What I've Been Playing: The Feel-Good Edition

We're well into 2013 (actually, it's about 4% over at this point), and that means somehow I made it through another holiday season.

That previous statement is a bit disingenuous... saying "somehow I made it through" implies that I didn't knowingly leverage my other responsibilities (such as work and home repair) to escape from the annual rituals of holiday shopping, frantic housekeeping, food preparation, and entertaining our families. Nevertheless, we all made it through Christmas, New Year's, and the Mayan apocalypse, succeeding in buying ourselves another 10 months or so until we have to deal with another joyous holiday season. The new year is afoot, and in the immortal words of Journey, "the wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'".

Anyone who knows me might expect I would scoff at the idea of "New Year's resolutions", as though celebrating an arbitrary discontinuity in the way we measure the Earth's orbital progression should have any bearing on one's choice to quit smoking or lose weight. However, I accepted long ago that traditions are an essential part of society, and our annual making and inevitable breaking of the oaths of self-betterment seem to be as important a tradition as any.

To get in the spirit of things, I've resolved to be more positive and generous in the New Year, a commitment I fully expect to last at least as long as it takes to finish this post. (I've also resolved to bring my lunch to work every day and to go to the gym twice a week, but I'm totally going to keep doing those things forever, from now on, no matter what.) Rather than my usual routine of degrading the creative accomplishments of others, I thought that instead I could run through each of the games I've been playing lately and say something nice about each of them.

Assassin's Creed III (Xbox 360)

Well... fuck. Way to ease myself into this.

If you've read my review of Assassin's Creed III, you know I was pretty disappointed with this game, and might suspect that saying nice things about it would be a challenge. Looking back on my critique, though, I was actually quite positive about certain aspects of the game, although these rare triumphs made its shortcomings sting all the more.

However, putting on my positive thinking hat, I'm forced to admit that after five games, maybe I've simply forgotten what was so utterly amazing about the Assassin's Creed series to begin with. For starters, realizing that the games take place within the Animus was one of the great reveals of this console cycle. Though admittedly trite, the whole "Matrix" angle was so well integrated with the narrative and gameplay that it made this tired old trope feel fresh and new again.

A screenshot from the first Assassin's Creed. Like its most recent sequel, AC1 had its share of issues, but still managed to do some truly amazing things.

More importantly, though—and what still makes Assassin's Creed great today—is the extent to which the franchise expanded the "acrobatic exploration" style of gameplay pioneered by the modern Prince of Persia games. Free climbing, running, and vaulting through the massive historical cities in the Assassin's Creed games really is a complete joy on both a visual and tactile level, and it's easy to forget what an incredible accomplishment this is. It is in this sense that Assassin's Creed III best carries the mantle of its predecessors, and further refinement of this art is arguably its most significant accomplishment.

Halo 4 (Xbox 360)

Speaking of games that are easy to take for granted, let's talk about Halo 4. My recent review echoed the prevailing attitude that this latest entry in the Halo franchise was essentially "more of the same", and I've wondered if the only reason I and others didn't critique Halo 4 more harshly was because everyone simply gave the new developers a bit of a pass. However, like Assassin's Creed III, Halo 4 does certain things so skillfully and effortlessly that they're easy to overlook.

Shoot the big one first.

I thought about this further as I pondered why I prefer Halo games to so many other shooters. (In fact, only Gears of War 3 beats out Halo 3 for the "space marine game" spot on my desert island list.) It's not simply that I'm much, much better at it than something like Call of Duty, though admittedly it's hard to enjoy Black Ops when you can't seem string together enough kills to buy yourself an exploding toy car, whilst everyone else is regularly calling down orbital laser strikes.

Perhaps the question, then, is why do I suck so much less at Halo? I believe one reason is that compared to many other games, I find the game design elements communicated by its artistic choices to be much more intuitive. The moment when your shields go down, the reaction of an Elite to a thrown grenade, the subtle visual cues that indicate how an armored foe can be damaged—in all these cases, Halo works very hard to inform your gameplay through intelligent choices in its artwork and animation. In many ways this is thankless work, but it ultimately leads to Halo being one of the toughest, fairest, and most enjoyable shooters around.

Tales of the Abyss (Nintendo 3DS)

For me, Japanese-style role-playing games (J-RPGs) have always been a bit of a comfort food. Whenever I find I've run through a few particularly challenging titles in a row, it's nice to revert to a genre possessing the kind of story and gameplay pacing that allows you to save the world with one hand while absentmindedly soothing a screaming baby with the other.

