A month later and I've finally come back for another sit-down with FFXII. There are a lot of things I can say about it - nonsensical plot development, retarded gambit insufficiencies, full party combat feels like an RTS - but in general I still give a solid "meh" to the whole experience. Taken in parts, I'd say the bad outweighs the good (especially since I've spent most of the game so far in underground tunnels), but the gameplay is low-key enough that I find myself just coasting along with nary a care.

In short sessions, anyway. I can only get a couple hours in before it starts to feel like a real drag. I'm sure I'll finish the game sometime in the next year or so.

Progress: Barheim Passage

There are plenty of games in which your roided-out hero hacks the arms off hordes of hapless, vaguely evil warriors. There are fewer in which those arms remain on the bloodied ground, rolling to and fro as you walk over them. Conan is one of these games.

As yet another gory, button-mashy God of War clone, Conan is pretty easy to understand: kill everything you see. Sometimes, you'll have to hit different buttons. As is par for the course, there are countless 'techniques' you can learn to execute new moves with particular button combos, but these are largely irrelevant given the pace of the game's combat. Just fucking swing at it until it's dead.

The game world is kind of meh - more colorful than Beast Rider's tribute to brownness, but Mario would find himself quickly bored of it. Same for the enemies, new ones being introduced at an acceptable pace, although you'll wade through the blood of a million of each of them.

I won't claim to be an expert on Hyborian lore, but non-combat segments - making up perhaps as much as 5% of the game - seem more Indiana Jones than Conan the Barbarian. In two hours of play I've fired ballistae on pirate ships, and unlocked two ancient temples (one using switches shaped like cat mouths, the other using switches to align giant flutes with the wind). Occasionally Conan also has to do some cliff-climbing and platform-jumping, but he sucks at it, his ability to jump on and climb up things seriously impacted by shitty collision detection. Falls into ravines have killed me about twenty times more than dudes with swords have.

But the terrible non-combat mechanics feel like they're made up for with the characterization of Conan. The story is neither epic nor offensive, a fairly run-of-the-mill yarn about dark sorcery, but Conan's attitude toward the warrior queen A'Kanna (and everything else in the game) exudes an indomitable spirit of badass. This is a character I could really like, if only his world was at all interesting.

Rescuing topless maidens is also a nice touch.

There is some good and some bad in Conan, but so far nothing has substantially wowed me in one direction or the other. It's a video game. That about covers it.

Progress: Africa? It looks like Africa

So! A year and a half after purchasing it, I've finished On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 1 in an evening. I feel like the length is pretty ideal, although now I thirst for the second installment.

RSPD stands at a unique crossroads of genres: action-sensitive RPG (think Mario and Luigi) and narrative-driven adventure. At the outset, RSPD appears to be spreading itself thin - the first several battles are stupid simple, and the beginning area is a straight line with few frills.

As the game proceeds, though, it gradually shines brighter and brighter. Your characters level up and learn more moves, you encounter more enemy types with weaknesses and strengths, and you purchase weapon upgrades with Fruit Fucker scraps (!!); combat becomes engaging, even hectic. And the adventuring is organized into "cases" (ala Professor Layton) that build several branching mysteries in the game world, until they come together - more or less - in the end.

The visual style of the game is really cool, basically a Penny Arcade comic come to life, and being able to insert "yourself" into it through the character creator is a great touch. At first it feels pretty empty, but in later scenes when you do crazy shit with Gabe and Tycho, seeing your own character in the scene is absolutely priceless.

There's no real ending, since the story proceeds into the game's second episode, but there's an awesome MC Frontalot song during the credits that more than makes up for it.

RSPD ep. 1 isn't perfect: I can name a couple flaws in the battle system (status effects are stupid overpowered, and some enemies are way too tough for their level), and the maps are on the repetitive side. But its unique blend of genre staples, and its surprising innovations - combat takes place on the adventure map, so you can see and walk around in enemy corpses afterward! - make it a wholly impressive and substantial game.

Also, it tends to be fucking hilarious. The writing and delivery are great. If you like the comic (and how could you not?), the game is worth it just for Penny Arcade's brand of humor.

Progress: 94% completion

Time Gentlemen, Please! - the follow-up to Ben There, Dan That! - has a great sense of humor. The theme of the game is zany and hilarious, and its copious, stellar writing fits it like a glove. As a game, though, I really disliked it.

Things started out well enough, but when TGP got to the point where I had to hop back-and-forth through time, collecting and using items from wildly diverse eras and settings - even within a computer meta-game - the puzzle mechanics, that is to say logic, fell apart. Most of the game's solutions were hideously arbitrary, and I never would have thought of them myself without help. (I followed a guide for a good portion of the game, which feels awful.) I would have done nearly anything for a Monkey Island SE-style in-game gradual hinting system, but even then, would've abused it pretty harshly.

TGP, like BTDT, strives to fill this logic gap with its writing. Examining or trying to use an item will yield some expository script, that may help guide the player to the right solution. Unlike its predecessor, this installment has a bajillion items, and another bajillion places to use them, making this form of trial-and-error an eternal and frustrating exercise.

There's something (awesome) to be said for a game that uses time-travelling Hitler as an antagonist. But Time Gentlemen, Please! exacerbates the adventure genre's biggest flaws, and great writing just isn't enough to overcome that.

