Month: March 2010

FroggerTwilightPlay

As I noted last week – between the lines – my gaming mojo’s been a-wandering post-Fringe. Initially, I thought this was the usual post-Fringe malaise but, as this week drew on and I still had no yearning for any gaming at all (save my brain-waking sudoku, which surprisingly works wonders for my concentration at work), I began to think something else was wrong. Maybe it was the French Film Festival, patchy in quality and attendance, or maybe it was the running around associated with fitting my new abode out prior to my arrival. Or maybe it’s a distraction of the feminine persuasion, buried deep within my mind and ever-so-delightfully niggling me, keeping my usual thought processes slightly off-kilter.

Whatever.

An unofficial target I set myself is to knock at least one game off The List every calendar month – hey, if I can at least manage that, I’m making some progress, right?

Oh wait – I typically buy more than a dozen games a year. Christ, I’ve bought three this year, and the glut is yet to come.

Bugger.

…but yes, finish one game a month. And that tends to make February and March a little stressful, given that they both get impacted rather heavily by the Fringe. February got off easy this year, with Portal falling early in the month, but March was always going to be a bit problematic.

I’ve got a couple of nearly-completed games that I always figured I could use In Case Of Emergency – there’s a dialogue-tree run-through of Super Paper Mario which couldn’t be more than a day’s work, maybe another weekend recipe collecting for Paper Mario. Super Galdelic Hour is a bit nebulous on its completion requirements – I’ve got a feeling the mysterious sketch that gets displayed at the end of a season will become ever more detailed, but I’ve no idea what may trigger that event. And Electroplankton… well, how hard can it be to explore those little sub-games?

And so I was moping around on Friday, resigned to the fact that I was going to have to pick up one of these games again, essentially playing a trump-card. But the very idea scared me; panicking, I started thinking of other long-shots: snaffling another 25 ranked wins on Brütal Legend? Not likely. A bit of quick whoring and a couple of wins of Texas Hold’em? Ugh – my poker ability is up there with my FPS skills. And then it hit me: Frogger.

A quick perusal of the usual haunts, and I found an amazing co-op “partner” (well, I say partner, but let’s face it – he did all the work) in BUGAJ75 RETURNS, whose ruthless efficiency and friendliness was exemplary… so much so that I actually registered with x360a just to leave him positive feedback (amonst other sites). And so, after about twenty minutes… Frogger was off The List. After nearly four years.

(Four years, eh? Oh yes – this past week also marked the fourth anniversary of my original launch Xbox 360, bless it’s rowdy fans.)

So the unofficial milestone had been reached – but the mojo was still AWOL. And I started mulling on some of the other “unofficial” benchmarks I’d set myself – like trying to knock off as many Wii games prior to acquiring a monstrous HD TV. So I looked at my List again, and thought “fuck it – Wii Play must succumb.”

Now, my Wii Play requirements are pretty lax: Gold Medals in every mini-game (yes, I know there’s Platinum Medals in there too, but if you think I’m playing through one hundred levels of Tanks, then you’re sorely mistaken). So far, I’m missing three: Find Mii (an annoying dirtbag of a game), Pose Mii (an insolent shit of a game), and Tanks (which I’m not very good at). A bit of practise absolutely failed to get me anywhere near my previous high-scores, but I shall persevere – and it shall fall.

Finally, though, I started a 100% run through Twilight Princess. I must admit to having dreaded the prospect – my memory of the early parts of the game (fuelled by my own blog post) was one of wading through stupefyingly twee boring bits before getting to the Zelda dungeon goodness. So it was with some trepidation that I started the game and selected a new save-file.

I don’t know what the hell I was talking about, really – it felt like less than an hour passed before I was rid of all the cat-feeding, goat-herding, annoying-child dullness and wodged deep into the game proper. And bloody hell, it’s good, isn’t it? Having a read around this evening, I was actually amazed that the Wikipedia entry for Twilight Princess states that it’s often considered the Best Zelda Ever; I wonder whether I’ll be espousing the same opinion by the end of the game (especially on the tail end of having had no less than seven 100% Zelda playthroughs last year).

