#1 son just finished Capcom's "Okami" (Wii version). I am proud of him for finishing it, because the only things that he wanted help from me on were the timed races. He gets a little freaked out on missions where you are timed, so it's understandable that he can't really do them. It's easier to play a race or two for him and let him take over again when he's ready. We might have looked up a puzzle or two, but I am impressed that after showing him a little bit of technique on one of the first bosses he did every subsequent boss battle himself.
"Okami" is an adventure game like the Legend of Zelda series games, but the game has more of an emphasis on character interaction for completing missions, and has an art style that makes it appear as an animated Japanese watercolor painting. Another major difference between "Okami" and the Zelda game for Wii "Twilight Princess" is that when you aim the Wiimote at the screen in "Okami", it's only to use the game's magic system. The Celestial Brush, when activated, is how the wolf god Ameratsu interacts with her surroundings. You pull the B trigger on the Wiimote, time stops in the game, and you draw various symbols on the screen to achieve various results. Lighting fires, blooming flowers, making the wind blow, and delivering quick slashes to enemies are all done in the magic system. The other fighting moves are done with buttons and shaking In "Twilight Princess", the slingshot, boomerang, and bow and arrow are all aimed on-screen with the remote in real time during battles. It's great for someone like me with lots of game experience, but it's not so great for a 9-year-old that gets anxious when he's trying to aim at something that's shooting back.
Finishing "Okami", I think counts for more than finishing one of the LEGO games - there aren't too many boss battles in the LEGO games that can even compare.
When I asked him if he wanted to finish some other game now that he finished "Okami", he said that he wanted to play "Okami" again so he could find all of the stray beads in the game. Luckily, this will be a good bargaining tool to get him to finish his homework.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
A little run-in with the locals...
I had to yell at an apparently intoxicated or otherwise mentally impaired woman today because she had to get in my face and tell me that my sweet Border Lab was actually a Pit Bull and if it got off the leash or bit her or her dog that she would sue me. If she was that concerned, she should have stayed on the other side of the street where she was. Oddly enough, she did not deny that she was intoxicated when I asked her. I guess 12:45 isn't too early to drink on a Friday.
I had just come back from and errand and lunch with #2 Son and Suki the Wonder Dog. There is a woman with a dog in my field of vision, something I am used to looking for with a dog in tow. I see her walking on the sidewalk on the other side of the street as I am getting out of the car. She is shorter than me, but a little taller than my wife. She is normal weight, which is not so normal these days. She is older than me, perhaps she is in her late 40s or early 50s. She has fairish skin with spots - she looks like she has spent her fair share of time outside, but she does not seem to tan. She is wearing a shirt that goes to her elbows, some random or tie-dye pattern, and maybe some sort of dark colored Capri pants or cargo shorts that go to her knees. Her dog is small, black and white. The dog's ears look like the Batman cowl ears from the 70's costume. Perhaps it is a French Bulldog, I cannot be certain until I spend more time with Google Image Search.
Realizing that I had not taken the recycling out, I grab the bins while I still have dog leash in my hand. Suki sniffs around the yard while I take her back and forth from the side of the house to the road. As I get the second bin to the front, I see the woman crossing the road, dog leading. So far, this is normal dog owner behavior, and I expect people to ask me about Suki because she's a little bit small for a Lab, and her face is a slightly different shape.
"What kind of dog is that?"
"A Border Lab."
"A what?"
"A Border Lab." I say it slower because I worry that I'm not enunciating.
"A what?"
"Labrador. A Border..."
"That's a pit bull. You're a liar." Until the moment that she calls me a liar, I was assuming that I was having a normal conversation with a sane person.