To extending the J-RPG / comfort food analogy: if the Final Fantasy series is a favorite sugary cereal from your youth that now tastes like being orally sodomized by a high-fructose dildo, then by contrast the Tales series is a favorite ice cream, reliably waiting in your fridge to console you after your wife divorces you because you gained all that weight from eating sugary cereal. From Tales of Symphonia on the GameCube to Tales of Legendia on the PS2 to Tales of Vesperia on the Xbox 360, Namco Bandai has made a habit over the years of releasing high-quality RPGs that improve with each iteration while remaining comfortably familiar. Since I missed playing Tales of the Abyss when it first came out on the PS2, the 3DS re-release seemed like a perfect opportunity to pick up a title for my mobile gaming pleasure I could be certain I'd enjoy. So far I haven't been disappointed.

Batman: Arkham City (Xbox 360)

I'm pretty compulsive about finishing the games I start, so it's significant when I tell you that a few days after picking up a copy of Batman: Arkham City, I found myself back at the store, receipt in hand, considering whether I wanted to return it. As we're still being positive though, let's ignore the many glaring design flaws that nearly caused me to give up on this supposedly critically acclaimed game, and instead focus on its incredible combat system.

Don't fret, gentlemen... there's plenty of beat-downs to go around.

Having never played Rocksteady's first Batman game (Arkham Asylum), I found the learning curve for Arkham City's combat system to be pretty steep, but was doubly impressed once I started to get the hang of it. I've rarely played a game that deals with crowd control quite so elegantly. In most hack-n-slash games (such as Diablo or God of War), the mechanics for dealing with swarms of enemies follow a simple, standard formula that balances light, heavy, and area-of-effect (AoE) attacks. Often the AoE attacks serve as a sort of "panic button", allowing graceless players like myself to substitute cheap shots and giant explosions for actual combat finesse.

A remarkable thing about Arkham City is that the splashy AoE attacks are largely absent, forcing you to take each of your foes out behind the wood shed for an individual old-fashioned whuppin'. In almost every melee battle, you'll hit a point where you start to fantasize about casting Ultima and vaporizing everyone, but with a bit of discipline and practice, eventually you'll have the Dark Knight leaping around the room breaking arms and smashing heads so handily, it will feel less like a game and more like an expertly choreographed fight scene in a badass martial arts movie.

So that about wraps up my holiday gaming, and other than my use of the term "high-fructose dildo", I'd say I stayed pretty positive. Maybe this whole resolution thing isn't such a joke after all... which I suppose could be a good thing, as I've also resolved to write blog posts more often.

Review: Assassin's Creed III

Incoherent gameplay, bizarre design choices, and frequent bugs squander much of the potential of this visually and thematically stunning game. Disappointment, thy name is Assassin's Creed III.

Disappointment is a peculiar emotion. I can be angry without first having felt calm, and I can feel happy without first having felt sad, but to be disappointed, I really need to have experienced something else first, usually "optimism". It is this characteristic that makes disappointment the most insidious form of emotional malaise: we are exposed to it entirely of our own volition, by first allowing ourselves to hope.

My friends, readers of my blog, and even strangers with whom I've made accidental eye contact know how uncontrollably optimistic I've been about Assassin's Creed III, beginning with the moment I first saw the leaked box art. It was then that I learned the fifth major installment in Ubisoft's epic action-adventure franchise would take place during the American Revolution, that it would feature a bad-ass tomahawk-wielding Native American, and that it would likely allow me the unique opportunity to scamper around the rooftops of a colonial-era replica of my hometown city of Boston, using British Redcoats as foul-mouthed, tea-swilling archery targets.

However, the clever reader will have inferred from my earlier ramblings concerning "disappointment" that this optimism was... misplaced. So what went wrong? How did Assassin's Creed III make the transition from my Most Anticipated Game of 2012 to Biggest Letdown?

Assassin's Creed III is beautiful, but unfortunately looks aren't everything.

Let's start with the basics. Assassin's Creed III draws its foundation from the other games in the series, relying heavily on their well-established portfolio of game mechanics. As you step back into the Animus to re-live the adventures of yet another historical Assassin (this time it's Ratonhnhaké:ton, a.k.a. "Connor", Desmond's Revolutionary-War-era ancestor), you'll quickly find yourself climbing, sneaking, and murdering again like old times. In fact, you'll feel almost as though you were playing any other Assassin's Creed game... but unfortunately, the key word here is "almost". In its attempts to build upon the franchise's winning formula, Assassin's Creed III somehow manages to struggle with narrative and design elements that its predecessors handled with aplomb.

Here's an example: in past games, you could boost each mission's completion rating (and take on a bit of extra challenge) through certain "optional objectives", such as finishing the mission without being detected, or without taking more than a certain amount of damage. Although this feature reappears in Assassin's Creed III, this time it feels like an afterthought. One mission asked me to perform a certain number of "corner assassinations", though I'm quite certain I was never told what those were. Another mission told me I should tackle a man I was chasing from above, but even after about 20 tries, I couldn't convince Connor to heed my commands to do so. Instead, each time he stubbornly leaped onto one of the other guards nearby, to the extent that I really began to believe he was being deliberately and spitefully obtuse.

Get used to killing Redcoats, because it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to sneak around without alerting them.

