Parappa the Rapper is Shit (still love it though)

 

I have fond memories of Parappa the Rapper, as a kid I had a demo where I would play the first stage with the onion man over and over again.  I also have fond memories of playing the full game through during my first year of university but rhythm games have come a long way and going back and playing Parappa now feels like pulling teeth.

We do however, have to give the game some credit for being essentially THE FIRST rhythm game ever made and while playing it now feels terrible it and it's popularity essentially put the groundwork down for all the rhythm games that we enjoy today.  Also you cannot fault Parappa for it's music, the tunes found in each level are wholesome, catchy and stick in your head for YEARS.  I can still personally sing the entirety of stage 1 and 2 from memory and will, even today, find myself occasionally humming bits of the baking stage or the flea market.  Most of the content is Parappa is fun, bright, memorable and will never fail to put a smile on your face.

But it SUCKS as a rhythm game

Rhythm games are supposed to be a simple concept.  Music plays, notes appear on the screen and you make the inputs in time with the music.  This happens in Parappa, prompts appear at the top of the screen in time with the music and you push those buttons but it's basically a crap shoot if the game gives you a positive or a negative evaluation at the end of each bar.  I'm not bad at rhythm games, I play an absolute shit ton of them both at home and in my local arcades so I'm fairly confident that I don't just lack rhythm but after the first stage Parappa the Rapper just does whatever the fuck it was.

Out of curiosity I looked up videos of people getting Cool ranks in every stage and to my utter dismay it seems that getting good scores in that game have very little to do with the prompts.  Spamming inputs semi in time with the tunes is what seems to get you a good score and after the first displayed it almost doesn't matter what you do after that.  When you eventually DO get a cool rank the prompts just fuck off altogether and you are left do freestyle, which I suppose fits the theme of being a rapper but doesn't really make for a good rhythm game experience.

As a rhythm game Parappa the Rapper is fucking awful and it got away with it by basically being the only one of its kind.  That of course quickly changed but the catchy tunes and wholesome vibe of game basically left rose tinted memories in the brains of everyone that had a PS1 back in the day.  One thing I am probably going to do after this post though, is go and dig out my copy of Um Jammer Lammy to see if the timing problems that I have with this game, carried over to later titles.  It would be interesting to test it with Parappa 2 on the PS2 as well but I've not been able to find a copy of that.

Maybe I'm being a BIT harsh when I say it's shit because there is a lot to like about Parappa, it just sucks that it fails so hard at the one thing it's supposed to be good at which is being on rhythm

Otogirisou

 

Spike Chunsoft is a developer that you will be quite familiar with if you're into games like 999 or Danganrompa but I became familiar a few years back when I picked up a copy of Kamaitachi no Yoru in a used book store for about 100 yen.  After being quite impressed by that I took it upon myself to seek out their other games and came across their first foray into the sound novel genre with Otogirisou.

For those unfamiliar, a Sound Novel is basically a choose your own adventure book that you play on a console.  The difference between a sound novel and the much more popular visual novel genres is that while a visual novel will have elaborate art and CGs, a sound novel is basically just text with a couple of crap background pictures but tries to create more of an atmosphere using sound and writing.  While you may want to put Sound Novels in the same boat as something like walking simulators, they differ in the fact that a lot of them still have fail states and puzzles to solve.  For example in Kamaitachi no Yoru it's pretty easy to make a string of incorrect decisions and either blunder into death or pin the who-dun-it murder on the wrong guy.  There's a mystery to get the the bottom of and a killer to avoid in that game so while it is just text on a screen there's still a fair amount to think about.

Otogirisou on the other hand is a bit less like that, there aren't really any fail states and you essentially are just playing a Goosebumps choose your own adventure book but on a Super Nintendo Cartridge.  It feels more like a proof of concept for later games in the genre rather than an actually fully developed thing but it's story is still interesting enough to make it fun to play.

The game follows two characters, which you can name, as they are involved in a car crash and end up stranded in the middle of nowhere on a dark and stormy night.  The two of them make their way to a mansion and then shit starts to get spooky.  In my playthrough the two of them explored the mansion for a while before accidentally triggering a bunch of memories in the female lead where she remembered that she actually used to live here and severely injured her long lost sister in a boiler fire many years ago.  The twin sister stalks the house trying to kill the both of you for a while before you set the house on fire (again, lol) and make your escape.  There's more to it than that but I'm not spoiling the whole damn plot line in the blog post in case you want to play it yourself.

