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Sonic’s Way Forward

RKasa
December 31, 2011
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Like many Sonic fans, I had a curious eye on this year’s Sonic Generations. When the reviews started to hit, many of them were positive, calling it the best Sonic in a long time. However, Tailsnake’s comment at Ars Technica stood out to me:

I’m not sure why the gaming media keeps acting like Sonic Colors didn’t exist. Sonic Generations is the Sonic Colors engine in HD on redesigned classic levels. Colors didn’t have the nostalgia factor, but it played just as well as Generations and didn’t have any annoying sidekicks either. Colors was the Sonic gameplay fans were waiting for, Generations is just Sega taking that engine HD (which is a great thing for fans, I just wanted to give Colors the credit it deserves).

At the time I was playing Sonic Colors—I still am, actually—and this comment resonated with me. Colors, not Generations, should hold the title for “best new console Sonic in years”. I haven’t bought Generations yet, but the Green Hill Zone-focused demo confirmed that the “modern Sonic” sections are indeed simply HD versions of the Colors formula.

Why was Sonic Colors—arguably the best 3D Sonic ever made at the time of its release—so sorely overlooked by Generations reviewers? I feel this is mainly due to Colors‘ status as Wii and DS exclusives, as opposed to Generations‘ more hardcore-friendly presence on 360 and PS3, to say nothing of the nostalgia factor hardwired into the latter game. As with many quality third-party Wii games, it’s a shame that Colors hasn’t been played by more enthusiast gamers, because it’s both a great platformer and a fantastic step forward for the long-troubled Sonic series.

The plot of Colors is simple, much like those of the Sonic games of old: Dr. Eggman has opened a theme park in outer space. Sonic and Tails, suspecting an ulterior motive, head to this park to investigate. The cutscenes and especially the dialogue are cheesy, but they’re also refreshingly wholesome, and with few additional characters to complicate things.

On a similar note, the only playable character is Sonic, though robotic Sonics and Miis can be used in an optional area. Sonic controls much like he always has, with breakneck speed and a strong sense of inertia. The major new feature this time around are the Wisps, diminutive aliens that can be collected for speed boosts or special abilities. Said abilities make up for the lack of other playable characters; for instance, the green Wisp allows Sonic to hover like Tails, and the pink one to climb walls, a la Knuckles. These powers can only be used for a limited time, though run into enough refills on the way, and the player can keep using them for as long as necessary.

In addition to the Wisps, the most striking thing about Colors are the environments. Standard platformer tropes are reimagined to fit the world—for instance, the requisite water level is a Japanese-themed aquarium—or ignored altogether. There are layer cake mountains, checkered lanes of light, and roller coasters that weave between asteroids. These levels are traversed from both front-facing and side-scrolling perspectives, shifting as necessary, and with none of the cameras-from-hell that mar certain other 3D Sonics. They also contain multiple paths, and with new kinds of Wisps unlockable in each area, many of them encourage repeat plays.

With the game’s outer space theme and some of its more eye-popping moments—not to mention the occasional shift in gravity and bounce between asteroids—Sonic Colors has been compared to Super Mario Galaxy, but they are alike only in superficial ways. Sonic is and has always been a very different character from Mario, and the levels in both characters’ platformers reflect that, including Colors. The thirty-plus Colors levels are built for speed and have plenty of springs, loops, and boosters, to say nothing of enemies placed in just the right spot to make you drop all your rings. Colors, then, does not come from the Super Mario Galaxy school of level design so much as that of classic Sonic; it is a well-done, modern take on a classic formula.

However, Sonic being Sonic, there are some frustrating bits. For some gimmicks, particularly the giant lollipops in Sweet Mountain and the special multi-jump sections, the timing is stopwatch-tight, and can require extreme precision to use successfully. The placement of at least one mid-level marker—from which Sonic can respawn, as long as there are lives available—is lousy in such a way that it’s preferable to simply start the entire level over again should the player die. It is difficult in spots where it doesn’t need to be, but in a way, this is just another affirmation that it’s a Sonic game.