This example may seem like garden-variety nitpicking, but Assassin's Creed III is packed with similarly frustrating cases of mechanics that are poorly implemented, totally lacking any sort of narrative context, and occasionally even downright broken. Whereas in past games your primary revenue stream was a sort of real estate side quest that integrated nicely with natural city exploration, now it's a crafting and trading system that takes place through an interface so tedious and clunky that I literally decided to just endure the entire game with a severe cash flow problem rather than suffer through it. Likewise, the revamped Assassin training missions are designed and motivated so badly it almost seems like they're actively trying to discourage you from playing them. And don't even get me started on the lockpicking mini-game, which couldn't have been more awkward if it had involved using a real pair of tweezers to take apart your Xbox Kinect.

While all these minor flaws conspire to kill Assassin's Creed III slowly via death by a thousand cuts, there are also some major flaws trying to shiv it directly in the kidneys. One notable failing is the stealth system, which one suspects would be a core game mechanic in a series based entirely around secretly killing people. In past games stealth has been handled pretty competently, but in Assassin's Creed III your adversaries seem to be hyper-aware, and hiding from them has become more difficult than ever. On several occasions I walked slowly and carefully by guards only to have them spring into "alert" status without warning, forcing me to run away like a little bitch with half the British army at my heels. (I typically led my pursuers halfway across the city while humming "Yakety Sax" to myself, before inevitably giving up on my attempts at evasive maneuvering and simply murdering everyone.) These issues made any part of the game with stealth components extremely frustrating, and any missions where stealth was mandatory downright infuriating.

Apparently, Connor's primary role as a player character is to convince us that Desmond's vapid personality is a hereditary trait.

At this point, I should probably comment on the plot. Rather than heap more criticisms upon a game that already has endured so many, let's first discuss some narrative aspects of Assassin's Creed III that I don't have a problem with. For instance, I don't have a problem with the bizarre sci-fi turn the series has taken, with its "ancient precursor civilization" (à la Mass Effect and Halo), a concept that will certainly go down as the Biggest Game Cliché of 2012. I don't have a problem with Desmond being such a central character, despite the fact that he's about as relatable as a wax statue of Keanu Reeves, and I don't care that Connor is even worse. I don't even have that much a problem with the ending, even though it totally blows.

What does bother me though, is that all of these elements were combined in such disarray, resulting in a plot so completely full of holes, that eventually it compelled me not to care why anyone did anything. Why does Connor become an Assassin? Why should I hunt and kill the Templars, and why should I help the American patriots? What is Connor hoping to achieve? The answers to these questions were usually poorly explained, lacking completely, or they happened well after I'd spent hours completing relevant missions with virtually no context. At one point, Connor became angry at another character for executing a captured enemy... as though I hadn't just spent 25 hours murdering every person in a red coat and a funny hat I ran into just for the hell of it. When your protagonist manages to convince you that he's so oblivious that you shouldn't care what happens to him anymore, that's not a good sign.

The worst part is, killing Redcoats with a tomahawk really is a ton of fun.

If it seems like I'm being too hard on Assassin's Creed III, it's only because it had so much promise, and because at times it even manages to actualize its potential. Visually, the game is absolutely stunning, and the environments have a wonderfully immersive feel, from the lively mercantile docks of colonial Boston, to the burnt-out buildings of New York after the Great Fire, to the tranquil beauty of the New England forests. Moving through these rich historical worlds is especially enjoyable because of the incredible quality of the character animations, as Connor free-climbs cliffs and leaps through treetops with such fluidity and grace it makes the ninjas from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon look like a pair of drunken lemurs. Similarly impressive are the naval battle side quests, which are fun to play and do justice to the epic scale of the Revolutionary War setting. Even the fractured plot has its moments; for example, one of my favorite scenes in the game was a death monologue so well-written that it incorporated the word "tittie", while still managing to be one of the most profound bits of video-game writing I've encountered.

In closing, I've probably been more critical of Assassin's Creed III than it deserves, though in my defense, the game misses a bar that it largely set for itself. With the high quality of previous titles in the series and the immense potential offered by its epic setting, Assassin's Creed III had some big shoes to fill, and it certainly wasn't up to the task. If you've never played an Assassin's Creed game before, then you might not be as disappointed as I was... but if that's truly the case, do yourself a favor and play Assassin's Creed II or Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood instead.

Assassin's Creed III: Early Thoughts

One of the problems with writing game reviews is that the process compels you to rush through each game as quickly as possible, so that you have an opportunity to share your opinions on a title while most people are still talking about it. While I enjoy having an excuse to tear through in a week a game that took tens or even hundreds of thousands of man-hours to make, it's very different from the way I used to play games, and also very different from the way most of my friends still play them. In fact, I'm not convinced that game critics should be digesting new games this way either, but that's a discussion for another time.