But even if I DID spoil the whole plot line in this post it wouldn't matter because the very story being told in Otogirisou changes with the decisions that you make.  The car crash on a dark stormy night will remain constant every playthrough but what happens after that is up to the selections you make.  Other examples of plots that I haven't played through yet include an ancient curse, a mystery regarding the history of the houses construction and being chased by a giant fish monster.  The game doesn't have a chapter select feature so while that's kind of annoying for repeat playthroughs but the game is short so skipping through the repeat bits is more of a mild annoyance rather than a huge time sink

I played the SNES version but there does also exist a PS1 version and if that's anything like the PS1 version of Kamaitachi then it probably has chapter select and section skipping as well as a nice tree so you can see how many of the story lines you've finished.  I'm not sure if that's ACTUALLY the case, I'm just making assumptions based on how the other games are.

I don't think an English version of this game has ever been released or an English patch made available by fans so it's sort of hard to play unless you know Japanese or are willing to learn a boat load of Kanji to get through it, which is a shame really.  There's also a movie based on this game that is available through through Hulu and Amazon Prime if you wanted to watch a version of it rather than play it but I don't have those services so I'm unsure if they are subtitled in English either.  IF you can play Otogirisou though, I recommend it because the genre has come a long way since the SNES days and it's nice to see where it all started.

Final Fantasy 7 Mobile Games

 

First thing I saw when I woke up this morning was announcements for some FF7 mobile games so I'm going to take a moment to talk about what I think of those.  There was apparently an announcement for some Yuffie-based DLC for FF7 remake but that's exclusive to PS5 which I don't currently own so it can fuck off.  It does seem however if you own FF7R on the PS4 you can get it for PS5 for free which is pretty nice I guess.

The first game that got announced was Final Fantasy 7: The First Soldier which is a Final Fantasy......Battle Royale game.  In the same vain as Fortnight, PUBG or Knives Out (if that's still even a thing), the usual deal of dropping into a map and shooting at each other with guns until there is only one person or one team left.  Only this time it has an FF7 skin wrapped around it.  I'm indifferent about this one since Battle Royale is kind of uninteresting to me, the genre lost its appeal pretty quick.

Final Fantasy Ever Crisis on the other hand, looks a lot more interesting.  From what I understand it's an episodic, more traditional style of RPG that involves dudes standing in a line and you picking commands from a menu.  There isn't much gameplay in the trailer to speak of but from what I can tell it seems that Ever Crisis will cover the whole FF7 universe including things like Crisis Core.  Considering that the only things I play on my phone right how are a Hatsune Miku rhythm game and a Mahjong game, having a proper RPG to fiddle with might actually be a welcome addition 

There are some people though that seem to be dismissing these games, not because they are battle royale games or episodic games but purely for the reason that they are on Mobile.  This makes no sense to me because if anything, Square are one of the only companies that make a least somewhat half decent little distractions.  Sure Record Keeper and Brave Exvius aren't the best games in the world and they are full of gatcha bullshit but you could do a lot worse.  Let's not forget as well, there are still people, people who will happily look down on Ever Crisis, that still beg for re-releases of Before Crisis which isn't just a mobile game, but a mobile game released on FLIP PHONES.

I'm not holding out for these games to be the next hot ticket, especially not The First Soldier, but I am hoping they will make some nice little distractions while I'm riding the god awful Japanese subways

EVO: Search for Eden

 

When I think about the games in the SNES library that the lame retro game fans on Twitter like to talk about, E.V.O isn't one that gets talked about all that often.  That's not to say it's completely forgotten, when it does get mentioned people do usually like to chime in with an "oh yeah, that game is awesome!" but unlike your Final Fantasies, Chrono Triggers and Marios, E.V.O isn't brought up all that much.

The story is simple, you play as a small creature and you must evolve your way through various time periods to reach Eden and become Gaia's right hand man.  Eat your way through a bunch of fish, dinos, mammals and birds and get to her to win.  It's a simple premise but the plot is sort of secondary here, we're not here for story time, we're here to eat some smaller, weaker animals.

The game starts you off as a fish and you must bite a few creatures nearby to kill them and gain Evo Points. Once you have enough Evo Points you can open a menu that has a pretty high number of options (later on at least) and you must evolve your creature to bring up its stats so you can kill and eat more things to evolve even further.  As you do this, you'll eventually reach a boss and upon killing the boss you'll be teleported to the next age where you'll do it all over again but as a different animal instead.  Later on in the game it's possible to evolve in specific ways to get specific creatures but I never worked this out.  For example I know for a fact you can become a human at some point but I ended up finishing the game as a weird horse-lizard thing with massive fangs.

