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Aug 20th, 2012 at 11:21:19 - Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (PS2) |
Wah one more entry for this weekend since I started SMT: Nocturne yesterday. Today was a public holiday so I spent a little while getting into it. I just played and quit Digital Devil Saga 2 a month ago and I kinda wanted to get to Nocturne while the Shin Megami Tensei world was fresh in my head. Good call. I think I had all this shit memorized when I was playing Persona 3 a few years ago, and I think it's pretty much back. This game is a lot more similar to Persona 3 than Digital Devil Saga, which I like very much. Basically in DDS, you didn't collect demons or do any kind of fusion or use them in any way -- you were demons, and you fought the demons. In Persona 3 (I forget exactly how it worked), you collect the demons and use them in some form or fashion, maybe equip them or something. In Nocturne, you collect and fuse them and they form your party, which thus far is awesome.
You acquire demons in a few different ways. One major one is through talking to them in battle. This is really neat, and it's way deeper than just talking. You can initiate conversations (and do so in different ways with different demons and/or your main character depending on their conversation skills, like Seduce and Flatter and whatnot) or demons will initiate conversations, oftentimes if you've almost killed them and they're begging for their lives. Sometimes when they beg you not to kill them, they'll say "haha, sucker!" and run off or keep attacking. Other times they'll join if you show mercy. If you initiate the conversation, they'll be more or less receptive depending on a bunch of factors, including race of the demon, phase of the moon, conversation skills your party has, racial makeup of the party, etc., etc. It sounds really complicated. Then asking them to join you isn't a simple matter of them answering yes or no. They'll ask you for items and money, sometimes multiple times (hmm, that's still not enough -- give me 100 monies; just one more healing item!). You can comply or not. If you don't you piss them off, and if you comply sometimes they'll end up still saying no thanks and giving you some other item in return for the 2 or 3 rounds of things you gave them, or they'll continue attacking you, or they'll run away. This is how you need to get items in the beginning of the game before you can fuse.
After you open the fusion system, then you can fuse two demons (or more, depending) to obtain a new stronger demon. This new demon will inherit some skills from both of its 'parents' (which is more or less difficult depending on its affinities, i.e., a demon that is weak to fire will have a hard time learning a fire skill from its parents). I remember this being how it worked in Persona 3. In Nocturne, there are several other options to add to the complexity of fusions, such as fusing when the moon is brightest to add a 'sacrifice,' which is adding another demon whose experience gets added to the 'child' of the parents, so that the child is however many levels stronger than it would normally be. Fusing a regular demon with an element demon results in the next stronger version of that regular demon's race. Fusing a regular demon with a mitama does something too but so far all the mitamas are higher lever than me so I haven't been able to buy one to try (you can only handle demons who are your level or lower). There are some other special elements to fusion that I haven't discovered yet but that I've seen in a strategy guide (more on why I was looking at a strategy guide later).
I've mentioned the moon level a few times. Like DDS's sun power, Nocturne has moon power (I don't think Persona 3 had anything like this). The moon power goes up from 0 (new) to 8 (full) and back down again, and repeats. 4 is half. This just constantly changes as you walk and it affects a ton of things, mostly when it's full. When the moon's power is full, it's like impossible to run from enemies. They won't talk to you because they're just like spazzed out from the moon. Some of your skills are dependent on moon power (and enemies' skills?). Mysterious treasure chests yield special and rare items when the moon is full. I'm proud of myself for figuring that out. Now whenever I see a mysterious chest (which is a special type of chest), I just run circles until the moon gauge fills up before I loot it and it, so far, has always yielded a gem, which rules. You use gems to buy elements and mitamas for fusion. And you gain the sacrifice fusion ability on full moons, but fusion during full moons is risky because the failure rate increases. Failing a fusion is no fun, as I recall from Persona 3 since you basically waste the two demons you fused. Save before fusing!
Ok so a couple things about the party. Your party is 3 demons and yourself. You can stockpile up to 8 demons and switch them in and out. If you want a 9th demon, too bad. You have to fuse some or trash one to make room for a new one. I had this complaint in DDS where it was easy to destroy the effectiveness of your party because skills in the mantra grid took forever to level up and were super expensive to get the higher level ones, and the game started killing off my characters which turned my plans to dust. Persona seems to (seems to, fingers crossed!) avoid this problem because if you find yourself missing a skill, you just go find or fuse a demon who has it. Not bad! So whereas DDS killed my electricity character in the story, if it were Nocturne, I could have gone and recruited an electricity-using demon in battle and solved my problem without hours of grinding. Since you can have 8 demons, you can have a lot of bases covered all the time. And you're constantly fusing and upgrading demons, so you've just got to be mindful of not letting any of those bases slip under the radar. Like right now I have a pretty decent party for what I need. I have a couple examples of how great the demon-party customizability is.
