Friday, October 01, 2004

NEITHER FISH NOR FOWL

I've played a couple of hours of Final Fantasy X, which my 9-year-old stepson is playing passionately. (He's played about 24 hours of it.) I find it frustrating. It is less a game than a narrative punctuated by game elements. The computer seizes control for long sections, playing computer rendered movies that you can only watch. You theoretically get control back between the movies, but the computer tells you what the terrain looks like and gives you a little red arrow to point the direction in which you're supposed to go. The only places you have full control are during battles (turn based) and when upgrading your characters. You are going to see what they planned out, or your character dies. There are no different strategies for playing the game.

I'm much more interested in strategy games like Civilization and Warcraft and SimCity, where you can pursue different strategies and get different results. I'm interested in Fable, which is only available on X-box -- supposedly it's a role playing game where your character actually changes according to your actions, which is how it is in real life. But I'm not sure it's the killer app worth buying an X-box before; and then there's the moral question of whether to willingly buy a Microsoft product.

5:01 PM

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