In which, I talk about a post-apocalyptic anime waifu tactical cover shooter gacha mobile game.

Posted on November 10, 2023 by baudattitude

So I have a dirty little secret.  I’ve been playing, and enjoying, a game about cute cyborg girls with big guns.  That wouldn’t be too shameful, on the face of it, but there’s one thing I feel desperately compelled to explain.

I’ve been playing it with the English dub voices.  I feel dirty.  Please let me put this in context.

Last October, my twitter feed lit up with ads for “Nikke: Goddess of Victory”, which I initially wrote off as yet another “Oh, Korea, what are we going to do with you?” sort of mobile cash grab.  I signed up for it before release, it dutifully downloaded to both my phone and tablet on release day, and then it kinda sat there.

In April, I finally got around to launching it.  From what I’m gathering, skipping the first few months was a good idea since it was notably a little rough.  The power of procrastination!

Anyway, I played for a couple of hours, just long enough to get through MOST of the intro but not enough to get to the point where the game starts throwing systems at you.

The story is essentially “Mankind has been largely wiped out by killer robots from outer space, and driven underground.  Your mission is to try to reclaim the surface by blowing up aforementioned killer robots.  Build a team of cute cyborg girls to save the world.”

It didn’t really hook me but I had to admit that the character designs for your starter team were nice.

Rapi is the duty-minded “adult” of the team.  She has a perpetual headache from keeping these two under control:

Anis is the requisite smart-aleck hothead.

And Neon is the adorable glasses girl who really really likes to blow things up and shoot increasingly-bigger guns.  Naturally she should be Best Girl, right?  Well, it’s complicated.

Oh, and she’s been put on the team as an infiltrator to send data back to her corporate overlords.  But she’s not very good at it.

Anyway, six months later I went to Japan and was browsing the shelves at an Animate in Ikebukuro with my wife, who was doing some research.

Research topic: “How Much ‘Link/Click’ merchandise has been released, and how much of it can I fit in this shopping basket?”

There was a section devoted to Nikke and Blue Archive, another mobile game I’d tried out and not gotten hooked on.  Since both games are pretty, I picked up a little merch.  Nothing huge, just a pair of mousepads with art from each game and some acrylic stands from Nikke featuring the starter squad members.

Then I got back to the US, unpacked my boxes of swag, set up the little Nikke acrylic stands and thought, well, maybe I’ll give the game another try.

OK.  So I am normally the sort of person who looks immediately for the “switch voices to Japanese” option in any game, so when Nikke booted and all of the characters were speaking English I assumed that it was just the only option.  Obviously since I’d played it before I would have turned off the dub, right?

I finished the REST of the game intro, to the point where the whole thing opened up and presented me with all kinds of amazing bars to fill that would fill up and go “ping!” and unlock other bars to fill, and that’s about where I got hooked.  I have the sort of brain that loves having bars to fill that go ping.

There are five red dots on this screen.  Every one of those red dots represents somewhere I can go to fill bars.  I have already filled many bars today, so most of the red dots that were previously there are gone now.  Tomorrow there will be more red dots.

To be a little less silly, the game loop is pretty much centered around building up teams of cute cyborg girls, leveling them and getting them better gear, and throwing them at cover-based shooter missions to slowly unlock the story.  Honestly, you could probably swap out all of the art with Manly Men Doing Manly Things and still have a pretty fun game, but probably one that would sink immediately to the bottom of the App Store charts and be forgotten after a month.

While there’s no “energy” mechanic to slow you down, most of the resources you can use to improve your team come from a bar that fills over about twelve hours and can be tapped at any point to empty.  The speed at which your resource bar fills increases as you finish story missions and is further improved by some things you can do in the base building mini game.

Oh, right, there’s a base building mini game.

Not too far into the story, you unlock the “Outpost” which is initially a bit of a boring blank slate.  As you go through missions you find building blueprints, and bringing them back to the Outpost lets you construct a variety of buildings which generate resources and more story sequences where you get to interact with the Nikkes outside of combat settings.

Also, you get an office of your very own, which your team immediately takes over from you as it has a working shower and a couch.

In what I think is a sign that the original intention was to monetize the heck out of this, every time you place a building there is a slight delay while a “construction time” counter counts down from 5 seconds.  My assumption is that the initial design was to have the player wait hours for buildings to complete unless they were willing to fork over some of the game’s premium currency, but that this was dropped before release.  I can’t prove this.

So coming back to what I was talking about earlier, while there is no “energy” mechanic there is a cap to how many resources you can collect in a day and this affects how strong you can make your team.  So you are effectively capped by the strength of the team compared to the difficulty of the story missions, which does ramp up fairly rapidly.

Maybe I should talk about those a bit.

The world outside of your Outpost is pretty bleak and covered with killer robots.  Every level (so far) has involved maps to slowly clear of killer robots.

Walking in to one of these encounters presents you with information on your team, your relative power compared to the difficulty, and the rewards you’ll get.  You can check enemy composition here, which can be useful to find out things like the encounter will have distant enemies making it a good idea to swap out one of your team members for a sniper or lots of close-up enemies meaning that a shotgun or two would be a good plan.

After determining your team, it’s time to stare at butts and shoot robots.

There is a LOT of visual data being thrown at you in combat, and it can get a little confusing at times, but you get used to it.

You can swap between your five team members to choose one for manual targeting at any time, and the other four will more or less do their own thing while you control the fifth.  Missions are either “defeat a boss” or “defend a point” or “prevent killer robots from crossing a line” and are very short affairs with lots of satisfying explosions.

