Lollipop Chainsaw – Fin

Posted on August 7, 2014 by baudattitude

I finished Lollipop Chainsaw last night.  I don’t have much to add to my comments from the other day – in general, it’s a pretty good brawler with a twisted sense of humor – but I wanted to point out two things in particular.

First, it’s pretty clearly telegraphed from the start that the five bosses you know about aren’t the REAL enemies, and that there was going to be a Super Big Bad Secret Boss after them.  This was not a surprise.  The NATURE of the Super Big Bad Secret Boss, on the other hand, was entirely unexpected and I am hesitant to reveal it for fear of ruining the experience for others.

I will say simply that it was pretty spectacular.

The Big Bad Secret Boss fight DOES end with a “press the X button to not die” QTE, and failing it makes you start the whole fight from the beginning, but I’ll forgive it because knowing what to do made the fight before the QTE much quicker the second time.

Second, the game has a “good” ending and a “bad” ending, and this is normally the sort of thing that makes me give a game very poor marks, because getting the “good” ending all-to-often revolves around doing stuff that is a pain in the arse at best and straight-up-artificial longevity at the worst.  Fatal Frame II, for example, even though it’s probably in my top ten games of all time, requires the player to finish the game on the very highest difficulty setting – which isn’t even available to you until you’ve completed the game a couple of times.

The “good” ending in Lollipop Chainsaw, by way of contrast, just requires you to save a few classmates from zombies over the course of the game, and I’d already saved all but one of them just as a side effect of playing aggressively.  Saving the one I’d missed was a simple matter of replaying the level I’d missed her on, rescuing her from zombies, and then quitting the level after the next checkpoint – I didn’t have to restart the game, or even replay the level in its entirety.

It’s a pretty short game – I doubt I clocked more than about 6 hours spread out over three nights – but does have some stuff you can do after the ending credits roll, if you’re in the mood to get more zombie chainsawing in.  I might have felt a little short-changed if I’d paid sixty bucks for it, of course, but looking at my Amazon history shows that it cost me a hair under twenty bucks, which is just about perfect for this sort of experience.

It also shows that I waited 10 months between buying it and actually taking it out of the shrinkwrap and slotting it into a PS3, but that’s probably a little better than my average, all-in-all.

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Twilight Sparkle, Zombie Hunter

Posted on August 5, 2014 by baudattitude

lollipopchainsawAfter finishing Onechanbara Z Kagura, it crossed my mind that I had another game on the shelf about dismembering zombies with a chainsaw.

I’ve only ever finished one of Suda51’s games, that being Killer7, but it made a heck of an impression on me.  It was a weird mix of adventure-game-style puzzle solving and lightgun-style shooting gallery, set in a world with the bizarre factor cranked up to 12.  Compared to it, Lollipop Chainsaw is downright normal, a sort of riff on Buffy the Vampire Slayer where you control a blonde cheerleader from a family of zombie hunters, cheerfully chopping her way through an onslaught of the living dead spawned from a dimensional rift to hell.  Oh, and your boyfriend was turned into a zombie but you saved him by cutting off his head.  Trust me, it makes more sense in context.

Along the way, you fight musically-themed bosses – punk rock, heavy metal, even 60s psychedelic music – and are forced to adapt on-the-fly to a variety of generally-frustrating minigames.  The most vexing of these so far – I’m just starting level 6 of 7 – has been in a level where you get sucked into retro arcade machines and are forced to play analogs of Pac-Man, Elevator Action, and Crazy Climber.

I was never very good at Crazy Climber, and it follows that I wasn’t very good at the Lollipop Chainsaw version of the game either.  This also leads to one of my few real complaints – the minigames all have short introductory sequences, and failing the minigames results in a short death sequence, and neither of them can be skipped or sped up.

Compared to Onechanbara, it’s, well, it’s a little more sleazy at times.  There’s an ample amount of virtual skin on display on both titles, but the camera angles in Lollipop Chainsaw’s close-ups are a little more obvious in what’s on display.  Neither one is something you want to be playing when your mum comes over to visit, but Lollipop is the one of the two that made me say “Really? That was necessary?”

Juliet also doesn’t control as smoothly as either of the Onechanbara sisters, but I’ll admit that it’s a subjective call on my part to say that.

There’s considerably more polish to the overall presentation in Lollipop, though.  It may be tacky, but it doesn’t feel cheap.

It’s also notable for having Tara Strong voice the main character.  Now, I’m not a voice actor groupie by any means and I actually have a really hard time picking her voice out even when I know she’s a character in a series, but her performance in this one is startlingly close to her MLP performance, to the point where it really does sound like Twilight Sparkle having a really bad day.

