Baud Attitude

I’m not very good at predictions.

For instance, several months ago when I first saw “Cooking Mama” on a shelf, I had the following thoughts:

1) Wow, that is a weird concept for a game.

2) I like weird games.

3) Weird games don’t seem to sell well.

4) I should buy that now, because it’s going to be impossible to find in a couple of months.

I am given to understand that it has, in fact, sold well over a million copies and generated at least two sequels.

So, predicting the future: Not my strong point.

Anyway, I played it a little after I bought it, but I got a little tired of the whole rapid-fire-minigame thing and put it aside after I’d unlocked a few recipes.  I was right about it being darn weird, though, they didn’t really bother much with the localization or change the recipes to be American food or anything like that.

After finishing Bomberman Land Touch, though, I was a little more open to the minigame-collection-concept, so I went back to Cooking Mama, started taking my potato peeling and squid frying SERIOUSLY, and burned through all 76 recipes with at least silver medals.  I wasn’t about to repeat them until I’d gotten 100% gold, or anything, that would be insane, but I wasn’t going to let myself slide with any copper medals.

Anyway, another game down.  I was quite disappointed in not getting any kind of fanfare, or ending credits, or anything like that, but at least I got to play a videogame simulation of making Katsudon, and that’s good enough for me.

A couple of Christmases ago, I was gifted a copy of Bomberman Land Touch.  And I was mightily perplexed when I put it into my DS and was greeted with, well, something rather different than I expected.

I know Bomberman.  I deeply enjoy Bomberman.  I have spent many happy hours with friends playing Bomberman, and I had certain preconceptions as to what a game called “Bomberman”-anything ought to contain.

This involves running around a maze, picking up powerups, and trying to blow your friends up.  Bizarre and incoherent trash-talking is a side benefit.  I once had a friend shout, in the throes of battle, that he was “On me, like a bag of chips.”

I have never understood this.

Bomberman Land Touch has none of that, at least not in the single player mode.  What it has instead is a collection of bomb-themed mini games and a not-terribly-deep story to give you a reason to play through all the mini games.  You’re a visitor to a pirate-themed amusement park, with the ultimate goal being to defeat the pirate lord and be crowned the Pirate King.  Hence the Gilbert & Sullivan reference above.

It’s taken me this long to play through, because the game drags at first.  Of course you can’t just start at mini game 1, beat it, move on to mini game 2, and continue to mini game 36.  That would be far too easy.  Instead, you collect assorted chits and doohickies that you get by beating the mini games, running errands for the residents of the park, and solving assorted adventure-game style puzzles.

By which I mean, you have an inventory that slowly fills with assorted outfits and bombs and you’ll wind up using each and every one of them at some point or another in order to solve a puzzle.

It never gets all Roberta Williams on you, though – there aren’t any really obtuse leaps of illogic to make.  Major points in that regard.

As your chits accumulate, you can unlock gates in the park that let you get to more attractions and new areas and meet more park residents who need errands run, and this is much more satisfying than I’m making it sound.

At any rate, I managed to achieve my goal tonight, and I was crowned the Pirate King, and I got a good laugh out of the end credits when they suggested I try the whole thing over again, this time in Hard Mode.

I don’t know the meaning of the term “Hard Mode”

But I do know that I’m glad to have another game finished.

Started Puzzle Quest today.

I just lost four hours. It was just after 7 PM at latest the last time I looked at a clock and now it’s pushing midnight.

And my stylus elbow hurts like crazy.

I’m blaming aliens. If there’s one thing watching the “X-files” taught me, it’s that missing time means alien involvement somehow.

The mysterious pain in my arm – also probably aliens.

Can’t be that I’ve been playing Bejeweled against Giant Rats for all that time. That would be silly.

Edit: I like Bejeweled. Everyone likes Bejeweled. But after 8 hours of playing Bejeweled-the-RPG, I am SO very much done with it. The item-and-spell-crafting parts of the game, in particular, crushed my soul.

One of the first Nintendo DS games I bought was Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, and it is a glorious game.  I spent far too many hours playing it and then going back to songs and trying to get higher ranks on them.

I never managed to beat Ready, Steady Go on anything harder than the easiest level, though, which is kind of sad I guess.

Then I bought Ouendan 2 last year, a few months after it came out, and didn’t get quite as sucked into it.  I beat it on easy and then put it aside in favor of starting something new.

At some point, I ran across a cheap copy of Elite Beat Agents and bought it – I resisted buying it at full price because, well, my reasoning was that it was just a localized version of the original game, and how good could it be after the conversion?

That’s sat around, untouched, for a few months while I was working on the PSP Appreciation Project.

I finally decided to get around to trying it out 3 days ago.

I have what I fear may be a permanent stylus groove etched into my tappin’ thumb now.  It’s a much better conversion than I expected, and the gameplay – not necessarily the songs list or the storyline, but the gameplay – is much improved from the first game.   EBA adds things like being able to skip through animations and get right back to playing a song after you fail it, and an “instant replay” that lets you see the part of the song where you failed so you can get a feel for how the notes are laid out without necessarily playing back through the song to that point.

It’s also a lot easier, which is nice for people like me who don’t do well with hard games.  I’ve beaten the game on the easy and normal levels already and gotten through about half of hard.  That’s where I took the cartridge out of the DS and put it away because I have homework to do and it will not get done if I can just flip open the DS and “try one more song.”

Bluntly:  It’s a really good game, and if you can put up with a song list that is guaranteed to contain at least ONE song that will, no matter how diverse your musical tastes, annoy the heck out of you, you should give it a try.

Oh – there is one exception to the “easier” rule.   Jumpin’ Jack Flash is a right bitch of a song to tap through.  It is, however, a song that I can put up with hearing over and over again, so it’s not too bad that it’s the bottleneck.  🙂