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The Longest Journey is a long game. In terms of content, it's actually not that long. What lengthens the game, possibly by putting it on the rack, is the really slow movement of characters. The main character, April Ryan, can go at about a trot when told to run, but doesn't bother in the in-game cutscenes, joining every other character in the game. They slowly stroll towards their objective, go through some motions to indicate something or other, then stroll back for more dialogue. This is especially annoying in certain parts. A major offender is when April has to read several books from a library of some sort, which leads to a sequence like this: - April positions herself just so, before talking to the librarian. - The librarian slowly walks over to the shelves in question. - He looks around for a while, reaches up, and takes a book. - He slowly walks towards a podium of some sort, and puts the book there. - He slowly walks back to April's position. - Then April can move to the podium, where she slowly bends over to read the book. - After she's finished reading, she slowly stands back up, and walks a short distance away. - The librarian slowly walks to the podium, and picks up the book. - He then slowly walks to another shelf and replaces the book, before walking back to his original position. Repeat for every book required, which is about six or seven of them. I have not discovered any key on the keyboard able to skip any of this. You understand my frustration. Some of the puzzles are very obscure, and I had to check a FAQ to get past them. In fact, some of them are obscure even after checking the FAQ, since we are never told in the game that this item has such-and-such property, or that April will, yanno, not die from doing something or other. It is possible to play the game without a USB controller or some such. It's just really, really fiddly with getting April to run instead of strolling. Characterization and dialogue, apart from the SLOW MOVEMENT (I'm never going to stop harping about that), is pretty good. April does some really boneheaded moves at times (made worse when the player has to do it in order to progress the plot), but at least it's believable if you assume that she's supposed to start as pretty shallow and get wiser as the plot progresses, and she does keep her " what were you THINKING" moments rare. Some of the banter is snappy. Some is forced. Your mileage may vary. The voice acting is pretty good, but not outstanding. It's professionally-done, if nothing else, so there won't be anything particularly jarring. Music is understated, ambient, and forgettable. Pity. Overall, I'd say that this would have been a great game if it had been cleaned up a bit more, particularly in the SLOW MOVEMENT. As it is, it loses replay value entirely because I really don't want to have to sit through all those cutscenes again. Tags: gaming, review
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Having read DC's Kingdom Come a second time, in an attempt to be more objective, I can safely say that I Don't Like It. The thing is, I can see how it got its reputation for being Great and Awesome and all that. I can perceive the pacing, and I can see what the writer is trying to do. The main problem is that I have no idea who all these people are, and why I should care about them. The DC heroes I really know about are Superman, Batman, and the Flash. That's it. Villain-wise, I'm passingly familiar with most of Batman's rogues' gallery, Lex Luthor, Darkseid, and maybe Brainiac. So when I flip through the pages of Kingdom Come, and I encounter the sort of comic pacing which makes me believe that the author is expecting me to be OMGSURPRISED at some revelation or other, all I can do is say "... what?" I mean, yeah, I can look them up on Wikipedia. But it still doesn't help me, since I don't know why I'm supposed to care so much that they're there, and why the writers expect the revelation of their identities to be such a shocker as to provide a full page illustration for it. It also suffers from the usual American comics problem of too many bold words for little to no reason, but that probably isn't fair to Kingdom Come specifically. I'm sure that to DC fans, this will be a very good book. But to me, it's just... obscure. Also, I know that the whole Biblical Revelation thing is a theme, but it gets repeated way too often. I got it after the first few times, thanks. Tags: review
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Essentially Katamari Damacy, but less Japanese, and with more Western pop culture references. For example, there's an orangutan in the Library stage, and the trophy referencing it mentions that "he gets mad if you call him a monkey". Also, the catchy J-pop is now slightly less catchy pop (in English), plus what sounds kind of like muzak. You also can't pick up everything like you can in Katamari Damacy, although this could be because I couldn't get big enough. Still, I liked the ability in Katamari Damacy to start with picking up little frogs and ending with picking up land masses, all in one stage. And humans in The Wonderful End Of The World are silent. It's amazing how much the screams in Katamari Damacy as you pick up people, and then those boxes containing people we call buildings, lend to the atmosphere. Overall I'd say that Katamari Damacy remains my collecting game of choice, but if you don't have a PS2 (or XBox 360, I suppose), then you could give this a try. Tags: gaming, review
