#11: BioHazard 0
So should this come
before the review of BioHazard 1 or
after?
It was released after, but it takes place before!
You see the kind of dilemma's I'm faced with in this project? Bet you never stopped to think about THAT, hunh? HUNH? DIDYA?
Asshole.
But my computer organized the 'BioH0.jpg' picture after 'BioH.jpg', so there you go.
In this particular installment in the long long LONG running series, you play as Rebecca Chambers AND Billy Whatshisname AT THE SAME TIME! Most BioHazards so far have offered 2 main characters to choose from, but this is the first (and last) one to give you control over both during the same scenario.
This allows for a whole new kind of puzzle-solving, requiring cooperation, and making the best use of each character's strengths and weaknesses.
Rebecca is weak and has low defense, as the sissy girl that she is, but she compensates for this by being extremely whiny and annoying.
Billy is bigger, stronger, but also somewhat slower, and he compensates for this by being an intolerable asshole and making lots of sexual innuendo.
So in most cases, Billy can be used to lift Rebecca up to an unreachable ledge, and Rebecca is small enough to fit through most holes; and amazingly, every hole in the game is exactly big enough for her, but too small for him. It's a Hole Conspiracy!
You can choose to keep them together and shoot stuff (AI is pretty decent in this case, fortunately) or you can send them both separately on a quest. Not one of the good quests involving Grails and Wooden Rabbits though. No, the ones involving lots of small silver keys and colored herbs.
When together, you can freely exchange items between the two, which is cool. Anything you can't carry with you can be put down on the ground at any point you want, which is also cool. There's no magic storage boxes anymore, so as soon as you find something you need, you can clear your inventory immediately, but this also means that if you want your old stuff back, you're going to have to go back and find it again. You do get all the information on your map screen, which is useful.
So is that all there is to it? Yes. Like its Gamecube predecessor, it looks EXTREMELY pretty, and like all its predecessors, it plays exactly the same.
Same old zombie shooting, same old puzzle solving, only with the two character twist this time. It might not be enough to keep everyone's attention though.
Since this game has a solid legacy to build upon, it's still pretty much fun, no matter how old the gameplay is, but you HAVE seen this all before, many many times, and the question is, do you want to do it again. I can see how many people would think they've had enough.
So what we have here is a very enjoyable game in an old mold. Mold! Get it? As in MOLDY!? IT'S A PUN!
Recommendable? Nah. For fans of the genre, or fans of the series only. Nothing special to see here folks, move along!
A 7.7!
Sorry, did I say 225? I mean 228!
Today is Sunday, and Sunday, by rule of the Bible, is Flea Market Day (it's in there somewhere!). And Flea Market means Lots of People selling Old Junk at low LOW prices!
And of course that means GAMES. Only in this case, it wasn't some stupid parent selling of their recluse child's most prized possessions at laughable rates (I want my pacifier back! you hear me MOTHER!?) but there was an actual stand belonging to those nice people from
Game Over.Their stand was real cheap. They were selling NES games for 3 Euro a piece, 10 for 25 Euro. Obviously these were all the most common NES games, no rare stuff, so that explains the price, but it's not representational of their huge Amsterdam Collection.
So, I bought Ducktales, Gremlins 2 and Kirby's Adventure for a nice total of 9 Euro, and because I have this really stupid rule that allows me to put down everything else when I buy a game with an 'old' letter so to speak, I immediately sat down for some nostalgic goodness.
Ducktales! It's CAPCOM, people! You know, the company that has been presenting the Universe from day one? I'll bet we don't get any credits at the end though.
Even if we do, God is probably going to be listed as 'R'. Or Bun Bun.
Thank you for your playing!
But seriously, I was (and still am) a HUGE Capcom freak, cos they just make excellent games, always have, and always will (probably), and even a game as old as Ducktales (1989) is still a lot of fun! If you're into retro of course.
There's only 5 levels, but they're non-linear, there's lots of treasures to find and collect, secrets and everything.
Your ending varies (ever so slightly) on the total amount of money you've gathered, so there is some minor beat-your-highscore related replay value.
Oh, and 3 difficulty levels! And the music is great, as with EVERY Capcom NES game back in those days.
I'm going to give this an 8.5! Bear in mind, I am rating these games by the standards at those times of course, don't think it deserves an 8.5 by today's.
It would probably get a 9.2
Hur Hur.
Oh, and yesterday, I finished the first CD in FF7. God, that last scene is really one of the BEST scenes in Video Game History EVER. The music, the drama, EVERYTHING.
It comes only second to that other milestone in Plot-twists in Video Game stories:
"Sorry, but our princess is in another Castle!"
By the time I reached 7-4 I was ready to
KILL
#10: BioHazard
Wow! I actually bought a Gamecube to be able to play this game, which is kinda like History Repeating itself, cos at the time I bought a PSX to be able to play the original Resident Evil.
Ahhh, good ole' Capcom! They don't really like to let go of their franchises do they?
And a good thing that is! The Resident Evil series has been widely criticised for its never-changeing gameplay, which is all part of Capcom's "If it ain't broke don't fix it" Life Policy, and, fuck it, I totally agree!
As long as they keep making games this good, who cares if nothing ever changes?
At least it means you get quality games every time.
Another thing this series is criticised for is that its nowhere NEAR as scary/intelligent as Silent Hill. And it isn't. SO WHAT!?
I mean, don't get me wrong, I
worship Silent Hill, like the depraved cult that it is, but in terms of pure Zombie-Blasting fun, it's got NOTHING on the BioHazard series.
Oh and Capcom sure do know how to make their games look pretty. I mean, DAMN, yo.
This game features pre-rendered backgrounds, like the original, only this time they're beautifully animated, and they're quite the sight to behold. This has to be the most beautiful and luscious rendering ever done and it amazes me everytime I see it.
The music has also been redone and fits the mood nicely. Music is really a subject where BioHazard'll never be able to touch Silent Hill though.
