Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Dead Money: To Begin Again

Today, I beat the first add-on pack for Fallout: New Vegas, the Dead Money expansion. I must say, I enjoyed myself quite a bit, despite absolutely hating it the first time I gave it a shot.

At about level 23 or 24, I had beaten the main story of the game, and decided to go see what was going on over in the Sierra Madre casino. Once I got there, everything I owned was taken away, and I was given some paltry weapons and light armor and basically told what to do by the mysterious Father Elijah. What sucked was that he put a bomb collar on me, making me do his bidding until the casino was properly raided.

But the bomb collar had a drawback (besides, you know, being a bomb). Radio interference would cause it to beep for about 10 or 15 seconds, at which point it would blow up, blowing the player's head off. So you have to either get out of range of the radios or speakers, blow them up, or deactivate them (some speakers are armored, and cannot be blown up and must therefore be deactivated at a computer terminal somewhere nearby).

Compounding this problem was the Cloud floating around the Villa, where the player starts in Dead Money. It's poisonous, and will rapidly drain your health if you remain in it. It also appears as a sort of fog, making it difficult to see things like speakers you have to destroy so your head doesn't get blown to bits.

Also, there were these guys running around the Villa, dressed in ancient metal haz-mat suits who threw spears at me and swiped long pole-arms at me, causing me and my light armor great damage. They also were tough to kill - once knocked down, they would get back up again, with full health, unless I managed to cut off one of their limbs or head, at which point they would be dead for good. Since I had, at the beginning of Dead Money, very few options for weapons (most of which were Melee, which my character has little skill in), killing these guys was incredibly difficult. I didn't have any of my Stimpaks, either, so regenerating my health was hard because I also couldn't sleep anywhere besides the Police Station in the Villa, which was quite out of the way most of the time.

For these reasons, I ultimately quit playing Dead Money, and went back to the main New Vegas area in a previous save, and leveled up some more. Once I reached level 31 and felt a bit bored with what was left of the main game (I certainly didn't complete everything in it, but finding new stuff to interact with was becoming more and more rare), I decided to give Dead Money another try.

Armed with a little bit of knowledge of the nature of the Sierra Madre, and with level 100 lockpick, science, and speech skills, I was able to arm myself much more quickly this time around. I knew the utility of the vending machines and how they worked, and I knew to look for Dean's Secret Stashes (marked by a glowing hand pasted on the wall near one of them) to stock up on healing supplies and ammo early on. I also went hog wild, not caring if I took damage, and ended up being able to kill the Ghosts much more quickly and permanently, at the cost of a decent amount of health. Once killed, though, they stayed dead, and subsequent trips through their territory wouldn't be as difficult (until much later, anyway).

So I eventually completed the old man's quests, and made my way into the casino proper. After turning the power on and locating all my comrades (whom had helped me get into the casino in the first place), it was time to enter the vault of the casino. I encountered the old man, killed him, and ran out of the vault, Metroid style, avoiding my own death via bomb collar, activated by the old man upon his death.

I skipped, in there, a whole bunch of story, which was actually quite good. I don't want to spoil it (there's really no point), but I do want to point out something I'm experiencing for the first time, here: narrative continuity between an add-on pack and the regular game. Typically, when I've played add-ons in the past, they are either pseudo-sequels to the main story, or completely divorced from it altogether. And while much of the story of Dead Money is separate, many of the characters in it have a lot to do with characters in the main story (one is even directly affected by the events in Fallout 1!). The ties to the main story are well done and subtle, and maybe aren't even obvious if you don't pay attention. I also liked how the main story, without even downloading the Dead Money add-on, references it, as well.

Overall, the add-on was worth my ten bucks, and I downloaded Honest Hearts, the second add-on, today. I've heard much about the Burned Man in my travels in the Mojave, and I bet I'll meet him in Utah.

What a great game.

Monday, June 20, 2011

The Best Donkey Kong Ever

Game Boy Donkey Kong is without a doubt the best game with the words "Donkey Kong" in it ever. I mean as much as I do like the first two Donkey Kong Country games, they don't even come close to this one.

Which isn't to say they are very similar; in the SNES games, you actually control Donkey Kong himself, whereas in the Game Boy game, you are Mario, trying to rescue Pauline (the original girl in distress from the arcade game - but by 94, Mario had been rescuing Princess Toadstool for years. Did Mario have an affair?!) from Donkey Kong himself.

Interestingly, Donkey Kong Jr. made an appearance here. In the DKC games, this Donkey Kong would go on to be the one you control, whereas the big Donkey Kong in the Game Boy game would (apparently) go on to become Cranky Kong.

Anyway, Donkey Kong '94 is king because Mario must traverse over 100 levels, solving puzzles along the way, to try to finally confront Donkey Kong. But what is glorious about this game isn't just the puzzles - it's really Mario's moveset. Mario has one of his most diverse movesets here - and he needs no powerups to access them. He can double and triple jump, do a backflip, and do handstands, which allow him to use his feet to stop barrels from crushing him, also making them land lightly next to him so he can pick them up and throw them back at Donkey Kong. He can even pick most enemies up, like in Super Mario Bros. 2, and throw them around, killing other enemies or (in a few levels) chucking them at Donkey Kong himself! All of these moves are mapped well, too. None are difficult to pull off. The double and triple jumps just require timing to activate at the right time, the handstand is just down and jump, and the backflip is jumping while turning around while running. It's actually fun beating the levels from the arcade Donkey Kong with this huge set of moves - I beat the first level in three seconds in this playthrough, actually.

