On a whim, I decided to buy Giana Sisters DS from Newegg, since it was only $15 and I've absolutely never seen it in real life before. I guess I figured the game would be hella rare someday, and that may or may not be true.
Either way though, I'm surprisingly glad I bought it. It's actually a fun little game! Well, I should say that it is by no means anything special. What I mean is that the game does very little to differentiate itself from other similar platformers. You just jump around and pick up diamonds (basically Mario coins). You have to get through the levels without dying. Sure, you can pick up a bubble powerup (one of two, the other of which I haven't seen yet) and float around by using the microphone or the A button, but that's about it as far as unique mechanics. And to be honest, the bubble works exactly like it does in that one level in Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins, although I would argue that it controls better.
The music is fantastic, though. It sounds like a Commodore 64, and is soothing, which are two things I would never type about music at the same time. It's weird because I feel like this game was very nostalgic for it's creators to make, but I have no idea if they're the same guys who made the original Giana Sisters.
I have to say, the balls of those guys back then to call the game Giana Sisters. "They're Italian siblings who run and jump and get a powerup that let's them shoot energy balls!" Sound familiar?! The graphics on the C64 game look a LOT like Mario 1, as well. In fact a lot of the level design of the game is ripped straight from the NES.
The graphics are pretty good, though. I quite like the pixel art - it seems to be a cross between a flash game (which I usually find bland and ugly) and a retro NES game (which I usually find gorgeous). I don't really know how to describe them better than that. It was actually the level graphics combined with the fluid character and enemy animation that I saw in a Youtube video that made me seriously consider getting the game.
But Giana Sisters DS is actually a pretty good little game. It's not a remake so far as I can tell, but it's hard to actually tell because there's so little information on the game anywhere. I have no idea why this was released in America. Who knows who the Giana Sisters are here, besides weird retro nerds like myself? And who thought the thing would sell, especially with the hideous box art? If you do ever come across the game in a Gamestop or whatever for like $5, pick it up! You'll be entertained for a few hours.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Monday, March 5, 2012
Devil Survivor 2: Devil Speed
Having beat Tales of the Abyss, I dove headfirst into Devil Survivor 2 and was immediately struck by how different the music is. I couldn't get over how retro-sounding it was, especially compared to the guitar butt-rock of the first game. I have since grown fond of what I've heard of the soundtrack, but it is much more Persona than Devil Survivor to my ears. Not a bad thing! Just not what I expected.
As for the gameplay, I must say that if the battles stay as interesting as they have been, Devil Survivor 2 might be an improvement over the first. There are more wrinkles to the battle system, but things generally balance out. I will say that the game starts out incredibly hard, mostly because you have no skills unlocked for your main guys, nor do you have much in the way of options for demons to summon. The game has gotten progressively easier as I go on, which is probably a mistake to say because I'm sure the game will hand me my ass as soon as I turn it on again.
Some of the stuff they've added is the ability to directly affect enemies Extra Turns with moves like Extra Cancel, which... Cancels the opponent's extra turn. But there are even passive abilities that change how easy or difficult it is to affect an enemy's or your own Extra Turn, which you'd think would get aggravating, but it isn't too bad. There's a few new demon powers, but most of the ones I've seen so far are as they were in the first game (they don't fix what isn't broken, basically). There's a neat new demon power called Ghost Wounds which doesn't seem much more than a nerfed Bind at first, but then you realize it limits the attack range of an enemy to one - imagine using it on bosses! I haven't done so yet, but it could change the dynamic of quite a few battles if used properly.
The battlefields start out as all repeats of battlefields from the last game, which would have been extremely disappointing had they not quickly switched things up. So far it seems like every battlefield from the first game is in this one, with a few slight changes, as well as a lot of new ones. My favorite map so far involves a set of four escalators (no, they don't move) in the middle of the field. These limit the center of the playing field to four narrow paths that demons and humans can only get through with demon powers such as Flight or Phantasm. There's also a neat parking garage map as well as some other interesting indoor levels that are overall much more interesting than DS1's set of mostly outdoor playfields that were all pretty much wide open. I just feel like so far, the battlefield design is top notch in DS2.
Now as for the story, I am only ten hours in. I am not too interested in what is going on, though. Maybe DS2's story is a slow burn (I hear it gets good later!) but one of the things I loved about the original was how quickly it hooked you with its storyline. So far, DS2 seems like I'm fighting some weird crap the Big Dipper sent to Earth (no, that is not a joke). Then again, I have no idea why there are demons around this time, and I have no idea what these JP people are all about.
No word from Metatron about humanity needing to purge the demons from the world yet either (I guess he figured humanity learned from last time).
There is this new Fate system, which basically seems like they're putting the Social Links from Persona into Devil Survivor. Can't complain much there, and raising the Fate relationship with one of your party members gives instant benefits, such as causing them to develop an innate resistance to an element (which doesn't take up a passive skill slot!) or allow you to Joint Skill Crack moves (which has allowed me to crack three moves at once by assigning three Skill Cracks to one demon and then having my main character kill it). They also unlock powerful demons for fusing just like in Persona. I'm pretty excited about this addition to the game, although my obsession with it caused me not to focus on getting an item for a character as fast as I could, which resulted in the death of a potential party member. It's too bad, but I can see myself playing through the game more than once to see everything like I did with the first game.
...Which is pretty much what I wanted from a Devil Survivor sequel. I'm going to obsess over this game. At some point I'll probably even try to figure out which DS is my favorite. The near 200 hours (!) I've played of the first game will probably win out in terms of game time, but that's just because I had to do everything over again in Overclocked.
Man, Shin Megami Tensei is such an awesome series.
As for the gameplay, I must say that if the battles stay as interesting as they have been, Devil Survivor 2 might be an improvement over the first. There are more wrinkles to the battle system, but things generally balance out. I will say that the game starts out incredibly hard, mostly because you have no skills unlocked for your main guys, nor do you have much in the way of options for demons to summon. The game has gotten progressively easier as I go on, which is probably a mistake to say because I'm sure the game will hand me my ass as soon as I turn it on again.
Some of the stuff they've added is the ability to directly affect enemies Extra Turns with moves like Extra Cancel, which... Cancels the opponent's extra turn. But there are even passive abilities that change how easy or difficult it is to affect an enemy's or your own Extra Turn, which you'd think would get aggravating, but it isn't too bad. There's a few new demon powers, but most of the ones I've seen so far are as they were in the first game (they don't fix what isn't broken, basically). There's a neat new demon power called Ghost Wounds which doesn't seem much more than a nerfed Bind at first, but then you realize it limits the attack range of an enemy to one - imagine using it on bosses! I haven't done so yet, but it could change the dynamic of quite a few battles if used properly.
The battlefields start out as all repeats of battlefields from the last game, which would have been extremely disappointing had they not quickly switched things up. So far it seems like every battlefield from the first game is in this one, with a few slight changes, as well as a lot of new ones. My favorite map so far involves a set of four escalators (no, they don't move) in the middle of the field. These limit the center of the playing field to four narrow paths that demons and humans can only get through with demon powers such as Flight or Phantasm. There's also a neat parking garage map as well as some other interesting indoor levels that are overall much more interesting than DS1's set of mostly outdoor playfields that were all pretty much wide open. I just feel like so far, the battlefield design is top notch in DS2.
Now as for the story, I am only ten hours in. I am not too interested in what is going on, though. Maybe DS2's story is a slow burn (I hear it gets good later!) but one of the things I loved about the original was how quickly it hooked you with its storyline. So far, DS2 seems like I'm fighting some weird crap the Big Dipper sent to Earth (no, that is not a joke). Then again, I have no idea why there are demons around this time, and I have no idea what these JP people are all about.
No word from Metatron about humanity needing to purge the demons from the world yet either (I guess he figured humanity learned from last time).
There is this new Fate system, which basically seems like they're putting the Social Links from Persona into Devil Survivor. Can't complain much there, and raising the Fate relationship with one of your party members gives instant benefits, such as causing them to develop an innate resistance to an element (which doesn't take up a passive skill slot!) or allow you to Joint Skill Crack moves (which has allowed me to crack three moves at once by assigning three Skill Cracks to one demon and then having my main character kill it). They also unlock powerful demons for fusing just like in Persona. I'm pretty excited about this addition to the game, although my obsession with it caused me not to focus on getting an item for a character as fast as I could, which resulted in the death of a potential party member. It's too bad, but I can see myself playing through the game more than once to see everything like I did with the first game.
