Nevermind - The Biofeedback Horror Game

Disclaimer: I backed this game on Kickstarter. Both in its failed initial run, and on its later, successful reattempt.

It's never really been a secret that I enjoy horror games. Far more than I've ever liked horror movies, at that (though really, I don't watch movies particularly often - much to the chagrin of my housemates).

I have fond memories of first playing the original Resident Evil, as a child, and being terrified when I encountered a corpse that had been pecked to death by crows - and got subsequently attacked by said crows. I turned off the game and didn't return for MONTHS. Felt like a badass when I did and got through that part, though.

Or the time I was playing Silent Hill 2, late night, lights off. Turned the game off to go to bed, and saw a... thing out the window. That was also terrifying, though it didn't stop me from returning to thegame the   next evening!

Therefore, it should be no surprise that Nevermind is, and always has been to me, an interesting concept. A game that detects your fear through a heart rate monitor, and makes the game SCARIER until you can calm yourself down sounds like a great step in the direction of using tech to scare the crap out of people!

Therein lies my biggest problem with the game, though. I couldn't try that feature out, because I don't have, don't need, and can't afford, a heart rate monitor for a single game.

Fortunately, you don't need one for the game to work - and its still damn creepy without it!

What I Liked

Story Conceit

The story is that you are a psychologist, of sorts. You plug into a device that allows you to delve into the subconscious of your clients, to try and find hidden memories, which will point you towards the source of their traumas. Once this process has been completed, treatment can properly begin - though your task in the game is purely to make that breakthrough.

While I seem to vaguely recall hearing a similar plot germ a while ago, I've not actually experienced any fiction that takes this tack, and it piqued my interest. The tutorial level, in particular, was clever in using a well known story to ease you into how the game works, as well as providing a good level of creepiness to whet the appetite.

Why does this remind me of the clown game at the fair?

Subtle Puzzles

The puzzles (beyond the tutorial level) range from being rather straightforward (oh look I found the photo I needed) to hair pullingly subtle (looking at clues on a wall and comparing that to the room's layout to figure out a safe combination). I quite enjoyed the tougher puzzles...

What I Disliked

Subtle Puzzles

...except that the toughest ones were absolute walls, and there isn't the concept of a hint button in the game at all. One puzzle locked me down for a good 20 minutes, and I eventually resorted to using a Let's Play video to get the answer since I was so stuck! 

Let's be clear - in this particular instance I couldn't even figure out what my actual goal was, let alone achieve it. This is, however, completely subjective - some people may well breeze through those. 

Length

I liked the game a lot, and was a little galled to find it had only two clients (beyond the tutorial level). While you can replay levels to find extra stuff, I've always found that scares don't hold up nearly as well the second time around, since you know what's coming! Therefore, I didn't bother with that.

You could, threoretically, blast through this game in a couple of hours. Seriously. I'd love to see some more content!

Let's face it - I would live on this street if I could

Verdict

While I wasn't able to try with the heart rate monitor, I still found myself enjoying this quite a bit. If you're willing to throw $20 US at it (and let's face it - that's the cost of a movie nowadays, which is roughly the same length of time and not nearly as fun unless that movie happens to be Fury Road), you'll find your money well spent.

Also, I recall hearing that the tech was being used to help people treat anxiety (though I doubt it would do so using the horror game - at least not for people who have actual panic attacks), so that's damn cool too!

Silent Hill: Homecoming

Development duties for Silent Hill 5 were handed over to an American company. While I question the wisdom of such a move, it did result in a Silent Hill game being made, so I suppose that's something. More details below.

What I Liked

• Despite the Americanism, its still Silent Hill

While the development duties changed hands, this time allowing the Americans to play with a Japanese franchise, seemingly with the aim of ramming it into the ground as quickly as possible (which mirrors my opinion of the Devil May Cry reboot, oddly enough) it remains “Silent Hilly” enough to tolerate. While the by-now-overused nurses appear a lot, and Pyramid Head is wrongfully used in the name of fanservice, the puzzles and the general feel of the game still screams Silent Hill at you. From the fog, to the way almost every door is permanently locked.

Although, admittedly, this one is much more linear than prior Silent Hill games!

• UFO Ending tradition remains strong

Silent Hill has always had a tradition of having multiple endings – one always being an ending which involved UFOs and aliens. This is the secret ending, usually requiring multiple playthroughs to find.. Apparently, in Homecoming it isn't quite so secret. It's also, by far, the most interesting ending of the five (which is quite sad – the other four endings, while more serious in tone, also weren't interesting in the slightest).

What I Hated

• Dodge ability works only half the time

One of the big new features that was advertised for Silent Hill: Homecoming was a revamped control system, including the ability to dodge. The game now controls much more like a third person shooter than it used to (though having tanky controls was arguably part of the thrill of Silent Hill).

However, I found that more often than not, the dodge button would simply fail to operate correctly. If you touch the dodge button as you were being attacked, you would either get a last second dodge (which meant a parry if you held a melee weapon, or taking a hit if you were holding a gun), or simply not move at all and take a bladed arm to the face!

No, to dodge properly in this game, you must press the dodge button a second BEFORE the attack goes through. The monsters telegraph their attacks to a degree, in an attempt to lessen the deadliness of this issue, however it is difficult to tell between a tell before an attack, or just a random shudder from the monsters, due to their mutated nature.

• Pyramid Head does not belong here

Pyramid Head was an important part of Silent Hill 2, symbolising James' sexual tension, as well as punishing him for his misdeeds by chasing him around and generally scaring the crap out of the player. However, it is simply that – a punishment for his sins.

While Alex in Homecoming has his own issues to come to terms with, it feels wrong to have Pyramid Head appearing here. For starters, he appears and simply walks away, opening a path for you to progress. Later on, he kills a plot-integral character right in front of Alex. This isn't right! It just feels like a fanservice issue, rather than an actual need to use him. Much like how he was used in the Silent Hill film.

• The game is almost over before you enter Silent Hill

You spend a total of 3 chapters of the game in Silent Hill. For a Silent Hill game, this feels kind of weak. Isn't the point of Silent Hill the fact that weird stuff is going on in the town? Admittedly, by the end of the game, they do explain why it spilled over into Shephard's Glen, but it still feels slightly off to me.

• Plot feels empty

Silent Hill plots are typically heavy on symbolism, and light on straight logic. Things tend to not make sense until quite late on in the game, and even then take some thinking (and possibly reading of other people's opinions) to realise what's going on.

However, Silent Hill: Homecoming does not have this. The game feels fairly light in plot until the last few chapters – and even then a lot of what takes place doesn't require any thought at all to decipher what went on. Particularly since it falls into the trap of having the “bad guy” explain their plan to you (while you are tied to a chair in a scene reminiscent of a Bond film).

It is very much a Hollywood attempt at horror in this manner, where the plot must be explainable in words with less than three syllables in them, for fear of losing sales (and therefore money) due to requiring too much thought.

In conclusion, while the game was tolerable, that's about all it is. It really pales in comparison to prior Silent Hill titles. Hell, it pales in comparison to the title immediately following it (Silent Hill: Shattered Memories – the retelling of SH1 which takes the plot of that, and remixes it so it goes in a completely different direction. While not an amazing game, it was fun, tried something different, and feels like it may be the beginning of an alternate history SH series).

Silent Hill: Homecoming is a completely forgettable experience, and altogether skippable. Don't waste your time.

Also, I got the good ending. After watching the other endings on YouTube, I would have preferred any of those, because things actually happened in them. Aren't we supposed to be wanting the happy ending?

F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin

Shooting bullets at things

The sequel to First Encounter Assault Recon seems like it is quite an old game to be released, and that I'm behind on the times. However, I feel that now is the perfect time to review it, due to the imminent release of F.E.A.R 3, and the fact that until now I hadn't played it. Those who read my reviews of the expansions to the original F.E.A.R game know that my opinion of those is particularly low – and I needed quite a long break after playing those train wrecks to be able to bring myself to play F.E.A.R 2!