The game has a fair bit of jank to it though, with stiff controls and pretty awful jumping even with all the upgrades to make your jumps better but the game is so pathetically easy overall that it doesn't really feel like much of a problem.  Some of the bosses can be a bit annoying but doing an evolution fully restores your HP and there's usually an option that costs basically nothing so once you work this out dying is ALMOST impossible.

The other irritating thing is that whenever you enter a new age and become a new animal, your stats are decreased into oblivion so while in the previous section you had massive teeth and a billion HP, once that area is over your back to being a small rat with 5hp that does no damage to anything.  This means that you have to do some annoying grinding which brings down the pace of the game but once you get going again the fun comes back pretty quickly.

So despite its pretty glaring flaws E.V.O is a really good game that's very much worth checking out.  I don't think it's been released on anything so you may have to get dodgy about it but in my opinion, it's worth the effort.

Nintendo's Obsession with Faff

 

I've been slowly making my way through the big Switch releases to try and convince myself that I didn't waste my wife's money asking for it as a gift for my birthday with varying amounts of success but if there's one thread that goes through the big franchises I've played so far it's that Nintendo games are OBSESSED with faffing around.

Faffing around is a British term that means doing a whole bunch of shit that is ultimately a waste of time and it feels like with the Switch Nintendo put up a big poster in the lead developer office with the words "faffing around" in huge block capitals to constantly remind their teams what to focus on.

The first huge game I finished on the Switch was Breath of the Wild and I've commented plenty on how I feel about that one but there is A LOT of faffing in that game.  Searching around for weapons, searching around for korok seeds, pointless side quests, filling in the encyclopedia, cooking and much more all just feels like stupid bullshit to do for the sake of doing it.  In old Zelda games you just....went...and sure there were some side activities you could faff around with but in Breath it feels like the faff has become the focus.  Even the shrines feel like faff because they are so small and easy and once you get a couple of upgrades under your belt they become essentially pointless to even do unless you are a weirdo that wants to 100% it or something.

Mario Odyssey was the second game to showcase Nintendo's obsession with faffing around.  Most Mario games have had 120 collectibles spread out over a number of levels.  Well crafted and fun to play courses with a nice little McGuffin at the end to give you a dopamine hit when the jingle plays.  Odyssey on the other hand has A THOUSAND fucking moons and most of them involve faffing around.  Herd some sheep, guide a dog around to certain points, posses a thing, run around collecting coins, do children's puzzles.  It has so much more to get while somehow also having significantly less REAL content.  The actual moons that you have to get are actually quite fun and Odyssey sports some of the best 3D platforming I've ever played with but Jesus lord Christ in heaven is it padded to fuck with FAFF.

But the game that loves Faff more than a child loves its own mother is Fire Emblem.  Good LORD does this game love some faff.  Most of the Fire Emblem games I've played are just a linear series of missions where you and your army fight off the big bad.  The series is focused on what's important which is this SRPG combat and while there are things like support levels and stuff a lot of that was done ON the battlefield.  You'd have your big burly axe man walk up to the fast sword man and they would go "It's sure great to have such a good buddy by my side on the battlefield" and then it would play a jingle and some stats would go up.  3 Houses however has taken all that and turned the whole thing into a faffing around simulator.  Now you're a teacher in a school so you have to faff around with lessons, faff around on the school ground doing "quests' for students, faff around raising support levels by taking people out to lunch and tea time, faff around fishing and the list goes on and on and on.  But you can't just skip the faff and go to the combat because the faff is INTEGRAL to having a good party.  When you get to the combat it's great, I really enjoy the actual SRPG part of the SRPG I spent 6000 yen to play but it's everything in between that pisses me the fuck off.

Side content is cool and all, gives some extra distractions or an excuse to get stuff to make a character or party stronger but with some of these Switch titles Nintendo have gone WAY fucking overboard with it and now it feels like annoying padding rather than fun side-shows.  Bravely Default 2 comes out tomorrow and I'm hoping for a tight, well crafted RPG experience but my body is in fact ready for large amounts of faffing around.

Have the Waifus gone too far?

I'm doing two things in this post that I don't usually do.  The first is putting a stupid clickbait title because of COURSE the waifus haven't gone too far, they can never go too far.  The second is commenting on a thing that I have no experience of but the very concept of this franchise is too funny to not at least point out.

