Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=20https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=231 Well, I finished the game with the guy character on the default difficulty setting. Very standard anticlimactic ending - the designers clearly were de-emphasizing the story in favour of Blowing Things Up In Interesting Ways, a decision which I must agree with in this case. The final level, though not excessively difficult, is very impressive, but I won\'t spoil it here. The real payoff is that the game appears to give extra weapon unlocks as a reward for beating all the levels on a given difficulty. EDF2 also rewards \"sequence breaking\" of a sort - whenever you unlock a level by beating the previous one, it\'s immediately available at all difficulty levels. Using this, it is possible to pick out some of the easier levels and beat them on harder game modes, as doing so will generally unlock higher-quality weapons. There\'s a catch to this, though - some levels, particularly on higher difficulty, practically mandate that you have to have a certain amount of HP in order to clear them (or mad skillz). Hence you would probably have to grind lower levels for \"armor\" powerups (which increase your max HP). This isn\'t a problem, as there are so many levels that just going through the whole game on Easy and Normal will give scads of armor - more than enough for Hard level, which will then give enough for Hardest, etc. Other levels, however, are really dependent on the chosen weapon - especially one particular early level which features a cameo appearance by a single very famous monster. The creature\'s AI is scripted to attack a bunch of houses at the beginning of the level, so you can get free hits on him. With a strong enough weapon, it is possible to kill him before he can even attack you. On harder levels, you just need a stronger weapon - but it so happens that by clearing a later level on Hard mode, I managed to unlock a ludicrously powerful short-range weapon, and so I cleared this level on Inferno mode (the hardest available) without coming under attack at all, and unlocked some more very cool guns. Rather broken, yes, but this is the sort of game where balance can take a back seat without destroying the fun factor. I\'m planning to start work on a weapon FAQ sometime... Wed, 21 Jun 2006 02:05:56 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=231&iddiary=774https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=231I really like this game. I've just encountered a new type of enemy, which appears to be a variation on the old tripods (quadrupeds, actually). These ones are much nastier - in addition to having many of the same attacks as the old ones, only souped up, their legs are flexible and made up of a chain of segments. (Very cool idea, and impressive for a budget game.) On occasion one of the bastiches raises his leg up, and then it's time to duck and cover lest you get impaled on the nasty spike on the bottom of his foot. Oh, and they can take a lot more punishment too - although I found that the standard homing missile launcher, when spammed, will take them down without TOO much trouble. ("Mr. Itano says hello, punk.") So I unlocked a more advanced weapon today, the Goliath R rapid-fire rocket launcher, and immediately decided to try it out on one of the earlier levels on Hard difficulty. (Which is pretty hard in general.) In this level you have to take out these two giant UFOs which keep spawning more giant ants and spiders into the city. The spiders are pretty lethal on Hard mode, because the webs they shoot are tough to avoid, and on Hard they shoot more of them at a go, so the damage can really rack up. Transcript follows. - Mission start. Decided to go for the UFOs first. - Tested the new launcher on the UFOs. It takes 3 salvos (each salvo lasting about 4 seconds, with a 1.5 second reload time between salvos) to kill one UFO, and the range is ridiculously long. Knocked both UFOs out before even making contact with the enemy. - Made contact with the enemy. Proceeded to get on hoverbike and run like a scared little girl. (Apologies to any scared little girls reading this.) - Noticed that the game puts you on the roof of the hoverbike when you get out of it, for a very good reason. If you're travelling slowly enough, you can surf on the hoverbike while it coasts to a stop, launch a salvo of rockets (or hand weapon of your choice) at your pursuers, jump in again and take off, and repeat ad nauseum. - Noticed that colliding with things in the hoverbike can damage it seriously. Note to self: be a safe driver. - Proceeded to spam rockets into the chasing spiders/ants, run, repeat. Noticed that the blast radius of the new launcher is pretty weak - not that good for crowd control. - When bored, proceeded to spam rockets into the surrounding buildings for grins. Said procedure also took out a few spiders. - Noticed an oil tank farm on the edge of the city. Hatched a Plan. - Whittled the enemies down to one last remaining spider. - Accidentally crashed the hoverbike into a tank, totalling it. - Proceeded to drive the tank around the city, picking up all the powerups dropped by the enemy, with the spider in chase. Blew up a few (more) buildings for grins. (Note: EDF2 kind of sucks in one regard: the powerups - which often contain unlockables - MUST be collected before you clear a mission; there's no "auto-collection" function.) There are a LOT of buildings in that city. - Planned to lure the spider into the oil tank farm and blow it up. - Drove the tank over some debris and accidentally flipped it