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Jul 6th, 2010 at 09:48:00 - Rogue Galaxy (PS2) |
I'm always most excited to start a new game, to see what it's like. Those first impressions of games are like first dates. I get nervous and excited and I don't know how to act. I plan the occasion to make sure I have a couple hours to sink in to get to know it better. Rogue Galaxy was developed by Level-5, a Japanese indie that did the excellent Dark Cloud games and Dragon Quest VIII. So, this is my first entry writing about a game from the first time playing. All others I've recently played through and am writing to preserve memory and practice, or am currently playing off and on but started some time ago.
You are Jaster Rogue, and you live on a dangerous desert planet currently under control by a military supposedly protecting it from a more hostile force. There's a far removed war going on. Jaster is bored and wants to go to outer space. Not an unheard of set-up in fantasy/sci-fi land. But this game executes perfectly the introduction to the game. First of all, RPG protagonists have a tendency to have parental issues, and this drives them on some level, and often times makes them introverts. I'm glad that Jaster is talkative and interesting from the get-go. He was indeed abandoned to a church as an infant and raised by a kindly priest. Here's another strong point: It's been like 2 hours of game time and I am already invested in Jaster's life, his priest father figure, his new friends, his planet and town. Chalk this up to good story-telling and excellent presentation.
Your town is laid siege to by a giant monster, and as you run after it (headed for the residential district, oh no!), a mysterious fighter joins your side. He stays with you a while, impressed in out-of-range-of-Jaster-to-hear monologue, and gives you his sword before departing. Meanwhile, two members of a space pirate crew, inconspicuously named Simon (Scottish accent, sounds just like the dwarf in Halls of Stone in WoW), and a robot, Steve (mild British accent), are searching for the great bounty hunter, Desert Claw. It so happens that your mysterious companion was Desert Claw, and when the pirates see your sword, pronounce you their man, and drag you away with them. Of course, you want to go because you're tired of small-town life, you want to see space, and you quickly realize that Desert Claw was your companion, and not mentioning your inauthenticity may be your ticket to the space pirate life. But first you have to kill this giant monster.
This introduces the bounty system. Giant monsters such as this are worth X amount of points. Killing X number of regular monsters is also worth a lesser amount of points. The specific task shows up after you've encountered that specific regular monster. There is a bounty ranking from 1-100. You begin at 100. Desert Claw is 1. As you accumulate points, you can surpass the greatness of other bounty hunters, and it looks like you're rewarded at 50, 40, 30, 20, 10, 9, 8, etc. This is fun. I like being tasked to go kill tough monsters. The little ones, I don't know if I'll keep up with, because based on my first experiences with the first 6 or so bounties, some enemies are more rare than others, so killing, say, 30 of them, may take a while of running around. But then again, I also don't know the locations of different enemies, so I may encounter more of a missed type elsewhere or something. I've moved up to 95 by killing the giant monster and fulfilling two other lesser bounties.
The battle system is real-time, pauses when you open the menu, and seems fast paced. It reminds of a game like Kingdom Hearts, or what stuck with me from Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. You control one character of three at a time, and can switch between them if you like. The ones you aren't currently controlling will give you these context commands, "suggestions," for actions they wish to perform (use potion, cast a spell, etc.), and just press the correct button if you want them to do it, ignore them if you don't. You can run, jump, melee attack, or range attack, as well as pause to use abilities or items, swap equipment or characters. You can hit or toss objects in the field as well. Some enemies are shielded, and you have to hold X for a power attack to break the shield. Our boss, a giant dragonfly looking thing, was immune to attacks in certain places. I had to attack it in a certain sequence of spots before it became vulnerable, and even then I couldn't reach the open wound. One of my party members gave me a special gun (don't remember the name) that creates stepping stones you can use to get at hard to reach places. This will I'm sure be useful for finding treasure throughout the game. Anyway, it allowed me to climb on the dragonfly's back and kill it.
