Time Wasters of the Week

I went and got Boom Blox for my new Wii, and it's pretty fun. My wife even enjoyed playing that some. At present, however, I only have one wiimote/nunchuk combo. I'll have to get another sometime for some real multiplayer Wii action. I still have yet to try out any of the other Wii games I have. I guess that's what happens when you get a new system complete with a respectable catalogue of it's games dropped on you from out of the blue sky.

Otherwise, I put the final nail into the coffin of Puzzle Quest (at least until the expansion pack) by consulting a FAQ and fast-tracking my way through the crafting system for that last achievement.

The myriad of RPGs on my stack has prompted me to institute a perpetual one-RPG-in-active-progress policy. In other words, there will always be one RPG (as defined by myself) in the rotation, until they're either all finished (not likely), or further notice. Puzzle Quest has just been knocked off, and the next game sliding into that niche once more is Etrian Odyssey. I'll probably just knock out the 3rd stratum and then sub that one out for another RPG, but for now the decision is made.

The only other game I've been playing is GTA IV. I put in around 6 hours or so over this Memorial Day weekend, and I'm up to around 30% or more finished. I'm taking missions on Algonquin from Playboy X, Packie, and Francis at present. I gave up tonight after my 3rd or 4th attempt at a mission taking out some union and mafia goons at a construction site. This game is fun as ever, and the story is starting to get pretty good.

PQ Victory! Plus, a Wii

Beat Lord Bane on my first attempt tonight! And now, I am finally done with Puzzle Quest. I did every quest I could find, and I got all but that one crafting achievement. Maybe I'll come back to the game when the expansion hits for that one, but for now I have to swear off of this thing to get some other games out of the way. It's too addictive!

A good friend has owed me a decent chunk of money for a while now, and as payment he's sent me a Wii and a bunch of games.

Now, this is awesome, but... the thing smells like it's been in a smoker's house for two years, and the wiimotes and nunchuks are all grimy and nasty, not to mention without the original battery covers. Instead, they have a type of cover that holds rechargable AAA batteries and a third party charger kit thingy. So, these wiimotes and nunchuks (and Brunswick Pro Bowling... lol) are going to Game Trader ASAP, and will be replaced by fresh ones (going to have to pick up a Wii Play pack, I suppose). I also need the wi-fi dongle thing if I'm going to get any VC/Wii Ware titles.

I hooked the thing up, though, and it works just fine. The core unit and cords and stuff aren't near as dirty as the controllers, thankfully. I guess I'm going to have to get my Wii game on at some point. I've had 5 pretty solid games gifted to me (3 from this friend, 2 from my brother-in-law). I won't lie though, I'm more excited about VC games than anything Wii native! Guess I'll need to pickup a classic controller or wavebird or something, too. Oh, and I just remembered the thing plays GameCube games as well...

Lord Bane's Bane

For the past week I've been going back and forth between GTA IV and Puzzle Quest, but mostly concentrating on the latter. I'm at the final battle now, but Lord Bane is freaking tough. He gets turn after turn without end.

I went through most of the game relying on the same weapons and spells, namely a Great Axe, which has a 50% chance of awarding an extra turn anytime I do 5 or more damage, and a suite of spells designed to change gems en masse to match 3 or 5 of a kind in several places around the board, gaining me extra turns and doing damage to my enemies at the same time. However, I read up on some tips for the game on a couple of boards, and found that I have the gear and spells to make a strong damage build work for my wizard, too. I tried that build out on some of the battles leading up to the end, and it was awesome how powerful it felt compared to what I had been using, but it didn't stop me from hitting a brick wall at Lord Bane. After a while of that build I swapped back to a hybrid of my extra turn-focused build and the all-out damage one, and I came really close to beating him, but lost nonetheless.

Well, at this point the only other achievement I need (besides the one for beating Lord Bane) is related to the crafting system, which I haven't touched. Maybe if I get into that I can forge some bad-ass new gear to take down Bane and kill two birds with one stone.

As for GTA, I've just arrived at the second safehouse, in Bohan.

