A couple of weeks ago, I realized that I had some Best Buy gift certificates that were about to expire, so I went out to our local store to try to find something to buy with them.

I wound up coming home with the PSP tie-in game for Tron Legacy, because I’d read that it was, well, different from the console games, which were more or less universally panned upon release.

It is, for the record, different.

Problem is, it’s still not very good. It’s basically a collection of mini-games, where completing a game gives you a number of qualifying points which you can eventually use to unlock another set of mini-games where you can build up qualifying points again and so on, and that’s not necessarily bad – the original TRON arcade game was nothing but a set of four mini-games, after all – but for some reason I just wasn’t having any fun with most of them.

I DID like the tanks mini-game, because I’ve been wanting to drive around a Tron tank since roughly 10 minutes into seeing the movie for the first time as a small child, but the rest – lightcycles, disc battles, recognizer sequences – just didn’t grab me.

It’s also very poorly designed for a portable game. There’s a LOT of loading in Tron: Evolution, and it’s especially noticeable whenever you fail a match – rather than getting a “retry?” prompt, you have to wait for the game to reload the overworld screen, reselect the mini-game, confirm that you want to play that particular mini-game, wait for it to load, sit through the little intro animation for the mini-game…

Oh, and if you put your PSP to sleep, then wake it again, it for some reason assumes you’ve changed the memory card, so you have to sit through some more screens while you’re prompted to reselect the card & save file, confirm that it’s OK to overwrite it, blah blah blah.

Put simply, a proper portable game should be one you can take out of a pocket for a 15 minute bus ride, make some progress, and sleep your PSP again until your next bus ride, with minimal frustration. This particular game fails that test, and isn’t engrossing enough to make me want to put up with it.

On the plus side, it more or less looks like a Tron game should, and the music is pretty good, and they got Bruce Boxleitner to do some voice acting, so they got those bits right.

Oh, well. It was pretty cheap, even before the gift certificates, and I got to feel good about myself for actually buying a PSP game instead of downloading it which seems to be more or less the norm these days. Seriously, I was in a Gamestop the other day and one of the employees was telling a new PSP buyer that the first thing she should do with her new system is get custom firmware on it, and this is a store that is theoretically in the business of selling games.

But I digress.

Back in August of 2009, out of a vague sense of obligation, I played through the first Jax & Daxter game.

My conclusion at the time was that it was, if not particularly overwhelming, at least OK.  I thought it suffered a bit from Enforced Wacky, to be honest; it felt like the game WANTED me to laugh but at the same time wasn’t quite up to MAKING me laugh.

For the sequel, I understand, they decided to turn the main character “dark”, which kind of reeks of “OK, we need to appeal to the crucial 12 to 17 year old male demographic, let’s uh make the main character all moody and stuff.”

So I didn’t even bother with the sequel.

I did, however, buy “Daxter” for the PSP, partially because it got simply amazing review scores – impressive enough that I don’t NEED to add “for a PSP game” to the end of that sentence – but mostly because Gamestop marked it down to $2.99 and I figured it had to be worth that.

I’ve been playing through that for the last couple of weeks, mostly in 15 minute stretches on the way to and from school.  It’s a pretty good portable game – it autosaves often, you can save anywhere if the latest autosave wasn’t recent enough, and it avoids having really long cutscenes.  Ready at Dawn gets some serious points for knowing how to design a game for a portable system, as opposed to making a straight-up PS2 port and calling it a day.

Much like “Jak”, Daxter-the-game turned out to be OK, but not great.  It did manage to pull off some genuinely comedic moments, and the final boss fight was frustrating only to the point of feeling tremendous satisfaction when I’d beaten him, not frustrating enough to make me want to hurl the PSP out the bus window.

Unfortunately, it also featured some really painful vehicle sections and really really terrible camera control.  I mean, it makes sense to map the camera control to the R and L triggers on the PSP, but it would have made a lot more sense if they’d mapped the R trigger to, say, “pan right” instead of “move the camera right, making the view pan left”.

