Finished Darksiders. Really great game overall. I was only two armageddon blade shards away from the end. I got the abysmal armor set and had no problems with the end boss (one shot). I hope they do another one. It was a great ride although the framerate and feel was kinda weird the whole way through.

Tonbos is playing WoW again. I’m about 20% tempted. But I’ve got some fun productive things rolling on squarism, can’t lose the groove. I’m interested as to what has changed. But I’m not excited about being overwhelmed again. I tried playing again about a year ago and it was a bit overpowering. I just looked at my inventory, all the items, all the things to do and no one really noticed I was back. I don’t think anything will have changed in that regard but I’m interested to see how Kittycylsm will affect the game.

Finished PixelJunk shooter. I was just a few gems away from opening the last boss fight.

Right now, I’m starting back up on Heavy Rain. Then my finish list looks something like this:

• MLB08 (one season)
• Demon’s Souls (I might sell it actually)
• Okami
• Assasin’s Creed 2
• Skate (1)
• Little Big Planet
• Beatles Rock Band
• Rock Band 2

I don’t even want to talk about the unopened list. Hey Batman, I see you.

Megaman is hard as balls. I suck at Megaman 9 and I’ve always sucked at any other one. It’s goddamn twitch shit. I can’t fucking stand elite twitch games. Ok, maybe you are good at megaman, street fighter 4 and all the other games I suck at. Great. You have my respect. But after that, there’s still a game there that I’ve barely seen.

Enter rewind.

Rewind is a feature on emulators that I’ve been slowly noticing. Maybe Braid turned me onto it. I’m not sure. Anyway, it simply rewinds time. Died on some spikes after carefully jumping over 20 blocks? No problem, just back up a few seconds. On one bar of health on the final boss? No problem, patiently rewind 100x and you’ll eventually get it.

So I beat it in one 1up (sorta) and actually had fun doing it. It was so pleasant that I got around to finally beating Gradius too. That’s only taken me since about 1986 to beat it.

Megaman has a great ending song and I’m going to remix it. Next up, Megaman 2? Damn, if only rewind worked on all the consoles …

Who cares? Well it’s kind of a bit of insight into what was going on in the gaming world around this time. The PS3 was in development and Polyphony Digital (the devs of Gran Turismo) were famous for polishing their titles to obsessive levels. It was going to be a huge drought in the definitive racing series. Around this time too was the launch of the 360. Forza 2 was getting good reviews and I picked it up thinking it was going to be a cute diversion like Need for Speed or something like that.

Forza 2 turned out to be a hardcore racing game on par with Gran Turismo’s simulation take on racing games. It has a bit more edge than the weird mature smooth jazz GT style from japan but the gameplay is realistically pleasing to a GT player. I started Forza 2 when it was released (May 2007) and I’ve been racing a few circuits whenever I’ve had time or gotten an itch. So at 2.5 years, it took a long time to finish.

The ending was very weak and excepting the achievement, nothing really happened. I just finished all the races and put it away. Meh. But good game.

When GT5 comes out, I’m going all out with a G27 wheel and racing stand.

I have started it many times and either lost the save or lost track of what was going on. Buying and starting the DS version was a good move. They cleaned up a lot of stuff and the DS has a dependable save game function built into the cart itself.

When I worked in Florida at a Sony call center (hey, that’s a good job down there). I worked a 4pm-2am shift. There was a guy there who loved Chrono Trigger. He played it on an emulator while waiting for calls (I’m sure he had beaten it many times). I remember asking him what it was. He was very nerdy and nice at the same time about it. I must have seemed like such an outsider. This was in 1999. 10 years later I finally get around to beating it.

I followed a walkthrough and that made it much easier to find all the secrets etc. But it really wasn’t needed. It was fun seeing “omg massive damage” at the end but it was really a cake walk. I grinded a little bit at the end to get infinite strength capsules while listening to TWiT for 2 hours but it was more radio listening than playing. In the end, I had about 26 hours logged. Not horrible at all.

The game is very symbolic, er maybe not symbolic. I guess I mean they have circular and emotional story elements that very much make the game seem bigger than it is. For a game that is very dated, it still does a lot with sprites and cheap 2D effects. I’m glad to have this one packed away. Maybe 10 years from now I’ll beat it again.

