So far, 14 games beaten in the year 2010

Technically, this is the sort of post I should have done around the end of June, but I’m a bit slow with these things, and so here it is nonetheless. We’re now definitely halfway through the year 2010, and I thought it’d be neat to stroll back through time and count up the number of games I’ve beaten at this point.

Beaten.

Sometimes, in the world of videogames, that concept is hard to pinpoint. I mean, at what point does someone beat an MMORPG like World of Warcraft? Is it when they reach a level cap or actually run out of in-game missions? How would one define beating UNO, a multiplayer-heavy arcade game that has no main quests to complete? So, for a lot of these games, I think I have to just use my better judgment and decide if completing enough of a game equals beating it. One easy clue is that, most often, a game on the Xbox 360 will have an Achievement tied to beating it, and so if that’s unlocked I will definitely check it off (there’s one exception to this, which you can read about below).

Not surprisingly, all games beaten in the year 2010 for me were either on the Xbox 360 or the Nintendo DS…

Xbox 360

• LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues
• Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter (something wonky happened and the “you beat the game!” Achievement never popped, grrr)
• BioShock
• SEGA Superstars Tennis (I basically played every single thing on this so it’s considered beaten)
• Dragon Age: Origins
• The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom
• The Saboteur
• Peggle (um, I completed the main campaign, just not all the side challenges yet)
• Street Fighter II’ HF
• Borderlands
• Limbo

Nintendo DS

• Hidden Mysteries Titanic: Secrets of the Fateful Voyage
• Pokemon HeartGold (I beat the first region and the Fab Four or whatever they were called, and have now unlocked the second region, as well as a lot of post-game material)
• TouchMaster 3

14 if my math is correct. That’s okay, but for some reason, I expected more in the Nintendo DS category. Maybe I’m just going crazy. Or forgetting a bunch. Oh wells.

There’s a couple of games I’m really close to beating, but still need more time with. Namely, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, Picross 3D (I’d like to get over the 200 puzzles mark for this one), LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 (this is going slower than many might have expected from me, but that’s because I’m playing the whole thing co-op with Tara), and ‘Splosion Man.

Gamers often fall into the trap of buying more games before completing the ones they’re already working on, and yes, I’ve hit that hump too. However, with money and time becoming a bigger issue right now, I’d really love to work on clearing out more of the backlog. There’s pretty much only two games on my must-buy list (Scott Pilgrim VS. The World: The Videogame and Fallout: New Vegas), and so I will climb this backlog mountain, hand over foot, until sweet victory washes over me like a morning breeze, and then–and only then–will I strike my victory pose.

An empty room, ready for doom and gloom

Sorry, dear readers of Grinding Down, but today’s gonna be extra light on content. I had a pretty horrific evening last night, and I’m still recovering from that…plus I think I got about three hours of sleep total. Coffee is keeping me going, as are phone calls and the thought of something cool to drink after work, but ultimately, I’m a headmess.

Also, throw in the fact that I beat Limbo last night, and, well, the depression deepens. I wasn’t ready for it to end; it ended nonetheless. There’s a staggering connection between the boy’s trip through the unknown and my life as it is, and one day I’d like to talk about what I see here, but I just can’t yet. It’s too…tangible. The game’s ending left me feeling cold and unloved, as well as strangely satisfied. It’s definitely a doozy, one worthy of exploration.

But yeah. This is it for today. I gotta give my brainwires a rest.

Co-op in Dragon Quest IX is kind of a flop

So, over the weekend, I got to try a little co-op adventuring in Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies. And I have to sum up my experience in the very words of the many dogs you’ll meet during your journey to collect seven fyggs (magical fruit that have been eaten by townspeople only then be returned to you whole and untouched…if that is even possible): nng nng nnnnnggg. In short, co-op is kind of a flop, but then again, I suspect I know why.

See, my sister and I got the game on the same day, its release day at that, and we played for a good amount later that evening. But then I had to return to the hubbub of life up north, and she stayed home in South Jersey on a mini-cation, wherein she got to play a lot more DQIX than I did. Needless to say, by the time we got together again for some co-op play, she was double my levels (37 or so to my paltry 16s) and nearing end-game material. This made for lame co-op questing since…I was not there yet.

