No posts due to Japan

If you are wondering about the lack of free game Friday or posting in general, it's because I'm currently not at home.

That said, from Sunday I should be able to churn out something special to make up for the down time.

So sit tight!

Saturn Month: NiGHTS Into Dreams

Well here we are people, we are finally getting into the meat of Saturn month, the greats of the system, and we're starting out with NiGHTS Into Dreams!

If you're the kind of person who never played this one, but you played the one on the Wii, good lord you are missing out.  The Wii NiGHTS game isn't exactly awful but it's missing a lot of the original charm I think.

There is a plot that I bet most people don't give a shit about, but for those that do....there are two kids who are basically crap at life, and because they are crap at life they have nightmares.  There is also some evil prick who resides in the dream world, stealing dream energy to take it over.  He creates Nights who then decides "fuck this" and rebels.  The kids, who end up in the dream world hold dream energy that cannot be captured by the evil prick, so it is up to you as nights, to harness this and go ruin the evil pricks shit.....I think

It's been a LOOOONG time since I played NiGHTS, and even then the story isn't a big part of it.  It's more about acrobatics and showing off how good the Saturn was at pulling off busy, colourful 3D environments.  Aside from the awesome gameplay which I'll show you in the upcoming video, the game just oozes charm and personality.  The design, the music, the little details in each stage all come together to create something really unique, so I'm hoping to get the video out on this one ASAP.

If you have not seen this version, I think you're in for something special, watch this space!

Castlevania Series Run: Symphony of the Night Opening Sequence

I bet everyone forgot that I was playing through the entire castlevania series didn't they?!  Well I sure as hell didn't, so today I started playing Symphony of the Night again.  This is only gonna be a short one, since I just started playing and I should be getting ready for work right now.

It's been a long time since I last played Symphony, and the reason I'm making a quick post about it is after playing for about 30 minutes or so, this game, has one of the best openings of any game I've ever played.

The game starts with the final battle from Rondo of Blood, and once you've done that, it gives you a scrolling text screen that tells you the story, but it ends with "No man can say who will emerge victorious"

I mean good god, that's fucking genius.  I find that when I play more recent games, it never feels like I'm doing anything particularly impressive, like I'm guaranteed to win by virtue of being the main character.  In this game though, it really feels like you're going up against something that's probably going to kick your ass, or at least give you a damn hard time.

Then you get this section

Just running through corridors one shotting monsters twice the size of you, god it feels so good!  Then Death shows up and steals all your awesome shit, and the game starts good and proper.  But this game does an amazing job of hyping you up for everything to come AND it makes you want to get revenge on the prick that took all your shit.

There is a reason this game is regarded as such a classic, and this is one of em!

Modern Game Difficulty

If you watched the last Saturn Month showcase that I did then you are probably aware that I mentioned that the difficulty of the Saturn version, was way harder than the difficulty of the Xbox Live Arcade version, well this got me thinking about difficulty in games and I'm going to share with you my thoughts.

Let's start by making a very simple and general statement, games are a lot easier now than they were a long long time ago.

Now, before anyone starts frothing at the mouth over that, I will say that this doesn't mean that games today are all cakewalks, it also doesn't mean that modern games don't have frustrating or difficult moments and I'm not saying modern games are bad in any way, shape or form.  It's all simply a case of the technology getting better and the gaming audience expanding.

Games today have become a damn sight easier, probably because there is just more people playing them now.  Not every "gamer" in 2012 has time to sit there for hours and get good at a game just to experience the story, so developers want to make stuff a bit more accessible to your every day guy or gal who just wants to experience the medium.  Also, with the fact that most people play online, the need to develop super difficult AI's is pretty much gone, you can deliver and experience with the single player and then leave the challenge up to the multiplayer.  After all, a human opponent will be way harder to figure out than a computer one ever will.

Also, games now are longer and this is a big factor when thinking about difficulty as well.  You had to pay £30-£40 for a new game on the Sega Megadrive back in the day, and the games aren't that long because of the technological limitations, so of course you'd have to make it super hard, just to get your moneys worth!

Now that's me being fair

While it's true that a lot of old games were "bullshit" hard, mainly because of bad design, modern game devs make games "bullshit" hard now just because they don't have a fucking clue how to make an actual challenge.  Let's take Darksiders as an example.  If you put the game on hard, all it means is that you take more damage, and the enemies have more health.  This is NOT challenge, dodging attacks is not a difficult thing to get good at after an hour or two of play, so it just makes things frustrating as you have to wail on a guy for longer.  Game developers today seem to have this bad habit of making games hard in the "bullshit" way, or just flat out way too easy at all times on any mode.

