Baud Attitude

I didn’t jump on board the DS bandwagon until a couple of years after its release.  Honestly, when it was announced, I thought that Nintendo had lost its collective mind, and by the time it became apparent that they’d actually had the right idea, they’d already announced the DS Lite, so I waited for that.

My exposure to the system, then, mostly came from seeing the DS software boxes next to the GBA section in stores, and being rather unimpressed with the lineup offered - titles like “Sprung” and “Ping Pals” and the like.  I lumped them into the category of “launch year crap”, which is harsh but after you see a few console launches you get a bit jaded.

Anyone arguing that the first year of a console’s life is NOT 90% crap, I invite you to go and pay $60 for Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game and get back to me.

There was also a game called “Feel the Magic”, which I wrote off as probably just being more-of-the-same.

Fortunately, my wife isn’t quite so jaded. She bought it, tried it, determined that it was way too weird for her, and told me to play it.

That was a year or so ago and it’s been on my list as “at least try this once so she’ll stop asking me if I’ve tried it yet”.

After finishing Izuna 2, but not quite wanting to dive into The World Ends With You, I figured I’d at least give it a few minutes.  I gave it those few minutes, and then every other spare minute I had over the next day, until it was finished.

It turns out that, kind of like I’d figured, it’s just a collection of stylus-based minigames, with occasional use of the DS microphone.

That having been said, it’s also hella fun, mostly because the minigames are so damn bizarre.  Spray painting giant rabbits onto buildings, calming rampaging bulls, saving pedestrians from man-eating ant lions, bowling for humans with live bowling balls…  And it’s all just to get a girl’s attention.

You are aided in this quest by a performance arts group called the “Rub Rabbits”, who wear bunny ears, ride unicycles, and apparently build Voltron-esque robots in their spare time.

There is a little bit of frustration in the aptly named “nightmare” level, but that is the only blemish on an otherwise glorious game.

Strongly recommended: A screen protector.  This game abuses the touchscreen like nothing I’ve seen since Ouendan’s spinners.

I’m going to start this Izuna-related post by talking about another game completely.

There is a particularly effective tactic in Everquest called “kiting”

No, really, this is about Izuna, I’ll get back to her in a second.

The tactic involves fighting something by hitting it with ranged attacks while running away from it fast enough that it can’t get you.  The thing you’re fighting follows after you like a kite on a string, hence “kiting.”

Most MMORPGs since Everquest have some sort of mechanic that makes kiting a less-powerful tactic, and EQ has gone back and added anti-kiting mechanics to most significant NPCs.

OK, now back to Izuna.

One of Izuna’s main points - and here I mean the game, not the character’s “main points“, you perverted bastards - is that it’s turn-based; every time you take a step or attack, everything else on the screen gets to take a step or attack.  This means that you can, for example, run away from things, but you can’t run away AND attack because that would take two turns.

This little bit of balance got thrown right out the window when they added “haste boots” to Izuna 2; they allow you to take two steps for every one step everything else gets to take.

These aren’t much help in most dungeon environments, because it’s very common to get surrounded in the cramped and narrow corridors that represent most of your dungeon-crawlin’ experiences, and then you’re pretty much done for.

On the other hand, they turned every boss fight into me running circles around the boss and peppering him with shuriken at range while he followed me, like the aforementioned kite on a string, until he fell down.

ONE boss was a bit of a worry, because she actually had a ranged attack, but she used it rarely enough that I was able to heal up between her attacks.

On the other hand, even though the bosses themselves became non-issues after I scored a pair of haste boots, the dungeon grinding to GET to the bosses was pretty consistantly challenging, and I went through an awful lot of escape talismans and near-death experiences getting leveled up adequately.

End result: Approximately fourteen hours of button-mashing, item collecting, and light side-questing culminating in a glorious, if seriously cheesy, victory with an enjoyable story payoff and a few bonus dungeons opened for me that I am going to ignore because they’re for the Hard Core Roguelike Fans and I am not a Hard Core Roguelike Fan.

Mind you, my normal playtime was on the order of 15 minutes per session, so 14 hours took me 20 days to play through.

Also, from the “relevant-to-my-interests” category: If you’ve helped a couple of minor NPCs out with side quests on your way through the game, they wind up building an onsen in the last town, which of course means a mildly naughty all-the-girls-in-the-onsen picture.

