Street Fighter IV: Championship Mode

While there wasn’t too much in terms of character balance changes (that feature will almost undoubtedly be reserved for the next incarnation of the game), the new Championship Mode introduced in the latest Street Fighter IV patch is phenomenal.  The mode is divided up into multiple grades and it mimics the conditions of actual SFIV tournaments – blind character select, multiple rounds, and a payout at the end for winning the tournament.  The entry-level tournament tier you’re placed into is Grade 3 (G3) with the opponent challenge is more or less analogous to normal ranked matches – meaning Sagats and Flowchart Kens aplenty.  With each successful win, you’re awarded Championship Points (CP) which contribute to your overall Grade Points (GP).   When you accumulate enough GP, you eventually progress through the classes of each Grade till a certain threshold when you are then promoted to the next Grade – and that’s where the fun really begins.  When eventually reach G2 (and reaching G2 is an inevitability – there is no point degradation in G3), the first thing you notice is the sad fact truth you are no longer winning anymore; in fact, you’d be lucky to be winning half as much as you were in the previous Grade.  Competition is tremendously disparate and the players are noticeably better: I considered myself competant and played maybe ten games before I was able to squeak out a victory.  Currently I’m at about 2750 GP, most of which was fueled by second and third round butt kickings, but I’m still having a ton of fun running with the tournament folks and their 8000+ GPs.  And even though I still lose a lot, I do feel that I’m adapting to the heightened level of competition.

WoW Patch 3.1 and Ulduar Raiding

The other majority of my gaming time has been spent playing World of Warcraft (of course) and raiding Ulduar with my guild on Gorefiend.  So far, we’re doing pretty well and we’re currently working on the final boss in the instance before we start working on the hard modes and Algalon the Observer (coined by Blizzard as the Destroyer of Raids).  Most importantly however is the fact that I’ve been working hard on the video footage for our first successful kills for the guild, going so far as to even make a YouTube Channel comprising of most of the video work I’ve done.  I intend on editing the hard-mode footage when we get there so there’s certainly still a lot work that needs to be done and there’s plenty of room for improvement.  Stuff to look forward to!

Blizzcon 2009

This year I was again fortunate enough to be able to attain tickets to this year’s Blizzcon convention in Anaheim, California.  As with last year, we booked the hotel and flight months in advance, even before we even knew of when tickets were going on sale.  Thankfully with some dilligence and a new and improved ticket purchasing system, we were able to get tickets to the show floor.  It’s still astounding that even though the convention tickets are 25% more expensive this year (due to the extra convention hall for exhibits), the first batch of tickets still managed to sell out in a mere thirty-three minutes.  Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising with tickets on eBay already going at 300% markup.  Still, I look forward to spending time with my fellow Blizzard fans, regardless of how rabid (and possibly unkempt) they are.

And that’s it for now.  E3 Predictions forthcoming!

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.

It’s interesting to find that the complexity that was so absent in the first four phases of Spore is almost overbearingly present in the final phase of the game.  In a sense, the preceding evolutionary phases act as a tutorial for the Space phase.  The main problem comes from the fact that whereas the other phases were simply the previous phase with a twist, the space phase seems to be a total disco inferno.  There is a hell of a lot going on in this phase, whether it be meeting aliens, defending against space pirates, establishing trade routes, abducting wildlife, terraforming planets, etc., some of which could happen concurrently.  This is a good thing for players who can deal with the more developed sense of micromanagement.  However, I just don’t see the mainstream finishing out the phase – as I mentioned before, Spore might be too smart for many of us.  They’re more likely to open up the Creature Creator and start a new campaign.

To me, the ability to create and share content via the Creature Creator is where the strength of the game lies.  When EA produces an expansion for Spore (99.9999% chance they will), a natural extension of this might be to extend their powerful tool by introducing a framework for user-created scenarios a la LittleBigPlanet, which would go miles as far as keeping the players interested in Spore.  Wishful thinking, though.

