Contributor: Chris Davidson

Chris is completely absorbed in Assassin's Creed 2 and Shin Tegami Tensei: Devil Survivor. He survived tetanus.

Well, I made it back this week, to my surprise. I was fairly certain death was imminent when we last talked. In any case, I decided to try to change things up a bit this week. I'm slowly getting absorbed into the Shin Megami Tensei series, and I'm currently playing Devil Survivor. Unfortunately, this just made me realize how broken and boring Imagine is in comparison.

This week I decided to set out to figure out the game's plot, and I'm going to sum it up for you now.

Tanuka: Hey, Flyr, can I borrow a moment of your time?

Flyr: Uh, I guess. What do you want?

Tanuka: What's the deal with the Tower of Babel story, and how is it related?

Flyr: It's just a tower? I don't fucking know.

I kept searching, and I decided to go talk to one of the local guilds. These fellows are tough to press for information, and I decided that infiltration was the best method of information-gathering. The guilds in this game gain experience and can level up. How this system works or what benefits you gain are unknown even to the guild masters.

Tanuka: So, what's the purpose of your guild?

Glaine: You mean clan. o3o

Tanuka: Sure, whatever. So, what do you guys want to do?

Glaine: What do you mean? o3o

Tanuka: Well, what do you hope to accomplish?

Glaine: Get to level 10, I think? o3o

Tanuka: What happens at level 10?

Glaine: Nothing, I guess. o3o

Tanuka: Sounds like my kind of people. Can I join?

Glaine: Sure. o3o

It took some hard convincing, but I managed to get Glaine to let me in. Once I was a member of the Darkness, the real information started to roll in.

Tanuka: So, Glaine, do you know the plot of this game?

Glaine: Kind of. It has to do with the PS2 games. o3o

Tanuka: Which ones?

Glaine: I never played them, but I think it takes place after SMT: Kingdom Hearts but before SMT Nocturne. o3o

I could've corrected him, but why in god's name would I do that at this point? I just hit the fucking wall of ignorance. If you're wondering, I don't know what o3o means, but I know that it's stupid.

Glaine: You see, there's this tower and these three pillars. Oh, and there's this general guy, and I was like, you can't revive him. The girl tried to revive him anyway, though. o3o

Tanuka: Which act is that?

Glaine: Seventeen. o3o

Tanuka: I see. And why are there demons?

Glaine: I don't know. I didn't play Kingdom Hearts. I just saw my friend play it once. o3o

Tanuka: Hey, man, out of curiosity, how old are you?

Glaine: Thirteen, and I'm a girl o3o

I know what it's like to use the Internet, and I was 10 once, too. I know that it's safe to lie about your age up to about three more years without drawing suspicion. Using this formula, the leader of Darkness is a 10-year-old girl, and that sounds about right.

This game's broken, it has no plot, and I'm in a clan run by a 10-year-old girl. If you haven't figured out what Imagine is yet, I think that sums it up in a nice little sentence. Play one of the other SMT games instead; they're actually good.

Jasmine is slowly dying from something or another. This might be the last thing she ever writes. What a grim note to go out on.

The biggest problem an RPG, MMO or otherwise, faces is the opening lull. I don’t care what game you put through this test -- every role-playing game has a narrow window in which it must grab the player. Recent titles have an easier time of this with explosions, weird pop-song cinematics, and giant oozing monsters, but they can let you down the moment the 20-minute tutorial kicks in.

The lull test does vary between Western and Japanese RPGs, but it eventually amounts to the same thing. Was the transition from introduction to the environment to the introduction of mechanics smooth and engaging? If not, your game fails.

Final verdict: Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine fails the lull test. It pains me to admit this, and I wish I could allow my fanaticism to cloud my vision. The game just isn’t holding up. When I realized the new character was going to take forever to get anywhere, I hopped back into the character I created during the beta. There was a time when customization was more limited than it is now.

I abandoned the game the first time so I could write about the homoerotic element of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Would you believe there are books about that? Anyway, it's been a while since then, and I had no clue what the hell my character was doing. I swiftly realized that I didn’t care. School didn’t take me away from this game the first time -- the game itself did.

Where did Imagine go wrong? The jargon and lofty concepts that I mentioned last week are the signs of a very good idea being ripped apart. I don’t think that there’s enough action and mobility in the MegaTen series to support a massively multiplayer anything. Perhaps if this game took its influence from Atlus’ Pokémon-clone DemiKids, there would be much more to go on. People want a Pokémon MMO, anyway. Why not make it dark?

