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The Slime (myself): "But this issue was supposed to be about heroes!" you exclaim. True enough. Fortunately, slimes became heroes in Dragon Quest IV. My butt? Saved on a technicality.
Solid Snake (Nicola Nomali): Probably the best psychoanalysis you're likely to see of the Solid Snake. And since this issue was about 8-bit heroes, it doesn't even get into all that messy silliness about Les Enfants Terrible and rapidly-aging clones and whatnot.
Solvalou (myself): I did a lot of research into ancient cultures for this piece and can guarantee that it is 100% historically accurate and thoroughly factual.
The newest batch of GameSpite Quarterly 3 content shows off the strength of this volume, in my opinion. They're all concise entries about fairly obscure character, rooted in the lore and mechanics of each game yet which venture well beyond the realm of simple, factual explanations. The book has taken some criticism in certain quarters for being insufficiently, I dunno, anecdotal. But it was never meant to be! We put together a breezy encyclopedia of 8-bit videogame characters spanning the gamut of years, systems, and popularity, and these guys here are fine representatives of our mission statement.
Spelunker (Bob Mackey): The star of his own eponymous game, Spelunker just might be responsible for my most humiliating game moment ever as I tried the PS3 remake at Tokyo Game Show and did such a terrible job that the booth girl broke her mask of implacable bland good cheer to express pity for me.
Steve Hermann (Justin Hoeger): Do you remember Shatterhand? Neither do I, really, but I figured we should include its hero on our list anyway. Because someone out there surely does.
Super Ace Lockheed P-38 (myself): This is possibly the first article about 1943 ever to appear on the Internet that doesn't go for the standard joke of, "LOL Japanese making game about killing Japan hurf durf." I'm sorry for abandoning this tradition, but there wasn't enough space.
(If you want the anecdotal stuff, hold out for GSQ4, which will have a needlessly elaborate 10,000-word essay on Etrian Odyssey, among other things.)
Today's GameSpite Quarterly 3 content takes us all the way through the letter T. Just three entries does it. Apparently T was much less popular an initial letter for 8-bit hero names than, say, A. No one knows why. The olden days of gaming were ripe with many heady mysteries such as these.
Taizo Hori (Luke Osteritter): I think this is the first article we've posted by GSQ newcomer Luke. Revel in his fresh perspective as he spins a tale about a man you probably know better as "Dig Dug."
Takosuke (Justin Fairchild): Remember how I said yesterday that we probably had too many Gradius-related entries? Yeah, well, I wasn't even thinking about Takosuke, who's tangentially associated with the series through its spin-off Parodius. So, uh... sorry?
Torneko Taloon (me): And finally, the raddest character to come from the Dragon Quest franchise shines beneath the spotlight in this book.
Speaking of books, I'm selling a bunch of my out-of-print Japanese game encyclopedias and "aspect mooks." They're neat, but they're not really much use for me since I no longer have the patience to spend the time necessary to parse all the Japanese text in these. And while I try not to make a habit of promoting auctions here, these books seem like they might of interest to some of you and they're pretty much impossible to find without combing bookstores in Japan and paying crazy inflated prices.
A significant portion of the articles for GameSpite Quarterly 4 have been submitted already, and the remainder will be in next week. So I guess I really need to get serious about posting content from GSQ3, huh? Yipe. Turns out these little bite-sized articles are a lot more time-consuming to post than the larger counterparts. This third issue really is gonna be the death of me.
Vic Viper (Ben Elgin): There's a great deal of Gradius redundancy in this issue, which is my fault; I scheduled perhaps a few too many articles about "characters" from a series with none to speak of. But at the very least, everyone knows the Vic Viper.
The Wanderer (Matt Cramp): I have a soft spot for Faxanadu, but this article kind of makes me question that. Apparently its hero is kind of a jerk!
Wario (John Berger): Wario is also a jerk, but that's kind of the point, so in this case the jerkiness is quite alright.
Having survived my weekend review marathon (and all the distractions in the weeks leading up to it), life can finally resume some semblance of normalcy. That means Cat and I are updating BakeSpite again. Huzzah and all that. I figured it bears mentioning here, because the post I put together last night seems like the sort of thing the readership of GameSpite might enjoy. It's about Japanese snacks, you see -- but not Pocky, because that's boring. Please read it and comment! Our food blog is very lonely -- it gets excellent traffic but desperately needs conversation.
This also marks the debut of the new camera we picked up to replace my Sony Cybershot point-and-shoot. It was fine for what it was, but what with Cat being an actual photographer who uses actual DSLR cameras for her work, I figured I needed something a bit nicer if I want to keep up with her contributions. You can easily spot the difference in quality between her photos for BakeSpite to date (they're nice) and mine (they suck), and the camera is one part of that. (Not the only part, of course; she's also teaching me to light properly and to color-correct.) We picked up a Canon Powershot G11, and it is pretty incredible -- technically it's a point and shoot, but I believe it's classified as "prosumer." It doesn't have an SLR lens assembly, but otherwise it offers all the fine controls of a DSLR. In fact, it offers some dynamic gamut and color balance feedback that Cat's 5D lacks. I particularly like the fact that Canon decreased the megapixel count from its previous models but left the CCD the same size -- the resultant improvement in sensor quality makes for a picture that looks much better at large sizes than something shot with a camera with a higher MP count and greater CCD density. I'm pretty well in love with this little guy.
