Halo Month, Part 1

Posted on April 3, 2018 by baudattitude

So, Halo Month is off to quite the start. I’ve read the first three books (“Halo: The Fall of Reach”, “Halo: The Flood”, and “Halo: First Strike”), played through the MCC version of Halo: Combat Evolved, and started Halo 2.

As mentioned before, a big part of why I’m doing this is because I’ve never really paid attention to the Halo universe outside of the games, and that made following Halo 4’s plot very confusing – a lot of it revolves around Doctor Halsey, who I don’t think ever shows up in a Halo game before that point but who is hugely important to the book plots from the very first book forward.

I can’t really talk too much about the quality of the books. They suffer a bit from the need to lovingly describe the various weapons and gear used by the Spartans, and it comes off a bit… men’s adventure? Like, there’s a drugstore action novel feel to them, with all of the talk of calibers and high explosives – and to make things worse, some of the technical talk is just painful. There’s at least one moment where a character is described as using a “114mm sniper rifle”, for example, which I am going to pretend is just a really interesting typo.

Let’s just file them under not-great-literature and move on.

Two of them are basically lore dumps to get you into the first game and then to explain how one of the characters in that first game survived until the second. The middle book, “Halo: The Flood” is little more than a novelization of the game storyline, which was quite a disappointment. I had expected it to go into, well, the backstory of the Flood. Silly me.

Of all of them, I think “Halo: The Fall of Reach” is the most critical to read and I kind of wish I’d read it before playing the game for the first time – some details from the page don’t perfectly match up with the on-screen events, but it really sets the stage and the stakes for the campaign.

I’d played Halo: Combat Evolved through twice before, both the original Xbox version and the Xbox 360 Anniversary edition, which was a good thing. It meant that I was ready for the godawful slog that is “Assault on the Control Room” and knew in advance that “Twin Betrayals” was just going to be “Assault on the Control Room” in reverse. What I didn’t remember was just how easy it is to get absolutely murdered by random chains of grenade explosions, or how painful breaking into the landing bay in “Truth and Reconciliation” was going to be. I was only playing on Normal difficulty, expecting a cakewalk, and I had to reset my expectations several times over the course of the campaign.

A lot of Halo’s campaign, after your first play-through, is just working your way to the Flood outbreak since that’s where the game really kicks into gear. It’s probably an unpopular opinion, but my favorite level is “The Library”, just because I really love the sense of being constantly almost-but-not-quite overwhelmed by hordes of enemies. It doesn’t have the same adrenaline rush as the final mad dash in the Warthog, but it keeps up the tension level for a really long time. It may be a bit linear, compared to other levels where Bungie was happy to let you get lost and wander around for a while, but linear works for me.

I suspect I have just insulted a lot of fan-favorite levels, and I’d be interested to hear other peoples’ thoughts on the campaign.  Be gentle. 🙂

The Master Chief Collection versions of both Halo and Halo 2 let you swap back and forth between the old graphics and new graphics with the press of a button, and I found myself switching quite a bit. Unexpectedly, I found myself preferring the old lighting in most of the levels – the ring is supposed to be ancient and long-dead, and the Forerunner ruins in the original game LOOK it. The fresh coat of paint added for the remaster kind of destroys the sense that you’re wandering through the remnants, like they spent a long time on retexturing everything and then realized that they needed to turn on all of the lights or you wouldn’t be able to properly appreciate the work they put into designing wall panels.

Old Vs. New

Also, the newly-added ground flora does a fine job of covering up ammo and weapon pickups, and one of the primary reasons I kept switching to the old graphics was so I could find stuff after fights.

That kvetching aside, the new models for characters and vehicles are far better and usually won out over preferring the older lighting. If they ever RE-remaster the original game, I hope they find a bit of a middle ground.

