Blasphemy, Heresy, and Apostacy

Killing God (or the applicable god-like being) has been a staple of the JRPG genre since the 16-bit days, if not earlier. A couple of my favorite instances are (spoiler alert?) Xenogears and Final Fantasy Tactics. Chains of Promathia was pretty awesome, too.

I find the more deicide-centered JPRG plots to be some of the more interesting ones out there. On a related note, I read the book of Revelation as a pre-teen, more for the horror than anything, and I thought it was awesome as an apocalyptic fantasy. Thus, I became interested in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne when I heard the plot's conceit: Tokyo is rent from the rest of the world and rolled up as the the inside of a sphere, it's own little "Vortex World" in a new dimension, with its physical and spritual natural laws still undetermined.

Demons of various types, along with a handful of human survivors, and many souls of the newly-dead, roam the new landscape, and the main character is young man chosen by a mysteriously Luciferian young boy become a half-demon steward of this new world, helping by his actions to determine its future. It appears to go from here toward a multi-partisan conflict between 3 main ethos that the main character can act in concert with, or ignore altogether, and reshape the world accordingly. I read there are six possible endings to the game, and Devil May Cry's Dante guest stars.

The central gameplay device seems to consist of recruiting wandering demons (mostly those encountered in random battles) into the main character's party, leveling them up, fusing them, and using their affinities to exploit enemies' weaknesses. It's close to your typical turn-based RPG gameplay, with a little bit Pokemon flavor in the demon recruitment and management.

It's pretty decent so far, but I do have to knock the environments; the overworld is a total classic RPG throw-back, which isn't terrible, but it has a laughably bad blue peg-looking thing as the party icon that you slide around to go places. The towns and dungeons and such are better, explorable in full 3-D, but they're sparsely populated and can be very bland (when they're not twisted and cool), reminiscent of Crisis Core on PSP and games like Shinobi and Maken X (another Atlus game), among other Japanese PS2/Dreamcast games. However, the demons and other creatures around, the character designs by Kaneko Kazuma, are extremely inventive and cool.

I wonder, though, if even an RPG as promising as this one is really worth the time investment. Would a better way of exploring the three themes in the title of this post just be to read a book? I'm sure there are plenty of philosophy books out there raising these questions, and even some good fiction based around them. Maybe my friends reading this could even recommend some?

Narrative in games has always been a major attraction for me, but these days I have a lot less time to devote, and a lot broader tastes in gaming. I find myself more concerned with a game's central play mechanic in addition to the narrative as a means to satisfy that itch that sends me to my consoles in the first place. Hence the reason I have jumped back into Halo multiplayer some this week, and have played a lot of action-y (especially 2-D) titles and Diablo lately.

You Can Never Go Home (Mega Man 9)

The NES Mega Man games, especially 2 through 4, were an extremely large part of my early days as a gamer.  My friend and I would create and illustrate our own robot masters on 3x5" index cards in the sixth grade.

That said,  I've been watching a few YouTube videos of these games that I haven't played in almost 15 years, stages I'd totally and completely forgotten about, and nothing about it all makes me want to go back and revisit that in the slightest.  Hype nonexistent.  I'd say I envy others their own, but it's just not true.  Classic Mega Man doesn't do it for me anymore.

Strange, considering that last month I went back and played through (and completed) of Mega Man X for the second time ever--the last time being in front of our giant in-cabinet, on-the-floor CRT TV on the living room floor as a 12 or 13 year old kid.  Maybe that leap from 8 to 16-bit was larger than I remembered....

WTF are they smoking? Assassin's Creed rocks!

I was up until like 1:00 a.m. last night with Ass Creed, because I just couldn't stop playing it. I turned it on around 7:00 or so in the evening intending to monkey around with it for maybe an hour or so before dinner, but I ended up coming back for more afterward and just kept going until the wee hours. It was a case of just one more little thing, oh I'll just go over here and then save and quit, well I'll just grab that flag I saw over there, oh now here's a guy I can eavesdrop on, well I might as well finish up the next couple of investigations so I can just kill the guy next time I play, oh well I may as well just kill the guy now, etc. etc. etc.

