The Gamer's Quarter

[Pijaibros]

[SuperWes]

[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

nine million points in stage nine of space harrier. as much as i love the pce version, it's really nice to finally have an arcade-perfect port.
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[JasonMoses]

So my roommate brought home Taito Legends 2. It has a big selection of games, most of which I like! There's no tate mode on vertical-oriented games, unfortunately, but I was able to deal with that once I figured out that setting "original aspect ratio" to on in the options menu at least puts bars on the side, which is nice, because the default options stretch out every vertical-screen game to a 4:3 ratio, regardless of its original resolution.

The big issue for me, then, is that my stick doesn't have a select button or an L1 button (it has 6 buttons mapped to default fighting game controls - square, triangle R1 on the top 3 and X, O and R2 on the bottom), both of which are required to actually start a game, and you can't remap the controls to allow you to insert credit/start game to something other than select and L1. What the fuck? You can remap every other control, but credit and start are grayed out. I imagine few others will have this problem, but having to insert a dualshock and swap out once a game starts is kind of ridiculous.

[a_plus]

just finished the statue of liberty in deus ex. everything from here on is brand new!

i've noticed i play this game in much the same way i did metal gear solid 2: conflicted about killing/stunning. i usually try to go in for the stunning, but when that doesn't work out, i resort to the bullet. i also love my sniper rifle in both games. i definitely hesitate to run in like quake, guns blazing, but it probably wouldn't be too much trouble to! mostly i just love sneaking in the shadows (i suspect i would really love the thief games, too)
i feel like that all says something about my personality. i'm not sure what. i haven't decided how i feel about killing in this game, yet.

[extrabastardformula]

[ryan]

[dessgeega]

[SuperWes]

[Cycle]

[dhex]

actually, that's how i first played it. i had no idea the game existed (i kinda dropped out of games for a few years around that time).

so far i can say the ps2 version has better character animations and the introduction sequence is like, 1.7 trillion times more interesting. the controls take a little getting used to, but as i played a melee sniper type i never had any problems, even on the realistic difficulty level.
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[ryan]

[JasonMoses]

[aerisdead]

I have the first disc - I know I'm going to be disappointed with it or whatever when I finally put it in (I've been too busy with other games to try it) but it was $10 and I consider that it gives me moral right to download the roms of the titles on the disc if I find it unberable to play on the PS2.
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aerisdead

[Fred]

[dessgeega]

FUN FACT!

the gamer's quarter's shapermc pronounces akkanvader "ark commander".

true!
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[ApM]

I've recently taken to playing the bejesus out of Guru Logic Champ on the bus again. God, that game is fantastic.

[Pijaibros]

I have just entered the 8th floor of Etrian Odyssey.

I went up 10 Levels in both the 6th and 7th floor. The 2nd Strata is much tougher than I thought it would be now that enemies are spamming status attacks and many of the creatures are resistant to physical attacks.

New armor is getting very pricey and I now have to buy the more expensive medicine. So much for being financially independent...

Now to get around that Wyvern and claim its delicious egg.

[Shapermc]

OK, so, like Odin Sphere. Why am I going to be the first person talking about the game itself?

Well, I think that I can blame my HDTV on this, but the game doesn't look as good as I remember it looking at E3 last year. Basically, I remember it looking more natural but the final product feels more like... more edged (like a paper marionette) in a beautiful paper diorama/story book. I blame my initial slight disappointment on the fact that I had my expectations impossibly high, and the longer it was between when I saw that 7 minute video and when the game came out the more my imagination filled the gap.

OK, so the game doesn’t look like a living, breathing, painting like I had initially said (and gotten scolded for by ATLUS for), but it still looks really, really good. After I stopped looking so closely at all the little details and just trying to rip apart my memories, and got into just playing the game, it begins to look gorgeous once again.

So, no, the graphics don’t live up to hype/expectations, and it was a little bit of a let down in the very beginning, but then I kept playing.

