Not Without Its Faults pt 1

I’ve ploughed through two more games recently, seeing through to completion both Disney’s Epic Mickey for the Wii, and Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team for the Xbox 360. Each of these games presents a case study in defied expectations.

Epic Mickey is a big budget, high-profile release from Warren Spector’s Junction Point Studios with some collaboration from Disney animation and Pixar Studios. The idea originally was to reboot interest in Mickey Mouse as a character, trying to shed some of his goody-goody image and go back to his roots where he tended to have more curiosity and mischief in his makeup. Mickey’s bad judgement in Fantasia might seem out of place to modern folks used to his squeaky clean image as Disney’s figurehead, but a look at his cartoon shorts from early in his career shows a much more troublesome mouse.

At any rate, all this high-concept thinking, pushed around with high-power talent and technical ability should’ve resulted in a game for the ages. That’s what the hype machine was saying prior to the game’s release (of course) and nostalgic as I was to see THAT old Mickey (not to mention some of the other characters being touted) I bought into it. Once reviews got actual hands-on time, they were less than fulsome in their praise. But I thought they were just strung out on dope, not really ‘getting’ how the awesome concept should override petty concerns like the odd bad camera angle or repetitious quest. My kids saw the ads and really wanted to play a game that plopped happy lil’ Mickey Mouse into such a Tim Burton-looking game world. So even if the game turned out to be not-so-good to me, they’d probably love it (not being so picky). I was so confident they’d love it, I bought the guide at the same time. I’d insist they NOT use the guide for their initial play-through if possible, but have it around to manage the huge collect-a-thon that I knew the game was going to be after they’d beaten it. And the book is pretty nice, a decent collectable in itself.

Well, I was right about the kids. They do love it. My son is on his second playthrough. My daughter hasn’t finished it, but only because she’s been really distracted by DDR. She just broke her dance pad (wore it out actually), so now she has no excuse. But who gives a crap what they think? They’re just dumb kids. This blog is what I think.

Epic Mickey is pretty damn good looking. The visuals are amongst the best I’ve seen on the Wii. Maybe not quite Muramasa great, but pretty far up there. Being a third-person 3D platformer, the graphics are all polygonal but they have a very moody hand-painted style. And the soundtrack is terrific. Composer Jim Dooley did a great job of coming up with original tunes and riffs on well-known songs (like It’s A Small World and the Pirates of the Carribean leit-motif) and imbuing them all with a Danny Elfman tinkle-tinkle creepiness. If you’ve seen any Tim Burton film that Danny has scored you know the kind of music I’m talking about. The game is not as dark and edgy as the ads made it sound, mostly because the game is almost non-violent (little in the way of real threats for most of the game takes a lot of edge off), BUT the aesthetic aspects and parts of the narrative (lost and forgotten cartoon characters) do imbue a lot of atmosphere and melancholy into the game.

It also does make Mickey an adventuresome hero once again. Plumbing the archives for the old Mickey and bringing along Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and plenty of other little-remembered characters was a great idea. Mickey has to own up to his mischief and deal with its serious consequences. You do this by performing tasks (a lot) and defeating minions and bosses (not so much) in order to undo YOUR original catastrophic mishap.

The controls worked fine for me. I’ve never really understood flat out hostility or antipathy for the wiimote controls. For older games come down the Virtual Console pipe I’ll use a joystick or the classic controller. But for modern Wii-designed games I never seem to have a problem using the waggle stick. For running, sneaking, jumping, and pointing at the screen to stream paint or thinner, the standard controls were fine.

But even with all this, it turns out much of the critical sniping is spot-on with my own opinion. The camera IS pretty effin' bad. I read a lot of 'kills you during critical jumps' complaints, but actually since you can have go pretty slowly and carefully you almost always have time to swing the camera around with the d-pad. If anything, actual onscreen visibility was more of a problem when making harrowing jumps. The game is dark, so the questions of whether you need to jump or where you could safely land seemed to crop up periodically. My problem with the camera was during combat. It tries to keep the same perspective as it does during most of the exploration time, but this is not the best choice in a fight in this particular game, especially where multiple enemies are involved. Honestly, the camera chooses not to be helpful even in battles with a single large beastie. I spent more effort trying to run and keep the camera facing the foe, than I did dodging or shooting paint. The battles aren't actually all that hard, but making the view work for you is an additional challenge that just did NOT need to be there. If I'd had a say in this particular aspect of the game, it'd have been to probably zoom out and up to give a higher, more encompassing isometric view, sort of like Powerstone 2. You'd sacrifice some detail during battles, but you'd know where everyone was at all times, and not have to fuck with camera facing. Again, this is a fault that is manageable, but because you're under duress in the battles, managing the camera while trying to dodge and shoot will seem a lot like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time while driving a car in traffic.