The Tribal phase begins with a cute cinematic of the creature gaining sentience and raising a stick in triumph, signifying the inclusion of culture into the history of the creatures’ evolution.  Spore takes what was built in the previous phase and meshes it with a rudimentary Real Time Strategy (RTS) game. The strict adherence to simplicity present in previous phases is present in this iteration as well: The end goal is to establish the creature as the dominant species on the planet by via declaring war, entertaining other tribes, or a mixture of both.  The tasks are facilitated again by the creature creator, this time with the addition of wardrobe with each article of clothing giving a bonus to gathering, combat, social skills, or a combination of any two.  Ultimately, that simplicity limited the development of the phase and it again felt like a glorified tutorial as I quickly played my maracas, flutes, and digideroos to global dominance and the Civilization phase.

I’m going to assume that Spore’s fourth phase mimics Civilization, despite never having played a single Civilization game in the series.  In that regard, I very much looked forward to the new phase of the game only to find that my past game decisions as a friendly, herb-devouring, socially adept but retarded-looking antlered bird creature put my civilization on the path of religious zealotism  (Yeah… I don’t really see the connection).  The goal of the game this time was to extend the influence of my nation throughout the planet, beginning with my freshly thrown together mess of a car equipped with French horns, organ pipes, and a Zen gong exerting its religious hegemony on a nearby spice mine.  This was followed by yet another session of begrudgingly throwing together random objects in the creature creator to create buildings for my city.  Yes, I said begrudgingly – designing so many creatures, vehicles, and buildings was extremely tiring and overwhelming for me at this stage of the game and I really wanted to move on as quickly as possible.

The actual meat of the Civilization phase consisted very simply of me building as many faithmobiles as possible and rushing my neighbors in early RTS fashion.  My weapons of choice however weren’t explosives and bombs but rather words and faith delivered via a singing holographic projection of my creature.  There’s a bit of suspension of disbelief at work here as the cartoony visual of bombs vs. psalm didn’t really do it for me, but the holographic of my bird creature was a laugh-out-loud moment.  In any case, the cycle of building vehicles and taking over cities continued a few more times until I was presented with a cutscene indicating that I now had access to flight technology and was presented with another creator!  Ok, seriously now.  Despite my clear irritation, it was at this point that the game took an almost inexplicable turn into the realm of non-casual gaming: the introduction of flight into my game for whatever reason multiplied the difficulty of the game many times over and the other large empire on my planet was soon at my doorstep dropping bombs on my city with its swarm of not-so-friendly airplanes.  Ugh.

My solution to this problem was rather unorthodox:  After 3-4 failed attempts to fight the aggressors off, I opted to try establishing a trade route.  “Ok, they’re not attacking me.  Now we’re getting somewhere!”  After a set time of commerce, I was given the option of buying out the city I was trading with.  So I did.  And then I received a message from my former enemy asking for an alliance of which I gladly obliged to.  And then the phase ended.

Err..what?  Was it seriously that easy?

Spore is a weird game; I knew in advance that the game is paced like a walk through the history of gaming, but I didn’t know what to really think of the idea of playing 5 different games at once.  However, I do know that despite the fact I’ve just reached the final Space phase, I’m nowhere near finishing the game.  As such, my overall impressions of the game are rather incomplete, but I can talk about the Cell and the Creature phases while I formulate thoughts of the later sections.

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!

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.

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.

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?

The first game on the menu is Soul Calibur IV, which I’m still finding completely addicting to play despite the fact that I’m still pretty bad at it.  My previous PSN account has a masterful record of 30 wins and 128 losses, of which at least 70 of said losses came from players spamming one button with Kilik/Mitsurugi/Siegfried and me failing to defend against that spam with my Hilde character.  The other 60 I would probably attribute to misplays and other general noobishness.  Despite this, I don’t consider losing matches a bad thing as practice against better opponents is the only way to get better.  My new PSN account in about 50 games is at about a 28% win percentage, markedly better now that I’ve learned to play a little bit.  And no, I didn’t change my PSN account because of my previous bad record in SCIV

While we’re on the subject of PSN accounts, I’m going to take a little bit of time and agree with Garnett Lee on last week’s 1up Yours podcast about not being able to change the online handle of the account.  I should not have to register a new email address to get a new handle.  Period.  This is pretty trivial database work.  Seriously Sony, you need this option here.