(Incidentally, I have a used Sony Cybershot for sale, cheap.)
Also, I really liked the photo above, but was forbidden from using it on BakeSpite. Something about the fingerprints visible in the chocolate making Cat want to throw up, I guess. If you experience a similar response, please remember to turn your face away from the computer before vomiting. In the future, I will be certain to refrigerate chocolate (and my hands) before handling it for photography to minimize the nauseation.
My Mass Effect 2 review went online overnight, which is good. Now I can go back to life as normal after freebasing the game over the weekend. I'm much too old for beating a huge RPG in a couple of marathon sessions, even if it's something I really enjoy. Which is definitely the case with ME2; the review I wrote is fairly critical, but I loved the game and can't wait to play it again (this time with a Renegade character). It has some flaws, but the atmosphere and game worlds are really top-notch. And even if the mechanical underpinnings are flat compared to the first game's RPG-driven structure, the combat tends to be pretty involving. I started up a New Game Plus run just to top off some quick achievements at a higher difficulty level, and the action really shines when the pressure is increased (although I would hazard a guess that playing on the maximum difficulty setting is a task for people who don't believe that videogames are meant to be fun, per se).
Anyway, I highly recommend the game, even to people who hated the original. Especially to people who hated the original, come to think of it. BioWare's overhaul of the game was clearly an attempt to cast a wide net and pull in all the people who would rather play a third-person shooter than an RPG, so it's really only RPG fans who are likely to find something to complain about in ME2.
Minor character spoilers in the coda behind the jump.
Everyone hated the elevators in Mass Effect. They were simply an attempt by BioWare to create seamless environments, of course -- loading times for new areas were masked by having the team stand around in an elevator while the data streamed in, with news casts and incidental dialogue for added color. A nice effort, but one that ultimately became the butt of jokes across the Internet. So, I wasn't terribly surprised to see the sequel revert to more traditional loading screens, which are actually pretty neat if you pay attention to what they're actually showing you.
As a result, Mass Effect 2 doesn't have any elevators. Well, almost. There is one that your party rides, just once; it's set in a dramatic cutscene in a section that BioWare demoed ages ago. What I didn't realize at the demo was that if you listen carefully, beneath all the tense dialogue, you can hear the faint strains of the peppy music they piped in to all the elevators in the first game. That, my friends, is continuity.
I have a long-standing tradition with videogames that allow for custom character creation: Whenever possible, I name and design my characters in honor of my old site mascots, ToastyFrog and Rorita/Yukiko. The latter tends to be easier, because games are more likely to let you create a cute young woman more often than they are a freakish man-frog thing.
So anyway, I did my best to make Mass Effect's Commander Shepard -- Yukiko Shepard -- look the part. No pink hair option, and no Rei Ayanami hairstyle, but bright red and close-cropped did the trick. She actually did look pretty much like you'd expect an older, slightly more realistic version of Rorita to look (taking into account, of course, a swift pummeling with the Unreal Engine 3 Ugly Stick). But no ToastyFrog, alas. Ultimate, I settled for making Wrex a permanent party member, partly because he was rad, but also because he was the closest I could get to having ToastyFrog and Rorita team up to shoot stuff.... in space.
But Mass Effect 2 brings me the best of both worlds. You can customize your armor design with custom colors, so I've gone with a green and orange scheme with a mottled pattern. Now it appears that Rorita has killed and skinned ToastyFrog and is wearing him as a decoration. Which, let's face it, is pretty much exactly how the comic would have ended if I had followed it through to its logical conclusion.
People have been squawking about the Japanese cover for Heavy Rain, and yeah -- it's not so great. I mean, seriously:
Kind of gross, I dunno. But it also reminds me of something. It's been nagging at my brain for a while, and I finally figured out what it puts me in mind of:
The giant, severed head of Rei Ayanami from the end of End of Evangelion! Given the artsy pretenses of what I've seen of Heavy Rain so far, this seems somehow apropos.
Hi dudes, I'm back from the east coast, where I had stunningly little time to make any headway on any personal projects. I just don't understand how time gets away from me, but I certainly intend to spend the next week alone, in a dark room, musing about mortality. Just kidding, I'm going to be playing Mass Effect 2, making easy choices about morality. And not making any headway on personal projects. The week after that will be spent weeping in the dark.
Anyway. This pair of entries represents what may well be my two favorite pieces from GameSpite Quarterly 3, clustered together by circumstance, coincidence, and possibly magic.
First up are the Warriors of Light from Final Fantasy, which is the one entry I penned for this issue that I can look back on and think, "Yeah, this was actually really good." Of course, it presupposes some level of familiarity with the game's plot, but that's kind of the case for most of these entries.
Secondly, we have William and James Lee, Esq., perhaps better known as Billy and Jimmy Lee of Double Dragon. Mr. Decoste has penned an impressive interview with the brothers that looks back at their complete careers. Essential reading for anyone who has ever wondered, "Whatever happened to....?"
