Kingdom Hearts 2 Zero -> Four

Since the majority of my gaming downtime will be spent with Kingdom Hearts 2 over the next few days, I'll update my impressions accordingly with time elapsed. Here're some things through the first four and a half hours of gameplay:

• I realize now what was missing from Chain of Memories on the GBA: expression. Sure, the static portraits were drawn to show a wide range of emotions, from shock to sadness to embarassment, but they prove their inadequacy when compared to how intricately characters express themselves in KH2. It's the believability that this additional level of expression lends to the events of the game that make KH, well, KH. Not to say that Chain of Memories wasn't a good game, but I do remember feeling like it lacked something.
• Back when the first KH came out, I remember thinking: "an RPG with Disney characters? This just looks too simple, too childlike, to be good." I was right in content but wrong in tone. KH succeeds because it is simple and childlike, but not childish. It has an innocence at its core that anyone willing to open themselves up to it will automatically connect with the characters and events of the story. At the risk of sounding cheesy, KH succeeds because it has heart.
  
• Man these games start slow. Just like the first, where you do some menial fetch quests (presumably to learn the controls and get used to getting around), KH2 has a series of menial jobs that hold your hand through the process of learning to walk, jump, run, and attack. I understand the utility of doing this, but in the case of KH2 if it weren't for the fact that they flood you with confusing plot developments throughout this early section that only make sense if you get through it all, these menial tasks would have proven excessive. They basically acknowledge that you've played a Kingdom Hearts game previous to this one by way of how they develop the story, so why can't they let us just get into the game instead of teaching us how to play (for THREE HOURS)?
• I get the impression that this game may be much longer than the first KH. The opening section, which I have just completed, took me over four hours to get through. By contrast I think it took maybe half that if not less the first time around to get through the intro and into the first themed world. With all that they seem to be attempting to tackle in terms of story concepts, though, additional length will likely prove beneficial.
• Christopher Lee needs to do voice work for all games, cartoons, and commercials for sinister-themed products. I think he's the only voice actor in this game so far to trigger the crossover to my subwoofer.
  
• I was thinking about the possibility that the Hundred Acre Wood will somehow be in this game, but then realized that the voice of Tigger has passed on since the first game. I am now torn... much of the nostalgia that made the Winnie the Pooh parts of KH was the presence of the original voice actors. I almost hope they don't have a Winnie the Pooh section in this game -- they did it perfectly in the first, and doing it again without Tigger's real voice will mar the experience.
  

That's all for now. I could touch on actual gameplay, but since I'm just now getting access to the new features (and even magic, for crying out loud) I'll give it more time before I address it.

Final thoughts on Riviera

I suppose I shouldn't blame the people over at Sting for trying something different with the RPG formula -- after all, where would gaming be right now if people didn't shake things up every once in a while? The problem is, after slogging through the latter half of Riviera: The Promised Land, I really can't help but think of how much better the game would have been had it been more standard.

Limited Inventory
The game allows you to carry a maximum of about twenty items, give or take. This includes weapons, recovery items, and status items -- basically everything that doesn't fall under the "story item" umbrella. You're forced to continually make decisions based on immediate need:

"Do I think I'm going to need those potions? What about this sword? I haven't used it in a while but I don't have any other lightning-element weapons..."

I suppose this sort of decision adds to the overall strategy of succeeding in the game, but is it really all that necessary? I've always bumped heads against the storage limitations in more traditional RPGs of the SNES era -- a fair comparison due to the GBA's SNES-like renaissance -- so having it whittled down to 20 or so made it a bigger issue for me. This by itself wouldn't have been a dealbreaker if it weren't paired with...

Limited Uses
Every item and weapon in the game has an attached max usage amount; I'll call it durability for simplicity's sake. I've encountered this sort of thing before, but never in a situation where it was impossible to replenish the durability of weapons. Half the fun in RPGs is getting a new weapon and going around killing enemies with it; Riviera denies you this, since the law of the land is conserve conserve conserve. You don't want to waste too much of a weapon in your regular fights only to run out in a boss fight. That problem of weapon conservation forces you into yet another area of tedium...

