The Return of the Video Games Thread

[bloop]

Ouch!

[Vlad!]

Less ouch

[Ian]

Opinions are mixed on that front; my roommate (who loves platformers in general and the Mario games in particular) got so frustrated with Sunshine that he quit about halfway through. Just from watching him play it looked like an exercise in frustration. (And it's not like he just sucks at games, either; I've watched him beat the old-school Metroid games and the NES Castlevanias).

I'm sure you can find it cheap somewhere if you want to judge for yourself, but if you have to miss one, Sunshine looks like a good one to miss.

I had a lot of fun with it, and I don't recall any major control issues.  I'd say it's definitely worth the 20>.

[Vlad!]

OK, so the video on this page makes me wonder how they can call TLCBTG a remake when it looks completely different, but it still looks pretty sweet.

[Vlad!]

I "finished" Hero's Saga Laevatein Tactics.

I put finished in scare quotes because I'm not sure if the word actually truly applies. I got what appeared to be an ending, but then an Epilog chapter started. Apparently after the game proper finishes, you go into a mode where you wander around the map trying to get your completion percentage up to 100% in a "gotta catch 'em all" move designed to, as far as I can tell, artificially lengthen the game without actually providing any more useful content.

Since I beat the game with my completion percentage at about 40%, I didn't really feel like grinding through enough battles to get to the 100% number, so I'm declaring the game done.

The other question in my mind, which I haven't bothered to stop by gamefaqs and resolve yet (though I probably will just to still my curiosity) is whether I got a 'bad end' or if the ending is designed to be a downer just to entice you to play more in the hopes of making it better.

Laevatein Tactics is an acceptable strategy RPG that manages to get it right primarily through not doing anything overtly wrong. There are a few rookie mistakes (non-skippable cutscenes, a couple awkward control issues) that could have been resolved with a little foresight, but overall the game manages to navigate potential pitfalls and emerge relatively intact on the other side.

One stand-out deficiency is unquestionably the music. Honestly, it's reminiscent of old 8-bit games that didn't bother to actually hire a composer but instead just piped a generic music-like track through the DSP in a loop. HSLT is a bit better than this, sure, but the lackluster and generic quality is disappointing.

The game itself is fun, the combat system is solid with a couple extra twists to keep it interesting, the plot, though laughable in places, serves its role as the glue binding one battle to the next, and I actually really like the continental European theme as a nice change from Generic Medieval Western and Generic Medieval Eastern.

I'd say that Laevatein Tactics is worth the price of admission if you're a strategy fan, but if Gung Ho wants to make this into a respectable series it's going to have to do a lot of work before it can compete with the greats.

[Vlad!]

Several years ago, I read an article on Hardcore Gaming 101 about the Phoenix Wright series. I was completely intrigued, because it sounded like the sort of thing I might enjoy. In fact, just the writing about the game had me laughing out loud, so I assumed that the the game itself would follow suit.

When I finally got a DS, one of the first games I played on it was Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, the US release of the series' first installment. While there were certain aspects I found frustrating, overall it did not disappoint. I played Phoenix Wright: And Justice For All and enjoyed it as well, and after ordering Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations sight unseen, I played it and enjoyed it as well. Perhaps the best way to describe the series is "consistency", as for the most part my complaints from the first game apply to all its sequels, but more encouragingly the things I liked about the first game are also present in the succeeding releases.

Thus, when I saw that the series was getting a fourth game in the US, I was excited. I launched Amazon.com to pre-order it, and found...Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney.

Wait, what? What happened to Phoenix? Who's the kid in the red? Is this some sort of crappy spin-off? I was concerned. I still bought the game, but my enthusiasm was dampened and it has sat on my shelf ever since, looking sadly at me every time I try to decide whether to play a game I already actually own or to give in to my neophilia[1] and check out a new release. It doesn't help that a friend told me that the game incorporated some 3D features (!), the third dimension of course being ever the nemesis of the classic gamer.

After finishing up with Hero Saga, though, I looked through my list of games to play and decided I wasn't quite up for another tactical RPG...and saw Apollo Justice. "What the heck," thought I, "I'll give it a shot". And shoot I did.

I must say, my reticence was entirely unfounded. At this point I am far from ready to pronounce Apollo Justice as an improvement over the series' previous installments, but it is certainly not a step backward. In fact, it appears to me that despite the new protagonist and the occasional new game mechanic, in the end Apollo Justice is upholding the consistency I remarked in its predecessors.

As a Phorum search suggests I haven't reviewed a game in this series here before[2], let me go over the highlights and lowlights. Essentially, in this series you play a defense attorney in the most messed-up legal system ever. The games are sort of a cross between old-school adventure games and interactive novels. A game is divided up broadly into 'chapters', each chapter encompassing a trial. For each trial, there are several days. Each day has two sections with two corresponding types of gameplay.

The first section is the 'adventure' section. In your capacity of attorney you will also need to do any detective work required to get your client off the hook, so in this section you're wandering around, interviewing characters, gathering evidence, and basically doing the standard adventure game schtick of "collect item, talk to character, activate plot trigger, repeat".

Once you have activated enough plot triggers you move to the courtroom. In the courtroom, your job is to talk with witnesses and poke holes in their testimony. Generally, each bit of witness testimony will have some flaw, contradiction, or hole for you to pick at, and it's your job to present the evidence that exposes these flaws. Looked at optimistically, it's a logic puzzle. Looked at pessimistically, it's a gameplay mechanic that requires you to read the game developer's mind.

The strengths of the series are really literary in nature, drawing from the interactive novel part of the game's duality. The characters are a colorful and amusing rogues' gallery of bumbling detectives, well-intentioned but ditzy sidekicks, nefarious criminals, and everything in between. Some characters are caricatures--such as the fat anime nerd who talks entirely in l33t speak--while others may be much more (or less!) than they appear. In addition to this, the writing is incredibly well-done, full of puns, wordplay, and fast-moving wit that makes the dialog an honest pleasure to read. Of course, games like this also require a stellar localization team, and Capcom seems to have pulled it off brilliantly. The jokes are fresh and funny and relevant to Western culture, leading me to believe that substantial dialog sections were reworked entirely just to ensure that they presented the same degree of hilarity--if not the same actual content--as the original.

