Baud Attitude

So, I’ve been knocking out the last bits of the PS3 backlog this month.  That’s two games played to completion (Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time and Into the Nexus), four games dropped from the backlog for various sins, and one to go: the 2013 Macross 30th Anniversary game.

I’d better finish this one, because a quick look through my Amazon history reveals that I paid a ridiculous import price for it.  It helps that it’s a pretty good game, mind you.  It’s also reportedly quite lengthy – while the PSP Macross games in this series were very much action oriented affairs build around short and portable-friendly missions, this is an open-world “Flight Action RPG” and has lots of talky bits and story breaking up the flying around and shooting things.

One of the hooks of the game is that your character, a Valkyrie pilot from the Macross Frontier timeline, apparently somehow meets characters from every other Macross series.

Except II.  Technically, in the timeline it falls AFTER Frontier so theoretically they have an out for why it’s not represented, but I think the real reason is that they would rather forget it ever happened.

Anyway, I’m not sure how the whole thing is going to shake out, as I’ve just finished the first chapter/tutorial section of the game, which has me about six hours in,  but I am rather looking forward to seeing how they pull this off (time travel? holograms? alien hallucinogenics? the mind boggles at the possibilities.)

It’s not ALL about the old characters and cameos, mind you.  The main cast of the game is characters original to the game, so you have your disillusioned mercenary pilot with a traumatic past, an amnesiac artificial human trying to avoid her destiny, and an micronized Meltlandi girl/fighter pilot/genius mechanic trying to unlock the secrets of the ruins that cover the planet they’re all stuck on.

I am really looking forward to seeing said Meltlandi macronize and kick arse, by the way, though I don’t expect anything can come close to Klan Klang’s berserker rage from Frontier.  Still, I’ll be disappointed if it doesn’t happen.

Though I don’t often write about it, the Dead or Alive series of fighting games remains my favorite beat-em-up and Barbie-simulator series – and, given that I am rubbish at the actual fighting part of the game, the part where I collect pretty dresses for my digital combatants represents, by far, the more important part of the package.

So, when I heard that some outfits were being pulled off of PSN due to rights expiring, I figured that I should see about getting them while I still could.

Keep in mind that I bought the game off the Japanese store, so DLC is always a little tricky because it’s being bought with a secondary PSN account.  DoA5 checks your licenses when you start the game, but once activated the content is available to all users of the console.  So, if I get the urge to buy a premium outfit, I need to buy it off the Japanese PSN, start DoA5 while logged into the Japanese account, wait for it to check my licenses, close DoA5, log in to my US account and run it, at which point the costumes are available to me and I can put an adorable purple witch costume on Marie Rose and go online for my regular dose of being humiliated by people who can actually play.

But look cute while I’m doing it, is the important point.

I may have gone off on a tangent there, and I apologize.

Anyway.  All of the costumes being pulled were part of Season Pass 4, so I exchanged some yen for that and the PS4 dutifully reported that I had exchanged money for virtual goods and now owned them.

But, as usual, the costumes weren’t actually available in-game. I don’t often actually buy costumes and I never remember the process that I need to go through, so this is half a rant and half something I can look back on later to remind myself of the process.

First, I needed to download costume “catalogs” – these are the actual DLC packs that contain the outfits. You can download them even if you don’t own the costumes, which is critical – how else will you SEE the adorable purple witch outfit on the Marie Rose you are currently shaming if you don’t have the costume data?

There are over 40 costume catalogs, as an aside.

Downloading the catalogs still didn’t unlock the costumes, so I fumed a bit.

Then I remembered that the “Season Pass” wasn’t actually a license for the costumes.  Rather, buying the Season Pass sets the price of the DLC packages bundled in the Season Pass to “free”.  So, I had to look up which packages were included in the Season Pass, find them in the store (where they were, correctly, marked free), “buy” those packages and suddenly I had all of my outfits.