...Which is pretty much what I wanted from a Devil Survivor sequel. I'm going to obsess over this game. At some point I'll probably even try to figure out which DS is my favorite. The near 200 hours (!) I've played of the first game will probably win out in terms of game time, but that's just because I had to do everything over again in Overclocked.
Man, Shin Megami Tensei is such an awesome series.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
The Tale, Completed
I finished Tales of the Abyss tonight with a game clock of 35 hours and some change.
I must say, I really enjoyed the majority of the game. If I had the time to really delve in to the subsystems and minigames and sidequests, I'm sure I would like the game a lot more. However, I have Devil Survivor 2 sitting right here next to me and that cannot be ignored for too long.
I rather enjoyed the story of Abyss, though. There was quite a bit of weird techno-babble, but my mind always replaced "fon" and "fonic" with magic, at which point everything makes sense (sort of). There were some aspects of the story which were strange or confusing, but I feel like the overall tale of most of the characters was compelling (aside from a certain betrayal that is forgiven by the main cast WAY too easily). I did miss the characters being complete dicks to each other throughout the game, although Jade did stay his normal jerk self the whole time, so that was refreshing. The motivation of the main enemy still seems a bit oddly thought out to me, but I'm sure I missed something somewhere (especially since for most of the last ten hours, I couldn't be bothered to sit through the skits).
As an aside, I don't understand why the skits don't let you skip through the text faster. I can skip voiced dialogue during the main game by pressing a button because I can see the text, but why can't I skip through the skit stuff? I would have watched every skit had I been able to just read through it at my own pace. They also tended to pack like three skits back-to-back-to-back right after a plot point, so you had to sit there for minutes at a time as text would just scroll by with no input from you whatsoever. Also, none of the skits are voiced, so any sort of pacing the game would have from preventing you from skipping through the text faster is lost anyway.
But I digress. I ended up getting some cool Fonic Artes by the end of the game, and had quite a bit of fun during battles. The last battle was pretty dumb, though, because the boss could basically kill everyone in one hit if he so decided. I'm sure I was underleveled a bit, but I decided I didn't feel like grinding so I just cheesed my way through the battle with strategic item use. I probably would have ground had the enemies in the last dungeon given me more than a THOUSAND EXP PER BATTLE! That was ridiculous since a few dungeons ago I was getting near two thousand. That sort of crap drives me nuts. It's like training in Pokemon all over again.
Overall, though, I would say the game is worth a playthrough, if only to see how well-written the characters are, especially near the beginning. I don't know if I could recommend the PS2 game since apparently there's some pretty bad load times, but the 3DS version was fun. I don't know if I'm ready for a Tales game again so soon, but now I'm thinking of picking up Tales of Graces f and maybe looking into picking up Vesperia at some point.
Anyway, Devil Survivor 2 awaits. Hee-ho!
I must say, I really enjoyed the majority of the game. If I had the time to really delve in to the subsystems and minigames and sidequests, I'm sure I would like the game a lot more. However, I have Devil Survivor 2 sitting right here next to me and that cannot be ignored for too long.
I rather enjoyed the story of Abyss, though. There was quite a bit of weird techno-babble, but my mind always replaced "fon" and "fonic" with magic, at which point everything makes sense (sort of). There were some aspects of the story which were strange or confusing, but I feel like the overall tale of most of the characters was compelling (aside from a certain betrayal that is forgiven by the main cast WAY too easily). I did miss the characters being complete dicks to each other throughout the game, although Jade did stay his normal jerk self the whole time, so that was refreshing. The motivation of the main enemy still seems a bit oddly thought out to me, but I'm sure I missed something somewhere (especially since for most of the last ten hours, I couldn't be bothered to sit through the skits).
As an aside, I don't understand why the skits don't let you skip through the text faster. I can skip voiced dialogue during the main game by pressing a button because I can see the text, but why can't I skip through the skit stuff? I would have watched every skit had I been able to just read through it at my own pace. They also tended to pack like three skits back-to-back-to-back right after a plot point, so you had to sit there for minutes at a time as text would just scroll by with no input from you whatsoever. Also, none of the skits are voiced, so any sort of pacing the game would have from preventing you from skipping through the text faster is lost anyway.
But I digress. I ended up getting some cool Fonic Artes by the end of the game, and had quite a bit of fun during battles. The last battle was pretty dumb, though, because the boss could basically kill everyone in one hit if he so decided. I'm sure I was underleveled a bit, but I decided I didn't feel like grinding so I just cheesed my way through the battle with strategic item use. I probably would have ground had the enemies in the last dungeon given me more than a THOUSAND EXP PER BATTLE! That was ridiculous since a few dungeons ago I was getting near two thousand. That sort of crap drives me nuts. It's like training in Pokemon all over again.
Overall, though, I would say the game is worth a playthrough, if only to see how well-written the characters are, especially near the beginning. I don't know if I could recommend the PS2 game since apparently there's some pretty bad load times, but the 3DS version was fun. I don't know if I'm ready for a Tales game again so soon, but now I'm thinking of picking up Tales of Graces f and maybe looking into picking up Vesperia at some point.
Anyway, Devil Survivor 2 awaits. Hee-ho!
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Now I remember why I wait like eight years between Tales games!
It's not because they're bad, but because they're insanely long!
I mean don't get me wrong. I just got done with a four hour Tales of the Abyss marathon. And as soon as I'm done with this post, I'm going to jump right back in. But man! I'm 25 hours in and thought the end was in sight, but it's not!
The characters, though, have gone through some "growth." I won't explain why, but Luke is no longer a petulant little asshole. He rarely tells people to shut up any more. However, Jade has become more and more of a jerk, and I absolutely adore him for it. He is definitely my favorite character in the game by a long shot.
Story aside, though, let me talk about the pacing. That four hour marathon was great and the next few hours will presumably be just as interesting, but the last couple of times I played Abyss?
It was... Abysmal.
Sick burn.
It was, though. The game decided to make me run back and forth between the same like five towns a million times, with not much battling in between, while the game just threw out plot point after plot point after exposition after plot point. And while a good chunk of the plot was interesting, it took too goddamn long to get through. And the swamp dungeon was retarded. "Oh, getting bored with all the exposition, player? How about a dungeon where you spend the majority of your time getting into a fight with a giant monster who can't be beaten? A monster who your party members tell you to run from? And they're right, too, because the thing can kill you in like three hits. Oh, and while you run from it - how about we halve your walking speed on the world map? WOULD YOU LIKE THAT, PLAYER?!"
I can't remember if I had gotten this frustrated with Symphonia. Despite playing that game forever and enjoying it quite a bit, I remember very little of it. I don't know how much I'll remember about Abyss, but I hope I remember how entertaining the party is as they bicker and bitch at each other.
That four hour marathon sure was fun, though. I got to explore some pretty neat dungeons, including one where the party was split up halfway through and had to spend the rest of it getting back together. It kind of reminded me of that dungeon in Final Fantasy VI where that happens, although it was no where near as hard (plus, with the ability to avoid battles if you can run away from the enemies, you don't lose a ton of time or HP).
Hopefully the rest of the dungeons are as interesting as that one (and with boss battles as fun!), because I can't guarantee I'll stick with the game once Devil Survivor 2 comes out if I'm not having fun...
I mean don't get me wrong. I just got done with a four hour Tales of the Abyss marathon. And as soon as I'm done with this post, I'm going to jump right back in. But man! I'm 25 hours in and thought the end was in sight, but it's not!
The characters, though, have gone through some "growth." I won't explain why, but Luke is no longer a petulant little asshole. He rarely tells people to shut up any more. However, Jade has become more and more of a jerk, and I absolutely adore him for it. He is definitely my favorite character in the game by a long shot.
Story aside, though, let me talk about the pacing. That four hour marathon was great and the next few hours will presumably be just as interesting, but the last couple of times I played Abyss?
It was... Abysmal.
Sick burn.
It was, though. The game decided to make me run back and forth between the same like five towns a million times, with not much battling in between, while the game just threw out plot point after plot point after exposition after plot point. And while a good chunk of the plot was interesting, it took too goddamn long to get through. And the swamp dungeon was retarded. "Oh, getting bored with all the exposition, player? How about a dungeon where you spend the majority of your time getting into a fight with a giant monster who can't be beaten? A monster who your party members tell you to run from? And they're right, too, because the thing can kill you in like three hits. Oh, and while you run from it - how about we halve your walking speed on the world map? WOULD YOU LIKE THAT, PLAYER?!"