upside down. So much for Plan A. Hatched Plan B. - Got out of tank and lured spider to stand next to tank. (This was a bit tricky, because the spiders actually jump around most of the time rather than walking/crawling.) - Jumped into the (inverted) tank and fired the main gun straight into the ground at point-blank range, blowing both tank and spider to smithereens. (Note: When a vehicle blows up, the occupant emerges unharmed.) Mission accomplished. Fri, 16 Jun 2006 12:40:02 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=231&iddiary=771https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=231Just got this game today. Unfortunately, since I stumbled across it in a fairly ill-informed import shop, I ended up paying full price for what is normally a budget game. Fortunately, the game's worth it. It starts out on a very strong note. In the first level, you (assuming you have chosen the default settings) find yourself standing next to a tank on a bridge over a river. On the far bank, a seething mass of *something* is crawling over everything - buildings, people, and so on. So you jump into the tank, like any other shooter player, and squeeze off a couple of shots with the main gun... ...And realize, a moment later, that you have just blown up a bunch of giant ants and demolished Big Ben. At its core, "Earth Defence Force 2" is a standard run-n-gun third-person shooter, made on a budget... but for what it is, it's excellent. The game is simple, and usually amounts to "destroy all enemies to win the stage". Even within this constraint, the stages somehow don't really get stale. Perhaps it's because they usually end pretty fast, and new weapons are doled out on a fairly regular basis. The story is pretty standard. Aliens are trying to invade the Earth (again), and they're starting by dropping tons of giant mutant insects in to soften things up. Against these hordes stands the Earth Defence Force... in other words, the player (or players - the game supports co-op mode), armed with a couple of guns, the odd vehicle or jetpack, and... well, that's about it. As stated, each level amounts to "blow all the bad guys up before they do the same to you", but it hasn't gone stale on me yet after 4-5 hours of play. The levels are worth a mention. They're huge cityscapes - we're talking Katamari Damacy huge - and virtually everything is destructible. Furthermore, unlike in the GTA series, when you blow up a building, it stays blown up even if you go off to the other end of the level and come back. New enemies appear every couple of levels, so things never get TOO boring. Thus far I've encountered giant ants (who have a nasty kick, and can spit acid), giant flying ants, giant spiders (who jump around and shoot webbing that slows you down and damages you), small UFOs which spam laser bolts, larger UFOs which spawn the aforementioned creepy-crawlies, alien tripods suspiciously reminiscent of the ones from "War of the Worlds" and just about every FPS since Half-Life 2, and... well... a boss who is instantly recognizable, but I won't spoil it for you. Apparently I've only cleared 13 or 14 of the 70-odd levels... ...And the equipment at your disposal is similarly inspired. The game has two characters: a standard ground trooper (male) in a uniform which could have come straight from a B-grade alien invasion movie, and a female Special Forces trooper who wears a jetpack (and a skirt, natch). Whilst this does reinforce the usual gender stereotypes, I find the female soldier to be more interesting in a fight - there's definitely something to be said for aerial mobility in this game, and her weapons are also pretty different from the guy's. To balance the fact that she can fly, the guy can drive vehicles. Unfortunately for him, the vehicles aren't much to write home about - there is a stock hoverbike, a stock chopper and a stock tank, of which only the tank is actually worth very much in a fight. (The bike is admittedly useful for zipping around the huge levels, especially in missions where you have to chase down a specific target.) Each of the characters has a different arsenal of weapons; the box claims there are about 140 (!) different weapons. Whilst some of these are straightforward upgrades of others, there's a lot of variety here - the three different versions of the standard assault rifle I've unlocked, for instance, handle quite differently from each other. Some weapons are pretty unique - the female trooper has a very short-ranged weapon which spams a bunch of low-damage laser beams in all directions, kind of like a really deadly sparkler, and is great for strafing runs - while others are just over the top. Take the guy's Sky Turtle Beta homing missile (yes, that's its name), for instance: it's so incredibly slow that you could probably outrun it by driving the tank, but when it blows up, it can take several medium-sized houses with it. I suppose you could call this the console version of Serious Sam, but that wouldn't really be doing it justice; the scope of this thing is just amazing, and it goes beyond many full-price titles in terms of what it delivers. I'm very, very impressed.Sun, 11 Jun 2006 12:33:22 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=231&iddiary=767https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=219Haven't had much time to play this recently. 