Killer 7 : Final thoughts
There’s a particular Japanese ghost story that I see repeated quite often, with some variation - that, not knowing the official name, I think of as the “extra person” story. If you’ve ever seen They Were Eleven, you have the gist of it - a group of people, in some extraordinary circumstance, discover that they have an extra member, but don’t know which of the group is the “extra” who isn’t supposed to be there. In some variants, we actually find out WHY there is one extra person - in other variants, the “wait, we have one extra!” is the Big Reveal and the story ends there.
Killer 7 draws on this ghost story - there are EIGHT Smiths in a group called the Killer SEVEN, and I was quite happy when it turned out to follow the first of those options and we found out who the extra was and why they were there. I was expecting it would remain unexplained - because, well, the story DOES have that reputation for being opaque.
Reputation aside, the game actually does an awful lot of explaining after a certain point, and the story becomes a lot easier to follow - though, I have the feeling that, if I were to put disc 1 back in the Gamecube and start over from scratch, it would make even more sense.
That’s a little more effort than I’m willing to put in, though. I happily did it for Fatal Frame II, which featured cute girls in frilly outfits, but Killer 7 doesn’t have quite the same replay appeal.
That sounds like a bit of a put-down, so I’ll clarify a bit:
Killer 7 is one ugly game, even accounting for “stylistic decisions”, the control scheme seems almost deliberately engineered to make things difficult for the player, the blood is overdone, the characters say “fuck” entirely too much, and there’s a “Boy, you really liked “Se7en”, huh?” cutscene that could have been dropped.
It’s also ridiculously satisfying and at times a sheer joy to play. I wouldn’t have felt ripped off if I’d actually paid full price for it, so getting it after it’d hit the clearance racks is even sweeter.
Note: I typed the bit above without realizing that a “Se7en” ripoff homage in a game called “Killer 7″ might have been an intentional reference, and now I feel silly but I’m going to leave it in the post so you can all point and laugh.
More Killer 7
Just for the record, when I was making fun of adventure games in my earlier post on Killer 7, I did not know that I would, at a point approximately halfway through the game, actually have to look around for doohickies so I could turn on a valve to drain a pool.
I got some of the particulars wrong, mind you. While you do get an awful lot of rings throughout the course of the game, none of them have been swallowed by fish, not yet anyway. Instead, they are, perfectly logically, given to you by a disembodied head that likes to go to amusement parks and hang around in garages.
At the moment, having broken up an organlegging ring by fighting a machine-gun-toting Sailor-Moon-wannabe in a plaid skirt followed by a quick-draw contest with her albino adoptive father, I’m hunting down an artist whose Power-Rangers-esque comic book seems to be predicting the future.
This is all, again, perfectly logical.
OK, I’m pretty much lying. What I should say is that, while I’m really enjoying the game, I’m looking forward to playing through to the end so I can go looking for discussions on what the hell the story was all about. 
Getting through backlogs… how to do it wrong.
So I’ve been really cranking through the games backlog this year, up to over 40 games finished and I might just be able to push that to 50 by the time 2009 rolls around.
On the other hand, my wife wanted to go out and look for DS games this weekend - she doesn’t really build up a backlog, mind you, she has a couple of Xbox games knocking around that she wants to get back to sometime, but apart from that she plays her DS an awful lot and doesn’t let stuff build up - and unfortunately for me, she took me along.
And there are an awful lot of cheap PS2 titles for sale right now.
I came home with Klonoa 2, which was defensible as I enjoyed the GBA games quite a lot. Seemed perfectly reasonable to add it to the backlog.
Unfortunately, I also came home with Ratchet & Clank : Going Commando and Up Your Arsenal, because I played the PS3 Ratchet & Clank demo and thought it was damn fun, which reminded me that I bought the first game when it went greatest hits and had never actually tried it and then I saw the sequels cheap…
…and Oni, because it was $2.99 with a spotless disc and manual and it surely must be worth it, and Jak & Daxter : The Precursor Legacy because, what the hell, I’m buying all these Ratchet & Clank games and I should at least try the Other Big PS2 Buddy Game, and Jedi Knight II because I thought I’d heard people say that it was awfully good.
So, added six games to the backlog.
At least, after buying the second and third Ratchet & Clank games, I DID put the first one into the PS3 and played it for 3 straight hours. Mighty fun game, that. Wish I’d played it at some point in the four years since I bought it, mind you.
I tell myself that it could have been much worse, I could have bought six NEW games and then been out $240. Buying these six only set me back $43 which isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things.
20th Anniversary Phantasy Star Wallpaper
A little while ago, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Phantasy Star series - you know, the really damn cool Master System and Genesis RPGs that Sega has been trying to pretend never existed now that they’ve decided that pumping out endless pseudo-MMORPGs is a better use of the name? - Sega put up an anniversary web site and put out a few bits and bobs designed to get the nostalgia flowing and the wallets opening.
