Bitter Sweet

This last Friday I caught Bitter Sweet at the Triple Door. I first heard the band up on Zune Arts, which if you haven’t seen yet you should totally check out - there are a lot of cool animations up there. Bitter Sweet’s debut album, The Mating Game, is really solid; varied, yet cohesive. I wasn’t surprised at all when I heard that one of the Bitter Sweet duo was also one of the founding members of Supreme Beings of Leisure. There’s a lot of similarities in the grand instrumentation and the quality of the vocals (although it’s a different singer).

Anyway, when I spotted the poster that said Bitter Sweet would be at the Triple Door, I was pretty excited. The Triple Door is a great venue: super classy with excellent food. It’s a great place to go if you’re really interested in listening and won’t mind not being able to dance. Bitter Sweet has a lot of funk in them, so they didn’t really fit into that “sit and listen” bucket most of the time, but I was busy munching on tasty schezwan green beans so I didn’t really mind.

I had a good time at the show, but I have to say that Bitter Sweet is a lot better in the studio. The actual band is only two people. This performance had six people. The actual required instrumentation of most of their songs is more on the order of ten or more. It’s hard to get into a performance where almost half of what you’re hearing is prerecorded. Which you would think would keep the integrity of the songs up to the quality of the studio recordings, but it didn’t. The show had a very rough start with the levels being way off and the tempo being rushed. They found their stride a couple songs in, but it never quite had the impact of their fine tuned studio recordings. You may just think I’m a stickler for production, but generally I actually prefer the grit of live performances. I spent a lot of the show watching the added musicians to try and figure out what they were actually contributing to what I was hearing. I never did figure that out, partially because the show was just so darn short. Bitter Sweet really needs to cough up another album to fill out their sets. I may sound pretty critical of the performance here, but I was happy to support the band and I’d snatch up any second album in a heartbeat.

Apparently I would have been better off never having heard that debut album before coming to the show. A friend that we (the already initiated) invited to the show had never heard the band before. And she promptly bought the album the next day. So if you had never heard how good the band was in the studio, apparently that show rocked.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

Played on PC

I held it off as long as possible, but at last I have hit level 70 in World of Warcraft (TBC reviews: GameSpot, GameSpy). I had no interest in rushing the journey from 60 to 70 because I knew that the returns diminish pretty dramatically after you hit the level cap. It’s likely that Blizzard has handled it better this time around, but it’s a fundamental limitation of this kind of game that at some point the content thins out and they have to string you along with a decreasing time/value proposition. So I’ve absolutely taken my time to smell all the flowers as I’ve strolled through The Burning Crusade.

The quality of content added in this expansion is undeniably of a higher quality than what was previously available. The quests are more interesting, the zones flow better, the rewards are more diversified, the instances are more streamlined… everything’s just plain better. This is true not just of the new Outland 60 to 70 content, but also of the new 1 to 20 content for the two new races: blood elves and draenei. Leveling a new character through the first two zones is a much deeper experience than it used to be. Unfortunately then you get dumped off in the old stuff for the next 40 levels. Which leaves sitting here with a level 20 blood elf, thinking “do I really want to go through all that again?”

Meanwhile back in Outland, my level 70 druid has a similar dilemma: how do I want to spend my time at the level cap? For me the game is all about the locations. So in the meantime the answer to my question is easy, as that of the seven zones in Outland I’ve only really cleared out five and a half of them. Plus there are fifteen instances on your way to 70, and I’ve only visited six of those. On top of that there are the more hardcore ones that require uber gear, but I recognize that I’ll likely never see those. So from where I am now I’m just going to keep doing what I have been doing: solo questing through the zones, grouping up to do an instance every now and then, and occasionally doing commando style solo runs on the instances that previously owned me so that I can convince myself that I’m a badass.

I don’t feel like I’ve hit the wall yet, and I’m optimistic that when I do I’ll realize it and have the self control to just stop and go play another game or something. My achievement point addiction and WoW addiction will continue to battle it out, striking some sort of tenuous balance. And then when my crack-riddled psyche needs some rest I can flail around like a crazy person with my Wii. Problem solved.

Warioware: Smooth Moves

Played on Wii

Warioware: Smooth Moves (GameSpy, GameSpot, GameFly) is my fourth contact with the Warioware series. And it feels like all the previous iterations were just building up to this one. It arrived on the GBA. Multiplayer was added when it was ported to the GameCube. When it hit the DS it brought a more intuitive set of controls. And then it revisited the GBA to experiment with motion controls (which is the one title I missed). And now it’s here on the Wii, and the Wiimote makes it the best yet.