It's not a perfect game by any means, but somehow it just rubs me the right way. If you reduce it down to its basics, it's basically a big stealthy collect-athon, but the world is incredibly well-realized. The visuals are among the best I've ever seen, just slick as hell, and the cities in this game are both humungous and full of tiny details. I could do with some more variety in the citizens, and especially in their voice acting. I could also do with more variety in the sub-mission "investigations" Altair has to do before the Assassin's guild gives him permission to execute his mission. Speaking of Altair, why is he such a dick? I don't know if I've ever played as a character I didn't care for as a person. No matter, he does what I want him to, and that's what's important.

But back to the "investigations"--before taking out your mark, you have to hunt around the city for clues as to where they are, what they're doing, who their allies and enemies are, and other general intelligence. You only have a few choices: pick-pocketing someone with some kind of important document, listening in on an important conversation, following one of the mark's subordinates into an alley or other secluded place and "interrogating" them, or finding an Assassin's guild informant and doing whatever errand they ask in exchange for info. There might be one or two more methods I'm forgetting, but the point is that each assassination requires you to do two or more of these, and there are 9 assassinations in all, so you do the math. That's a lot of repetition of these little sub-missions. I've done 4 of the 9 marks so far, and I'm not bored yet, but your mileage my vary.

The other thing this game does a lot, for better or worse, is the collect-em-all thing. Each area in the game has 20 - 100 flags scattered around, and even though as far as I can tell there is no great reward (besides Achivement points) for finding them, I still can't stop looking around for them and going out of my way to pick them up when they're in such out-of-the-way spots as the top of an extremely tall church steeple in Jerusalem. There are also 60 Knights Templar scattered around the game world for you to find and kill (the Templars and the Assassin's are sworn enemies apparently), and lots of viewpoints to find and climb, as well. It's all fun and classic gameplay, but again lacking in variety. If you add up all the, lets call them widgets collectively, there are something like 500 widgets to track down in the game, if you are so inclined. But not much else to do, besides the killing of course. Again, fine for me (for one play-through, anyway), but your mileage my vary.

Let's talk about the combat for a minute. In the last Ubisoft action-adventure I played (Prince of Persia: Sands of Time), I hated the combat sequences, because the were interminable, innumerable, and broke up the good part of the game, which was the environment puzzle navigating. Combat in Ass Creed (a term of endearment if ever there was one) isn't the drag it was in that game. It's a good bit snappier here, and often completely optional. You're not required to rescue those citizens and fight all those guards, nor are you required to kill any guards who give pursuit upon recognizing you as an Assassin. You probably will end up doing it anyway, though, because the combat is pretty fun, and not hard to manage even if the typical scuffle is 4 of them to one of you. Altair has a decent set of moves, and a handful of weapons to choose from to break up the monotony--something the prince lacked.

So yeah, I went into this game not expecting much based on reviews and forum poster's accounts, but I've found it pretty enjoyable so far, and pretty impressive in terms of presentation. Check it out.

GTFO, Fable

I'm done with this game. It's not that it's a bad game, per se, it's just kind of cumbersome in a lot of ways, so that it's been only barely holding my interest with it's middlingly cool combat. The plot is unremarkable to this point, and a lot of the voice acting is shit. I don't like the linearity of the world, either. It's all these tiny zones with narrow paths through them that you are totally unable to stray from. It reminds me of FFX or that LotR 'B-team' RPG they came out with that totally aped FFX. Plus, the game just locked up on my 360, costing me an hour and a half or so of time that I'm not willing to put back into it. I guess the moral of this story is that you had to be there at the time.

I wish Rock Band was getting the new Metallica album instead of Guitar Hero III. They shred pretty well this time around.

Diablo is a Demon

And by that I mean a total and complete pain in the ass. I must have died ten times trying to take his sulfurous ass down. I lost all of my accumulated gold rez-ing my rogue hireling and in death penalties, plus buying potions. Finally I just had to send my shadow warrior in to get one-shotted so I could sneak around the demon's backside and light his ass up with my claws and kicks. In the end he was destroyed at last, and dropped some weak-ass shit that I immediately went and vendored. So, I finished Diablo II proper, and from here it's on to the expansion Lord of Destruction, and act V. Well, my assassin is an expansion class anyway, so in a sense I've already been playing it...

Retrograde Motion

Gaming as a contemporary experience--being perpetually "in the now"--moves along at quite a fast clip, and it's just about impossible to keep current if your tastes extend to more than one genre. Every now and then you just have to ignore the new for a while and take a closer look at things already past their retail "sell by" date.