The discussion that cropped up in the wake of last week's Final Fantasy VIII musings have reinforced my awareness that polarizing game design can sometimes be great game design. The idea sounds fairly stupid on the face of it, I suppose: If half the people who play a game hate it, how could it be good? Yet in revisiting the decade-long debate over FFVIII, I find that the content of the arguments surrounding the game is interesting. While the "con" team has its share of people who simply don't like the game for perfectly good reasons, a significant percentage of people who criticize it don't quite seem to understand the game -- or, at the very least, they don't seem to be taking it on the terms its developers intended. They approach the combat system from the wrong direction, they get bogged down by habits carried over from other RPGs which prove ineffective here, they write off the cast based on surface appearances or on general Internet hive-mind perceptions. The "pro" team has its foibles, too; there are an awful lot of people who will admit no fault in the game, or who try desperately to come up with insane rationalizations for its failings out of some misguided sense of chivalry. On the whole, though, the game's fan base takes the game as it is, accepting its flaws while praising its strengths and reveling in its uniqueness.
So which side is right? Is FFVIII a ruinous mess of a game, or is it actually a commendable work? Obviously, my opinion falls into the latter camp, but not without justification. (Or so I'd like to think, anyway.) This seems a case where a game's polarizing nature speaks well for it: The creators did something unconventional in the name of their collective vision for the game. Their experimental efforts didn't always pan out for the best, but they were more successful than not. Gaming is a medium increasingly dominated by safe, complacent design in name of profitability. That Square would follow up its most successful work ever by something that broke so many accepted rules and practices was gutsy.
This is one of those things I have to keep in mind when I review games; I may not always like an off-the-wall or laterally designed game, but I think it's important to be able to recognize the intent behind it. God Hand, for instance, isn't necessarily something I think is fun. That's not because it's a lousy creation; it's because God Hand a loving homage to a genre and style I don't really enjoy. (See also: Bayonetta.) Just because a game bores to me to tears doesn't mean I think it's crappy... I just means I duck out of reviewing it.
On the other hand, you have Order of Ecclesia, a game in a genre and series I love -- it bores me to tears, which is probably a sign that something about it terribly wrong. In theory, I should like Ecclesia, but in practice I find the developers' decision to take the standard Metroidvania template and boost the difficulty to be poorly executed, since their attempt revolved around cranking up enemy stats rather than smarter level design or trickier AI. Being forced to chip away at the same stupid enemies I've been breezing through for two decades doesn't make them more interesting, it just slows the pace, which in turn causes me to look around and realize how stagnant the Castlevania series' design has become. It's like the Wizard pulled back the curtain before Toto even arrived in the scene.
But then, some people really love the game, so who's to say it's badly designed? I keep digging away at it, hoping to strike the nugget of goodness its fans swear exists somewhere inside, but so far I'm panning nothing but gravel and dirt.
Which brings me to my current review conundrum, Sands of Destruction. I ducked out of the Ecclesia review without even knowing how conflicted I'd be about the game, but I volunteered to review Sands out of sheer curiosity. It's like the mutant offspring of Xenogears, the very definition of a conflicted game. Despite my using Xenogears as a whipping boy for so long, I don't actually hate it -- I just found the flaws it possesses to be unusually infuriating. Still, I've always felt that the concepts laid down by the game could be revisited to create a genuine masterpiece. You know, with a little more polish and a lot less ambition that results in a rushed tumble through the second half of the story through a wall of static text. Maybe, I thought, Sands would be that masterpiece.
Turns out it's not. It's not even close, in fact! It is, however, a very bizarre piece of work that feels more like a distorted echo of Xenogears than an actual follow-up. At the same time, I've already had a debate with someone about the merits of its combat system, among other things. So, I suppose I need to keep all of this in mind as I enter the back half of the adventure. Is it a broken mess or a madly inventive work of genius that defies convention? I can't decide just yet.
I can say with certainty that I don't hate it, though. Sands feels exactly like a second-tier 32-bit RPG that fell 12 years through a time warp to land in 2010. I didn't even realize I was nostalgic for that particular niche of gaming, but apparently I am!
Apparently Capcom is compiling the Mega Man Zero tetralogy (call it a "quadrilogy" and I explode your face) into a DS cartridge. No U.S. release is yet confirmed, but honestly now. Why wouldn't they? Capcom likes money, especially easy money.
I'm pretty happy about this news, because I sold off my Zero games about a year ago. I enjoyed the series, or at least I did when it wasn't punishing me for having the audacity to make use of its play mechanics, but then I noticed they were selling for stupid amounts of money on eBay. So, I decided to brave up and put a theory I have to the test: There's no sense in hanging on old games in a successful series by a major publisher, because eventually they will show up again -- often in a better format than they appeared the first time.*
Gaming has finally reached the point where it has its own sense of history, and old games are like old albums. There's money to be made in dredging up back catalog material, because there'll always be people who loved those games the first time around and a steady influx of new fans who started in with a franchise at a later chapter and are curious about the older works. Admittedly, the Zero games aren't quite old enough to be historical curios for new fans, but everything else is true enough.
So, I'm pretty happy about this turn of events, because I'll probably enjoy the Zero games a lot playing it on those big ol' DSI XL screens. And, because I do love being right. Especially when I'm right with a decent net gain.
I am posting this update from SFO because I spent all my update time trying to think of a pun around "Wee Willie Winkie" and didn't have a chance to post before leaving town. I gotta say the iPhone is not the optimal blogging platform. Sorry, Steve. On the plus side, I did come up with a pun! 'Cause Wonder Boy is on Wii, you see. Many times over, as a matter of fact.
Anyhow, I've decided to continue our GSQ3 postings from the end of the alphabet. Perhaps we shall meet somewhere in the middle someday. Please pardon any confusion this causes!
Does anyone else find it weird that someone with the name "commando" appears to be wearing a pair of tighty-whiteys? Dr. Wily isn't living up to his promises. I guess he just lacks the...
