The Mammon Philosophy

Caught this great comparison of VC prices versus the used game market (via Kotaku, also Joystiq.) Sure, the bottom line sounds great: if you were to buy every game in the catalogue, you’d save a little under twelve hundred bucks. But being a realistic gamer, this isn’t feasible for me — waiting for the nigh-impossible scenario of a Killer Instinct release is currently saving me $52 out of a possible $52 on an assorted selection of their other lesser fighting games, for example. For curiosity’s sake, though, I have to know: how much could I have saved if I’d gone to the trouble of seeking out hard copies of my downloaded games?

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You’re supposed to win at video games. Succeed against the odds. That’s the point. But in achieving that success, you’re often called upon to fail, which is bothersome if you’re accustomed to victory. Oh, sure, there’s got to be a challenge; it should really suck to have to work your way past a series of soldiers to turn a power generator online so you can electrocute a gigantic otherworldly invader (to borrow an example from Gordon Freeman’s Wacky Physics Adventure, or “Half-Life” as the kids like to call it these days.) But damn if losing repeatedly doesn’t have an ill effect on the psyche. Yup, I’ve been losing again, and the callous pessimistic side of my mind has been taking it out on me.

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Went down to the local EB Games yesterday, up to the counter in my usual way, took my preorder slip out of my wallet and requested my copy of No More Heroes. “It doesn’t come out until February,” the lady says. They moved the date up to now, I counter. “Nope. Pushed back again to Feb. 1st.” Oh dear. But it says… okay, it doesn’t say the date on my receipt, but man this is ridiculous, I didn’t hear a thing about any re-delay. Still, I know better than to argue release dates with gamer clerks. We share a chuckle over the last guy who tried that (cute lady game store worker who keeps up on Internet culture? Seven or eight years ago, I would’ve had a new crush!) and I head out amid promises to return in February.

Hot Tip: do not call a Canadian game store worker a “noob,” because they’ll call mall security and your ass will be tasered.

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Is it really almost January 22nd? I hope everyone’s as excited about No More Heroes as I am; I haven’t bought a title on launch day since the original Super Smash Bros., and that was back in the days before the world apparently went crazy for preorders. What happened to the good ol’ days of just wandering into the store and seeing what was available? I couldn’t even have told you what month a particular game was coming out back then. It’s plausible to state that changes in marketing strategy and press coverage have had an effect, turning what used to be a monthly review process (your Nintendo Powers and GamePros) into a daily, up-to-the-minute grind (”Smash Bros. Delayed To March: Updated 29 Seconds Ago”) that forces companies to throttle the information stream with a nonstop barrage of screenshots, videos, and those dreaded “Countdown” websites. But more likely, the change has come from within: as the gaming generation gets older, more of us are holding down jobs, affording us the luxury of buying video games whenever we want instead of saving up our allowance for a favoured trip to the local Microplay.

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Finished off Twilight Princess over the weekend. The final round puts the exclamation point on the neverending feel of the game by subjecting you to boss after boss after boss, although at least they have different elements to keep it interesting, even featuring a throwback to a skill you learned at the very beginning of the game. The dungeon before the boss parade is terribly underdeveloped, however. There’s a new version of the traditional Iron Knuckle enemy, encountered first in the Temple of Time, who returns to torment you on the third floor. “What can we do to increase the challenge?” the programmers pondered as they developed the fourth floor. “I know! Let’s make the player fight two Iron Knuckles at the same time!” No surprise, since Ocarina of Time did the exact same thing. But no prior knowledge of a design that became an instant classic can prepare you for the horror you face on the fifth floor.

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Clearing through level 3-3 of The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout, you hop on a platform, expecting it to rise up and bring you to all those carrots. Except it’s not going up, it’s going down. Surely it won’t descend into the bubbling lava below, right?

Fortunately, this only costs you a single hit; each of Bugs’ three hearts goes from red to white to black to clear before disappearing, and on the occasion that you face a difficult situation — say, jumping to a platform that only appears for a few moments at a time in the precise spot where a reverse comet flies through while an earthquake is happening — the minigames offer enough extra lives to remove all barriers from your path, except perhaps your own patience.

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The ball-and-chain miniboss in Twilight Princess is perhaps the best example yet of the screwy game mechanics. The diameter of his swing is equal to the width of the narrow storeroom in which you fight him; he can only be hit in the back, after he’s thrown the ball at you; and he only throws the ball at you once you’ve rocketed past him with the Clawshot, and then hurls it with such speed that even the slightest hesitation on your part results in getting hit. He thrashed me twice in a row, so I stopped playing.

Star Fox Command has a level that’s kicking my ass somewhat right now. I haven’t found a good balance between getting a good score (which I ignored on previous stages) and actually beating the level, plus a missile blew up the Great Fox last time I tried it. So I stopped playing.

We were having a discussion about Battletoads at the smnet forums, which I can’t play regular-style as my NES is broken and it hasn’t arrived on the Virtual Console. I rigged it up with Mednafen and started in on it with my keyboard, but eventually the split-second rapid-motion of Volkmire’s Inferno overcame me. You get the pattern, I’m sure.

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The joy of the “hectic holiday” has come and gone; I’ve been too busy playing my shiny new Triforce DS to actually write about it. But I’m glad I did, because now I can confidently say that The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is the game that Twilight Princess should have been. It’s everything I wanted, but I couldn’t vocalize it until after I knew exactly what the problem was.

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