In an ideal world, costume catalogs would just be part of the game data so they were automatically installed as part of the update process, and the act of buying a Season Pass would automatically license your account for all of the included content and automatically start any required downloads. As it is, it’s a lot of extra steps, and it means that my Japanese PSN download list is ridiculously full of DoA5 costume catalogs and it’s hard to find anything else sometimes.

Of all the first world problems I have ranted about on this site, a rant about the difficulty of playing virtual dress up on my virtual harem is possibly the most first-worldy ever, but… well, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read more than a couple of posts, now that I think about it.  I am not a deep man, I do not explore particularly deep topics.

The PS2 came out at possibly the worst possible time.  I was deep in the throes of an Everquest habit, and it followed up the PS1, a system where niche Japanese games tended to get incredibly small print runs and then disappear.

So I bought a ton of games for the thing based on “well, I don’t have time for this right now, but if I don’t buy it I’ll never be able to find it again”, which is (for the record) a terrible strategy.

Earlier this year, I finally admitted that there was a huge stack of JRPGs that were never going to get played, and those went on their way to eBay.  It was a wonderfully freeing sensation.

Still, I wasn’t going to give up on Fatal Frame III.  I’d played every other game in the series, and tried to start the third installment a couple of times, but for one reason or another had always bounced off of it early on.

More than that, I decided that I was going to Play It Right.  I own the disc version of the game, so I could have ripped that, but instead I found an “undub” ISO of the game online, loaded up PCSX2, applied all of the patches to make the game widescreen and to improve the resolution and add anti-aliasing and all of that, got about an hour in, was feeling quite good about the whole thing…

…and it crashed during a cutscene.  Save points in the Fatal Frame games can be a little scarce, so I wound up quite a bit back from where I’d gotten and was forced to re-evaluate what I really wanted out of the game.

It turns out that what I wanted was the ability to play a game without worrying whether the emulator I was running it on was going to up and die at any given moment, so I wound up going back to the “PS2 Classics” version off of PSN, which did NOT crash at any point and which actually looked OK, even if it wasn’t upscaled and antialiased and so on and so forth.

Fatal Frame 3 is a direct sequel to both Fatal Frames 1 & 2, though it doesn’t rely too much on you having played the earlier games.  If you HAVE, you will get to enjoy a lot of the callbacks, mind you, and I’d recommend Fatal Frame 2 to everyone just on principle, so at least play that one.

Much like every other game in the series, you find yourself smack in the middle of an obscure Japanese ritual designed to save the world from unspeakable darkness, at the cost of sacrificing girls TO unspeakable darkness which you would think would be the first sign that things aren’t going to go to plan.  There are a bunch of ghosts around, some of them are very unhappy with their state of affairs and want to kill you, you have a camera that somehow hurts ghosts, and there is a lot of wandering around looking for keys to open doors and a lot of undead that need to lose the significant prefix in order to dispel seals.

It’s pretty damn bleak and creepy, is what I’m getting at, though it does have the happiest ending I’ve seen in any game in the series.

On the downside, there’s rarely any real direction as to where you should be looking for the SPECIFIC ghosts you need to overcome to unseal any particular sealed door, so there is a lot of walking very slowly around a gigantic mansion, cursing your character’s inability to run, and then realizing that you have been holding the “run” button this time and that you actually COULD be moving even slower.  A FAQ is therefore recommended for those “where am I supposed to be going now?” moments.

Also recommended: headphones, a dark room to sit in, and a controller that supports rumble.  This game does a lot with rumble for atmosphere and I don’t think it would be nearly as effective without it.

It wasn’t my favorite game in the series, but there’s something about the specific nightmare fuel that the Fatal Frame games tap into that you won’t be finding anywhere else.

Oh, and I finished the Chuo line version of Densha De Go! Pocket last week as well.  So that’s all of the PS2 games off the backlog and only one physical PSP game left.  At some point here I am going to be down to only needing current-gen systems hooked up.