February 2012
3 posts
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A yak' business
So, remember when I went on and on about how flawed Yakuza is? You should mentally follow that post with a jumpcut to me finishing the game with over 28 hours on the in-game clock. I ended up liking it quite a bit.
All of my previous criticisms still apply, plus a few more. The pauses when the game changes camera angles can be awfully long. The fighting is indeed fun, but it derives a lot of...
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Ninja Guy Man 2
I’m guessing that every review of Ninja Gaiden II mentioned the fact that there’s a boss in the game that explodes when you kill it, and that this explosion can and will kill you as well. (And not in the tolerable “die in a cutscene” way, but in the real “Game Over” way.) It turns out the way you survive the explosion is to hold the Block button down, which...
January 2012
6 posts
3 tags
Missed storytelling opportunities
Brief thought about Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, which I’m enjoying. The gameplay is good, which is to say it basically executes on the Sands of Time formula without any unfortunate aesthetic decisions. However, and I need to play Sands of Time again because I haven’t since 2003, the storytelling seems less good. The story itself is fine, but so much of the dialog is...
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“BRAVERY HAS BEEN ELIMINATED”
– Split/Second, notifying me that a driver named Bravery has been disqualified from the race
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Every day I'm Crystalin'
I planned on playing a bunch of video games while I was home on vacation, but what I mainly ended up playing was SNK’s sort of Zelda-like Crystalis. If you haven’t played it, it’s definitely worth checking out. If nothing else, the setting is unique: it’s post-apocalyptic but cartoony and cute, with an interesting backstory and a good variety of sub-quests that have you...
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December 2011
5 posts
A Cat A Day Helps The Crazy Stay: Steam 2011... →
lunserschutz:
I was asked by a friend to highlight some of the best of the cheap games from the Holiday Sale, so here’s my list. These are only games that I own/have played/etc so it’s not definitive and shouldn’t be taken as such. I just quickly went through the <$5 games list and didn’t put too much thought…
I hope Avadon is good even though the name is kind of silly!
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Zork
I bring plenty of game devices when I travel, but actually playing games on a plane is tricky. I can’t really relax or focus on a plane. That doesn’t stop me from trying, though, and while flying yesterday I tried the original MIT version of Zork as bundled with Frotz for iOS.
It’s been a while, but I’ve put in my time with text adventures. When I was a kid my dad and...
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I’d love to see a James Bond-themed Zelda clone. Bond and Link both do odd jobs in different locations using an array of fancy gadgets, you might as well replace the bombs with an exploding pen or something.
The gadget aspect of Zelda really got ratcheted up in Skyward Sword, where you get a remote-controlled flying beetle that can grab stuff and cut ropes for you. Maybe not as elaborate...
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“Hold L2 and press Square to agitate the harpy.”
– God of War 3 tutorial text
November 2011
14 posts
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“You don’t want to fuck with pacifists like us.”
– Street punks in Yakuza
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A few evenings with Skyward Sword
I like it so far.
Having just played Oblivion, which has an overly strict “fatigue” meter, I actually like that Skyward Sword does something similar but friendlier. More to the point, I like that Link actually huffs and puffs and gets visibly tired if you have him dash around and jump and climb things. Link now has the standard suite of Tomb Raider moves (shimmying on ledges, running...
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Danc on tradeoffs between presentation & gameplay →
This is sort of what I was talking about with Oblivion — the graphical fidelity of the world makes the weaknesses (graphical and gameplay) really jarring. If you look at an older game like Ultima 7, which is a similar design in many ways, it’s more effective (at least for me) because everything is equally low-res.
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Inflammatory Remarks on Oblivion
I think I may be done with (The Elder Scrolls IV:) Oblivion again. The first time, I played through what is essentially the tutorial (feat. Patrick Stewart) and lost interest as soon as I emerged from the training-wheels dungeon into the world, which was filled (theoretically) with possibility, and (perceptibly) with trees. But everything I’d heard about Oblivion suggested it was a...
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“It’s cold as balls up there.”
– characters in Oblivion reviewing Skyrim (paraphrased)
Ned Hepburn: Video Game Ideas. →
nedhepburn:
Street Fighter Healthcare. You have one fight at the beginning. You spend the rest of the game trying to pay off your medical bills (in Arcade version, you just keep putting in quarters).
Zelda With All The Dumb Shit Cut Out Of It. Only fighting and that gnarballs 8-bit soundtrack.
It has come to my attention that some people on Tumblr are using the tag #dreamcast to denote posts about their ideal fantasy casting choices for movies or whatever. That is not okay.
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Nothing is ever as good as Shenmue
Yakuza for the PS2 reminds me quite a bit of my favorite game ever in the whole world, Shenmue, and if I’d known that I might have taken off the shrinkwrap (still bearing a $9.99 CLEARANCE sticker from Circuit City) a little sooner. It’s got a similar structure, alternating between exploring detailed (but very limited) city environments and beating up groups of surly hoodlums who have...
