Mega Monster Mania is a very well-made $1 game that scratches that itch I have for playing games with randomized components (e.g. levels, loot, etc.).  That mechanic, when executed properly, is probably the most important contributing factor in a game’s addictiveness.

The art direction is a testament to the fact that games can be fun even when its visuals are limited to iconic representations.  The game is fun to look at.  My only complaint is that hits don’t “feel” like they make contact with the monsters.  I wonder if a “freeze-on-contact” effect would have improved this or wrecked the game’s pacing.

The movement and combat controls are intuitive enough, though I confess I didn’t discover what auto-attack actually did until Depth 2 or so (’cause I didn’t feel the need to aim with the right stick).  Where the controls don’t deliver, though, is in the use of items.  There are so many buttons on the Xbox controller, you’d think that each special item could have had a button dedicated to it.  Having to cycle through tools before finding the health potion was frustrating because it required me to take my eyes off the action.

(Speaking of combat: swords are the way to go.  Bows are pretty useless, but they’d benefit from some auto-aiming assistance or increased rate of fire.)

The frenetic, electronic music lends tension to the game, but not atmosphere.  (Good music is the one thing I dread having to find for my own indie games.)  The music was drawn from 100% royalty-free tracks available at McFarland Beats.

The sound effects are simple, but they remind me of classic coin-op games from the early days.  Nostalgia FTW.

Two-player competitive play is available, but I haven’t experienced it.  Not the competitive type, myself.

What impresses me most about this game is that it was made in 30-40 days (albeit with an existing engine).  Steger posted a series of YouTube videos chronicling the game’s development to the Stegersaurus website that illustrate the progress he made from start to finish.

Despite the desire I have to play video games, I don’t have the time to play them like I used to. There was a time when I could spend an entire weekend marinating in a single game, but, alas, not anymore. I have too many time commitments to immerse myself like I used to be able to, and too many games to stay on top of if I’m to have any hope of maintaining my credibility as an enthusiast.

One symptom of this time starvation (starvation, I say!) is a decrease in skill level. That’s why the Wired article resonated with me; I can relate to that sinking, aging feeling that comes only from trying to compete against someone who’s as young as I was 15-20 years ago. Sure, some of the hand-eye coordination and reflex enhancement I got from games is irrevocably baked into my DNA, but I’m not in top form anymore and probably never will be again without lots of time to commit to the effort (and it would be a lot of effort). But having said that, I don’t have any desire to get back to that level. The article’s interviewees and I have that in common.

But the slow march toward gamer retirement affects the single-player experience, too.  It manifests as an unwanted sense of urgency when trying something new or venturing off the game’s beaten path. Instead of immersing myself in a game’s world, I feel like I have to rush to complete anything satisfying in the little time that I have.  (This may be what really kept me from enjoying Demon’s Souls more than I did.)

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately, and I reason this way: my particular flavor of video game starvation is rooted in not being able to get lost in the game.  Getting lost takes time.

I’m the kind of guy that could spend an entire day just roaming around the wasteland in Fallout 3 hunting creatures and finding whimsical locales, or blowing up Nazi installations and taking in the amazingly crafted scenery in The Saboteur. Up until recently, I’ve felt that the real fun of today’s games hasn’t been found pursuing the main story, but rather in treating the game as a giant sandbox: poking and prodding it in different ways to see just how alive it really was. It’s a hypnotic way to play. And that’s just what it is: undirected, goalless play. It’s the same kind of play that infants can experience in something as simple as a bucket of wooden blocks.

But here’s the rub: the thing about play is that it is positively wrenching to be interrupted, especially when you consider how long it takes to truly let the world sink in. I imagine it’s what coming down from a psychoactive high must feel like.  And I think this phenomenon actually gets worse as you get older, when interruptions are more and more likely to occur.