2019. It’s a date.

I skipped the pigeon shooting in GTA4. It’s a mini game where you go around the city and shoot the “flying rats”. There are a crap-ton of them so I was marking them off in a digital map with a photoshop clone named Pixelmator. My little system was working great until I counted up how many I had left. My count was 57 and the game’s count was 58. That means I marked one down wrong. I spent some time backtracking but it was too much to deal with. Finding a missing bird is harder than finding a bird (and they are already hard to find). A bird that exists at least has a red glow on it and a missing bird is not as obvious. So I gave up on the whole goddamn thing.

The image above is from Beyond Good & Evil. Hmm, how to describe BG&E. I’ll keep this short. It’s an underrated and undersold adventure game from Ubisoft. It’s not as good as the fans say imo. I enjoyed parts of it (like the parts near the end) but it’s not the underdog that everyone says it is. I found it very frustrating and not that engaging. It had a very european developer feel to it (nothing wrong with that). It was just a little bit off most of the time. The controls were weird, the game engine didn’t keep up and the camera and level design was like playing blind pinball. I nearly sold it but then took it off the sell pile to put a nail in it. I’m just glad it’s done.

True to how I beat X & VII, I was on a mission to beat the hardest “weapons” of the game. Then I could blaze through the ending like a warm bullet falling effortlessly through a warm ocean (knife / butter metaphor avoided). Such was FF12. It’s an adventure for about 50-80 hours and then you have a choice to make (as in past ones). Should you just end it or should you spend more time getting everything done? In FFVII, this choice was made when a friend of mine and I decided we’d take on the Ruby and Emerald weapon. This had some implied baggage, firstly that we had to get abilities and gear to make this happen (I can’t remember the exact things). The same decision point came and went and the very same friend and I decided that “yes we were going to uber”.

So we (in parallel game save universes) sought out to get the materials to make The Tournesol (The Sunflower). The best sword in the game. It’s a real beauty and it took forever to get it. It’s just like grinding in an MMO. Kill stuff, sell stuff and get goal done. The mechanics in XII are actually pretty entertaining. You have to sell a number of items and then an item is unlocked to buy. Once you buy it, the item count resets and you could start all over again. Of course, if you read online you can figure out the minimum path to unlocking an item. The Tournesol is such an item that you’d want to follow this path because it could save you 20 hours of gametime. I don’t know what my time was but it took about a week (after work) to get this damn thing. In the end, it’s funny because just like other FF games, you don’t really have the cool stuff until the end and then the game is over. Feh.

So then I’m approaching 150 hours in game and I leveled to about 90ish. Vaan is 90 and most others are low 80s. Time to take on a “weapon”. In XII, there’s a corelation that the Internet hasn’t summarized, Yiazmat is the Ruby Weapon and Omega Mark XII is the Emerald Weapon. There was an Omega Weapon in X, I believe that would be the equivalent of the Ruby Weapon or Yiazmat. They’re not exactly all the same but whatever, those details I don’t care too much about (join a ff forum and argue until you’re a hermit). I’m just trying to set the stage here.

I downed Omega Mark XII, no problem. Tom had beaten him before me and I got all the strategy from watching him. Youtube (as always) has some monkey-see-monkey-do tips that make him a non-issue. I really wish I had the same resources during FFVII for the Ruby Weapon fight. Looking back, I didn’t have gamefaqs or net sharing, just AOL on a 386. Perhaps this is the “walking uphill to school both ways” geezer talk of the modern era. *pause for effect*

So now the game is approaching the singularity point. I’m not maxed out and there’s only one thing left. Yiazmat. Oh noes. I had read about this one. See, in the game it’s described as a fight that NPC’s in the game had heard about from their fathers. Yeah, this boss fight has been passed down from generation to generation. One NPC said his father died after fighting him for a week. Ha! Ok, so this guy is some kind of HP-sink-hole of doom, how bad can he be after I level to 99? Hmm. Reading the Brady game guide, my eyes tear up in horror … “Yiazmat has 50 million hit points”. I then proceded to run around the room like Christopher Lloyd shouting “1.21 gigawatts?! 1.21 gigawatts?!” I put it away for about a week and did other things while muttering “50 million hp … feh”.

Eventually, I started back up again and I piled all my party peoples into the Henne Mines. I set up my gambits to kill the undead bats that drop in on you. It’s a great place to grind out XP. You just mass sleep everything and mass-Curaja “Target: Undead”. I was able to practice drumpad and recording while I slowly leveled everyone to 99. Then when I had a block of time on a weekend, it was time to start on Yiazmat. It wasn’t actually too bad. It took me a little while to learn the best gambit setup and I had to babysit it most of the fight. I only saved once and I was mostly holding the controller for the entire 4.5 hour boss fight. Yes. Longest boss fight ev-ar. 4.5 hours. I ate dinner, I vacuumed the room, I recorded some stuff and I left the room for breaks while my guys pounded away on 50 million hp (6999dmg hits at a time). Eventually he fell and things were done.

