It’s Called “Miracle Girls Festival” Because “Lolirock” Was Taken

Posted on May 3, 2016 by baudattitude

mgfThe second Vita rhythm game I mashed my way through over the last few days of being miserable in bed will be very familiar to anyone who’s played any of the entries in the Project Diva series, because the rhythm mechanics are almost completely lifted from the PD games but leave out some of the more annoying bits like Technical Zones and Chance Time and scratch notes.

It also doesn’t have Miku in it, nor any vocaloid music.  What it has, instead, are theme songs from 11 different anime series sung and danced-to by a total of 47 (it’s on the box, I didn’t count) incredibly moé characters.

I have not been keeping up on my moé anime, so I only recognized one by having seen it and two or three others by vaguely having heard the names.  So… I probably didn’t get the intended impact of getting to see my favorite characters caper about for my amusement, but it was still full of bippy music and cute girls so what the heck.

There is a …limited… story revolving around the characters from one show putting together a music festival that travels around Japan performing in various fantastical venues, but it’s mostly there to take you through learning the game systems and getting used to higher difficulties, because it starts out at Easy and ramps up to hard very quickly.

If you’ve played any Project Diva games, MGF is going to be a cakewalk of a game, with only a couple of the 22 songs having any real tricks about them.  There’s one song with a jazzy, broken rhythm that is a pain to adjust to and another song that has a ridiculously complicated note chart even on “Normal” (roughly 440 notes, or at least twice the norm) and gets nigh-unplayable once you start hitting the Extreme difficulty setting, but those are outliers in the generally-very-playable songs list.

While it has a comparatively short songs list, it does make up for it somewhat by having both TV-size (90 or 120 second) and full-length (~5 minute) versions of all songs, and a total of 10 difficulty levels.

It’s also a very easy platinum trophy to get, if that’s your sort of thing.  You do have to unlock every song on its Extreme difficulty (and unlocking is a fairly involved process), and then finish every song on Extreme both at the TV-size length and full versions, but the scoring is VERY forgiving.

As an example, I decided to see what would happen if I let a song play to completion without hitting a single note, and I got a passing score…

…so yeah.  Project Diva this ain’t.

What you DO get from playing on higher difficulty levels and getting better scores, in addition to profound satisfaction, is steadily larger amounts of in-game currency, used to buy more songs and costumes for your singers and virtual action figures of everyone and display cases for your virtual action figures.

You also need to earn a ton of the currency to unlock two of the game’s trophies, so there’s that.

Should you decide to pick up Miracle Girls Festival and need a quick way to grind your way to riches, I can heartily recommend playing through “Innocent Blue” on the “ura extreme” difficulty setting.  This is, in theory, the nastiest note chart for the song… but it’s also very quick to play and has no tricks about it.

innocent_blue_ura

That brings me to seven platinums for the year without resorting to playing awful games for easy trophies.  Last year was the year of burning through the backlog, but this year has been the year of actually exploring games.  It’s a good change of pace.  🙂

 

 

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The Idolmaster: Must Songs (Red) : Banging on the Bongos Like A Chimpanzee

Posted on May 3, 2016 by baudattitude

imas_mustsongs_redI managed to pick up a godawful flu last week and spent a solid five days in bed either sleeping or wishing I could sleep.

During the “wishing I could sleep” bits, I played through a couple of Vita rhythm games, because I needed something to keep my spirits up.

I can happily report that The Idolmaster: Must Songs is a FANTASTIC way to keep your spirits up, at least assuming you like Idolmaster music and taiko drumming, because it mixes both of those and adds glitter and sparkly bits to taste.

When amazon.co.jp opened up video games to international ordering a few months ago, I ordered Must Songs completely sight unseen.  I knew that it was (a) an Idolmaster game and (b) a rhythm game and (c) very cheap, and that seemed like a good combination.  I’ve been a fan of the Idolmaster series since being both intrigued and confused by seeing it in Tokyo arcades back in December of 2005, but I’ve never been very good at the “proper” idol management sim entries in the series and have mostly stuck to lighter entries like Live For You and Shiny Festa.

So that’s my background leading up to Must Songs, anyway.

