Baud Attitude

Earth Defense Force 2017, the first game in the series to grace American shelves, was a bit of an impulse buy.  I picked it up because my wife had heard good things about it and it was, well, it was pretty cheap.  I think it launched at 30 bucks or so, which compared very well to the average $60 Xbox 360 game.

It was one of my best purchases for the console.  It wasn’t a terribly complex game – pretty much every level was “You are in the middle of a crudely-modeled Japanese city, surrounded by giant insects and mecha.  Here are some large guns.  Do what seems appropriate.” – but it was undiluted fun.

The sequel, Insect Armageddon, had more of a story and spent more time working on a leveling system and adding complexity, but it lost a lot of that undiluted fun in the process.

Thankfully, EDF 2025 completely ignores all of the changes made for Insect Armageddon and goes back to the formula of giant insects + lots of guns + destructible environments + over-the-top physics = fun as all get out.  There is something joyous about seeing a skyscraper crawling with 30-foot-long fire ants, hitting it with a big rocket, and watching pieces of ants fly everywhere while the building collapses.

It’s taken me a solid week to play through on Normal difficulty with one of the game’s four classes.  It has 85 levels in offline mode – with more available as DLC and when playing online – and I needed to play some of the earlier levels on higher difficulty settings to get better weapons to tackle the higher levels on Normal.  It also took me nearly two hours to get through the last level, which is a three-stage boss fight sort of affair where the “boss” is big enough to cover the entire sky and your progress in the fight can be tracked by the amount of sunlight you start letting through as you blast away at it.

That was a single play-through, and there are achievements for each of the four classes on all five difficulty levels.  That’s a minimum of 1700 levels played for 100% completion.

There is a LOT of game here for the completionist.  I am NOT one of those so I will happily put it on the shelf and pat myself on the back for my efforts in high-impact pest control.

As with the previous games, this is not for anyone with the slightest hint of arachnophobia.  Anyone else should check it out.

I came to own El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron only after it was featured in an Xbox 360 Games on Demand sale at the bargain price of $2.99.  At the time, I played the prologue and about half of the first level, and couldn’t get the game to “stick” with me in the slightest.  It was pretty, to be sure, with a sort of abstract watercolor aesthetic, but I didn’t know that I could handle 8 hours of abstract watercolors.

Recently while looking at the short list of Xbox 360 games I had yet to play, I came very close to simply putting El Shaddai on to the “won’t play this” pile.

Fortunately, before I did that, I decided to man up and give it one more shot.  This turned out to be a fantastic idea, because this is one of the most gorgeous games I have ever seen.  As soon as you’re past the second level, the game starts throwing wildly varied art styles at you – a world of floating platforms that wouldn’t look out of place in a Tron sequel, a futuristic highway straight from Bubblegum Crisis, a surreal 2D level with hints of the whimsy of a Loco Roco… weird, beautiful, fantastic environments.

The game is mostly a platformer, switching between 2D and 3D levels as it pleases, with occasional bouts of combat.  Your character can pick up one of three different weapon types (or fight unarmed), and each of your opponents is weak against one of the three and strong against another.  The fighting system, as much as I’m not really qualified to comment on it, was pretty easy to pick up.  It uses a lot of pauses and long presses of the “attack” button rather than complicated button combinations, so it was pretty easy to learn how to pull off the “break opponent’s guard” move that is pretty much essential to survival.  Once I got that down, the fighting bits became the least dangerous parts, and I tended to just die from my eternal quest to explore the bottom of bottomless pits.

It also turned out to be quite educational.  I’d never heard of the Book of Enoch before, and having a video game protagonist based on the titular Enoch made me go and look up the Wikipedia entry on the topic after finishing the game.  It’s pretty heavy stuff, and it does make it somewhat difficult to critique the plot without being a lot more familiar with the source material.  On the other hand, I certainly FEEL like El Shaddai does a decent job of interpreting the events from the scripture and making them into game moments, and that will have to do for me.

This is very near the top of my mental list of underrated and obscure games.  I can’t imagine that it’s going to reappear at the $2.99 mark any time soon, but I also can’t imagine that it could possibly cost much more to pick up a used disc copy.

I’m down to three Xbox 360 games to play – the Anniversary edition of the first Halo, Deadly Premonition, and Earth Defense Force 2025.  I’m not sure which is going to wind up in the tray first, I’ll just need to let whimsy guide me.

It’s taken me fifteen years, but I have finally finished a Nintendo 64 game.

I didn’t manage to finish a single one of the eleven games I owned for the thing when I actually owned the original hardware, which has always been a topic of personal shame, so I am rather grateful to Microsoft and Rare for getting an upscaled re-release of Perfect Dark on to Xbox Live Arcade and giving me the chance to redeem myself.

Back when I owned the cartridge version, I had come very very close indeed to finishing the game.  I’d managed to get to the last level, and to the very final boss fight, and I had taken several cracks at it, and eventually I just had to admit that I wasn’t going to get it done.

The thing that finally made me admit defeat back then was that, well, in 2000 Rare hadn’t heard of checkpoints, or had heard of them but didn’t want to put them in, so failing said fight meant playing through the entire last level from start to finish every time.

This got old after a few tries.

Perfect Dark XBLA is a very faithful rendition of the original, so naturally it has all the weird design quirks of an FPS from 2000, including the fail-any-objective-play-through-the-entire-level-again quirk.  You would think that it would, therefore, be just as frustrating.  On the other hand, rather than playing with the godawful N64 controller, you get to use a dual-analog Xbox 360 controller, and I will tell you that it makes a WORLD of difference.

I really liked Perfect Dark – barring the end level – back when I played it on the N64.  I had particularly fond memories of Elvis, your grey alien sidekick for the latter half of the game, and I was a bit worried that my fond memories might be just a BIT rose-colored and that replaying the game might rather ruin them for me.

Turns out, nope.  Elvis is still pretty awesome, and the game, for all of its clunky bits, is still a blast.  It’s very easy to get lost at times – even though the levels are pretty small, there aren’t a lot of cues as to where you should be going to get to any given objective and there are some levels were it can be rather confusing what constitutes a door that you can open and what is simply decorative paneling.

The final boss DID still manage to kill me.

Once.

Perfect Dark Zero, the native Xbox 360 followup, has always been my go-to example for why prequels can be a really bad idea at times.  When you start the first game, Johanna is, well, she’s a pretty bad-arse secret agent and all that, but by the end of that game she’s befriended an AI and an alien, gone to another planet, and shot a lot of nasty, non-human, things.

In Perfect Dark Zero, she just kind of shoots guys.  It can’t get TOO crazy or the way the character behaves in the original game wouldn’t make sense, so it all kind of comes off as rather flat.

Maybe Rare will resurrect the character at some point and actually write a proper sequel.  In a world where we’re getting Shenmue III, anything’s possible.