The Future, Conan?

I haven't played a whole lot that I want to ramble on about this week; just a couple of hours of Puzzle Quest, a little bit of Hexic HD, and a bunch of GTA IV. I don't want to say a lot about the latter, partly because I'm just so sick of hearing about it in the press, and partly because I'm only maybe 15% into the game. Suffice it to say that it's a lot like III through San Andreas, but better--it's a lot of fun.

I thought I'd take this opportunity, then, to take a look into the future, all the way to the year 2000 (and 9). Thinking about the month of May, and the lack of any games I want to pick up releasing therein, I set my eyes to the beyond, and even beyond the beyond (not the shitty PSX RPG), to take stock of what's coming out over the horizon, and what of that I'm interested in.

A quick list:

Metal Gear Solid 4

Etrian Odyssey 2

Ninja Gaiden 2

Too Human

Fallout 3

Halo Wars

Resistance 2

Yakuza 2

MOON (little known DS game)

Mirror's Edge (that trailer looks incredible!)

Persona 4

FF and DQ remakes for the DS

Bionic Commando Re-Armed (the remake of the 8-bit)

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix (...come to Butthead....)

I guess that about covers it. Not all of those are sure buys, but they're definitely on my radar. So many games!

Other April-ending ends and odds

Quite aside from the MGS series (quite), I've spent a whole lot of time the last couple of weeks playing Puzzle Quest. I must be getting pretty deep into the quest mode by now. My Wizard is level 35, and I have a pretty nice set of broken equipment and broken spells for this broken (but awesome) game. Maybe it's not broken, maybe it's supposed to be ridiculously crazy and extra turn happy. It's amazing when I (or my enemy) can get like 7 extra turns all in a row and set up some insane chain-reaction culminating in 50 or more points of damage to the opposition.

Monster Hunter Freedom--not for me. Aside from just general graphics and interface jankiness (it's a 2004 PSP game, so I can understand this somewhat), the way this game is built just is not what I'm looking for at this point. The game seems to be 100% loot based. Get a mission, go kill some shit or gather some shit, and use the proceeds to upgrade to cooler gear. Rinse, repeat. There's barely any window-dressing of a world or story whatsoever, and the game is even further hamstrung by supporting only ad-hoc multiplayer for the, I don't know, 50% of the game that is designed to be taken on with a partner or team. I can see why this thing is so monstrously popular in Japan, and all at once I can see why it does pretty 'meh' numbers in the States. It makes perfect sense now that I've played the game. It's like an MMO, except not Massively Multiplayer, or Online!

I'd like to say that MH:F would have likely gained more traction with me back when I was like 15, but (aside from what would have been mind-blowing graphics), I kind of doubt the veracity of that statement. So, this is going to get traded in soon. I'm glad I finally got a chance to check the series out, though.

My copy of GTA IV should arrive today!

Time Flies

Has it already almost been a week? The big thing over this past weekend was some XBLA stuff, some Rock Band, and gearing up for MGS2. A lot of that time was spent on Puzzle Quest alone. I'm determined to play that game all the way through to the end. I have no clue how far into it I might be, though. It's just too good of a game; that devious combination of puzzle and rpg tropes is the definition of addicting.

I flew a few missions more in Ikaruga, too. I've made it up to around halfway through the 3rd level (on easy with max lives and continues). That game is beautiful in it's simplicity, and it looks great in high-def. Not a bad deal at $10, either.

I found Monster Hunter Freedom for PSP used, and in mint condition, for $20 at EB the other day, so I decided to give it a whirl. My first impressions are "someone please tell me how to play this game." A couple of times now I've gone off on my first quest for the hunter's guild, which from what I can make of the briefing, is just a test to see if you can either survive a trip out into the wilds or if you can actually find this cryptic artifact that I'm assuming actually exists, not having seen any evidence that would lead me to actually believe in it. I've just wandered around so far, attacking random things and wondering where the hell this "paws pass" or whatever it is I'm looking for is. My PSP battery died halfway through my morning commute today, and that didn't help matters.