(1) Fire Sewers - I entered an area that an NPC warned me had a lot of poisonous monsters. Turns out they didn't use that much poison, but I did find out that the two most plentiful demons were weak to fire (when you get attacked by 6 enemies, you need to know these things!). The problem was I had no fire-users; therefore, I couldn't exploit their weaknesses at all; therefore, I got my ass kicked and only barely survived a few battles before running right back out of the dungeon. I remembered I'd previously had and fused a fire-using demon into something else. So I went back to where I remembered finding it before and recruited it. Then I went to the Cathedral of Shadows (where you fuse demons) and fused it into an even better demon who had a fire affinity, so inherited the parent's fire skill, and was set to learn another one. Then by chance I happened to have two more demons I wanted to fuse who yielded a different fire-affinity child with a basic fire spell. So voila! Two very useful fire-using demons all of a sudden. I went back to the sewers armed and ready and had a much better time.
(2) El Matador - This example is only a thing because I died due to the one downside of the game thus far -- game over on main character death. NOOO! I really hate this rule, especially in punishing RPGs like this, where it is VERY EASY to get killed before you get a chance to act. Example: ambushed by more than a few enemies (this is basically a death sentence); another example: enemies at any given time attacking your main character in succession is also a death sentence if they exploit a weakness (using fire against your fire-weak character). I died once in two hits (a critical on a weakness and another physical attack). You can't plan for that. I mean, in the broadest sense you can reduce some risk, but on a moment to moment basis, once the enemy begins its round, if they decide to all attack the main character, and especially exploit weaknesses, even if he's fully healed, he's going to die and you'll get game over. It's very disheartening. Ok, so this example is actually in multiple parts...
Part 2 of example (2) Return of El Matador - El Matador was hard as hell. The game surprised me with this special boss battle that I couldn't escape and wasn't ready for, hadn't had a save spot in forever, wasn't properly healed, etc. He only has a few attacks. One is a basic single-target physical attack and the other is the party-wide force attack. When I fought him, I had one character who was weak to force, another who drained force, and the other two neutral. Pro and con there. Con is one character, my healer, got blasted every round. Pro is that when your resistance is drain-level the attacker loses two turns. So if he cast his force spell first, he didn't get a second attack like usual because the drain makes him lose it. I guess drain outweighs the weakness of my healer. A weakness adds a turn for the attacker otherwise. Also, at the beginning, he casts something that makes his agility super high, so it was literally impossible for me to hit him. I missed 100% of the time. Luckily one of my characters had a spell that raises my own agility, so once I figured this out I could counter his spell and hit him. So every round he'd slam me with his force attack, and I struck this scary balance between healing, keeping my healer's mana refilled with my main character using items, and attacking with the other two. Eventually he died, but that fight sucked. So another 15 minutes after the fight, and before I found a save point, I experienced one of those super ridiculous and impossible-to-prevent main character deaths (weakness crit + weakness crit + weakness crit or some nonsense). I just laugh at these now because they've happened a handful of times already and they're so freaking stupid. So the next time I play I'll have to fight El Matador again. But this time, I've got a hell of a plan to use my demons AND my character's matagama to great effect.
Part 3 of example (2) - Return to El Matador - The problem in the fight was just getting hit so damn hard, which caused my healer to have to heal every round, thus running him out of mana and causing my main character to have to use an item to replenish the healer's mana every other round, and usually to use a healing item to supplement the healing spell. So, I need to reduce damage by that force spell. I could take out my force-weak healer. I do have another demon who only has the single-target healing spell instead of the party spell, but not being crit every time might make that a viable option. If I want to I can even go recruit and fuse a perfectly tailored demon who can heal and is resistant to force magic. I love that I can do that if I want to.
The other thing I can do concerns boosting my main character's defenses. Demons learn skills just by leveling up and inherit them through fusion. The main character learns skills by equipping and leveling up with what are called matagamas, little parasite things that give him different affinities and skills. I know I've got one that gives me force magic. I haven't looked but I assume it also makes you resistant to force magic. I could put that on and change my affinities and weaknesses (which in this case would be from neutral to force to strong against force, maybe even drain if I'm lucky -- then I'd have two characters draining and thus not needing healing). So hopefully with all these options, these wonderful, glorious, lovable options which Digital Devil Saga so glaringly lacked, I will have an easier time with El Matador the second time around.
