everyday gamer

Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve written one of these.  Call it a minor hiatus or a busy streak or whatever you will.  But never fear, games have been played.  A lot of the newly fan-translated Mother 3, courtesy of the fine folks at starmen.net.  Oh, and a little game by the name of LittleBigPlanet.  But that’ll get its own entry later this week.  Sorry guys!

It’s very interesting how Nintendo of America continues to spite its Mother fans by not releasing the fan-beloved Earthbound.  It’s a beloved franchise in Japan.  There aren’t any translation issues to be had – it’s had an American release.  It has a rabid fanbase in the United States.  And it’s already been rated by the ESRB.  NOA President Reggie Fils-Aime has stated that Nintendo always needs make sure that releases are timed in order to keep the momentum of their consoles going.  But at times, it seems like NOA doesn’t even want to acknowledge the existence of the series: Earthbound was included as one of the in-game demos for the Japanese version of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and not the American version.  Because of this, many feel that the Japanese-only Mother 3 will never see an American release.  Which is precisely why a bunch of fans took matters into their own hands and translated the ROM for the fans.

Not surprisingly, the game plays a lot like Earthbound.  But there’s something innately endearing about a five old Japanese RPG that plays a lot like the 22 year old Dragon Quest.  And it has everything to do with the quirky sense of humor that has always existed in the series and has somehow remained intact through the fan translation.  Self-deprecating inanimate objects?  Hilariously deadpan dialogue from serpentine ally?  Random Mr. Saturn antics?  Sexually ambiguous and uncomfortably awkward situations?  Mother 3 has them all.

Kudos to the the starmen.net folks for translating this wonderful game for everyone.  Kudos to Shigesato Itoi for another great Mother game.  And please keep them coming, Mr. Itoi – you are greatly appreciated.

WBP Mother 3, WBP

The Cell phase comprises of roughly the first 20 minutes of Spore.  It begins with the design of your single celled organism in the creature creator.  You start off by designating yourself as a carnivore or herbivore and then you get to spend a little bit of time in the Creature Creator although you’re a bit limited in what you can do to your little blob since additional body parts need to be unlocked.  Afterwards your cell is thrust into a very beautiful version of freeform Pacman where the goal is to basically eat as many of the correct colored pellets (green for plant, red for meat) as required to sprout legs and advance to the next stage of evolution while avoiding the predators and essentially “tricking” out your creature with numerous new body parts you’ve attained.  While the actual body parts you can get in this phase don’t really have an effect on the rest of the game, it does serve as good practice in using the Creature Creator and preparation for the Creature phase and other later stages. In that regard, the Cell stage is set up sort of like a tutorial and once you play it through once it becomes trivially easy.

Once you actually get the power to add legs to your organism, the Creature phase begins.  The game archetype at this point shifts from a 2D version of Pacman to a 3D Pacman-meets-World Of Warcraft game where the goal is to become a dominant species in the planet via social (dancing, singing, posing) or not-so-social (uh..eating other species?) means. As reward for being an herbivore in the first phase, I was presented with a rainstorm-creating ability that helped me on the social track a bit more. As you befriend or devour more creatures in this phase, you get additional body parts to utilize in the far more fleshed out Creature creator.  What’s particularly interesting in this phase is that there is nothing stopping you from doing a full on creature redesign. You can even start becoming the opposite diet designation if you so choose.  However, the end goal in this phase remains befriending or devouring the other species.

Once I filled up my DNA bar, my retarded bird-like creature with antlers was headed to the Tribal phase.  Overall, I liked this phase a bit more than the Cell phase because there was a semblance of complexity present.  Which is a bit of a stretch in itself since it’s basically just “kill” or “dance/sing/whatever” on demand.  Final verdict of the creature stage: underwhelmingly fun.

That’s it for now.  Next time: the Tribal and Civilization stages!