What I Liked

• More than 2 weapons at once!

This absolutely shocked me – this would be the first modern shooter I have played in quite a long time that aims for realism (to a degree) and yet allows a player to hold more than two weapons at once! Admittedly, it is still restricted (4 guns, 4 types of grenade), but it allows much more choice than, for example, Call of Duty, or Duke Nukem Forever (the latter being very disappointing in this regard, due to its roots).

In addition to this, a fair few of the guns are quite satisfying to use. My jaw dropped when I got hold of the Napalm Launcher. While its not particularly powerful, I always enjoy being able to set things on fire in a game – and a fire launching gun is something I never see often enough in shooters! The sniper rifle would immediately gib an enemy soldier if you get a good shot on them. In fact, the only disappointing weapon was the Hammerhead – the successor to the first game's “Penetrator”. It is essentially a nailgun, and is quite powerful. However it doesn't feel as powerful as it should be.

The plasma weapon you get late in the game is particularly awesome.

Alma just loves to ruin your day

• Plot

The plot for this game is utterly insane. To be honest, I found it quite difficult to follow, but it was entertaining nonetheless. It began to fall into place by the end, and made a semblance of sense by the end, leading up to one of the strangest game endings I have ever seen. I won't spoil it for anyone (obviously), except to say that it leaves a sequel a foregone conclusion (and really... the sequel's out at time of writing, so meh). It's also kind of disturbing, but that's the aim of the game really.

• Mechs

The first game had a bunch of mech-like power armours to battle against. These battles were frustrating, and forced the player to rely on explosives due to their increased damage (they could be taken down purely with bullets, but it would take a lot of them). Of course, you destroy them all and continue on your merry way.

Why do I mention this? Well in F.E.A.R 2, you have two sequences where you are lucky enough to pilot these. These sections are fairly easy in comparison to the on-foot sequences, but I found it quite fun to run around blasting these guys in a mech. Variety is always a blessing in an FPS, and these sections were much needed short bursts of destruction.

What I Hated

• The Fear is a Lie

For a game titled FEAR, there was a surprising lack of it. This may be the jaded gamer in me talking, but I found that the game didn't creep me out in the slightest until quite late. The sections that did creep me out were creepy due to random ghosts attacking (and dealing damage) out of nowhere than to the actual game. They get a lot of atmospheric things right – there a lots of corridors of corpses and blood, and the occasional dive into the mind of the psychic (and psycho) girl who is chasing you. However, it occasionally feels like they're just going through the motions.

I find it quite difficult to describe why it didn't scare me – since such a thing is quite subjective. I have spoken to other people about this game, and some have been scared, and others were very not scared. I was scared the first time I played the original game, but since then it seems to have become simply run and gun to me.

Admittedly, a FPS where you are allowed weapons (some of these weapons being extremely powerful – not to mention the aforementioned mech piloting segments) makes a horror game feel much less horror oriented, since you are able to fight back against the bad guys. The game attempts to wrench this from you when you have the sequences where Alma exerts her influence over you, but before long you realise that these are all scripted, and you will be returned full control of yourself before long.

If you want a game that will scare the pants off you, this is not it. Play Amnesia: Dark Descent instead.

• Mostly Generic Enemies

This is a complaint I had with the first game – with the exception of the ninjas and the mechs, every fightable enemy is a generic soldier. Some have small arms, some have bigger guns, some have sniper rifles, some are wearing helmets, and some are not. This is about as much as the enemies vary.

In addition to this, there is only one type of ninja (fair enough), and one fightable monster/mutant type. It begins to feel very samey after a while, after you have gunned down generic replica soldier #8445674. Admittedly, the replica soldiers are supposed to be replicas of each other – that's part of the plot. However they are not the only enemies you have in the game, and the sameness of the other enemies seems unjustified, and simply not fun, to me.

• Certain Environments are Boring

A lot of the early game environments are much like they were in the first game – empty warehouses, underground laboratories, and deserted hospitals. These places are all well and good, but they feel too over-utilsed in horror games nowadays (particularly since Silent Hill made hospitals scarier than they have ever been before). Compound this with the fairly bland enemies, and the early game feels like a chore. It wasn't until about halfway through the game (where I reached the streets of the city) that I began to really enjoy the game at all. Unfortunately, first impressions matter – people will stop playing if they get bored unless they're pedantic and want to finish the game.

• Conflicting Goals

This is partially covered above, but the game doesn't seem to be able to decide whether it wants to be a balls to the wall shooter, a realistic simulation, or a horror game. As a result, it has a tendency to flip between the three. Whilst not necessarily a bad thing, some of the transitions feel kind of clumsy.

The AI is fairy strong on some points, forcing you to think tactically (to a degree) about what you're doing. When to reload, when to hide, when to shoot. However, this is blown by giving you an activate-at-will slow-mo ability which gives you a limited amount of time where you can essentially charge at the enemies without regard to sense.

You are repeatedly shown scenes of random soldiers being dragged away by an invisible force, and ripped apart in an attempt to scare you (or at least creep you out). Moments later, this tension is broken with an all out gunfight, or a terribly placed line of dialogue. An actual line from the game: “You're like free pizza at an anime convention. She smells you, and she will consume you.”

Uh... what?

The protagonist of F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin

• Retarded Default Controls

This is a minor gripe, but the default controls reek of console port. Right click is the melee button by default, while I cannot remember the initial setting for scoped sighting (which you will want to use a lot, since, you know, aiming when shooting is a good thing). The middle mouse click opens a very consoleriffic gun selection "quick menu", which felt very wrong to use early on, and didn't get much easier as the game continued. I found myself simply ducking behind a corner and scrolling to find the gun I wanted!

All in all, F.E.A.R 2 is a huge improvement over the first game, particularly the terrible expansions it had. While completely disregarding those expansions plotwise makes me all the more bitter about suffering through them, it was for the best. However, don't come to this party expecting to be sent home crying to your Mummy.

Game Cameos

Game developers and publishers occasionally do funny things, in an attempt to sell more copies of their game and make money. Sometimes they are ridiculous marketing campaigns, promising things that never arrive in the completed product (the original Assassin's Creed, anything Peter Molyneux is involved with). Sometimes they make extra little games to draw attention (Bulletstorm with Duty Calls), or just draw attention to odd things ("Duke Nukem has been in production for around 12 years, but its coming out! Quick, buy it!").

And sometimes, they insert random character cameos. Oh noes...

A cameo can either work really well as an added little bonus to the game. It can also fall flat on its face, making it seem like a stupid little cash in - or even worse, completely breaking a game and rendering it unplayable.

The "Tales of" RPG series does good cameos. They tend to have characters from other games in the series feature as a special optional boss in the coliseum. This works well because it completely does not intrude upon the game - they have nothing to do with the main plot. Indeed, you could miss the cameo entirely if you do not fight much in the coliseum (there's only one coliseum battle required in Tales of Symphonia. I do not know about the other titles). Once the battle is over, those characters disappear and never appear again. A true cameo role.

Viewtiful Joe also does a decent cameo. You play the entire game through, and unlock Dante, from Devil May Cry, as an alternate character to play as. He has nothing to do with the storyline as it stands regularly (as far as I can recall, anyway), and is completely optional, fun extra.

I have no problems with these cameos. The problem arises when the cameos become stupid, and adversely affect the game.

The single biggest example of this is Soul Calibur 4. It is quite an entertaining game, until you bring Star Wars characters into the mix! Soul Calibur is a sword fighting game with a medieval age type setting. Swords, armour, staves, etc clash in an all out slashfest. Quite entertaining.

