Diary Entry #48: SPray Suxxx

SPray really pissed me off. After like eight hours, I was about to hit my first boss battle in the game before it bugged out on me. All over the internet there's both warnings of game breaking bugs and other people swearing they've never experienced any issues, and I proudly belong to the former category.

I went to the volcano temple, solved a bunch of puzzles, then went through a teleporter that was supposed to take me to the boss. Instead, it restarted the whole game, taking me back to the developer/publisher logos and title screen. Reloading did nothing as a gate that led to the teleport was permanently closed no matter how many times I attempted to open it. Three times specifically.

So I went straight back into Brutal Legend. My last attempt to play the game evidently got me about half way through, and I blasted through it in about 8 hours ignoring most side quests. Brutal Legend has this vibe like there's a giant open world to explore, but there's barely anything interesting in it aside from the occasional side quest. I made a vow to only play the side quests that popped up directly in my path, an undying promise that led to me playing a singular optional mission.

Regardless of the hollow world, it's still brimming with personality. There's a ton of funny dialogue and tiny monsters to run over. The story is full of cute little references to all sorts of metal stuff, which really appealed to me.

Most of the rest of the game is pretty unappealing in every way early on. The early, mostly beat-em-up levels are absolute torture. There probably was 8 million triple A games like this one back in 2009, so it makes sense, but in 2019 it makes you want to vomit.

Things pick up halfway through when the game finally reveals it's true form: a kick ass action/real-time strategy hybrid. You, as Jack Black guy, amass resources to create different types of units that go into battle, sometimes jumping in yourself to ensure victory. It gets pretty crazy later on as the game ramps up the difficulty, forcing you to address multiple threats at once and frequently requiring your car's firepower.

Brutal Legend wouldn't go in my top 500, but it's definitely a fun and unique game. I have a personal problem with some of the choices they made: there's a huge fan service heaped onto Ozzy, Lemmy, and Rob Halford, but none for Dio! Jack Black has appeared in Dio's music videos, written songs about him, and even had him appear in the Tenacious D movie, but they couldn't squeeze him into Heavy Metal: The Game? Especially now that Dio's passed, it feels like a huge slap in my metal worship face.

Speaking of metal worship, isn't it weird how metal people literally worship certain performers, bands, and albums? Other people can have favorite albums, but as a metal head I feel totally subservient to the awesomeness of all my metal gods. Like Wayne and Garth when they meet Alice Cooper, bowing down and proclaiming their unworthiness.

I got to play drums with my favorite Canadian metal god Thor though and didn't really have that kind of feeling. Perhaps there was a desire to avoid being a goofy mark or to exhibit a certain level of professionalism, being a member of the band for that day. I did tell Thor that it was an honor to play with him and noted that he'd signed all of my Thor memorabilia in the past.

Perhaps in all my love for my metal gods there's a fear that they won't live up to my pedestal I put them on, although it's pretty clear Thor is just as enthusiastic as he appears in the film Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare. Maybe if I met more of them I'd be able to understand, but I probably will never meet enough metal people I deeply respect to come up with a large enough data pool.

Anyway, I started up Ys 7! Hope it's cool!

Diary Entry #47: Touching base after four years.

It's a little disgusting how much content there is on the internet. My footprint is relatively small: I post pictures of stock I get at my store, make videos about a mentally disabled puppet, and write in crappy blogs. I doubt anyone will have even a passing interest in my video gaming experiences, but either way, I feel like writing and documenting what I'm playing for my future self.

LEGEND OF ZELDA: SKYWARD SWORD

Finally dumped the thirty plus hours necessary to get through this bad boy. My now wife bought this when she got our Wii at Gamestop years ago, and I always told myself I'd get to it after I finished Twilight Princess. Unfortunately, that never happened: Twilight Princess made me want to vomit with all of the nasty collect-the-stuff sequences and grotesquely linear overworld. The dungeons were awesome, but everything in between was abhorrent.

Skyward Sword does a little more to make things feel more open, including a massive sky world that I never bothered to explore because the game's pretty damn linear. There were tons of side quests, all of which probably added another ten hours to the game, but I never bothered to complete any of them.