At any rate, every once in a while I choose a game to take my time with and really enjoy. Given that I'm a fan of the Assassin's Creed series, a long-time resident of the Boston area, and a lover (well, at least a liker) of history, Assassin's Creed III was a good choice for a title to really savor. Since I'm about 15 hours now and I'll likely be taking some time off from the game after Halo 4 drops tomorrow, this seemed like a good time to share some of my thoughts thus far.

To get everyone on the same page: Assassin's Creed III is (somewhat confusingly) the fifth major installment in the Assassin's Creed franchise, Assassin's Creed II having had two of its own sub-sequels within the trilogy. In this latest installment, our pal Desmond once again steps into the Animus to experience events through the lives of his ancestors in the hopes of unraveling secrets about the history of the Assassins and their centuries-long war with the Templar Order. This time the history lessons take place during the American Revolution and follow Ratonhnhaké:ton, a half-English, half-Mohawk assassin who thankfully goes by the more pronounceable pseudonym "Connor".

Don't eat the red snow.

My early impressions of the game are that while the environment is fresh and interesting and there have been some of positive changes to the gameplay formula, I'm surprised at how many parts of the game seem way more rough than they should, especially considering how much Assassin's Creed III draws on the mechanics of its predecessors. Ubisoft's decentralized model of development seems to be once again at work here, with some of the game elements being highly refined, and others feeling incredible awkward as hell.

First, the good news. The movement systems have been improved a great deal, so Connor can scale cliffs and skip across tree branches with the same finesse his predecessors reserved for scaling buildings and skipping across rooftops. As someone who has done a bit of outdoor rock climbing, I can say that all of the climbing animations appear fluid and natural, and are genuinely a joy to behold. It's a good thing, too, because there's plenty of mountains and forests in the New World to climb. Another positive new aspect are the naval battles, a series of mini-game side missions that turned out to be way more fun than I thought they'd be. Also, they've added a hunting mechanic, which (despite being kind of a rip-off of Red Dead Redemption) is a fun diversion when you're roaming the New England frontier.

Now, for the bad news. The stealth systems have taken a step backward, with guards having much more heightened and far more unpredictable levels of awareness. Since there are also seem to be a lot fewer places to hide in colonial Boston, I find that after inadvertently sounding the call to arms, I frequently end up being running around for five full minutes before I give up and just stop and slaughter the dozen redcoats chasing me. The combat mechanics also have ticked up a bit on the awkward scale, and thus the whole "assassin" part of Assassin's Creed III is somewhat less rewarding than it has been in the past.

In addition, I'm a little annoyed with some of the open-world aspects. Since I've been taking my time, I've been doing pretty much all of the side quests and optional missions, but they really don't seem to fit into the story very well. For example, I've been going around and infiltrating various British forts, executing their commanders and blowing up their powder reserves before raising the ol' stars-and-stripes. However, there's been hardly any interaction with American Revolution at this point in the story yet (save a single conversation I had with Sam Adams), so I have no idea why Connor would be compelled to do this. I guess he's just a completionist, jonesing for that 100% achievement.

In closing, so far Assassin's Creed III has been a mixed bag across the board. (Example: new fast travel system, good; new menu system, not so good.) However, if you like the Assassin's Creed series (which I do), the novelties this incarnation has to offer make it well worth playing. At this point I'm really too early in the story to comment on the plot (other than the first big twist, which I did not see coming and really enjoyed), but I'm hoping that in the end it turns out to be good enough to give Assassin's Creed III a winning record overall.

My Fall Preorder Lineup

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Preorder

I've gradually grown to love "preordering" upcoming titles before they're released. Originally I viewed the practice as a way for desperate Gamestop employees to harass you at the register, by running through all the additional games they'd like you to buy beyond the one you were actually holding. As I started buying most of my games online, I became more willing to drop a bit of pre-release coin in exchange for various discounts and bonuses.

Today, I'm a straight-up preorder addict. I buy upcoming titles on Amazon as soon as I know I want them, without regard to whatever preorder bonuses may or may not materialize. (More than once, I've ordered games so far in advance that they've been delivered to a previous address several months after I moved.) Every release date is like a little mini-Christmas, and the UPS guy is my own personal Santa in brown short-pants. Here's a quick run-down of the titles I'm expecting to show up on my doorstep between now and the end of 2012.

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Game:	Borderlands 2
Platform:	Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC
Release Date:	September 18, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Cautiously Optimistic

Released in 2009, the original Borderlands received a fair amount of acclaim for its distinctive visual style and its skillful integration of RPG elements into solid first-person shooter gameplay. Also, from what I heard, when experienced at its finest, the four-player co-op bordered on transcendental. Unfortunately, this was never my experience, as the difficulty scaling was so aggressive that to play with anyone a few levels above or below you was either prohibitively challenging or pointlessly easy. Furthermore, the bare-bones plot and repetitive mission structure left me pretty unsatisfied with the single-player experience. Still, there was a whole lot about Borderlands that reeked of promise, and if its sequel can fix some of these missteps while building on the potential of the original, it could turn out to be one of the best games of the year.

