Well, I signed on to do five of these Nethack diaries, and this is the fifth, which is good, because in order to find new things to complain about I’d have to keep playing the game.
I’m kidding, of course. There are a lot of things I like about Nethack. It’s fun to imagine how thrilling it must have been to college students in 1987, clandestinely passed around on floppy disks or played on a library terminal. The immaturity of the Internet and absence of Google would have made knowledge of the game’s countless spoilers a rare commodity, to be drunkenly shouted by one engineering student to another in crowded small-town bars with lenient carding policies. Gorgeous coeds would get into yowling, hair-pulling catfights over who deserved to fellate the most proficient Nethack player.
I could be romanticizing things a bit. My own first exposure to roguelikes was Nethack’s predecessor, Hack, which I acquired on a Fred Fish disk for my Amiga in high school, long before I discovered beer or coeds. I played it endlessly, dying in more ridiculous ways each time, never really getting the tiniest grasp on how anyone would actually go about winning the game. But then I had an excuse: I knew one other guy who played it, he was as clueless as me, and we had no way to learn about the game other than trial and error. In 2011, all the secrets of Nethack are at my fingertips online, but I still don’t know how to win. I’ve played without spoilers for so long not out of some kind of hyper-morality, but just because Nethack spoilers put me to sleep. I’m certain that interest in playing a game and interest in learning a vast range of counter-intuitive facts that are, for all intents and purposes, separate from the game itself, are two different interests. While some people may have both of those interests, I don’t. And thus, I will never win Nethack.
While that was fine for me in high school, in my old age, I’m less patient with this random, mysterious, goofy game that will kill you on a whim. Maybe I’m distracted by all these coeds and beer.
Rally racing is a terrible idea. Whose idea was it to go fast over, like, gravel? And dirt and mud? You can’t get any traction on that stuff. Your car slides. And sometimes there are rally races in snow. Snow! Can you believe it? That’s the stuff people ski on. It’s the worst place in the world to go fast. When people have footraces and baseball games where it’s snowy, I’m pretty sure they bring out big snow melters to clear the track, or whatever it is you do to get snow out of the way. But not in rally racing. In rally racing, it’s like they intentionally want you to drive on snow. It’s like they go to whole countries full of snow, such as Finland and Aspen.
After my ongoing love affair with Shift 2, I was a bit worried that I’d be tapped out in terms of racing games. But the kind of driving you’re doing in Dirt 3 is really its own beast. It’s loosey-goosey enough for things to go wrong from time to time. The above video illustrates perfectly the difference between actual racing and rally racing, and the difference between Shift and Dirt. If the above had happened while I was playing Shift 2, I’d go straight to “restart race” in the pause menu. But in Dirt 3, it’s just another thing that can sometimes happen on the way to the finish line.
By the way, I blame the elephant grid for what happened in that video. Stupid elephant grid.
In LA Noire, there are a couple of points where the game flirts with what must be one of the most maddening aspects of crime, and something you rarely see in pat episodic TV shows: sometimes you can’t know who committed a crime, because people lie and evidence doesn’t always tell the whole story. Unfortunately, LA Noire pulls its punches in this regard. It only dabbles in contrived ambiguity so it can set up a later reveal.
If I thought documentaries were real movies (they aren’t), it would bring to mind Paradise Lost, a pair of fascinating documentaries about the 1993 murder of three children in West Memphis, Arkansas. There’s a bit of an agenda behind director Joe Berlinger’s movies (the first made in 1996, the follow-up in 2000), but he doesn’t let it get in the way of telling the story and leaving you as unsatisfied as you should be. Probably the best cinematic example of this is David Fincher’s chilling Zodiac, an icily detached dramatization of the search for a serial killer in the 70s who (spoiler!) was never caught. I would have loved to have seen a little of that uncertainty and helplessness in LA Noire.
Most recently, I stumbled across an Australian movie called Noise, starring no one you’ve ever heard of and not to be confused with an American movie called Noise, starring Tim Robbins. To this day, I have no idea how the Australian Noise made its way into my Netflix queue. It just showed up one day and I had the good fortune to start watching it without knowing whether it was a horror movie, a romantic comedy, or a documentary (which isn’t a real movie anyway).
Noise is an unsettling experience from the opening scene to the final shot, but it’s an unforgettable study of how a crime unfolds and resolves, told from the perspective of a victim and a police officer, and the community they inhabit. It’s creepy, stylish, as unmistakably Australian as Picnic at Hanging Rock, genre bending, and flat-out unforgettable. For better or worse — you may very well hate it — it’s one of those movies that will bounce around inside your head as sure as the ringing in your ears after a gunshot.
Having just started Dirt 3, I can’t race a race to save my life. This is partly because I have too much pride to dial down the realism settings, which means I’m using a handling model that ensures I spend a lot of time getting up close and personal with Finnish trees. Fortunately, unlike the previous Dirt games, I can set the realism separately from the skill level of the other drivers. So for now, I’m my own worst enemy. My kingdom for a patch of asphalt!
And although I haven’t figured out the driving, I’m already in love with the ability to snip a piece of a replay and then upload it directly and without fuss to a YouTube account. So what you can see up there is the single most impressive feat I’ve accomplished. I’m sure the people who live in that house were impressed.
