Well, I was inspired by a post I read over on the Quarter to Three forums to try and streamline the time I spend playing video games. The basic premise being that there are only two levels of quality in games: games which immediately (or quickly, at any rate) engage, amuse, entertain you and hold your attention, and those that do not. Essentially, there are only good games, which are great, and bad games, which are not great. With the sheer amount of games being release for the PC and the three consoles, mediocrity, adequateness and "pretty good" games have got to go. I don't have that much time.

So, who makes the cut, and who doesn't? Well, let me elucidate the concept by outlining some classic examples of both categories.

(list below the fold!)

Good

• The Fallout games - engaging and clever from start to finish, never a dull moment.
  
• Morrowind - In addition to being a great game in its own right, mods and vast item collecting potential
  
• Neverwinter Nights - Not the game, but the enormous community mod scene. No game has ever given greater fun/$ value.
  
• Gran Turismo # - leveling up cars: mm mm good
  
• X-Com/UFO unknown - I hate the genre-smash. If you're going to do the genre-smash, here is your target; be this good, or don't bother.
  
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 - I'm not a "gameplay guy," but this was fun gameplay, character leveling, and collectalishness to the nth degree.
  
• Any Monkey Island title
  
• Full Throttle
  
• Half-Life
  
• Ultimas VI-VII
  

Not

• Baldur's Gate 2 - look, I know, great story, awesome dialog, memorable characters... bottom line: combat in the infinity engine is as pleasant as being sodomized with a flaming pineapple. If that's your thing, hey, don't let me keep you from the produce aisle.
  
• Final Fantasy X - spent several hours enduring way too many cutscenes about this jackass metrosexual soccer player and his band of merry men to get to the classic FF overmap. It doesn't have one.
  
• Ultimas VIII-Ascension - It wasn't broke. They fixed it. These games represent 85% of all accumulated dissapointment in my life. Thanks, guys.
  
• Any MMOG - If my enjoyment of a game is entirely dependent on the people I play with, then the game is essentially removed as a factor, isn't it?
  
• Tomb Raider - I. Hate. Jumping. Puzzles.
  
• Blood Omen - Gave birth to one of my favoritest game series plotlines ever, but, goddamn, even the cheat codes couldn't make this much DSBS (Dungeon-Slumming BullShit) bearable.
  
• Diablo - ClickClickClickitClick itagainOk, it's dead! ....Click the next one!

So, last week's contestants yielded an even 50-50 split, with Rome: Total War earning a lengthy stay on my hardrive, and Fable going to the big uninstaller in the sky.

Rome is great, Shogun was great (I missed Medieval, may go back around and hit it at some point), I just dig this series. The strategic and tactical portions are both very similar to Shogun, with enough differences to make things new, and, I think, give each game a spot in my heart. The simplified strategic game in Shogun actually appeals to me a bit more, in its board-gamishness; having micro-managerial control of movement within provinces doesn't do that much for me, gameplay-wise, but I suspect it will add more to its longterm depth. Being able to hide armies in forests for ambush and block strategic passes were great additions, and the larger numbers of possible allies/enemies is nice too. As for the battle portion, man, I don't know if I just sucked a Shogun, but while that game had me dreading combat and using auto-resolve, this game has me rushing into ill-conceived attacks just to get to the goods. I'm typically anti-RTS, but I found myself in the kitchen the other night excitedly regaling my wife with a description of how my light cavalry broke the Gallic left flank and was able to envelope the enemy general and his heavy infantry against my spearmen. I'm sure that wasn't the highlight of her night, but damn, dat's good gravy.

You know, it seems like, 2 years or so ago, I was really excited about Fable and Bard's Tale, and I think a lot of other people were, too. Then, well.... (sound of chirruping crickets)(no, crickets don't "chirp," they "chirrup." This is what you get from me, folks: pure Quality). Anyway, one day I noticed that Fable had apparently made its way to the PC, finally, so I, of course, decided to give it a shot. Wow, what a snoozefest. First of all, the setting... has no setting, at least initially. It's a medieval world with random monsters and a "guild of heroes" as a bad plot device. No history, no mysticism, no politics... blah. There's some passable collection components to the game, but not anything beyond the most basic, and the much-touted romance angle is a vapid mini-game with no appreciable impact on the character or the world. The missions are painfully vanilla -- collect some shit, escort some shit, kill some shit. Fable combines enough sparks of life, though, in its wide variety of passably executed half-ideas, to keep me in the game much longer than it did, because the real deal-breaker was the combat system. Boring, boring, boring. The camera sucks, control and targetting are vague, each weapon has one repeatable move and one special move only, and I could not for the life of me get any kind of sneak assassin attack to work. Tedious in the extreme.