).

So here we go! First game: Afterburner Climax for the Xbox360.