Baud Attitude

I can now confirm what I’d heard about Star Trek Legacy’s length: It’s a pretty short game, especially if you’re playing it on easy.

About the time you’re starting to feel really comfortable with the controls and flying your ships around and commanding your small fleet, you get a whole bunch of achivement points and then you get to watch ending credits.

Still, I paid 8 bucks for it.

It was definitely worth 8 bucks, once I got past the “Enterprise” missions, anyway.  The Kirk missions were great fun, and four out of five of the “Next Generation” missions were also great fun.

The exception being “Revelations”, which was mindbogglingly annoying and which is also the very first mission in the Next Generation storyline and which has a really long cutscene for you to sit through every time you restart the mission, which in my case was about 8 times.

It actually sent me running to Xbox forums to get tips, which I am somewhat shamed to admit because of the whole, you know, playing on Easy and everything.

On the other hand, “Revelations” starts with Picard assuming command of the Stargazer, which is one of those total-fanboy-glee-moments, and the storyline takes you all the way through until after the events of Nemesis and the end of Voyager.  It’s a neat way to bookend the whole Next Generation timeline.

OK, now I’m going to stop with the whole Trek thing; I’m starting to scare myself.

It is no coincidence that the last Star Trek licensed game I played was Star Trek : Strategic Operations Simulator, a vector graphics arcade game released in 1982.  For some reason, the series has a reputation for attracting the worst sort of cash-in games, and I haven’t really been a fan of the show since Next Gen went off the air.

That having been said, when Next Gen WAS on the air, I used to watch it with a near-religious fervor every Saturday, and that explains the brief and compelling moment of nostalgia I experienced when flipping through a clearance bin at Sears several months ago and finding a copy of Star Trek Legacy for the 360 marked down to $7.97.

I’m playing it now because I’m actually running a little short on 360 games and it’s the most convenient system to play.  It’s this, Sneak King, or Eternal Sonata, really, unless I want to try another driving game or go insane and try to play through Viva Pinata.

It has a reputation for being pretty short, which I can appreciate even though I can’t corroborate it yet, and for having nice graphics, which I can report is also the case; at least, the ship models are quite nice looking.

I have a hell of a time actually controlling my ship, but it seems to be OK because I have three other AI-controlled ships on my side and they do an OK job of killing anything I can manage to target.

Unfortunately, every one of the three missions I’ve played thus far has some sort of “protect” element to it, but at least the game is somewhat forgiving if you let the occasional medical ship go down in flames while you’re protecting two other medical ships halfway across the map.

Also unfortunately, the game makes you start out playing through missions from the “Enterprise” era, which is not doing anything to feed my sense of nostalgia, but I understand that there are only 5 missions per era so I should be on to Classic-Trek-era missions soon enough.

After this, I’m going to need to play something REALLY naughty if I’m to have any hope of restoring my pervy-fanboy cred.

I was terribly tempted to claim that, upon returning Bioshock to the shelf, I took the next game off the shelf to play, and that game was Bullet Witch.

To be perfectly honest, though, if I’d done that, I would have had to skip over Blue Seed, Blue Stinger, Bloodrayne, Bloodrayne 2, Bombastic, Boulder Dash EX, Brain Age, Brave Story, Breath of Fire III and Brute Force.

I don’t actually shelve Saturn, Dreamcast, Xbox, PC, PS2, GBA, DS, PSP and Playstation games on the same shelf, you realize. This is all just hypothetical.

And I HAVE finished Brute Force, at least.  AND Boulder Dash EX AND Brave Story.

But I digress.

Ignoring - for the moment, and hopefully for all time - my organizational scheme and in particular that part of it that is “Games that start with B”, let’s get back to Bullet Witch.

Bullet Witch is one of those games that gets criticized as being, well, sort of the swimsuit issue.  The implication is that, if you’re buying it because the character designs are, as they say, relevant to your interests, it doesn’t matter that the articles aren’t up to par.

See also: Dead or Alive, the aforementioned Bloodrayne games, Final Fantasy X-2, most of the Simple 2000 catalog, so on and so forth.

This is, at least in part, a valid point.

Bullet Witch suffers from quite embarrassing pop-up of scenery elements, the textures are nothing to write home about, and the AI alternates between embarrassingly stupid - shooting into walls while you’re shooting them in the back - and annoyingly deadly - one-shot sniper kills in certain levels.