Unfortunately, the series' weaknesses mostly stem from its gameplay, drawing from its adventure game ancestry. Now, I have to mention that I am not intrinsically a fan of adventure games, as I'm sure I've talked about before in this thread, but honestly I think the genre as a whole tends to share the same intrinsic failings. Wandering around pixel hunting and gathering inventory items is no fun, especially when you feel like you've done everything you need but somehow you failed to hit that one plot trigger to actually advance the story. In the second chapter, Apollo Justice found it necessary to annoy me by giving me two important plot items in a trash can and having my sidekick say "I only have enough room to carry one". Um, hello? You're already carrying a hubcap, a ramen bowl, a billy club, an embalmed aardvark, a mahogany armoire, and the plume from the hats that the Buckingham Palace guards wear. How is it that you can't find enough room to carry a pair of bedroom slippers? It's just an arbitrary mechanism to force me to go back to the trash can whenever I discover that I need the other item and then swap them out.

For all its faults, though, the series (and Apollo Justice in particular) has moments of brilliance which more than make up for the frustrating parts. In the first chapter alone there were a number of laugh-out-lound moments and clever witticisms. Also, there's just something about when the courtroom music starts pumping and the objections start flying and you can see that the witness is up against a wall with all his carefully-constructed lies crumbling around him that is every bit as exciting as a boss battle or a tight platforming sequence in a more action-oriented game.

To quote one of my favorite quotes, from Abe Lincoln, for those who like that sort of thing, it's exactly the sort of thing they would like. Personally, nothing but my personal pride and a childhood lecture from my father on the horrible fate of those who cheat their way through life keeps me from using a FAQ to navigate the adventure segments to get to the courtroom sections. Even so, I feel great affection toward this series, and Apollo Justice is a great installment. Once I've finished it I'll post some additional thoughts on the unique things it adds to the series.

[1] Note: do not confuse with necrophilia
[2] I talked about Phoenix Wright 3, but for some reason I never actually reviewed it...though the Phorum's abysmal search features might just be failing me

[Vlad!]

So I've been looking over the games that I played this year, and while I played some good games this year and I played some games that came out this year, I have to say that most of the best games I played were ones that didn't come out this year. Well, I guess that's not *too* surprising; when you combine the fact that each year brings with it only a few games that I like and I usually end up taking up about the first half of the next year playing the current year's games, I guess it's not too much of a stretch.

Of the games that I remember playing this year, here's my rundown:
2009 Favorite
Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume (impression, review).

2009 Runner-up
Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier (impression, review).

(I also want to give honorable mention to Hero's Saga: Laevatein Tactics)

2009 Most Disappointing
Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled (impression, review)

Scribblenauts is the runner-up for most disappointing of 2009.

Overall Favorite
Final Fantasy IV DS (impression, bonus material, review)

Runner-up
Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm (impression, review)

Most disappointing
Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice (impression, 2nd impression, review). While I don't feel like Disgaea 3 was in any way a bad game (and in fact it's better than many games I played this year), I have not yet come to terms with the fact that not all Nippon Ichi games are going to be as epically good as Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. I'm also not pleased with the game's increased reliance on downloadable content and quests after the main game to flesh out the story.

[Vlad!]

Gamefly is doing their annual game sale, including my favorite game of 2009, Covenant of the Plume.

If you're looking for cheap used games, you could definitely do worse...

[bloop]

I got Uncharted 2 and completed the story.  I have to go back and find the loot, but I'm not sure what kind of reward you get for that.

I'm playing "Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story" at the moment.

[Vlad!]

I finished up with Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney over the break (and soon enough that it could reasonably be added to this year's tally of games...).

I was very pleased to see that it had suffered not a bit for its change of protagonist. It feels like it rings in a little short, with only four chapters, but the final one could reasonably considered two chapters' worth of material. There's a bit at the end where you play as Phoenix (including getting your fill of Magatama-fueled psyche-lock-busting action), including a nifty little system that lets you gather data between present and past (which is perhaps a little dodgy plotwise since occasionally you wind up with evidence in the present which you then use in the past, but I'm willing to forgive it this transgression).

I think in this, the fourth installment, the writers outdid themselves when it comes to creating a plot. Indeed, Apollo Justice does the best job of any in the series of presenting what I would consider to be a coherent and consistent narrative. Not that I particularly disliked the earlier ones that were a bit more scattershot, but if the series' first couple games were lacking anything it was meat, and I think Apollo Justice is meaty enough to stand on its own.

Also, I found myself much less frustrated with this one than I did with past installments. There's still a certain element of pixel hunting involved and some circuitous logic to navigate, but it's lessened. If anything, the pendulum might have swung too far in the other direction: there were times when I found I had unraveled the mystery well before any of the characters and I was stuck waiting for them to catch up. It must be admitted that this did not happen all the time, but definitely more than in games past.

I would have liked to see more characters from previous games show up (though I was pleased to see that recurring character Wendy Oldbag was absent, I trend I hope will continue in perpetuity). I don't have a problem with any of the newer characters, actually, and I quite like some of them. It's just that there are a few figures which I felt were as inextricably linked with the franchise and Phoenix himself, and a game without them just doesn't seem, er, Wright.

(There were ladder jokes in the second and third chapters, though, which were clearly put in there as a nod to longtime series fans).

I had a lot of fun with Apollo Justice, and I'm looking forward to the next installment, which as you may recall will have us playing as Miles Edgeworth. In my mind this is a very impressive hump for Capcom to have traversed, because I'm not sure any of their other longrunning series have had four successful games in a row before (Capcom, you may recall, are known for milking their series to death, and I'm not sure they have released four good Street Fighters or Mega Mans (Mega Men?) in a row, ever).

[Vlad!]

<Note: I'm currently at a church conference, so this will be the year-end clearance of stuff I typed at some point over the past month but for some reason never got around to posting>

I've been hearing a lot of buzz about this Bayonetta game, though its claim to fame seems primarily to be its shapely eponymous protagonist rather than anything particularly worthwhile in its gameplay. I downloaded the demo, and my impression is basically that this game is what Heavenly Sword tried to be about two years ago. Why do I say that? Because Bayonetta plays like Heavenly Sword minus the things that people complained the loudest about.

