I Suck at Video Games

I’ve never been very good at Jenga. My hands are too big, and they shake a lot. I reach for a piece, and it just topples over. I am pretty good at Boom Blox, though.

Boom Blox is a new video game from Electronic Arts and Stephen Spielberg. It’s basically a collection of smaller games where you knock things over, blow things up, and move things around; all while using the Wiimote as your tool. Sometimes you throw a bomb at a bunch of blocks trying to knock gems off of a tower. Sometimes you throw a bowling ball at a bridge, hoping to knock some parts off but not others, and in the game that is the most addictive, you play Jenga. Just don’t call it that, please.

The multiplayer games on this disc are just awesome. In the Jenga variation, you have towers of sticks, and you use the Wiimote to grab certain of these sticks and then pull them out of the tower, hoping not to topple it over. If you topple it over, you’ll likely lose. There is this amazing tension when you pull them out, and the not-quite-realistic-but-maybe-it-is-I’m-not-a-physicist-so-I-can’t-be-sure gravity starts moving the tower ever so slightly, and you tense up and hope it doesn’t all fall over. When playing with friends, the trash talking opportunities are countless.

There’s also a game where there are towers full of blocks, and some of the blocks are worth points, and others will make you lose points. You take turns throwing a ball at the towers, and trying to knock the point blocks to the ground while keeping the penalty blocks on the tower. This game can get overly lopsided scores in a hurry, so sometimes you’ll want to spend your turn throwing your ball at the annoying block animals that mock you when you do poorly. When you hit them, they flop around and then disappear in very entertaining ways.

Another game is a bit of shuffleboard variant. Each player has blocks of their color, and they are trying to move them along the ice into scoring areas. You throw a ball at your blocks to move them, and you can also try hitting your block into your opponents’ blocks to knock them off the playing field. This game has amazing screw-your-neighbor opportunities, and could start fights in the wrong group.

There’s also some shooting games, and some blowing-stuff-up-real-good games, and some games I probably haven’t unlocked yet. All in all, Boom Blox is wicked fun as a multiplayer game. My flatmate and her boyfriend played for 4 hours on consecutive days. They would never admit this, but the Wii is kind enough to email me how often my games are played. (If Wii ever adds an “adult channel,” hopefully this channel won’t report its use.)

The single player game is a bit challenging, but bores me to tears. It’s more of a puzzle affair. Once you figure out where to hit the tower or how to pull the sticks, the actual doing of them isn’t too hard. And if I screw it up, which I’m always likely to do, it’s pretty forgiving of errors. It’s a pretty good game to play for someone who sucks at video games, and I’m thankful for that. It was probably made for kids; who knows? I never pay attention to stuff like that. A fun game is a fun game.

Go ahead and get Boom Blox for your Wii if you ever have friends come over who are tired of Wii Sports. It’s the next best competitive multiplayer experience going. (Will anything ever be better for parties than Wii Sports Bowling?)

I was sure I was going to get an XBox 360. So sure, in fact, that I bought a controller for it during a giant sale at some game site. It was less than half price, and I knew I would need a second one. Sometimes, I shouldn’t be so sure of things. I’ve decided to get a PS3.

Why would I make this change?

First off, we have the reliability factor. There are just too many stories about the Red Ring of Death, and although Microsoft is happy to replace those consoles, I don’t want to be in the middle of a game and have to wait a week to keep playing it. When game addiction sets in, I want my console to work! This was a big strike against Microsoft.

Secondly, there is the Blu Ray thing. I have a wee little HDTV, but this may not always be the case. It seems silly to not get Blu Ray discs once their price gets close to that of DVD. It may take a while, but I should be protecting myself against future obsolescence.

Then we have the games. Oh, the XBox 360 definitely has the better exclusives right now. Mass Effect and Bioshock come to mind. But here’s the thing: both of these are available on the PC, and I now have a PC that can play these things! I have a fancy shmancy 22″ monitor and a high-end video card. Why shouldn’t I play those on the PC then? Seems simple.

The online thing was a big plus for XBox 360, but I can skip that whole point collection thing knowing that I can get Super Puzzle Fighter for the PS3. However, it turns out that the majority of my friends who have a console have the PS3, so if I want to play online with them, I will need to have the same console. Plus, since it does not have as big of an install base, used games tend to fall in value a lot quicker.

So now that I’ve made this choice, and am ready to make the plunge, I wonder when my wallet will be ready.

