Catching Up - Crisis Core, Nostalgia, Neo Geo Pocket

Well, it's been a month and a half since my last post. That's what happens when you get a grown up job where you work lots of 12 hour days, I suppose.

However! I have still been playing games. I never did finish Super Princess Peach, although I'd like to someday. Since then, I've played some weird stuff. I'll try to be brief for each of them.

I picked up Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII right before I started the new job (so like, late May?). I put in about ten hours, and I thought it was pretty neat! The combat system was getting a little repetitive, but I suppose that's because it reminds me a little bit of Kingdom Hearts. A little. There are differences, and I think Crisis Core is better, but it still boils down to mostly mashing X while healing every once in a while. The story seemed neat, though, so I'd like to go back to it sometime. I never did finish Final Fantasy VII, so it's kind of neat to see Sephiroth before he became all evil or whatever. I wish more game prequels had you traveling around with the ultimate bad guy of the original game. I think it's a neat narrative idea (one that has been admittedly played out in movies and books but not in videogames yet, outside maybe Bowser in the Mario RPG games).

I also started playing Nostalgia, a recently released RPG for the DS, published by Ignition Entertainment. I'm a huge fan of Shane Bettenhausen, who works for Ignition now, and he pimped Nostalgia on an episode of Active Time Babble a while back, and it sounded neat. I'm really glad I bought it, because it reminds me of a few old RPGs: Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy X, and some random early PS1 RPG.

It is Final Fantasy IV in the sense that the story is ridiculous, dramatic, and over-the-top (and pretty dumb), but ultimately enjoyable. The battle system is like FFIV as well, without the ATB gauge. That, actually, is where the FFX influence comes in - there is a list of turns on the bottom screen that includes both player characters and enemy characters, and certain actions taken will change turn orders, dramatically altering battle, just like in FFX. The random early PS1 RPG element comes from the graphics, which are a crisp, smoothly displayed set which comes across like a mixture of FFVII's simple polygons and FFIX's more complex character designs.

I'll likely have more to say about Nostalgia! I really like it so far, have put about 11 hours into it, and will hopefully beat it soon.

But I'd like to talk now about this great little handheld system I picked up last weekend in East Lansing - the Neo Geo Pocket Color. I got it and Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure for $20 - a steal, considering on eBay the system alone sells for like $60. The guy gave me $10 off for not having a watch battery in it, but I picked two up for $5 and I'm all set now. It's a well designed little system - the joystick/d-pad thing is very comfortable and responsive. The ergonomics fit the hand very well. My only complaint is the A button is near the screen, while the B button is away - and A, like other systems, confirms selections, and B cancels them. Dammit. If this little thing had been backlit, it would have been better than the original GBA, in my opinion.

Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure, by the way, is the best portable Sonic game ever made. It is like a remix of Sonic 2 with music remixes of Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles. It plays well, and baddies don't knock you off balance so quickly like in other Sonic games. You actually have a chance to react to them, because they move slowly at you at first when they first come on the screen. It's a little hard to explain but it works. The graphics look really nice too.

I have more NGPC games coming in the mail, too, as I got a really good deal on them in that always awesome Trading Time thread over at GameSpite, so I'll probably write about a few of those as well, hopefully soon, if I can find the time.