Oh, and it takes camera control away from you during boss fights, which is great from the point of view of seeing the boss all the time but not so great when you’re trying to make jumps between platforms and the game won’t let you see which way you’re going.

Those gripes aside, I guess I did play through to the end, and the Enforced Wacky wasn’t nearly as omnipresent as the original PS2 game, and, uh, it was 3 bucks and gave me something to do during my commute.

B-, shows improvement.

Then I took that game out the next morning and put Miku back in.

The end result is that, nearly two weeks after the point where I’d cleared every song and where I’d normally call a game finished and stick it back on the shelf, I’m still playing.

I’ve also ignored every bit of sanity I had when I said I wasn’t going to try beating all the songs on hard. I’ve done that, and then I went back and beat them all on hard with a GREAT ranking. “Disappearance” took 16 tries, by the way.

But, you see, I had to do that to unlock the gold Miku dress. It’s only logical.

At this point, I only have two outfits left to unlock to 100% the entire game, and I’ve put nearly 40 hours in. That might actually make this the longest game I’ve played since The Witcher.

Definitely not going to buy the sequel until after I’ve graduated, I tell you that.

Now, I certainly didn’t get a GREAT rank – the song definitely deserves the ☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ difficulty rating – but I’m not going to torture myself by trying for it.

I’m at a little over 50% of costumes unlocked.  Some of the remaining ones are just a matter of playing through one song or another a couple more times, some have really nasty requirements to unlock.  I wouldn’t even consider going back and hunting down costumes if it weren’t for having bought Dreamy Theater on the PS3.

More on Dreamy Theater another time.

As an aside, I had a bit of a problem figuring out why I hadn’t unlocked the swimwear version of Miku since I’d done all songs on hard, in theory meeting the requirements, when I realized that I had unlocked the Space Channel 5 outfit, which required me to have completed Miku Miku Shite Ageru on hard wearing the Space Channel 39 outfit, which wouldn’t have counted towards the Miku unlock.

A quick pass through Miku Miku Shite Ageru on normal got me a GREAT and an unlocked costume.

Also, most of the Miku’s room accessory categories are in the 80% complete range.  Since those are unlocked COMPLETELY randomly, there’s no way to try for specific ones, which is actually nice – I may not have a complete set, but I can’t be blamed for it.

Overall, I’m pretty content.  It certainly makes up for the crushing defeat I suffered at the hands of the DJ Max series.

Uh, where was I?

Oh yes. Hatsune Miku: Project Diva, which I “beat” a week ago and which you’d think should have been retired back to the bookshelves so I could get into something with a little more narrative. Instead, it has a firm lock on my PSP’s UMD drive.

See, first I had to beat all the songs on “easy” in order to unlock the songs list, then I had to beat a couple of songs over and over to unlock the “Ren” and “Lin” versions, then I went through and beat everything on “normal” so I felt like I’d accomplished something, and it should have ended there.

Then I thought, well, if I beat all the songs on “easy” with a ranking of “great”, I unlock the PV modes so I can just watch the videos without having to press buttons. That didn’t take
me TOO much longer.

…and then I was like, well, there are one or two costumes I’d like to unlock…

…and now I’m on a quest to beat every song in “normal” mode with at least a “great” ranking so I can unlock the “hard” difficulty for every song. This has the side effect of unlocking a ton of costumes and items for Miku’s room, by the way, which were things I really didn’t focus on before.

Get the idea? I’m up to nearly 20 hours put into this thing and it still hasn’t gotten old.

Oh, and I’ve found that passing a song on “hard” is generally a good sight easier than unlocking the hard mode in the first place. I swear, I’m not going to be crazy enough to try to get all “great” rankings at this difficulty level though.

For some reason, I’ve had Genesis stuck in my head, and kind of an odd song choice at that.  I don’t think it was a single and I don’t ever remember hearing it on the radio, but for some reason it seems to “go” with Hatsune Miku: Project Diva.