The Nintendo DS has caught on with the masses, mainly because of the wide variety of so-called casual games. Some of these are downright offensive (Horsez, Petz, Pet Horsez), but most of them are in the puzzle category. The DS puzzle games are what I do on my BART commute every day, so I have lots of experience with them. I don’t even suck at them. So let’s take a look at some highlights and lowlights from the DS puzzle games I’ve played.

Brain Age (and Brain Age 2): It was 5 minutes of drunken Brain Age at Butter in San Francisco that convinced me to buy a DS. I was excited because after years of sucking at video games, here was a game I could be good at! Doing simple math problems as fast as possible! Brilliant! I played Brain Age for a long time until I got bored of the games. Some of them frustrated me (memorizing lists of words) and some just got too easy (3 people leave the house, 2 people go in the house, 5 people up the chimney, etc.). So when Brain Age 2 came out, I thought “here’s the game I love, but with new variety!” Well, I played it for about a week, and it has been left unplayed ever since. I can’t bring myself to sell it because I know I am supposed to like it, but I just don’t care for it anymore.

Puzzle Quest: This one had me seeing circles for weeks! This is an RPG, but instead of fighting with swords, you fight with Bejeweled. Brilliant! The story is so bad, I was just begging for opportunities to skip past it, but the actual battles were puzzlerific! And the system to get new spells and character upgrades was fantastic. I beat this game, collected all the spells, captured all the monsters, and realized I would never play it again. So to eBay it went. But before then, I had a great time with it.

Word Jong: Word Jong is kinda bad. It’s stacks of letters on tiles that you pull off piles to make words for points. The puzzle itself is entertaining enough if you like anagramming, but the actual game itself is really poorly done. The example that kills me is that there is a game mode where you battle against computer opponents. And the computer opponents will make words, backspace, make words, backspace, make words … oh you get the idea. When I am playing against a computer opponent, I want the thinking to happen off screen! It adds no value to the game. I got bored of this pretty quickly, and you probably will, too. Playing against a human opponent is probably fun if you are in the same room. Otherwise, I can’t recommend it.

Picross DS: Picross may have been played more than any other game in my gaming history. It’s phenomenal. It’s a Japanese picture/logic puzzler. There are numbers on the rows and columns that represent the number of dots filled in on a grid. And that’s it. You figure out which dots are filled in, which are empty, and you see a picture! The DS version allows you to download a bunch of additional puzzles, including all of the puzzles from the original Game Boy version of this game, which was called Mario’s Picross. Lots of Mario-themed puzzles in there, which is loads of fun. If you like addictive logic puzzles, this is the game to buy right away!

Clubhouse Games: This is the one I have in my DS right now. It’s out of print, and going for big bucks on eBay, and I can totally see why. It’s a very generous collection of classic games, from Dominos to Spit to Reversi to Bowling … it’s got lots in here. There are multiple game modes to play including a pretty difficult challenge mode. There are some games in here I’ve never heard of, some I’ve heard of but don’t know how to play just yet, and some I am too good at (I pitched a shutout in reversi against the AI). This is a great game collection, and my guess is that a sequel must be coming, otherwise there is no way that this should be unavailable. An absolute must for casual DSers.

The other day I got in my friend’s car, and she was playing a Dr. Demento CD. I had never heard her play Dr. Demento before, and the song was Fish Heads by Barnes & Barnes. I hadn’t heard this song in over 15 years. I sang every word. Who could forget the classic line “roly poly fish heads are never seen drinking cappucino in Italian restaurants with oriental women … yeah?

Then she switched to the Garden State soundtrack (hated the movie, loved the soundtrack), and a Shins song came on that I have heard dozens of times, many within the last couple of years. I didn’t know a single word.

Memory is a weird thing, and I have always prided myself on having a very good one. So this concept is new to me. I know all the words of songs that I haven’t heard in years, but new songs I listen to all the time just happen around me.

I like Death Cab For Cutie. I have every one of their albums. I listen to The Photo Album at least once a week at work, and have for the last year or so. My favorite song on the album is Why You’d Want to Live Here. I know it starts “I’m in Los Angeles today,” and the rest of the lyrics muddle together in my head (something about a gas station attendant and bad weather) until he sings “I can’t see why you’d want to live here.” The music and the beat are entrenched in my mind; I can’t for the life of me remember the words.

This must be why older people like classical music more than younger people. They don’t have to learn words! I go to a Death Cab For Cutie show, and people must look at me like I must be some “he only knows the singles” fan because I don’t do any singing along. If I go to a performance of Shostakovich, no one could accuse me of the same. What singles?