As I mentioned, I’m only a little ways into Halo 2 – specifically, at the point where the Master Chief actually winds up on the second Halo installation. So far, I’m liking the changes to the visuals much more than in the first game, and there is a real evolution in pacing – the opening level is a bit of a drag, especially since I managed to get lost several times, but everything since then has been firing on all cylinders.

Next up, I should finish Halo 2, then read one or two more books and dive into Halo 3. I also have Halo Wars waiting for me, and that’s going to be the first completely new-to-me game. I don’t have a lot of RTS experience so I’m a little anxious about that one, but we’ll see how it goes.

Posted in videogames, xbox, Xbox One | 2 Comments

Five other things I played in March

Posted on April 1, 2018 by baudattitude

I haven’t been going as whole-hog on my backlog this year, because honestly I feel like last year ended with me in control again after quite a while of feeling buried under the shame of a mountain of games I’d bought but never actually played.  I’m still, oh, 70 or 80 games behind but at least it’s not three digits anymore.

It’s a good feeling, and it means that I can do things like trying a different Dark Souls III spec without self-inflicted guilt.

I may be putting a little too much emphasis on this, but I don’t think I’m the only one to have backlog stress.  If you’re struggling with your own “to-play” list, or want to brag about how your first quarter of 2018 has gone, feel free to share your pain or triumph in the comments.  This is a judgement-free zone.

Anyway, even with being a little more mellow and with being distracted by replaying a game, I did manage to knock 5 games out.

A few years ago, I talked a friend into buying Borderlands 2 so we could co-op through it.  At the time, I didn’t realize that the campaign was quite so ridiculously long – I think we made it about 25 hours in before it kind of fizzled out.

Anyway, I decided that I would make another go at it and started from scratch. It turned out to be worth going back to – while the game’s inventory system is just awful, it has some really enjoyable gunplay, the script got some genuine laughs out of me, and I even managed to enjoy the “sorting through a pile of vaguely-similar weapons every 15 minutes” aspect, which usually bugs me in loot games.  Also, the cel-shaded look has aged really well.

I’m not being entirely truthful when I say that I bought a WiiU for Splatoon.  I decided to buy one when Nintendo announced that they’d be localizing Fatal Frame 5.

On the other hand, I knew I needed to have Splatoon in my life from the first time I saw the first video of it – maybe an E3 video? maybe a direct? I can’t recall, but I do remember really confusing the guy at Best Buy who I preordered the Splatoon console bundle from.  It was a mix of “wait, someone wants to buy a WiiU?” and “wait, we are actually taking preorders for WiiUs?”

I put a good number of hours into the multiplayer, but it also deserves special mention for having a really fun single-player campaign, capped with one of gaming’s best final bosses.

The sequel… well, I haven’t played any of the multiplayer yet, but I expect it’s just as good as the original game, just without needing to hold a massive tablet controller all of the time.  I did play through the single-player, and it was… well, it was OK.  It would have been worlds better if almost every level hadn’t had a “Sheldon Request” making you play with specific weapons, mind you.  It did not stand up to the standards of the first game.

That said, I am really looking forward to the DLC expansion announced recently.  The Octolings have really neat designs and it seems sad that they’re limited to being the bad guys in a part of the game most people will only play once, if that.

I’ve never had a ton of attachment to Mario, but I wound up playing a whopping three Mario platformers last year – and two of them were excellent games.  I probably wouldn’t have gone out and bought a fourth, but Nintendo added 3D World to their Player Selects line and $20 felt like a good price.

It turned out to be a lot of fun, and I’m glad I took the plunge.  I don’t do well with platform games – I tend to seize up when asked to do something like jump from one swinging platform to another – but the short levels and mid-level checkpoints meant that I was able to brute-force my way through every level in the first 8 worlds and send Bowser packing.

Being a pre-Odyssey game, it still has the annoying combo of limited lives AND stage time limits, which was particularly vexing in one of the Bowser stages where I was supposed to be knocking things back at him to damage him and he ran out the clock on me by not throwing enough things for me to knock back… but lives were easy enough to come by, and I still had 30 in the bank when all was said and done.