I would like to point out that, when I was helping out the NPCs, it wasn’t because I knew what the final result would be, just that helping them out seemed the nice thing to do.

Honest.

Addendum: 20 minutes of googling fails to turn up the reward image for finishing the onsen side-quest, so I can’t share it with you.  I am shocked, shocked I tell you.

I don’t think that will ever win any awards as an advertising jingle, but it’s a good enough motto to live by.

Izuna 2 certainly tries to live by it, and I’m trying to decide whether that’s a good thing or not.

Only controlling one character in the first Izuna had a couple of drawbacks, the biggest one being that, if you got killed in a dungeon, you lost everything you had in inventory.

There was also a slightly more subtle problem resulting from its system of weapon affinity.  See, the game rewarded you for always using the same weapon - the longer you had something equipped and were using it to hit things, the better you got with it.  You could, at least according to the manual, transfer affinity from one weapon to another by using a talisman, but I never figured out how to do it.

Unfortunately, this also meant that I had to pass up all the assorted bane-type weapons I found in later dungeons - bane weapons being those that were weaker against most critter types but strong against one particular one.  It was better just to keep an all-around-average sword equipped.

Izuna 2 introduces the idea that you’re going to bring a partner with you into dungeons - not that you’ll be controlling them both at once, but you can switch who you’re controlling and if the character you’re controlling gets killed the other automatically comes into play.

This has a lot of potential.  First, it means that one “oops, I was trying to run away from monsters and ran in to some other monsters” isn’t necessarily a crushing defeat.  Since “oops, I was trying to run away from monsters and ran in to some other monsters” was my normal death in the first game, this is a Good Thing.  When Izuna hits the deck, I’ve got someone there to carry on - or, at least, use an escape item before both characters eat dirt.

AND it means that I can give the “backup” character a bane weapon, switch to that character whenever I’m fighting something of the appropriate type, and get the double benefits of high weapon affinity and enhanced damage from the bane weapon.

Also, as long as both characters are still alive, they are charging a “tag attack gauge”, and when that fills you can perform pair attacks that hit everything in the room for, as the kids say, MASSIVE DAMAGE.

I quite like the pair attacks.  They’ve got a little animation sequence associated with them - Izuna 2 really does raise the bar over the first game in terms of art - and they’re flashy.  Flashy is fun.

On the other hand, the two-ninjas-one-dungeon approach does have a big drawback: only the character actually in use at any given time gets experience.  The backup character just kind of follows you around without learning anything from it, which is really pretty unusual for RPGs.  Usually, your “B” team gets at least a little experience so they’re not completely useless if you decide to switch them in.

So, if you want to use both characters and actually have the second one be worth half a darn when you’re using them, you have to level them individually - pretty rough considering that the original Izuna already had a ton of grinding and you were only leveling one character.

Your characters also all share the same amount of inventory space, which is a very harsh constraint.  You get twenty inventory slots total, which includes both equipped items and general inventory, so if your backup character has one weapon and one defensive item, that’s two less pieces of loot you can pick up in the current dungeon.

I think the only sane thing to do is to pick one backup character and try to keep them roughly level-equivalent, while leaving the rest of the backup characters back in the caravan.  It’s a shame - I’m deliberately passing up the chance to have a ninja maid tag along - but it’s much less painful than trying to keep everyone up to par.

It’s good to be married to a woman who understands your basic needs for things like weird Japanese puzzle games.

A couple of weeks ago, she was visiting family in San Jose when she went into an import computer parts & video games shop. Of her own volition, I will point out.

Apparently, they had some import DS games on clearance, because she brought me home an odd little puzzle game called Kuru Kuru Chameleon.

It’s a interesting twist on the whole “match colors” genre - basically, it’s a versus game where you’re facing off against an opponent across a playfield made up of hexagons, each of which can be any of seven colors. You start off controlling one piece, and whenever it’s your turn, you can select from five of the seven colors to change it to - you can’t change to your current color, and you can’t change to your opponent’s color. Knowing this, you can deny your opponent moves by changing to a particular color.

After you’ve changed color, any uncontrolled pieces adjacent to yours that are the same color as your new color become part of your territory. You can also enclose spaces, which changes all the pieces you enclose to one color and incorporates them into your territory.