Dang, this blog series is dragging. I gotta wrap it up before 2010 is over.
Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride
Artepiazza/Square Enix | DS | The game of life
Huh, I'm not sure I have much else to say about this game, come to think of it. I recently wrote an article about it, and I talked about it at length on the episode of Active-Time Babble we recorded today. And really, my original review of the game was probably sufficient, if you want to be completely honest. But let me try anyway, however briefly.
Dragon Quest V is a remarkable game: It is very simple and completely predictable in every way except for how powerful and moving such a simple and completely predictable RPG can truly be. Yuji Horii and Chun Soft really established the Dragon Quest series' nature with this game, originally released for Super Famicom (Super NES) in 1992. See, when Final Fantasy went 16-bit, it completely reinvented the series' battle mechanics and narrative presentation, adopting pseudo-real-time combat and an unprecedented focus on a linear plot and characters. Dragon Quest V, however, was... pretty much the same as Dragon Quest IV. The one real gameplay innovation it offered was the ability to recruit monsters into the party, and Megami Tensei had already trod that ground on Famicom a few years prior. There was nothing new about DQV, really! It was practically the antithesis of what a 16-bit game should be. Heck, it even looked like an 8-bit game.
What DQV lacked in mechanical innovation, though, it more than made up for with -- yes -- heart. It's a heartfelt game, it tells a moving story, and it's clearly a labor of love. Its most memorable moments are alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking. Falling in love even factors heavily into the story; you are literally unable to destroy the game's main villain without doing it. Yet unlike other games that claim to be emotional and go about proving it by hitting you over the head with sentiment at every turn, DQV prefers to be understated. It lets the player experience the life of a man who plays an important role in destiny's grand scheme; his life is inextricably interwoven with a mission to save the world, and by allowing you to play out the whole of his quest you also experience the whole of his life. Family and friendship are integral to the tale. It is a thoughtful game, and unlike most RPGs, I think its story is the sort of thing you'll appreciate more as you grow older.
The DS remake is actually the second remake of this RPG, so clearly I'm not the only one who fell in love with it. It is, however, the first to reach America... and from what I understand, we received the definitive version. In any case, this is a game that belongs in the library of anyone who enjoys RPGs. And of anyone who claims to care about meaning and humanity in their videogames. DQV is a quiet masterpiece.
Playing through Final Fantasy VIII again for the first time in ten years has brought with it a surprising revelation: I actually really like the game's characters! This is pretty rare with RPGs; generally, my favorite characters are the ones with no clearly defined personality and no dialogue. This is because most RPG writers are really terrible at their jobs and specialize in creating fictional people that I detest with every fiber of my being. Generally speaking, videogame characters exist along a sliding scale of annoyance, and silent guys are therefore the least annoying ones.
This is true even of FFVIII; everyone in the game has his or her boneheaded moments. Strangely enough, though, in this case that somehow adds to their likability. For example! Zell is irritatingly hyperactive and brash, but nevertheless he doesn't come off as macho as you'd expect from a brawler -- he's the opposite of Final Fantasy XIII's Snow. He's kind of a doofus, but he's good-natured and earnest, eager to show off and easily deflated with a cruel rebuke or a word of rejection. Selphie is kind of like a lost and confused puppy, but she's also a tech whiz with a habit of blurting out whatever's on her mind, even when it's wholly inappropriate. This makes her the best character to have in the party, because her dialogue wobbles between "vacuous" and "unsettling." And much to my surprise, I don't even mind Irvine and Quistis, despite the fact that their personalities are almost entirely defined by the fact that they have crushes on other cast members.
Even more surprising is that I actually like Squall. Yeah, he's sulky and kind of whiny when he talks, but the game actually lets you see what he's thinking -- and his internal monologues give him a lot more depth than most people give him credit for. He's not just a morose, self-involved jerk; on the contrary, he tends to be conscious of others' feelings. He may shoot down Zell with his words, but inwardly he's apologetic. He actively wonders if Selphie is slightly insane. I dunno, the more I play of the game, the more I realize he's not a terrible character.
And that's true despite the game's best efforts to make him one. One of my favorite things I've discovered about FFVIII is that if you actually try to make Squall more social -- for instance, if you accede to your classmate's requests to check out your Gunblade or magic spells -- the game actually punishes you. There's something amusingly subversive about the fact that trying to play Squall as a nice guy is simply the wrong way to do it. Normally I'd be annoyed at a role-playing game that doesn't let you role-play... but here, yeah. It's kind of funny.
The one character I really can't stand, unfortunately, is Rinoa. I say "unfortunately" because the crux of the game is that Squall -- who I think is a pretty decent guy and a respectable player avatar! -- is doomed to become smitten with her. I can't for the life of me figure out why; she's childish and annoying, and in fact the single stupidest sequence in the game is instigated by her asinine temper tantrum. She's loud and poorly spoken. She's genuinely sulky in the way that Squall tends to be unfairly stereotyped as. God, she actually calls Squall "MEANIE." She is, basically, the videogame equivalent of Willy from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: A completely unlikable female lead with whom the protagonist falls in love, presumably out of some sense of bitter spite on the writers' part. I'm not sure what I did to offend Kazushige Nojima, but the dude sure knows how to get even. Watching Squall mope over this idiot girl-child is almost the worst part of the game.
