Baud Attitude

Waifus In Spaaaaaaaace

Posted on August 22, 2015 by baudattitude

I really don’t play a ton of JRPGs – not because I dislike the genre, but because they tend to be rather long affairs and I just don’t have the hours to devote to them like I did back when my “backlog” consisted of a shelf of about a dozen SNES and Genesis cartridges. In the time it takes to grind through a single Epic Story Wherein An Amnesiac Youth Discovers A Massive Conspiracy And Saves The World, I can play five or six games In Which A Grizzled Combat Veteran Shoots A Lot Of People In The Head In The Name Of Peace.

That said, I got sold on Star Ocean: The Last Hope: International for two reasons:

First, the character designs are pretty cool.

Second, the main character’s name is EDGE MAVERICK.

You have to say it like that, by the way. All capitals are very important when it comes to EDGE MAVERICK.

Anyway, I’ve put about eight hours in so far and I’m liking it a lot. I did hit a bit of a roadblock in the form of the game’s second real boss fight, but looking around online suggests that I just came at it way under level and need to back off and do some old fashioned grinding before making a second attempt.

Before I got going on Star Ocean, though, I needed a game to run through to try out a new video card, and I decided that it was a good time to finally play Remember Me. It’s very pretty, the Future Paris it’s set in is a place I’d like to see more of, and the main character is definitely someone who deserves a sequel, so I hope it gets one. It’s also been given away to PS+ subscribers and regularly sees huge discounts on Steam, so I suspect that it did not meet sales goals and a sequel is a pipe dream. So it goes.

I also finally GET that there is a standardish control layout for 3rd-person action games, much like the very standard control layout used by virtually every console FPS since Halo, and I feel a bit daft for not picking up on it previously. Now, if only fighting games could settle on a standard…

Posted in PC Gaming, ps3, videogames | Leave a comment

Stabbity Stabbity Pokey Pokey

Posted on August 10, 2015 by baudattitude

It’s been a while since I’ve finished two games on the same day, and I honestly don’t know if there are two games in my collection that could possibly be any more different.

The Rub Rabbits! is a prequel to the earlier game, released in the US as Feel The Magic XX/XY, is pretty much identical to the earlier game in that it is a collection of weird mini-games that you, as the player, must guide the main character through if he is to ever win his true love. It’s a game that could only have been released as a retail game during that weird period where the touchscreen on the DS was something new and novel; these days it would probably be written off as a cheap mobile game and sold for 0.99 on the app store.

It’s hilarious nonetheless. There aren’t many games that ask you to hit your friends on their heads to knock them out, then quickly bury them in snow before a roaming bear can find them, or that set you the task of picking fruit by throwing your girlfriend into the trees and catching what comes down, or that have you tied up and rolling around a mansion’s foyer trying to avoid shots fired from your obsessed stalker’s “love cannons” on the balcony.

To add to the bizarre factor, this thing came out of Sonic Team and was produced by Yuji Naka. It has a heck of a pedigree for a mini-game compilation album.

If you have a few hours and a DS lying around, I daresay that checking out both games is worth it. Maybe Sega will even dig them out some day and throw them up for iDevices and Androids, they’re pretty much made for it.

I’m not sure which DS game I’ll hit next. I put Theresia in and gave it fifteen minutes before I decided not to continue. It has fantastic sound design and a delightful level of “creepy” to recommend it, but the graphics are just too grainy to think about staring at them for the twenty hours or so it would take to play through.

Changing the tone completely from The Rub Rabbits!, I cranked out the last three levels of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 tonight. I was playing on “Acolyte”, which is basically the equivalent of the first game’s “Ninja Dog” mode, so I don’t know that I can take TOO much pride in seeing the end credits roll, but I’m going to take the W and not worry too much about the details.

Like the first “Sigma” game, this is an updated and expanded version of Ninja Gaiden 2, with selectable difficulty levels and three added levels where you play as different characters and get a little more backstory. When the game came out, these were a little infamous for the added Sixaxis motion controls, but I didn’t find them particularly distracting – more like nice changes of pace from the ever-raising stakes of the Ryu levels.

