Baud Attitude

I wrapped up Cursed Mountain this weekend, and I’m happy to report that the initial very positive impressions I had of it continued all the way to the end. It’s hard not to compare it to the Fatal Frame series, and I think that any fan of that series would be well-served to hunt down a copy and dig the Wii out of your closet, where it’s been sitting since roughly 2008. Cursed Mountain has the same sense of being isolated from civilization and hunted by the unfortunate by-products of Ancient Rituals Gone Wrong, and your means of defense is, well, not quite as weird as a spiritual camera but still plenty quirky in its own way.

The motion controls never really got less awful, but I did eventually get to the point where I was getting over 90% recognition on the assorted swings and thrusts used in the ghost purification rituals your character needs to perform to properly take the un- out of undead, and that was enough to carry me through the last couple of fairly combat-heavy levels.

It’s also the hundredth game I’ve played to completion this year, which is a nice big round number to marvel at. Granted, many of those were very short – fully a third of them were visual novels (16) and hidden-object games (17), and those all tend to be wrapped up in under 6 hours.

The big genre just after those, however, was RPGs (15) and those tend to be on the longish side, especially things like Tokyo Mirage Sessions#FE and Dragon Age Origins, both of which were 40+ hours.

The one big genre almost completely absent so far has been FPS/TPS style games. I’ve only played four this year, and that’s with counting both Typing of the Dead and Star Trek (2013) in this category when they could easily be filed elsewhere.

It’s been a very varied year for platforms, too, since I’ve been trying to finish off the games libraries of any console I have where no new games are coming out. I’ve played games across 18 different platforms, including weird little systems like the Bandai Wonderswan and prematurely-discontinued systems like the Saturn and Dreamcast. I don’t think I’ll ever see that level of diversity again.

Even with the focus on clearing out the old, just over 40% of the titles I played were from 2015 or newer. That’s a good thing to see, because it means that I’m actually buying new things to PLAY and not just to sit on the shelf. 20% were 10 years or older, though, which just goes to show that I used to be really bad about that.

I have about three months left in the year, so as long as I can stay off MMOs I should be able to break my 2015 record of 115 games and go into 2018 with a much smaller backlog and much less guilt. Wish me luck. 🙂

Edit: Revised to add some thoughts after finishing, didn’t feel like a whole new post.

I was very close to dropping Other M a couple of nights ago. There were just so many stretches of boring hallway, and the jump physics were killing me.  I was still liking the music, at least, but I kind of felt that I’d seen enough and could move on.

Then, I hit a boss (the construction robot, to be precise), and it flattened me. I hit “Yes” to continue, expecting to have to sit through a bunch of cutscenes and dialogue, and was floored to find myself facing the same boss again, with no preamble. If you’ve ever played Dark Souls II, it was very like the Royal Rat Authority, where death->fog gate->one more try was made blissfully fast by a bonfire positioned 10 seconds away from the boss room.

Anyway, the robot killed me a lot, but I kept feeling like I was getting *better* every time, and the satisfaction of watching it stop and fall over once I got good enough was a wonderfully warm feeling.

This turned out to be a good warm-up for the next tough boss fight, AKA “hey it’s the lava stage and the big pterodactyl dude from Dead or Alive Dimensions! Awesome! Ow. Ow. Hey guy, that hurts! Quit it please?”

(Apparently, his name is Ridley, which is not a name I associate with big pterodactyl monsters. Who knew?)

I’m not sure how many times I wound up eating dirt on that fight, but I do know it took me a TON of tries. Again, being able to instantly take another swing at the boss turned out to be the key, and he eventually dropped.

Tl;dr version of this post: I was really close to deciding that this game had outlived its welcome, but it is being redeemed by some seriously fun boss fights.

(Edit begins)

Finished Other M tonight, after a three hour marathon to get through the last few boss fights.  I know that “three hours” isn’t much of a marathon, but the control scheme made it feel a lot longer.

To sum it up: I really liked it!  I understand it doesn’t fit perfectly into the canon from the other games in the series, but I haven’t played any of those so I’ll just go with what I personally experienced.  It’s a little odd in that the best boss fight, against the aforementioned giant pterodactyl, comes about halfway through the game, and the final boss is actually quite a letdown, but I liked the way that I went from being kind of a pushover at the start of the game to an unstoppable spinning death ball towards the end.

Between this and Pokémon, that’s two major* Nintendo franchises that I’ve played for the first time this year.  Maybe I’ll even play a Zelda someday.

* I’m not sure if Metroid actually counts as a “major” Nintendo franchise.  It’s not one of their big sellers, and it skipped both the N64 and WiiU consoles, but at least it’s more alive than F-Zero.

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.