Baud Attitude

Quickie post tonight. Still chugging through Cursed Mountain and Metroid: Other M as my at-home games, with IA/VT Colorful on Vita in my portable slot for lunch breaks and the like.

IA/ VT is pretty brilliant, as an aside. It’s all vocaloid music, so not to everyone’s taste, but it does some really evil stuff with note charts.

Cursed Mountain continues to be almost everything I like in a horror game. It’s not a Fatal Frame game, but it really works the “outsider stumbling in to ancient evil rituals gone wrong” thing well. If it weren’t for the motion control finishing moves, I’d have nothing to kvetch about, and I am a dedicated kvetcher.

Other M also doing very well, though again it’s a game that makes me really wish the Wii had come out with a more conservative controller. If you’ve never played it, you spend most of the time running around with the controller held like a NES d-pad, but frequently need to point the controller at the screen to lock on to things and shoot missiles. I’m maybe a third of the way in and loving most everything about it except the controls.

It does make me really appreciate the Detective Mode/Witcher Sense/Focus Vision mechanic in so many recent games. There’s a lot of getting stuck and not knowing whether I’m supposed to be backtracking or whether I’m just missing the one inconspicuous grate I need to bomb.

It ALSO made me realize something that kind of blew my mind, because I am a big fan of control “language”, if you will, the little things that seem to show up in game after game that make playing newer games easier once you catch on to it once, and I’d never really thought about this particular bit of control language.

That is, the jump button, and the difference between tap-to-jump and tap-and-hold to jump. Both the Mario games I played recently and Other M use tap-and-hold, where the duration the button is held determines the distance or height covered by the jump.

This is VERY weird to me, because I mostly play games where “jump” is a constant regardless of how you press the jump button. It’s taking a huge effort to unlearn that, and I’m pretty sure that watching me run Samus around and fall off things would be a painful sight for anyone more tuned-in to how jumping works.

I’m kind of wondering if the difference can be traced back to a particular evolutionary branch. Probably a topic for smarter people than me, though.

So, the Switch seems to be doing well at getting Japanese publisher support and I’ll probably wind up owning one in the next few months – especially with Tecmo slipping Fatal Frame references into Nights of Azure 2. 

But. I still have a bit over a dozen Wii games that are making me keep the WiiU hooked up, so I should probably play them if I want to get that HDMI port on the TV freed up. 

So far:

Nights: Journey of Dreams, the sequel to one of my favorite Saturn games and possibly one of the biggest disappointments. When I bought it in 2009, I put it in, played until I got to the first boss, got really frustrated and took it out again. 

This time round, I put in the disc, played for about 45 minutes until I got to the first boss, got really frustrated… wait, there’s a pattern here. It’s a pattern that says that this one is being retired from the backlog in disappointment. 

Madworld didn’t even last 15 minutes before suffering the same fate. It’s (a) a little too violent for me (you would think the guy on the cover with the chainsaw hand would have been a clue) and (b) the music was, err, painful is a good word for it. 

Also (c) annoying motion controls, but I knew I’d be hitting some of those so they don’t really apply solely to Madworld. 

One game that IS staying on the backlog, despite the motion controls, is Cursed Mountain. I love me a good bleak horror game, and CM hits all the high notes for my tastes. I started it up to see if it was going to continue the disappointing pattern I was seeing with Wii games, and then played it until I was forced to stop because the Wiimote audio was keeping my wife up and couldn’t be piped to headphones. I’m only about a third through but for now it is getting very high marks from me. 

After that, I put another three hours into Metroid: Other M, which I am happy to report seems to have a much more traditional control scheme. This is the first Metroid game I’ve played for more than about 10 minutes, so really all I know about the series going in was that the hot chick in the skin-tight blue suit was not, in fact, named “Metroid”. 

Other M seems tailor-made for me, because it opens with a huge info dump on Samus’s personal history and it seems like it is going to have a bunch more flashbacks coming to catch me up on the character.  I put about three hours into it, and my only real complaint is that it doesn’t really make it clear where I should be going next at any given time and the map is hard to follow.  

Also I had a hell of a time until I realized that your beam cannon could be charged while you were running. That’s not a game design issue, though, that’s just my not getting it. 

No idea what’s next after those. For now I just need to keep fighting off hungry ghosts and alien bugs, respectively.