Even THAT is actually not the games biggest fault though. Some reviewers refer to 'tedious fetch-quests'. And boy are they right. That's all this game really is. I bitched about the fights up above, but they only constitute a fraction... a frustrating fraction... of the overall game time. Everyone in the game has some goshdamn thing or other that they need you to do. And you will back track over and over again, to make things happen for the NPCs. And many of the deeds have multiple layers. So you might have to ferry ingredients back and forth between two locations more than once, or have the same mission repeat but with a bit more challenge. You learn several of the levels and their connecting 2D stages far more than you'll want to. You'll be able to navigate 'em with a blindfold on. Bafflingly (and also frustrating) there are a number of levels you CANNOT get back to. So if you fuck up a quest, you're done. I don't have a problem with that, but trying not to use the guide, I didn't know if I exited certain levels I'd never be able to get back... because many levels you can. Ugh. Points I guess for so much non-violent challenge. But it's a challenge just staying awake or maintaining interest in monotonous tasks, finding another flower or rounding up more annoying Bunny Children.

What really gets me about the fetch-quests though, is not the number of them, the repitition or the happy banality. Its the 'guide-itis'. This is where a game contains a puzzle that cannot be solved with normal logic or without a working knowledge of what the games' designers expected from you strategy-wise.

Spoiler alert: Here's an example. At one point the game wants you to find 'power boxes' scattered around a level. These are more or less analagous to the electric meter that every home (in the USA at least) has located on the outside of it. The game shows you one on the outside of a house-- blue with a voltage symbol on it. Then it says 'find three more'. So naturally I go looking all over the other houses. On the back of the buildings, like the one shown. But when that fails to turn up anything, I figure it's a game so they might be stuck on roofs or cornices or something. So I get on top of buildings and look. This turns up an additional one. I cannot find the final two anywhere. After way too much time spent looking, I crack open the guide.

One is located behind in an alcove INSIDE A WALL. The other is in a pit UNDER SOMEONE'S LAWN. What the fuck? Yeah, I could've found them... IF I'D SPRAYED THE ENTIRE LEVEL WITH THINNER... to uncover these hidden spaces. Another time I got stuck, and the answer this time was a hard-to-see route that again, YOU SPRAY WITH THINNER TO UNCOVER. After those two times, I never had another problem finding shit, because the answer is SPRAY EVERYTHING WITH THINNER. There are no hints from the NPCs, no 'fault' in the walls or ground like almost every other video game has in similar circumstances to keep you from hitting every possible spot on a stage. Nope. You pretty much have to thin ever goshdamn spot that looks like it can be thinned. And not only was this tedious, but it was antithetical to how I was trying to play the game. I was kind of playing like Mickey was unhappy that he caused the 'thinner disaster' that started the bad stuff, and created the villain. So I tried to be as positive and lean toward the constructive 'paint' end of things. Covering a whole level in thinner was just NOT what I wanted Mickey to do, purely from a character standpoint, let alone it's just dumb and arbitrary. End spoilers.

So I went to the guide twice to help me get on with the game. I'm not proud about it, but I maintain that I just couldn't get my head around what the game was after from me, the player. AFTER that, no difficulties. I didn't even try to do every quest that came my way. About 60% of the way through the game, the endless whining needs of the game world just stopped mattering. Some of the quests even 'improve' the ending cutscene, but I just didn't have the stamina.

The cutscenes were good, though I'll agree with the majority of critics that not having them fully voiced was odd. As much of a budget as this game obviously had, you'd think having Mickey and company talk would've been a no-brainer... at least during the cutscenes if not during all the in-game conversations. But no, it's all exclamatory oohs and ahs and the occasional grunt of effort. That's it.



Whatever the faults, the game's final act was pretty cool and I'm glad I stuck it out. That game becomes much more what I was hoping the whole game would be like actually. More focused on play skill with some timing on the jumps and peril from enemies while you are trying to perform other tasks. There's a fake-out with the final boss that works better than most final boss fake-outs.