I’ve started a new game as an orcish barbarian. One thing I’ve run into early on is an altar. Your character can gain benefits from his god by sacrificing his kills on these things. This altar-sacrifice “feature” is shared among many roguelikes, including Dungeon Crawl, frequently cited as the most “user-friendly/modern/fun/not stupid/actually playable” example of the genre. And I wonder if anyone actually likes doing it? It just feels like homework to me. You’re an adventurer exploring a dungeon and thwacking baddies, I get the allure of that. But to then pick up your victims and lug them to an altar for brownie points just feels like taking out your recycling, and it’s about as much fun.
The above image isn’t from the first boss battle in The Witcher 2. It’s just from the first one that made me mad.
There’s really no point telling you the backstory, which won’t matter to you unless you’re playing The Witcher 2. But the main point is that this guy is the same kind of guy as you. He has all your powers. Well, all the powers you’re supposed to get when you eventually level up, but you have to fight him before that happens. So he’s popping out all the spells, abilities, and inventory items that you didn’t get because you opting for other spells, abilities, and inventory items. Plus, he’s got way more hit points than you and he does way more damage than you do.
I don’t know how you’re actually supposed to get through the battle. For me, it was a matter of playing it over and over and over, giving up for the day, trying again the next day, Googling message board posts that were no help, watching YouTube videos that were equally unhelpful, and just plugging away some more. I finally beat him when he glitched and got stuck against a wall. It was at least 20 attempts.
It reminds me a bit of the Jedi Knight games. You’ve been running around totally being a badass Jedi, lightsaber and Force Powering your way through the game. Then you have to fight another Jedi who has all your powers and it’s no fair. I was supposed to be the big fish in the pond!
Well, I’m dead, jerks. I’m dead in Nethack, and I’m getting the flu in real life. You may not care about the flu detail but this is called a “game diary.” I can write about my damn lunch if I want to. Dear diary: Today I ate a sandwich.
Woo hoo it’s LA Noire time, suckaz! Another tour de force outing for Rockstar! Aw yeah! This is what gaming is all about! Examining corpses! Trailing perps! Weird gunfights! Boring driving! Collectibles that nobody can find! Wait, what? Aw, shit. Maybe next time, fellas.
More big budget gaming disappointment (sort of) after the jump!Continue reading →
Codemasters’ rally racing game Dirt 3 is out this week. The previous Dirt games, and Codemasters’ racing games in general, have all been excellent. And given how awful the drift events are in Need for Speed: Shift 2, I’m ready for something with a little slide that isn’t completely unmanageable.
Also out this week is a downloadable action RPG from Atari called Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale, made by the creators of Scratch: the Ultimate DJ, which is mostly famous for a lawsuit against Activision’s DJ Hero. That description is a rollercoaster ride of expectations. “Downloadable action RPG”? Yes! Tell me more! “From Atari”? Oh. “Dungeons and Dragons license”? Hmm. Well. “From the creators of Scratch: the Ultimate DJ”? Uhh…
There might be a conflict of interest in having the three of us, all long-time members of the Kristen Wiig Fan Club, try to discuss Bridesmaids impartially. So to make sure the podcast doesn’t consist solely of us talking about how good Bridesmaids is, we argue for a bit about MacGruber. Then, at the 54-minute mark, we do a 3×3 of our favorite vocal performances.
So there I was, getting my ships repaired and ready for the next fight my little fleet would face when all of a sudden, THIS asshole pops up. What’s he want? Apparently the little scamp is impatient and wants ME to get back into the fight freaking ASAP while he sits all comfy and cozy back on the mothership. He buddy, I got your system map right here…
This is just one example of all the little things that Space Pirates and Zombies is littered with. Tons of little touches that add flare and zest to the game, wherein you can tell the programmers really put a lot of care and thought into things that might go unnoticed elsewhere. In this, my final entry, I’ll look at some of those tiny, little yet awesome things, as well as wrap up my look at the game as a whole. Join me, won’t you?
It has all come down to this. In game time, it has been a mere five months since I arrived in Calradia. Since then, I have made a name for myself in this world. Now a faction is welcoming me in, not through its own choice but rather through the actions of a rogue lord who got a little too bloodthirsty one day. This marriage takes place under the dark cloud of impending war, this time one that promises to take a great many lives more than the last and which will be unmatched in its savagery.
I’m playing as a gnomish wizard, because that’s what I feel like in real life: a short, weak creature who has a lot of potential that will never pay off because he will be doing pretty well until he eats a rotten rat corpse and dies with only his pet cat to remember him.
If LA Noire was just a movie, I’d be wildly enthusiastic about it. And I am enthusiastic about parts of it. What a fantastic bit of noir! Unfortunately, it’s a videogame. And as a guy who writes about videogames, I’d have to say LA Noire is ultimately a failure.
I haven’t really considered the toll all of this is taking on my little sackboy. He’s a social creature. Much more so than I am. Being locked inside my PS3 is tearing him up. I try to explain it to him, but it’s no use. Letting him run around in story levels isn’t helping either. He was raised in the community. He needs to explore those levels. They make him feel alive.
Wait. What’s that you say? The PlayStation Network is now up? Phew. What a relief! He’s going to be so happy! Okay fine. I forgive you Sony. I forgive you if you promise not to let it happen again.