In Japan only, of course.
Anyway, one of the bits and bobs was a very neat poster. I couldn’t buy it, of course, and the provided image sample was far too small to use as a desktop wallpaper.
I finally found a decent-size version of the image. Still a bit small, but on a white desktop background it works pretty well regardless of your monitor size.
I share this with you now:
Firmware frustration
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.
Smith, Party of Eight?
As often as I see the topic come up on forums and blogs, I think it’s safe to say that most - if not all - gamers have a list of games that they loved and that they think got the short end of the stick in the marketplace.
Sometimes, these are pretty individual opinions - I haven’t met too many other folks who absolutely loved Alisia Dragoon, for instance - but there are games whose market reception was legendarily apathetic in comparison to the efforts spent on promoting them. These usually get even more credit if their production costs were so high, and their sales so low, that they heavily contributed to the failure-or-near-failure of a publisher or development house. See: Majesco, Clover, etc.
The top two games that I see trotted out as “overlooked” are Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil. Both expensive games, both heavily marketed, both marked down to twenty bucks in their first month of sales.
I can’t say that this is ALL bad. Yeah, it’s sucked having to wait so long for a BG&E2, but I’m not sure that it would be better if it had sold by the truckload and spawned an endless stream of sequels and spin-offs.
Put another way: Do you really want to see a BG&E-inspired Kart Racing game?
Anyway, after you get past the “big two” underappreciated games, you tend to see at least a mention of Killer 7.
Killer 7 is a game that’s at the end of the “accessibility” scale that’s furthest away from, oh, Pac-man. The control scheme is obtuse - you don’t even use the joystick to move, for instance, your character moves forward when you press the A button and turns around if you press B - and it has the worst case of Ugly First Level Syndrome I’ve yet encountered, a bizarre mostly-white building that reminds me of the worst examples of mid-90s 3D and which is so devoid of distinguishing features that I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a hotel, an office building, or maybe an apartment block.
Your in-game advice is delivered by a gibbering nutjob in a bondage outfit, and when you die, you leave a take-out-baggie - seriously - full of your vital bits that you then have to use another character to retrieve and bring back to a save room before you can continue.
Is it any wonder that I was able to pick this up, a few months after release, for $9.98? Or that the shelf I took it from was full of similarly-clearance-priced copies?
At its core, it’s awfully close to an adventure game. You have a limited set of locations you can explore, there are puzzles to be solved to open up new locations, and the puzzle solving tends pretty heavily towards the “to open this door, you’re going to need to do two or three fetch quests, seemingly unrelated to the actual door opening, which will result in the key to the door falling out of its hiding place for no apparent reason.”
On the other hand, while you’re roaming around whatever building you’re in looking for the crank handle that will turn on the water pump in the basement and drain the flooded room, leaving the fish in the flooded room gasping on the floor so you can find the fish that swallowed the signet ring that you need to show to the butler so he will loan you a serving tray which you will use to reflect the moonlight on to the portrait of the princess which will open the secret compartment which…
I am, of course, kidding here.
I hope I’m kidding here, anyway. Let’s start over.
…while you’re roaming around whatever building you’re in doing adventure game stuff, occasionally you will hear an evil laugh and something invisible will run at you and try to get close enough to explode. That is your cue to switch to shooter mode, hit the “scan the area for invisible running exploding guys” button, target the newly-visible running exploding guy and try to shoot him before he blows up on you.
This bit is sort of cheap. Often the invisible running exploding guys spawn so close to you that you don’t have a chance to protect yourself, and then you tend to wind up in the aforementioned take-out-baggie. It’s not like you can pull out your gun and then back up, or anything. While aiming, you’re rooted in place.
It’s a bit of a hybrid of the genres, and doesn’t necessarily take the best bits from either, is what I’m getting at.
Now, it does come with some payoffs, if you can make it past the first level. It’s got an art style that looks dreadful in still images but really works in motion, what I’ve seen so far of the story looks pretty interesting, even if I’m having a little trouble following the different players and their motivations, and you switch between characters as diverse as a wheelchair-bound sniper, a curiously soft-spoken wrestler in a Lucha Libre mask and tuxedo, and a waifish psychic who can break barriers by, well, bleeding all over them.
Did I mention I’m a terrible hemophobe? Between this game and Bullet Witch, It’s been a bad month for my particular neurosis.
Let’s put my squeamishness aside, though, and carry on.
Twenty minutes into playing Killer 7, I was wondering what the heck people saw in it.
An hour into playing Killer 7, I was wondering why I was still playing it instead of, say, minesweeper.
Two hours into playing Killer 7, I started wondering what the heck was going to happen next, and if the next - I don’t like to use terms like “mindfuck”, but it applies here - could possibly top the last.
That’s a pretty good progression, I think.
