Weekend Entertainment Pursuits, Part I

In the order I feel like talking about them.

On Sunday, I bought Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. This is my first guitar game! It is in a sense a trial run for Rock Band, or rather Rock Band 2, because I won’t play Rock Band on a console that doesn’t give me downloadable content and we only have a Wii at present. It seems prudent to find out if I like the genre before getting all ambitious.

Aerosmith rather than the main game because again, I’d feel cheated out of downloadable content and also I happen to dig the Aerosmith a lot. I’m from Boston. Suck it up.

So it’s cool! It took me like an hour to figure out that Easy mode is dead boring, which is why I was getting bored. I went off and tried Medium mode and that was much, much better. The game cleverly makes you play through the opening bands first at each venue, so you don’t get to wallow in Aerosmith immediately. This works for me.

The narrative is pretty clever; this is completely a game for fans. You start out at their first show, a high school venue, then move on to Max’s Kansas City (where you play the song that refers to playing at Max’s Kansas City), and so on. Between each venue, there’s a video with band members talking about how their careers were progressing and so forth. I, um, skipped those.

Other than that it’s a guitar game and I’m the last one to this particular party. I do find myself wishing the guitar was more prominent in the mix, but moving to Medium helped there as well. Fun. If the fun persists, there will be Rock Band 2 someday.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Weekend Entertainment Pursuits, Part II

Wanted sucked rocks. Here’s a list of the good:

• Set pieces: the skyscraper assassination, the sunroof bit, the keyboard across the face.
• Angelina Jolie’s performance, which was surprisingly nuanced and subtle, especially at the end.
• The Russian thriller-verging-on-horror aesthetic: the knife fight in the denoument.
• Timur Bekmambetov bringing in his Russian homeboy Konstantin Khabensky to play a supporting role.
• Curving bullets.

And the bad:

• That’s not a plot, Timur.
• That’s not an American accent, Wesley.
• Blurred choppy confusing action sequences. And I like fast cuts.
• Misogyny to beat the band, lovingly preserved from the original comic.
• No wasting Terrence Stamp, please.
• What the hell? The rat bit? That makes no sense.
• Come to think of it, the weird recuperation pools kept changing, too.
• After all that talk about how assassination can be moral because it saves lives, the train? Excuse me?

The scales balance poorly. There were way more blurred choppy confusing action sequences than there were excellent set pieces. If the action had been all good, I might have forgotten about the lack of creamy moral center. However, none of the victory conditions were achieved. Pity.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Weekend Entertainment Pursuits, Part III

I also played some D&D 4e. Tom runs a nifty game, plus it’s always fun playing with new peeps. Rock on, teenage love triangle, rock on. I’m trying to decide if my Felix is crushing on Geoff. It seems likely.

That link there is a good description of the game and I agree with all of the points made therein. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a remarkably movement-oriented system. Most of our fights were in clear space, and by the end of the game I was just moving thirty feet every turn, because I wanted to tag enemies with my Curse and you can only do that to the closest enemy. The one fight where my back was to a wall, that made me sad. Playing a Warlock is like playing a GEV with a howitzer bolted to the top in Ogre. Zip zip zip. BOOM. I very much regret the failure of my 5d8+1d6+6 bomb single-turn attack sequence.

It feels like D&D. Lots more powers, and much more to do, but it’s a d20 and you roll it and you hit things and do damage and move six squares and take attacks of opportunity and flank. The changes just sort of supercharge it in an alarmingly Hong Kong actiony sort of a way. Also, there are still weird little side cases that make you go “hm, not sure how that should work. Please send lawyers, runs, and FAQs.”

Cian, who I mentioned in comments a few posts back on the LJ side, was a cleric with a side business in being an archer. I spent a lot of feats and points on that, because I was expecting to get very bored if I was just a healer. I knew I’d run out of spells and I wanted to be effective in other ways.

If I was using 4e for him, I wouldn’t need to screw with any of that. He’d have a lance of pure holy light zapping out of his fingertips on demand, a million times a day. There is nothing bad about this. I like that I don’t have to spend feats to avoid boredom.

It is lacking in out of combat skills, albeit not to the degree that detractors claim. Also I don’t know if I like skill challenges. We did one and it felt a touch artificial. The old ad hoc system that Jeffwik or someone described based on an early leak, where you did whatever you wanted and rolls just applied? That seems better. I think Tom was running ours sort of like that, but since we were not RP-focused we were a bit slow to get into that mindset.

That, however, was my only beef. I have already created a spreadsheet to assist me in choosing 1d6+3 rolled against Will vs. 1d10+4 rolled against Reflex. It is a good system for the crunchy side of me, and it is simple enough to be fun for the non-crunchy side of me.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.