Friday, August 29, 2008

Casual Friday: Action figure get!: Electric Boogaloo.

I can't (don't want to) always write about games. After all, this is a blog! About me! Sort of. So, on Fridays, I'll talk about whatever it is that I happen to be thinkging.

This Friday, I'll talk about the new action figures I got recently. If you've followed the blog at all, you'll know that I got the Aquarious and Scorpio figures earlier. I got Cancer shortly thereafter. Then, I ordered three more (Libra, Sagittarius, and Dragon). Now, I did get 2 out of the 3 (the other one is on the way, either that or I've been ripped off), I don't have pics, so you'll have to settle for stock images:



Yeah, they look pretty badass. And I plan to collect more. Whenever I can. I hope.

See? That wasn't so bad. It was pretty short too. However, Casual Friday may or may not include longer posts, as well as rants (most not serious in nature), but hey, que sera, sera.

Peace

Thursday, August 28, 2008

On a (Lots of) Hair Trigger.


Square Enix recently announced that they will be bringing The SNES RPG Chrono Trigger to the DS. Now, resounding "FINALLY!" aside, the announcement was met with pretty wholly positive reaction from fans.

In case you don't know, Chrono Trigger was an RPG on the SNES. Now, what makes it different from your Dragon Quests and your Final Fantasies (and you rap music, and your DVD's...) is that it's basically a combination of the two (so really, it's not that different, really), and the only work of the so-called "Dream Team" of the creators of both series, including (but not limited to) Hironobu Sakaguchi from Final Fantasy, and Yuuji Horii on the Enix side. Akira Toriyama handled the art (he drew Dragon Ball Z, guys!), as he did in Dragon Quest. The irony, of course, is that these companies would merge later, but the Dream Team was never reassembled.

I've never played Chrono Trigger (I'm not as old as you think), but so far what's been revealed about this remake makes me kinda skeptical of how much thought Square Enix is putting into it. First of all, it won't be 3-D, which the DS remakes of Final Fantasy III and IV had going for them. However, this actually makes me glad instead of angry (which many fanboys are), as, unless they scale the difficulty for a wider audience (which hasn't been the case with the remakes so far, in fact FF IV was even harder than the SNES version), I'll be able to experience the game mostly unchanged.

Of course, companies seem to think that remakes won't make money unless they pack in extra stuff to get those people who played them already. The new version packs new touch screen controls (ooooooohh!! Maaagical touch screen controls!), and an extra dungeon. The sound quality is also good, from what I've heard. Now, I don't really think that it matters. Sure there are people who will buy it for that reason and that reason alone, but those numbers really pale in comparison to: a) the new kids who got into FF IV from the DS version, and will buy it by the brand alone, and b) the obsessed fanboys who would buy it if the game asked to them code it them-damn-selves. It's not so much that I don't like the new content, (and really, no one should object to new content that you're getting for free), but if the game would come out earlier sans touch screen controls and new dungeon, I would much prefer that.

The game has also been priced and dated. The game will be 39.99 and will come out November 25th. The release doesn't bother me at all, but the price might bother some. But hey, more likely than not, Square is probably targeting the same audience that bought The World Ends With You for 40 dollars, so price really shouldn't be a problem for them. As for the rest of us, we'll just have to cough them up somehow, and enjoy what everyone else says is a timeless classic, or something like that. I'm obviously not old enough to enjoy this.

Peace.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

My, what big flamethrowers you have...

Now that the fall school season has started, I have even less time to write without the need to turn in the next day, but I hope to occasionally be able to blog here and there, and when I do, it will be a review (I'm playing games, I swear! I just don't seem to be getting anywhere...), or just random crap, and some of it may or may not include games.

First of all, I felt like giving my thoughts on Call of Duty: World at War. The game seems fine and all, but most of the talk surrounding this game is that the developer is not called Infinity Ward (who made that one shooter you might still be playing). People were outraged (well, as outraged as a fat guy at a computer can be without causing damage) at the fact that Treyarch, devs of the sorta-lauded-but-kinda-in-a-weird-place-so-people-went-meh Call of Duty 3. I'm not going to defend the game, except for saying that even though it wasn't as good as 2, it sure as hell was better than many shooters that came out at the time.

That point aside, Treyarch really is in tough position. After making a name for themselves with Spider-man 2, then screwing up (by all intents and purposes, for not being named Infinity Ward) at COD3 and then Spider-Man 3. So, they needed something big to get people's trust back.





Judging by the image above, I think it's safe to say they're on the right track. Now, that looks like ordinary fire there, but see it in motion and I think you'll at least consider changing your mind. If you've played any games with fire (and you should have, hopefully), it always seemed to look so square and just crappy compared to its surroundings. But Treyarch seems to have nailed it. This may also be part of a trend, from what I've heard.


Now, beautiful fire a great game does not make. They're still in a shaky state. But I'm in a state to forgive them for whatever they've done in the past. And really, if you take off your stupid fanboy glasses and see the world for what it is, their sins are as heretical as you thought they were. Nevertheless, I'm going to forgive Treyarch on behalf of the gaming community. Treyarch, we forgive you. Even though we should be apologizing.


