Progress for November 2, 2010 - Kingdom Hearts

Whose brilliant idea was it to hide the fucking difficulty setting? Apparently I have to play this game for TWENTY-THREE MORE LEVELS before I actually start make any progress in terms of my character's strength.

Fuck you, Disney. You took what should have been an excellent game and completely shit all over it.

Kingdom Hearts can suck my ass.

Progress for October 25, 2010 - Kingdom Hearts

Nobody cares. Been playing it. About 15 hours in. Level 26.
Progress will be slow for a bit while I work on other projects.
Progress is really slow for FF8 as well. I'm about halfway into disc 2.

I want to play something more action-oriented next.. any suggestions?

Progress for July 19, 2010 - God of War - COMPLETED!

Kinda snuck up on you this time, but who gives a fuck nobody reads this blog anyway.
expect a review whenever I get around to it. it's not like I have a deadline or anything.

Progress for May 1, 2010 - God of War

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Okami - Retrospective

Stop me if you've heard this one. A wolf, accompanied by an annoying character that rides around on it, speaks for it, and taunts it repeatedly, runs around an ancient land, battling creatures of darkness in an effort to purge the shadows from the land. Along the way you collect new items and powers, that help you access previously inaccessible areas of what would otherwise be a truly free-roaming world.

Yeah, comparisons between Okami and the Legend of Zelda series (specifically Twilight Princess, also on my list) are inevitable. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Zelda's formula has been duplicated, copied, cloned, modified, and ripped off numerous times ever since it first exploded onto Famicom systems in the mid 1980's. You could even argue that Metroid, which came out 6 months later, even ripped off the concept, but in a side-scrolling presentation. Perhaps Metroidvanias should be called Metroidzeldavanias.

This style though, has proven to consistently yield extremely positive results. Games like Shadow Complex, which pay tribute to the style are excellent examples of what an unashamed clone can be. The Zelda and Metroid games are all among the highest rated of any game on the console. Even on the CD-I, the Zelda games hold the #2, 3, and 4 slots in popularity on Gamespot. Axis and Allies must be a pretty good game.

It's unavoidable to compare it to similar games, but even allowing for that, Okami is a damn fine game in its own right. I'm not going too much into the actual gameplay, because anyone reading this has likely already played the game, or at least heard enough about it. But for the uninitiated, you play as the goddess Amaterasu, who has come to Nippon in the form of a white wolf to fight demons. There's a deep story behind all of this about an evil eight-headed dragon named Orochi and a legend that goes back 100 years of a similar wolf fighting and defeating the same dragon, but in the end it all boils down to: "You're a god. Fight evil."

The thing that really sets Okami apart from other games aside from its Katsushika Hokusai visual style is the Celestial Brush mechanic that has you drawing representations of powers on screen in order to activate them. While this sounds fun in theory, it begins to get troublesome when you realize it's impossible for the game to walk the line between "simple" and "distinct" with all 13 powers' brushstrokes. I don't doubt the advanced technology that programmers must have pulled their hair out over when creating the Celestial Brush, but it's not perfect. You will end up using the same gestures for several different attacks, and others that use very similar gestures. The problem with context sensitive controls is you will almost always run into a time when the same context is happening simultaneously. This can result in creating a useless waterspout circle when you're trying to form a lily pad or gust of wind, or causing a trail of fire when you only want to use the slash ability.

The overall presentation of the game is enjoyable, and you can tell a lot of care and humor went into creating all of the memorable characters. If you can begin to actively HATE someone who doesn't exist, it's always a testament to the skill of the writers. One thing I could have done without, though, is the annoying nippon-ese that the characters speak in. It's okay for letting you know what a character sounds like, but it gets VERY annoying VERY quickly, especially when you don't want to skip the text because you actually want to read the story. This is actually a considerable detriment to the game, because I found myself skipping what I was fairly certain was a very well written story simply because I didn't want to hear the gibberish anymore and just wanted to get back to the gameplay. PLEASE, Capcom, put an option to turn the speech off in Okamiden, or omit it altogether.

Okami is a very good and very long game. This is the kind of game a kid who only gets one or two games a year could get for their birthday or Christmas and it would get them through many, many months down the road. If I were younger, I could definitely see myself devoting many weeks of my life to this game, seeking out every hidden bead, powering up every weapon, playing through multiple times to unlock every hidden reward and then looking back on the time with fondness 10 years later, just like certain gamers do now with games like Ocarina of Time or even the original Legend of Zelda. Okami is the kind of game that defines "instant classic."