Basically, it's ALL good, it's a very faithful rendition of the original, whilst at the same time throwing in lots of cool extra stuff, new environments, new cut-scenes, slightly less toe-curling dialogue, extension of original scenes and puzzles, new object placement, you name it, it's in here.
There's one addition that RUINS the fun though. It's called Crimson Head.
You see, in the old games, when you killed a Zombie, it would be gone when you leave the room and enter again. Not this time. They stay around. And you know what?
After a while,
they get back up again And as if that alone wasn't enough, they're 3 times as fast and powerful! YAY!
Also, they are RED! Which is not only bad fashion sense, but also the reason they're called Crimson Heads I guess. Fucking Indians.
The only way to prevent this is to make sure you burn them! BURN THEM! BURN THEM ALL TO HELL! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA! Yes, I get that sometimes.
So the easy way out is the American Barbeque style, which is to bring your own Fire Rounds with you for the Bazooka and just burn them to a crisp immediately.
If you don't have any of them around, there's only one other option, which is to burn them using your trusty Gold Zippo.
Chris has a lighter as his standard item, but Jill has to sacrifice an inventory panel for it. What's more, you'll also need a flask of lighter oil with you, which can only contain two units of oil. Oil can be acquired from the big Jerrycans which can be found in most save rooms, and hold some 6 to 8 oil units. This means a LOT of running back and forth to make sure you have enough oil with you, which can be very tiresome.
And really, this takes a large portion of fun out of the game. The game would have been nearly perfect if it hadn't been for this. So as it is, it's only really damn good. Both as a remake, and as a Stand-alone Survival Horror Game.
I recommend this to anyone who's into the genre, cos it won't dissappoint, but it might frustrate a little. Still, it's
extremely pretty, so just compare it to women. Pretty women I mean. Who are annoying. Not the ugly ones. Not the nice ones either. Um. Okay, forget the simile, just compare it to a great game that has one really stupid idea. Yeah, that seems about right.
A 9.0! Zombies Rule!
#9: Beyond Good and Evil
I love Ubisoft. They're about the only Western company that makes decent games, now that Rare seems to have gone to complete waste. Plus, they've made a bunch of very decent and affordable games for Gamecube (or for every platform actually) one of which is Beyond Good and Evil.
In this game, you play Jade, who's entirely clad in green, hence the name.
How Original.
But don't confuse the black woman with the bad dress-sense from that awful game series with the slightly colored girl with the headband from that pretty cool game, cos Beyond Good and Evil is actually a very entertaining game.
Jade is a reporter who gets recruited by a small rebel organization to....um.....rebel against the Government, which has secretly joined hands with an Invading Alien Race called the Domz.
Taking pictures is therefore an intrinsic part of the gameplay. You have to take pictures to provide proof of the Governments Hidden Agenda, which will be published in the Rebel's little pamphlet to let the Good People of Hylia know what's going on.
Also you have to take pictures of rare species of animals to earn money and and pearls and stuff. Pretty cool.
Other than that, the game seems to be a cross between Zelda-like combat and Metal Gear Solid-type Stealth Dungeon Crawling, whilst, unfortunately, never reaching the same heights of either of those series.
Hylia, Jade's home planet, is very pretty to look at, especially the outside scenes, there's a whole shitload of pearls to collect, I wouldn't know what happens if you get all of them, cos I never bothered, but it's enough to keep you busy for awhile.
The version I played was entirely dubbed in Dutch, which is something that doesn't happen very often in Console Games, and as far as I'm concerned, shouldn't become regular practice. There is some amusing dialogue though, even in Dutch, and voice acting is not
that bad, but the fact that the entire cast is the same as the very cheaply dubbed anime we get on TV over here just causes a lot of involuntary negative cross-referencing. Which is an expensive way of saying that I've come to LOATHE those voices and they make me want to vomit convulsively.
Fortunately, it is also possible to opt for a French Dub! Yay!
Oh, wait, that sucks too. D'oh!
Actually, I've been told that if you send your copy to your friendly local Ubisoft Department you can exchange it for the English version, free of charge, I just didn't bother to.
All complaining aside, the game is really very enjoyable, although, as mentioned, never quite as good as all the games it seems to be stealing from. Just a good game and a good waste of time whilst you're waiting for the next big hit to come along.
An 8.3!
1997
Wow, have you ever noticed how things can
age in only a handful of years?
I mean, this is me on a picture taken roughly a year ago:
And this was me, like, 8 years ago or something. That's only 7 years before! :
Is this going anywhere?
Yes, inexplicably.
You see, I can remember when I first popped in Final Fantasy VII on PSX and I was totally AMAZED, WOWED, OVERWHELMED and FLABBERGHASTED at the gorgeous grahpics.
I was also completely DRUNK probably, because when I look at it now, it's like, "Gee, maw, lookit dem purty pickchors!".
It hurts the eyes I tellz ya! These graphics used to be GREAT. What HAPPENED!?
Time happened, that's what. Bloody processing power and billions of polygons happened, the Nazis. I keel your mother, bitches!
So any old how, Final Fantasy VII is next in this wonderful bit of occupational therapy, which means I have a long way ahead of me still.
I can tell you one thing though, the midi in this game was already extremely crappy in the year this game was released, so you can imagine what it sounds like now...
Also, the localization is HORRIBLE. The game has a truely great and epic story, very dark and brooding, but a lot of people have missed it, due to the simple fact that some of the most important dialogue is completely incomprehensible in English.
If I'm not mistaken (and I rarely am) it was translated by 2 Japanese guys, and everyone knows how good Japanese are at English. Shine GET!
For instance, and I'm not making this up, early on in the game, when you reach Sector 5 of the Midgar Slums, there's this guy sitting in a pipe who has some serious health defunctions. When you try to enter the pipe, Aeris will stop you and say, and I quote:"This guy are sick"
!
!!
!!!
He are not the only sick one here, girly! I mean, geez, this is basic grammar people!