The conversation gets complicated at that point, because we're talking over each other a little. She continues to assert that I am a liar, and that if that dog gets off the leash or bites her that she will sue me. I ask her if she is intoxicated, and if I might have to call for a D&D (drunk and disorderly). She suggests to me that she might call her lawyer. Judging from her behavior, it seems plausible that she both has a lawyer and has his number memorized. At some point, her belligerence puts her face in the proximity of mine, and I mentally check the way that she is standing against the way that I am standing. I am worried that she will decide to kick me in the crotch. I am worried that I will not show proper restraint. Since yelling may still be covered by the First Amendment I opt for standing to my full height in front of her and saying:
"GET. OFF. MY. LAWN."
She complies, punctuated with a disgusted "Fine". She mutters something else about a lawyer, and yells back to me to ask if I thought she was stupid.
"No, I think you're intoxicated."
Before she is out of visual range, but well past earshot, I catch one of the other neighbors out walking his dog, an old retired guy. I ask him if he had seen that woman walking that dog before, and he said that he had not, and he mentioned that she was muttering to herself the whole time about "Doesn't he know that thing is dangerous?"
I had just come back from and errand and lunch with #2 Son and Suki the Wonder Dog. There is a woman with a dog in my field of vision, something I am used to looking for with a dog in tow. I see her walking on the sidewalk on the other side of the street as I am getting out of the car. She is shorter than me, but a little taller than my wife. She is normal weight, which is not so normal these days. She is older than me, perhaps she is in her late 40s or early 50s. She has fairish skin with spots - she looks like she has spent her fair share of time outside, but she does not seem to tan. She is wearing a shirt that goes to her elbows, some random or tie-dye pattern, and maybe some sort of dark colored Capri pants or cargo shorts that go to her knees. Her dog is small, black and white. The dog's ears look like the Batman cowl ears from the 70's costume. Perhaps it is a French Bulldog, I cannot be certain until I spend more time with Google Image Search.
Realizing that I had not taken the recycling out, I grab the bins while I still have dog leash in my hand. Suki sniffs around the yard while I take her back and forth from the side of the house to the road. As I get the second bin to the front, I see the woman crossing the road, dog leading. So far, this is normal dog owner behavior, and I expect people to ask me about Suki because she's a little bit small for a Lab, and her face is a slightly different shape.
"What kind of dog is that?"
"A Border Lab."
"A what?"
"A Border Lab." I say it slower because I worry that I'm not enunciating.
"A what?"
"Labrador. A Border..."
"That's a pit bull. You're a liar." Until the moment that she calls me a liar, I was assuming that I was having a normal conversation with a sane person.
The conversation gets complicated at that point, because we're talking over each other a little. She continues to assert that I am a liar, and that if that dog gets off the leash or bites her that she will sue me. I ask her if she is intoxicated, and if I might have to call for a D&D (drunk and disorderly). She suggests to me that she might call her lawyer. Judging from her behavior, it seems plausible that she both has a lawyer and has his number memorized. At some point, her belligerence puts her face in the proximity of mine, and I mentally check the way that she is standing against the way that I am standing. I am worried that she will decide to kick me in the crotch. I am worried that I will not show proper restraint. Since yelling may still be covered by the First Amendment I opt for standing to my full height in front of her and saying:
"GET. OFF. MY. LAWN."
She complies, punctuated with a disgusted "Fine". She mutters something else about a lawyer, and yells back to me to ask if I thought she was stupid.
"No, I think you're intoxicated."
Before she is out of visual range, but well past earshot, I catch one of the other neighbors out walking his dog, an old retired guy. I ask him if he had seen that woman walking that dog before, and he said that he had not, and he mentioned that she was muttering to herself the whole time about "Doesn't he know that thing is dangerous?"
Sunday, August 8, 2010
The radical fetishization of game cases.