Pointing out that the main character is pretty high on the pander-factor is also a valid critique - she wears one of those horribly-inappropriate-for-combat fantasy outfits, including some quite absurd heels - and, if the default outfit is not sufficiently eyeroll-inducing, you can download new outfits, including one with a white blouse and plaid pleated skirt.

The heels appear to be a constant, regardless of outfit.

But…

(You knew there was going to be a “but”, didn’t you?)

…sometimes, you don’t want an AAA title that had dozens of artists modelling every square inch of your virtual environment and obsessing over details, with complex and fully-developed characters.  Sometimes, you just want to run around, in a skimpy outfit, with a massively improbably gun, and shoot things.

This would be where Bullet Witch starts to deliver; your character is armed with a vaguely broom-shaped machinegun that’s as tall as she is and a spellbook full of suitably destructive spells.  As you finish levels, you get skill points with which to buy different broom-shaped guns and more spells.

Telekinesis is particularly nicely done.  When someone is shooting at you from behind a car, it is deeply satisfying to - instead of, say, trying to aim for the small exposed part of them holding the gun - telekinetically pick up the car and hit them with it.

You could also, say, make spikes grow out of the ground underneath them, with highly comical results*, hit them with lightning strikes, blow up the car with magically-fire-imbued bullets… and I’m sure lots of other fun things that I just haven’t unlocked yet.

* Highly comical for anyone not being impaled, anyway.

The game has a reputation for being quite short, which is something I can appreciate in a game now and again, and it tanked hard enough upon release to be marked down quickly; I got it for $14 new several months ago and it’s been sitting on the shelf - actually, in a box, but we weren’t going to talk about that any more - just waiting for me to get around to it.

Having done so, I give it a provisional thumbs-up.  Provisional, of course, in that I have heard that some of the boss fights are on the frustrating side and I haven’t faced any of them yet.  If, in a couple of days, I’m pulling the disc out of the 360, snapping it in two and mailing the shards to the developers with a post-it attached reading “this is you, if I ever get my hands on you”, I will revise my opinion.

…

A follow-up to the above:

I decided that I’d play for a little bit longer before actually posting today’s entry, and wound up playing for the four hours it took to finish the game.  A good hour of that was spent on the final boss alone; I didn’t die but he took ages to wear down.  Definitely one of the more epic boss fights; I think he went through five stages before finally falling over.

Given that I had the controller glued to my hands for that long, I think I can ditch the “provisional” part of that thumbs-up.  Good stuff.

For right now, I think I’m running
A race I know I’m gonna win
And I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing
I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing

– I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing (Pet Shop Boys)

I’ve never sat down with a racing game with the intent of Finishing The Damn Thing.  I buy them occasionally, go a few rounds against CPU opponents, and hit the annoying point in the difficulty continuum where the game expects you to know a) how to brake, and b) how to finish races without crashing too much.

At that point, I usually lose a couple dozen races in a row and give it up.

Flatout Ultimate Carnage has been quite an exception in all regards.

It’s not that it doesn’t require occasional use of the brake, because it does, and I have reluctantly and begrudgingly learned how to occasionally let up on the gas pedal and even brake now and again in order to go around corners.

It’s also not that I’ve not lost, well, several dozen races in a row at times.  The sixth cup in Street Mode, for example, is straight-up broken in terms of difficulty.  It took me probably 6 hours of driving to beat that one damned cup.  (I then placed first in the seventh, eight, ninth, and tenth cups, so I think I am justified in bitching about #6)

But, it seems that I can deal with both of those frustrations as long as I get to do one simple thing:  Hit stuff.  Lots of stuff, including other cars, hazard cones, stacks of tires, panes of glass, gas pumps, traffic lights, stop signs, light posts, patio furniture, mall carts, uh… well, lots and lots of stuff.

And when you hit it, it all goes flying in magnificent fashion.  Of course, you’ve also got about a 50% chance of spinning wildly out of control.  More on that later.

That, it turns out, is enough to keep me going; that and a sheer bloody-mindedness that I have never before applied to any racing game and refuse to apply to any racing game in the future.