5-1, Meiling's standard attack, is easily one of the more difficult missions in the first half of the game. I just managed to clear it for the second time (first time was on the office pc). The interesting thing here is that you can exploit a bug in her AI: whenever you hug the edges of the stage, it messes with her movement and targeting. However, this time I tried it without exploiting the bug, and it was actually easier. See, she also has a spread attack which is quite a bit easier to dodge if you aren't restricting yourself to hugging the edge. There's a moral somewhere in this, but I'm not sure what it is exactly...Sun, 11 Jun 2006 11:51:00 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=219&iddiary=766https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=219Cleared 8-6 during my lunch break a couple days ago. This is the first Level 8 pattern I've cleared, although I have most of Level 9 in the bag already. Primarily 8-6 is an endurance card; it doesn't require extreme skill or clever tricks, but consistent skill under sustained pressure. I need just 8 more cleared patterns to unlock the final level... The rest of L8 is pretty tricky, but I can probably go back and finish off Level 5 and 7 - I have one pattern missing from each of those. I may have to attempt level 10, but I've tried all of those before and they all seem pretty darn deadly. Tue, 25 Apr 2006 04:58:11 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=219&iddiary=729https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=219I just re-installed this due to getting a new PC and started playing through it again. Shoot the Bullet is yet another independent game by the prolific entity known variously as ZUN or "Team Shanghai Alice", and is the 9.5th (heh) game in the Touhou/Shrine Maiden series. Since Perfect Cherry Blossom (the 7th game) there have been 4 releases: TH7.5 - Immaterial and Missing Power TH8 - Imperishable Night TH9 - Phantasmagoria of Flower View TH9.5 - Shoot the Bullet Fun titles, eh? Anyway, the integer-numbered games are the more straightforward shooters (although TH9 was slightly off the beaten path), and the ".5" games, of which there have been two so far, are generally considered spin-offs. TH7.5 was a fighting game of the Marvel vs. Capcom persuasion, developed in collaboration with another indie studio. ...Which brings us neatly back to Shoot the Bullet (StB for short). StB is a brilliantly clever and innovative take on the concept of a "shooting game", in that your shooting is done with a camera. No, this isn't Fatal Frame. At first blush, in fact, it looks similar to your garden-variety shooter, until you realise that you can't actually shoot (in the usual gaming sense of the word). Instead, pressing the fire button causes a rectangular viewfinder to appear over the game screen, whereupon you can then release it and "take a picture". (Never mind that you sometimes get your own character in the picture. Suspension of disbelief is wonderful.) So what sort of game effect does picture-taking have? Well, StB isn't structured like a traditional shooting game; instead, it's divided into about a hundred (give or take a few) different mini-challenges, each of which is a specific "boss attack" or series thereof. In other words, when you start a challenge, a boss shows up and begins a particular attack pattern, which will usually last throughout the challenge and will often intensify as time passes. Your job is to take a set number of photos of the boss - the number depends on the challenge. Getting hit at all, or letting the time run out (there's a 2-3 minute timer for each challenge) will immediately cause you to fail. Sounds easy? Well, it isn't. For one thing, your camera is an antiquated model, so after every shot, you need to rewind the film (which is automatic and takes roughly 10 seconds) before taking another. You can go into a "quick-rewind" mode where your film rewinds much more rapidly, but in this mode your movement speed is incredibly slow. For another, the viewfinder usually appears over your character. If the boss isn't in the viewfinder, you could try moving your character closer before shooting - but that will often expose you to severe danger. The alternative is to use the "zoom mode" - that is, to hold down the shoot button. This has the effect of slowing down time and allows you to use the movement keys to move the viewfinder - of course, your character is immobile in this state. The catch is that the viewfinder begins rapidly shrinking when you're in zoom mode, and when it reaches a specified minimum size, the shutter automatically triggers, whether or not you managed to get the boss in the picture. And then, if you failed, you have to rewind and try again - while under fire. The bright spot here is that even if you don't get the boss in the picture, any bullets you capture in the viewfinder when you shoot (hence the title) will disappear, allowing you to use the camera like a "smart bomb" to get out of tight spots. Another element which deserves mention is the scoring system. This gives bonuses for a whole bunch of things, including (1) making sure the subject is centred in the picture, (2) managing to get yourself in the picture as close to the subject as possible, (3) taking a picture while flying dangerously close to a bunch of bullets, (4) taking a picture at "just the right time" (the game gives you an indicator of when that time is), and so on. However, the main scoring element is "how many bullets you get in the picture", which obviously encourages risky behaviour. The game is positively brilliant, even though I kind of suck at it. The mini-challenge model is great for quick breaks, and the patterns are all different and mostly very interesting to beat, with a good mix of "memorization" patterns and "skill" ones. There are enough easy patterns to keep the game