The game simply doesn’t have a hook. I’ve forced myself through the agonizingly dull opening hours of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games, but find myself drifting from every MMO I’ve touched. This should be the online game that hooks me. I’ve poured months of my life into the prerequisite material, but there’s a spark and direction in the linear games that doesn’t respond well to being dragged to pieces. The music and skillful direction of the console games breathe life into the story that no amount of effeminate player characters summoning demons will.

So, I agree with everyone else. If you will excuse me, I’m going to try to heal with Persona 3.

I have a confession to make -- I haven’t played Bad Game in a week.

I’m sure that at this point in the article, you’re likely saying to yourself, “Wait a second, Brian -- isn’t the whole point of the Bitmob Game Club to actually, you know, play the game?” In addition to apologizing to James for stealing his brilliant gimmick and to Alex for the heart attack he suffered when he first started reading my contribution for this week, allow me to explain myself.

In contrast to many gamers, I’ve never played games for “escapism,” as described in Rachel Jagielski’s excellent article, Bitterly Confronting Why I Game. As I finished reading Rachel’s introspections last week, I found myself doing my own introspecting.

As an engineer by trade, my life is normally consumed by technical problem-solving. I've spent the last eight-plus years of my life faced by problems on a daily basis, and I've become very skilled at finding problems, characterizing what’s wrong, determining the root cause, and doing whatever needs to be done to fix it.

When you get right down to it, that’s what videogames are at their core, isn’t it? Regardless of what the problem may be -- someone's kidnapped Princess Toadstool, a rogue Spectre has attacked a human colony, or blocks composed of four squares are falling from the ceiling -- each game is, essentially, an exercise in problem solving. In every game, you learn what you can about the system, what your abilities are within that system, and, using your own skills and ingenuity, you solve the problem -- save the Princess, defeat Saren, clear 100 lines, whatever.

That games happen to be fun as hell and allow infinite creative opportunities for storytelling, art, and music is wondrous. In the final analysis, I game because the fundamental mechanics of videogames appeal greatly to my personality, and I get to have a great time while doing so.

So what on earth does this all have to do with Bad Game? Simply put, I don’t game for escapism -- in fact, I do the exact opposite. Instead of gaming to forget the sorrows of my daily life, I do it to make my good days even better. I really have to be in the mood to game -- if I’m feeling tense or upset, I’m more apt to lose myself in a book, watch TV, or exercise.

Coincidentally, this past month has been one of the most stressful of my life. At the beginning of November, my entire division at my company was put on furlough, and this past week, we were all laid off. To be jobless in this economy is frightening enough, but this particular layoff has been much worse than normal (I can’t go into any further detail, but trust me that it really sucks to be me right now).

I’ve also been interviewing lately for a position that I really want -- which, as most of you know, between the interview process itself and waiting for an answer that will decide your future, is its own brand of hell. I’ve pretty much been a nervous wreck for the past two weeks, which is not exactly the best of circumstances to try get into a game as bad as Bad Game.

If I had been able to muster up the courage to get back into Bad Game, I can tell you exactly what would have happened. I would've spent hours on various websites, message boards, and GameFAQs to attempt to figure out how the hell to do half of the stuff in the game due to its horrible localization and utter lack of any in-game help.

I would've spent an inordinate amount of time running around and trying to kill the same types of enemies over and over and over again, struggling constantly with the Stone Age camera, and fuming at the interminable delays that accompanied any sort of combat action other than a straight attack. (Seriously, any action other than basic attack requires you to click on the action, wait for it to charge up, and then click it again to actually do it. How hard is it to just say “I wanna shoot that guy” and be done with it?)

Essentially, it would've been the same sort of things I did while playing Demon’s Souls this past month when I was calm enough to game -- but with 95 percent less fun, 100 percent more aggravation, and 10,000 percent more cheapskate tweeners running around and proving the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory beyond the shadow of a doubt. Yeah -- thanks, but no thanks.

In a related story, this is probably the last Game Club I’m going to participate in. While it certainly had its moments -- good times were had by all during our shared Battlefield Heroes sessions, and it’s been a privilege to have my work posted alongside that of James, Jasmine, and Chris -- it’s time to admit that I’m a console gamer at heart. (That, and my PC was slow and underpowered 5 years ago when I built it -- I’m honestly surprised that it was able to run either of these games at all.)

Thanks are definitely in order to Alex for getting this whole show up and running, and of course to my fellow Game Clubbers for their own excellent contributions. Hope you all enjoyed it!