Of course, nothing I can do will prevent me from getting ambushed and one-shot after I beat El Matador again.
I've really enjoyed Nocturne so far and feel it makes up for much of what annoyed me about DDS. I expect this is a really difficult game, and that's good. I need a challenge to keep me occupied at home on the weekends. Kingdoms was way too easy. So in a sick sad way, I honestly find the occasional ambush-deaths refreshing. Maybe that's why I've been laughing out loud when it happens. I'm dying! I feel so alive! Haha. Til next time...
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Aug 19th, 2012 at 22:32:16 - Kingdoms of Amalur (360) |
I don't think I've ever written this much on one game, but it's such a long one. After I finished it, I looked online to see what else you could do since you get to keep playing after you've beaten the main quest, and people were talking about spending 200 hours and stuff on KoA. Like they tried all three classes and the hybrids, crafted all the best weapons and armor for each class, found all the lorestones, did all the quests, etc. I think there are so many better (action)RPGs out there, I couldn't justify doing anything after the main quest that wasn't challenging. Unfortunately there aren't any special secret hard bosses, and I reached the level cap of 40 before beating the game which means nothing would ever be difficult (nothing was ever difficult in the first place either), so there really wasn't anything left for me to do.
Kingdoms of Amalur was a really solid experience. It didn't innovate anywhere. Just a jack-of-all-trades action RPG with what I think is an excellent story in an excellent universe. I've talked about how average every system in the game is in previous entries, and it stays that way to the end. For skills, I ended up maxing out or near-maxing out a bunch of them, and they simply aren't that useful. For the talent tree, I got all the sorcery spells maxed out, and then went into the might tree for some nifty bonus health and a cool berserk mode for when I dropped below 25% (which never happened, lol). So I ended up unlocking a couple levels of the warrior destiny for going through the might tree and a few levels of the battlemage destiny for having sorcery/might talents.
As far as the leveling goes, I've mentioned how unbalanced it is, your level/zone for example. Simply by doing quests, I outleveled all the zones. When I decided to quit doing side quests, the zones caught up a little bit, but even by skipping virtually all side quests in the Plains of Erathell and Klurikon and Alabastra, I STILL hit the level cap of 40 before the end! If someone could please explain to me how that should even be possible, I would love to hear it. What that says to me as a consumer is "Hey, we inflated the amount of content in this game so we can say it has 200 hours of gameplay, when really you'll hit the level cap and beat the game in 50. But do go around and needlessly do 100 more quests because they're there." And I swear, the entire zone of Detyr needs to be wiped from the game. The others were magnitudes more interesting. I really disagree with the people who called the story generic and forgettable. There is SO MUCH detail behind the Fae and much of their culture is very fleshed out. I feel these people didn't spend much time chatting with the NPCs, because that's where you really feel the depth of the lore. Again, EVERY NPC in the game says DIFFERENT things. It's amazing. Alternatively, people who degrade the story definitely have grounds to do so if Detyr is their main source because the gnome mining operations in the desert is such a played out thing in fantasy.
Turns out I was correct in predicting how the game would flow through Klurikon and Alabastra. You do indeed travel south through these zones with your powerful 4 or 5 super-allies to the heart of the Tuatha. It is much faster paced, less side quests (there is one more faction, which was a fun story to play through), less crap to explore. I do question how there are so many little camps of humans and good Fae in Tuatha lands. If they've had Mel Senshir under siege for 10 years and their army has been growing becoming more fierce, then I'm not sure I believe that there are so many human and Fae camps in Klurikon and Alabastra. I believe the Tuatha would have pretty much exterminated them all. But I guess you gotta have side quests. No, actually, you don't. It is possible to make an even more interesting main quest without 'fetch me 3 pineapples' or 'kill 8 garden snakes' or whatever variety, in order to use all the space and cool places in these zones.