I have NO desire to run through this game again and find more shit. I did do that for Brutal Legend and a few other games, but this game just emphasizes the wrong things for me. It certainly isn't the lack of violence or relative lack of difficulty. Not all games need to be as bloody as Mortal Kombat or as challenging as Ketsui. At first I welcomed the change of pace afforded by Epic Mickey. But it got old pretty quickly. It is hard for me even to say this game is great for little kids and their patience for fetch quests because the game is so damn long, and it does have that camera. My own kids like it, but they are nearly in middle school. I think younger gamers would get totally bogged down on the first run-through.

Unless they have the guide. But you didn't hear that from me.

Composed In The Baroque Mode

I’ve been sinking quite a few hours into Sting’s role-playing game, Baroque for the Nintendo Wii. One variant of the several, historically mutable, definitions of the word ‘baroque’ is: ‘adorned or decorated so heavily the original intent is unclear’.


That would definitely fit this video game and the choice for that title has to be intentional despite Japanese developers penchant for devising titles in English that are nonsensical or ill fitting. Baroque’s mechanics are so convoluted (though the controls are simple) and its narrative so obscure that, personally, I’m incredulous that somehow this thing actually got made at all, let alone was successful enough to warrant conversions to multiple platforms.

In the heyday of the Sega Saturn, the lion’s share of my purchases were Japanese import titles. Baroque first released in 1998 looked really interesting from the screenshots and descriptions. Very murky and mysterious and cool. But the Japanese-only language issue was a problem. I’d just gone through Samurai Spirits Bushidoretsuden, the Samurai Shodown RPG, with the help of a guide and that was pretty damn labor-intensive. Good game and fun, but a lot of work. I also had the Saturn’s Japanese-language Grandia in my to-play stack. I really didn’t want yet another guide-aided slog. So I didn’t buy it.

Flash forward nearly ten years, and I see copies of a game called Baroque at my local GameStop in both the PS2 and Wii sections. WTF? Cover art and screenshots looked sort of like the game I thought of as Baroque, but not as dark and evil. Yep, plot description seems to jibe with my memory. I looked up online to be sure. Sure enough Atlus USA published remakes of the RPG Baroque in the United States. Not only was the game now totally accessible to my English-speaking self, but a lot of additional information was also in the form of an online mini-community. And while trying to avoid outright spoilers, I was reading that Baroque’s graphics were brightened up, the mechanics for controlling and fighting modernized, but that it was still considered a grueling hardcore dungeon crawl (original Wizardry came to my mind reading that stuff).

I’m already on the fence about RPGs as it is. Given that I used to play pen & paper role-playing games, and used to work for Games Workshop (not an RPG company, but fantasy toy soldiers and a lot of its customers and staff are also role-players), you’d think the genre would form a regular part of my balanced breakfast, but not so.

My indulgence in RPGs has never been more than occasional. I’ve racked up far more minutes in action games with RPG elements; basic item management and leveling up as games such as Odin Sphere or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. But actual role-playing games I have played I can probably count without having to include my toes or other appendages. Two real reasons: one, I’m impatient with the learning curve and strategy aspects. While I like ‘exploring’ well-conceived game worlds, I want to just get to it. And I am (or believe I am) suck-ass at the more think-y aspects of many games including puzzles and tactics. Two, RPGs typically require A LOT of time put in. I play a lot of video games for a working parent, but sometimes it can be sporadic. I mostly go for short-burst pick up and play games that suit my lifestyle. So that’s why my ‘currently playing’ list is so dominated by arcade games like fighters and shooters. When I do have some kind of long-play title I’m working on, it’ll be an ‘action-RPG’ (SOTN mentioned above), or some first or third-person shooter, games that are not nearly as intricate and attention-demanding as RPGs are. I’m also pretty easily immersed. I don’t require dense, novel-trilogy levels of detail. I grew up as an arcade gamer and so it isn’t so easy for me to find the patience for games that really drag out at all, let alone to the levels many RPGs pad themselves out for maximum perceived value.

So weirdly, I am in some aesthetic ways someone who should like RPGs, but based on practical concerns I tend to shun them. Every now and then I'll get enough of a hankering. Most recently I played through Skies of Arcadia on the Dreamcast. I also bought the Virtual Console version of Chrono Trigger, like two weeks ago, but my kids have beaten me to that one for now. Baroque’s bizarre science and religion mash up story… revealed as your character continually cycles through death and rebirth…looked pretty intriguing. That the play style involved some ‘roguelike’ features; randomized dungeons, complete reset of characteristics and items upon death, just made it appealing to the so-called hardcore (okay, masochistic) side of my gamer self.

