Most of the Xbox 360 games I like to play are violent, scary, gory, or some combination of the three, so generally I have to play them after little boys have gone to bed. Over the Christmas break, Lea walked in on a gnarly Gears of War 2 session.
“I don’t know how you sleep,” she said.
Well, with something like Gears 2, it’s easy. We still have thousands of new species to describe, but I’m pretty sure there’s not anything remotely like the toothy fellow above stomping around on Earth. It’s pretend. No problem.
So after I finished that game, I started playing Condemned: Criminal Origins. (Santa Claus found a good deal on both Condemned and Condemned 2.) This is part of a video game genre called survival horror. The designers drew upon Seven and The Silence of the Lambs to set the mood.
In this one, you run around in subway tunnels and utility rooms and stuff in the middle of the night. Most of the time there’s no power, and your flashlight isn’t very strong. Around every corner there could be a drug addict waiting to pound you with a steam pipe. There are few guns, and they aren’t reloadable, so most of the time you’ve got a pipe or an axe yourself. The soundtrack is brilliant, capturing rustling and other ambient noises quite realistically.
Does it give me nightmares? No. But it spins me up something fierce. There is a lot of “decompression” involved before I get horizontal.
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Well, I’ve checked my intellectual dipstick, and it seems that sumbitch is bone-dry for the evening….
Never got in to the horror genre. I’ve been a “Madden” addict for years. I’ve tried my hand at a few video game versions of “Dungeons & Dragons” and found “Pools of Radiance: The Ruins of Myth Drannor” to be my favorite. The stealth / action genre has really hooked me. I loved the first two “Syphon Filter” entries and the first four “SOCOM: US Navy SEALs.” The first “Splinter Cell” was pretty good, too. I’ve tried a MMORPG yet, but “Lord of the Rings Online” is calling very insistently. I just finished “Assassin’s Creed” last night. I liked the gameplay, but it only took me maybe 8 or 9 sessions at 1-2 hours a piece to finish the game, which I found disappointing. Hopefully the sequel, due out in 2010, will be better. “Alpha Protocol” is another title I’m looking forward to.
I enjoyed the first Splinter Cell and played through most of Pandora Tomorrow, but lost interest after that. I understand that games can’t offer multiple ways to solve problems everywhere, but I got aggravated with the high number of instances in which you had to solve a problem in a very specific way to have any chance of survival. I understand the point of the game is stealth, but I kept encountering places where it seemed like run ‘n’ gun ought to work, only to find that no, you have to stand in that sliver of shadow right there, then plant a mine, then…
I’m staying well away from MMORPGs. I detect great danger down that road.