Special mention goes to the “Captain Toad” puzzle levels, which were absolutely charming, and I may just need to check out his solo game when it gets a Switch release later this year.  Or I could always hunt down the WiiU original.  That might be a lot cheaper.

While I used to be a big comics reader, I stuck mostly to the DC side of the comics shop.  As a result, my only exposure to Deadpool has been the recent movie, which was a surprisingly good non-Marvel-Studios Marvel movie.  Really, between Deadpool and Logan, Fox was really firing on all cylinders when it came to super-hero movies.

(Let’s just try not to think about X-Men: Apocalypse right now.  I apologize if by mentioning it I have reminded you that it was a thing that happened.)

Anyway, I had just enough exposure to Deadpool that I decided to buy the game when it was announced for delisting from Xbox Live, and I finally got around to booting it up this weekend.

It’s not a long game – it took me about 7 hours on the “Veteran” difficulty setting – and there’s very little about the gameplay to recommend it – really, it’s a by-the-numbers 3rd-person brawler and suffers from a severe lack of variety in level design.

HOWEVER.  It’s funny as hell, and that makes up for a lot.

Well, that deserves a qualifier, really, because the humor is definitely on the mean-spirited side of things and for maximum appreciation you really need to have been a 12-year-old boy at one time or another.  If your reaction to random fart jokes is to roll your eyes rather than giggle, you might not have the same positive reaction to this game.

You will also need a fairly high tolerance for male-gaze-heavy camera angles whenever there’s a woman on screen… though, even though Psylocke’s role in this game is mostly to stand around with her butt directly pointed at the camera, it’s still a better use of the character then the previously mentioned X-Men: Apocalypse.

Finally, while the combat is mashy as heck and really tedious for the first hunk of the game, it starts getting much better once you’ve unlocked a few weapons and upgrades, and the last level features a boss gauntlet that really justifies all of the time you spent getting to it – it just throws wave after wave of mooks and previous bosses at you, and is a wonderfully hectic affair.  I even picked up one of my favorite recent achievements from this level:

So this gets a thumbs-up from me.  If you’re on the fence… maybe go on Youtube, watch the first half hour or so, decide for yourself whether the gags are up your alley.

Finally, Never Alone, which has exactly zero fart jokes.  No jokes at all, really – it’s a fairly bleak affair, a puzzle platformer which has you taking control of a small girl and a fox in an effort to survive inclement weather and a particularly nasty villain.

Seriously, I really hated the guy, with a passion that I can rarely summon for videogame antagonists.  I was glad to see him brought to a fitting end.

It’s gotten a lot of praise for its setting and for its source material – it’s based on an Inuit folk tale and has a number of videos you can watch to find out more about the culture if you want to learn more.  It’s pretty much the game equivalent of Oscar bait, and has accordingly won a ton of awards.

I kind of suspect that most of the praise has come from people who didn’t actually persevere through the whole thing, however – it is a VERY short game, which you’ll likely knock out in 3 hours or less (I took 2 hours 41 minutes, and as mentioned earlier I am rubbish at platformers), and while it has a very good “first level completion” rate of 87%, a bare 15% of players actually stuck with it until the end.  That’s a steep drop-off.

You will die a lot in this game, many of the things that kill you are poorly-telegraphed until you die from them, and it can be quite an unenjoyable affair at times.

On the other hand, cute fox.  REALLY cute fox.  You may decide to play this game only for the cute fox, and I don’t think there’s a single thing wrong with that.

So, not cutting down the backlog with quite the same force as last year, but still generally having a good time at it.

For April, I have a self-imposed backlog challenge theme.  When I bought my Xbone, I also got the Master Chief Collection and Halo 5, so I’d like to rack up some more hours in a green helmet… but I’ve held back, because playing Halo 4 a few years back didn’t make a ton of sense and I really felt like there was a whole lot of backstory that I was missing out on.