For co-op play, you can do two things: let someone into your world, to help you on your quests, or travel to someone else’s world, to help them on their quest. Experience and gold is shared, and visiting adventurers can open as many blue treasure chests as they want. Now, if you want their help in battle, you have to make room in your team, basically dropping off a party member or two. This also means that, while adventuring in my sister’s world of really high-leveled enemies, if caught in a battle too far away from her, it’d just be me, solo, fighting against the devil’s army. Sure, I could call her into action, but it wouldn’t work if she too was already in a battle, now a fighter short. So we had to stick together, and I basically just visited some of the new towns and grabbed some early recipes since I couldn’t afford anything. Then she came into my world to help me beat Leviathan, which was nice of her to do. Other than that, there wasn’t anything crazy exciting about the experience. She also got some additional quests from me since I was to DL them from WiFi and she was not.

I can see where the co-op would work best. Either playing together from the start, or playing together for all the post-game quests and treasure maps and so on. Those are probably the best options, but I doubt it’ll happen again for me. Still gotta figure out how this “tag mode” works as there’s a special event coming up at the local GameStop…

Scraping the bottom of the awards barrel

Achievements. I like ’em, and so do a number of other gamers. They add extra replay value to certain videogames, as well as reward you for doing something out of the ordinary or, in the case story-related Achievements, just continuing to play the game. Often times, they have fun titles or reference pop culture or a neat picture attached to them.

However, there’s also an entire population of gamers that ignore them and see them as nothing more than graphics to measure one’s e-peen with. Which I totally understand. Really, I do.

To me, getting all Achievements in a game is more of a personal mission rather than a bragging one. It’s something I want to accomplish because I want to see if I’m able to do it. That’s all. As you can see from my list to the right, it’s mostly LEGO games. I’m clearly not an Achievement whore. I just like getting them and talking about the hows and whys.

That said, soon after Achievements became all the rage, other systems and non-Xbox 360 games started looking into ways to hop on the trend wagon. PlayStation 3 introduced Trophies, which are, most of the time, exactly the same concept of Achievements. Little pings awarded for ping hunters.

And then came the Nintendo DS games. With no shared online community, they were less worried about branding a new concept than just coming up with tasks and rewards for players playing their games. Spore Creatures had Badges, Touchmaster 3 had its own versions of trophies, Scribblenauts had Merits, and now we come to Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies, which is really scraping the bottom of the barrel with…Accolades.

Yes…Accolades. A word originating back to 1615.

ac·co·lade

–noun

1. any award, honor, or laudatory notice: The play received accolades from the press.

2. a light touch on the shoulder with the flat side of the sword or formerly by an embrace, done in the ceremony of conferring knighthood.

3. the ceremony itself.

4. Music a brace joining several staves.

5. Architecture

a. an archivolt or hood molding having more or less the form of an ogee arch.

b. a decoration having more or less the form of an ogee arch, cut into a lintel or flat arch.

Hmm. I guess I can’t argue with that first definition there, but something about this word screams ridiculous to me. I mean, maybe calling them Honors would’ve been a better fit. And it fits the medieval fantasy world, but I think Nintendo needs to just get the ball rolling and solidify some kind of in-game rewards system for both their Nintendo Wii and Nintendo 3DS/DSi/DS systems.

My suggestion?

Laudatory Notices.

Just think about it. You’re playing Mario Kart DS, you’re in second place on the final lap, and you just zoomed through an item box. Lucky, lucky you…it’s a red turtle shell! Waluigi is a few feet in front of you, and you let the red death fly, zipping by to seal the deal and win the race. <insert catchy musical sound> Laudatory Notice! Shell Shock

It’s gold, Jerry. Gold!

Don’t mess with this Fatherland Fighter

Well, Saarbrucken is no more. It took three return trips, but I finally cleared it last night of all white Nazi dots save for three or four hard-to-get ones:

Fatherland Fighter (15G): You completed 53 ambient freeplay in Saarbrucken.

…and let’s now transition into strange thoughts.

