Baud Attitude

So, full disclosure here, I don’t know much about opera.

The performance form, anyway.  Not the web browser.  Actually, I don’t know much about the web browser other than that Opera fanatics tend to have that extra level of crazy that goes above and beyond Linux evangelists.

Not that crazy is necessarily a bad thing; progress demands crazy people.

Anyway.  Opera, in the classic sense.  I don’t have a lot of experience with it.  The last time I went to see an opera was with my family, who bought a nice set of cheap seats in the nosebleed section of the local concert hall to see, uh, I forget what the opera was but the chick in it dies of consumption.

I realize that’s like trying to narrow down a Gilligan’s Island episode by saying that it’s the one where they almost get off the island but Gilligan screws it up.

Anyway, one thing I didn’t realize about myself before that incident was that I am apparently prone to vertigo.  One thing I didn’t realize about opera houses is that, if they find a customer sitting out in the lobby having turned a pale shade of gray and trying not to lose his dinner all over the lobby, they will stick you in a seat that’s less prone to giving you the screaming heebie jeebies.

So I actually wound up with a really good seat while the rest of my family was stuck up in the bleachers.

Not that they were actually bleachers.  In fact, they differed from bleachers in two important ways: First, they consisted of individual seats rather than benches.  Second, there was absolutely no chance of catching a foul ball.

It occurs to me that opera could be considerably improved if they added the possibility of catching foul balls.

But I digress.

Oh, and about halfway through the second act of whatever opera it was, the supertitles cut out, which was apparently not intended.  Since I’d never been to an opera with supertitles before, I kind of assumed that this was normal, that you were only supposed to understand the first bits of an opera and that everything afterwards was supposed to be incomprehensible.

The titles DID eventually come back on.

It was still pretty incomprehensible.

Anyway, wow, this post really wasn’t about opera, even though it has an opera in it.

See, Parasite Eve, which I started tonight after finishing Koudelka last night (and spending a little time with Red Alert 3 : Uprising), starts with an opera gone Horribly Wrong, with an audience full of people bursting into flames.  I’m pretty sure that’s not normal behavior for an opera.

Like, oh, 95% sure.

I figured I’d take another journey into the PS1 vaults since I was already kind of used to 1990s graphic quality and wanted another good creepy game after Koudelka.  Having played for an hour so far, I think I made the right choice.  I’m a little worried that there won’t be enough healing items around to keep me upright, but I guess I’ll find that out as I find it out.

At least there seems to be lots of ammo.

I am given to understand that it’s a pretty short game, that the story is pretty good, and that the third game in the series was only released on Japanese cell phones, which drives some people stark raving mad.  I figure I’ll play the first game, but not the sequel, because then I won’t ever have to rant about not being able to play the third.

I wound up staying up until 1:30 last night to push through the final disc of Koudelka.  All told, my playtime was on the order of 17 hours and I was hopelessly overlevelled for the final boss by the time I got to it.  I probably made things harder for myself just because I insisted on prolonging fights to do stuff like build up Koudelka’s weapons skills, which I then never used.

I didn’t manage to take down the optional boss, mind you.  There’s this point where you get chased out of a building by a Big Nasty, and if you go back and kill him you get the best sword in the game… but since the only reason to have the best sword in the game is to use it against the final boss, and the final boss is easier than the Big Nasty, the only reason to kill the optional boss is, well, to say you’ve done it.

I quite like the way the game plays with some conventions of RPGs.  There is one boss, for example, that you can choose to fight and kill in traditional RPG fashion, but if you do a little bit of backtracking and complete a side quest, you don’t need to fight them at all – you just give them an item and they depart in peace.  You also don’t need to actually beat the last boss to finish the game – in fact, if the last boss kills YOU, you get an ending that is arguably considerably more upbeat than the ending you get for “winning”.

I did have a weird realization when playing Koudelka, though.  See, it really is a pretty limited game in a lot of ways.  It takes place in a sequence of tiny connected rooms, the graphics are, well, not what you’d call amazing, and the gameplay, if you strip away the atmosphere and story, boils down to hunting for the red keycard to open the red door while occasionally fighting off random encounters.

At the point this was released (2000), I was spending every possible waking moment in Everquest, which was a massive world with huge zones and thousands of things to do.  It’s easy to look back at it now and talk about it as dated by comparison to modern MMOs, but compared to everything else that was out at the time…

So apparently Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time got marked down to $1.00 on Direct2Drive for a few hours.

I found out about this while I was still at school, so when I got home one of the first things I did was pop open a web browser and go to buy it…

…by which time, it had already been marked back up to $9.95.

Not that it’s not worth $9.95, mind you, it’s a fabulous game.

But, I already have the Xbox version, which plays fine on the 360 and which means that I really can’t justify dropping 10 bucks just to have it on the PC.  A buck would have been much more justifiable.

Oh, well.  I was lightly vexed, I have ranted, I feel better.  🙂

So, I’m still playing through Koudelka and really starting to realize that when a reviewer says “12-15 hours of gameplay”, it means “24-30 hours” in my personal time space.  Fortunately it’s still quite enjoyable and the game’s “escape” command works almost every time – so if I find myself running into a few too many random encounters, I can just escape out of them.

Anyway, as previously noted, I’m quite fond of the characters.  The story is just now starting to explore their motivations for coming to the monastery in which the whole thing is set, and I think it says a lot for the writing that I’m genuinely interested to find out what sequence of events has thrown these three together.