End result?  I beat Flatout mode tonight, getting a rather pathetic little cinema, an achievement telling me that I had, in fact,  beaten Flatout mode, and a considerable amount of satisfaction.

I never DID manage to beat two of the time trials in Flatout mode, I will admit, but it turns out that you don’t actually have to do the events.  They’re optional.  You just have to place in all of the cups.

If I’d known this in advance, it would have saved me an awful lot of frustration, particularly involving the “Pinegrove 3″ track.

I have many unkind thoughts for the designer of this track.  I will not voice them here because, well, they are the kind of unkind thoughts that might seem justified and funny and hah hah hah right now, but if anything ever happened to the chap I wouldn’t want to have committed them to the web where humorless people might find them and ask humorless questions.

Ahem.

Pinegrove 3 and Street Cup #6 aside, Flatout mode was great fun.

I will admit, to address one common complaint I see online, that it takes a certain degree of suspension of disbelief to make it fun.

You have to put up with the fact that you can, at times, drive through telephone poles without slowing down… but, at other times, hitting an innocuous-looking scrap of plywood on the track will send you careening out of control, letting all the drivers you’ve been assidously blocking for the last lap zip past you and condemn you to a miserable finish instead of the glorious victory that was IN YOUR GRASP, DAMNIT, IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR THAT ONE GODDAMNED LITTLE BIT OF WOOD THAT YOU COULD BARELY EVEN SEE AND THAT CERTAINLY SHOULDN’T HAVE MADE YOU SKID INTO THE GODDAMNED WALL.

Again, ahem.

As I was saying, If you can let yourself get past the crazy physics engine when it is working against you, and just enjoy the crazy physics engine when it is making pretty showers of destruction, it is a heck of a ride. 

OK, so a little more on Flatout: Ultimate Carnage, just because I got an achievement that was both insulting and strangely satisfying.

There’s a computer-controlled driver in Flatout UC named “Frank Malcov”.

Frank drives a big SUV, and he’s not a very good racer.  He never wins a race, as far as I can tell, and that’s not his purpose on the track.

Frank exists to be the bastard who, when he’s in third place and you’re in fourth, deliberately wreck himself AND you in order to stop you from catching up.  When I was just getting started with the game, I had a heck of a lot of 8th-and-lower place finishes as a result of old Frankie boy doing something mindbogglingly suicidal and aggrivating.

It is rare that I have actual hatred for an NPC, and I think that some credit is due the folks at Bugbear Entertainment for managing it.

Today I got the achievement “Frank Malcov Award”, which has the description of “Your driving makes Frank Malcov proud!”

There’s no other information, and there’s a fair amount of debate online as to what exactly counts for this achievement, but here’s my thought:

I got this directly after a race which I won by forcing the lead car into a wall just before the finish line, then driving head-on into another wall, which - while not on the track - was past the finish line.

So basically I think “Making Frank Malcov Proud” consists of being an absolute bastard to someone who’s about to win.

As previously noted, my poor Xbox 360 went off into the wild and scary world that is the Microsoft repair center in Texas, someone else’s poor, refurbished 360 was sent to me in its place and all should have been well again.

That is, it was mostly well again except for my XBLA titles, which were still tied to the last console.

Fortunately, it only took 17 minutes on the phone to get it straightened out, even though “getting it straightened out” just meant that they walked me through the license reassignment tool that you’re supposed to use when you BUY another 360, and which I don’t think you’re supposed to have to use when you have another 360 given to you by Microsoft.

This was good timing, since Xbox Live is down today - if I’d gotten the whacky urge to boot up Trigger Heart Exelica or Omega Five, I’d have been severely vexed.

Cripes, I played too much Everquest, I keep trying to type that word up there as “vxed”.

And now I’m consumed by the desire to say “keep trying to tipt that word up there as “vxed”.”

I need help.

Anyway, with my refurbished 360, I have been playing something a little out of character.

See, I have this good friend who keeps trying to get me hooked on two genres: Racing games, and tactical shooters.

This hasn’t worked out too well.  I did play through Rainbow Six: Vegas, but honestly that was helped considerably by the ability to put a snake cam under a door, target two or three bad guys, and tell my squad to go kill them all while I cowered in a corner.

Still, it was a good time spent blowing up stuff in Vegas, and I may even get the sequel once it drops to 20 bucks.

