Not having school is nice. It lets you blow stuff up.
Being able to put aside books for a few weeks and blowing off my Japanese studies for the same length of time has kinda helped clear the backlog a little bit.
Despite previously-mentioned glitches with cutscenes, I was able to finish Armed and Dangerous in backwards compatibility mode on the 360 today. It was a little embarrassing to find out that, back in 2003, I’d played up to level 15. There are 21, in total, so if I’d given it just a little more of a push back then it wouldn’t have wound up on the shelf for four years.
I try not to think of myself as a graphics snob, but it’s not a pretty game even by Xbox standards. I’m guessing part of that might be because they wanted to be able to throw lots and lots of bad guys at you at the same time and so they went with rougher models. The draw distance is also pretty crazy, you can see - and be seen by snipers - for a very long way.
So I’ll cut them a little slack there. Just saying that, while it’s really quite enjoyable - if, like me, you enjoy mindless simulated violence for hours on end - it’s not a showcase title. 
I’d like to see Planet Moon do some more games in the same ilk as this and Giants, but it seems they’ve been sucked into the hopefully-profitable world of Wii minigame collections.
They went with a great design idea in a few of the later levels - you start off surrounded or heavily outnumbered and your first task is just to cut down the number of enemies so you don’t die right off the bat, then you can start to breathe again. This has two nice effects - one, you don’t get halfway through a level and THEN get a mass of stuff dumped on you, if you survive the first onslaught you’ll probably survive the level - and two, it gives you a nice hit of feeling like you’ve really accomplished something.
Now, then, I’m playing through Baulder’s Gate : Dark Alliance in Co-op mode with my wife, but since we didn’t want to stay up until super late with work in the morning, we put it aside for the night and I decided to check out another game I’d started and put aside, back in 2002: “Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus”
Sly’s a fun character, and the game is surprisingly pretty, particularly for a PS2 game. Cel-shading, while the very definition of an “overdone trend”, DOES age well.
Unfortunately, the game designers decided he needed some extra-goofy sidekicks, so he’s got a nerdy turtle buddy and a …I think maybe a hippo? a pink hippo? friend, both with annoying voice acting.
The wikipedia entry for this game describes it using words like “easy” and “short”, so I figured it was right up my alley. I didn’t remember how far I’d gotten, but I knew I’d gotten some ways into the game so I figured I’d check my saved game, see what level I was on, figure out from there.
As it turns out, I didn’t need to do any complicated math - the game itself keeps track of your percentage completed, and it told me that I was at a whopping 7% done and had played for 1 hour, 27 minutes.
Fortunately for my sanity, I remember quite vividly that I waited for the game to drop to $20 before buying it, so at least it’s not like I dropped 50 bucks in it and then put it aside after an hour and a half.
Now, it may just be that I’ve been playing an awful lot of platform games - and an awful lot of games in general - but I started a new game and was at 21% complete in a little over two hours. As long as there’s no terrible, terrible surprises, I might even be able to finish it this year.
It’s going to be an odd day at work.
It’s the day after Christmas, so everyone will be swapping stories about their swag, and the crazy things Aunt Marge says when she gets a couple cups of nog in her, and if anyone asks me what I did, I’m going to have to come up with something that sounds better than “Well, my wife and I played Baldur’s Gate : Dark Alliance for like six hours.”
…because, well, that’s what we did.
This wasn’t the original plan, which was “go out for Christmas dinner, then go and see the Golden Compass and National Treasure II : Electric Boogaloo”, and I think that’s all the review the game needs: It’s good enough to make us change our plans for the whole day (we DID still go out for Christmas dinner, mind you, but we ditched the movies idea).
And really, that’s what Christmas is all about. Button mashing your way through rats and green slimes and kobolds and rogues and gnolls and yeti under the warm glow of Christmas tree lights.
We’re playing on the Xbox 360, since the original Xbox was giving us fits - the replacement cord thing Microsoft mailed out ages and ages ago when Xboxes were catching on fire isn’t working correctly, or it thinks our Xbox is in dire peril of burning up, because it refuses to supply power to the console.
I will report that the backwards compatibility, as it pertains to Baldur’s Gate : Dark Alliance, is working neatly for the most part. Archery is useless with a 360 controller, since aiming arrows in the game depends on the analog face buttons the original Xbox controller featured and the Xbox 360 controller does NOT, but that’s not so much an indictment of the compatibility as an unfortunate shortcoming of the new controllers.
Unfortunately, the other game I’ve been trying to run on the 360 today, Armed and Dangerous, is not quite as smooth of an experience.