I can't remember if I had gotten this frustrated with Symphonia. Despite playing that game forever and enjoying it quite a bit, I remember very little of it. I don't know how much I'll remember about Abyss, but I hope I remember how entertaining the party is as they bicker and bitch at each other.
That four hour marathon sure was fun, though. I got to explore some pretty neat dungeons, including one where the party was split up halfway through and had to spend the rest of it getting back together. It kind of reminded me of that dungeon in Final Fantasy VI where that happens, although it was no where near as hard (plus, with the ability to avoid battles if you can run away from the enemies, you don't lose a ton of time or HP).
Hopefully the rest of the dungeons are as interesting as that one (and with boss battles as fun!), because I can't guarantee I'll stick with the game once Devil Survivor 2 comes out if I'm not having fun...
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Tales of the Abyss
A few days ago, I bought Tales of the Abyss for the 3DS. I was a bit hesitant to buy it, since of all the Tales games I've played, I've only liked Symphonia. However, I hunger for RPGs, and haven't played an action-based one in a while (with maybe the Ys series being the last ones I played, last year).
Tales of the Abyss (the version I'm playing) is a port of the 2006 PS2 game with some minor 3D effects added, while fixing some - apparently pretty bad, I'm told - technical problems. The 3DS version has no load times, which means this version is likely going to be the definitive version of the game. The 3DS gets one of those, for once! ...Okay, Devil Survivor Overclocked is better on 3DS, the 3DS port of Ocarina of Time is probably the new definitive version, and the same goes for Star Fox 64 3D. I guess I'm just bitter that bit.trip.SAGA has technical problems the Wii versions don't have.
As for the game itself, though, I must say I'm really enjoying Abyss so far. I'm about nine or ten hours in. Let me just say this:
The characters in this game are complete assholes, and I love them.
The narrative of Abyss throws your battle party together out of necessity rather than choice, so no one in the party is really comfortable with each other, much less nice to each other. So, whenever one of them screws up, the others pile on that person and make fun of him or her. The main character, Luke, spends most of his dialogue saying dumb things and then telling other people to shut up after they make fun of them. The quiet girl, Tear, the first to join your party, rips on the Luke whenever he gets cocky after battles. She, in turn, is made fun of by Luke for being "ice cold." And not in a flirty way! He means it! As in "You are an ice-cold bitch, Tear."
Then there is Jade. I have no idea what role he will play in the narrative overall yet, but I must say he is already my favorite character in the game (and quickly becoming a very memorable character overall). He's a bit older than the other party members, and he makes it his job to make fun of, embarrass, and just generally be a dick to all of the other party members. He goes out of his way to do this. He's not always overt about it, either. Sometimes, he just stays silent as he watches the other characters make idiots out of themselves. Once, he was called out for not saying anything, and he said something along the lines of "Oops! You caught me. I was enjoying that." My favorite line, though, occurs if the party enters a battle by being chased down by an enemy on the map: Luke will panic and act like everyone is going to die, while Jade says in the most sarcastic voice you'll ever hear "Oh no, this is terrible!" after which Luke tells him to shut up.
I love that guy.
The battles, though, seem to be built on your typical Tales system. It has been years since I've played anything in the series substantially (probably since 2004's Symphonia), so I'm not sure how much different it is from more recent entries. I will say, though, that the system feels just like what I remember of Symphonia's. The enemy groups are all visible on the map, and you don't enter battle unless you touch them. The battles themselves take place is 2D, although you can run around the battle in 3D when you're not attacking by holding the L trigger. Don't worry, it's more intuitive than you'd think. You spend the battles doing button combos, while trying to chain in special attacks throughout, to keep your hit count up to do more damage and keep the enemy from attacking you. If you need to use an item or want to tell one of your AI-controlled companions to use one or cast a spell, you can press X, which will pause the battle while you cycle through some simple menus to do what you need to do. A cooldown timer will then appear on the upper left of the top screen to let you know how long it will be before the item or spell is used. I haven't seen one for longer than two seconds, either, so it's not like you have to wait forever.
From what I can tell, the AI is programmed fairly well, so I don't think you'll have to worry too much about babysitting them or wasting revival items on them too much. You do have the option outside of battle to tweak your party's AI a bit. You can tell the characters to only cast magic when they have 75% or more of their MP unless they need to cast a healing spell, or reduce that number to 50%, 25%, or to use magic willingly. You can pick and choose which spells and abilities they can use as well, so if you don't like them wasting MP on, say, a shield spell that only protects you over a certain area of the battlefield, you can turn that crap right off and they won't cast it anymore. You aren't forced to play just as Luke, either - you can switch your party members at any time and play as a spellcaster if you so choose. I like Luke's gameplay, though, so I've spent the whole game playing as him so far.
The main story so far is basically about averting a war, so I'm not too enthralled with that, although the constant banter between the party members definitely keeps me interested. Supposedly, Tales games subvert genre stereotypes about halfway through, so maybe that will change. I hope it does! But I'm having a blast so far, so I'll keep playing.
It's too bad Inazuma Eleven finally came in the mail a day after I bought Tales of the Abyss. Oh well! I'll get to it eventually...
Tales of the Abyss (the version I'm playing) is a port of the 2006 PS2 game with some minor 3D effects added, while fixing some - apparently pretty bad, I'm told - technical problems. The 3DS version has no load times, which means this version is likely going to be the definitive version of the game. The 3DS gets one of those, for once! ...Okay, Devil Survivor Overclocked is better on 3DS, the 3DS port of Ocarina of Time is probably the new definitive version, and the same goes for Star Fox 64 3D. I guess I'm just bitter that bit.trip.SAGA has technical problems the Wii versions don't have.
As for the game itself, though, I must say I'm really enjoying Abyss so far. I'm about nine or ten hours in. Let me just say this:
The characters in this game are complete assholes, and I love them.
The narrative of Abyss throws your battle party together out of necessity rather than choice, so no one in the party is really comfortable with each other, much less nice to each other. So, whenever one of them screws up, the others pile on that person and make fun of him or her. The main character, Luke, spends most of his dialogue saying dumb things and then telling other people to shut up after they make fun of them. The quiet girl, Tear, the first to join your party, rips on the Luke whenever he gets cocky after battles. She, in turn, is made fun of by Luke for being "ice cold." And not in a flirty way! He means it! As in "You are an ice-cold bitch, Tear."
Then there is Jade. I have no idea what role he will play in the narrative overall yet, but I must say he is already my favorite character in the game (and quickly becoming a very memorable character overall). He's a bit older than the other party members, and he makes it his job to make fun of, embarrass, and just generally be a dick to all of the other party members. He goes out of his way to do this. He's not always overt about it, either. Sometimes, he just stays silent as he watches the other characters make idiots out of themselves. Once, he was called out for not saying anything, and he said something along the lines of "Oops! You caught me. I was enjoying that." My favorite line, though, occurs if the party enters a battle by being chased down by an enemy on the map: Luke will panic and act like everyone is going to die, while Jade says in the most sarcastic voice you'll ever hear "Oh no, this is terrible!" after which Luke tells him to shut up.
I love that guy.
The battles, though, seem to be built on your typical Tales system. It has been years since I've played anything in the series substantially (probably since 2004's Symphonia), so I'm not sure how much different it is from more recent entries. I will say, though, that the system feels just like what I remember of Symphonia's. The enemy groups are all visible on the map, and you don't enter battle unless you touch them. The battles themselves take place is 2D, although you can run around the battle in 3D when you're not attacking by holding the L trigger. Don't worry, it's more intuitive than you'd think. You spend the battles doing button combos, while trying to chain in special attacks throughout, to keep your hit count up to do more damage and keep the enemy from attacking you. If you need to use an item or want to tell one of your AI-controlled companions to use one or cast a spell, you can press X, which will pause the battle while you cycle through some simple menus to do what you need to do. A cooldown timer will then appear on the upper left of the top screen to let you know how long it will be before the item or spell is used. I haven't seen one for longer than two seconds, either, so it's not like you have to wait forever.
