Look Out! Samus Is Here

I've been playing some Metroid games over the last week or so. Metroid: Samus Returns recently came out on the 3DS, it being a remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus, the old Game Boy game. I played through that game in its entirety whenever that was, maybe 25 years ago.

The remake is pretty solid. It's fun enough to play, but as is usually the case with polygonal "2.5D" graphics, its pretty ugly. Super Metroid, which I played a little of as well this past weekend, and the fan-made AM2R, which also attempts to remake Metroid II, but with Super Metroid-style 16-bit graphics, both look much nicer.

Another problem with Metroid: Samus Returns is that it forces you to use the circle pad to control Samus, and the d-pad below it as a simple selector of ancillary modules in Samus' suit. 2D action-platforming is never ideal on any sort of analog stick or pad. There is also the somewhat questionable addition of the melee counter move to the game. I find that it makes combat a more reactive prospect. It seems like the best course of action with an enemy is to let it charge you, bat it away, and then put a few energy rounds into it. I'm not decided on whether I feel this harms the flow of the game yet.

I might prefer to continue playing AM2R over the remake, if I'm honest. Maybe there's room for both, though. They don't seem to be exactly the same in terms of map layout, at least.

I'm still working toward completion of Hexcells Infinite, as well. I had some problems with the last couple of puzzles involving misclicks and jumping the gun, so I had to screenshot my progress to those points and painstakingly recreate it to ensure I could get a perfect clear on each.

Otherwise, the last week or so has been all Diablo. I felt the call back again, and decided this time to dust off my Wizard, the first class I played when the game launched, and delve into the real endgame. I've been trying to sort out a solid play loop while also reacquainting myself to the class. I've settled on running bounties enough to keep a stock of materials for use in extracting legendary affixes to save in Kanai's Cube, and then running Nephalem Rifts to keep a stock of Greater Rift keystones in order to run Greater Rifts for upgrades to legendary gems. All while collecting loot along the way, periodically using infernal machines to collect Hellfire jewelry materials, and trying to track down as yet unexperienced events and places to fill out my achievements list. I would also like to collect all the full class sets in the game and run all the associated dungeons, while I'm at it. There is seemingly no end to the things one can get up to in this game.

Zero Suit Samus

I finished Metroid: Zero Mission on a plane today. As it turns out, there's a whole extra part on top of where the original game ended. I knew something was up when I went to fight Mother Brain without the power bombs and two or three other suit upgrades. Anyway, now I get where the titular heroine is derived from when she makes her appearances in other games.

I was pleasantly surprised by the bits at the end, but I'm glad the shift in gameplay lasted only long enough to make you glad to get back to the norm for the finale.

I wonder how Metroid: Other M is shaping up for Wii.

2009 Year-End Recap

It's New Year's Eve, and time to take a look back at 2009. This year, I finished 19 games or stand-alone campaigns within games, which I also count:

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

Metroid Fusion

Killzone

Gears of War (Hardcore)

Portal

Peggle Extreme

Starcraft (Terran)

Grand Theft Auto IV

Half-Life: Source

Peggle Deluxe

Underworlds

Oblivion (Dark Brotherhood)

Oblivion (Knights of the Nine)

Ico

Red Faction: Guerilla

Mass Effect

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

Halo 3: ODST

Borderlands

While hardly anything to sneeze at, this is down from my total of 26 for 2008 (15 for 2007), and I should really pick up the pace to keep up with the obscene amount of games I've purchased (or received as gifts) over 2009.

It's been a crazy, insane year for games, adding a couple of platforms and the huge amount of awesome deals available over Steam, in particular. Just today I bought 3 more games for well under $10 each. This brings my purchased list to a grand total of 59! As I move most of them to the newly updated Pile of Shame, I can see I have quite a year ahead of me for 2010. To help thinning out the pile, I've instituted my new one-in, one-out policy. That is, if I want to buy a new game that costs more than $10, I need to have finished a game recently. This should help save money, too. So as it stands right now, I need to finish something before my next purchase, likely Mass Effect 2.

I'm in the middle of about 20 different games right now, so it shouldn't be too much of a stretch. Since coming to Arkansas and New Mexico for the holidays, I've played a little bit of Torment, just trying to get it to work on my parents' PC. It kept crashing anytime I'd enter any place where it was possible to rest, so I didn't get far. I'll have to pick it up from where I left off at home.