The issues started with just trying to boot the game - it wasn’t detected as compatible for some reason, so I had to burn a backwards compatibility update disc. First time I’ve had to do that, and afterwards it booted all right, but…
The bits where you’re running around shooting things are, well, they work pretty well.
The cutscenes, on the other hand, not so good. There’s some stuttering audio in the first cutscene, then the next three or four are all right, and after that, well, the cutscenes play but the dialog doesn’t. Sound effects play, and music, but character dialog is completely mute.
Oddly enough, cutscenes played from the “Extras” menu work fine.
So, I have to wait for the game to save after each cutscene, exit to the main menu, play the cutscene from the “Extras” menu, then resume the game. It’s a workaround but quite an annoying one, especially as a big part of the draw to the game IS the story.
Oh, and I don’t seem to be able to download the “downloadable content” for the game. It looks like it signs me into Xbox live all right, but when I try to push the “A” button at the screen where I’m told to push the A button to download the extra mission, it just makes a little chime sound and doesn’t work.
Technical issues with trying to make the game work on a 360 aside, it’s a hoot of a game. Compared to Giants: Citizen Kabuto, it’s quite a bit more difficult (even on Easy) but it does have mid-level save points which help take the sting out of dying and the humor factor is cranked up a notch or two, with a constant stream of banter and taunting going on.
A Giant Bundle of Joy…
One of the side effects of this year’s “clear out the backlog” project has been a new appreciation for bundled software.
Usually, if you get any software with a new piece of hardware (beyond, you know, the basic drivers and what-not), it’s, well, passable at best. It’s “Photoshop Elements” instead of “Photoshop”, or a “3 level demo” instead of a full game. It’s really there to make you want the Real Thing.
Having said that, I understand that Photoshop Elements is, yes, a fairly decent program. I think my point remains clear.
Two of the games I’ve played this year came in bundles… and in both cases, they got shoved in a drawer and largely forgotten about. The first was Deus Ex, and I don’t think I can express enough times how much shame I have for leaving THAT one unplayed for seven years.
The second was Giants : Citizen Kabuto, from Planet Moon Software.
I’ve heard the name a fair few times, but it’s kind of a nondescript name and it never excited my imagination enough to go and figure out what it was about. Am I shallow? Well, yes, but I’m man enough to admit it in this case.
Even if I had gone looking for an answer to “What kind of a game is this, then?”, I don’t think I’ve have gotten a very satisfying answer, because it’s kind of a tricky one to categorize. It’s got some shooting bits, some jet-ski racing bits, some real-time strategy sorts of levels, and several levels where you stomp around the landscape as a Big Damn Giant Monster eating people and crushing buildings with your butt.
Mostly, though, it’s very funny and also very British. If you’ve never seen the point of that Douglas Adams chap, never cracked a Terry Pratchett novel, never watched a Monty Python movie… it might not be the game for you.
On the other hand, if you are “keen on” British humor and also like blowing things up Real Good, it’s a fun ride. The single player campaign isn’t very long - it felt, just a bit, like a really drawn-out tutorial designed to get the player ready to jump into online multiplayer - but I don’t think it really needed to be stretched out just for the sake of being stretched out.
Two benefits to being this late to the party:
1) From looking at old reviews of the game, when it came out it was a bug-ridden mess and wasn’t really playable until they released several patches.
2) While it IS a remarkably pretty game for 2000, it’s showing its age a little. There’s a community-done mod that replaces the default textures with new, hi-resolution textures and really pumps up the visuals. It’s available at http://www.giantswd.org/.
Next up on the “play list”: Armed and Dangerous, the “spiritual sequel” to Giants. I’ll be putting down the mouse for this one - I’ve got the Xbox version and from what I hear, there’s no real reason to track down the PC version.
Wait…
Tonight, I took some photos of our Christmas tree and our attempts to make our cats hang out under the tree or look up at the tree in cute ways.
They, honestly, would prefer not to be anywhere near the tree, which is a Good and Proper thing, as if they aren’t near the tree they can’t get the ornaments off it or knock it over. This was intended, and in fact engineered, and I will describe how we did this:
As soon as the tree got put up this year, I brought out their Most Hated Object in the house. That is to say, their cat carrier. It is the Horrid Portal which takes them to the Animal Hospital for their periodic checkups.
I opened the cat carrier. The sound of the clips springing open sent both cats flying for the safety of Being Under Something.
Then we left the cat carrier open, in front of the tree, all night.