From what I can tell, the AI is programmed fairly well, so I don't think you'll have to worry too much about babysitting them or wasting revival items on them too much. You do have the option outside of battle to tweak your party's AI a bit. You can tell the characters to only cast magic when they have 75% or more of their MP unless they need to cast a healing spell, or reduce that number to 50%, 25%, or to use magic willingly. You can pick and choose which spells and abilities they can use as well, so if you don't like them wasting MP on, say, a shield spell that only protects you over a certain area of the battlefield, you can turn that crap right off and they won't cast it anymore. You aren't forced to play just as Luke, either - you can switch your party members at any time and play as a spellcaster if you so choose. I like Luke's gameplay, though, so I've spent the whole game playing as him so far.
The main story so far is basically about averting a war, so I'm not too enthralled with that, although the constant banter between the party members definitely keeps me interested. Supposedly, Tales games subvert genre stereotypes about halfway through, so maybe that will change. I hope it does! But I'm having a blast so far, so I'll keep playing.
It's too bad Inazuma Eleven finally came in the mail a day after I bought Tales of the Abyss. Oh well! I'll get to it eventually...
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Import: The Last Window
I imported a game last week.
The Last Window: The Secret of Cape West is the Japan and Europe only sequel to 2007's Hotel Dusk: Room 215, which was released in the US. It again stars Kyle Hyde, and the game's story takes place a year after the first game.
The game play is exactly the same as in Hotel Dusk. The player moves Kyle around on the touch screen while holding the DS like a book, and Kyle's dialogue displays in a text box on the left screen while he either manipulates puzzles on the right screen or talks to other people. I enjoy the game play, but to be honest, there isn't a lot of it. Most of the time, you talk to tenants and make sure you pick the right questions to ask or answers. When you do solve a puzzle, it is either baby easy or pretty obtuse (getting the key out of the music box took me forever to figure out).
Where the game shines, though, is in the narrative, and more specifically, it's presentation. No, I do not mean the graphics - while I really do enjoy the "Take On Me" music video art, what I love is the writing. Kyle is very well written as a grizzled ex-cop, who doesn't really have a knack for sales, which is his current job. The other people who live in his apartment building (the eponymous "Cape West") are all well written as well. The game does a good job of making them all seem like normal people, while slowly revealing more sinister secrets about a few of them as time goes on. It also handles misdirection well; I had completely read one particular person to be a murderer, and I wasn't even close. It really does read like a good, pulpy detective novel (which, when written well, I genuinely enjoy).
The story ties into the first game in subtle ways, as well. Nile was a group of criminals that Kyle was investigating on the side in the first game, and were a big reason why he had quit the police force two years before the events of The Last Window. They eventually pop up in this game, and it all makes sense why. The story stands on its own, but has callbacks to the first game, and even some foreshadowing that I didn't realize was until much later (a painting hanging on one of the tenant's walls). All the little touches to the narrative impress me and I wish more games were capable of it.
The first quarter of the game, though, is pretty boring. You spend a lot of that time doing mundane things like paying rent and talking to all the tenants. I honestly can't remember what a lot of it was. It's worth getting through, though. Once the story proper picks up, the game becomes tough to put down.
The Last Window makes me very sad, though. It wasn't released in America mostly because it didn't sell well in Japan or Europe, and I don't think the first game did very well in the States anyway. This type of game should do well here, if only the right audience had access to it. Like I said before, the game is basically a mystery novel - which sell very well in this country. If more people were exposed to it, I'm sure we'd be seeing many more games of its ilk. Unfortunately, probably the only place where it could get notice would be on Apple devices, and it would probably cost too much for most people to pay attention to it and I'd also never have a chance to play it because I hate those things. I wish gamers would give off-the-wall stuff like this a chance. I know people who like to both play video games and read; there is no reason why they shouldn't give Hotel Dusk and The Last Window a shot. CING, the creators of Hotel Dusk/The Last Window, went out of business a year or two ago. It seems like Kyle Hyde's story was meant to be a trilogy, and we'll never get to see how it ends.
Hopefully America's gaming market matures, so I don't have to import other gems like The Last Window in the future, and so developers with solid ideas don't keep going out of business.
The Last Window: The Secret of Cape West is the Japan and Europe only sequel to 2007's Hotel Dusk: Room 215, which was released in the US. It again stars Kyle Hyde, and the game's story takes place a year after the first game.
The game play is exactly the same as in Hotel Dusk. The player moves Kyle around on the touch screen while holding the DS like a book, and Kyle's dialogue displays in a text box on the left screen while he either manipulates puzzles on the right screen or talks to other people. I enjoy the game play, but to be honest, there isn't a lot of it. Most of the time, you talk to tenants and make sure you pick the right questions to ask or answers. When you do solve a puzzle, it is either baby easy or pretty obtuse (getting the key out of the music box took me forever to figure out).
Where the game shines, though, is in the narrative, and more specifically, it's presentation. No, I do not mean the graphics - while I really do enjoy the "Take On Me" music video art, what I love is the writing. Kyle is very well written as a grizzled ex-cop, who doesn't really have a knack for sales, which is his current job. The other people who live in his apartment building (the eponymous "Cape West") are all well written as well. The game does a good job of making them all seem like normal people, while slowly revealing more sinister secrets about a few of them as time goes on. It also handles misdirection well; I had completely read one particular person to be a murderer, and I wasn't even close. It really does read like a good, pulpy detective novel (which, when written well, I genuinely enjoy).
The story ties into the first game in subtle ways, as well. Nile was a group of criminals that Kyle was investigating on the side in the first game, and were a big reason why he had quit the police force two years before the events of The Last Window. They eventually pop up in this game, and it all makes sense why. The story stands on its own, but has callbacks to the first game, and even some foreshadowing that I didn't realize was until much later (a painting hanging on one of the tenant's walls). All the little touches to the narrative impress me and I wish more games were capable of it.
The first quarter of the game, though, is pretty boring. You spend a lot of that time doing mundane things like paying rent and talking to all the tenants. I honestly can't remember what a lot of it was. It's worth getting through, though. Once the story proper picks up, the game becomes tough to put down.
The Last Window makes me very sad, though. It wasn't released in America mostly because it didn't sell well in Japan or Europe, and I don't think the first game did very well in the States anyway. This type of game should do well here, if only the right audience had access to it. Like I said before, the game is basically a mystery novel - which sell very well in this country. If more people were exposed to it, I'm sure we'd be seeing many more games of its ilk. Unfortunately, probably the only place where it could get notice would be on Apple devices, and it would probably cost too much for most people to pay attention to it and I'd also never have a chance to play it because I hate those things. I wish gamers would give off-the-wall stuff like this a chance. I know people who like to both play video games and read; there is no reason why they shouldn't give Hotel Dusk and The Last Window a shot. CING, the creators of Hotel Dusk/The Last Window, went out of business a year or two ago. It seems like Kyle Hyde's story was meant to be a trilogy, and we'll never get to see how it ends.
Hopefully America's gaming market matures, so I don't have to import other gems like The Last Window in the future, and so developers with solid ideas don't keep going out of business.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Metroid II: Return of Samus
Metroid II: Return of Samus was released on 3DS Virtual Console this week, and I promptly grabbed it on Wednesday. Three hours and twenty minutes of gameplay later, I've finished it for probably the third or fourth time in my life.
This game is considered by many to be the black sheep of the Metroid series, and, as much as I like it, that is probably correct. It's an oddball little game, that's for sure. But it is not a bad game, which is what many people paint it as. It certainly has some issues, but the game is worth playing overall.
One of the issues with making games for the 8-bit Game Boy back in the early 90s was that despite its (relative) power, the screen resolution was tiny. This meant that although the system could display pretty detailed sprites, they either had to be incredibly small or way too large. One of the primary complaints people have about Metroid II is that Samus' sprite is way too large on the screen, which means that the player has a limited amount of time to react when enemies appear. While this is true, Metroid II does mitigate this by being predictable - and not in the "oh I know what is going to happen, BORING" way, but in the way where the player can recognize the room and enemy type and predict what things he'll likely encounter. The game will occasionally throw you for a loop, but most of the time you can predict what sorts of things will happen given the room. This fits with the overall theme of the game, as well - you are exploring a wild planet, after all, and you are a foreigner invading an ecosystem that has creatures who have behavior patterns and follow rules (the designers of the game, though, most likely just made the enemies behave the way they do to, again, mitigate the problem of there not being enough screen real-estate for the player to react to them).