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Game:	XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Platform:	Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC
Release Date:	October 9, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Sporting a Raging Nostalgia Hard-On

If you've ever spent any time talking to a PC gamer, chances are they've mentioned XCOM at some point. Originally released in 1994, XCOM was a turn-based tactical strategy game that revolutionized the genre, while simultaneously keeping my friends and I up playing into the wee hours, terrified that at any moment a Cryssalid would burst out of the monitor of my Tandy desktop and impregnate us with its zombifying alien toxins. This upcoming remake of the original has been lovingly developed by the capable hands at Sid Meier's Firaxis Games, the folks behind the Civilization series. All signs point to this game being a slam dunk, and for the developers' sake I sure hope so... should it disappoint, an army of XCOM fanboys stand at the ready to unleash a flood of impotent Internet rage.

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Game:	Dishonored
Platform:	Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC
Release Date:	October 9, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Skeptical, But Intrigued

Dishonored is a first-person stealth/action-adventure game developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. I hadn't heard about this game at all until this year's E3, and I'm still a bit skeptical. If there's two things that first-person games tend not to excel at, it's stealth and melee combat. (Fans of the Thief games would probably disagree with me here.) Still, the impressive screenshots and industrial-era setting—along with the fact that it's one of the few new games this year that's not a sequel—piqued my interest enough to go with Dishonored as my impulse buy for the fall.

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Game:	Assassin's Creed III
Platform:	Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC / Wii U
Release Date:	October 30, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Brimming With Revolutionary Bloodlust

Being a New Englander, any game where you run around revolutionary-era Boston murdering Redcoats is going to get four out of five stars from me just for showing up. Sure, the Assassin's Creed series started to get a little stale after Ubisoft released a second follow-up to Assassin's Creed II, but it's still a rock-solid franchise, and everything I've been hearing about this game indicates that the developers have taken nothing for granted. For now, I'm going to allow myself to revel in unchecked enthusiasm for this game, fully confident that it's going to turn out to be phenomenal.

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Game:	Halo 4
Platform:	Xbox 360
Release Date:	November 6, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Glad It's Not Call of Duty

I never thought of myself as a huge Halo fan, usually preferring to scratch any competitive multiplayer itches with the Gears of War games. However, my friends and I have recently gone back to playing Halo 3 during our weekly online play-date, and I was quickly reminded of what an amazing game it is. As someone who is thoroughly bored of the whole Call of Duty thing, I'm picking Halo 4 over Call of Duty: Black Ops II as my preferred multiplayer shooter for the holiday season. (If my friends are reading this... you now know what to tell your wives you want for Christmas.)

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As you can see, I've got my work cut out for me for the rest of 2012. (I'm actually glad Bioshock Infinite got pushed off to February.) Looking at this lineup, it makes me wonder what kind of space is left in the marketplace for the Nintendo's new console (the "Wii U"), which they just announced will be available November 18. Regardless, there will probably be no U for me... my dance card is full.

What I've Been Playing

Summer is one of the toughest times in the childhood of a video gamer. Even back when I was in elementary school, I remember lamenting the cutting irony of the fact that summer vacation arrived (a) well after I had thoroughly exhausted all interest in whatever game I'd gotten for Christmas, (b) well before my autumn birthday (at which time I would inevitably recieve gifts of clothes and school supplies anyway), and (c) at a time of year when hardly any new games were released. In the end, I suppose all these barriers to gaming were likely of little real consequence; even if I'd had a stack of unplayed cartridges at my disposal, my fascist parental overlords probably still would have forced me to play outside.

As an adult, I find summers to be much more palatable. Sure, I don't get two months of contiguous vacation, but instead I have disposable income, free will, and air conditioning. And even though there aren't many triple-A game releases this time of year, there's a nearly endless supply of cheap downloadable fun to be consumed via Steam's Summer Sale (which just ended) and Xbox LIVE's "Summer of Arcade". Here's what I've been playing...

Diablo III (PC / Mac)

Released this May following a 12-year hiatus in the franchise, Diablo III has been the preeminent time-sink for something like 10 million people this summer. Despite its success on paper, the game itself has traveled kind of a bumpy road, one rife with server issues, bizarre gameplay limits, and game hacks and exploits. In a typical video game, these issues would be less of a problem; however, Diablo III incorporates a "Real Money Auction House", which (for those of you who don't know) is a virtual marketplace that allows players to buy and sell in-game equipment and commodities using real-world currency. Apparently, the lesson to learn here is that if you create a virtual economy that is already incredibly unstable because of its implicitly artificial nature, piling a bunch of additional problems on top of it yields results that are somewhat of a total clusterfuck.

Is there someone out there willing to drop $200 on a "Focused Beating"? Only time will tell.

