It’s been nearly three years since I stumbled across an Otomedius machine in an Akihabara arcade, two and a half years since it got a home release, 15 months since it got a budget price re-release, 10 months since I hand-imported a copy of the budget re-release and a Japanese 360S to play it on, and barely over a month to go until the sequel is released, localized, in North America.

So getting around to spending some serious time with it now is, well, actually for me that’s almost timely.

But what IS Otomedius?

Well, basically, it’s a game where you defend yourself after wave after wave of murderous penguins.

Sunbathing penguins, construction worker penguins, penguin mummies, penguins floating from balloons and dropping explosive watermelons… penguins.

OK, so there are some other enemy types, but they don’t stand out as much.

It’s got character designs by Yoshizaki Mine, which means that you can expect a certain top-heaviness to the main characters.

This is not the main character.  I don’t really care.

If the homicidal penguin thing hasn’t already sold you, I will add that it features well-timed, but barely-comprehensible strategy tips from time to time, such as when a boss appears on screen and you are instructed to “shuuto itto in za heddo”

It’s a glorious thing.

Here, watch a few minutes of it:

I have actually tried a few times to get into it and have been roundly thwarted on all previous attempts because I didn’t really understand the power-up system and because I was dumb and – not understanding the power-up system – tended to select the “automatically assign my power ups as you see fit” option, which tended to result in the game selecting SPEED SPEED AND MORE SPEED, meaning that my on-screen character tended to zip around the screen like a hummingbird on acid at the slightest jiggle of the directional stick, which is not very conductive to long-term survival in a game where you’re often trying to fly between laser fire with a very small margin of error.

Once I figured out that the auto-power-up feature was killing me and turned it off, I actually started to do fairly well, by which I mean that I can almost complete the game on one credit on “easy” except for the last boss which is a real pain in the arse.

The game has several difficulty levels above “easy”, but let’s not talk about them right now.

Anyway, it’s bloody unlikely that the original game will ever be released outside of Japan, but at least the sequel is coming out in the US.  Whether I buy it or not will be highly dependent on whether it’s possible to use the original voices, of course.

So, at the very end, Halo: Reach delivers exactly what it promised in the opening cinematic:  Your broken helmet lying on the ground and your character dead.

The trick that Bungie needed to pull off, then, was to make a game where you know the ending still worth playing through, and I think they pulled that off quite well.  You know from the beginning of the game that you’re fighting a losing battle, but you keep pushing forward, winning enough small victories to feel like you’re not giving up.  It helps somewhat that, if you’ve played the original trilogy, you know that it all ends well, but it’s the sacrifices on Reach that kick off the events of Halo 1 – you’re not getting to the eventual peace without paying for it in advance.

On that note, I thought they did a reasonably good job of making Reach seem like a natural lead-in to Halo.  It helps, of course, that it’s more of a universe-building sort of prequel rather than a character-origin sort of prequel – it doesn’t run into the same problem as something like Perfect Dark Zero, where you can’t be too badass inasmuch as it would ruin the opening of the original Perfect Dark.

Wait, let me take that back.  Both Reach and ODST have one unfortunate consequence of being released after Halo 3: They couldn’t really do any vehicle sequences to top the tank sequence from Halo 3.  Both games HAVE a tank sequence, but they just don’t live up to TANK BEATS EVERYTHING.

Alternately, Reach DOES score points for not featuring a Dramatic Vehicle Sequence as the final level.  It was getting kind of tired. 

Special mention goes to the music, though that’s almost a given by this point.  The Halo series has always had an excellent soundtrack – I think it’s one of the things that made the first game stand out so much – so saying that Reach is “more of the same” is about the best compliment I can level at it.

I’ve heard a rumor that they’re considering releasing an updated Halo 1 in the Reach engine, and I’m looking forward to it.  Yes, I’m even looking forward to playing The Library again in HD.

Within the first two minutes of starting Halo: Reach’s single player campaign, you’re treated to the sight of your helmet lying in the middle of a wasteland.

This is probably the first clue that things really aren’t going to work out for you.

After ODST, I probably shouldn’t have jumped directly into another Halo game, but the box was just so convenient and I couldn’t resist.  I was a bit worried that it might be just more of the same, but my fears turn out to have been unfounded.  After having played through the first four levels, I can safely say that while you’re shooting mostly the same aliens and you’re using mostly the same guns to do so and you’re driving mostly the same vehicles and so on and so forth, the two games are actually quite different.  You’re a Spartan in Reach, after all, not a “tough-but-not-quite-a-Spartan” like in ODST.

