Done stabbing mans – also, I’m a pretty pretty princess.

Posted on August 27, 2009 by baudattitude

Well, Assassin’s Creed decided to stop crashing halfway through levels, and decided instead to start crashing between levels, so I was able to finish it.

I don’t know quite how to describe my feelings on this – on the one hand, I’m really glad that I was able to play through entire chunks of the game, uninterrupted, and as a result had a lot of fun – on the other hand, it still crashed a lot, just not during critical bits, and it’s hard to say good things about a game just because it started crashing when it was more convenient for the player.

I remember hearing several complaints, back when the game came out, that people expected it to be more of a stealth sort of game, where you carefully cased your target, waited for them to be unguarded, and went all stabby on them in the dark of night with no witnesses.

It’s not that sort of game, though.  Even early levels have you fighting a lot more than being stealthy, and the final level, which is basically a running, multistage boss fight, is 100% fighting and no sneaking around or platforming.

That said, I found the action bits to be entirely satisfying, so I wasn’t disappointed when the stealth bits got thrown out the window.

The ending is shameless sequel setup, with your character left more-or-less completely without resolution.  If I’d played the game two years ago, this would vex me.  Since the PSP sequel comes out in a couple of months and picks up right where the first game left off, I’m OK with it.

After that, looking for a change of pace, I took Lost Kingdoms off the Gamecube shelf and gave it a spin.

I wasn’t really paying attention to console games between 2000 and 2003, so I wasn’t around for the Gamecube launch – or for that matter, the PS2 or Xbox launches.  I was still wrapped up in the sort of cocoon that you live in when you’re a MMORPG addict; you are vaguely aware that other things are happening in the world but they don’t seem to matter much.

As a result, I didn’t go through the new-console bipolar syndrome, where you’ve just spent a few hundred bucks on a new box that plays games, only there’s not many games for it, and every new release gets hyped well out of proportion to its actual potential and then winds up disappointing you – and that’s the environment Lost Kingdoms was launched into, as the Gamecube’s “First RPG”, a label which manages to quite completely fail to describe the actual contents of the game disc.

I assumed, when I started it, that it was an RPG first and foremost, though I’d heard that it was “card based” and assumed that there would be some sort of card game based battles.

Turns out, it’s all card game based battles with the lightest veneer of RPG painted on top of them.  This was a bit of a shock, especially since I’ve never played any console games based on card mechanics and was quite out of my element.  I managed to get my feet under me after about six hours, which was just in time for the game to end.  Yes, it’s really that short.  There are, I am told, some side quests you can do to pad it out, but I wanted to get my kingdom saved.

It’s a weird genre – and I admit that I say this solely based on this one example, which may not be representative of the genre at all.  You’re playing a character – and, let’s give From Software a thumbs up for making it the Princess’s turn to save the kingdom – but you’re as much a spectator as a participant; your role in most battles is to get on to the battlefield, summon up a bunch of monsters, and then run around trying not to die before your monsters can beat the other monsters.

The challenge comes from all this happening in real-time, with no idea what cards you’ll have access to at any moment, making you adapt very quickly to changing circumstances, which I would call a good thing.

On more of a down note, it’s made more complex – and downright frustrating, at times – by the Japanese obsession with elemental strengths and weaknesses, which seemed to ensure that, at any given moment, the four cards I had visible in my hand were precisely the wrong four cards for whatever type of opponent I was facing.

Anyway, despite having to repeat some early levels four or five times because I had the wrong cards or simply ran out of cards before I ran out of opponents, I persevered to the ending, have a vague sense of being a better-rounded person as a result of trying out a new genre, and will probably be much less confused should I try out the sequel, which of course I bought several years ago even though I hadn’t even started the first game.

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Stabbing mans

Posted on August 25, 2009 by baudattitude

So. I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed, which is a game of three parts. You run around cities doing all kinds of cool semi-parkour style moves, you do some intelligence gathering on mans to stab, and then you stab the mans.