Old games were bullshit hard too, in a different way of course, but a well developed retro game feels fair in its difficulty whereas a well developed modern game, still feels bullshit in it's difficulty.  This isn't true for every game of course, but it's pretty commonplace.

So yeah, there's a little bit of an insight into what I think about difficulty in games.  Games I would breeze through as a kid now kick my ass, so it could be a case of me being bitter and wanting something to blame, but whatever, I'm still having fun with the medium anyway.

ADDITIONAL BIT:  A lot of games today also lock out the hard mode until you beat the normal mode, this needs to fuck off right now.  I like a challenge, so I like to put my games on hard, so don't fucking lock me out of it just because I haven't played your piece of shit game all the way to completion on normal, goddamnit

I suck at Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo

I just finished uploading the little showcase video I made for this game!  I'm aware that I suck, and I still need to solve some mic issues.  I'm still new to this whole, recording games thing, but hopefully, by the time the next showcase comes around, everything will be good and sorted.  Not much to say about this one, I died a lot but I managed to finish on a win! 

VIDEO TIME!

Zenonia post game thoughts

I'm going to stop planning to record the Saturn videos on a Monday, it's a hard day and I just don't feel like being all chirpy down a microphone after having to deal with that.

So now I've got that out the way, let's talk about a game I beat today! Zenonia!......and it can go fuck itself!

If you remember a long long time ago, back when this blog was still fairly new, I did a Free Game Friday feature on this little iPhone RPG, and I think I said some good things about it.  Well after getting through the last section of this game, I can say that most of what I said was complete and utter bullshit.  There are good points to this game, it is fun, but the last two dungeons suck so much fun out of everything that the whole thing feels like a slog. 

The second to last dungeon is this stupid fog of war cave where you can't see shit and getting blindsided by some asshole monster is fairly commonplace.  It was at this point that no matter how long, boring or delayed my trips to work became, I didn't want to touch this damn thing.  So today I just thought "fuck it" and blasted my way through the final part of the game.  I would die constantly getting to the end, but for a mere 3000 gold you can revive with no penalty, and when you do get to the boss, it can't even fucking touch you.

The final dungeon and the build up to the final battle is even worse.  It's a huge fire cave filled with crap, copy pasted enemies and hard to spot floor traps.  It's not a difficult dungeon but good lord is it dull.  After slogging your way though the mobs, you get some piss easy block pushing puzzles, and then you fight the final boss, who I killed using nothing but my overpowered AoE and simply mashing the "hit it with my sword" button.

The sad part of the whole thing is, everything BEFORE these two areas was actually pretty good, I was having a blast with this thing until then.  It just dropped the ball so hard right at the end that even for a free iPod game it's difficult not to be a little bit pissed off.  Oh, and I won't spoil it but the ending sucks too.

So you know what? Even though I told you a long time ago to give Zenonia a go, don't fucking do it.  Despite having not played them, I'm sure Zenonia 2-4 are better games, so don't make the mistake I did and try to play through the series in order unless your some kind of masochist for video game bullshit.

Keyboard and Mouse Vs Controller

This is another one of those debates I see pop up on various forums and internet websites, and quite frankly it's a discussion I wish would just fuck off forever.

If you're going to have this discussion in a general sense, you should just shut up.  Both have advantages and disadvantages but you have to think about it based on what kind of game you're actually playing.  You can't just go and say that one is outright better than the other, because that would just be silly.

There are some genres of game where it doesn't matter if your using a controller of a keyboard and mouse.  Things like RPGs with turn based combat, or turn based strategy games (yeah, it would be a pain in the ass with something like Civ, but it would still get the job done) and things like that.

That said, a keyboard and mouse is about the only way to go for FPS and RTS games.  In FPS, the precision you get from aiming with your mouse is something you just can't quite get with a controller.  FPS controls on consoles are in fact, very good, but it just feels more natural on a keyboard and mouse, to me at least.  RTS games just require so many buttons to do so many different things, that trying to put an RTS on a console just seems a bit dumb really.  In order to have RTS on a console, you would need a keyboard peripheral or you would have to dumb down the gameplay quite significantly.

That said, I would not want to play platform games or fighting games on a keyboard and mouse.  I feel that when platforming, it feels way better to use a controller due to the fact I can make jumps a lot easier, and with fighting games, I'd hate to put quarter circle inputs in with a goddamn keyboard, it would be awkward as fuck.

But you know what, that's just me, I'm sure there's a guy who can beast FPS games with his pad, and another guy who can whoop my ass at Street Fighter with a keyboard.  At the end of the day it just comes down to what feels most comfortable to the player.  So while it makes sense to have certain control schemes for certain genres, the whole debate is rendered a bit pointless when it just comes down to personal preference.