After the mission, you get a wrap-up screen with your rewards, some bars fill, and it’s off to more killer robots.

This would get boring pretty fast, if it weren’t for the frequent breaks for the story to advance.  There’s a good balance of shooty bits and visual-novel-style sequences, most of which are told with character sprites.   For Big Drama moments, you get the occasional custom CG.

Wait, I almost forgot!  There’s also a guy you occasionally have to talk to.  He’s kind of your mentor and frequently steps in to save you from the corporate drama and politicking that provides the game’s recommended levels of angst.

I think the designers were like, we need to prove that we CAN draw men.  So they knocked out  Andersen, here, and then got back to the much more lucrative process of designing waifus.

Speaking of, let’s not pretend that the game is being run as a charity.  While it’s fairly generous at handing out currency you can throw into the game’s “recruit” gacha, the end goal IS to make you open your wallet.  So it has characters to suit ANY taste, though naturally the one you WANT never quite seems to fall out of the machine when you shake it.

Biker girls with leather pants?  Naval girls with no pants?  There are dozens of options.  You’ll get one of these SSR characters every once in a while, but be prepared to get out your credit card if there is one you MUST OWN AT ANY COST.

There is a pity system of sorts, in that you slowly collect tickets from the gacha system that can eventually be turned in to purchase specific characters.  I haven’t interacted with the gacha enough times to build up enough tickets to explore this, but I’m told it exists.

I made the EXCELLENT decision to start playing this game during its first anniversary celebration, so it has been deluging me with free gacha draws and I have gotten to build up a pretty good team of characters.  If I was spending much real money I might be more critical of it, but it has been a blast and I felt like gushing about it.

OK, now for the Real Talk.  While Neon SHOULD have been the Best Girl, it did not take long before I realized that the real Best Girl was, in fact, Anis.  Apparently I like… angry girls?  I’m not sure how to process that.

Also, I eventually launched the game on my phone, rather than my tablet, and discovered that I had switched the game audio to Japanese on the phone, meaning that I was no longer stuck with the English dub!  Progress, right?

…except.

…Anis’s Japanese voice is really boring by comparison.  It’s kind of generically cute as opposed to perpetually-snarky.

I can’t get over it, so I’m stuck with the dub, and I feel I have lost an amazing amount of geek cred by admitting this.

I mean, it’s a Korean game right?  So even the Japanese voices aren’t the original language, right?  There’s NO SHAME IN CHOOSING THE ENGLISH DUB SINCE EVEN JAPANESE IS A DUB, RIGHT?  I’M NOT ABANDONING YEARS OF ANTI-DUB SNOBBERY HERE, RIGHT?

please forgive me I have sinned.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in iOS, videogames | Leave a comment

Sugar Overload in a Love Live Cafe

Posted on November 5, 2023 by baudattitude

So, I was in Japan for about two weeks recently.  It was my first time since 2017, and my wife’s first time visiting since 2005.  Needless to say, we had a long list of things we wanted to do and finally narrowed it down to spending a week in Kyoto and then a week in Tokyo.  There’ll be more trips in future for other stuff.

I’ll probably have a bunch more posts to write about the trip in general, but I wanted to start off with a little side trip I made, almost entirely by chance.

See, about three days before the flight I was looking at a map of the east coast of Japan and realized that Numazu was basically between the two places we were planning to stay.  I’d always assumed that it was somewhere super rural or on Shikoku or somewhere, not literally  five minutes away from a Shinkansen stop, and this kinda blew my mind.

So, on a bright and sunny Monday morning, I boarded a Kodama Shinkansen bound for Mishima, which is the aforementioned stop, and set off at a couple hundred miles per hour towards the home of Aqours… and, critically, the home of the “Sun Sun Sunshine” Love Live! Sunshine!!-themed cafe, which I was bound and determined to see before it closes early next year.

And then we stopped, a couple of stations short of Mishima.  For a few hours.  Because there had been a fire on a hillside directly above the tracks, and train service was suspended until they could be sure that nothing was going to fall onto the tracks in front of a train going at ludicrous speed.  But I still made it to Numazu in time for …well, it was going to be lunch but we were stopped for so long that I finally gave up and hopped off the train and grabbed a mediocre ekiben and got back on the train.  So I wasn’t in the mood for actual food anymore, but surely they would have desserts?

It’s been several years since the peak of Love Live! Sunshine!! fandom, but Numazu is still pretty proud of their claim to fame, which presumably got a bit of a boost from the recent Yohane-themed spinoff show, and you will see plenty of school idols when walking around the station area.

They put the best girls in front.  And also Yoshiko.

The cafe itself is literally within view of the station exit.  I’m 50/50 on whether that’s to be more convenient for fans or to make it less likely that the fans will venture further into town and annoy the locals, but in any event it’s easy to find and has a super cheery exterior.

It’s a little run down inside, but at this point the anime IS several years old and the cafe itself is slated for teardown so that’s not too surprising.  The waiting area has a small sampling of merch and some decor.

You can’t buy any of the nesos.  Actually I didn’t see a single Love Live! neso for sale anywhere in my trips through anime stores.  Are they, like, super rare now or something?

It took a while for someone to come out and seat me, but eventually I was seated at a reasonably comfortable piece of lawn furniture and presented a menu and a long list of rules, which I will try to recite from memory.

In no particular order:  You cannot record video in the cafe.  You can take photographs, but you should not take photographs that include other patrons.  Since the place was damn near empty, that was not a tricky rule to obey.

