Baud Attitude

I finished Kingdom Hearts yesterday, and it was quite an enjoyable ride.  There was no Psychonauts-style Insane Difficulty Jump at the end, the Disney-themed villain in the last world was a really nice surprise, and even the Patented Square Multi Stage Final Boss Fight wasn’t too painful.  Like pretty much every other encounter in the game, it boiled down to “How well can you heal?”

Not having the story, well, finish or anything is a minor quibble and one barely worth mentioning.

That’s a little harsh; you do get some closure and sense of accomplishment.  You’ve thwarted a nasty villain and saved lots of innocent people, reunited friends, restored hope, so on and so forth.  You’ve Done Good.  It’s just that all that is stuff you’ve done along the way, as kind of side benefits of your actual goal, and in the end you’re not really all that much closer to the goal your character started the game with.

The Super Secret Ending, while a little hard to understand, gets some significant Cool Points.  It was worth doing a little dog hunting to see.

A final word on the hated Gummi ship:

I went into the game knowing that something called a “Gummi ship” was going to be painful, which prepared me a bit for it when it happened.  I didn’t know that it meant that there was a jammed-in 3rd person shooting game every once in a while.  I also didn’t know that there was a whole meta-game revolving around collecting parts for new Gummi ships and building and customizing Gummi ships.  I went into the Gummi ship garage a total of ONCE, got trapped in a godawful tutorial, and turned off the console in order to escape.

When I rebooted, I stayed the heck out of the Gummi ship building section, pretended it didn’t exist, and finished the game using the same Gummi ship I started with, no customization needed.  If you are thinking about playing this game, I strongly recommend you do the same.

I have mentioned that one of the games on my far-too-neglected backlog is Kingdom Hearts, the Square-Disney collaboration that has launched a thousand disturbing doujinshi.

I think I am approaching the end of the game.  At least, I’m currently in a place called “End of the World” and that sounds pretty damn final.

Before getting here, though, my lovely and patient wife, who has sat by my side and watched me hack and slash my way through the many Disney worlds present in the game, said to me, “You know, you get a better ending if you collect all the dalmatians and finish the Hades cup.”

Well, who am I to skip hours of tedious searching for dogs in the hope of seeing a better ending?

After we found the last damn dalmatian, the next step was obviously to tackle the Hades cup tournament.  She looked this up in a guide and found that it recommended being level 60 before you even tried it.

I was level 51.  It was pretty obvious that I needed some leveling up.

So we figured that the best way to do this leveling up would be to enter the Hades cup, and just look at it as a way to get experience so we wouldn’t be too crushed when I was humiliated.

It turned out to be a great way to get experience.  By the time I beat it, which I will now point out was on the very first attempt, I was level 55.

It was a damn triumphant feeling.

Now to press on to the end.

I try not to have multiple games going at the same time, but my wife and I started Kingdom Hearts this weekend.  It makes a nice “together” game in the way that Half Life 2 does not make a nice together game.  I don’t play FPS games in a way that’s watchable by anyone who doesn’t want to get motion sickness.

I fervently believe that you can be a full-blooded 100% male and still enjoy Kingdom Hearts.  Running around Disney-themed worlds collecting dalmatian puppies with Donald and Goofy as your traveling companions is Not Really That Questionable, especially as you, uh, you, uh, you’re a kid with a big damn key as your weapon and a relationship with your best friend that has no doubt featured in a thousand doujinshi…

You know, I give up.  I can’t really justify this one from a manliness standpoint, but it’s a good couples game.

I usually try to come up with clever post titles, but how on earth do I out-clever a game title like that?

Anyway: The Maid Uniform and Machinegun, #105 in the “Simple 2000″ series.

Do I NEED to say this is a Japan-only release?

Awesome title aside, It’s actually kind of a fun premise.  You’re a maid robot who’s been sent back in time to protect the child-self of the guy sending you back in time.  You point out that there’s a bit of a time paradox there, but it doesn’t matter - you get sent back anyway.

In blatant violation of the Rules of Time Travel as set down by the “Terminator” movies, you arrive fully dressed.  It’s Not That Kind Of Game.

You arrive with a basic maid outfit, a basic sword, a basic handgun, a basic sniper rifle and a basic assault rifle.  If this sounds familiar to you… it’s sort of like HoiHoi-san.  Same idea; you run around, do missions, win them and get points, use the points to buy upgrades.

Now, if it were me sending a maid robot back to protect my child self, and I was rich enough to afford maid robots and time machines, I would kit my maid robot out with some pretty nasty futuristic weapons and not make her scrounge up the cash to buy them herself.  But I digress.