In Japan, gambling is illegal, you can't just walk into a casino and hopefully make a couple of beers worth of Yen in Blackjack because gambling for money is against the law.  Pachinko and Slot places are an exception to this because what you are doing in those places are trading tokens/balls for physical prizes.  We won't talk about the little tinted windows around the back but these places get around the issue by offering goods rather than cash.  There is however a few exceptions to this rule in the form of boat racing and horse racing.  I've never done it myself but as far as I'm aware, gambling for cash on these two things is totally fine.  Probably as a result of this, horse racing games are quite popular.  I was in a store the other day and saw an advert for the latest Winning Post game on PS4, just to give you an idea of how much this is still a thing.

So then yesterday a friend of mine sent me an image of Uma Musume: Pretty Derby, a game for the iPhone.  What I can gather from what he told me is that it's a visual novel/management game where you have to manage the girls to participate and win in horse races.  The kicker? the girls aren't the jockeys, they are THE HORSES THEMSELVES.  Fire the starting gun and watch as 12 anime as fuck waifus run down a track and bet to see which one of them is the fastest, the concept is hilarious.  What makes it even funnier is that the story behind the franchise is that the girls are actually reincarnated famous race horses from the past who have to train at an academy to become, not only good racers but pop stars as well.  

The most popular and well known version of this concept I think is Kantai Collection, a game where famous Japanese war ships were turned into anime schoolgirls and they must work together to fight a bunch of deep sea aliens or something, it's a trend that has been going on for a long long time and every time it never fails to make me laugh.

I am not commenting in this post on the quality of Uma Musume as a game or an anime as I have not seen them, but you can bet your ass that I will be checking it out.  Watch this space for a more detailed breakdown of this hilarious concept
 

The Xen Problem

 I think everybody knows what Half Life is, it's a game that needs no introduction.  If you don't know what Half Life is then I suggest you close this page and go play it right stat now because what the fuck is wrong with you? But no matter if your a die-hard fan or casual player I think almost everyone can agree that the games final area, Xen, is a gigantic pile of garbage and it would be more fun to eat a box of thumb tacks than play through this section.

The solid first person game play of Half Life takes a drastic change when you hit Xen.  Low gravity, sparse ammunition, flying alien babies, weird terrain and really on paper that doesn't actually sound so bad on paper but when you play it the experience is grueling.  Low gravity gives way to stupid, annoying first personal platforming with alien babies blasting you on all sides while you're trying to figure out where to go and how to not die.  The weird layout makes this a pain to get around and sometimes you aren't even sure if you're actually making progress or not.  Ammunition is sparse but enemies are plentiful so I hope you like using the Hive Hand because otherwise you're going to be struggling.  To top it all off as well you have to fight what is probably the most annoying boss in FPS game history, Nihilanth, a giant floating baby that will just teleport you into random jumping puzzles whenever the fuck it wants.

But I'm just talking about the original there.  The remake, Black Mesa, completely re-did Xen in an attempt to make it more enjoyable and I have never seen a developer fail at a goal with a remake as hard as Crowbar Collective failed with this.  Not only are all the old problems still there but they made Xen WAYYYY longer.  Not only is it longer, but it's also full of stupid switch and plug puzzles that bring the pace down to a snails pace.  There's even one extremely pointless bit where you have to deactivate 3 barriers by doing the same combat room over and over again.  We do have to give them credit though, the Nihilanth boss is significantly more fun in Black Mesa than it is in the original game, I can at least admit that was a welcome change.

Half Life has a massive legacy and for good reason but it's such a shame that it has to be tarnished by that absolutely fucking AWFUL final section.  Luckily though Valve realized what a terrible pile of shit Xen was and didn't include it in any of the sequels.  Hopefully it will stay that way if they ever decide to release Half Life 3

Sweet Home

 

Sweet Home for the NES has quite the bit of buzz surrounding it with it being a sort of inspiration for the Resident Evil franchise and finally I got to play it.  This is not to be confused with the recently released Sweet Home TV series on Netflix which is a Korean drama about a monster based post apocalypse, I made that mistake when looking through my listings but more on that another day.  

Sweet Home is an RPG about a group of people going into a haunted mansion to try and un-haunt it.  To do so you must solve a bunch of puzzles and fight a bunch of monsters gaining strength through levels along the way so you can exorcise the big bast ghost at the end.  It's a NES game for fucks sake, the plot isn't that involved.

What is quite involved however is the gameplay.  At the start of the game you have 5 characters, all of which you can name yourself.  Each one of those 5 characters has an item that is specific to them.  For example one guy has a lighter for opening paths, one guy has a medkit for curing ailments and one gal has a key for opening locked doors.  On top of that each character gets 2 free inventory slots and a weapon slot so managing equipment and puzzle McGuffins/healing is an integral part of the gameplay.  But, to make things just a little more intense, the game features perma-death.  So if one of your guys falls in battle, they are GONE, for good.  You won't find yourself stuck because the game provides regular versions of the character specific items so you can progress, but if that happens you are two inventory slots down, a weaker party AND you have to manage your shit even more meticulously than before.