It turns out that it’s actually an Idolmaster-themed entry in the Taiko no Tatsujin series, which is one of those rhythm series that has been running for absolutely ages but which I’ve never gotten into before.  It turns out that I have been missing a wonderfully fun and energetic series of games – the controls are simple but the pace is frenetic and the screen is covered with bouncing taiko drums and dancing backgrounds and rainbows and … well, it’s a sort of gleeful sensory overload that rather resembles a tuned-to-the-point-of-being-weaponized version of Peggle.

The particular Must Songs I got was the “Red” version, which is 40 im@s songs covering the first five or so years of the franchise.  The “Blue” version picks up from that point, so if you are more familiar with the anime and recent games it’s likely the one you’d want instead.

My one complaint is that, while the first couple of difficulty settings are very straightforward, and the third setting brutal-but-learnable, the top setting “Oni” difficulty more than lives up to its name.  I had to put it aside and admit that my fingers are just a little too old to hit notes at the pace that level demanded of me, so I won’t be picking up the platinum on this one.

Recommended for: Rhythm game fans, Idolmaster fans, anyone who has ever wanted to dress a Taiko drum up like Akizuki Ritsuko and give it a good poun…

…

…let’s just pretend we didn’t say that.

ritsuko_drum

 

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Did I Actually Just Finish Dark Souls?

Posted on April 30, 2016 by baudattitude

Yes.  Yes, I did.

das_end

So, for the record, I made it a full 24 hours between finishing Demon’s Souls and buying Dark Souls from Steam.  I had grandiose plans to wait for a sale, but it turned out that I really, really needed some more of the same sort of game.

Technically I could have started a NG+ game of Demon’s Souls, which is “the same game, just 70% harder”, but I’m not sure I have the mental fortitude for that.

Anyway.  Dark Souls turned out to be a rather longer game than Demon’s Souls, and quite a bit more obtuse in points.  The hub structure of Demon’s Souls didn’t always make it clear WHICH world to go to next, but it made your starting points pretty obvious.  Dark Souls likes to hide paths from the player, which is a bit frustrating until you start learning how the zones slot together.

The canonical example – and it’s done with such obvious intent that it’s hard to take too much umbrage at it – is the paths out of Dark Souls’ hub zone.  One of the exits is initially unavailable (it’s an elevator that needs to be repaired, and you need to get to the other end of the shaft to do so), two other exits are hidden by topology, and the remaining exit is a very obvious path that leads you into a graveyard.

Taking that path will get you killed in a hurry, because the undead in the graveyard are nasty sorts indeed.  They’re not invincible, and I was even able to win a couple of fights, but they are there to show you that the obvious path isn’t always the right one and to teach you that if you’re dying repeatedly you’re probably somewhere you shouldn’t be just yet.

Learning how to get from point A to B without dying is one of the small ways the game rewards you.  Much like Demon’s Souls, there’s a constant feedback loop of incremental self-improvement that is profoundly satisfying, and that’s what I wanted more of after finishing the older game.

So.  Now for the really controversial statement:

Dark Souls really isn’t that hard.  I mean, it’s pitched as the Most Manly Game Ever by its fans, who can be incredibly helpful one moment and only slightly more obsessive than Vegan Amway Salesmen Who’ve Recently Discovered Crossfit the next, but it’s really just a game that rewards patience and experimentation.  It’s also a game that demands community interaction, and you will NOT get far without having a bookmark to the associated wiki, if only to occasionally check whether you are dying repeatedly because you don’t understand how a boss fight works or if you’re dying repeatedly because you know how the dance is supposed to go but you’re getting the steps wrong.

I never had a controller clenching moment like the ones I got while playing Ninja Gaiden, for example, or Gunvalkyrie.  Those are games that demand a high degree of manual dexterity and the ability to pull off complex inputs, and they usually have One Proper Way to kill any given opponent.  Dark Souls gives you a ton of tools and sometimes selecting the right one for a challenge is the hardest part.

So anyway, I’ll probably be picking up Dark Souls II in the near future, and if THAT goes well… well, the third and final game in the series is already out, so there’s no Half-Life-esque risk of getting invested in something and having it go nowhere.

When I come back to you, a broken man, feel free to point out the bit where I downplayed the series’ difficulty and laugh.

