No joke. I hate ths game.

I bought Arkham City because I had watched Drave play Arkham Asylum and thought it looked really cool. When Black Friday rolled around, I used a variety of coupons and deals to get the game for somewhere in the vicinity of $3. Last night, I sold it on eBay for $30. Of course, I had started playing it only three days earlier. Completion percentage? Around 4%. So why is it gone so fast?

In this game, you get to be Batman. That’s pretty cool. Being Batman feels badass, up to a point. That point is when you’re standing in a loading bay trying to figure out that the R2 button actually has some purpose when using the electro magnetic pulse projector weapon thingamajig, even though you’ve been told you use R1 to fire it. It’s not badass trying to get the controller to recognize a quick tap for detective mode as opposed to a full press for environmental scanning. It’s not badass when you’re supposed to “quick fire” your batarang or batclaw when you’ve never been introduced to that concept before. In fact, it’s only badass when you’re being like Spider-Man.

Arkham City is ridiculous amounts of fun when you’re outside pressing X and R1. X dives and floats, R1 grabs on to nearby rooftops and hanging points. Diving around the city pressing R1 is a blast. You can just fly around the city without ever touching the ground. It’s the stupid levels that get in the way.

When I’m crawling around stupid sewers trying to follow pipes, and then I bust out of the ground to press the square button in rapid succession until everyone falls down, I’m like … wow this sucks. Who can button mash faster, me or the AI? For as long as I played, it was me. I’m certain that later in the game it would have been the AI, but I’m not even going to bother.

I’ve heard there’s tons of little easter eggs in the game, perfect for fans of the Batman comics. (I’ve always been a Marvel guy myself, although The Long Halloween is pretty fantastic.) But all I’d found up to the point at which I quit was a bunch of question marks that I’m supposed to collect that appear to open up some challenge maps that I never attempted.

Listen, here’s the thing about me as a crappy gamer. I fucking hate open world games. Hate them. I do  want to be led in a specific direction and given a puzzle to solve. And as the industry keeps pushing more and more in this open-world direction, they give me fewer options for games to enjoy.  To me, open world games means either missing a bunch of stuff that’s in the game, or reading GameFaqs a lot. Now, I’m a GameFaqs power user, but actually keeping my laptop next to me while playing a game is not fun.

Arkham City may be a great video game to some, but to me it was a dark, muddy shit storm.

The greatest one-hit wonder of all time; it was the one hit for two bands!

Try Doodle Jump, they told me. And for 99 cents, I was on board. Why not? How much could I lose? A dollar? So I downloaded the game, figured out how to play, marveled at the cool art style, and then missed a platform. Game over. Wait. What?

This was my first exposure to a new kind of game that has taken over my iPhone gaming life. These are games with only one life. Make one mistake, and it’s all done. Now, for someone like me, this works OK. Don’t want to watch the commercial? Great! I can try a round of this game. Waiting in line at the grocery store? Great!

And I’m not alone. The top selling games for iPhone are littered with these titles: Doodle Jump, Monster Dash, Robot Unicorn Attack and Fruit Ninja. (Technically, you can let three fruit fall in Fruit Ninja, but hit one bomb and it’s lights out.)

I’m sure there’s others, but these are the ones I’m playing.

And I hate them all.

When you’re not particularly good at video games, even getting to the “hard parts” is a challenge. So when you have to dredge through the easy parts over and over and over again, the boredom and frustration overtakes me. I have friends who can probably do the early levels of Super Mario Bros. with their eyes closed. I do them with sweaty, clenched fists, and swear consistently as I die before making it to the first pole.

Of all of these, though, Monster Dash is my favorite. It’s full of cute achievements, funny advice when you die, and some neat weapons. I do wish I could slow down a bit, but I realize that’s not the point of the game. I would like to know if there’s more than 3-4 levels, though. What happens if you actually make level 5? Does something happen? Do you get an extra life? Can you continue?

