Progress for May 6, 2009 - BioShock

Welp, another day, another chapter. I'm starting to really regret playing the game on Easy; It's, well, TOO easy. I'm spending too much time each chapter doing tiny minutiae like searching bodies for loot and components and hacking safes, all of which invariably lead to more of the same.

Maybe I should stop concentrating on the little stuff and just keep focusing on the quest items. Sure, I might miss some weapons and ammo. But it's not I couldn't do with some increased difficulty.

Progress for May 5, 2009 - BioShock

These levels are TOO DAMN LONG! Every time I sit down to play, it's like committing myself to watching a double feature of 1984 and Metropolis. The back and forth between Andrew Ryan and Atlas is enjoyable to listen to, but I'm usually too busy tracking down splicers to pay much attention to them.

I'm starting to notice a lot of minor bugs. For about an hour, the same piece of Subtitle was plastered on the bottom of the screen, even after toggling the subtitles setting and refreshing the view multiple times. Also, the game has a nasty habit of interrupting audio log playbacks with new communiques from Atlas or Ryan, and then replaying an earlier audio log completely unrelated to the current ones.

I know bugs are unavoidable in games, especially in one this huge, but it really takes you out of the immersion when you notice polygonal seams in the water.

Progress for April 21, 2009 - BioShock

Talk about night and day. This game is so completely different from Chrono Trigger.
I started the game on the easy setting, because I want to be able to appreciate the storyline without too much hassle. If all goes well, I'll be playing the game again at least once more on a higher difficulty.

The logistic issue I've noticed about BioShock is how long the levels are. I played for 6 hours today and just now made it to the smuggler's hideout. It's going to be tough to find the 1-2 hours I'll need to complete just one chapter.

So far, I have two minor complaints:

1. Dear 2K games, Don't fucking map a context-sensitive action to the same button that uses a consumable! I've wasted so god damned many EVE Hypo's trying to hack cameras and turrets just because the crosshair is half an inch out of range.
2. And once I'm into the hacking game, the controls are JUST sensitive enough to be annoying. If they were any less sensitive, you'd be ready for it and be able to overcompensate for their latency and inaccuracy. But because they're that specific kind of slow, you don't know what to expect.

But other than that, the game is as immersive and well-written as everyone has always said. I really think I'm going to enjoy this.

Chrono Trigger - Retrospective

Ask any Square Fanboy their top 5 Super Nintendo RPGs and you will inevitably hear Chrono Trigger at or near the top. For what it's worth, I did enjoy the game, and I can see where the game earns its "masterpiece" title. The graphics are impressive for its time, the combat system is somewhat unique, and it deals with a subject matter that rarely gets old: Time travel. However, there are many points in the game that shocked me not for what happened in the game, but for didn't happen. The game is given numerous opportunities to shock the player with an jaw dropping plot twist, but never pulls the trigger.

The game started off by lulling me into a false sense of epicness with the brilliantly written leene/marle quest. But then it degraded into a simple episodic. For the first half of the game, nearly every quest you do is self-contained and unrelated to the quest before it or after it. This style continues throughout most of the rest of the game; You find an area with a problem, you fix that problem, then move on to a new area. The locales and characters are all different enough so this doesn't feel very monotonous, but it is awfully shallow.

There were multiple times when playing the game that I thought I was sensing a devastating plot twist, gearing up to be blown away when it finally happens... only to be disappointed when it doesn't. The first time this happened was when approaching Magus to prevent him from summoning Lavos. You find out that Magus is trying to summon Lavos to destroy him, but is unsuccessful regardless of whether or not the party interferes. Now, tell me this isn't a much more dark and epic plot twist:

The party prevents Magus from summoning Lavos, but then discovers that he was trying to summon it in order to destroy the monster. By defeating Magus, the party THEMSELVES are responsible for Lavos destroying the world. Magus would have done it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.

Another time the game disappointed me was during the Dalton thread. Dalton has stolen a FREAKING TIME MACHINE! and all he wants to do with it is fly around the world as a king on some sort of airborne throne? What kind of evil overlord sets his sights so low? In my director's cut, Dalton would have taken the Epoch and used it to travel through time and rewrite history to make himself into a god. It worked for Kefka. This would have also done well to add several hours to an already short game.

Chrono Trigger is an RPG that tries to do too many things at once. It tries to have humor, irony, slapstick, plot twists, epic storylines, and even boasts 12 unique endings. But it tries too hard to cover so many bases, it simply stretches itself too thin to be effective. The game is 50 feet wide, but only 3 inches deep. I can only hope Chrono Cross is more my speed.

The Good

• Excellent music. Some of the best ever from the 16 bit era.
• Simple but satisfying combat that uses position as a legitimate tactic.
• Perfectly balanced enemies and skills reduce the need for grinding to almost nil.

The Bad

• Meandering storyline that defies all rules of the hero's journey.
• Lack of character development for all but a few party members.
• Frustratingly non-epic
  

Defining Moment

• Chrono dying. Not because of how unexpected it was, but because it was the ONLY plot point I had managed to avoid spoilers for all these years.

Burning Question

• Why is Marle doing Fire Sword on the cover of the game box with Chrono? Marle is an ice tech user.

Progress for April 20, 2009 - Chrono Trigger - COMPLETED

Done. The ending did a lot to wrap up a lot of loose ends, especially when accompanied by the anime cutscenes from the PS1 version, Then when you think you're done, you find out you only got 1 of the 12-some endings in the game. I think only a total completionist or someone who really REALLY likes the game will go to such insane lengths to 100% a game like this.

Personally, I'm just going to watch the endings on Youtube and consider it done.

Expect a review tomorrow. I have many choice words to say about this game.

Progress for April 14, 2009 - Chrono Trigger

Well, Almost done. I revived Chrono and completed 2 of the final missions. I'll likely be finished tomorrow and I can finally start playing something I want to.
Not that I'm not enjoying the game. I do like the relationships in the game, especially between Lucca and Robo, Even though Lucca's storyline and time travel experience reeks of Deus ex Machina.

Progress for April 10, 2009 - Chrono Trigger

Well, I'm back in the game, and I'm starting to get tantalizingly close to the end, which is really the only thing that's keeping me going. I've had to replay parts of the game numerous times because my guide decided to fake me out. I will admit, Chrono dying DID catch me off guard. I'm shocked that with so many spoilers around the internet I caught that Magus would join the party, but never found out about Chrono.
I beat Dalton, and now I'm just going around the maps doing some sidequests. I did the Prometheus quest and defeated the sun stone. I suppose it's time to climb Death Peak now.