interesting for a beginner, too. Currently I've managed to unlock most of the levels on my office PC (don't tell my boss!), except for the last set. On my home PC, I just started, and managed to clear the first 3 sets of levels. The game's available from the usual sources - www.paletweb.com and www.himeyashop.com . Unfortunately, no demo is available. Understanding of Japanese is helpful but not required. Summary: If you only buy one Japanese indie game EVER, this is probably a pretty good pick. Oh, and some guy with a lot more time/skill than me posted some videos of the more difficult bits in the game on Daily Motion: http://www.dailymotion.com/DracilWed, 19 Apr 2006 12:20:35 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=219&iddiary=721https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=207I'd have posted this earlier but for the fact that I was too involved in playing the game to blog about it. In short, this game is absolute genius. Even if you don't normally like rhythm games, or can't read Japanese, or both, it's pretty damn amazing. The premise behind the game is that there's a squad of male cheerleaders (which are far more common in Japan than in the West) who go around Tokyo helping people in trouble. When someone yells for help, they show up and do a song-and-dance routine to motivate the unfortunate individual. This is where the player comes in. The game is kind of a mix of a rhythm game and Virtua Cop - if that makes any sense - in that the player has to tap "targets" on the screen to the beat of the music. It sounds straightforward at first, but can get pretty hectic. As the beats are tapped out (with cymbal and whistle effects), the Ouendan go through their routine in the background of the lower screen, while the upper screen shows how the motivate-ee is doing. Naturally, there is a life bar (representing the morale of your client), and if it runs out, the game is over. The way in which the stylus and touch-screen are used lends the game a very tactile feel, unlike similar games like Amplitude. The real genius of Ouendan is in the way that it meshes a layer of narrative with the standard rhythm-game format. Each song corresponds to a particular client and their own little mini-story, which can range from mundane (helping a student pass his university entrance exam) to wacky (helping a pair of slacker cops defeat an invasion of alien robots) to all-out bizarre (travelling in time back to ancient Egypt to help Cleopatra go on a diet). The visuals look like they could have been pulled straight from a retro manga, only with colour, and the comic-book style makes the stories immediately obvious even if you don't understand Japanese. The difficulty curve of the game is pretty near perfect; I'm not good at rhythm games, and yet the game managed to guide me all the way to finishing the last level on the highest difficulty setting. There's a slight caveat: the last level on each difficulty setting is significantly harder than the rest of the levels, so be prepared for a bit of pain if you're not great at rhythm games. Still, it's engaging enough that you WILL want to finish the whole thing. If you can't stand J-rock or wacky stuff, the game may not appeal as much to you, but I found it to be amazing. This is probably the best game I played in 2005, and may well gain that honour for 2006 as well. Three minor flaws do exist. First, it's almost impossible to see the little animations which play in the upper screen during gameplay, as one's attention is fully occupied by the lower screen. Second, the game only has about 15 songs, each with 4 difficulty levels, so it's relatively short. It is, however, worth coming back to, both to better your score as well as because it's simply great fun. Finally, at times some of the icons on the touchscreen may be obscured by the player's own hand. Using a longer stylus or some similar implement is one way to work around this problem, although practicing the song will often allow you to predict when those beats appear and shift your hand to compensate. To see a gameplay video in Flash (note: this is on Hard difficulty; Normal isn't nearly as tough), head to http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ds/aosj/175r/index.html and click the red button at the bottom. Summary: I can't recommend this game highly enough. It could well be the most fun I've ever had with my DS.Sat, 07 Jan 2006 01:31:36 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=207&iddiary=680https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=150More good stuff, more bad stuff, and more un-ugly stuff. The good: Episode II's battle system remains fun, and the fights are really tightly designed. The boss fights are especially good. When was the last time you got white knuckles whilst playing a turn-based game? Also, I think I've become used to the weird juxtaposition of realistic characters and mediocre animation. Either that, or the animators finally realized they couldn't slack off any more. The bad: The mecha (E.S.) sequences are poorly thought out. Sure, the fights are pretty good (as noted above), but at the same time the E.S. system feels somewhat like a dumbed-down version of the regular battle system (although it does have a few little extras that make it interesting). The field maps are excruciating because the designers made the E.S. move like they're on Valium. Reality check, Monolith: these are not Mechwarrior 'mechs. They are supposed to move FAST. As it stands, my grandmother could run faster than one of these things. The un-ugly: (1) One particular event during a boss battle