When Galaga was re-released into arcades a few years ago, they added a Continue feature. I thought this was the most offensive thing I could possibly imagine. Classic games didn’t have continue! That’s what made them so difficult and awesome! Can’t make stage 50 in Galaga? Tough cookies, kiddo!

Now, the roles have been reversed. Now I want continue. What awaits me up there in the Doodle Jump sky? Is there a pot of gold up there? Some sort of wisdom floating up there in the great heights?

I’ll never know, for in these types of games, there’s only one life to live. And when you’re a crappy gamer like me, that’s a pretty short life.

Playing this game is like standing on a sinking ship.

“Write anything, solve everything” states the advertising for Scribblenauts, the much hyped puzzle game for Nintendo DS that came out last week.  I’ve been obsessed with the concept of this game since the moment I heard about it.  In Scribblenauts, you’re presented with a puzzle.  In order to solve the puzzle, you need things.  To create things, you simply write down anything you can think of.

That seems simple, right?  Unfortunately, Scribblenauts is–without a doubt–the most frustrating gameplay experience I’ve had in a long time.  The game does an amazing job of recognizing what you’ve written, but so little of it does what you want it to do.

Here’s an example.  There’s a level with a tripwire.  Somehow you need to trip this wire without falling down yourself (or at least I think that’s what you need to do.)  Mannequin?  Crash test dummy?  Caveman?  None of these work.  What does work?  I don’t have a clue; this level is unsolved.

I could say that for a lot of levels; they are unsolved.  One level requires you to get past a tornado.  God?  Wormhole?  Sun?  Tank?  Nope, none of these.  This is a game that requires you to cheat or share solutions, yet doing so makes the game completely unrewarding.

There are also levels where I can’t even figure out what’s going on.  And only a couple of hours in, I find that I don’t even care anymore.

While the designers say that there are “tens of thousands” of words, and Internet research shows the number to be close to 22,000 of them, I find myself only needing a few things:  ladder, gun, axe, jet pack.  I think I can get through 95% of the puzzles I’ve tried so far using just those items.

The most fun that can be had in the game is immediately after turning it on.  You get a little sandbox area where you can just create things and make them interact.  This is a sweet tech demo, let me tell you.  Try a teleporter, and see where it takes you.  This is my favorite thing in the entire game so far.

Scribblenauts is the kind of game you bring out at a party to show people how cool games can be, but it’s not the game you’d ever want to actually play.  Conceptually, it’s an absolute piece of genius that I want to tell the world about.  It’s great that 5th Cell is trying something completely new, and kudos to them for that.  It’s too bad the concept wasn’t applied to a better game.

Wait, I play this how?

Yesterday, Apple gave one of their big deal press conferences where they announce new products and software.  This was known to be an iPod event, and it was promoted using the tagline, “It’s only rock n’ roll, but we like it.”  So what did they spend nearly half of the time promoting?  Games.  Yes, they promoted games for the iPod Touch and the iPhone, bringing up people from Gameloft and Ubisoft to demo upcoming titles.  But here’s something they won’t tell you:  gaming on the iPhone sucks.

The first problem with gaming on the iPhone is that it’s a phone.  This means you can get a phone call or a text message in the middle of a game, and depending on the game, you may lose some progress.  This is a pain in the ass.  This is one place convergence fails.  What’s wrong with a phone in your pocket and a DS in your bag?  Nothing.

Problem two is illustrated by Madden 10, pictured above, which is a much hyped iPhone game because, well, it’s Madden.  It features all 32 teams, pretty decent graphics, some pretty annoying sound effects, and an admittedly cool feature that lets you slow down the action to make split second moves like jukes on offense or jumps on defense.  What it doesn’t come with, however, is a controller.  Have you tried using one of these iPhone virtual d pads?   They make the d pad on the XBox360 look like the d pad on the … well, the PS3.  It’s a horrible experience.  Tapping on the receivers to throw to them?  Impossible to navigate.  This was $8 wasted, because it is absolutely not fun.