Gaming, WBP Spore, WBP

These past two weeks in Whatcha Been Playin’ (I apologize for not having one last week) were spent playing my two of my favorite games from my favorite jrpg series: Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy IV DS.  No new games…just good old games.  Yeah, yeah FFIV DS is technically new, but c’mon now.  It’s an old game.

Final Fantasy XII is a very special game to me as it’s the only Final Fantasy that I’ve played through completely only once and actually enjoyed.  FFVIII I barely played through the first time and swore never to draw a damned curaga again.  I appreciated the scope and presentation of FFX, but for the most part found the story (summarized by “I hate you dad!”) and the voice acting obnoxious enough to merit a “no thanks” on the second go-around.  On the other hand, I just loved XII.  Between the deep fusion of traditional jRPG and MMO styled gameplay to the made-for-adult (read: not 4 ragtag teens out to save the world) storyline to the Gambit system that tweaked the programmer inside of me, the game just clicked for me and I loved every minute of it.

Last week I felt a nostalgic obligation to continue playing my PS3 save that I started when I first bought the system.  Unsurprisingly, I found that the game play and story really does hold up, though perhaps I was just itching for an RPG to play without having to spend money.  FFXII is a really good game.  However, I do wish this game was given the high-def treatment.  It looked beautiful on standard def; less so on high.

Final Fantasy IV DS was the other game I spent a significant amount of time playing.  Good lord, this game is tough.  Similar to how old NES games did little more than drill you on muscle memory by subjecting you to learn by dying, FFIV DS seems to do the same thing.  Minus the muscle memory.  And many times more dying.  During one play session in the final dungeon, my level 65ish or so party was running around collecting the final armor sets for the better part of an hour only to get demolished by the Red Dragon guarding the Crystal Gloves.  I wanted to scream.  When I cooled off a few days later, I decided to skip that chest and head to the save point a handful of screens later.

“Ok, I have a save point.  Time to try that chest again!”

Three rounds later, I was met with another death.  Wonderful.  “How about I just skip this one for now?”

Two rooms down, I accept the challenge from the Lunasaur guarding a pair of Ribbons for Rosa and Rydia.  Five rounds of damage dealing and no problems!  Home free!  And then all of my guys get breathed for a billion status effects and are confused and uncontrollable.  Ok, no problem: use a remedy and fix the party turn by turn.  Next round, breathed again.  And again.  And again.  And then I turn the system off.  Damn.  This game is hard.

I did wind up finishing the game a few nights ago.  Don’t get me wrong, the storyline is still in my top 3 in the series.  But wow, was this game frustrating.

WBP Final Fantasy, WBP

What’s this?  I’ve been playing a game that’s not Soul Calibur IV?

Ok, not quite true as I’ve still been playing a hell of a lot of Soul Calibur (win percentage up to 43%…woot!). Instead, the highlight this week for me was Team Fortress 2 and the new content update featuring the the Heavy weapons guy.

Team Fortress 2 is my Counterstrike.  That is, it’s the game where I start up on a whim and play for bite-sized sessions at a time.  Whether it be a quick game before dinner or in between other activities, it’s a very low commitment game for me that I don’t need to devote a lot of time to like WoW and most console games.  In the past few months, my playtime has been following the pattern of weeks of only a handful of games followed by an exceedingly larger spike coinciding with every TF2 class update:  It happened with the Medic update back in April, again in June with the Pyro update, and finally this week with the update to the Heavy class.  While I wouldn’t go so far to say that I’m tired of playing, it’s almost as if each new patch is a new lease on life for my interest in the game.  Valve is able to do this by introducing new, different, and sometimes hilarious weapons for the classes unlockable by manageable-yet-often-absurd achievements introduced in each patch.  While I’m generally not too fond of using achievements to lock away new content (it often forces you to play the game in a way that it’s not meant to be played), Valve has found a good balance in making the quest for new weaponry challenging but not overbearing.  Twenty-two out of thirty-six achievements for all of the weapons is a far better solution than the full 36 required for medic pack achievements.  Which I did successfully but only with the help of some games in purely “achievement farming” maps.  Thankfully, the Pyro and Heavy pack did not follow the same philosophy and force me into those sort of games: all of those achievements were achieved legitimately.  Even the taunt-kill ones, which were honestly hilarious to pull off in a real game environment.