After the hardest fights are done, everything else is easy (makes sense). The ending is really, really good. I won’t say anything about it. The ending fights at level 99 is a lot like being 99 and fighting Sepiroth in VII. It’s a non-issue.

Fantastic game. Best game on the PS2 if you ask me.

I beat Paper Mario:TTYD yesterday. It was my fourth attempt at the final boss, the shadow queen. Annoyingly, every time you reach her, a 10 minute narrative plays and you have to sit through lots of dialoge and scenery. If you lose against the final boss, game over and you have to watch the narrative again.

So after losing three times, I spent a week leveling up and finishing the major side events. For example, a 45 minute gaunlet run called “The Pit of 100 Trials” or something like that where you fight enemy after enemy non-stop in a pit of doom. After completing it, you get some cool badges (badges do different things in the game) and it was a good way to train up to guarantee a victory in my 4th attempt to wrap the game up.

Paper Mario feels like an interactive pop-up book. Things animate and shift as if they are made of kid-papyrus. But the game mechanics are so classicly turn-based RPG, the older crowd can’t help be excited by the Final Fantasy training wheels. While riding a Barbie bike,

The styling is very original, borrowing from the Nintendo64 version. And it looks like the Wii version (Super Paper Mario) looks like a worthy sequel. I’m sure it’ll be fun but I think I might try to finish up Super Mario Sunshine on the GameCube before moving on to a new title. I never finish anything, turning over a new leaf has lately meant lots of reading on Gamefaqs and burning the motivation oil to a crisp until the tedious last hours of a game (long after it feels like it should be done) is finally gone and a The End sign signals closure.

Paper Mario is underappreciated but at the same time there are dark corners of the web that house fanboys (and girls .. fanpeople?) so extreme that I wonder if they know narratives and character development can be found in more mainstream forms. Instead of writing that fan-fiction piece that only 20 people on usenet read, how about doing fantasy football or NFL fanfiction, oops nevermind NFL fanfiction, it’s already been done. What:

John Elway knew immediately that something was amis when he walked into his study.

But disregarding the eerie fanatasicm over an obscure Gamecube title, it was an enjoyable story with toddler-RPG game mechanics so adorable that you could help but eek out a girlish yelp when you see “Happy Heart” is really a Regen spell, “Power Lift” is a buff and the best way to grind is fighting Amazing Dayzees on the Twilight Trail.

At the end of it, I was level 40 and put in about 50-60 hours over 3 years. Yes, 3 years … very, very sporatic and occasional.

Xenosaga has it’s flaws. Oh, flaws.

1. Too many cutscenes.
2. Too nerdy even for me.
3. Too slow of an interface. When you leave a battle, you have to wait for the engine to finish fading out before doing something, like getting into the menu to heal yourself.
4. You don’t actually need to tweak your dudes. It’s like a movie with fighting thrown in.
5. Makes me ashamed to play it. Who the hell plays/writes this anime fanboy shit! I WILL NOT JOIN YOU!
6. It’s not the artsy anime, it’s the lonely-drama type. Whatever.

Anyway, I burned through most of it with a walkthrough as fast as possible. Just want to get through it. I don’t care about uber-leveling and grinding on the same horseshit when I come home from work. And especially as the toy-characters developed I just wanted it to be over like a romantic-comedy wife-offering movie-date. Wah right?

Well I don’t know what I expected from NAMCO, a company I associate with plastic toys and shavers (oh Nor-el-co). But none of the people in this 80-hour story seem to be over the age of 11. And of course they have like massive dish-saucer eyes. It’s an embarrassing gameplay experience. When someone walks in the room, I throw a towel over my monitor as if burying my secret masturbating parrot.

“Gwak! Lame as shit! Lame as shit!”

So 68 hours later, I feel nothing but relief as I realize I’m on the proverbial last boss. It’s the final countdown, I prep, I read, I get ready to trade this thing in. And then I die.

More specifically on how I got my ass handed to me, this massive end-boss comes out in a typical scary fashion and the background art promptly changes to melting feathers and marshmellows instead of the techno-metal architecture. While the scenery is changing from metal and wires to heaven and sugar, the music changes to a floatly original piece that I’ve never heard before. Yep. This is definitely the last guy. Everytime the last guy comes out, you see new art and new music. Hell, I know this tune. This is the “omg positive jp epic climax ending” scene. And it’s somewhat relaxing with my 3 guys doing their thing with 900hp.