This worked well from my point of view, as neither cat attacked the tree after that, but then came the bit where my wife thought it would be cute to have some pictures with the cats interacting with the tree. When they need therapy, it’s her fault.
Anyway, we coaxed them into being nearish the tree for long enough to get some photos, and then I went to try to get them on to the PC.
I think I need to charge my camera, because the normally quick process of “Plug camera in. Scanner and Camera wizard launches. Transfer photos.” wasn’t working.
Instead, I got a progress bar that never stopped, and so I hit the helpfully provided Cancel button.
The cancel button changed, as follows:
“Wait…”
I tried pushing the button. It didn’t do anything. Which is to say, it depressed, but with no discernible effect. I pressed it a few more times, for the hell of it, and then left it going. I unplugged the camera 10 minutes ago, and it still says “Wait…”
I’m not sure if it’s just a really poorly coded button, or if it’s some programmer’s attempt at Zen.
Either way, it’s probably only funny if you’re a bit of a geek, but that’s my intended audience here.
Yes, Psychonauts IS all that and a bag of chips, but…
I really did plan to get to sleep at a reasonable time last night, but I felt really close to the end of Psychonauts and decided to see if I could finish it.
And I did - granted, I was up until nearly 2AM, but it was worth it. The developers and artists really did pull off something extraordinary with the game worlds; every mind was different and bizarre in a truly appealing way.
I give it a solid recommendation.
That said:
Dear designers,
When you have put something in to your game and think to yourself “Wow, this is really hard. We should give the player infinite lives so they can try it over and over again until they get it right.”
…Take it back out. If you need to give the player THAT many chances, something is wrong with the design.
AND: If you do decide to put an “infinite loop until you get it right” segment in your game, DON’T have an NPC taunting the player with the same three or four phrases, over and over and over again.
FURTHERMORE: Don’t put the whole damn thing on a timer, where you can fail even if you get the platforming bits down right.
Meat Circus acrobatics bit, I’m looking at YOU.
After about try 20, I turned off the speakers and all was well again. After about try 50, I made it through, and from there it was only another 10 minutes or so until the end of the game.
Nice… Goggles.
I’ve never played Day of the Tentacle, or Full Throttle, or… well, I’ve never played any of Tim Schafer’s games, even though he’s one of those “name” developers that has a massive and vocal following.
On the other hand, I did buy his “Pyschonauts” a couple of years ago. It was one of those games that launched to massive critical acclaim and then wound up on the clearance racks inside of a couple of months… kind of like Beyond Good and Evil.
So, I had the Xbox version, which set me back all of 10 bucks, and I played it once. Started the game, sat through the intro movie, ran straight up the ramp into the “Basic Braining” training mission, completed that, and saved.
It did not really hook me, and I never got back to it. I am bad like that.
Just recently, I spent another four dollars to buy the PC version of Psychonauts when I found it in a Big Lots. Not a bad use of four bucks, by the way - playing it in 1680 x 1050 with all the graphical bells & whistles cranked really puts the Xbox version to shame, and it has pretty decent joypad support.
(I have noticed that I have to keep two different joypads around - one Logitech 10-button dual-shock style controller, and one Xbox 360 controller. Games tend to have a default button mapping that caters to one or the other. Psychonauts, being a couple of years old, prefers the dual-shock style controller.)
After I finished Tomb Raider Anniversary, I decided I’d give it another try. This time, I didn’t rush things. I started the game, ran around the camp as best I could, talked to all my fellow campmates, dug up some arrowheads, did some random thingy collecting… my opinion of the game increased greatly, and it has continued to do so with each new level.
So I’ve got that as the top game in the queue right now, and I was thinking about putting Armed and Dangerous on the stack next, but I hear that Armed and Dangerous has lots of things in it that are much more fun (and it’s already a damned funny game) if you’ve played Giants : Citizen Kabuto first, and I got a copy of Giants : Citizen Kabuto bundled with a motherboard a while back… so my queue looks like this:
Psychonauts
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Armed and Dangerous
I also have “Kingdom of Paradise” spinning in the PSP whenever I get a few minutes when I’m out and about. I haven’t progressed very far, but I’m liking everything about it except for the voice acting. It’s bad enough it got dubbed and there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn the Japanese voices back on; they went that one step further and made sure that, whenever a Japanese word is left intact in the English script, it’s pronounced as poorly as possible.
In which, I finish a hard game.
Lara Croft and I have a somewhat sparse history. I owned the original Tomb Raider back when it was released for the Saturn, but never finished it, and then I bought and got crushed into pitiful defeat by the second Tomb Raider on the Playstation… and then I didn’t play another Tomb Raider game until the excellent “Tomb Raider Legend” on the Xbox 360.