Still, it’s a gorgeous game, with an outstanding and varied soundtrack and the type of zippy, interesting gameplay that one would want from a Sonic. Though I still have a ways to go until the end, I do plan on continuing with Sonic Colors in the new year, and I hope that future console Sonic games—not just Generations—build upon its template.

Of Backlogs and Buccaneers

RKasa
November 20, 2011
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It was a long time in coming, but I finally, finally managed to play Level-5’s space pirate action RPG Rogue Galaxy. I don’t know exactly how long I’d had it sitting around, but its presence there dates back from at least April 2008. After roughly a month and a half of playing, the Rogue Galaxy Era of my backlog officially ended on November 7, 2011 after watching the credits roll. Looking at my “Currently playing/in my backlog” list from that post, it seems that Persona 3 (or rather, Persona 3 FES, which I had acquired since then) should be my next major priority.

However, let’s not concern ourselves with that right now; this post is about Rogue Galaxy. Ah, Rogue Galaxy! I can still remember how excited I was about this game before it launched. The splendidly quirky Dark Cloud 2 had been my first introduction to a small development house called Level-5, and from that point on, I was immediately interested in anything they produced. However, since that time, I had played their masterful collaborations with Square Enix, Dragon Quest VIII and IX, and none of their other titles. The first Dark Cloud and Professor Layton games are currently languishing in my backlog, but Rogue Galaxy had been in the Pile of Shame longer than either of them. This is not the case any more, and now, I feel obliged tell you about this game which took me way too long to get around to playing.

Much like Dark Cloud 2, Rogue Galaxy is a beautifully cel-shaded action RPG (with even more beautifully cel-shaded FMVs). The story follows Jaster Rogue, a young man on a desert planet who dreams of going up into space. One day, his dreams come true when a pair of crew members serving under the pirate captain Dorgengoa mistake Jaster for one of the galaxy’s top bounty hunters and bring the young man aboard their ship. What follows is an adventure filled with planet-hopping, interesting characters, and gobs of clichés. Think Treasure Planet with touches of every JRPG ever, told through cutscenes as long as Xenosaga, Episode I‘s, but without the sluggish pacing. Finally, I’d like to mention one handy feature in relation to the plot: a brief recap of recent events that pops up when starting a new game or continuing from a save.

The game is jam-packed with things to do. In addition to the main quest, there are a handful of sidequests and optional goals, including bounties to hunt down, a multi-tiered insect fighting tournament, and a complex factory-based item creation system that’s reminiscent of the town-rebuilding aspects of the Dark Cloud series. Speaking of items, there are an overwhelming number of them—not just in the form of weapons and healing medicines, but shields, foods, metals, gems, machines, circuitry, random objects, event-specific things, a talking purple frog that can merge two weapons into one, and a handful of alternate outfits for your party members. These items are used in some of the optional activities I described above, as well as the Revelation Flow, charts (specialized for each character) from which new abilities and augmentations can be unlocked. Then, there’s the separate section for special items—three types of them, to be exact. This is a game that loves its stuff.

At the core of all this is some very good combat made use of in environments that are pretty but relatively monotonous, and all far larger than they need to be. The party-based battle system most closely resembles that of Kingdom Hearts; there are no cutaways to “battle screens”—instead, enemies simply appear on the field—and one character is directly controlled by the player while the other two are handled by AI. However, here the action can be paused at any time to access party members’ menus for special commands, and AI-controlled members will often ask for advice on which attack or item to use. All of the special moves, by the way, are accompanied by brief cutscenes, which are thankfully skippable, though not right away. Each character also has a set of “Burning Strike” attacks, which relies on a filling up a meter and timed button presses, as well as combo moves that recall the Double and Triple Techs from Chrono Trigger.

It’s an engaging, well-executed system… for the most part. Its major weakness comes about in the rare instances when characters find themselves in one-on-one battles. Although Rogue Galaxy tends to err on the easy side, once party strength is cut down by a third, you’re facing the toughest fights in the game. It’s easy to blow through a dozen or more healing potions during one of these battles, to say nothing of dying and getting “Game Over”.