(The only reason it's "almost" is because the act plodding around the huge, empty world map in a mobile school building is so crushingly tedious it's nearly made me quit playing several times. It takes a lot to quash my natural compulsion to explore in a videogame, but man, Garden sure pushes the right buttons.)
Anyway, I guess the essence of my feelings about FFVIII's cast is that the characters are all interesting. Flawed, sometimes head-slappingly so. But interesting. And I think that's the single thing I demand from a game these days: Be interesting. I don't have time to waste on something that's going to bore me. So despite its sometimes-overwrought dialogue, its sometimes-idiotic plot twists, its sometimes-antiquated game design, I want to keep playing FFVIII because everything about it is interesting. Except Rinoa; the only interest I have in her is shoving her off a cliffside.
Mmm, shoving. Mmm, annoying idiot plummeting to death.
"Boss, I couldn't help but notice that people keep talking about me! It looks like I'm famous. People really like me, huh, boss? I bet you must feel pretty luck to have an Internet celebrity like me working for you!
"By the way, boss, I dropped the key to your apartment a little while ago. Sorry! While I was looking for it, I found this thing that it seems like you wrote. I was really happy that you wrote about me, boss! It's nice that strangers like to talk about me, but to know I made such an impression in your heart... it makes me super happy.
"Well, I thought it made me happy, anyway. But then I read what you had to say, and, well, it wasn't very nice. Why would you say these things, boss? I don't understand. I just want to help you, boss. Don't you like me? Boss? Boss!?"
My fiancée and I have kicked off an exciting new project: BakeSpite.net, a joint food blog. I suppose this is only exciting for other people in the unlikely event they want to see what we have to say about food, but it's exciting for me because it's an opportunity to write about something that has nothing whatsoever to do with videogames. And that means it'll help keep me from being the sort of sad, emotionally withered shut-in who fixates on other people's opinions about videogames for years. There's more to life than gaming, even if I do make my living on videogames. I don't know how often we'll be posting to BakeSpite, but it'll be a fun change of pace. (And it won't take away content from this blog, so don't worry.)
You can read a brief mission statement of sorts at my opening post. Meanwhile, I am liveblogging dinner. Hopefully I am not terribly miscalculating how interesting this sort of writing will be to the larger populace... but even if I am, at least we're having fun.
Tonight, we're talking about the Kong family. That's right, it's all DK, all the time. First, we have Donkey Kong, the senior one. I will go to my grave refusing to accept the idea that this is the same character as Rare's awful Cranky Kong. DK was too interesting to be turned into a cut-rate Abe Simpson, by gosh. Then there's Donkey Kong, Jr., the... uh, junior one. Like it says right there on the tin, in fact.
And with this, our GameSpite Quarterly 3 index is one-quarter of the way full. The pacing is kind of slow for these online posts, but it's probably just as well, because there's no way GameSpite Quarterly 4 is going to hit on its properly deadline. I realize that makes the "quarterly" appellation something of a lie, but it's a necessary compromise. I nearly killed myself getting GSQ3 done, and the quality of my writing suffered as a result. I'm the guy editing the dang book, so I feel like I should aim to lead by example rather than be the leaden burden bringing down the average quality. GSQ4 will thus be a few weeks late; we're moving to an "it'll be done when it's done" schedule, much like Duke Nukem Forever. The difference of course is that we're not flush with millions of dollars of liquid assets from a previous blockbuster hit, so we can't afford to dawdle foe a decade. A month, maybe, but not a decade.
Hey kids, it's more content from GameSpite Quarterly 3! Which is neat and all, but as a lot of people have noted, this stuff doesn't work nearly as well online as it does in print. This is not a shameful attempt to extort you into buying a copy of the book -- well, maybe a little bit -- but simply a salute to the greatness of print. Guys, tree corpses are still a wonderful way to absorb the written word. Don't believe Ondore's lies!
Today's entries are significant for including one of our deliberate attempts not to make this issue entirely centered around the American 8-bit experience by including an entry on UK microcomputer hero Dizzy. So that's nice. I think Matt Cramp may be Australian, though, so I'm not sure this attempt really counts as us expanding our horizons. It's more like being slapped across the face for our closed-minded colonial ways. How sad.
In other news, today's episode of Retronauts is pretty keen! Also, I've discovered that Street Fighter 2010 is not a very good game, but it's a very interesting game. And that makes it notable. I'm glad I waited until 2010 to try it, though, because I really don't think I would have appreciated it as the noble failure it is back in the day.
OK, look, I swear this is going to be the last not-yet-available-in-the-U.S. title I include in my 2009 favorites.
Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Sky
[tentative trademarked title, albeit acceptably alliterative]
Level 5/Square Enix | Nintendo DS | RPG | Tiny evolutionary footsteps
I didn't mean to get hooked on Dragon Quest IX, but as it stands my game clock currently shows more than 60 hours invested in the game. And it would be a heck of a lot more if I had spent more time in Tokyo with the game set to passerby communication mode, because it's seriously a fantastic addition to the game that, if done right, will totally force me to spend a few hundred hours with the U.S. game. The core game itself isn't too bad, either -- a bit on the easy side, though. I remember a lot of pre-release developer hype about how this would be the hardest Dragon Quest ever, but the opposite has been my experience. I'm on my way to collect the last of seven magical plot MacGuffins, and my only defeats have come at the hands of bonus bosses I downloaded over Nintendo's WFC. And I haven't even gone through the goofily baroque requirements to earn the locked job classes! I've been playing like a bum, and I'm still cakewalking through the adventure.
