Beaten: Dragon's Dogma (on 5/30/13)

System: PS3
Status: Beaten

For all the flak Capcom gets for its treatment of its older franchises, they have recently come up with some pretty awesome new ones. Dragon's Dogma is one of my favorite new ones they have made (the other being Monster Hunter), and its certainly a unique entry.

Where Monster Hunter could be defined as Bossfights: The game, Dragon's Dogma doesn't go quite that far. Dragon's Dogma still has amazing fights and set-pieces, but the key is that the game's engine from the very beginning is designed for it. The very first fight is against a giant dragon, the size of a castle, and when you fight it again later, the only thing that has changed is your gear. The game makes great use of the grab mechanics, sort of like Shadow of the Colossus, in that you need to hang on to monsters and stab/cut/whatever to do some serious damage. The difference between this and Shadow, is that you have allies who can also be away from the enemy, shooting arrows/magic/etc, or you could be doing that and leave your allies jumping on them. The game has a lot of very cool mechanics for different classes working together, such as knights using their shields to fling characters into the air to grab enemies, putting elements on weapons, and the like. The only problem with it is that you are only ever allied with AI characters, so you have to rely on them to act appropriately. They aren't stupid, since the game actually has mechanics for them 'learning' certain monsters and what works...its just too bad they'll remind you that 'Fire works well!' every five minutes, because its certainly true for almost everything.

Still, the game's mechanic treats bossfights almost as incidental...not that they aren't important, but you only a few times get a quest that says 'go kill this big  monster', usually you'll be going somewhere else, you'll see a nasty thing, and you want to go kill it. The game rewards you with pieces of the monster to upgrade your gear with, so you are urged to go hack off bits and stab them. Still, sometimes the reward is the awesome gameplay that happens just from the mechanics, launching from a melee fighter's shield, landing on the wing of a flying griffen, and stabbing them in the wings until they do a death dive and carve a furrow in the ground with their sudden crash landing, while the rest of your team proceeds to hack them apart. There are some reskinned monsters, but they tend to put different spins on them, so that you'll get killed if you assume all drakes or griffen styled enemies are the same.

The game's story is pretty barren, and NPC interaction is really loose. Since you custom make your own character, and interaction is purely determined by doing nice things to people, you can be utterly surprised when the game picks your 'lover', whom you just did quests for.

Still, overall the game is very enjoyable, the only major drawback being that you are walking almost everywhere, and it can take a long while going from points, fighting the same spawned enemies every time. The bigger monsters are more random, but chimeras, wolves, bandits, and the like spawn in the same places every time. Definately a game to pick up though for a unique experience, though perhaps you should find the director's cut, entitled 'Dark Arisen'.

Lost my save due to the PS3 crashing dead, so need to replay the whole game and do new game + plus some achieves to complete.

Beaten: Darkstalkers Resurrection (on 3/20/13)

System: PS3
Status: Beaten (on 3/20/13)

Darkstalkers is a series I've always liked in concept and art style, but never had the chance to actually...you know...play it. The concept of various movie-monster beings fighting it out was interesting to a much younger me, and I still find the concept cool in a fighting game. The problem being, the series is basically unknown in the states, since we only got a few of the games, and really hasn't existed at all since the PS1 era.

Darkstalkers Resurrection really doesn't fix that. This is basically a port of the two arcade games, with a bit of window dressing on the outside. You can pick which arcade game to play, and there's some art and achievements attached, but otherwise the games are left entirely untouched and original. This is likely great for those who want to play the original versions, but naturally, this leaves the fighting games themselves feeling like...well, a PS1 era fighting game. You get an arcade mode, and a 'challenge' mode where you have to do specific combos for each character (a huge pet peeve of mine, its not actually a challenge mode).

I went through the game and beat each one on arcade mode, and really don't have any incentive to play it any further. Completion is out of the question for all the achievements, since the challenge mode is a rude joke. The sad thing is, I keep a large fighting game library to have plenty of options when I have friends over...this likely won't even register in my mind as an option when that happens.

Beaten: Journey (on 3/9/13)

System: PS3
Status: Beaten (on 3/9/13)

There's really not much I can say about this game that hasn't already been said by numerous other actual games journalists. From my experience, the game is more of an experience than anything else. The gameplay is sparse, and tends to be more looking around for the next thing to activate. It is however a beautiful game to look at, and it is more beautiful for the set pieces that the game manages to string together to show off that beauty.