I brought along my Mac and DS, but oddly enough I've only been using the latter. I started on Metroid: Zero Mission and Final Fantasy IV (the DS remake). Both are (relatively) modernized versions of classics that I loved growing up. Metroid is made easier by the inclusion of a wider move set and an auto-map, while FF IV is substantially more challenging than the neutered version us Americans originally got as Final Fantasy II on the SNES. It's apparently even harder than the original, putting it more in the realm of something like Etrian Odyssey or Shin Megami Tensei.

Yeah, it's going to be a busy 2010. Happy New Year!

Embark: Holiday 2009 & Games Of The Year

I was just packing things for the annual pilgrimage to see family around the Christmas holiday. Not games; I've not yet completely decided what I'm going to take. I'm tempted to try installing Planescape: Torment on my wife's shitty old laptop just to be able to take that with me. I don't have any sort of Windows virtual machine on my MacBook, unfortunately. I am bringing the game files and my saves with me on a USB HDD, on the off chance that my parents' old-by-2002-standards machine can be coaxed into running it. I think it just may.

I've been playing a lot of Torment lately, and I'm still in Sigil, the starting city, though I've got four members in my party now, and will probably soon recruit a fifth. The writing in this game is remarkable, and the way it parcels out the background of The Nameless One irresistibly compelling.

Aside from the aforementioned epic, which roots me to my chair for three to eight-hour stretches, I've done some dabbling this week with Red Faction: Guerilla multiplayer, enticed by a 5x (!) XP period, and Torchlight, goaded by the game's new Steamworks and Steam Achievement integration. I also was forced to rush out to Best Buy this weekend to pick up the Metroid Prime Trilogy on Wii for the insane bargain price of $20. It's a hell of a package to begin with, and that good of a deal made me turn in my Borderlands completion token to get it. Now I'll need to complete something else (Torment, maybe) before Mass Effect 2 arrives on January 26th.

At first the Trilogy disc wouldn't load up on my Wii, and I was afraid I'd gotten one of the bum one that has trouble reading dual-layer DVDs, but after a couple of tries it booted up. It was probably just the fact that I hadn't turned on the Wii since whenever I posted about the Legend of Zelda. I actually had to replace the AA's in the wiimote, which is a regular occurrence when I go to get my waggle on. I played through Metroid Prime 1 when it came out on the gamecube, (but never touched either of the other games in the series), so I thought I probably wouldn't replay the entire thing, but that it'd be a good place to jump into to test out the new Wii motion-control scheme. It takes some getting used to, but by the end of the intro space station segment and descent to the planet the game takes place on, I had more or less become accustomed to it, and I actually quite like it. Swapping of visors could maybe done a better way, but it's not hard to come to the conclusion that given time and evolution, such a control scheme could obsolete the twin-stick method--which is really not that great to begin with, merely the best we have at the moment.

Starting up Metroid Prime 1 again, though,... I don't know... I might want to replay the damned thing. It's probably a bad idea; I should probably just move on to the second game in the series whenever I feel like playing it after the holidays.

This week also happens to be a week of Pure White World Tendency for the Demon's Souls universe, so I took the opportunity to jump into 1-1 to go to the execution grounds to the left of the beginning area and kill Miralda and collect some loot. While crawling around the Boletarian Palace now at soul level high 30's, I decided to pay our old friend Red Knight a visit and kill him. It was an especially sweet victory. From there I moved on back to 2-2, the level I have been working on, and got summoned as a blue phantom to someone else's world and shown the way to the boss, Flamelurker, and how to fight him. We killed him and I won my body back and then promptly went and fought him with my own summoned companion.

I wouldn't have won that battle alone, at least not without several attempts under my belt. My companion and I kept trading hate back and forth, attracting the beast this way and that, taking advantage of backstab opportunities as they came, using almost MMO-like tactics. What an awesome game. I think it's safe to call it my Game Of The Year 2009, and since I'm going to go ahead and name it, why waste time? I'll lay it out here:

My 2009 GOTY: Demon's Souls

Runner-Up: Red Faction: Guerilla

See the posts I've made about each game for my reasons why. There are a whole host of 2009 games I haven't even touched, but if I can't be compelled enough to buy and play them, then they don't deserve a spot in the running, then, do they? Similarly, there are some outstanding games I played in 2009 (Far Cry 2, Torment to name a couple) that, were they 2009 games, might belong in one of those spots, but alas; they aren't. I would like to give a shout-out to a few honorable mentions that were just edged out of the Runner-Up spot, though: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Demigod, and Torchlight.

For those keeping track:

2007 GOTY: Bioshock, Runner-Up: Halo 3

2008 GOTY: Metal Gear Solid 4, Runner-Up: Gears of War 2

I guess I really like to shoot/slice stuff?