Here's my biggest thing at the end though. This whole game is about your character being fateless. Everyone else is bound by fate. You, however, can actually change other peoples' fates since you don't have one and are free of it. So throughout the game, they play on this idea so you get some different outcomes by choosing one way or another for parts of the main quest and for faction quests. It's typically basic light side/dark side type stuff, but I always appreciate the effort. But at the end of the game when you have to go stop the God that Gadflow is summoning, you have no choice! You have to stop it! You can't say "I will ally myself with the evil god and herald the destruction of everything! Hahahahahaha!" WHY!? You've let me make some important choices throughout this game which is ABOUT changing fate and changing the world, yet you won't let me change the final outcome?! I mean, technically then you couldn't continue to play the game afterward because the world would be destroyed, but maybe then they could have just replaced all the NPCs with Tuatha or something. And I wouldn't mind it if they'd let me destroy the world and then put me back in the normal world after beating the game. Like, I can deal with that inconsistency. Anyway, sort of lame there.
And there you have it.
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Aug 17th, 2012 at 21:12:21 - Deus Ex (PC) |
I wrote a full entry for this last night but foolishly was careless typing it in the browser window and due to a browser hang-up accidentally clicked away without copying it to clipboard first. :-( Time to recreate...
Geez, I dunno about the original Deus Ex. I am sure this game would have been AWESOME to play when it came out, but that was then and this is now. I distinctly remember this CD-ROM in the general vicinity of my family computer circa 2000. My brother played it, but I never did. I clearly understand now why Deus Ex is consistently atop these 'best games of all time' lists, but I think, like with most older things, you would have had to have been playing it back then to put it on the list at all. With Human Revolution sitting installed and ready, I think I'll skip on ahead to the modern version. I intended to play Deus Ex for homage and continuity and all that, but I think I got the gist!
Deus Ex immediately struck me with its innovation. Even today, games in similar genres don't do or fail to do well what Deus Ex does. I'm thinking of the excellent skill system, the fully voiced dialogue, the multiple ways to complete missions, the multiple pathways weaving through each level, the fact that your actions (completion or failure of secondary missions, sequence of talking to people and doing things, pathway through the level) have consequences, and the fun electronics/hacking/lockpicking. NPCs will say different things to you, your end-of-mission report is different and your boss and co-workers actually comment on what you did or didn't do with opinions, and you get more or less skill points as a reward. One time I completed a level with nothing short of a shooting spree, and as a result, when it was time to restock at the armory before the next mission, the specialist there called me trigger happy and gave me multitools instead of ammunition and suggested I try to kill a few less people. Like, so many of today's games fail to have appropriate NPC responses to your actions. They're generic, or there's not even the possibility of multiple outcomes. Deus Ex wasn't the first stealth/shooter game out there or the first with multiple paths and voiced dialogue, but I see its influence in many modern games. It reminds me of Rainbow Six and Splinter Cell games, Bioshock, other games that focus on this computer hacking/electronics/lockpicking, even fantasy versions like Elder Scrolls games. And the music, wow, can you say Mass Effect?
So, many aspects of the game do hold up today,and even shine, but some are hilariously dated. The AI, for example, is like watching a movie that's so bad it's good. Sometimes when you shoot an enemy one time, he turns and runs (in a straight line). Enemies will run behind cover, then move to the center of the room and stand still. Enemies will run around you in circles not firing. Enemies have no communication skills. If you shoot an enemy in a room full of enemies, there is no guarantee the others will notice. If you walk up to an enemy, there is no guarantee he will notice. I can't tell you how many times I casually strolled up to a guard and shot him point blank...from the front. Enemies have terrible short-term memory. If you open fire, kill a few, blow up a box of TNT, and then go around the corner, the remaining enemies will forget all that within a few seconds. Out of sight out of mind.
Even though the enemies aren't challenging, the other option is: the stealth approach. Computers/electronics/lockpicking are skills you can invest points in. These seem very important because levels are littered with traps like laser grids, sentry robots and turret guns. If you can hack and stuff, you can turn off security, or even turn it against enemies. But this stuff is heavy throughout the levels. You can shoot up all the guards, but you sometimes face an insane corridor with a security camera, then two turret guns, then a laser grid armed with explosives, then another camera...and at the end, a locked door. Shit, no lockpicks! It's handy to always have some picks and multitools. The other challenging bit is navigation. There is no map in the modern standard sense. Some levels you get a static low-res map of the area, but your position isn't on it, there's rarely any point of interest marked, and you can't interact with the map at all besides open/close. After a while though, I came to enjoy the lack of a map because exploring is both fun and rewarding in Deus Ex. You get skill points for discovering new places, completing secondary objectives, and talking to some people. There are so many optional and hidden places/things in each level, and it's usually something interesting that you find, whether it's an ammo cache or a hobo shanty town or a secret meeting that nets a secondary objective if you spy on it. And for not having a map, the NPCs are very good about telling you where to go. They say 'find the warehouse a few blocks south of here' or 'my friend is in trouble in an alleyway northwest of the bar.'
