So about Bayonetta…
Finished “Bayonetta” this afternoon. Having done so, I’m very glad that I took the advice of the community and ratcheted the difficulty down a notch, to “Easy” (although there is a “Very Easy” difficulty that I didn’t have to stoop to).
I was feeling a bit sheepish about playing on easy, mind you, because I got to the very last level of the game with an inventory full of all kinds of healing and protective and buffing items that I hadn’t had to use and my only deaths had been owed to the game’s proclivity to, in the middle of a cutscene, throw a QTE at you with an instant death penalty should you muff it, and then I blew through that entire inventory surviving the Big Goddamn Boss Fight.
So “Normal” would not have been a good plan.
Anyway, some random thoughts:
The “was that particular camera angle REALLY necessary?” aspect of the game’s cutscenes never really goes away. Ignoring that, there are a lot of cutscenes and they tend to drag on a bit. Normally I’m a fan of lots and lots of story and exposition, but this really pushed it.
Combat remains nicely crazy to the end of the game, and the last bits of the game feature fights of truly massive scale – there’s lots of “woah” moments.
The visuals in general are amazing; I had to stop myself blindly charging through levels and remember to slow down and look AROUND from time to time. There were some jaggies, but nothing to really quibble about. There was, however, an awful lot of screen tearing in some levels, which IS something to quibble about, but it seemed to go away in later levels.
The nods to Sega fanboys were many and appreciated. I especially enjoyed the Space Harrier level.
If I DO decide to go back and tackle it on a harder difficulty level, it looks like there’s lots left to unlock. Different weapons, assorted “challenge rooms”, new outfits… it’s not a one-time-through-and-you’ve-seen-everything sort of game.
The aforementioned QTEs are awfully annoying. Not quite “The Force Unleashed” levels of annoying, but still… “Press A not to die” is a lame game mechanic.
All in all, a very well put together game with a few quirks, and I’m glad I got over my apprehensions and gave it a chance.
Yogurt for MEN
When I saw this stuff for sale, I had to try it out. Yogurt marketing as I’ve known it up until this point tends to be all about athletic looking women in leotards, not fists.
The Japanese reads “Businessman’s breakfast yogurt” and “Includes konnyaku balls”, by the way.
It was an interesting yogurt experience. It was, unsurprisingly, banana flavored, but a little bit bitter and the addition of konnyaku gave it a surprising texture. This is yogurt you can actually sort of chew, which is just not a verb I traditionally associate with yogurt.
All in all, fairly good stuff and quite lived up to the punchy nature of the packaging.
In which I purchase officially licensed “Hannah Montana” merchandise.
Let’s be perfectly clear: I’m not a fan of Hannah Montana. That isn’t to say that I have anything against the show, I’ve never seen it and I’m not exactly in the target demographic so I really don’t have an opinion either way.
I will admit that I do have two or three Miley Cyrus songs on my iPod, but that’s perfectly normal for any man in his late 30s who uh…
A restraining order? For me? You shouldn’t have!
Anyway. Let’s move on.
See, regardless of my apathy for the actual Hannah Montana phenomenon, it did bring at least one good thing into the world: Lilac PSPs. I like me some pastel-colored electronics.
Thing is, though, I bought a white PSP-1000 while I was in Japan 4 years ago, and it’s in perfect working order, so buying another one, at $200, was kind of hard to justify.
It became easier when my wife bought a PSP-3000 for herself and I found out that you could hook it up to your TV, or say to a monitor with component inputs, and play PSP games on a rather larger screen. They may be letterboxed and all that, but it’s still a rather nice option.
Still, $200 seemed a lot of money. I was also rather worried that the lilac PSP in the bundle might have, say, a massive Hannah Montana logo emblazoned on the backside, which would cause even more people to question my man status.
Fortunately for me, it seems like a lot of people had trouble justifying $200 for a PSP, so our local Fred Meyer had several bundles that hung around until they got put on clearance at $190. That’s not really much of a discount.
Then they sent me a coupon for $20 off anything in home electronics AND had a sale wherein every piece of “clearance” merchandise was marked down an additional 40%.
At that point, owning a second PSP became a lot more justifiable, and I found a couple of forum posts that implied that the lilac PSP was free of potentially embarrassing logos, so I decided to bite the bullet, take the plunge, reuse the metaphor and just find out for myself.
Purchased: One (1) “Hannah Montana” Limited Edition Entertainment Pack:
Don’t forget: Les filles JOUENT aussi!
Wait… shouldn’t that be “Les fillez” ? I mean, to go with the “Girlz”?
Upon opening… the tension builds… I ignore the packet emblazoned “Open me first” in favor of answering my real question.
Incidentally, the battery is in the “Open me first” packet, which I found out after I plugged the thing in to charge, left it for several hours, tried to turn it on and had a minor panic attack. Just a little protip for you, there.
And we’re good! We have no logo! I can proudly play my new lilac PSP in public without fear of anyone questioning my manliness… maybe. It will help if I don’t actually apply any of the included shiny stickers to my new PSP.