Just last week, they announced a Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone–now removed from the store for some weird reason, and I told people, “when they come out with Space Taxi and Archon, let me know.”  Someone told me that Archon was already on the iPhone.  Awesome!  I noticed that there was both a regular version and a lite version (why they don’t call these “demos” in the app store, I’ll never know) available.  I downloaded the lite version, and it’s absolute crap.  The game has no idea which piece you’re touching, and if you try to change, you might move the piece by mistake.  The drawings and animations are garbage.

I tried out the Katamari demo for the iPhone, and I felt like I was stuck in the middle of a tech demo gone awry.  I was tilting the phone to roll my Katamari, and tilting it more and more and twisting it around and I just couldn’t get the thing to go where I wanted it to!  This is one of those times I would normally get frustrated and throw my controller.  But I can’t throw this controller: it’s worth $600!  What fun is  a gaming system if I can’t break a controller or two?

There is one bright light in my iPhone gaming history:  Word Ace.  This is a “gambling” game where you play texas hold ‘em, but with letters instead of cards.  You bet each round with your two hidden letters, and after the river, whoever can make the highest scoring word wins!  It  has online play, a friend system, trophies for fun accomplishments (although I received one trophy as a bug because I hadn’t actually done what it said I did), and a nice interface.  This tells me one important thing.  It tells me that the iPhone has a great future as a gambling device.

For gaming?  Not so good.  Do you want a portable gaming system that works great, has a great selection of games, is easy to play, and won’t start ringing in the middle of a difficult level?  Get a Nintendo DS or DSi.  Heck, get a PSP.  You have two pockets for a reason.

“You should just get an R4,” she told me.

I’ve never been secretive about the fact that I download music like crazy. All I do these days is illegal downloading and buying vinyl. There’s hardly any CDs in my present, and even fewer in my future. That said, I’ve always been anti-pirating when it comes to videogames. It’s always seemed like too much work? I’ve always felt dirty about it for some reason? I can’t explain why this is so, but I’ve never pirated a game before.

Until now.

And here’s why.

I got very excited about the release of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. I was a huge fan of the original, so I bought this one without reading any reviews … before I go on, I should just include the email I sent to D3, the publisher of the game, after playing their game for an evening.

Hi,

I’ve never written to a video game publisher before with comments on a game, but I’m so disappointed by the DS version of Puzzle Quest Galactrix, I just had to say something. This game is so chock full of bugs, it’s painful to play. I really enjoyed the first Puzzle Quest game, so I bought this one without waiting for reviews, and at Best Buy where I clearly can’t return it. I feel ripped off.

These are the bugs I encountered when playing it:

1. On the screen you go into after going through a gateway, when you press a new system, the software performs an instant autosave, then brings up a loading screen. In three hours of playing, this screen froze three times. At least it knows to save first.

2. On the actual puzzle screen, five times in the same three hours, I would select two pieces to exchange, and pieces on the opposite side of the playfield would move instead.

3. When I would go to a planet’s menu, and try to click on one of the options, more than half of the time, my click would send me moving toward the corner of the screen, and not actually select my choice off of the menu.

4. The amount of loading, and length of the loading times, is ridiculous. I’m not sure this is a bug, but it seems like somewhere in development, D3 just gave up on trying to get it right.

I’m surely not going to buy any other games from your company without waiting for unanimously good reviews. And the Puzzle Quest brand is now sour to me. Feel free to call me or email me to discuss further.

