I finally beat Elite Beat Agents (EBA) today. Last night, I played the second stage of the final level (set to "Jumpin’ Jack Flash") for about an hour before I beat it. This morning, I unlocked the final bonus level and beat it on all four difficulties.

What does it mean to beat a game? In many of the games I beat, you get a nice little movie and that ties up the story. EBA had a small movie where the agents helped save the world and everyone was happy. It sounds typical enough, but EBA is very different from a game with a more linear narrative.

EBA rewards players in a different way – it has unlockables that are present in so few games that I’ve beaten. I have to admit, it’s very satisfying to mark your progress in an episodic game with milestones such as increasing rand and new difficulty levels. Although this game took relatively little time to beat, I found my confidence increasing and I felt like an Elite Beat Diva by the end.

After finishing EBA, I wondered how much more I would play it. I did go back to increase my score and unlock the final bonus level. I after beating every level on every difficulty, I also got access to the character Commander Kahn. I really love this game and I will happily share it with others, but I don’t know if I will have nearly the same devotion to it in the future that I did while I was beating it. I have unlocked most of what I want, and the only way to get points now is to beat my near-perfect scores. That is no small feat, and I have endured much frustration due to the repetition involved getting those scores in the first place.

While some may want to play the game until they have perfect score in everything, I don’t think I’m that type of player. Going back to Richard Bartle’s player types, I think I am an achiever but not in the extreme. I am driven to beat a game I enjoy, but I don’t want to spend hours on perfection. After all, the frustration I would find through going through these levels over and over again just to get a certain score do not make it worth my time.

However, I would highly recommend this game to almost anyone who owns a DS. I really enjoyed its originality and excellent understanding of design for a portable console. I love it so much, in fact, that I am considering getting the imported original version. Perhaps I’ll have it finished by the time the newly-announced sequel is released.  

I’d always known that there were many different types of players in World of Warcraft. Just like Richard Bartle’s essay on player types in MUDs, this MMORPG allows many different types of players to find satisfaction. I don’t think it really sunk in until after I met a few of those who fall into other player types such as killer and socializer.

I hadn’t played a lot of WoW since my first group experience. I played briefly during a lunch break at work on Day 5, but then I ran out of time to play later. On Day 6, I had reached level 10, so I focused on completing quests relating to the acquisition of the druid’s bear form.

I focused on individual activities like shopping and simple quests for most of the day. I was a bit careless a couple of times, such as when I got killed in an instant by a mysterious character in charge of wind mounts on disputed land. I also underestimated the power of some annoying Harpys in the Oracle Glade and got myself killed twice.

By Day 7, I felt empowered again after completing some quests by myself. Then I made one of the stupidest newbie mistakes: I assumed that I could do anything alone if I set my mind to it. I thought that I could single-handedly sneak into the Gnarlpine Hold and kill a vicious Gnarlpine leader. I thought I could follow my tested technique of picking the gnarlpines off one by one, but it just doesn’t work when the gnarlpines are close together, as they were in the Hold. I died several times and finally decided to give up and go on another quest.

I went back to the Timberling area to complete a quest for the same guy who wanted the tumors. I had to kill a big monster, and there happened to be a group there already trying to kill it. They were several male night elves that didn’t seem to care about much except killing things. I helped one of them figure out where to find the tumors he needed (which were on the Timberlings). Then I got the whole group to come to the Gnarlpine Hold with me.

Most of the people in this group were of lower levels than I was (between 4 and 7). However, they seemed to want to kill practically any creature in the forest. I led the way (burned in my memory from all my trips to revive to my corpse). I led a successful attack into the hold and they helped me kill the nasty gnarlpine boss just before most of us died. (I ended up dying about five times just trying to get out of the Gnarlpine Hold and eventually got enough time to transport out.)

Even if I died multiple times, I was so happy to have had some help. I am no longer ignorant of the fact that some quests really do require other players in order to succeed. It was fun to fight with those guys because they seemed happy just to kill. Dying didn’t even create much of an obstacle for them. In World of Warcaft, dying won’t set you back – it’s more of an annoyance. I can take a lesson from my group today and not even get annoyed. After all, there is great pleasure to be had from simply killing.  

