Gaming in September - a study in diversification

.....or how life has been a bit busier of late.

I couldn't let the month go by without putting in at least one blog entry. Unfortunately, the game (or games) that I'm currently playing are not quickies.

As you may have seen in passing, I have a section of my blog sidebar called "Chip's List of Required Games for Greater Edification." This list includes games that my best friend feels that I should play for a myriad of reasons. Perhaps the game is ground-breaking in design or conception. Perhaps it is one of the greatest games of its time. Whatever the case may be, it is considered my "homework" and so I usually try to do a review on it after completion (Symphony of the Night being an exception...didn't have a blog at the time).


So my latest Chip-required game is Dragon Quest 8. Initial impressions are very favorable as it seems to be a perfect blend of old-school hardness and new school graphics. Plus, in the tradition of older RPGs it takes a long time to complete. I've put in about 10 plus hours (at this time) and I'm still chewing my way through the opening areas.

Now were I just to focus my efforts on Dragon Quest 8, I might be able to finish it and review it soon. However I've also started up a game of Final Fantasy Tactics. Thankfully, the latter is a game I've played a few times already (and one that Chip has ultimate mastery of), so I don't feel as much pressure to play through in a hurried fashion.


And as if playing through two lengthy, time-involved games wasn't enough, Chip has convinced me that we should try the Lord of the Rings: Online - Mines of Moria.


As you may have gleaned from my World of Warcraft post, online gaming is an experience that I'm always coming back to and feel very nostalgic about it. As it turns out, Chip was beginning to wax nostalgic himself about the "good ol' days". While he was very happy playing through his current game (Final Fantasy XI), he missed "rolling with his homey."

So we put our heads together to look for a game that would be new to both of us and preferably one that was decently priced. Star Wars - the Old Republic won't be released for some time, and all the "free" games (Aeria, Perfect World, Ragnarok - free servers) had the same problem - they all boiled down to a basic "rinse and repeat" formula as Chip puts it. Novelty lasts only so long in those games as a result, which makes sense because you get what you pay for (or don't, in this case).

Lord of the Rings Online has a free trial period (10 days), allowing you to explore the land and do some quests before deciding if you want to continue with it. While I plan to give it a more indepth review later, I have to say that initial impressions are very favorable.

Gaming aside, my personal/work life has also been quite busy of late. My company is helping a group of adults with disabilities (that we provide services to) save and raise money for a trip to Disneyland. So my weekends and occasionally weeknights have been spent volunteering to help raise money. We've put on a basketball tournament, had several yard sales through out the summer, set up a benefit concert with local country stars, and next week we'll be doing a spaghetti feed/dance to raise more funds. It's been a busy few months, but it'll be worth it to spend a week in California taking this group to the various theme parks (I think we're even renting a van and driving to Sea World). For many of the adults we help, this will be their first and maybe only chance to do something like this. If it's successful though, we may try this again next year or the year after that.

The trip will be October 18th through the 24th. Wish me luck!

Secret of Mana: A retro-game review

....or how cute monsters nearly killed me, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

So I just beat Secret of Mana a little bit ago. I mean literally minutes ago (Misti by my side). I had forgotten just how much fun this game was. Everything about it is just great. The colors are vibrant, the areas very well fleshed out, the storyline is straightforward and interesting, the characters are well defined, unique and wonderful music, etc.

When I first purchased this game as a young teen, I bought it because it was a Squaresoft game that looked fun. Little did I know just how wonderful it was going to be. From the very beginning you are just thrown into a world as a young boy trying to grow into a destiny thrust upon him by taking a sword found in the middle of nowhere. And after taking this sword you learn just how dangerous this world becomes as cutesy little rabbits (named rabites in this game) attack you without provocation.

From a technical standpoint, this game was unique all around. First of all, it had a new menu style, which I believe was never before seen in a role playing game. While most games had a series of menu where selecting one would bring up a new one in a list fashion, Secret of Mana boasted a series of rings where pushing up and down brought up a new "ring" of choices and left and right made selections. A very time effective way of doing things, which leads to the next point. Prior to this, most RPG's were turned based. This was a real time RPG where you had to run from enemies to power up your attacks. While the game did "pause" while you selected spells or items or exchanged weapons, all fighting occured without interruption. Finally, this game allowed Cooperative play, making it even more unique. That's right, a buddy could walk in, push start on his controller and control one of your characters. Furthermore, if you had the multi-tap, you could have up to three people playing at the same time.