It’s a brilliant game – I will say this even admitting that some of the intelligence gathering missions are painfully repetitive – because the other parts of the game are so damn fun.

And then there’s the bit where the game is buggier than a farm-house porch lamp on a summer evening.

Let me describe – and to be fair, let me point out that these issues seem confined to the PS3 version, and further to running on early 60GB models – the issue I’m encountering.

Simply put, the game locks in a fascinating way. The game sound doesn’t stop, you can still rotate the camera, in many ways it seems like everything is fine. Except, of course, that your character, and all NPC characters, freezes solid, and the only way to get out of the mess is to cycle power.

I will describe why this is particularly annoying:

The game revolves around several missions wherein you find out about a particularly odious individual, gather information on them, take it to your boss, get the heads-up to stabs him, infiltrate his base, go all stabby stabby, and run back to your boss.

You are subjected, during this, to three unskippable cutscenes.

Should you die at any point… You start over in the phase you died in. It’s actually fairly forgiving.

Should you CRASH, however, you go through the whole damn sequence again, including all the unskippable cutscenes.

I crash, on average, twice per stabby mission, so I’m watching these cutscenes a LOT, and they’re not really that good.

And yet I’m keeping at it, so either it really is quite good or I really am quite the masochistic.

This makes the second big-name PS3 title I’ve played recently that goes randomly into lockup land. I do try to remind myself of all the games I’ve played that don’t, you know, crash randomly, but there are times…

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Progress

Posted on August 23, 2009 by baudattitude

I think I need one of those industrial-safety signs you see in factories, only mine would read:

It has been

33

days since my last game purchase.

I have finished

10

games since my last game purchase.

Which I think reflects a good attitude towards dealing with the backlog.

Unfortunately, at some point I’m going to break down and buy SOMETHING – safe money is on Silent Hill : Shattered Dreams in October – and then I’d have to set the numbers back to zero and that would be really depressing.

So maybe I don’t need a sign.

Anyway, that 10 up there includes the two games I finished today, for certain values of “finished”, anyway.

See, I had a good friend over last night who has a weakness for the Beatles but who has never played any of the, shall we say, “Plastic Instrument” games.  He was in the uncomfortable state of WANTING the upcoming Beatles plastic-instrument game, but not knowing whether he’d actually enjoy it.

I am not myself a real proponent of the genre, but I had a pair of plastic guitars in the apartment and had played Guitar Hero II to the point of unlocking about half the songs.

Anyway, we put in Guitar Hero II and let him play bass on a few songs.  If we’d stopped at 3 (the point where he reached, I think, maximum annoyance with the entire genre), his life would have been much cheaper.

Unfortunately, he got the hang of things at that point, and, well, it looks like he’ll be giving the Rock Band people some money.

After a few songs in Guitar Hero II, I realized that I had, but had never played, the “Rocks the 80s” variant of the game, so we put that in, played through the 8 tracks you have access to when you start the game, tried and failed to make the “unlock everything” code work, and started playing through the career mode on easy.

After he left, I finished out the game on easy, realizing in the process that doing so only opened up 20 of the game’s 30 tracks.

By the way, it’s damn near criminal that they released this game at full retail – I paid 20 bucks for it and I feel like that’s overpriced considering how much of the assets they took straight out of GHII and how few songs you get.

Anyway, this morning I decided to take a run at it in, you know, MEDIUM difficulty.

It was, well, a nice difficulty level.  I failed a couple of tracks but finally managed to complete the game and open up all the tracks for play.

I was happy, but the sort of happy that leads to doing silly things like going back to Guitar Hero II and trying to unlock all the rest of the tracks in THAT.

Two words: Fuck “Freebird”

…anyway.  After four tries at the final song – all of them failing at 73%, by the way – I managed to skate through it by the skin of my teeth, unlock all the tracks for multiplayer, and wind up with enough cash to buy every song from the in-game store.