As you fight, your weapons level up in Skill and elemental attributes (fire, water, etc.). I'm not sure what skill does yet, except that I read in the manual that you get a frog who can eat two fully skilled up weapons to produce one stronger weapon. After the skill is maxed, the weapon will continue to level up elemental attributes. Characters have few stats and attributes, which makes for less definitions I have to memorize, and there aren't many status ailments, and most of them do the exact same thing. I would say this makes the game too simplistic, but there seems to be plenty of other things to focus on, such as the Revelation system. This is how you acquire skills. It's kind of like the skill grids from Final Fantasy X, XI,and XII (I think all 3), where you put points into a skill anywhere on this giant map to specialize in certain ability types. In Rogue Galaxy though, you put items in the grid, and once they go in, they can never come out. There may be one box, two boxes connected, or like 6 connected boxes which together represent one ability. All connected boxes must be filled with specific items to learn that ability. Further, each character appears to have a different revelation map. When you unlock a skill, all adjacent sets of connected boxes become available for you to fill in. It's neat. I've already learned a few skills on Jaster and two on Simon. I can imbue my weapon with lightning, cast a wind spell, or confuse enemies. I'm looking forward to unlocking more abilities.
So after killing the giant dragonfly monster, Simon and Steve tell you their boss wants you on their crew. Who is their boss? Why, a legendary sky pirate Jaster has dreamed of seeing forever. Before Jaster leaves, he returns to his priest/father to tell him. One reason this game is already so good story-wise is because of the animations of facial expression and interaction, and direction of scenes, not to mention voice acting. Jaster enters the church, the priest, Raul I just remembered, facing away from Jaster to an altar. Jaster looks uneasy, looks away, and begins to tell Raul he's leaving, contemplates it, then just tells Raul how grateful he is for Raul raising him and looking after him. Jaster turns to leave and makes it to the city gates before Raul has caught up with him. There ensues a very touching series of cut scenes with Raul saying he knew this day would come. They used to sit outside at night and look at the starts, Jaster as a child talking about going into space, thinking Raul is silly for not wanting to leave, Raul making comments about this planet being home, etc. Jaster is clearly guilty over his decision and Raul is sad to see him go, and you can feel the old man's loneliness setting in already. This kind of thing in games is generally cheesy and lame for me, but Rogue Galaxy just tells it right. I hope this is a sign of what's to come.
Jaster & Co. leave, there's an exciting CGI sequence/opening credits of a pack of hungry sand worms chasing Jaster and the pirates' space ship, which is a pirate ship, complete with skull and crossbone sails, with rockets for space travel, and a daring rescue of Jaster by a female character. I quit when I found a save point inside the pirate ship and will begin next time by exploring it. Other characters encountered so far are a one-eyed bounty hunter with an ego and a diabolical talking cat who is in charge of the ship while the captain is napping.
One more thing about the level of immersion due to the NPCs is that the NPCs all have names, each and every one of them, has a name above their head. I've already been able to remember what a couple specific people said and who they are in the story. Raul for example, when I remembered earlier in writing, was because the image of his name flashed in my mind. Also, each of the 100 bounty hunters has a name. I've caught a few good ones (Beauti Fulle, Pixel Shayder, and Don Perrigno) and I'm sure there are a lot more that I don't get.
For opening sequences, Rogue Galaxy gets a 10/10. There was also a very nice and timely series of tutorial windows that popped up all throughout this time during battles at the correct moments you needed them and there is a help menu accessible at all times out of battle. Very nice indeed.
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Jul 6th, 2010 at 04:20:44 - F.E.A.R. (PC) |
F.E.A.R. I was playing about the same time as Manhunt 2. I only bought FEAR because I heard it "redefined shooter horror" or something and, enjoying horror and shooter games, ate it up. I was disconcerted by the tag though (I've faced many disappointments and am critical of horror) and by the fact that Alma looks like the girl from The Ring.
My initial impressions were of a standard shooter. The cut scenes with Alma and Paxton Fettel weren't that exciting, and the story was too mysterious for me to care. Personally, I dislike super mysterious stories, especially ones that propose to be cleverer than they are. Give me something to care about besides the girl from The Ring. I saw that movie already. Make me think this game is doing something different than copy-catting Japanese horror remakes. I pressed on.
The most creepy aspect of the game turned out to be the environments, which was mostly miles and miles of office buildings. This is because I never knew when I would see Alma. See, she wasn't scary at the beginning, but she turns into a real presence. You see her in these slo-mo controllable cut scenes where she sets hallways ablaze as you run. You also see her victims scattered and lifeless throughout the levels, hear her speaking to you, etc. I could make decent guesses as to when the scary parts would happen, like when you get into an enclosed area or tight space, with lots of pipes. Even though the offices were massive, the more I saw of Alma and her fury, the more a sense of dread fell upon me playing, just knowing she was going to show up again. I'm not quite sure why she spooked me so much, but I know the more I saw her, the less I wanted to see her. And back to the larger environments, the lighting was nice and dim, the offices had a nice number of corpses and ransacked desks, and you usually heard enemies before you saw them.