The puzzles Sweet Home range from insultingly obvious to so obtuse I have no idea how the fuck you are supposed to solve them without a guide.  There's one bit in particular where you have to use the look command on a fountain and on the second or third try the fountain starts spurting blood which changes a thing for progression.  What I imagine most people do there is look at it once, decide it doesn't do anything and then get stuck for HOURS until they look at a guide and find out they have to spam the look command a few more times for it to work.

Overall though Sweet Home is a pretty good game and you can see the little aspects of it that were lifted for Resident Evil, almost like looking at the rings on an old tree stump.  The inventory, the way items are managed (identical to RE0 pretty much) and even the little animation that plays when you unlock a door for the first time.  Yeah, it's got some jank to it but it's not that long either so go give it a try. 

The Misguided "Horror" of Dead Space

 

Dead Space is one of those games that reminds me just how old I'm getting.  I still remember buying this, in 2008 when it first came out as a first year at university.  Going to the local GAME (UK Chain of game retailers), picking it up and rushing back to my dorms to slam it in my 360 and play it through almost start to finish in a single go.  Despite the fact that I remember having a good time with it and despite the fact that I still had a fun time with it on stream recently, it still BAFFLES me to this day that various people I know personally and a number of media outlets will praise this game for being scary.

Before I start talking about ineffective the horror is I do have to at least admit that the idea of making limbs the primary target for weapons rather than standard headshots is a least somewhat interesting.  In most games, carefully placing shots to the noggin is part of the core skill set required for success but in Dead Space it asks you to instead aim for the flailing limbs of the monsters instead.  Luckily, with the protagonist Isaac being an engineer, a lot of his weapons come in the form of tools for cutting stuff with, so in this regard it's a nice melding of story and gameplay.  

But that's about the only nice thing I have to say about Dead Space.  While it is a competently made third person over the shoulder horror shooter which every bloody action-horror game has been since RE4, it is probably one of the least frightening horror titles in recent memory.  

The most striking problem with the horror in Dead Space is the enemies.  The first time you see a Necromorph wildly running for you it can be a little intense while you try and line up your shots to its shoulders and thighs to blast its appendages off but throughout the entire game there's maybe like, 6 flavors of Necromorph and they are ENDLESSLY repeated through the entire game.  So the first encounter with each type might get you but by the end of the game they become an annoyance more than anything else.  Another stupid "thing" you have to clean up before you can carry on following your little blue line.

This then leads into the second issue of the horribly designed areas that you must wade through as you embark on your adventure through the Ishimura.  Sure it all looks very nice and it's trying very hard to be atmospheric and oppressive but the overall design of the place is so obvious that it sucks any potential impact out of a potential scare.  A long corridor with a vent or a dead body at the end? Yep, that's an ambush.  A large room with a big door leading to your objective on the other side? Ambush or boss encounter for sure.  It's trying very hard to surprise you but the level design is so uninspired and lacking that there may as well be big neon signs flashing bright red with "THIS WAY TO NEXT COMBAT ENCOUNTER".  There's one point where a big tentacle grabs you and tries to pull you in a hole and the first time, unless your paying extra special attention, which you probably aren't, this is actually fairly effective.  But they do it again later on and it's so obviously signposted that you end up rolling your eyes as you get your Plasma Cutter out and prepare to wrestle with the shitty aiming.

But the worst thing, the thing that sucks all tension out of the game entirely is ammo and health management.  Resident Evil 1 for example is another game that I don't find particularly scary either because who the fuck in 2021 find slow shambly zombies scary after the complete over saturation of THAT genre?  But the game still holds a good place in the survival horror genre because while artistically it's not particularly scary, mechanically (at least your first time in) Resident Evil is intense as fuck.  Sure, you're playing as a highly trained S.T.A.R.S member and sure there's plenty of weapons lying around but ammo for those weapons is scarce.  It's all well and good having a grenade launcher that shoots acid but it's not much use to you against a hunter if you don't have any acid rounds for it.  Even the simple act of saving in that game could generate some intense emotions because "oh fuck what if I don't find any more ink ribbon soon" and this is an effective form of horror that's basically exclusive to this medium.  Dead Space however fucks all this up by tailoring drops and containers to whatever you are holding or whatever state you are in.  The game will only give you ammo for whatever guns you are currently holding with very little exception so if you are only carrying the plasma cutter, you can guarantee you'll be swimming in plasma cutter ammo for basically the entire game.  When the game does give you random ammo on the rare occasion? just go to the store, sell it for credits and buy MORE plasma cutter ammo. In fact, despite Dead Space having like 6 guns to choose from, you may as well never use anything BUT the plasma cutter.  It's strong, fast, has cheap ammo and is effective against all flavors of necromorph.  The game also does this with health so as long as you don't get one shot by a big machine you basically cannot die from normal combat.  