There are also some blocking hexes on the board - you can’t control them, but you can use them as barriers. Some of the characters have the ability to destroy or add blocking pieces, which adds to the strategy.

The game very quickly becomes a mix of trying to control the board and at the same time deny your opponent moves. It’s kept fresh by having random objectives - sometimes you just need to get 50% of the board under your control, sometimes you need to capture a particular hex to win, sometimes you need to enclose specific oversized pieces.

It’s pretty challenging; the CPU opponents don’t cut you a lot of slack, and the final boss can bust out some special attacks that will leave you frothing.

The downside is that, while this is decidely in the category of “color based puzzle games with cute characters”, they kind of skimped on the actual characters. You get a ditzy pink-haired girl, a violent-but-amply-chested jungle woman, and two boy characters who are so shotacon that it made me cringe to play through the game as them. If you like ‘em young and weepy, though, this is the game for you.

Oh, and there’s a boss, who’s your standard ojou-sama type with a chameleon hat.

I guess I’m mostly annoyed by the characters because I don’t feel like I’m being pandered to enough. The developers didn’t even have the decency to put in a maid, or anything.

Because there are only four characters, playing through the story mode consists of selecting one of the four characters, meeting the other three, and finding reasons to challenge them to matches. After beating the other three characters, you fight the boss, lose a few times, swear mightily and eventually get a congratulations screen. Matches are pretty fast-paced, so even if you get stuck for a while the whole procedure shouldn’t take more than an hour or so.

On clearance, it was 10 bucks and well worth it. Its characters don’t manage to have any particular charms, but the game itself is fun.

Also, you can turn off the annoying little-boy voices from the options menu, and that is a good thing.

Note: After writing this, I did some searching, and apparently this has been released in the US as “Chameleon” on the PSP, with the cutesy boy characters getting a quick gender swap. Either that, or I’m drastically misinterpreting the characters in the original.

Neither option is all that appealing - on one hand, you have cute boy characters with exaggerated feminine traits who pout and cry a lot, on the other you have slightly boyish girls who pout and cry a lot.

Obviously I didn’t update the site much in May, for a few reasons.

1) With the term coming to an end, work at a bit of a high point, and a trip to Japan coming up later this month, “crazy busy” is a good description of May.

2) There’s been a bit of a return to the EQ addiction in the household. This is a bad thing, and will probably all end in tears.

3) I normally post something whenever I finish a game, and after abandoning Princess Peach, starting Yoshi’s Island DS, and giving up on that as a bad cause, I hadn’t finished anything until today.

I’ve spent the last two weeks in the enjoyable company of a certain young ninja girl. That being the titular character of “Izuna, Legend of the Unemployed Ninja.”

Honestly, if you’re my kind of person, you’ve probably already played it. Failing that, if you haven’t played it, hearing that there IS a game called “Izuna, Legend of the Unemployed Ninja” has probably made you decide to play it. If at this point you still need to hear me say anything more, I’m questioning whether you’re really my sort of person.

I’ll mention one more point: The banker NPC, who you have frequent occasion to visit, is a cute shrine maiden with glasses.

If you’re not already checking eBay for a used copy, I’m done with you.

But I’ll continue.

Izuna is often described in terms of being old school and uncompromisingly difficult and in general people say bad things about how it’s nasty and unforgiving.

This is true, to a point. See, it’s basically a graphically spiffed-up version of the old Unix game “Rogue”, and that game is crazy nasty and unforgiving: you’re thrown into a dungeon, you have to survive against heavy odds, and you’re probably going to starve to death if the monsters don’t kill you first, after which you start over again at level 1 with no stuff.

Izuna, on the other hand, doesn’t need to eat, and if you die in a dungeon you don’t go back to level 1. It’s practically easy!

Yeah, you lose all your stuff and all your money, but after you finish the first dungeon, you have access to the aforementioned incredibly cute banker who is happy to keep your spare gear and cash on hand for the next time you slink back to town, naked and bankrupt.

So it’s hard, yeah, and the game does tend to pick the worst possible moments to throw vicious chains of enemies at you, but you’re always able to pick up and head back down into the dungeon for another round. This time around, you’re probably a couple-three levels higher and it’ll be easier; you might even get down to the boss - and if you’ve fought all the way down to the boss, you probably won’t have any trouble with them. I only had to fight one boss more than twice.