Rub IS Love
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.
LittleBigPlanet - It was worth the rental.
I came extraordinarily close to falling for the LBP hype and dropping the sixty bucks.
Thankfully, I didn’t. I rented it from our neighborhood video store instead. This was $7.99, and the game was definitely worth that.
Let me be straightforward here: LBP is marketed as being all about creating your own levels and playing through levels other people have created. I’m not interested in either, so my point in renting it was to see how the out-of-the-box single-player game was.
It’s freaking gorgeous and oozes style.
It reminded me a lot of a mix of Clockwork Knight and Exit, with the graphics turned up to 11 and music that never once got old. Your character, when you start the game, is boring as all hell, but that doesn’t last very long. By the time you’ve played half-way through LittleBigPlanet’s story mode, you have a schoolgirl dress, glasses, nekomimi and a two-ponytail wig with which to dress your Sackgirl, and that should be enough for anyone.
You’ll also have played for about three hours, and another three hours will get you to the Bunker stage, which is the third stage from the end of the game, and then another two hours will see you through the Bunker level, unless you need to go out and buy another controller having snapped yours in half, and then another 30 minutes or so will see you to the “ending.”
I will not spoil the ending here, largely because it would take longer to type out a spoiler than it takes to watch the ending. It’s a 10-second affair that ranks right up there with Quake and Sudeki, and it came as quite a dampener to the experience - they got Stephen Fry to narrate the introduction and the tutorials, would it have killed them to have him record some sort of congratulatory voiceover?
Still, this is not the first time that Sony has bet the farm on a platformer that I didn’t really “get”, and it worked out pretty well for them last time, so who am I to criticize?
Fatal(er) Frames
After finishing Fatal Frame 2 : Crimson Butterfly : Director’s Cut at the Normal difficulty, I had two endings unlocked in the game’s gallery mode, with two endings still locked.
Since the normal mode ending is a little depressing - gosh, it’s a Japanese horror game, who would have thought? - I decided to do something that I have never done before with a game.
Play through it, again, on Hard.
I didn’t quite know what to expect - other than, well, it was going to be harder, I assumed.
This turned out to be the case, but not quite in the way I expected.
See, as you go through the game, you have one weapon available to you to use against the undead: A special camera. As you fight ghosts, you are scored based on the quality of the pictures you take, and you can use the points that you get from this to purchase upgrades for the camera.
In hard mode, not only are the ghosts you fight tougher than the ghosts in normal mode, but there are fewer of them.
I didn’t expect that part. I expected rampaging hordes of the undead.
After I thought about it, I realized that it makes perfect sense and is a much better way of balancing the difficulty than just throwing more ghosts at the player. If they had taken the “hard = more fights” approach, it would have been a more action-oriented game, which just wouldn’t have made sense.
It also helped to maintain a little bit of tension - having seen all the gotchas the first time around, they didn’t make me jump as high on the second pass, but walking through rooms thinking to myself “OK, I got jumped here before… am I going to get attacked again this time?” kept the tension level up.
End result was: Playing the game again, on hard, was actually pretty fun. It was also considerably faster - I played through the first time without using spoilers, so I spent a lot of time backtracking trying to find the next thing I was supposed to do.
Then I finished it, and found that you get the same ending as playing on normal mode, and that’s when I admitted defeat and ran to youtube to see the #3 and #4 endings. There ARE two modes above “Hard” - “Nightmare” and “Fatal” - and I am just not man enough to try them.
Ugly First Level Syndrome, an Anecdote
I was at work today and sort of casually eavesdropping on the gentleman in the next cube who’s recommending SOCOM to another of our developers, and the developer in question brings up Rainbow Six Vegas because, well, they’re talking about tactical shooters and it’s relevant to their interests.
Specifically, he brings it up as “It looks like a PS2 game” and warns the first guy, in no uncertain terms, to stay far away from it.
See, he has a PS3 and a 47″ screen and, as he puts it, likes to sit about 3 feet from the screen. Which is going to kill his eyes someday, but he’s still pretty young and who am I to talk?
The thing is, as I listen to him talking about how ugly the game is, I realize something: He didn’t make it through the first level, and everything he’s saying is completely defensible if you’ve only seen that level - the game IS godawful ugly until you get to the second level and actually get in to Vegas.
So I stuck my nose into the discussion, double-checked that I was right about that, and then shared in his disgust about the opening level and tried to make the case that the game actually does get rather pretty after you get over the initial hump.
Anyway, he’s going to go home and push through it to see if I’m right or not and will report back.
So, two things.
One: This supports my “Guys! It’s OK to put a pretty level up front!” theory of Game Design.
Two: Ubisoft bloody well owes me one for trying to untarnish their image.
OK, Ubisoft really doesn’t owe me anything, but I can be smug in their general direction and that’s good enough for me.
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