"Leveling Up"
Riviera sports no real experience system. You "level up" by mastering a weapon, thus gaining HP, MP, some other stats, and an Overdrive skill for that weapon. To master a weapon, you have to use it in battle a certain number of times, depending on the character's skill with that type of weapon. For example, the main character Ein is Lvl3 (of a max of 3) with swords, so you have to use a sword 8 or 9 times in a fight before he masters it and increases in level. Another character with Lvl1 sword expertise would only require 3 uses to master that same weapon, but would be given only a Lvl1 Overdrive to use.

This is not bad on paper (by itself), and is in fact a pretty decent system. Where Riviera runs afoul here is how this leveling method interacts with the aforementioned limited-use feature: were you to use the weapons in battle, you may not have enough durability to master it with every character that can use it. To address this, Sting put in a "Practice" feature where you enter into a battle outside of your normal battles that does not use up item durability. Sweet. By the end of the game, I'm fairly sure I fought more Practice battles than I did real battles, which thoroughly screwed up the game's...

Pacing
Riviera is not a long game, topping out around 15-20 hours. An RPG of this length has no reason to drag along like a snail in a tray of salt, which is how this game felt to me after awhile. Due to the excessive amounts of Practice battles and the constant worry over wasting weapons and/or healing items, the latter half of the game felt like a chore. Were this not a portable RPG, I can't imagine that I would have ever finished the game; being held captive on commuter trains does wonders for one's patience for playing a game through to the end.

In Closing
What Sting did with the graphics and presentation of this title was nothing short of amazing. I imagine seeing this game back in the SNES and I'd have been shocked stupid with the intricate battle animations, voice work, and interesting battle system. Unfortunately, that battle system was wrecked by item durability and storage limitations, and further compounded by a huge amount of battles (of the Practice variety) that should have been unnecessary.

Nice try, Sting, but not nice enough.

More Ghost Recon

Because it's just that good, here're some notes about GRAW after completing the single player on Normal difficulty:

AI
Shoot at an enemy and about 50% of the time they'll react and try to find new cover; the remaining time they'll either (a) stay exactly where they are and take a ream of bullets or (b) run further out into the open. Walk up to an enemy from behind and about 60-70% of the time they'll hear you and turn around/drop to the ground/run for cover; the remaining time they'll stare blissfully off into the distance like they're pining about Mary Jane Rottencrotch (5pts to whoever catches that reference). The times that the enemy AI really work well, though, I've come away impressed. I've walked into a courtyard with enemies above and all around, and watched as they tried to flank and get better angles at me while I hid behind cover.

As for your good old teammates, well, they're much more spotty than the enemies. For the first 5 or so missions, they do just fine finding cover, shooting enemies, not shooting you, etc. Round about the last three missions, however, they apparently start sniffing glue. I've seen them clump together in the middle of a street, completely heedless of the fact that a fusillade of bullets is raining down upon them from an entrenched M50 gunner. They've blown me up with rockets, shot me in the back, hit me with grenades, and run directly in front of me while I'm shooting. I've watched as they shot $1500 worth of ammunition down the street and hit absolutely nothing. I've set my grenadier to take down an armored APC, and watched as he missed for over a minute and would not listen to me when I told him to stop.

This is not to say that the teammates really get in your way a lot, it's just that those few instances where they do they seem to do it at the worst possible moment. For much of the game, and often during retries after getting gunned down, the teammate AI performs admirably. This is no Full Spectrum Warrior, mind you, so you can't really control much of what they do, so for nearly-autonomous AI it wasn't bad at all.

Pacing
The thing that really kept GRAW engaging was the fact that they did a great job keeping the pace up. Usually in games of this ilk, and its sister genre the FPS, I hit a period where my interest wanes and I really don't want to play it for a good while. This is usually due to reaching a point where the game slows and what they have me doing doesn't seem to fit with the overall picture -- filler missions, if you will. Trying to fatten out the amount of gametime it takes to complete. GRAW has no filler; every mission is set up in a way that makes it fit in with what you'd expect would happen given the events you are presented with.