Part of me kind of secretly wishes that Sean Devlin, with each meaty explosion and Nazi death-scream, transformed into a much darker, looser form of himself like Wander did in Shadow of the Colossus as he took down moss-covered boss after boss after boss. Or maybe he instead lost color as the world around him blossomed. I understand why this wouldn’t work: Sean is doing a good thing, killing all those Nazis, because, as we’re taught, Nazis are bad, and killing them is good. The difference here between him and Wander is that: the Colossi are not inherently evil. They just exist, spending their days stomping around or hiding in caves, and Wander is the jerkface going around killing them because some bodiless voices tells him to. I just like seeing cause and effect taking place.

I mean, Devlin is basically a one-man army, and he’s taken out a lot of targets. With more to come. That’s gotta weigh heavily on his mind even if revenge is fueling his progress, even if he makes a funny Irish quip now and then, even if he lacks the same amount of remorse for running over a cow or pedestrian in the street.

There’s four more Achievements devoted to ambient freeplay events. They are as follows:

• Wrecking Crew: Complete 333 ambient freeplay in Paris Area 1.
• Unnatural Disaster: Complete 212 ambient freeplay in Paris Area 2.
• Walking WMD: Complete 239 ambient freeplay in Paris Area 3.
• Guerilla Warfare: Complete 425 ambient freeplay in the countryside.

Let’s do some math! To get all four, I need to blow up…1,209 more white dots. Well, maybe not entirely. Throughout the course of the main missions and just running around, I suspect I’ve taken out maybe 1/4th of those dots. But still. Man, that’s gonna take a lot of dynamite and rocket launching. I’m also working towards the Achievement of spending 75,000 contraband so this will help keep me focused too.

Either way, if there ever comes a day where someone is like, “Hey, do you know of a videogame with say 1,000+ missions?” I can answer with extreme confidence.

Stuff your sorries into a sack

It’s been a rough couple of days in addition to a rough couple of weeks–which will ultimately just be lumped into a rough couple of months in due time–and I just couldn’t find the time or energy to post something at Grinding Down yesterday. Sadly, all I think I’ll be able to post today is this little apology thing, which, I can only assume, is not very exciting to read.

That said, immediately after work today I’m swinging by the local GameStop to pick up LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4. It’s my official purchase of the month for June 2010, and I’m excited, even if some reviews I’ve read recently complain about it being buggy; others said it’s more or less Potter perfection. Either way, it’s a game I need, and despite the guilt festering in my heart, I’m going to get it and play it and enjoy it as much as possible. The plan is even to cover the first hour of gameplay for, well, The First Hour.

Fifty-eight minutes to go, and then I’m off to another world, escaping yet again, flick and swish…

Videogame Paris is as good as it gets

I will most likely never travel the world.

This is an easy assumption for me to make because I know what goes into traveling the world and seeing the sights, and I just don’t have that stuff. Money, time, that kind of drive, and so on. There’s really only a handful of places I’d like to visit, and they include Paris, France, anywhere in Ireland, and Tokyo, Japan. Okay, okay, and maybe New Zealand to check out all those Lord of the Rings locations. But other than that, I’m content with New Jersey and its surrounding states. We have nice parks and fun boardwalks, and hands-down great autumns.

In October, after Tara and I get married, we’re honeymooning it up in sunny, alligator central: Florida. Disney World and Universal Studios will be our main destinations, and what’s kind of neat is that we’ll get to do a little globe-trotting via the World Showcase in Epcot. There we can hit up everything on my list (I think) save for…well, Hobbiton and Lothlorien. There’s a smaller version of the Eiffel Tower at Paris, Epcot, and we’re totally treating ourselves to some sushi over in feudal Japan. It’s a lot of fun just walking from country to country, hearing the music changing, smelling new smells, and really being immersed–if for only a few yards–in a foreign culture.

This sort of worldly immersion happens from time to time in videogames, too. Fallout 3 had you sneaking around a totally effed up Washington, D.C., and I remember a forum posting that actually compared screenshots of the subway tunnels to that of real life ones; they were eerily on the mark. If I am ever to visit the Mall again, I’ll definitely be seeing it in a whole new way…mostly because I’ll be on the alert for Super Mutants. And despite all the hate I spew on Grand Theft Auto 4, Liberty City is a wonderful recreation of New York City, and some areas really do come to reflect that of their real counterpart. I am especially fond of their parks.