This is a selective thing for me because I know every word of my soon-to-be 2006 Single of the Year, Pull Shapes by The Pipettes. Or at least I think I do. Then again, that is the most played song on my iPod. Then again, Why You’d Want to Live Here is second. There’s a line about billboards in there, I’m sure.

I promised some Guitar Hero content in here, and this is it.

Play the game for about 20-30 minutes straight. Then stare at any one object in your room. It moves. Like in some freaky getting bigger and smaller at the same time way. It could very well be the scariest thing ever, and even though I have passed every song I have tried (Sweet Child ‘o Mine had me in the yellow for a while), the game has officially started creeping me out! Maybe I should sit farther away from the television? Has anyone else experienced this?

The content of the game is amazing, by the way. The song list, even though I know it, keeps taking me by surprise. When I get called to do an encore, and the encore is Carry On Wayward Son or War Pigs, I get excited like I’m watching the show myself!

I’ve also started playing a game called Okami about a wolf on a Zelda-like quest, who unfortunately is teamed up with a Zelda-like combination of Navi and Tingle, combining the worst of each. I am hoping as I get deeper into the game that this little helper of mine is killed, and I have to avenge its death. Then, when I get to the big boss who killed this annoyance, I can thank them instead of eating them. Otherwise, the game has been truly artistic so far, with superb design and clever gameplay.

Stupidly, I forgot to remove this game from my Gamefly queue after I got a copy, so it just showed up in the mail today. What a waste. Turns out I also suck at renting video games.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell which sucks more: the game or me. This time, I’m voting for the game, but I’m not so good either.

MLB Slugfest 2006 is the newest “action baseball” product from the creators of NBA Jam. It takes a baseball game and makes it into a cartoonish event, full of fights, punching, celebration dances, and other tomfoolery. It highlights the kind of actions that people hate about athletes and applies them to baseball players, who generally act with more class than this.

I got this game for $15 brand new, which may be too much, because I don’t think I’m going to be able to sell it anywhere for anywhere close to this, and I have no belief that I will ever get $15 worth of enjoyment out of this crap. It’s just about the worst game I’ve ever played.

My personal “I’m going to suck at this” moment was when I read the instruction book,, and saw that near the back of the book, there was a list of trick pitches with the button combinations needed to throw them. Oh great, combos. I’d say that the only combos I like are pretzel snacks and pizzas, but I don’t like these combos either. Needing to memorize an arbitrary collection of buttons that are needed to press in a specific order just to beat a game has always seemed somewhat silly to me. In fact, I hate it.

Besides, what is baseball about combinations? Is a pitcher going to through a hadouken or a sharyouken? (No, I don’t know how to spell them, and I am not on the Internet right now to look them up, and I’m not going to bother when I’m connected, either.) Why is he trying to knock out the batter with a spinning kick anyway? First, you get the strikeout, and if you can do the fatality, you get to rip the batter’s head off. This is not baseball.

The first time I tried the game, I was down 12-1 after two innings. I had managed to give up 7 inside the park homeruns because the fielding and throwing is so completely messed up. In order to throw to second base, for example, you push the right analog stick upwards. Every single time I did this, the fielder would throw to second, and the second baseman would then immediately throw to third. This means that if a runner were about to slide into second, you wouldn’t bother making a tag.

Now let’s suppose for a moment that I actually had the ball on the base, and the base runner was standing there. What this game actually allows to the runner to do is punch the fielder. An effective punch will make the fielder drop the ball and double over in pain. When this happens, the runner advances a base. Then this starts again. It’s fun to watch the game declare INSIDE THE PARK HOMER when a runner basically thugged his way around the bases. This is baseball for assholes.

The game has a season mode, and I decided it would be fun to create my own team and play a season. So I picked all the players from my fantasy team, the Hayward Cleavers (get it? Hey Ward Cleaver! Ha Ha!) and made them into a team. Then I get to assign them to a city — I picked San Francisco — and play a schedule. The game keeps statistics, which is fun. But before you get too excited, you should know that while Manny Ramirez plays for my team in the game, he is still playing on the Red Sox, so all his stats are doubled! So everyone on my team leads the league in everything! This sucks. One fun thing about Season Mode in a sports game is trying to be a league leader. Here, you just are one by default.

I just remembered that this website is about how I suck at video games, and not how video games suck. I’ll tell you then, about a game I played against Oakland. I had finally figured out how to field, and things were going swimmingly well. I was up 7-0 in the 8th, and I was so excited at the prospect of an actual shutout! So Oakland hit two grand slams in the inning, and ended up winning the game 11-9, which reminded me of the reason we’re all here.

I suck at video games.