On my usual Friday trip to Wal-Mart, I added a CD organizer thingy to my shopping list - not like the big Rubbermaid photo&CD organizer totes that I have been getting, but one that just has little sleeves in it for the discs. I took 2-1/2 bins of PS2 games and condensed them down to something the size of a large hardback book, with 1/3 of a bin now being taken up only by what game manuals came out of that stash. A success overall, as it now allows me easier access to a lot of games that I don't always go digging through the bins for - and I even got so crazy as to alphabetize them. I had a couple of games that I couldn't bear to take out of the cases - no, they weren't Street Figher Alpha Anthology or Capcom Fighting Evolution - actually they are R-Type Final and Mister Mosquito. Too wacky to mess with, I suppose. I was surprised by a few things - I forgot that Death by Degrees had a demo disk for Tekken 5 in it, I forgot that Ribbit King had a second disk of bizarre movies on it, and I forgot that Barbarian was made by Titus, the same people that made that awesome Xena:The Warrior Princess fighting game for N64. I have no idea what has kept me hanging on to plastic cases all this time, but I think that part of it is how fragile the first era of CD's were.
At some other point on Friday, I wandered into out local Gamestop with the kids in tow. #1 son and I looked around in the Wii games, and we were looking at Sega Superstars Tennis as a light and fun way to break up our overly serious Okami adventure. I was a little annoyed with the employee on duty - it was a middle-aged woman. I don't mean to be ageist or sexist, my annoyance stemmed from the fact that she gave off no 'gamer' vibe at all. As a matter of fact, that particular store has had, in the past, quite a number of female employees that were gamers - and even one female general manager that was rather knowledgeable about intricate details of Final Fantasy that were even a little scary (in a good way). In general, I have found female employees a little easier to deal with largely because they tend to be a little more professional. Also, you would think that a store staffed with female gamers would be sure to attract the attention of the predominantly male gaming audience and be a little less off-putting to moms of gamers when they have to make a trip there to ask an employee something about a game. I'm sure that Gamestop's rigid rules and procedures will continue to produce their desired employee churn and anybody good they ever have will leave as usual. We bought nothing and left - we may consider the tennis game later, but it's not going anywhere.
By the time I have all of the games out of their plastic cases, I was starting to think that just putting them all in the recycle bin was the wrong move - so I called Gamestop to see if they wanted them. I got Middle-Aged-Non-Gamer-Woman on the phone, as I had suspected that I would. I pleaded my case for not throwing out cases, and suggested that they could make good use of them. She plainly stated that she got all of her game cases from corporate.
After a subsequent phone call, I think that one of the local Play-N-Trade stores has warmed to my idea. Where's the sense in putting game cases out for recycling when they could just be re-used directly without all that processing?
Also, Cherry Crush is awesome, and so are Ketchup flavored Pringles. I would advise, however, having them separately.
At some other point on Friday, I wandered into out local Gamestop with the kids in tow. #1 son and I looked around in the Wii games, and we were looking at Sega Superstars Tennis as a light and fun way to break up our overly serious Okami adventure. I was a little annoyed with the employee on duty - it was a middle-aged woman. I don't mean to be ageist or sexist, my annoyance stemmed from the fact that she gave off no 'gamer' vibe at all. As a matter of fact, that particular store has had, in the past, quite a number of female employees that were gamers - and even one female general manager that was rather knowledgeable about intricate details of Final Fantasy that were even a little scary (in a good way). In general, I have found female employees a little easier to deal with largely because they tend to be a little more professional. Also, you would think that a store staffed with female gamers would be sure to attract the attention of the predominantly male gaming audience and be a little less off-putting to moms of gamers when they have to make a trip there to ask an employee something about a game. I'm sure that Gamestop's rigid rules and procedures will continue to produce their desired employee churn and anybody good they ever have will leave as usual. We bought nothing and left - we may consider the tennis game later, but it's not going anywhere.
By the time I have all of the games out of their plastic cases, I was starting to think that just putting them all in the recycle bin was the wrong move - so I called Gamestop to see if they wanted them. I got Middle-Aged-Non-Gamer-Woman on the phone, as I had suspected that I would. I pleaded my case for not throwing out cases, and suggested that they could make good use of them. She plainly stated that she got all of her game cases from corporate.