I was initially shocked to see that, when I was given the option of setting my own difficulty level, there is actually a hard difficulty level available from the very start of the game. It seems to have become a disturbing trend in games to not offer a “hard” difficulty from the start but only after beating a game. This alone is something that’s been going on for a long time, but the fact that it seems to have become a carrot for beating the game, to the extent of even showing the difficulty level from the start but not allowing you to select it, is what’s been irritating me in the past couple of years (mostly because the game’s too easy in the first place). Also, while I already knew this, it was nice to see an option for the Japanese spoken language. I decided to go with the English option because, well, no one else is going to so I figured I may as well be able to comment on the quality of it.

After my expectations of Super Paper Mario being more like Super Mario with parts like Paper Mario (and then being completely wrong) I was expecting Odin Sphere to end up similarly. Especially with the fact that it’s been commented that the game will easily take 40 hours to complete, I just figured most of the game would be consumed with RPG-esq qualities of general boring-ness. After about four hours with the game I’m happy to announce that there is much more action and combat than I expected. On top of all that it’s actually hard, like the difficulty level. I don’t know how they thought of it either, but they managed to mix the RPG qualities of the game directly into the gameplay.

As a brief example of one of these RPG elements: seeds. When you kill an enemy they release phozons into the air. When you plant a seed it will need to absorb a set amount of these to produce its product. Say you really need a health item, you will need to plan the seed, but you have to do it while you can be attacked, and planting the seed takes time (a few seconds, but it still leaves you open for attack). So you have to plan where to plant it. Then you have to kill enough enemies to produce the product. When it’s ripe you have to cut it down and collect it (easier than it sounds). Then to gain the health and experience from the plant you have to eat it. This may sound simple, but eating takes time, and like almost everything else, you leave yourself open for attack while eating. (also there’s the neat bit that food is not just an eat and forget item all the time. Like a Muggle fruit you can eat it twice, the first half and then the second, each producing the same amount of health and experience, then you can take the pit of the seed and re-plant it). Alternatively, if you don’t want to use the phozons to grow things to eat and gain experience, you can absorb them into your weapon to make it stronger.

The key point is that most of the time you’re doing this while managing enemies. It becomes very challenging to plant food that you’re going to need at the beginning of a boss fight and then survive long enough to cut it down and eat it.

So, this leads me to my initial complaint about the game: the combat is very simplistic (at least with the first character, I imagine that it becomes more complex with later characters). It also seems somewhat random for very powerful attacks. But what the game lacks in complexities of combinations, it makes up for with the battles themselves. You have to spend a good amount of time separating smaller groups from large packs, and if you can’t you need to be able to manage crowd control well (magic attacks help for this). Though, this kind of leads me into my second problem with the game: the camera is a bit too close to the player most of the time. When you’re running around you have to pay attention to a small map on the top frequently because many times if you just wait for the enemy to come into view you might already be attacked.

Though, I’m not trying to say that the combat is bad, don’t get me wrong here. It really is the focus of the game for me, so I’m paying a lot of attention to it. I also have a feeling that if you’re playing on an easier difficulty that the game could end up as just a button mashing fest. The game is honestly challenging. It really shines in boss battles where you have to be managing in a few things at once like multiple enemies, and one of them takes up more than the whole screen and likes to swallow you whole.

After a while the game started to make a bit more sense and I realized that there is far more strategy to how you need to play than initially meets the eye. You can’t just hope for enough money to buy health items: you have to grow them. But you can only grow them if you can kill enough enemies. And you have to manage killing the enemies (not ignoring them) so that you can harvest the plant and actually get the health points. So you have to be very careful when fighting so that you can kill enough enemies that you can get the health to take on the boss. Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned Alchemy.

Ok, story/acting/writing; none are bad overall, but they can take a dip occasionally. The (English) voice acting ranges from good to terrible, and is usually in the bearable range. The writing is a bit above par for RPG quality writing. The main issue I have with this section is the amount of time that is spent on the story. It’s an interesting story so far because there’s a lot of secrets being revealed and it has demon lords and inner torment. But honestly, it’s not that good, and they spend a lot of time on the cut scenes.

