Cubing in public, and breaking cube news

Having had a number of long days and odd situations at work, I was faced Friday with the prospect of having to take a long lunch so I didn't put myself into unauthorized overtime. I brought my good stickerless DaYan with me, and went to go run some errands to make the most of my lunch hours.

I had intended as my first stop to go to Home Depot and find out if they could sell me a prefabbed kitchen drawer to replace my blown-out silverware drawer. Particle board is not amenable to being re-drilled that much, and it had several stress failures in it. I discovered at Home Depot that they don't do kitchen cabinets the same way that they used to. I remember it being more like IKEA, where if you want a particular setup, they say, "Go get 4 drawer kits, one Base A, Two Base G's, and a Door M and N." Now, an entire section is a pre-assembled piece and you just have to fit them together, and the drawers are done completely differently now. Smartly, the rollers are underneath the drawer instead of hanging off the sides, so gravity doesn't act to misalign the mechanism.  I made a couple of laps around the furniture section, hoping to catch someone's eye so I could ask the stupid question to which they were going to answer "No" to, but the only employees that I was able to engage either were in other sections or the sniper guy in the front of the store that I wasn't going to talk to because I wasn't particularly interested in whatever special offers he had today.

Feeling down for having flunked out of the first errand, I walked over to the TigerDirect in the same plaza. Instead of avoiding the salespeople, I brandished my cube and walked right towards them. When the first person said "Hey - Rubiks' Cube!" I knew I was going to be good to do my three minute schtick. I managed to finish off a 27 second solve, talked to them about Will Smith learning to do the cube for ha movie, the fastest current time, the basics about the Fridrich method, how the corners first method is different, how algorithms work, and how learning how to do two moves with a single had motion improved my time. After the demonstration, I got someone to direct me to a good keyboard because I had gotten tired of the overly flat Dell keyboard that comes with the new computers that my company has been rolling out. They showed me a Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 and they had it for $35, and I was pretty darn happy about that. I even did a little bit of my cube demo a second time for the cashier who rang me up since nobody was in line behind me and they seemed interested.

After I got done with that, I went down to the Gamestop up the street. I found a used copy of Killer is Dead marked at $8, but it rang up $16. The cashier was nice about it and split the difference, so I got it for $12. While he was figuring it out, I did a little bit of my cube routine for the line that had formed behind me. During part of my schtick, I had mentioned to the cashier that I usually had my cube with me for when I had to wait in line at places instead of playing Angry Birds, and I got a sort of a hipstery I-didn't-think-anybody-still-played-Angry-Birds response from him. That's a sentiment that's not unexpected from the general public, but I found it slightly unexpected from a game store employee. This is Gamestop after all - if people weren't playing old games they wouldn't be making enough money to be in a strip mall every 15 miles all over America.

So, having forgotten several items on the list, I found myself at Walmart later that evening to get a couple of the things I couldn't manage to get elsewhere. Our local store is being remodeled, so everything is out of place. Towering shrink-wrapped pallets fill the rear aisles, the newly redesigned parking lot doesn't have cart corrals in the right places, the back-to-school section is two narrow corridors of doom and destruction, support posts block the traffic flow of the most used cash lane of the store, turkey pans are assisting with the air conditioning system, and if anything new came in the store you would only find it by accident.

Last night's accidental discoveries were some of the Star Trek series of Hot Wheels cars and a newly redesigned Rubik's cube!