Thanks for your time,
Gordon Elgart

And here’s the response they sent:

Gordon Elgart:

Thank you for writing to us about the game Puzzle Quest: Galactrix for the Nintendo DS. After reading your email, it seems that you are experiencing many issues with the game. I have a few suggestions that might make playing the game a little more enjoyable for you. First, the issues dealing with the gems on the opposite side of the board moving when you select a gem and your ship moving to a corner of the screen when selecting menu options may be fixed by calibrating your Touch Screen. To calibrate your Touch Screen, turn off the system and remove any game cards game paks that are inserted into the DS, then turn the system back on. After bypassing the Nintendo Health and Safety warning screen, you’ll be taken to the IPL screen. At the bottom of the IPL screen, you’ll see a little Nintendo DS icon at the bottom center of the screen. Touch that icon to go into the Nintendo DS options. In the options menu, touch the orange square on the right side of the screen that has a cross-hair in it. This will take you to the Calibration menu. Follow the instructions on-screen to calibrate your Nintendo DS’s Touch Screen. After testing the game, we’ve found that holding the stylus in the most upright position that you can, and pressing firmly, but not hard enough to do damage to the Touch Screen, was the best way to use the Touch Screen and Stylus to control the game. Also, while in any of the battle boards or mini-games, firmly touch the gem that you would like to move, make sure that it is highlighted, then drag it to where you would like to move it. This will ensure that the gem moves to where you would like it to go. As for the game freezing three times in the span of three hours, this may have been due to the amount of objects on the screen. The DS has a small amount of available memory that can be quickly used up when there are a large amount of objects on the screen. To keep this from happening in the future, I suggest clearing off any enemy ships by either battling them or by using Psi Powers gained by completing the series of “The Lost” mission that start in the Ceti system. Also, if you start to collect side missions and main storyline missions, you’ll see exclamation points, question marks, and crosshairs focusing in on certain systems. The more of these that you have on the screen, the more available memory will be used up. I suggest that once you get a mission, you complete it, to keep the number of these objects off of the system and galaxy maps. I hope this information is helpful. Thanks again for taking the time to write to us.

Sincerely,

Support Services

So I wrote back:

Hi,

I’d like to breakdown your feedback piece by piece.

1. Calibrating the touch screen won’t help. The pieces I touched were highlighted, but then OTHER pieces moved. This is a bug, not a hardware issue.

2. The game freezing cannot be blamed on the hardware either. It’s a software flaw. One that you decided not to bother fixing.

3. This information was not helpful. If the game is so bad I don’t want to play it, playing it differently is not going to help. You sold me a crap game and I can’t return it. It can’t be patched because it’s for the DS.

4. I can’t believe you blamed the user. I’ve been playing console games for near 30 years. I think I know how these things work.

-Gordon

Of course I never heard back from them, and I felt like a fool for having been taken like a sucker for $30. The reviews of this game have been pretty good, but if you look at the Amazon page for the DS version, you’ll see nothing but pure hatred for the experience.

I decided at this point that I was no longer gonna be a sucker. I would do what I do for music: download the game to sample it, and then reward quality with a purchase of some kind. And it turns out it’s remarkably easy to find games to download. I downloaded a bunch of them, then went shopping for a “homebrew” card, and soon I will be sampling DS games instead of buying them.

And if anyone in the quickly dwindling ESA happens to be reading this, and wants to know why people are moving toward piracy, it’s not always about the money. Sometimes it’s about being treated properly as a Customer. An overreaction? Probably. But once the card shows up in the mail, do you think I won’t use it?

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.

So if you read that last sentence, it says I had a great time with it before it went on eBay. Puzzle Quest Galactrix is going on eBay before having a great time with it. There’s no great time to be had here.

This game moves along so incredibly slowly. To get from one puzzle to the next takes 2-3 minutes. There’s a load time (a load time on a DS game!), the autosave, the incredibly poor navigation system, and the crap story. This is just miserable.

Then there’s the gameplay itself which is really clunky. There’s a mode where you race against time, and you have to wait for a couple of seconds after your previous move to make your next move. And the puzzle pieces break so slowly, which also counts against your time. If you’re in a battle, and you make a mistake, you lose your turn. At one point, I was trying to move a piece in the middle of my screen, and the game had some sort of bug that always made me choose a piece that was far away from where I was pointing. Finally, I chose a different piece and it moved the right one. Was this thing playtested?

I just hate this game. I hate playing it. I hate the look of it, the feel of it, and the speed of it. I am never playing this thing again.