After a stressful week, I find that playing a video game can be rather therapeutic. You can project your enemies onto the plethora of monsters you must fight and gain a sense of satisfaction from completing in-game tasks. While the individual tasks in a game as long as an RPG can be quite nominal, they are fairly easy to complete. I am a person who makes lists and loves to cross things off of them, so it is fun for me to go through with a strategy guide and mark my progress.

Richard Bartle would probably classify me as an achiever for this reason. I do thoroughly enjoy running around the levels and collecting items. I like playing independently – I enjoy competition most if it’s against the game or myself. I don’t mind leveling up at all, but there could be two possible motivations for this. The first would be that I enjoy gaining levels, another form of achievement. I find that higher levels make boss fights a little bit easier, and I am a fan of low-stress games. My second motivation is that I enjoy killing monsters. As I mentioned earlier, I can unleash any pent-up aggression on the virtual monsters. If a monster scares me, it shatters that line where I feel safe (like when I jumped and screamed after the sudden appearance of a monster in Doom). This takes me out of the play and I would much rather fight monsters when I can see them clearly.

These two motivations are not mutually exclusive, however. While Bartle’s ideas apply mostly to MUDs, I do think that it is possible that people can fit multiple classifications, and these qualities may be seen more clearly in different games. I believe that I do have a bit of a killer in me – I’ve been known to shout Bartle’s “Die! Die! Die!” (a killer classification quote) when excited about any fight. However, I think that my neurotic collecting and leveling up would classify me as an achiever, even if I do decide not to go after EVERY ultimate item at the end of these games. (Usually, at the end of RPGS, I am at such a high level that it really does not matter if I get all the items since it would not make it significantly easier to beat the game.)

I had been neglecting my RPG addiction in an effort to spend time with my mother during her recent visit and get my homework done. However, once I had a few spare hours to myself, I decided it was time to jump back into that genre I love and give Kingdom Hearts II another try.

I was so excited to play again, thinking that after my first five hours, the game would really take off. I had regained control of the original party (not the main character’s doppelganger and his friends). I was thrilled to have to chance to run around and collect items, and maybe slay a few enemies along the way. Unfortunately, I had triggered a story point before I saved that cleared the area of monsters. How disappointing. While it was nice to run around quickly, I missed the satisfaction of slaying the monsters. I told myself not to get too upset, as I would soon enter a new area that was sure to offer more enemies.

I was bitterly disappointed when I played for the next two hours, when I encountered fewer than 20 fights (lasting about 15 seconds each) and more and more movies. The movies were obviously being used as a crutch to patch together an overly complicated story. I was in control of the characters for less than half of the time again. I found that the play mood was interrupted and I was rudely thrown outside this game “magic circle” each time a new movie appeared. There were so many that I kept wondering how long it would be until I would get to play again. This game me the felling that I was not invited to my own party – they didn’t need me, the player, to help them tell the story. I was just there to hack up the occasional enemy (ridiculously easy) and move along a very clear path in order to trigger more movies. It not longer felt like play.

Even if the killer in me could not be satisfied by the fights, I had hoped that the achiever part of me could find satisfaction. However, the collection of items didn’t even seem fun anymore. After eight hours of gameplay, you could collect synthesis items to synthesize better weapons but you didn’t have enough to actually improve weapons yet. Even the ready-made weapons were (what I considered) worse than what I already owned. Plus, I did not have enough money because I had barely been allowed to fight. The only other way to gain money in the game was to complete ridiculous mini-games and I really did not want to waste my time re-playing games that were ridiculous when I completed them earlier as the doppelganger.

After all this, I really thought that I would give the game one more shot or at least play it until I got to the Pirates of the Caribbean level. Unfortunately, my strategy guide walkthrough showed me that it would be at least 5-10 hours away, and I simply did not have the patience to wade through so many movies for a level that I heard wasn’t nearly as cool as it seemed.

The magic circle was shattered and my needs as a player were not met. I decided to send this game back and stop wasting my time being disappointed by a game that would not satisfy my player types.