Je Retourne (2010 Edition)

Hello again!

So: the Fringe this year was good – blindingly good, in fact – and, coupled with an appropriate Festival, ensured that I got zero gaming done (apart from the odd brain-awakening game of Sudoku on the iPhone) for over four weeks. And, unlike last year, I didn’t miss gaming at all – mainly because I was too busy either filling my mind with arty stuff (120 shows all up), or my gullet with alcohol (equal parts Asahi and house reds), or talking to many culturally far-flung people, or all of the above. It was easily one of the greatest months of my life…

…which could explain why, when I returned to my Other Hobby after a month, I was so utterly disappointed by what I found before me.

I’d received my NTSC copy of No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle from Play-Asia mere days into my self-imposed gaming exile and, while tempted, I managed to leave it in the shrink-wrap until last Tuesday. Somewhat rested and dragging my sleep patterns back into off-season normalcy, I fired up the Wii and began Travis Touchdown’s second outing.

And, from the opening sequence, there’s something that rubs me the wrong way about NMH2. Maybe it’s the more detailed textures on the character models that ruin the semi-cel-shading; maybe it’s the immersion-breakers. Hey, the original game revelled in the knowledge that it was a game, but the sequel flaunts it like a drunken D-cup bridesmaid on a hen’s night, with fourth-wall-breaking references a-plenty in the opening hours.

Whilst I can understand the majority of complaints about the clunky overworld in the original game, its absence in the sequel makes the whole experience feel empty and disconnected. There used to be a real sense of purpose – no matter how monotonous – about having to ride to the High School to take on Shinobu, or to the baseball stadium to meet Bad Girl; now, their counterparts are just a menu item, something trivial on a list to cross off once beaten. There’s also no character to any of the new bosses; they’re essentially anonymous until you get the garish “DEAD” message and discover their name for the first time.

In fact, there’s so much that appears to be changed for no reason – the aforementioned texture tweaks (resulting in a muddy look), the lower camera angles, and the slightly faster – but seemingly less fluid – combat are all steps backwards, in my book. Even the ability to play as both Henry and Shinobu is handled clumsily, with the latter introducing a precision jumping mechanic to a game that really shouldn’t have one. The real-time weapon change is nice, though (but I thought you needed the power of the Playstation 3 for that? ;)

And then there’s the gamebreakers – getting stuck in endless knockdown loops. Changing katanas leaves you immobile and invincible for longer-than-a-moment – but not when that instakill satellite beam is being used. The penultimate boss battle seems to have not been playtested at all, and is plagued by incredibly crap timing; once you’re knocked down, it’s only by the grace of god that you can actually get up again before your health is depleted. And in a late bit of dialogue, the subtitles used “your” instead of “you’re”. Really? Quality control is that lax?

Eventually, after 11 hours (which included a fair bit of whoring, foolishly expecting extra weapons to appear in the lab run by the now-completely-ridiculous Naomi), I finally beat the lacklustre final boss. And, just like much of the action preceding it, the ending is disappointingly perfunctory; there’s no surprise denouement, no sting in the tail, nothing clever.

Now, I accept that I may not have been in the best mental state to play this game; I always suffer a bit of a depression when the constant mind-stretching delight of the Fringe wraps every year, felt more acutely this year on account of the personal connections I made over the period that I’m desperate to not lose. And it’s through this haze of malaise that I viewed NMH2.

Remember that I love the original game; it was my Game of the Year in 2008. And I recognise that I only began to truly love it on about the third playthrough.

And at all times – even on the first playthrough – I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed belting through NMH2.

Where the original was original and witty, astute and brash, and with solid gameplay to match, the sequel seems to rely on the tone alone, rather than the mechanics. In making the NMH2 a more mainstream production – decision described by most reviewers as “fixing all the bad bits of the original” – Grasshopper have callously ignored all the things that made the original great, making change after pointless change, leaving behind an almost completely soulless experience.

Yes, I’ll give it another couple of playthroughs – my OCD demands that much – but I can’t see NMH2 growing on me the same way the original did. Here’s hoping it does… but it has a very, very deep dark pit to climb out of first.