Baud Attitude

If my mother played videogames – which, let’s be straight up here, she used to be quite fond of Asteroids and Ms Pac Man… If my mother played tactical RPGs, which she doesn’t, at least as far as I’ve seen recently, she’d like Jeanne D’arc.

See, she’s from Glasgow, and if there’s one thing that is apparently endemic to the Scots, it’s an undying hatred of the English.

Jeanne D’arc is all about, well beating down the English.  You play a, well, look, if I have to explain that your characters are French, you really need to go back and take a history class, or at least watch Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure again. Go on, I’ll be here when you get back.

I’m given to understand that this game is based, at least in some sort of vague way, on historical fact, though I don’t think that the English ever actually made pacts with evil demon critters back in the good old days.

These days, I think they’re all for it, but they’ve also stopped fighting with the French, so it doesn’t really matter one way or the other.

Anyway, Jeanne D’arc, which I’m hoping will not end with a tragic immolation scene and delayed canonization, is so close to being a Shining Force game that it really doesn’t matter that I don’t have any centaurs on my side.

Put simply: It’s mighty good, at least up to where I’ve gotten, which isn’t TOO far really but is enough to have gotten me good and hooked.

Now that I’ve said that, some nitpicks:

1) It’s a portable game, but it has an awful lot of cutscenes and dialogue heavy bits.  You can, at least, pause them.  You can also elect to SKIP them once paused, which is a wonderful thing if you’re retrying a battle for the third time.

2) There’s a lot of loading between fights.  This is probably much better if you’re running it on a PSP2000 or 3000, or – even better – if you’ve bought it off PSN and are running it off memory stick, but on my PSP1000, it does grind the old UMD drive an awful lot.

3) Pretty early on, you get into a battle where the objective is to run away.  You are, after all, playing a band of French soldiers.

YES, I WENT THERE.

Anyway.

The enemy general is a freakin’ monster, and not in the orcs-and-lizardmen sort of way.  If he gets two hits in on any of your characters, they’re pretty much done for, and if you lose any of your characters you lose the battle.

You’re not supposed to be able to beat him, which was made obvious when I DID beat him and then he showed up in the very next cutscene and my characters were all, like, “but we just got away from you!” and I’m thinking, “no, you didn’t, you whupped his tea swilling armor-plated-arse in the last encounter!”

A little bit of a continuity flaw there.

Those minor things aside, serious thumbs up. It’s challenging, it’s satisfying, and – tragic lack of catgirls aside – it’s awfully pretty.

I am officially old enough that things I remember from my youth are starting to have “30th Anniversary Editions”, which isn’t really THAT bad and I promise not to get all depressed about it until stuff starts having “50th Anniversary Editions”

Anyway, 30 years ago… well, a bit more than 30 years, because I didn’t actually buy Space Invaders Extreme when it was released, I waited until the PSP version dropped to $10… 30 PLUS years ago, I remember playing Space Invaders and doing very poorly at it.  I specialized in shooting through my own shields, which I think we can all agree is a somewhat flawed strategy.

Space Invaders got supplanted by Pac-Man and Omega Race and Joust and Robotron 2084 before I stopped going to arcades, and honestly I didn’t feel a whole lot of nostalgia for it.  Picking up a 30th Anniversary Edition, cheap though it was, is something I can’t really explain.

It’s Space Invaders, for crying out loud.  Taito puts out a new version every five years or so, and people who actually HAVE nostalgia for the game buy it, and everyone’s happy.

As inexplicable as my purchase was, it turns out that it was a pretty decent choice.

Space Invaders Extreme is one part shooter, one part puzzle game, and about four parts Jeff Minter, though I don’t think he was actually involved with the handheld versions.  (He is doing visualizations for the upcoming Xbox Live version, though.)

If he wasn’t, it’s a hell of an homage to his style of taking a classic shooty type game, pumping up the gameplay with some over-the-top powerups, adding trance/technoesque music, and shovelling in a couple of wheelbarrow loads of particle effects.  Oh, and taking out the shields.

It doesn’t, however, have the soul-crushing difficulty curve of a genuine Minter game.  I say this because I was actually able to finish it, albeit on the easiest difficulty path and with LOTS of retries.

I have no shame when it comes to taking the coward’s way out.

Difficulty is handled in interesting fashion; a mix of adaptive difficulty and player choice.  Starting at the end of the second level, you’re given the choice of which of a couple of third levels you want to play, with varying difficulty levels, and you repeat the process after the third and fourth levels.  If I can believe everything I read, there are two possible third levels, three possible fourth levels, and four possible fifth levels, making a five level game into a total of eleven levels and mandating multiple playthroughs if one wishes to see everything.

To complicate matters, you can’t just pick the higher difficulty levels to see what they’re like; you have to earn them based on your performance.  If I were a completionist, I would be playing this game for a good long time.

I think we both know what the odds of that are.