Versus

For all the good in this game, it did have a few flaws. First, the computer controlled players may have difficulty with "tracking"or "pathfinding", that is, following a path close to what you as the main player decide. As a result, the computer may become stuck running against a wall or running along a different path to try to catch up with you, preventing any forward progress. That being said, this has always been a probelm in games when the computer controls a player character and one that plagues games even now, almost 13 years later.

Another aspect that may turn players off is how unforgiving the hit-detection may be. When you fight with enemies, your attack is compared with their defense (straight-forward, eh?). However the animation of your attack may not connect fully thus causing you to miss, or worse, the enemy may appear to miss, but send your character flying anyway. This can get even more frustrating when attacks are stacked upon you, causing you to continually fly back without being able to defend yourself or run away.

Overall a great game and one that players should pick up, even if it's the re-release on the Nintendo Wii. I guarantee at least 30 hours of pure fun if you just try to do the minimum to beat the game.

Now for the Nostalgia: One of my favorite early gaming memories involves this game. It was actually the first night that I, as a teen, stayed up all night playing a videogame. I had invited some friends over to hang out (it may have been close to my birthday, I'm not exactly sure). My high school best friend Cody and I decided to start a game around 6 or so at night. And we kept on playing. Around 4-ish in the a.m. I started to get a bit nervous about thinking it may be time to sleep, but the game just kept on holding our attention and pushing us forward. Finally I looked over and realized that the sun was coming up and I had just played videogames literally all night long. We decided to stop sometime around 8:00 a.m. to get some food, and to talk about how far we had gotten in the game (all the way to the Sunken Continent before the Mana Fortress is raised). The fun of co-op play was a novelty for most SNES games, so it was doubly fun just hanging with my best friend and playing one of the best RPG's of it's time (and I might argue one of the greatest of all time.

So if your looking for a game with fun graphics, a great story, and most importantly a chance to game with a buddy, look no further than Secret of Mana.

Cataclysm? Werewolves and Goblins? Awesome!

.....Or why I may just be popping back into World of Warcraft. (The Joy of MMO's)

So awhile ago I wrote a blog entry about a new Star Wars MMO coming out that had me all excited. And while I'm still looking forward to it, Blizzard just released word about a new expansion to the World of Warcraft series. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. Their last expansion gave gamers an incredibly powerful class in the Deathknight and a couple of new zones were added, but overall, I didn't see enough to bring me back to a game that is a huge time sink. I'll get more into the new expansion after a brief explanation followed by some nostalgia bragging.

Now for the unfamiliar, MMO's are a unique genre of game where instead of the goal being to complete the game, you instead have to set up goals within the game: to reach the next level, to kill a particular bad guy, to get a powerful weapon, etc. "So what is the fun in this?" you might ask. Well, for starters, there is a social aspect to the game that you just don't get when you play on a console (PS3, Xbox360, etc.). Sure there are a few co-op games where you can play side by side with a buddy and run through a game, but take that experience, multiply it by a hundred and then you have an idea of what the online community is like. It is a whole different feeling when you realize that the group of friends you have met all come from different parts of the world and that you are all uniting to take down some big bad monster.

Some of my favorite gaming memories involve my best friend and me running through Azeroth in World of Warcraft. We'd both been playing for a few months on a PvP server and so we were getting pretty good a defending ourselves against other players. We decided to set up a couple of Horde characters on a new server that we could just run without having to worry about other people joining us - and thus House Savanhi was born. We were a fearsome duo - Kaylos (me), a bloodelf paladin, and Bastille (Chip), a bloodelf hunter. We were fearless running through Alliance territory while hunting for new pets for Chip. But our true crowning moment didn't occur until we hit level 24. Up until this point, we had attacked and destroyed players who were up to 9 levels higher than us (read this as: significantly stronger). However when we hit level 24 and were hanging around an area called Southshore, we were attacked by a human warrior whose level appeared not as a number but as a skull. This meant that attacking him was instant death. House Savanhi bows to no man though, so we fought back and brought his health down considerably.

We lost.