You must spend at least Y500, which isn’t particularly difficult if you are ordering literally anything.  To receive one of the shop’s limited-edition coasters, you must order a drink.  You will receive a random coaster and cannot ask for a different one.   One drink, one random coaster.

You must finish your drink before ordering another.

They made sure I understood all of these.

The table is laminated because they don’t actually expect you to use the coasters.  In fact, when I ordered a “Ruby” (an extremely sweet cherry drink), they brought it out on a tray next to the upside-down coaster, put the drink down on the table, made a bit of a show of flipping over the coaster to expose the image side, and put it on the table on the opposite side of my body from the drink.  There was no risk of any liquid actually touching the coaster.

Oh, the coasters aren’t 100% random.  You can order a special dessert set to get a coaster featuring the (dog? wolf?) from the recent Yohane show.  I assume this coaster is not part of the random assortment.

For the record, I wanted sweets and I got sweet overload.  And a coaster.  For like Y1800, about 12 bucks thanks to the current exchange rate.

Oh, and the Ruby-themed drink I bought after finishing this scored me a Chika coaster.  That was Y700 and honestly more ice than drink, probably so the diehards slamming back drink after drink in their quest for a complete set don’t need to make TOO many bathroom stops.

I stopped myself at that point.  My policy with any sort of random merch is to buy ONE, be happy with what I get, and not keep going.

While enjoying my sugar, sugar, and more sugar, I got to listen to a video loop that seemed to consist of highlights from the Love Live! Sunshine!! anime, some advertisements for blu ray volumes that were released like seven years ago, and some interviews with the voice actresses/idols.  It was a pretty good time.

Then I took a few pictures of the interior and went for a walk in Numazu before hopping back on the train back to Tokyo.

I’m pretty sure the staff would have accommodated me if I’d asked to get a picture of myself with my face through the mikan, but dear lord a man must retain some pride.

I am more of a μ’s fan, but this was a good time and well worth the time it took for a little side trip, even if it included a few hours of unexpected sitting on stationary trains.

Posted in anime, Japan, travel | 1 Comment

On Galapagos Syndrome

Posted on September 26, 2023 by baudattitude

Kind of a cool discovery today, and I thought I’d exploit it for what the kids call “content”.

Some backstory, though.  I’ve been going back and forth to Japan, when possible, since about 2006, and I’m planning to go again later this year.  This has always been a good time, but it hasn’t always been the easiest thing from a tech standpoint.  Cell phones in Japan, for example, used different radio frequencies and standards compared to almost anywhere else in the world, meaning that going back and forth between Japan and the US meant buying one of a tiny handful of dual-mode phones.

Thankfully, that particular problem died due to Apple entering the phone market.  I’m not sure if communications standards changed or whether Apple just wanted to sell the same phone everywhere in the world so all iPhones were dual-mode phones, but I was very relieved when I got to Narita in like 2010 and my iPhone 3GS hooked right up to the SoftBank network and stayed there for the rest of the trip.

Sadly, the last time I was in Japan was like 2017 – thanks, Corona – and there were still some things you couldn’t do with a foreign phone, like Apple Pay for purchases and for transit.

Come 2023.  I’m prepping for this year’s trip, my wife is coming this time, and I’m concerned because I would like to get her a Suica card for trains and vending machines but  Japan Rail is currently not issuing new Suica cards due to a chip shortage.  So, we sit down and watch a video on the current state of things and discover that there’s a tourist-specific Suica that she’ll be able to get, even if it expires after 28 days.

The video ALSO claims that you can just add a Suica to Apple wallet and it will create you one out of thin air, and I was a little skeptical about that but figured I would try it.

OK, so here’s where I was legitimately shocked.  You can go into Apple Wallet, tell it you want to add a transit pass, scroll down to Japan and pick Suica and it just works.  That was stunning, but not exactly shocking.

What amazed me was that the phone prompted me to import my existing physical card, and when I chose this option it was just like, OK, lay your phone on top of your Suica and leave it there for a minute.

I hadn’t used the card since 2017, so when it gave me a random “that didn’t work, bro” sort of error message I wasn’t too surprised.  Like, after 6 years of disuse I wouldn’t be shocked if my card aged out of the system, right?

But, there was a “Try Again” button so I gave it one more chance.

It seems I left about twenty bucks on my account the last time I left Japan.  Not a bad thing to get back.

OK, so.  I haven’t actually tested this out.  It’s possible that I’ll get to Japan, try to tap my phone on a turnstile and just get an embarrassing failure sound.  But right now, at this precise moment in time, it looks like this is going to work and that’s pretty cool.

Maybe Apple Pay will work, too?  OK, that’s just fantasy land territory at this point.

 

 

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Getting ahead of the digital future

Posted on September 9, 2023 by baudattitude

Since I’ve gone almost entirely away from physical media, I’ve had to come to grips with the notion that the “digital future” probably means losing access to things I’ve paid money for, from time to time.  It’s actually pretty rare that this happens, and usually there are workarounds.  Like, I bought “Bioshock 2” on Microsoft’s long-defunct Games For Windows Live Marketplace, and I can’t download it any more, but it’s also available on a myriad of different systems at this point.

Most of which have controller support.  I’m still annoyed by that.

Of course, if a digital platform shuts down, I can’t buy anything new there even if I still have access to all of my old stuff.  This usually sees me doing a last-minute binge of “I might play this some day” and then I don’t, and today’s binge is probably not going to be an exception.