The following image, which I am stealing without credit as I wasn’t able to track down its original source, really says all that needs to be said on the topic:

twiwood

It’s a pretty short game by reputation, so I should be able to knock out the last couple levels in another night or so.  I’ll update this if it turns terrible, of course, but I’m liking it a lot so far.

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One Cowboy Hat. One Chainsaw. Ten Thousand Zombies.

Posted on August 3, 2014 by baudattitude

 

oneechanbaraZkagurawithnonono

After a marathon play-through of all three Mass Effect games, I needed a bit of a change of pace.  I found it.

I am an unashamed fan of the Oneechanbara games.  They’re not exactly high-concept or high-budget games – they’re little more than excuses to run around poorly-textured environments as a scantily-clad vampire swordswoman and beat up hundreds of copy-and-pasted zombies, with occasional boss fights to break up the monotony.  They started off as entries in the “Simple 2000” series for the PS2, and the series is one of the few that actually managed to escape that particular bargain-bin ghetto.

Not sure if that metaphor worked.  Moving on.

The most recent one – “Onechanbara Z Kagura with NoNoNo!”, to give it its full and proper name – is the 2013 PS3 version of the 2012 Xbox360 title, with an extra playable character who I haven’t managed to unlock yet and can’t comment on.  The two PLAYABLE characters are new to the series but are cast from the same molds as the two sisters from the Xbox 360 and Wii games, just with their personalities swapped around a bit.  Kagura, the bikini-and-cowboy-hat-wearing vampire in this game is the wild and reckless character, while Saaya is the more calm of the pair and does her best to keep her sister under control.  Saki and Aya do show up for a couple of fights and are available as DLC if you want to play through the game with them, of course, so there are three possible campaigns – Kagura / Saaya, Aya/Saki and NoNoNo.

NoNoNo is not a vampire, just to be clear.  She’s a character from D3 Publisher’s “Dream Club” series and is apparently a hostess girl from the future or some such.

Oh, Japan.

Anyway.  Compared to previous entries in the series, it’s a much better looking game.  It’s still not a AAA title by any means – there’s still a ton of copy-and-paste going on, and pretty much every boss model gets reused at least once, but you can tell that they put a little more effort into this one.  The core of the game hasn’t changed much – you still run around, get locked into logic-defying arenas full of monsters and need to defeat them all to continue – but that’s like saying “This Mario game is still all about running to the right and jumping on turtles.”

One of the more welcome improvements is the change made to the “mudmen” enemies.  In previous games, these were enemies that were unkillable through normal means.  You had to use a special attack which was frustratingly timing-dependent, or let your rage meter build up to levels where you were actually taking damage just from running around.  In this game, you just have to use a special attack consisting of pressing the Triangle and Circle buttons at the same time.  It eats a little health, but that’s quickly recoverable thanks to a second improvement, where you can simply hold down another pair of buttons to regenerate health, presuming you’re not being attacked at that precise moment.  It makes for a lot less needing to hoard health recovery items, which in turn improves the pace of things.

Wow, that’s a homonym that I’d never really noticed until I typed “horde health recovery items” and stared at it for several minutes trying to figure out why it looked wrong.

But, I digress.

The boss fights ARE, unfortunately, horribly infected by QTEs, which I normally consider an unforgivable sin.  I’m inclined to make an exception, though, because they’re pretty forgiving QTEs AND they’re an opportunity for the characters to show off some absolutely brutal fighting moves.  Let’s just say that we’ve come a long way from the days when the fatalities in Mortal Kombat were enough to make Nintendo clutch its figurative pearls and sit down lest they be overcome with the vapors.

Finally, because there’s not much I enjoy more than playing pretty princess dress-up, I am happy to report that there are a plethora of costume and cosmetic items that you can get for your characters, both from in-game quests and as DLC, and nobody is going to judge you too harshly for slapping a gothic-lolita maid uniform and a pair of batwings on your characters.  In all truth, it would be wrong NOT to do this.

To sum up: about five hours of gratuitous semi-nudity and mindless violence, generally at the same time, with the option to play through the campaign three times to see it from different perspectives.  Good times.  Good times, indeed.

 

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I built a thing.

Posted on August 1, 2014 by baudattitude

So, there’s a line of building toys called Nanoblock, similar to Lego but much much smaller.  The smallest pieces are just 4mm x 4mm, or a quarter of the size of the lego “1×1”.  Most of their kits (well, at least most of the ones I’ve seen) are blocky versions of various world landmarks, animals, trains, that sort of thing.  The nearest Japanese bookstore carries some of their kits, but they’ve never had the Tokyo Tower kit in stock and anyway they want like 20 bucks for one of the small kits, which just seemed like a little too much import markup.  There are sellers on Amazon that DO have the Tokyo Tower kit, but again they want like 20 bucks for it.