Which is what I'm attempting to do now. One look over at the sidebars of this blog will tell you just how many games I have laying around unfinished, and in many cases, unopened. It's entertainment in the bank, and what I find I'd like more of at the present is more money in the bank, which provides a nice secondary motivation for this endeavor.

To this end, I wrapped up New Super Mario Bros. this evening. That only took two and a half years! What is there to say about this game? It's the latest in a legendary series of 2D platformers, the core platforming series in all of game-dom. It's about what you'd expect if you'e ever played SMB 3 or Super Mario World, which is to say it's a rock-solid fun experience.

I don't really know what came over me yesterday, but I wanted to jump into something new. I thought to finally start the borrowed copy of Assassin's Creed sitting on my TV stand, but instead I jumped into a couple of things.

The first was Fable. The original Xbox didn't have much of anything remarkable that couldn't be had on the PS2 eventually, but Fable was one of that handful of Xbox exclusive highlights. Back around the time of it's original release, the hype levels had risen so high that even I--in Japan, and way over my head into FFXI--took notice of the coming 'RPG revolution.'

Well, I think it's fair to say that Fable was hardly a revolution, and the game has apparently taken it's knocks in backlash since, but being an Xbox owner by virtue of backward compatibility (remember that shit, Sony?), I wanted to see what all of the fuss had been about. Also, this game can be had for like $7.99 these days if you know where to look. I've played it for about 5 hours or so this weekend, and I like it. The character models are kind of unsightly, and the menu system is not-so-pretty (though not terrible), and it kind of has that "last-gen-in-a-bad-kind-of-way" look to it overall, but the game is fun.

I like the battle and experience systems. So far I have kind of a jedi-like warrior-mage hybrid character who relies on his weapon primarily for damage but has a few 'force' tricks like shooting lightning, an area-of-effect force push with knock-back and damage, and a teleport to just behind the target so you can cut them down without being countered. So far my good/evil alignment is still around the middle, edging a bit more toward good. I find it hard to be an out and out asshole to people, but at the same time I'm not going to bend over backwards for everyone, like that guy who had been bitten by zombie werewolves and wanted to join my escort party through the swamps. Yeah, that's going to end well. Also, that mother who wants the remedy for her son who ate the magic mushroom can suck it. It would take way too much energy to track down the other mushrooms for that witch to make the remedy.

The other thing I threw in this weekend is Zelda: Twilight Princess for Wii. I basically just decided to sit down with it one good time before blindly trading it in for credit at Game Trader. I thought if anything I'd get the Gamecube version since it'd have a traditional control scheme. I've changed my mind. After about three hours with the game, it seems pretty damned good, Wii-mote and all, plus I read that the GC version isn't widescreen and only allows you to map two of your items to buttons rather than the 3 the Wii version allows. Other differences include the spin attack having to be charged on GC, whereas it's instant on Wii (which is handy), and interestingly, the games environments are all mirrored from one version to the other.

See, Link has always been a lefty, but Nintendo found that playtesters liked to use the nunchuck in their left hands and the Wii-mote (sword swings) in the right hand, and so they mirrored the entire game to retcon Link into a righty for the sake of soccer-moms and shogakusei everywhere. Whatever, I don't care, I just think it'd be cool to have the option to play the GC mirror image, since at places it apparently evokes environs from Ocarina of Time (although that game gets way too much worship anyway).

I'd like to plow through Fable kind of quickly and then pick up and continue Twilight Princess. Zelda's title demo really, really reminds me of Shadow of the Colossus, by the way. It's uncanny. Elsewise this week, I finished up Diablo II act III, killing the first of the Prime Evils, Mephisto. Bastard dropped a set piece that I already had. I had to create a Diablo mule, too, so I spent a few hours this week idling in the first act's rogue encampment to get the dude enough playtime so he wouldn't get deleted after 10 days. Good music there, but not as good as Diablo I's Tristram music. I also played some Castle Crashers online with my college buddy Jonathan, jzpeeps. Great game. Definitely better in co-op, though.

PAX 08 & August Digital Bonanza

We just got back from a Labor Day Weekend trip to Seattle, which included an afternoon spent at the Penny Arcade Expo. It was pretty cool, but a little smaller than I had expected (the booths were tiny). There wasn't anything completely new unveiled at the show, but there were plenty of upcoming games on display and playable, if you were willing to brave the lines. I wasn't. I did get to watch a few cool things being played, though: Left 4 Dead, Mirror's Edge, Fallout 3, Starcraft II, Gears of War 2, Rockband 2, Guitar Hero World Tour, Wii Music, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, Yakuza 2, and a whole lot more.