The packaging is clear plastic on top to show the cube inside, with an insert on the bottom that mentions that there's a new smoother mechanism and on the other side that there's a new Rubik's cube app on Google Play and the Apple Store. The cube is shiny - at first I thought that it was just redesigned stickers but it turned out to be embedded plastic tiles. This is not the first time that a Rubik's cube was done with tiles, but the plastic tiles on the 80's cubes were thicker. These new tiles are recessed. I have not been able to disassemble the new cube as I find the mechanism is rather stiff. It may have a spherical mechanism similar to the Void cubes and the 80's Rubiks' Revenge, or it may just be that there are spherical feet. It is not suited for speedcubing that I can tell, but perhaps some breaking in will do it some good. The only information that I had found about the new cube was on the Hasbro page.  I had one face that I couldn't turn that well for ten minutes or so, and then with a firm grip on two layers I was eventually able to turn it. I couldn't tell if it was hung up or there was a piece of plastic flash, but now I can hear a rattling piece of plastic inside the cube when I shake it. Since I can't wear down or delaminate the stickers and they're widely available, I suppose I could silicone this one without fear. If the silicone lubricant works, it would be the first time in a long time that I can carry around a real Rubik's cube without having to apologize for it.

PS3 games people overlooked, part 2

Another one of the PS3 games that I wanted to get to before it was no longer readily available was Shadows of the Damned. It has a few fun things going for it.

1. Shinji Mikami is one of the Creative Producers. He's been involved with Devil May Cry, Killer 7, Resident Evil 1, Resident Evil 4, some of the Phoenix Wright games, an obscure but critically acclaimed brawler called God Hand, and that game Vanquish that I just finished not that long ago.
2. Goichi Suda, more often known to Americans as Suda 51 is the Executive Producer. He previously worked with Shinji Mikami on Killer 7, but has also worked on one of my favorite Wii titles No More Heroes and its sequel No More Heroes 2, the zombie brawler Lollipop Chainsaw, and the arty-looking assassin hack-and slash title Killer is Dead.
3. Steven Blum voices the main character, Garcia Hotspur. While Mr. Blum is a seasoned professional, and few doubt the quality of his voice, I was a little surprised that it was him. I was partly surprised because I didn't identify it right away, and partly because I thought they would have tried to get a Mexican-American voice actor. Since Steven Blum lives in southern California, it's not like he's unfamiliar with the accent.
4. Garcia's sideckick/comic relief/tour guide/club/gun/motorcycle Johnson is voiced by English actor Greg Ellis. 

The premise of the story is that you're some sort of fancy pants demon hunter, and the demons decide to take your girlfriend from you as revenge. (A tale as old as King Kong.) This is complicated by the fact that you decide to travel directly to Hell to get her back, and she might not even be who you think she is.

It's a third person shooter with a extra non-standard game mechanic. (You could say the same thing about Vanquish and its speed boost mechanic.) The non-standard mechanic is a light/dark mechanism. Light is good, darkness is bad. Dark enemies need to be shot with a light bullet before you can destroy them. Dark areas need to be lit up before they can be traversed or you lose health. Some objects have different properties in the dark and in the light. Also, demon baby door guards like strawberries, but sometimes they'd rather have brains or eyeballs to eat. I am worried this is going to turn the entire game into a series of lame fetchquests, but it hasn't happened yet. (Maybe someone should make a parody of an action/RPG called "A Series of Lame Fetchquests".)

The graphics are really interesting looking, and there are lots of eye-catching posters and handbills on the walls that add amusing subtext to the story. The voice work is great, and the music is eerie and atmospheric punctuated with little Spanish guitar accents. The story is just twisted enough that I'm hooked in, but the game has been slow-going for me so far.

Other than some explicit puzzle solving hints, the game doesn't always teach you what it wants you to do, and it's hard to tell when the things you're doing in combat are effective or not. Certainly I don't want a game to feel like it has to hold my hand and tell me everything, but if an enemy doesn't have a health bar or any visual indicator that you're doing damage to it it's hard to decide what the best course of action is.

The other problem I'm having with it probably is due to the fact that I'm not playing regular shooters - my aim is terrible, and I can't seem to stay focused on enemies. It may be a sign that I need a different control scheme, since I didn't remember having this much of problem with Resident Evil 5 and 6 or Vanquish.

I think I'm going to have to revisit this game later, but my first impression is that there are a few things wrong with the game and a few things wrong with me.

The Importance of X (or A, as the case may be.)

Over the course of the summer I played the following action/platform games on PS3 all within a short span of time.