In any case, I chose to go with the Wii version. And the wiimote/nunchuk combination works fine with the game. The combat in Baroque is rather action game-y and the part of the game that resembles ‘standard RPG’ mechanics the least. You have to actually run around and fight in real-time. You can avoid enemies or circle around them to strike when they are vulnerable. My understanding is that this was tricky in the Saturn original. The dark graphics and the limitations of a first-person view made fighting difficult. Switching to third-person and clearing away the murk makes Wii Baroque much less frustrating, although it is still tough until you learn what you are doing. These fixes came at the expense of much of the game’s evil atmosphere. It may have made things difficult, but Saturn Baroque had a grim, grimy ambience that is lost to a shinier (but still fairly plain) new version. The soundtrack has been re-done too. The new one is fine to me, and quite fitting for the game, but players of the original frequently say it isn’t a patch on the Saturn’s moody industrial tunes. The story itself is largely unchanged.

Now having spent a considerable time with the game, I do find even the new version to be problematic. Most players used to other games would probably find the combat inflexible, the dungeons repetitive, and the dying/resetting aspect quite off-putting. None of that bothered me. The graphics, sound, music, and controls; none of these are cutting-edge, but they all came together for me personally.

Nope, my difficulty comes from the very heart of the game designers’ philosophy, and one of the things that made me want the game a decade ago. The way the mysterious plot and the in-game objectives are doled out.

As I said in the beginning, Baroque hides the particulars of its narrative points under layers and details. At first, you play and are trying to just figure out how to survive. Then you are trying to figure out how the items work or interact with each other. Then you are trying to figure out how to find or keep the best items. THEN you want to figure out what to do next. Apart from just going through the dungeons—what is the point? Well, NONE of this stuff is spelled out for the player. The manual has a lot of words in it but doesn’t really put the system together. The manner in which items are used for various effects (there’s no magic system) is discovered through trial, error, and numerous deaths. The non-player character dialogues are cryptic in the extreme, but critical to the game. All of this reflects the Japanese original quite accurately and effectively simulates your avatar who, in the story, has no memory and no idea what to do. Story and objectives are progressed by hearing dialogues, but it can frequently take many conversations with multiple characters just to dial in a single goal. And the whole time you are running around trying to find these conversations, you are highly vulnerable and still trying to work out other basic aspects of the game, like trying live long enough and not just die and repeat the upper few levels of the dungeon…again.

Most dialogues are triggered by items given to the speaker. There are hundreds of items in the game, with the player having a limited inventory. So again, a lot of running around and experimenting. This may be the first collect-a-thon type of game where collecting every goshdamn thing is integral to the story and not just a bonus for completists. You can complete a Mario game without finding all the stars, but in Baroque, you really have to pay attention to what you’ve acquired so you know what moves the game itself along. Add to THAT enemies and objects that can take your shit away from you… and yeah, a TON of work. And you MUST die multiple times. On paper that seems like a cool, hardcore concept, but in practice it isn’t so simple when the game severely limits what you will be able to keep with you the next time you resurrect. There IS a system for moving items around or hanging on them for your next incarnation, but the way its done is all part of the game’s strategic underpinnings… and while I wouldn’t say it is tedious exactly… it is a lot of work.

The game lets you save after each completed dungeon level. So I kind of found myself keeping a couple of save points running at all times, so that I could revert to a previous happier moment if something untoward happened, frequently the loss of a needed item rather than a death. I generally didn’t allow myself to ‘die’, as it were, until I’d gotten to the end of each dungeon run, where you have to either die or be absorbed by the game’s deity. Which usually furthers the narrative.

At this point, near the completion of the game, I’ve had numerous restarts from save points but my character himself is on his eleventh incarnation. From my understanding this is pretty fuckin’ speedy. A lot of players have logged many many more hours than I have. Here’s the thing, though. This is a game for completionists. For players who like to winkle out every detail and every nuance. It is for gamers who don’t mind plugging through the same hallways and rooms, because there’ll be some other weird item to find or slice of dialogue to hear. The game has extensive screens for tracking everything you find. I get the appeal of this, and I even find it compelling myself to a certain point… but it isn’t for me. I made time for an RPG, but I didn’t make time for the most demanding collect-a-thon I’ve ever heard of. So I did something I’m not proud of:

I used a guide.