Posted in PC Gaming, Souls, videogames | 2 Comments

On Youthful Rejections Of Gender Stereotypes

Posted on April 28, 2016 by baudattitude

Like pretty much every child with a pulse, I loved me some Pac-Man in the early 80s.  I had a Pac-Man lunchbox, a cassette tape of the Pac-Man Fever album, books on how to beat Pac-Man…  I shoved a lot of quarters into the Pac-Man machine at the local pool hall / arcade, and let’s not speculate too much on the sorts of parents who would let a kid of my age hang out in the local pool hall / arcade.

Then I moved to a Town Without Pac-Man.  Specifically, Chadron, Nebraska.  It was not a big place.  It did not have a pool hall / arcade that a young child might be allowed into.  It did have an arcade, attached to the local ice cream parlor, but they didn’t have Pac-Man.

They had Ms. Pac-Man.

I rebelled at this.  I have a sister, and she took to it immediately, but to a callow lad it was a matter of boyish pride to not play as a GIRL, even a girl defined by a bow and some lipstick tacked on to the most gender-neutral character since the Pong paddle.

Mental Note: Has anyone ever made a Ms. Pong?  Must research.

It took me a while, but the lack of Pac-Alternatives eventually pushed me into giving it a try, and it turned out that I liked it a lot better than plain old Pac-Man.  It very quickly became the game that I would gravitate to in an arcade, because I could make a quarter last for quite a while and that sort of efficiency appeals to a kid.  It also became nearly ubiquitous – I don’t think I ever saw an arcade after that point that didn’t have at least one machine.

Oh, and it taught me that some arcades are run by absolute bastards.  I remember playing a Ms. Pac machine in Rapid City and not getting an extra life at 10,000 points because that particular machine was set to 15,000 points and had the difficulty yoinked to the highest setting.  I like to think that the arcade owner was eaten by a swarm of locusts, because that’s a real risk in rural South Dakota.

The last time I happened on a Ms. Pac-Man machine was in a pizza joint in Tigard, where I placed a to-go order, sat down at the machine, put in a quarter, and made that single quarter last until my pizza was ready.  It’s just the sort of game where you can kind of get into the zone.

Anyway, I like to think that being faced with the early conundrum of I Can’t Play That, That’s For Girls has helped me find that I really enjoy a lot of things that Boys Shouldn’t Like, and this has affected the character choices I make in games pretty much ever since.

So… when Namco released a Ms. Pac-Man port for the PS4, with trophy support, I needed to get that platinum trophy on my profile, as a tribute if nothing else.

It is an amazing port, by the way.  I mean, it’s just the original ROM wrapped in an emulator, but it has some really good options for how you want your game experience presented to you.  I had my mind ever-so-slightly blown when I turned on scanlines, as an example, and realized that as a vertical game the scanlines went top-to-bottom.

Yes, I am easily impressed.

Sadly it is hampered by the DS4, which is a terrible terrible controller for this sort of game.  It’s like the experience of putting a quarter into one of those cocktail Ms. Pacs, sitting down at the player one side, pressing the start button and then discovering that someone has stolen the joystick knob and that the remaining steel nub always wants to pull to the left.  Also it expects you to play with your left hand, and that was a real mental jump for me.

If you happen to have a actual joystick for your PS4, I can recommend it without reservation.  If you don’t, well, I have reservations.

Anyway, I managed to get over the controller issues long enough for this:

mspac-manplat

…and I feel good about it.  The trickiest trophy wasn’t the “eat all ghosts and fruits on a single board” trophy – that’s nothing particularly difficult – but rather the “play for three boards without dying and WITHOUT eating a ghost” trophy.

That’s the sort of challenge I’d never set myself before and wow if it doesn’t turn out to be a bit rough.  You cannot help but eat all four power pellets when clearing a level, and the ghosts don’t always do a very good job of running away from you, to the point where I lost out on this on several runs by being trapped in a corner with blue ghosts coming at me from both sides and no way to avoid eating one.

There are also similarly arcade-exact ports for Pac-Man, Galaga and Dig Dug, but I don’t have the same compulsion to get those.  Me and the Ms. are good for now.

 

Posted in PS4, videogames | 1 Comment

Senran Kagura 2: Electric Boobaloo

Posted on April 26, 2016 by baudattitude

senrankagura2boxSenran Kagura 2 is possibly one of the most-inappropriately-titled sequels of recent memory, being at least the fourth – and possibly fifth, depending on how you count the Japanese releases – game in the series. I’m given to understand that the 3DS games are considered the main storyline, which makes the numbering make more sense, but it’s difficult to reconcile this when the main antagonists for THIS game were actually introduced in the theoretically non-canon Vita game.