And, honestly, the game is gorgeous. I am honestly shocked that the game looks so good for, not only being non-HD, but also not even progressive scan. It’s flooringly stunning at times, and at worst just good looking. I’m constantly finding myself amazed at how good it really looks. I read in an interview in Play magazine that they could have made the game HD if they had just scanned everything in at a higher resolution, but I think that would have had a negative effect on the game. As it stands it’s standing on a fine line between gorgeous, living, swelling, animated art, and the best quality flash-game possible to make. I think at a higher resolution that the soft blur would be lost that is just enough for the brain to bridge the gap with a hint of imagination.

And again, I’ve just started the game. This is going to be a long process.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dessgeega]

matt why don't you call me anymore you bastard
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[Shapermc]

[Shapermc]

OK, I also picked up Wartech AKA Senko No Ronde, the VS shooter (shooter/stg) for arcades and now 360. I have no idea what the original name translates to, but the US name and cover are fairly bad choices on Ubisoft’s part. Top that with a price that most Americans are going to scoff at, well, I have a bad feeling for the success of this game.

The game is great though. It has surpassed my expectations, though I admit that they were mixed expectations. In case you don’t know, the game was developed by G.Rev: a mix of old Taito employees and some other hardcore guys. Their past games include two of the greatest shooters: Border Down and Under Defeat. Before playing the game I knew that SNR was basically a bullet hell shooter, mixed with Psychic Force-esque combat arena, giant boss formations, and it was really-really confusing. I had seen a handful of videos and wasn’t really sure what to expect. From all hands on reports of people in the past two years, the game was underplayed, under documented, and it would either get moved to dingy corners of arcades shortly after its arrival or removed completely.

Had I been playing this game at 100yen per try I would probably not have played very long.

It’s a bizarre combination of games really. It’s as much about defense as it is about offense. Perhaps even more about defense. The controls are very, very simple. At the same time the combinations of attacks can get very, very deep. Not deep in the same manner that something like Street Fighter Three is deep (frame counting or gigantic chain combos), but more in the manner of strategy. Though, I guess on one level, that it all boils down to one and the same.

Anyways, the game is really solidly built as expected. Out side of a couple of character, everyone has a very different play style. The basic progress of the game goes like: attack/defend, special attack, reload, B.O.S.S. attack, repeat.

Hmm, that’s probably a bad description. That makes it sound rigid and simple. I’ll just say that transforming into the BOSS mode is really, frigging, awesome. Seriously.

I’m at a bit of a loss of where to go from here with talking about the game because it’s fairly intricate. One of the nice things about the game is that when your life bar runs out you go into “vanish” mode. This will turn the game into something much more similar to a modern shooter: you have a tiny hitbox now and it will even flash. This makes your ship much more difficult to hit and it will also allow you (if you can) to transform into a more powerful BOSS with stronger crazier attack patterns. It’s really satisfying to make a comeback with a desperation BOSS attack.

The translation of the game seems to be handled with the niche and hardcore in mind. It seems as though Ubisoft made a trade off of leaving the game 99% alone internally, yet completely destroying the box/name. The game retains all of the spoken Japanese, and the art is the same as the original (which frequently makes me feel like a bit of a pervert). The spoken Japanese is all subtitled, even in battle. This creates a bit of a problem because there is a lot of talking going on during the battle. Basically the characters will frequently (in story mode) discourse throughout most of the battle making it very to figure out what’s going on, but if you want to know you’ll probably get killed because you’re reading subtitles.

