Events and Non-Events

And there was me expecting a mostly boring weekend (with the possible exception of tonight's Doctor Who, written by Being Human supremo Toby Whithouse). I popped out shopping in the morning just in time for a rainstorm that - thankfully - had ended before I'd got through checkout. On the way back, I was being lightly rained upon by the most insultingly small and thin cloud I'd ever seen... In fact, looking up, it might well have been nothing but rain that I was seeing, considering it was mostly done before I got back home.

I toyed briefly with the idea of going out again, since my first trip didn't cover all the shopping I wanted or needed, but lethargy got the better of me. Not too long after, I heard sirens. Since there's an ambulance station just down the road, it's not uncommon to hear their sirens. Police cars and fire engines pass through fairly regularly also, so I didn't think much of it until I realised that the sirens had stopped outside.

Looking out the window, sure enough, the ambulance was just working its way in front of a downed motorcycle, and a car that had pulled in next to it - clearly involved in the collision. The rider was sprawled out on the road next to his bike, and crowds were already gathering. Weirdly, I hadn't heard anything that sounded like a collision, and it's not as if I was doing anything noisy. Normally someone would have sounded their horn at least...

Oncoming traffic was attempting to go around the ambulance and, naturally, started coming up against traffic from the other direction. There was one ridiculous face-off between one car circumnavigating the ambulance and another that just happened to be in the right lane. I was surprised I didn't hear more accidents as the day progressed.

Returning to the window every so often, I saw more and more lollygaggers hanging around and, eventually, a police car blocking and redirecting the oncoming traffic. Once the ambulance left, though, the world returned to normal within moments.

Later on, I made a quick trip (well, an hour or so) to the world of the Bionis and the Mechonis... otherwise known as Xenoblade Chronicles. I stopped playing last time around the point I was going to have to face off against a giant spider boss. Spiders being among my least favourite creatures, and giant spiders in particular being my least favourite monsters in videogames of all kinds, I just wasn't looking forward to it. Bolstered by my recent(ish) success with Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and wanting to drag myself out of cold germ-induced doldrums, I decided to pick up the Wiimote again and, at the very least, smash some oversized arachnid in a futile attempt to deny my phobia.

Turned out to be quite an easy battle, even though it does introduce the 'visions of the future' gameplay mechanic, where the main character, Shulk, gets a premonition of an opponent's more devastating attacks, giving the player the chance to avert the inevitable. The only thing that makes this battle more difficult is the number of smaller spiders (though still large by arachnid standards) there are lurking around the behemoth. What's more, if you're lucky enough to kill all of them... a whole bunch more turn up to replace them. Nice.

But once that fight is out of the way, you're unceremoniously dumped back into the wandering portion of the game, and allowed to move on to the next area. I was more than a little nonplussed by this. Once the final blow was struck, that was it... no victory dance, no fanfare, just a slight pause and - bang - straight back into walkabout mode. Sure, Reyn has something to say, but he always does, no matter the opponent.

I wondered if the game had glitched, but the same thing happens only a short time later, when Ryen and Shulk defend the improbably named kid Juju from a pair of Triceratops/Armordillo crossbreeds. Seems like a very strange omission, considering how opulent its presentation is in just about every area.

Or, on the other hand, perhaps the developers should be praised for avoiding excessive use of cut-scenes. By and large, no real purpose is served by the posing and such... and, generally, this style of game tends to just have the defeated monster fade away in some impressive, trippy way. It's not as if they crumple into heaps and just stay there... and the minor creatures occasionally transform into treasure chests upon death. It just seems so odd that all the battles (so far), no matter how important they are to the plot, tend to end without marking the occasion... Somehow it just doesn't fit the pattern...