This is me beside a V.A.T.S. (I think that's how it's written) from Fallout 3. I don't know what the acronym stands for, but I'm looking forward to find out!

This is one of the panels we went to (yes, I did drag my wife along--no, I don't think she was all that interested). Left to right: Perrin Kaplan, formerly of Nintendo, Jon Davison, former EGM/1-UP head honcho, Cheryl something or other, author of Grand Theft Childhood, and Newsweek's game writer N'gai Croal. This panel was on games' treatment of sex and violence, and how the industry should improve it, while also keeping parents well-informed of which games contain what content.

It was a good time, and I got to meet some cool folks, like Jon Davison there, and also Cheapy D of Cheap Ass Gamer and the CAG-cast, and Scott Benson, the host of Evil Avatar Radio (WACV), the game-related radio show/podcast. All very nice guys, and very generous, considering they provide me with hours and hours of entertainment each week for $0.00.

Below is my August gaming haul. No physical product! The revolution has come, and GameStop shall be first against the wall!

The world is flat.

The 2D resurgence continues. I completed Mega Man X tonight. I mentioned previously that I wanted to see if Sigma was as hard to beat as I remembered, and sure enough, he was pretty damned hard. I do think I'm a smarter and more patient player these days, though; I'd say he was probably 80 to 90 percent as hard as I remember. I guess I'm a grizzled veteran with some solid battle experience, and not so green a kid like I once was. War has changed... I'm not a hero, never was. Just an old killer hired to do some wet work.

I also capped off my 'Summer of Arcade(PSN)' with the purchase of Castle Crashers, the new 2D Final Fight/Double Dragon/TMNT/Simpsons/X-Men style beat-em-up from The Behemoth, the guys behind the awesome Alien Hominid (also up on XBLA). You can actually play as the Alien Hominid in the game, along with a ton of other characters, as you fight your way through a stylized fantasy kingdom to rescue a gaggle of princesses. It's pretty good. From what I've seen, every character has the same basic move set: light, heavy, jump, block, and magic attack, but their starting weapons and magic attacks differ, which may or may not be just a cosmetic thing; I'm not sure yet.

You also gain XP as you fight along, and when you level up you get some skill points to allocate over strength/damage, magic/mp, defense/hp, and agility/archery. So far I'm playing as the Alien, level 7, and going for max magic (his trusty blaster) and defense. I've read of a bunch of different bugs and netcode problems, but I haven't seen anything yet except not being able to find a game online to join, which could mean problems or nothing at all. Hopefully they'll get it all sorted, and hopefully some of my friends will also pick up the game!

I'm still playing Diablo II, as well. I'm mired (because it's a swamp, you see) in Act III at the moment, trying to kill all the annoying little Tiki dudes and locate the next waypoint that'll allow me to warp back and forth from town--which is important when you're always playing online and the game is re-randomizing every area each time you log on. Oh well, going through each area repeatedly just means more xp and more loot for me, not to mention an easier time later on in the game.

Welcome to the Swinger's Club

The past few days I've been focusing almost solely on Bionic Commando Re-Armed. It is completely awesome, being faithful to the NES original in all the right ways, and making improvements in all the right places.

The bionic arm swing mechanic takes some getting used to, of course, but you learn to live without a jump button (or you get frustrated and quit playing). The game at times demands an incredible amount of precision in your grappling, but for the most part that stuff is confined to times when you are hunting down optional secrets. However, you can really feel yourself getting more and more skilled at flying through the levels grappling from one place to the next, with your feet only hitting the ground when necessary. This is what made Bionic Commando so unique and awesome 20 years ago, and keeps it so to this day. I hope the 3D 'modern style' Bionic Commando game feels this cool.

I finished the game tonight--on easy mode, because I value my sanity--and managed to find every piece of equipment, and every little cleverly-hidden secret, so far as I can tell. There are a couple of blanks left in the database, but I'm thinking those are unlocked by stuff you encounter on the higher difficulty settings.

