After loving Fatal Frame II to pieces, which is an odd emotion to attach to a horror game, I was not too surprised that I thoroughly enjoyed the original Fatal Frame, with the exception of one notable segment very close to the end where you have to fight four, well, rather tough ghosts – though I hesitate to call them bosses – which came right at a point where I happened to be almost completely out of healing items.

So it was really rough and I had to do it over a few times before I got it.

On the other hand, the final fight of the game was done really well.  The game recognizes that, well, it’s the last bit of the game and you might be running a LITTLE low on resources as you come to the end of the game, so it actually takes pity on you and hands you just enough film and health to fight the last fight, even if you’re otherwise running dry.

I did have to do it over once, but I won’t blame the game for that.

I tried for a bit of a change of pace after that and started Lego Indiana Jones, and it really wasn’t grabbing me.  Unfortunately, while I liked Lego Star Wars an awful lot, I find that I’ve fallen into the trap of buying progressively less enjoyable sequels.  I own Lego Star Wars I & II, Lego Batman, and Lego Indy, and honestly I’m kind of dreading trying to play through all of Lego Indy and haven’t been able to even get through the first level of Lego Batman.

Oh well.

So I started Fatal Frame III instead and will let you know how that goes.  I’ve played about an hour so far and I’m noticing a few things:

1) I still miss the FPS mode from the Xbox version of Crimson Butterfly, BUT at least the game’s controls are very customizable – so I can always have movement on the left stick and look on the right stick.

2) I’m also really seeing the difference between PS2 visuals and Xbox visuals.  I mean, the PS2 graphics are certainly adequate, but there’s a… it’s hard to describe.  It’s like the Xbox versions did shadows better, which means a lot in an atmospheric game.

3) I’m really glad I played through FF 1 & 2 before starting this.  I played through FF2 without ever having played the first game, and that wasn’t a problem.  FF3 is, so far, full of references to both older games.

4) Speaking of which, both older FF games DID have happy endings, if you played through them at higher difficulty levels, but in the world of FF3, those happy endings are ignored.

5) The game goes back and forth between the real world and a dream world and it’s a big change.  I’m used to being stuck in crumbling ruined mansions from beginning to end, so the bits where you are running around your tastefully furnished house (with cat!) and not being chased by ghosts are a little odd.

6) On the other hand, there’s a lot more backstory for the assorted ghosts you run into, which can be interesting to read and which wouldn’t make sense if you weren’t occasionally popping back to reality.

Then I got to a bit, maybe 10-15 minutes in, where I had to push a small, fragile box around while archers shot at me and the box, and I said to hell with it after the fifth or sixth time I got the box ALMOST to where it needed to be before it got shot to pieces.

Oh, well, at least it was cheap.

Pity about buying it and the sequel at the same time, though.

Decided to start Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando instead, and it’s going a long way to alleviate my box-related frustrations.

The solution was Crash Bandicoot, a character who was The Big Hotness at the time, but which has thankfully faded into relative obscurity.  I’m not sure whether there ever was a “Crash Bandicoot” cereal, but I don’t think that there’s a big market anymore.

That is to say, they’re still making “Crash” games, but the original developers aren’t involved any more, and they’re not specific to Sony consoles, and, well, it’s sort of like the Sonic situation, except people still care enough about Sonic to bitch when a bad Sonic game is released.

Anyway.  Back in the day, I wrote Crash off as a bad case of trying too hard, so I’ve never played any of the titles in the series.  I understand they feature an awful lot of collecting various bits and pieces and, uh, jungle themed levels.

The “Crash” people, after wringing as much money out of the property as possible and then selling it off to the highest bidder, went on to develop the “Jak & Daxter” series for the PS2, which became one of the Big Three mascot/platform games for the PS2, and after playing through the first Sly Cooper and Ratchet & Clank games over the last couple of years, I figured I should try out Jak.

Also, I have “Daxter” for the PSP, which I’ve heard is excellent, but I figured I should probably know who the main character is before I start playing that.