Being one of those crazy people who doesn't play games so I can farm loot to sell on the Internet, I tended to approach Diablo III as... well, a "game". While Diablo III is undoubtedly highly-tuned, expertly polished, and addictive as hell, even after my first 30 hours of gameplay I'm still not sure if it's actually "fun". It's entirely possible Blizzard has simply figured out an algorithm for directly triggering the pleasure centers in my brain via randomized loot drops.

Resonance (PC)

Eventually I took a break from Diablo III and returned to my traditional summer practice of snapping up old titles and indie games in bulk off of Steam. One of my first purchases was Resonance, an indie point-n-click adventure game in the old-school pixel art style.

Resonance: why wrestle with Diablo III server issues when instead you could be riding the subway as a particle physicist?

Compared to staring at Battle.net error codes, I much preferred Resonance as a way to pass the time. Although the puzzles aren't terribly mind-blowing and the voice acting has the kind of stilted, canned quality that is hard to avoid in adventure games, Resonance is still well-executed in many ways. Not only does it build on the traditional adventure-game formula with a few interesting gameplay innovations, but its plot and character development were more than enough to make Resonance worth a few hours of my time.

Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 (PC)

I really enjoy the webcomic/blog/Internet institution Penny Arcade. I think one of the reasons I like Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik's commentary so much is that it spans the full dynamic range of the human experience from the existential to the profane, in much the same effortless manner of comedians like Jon Stewart or Louis C.K.

It's because I enjoy the eccentricities of the Penny Arcade world view so thoroughly that I've continued to play their "Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness" series, despite the fact each installment thus far has been decidedly middling. Granted, this newest offering is a departure from the two previous Hothead-produced titles, rendered instead in the style of a 16-bit console RPG by the qualified retro enthusiasts at Zeboyd Games. However, the end result is still a mediocre role-playing game that could (and should) be ignored by anyone who isn't a Penny Arcade fan.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations (Xbox 360)

As I've mentioned before, seeing the Assassin's Creed III gameplay trailer at PAX earlier this year really got me getting back on the AC bandwagon. After playing Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, I decided to ride the sequel train right on through Assassin's Creed: Revelations, the third part of the "Ezio Trilogy". This (hopefully) final chapter follows Ezio's exploits in 16th-century Constantinople, where despite being well into his fifties, he somehow manages to keep free solo climbing, base jumping, and serial murdering as though he was still a teenage assassin.

Apparently three decades of jumping off rooftops and stabbing dudes in the face really ages a guy.

Unless you are deeply fascinated by the lore of the Assassin's Creed universe, AC: Revelations is a sequel that could easily be skipped. While it is certainly as expertly crafted as other entries in the series, its more-of-the-same gameplay and its insistence on extending the already overdrawn Ezio plot line offers more exploitation than revelation.

Double Fine Happy Action Theater (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

Recently my kids and I had a playdate with a friend of mine and his two children. After a three-hour maelstrom of toys, tears, and bathroom mishaps, we were starting to run out of hope, as well as beer. Enter Double Fine Happy Action Theater, an Xbox LIVE downloadable arcade game for the Kinect that also seemed to be a safe and legal toddler narcotic. Although it's little more than a tech demo of 20 or so minigames, Happy Action Theater includes some of the most innovative uses of the Kinect sensor I've seen thus far, and each is delivered with trademark Double Fine flair. If you have young children I highly recommend it... at $10, it's one of the cheapest and most effortless ways you'll find for wearing out your offspring.

Terraria (PC)

The first time anyone hears about Terraria, it's always the same description: "It's 2-D Minecraft." To be fair, it's an accurate description; Terraria not only borrows Minecraft's core gameplay concepts (i.e. "mining" and "crafting"), it also borrows almost everything else. However, it's a testament to how genuinely well designed and innovative Terraria is that it can plagiarize so heavily while ultimately delivering an experience that is quite different from that of Minecraft. While life in Minecraft is an exercise in solitary exploration that occasionally borders on survival horror, Terraria is like Legend of Zelda would be if after conquering a dungeon you could lug it up to the surface and use pieces of it to build yourself a kick-ass fortress.

Now if only I would put this much effort into my real house.

My only gripe about Terraria is that the difficulty curve is steep. Even with heavy coaching from online walkthroughs and FAQs, after 20 hours I still couldn't beat the first boss. In the end, I decided just to be happy with the fact that I had built another sweet residence to my long list of virtual properties.

Well, that pretty much wraps up July's gaming exploits. God and Amazon Prime willing, this time next month I should be writing about one of my most-anticipated games of 2012: Darksiders II.

What I've Been Playing

As I've mentioned in the past (and as known by anyone who has had the misfortune of meeting me personally), I love criticizing things. Unfortunately, the writing of game reviews brings with it a host of other problems, and since I started blogging I've noticed that my gaming habits have changed significantly. These days I almost exclusively play new releases, rushing through each game as quickly as possible in the hopes that I can pen some sort of semi-informed review while anyone still cares. (In fact, in the 10 days it took me to finish Mass Effect 3, everyone had already become sick of debating its "controversial ending".)