So: Two games down, one friend introduced to the rhythm genre just in time for him to make unwise financial decisions, and overall a good day of things.

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In which, I pat myself on the back:

Posted on August 17, 2009 by baudattitude

So, back in April or so, I found out from denpa no sekai that MOSAIC.WAV was releasing a new album, “Superluminal”.

And this I consider good news, because – with the exception of Amusement Pack – I haven’t yet met an album of theirs that I didn’t like.

And, to be fair, I probably would have liked Amusement Pack better if I was, you know, fluent in Japanese and all that so I could get the point of the interstitial spoken-word tracks.  So I don’t hold that against the band, not too much anyway.

On the other hand, I wasn’t about to drop the money to import their new album back in April because, well, the whole quitting my job and going back to school thing.

On the third hand, most of their library is available on iTunes, and substantially cheaper.  It just tends to lag behind the disc releases by a few months.

So I’ve been checking the Japanese iTunes store every couple of weeks, when I remember it, and I noticed last night that Superluminal was finally available for the low low price of Y1500. (about 16 bucks)

I clicked the “Buy album” link, got presented with the typical iTunes dialog box of “Are you sure you want to buy this?”, and had a sudden feeling of “wait, I shouldn’t push this button yet…”

Turns out it’s actually available on the US store, for $9.99.  Who would have guessed?

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And the award for…

Posted on August 17, 2009 by baudattitude

…really minor supporting character who’s only mentioned in a couple of flashback sequences but then goes on to star in his own game and turns out to be way more likable than the main character of the game he appeared in as a minor flashback character goes to…

Yes, I finally got around to playing Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, which stars the damn-near-a-trivia-answer Zack, who I vaguely remembered from playing through Final Fantasy VII back in 1998 or so.

Short version: I liked it.  It had the difficult task of working both as a game and as a nostalgia trip, and I think it pulled both off neatly.  My only gripe is that the random encounter rate in some areas is bizarrely high – you go from fight to fight within a couple of steps, and the areas with this also tended to have the sorts of monsters that liked to poison, or silence, or otherwise inflict generic and annoying status effects.

I was a bit confused – ok, a LOT confused – by the DMW mechanic, but I learned over time that, yes, it was supposed to be completely random and no, there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I should just deal with it.

It all worked out, anyway, because if you stick to the main storyline and don’t go running off and doing the optional missions, the game is pretty easy.  You have to balance magic vs physical attacks, keep yourself healed, the usual stuff.   It adds a bit of spice to the typical RPG-style battles by putting the character in a free-roaming 3D arena where you can easily dodge attacks.

From start to finish, I only found one battle I could not win, and only because of a combination of elemental effects – I had a fire spell equipped and a lightning enhancement on my sword and ran into a creature who was a) immune to electrical attacks and b) HEALED by fire attacks, and you really can’t blame the game for letting me get myself into that sort of mess.

This is a little tongue-in-cheek, but I think that the biggest challenge facing the player is making sure that, when the game tosses you into an over-an-hour-long sequence of boss fights and cutscenes – as it does twice – you have enough battery power to make it through to the other side.  🙂

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Powerslave perspectives

Posted on August 15, 2009 by baudattitude

Finished Powerslave tonight, after about a week’s worth of playing, getting stuck, looking up FAQs and video playthroughs, abusing save states and generally doing my best to change the rules of the game to be in my favor without actually going over the line into the likes of invulnerability codes.

Put simply: If I’d tried playing this game back in 1996, when I bought it, before SSF and youtube and gamefaqs… There’s no bloody way I would have been able to make it through.  It exudes an attitude towards the player that, while not entirely out of place at the time, would come across as actual hatred if it cropped up in a modern game.

You will, the game says, make 8 precision jumps from moving platform to moving platform, high above lava while being bombarded by flying enemies, and if you don’t manage to do it, you’ll be sent back to the start to try again.