With the Xbox 360 marketplace going offline in July of 2024, I thought I should look through the games on offer and just make sure that I had everything I could possibly want from it.  It turned out that the list of “I might ever want this” and “I don’t already own it” was pretty short, so the binge wasn’t much of a strain on the wallet.

Exit was a puzzle strategy platform sort of game that I played to death on the PSP back in the day.  Mostly while hiding from my actual day job, if I’m honest, but it’s not like the difference in productivity between “me pretending to work” and “me abandoning all pretense of working” was all that massive anyway.

Anyway, you’re a dude with an awesome scarf who saves people in all kinds of trouble, and the game is just super stylish.

I never played the sequel, but now I own both it and the original and may even play a level and get that nostalgic feeling and then forget to ever come back to it.

Speaking of nostalgia, I am a young lad of the age to have seen Tron in the theaters and owned the Official Novelization Of The Major Motion Picture and played the Official Arcade Game whenever I could cage a quarter from my parents, and apparently the Xbox 360 Marketplace is the only way you can play the game without buying one of these gorgeous things from Arcade 1up:

But while I like Tron, I don’t six-hundred-dollars-LOVE-Tron, so spending five bucks on the Xbox 360 version will do me just fine.

I didn’t buy Discs of Tron because (blasphemy!) I was never a super fan of it.

I wanted one other Xbox 360 game – “Flatout: Ultimate Carnage” – but it looks like that was only released on disc, or if it ever was available via the marketplace it has been pulled.  Fortunately, you can currently buy the entire Flatout series from Steam for 8 bucks, so I did that.

Imagine my delight when I tried to launch it and it simply closed without any sort of error message.

Thanks to the fine folks over at PCGamingWiki, I discovered that this was a known issue and that I needed to download and install the Vista-era Games for Windows Live client, which miraculously still works on Windows 11.

The game also looks pretty good at 4k, and controls very nicely with my repurposed Stadia controller.  I remain very glad Google decided to unlock those after that particular part of the digital future died, because it is a super comfy game pad.

With the startup and controller issues resolved, I decided I’d play Just One Race to see how it worked… and finally stopped myself five races later.  There’s just something about the way the physics work in this and the godawful horrid soundtrack and all the wonderful things you can crash into and send flying that make it a very compelling package.

Anyway, there’s probably some DLC I should pick up while I still can.  I’ve got like 10 months.  Plenty of time to forget I need to do that.

 

Posted in psp, videogames, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment

WoW Cheevo Spam

Posted on August 20, 2023 by baudattitude

It’s pretty common that no posts in a while = I’ve been playing too much of an MMO.  The recent one has been WoW, and I thought I’d share some of what I’ve been up to.

The game got its version 10.1 patch back in early May, bringing with it a new raid zone and a frankly rather-forgettable outdoors zone full of mole people with Minnesota accents.  They sit firmly on the bad side of the line that separates “cute and charming” from “grating”, so the less said about them the better.

Instead, I have been playing a tiny fox with a big sword and took over one of my guild’s two tank spots, which has been a real change in terms of responsibility.

Also adorability.

I’m not in a terribly hard core raiding guild.  We try to get the “Ahead of the Curve” achievement for any given patch, which consists of completing the current raid zone on Heroic difficulty.  That’s the third of four difficulties and is usually challenging without being guild-breaking.

It took us about three months to complete this goal, after which most of the guild stopped logging in. Historically they’ll be back for the next patch, which will likely be in late October/Early November.  Until then, they are presumably experimenting with Man-On-Bear action in Baldur’s Gate 3.

I’ve been plugging along to knock out a few more accomplishments.  In addition to collecting seasonal armor appearances (fashion is the true end game), I managed to knock out this season’s Keystone Master achievement for running Mythic dungeons and run through the newly-introduced Dawn of the Infinites dungeon.

Last season I ran something like two hundred and forty Mythic dungeons.  I have been considerably more casual this season, and managed to pick up KSM with just over 20 dungeon runs.

I also got into a group that went through the raid, on a slightly lower difficulty, while knocking out some optional achievements along the way.  These were a lot of fun.  They included challenges like killing a boss at the same time you have a massive frog jumping around to disrupt things and getting an entire raid group to deliberately stand in front of a dragon while they did their Godzilla-level breath weapon attack.

There’s one of these meta achievements every season, and this was my first time completing it.

Now that I’ve finished my major goals for the season, I’ve been goofing around on a couple of other characters and have picked up some new friends to do casual raids with.  I haven’t been a terrifically-social WoW player previously, but I’ve been kind of adopted by a couple of different late night raid teams and it’s been a super relaxed, super friendly time.

Apart from WoW, I just picked up “Lifeless Moon”, the sort-of-sequel to “Lifeless Planet” and I’ll probably post my thoughts on that once it’s wrapped up.   My wife is also getting me caught up on Star Trek: Discovery – very good so far – and I have been going back to watch the recent Marvel movies on Disney+.  Without saying anything here to make any enemies, I’ll just say that everything since Doctor Strange 2: Strange Harder has kind of fallen a bit flat for me.  I’m trying real hard not to be one of those curmudgeons who rants about how the MCU should have ended with “Endgame” but it’s a difficult thing at times.

 

 

Posted in mac, MMORPG, videogames | Leave a comment

If it’s Thursday, this must be Sparta

Posted on July 14, 2023 by baudattitude

While it may hurt my gaming cred – side note, I have no “gaming cred” to hurt – I am unabashedly a fan of open-world games where you have a giant map covered in icons and fog that can be rolled back to expose more icons, in the way that one would peel back tinfoil to expose tater tots.