So, this April is Halo month – not just the mainline games, mind you, but I’m going to read the books AND watch the movies AND play the spin-off games… and I’m going to do all of this mixed-media consumption in release order, which I hope is not too painful.  I have constructed a spreadsheet.

I may even buy some Doritos.  And Mountain Dew.  You know.  Game fuel.  Advance warning, I may be going Full Bro here.

 

Posted in PS4, Switch, WiiU, Xbox One | Leave a comment

Dark Souls III: There IS an easy mode.

Posted on March 30, 2018 by baudattitude

It’s been nearly two years since I decided to man up and see what all the hype about “Demon’s Souls” was about, and that lead to me spending most of April and May of 2016 playing through that game and then the three Dark Souls games.

This was entirely out of character, because I am not typically drawn to difficult games and the Souls fanbase rather revels in the legendary difficulty.

It turned out that, well, they’re not forgiving games BUT they reward patience and persistence rather than twitch reflexes, and that’s pretty well suited to a old guy.  I didn’t ever really feel like they were unfair… until I hit Dark Souls III, which was just BRUTAL.  It took me a good fifty hours to claw my way through and I wound up summoning other players to help with the vast majority of the bosses.

A good part of that, it turns out, was just because I decided that I was going to play a pure magic user – no pyromancy, no miracles, just raw sorcery – and I did this just in time to start a game that was really unforgiving to glass cannons.  I spent hours grinding INT up and collecting the four rings needed to make sorcery even halfway viable, and the result was… well, if I could make space between myself and the thing I was trying to kill, I could usually blow it up REAL good.

Dark Souls bosses rarely let you make any space, and the bosses in Dark Souls III are particularly keen on getting right up in your proverbial grill.

Anyway, I mentioned a few days ago that I’d been needing distraction and had started a second playthrough, this time picking the Knight starting class and working on the Yuria of Londor questline since I’d missed my chance to do it the first go ’round.

It went pretty well.

Actually, let me rephrase that.  It went shockingly well.  I gave the Soul of Cinder a merciless beat-down with only about 30 hours on the clock, and on my first try.  Excluding Pontiff Sulyvahn – I have NEVER been able to reliably parry in a Souls game – I didn’t get hung up on any boss for more than a few attempts and had a surprising number of first-attempt kills – all solo, with the exception of summoning Yuria for a fight because I wanted her armor set.   I didn’t even go nuts hunting down Estus flask upgrades or gear, with the exception of about two hours of beating up Lothric Knights so they would drop me their armor set.

Fashion Souls IS the true end game.

Some of this, yes, I did play the game about two years ago and I did remember a few things, but most of it was realizing that the game really wanted me to play a character who would go toe-to-toe with the bosses instead of running around trying to pew pew them to death.

So.  Lessons learned and all that.  I may have to rethink my personal ranking of the series, because I was quite harsh on this game when I originally played it, and it turns out I was just doing things wrong.

 

Posted in PC Gaming, Souls, videogames | Leave a comment

On Secret Weapons

Posted on March 21, 2018 by baudattitude

So, I had to be on a conference call from home tonight, and my only role was to sit and listen for my name and answer questions if asked.  We’ve been having this call every night so far this week and I have yet to be called upon, so tonight I decided that I would start a new character in Dark Souls III, and make a melee build since I’d had such an annoying time playing it as a pure sorcerer build the first time around.

It worked out pretty well, until I decided to start going after the Sword Master just outside Firelink Shrine.  I’d killed him on my first playthrough because, well, I was playing a pure sorcerer build and could just blow him up at range.  As a melee character, he was not quite such a pushover, and I died a few times.

Then my wife walked in and saw that I was playing a game while I was technically supposed to be working, so she shook her finger at me and said “shame!” and then walked over and put her hands over my eyes.  While I was fighting him.