So why the HELL did Namco decide to do a deal with George Lucas' people, and add in Darth Vader, Yoda, and the apprentice from The Force Unleashed? These characters affect the game badly in a few ways:
# They have an extra game mechanic which applies only to them - the Force. They have an extra meter as a result.
# They get in the way of random character selection - I like to do the random character selection, but I sure as hell don't want to be playing as Yoda when I do!
# Yoda is both useless, and gamebreaking. If you learn how to use Yoda half-decently, you're essentially immortal because HE IS TOO SHORT TO BE HIT WITH A REGULAR HORIZONTAL ATTACK. They seemingly tried to mitigate this by making every movement of his involve jumping around like a monkey, but seriously this is as bad as Dr B in Tekken 3!
# The Apprentice throws lightning. Nowhere else in the game do I recall seeing a projectile attack.
# Star Wars + medieval fantasy = fail.

Another example of where a cameo didn't make me very happy is the recently released (and banned) Mortal Kombat on the PS3. Kratos from God of War appears in it. At least this time the universe crossover works - Kratos is exactly the kind of guy who belongs in Mortal Kombat, due to the brutality of both their universes. However, I played a few levels as him, and it wasn't executed well at all. In a (mostly) unarmed fighting game, he permanently has weapons. Also, he only seems to have one voice acted line, simply lifted from one of the GoW games.

Seriously devs, if you're going to include a cameo in your game, think it through. Make it an Easter Egg, or a hidden secret that isn't a fundamental part of the game.

Fear of Water, in game form

Hydrophobia: Prophecy is a pretty looking game (at least, the PC version is, although it's allegedly been heavily retooled from earlier editions) all about being on a boat. And fighting terrorists, for some reason.

It follows the plight of Kate – an engineer on a large ship which is supposedly the last hope for humanity – Earth has run out of resources and so the scientists on this ship are working on a solution to this problem. The problem – extremists attack the ship during a random celebration party (which was a lead up to an announcement, which is never made nor mentioned again once the shit hits the fan). Kate is in an elevator when the extremists attack, causing her to fall onto a lower deck of the ship, which is quickly flooding. You need to help her escape through puzzling, jumping, climbing, and shooting.

I Liked:

• Potential in the plot (what happens when Earth runs out of resources?)

The plot has potential, the setup being that you are an engineer on a large ship, which houses a technological powerhouse that is working on a way to create enough resources for humanity to continue to exist on Earth. It has the potential to explore the issues of resource use, what happens when we eventually run out of resources to sustain life with, and so forth. Frustratingly enough, it fails to explore this topic in anything bar a superficial method to place you on a boat, and to have terrorists attack said boat.

• Water Power

One of the cooler powers in the game is the ability to control water. This could allow for all sorts of interesting puzzles and combat situations. You can essentially create a tower of water to carry and throw objects with. 

However, much like everything else that was good about this game, it is underutilised. More on this later.

• Water graphics

You would be hard pressed to find water graphics this pretty outside of Bioshock. I find Bioshock's to be a bit nicer, but really, water is difficult, and this water looks great. It even acts in a way that makes sense, spilling out when a door is opened from a flooded room (although it does seem to mysteriously disappear once the door is closed). One point worth mentioning though, is when the aforementioned water control powers are being used, the water suddenly looks horrible. I can understand the difficulty of making it look right when you do this kind of thing in real time, but it looks very different from the nice water just below the tower you've created!

• The hacking mini game

You are an engineer. Early sections of the game explain that the extremists lock you out of your own system, thereby justifying the myriad of broken or locked doors you come across (which makes this game linear as all hell), and need to hack to gain access to wherever you are headed at the time. Hacking doors – you all know what this means. This means a minigame!

However, I quite enjoyed the hacking minigame here. Unlike some more intrusive or nonsensical hacking minigames (ie the demented tetris/columns game in Secret Agent Clank, the pipe dream hacking game in Bioshock), you simply have to match a waveform displayed on your hacking device to the waveform from whatever you're trying to hack. This makes them run quite quickly, and nonintrusively, keeping you in the game. More importantly, it makes sense considering that you are an engineer. Unlike Bioshock's “I'm going to hack a security camera by playing with some water pipes” confusion.

I Hated:

• One gun with lots of ammo types – all of which suck

Early in the game, you are weaponless. Eventually you get a gun, but it fires “Sonic Rounds” - used to knock people unconscious, but having the ability to kill someone if they are shot enough with it (which is played off as an unintended use of the device). It's all well and good to begin with a stun gun, but instead of giving you access to new weapons frequently, Hydrophobia gives you new types of ammunition. This neatly solves the problem of “how can you carry 12 guns?”, but leaves another issue which didn't sit well with me – how can you jam bullets into a sonic laser-esque weapon?

Also, why do all my bullets seem useless in comparison to the unlimited sonic blast weapon? I found, at most, 8 bullets for the regular “Semi-auto” bullet type. Admittedly, later on there was plenty of rapid fire rounds, but I always found myself falling back on the sonic weapon, with the exception of the final battle (where you're forced into using the electricity blast weapon). Underwhelming, to say the least.

• Understated plot

As mentioned before, the plot has potential to be an interesting commentary, or “what if?” situation, with the potential future running out of resources being a major cause of the events that unfold. Instead, however, we are presented with this as only a backdrop (and large parts of it we have to infer from out of game material, since much of the scenario such as the state of the world itself is left out except for passing mention in hidden documents strewn about the world).

Challenging moral questions such as “if we were to go into population control, who decides who is to be killed” are completely ignored in favour of a generic “megalomaniac extremist thinks that mass murder is the only method to solve the problem and sets about doing that on your boat”. As the events begin to unfold, your mission begins as “survive and get to a safer spot”, until eventually Kate (your character) arbitrarily decides that she should figure out what the extremists are aiming for, stop that from happening, and somehow ends up chasing the enemy leader herself by the end of it, in a series of contrived revelations / events. This unfolds a little too quickly for my liking, and she seems to change very quickly from “engineer just trying to survive” to “action hero who sounds a little scared, but is still killing swathes of extremists all the same.”

• Underuse of powers

I mentioned that I liked the water power you gain in the game – I find it to be a nice, innovative idea. Quite fitting too, considering that you spend the game on a boat with large sections flooding. The issue is that you don't get many opportunities to use this innovative ability. Much like everything that was good about this game, it is underused.

You do not actually obtain this power until a short period before the end of the game (for plot reasons), and get to use it for one puzzle, a few combat scenarios, and the end (or should I say only?) boss encounter. There could have been any number of interesting puzzles and combat scenarios created with this mechanic, but the developers decided not to use what they created, sadly.

• Fiddly controls

There was many a time I wanted Kate to jump at an edge, where she waited to jump until after I ran off, even though I let the spacebar go about three steps before it. Many a time she refused to walk where I wanted her to go, and the water power contr4ols were frustrating. I can only imagine the input system was (badly) ported from a console, it just feels clunky, though also feeling like it would work on a controller.

Overall

The game was worth a look for me, because of its interesting setting. “Save the World, Kill Yourself” is spray painted over a lot of the walls, succinctly demonstrating the extremists viewpoint.

It resembles my view of this game closely enough – save your money and kill any thought of buying this. While it was entertaining in parts, it fell frustratingly short in every account as far as I'm concerned. A missed opportunity.

Dragon Age 2

"Do you ever feel like the world's getting... simpler? Like everything from eating to fighting is a lot less complex than it used to be?". The drunk in The Hanged Man tavern can be heard saying quite often. I think this is a great dig from the developers at themselves for the transformations they've made to Dragon Age, and also marks my major reaction to the game in general.

Not that this is a bad thing, mind you, as combat flows much more smoothly than it ever did in Dragon Age: Origins (DA:O), and it tends to be more visually spectacular (in an actioney way, apart from simply being a graphical update). On the other hand, it is much simpler than it was in DA:O, and I found myself using less strategy to conquer my opponents, and more overpower tactics than anything.

The game follows the plight of Hawke - a human escapee from the small town of Lothering. The town gets destroyed by the Blight (a massive invasion of Darkspawn - the DA equivalent of orcs) in DA:O. Hawke narrowly escapes the destruction with his/her (you get to select gender, class and first name - I named him Bob. I regret that choice) family mostly intact (in this prologue sequence you lose a family member dependant upon the class you select, to allow for a balanced party in the early sequences as well as  differing stories down the track).