It’s all kind of a mess really, and I’m probably putting too much thought into it.

Anyway.

SK2 was MY fourth game in the series, and the one I have the most mixed opinion of. On the upside, I really enjoyed the story and the interactions between the characters; I have spent a lot of time virtually hanging out with the Hanzo and Hebijo crews and watching them in this feels very much like spending time with old friends.  The new tag-team mechanic, complete with team attacks, is a great addition and I loved the way that the story missions kept mix-and-matching combinations of friends and rivals.

It also has some of the best use of 3D I’ve seen on the 3DS, and that’s from a guy who has an older system without the new super-stable 3D. The combat arenas have a great feeling of depth to them.

On the other hand, the actual levels were pretty dull. Most of them consisted of fighting a bare handful of opponents – barely enough to fill a single ninja art scroll – and then tackling a boss, who was usually VERY aggressive and much better than I was. I died several times on the very second level, and limited opponents meant very little opportunity to grind up levels to get tougher.

The camera is also not good. SK2 is, like Shinovi Vs, a full 3D game. Unlike the Vita, however, the 3DS doesn’t have a second analog stick, so tracking enemies is a pain. There’s a lock-on feature but it doesn’t rotate the camera to your opponent, so I spent a good deal of time attacking things I couldn’t SEE. This might be less of a pain on the New 3DS, with its analog nub, but I don’t own one of those and I’m not likely to drop a couple hundred bucks on a sidegrade system.

The thing that got me past the terrible camera and difficulty level was discovering that the AI simply could not handle the jump-and-slam-to-the-ground move. It would almost always send the target flying and could be used again before they had a chance to stand up, and simply hitting it over and over again was enough to get me through to the end credits without failing a single mission after the second.

So that’s 60+ levels of hitting B, holding down, and hitting X. It worked…

There are a couple of challenge modes – I dipped into one of them long enough to unlock some character buffs – and online and local multiplayer, which I didn’t try. To be honest, I’m more relieved to have finished it and to be able to move on to Estival Versus than I am particularly enthused about beating it.

So short version: very good looking, great use of 3D, fun dialogue and story, not so great the game. On to the sequel!

 

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Did I Actually Just Finish Demon’s Souls?

Posted on April 17, 2016 by baudattitude

Yes.  Yes, I did.

In the last world, I finally got invaded by another player.  I was trying to turn a dragon into a pincushion at the time, so I was a LITTLE distracted, but I was able to pivot the camera around enough to let me see him run up behind me and stand there for a while.  Then he hit me twice, which was enough to take me down to a sliver of life and send me running.

At that point, I think he committed suicide because he felt like he’d gotten his message across.  I certainly didn’t beat him, at any rate, but he died.  So, um, “Frakuun”, thanks for not slaughtering me.

demons_souls_trophies_1demons_souls_trophies_2_fixdemons_souls_trophies_3demons_souls_trophies_4demons_souls_trophies_5demons_souls_trophies_6

Demon’s Souls – well, the entire Souls series, really – certainly uses its difficulty as a selling point, and that’s not something that usually attracts me.  Hence playing it for the first time in 2016. 🙂

What it has once you get PAST the difficulty is a really fantastic atmosphere and an addictive feedback loop of “I did poorly there.  I did a little bit better there.  I did even better this time.  How was this ever hard?”

I understand that Dark Souls is a very different game so I won’t be hunting that down to jump in to right away.  Also, I’ve spent the last week either playing Demon’s Souls or thinking about what I was going to do next in Demon’s Souls so I should probably make sure that I’m still employed, still married and that our cats remember me.

 

 

 

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Demon Hunter Amy

Posted on April 16, 2016 by baudattitude

I should probably confess that I’m pretty bad with names.  I have about a half dozen that I recycle from one MMO to the next, and I tend to pick the absolute most generic names when forced with the decision in any non-MMO.

This is why my Demon’s Souls character is named Amy.  I don’t KNOW any Amys, I’m sure I have in the past but at the moment none are coming to mind, so it’s good because there will never be a question of who she’s named after.  It’s not a great name for a slayer of mighty demons.  Honestly it’s the sort of demon slayer name that would bring shame upon the family of any demon lord pathetic enough to fall before Amy.

