Baud Attitude

I mentioned yesterday that I’d tried to play Ninja Gaiden before.  Three times, in fact, and more-or-less in the following sequence:

2004 – while visiting a friend, he invites me to try this brand new game which he has just brought home.  The two of us, handing the controller on and off, manage to fight through a castle full of ninjas and get to the boss, who promptly hands us both a to-go bag full of our pride and ambitions.

2007 – I take advantage of fire-sale prices on Xbox games to buy my own copy of Ninja Gaiden.  I fight through a castle full of ninjas and get to the boss, who says “Did you not learn your lesson three years ago?” and sends me to the game over screen without breaking a sweat.

2007 (take two) – I try AGAIN, this time being super-careful to conserve healing items.  I get to the first boss with an inventory full of potions and discover that this really just prolongs the inevitable.

At this point, I got rid of Ninja Gaiden and bought Ninja Gaiden Black, at slightly more-than-fire-sale price, because I understand that, if I do poorly enough, it will give me the option of a “ninja dog” difficulty level, tuned for people who are bad at action games.

2015 – I finally put Ninja Gaiden Black into an Xbox, fight through a castle full of ninjas, and – surprisingly – beat the first boss on my first try.  Sadly, I discover after the fact that you can no longer activate “ninja dog” mode after clearing the first level, so I’m stuck with Normal difficulty until the end or until I admit defeat.

This post really isn’t about my multiple attempts or my general inadequacy at action games.  What actually blew my mind about Ninja Gaiden yesterday was that the game doesn’t ALL take place in castles full of ninjas.  In fact, while the second level takes place in a somewhat archaic-looking Japanese village, the third level has you fighting across an airship and the fourth drops you into a very European-looking town, with lots of brick architecture and narrow alleys.  It’s more than a little jarring to have my decade-old mental image of the game completely thrown out the window, and it’s put me in the pleasant position of having no idea what sorts of places the game is going to send me but eagerly anticipating the trip.

Well, except I assume there will have to be either a) a swamp level or b) a sewer level or c) both, but I’ll deal with those when I get there.

If I get there.

Did I mention that I’m still pretty bad at action games?

I needed something a little less creepy after Silent Hill 4.

Back in 2008, my wife and I happily button-mashed our way through Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, a game which I am given to understand is viewed as something of an abomination by Proper Baldur’s Gate fans, those being the fans who grew up on the isometric PC games in the late 90s.

We had a lot of fun with it, and wound up buying a few other games in the same genre.  Then we found out that we REALLY prefer playing through hidden object games together, and haven’t gotten around to doing the co-operative button mashing thing since.

Then I started trying to knock off my backlog one system at a time, and that’s how Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes found its way into the tray of our aged and finicky Xbox.

I liked it a lot.  It doesn’t have the most original setup – there’s an evil wizard, he tried to take over the world, you and your friends stopped him and died in the process, it’s been a few decades and someone has resurrected the wizard, so you get resurrected to, well, stop him again.  The NPC who resurrects you basically tells you “he’s that way, here’s a (sword/staff/bow/mace), go do something about it, would you?”

It doesn’t need an original setup.  In this case, a few fantasy cliches and a few of the nastier pages from the Monster Manual are all that are really needed to make a satisfying dungeon crawl / loot bash.  There are occasional puzzles involving switches and color-coded pressure plates, and an awful lot of looking for four or five of X, where X is a set of objects you need all of in order to open a door, and a friendly shopkeeper or two to sell your junk to and buy potions from, and the rest is pretty much Front Towards Enemy, Mash Attack Button, at least on Normal difficulty.

The first couple of levels, where you’re broke and kind of short on healing potions and swinging wildly at trolls with your rusty longsword, are actually the toughest.  Once you get your feet under you, it’s pretty much smooth sailing to the inevitable multi-stage final boss fight.

Playing it on a modern flatscreen, the low poly models do stand out a bit – it’s not UGLY, by any means, but it’s definitely rough around the edges.  The environments hold up considerably better; it does a good job of selling the contractually-obliged swamp, fire, and ice-themed levels.  There are also some cutscenes that play before boss fights; these are pre-rendered and look really good.

Total play time was probably 12 hours over four nights.  It dragged a bit towards the end, if I’m honest – there’s a necropolis level which just seems to go on and on long after it’s overstayed its welcome – but I’m willing to accept that it may just have been me being impatient and wanting to get to the bit where I punch the evil wizard in his evil wizard face.

In retrospect, it was pretty ironic to have chosen this last week to play Silent Hill 4.

It’s not that I was ACTUALLY kept inside my house by mysterious chains and sealed windows, but being stuck inside for several days with a bad back did leave me more than a little twitchy to see the outside world.

My feelings for the game are a little conflicted.  On one hand, it has a fantastic premise and a really good first half.  It’s not really set IN Silent Hill, though at one point you find yourself on the shores of Toluca Lake, but it feels like a Silent Hill game regardless.  The environments are brutal, twisted, and opressive, there’s fog everywhere, and there are a lot of really unpleasant creatures who want to make your life difficult.

I particularly enjoyed the part of the game where you’re finally able to visit the other apartments in your building.  Including you, there are about twenty residents in your building, and there are very human dramas going on that have nothing to do with the game’s main plot.

On the other hand, the second half of the game is one long escort mission and the inventory/save system seems designed to annoy and to pad out the game length.  Your character has a painfully small carrying capacity, so you are frequently shuffling items in and out of a trunk kept in your apartment, and every trip back to the apartment means a ton of backtracking and a pair of cutscenes.  It really put me into a bad mood while I was playing, and I eventually resorted to an exhaustive walkthrough to get me through the last couple of levels, which is something I usually try to avoid.

The final world, and the last encounter, were VERY good, and I somehow managed to get the best of four endings on my first playthrough, so my final impressions of the game were positive.  If I’d given up an hour or two before, this would have been a much more ranty post.

After SH4, I was left with four Xbox games to choose from, and the next one off the shelf was Atari’s 2003 “Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes”, a top-down game with a more-than-passing resemblence to Gauntlet but with some bolted-on RPG elements and a light coating of story to round it out a little.  So far I’m about two hours in and am giving it a preliminary thumbs-up – I’m still occasionally mixing up the various action buttons and my attempts to faceroll through dungeons while chugging heal potions were met with abject failure, but it uses the D&D license well and the combat is starting to click with me.