I hate it; it hates me.

When I played Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for the OXB (Original X-Box — can we see if this acronym catches on?), I was defeated by that game’s awful camera. You’d be running across some wall, or leaping across some gap, and the camera would change angles just enough to have me fall to my death. The good news on Prince of Persia for PS3? You can’t die. The bad news? The camera changes angles just enough to have me nearly fall to my death.

This whole “you can’t die” thing supposedly makes this game easy, and yeah it really does. The combat is lame button mashing, and if you do manage to “die,” the character you’re traveling with will pull you out of death with her magic. What’s the point in that?

And the bits stolen from other games? Hello! Upon defeating a boss, you refertilize fertile lands (or something equally lame) by bringing color and flowers back to the world. The cut scene is basically a less artistic bite of Okami. What’s the point? If I want to do that, I’ll play Okami. It’s a better game.

As for the dialogue, oh goodness gracious, it hurts. If you can handle it, you can see what I mean in this video, part of a series that shows the entire game being played all the way through.

I don’t think this would be the worst game I could play right now, but I definitely don’t intend to finish it. It’s going back in the mail today.

This is always the longest thing I write every year. Comments of “tl;dr” will not be appreciated.

I also do this thing where I don’t choose my favorite album of the year until two years later. Maybe I haven’t heard it yet! I don’t have time to buy pirate every album that comes out during a year. So look for bonus content at the end, where I select my favorite album of 2006. The 2008 albums–11 of them–are listed in alphabetical order by artist.

Bloc Party – Intimacy. Another great album from Bloc Party. The lyrics on this album aren’t as personal or confessional as they were on A Weekend in the City, but whatever. It sounds great and it’s fun to drum along with. In my opinion, this album has some production issues; some of the tracks sound distorted when played on my car stereo. This is obnoxious, and cost the record some points. And yes, this is the actual CD, too.

Death Cab For Cutie – Narrow Stairs. I never buy it when a band says they are trying to work differently than they had worked previously, and that their new album will be a departure. I didn’t buy it here, but it doesn’t matter. There is one standout track that sounds different from their previous work–I Will Possess Your Heart, which is an instant inductee into the Stalker Song Hall of Fame. The rest sounds like good Death Cab For Cutie, which means I like it.

Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid. Here’s the album I listened to most often. I always champion Elbow, and tell people they should love them. I’m sure many people are sick of me talking about them. Well, this album won the Mercury Prize, an award given to the best album by a United Kingdom artist during the award year. Good for them! It’s Elbow’s best record, and the lyrics and vocals are uniformly excellent.

Foals – Antidotes. Last year, I called Battles “like King Crimson, but you can dance to it.” I should have saved that for Foals. I’ve seen this album called math rock, but it’s really just a dance record. There are spots where it delves into ska, with horns playing syncopated rhythms. There are spots where it falls into a Franz Ferdinand style groove, and then there’s some slower airy moments.

Girl Talk – Feed the Animals. The Internet is awash with blog posts about this CD. There’s nothing else I want to add to the debate right now. Let’s just say that this is one of my favorite albums to listen to and leave it at that. Is it fair use? Is it outright theft? I’ll let the lawyers sort it out, and I’ll just keep on dancing.

Helio Sequence – Keep Your Eyes Ahead. Helio Sequence is a band I thought was going to disappear, and I didn’t think I’d miss them. I had their previous album, and with the exception of Harmonica Song, I wasn’t all that fond of it. So when Pandora threw the track “The Captive Mind” at me, I was surprised at how much I liked it. I bought the album, and it turned out the whole thing was great. The singer/guitarist/songwriter dealt with some throat problems, and the incredible drummer had a short stint in Modest Mouse (listen to “The Ocean Breathes Salty”). They’ve come back stronger and better then ever.