Another major complaint about the game is the lack of free form exploration. In Metroid II, Samus is tasked with obliterating the Metroid species on SR-388, and so the whole point of the game is to track down every last Metroid and kill them all. There is a counter in the bottom right of the screen that tells the player how many Metroids are left. Also, when paused, that counter switches to tell you how many Metroids are left in your current area. "Areas" are divided into sections where the player must kill a certain number of Metroids, after which the planets lava will drain a little, allowing Samus to explore deeper into the planet. This doesn't really make any sense - why does the death of a certain species cause lava to drain? - but because of this, the player is limited to these areas until they clear out the Metroids.
This wouldn't be much of a problem to most people, I'm sure, if the level design wasn't so odd. It's unclear if the designers really were trying to make the underground caverns of SR-388 feel natural to the point that there are very few landmarks and thus it's very easy to get lost, or if they were constrained by the shortcomings of the Game Boy (probably a little of column A and a little of column B). The player will encounter very tight passageways filled with enemies that are hard to hit (depending on their current beam weapon, anyway) and then all of a sudden they'll be in a wide open cavern with very few enemies and tons of empty space they can jump through. These rooms are usually where players get disoriented, and they are actually my biggest complaint about the game. Because they are so large and empty, it's easy to confuse one room for another, and most of the time, they have little to no background - which means you can't tell how far Samus is falling when she jumps off a ledge into the blackness. This disorientation is further exacerbated when you realize that each of these enormous rooms are slightly different, but not in immediately obvious ways. So you might think you're in one large room, and start heading in a certain direction, when you are really in a different room. This is why an in-game map would be great, which is another complaint people have (myself included).
The 3DS version, though, is nice because you have the ability (as with any 3DS game) to go to the main menu by hitting home, hopping on the internet, and pulling up a map of the game (which I did when I got lost right at about the halfway point - didn't need to use it again after that, though). You also have the ability to use savestates, which make the battles against the Omega Metroids a bit more manageable (bastards). It is for this reason that I'd say this is the best version of Metroid II - sure, it's not the Super Game Boy version, but who cares? I played through this game on my original brick Game Boy when I was a kid, and if I could beat it on that impossible to see screen, anyone can beat this game on their beautiful 3DS screen.
My favorite thing about Metroid II, though, is the atmosphere. This is a creepy game. The few actual songs the game has are great, but most of the time there is just this weird set of atonal beeps and bloops. It sounds as alien as one could imagine. Since there are sometimes seconds long periods of silence, where you can only hear Samus' footsteps, the fact that Samus is alone in the middle of nowhere is really driven home, even more so than in the original Metroid, which I also think is good at reinforcing the feeling of loneliness. And when you encounter a Metroid, it is genuinely scary - they usually pop out of an egg or mutate when you first see them, and then they come at you with everything they have while creepy music plays. The game won't let the player control Samus as they mutate, so they are forced to watch this grotesque evolution play out (the player is allowed, however, to switch to missiles during this time). The power of the Metroids is also readily apparent, what with the fact that every other enemy in the game is some small, easily swatted away insect that probably only survives on SR-388 because the Metroids have no interest in eating them. There are a few larger creatures, but they are usually heavily armored and can only be damaged by shooting them from one side, suggesting that these enemies developed some sort of defense against the predatory Metroids.
The game is also really challenging. Not just because it's easy to get lost, either - as you get farther into the game, the Metroids get tougher and tougher. The Omega Metroids take a whopping 40 missiles to kill, and they spend a lot of time flying around the screen erratically! Luckily, they too have patterns, so if the player is observant they can be exploited.
Metroid II is also, as far as narrative is concerned, the most important game in the series. It's ending is the catalyst for Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and Metroid: Other M - which is near half of the entire series created up to this point, including the Metroid Prime series. If you take that series out of the overall narrative (as the Japanese creators of the series apparently have at this point) Metroid II's events are crucial for the narrative of all the rest of the following Metroid games. Pretty neat for a little black and white Game Boy game, huh?
This game is considered by many to be the black sheep of the Metroid series, and, as much as I like it, that is probably correct. It's an oddball little game, that's for sure. But it is not a bad game, which is what many people paint it as. It certainly has some issues, but the game is worth playing overall.
One of the issues with making games for the 8-bit Game Boy back in the early 90s was that despite its (relative) power, the screen resolution was tiny. This meant that although the system could display pretty detailed sprites, they either had to be incredibly small or way too large. One of the primary complaints people have about Metroid II is that Samus' sprite is way too large on the screen, which means that the player has a limited amount of time to react when enemies appear. While this is true, Metroid II does mitigate this by being predictable - and not in the "oh I know what is going to happen, BORING" way, but in the way where the player can recognize the room and enemy type and predict what things he'll likely encounter. The game will occasionally throw you for a loop, but most of the time you can predict what sorts of things will happen given the room. This fits with the overall theme of the game, as well - you are exploring a wild planet, after all, and you are a foreigner invading an ecosystem that has creatures who have behavior patterns and follow rules (the designers of the game, though, most likely just made the enemies behave the way they do to, again, mitigate the problem of there not being enough screen real-estate for the player to react to them).
Another major complaint about the game is the lack of free form exploration. In Metroid II, Samus is tasked with obliterating the Metroid species on SR-388, and so the whole point of the game is to track down every last Metroid and kill them all. There is a counter in the bottom right of the screen that tells the player how many Metroids are left. Also, when paused, that counter switches to tell you how many Metroids are left in your current area. "Areas" are divided into sections where the player must kill a certain number of Metroids, after which the planets lava will drain a little, allowing Samus to explore deeper into the planet. This doesn't really make any sense - why does the death of a certain species cause lava to drain? - but because of this, the player is limited to these areas until they clear out the Metroids.
This wouldn't be much of a problem to most people, I'm sure, if the level design wasn't so odd. It's unclear if the designers really were trying to make the underground caverns of SR-388 feel natural to the point that there are very few landmarks and thus it's very easy to get lost, or if they were constrained by the shortcomings of the Game Boy (probably a little of column A and a little of column B). The player will encounter very tight passageways filled with enemies that are hard to hit (depending on their current beam weapon, anyway) and then all of a sudden they'll be in a wide open cavern with very few enemies and tons of empty space they can jump through. These rooms are usually where players get disoriented, and they are actually my biggest complaint about the game. Because they are so large and empty, it's easy to confuse one room for another, and most of the time, they have little to no background - which means you can't tell how far Samus is falling when she jumps off a ledge into the blackness. This disorientation is further exacerbated when you realize that each of these enormous rooms are slightly different, but not in immediately obvious ways. So you might think you're in one large room, and start heading in a certain direction, when you are really in a different room. This is why an in-game map would be great, which is another complaint people have (myself included).
The 3DS version, though, is nice because you have the ability (as with any 3DS game) to go to the main menu by hitting home, hopping on the internet, and pulling up a map of the game (which I did when I got lost right at about the halfway point - didn't need to use it again after that, though). You also have the ability to use savestates, which make the battles against the Omega Metroids a bit more manageable (bastards). It is for this reason that I'd say this is the best version of Metroid II - sure, it's not the Super Game Boy version, but who cares? I played through this game on my original brick Game Boy when I was a kid, and if I could beat it on that impossible to see screen, anyone can beat this game on their beautiful 3DS screen.
My favorite thing about Metroid II, though, is the atmosphere. This is a creepy game. The few actual songs the game has are great, but most of the time there is just this weird set of atonal beeps and bloops. It sounds as alien as one could imagine. Since there are sometimes seconds long periods of silence, where you can only hear Samus' footsteps, the fact that Samus is alone in the middle of nowhere is really driven home, even more so than in the original Metroid, which I also think is good at reinforcing the feeling of loneliness. And when you encounter a Metroid, it is genuinely scary - they usually pop out of an egg or mutate when you first see them, and then they come at you with everything they have while creepy music plays. The game won't let the player control Samus as they mutate, so they are forced to watch this grotesque evolution play out (the player is allowed, however, to switch to missiles during this time). The power of the Metroids is also readily apparent, what with the fact that every other enemy in the game is some small, easily swatted away insect that probably only survives on SR-388 because the Metroids have no interest in eating them. There are a few larger creatures, but they are usually heavily armored and can only be damaged by shooting them from one side, suggesting that these enemies developed some sort of defense against the predatory Metroids.