Think about your favorite movie. I bet it has a pacing to it; a rhythm that glues the most intense scenes together with cohesive but less-gripping scenes; you know, those scenes during which you sense it’s probably safe to go to the bathroom and not miss anything good. Now imagine one movie that manages to string together all of the most engaging, most cliffhanging, most surreal bits from your favorite films into one epic cinematic experience. No breaks; everything’s edge-of-your-seat all the time.  That’s how I used to feel about long freeplay sessions in the big open-world games.  In these binges (and make no mistake, that’s what they were, complete with a weird kind of hangover), I’d go for days or weeks without pursuing the main story.  Instead, I would completely fall into the virtual world and marvel at how it reacted to me when unchained from the stilts and props of beginnings, middles, and ends.

Sound strange?  I wonder what made me approach games from such a radical angle, wherein I free-played almost in spite of the main story.  Looking back on those days, when “non-linear” was evolving into “open-world”, I think what motivated me were two things: discovery (resulting from self-guided exploration) and unscripted interactivity.  I wanted to drive every street (GTA III) and see what was around each corner, break into every house (Thief III) and see if I could get away with it, chart a course to the horizon (Elder Scrolls: Oblivion) to see how random encounters affected traveling, investigate every species (Spore), find every space station (X3: Reunion), or enact whatever other limit-pushing stimuli I could imagine and observe how the world reacted.  I wanted to learn what the game (a world, as I saw it) was capable of.

Those long freeplay sessions were so engaging, so hypnotic, that there weren’t really any breaks at all.  No pacing; my mind was racing all the time. I found them as captivating as any cliffhanger or any climactic scene in the biggest summer movie.  Back then, the interruptions were fewer and farther between.

The flip side, though, was that I never finished anything.  And this regrettable trend is where a lack of time has had a measurable impact on my life lately.

I can’t have those freeplay binges anymore.  But my brain still wants that escapism.  So it discovered a compromise that, to others, probably seems like a real “duh” moment: follow the main story instead of roaming aimlessly.  ”You’ve got less time,” said my brain, “but you can fill it with an equivalent amount of dopamine by compressing the immersion.  More often than not, game designers design the game’s plot to be engaging, so walk through that funhouse and hope for the best.”

Seemed reasonable.  So with some effort, I ratcheted back the freeplay throttle and focused more on games’ main stories.  The result is a net positive: I can take advantage of the game’s inherent pacing to measure out shorter but “denser” bursts of play between bouts with real life.  It dampens interruption syndrome because you’re more likely to reach a reasonable stopping point in the hour-or-so you have to play every few days, whereas an interruption in a freeplay session more resembles a fishing grenade thrown into your stream of consciousness.

There are other bonuses, like no more post-gaming-marathon hangovers (ever have those?).  And I finish more games.  I just finished The Saboteur after forcing myself to stop blowing up the countryside and was rewarded with some great World War noir.  Uncharted 2 is underway now, and Mass Effect (1, not 2!) is next on the list, now that I’m a lot more in-tune with games that tip the scales on story rather than sideshows.

Like I said, this bit of life hacking is a net positive, as I’m able to enjoy games with less frustration.  Because it takes less time to ramp up the immersion when a story is involved, I can get a bit more out of satisfaction out of each sitting.  But it’s not without its negative aspects.  When time constraints force you to follow the main story, the merits of open worlds sort of evaporate.  Exploration and experimentation is replaced by storytelling in the interest of time.  Real escapism is replaced by what amount to interactive movies.  Or vice-versa: with more time, finite storytelling may be replaced with exploration and experimentation in the interest of immersion.  What we haven’t seen yet is a game that can sustain both experiences simultaneously. (Ico & Shadow of the Colossus come to mind as maybe having hit close to the mark.)

And there’s a subtlety here that makes a solution elusive: for reasons I haven’t quite figured out yet, finishing a game’s main story somehow spoils the world in which it’s set.  It’s like deflating a balloon.  When I finished Fallout 3, I lost my desire to go see all those untouched locales on the map.  (However, its expansions truly rekindled that interest, and I look forward to getting to the ones I haven’t yet cracked.)  And when I finished The Saboteur, dynamite-on-Nazis lost its appeal.  I lost interest in Spore immediately after reaching the ultimate destination.  WTF?