The most recent would be Nazi-occupied France in The Saboteur. It truly is quite an accomplishment, especially when Sean finds himself in the really controlled parts, the ones where only yellows and reds shine through the harsh black and white of the world. The countryside feels very much like a French countryside, and again, seeing as I’ve never been there, I’m only able to draw upon references from movies and books and paintings. It sure feels genuine though. I finally made it to the section housed around the Eiffel Tower a few days ago, and doing some missions at night and seeing it glowing tall and great in the background is a wonderful thing. I even spent a few minutes just casually walking down sidestreets, taking in Paris, hearing its sounds and seeing what was where. I have to trust that love and care was put into The Saboteur‘s layout and design despite it being the swan song for Pandemic Studios, and that a lot of what is there is there because…that’s where it is.

So, for now, I’ll take Paris, France from The Saboteur. My sister has gone before, and I’m interested in showing her some of the areas in a few weeks to see if she recognizes anything. Then Sean is going to jump off the Eiffel Tower and get an Achievement. Just so I don’t forget I’m playing a videogame after all.

Depressed gamer is depressed

Clearly, I’m depressed. Well, it might not be all that clear to you, my silent readers, but to me, it’s beyond evident. I know this because I bought more videogames this week after buying some videogames the previous week, and all I look forward to now at the end of the day is coming home from work and immersing myself in another world. Any world but this one. It could be Nazi-occupied Paris or Pandora littered with skags and psycho bandits or even a fantasy farming game that also houses caves of monsters. It does not matter. So long as it passes the hours until I can pass out and do it all over again, that’s fine.

While getting my oil changed over the weekend, I walked around the mall, finally stepping into GameStop. I just meant to wander, really, but then I noticed they had a “buy two pre-owned games, get one free” deal going on. So I did some searching. I knew that I wanted to get my mother a new Nintendo DS game, and I found Dream Day Wedding Destinations for fairly cheap, but now I needed to more games to seal the deal. Seeing as how I was going to be traveling that weekend (and the next 796 weekends), I decided to pick out two DS games for myself. Still haven’t had the energy to beat The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, and while Picross 3D is fun, it’s not really a story-driven game, just the same thing over and over and over. I needed a little more drive (pun intended, as you’ll soon see) in my games, and I grabbed Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon and Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for about $15.00 each, thus picking up Mom’s game for free.

Both games are pretty good so far, but that’s not what I’m here to write about.

Depression. It sucks.

In high school, I handled it with an outburst of creativity, drawing furiously or scribbling in my notebooks ideas that would never come to fruition (like that one about a school of magical centaurs), but getting them down on paper nonetheless. I almost over-created, in some sense, staying locked away in my bedroom and just letting it all out. My small circle of friends quickly dubbed me “a hermit,” further leading to more depression sinking it, and I later turned the tables on them (though they most certainly have no awareness of this) by writing and selling a little short story about a hermit.

College was much harder in terms of depression. I did not like my college experience; I hid it really well though. If you called me a fake, I would not argue. There were dozens of reasons not to get down, and dozens of reasons countering this. I had a hard time dealing with issues of identity and friends, and ultimately turned to rum and booze and drinking my nights away. Sounds like a cliché, but it’s not at all. My PlayStation 2 was always there, but I never really needed it to comfort me. I did find a way to release my creativity via my guitar, playing “open mic” nights at local cafes and such, which was scary and fun and kept me on my toes, but it didn’t stop the bad thoughts from coming.

Now that I’m out on my own and mostly alone during the workweek, I rely a lot on mindless (and not-at-all mindless) entertainment like videogames. They are both a treat and savior to me come the evening, as I don’t watch any TV shows right now, can’t stand anything that I write short story-wise, and am so turned off by drawing that I have to wonder why I even try. Yet videogames are easy. Push the A button, watch something explode, reap the reward. Instant gratification, instant satisfaction. Lots of goals and Achievements and things to obtain, keeping me focused on something. Sure, some videogames let me down now and then, but never in a sense that my chest wants to cave in or that I want to scream at the sky, “Failure!”