If anything, the thing this game does perfectly is it is an amazing introductory game. Most modern games have a lot of different controls and assumptions that you've played similar games before. Journey has none of that, you move, and you jump/fly, and that is about it, everything else is just exploring the world with a vague (but firm) goal of reaching that light at the end.

To my mind, completing this game will be getting all the achievements, or at least the white robe (for collecting all the white symbols), but that would require me sitting down and doing so with a guide since its so easy to miss them.

Beaten: Persona 4: Arena

System:  PS3
Status: Beaten (on 1/7/13)

Fighting games tend to be quick turn-arounds for my list. Its really easy to get the credits screen since it only takes beating one character for that, and for my criteria that counts. For this one, I at least went the extra mile and actually finished every character's story mode when I was playing it. Unfortunately, I haven't touched it since, and my PS3 being replaced cost me all the saves I had on the old one, so that means doing the story again. At least I actually have a TV big enough to see the whole screen now...

As a review, the fighting game aspect is alright. It reminds me a lot of the Jojo's fighting game on the Dreamcast, where you have your main character and then a summon that you can call in to do extra attacks. The summon can be broken by others attacking it, and the game has RPG-like status effects that can be applied. I didn't spend enough time to really learn the system innately, it was a little slow for my taste and the character sprites take up a huge section of the screen. I tend to prefer my fighting games small and quick.

Story wise, it is interesting to see characters from the two recent persona games interacting and seeing how the story works out between them and in addition to the original stories, but it gets forgettable fast. It doesn't help that in order to see the true ending, you have to see the same scenes over and over from different characters. I ended up skipping over most of the dialogue because it was the same conversation from different angles over and over.

Fighting games are always hard to complete, especially when they include trophies for online play, which in all likelihood no one is doing anymore. This one also has the issue that 'challenge' mode is glorified 'learn this combo' for all the characters. What ever happened to challenge modes that were challenges? Guilty Gear did that rather well, each was a fight with special conditions and challenges, and I haven't played a fighting game that has done that well since. Rather sad.

Beaten: Yakuza: Dead Souls

System: PS3
Status: Beaten


Ah yes, this is the reason I stopped blogging about the games daily. I enjoyed this game so much that I didn't want to stop playing to blog about it. That and it was a welcome respite from a horrible job.

My love for the Yakuza series is no secret, it has a definite charm with how it goes about telling stories with complete seriousness, mixed with absolutely goofy side quests, and ultra-violent street combat. Dead Souls is an offshoot, not cannon with the main story, mostly for reasons of zombies.

I have seen reviews of this game that discuss the wonky mechanics for shooting and aiming, which for the most part are correct. The aiming stick switches depending on whether you're looking down the sights or running and gunning. I do think a major issue with people playing this game is they play it like Resident Evil or similar over the shoulder action games. The difference is that the zombies in Dead Souls are fast, and tend to not just let you aim and head shot them at will. The game also gives you infinite pistol ammo, and plentiful ammo for other weapons, most of which tend to be fully automatic or have an area to their shots. Your character also auto-aims while running around, so its perfectly viable to run through a horde gunning like crazy.

The game play as said before is very quick, most of the time you're gunning down hordes and hordes of zombies without much hesitation. Once the game starts introducing special zombies, you have to change things up when you hear their signature sounds or see them from a distance. After a while, there is little surprise, while in free roam the special zombies appear in the same locations every time, maybe adjusted a bit by the free roam area changing between main characters. It is interesting that the game keeps track of total zombies killed for the entire game...usually ending up in the tens of thousands after a single play through.

The story is treated with surprising seriousness, and you can see the city going to hell as the quarantine zone keeps getting forced out further and further. Though the concept is a bit off, the main character's treat zombies running around the city like you would expect them to given their personalities from the previous games. There are references to previous games, though enough explanation is given that its doubtful anyone would be too lost. With how well they treat the story, its hard to believe its a side story. Unfortunately, it seems it'll be the last one released stateside, since they don't plan to release five in English.

If I had any issues with the game, it would be the repetitiveness. Its easier than other games in the series to complete all the side quests and various minigames, but it gets very annoying to have to go in to the free roam zone, do part one of a quest, step back out, go back in to do part two, rinse and repeat, each time fighting the same zombies over and over.