Oh, and after several games where you don’t fight Elites anymore, having them back in all their bouncy rolly ducking-into–cover-just-as-you-get-a-bead-on-them glory is equal parts joy and frustration. 

I’m taking this game a little slower, though.  I’m at a pace of about a level a night, which turns out to be 30-45 minutes – just enough that I can honestly call it a “break” from homework rather than admit that I’m putting the homework completely aside.  Should have it finished in a week or so at this rate.

For the record, I went with option (3), and got my wife a string of freshwater pearls and matching earrings.  Oh, and some slippers because I missed the fact that I was supposed to get them for her for Christmas I a couple of months ago.

In return, she got me:

Now, she had WAY too much fun with the first game – not playing it, mind you, but sneaking up behind me while I was playing it and making me jump – so I’m not entirely sure this was a gift for me so much as it promises to be hours of fun for HER, but I’m still looking forward to it.

Fortunately for my sanity, I no longer have my back to the door while I’m playing; she’ll have to be extra sneaky to pull her old tricks on me.

I haven’t played an Xbox 360 game in about five months, ever since finishing “Bayonetta”, so it’s good to see that the thing is still fully operational – I did have to run a dashboard update, of course, but that’s to be expected.

I wasn’t REALLY worried, of course.  The Xbox 360 I’m using these days is one of the new “Slim” models, painstakingly hand-imported from Japan back in August, and not my original Xbox 360 which has already died once and which will inevitably die again, this time out of warranty.

Such is life.

Anyway, my midterms are over and I decided I’d treat myself to a few hours of Shooting Mans.

Fortunately, I had Mans Aplenty to shoot.  A couple of weeks ago, I was in our local Fred Meyers and noticed that they’d marked Halo: Reach down to 30 bucks, with ODST right next to it at 20 bucks.  $50 later, I owned All The Halos.

So, this weekend, I decided to put ODST into the ’360 and see what playing A Halo Game Where You’re Not A Spartan was like.

It turns out to be quite a bit different.  Rather than being an unstoppable juggernaut casually blasting your way through hordes of Covenant to Stirring Orchestral Accompaniment, you’re, well, you’re still quite tough – there’s no question there – but you’re considerably more frail.

For example: Grunts, which are more or less  forgettable in the original Halo trilogy, become enemies you have to pay attention to, especially when the cute little cannon fodder is carrying, oh, Big Damn Anti-Tank Cannons as opposed to the pea shooters they’re normally known for, and enemies that were a bit of a challenge from Master Chief’s perspective become Serious Business.  The first time I got into any Serious Combat took me a good dozen tries to get through it, mostly because I was having so much trouble adapting to how I needed to play.

Wow, that’s a lot of whining to cover up how bad I am at these games. 

It’s not just that your character is a bit of a wimp, though.  The game’s story is told in reverse and has a very different pacing from a Proper Halo Game.  It starts out with your character – part of a small team – stranded in a rather creepy abandoned city at night, running around the city trying to figure out what happened to the rest of your team.  As you find various items – a discarded helmet here, a twisted and broken sniper rifle there – you participate in flashback missions to the events of the day.  These flashbacks are full of action and things blowing up and Manly Men Doing Manly Things, and the first couple of them were quite relieving – rather than running around a dark city dodging patrols, you’re driving warthogs around and shouting ooh-rah and generally making things go boom.

In one of them, you drive a tank, and things REALLY go boom.

After a couple of them, however, the “Proper Halo” levels started being almost unwelcome – I was starting to really quite enjoy the quiet and slower-paced city “hub” and the transitions out of and into it were rather jarring.

Eventually, though, the flashbacks catch up to the Here and Now, and the last couple of levels were Really Quite Good.

In a strange coincidence, I played through the last two levels immediately after watching three episodes of Castle with my wife, so when “Gunnery Sergeant Buck” started talking, I did a bit of a double take.  It was a little tricky taking him seriously after that point. 

I didn’t pay attention at the time, but apparently there was a fair deal of controversy surrounding ODST.  It’s quite short for a Halo game and doesn’t cover much new ground, so people apparently balked a bit at being asked to pay $60 for it when it was released.

17 months later, at 20 bucks, I thought it was well worth the price of admission.

In short, if I feel like I need a quick pick-me-up, I go for a brisk wallow in the mud-pit of human suffering that is the Xbox Live Account Suspensions and Console Bans forum.