About the AI, I'd heard all this and that, it was so advanced, they use group tactics, blah blah. I will say I think it's cool that they take cover, will flip desks, attempt to flank you, call out when you are flanking them, call for help, etc. I will also say that they posed a challenge to me. They posed a challenge to me until I discovered the total game-winning benefits of slo-mo. In FEAR, you have a superhuman power to slow down time. When you use this power, an energy bar slowly drains, and more slowly refills as you rest. In slo-mo, everything slows to a crawl, you included. I think this was ideally put in the game to help with difficult encounters, but it's easily usable for all encounters, and I had a blast popping out of my own cover to nail enemies. They could take cover and be clever all they wanted, but all I had to do was slo-mo, catch them with their heads up or moving, and they died. It was no contest. So I would have liked some middle ground, probably where I wasn't able to make such gratuitous use of slo-mo, which would have made the game a bit more challenging. Without slo-mo, the pace is frenetic and there are some serious firefights. I very much enjoyed the action.
99% of enemies are just soldiers with various types of gun. Special enemies are extremely rare until the very end of the game when those shadow creatures come after you. There were some of these wall-crawling guys, but maybe 5 in the whole game. I would have enjoyed more diversity. Level after office building level of army drones got a bit repetitive. So, by the end of the game, I realized I had enjoyed my experience, but even though there is obviously a expansions and a sequel (or 2?), I don't think I want to play anymore FEAR. I just don't care enough about the thin, thin story, my character's past and ties to Alma, or anything else in the game besides slo-mo.
And one final note, the phone messages that reveal story line are absolutely pointless. They don't reveal anything important or even interesting. I'm reminded of Doom 3 where the phone messages played a larger role in immersing you in the story of what happened. Other games have done it much better, and I feel these messages were tacked on in FEAR. The end.
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Jul 6th, 2010 at 03:38:04 - Manhunt 2 (PS2) |
Contrary to my previous post about God of War 2, Manhunt 2 is not as good as its predecessor, nowhere near it. I played directly after GoW 2, so I was even in the mood for sequels. I believe I'll sound off similar to the majority of people who have played both the 1st and 2nd Manhunts.
The Manhunt series is ultra-violent. It's not just the blood and the shooting, it's the brutality in the role the player takes while having to kill or be killed. You don't just kill bad guys. You creep up from behind them out of the shadows and strangle them with razor wire, or you wait around a corner to execute them with a baseball bat, or suffocate them with a plastic bag. Manhunt 2 introduces gun executions. Instead of shooting someone, make them beg first. Also, environmental executions. That cop enjoying taking a leak in the bathroom? Well smash his head on the toilet seat. I don't mind the violence, personally. It makes the experience gritty, somewhat emotional, and full of desperation. What I do mind is the censorship from Manhunt 1 to Manhunt 2. In the 2nd instance, the execution scenes have this distorted effect so you can't really see the violence happening. You know you're clubbing a guy with a bat, but you can't quite make it out due to this visual effect. On one level, the visual effect fits with the story (you've been made a psycho with a split personality by participating in some experiments) in that you don't know if what the character is seeing is real, a figment, or which "personality" you really are. But if that's the rationale, it's a cheap trick for dumbing down the violence of the game that did so much for pulling me into the terrifying world of the first one. Although I will say I've read about plans being nixed for the Wii version because you actually act out the executions with Wiimote movements. That I believe crosses the line. I also understand wanting that lower rating for more sales, but I feel the game suffered for it.
The story in Manhunt 2 was predictable. I intuited very early on that the two characters were really one and there was two personalities inside one head, and as usual, the violent one tries to subjugate the milder one. I'm always reminded of the movie, Identity, with the twist at the end. That movie killed all twists of multiple personalities because few will be able to compare. The experiment was very Clockwork Orange, though not done sadistically, but brainwashing by exposure to increasingly disturbing images and themes. I remember the back-to-the-past levels as being irritating. Sometimes games make the right choice having playable back story. Other games, it's a poor decision. I felt it was a poor decision here because I (don't know about other people) didn't care too much about my protagonist(s) and didn't care to divert from the present to explore the past. Cut scene please.