God of War 3 (completed regular difficulty)

Heavenly Sword (completed regular difficulty)

Ratchet and Clank:Tools of Destruction

Devil May Cry 4 (completed regular difficulty)

Bayonetta

Ninja Gaiden 2 (completed once, can't recall which difficulty)

I like all of these games, and for different reasons. Ninja Gaiden 2, Devil May Cry, and Bayonetta are a different kind of gameplay from God of War and Heavenly Sword, and Ratchet & Clank is yet another kind of gameplay. The thing that I noticed the most from playing all of these games in the same timespan is that you can't jump in Heavenly Sword, and that Bayonetta and God of War use two different buttons to get into the item menus. The problem with the item menu didn't take too long, but the other thing really got me noticing how ubiquitous the use of the X button to jump with is (or A, if you're playing on XBox/XBox 360.)

I think that I only own a few games that have a jump mechanic where it's mapped somewhere strange. On the first Devil May Cry, they mapped the jump button to triangle which I never got used to. I was so glad that they fixed it in Devil May Cry 2 that I overlooked a lot of the game's other flaws. I wonder if they changed it for the HD remake? On the game "de Blob" for the Wii, they mapped jumping to swinging the Wiimote. In one case, it was workable but I had to think about it a lot. In the other case, I didn't have to think about it that much but it was largely inaccurate for me. I think Onechanbara for Wii has the jump button mapped someplace strange also, but you don't jump in that game enough for it to matter.

In general, I found it nice for the games that I listed at the beginning here that I didn't have to think about jumping. It kept me engaged in the game and not perpetually having to run back and check the controls in the menu. I presume that the same sort of thing happens with FPS games, where people have a certain expectation of a control layout and it's nice not to have to think about it so they can just play the game. With fighting games, I'm used to having to adapt a little for each character, so it's not so bad with different games having different button layouts but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a preference.

In the event that there isn't a standard, ubiquitous layout, I have to say that I really appreciate the times where there are visual cues or on-screen reminders available, especially for context-specific controls or buttons that see only occasional use. God of War does that fairly often, and I have to say that it's nice to jump back into a game after not having played it for a while and be able to open up a treasure chest right when I walk up to it and not worry that I'm about to accidentally use a magic attack on it by mistake. I just started playing Arkham Asylum in the last week and like the little touches like seeing (R1) right next to the little reticle that shows you what ledge you can grapple up to, or the little reminders in the corner about how to use the explosive gel once you equip it.

I have complained about bad controls before, so before I launch into a tirade about those I would just refer people back to my old post about Suda51 and Killer7.

Familiar controls (or at least intuitive controls) can help make a good game great, and in a lesser game can keep a help player interested long enough to care whether they finish or not.

Even I have a limit.

After I finished No More Heroes 2:Desperate Struggle on its easy "Sweet" mode, I thought that I would give Suda51's American debut, Killer7, another try.   I had heard so much about it before I played it, and had agonized over purchasing it several times but had passed over it in favor of more action-friendly titles like Devil Kings, Sengoku Basara, and Ghost Squad.  Once I finally purchased it, I played about as far as the first puzzle and stopped.  My kids clamored for me to put Pikmin back in the Game Cube so that they could watch it.  It's more soothing and pastoral than Killer7.  Killer7's visuals, although mostly flat-shaded polygons reminiscent of Star Fox for Super Nintendo and the old I,Robot arcade game from 1983, still have some appeal since they were done with so much style.  The sound design is good, and the story is wacky enough that even Twin Peaks and Lost fans need to actively pay attention.  Sadly, it's not enough.