Carrying this already-tortured analogy one step further, I have been binging the heck out of tater tots for like three weeks now.  After finishing Atelier Ryza, I dove into Ghostwire: Tokyo, followed by Halo Infinite, followed by finally going back to Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey so I could finish up the DLC in time to, if I’m honest, probably not play Valhalla before the next Asscreed game hits the shelves.  That’s in October, I think?  So I have three months to not play Valhalla in.  I can totally do that.

Despite all of these games being about running around a giant map and ignoring the main quest, you couldn’t pick a triptych of games with more different vibes.

Starting with Ghostwire, a game where the main character dies in a motorcycle accident in the opening cutscene, just in time for a disembodied spirit looking for a body to take over.

Except, you weren’t QUITE dead yet and now you’re stuck in a supernatural buddy cop movie where you have to run around Shibuya and bust the heck out of a whole mess of evil ghosts while also trying to foil a mad scientist’s plans.

I won’t go into the specifics of these plans, but trust me when I say that they are not good and rightfully deserve foiling.

Shibuya isn’t my favorite city in Japan, but I’ve spent a fair bit of time there in both real life and various virtual versions, and I really liked the version on offer here.  It isn’t a block-for-block recreation, but it’s close enough to make little difference and the art team worked overtime to make sure that it felt real and lived-in.

You know, if you take a second between rescuing lost spirits and sending vengeful spirits to the after-afterlife to stop and look around.

I followed that up with Halo Infinite, a game I wasn’t at all certain would survive the transition from a generally-linear FPS.

Short version: It survived and was a genuine blast to play, though I got a little annoyed when the last few missions dumped me back into an extremely linear sequence.  I think I COULD have fast traveled out and gone back to the over world to spend time checking icons off a map, but it didn’t feel right.

That aside, the whole thing felt like a massive playground, albeit in a slightly rough neighborhood.  Zeta Halo is covered with bases to capture and stuff to collect and very rarely gives you any grief about the methods you use to accomplish your goals.

Case in point: At one point, I happened upon an enemy tank in an enemy base, and used it to pound the stuffing out of a bunch of Totally Not Covenant Because We’re At Peace With the Covenant dudes in said base, and it was Good Times listening to all of the bad guys shouting at each other about how they would like to get me out of the tank and would someone do something about the tank.

Then I realized that I could lower a gate and get the tank OUT of the base, and drive it around the map – albeit, quite slowly – and that having a tank made many other activities entirely trivial.  Cheap?  Yes.  But nothing stopped me, and shelling enemy bases into goo while not actually being in any particular risk never failed to put the biggest smile on my face.

I think there are a lot of games developed with the philosophy that you can have a tank, yes, here, where we intend you to have the tank, but if you try to take the tank anywhere not intended we are going to have some extremely sturdy bollards preventing you from doing this.  Halo just shrugs and says, sure, until it blows up you can go wild with the tank.

Also the screams of Grunts when you hit them with your electrified grappling hook never got old.  I’m not sure I’m a good person but mmmmm so satisfying.

Howlongtobeat tells me that you can clock the Halo Infinite campaign in under 11 hours, and I spent over twice that running around doing hashtag-JustSpartanThings.

I don’t THINK hearing “Spartan, spartan, spartan” over and over again during the course of the Halo campaign had any bearing on my decision to go back to Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey after Halo was over, but now that I’m thinking about it I’m not able to entirely rule it out.

Anyway.  I bought the Complete Edition of Odyssey a bit over three years ago, binged the heck out of the main story, put it aside for three months or so, binged the heck out of the first DLC pack, put the game aside again for another five months and then came back to start the “Fate of Atlantis” storyline in, roughly, February of 2021.

I did not get very far into Fate of Atlantis before shelving the whole thing.  The game’s depiction of Elysium wasn’t nearly as exciting as sailing around Ancient Greece, and the storyline kept asking me to side with one of two thoroughly unlikeable NPCs.

Still, I am one of the weirdos that actually got sorta invested in the modern day AC story, and the DLC promised me some more of that, so it’s been on my get-back-to-someday list for a while.

Now that I’ve done that… eh.  Of the three DLC chapters, the best is decidedly the middle “Hades” chapter, which has you reuniting with a whole lot of characters who died in the main game for some final adventures.  And, even though the story beats in Elysium and Atlantis never really landed for me, both were at least really pretty environments to climb around and run through.  Ubisoft has some great environmental artists.

It’s also worth noting that the comes-with-everything edition of Odyssey regularly goes on sale for thirty bucks, which gets you Odyssey itself, six DLC episodes, a tremendous amount of post-launch free DLC and two remasters of earlier AC games.  If you have even the slightest interest in sneaking around and stabbing mans in historical settings, it is a shockingly good value.

 

Posted in videogames | Leave a comment

Call of Cutey: Alchemical Warfare

Posted on June 24, 2023 by baudattitude

Even though you’d think the Atelier series would be smack dab in my wheelhouse, I’ve never played any of them.  It’s a combination of (a) being afraid of time limits, which were a Thing in the earlier titles and (b) their reputation as being cutesy girly games for manly spreadsheet enjoyers.

As a side note, to test that last theory, I spent some time looking up reviews of Atelier Ryza after finishing it, and every one I read (sample size: four) was written by someone with XY chromosomes.  I can’t speak to their fondness for Excel, mind you.