Miku is certainly not the first attempt at a virtual idol, but – with all due respect to Sharon, Ulala, and Kyoko – she’s the first to really make an impact.  Even though I really didn’t know what the hell I was looking at the first time I saw her waving a scallion around, it was something that got stuck in my head, and the heads of, well, an awful lot of people who are an awful lot more creative than I could ever hope to be.

Since then, she’s become something of a collective mascot for the nicovideo hordes and spawned a staggering array of merchandise, both professional and fan-produced, including a series of PSP games that I am now going to get around to talking about, honest.

Project Diva came out nearly a year and a half ago, but I wasn’t feeling rich enough to import a copy and I figured that I could wait for it to come out under the “Best” label for cheap.  Co-incidentally, that “Best” label release just happened to coincide with my study abroad session in Japan this last summer.

Not that I could find a copy, mind you.  It was released and immediately sold-out, so I wound up buying a used copy of the original release for slightly more than the “Best” label would have cost me.

And of course I then waited five months to play it.

And it’s bloody brilliant.  It may even challenge “Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan” for my Favorite Rhythm Game Ever, though possibly just because Miku is insufferably cuter than the Ouendan boys.

Like most rhythm games, the game mechanic consists of pushing buttons in time with markers on the screen, with you being judged on your precision and on building up massive combo chains of concurrently-hit notes.  There’s not much new there.

Unlike most rhythm games, each and every song has a music video running behind it, with Miku as the star naturally enough.  One of the more unique ones below, with no gameplay covering it.

And the same, with gameplay:

Anyway, I did a bit of a marathon session unlocking every song in the game and now I’m on a quest to beat all of them on, at least, “normal” difficulty.  I don’t have any illusions that I’ll ever beat all of them on “hard”, at least not as long as this little beauty is in the lineup:

Wow, three video links in one post.  That’s a new record for me I think.

Oh, and there’s a sequel out too.  As mentioned, I’m awfully cheap so I’ll probably get around to buying it in a year or so.

Sadly, this post and the next two are in reverse chronological order, which kind of spoils the progression. Oh, well.

Anyway.  After finishing Gurumin and then writing a couple of posts talking about it and Borderlands, it was a little after 5 PM, so I had some dinner and then scanned the shelf O’ PSP games for the next candidate.

I picked out Star Wars: Battlefront: Renegade Squadron because I’d heard that it had a “short campaign” and also because I’d heard that the game features a sequence in which you defeat Emperor Palpatine by trapping him in a temple with rocks and that seemed simply too ludicrous not to see for myself.

I should clarify that last bit.  The rocks are not his companions in the temple – rather, they are the means by which you imprison him.  English is not a terribly precise language.

Anyway, I was a little puzzled when I went looking for definitions of exactly how short the campaign was, because no review that I found seemed inclined to actually nail it down.  I saw a couple of “less than six hours”, though, which seemed about right for a PSP game, so I figured that I’d get going on it – it was almost six by this point – and I’d probably be done by midnight or not too much afterwards.

At 8:45, as the game’s credits were scrolling, I realized why no review had been keen to pin a firm play time on the campaign.  When this game came out, it was forty bucks, and that’s an awful lot to ask for an experience that lasts less than three hours, even if you CAN trap the emperor in a temple BY MEANS of some rocks.  I doubt any professional reviewer really wanted to be the guy saying, look, the best thing about this game is that you can play it start to finish on a single charge of your PSP’s battery.

Nevertheless, the game does offer some opportunities for entertainment.  In addition to the rocks thing, you also get to watch Han Solo charging imperial stormtroopers as their blaster fire splashes off his chest – yes this is an actual cutscene – and you get to wonder about the biology of your character, who can take three story falls with no negative effect but who dies as soon as he touches water.

The story, biological improbabilities aside, isn’t too bad; it’s a series of “while the plot you remember from the movies was happening, here’s what was happening elsewhere” side stories, and there’s some nicely done static interstitial art between missions.  It also answers the question of “just who WAS the bounty hunter that Han Solo ran into on Ord Mantell”, though a quick look at Wookiepedia reveals that Han Solo has – if you take all the various stories into consideration – been to Ord Mantell on no less than four separate occasions and been attacked by bounty hunters every time.

