Baud Attitude

There was a weird little period – basically, the first four months of 2008 – where whoever’s responsible for selecting which titles get put up on Xbox Live Arcade actually got some taste.

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.

I finished Eternal Sonata tonight, and my final impressions were positive.  I can’t get over the effort that got put into making this game look pretty at every turn – there were times I’d run my characters through an area at top speed, stop, walk back to the area I’d just left, and take a few minutes to just LOOK at things.

I also really liked the combat system, particularly the way that it held your hand early in the game and slowly built up to a system that was fairly challenging but that let you pull off some really impressive combination attacks – even though I didn’t do the side quest to unlock the Final Level Of Badassery.

It made me realize something about myself: I’ve changed a lot since the 90s when pretty much all I played were JRPGs.  I couldn’t beat action games at the time, because they were usually made pretty hard so you couldn’t beat them in a rental unless you had a) the reflexes of a teenager and b) memorization skills, but I could beat JRPGs that were turn based and let you simply grind your way past challenges.

Nowadays, action games are tuned to be easy enough for 30-somethings like me to beat, and I’ve played enough of them that I actually manage to feel fairly adequate at them – and the old style turn-based JRPGs are a bit, well, dull.

Oddly enough, I still like strategy JRPGs.  Jeanne D’arc was huge fun, for example.

Eternal Sonata was nice and actiony AND it mostly let me decide when to blow through an area quickly, avoiding combat, or take things slow and grind up levels.  More games need that.

Now, then, I do have one or two unkind things to say.

First off, the localization team gets a lot of points in my book for including the original Japanese voices and allowing you the option of subtitles.

It is, therefore, a shame that they neglected to subtitle most of the ending.  It’s not that it would have made a lot of difference – from what I’ve pieced together, the story has a lot of plot that’s not ever explained even if you do understand the ending, but it would have been nice to be able to read along as all the characters talked to me.

Second, there are a few parts of the game that are never described or hinted at but that are necessary if you’re an achievement hunter.  I’m not; I cheerfully breezed to the end with the fewest possible achievements, but if I cared about getting a 1000/1000 on a game I’d hate Eternal Sonata.

Lastly, it felt like it had too many characters for the small party size; towards the end of the game I had 2/3rds of my lineup benched because the three characters I’d focused on were so powerful that swapping anyone off the bench just seems counterproductive.

OK, so back in February I swore that I was going to make a serious go at Dead Rising, for real this time, after I cheated a bit and leveled the main character up to level 20 by exploiting a… let’s say, “oversight”… in the game’s storyline.

Put simply, the mall isn’t overrun by zombies, and therefore nobody dies, until you’ve walked through a particular doorway.  If you never walk through that doorway, and instead simply leave your character in a certain spot for six hours – with a wired controller, of course, since if you do this with a wireless controller it will pause the game – you “finish” the game, get the “B” ending, get a bunch of XP and your character eventually levels up.

So I did that, and it worked out pretty well, and I got Frank up to level 20, and then I didn’t have the energy to actually get around to starting a serious play-through.

9 months later… Well, I only had 2 games for the Xbox 360 that I hadn’t beaten yet, and the other one is Eternal Sonata and that’s an RPG that might take a while to play.  End result: I actually had motivation to get down to Dead Rising and even finish it.

By the way, even WITH a level 20 character, I still managed to get myself killed at the start of case 2-1, which is about 10% of the way through the game.

The secret to finishing Dead Rising actually ties back to my last post, where I was ranting about Super Mario Brothers 3.  It’s all about community, that is, it’s all about knowing that you shouldn’t even try to finish the game without grinding levels, and – probably even more important – without knowing where a couple of very specific items are.

Put more straightforwardly, once you know where you can get katanas and where you can get an unlimited supply of high-quality healing items – both of which are in “Paradise Plaza”, the section of the mall you have access to from the beginning – the game becomes a lot easier.  Not trivial by any means, but it gets easy enough that it’s actually completable.

What do I think now that I’ve finished it?  Well, it’s actually a pretty neat game.  Once you open up the mall a bit, and get your hands on some heavy firepower, it’s genuinely FUN to play.  It just takes a lot of trust – trust that the game is worth the trouble – before you get to that point.