Baud Attitude

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.

OK, I have to cut Tecmo a little bit of slack now about that fight in Fatal Frame II.

More spoilers for the game follow.  You are warned.

After a few attempts on my own, I went looking for FAQs, and found about half-a-dozen, mostly for the PS2 version.

Every one of them commented on the fact that the last boss - the last boss on “normal” difficulty, anyway - could kill you in one hit and so on and so forth, but each and every one of them seemed to think that the fight was kind of a throwaway, that just getting to the boss was much harder than the boss itself.

Now, I pride myself on one thing: I don’t go to a FAQ for minor setbacks.

I may take games and set them to “easy”, but at least I try things for myself several times before giving up.

This means that, by the time I have to go to a FAQ about something in a game, I’ve usually gotten to the “nasty difficult bit” that EVERYONE has trouble with.

See also: “Meat Circus”.

This fight didn’t match my typical pattern.  It was, apparently, EASY.

I was very confused

Then I saw something that was almost an offhand comment in one of the six FAQs:

“shoot the boss in the head”

This made the lights come on.

See, I have the habit, and I’m not sure where I picked it up, but in FPS games, I aim for center-of-mass.

So, I went back for another go, and forced myself to aim just a little higher than I normally would, and, uh, won on my next try.  It wasn’t even a fight.

So, yeah, it’s easy.  That is, it’s easy once you know that, no matter how good your timing is,  the boss can’t be killed by shooting it in the chest.

I’m tempted to give the game another go and see if the same tactic makes a difference with other ghosts; it’s possible that I made the game a lot harder than it actually needed to be.

Follow-up to the above follow-up: I’m going to at least give Fatal Frame II a chance in hard mode, especially since, upon beating it for the first time, I unlocked these for the girls:

Pardon the poor quality screen shot.

Fatal Frame II : Now Even More Relevant to My Interests.

I’ve tried to speak in general terms here, but the following is a wee bit of a spoiler for the final fight in Fatal Frame II, so you might not want to read on if you’re like me and still have games from 2004 you haven’t played through and are trying for the first time.

OK, if you’re still with me.

Dear Tecmo Developers:

When designing a game where the main character picks up, over the course of the game, lots and lots of healing items and occasional items that will miraculously step in and revive the character in the event of their untimely death:

Do not wait until the last boss to introduce an enemy whose touch is a one-hit kill, which kills you even if you DO have one of the rare items whose sole purpose is to restore you to the land of the living.

Furthermore, after designing a game in which combat is deliberately slow paced and consists of dodging attacks while waiting for the correct opening, do not wait until the last boss to introduce an enemy who regenerates unless constantly attacked, especially not when the only way the player can attack is by provoking the boss into attacking and then trying to riposte incoming, invariably fatal, attacks.

Lastly, if you’re going to do both of those, don’t put the last save point so far away from the last boss fight that every death and retry involves 3.5 minutes, at a dead run, of navigating a rather nondescript corridor so you can get back for another attempt.

To be fair, thank you for two small concessions to sanity you have made:
1) Thank you for letting me fight everything up until just before the last boss fight, then go back and save.  Not having to go through a bunch of small fights every time is very appreciated.

2) Thank you also for making the penultimate cutscene skippable.  That in itself is probably the only thing keeping me banging my head against this particular wall instead of just going to Youtube for the ending and calling it good.

OK, OK, it could have been much worse.

The cliffhanger at the end of Half Life 2 wasn’t as bad of an ending as, say, Halo 2, and it probably won’t be TOO long until they get Episode 3 out and I can pick them up and finish out the story.

Still, it did make for a WAS THAT IT? moment.  At least the box art for HL2: Episode 1 does kind of keep me from worrying too much about whether Alyx lives. 

Griping about cliffhangers aside, an excellent game and I can see why it got hyped to high heaven and why everyone raves on and on about how cool the Gravity Gun is.

Next up: Finish Kingdom Hearts and enlist my wife’s help in bashing through Champions of Norrath.

Back in January, I caught up to 1998 and finished Half Life on the PC.

Then, since I had a copy of the Xbox version of Half Life 2, which I’d acquired at a K-mart for the princely sum of $9.99, I tossed that into the 360 so I could see what happened next.

I played through the first half-hour or so and called it good. My plan was to wait until the Orange Box dropped in price, buy that, play Half Life 2 on that.

It took me a few months to realize that I was being a bit of a perfectionist, and in a way that costs money.

I have the Xbox version. It’s not as pretty as the Orange Box version but it’s the same game and I’ve already paid for it.

I’ve played Portal, and if I buy the Orange Box with Episodes 1 & 2 on it, it leaves me open to feeling rather foolish when Episode 3 comes out and they put out a compilation disc with all three episodes and Portal 2.  Because, if I buy the Orange Box, they totally WILL put out a single compilation disc with all that stuff on it, and they will snigger heartlessly at my wailing.

So: I will wait on that, and in the meantime I am playing the game I already own. I’m up to “Water Hazard” so far, and while it’s got some shortcomings from being shoehorned onto the original Xbox, it’s still quite playable and enjoyable.

I still hate headcrabs, though. Oh, how I hate them. I’ll take on armed security goons with nothing but the crowbar, but headcrabs mean it’s submachinegun time.

