Pirates and Titans
July 12, 2006
Last weekend I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest early on a Saturday morning. At eleven AM the theater was packed; the management had set up lines for the 1:10 PM showing. I'll consider myself lucky to get a seat (and Sunshine too). Since my Lord and Master was in disrepair I went to see the movie after reading the meager thoughts other feebleminded reviewers could muster. And it turns out they were right.
You can't go see that movie without seeing the first one. Dead Man's Chest is really just more of the same, but you'll miss out on all the... uh, cameos in this movie. Anyone of any consequence at all returns to either fill the same role as before or go in the opposite direction. Johnny Depp's performance as the lovable Captain Jack Sparrow is great, but it still feels like same old, same old. There's very little fresh stuff here. Oh sure, the Kraken attacks are scary and Davy Jones looks fantastic, but I missed the extreme gum disease of Captain Barbossa (though that witch doctor lady certainly tries her best).
Still, as the middle child in a trilogy it could have been worse. And it could have been better. What we have instead is perfectly adequate. They managed to entertain for the extreme running time of two hours and thirty minutes, but I can't say I'd see it again or buy the DVD (the last one I bought being King Kong). Maybe next time I'll be sufficiently guilted into seeing A Prairie Home Companion.
One day I'll shut up about the summer game drought, but it won't be soon (my guess is August 8th, when Zombie Blood Monkeys comes out). In the meantime I picked up Titan Quest for the PC. I wonder if it's to the game's credit that it plays exactly the way I expected it to play. It's a Diablo II clone, I'm told, slavishly copying that game's format, features and flaws. Since I could never be compelled to get past Act 1 of Diablo II I hesitated for a while on this purchase. For me it's a single person version of Dungeon Siege, but with that heaping helping of tedium that my once friends at Gas Powered Games used to leave out.
Example: in Dungeon Siege you click once on a monster to issue an "attack" command. Your hero will hit the monster with a sword or bow until the monster is dead or you issue another command. In Titan Quest you click on a monster to have your guy run over to that monster and hit him once. Then he will stand there and allow himself to get clobbered by the monster, who understands the phrase "to the death." So to keep your guy alive you have to keep clicking on the monster, where one click equals one attack. Now, they have a "we hate you a little less" mode where you can hold the mouse button down over a monster to keep attacking. You might think that you can then spot a monster at the edge of the screen, then click and hold your mouse over him until he is dead.
No, you cannot. Once you click and hold you have to keep your mouse over that guy. And since your character advances on the monster, you're essentially clicking and dragging across the screen at a variable speed over a target that (a) moves at a speed determined by the camera zoom and (b) will sometimes retreat or dodge on his own. Instead of a pixel hunt it becomes a pixel chase.
Another sign that the developers were into the "if it's revealed to be broken, don't fix it" routine is what happens when you kill a monster. As you may or may not know, the point of these games is to get treasure (weapons, armor, items, etc.) from monsters then use that treasure to kill more monsters. When a monster dies, Titan Quest helpfully gives you a button to hold down that highlights the items a monster dropped. This is good, because a knife dropped into a field of corn quickly becomes just a sharp ear even at maximum zoom. What's bad is that they do not have a button to "pick up everything" or "pick up all the good stuff". The game is certainly intelligent enough to know what's good and what's junk, but you have to get it yourself. To make matters worse, they have no "auto sort inventory" button. While I'm perfectly willing to feng shui my briefcase in Resident Evil 4, you can't rotate items in Titan Quest. Thus you might have a long strip of empty slots at the bottom of your inventory but will be unable to use them because you can't rotate a staff 90 degrees and fit it in. Ridiculous.
Despite that I'm having a good time. The weapons you get are satisfying, the loot is shiny, and the monsters have an interesting feral look to them. I just turn off my brain and click and click and click...
