Blessed by the Potato

I got Metroid Prime (actually Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, though I don’t recall hearing about a Prime 1 or 2) for the Wii way back at Christmas, but just got around to giving it a whirl this week.

I recall playing the original Metroid at a friend’s house on the NES as a kid, getting better and better until one night we played through the whole thing in one crazy marathon that took us until past midnight (which, at the time, was obscenely late) to finish. I recall liking the combination puzzle/action shooter aspect of it, so I was looking forward to playing the current one for the Wii. So far, the game itself seems to be quite good for the Wii, however I find the control setup rather painful.

Let me go back a step: the Wii is an awesome, unique game system with a totally revolutionary set of control inputs that has already allowed a number of games to really push the boundaries of what and how we play. However, it is not, most decidedly not designed for marathon weekend gaming sessions. The nunchuck/wiimote setup I’m finding is rather painful to use since so many finely controlled wrist movements (or in the case of Mario Galaxies, spastic wrist movements) are needed to control games. This is an interesting, fun way to interact with a virtual environment, don’t get me wrong — in fact, one thing I’m really impressed with in Metroid is the way to open doors by pulling out a control lever, twisting it, and pushing it back in. It’s just a nifty movement to make with the motion-sensitive device. However, it is not a kind control scheme for my wrists. The worst thing I find is having to hold the Wiimote at the screen to control an on-screen cursor since it offers the fewest ways of repositioning myself for relief and variety, and also requires the most “rigid” and controlled wrist movements. For some games, such as Zelda and Mario, only occasional screen pointing is required, so this doesn’t become much of a problem. Metroid, however, is a first person shooter where your turning is controlled by moving the pointer left/right, as you would with a mouse on a computer. This means that the pointer has to be kept on the screen constantly, and I’m finding it can be a real cramp on my poor atrophied wrist. The nunchuck stick defaults to strafing, which I see can be useful for combat, but means that I can’t do most of the exploration with the joystick alone as I can in other games to give my right wrist a break…

That wouldn’t be so bad if I could save and take a break whenever I wanted, but Metroid is a spread-out save point type game. I’m a grown-ass man, and I want to be able to save and quit whenever I please. I’m just getting too old to game through the pain and Nintendo hands, and moreover, I’ve got responsibilities and an early bed time and stuff, so I want to be able to quit on say 5 minutes notice. On the level I was playing last night, I found the map, and it indicated that the save point was another 40 minutes of gameplay away, based on the speed I was going through the other portions (fortunately, there was an unannounced save another 5 minutes in, but that was still a 20 minute break between save possibilities). Of course, I can’t really blame the game designers, since when you save and quit you get your health and ammo restored… wait, I can blame the designers for that, since they could have put in a “quicksave” as well, or save points that just save but don’t restore…

Nintendo doesn’t seem to have been hitting very many ergonomic hits lately, as I’ve also got a DS which I find is an absolute killer for me. It just doesn’t fit quite right in my hands, like I want to hold it completely differently to just hold it so I can see the screen, maybe with my thumbs in towards the centre a bit more for a heftier grip, but then the controls are out near the edges for people with tiny hands…

I haven’t had a chance to play MarioKart for the Wii, but the reviews I’ve seen for it so far indicate that it (like many other games for the Wii) might be just as fun if not better if played with a game cube controller (and I’m ready to believe that if the motion-sensitive cart controls are prone to oversteer like the cow racing and manta-ray surfing minigames). Does anyone have a spare gamecube controller kicking around?

My parents bought the PS3 essentially to serve as a non-user-friendly BluRay player, so it’s not a total let-down that it’s a fairly lousy game system. Don’t get me wrong: guitar hero is fun, but it’s better on the Xbox.

Until now, I hadn’t bothered connecting the thing to the internet, partly because I figured if I ever want to play a multiplayer game, that’s what the PC is for (I don’t have any experience of using a console to connect to the internet), and partly because I was just too lazy to dig up the password for the wireless network. But today we were playing Rock Band over at Netbug’s, and it was neat that we were able to include Ryan in the game by having him play from his house over the Live service (though why he didn’t just come over and play in person since he wasn’t all that far away is a mystery). Plus, Netbug had downloaded content for his games, which made me wonder what might be out there for the PS3.

So I go and set the stupid thing up on the wireless, and of course the first thing it tells me is that there’s a system update available, so I get it. I don’t know what that lump of shiny black plastic was trying to do with my network, but it managed to crash my wireless router and not only disconnect itself, but disconnect every other computer in the house. After fixing that, it got the update just fine. Except now I need to update Guitar Hero before I can play it… and it won’t update! First, it downloaded about 16%, then crashed the wireless router again. After that, I gave me “an error occurred” message, which was ever so descriptive about what the problem is. It’s really infuriating to have this kind of thing happen on a PC, but at least there it’s sort of expected that users will troubleshoot things and all the various non-compatible software, hardware, and drivers will occasionally lead to a conflict… but this is a closed system! This shouldn’t happen at all! And if there is some random error, it should still let me rock out to the old version of guitar hero and just get the stupid update later. I want to play, and that’s about all the system is good for!