Progress wise, all I need to do is grind my level up to ninety nine for a trophy, then its time for Dead Souls mode.

Beaten: Wolfenstein 3D

Beaten: Wolfenstein 3D

System: PS3 (PSN Download)
Status: Beaten
Currently: Just finished on the 'normal' difficulty, which leaves hardest for completion.

This game definitely does not hold up to the test of time. I really hate to say that, because this was always a game I wanted to play since I could only rent it on the SNES (which was buggy and censored). The PSN collection came with all 6 episodes, but its rather clear that the first 3 have the best design out of all of them, and the other three, which seem to have been sold together, were of far lower quality. Its not like the graphics or anything were of lesser quality, but the first three episodes kind of had a nice flow to them, a new enemy in each one that you had to get used to (albeit any differences are minor other than how fast they kill you), and a steady progression in difficulty. Once you hit episode 4 though, the little things you hadn't really noticed before start to kick in.

The damage as I noted in a previous post, is all kinds of out of proportion, especially when you're right next to an enemy, and they can nearly take your head off with two shots (even the grunts). The enemies probably just deal more damage the closer they get to you, which means being able to see them first and not let them get close is very important. Once you get to the additional three missions, the designers seemed to realize the only way to up the difficulty was to make it much harder to see the enemies first...and thus follows about 27 solid stages of tight corridors with alcoves that you have to check every step, and even when you do, sometimes they'll pop out and blast you before you can reasonably react. This isn't challenge, its fake difficulty, and often I was blasted down to near dead and had to backtrack because of an enemy you couldn't possibly see unless you knew he was there beforehand. This is made even worse by the fact that one bad turn of luck kicks you back to the start of the stage with a pistol and hardly any ammo, which means you might have to reload or get really lucky depending on the stage. This design also means a lot of the stages are a lot of walking down very tiny corridors, looking for a key, and getting lost, hoping to not run into an enemy at the wrong time and get blasted. The rewards for finding secrets and exploring are not worth the hassle, since you can only find more health, ammo (with a max of 99), or points which give you extra lives. At no point did I ever feel necessary to go exploring for secrets.

Overall, it is a classic and its worth a play, but I would almost just recommend playing the first three episodes, they're a more solid game.

11/17: Quickfixes

Unfortunately, I've been stuck in one of those moods where I really can't get anything in particular done, so been pecking at a few games idly.

Name: Beyond Good & Evil
System: PS2 (Playing on PS3)
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Just finished the second story dungeon.

I feel really bad that I've never gotten to this game before, especially since I know it to be a solid game the few times I've booted it up and played it for a while. It also wasn't a big investment, and a great deal since I snagged it for 6$ from a Gamestop, like most of the later additions to my PS2 collection. I really have no complaints other than the strange graphical glitches that happen occasionally, which I have gathered come with the PS2 port of the game (and the PS3 may be making worse, I don't remember my PS2 doing the weird thing with the water). Overall the gameplay is solid, the partner system is fairly well implemented, there's nothing overtly annoying about any aspect of the game. The Pokemon Snap-like camera subquest is actually really fun, though once you get the radars that tell you where the animals you don't have are, it becomes rather trivial. Still, it seems a game that is full of collection sidequests, where the designers did their best to make sure they were not frustrating, which is always a good idea. Just need to put a few more hours into this and I can probably tick it off my completed list rather quickly.

Name: Wolfenstein 3-D
System: PS3
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Finished Episodes 1-3 on 'normalish' difficulty.

An oldie that I never got around to truly playing other than the horrendous SNES port I rented a few times back in the day. The PSN port does a pretty good job of capturing the game without mucking with it really at all. They even left in the old text screens after each episode advertising the next...along with all the cheesy text detailing you 'kicking Hitler's skull off'. Fun. My wife has all sorts of trouble watching me play this, and I have some issues as well, the game is smooth except when you start to turn (strafing and the like), where it gets a bit herky-jerky, and tends to give me motion sickness a bit. The damage also seems way out of line for the enemies even on the lower difficulty I'm on. One shot from pretty much any enemy can nearly kill you...or just nick you, and there doesn't seem to be much reason for the differences, not range or if you were moving or not. Still, the game is loaded with ammo (and all guns use the same type), along with plenty of health, so its really not that difficult. Taking it easy though so I don't make myself sick with the herky-motion. Twin-stick controls I think are the best way to play these old games though, its even how I prefer to play the original Doom 1/2 games now.