Purdy Pictures
The draw distance in this game approaches all I could imagine needing in a videogame. Looking out across rooftops really gives a sense that you are in the middle of a large, sprawling city; a city that is not (a) in the middle of a record for foggy weather or (b) more smoggy than downtown Los Angeles. Shadows and lighting react realistically to your movements. The lens flare that was so prevalent in the last generation has been replaced with more of a diffuse glow reminiscent of the tech demos the Half Life 2 people put out for HDR (High Dynamic Range) lighting technology last year.

The people all animate very well, and for the most part react realistically to being shot. The game makes use of a shaky-cam when running around that makes everything feel much more like a movie, and alternatively more realistic for some reason. Specifically, I was often reminded of Black Hawk Down, which is a pretty nice reference when you're going for intense shooting and gritty realism. It also didn't hurt that bullets react with the environment -- dirt kicks up from shots hitting the ground, chunks of concrete can pop off of walls, things that you may want to use as cover can be blown away, and cars will explode if you shoot the gas tank. All of those things help make the experience feel more real, and thus much more engaging.

Overall, I have only two gripes with the graphics. First, the main character's face looks pretty poor when you put your back against the wall -- kind of like a plastic turkey. After playing Fight Night Round 3 I realize what is possible in terms of realistic facial representation, and GRAW leaves much to be desired. Second, there is not much mouth synch to speak of, and if anything reminds me of an episode of Terrance and Philip on South Park -- mouths open and shut like a mouse trap with little to no relation to what the character is saying. Finally, the character models for enemies and allies riding in the machine gunner seat of a tank are very low poly and look like Xbox 1 models with better anti-aliasing. All minor gripes, really, but putting down the good without the bad would be disingenuous, no?

Now on to the multiplayer...

Ghost Recon = 24?

I've been playing through Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter since I got my 360 a little over a week ago and enjoying it for reasons I couldn't pin down specifically. There are a bunch of general statments I can throw at it -- things like "damn nice looking", "exciting", and "immersive" come in to play -- but none of them seem to fully explain why this Ghost Recon is so much more entertaining than the previous incarnations of the series.

Then it hit me: it feels like a spiritual sibling to 24, the recently unseated King of TV Shows (The Shield took that honor recently). Ghost Recon plays out over 2-3 days of nearly continuous action, all the while throwing curveballs at the predicted course of events. It also never takes you fully out of the action like the previous installments in the series used to; there is a certain cohesiveness to the where and why of each mission that makes the overall package much more immersive and intelligible.

(It also doesn't hurt that they have some Predator-esque helicoptor sequences where you're sitting in the gunner's seat looking down across Mexico City with music blaring in the speakers. Sure, there's no Jesse "The Body" in the helicopter with you, spitting tobacco juice on your boots and calling everyone "slack-jawed faggots", but no game can be that perfect.)

This is now my third Ghost game, the first two being Ghost Recon 2 and Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike, but the first time that I will complete the single player at least once before even venturing into the multiplayer modes. I may even play through the game again on Hard -- it's that good.

Riviera the Promised Ending

I'm in an RPG-playing mood right now. My drive to play certain types of games comes and goes -- not sure why, really -- so it's come to the point where I want to play something slow, relaxing, and text-heavy with a hackneyed plot about saving the world. The problem is that Kingdom Hearts 2 is just around the corner and I don't want to burn out my RPG-groove in the next few weeks before that game comes out; this all but rules out games that will take me another 20+ hours to work through.

See ya Tales of Symphonia. You're a good little game, and will be next up if there's any juice left in the ol' RPG tank after KH2, but I'm just more excited for KH2 at present.

Hasta luego, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. I'm more than halfway through, but you'll take me far too long to complete without infringing upon KH2 territory.

Not happening, Dragon Quest VIII. We shouldn't kid ourselves. It's just not going to work out between us. 100+ hours is just too damn much for an RPG as old-school as you are. I hope you find someone out there for you; someone that will happily level-grind for the next decade in order to complete you.