Modern games generally don’t do this.

The experience did, however, give me a marvelous sense of perspective.  The next time I’m playing a console game that actually does pull this sort of player abuse, I’m just going to put it aside until whatever console I’m playing it on gets emulated so I can get through it the cheap way.  🙂

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Random praise for Powerslave

Posted on August 15, 2009 by baudattitude

Ok, so Powerslave is coming along nicely and I’m starting to feel pretty, what’s a good way to put this? Confident in my ability to turn random aggressive polygon monsters into low-resolution piles of pixelated goo.

So it threw me a tiny curveball.

According to the manual, there are three boss enemies, though I’m expecting a fourth just to spice things up.

The first boss character is in, well, an arena. In getting to him you go through a level that is clearly a funnel – you feel from the onset that you are being lead down a path to your doom, made even more obvious by being dropped into a large circular arena with a giant door on one wall – a door you have to OPEN to let the boss out. It all leads to a nice sense of tension.

Boss #2, on the other hand, is just sort of hanging out in a hallway in its level. There’s no buildup; you’re happily wandering through the level when you turn a corner and BAM.

The ensuing chaos was glorious, going from “huh. Haven’t seen one of those before” to ” huh. It kind of hurts and WOW it’s taking a lot of bullets to kill” to “uh, I’m running kind of low on ammo and close to death, is it ever going to stop and fall over?”

And then, after it was all over – WHAT WAS THAT THING?

Glorious.

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Purging away…

Posted on August 13, 2009 by baudattitude

As of two days ago, I had four bins of cables / computer parts, neatly labeled as “AV Cables”, “Pasocon Cables”, “Pasocon Parts” and “Mynock Chow”.

Now I have two bins.  I condemned an awful lot of S-video cables, Cat-5 cable and USB-to-mini-USB cables to the abyss, and I feel better for it.

I also went through the boxes of tools & electronic parts and culled remorselessly.  I’ve come to the understanding that I will never use the components I bought back when I had a crazy dream of restoring vintage arcade machines, and that it would probably be best if I didn’t have them any more.

Finally, I’ve broken down a lot of product packaging to be recycled.  I mean, not everything – my recent implants from the possibly-benign overfiends at 1 Infinite Loop render me incapable of braking down any shiny white boxes with Apple logos – but stuff like the box for the 3rd-party SNES controller I bought in 1992 and whose box has followed me from apartment to apartment ever since.

I’ve managed to do an awful lot of stuff-reduction in the last year or so, and mostly without regrets.  I’m reasonably confident that, at some point, I’m going to realize that I’ve gone just too far in getting rid of SOMETHING, and at that point I’m going to have to go out and rebuy whatever it was, but I’m also reasonably confident that the cost of rebuying it will be offset by all the space I’ve freed up in the meantime.

On another note: Continuing my walkabout through the depths of my Saturn collection, I’ve come to Powerslave – or, as it’s known everywhere outside the US, Exhumed.  It’s one of the gems in the Saturn lineup, but one that I was worried might not have aged well.  After all, it’s an FPS designed around a Saturn pad, and I’m used to dual analogs or mouse & keyboard these days.

I will be brief: It’s aged VERY well.  The lack of mouselook is, well, a bit limiting, but the game was designed for it.

It wasn’t, however, designed to be finished easily.  It’s actually fairly brutal, leaving you starved for ammunition or health a lot of the time and forcing you to make long, precise jumps over lava pits and the like – and with no mid-level-save, missing one of these jumps sends you back to the level start…

…which is why I’m playing it through SSF and abusing the “save state” function liberally.  Sure, if I manage to finish it, I won’t have done it terribly cleanly, but I think I’ll be able to live with myself.