In short order you find yourself having escaped the Blight, and living in the city of Kirkwall - once a slaver city, now a "free" city, although there are a lot of underlying problems in the city.

You spend the game playing through the course of ten years in the life of Hawke in Kirkwall. Well, I say that, but in reality you play a section of the game, then the story skips a few years. Typically you do a bunch of quests (side quests and storyline ones), then finish a chapter by dealing with whatever situation has arisen during the storyline quests of that chapter, then time skips ahead to the next chapter. While this is an interesting way of presenting a story, this also leads to some disconnect, since there is a lack of an overall bad guy, which makes the entire game feel like "I moved to Kirkwall, did some things, some stuff happened, and then it ended". While large portions of the story are quite dramatic, and it drew me in immensely, the ending (or lack thereof) rubbed me the wrong way due to the lack of conclusion, closure, or even... anything. There was no epilogue (unlike DA:O, which provides an extensive epilogue explaining the long term effects of many of the decisions you made), there was... nothing. I felt cheated.

On the other hand, the journey there is quite enjoyable, the combat is fun, and I was immersed. Some of the events which occurred I wasn't entirely sure if they were avoidable, but they did feel like I could have changed what happened simply by making other decisions. Admittedly, this would take a second playthrough to learn about (which I don't feel up to at the moment).

All in all, the game is worth playing, just don't expect the most amazing thing ever.

Also, Varric is awesome.

Dissidia Duodecim

Dissidia 012: Duodecim: Final Fantasy (hell of a title) is a PSP game which, conceptually is the Super Smash Brother of Final Fantasy in that a bunch of Final Fantasy characters from differing games are brought together in a fighting game with a ridiculous and nonsensical plot, but plays more like an arena fighter. However, how many arena fighters are there that actually work well in a 1v1 combat setting? (The answer is exactly two,  and one of them was the first Dissidia title)

If there are any Final Fantasy fans reading this who have not played the first Dissidia title on PSP, well, first of all, shame on you! But aside from that, you can safely skip it and go straight to Duodecim, since all of the original storyline is contained inside of it. While this is a cool feature and all, it frustrated me to no end that I had to play through a storyline that I had already covered from start to finish again - and its not a short one by any stretch of the imagination!

The plot of Duodecim has some kind of croc-bullshit about the Goddess Cosmos and the God Chaos locked in an eternal war on some world, and summoning warriors to fight for them. These warriors are the main heroes (and villains) of Final Fantasy games I through XIII, with some notable additions and exceptions (there are no villains at all from XI or XIII, and the XII villain is an extra hidden along with two heroines from XI).

This is everyone. I think

The storyline of Duodecim is a prequel, adding in a bunch of extra characters (namely Kain from FFIV, Tifa from FFVII, Laguna from FFVIII, Yuna from FFX, Vaan from FFXII and Lightning from FFXIII). However, there are multiple story modes in Duodecim - just as there was in the original Dissidia title.

Duodecim's initial story mode (012) focuses entirely on the new characters, and their actions (and some kind of explanation as to why they weren't in the first game, since this is a prequel). However, I found this story mode to be a little bit heavy handed on making you play as Lightning. It makes you play 3 chapters solo as Lightning, while everyone else gets a single solo chapter each, and a final chapter where you take all 5 in the newly featured party battles (you're not allowed to take Kain in this particular chapter - which I find highly unfair considering he's one of the cooler characters who was brought in).
This means that in the entirety of the first story mode, you can play as Kain once, everyone else twice, and Lightning 3 or 4 times.

The second story mode - unlocked by completing the initial one - is the story mode from the first Dissidia game. However, the difference here is that it contains the new features from Duodecim - those being Assists, the newly redesigned World Map, and party battles (which are just round robin 1v1s, or a winner stays on form of the same thing). In this story mode, you play as all the old heroes once, bar the Warrior of Light (FFI), who you play twice. You then play the final chapter as a party of 5 characters of your choosing (restricted to heroes from the original game).

Once the second story mode is completed, you unlock yet another story mode title 000 - Confessions of the Creator. This one is an extra one without any real bearing on the plot, and you are allowed to use any unlocked character at all in your 5 person party. This includes villains. However, at this stage in the game, if you have played through the Story Modes and only the story modes (like I did), your villains will be level 1, the heroes you used in the later stages of the second story mode will be approaching level 50, and Lightning will be around level 30. Kain was level 14. This makes taking anyone else a much more difficult option - particularly in this story mode, since the weakest enemy you will find is around level 50 - so you will need to grind in other gameplay modes if you wish to take, say Sephiroth (though why you would take him over Squall is beyond me).

Squall is more badass than you

Gameplay wise, it plays much like the first. If you haven't played that, as I said earlier, shame on you, but it does take a bit of getting used to. It is an arena battler where you fight in one on one situations. Hitting with a standard attack or combo (which can be physical or magical, depending upon how you've set up your character and which character you're using) will deal Bravery damage. This is not "real" damage, but it does reduce the large number on the other character's gauge (you can see both combatant's gauge sets). Dealing Bravery damage to a character reduces the enemy's bravery score and adds the same amount to your own.
However, this alone will not kill a character - it does not act as a health gauge, but more like a momentum gauge than anything. When you reduce a character's Bravery to zero, you inflict upon them a status known as "Bravery Break", awarding you bonus bravery (from a central pool held by the arena itself), as well as rendering the enemy's HP attacks harmless as long as the status persists.
A HP attack is how you actually damage a character in Dissidia - it essentially is a large attack (occasionally a Limit Break pulled from the character's respective game). Connecting with one of these deals HP damage to the enemy equal to the amount of Bravery you have at the time, however it also empties your bravery gauge, allowing the enemy an opportunity to break you, and counterattack. Your bravery regenerates to its initial state after landing a HP attack, however the bigger the blow you dealt, the slower it regenerates.
As you can see, this can lead to some interesting tug of war style battles. I liken the system to an old wrestling game's momentum meter, where you can deal more damage if you have the match leaning in your favour from the regular hits you are dealing out - otherwise you can turn it around in your favour by playing skilfully and not losing your head.

Aside from this, there are other features such as Assists, Summons (though they're reduced to status effects for everyone other than Yuna), the EX gauge and so on, but I'll be here for a week if I try to explain them all.

Not to mention that outside the battles themselves the game is an RPG - including levelling up, equipping abilities, weapons, armour, accessories and summons... and there are many hidden treasures to find and unlock. This game will take hours upon hours to complete, let alone master!

The game was seemingly designed to allow for the kind of combat you see in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. In this, it is quite successful, I have saved many a gameplay replay to watch later - even if it was a lost battle (which I find people are less inclined to save due to the bitterness of defeat), simply because the battle was so fun to enjoy! I had a particularly satisfying battle where I fought as Squall, against a carbon copy of my build of Squall - level, abilities, equipment and all. It was a battle for the ages, and at some stage, I will throw it onto YouTube because I think others may enjoy it.

All in all, Dissidia Duodecim is a fun game, although worth slightly less for people who completed the first title, since you will need to complete the same storyline again (and if you've finished that story, you know how long that will take - not to mention the fact that you need to play through as Zidane again... stupid monkey). Nonetheless, buy it if you have a PSP.

And if you don't have a PSP, then buy one, and Dissidia Duodecim. PSP prices dropped recently so there's no excuse.

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The gaming backlog has been moved to its own separate page, because it makes more sense there. The link on the sidebar will take you there - it has been updated again since I finally finished playing Tales of Symphonia with Sarah over the weekend :P We started playing the sequel to this game, and all I have to say at the moment is YUKIMURA!!!!!!

Portal 2

On a note related to this post, I have updated the backlog post a LOT lately, with new purchases (why oh why do I keep making this harder on myself) as well as a few completions - including the topic of today's post.