My biggest problem with Bayonetta (besides the problem that it chose a genre I'm not much of a fan of) is that I don't especially feel like I'm playing it. Maybe it's just that I'm not that used to fast-paced games, but I felt like I was just mashing buttons and the character on the screen just sort of did her own thing. Really this is the same problem that the Devil May Cry games have had: the standard-issue enemies exist primarily to be killed in spectacular ways, not to actually pose much of a challenge. I'm sure the demo wasn't of a particularly hard level, but even so I was beset on all sides and (despite having only the vaguest of ideas how to play) managed to button-mash my way through just fine.

The cool part about the game is that "doing her own thing" involves a lot of ridiculous stuff, such as shooting guns with her feet and stabbing people with her prehensile hair. I was playing this demo with my former roommate, and at one point I somehow managed to enter a combo that caused Bayonetta's hair to turn into a giant monster and eat the boss I was fighting. We looked at each-other like "uhhh...." and then he said "I don't believe I actually saw that".

I award the game six hundred and fifty four imaginary points because the main character's hair can eat people.

(My hair is a bird. Your argument is invalid.)

[bloop]

The whole "my clothes and hair become a monster" struck me as such blatant fan service that I almost died laughing.  Folks are talking about it as if it's some sort of masterpiece, and I just don't see it.  It's pretty, though.

[Vlad!]

The whole "my clothes and hair become a monster" struck me as such blatant fan service that I almost died laughing.  Folks are talking about it as if it's some sort of masterpiece, and I just don't see it.  It's pretty, though.

Yeah, the entire game is a bit provocative, which is fairly easily discerned from the cover art alone, but at least in the demo I didn't see anything egregious. I realize I've complained about less before, but to me it matters a lot whether it's appropriate for the game. Fanservice in a game with characters I'm supposed to be taking seriously and a plot that's played straight otherwise just seems out of place, but in a game where the protagonist's hair becomes her clothes, she stands on her hands to shoot guns--which are built into her shoes--and she can build what appears to be an iron maiden out of her hair and then shut it on her enemies...well, obviously the game is trying to be over-the-top in every aspect, and so if it is thus in fanservice as well then that is unsurprising.

[bloop]

Well, besides the over-the-top nature of it, which is actually kind of funny, I just don't see the gameplay as anything all that special.

[Vlad!]

That seems like a fair assessment...from a pure gameplay standpoint, I don't see it as being any better than say Devil May Cry or Heavenly Sword or any of that ilk.

[Vlad!]

As you may recall, I have been an on-again, off-again fan of the Harvest Moon series. I loved the SNES installment (which at least to my memory is the very first one). Then I completely ignored the series (pausing briefly to try and sneer in disdain at the N64 offering) up until Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town hit the GBA. For some reason that one scratched my itch just right and I played it through.

I set out resolutely ignoring the series for another six years or so, but then something happened...Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon came out. I was intrigued...a Harvest Moon where not only have swords not been beaten into plowshares but both actually share equal space in your knapsack. I played it and liked it, despite the fact that it was in 3D (rarely a good sign, in my book).

Natsume has been turning the crank on their Harvest Moon games, so in addition to Rune Factory 2 (which is already out), there have been a couple of the original series to come out for the DS. I think Rune Factory 3 is also in the works as I write this. Because of the coup they managed to pull off with Rune Factory, I decided to try out Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness.

The schtick of this one is that you're on an island (well, island group...not quite an archipelago), which really changes little except for the need to ride on boats to get places. It actually appears to use the Rune Factory engine, more or less (which is quite possibly also the engine the previous Harvest Moon for the DS used...I never played it so I'm not quite sure).

The trouble was, I had a lot of trouble getting interested in this installment. I was tilling the ground, planting my turnips, talking with the townfolk, and I asked myself: what's the point? Why not wait until Rune Factory 3 comes out so I can water the ground with the blood of Orcs (note: Orc blood not guaranteed to provide adequate fertilizer)? Yes, dear reader, after tasting blood, the idyllic farm life presented in the mainline Harvest Moon series just seems...dull.

Perhaps in another three years or so I'll try another Harvest Moon proper. By then it will probably be Harvest Moon In Space and you'll be jetting around mining asteroids and growing crops in hydroponic farms. But for right now, I'm still feeling like "been there, done that, ate the turnip".

[Vlad!]

Nostalgia is a powerful force, especially when it comes to video games. It's what made me smile when I started playing Black Sigil, in spite of all its failures. It's what made me rant about a game that hasn't even come out yet. It's why I'm going to buy Final Fantasy XIII despite knowing almost nothing about it.

It's also the name of the video game I'm playing. Yep, I picked up Nostalgia for the DS.

It's interesting to contrast the game named Nostalgia with Black Sigil, which I pretty much identify with the idea of Nostalgia [1]. For one, Nostalgia uses the same Matrix Software engine that powered Final Fantasies III and IV on the DS along with Matrix's own RPG Avalon Code. When you turn on the game you see a whole lot of logos, because while Matrix did most of the development, production was all handled by Tecmo and project direction was handled by Red Entertainment. This seems to be the way it should be, since while Matrix have demonstrated over and again their skill at writing code, their skill at designing fun games is still not exactly honed to the level it should be.

Erm, where was I? Oh yes. It seems weird that Nostalgia would be completely in 3d. However, the unfortunate fact is that for today's gaming generation, at least in North America, some of the most nostalgic RPGs are, in fact, in 3d. In any case, I don't think the name Nostalgia is meant to imply that the game is targeted at fans of yesteryear's RPGs, though admittedly that's exactly why I picked it up.

