Masem’s Gaming Blog

Played through a campaign up through the Space stage yesterday and I’m very impressed - though still disappointed about what was once in the game that has been removed.

Cell Stage - Less esotertic version of flOw, works well but goes by quickly.

Tribe Stage - A bit repetitive but instant gratification with the evolution of your species via its rewards.

City Stage - Not thrilled with this, I suck as RTSs and had troubles getting through it the first time until I figured that the best time to attack a village is after they sent all their forces to raid yours and you’ve defeated them sounding (as I could still pump out new units as others died right there.)

Civilization Stage - Maybe a bit too easy; I did find that they didn’t mention that your city gets stuck with whatever branch (economic, military, or religious) once you set it, and wondered why I had no military units.  This felt like the stage with the least helpful hints on what to do, despite how close to any Civilization game ever was.

Space Stage - Have to agree with most everyone else, this is where the game really pays off - it feels open and expansive yet not too open (ala the Oblivion problem) as the missions help guide you with what to do.

The user content and sharing aspects are of course awesome.

My primary disappointment with the game is the loss of how the game was to determine what abilities and skills your creatures, buildings, and vehicles would have based on how you designed it.  There’s still a taste of this; most parts you install (up to a limited number, of course) give certain benefits, but there was supposed to be something more organic and less exacting about the way it is currently.  For example, adding any pair of legs gets you a speed boost, regardless of how “functional” the being may end up being; original demos for this showed that the game would have adjusted the speed bonus for strategically placed legs over useless ones, and other aspects of the design.  Similar for all other design elements.  It’s still the same user-created aspects which makes the game extremely fresh, but the lack of significant impact of how well the design aspects are put together is disappointing to see.

The other disappointment is the minimal (to some extent) impact of previous phases on successive ones.  Certainly your route through one phase sets what you are in the next, but this seems to be a choice out of three options.  Physical appearance and other aspects set in the Tribe phase don’t mean anything in the City stage, for example.  Basically, each phase is almost a unique phase with minimal bearing beyond appearance that what you created before carries forward.

This is not to say Spore is bad; it is still impressive.  It is just lacking elements that were shown originally to be in the game that are no longer present that had piqued my interest much more in this game.   Still, the Space stage alone is worth the cost of the game.

I know this game has gotten a lot of praise, but while I’m enjoying the story and general RPG elements of it, there’s alot that I’m just unimpressed with.  BioWare has made great titles before, and while I appreciate the complexity of the story and the conversation system, the overall game doesn’t feel like a significant change from past BioWare titles.

I’m not too thrilled on the combat.  I’ve started with a pure soldier class, and while I believe I’m upgrading weapons and armor at each possible opportunity, I still feel I’m struggling against it mostly due to some of the mechanics such as dealing with biotics (telekinesis-type powers in the game), poor party AI that tend to get in the way, and poor visual clues where damage is coming from as to not allow me to react fast enough to find cover or the like.  I can see where they were going with it, and I can understand that they were trying to seamless connection between combat and general interaction, but it feels really clunky.

At times, on planets, one needs to drive a vehicle around.  Don’t get me started on how poorly that controls or how that aims and fires at targets.  That feels like a total misstep in implimentation.

The missions do feel open (I’m two major missions in, and still have like a roster of 4 missions to select from with more being added), which is good.  However, most of these feel much like BioWare’s standard “rule of 3″ - a subpart of the mission requires you to complete 2 or 3 mini-missions, after which the sub-mission allows you to proceed.  I know this is very common in Western RPGs compared to the more linear approach of Japenese RPGs, but it still feels stale given that BioWare’s done this 3 times before (at least) through both KOTORs and Jade Empire.

I still feel intrigued enough with the game to push forward, but compared to what I hear others talking about, this game just feels like it overpromised and had to drop or rush some aspects out to meet end of year sales - not as bad as, say, Blacksite Area 51 or Kane and Lynch, but enough that if they game it 3 more months, they would have had a really polished game on their hands.

I should know better about the NFS series - the series has really ventured away from its roots of being literally about the speed, but too many of the recent titles save for Most Wanted just went in a really weird direction.