That might have been the end of it, but they had to go and re-make the original game for modern systems and PCs… and they did it RIGHT, in my opinion anyway; they did change an awful lot of the game but they had the spirit of the original down perfectly. The only thing I kind of miss - and this is the embodiment of masochism - is that they did away with the breakaway floors that would drop you to your death in the original.
I miss the spike pits. There, I’ve said it.
The sticking point for me the first time around was the boss at the end of the Egypt level. Never could manage to beat him. In the remake - and I refuse to believe this is sheer chance, I believe that the developers at Crystal Dynamics did this solely - SOLELY - for my benefit - there is no boss at the end of the Egypt level.
That said, there is a platforming bit, a couple of levels later, where you are climbing a shaft with lava at the bottom and things flying at you trying to knock you into said lava and ruthlessly timed pole-swinging and wall-running elements. After about twenty painful deaths at once particularly sticky bit, I went, humbled and angry, looking for sympathy and advice.
I did find that the section I was stuck on was universally considered the hardest bit of the game, which comforted me somewhat, and I found further that there were lots of people out there who had completed it and were glad to offer hints, explicit walkthroughs, and even video run-downs of how to pass this nasty tricky bit.
And pass it I did. After that… smooth sailing: a couple of really quite entertaining boss fights, some tricky-but-never-impossible platforming and puzzle bits, and I was happily watching the end credits roll.
I have so many games in the backlog that getting stuck on a difficult one for any length of time seems a real waste, so I don’t finish many “hard” games. I readily admit this.
Still, there’s a satisfaction that comes from actually sticking with a particularly nasty bit and finally overcoming it - yeah, I had to go and look up HOW to, and yeah, it took me a gazillion tries even knowing the trick - but, darnit, it feels good.
Looking forward to Tomb Raider : Underworld now.
Math leads to bruises.
School is done for the term, so I have a blissful couple of weeks where, instead of juggling homework + Japanese studying + work, I just have to worry about work.
My last final - and it was quite a bear, I managed to get the top score in the class with a whopping 83% - was in Statistics, a class where the teacher started out the term by splitting the entire class into four-person groups. All term long, we’ve been doing assignments and taking tests as a group, so we got to know each other better than normal.
With the end of the class approaching and our little group about to be cast to the winds, obviously we needed to celebrate the act of surviving the term. This is when one of our members piped up with a “let’s all go ice skating!”
I’ve only been ice skating once before, back in high school, and I fell down, I remember, seventeen times before giving it up. There was a little girl on the ice rink who seemed the embodiment of the devil - I would climb to my feet after a fall, push off, get a little ways further along the ice rink, and this little demon would zip by out of nowhere and do a spin or something in my peripheral vision, and I would fall down again. Not that I am bitter.
Nonetheless, it was so far removed from the standard suggestion one gets in college, which is to say, “Let’s all go drinking!”, that I felt I ought to agree solely on principle.
So. Final done, it comes the night of the Great Skating Experiment, I get to the ice rink and discover that two of our four have decided to blow off the whole ice skating thing for, admittedly, fairly decent reasons. The remaining member is the woman who suggested the excursion and who, I come to find out, used to ice skate, three times a week, for fourteen years.
I am quietly glad. It means that there will be fewer witnesses.
My classmate shepherds me around the rink once. It ain’t pretty, but I don’t fall down, even when she gets all “Cutting Edge” on me.
And by Cutting Edge, I do not mean that we started off with mutual hatred that translated into Olympics-winning skill, I mean that she took to saying “Toepick!” with a particularly twisted glee. Oh, and “Bend your knees!”… often.
Having done the initial shepherding, she apologizes but she really has to go for a bit at her own pace, so I am left bereft of partner. No problem. I did this once, right, how bad can…
In the next circuit, I fall down four times. I do not fall gracefully. I go from roughly vertical to flat on my arse with all the skill and grace of a bag of flour.
The worst part is not the pain.
The worst part is the kid standing over me. He’s, I’m going to guess, maybe 12 years old. He’s like four feet tall. He’s wearing a Lnyryd Skynyrd T-shirt, which reminds me rather vividly of the days when I was 12 but which seems out of place on a modern 12-year old.
And he’s saying things like “Are you OK, MISTER? That was a pretty hard fall, MISTER. Do you need help up?”
Somehow I managed to drag my ancient and hoary self to a bench. I adjust my skates, which is to say, I tighten them. A lot. This is the sum of my advice to you, should you ever find yourself in the situation where you are ice skating: Your skates are never tight enough. I was not adequately warned of this basic axiom, so I pass it along in the hopes that it will save someone else a “are you OK, MISTER?” situation.