So I flailed around a bit and then decided that discretion was the better part of valor and just pushed the stick dead forward until she said “HOW CAN YOU EVEN SEE WHERE YOU’RE GOING” and took her hands away in disgust.

And my vision was restored just in time to see 2000 souls added to my total, because apparently he’d fallen off a cliff chasing me, and then I went and picked up the uchigatana from his spawn point.

I love these games.

 

Posted in PC Gaming, Souls, videogames | Leave a comment

Star Wars: Battlefront II, March 21st Update: A New Hope?

Posted on March 21, 2018 by baudattitude

Earlier this year, I rented Star Wars: Battlefront II – mostly just to play through the single-player campaign since they actually did one this time.  In the process, I tried out the game’s “Starfighter Assault” multiplayer mode, and had way more fun than I expected flying around and getting shot down by other players.  So… when it showed up in a sale at 60% off, I went ahead and bought it.  I am weak.

For the last few days, it’s been my go-to game for the couple of hours between getting off work and going to bed, and my “playing” to “respawning” ratio has improved considerably – as long as we are clear that we’re talking only about the Starfighter Assault mode, as opposed to any of the other multiplayer modes in which I spend more time waiting to respawn then actually playing.  I really don’t have the reflexes for the ground-based combat play modes, but Starfighter Assault is a much more casually-paced affair and has objectives that you can contribute towards even if you aren’t very good at one-on-one dogfighting.  It’s a lot like Splatoon or Titanfall in that way.

And, in that time, I have come to admire the utter bastard efficiency in which the card-based progression system was designed to point out to you how your frequent and unavoidable deaths are the result of having Worse Cards than the guy who just killed you, and (by the way) you could probably get some Better Cards if you just opened a few loot boxes.  This REALLY comes out in the game’s “Heroes Vs. Villains” multiplayer mode, where you not only have to deal with the other players having Better Cards but also with the problem that half of the characters on either side are locked and must be unlocked with currency earned at a glacial rate through repeated play sessions.  Want to play as Luke?  That will be 5000 credits. (A typical 15-20 minute multiplayer session nets 350 credits on a good run.  If you’re feeling short of credits, well, those are in the loot boxes too.)

Put simply, this is a heck of a greedy game, but today’s patch is going a long way to turn that “is” into a “was”.

For starters, you no longer get abilities or upgrades out of card packs.  Rather, if you spend a lot of time in the cockpit of an X-Wing, you will get more levels in X-Wing, letting you unlock the specific upgrades and abilities you want.  Now, if you get slaughtered by a guy with a purple-quality level 4 weapons upgrade card, you can just look at it as something you will eventually be able to get.  The other effect is that you can’t pick a particular game mode or unit that you’re good at and use that to grind upgrades for a different unit.

In addition, all of the hero and villain characters are unlocked.  Rather than having to choose between the four “free” characters offered to you at the start of a Heroes vs. Villains match, you now have a full complement.

These are some pretty good changes, and the end result is that this is now a game, rather than a thinly-disguised advertisement for loot boxes.  Honestly I think they’re wishing they’d released it like this instead of in a state that not only cost them sales and consumer goodwill, but which has inspired legislatures to start asking whether the industry is really capable of self-regulating itself.

One thing I will recommend, if you decide to pick this up now, is to make sure that it’s installed to an SSD.  I had it running off a traditional hard drive, and load times between maps were in the 50-60 second range.  On an SSD, they’re much less frustrating – and, as a side bonus, having this on an SSD means that I load into the hero selection screens faster than people using hard drives, meaning that I have a good 30 seconds to lock down Darth Vader before anyone else can try to choose him.

On second thought, maybe it’s best if you stick to a hard drive.  You probably don’t want to bother with that. Yeah. 🙂

 

Posted in videogames, Xbox One | Leave a comment

The Beige Box, Part One

Posted on March 19, 2018 by baudattitude

So, I mentioned that I had a new piece of very old hardware come into my home a few weeks ago, and I wanted to show off some of what I’d been doing with it in the meantime.  I also wanted to play around with recording some video content.