To some benefit, Pro Street does not glorify the underground or illegal street racing scene nor tries to even provide a story.  Instead, it’s pure racing.  The career path is present as a branching set of “race days” consisting of 4 to 7 races each.  Within each race day, your goal is to win enough points to win the day, but you also want to consider dominating each day by basically crushing the competition on each race in that race day.  Both a win and a domination gain you prices outside of the usual cash and once in a while a new car.  (In this iteration, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of variances in the car models - you can customize them up the wazoo, but I think I’ve only seen maybe 6 different models so far).  A nice idea is that if you should leave the race day, you loss all progress in it, so you need to make sure you have all the cars that you plan to take into it for the different events up to the specs you want.  While you can repair cars between races in race day, a few race days don’t allow this, so you may have to abandon them early if you lack an appropriate backup car.

Races include Grip (standard circuit races), Drag, and Drift.  Time attack is like Grip save that its who get the best time for one lap, not position.   There’s a Sector Attack mode which is like a combined checkpoint/circuit, where you get points for getting the best time on specific sections of the track.  There’s also a Grip Class race, in which you are only racing against 3 other cars but there are another 4 cars from a different vehicle class on the track, making things get interesting in whether you try to fight for position against a car you don’t have to worry about beating or not.  Everything’s run in the daytime, and based on numerous configurations of tracks at the same setting.

Thing is, this feels more like Forza racing than NFS.  The game now has the same green/red arrow system to help with cornering speeds, and because it’s just pure tracks or roads modified to be tracks, it feels no different than a standard track racing game.  There’s no track that really mimics some of the nice hills and corners that were in either Hot Pursuit game or Most Wanted - so far these are mostly flat with “standard” race-type turns, which , when they’re 180 hairpins, sorta defeats the “need for speed”.  Plus it doesn’t seem like you can blaze through this: the career tree is broken into a series of  “knots” of races, and the core knot of one branch requires a number of wins and dominations from the previous knot branch, but even then you may not have the right car to enter it, or you cars may be pitifully sucky as to have no chance to win, requiring you to go back, earn cash, and upgrade the cars.  I’ve felt I put a lot of time into the game and am only at 15% of the career, so it seems like a long way to go.

I would almost call this an RTS-lite game - at least where I am about 25% of the way through the game.  The game is after FFXII (which, note I have not finished, but was able to pick this story super quick, as it relies little beyond characters and the Ivalice setting), with Vaan and gang now exploring a sky-based group of islands.  The game is a series of RTS games; you control up to 5 party members, and you gain access to Espers - creatures that you summon at the start of each match and, when available through summoning points on the map.  A special Ring of Pacts is set up like the skill tree in FFX, in that you can get new Espers after unlocking other specific ones.  Espers themselves are based on the standard four elemental magics as well as healing/special or no magic ability at all, and you can only take 5 into a match (though you can alter their configuration as needed).  It’s a pretty nice system though I’ve yet had to worry too much about making sure I have elementals to deal with weaknesses the other side has or to prevent being hit by a large advantage.  In fact, the game to this point has basically been “select all, fight here”, though I see this strategy easily being defeated where I am now if I’ve not gotten appropriate new equipment or done side tasks to level up enough.  So I am expecting at some point to have to split my attention.  However, for being one that doesn’t play RTSs much, this is a very gentle introduction that yet still captures the FF game flavor.  And of course, using the DS helps with a lot of the controls.

I’ve gotten through the “tutorial” sections of the game (about 2-3 hrs of gameplay), and so far finding this interesting.  It’s definitely got the feel of the new Prince of Persia games (and I have to admit I didn’t make the connection until I noted that both this and the POP games were done by Ubisoft Montreal, which would explain why they’re so similar) when considering the acrobats of climbs up and around buildings.  I do like that the game, while using stealth, seems more “active” about it compared to the “wait and wait and wait” stealth in games like Thief or Metal Gear Solid - I would almost say its closer to an arcade feel of stealth as in Sly Cooper.  Basically, it’s not so much standing in the shadows that will hide you, it’s either the blending in with the crowd while still moving, or getting to higher ground to ditch attention.  The story is a bit interesting, I’ve got an idea where it’s going, but its good to see that they push the key twist of the game early (as to review that game without talking about the twist would be near impossible).

