Mass Effect
As I posted earlier last week, I'd been wanting to play Mass Effect again. After popping the disc back in, I realized exactly why I had stopped the previous attempt to romp through.
On the first mission after Shepard becomes a Spectre, you have to drive around on a molten world with nasties shooting you up from all sides. Now, your vehicle, the Mako, controls about as smoothly as a plane with one wing. This thing is just plain not fun to drive. All the movement is focused on the left analog stick. The problem with this is that acceleration is also controlled with that stick, making forward movement the only quick and viable course of action. This makes the combat scenarios a little more diffcult than they need to be. They really needed to add an acceleration button to the mix.
The way I see it, they could have done this several ways. Firstly, they could pull a Grand Theft Auto and mount it to the left and right triggers. The problem with that would simply be the minigun on the Mako which is used with the right trigger. I think the best solution would simply be to cut out the repair option all together, map jump to the Y button and accelerate to the A. My line of thinking suggests that if you can CONTROL AND MOVE at the same time, you should be getting hit less, making the repair option superfluous to begin with.
The lava on the planet was also a huge issue for me, I died about five times due to the instant death from simply touching the stuff. The terrain is rugged and the Mako has a way of getting bounced around whether or not you intend for that to happen. This makes driving along the edges of cliffs incredibly dangerous and jumping moreso. I don't really understand why they wanted the Mako to be able to jump around if they're going to make it so easy for you to die doing so. I also found some texturing problems with the lava as well. There were a few times I got the lava death just driving around on the normal terrain. I think either they accidentally placed the lava there or they just plain forgot to add the BRIGHT RED BURNING LAVA texture to it. Either way, I wasn't too happy with it.
Aside from my quips and complaints about this world, my experience afterwards was fantastic. BioWare truly crafted one of the most believable(if a little sterile) universes I've seen in gaming. Each race has a backstory, different traits and grudges. Each character has atleast something interesting about them, whether it's Wrex's dark past or Ashley's racism. The planets are beautiful and planet Noveria has got to be the best frigid homeworld I've seen in a game. It's hard to say why exactly I think it's so good, I guess that's because being negative is just so much more fun. I'm almost done with the main game, so I'm going to be taking a break from the plot and explore some planets and do some side missions. I still just want to shoot stuff.
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona
I was originally planning on writing an article on the five reasons why Persona PSP redeems the Revelations version. I got about halfway through it when I found out someone already beat me to the punch. This kind of broke my will to talk about anything for a while, but after about a weeks time, I'm feeling up to fawning over this gem again.
I played Revelations for about five hours earlier this year and decided to stop after hearing about the PSP remake. I found the game overall to be quite fun and pretty charming but I couldn't get over some of the issues.
The game doesn't really tell you what a lot of things do. It gives you all kinds of different weapons, guns and spells with different ranges of attack, but doesn't in the least try and tell you what hits where. This makes arranging your party a lot trickier unless you're looking at a guide or something.
There was also the horrid world map. It's really hard to show you exactly how bad it was without displaying the thing in motion. The town was kind of set up like a normal town with sidewalks you could walk on. The problem was that the point of view made it really hard to see where you were going. It was almost a behind the back perspective in a game that really needed an overhead view just to see the lay of the land. The game gave you a map to help you traverse the town, but the problem was that it rotated with you, making things really confusing if you weren't paying attention to each and every turn you made.
I also had a problem with moving around in the third person rooms. These rooms are from an isometric viewpoint, which isn't that bad except that the buttons are mapped the opposite of every other isometric game. If you press the UP button, you walk northwest instead of northeast like all most other games sharing the perspective.
The localization was another common issue with the the thing. There were several grammatical issues like the word "your" being used for "you're". I see enough of that on the Internet, I really don't need to play games that are going to pick at my pet peeve too. That doesn't seem to be most people's problem though. Most of the complaints I see are that they Americanized a game that is very much a game highly centered in Japan. They also turned Masao Inaba into a black teenager in the Revelations version. I honestly don't see a problem with the change. Yeah, it wasn't necessary, but they could have tried to make him speak Ebonics. It could have been much worse. Possibly the biggest crime in the haphazard localization was the fact that they cut a rather sizable side quest completely out of the game. Side quest is probably a little misleading, the Snow Queens Quest was essentially a whole new storyline and set of dungeons to explore on another playthrough. I often see it referred to as the other half of the game.
So anyways, when I heard that they were fixing all those problems with PSP port, I immediately stopped playing Revelations and waited for it to hit the shelves. I even purchased a new PSP because I didn't feel like bungling around with my broken custom firmware enabled PSP. Now that I have the game and have spent about ten hours with it, i could sing praises about it all day. They brought the game over exactly as it was in Japan. The only change in the dialogue was that the game was in English rather than Japanese. Getting used to the characters real names was kind of hard at first; i still find myself calling Nanjo 'Nate'. The menues and text are much higher res, making it really pretty to look at and it looks like the sprites were cleaned up a bit. The world map is now a whole lot more similar to Shin Megami Tensei II rather than the complete mess it was originally. My favorite fix was the fact that they show exactly what attack or spell is going to hit which parts of the battle map. This makes arranging your party so much easier compared to the original. Before I didn't even bother moving my characters around and just sucked it up, but now I find myself changing it up a lot more.