Radiohead – In Rainbows. The Internet is also awash with blog posts about this album. I paid the minimum to download it when it came out, and have bought the physical CD as well (in Tokyo, where it came with a bonus CD). I was on the fence about whether or not I liked it until I saw Radiohead at the Hollywood Bowl this summer. On both nights, they played the entirety of the record, and by the end of those shows, I was a fan of the album. It’s an unfair advantage for them, I know.

Sons & Daughters – This Gift. This was the early Oscar contender that I nearly forgot about. Then I added it to my “2008 Contenders” playlist, and started running the album over and over again. I saw this band in Austin back in March, and bought this CD before I even left town. I listened to it a bunch in March, and then a bunch again this December. Admittedly, this is the one I had to add to make this list 11 albums long, but I didn’t think it fair to leave it off. I’ve said more about my process than about the album, but I’m out of room. Better listen to it yourself then.

The Ting Tings – We Started Nothing. This album features a couple of hard-to-avoid singles, “Shut Up and Let Me Go” and “That’s Not My Name.” There are people who may find these songs annoying, and they wouldn’t be wrong. If you’re not on the dance floor, these could be annoying songs. Overall, though, this record has a persistent dance groove and singable melodies. It’s not all shouting of inane lyrics. I promise.

TV on the Radio – Dear Science. I haven’t seen many top 10 lists that haven’t included this one. I’m not trying to be all different, so it’s here too. What this record offers that has been missing from TVotR’s previous output is space. It’s just easier to hear the different sounds, which makes it more pleasant to listen to, and also makes it Rock more when it wants to rock, and makes it a lot funkier when it’s trying to be funky. Just everything about this album is outstanding. In 2010, it will be a clear favorite for 2008′s album of the year.

Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend. Internet, awash, blog entries, blah blah blah. Some may feel like this record is a bit too “precious.” I tend to agree, but that’s not such a bad thing here. Precious records are good. If this band hadn’t been hyped to death, I would probably be begging people to listen to it. “Look,” I’d say, “he’s namedropping Peter Gabriel in a song that sounds like it might be a Peter Gabriel song!” OK, so maybe it is a bit too precious. I like it regardless. You will, too.

Here’s the secret text some of you have been waiting to see. As always, if you email gordon@isuckatvideogames.com with your snail mail address, I’ll send you the official Gordon’s Best of 2008 mix CD. This offer valid for the first 15 people to respond. Now, here are my choices in some specialty categories!

The “No apologies” song of the year: Miley Cyrus – See You Again (“See You Again”). I heard this song between sets at NoisePop last year. I asked Joel to use his Verizon song identification phone doohickey on it, but his battery was dead. So I jotted down the lyrics and looked it up when I got home. Miley Cyrus? Really? Hannah Montana? Whatever, this is a great pop song. Admittedly, the lyrics are a little childish. I do wonder, though. Is her best friend really named Leslie?

Live Album: Muse – HAARP. Read below for comments.

Favorite album of the Year For 2006: Muse – Black Holes and Revelations. It’s a bit unfair when a great live act like Muse releases a live album that features my favorite album of 2006. You can see me talk all about that album in my 2006 music review column. (Maybe it’s Googlable?) What’s good about it, however, is that I can use one song on my mix CD to represent both records. One of my dreams is to go to Wembley Stadium to see a Muse show. This live CD (and the accompanying DVD) have shown me that this is not some sort of crazy dream. It would be an amazing show. I particularly like when he yells out “C’mon England!” And of course, this recording features my absolute favorite thing in the world: giant crowds singing along with guitar solos. (See my coverage of Rush in Rio for more on this phenomenon.)

Only movie soundtrack I actually bought, thus my choice for soundtrack of the year: The Dark Knight by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. Every bunch of years, I buy a score album from a movie. It’s incredibly rare. In fact, it’s possible that the last one I bought was Antz. This one, though, is a bit of a dream team of film composers, and the score that came out of it is great to listen to, especially very loudly. My car shakes at parts. I feel like Batman and want to fight crime. I just don’t think the suit would fit me all that well.

Thanks for reading! Comments are encouraged.