You probably need to complete those to upgrade your coin purse. I never got mine to exceed 300 rupees, which severely limited my purchasing options throughout the game. The best shield in the shop was 500, and the only reason I finished the final boss with my crappy iron shield was how fucking slow he moved.

Five collect-the-stuff sections still remain, and dear lord are they bad. There's longer sequence later in the game where you have to swim around a huge, flooded forest area and collect music notes. I wanted to shove my Wiimotion Plus remote right up Nintendo's ass.

But these are really minor complaints. The rest of the game is brimming with solid puzzling. Although they're not really super different from those found in Twilight Princess or in the shrines found in Breath of the Wild, the dungeons definitely represent the best use of the goofy Wii technology. There's a definite familiarity to the design, like after finishing the game I can't really pick a favorite section because everything's either been done before or gets repeated throughout the game. Still, I was immersed in it while I played.

Swordplay is a big deal, with most enemies blocking attacks deftly unless you  hit them a certain way. Much of the time I was writhing around the couch, annoying my wife with my totally masculine sexual energy as I tried desperately to swing correctly. You don't really appreciate just how tight the combat controls are until you hit the boss battles, with fast combat that requires you to use your brain a little. This game finally realizes the promise of the Wiimote..like eight years ago. Wish I had just played it then.

Also, Ganon's not in the game. Link, Zelda, the Triforce, and the Master Sword are. The scenario writers are a bunch of assholes.

LUNACY

My bro Andy and I played this for a few hours last night. At first I thought developer System Sacom was straight up ripping off D with it's cinematic horror vibe and Myst-like movement, but now I kind of feel like Kenji Eno was really jocking their style. Their first North American adventure game, Mansion of Hidden Souls, came out two years before D, and they managed to churn out a Saturn sequel with the same name within a year.

While Mansion of the Hidden Souls was all about ghost butterflies in a Victorian mansion, Lunacy takes things down a much more Kafkaesque route. You're a traveler named Fred, initially imprisoned and later just trapped in a weird, dreamlike town. Led by a rich baron guy who sits in his mansion, everyone sort of just does whatever he wants, whether it's be his doctor, fix his clocks, or marry their children off to him. In case of the last one, the woman disappeared before that could happen, leading to some cool ghostly visitations. There's also a guy who basically is the baron's hitman who just follows Fred everywhere, and another guy who has an enormous butterfly specimen collection.

If you hadn't noticed from the description, there's a lot of elements borrowed from Mansion of the Hidden Souls: butterflies, ghosts, and Victorian mansions. I've only played the first one, but the Saturn sequel looks just as good. I might play that before I finish Lunacy, just so Andy and I can beat it together.

SPRay

SPRay (Spirited Prince Ray) is a game that melds the spray shit with water gameplay of Mario Sunshine with Legend of Zelda style dungeon crawling. There's a ton of good ideas, but developer Eko System really could have polished this game a little more.

Spirited Prince Ray is accompanied by two sprites that literally spray different liquids from their mouths. The angelic creature shoots water and ice, while the demonic one shoots literal vomit and slime. The slime is currently my favorite spray, allowing you to stick to walls and jump off to greater heights and cling to paths upside down. 

I almost rage quit the game because of one sequence where you have to push a small ball up a hill. They didn't bother to put a decent physics engine in the game because it's for fucking five year olds, but the ball had a damn mind of it's own. I almost got it to the little button I was supposed to get it to, but then it got lodged in this decorative broken door and I couldn't get it out. My wife made fun of me, asking politely why I put it there and that I should get it out of there if I want to solve the puzzle. God fucking damn it.

Clunky crap aside, I still like it! It's ugly, stupid, and goofy, but that's part of the charm as long as there's light puzzles along the way.

BRUTAL LEGEND

I've started this game nine fucking times and I swear I'm going to finish it. After I beat SPRay...and Lunacy...and everything else in my Steam library.

Howlongisit.com informs me that the average playtime is around 9 hours, and I'm already an hour and a half in again. So let's just hope I can muster the strength.