And even if the game does turn out to be crappy, let it never be said that it had crappy fire.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Post-Trip Impressions.

So I've returned from my trip to Mexico, and just now got around to setting up my systems, and have been digging around the Xbox Live Marketplace. Needless to say, I'm a little behind on game releases. On that note, I have been playing games for review (and some of them are pretty dated, so sorry about that), but I just had to play some of these games and give some impressions on them.


Too Human

I'd been hearing a lot about this one, and I wasn't really sure what to think. Opinions range from it being too action oriented to it being too much of an RPG. So when I was looking through the demos on the marketplace, I quickly downloaded it, waited for it to finish, then started playing.

Now that I have a modest idea of what the game is about (and really, demos can only give you so much of a glimpse of the complete product), I think I can say that I like it, but not as much as I thought I would. The combat feels...well, awkward. I think it's innovative to have the attack button be the right analog stick, don't get me wrong, but I just had some problems getting used to the right stick not being in charge of camera control. I would often find myself trying to get the camera to look where I wanted it too and end up swinging my sword. That's not to say the camera is bad (you can always center it by clicking one of the bumpers), It just takes getting a little used to.

But aside from the getting used to it thing, there are problems with the fighting. In the demo, the enemies would die so quickly at the hands of any melee weapons (keep in mind I was the barbarian) that I never felt like I was fighting anything, just sorta hopping from one enemy to another, killing everything I saw. Guns didn't seem to do much except hold enemies in the air (a la Devil May Cry 4), and did really tiny amounts of damage (again, I was the barbarian, which probably menas that gun-toting class will do more damage with those). It did feel fun, but it was more akin the Marvel Ultimate Alliance than to DMC4, I guess I wasn't ready for that.

The looting part of the game was fine though. After you beat certain enemies, they'll give you loot. Like that one game. At first the menu confused the living hell out of me, I didn't know where to go to see what stuff I had just gotten. After that small hump, equiping my guy with things became easy, though for someone like me, who has to check the menu everytime he gets something to see if it's better than the stuff he has, it made for a lot of menu time. The weapons certainly did feel different from one another, but only when the picture of the gun was different. Guns with the same little picture (like handgun versus a rifle and a two handed sword versus having one in each hand), all felt the same. The stats were different, but the weapons always seemed to really do the same exact thing. I guess I should expect that from lootfest games by now.

The story that I played was short, but I think I've had enough of the story to know that won't care about it. Norse mtyholgy in the future, with humans with guns fighting robots or something works and all, but it didn't really do anyting for me. The dialogue was horrendous as well. Sure, the sort of stuff the characters are spouting seems appropriate for Norse mythology, but I just felt the developers forget their game was set in the future, not in Norse times. As a whole though, I really did like it, but I really can't tell how much Until I get my hands on the final product.

Tales of Vesperia

Ah, finally, it's the latest game in that-series-that-I-haven't-played-since-Symphonia, otherwise known as the Tales Series. Now, it's very hard to actually make a demo of a RPG, because you only get such a small fraction of what the game really is, and since RPG's involve payoff over a long period of time, you miss out on more than you would than say, a First-person Shooter. Nonetheless, I commend Namco-Bandai (not sure if there should be a hyphen there) for releasing anything at all.

Out of the small amount of time the demo provided, I got a good vibe out of it. The graphics are far improved from the their PS2/Gamecuve predecessors, with sharper colors, textures, and animations, although it's a little hard to tell, what with the cell-shaded style and all. The demo opened with a cutscence that again exemplifies how bad acting in RPG's are, especially in the english dub versions. Then, I got to the part where you run around and find monsters, which wasn't all that bad, as it follows the same formula as other Tales games, which is you see an icon of the monster encounter, and you can choose to avoid or fight it at your leisure. This meant that there wasn't a lot of stopping my progress and getting annoying, like other RPG's tend to do.

The encounters are quick, but it took me a bit to get reaccustomed to the control scheme on a 360 controller. Regular attacks are handled with the B button, special moves are handled with the A button, or A and moving the right stick in a given direction, which held up quite well. I was comboeing regular and special attacks very early on, and it feels nice to do so. You control one character and the AI controllers the other three, but I don't know if you can issue them commands, like you could in other versions, I didn't really get a chance to experiment.

The demo (or at least for me) ends with a boss battle, who was quick to deliver my butt to the right address, mine. I don't know if there's more after, but I get a feeling you just get another cutscence and the demo ends. Whether I lost or not isn't really important, because I got enough out of the game to feel that's it shaping up to be just like the other recent games, and to me, that's a good thing.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Get Curious With Layton.


In the vast gaming pantheon, I like to think there are three types of games: The ones everyone knows about, you know, the ones that started out in the mid-70-80's, and are huge franchises today, and everyone should know. There are the new titles that are blasted in your face so that you have to know about them, are covered in great detail, and by the time you play them, they already seem like an established franchise. Then there are those games that not many people care about. You hear about them, yes, but because they're not blown in your face through multimillion dollar adverts, you often don't give them a second thought. Professor Layton and the Curious Village is definitely one of the latter.