I’m not making that up.

Also it uses the sound effects from the films, which adds a LOT to the nostalgia value.

Put simply, I paid nine bucks and got my fun out of it, though I’ll freely admit that a lot of the entertainment value comes from writing a snarky blog post about it.

When Gurumin was released, I was fooled by the box art and the game’s subtitle into assuming that it was Yet Another Monster Collecting Game, so I didn’t buy it.

I saved some money that way, because it had dropped to $14.99 at Best Buy by the time I’d heard that it had nothing whatsoever to do with Catching Them All and was in fact a pretty decent game, and I bought it at that price and then promptly left it on my shelf for a while.

I finally finished it this weekend, so I thought I’d talk about it.

Here’s the ironic bit: Gurumin is a really short game, especially for an RPG.  I spent less than a dozen hours playing it, by in-game clock, and that’s even with “finishing” it, getting the “bad ending”, and going back to do all the annoying little bits of running around needed to get the “good ending”.

On the other hand, it’s taken me months to play through.

The first time I tried playing through it, I got turned off by the voice acting.  The developers DID provide an option to play through the game with the original voice acting, but it required you to beat it once using the English voices first.  I didn’t want to do that, so I put it aside for a while until I found that someone had thoughtfully uploaded a save file for the game to Gamefaqs, with the original voices unlocked.

With that in place, I gave it a whirl, and got a little ways into it, and then decided that it was the perfect game to play on the bus to and from school, and then played through it for about 15 minutes at a time that way for a couple of months.  I wasn’t playing every day, though, and I was having trouble remembering what I’d done from play session to play session, so I really wasn’t getting into it and I was starting to wonder if I shouldn’t just put it aside for good and stick something else in the PSP for taking to and from school.

I finally decided, however, I would sit down and give it an extended play session instead of abandoning it, and then I spent about six hours getting to the ending.

To be honest, it doesn’t have anything special going for it.  The gameplay is nothing you haven’t seen before, your epic Quest To Save The World revolves mostly around getting bits of furniture back from the depths of rather short dungeons, and I found myself frequently resorting to a FAQ just to find out where I should be going next, which is pretty much my Cardinal Sin of Game Design.

On the other hand, it’s awfully cute and has a lot of charm going for it, so there’s that.  I hadn’t been able to get into the story or characters playing it for 15 minutes at a time, but playing it for a longer session made me quite fond of them and made me really appreciate the epilogue-style vignettes in the credits after the story “ending”.  It’s also got some great music, and the developers made ten tracks from the soundtrack available to download from their web site which is a genuinely classy move.

Finally, while it was a bit hard to find in UMD form for a while, you can get it off PSN for the eminently reasonable sum of $15 US, and it’s definitely worth taking a tumble at that price.

The PSP sequel came for the 2009 holidays, so a couple of months after I finished the original game. I got it as a Christmas gift, sat on it for 9 months, and finally played through it over the weekend.

I was quite happy with it, to be honest.  There were a few terribly frustrating moments revolving around timed sequences, but they represent a fairly small part of what the game has on offer – most of the game is, like the original, a fun romp around the rooftops while you go stabby on mans.

A word here, because it’s appropriate.  The guards in Assassin’s Creed  were terribly, terribly annoying.  They treated anyone moving around the city at any pace over a slight jog to be a criminal immediately in need of a cold steel infusion, and heaven forbid you climb a ladder in their presence.

In Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines, to give the game its full title, the guards are much more forgiving about you running around town at full speed, but they’re also about as dumb as a pillowcase full of doorknobs, and often completely deaf to their buddy’s dying gurgle, if that buddy happens to be standing slightly behind them.

On the other hand, it meant that I had to spend less time running away from guards while looking for a haystack, and could instead spend time walking up to rooftop archers and trying to stab them in the most amusing parts of their dialogue.

Obviously I can’t stab something in the dialogue, there’s some bad grammar in that last sentence, but I’m confident that you’ll be able to follow along.