The game itself is actually very good. It's set in the real world circa the mid 1800s, though instead of rail it appears that the primary mode of travel is airship. You are a fledgling adventurer trying to find your archeologist dad (if this sounds like the plot of Square's old Treasure Hunter G, you aren't the only one thinking that...but believe me, this game is very different. For one, I haven't had a violin-playing monkey join my party yet). The mechanics are very solid. The menu system is a little wonky--it's actually reminiscent of the menu system in the original Breath of Fire, a system you will note that Capcom scrapped a decade and a half ago. What was that thing that Santayana said about not remembering the past?--but considering that the last menu system Matrix developed had the user flipping through a two-thousand-page book one page at a time, I'd say they're moving in the right direction.

One decidedly modern flair is that (like Atelier Iris and Final Fantasy XII) the game involves a quest system. Perhaps Atelier Iris can be excused slightly because the quest system drives the plot, but in my nostalgia, you have to find subquests by talking to characters and exploring, not by visiting some adventurer's guild and getting them assigned. Still, these quests are (thus far, at least) completely optional and not too painful.

The most important aspect to note, though, is that Nostalgia is just plain fun. It's original, it's amusing, and it's a blast. The steampunk but real-world milieu and the character designs (which for once don't feel like the came straight out of an anime studio) are like a breath of fresh air, while the gameplay and the story are engaging and wonderful. I'm only about five hours in, but call me hooked so far!

[1] It must be mentioned that in Japan the game is called "Winds of Nostalgio", suggesting to me that the original title was not perhaps quite so bold as the translated English title.

[Vlad!]

Iiiinteresting.....

(Most of this post is me reminiscing old-man style...if that's not your thing then skip down to the hyperlink)

When I was in college, my roommate strongarmed me into playing the Playstation remakes of Lunar: The Silver Star and Lunar: Eternal Blue (in case you're not up on your RPG history, they were originally released for the Sega CD). At the time I had little use for the PSX, preferring the Super Nintendo. I didn't even own a Playstation; I played the games via software emulation on my computer.

I was drawn in. Here was an old-school RPG with sprites...but thanks to the extra storage on the disc it was able to have animated cutscenes, voice acting, freaking song numbers...OK, so the voice acting was memorably crappy, but still. Even though the story was generic, the effort that Working Designs put into the script is legendary (Victor Ireland, despite his strangely-shaped head and lack of ability at choosing voice talent, does a great job at providing comedic localizations). It honestly felt as much like a fan translation as an actual official release, not because of the low quality but because it was more lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek than even the venerable Ted Woolsey (though Ted is still The Man).

Even though looking back the games were not the best, they still have that undeniable charm. Thus, I was surprised and gratified to see that XSeed is working with GameArts to get a new version out. Apparently they saw fit to rename it--again--but whatever.

Sadly, it's for the PSP. I don't have a PSP, and honestly I don't have the time to juggle the two consoles I do have, which is why the games I review tend to have been out for a year or more before I get around to them (bloop, I have Valkyria Chronicles sitting on my shelf right now, judging me from across the room). It appears that they decided to remix (and re-lyric) the opening song (which is cool and all, though the opening song for the original SCD version was, depending on your tolerance for cheesy synthesizer action, either catchy or stomach-turning [1]).

I wish them well. The Lunar game for the DS sucked, but Game Arts didn't really have anything to do with it. I guess it's all part of our remake-happy culture that the next move with the property would be a re-re-reimagining of the classic original. In any case, if you have a PSP and you haven't played The Silver Star in any of its incarnations, you could do worse than giving this one a try.

[1] If you watched that video and are confused, they took the opening from the Sega CD version and superimposed it over the intro animation to the PSX version, for some inexplicable reason.

[Vlad!]

Continuing in their quest to make the early Final Fantasy games the most remade games of all time, Squeenix will apparently be releasing Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II on...wait for it...the iPhone. (iTouch owners may apply as well).

They say they're going to upgrade the graphics again. After revamping the graphics for the Wonderswan Color and the Playstation, another revamping brings the graphics in grave danger of being over-vamped. Whatever that means (don't ask me; I just made it up).

I'm not sure who their target audience is. I imagine the list of people who like Final Fantasy but don't own an NES, a GBA, a DS, a Playstation, a Playstation 2, or a Playstation 3 is pretty small. If they had just done a simple port and sold it for five bucks or something then they might have gotten a handful of people who are intrigued and willing to drop a fiver, but with the re-re-revamped graphics, they're likely to charge ten or more, making it out of most peoples' impulse buy price point.

What crazy times we live in.

[bloop]

PS3 technobabble

I don't know what any of this means, but people are getting pretty excited over it.

[Vlad!]

I saw that...'Geohot ' is the man. You may recall that he is very well known for hacking the iPhone.

In layman's terms...there is a battle for control over your hardware. Companies like Apple and Sony want to be able to control what you can do on the hardware, while hackers like this guy think that you should be able to do anything that the hardware is capable of doing. The PS3 resisted being hacked for so long first because Sony was uncharacteristically liberal in what they allowed it to do out of the box so there wasn't the pressing need to hack it and second because they have some pretty heavy-duty protection on their hardware to make sure you can't access what they don't want you to access. Geohot decided he wasn't going to take that for an answer and has now broken out of the little box Sony wants you to be in.

[Vlad!]

I finished Nostalgia today. Nothing like a bunch of snow to make one stay home and play video games. According to the game timer it took me 33 hours and 32 minutes, which is sad because if the save had taken one more second it would have been at 33:33.

It was quite a bit of fun. The characters were plucky and endearing, if not precisely original, and the gameplay remained mostly fun throughout. I do have to complain a little bit, but then I'll get back to what I liked.

First off, it was easy. Really easy. It's one of those games where it starts out at a decent level of challenge and then before you know it has become a cakewalk. By the end of the game I was more godlike than the theoretically-godlike boss I was fighting. His opening attack, which I assume was intended to put me on the ropes from the get-go, did single-digit damage to my party and actually healed one of my people. All this in spite of the fact that I never even took time out to artificially build my levels. There were definitely some times when I wound up getting lost or confused about a dungeon gimmick and fought more battles than strictly necessary, but there wasn't any powerleveling involved. I did, however, do all the optional sidequests I found.