There are two distinct areas to BCR's challenge factor, a) the environment itself, and b) the enemies. The stages are more or less identical on easy, though there are some phantom safety platforms provided over pits and spikes from time to time, especially in the last two or three stages. Where it feels like there is a ton of difference is in the enemies, the bosses in particular. Most run-of-the-mill enemies died with just a few shots, and the bosses were all extremely easy. Most of them I beat two or three times, since I was running each stage several times to root out all of the secrets. I get the feeling that on hard or super hard mode, these bosses could be incredibly cheap, whereas the stages aren't going to change all that much.

If you're looking for a good challenge based solely on the terrain (or lack of it) you have to navigate, there are the 60+ challenge rooms you can attempt. I've done about 9 or so, and already they're getting into Braid territory where you'll look at it and think "how in the fuck?" Good stuff. I've already pulled off a few maneuvers you'd think impossible at first glance.

All in all, BCR is great. If you liked Bionic Commando, you'll love what they've done with it here. If you're new to it altogether, try the demo. I can see the uninitiated being thrown for a loop to begin with, but it really is worth it to stick with it until you've got the hang of it, so to speak.

Braid Done

Just finished it, 100%. Even got all the achievements save the one for speed running the game. Some of those puzzles are real head-scratchers. It'll be something that looks totally impossible, but if you think hard enough and mess around with the (few) tools at your disposal, you might get it eventually. Some of them involve thinking about the flow of time and your manipulations of time in ways that you're just not used to. Again, it's kind of like Portal, only thinking in time instead of space.

My wife liked the look and sound of the game. The music is pretty nice. I don't get whatever the 'story' stuff is supposed to be communicating, though. There are these jigsaw puzzle paintings that you assemble as you go through the game collecting pieces, and they look like they have some significance, but if you're not the guy who created the game, you're pretty much left out of whatever it is. So yeah, it's a solid puzzle game, but I don't know what the hell it's about (other than solving puzzles for some abstract reason).

For the matter of value, well, that's a tough one. It's got excellent production values and interesting mechanics, but almost zero replay value. Once you've figured out all the puzzles (which took me maybe 5 hours total), there's not much left to do but theorize what it all means and try speed runs, if you're into that kind of thing. Still, there is something to be said for Braid as an experience. It's one of a kind, and for that I'll begrudgingly concede that there is $15 worth of something here, it's just not $15 worth of pure gameplay. Geometry Wars it is not.

2D Alive And Well

And to think, a decade or more ago, Sony was actively discouraging 2D games on their new PlayStation hardware. Rumor had it even a masterpiece like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night almost couldn't get by their wrong-headed policies at the time.

These days, I'm up to my ears in 2D. Over the last couple of weeks, the stars have aligned, great old ones hidden in the folds of the cosmos have stirred, and a grand convergence has been set into motion. These are but a few of our new bi-dimensional overlords, those whose calls I personally have heard and obeyed: Geometry Wars 2, Pixel Junk Eden, Bionic Commando Re-armed, Braid, Mega Man X, Mega Man Zero, and Diablo II. Neglected altars of worship, soon to have the dust and cobwebs swept away from their forbidding forms include: Alien Hominid HD, Contra 4, Einhander, Ikaruga, R-Type, New SMB, and a number of Castlevania adventures. This is to say nothing of upcoming titles like Castle Crashers, or non-action games that are by their nature 2D, things like Puzzle Quest: Galactrix or 16-bit style JRPGs, which I have a number of waiting to be attended to.

I've completed Act II in Diablo II now, and that Duriel was a tough fight. He tore through my Shadow Warrior minion while I was trying to lay flame traps around him, and I had no choice but to get up close and personal with him, hand-to-hand MNK style, while my rogue hireling feathered him from afar with fire arrows. I was using a combination of health/mana draining charged strikes and the explosive kick finishing attack. I never died, but I did have to use a couple of town portals to get a quick heal and restock potions and revive the minions. My assassin is up to level 22 or 23 at this point.

I got my first couple of PSN trophies in Pixel Junk Eden. Not much to say about this; it's good to kill a few minutes here and there, before or after watching a movie on the PS3. It's pretty relaxing and chill. Coincidentally, it has a swing mechanic, not unlike Bionic Commando Re-armed, which I picked up this week, also on PSN. I bought it immediately to support the team working on it at Capcom in Osaka (I'm sympathetic fellow gaijin trying to carve out a place in Japan). Those guys have a podcast that is just hilarious. Of course I planned to get it eventually, so I thought I might as well help them get the best release week possible. I haven't spent a lot of time with it yet, but I'm liking what I've seen so far. I was a fan of the NES Bionic Commando back in the day.