It’s not like HoiHoi-san in that HoiHoi-san actually has, well, production values.  This game, on the other hand, is a Simple 2000 game, which means that you’re not really getting 2000 yen worth out of it, but it’s so cheap and has such a bizarre concept that you can’t keep yourself from buying it.

So: with your basic set of weapons, you set about trashing a bunch of vicious little doll robot thingies.  After a couple levels of that, you get to pull out the sniper rifle and snipe at rocket-propelled doll robot thingies and Ominous Black Cars from a balcony.

After each of these levels, you get scored based upon your performance.  You get better marks for using your sword instead of a gun, for doing combo attacks, for avoiding damage, that sort of thing.  I was racking up the points fairly well and starting to look forward to upgrading my basic assault rifle…

And then I hit level 4.

In level 4, you fight through a bunch of little doll robots and mecha piloted by little doll robots and then meet the Other Maid Robot, because of course you need an antagonist.

She’s blond, by the way, I guess blondes are evil?

Anyway, the Other Maid Robot wiped the floor with me about a half-dozen times.

Now, to be fair, you DO get some points after you get the Game Over screen, and in theory I could save up these points and keep playing through the level up to the point where I get into the boss fight and lose… eventually I’d have enough points to seriously kit-out my robot maid self.

…But.

It would be a lot of replaying the same level over and over again in order to afford upgrades, and even with them I’m not sure I’d stand a chance.

So I’m giving up for now.   Time spent replaying level 4 of this game is time better spent playing, well, just about anything else.

My introduction to bullet-hell style shooters came a few years ago in the form of a brutally localized game called “Mobile Light Force 2″

It is a translation, and I use the term quite loosely, of Shikigami no Shiro.  I could get deeper into the details of the damages done to the title in localization, but others have done it far better then I could ever hope to.

Anyway, even with the bastardizations done to the title in the name of making it more palatable to domestic tastes, I quite liked the game, so I made sure to hunt down the original title when I was in Japan last August.  After doing so, of course, I let it sit on a shelf for the last seven months.

I decided I’d sit down last night and give it a go, expecting to be blown away by getting to play it As It Was Intended.  Because, well, when you’re an obsessive purist, you like to think that you’re obsessive about Things That Matter.
In retrospect, I should not have set my sights so high.  Yeah, it was nice to have the original title screen and interstage art, and also nice to have the original voices, but it wasn’t like playing an entirely different game - it wasn’t like the “Street Combat” localization of the first Super Famicom Ranma  1/2 game.  Somehow I’d gotten it into my head that the original title featured cinemas and voiceovers that had been hacked out of the game, and, well, it didn’t.

Either way you play it, it’s still an excellent shooter and features a cute witch with glasses, so you really can’t lose.

I feel a little ashamed about this next, for a few reasons:

1) I bought it at launch in 2005. At least it was only $30.

2) After buying it, I then played the previous game in the series, waited another year and a bit, and then played the third game in the series, completely skipping this one.

3) Once I finally got down to playing it, it only took three or four hours to see the gloriousness of it all.

But, I finally finished We Love Katamari - and, in retrospect, it’s a good thing I DID put it off, because if I’d played it before Me & My Katamari on the PSP, I would have been disappointed with the PSP game. As it is, the PSP game is better than the first, and the PS2 game better than the PSP game, so it was a good order.

Oh, and Cowbear? I had a crazy good streak going, had managed to dodge cows and bears left and right, and then, just when I was thinking: I’ve got a decent-sized Katamari here, let’s go back and nab us a bear statue or something… I hit a “Tiny” bear that I couldn’t even see before the King popped up to tell me I’d hit it. Damnitall.

I’m done with rolling for a while, at any rate.  I’ve heard mixed things about the 360 version, so I’ll put off getting it until it hits the $20 mark or so.

I don’t know if I’ve ever finished two games on the same day before, but before I went out and bought Call of Duty 4 this afternoon, I tackled the last levels of Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus.

Thankfully, it’s a very forgiving game - not only is it trivial to backtrack to earlier levels and stock up on extra lives, but it also takes pity on you after you fail an area several times and makes it a little easier.

This made the 30 or so times the last boss killed me not quite as frustrating as they might otherwise have been.  I think the lesson learned here is that I’m not very good at platform games.

Final impressions: Absolutely brilliant platforming action, graphics that - for a PS2 game - are quite attractive, and two out of four characters that I wouldn’t mind seeing more of in future games.

That said, the sequels have missions where you have to play as the two out of four characters I would mind seeing more of, so I think I’ll skip the sequels and simply enjoy the memories of the original game.