Not that I’m actually tempted, because that would just be plain weird, and I like to think I’m a perfectly normal and well adjusted guy.
The Man Spa
About two miles from our previous apartment, there was a day spa whose advertising seemed predominantly aimed at women. You could go in for a day of relaxing, having people do your hair and nails, get a massage, generally decompress from the stress of daily life.
If I had money – or gullible financial backers – I’d tempted to open a chain of Man Spas based on the Japanese capsule hotel experience.
From my – admittedly rather limited – experience with capsule hotels, they hit pretty much every need a guy wanting to get away from the stress of daily life could possibly have.
The one I stayed at in Osaka this last trip had a vending machine full of alcohol, more smoking areas than non smoking, 24/7 pornography on your in-capsule television, a huge bath and sauna, mahjong tables, video games, massage chairs for a couple hundred yen, actual masseuses available if you wanted to spend more money, and you could walk around in pajamas all day.
Oh, and a restaurant that sold a menu made of “fried” that you could eat in your pajamas while drinking alcohol from the machine and smoking.
I think duplicating this could really work. 
This is a thing.
This is a real thing:
No, seriously, this is an actual thing.
Finding my limits
The biggest purchase I made in Japan was an Xbox 360S, partially because my US 360 is four years old and will presumably die any day now but mostly because I wanted to play Japanese-only releases of shooters and Idolmaster games.
Fortunately, while Japanese developers are prone to slapping region codes on their games, US publishers aren’t as picky, so I can use most US titles on it even though it’s from a different region. Pretty handy. There are of course limits to this: many games from Japanese publishers released in the US ARE region locked to prevent reverse importing, so I can’t play, for example, Bullet Witch or Earth Defense Force 2017 on my new console.
One Japanese-developed game that works just fine on an imported console is Bayonetta, and I’ve been playing that this week. It’s pretty stunning to look at and the combat is the definition of satisfying, but I’m having real trouble resisting the urge to roll my eyes whenever it goes into a cutscene.
For the record: I’m a big fan of games that pander to the base instincts of men. If you take a generic action title and shoehorn in a scantily-clad waif with big swords that are also guns, I’ll be right there on day one to pick it up. Same goes for extremely questionable strategy games or beach volleyball games with jiggle physics. Something about Bayonetta, however, just manages to push my “Oh, come on, was that REALLY necessary?” button.
Fortunately, it has a lot going for it besides the draw – or in this case, surprising lack of draw – of the main character. The monster designs are particularly impressive, and I’m liking the way it presents parallel worlds, letting you romp through a modern city in the “real world” and then seeing the same world with the flower gardens and sparking water fountains of Paradisio or the lava-filled streets of Inferno. Also, as I said before, the combat is remarkably satisfying; it seems to have been designed to let even pathetic button mashers (like me!) pull off crazy moves, and shifts neatly between very acrobatic and brute-force depending on what sort of weapons you’re using at any given moment.
So far, I’ve played through the first three – out of eleven, I think – chapters. Looking forward to where it goes from here.
Let’s get these out of the way
Here’s a pile of random Japanese-English signs and so on that I’m just going to throw into a single post, make a couple snide comments about, and move on to more important things instead of pretending that each one is worth its own post.
Poster at a police station. This one was behind glass so it’s not a terribly good photo. There was a much larger poster of this up in the local train station, but when I went back to take a photo of it, it’d been replaced with an advertisement. I guess the train station didn’t care much about your sense of justice.
Dino’s wish – what, the purple guy from the Flintstones? – is to keep and shine your beauty forever. Pretty heavy stuff for the family dog.
Speaking of things that are purple, this shirt is either the worse case of poor color recognition skills or it has some deeper meaning.
I’m going with the poor color recognition skills for now.
I keep staring at this one, and I keep ALMOST seeing what they were trying to say, and then I just can’t make it make sense.
So so close and yet so so far.
I saw many very awesome T-shirts, but unfortunately most of them were being worn by live people walking around. I didn’t have the guts or the gall to stop random people and tell them “your shirt is hilarious, may I take a photo?”
Anyway, I like “Here is a tiny dressing up fou you” a lot, and it was being worn by a shirt form, and those can’t complain that you’re taking a photo of them.
This is probably my favorite from the whole trip. It’s not just the slightly off-kilter English, it’s the message: “I don’t care what people think about me. I have bigger things to worry about. Like, say, bolstering my sagging self esteem through buying clothing.”
This will be a day long remembered
Lucky find at Goodwill today. It may be a bit of a challenge making all of these work in a modern operating system, mind you, but I’m looking forward to it.
Achtung, Buddy
Unfortunately for the Great Backlog Project, I didn’t play many video games for the last couple of months while I was in Japan. Even worse for aforementioned Great Backlog Project, I did buy quite a few.
However, I have been back in the US for a couple of weeks and I’ve managed to put in a few hours, controller-in-hand, to do something about this situation.