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I'm just going to go ahead and say it - buy Portal 2. Now. If you haven't bought it yet, you're a damn fool.

Also, you're committing sacrilege if you have not played the first Portal. I'm serious here. I learned today that one of the guys at work had never played it, so I took matters into my own hands and bought him a copy on Steam. I like to think of it as making the world a better place, if only marginally.

I want one. Now.

For those who don't know the premise of Portal, you are given a gun that shoots portals. Certain types of flat surfaces allow you to fire said portals into them. You can fire a blue portal and an orange portal - when both are laid down, physically entering one will result in you coming out of the other one. The kind of teleportation portals we all wish existed in real life.

Your task is to use the aforementioned portal gun, as well as your brain, to solve a bunch of physics puzzles, that all involve getting you to the other side of a room safely. While this sounds utterly boring when I describe it, that's because, well, I don't describe things well?

It's a first person exploratory puzzle game, if that makes any more sense. In the first title, you are a test subject for a company called "Aperture Science", and your not-so-friendly robot test supervisor GLaDOS offers you... well, less guidance more snarky comments as you progress through the lab. Eventually you escape the confines of the test rooms to try and break out of the lab.

In the sequel, the storyline begins somewhat similarly, in that you are kind of thrust back into the lab test rooms, although they are now badly damaged and gradually get repaired as you continue through the game.

The puzzles originally consisted of mainly buttons, boxes, platforms, the cutest gun turret robots you'll ever meet, and the like. In the sequel, some more elements are added, such as light bridges which can be extended to different parts of the room via portals, goo that makes you run really fast when you walk over it, and a sort of swirling blue antigravity field thing that carries you in whatever direction it is moving.

In addition to all of this, a coop mode has been added, and it is brilliant. There is a certain satisfaction to be had in completing a puzzle, and that is only doubled when you manage to complete a puzzle with the aid of another player. All of the coop puzzles are designed in a way that both players need to get involved, so if you have a player who simply refuses to work with you then I can see how it could very quickly descend into chaos, with the players trying to portal each other into the water (which kills you). Luckily, the game also warns you when you try to look for a coop partner randomly online (it flat out tells you its more fun with a friend rather than some random).

All in all, if you haven't bought it yet, or planned to buy it yet, I doubt I've done much to convince you. However, buy it buy it buy it! It's an entertaining, intelligent game with quite a funny plotline. And the ending to single player is simultaneously hilarious and awesome.

Gangstas

Rapper vs helicopter. Rapper wins, apparently

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. I mentioned I bought (and was intending to play) this horrendous sounding game a couple of posts back. I did actually follow through on this - and the game was about as good as I expected.

Actually, that's a lie. It was actually much better than I expected.

I'm sorry Rena, please don't kill me!

As I mentioned the other day, the storyline is A M A Z I N G. You probably don't care about spoilers for this particular game, but if you do, I suggest you be very careful about reading this post!

The game opens with 50 Cent finishing off the last show of his tour in an unspecified Middle Eastern country. His promoter guy can't pay him the $10 million he promised, so Fitty pulls a shotgun on him.

At this point, I was wondering where he got the shotgun from. I mean, he walked in empty handed, wearing his usual gangster stuff, which is easy enough to conceal a pistol in, sure. But a SHOTGUN?

Anyway, the guy eventually gives in, and gives Fitty a jewel encrusted human skull (apparently priceless) as payment. On his way out of the country he sits in a hummer, arguing with the guy about which gangstas are more gangsta - New York or unspecified country's. At this point I was bored and didn't care - until explosions and gunfire exploded around them. In the chaos, some random woman steals the skull and escapes.

"Bitch took my skull!"

You spend the entire game shooting lots and lots of gangstas, until you eventually run out of gangstas to kill, it seems.

The gameplay is fairly standard fare - third person cover based shooting. Except that I didn't need to use cover until the *very* late stages of the game where I was consistently facing off against snipers, gun turrets and helicopters. Until this point, I didn't so much as hide behind a rock. It appears our buddy Fitty is bulletproof (unsurprisingly, Bulletproof is the title of 50 Cent's first game. Yes, THERE IS MORE THAN ONE OF THESE GAMES) - also a fact he mentions in a cutscene at one point. He also proves it - taking a bullet at point blank range late on - then getting up about 5 seconds later to fire rockets at a helicopter.

The game is quite rough around the edges in terms of gameplay though. Some things just aren't done well, some things completely clash, and some things make no sense whatsoever. For example, the weaponry types are colour coded. Grey for pistol (which you can never run out of ammo for), yellow for assault, blue for close range (shotguns, SMGs etc) and red for heavy weapons. This is fine, visual cues on the ammo boxes are handy.
The part that doesn't make sense about this is the fact that the enemy gangstas are also colour coded the same way. They wear brightly coloured tshirts which make it easy to see where they are, and give a general idea of what weapon they're carrying. It seems oddly out of place that there are so many gangstas packing weaponry that seem to be part of some kind of sick Wiggles impersonation group. Except much more violent. And now, much more dead.

When you kill an enemy, they drop money. You pick up their money, and spend it on more weaponry, "counter kills" (which is a fancy name for Quick Time Event melee kills), and taunts. I spent some money on taunts - they were less fun than the taunts you began with. You can also find cash in boxes (stashes I suppose). What doesn't make sense here, is that THE MONEY IS CEL-SHADED. Nothing else in the game is. This leads to a strange incongruence in the art style - though I really would have been happy if they'd just made the entire game a cartoon - its close enough already.

Also, 50 Cent has gangsta powah. There is literally a gangsta mode, which slows down time for a little while. I'm not sure if all of these things were Fitty's idea, but gangsta mode sounds like it could have been.

By far, the most annoying thing about this game is that its coop. Its a coop shooter in the vein of Gears of War. However, you can't actually play it coop on a single console - if you want to play this coop game in two player, you have to do it online. If you play solo, you choose one of Fitty's boys to follow you around, shoot at things, continuously yell at you to get into cover (because I never did until the end sequences), and occasionally help you open a door or give you a boost up a ledge. This annoys me - and its not the only game to do this (Crackdown, I believe, made the same mistake). If you're going to make a coop game, then let people actually play it coop on one console! Surely it's not that difficult to add a split screen!

Anyway, its over, and I have returned to Final Fantasy XIII. Woo!

And you'll be glad to know - he gets his skull back

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The backlog has been updated - since last mention, two games have been finished, and a bunch more added. It's getting ridiculous now...
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Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions

Final Fantasy Tactics is a game I have a love-hate relationship with. It's also a game that's been bugging me for YEARS. That's right, years.

Yes, the game that has been haunting me for years is a box of tic-tacs

My first encounter with Final Fantasy Tactics was years ago in a gaming magazine (in the days before I had reliable Internet access), in a small article which lamented the fact that there was a new Final Fantasy title (this was after the wild success that was Final Fantasy VII) that wasn't going to make it to Australia. Of course, importing at the time was all but out of my reach due to being young, not having knowledge of how or where to import games from (again, lack of Internet would have me rely on a physical shop that was willing to import a niche title), and not having knowledge on how I would make the damn game work once I had it (because region locking sucks giant donkey balls, and is completely unnecessary).

Cue someone at school handing me a copy of Final Fantasy Tactics on a disc a few years later, after I had offhandedly mentioned that I wanted to play it. This person had a chipped PS1, and a burned copy of the game. I borrowed it, acquired a PS1 emulator for my computer (by then I had amazing dial-up interwebs), and played. 10 minutes later, after the game playing really really slowly (due to the computer being unable to handle the pressures of emulating the Playstation), and a fairly boring (for me at the time) combat system. I returned the disc, and let it go.

Come 20xx, when Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions is released for the PSP. A re-release with new cutscenes, a few extra quests, and an extra new cameo character is released. At the time, I have other PSP games to play, and I had remembered how bored I was by the combat when I was younger (and less patient), and so avoided it.

