Mention the concept of “grinding” in a room full of gamers, and you are liable to get one of two reactions: either some titters of excitement, or a cacophonous mix of sighs and groans.  There are, in my experience, very few people who respond to the idea of the grind with simple ambivalence.

Grinding, in traditional gaming terms, stems from RPGs where the player has to fight battle after battle in order to gain experience and level up before being able to proceed further in the game (think of the original Final Fantasy and the huge jump in difficulty when moving from one area into the next). In more general terms, grinding is any time the player engages in a repetitive activity for the purpose of gaining some sort of reward (think brewing hundreds of potions in Oblivion to become a better alchemist). 

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The thing about multiplayer games is, no matter how good about yourself you may feel when you are able to annihilate your friends on a nightly basis, as soon as you step out that door and into the wider world of competition, you’ll (usually)  find out that you’re about as tough as wet socks.

Take Team Fortress 2, for example; some nights I feel like I’m king of the server, with rockets that can’t miss and piles of dead trailed behind me.  On most nights (ok, the vast majority of nights), I feel completely mediocre… or worse.  It’s all about who the competition is.

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As any casual observer might note, I’ve put up a new design for the site over the past couple of days; it’s still a work in progress, but I hope everyone finds it easy to read and navigate, and hopefully a little more gentle on the eyes.

Got to put in more time with Empire: Total War during the course of the week, and have been playing my way through the first campain, which covers the settlement of America; some of the battles can certainly get quite epic, but I do see a lot of issues with the general pathfinding of units, as they often seem to pick the least desireable route possible to get to their destination.   Also got to sink a few more hours into Lost Odyssey, and I can say in all honesty I’m finding it really, really boring so far, for reasons I intend to cover more in-depth in an upcoming article.  Master of Magic also continues to occupy a lot of my spare time, and all I really have to say there is that when my Shuri the Huntress and her legion of Doom Drakes shows up, your pitiful city walls aren’t going to help you.  Also bumped out a few more Scout achievements in Team Fortress 2, and I look forward to the continued raging debate over whether or not The Sandman is broken, lame, or both.

-Joel Haddock

Alas, Persona 4 is making me increasingly a liar, as every week I say that this is the week I’m finally going to finish it, and every week it proves me wrong.  I’m 55 or so hours in and have finally gotten to (more or less) the end, so if I don’t finish it by the end of this coming week, I’ll officially have to turn in my PS2.  In other news, I picked up both MadWorld and Resident Evil 5, both of which have been great, parent’s guild-baiting, violent fun.  Madworld may in fact be the most violent game I’ve ever played, enhanced only by the fact that the color red is the only color shown on top of the bleak, “Sin City Come to Life” comic book style visuals.  Resident Evil, on the other hand is much more subdued in its violence, and while the core elements are there, it just doesn’t feel like Resident Evil anymore…..look for first impressions of both games from me over the weekend.

-Jeff Feeser

The demo for Empire: Total War popped up on Steam earlier this week, so I gave it a spin; I’m a big fan of Age of Rifles warfare, though relatively few games are set in that period anymore.  The demo was short, but convinced me to definitely pick this one up; the sea battles, though, seem like they could end up being a little too slow to enjoy in the long term, but that can probably be more than made up by watching rows of musketmen get scattered by some well-aimed cannon barrages.   Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon arrived from Amazon on Monday, and that has become my current train-game of choice; only on chapter 6 at the moment, but I can say with utmost assurity that it is definitely a Fire Emblem game – I’ve already restarted several battles in order to find ways to save every unit, thus beggining the cycle anew…  My TF2 mapping continues on pace, and I think I’ll be ready to do some playtesting in the next week or so, thus telling me whether I’ve actually made something enjoyable to play.  Speaking of TF2, the Scout update came out on Tuesday, and it has quickly served to remind me why scout is my least played class; I figure I’ll have all the achievements right about the time Team Fortress 3 is ready to come out…

-Joel Haddock

For some reason, I can’t quite seem to focus on finishing a Team Fortress 2 map successfully lately; after scrapping my first CTF map concept, I started up another one (as mentioned a few weeks ago), but now I’ve decided to drop that one and start work on a new variation of the first one.  While this does manage to keep things fresh and new, it’s not so great in terms of actually getting a final product.  This week also feels like a bit of a holding pattern in terms of starting new games, as I know a whole slew of titles I’m interested in are coming out over the next several weeks, first and foremost being the new Fire Emblem for the DS.  With that in mind, I haven’t really wanted to get too involved in any older titles, so I’ve just continued hacking away at King’s Bounty and Hoshigami.  Speaking of Hoshigami, if anyone out there comprehends this confeigm engraving system, please enlighten me; even the FAQ writers don’t seem entirely clear on it…