It's weird, cos the game is filled with (more intentionally) funny dialogue, and loads of gramatically correct slang, and yet a simple sentence like that poses major problems apparently.
"Hey Cloud, how about information Shinra?"
*sigh*
Thank god the game itself is great.
Huh? Oh, yes, sorry! Ehem: WARNING! SPOILERS!
Dancing Dead
Another one bites the dust!
That's right, after an intense weekend of gaming, Final Fantasy VI has lost the endurance contest and has admitted defeat at the hands of the mighty INGEN!
MUHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAETC.!!!
I was like, okay, Kefka is a breeze, so I went into the battle pretty confidently and reached the final phase whereupon he threw Ultima at me and killed me stonedead.
Slight disappointment there.
Didn't get the chance to do that the second time though. HAH! And that was even AFTER he replaced my best two characters with two other losers.
Clown.
So, onto the verdict.
Well, what can I say that hasn't already been said by everyone else on the planet?
What unblown trumpet is there left?
THIS is a Superb game. This is screaming quality embodied in a small gray cartridge, or in this case, PSX CD-ROM. It has bloody EVERYTHING. Great story, fantastic music, fun dungeons, loads of characters, loads of skills and magic, variety, I mean, geez, you name it, this game has motherfucking got it.
What it DOESN'T have though, is rabies, which is kind of a shame, since there IS a dog in it. Missed opportunity there, Square!
And, oh yes, the dog's name is Interceptor. I mean, how friggin'
COOL is that. And his owner is a Ninja. I told you this game has EVERYTHING.
For once, Square decided to look back at the previous installments of the series, and they must've gone "Shit, this sure is a load of crap! why on earth did people buy this crap? It's crap I tellz ya!"
"Calm down, mr. Sakaguchi, time for your Hi-Potion!"
"Oh yeah, that's the stuff. Come to papa!"
And in a rare moment of soberness he decided to throw out EVERYTHING that was annoying about the prequels, leaving only the title screens, basically.
No, wait, leaving only FF5's Title screen, and instill the rest of the game with pure golden goodness! Damn, this game is FUN. Filled with classic moments from beginning to end. If you haven't played this, you haven't played real Final Fantasy.
In fact, you're probably one of those band-wagon gamers that decided to play FF7 because everyone said it was cool, and are now a self-proclaimed square-expert even though you think 7 stands for 1. Asshole.
"But is there nothing you frown upon then, oh wise one?"
Shut up! Oh, no, wait: Yes!
You see, this game has 14 characters. 14! Count 'em, they're all there.
Up till now, Final Fantasy games have only had a small amount of characters, and you were always stuck with the same party, because the story demanded it. There was no exchanging characters at your wish.
Now there's nothing wrong with having a lot of characters, but it does pose some problems. i.e. You can't spend your time keeping everyone at high levels. It's simply too much work. Your party can hold 4 people at a time, and it is more than likely that you'll be spending the majority of the game with the same characters, i.e. those that have been in your party from the beginning basically.
Also, the balance seems to be rather unfair. Whenever I play this game, I ALWAYS end up playing with the same party, simply because some characters have considerably better abilities than others. This is a shame, cos it puts all those other characters to waste.
Square must've noticed this cos they pull a real dirty stunt towards the end. Something I absolutely HATE in games with so many characters: they FORCE you to split your group to navigate some dungeons. So you HAVE to work with all those weak characters that you haven't been levelling up, and really, I don't think it's fair to demand the gamer to keep up with ALL 14 characters. It's too damn time-consuming.
Now, one of these dungeons is optional, and you only have to take two groups, so you can still spread your strong characters and have good parties, but for the final dungeon (Yes, the FINAL one, the one you can't AVOID) you have to split everyone into 3 groups. 3! That's 12 of the 14 you have!
Needless, to say, you'll get your ass kicked more than once. I took the easy, but time-consuming way out, by just having my strong party do all routes by Teleporting back and forth, but I just wish Square hadn't forced us to do this.
As good an idea as it is, and as much fun as the Final Dungeon can actually be, I still don't think it's very nice to demand such a thing of a gamer, who just wants to see the ending of what is otherwise a superb game.
Still, that's only a minor gripe I guess.
So, what's the final score? A 10-!!
Yes, that's a '-' (minus) there. I already explained why, the other reason is that I KNOW of myself that I like Final Fantasy 7 just a
tad better, and there has to be a way for me to express that, right? ;)
And I don't like it quite as much as Chrono Trigger either, which I did give a 10, but I'll get to that later.
Smart people will also be able to guess what is the likely outcome of my imminent playthrough of Final Fantasy VII :)
Midgar, here I come!
Backlog #8 Battle Arena Toshinden
Toshinden meaning "Fighting God Legend", so that means we have Battle Arena Fighting God Legend. I love Japanese game titles!
I think this was one of the earliest PSX games ever. I remember playing a Demo of this when the PSX had only just been released, and at the time it was pretty impressive. Not anymore though.
I dunno, I've never really been able to get into 3D fighting games as much as 2D ones. Even though this game is a good break from all the bog standard 3D brawlers that only allow for kicks and punches, in that it also has over the top special moves and fireballs etc. So this is probably the closest thing you could get at the time to a classic 2D beat-em-up in the vein of Street Fighter or King of Fighters.
It's just not nearly as much fun though. 3D wasn't really advanced at the time and the game is rather sluggish. It does have a good combo system though.
And there's ring-outs and everything, and you can actually make use of the 3D arena by making sideway dodges and such. It did a far better job at making a REAL 3D fighting game than Tekken did at the time. Tekken sucked. Still does.
But I'll be honest, I only rented this game once, and didn't like it all that much, but I loved the music, so I bought it many years later for nostalgic value.
And I STILL think the music's good, although there seems to be a big difference between the Japanese and the Western version, in that the Western version has live electric guitars, and the Japanese one doesn't.