My first couple of hours with Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance were spent reading the 3 'books' of back story in the "special" menu of the game. It's interesting how those are set up. There is meant to have been a book published by one of the minor characters in the first MGS, detailing the behind-the-scenes happenings in and around the events at Shadow Moses. The first article of interest is a mock book review of said book, the second a mock-noir recounting by a bumbling journalist of his own investigations into the incident and the book (kind of humorous), and the third is the 'book' itself, which reveals a few previously unknown facts about the Patriots, a guy called Richard Ames, and what really happened in those islands north of Alaska's Fox archipelago. Altogether this stage-setting amounts to about 500 'pages' (a paragraph or so each). I try not to dwell on what my reading all of this says about myself.

As far as the game proper, I've made it through the Tanker chapter, and about an hour or so into the Raiden section of the game. I've only played through MGS2 once in the past, so my memories of the story are nebulous at best. I'm thoroughly enjoying it to this point.

1998 2: 2008

I guess I have a thing for 10-year-old games at the moment. I've been re-playing Metal Gear Solid from the collection I recently picked up. I had only planned to re-play MGS2 as a refresher before 4 comes out in June, but I figured I might as well hop in at MGS1 considering the last two games in the series I played were MGS3 and Portable Ops (and, as anyone reading this no doubt is aware, the series chronology goes: 3>PO>1>2>4).

This is my fourth or fifth time through the game, counting solo and co-op (passing the controller back and forth with a friend) playthroughs. The game holds up amazingly well, especially with the texture smoothing the PS3 can do for it. There's also an option to stretch the image to 16:9, but while that has worked for me in the past with GTA: San Andreas, it makes MGS look really off. Most amazingly, though, is how the actual gameplay holds up. I keep trying to figure out if this is a sign of one amazing game or a whole industry's stagnation.

At first it was a bit jarring not to be able to pull off Metal Gear moves I've become accustomed to, like the somersault, rail-hang, or box-climb (let alone first-person aiming). Before long, though, I was once again used to the relatively simplistic control scheme of the original MGS. Even after all this time, the game feels nearly perfectly executed, including the cut-scenes. The character models are now overly blocky, but none of the impact is lost. Truly an amazing feat if there ever was one. And David Hayter just sounds so good. Also, the hand-drawn character portraits present in the codec calls are hella cool, and they should have stuck with those throughout the series.

I'm just past the torture sequence, at around 6-and-a-half hours in, which is somewhere around half-way if I remember correctly. I know I still have the Hind (D), Sniper Wolf, Vulcan Raven, and the Rex/Liquid fights to go. I'll probably finish the game this week and move on the part 2 shortly.

More contemporaneously, I've picked up Ninja Gaiden DS, and it's awesome! This is hands-down the best gameplay use of the stylus I've seen yet. Admittedly, I've not played Zelda yet, but all indicators point to Ninja Gaiden one-upping it in the control department. Ryu controls smoothly and swiftly outside of battle, and quickly and precisely in battle. Like any good ninja, his sole purpose is to flip out and kill people.

This game was created expressly for the DS, and it really shows. Even in DS-as-book orientation, the game just feels awesome to play (even for a lefty like myself, thanks to the flip option). Stabbing and jabbing with the stylus is like second nature, and jumping maneuvers like the Flying Swallow or Izuna Drop also feel great to pull off by flicking the stylus up to jump, then across or up again to perform the attack. When I think of the feeling of playing this game, there's only one other game that comes to mind with such a smooth sense of fighting and mobility, and that's Symphony of the Night, and that's a hell of a game to draw comparison to.

Briefly, I downloaded the demo of Ikaruga on XBLA, and it's pretty cool (and tough). I also popped in Rock Band for a bit, in perverse observance of Europe's plight with this game. And finally, I hit up Puzzle Quest for a few minutes. They really should have created unique quests in that game for each of the character classes. I'm so far in with my Wizard that it'd be a huge waste of time to start over with another character (but I have anyway, once before), but I'd like to try out other classes, such as the 4 new ones they are adding in the ex-pac just over the horizon.