The AI was. really. really. stupid. Or buggy. Or both. Sometimes they saw me in the shadows when they weren't supposed to be able to. I could slip them by running in circles around an object, and hide in the one shadow out of their line of sight. He couldn't have gone in that dark, shadowy corner! He must have disappeared! Oh well, I'll just turn my back to the dark shadowy corner for 15 seconds or so. They also didn't respond as well to the knocking as the first game. If you knock on a wall, the sound alerts enemies, who come running to investigate. Oftentimes, they'd ignore the sound, or come part of the way and stop. Enemies seemed to have a range past which they wouldn't move in some areas. It makes sense if they're in a fortified position with guns, but sometimes they just didn't want to come past a certain point for no explicable reason. Sometimes the enemy would stand in the open with a gun aimed at me and not shoot. Sometimes the enemy would stare at a wall for a long time. They were so stupid sometimes that it made it difficult to kill them. Let me explain. You expect enemies to patrol a path. If they don't patrol a path, they could be intelligent, changing up where they walk. Or, they could be stupid, walking into walls, standing in corners, standing still, following right behind another enemy, suddenly stopping, turning, walking 5 feet, stopping, turning, turning, for no apparent reason. This makes them unpredictable, which is a challenge, but also an irritation because there is no apparent motivation for their actions.
One more topic: the enemies themselves. In Manhunt 1, you are a convict, freed (or escaped, I don't remember) and held in this compound by a madman who records everything for a sick movie. The filmmaker's henchmen are hired gangs, who are completely and utterly depraved psychotics, which makes them terrifying. You are afraid of being hacked to bits by psychos. Staying in the shadows, avoiding fighting, seemed more important in the 1st game. In the second game, there are less gangs, and they're certainly not as weird. One inhabit a sleazy night club, but that's the only really strange one. The rest are suits or cops or mercenaries, fairly normal stuff. They seemed less formidable for their normalcy, as in I wasn't hesitant to engage them face-to-face. So the second game was much less interesting and immersive, which is too bad, because I so enjoyed the first.
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Jul 5th, 2010 at 09:48:31 - God of War 2 (PS2) |
God of War was awesome. God of War 2 is more of the same. I played the first one so long ago, maybe 3-4 years, that I can't compare the two side by side, but from what I remember, yea, it's basically the same as the sequel. You are Kratos, you are a badass, you are pissed off at the gods (Zeus in this case), and you go on an epic adventure in mythological places fighting hordes of mythological creatures (minotaurs, medusa [how do you say medusa plural?], and cyclops[es?]), and proving yourself over gods (Hermes, the Fates [not really gods], Zeus, and others I don't remember).
When you defeat enemies, you receive various colored orbs that do various things. Reds accumulate to level up magic attacks and weapons. I was a fan of the bow and arrow magic in this game. The medusa head I never used. I remember earthquake being handy in places, as well as the lightning spell. I mostly used my main weapons and the berserk type ability to tear through difficult fights. And fights are difficult. One thing I enjoyed about the first game was the 10 minute epic boss fights and even the long regular battles that I found myself dying from and not upset to start over. Same in this game. The Zeus battle comes to mind. I did it a few times before perfecting my movements and timing of repelling his magic and shooting him with my bow and arrow. Also, the button context portion of the fight I did over and over memorizing when I'd have to react fast to the cues on screen, and eventually calming my hands down enough to press the correct buttons fast enough.
This game looks absolutely fantastic on a PS2. It must be pushing the PS2 to its limits. The environments are so nicely done, detailed, and you can see far into the distance. I remember being very impressed by the Atlas level. One thing I didn't mind in the first game that bothered me in this is Kratos himself. He's too pissed off and yells a lot. I think in a few years, as with the last game, the intensity will stay with me, but I'll forget the details. These games are intense. They're masculine. You get pumped up and kill stuff and are a general asshole to accomplish your goals. You're on edge to mash the context commands. It's bloody. There are always naked women. Yea, I found myself only able to play for short spurts before it just being too much to handle. I don't care much about Kratos himself, as he seemed to be the same Kratos from GoW 1, just pissed for a slightly different reason.
Oh right, and the opening battle is a massive boss fight. Totally cinematic and immersive from the get-go. I would have more to say about this, but I've played so many other things since then. Nice game, wonder if I'll get around to the third one some day.
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