The second game on the plate is the remake of Final Fantasy IV for the DS, a game that holds a very special place in my heart as the RPG that got me into the genre.  This is the third release of the game I’ve played and the second time I’ve purchased it (I picked up the GBA version a few years ago as well).  And the game is still awesome, though admittedly I am still a part of the problem for purchasing yet another Final Fantasy remake.  This incarnation of the SNES classic features a full 2.5D reinterpretation of the old game, voice acting (which is ok, I suppose), and in-engine cut scenes that are pretty decent despite the hardware limitations.  What I like most about FFIV this time is how the game manages to take the memories I have of the old 2D environments and rendering them in such a way that allows them to keep the charm of the old game yet at the same time look modernized.  The game also features a solid retranslation, though I suspect some things were kept in (You spoony bard!) for the older fans of the game.  Jeremy Parish of 1up supports this assessment, stating in his review that the game is mainly marketed at the older fans of FFIV.  As such, the game is also a bit harder than I remembered: I’ve already lost my party a few times to former pushover bosses.  Regardless, I’m enjoying myself.

Pixeljunk Eden has been my post dinner snack game.  As expected, once I got past the initial control barrier the game got a lot more interesting.  I wound up spinning and jumping through the first garden collecting all six spectra and starting the second and third gardens.  Honestly I haven’t played much more of this to say anything more than it seems to be one of those games that you play for short bursts in spare moments.  That’s not to say that Eden isn’t a good game, but rather I wanted to savor the flavor of this dessert for a long time.  Perhaps I’ll find some more time to play this week before Bionic Commando gets released.

This week’s gaming regiment has consisted of a little bit of MGS4 just to finish my second playthrough no-kill style, my daily dosage of WiiFit exercise, more WoW endgame raiding, a couple of little stumblings through my Pixeljunk Eden garden to L2P, and a lot of stumbling through Soul Calibur IV, my entry into the series.

My first impressions of Pixeljunk Eden were kind of mixed from the demo that was made available last Thursday on PSN.  To say that it’s one of my most anticipated games would be an understatement given the amount of hype I’ve been hearing about the game.  When I actually sat down to play it, I found myself very confused as the game didn’t come with a manual anywhere and I wound up just mashing buttons to see what would happen.  Hey, I can swing in circles!  Hey I can spin in the air!  I knew Eden had a bunch of platforming elements to it from the start, but I found myself just hopping around and spinning around with my Worms-esque ninja rope collecting stuff aimlessly till I ran out of time.  It would take a few more sessions and some scouring on the Eden thread on NeoGAF to learn about what precisely I was supposed to do in this game and how I was going to do it.  Then it hit me: Eden is a total chill-out to the music and casually platform game where you collect plants to create a psychodelic garden.  I had to collect pollen, make plants sprout, and swing higher and higher till I retrieved another plant to move to my garden (the title screen). Yeah, it’s such a hippie game and it sounds very like a game you’d get stoned to.  But it’s very relaxing and is pretty cool once you get past the initial barrier of the confusing, minimalistic controls.  Will definitely pick this up when it’s released tomorrow: I can definitely see this as one of those games I turn on for a few minutes in random fits of boredom.  Not to mention it has the added perk of being to upload video directly to Youtube, which is just neat in itself.

I never really got into the previous incarnations of the Soul Calibur series – I didn’t own a Dreamcast and didn’t really play console games during my college years outside of several Final Fantasy games.  Nevertheless, the thought of competitively playing a fighting game online against human components piqued my interest.  When coupled with the awesome SCIV preview in EGM last summer, I was sold on the idea that this game would be the one to bring me back into the fighting genre.  So when it arrived in the mail yesterday, I was pretty ecstatic: I hadn’t played a new fighting game seriously since Super Street Fighter 2 (ie, almost a decade).   I promptly popped in the disc, picked a character that looked interesting – Hilde, and then just sort of went with it in the training and single player modes.  And boy was it a culture shock.  This game played nothing like Street Fighter 2 – there’s like 8 zillion more inputs!  I wound up looking through the moves list and shrugging indifferently and took the game online to play with the other newbies.

That was a mistake   Those newbies definitely showed me how much I sucked.  Not that it’s a bad thing in any stretch, but rather that I had a lot to learn.  Strange enough, I found Guard impacting a little bit easier to do online (maybe due to latency), but still wound up eating dirt more about 90% of the time.  Still, I had a lot of fun and I’m pretty determined to stick it out and play some good games with people.  And learn how to Guard Impact a-la Daigo parrying in SF3:Third Strike.  Serious.

Maybe I’ll pick up a set of Hori arcade sticks.  Meh.