Other than that, there's nothing really special here. A small selection of fighters, everyone gets the same ending (that seems to be coming into fashion nowadays though), there's one or two hidden characters, some secret special moves, but it's just not very interesting. A 6.7
Twilight What?
Okay, so the subtitle may suck, but the New Zelda game is shaping up very nicely indeed. Trailers don't do it justice, that's why some people have done us the courtesy of providing a bunch of video's covering the first segment of the game, right up to the very first boss battle.
Spoilers galore of course, but very VERY pretty ones.
Plus Audio Commentary!I don't have anything useful to note, and who
cares when E3 is going on?
I just got Stragos and Realm in FF6 so the floating continent is drawing ever closer.
Which means I'm approaching the turning point of the game and am almost halfway through.
Probably no update for tomorrow, cos tomorrow is Star Wars Day! I'm typing this on my very small laptop, cos I'm queueueueueing in front of the cinema, and I'm in between some Huge Fat Bastard dressed like Han Solo (Yeah, man, YOU DA BABE MAGNET!) and a woman looking like a Wookie. God I hope that's cosplay.
Gaming Life
E3 is here! Oh
yes.Although I was told E3 start on May 17th and it's only 5 o'clock in the morning there whilst I write this, lots of mouth-watering stuff has been released on the Internet already, I suggest you get your ass over to www.gametrailers.com IMMEDIATELY to see what the next generation is capable of.
Great site, that, I keep telling people about it, but noone ever thanks me for it.
You get all the video footage of all the new stuff, completely for free, not even logins are required, and you don't have to wade through page after page of the rantings of some asshole who thinks he can write.
.....
Well apart from this one then :S
Anyways, CHECK OUT the
realtime PS3 remake of the Opening of Final Fantasy 7. I WANT TO HAVE ITS BABIES. Hell, I'd settle for licking its shoes.
Or perhaps licking its baby's shoes.The umpteenth trailer for Advent Children also looks VERY impressive, but I think it's just about goddamn time they stop feeding us with trailers and bring out the damn movie already. Wasn't it already shown at a movie conference, like, half a year ago!?
No news on Zelda yet unfortunately, but I'm sure the next couple of days won't go by unnoticed.
On the Personal Gaming Front, I've just finished the Opera House in FF6.
MAN, what a great scene that is, no matter how many times you see it.
The music, to this day, is ever impressive, but maybe that's because I was listening to the Orchestral version inside my head. Some of Uematsu's best work, right there.
So I've also been to Zozo already. That's the name of a Town don't ya know?
Do not confuse it with the character Gogo. Hoho, these Japanese and their silly names.
And I'd like to take a minute and rant a little about this town, cos, obviously, it doesn't make any sense. I mean, it's probably there only for comedy value, but I wouldn't be a complete loser if I didn't take everything I see in a game totally seriously.
Zozo, a town where it seems to rain constantly, is a gathering-place for pathological liars. EVERYONE lies, in EVERYTHING they say. To a completely absurd degree.
You step into a building, soaking wet, and this guy comes up to you and says:"Nice weather we're havin' eh?" Now I can see the comedy value in that, I mean, I know plenty of humorless bastards in real life, who'd say a thing like that, but it takes on preposterous forms.
You go there to find one of your allies who has only recently changed into a pink monster and flown away through the sky, leaving destruction in her wake. I wish I was making this up, but I'm not. But I want you to imagine what goes on inside the heads of the inhabitants of Zozo, during a conversation like this, I mean, being a pathological liar is cool and all, but you have to have some credility right? I mean, you have to know where to draw the line, no? Okay here goes:
Me: "Excuse me, Sir, can I ask you a question?"
Guy: "No?"
Me: "Um, did you see a girl come through here? I think you'd recognize her, cos, you know, she's all pink and furry...?"
Guy: "Girl? Girl? I ain't seen no girl, mister.
And she definitely ain't on the top floor of this building."
*sigh*
I mean....
*sigh*
And then there's the puzzle with the clock you have to solve.
You have to find out exactly what time it is, by listening to the people of Zozo's lies. Now you can take as long as you need, which kinda implies Time doesn't move in Zozo, which is bizarre, because you even need to guess the amount of seconds.
But there's this one guy standing in what used to be a shop, and there's a clock on the wall and they guy says "That clock doesn't have a minute hand. And it's not pointing at the right time either"
I mean, I can understand him lying about the second part, but geez, "There's no minute hand"!?
"Then what the Hell is that long black thing, you know, THE ONLY DIAL on the clock there!?" "That's....um....ah....a snail! Yes, that's right."
I'm surprised these guys have been liars for all their lives, when they lie as sucky as that.
Okay, I guess I'm ranting about nothing and it isn't funny, but that sure as hell didn't prevent Seinfeld from becoming popular.
Um....
More E3 tomorrow!.....?
Final Fantasy VI
Oh yes. Now we're
really getting somewhere!
No more amateur dabblings in the great Arts. This is the STUFF.
Final Fantasy 6, also known as Final Fantasy 3 (don't get me started) was the last FF to be released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and it was critically acclaimed BY EVERYONE for being totally KICK-ASS.
Unless your name is Laura and you work for Power Unlimited and are a stupid Whore.
So I'm only a couple of hours into the game yet, I've just reached the Returners Hideout and I am about to venture on a wild raft ride whilst protecting Banon, the Big Cahooney of said rebel movement. He dies means YOU die. Nice.
So this means I'm only an inch away of my first encounter with Ultros! Yay!
Squid rule! I have to say though, I used to enjoy his presence in this game back in the day, but nowadays, having read some manga and seen some anime, I'm kinda freaked out by the fact that he gets along well with girls...
Since I'm pretty sure I won't have a lot of bad stuff to say about this game, I'm going to be putting a grain of salt on every snail I see. Is that even a common expression in English? Whatever.
I know what I mean.
Which brings me to this: Why the Hell is there an Inn in the Returners Hide-out!?
I mean, here you have a Secret group of Secretly recruited people, secretly trying to overthrow the Empire from their Secret Hideout,
and they have an Inn."Hello, welcome to our Ultra-secret Hiding Place, how can I help you?"