Edit: Oops, not a total disaster: there is a way to get in and play, it’s just not obvious. (The only option when presented with download is “Ok” with “cancel” at the bottom — cancelling actually goes into the game instead of back to the menu).

One neat thing with the online connectivity is that the PS3’s processing power can be put towards the Folding@Home project if you want to leave it on and unused.

I wrote a bit about Guitar Hero earlier, and have now managed to finish the game on “easy”. I have to say, I eventually started to get the hang of it and was just flying through the last few levels, despite the increased difficulty of the songs. I still had a lot of trouble with some relatively simple parts of songs: half-notes* are pretty hit-and-miss, the guitar just doesn’t seem to strum fast enough to hit them, and if I try to force it by going down-up it occasionally throws in a third strum. I have a hell of a time holding the rhythm on fast repetitive parts too, and I can’t tell if that’s my issue or the controller’s.

* – Edit: Wayfare tells me that my musical terminology is wrong and that the notes I was having trouble hitting and that I was calling half-notes are really 1/8, 1/16, or 1/32 notes.

Medium, I find, is a big step up from easy. I really wish there was an “easy plus” or “medium light” where I could throw in the blue fret without this hammer-on pull-off insanity. Though it took a few tries on a number of songs, I managed to get up to the Live in Japan set, and am just getting crushed by songs like Knights of Cydonia. I simply can’t do it, not even close. There isn’t even much of a work-up to it: what few furiously fast sections like that were in previous songs were really short, and there weren’t any that required quite so much in the way of change-ups across the board and then bam! you’re hit with this two and a half minute monster.

While it came later on for him, Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation also seemed to find GH3 presented a brick wall of difficultly increase that was just frustrating and made the game seem a lot less fun…

Ah, well, back to being frustrated by DDR. At least with that I get exercise; though GH can be more of a workout than you might think at first, especially if you’re taken to doing flying leaps off the furniture, wailing out the tricky parts on your knees, and jumping up and down for star power…

I’m a lot late to the party to be talking about Guitar Hero: anyone reading this has likely already played it long before I got my hands on it. I didn’t really see the appeal and all the hype, largely because I’m not in the slightest bit musical, but also because buying a plastic guitar controller seemed very gimicky. And since I didn’t really see myself needing a guitar controller for any other game, it also made the effective cost of Guitar Hero much more than any other game I could pick for a console.

Recently, my parents bought a PS3 to serve as a blu-ray player for their TV (coincidentally, much the same reason we got the PS2 back in the day — the price of the game console is not all that disparate from the price of a simple player). My sister got Guitar Hero 3 for it (the only game she has for the console), and I got a chance to play it a few weeks ago. It’s actually really fun, even though I suck incredibly at it. Musical talent is not really necessary: rhythm is important to beat in time with the music, but otherwise it’s a colour-matching game. There is a correlation between the frets you have to hit and the actual notes, but you don’t have to actually have any special knowledge or appreciation for the music to plow through it. We were having so much fun rocking out with it the first day that I ran out and bought a second controller, for a system that my sister has and that I don’t have regular access to! (actually, I bough a second bundle since the damnable craptivision didn’t see fit to sell a stand-alone guitar for the PS3. I would offer my spare GH3 disc for sale, but of course no one could possibly get a stand alone guitar for the PS3 to actually need it… though I suppose there might be a rare soul out there who scratched their disc beyond all readability…)

However, I first played the game over at Netbug’s house on his 360 (actually the same weekend that my sister brought home the PS3 version). The weird thing is that I actually did better that first time I tried it (managing to make it all the way through a few songs on the first try on easy) than I did on the PS3. With a lot of practice and painful failures and repetition, I was able to get about halfway through the game on easy, at which point I tried to give my pinky finger a workout by starting again on medium. I couldn’t even get past the backyard stage. Oddly enough, my fretting finger work looked to be perfect, but I just couldn’t strum properly, particularly for some of the fast notes: I just couldn’t physically move the damned strum bar fast enough to hit consecutive notes, and some “holds” stopped randomly even though I didn’t move my fingers. Slowly, this was revealed to be a bit of a pattern: some of my brother’s friends who mastered expert on other systems couldn’t hit notes on medium with the PS3. The timing was just simply “off” for the strumming.

Searching around online there are numerous complaints about the wireless guitars for GH3, the PS3 in particular. There are some really dumb design decisions with this thing. First off, it has a detachable neck that has lead to some connection issues — but the boxes are still the full length, so the separate pieces didn’t actually save them any space at all. A single unit with more robust connections would have served them better. Then there is a widely-reported problem with the wireless for the PS3: supposedly bluetooth “wasn’t ready” so they instead had a wireless dongle that is apparently horribly prone to interference from home wireless networks. I’ve sent my siblings some tips others have given on the internet (including the inconvenient step of turning off the wireless internet while playing), and if none of those work we may be returning the guitars and looking at getting a PS2 or Wii set.