So, here it is.  You’ll have to pardon the frequent awkward pauses and the way my camera keeps deciding to shift between color profiles.  I have a tendency toward being dissatisfied with things and to decide that I need to tweak and fix them and this means that there are a lot of projects that I’ve never actually finished.  This is maybe a little far the other way.

Oh dang.  I forgot to say “don’t forget to like and subscribe”.  I feel like I’m breaking some rule or something.

 

 

Posted in PC Gaming | Leave a comment

TERA for consoles is a hot mess.

Posted on March 10, 2018 by baudattitude

So, I’ve been quite a fan of Enmasse’s TERA MMORPG for the last several years.  I got on-board at launch, went MMO-crazy as one does with a new obsession and played almost nothing else for several months, then retired it except for occasionally resubscribing for events and holidays.  That’s not a slight against TERA in particular, just a realization that I get very little else done in life when I’m in full-on MMO obsession mode.

After a while, they went free-to-play, with some great bonuses for us founders, and that made it even easier to occasionally drop in and lose myself for a weekend.  I even tried some of Enmasse’s other games when they had Tera-based promotions.

So, I was very quick to sign up to be in the beta when they announced the console versions.  They had the first technical test a few months back, and I logged in and ran through the new introductory zone and contributed my small bit of load to the servers.

Then, they announced a beta weekend, and sold it pretty heavily by advertising all the cool cosmetic stuff you could earn by reaching certain goals in the beta.

…So, naturally enough, I downloaded the beta on Friday night and played it for nine hours straight to hit the level cap.  And it was not a good experience.  Playing on an Xbox One S, there were constant missing textures and frame rates that dropped into the single digits, with frequent freezing that often resulted in the game simply crashing.

It actually crashed so often during those nine hours that I eventually started mentally sorting the KINDS of crashes.  There were the crashes where the controller would go completely non-responsive, but other stuff on screen would keep moving, the crashes where the screen and audio would freeze, but the game client wouldn’t close, the crashes where the game client would close and I’d be back at the Xbox One Dashboard, and the REALLY impressive crashes where I’d hear a horrible noise in my headphones and the console would simply turn itself off.

Being able to crash a console to that degree is a pretty neat trick.

Still, I stuck with it and got to the level cap because I wanted the pretty shinies.  They’d announced beforehand that the server would be wiped at the end of the beta period, so I assumed they’d wind up in the item claim section of your account after the live launch.  I even set some alarms so I would be sure to log on for the official stress test windows.

I took a TON of screenshots and videos while I was grinding up, and I was really ready to put up a post of “yes, it’s kind of unstable right now but best MMO combat ever etc etc etc”.

And, to be fair, they have done a fantastic job of making a controller-friendly interface, for the most part.  I was never able to figure out how to make separate chat boxes or resize the existing chat box, so following group or zone chatter was really difficult, but that was the only thing that really vexed me.  Technical issues aside, it’s TERA but on an Xbox.

Then, after my nine-hour grind session – the only time in the last I don’t know HOW long that I’ve actually stayed up late enough to see a sunrise from the wrong side – I figured I’d log on to the beta forum and see if I could find out any information about the “run dungeons with Enmasse employees” event.  And, instead, I found a thread about “Beta Rewards” and abruptly cancelled my plans to make the stress test events or play the console version when it came out.

The link behind “These Rewards” is to a set of three, honestly kind-of-ugly masks that are unlocked by posting screenshots to social media and so on.  The link behind “Open Beta Stress Test Rewards” is a link to, well, ALL of the mounts and cosmetics and other stuff you could earn through playing the game during the beta test.