Oh yeah, the game is about 66% faster as well. That's nice.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
I started playing this game again earlier because I had to babysit. Having the kids watch me play games has always been my favorite method of child watch since I first started doing it. How could it not be, I get to play games, they get to be entertained. It's a win win really.
Ocarina of Time is probably my favorite of the Zelda series, but I don't necessarily think it's the best. The reason why I think Ocarina is my fave is pretty much based on the atmosphere of the game. You don't really get much of the oppressive nature of it until the Forest Temple, but when you get there, man is it creepy. I think it's one of the very few instances where hardware limitations actually helped the game out. The "Fog of War" as they used to call it gave each temple a mysterious feeling and that coupled with the music really emphasized the general idea of each dungeon. The forest temple had a haunted Celtic feel to it, the fire temple had a musky, torturous feel that was greatly heightened by the Islamic chanting. The Shadow Temple felt very much like a tomb. The three 3D Zelda games to come afterwards didn't meet the same success in my opinion when it came to the ambiance.
Today, I started from the beginning of the game and stopped right after the fight with the King Dodongo. One thing that I really liked about Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask is how they present each bosses name. There's something really cool about seeing "Infernal Dinosaur: King Dodongo".
(For those who are curious, my favorite 2D Zelda is A Link to the Past and I think Wind Waker is Objectively the best.)
Scribblenauts
Scribblenauts seems to have had an interesting backlash to it since it's come out. I think that it was hyped to no end and just like every other game with the same problem, any flaw found would be it's death knell. For Scribblenauts, that tragic flaw would be the pseudo protagonist, Maxwell, and how you control him. The main problem is simple, due to the touch screen based movement, one false touch and Maxwell will run jauntily. It doesn't matter if there's an inferno or a Robosaur in the way, if the game thinks wanted Maxwell to run there, then by god, Maxwell will run there. Personally, I think gamers today don't have any patience when it comes to quick and easy deaths. The way a Scribblenauts stage is set up is so that the vast majority can be completed in a minute. I think people really overlook that when they complain about the "leap before looking" issue. While false deaths happen here and there, sometimes more than you would like, you only lose about 30 seconds worth of time. God forbid some of these players play something like I Wanna Be The Guy.
I'm having a lot of fun with the game myself. Yeah, there are problems here and there. Most of my issues are that things don't react as they should to their environment. If I put a tree on a slope, it should stick in the ground, not go tumbling down the hill. Aside from that, the vast majority of things I find in the game surprises me. I was shocked to find out that there were several memes in the game like Longcat or Weegee. The Pterodactyl and the rope have been my best friends when it comes to moving things around. I know I should probably try and be more clever, but like some gamers don't have a patience for dying, I don't have patience for stupid difficult puzzles.
Bionic Commando
I'm not going to lie here, I didn't discover how much I really loved Bionic Commando until this year. Hell, I couldn't even say that I liked it back in the day. My awareness of the game came from Hitler no Fukkatsu: Top Secret after I found it in a file filled with NES roms. I was blown away by how blatant the game was with the whole Nazi thing. Eventually, I found out the game was released without the national socialist links as Bionic Commando. I really didn't like the game at all. The lack of the jump button frustrated me to no ends. The grappling mechanic also seemed far to rigid and imprecise for it to be useful to me. At the end of the day, I figured that it was just a bad game made by terrible people and left it that way in my memory for years.
It was the rantings and ravings of Jeremy Parish of Retronauts that finally made me give the game the time of day. I decided to play it safe and download the Rearmed version on Xboxlive and I found that I still hated the game. This time would be different though, I figured that if Parish loved it so much, there was obviously something I wasn't seeing. It took me an hours worth of attempts to finish the first level and the boss and by the time I had vanquished the Pipipi robot, I was hooked.
Later on that same day, I drove about ten minutes from my house to my local retro video game store and picked up the original game and decided to work my way through that before going further in Rearmed. There was a little bit of discrepancy in my newly gained skills from the revamp, but after about a half an hour I had learned the grappling mechanic well. It took me several hours and quite a few gameovers before I actually took down the Albatros and made Master D's head explod.
I played through the game every day for a period of about two weeks and enjoyed the game just as much every time. To me, Bionic Commando is like a good action movie. It's super short, but it's just so fulfilling that I can't help but go back and shoot some Badds.
I've been playing it on my DS via flashcard whenever I'm somewhere I don't really want to be. Sometimes when I'm forced to watch a movie I have no interest in and other times when nature's dues are calling. I love the game so much, and in all honesty, it's joined the ranks of games like Super Metroid in my mind.
Super Metroid Eris
I really don't have to talk about this game again. I think I've talked about it enough, but you know what, it is STILL really good.
After about halfway through it last time, I shelved it for some other game I don't remember. I think the problem was just that I had a hard time finding the Hi-jump boots and got frustrated. Maybe the difficulty finally got me; after all, Botwoon in Eris is leagues more difficult than normal Ridley. But alas, I stopped playing the game.
I started playing again and it was just as much of a blast this time as it was last. This time around, I've gotten a lot further. I'm still looking out for Ridley and Phantoon, but I got every major pickup I can think of aside from the Plasma beam.
(I really did mean for this post to be brief, but man did I ever fail at that.)
No comments:
Post a Comment