It’s possibly the best Pure Goddamned Action game I’ve played, with levels that are over-the-top but don’t have the heavy camp factor of Oneechanbara. The first level alone is worth the price of admission, a chase through a future Tokyo where all skyscrapers in Japan are topped with neon-covered pagodas and you fight a King Kong-sized Buddha statue as the level’s mid and final boss. I’d seen it before, in the form of a Dead or Alive 5: Last Round stage, and I confess to a faint squeal of fanboy ecstasy when I recognized it.

If I have one quibble with the Dead or Alive / Ninja Gaiden universe, though, it’s that I have a really hard time keeping track of exactly how many hidden ninja villages there are on and around Mount Fuji. I don’t think, for example, that the Hayabusa and Hayate clans are from the same village, and then there’s the Black Spider Clan’s village, and there might be a couple of others. My experience visiting Mount Fuji was that there were mostly just a bunch of tourists climbing it because it was there.

…though, I guess, if there WERE ninjas, I probably wouldn’t have seen them. Something to think on.

I had a hard time finding this for reasonable prices used in the US, but I lucked into a cheap copy of the “Premium Box” edition when I was in Japan last year. It included the game, the soundtrack, a few cheap character goods, and a slim artbook/strategy guide for about Y2000, which was DEFINITELY in my price range. It also booted up and realized that I was using a US PS3, so the entire game was in English and used X to confirm and O to cancel. Honestly, if the manual hadn’t been in Japanese, I would have thought that I was reverse-importing a US copy that had somehow made its way to Akihabara.

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Numbers! Part Two

Posted on August 9, 2015 by baudattitude

Warning: Dreadfully dull post full of navel gazing ahead.

Last year around this time, I realized that I’d been keeping track of my backlog progress for seven years, and that I’d finished 250 games in those seven years, and then I spent some time breaking that down into numbers.

With another year down, and since I’ve been really trying to hit the backlog hard, I thought I’d follow it up with a sequel.

I’ve finished 62 games and expansions in the last year, which is pretty nuts. I’ll admit that there are a couple of very short games in the mix there, and at least one shmup that I hated so much that I credit-fed to the end without shame. Those are balanced out, I think, by the 150+ hours I put into Skyrim/Dragonborn/Dawnguard and the let’s-not-talk-about-it number of hours I spent finishing a pair of Everquest expansions.

By system, it breaks down to PC (27), PS4/PS3/PS2/Vita/PSP (16), Xbox/360/Windows Phone (13), and WiiU/Wii/3DS (6). Only 13 of the games I finished were on portable systems.

The single biggest category was FPS (11), followed by Hidden Object (9) mostly because those have proven a fun way for my wife and I to spend a weekend evening. The only other categories to break 5 games played were Rhythm (6), 3rd-person action (5), Horror (5) and Shmup (5).

All of those 3rd-person-action games were from the “Character Action Game” subgenre, which is basically a name created by people who want to make it very clear that they play Manly Action Games For Real Manly Men, rather than “Push A For Awesome” games like Assassin’s Creed. That was Killer Is Dead, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae, Oneechanbara Z2 Chaos and El Shaddai.

It is possibly the dumbest distinction I have come across in the gaming community, but there you have it. It’s a pretty fun subgenre, anyway, if you can ignore the chest-thumping.

Surprisingly, considering all the jokes I make about fan-servicey games, I only played 5 that I’d put into the “Questionable” category. While my mother might make disparaging comments about me wasting my life if she happened to visit, at least there weren’t many games I’d feel embarrassed about having left out on the coffee table.

Anyway, a very productive year of gaming. I’ll hopefully forget to do this again next year 🙂

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How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee?

Posted on August 8, 2015 by baudattitude

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse and a fondness for digital entertainment, I thought I would sail about the iOS app store and see what could be found.

Since then, I have played a good number of “free-to-play” games, and it’s been a very small fraction of those that have felt, well, “fair” is probably the best description. The first Fantasy Defense game is my best example of that – it was absolutely free to download and play, and I was eventually able to clear the game without spending a dime in the in-game store.