I also own that video game store I might have talked about eventually opening in previous blog posts. I spend 52 hours a week here and still manage to get in a lot of time with my wife and video games, so I'm probably living my peak life here. I'm not really sure I want to be doing this for the rest of my life, but it's definitely an enjoyable experience and one I'm really glad I took a chance on! 

Diary Entry #46: Resident Evil HD is Stupid, Abhorrent Revisionist Garbage

Two things really, really bothered me yesterday (I wrote this in January, which was not yesterday).

First thing: everyone's problem with some guy leaving blink 182. In 2015, these old assholes have absolutely no relevance. The only reason they're even pretending to be together is for cash, and the fact that one guy left the group is not going to affect anything creative, only profit margins. Honestly, I thought the band had broken up years ago and this was just some reunion bid gone wrong, but no, they're just sacks of crap who don't care enough to actually do something.

Second thing: I was reading that the new HD version of Resident Evil 1 eschews the tank controls that defined the survival horror genre.

This is heresy people.

Tank controls: it's probably easier to use this than to 
navigate Resident Evil 1's crazier sections.

Think back to all the bad jokes revolving around Steven Spielberg and George Lucas remastering their films, which ultimately led to some marked content revisions. Taking Star Wars and throwing in some extra CG beasties isn't improving much, although it does go far in terms of alienating the true aficionado.

For years, I recalled magazines speaking volumes about how great Super Castlevania IV was, how it improved on the original's time honored formula. But playing it years later after mastering the original NES classics, Super Castlevania feels like easy trash. Now that Simon Belmont can change direction while jumping, whip multiple directions, and leap onto stairs, almost all of the difficulty is gone. As with many games with limited controls, Castlevanias are largely difficult and compelling because you can barely move your character from point A to point B.

Super Castlevania IV = baby mode Castlevania.

The same principle goes for Resident Evil: how difficult is it to run away from a pack of zombie dogs when you can hardly tell what's happening? The tank movements are also done for aesthetic purposes: in Alone in the Dark, PC technology made it so that players could only move forward and turn very slowly through pre-rendered "camera angles", and it just stuck with the genre for years. It was fun, stylish, and while it might have just been done for technological purposes, it simply looked great. Eventually, even LucasArts used a similar set up for its 3D adventure games, which essentially were Alone in the Dark sans combat and add dialogue system. Almost every survival horror game was like this, and with several coming out a year, it was a total blast.


Now, just like Castlevania IV made jumping all easy and the whip all floppy, I'm supposed to believe that getting rid of limited movement somehow makes Resident Evil better. Just like I'm supposed to believe that extra CG makes Star Wars better. Just like I'm supposed to believe Final Fantasy 3 on the DS is somehow a remotely playable game.

This man will forever be Jabba the Hutt in my eyes.

If someone told me to rewrite the Great Gatsby and make Jay a Rambo type character with syphilis who spread his vile disease using a rocket launcher attachment in a vicious attempt to destroy humanity and simultaneously fulfill his abhorrent homoerotic desires, even though I think it would make it a better book, it would be a revisionist atrocity that any decent human being with a tenth grade education would absolutely abhor.

I haven't looked at gameplay footage, I haven't read any further than the whole new control debacle, I just know I'm pissed. This trend will totally ruin everything that made the game industry purer than the disgusting, derivative, glossed-over music, film, book, television, radio, and just about every other media industry out there.

Diary Entry #45: Star Ocean 2 Do Not Have The Value

            I remember balking at ads for PS1 games throughout the late '90s. At the time, I was an NES purist. We only owned three different game consoles: the Sega Game Gear, the Sega Pico, and the NES. I balked at the silly 3D images of Final Fantasy VII's huge marketing campaign, thinking about how stupid it all looked in comparison to my beloved 8-bit Final Fantasy.

            But in 1999, Star Ocean: Second Story's ad was played continuously on Cartoon Network. Years later after the actual content of the ad has faded from my memory, I can still recall how the ad made the spry, twelve-year old me feel. Did they show the little 2D people running around hitting each other? Did it show clips from the games 3D cutscenes? My girlfriend and I have only managed to uncover an old French ad, but I'm pretty sure the original ad had a robotic female voice telling me about the game's features. I do remember the ad boasting about the eighty different endings available in the game, which to me was unheard of. I could play this game EIGHTY TIMES and it would never be the same!

