999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

 

Chunsoft, or I guess Spike Chunsoft as they are now known, are a developer I really like.  They've been around since the 80s but I was really made aware of them in the mid 2010s when I got my hands on a very cheap copy of Kamaitachi no Yoru for the Super Nintendo.  Kamaitachi isn't really a "game" per se, it's more of a choose your own adventure novel slammed into a SNES cartridge.  There is a game element to it, the process of combing through the story to deduce who did the murder that takes place at the start of the game but gameplay consists entirely of reading through long passages of text with very little actual input from the player.  It sounds boring as fuck when I write it like that but Chunsoft are quite adept at weaving a decent mystery and so the game is carried by strong writing and some clever twists and turns.

Fast forward from the Super Nintendo to 2009 and Chunsoft are still at it with the first entry in what is now known as the Zero Escape series, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.  No longer just a sound novel, 999 has graduated into a full on visual novel with character art and even, if you're playing the PC re-release like I was, voice acting.  The original version didn't have the VA so its a little closer to its roots in that regard, I suppose and the VA in both English and Japanese is sort of crap so maybe the DS is the way to go.

The gameplay is pretty simple with it consisting mainly of reading the story and making choices at various key moments.  Unlike something like Kamaitachi though, 999 splits its talky, novelly sections up with point and click adventure segments where you poke around a room and solve puzzles.  The puzzles are mostly pretty easy and getting stuck usually means that you've missed some clickable aspect of the environments you're in but they are a welcome addition either way.

They story is sort of hard to talk about in a review like this because the story is all there really is to this game.  If I go into any detail with it and spoil it then there's no real reason for you to go play it and I DO want you to go play this game, it's good.  To summarize in a not quite accurate way, the game follows 9 people who have been kidnapped onto a sinking ship and have 9 hours to get out or else die in a watery grave.  Doesn't sound too complicated until you factor in that each victim has a numbered bracelet which, through some simple math, allows them to access the numbered doors in the ship which block their escape routes.  The other problem with those bracelets is that they will send a signal to the bomb in their gut if they fuck up and kill them.  So think of it kind of like anime Saw.  That doesn't quite do it justice because writer Kotaro Uchikoshi was fucking ON something (good connotation) when he wrote this game but it's an easy comparison to make.

My one problem, and I will put a spoiler for one of the endings here so stop reading and fuck off to play 999 if you haven't already, is that mistakes in this game feel undeserved and bullshit.  For example, I stumbled into one of the endings where everyone gets murdered at the end but the choices that you make in 999 don't give any indication as to that being the path that you're on.  In Kamaitachi, when I got one of the many bad endings for that game it felt like my fault.  A bad decision somewhere down the line, a misunderstating of the facts.  But in 999 pretty much all the choices you make are "pick a door".  Imagine some guy comes up to you in the street and says "pick a card", so you choose one at random and then he shoots your dog.  You had no way to know that the card you picked was the dog murder card, you'd be pissed.

Thankfully the game doesn't twist and turn quite as much as other Chunsoft games and you can use a flowchart to jump to any previously viewed point in the story to make the other choice so I guess 999 actually ends up being more book-like than the SNES games despite the point and click editions.

Either way, it's a good game, worth playing and it's got a decent steam version that comes bundled with the sequel that, at time of writing, I have never got around to playing.  I'd probably suggest the DS version over the PC version just because I have fond memories of curling up in bed with my DS, a hot beverage and a good mystery but there's nothing overtly wrong with the port so just get comfy in your gaming chair if need be.

Mobile Games Need to Stop Lying

I don't hate mobile gaming as much as I used to.  Certain titles like Shin Megami Tensei Dx2 and Dragon Quest Rivals have changed my opinion on mobile gaming being a complete steaming pile of dogshit.  I'm not ashamed to admit now that sometimes in my downtime I'll go sniffing around the app store for a new RPG to have a go on or maybe find some kind of rhythm game that's just packed wall to wall with anime girls.

It's also not uncommon to see adverts for these games on social media.  Scroll through your Twitter or Facebook feeds and you're bound to see at least one advert for some kind of mobile game.  One thing I can't stand though is when these adverts flat out lie to you about the content of the game.  There was one I remember quite vividly for a game called Z Girls or something, some town building waifu game with zombies which in it's ads used a lot of images of Vocaloid characters.  It's not uncommon for some mobile RPGs to do vocaloid crossovers but these game was completely devoid of any of that.  It was just putting the characters on the ad to try and entice certain fans into thinking their shit game was worth playing.  The absolute worst offender was some Pay2Win menu based Romance of the Three Kingdoms strategy game that was using footage from some goddamn Dynasty Warriors game in its adverts.  How do they even get away with shit like that?!

Generally speaking if you see a game that has these kind of ads they are usually shit anyway and are trying to use the misinformation in the ad to at least get a download and bump themselves up a listing on the app store.  There are quite a few games however that don't lie to you and are actually pretty good such as Azur Lane and South Park Phone Destroyer.

Let's be honest though, if you really want some decent mobile gaming you're probably better off just buying a DS, Vita or Switch.