Yet despite all these massive glaring failures in both artistry and game design, the game still got 9/10s from critics across the board and millions of people signing it's praises about how they were shitting their pants real hard.  Maybe you should see a doctor about those weak bowels hm? 

But that's not to say it's a bad game, it's a fun game and nothing quite beats Isaac's legendarily strong stompin' legs but to this day I have no idea how anyone find this franchise scary.  Granted I haven't played much of the sequels but it seemed to lean more into the action focus than the horror focus and to be honest, that's fine, it was way better at being an action game anyway.

Tau Vs Cole Phelps: Masterminds Clash

 

Last night I started playing L.A. Noire as part of my viewer request segment on the stream.  I'm usually not taken with games from Rockstar if I'm being honest and I didn't think I'd enjoy this one that much, but after 4 hours I'm pleasantly surprised.  I basically had to rip myself from the stream last night because I was so engrossed in playing detective.

I won't comment concretely on the quality of the game just yet because I'm still pretty early on in the story I think but there's something quite annoying about this game that really stands out in a game about being a detective.  You may think that the goal of this game is to use clues and information to work out who did whatever crime your working on but that's not really true.  Your job as the player is to work out what the hell Cole, the main character, is thinking and make sure that the answers you give to a situation match what's going through his mind.

For example, there's a case very early on where you find a car crashed an abandoned in a train yard.  The car is full of blood but there's no body.  In the trunk of the car you find a receipt for the sale of a live pig and by the car you find a bloody pipe and a dropped wallet with, what you assume, is the victims address.  So fine, maybe its a murder or maybe something else is going on.  The next step of this case is to go to the victims house and tell the wife that her husband has been killed...

Now hold on there, Cole

There's no fucking body, I don't KNOW that the husband is dead.  It MIGHT be the victims blood, it MIGHT be someone else's blood or, for all we know, it might be pigs blood.  But no, because Cole thinks the man is dead, I'm not allowed to explore any other avenue, I HAVE to go to the house and tell the wife her husband is dead.  When exploring the house you find evidence of an unhappy marriage, separate bedrooms, train tickets to Seattle and, most damning, a missing pipe from a boiler outside the house that matches the pipe at the scene.  The wife seems to cooperate and tells you about a shifty friend of the victim.  If the guy is dead, this guy might have something to do with it, so down to a bar to go find him and ask him a few questions.

So you get to the bar, ask the guy some stuff and find out that while on trips to Seattle he's fallen in love with another woman and this guy used the pig to "help him out"

OH OK! I GET IT! This guy crashed a car and bludgeoned the live pig in order to fake this dudes death so that he can escape to Seattle and spend his time with his new lover.  So Cole asks the obvious question of where is this guy, and in response you get a sort of roundabout answer where's like "I can't say my hands are tied".  When I pressed the Doubt button on this dialogue, Cole immediately gets mad and starts accusing the guy of bloody murder.  Me as the player meanwhile am facepalming at my monitor screaming "No Cole you fucking idiot, he killed the Pig, we just want the location of the guy, HES NOT FUCKING DEAD"

This sequence ends and you tail the guy to his apartment, find him with the "victim" and then make your arrest and beat the chapter.  Yeah great, but I was penalized at multiple points during the case because my train of logic of the guy not being dead didn't match with Coles' logic of there being a murder.  It's annoying when you get told your wrong during the investigation because your logic doesn't match the game, only to be COMPLETELY CORRECT come the conclusion.  It's an irritating disconnect between character and player and it's exasperated by the fact that the only options you get during an interrogation are Truth, Doubt and Lie and the difference between Doubt and Lie is pretty fucking abstract. 

This isn't a problem exclusive to L.A. Noire.  Personally I find it most common in horror games with no combat where you'll be running from whatever it is through hundreds of rooms and corridors FILLED with blunt and sharp objects that would make an effective weapon but you aren't allowed to pick them up because the dumbass you're controlling isn't allowed to.  Only in L.A. Noires case the problem is made way more obvious because you're supposed to be solving puzzles but you're sort of limited in your approach by Cole's smooth brain.