Not just for one hint. Not just to find some devilishly well-hidden item. I mean I used it EXTENSIVELY.

It happens every now and then that I’ll hit up an online guide or walkthrough when I’ve reached my limit on trying to figure out an objective. That’s probably my most common reason. I can’t get my head around the various clues given in the game, if in fact there are any clues—some games as we know, don’t always work logically—so I hit up some online help to connect me to the next step. Less frequently I might look up tips or strategies to beating a troublesome level or boss. But in the main, I consider it pretty easy to get too much help and spoil the experience. So I try to be judicious. This is really the way most mature gamers use helps or walkthroughs, but it has been a bitch to explain to my son, who doesn’t understand how figuring shit out is ‘more fun’ than having your hand held through the whole thing. I’ve resorted to hazing and sarcasm to keep him away from guides.

If I’m going to use help in any significant way, I’ll buy the actual printed official book and use it AFTER I’ve completed whatever basic story mode or campaign is the backbone of the game. As I said, I’m not a collector-maniac in video games, but sometimes it is cool to continue to poke around for stuff. So for some games like Bayonetta, Vanquish, or Brutal Legend, I liked the game worlds so much that it was fun to buy a guide, and explore to get to previously unseen areas or find items or learn to play the game better or in unconventional ways. I don’t think looking under every rock and tree is loads of fun, but having the guides gives me a bit more incentive to spend some extra time in a game world without the tedium of endless clueless searching. I also frequently buy guides for fighting games. For some reason I just prefer my move lists in front of me in print, rather than pausing the game to look it up onscreen.

I avoided buying Saturn Baroque because I didn’t want to eke through it inch by inch using a guide to get around the Japanese…but that feels like what I did with the English version anyway! As I was playing, early on it became apparent I would not have the patience to work the details of this game out on my own. So I went to a walkthrough intending to just learn how the items, item combination, and inventory system worked.

But as I played and discovered that every single tidbit of information (necessary and otherwise) was going to be delivered in the same obtuse, miserly manner, I caved and started fishing out what my actual goals and objectives were. Who to talk to, where they were located, and what item to give them. I managed to avoid actual plot spoilers, so the central desire to find out what ‘the story’ was about remained for me, but that was about the only discovery aspect I got to experience. As much as I hate using a guide it is hard for me to say this actually ruined the game for me. I would like to stumble upon meaningful events on my own, but the amount of play time required for this was just more than I could possibly afford. So I sort of reduced the actual play mechanics to the same level of directness that almost every other RPG employs. ‘Take this magic book to the wizard who lives in the tower’ might be something an NPC would say to you in your traditional role-playing game, so I kinda forced that onto my game of Baroque. I’m not thrilled to admit it, but as compelling as the story is, I would NOT have stuck with the game if left entirely to my own devices. Life’s too fucking short.

In hindsight, I can now see a sort of ‘play formula’ that I could’ve used to get through the game without a guide to the objectives. It’d still require that the player know more about the basic mechanics than the manual or the game really tells you, but I could write up a breakdown that would leave all the surprises and discovery intact while giving the player a better shove out the gate. And in fact, some people have done this; they just aren’t quite ‘explanatory’ enough, I don’t think. Maybe I should start up a page on this blog for this purpose. ‘KOG’s Truly Useful Guide To Baroque’.

Here’s an odd final note: Like some RPGs (and a few other types of games), Baroque has a post-campaign scenario, an endgame. If a player completes these epilogues it’ll usually net you the complete, true, or additional ending. Chrono Trigger is pretty well known for this, allowing you to take your fabulously leveled-up protagonist back through the story, now able to take on the final boss at his earlier appearances in the game and so get a different ending, depending on where in the chronology you destroy him.

After Baroques’ credits roll, you strangely find yourself resurrected yet again. Ostensibly, this would help the collecto-freaks this game caters to continue to work at filling in all the item slots in the database, but supposedly if you accomplish such-and-such-and-such (yes, I used the guide to see if there were, in fact, any goals in this endgame) you actually bring some dead NPCs back to life and redirect the course of events again. The such-and-such-and such are actually pretty complicated, involving hunting down dozens of items and bringing them out of the dungeon over the course of multiple runs. So I figured that was pretty much all she wrote for my continued involvement. As I said, this game makes fanatic collecting a literal part of the game, and there’s this huge stretch ahead that I didn’t really want to indulge. But on a whim, I thought I’d just check out the dungeon one last time, seeing what was different now that I’d ‘saved the world’.