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Great Expectations

Posted on August 10, 2009 by baudattitude

I quite like Magic Knight Rayearth – the first TV series, that is; I haven’t seen the sequel or the OVA remake.  It’s got a hella catchy OP song, CLAMP art, Mokona, and one of the biggest I-Did-Not-See-That-Coming plot twists I’ve ever, uh, not seen coming.

I SHOULD be the perfect audience for the video game adaptation, which I’ve owned for over a decade and which I hadn’t yet gotten around to playing until this week.

It turns out that, well, no.  It’s an awfully pretty 2D game, has good BGM, follows the story neatly, and throws in some original characters, but it’s not very fun to play.

I should amend that.  The puzzle solving is fun, and I even rather liked the platforming jumpy bits, but the combat – which, you know, I’m a guy, I like hitting things with sticks – is rather tedious.  You have two characters with swords and one with a bow, and the best strategy in every case is to keep the sword characters on the sidelines and use the bow character for everything, because trying to mix things up in melee is a pain in the arse; it’s hard to get close enough to an enemy to hit it without being hit yourself, and when you do get hit, you tend to get hit two or three times and often knocked into a hazard.

In addition, the Big Damn Twist is, well, it’s the same Big Damn Twist, which kind of illustrates the problem any video game adaptation has – you can’t really go changing things too much, so your biggest audience – fans of a show or movie – are Not Surprised when you have the exact same ending.

I think the real problem is, I’d had the game sitting in my “Play this, damnit!” stack since 1998, and there was no bloody way it was going to meet my expectations for it.  A little time spent setting my expectations properly before I began would probably have been a good idea.

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QTEs Unleashed

Posted on August 8, 2009 by baudattitude

I finished The Force Unleashed this morning, at about 3AM, with my wife cheering me on, and I have to say that it had a pretty neat story – if it’s canon, anyway, and I’m given to understand that the game’s default ending IS supposed to be canon, though who knows for sure – and so I will recommend it to anyone who grew up on Star Wars movies, action figures, lunchboxes, and bedsheets starting at the age of, roughly, 5.

I didn’t actually have “Star Wars” bedsheets.  I had “Battlestar Galactica” bedsheets.  The lunchbox thing, though, Star Wars all the way for me.  My sister? Holly Hobby.

Anyway.

I’m going to put it right up with Dark Forces in my list of “Star Wars games I actually enjoyed playing”, which is high praise considering:

1) The game’s tendency to, if I had an AT-ST and a hunk of rubble directly in front of me, decide that I wanted to unleash the full fury of my force lightning blast into the hunk of rubble while the AT-ST riddled me with blaster fire.

2) The mid-level boss fight I spent stuck in a railing, unable to move, throwing my lightsaber at the boss over and over again until he mercifully used force grip on me and threw me across the room.

3) Needing to repeat the first SEVEN end-level boss fights because, the first time I finished each level, it would crash without first saving my progress.

4) Random crashes throughout the game.  Thankfully the game has lots of checkpoints.  This was the PS3 version, I can’t say if the 360 version is any less frustrating.

5) The goddamn Star Destroyer bit.  On the plus side, this was the first “boss” that wasn’t immediately followed by the game crashing.  I was incredibly relieved by this until I realized that I was happy simply because the game had stopped abusing me.  Call it battered gamer syndrome.

6) The way it throws QTEs at you all the damn time.  Seriously. Having Big Dramatic End-of-Fight sequences is cool – for spectators.  As the poor mook with the controller, your entire attention is on the bottom of the screen, anticipating the next “Press X to not die!” message, with only a vague awareness that Neat Things are happening in the other 80% of the screen.

Those little tiny nitpicks aside… a good ride.  The visceral nature of the force powers you unlock through playing makes being a bad guy a tremendously joyful experience, almost to the point of being disturbing, and the assorted screams, moans, and grunts from your hapless victims really complete the package.  The environments are also 100% fan-service glee, especially the junk planet, which is basically a big game of “Spot-the-Nina” for Star Wars geeks.

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