My second biggest complaint is that the airship battles are way too annoying. The enemies take far too long to kill and encounters occur way too frequently. By the time I beat the game I hadn't even explored all of the map, just because of how frustrating it was to get from point A to point B. I guess I'm OK with the occasional battle, though by far my preference is no battles at all while in vehicles exploring the map. That just discourages players from spending time looking at the map you painstakingly created. Lame.

Also, the ending was pretty weaksauce. There were a couple plot threads that got swept under the rug, and defeating the last boss was very anti-climatic simply because after winning he went ahead and enacted his evil plan anyway. That actually happens a lot in this game. You beat a boss, and then he or she says "no, this can't be...I've been defeated. But my defeat doesn't matter, because I'm going to do the thing you fought to keep me from doing while you just stand there and gape at me". In fact, though I really liked the setting and the world, the plot itself was paper-thin in places and really overall ended up being horribly generic. The ending sequences were cute, though, and the plot definitely did have its moments.

These complaints aside, Nostalgia was a fun game. True to its name, it did invoke feelings of yesteryear, what with its old-school aesthetic. I hope that Tecmo, Red Entertainment, and Matrix team up again, since even though all the companies involved have quite beefy resumes, this game in many ways felt like a freshman effort. In any case, I enjoyed the game quite a bit.

I have a lot of games in my 'to play' list...I think first I'll try out one that I expect to be poor but which caught my eye for some reason, and then after that I'll move on--finally--to Yet Another Remake.

[Vlad!]

OK, so I said I was going to play a game that I don't expect to be good. That game is Glory of Heracles.

Why didn't I expect it to be good? Well, for one I hadn't bothered to actually research who developed it. It was developed by Paon and produced by Nintendo, which isn't too surprising since Nintendo have worked with Paon before on various Donkey Kong-related ventures, but as it turns out Paon was founded by refugees from none other than the defunct Data East. Yes, the same Data East who created games before the term 'video game' even made sense (they made pinball games; though not as venerable as say Gottlieb, they still have more chops than I gave Paon credit for).

Another reason I didn't expect it to be good is that stealing from Greek mythology is about as lazy as it gets. The Renaissance managed to make it work to some extent, I suppose, but the last really great thing based off of Greek mythology was made back before it was considered mythology, and it was written by Homer. I figured that if Paon were lazy enough to cut corners on their story and characters, they would probably be too lazy to have "make the game actually fun" in their development schedule.

As you may be able to tell from my verbage, I am preparing to admit to being wrong.

That's not to say that Glory of Heracles is a particularly great game. However, it's also not nearly as abysmal as I thought it would be. I believe I have used the adjective "solid" to describe this circumstance, and it applies here as well.

The first indication of its non-suckiness is that it actually doesn't steal its characters from Greek mythology (or, perhaps more accurately, if it does steal them it steals obscure enough characters that I haven't heard of them). Yes, the titular Heracles is certainly present, but even the eponymous hero's identity isn't tied up in legend, since he has been laid low by the Oldest Plot Device in the Book: amnesia[1].

The second thing that interested me is the style of gameplay. Watching the obviously anime-inspired opening cutscene, I expected a standard-issue Japanese-style RPG. However, GoH combines the Japanese underpinnings with a very North American feel to produce something that feels as much like say Planescape: Torment or Arcanum as Final Fantasy.

The game is definitely character driven, but this also plays to its strengths. The entire plot of the game pretty much revolves around finding out who your characters really are and why they are the way they are, if you will excuse the overuse of the word 'are' in there. It then provides characters that make the player want to find out more about them, and use that as the compelling hook to drive the plot. Again: this feels a little bit like storywriter training wheels, but the quest for self-discovery is one of those essential plots that can always be done fresh if handled well.

Glory of Heracles is a very acceptable game, and provides solid gameplay with interesting characters and a potentially interesting story. I'm going to let this one go, but I certainly may come back to it at some point.

[1] I would like to say, on behalf of gamers everywhere, that as a plot device, amnesia is taking the lazy way out. I hesitate to roundly condemn it since plenty of games that I love use it (one of my favorite games of all time, Final Fantasy VI, has not one but two amnesia subplots, though both in the end are fairly minor threads), but come on. We've heard it before.

[Vlad!]

I haven't actually played the other game I coyly referred to yet, mostly because my gaming time this week has been mostly spent on Rainbow Six: Vegas. I've got an old college buddy coming over in a couple weeks, and I need to get my skillz back up before I embarrass myself.

(If anyone has R6V for the PS3 and wants to get some Terrorist Hunt on over the Interwebs, let me know).

I've also been keeping an eye out for media about White Knight Chronicles. Level 5 have neglected to push out a demo, and determining whether the game is truly as great as it's hyped up to be or just a bubble of hot air isn't exactly easy. I heard that it's supposed to be a full-length RPG, which generally means between 60 to 80 hours for completion, and blerg to that.

[Vlad!]

When my brother and I were but young lads, we acquired a game for the NES called Dragon Warrior. This was really the first game of its type that we had encountered: rather than depending on skill, so it seemed, you controlled your spritely avatar through the 8-bit world and selected his actions from a menu. "Imagine if Mario were like this", we laughed. "A goomba approaches. Command?"

Even after I played me some Final Fantasy and realized what the whole world of RPGs was really about, Dragon Quest (as the series is rightly called) has stood out as kind of a backward, past-facing franchise. Even "Pitchfork", the writer of epic Final Fantasy reviews, said this in his review of FFX-2:
"Whereas rival developer Enix clung to a very specific formula in making its Dragon Quest games (Mistah K. calls them video game comfort food), SquareSoft liked taking risks."

As I look back over the series, though, I think this is a bit of a mischaracterization. When evaluated in the context of the times that these games came out, they have always been on the forefront of RPG innovation. Dragon Quest II featured a party system, III had a freaking job system, IV told its story from the perspective of multiple characters, V let your character marry and have children, and later your hero can join his own progeny in the battle against evil. I honestly haven't played VI, so I don't know what its deal is, and I thought VII was so boring and dull that I gave up after about an hour and a half. But VIII featured a completely new engine (cel-shaded and all!) and was in many ways a true return to form, even as it broke the Dragon Quest mold. It's certainly true that with regards to setting and aesthetic the DQ games are all remarkably similar, but so what? To deride them as a perpetual rehash is to do them a grave disservice.