Okay, I have to admit that I don't really remember if there was an actual sign on the wall that said "Inn", like most Inns do, but the fact remains that there's a room specifically created for
a party of four people to have a rest in.
Granted, you are not charged any money, but THERE'S A GUY BEHIND A COUNTER!
In a Fucking secret Hideout for Rebels
in the middle of the mountains!I mean, does he stay there, while you're asleep!? That's pretty freaky!
Do they often get guests? And do they always travel in groups of exactly four?
Even if they do, WHY IS THERE A GUY BEHIND A COUNTER!?
I mean, Geez, why is there a COUNTER in the first place!?
"Thank you for joining our organisation, here's your bedroom, don't mind the clerk over there, that's just ole Jimmy, he likes to watch people sleep."
And I swear, his sole job is to tell you where the beds are. You go up to him, he asks if you wanna take a rest, you say "In an Inn?
You Think?", and then he doesn't charge you anything, he just says "Okay, the beds are over there. G'night!"
Well, shit, thanks Jimmy! I couldn't have found those big rectangular bits of wood with matrasses and sheets and pillows by myself!
*sigh* I can't wait until I reach the brilliance of Narrative Logic that is Final Fantasy 8.
Kiss of Death
Haha! Finally Finished Final Fantasy Five!
Man, that game was HUGE, I had no idea. I knew 6 was big, but 4 was pretty short, relatively speaking. I wasn't expecting a 30+ hour adventure for this one.
If only it
had been shorter, cos I was getting pretty sick of it near the end. Very much like FF4, this game
really gets on your nerves after awhile.
A shame really, cos the system is pretty good. Job systems rule, as I've pointed out before and they're a great added incentive to keep fighting.
The story isn't too interesting, the badguy is totally boring, but the fact that you have three worlds (or perhaps 2.5) to explore keeps it interesting and entertaining.
Things is though, at the time Square seemed to have this policy:
"Don't make your games too enjoyable, otherwise you can't improve on them"
And the latter half of the game is thus filled with frustration at overpowered bosses and really cheap standard enemies. For awhile I thought I was just a couple of levels short or something, and perhaps I needed to level up, but soon I noticed that it wasn't annoying because I suffered too much damage, or didn't deal enough myself (You can easily kill most enemies with one or two of your party-members), it's just that they all have really cheap moves, like instant kills, life shaving, extremely high critical hit rate, 100% counters.
Soon battles just stop being FUN. And with that, the game pretty much stops being fun. Hell, in the final dungeon, you don't even get ANY experience points!
I mean, what the Hell is that!? You're supposed to fight this big ass, bad ass, scary-ass, and in fact general ass Final Boss, who's insanely strong of course, and you can't even walk around to level up first! All you'll get is Ability Points!
I mean....that sucks!
And then there's the encount rate which is pretty much all over the place, going from One-battle-per-step to "Hello, anybody there?". Seems to be dungeon-specific though.
I tell ya, at one point I got SO angry I pressed the eject button of my PS2 (playing the PSX remake), waited REALLY FAR TOO LONG for the game to come out, picked it up and actually
flung it across the room! I mean, I ain't never done no such thing in my life, officer! Not with CD games at least.
That's
almost as scary as calmly taking your Super Street Fighter II cartridge out of your Super Nintendo, tranquilly going downstairs into the backyard, peacefully getting the Giant Sledgehammer from the tool-shed and start SMASHING away at it like some crazy sonofabitch. Almost though.
So I reached the Final Boss, Ex-Death, and, typically, he has two phases.
The first one is him in his Giant Tree incarnation. Sounds stupid? That's because it
IS. But he's not even too hard, you can kill him off without too much trouble. He does have this one really cheap move that petrifies and kills you instantly, and dying doesn't absolve your status ailments, so you have to cure AND heal that character, but he won't use that too much.
No, the fun starts AFTER that, when he morphs into this Giant Monster Thingy called Neo-ExDeath, which seems to be standard operating procedure for Video game Bad guys. Man, I wish I could do that. Someone kicks my ass, I turn into this Enormous Phallic Demon and show them what REAL Hit Points are. Hur Hur.
Anyhoo, he consists of four attackable parts, each with 50000 HP and they can all pretty much kill your entire party with whatever they do.
So I was just about to put down the controller and get my crowbar, I mean, playing until the final boss is theoretically playing the entire game right? I can do that!
But then, I read about this great glitch on gamefaqs! If it is, in fact, a glitch.
I half suspect Square put this in on purpose as some obscure way of nailing the final boss, since it doesn't seem like they fixed it for the remake.
You see, what you do is, you make sure one of your characters becomes a Chemist, learns the "Mix" command ability, then combine a "Maiden's Kiss" (which cures frog status) with "Holy Water" (which cures Zombie status) to create "Kiss of Blessing" (which casts Berserk, Haste and a whole lot of other stuff) use it ON EX-DEATH and he won't be able to morph when you kill him! Ridiculously easy! I was laughing all through the Ending Sequence (25 minutes!)
So at least I finished the game properly now :)
To sum it up, this game has its fair share of faults. They STILL haven't fixed the equipment system, you STILL don't get magic descriptions, it's STILL so annoying that you want to tear off your nails and pour acid on your fingers, but it DOES have a great ability system, huge game with multiple worlds etc. As an RPG, it's definitely not bad. WAY better than FF4, which is kinda like saying winning 10 bucks in a lottery is better than getting ass-raped by a Huge Black Dude. Kinda.
Still, this gets an 8.0 for being good enough, but with too much frustration towards the end.
Fortunately for me, this is were things will start going uphill. Nothing but extremely good FF's from here on out so I think I'm good for a couple of months.
Let the games begin!
Quote of the Week:
"Don't eat with your mouth full!"
#7: Baten Kaitos
Man, that sounds like the scientific name for some really funky disease!
