Baud Attitude

Embarrassingly enough, once I finally got around to playing Panzer Dragoon Orta, it turns out that it’s a pretty short game. The in-game clock put my final time at just under four hours, which probably includes a few false starts from back when I first got the game.

On the other hand, that was back when I was absolute rubbish at pretty much anything action-based, so I doubt I’d have been able to get past the final three-stage boss fight, would likely have gotten frustrated, and probably would have long since sold the thing off.

So, maybe waiting over a decade was a good thing after all.

It is a little odd going back to a game from the early 2000s when the dual-analog control scheme wasn’t quite as standardized. PDO’s controls aren’t as weird as the other Smilebit game I’ve played (GunValkyrie), but it still felt more than a little weird to be completely ignoring that second analog.

The simple controls work, though, because PDO is, like the earlier games in the series, a game with pretty straightforward mechanics. It’s honestly not much more than a very pretty shooting gallery that you fly through. There are branching paths in most of the levels, and PDO in particular adds some strategic elements with the multiple dragon forms and a greater emphasis on flanking in the massive boss fights that have always been the hallmark of the series, but you don’t legitimately have a whole lot of say in where you’re going or how fast you’re going to get there.

The payoff, though, isn’t really about the gameplay. It’s about getting to immerse yourself in a starkly-beautiful post-apocalyptic world and seeing just enough of its mysteries to leave you wanting more.

That may have gotten a little florid there but I trust you take my point.

Anyway, it was an excellent reason to blow the dust off the Xbox. 🙂

Recently I’ve had a friend helping me out by listing a bunch of stuff on eBay, which is a little lazy on my part if I’m honest, but which is also proving very handy for both of us – she gets a cut of the proceeds and huge amount of positive eBay feedback, and I get some much-needed cash and space back.

Also she mocks me relentlessly about some of the stuff I ask her to sell, but she’s known me long enough that I don’t think any of it actually comes as a shock.

Anyway, the space is the really important thing. Not that the money is a BAD thing – I just had a dryer decide to explode in the same week as my mechanic said, hey, do you know what a strut is? It’s something you need to replace a pair of – but the new free space is important because it’s let me start putting together a dedicated gaming space.

Yeah, as goals go, that’s pretty low on the list of life achievements for most people, but I’m enjoying the process.

Anyway, in determining exactly which consoles should be hooked up, I found myself trying to decide whether I needed an original Xbox or whether I could make do with 360 backwards compatibility, and the answer was “not yet” because I still have a few games that either aren’t BC at all or have problems when emulated.

Like, oh, Panzer Dragoon Orta, which I pre-ordered, ran to the store to pick up on release day, cheerfully handed over 50 bucks for, added another 20 bucks for the soundtrack of, and then played up until the third level and put aside to get back to rotting into a chair while I played EverQuest.

That was, oh, 12 years ago.

Anyway, I decided to rectify that tonight and played up to level six in a single sitting.

It’s really, really good. It’s colorful and challenging and is just generally imaginative as all get out, and I feel rather dumb for letting it sit on the shelf for this long.

I understand that it gets seriously nasty in the last few levels, so I doubt that I’ll be following this post up with a victory post anytime real soon, but I figure that if I made it through GunValkyrie I can make it through pretty much anything.

I just Orta tried it earlier. 🙂

Dug deep into the backlog this week and unearthed Silent Hill 2, which I’ve been meaning to play for ages.  I played through the Wii remake (re-envisioning?) of the first game a couple of years ago, which I am told is an abomination and an insult to the series at large, so this is my first proper Silent Hill game.

It… hasn’t aged well, I don’t think.  It is somewhat saved by some excellent sound design, and the fog and shadow effects aren’t half-bad, but character and enemy models are pretty terrible and objects in the environment are usually just a few shiny pixels on a shelf.  It’s a 13-year old game, after all.

(With that said, it still looks better than the HD remake versions that came out a couple of years back.  Those are shinier, yeah, but in a way that displays far too much detail at times.)

It’s also terrifically easy to walk past key items and not notice for quite a long time, which got me well and truly stuck on two occasions.

Putting those gripes aside, it’s got atmosphere in spades and a seriously creepy ending, so  I’m glad that I finally got around to playing it and I’m looking forward to trying 3 at some point.