This is the forum where people who’ve – generally – done something dumb with their Xbox or with their Live account go in order to ask why they’ve been banned and if they could pretty please have their account back and swear they’ll never do it (whatever it is, though of course they did nothing wrong in the first place) again, and are told, simply, “no.”

Much like tvtropes; you start reading it and then you just keep reading and all of a sudden it’s 3 AM.

Here’s a few particularly enjoyable bits selected from today’s postings.

B1FF lives!

MY ACCOUNT H1T DAT TROJAN WAS PERM BANNED AND I DONT KNOW WHY AND I ONLY MODDED MY AVATAR COLOR SO IF THATS WHY THATS NOT COOL U GOTTA HELP ME PLZ

I like this one a lot because the guy is trying really really hard to be helpful at the end.

i got home from work on  saturday and turned on my xbox to find that i had been banned i dont know why i could have been banned but when i phoned up xbox they said   that  because i baught my xbox off of ebay it may have been alterd and thats  why i was banned can someone telll me what i have been banned for and also if i can get my xbox unbanned

also the other day i was in a party with my friend and someone else i  didnt know who said they were going to ban me from xbox i didnt believe them but  maybe  thats why i was banned i can try and get the gamer tag  if you would like

And of course, appealing to a higher authority is always a good tactic.

I am really upset how your system works. Your company is corrupt. You made me waste $25 on a 3 month card for an account that is now permanently suspended and you also stole a lot of downloadable content that I can no longer use on my account since you suspended it. My parents are also upset that you are not allowing this to be lifted when I didn’t break any rules whatsoever. I am in a MLG group and a machinima and now I can’t participate in them cuz of you. This is really unacceptable. I did nothing wrong of the sorts and you really must stop deleting people’s posts. Have you even heard of the 1st amendement??? IT’S CALLED FREEDOM OF SPEECH. I would like to speak to whoever is in charge because my parents are not happy one bit at you guys.

I acknowledge that reading this sort of thing for amusement makes me a terrible terrible person.

Edit: while most of the time, the response from Microsoft representatives is a dry “you were banned for violating the code of conduct”, occasionally a rep will let their snarky side show.  Here’s one I thought deserved preserving for posterity.

I was feeling a bit sheepish about playing on easy, mind you, because I got to the very last level of the game with an inventory full of all kinds of healing and protective and buffing items that I hadn’t had to use and my only deaths had been owed to the game’s proclivity to, in the middle of a cutscene, throw a QTE at you with an instant death penalty should you muff it, and then I blew through that entire inventory surviving the Big Goddamn Boss Fight.

So “Normal” would not have been a good plan.

Anyway, some random thoughts:

The “was that particular camera angle REALLY necessary?” aspect of the game’s cutscenes never really goes away.  Ignoring that, there are a lot of cutscenes and they tend to drag on a bit.  Normally I’m a fan of lots and lots of story and exposition, but this really pushed it.

Combat remains nicely crazy to the end of the game, and the last bits of the game feature fights of truly massive scale – there’s lots of “woah” moments.

The visuals in general are amazing; I had to stop myself blindly charging through levels and remember to slow down and look AROUND from time to time.  There were some jaggies, but nothing to really quibble about.  There was, however, an awful lot of screen tearing in some levels, which IS something to quibble about, but it seemed to go away in later levels.

The nods to Sega fanboys were many and appreciated.  I especially enjoyed the Space Harrier level.

If I DO decide to go back and tackle it on a harder difficulty level, it looks like there’s lots left to unlock.  Different weapons, assorted “challenge rooms”, new outfits…  it’s not a one-time-through-and-you’ve-seen-everything sort of game.

The aforementioned QTEs are awfully annoying.  Not quite “The Force Unleashed” levels of annoying, but still… “Press A not to die” is a lame game mechanic.

All in all, a very well put together game with a few quirks, and I’m glad I got over my apprehensions and gave it a chance.

Fortunately, while Japanese developers are prone to slapping region codes on their games, US publishers aren’t as picky, so I can use most US titles on it even though it’s from a different region.  Pretty handy.  There are of course limits to this: many games from Japanese publishers released in the US ARE region locked to prevent reverse importing, so I can’t play, for example, Bullet Witch or Earth Defense Force 2017 on my new console.