But despite how much I just wrote about it, I'm still really enjoying the game and I'm VERY excited for another session.  You can come check out the rest of my playthrough and watch me berate Cole for being a dipshit some more a www.twitch.tv/taurinensis 

Shin Megami Tensei 4

Hoy!
 

I just finished this game and I had to rush to my computer and type out this post because HOLY SHIT is it good.  If you need a monster collecting game on the go, put the Pokemon shit away and get yourself some of this hotness

The game follows the adventures of Flynn (or whatever you chose to name him), a strapping young man who has come to the prosperous city of Mikado to become a Samurai.  After doing a sort of test to see if a mystic gauntlet will allow him to become a Samurai, he joins the ranks of the soldiers sworn to protect the people from demons that dwell in a cave just under the town called Naraku.  It doesn't take long faffing around in there though before OOPS! You're actually in a post apocalyptic Tokyo and you must explore the ruined city and continue an adventure that will end up shaping the entire world.

 Game play wise, for people familiar with SMT, it's more SMT goodness albeit slightly easier compared to previous entries.  The game does however have an expert mode that, at time of writing, I have not tried yet due to it being locked behind a game clear but I suppose for real die-hard fans the challenge is there.  For those not familiar with SMT, the game is sort of like a demonic Pokemon where you run around, recruit demons and use them to fight enemies and bosses.  To get demons you have to negotiate with them, answering their questions or giving them money and items to convince them to join you.  From there you can also fuse demons together to create newer, stronger demons which you are going to want to do if you don't want to make the game incredibly hard for yourself.

Usually here, with most SMT games I'd be warning you about the games difficulty as this series is sort of notorious (outside of the Persona spin-off franchise) for being quite difficult but if you were looking for a place to start, 4 is a good bet as it has a weird reverse difficulty curve.  The first parts of the game in Naraku are tough as nails with certain enemies and bosses just destroying you and your demons.  But after a while the game starts to get easier and easier.  For me personally, I was so pumped up and overpowered that the final boss could barely touch me and even when he did get a few good hits in I was able to fully heal it off in a single turn.   

The game is also pretty replayable with it's 3 (technically 4 but one of them is for little babies) endings.  The game will pose a number of questions and situations at you and depending on what choices you make you will either go down the Law or Chaos path which have different bosses and such during each.  For people willing to look at a guide you also have the choice to do a True Neutral path which involves doing a bunch of side quests and making some very specific choices at very specific times which is a good goal to go for on a second run I feel. 

As far as criticisms go, of course I have to shit on the game for locking the expert mode behind a game clear.  I'm VERY familiar with this series and the games normal mode after the opening area was pretty much a joke.  Probably perfect for newcomers but for a seasoned veteran it's very easy so if the story doesn't sweep you up like it swept me up, then the game MAY get boring for you. Also I can't quite place my finger on exactly why but I hate the interface for demon fusion in this entry.  I just find it clunky and annoying to deal with.  My final big criticism is that the "Challenge Quests" are extremely uninspired and boring.  I was trying to be diligent and do as many as possible at first but after a while I got so sick of them that I just ignored them entirely.  Due to this it would EXTRA piss me off when you try to do a demon negotiation and instead of doing that they would waste your time with "hey guy wanna do a quest for me?" but once you accept it they stop bothering you about it so its a minor issue really.

Seriously though, if you're into these kind of monster collecting games I HIGHLY recommend SMT4, it's one of the best of it's kind and probably the best game I've ever played on the 3DS.  So stop wasting time and go hunt some demons already

Hellblade: Senuas Sacrifice

 

This weekend I played through Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice from start to finish on stream and it's another one of those games that completely baffles me because it seems to be rated pretty highly among the gaming masses and yet I feel that unless I play Outlast 2 again, Hellblade is a strong contender for this worst game I will play this year.

The story follows Senua going into hell to save the soul of her lover Dillion.  That's it, that's the entire plot.  There's a bunch of other shit going on with Senua's "mental illness" that I'll talk about later, about her being blamed for a plague and abuses from her father but as far as plot objectives go, the only thing to do is go to hell and save the soul of Dillion and bring his ass back to the world of living. 