Anyway.  Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout.  It’s the 21st game in the series, has no time limits, introduced a main character so popular that she got her own trilogy, and is generally considered a good place to jump on.   I bought the first two games during a PSN sale last year and just got around to finishing the first.  Nine months later.  For me, that’s actually a decent speed.

It’s a good thing I bought two games, because the pacing in Ryza drove me crazy for quite a while and I might have dropped it if I hadn’t already spent money on the sequel.  I’m glad I didn’t, and I’m glad I played it to completion as it was a lot of fun, but WOW does this game spend a long time spinning its wheels before the plot kicks off.  If you’re reading this and considering trying it out, I figure you’re forewarned now.

Part of the reason that the game doesn’t really get into the Stuff Just Got Real phase for quite a while is that, well, it’s got a bunch of characters and they’re all pretty fleshed out and interesting and you get a lot of talking-heads-style cutscenes while you’re learning about them and their backstories.

There are also a ton of systems that I had trouble wrapping my head around at first, which resulted in quite a few nasty and brutal deaths to bosses.  In fact, I don’t think I hit any boss that didn’t wipe me out at least once or twice, which in most games would mean that you needed to go grind levels for a bit and come back.

In Ryza, it means that you need to go Do Some Alchemy, which you would have thought would be obvious but which took me a while to realize.  It also took me hours and hours until I realized that the game wasn’t going to hold my hand and tell me WHAT I should be alchemizing.  I just needed to take every new recipe I got, make it for the first time and then look at what else I could make with it.

Honestly, I’m not entirely convinced that’s on me.  It felt like there were a ton of quality-of-life features the game could have, like letting you know where you had collected an item before and what tool was needed to collect it from which sort of gathering node.  I’m not going to say definitively that it’s a subtle way to push you to buy a guide book, but I will say that alchemy gets considerably less annoying if you have a drop locations table open on a second screen at all times.

One late-game alchemy synthesis, in particular, involves collecting components from flowers in a certain zone.  There are only 3 or 4 of the flowers in the zone and they give different materials based on which tool you use to harvest them, so I wound up having to make several passes through the zone with different tools.

On the other hand, you can simply run around enemies to avoid combat if you don’t feel like it, so farming really isn’t much of a chore.  Ryza runs at a pretty good pace, you can make items to make her run faster, and there’s even a sprint button that you can keep activated more or less 100% of the time as there’s no stamina loss associated.

Sprinting DID wind up giving me motion sickness after a while, though, so mostly I kept that off.

Once I got the hang of where I could find things, and how to efficiently gather them, and how to use the fast travel system to instantly reload the zone I was currently in, I had a lot of fun with the alchemy system.  I didn’t get into it to the point of discovering infinite loops that could be used to completely break the game, but I did enjoy the going out and farming for just the right materials to make cool gear for all of the characters.

Well, the three characters I used.  There are six characters, you can only have three in your party at any time, and none of them are particularly worse than others so you really get to pick whichever like the most based on looks and personality.

You have the titular character, Ryza herself, who is sort of a brat who thinks there must be more than this provincial life really doesn’t want to inherit the family farm. She eventually evolves into… well, sort of a bratty Tony Stark, always inventing new things without knowing quite what they’re going to do.  Some of them explode.

She has a pair of childhood friends, and I will forgive you if you just call them “brains” and “brawn” but their real names are Tao and Lent.  They mostly get exist to get sucked into her crazy misadventures.

She picks up a traveling merchant’s daughter, who represents the barely veiled actually not veiled at all love interest.  Ryza herself appears to be completely clueless that the party’s token buffer/healer is crushing on her.

…well, at first.

LEWD.

She also gets an Alchemy mentor who teaches her the subtle tricks of the trade.

…and the alchemy mentor comes with some extra muscle.

In this screenshot, you can see her eyes.  That isn’t necessarily always the case.

Some cutscenes are less than subtle with the camera angles, is what I’m saying.

Lila’s ample… tracts of land and some moderately-inappropriate bouncing on the 17-year-old main character aside, there’s really nothing objectionable about the game.  You could probably play this around friends or a spouse without more than the occasional eye roll.

Well, my wife did say a couple of things about Ryza’s Daisy Dukes, but there were several other outfits I could pick from.

I realize I may be sounding a bit negative at points in this, but I think most of the things that annoyed me were simply me needing to learn how the Atelier series works.  There were 20 games before Ryza, after all, and presumably there are a bunch of long-time fans who don’t need to be hand-held through the alchemy bits.  While I’m not going to jump right into Ryza 2, I’m expecting a lot of the stuff I learned from Ryza 1 to simply carry over when I do.

Overall, it was a nice comfy RPG with lower-than-average stakes and characters I didn’t mind hanging out with for 30 or 40 hours.  You’re not trying to save the entire world, you’re just trying to help the village and the people you grew up with, and you’re making friends along the way.

Well, and blowing stuff up.  FOR SCIENCE.

 

Posted in PS4, videogames | Leave a comment

COD:MEWTWO. Completely different from CoD: MEWTWO.

Posted on June 14, 2023 by baudattitude

After playing a dozen Switch games, it was kind of weird going back to the Series X and jumping into the Biggest of Big Budget games, but it turned out to be a pretty good change of pace.

I have a hard time keeping track of the stories in the assorted Calls of Duty, despite having played nearly all of them over the years.  I tend to play them out of order, with long gaps between, so the Big Reveals and character callbacks are largely lost on me.  One of these days, I should probably do what I did with the Halo series a few years back and just play through all of them in order, with supplemental lore material thrown in as I can.

