Well, technically, the only part of the game that’s a hidden object game is the cover art, reproduced here for your brief puzzlement.  US on left, Japan on right:

Did you see that there’s actually a guy on the cover?  It took me a while, too.  There’s no shame.

Anyway, I originally bought Gunvalkyrie back in April of 2007.  That’s five years ago, now, come to think of it.  I really am not good about getting right to games.

Back then, I played a little bit of it and felt like there was a decent game in there, unfortunately hidden behind a control scheme that was a bit dense, but it fell off my radar pretty quickly.

After reminding myself of it last week, I was inspired to give it another go.

Now that I’ve dug it out of the box that all non-360-compatible Xbox games had been stuck in, managed to coax our old Xbox back into service, and put the last three days into seeing what I could do about that control scheme, I can verify that there actually is quite a decent game in there, partly because it draws you in with a bizarre plot centered around Great Britain conquering the world and seeding the galaxy with colonies (in the late 19th century, mind you) and partly BECAUSE the control scheme is so bizarre compared to other 3rd-person games.

Take, if you will, the Assassin’s Creed games.  They use a pretty bog-standard control scheme which isn’t difficult to pick up.  Run around with the left stick, steer with the right stick, and it has a single button that puts you into Awesome Assassin Mode, where you hold down the button and run forward and your on-screen character does Amazing Parkour Stunts and you get a vague sense of smugness at how awesome you are.

Gunvalkyrie is as far from that familiar and accessible control scheme as you can get.

Your character IS capable of pulling off some terribly impressive aerobatics, but actually getting them done is left in your hands and depends entirely upon you learning a set of controls that are… well, not BAD controls, just terribly, terribly unique and entirely non-configurable (you can’t even invert the view axis!).  It makes constant use of the stick buttons, the “L3″ and “R3″ buttons as it were, and the result is that you are pressing DOWN on the pad at the same time as moving the pad most of the time.  The sound of the controller during a heated boss fight is, well, remarkably similar to the sound of a Guitar Hero controller being used to play a particularly heated solo.

The result of this is that, once you start getting the hang of using the thumbsticks in ways that no game before or since has asked you to, there’s a tremendous sense of satisfaction.  The game has a meter on screen which slowly counts up as you perform more and more mid-air stunts in hazardous conditions (you must be near an enemy for it to count up) without actually being hit or touching the ground, and when the meter fills you turn into a Massive Badass for the next 10 seconds, invulnerable to incoming damage and with your weapons turned up to 11.

Managing to pull this off during the final boss battle, during the brief period of time when the boss was actually vulnerable, and after 20-some failed attempts at beating the final boss, is going to stand as one of my all-time triumphs.

I am not, by and large, a fan of “hard” games.  I like running through games as, well, a bit of a tourist to be honest.  I’m the reason they PUT “easy” settings on games, and I am also the reason why developers like Smilebit DON’T add a difficulty setting – they don’t want tourists to finish their games!

Every single person playing this game has to face the same challenges in the same way. The result is that, once you get the control scheme down, once you suffer through the platforming HELL that is the Naglfar’s Pit level and put the requisite hours in to figure out how to beat the bizarre bat-winged-cherub last boss, you are in a very small crowd of gamers who have done the same, and it feels good to be there.

I’m so stoked, in fact, that I am going to dig out my copy of Ninja Gaiden and…

…wait, I’m not THAT crazy.

After loving Fatal Frame II to pieces, which is an odd emotion to attach to a horror game, I was not too surprised that I thoroughly enjoyed the original Fatal Frame, with the exception of one notable segment very close to the end where you have to fight four, well, rather tough ghosts – though I hesitate to call them bosses – which came right at a point where I happened to be almost completely out of healing items.

So it was really rough and I had to do it over a few times before I got it.

On the other hand, the final fight of the game was done really well.  The game recognizes that, well, it’s the last bit of the game and you might be running a LITTLE low on resources as you come to the end of the game, so it actually takes pity on you and hands you just enough film and health to fight the last fight, even if you’re otherwise running dry.

I did have to do it over once, but I won’t blame the game for that.

I tried for a bit of a change of pace after that and started Lego Indiana Jones, and it really wasn’t grabbing me.  Unfortunately, while I liked Lego Star Wars an awful lot, I find that I’ve fallen into the trap of buying progressively less enjoyable sequels.  I own Lego Star Wars I & II, Lego Batman, and Lego Indy, and honestly I’m kind of dreading trying to play through all of Lego Indy and haven’t been able to even get through the first level of Lego Batman.

Oh well.

So I started Fatal Frame III instead and will let you know how that goes.  I’ve played about an hour so far and I’m noticing a few things:

1) I still miss the FPS mode from the Xbox version of Crimson Butterfly, BUT at least the game’s controls are very customizable – so I can always have movement on the left stick and look on the right stick.