The game is also really challenging. Not just because it's easy to get lost, either - as you get farther into the game, the Metroids get tougher and tougher. The Omega Metroids take a whopping 40 missiles to kill, and they spend a lot of time flying around the screen erratically! Luckily, they too have patterns, so if the player is observant they can be exploited.
Metroid II is also, as far as narrative is concerned, the most important game in the series. It's ending is the catalyst for Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and Metroid: Other M - which is near half of the entire series created up to this point, including the Metroid Prime series. If you take that series out of the overall narrative (as the Japanese creators of the series apparently have at this point) Metroid II's events are crucial for the narrative of all the rest of the following Metroid games. Pretty neat for a little black and white Game Boy game, huh?
Sunday, November 6, 2011
The Nintendo DS: Part Five
The 3DS has been out for 3/4 of a year, but that doesn't mean I can't stop eulogizing the original DS! Oddly enough, there have been a great game or two released for the system since I wrote the last post in this series, even. But anyway! Back to the saga of the DS!
(part 1) (part 2) (part 3) (part 4)
---
Since its debut in the fall of 1996, the Pokemon series has always been a juggernaut for Nintendo. Each version in each "generation" of core Pokemon games sell well into the millions. The GBA versions of Pokemon were good, but that generation was the first in which Nintendo was criticized for "going through the motions" with the series. Cries of "the Pokemon designs are too similar to the old ones!" or "the designs are stupid" spread like wildfire on message boards across the internet. It probably didn't help that Nintendo released the first of the Pokemon remakes, FireRed and LeafGreen, which were upgraded versions of the 1996 Game Boy games. "Obviously, Nintendo is out of ideas when it comes to this series," many said. "What could they possibly do different in the future?"
Astute observers, though, would have noticed where Nintendo was likely going to go if they paid attention to how they released the aforementioned remakes. FireRed and LeafGreen both came with wireless adapters, so players could trade Pokemon wirelessly with each other, eliminating the need for each player to have their own cords and all that. If you owned FireRed or LeafGreen, you had a wireless adapter and were thus ready to go. No extra cost, no extra trip to the store for mom and dad, you can just trade with your friends right now. The only thing the adapter didn't let you do was go online to trade your Pokemon.
Nintendo's next generation handheld fixed that. Sporting wireless connectivity right out of the box, the time was right for Nintendo to implement some new functionality to the series before it became stagnant. It was time to allow players to trade their Pokemon with anyone in the world.
And that is exactly what they did. There were now almost no barriers to entry to playing and fully enjoying Pokemon like there was in the past - so long as you had the system and the game, you were on a pretty even field with everyone else. You would not have to buy two versions of the same game to be able to get all the Pokemon - you could simply trade with someone on the internet to get the ones you were missing. You didn't have to buy a separate cord to be able to hook up with a friend. And, despite the collective internet losing its collective mind about the implementation of Friend Codes, the DS Pokemon games only made you enter them to trade with individual friends. You could trade to people on the internet without having to waste your time typing in a long code each and every time you made a trade.
The level designs in Pokemon Diamond and Pearl were a huge step up from the GBA games as well. Gone are the underwater sections from that game, which were ugly mazes that you could only get to by using a HM move (a move taught to your Pokemon that was usually useless in battle, but took up one of your precious four move slots so you could get around the world map). Some areas of the world had dynamic weather, which would change the way the player can move about - and also changes which Pokemon might appear. You could also bring your Pokemon from the previous generation up to the new one by utilizing the GBA slot on the DS.
Also, with just a few exceptions (the obligatory new version of Pidgey - the Starly evolution line, among a few others), the new Pokemon designs were interesting again. Battles were a bit easier to get through as well, because the player could use the touch screen to issue commands to his Pokemon in addition to being able to use the buttons as before.
Nintendo eventually released Pokemon Black and White, also for the DS, this year. They fixed some of the complaints people had about Diamond and Pearl, most notably how slow the battles moved even with animation turned off. Black and White added even more weather effects, and the world was navigated with a bit more visual flair as well. The story had a bit of a darker tone to begin with and was thus a bit more interesting than usual, despite veering into familiar territory near the end.
But the Pokemon series could not exist as it does today without the DS hardware. There will not be a mainline Pokemon game released at any point in the future without the ability to trade over the internet. But not every game would need such features. Some games were meant to be deliberate throwbacks to simpler times. Nintendo had been hinting at looking back at some of their older titles already on the GBA with the E-Reader versions of classic NES games, along with the Classic NES Series. But it had been a long while since their most important franchise returned to the realm of 2D...
(part 1) (part 2) (part 3) (part 4)
---
Since its debut in the fall of 1996, the Pokemon series has always been a juggernaut for Nintendo. Each version in each "generation" of core Pokemon games sell well into the millions. The GBA versions of Pokemon were good, but that generation was the first in which Nintendo was criticized for "going through the motions" with the series. Cries of "the Pokemon designs are too similar to the old ones!" or "the designs are stupid" spread like wildfire on message boards across the internet. It probably didn't help that Nintendo released the first of the Pokemon remakes, FireRed and LeafGreen, which were upgraded versions of the 1996 Game Boy games. "Obviously, Nintendo is out of ideas when it comes to this series," many said. "What could they possibly do different in the future?"
Astute observers, though, would have noticed where Nintendo was likely going to go if they paid attention to how they released the aforementioned remakes. FireRed and LeafGreen both came with wireless adapters, so players could trade Pokemon wirelessly with each other, eliminating the need for each player to have their own cords and all that. If you owned FireRed or LeafGreen, you had a wireless adapter and were thus ready to go. No extra cost, no extra trip to the store for mom and dad, you can just trade with your friends right now. The only thing the adapter didn't let you do was go online to trade your Pokemon.
Nintendo's next generation handheld fixed that. Sporting wireless connectivity right out of the box, the time was right for Nintendo to implement some new functionality to the series before it became stagnant. It was time to allow players to trade their Pokemon with anyone in the world.
And that is exactly what they did. There were now almost no barriers to entry to playing and fully enjoying Pokemon like there was in the past - so long as you had the system and the game, you were on a pretty even field with everyone else. You would not have to buy two versions of the same game to be able to get all the Pokemon - you could simply trade with someone on the internet to get the ones you were missing. You didn't have to buy a separate cord to be able to hook up with a friend. And, despite the collective internet losing its collective mind about the implementation of Friend Codes, the DS Pokemon games only made you enter them to trade with individual friends. You could trade to people on the internet without having to waste your time typing in a long code each and every time you made a trade.
The level designs in Pokemon Diamond and Pearl were a huge step up from the GBA games as well. Gone are the underwater sections from that game, which were ugly mazes that you could only get to by using a HM move (a move taught to your Pokemon that was usually useless in battle, but took up one of your precious four move slots so you could get around the world map). Some areas of the world had dynamic weather, which would change the way the player can move about - and also changes which Pokemon might appear. You could also bring your Pokemon from the previous generation up to the new one by utilizing the GBA slot on the DS.
Also, with just a few exceptions (the obligatory new version of Pidgey - the Starly evolution line, among a few others), the new Pokemon designs were interesting again. Battles were a bit easier to get through as well, because the player could use the touch screen to issue commands to his Pokemon in addition to being able to use the buttons as before.
Nintendo eventually released Pokemon Black and White, also for the DS, this year. They fixed some of the complaints people had about Diamond and Pearl, most notably how slow the battles moved even with animation turned off. Black and White added even more weather effects, and the world was navigated with a bit more visual flair as well. The story had a bit of a darker tone to begin with and was thus a bit more interesting than usual, despite veering into familiar territory near the end.
But the Pokemon series could not exist as it does today without the DS hardware. There will not be a mainline Pokemon game released at any point in the future without the ability to trade over the internet. But not every game would need such features. Some games were meant to be deliberate throwbacks to simpler times. Nintendo had been hinting at looking back at some of their older titles already on the GBA with the E-Reader versions of classic NES games, along with the Classic NES Series. But it had been a long while since their most important franchise returned to the realm of 2D...
Thursday, November 3, 2011
In case you hadn't picked up on it yet... I am a huge fucking dork
I haven't done a sort of "what I've been playing" brain dump of a bunch of games I don't have much to say about in a while, so I thought I'd write one of those here. I also scored some awesome deals the past few weeks so I thought I'd throw them up here, too.