            Based on how often they ran the ad, this was Enix's attempt at having their own Final Fantasy VII, but I never really heard anyone talk about the game. If anyone ever did mention it, my eyes lit up and I started blathering on about how great this ad was.

            Eventually, I managed to pick up the PSP remake of the game. The battle system was ingenious, with everyone running around wildly swatting and casting spells at creatures. You could set it up so that the game would play itself, or you could switch between your party members and take control of any of them at one time. Still, something didn't sit right with me. I wanted to play the original Star Ocean: Second Story, the one whose ads lit my face up and finally got me interested in 32-bit gaming.

            And now, fifteen years after that pivotal commercial, I'm knocking on the final boss's door. I broke down, got the game, and went through virtually everything Star Ocean 2 had to offer. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to my deeply-rooted personal hype.

            The company behind the game, tri-Ace, is either a very lucky company or an extremely talented group of developers. Over the past twenty years, they've gone from being a small independent company to being vanguards of the Japanese RPG. After years of Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile games and releasing seven games in their first decade of existence, the past several years have seen them developing three games a year for big name publishers like Square Enix and Sega.

            Founded in 1996, the company was comprised largely of people who left Wolfteam during the troubled development of Tales of Phantasia. Prior to that game, Wolfteam was known in the west for it's Genesis and Sega CD games, ranging from the Castlevania clonery of Earnest Evans to the FMV auto action of Road Avenger. Phantasia benefits from this pedigree, reinventing the side-scrolling action RPG into something entirely new. Rather than having a Zelda 2-esque action title, the game's traditional JRPG random encounters are all in real time, with most of the strategy lying in your positioning of your party and timing of discrete attacks. Even better is the over-the-top use of digitized voice effects, with every character spouting silly battle cries and victory pomps. It's all very fun, and you can tell the Super Famicom hardware is being stretched to its limits.

            With all the main designers moving to tri-Ace, it's no surprise their first game uses some very similar principles. Star Ocean uses tons of recorded voice and a real-time battle system, although it's one of the first "it plays itself" style games. Ditching Phantasia's side-scrolling view, fights take place across a large battlefield where characters automatically attack based on the player's menu options. At the time, this was probably super innovative, but nowadays it's Square Enix's status quo. Final Fantasy XIII's battles are a prime example, forcing the player to choose between different fighting styles and just watch everything automatically unfold. Not surprising that Final Fantasy XIII's two sequels were developed in part by tri-Ace. 

            Expectations were astronomical coming into the game, and at first, I thought everything was alright. Great battle system, complex-ish skill development, cool digitized voices during fights, and some fairly interesting visuals peaked my interest. Unfortunately, early on, the games awful storyline managed to ruin much of the enjoyment.

            The game features two scenarios, although I'm sure they're largely the same. Claude is in the space military because he does whatever Commodore daddy tells him to, and Rena is part of a mystical race with special powers. Of course, they've got a budding romance thing that EVERY CHARACTER has to comment on or allude to in the first five hours of the game, and they're ALWAYS embarrassed by the implication. Here's a small thumbnail gallery of examples:

            It's obnoxious, and it doesn't get any better as the game goes on. Later, the game tries to shoehorn in a bunch of pop-psychology crap about the tension between Claude and his father. Perhaps the most striking scene is near the beginning of the second disc, where we delve deep into Claude's brain and uncover this: 

            How do I react to these decadently pixelated close-ups? Was this what developers had in mind when they created sprite scaling and rotation effects?

            Who writes this crap? Who does this appeal to? Embarrassed that someone might think you have a boyfriend? Shouting at your super-pixelated father? Perhaps the girlfriend-less, twelve-year-old me could relate to it. Crotchety old me doesn't.

            Even more trashy are the CG cutscenes. This strange pink Elvis demon looks even worse than pixel-face dad. I understand that Final Fantasy VII had a ton of awesome cutscenes, but those were integrated in fun and interesting ways. Here, there's just four random cutscenes that mostly look like trash.