And then the boss hits all of my guys for 1100hp. “What in the flying fuck?” Some ability called like Dark Omen or something. Completely killed me. Game Over. It was 1am. What do I do? 1am, I gotta go to sleep. So I do. I curse Dark Omen, I flip, I curse and I sleep. Game Over, Day Over.

Next day, I read. I get some ideas from folks online. A lot of them involve running around and getting stronger (grinding), something I intentionally wanted to avoid. But apparently I was rushing too much. So I grabbed a book and pressed “triangle” while reading. That’s about all there is to it. After an hour, I put my book down and tried again.

This time it went much better and before I knew it I was watching the massively crappy ending. Jesus, it’s bad. It’s like Waterworld meets Battlefield Earth. The icing on the cake is crappy music mostly likely by someone who knew the producer. A swirling musical shit vortex with lightning igniting the fecal gas pockets. Does this abomination unto credits and cut-scenes help sooth my bitter hanging plot threads? No. It antagonizes them. And it’s so obvious that there will be a sequel.

Of course, I own II and III. Somehow I continue to think that consumerism forces quality and my bet is all-in many shrink-wrapped amazon delivery days ago.

Katamari Damacy = Rolling a Ball

Oh how true. So I beat Katamari Damacy a few days ago and it’s the Yin to the Yang of Xenosaga which I’m trying to burn through as fast as humanly possible and sell it for $USD. Katamari is fun and light whereas Xenosaga is obviously marketed to people more down the Complacent Shaft. So complacent that I suppose they don’t contact real girls without dish-pan saucer eyes and loin-hankerchiefs as costume.

Xenosaga means Nerd Opera in Japanese I guess. It’s not the massive quantity of cut-scenes. I don’t mind replacing TV broadcast waves with a spinning disc. It’s the same basic mechanism while I eat a sandwich and nod along with the plot. I think my biggest issue is the assumption of audience. I’m supposed to be interested in how the main character goes to sleep. How she is flustered and cute when she’s answering email on her futuristic blackberry. I’m supposed to get into the story but it misses me completely and hits the guy behind me who is really rolling a 1d4 while I just casually appreciate the entropy. Let’s skip the pretentiousness and get back to it.

Katamari is a great game. It’s weird as hell. You roll a ball around and collect items to make a ball of a certain size and then the level is over. It’s super simple and it’s super different. The soundtrack was weird as crap. Cows, rainbows, giant cosmos kings and trippy cutscenes are a major thread in the game. There’s no escaping the constant thought of “only in Japan”.

It was perfectly paced and in my massive TODO list of having fun I’m glad that I got through it quickly.

Xenosaga = Leveling in Space

On the flip side is my current game crap. Xenosaga I. It’s a space rpg with a massive story and minimal appeal in combat. I unfortunately bought all three somehow relating consumption to appreciation. That girl above is named MOMO. She’s a robot. Momo means “peach” in Japanese and she’s got peach colored hair of course. She is supposed to be an adult robot but she has the voice of a 12 year old by a voice actress named Sherry Lynn. Don’t judge me yet. This girl at work and I were talking about her annoying voice and she pointed me to her acting resume. I’ve heard her in other films etc and was equally annoyed in those too. All in all, this coworker and I agreed that her voice is like helium on helium.

When you attack with a special move, you announce the name of the attack. So if you press three buttons to perform “Floral Tempest” (scary I know) then your character shouts out Floooral! Tempest! in a very Super-Sayen kinda way. Also of note is the third repetition of the move’s name at the top of the screen which will say simply: Floral Tempest. I usually turn the audio down to avoid hearing the same sample for the 300th time.

The cutscenes are sometimes 20 minutes long and include the ability to pause them. Good feature but am I watching a show here? But after the show is over you are left with a strange bit of gameplay and an amazingly complex leveling and stat system. I’m just not worrying about it until I die, it’s way too complicated and I don’t know if you even need to tweak your peeps to beat the damn game. I haven’t tweaked, learned, spent points in, worried about or otherwise used this complex stat system to beat the 6 or so bosses so far. Very odd.

It’s not all bad, some parts are somewhat fun. The style and design is very Robotech / Transformers. The acting isn’t bad and the story is relevant in itself. But there are glaring things that go against my grain. I should have listened to metacritic which gave Xenosaga I an 80-something. 80-anything is somewhat generous. I wonder if non “anime people already involved in countless dish-play eye drama stories” actually played it all the way to the end …