Baud Attitude

Anyone who’s read more than a few posts here might come to the conclusion that I rate games on a) whether there’s fan service, b) if the fan service is relevant to my interests, c) if there’s a lot of fan service, and d) whether or not the game is any fun to play.

This is not far from the truth at times.

Otomedius Excellent is one of the solitary exceptions to the rule, because it is nothing BUT fan service, complete with Yoshizaki Mine character designs and cute girls in glasses riding improbable fighter planes into battle, and I hated every minute of the hour it took to play through the story mode.

I LIKED the first game, Otomedius Gorgeous.  It was a little frustrating at times, but the levels were interesting and the enemy designs were hilarious.  Most of the bad guys were, for some reason, penguins.

The levels in Otomedius Excellent are dull, the enemies are a sea of indistinguishable generic robots, and about the only good thing I can say about the boss fights is that, after a while of fighting them, the bosses get just as bored with you as you are of them, and they leave.

Wait, no.  One of the bosses is a giant space battleship piloted by, in theory, Shiori from Tokimemo.  That would be kind of cool, if the boss was Tokimemo themed in some way, but it’s just a really generic space battleship.

I am at a loss for what possessed Konami to strip out most of what made the first game fun to play.

At least I only spent about twenty bucks on the domestic release rather than importing from Japan.  That’s something, I guess.

I played through the PSP version of The Idolmaster a few years back, and it was quite a rough game to get though as a non-native speaker.  It’s very text heavy and you are frequently given dialog options with a very short time limit to make a decision.

Even ignoring the language barrier, it takes a long time to shepherd your chosen idol through her rise to stardom, and it involves many tedious minigames and not much actual music.  The last thing I wanted to do once I’d finally gotten Ritsuko to the top was to start over with another character, much less work through the process twice more so I could manage a trio.

Live For You is almost an apology for the pain of the first game.  It’s a straightforward rhythm game that lets you throw any combination of idols on stage, with any costumes you like, and just lets you have fun tapping along to happy, energetic music while your chosen characters perform on screen.

It’s also famous for throwing achievement after achievement at the player.  If you don’t mind being super cheesy, you can get a full 1k gamerscore in a couple of hours.

I am not super cheesy, so it took me probably six or so hours.

Even if it WAS super easy, I’m still quite happy to see a 1000/1000 on my Xbox Live gamer card.  The last time I managed to do that in any game was, um, seven years ago, and that was only because you cannot play through Phantasy Star Universe WITHOUT getting 1k.

The rhythm game was a little on the tricky side, especially on Hard.  While the songs can’t be as fast as Project Diva songs – the characters in Idolmaster games are voiced by humans who are subject to, you know, the laws of physics, whereas Miku can sing at 240bpm, the note charts are complex and timing demands quite exacting.

On Easy and Normal difficulty levels, it’s not that bad, but it’s still easy to slip into a bit of a Can’t Blink, Will Break My Combo mode and start resenting the fact that the cute girls dancing and singing are distracting you from the stream of note symbols that you’re trying to hit.

…

Moving on.

It’s nice to finally get this off the backlog.  I went on a bit of a Japanese 360 games binge when I was living there in the summer of 2010 and I’m finally coming to the end of it.

Next up, unless I have a change of heart, is Deathsmiles IIX.  I may also put Bistro Cupid in and give it a spin for a bit, and then I think I get to put the Japanese 360 away for a bit.

After three play sessions, I wrapped up Call of Duty 3 tonight.

It did have a few less-than-stellar moments scattered throughout.  Treyarch felt compelled, for some reason, to put little QTE segments in when you were doing stuff like placing explosive charges, and they got pretty tedious after the first couple.  The later levels also featured a LOT of moments where I was waiting for someone to come over and kick open a door so I could walk through it, which is one of my pet peeves when it comes to games.

Even with that, I don’t mind saying that it wound up being one of my favorite entries in the series.  Recent CODs have focused heavily on the player being part of some Super Elite Special One Man Army Ninja Warrior Force, saving the world from nuclear annihilation or what not, and that’s cool and all I guess, but I kind of liked being Just Another Grunt, with a bunch of other grunts around me, trying to push the Germans out of France.

I’m not saying that I don’t have CODBLOPS3: Now With Even More Futuristic Guns on my wishlist for later this year, because I did like the stuff they did with the 20-minutes-into-the-future stuff in both BLOPS2 and Advanced Warfare, but sometimes it’s nice to just pick up a M1 Garand and help a Nazi take his helmet off.

I don’t have many 360 games left on the backlog, so I may focus on wrapping that system instead of jumping right into CoD1.  Between Splatoon matches, of course.

For a guy who doesn’t play a lot of military-themed shooters, I’ve been hitting the Call of Duty series pretty hard this week.  It’s a good way to grind through the backlog, and it’s interesting seeing how the game series has evolved over time.

Going back to Call of Duty 3 after playing so many of the modern entries is a big step back in some ways, especially production values.  It’s not a great looking game – let’s be charitable and say that the visuals are, um, “functional”, and I somehow doubt that there’s going to be licensed music playing over the ending credits.

It’s also a much slower-paced game.  I don’t think there IS a run button – if there is, I haven’t found it yet – and the act of aiming feels like trying to push an oar through molasses.  Fortunately, the enemies are also prone to standing still and there’s a lot of aim assist.

It also doesn’t seem to feature respawning enemies, which is a HUGE change of pace.  You can take your time with each encounter, without feeling compelled to always rush forward to cross the next invisible line to turn off respawns.

It’s possible that I’m just not seeing the respawns – I am playing on easy, for the sake of expediency, after all – but I honestly think they’re just not there.

This game got a lot of bad press back in the day, and I had pretty low expectations going in.  So far, I have been pleasantly surprised at pretty much every turn.

Still, I’ve only finished 5 out of 14 levels.  Plenty of time left for disappointment.