The Good

• Classic Zelda-esque free-roaming/dungeon diving gameplay
• Unique Celestial Brush mechanic
• 40+ hour epic; very good value for the price

The Bad

• Game might be a bit TOO long for the average gamer.
• Nippon-ese gibberish gets grating after a while
• Celestial Brush is not perfect

The Defining Moment

• The second celestial brush appearing during the battle against Ninetails. I almost shit myself.

The Burning Question

• Okay, so what exactly is the point of the whole time travel subplot? I'm usually really good at figuring these things out, and I'm pretty sure it's explained somewhere else in the game, but the nippon-ese kept me from reading too much further into it.

Progress for January 8, 2010 - Okami - COMPLETED!

Woo! This game was... very... confusing. Characters and plot lines drop in and out with little to no setup, and function primarily to lengthen an already obsessively long game.

Anywho. Yami is dead. Nippon is saved. Full review later this week.

Final play stats:
Play Time 45 hr 36 min 5 sec
Days Passed 70
Saves....... 86
Deaths..... 0 (Pink tree)
Enemies Defeated 459 (green tree)
Money Gained 3,422,795 (green tree)
Demon Fangs 296 (green tree)
praise earned 4,269 (green tree)

Presents from Issun:
Karmic Transformer 1
Karmic Transformer 2
Karmic Returner
Stray Bead
Karmic Transformer 3

Progress for January 7, 2010 - Okami

Christ, how much longer is this game? I know I'm relatively close to the end, but I have no idea whether that's 2 hours or 20 hours away by this game's perception of pacing.

I just defeated Orochi for the second time. The time travel aspect was... interestingly handled. But I don't think it was entirely necessary.

Anyway. I'll probably continue tomorrow, after I take back some library books.

Progress for January 3, 2010 - Okami

Wow, this game just keeps on going, doesn't it? You certainly get a lot of gameplay for your buck. I've made it to the frozen north, and I spent most of today searching around Nippon for extra praise and treasures in order to boost my ink and health, and to upgrade my combat abilities.

I bought the Golden Fury attack.

Amaterasu pees on the enemies.

I'm afraid to wonder what Brown Rage does.

Progress for January 2, 2010 - Okami

I think I made a lot of progress today. I'm up to about 33 hours, and I just killed Ninetails. The battle with him scared the shit out of me when I saw that second paintbrush show up O.o but I still prevailed.

One thing that really pissed me off: Without any warning or provocation, the game completely cuts off your ability to travel outside of North Ryoshima, forcing you to make due with whatever supplies and praise you've picked up since then. There is one merchant available, but your ability to upgrade your stats during this time is very limited. If you aren't able to defeat the boss, you better hope you made multiple save files.

Progress for January 1, 2010 - Okami

I'm starting to fall into the groove of this game. I think usually when I play a game like this, I try to do it perfect on the first playthrough. I grind for items, search high and low for every optional piece of treasure until it all just becomes monotonous and boring. I had the same problem with BioShock, and I think I'm going to have a similar problem with Fallout 3. But now in Okami, I'm just going from one objective to the next. I have too many games to get through to dawdle, and I hear Okami is pretty effing long.

I made it to north ryoshima coast, and now I'm trying to find the whirlpool to get to the dragon's realm. Sounds like fun!

Progress for December 30, 2009 - Okami

Believe it or not, I have actually been playing this game over the past few days. I'm a little over 25 hours in, and I just cleared all of the green mist out of sei-an City. I spent the better part of today doing little side quests, gaining praise and yen to buy new items and powers. Tomorrow I'll head back to the temple and find the Fox Rods.

Seriously, Fox Rods? wtf? it sounds like what you get when you cut off a fox's arms and legs and freeze it.

Progress for October 18, 2009

Well, I beat Orochi. For the first time. That was probably one of the most enjoyably epic boss battles I've experienced since Shadow of the Colossus. I wanted to continue today, but I spent the afternoon finishing up a project I'd been working on all week. But now that that's done, I can... start working on the next project.

Yeah, I'm busy. But I have been putting time aside for games. I should explore the festival tomorrow.

Progress for September 16, 2009 - Okami

Spent so much time playing yesterday, I completely forgot to put up the update.
It's going alright, I suppose. The game is actually rather slow to develop. You tend to spend a lot of time in towns doing fetch quests (fetch. Dog. yeah.) and the brief time you do spend outdoors is just to get to a new area.

I went about 6 hours straight and kinda got overwhelmed from that. I didn't even want to play again today. But I'll probably continue tomorrow. I still have to find that last dog before I can go on.

Elapsed time: 10 hours

Progress for September 15, 2009 - Okami

Like Gun, I started playing Okami a long time ago. In fact, I bought the game at launch and even pre-ordered it to get the free caligraphy pad. But they were out of them when I went to go pick it up. Damn you Electronics Boutique!