One Japanese-developed game that works just fine on an imported console is Bayonetta, and I’ve been playing that this week.  It’s pretty stunning to look at and the combat is the definition of satisfying, but I’m having real trouble resisting the urge to roll my eyes whenever it goes into a cutscene.

For the record:  I’m a big fan of games that pander to the base instincts of men.  If you take a generic action title and shoehorn in a scantily-clad waif with big swords that are also guns, I’ll be right there on day one to pick it up.  Same goes for extremely questionable strategy games or beach volleyball games with jiggle physics.  Something about Bayonetta, however, just manages to push my “Oh, come on, was that REALLY necessary?” button.

Fortunately, it has a lot going for it besides the draw – or in this case, surprising lack of draw – of the main character.  The monster designs are particularly impressive, and I’m liking the way it presents parallel worlds, letting you romp through a modern city in the “real world” and then seeing the same world with the flower gardens and sparking water fountains of Paradisio or the lava-filled streets of Inferno.  Also, as I said before, the combat is remarkably satisfying; it seems to have been designed to let even pathetic button mashers (like me!) pull off crazy moves, and shifts neatly between very acrobatic and brute-force depending on what sort of weapons you’re using at any given moment.

So far, I’ve played through the first three – out of eleven, I think – chapters.  Looking forward to where it goes from here.

We’re learning that being in a house instead of an apartment comes with all kinds of exciting changes… stuff like dealing with electricians, plumbers, buying a new washer & dryer… fun stuff.  On the plus side, though, we do have a) more room in the new place and b) less stuff since we did some heavy purging before we moved, so the effect is c) things look pretty good on the organizational front.  There’s an organization tip for you:  To make more room, throw out like 20% of your stuff.

Anyway, I treated myself to an Xbox 360 game to celebrate our new digs.

Gamestop had this behind the counter.  I can’t fathom why.

(Thumbnailed for those unfortunate enough to be at work)

Oh, right.  Girls, sausages, unfortunate ice cream accidents, that sort of thing.  No actual hanky-panky, mind you, Microsoft isn’t desperate enough for sales to allow that sort of game to be put on the 360.  It’s awfully suggestive but that’s all.

Anyway, the infamous jubblie mousepad:  It’s actually quite good wrist support if you use a trackball.  I don’t think it would be very good for your wrist if you used a mouse, though, because the effect of it is to trap your wrist in place.

I’ll give the game a shot here soon enough.  What I’ve heard is that it’s a cross of a strategy RPG and a relationship sim, with a touch of a Phantasy Star III-style generation system.  Might be fun.

Between January and April of that year, they released Omega Five, Rez HD, Trigger Heart Exelica and Ikaruga. I went through quite a few Microsoft points.

The first of those, Omega Five, is a plot-free explosion-heavy side scrolling twin-stick shooter.

It’s pretty neat.  It gets criticized for being a short game, but I compensate for that by being terrible at shooters.

I bought it in March of 2008, played it a bit, got pretty good at it by my standards – which is to say, I got to the point where I could get halfway through the game before I died.  That doesn’t mean that I ever finished it, mind you, because I would get to the final level and just get creamed.  That’s where I left it, until today.

See, it turns out that, after finishing Eternal Sonata, I only had one Xbox 360 game still sitting on my “unbeaten” pile.  Obviously, in this case, a virtual “pile”, being as the game is an XBLA title, but still a pile of sorts.  Well, I guess if there’s only one thing on it, it’s not a pile.  Huh.  Metaphor needs work.

Still, I had one Xbox 360 game to play, damnit, and I was going to beat it if it killed me.

So, throwing aside pride, I went to the internet to see if I could land some play tips.  The first site I found offered the most valuable play tip of all, as follows:

“Play for 5 hours and you unlock unlimited continues.”

Well, unlimited continues sounded good to me, but I needed to do some playing to get up to that point, so I loaded up Omega Five and started making with the shooting of mans.

It came as quite a shock to me when I managed to finish the game – with two continues left, even – before even unlocking the unlimited continues I’d been trying to achieve.

So, inasmuch as that means that I had to use five continues to win, I still kind of cheesed my way through the game.  On the other hand, I have just that tiny shred of pride that says “but at least I didn’t NEED unlimited continues!”

I guess I can unhook the 360 for a while.  I haven’t bought any new games for the system since Oneechanbara, after all – most games I either buy on the PC, where they’re cheaper, or on the PS3, which is quieter and more reliable.  I’d sort of like to play Halo Wars and ODST, but I can wait on those until they’re crowding up the budget bins.