After a subsequent phone call, I think that one of the local Play-N-Trade stores has warmed to my idea. Where's the sense in putting game cases out for recycling when they could just be re-used directly without all that processing?
Also, Cherry Crush is awesome, and so are Ketchup flavored Pringles. I would advise, however, having them separately.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Legend of Zelda - The Skyward Sword Official Trailer
While I am not always in favor of realism in games, I am looking forward to the fact that the new Legend of Zelda game uses the Wii Motion Plus to improve its swordplay (and a couple of other things).
The swordplay in The Legend of Zelda:Twilight Princess was fun, and that game did a good job of doing a lot of different sword and shield moves with the motion controls. The slingshot and bow and arrow seemed like much more useful weapons because you could point the Wiimote directly on the screen to aim them. So, it would seem that a natural extension of that would be to make the swordplay more direct.
From the official trailer, we see that some enemies are specifically tailored to be defeated by sword attacks at a specific angle. Also, we see the slingshot, bow and arrow, some awesome bomb bowling, a whip - new to the big versions but previously used in the DS game The Legend of Zelda:Spirit Tracks. Most crazy of all is the new remote control flying scarab beetle - check Link poised to fire it up at 1:06 in the video. My older son made some sort of squealy noise when he saw that for the first time.
The only things that I might not be looking forward to
are:
- The boomerang, and
- playing lefty.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Friday, July 23, 2010
New Marvel vs Capcom 3 characters announced at ComicCon
So I wake up Thursay morning, blearily stare at my computer screen, and see that they have announced more characters for MvC3!
Chun-Li is no surprise, as I had surmised before that she had been in too many of the other crossover games to not be present in this one.
Doctor Doom, the main enemy of the Fantastic Four, wasn't much of a surprise either since he was a interesting character to use in MvC2.
Super Skrull was not that much of a surprise, but only because I had heard talk of his inclusion when the original silhouette was posted on the MvC3 official page. It makes it easy to include the Fantastic Four, which were previously difficult to use because of licensing deals, because Super Skrull has all the same powers as the members of the Fantastic Four.
Trish is a little bit of a surprise to me, but a welcome helping of fan service in a cute leather outfit indeed. It would be even more awesome to have a Dante/Trish/Lady team, but I'm guessing that's overkill.
Trish's outfit in MvC3 looks more like the Devil May Cry 1 and 2 model than the one she's wearing in DMC4. That's fine by me, as I really learned to appreciate Trish more when I unlocked her as a playable character in DMC2. For some reason, I expected Capcom to take the macho route and include Vergil or Nero instead of Trish.
Included in the first video above - the word "Viewtiful" (Look after Doctor Doom lands that 36-hit combo - around 0:26). Decide amongst yourselves what the implications are. Not included in the MvC3 video above but otherwise announced - Thor and Ameratsu. There are some screenshots out there. I'm excited for the new characters, although I'd really like to see some footage of one of the larger characters against Ameratsu, just because I suspect that a lot of their standing regular attacks will just whiff over her fluffy white head and Ameratsu will be well suited to giving the big guys the rushdown and biting their kneecaps off.
In anticipation of all of the fighting game goodness to come, and also because I don't have SFIV, I dug through my box of fighting games and threw Tekken Tag Tournament, Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, Tekken 5 and Arcana Heart in the PS2 for a few minutes each last night. Tekken Tag looked a little dated, as the character models look a bit better in Tekken 5. Tekken 5 annoyed me only because I never finished that stupid "Devil Within" mode - I liked Tekken Force Mode in Tekken 3 and 4 so much better because they were straight-up brawlers that left the moveset of the Tekken characters intact. "Devil Within" is a different control scheme, and full of jumping puzzles. Also, there is a limit to how many times I will re-fight True Ogre before it starts feeling pointless. Neo Geo Battle Coliseum felt floaty and "off" a little. I keep trying to play SNK fighters because there are legions of dedicated KOF fans that swear by those games, but something never feels right. I even picked up a couple of the 3D King of the Fighters games, which I liked a little bit more, but I never really connected to. It's sad that I would rather play a deeply broken Mortal Kombat game with good characters than something with more critical acclaim that I just can't connect with.
