Video Games: Get Lost, Galactrix

The bad guy is less scary
and more boring/pretentious than he realizes.

Found another time-waster.

I loved playing Puzzle Quest on my Nintendo DS. It was intuitive, inventive and, whenever I ran into a challenge I could not beat the first time, I was excited to try it again. Eventually, I ran across a copy of the follow-up, Puzzle Quest Galaxtrix, at Big Lots for somewhere around $3.00 - a great deal, I thought. I mean, it was a "Best of E3!" pick, so it had to be good, right?

Wrong.

This game is frustrating, dull, and un-engaging. I found myself skipping through dialogue and flipping off the screen more times than I'd care to admit. So what the heck went wrong with Puzzle Quest Galatrix? How could it be so different from the addictive fun of Puzzle Quest?

In a word: leapgates.

The map of the galaxy is made up of sectors that you have to jump to using leapgates. Unfortunately, they have all been disabled by some kind of virus, so you have to 'hack' them. Hacking involves matching colored sets in a specific order before time runs out. It's similar (in concept, if not in practice) to training monsters in Puzzle Quest. The game's core play mechanic is where this becomes almost unplayable.

Whenever you make a match, there is a short animation that plays where the crystals turn to energy and zap over to the player info. New tiles then fall in and, if any other matches happen, the animation plays for them and you wait until any subsequent matches from incoming tiles are over.

During this process, the timer never stops counting down - even during the animations and new tiles appearing. You don't get any bonus time for matching regular tiles. Instead there are special 'timer' tiles scattered across the board that will give you 10 seconds if you match them; by which time you will have burned up most of your timer. Unwittingly setting off a cascade of matches - which is easy to do, since you have no idea what will be falling in - will eat up most, if not all, of your time.

Does this screen excite you? Because you will be looking at it. A LOT.

The easier gates have more time and/or less required matches, while the harder gates have less time and/or more required matches to open them. And what do you get when you open a gate? Another sector whose gates must be opened before you can proceed. And not all sectors have anything worth getting to, either - but you won't know that until you open the gate and fly your ship there. Imagine my joy at taking 20-something attempts to get a hard leapgate hacked, only to end up in a sector that nothing worth buying/mining, and no missions to take.

As I was collecting missions, I noticed a bunch of them had zero connection to the plot and required me to cross the galaxy. For example, one planet had a set - more than one! - of missions concerned with delivering food. I played every single side mission in Puzzle Quest; at least they involved people in need of a champion to right wrongs and fight evil. In Galactrix, people are literally looking for an intergalactic delivery boy. It's bad enough having to do that across one sector map, but a across ten (or more)? Screw that, man.

I don't know who was responsible for giving this game a "Best of E3!" award, but I cannot believe they played it for more than half an hour at most. I made it about three and a half.

Video Games: Sayonara Supreme Commander

The latest victim of my campaign against time-wasting video games is Supreme Commander.

I picked this up at Ollies' for $5 - not a bad deal at all. It looked nice, despite being a few years old, and I was in the mood for sci-fi RTS - additionally, I'm too poor to get SCII and do not yet have a high-end machine to the game justice.

So what went wrong? The problem came to a head in the third mission of the UEF campaign when the Aeon were constantly attacking my bases and denying my attempts to expand the southernmost island. It took me FIVE HOURS to beat it. Needless to say, the wife was not happy when I came to bed at 2:30 am.

The game has this annoying approach of adding to the map and mission objectives incrementally. So you think you're building towards one corner of the map and when you finally get there - Oh, by the way, you have to clear out this base way over here that you had no idea existed, because we wouldn't let you explore that part of the map.

I looked up a walkthrough online and, from what I can tell, nearly all of the 15 missions are structured that way. Assuming each mission takes four hours (benefit of the doubt), that's 60 hours of enemy forces throwing themselves against my massed banks of turrets while I slowly pick away at their defenses. Also, I was so annoyed with the talking heads continually bugging me with comments about needing to check my objectives and that there are still alien scum that need killing. I get it - I'm slow!

60 hours of game play might be fine for your average gamer - heck, it would have been fine for me in college - but it's more than I have to give these days. Especially for a setting and story I really don't have any interest in.

Misc: Taking a Stand Against Time-Wasting Video Games

Do you remember the xkcd strip titled Cutting Edge? If not, go ahead and click on the link - I'll wait.

Ready to continue? Okay, good.

That strip defines me as a video gamer perfectly. A few years ago I realized that I could get older games - especially PC games - much cheaper from places like Big Lots and the bargain racks at Wal-Mart and Target for $10.00 or less and they would usually perform at or near the highest quality settings on whatever system I was currently running.

One game that has been sitting on my shelf for a while now is Homeworld 2. I really enjoyed the first Homeworld and had high hopes for the follow-up.  Those hopes were dashed to pieces this weekend. Despite being released in 2003, it still looked good and had a lot of the driving story and atmosphere that made the first one so compelling. So why am I so disappointed?

The game is TOO FRICKIN' HARD!

And you know what? I don't have the time to waste playing each mission over and over, ad nauseum, to beat it. In my younger days - heck, even earlier this year - I would've stuck with a game out of a sense of obligation. I spent a whole $5.00 on it, right? I need to beat it to justify the purchase and somehow validate myself as a gamer, a man, and/or possibly even a human being.

Let's say I stick with it. Let's say I forgo all my other time-sucking hobbies and interests to focus on this particular one. Let's say I obsess over it every waking second and get irritated when I spend time being a husband and father while that horrible, obsessive, irrational little nagging voice in my head keeps whispering that I really need to be saving the universe (I have issues, if you didn't know). What do I get for spending all that time beating such an incredibly frustrating game? A pre-rendered scene of variable quality, a list of credits, and - possibly - some message telling me that if I were to go back and play it again, I'd do better. That's it.

The reward is not worth the effort.

My free time is at a premium, and I want to spend it doing something I enjoy. Something that provides a sense of accomplishment, not frustration, and - ideally - will still be around in some persistent form when I move on to the next project. Video games are quite possibly the least meaningful, least rewarding hobby I have, and I will no longer sink hours and hours of my life into a game that is not fun.

If you are one of the few masochistic individuals who managed to unite the cores and defeat the Vaygr, good for you. I hope you feel like it was time well spent. As for me, I noticed yesterday that Wal-Mart had Assassin's Creed on the bargain rack for $10.00 . . .