The game which prompted this paen is, in fact, Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen for the Nintendo DS. I'm enjoying these remakes, because I have to admit: I sort of dismissed DQIV back when it first came out. The series stuck with the NES longer than it perhaps should have, and honestly the venerable 8-bit system was not capable of telling the story the game was trying to tell. I finished the first chapter, that of Ragnar, the knight in pink, and then just sort of laid it aside. It's very gratifying to me, then, that this remake would allow me to play the game the authors intended to be played.

As I alluded to earlier, the story is told in multiple chapters. This mechanic would later be adapted and improved upon by Squaresoft in its Japan-only title Rudra no Hihou (which is, by the way, a most excellent game as well), but Enix did quite an acceptable job with it themselves. As the stories unfold and begin to intertwine, we begin to get a clearer and clearer picture of what is going on in the world the writers are painting for us.

DQIV DS is an excellent remake. It remains very true to the original in feel, while adding additions such as regional dialects in the English text. This version is certainly not as exhaustive as the tour-de-force that is the Final Fantasy IV DS remake, but it still makes an excellent game more accessible by giving it the character it really should have had from the beginning.

I've been enjoying it immensely. I don't know how far along I am, since I haven't actually played through it before, but it's quite the good time. I can appreciate this version for letting the source material shine the way I have always felt it should have.

[Vlad!]

Finished up with Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen. I say "finished" because I have no desire to play through the now-obligatory nonsense added on after the "last" boss is killed and the credits roll.

Since I didn't play more than a single short chapter of the original I can't say very authoritatively how this version compares with the original, but DQIV has the reputation of being a classic RPG, and it seems to me that this remake has carried on the legacy.

It certainly feels like an RPG of the old school--and rightfully so. I was surprised to find that I didn't need to spend a lot of time grinding levels. There was one part where I spent time grinding gold, which is essentially the same thing, but I'm not sure if that was strictly required. I beat the game with about an average level of 33; checking a walkthrough afterward to see what I missed showed that the suggested level was 38. This is unsurprising because most RPG walkthroughs go the over-leveled route, but I did lose the final battle once and just barely squeaked through the second time.

(A bit of tactical advice: there is an accessory you can buy which, when you die, will sacrifice the accessory to fully revive and heal all your other party members. Buying a lot of these and putting them on party members you don't care about is a great way to get a free revive. I made use of this in the final boss fight).

This is why, though I like standard Japanese RPGs, it's the tactical RPGs I really enjoy. Increasing the difficulty in a standard RPG just generally means you need to grind a couple levels before you proceed. Increasing the difficulty in a tactics RPG means that you have to use your brain more. But I digress.

The plot is entertaining and the characters more so, though unfortunately there is not nearly as much character interaction as the game really deserves. It almost seems a shame that the writers created some very relateable, distinctive characters and then kept them mute most of the game. The pacing remains consistently good throughout, and if there's one thing the Dragon Quest series is pretty good at, it's being not so linear that it feels like the game is on rails while linear enough that it doesn't get lost in itself. A few extra optional sidequests would certainly have been welcome, but again, the JRPG genre was really still in its infancy in many respects, and when you only had a few hundred kilobits to store your game in it no doubt seemed a little strange to spend time and storage space on a quest that some players wouldn't even bother with.

Although I complain about remakes and the lack of original IP, I am glad to get a chance to play some classic games with an extra layer of polish on them.

[Vlad!]

RTS fans:
Tiberian Sun and the Firestorm expansion are now free downloads!

The original Command & Conquer (now retitled as Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn) was what got me into RTS games. Back in those days, there was no such thing as a standard installer, so they tended to be more lavish than they are today, simply because developers would write their own. Of course, "installing" a game generally just meant copying files from a diskette or CD to the hard disk. In any case, the C&C installer was epic, including full recorded voiceovers and a futuristic-looking screen full of widgets that didn't really do anything except look cool. I suck at RTS games, though, so I flexed my nascent programming skills by writing a savegame editor for the DOS version of Command and Conquer. I'm pretty sure the only reason I beat the GDI missions were because I could give myself unlimited cash (I think the only reason I beat the NOD missions are because I would just build a lot of flamethrower troops and burninate everything, Trogdor-style).

I've actually bought the Tiberian Sun games twice, once right after they came out and once when I bought the Command and Conquer big pack o' games for nostalgia purposes. It's proof that I'm inherently masochistic, because I love RTS games but I'm so, so bad at them. I couldn't even play through the normal campaign of Starcraft without cheating on the last handful of missions, and I couldn't beat the Brood War missions even with cheating (obviously I could have used some of the more hardcore cheats like 'your units are invulnerable', but there's cheating and then there's cheating ).

In any case, the Tiberian games really helped define the genre, and the Red Alert games helped refine it (you can read some of my ramblings on the Red Alert 3 demo if you're feeling like a glutton for punishment verbosity). They're available for free, so if you're bored then by all means...

[Vlad!]

Usually after playing a particularly good game I try to play a mediocre (or just plain bad) game. This might seem unfair to the bad game--since it might be a decent game which seems bad by comparison--but I like to think that I can be at least somewhat impartial, and in any case if it is unfair then I'd rather be unfair to a game teetering on the edge of mediocrity rather than a game teetering on the edge of greatness.

All this to say, I gave Dragonology a try.

Why did I even bother with it? Because the premise is actually kind of cool. It's inspired by a fictional field almanac of dragons written by the equally fictional Dr. Ernest Drake. In the game, you play as the assistant to Dr. Drake, who is going around collecting data and samples while preparing said book. Your job is to find traces of dragons (claw marks, teeth, tracks, scales, poo) and analyze them. You then track down the dragons and capture them. All of this is done with a time limit, I suppose because without a sense of urgency it would all seem terribly dull.

Not that the artificial urgency does a whole lot to ameliorate the dullness, unfortunately. I understand that I'm out of the target age range of this game by a good margin, but it seems to me that it requires a tremendous amount of effort to take a game in which you are an assistant to a billionaire dragonologist who flies around the English countryside in a dirigible gathering information about dragons and make it dull.