It could be worse.  It could be Anne.  With an E.

That’s not even a first name, it’s more of a middle name.

But I digress.

Anyway, five more demons down over the last couple of days.  I haven’t been able to sit somewhere high and snipe any bosses to death in a while, so that particular cheesy tactic seems to be lost to me.  Of these, “Maneater” was the only particularly rough one, because he’s two bosses at once and the arena is very easy to fall off of.

You die when you fall off, in case you were wondering.

demons_souls_five_more

I managed to die one time each to Adjudicator and Fool’s Idol, which are typically ranked among the easiest bosses to curb-stomp.  My humiliation knows no bounds.

Part of the timing of me playing through this game is a craven attempt to avoid PvP.  I figure, Dark Souls III JUST came out, nobody is going to be going back to a seven-year-old game and pwning newbs.

I haven’t had to fend off any PvP invasions yet, so I guess that’s working out.

I’m not sure how far along I am.  I have at least seven bosses left, but I suspect that there will be at least one Ultimate Big Bad after those guys.

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Two More Down

Posted on April 12, 2016 by baudattitude

demonssouls_flamelurker_leechmonger

Flamelurker managed to kill me twice and I got VERY lucky on the third attempt; I had him down to a sliver and made the mistake of standing still to get the kill shot off.  It landed on him just as his big flaming attack hit me and left me with barely a pixel’s health.

So really he should have won that round, but there are no do-overs for demons in Demon’s Souls.

Leechmonger was a little embarrassing as bosses go.  I went from “huh, I’ve never even looked into world 5” to “Welp, dead boss” in under an hour.  The swarm of rats I ran into on my way down to find the boss was actually a bigger threat, because they very nearly pushed me off an edge and to my doom.

I admit that I was somewhat helped by a player message that said, basically, “Stand here and rain fire magic down upon the boss” and I just happened to HAVE a fire spell and some mana regen items and well, the rest should be easy enough to infer.

I have no idea where I should be going next.  Guess I’ll just try worlds and see what kills me.

 

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Dear Diary, Today I…

Posted on April 11, 2016 by baudattitude

demonssoulsbox…played some more Demon’s Souls.

Day Two highlights:

Killed a big red dragon by standing on top of a tower and shooting it with a lot of arrows.

Killed the Armor Spider boss by hiding behind a pillar and shooting it with a lot of arrows.

Killed the Tower Knight boss by hiding on the ramparts and shooting it with a lot of arrows.

Basically I’m glad the guy in the Nexus has an unlimited supply of arrows to sell.

Also got up to Soul Level 30, so upgrades are starting to get a little expensive, but on the other hand souls are starting to come a little easier.  Good thing, considering how many of them I spend on arrows.

After ten hours, I’m starting to really feel like I have my feet under me against some enemy types that absolutely demolished me the first time I met them.  The silver skeletons in world 4, for example, were absolute nightmares.  Now, they’re easy souls unless I back into a rock and wind up eating their overhand HASSAN CHOP! move.

Not that I ever back into rocks.

…

Anyway, I’m not sure what to do next, but I did see a big guy behind all of the silver skeletons in world 4.  I remember him from the tutorial, where he killed me with one swing.  I understand that he’s SUPPOSED to kill you with one swing, but I still have a few anger issues to work out with him about that.

Maybe I can shoot him with a lot of arrows?

 

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This is gonna end in tears

Posted on April 10, 2016 by baudattitude

A few months ago, in a fit of insanity, I bought Demon’s Souls from a PSN sale.  I don’t normally play difficult games, so it’s quite out of character, but I figured that it would be good to at least play a Souls game, die horribly a few times, and get some blog posts out of it.

So far, I’ve died twice – once in the tutorial and once discovering that fire is, in fact, hot – and taken down the first boss.

demons_souls_phalanx_trophy

This is presumably where things start getting nasty.  I DID pick the ultra-noob-friendly “Royalty” class and I am abusing Soul Arrow for all it’s worth, but I suspect that will only take me so far.

What I have seen up to this point reminds me, oddly, of Ico.  There’s the same sort of monochromatic and mournful atmosphere to Demon’s Souls.  Ico didn’t have quite as many dragons or animated skeletons, though.

I’ll post updates as I die horribly.  Please look forward to my tears and rage.

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