Other good things: They did cut the game down a bit from its console incarnation, which eliminated many of the annoyances.  Instead of having a massive world with lots of empty space to cross between towns, the world is pretty small and the towns likewise.  This also makes things pretty linear – good for me since I like knowing what I’m supposed to be doing – but maybe not good for everyone.

The towns are also a bit depopulated compared to AC1, and this is again actually kind of nice.  The developers took out the annoying NPCs that would follow you around asking for money or occasionally attacking you, which was a big frustration for me while playing the original, so I’m happy with the change. The NPCs that ARE left feel no shame about making fun of your running around Cyprus and occasionally climbing buildings, so it kept that feel as well.

It didn’t really advance the AC1 story that much, though, so that’s a bit of a down point.  As far as expansion packs go, it was better than the 2008 Prince of Persia’s epilogue, but it also cost four times as much.

I’ll close this with something that got a laugh out of me, and something that was a personal revelation.

Laughter: Since you’re an assassin for the good guys, you hang out with a group of Cypriot resistance fighters.  At one point during the game, you have to go bust some resistance fighters out of prison.  The developers didn’t spend the time / money to make a new model for the resistance fighters as you were releasing them, and the normal model has the NPC wearing a sword at his belt, so the effect is that you bust open a locked cell and a bunch of heavily armed former prisoners rush out.

Revelation: I’ve seen a lot of frustrating things in gaming, from escort missions to timed fiddly platforming bits, but there’s nothing quite so painful as sitting through Ubisoft credits.  Seriously, I’m sure that the assistant to the director of EMEA marketing is a wonderful person, but they don’t need to appear in the credits and slow them down even more. 

I will admit that I do have two or three Miley Cyrus songs on my iPod, but that’s perfectly normal for any man in his late 30s who uh…

A restraining order? For me? You shouldn’t have!

Anyway.  Let’s move on.

See, regardless of my apathy for the actual Hannah Montana phenomenon, it did bring at least one good thing into the world: Lilac PSPs.  I like me some pastel-colored electronics.

Thing is, though, I bought a white PSP-1000 while I was in Japan 4 years ago, and it’s in perfect working order, so buying another one, at $200, was kind of hard to justify.

It became easier when my wife bought a PSP-3000 for herself and I found out that you could hook it up to your TV, or say to a monitor with component inputs, and play PSP games on a rather larger screen.  They may be letterboxed and all that, but it’s still a rather nice option.

Still, $200 seemed a lot of money.  I was also rather worried that the lilac PSP in the bundle might have, say, a massive Hannah Montana logo emblazoned on the backside, which would cause even more people to question my man status.

Fortunately for me, it seems like a lot of people had trouble justifying $200 for a PSP, so our local Fred Meyer had several bundles that hung around until they got put on clearance at $190.  That’s not really much of a discount.

Then they sent me a coupon for $20 off anything in home electronics AND had a sale wherein every piece of “clearance” merchandise was marked down an additional 40%.

At that point, owning a second PSP became a lot more justifiable, and I found a couple of forum posts that implied that the lilac PSP was free of potentially embarrassing logos, so I decided to bite the bullet, take the plunge, reuse the metaphor and just find out for myself.

Purchased: One (1) “Hannah Montana” Limited Edition Entertainment Pack:

Don’t forget: Les filles JOUENT aussi!

Wait… shouldn’t that be “Les fillez” ? I mean, to go with the “Girlz”?

Upon opening… the tension builds… I ignore the packet emblazoned “Open me first” in favor of answering my real question.

Incidentally, the battery is in the “Open me first” packet, which I found out after I plugged the thing in to charge, left it for several hours, tried to turn it on and had a minor panic attack.  Just a little protip for you, there.

And we’re good! We have no logo! I can proudly play my new lilac PSP in public without fear of anyone questioning my manliness… maybe. It will help if I don’t actually apply any of the included shiny stickers to my new PSP.

Not that I’m actually tempted, because that would just be plain weird, and I like to think I’m a perfectly normal and well adjusted guy.