Not so sure I’m great with the size of the world yet - I’m still early enough in the game that there might be things to do or find in the rather large cities or the landscape between them, but traversing the game world without bringing up alarm levels is someone on the tedious size.

Oh man, this is already so much better than Super Mario Sunshine.  As probably most have seen the previews, much of the game takes place on small planetoids, and an excellent camera system is used as to avoid many of the problems from Sunshine while not being disorienting.  There’s parts that feel like a standard 2D Mario platformer, and the new additions for the Wii side (that I’ve gotten to), primarily the spin attack which through the first couple “galaxies” has been used rather nicely for defeating foes.  The controls feel nice and slick (using both Nunchuck and Remote) and really intuitive once you learn everything.  Plus this looks really really good - again, the Wii may not be pushing the envelope for graphics, but this is very pleasent to  look at.

Consider this as Squenix’s first venture in the Pokemon-type RPG.  Basically, you go around, collecting monsters to fight together monsters in order to get them into your party.  While there’s less about competing against other “scouts” (aka trainers), and much more in terms of visible random encounters that you see.   Where it is better than Pokemon is that it is much easier to work on convincing a monster to join you: you “scout” it and then let your monster party do one round of attacks to accumulate a percent of a chance to turn the monster to your side.  A weak part will only gain a few percent while a powerful one can get close to 100%.  No more carefully waiting until you’ve poked the monster enough to weaken it to capture.  The other aspect I’ve yet to get to is that one can then synthesize monsters together to make stronger ones — my monsters are too low level to do this, but it seems to have standard aspect of the DQ games that make them interesting to experiment with.

Unfortunately, the game is done in 3D mimicking DQ8 in art style and approach.  While it may look ok, the 3d movement is just too klunky to really work well - I’d much rather have seen them go all 2D sprites like in Rocket Slime, or a fixed top-down 3D angle like Pokemon Diamond/Pearl.

I’m pretty impressed with this game - while we’ve had at least one FPS on the DS before (Metroid Prime: Hunters), this is a little different as, so far, the shooting aspect isn’t much (though I know I get more guns later in the game), but for that, it works nicely.  Exploring the abandoned mental hospital that is crawling with monsters, you move with the dpad, look around with the stylus on the screen, and then use your currently selected object with the left shoulder button - this requires you to hold the DS in the right way but definitely feels more comfortable on the Lite than the old DS.  The game uses darkness effectively - you pretty much have to walk around using a flashlight all the time, and need to use sound to listen for certain monsters that lurk the halls - including little ankle-biters that easily can sap health.  There’s a few puzzles so far (eg a numeric code written in blood on the wall that you need to enter into a number pad to open a door) but otherwise outside of that is not much more different, gameplay, from a usual FPS - it’s all about the atmosphere which is done pretty well on the limited DS hardware.

On the single player side, I am so glad they’ve moved to modern times.  Sure, the basic elements are still regular Call of Duty elements (checkpoints, limited weapons, etc.) but the move to the present gives them much more flexibility with combat arenas and appearances.  The intro level, a raid on a listing ocean tanker, is pretty damned awesome in how it asserts the rest of the game.

Multiplayer looks interesting but from what I’ve tried, I noticed that of the 11-12 or so game modes that the game has, you are locked from all but 2 of these in ranked play until you get enough ranks; other features of multiplayer mode are also similarly locked.  I’m not sure if this is a great idea even if it is relatively easy to gain the necessary ranks.  It pretty much means that to unlock all the available features, you have to play now while there’s plenty of players to earn the appropriate ranks and before the online game community becomes stale.

As with Disgaea, this is another great game to have available everywhere due to how deep and complex the gameplay can get.  The transition from the PS1 title pretty much leaves intact all the graphical elements, maybe enhanced for readability on the PSP screen, plus adds a few pre-rendered cutscenes at critical moments.  The most annoying graphical feature is a slowdown that occurs when you use a special attack (magic spell, rushes, etc.) which seems to be related to disk loading but may also be a element of the emulation process they have.   Annoying, but well overlooked considering the gameplay that’s possible.

Plus there’s ad hoc wireless co-op and competitive battles you can take against another player’s party which is a nice addition to the game.