Not much was. BUT. At the bottom of the dungeon, I got the dialogue saying I’d triggered the final set of events. I didn’t DO the such-and-such-and-such that the guide says you need to do. I just played as well as I could and then went back in one more time for old times’ sake. So just to test if I really was in the final stretch, I entered the dungeon and headed right for the floor the guide indicated would house the first set of ‘final’ enemies. And there they were. I was loaded up on invincibility items (just in case) and it wound up that I needed them. Then I actually killed the creatures. So now I find myself somewhat jazzed at the idea of actually completing the full story arc, which seemed like a lark only a day ago. I don’t know how it happened, but I am only three or four dungeon runs from finishing the narrative aspects of the game. One run for each set of the final enemies. It seemed like I was going to have to resort to reading the dialogue online or watching Youtube clips of the final section, but I’m glad I held off on doing that.

In a day or two, the game should be done, and I’ll feel really fortunate that somehow, using a guide, I manage to play this intriguing, difficult game while divesting myself of all the bullshit in it that would’ve made me throw in the towel ages ago. Despite my guide-guilt I feel like it’s a really good game, but there’s so much about it that makes it difficult to just outright recommend.

(image kyped from Daily Record UK)

Game Of The Year 2010

Looks like alot of people online... at least in the dungeons where I travel... thought 2010 was a crappy year for games. I didn't find that to be the case personally. I'm not super-big on playing new games *just* as they come out, frequently splitting my time with games for older consoles or trying to play catch-up on my backlog.

Still and all, there were a lot of new first-run games that I bought and I enjoyed nearly all of them a great deal. Of particular note: Ketsui, Vanquish, Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu, Super Street Fighter IV, Limbo. All top tier games I've spent a lot of time with. Other notables that aren't really my thing, but that I've dorked around with and feel are really damn decent: Epic Mickey, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Kirby's Epic Yarn, Halo: Reach, Super Meat Boy.

I spent a lot of time in older games like Okami, Brutal Legend, Wolfenstein, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, Battle Garegga... easily as much or more than I did new games, so I might not be the best judge of the best game in a year of its release. There's so much I didn't get to. I probably should rename this (dubiously distinctive) award 'Game I Had The Most Fun Playing 2010' so that I could cast a wider net for titles that were more representative of my time. But that doesn't roll of the tongue or type quite as easily as Game Of The Year. So I'll stick with GOTY and do the traditional thing everyone else does and stick to just the year's releases.

This was a really good year for Cave fans (and a lot of general STG fans) with all the releases from that publisher. And I gotta say Ketsui and Daifukkatsu really impressed me. I still play both games frequently. Daifukkatsu isn't actually that old, but that I still need to give Ketsui 'one more go' months and months after its release is saying something. My love for Vanquish is the subject of a lot pedantry on this 'blog. It is the Xbox 360 game I am closest to getting all achievements for... and I have no real interest in achievements as a whole.

However, Game Of The Year for 2010 was undoubtedly Sin and Punishment: Star Successor for the Nintendo Wii. While I spend more time on my Xbox 360 (and probably my Sega Saturn) than I do the Wii, the little white box once again (second year in a row) comes up with that one game that leaps to the top. And once again it is a game with firm roots in a venerable arcade style of gaming. Where Muramasa last year was a platformer and loosely, a beat 'em up, S&P is a rail shooter. Muramasa added elements to the basic formuals of old games and coupled that with a stunning art style. S&P does more or less the same thing, adding dodging and melee elements to a game that could've been just like House of the Dead or Time Crisis.

I don't need to rehash what I've already said in another post about this game's details. It is simply awesome. And it just goes to show that you don't need super PS3 visuals, or a completely modern set of mechanics to make the best game. If there's anything particularly forward-thinking about this game, it is that it's probably the best use of a motion controller I've seen yet. The wiimote/nunchuk combo is perfect for it. The mechanics themselves aren't even new... they were clearly defined in the first S&P game that came out for the Nintendo64 years ago (now on the Virtual Console, go buy it). But those original controls took some serious getting used to, but on the Wii they're a breeze.

Given the legendary setpieces of the original S&P game, and the sheer scale of its onscreen action (pretty much developer Treasure's standard) it would've taken one hell of a game for the sequel to top the original. And that's exactly what was delivered.

