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!