I did buy some random currency for $5 AFTER I cleared it, mind you, because it was a fantastic game and the developers deserved to get paid.

Rare positive examples aside, I’ve tried a ton of games that turned out to be thinly-disguised whale hunts. Montowers was a particularly grotesque example, and Gameloft’s My Little Pony was infamous for a) being targeted at preteen girls and b) having a main quest line that couldn’t be completed without dropping a couple hundred dollars on virtual ponies.

That leads me to Fable Age, which came to my attention by way of my wife, who is something of a nightmare for developers; a white whale if you will, because she has a tremendous patience when it comes to extracting fun from these games without spending money on frivolous stamina refreshes and one-time power ups.

I think that is probably as far as I can stretch the Moby Dick references without actually reading the damn thing.

Anyway. Fable Age, a game where you collect characters from NOT DISNEY versions of fairy tales DID WE MENTION THESE ARE NOT THE DISNEY CHARACTERS, take them into battle in “quest books”, match colorful gems, watch damage numbers dance above the heads of your opponents, watch damage numbers dance above the heads of your characters when your opponents retaliate, and generally try to get a lot more of column A than column B. At the end of each chapter of the quest book, you get some loot, which you can use to power up your characters. Occasionally this loot contains another character, though they’re generally fairly low-powered. At the end of every quest book (usually 3 to 5 chapters), you get a “Fable Stone”, which is the game’s premium currency. Collecting five of these allows you to get a much more powerful random character. Collect characters, level them, collect more characters, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.

When in combat, you do damage by matching colorful gems. When you clear out gems, other gems cascade down to take their place, and of course sometimes THESE gems form chains and there are happy explosions and enthusiastic music.

There’s more to it, of course – your characters all have special attacks which power up over time, and there are mechanics based around the color (element) of your characters and the color/element of the thing you are trying to defeat, and you have a resource (“links”), which allows you chain together strings of unlike colors to make longer combos, and your characters have passive effects which affect damage, or which increase elemental resistances, or which boost the number of links you have, and it’s actually a little deep if you get into it.

But at its core, it’s all about sliding your finger over pretty colors, watching the numbers fly, and building up teams of cute fairy-tale characters to kick assorted arse and take assorted names.

It has a pretty interesting way of gating content based on player level, as an aside. Undertaking quests takes a certain amount of stamina, and your maximum stamina increases with level. If you’re low level with 15 stamina, and you’re looking at an optional quest with a 25 stamina cost, you know you’re not ready for it. When you DO get up to a level where you have 25 stamina and you’re looking at that same quest, you’re weighing the odds of actually beating the thing versus the odds of spending your entire stamina pool and having nothing to show for it. As silly as that sounds, it can actually get a little tense.

Fortunately, quests with that high of stamina costs are strictly side quests so far. There are thirty “quest books”, and the chapters in these come with single-digit stamina costs, at least as far as I’ve seen. You can play a ton of them without worrying about running out of stamina too quickly. It’s honestly, well, fair.

I know, I’m shocked too.

Now, if you want the absolute best characters, you’re probably going to be shelling out actual cash. Likewise, if you can’t put the thing down and do something else when you run out of stamina and need to wait for it to recharge, you’re going to suffer the costs of impatience.

On the other hand, I’ve managed to get some pretty powerful heroes from the scarce few pieces of premium currency that I’ve gotten through game play, and it’s very much a game that I’m able to play for 15 or 20 minutes and walk away from, so I’ve had a lot of fun with it so far and managed to avoid temptation in the process.

To sum up: A surprisingly fair free-to-play game with cheery graphics and music and all the carefully-calculated endorphin releases you could hope for.

Take it away, Melville.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

THE END

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False Idols

Posted on August 4, 2015 by baudattitude

After knocking the K-On! rhythm game out of the backlog last week, I went back to the PSP shelf, picked up Megpoid The Music#, booted it for long enough to do the data install, and stuck it in my bag to play during my lunch breaks at work.