The dungeons are randomly generated, but all the normal things you’d expect apply: as you get lower, enemies get harder, treasure better, traps more frequent. You have seven dungeons to get through to finish the story, with an optional 8th dungeon that actually IS just as nasty and unforgiving as Rogue - which is, I assume, why it’s optional. If you’re crazy, it’s there to give you a challenge.

Getting through the seven not-optional dungeons and seeing the extent of the story was really challenge enough for me, so I’ve stopped there. I understand there’s a sequel coming out, which will probably be more of the same.

If that “more of the same” includes more cute girls in glasses, consider it a day one purchase.

I am relatively new to the Mario franchise.

I played Donkey Kong, of course, and Mario Bros and Super Mario Bros in the arcade, but, as I didn’t own a NES during its heyday, I never really joined the Cult of Mario.  I did own a SNES, but I bought the core system that didn’t have a bundled cartridge.

Later, when I bought a N64, I did pick up Super Mario 64, mostly on the hype - which actually explains most of the games I bought for that system - and didn’t really get it.  I ran around a bit and collected a few stars, got rather tired of it, and went back to Doom64 and F-Zero X.

Super Mario Sunshine likewise failed to hook me.

I don’t honestly know why I kept buying Mario games, except, well, I kept buying the hype.

Then I bought a DS, and once again bought into the hype, this time for New Super Mario Brothers, and suddenly I got where all the hype was coming from.  It was actually a really good game, albeit with a bit of an annoying save system, and I played through it and even went back to it to unlock a couple of worlds I hadn’t gotten to the first time around.

Following that, I played through the original Super Mario World on the GBA, and even branched out into the Mario RPG lineup with Partners in Time.

I was starting to become a Mario convert.

Then they released Super Princess Peach, which had a neat twist on the whole Mario-saves-Peach thing and got lots of good reviews that pretty much all said “It’s Mario, but, you know, for girls.”

Having played it, I can confirm that it is, in fact, Mario, but, you know, for girls, and also that Nintendo hates girls.

Let me explain how I’ve come to this conclusion.

Every Mario game has more or less the same premise.  Bowser needs to be stopped, Peach rescued, kingdom saved, that sort of thing.  This is accomplished by running from left to right across the screen, stomping turtles and mushrooms as you go.  Eventually you reach Bowser, defeat him, life is good again.

Pretty much every Mario game also includes a side quest where you collect Stuff.  Yoshi coins, stars, shines, blah blah blah, there’s some Big Shiny Things that you will naturally get a few of in the course of playing the game but REAL completists will get them all.

I’m not a real completist.  I want to beat Bowser and enjoy the good life until the next time.  So far, me and Mario have had a pretty good understanding about this.  I don’t collect all the stars and he doesn’t give me any grief as long as Bowser gets what’s coming.

Super Princess Peach, being Mario, but, you know, for girls, also has a collection side quest.  It involves freeing Toads.  There are three hidden in each level, but freeing them isn’t a condition of completing the level.  You can progress just fine without finding them, until you get to the last level.  That’s where your sentient umbrella pops up and says:

“Oh my goodness! I can feel a powerful force from within!  Before the final battle, you need to rescue all the Toads from past stages.”

To expand upon my annoyance with this:  By this time, you’ve jumped, swum, and umbrella-bashed your way through every level of the game.  Your name is spoken in hushed and fearful tones wherever sentient mushrooms gather to speak legends of the Destroyer, She Who Walks In Fire, The Pinkish Abomination, El Diablo Melocotón.  You are knocking on Bowser’s door, ready to show him that you’re standing by your man, damnit, and that you would like him back.

However, you’re not going to take that final step through the last threshold until you go back to Every Goddamn Level You’ve Already Beaten, and collect Every Goddamn Toad you may have missed.

In my Own Private Version of the Marioverse, this is the point where Peach points to Luigi, who she rescued in the previous world, and says to him “He’s your brother.  Let me know how it goes.” and goes home to catch up on her sleep.

This level of being an absolute jerk to the player isn’t present in any Mario games, you know, for boys, and so I come to my original conclusion.