The View From The Foothills

I’ve been a video game junky this month. Just after Christmas I
went out and bought two new titles for the GameCube, Metroid
Prime and Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. The former is a
first person shooter; you’re a bounty hunter in a really neat suit of
powered armor, and you’re up against the Space Pirates. No, really!
The latter is a Dungeon’s and Dragons ™ game, the latest in the
Baldur’s Gate series. I’ve been playing them alternately.

Baldur’s Gate is a traditional hack-and-slash dungeon crawl
with really nifty graphics. Playing it was a lot like playing the
other D&D-style games I’ve been playing for years (notably Angband);
and if the graphics are better the game model is considerably less
sophisticated. But it was fun; I finished it this afternoon, killing
the last nasty monster with much less trouble than I expected.

Metroid Prime shows considerably more effort and
imagination, and it’s a lot of fun. In your powered suit you’ve got
(ultimately) four different kinds of ray gun, plus missiles. In
addition, you can turn yourself into a small metal ball and roll
through tight spaces. It’s a kick. There is but one thing I
really dislike about Metroid Prime–they don’t give you nearly
enough opportunities to save your game, which is annoying in several
different ways. I’ve been stuck in the same spot for almost a week;
every time I play I do a little better, and get a little bit
farther…and then die before getting to the next save station. Ugh.
Game designers, take note–if there’s more than twenty minutes of game
play between save stations, you’re doing something seriously
wrong.

A while back I talked about playing
GAUNTLET: Dark Legacy on our GameCube while my adoring fans, David and
James, watch in awe as I slay fierce and evil villains. There have been
new developments in the last week or so; Gauntlet is a cooperative game
for up to four players. So we got some more controllers,
and now David and James will sometimes play along. David’s getting
pretty good at it, though James idea of how to play is to run headlong
into danger, opening as many treasure chests as he can and shrieking with
glee when he picks up an object. He’s not to clear on how it all works,
so on those occasions when his character (”Green Dwarf”) survives to the
end of level he gives me a big adoring hug and says, “Daddy! You saved
me!” (James is three, by the way).

Anyway, today marks a major milestone; my original character, playing
alone, completed the last couple of levels, destroying the evil mage Garm
and purging the Realms of his evil. David was very impressed. I was
perhaps a little dismayed by the final statistics; over the last four of
five months, I’ve spent almost 48 hours getting to the conclusion. And
that doesn’t count the time spent playing with the boys. If nothing
else, I can honestly say I’ve gotten my money’s worth.

Here it is the 14th of November, and I
haven’t finished reading even one book. Part of the problem is the
Burton biography; I’m trying to finish it before going on to anything
else, and while Burton’s life was the stuff of adventure, the bio is
nothing like a novel. I sometimes wonder why I bother reading
biographies; I don’t care for tragedy, and most bios end only with the
death of the principal.

But it wouldn’t be fair to blame the whole thing on poor old Richard
Burton. A lot of blame has to be put squarely on our Nintendo GameCube.
I bought it six months or so ago; I thought the kids would enjoy it, and
I’d get to play it, too. The way it actually worked out is that I play
it and the kids watch.

“GAUNTLET: Dark Legacy” is one of the games I’ve been working my way
through. It’s surprisingly fun considering that the graphics are a
couple of generations behind the GameCube’s best output, and the user
interface is a disaster. As you go along you collect power-ups of
various kinds, and after nearly completing the game I still have no idea
how to figure out reliably what power-ups I have with me at any given
time.

It’s your basic “dungeon crawl”. You’re playing a mean, nasty, violent,
hair-trigger, suspicious sort of person, which is a good thing because
the world is full of nasty monsters trying to kill you. I find this sort
of thing relaxing. It lets my back brain freewheel on whatever problems
it’s working on, while my conscious brain works off stress. Sometimes in
the evening I’ll tell Jane, “Jane, I’m going to go upstairs and kill
things.” She says, “Have fun, dear.”

I’ve doubtless now lost the respect of many of my long-time readers by
making this admission; ah, well. If I get to feeling anxious about it, I
know the cure.