            It's unfair to say any game is bad just because the story sucks, but Star Ocean's dialogue is so verbose and the cutscenes are so long that it totally ruins the experience. Do I really have to know what everybody thinks of each other? Do I really have to wade through twenty lines of dialogue about how cute a character is or general "how's everything going?" type deals. I don't mind the thirty second spell cast animations, but why do I have to know what everyone's thinking at all times?

            All of this functions to wear down the player, forcing them to endure hours of wordy garbage to go through the occasional dungeon. Perhaps the second biggest problem was no effort on the games part to explain the smithing or crafting aspects of the game. The only time I actually needed hyper-powerful weapons was the last two bosses, which is just plain rude. 

            And the eighty different endings? My one sucked. The characters just talk some more until the game ends. So much for playing the game seventy-nine more times.

            The game ends with the phrase "DO LIFEFORMS WHICH DO NOT EVOLVE HAVE THE VALUE?" Probably a desperate attempt to draw from the genes/cloning themes of Metal Gear Solid and FFVII. Talk about a flaming bullshit aftertaste. And why keep that as the only piece of Engrish in the entire game?

            So my hopes and dreams were deflated. Moving on.

            Currently I'm dabbling in both Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean 1. I compared them a little bit here, but I look forward to going into much more detail. I'm also playing Hokuto no Ken 4 for the Famicom, and I'll probably start something else. Either way, I'm going to be playing four RPGs at once.

Diary Entry #44: Ain't No Ghetto RPG Party Like A PS1 Ghetto RPG Party

            A lot of people heap tons of praise on the SNES RPG library. With all the Fantasies and Illusions and Brain Lords, it's jam packed with JRPG classics. Still, there's a problem: a huge chunk of these greats stayed on the Super Famicom, never to reach American shores. Most criminal is the loss of Akitoshi Kawazu's directorial output, the Romancing SaGa games and the phenomenal Treasure of the Rudras.

             Even more criminal is that we missed the JRPG dung heap. No Hokuto no Ken V, no Ancient Magic: Bazoe!, no Aretha 2, no nothing. It wasn't until years later when games like Final Fantasy VII and Pokemon took JRPGs to the top of the sales charts, and all of a sudden many companies were releasing anything remotely RPG-like for a quick buck.
           

             Monster Seed is a grand example of this. Developed by NK System, whose only other game is the awesome looking Koukai Sarena Katta Shuki: The Note, Monster Seed is Pokemon with an extra chromosome added in for good measure. Imagine having to punch Psyduck in the face and he cusses back at you. That's Monster Seed.

             Rather than catching animals in the wild, you have create them in a strange incubation machine. The creatures are created through a strange process involving choosing different fluids and a setting a specific baking temperature. In the end, you get something that looks like this:

             Adorable. 

             Battles are on a square-grid map similar to tactical RPGs, with characters taking turns moving about and picking their attacks. When calling your creatures, they initially appear as little glowing orbs for one or two rounds before actually appearing, a feature that never really effects anything since it takes the opposing Monster Seeder the same amount of time to generate their allies.

             One of the worst aspects of the game is how small the battle areas are. This ugly and confusing fight pretty much characterizes the entire game, with six or seven creatures all snuggling together and sometimes hitting something.

             The dungeons are pretty straightforward, but I do appreciate the occasional old-school touch. In the first dungeon, the player character has to avoid giant spikes and pendulum axes to survive. Not nearly as cool as Wizardry's poison/exploding treasure chests, but the thought counts.

             Arc the Lad is a much bigger name series in Japan, published by Sony themselves and probably getting a nice marketing push as a result. With it's 1995 release date, it's one of the PS1's first RPGs, although it wasn't published in America until the immortal Working Designs brought it over six years later. As usual with the company, the dialogue is spiced with some goofy humor, but everything else remains intact.

             In comparison to the Final Fantasy VIII's and Legend of Dragoon's people were accustomed to by 2001, Arc the Lad looks like a 16-bit shit. Super-deformed midgets riding airships and talking about defeating the big evil is something JRPG fans have experienced countless times over. To be fair, Arc the Lad should be compared to other games from 1995 like Chrono Trigger, but it's difficult to cast aside the notion that this game is simply archaic.