"I think you'd better sit down, mr. Azz, I have some bad news for you. We have checked the scans and you're suffering from a severe case of Baten Kaitos..."
"Oh god no! Say it isn't so! What shall I ever tell my wife and 56 children?"
"Get out of my office, you freak!"
And having played the game, I
still don't know what the hell a Baten Kaitos is! Granted, that may have been because I forgot. It's possible that it plays a very significant role in the game, I just can't remember.
"How the Hell can you forget something like that, you retard?", I hear you shout.
First of all,
your mom.Second of all,
because the rest of the game is so fucking good it'll make you forget anything else.Damn, yo, this has to be one of the best next-gen RPG's around. I even daresay I haven't played anything this fine since Final Fantasy X. It's great to finally see an exclusive RPG for a Nintendo Console again, that doesn't totally suck, and what's even better, I read they're bringing it to DS too. That rules out every chance of me buying a PSP right there.
What's so great about it then?
Everything I tellz ya! Pretty scary, considering this was made by the same people who did the abysmally boring Xenosaga games.
Graphics: Top-notch. Beautifully animated, lusciously colored pre-rendered backgrounds, superb magic and special effects, totally gobsmacking.
Music: Kick-ass. Motoi Sakuraba is back to deliver his progressive rock goodness, mixed with the obligatory majestic sweeping orchestrations and bombastic event music.
Extremely varied but consistently high quality.
Gameplay: Superb. The whole game works with a Card system. Not only do you use cards for attacks during battle scenes (cards represent active attacks though, no Yugi-oh monster card crap here), Cards are also actively used for puzzles solving and event progressing. There's over 1000 cards in the game, containing weapons, armor, special attacks and items amongst others. Combining them in the correct order can open the path to new attacks and rare items, with about 150 possible combo's in total.
You also get a number of Event Cards which can be filled up with event items of your choice. Some are used for puzzles, others for sub-quests to earn cool stuff.
This game is PACKED to the brim with side-quests and it has an impressive main story to boot. It comes on 2 GC CD's which are known for not holding as much data as the competition, but the game still weighs in at a hefty 50+ hours with very little backtracking. You're pretty much moving to new territory all the time until the very end. Monolith has shown that with effort, you can still do a lot with a relatively small amount of data.
If there's one gripe I have, and I ALWAYS do, it's that the experience system was messed up needlessly. I mean, you get experience at the end of every battle, old-school styly, you know, like it's SUPPOSED to be, and yet they chose NOT to give you any clue on how many points you need before you can level up, and what's even worse, even if you have enough points YOU WON'T LEVEL UP AUTOMATICALLY!
"What?"
Exactly!
You see, there's this flower type thingy in the game which functions as a save point.
Now there's 2 kinds: The red ones and the blue ones.
The red ones only save, the blue ones save, heal and allow access to The Chapel.
Inside the Chapel there's this priest (bet you didn't see that coming) who has to do the levelling up FOR YOU, provided you have enough points. Typically, the blue flowers are ONLY found in cities, and NEVER in dungeons. There's a red flower in the room before the boss, as are the rules, but never a blue one. Which basically means levelling up before a boss becomes totally useless. Unless you like to walk around not knowing how many points you need, and then haphazardly
leaving the dungeon to go and see if maybe you earn another level.
Such a shame, cos if they hadn't done this, this game would have been
Perfect. As it is, it's just really fucking good.
So I give it a 9.3
More like this please!
Hohoho.
Whilst playing Final Fantasy 5 I came across a very peculiarly named Castle.
You can find it hereHover your mouse over the picture and it should give you a caption with the name.
You have to be able to read Japanese though, and even then you probably won't get it, but there's a select number of readers here that will probably smile at least a little.
Banjo Tooie
This has to be the worst-named sequel EVER.
Rare, being the British ass-holes that they are, never shun the atrocious pun or two and they even went so far as to put it on the box as their title.
Fortunately, I played the Japanese version, which is called "Banjo and Kazooie's Great Adventure 2" which is a little less imaginative, but doesn't make you want to claw your own brain out.
Thank God the Japanese don't know what a pun is. They probably think you can eat it.
Good. So this is Backlog #6 coming in very soon after number 5, cos they're so similar. Well actually not
that similar.
For, you see, this game is in fact really really GOOD.
Everything that was so incredibly annoying about Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 is NOT in here! No frustrating mini-games, and a very user-friendly system.
You don't have lives, so when you die, you're just sent back to the beginning of the level or area and you don't loose
anything, which is very very GOOD.
Camera still sucks though, but hey, we're in 2005 now, and consoles can pull of some really amazing stuff but we're
still getting crappy camera systems on a regular basis.
I suppose some things'll never change.
If there's anything negative I can say about Banjo Tooie, and of course there is, it's that it's just more of the same. You've played games like this before (and after) and if you're sick of the whole 'collect this-and-that' scheme, then you're going to want to skip on this one. If you're looking for a very fine platformer though, then there's definitely merit to playing this.
The game is absolutely friggin' HUGE, it's amazing this all fits on one humble N64 cartridge. Levels are insanely big which is the other complaint I have; they're just TOO big for their own good sometimes. It's easy to lose track of what you were doing or where you were going because of the sheer size of everything. There are warps in the levels though, which help a lot, but navigating through gigantic worlds can start to get tiresome at some point. And there's so much to do that hardly anything you do actually means anything.
Like the prequel, you have to find 100 notes and 10 Jigsaw-pieces per level, and there's lots of side quests and secrets to find this time too, so it often happens that you pull of this amazing feat and you'll be like "Yeah, gimme that Jiggy, baby!" or something less scary, and instead you'll get something really lousy, or you'll find out you've just performed one small bit of a long chain of events that you need to go through to get one of those shitty little puzzle bits.
Still, there's been lots of games like this on the new generation consoles and very few of them reach the standards set by this game, so it can still hold its own in this day and age and even the graphics still look impressive.