Holding Pattern

This week has been much the same as the last.  Highlights being finally finishing Metroid Fusion and playing Gears of War co-op through acts 2 and 3 on Saturday night.

It was nice in Metroid to finally accrue all of Samus' lost power-ups and be able to face down the SA-X for once.  Most of the game you're avoiding or running in terror from it.  I almost had to call foul on the game, though, for pulling the old Metroid escape sequence but spiking it with a final boss battle.  I almost didn't make it through in terms of either life or time.  I'm done with this one.  It was cool to see where the overarching plot went, but by all reports Metroid: Zero Mission is the better GBA outing in the series, and I've got that in the queue waiting for a likely time.

I played some more Burnout Paradise this week, too.  That's a great game.  It's got a bunch of those qualities that keep you coming back to a game, like short, attainable goals, a sense of progression from unlocking more cars and beating more events, and a great online mode.  The sense of speed in the game is also excellent.  I crash a lot.

I put maybe 4 hours into Killzone this week, too.  I'm up to the beginning of the 8th mission, of 11.  I have a few gripes forming: a) checkpoints in this game are few and far between,  b) enemy grenades seem way too unfairly deadly, c) the Helghast are beyond stupid AI-wise (and need more lines of spoken dialogue, or at least the frequency with which they spout their limited lexicon dialed back a bit).  Otherwise, it's cool.  The level design is kind of sparse, but I'd chalk that up to it being a hardware limitation, since the art-direction is pretty spot-on.  Also, some of the dialogue is a bit overwrought--it's standard action-flick fare.  Again, the limitations of the PS2 are the albatross around this game's neck.  I'm excited to see how the sequel turns out when it's released in a month or so.  The weapons and sense of being there and atmosphere are already pretty great.

I had a few minutes to kill tonight and so I played some Hexic.  My brain just does not work the way that game wants it to.  I got my best score to date, nonetheless.  I think I made two of the star-flower things.  If I understood the victory conditions correctly, I would need at least 18, arranged in the proper manner, to make 3 black pearls, and then get those arranged together, to win.  I hope Puzzle Quest Galactrix is released soon...

Progress Report 01/19/2009

I got some good time in with an assortment of games this past week. Variety is always nice. I've been jumping into Metroid Fusion for 30 minutes to an hour at a time every couple of days. It's good, but not totally engaging me the way Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night have in the past. That's probably no fault of the game's, though; in an era of gigantic open world, open-ended gaming, it just seems kind of quaint. I do enjoy it, just in a more connoisseur-ial fashion. I appreciate it.

Finishing Gears of War 2 left me wanting more, and coincidentally there's a Gears 1 achievement I want to unlock so that I can unlock the final playable character model in Gears 2 multiplayer, so I popped the first game into my system this week and started off a playthrough on Hardcore difficulty. I finished Act 1 so far, and hopefully someone will jump in with me for some buddy action!

I've been extremely impressed by the post-release DLC support (entirely free to this point) that Burnout Paradise has received over the last year, and all the raving (and my desire for something new to play before/after watching a DVD without having to toss a disc in) finally convinced me to pick it up from the PSN store. I've never played another Burnout before, but it sorta reminds me of a mix of Ridge Racer and GTA's driving engine. It's a free-roaming city street racing game, but you have no goals you have to meet, or anything you really have to do in order to progress, except just have fun.

What's really cool is the (almost) seamless online integration. I can just hit right on the d-pad a couple of times and all of the sudden I'm online and there are a bunch of other players around the city doing things, cooperatively or competitively. I'm in the same city, on the same street as before, only now there are real people driving (a few) of the other cars on the road. I got into a game the other night where a couple of the 8 people had headsets (I don't, on PSN), and they were able to give directions and coordinate with the rest of us to meet up in certain areas and do things to complete some multiplayer challenges. It's good, mindless fun, not something with a million cars and parts you really have to worry over or races you have to practice a whole lot at, like a lot of other racing games.

When I was logging onto the PSN store to get that, I noticed a new PSOne Castlevania up on the store that I'd never played before, and it was only $6, so I impulse bought Castlevania: Chronicles. Turns out this is a port of an old Japanese PC adaptation of the original NES Castlevania. I knew about the game since it came out in 2001, but I'd thought it was just a PSX update of the NES Castlevania. The difference, essentially, is a bunch of extra levels and some tunes that weren't in the NES game. Win-win. Tough game--luckily you can save at the beginning of each level. The graphical fidelity is somewhere between 8- and 16- bit--adequate.