Name: RetroMUD
System: PC (Portal GT client)
Status: Null
Currently: Levelling up my Fallen alt, trying to get my Psi main money to train.

A real oldie for me, and a classic MUD, though the player base has shrunk in recent years due to a good solid year or so of crashes and unstableness. The core of the game is still great, with numerous classes, lots of options as to how to build characters, and all around freedom to do what you want. The community is always great for the game, and half the fun is chatting with the good people there. I really can't review the game much more than that, especially since a lot of it is personal experience, and not many people play MUDs anymore. Still, if I'm not playing something else, I'm playing this, much easier to cram in an hour or so of farming now that you don't have to worry about putting your gear in boxes if you carry it around.

Daily Review: inFAMOUS

Daily Review

inFAMOUS

System: PS3 (PSN Download)
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Almost done with the Warrens

I am very mixed on this game so far. So many elements of it to me are rather fun, but it is very telling when you stop playing a game due to frustration rather than at natural stopping points.

Guess I should start with the good first, so I don't forget to mention them. So far, the game feels very realistic, and does a good job of pushing you to play smart rather than just rushing in to enemies. Your character is very susceptible to bullets despite being a superhero, and the game reminds you of this. The powers you get are rather varied, though to be fair are mostly just different methods of 'electrical death', and I do find myself using the new powers to compliment the old, but the game makes sure to give you situations where you don't forget them (in example, enemies behind fences or guardrails where its a good idea to use that new electrical rocket attack). The parkour aspect is different, and while it takes you a while to get anywhere unless you ride the trains (and get motion sick), it does let you naturally discover the little items the game wants you to collect, and makes the city feel more realized than just something you skim past.

However, all that said, the parkour aspect itself is the most frustrating aspect of the game. Your character will cling to -everything-, which is good at some points, but you can never anticipate what he will cling to. Do the same jump twice, and you'll stick to different parts of the building for no apparent reason. Ostensibly you can see the 'lines' where you can grab and the 'knobs' where you can hold on, but the graphic style is so gritty that often times you start scaling to get to a spot, and wonder why you can stick to this ledge, but not this other thing that looks like a ledge. In addition, the thing will just glitch out on occasion, and while you're under fire, your character will dance around for a bit like he's trying to find a place to stand...on a perfectly level roof. This does seem more prevalent on angles and slopes, but it really detracts from the game.

The entire reason I quit today was due to a sidequest where you race rooftop to rooftop, connecting uplinks on them. So far, these have been difficult, but fair, you find the right path and rush, barely finishing after a few tries. This one was complete and utter bullshit though. The first two are seperated by wires you glide on, all good. The third one for some reason is on the other side of a ladder and a jagged outcrop of building, which requires about five jumps to get him to stop sticking to everything and just touch it. The one after that is across a gap too far to jump, so you end up clinging to the building and taking forever to scale up. The one after -that- is the same deal...and there were at least two more after it. Most of these tend to be one or two links, three at the most. I do get the feeling I'm supposed to have the 'flying' power before I do this, but there's no indication in game of that, and I make a habit to complete everything as soon as possible.

The other gripes are more in general. I hate silly polar alignment choices, in this game you're either a serial killer or a true hero, nowhere in between if you want to get the good powers and the trophies for being good and evil. The open world aspect has been fun in other games, but beyond little blue shards and quests that are marked on your map, the world itself is devoid of -anything- to do. All the sidequests are variations on the same subset of missions, and the combat while realistic, gets very frustrating. The game is only difficult because of the wonky controls, the normal difficulty is offset by very forgiving waypoints, so forgiving sometimes it is just better to die so you get ported closer to your next goal.

Still, I'm going to finish it, hopefully soon, but thoughts of beating it again on evil are making my brain twitch.

Beaten: Bionic Commando: Rearmed

Beaten

Bionic Commando: Rearmed

System: PS3 (PSN Download)
Status: Beaten
Currently: Just beat the game, leaves super hard, the challenges, and the secrets.