Mega Man Zero is insanely difficult, so much so that it made me want to go back and see if Mega Man X was also that hard, and I was just better at this stuff when I was a kid. I also was interested in the X series since the only one I ever played was the first, so I found a copy of the X collection for PS2 on the cheap. I've been playing the first game over the past couple of weeks, and it's definitely not easy. I don't think it's quite as tough as MM Zero, but it's no walk in the park. At this point I've taken down 5 of the 8 initial robot masters. These guys will fuck you up if you go in there without the right weapon. I was only able to beat two of them with the plain old mega buster, but once the pieces start to fall into place and you get the appropriate weapons, they go down easier. I remember the final battle vs Sigma being one of the hardest I had ever fought at the time, and I'm interested to see it now, almost 15 years later.

I wasn't too keen on Braid, with the strange aesthetic and high(er) price point, but with the whole internet going gaga over it, and the creator coming off as an honest and interesting guy in interviews, I decided to check out the demo. Well, I'm glad I did, because I like the game. Before I'd even finished the demo I was damn impressed it. Sometimes you just have to see it first-hand to understand. The art style (particularly the character and enemy designs) aren't my favorites, but otherwise it's beautiful in HD, and the puzzles are just nuts. It's mind-bending in the same way Portal was last year.

I'm still not totally convinced this game needed to be $15 with some of the incredible XBLA games that are only $10, though. It's not that I have a problem with spending $15 on a game like this (Puzzle Quest was $15, too), it's just you'd expect things of like quality to be of like price. Is Braid really worth 1.5 times Geometry Wars 2? I guess the question is why do we expect price to be a function of quality/quantity, when at retail everything from Bioshock to the shittiest movie cash-in costs the same $60?

Addiction--No Laughing Matter

The mind of a compulsive gambler is a very unreal place. Just one more play, it thinks, that'll be the one. Which is how it came to pass that this evening I spent near two hours' time more than I had anticipated with Fable II Pub Games, a clever bit of marketing if ever there was one. I had intended to sit down with it for 5 or 10 minutes just to check it out, since I was able to get it for free, more or less--I just had to pre-order Fable II (which can later be cancelled if I decide I don't want it). But upon jumping into action and noting there were points I was accruing toward 'gambler levels,' I just had to keep going, taking hit after hit, going into Fable II world debt borrowing money for more and more chips to keep playing the slots and that card game (which is pretty cool). The one with the dice I didn't really get to tonight, but probably will when the urge to gamble strikes again.

I was really into the various slots games, betting the max amount of chips each time, racking up more gambling points, more chips, and more game modes, concept art, and achievements unlocked. At this rate, if I ever play Fable II, I should be pretty loaded from the outset.

This thing even ate up enough of my free time tonight that I wasn't able to get in a session of Diablo II on battle.net. There's always tomorrow... and Bionic Commando Re-armed then, as a matter of fact, a game I've been waiting on for a good while. I have to go with the PSN version here, for the superior d-pad.

Diablo II - Act I Complete

I've focused most of my gaming concentration on Diablo II in the past week, bringing myself presently to a point shortly into the second act. My Assassin is now level 19, and I'm mainly going the charge move/finishing move route along with the passive martial arts skills, though I'm trying out some of the traps, as well. To this point I've found a lot of white, gray, blue, and yellow items, but in a dungeon near the beginning of Act II's desert I found a green item, which I take it is part of a set. It's the belt, and it's called Frost something or other. I wonder if it's rare... because I'm playing an online game (even though I always play solo), I could join someone else's game to trade stuff, but I haven't bothered trying anything like that yet. Being only 20% into the games easiest mode, I'm sure I don't have anything special.

Apart from Diablo, the only thing I've been playing to speak of is Geometry Wars 2. I'm second among my friends list, although I'm not sure how the score is counted. It says I have 80million something points, while the guy ahead of me has 82million something, but if you go into the actual game and look at the individual leaderboards, his scores are way higher than mine all around. So, it's not just a simple sum of all 6 scores from all 6 modes; there's got to be some other mechanism at work here. My best mode is still Pacifism, where I've hit 37 mil, and I still can't finish Sequence. Awesome game.