Game play wise Hellblade is an absolute snorefest.  Most of the game revolves around "match the shape" puzzles usually in the form of locked doors but sometimes taking the form of broken stairways or bridges.  In the first form you come to a locked door with some runes on them, you study the runes and then walk around the environment until an outline of that rune appears in the middle of the screen.  When that happens you hold down R2 and pan the camera around until you line up something in the environment with the shape of the rune, rinse and repeat 2 or 3 times and then you go through the door and do it all again.  The second type is exactly the same but you just have to look at weird floating bits of debris from a certain angle so the thing you need to cross looks repaired and then it magically repairs itself.  I am not joking by the way when I say that this is EVERY. PUZZLE. IN. THE. GAME.  When you aren't doing that, you are holding up on the joystick and listening to stupid dialogue as Senua walks or jogs VERY SLOWLY around.

Sometimes though things are broken up by a little bit of combat and while the combat has a sort of heavy, satisfying feel to it, ultimately it's extremely boring.  The best way to imagine Hellblade combat is to first imagine the combat from Punch Out on the NES, adding a half assed dodge roll mechanic and then removing every single enemy special attack, that about sums it up.  Enemies will walk slowly towards you and then attack, you can dodge literally every attack by mashing the dodge button, no timing required.  After they whiff, you make a couple of light or heavy hits and you repeat this process until they fall over.  After fighting the crow dude you get a mirror that lets you "focus" which slows down the enemies and lets you go on a big killing spree until it's over.  If you do manage to take a few hits, you can also use focus to fully recover and thin out enemy numbers.  The first few encounters are sort of fun but by the time you've killed the first major boss you'll probably be begging for some combat variety and you definitely aren't getting any.

But the real reason I hate this game isn't the lackluster game play or the crap plot, but for the fact that it's incredibly dishonest.

After the first main combat encounter the game tells you "every time you fall in combat the curse will creep up Senua's arm, and when it reaches her head, all progress will be lost", meaning that if you die too often, the game is going to delete your save file.  Well guess what? It's not fucking true.  You can die as many times as you damn well like in Hellblade and sure as shit, the curse on her arm WILL creep up towards her head but it will never get there.  It gets about as high as her shoulder and then just....stops.  You're in no real danger at all.  I've heard people try to justify this with "but it's a game about mental illness and it's supposed to make you feel some of the anxiety she does blah blah blah I'm a huge dipshit that takes PR talk 100% seriously"  It didn't make me FEEL anything, I don't play games with the intention of letting the enemies or environmental hazards kill me.  You don't need to LIE to me to try and create some fake-tension, there would have been plenty of that naturally if you'd just made a competent game, but ya didn't, so all I got was boredom and anger from that stupid warning.

Leading me finally into the theme of "mental illness", a touchy and very serious subject for sure and something that should be treated with respect.  A subject matter that, if done well, may shine some light on what it's like for sufferers of mental illness for people like me who have never really struggled with it.  Well they didn't do that and I think the best thing to illustrate that was that I had a few people in my chat, people I know personally, people who I know HAVE had some kind of mental health problem and do you know how they described the depiction of mental health in Hellblade? "Insulting"

The game makes such a huge deal of how much effort went into the research and depiction of mental health for the game with a big warning at the start and the credit for the "Mental Health Advisor" being the first credit you see at the start of the game.  Well even an uninformed idiot like me can tell that it's a shitty depiction of mental health because what happens near the end of the game is that Senua goes down a hole to get Dillion's skull that she dropped, finds Garm, the Norse guardian of Hell's gate, kills him and then just sort of gets over it all.  I guess not fully but all the "psychosis" that plagues Senua throughout the game is just gone, poof, just like that, after the Garm fight.  Like I said I'm not expert on mental health issues but I'm pretty sure they don't just recover like that because you killed a big dog.  It's not the fucking flu or a mystic curse that just goes away with a magic spell, it's deep seated trauma and it just vanishes because she put a big glowy blue sword in a dogs face.  

Personally, and this is just a theory (A GAME THE..no sorry), that Ninja Theory put the mental health aspect of the plot at the forefront of the game in order to deflect criticism.  You've seen it before with other media, I think the most famous example of which being the new Ghostbusters movie.  "You can't hate the new Ghostbusters film otherwise you're a sexist".  This is just "This games about mental health so you can't hate it or you're being grossly ableist(?)" A shit ploy to sway peoples opinions, a way of stopping people saying anything bad about your boring, walking simulator-esque shit fest for fear of being seen as looking down on the mentally ill.  Maybe I'm being cynical, or maybe Ninja Theory are a bunch of pathetic fucks who haven't made anything better than a 6/10 their entire lives.

Cynical or not, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is an AWFUL game.  Don't let the pretty Unreal Engine graphics fool you into thinking it's an experience worth having because it isn't.  It's a big turd.  A very polished and pretty turd, but still a turd nonetheless