That was initially disappointing to me until I tested the passive communication feature in Tokyo and discovered that the real point of DQIX isn't the almost-nonexistent story or fairly rote main quest. That stuff is basically just the primer; DQIX shines in its post-game content.
The game also helped enlighten me as to the appeal of loot-centric games such as Diablo and Monster Hunter. DQIX gives players a party of four warriors, all totally customizable from the Akira Toriyama Big Book of DragonBall Templates, and every bit of gear you equip shows up on your warriors. And you can create a ridiculous amount of gear through alchemy, based on loot drops. By this point in the game, I've found much better equipment than a helmet that looks like a blue Slime, but by god there's no way I'm having my partisan-wielding warrior swap out her Slime helmet for something more mundane.
(I did upgrade my female characters to real trousers as soon as something more durable than the obligatory battle panties became available, though.)
I dunno, DQIX is simply addictive, especially once you factor in the weekly downloads and the communication features and such. And while it's not exactly a technological tour de force, it's just advanced enough over its predecessors (besides Dragon Quest VIII, obviously) to make the DS remakes feel a bit pokier and more dated than they did before I'd played DQIX. Anyway, I've played a stupid amount of this game in a language I only halfway understand, and if Nintendo and Square Enix make smart localization choices -- which is going to be tricky, given that so much of what makes DQIX interesting is specifically geared toward the Japanese market -- I can foresee it becoming a tiny monster over here, too. Anyway, here's hoping the U.S. version shows up sooner than later, and that it manages to translate this semi-multiplayer style that Japan loves so much into something Americans can sink their teeth into as well.
(Mainly, I want DQIX to arrive before PAX this fall so I can sneak away from our booth and hang out in the handheld lounge.)
Capcom Unity posted a link today to the newest trailer for The Last Ranker, the upcoming RPG from (among others) Etrian Odyssey director Kazuya Niinou. I've been pretty eager to learn more about it because I'm pretty much smitten with everything Niinou touches, and Last Ranker seems like a formula for success: A Niinou RPG backed by a publisher capable of sinking enough dough into the game to come up with a fairly high-quality (read: PS2-quality) production. Also I guess some Breath of Fire veterans are on board as well, in some capacity. Needless to say, I was excited to watch the trailer.
And then... I actually watched the trailer. Now I am not excited for the game at all. This makes me sad. But seriously, look at this:
What the heck! How could these people come up with something so grotesquely generic-looking!? Everyone dresses like Tidus, and the battle system appears to be two people taking turns hitting each other. I realize that "two people taking turns hitting each other" describes the role-playing genre in its most reductive form, but usually games dress it up a little. And by "dress up" I don't mean "dress the only female character up in little more than a pair of battle panties."
I'mma cross my fingers and hope this is some sort of elaborate sham. The real game is actually going to be revealed next week, when we will learn it is every bit as awesome as it used to be in my dreamy hopes. Yeah.
(I will say that "battle panties" are a pretty good idea, though. I sure hope those show up on the next season of Project Runway. Or maybe in the Project Runway videogame!)
Actually, we're not quite beyond the C with this update; letter D doesn't begin until next time. Still! Imagine a scratchy voice singing that song as you read these entries and you'll feel all creeped out. For some reason 78rpm recordings of "Beyond the Sea" are shorthand for spooky in everything from X-Files to BioShock. And now at GameSpite, too!
Chocobo (Final Fantasy series, by Ben Elgin): Who doesn't love chocobos? I love them even though I just got the chocobo forest in Final Fantasy VIII, which is probably the least entertaining thing that's ever been associated with the stupid birds. And yeah, I'm including Chocobo Racing in this complaint.
Choplifter (eponymous, by me): Uh, another kind of crappy article by me. I'm sorry once again. Fortunately, I can pad my mediocrity but surrounding it with good material.
Commander Keen (eponymous, by Wesley Fenlon): GSQ3 entries range from odd to amusing to informative. This one is very much the latter.
The Halo franchise gets a lot of crap due to its popularity, its accessibility, its streamlined design, the rather questionable online userbase it's generated, and who knows what else -- but I appreciate the games for offering a quick, satisfying, single-player experience and for delivering a genuine challenge on higher difficulty settings. Bungie's design philosophy centers around a string of self-contained encounters that force you to make effective use of your full (limited) arsenal, the environment, and an ability to predict the behavior of some rather chaotic enemies.
Of course, I've been a Bungie fan since I first ran through a demo of Marathon 2: Durandal on the Quadra 800 at my school's newspaper, so perhaps I was doomed to love Halo no matter what. Still, even I was surprised by just how good Halo 3: ODST is. I figured the series was more or less tapped out, as it consists of a fairly limited "sandbox" of elements which appeared to have been fully explored and rearranged over the course of Halo 3. ODST began life as an expansion pack, or so we've been told, and on top of that its campaign is limited to a very specific slice of the Halo universe, which means that it completely omits a big chunk of that already thoroughly explored sandbox.
Halo 3: ODST Bungie / Microsoft | Xbox 360 | First-person noir
But just as a master chef can create great cuisine even from leftover ingredients, a Master Chief can... oh, wait, there's no Master Chief in this one. Ahem, I mean: Like a master chef, Bungie created a great shooter not on the strength of its raw components but rather in how they were presented. ODST is unlike any other game in the series, although it's definitely of the Halo oeuvre. The central game, set in the nighttime streets of New Mombasa in the wake of a disastrous combat mission, sees the rookie member of an elite shock trooper team casting about to find his lost teammates. The rest of the story plays out in flashback vignettes that relay the fate of the rest of the rookie's squad. These two aspects of the game feel wildly different from one another, yet they still work together neatly to create a somewhat open-ended Halo experience.