I recommend this to anyone who like platformers: 9.0
Quote of the Week:
In a rare moment, Dennis said what was probably one of the funniest things I've ever heard him say, while getting his ass royally kicked during Street Fighter:
"Hah, I'm blocking all your moves!
With my face."
Backlog #5: Banjo Kazooie
Back in the day when Rare still made videogames (how long have they been working on Perfect Dark Zero now?) they made this whole slew of very similar platform games, starting with the Donkey Kong Country series on SNES and continuing with Banjo Kazooie on N64.
In fact, it's safe to say the Rare was pretty much the only company, next to Nintendo itself, that made decent games for the N64 and still makes it worth owning the damn machine in the first place.
So what can be expected from a game like this then? Well, everything they've already done before and after. That is, running and jumping through big levels, collecting lots of stuff and defeating lots of baddies that look like regular household objects with very big eyes.
Once again, a trend that is started by Mario is taken up by another company and being drained of every singly drop of juice it has left.
But I'm going to have to be honest here, if there's one company that can pull it off and make a game that is close to, if not equal to or better than the original Mario games, it's Rare. Or at least, it used to be.
Take Banjo Kazooie for instance. Huge Levels. Very pretty graphics, lots of stuff to do. Juxtapose that to Mario 64 which had Average sized levels, decent graphics, kinda eventless stages and it gets boring long before the 15th and final stage.
I've been accused of blasphemy before, but I really didn't think Mario 64 was all that great.
As a huge fan of the old games, especially Mario Bros 3 and Mario World, I thought Mario 64 lacked the fun and variety of the old 2D games, and, despite what almost every review on the internet says, it doesn't retain the original gameplay AT ALL.
So in that respect, I feel very much enclined to say that Rare's Banjo games are better than Mario 64, even if you consider the fact that Mario was pretty much the blueprint for these games. It's common for the Japanese to steal an idea and improve on it. Sometimes it can happen the other way round.
That's not to say that Banjo Kazooie is so fantastically good. No. This
is Rare we are talking about and they have the tendency to make their games INCREDIBLY frustrating. Cast your mind back, if you will, to my Donkey Kong 64 review, and you'll know what I mean.
Fortunately there are no highly annoying sub-games this time. No, instead the frustration is incorporated into the main game itself!
Oh Joy.
Actually, it's not that bad for the majority of levels, but once you reach Rusty Harbor you'll be pulling EVERYTHING that can be pulled out of your body.
Well, at least that earned me a very cheap circumcision. Ouch.
The biggest problem though is this: You have to collect music notes.
Every game has its collectibles, be it coins, rings, crystals or Golden Frog Statues, and this game has music notes. Typically you need these notes to open up doors to other levels, and of course at the end there's this big secret door where you have to collect practically every note in the game, and that's good and all, but there's 100 notes in each level. That's hard enough already, but to make things worse, when you die, YOU LOOSE ALL OF THEM!
That's right, every note you collected in that level (fortunately not in the entire game) will be lost, and you have to get them ALL back again until you manage to get out alive. This is really really REALLY terribly incredibly frustrating.
The game would have been so much better if they'd done this right.
Thanks Rare!
So because of that I'm giving this game the same score as that other frustrating Rare game: an 8.0
Tadaima!
Hi! I'm back, and I've brought you all presents!
You can get them at the local supermarket, but you'll have to pay for it.
You can pick anything you like though, how sweet is that!?
I'm too tired now (read: lazy) to make a decent update, just thought I'd relieve you all from your misery. Get a Life! You can expect a (not so) BIG Update soon!
Well, my short trip to nowhereland wasn't COMPLETELY without games.
My cousin's boyfriend/knocker-up brought his GBA and XBox so that the rest of the family actually had something to do for a change, it's very unfortunate that he knows next to nothing about games, and he spends his time playing Western Crap made by really stupid obscure companies. But then, that is pretty much the whole library of the XBox summed up right there, so that was to be expected.
He DID have Ninja Gaiden though, which was cool. I played until the forth level and then I had to stop, and I had to be dragged away kicking and screaming. Man, that game is really cool. I'm not going to get an XBox just for that though.
On the Project front, I've just finished the Big Bridge Battle in Final Fantasy V, which was surprisinlgy easy. In fact, the whole game so far has been considerably easier than I remembered. Maybe it's because I just finished FF IV, I dunno.
Great game this.
Now if you'll excuse me, spending 5 days with the family cooped up in a small shack has got me urging to download some Porn (take that as you will) so I'm off.
Ingen out!
Quicky
Okay a couple of things:
1. I'm going away on a small trip until the end of this week, so no updates until at least Sunday. But don't worry, I won't be playing any games either.
2. I'm already enjoying FF5 WAY more than I ever enjoyed FF4. In that I actually WANT to keep on playing. Job systems rule!
3. Sin City also rules. Go watch it NOW.
Final Fantasy V
Well, now that I've Finally Finished Final Fucking Fantasy Four it's time For Final Fantasy Five. Fabulous! Fantastic!
I expect this to only get better as I progress, since FF4 is pretty much the only FF that sucked as far as I can remember. I think FF5 gets pretty hard at times too, but at least it's more fun.
Ahem, in FF 5 you play the Nameless Hero (at least he was nameless in the game, although searches on the Internet indicate that he's called Butz. Yes, Butz. Nice one, Squaresoft! Fortunately it's his First name, so no Seymour jokes, please), whom I have appropriately dubbed INGEN!, although I was going for 'Azz'.
I'm only very early into the game, so I don't know what the story is about, other than the fact that the Wind seems to have disappeared, which I guess means no more movies with Eddy Murphy. What is causing slightly more trouble are the huge bits of rock falling from the sky and crashing here and there and generally making a mess of things, which you get to see in glorious Mode 7 sequences (God, how I LOVE Mode 7! I swear, I don't care how beautiful 3D has gotten these days, Mode 7 still RULES!).