Arcana Heart perked me right up after all of that, though. While it's slow compared to a lot of the other games and the arenas are large, the graphics are excellent for a PS2 game, and the fighting mechanics feel more solid than the SNK fighters. The idea of having separate sets of super moves and normal moves is interesting, it gives people a chance to build a character to their play style a little more. It only has three normal attack buttons and one special attack button - maybe it's the perfect game to get me warmed up for Marvel vs Capcom 3.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
So what does "Mature" mean again?
This weekend is a buy 2 get one on used games at Gamestop. Saturday's purchases were:
MadWorld for Wii
Wall-E for Wii
Scooby Doo: Night of 100 Frights for Gamecube (I always tell #1 son that if we can get a game for PS2 or Gamecube to get the Gamecube version.)
Two for the kids, one for me. At first, we were going to get No More Heroes 2 instead of Wall-E, but I felt like that No More Heroes 2 would be around for a while. My reasoning for getting MadWorld was that if I really want to experience what the Wii has to offer hardcore gamers, I should pick it up before it disappeared. Since No More Heroes 2 is a more recent release I wasn't worried about it going away any time soon. Also, I thought it was somewhat unfair to double up on UltraVoilence, since I'm not the only one that plays Wii in our house by a long shot. I had played the demo of the Wall-E game for PC, and it wasn't horrible, so I figured it was worth a try. It took us a while to decide what to get, and it took a little longer because #2 son kept bringing me cases for PSP games. "Bub, we don't have PSP. Leave 'em on the shelf". I would also like to thank Chrisitan at our local Gamestop for being a good sport while I did Rubik's cube demos in line at the store.
Eventually, we got home to play stuff. While it doesn't look as good as the PC version, the Wii version of Wall-E seems to play OK but we didn't delve very far into it. The controls showed a surprising amount of depth, even going so far as using the Wiimote to look around. As soon as we got home, #1 son fired up my Gamecube and got right to work on the Scooby-Doo game, and noticed that it was full of jumping and part-collecting. It also has a lot of well-arranged incidental music from the cartoons in it, so it definitely gave off the Scooby vibe. #2 son sensed the Scooby vibe and went in to watch him play, so I switched out discs and got started with MadWorld.
I have always been a big fan of brawlers, I think my favorite one in the arcades was The Combatribes, although I did play both Streets of Rage and several of the Final Fight games on the 16-bit consoles. I also played Double Dragon on a green screened Compaq portable at some point in the 80's, and I also remember getting my butt kicked by some stupid game on NES or SNES called "BattleToads". Stupid jetbike levels killed me every time. But, I digress.
The conceit of MadWorld is that you're an entrant in a city-wide televised combat spree called "DeathWatch". They play it up like it's a highly rated TV show and a terrorist plot all at the same time, especially since the island that the game takes place on had all of its bridges demolished all at the same time, right before the show starts. It implies that some big players are involved behind the scenes - it also implies that our protagonist might just be more than he appears.
Just because a game is rated for mature audiences is no guarantee that what you are experiencing is mature subject matter, or intellectually mature, or has mature gameplay. This is the most profanity laden and unapologetically violent game that I have played, but I hear that House of the Dead:Overkill (another game I haven't gotten to yet) actually has more profanity. Even Resident Evil 4 hides some of the decapitations with blurry cameras and slight cutaways, but Madworld includes a couple kinds of impalements, bisections, fire, getting run down by trains, getting thrown into saw blades, and being crushed with a two-ton metal ball - and that's just in the first level. Now while this sounds a bit gruesome, bear in mind that the entire world is rendered in a graphic novel styled black and white, full of deep shadows and punctuated with the occasional red and yellow. It is reminiscent of Frank Miller - perhaps the target audience for the game is people who enjoyed Sin City? Level two has a game called Man-Darts partway through, and while I can only explain it by saying that it involves a big baseball bat and a thirty foot high dartboard that you whack enemies into headfirst, it's a lot more fun than it might sound even though I had to fight the camera more than my opponents.
