Well, the November LAN party has come and gone and this time people actually beat me to writing about it. I think we’re getting old and all self-reflective. More on that later.

As I anticipate (perhaps prematurely) on getting back into PC games and RPGs after a decade hiatus*, I thought of Steam as Wiiware or XBox Live for the PC. Wiiware has sold me the bulk of my Wii games, so I thought Steam was a great idea too. But opinions seem to be antipodal on the subject and I wanted to learn why. I had a ready pool of interviewees since Team Fortress 2 (more on that later) requires Steam to play.

It turns out there are two problems. The first is the good old hobbyist-hardcore argument: there’s no need in the PC world for Steam because manually buying, installing and patching games always worked before. This led into an amusing discussion about how the PC world is full of simplified, shortened console ports these days. Amusing to me, at least, as a console gamer who gets bored with 90% of games over 20 hours long. Anyway, the second reason is pretty simple: Steam is a bad implementation of what the Wii and XBox get right. It’s bloated, invasive and incessantly offers services that you want only rarely. Such as seeing when your friends are online when you just started your computer to, I don’t know, change wallpapers or check e-mail. I don’t actually know what the other guys do at home on their computers besides play games because none of them work from home anymore. I know Josh codes at home, but I’m nearly convinced that he actually writes code in Notepad. Maybe he dual boots into Linux, that’s a possibility.

I did play a few network games this time around (more on that later), but most of the play time I put in was on the Wii and the XBox. I saw a lot of games that I had been curious about but hadn’t had a chance to play. I’ll just summarise my impressions in a sentence each, because some interactions were pretty hazy early-morning button pressing sessions. The haziness was not helped by Microsoft’s American re-ordering of the classic SNES ABXY button configuration and their stupid ordering of LT (left-top) on bottom and LB (left-bottom) on top. I suppose I should be happy they didn’t reverse the Back and Forward buttons too.

Ahem. So

• Rock Band 2 has Eye of the Tiger. That’s the only song I recognised—it was followed immediately by some punk-like blah that sounded like it was written about teenagers instead of manly boxers from the 70s.
• Assassin’s Creed looked interesting, like a cross between Prince of Persia and Metal Gear. I’m not sure I could stomach the constant assassinations, though.
• Same for Fallout 3, only more so. Looked fascinating, but I really needed the VAT aiming system to play. Unfortunately, the VAT made the already bloody kills go through the roof. Sorry. Not my cup of tea.
• Even without the extreme violence, Gears of War 2 wouldn’t be my cup of tea. I find modern war (games) boring at best and stomach churning at worst. For some reason Gears was closer to boring, maybe because the composite connection we had jury-rigged to Butch’s TV wasn’t clear enough.
• Mario Galaxy is a lot of fun and very creative. The difficulty seems to ramp up fairly quickly, but that may just be that I played a whole bunch in one sitting—the first levels are actually forgiving because there’s no way to fall off the planet.
• Okami, a game I brought because I haven’t had a chance to play at all, looked interesting but a little lacking on the actual gameplay. In the first two hours, I saw some beautiful scenery and interesting conversations, but the battles were too confusing to be enjoyable. Maybe it’s just a problem of pacing and I will figure it all out eventually.
• On a related note, the battles of Twilight Princess are a lot of fun, except maybe for the grab-em-all electrical field ones. It doesn’t seem fair that Nintendo can make a game more fun just by making you shake the controller to attack. But it works.

Remember when I asked about the perfect mouse? Turns out three other people are still using Microsoft’s Intellimouse Optical. Matt, Tristan and I think it was Joe.

Warhammer is pretty cool in that it allows team-based instances that create a LAN party atmosphere pretty close to Team Fortress 2 (more on that later) but also allows people to quest on their own. I learned that questing is so dumbed down in these games that it only requires half a brain, so I used the other half of Tristan’s brain to hold a decent conversation. I tried this with Thomack while he played Team Fortress (more on that later) but it just wasn’t the same: he eventually accused me of being an albatross and sent me to hang around Butch instead.

He was civil about it though. The Game Anthropologist makes the case that Team Fortress 2 encourages more civility because of its long heritage, team scoring, automatic taunts and medic class. I don’t buy his arguments completely—it could just be that we are getting old. It definitely seemed like there a lot more sleeping at this party than in previous years. Even the early birds weren’t quite as early in their disturbed sleep patterns.

Well, the last thing I should note is that I lost a good couple of rounds of Starcraft to Josh Rose. I hate losing multiplayer games (especially chess) but it wasn’t so bad. The truth is that I’m no good at strategy games, I just like to watch the awesome graphics as my little men run around. So in Starcraft I like the Zerg because you get more little men (and it’s easier to generate an army from the keyboard).

*I didn’t play any PC games after Jedi Knight 2, Descent 3 and Age of Empires 2—roughly the point at which I discovered emulation would let me play all the SNES games I couldn’t buy as an impoverished teenager. I didn’t play RPGs after Josh burned Vamo’ alla Flamenco into my brain on his endless quest for better Chocobo parts (???) in FF9.