Snap Judgment

After I finished yesterday's unecessarily long and detailed post on DC Dual Force, I followed through with my threat promise to play Marvel Snap so I could compare the two. Now, with all of forty minutes of MS behind me, I feel entirely qualified to jabber on about it for another half dozen paragraphs as though I had some small idea what I was talking about. 

Actually, y'know what? Let's do it in Bullet Points. They always makes things look more authoritative and they're way quicker to write.

• It's PvP!
• I knew that.
  
• There is no PvE mode.
• I did not know that.
  
• Everything I said about lack of context  in DCDF applies equally to Marvel Snap.
• And it's every bit as annoying. 
• Possibly even more so.
• Although I couldn't exactly tell you why.
• It could be because it feels smug, somehow.
• But then Marvel has always been the smug one.
  
• There's a tutorial
• It's perfunctory.
• And that's being generous.
  
• It assumes the mechanics are so simple they'll explain themselves.
  
• They really won't.
• Not at all.
  
• I went into into the game with no idea what I was doing.
• Not a good idea in PvP.
  
• And yet I won every game I played.
  
• It was only five games.
• But still...
• Stepping back, there's a nice animated movie at the start. 
• I don't think DCDF has an intro movie so score one for Marvel.
  
• Squirrel Girl's in the movie.
• A lot.
• I think that might be significant.
• Because she's not a serious character. 
• Is she?
• I'm really not qualified to say.
• I ought to read Squirrel Girl sometime.*
  
• There's very, very little voice acting
• But it's a lot better than in DCDF.
• The graphics are snazzier.
• The UI is intuitive.
  
• And yet I prefer both the look and feel of DCDF. 
• Go figure.
• Add to that, Marvel Snap just throws free stuff at you. 
• And there are a bunch of obvious progression hooks.
• Ladders, ranks, tiered card upgrades - you name it.
• Missions and dailies
• All the good stuff.
• If DCDF had any of that I must have missed it.
• And yet DCDF is still more compelling.
• For me, anyway. 
• Not, it seems, for the world in general.
• Everybody loves Marvel Snap.
• I didn't.
  
• Here's why.
• 
  S T R E S S !
• OMG! The Stress!
  
• DCDF against an AI opponent is absolutely unstressful.
• Relaxing, in fact.
• Marvel Snap against a human opponent is unpleasantly stressful.
• Even though there is absolutely no interaction or communication of any kind.
• Except by playing your cards.
• Which fricken stressed the hell out of me!
• Honestly, I was so tense. 
• It was horrible.
• I hated it.
  
• Pretty good of me to play five games, then, wasn't it?
• Especially as winning each game just made the next one more stressful.
• That's the curse of the streak. 
• I probably should have lost one on purpose just to relieve the pressure.
• I did learn that I don't want to play any more Marvel Snap.
• So that was good.
• And at least now I can say I tried it.
• Also, DCDF is looking pretty good right now.
• I really didn't expect that.
• I thought it would be the other way around.
• It just goes to show, doesn't it?
  
• I think I'm going to stick with DCDF.
•  If I play either of them.
• I probably won't play either of them.
  
• At least until they add a PvE mode to Marvel Snap.
• Then I guess I'd give it another try. 
• Just for science, you understand.
• Certainly not because I want to.

All things considered, it was a surprising  - and surprisngly unpleasant - experience. I think the reason I found it so stressful was because there doesn't seem to be any kind of time limit on making your moves. I kept angsting about whether I was keeping the other person waiting so I kept rushing my plays, which I found very annoying, although not as annoying as not being able to check what a card did before I played it. 

There has to be a way to do that during a match but I couldn't find it. This is where a decent tutorial would have helped. I found myself thinking that if I was going to go on playing I'd probably need to write all the conditions on every card down on paper and have them on the desk in front of me, at which point I decided it was definitely time to stop.

From posts and comments I've read on other blogs, people seem to find Marvel Snap a bit of light-hearted fun. I can't quite see it myself but I expect that's just me. Anyway, I got a post out of it and it made me feel considerably warmer to DCDF so I guess that's a win.

* I just read the first issue of Marvel Rising - Squirrel Girl & Ms Marvel. It was excellent. I highly recommend it, especially the first eight or ten pages, which are really quite unusual for a supehero comic. The whole thing is likely to be of interest to anyone who follows this blog, for reasons that will become clear if and when you actually read it. 

Oh, alright, that's far too mysterious, not to say misleading. The plot is all about video games. That's all I meant.

To the point, though, as I thought, Squirrel Girl is definitely not the most serious of super-heroes. She is, however, the genuine article, not a parody, something I was less sure about. I can see why they chose to go with her for this game.

Carded

I'm not sure where I first heard about DC Dual Force. Probably MMO Bomb or MassivelyOP, unless maybe it was NME. For a music magazine, they do run a lot of gaming news, some of it quite random.

I may not have paid much attention to which site I was looking at but at least I registered the salient points:

1. Free
2. Steam
3. DC

Put all three together and there seemed no reason not to give it a try. I'm enough of a DC fan to get mildly excited at the thought of just about anything that might feature one of my favorite characters. Granted, most times it's just it's Batman again, but I can always hope.

As far as I can gather, the game is supposed to be DC's answer to the highly-rated Marvel Snap. I already added that one to my Steam account weeks ago but I haven't yet gotten around to playing it. I must not be such a Marvel fan, obviously, although as I was running through my mental list of Favorite Characters From Superhero Comics just now, it did seem to be mostly names from Marvel that drifted to the top. I can thank the relentless over-exposure of the last few years for that, I guess.

Both games are DCGs or DCCGs or whatever the acronym is. Collectable card games in which there aren't any actual cards. I have no idea whether the gameplay is identical or even similar, not having played both of them (Probably could have done that before I decided to write this post) but people do seem to like comparing the two so I guess it's at least in the same general ballpark.