Ico is one of the best video games ever made. Sure, it’s short. And it’s a little easy. It has to be, or else I wouldn’t have finished it. I like it so much that I finished it 5 times. Now, it’s like sitting down to watch a favorite movie. It takes a bit more than 3 hours, and sometimes there is a plot twist you just don’t remember. There’s that water level which also surprises me, and confuses me a bit. I never have to throw controllers playing that game anymore.

I had a long-standing bet with my friend Drave that there would be a sequel to this game. It was a bet I could never lose because he forgot to put a time limit on it. Therefore, if no sequel ever happened, he still couldn’t collect! Of course, we had bet nothing, so there was no collection to have. But he could never have the satisfaction of winning.

I eventually saw an Internet rumour about a Japanese trade magazine advertising for programmers for a game from the makers of Ico, and I knew immediately that I was waiting for this game, whatever it was going to be, and whenever it was going to be.

That game is Shadow of the Colossus, and it was the primary reason I got the used PS2 from my co-worker. Sure, he threw in God of War (I’ll talk about that some other time), but it was all about Shadow of the Colossus. So I ran out to get it, and popped it in.

I watched the opening title screen and hit start. Then there was a long — really long — opening cinema about my love being dead, but if I could defeat the 10 Colossi, I could bring her back to life. And I really want to bring her back to life, because she is my love. And oh look at the castle, so reminiscent of Ico, and the lighting and shading effects. Ico-ish. And my character. This game is going to rock!

Next I get to jump on my horse and go out looking for adventure! And then I look. And I look. Wait, up ahead, there I see the level I need to do first.

Now I am in a clearing and I know I need to go up, but I cannot find a way to go up. After spending about 20 minutes trying to go up, I make my first look into Game FAQs for help. It turns out I can push a button on my controller to hold the wall and climb up! Wow! Who knew? Do people actually figure this stuff out on their own?

Next I get up, and there is this giant beast ahead of me, and it looks amazing! This is seriously one of the most amazing looking games I have ever seen. So I run up to it to attack, and I die.

So I try again, and he stomps me dead.

One more time, and another time dead. There is some combination of buttons I can press to zoom in on what I am supposed to be looking at, and all I see is the creature, so I try again. And get stomped dead again.

And again.

So it’s back to Game FAQs for another hint, and it tells me to run around behind the thing! Ah! So I follow the instructions and run up to the back and grab on and stab stab stab and the thing falls down! And I fall off of it. And it gets mad. And stomps me dead.

Now wait a minute! That wasn’t supposed to happen! So this time I stab stab stab and the thing falls down, so I climb up on his leg and he shakes me off and then I climb on again and I can’t stay on!

I read Game FAQs. More than one FAQ so I can be sure I have this right. But it is no use. I cannot figure out, even with the steps written out for me in plain English, how to beat the FIRST Colossus in Shadow of the Colossus. I turn off my PS2, change games, and roll up some stuff into a star as comfort food. (I’m not so hot at Katamari, either, but that’s another column.)

I haven’t tried Shadow of the Colossus again because the embarrassment of this particular level of sucking is just too much for me to take. Usually, I can get somewhat far into a game before getting stuck or frustrated, but this is ridiculous. In fact, it was an hour later that I went to check if isuckatvideogames.com was available. So here we are.

EPILOGUE: It is 5 weeks later and I am in the Playstation store at The Metreon, and I am looking to see if there is a game I might actually like to play. Some guy is playing this incredible game, and I ask what it is. He tells me “Shadow of the Colossus.” I say “hey, I have that game, but I suck so bad I can’t even beat the first Colossus.”

He then shows me. Runs around back. Stab stab stab. Climb climb climb. Stab stab stab. I think it took 45 seconds. His friends giggled. I blushed in shame.

I suck at video games.

I just turned 35, and since I am no longer a male between the ages of 18-34, I am now in the proper demographic where I feel it safe to admit it. I suck at video games.

Here’s the rub: I love playing them. I’ve noticed that there is a big gap in the video game review world. Everyone who writes about games for a living is able to get to the end of these things before 100 people have written online about how to beat them. Where is the voice of the crappy gamer?

I always find myself buying a PS2, playing a few games that look cool, sucking at them, throwing controllers, reading cheats online, and eventually selling it all on craigslist at a small loss.

Then, a few months later, I start again.

The time has come for me to stop the cycle! I am now going to suck at games as a creative endeavor!

Join me in my quest to suck at as many video games as possible. You can be surprised when I’m good at one, and laugh at me when I’m not. I’ll tell stories about video games and other media when applicable. I’ll swear. I’ll throw (even more) controllers.