Anyway, back to Jak & Daxter, which was OK.  It got a tremendous amount of good press when it was released, it doesn’t hold up QUITE as well today but that’s to be expected, and I found myself quite appreciative of the game’s relaxed attitude to death; there’s no such thing as “lives” and dying usually means simply starting anew from a nearby checkpoint – and you retain any progress you’ve made even if you happened to grab, say, x or y widget on your way off a cliff to your death.

I also deeply appreciated the last boss; they put in a nasty tricky platforming bit just BEFORE the last boss fight, but the actual boss fight is pretty easy and avoids the “Am I just going to pack it in right now and give up after getting this far?” question that I was very much faced with in Sly Cooper and a little less concerned with in Ratchet & Clank.

If I had to rank the three series, I’d put them in Ratchet –> Sly –> Jak order, but that’s a bit misleading.  There’s a long way between Jak and, say, the Bubsy or Bug! games.

I finished Okami last night.  Since I recieved it for Christmas 2006, that means that I had put off playing it for just about two years.  That might not be an altogether bad thing, because I don’t know if I would have been able to play through it two years ago.  While the fights were never terribly difficult, some of the platforming required towards the end was… well, I wound up falling down bottomless pits a lot, and even though the game was always rather nice about putting me back on the last ledge I’d fallen off of, it took a lot of tries to make it through some areas.

Looking back at reviews from the time of its release, Okami got billed as the PS2′s “Last Big Game!”, which is rather ironic considering how well the system has held on in the intervening two years.  I think Persona 4 is the PS2′s CURRENT “Last Big Game!” and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a few more “Last Big Game!” releases before the system finally does shuffle off into obscurity.

Anyway, back to the game.

I was worried about two things when I started Okami – first, that it was reputedly a tremendously long game, and second that I wouldn’t be able to pull off the whole painting-mechanic gameplay.

It didn’t turn out to be as long as I’d heard.  Admittedly, I skipped a bunch of side quests, but it took a little less than 44 hours to complete.  That’s still a pretty epic game, by my standards, and I have confidence that if I’d really gotten into the collecting-and-completing aspect of the game I could have easily spent 80 hours at it.

The painting turned out to be a little tricky, more so as the game progressed and I got access to more brush strokes, but it never really justified my initial apprehension.

There were a lot of occasions where I wanted to do a brush technique involving drawing a circle, and the game thought I wanted a loop-the-loop instead, which resulted in triggering a completely different power, but – in its defense – I never found a single situation where accidental misuse of an ability resulted in anything negative happening.  If I drew the wrong stroke, I just didn’t get the intended effect.  This is a neat trick; it means that the player CAN fail at something, but it means that failure just means “try again”.

Okami ended well.  The last few Big Fights were of suitably impressive scale and nastiness, without ever being too overwhelming, the story threw a couple of unexpected – but entirely logical – twists at me before wrapping up, and while actually coming to an end, it left a little room for a sequel.  Of course, Clover is dead and we’ll never see a sequel, so it’s a good thing that they only left a little room for a sequel and didn’t dwell on it all that much.

This was the last of the Games-Are-Art-Really titles I had to play, so I have no clue how I’m going to follow it up.  I’ll think of something.

Oh, and Merry Christmas, by the way.

I’m past the Big Plot Tw… I probably shouldn’t say that.  I’m past what seems to have been at least the FIRST Big Plot Twist.  More specifically, if this were your average 20-hour game, I’m past the point where I’d have expected ending credits and unanswered questions designed to sucker me into buying the sequel.

I don’t know WHY this comes to mind all of a sudden, but my copy of Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories (AKA: Kingdom Hearts 1.5) just arrived from Amazon.

Sniping at Square-Enix aside, back to Okami.

In the manual, you find out that your character will at some point in the game gain the ability to double jump, which is mostly a device that’s used to scatter stuff throughout the early levels, just barely out of reach, so you have a reason to come back to them – the ability is completely optional in the early levels.