First off, I scored pretty big in Mt. Pleasant last weekend. The local game shop had Xenosaga III (PS2) mint for $17.99, the lowest price I've ever seen it, so I grabbed that along with a mint The Legendary Starfy (DS) for $11.99 and near mint Star Ocean: The Second Story (PS1) for free (part of their constant B2G1 free sale, probably my favorite thing about that store). I haven't played any of those yet, but I was intrigued because it was the first time I had ever seen the PS1 Star Ocean game and I had just bought Star Ocean: First Departure (PSP) for a song the previous week (a Target coupon for $5 off their online store netted me the game for about $4 shipped brand new).
The previous week had been pretty good to me as well. My "requests" list on Goozex has started to bear fruit, and I received notice I would be getting Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! (DS) in the mail in a week or so for 650 easily earned points (I will not be missing an extra copy of Izuna 1 (DS), Tales of Phantasia (GBA), or the battered copy of Mega Man (NES) I had received off Goozex once already - and I still have 900 points left over from those trades!). I've played four songs on it already, and despite not being able to read the language or understand what the songs are saying or what's really going on on the top screen, this feels like more Elite Beat Agents which is pretty much exactly what I've wanted since laughing my way through that game. The Ouendan are just as ridiculous and goofy as the Agents were, so I'm sure I'll play my way through that game, and maybe someday Goozex will send me the sequel, which sports a title including the words "Hot-Blooded."
Strangely, I've been getting ridiculously lucky on Glyde lately as well. I grabbed Mario Hoops: 3 on 3 (DS) for $12.99 shipped as soon as I saw it, as that is about ten or fifteen bucks cheaper than I have ever seen it anywhere since it came out like five years ago (right now on Glyde, the game in the same exact condition - "excellent" - I got it for is $27.99). The game will probably arrive in the next few days. I was also able to score Harvest Moon DS for $9.49 shipped in excellent condition, which I was thrilled about because I wish I never would have sold the thing a few years back in the first place and that's as cheap as I've ever seen it. There isn't currently an "excellent" condition copy available on Glyde, but right now a "good" copy is going for about $14 shipped. I got the Gamecube Warioware in excellent condition for $6.83 shipped, which is cool because that game is multiplayer Warioware on a big screen (and isn't like forty stupid dollars like the Wii version has been for years). I got Sim City DS for $6 shipped and Orcs and Elves (DS) for $5 shipped, neither of which are great games but I've been kind of interested in both since they came out and I figured they won't get any cheaper than that.
Probably the cream of the recent crop, though, is what I was able to snag a few days ago. I decided to log into my Gamestop rewards account for no apparent reason and discovered I could spend 6000 of my then 15000 points on a coupon for $10 off any used game. Since that coupon is usually 10000 points and the deal is only going on this week, I printed one out and went to the store. Lo and behold, someone had sold back a copy of Aliens: Infestation (DS) already! It was listed as $24.99, way more than I'd be willing to pay for the game, but at $14.99 plus my ten percent discount, I figured that was a good deal so I grabbed it.
Now I can actually talk about a game! I was interested in A:I because I had heard it was shockingly similar to side-scrolling Metroid. Since there hasn't been a new side-scrolling Metroid since Fusion, I have been dying for some of that so I read some reviews and put it on my to-buy list. First of all, this game is hard. The Aliens do not go down easy, and can kill you fairly quickly. When you play Metroid, you feel pretty much like a badass, because not much can stop you except maybe a boss. Not so in Aliens. Your marine guys are way weaker than Samus, cannot take much punishment, and are way less agile. The little guys who try to jump on you and suck your brains out or whatever are quite dangerous, because they can stop you in your tracks as you take damage from the big guys running around, who are VERY fast and can sometimes take quite a few hits to take down. You also have limited ammo for everything besides your handgun - and your handgun sucks! You can upgrade your weapons by finding upgrade kits strewn about the levels like missile tanks in Metroid, but they seem to be much rarer here.
I might write more about the game in the future, as it does some interesting things (such as how if one of your guys dies, they are dead forever - unless of course you power down your system before your next save or before the next time you beat a boss), but I must go play some more Balloon Kid (GB). It just came out on the 3DS VC, and it's a sequel to Balloon Fight with (gasp!) actual level design! Plus my girlfriend totally owns an actual cartridge. Prior to seeing her copy, I had no idea it even existed. I probably won't write about it here (there's not much to say - you travel left, collect balloons, and avoid dying) but it's pretty fun, and easily worth $2.99.
And thus ends a post in which I write a thousand words about damn near nothing.
First off, I scored pretty big in Mt. Pleasant last weekend. The local game shop had Xenosaga III (PS2) mint for $17.99, the lowest price I've ever seen it, so I grabbed that along with a mint The Legendary Starfy (DS) for $11.99 and near mint Star Ocean: The Second Story (PS1) for free (part of their constant B2G1 free sale, probably my favorite thing about that store). I haven't played any of those yet, but I was intrigued because it was the first time I had ever seen the PS1 Star Ocean game and I had just bought Star Ocean: First Departure (PSP) for a song the previous week (a Target coupon for $5 off their online store netted me the game for about $4 shipped brand new).
The previous week had been pretty good to me as well. My "requests" list on Goozex has started to bear fruit, and I received notice I would be getting Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! (DS) in the mail in a week or so for 650 easily earned points (I will not be missing an extra copy of Izuna 1 (DS), Tales of Phantasia (GBA), or the battered copy of Mega Man (NES) I had received off Goozex once already - and I still have 900 points left over from those trades!). I've played four songs on it already, and despite not being able to read the language or understand what the songs are saying or what's really going on on the top screen, this feels like more Elite Beat Agents which is pretty much exactly what I've wanted since laughing my way through that game. The Ouendan are just as ridiculous and goofy as the Agents were, so I'm sure I'll play my way through that game, and maybe someday Goozex will send me the sequel, which sports a title including the words "Hot-Blooded."
Strangely, I've been getting ridiculously lucky on Glyde lately as well. I grabbed Mario Hoops: 3 on 3 (DS) for $12.99 shipped as soon as I saw it, as that is about ten or fifteen bucks cheaper than I have ever seen it anywhere since it came out like five years ago (right now on Glyde, the game in the same exact condition - "excellent" - I got it for is $27.99). The game will probably arrive in the next few days. I was also able to score Harvest Moon DS for $9.49 shipped in excellent condition, which I was thrilled about because I wish I never would have sold the thing a few years back in the first place and that's as cheap as I've ever seen it. There isn't currently an "excellent" condition copy available on Glyde, but right now a "good" copy is going for about $14 shipped. I got the Gamecube Warioware in excellent condition for $6.83 shipped, which is cool because that game is multiplayer Warioware on a big screen (and isn't like forty stupid dollars like the Wii version has been for years). I got Sim City DS for $6 shipped and Orcs and Elves (DS) for $5 shipped, neither of which are great games but I've been kind of interested in both since they came out and I figured they won't get any cheaper than that.
Probably the cream of the recent crop, though, is what I was able to snag a few days ago. I decided to log into my Gamestop rewards account for no apparent reason and discovered I could spend 6000 of my then 15000 points on a coupon for $10 off any used game. Since that coupon is usually 10000 points and the deal is only going on this week, I printed one out and went to the store. Lo and behold, someone had sold back a copy of Aliens: Infestation (DS) already! It was listed as $24.99, way more than I'd be willing to pay for the game, but at $14.99 plus my ten percent discount, I figured that was a good deal so I grabbed it.
Now I can actually talk about a game! I was interested in A:I because I had heard it was shockingly similar to side-scrolling Metroid. Since there hasn't been a new side-scrolling Metroid since Fusion, I have been dying for some of that so I read some reviews and put it on my to-buy list. First of all, this game is hard. The Aliens do not go down easy, and can kill you fairly quickly. When you play Metroid, you feel pretty much like a badass, because not much can stop you except maybe a boss. Not so in Aliens. Your marine guys are way weaker than Samus, cannot take much punishment, and are way less agile. The little guys who try to jump on you and suck your brains out or whatever are quite dangerous, because they can stop you in your tracks as you take damage from the big guys running around, who are VERY fast and can sometimes take quite a few hits to take down. You also have limited ammo for everything besides your handgun - and your handgun sucks! You can upgrade your weapons by finding upgrade kits strewn about the levels like missile tanks in Metroid, but they seem to be much rarer here.