I had been reminded before that bad controls can ruin a game.  I wasn't that excited about Resident Evil 2 at the time that it came out, because the loading screen between rooms and the tank controls were a big turnoff, especially with having to fend off zombies.  Even though RE2 had made big improvements over the first game, it wasn't enough for me to want to play it because during the few instances where combat was required, I felt totally ineffective.  Since one of the two characters you play as in RE2 is a cop, you would think that feeling ineffective would be a bad thing.  The designers played it off by saying that the control scheme increased the player's fear, making something that was only slightly scary somewhat scarier.  For me, that wasn't it.  It was feeling like I wasn't really controlling the character that kept my immersion level in the game pretty low.  I liked the story and the characters, and I even played the Resident Evil light shooter game Dead Aim, since you could actually aim at your targets in a useful way.  When Resident Evil 4 came out, I thought that most of the problems that I had with the controls had been fixed.  When I tried to show RE4 to my buddies, however, they viewed the game in the context of first-person shooters and were annoyed that you couldn't strafe or even shoot while moving.  I was too excited about an over-the-shoulder camera to care at that point.  The Wii version of RE4 did me one better by allowing direct aiming with the Wiimote. (Awesome!)  So, I was immersed in the game sufficiently.

Now, let's go back to Killer7.  Moving the character in that game is mapped to what normally would be the action buttons for a Gamecube game, A and B.  A to go forward, B to turn around.  Any feeling of directly controlling the character with the... , controller, goes away.  You only use the analog stick to aim while shooting, or to pick a direction to walk when there is more than one way to go. Like Resident Evil, you can only shoot when stationary, and you to have to use the R trigger to ready your weapon (which is oddly similar to RE4). Add to this that most enemies are invisible until 'scanned' with the L button, and it starts getting a little silly.  So, the controls are wacky to me, and I'm never really 'in' the game.  The other disconcerting thing is that the other members of the Killer7, the group that your character is part of, have unique abilities, and you have to run back to a save room to switch when you need to use that ability, and it's another thing that takes you out of the game.  In the majority of games, you have a main character that the player identifies with for most of the game.  I don't really mind the occasional side mission with another character - The Onimusha series and the Ratchet & Clank series both seem to do this well - but seven feels like too many and potentially distracting.  If you could start with anybody from the very beginning so each individual gamer had somebody they could identify with, maybe it would be better, but it's hard to say since I haven't played though enough of the game to really get the big picture on how the 7 different personalities all fit together.

I really like what Suda51's Grasshopper Manufacture team did with the two No More Heroes games, and I know that he worked alongside some of Capcom's people before.  I would have liked Killer7 better if it had used the same game engine as RE4, even if only so that I could move the character a little more directly.  As it turns out, Suda51 and the Resident Evil team are working together on a new game that should be out pretty soon - Shadows of the Damned. (If you're afraid of Electronic Arts or depictions of demons or sidekicks that are actually weapons that have double entendre-laden names, don't follow the link.) As usual, it will be a while before I play it but the trailers are promising to have horror, action, and Suda51's trademark wackiness.

I also got to see a Nintendo 3DS handheld in person (finally) and was unimpressed with the 3-D.  Yes, it's 3-D, but as usual all of the visual cues for depth are coming from the edges of objects and not the surfaces of objects, so we see them as layers like a pop-up book.  I did like that Super Street Fighter IV did not try to make anything closer than the plane of the screen, though. (Maybe it's where I had the slider set.)  I also like that it had enough horsepower to match SSFIV's painting-influenced visuals.  I don't really like playing fighting games on a handheld, though.  Usually there aren't enough buttons, but that is not an issue now.  Now the only issue is that I didn't like the D-pad that much and the circle pad seemed to only be helpful for fireballs but not dragon punches.  If I had chosen a character with 'charge' style special moves like Guile, it might have been easier.  Even so, I would rather have a more fighting-game-specific controller in my hands.  My current faves are the Nubytech/UDON controllers - I have a Ryu one for PS2 and an Akuma one for XBox.  So, as usual, it seems to be all about the controller.  I hope that the 3DS controls work better for their first party titles like Pilotwings Resort and The Legend of Zelda:Ocarina of Time. I would expect them to, as they are more suited to those kinds of games than they are suited to Street Fighter.  I'm sure I'll eventually deal with it, but if it's too wacky and unintuitive to control I can't be bothered.  After all, as much as I like these games, I do have a limit.