CLICD

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

It's wondrous how inanimate objects can take on human properties, isn't it? Games, for me, can loom. They haven't been released yet, but they're out there, like great ships at sea, sailing towards me with an unstoppable mental force. Currently Final Fantasy XII looms large in my mind. It's coming out on Halloween this year, giving me my only reason to go to the mall on that frightful day. The children scare me. I worry that one of the fifty billion of them that run from store to store for candy are going to infect me with something.

Where was I? Oh yes, Final Fantasy. For a long while I feigned disinterest. Ever since FFVII my motivation for buying traditional FF titles has been draining away. FFX was fun for a while until I realized that (a) the people who know what's going on aren't talking, and (b) when they are talking it isn't in English. That's one series that has been accused of sequelitis so long it's broken through that label and created an entirely new phenomenon composed exclusively of roman numerals: CLICD. "Clicked," as in, "snapped." Final Fantasy is as meaningful to serious gamers in the industry as the day it's being released on is to everyone else. The diehards are buying it as well as everybody else who doesn't know any better, but those of us doing research are a little nonplussed.

The big change for the series, aside from the abundance of topless men, is the new gambit system. They've taken Final Fantasy's active time battles and turned them into something absolutely unforgivable for everyone on planet earth except me: Dungeon Siege. As soon as I saw Penny Arcade's take on this title I knew I had to be first in line. They mourn the death of the traditional battle format. I say good riddance to it. But I'm not worried; it'll be back. Every Final Fantasy will be reincarnated on every new platform Nintendo or Sony choose to develop. In ten years I have no doubt I'll be playing a port of FFVI on the Nintendo Holo, a white handheld that projects a 3D model of the game into midair.

The other game that actually deserves to loom is DEFCON. Although now, happily, the looming is all over. DEFCON is a game based on the simulation "Global Thermonuclear War" from the movie Wargames (check the trailer, it's good stuff). It feels like the closest anyone wants to get to a real simulation of World War III. You pick a country, deploy radar stations, missile silos and airbases, then drop your subs and battleships in the water. A timer ticks down the five levels of DEFCON. At level 4 your ships start moving. At level 3 they'll start firing on each other with small arms. At level 1, the nukes can come out and play.

The music is terribly haunting. It's very quiet, but you hear snatches of people crying, nervous coughing, and a sad melody that plays as the bombs fall. When they do, a white disc appears where a city used to be, with the caption "TOKYO: 7 MILLION DEAD" or "SAN FRANCISCO: 4.3 MILLION DEAD." You can turn on a population heat map and watch the planet literally go cold. It's very frightening. No wonder the subtitle of the game is "Everybody Dies." I give it four horrible, horrible stars.