So, let’s be clear: The beta test is running for three days, including tomorrow.  If you grind all the way up to level cap and get yourself the shiny gold wolf and the fire wings and halo, you will get to enjoy them only up until they shut down the servers and wipe everything for the end of the beta.  That’s pretty weak for the thousands of hours of data they’re getting out of the beta test weekend.

I’m not sure why they bothered having a CHARACTER SLOT as one of their rewards, since the Beta lets you create 16 characters already.

Right now, I’m upset with the company to a degree that has really quite soured me on recommending their game to anyone in the future.  I’ll update this if there is any new information to make me walk back some of the vitriol, but for right now I have lost the last six years of good feelings about TERA in one weekend.  If you’re looking for a console MMO, maybe try FFXIV or Elder Scrolls Online?

 

Posted in MMORPG, Tera, videogames, Xbox One | 2 Comments

Eleven Years Blog

Posted on March 2, 2018 by baudattitude

Another year of blogging down, and another 30000 or so views since this time last year.  For a blog that’s 90% me talking about playing games very badly, I’m kind of amazed it gets that much traffic.

Mind you, my most popular post over the last few months has been a post describing where you can find the code to open your Amazon locker to get your package out, so maybe I should thank them for making that process confusing.

Now, last year, Nintendo marked the 10th anniversary (3/3/2017) of Baud Attitude by launching their latest console, but I don’t have anything that exciting lined up this year.  I am going to be doing a bit of video work and have a project lined up that I hope everyone will get a kick out of.

Here’s a sneak peek:

SO beige.  Look forward to it!

 

 

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A sad day for digital importers; JCB pulls out of the US.

Posted on February 15, 2018 by baudattitude

For a little over a decade now, I’ve been carrying around a JCB (“Japan Credit Bureau”) credit card, and it has been an endless source of amusement when using it to pay for goods and services.  I’ve occasionally gotten to use the 1-2 punch of handing a cashier a card they don’t recognize, and then handing them a (British) passport when they ask for identification.

OK, I’M A BAD MAN.

But, apart from its use as a payment method that virtually nobody in this country recognizes, it’s had a much more useful trait – most companies in Japan recognize it as a domestic card and not a filthy American credit card.  Which means that, for the last decade or so, I’ve been able to buy off the Japanese PSN and iTunes stores without the bother of hunting down points cards from dodgy resellers, and I have bought a ton of PSOne classics and other games that never made it out of the country.

It’s also been very helpful on the occasions I visit Japan, because it’s instantly recognized everywhere.

Sadly, that ends in a few months.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too shocked by this.  JCB only ever offered the card to people living in a few states (CA, OR, HI, maybe one or two more) and I’m pretty sure that it was just a status symbol for the company.  They sent me a Nintendo DS a few years ago for winning some sort of sweepstakes I didn’t even know I’d entered, and I’m pretty sure that wiped out any amount of interest they’ve made out of me over the years.

I’ve already gone and topped-up my PSN account to the maximum balance  (Y20000) which should last me a while.  So, really, this will only be a pain for iTunes on the occasion I want to buy songs from the Japanese store.  I don’t think there’s any way to preload your balance there.  Maybe the dodgy code resellers have gotten less dodgy over the years?

I’m just generally vexed about the whole thing.  I have rather enjoyed having my own version of Ford Prefect’s American Express card, and that’s being taken from me.  If you need me, I will be sitting in a corner and fuming.

(OK, maybe not so much with the fuming.)

Posted in Japan | Leave a comment

Press Y for Yuri: Nights of Azure 2

Posted on February 15, 2018 by baudattitude

I didn’t exactly plan things this way, but for some reason the last year has seen me playing quite a few Koei Tecmo games.  Nioh, Blue Reflection, Nights of Azure, Fatal Frame III, even Metroid: Other M by a technicality.  I also have Warriors All-Stars sitting on the very short list of “up-next” games.

