James Cunningham
With September almost half over at the time of this writing, the summer gaming months have faded away while the fall crush of titles is only just starting. At the moment, though, I'm not feeling particularly overwhelmed by the millions of things I want, possibly even need, to buy and play. It's a bit of a relief, because very little kills the joy of a new game more than knowing there's something else coming out one day later, and I'd better have fun with what I've got now because leisure time is limited. I can only play so much, after all.
With the middle of September also comes the Tokyo Game Show, and lots of news. Microsoft finally announced the Xbox 360's launch date, which was nice to finally pin down. For a while there I was picturing a November 5th press conference with a harried rep saying something along the lines of "Yeah, day after tomorrow. Sorry about that, we just wanted to be sure." Not to be outdone, Nintendo revealed their Revolution controller, sending message boards across the internet into a tizzy. Personally, I'm taking a wait and see attitude. My initial reaction was one of utter confusion, but the more I hear about it the more I want to play with it. I've no idea how it'll work in the end, but I have to admit to being very interested in seeing how it plays out.
For gaming this month I snagged Nintendogs, which I haven't played much because I feel weird talking to a machine, and the charming Graffiti Kingdom. I also haven't yet beaten Killer 7, but still pick it up now and then. Normally, once a game has been out this long and unbeaten, it becomes just another half inch of height on the ever-growing pile of shame, but Killer 7 has managed to avoid that fate somehow. There's something in it that keeps me coming back, and that's not a quality a lot of games have. At this rate I figure I'll have it beaten in January, maybe.
My pleasant surprise for the month is The Neverhood, a game I figured I'd missed and would never get a chance at playing. It's a claymation point & click adventure that was released before Skullmonkeys, and a friend of mine who still had a copy lent it to me. The Neverhood is wonderfully insane, and the puzzles have all had logical solutions in their bizarre, abstract way. It and Skullmonkeys were both created by Doug TenNapel, as was Earthworm Jim (and BoomBots, but I'm trying to forget that), and I still hold out hope that someday the gaming industry will throw him a big fat sack of cash so his brand of insanity can run wild again.
Finally, I learned a lesson about reviewing games in advance this month. The game in question, Atlus' Trauma Center: Under the Knife, won't have its review posted until October 11, but there are a few things I can say about it now. First, it was well worth the playing, and second, I haven't had to exert that much gaming muscle in a long, long time. It was the good kind of gaming workout too, where after the stage is completed I could tell where I'd been blowing it before, either by wasting time or misjudging the stage's priorities. Beating Trauma Center's final stage, which I swore (loudly, and with much four-letter word usage) was impossible for mere humans, turned out to be one of the more rewarding bits of gaming I've done.
So what did I learn? Beating a game that very few people have played means that there's nobody to talk about it with. There are very few previews for the game, no threads full of people chatting back and forth about it, and even if there were it's not something I'm allowed to talk about yet. In a way, it reminds me of what gaming was like before the internet. A game would look interesting, I'd pick it up without a whole lot of information to go on, and play it free of outside opinions. Any trouble I'd have would be mine and mine alone to deal with, and the same for any triumphs. The internet and its thousands of forums has made gaming a more social experience, in its way, than I'd really noticed in the years that it's taken for things to change and develop.