Afterwards, Chip and I discussed the fight in the little chat box -
Chip: "Dude, we almost had him."
Me: "I know...we did get him down pretty low."
Chip: "I think we can take him!"
Me: "...."
Me: "Let's go for it."
We both realized that we had held back some of our more powerful abilities.Sure enough when we got back to Southshore, the warrior spotted us and charged in. This time though, we had a plan. We spread out and I alternated between attacking the warrior and healing Chip and myself while Chip blasted away. It was a fierce battle but we were victorious. After the fight I looked up the warrior on the Armory, and found out that he was a level 44 human warrior. He had 20 levels on us, and we - just the 2 of us - beat him! Within 10 minutes of this fight, we slaughtered a 36 dranei paladin, 31 night elf warrior and a 32 human warrior. We were actually being solicited for help by other players to protect them against Alliance players.

Moments like this just don't happen on console games. The sheer adrenalin of matching wits and skill against a human opponent (outside of a First-Person-Shooter game), knowing where and when to use skills and abilities, working in tandem with your best friend to take down a stronger human player. Exhilarating!

And it is moments like that might just cause me to head back when the new expansion comes out. As I mentioned in the title, thar be Werewolves! Granted, they're called Worgen, but the principle is the same. And I do love me werewolves (see my first Twitter tweet if you doubt it). The sheer novelty of playing that race might be enough to draw me back where deathknights and flying mounts failed.

Now before this blog entry gets too much longer, I'm just going to stop here. I'll get more into some of the cooler details of the expansion in the future and I'll also point out the debate between monthly fees and paying for new console games.

Next time: A retro-game review: Secret of Mana followed by Dragon Quest VIII.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (Game Review)

…Or how to use Force Lightning to fry Jawas*. *note - no Jawas were hurt during the making of this blog

I finished Star Wars: The Force Unleashed yesterday and was overall pretty happy with the game. The plot is very straightforward but adds more depth to the already impressive Star Wars canon. The timeline for this game takes place between Star Wars III and Stars Wars IV. Vader has decided to train a secret apprentice and is using him to hunt down enemies of the empire, all the while promising him that they will destroy the emperor and together rule the galaxy (sound familiar? Like the end of Star Wars VI, maybe?).

The graphics for this game were very impressive, with very well fleshed out environments that just help to add to the feeling of being on an alien world or running along the decks of a star ship. The cut-scene cinematics were fairly impressive with a wonderful attention to detail, e.g. stubble on the main characters face removing a level of plasticity usually seen on computer animated humans. Once again though, the main problem with the cinematic cut-scene comes from trying to have the lips move to match the words being spoken. Computer generated graphics and motion captures have come a long way, but we’re still not quite able to capture the nuances of the human face.

The gameplay was very fluid, with the action flowing quite nicely during fights. The combos were easy to execute and easier to remember, allowing the user to use his lightsaber effectively to mow down enemies in front of him. I’d personally classify this game as a platform/action adventure game (with some role-playing elements) and as such I do have some problem with the platform aspect of this game. At times, the appropriate platform on a wall or bit of rubble won’t be as apparent as it should be, especially if it is necessary to advance further in the level. While the double-jump and dash is helpful for trying to fix mistakes made while reaching the next platform, it takes some practice to get used to, and ultimately use it effectively. Compounded with this problem is the issue of missing a jump and hitting an invisible barrier that prevents you from performing a double-jump and/or dash to salvage the situation.

Another technical issue that bugged me was the camera for this game. The user has some measure of control over the camera using the right analog stick, but at times this makes little difference as items in the foreground block your view or worse, become only partially transparent leaving thick lines that still impede vision while somehow becoming more distracting.

Finally, throughout the game are various achievements, like collecting “holocrons”, objects that either give you items that change your lightsaber or contain costumes. While playing this game I decided to make it my mission to finish all the objectives including getting all the hidden holocrons. I was looking forward to the last level, because it contained the famous “Black Lightsaber Crystal”. Needless to say as soon as I picked it up, I equipped it…and was very underwhelmed. Maybe I had built it up in my mind too much, but honestly, it just wasn’t as cool as it should have been. The costumes were nice but quickly lost their novelty.

In the end, I don’t think that this game has a high replay value, but idea of being able to run around and use Force powers at will is definitely appealing. If nothing else, I’d get the game for the ability to play the first level as Darth Vader. It is just the coolest thing on earth. Fun Fact: He only has two speeds while you play as him – walk, and walk with more anger! He never runs. Ever. And I’ve got to say that there is nothing better than Force grabbing a wookie who’s leaping toward you and throwing him back at his fellow wookies. One of life’s greatest pleasures.

Next time: A retro game review – Secret of Mana.