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor is a must-own title for the Wii. And an swift shot to the balls of anyone who trots out the usual bullshit about the Wii being a suckass console. It has incredible visuals, blazing action, is difficult, hardcore, and a high point for the machine's standard controller.

Score that ten out of ten.

Wolf Time Is Over

So wow. I finally completed Okami.


I didn’t try to do all the side quests or collect all the items. I didn’t just do a full-tilt run through… there’s some extra gathering and grinding because I didn’t really know what would be necessary to complete the main objectives. Now that I know what the main narrative is, and have a good idea what abilities are needed to reach hidden items, I could do another run-through, and even without looking at a guide any further, complete it with a pretty high percentage.

But I’m not going to go through the game again. And here’s why: It is just too long.

It seems odd to me that this game has so many aspects of a long RPG (that most people would probably play through once, maybe trying to complete as much incidental stuff as possible) and many aspects of a collectible-heavy action game like Super Mario Galaxy (that folks might play over and over again to get better grades on each level and find all the shit).

Okami is another in a huge array of action-RPG games, the definition of which varies from gamer to gamer….with Okami seeming to skew heavily to the action side. You move and fight in real-time… and it is possible to run from one end of the kingdom to the other without using the overworld map. Like Odin Sphere or Muramasa your characters strength and survivability are greatly affected by the RPG elements, the items and leveling up. My problem with Okami is a lot like the issues I had with Odin Sphere. Even long action games tend to be a more distilled gaming experience compared to RPGs. When an action game tries to BE an RPG… in some misguided attempt to provide value for money or something… then it overstays its welcome. Okami took me fifty hours to complete. At 25 or 30 hours it would’ve been more than a good buy (play time-wise). If I’d tried to find all the items and do all the side missions I can’t imagine how inflated my time would’ve been. And Okami is beautiful and slick, but it ain’t THAT beautiful and slick.

If you’ve read any of my posts on Odin Sphere, my feelings about Okami would read very similarly. It is very beautiful, it has a wonderful soundtrack, and the story is cool and funny at times, with a lot of characters, some of which are quite memorable. So the aesthetics are firing on all cylinders. It doesn’t recycle scenery as much as Odin Sphere did, but other aspects of the game drag on and on and on. Boss fights in particular a hugely long AND recycled. You fight Orochi, the major villain of piece three times… and none of them are quick.

The whole game illustrates the adage ‘too much of a good thing’. You can get sick of you favorite food if you eat enough of it. Okami threw new missions, new characters, and new locations at me, and I still got sick of it after the first half. There have been a number of times I’ve tucked in with a long book, or a huge game and enjoyed it. But the mechanics of this game just speak to a more focused play experience than it turned out to be. When these guys formed a different company and produced Bayonetta I think they figured out what works. Bayonetta has A LOT in common with this game apart from the style of the artwork… but is much shorter and more focused, while still having aspects you can dig into and explore. You get graded on your performance for each battle in Okami, just like in Bayonetta. There’s a lot of skill and technique involved, choosing the correct weapon and practicing enough to get good and kill the monsters as quickly as possible, just like Bayonetta. There is no method to jump right back to a sub-level without replaying the whole campaign, which is decidedly NOT like Bayonetta. They’ve got this whole action/combat thing going on, but it is inextricably woven into this GIANT story.

Ever play one of those games where the objectives, steps towards objectives, or puzzles are so obtuse you’d swear they are in there just so you have to buy the guidebook? Yeah, Okami has some of those. Japanese mentality being different and all that, there were times when some of what the game wanted from me was just impossible to figure out. It might be a puzzle, or it might be ‘where to go next’ based on some obscure hint an NPC gave out. The game keeps a log of objectives and hints but some of it was just so oblique I couldn’t manage it. I probably looked at an online guide about five times through the course of the game. I’m not proud of that, but four of those times I went ‘how the fuck did they expect me to know that?’. So there you go.

I can’t say it’s a bad game. It looks like no other game and it is obvious that the designers put their all into it. I’m a game aesthetics whore, so there is a lot about Okami that really speaks to me. But, it kind of sucks for such a huge, beautiful, expansive game to make me say that I’m glad its over.

But I’m glad its over.