The game really is an amalgam of all the mainline Mario games made up until that point. It even predicted some of the moves Mario would have in his first 3D outing two years later. But the puzzles are great, too. Figuring out how to get the key to the door is, years and countless playthroughs later, still a blast. Stage 8-1 gave me problems, even though I have beaten this game a ton of times - I couldn't remember how to beat it, so I had to solve it all over again.

The music, too, is amazing. Each world has it's own theme, and they all evoke the setting quite well (nothing too serious, either - this is, after all, a game in which you spend one world on a pirate ship, another on a plane, and yet another in an ice world) with upbeat tunes and the occasional ominous tune. The last few levels, in particular, have interesting music, some of which I haven't really heard imitated elsewhere, either.

It's interesting, having played through this game after beating Rabi Laby, a DSi downloadable title by Agetec. It, too, is a puzzle platformer, and an enjoyable one at that, but it pales in comparison to Donkey Kong '94. Rabi Laby is a bit more puzzle-y, with less reliance on traditional platforming than DK: the girl in the game can barely jump, and the rabbit only jumps twice as high, so you spend most of the game working around these limitations to get the little girl to the exit. Rabi Laby definitely had harder puzzles, though. There was one instance where I couldn't stand it anymore and had to look up the answer to one level online (and I'm glad I did, because the answer was stupid and I never would have figured it out). Rabi Laby was worth the five bucks I paid for it, but if I had a 3DS, given the choice between Rabi Laby and the recently released Donkey Kong '94 for the 3DS virtual console, I would go with DK94 every time. That's actually the reason I played DK94 the past day or two, too. Everyone who had a 3DS has been talking about the game online recently, so I had to dig up my copy and play it on my GBA SP.

Man, between Ocarina of Time 3D (with awesome commercials!) and the virtual console already having Donkey Kong '94 and Link's Awakening on it (the two best original Game Boy games ever made), I really need to get a 3DS. Maybe in a month for my birthday...

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

The DS: A Classic Adventure Powerhouse?

I suppose it makes sense, what with the touch screen, stylus, and the (relative) rebirth of classic point and click adventure games on the PC in the past few years, but this old genre has flourished on the Nintendo DS.

Sure, it's no PC in that regard, but the level of quality versus quantity is pretty unarguable. Here's the list of classic adventure games that I've played:

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Justice for All
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations
Ace Attorney: Miles Edgeworth Investigations
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
Hotel Dusk: Room 215
9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

And I'm not even counting the Professor Layton games, which are kind of borderline. They are great games, either way, though.

It is somewhat odd that Capcom dominates that list, publishing all but two games (Hotel Dusk and 999). Who would have thought Capcom would make so many awesome adventure games?

Anyway the reason I bring this up is because I just finished Capcom's excellent Ghost Trick. Developed by many of the Ace Attorney people (possibly the same team, depending on where you get your info on the internet), the game is about Sissel, who dies at the beginning of the game. He receives powers after his death, and is able to move about in ghost form by possessing certain items. Sissel can manipulate many of these items, allowing him to move around farther, and also to interact with the many living characters that inhabit the game world.

Also, when he discovers a dead body, he can travel back in time to four minutes before their death, and do his best to reverse it. If he does so, he changes their fate, and thus allows the storyline to progress.

Sissel, you see, suffers from amnesia. He cannot remember who he was, other than the fact that when he dies, he can see his body from his ghost form. He spends the rest of the game trying to figure out who killed him, why they killed him, who he really was (for example, why was he present in the junkyard when he was killed?), and why many of the people he encounters seem to know and recognize his earthly body.

I will not spoil the story here, because it is fantastic, but it also holds up throughout. This is probably my main complaint about every other adventure game in the above list, save for Hotel Dusk. That isn't to say the stories aren't enjoyable, just that the suspension of disbelief falls pretty hard near the end (especially, ESPECIALLY in 999 - as much as I enjoyed the characters and most of the dialogue in that game, the true ending was pretty forced and weird). Ghost Trick has a somewhat goofy explanation for the main event the story spins around, but given the context of the game, it seems grounded and makes sense. I was satisfied with it, and was surprised several times by the twists and turns in the story.

Also, the puzzles were never too obtuse to figure out with a few tries. They were challenging, but since they made sense, it should only take even a adventure game newbie a few tries to figure out.

The animation, though, is unbelievably gorgeous. The characters who move around on screen look a touch rotoscoped, then colored over. They move smoothly, and often hilariously (see Detective Cabanela doing anything, also the "Panic Dance"). The dialogue shifts between lightly comedic (Missile the Pomeranian might be the only dog of that breed whom I find both adorable and lovable, and hilarious) to somewhat gloomy and sad, but never excessively so.

There is the possibility of a sequel (don't worry, nearly all story elements are tied up in this game), although apparently the game didn't sell to well in Japan (and likely in America, either). Capcom apparently even blamed it for a poor showing in the fiscal quarter of its release, too, so that probably dooms any chance of a sequel. Maybe. The runaway success of the Ace Attorney series, and the fact that this is Capcom, who makes sequels to EVERYTHING (they even made an Okami sequel, of all things!), might mean we get to solve more mysteries via Ghost Tricks.