So, for a change of pace I decided for the month of April to play whatever I felt like playing whenever I felt like playing it. (At least, as long as "whenever" happened after the kids went to bed.) Rather than write exhaustive reviews for each game, I figured I would instead attempt to condense my standard several pages of witty commentary and dick jokes into just a paragraph or two about each game.

Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)

After spending an uninspiring winter term studying at the University of Final Fantasy XIII-2 (The "Safety School" of J-RPGs), I was anxious for a role-playing game that would really spike my cocoa. Enter Xenoblade Chronicles, (nominally) spiritual successor to the other "Xeno games" (i.e. Xenogears on the PS1 and Xenosaga on the PS2). Xenoblade Chronicles was originally released in 2010 for the Wii, and like most Wii games, it wasn't released in North America. However, unlike most Wii games, it was supposedly quite good... in fact, it was apparently so good that a fan campaign led to it being released here nearly two years later.

You'll enjoy exploring Xenoblade Chronicles' lush and expansive world, especially since there won't be any pesky high-definition graphics getting in your way.

Right now I'm about 20 hours in, and so far the game's primary effect has been to remind me that the Wii's graphics are on par with a PS2 that's been left out in the rain, and that its controls handle like an old Atari joystick made out of a live weasel. That said, it's impressive that such an underpowered system can support a game of this scope. The stereotypically inane J-RPG dialogue--while still present--is softened by the choice to make everyone have a British accent, and the initially simple battle system continues to become increasingly more layered. So, I suppose for now I'll forge ahead with the hope that all that hype was founded in some sort of reality I have yet to experience.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (Xbox 360)

Seeing the extended-gameplay trailer for Assassin's Creed III at PAX East rekindled my interest in this series, or at least nudged it enough that I was willing to drop $21.99 on Amazon and about 20 hours of my life on Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (which I passed on when it came out back in 2010). I have to admit, I'd forgotten how much I love these games. Although largely unchanged from the formula of Assassin's Creed II, there are a few subtle changes that go a long way towards enhancing the AC gameplay experience.

I had heard that the real contribution of ACB was its innovative multiplayer, but unfortunately I didn't explore this aspect very much... in part because I didn't want to tarry before moving on to Assassin's Creed: Revelations, but mostly because I didn't feel like getting the ol' hidden-blade-to-the-brain-stem treatment by the few die-hard assassinos still lurking on the servers after 18 months.

Gears of War 3 (Xbox 360)

For about half a year now, Gears of War 3 has reigned as the official game of TNGN (Thursday Night Game Night), my weekly multiplayer gaming session with my friends from high school (or as my wife calls it, my "standing Thursday play-date"). As much fun as it is to frag complete strangers, there's a lot to be said for engaging in multiplayer with folks who respect a request of "don't kill me for a few minutes; I need to go change a diaper".

"RAAM's Shadow" introduces the new character Michael Barrick. He can be easily distinguished from other characters in the Gears canon by his gravelly voice, terse demeanor, and impossibly large musculature.

Actually, I think there must have been quite a few diapers that needed changing during the month of April, because more than once our TNGN crew seemed a little thin. In fact, one week I was a party of one, but instead of sobbing into my Manhattan and cursing children everywhere, I instead took the opportunity to wrap up the GoW3 RAAM's Shadow DLC. It turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable and well-executed addition to the campaign, especially the parts where you get to play as General RAAM (the final boss from the first Gears of War).

Dragon Quest IX (Nintendo DS)

They say the birth of a child is a happy event. I'm inclined to agree, because the birth of my daughter in January resulted in my three-year-old son getting an Xbox Kinect and myself getting a Nintendo 3DS. After playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D for about an hour, I opted instead to go back and dive into some of the old Nintendo DS games I missed, such as Dragon Quest IX.

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies is an RPG in the classic Dragon Quest (a.k.a. Dragon Warrior) style, meaning that you can't blow your nose in the game without it being accompanied by several pages of text narration. While this results in a gameplay experience that is doubtlessly padded, it also has a certain laid-back charm that is well suited to a portable gaming experience. In the past few months, somehow I've managed to sink 50 hours into this game (mostly in 15-minute chunks), and I still haven't beaten it.

Fez (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

Last month's indie darling Fez looks on the surface to be simply a perspective-based puzzle-platformer, reminiscent of Crush or Echochrome. Though its pixel-art graphics and chiptune soundtrack are not without their charm, most folks are unlikely to be blown away during the three hours it takes to collect "32 Cubes" and beat the game.

What does it mean??