Lastly, I played through missions 2 and 3 in Killzone last night, since Netflix streaming on the 360 was being difficult. As I've said before, it's a classic example of a developer trying to outdo their platform. It's like how Crytek future-proofed Crysis by making it for 2010 machines in 2007. Except Killzone's case is a little dumb when you consider the fact that PS2's aren't upgradeable. Apart from the frame rate, and brain-dead enemies, I think it's a pretty good game. The graphics are pretty impressive at times for a PS2 game, and the weapons are cool. I also like how you can choose to control any of the people in your squad. I played for a bit as the assassin woman, and I just added a new guy with a minigun. More will be written about this one later.

Light Week

I didn't play much at all this past week. I put about an hour into Killzone, a couple into Metroid Fusion, and about the same into WoW. I was getting over jet lag part of the time, and the rest of the time making good on my fitness resolution, watching movies and shows on Netflix, and watching the fallout from the EGM closure/massive 1UP layoffs online. EGM used to be so awesome back when I was in high school. You know what else was true of that time? We didn't have the Internet in practically every home in the world where anyone cares about gaming.

If I had to name the one big thing I did, it would be (in WoW) to have finished up all of quests in my level range in the Stonetalon Mountains zone. Next I need to finish up the Ashenvale stuff, and try to catch up on instances, too. I got my dire wolf mount, also, which is cool.

At the top of my list of priorities for completion right now is probably Metroid Fusion, because it'll probably be the quickest and easiest to get through, but also because I've been playing it off and on for god knows how long, and I really need to finish it to be caught up on the (real) Metroid series. They really need to come out with that rumored Metroid Dread for the DS.

WoW, NXE, Oblivion, and Fusion

My brother-in-law is a huge WoW player with like 6 or 8 level 70 characters. He's to the point now where he pays Indonesian players around $100 (a small fortune to them) to get a character to 70 for him so that he can use it to raid with. It's a different world out there. So anyway, I got to catch up with him quite a bit during my trip to Japan, and he's long been trying to get me to play WoW. Now, I'm actually ready to. In fact, Jeff actually gave me a set of WoW discs, one of his own numerous sets, and he's going to be letting me use one of his multiple accounts to play with, as well. So I'll effectively be able to level to 60 without paying a dime. I may even be able to get Burning Crusade and level 70 from that account, too.

Jeff had just gotten Wrath of the Lich King when I was at his place, and I got to play for about an hour. I created a Tauren death knight and dove right into main attraction, working directly for the Lich King to spread his evil influence across the land. I rolled through about 5 quests, and it seemed pretty cool. Previously I have played a Human warrior and Night Elf hunter each for a few hours. I think once I get my account info from Jeff, I'm going to go Horde and create an Orc warrior for my first real WoW character.

Yesterday was the rollout of the "New Xbox Experience," otherwise known as a firmware refresh for the 360. The biggest update yet, almost a complete overhaul, but still just a firmware revision. The big things here are Netflix streaming, which is crazy awesome amazing (for those of us in the U.S.), the party system (not sure if this is relevant to me at all yet), HDD game installation, and most importantly, the ability to delete game trials from your played game history. I played around with the new dashboard some last night. I created an avatar, an Xbox Mii, essentially, and installed Oblivion to my hard disk. I also played the Tomb Raider Underworld demo. It sucks.

Oblivion plays pretty well from the hard drive, with a good bit less time spent at loading screens (though still more than you'd like), and less pauses for loading while walking around the overworld. I finished up the Fighter's guild quest line last night. To this point, through the main quest and Fighter's guild, I've only been using my one character, who is now a level 27 Redguard Warrior. I think I'm going to roll new characters for the Mage's guild, Thieves' Guild, and Dark Brotherhood quest lines. If I'm not entirely burnt out with the game after those and want to do the Arena stuff, I might go back to my Warrior for that. This is all just the base game stuff, I haven't even bought Knights of the Nine or Shivering Isles. Maybe I'll play that stuff on PC someday, although I've still got Morrowind for PC I bought years ago and which never really ran well on the computer I had at the time. I want to play that, too.

On the flight back from Japan, I restarted my Metroid Fusion game. I had gotten stuck somewhere and decided just to toss out that entire save, which was only about 2 hours into the game. I've already gotten back up to speed and past the spot where I had been stuck, in the 3rd or 4th sector of the game. Not a whole lot to say about this now, but it plays pretty well. I just wish it was a DS game instead of a GBA game. Using L and R for functions that ought to be on face buttons sucks.