Actually, I think the fundamental problem is that the game is too heavily based in reality. This may seem like an odd statement given the subject matter, but if you were an assistant to a dragon researcher then things like looking around for dragon teeth and trying not to get eaten by bears are things you would actually do, and a game depicting these things is just as boring as a game depicting, say, researching bears in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

(As a side note, several years ago I got to spend some time with park rangers who actually did research bears in the Smokies, and their job is super cool. But it's cool because it involves walking around the woods, and occasionally shooting a bear with a blowgun. Sitting in your chair tapping on the screen with a stylus as your avatar does these things is not nearly as cool).

If there's one thing I've learned from games like Harvest Moon and Animal Planet, it's that a well-designed game can make even the most mundane activities fun. Diner Dash--a game about waiting tables at a restaurant--has gone from an addictive flash game to a very successful franchise. And honestly, I think with a bit of tweaking Dragonology could be up there with the best of them.

The biggest problem, at least as it seems to me, is that none of the things you have to do require any skill or effort at all. You know how, in Harvest Moon, you start out with a crappy hoe that lets you till one square of ground at a time, and it takes you all day just to prepare the ground, plant your seeds, and water your crops? You think to yourself, man. I can't imagine how hectic it's going to be down the road once I have more than a quarter of a field worth of vegetables to deal with. But then by the time that point comes you have the uber-hoe that can till half your field in one thwack and you have all the time in the world for mining minerals and wooing your girlfriend and riding your horsey and playing frisbee with your dog and hang gliding off the local mountain and whatever other minigames they've added to the latest one while I wasn't looking. Well, in Dragonology, you walk into an area and see things with glowing circles around them. You tap the circles. Then you have to do one of a handful of things to analyze the object, none of which takes any effort.

Just because I'm such a nice guy, I'm going to provide some things the developers could have done to make the game more fun:
* Let me actually fly the zeppelin to the site. Maybe occasionally while flying to the site I will see dragons flying around and be able to capture them.
* Don't make the dragons little more than dumb animals. Make them live in caves. Caves with cunning traps, riddles, and puzzles.
* Don't make me do pointless things. There was one screen where I had to walk slowly to avoid waking a sleeping bear. That was the only purpose of that screen: there's a bear. Don't wake it up.
* Don't insult my intelligence. At one point I came across some poo. I had to put it into a beaker and drop some chemicals into the beaker to identify the poo, at which point I found out that it was lynx poo. I'm pretty sure that someone who's even an amateur naturalist could tell lynx poo from dragon poo. (I'm assuming that the chemicals determine the composition of the poo. Lynx poo probably has little bits of rodent and other small critter remains, while dragon poo probably has little bits of lynx remains).

So there you go. A good premise does not a good game make.

Up next: Puzzles! Top hats! English accents!

[Vlad!]

Ah, genre-mashing. Seems so popular these days. From the waffling over what to call first-person-shooter-RPG Deus Ex a decade ago to the modern third-person-shooter-adventure-platformer, it seems like our maniacal attempt to classify and categorize games gets us in trouble almost as much as it helps. Well, a couple years ago, Level 5 dropped another genre-buster into my lap: the adventure-puzzle-minigame-compilation hybrid. Yes, I am referring to Professor Layton and the Curious Village, a game which I mentioned briefly here and "reviewed" here back in 2008 when this thread actually contained conversations.

In my review I said this:

Does the game provide $30 worth of amusement? I hate to be mercenary, but for many gamers, including myself, the games budget is far from unlimited and this is the question we have to ask ourselves. I personally have spent more money on less amusement in the past, but for me the replay value of this type of game is really low. I suggest renting it if you want to play it, since if you're like me, once it goes onto your shelf it won't come off again.

Which is weird, considering that my mail client informs me that in October of last year I purchased, along with two other games, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. I am not entirely sure what possessed me to make this purchase given the sentiment I expressed above. All I can say is that the Vlad! of August, 2008 is not the same as the Vlad! of October, 2009. Of course, that Vlad! didn't actually get around to playing the game, leaving it up to me, February 2010 Vlad!, to take up that mantle.

I have to say, I really love the Victorian English aesthetic to these games. They hearken back to a simpler time; a time when travel by train at 50 mph was the best you could hope for in terms of covering long distances and a man could refer to women as 'the weaker sex' without getting a talking-to by HR. Actually, now that I think about it, Victorian England sucked, but the idealized turn of the century Britain is pretty sweet.

In any case, Diabolical Box is extremely similar to the original game. A mysterious and vaguely sinister plot pulls our intrepid heroes through various events which for unfathomable reasons involve solving lots of puzzles and brain teasers. I imagine that it takes a really short amount of time to make a new Layton game, which is probably why there's like five of them out in Japan.

So far--and I'd estimate I'm between a third and a half of the way through--the caliber of puzzle has decreased slightly from the first game. I suspect this is because they used up a lot of the really great ones early on. There have been a couple that made me say "this puzzle is stupid", though thus far there haven't been any where the game rejected an answer I think is actually correct (there have been times when I gave an answer that at the time I thought was correct and turned out to be wrong, but after figuring out the right answer I have always seen why my previous answer was wrong). There is also a definite increase in the number of tricky puzzles. Just yesterday I got thrown off by one that had two levels of trickiness. I felt good about myself by seeing through one trick, only to get caught by another. I like that.

(Yesterday there was also one of the more embarrassing moments I've had with one of these games, where I found myself stumped by a geometry question which required me to find the area of a shaded region. Using only the DS screen and stylus for scratch space I had calculated the area of part of it by estimating pi to be 3.14, but then I got stuck when I couldn't remember the formula to find the area of a sector (it's 1/2 r squared theta, by the way). I used a geometric approximation and eventually got a result, though I knew my result was going to be high because of the approximation I used (the result I got was 414). Turns out I didn't need to know any more geometry than calculating the area of a square. The real (and exact) answer was 400. While I was proud that I got reasonably close by doing it the "wrong" way, that was still the dumbest I've felt in a long time.)