July Indulgences

I swear, I only bought these to check out and then, with all probability, sell.  The material ones, I mean.  But not Diablo.  Anyway, here they are:

 Geometry Wars 2.... all I thought impossible in a sequel, done with panache.

I love the Killzone art.  Those Helghast just look awesome.  I hope the game/series is good.  I also hope ZOE 2 is all it's cracked up to be, but it'll fetch a high price online either way.  Mega Man Zero is tough! Great 2D action, though.

The Diablo Battle Chest, or, my next FFXI-sized addiction waiting to happen.  This is what I've been playing the most of this week.  I've got a level 7 Assassin on the US West realm of Bnet, and I always name my game Covenant, password kujata (keeping it simple if anyone wants to jump in!)

Diablo Contained, Tristram Saved

It wasn't until after I killed Diablo and finished the game as my warrior that I realized there is a whole other way to play this game. I had been hoping to continue on as with warrior, but the upper difficulty levels are apparently only available when playing online, and I wasn't able to carry him over. I decided to try out a rogue online instead, and it dawned on me when I hit ESC but wasn't able to pause the game, that Diablo online (whether single or multi-player) is more about the persistent nature of the character than the transient world of the game.

That is, at any time I could take my now level 3 Rogue and restart the whole game anew, keeping my EXP and what items I had on me at the time. Not only that, but all the shortcuts into the deeper layers of dungeon are already available, given that your character is of a level to use them. The idea that the world itself is not to be the main focus of the player is exemplified by its defining characteristic--it is almost entirely randomized from the moment you step foot into it.

Diablo's main thrust, then, is the development of your character over time, in the loot you find, the skills you learn, and the power you obtain with each new level. Completely obvious, sure, but all the time I spent on the offline quest, I was locked into a static (if previously randomized) world. If I wanted be able to die and reload, or save my game and come back later, I could do that. Online, you're in a game world only until you either die or log off, since either occurrence will restart you in a fresh new game (unless you have others in your game who can resurrect you or keep the game alive, of course). The only thing that ever carries over is your character level and, unless you die, all your items. It's a fresh new way to approach the game as compared to what I'm used to, and makes it almost more of a rogue-like. Mind blown. How can Blizzard be so awesome?

In other awesome Blizzard-related news, I picked up a Diablo Battle Chest, so now I have D2 and the expansion on my mac, in glorious 800x600, complete with the no-CD patch. Glory! I love the fact that I can fire up the complete StarCraft or Diablo II at a moment's notice with no rooting around for discs. It's almost worth being nearly a decade late to the party with these games.

Quickly: I got a Mega Man Zero GBA cart for $9 at GameStop. Kickass! It's just what I was looking for in Mega Man Powered Up, but could not find. Zero, and the MMX universe, is much cooler than the classic MM universe anyway (I might have thought differently back in 1993, but I was only 12 then). Also, the Pixel Junk Eden is pretty fucking cool. I'm going to have to pick that up along with Geometry Wars 2 and Bionic Commando Re-armed soon. Assassin's Creed impressions coming up whenever I get a chance to throw it in.

The smell of death surrounds me.

Diablo is extremely gothic macabre in atmosphere. The music theme of the town of Tristram is remarkably evocative of the dreadful and unwholesome with its acoustic guitar chords and arpeggios accompanied by a wailing wind's whistle. It's a favorite of mine. This sort of grim and spectral ambiance has always fascinated me, from Castlevania to the Book of Revelation, Dante's Inferno and the covers of Opeth albums and the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Like Anne Rice's Vampire Lestat, I can sink my teeth into this milieu.

It's the dire and woeful without the gore and gratuitousness to completely crush the subtlety that defines the mood. Diablo has plenty of gore, but then, it is an action hack-and-slash full of the rotten, undead, and demonic; in any case, the tone is never compromised by gameplay conventions.

I've fought my Warrior through the cathedral, catacombs, and caves into Hell itself, now at subterranean floor 13. It has ocurred to me that the game is meant to be played through multiple times, new game+ style, retaining character experience and items from one difficulty level through to the next. I've only reached character level 20 or so, and still don't have any gear I'd say even verges on being 'epic.' We'll see what I come across in the final strata of dungeon.

I also haven't decided yet whether I'll continue on after killing Diablo, try another class, or just move on to Diablo II. Hmmm.