However, once you beat the game and unlock New Game +... that's when things begin to get weird. As you start over on your quest for the "32 Anti-Cubes", you begin to realize that the pixel-art world of Fez is rife with cube-based iconography, and that the environments you've been carelessly hopping through are littered with snippets of language, numbers, history, astrology, and religion, much of which is integral to solving the puzzles in this second half of the game. The culture of this strange little universe is so deep and interwoven that at one point (around 2:00 AM) I started to believe an entire race of 2-D people actually lived inside my Xbox. It's been a long time since a puzzle game forced me to write actual notes on actual pieces of paper.

Well, that's about it for the April Game Roundup. In other news, we're closing on our new house tomorrow. Perhaps in another month I'll be writing about my new favorite games, which are likely to include such titles as Wallpaper Removal Challenge 2012, DIY Home Wiring: First Aid for Minor Electrical Burns Edition, and Moving All Our Crap to a New House.

PAX East 2012: Day Three

9:00 AM - Latest start yet. I think I must have been feeling pretty good last night, because when I got home I was self-assured enough to eat blue cheese dressing out of the jar with a fork. I do feel the tiniest bit guilty walking across Boston Common hung over and on my way to a video game convention, while folks in their Sunday best head the other direction for Easter service.

11:31 AM - Hitting the expo floor for reals today. First stop: Assassin's Creed III. Now I'm normally not one to gush, but the gameplay footage looked absolutely phenomenal. The concept of operating in a wide-open and natural environment like a colonial New England forest is a great innovation for the franchise (which had been getting fairly stale), and it seems that a lot of the movement and combat systems have been rebuilt to accommodate that change. Plus, murdering Redcoats with a tomahawk is always a crowd pleaser, at least provided you're not British.

No photography or video recording was allowed inside the theater, so here's a picture of the outside instead. 

12:02 PM - Checked out some more of the indie and XBLA offerings. There's some good stuff down here, including Guacamelee!, a luchador-themed action-adventure game, and Charlie Murder, a beat-em-up with RPG elements from Ska Studios (makers of Dishwasher: Dead Samurai).

Ska Studios art always looks like you wish the sketches in your high-school notebooks looked, if only you had been an amazing artist and super angsty.

12:46 PM - Had a great chat with the Australian creator of Antichamber, a first-person puzzle game that uses "non-Euclidean" geometry. (Basically, it's like running around in an M. C. Escher drawing.) He described the painstaking design process of user testing and game refinement as he attempted to make the game as intuitive as possible (yet still mind-bending).

Hey, it's not like Euclid is the only person who knows how to organize a three-dimensional metric space.

1:15 PM - The shout-out for Dust: An Elysian Tail at the Giant Bomb panel last night must have had an effect, because a lot of folks were interested on the game today. An upcoming XBLA action-adventure title with a beautiful fantasy-themed visual style, Dust was actually designed, illustrated, and coded by a single guy! I actually ended up in line with Ryan Davis and Jeff Gerstmann from the Giant Bomb site, and got a chance to talk with Ryan about his opinion regarding the collection of games this year.

2:16 PM - Took a break to eat a surprisingly tasty food court burrito, as well as count the number of people walking by wearing Utilikilts. Answer: five.

3:51 PM - Attended the panel, "How Young Is Too Young for Games?" Given how much we hear in the media about violence in video games and its effect on children, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of reliable research on the subject, and the little that exists is inconclusive. The panel's shocking conclusion: there's no substitute for moderation and good parental judgement.

There was a setup where you could text in which games had been most influential in your own childhood development. I sure hope the guy who said that World of Warcraft affected him the most when he was "0 to 5 years old" was either confused or kidding.

4:50 PM - Round two of the expo floor. Best experience by far was Dyad, which you maybe could call a shooter, but is really more of a psychedelic audiovisual experience. Whatever it is, it's coming to the PS3 Network this summer.

After playing this game, I actually was so mesmerized that I wordlessly stood up and then lazily wandered in an arbitrary direction for about a minute, before coming back to the booth and apologizing to the designer for my behavior.  

5:36 PM - The expo floor is closing down. I managed to hit a few more games, but nothing was better than what I've already mentioned. I think it's time to call it a day.

11:24 PM - After making my way home and relaxing for a few hours, I'm prepared to render judgement on my first PAX experience. In two words: mission fucking accomplished. Here are a few take-aways:

1. I was surprised to discover how many panels there were, by the breadth and depth of their topics, and by how informative and entertaining they were. I naively expected that I would spend most of my time on the expo floor, but I ended up much preferring the panels.
2. On the exhibition side of things, I found checking out the indie games to be the best use of my time. There's nothing like getting to play some awesome game that a few dudes created in their basement, while they stand next to you and politely answer any idiotic question that pops into your head. Also the lines are short.
3. Finally, for all those people that think there's a link between video games and violence: I just watched 70,000 people cram into about a square mile of space for three full days where they played violent games literally non-stop, and remarkably no one was murdered. That should be all the evidence anyone would ever need.