Like I said, to get into a lot of these places, and to find other secrets and cool passage ways to help you navigate, you're going to need lockpicks and multitools. You'll also need an array of weaponry, healing, and other random types of items. Unfortunately the inventory is pretty small. I filled it up within an hour. There is money in the game, and I assumed that I was losing it by throwing away items due to space, but I never found anywhere to sell items, so maybe I was wrong. It seems money is only good for buying the odd bit of supplies or bribing NPCs for information. But like the map, after a while I didn't mind. I began keeping only that which I needed, which meant basically not trying to carry 5 guns. Ammo doesn't take up space, which is awesome. But when you loot enemies, it autoloots everything, so I was constantly having to get rid of the constant supply of knives and cigarettes and other crap they carry around.
Since there is so much inventory management, the game uses hotkeys for deleting and using items, and for many other menu functions. BUT, the hotkeys didn't work! That was annoying for sure. I think it's a Steam issue since it's an older game brought back to life. Sometimes original controls have problems. Another really annoying example is that F12 toggles your flashlight. F12 is also the Steam hotkey for screenshots. Deus Ex is a really dark game, so I constantly toggled the flashlight, which means Steam was constantly taking screenshots. I went into Deus Ex's options to change the flashlight hotkey, but I couldn't. According to the controls F12 doesn't do anything, and there was no option even for the flashlight. It's like it was hardwired to be F12, yet F12 supposedly was nothing.
And like I said, Deus Ex is inexplicably dark. The whole game takes place at night, so it's understandable that it is dark, but not DARK. I noticed some bad eye strain, and last night I even started getting nauseous, so I started taking pretty frequent breaks. I'd never played it for more than like an hour in a session until last night so it never got too bad. That's actually part of the reason I'm going to skip ahead to Human Revolution. I turned up the brightness rom 60-70, but that just washed it out and it looked terrible. Besides the darkness, the visuals are okay. Obviously they're really dated and look like crap relative to today's games, but it's fine. There's good use of camera angles and zoom during the dialogue scenes. They had lip synching and everything. Again, teenage David in 2000 would have been amazed by all this.
The last issue is the lack of autosave. I replayed big chunks of the first 2 levels due to lack of autosave. I'd wager I spent about 25% extra time on Deus Ex replaying bits because I'd die without saving. The game says it autosaves though. Whenever you move to a new area, it says 'loading' (the area) then 'saving' (presumably, my game). But that is false! I don't know if it's saving something else, or if there is supposed to be an autosave feature and it's another Steam issue, or something else. But yeah, that cost me a lot of time. Once I realized that it wasn't going to ever save for me, and I died enough to get annoyed that it was telling me it was saving and then not saving, and once I conditioned myself to quicksave before doing something dangerous, I got over the problem. But that's one of those things. Practically all games autosave these days and we take it for granted. On the bright side though, all those early instances of replaying levels showed me how flexible my choices were in how to go about completing missions because I got to try lots of different approaches in the first couple levels. I developed an early appreciation Deus Ex in this way.
That's about it. Definitely a cool game, and I hope that Deus Ex: Human Revolution is everything I like about Deus Ex and modernized with some new innovations for me to marvel at. Definitely worth spending some time with the original to get a feel for the series.
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Aug 16th, 2012 at 23:46:46 - Cut The Rope (Other) |
Retiring this log. Cut the Rope is a really cute little mobile game that I've been playing off and on for months. But I had to reset my phone and when I downloaded it again they had changed the free version to have a ton of ads that get in the way of buttons you need to press when changing levels and exiting the game. It is pretty annoying. So I'll find another phone game to take its place.
But it was a lot of fun. You have to feed candy to this little green monster named Om Nom. As the title suggests, the candy is attached to ropes and you have to cut the ropes in the right order and at the right times to successfully drop the candy in his mouth instead of missing his mouth. I can't really explain it. But there are bubbles that make the candy float, and air pumps where you can swing the candy, and some other environmental things you can do to move it around. But it's a physics puzzler, so the candy swings realistically on the ropes, so your cutting this or that rope at this or that timing and using the bubbles and air pumps and whatever correctly all matters. I like it better than some of these other similar-ish games like Angry Birds or Bag It because your success is less luck-based and more thought-based. If you think it through, you can do it. Anyway, maybe I'll pay the dollar and buy it sometime down the road, but with all the other similar quality freebies out there, I'd rather try some of those.
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