Outside of that, there’s a lot to say, but not much that I can really comment on yet. I’ve only spent a few hours with it and I’m still figuring out which ship is my character. The game is a joy to play, and I can’t wait to get online for versus matches. The only problem with it goes back to the beginning: price. I know I’m not the norm, and I know that this game isn’t going to sell well in the US, so why doesn’t Ubisoft know this? Earth Defense Force for the 360 came out at $40 and it was a perfect price. It’s selling decently and it’s getting a lot of word-of-mouth press because of the price. Even as someone who has imported both of G.Rev’s other games, I still found the price tag a bit hard to swallow. I want to recommend it to other people, but I would feel a little guilty if I did since it’s for such a specific taste. At $40, or hell even $50, I would be much more willing to say take the dive and jump in. I hope that some people here end up renting it at least. If you do shoot me an email at shapermcATgmailDOTcom and I’ll meet you online for some combat.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[helicopterp]

[helicopterp]

Oh, and I just finished the 3rd chapter of Touch the Dead. It was the weakest so far, but I still like the game a lot.

The next chapter is going to be very hard, because I'm virtually out of ammo for my shotgun and my rapid-fire thingy. Which leaves me with my pistol, which always has unlimited ammo, but takes a long time to reload and doesn't do much damage.

And the crowbar is terrible from every standpoint.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Lestrade]

[simplicio]

So after playing about two races in Tony Hawk: Downhill Jam, I'm coming to hate the Wii for dangling a carrot in my face. Jam is a terrible game, a hodgepodge of testmarketed "cool" but without the time taken for testmarketing, and gameplay like a locked down SSX without level design or fluidity. Yeah, I know this is first generation software, and Raving Rabbids (stultifying stretched out mini games), Elebits (Katamari without a sense of scale) and Banana Blitz (the same game as always but entirely broken this time around) aren't really any better. But this is nearly insulting. It's making me hate games so much I can't even put more effort into posting about it.
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"Worlds turn the new machine to thee. To thee. Though, thine the new machine space."
-Kurt Schwitters, 1919

[Ethoscapade]

[antitype]

So I'm finally playing HL2 Episode One on a PC that can more than handle it (my last PC would run HL2 just fine at medium detail settings, but had trouble with Ep. 1) — it's fucking great, of course (I just met the zombines), but I'm just discovering that the game is rather notorious for its odd and frequent crashing/freezing. This dark tunnel (the "Lowlife" section) is the first place I've had any such trouble myself, but now when I die and the game goes to load the last quicksave it freezes. Quite annoying! A quick search informs me that the typical solution is to force the game to run in DX8 mode, but, uh, yeah, I don't wanna. Is there any other way around this? And yes, my nvidia drivers are up to date.
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antitype.livejournal.com | last.fm

[dhex]

you have an 8xxx series nvidia card?

i've lived a charmed video card life myself so the only weirdness i ever had in hl2 and related environs was some stutter upon loading (like a second's worth) and a driver revision about a year ago that just didn't care for anything halflife related and wouldn't actually load (that was nvidia's fault).
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[antitype]

Nah, it's a 7600GS, which ... well, runs the game beautifully, with all settings completely maxed out — though maybe this has more to do with my CPU and 2 gigs of ram? In any case, yeah, it's been a nearly flawless experience until now. Only the most minor of stuttering hiccups pop up from time to time, and the screen gets slightly jittery when there's fire all around me. This deal with the freezing when it's loading is the only thing that's, uh, really bothered me.
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antitype.livejournal.com | last.fm

[Ethoscapade]

yeah, i had to force dx8. i didn't want to either, but nothing else worked, and then once i did my framerate doubled, as if to tell me how stupid and stubborn i was being all along.

mind, i'm running with a 1.6g pentium m, 1gb of ram, and a radeon x600; i wasn't being asked to give up HDR - you might have to, unfortunately.

[ryan]

I'm playing Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam and wondering what the hell went wrong with the series. I mean, the main series itself might not be the best thing since sliced bread, but I really enjoyed the improvements in the last one. Taken as a whole, though, they are far, far better than this.

I don't even know what this is.

Well, I do know: It is supposed to be an ESPN Extreme/Skitchin' core with Tony Hawk tricks to liven things up. On paper, that's not a bad idea at all - the series has all the tricks to mesh in with an over-the-top racer. What was released though, by Toys for Bob (aka We made fucking Star Control), no less, is just a mess: the frame rate is horrible, the characters are annoying, the full-motion video (WHY?!) clips repeat, and the course design can be downright confusing. Worst of all is the way the tricks have been simplified. I understand that they can't be overly complex in a racer, but I can grind significant chunks of courses without even trying, which isn't satisying in the least.