Here’s the thing I’m talking about, for reference:

nanoblock_tt_package

Anyway, I’ve been wanting this kit for a couple years now but grousing about the price for just about as long, so I made sure to pick one up at Loft in Tachikawa when I had the chance.  It has the bonus property of being work-appropriate, which I can’t say for most of the stuff I bring back from Japan.

It was a lot of fun to put together, though the sheer number of tiny tiny pieces was a bit daunting at first.  These things are small, and the instruction sheet for even a very small model like this one has a lot of steps.

My first surprise was that it went together on the first try, even if it took the better part of a half hour.

My second surprise was that there were something like 40 pieces left over.  The company that sells these kits is apparently very aware that they are selling you a box full of tiny tiny pieces and have chosen to stick at least one, often two extra of each kind of piece in the box so you don’t have to beat yourself up too badly if you lose a block in the rug.

nanoblock_tokyo_tower

So I have a blocky representation of Tokyo Tower now, a deep appreciation for the effort it takes to put together any of the larger nanoblock kits, and I’m slightly more inclined to put together more in the future knowing that they have a built-in safety feature in the form of spare parts.

Oh, and I won’t fuss nearly as much about import prices from now on.  The savings from flying to Japan, finding one of these in a store, and needing to make room for it in my luggage on the way home?  Less than five bucks.  I guess the importers aren’t marking them up THAT badly.

 

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Shepard don’t fear the Reapers

Posted on July 29, 2014 by baudattitude

me3logo

So that was about 70 hours, mostly well-spent I think.

I should put more words here.

I was a bit skeptical about the Mass Effect series before I started it.  To be honest, I was mostly turned off because it seems to have collected the sorts of fans who Take Things A Little Too Seriously, and also it’s from Electronic Arts and I still haven’t forgiven them for dropping support for Atari 8-bit computers in roughly 1984.  That’s fair, I think, it’s only been 30 years and I can’t be expected to forgive them quite yet.

Did I just make fun of other people for taking things too seriously, and then say that?  Really?  Let’s move on and talk about the actual games before I’m forced to examine that last bit too closely.

I won’t spend too much time talking about Mass Effect or ME2, but it would feel weird skipping straight to the end.

The first was an action RPG with 3rd-person cover-shooter mechanics, Diablo-style random loot drops, seriously janky vehicle physics and mechanics that you are largely allowed to figure out on your own.  Considering how many games I’ve played where the tutorial level stretches through, roughly, the first half of the plot, it’s kind of refreshing to have a game that gives you some of the basics and then kicks you out of the nest to fly or fall.

I didn’t necessarily see it that way at the time, mind you.

I didn’t give myself any time to relax between finishing the first game and starting the second, and the transition was just a little bit jarring.  It was the same universe, sure, and I had a kick seeing characters from the first game again, but the controls were just different enough to throw me for a loop and I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t know who these “Cerberus” people were.  It turns out, as an aside, that they’re a niche group you butt heads with three or four times in the first game if you go around looking for side missions, but it’s very possible to miss them if you focus on the main storyline.

Even with those complaints, it was a huge improvement over the first game.  I was not a fan of ME1’s combat, which ME2 tightened right up, and I had a lot of fun with the story, even if the first third of it was “let’s get the band together” and the second third was “let’s run some errands for the members of the band so they like me more”.

It also had the Best Character-Establishing Shot in recent memory, with Legion’s first appearance.

Somehow I managed to make it through ME2 without losing any of the Important Crew Members (let’s not talk about the half of the Less Important Crew Members that didn’t make it), and followed that up by immediately installing ME3 and going through Yet Another Jarring Opening Sequence.  If I am completely honest, it wasn’t until about 90 minutes in that I stopped believing that it was just another cliched nightmare sort of thing and that Any Minute Now there would be a scene where Shepard bolted upright in bed, covered in sweat, and the ACTUAL story could get underway.

Yes, It starts off that bleak.

It’s hard to separate Mass Effect 3: The Game from Mass Effect 3: The Assorted Nonsense, and much of the bad press the game got was because of The Assorted Nonsense, and I will admit that rather a lot of that bad press seems to have been quite deserved.  It’s hard to feel that gamers didn’t have Origin forced down our throats, and the multi-player likewise felt tacked on for the sake of selling online passes to used purchasers.  Worse yet, the game feels rather ephemeral – so many of the features require various servers, or are at least enhanced by various servers, and at least one companion tool has already been pulled out of the iOS app store.  The notoriously controversial ending may have been replaced with something that patches up plot holes and gives the player more closure, but that version isn’t on disc, not even on the recent Trilogy release.  Five years from now, it may not be possible to play the same game.