So what does that leave me with? Riviera: The Promised Land on my GB Micro. It won the race because I think that I'm very close to the end of the game. You see, I bought this game late last year and played a good chunk of it on my commute to work. It had a lot of promise: some of the best production values I've ever seen on an RPG with SNES-like graphics, pleasant music, no wandering around aimlessly on a world map, and an interesting integration of weird dating-sim features (you play a guy in a group of all girls, and decisions you make will increase or decrease their satisfaction with you. Supposedly this affects events throughout the game). Unfortunately, there are a number of "quirks" in how the game is structured -- stemming from an apparent directive of the developers to break with RPG convention -- that wore on me over time. So I moved on to other things; things like reading a book.

But I digress.

Welcome back Riviera. I am willing to put up with your horrid inventory system that won't let me hold enough stuff. I am willing to put up with the fact that I will spend more time in "Practice" battles than I will in real battles. I am willing to put up with the weapon system that gives me a limited amount of uses before the weapon breaks. I am only willing to do this because I think you are almost over. You have as much juice left as a Russian beauty as she rounds the age of 25. Finish soon. Make it so.

The DS Owns ME

If it can be considered a console, the DS is by far the best system going around right now. Soon, after the wallet-sucking releases coming up in March and April -- a new Tetris with online play, a new Worms with online play, Metroid Prime Hunters, Brain Age, Big Brain Academy, and New Super Mario Bros -- I will own more games for the system than I do for any of the current and "new" generation home consoles. Whew. That list doesn't even include games that I've been meaning to pick up (Mario & Luigi Partners in Time, Super Princess Peach).

There have been so many great games that I have difficulty putting them in any sort of ordered list, so here are my favorites thus far, in no particular order:

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
• Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow
• Advance Wars Dual Strike
• Meteos
• Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!
• Animal Crossing
• Mario Kart DS

Age of Empires is on the bubble, but since I've not yet finished that game (I can actually grade games once completed on the DS, since it probably has my highest completion ratio since the N64) I'll let the jury hang out on that one. There are also a number of other fun games that could be on this list (Feel the Magic XY/XX, Wario Ware Touched!, and Trauma Center to name a few) but I've left this list to the créme de la créme; those others have some notable flaws that have kept me from coming back to the game again once I finished it.

Even still, to be able to put together a list that includes some truly all-time favorites (Phoenix Wright, Ouendan, Meteos) just a year and change after the system launched (November '04) is an impressive statistic. Upcoming releases don't seem to be slacking in quality, either, and there are a number of titles that I'm excited for based on rumor alone (a new 2D Metroid called Dread, a new Four Swords, a Crystal Chronicles done right...).

Basically, it's a great time to be a DS owner.

The DS Owns Japan

This week's Japanese Top-10 looks like this (sales are shown This Week (Total Sales) ):

1. Animal Crossing : Wild World - NDS - 82.000 - (2.117.000)
2. More DS Brain Training - NDS - 71.000 - (1.505.000)
3. Samurai Warriors 2 - PS2 - 49.000 - (474.000)
4. English Training DS - NDS - 42.000 - (617.000)
5. Prof. Kawashima’s Brain Training : How old is your brain ? - NDS - 41.000 - (1.683.000)
6. Mobile Suit Gundam Climax U.C. - PS2 - 34.000 - (191.000)
7. Children of Mana - NDS - 27.000 - (129.000)
8. Valkyrie Profile : Lenneth - PSP - 21.000 - (91.000)
9. Mario Kart DS - NDS - 19.000 - (1.171.000)
10. Monster Hunter Freedom - PSP - 17.000 - (558.000)

This is the reason I'm excited for #2 and #5 to come to the US in April and May of this year -- any game, whether it's really a game or not (these are not really games, but exercises intended to improve brain function), that sticks on the top ten charts for months on end simply SCREAMS buy me. And they're not even RPGs (if they were, that doesn't really SCREAM buy me, persay, since those crazy Japaners love their RPGs).

It's also scary to note that both Brain Training games have outsold Mario Kart by a good margin. This is one of the best Mario Karts ever made, by the way, and it's being beaten by a non-game. THAT is cool.