I also go Brain Age in from goozex and am enjoying it. I've had Big Brain Academy for a while, so it's a nice change. Diablo 1 is in the mail, and I plan on taking advantage of Diablo 2 for $10 and its expansion for $10 at EB today, I know I'm really late with these; also, last Warhammer: Dawn of War expansion is in the mail, the one that turns the game into a risk-style strategy game (yesssss!).
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[antitype]

[Ethoscapade]

it would start skipping and eventually lock up on me without fail within three to five-ish minutes after loading my save. your card can handle HDR fine; episode one's programming is just way too high-level for its own good.

[antitype]

Yeah, I guess. I switched it to DX8 and this helped for a while, but as I was about to head above ground, the autosave/loading screen at the top of the elevator froze the game again.

This sucks. Such a fucking awesome game, otherwise. I hope this is something that could eventually be patched out.
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antitype.livejournal.com | last.fm

[dessgeega]

shaper told me last night valve is releasing half-life, half-life 2, episodes 1 and 2 and portal on a single xbox disc in the fall. there's a vague chance i might have an xbox by then? exciting!
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[Ethoscapade]

[antitype]

Hey, I was actually able to play for an hour or two with no interruptions! And then I got the audio-looping crash.

So I mean, if the game isn't patched up at some point, is it just a matter of technology, drivers, etc. catching up with the game to a point where it just doesn't crash anymore? Or at least not so much? Or is this just wishful thinking?

I guess it's not such a big deal as long as I can start the game up again and continue from where I left off, more or less. It's just a major hit to the flow.

Funny thing, too: the audio clip that it chose to loop on was the resistance fighter saying, "Huh, déjà vu."

"Huh, déjà v-déjà v-déjà v-déjà v-déjà v---" ad infinitum.
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antitype.livejournal.com | last.fm

[ryan]

[dhex]

have you tried the troubleshooting steps? i.e. start it with whatever the "nosound" argument is first and see if it crashes at all.

does hl2 regular crash at all or what?

if not...i would say do the whole wipe and restore thing overnight tonight or something. i'm not totally sure how it works but it's in there somewhere.
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[antitype]

Yeah, I guess the Black Box was going to be all of that minus HL2 and Ep. One, since we all pretty much have those already(?). They recently retitled it the Orange Box, threw those in and made it $10 more — still $10 less than the Xbox 360 edition. I would have preferred the Black Box, but what can you do.
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antitype.livejournal.com | last.fm

[dhex]

also try this shit

steam://support/?Issues=*
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[antitype]

[Ethoscapade]

yeah, don't bother reinstalling - ep1 is just very unstable for some people, and valve can't / won't fix it.

as i understand it, black box was going to be ep2, tf2, and portal, for $40, whereas orange box is that plus hl2 and ep1 for $50 - same deal on the 360, only plus $10. then they cancelled black box, which, um, not that orange isn't already a fabulous deal, but those ten dollars didn't need paying previously - i wonder if they'll still offer them piecemeal?

[antitype]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I was saying above.

Oh, dess, unless I'm mistaken you won't be getting HL1 in that set. Which is too bad, I suppose, but it sort of makes sense. Though it kind of leaves you hanging, unless you just want to play the PS2 version. Was that any good?

You'll miss out on HL: Source, though. Some folks apparently prefer the original version with or without OpenGL, but I'm not sure why. I think the Source upgrade is rather nice (though yes, I know it's not quite the Black Mesa remake).

If nothing else I imagine you must have a PC that can run a game from 1998...? I think it's like $10 to download the plain ol' Half-Life directly from Valve via Steam.
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antitype.livejournal.com | last.fm

[Intentionally Wrong]

Can't we just but them individually off Steam?

[ryan]

[antitype]

[ryan]