Presuming there IS supplemental lore material.  I haven’t looked.  It’s very possible there’s like a forty novel series that is central to understanding why you are inserting bullet A into bad guy B in a variety of exotic locales, and if that’s the case then I may have to pass on the supplemental lore material.

Back to the game, though.

It’d be kind of silly to talk much about the actual gameplay of any given Call of Duty title, since they sell millions of copies, but since less than 13% of people have apparently finished the campaign mode I can at least talk about what I enjoyed there without feeling too silly about it.

Simply put, it’s a thrill ride.  Or, rather, an amusement park full of thrill rides, with a ton of variety.  While there are certainly levels that just consist of “run forward, shoot mans”, there are times you’re piloting an aircraft and providing cover for a ground team, or suddenly in a stealth-based level where you are gathering materials to craft crude tools, or trying to catch up to a fleeing SUV while jumping from commandeered vehicle to commandeered vehicle and dodging land mines.  The variety of stuff you DO on the wild ride from opening credits to ending credits and mid-credits teaser for the next game is just all over the place, and I was down for roughly 98% of it.

That remaining 2% represents some unkind thoughts about the sudden BOSS FIGHT HERE that is the culmination of level 16 of the campaign, but fortunately level 16 is the next-to-last level and the game ended with a gloriously manly sequence that washed the bad taste out of my mouth.

What really sets the series apart for me, however, is getting to see just what the game’s art and level team gets to do with functionally unlimited money, because the amount of detail that gets crammed into the various exotic shooting galleries you run through is just nuts.

Also I love scooters and this game has a ton of them.

This one in particular is VERY similar to the Burgman I ride on a regular basis.

A bunch of smaller 50-150cc scooters, and another Burgman or similar, silhouetted against a moody Amsterdam sky.  I was supposed to be hunting down terrorists or something at this point.  This was the level where you spent a lot of time swimming around and murdering people standing on docks.  it was a good time for anyone not standing on a dock.

More obsessively-detailed set dressing:

I’m not sure what’s going on with this computer.  There’s no CPU cooler, but there’s a big boxy thing with a fan on it just behind the drive bays that looks like it might be a second power supply, or something?

Magazines and marshmallows.  Also whoever sits at this desk can’t decide whether pencils should go points in or eraser in, and I feel that alone is justification for the fact that I had probably shot him just minutes before taking this screenshot.  Some people are past redemption.

Someone spent a lot of money on an art degree and then spent at least a day of their life designing this cardboard box with uneven packing tape on it, and I feel that deserves recognition.  Also I love the little fake flowerpot next to the duffel bags full of weapons and bullets and explosives and stuff.

Less keen on the weird six week calendar.

This level was like the Chernobyl level in Modern Warfare just dialed up.  Also windmills.  I didn’t notice any of the windmills missing blades.  Do they really just store spare blades next to wind farms?  I guess it makes sense to keep one or two around so you don’t need to ferry another one over if one breaks.

A pretty mountain in Mexico.  One of my favorite bits about the story of this game is that most of it is a cooperative thing between a dude from Scotland and a bunch of dudes from Mexican Special Forces and the dude from Scotland doesn’t speak any Spanish at the start of the game but is obviously hard at work learning Spanish throughout and seems pretty dang fluent by the end.  Like, when he’s in a black helicopter on his way to shoot a ton of dudes he is using that downtime to crack the books.

It kind of makes ME want to learn Spanish.  I thought video games were supposed to make me violent, not make me want to go back to school.

Lastly, a shot of Navy Pier in Chicago.  At least, I understand that’s where they keep their ferris wheel.  I think a lot of these screenshots were somewhat reduced in clarity when they were converted from HDR to SDR, which is a pity.  This was a really pretty night view and frankly I would 100% live on the 46th floor of a downtown Chicago skyscraper to get this view.

And a triumphant ending credit scroll.  It’s almost certainly an exaggeration to say that Call of Duty credits go on longer than the campaign itself but MAN do these games employ a ton of people to make.

After the ending credits, I played a single multiplayer match and managed to kill four opposing players while dying 28 times myself.  I understand that Call of Duty has matchmaking that is very aggressive about finding other players at your own skill level, and if that’s the case then I pity the poor algorithm that has to try to hook me up with ANYONE, should I give the multiplayer another chance to humiliate me.

Checking Wikipedia’s list of mainline Call of Duty games, I apparently skipped “Call of Duty: Vanguard”, which was last year’s entry.  I bought it during a PSN sale some time ago, so that’s going on the short list of to-play games.

 

 

Posted in videogames, Xbox Series X | Leave a comment

Switch thoughts, 12 games later.

Posted on June 10, 2023 by baudattitude

It’s safe to say that I’ve gotten more use out of my Switch recently than usual.  I just wrapped up my 12th game in a row with Qureate’s Prison Princess, an escape-the-room sort of puzzle adventure game with cute girls in revealing outfits, that might have been great if the designers hadn’t decided to stick timers on the puzzles.  That is the end of my comments on Prison Princess.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the Switch hardware, as it feels like a system that tries to be both a console and a portable and doesn’t manage either very well.  It’s either an underpowered console or an pocket-unfriendly-sized portable with $60 $70 games.

Also I am still salty that they ditched StreetPass because I loved carrying my 3DS everywhere and seeing the green light come on.

HOWEVER.