As for the environments, as previously implied, they are generally gorgeous, but also wear out their welcome fairly quickly, with little variety within single areas, and wide, lengthy pathways that take a long time to get through. Backtracking to unlock special chests, defeat bounties, or seek out any other extra content is often tedious, to say nothing of going through the game’s dungeons the first time around. The save points, which double as teleporters, do help to lessen this tedium. Unfortunately, I wish I could say the same about the map system, which only allows for views of many different floors at once at save points, and can be unreliable once the ability to see all unlocked chests on a given planet is accessed.

The music is inoffensive and only occasionally ear-wormy. The regular battle theme in particular has a starting similarity to the one in a certain other game about pirates in flying ships. As for the voice acting and sound effects, much like the music, they get the job done reasonably well. There’s nothing truly outstanding about the sound design in general, but nor is there anything bad.

I’m sure I’m forgetting something; Rogue Galaxy has so much going on that it would be hard not to. It’s a beautiful, ambitious title filled with both great and frivolous ideas, and arguably one of the better Sony-published JRPGs of the PS2 era. However, it lacks some of the coherence and originality of the best that console has to offer. I hesitate to call Rogue Galaxy average—since it isn’t—but it’s also not the masterpiece it had the potential to be. That said, it is still a very good game, and although it took me ages to get around to playing it, I’m glad to have ultimately done so.

Games will be Games

RKasa
November 19, 2011
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I know it’s been a long time since I last posted here, and I’m afraid I don’t have any truly valid excuses for that other than general procrastination (though the issues I’ve been having with WordPress lately are annoying). However, there has been a lot of gaming going on in our household, as usual. I will write about some of the games I’ve been playing later, but for today, here’s a couple that my husband beat over the last couple of months.

First up was Batman: Arkham Asylum, specifically the “Game of the Year” edition for Xbox 360. Having been a PC gamer for several years, the mere existence of a console GOTY edition once struck me as a bit odd, but it’s also a sign of the times. After all, console games have steadily become PC games this generation, with bugs, the requisite patches for those bugs, and expansion packs, now termed “downloadable content”.

Arkham Asylum itself, however, is a console game through and through. Genre-wise, it’s a brawler set in a somewhat open-world environment, complete with combo moves and collectables. It stars everyone’s favorite DC Comics hero, the Goddamn Batman, in a game world that is as dark, gritty, and poker-faced as he is. This world is the microcosmic Arkham Asylum, which is located on an island this time around, and is grimy and run-down, almost in that Weird NJ abandoned mental hospital sort of way. The fist-fodder consists of a handful of standard enemies with a few weapon variations thrown in, plus the odd grotesque supervillain. The plot is comic book/video game boilerplate, and there are several references to the larger Bat-canon littered throughout, including a database of series villains that (although being wildly inaccurate in regards to Harley Quinn’s first appearance) makes for interesting reading.

Video games!

Gaminess runs as rampant as the inmates. One of the first things one notices about the game is the odd placement of Batman when the player is controlling him; instead of being centered on-screen, our hero is off to the left when walking around, an arrangement that my husband found took some getting used to. Clearly, the goal in this bit of design is to give the player a clear field of vision without resorting to a first-person perspective. It’s not what I’d call immersion-breaking, but it does call attention to itself. Then there’s the gadgets, which are optimized for extreme gaminess. One favorite was the Cryptographic Sequencer, a hacking tool that uses two dials (or analog sticks, if you prefer) to short-circuit electronic locks.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Arkham Asylum is how violent it is—despite Batman being a character who avoids guns and killings out of principle, and despite this being a T-rated game. When Batman punches or kicks a villain, the hit is hard and brutal, emphasized by the animation and sound effects. This is a Batman for the New 52 era, even before that reboot existed; a Batman as concerned with grittiness and realness as your average gangsta rapper. In a way, this subtle pandering to the demographic that this game is going for (while still maintaining a T-rating), is yet another sign of gaminess, and not a particularly encouraging one at that.