The Heavy pack was particularly enjoyable because this patch more than any previous one showcased TF2’s great sense of humor.  Case in point: the first unlockable in the Heavy pack is the Sandvich.  Which is, well, just a sandwich that replaces your normal shotgun.

The best funnies seem to be centered around the Heavy since he’s sort of the stereotypical lovable eastern European big oaf that speaks in broken English.  But he’s such an integral part of giving Team Fortress 2 its unique feel.  Point 2: the “Meet the Sandvich” video.

Anyway, I am thorougly enjoying this update.  Great stuff, Valve.  Keep up the great work!

P.S.  I’m not yet finished Bionic Commando: Rearmed, but I assure you the review is coming along with some other bonus stuff.

WBP Team Fortress 2, WBP

This week in WBP has been delayed a bit due for two reasons:

1. The unexpected amount of time that was spent on the previous blog entry, and
2. The release of Bionic Commando Rearmed on PSN late last week

Seeing as one of these points is rather integral to this week’s WBP, I felt it was appropriate to delay the entry a few days so I could talk about it.  In any case, this week’s WBP consisted almost exclusively of more Soul Calibur IV and the retro remake of Bionic Commando.

This week spent with Soul Calibur IV was a bit different from the previous couple.   Up till this weekend, my main character has been Hilde.  The logic for sticking to Hilde boiled down to the fact that the character was new (meaning less characters would know how to defend against her) and the character design just looked awesome.  One-hundred wins and two-hundredish losses later, I realized that my lack of skill couldn’t be the sole reason I wasn’t winning ranked matches.  Rather, it was a combination of that and character imbalance and internet latency.  Online basically consists of a lot of players who essentially power-leveled their ratings by abusing internet lag and the spam-skill characters (read:Kilik, Raphael, Amy).  My Hilde playstyle primarily consisted of capitalizing on my opponent’s unsafe moves and then unloading a moderately damaging combo and keeping them on the defensive by mixing it up.  The main caveat comes at the start of the match: Hilde does not have too many panic buttons if the opponent gets too close.  As a result, most of my losses come from not being able to get away from the fast attacks of the mentioned characters.  At that 140 loss mark, I figured it was a good enough time to start learning how to play a secondary character.

So I gave Sophitia a try.  I don’t have anything to add except that I have a record of about 50 and 8 with Sophitia after spending a brief session in the training mode.  She’s completely broken; safe attacks and high priority moves.  I’m not going to say that I didn’t have fun winning all weekend, but c’mon Namco.  Could you balance this game a little better?

The other game that consumed a bit of my time over the weekend was Grin’s remake of Capcom’s classic arcade and NES game Bionic Commando for PSN/XBLA/PC.  Although I’ve never played the NES version, I did play the death out of the futuristic quasi-anime Gameboy remake back in the mid 90’s.  My initial thoughts on playing Rearmed were of how my swing-grappling skills have atrophied so much: I did not remember the Gameboy version being so difficult.  The physics of the swing mechanic are more or less the same as the version I played; even so I found myself in a pit of spikes very often.  But that’s not necessarily a bad thing…after all, Rearmed is a remake of a classic Nintendo game.  Meaning that it’s not obligated to coddle the player with modern gaming amenities like dumbed-down casual-friendly difficulty levels.  Instead, the game chooses to kick you in the nuts swiftly and viciously from the get-go with the deviously-tricky ceiling grappling all the way to the purely S&M mobile platform grappling in later stages.  And yes, this is a good thing.

I’ll probably wind up finishing the game this week sometime and maybe a couple of the interesting bonus challenges.  And perhaps write a review, hmm?

WBP Bionic Commando Rearmed, Soul Calibur IV, WBP