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I've been busy playing the strangely-addictive Audiosurf. I bought it on Steam for US$9.99, and complaints about Steam aside (yes, Steam, I am living in the city of Singapore, in the state/province of Singapore, in the country of Singapore, because it's the same bloody thing), I think it's definitely worth it. Audiosurf is best described as a coloured-block-matching game done in the style of a racing game, with musical accompaniment. What happens is that you're this little futuristic spaceship-thing on a futuristic highway (very neon), three lanes, and in your path are different-coloured blocks. Touch a block to pick it up on a 3x7 grid, and if you match three blocks or more of the same colour, they disappear (of their own accord, after a short delay; you don't have to click anything for them to combo up). You control everything with the mouse, with the left and right clicks for special abilities. This would normally not interest me as much, except that the blocks and the highway are generated according to a music file. Your music file. That's right, now you can race F-Zero-style to "1812 Overture". There's a whole lot of accepted formats, including CD and MP3, which are all I cared about. Technically, iTunes music is supported, but iTunes DRM is not; in other words, to play a song from iTunes in Audiosurf, you have to burn it onto a CD first to un-DRM it. To make a hollow laughter. According to the website, Audiosurf is playable on older systems. Whether you believe them or not is up to you. There are lots of options and modes to play in. I concentrated most of my time with the Mono Casual, which is the easiest to play (not counting the "watch the scenery go past" Free Ride). In this mode, there are grey blocks, and non-grey blocks, which are all the same colour (but not grey), but that colour shifts now and again, presumably so you won't get bored. (You can turn this off.) All I need to do is to collect the non-grey blocks, and try to avoid the grey blocks. There's no serious penalty to accidentally hitting a grey block, but it remains in your grid for some time, taking up space. Also, there's a substantial bonus to avoiding all the grey blocks in a level, so I suppose the penalty is not getting that bonus. In other modes, I need to worry about colours. There's a tutorial for the game (narrated by one of the programmers, judging from the relatively amateur diction), so I'll let that explain everything. It's not a very difficult game to pick up. Before I go into my adventures in Audiosurfing, I should mention the drawbacks. First, you have to provide your own music. Audiosurf does come with some free tracks (not many), and if you buy it off Steam you get the whole Orange Box soundtrack, but other than that, you're on your own. Secondly, there's a volume control for sound effects (which you can also turn off), but there's no volume control for the music. Presumably you have to use the master volume control. Yeah, I don't know why either. ( The Sound of Surfing.Collapse )Would I recommend this game? Definitely, at this price. The main disadvantage I can see is that you have to provide your own music, which means that if your music collection isn't very big, then this won't be as fun. Tags: gaming, review
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So I finally managed to finish Half Life 2, years after everyone else did. I was planning to go through the HL2 series in as chronological an order as I could, for much the same reason that one usually reads a story from beginning to middle to end. (Achronological order a la Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya notwithstanding.) In other words, I have yet to play Episodes 1 or 2 of HL2 (which would make the actual game titled Half Life 2 "Episode 0", I presume), despite being sorely tempted to. Firstly, the good parts: the game is cinematic. Coming from the days of Marathon and System Shock, where the story is impressive but the presentation is very much that of a game, I used to think that Bioshock was scripted out like a movie, but now HL2 blows it out of the water (pun unintended). Every moment of dialogue and story in the game was a thing of joy and beauty, and all rendered flawlessly in the game engine. If all these scenes were somehow spliced together and packaged as a complete game in itself, I'd probably buy it too. I now understand why this game has been praised so much. Which kind of brings me to the bad parts, which is that to me, HL2 is, at base, a collection of breathtakingly awesome story scenes interspersed and barricaded by long stretches of incredibly annoying gameplay. My complaints about the gameplay are threefold: - Vehicles - Jumping - Lack of direction The first is pretty straightforward: yes, vehicles are in the game, in the form of a sort of stripped-down speedboat, as well as a dune buggy. This means that vast stretches of gameplay will be dedicated to having Gordon ride in one of these, and then throwing all sorts of obstacles at him for no reason other than to have obstacles. The whole exercise begins to turn into some sort of off-road racing game with random impenetrable force fields and derelict cars blocking the road, necessitating that Gordon stop, get out of the vehicle, slowly figure out a way to get past these obstacles, get back into the vehicle, and drive on. Expect to have to make gravity-defying ramp jumps every other obstacle. Which segues neatly to the next problem, which is a particularly annoying form of Do It Again Stupid: there are plenty of cliffs and effectively bottomless drops in the game. Make one misstep, and you die. Get knocked to the side by an unexpected impact or tackle, and you die. Misjudge the distance of a jump, and you die. Accidentally jostle yourself, and you die. There is a reason why I hate the cloud/sky levels of Super Mario games; I understand that, like vehicles, some people like this aspect of HL2. I, obviously, am not one of them. The last is probably something inherent to the HL2 "feel": several times, I had no idea on how to proceed through the game. Invariably, the answer gleaned through GameFAQs was to defeat all the enemies swarming at oneself in order to trigger some sort of sequence. This would probably not be as irritating if there weren't areas with infinitely-respawning enemies which needed some other method of progression, and there is often no discernable difference between the infinite and the non-infinite varieties, not even in the number or type of enemies. (See: Ravenholm.) Essentially, I am to look for a point of egress while under fire, and if none present themselves to me, I have to shoot people in the head, all while considering that sometimes the solution to the puzzle of infinite enemies is very well concealed. This also occurs in cases like, say, the last fight, where no indication on what one should do is given (or