Progress: Complete

I'm not quite sure how else to put it - Borderlands is the new Diablo II. Single-player is workable, but generally dull and lonely. Online co-op is seamless (when it works, which is most of the time) and a total fuckin' blast. And once you finish the game, you can play it again on Second Playthrough, where everything is even more ridiculous!

The level cap (50) seems on the low side, but there is more than enough weaponry to keep things interesting well beyond it. The skill trees also give way to some pretty interesting variety, and one great difference between Borderlands and Diablo is that you can easily change your skills as many times as you want.

Each of the four characters can play pretty differently, but I really like all of them. And what's great is that, although they have particular talents, there aren't any character-based restrictions: any character can use any kind of gun. Seeing as there's a functionally infinite amount of different guns, this makes for an awesome level of freedom in how you can shoot things.

I'm sure it'll get old eventually, but I've been playing it every night since last week and it still hasn't. Admittedly, my level of enjoyment is directly dependent on the fact that basically everyone I know has also picked the game up. Apparently it's doing very well!

Progress: Level 46 Berserker

So there are two ways to play Borderlands, solo and co-op. Thus far I've only been in the wastelands with friends, and it is a total blast. This is the new Diablo II - with shooting instead of spellcasting. Color-coded loot spills out of boss monsters as their bloody gibs explode into the air. Vicious dog-monsters spit projectile acid. Extra-tough monsters earn the nominal prefix "Badass." There are midgets with shotguns.

I'd love to play the game by myself, too, so I can actually see the exposition and understand what the fuck is wrong with this place. Regardless, co-op is a ton of fun.

Progress: Level 14 Siren

When I woke up this morning, my first thought was shit, I've overslept. Second was I want to finish Braid. So I did. Worth it.

The story threw me for a loop at the end, until I checked the interweb for some instant gratification. Very interesting stuff, but it's not really why I like the game. The gameplay is just so mind-bendingly awesome.

Really, the only complaint I can lodge against it is that there are so few enemy types. One or two more, I think, would have been cool. But it's inconsequential to the jumping, time-fucking crux of the game.

Braid has left me wanting more. Maybe not enough to restart the game so I can collect everything - maybe so. I'll have to see if I'm still hungry for time-warping after some Borderlands.

Progress: Complete

I played some of Braid when it came out on XBLA, on a friend's Xbox, up through the third world. Months later, when the PC version came out, I played the first world again in the Steam demo - then once more when the Mac demo was released. I still loved the game's crazy blend of platforming, puzzles, and twisted metaphysics; but having become so well acquainted with it, by the time I actually sat down to play the game in earnest, the last thing I expected Braid to do was blow my mind.

Then I got to the fourth and fifth worlds. Holy fuck!

My brain gasped for mercy. It was all I could do to whizz through the levels, for the sake of coming back and solving the puzzles later. I told myself I would put it down and go to bed, but the "Just one more puzzle" sensation drove me all the way to the attic. In retrospect, it makes the game feel short - but the past few hours have been some of the most dense and awesome of my entire gaming career.

Even now that I've got a solid handle on the gameplay mechanics of the first five worlds, I'm still turning over in my head the notion of how all this was programmed. Each in-game entity must have its own sense of "forward" and "backward" time, what can trigger it to move (or stop) in each time-direction, and how quickly - and the procession of time in the game, as an abstraction of actual time...

This is going to keep me up all night.

Progress: Final (?) world

Shamefully, I had never played the original Monkey Island until today. That is, today I played the Special Edition, which is the same but better-looking and -sounding.

It was a bit shorter than I expected - not that just-under-six-hours is too short for an adventure game, but Monkey Island is split into four "parts," and the first occupies about 75% of the game's length. So the ending was a bit sudden; but the game was a joy to play all throughout.

As in Screaming Narwhal, there were a few times I ran into frustratingly obfuscated riddles; but Monkey Island SE's in-game hint system proved itself wonderfully. In all but the most indecipherable circumstances, I was able to get the gist of what the game wanted from me, without having it lead me by the hand. Other than that, my only real complaints regard a few screens with hard- or impossible-to-see hotspots (but again, the hint system is able to cover this).

The good news is that I finally have a merit badge for this crucial piece of gaming canon. The bad news is, now I've been spoiled by the Special Edition's rich graphics and voice work. A remake of Monkey Island 2 can't come soon enough.

Progress: Complete

I still hadn't taken advantage of the free Tales of Monkey Island episode I downloaded on Talk Like a Pirate Day, so I sat down with it today, and figured it would be a fun way to spend an hour or two. It turned out to eat up my whole evening. For the most part, I was really pleased with it; more so than the other free Telltale episodes I've tried so far (Sam & Max, Wallace and Gromit).

The last few puzzles really pissed me off, serving as extreme reminders of what can go wrong in a point-and-click adventure game: namely, obtuse and arbitrary puzzle solutions, and forced sequences (e.g. point C was accessible, but unsolvable, until I'd solved points A and B). Until that point, though, Screaming Narwhal had more reminded me of what can go right in an adventure game: mind-testing logic puzzles, narrative mysteries, and strong writing.

I'm still not planning on getting the rest of the series - at least, not at this point. First I'll have to see if I get emotionally intellectually invested in the characters from the catching up I'll be doing with their previous adventures.

Progress: Complete