But conversely, too much freeplay will burn you out: I explored Tamriel for so long and consumed so many side quests that I honestly forgot what the game’s main story was.  By that time, my character was so high-level (and ruined) that the main story lost its hook in me, as if it were some contrived thing in an otherwise sublime, organic simulation.

There’s a deeper truth here.  It’s probably something that could be molded into a life lesson for kids that spend too much time playing video games.  Suffice it to say I’m transitioning from an active side of the gamer spectrum to a passive side, sacrificing escapist sandboxing for a more directed, spoon-fed kind of entertainment.  Time deficiency is the catalyst in this mutation.  But this 31-year-old doesn’t want to get out of the sandbox, and is kicking and screaming all the way home.

Objectively, I respect it for what it is.  Subjectively, here are my initial thoughts on it having tried to play through Boletaria Castle.

Demon’s Souls is YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward. YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, YOU DIED (fell off the stairs that time)

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting system is clearly inspired by YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting system is clearly YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting system is clearly inspired by Nethack.  But the game doesn’t strike me as YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting system is clearly inspired by Nethack.  But the game doesn’t strike me as fun.  I am not its target demographic.  I don’t YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting system is clearly inspired by Nethack.  But the game doesn’t strike me as fun.  Clearly I am not its target demographic.  I don’t find it compelling in the YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting system is clearly inspired by Nethack.  But the game doesn’t strike me as fun.  Clearly I am not its target demographic.  I don’t find it compelling in the way the designer intended YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting system is clearly inspired by Nethack.  But the game doesn’t strike me as fun.  Clearly I am not its target demographic.  I don’t find it compelling in the way the designer intended or in the way YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting system is clearly inspired by Nethack.  But the game doesn’t strike me as fun.  Clearly I am not its target demographic.  I don’t find it compelling in the way the designer intended or in the way hardcore gamers YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting system is clearly inspired by Nethack.  But the game doesn’t strike me as fun.  Clearly I am not its target demographic.  I don’t find it compelling in the way the designer intended or in the way hardcore gamers do. YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting system is clearly inspired by Nethack.  But the game doesn’t strike me as fun.  Clearly I am not its target demographic.  I don’t find it compelling in the way the designer intended or in the way hardcore gamers do.

I can’t YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting system is clearly inspired by Nethack.  But the game doesn’t strike me as fun.  Clearly I am not its target demographic.  I don’t find it compelling in the way the designer intended or in the way hardcore gamers do.

I can’t imagine YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting system is clearly inspired by Nethack.  But the game doesn’t strike me as fun.  Clearly I am not its target demographic.  I don’t find it compelling in the way the designer intended or in the way hardcore gamers do.

I can’t imagine YOU DIED

Demon’s Souls is a very, very, very hard game.  It’s sort of like being constipated: it begins with a desire to accomplish something, but spends most of its time making you exert a lot of effort to arrive at very little reward.

It’s a beautiful game, and very well-executed.  It reminds me of some other games I’ve held in high esteem.  I can see echoes of Ico in its massive and labyrinthine locales, and the clever use of past playthroughs as a hinting system is clearly inspired by Nethack.  But the game doesn’t strike me as fun.  Clearly I am not its target demographic.  I don’t find it compelling in the way the designer intended or in the way hardcore gamers do.

I can’t imagine why.

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Okay. Listen up. Here’s the news.

One. The iPad browser doesn’t do Flash, it probably never will, and you don’t need it. The sun had already begun to set on Flash as web glitter long before the iPad came out, and it ain’t the only video game (get it?) in town. HTML 5 isn’t there yet, but it will be eventually, and the tools will come with it. And when HTML 5 is the preference, you won’t need everything it does either, though you’ll complain just as loudly when we collectively decide that it isn’t needed anymore, either. I’m so sick of hearing this complaint. But I’m biased, because a Flash-enabled web has enhanced my life in precisely zero ways. It offers nothing I can’t live without.