Well, that was a little dissapointing. Picked the game back up on a whim, knowing I had been struggling on the final stage, and apparently somewhere along the line they patched the game to have infinite lives. So a stage where previously 3 lives didn't even get me through the first three parts of it, beaten in about ten minutes or so. Probably a good change though, I doubt anyone nowadays has the patience to do Ninja Gaiden level memorization of every jump and swing, especially with Bionic Commando's strange jumping mechanics.

Review wise, this is a great game and worth the price to pick it up. It is a true and true platformer, and very old school in design. The jumps are unforgiving, especially given they stuck to the original design in that you can't actually jump. You can only attach your arm and swing around, so a lot of the game kind of confused my wife until I reminded her that you can't actually jump in the game...so two platforms going back and forth is much harder, since to get from one to the other, you have to fall off one, shoot your arm up diagonally to catch the other platform, and then swing up top. With infinite lives this is less annoying since you don't have to start the entire stage back because you messed up 3 jumps. The boss fights are fun and quirky, though very short, once you learn the trick you can have them beaten in a minute or two. The game itself has far more replay if you're a perfectionist and want to get high scores, but for everyone else I doubt you'll play the harder difficulties. We'll see about them if I ever get back to completing this.

Daily Review: Valkyria Chronicles

Daily Review

Valkyria Chronicles

System: PS3
Status: Beaten
Currently: Just beat it, finally!

So yeah, I love this game, its unabashed. I'm really regretting it took me so long to beat it, especially since there are sequels on the PSP, and I actually have one now. Not to say its perfect, but it is definately a great game. Its really surprising that lately Sega has been making awesome games (Yakuza series as well), as long as it isn't Sonic franchise.

The game is beautiful, it is drawn in this 'paintbrush' style that makes the entire game look like a painting (including whitened out sections at the top and bottom). The world is a stylized Europe, set in pretty much World War 2, barring certain technology (Its all land war). As a strategy RPG, it works well, you have to carefully consider your movements, jump from cover to cover, guard your approaches, lay down covering fire, hide behind tanks, etc. The missions are usually quite fun, tossing you into situations where you have to adapt and adjust your tactics, and at the same time try to rush to get a good grade for more experience and cash.

Any gripes I have are really nitpicks, and some of them were misconceptions on my part, I'll handle those first. First of all, I played this game like Fire Emblem, and that was wrong. At first I would restart a mission if I lost someone who wasn't important....except all but the character's who you can not let die during the particular mission, anyone who falls you can run up next to, call a medic...then call again in the same mission. Once I realized this, I abused it, in one mission I had a mechanic who would run up, repair the tank, and get nailed by crossfire. I would call the medic, then at the next base I captured, call her up again, and go again. I literally had her shot down four times, and called back into action four times. As long as the enemy doesn't get to that person, they don't die permanently (but will if an enemy touches them).

The other weird part was realizing I could save scum. You can save in the middle of missions...I put the game down at first because I would go through a 5-6 turn mission, and screw up near the end, having to start all over. Once I realized I could save mid mission, I would save at the beginning of a turn where nothing really went terrible, and be able to reload if I made a really bad move. This saved me from having to start all over, and at times wasting hours.

So, other than those two misunderstandings, my main gripes lay in some minor elements. The first, is that for most of the game, the game is played as a straight war stories. There are some 'land battleships' that are too big to be believed, but its kinda acceptable with the mysterious fuel source they use. However, at the later part, you have super-powered beings tearing up battlefields, and the final enemy general goes 'one wing angel' and takes on your entire squad by himself. It doesn't ruin it, but its rather weird since the game would have worked fine as a war story (an idealistic one, but still a good war story).

The other nitpick is on certain missions, you're going to have to go into it, fail, and reload entirely. This is because halfway through the mission, something happens, and then suddenly the team you brought is useless for what the 'real' objective of the mission is. This is in general a complaint for a lot of RPGs, where you have to trial and error a boss, going back through once you find out what they do. Its not really good in any game, you should be able to figure out the boss as you go. In a rather realistic war story, its kinda silly that you have to presciently position your troops to get enemies before they can screw you over. Again, its a nitpick, once you know the happening you can usually give it one more shot and make it.

The story is good, the game is great (albeit stressful at times), the whole thing is very solid. If you see it and you like strategy games or war games, pick it up, completely worth it.

I have it listed as beaten, as the game has in-game medals that you can acquire, and you need to A rank all the missions along with getting all the weapons, maxing troops, etc. I'll consider it completed when I get all of those.