Source: Jeux-France

Hello, My Name Is Paul and I am Addicted to Games

Since gaming has taken over as my primary hobby over the last few years -- displacing drawing, comics, martial arts, and lifting as my primary time-waster -- I figure that I should easily be able to fill up a blog with all the game-related material that floats through my head on the average day.

But before I get into more current affairs, let's get into a little background.

The Early Days

The first gaming experience that I can recall was on an ancient IBM home PC, the kind with no harddrive that used two floppy (5.25") drives to boot and run applications. My dad used to get the hook-up from work (no idea why, he worked for a company not connected to gaming in any way) so he brought home classics like Decathalon, Frogger, and Zork on a fairly regular basis. You haven't lived until you've run the 400m dash using only the arrow keys on a keyboard (or at least, so I thought back then).

Shortly after that, we somehow came upon an Atari 2600 (I don't remember getting this, but it was just there one day) and with it Donkey Kong, Pitfall, Asteroids, and the awesome Combat. There were a LOT of good times playing that system on the ancient UHF TV set we had in our basement: this was back when games were simple enough that my parents would play along with me and my sister. To this day (rather, before I moved out and took my games with me), whatever game I'm playing there's a 70% chance that my mom will mention how much she loved watching me play Superman on the Atari. Or playing "that tank game" (Combat). The Atari passed on to Consumer Electronics Heaven after a few years, leaving the PC with no competition for a few years.

There was a lot to love about the PC in the late 80's through the mid 90's (read: before FPS took over). Adventure games made you think while simultaneously entertaining with some truly fun and creative content. I was hooked on the King's Quest series -- basically eating up everything that Sierra threw at me for almost a decade. Space Quest. Quest for Glory. Leisure Suit Larry. Later on, Sam & Max and Grim Fandango. I fondly remember frantically typing "swim" in the first King's Quest -- you had to use text input for much of that game -- in a vain attempt to prevent King Graham from drowning in the lake. My sister had this ego problem about her typing skills at the time, and I remember vividly the time I was watching her and typos sent poor Graham to an early grave. 60 words-per-minute indeed.

Then came Tie Fighter. I played this game through no less than three upgrades to my PC. This game remains the best flight sim I've yet played, and it looks as though that won't change for quite some time (psst! Nintendo? Revolution please!). There was something awesome about how they presented career advancement in that game that kept me running missions over and over to get high scores and get into the "Inner Circle." I wasn't even that much of a Star Wars geek before I played this game; Tie Fighter made me an addict.

On to the 8-Bit

There's really too much in here to recount all at once, so since I'm lazy here are some points about the 8-bit era:

• It took years of badgering, but eventually (around 1989 I think) I was given an NES for Christmas. It was only years later that I found out that it was my sister who earned it -- apparently it was the grand prize in a wrapping paper selling competition at school, and she sold it to my parents for $100.
  
• Yes, I saw The Wizard in the theatre. So sue me.
• I was one of those cheaters that would put the light gun 4" from the screen in Duck Hunt. I blame it on the TV -- I was obviously awesome at that game, and the dog never laughed at me...
  
• I think the first time I ever cursed at a game was in the battle with Wart at the end of Super Mario Bros 2. No wait, maybe it was Bayou Billy. No, definitely Blaster Master. That game was a bastard.
• Back then, my sister still played video games. And she was good. Real good. Beat the first Super Mario Bros maybe a year before I did. Now all she plays is DDR at Christmas after a few mimosas.
• There was a coupon for a free Pizza Hut pizza on the back of the TMNT 2 instruction manual. I fought with myself for a few months over whether or not it was O.K. to cut up the manual, and finally gave in to my baser instincts of tasty free food. On a side note, I'd love it if someone can explain to me why the Personal Pan Pizza size is so much more tasty than the normal Pizza Hut Pizza.
• I used to come home for lunch throughout elementary school and play Ikari Warriors with my cousin. A-A-B-B-A holds as much esteem for me as Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A, mostly because of the good memories I have playing this game while munching on Kraft Mac N Cheese. Talk about worth the $1 it cost at a garage sale...

Enough for Now

So that's basically how it all started. In future posts I'll go into better detail about the specific games that fed my gaming addition throughout the years, and some of the fun times I've had.