2011, I caved in and ordered the game off PlayAsia. I played it, frustrated the hell out of myself repeatedly, and then eventually finished the game last Friday evening.

Final Fantasy Tactics is a tactical RPG. This makes combat much slower than one is used to from playing other Final Fantasy titles, or (more recently for me) the Tales series. Instead of simply getting control of a character, and telling them to make the magics, or hit the dude with the sword like the other Final Fantasy games, you control a larger party, tell them where to move, if in range you can attack or use magic, etc. Much slower paced, but also much more... well... tactical. Hence the tactics title, I suppose.

This also leaves things more open to confusion early on. The first few battles are ones where you are only able to control your own character - the others are guest characters. This means you spend the majority of the first few battles watching sprites run around and kill each other - while you get to maybe move a few squares here and there. Not much of the battle system is explained to you in-game unless you watch the tutorials separately (which is boring, but it definitely helps).

Eventually when you learn how to play, and get a bit into it, its quite fun. You can switch jobs at will, and every time a character makes a successful action, they earn experience for themselves, and job points for their current job. Experience is a general thing for the character overall - higher level means higher stats to do better at the killing and surviving and the healing things. Very standard.

Job points are used to learn abilities for the current job. For example, 200 job points as a Black Mage can teach you Fira (the level 2 fire spell). Or you can learn Fire, Blizzard and Thunder for a total of 150 (they're 50 each). You also can learn equip abilities, move abilities and reaction abilities for a variety of abilities. Once you learn an ability, you can use it in any job, although there are some requirements (for example, equip the Black Magic skill to be able to use your Black Mage spells in any job other than Black Mage), and certain jobs are better suited to some abilities than others. You'll find that a Knight will tend to do little damage with Black Magic, for example, while a White Mage will likely have a better time using Black Magic as a secondary skill, since their job uses the arcane arts already anyway!

There are quite a lot of jobs in the game, some are specific to certain characters, and a lot of them need to be unlocked by reaching certain job levels in other jobs. For example, the Arithmetician job requires levels in Black Mage, White Mage, Oracle and Mystic to unlock.

The Arithmetician job is also one of the strangest of the lot - when you are using it you get to keep all the spells you learnt as the four aforementioned jobs. You get an ability called "Arithmeticks", which allows you to cast a spell instantly with no MP cost. The catch is that it will hit everyone on the map that is covered by the algorithm you pick. You need to pick a multiple (3, 4, 5 of prime) and a statistic (level, experience, charge time or height on the map), and everyone who matches the particular multiple in the particular statistic that you pick will be hit by the spell. This makes Arithmeticians especially powerful, since they don't even have to move anywhere near danger, as long as you select the correct algorithm and spell combination, you can annihilate an entire squad if you're lucky (in that enemy stats allow you to hit all of them, and not your own side!).

Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions features three cameos from other Final Fantasy games. Two of them were in the initial release of the game, and may look somewhat familiar if you look at the screenshot below.

Aren't you supposed to be dead?

Cloud and Aeris - although Aeris is in the game only briefly, Cloud can join your squad. However, he is beyond useless. He comes with no weapon at all, can only use his special skill (which emulates his limit breaks from FFVII) if you equip a certain hidden sword on him, and starts at level 1. When you recruit him, your group is likely to be at least level 40, making him the most useless character I have seen in an RPG to date.

The other cameo, the one introduced especially for this re-release, is much more useful. In fact, he saved my party on numerous occasions, and has been known to end boss battles in a single turn. I blame this on horrible balancing occasionally, or just the fact that he is too much of a badass for everyone's good. He is able to shoot enemies from quite a hellishly long range, sometimes 4 times per turn. He has quite a decent move range (unless you make him a knight or something, which would be STUPID since his original job is better, and special, and once you max it out then Chemist is great to back his killing power with the ability to heal people - and retain the ability to equip guns), and he steals stuff from people.

Because he's a GODDAMN PIRATE.

Also, for some reason, noone in FFT has a nose

Balthier from Final Fantasy XII makes an appearance. I haven't played much of FFXII, but if he is even half as bad-ass in that as he is here, then he will be my permanent party in FFXII.

The entire party. On his own. Because we don't need anyone else. Well, except maybe his bunny-girl partner. Gotta love fanservice!

Thanks Japan!

Storm's a Brewin'

I bought Bulletstorm last Thursday. I have since, finished the game.

TWICE. The second time being on Very Hard mode.

It is rare for me to finish a game twice nowadays - I have so many games to play that usually once I finish one, I'm done with it, unless its multiplayer is good, in which case it becomes a fallback MP game.

Bulletstorm's multiplayer isn't that good. It had an interesting idea - team up with other people to aim for as many cool "Skillshots" as you can. However, it is implemented via Games for Windows LIVE, which is a piss poor excuse for an online platform. This immediately removes the possibility of dedicated servers, or even getting a choice of server to play on. There is no chance to select a server with a low ping - you just hit connect and hope like hell you don't get screwed. Not to mention the login kerfuffles. I kind of feel sorry for the people who bought the game on Steam - they probably have to log in TWICE to play the game.

I hate Games for Windows LIVE.

Once you get the game running though, its quite fun. You spend the majority of the game running around looking for the most interesting and awesome ways of killing the mutants that are hunting you. Typically that involves things like impaling them on giant cacti, kicking them into exposed electrical wires, using your electric leash's "thumper" attack to send everything sky high before impaling multiple enemies using your drill gun - a gun aptly named the "Penetrator", and other such atrocities.

Quite a brutal game in terms of body count, graphic violence and potty mouth. Every character in this game has a bad case of potty mouth. Admittedly, its what you expect when you play as a Space Pirate, and I don't have a problem with coarse language in the slightest, but it can get tiresome sometime. Especially when, take away the word pirate and replace it with marine, and your character suddenly becomes ridiculously generic again. Who am I kidding, the character is very generic. There is even the sequence early on where you flash back to his time as a space marine!

However, where the game shines is the gameplay. Admittedly, the levels are linear, but I'm fine with that. Too much freedom tends to result in my getting lost anyway. In this game - the goal is clear. Follow the path to where you need to be - killing everything in your path in the most inventive way possible with the environment around you. Blow up that hot dog cart, with the resulting explosion killing nearby mutants, for the "Sausage Fest" skillshot. Find a bottle of booze, down it and kill a mutant while drunk (which can prove quite difficult sometimes due to blurry-screen and the game refusing to aim where you want it to) to get whatever skillshot you just earned, with the addition bonus "Intoxicated". Find some enemies in the cargo bays of a spacecraft, pull the level that opens the door behind them for the skillkill "Ejeculated".

Yes, very crude, but oh so enjoyable.

Also, at one point you get to control a giant robot dinosaur. And it shoots lasers out of its eyes. It gets the best name ever too.

Waggleton P. Tallylicker.

F.E.A.R it. Again.

I started playing the second F.E.A.R expansion yesterday. Cryptically titled "Perseus Mandate", it seems to have very little relevance to anything.
Heck, in my post the other day about the other expansion, I even pointed out that the expansions are disregarded by the sequel that I plan on playing at some point. So, the first question is, why bother?

This would be because, as much as the prior playtime angered me, I was intrigued. It did leave off with your character having just taken a helicopter explosion to the face, then turn to see the entire city in flames. Kind of an interesting hook to continue playing - even if all the gameplay that lead up to it was boring as hell.

So I began the Perseus Mandate. And it seems the chapter or so I have played has been totally NOT worth it, as predicted.

For starters, you start playing as an entirely different character, from another F.E.A.R squad. This means that the hook of the nameless character I have been dragging from one empty warehouse to another being left alone on top of the hospital with fire everywhere has been instantly removed, in favour of giving me a new, slightly less nameless guy, with a full squad.

And why does this new guy just happen to have the same slo-mo bullet time power that the other guy, who reportedly has this power because he's "special"? As a good friend of mine pointed out in his blog - once everybody has superpowers, they're not superpowers anymore. They become typical. Normal.