Of course, that leads into another topic that probably deserves its own rant: what is up with the wireless craze in consoles? There is a wireless crazy in general in our society which I don’t fully understand. Cordless phones: sure, I like to have the freedom to walk when I’m on the phone, and while almost every room in my parents’ house has a phone jack anyway, it’s a lot easier to not have to switch phones as you walk, to not have to keep those jacks populated, and in other houses (such as mine here in London) there aren’t as many free jacks. Wireless internet: I actually don’t care for it. Prone to interference, snooping, power-hungry and not a very scalable technology; however, houses these days (even brand-new houses) aren’t wired for convenient plant-my-laptop-anywhere networking (and even then, there’s still a cable to trip over… though the power cord is somehow not prone to that) so it’s an easy way to get internet access for many family members. Wireless controllers I just don’t get. A wireless keyboard or mouse sometimes have lag issues, but more importantly, battery issues. Not only is it a huge pain to have to swap out batteries that always seem to go flat at the wrong moment, but batteries tend to be heavy. Who wants a heavier mouse to flip around the pad all day? Or a heavier game controller? Granted, the two AA’s in the Wiimote don’t add much to the weight since those vibration motors are pretty hefty, but still: what happened to the goodness of cords? For a guitar game in particular one would think that a cord would add to the authenticity (granted, I don’t play, but I do believe electric guitars plug into their amps) in addition to fixing the many woes of the PS3 wireless implementation.

One final weird kick in the pants is that the PS3 guitar dongle is “USB”. Like me, you might then think that you could take it and plug it into your computer or another console with a USB port and get it to work… sadly, that’s not the case :(

PS: I’m looking for a working used PS/2 to have as a second unit for our family. If anyone out there is selling one (in Toronto, London, or points between) let me know!

Sword of the Stars has been way, way in the back of my mind for a long time now. I got the demo shortly after it was released, but just didn’t have time to play through it, and CivIV: Warlords came out, and all kinds of other stuff just conspired against me… not the least of which was that the first half hour or so I did spend playing the demo didn’t exactly knock my socks off.

So this weekend I found myself with some free time to play video games (a very rare and wonderful and much needed break), and decided to give SotS another go around. The demo has been updated, so I started off by getting a fresh version. For those who don’t know, SotS is a space strategy game along the lines of Master of Orion, Galactic Civilizations, or Space Empires. What sets it apart, and what really got me salivating, was that it doesn’t just pick one flavour of FTL space transportation. Each race has their own method of getting around the stars: the humans take advantage of natural proto-wormholes, leading to a network of space lanes which they can’t deviate from, kind of like the Space Empire series, Wing Commander games, etc.; the lizard-folk can just spin up their hyperdrive and shoot off in any old direction, like in MOO2 and several other titles; the bug creatures have to travel by sub-light drive and build a network of instant teleportation warp gates. Having all these different ways of getting around the galaxy seemed really interesting. On top of that, the galaxy map is truly 3D, the kind of galaxy map MOO3 was supposed to deliver (sigh, MOO3).

Despite my high hopes, I haven’t really been blown away by SotS so far. Unfortunately in the two demo games I’ve played so far, I’ve ended up as the humans both times playing… the humans. So the different galactic transportation strategies haven’t come into play yet. Other things have started to bother me. Tactical combat for one: it’s quite neat and intuitive when you’re near the beginning of the game with some small fleet skirmishes. But later on, I was annoyed that I could send a massive War Armada of Doom and still only got to deploy 3 ships at a time. I also found the complete lack of a mini map made it impossible to engage the enemy at a distance: they’d be lobbing missiles at me, I’d be hemmoraging ships, and I still couldn’t even see them. It was highly frustrating (and improved sensors tech didn’t seem to help, either, but I can’t say for sure if my upgraded sensor squadron ever made it into the battle). So then I started using the auto-resolve for tactical combat, which brought with it its own slew of frustrations. First off, it wouldn’t give a summary of the battle, so if my armada was wiped out completely, I would have no idea whether their defending fleet was left with just one limping destroyer, or was at full health laughing at me. And, in what might be a bug, if I used auto-resolve for one of my attacks, I was then forced to manually defend myself against their attacks.

Other little things started getting to me. The voice work for one really seemed amateurish and grating. Some things I might just need the manual for, but I had trouble controlling my empire. The game is very much built around getting to the basics of the 4X genre, with a tech tree almost solely devoted to improving your ships and production thereof, and economy and planets that are just shells of what they are in other games. Because of that, I didn’t seem to understand or control what my economy was doing. Some turns I seemed to be raking in cash like crazy, and other turns it seemed starting a new colony would bankrupt me and suspend all my research. In the demo I didn’t get to see much in the way of diplomacy, so it’s really just exploration, expansion, and combat.

So now I’m a little torn. On the one hand, I wasn’t thrilled with the demo, and the issues with tactical combat in particular would lead me to pass by the full version. On the other hand, I didn’t get to see how the different FTL technologies would interact, and I think I’m willing to ignore the obvious faults I’ve seen to get to the gimmick real appeal of SotS…