I say “controller in hand”, even though I’ve only been playing KBAM PC games. It’s still a good turn of phrase, and makes a hell of a lot more sense than “keyboard in hand”.
I digress.
Anyway, I haven’t been restricting myself exclusively to decade-old cult RPGs. That would be silly. I’ve also been playing decade-old 3rd-person beat-em-up games, 7-year-old science-fiction first-person shooters, and, yes, nine-year-old games involving shooting Nazis and zombies, which I believe I’ve previously described as the perfect video game enemies inasmuch as nobody minds when you kill them.
Or re-kill them, in the case of zombies.
Anyway, to take those in order, the first would be Bungie’s “Oni”. I’m not sure, but I think Oni may have been the first major US title to really try to imitate a Japanese anime style. It certainly stood out on store shelves, at any rate.
Sadly, apart from the main character’s design, there’s not a lot to recommend it. The studio famously employed actual architects to design the in-game buildings and environments you run through, which makes it even more of a shame that they’re so hopelessly drab. I made it through three or four levels of warehouses and office buildings hunting down consoles and unlocking doors and occasionally enjoying some rather well-done hand-to-hand combat and some atrocious – I mean, ATROCIOUS – ranged combat.
Environments and ranged combat aside, I was enjoying things until I ran into what I’m going to describe as Oni’s REAL problem: It’s not an especially easy game, you can’t save when you want to, and the occasional mid-level checkpoints are really quite far apart.
Hence, after I ran into a particularly nasty combat bit, beat my head off it 5 or 6 times, finally got past it, got rather a bit further into the level, died, and respawned back at the particularly nasty combat bit… I popped the disc out and called it quits.
The online community does get credit, by the way, for developing a patch to fix the problem of the game not working at all on modern video cards. I was initially quite chuffed with the game because it would play the intro movie and then summarily crash before showing the main menu.
Anyway, after Oni, I gave Chrome a try. Chrome was one of the titles in the Steam Summer Sale, and was a mere $1.99 – and that packaged with its own sequel, to boot. Put simply, it was a heck of a deal.
I think I even got $1.99 worth of entertainment out of the game, if for no other reason than that the developers actually had the chutzpah to name their main character “Bolt Logan”
Seriously, you can’t get much more manly than that.
Unfortunately, the game really failed to grab me. I played through the first level, suffered my partner’s inevitable betrayal and met the Mysterious Woman featured prominently on the game’s main menu, and really felt no great compulsion to avenge myself or to explore her Secret Past and uncover the Grand Conspiracy.
Oh, well, it was only a couple of bucks.
By now, you’re asking yourself if I am actually capable of finding enjoyment in ANY game.
Well, actually, by now most of you have probably given up, because this has already become a wall of text. If you’re still reading, it’s probably only out of curiosity as to what the heck the title was all about and when I’m going to get to the Nazis and zombies.
So.
Should get to that, shouldn’t I?
Nazis and zombies are the primary antagonists of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a sequel/remake to the game that was, if not the first first-person-shooter, certainly the one that initially defined the genre and which was in itself a complete re-envisioning of an Apple II game from the 1980s.
So it had a bit of a pedigree, and has itself spawned a recent sequel.
I’d been curious about RTCW for a while, but it’s not something you can find in software stores any more, and for some reason it’s not sold individually on Steam – it’s only available in bundles with older Wolfenstein games, and I didn’t really want to pay money for copies of Wolf3D and Spear of Destiny.
Fortunately, I stumbled across a copy in our local Goodwill a few days before leaving for Japan, and though I didn’t play it before leaving, it was very much on my want-to-play-this list for when I returned.
Now, this game DID grab my attention. It’s very dated in some ways, particularly graphically.
Fortunately, it doesn’t take modern graphics to convey atmosphere, and the enemy AI is just good enough to be annoying-in-a-good-way, so I had a lot of fun playing through it.
And yes, it’s full of Nazis and zombies, who are pretty much always fun to shoot.
AND it has a couple of enforced-stealth missions that Don’t Suck, which is borderline amazing.
It’s also quite short, which may have been a bit off-putting in 2001, but which is a major selling point for me these days. I’m given to understand that it was primarily a multiplayer title in its heyday, and for all I know may still have a vibrant online community, but that’s not exactly my focus.
Oh, much like Oni, Wolfenstein did have a nasty habit of crashing before getting to the main menu. That took a patch and a driver update to resolve, so a bit of a fail on technical merits. Flipside, it was easy to tweak the game into running at 1920×1200 with a proper widescreen FOV, so extra points there.
Anyway, I’m not sure why Steam won’t break it off for individual purchase, but I’m glad to have finally tracked it down and played it.
We prepared the seat.
Another cheap shot at Japanese-use-of-English here. This was on the window of an Italian restaurant in Kawasaki-shi.
It’s actually a fairly literal translation of the text, and it makes perfect sense in the original, so I feel bad about making fun of it.
But I’m going to do it anyway.