After spending about 30 minutes skipping through the absurdly long intro, I finally reached the first save point. Unfortunately my memory card didn't have enough space on it. Luckily my sister's PS2 was available for my file-swapping needs. I don't know why more PS2 games don't have card file management built into them. At any rate, I was able to continue after 5 minutes of maintenance.

This game always reminds me of tuna fish and breathmints. Probably because the first time I played it, I was snacking on a "Starkist lunch pack" that contains tuna in a pouch, crackers, mayonaise and relish, and interestingly enough a breathmint for afterward. I suppose they take the term "tuna-breath" seriously. I don't know why I remember that among all other benign memories, but I guess it seemed unusual enough to merit a place in my brain. Right next to the license plate of our family's old station wagon that we got rid of 15 years ago. I don't even know my own car's license plate from memory.

Oh yeah, Okami! I'm 4:48 into the game and I have 5 of the 13 brush techniques. I just got the Water Lily and I'll be exploring the new area tomorrow.

Gun - Retrospective

I really liked this game. Unlike most of the other games I've completed during this blog, Gun was one in particular that I enjoyed from beginning to end. It never got boring, and in fact left me wanting to play more of it even once it was over. This was in part due to its short length; I just didn't want the game to end!

Gun's strongest point is its spectacular storyline and voice acting, sporting such talent as Thomas Jane (The Punisher), Lance Henriksen (Millennium), and Ron Perlman (Hellboy). While it sounds cliche, the story literally had me hooked and playing the game from beginning to end almost non-stop, and I don't even watch westerns. See that jump from 37.2% to completion? That's all in one day, bitches!

That's not to say the game isn't without it's flaws. I won't comment on the difficulty, since I was playing the game on the easy setting, but the game world is considerably smaller than other games of the genre such as GTA or even Simpsons: Hit and Run. But this is occasionally a good thing when your horse arbitrarily disappears after completing a random side-mission, leaving you forced to hike back to the nearest town on foot. However, it does leave you realizing that you will be revisiting the same locations multiple times for different reasons, whether they be bounty hunting, pony express message delivery, searching for hidden gold, or progressing the storyline.

Unlike other GTA clones, Gun uses a refreshing mechanic normally reserved for action games. Known to most people as "bullet-time," The Quickdraw system lets you slow time and automatically target your enemies to quickly dispatch them. This can be lengthened by doing special feats like getting head shots, disarming enemies weapons, knocking enemies off of their horse, or trampling them with your own. While the Quickdraw mechanic is a life saver when you're surrounded by bandits who want your blood and money, switching between targets is a tad finnicky. Targets are always defined as being either left or right of your current lock-on, even if it is quite clearly above or below. So you will often find yourself pressing right to aim at the nogoodnick below the one you just killed. Additionally, moving targets can force the crosshairs to lock onto them more than once, so it can sometimes be difficult to aim at exactly who you want to kill.

The game also suffers from occasional glitches. In addition to the CRASH I got a few days ago, my game doesn't display any ammo or clip animation for the final shotgun upgrade, which led me to believe it had infinite ammo until I ran out.

Despite its flaws, short length, and smaller scope, the Gun IP is a strong newcomer entry into the sandbox genre. I look forward to seeing how the rumored sequels fare against similarly themed Red Dead Redemption from genre juggernaut Rockstar.

The Good

• Fantastic storyline
• A+ voice acting

The Bad

• Comparatively small map
• Short storyline with not enough side-missions

The Ugly
Defining Moment

• Running around shooting buffalo and sheep with exploding bow and arrow after completing the story missions. POP!

The Burning Question

• Why do I have less to say about good games than bad games?

Progress for August 16, 2009 - Gun - COMPLETED

And another one bites the dust. This game was fun as hell. I spent all of today playing through the rest of the story mode and almost all of the side-missions. All I have left to do are the hunting missions, which are made ultra-fun with my exploding freaking arrows.

Seriously. I must have spent like half an hour tonight just launching them willy-nilly into herds of buffalo and cattle, and watching them go *POP*

Of course, review tomorrow. Good night, America!

Progress for August 15, 2009 - Gun

Just lost an hour and a half of gameplay because the fucking game decided to crash and some designer decided it would be a good idea to create a game that doesn't automatically save your progress. Fuck you Neversoft!


Progress: 37.2, but it should be a lot higher. Fuck you.

Kill.Switch - Retrospective

I'm probably not going to go as in-depth into this game review as I have with others. For one thing, it really didn't last long enough for me to really find it memorable. An 8 hour timestamp tends to do that. But for as long as it did last, I did enjoy it. To a point.