Warioware has always been crazy, and there’s a group of people that have always found it appealing. But bringing the whole experience to life with the motion controller makes it far more approachable. Seeing some ambiguous one-word explanation and being expected to press a button or do something on the D-pad just wasn’t that intuitive. But physically shaking that banana or turning that key is obvious. In the past, multiplayer with Warioware was a brutal matchup of those who knew the games and those who didn’t. But the gap is much narrower with Smooth Moves, making party style multiplayer viable after only a quick introduction.

I’ve said before that I want my games to be more exciting than reality. Warioware shows the exception to this rule. The microgames are generally the most mundane tasks imaginable (like vacuuming or sharpening a pencil). But throwing a set of these tasks at you in disorienting rapid succession somehow makes that all okay. And mixing those in with more fantastic tasks like throwing shurikens at impeding ninjas or lasering down giant monsters can’t help but make you smile.

The one complaint I have with Warioware is that although the controls are more intuitive they’re decidedly more flakey. There are times when you tweak out the sensor and miss a round even though you were doing the right thing. And if the game were less fun this would be really aggravating. But before you have a chance to really get mad a new game is coming your way and you’ve forgotten all about it.

Viva Piñata

Played on Xbox360

I usually wait until after I finish a game before I review it. But I’m pretty sure that Viva Piñata doesn’t have an end. I guess the closest thing would be getting all the achievement points. But given all the other games I have going on right now (ahem, new Wii), I don’t think that’s happening any time soon. So I’m going to jump the gun and tell you what I think now instead of later.

Viva Piñata received a lot of critical acclaim (links: GameSpy, GameSpot, GameFly), and with good reason. It’s a charming game with adorable graphics and compelling gameplay. It’s hard to stop playing Piñata once you’ve started, because there’s always something to do in your garden. Advancing through the game and discovering all the creatures is genuinely fun. But there’s something about it that’s just… off.

The thing that initially confused (and disturbed) me about Viva Piñata is that despite all the cute creatures with personalization options, this is not a game about enjoying your piñatas. It’s about getting over attachments. You start the game intuitively caring a lot for your individual piñatas. But to advance in the game you need to grow heartless and start selling of your piñatas and feeding them to other Piñatas. You quickly learn to not get too attached to your piñatas because eventually you’re going to have to do away with them. Don’t bother spending money to buy a cute hat for your Newtgat, because half an hour later you’re going to be feeding him to that Badgesicle that just moved in. And definitely don’t stop to give him a name - just keep it at “Newtgat 2” so that it’s easier to say goodbye. As a game that’s targeted at kids (with it’s own Saturday morning cartoon and everything), that underlying message is kinda disturbing.

But hey, I can’t be too harsh. Because even as I’m sitting here preparing to retire Viva Piñata to the shelf for awhile, I kinda still wish I was playing it. My memories are filled with delightful moments of coaxing new creatures to join my garden and rejoicing when they finally decide to stay. But somehow my brain has blocked out all those other memories… like when I was too slow to call the doctor and my piñata died from some crazy candy fever… or when I had to put down my first Raisant because he picked a fight with everybody… or when garden filled up and I had to sell off entire species to make room for some new hotness…

Damn. It’s a wonder I don’t curl up in a ball and cry myself to sleep after playing this game.

Perspective

One interesting aspect of the new Armory feature for WoW is that you can now go look up that bastard who corpse camped you for half an hour. Now I know that I was only one of 49514 (Contrast that with my lifetime kill count of 2372, which unfortunately I was never able to add that bastard to).

I play on a PvP server because quite frankly it makes everything just a tad more interesting. I’m one of those people that actually enjoyed Ultima Online’s PvP system. Nothing made your heart beat quite as fast as having the bounty board’s number one menace riding towards you. Likewise with WoW, the possibility of random PvP adds a wild card into what could otherwise just be a standard RPG grind.

However, PvP is only really fun when it’s relatively even. And unfortunately the design goals of the endless MMORPG gear grind are at odds with the design goals of fair PvP. Even WoW’s reward for PvP is just more gear. Which is a bulletproof “rich get richer” game design. That would maybe work if the PvP matchmaking brackets were based on gear value, rather than the mostly useless measure of Level (given that there’s a level cap and everyone’s at it). Supposedly they’ve fixed that and added a better matchmaking system for the Arenas, but those aren’t “casual” friendly as they require you to form a regular team of consistent players. Essentially leaving no real viable outlet for the occasional PvPer.

But this is all part of the appeal of MMORPGs, I guess. In a singleplayer RPG, you’re always the hero. You rise up and save the world. You’re special. But in an MMORPG, you’re competing against thousands of other potential heroes just like you. Which means you’re guaranteed to be outclassed by a large percentage of them, making your digital self just as mundane as your physical one.