Racing games?  Not at all.  I’m not a Car Guy, so I don’t have the “cars-as-porn” thing going, and I have no clue about racing in Real Life, so there’s no attraction there.

I do occasionally buy hovercraft racing games - you know, Wipeout, F-Zero, even Extreme-G.  These have loud techno soundtracks and shiny graphics, which is all I really need for entertainment.

I play them a little bit and put them away.

The same goes for Daytona USA, which I’ve bought three times so far - on the Saturn when it was released, on the Saturn when they released Daytona CCE, and again on the Dreamcast.  I am Not Any Good at Daytona USA, but it’s a Sega-solidarity thing, really.

I’ve also got Ridge Racer for my PSP.  I don’t know WHY I have Ridge Racer for the PSP other than that it was the Game You Have To Buy With Your PSP, If You Already Have Lumines And Wipeout.  I’m going to blame it on Reiko Nagase.

It comes as something of a surprise, then, to find myself putting in “Flatout: Ultimate Carnage” as my “I don’t know what to do with myself, and I have a free half hour” game.

I’ve just unlocked the last three Cups in the Derby mode, which also unlocked a bunch of new cars, I’ve got $36000 in my virtual-car-spending-account, and if I didn’t have work in the morning, I’d be building myself a new set of wheels and getting down to some serious vehicular mayhem / racing.

Well, Microsoft gets reasonably good marks for turnaround time in supplying me with a “Certified Microsoft Replacement Xbox360 Console” to replace my sadly deceased console.  It arrived last night, happily encased in a plain, but well-padded box which I will be retaining for the eventual day when I have to send it back for another replacement.

Of course, I didn’t luck into a new, HDMI-enabled, quieter-fan & drive console.  The one I got back was actually about a month older than the one I sent in.

Oh, and also of course, Microsoft botched the license reassignments, so I can’t actually play any of my XBLA titles without being logged into Xbox Live, even after following their instructions to redownload them from the Marketplace download history.

This would be why I hate the idea of download services instead of having physical media.  I’m going to have to call Microsoft’s customer service and try to get it sorted out, and I’m really not looking forward to that.

At least I’m only in for about 50 bucks worth of XBLA stuff.  Space Giraffe, Geometry Wars, Trigger Heart Exelica, Omega Five, Boogie Bunnies, and Rez HD are the only things I’ve paid for - if I can’t get Undertow and Carcassone back, it won’t bother me all that much.

But they had best get me back my shooters, or, or, or…

well, I guess I’d have to pout at them, or something.

That’s no idle threat.

You know,

“There’s a Hole In My Entertainment Center (Where My Xbox Used to Be)”

would be an awesome country song title.

I found a box, printed up the shipping label, and took my Xbox 360 to the nearby Staples UPS counter. It’s out of my hands now.

Tomorrow I get to call Microsoft and ask them how to get my 360 fixed.

I’m actually GLAD this finally happened.

My console has a manufacture date of 9/11/2006 and I was worried that it might survive, against considerable odds, until its third birthday - and, thus, be out of warranty - before it finally died.

It allllmost made it to 2 years old. That’s pretty good, I think.
Maybe the 360 Replacement Gods will be smiling on me and they’ll see fit to upgrade me to a new model with a quieter fan and HDMI output. That would be a beautiful thing.

Update: After a reasonably short - 20 minutes - conversation with a CSR over at Xbox service, they’re emailing me a shipping label to use when sending the console back to them.  No free shipping box for me, but they took great pains to reinforce the whole thing about the repair being free of charge because Microsoft has extended the warranty to three years for this issue and aren’t I a lucky guy?

Despite horror stories I’ve heard about enforced troubleshooting, the CSR didn’t make me jump through too many hoops. He had me unplug all the cables, plug them back in, verified that I was still seeing three red lights, and skipped straight to the “it’s broken, we’ll fix it” part of his script.

There was no nonsense about removing the hard drive, laying the system flat, plugging it into the mains instead of into an outlet strip, none of that, and no questions about whether I had done anything to the console or tried using any non-Microsoft-approved accessories with it.

I quite appreciated this, though I was ready to step through it all for the sake of not causing some poor phone slave too much grief.

So, 24-48 hours until I get a shipping label, then 2-3 weeks turnaround. Here’s hoping it goes well.