             The battle system doesn't do much to add any complexity. Imagine the most generic tactical RPG of all time and you've got Arc the Lad. There's no rock-paper-scissors system or formation-heavy planning. Walk up to stuff, press attack, do it again. 

             The only battle variety occurs when enemies block your magic attacks. This can really ruin any battle where strong attackers are present, although this predicament seldom appears. My personal favorite magic attack involves a strange angel figure appears out of nowhere and showers the enemies with thunder and lightening. Looks awesome and terrible.

             The grand, sweeping melodrama is refreshingly stupid, especially since I just dipped my head into the obnoxiously stupid Tales of Xilia. Everyone's got a chip on their shoulder, ranging from parental fatality to wishing they were a musician. No confusing "I harness the power of elemental spirits that I lost so please help me kid who's still in high school" garbage, just a bunch of pissed off rebels who are ready to kick some evil ass.

             

             Refreshingly stupid is really the only way to describe Arc the Lad, packed full of the same old stuff in the most direct package possible. Concise battles, goofy cutscenes, and a whole lot of little else in between. Moves quick, kicks ass, great game.

             Digimon World 3, on the other hand, confuses the hell out of me. The opening cutscene, comprised entirely of your character walking into different rooms, is way too long, and finally ends with you meeting your Digimon. Why do so many Pokemon rip-offs have the monsters speaking in English?

             The battles look totally high-tech; bright pink Digi-worlds like these are one of the reasons they put seizure warnings on video games  nowadays. You'd think a game coming at the tail end of the PS1's life would look awesome, but Digimon World 3 looks absurdly cheap.

             These old men want to become Digimon. What?

             I've walked around the Digi-city for twenty extra minutes and could not find a way to fight anything else. I give it a 2/1000. You can simplify that to a 1/500 if you want.

             In addition to these greats, I've also played Granstream Saga and Beyond the Beyond, with the latter playing a lot better than most of Camelot's Shining games. I might continue Tales of Xilia, I might play Arc the Lad. I might play my guitar. I could probably use a shower. Not all at the same time.

Diary Entry #43: Budget Titles Are Better Than Alan Wake

             I recently picked up a 360, prompting me to pick up a copy of Alan Wake. It's one of 2010's most revered games and one of three 360 exclusives that deserve my time. The only problem: it sucks.

             Called a narrative triumph by many, Alan Wake's storyline is incredibly threadbare. The game is broken into six "episodes", and any interesting story content is featured at the beginning and end of each portion. Most mid-episode cutscenes lead to absolutely nothing except more woods to run through.

             If Alan Wake teaches me anything, it's that wooded areas always feature nice little hallway like trails. Final Fantasy XIII has a similar walk-down-the-obvious-path setup, although the story tries to compensate for it somewhat. The characters in that game are running through "the tube", a long path filled with random robots and soldiers that's supposed to eventually lead to an escape from the city. Alan Wake's tube is absolutely soulless and inexplicable, forcing the player to wander in circles until Alan makes it to a mundane locale. Never in my gaming life have I ever thought I'd run straightforward for twenty minutes killing anything in sight for the express purpose of reaching a gas station, unless it was a zombie-free outpost or something. In Alan Wake, it's just a bright spot where you finally get to end the awful combat sections.

             Every enemy is at first totally indestructible due to the dark aura that surrounds them. Shining a flashlight at these monsters dispels the darkness, and after they've turned normal, it's all Resident Evil clonery: dump as many bullets into them as possible and hope for the best. In what appears to be a cost-cutting measure, the woods are filled with the same three enemies for the entire game: a gardner guy who slices at you with a little sickle, a small lumberjack that throws axes, and a big lumberjack who takes more bullets. It never gets more complicated than that, and even while I was playing on the hardest difficulty setting, the only thing that killed me was my apathy towards the games dull combat.

             The Heavy Rain-esque exploration sequences are probably the most interesting aspect of the game, but they only represent about twenty minutes of the games six or seven hour playtime. You'd better really like shooting stuff with flashlights and guns, because there's really nothing else going on.