It was when I got to the point where I NEEDED to be able to double-jump to progress that the trouble started, because I couldn’t.  I kind of expected to be given the ability at the point where I needed it, so getting to that point and then not being able to was, well, sort of like walking into a door.

As I was running around trying to figure out how to pull off this suddenly-essential move, I ran into an NPC with a helpful hint – to learn to double jump, I would need to go to the dojo and train.

Now, I’d been to the dojo a few times already, and I’d purchased three of the four abilities available there, so I figured that there would suddenly be more entries in the moves list that I could select from now that I needed them.

There weren’t.  It was still the three I’d learned already and a fourth which I had never learned because it was really expensive, about five times the price of the next most expensive ability.

Well, says I, obviously I just need to buy the fourth ability and then I’ll unlock more.   Time to farm up some cash.

Buying this skill had a price tag of 100000.

When I hit 99999, I hit the limit of my coin purse.

It IS possible to buy a bigger coin purse.  Problem is, you buy it with “praise”, which you mostly get by doing nice things for people.  I didn’t have much praise stockpiled, and I had been pretty good about doing nice things for people and feeding animals and so on and so forth so it’s not like I’d walked away from lots of opportunities to accumulate praise.

It took me a couple of hours of running around and doing quests for NPCs to get my praise up to the point where I could get a bigger coin purse, and it was almost all doing quests that I had deliberately skipped because they looked annoying.  Most of them were, by the way, and just to add insult, only about half of them actually gave me praise.

Still, I got enough praise to increase the size of my coin purse, dropped the 100k on that final ability, and… absolutely nothing unlocked.

I said some bad words and started thinking about it rationally.

An NPC had told me to go to the dojo.  Maybe he meant a dojo a little closer to him?  I’d had to backtrack an awful long way to get back to this dojo, after all.

It turns out that there’s another dojo, and that you can learn the double jump skill at THAT dojo for a very reasonable 20k, and if I hadn’t dropped 100K on learning what turned out to be a completely optional skill, I would have had that 20K and more besides.

I rolled up my virtual sleeves, got back to cash farming, and it wasn’t TOO long before I was able to double jump with the best of them, able to get a bit further in the game, and considerably less frustrated.

But, for a few hours there, the game actually did manage to go from “wow, this is really pretty and the music is so peaceful and the characters have Charm To Spare” to “the developers hate me, personally, and I’m starting to hate them back.”

To save you any click-through, the games were Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts, Beyond Good & Evil, Killer 7, and Okami.

I’ve played through the first five of those since that post, but it took me until this last weekend to start Okami.

I have been dreading starting Okami, but not for the usual reasons.  I have heard nothing but good things about the game since its release, which is why it made the aforementioned list to begin with.

What has worried me is that I’ve heard that it is a crazy long game and that you can spend as much as 80 hours on it.  That’s the sort of game you need to be able to put large chunks of time into, and with a school and work schedule that takes up as much of my week as it does, there’s no way I could have played through it in less than 2 or 3 months.

On the other hand, I had my last final exam of the term on Saturday, and I have the next three weeks school-free, with a few work holidays in there as well.

It seemed a good time to get down to it.

I’ve played it for, oh, 9 hours or so and I feel like I’m just getting started, so I think what I’ve heard about length is accurate.   I also think that, at least from what I’ve seen so far, every bit of praise I’ve seen heaped on this game is well-earned.  You just feel good after playing it – not just because the visuals are pretty and the music soothing, but because you generally feel like you’re being a nice guy.  Wolf.  Sun-god.  Whatever.

Your primary goal – the only one you can’t decide not to do, really, most of the goals in the game are strictly optional – is to restore a country corrupted by an evil dragon-thingy.  In the process, you plant an awful lot of flowers and feed an awful lot of woodland creatures.  Not terribly manly, no, but surprisingly satisfying.

Now, I’ve been playing Okami on our PS3, which is hooked up to the TV in our living room.  Since that’s a shared TV, I don’t always have access.