More video games!

Assassin’s Creed II‘s Ezio Auditore di Firenze is a more suave, stylish, and handsome hero than the Dark Knight, and we welcomed him back into our lives with the next game on my husband’s agenda, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Compared to its predecessor, it was largely more of the same, albeit in a (mostly) new place, the city of Rome. The story picks up right from the ending of AC2‘s, continuing on with a new main goal, more assassin missions, an altered approach to management simulation, a smattering of interesting new features, and yet another crazy ending.

The entire Assassin’s Creed series is gamey by design. You are playing Desmond who is “playing” his ancestors through abstracted means: the Animus device and its software. When Batman picks up an audio tape that just happens to be shining, there’s no excuse for that shine other than the game’s developers wanted to call attention to it. When Ezio spots a collectible Borgia flag marked by a certain white glow, that artifacting is intended to be a feature (or side-effect?) of the Animus. The same goes for the game’s menu, health meter, “Truth” puzzles, and just about everything else. Even the part of the menu that details historical facts is said to have been written by someone in the real world; in the Ezio arc, it’s the snarky Brit Shaun.

True gaminess outside of the veneer provided by the Animus is smartly rare. When Desmond steps out of the device, there’s no health meter or map, and the menu is irrelevant. One unintentionally hilarious bit of gaminess manages to sneak through, however: Desmond wears a sling-style backpack, which he keeps on when sitting in the clinical, ergonomic Animus.

That said, the meta-narrative involving Desmond presents an interesting problem for future installments in the Assassin’s Creed series. Many have speculated that Desmond himself will be playable for the majority—if not all—of a future title. Yet, how would this be pulled off while providing the player with the information they need (via the HUD and menu system) while explaining these tools existence in the real-life world? There have been hints throughout all of the games about the changes in Desmond’s perception, but tacking on a HUD to his real-life adventures would be a bit too much.

Gamers still don’t know if a Desmond-centric Assassin’s Creed is in the works. Series developer/publisher Ubisoft seems to want to milk the series for all its worth, and after the recently-released Revelations, said to be the last game to star Ezio, they could very well dip back into history with something set during the American Revolution, or the Victorian Era, or World War II. The possibilities really add up with a series like this, and it could be a long time before Desmond sees the last of that ol’ Animus.

Another Quick Site Update

RKasa
September 21, 2011
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Today I migrated the okamiblog Archive to Brain Scrap House from the Blue Shinra Project. For future reference, these posts can be found in the “Old Stuff” section.

The first two Gaming Roundups, from 2007 and 2008 respectively, have also been transferred to Brainscraps; they can now be found, as well as the others, under Games.

Aside from possibly fixing a small problem with the site’s layout, that’s all I have for site business for awhile. The usual lengthy posts about games, games, and more games will resume shortly.

Quick Site Update

RKasa
September 14, 2011
1 Comment

I’ve just installed and enabled the Disqus WordPress plugin here at Brainscraps, which will hopefully make commenting more convenient. It’s been tested (thanks, bitprophet) and it works, but please let me know if you run into any problems nevertheless.

There will be some other changes coming, mostly involving moving and collating old content I have written and stored on other sites to this one. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for some time now, so hopefully I can get the ball rolling on this soon.

The Second Act Syndrome

RKasa
September 13, 2011
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So I decided to play Halo 2 after all. On console. If I wanted to continue with the series, I had no choice in the matter, seeing as how the PC version requires an upgrade from Windows XP, which I refuse to do.

Although I wanted to play the game, I wasn’t looking forward to wresting with the control scheme, and wrestle I did. Though I play them infrequently, I have long been accustomed to keyboard-and-mouse controls for first-person games. The Wii offers a excellent console-based alternative thanks to the Wii Remote, but the dual analog sticks that are standard for Xbox and Xbox 360 FPSes were unappealing.