I’d never really paid attention to them outside of the Dead or Alive and Fatal Frame series, so I was kind of surprised to realize how much variety exists in the games they publish.

So, let’s have an awkward segue here and talk about Nights of Azure 2: Bride of the New Moon – or, rather, the original game because it’s hard to talk about a sequel without its predecessor.  I played Nights of Azure in November and thought it was an awfully pretty game with some amazing costume design, a combat system that felt a little too floaty to be satisfying, and way too many different systems to keep track in what was, after all, a fairly short action RPG.  I also got a little tired of my best friend constantly running off to try to sacrifice herself to the Nightlord.

Some great news, then, in that a lot of the “why is there a ship trading simulator in my action RPG again?” systems were dropped for the sequel, your best friend doesn’t dwell TOO much on running off to sacrifice herself to the Moon Queen, and combat is greatly improved.  The first game had you running around with up to four little demon familiar pals at any given time, and some of the fights had me feeling like my best option was to stay out of the way and let my pets do a lot of the work. Not so in the sequel – while you do still have a couple of pets, they don’t feel quite so center-stage.  The most important criteria in pet selection is that there are a few kinds of gates that close off optional areas with treasure chests, and each of these kinds of gates can only be opened by a certain pet.

In fact, combat in general has a feel to it that is greatly improved.  It’s always difficult to define “weight”, but NoA2 felt “weightier”.

It’s still a button-masher, though, make no mistake.  Some of your demon pals can transform into different weapons for you to use, at least, each with its own moveset, so there’s more variety in your mashing.  I didn’t play around with the alternate weapons too much, however, since I always wanted to have a couple of door-opening pets handy.

Oh, right, you also have a human/demihuman partner, or rather your choice of several different partners, and you get to do all sorts of pair attacks based on your buddy. As you spend more time with a given partner, you’ll unlock story events with them, and all of the characters turn out to have some pretty interesting backstory.  To be honest, the whole “saving the world from eternal night” kind of faded into the background and I found myself a lot more invested in learning more about the different characters.

Soooo, that leaves the bad parts of the game to talk about, and unfortunately there are quite a few.

If you played the first Nights of Azure and grew to know your way around its fairly large and interconnected maps, the biggest shock is likely going to be the drastic reduction in environmental variety.  The sequel has a total of seven areas (and a DLC area), and quests will have you revisiting each area over and over again until you are foaming at the mouth the next time you get sent to clear out the monsters in the Spirit Forest AGAIN.  The maps are also made up of very small segments, and it just feels like it was designed around devices with intense memory constraints.

That same feeling of being designed for last-generation devices extends to the monster variety, or lack thereof.  With the exception of a few bosses, you’ll see the same handful of creature designs in every zone – there’s no sense of place to them.

Finally, I really should not have bought the Switch version, because it’s a mess.  I talked myself into it because it had a downloadable Fatal Frame outfit and I thought that it’d be, you know, maybe a little bit of a downgrade but what the heck, right?

If you’re playing on the built-in Switch display, it’s… passable.  I actually wound up using the Switch in desktop mode for about two-thirds of my play sessions, and it’s much easier to overlook the criminally-low-resolution textures when you’re looking at a screen that size.  Blow it up to the 43″ set I use for most of my gaming, though, and it looks like something from the lower end of the PS3 library – and that may be stretching things.

Looking at the download size of the Switch version – 6.8 GB – compared to the 20GB PS4 version says a great deal about what happened here.  I suspect they squeezed the heck out of everything so they’d be able to ship it on an 8GB cartridge, and it absolutely shows.  I mean, you’ve got a mostly-fully-voiced game with a fair bit of dialog, some FMV cutscenes, and of course a typically-great Gust soundtrack… something had to go somewhere.

So, I guess what I’m leading up to is that my IDEAL Nights of Azure 3, should they eventually make one, would be the game systems of the second game combined with the world and visuals of the first game.

And I’ll probably get the PS4 version next time.

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