Professor Layton, is, for all intents an purposes, one of those books you sometimes find at a Grocery store, filled with puzzles that you'd often show to your friends, solve the easiest ones you could find, and go to the back of the book for the answers to the ones you were too lazy to figure out on your own (or the ones you'd stare at for hours without making an sense of them), in a DS cartridge that you can carry around at your leisure. It's a collection of logic puzzles that range from simply getting a ball from one end of a block-filled maze to the other, to a riddle with a deceptively simple answer. Where it shines above said books, however, falls into two categories; its presentation and the story that connects all of the puzzles together.

The story goes something like this: You are Professor Layton, a skinny man in a top hat renowned for puzzle solving skills, and his apprentice, Luke. You are given a letter from a someone named Lady Dahlia (like the murder, yes.) To come help her find the Golden Apple in the village of St. Mystere, the finder of which will inherit a dead baron's fortune. Once there, you begin a Sam & Max like adventure, where you find clues, get to different places, and progress the story along the way. This is augmented by the fact that in order to get almost any information to help guide you along your way, you must first solve one of 120 puzzles (not all of them are mandatory, but for the completist there's a lot of work to do here). It seems like a shaky dynamic at first (why would all these people be so fascinated with puzzles?), but as the story works itself out, it does happen to make sense along the way (trust me).

The story is presented to you mostly in the form of dialogue between characters, with speech bubbles all present and accounted for. However, during rare instances, you are given gorgeously well made FMV cutscenes, with voice acting and everything. They're very few and far between at first, but towards the end of the story they get more frequent. The sound here is okay when listening from the DS speakers, but through headphones, the voice acting really pops.

When you are presented with a puzzle, it shakes out something like this: You are presented a picarat score from 10 to 80 (picaracts represent the value of a puzzle, 10 being easy and 80 being really, really, hard, and basically are a score of how well you've done). you are brought to the screen where you attempt to solve the puzzle, and are given the chance the unlock hints using hint coins (you start with ten and more are hidden throughout various places, found by touching said places). The first hint is usually pretty vague, but gives you how you have to think in order to solve it, and the other two hints are usually very specific, which can lead to frustration if you already know what the hints tell you, but are stuck in some other way.

When you think to know the answer to a puzzle, you enter it via touch screen, then Layton (or Luke) appear and tell you whether you're right or wrong. If you're right, you can continue solving puzzles, if you're wrong, you can try again, but the picarat value goes down when you do re-try (about 10 %), however it only goes down twice.

The problem with this system is that it is very easily exploitable. You can save right before a puzzle, enter it, get all three hints for it, try and try again until you get it somehow, then when you get the right answer shut off and restart the game, where you'll start off right before the puzzle, answer at the ready, and get it without the loss of hint coins or picarats. Thus, completing the game without ever losing a hint coin and a perfect score is easily achievable by anyone who's figured this out. It reeks of the Ace Attorney series exploit which allowed you to breeze through the game without ever thinking, but it goes without saying that even with this little pro tip, the game is still enjoyably difficult (the hints don't always give away the answer).

There are a wide variety of puzzles, from crossing chicks and wolves to riddles, and all of these types of puzzles range from easy to mind-crushingly difficulty, especially in the later stages of the game. This means that if you're a parent or have a younger brother or sister, you can let them solve all the easy puzzles, and when they get stumped, have them come to you. If you'd rather solve all the puzzles yourself, you can do that, then go to the puzzle index and have the younger person try to solve them there.

The puzzles given to you by strangers aren't the only ones, however. Not only are there hidden puzzles throughout the various parts of St. Mystere you visit (again found by clicking random places), but throughout the course of your adventure, after completing certain puzzles, you will be given one of three things: A gizmo, a painting scrap, or a piece of furniture. Each of these things are part of their own puzzle. Gizmo's assemble a robot (which is not only effortless to do, but gives you a hint as to the ending of the game), painting scraps form a puzzle you need to put together, and you must arrange furniture to make Layton and Luke happy (maximum happiness solves the puzzle).

Completing those then unlocks bonus puzzles found in various houses, and these puzzles are decidedly harder than the ones found in the main game, and completing all of those will unlock more bonus puzzles (probably the hardest ones of all). And after that, you can download even more puzzles via the game's Wi-Fi connection, though they're all already on the card, so don't expect an endless stream of brain hurt. Needless to say, however, there's a lot of puzzle solving to go around.

Professor Layton offers a great diversion from the routine run-n-gun, hack-n-slash gameplay usually shoved down our throats, and instead shoves 120+ puzzles down your throat. The story is a great way to connect all this puzzle solving, and since not all the puzzle solving is necessary, there's a stopping point for both people who just want beat the game and hardcore completists, but the fact that have to passively play the game (by thinking a lot), may not be for fans of the aforementioned types of gameplay.