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Silent all these hills
Some horror-buff friends and I recently played through Silent Hill 2, them for the first time. I originally played SH2 way back in 2004, and stopped being freaked out in my own basement in 2009 or so. I had no idea if any of us would enjoy the game as much as I remembered enjoying it, but we actually did.
I’ve (apparently!) gotten used to horror-type games, so when I was holding the...
October 2011
6 posts
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Demon's Souls
Is this a joke?
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“Ha ha ha. You slaves are lucky, lucky people. What better way to spend your...”
– Dragon Quest V, not as racist as it sounds
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Enter the Dragon
zole: Jesus Christ
zole: The monk in my party just dodged an attack from a fucking dragon and then counter-attacked by hitting it in the FACE
zole: For 70 points of damage out of a total of 117
jason: Haha
jason: Monks bad-ass, son
zole: And I was all psyched up to deal with this DRAGON
zole: Nope, just punch it in its stupid face
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Stayed up late playing Final Fantasy Tactics on the PSP. I need to not do that. It’s not really a fantastic game, or maybe I’m just not getting something, but I think I mainly just want to figure out the jobs system.
I like customizing things in games. However, the learning curve in FFT is pretty steep, so I’m left to turn my Chemists into White Mages and just hope that...
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Drop Red Dead Gorgeous
Every Grand Theft Auto protagonist wants something, which gives the game a reason to exist. They want something they can’t really achieve on their own, which gives them a reason to do favors (“missions”) for other characters. And they have a background that perfectly balances likability with a willingness to totally shoot people who sorta have it coming.
While I was playing...
September 2011
4 posts
Anonymous asked: Re: characters not talking. Does DQIV not have a button you can press to talk to your party? I thought that started with this one, but maybe it came later. I know it's in the ones I've been playing recently. --Meghan
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Dragon Quest IV
I’ve kind of dug myself into a hole by trying to write some kind of summation of the games I play. It takes time, which was kind of not the point of this thing. But it seems worth doing, for some reason, so I’ll try to say something about Dragon Quest IV. Problem is, not much comes to mind. I totally played it, and I came back to it an awful lot, so I can extrapolate from that data...
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Shadowgate
I was able to get through the first half of Shadowgate because I remember most of the solutions from reading Nintendo Power in 1990. Does that seem odd? Their coverage of the game consisted of a series of screenshots and instructions that showed you exactly what to do in every room. It’s a point-and-click adventure game, so there’s no actual challenge to the game besides the...
August 2011
12 posts
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Shining Force Feather →
Wikipedia, if you won’t explain why it’s called “Feather”, what good are you.
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Crackdown has nicknames for all the guns. The rocket launcher is the “Hothead” for example. But there’s a rapid-fire shotgun called the “Equalizer”. What? “Well, I’m alive and you have a sucking chest would from buckshot fired at point blank range. Now we’re even.”
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Got DJ Hero 2 because it was on sale. It’s decent, although I find it hard to tell when you’re supposed to crossfade, and also you’re 95% just going through the motions another, actual DJ has set out for you. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t have thought to mash up “Hot In Herre” and “Regulate”. (totally works musically, doesn’t work at all...
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Mouse rage
citationneeded:
Mouse rage, and in fact all types of computer rage whilst gaming are counter productive, as the player loses concentration and can damage equipment, which leaves them vulnerable to enemy attack.
Link
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Leaving Vice City
Today Facebook was nice enough to put a status update I posted a year ago in the sidebar for me. So, FYI, I watched Yojimbo one year ago today.
Relatedly, I keep a text file with a list of games I’ve finished, and when adding Bastion and Dragon Quest IV I happened to notice that I’d finished Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on August 16, 2007 (close enough to 4 years ago today). However,...
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Finished Bastion Monday night and Dragon Quest IV on Tuesday. I should write about those, but right now all I want to do is rest my thumb. See, I play DS games before I go to sleep, and I also have a weakness for looking at nonsense on my iPhone before I get out of bed in the morning. Somehow that posture (does lying down count as a posture?) has given me arthritis or something. No more D-pads for...
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Video games! Why do you still insist on telling me there is no saved data the first time I play you? I already know, and you don’t need me to make a decision or anything.
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/bin/bastion
I’m glad I’ve kept at Bastion, because dealing with the clunky combat is a one-time cost, and the story dividends really start to pay out as you go along.
I can’t quite tell if the combat has gotten better or if I’ve just gotten used to it. I think it’s the latter, because the reason I’m enjoying it is that I’ve figured out how to get around the...
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Crack it on down
Crackdown is a good example of how a game can be fun but not very good. The reviews I read when it came out seemed to be a bit confused by this too. It’s sort of a Grand Theft Auto clone, except you’re a genetically-engineered-or-whatever super-cop rather than a criminal, and you can jump really high and pick up cars and stuff.
I’m trying to think of other fundamental...
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“They said Queen Anne was just a folk tale. Now there’s living proof she...”
– Rucks, Bastion