2) I’m also really seeing the difference between PS2 visuals and Xbox visuals.  I mean, the PS2 graphics are certainly adequate, but there’s a… it’s hard to describe.  It’s like the Xbox versions did shadows better, which means a lot in an atmospheric game.

3) I’m really glad I played through FF 1 & 2 before starting this.  I played through FF2 without ever having played the first game, and that wasn’t a problem.  FF3 is, so far, full of references to both older games.

4) Speaking of which, both older FF games DID have happy endings, if you played through them at higher difficulty levels, but in the world of FF3, those happy endings are ignored.

5) The game goes back and forth between the real world and a dream world and it’s a big change.  I’m used to being stuck in crumbling ruined mansions from beginning to end, so the bits where you are running around your tastefully furnished house (with cat!) and not being chased by ghosts are a little odd.

6) On the other hand, there’s a lot more backstory for the assorted ghosts you run into, which can be interesting to read and which wouldn’t make sense if you weren’t occasionally popping back to reality.

I’m having a little trouble adapting to the controls, I’ll admit.  I really appreciate the FPS mode from Fatal Frame II now, because the constant shifting between first and third person in this game is a bit tricky to manage.  I’ve already died once, and it was to a fairly early boss fight and I’m going to blame it squarely on not being able to spatially orient properly when switching perspectives.

Still, I’ll get the hang of it.  It’s a lot of fun so far and definitely seems worth the effort to recalibrate my brain a bit. 

I didn’t get much sleep last night.

Where was I?  Oh, yes, episodic content.

I’m really not a fan of games – or movies, for that matter – that are designed to require a sequel.  Not only are they generally unmitigated cash-grabs, I’m always worried that, even if I like the first installment in a series enough that I’ll WANT the sequel, there won’t be enough commercial interest to justify it ever being made.

Like, oh, I dunno, Shenmue.  Not that I’ve played the second one, mind you, but just knowing that there won’t be a third is quite vexing.

Episodic content is a little different from this, I guess.  The idea as I understand it is that you buy a full game – with an ending, presumably – in pieces.  The advantage being, I guess, that when it gets canceled 2/3rds of the way through the story, at least it’s cheaper.

…that may be a bit cynical.

On the other hand, I bought the Orange Box a couple of years ago when a combination of a sale and a surprisingly good coupon brought the retail price down to ten bucks, so I wound up with Half-Life 2 : Episode One & Two, which were kind of the vanguards for the whole concept.

I’ve been putting off playing them. After HL2′s cliffhanger ending, I decided that I wasn’t going to play through the episodes until Episode 3 came out.

Presuming, of course, that Episode 3 actually finished the story.

I did look up how HL2: Ep1 BEGAN, mind you, because I wanted to know what happened immediately after the credits, but that was it.

On the other hand, when Valve announced Portal 2 a couple of months ago and tweaked the ending of Portal 1 to make it more sequel-friendly, I decided that I wanted to play through Portal 1 again, but before doing that I should probably play HL2: Ep2 because I’d heard that there was a slim connection between the two games.

Then, I decided that if I was going to do that, I’d go back and play through HL2 before starting the episodes.  The first time I played HL2 was on the original Xbox, after all, and I’ve heard nothing but scorn for the Xbox port and wanted to see for myself whether it was justified scorn.

For the record: The PC version of HL2 IS quite a bit prettier than the Xbox version.  Apart from that, the Xbox version is a pretty good way to play through the game and doesn’t deserve the hate.

So, returning to my monologue here, I played through HL2 and started on the episodes.

HL2: Ep1, I have to say, was not as good as I was expecting.  It suffered a great deal from recycled-level syndrome, over-use of the gravity gun gimmick, and withholding your crowbar until 3/4ths of the way through the game.  It had a good final boss fight, but that was followed by a cliffhanger ending even more annoying than the original game’s.

HL2: Ep2, on the other hand, I wound up liking quite a lot.  It changed up the scenery a fair bit, added a new enemy type that ranks right up with Bioshock’s Big Daddies in terms of how satisfying it is to kill them, and ends with, well, something of a non-ending, but at least with an ending that isn’t a total cliffhanger – and the vehicle segments were better than those from the original HL2.

Oh, and the final boss event in Ep2 was REALLY fun.  It took me a few tries, I’ll admit, but I was playing on “Normal” so I expected to die a few times.

So short version:  I’m now eagerly awaiting the release of Episode 3, and I’m kind of vexed with myself from letting myself into this situation, but at least I held out until 2010.  I’m not some poor bastard that played through Ep2 in 2007 and has been waiting for the last three years.  It’s a small comfort.

Wow, that last sentence is pretty much an abomination of language.

