Baud Attitude

I’m letting my PSP annoy me lately.

See, here’s the thing:  I have a Ceramic White Japanese PSP-1000, hand-imported from Akihabara back in August of ‘06.  I rather like having the Japanese firmware; it means that when I go looking for demos or wallpaper or what have you, I’m taken to the Japanese PSP site which has better stuff than the US site.

It’s running firmware version 3.50, which is the last version that can be replaced with custom firmware without too much effort; all I need to do is use the Lumines buffer overrun thing.  Of course, then I lose the things that I like about having an imported PSP.

It running firmware 3.50 is also what’s stopping me from playing the last three or four PSP games I’ve gotten; they all require at least 3.51.  If I upgrade to 3.51, I’m locked into official firmware from then on out.

I had a solution to this.

I was going to buy a “Deep Red” PSP-2000 in Japan in June so I’d have one PSP with up-to-date Japanese firmware and I could replace the firmware on my original PSP with custom firmware.

I also thought that the red PSP looked super cool, so, you know, two good reasons to drop another Y16900.  It occurs to me that I have pretty poor priorities for how to spend money.

But:

The red PSP-2000 was not to be found, anywhere, for any price.

I could have picked up pretty much any other limited edition - even the Final Fantasy limited edition package - just not the red one.  I did see a gentleman using one in a maid cafe, so I know that they do exist and aren’t just a product of my fevered imagination.

And, no, I don’t want the red PSP that came out in the US, because I’d have to try to scrape off the Kratos and I don’t think that would work out well.

I’m honestly not even sure what homebrew apps I WANT to run.

The usual reason people put custom firmware on their PSPs is to run bootlegged copies of games, and I could really care less about that, so I’m not exactly sure why I’m holding back upgrading the PSP to the latest version except that, well, it feels like I’m closing a door.

And, no, It’s not that I’m refraining based on any particular ethical grounds.  It’s just that I don’t have enough time to play through all the games I’ve actually spent money on, so there’s no point in making my PSP able to play ISOs; it would just mean that I could accumulate even more games that I don’t have time for. 

This has been especially annoying since it’s mid-November and two of the PSP games I haven’t been able to play were 2007 Christmas gifts, so they’ve been sitting unplayed for 11 months while I try to make up my mind.  I’ve also been putting off buying games I want - like Crisis Core - so my PSP has pretty much been nothing but a media player all this time.

So, yeah, it’s a petty thing to be frustrated about and I really need to make up my mind, but first I needed to rant about it.

I have faced evil, and I have sneered in its cute little face.

Strictly speaking, the PSP version of Lemmings does come with 36 PSP-specific levels, but they have been thoughtful enough to split them off on to their own menu where those of us who want to beat the original game can do so without ever seeing them.

To follow up my earlier rant about Mayhem 23 (”Going up…”), there’s a workaround to the bug.  You can have a basher dig - just a little - into one of the walls of the chute and then turn him into a blocker, which does the same thing as the ceiling did in the original level.  You can’t put a blocker on the wall of the chute and have him block anything, though, because he’s on an incline and lemmings will just blow by him.

So I’m chugging along in Lemmings on the PSP, and it’s going pretty well.  I’ve had to look up the solution to a couple of “Mayhem” levels so far but I’ve gotten to Mayhem 23 mostly on my own.

And Mayhem 23 is a bastard son of parents who were also, themselves, bastards, and quite possibly the whole bastard thing goes back for bastard generation upon bastard generation.

Ahem.

Anyway, so I went and looked up a solution and found out that it wasn’t really me, unlike the last two levels I’ve had to go and look something up on.

See, it’s got a ramp - and here I am assuming that you have played Lemmings, and if you haven’t you’re simply not my kind of people anyway - it’s got a ramp that goes all the way up to the top of the play field.

On PC and Amiga versions - and probably all older versions of Lemmings - when your lemmings walk up the ramp, they hit an invisible ceiling and turn around, so now they’re going the right way to build a critical staircase.