Genre-blending or not, Layton is really nothing more than a bunch of puzzles held together by a pixel-hunter on rails. However, I like the voice acting (the English accents give it a nice bit of gravitas) and it's really refreshing to have a look other than generic anime style and a feel other than generic Western country or generic Japanese city. And even if it is nothing more than a puzzle book with a plot, it's still a decent bit of entertainment. And I have to own up to my own apparent hypocrisy, since after saying it's not worth buying the first one I went and bought the second one. This game should be accessible to anyone who's gotten past sixth-grade math or so (as the above anecdote illustrates, you really don't need to understand advanced geometry), and I think even non-gamers might enjoy it for a lark even if they don't complete it all the way.

[Vlad!]

Guess which Nintendo system got a new game yesterday?
The Wii? You wish.
The DS? Nah.
The Gamecube? Guess again.

It was the freaking Nintendo Entertainment System. I'm not even joking.

Region-free, just the way we like it.

Via Joystiq.

[Vlad!]

Yesterday I finished up with Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box.

The plot, and especially the ending, to Professor Layton and the Curious Village was kind of goofy and contrived, but it was goofy and contrived in a way that was consistent with the character and style of the game. Diabolical Box started out along the same vein, but it wound up a bit too strange and contrived. I found it annoying and perplexing that a game which has as its primary mechanic puzzles that require players to spot minute differences and flaws and which hinge on exacting readings of the hints then has a plot so full of holes and so flaky that the greenest of puzzle solvers would scoff in derision.

However, the plot in these games is really just a wafer-thin pretext to move the player from one puzzle to the next. Even the lamest of plots can be redeemed by good puzzles. And while there certainly were some good puzzles, I was much less impressed by them than I was in the previous installment. In addition, there were more of the kind of puzzles that I really don't like at all. A normal human being might just skip the puzzles--I think you're required to complete about eighty-five of the game's one hundred and thirty-five puzzles--but I of course had to complete all the ones I encountered. I apparently managed to miss two of them, but I still finished 133.

For some reason I found myself having a lot more difficulty playing this installment for any length of time. I think this goes back to the annoyingness of the puzzles, but it's possible that my attention span dwindles with the seasons or tides or phases of the moon and I'm just at a low point right hey what's that shiny thing over there? While I think the entire game took me maybe thirteen hours to beat, those thirteen hours were stretched over a few weeks of real-time.

Also, if you do decide to go the rental route for this one, make sure you get the manual. I don't know if it's copy protection or just a gimmick, but one of the required puzzles needs the manual in order to complete it. Kind of lame, and I suppose you could look it up on the internet if you don't have the manual, but there you go.

As every good Square-Enix fanboy, I have Final Fantasy XIII on pre-order. However, I don't think either my work or my life schedules right now are up to the burden it will no doubt place, so I doubt I'll get to it particularly soon. I think it's going to be time for at least a couple-week break from video games again while I catch up on some reading and side projects I have going on. Til next time!

[Brenden]

I have been slowly playing through Zelda: Spirit Tracks.

I have given up for the time being after getting frustrated by the limitations of the train travel mechanic. You can only chug along lethargically, and when you get attacked it is difficult to fight off enemies if you don't see them right away. When you're carrying people or items it gets even more frustrating, as you lose points for getting hit, even if there are three enemies attacking you faster than you can fire your train's only weapon, a slow cannon.

I got especially pissed after a run in with land pirates who ravaged my train since they took a few hits a piece and several were attacking at once. I couldn't defend or avoid their attacks, so I had to get slammed while I picked them off one by one.

Also, the forced stealth in the Tower of Spirits got really old after a particularly annoying section. The last Zelda game I've played and really loved was Link's Awakening. I don't think I'll bother with the franchise anymore, might even sell this game to pick up something better.

[Vlad!]

My experience with the franchise seems to be close to your own. I loved the first four (yes, even the oft-reviled second one, The Adventures of Link). Ocarina of Time was OK, actually, but I didn't play it all the way through. I never played any of the succeeding ones until Phantom Hourglass, which I strongly disliked because of the ship travel mechanics (similar to the train travel you describe) and the repetitiveness of the temple of time.

If you're looking for a good third-person adventure game to scratch that Zelda itch, they're pretty old in DS years, but both Chibi Robo: Park Patrol and Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime are great. If you haven't already, definitely consider giving them a shot.

[Brenden]

Picked up Rocket Slime. I'd seen the game before but thought it looked like a kiddy game from the box art. This is a lot of fun, a bit much on the puns, but combat is simple yet requires some thought to master. I'm loving it so far, though I wish it was easier to save your game.

[Vlad!]

I'm loving it so far, though I wish it was easier to save your game.

Haha, yeah, that's one thing that the Dragon Quest-style games have never quite gotten the hang of.

Glad you're enjoying it, though. I liked it quite a bit.

[bloop]

I thought the DQ games were very intuitive in that regard.  You get saved at the church.

[Vlad!]

I thought the DQ games were very intuitive in that regard.  You get saved at the church.

Yes, by singing slime nuns.

Though having a building dedicated to saving is a bit of a throwback (the Final Fantasy series allowed saving in the overworld in Final Fantasy II and beyond, as I recall), I've generally viewed it as being part of the game design. What annoys me about pretty much all the DS Dragon Quest games is that the DS is capable of writing save data way faster than the standard Dragon Quest "saving your game" sound plays, and usually you have to navigate your way through a menu to save the game. This means that saving takes a lot longer than it should. I don't know if this is Brenden's gripe, but I certainly would prefer they streamline the saving process.

[Brenden]

It's more that when I need to stop after working my way through a level, I don't want to go back to the town to save, then have to fight through all the enemies again. I'd love to be able to save where I am or at least at checkpoints in each stage.

Another minor complaint I have, the enemies respawn the second you leave the screen. More an annoyance once more difficult enemies appear.

I really love the tank battles, the most fun part of the game for me.

[bloop]

I don't remember - do the DS games feature a soft save.  I don't think they do, but that would be nice to at least do that.

[Vlad!]

Dragon Quest IV does. I'm not sure about Rocket Slime or Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, the other two DQ games I've played.