Anyway, I went to turn on our original Xbox, and it powered up, and the drive door wouldn’t open, and it flashed a red light at me and then displayed a message, in six languages, telling me that it was broken and needed service.

This is the second time it’s blown up.  I fixed it myself the first time, by swapping the power supply for a new one ordered from Lik-Sang (may they rest in peace), but I don’t think I’m going to bother fixing it again.  I can play Splinter Cell on our 360, but I AM taking all of our non-backward-compatible Xbox games, tossing them in the “sell these” bin, and marking them off the old backlog.  I have to figure, we’ve had an Xbox since 2002, if they didn’t get played by now they were never going to be played.

To all of my friends who are about to say “wait, I have a perfectly good Xbox that you can have”… don’t. 

And it was really quite difficult in places.  I posted a long rant about the first serious boss fight, and I find constant affirmation in the number of hits that rant gets from people trying to beat him.

That said, it was one of the best games I have ever played, partially for the platforming, a little bit for the fighting, and a great deal for the characters.  I hate hard games, mind you, but the charm of this one made me overcome the frustration.

Now, I have heard, over and over again, that the second game is, well, not good, but I have been known to enjoy games that were not good, and I loved the first game so much that I wasn’t about to be put off trying the second just on the say-so of random people on the internet.

Having now put three hours into the game: The random people on the internet were right.

I can’t decide what I hate more: the dreary level design, the godawful music, or the utter prick that the once-likable prince has become.

At this point, I’m trying to decide whether I’ll even give The Two Thrones a spin, or if I will pretend that the Sands of Time trilogy started and ended with the first game, freeing me up to play the 2008 Prince of Persia game instead.

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.

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.

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.

Because it was so bloody nice out on Saturday, my wife and I went out to the local open-air-mall, or, I think they call it, “Lifestyle Shopping Experience”.

Which means a mall where you get rained on, also you have to dodge people in cars because, while there is a large central area that is pedestrian-only, there are several restaurants and shops and theaters that you need to cross streets to get to.

But I digress.

Anyway, we saw this store:

And my thought process went something like this:

1) What the hell is that?

2) It’s a… pudding store?

3) I must eat there.

Turns out they serve rice pudding, 20 or so different flavors of rice pudding, and crepes and frozen yogurt.

Ordinarily I would say that they have the prospective lifespan of, oh, you remember when there were all those sock-only stores in the malls?  They lasted a good couple years, right?

On the other hand, in the few minutes it took us to order and enjoy our desserts – pumpkin pudding for me, strawberries and whipped cream in a crepe for my wife – several other people came in for pudding.  So they might just have a niche going.

It was enough to get us to go back the next day for more pudding, anyway.

That doesn’t have much to do with the post-Star-Trek-Legacy game of choice, which is Fatal Frame II : Crimson Butterfly : Director’s Cut, or maybe Fatal Frame II Director’s Cut Crimson Butterfly or Crimson Butterfly : Director’s Cut: Fatal Frame II or…

Look, the subtitles aren’t entirely unambiguous, all right?

Anyway, I rented this game back in, oh, November of 2004, and played it for about 2 hours.  I got up to the point where you meet the first hostile ghost you can’t actually fight with the camera, which meant that I also died a horrible painful death.

Then I returned it, because in 2004 I was in the heights of Everquest addiction and I was able to justify paying seven bucks to rent a game and then only playing it for 2 hours.

Then I got a $50 gift card for Fred Meyers for Christmas, and I spent it on a copy of, and let’s just avoid the whole name issue by just saying “Fatal Frame II”, Fatal Frame II to call my very own.

Oh, and I didn’t actually put it in the Xbox or anything silly like that, I put it on the shelf and went back to Everquest.

Flash forward to my post-playing-Bioshock-in-the-dark self, and suddenly I got the urge to take it off the shelf, open it – yes, open the four-year-old-shrinkwrap, I’m pathetic – and put it in the 360 and give it a spin.

I’ve been playing after dark, with the lights off, using headphones, and I believe that this is the Right And Proper Way to play this game, because it has managed to give me the serious spine crawls on several occasions.

I have gotten considerably past the point where I got back when I rented it, after devising an absolutely wonderful strategy for dealing with that ghost that I couldn’t damage with the camera.

I will share it with you: Run, screaming, like a little girl.

In addition to satisfying my sudden craving to play games that will make me jump, it also lets me try to get some of my Pervy Cred back.

It’s got twin sisters who run around in lacy outfits with short skirts, it’s got stairs, and it’s got a camera.

I spent several minutes of my valuable time trying to get the perfect panty shot for you, my faithful and perverted readers.  I didn’t have a lot of luck at it, and no way to transfer the in-game-photos to the PC, so I gave up.

You’ll just have to go and play it yourselves.