Setting that aside and looking at the game only as, well, a rather enjoyable 3rd-person shooter with light RPG elements and one heck of a storyline is pretty tricky and I wasn’t always able to pull it off.  I managed to do enough surveying planets and doing side quests and odd jobs to get the Not Entirely Happy But Still Pretty OK ending without being forced into the multi-player, but it always vexed me to look at my war assets knowing that their impact was being halved because I was only playing the single player campaign.  Thankfully, the glaring at the war assets screen represented a relatively small part of the game, with the vast majority spent running around alien worlds and blowing stuff up.  THAT stuff was pretty much as good as it gets.

So, about 70 hours, mostly well-spent.  Probably won’t jump right into the recently-announced sequel until ME6 hits, of course.  🙂

 

 

 

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Still playing Mass Effect

Posted on July 27, 2014 by baudattitude

Finished ME2 and launched right into ME3 and immediately got a sense for why there was so much griping about it when it came out.  Still, it’s pretty amazing and I’ll put something up here about my thoughts on 2 and 3 combined once I’m done.  I think that playing them back to back like this is really the only way to do it; I can’t imagine having had to wait a couple of years between them and trying to remember who all the minor characters were.

For now, though, here are the toys I bought in Japan.  All but one of these were from secondhand, so this really wasn’t as expensive as it looks – actually, half of them were Y500.  The Tony Taka “Peacekeeper Daisy” figure was, um, a little more, but I think it was worth it.  Sorry for terrible photo all in all.

shelfoftoys

Daisy is also my first 1/6th scale figure so she pretty much dwarfs everything else on the shelf and just barely fits.  Kotobukiya is teasing a sequel figure with another Tony-designed fairy so I’ll be saving my nickles while I wait for that to come out.

Complete list of figures below the “Read More” button.

Continue reading →

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Streetpass Effect

Posted on July 22, 2014 by baudattitude

I mentioned a month or two ago that I’d taken to collecting Streetpasses on my Pretty Princess Pink 3DSXL, and that I’d gotten a few Special Miis thanks to E3.

That was cool and all, but really I wasn’t getting very many passes. I was sitting at maybe 30 unique Miis in Mii Plaza and only had a sprinkling of puzzle pieces.

Then I went to Tokyo. If you find yourself in the same situation as I was in, I must recommend this as a tactic.

I have to say, first off, that I didn’t see nearly as many portable game systems as I used to. Smartphone gaming is a Thing, even in the Land of Nintendo, and I saw an awful lot of folks playing Puzzle and Dragon on their iPhones and Sony Xperias.

(As an aside, though I did see a ton of Android phones, I didn’t see so many Samsungs. I think Sony has the home field advantage.)

Even so, I went past many, many people who at least had 3DSs buried in their bags, because it took me no time at all to rack up about 500 streetpasses. I even managed to get the 100 Streetpasses-in-a-day achievement, though admittedly that took going to the Tokyo Pokemon Center and then wandering around Akihabara for about three hours.

Now that I’m back in the States, of course, my pass rate has slowed to virtually nil again. I found out that I can get passes over the free WiFi at McDonald’s and Home Depot, so I’ve been picking up about 10 a day from those at least and I’m up to 650 pieces of a total 1113.

Hey, as far as life accomplishments go, it’s not a great one but I do enjoy seeing the boards slowly fill up.

Posted in Japan, nds, videogames | 2 Comments

I Geth I Was Mistaken

Posted on July 21, 2014 by baudattitude

I spent another four hours with Mass Effect 2 tonight, and I’m happy to report that the Geth DO show up.

This entry in the series feels a lot more like a shooter than the first one did.  That’s far from a complaint, mind you – in ME1, I spent most of the time using various pistols because they seemed more effective than pretty much anything else, but I’m finding that every weapon in ME2 is worth using.  Also, since ME2 dropped the infinite-ammo mechanic, I’m NEEDING to switch up weapons in order to keep myself in ammunition.

The pacing is a drastic change, too.  I’m 10 hours in, I’ve spent most of that time getting the band back together, and I still have several people to go find and recruit – and after I find them all, each of them has a technically-optional mission that I can run to fully gain their trust.  I also need to get upgrades, and they’re not in shops any more so I need to collect components and research schematics.  The whole saving the universe thing seems to have fallen by the wayside a bit in favor of getting old buddies out of jams and scanning planets for minerals.