Two. The iPad doesn’t need memory expansion slots. You don’t need to store so much media on the iPad between connections to a larger device.

Three. The iPad is not just a big iPod Touch. Whether you realize it or not, you interact with devices differently based on their size and shape (more on that in a bit), and you can do things on a larger device that you can’t do on a smaller one. (And vice-versa!)

And finally, if you’d let yourself get used to the keyboard, you’d do just fine. If that doesn’t work, make yourself get used to it. C’mon. You’re a big boy/girl probably.

Want

I want an iPad but probably won’t be an early-adopter. Not because it’s lacking anything, really, but because 1) it’s too expensive (and the price will go down) and 2) I want more than one.

I want one for the living room, and one for my bedroom. I want one in the kitchen, and I want one in my briefcase. I want one upstairs, and I want one downstairs. I want one in my car, and I want one in the bathroom. That’s, like, $5,000.

(Did you ever consider that iPads can be stored in bookshelves?)

Here’s one of many things I think nobody gets about the iPad yet: like a book, newspaper, or magazine, it doesn’t have to boot. Or yawn itself awake from sleep, or come out of hibernation. It’s the closest thing to an appealing, instant-on, all-purpose computer we’ve seen. That’s important because it brings it that much closer to being the ubiquitous device that all the sci-fi shows and movies have led us to expect. It won’t be long before people begin to appreciate how damned convenient it is, and, just like TiVo and the TV it parrots, they’ll wonder how they ever lived without it.

(Did you ever think about mounting an iPad on a wall?)

Here’s another thing I don’t think anyone gets about the iPad: you don’t have to open it up, you don’t have to use two hands to manipulate it, and it doesn’t make your crotch dangerously hot when you’re typing a blog about it on the couch. When I think of how much writing I’ll be doing on the couch… I’m using an old Gateway laptop to write this. It’s big, its battery is too old to replace, it’s heavy, it’s hot, and (ironically) it’s a convertible tablet with no touch sensitivity and a stylus that doesn’t work. And it’s the smallest laptop of anyone I know. But if I want to move from my current position, I have to grab the thing with two hands and lift it, then shift my weight so I can sit up and put it somewhere out of my way so I can stand. When I sit back down again, I play that sequence in reverse. Aside from the heat, the effect on my blood circulation, and having to open and close a lid!?, it’s my least favorite thing about laptops. (And netbooks, which improve on this situation by making the keyboard (wait for it) SMALLER!?)

(I can have the Internet next to my cereal, rather than the other way around.)

Flat, thin, light, stackable, minimalist, solid-state computers are good things. Even if the iPad doesn’t stick, it’s going to help galvanize that very important fact in our minds.

Where It Falls Short of My Ridiculously High Standards

I don’t see a way to write code on it. I’m really curious to see how long it takes for a compelling Remote Desktop app to make it onto the iPad and be free.

And as for reading books, that’s tricky and important. If nothing else, we’re about to find out how important grayscale E Ink really is to people. I really like my Kindle. My book intake has skyrocketed since my wife gave me one for an Anniversary gift. And when the Kindle isn’t handy, I’ve used the Kindle App on my iPhone to read. It’s not as nice. Especially at night, long reading sessions result in a troubling oscillating afterglow in my vision when I turn it off.

I’ll have really conflicting feelings when my Kindle and iPad are in reach at the same time: like having to choose between the really smart girl and the girl that glows.

The Potential Dealbreaker

It has to support both me and the Super Wife. That means support for more than one Exchange account, and a calendar that we can collaborate on. I’m not saying that it needs a login screen (that would be a dealbreaker), but the iPad must understand that it will be shared between spouses.