made me, as well as a friend who was watching me play, burst out laughing incredulously. It's probably the coolest boss attack ever. (Thankfully, my party survived.) (2) If Gran Turismo is "car porn", then many of the cutscenes of this game have to be classified as "mecha porn". They're that good, which makes the sedate nature of the actual E.S. battles even more sad. Sat, 09 Apr 2005 03:33:44 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=150&iddiary=468https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=150So I take back (partially) what I said about the challenge level. It's at least average, with the regular enemies being a little more challenging (relative to player's expectation) than the bosses. The dictum "know thy enemy" is even more important than ever. Even the regular enemies are virtually invincible if you keep hitting them with the wrong type of attack, and even if you use the correct attack type, the battle is likely to drag on a bit unless you've really got a good handle on the game's timing system. I cleared about half (?) of a 'dungeon' sequence today. Thank the developers for halfway save points, because I didn't want to play too long (work commitments :( ). The monsters here are pretty tough, but it becomes a lot easier once you have a handle on their weak points and Break sequences. There's quite a bit of backstory going on which has cleared up some of the mysteries of Episode I, but I fully expect more questions to be generated as the game progresses.Wed, 30 Mar 2005 18:23:37 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=150&iddiary=460https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=150I've just gone through the first few hours of this game. Thoughts: - If you haven't played Episode I, you're likely to be quite lost. There's a quick synopsis of the story so far available early on, although inattentive players might miss it. However, the setting of the game is so detailed that even the story synopsis isn't going to help matters much. I find Episode II's story a lot less abstruse than I's; this is not to say that it is simple, but rather that it seems more consistent, more significant, and by virtue of these two qualities, more comprehensible. - The new battle system is fairly involved. I really like it a lot. Basically, it requires you to set up fighting game-esque "combos" across multiple characters in a turn-based format. If you do it right, it's possible to take down even bosses with relative ease. The challenge level seems just about right, leaning a bit towards the easy side. - Similarly, the gameplay has been streamlined right down to the bone. There are no shops or inns, and you don't get money for killing enemies. Characters cannot use equipment. This simplicity is very, very refreshing (IMO), and doesn't significantly detract from the interest factor of the game - instead, it makes Episode II less of a spreadsheet and more of, you know, a game than its predecessor. - Once again, "dungeon" sequences in Episode II are an exercise in resource management: conserving your party's MP, HP and items until you make it to the next save point. Good play and a certain amount of risk-taking are rewarded, and mistakes are accordingly punished. It's an old formula, but it works. Now, on to the down sides: - Character development has been cut down significantly. The uniqueness of each character is defined by their starting stats and their available attacks - plus a couple of extras in some cases. All characters have access to the same open skill tree, and start out at the same point in skill terms. This is somewhat disappointing, after the fairly robust skill tree of I and innovations in other games such as FFX (which boasts one of the best character-development systems in the genre). The flexibility of the system, however, redeems it almost completely; it's really nice to be able to tailor each character's skill set to your preferences. - The graphics are better, but the visuals are poorer. Allow me to explain. Most console-RPG fans have already heard about how Episode II uses more "realistic" character models, in contrast to the stereotypically anime-styled models of Ep I. The big problem with this is that the quality of the animation work has not improved. Stilted or jerky motions are often present. Although they were also there in Episode I, the abstractness of the character design in that game meant that they didn't jump out at the player as much. With Episode II's more realistic character designs, it's blindingly obvious when the animators drop the ball - and they do that a lot. - The one minigame I played in the first few hours is positively dumb. I'm not expecting much, since Episode I's minigames were, for the most part, either pretty poorly done or completely unconnected to the game. - MOMO's voice still annoys me. It could be worse, true, but I found myself wishing for an option like that one in Growlanser which allowed you to turn off specific characters' voices. A Japanese-language option would have been nice too, although that would probably have inflated the game to 3 discs. Taken as a package and based on my experiences so far, I'd definitely recommend Episode I and II over, say, the two FFX games. Still, that's not saying a lot considering that (1) I found FFX-2 to be an unfortunately joyless endeavour, despite its designers' best efforts to the contrary, and (2) the Xenosaga series does little to address the more egregious and deep-seated problems of the genre as a whole. Sun, 27 Mar 2005 21:33:09 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=150&iddiary=457