There are a ton of them out there, like over a hundred million of the things, and it has mostly-standard controllers, and it’s powerful enough to run Xbox 360-era games in handheld mode while only costing a couple hundred bucks if you buy the doesn’t-actually-“Switch” version.

That many potential customers, and a robust eShop that finally has a mostly-modern account system, means that it’s an easy place to publish the most niche of niche games and you (probably) won’t have to worry about the sorts of ham-fisted content moderation policies that Sony has become known for lately.

With all of that added up, it’s turned into a pretty impressive way to play lower-spec games, or stuff that would otherwise be locked on decaying legacy hardware, or things that just make more SENSE on a system that turns on in seconds and doesn’t need a TV.  It’s perfect for the visual novels and weird food stall management games and unexpected revivals of forgotten titles that I have been playing recently, or to boot up the Arcade Archives release of Moon Patrol for when I want a heady hit of pre-teen nostalgia.

Though, to go back to being a bit of a downer, it rather feels like Nintendo is kind of coasting on the success of the system and letting the hardware stagnant. Like, they COULD go through all the trouble of hardware R&D and then publish a new Mario Kart for a new system, or they could just sit back and count the money rolling in for the one they already have and where the development costs were spent years ago.

I was certain there would be a new Switch for 2022 when Splatoon 3 came out, then absolutely positive they wouldn’t launch a new Zelda game in 2023 without one, and now I have no idea whether they’ll bother before the system turns 10 in 2027.

They probably won’t wait until 2027.  That would be just nuts.  And it’s not like I NEED a more powerful system to emulate Moon Patrol on.  Right?

Posted in Switch, videogames | 2 Comments

Let me be your HOG.

Posted on June 7, 2023 by baudattitude

I haven’t played many hidden object games in the last few years, but I recently stumbled across the eighth entry in Sunward Games’ The Secret Order series on the Switch eShop, and since I’d played the first six games I figured I may as well see what Sarah Pennington has been up to.  Not sure how I missed #7, but maybe I’ll track that down later.

For the uninitiated, Sarah has been living a very odd life since the events of the first game, where she was a perfectly ordinary person living a perfectly ordinary life until she was saved from an assassination attempt by her nephew from the future.  She’s been to the past (a few times), to the Amazon, ancient Egypt, etc, etc, lots of various exotic locales where the problems of the day can be solved by rummaging through piles of junk to find random things and solving logic puzzles, and this installation in the series has her going back to, well, uh…

Look, it’s right in the title.

Anyway, the last time she was in the Buried Kingdom she made friends with a baby dragon and restored the proper ruler and all was well, which naturally couldn’t last.

Look, the plots in these things are usually pretty flimsy.  Bad guys are bad, good guys are good, it’s all about the art and the puzzles.

And this game IS pretty, with lots of the colorful environments you tend to get in any HOG and some very detailed characters.

Yes, you talk to a skeleton who is also a harp.  Which is pretty metal.

Admittedly, compared to Live2D or E-Mote, the actual character animations are pretty stiff and unremarkable.  It would be interesting to see Sunward combining an animation system like that with their more detailed characters.

The art style extends to some of the weird things you have to pick up and carry around until you’ve found the right place to use them to solve a puzzle, after which time you typically discard them without a thought towards future purpose.

Well, you use this thing twice, because it’s an axe on one side and a hammer on the other.  Unique tool, indeed.

And for some reason the developers put a mimic in the game?  You carry this around until you find a rope that needs something heavy on it to serve as a counterweight, then the mimic gloms onto the rope for you.  I’m actually OK with using this once and never again.

 

Unfortunately, while the art is top notch and the story had just enough weirdness to it to be interesting, the game as a whole is a bit of a letdown.

First, while this is a hidden object game, I had a heck of a time actually solving hidden object scenes on the tiny Switch screen.

I wound up needing to switch the game into “tile match” mode most of the time.  This lets you play a round of concentration to clear the hidden object scenes, and that was kind of a disappointment.  One of the big draws to any HOG is that it scratches the same itch as looking for “Nina” in a Hirschfield drawing or spending more time looking for the bunny on a Playboy cover than you do ogling the cover model, and playing a HOG as not-a-HOG doesn’t give you nearly the same feeling of being clever.

There is something about being told that you need to find a “bow” in a scene and needing to figure out whether you are looking for a projectile weapon, a violin bow, or a hair ornament, and whether it will be right out in the open or maybe just barely visible as an object in a painting, and I didn’t really get to enjoy that because it was frustratingly difficult to find things on the Switch’s screen and the virtual pointer didn’t really allow for precision clicking.  Some sort of zoom or magnification setting would have been really helpful here, or letting you use the touch screen to select things rather than forcing the use of the joycons.

I realize that I have just seriously dated myself with the earlier references.  Fortunately, the average HOG enjoyer is probably old enough to get them.

Second, it’s super short.  Like, you can make any hidden object game shorter if you abuse the “where do I need to go” button and fast travel, much less the hint button and puzzle skips, but this is blink-and-you’ll-miss-it short.  There aren’t very many hidden object scenes at all, and few puzzles that aren’t a matter of just using every item in your inventory on them until one of them works.

This is published by Artifex Mundi, who tends to have pretty steep discounts on their eShop games when they go on sale, so I suspect I paid closer to $3 than the $15 list price they ask for this. At $3 it’s a good deal for about 3 hours of light puzzle solving.  At full price I would have been upset.

Maybe I should figure out which game was #7 and give it a go.  I suspect if I actually play it on the TV instead of in handheld mode I will have much less to grouse about.

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