< 60 Days

Super Wife and I are driving to Detroit this weekend. I really wish we had a 3G iPad for those 22 hours of driving. After that, I’ve got a lot of things I want to blog about, and this laptop is crazy uncomfortable. I want to reiterate that last point: my computer is uncomfortable. I want to read my video game news every morning at the kitchen island on an iPad instead of an iPhone. I want Super Wife and I to be able to pass an electronic calendar between us with one hand each.

There are a lot of reasons I want an iPad, and few of them have to do with apps. Instead, they have to do with all the things I’m grumpy about regarding my current computing lifestyle.

Is that marketing?

(Update: this piece by Carmi Levy at Betanews resonated with me; he seems to share many of my usability frustrations.)

I read it fairly quickly.  I had a strong appetite for a story that bled more of the conspiracy-laden intrigue of the first novel, Empire, and the game that played alongside it: Shadow Complex.  (I don’t italicize game titles because I never had a high school English teacher drill that habit into me.)

This installment didn’t sate me; I feel like I skipped a meal with Hidden Empire.  Not only that, but to pursue this metaphor to its final stupidity, if Empire was a pizza, Hidden Empire was that part of a plate of spaghetti that your kid didn’t finish.  The two bear a passing resemblance to each other and share some of the same ingredients, but they don’t provide the same kind or quantity of energy.

I may be on to something here—a pattern in the way Orson Scott Card writes novels.  After reading Hidden Empire I was left a feeling familiar to me after I finished Speaker for the Dead, namely that I wondered what the sequel had to do with its predecessor.  (I’m apparently not the only one who feels this way about the Ender series.)

I don’t have a lot to say about Hidden Empire’s plot or characters, really.  It’s very much like what I imagine 24 is like, and that stands to reason considering Card’s comments at the end of Empire.  And that appeals to a lot of people, I suppose.  But it left me bored.  I kept waiting for a big reveal that never happened, and the most compelling character—Averell Torrent—didn’t undergo the punctuated evolution that I expected to be the climax of the story.

In Empire (and Shadow Complex) the big reveal was unmissable.  It was something incredible and amazing, but rendered as plausible as possible by the story and details that surrounded it.  Hidden Empire lacked that quality altogether.  Instead, it felt more like a sociology study centered around mother’s crisis of faith and her  precocious child.

Beginning later in the book and continuing into its finale, I felt like Hidden Empire sort of dissolved into conservative fan-fiction.  Honestly, when Rusty Humphries made his cameo appearance, I couldn’t get “AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!” out of my head.  And the irrational faith the hero (?) showed in the President—especially under the circumstances—was hard to swallow.  One day I think I’ll re-read Ender’s Game and re-examine whether zero gravity actually has a strong rightward pull.

Now, it’s my understanding that Donald Mustard of ChAIR Entertainment Group approached Card about writing a novel in the Empire universe.  Card subsequently licensed the rights to the Empire property from ChAIR in 2006 and wrote a book.  So far so good, Empire and Shadow Complex were supposed to tie together.  But the two stories diverged drastically.  They shared a giant underground base and a fake log cabin in common, but that’s it.  I can’t understand why the continuity problems between the stories don’t seem to be discussed anywhere: what, the base was infiltrated once by Jason & the NSA (?), subdued, hidden under a lake again, had its assembly line brought back online, rediscovered by Cole & Co., and then resubdued by the federal government?  And that giant airborne nuclear submarine—remember that?  Hit with three nuclear warheads over the pacific northwest and then crashed into a mountain?  I was astonishedthat the two stories didn’t acknowledge each other.  This is supposed to be a franchise, right?

I’ve lost interest in the Empire books at this point, and this is why: the people behind the canon can’t keep their stories straight.  And in a fight, the video game wins.

which is the error message that the Love Beta showed me to gently alert me to the fact that my hardware is too old to do anything cool, I read this:

CES 2010: Dell/Alienware announces new gaming PC netbook

in this article at bigdownload.com.