-Joel Haddock

After spending time over the weekend advancing plotlines in Persona, almost all of this week has been spent in various dungeon-crawling games. The boss in the 4th Persona dungeon didn’t even give a second though about handing me my own ass, so i decided that I needed to get my levels up, especially that of my healer. One thing I like about the Persona games is the “rush battle” option…if I know i’m going to win, hit triangle and your dudes will just attack over and over, until the enemy is dead, while I sit back and watch something on TV (truly, I am a great leader). Also nabbed “Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony” for the PSP…I loved the PC games (and am a huge sucker for that style of game), and I’m enjoying the PSP outing as well…not a lot of depth there, but it’s good for a diversion when I just want to play something for 20 minutes. I also finally got around to hopping on the Left4Dead train, and almost immediately hopped back off due to my PC’s complete inability to play the damn thing at a decent framerate, which has angered me to the point where I’m finally considering biting the bullet and getting a new PC – anyone have any recommendations for the best gaming machine I can build on about a $650 budget?

-Jeff Feeser

My gaming time was extremely limited this week, to the point that I think all I’ve actually played was a short bout of Team Fortress 2 and some Hoshigami Remix on the train.  Hoshigami Remix, it should be noted, was designed by beings from another plane of existance with a deep hatred for humans; the coinfeigm engraving/evolution system makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.  On the TF2 front, I put some more time in with my map (currently, ctf_inspiredname), and started trying to get a handle on playing Scout in preparation for the pending update.  Scout is the one class I have always studiously avoided, due to my really sucking at it – now is the time to remedy that.   Finally, I found myself suddenly missing Star Wars: Galaxies crafting system yesterday completely out of the blue; this is grounds for slapping me.

-Joel Haddock

As cold as it seems here in Baltimore at 12 degrees, looking at the weather map shows it down to -40 in Minneapolis, so suddenly things don’t seem so bad.  On the final dungeon of Persona 4 right now, though I feel like I have failed to sufficiently max out several key social links; I chalk this up to poor planning on my part.  The game remains incredibly solid through and through, and is reason enough for anyone to dust off their PS2. On the PC side of things, I’ve loaded up good ol’ Panzer General 2, which continues to challenge me after all these years.  My TF2 map has been on hold for most of the week due to lack of time, so that 4 month timeframe suddenly seems annoyingly plausible.

-Joel

Due to the complete lack of efficient heat in my home, it appears my brain has completely been frozen over, and as such I haven’t been able to devote as much time to Persona as I’d like to.  Given my need to have a gaming experince that doesn’t require much thinking, I’ve turned to the old standby, the first person shooter.  I’ve been spending the better part of the week plugging through F.E.A.R., Far Cry 2, and (the not-actually-first-person-but-close-enough) Gears 2.  While they’ve all been great at passing the time, none of them have been particularly engrossing, with Far Cry being the worst of the bunch.  I’m still working on the original Prince of Persia on XBLA as well, in preparation for a “then and now” piece I’m writing on the series, but I’m stymied by the game’s completely brutal difficulty.  Finally, I dug in the bargin bin this week and nabbed a copy of Skate, and while i think my skater’s broken enough bones to be put in traction several times over, I personally have been having a blast putting him there.

-Jeff

I started out this week by discovering that, for some unknown reason, Castlevania: Order of Ecclasia is the one game I apparently cannot play on the train commute to work.  For whatever strange reason, it makes me incredibly dizzy.  So, with that unavailable, I decided to go back and re-tackle Panzer Tactics, which I was never able to beat (which I guess makes me a historically accurate player…).  On the console front, my march through Persona 4 continues, and I think I’m coming to the end of the game – it remains a fantastic game, and I’ll have a full review as soon as I wrap it up.  I also got down and dirty with starting my text Team Fortress 2 map this week, and I’m aiming to finish this one in a much quicker timeframe than the 5 months it took me for my last one…

-Joel Haddock

Much like Joel, I’m still stomping through Persona 4, although my progression hasn’t been as quick due to the game’s propensity to murder your main character without you so much as taking an action.  Unfortunately, unlike most RPGs outside of the Persona series, as soon as your main character is offed, it’s game over, due to your teammate’s apparent inability to use a healing potion, even though you’ve used it on their own ice-weak dumb asses plenty of times.  Since Joel and Chris got it for Xmas, I’ve also been spurred to get back to Order of Ecclesia, in which I’ve just entered the seriously hard Castle of Dracula.  My only problem with the game so far has been that it falls into the niche that I call “games which require GameFAQs”, as I see no way that i could’ve possibly found the last two villagers without a FAQ or randomly running around the world and hitting every single wall with my mace.  Maybe there’s an X-Ray Specs glyph that you can use that I just haven’t found yet…

-Jeff Feeser