Yes, the “#” is part of the name, and it’s pronounced “Megpoid the Music Sharp”. I do not lie.

After a few minutes playing, I made a major assumption. It turned out to be very wrong, but more on that in a moment.

It felt very much like a quick-and-dirty Project Diva knock-off, and I figured that it had been pushed out the door in late 2009 to cash in on the Miku craze. From that perspective, I was willing to forgive it some of its faults – like a constant barrage of “now loading” screens, a lack of auto-save, a painful “hitch” when changing outfits, and songs that are embarrassingly short – we’re talking less than two minutes in many cases.

(The songs are good, mind you – there are some very catchy tunes on this disc. They’re just very, very short)

Then, having made this initial assumption, I looked the game up online, because I was curious who the main character was.

That was… a eye opener.

It turns out that this actually came out in 2013 – and, from that perspective, it’s really hard to look at it too charitably. It STILL feels like a quick-and-dirty Project Diva knockoff, or maybe just a promotional tool to boost the popularity of the Megpoid Vocaloid production software, but it’s a promotional tool that they had the nerve to charge Y5800 for.

(There was also a collector’s edition, which came with a figure. It originally retailed for Y9698. If you’d like a copy, Amazon Japan has new copies in stock, priced to move at Y2800.)

Thankfully, I picked it up used in July of 2014, and I think it cost me something like Y480. I got Y480 worth of game out of it.

For extra weird factor, this isn’t available on the PSN store – so either it was a UMD-only release in 2013, or it got pulled down at some point. If you could play it on a Vita, it might at least help with the loading times, but it looks like that just isn’t an option.

I still have one more rhythm game to play from my 2014 used-game-shopping binge, and that one will have me breaking out my 9-year old Coral Pink Nintendo DS Lite, just for old time’s sake. Kind of looking forward to it, to be honest – the Vita and 3DSXL are phenomenal game systems, but the PSP and DS Lite NAILED the “portable” aspect of the portable game system.

Posted in psp, videogames | 2 Comments

Hey now, Hey now, Ika Ika Un-day

Posted on August 3, 2015 by baudattitude

I’ve been playing Splatoon in a very relaxed fashion since its release, finishing the single player, doing some Amiibo challenges, logging on for Splatfests, that sort of thing. I saw people at the level cap of twenty within its first week of release, but I didn’t see any reason to emulate them. Just playing in a relaxed fashion was about to slowly grind my way up the levels.

Then Nintendo released the August patch notes, which include a level cap increase from 20 to FIFTY.

This comes with a new scoring system, cribbed from the Splatfest system, and I’m not fond of it in the least.

Right now, it’s pretty easy to get about 900 points in a round of Turf War. I have games where I can hit the 1200 mark and some where I get shut down, but let’s average at 900. With a win, there’s a bonus of 300 points – an extra 33%. This is a pretty good perk, but it’s nothing to rant about if you don’t get it.

In Splatfest scoring, you get 2 points on a loss – assuming you’ve done a bare minimum – and 5 points on a win. That’s an extra 150% win bonus, and it makes losses REALLY sting.

I’m pretty sure I’ll never have the drive to hit level 50. That said, I wanted to at least TRY to get to 20 before the patch…

…and made it with a couple of days to spare, even, thanks to a string of really good teams.

Splatoon has been a genuinely new experience for me – it’s the first time I’ve ever gotten in to a multiplayer-focused game from the ground floor, and it has been a ton of fun to watch the game evolve. I’m a little anxious about what the Big Dang Patch is going to bring – the level cap increase also comes with a bunch of map tweaks and special weapon changes – but it’s been a fun ride so far. 🙂

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Sakuragaoka Girl’s High School Musical

Posted on August 1, 2015 by baudattitude

I watched the first season of K-On! a few years back, and it really didn’t make much of an impression. I finished it, so I probably liked it, but it was really just kind of a moe-by-numbers show, designed to sell the maximum amount of merchandise by having at least one character tuned to appeal to any given viewer’s sensibilities.