The voice actors that play the two play-by-play announcers in MadWorld are John Dimaggio, voice of my second favorite American English speaking robot, and Greg Proops, voice of my favorite non-alien speaking Podrace announcer.* In the first few minutes of the game alone, the two announcers drop F-bombs like it was February 1945 over Dresden. They start repeating jokes pretty early on, so you may just turn them down as soon as you're tired of them. I was very pleased to see that the announcers had their own volume slider. The enemies swear at you all the time too, so don't think turning down the announcers will help. After you turn down the announcers and the enemies, you will notice that the game's music is a flavor of hip-hop that includes at least a third as much swearing as the announcers. At this point, I was hoping for a button in the options that said "Instrumental & SFX Only". The violence I am used to but it probably doesn't annoy me because it's ridiculously over-the-top. The constant barrage of profanity annoys me, though. I'd like to be able to play the game without getting everyone within earshot annoyed. The music part of the music is well done, and the sound effects are meaty and solid.
It was also nice to hear that the voice of our protagonist Jack is played by the same actor that played protagonist Brad Hawk in Namco's Urban Reign, Steven Blum. The opening narration for Urban Reign was a standout piece of the game, and he gave you the inspiration to kick butt just from his voice alone. He serves a similar purpose here, to let you know that Jack is not a dude to be messed with.
My biggest issue with the game is that while it has many similarities to No More Heroes with even more swearing and the swordplay and the beatings and the ranking system and the on-screen controller motions for finishing moves, it misses the mark on the controls a little. It's difficult to stay locked on to the bosses and mini-bosses, and when you're not using the lock-on feature, the game often whiffs a punch into the empty space right next to an enemy if it thinks you're actually trying to get some other farther away enemy that's at a different angle to you. If your character is such a bad motor scooter, how could he mess that up? After having played games like Rygar and Devil May Cry and God of War that get that right a lot more of the time, it's sad to see a good developer miss the mark on that.
I hope all you people out there playing Heavy Rain appreciate what you got - that may actually be a "Mature" game. For that matter, Shadow of the Colossus and Sly 3 show more emotional maturity than MadWorld does. Heavy Rain may have a more choose-your-own-adventure game interface, and isn't as much of an action game. From a gameplay standpoint, MadWorld has a lot of things that I like in it, but a lot of the game's overall tone looks like it was just there for shock value and not because it fit with the game's story.
Maybe what I really want is a cartoony Devil May Cry game on Wii, rendered like Under The Skin or Viewtiful Joe. Enemies explode into red orbs (Devil May Cry's currency) upon defeat. Nero, Lady, Vergil, Trish, Leon Kennedy, and a few others show up as drop-in-drop-out team mates. Lots of action, some difficult puzzles that don't require jumping, minimal swearing, music that you need a subwoofer for, and some extra multiplayer modes. Dante runs an "agency", so why not let him do some detective work? Of course, if Capcom made anything like that they would be berated for making "LEGO Batman meets Carmen Sandiego".
* John Dimaggio's Bender is my second favorite American English speaking robot because he loses out to Robby the Robot from "Forbidden Planet" - nothing against John DiMaggio, Robby has a cooler hardware configuration. Also I had to specify American English because Anthony Daniels just slays both of those guys, and R2-D2 doesn't even speak English. As far as Greg Proops (the English speaking half of the podrace announcer) goes, it's just sad that he's at the top of such a very short list.
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