at least given audibly enough to be subtitled). Once again GameFAQs saves the day, because I was under the impression that considering Gordon Freeman caused all of this in the first Half Life by meddling in machines and energies mankind was not meant to ken, he'd probably not consider that a portal must be shut down via only one method, by firing highly unstable energy balls at the reactor core powering it. Since the whole place proceeds to explode due to exactly this action, I think I was justified in hesitating. It also strikes me as odd that Gordon Freeman is able to carry a dozen weapons and their ammunition around without trouble, but he cannot carry a map and compass. In short: HL2 is a Very Good Game. It is not the Best Game Ever, but it is, nevertheless, a Very Good Game. I'd recommend it to anyone with good FPS skills, because you'll definitely need those skills (or the Noclip cheat) to actually get through the story. Otherwise, be prepared for some very frustrating times. Tags: gaming, review
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So one of the things I've been poking at recently is a GBA game called Card Captor Sakura - Sakura Card Hen (which has the additional subtitle of Sakura to Card to Otomodachi, translating into "Sakura and Cards and Friends"). I will have to admit that I've been playing it as a ROM using an emulator, entirely because my entire (meagre) ROM collection consists of various Japanese-language games, and I'm using them to brush up on my Japanese. (If it's out in English, I may as well buy the game.) In any case, when I first tried out the game, I was struggling through it, and felt that the language was a bit tough. Fast forward almost a year, as well as playing through the second and third Gyakuten Saiban games (known in the US as Phoenix Wright, of which I have the first two) where every character spews kanji at the player rapid-fire. When I returned to Sakura Card Hen, I realized how easy it was to get the gist of the conversation now. Of course, there were other factors, ( listed under this cut with a quick review (spoilers for the last season of the anime).Collapse )One problem that does crop up in the game: the one who gives you instructions on how to play the game is Kero-chan. Kero-chan speaks in Kansai-ben. This tends to complicate matters. Tags: ccs, gaming, review
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There are still a few more shows that haven't aired yet ( Bartender et al), but I'm sure everyone's getting sick of my ramblings. (I'm getting a bit tired of quick-translating in my head too. I'm starting to think in anime cliches...) So I'll just leave it be for now, unless there's a new anime this season that someone really wants to hear my thoughts on. Today: Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru, Shijou Saikyo no Deshi Kenichi, Kujibiki Unbalance (yeah, I know I said I wasn't going to review it, but I heard that it's so different from the actual KujiAn in Genshiken that it's pretty much a new series on its own), and Gin-iro no Olynsis. (If you ever wonder, I'm listing the anime out here in order of what I watched, and the anime under the cut in alphabetical order. ( Namely, this cut.Collapse )And that's it for now. I haven't blogged about some other shows ( 009-1, Super Robot Taisen OG ~Divine Wars~, Jigoku Shoujo Futakomori, and a few others I missed) largely because I have nothing much to say about them, since they're not really my thing. I'll go post up the shows I'll be following a bit later. Tags: anime, review
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CODE GEASS - Lelouch of the Rebellion, Mamoru-kun ni Megami no Shukufuku wo, Asatte no Houkou, and Sumomomo Momomo. ( Once again:Collapse )I've also got Kujibiki Unbalance, but I think I need to get Genshiken to really appreciate it. EDIT: Also: Kyuuichi gets hospitalized. (Only funny if you're familiar with both Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi and at least the first episode of Kanon.) SAIMOE EDIT: OMG. Rin Tohsaka ( Fate/Stay Night) actually managed to beat Hazuki ( Tsukuyomi Moon Phase). Not only that, but with a sizeable margin (892 to 639). From all accounts, the invalid (duplicate) votes for Hazuki outnumbered her actual valid votes. Tags: anime, review
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This time, just Negima?! and Marginal Prince. ( Again, cut.Collapse )Yeah, this is likely to carry on for a while. UPDATE: And two more for today: Yoake Mae Yori Ruri Iro Na, and Busou Renkin. ( Cut!Collapse )On a final note, because it may be expected of me: Saimoe results for right now show that Mikuru Asahina ( Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi) handily crushed Alicia Florence ( ARIA), as expected. Also as expected, Shana ( Shakugan no Shana) emerged victorious over Ana Coppola ( Ichigo Mashimaro). Current matchup is between Haruhi Suzumiya and Yuki Nagato (both from MoSH), and Hayate Yagami ( Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha A's) and Aruru ( Utawarerumono). Clash of the titans, so on and so forth. Tags: anime, review, saimoe
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Grabbed two more raws of the new anime season: Death Note and Ghost Hunt. I'm not going to give my first impressions of Death Note, largely because it's fairly true to the manga, which is fairly well-known. Suffice to say that it's quite well-done, and the first episode should be good for DN fans. As for Ghost Hunt, I'll put the first impression ( under a cut.Collapse )A quick summary and scoring so far of the raws I've seen ( under this cut:Collapse )Currently grabbing: Red Garden, Pumpkin Scissors, D.Gray Man, Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi HengeCurrently awaiting: Happiness, Bartender, Code Geass, Kanon, Negima?!, Asatte no Houkou, Sumomomo MomomoUPDATE: Finished watching the first raw eps of Red Garden and D.Gray Man. This season appears to be filled with either harem (the old standby) or supernatural/horror stuff. As for Pumpkin Scissors and Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge, I'll get around to them tomorrow or something. Tags: anime, review
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bouncy