What’s really terrible is the fact that I can’t openly discuss the reasons behind this depression. They are heavy and personal, complicated and unnerving, multiple and multiplying, a total dose of mindfuckery, and I can only imagine what this looks like from the outside looking in: hollow, emo whining. It’s not; that much I can assure you. Depression as depicted on TV commercials is not always how it has to be. You can smile through the day and think the worst things on the inside, and nobody would have a clue. You can still play videogames and have a convivial time, and you can still be the saddest hobbit this side of Middle-Earth.

Talking about the hey days, olden times, way back when, the good old days

One thing that I’ve sadly slipped into here at Grinding Down is a routine, and that routine involves talking about all the new videogames I’m playing currently or the new games I want to really play once they are released to us savage animals the public. I mean, this isn’t the worst thing, as some times it’s fun to muse on about how much Niko Bellic is a jerk or what life is like in a little game called Fallout 3, but I also started up this videogame blog to talk about all kinds of games, especially ones from the yonder years, not necessarily Pong era, but older games of the last two decades that just don’t get touched upon much more because of all the 3D bullshit and hands-free console apps and whatever new shiny thing is put on a pedestal for us to look up at in awe and wonder. Can you tell I’m not terribly impressed with 3D witchcraft?

Maybe it’s thanks to E3 and its global domination plans to win over all gamers with nostalgia-limned titles like Donkey Kong Country Returns! and a Kid Icarus title for the Nintendo 3DS or that adorable and quirky Kirby’s Epic Yarn…you know what? Too many to list. I’m sure many of you can name the rest. Maybe it’s from all the “let’s play” articles I’ve been reading lately. Or it might have to do with my recent string of purchases on Xbox Live, with Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting and the arcade-like throwback of ‘Splosion Man. Lastly, maybe it’s because I can sometimes hear my yellow-faded SNES in the back of my closet calling my name from time to time to bust him out and have a go.

Either way, these games exist.

And I want to talk about them. Sure, every now and then I do a piece on games I regret parting with, but that’s not enough. And this is where it gets hard because you’d think there’d be nothing new left to write about, oh, say Final Fantasy VII or Super Mario Bros. or Suikoden II. Actually, I bet Greg Noe would agree that there’s not enough written about Suikoden II at this point; it is, after all, one of my top five games OF ALL TIME. Still, it’s not like you can write up preview reports for PlayStation 1 games or speculate about how awesome it’s going to be to play as Solid Snake all the way through Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. I kind of like how things are done occasionally over at Verbal Spew, with articles more or less just exploring these games of the past, comparing them to the nowadays, maybe not even.

But yeah, hopefully soon I can put down some words about videogames that most likely aren’t even being thought about during this crazy E3 black-hole. I love my Xbox 360 and many of the current generation games, but I also love my SNES and PlayStation 1, a system I bought all on my own, as well as every game I got for it, making it extra special to me, a working boy in high school; these loves do not outbid the other; they are the same, as they really should be, and I just don’t ever want to forget the building blocks that got us to today.

P.S. I got the strangest sense of déjà vu when writing this post. It’s still tickling me now.

Please select player in SPVTWTG

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game, or SPVTWTG if you like those easy-to-figure-out acronyms, comes out for the PlayStation 3 network in early August, just a pinch before the movie drops on August 13, 2010. That’s cool, but of course I don’t have a PlayStation 3 and must then wait it out until it makes its way over to Xbox Live. However, if there’s one thing I do know, it is this: I’m playing as Kim Pine. And will most likely have to fight over her with my fiancée as she will want to play as Kim Pine also. No one likes Ramona anyways:

Hmm…does that look familiar to you? It should, n00b. I’ll wait while you figure it out. No, it’s not from the Glee finale. C’mon…think.

Meh, you’re taking too long. It’s an homage to Super Mario Bros. 2, duhhh:

Ha, that means Ramona is really Luigi, and that’s funny because he kicks so goofily when he tries to jump super high. Not sure how Stephen Stills would feel about being compared to a mushroom-head, but I bet he’d not like it. But yeah, Kim is totally a princess. May she float for a few seconds through my dreams night in, night out. I want this game so bad, and dang it, I might have to start considering a PlayStation 3 fund if it takes longer than a few weeks to port over to the Xbox 360.