The flashbacks are pretty much what you would expect from Halo; each one is presented from the perspective of a different missing member of the ODST squad, being set within the boundaries of New Mombasa or its immediate boundaries and pushing the player from one encounter setpiece to the next at a brisk pace. Yet while the mechanics and pacing are familiar, the running dialogue does wonders to help define the ODSTs as characters -- predictable archetypal characters, admittedly, but a likable army troupe of soldiers nonetheless. It helps a lot that Bungie recruited the voices and likenesses of fan favorite actors like Nathan Fillion and Adam Baldwin to play characters who are, essentially, machinima versions of Malcolm Reynolds and Jayne Cobb. Even with the Halo 3 engine's infamously ugly people, seeing a guy who looks like Nathan Fillion talking like Nathan Fillion and delivering Nathan Fillion-esque dialogue does a lot to class up the experience.
And the shooty bits are good, too. A breeze for series vets on Normal, tricky on Heroic, hair-pulling on Legendary. The encounters feel a bit predictable, unfortunately, but even then ODST throws a spanner into the works: Since you're not playing as the Master Chief, not only do you get to hear more interesting dialogue, you also have to think harder about your encounters. Grunts is Grunts, of course; David recorded the opening moments of my review session, at which point I hadn't played an FPS in about a year, and I still managed to make short work of the little bastards. This isn't because I'm awesome at Halo or anything -- far from it, in fact -- but just because the game feels instantly familiar.
Pretty soon, though, you begin running into bigger, stronger, tougher enemies, and you realize something's off. They take more effort to put down, they seem to be harder to avoid, and they're basically just more threatening. Bungie took a bit of a risk in demoting players from Spartan super-soldier to mere elite human, but it paid off: They mixed up the control physics to make you slower, weaker, and less agile. You can't jump as high, you can't run as fast, you can't dual-wield, you can't melee as hard. There are some odd inconsistencies -- your non-Spartan health works pretty much exactly the same as the Chief's did in the original Halo -- but on the whole it makes for a fantastic game, a real challenge. Enemies like the hammer-wielding Brute chieftain get upgraded from mere bastardry to "I hate him as much as the red devil from Ghosts 'N Goblins" status. And even the interface reflects the difference: You know your stamina is restored not by the hum of a recharging shield but because you hear your ODST's sigh of relief as his breathing returns to normal.
What really sells the game, though, aren't the familiar sights and encounters of the vignettes but rather than solitude of the hub world in the rookie segments. Here, you're given free control to roam the streets at your leisure, working your way through pitch-black streets patrolled by teams of Covenant marauders. How you approach New Mombasa is completely left to your discretion. You can play it stealthy by turning off your scanner and moving about in the dark with silenced weapons; or you can take on the bad guys head-on. You can plan your route about the city around the patrols or through them, you can take side trips to find hidden terminals that explore a key component of the game's backstory through audio flashbacks, you can unlock hidden caches of weapons and vehicles. You can play it solo, soaking up the atmosphere, or you can play in tandem with a fellow rookie -- and unlike Halo 3, every inch of ODST is designed as a cooperative experience. In fact, many of its encounters seem designed to foster teamwork, and few things are more satisfying than teaming up with another player to take down a pair of Hunters with cat-and-mouse tactics.
In short, ODST is the first Halo to give me the one thing I love most in games -- freedom and openness -- and it does so in a manner that still feels wholly consistent with the previous games. Yeah, I'd fought these same enemies before, but even that worked in ODST's favor, I think. The "expansion pack" nature of ODST meant that Bungie didn't have to concentrate so much on riding the cutting edge of tech and could instead focus on offering a better story and a more developed environment. Oh, and the best soundtrack of the year. And I didn't even mention to cooperative multiplayer, which is so much more interesting than normal deathmatch play! Gosh.
ODST sold well, I think, but it didn't command the same hype as previous Halo games... which is a shame, because in my book, it's the best one yet.
It is inauspicious to launch into a new decade by posting a picture of Cheetahmen on the front page? Probably. But then, the decade doesn't actually end for another year, so I guess I'm safe.
We still have a long way to go to get through the online edition of GameSpite Quarterly 3, so I guess it's good for me to begin the new year all dutifully and stuff. Today's entries include a sort of crappy Captain Commando entry by myself -- it really doesn't do justice to Section Z, I'm afraid. But that's OK, because balancing it out is Nich's brilliant Cheetahmen entry. My advice? Load the link at the bottom of the page in a separate tab and sing along aloud as the tune plays.
In other news, I decided to give a little more time to Order of Ecclesia now that I'm armed with the knowledge that the game includes a Vagrant Story-style weapon affinity system. If only the game itself had bothered to inform me! It's less annoying this way, though still somewhat irritating. Even the appeal of playing it on the opulent DSi LL can't quite overcome my annoyance at its general tediousness! At the moment, I'm having a much better time with Final Fantasy VIII and Avernum VI, so... I guess maybe I'll try Ecclesia again in another year. Maybe if I keep chipping away at it an hour or two at a time, I'll have it beaten by the next time the calendar flips the tens digit.