I realize that I am roughly the last person on the planet to not yet have played the new Prince of Persia games.  There is a reason for this:

Back in the heady days of my youth, I quite enjoyed Karateka.  I spent many happy hours playing it on the Apple II computers at school, and I believe it may be the first game I ever managed to “finish”

The designer of Karateka, Jordan Mechner, went on to design the original Prince of Persia game, which may have the distinction of being the first game that ever hurt me so brutally that I gave up on it for all time.  I tried to play it, I really did, but I inevitably died before even getting to the sword, and that’s about 4 rooms into the game.

With that kind of history, is it any wonder that I might be a bit skeptical about a modern 3D update?

On the other hand, it’s one of those games people rave about, so I bought it last year while Gamestop was having a 2-for-1 Xbox sale and it’s been sitting on my “play this” shelf ever since.  I have also bought the sequels.  This is a bad tendency of mine.

So anyway: I finished Brute Force a couple of days ago - and I will say that, as dull as the main character is and as repetitive the environments are, the two asteroid levels made up for the trouble playing to them and “Flint” is nicely easy on the eyes - and I needed something new.

My typical method of selecting a game is to look down the list of games on my backlog and Google for reviews, paying special attention to phrases like “too short” or “only 8 hours of gameplay” or “too easy”

Prince of Persia came with lots of reviews complaining that it was too short.  Some reviewers added “and too easy”.

Sounded like my kind of game.

In what I will consider a personal homage to the original game, I died many, many, many times before I even got to the Dagger of Time that the whole damn plot revolves around.  I came quite close to abandoning the game completely before I’d even passed the training level.

But I did eventually get the dagger and I have been happily platforming around and killing zombies for a couple of hours now.

The game has a pretty smart checkpoint / save system.  It works something like this:  Every time you manage to get through a particularly hairy sequence of the “I can’t believe I survived those whirling blades” variety,  you hit a checkpoint.  Every once in a while the game throws a bit of platforming at you that is going to require new techniques and make you die over and over again, but just to be nice you get a save point first.

Save points in Prince of Persia can be assumed to come with a blinking red sign: Frustration ahead.

This makes them a great way to know when to take a break.

I do, however, have a minor quibble with a design decision as far as the checkpoints go.

I will describe.

Last night I met the first boss fight.  It’s the scene where you meet your father again and catch up with Farah.  If you’ve never played the game, it consists of fighting 16 zombies and then a boss.  The boss is actually kind of pathetic, but the zombies can wear you down through sheer numbers, if nothing else.

When I got to this boss fight, I had just had some whirling-blade-related mishaps.  I was running on a tiny sliver of health and one full tank of sand.  That won’t make any sense if you haven’t played the game, but as I’m the last person on the planet to play it, I feel confident that I don’t need to explain about the sand.  “Tiny sliver of health” makes sense to anyone, and I am confident that we can all visualize what kinds of mishaps one can experience when whirling blades are involved.

Anyway: I looked at the mass of zombies in front of me. I looked at my health bar. I said to myself:

“I hope there was a checkpoint just before this fight.”

And there was, and it was a good thing, too, because the zombie horde killed me without breaking a sweat.

Not that zombies sweat, I guess.  Anyway, they only had to land three hits on me to kill me.

So I get the “you died! retry?” screen, as expected, and it puts me right back into the boss fight, which I didn’t entirely expect but I’m glad not to have had to go back through the platforming bits, and…

…I still have a sliver of health and one tank of sand.

I had to kill all 16 zombies, and the boss, while taking fewer than 3 hits.  This took, I do not want to think how many tries, but it turned my “I’ll just play a little bit more and then I can get to bed by 12:30″ into “I hope I don’t wake the wife up coming to bed at 2.”

But, damnit, I feel good about winning that fight.  I got really, really, REALLY good at blocking, I will tell you that. 

OK, so:

Back in 2002, early 2003, Microsoft rolled out the Hype Train for an upcoming game called Brute Force.  In retrospect, they probably poured the hype on a little TOO strongly, as it got a bit of a backlash when it came out and wasn’t the Next Halo… but I digress.

I’d played the demo version included with a magazine and quite liked it, and it came out shortly before my birthday, so my loving and thoughtful wife made sure that I had a copy.

Keep in mind, I hadn’t played Halo, or really any similar games on the Xbox up to that point.  I’d spent an awful lot of time playing Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball and Panzer Dragoon Orta.

With those as my gaming foundation, Brute Force was Hard.  I died over and over again just getting through level 3, then finally gave up on the game as a lost cause thanks to an escort mission on level 4 where I simply couldn’t keep the guy I was escorting from running in front of me and getting to enemies before I had a chance to clear them.

It didn’t help that, while the game looked great, the main character had all the personality of a rock.

Not an interesting rock, either.

Four years later I decide: Yeah, the main character is still pretty damn uninteresting, but I’m going to man up and and least TRY to play it.

I got through the first six levels in a sitting.  I barely even noticed the escort mission this time.  I’m not going to do anything silly like complain about this; I’m just going to feel a little silly about all the bitching I’ve done about how I really wanted to like this game, but they had to put in a stupid impossible escort mission and blah blah blah blah.