Kaz

I’ve been meaning to have a boring weekend for the past month or so. I had been meaning to stay at my apartment as much as possible, do as little as possible and sleep as best I could (it gets harder once you start working full time, strange, I know). This weekend, with a veritable glut of board games, card games and video games in tow, I embarked on a wonderful journey of self-discovery: I rediscovered how much my ass enjoys couches.

I’ve just picked up a full copy of Carcassonne–several expansions to go along with it as well–and enjoyed the simple pleasure of organizing all the tiles, and meticulously punching them from their cardboard womb. I also snagged a 6 player copy of the seminal German board game Settlers of Catan, which easily transforms into the delightful drinking game “Drunkards of Catan” which was made more delightful when it easily came the closest to being the first board game to list as a cause of death on a birth certificate. I finally have my own version of Munchkin to trick people into playing and got to try some two player rounds of Chez Geek.

But the nerdery didn’t stop there.

I’ve been plugging away at Dead Space, Fable II and Little Big Planet. Dead Space was stopped, well, dead in it’s tracks around the end of chapter 2 mostly at the fault of Fable and LBP. I’ll be picking up where I left off and finishing that game, in fact, I made a pact with Tom that neither of us would take Fallout3 out of the shrink wrap until Dead Space was vanquished. The fear being that neither would return to such a wonderful game in the face of such a massive RPG (plus we both loved the original Fallouts).

I’d expected Little Big Planet to dominate not only my attention, but due to it’s easy to use tools, I expected my girlfriend would love to bounce through the levels with me.

Ironically I found a surprisingly different result. I spent a lot of Saturday in Albion, I was motoring through the story when my girlfriend arrived in the late afternoon. She watched for a while and asked if I had tried co-op yet. I was kind of amazed she was offering to try.

To understand my amazement you have to understand her gaming preferences. She likes The Sims, Time Crisis, Guitar Hero/Rock Band. She plays Starcraft and will play Unreal Tournament, but ultimately doesn’t care too much about action or RPG type games (except for her passing fascination with attempting to play WoW). I would hazard that she represents more average gamers than anyone on the podcast.

So I was shocked that a seemingly hardcore fantasy RPG would make her want to play. So shocked that I assumed she only wanted to play merely to participate in my obsession, doing something with me would be more interesting than watching my slave away as a lumberjack by my lonesome, even if the game wasn’t up her alley. As we played, though, a transformation occurred. She started to care that the gold she earned could be going to her own character. We went so far as to have her play through the childhood opening to have her very own hero to play.

As the night when on she commented on how she liked the game–that the game didn’t intimidate her, that it felt easy to get the hang of combat. Then she divulged that when I wasn’t around she could see firing up the Xbox to play through her character and hoped I would tag along with her, to return her favor. An interesting development to be sure.

So I was happy to see Adam Sessler’s latest “Sessler’s Soapbox” was devoted to how Fable II is a great starter game to get people interested in RPGs. I knew a game like LBP or music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero could capture her attention. I was just shocked that there was such a phenomenon with Fable and that other people had noticed too!