My laptop—on which I tried to run the Love Beta with the same wishful thinking that tells me Congress will “come together”—is 4 years old.  My desktop is older.

…hmm…so that’s what it feels like to give up any trace of credibility I had as a PC gamer…

I’m officially in the market for a new computer.  And this netbookish Alienware machine looks very promising.  I’m sick of building my own boxes.  The desktop I have—which I spec’d for Half Life 2—has suffered from the same undiagnosable USB-related hard freeze problem for almost 6 years now.  I put up with it because until recently I hardly ever used my desktop (I think Spore was the last game it really ran) and this particular problem only seems to occur when I’m not around.  It was fun to build my own PC when I was in college, but now that exercise would just be a huge time sink.

And now we have things like Love on the scene, which I really really really want to play on a decent machine.  I don’t think PC gaming is dead yet.  In fact, modern PCs’ processing power and the more sophisticated control schemes that keyboards and mice offer really do make certain kinds of games feasible that weren’t possible before.  I dare say that my own big game idea wouldn’t really work well on a console for that very reason.

The Dark Void soundtrack can be preordered on Amazon.  And I can preorder it.  And I will.

The game itself is intriguing.  I’m optimistic about it.  The premise has promise: use a jetpack to fly anywhere, explore a big world, land on anything, and enjoy combat both on land and in the air.  I anticipate lots of things to discover.

When I first turned on the jetpack for the first time, I dove downward and crashed into a mountainside.  Herein lies a problem with the PS3 not shared by the Xbox 360: I can’t set my personal defaults such that my Y-axis is inverted.

Once I got the hang of it, flying became easy enough.  The controls were a little hypersensitive, and that became more apparent in combat.  I found it difficult to track enemies in flight.  The only assistance the game gives you in flight is a button that orients the camera (not you) toward the nearest enemy, at which point it becomes your responsibility to orient the hero in the same way.  While this assistance is active, the targeting reticle disappears, and when it reappears it likely won’t be on top of your target.  I found that I overcorrected almost every time, resulting in my having to re-correct before I opened fire.  (I was wrong.)

When I landed in the first tower, I found combat even more difficult.  Here the controls were definitely hypersensitive.  The cover system felt clumsy, not responding to the Square button and analog sticks as I expected.  Likewise with melee combat, which I think could have taken a lesson from Shadow Complex.  Long story short, the game seemed to have trouble deciding whether to respond to your control or not.  Sometimes it would, other times it wouldn’t.  Without reliable controls, and without any targeting assistance to counteract hypersensitive controls, combat seemed needlessly hard.

I laughed the first time I accidentally activated the jetpack in a hallway.  There was no recovering from it; it flung me against floor, wall, floor, ceiling, and floor again, where I subsequently bled to death.  This made me wonder two things: first, will the game make use of this, forcing you to pull off a close-quarters jetpack maneuver in order to escape something horrible?  And second, how many times will I do this by accident before it starts to piss me off?

Moving on.  The art direction seems solid if not a bit derivative.  I wouldn’t have thought to blend a steampunk aesthetic with, for lack of a better description, “Geth chic”.  But it could work.

Backing up a bit… the opening cutscene was just confusing.  I’m afraid to ask who the hero’s Egyptian stoner sidekick is, for fear I’ll get an answer.  But he was just odd.

The demo felt a bit short, spending too much time in dark corridors instead of the great wide open, where I think this game will shine.  Surely they could have spent more time showing off the player’s ability to interact with the environment while in flight.  Didn’t I see a shot somewhere of the hero clinging to an platform on which he’d perched to take mid-air cover?  Where was that in the demo?  And what about being able to tinker with the upgrades?  Eh… smacks of rush.

So I wonder about the gameplay, love the music, dig the visuals, and feel good about the possibilities offered by a jetback-fueled open-world game that seems to want to innovate in the field of creative combat mechanics.

Ah, to be an independent game developer. The riches, the romance, the swashbuckling… Must be a great life.