             For a game about an author, it isn't particularly well-written. Alan Wake's scattered pages from his novel, which function as both a throwback to the journal entries from Resident Evil and a way to totally give away what will happen next in the story, is beyond hammy. The six featured characters are lifeless. Alan himself bitches about whatever for most of the game because he's deep, the FBI agent trailing him is a pissed off veteran with a chip on his shoulder, his manager is fat and nerdy, etc. It's the same as any other blockbuster-media influenced game like Heavy Rain, appealing to the players sense of stereotypes over anything else.

             I feel like Alan Wake is best compared to another 2010 title with a similar Twin Peaks influence: Deadly Premonition. Many people believe Deadly Premonition's story is its strongest suit, and while it certainly has the most colorful, divergent, and thought-provoking narrative since D2, the gameplay is really what shines through. A fractured mix of a J-Adventure, Grand Theft Auto, and Resident Evil 4, there are so many disparate ideas that end up working well.

             Like Alan Wake, Deadly Premonition's combat is easily it's lowest point, but half the game or more is dedicated to wacky cutscenes, side-quests, and mini-games. Even then, at least I can blow people's heads off in Deadly Premonition. In this day and age, if shooting a baddie in the head does as much damage as shooting them in the foot, your third-person shooter is lacking something.

             I'm not sure why, but I also keep comparing Alan Wake and Cursed Mountain, a budget Wii and PC survival horror game that came out a year earlier. Like Alan Wake, enemies are not easily killed at first, but Cursed Mountain uses a pretty novel mechanic to pass this: players must use their "third eye", an otherworldly power that allows you to slip into the realm of the dead and shoot awesome projectiles at baddies. Unlike Alan Wake, the games puzzles actual have more depth than flip-a-switch-after-wading-through-ten-baddies type objectives. Additionally, the Himalayan setting of Cursed Mountain is a great idea, recalling the snowy horrors of great films like The Thing, The Shining, and Silent Night, Deadly Night.

             The 360 is part of a larger goal of mine to collect more and more gaming stuff to eventually open a store. I'll go into more detail about this as details become clearer, but I'd say I'm off to a good start. I definitely need more 360 and NES games. I'm not clear on how many people actually take DS collecting seriously, especially since I always just see tons and tons of them sitting around unsold at GameStop, so I'm not too worried about accumulating that stock.

             Current games to play: Final Fantasy XII, Deadly Premonition (again), Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, Yakuza: Dead Souls, and Pixel Pirates.

Diary Entry #42: Dune!

             The Dune film is one of those sci-fi shambles that everyone loves anyway. It doesn't matter how poorly edited or paced the film is; the fact that it's slightly more intelligent than Star Wars is enough to make nerds go crazy. In a similar manner, Cryo Interactive's Dune is slightly more intelligent than the average adventure game, but it's not nearly well made enough to stand up against any Sierra or LucasArts game. Or Dune 2.

             From the start, you can instantly tell the game's modelling everything after David Lynch's Dune. Kyle MacClachlan's pixelated mug is the first image you see, and other actors and actresses likenesses are featured throughout the game. Gotta love pixelated Sting.

             The goal is for you to travel to various Fremen (FREE MEN!) bases, recruit them, and use them to fight off the Harkonnens, a fat, slovenly race. They're all ugly, and every one of them makes some sort of cryptic remark about how you might be the one. You control every territory you visit excluding any already owned by the Harkonnens.

             Options are decidedly limited. There's a limited number of Fremen you can recruit, and they can be turned into either warriors or spice miners. Spice is the only form of currency, and tributes to some sort of space emperor have to be made every few days to keep the game going.

 

             And that's about it. You fly around, recruit guys, talk to people to further the story, and then it eventually ends. The strategy is very limited: sometimes a Harkonnen will take over one of your territories, and the only real way to win is just have strong warriors walk right into the area. Eventually, you can grow plants that will drive the Harkonnens out of their areas, but this is too little strategy far too late. 

             Harvester, on the other hand, is a great game. Here's some photo evidence:

             I'm hoping to cover this shortly in my next blog post. I recently order the NES PowerPak, a developmental cartridge that looks really, really awesome. I'm going to play the hell out of it.