DCDF has a "Mixed" rating on Steam, which seems to reflect not so much a meh response as a psychotic division. From the reviews I read, people either absolutely love it or utterly despise it. Very little middle ground.

Having played for nearly three and half hours - a couple of lengthy sessions - I find myself weirdly in sympathy with both camps. I spent most of the time thinking "This is a total waste of my time. It's half-assed nonsense. I'll just have another go..." I wouldn't mind playing again right now...

The game begins with a Tutorial in which - guess who? - Batman takes it upon himself to show you how to play. There's a framing device that I found amusing; Bats keeps beginning to explain some technical feature he thinks is important but before he can get into it he gets interrupted by some emergency and we have go sort it out, which is when the actual instruction happens. Learning by doing rather than yawning through yet another Batman Knows Best lecture. Jason Todd must be laughing his cape off.

Other than the actual gameplay, the tutorial involves voice acting, comic panels and speech balloons, which not unreasonably creates the impression there's going to be some form of narrative structure or storyline to the game. As far as I can tell, there is not. Once you hit the game proper, all of that goes away. At least, it did during the eight or nine rounds I played. Maybe it comes back later but I doubt it.

I'm guessing the nearest you'll get to a plot is in Comics mode. There are a number of Modes, in one of which, Comics, you get to play through the events that occured in specific published issues. Well, you do if you imagine them as comics produced for pre-school children, the kind with a single picture on every page and just the odd caption to explain the extremely basic plot. Oh, and a lot of sound effects apparently lifted verbatim from the ultra-camp 'sixties Batman TV show. 

This perfectly sums up my issue with most, if not all, of the superhero video games I've ever played. They all seem to have been designed by people who have not only never read an actual comic but who have taken all of their cues from the kind of cultural commentators who believe the form exists purely and simply for the entertainment of very small children or adults with an extremely low IQ. 

Given that the absolutely least interesting thing about superhero comics over the last forty or fifty years has been all the punching each other in the face, I find this quite peculiar. It's not as though other media haven't moved on from the 1950s stereotype. I mean, I know a lot of non super-hero fans complain about the final act of every Marvel movie being one long fight scene but even those critics acknowledge the two hours of soap opera melodrama and would-be witty badinage that comes before the explosions.

In superhero games it's just thump thump thump. It certainly is in this one.

I'm not saying it's not fun. It is quite fun. What I'm saying is that this kind of gameplay has absolutely nothing to do with the reasons any of these characters ever became famous enough for anyone to care about them in the first place. The designers are relying one hundred per cent on the recognition factor to pull eyes to their game without understanding why people recognize the characters to begin with.

Of course, if it featured wholly original characters no-one outside the company had ever heard of, no-one would be playing it at all, so I totally understand why they're doing it...

The question is whether seeing a bunch of familiar names and costumes on screen is enough, when none of those characters either act or speak in any way whatsoever like their originals. And no, it's not.

Honestly, it might be, if there was even the smallest hat-tip to authenticity, so you at least felt you were looking at the same characters you grew up with. They do change all the time as different writers and artists offer their interpretations after all. In DCDF, there's not the least concession to any of that prior history. The mechanics randomly team villains with heroes and pit longtime allies against each other for absolutely no discernible reason. Authenticity is clearly the last thing on anyone's mind. 

At first I couldn't really figure out what was going on. I'm long past the time when I knew what was current in the DC Universe so for a moment I thought maybe some of these people had switched sides. Certainly, over the years, a lot of villains have gone straight and the odd hero has turned bad, although it rarely lasts long. After a couple of rounds, though, I realised it was just opportunistic game mechanics in action.

There is a spurious veneer of canonical coherency. As a deckbuilder, the game groups the cards, to an extent, by having you pick from Teams. Each Leader (You get two Leaders in each Deck.) has their own Team, which is vaguely consistent with expectations but the whole thing falls down when you realise you can pair a Hero with a Villain as your two Leaders if you want and then your whole hand is just a mishmash of good and evil.

I had Poison Ivy and Batman working together. And Flash and Harley Quinn. I could just about accept that as not wholly egregious. Ivy and Harley have both worked with heroes before, when it suited them. I don't think anyone's going to be making the same allowances for The Joker or Doomsday, though. You can pair Doomsday with Superman or The Joker with Batman if you want and they'll work together as happily as though they weren't mortal enemies and (In at least some continuities.) each other's murderers.

This is the sort of thing that annoys me even while I'm telling myself it really doesn't matter. I know it's just a dumb card game that only exists as a bit of mindless fun meant to make money but I can't get past eighty years of history that easily. The gameplay may be moderately compelling but the lack of context keeps getting in the way. 

I keep asking myself  "Why is any of this happening?" and coming up with nothing but "Because". And just because isn't enough.

All told, I'm not sorry I gave the game a try. I'm not even saying I won't play it a little more although I suspect even its limited appeal will fade quite fast. I am a little disappointed by just how cynically exploitative the use of the characters seems to be. I wasn't expecting much but I got less than that.

Even the art, which I've seen mentioned by negative reviewers as the game's only saving grace, isn't that impressive. Much of it looks souless and calculating, lacking the personal feel I'd expect from even the weaker artists working on the comcs themselves. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if some of it wasn't done by some of those same artists - it does look like the kind of thing people knock out for a few dollars a sketch at comicons.

Having exposed myself to the DC version of an online collectible card game, I suppose my next logical step is to do the same with their frenemy across the panel borders. I might as well. I already have it installed. 

Marvel Snap has a much better reputation so my expectations are higher this time. We'll see if they're diappointed once more or if I come back a convert. Place your bets now.