So anyway, I did my best to make Mass Effect's Commander Shepard -- Yukiko Shepard -- look the part. No pink hair option, and no Rei Ayanami hairstyle, but bright red and close-cropped did the trick. She actually did look pretty much like you'd expect an older, slightly more realistic version of Rorita to look (taking into account, of course, a swift pummeling with the Unreal Engine 3 Ugly Stick). But no ToastyFrog, alas. Ultimate, I settled for making Wrex a permanent party member, partly because he was rad, but also because he was the closest I could get to having ToastyFrog and Rorita team up to shoot stuff.... in space.
The discussion that cropped up in the wake of last week's Final Fantasy VIII musings have reinforced my awareness that polarizing game design can sometimes be great game design. The idea sounds fairly stupid on the face of it, I suppose: If half the people who play a game hate it, how could it be good? Yet in revisiting the decade-long debate over FFVIII, I find that the content of the arguments surrounding the game is interesting. While the "con" team has its share of people who simply don't like the game for perfectly good reasons, a significant percentage of people who criticize it don't quite seem to understand the game -- or, at the very least, they don't seem to be taking it on the terms its developers intended. They approach the combat system from the wrong direction, they get bogged down by habits carried over from other RPGs which prove ineffective here, they write off the cast based on surface appearances or on general Internet hive-mind perceptions. The "pro" team has its foibles, too; there are an awful lot of people who will admit no fault in the game, or who try desperately to come up with insane rationalizations for its failings out of some misguided sense of chivalry. On the whole, though, the game's fan base takes the game as it is, accepting its flaws while praising its strengths and reveling in its uniqueness.
This is one of those things I have to keep in mind when I review games; I may not always like an off-the-wall or laterally designed game, but I think it's important to be able to recognize the intent behind it. God Hand, for instance, isn't necessarily something I think is fun. That's not because it's a lousy creation; it's because God Hand a loving homage to a genre and style I don't really enjoy. (See also: Bayonetta.) Just because a game bores to me to tears doesn't mean I think it's crappy... I just means I duck out of reviewing it. 
Which brings me to my current review conundrum, Sands of Destruction. I ducked out of the Ecclesia review without even knowing how conflicted I'd be about the game, but I volunteered to review Sands out of sheer curiosity. It's like the mutant offspring of Xenogears, the very definition of a conflicted game. Despite my using Xenogears as a whipping boy for so long, I don't actually hate it -- I just found the flaws it possesses to be unusually infuriating. Still, I've always felt that the concepts laid down by the game could be revisited to create a genuine masterpiece. You know, with a little more polish and a lot less ambition that results in a rushed tumble through the second half of the story through a wall of static text. Maybe, I thought, Sands would be that masterpiece.
I'm pretty happy about this news, because I sold off my Zero games about a year ago. I enjoyed the series, or at least I did when it wasn't punishing me for having the audacity to make use of its play mechanics, but then I noticed they were selling for stupid amounts of money on eBay. So, I decided to brave up and put a theory I have to the test: There's no sense in hanging on old games in a successful series by a major publisher, because eventually they will show up again -- often in a better format than they appeared the first time.* 
Dragon Quest V is a remarkable game: It is very simple and completely predictable in every way except for how powerful and moving such a simple and completely predictable RPG can truly be. Yuji Horii and Chun Soft really established the Dragon Quest series' nature with this game, originally released for Super Famicom (Super NES) in 1992. See, when Final Fantasy went 16-bit, it completely reinvented the series' battle mechanics and narrative presentation, adopting pseudo-real-time combat and an unprecedented focus on a linear plot and characters. Dragon Quest V, however, was... pretty much the same as Dragon Quest IV. The one real gameplay innovation it offered was the ability to recruit monsters into the party, and Megami Tensei had already trod that ground on Famicom a few years prior. There was nothing new about DQV, really! It was practically the antithesis of what a 16-bit game should be. Heck, it even looked like an 8-bit game.
I didn't mean to get hooked on Dragon Quest IX, but as it stands my game clock currently shows more than 60 hours invested in the game. And it would be a heck of a lot more if I had spent more time in Tokyo with the game set to passerby communication mode, because 
The game also helped enlighten me as to the appeal of loot-centric games such as Diablo and Monster Hunter. DQIX gives players a party of four warriors, all totally customizable from the Akira Toriyama Big Book of DragonBall Templates, and every bit of gear you equip shows up on your warriors. And you can create a ridiculous amount of gear through alchemy, based on loot drops. By this point in the game, I've found much better equipment than a helmet that looks like a blue Slime, but by god there's no way I'm having my partisan-wielding warrior swap out her Slime helmet for something more mundane. 
I dunno, DQIX is simply addictive, especially once you factor in the weekly downloads and the communication features and such. And while it's not exactly a technological tour de force, it's just advanced enough over its predecessors (besides Dragon Quest VIII, obviously) to make the DS remakes feel a bit pokier and more dated than they did before I'd played DQIX. Anyway, I've played a stupid amount of this game in a language I only halfway understand, and if Nintendo and Square Enix make smart localization choices -- which is going to be tricky, given that so much of what makes DQIX interesting is specifically geared toward the Japanese market -- I can foresee it becoming a tiny monster over here, too. Anyway, here's hoping the U.S. version shows up sooner than later, and that it manages to translate this semi-multiplayer style that Japan loves so much into something Americans can sink their teeth into as well. 