In fact, they still are. Early on in Halo 2, I spent much of the time fiddling with the settings, trying to find the sweet spot that would make up for the right stick’s (or rather, the surrogate mouse’s) lack of finesse. Finally, I found an okay compromise by turning the camera sensitivity all the way down to 1 and vertical inversion on. The irony here is that, when I played Halo: Combat Evolved on PC, I had the sensitivity set at its highest level, 10, and inversion turned off! Anyway, on with the review, and please note that as usual, this covers single-player only.

Y'all know this guy.

The Xbox game Halo 2 is, in many ways, your typical sequel. At a fundamental level it offers more of the same, but also builds upon the first game’s foundation, with some decent variety in the environments, new weapons and enemies, and a slightly more complex story. Spartan 117, aka the Master Chief, is back, as is shipboard AI-turned-sidekick Cortana, and though there are a few brief glimpses of their respective personalities at work, such moments aren’t as prominent in this outing. Military caricature Sergeant Johnson is, oddly enough, back as well; unfortunately, the circumstances behind his return are glossed over in one of the earliest scenes.

Of the new characters introduced, the most prominent one is an intelligent and honorable Covenant Elite who eventually becomes playable for a significant portion of the campaign. With the human UNSC well established in Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2 spends less time with them and more with the Covenant, allowing the player to get to know both them and their motives a bit better. While splitting between the points of view of Master Chief and this Elite sometimes led to haphazard storytelling, I appreciated the opportunity to learn more about the UNSC’s enemies.

The story, by the way, is still sci-fi cotton candy, even with the obvious effort to give gravitas to the Covenant’s quest. As in the first game, there are well-placed touches of humor here and there, especially early on, and the game upholds its predecessor’s tradition of general lightweightedness—one character in particular does so to a fault. On a similar note, though we get to see much more this time through a Covenant point of view, they still lack some of the depth of certain other popular sci-fi aliens. Also lacking is the emptiness that the first Halo displayed every so often, not to mention the tension which came about thanks to that game’s big plot twist. Thankfully, the environments, as before, are not at all greys and rust, and instead display varied and judicious applications of color.

Speaking of the environments, there’s a bit more diversity this time around, though those narrow corridors—which I’ve suspected are there for buffering purposes—are back in some areas. A strange bug popped up in at least two areas, one which caused semi-transparent overlays of parts of the environment to become stuck on top of my field of view; this bug was not game-breaking, but distracting and, at its worst, annoying. Vehicle sections once again appear on a regular basis, with tanks playing an especially prominent role this time around; however, as much as I like Halo 2‘s tanks, there seemed to be one too many parts devoted to driving one.

As far as other gameplay elements go, the new Covenant weapons are excellent, and it was great to be able to use the cool-looking melee-based Energy Swords this time around. For the UNSC, there wasn’t much new weapon-wise, though the submachine gun’s recoil was realistic but annoying, especially since I wasn’t fond of the controls to begin with. One of the big new features touted on the game’s back cover was dual-wielding, which could only be done with some weapons and proved cumbersome whenever I wanted to toss a grenade, but worked well in general. Two notable subtractions from the game’s features are the health meter and medipacs, but I didn’t realize they weren’t there until roughly halfway into the campaign. The battles themselves were about as balanced as they were in the first Halo (note that I played on Normal difficulty for both), and I found myself using many of the same tactics that I had before.

Speaking of battles, the worst part of the campaign was the final one. It involved taking down one particular unit and was set in an arena-style map consisting of three tiers (going from large up to small, and the middle one with holes in the floor), and a central beam of light which can shoot you upward. Combine this with a healthy amount of backup, and I found myself not only constantly lost amid the chaos, but also robbed of the satisfaction of a killing blow. The campaign concludes with a teasing cliffhanger, as if to push more insignificance onto the ending which, much like God of War 2‘s, hammers home the fact that this is the second act in a trilogy.

So where does that leave me? Ordering and waiting on a copy of Halo 3, of course! As much as Halo 2‘s final act disappointed, the game as a whole left me wanting more. Despite the fluffiness of the Halo universe as I have seen it through these two games, and despite having to put up with the clumsiness of the right analog stick, I want to spend more time with these characters and the beautiful and terrifying galaxy they live in.