I might write more about the game in the future, as it does some interesting things (such as how if one of your guys dies, they are dead forever - unless of course you power down your system before your next save or before the next time you beat a boss), but I must go play some more Balloon Kid (GB). It just came out on the 3DS VC, and it's a sequel to Balloon Fight with (gasp!) actual level design! Plus my girlfriend totally owns an actual cartridge. Prior to seeing her copy, I had no idea it even existed. I probably won't write about it here (there's not much to say - you travel left, collect balloons, and avoid dying) but it's pretty fun, and easily worth $2.99.
And thus ends a post in which I write a thousand words about damn near nothing.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
"A painting... of the soul!" Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin
I decided randomly a few weeks ago that I wanted to play a Castlevania game, and not one that I've beaten a thousand times (such as Dawn of Sorrow). So I picked Portrait of Ruin, a game that I didn't get very far in when I first got it and haven't played since probably 2006.
Coming right off Dawn of Sorrow (still my favorite in the series), PoR is somewhat a disappointment. There's no Soul System, so killing enemies only nets you experience and the occasional dropped item like usual, rather than thousands of different powers you can use. You do have two characters to switch between, Jonathan and Charlotte. They each play a little bit differently, as their attacks are of different types - Jonathan's attacks are what I'll call "physical" and Charlotte's are what I'll call "magical" (the game might have terms for these, but I never saw what they were). Most enemies will take damage from both kinds of attacks, but some enemies will take significantly reduced damage from a particular type (bosses are often guilty of this - they seem to be built around the developers wanting to force the player to beat them with one of the two characters in particular). What I find interesting about this system is how it was iterated upon in the sequel a few years later in Order of Ecclesia, where there are multiple kinds of weapons and specific enemy types are weak to specific types of weapons (swords, whips, axes, etc.). I just find it kind of neat how you can draw a clear line of evolution from this game to that one, despite being awfully different in many respects.
As different as they are, though, I must say OoE is pretty much the spiritual sequel to PoR. Though they do not star the same characters, I think OoE improves upon PoR's ideas in every way. The levels are split up into different maps in both games - PoR has levels divided into "paintings" that are basically just warp points, whereas OoE is one continuous world divided into discrete levels (for example, you can travel from the town to the forest to the lighthouse in OoE, where in PoR, you'd have to hop into different paintings for each of these). The battle system has similar ideas, because in PoR, you have two different characters and can "call" the other person in to help you fight (the ally AI is pretty crappy, but it IS an option) or can switch between the two on the fly. OoE has only one playable character, but she can switch between three different equipment sets on the fly, which changes which weapons she has equipped so it's similar to PoR ally-swapping. There are weird little missions you can get in both games, too - in PoR, they come from "Wind," and you can only take on five at a time and you cannot even SEE any other ones until you start completing them, whereas in OoE you get them from the villagers you save in the individual levels, and you can pick and choose which ones you want to do at any time. The nice part about OoE is that the missions make sense - one mission you get tasks you with finding the cat of one of the little kids in town. The missions in PoR are random and arbitrary most of the time. One of them is creepy - "Wind," a dead ghost, asks Charlotte to come back wearing three maid items to complete the mission. Gross.
Anyway, Portrait of Ruin plays pretty well for most of the game and the levels are fun, right up until the last third of the game. You get to a point where you have to go through "dark" versions of levels you've already beaten with slightly altered maps and harder enemies. For a Castlevania game, this is a terrible idea. You already travel through these levels enough as it is looking for stuff and the way to go and all that, and you force me to do it again?! With less save points? Ugh. One of them in particular, the dark counterpart to the Nation of Fools, is like torture. It's difficult to figure out where you're allowed to even go, much less figure out where you should go. Oh and there's also yellow Medusa Heads around. Not fun. Also boring!
I do really enjoy the bonus mode you get for beating the game, though. You can play as Richter Belmont and Maria through the entire game, without any story scenes or missions or anything like that. They level up just like Jonathan and Charlotte, but they don't get new equipment or anything like that - Richter always has the Vampire Hunter whip and the normal assortment of Castlevania subweapons, and Maria has her awesome bird attack that shoots out at an upward arc really fast and does tons of damage quickly, assuming the enemy takes decent damage from magic attacks. Richter and Maria are a blast to play as and frankly would be a great bonus mode in any Castlevania, honestly.
So Portrait of Ruin is the worst DS Castlevania, but it is still absolutely worth playing. I had a blast playing through it and if it has been a while since you've played a decent Castlevania, pick it up and play through it.
(Click here to read my Order of Ecclesia post from earlier this year. It's pretty good!)
Coming right off Dawn of Sorrow (still my favorite in the series), PoR is somewhat a disappointment. There's no Soul System, so killing enemies only nets you experience and the occasional dropped item like usual, rather than thousands of different powers you can use. You do have two characters to switch between, Jonathan and Charlotte. They each play a little bit differently, as their attacks are of different types - Jonathan's attacks are what I'll call "physical" and Charlotte's are what I'll call "magical" (the game might have terms for these, but I never saw what they were). Most enemies will take damage from both kinds of attacks, but some enemies will take significantly reduced damage from a particular type (bosses are often guilty of this - they seem to be built around the developers wanting to force the player to beat them with one of the two characters in particular). What I find interesting about this system is how it was iterated upon in the sequel a few years later in Order of Ecclesia, where there are multiple kinds of weapons and specific enemy types are weak to specific types of weapons (swords, whips, axes, etc.). I just find it kind of neat how you can draw a clear line of evolution from this game to that one, despite being awfully different in many respects.
As different as they are, though, I must say OoE is pretty much the spiritual sequel to PoR. Though they do not star the same characters, I think OoE improves upon PoR's ideas in every way. The levels are split up into different maps in both games - PoR has levels divided into "paintings" that are basically just warp points, whereas OoE is one continuous world divided into discrete levels (for example, you can travel from the town to the forest to the lighthouse in OoE, where in PoR, you'd have to hop into different paintings for each of these). The battle system has similar ideas, because in PoR, you have two different characters and can "call" the other person in to help you fight (the ally AI is pretty crappy, but it IS an option) or can switch between the two on the fly. OoE has only one playable character, but she can switch between three different equipment sets on the fly, which changes which weapons she has equipped so it's similar to PoR ally-swapping. There are weird little missions you can get in both games, too - in PoR, they come from "Wind," and you can only take on five at a time and you cannot even SEE any other ones until you start completing them, whereas in OoE you get them from the villagers you save in the individual levels, and you can pick and choose which ones you want to do at any time. The nice part about OoE is that the missions make sense - one mission you get tasks you with finding the cat of one of the little kids in town. The missions in PoR are random and arbitrary most of the time. One of them is creepy - "Wind," a dead ghost, asks Charlotte to come back wearing three maid items to complete the mission. Gross.
Anyway, Portrait of Ruin plays pretty well for most of the game and the levels are fun, right up until the last third of the game. You get to a point where you have to go through "dark" versions of levels you've already beaten with slightly altered maps and harder enemies. For a Castlevania game, this is a terrible idea. You already travel through these levels enough as it is looking for stuff and the way to go and all that, and you force me to do it again?! With less save points? Ugh. One of them in particular, the dark counterpart to the Nation of Fools, is like torture. It's difficult to figure out where you're allowed to even go, much less figure out where you should go. Oh and there's also yellow Medusa Heads around. Not fun. Also boring!
I do really enjoy the bonus mode you get for beating the game, though. You can play as Richter Belmont and Maria through the entire game, without any story scenes or missions or anything like that. They level up just like Jonathan and Charlotte, but they don't get new equipment or anything like that - Richter always has the Vampire Hunter whip and the normal assortment of Castlevania subweapons, and Maria has her awesome bird attack that shoots out at an upward arc really fast and does tons of damage quickly, assuming the enemy takes decent damage from magic attacks. Richter and Maria are a blast to play as and frankly would be a great bonus mode in any Castlevania, honestly.
So Portrait of Ruin is the worst DS Castlevania, but it is still absolutely worth playing. I had a blast playing through it and if it has been a while since you've played a decent Castlevania, pick it up and play through it.
(Click here to read my Order of Ecclesia post from earlier this year. It's pretty good!)
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