I DO always have access to our Xbox 360, which is hooked up to my monitor in the computer room, so I’ve been playing Dead Space on that, which was an early Christmas gift.

This is, so far, the second-freakiest game I’ve ever played, beat out ONLY by Fatal Frame II.  I’m finding that I can play it for about an hour before I need to find a save point and take a break. 

That’s not a complaint by any means.  When I play a game like Dead Space, I’m playing it for the heebie-jeebies, and it’s delivering.

The two games complement each other almost perfectly; if I – when I – get too twitchy to keep shooting necromorphs, I can change gear and feed rabbits for a while.

And yes, I know, it’s an Electronic Arts games and I don’t buy Electronic Arts games.  It was a gift.  I can therefore retain my down-the-nose sneering in the general direction of Redwood City while still enjoying the game.

I bought the first Ratchet & Clank game years ago, when it was added to Sony’s Greatest Hits line, because I’d seen people raving about the series and figured I should probably own it.

It sat on the shelf for a while.  Note that I didn’t say “and figured I should probably play it.”

Then, I was browsing the PSN marketplace, mostly because I was looking for a LittleBigPlanet demo – this was before I rented and finished it, obviously – and my wife talked me into downloading the demo for Ratchet & Clank Future.

And that was pretty enjoyable, but I didn’t know who any of the characters were, so I decided that I would dig deep into the backlog and give the first game a shot.

Well, obviously, I knew that the metal guy was probably “Clank”, but work with me a bit here.  I’m using exaggeration for effect.

The first game was, well, not as pretty and shiny as the PS3 game, but damn if it didn’t suck me in and make me play it whenever I had a spare half hour or so.

Tonight I brought it to a most satisfactory conclusion.

Now, as I look over the last couple of weeks of blog entries, I notice something important:  I didn’t bitch at any point.  This says a lot about the game – usually I can find SOMETHING that annoys me.  Truth is, it was a really good combination of platforming, very very light puzzling, and lots and lots of blowing stuff the hell up using a wide selection of satisfactory boomsticks.

OK, well, the hoverboard bit, that was painful.

BOTH hoverboard bits.

I had been warned, by the way, about the final boss fight.  There seem to be quite a few veterans of the first game who, upon finding out that you’re playing it for the first time, take care to say that the last boss is a huge difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game, and this is true.  It took me four attempts to beat him, and I was flat broke from re-buying ammo by the time I did.

It didn’t get frustrating, though.  I’m not sure if that’s excellent game design or if Psychonauts just hurt me so badly that I can never again feel pain.

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 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.

Watched a little anime – “Spice and Wolf” and “Clannad”, watched some classic movies -  “The Big Sleep”, “African Queen”, “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Lawrence of Arabia”, and played through the Agrabah, Monstro, and Atlantica worlds in Kingdom Hearts.

Spice and Wolf is another in the genre of “normal guy has his world invaded by a supernatural girl” shows.  Horo is an awful lot like Hazuki-with-a-tail, at least from watching the first episode.  It was interesting enough that I’ll check out the next couple of episodes, anyway.

I watched the first two episodes of Clannad and liked it.  No surprise there, I haven’t yet been disappointed with a Kyoani production.

Shocked and depressed, yes, but not disappointed.  Hopefully this won’t have an Air-esque ending.

Loved The African Queen.  Liked bits of Lawrence of Arabia.  Was quite disappointed by Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  Liked The Big Sleep, but not as much as I expected to.   These aren’t necessarily movies you watch for their own merits, though, you have to watch them because they’re part of the collective culture and seeing them helps you appreciate everything that has derived inspiration from them, if nothing else.

Oh, and Kingdom Hearts, while not the most manly game ever created, continues to entertain.  The Ursula fight in Atlantica was a bloody pain in the arse, though.  I had a terrible time getting the underwater positioning right throughout the level, so having to navigate in 3 dimensions while under the other stress factors inherent in a boss fight wasn’t fun.

All in all, a good way to cap off Spring Break.

Hope your weekend went as well.