Too Lame *drumroll*

It's really a shame about Too Human. I've been keeping up on the buzz (and rancor) surrounding it because I thought it had potential, and I was a big fan of developer Silicon Knights' prior game Eternal Darkness for the 'Cube. I downloaded first tonight an E3 trailer for the game, which I didn't think was too pretty, and then the playable demo.

To put it bluntly, it sucks. It feels like an early-period Xbox/PS2/Cube game with some 360 textures pasted over the top. The character models make Oblivion's look sexy, and the script and voice acting are trash, and that's just the presentation. The execution is even worse. Baldur, when he isn't ice-skating from one mob to the next, feels about as agile as a sack of bricks, with crappy canned animations that keep you rooted in one place all the time while swinging your sword. The arenas range from bland to dull, and I've seen koopa troopas with more interesting attack patterns than the robot enemies in Too Human.

But worst and most unforgivable of all, the equipment and skill tables are two and three layers deep in a slow-loading main menu, meaning that each trip in there to see what you just picked up or to change gears yanks you right out of the game and into janky menu hell. Did I mention that this is a loot-based dungeon-hack game? Now you see where this is going.

Coincidentally, Blizzard's genre-founding 1996 title Diablo (that's from twelve years ago) still plays fast and smooth and is a whole lot of fun, if you can do without things like bloom lighting, polygonal models, and screen-filling resolutions.

Dungeon Runnin'

Ever buy a game and then, for whatever reason, have it sit and gather dust for a decade without really sinking your teeth into it? That's what happened with my copy of Diablo. I bought it around the time it came out in '97 or '98 based on the demo, and for the life of me I can't recall ever getting much farther than the Butcher, and I have no clue why I never played it much. I mean, I played through all of FFVIII and X in the intervening years. I could have better spent those 150 hours or so on it! Hell, I even played through Xenogears twice (and don't regret that quite so much).

It's not like I don't like hack 'n' slash loot games; I adored Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath for PS2. Just, for some weird reason, I never got around to giving Diablo it's due. Maybe I just gravitate toward a joypad more than mouse and keyboard.

Well, better late than never. I've had my Diablo disc floating around, and I wanted to play it a few months ago, but couldn't install it on my Mac. Then, with the D3 announcement recently, it occurred to me that my wife's computer, slow and lame as it is, does run XP, and is only around half the age of Diablo, and thus should be able to run it well. And it does. It runs it "windowed" in thick black borders due to the game's low resolution, but there's nothing at all hindering play.

I created a warrior, who is now up to level 6, and I've killed the Butcher again and am about to start level 3 of the dungeon. I'd like to finish the game this time, and then later get D2. Incidentally, this and Etrian Odyssey makes two games I'm playing concurrently that center around massive dungeons.

June Swag

June was a pretty light month. July is looking to be about the same, which is good, since I have already spent way too much money on games over the last year or so.

It was Metal Gear Solid 4 month, and I was further spurred on to pick up MGS3 Subsistence.

June also saw the release of Etrian Odyssey II, and I picked up another copy of Ico, having sold mine a long time ago. The box isn't pictured, because the American cover art is a tragedy.

Another one down, another one down

I just beat Shadow of the Colossus. That last one was a real ordeal. I had to climb that monster probably 20 times before I was able to go the back to the left hand to the right hand to the collarbone successfully, and then once I got to his crown I had to hold on for dear life to gain purchase and be able to stab him good.

The flying desert colossus was also kind of a bitch because I couldn't seem to get Agro (the horse) to meet head-on with its wings so I could climb on. I also had some trouble with the two dog-like ones with the plated armor, because they'll knock you down over and over, and Wander (the boy) takes an eternity to get up after getting knocked down. Most of the others didn't pose much of a problem at all. I'll play on hard mode whenever I come back to SotC.

It's an amazing game, and truly one of a kind. At the moment I don't really have a favorites of all time list (longer than 3 titles, anyway), but this SotC would definitely be a candidate. My only problems are with the camera sometimes being at a bad angle for judging jumps on a moving colossus, and the fact that Agro doesn't always do what you want him to, but I suppose that's just realism. If they ever did a sequel, I'd also expect there to be more than one way to scale and take down the colossi. A little more free-form problem solving and a little less being funneled through a specific sequence of actions would be nice.