(image kyped from GameFAQs)

A Little True Life Story

So a couple of weeks back I’m in my local Gamestop. I went to put a copy of Halo: Reach Legendary Edition on pre-order for my son’s birthday. I go in, make my request, plunk down the deposit and then do a little looking around the store. I have some time to kill and I might turn up some hitherto unneeded video game gem in the used racks.
I’m at the bottom of the Xbox 360 section having to pick through the unalphabetized titles when I overhear this snippet of conversation between a recently-arrived customer and one of the pale, paunchy salespeople… and NOT paraphrased either:

GS Emp: So how about E3, huh? Excited about anything coming out?

Cust: Not so much. A few things maybe.

GS Emp: What about that Sony move? That’s going to be amazing!

Cust: It looks just like what the Wii already does.

GS Emp: But the Wii is a failed system.

Cue customer shrug.

So I stand up from where I’m shopping, turn to face Lord Dork of Gamestop and say:
‘On which planet of idiots is the Wii a failed system?’
Then THIS snippet of conversation took place:

GS Emp: Well… it just isn’t doing, uh, good.

Me: By whose standards? Where are you getting your information?

GS Emp: Well, if you go on the internet you can see it is failing.

Me: Where can you read that? Every ‘official’ source, online or in magazines, will tell you that the Wii is the runaway bestselling console. As a gaming unit, its sales are only exceeded by OTHER Nintendo products. The top selling spots for software are routinely occupied by Wii games. What the hell are you talking about? I’d really like to know.

GS Emp: Well, uh, in THIS store the Wii doesn’t do, um, good. We sell more Call of Duty.

Me: And you sold NO copies of Mario Galaxy 2? And you expect to sell no copies of Metroid: Other M? This single store in this podunk town is the yardstick by which Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo measure success?

GS Emp: Well, no, but customers I’ve talked to don’t like Wii games.

Me: Then if the Wii has FAILED at anything, it is catering enough to some specific gamer tastes like yours. And THAT my friend is what you will read on the internet when you read fanboys bashing the Wii, if you’ve got an ounce of discernment. That THEIR tastes in games don’t seem to be well-represented on that console. And maybe yours aren’t either.

GS Emp:…

Me: You can like what you like and you can hold your opinions. But just blanket badmouthing makes you look stupid and it certainly isn’t what the suits up at Gamestop Nazi Central want you to be saying, is it? IS IT? The biggest segment of your customer base… and you’re badmouthing the system they plunked money down for? Whether you like it or not, what kind salesman does that make you?

GS Emp:…

Me: It makes you a shitty salesman. It makes you a great frothing fanboy, but a shitty salesperson. It’d make my day if this guy (pointing to original customer) was a secret shopper for Gamestop Nazi Central. Dude, turn in your gamer card and go back to nerd school.

Cue me walking out of store with the other staffer, the one who took my deposit, just staring slack-jawed.

Jiminy Christmas people. It is the games that make the systems. Even for the hardcore, the Wii has great games on it. But if you don’t think so, keep yourself from sounding the fool by acknowledging your bullshit is opinion and not fact.

If there’d been some Mom with her kid in there, shopping for a Wii game, when this dork had spouted off, then I probably would’ve gotten mean.

Yep.

In a year with a lot of good games... many of which I probably won't get to PLAY this year owing to my extensive backlong... Sin and Punishment: Star Successor is at the top of the running for my Game of the Year.

My son recently got Lost Planet for a bargain rate at Gamestop. It has all the flash and sheen of a typical shooty Xbox 360/PS3 game. He's really liking it especially since he hasn't been allowed to have all that many violent games... and y'know, he's an eleven year old boy so he likes him some violence.

Anyway. After he'd had a round of THAT, I put in Sin and Punishment for the wii. Now everyone knows the wii isn't going to match the Xbox 360 graphically, but what Treasure has managed in this game is still pretty damn amazing. There's ten times as much shit being chucked around at any given second compared to Lost Planet and it still has a lot of polish and detail, especially the bosses.

It isn't about poking around at your own pace amongst uber-realistic sets, it's about running and flying through stages where with all the incoming attacks you are shooting, dodging and slashing (sometimes all at once seemingly) 'til you're hand cramps up around the wiimote.

My son seeing this said 'enh, it's okay'. So I sent him to bed with no dinner.

Agree with me or starve.

These Guys Are Insane

http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/sinandpunishment/vol1_page1.jsp

...and they make insane games. I cannot wait to finally be able to play S&P 2.

I've had to wait because I don't have a Japanese wii... though there's some temptation to get one since Milestone's Ilvello was canceled for US release.

Bring on the Sin and Punishment!

(pic from Play.tm)