So it is YOUR job to help set things right, undoubtedly involving Crystals in some way, and defeat the Evil Bastard, whom we will probably not get to meet until the last few minutes of the game, with the help of your buddies Lena the wimpy princess who's doomed from the beginning to become a Magic User, Galuf the Obligatory Old Git, and Faris, the cross-dressing Pirate. I'm sure other people will join up in the course of the game, but I'm having enough trouble handling the whole Sexually Frustrated Pirate thing already.
Speaking of Jobs (desparately grasping for a bridge here), this is the first FF to incorporate an Ability Point system, in the shape of Jobs. Any character can become any Job and learn all kinds of cool stuff. Job systems rule, so I'm liking this much more than FF4's level based ability system.
Magic and Summons, however, have to be
bought from stores before you can use them, fortunately you only have to buy them once to be able to use them for everyone for the rest of the game, but it's still weird. Original thought though.
I like this game so far.
On a side note, I'm probably going to have to skip playing Golden Sun, since I'm not currently in possession of the game anymore. There's a couple of games I've lent to a friend, and I think he ate most of them. So this is Force Majeure and I have to go on to Grandia II, which means I might just as well go on with the FF series without interruption. Let's see what happens shall we?
Setting things straight.
Okay, I have to be honest here, I may have been overreacting in my angered response to FF4 just a
little. See, thing is, what was annoying me most were the battles, which just seemed unfairly hard, but I found out there is a mitigating factor. The game, like most FF's I think, offers a configurable Battle Speed Option, and I, being the impatient freak that I am, set it to the fastest speed.
Now this shouldn't be a problem, cos it never has been, it merely means the pace of the battles is upped, and they won't take as long as is the standard.
That's how it works in all the OTHER FF's at least. Not here though.
No, here it means the enemies are 5 times as fast, and you are NOT.
There were basically 3 kinds of situations:
- Back Attack: You are attacked from behind and will get hit by every enemy before you can do anything.
- Surprise Attack: You are attacked from the front and will get hit by every enemy before you can do anything.
- Preemptive Attack: You surprise the enemy and your fastest character can hit once, and the rest have to wait until they are hit by every enemy before they can do anything.
Technically speaking there are also plain battles, but I hardly got those for some reason. They just mean that 3 out of 4 enemies can attack before your fastest character can move. Nice.
So you can understand how INCREDIBLY frustrating this was, so just for the Heck of it, I decided to put the speed back to standard, and suddenly I could actually
do something before I was killed.
It seems Square didn't do a very good job of implementing a good battle speed system.
Inexplicably I also got a lot less Back Attacks, Surprise Attacks and Preemptive attacks after that. So I don't know what this means.
Fact remains, you are at all times insanely overpowered by the enemy, new equipment has no noticeable effect and levelling up hardly helps.
In fact, I've read that once you hit a certain level, around 70 or something, your status actually starts GOING DOWN. I swear, this is so insane, I can't make this stuff up!
The game just feels like it should have been better, gameplay-wise. One one hand, you see, you have an RPG of a decent size, with a great soundtrack, and above all a great storyboard.
There's so many things happening at every turn, it's really overwhelming, in a good sense of course. The story is rich and rewarding and there really never is a dull moment.
Dungeons are a slightly different affair. They're all pretty much the same, walk from A to B kind of affair, loaded with treasure though, that's nice. No puzzles, no gimmicks, nothing, just pathways. Not too maze-like, just dull and pointless.
But at least there's always some kind of cool event waiting at the end.
Sadly, RPG's are not simply about good stories and a sweeping musical score only. You need to have the gameplay to back it up. Now, there's lots of people who think story and such are more important, but I'm playing a fucking
game here. I want to have
FUN, and fun is something I'm not having here, with too many frustrating elements.
Not only battles but also the shop and equipment system totally suck. Shops only show who can equip what, nothing more. You can't see how many pieces of a certain item you are carrying or already have equipped which is annoying enough, since you might be buying something you already have on. So first you have to look at all your equipment and memorize it. This would also be easier if you could go into the equipment screen and scroll from one character to the next using the L and R button as is customary in, well, EVERY game on earth, except this one. So you have to go into and out of the equipment screen for EVERY character. Nice.
THEN, even if you're not carrying said item already, you have NO clue whatsoever if it will improve your status or not, until you actually equip it. So if you don't want to waste any money, you'd have to save your game, buy what you want, try it on, then load your game to buy what you actually need. Super.
Furthermore there are no helpful descriptions for magic and skills, you don't know what ANYTHING does until you use it, and even then the effect might not be immediately clear. It's like the creators assumed you are familiar enough with the series that you don't need any explanation. Stupid.
Anyhow, it's finished now, the final Battle with Zeromus was actually comparatively easy, I've had harder fights with sub-bosses, so I can give the final score, which is....a 7.3!
Blame this entirely on the shoddy battles and lousy equipment system, if they had done this better the game would've scored considerably higher, since it has enough pace, secrets, sub-quests etc. to keep it interesting from beginning to end, it's just that the totally annoying game mechanics make it too bothersome.
Too overrated in general.
Onto the next!
The Good and The Bad
God, how I hate Final Fantasy 4.
There, I've said it.
Yes, I HATE one of the most popular and critically acclaimed SNES games of all time.
To such an extent that I really do not understand how all those people failed to notice the many hair-pulling factors this game entails.
I mean, is it just the fact that the box says Squaresoft?
Well, I won't go into too many details, since I'm not finished yet, so I won't give a review, but suffice it to say that I'm not happy.
At all.
Also, I added a Link to my entire list of games again, only this time in real alphabetical order, so none of that IGN BS. I also put the scores behind the title of each game, so you know which games are good and which ones should be avoided like the plague.
I wanted to do some kind of "Look Back at What You've Done" feature (yes, the name needs some work) after every 25 games or so, that's why the games are numbered for every 25th game.
For those who are interested, the best game of the first 25 was BioHazard 2, for the second batch it was Chrono Trigger.
I may do some more elaborate award shows in the future.
Then again, maybe not.