On the PSP, they walk right through the invisible ceiling and fall into water, drowning.

So: not only is it a reasonably nasty level in the original, but a bug in the PSP version makes it even nastier.  I have found at least one guy on the net who claims to have completed all of the classic levels on the PSP, though, so I’m going to assume it’s possible, but I’m going to bitch about it even so.

When I last mentioned Lemmings, I admitted that, despite having purchased the game four times so far since its release back in 1991, I’d never gotten very far with it.  As best as I can figure, I think I stopped about halfway through “Tricky” - at least, that’s where the levels stopped looking familiar.

I’m not sure what’s stopped me in the past.  I don’t know if it was a matter of the levels getting too hard, or just having other stuff to do.  Since the original game let you get to any level just by entering a password, I’m not sure if there just wasn’t any INCENTIVE to go through the levels in order.

Anyway.  So I’ve been playing the PSP version.  And I’ve made a little more progress, and thus far without having to go look stuff up in a FAQ.

I’m just about to that point, though, as the level I’m stuck on is a right bitch and a half. 

Wish me luck.

Oh, and when I bitched about the music being wrong, I just hadn’t played enough.  I kind of WISH the music was different now, after playing for longer.

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.

She’ll be coming round the mountain

She’ll be coming round the mountain

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.

It’s in my head and it won’t stop and it won’t let me die.

Among the advantages of having a wife that buys new gadgets before I get a chance to : I get her hand-me-downs when she gets tired of them.

So, when she got herself a PSP and a DS and then decided that carrying around TWO portable systems was just way too much purse space, I lucked into her stash of PSP games.

And she has good taste, so I didn’t mind at all.

One of the games she handed down was Kingdom of Paradise, and I finally finished playing that tonight. I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to play games on the move recently, so I wound up stretching out a 20 hour RPG over something like two and a half months. I was strong, however - I have 3 PSP games sitting, shrinkwrapped, on the shelf, and I told myself I wasn’t going to break them open until I’d completed this one.

It’s a pretty decent game. It’s a lousy portable game. I’ll explain:

First off, the good: This game does not feature the generic European setting that fantasy RPGs seem to be stuck in. Your hero is, instead, running around a fantasy world built mostly on Chinese legend, particularly the Four Symbols (Plus one!) that most western anime fans are familiar with from either Fushigi Yuugi or Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. Already, this is a plus. It adds a definite touch of awe the first time you go toe-to-toe with one of the four gods.

The graphics are a nice bit of work, the characters are multilayered and interesting, and the story doesn’t pull any punches.

Also it has a cute girl with glasses. I’ll let a random NPC sum up my thoughts on that issue:

The downsides:

I don’t have any significant beef with the majority of the voice acting, except that every single proper noun is mispronounced. If you’re used to the Japanese pronunciations of words like “Byakko” or “Seiryu”, you will be wincing constantly. If you’ve never heard them said properly, you probably won’t notice.

Leaving the voice acting aside, here’s the biggest complaint I have with it: The developers tried to make a console RPG, just shrunk down for the PSP. It’s full of loading times, long fully-voiced cutscenes, and boss fights that stretch out forever. The last fight in the game took me over an hour. This is not portable-friendly. When you’re making a game designed for people to carry around and play whenever they have a few minutes, you need to cut back on your cinematic aspirations and grueling boss battles.

It takes a certain degree of faith to pause in the middle of a boss fight, hit the power switch on the PSP to put it in sleep mode, and pray that you’ll be in the same place when you get back and you won’t have to re-do the fight from the beginning.

I should not have played this AFTER Brave Story: New Traveler, because Brave Story does all that stuff right.

It does, at least, feature a running log of “You need to go do X next”, which is really handy when you have to go a week between play sessions. AND you can save anywhere, except in the middle of scripted events. These are features that all portable RPGs should have.

And now for a random screenshot, taken completely out of context, that gives an entirely incorrect impression of the game’s storyline:

Let’s hear from Yuno on the issue.

Yeah, that about sums it up.

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.

…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.