While the show didn’t make much of an impression, I do like rhythm games, so I picked up a cheap copy of K-On! Hougako Live!! for the PSP when I was in Japan last summer.

I finally got around to playing it this week, and it made a bad first impression. It had the three songs I remembered from the show, but also had sixteen songs that I didn’t remember at all, and I had some trouble adapting to the way note markers work.

It also doesn’t pull many punches with difficulty levels. Because it has a very limited number of tracks, it needs to ramp up from the introductory level to endgame levels pretty quickly, and it becomes very challenging even on “normal” once you get about halfway through the songs list.

It makes up for the short song list in a fairly unusual way for rhythm games, but one that will be familiar to anyone who remembers later entries in the Guitar Hero franchise. You can play any of the songs as each of the different instruments used by the band, so each one has a separate note chart for lead and rhythm guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards. The instruments also play very differently – guitars use all four face buttons and all four directional buttons and have lots of hold notes, while drums use all four face buttons but only one of the directional (down) and have no hold notes.

One rather clever bit is that, because the band’s bassist is left-handed, her parts are played largely with the directional buttons.

It does like to do some pretty evil combinations of the directional+face buttons. The Project Diva games, as an example, will often ask you to press right and hit the circle button at the same time, which is pretty easy to remember. This game likes to have you hit, oh, the circle button and the down arrow, and then the X button and the right arrow, and alternate those for a while.

Fortunately, it doesn’t deduct points for hitting the wrong notes, so I was able to mash through that bit by spamming down+right+X+circle all at once.

Anyway. It wasn’t really sticking with me, and I was inches away from playing through each of the songs with one of the instruments and calling it done.

Then, purely by luck, I got an A rank on one of the songs and unlocked a family-restaurant-style waitress outfit. I put this on the character I’d been playing, and the result was adorable, and that made me play through the same song with all of the characters until I got an A rank on each character so I could have a band full of characters in adorable waitress uniforms…

…and then I buckled down and got to the process of passing every song with every character at least once, so I could get the ending credits.

I also unlocked nekomimi and stuck them immediately on Azusa, for reasons.

I don’t know that I’d recommend it to anyone who was completely unfamiliar with the source material, but I thought it was a pretty decent game even though the show didn’t have a lot going for it – and, obviously, if you ARE a huge K-on! fan, well, um…

…well, you’ve probably played it, or the PS3 remake, at some time since it came out four years ago. But, if you haven’t, it’s almost certainly something you’ll want to play.

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Don’t Stop Beheading

Posted on July 28, 2015 by baudattitude

I finished Ninja Gaiden Sigma this weekend, though I was eventually forced to swallow my pride and drop down to Ninja Dog level. In retrospect, it was the right decision, but I might have held on a little longer if there were a few more save points, or at least more reasonably-placed save points.

Say, directly before the first Alma fight. That would be an excellent spot for a save point.

AFTER dropping down to easy mode, I still managed to die often enough that I felt some sense of accomplishment when the credits rolled.

I understand now why this game has gotten such praise. Setting the combat system aside, I loved the way the world is laid out once you get to Tairon. It’s not quite open-world – the story is very linear and you can’t go looking for side quests – but it’s almost always opening up new parts of the city without closing off old ones. There are a few places you can’t get back to, of course, like the chapter 3 airship, but most of the city remains available to you right up until the penultimate level. For example, I was all the way to chapter 16 when I remembered a chest in chapter 5 that I’d missed during my replay, and I was able to run back through the city to collect its contents.

The mandatory magma level was a pain. I will say that. Also, the level which involved a lot of swimming through tunnels, that was a pain too. That’s two levels out of 19 that I wasn’t fond of, so that’s a pretty good ratio. I’m also not fond of the control scheme tying one of the game’s most critical attacks to pressing the square and triangle buttons at the same time, because I couldn’t find a way to hold the controller comfortably and still hit these regularly. I’m going to chalk this up to the limitations of 42-year-old finger joints, and use the excuse as a salve to treat the burning feeling of needing to drop the difficulty level.