Oh god I just realized that this might technically count as doing trade skills.

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNN

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Mass Effect 2: I Am Disappoint.

Posted on July 20, 2014 by baudattitude

Let me start of by saying very clearly: I am not disappointed with Mass Effect 2, the video game. Rather, I started it intending just to see how it tied into the first game and then played for six hours straight, which is a pretty good sign that I consider it an excellent game.

I was extra glad to find out that the thing I’d spoiled for myself accidentally is a thing that takes place (and is explained) in the first hour or so of play, so I don’t need to sit in my chair wondering when I’m going to get hit with it.

What I am disappointed in is that the villains have changed – not the Big Bad villains, but the minions that are presumably working for them. This game introduced a new kind of minions, and honestly I’m not really disappointed in the new minions either – they’re nicely creepy and it’s good when your bad guys aren’t too familiar.

The only reason I’m disappointed, then, is because I had planned to title a post “Mass Effect 2: Geth Again” and it doesn’t look like I’m going to get to do that since the Geth don’t seem to be in this one.

I guess I could complain that they changed the key bindings around and I’ve had a couple of deaths due to mixing up the functions of space and left shift, which were swapped for no logically explained reason, and changing quick save from F6 to F5 also makes no bloody sense, but uh. That’s pretty pathetic stuff to gripe about.

Short version, then: the graphics are better, they’ve sanded off some of the rougher bits of the original, and I was able to import my save from ME1 and have it pick up on all of my story choices, and it really feels like this is My Story as a result. I’ll just have to work a little harder when I make up a funny title for the next post about it.

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Don’t Drink, Don’t Smoke, What Do You Do?

Posted on July 20, 2014 by baudattitude

The problem with games with morals systems is that I only ever really see the nice guy path. I mean, sure, it might be fun to see a bit more of the, let’s say, “morally ambiguous” path, but when the mouse pointer is hovering over the “throw the puppy into the blast furnace” option, I can never bring myself to click it.

I blame Lord British, to be perfectly clear. I played Ultima IV at a young and impressionable age and was uh…

…impressioned? I’m going to call that a word, anyway.  Having to play a game by a set of eight virtues is pretty heady stuff for a 12-year-old kid, particular after the empty-all-the-chests-kill-all-the-guards gameplay from Ultima III.

But enough about old Origin games and more about something a little more recent:

masseffecttitle

I’ve been putting off starting Mass Effect for a few years now, for a variety of reasons – no controller support in the PC version, knowing that the trilogy was unfinished, not wanting to commit quite THAT much time to an RPG in favor of playing quick-to-finish action games – and I probably would have kept putting it off except for recently needing to stay up for about 32 hours to set myself to Japan time before getting on a plane.

Since I started Mass Effect about 24 hours into this, my memories of the earlier bits of the game are a little fuzzy.  Mostly I have vague memories of following objective markers across alien planets and feeling completely outgunned most of the time.

I made the mistake, you see, of not having anyone in my away team with the skills to open all of the assorted secured lockers we were walking past, so I wasn’t getting money or upgrades very often.  Once I figured out that, hey, I should have a tech guy along, the game got WAY easier.  Not that I didn’t still die an awful lot, because apparently I love the spicy taste of plasma cannon, but I stopped dying quite AS often.

Anyway, I played the second half while NOT sleep-deprived, and had quite a good time.  I’d MOSTLY managed to avoid being spoiled, though I did ruin at least one plot point for a later game for myself by foolishly browsing Amazon’s selection of related plastic trinkets, but that’s all on me and I can’t fuss too much about it.  Mostly all I knew going in was that a) the first Big Bad Guy I met wasn’t the REAL Big Bad Guy, and that b) it had managed to make the pearl-clutching set clutch their pearls all that much more tightly by including girl-on-alien-girl romance action.

It gets significant points for occasionally having solutions to conflict that did NOT involve insert bullet A into mook B, and getting to skip one boss fight completely purely on charm brought back happy memories of talking my way through the final Big Bad Encounter in Planescape: Torment.  I will take some points OFF for being able to accidentally gimp myself by forgetting a tech guy, but not many.

Mostly I play RPGs to get to feel like The Badass Guy (or Girl) who gets to save the world, drive back ancient evils, and generally secure a bright future for people who never appreciated me along the way.  This one gave me all that AND let me romance a blue alien girl with tentacles, so I will mark it off as mission accomplished and try to get to the sequel games before I forget everything that happened in the first one.

 

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