The first issue I'd like to bring up is something I've noticed in a lot of recent video games, mostly ones that are based around real-world situations like Kill.Switch, Call of Duty, Splinter Cell, or the previous bane of my existence, 24: The Game. What on earth happened to calling guns what they are? In Wolfenstein and Doom, you had pretty standard weapons and they were called rather universal names: Pistol, Shotgun, Chaingun, Rocket Launcher, Plasma Rifle, Flamethrower, etc. The only exception to the rule was the BFG-9000, which gave an excellently ominous and mysterious feel to the weapon when you read about it and finally found one buried in the lava in Pandemonium. But Kill.Switch, like so many other modern games, uses this naming convention for every weapon in the game. Why do you have to call it an MCRT 300 or M1 when you can just as easily say Sniper Rifle or Shotgun?

Kill.Switch also very much lacks variety in its weapons. You basically have a shotgun, a sniper rifle, a grenade launcher, and then 7 different kinds of machine guns that all use different ammunition. This is really the only distinguishing characteristic between these guns; the fact that enemies drop ammo depending on the weapon they're using. So it's in your best interest to use the same gun as they are. With the exception of the first 3 I mentioned, all guns feel very similar to one another, with minor differences in accuracy, recoil, and clip capacity.

Kill.Switch's story is forgettable to say the least. The premise of the game involves a controller taking command of a field operative via a neural uplink. This means you are controlling a soldier, being controlled by another person, who is in turn being controlled by you. Gameplay-wise this, of course, means absolutely nothing. While the plot involves a rogue agent trying to use the main character as an instrument to start a war and then profiteer from the arms rush, the missions really don't get any deeper than "Go here" "Get this" and the occasional "Kill this person." And that's really all you need to enjoy the game.

For what it's worth, I did find Kill.Switch quite enjoyable. You literally can not just run right out into the open or you will be torn to ribbons within a matter of seconds. The entire purpose of gameplay is based around finding and utilizing waist-height and head-height cover. You can lean around corners or over low cover in order to fire, Which is also the only time you can use the scope on your weapons, but you can aim your crosshair at any time, whether hiding or exposed. You can also blindfire without exposing yourself, which greatly decreases your accuracy, but allows you to remain safely out of harm's way. This engine is very well done and makes most levels very systematic to complete, which is a plus for people like me who prefer a slow methodical approach to war than an overzealous twitch-laden trigger-fest.

However, the engine is not without its flaws. There are many times when the game's idea of "cover" will not agree with the enemy placement, and you will find yourself having to choose between not being able to hit anyone from a semi-exposed position, or being able to hit most of the enemies, but being fully vulnerable yourself. You can also only turn a limited amount in any direction while you're using cover, so many times you will be forced to completely reposition yourself to hit a target that is just out of range. Additionally, the location of the crosshair and your character's ability to actually hit that target are two different things. Often you will be able to see a shot in third person mode that you can't see in first person scope-mode -- The trajectory that actually matters.

Despite its incredibly short length (As I said before, I was able to beat this game in under 8 hours) Kill.Switch is an enjoyable playthrough, although these days it is forgotten in favor of other games that use cover like Gears of War or Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, but Kill.Switch was one of the first to use the cover system, and if you like the newer games, it might be worth it to you to check out the system in its infancy, especially if you can find it in the bargain bin.

The Good

• Fluid integration of the then-innovative cover system.
• Clever AI that will use cover as well.
• Grenades actually feel necessary to complete certain levels rather than superfluous.
  

The Bad

• Too short: only 5 scenarios of 3-4 sections apiece, plus a 1-section training arena.
• Insubstantial plot and pointless neural uplink story premise.
• Weapons are not very memorable.

The Defining Moment

• Throwing a flash grenade around a corner to blind an enemy, then diving over a tripwire and meleeing the guy in the face. Sweet!

The Burning Question

• Okay, what is with the dot in the title anyway? It's always shown as in online listings as "Kill.Switch" with a period, but my punctuation knowledge tells me it's an interpunct, and should be "Kill·Switch."

Progress for August 12, 2009 - Gun

Wow. Jumping from Kill.Switch to this was interesting to say the least. Gun is MUCH easier, and a lot more versatile. But I suppose that's why they call it an open-world game.

The most recent save file in Gun is dated April 23, 2007. Over 2 years ago. I'm probably going to be running into a lot of these kinds of situations where my previous save file is still intact, but I start the entire game over simply because I don't remember any of the storyline.

In essence, it's what's kept me from finishing a lot of these games; I don't want to start all over again because I've already made so much progress. But I don't want to continue from where I was because I'd be stuck without the storyline. So the games just sit there gathering dust.

Progress: 21.8%

Progress for August 12, 2009 - Kill.Switch

I just beat this game in a single day. It's that short. My final time was 7:19:11

Review tomorrow.