Not to mention that the enemies and locations are - again - identical to the two games prior. Generic clone soldiers, generic not-so-clone soldiers, and the ninjas. Admittedly, the creepout sessions have gotten more disturbing, but this seems to be through virtue of simply having lots more gore and death involved, than being suspenseful in their own right.

Oh, and the game seems to have had most of the first chapter in well lit areas. Brightly lit places tend to not be scary. And the ninjas attacked again - way too early. And in a well lit room. Sure, they're still hard to see since they've stolen OTACON's stealth camo, but they're much less scary to fight in a room where you can see more than 10 metres in front of yourself!

As my girlfriend arrived at my place last night to rescue me from my self-imposed videogame-born hell I had reached a new type of enemy. Finally something new! Except that they're a different type of generic soldier. With better guns. Of course, the better guns advantage is quickly lost when I take said gun from the first one that goes down - the rest serving as obstacles to my ending the drudgery, and slight ammo stockups.

To sum it up, one of the squad members, shortly after encountering the ninjas said "That's new". "No, no it isn't new" I answered, quite vocally. To the utter confusion of my brother.

Is it bad that I'm talking to a game? Probably.

Either way, I will finish this stupid game sometime next week most likely - and then move onto something infinitely more enjoyable. I won't touch F.E.A.R 2 right away, because I;d rather not rip my soul to shreds more so than it already has been.

Nothing to fear but F.E.A.R. And ninjas.

I recently finished F.E.A.R Extraction Point - the first expansion to F.E.A.R. For those who don't know, F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon) is a first person shooter crossed with a horror game. Except that it didn't quite work.

Note that huge spoilers will follow. But really, the plot, while it has its moments, seems fairly disposable.

The original game begins with you being the new recruit / pointman of F.E.A.R, which is never really explained well to the player through the game, but is essentially S.W.A.T for paranormal/supernatural things. Which is a horrendous idea in the first place. Since when have ghosts and other paranormal activities been susceptible to assault rifles? Oh right, they aren't. Even in this game, they're not.

No, the main bad guy, Paxton Fettel if my memory serves me correctly (and if not, I'll call him that anyway because his actual name was at least as ridiculous as that) is some... random guy. You get to watch him eat people at the start. Kinda creepy.

Somehow, he has some kind of clone army, which he directs to kill people. Your squad shows up to figure out what's going on, and to "eliminate" him. There is also the small matter of some insane little girl (as it always is in horror) with supernatural powers making weird shit happen occasionally.

You will literally receive visions occasionally - usually completely harmless, but sometimes less so - of weird stuff. A hallway with blood down the walls, the hallway itself stretching as you attempt to walk down it. Or maybe the entire world around you becoming black except for a circle of flame, with ghouls flying at you in an attempt to eat your soul, and drag you to the hellspawn pit from whence they came.

This sounds cool doesn't it? Well, this is all that about the game that is different - or even mildly interesting. And its not even scary.

Well, its creepy the first few times, but it happens quite a lot, so you kinda get used to the idea that your character is possibly losing his mind for brief periods, before being returned to whatever warehouse he was in, to continue on his merry way killing generic soldiers.

And that's exactly the problem. In the original game, I seem to recall a grand total of two types of enemies. Generic armed forces (because guns don't hurt ghosts, they had to give you something you could fight), and ninjas. I shit you not.

There are random ninjas which appear, and attack. Usually from behind. A shotgun blast usually deals with them well enough, until the next 3 attack simultaneously...

The major problem with this game is that EVERY LOCATION IS THE SAME. SERIOUSLY. It leads you through abandoned warehouse after abandoned office to abandoned parking lot to abandoned lab to abandoned office... every building looks the same!

F.E.A.R itself, wasn't so bad. It retained some form of interest, particularly with the giant explosion near the end, and the ending itself, where your helicopter is dragged down by the creepy little girl.

The expansion, however, was much, much worse. The reason being that it is THE EXACT SAME GAME. For some reason, the telepathically controlled clone soldiers reactivate themselves (even though their creator / controller is dead - and the reason he can still control them is never explained. The character himself even tells you in a vision that this makes no sense), and you are forced to try and regroup with the surviving member of your squad, after the helicopter crash.

Never mind the identical plot (you spend a large portion of the original trying to regroup with your squad, as well as chasing Dudeface McGee in between being driven mad by visions), this one's completely different.

How, you ask? BY KILLING OFF EVERY REASON YOU HAVE TO CONTINUE PLAYING. You early on link up with one of the survivors, who proceeds to fight with you for a couple of levels, and then gets himself killed in an admittedly creepy possession-type scene. His last words are to find Jin - the only other survivor.

You spend the entire game trying to get to the hospital where she is, traipsing through (stop me if you've heard this before) abandoned office buildings, an abandoned subway, an abandoned parking lot, and then, eventually, said hospital. Except that when you find her, she's dead (as expected).

Your mission then becomes "get to the extraction point on the roof". When you get there, the helicopter you are about to get in... explodes. Then the credits roll, you see a buring cityscape, and are told to go play the other expansion.

And will it be worth it? No, no it won't. Particularly since Wikipedia clearly states that both expansions are completely disregarded for the sequel F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin.

The moral of this story is that the F.E.A.R games are not scary. Particularly Extraction Point. The visions occur often enough that you begin to expect them every 10 minutes or so, the grisly scenes you come across where soldiers have been decimated become same same, and the only times in the game where I was creeped out involved the ninjas appearing behind me without warning, and a particular vision where the hospital became a completely different locale. And the reason that vision creeped me out was because it proved to me that the game's artist's were capable of texturing walls a colour other than white.

Also, why do you have bullet time? I never really understood that...

Chime

Today, I bought a game off Steam cheaply. I played it for the last 30 minutes or so, and I figured I'd share my experience with you all.

The game is called Chime, and set me back merely $5 - quite cheap for a game. Cheap enough for you to think its an indie title. A thought which is entirely accurate. However, indie games does not always mean cheap and crap games. In fact, quite a lot of indie games reach levels of awesome that the AAA titles can never aspire to, simply because indie developers are more willing to take risks, and do something different than to make generic shooter #357.

I'm looking at YOU, Bungie.

But I digress. This was not to be a tirade defending indie games, this was to bring some attention to Chime. This game is great.

It is slightly confusing to play at first, because it has quite an odd idea behind it. It is a puzzle music game.

I'll let that sink in for a moment. Not a music action game like Beat Hazard, or a rhythm action game like Beatmania, Amplitude, Guitar Hero, DJ Max, etc. A music puzzler.

The idea behind the game is that you are given a large grid, and blocks to fill it. The block are different shapes and sizes, and your job is to arrange them as neatly and quickly as you can to form quads. A quad being a square that is 3x3 or more, or a rectangle of similar minimum size. As you make more quads, your coverage of the grid is increased, which will allow you to complete the level and move on once the timer runs out.

The interesting part here, is that each level is a song, and the amount of the song that you can actually hear is dependant on how much grid coverage you attain.

After a little bit, the square you place get stamped into the grid, and you can place new ones over the top - so if you mess up you can make the coverage work better. When the time runs out, 50% coverage will unlock a new level, while 100% coverage will give you a bonus of some kind. I've not obtained it in my short attempt yet, so I cannot say what happens. Mainly because I don't know.

It's like a demeted, awesome, musical game of tetris, and I love it. That is all.

Horrible name, fun game!

For Christmas, among some really random items (such as Guitar Hero pyjamas, a ninja themed pen, and a manga called "My Girlfriend is a Geek"), my awesome girlfriend got me a copy of a PSP JRPG called Ys SEVEN.

What a stupid name for a game series. How do you pronounce this? Do you pronounce it like "whys"? Do you pronounce it the way the letter y is regularly pronounced? How is it pronounced on its own anyway?

Turns out that it seems to be pronounced "ees". Which is weird. Very weird.