The graphics, while still kind of painful, aren’t anything I can legitimately complain about, and they’re backed up by some really nice sound work.  I really don’t have much to complain about with regards to this game, so this next bit is going to sound super petty:

Koudelka has one of the worst inventory systems I’ve ever run into in an RPG.  It’s not just that you can’t sort it and that you can’t easily see stats on items, it’s not just that it’s a limited size and that picking up new items forces you to drop old items without being able to oh, check the stats of the thing you’re dropping vs the thing you’re picking up.

No, my big complaint is that the game throws a LOT of freaking quest items at you, and that they share inventory space with stuff like weapons and healing items, so you run into situations like I had tonight, where I was dropping weapons left and right to make room for weird pieces of glass and stone tablets and so on, and then I hit a sequence of rooms where I used most of the random doohickies I’d been picking up, and now I have an inventory that’s mostly empty – which is good, in a way, because now I can stop worrying about it for a while, but I really would have liked to have held on to some of the stuff I was forced to drop along the way.

Oh, and this is silly and somewhat related:

At one point in the game, I fought a boss and defeated it.  Go me.

Shortly thereafter, I got stuck on a puzzle and resorted to gamefaqs to get through it.

When reading the solution to the puzzle, I noticed that the faq mentioned that the boss I’d just fought still had loot on him, and that if I went back and searched his body I’d get twenty rounds of pistol ammo and a new, better pistol.

I went back to the bosses’ body and searched it.

I found a box of pistol ammo.

I had 99 pistol ammo already in inventory, so the game told me I couldn’t pick it up.  Since I couldn’t pick up the pistol ammo, it didn’t even tell me about the new & improved pistol.

The only way to pick up the new, better pistol was to a) walk around until I’d triggered enough random encounters to burn through 20 rounds of ammo, or b) delete the 99 rounds of pistol ammo I had in inventory so I could pick up the 20 rounds and then pick up the pistol.

Furthermore, if I hadn’t happened to see, in a faq, that there WAS a new pistol to be had, I would have searched the body, gotten a “you can’t pick up this ammo because you have too much”, and gone on my merry way never realizing that I should do whatever it took to be able to pick up the ammo.

Like I said, silly.

Also, if that’s the most heartfelt rant I can come up with, it speaks highly of the game.  🙂

That’s a pretty good setup line for a joke, I think, but I’ll leave the rest of it to your imagination.

I’m a big fan of buying Shadow Hearts games, even though I’ve never finished one, but I have an excuse for that.

See, I stopped playing the first Shadow Hearts game because I was having a horrendous time reading the in-game text, something which I blamed on the game itself, its developers for choosing a hard to read font, my television for being too blurry, and in general just about everything except the real problem.

…yeah, it was time for glasses.  I should have realized sooner, like when I would be standing at one end of a grocery aisle and not be able to read the sign at the other end.  Kind of hard to blame that on a blurry television.

ANYWAY.

A couple of months later, once I’d actually gone to an optometrist and discovered the joy of being able to see again, I realized that I had unfairly blamed just about every possible culprit other than the real one.

But by then it was too late to jump back into Shadow Hearts, and I would have to start it over from the beginning.

I didn’t, but I remembered liking it, so I bought the sequels when they were released and put them on my “play these sometime” stack.

Around the time I bought the third game in the series, I heard that there was a prequel, of sorts, that had been released for the original Playstation, so I tracked THAT down, via eBay.  It cost me $40 at the time, too, which was kind of an absurd amount for a PS1 game, but it was tricky to find and I managed to justify it.

That was, oh, 2006.  So, four years later, I’m giving said prequel, Koudelka, a spin.

It’s actually quite good.

I mean, it looks terrible.  PS1 games have not aged well at all, and there’s only so much that the upscaling mode of the PS3 can do to help.

But… I’ve been playing it for about six hours now, and it keeps sucking me back in.  I’m enjoying the banter between the three characters, particularly the I-don’t-care-if-you-live-or-die attitude of the titular main character, and the story, while kind of heavy on being grim & gritty for the sake of being grim & gritty, is compelling enough to make me want to see it through to the end.  There’s this monastery, see, and it’s pretty much cursed and stuff, and you have these three people who have all come to it for their own reasons, but wind up joining up in order to survive being as the place is full of the, you know, spirits of the damned and such.

The developers also did a really good job with the sound, something that particularly stands out when compared to how poorly the visuals have aged.  The sound of hitting an animated skeleton with a club, for instance, conveys the idea that you are hitting a skeleton much better than the action on screen does.  The game is full of atmospheric sounds, and you can tell what sort of surface you are walking on by the sound of your footsteps.  It does a great job of bringing you into the game world.

One caveat:  There are, I think, two battle themes – one for normal encounters and one for boss fights – and fighting is fairly common, so you hear the same battle music over and over again.  I rather like it, so it doesn’t bother me.  If you didn’t like it, it would probably drive you batty in fairly short order.

I’ve been told that it’s a quite short game, and that it shouldn’t take more than 15 hours to play through, which is about the point where games start to outlive their welcome, so that’s a good thing.  Of course, I was also told that it should take about two hours to play through the first disc, and it took me four and a half, so, uh, I may be at this for a while.  🙂