I immediately started Ninja Gaiden 2 Sigma (Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2?) after finishing, so I think that speaks to how satisfying the first was.

I also managed to hit my first “completion” goal with Project Diva f 2nd, getting GREAT+ on all songs on Normal, and I’m actually a little down on the game. I kind of get the sense that the Vita version took second fiddle to the PS3 version – the heavy use of scratch notes makes a lot more sense if it was designed around the dualshock, and the game is much more forgiving of late notes than early notes, which makes sense if it’s trying to adjust for LCD TV lag.

I’m not fond of the Technical Zone mechanic in this iteration. It didn’t strike me as too bad when they implemented it in Miku’s first Vita outing, but I had far too many runs in 2nd where missing a note or two at JUST the wrong time dropped me from getting a low GREAT to a high STANDARD. Looking back, I really think the second and third PSP games had the best scoring/progression system. The first was great for an introductory outing, but overly dependant on getting huge combos during Chance Time.

It’s a bloody shame, because the song list is fantastic, but I really think the series took a step down in fun level and it has me worried about future games using the same engine.

Finally, one advantage of taking forever to get around to games is that I got to play through Journey for the first time with the recently-released PS4 version.

It’s a really pretty game and doesn’t take more than a couple of hours to play. It could use just the VAGUEST hint of a tutorial on how the jumping/flying works, but I may just have been being particularly thick-headed on Sunday morning.

I’m not a fan of the semi-enforced multiplayer mode, and eventually wound up going offline in order to feel comfortable exploring the world at my own pace. Surprisingly, the multiplayer DID work even though I’m not a current PS+ subscriber, so apparently there are some exceptions to needing to pay for play online.

I’m hesitant to say anything about the game other than that it’s terribly good. If you’ve got hardware that it will run on, I’d say it’s a must play.

Posted in ps3, videogames, vita | Leave a comment

Cult of Personality Test

Posted on July 27, 2015 by baudattitude

Pretty much every job I’ve had in the last decade has had me take a Myers-Briggs test, and I always score as an INTJ. It’s nice to be predictable, I guess.

It’s not a terribly useful thing to know about yourself, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a manager adapt their managerial style to me based on my category, so I usually just take the ubiquitous folder of vague personality trait descriptions, read through it a couple of times, and set it aside until such time as I shred it with the rest of my personal files and move on to the next job.

This test turns out to be MUCH more useful:

Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivation Profile

It leaves out a motivator of “I will play a terrible game to completion if the character designs are cute enough” but I liked it otherwise.

For reference, my results. I don’t think I’ve ever taken one of these sorts of tests and come out quite so one-sided, wow.

Short version: I like it when stuff explodes and I don’t want to work very hard for it. I also appear to be really concerned with WHY stuff is blowing up.

Followup: My wife’s version. Turns out, we have pretty similar philosophies for the most part, she just doesn’t like watching stuff blow up as much.

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How to Derail a Meeting

Posted on July 27, 2015 by baudattitude

I inadvertently started something beautiful and terrible at work today.

I have a regular 8:30 meeting, which we have because someone got the idea that daily team meetings were a great idea. That person doesn’t attend the meetings, mind you.

At any rate, I made an off-hand comment that the US could be divided up into basically four parts: the West coast, which is civilization, two cities in the East coast (NY and DC), “granaries” and “industrial”.

I may have been doing this specifically to tweak someone who identifies strongly with his hometown in the “industrial” part of that.

He, predictably, accused me of painting vast swaths of the country with too wide a brush, and I acknowledged his accusation as fair and amended my definition to include “cheese-producing states”.

There was a pause, and someone else at the table was roused from their morning coma just enough to contribute, as follows: “I went to a cheese factory this weekend. It was pretty neat.”

The rest of the meeting was spent in a hearty debate over the relative qualities of different varieties of cheese and their production methods. At one point, two people had the wikipedia article on “rennet” open to provide authority to their firmly-held convictions.

Nothing else work-related was accomplished.

It was the best meeting I’ve had all year.

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