Call it what you want, I found it to be quite an entertaining game. Much of the plot is standard JRPG fare - Adol the main character is a generic warrior type with a thirst for adventure. He enters the country of Altago with his friend Dogi. They get imprisoned quite quickly, then released and told to go check out the nearby shrine. They do so, and are promptly rewarded by having to fight a gigantic creature, hearing the voice of a dragon in their heads, and given some strange power. He then needs to visit other shrines so that he can acquire the powers of all 5 dragons...

Stop me if you've heard this before. To be fair though, it throws a couple of curveballs late in the game.

Generic-y plot aside, it gets fun the moment you're finally allowed out of the city and begin messing with combat.
This is an action rpg, so you need to run out and start hacking yourself, unlike most other JRPGs I've played, where you simply give orders to your party members and watch as they slash things apart for your enjoyment. It plays very much like a hack n slash action game, albeit with restricted combos, and the RPG tropes of experience points, levels etc.

Differing characters have differing weapon types. Adol begins with a slash type weapon, while Adol a smash type (he punches things until they die). Later on, characters with piercing types appear. Different types of enemies react to different types of weapons. For anything with a hard shell, you'll need Dogi to punch them. Hard.

If you've played Final Fantasy X, you'd recognise the idea, since you needed Auron (or the utterly useless Kimahri) to deal with heavily armed creatures more often than not, while Wakka would do well against flying creatures. This works off the same principle - including the part where later on other characters can get the same bonus ability types (by the end, Adol can have weapons that do each type of damage, and his ultimate covers all at once).

Half of the fun really is the combat. It does get a touch repetitive, however being a PSP game, its very easy to break it up between other games. The length also reflects this, being able to be finished in around 30 hours (rather than the standard 50 hours for a jrpg). The good thing about this is that it didn't feel like they were artificially adding to the length.

Well, it didn't feel like that until you had to run around every dungeon you've already completed AGAIN, with a second dungeon inside the first dungeon that you originally couldn't access. I would call bullshit on this, as it seems like an excuse to make you run through the same content, but more often than not you get to the second dungeon quite quickly, with a minimal of running through the first one again. It seems more like setting the game in a single country didn't leave the enough room for all the dungeons they wanted to do, and so needed to place them somewhere, deciding upon hiding them in dungeons you've already been to!

Half the fun of the game is in defeating the titanos - huge monsters that serve as the majority of the game's bosses. There are 3 optional ones to deal with as well, that are kind of in the way on random wilderness areas - but if you try to fight them the first time you find them, it is absolutely certain that you will find yourself on the Game Over screen in short order. You need to run for dear life at first, returning when you're much more powerful to deal with them.

On that note, the soundtrack is quite good. Particularly the early-game boss theme. Quite a rousing tune - perfect for annihilating titanos!

All in all, I enjoyed it. Might look into some of the other eeeeeses :P

Now I Put You In the Box! - Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

I received Castlevania: Lords of Shadow as a Christmas gift from my brother and sister. This made me happy, because I had asked for it, and was wanting to play this game for quite a while.

I had been told that it rebooted Castlevania, took it and gave it a Devil May Cry-like quality. I can see where that comment came from, however, I felt that gameplay-wise it would be a mish-mash of that with God of War.

However, the God of War comparison stops mostly at the weapon. Like previous Castlevania titles, the weapon is a whip-like chain. This is where inevitable comparisons with God of War stem from. I would like to end the comparisons with God of War right there though, because there is a huge, obvious difference between the two.

In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, your character is not an evil bastard out to destroy the world. In fact, you are out to save the world by killing the Lords of Shadow - the Lord of the Lycans, the Lord of the Vampires (who is NOT Dracula in this game!) and the Lord of the Undead/Necromancy.

Admittedly, he stays on his noble path because he has the promise of power, which he plans to use to resurrect his recently deceased wife, but his intentions are otherwise noble. Gabriel Belmont is, after all, a member of an Order devoted to destroying the supernatural creatures of the night.

The game is quite fun, fast and furious in its combat, and rewards skill over button mashing. After a level or two, you unlock the abilities of light magic, and shadow magic - activating light magic allows you to regenerate health from hitting enemies. Shadow magic deals extra damage. You occasionally find fountains of "neutral" magic to convert into these. Enemies also drop neutral magic - as long as you're not using magic when you kill them.

But more importantly, you have the ability to "gain focus". A bar fills up at the bottom of the screen, as you hit enemies. Taking a hit empties the bar immediately. The bar also fills up quite slowly if you spam the same moves over and over again - speeding up if you vary your attacks. Activating magic pauses the bar's growth - unless you get hit while using magic, in which case it still empties.
Your reward for filling this bar is to become focused. When you are focused, every single time you hit an enemy, an orb of neutral magic is dropped. At this point, you need to balance dodging/blocking to not lose your focus, attacking to generate more neutral magic, and actually drawing it the neutral into one of your magic medallions - since it does not simply sit there forever, fading if left long enough.

This all sounds quite complex, but it is introduced bit by bit. Admittedly, I never became focused for long periods at a time, though this was more due to my natural "kill them all quickly, quick make them die!" playstyle than it was a failure to understand the system.

The storyline is quite a good one. Patrick Stewart voices the character of Zobek - one of the main characters of the game, who also narrates during every loading screen. While parts of the story seem generic and played before, and some sections are downright predictable, the epilogue caught me off guard, and sets up another game quite beautifully. A game that I look very much forward to.

Overall, thumbs up to this game. Definitely worth a play. Its also one of the prettiest action games I've played recently (and it shows in its size... the xbox version is 2 discs!)

It also has one of the funniest scenes I've seen in a game. I won't spoil it for you, but it makes the title of this post much less irrelevant.

The Return

I now am back at work, and my computer is finally back in the land of the living, and so I can actually make posts again.

Miss me?

Didn't think so.

Anyhoo, the last couple of weeks were interesting... and quite relaxing. A fair bit of nothing went on, though I did do some things.

Christmas Day was the usual shindig at my place. Family members I rarely see appeared, presents were exchanged, and food was eaten. Lots of food. Like, heaps.
The difference is that this (last I spose) year, the food needed to be gluten free so that I would be able to consume it without my insides melting.
This didn't change much. In fact, it was only my portion that was made gluten-free. So once we reached dessert time (after 3 courses of random meats, pasta and more meats), the true difficulty of my condition hit home.

Plaits of wheaty, pastryish goodness covered in syrup. Cake - lots of it, and many brands of ice cream are inedible to me. Luckily pavlova is fine. As a result, I lived off the pav :P

Post-Christmas, I headed to my girlfriend's place for a few days, where we whiled the hours away playing videogames, and preparing for our next Pathfinder session, and just generally bumming around doing very little. And yes, we did get another Pathfinder session in - quite a long one too, covering the most of a night (10pm to about 4am) and much of the next day (10am to about 3pm).

New Year's Eve was a trip to the zoo. I have ridiculous amounts of photos of the tiger (it wasn't asleep for once! Did I mention tigers are my favourite animal actually-in-existence?), as well as numerous photos of the elephants (the baby one was really cute!)

The night portion of NYE was spent playing Final Fantasy VII. I didn't expect this, but we were both exhausted from wandering around the zoo for the most of the day and couldn't be bothered to go out - nor would we have really been able to, considering that there would have been something like 325682476286784275903862 people there...

After that, I was forced to return home, since my parents had gone on holidays, and they didn't trust my younger siblings to look after the house (and the cat - they took the dog with them) on their own. During that few days I managed to reach level 81 in WoW (Dwarf Hunter on Draenor named Kalgar), and caught up with a few mates who I used to work at Maccas with (playing Mario Kart 64, no less!)

Come the 5th of January, my lady and I headed to the south coast for a few days of escapism from family, and general existence. We didn't do much because the weather was utterly schizophrenic, but we did manage to play some putt-putt, and burn ourselves horrendously at the beach.

We returned, relaxed a day, and are now both back at work.

Oh, and somewhere in there, I managed to finish Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. Good game, will talk more about that tomorrow.