After that, I managed not to fall down again for the rest of the night. I’m not going to say I was ever far from the comforting embrace of the wall, but I got to the point where I was actually enjoying myself and it felt like I was getting a heck of a good workout in the process.
Today, I have a glorious assortment of bruises - I will not subject you to pictures - and I am sore in muscles that I am SURE should not have been being used by skating. I am, however, getting mostly sympathy at home, and only a little bit of the “you know, you’re not a kid anymore” speech that I so richly deserve, and I mention this as an example of what a wonderful wife I have.
I think I’ll give it another try sometime, though. That is, once this set of bruises fades.
Mega Man : It ain’t happening.
I want to like Mega Man : Powered Up. I really do.
The Mega Man series is one of the most iconic ones out there. Not having played any of the games in the series felt almost like being illiterate… or at least like I was missing a fundamental part of gaming history. The PSP remake of the first game is colorful and charming. You can even play as a cute girl robot with bunny ears and a giant mallet.
…But…
I set the game to “Easy”.
I play through the introduction level and get to the part where you can select which level you’re going to play.
I pick the “Cut Man” level, because that’s supposed to be the boss you start with; he’s the easiest boss and if you beat him you get a weapon that you can then use to beat the next boss, and so on.
I get through the level, up to “Cut Man”, we have a little talk, and he kills me without breaking a sweat. Repeatedly.
Perhaps, I think, I’m missing something here, so I go to gamefaqs.
The author of the Mega Man : Powered Up FAQ has this to say on the topic of “easy” difficulty: “If you need help, then you shouldn’t be playing the game.”
I think I’m going to take this advice. Oh, well, it was only 20 bucks.
It’s a crying shame…
…that I played Deus Ex earlier this year.
Because, well, I can’t come right out and say that Brave Story : New Traveler is the best game I’ve finished this year.
It even does harm to my old-school Sega-fan cred to imply that Brave Story might be the best RPG I’ve played this year, since I beat both Panzer Dragoon Saga and Shenmue a few months back.
So let me stick a couple qualifiers on here: This is the best 2007-released game I’ve finished this year. How’s that?
That’s pretty solid, anyway. Let’s talk about why:
1 ) A script that actually made each of the characters seem like, well, people. Watching Ropple change from a god-I-want-to-strangle-this-brat into someone who actually seemed kind of personable: wow. Leynart was still kind of boring at the end, though. That’s why he wound up warming a bench in the wagon while the interesting characters went off to kick arse and take names.
2 ) Lack of loading times. That is to say, when you changed from the world map to a dungeon, or from the world map to a town, there was a short loading pause. Apart from that, it seemed like the game was keeping all the enemies for an area in-memory so it didn’t need to hit the disc much if at all. This made for random encounters being a quick “woops! monsters!” thing instead of “damnit, monsters, now I’m going to load the battle scene, kill the first level slime that jumped us for no reason, watch all my characters do a little victory dance, load the field map…”
3 ) Speaking of random encounters: Giving the main character a “Stealth” spell that stopped random encounters with lower level monsters happening was an awesome thing - so when you wound up backtracking, you could run unmolested through dungeons. It seems like every review I read of Brave Story bitches about the random encounter rate, and nobody ever mentions this spell. Admittedly you don’t get it until late in the game, but you also don’t need to do much backtracking before then.
4 ) Item crafting (Tradeskills!) and a quest log, both awfully nice for us recovering MMORPGers.
5 ) Catgirls, of course. And the little “Yuno leveled!” animation. Really, all the animations were impressive; I loved the way one of your characters would dash up to attack one monster and the other monsters would turn their heads to watch you.
6) The resolution of the “Rei” story. This won’t make sense to anyone who hasn’t played and finished the game, and I don’t want to spoil it, but if you’ve played it - wasn’t that a damn cool way to wrap him up?
7 ) An enemy called “GIANT ENEMY CRAB”
8a ) Hey, look, it’s the as-expected-halfway-through plot twist where we find out who the real bad guy is!
8b ) Uh, OK, so it’s the 90% through plot twist I didn’t see coming at all. Woof. How the heck are we going to wrap THIS up?
9 ) GIANT ENEMY FROG!
I’ll stop there because that’s dangerously close to a “Top 10″ list.
Anyway, PSP appreciation project: Brave Story edition complete. The PSP is starting to feel a bit more like a console and less like a portable media player and web browser.
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