Etrian Odyssey: Not as Hard As You Think

Very recently I replayed and finished a game called Etrian Odyssey on the DS.  The game was released in 2007 and is a dungeon crawler where the player is tasked with entering a labyrinth and solving its mysteries as they progress down 25 floors of danger.  The game came out in 2007 so this isn't going to be a review but I want to address something people have always said about it's difficulty.

Etrian Odyssey can be a challenging game to a new player, you have a number of classes to pick from who each have their own unique skills.  Then once you've made your team you have to gear them out, go into the dungeon and start to get them to a higher level.  Once you level up you get points to put into a skill and the lists of skills are so long that it would surely overwhelm a lot of new players, it sure as hell did for me my first time round.

So the things I hear the most regarding difficulty is that the encounters can be tough and dying makes you lose a lot of progress.  Well the second one might be true, since save points inside the dungeon are quite few and far between death can me a pretty hefty setback depending on how long you were exploring but encounters, even the special enemies and bosses become disgustingly easy once you get your head round the characters skills.

In my replay I managed to remember all the points required for the best skills and I realized that a great deal of the skills on the characters list are completely useless.  For example, the games version of the warrior has all these skills called things like "stunner" or some whirlwind thing that hits adjacent enemies but it's all crap.  Max out the attack, HP and All Slash skills and he can deal with most of the standard encounters alone.  Another example would be the survivalist who only really needs one skill called Apollon which does massive damage after 3 turns to a single foe.  You can take such a massive chunk of health from a boss in such a short time that the fight becomes almost trivial.  Couple that with a medic who has a maxed Salve 2 and the the game becomes almost too easy.

Granted, you would never know to do all that shit the first time round but I went back to this game with memories of having a hard time but my replay was just pathetically easy.  Even the final boss stood absolutely no chance and I beat him stood in line for a ride at a theme park and barely paying attention.

So what I discovered essentially is that a number of the skills are a bit unbalanced and break the combat a little bit and once you figure out what those skills are the game becomes a cake walk.  I'd recommend Etrian Odyssey since its a great little RPG and fans of dungeon crawl games might get a kick out of the whole draw your own map feature using the DS's lower screen.  It's become a big series too and I've not played a lot of the later ones so I'm curious to see if the later titles are as easily broken as this one.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin

This is a game that has been part of my collection for a very long time and beaten on multiple occasions but very recently I just went and beat it again so I thought I'd talk about it a little bit.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin is a DS game that, like most Castlevania games post Symphony of the Night uses the Metroid style rather than original Castlevania style.  I'm not saying that as a bad thing, I like metroidvania a lot but it just is what it is.

Portrait of Ruin being on the DS had to have some kind of gimmick that set it apart from other titles in the franchise.  For example Dawn of Sorrow had you drawing seals on the screen to finish bosses and other things but the gimmick here doesn't involve the touch screen of the system at all.  Portrait of Ruins thing was that you had two characters that you could freely switch between.  These two characters where Johnathon and Charlotte and they both have their own strengths and weaknesses that you must use in order to overcome Dracula's castle.

Except the vast majority of the game isn't spent dealing with Dracula at all, oh no.  At some point some tosser called Brauner came along and sealed Dracula away using magic evil paintings.  Actually, I'm not actually sure he was trying to seal him away, I beat it last month and I didn't really give a crap about the story but it's something to that effect.  What this means in terms of game play is that you not only have to deal with Dracula's castle but with the insides of Brauner's paintings.  Of course, once you deal with him Dracula comes along to try and ruin your day but that's only at the very end of the game when you're on course for the best ending.

The rest is standard metroidvania fair of finding weapons, levelling up, exploring the castle and gaining abilities that help you get through all the walled off bits.  There is also a ghost sitting in a room near the castle entrance who will give you quests and completing these quests will yield various rewards.  There are also a few online features I never used and extra characters you can use once you beat the game so there is quite a lot of content here.

That said, this one is far from perfect and for some reason the little niggles in this one get to me a lot more than any other Castlevania game.  For example, Johnathon spends the whole game carrying around the Vampire Killer, the legendary whip that's been used since the series began.  However, because he's not a Belmont they make a big deal about how he can't use it without special help and if he does use it it'll consume his soul or some shit.  However, once you do unlock the vampire killer's power it has absolutely no adverse effects and is probably the best weapon in the game.  It's such a major plot point but the games lets you swing that shit around like any other weapon with no repercussions, it seems a little silly.

The double character thing also seems like a bit of a waste since my last through consisted of using Johnathon and nothing but unless I needed magic for something specific or she had to help me push something.  Charlotte is pretty much weaker in every way and while I'm sure there's some hardcore player out there who could argue the benefits of Charlotte, for a guy like me she's fairly useless.

The worst thing about this game though is that it goes and pulls a Silent Hill 4 but repeating the same 4 or 5 levels twice just with slightly stronger enemies the second time round.  It's fine because unlike SH4 the core game play is really fun but I do wish that they had a bunch unique portraits to go through rather than just 4 or 5 repeated.

While I personally think Portrait of Ruin is a really good game I'd find it hard to recommend it to someone who wasn't a Castlevania fan.  If you were looking to get into the whole metroidvania thing or you came off Symphony and wanted to try something else, go play Aria of Sorrow or Order of Ecclesia, it's like this one but way better.  Not that this is bad, just go enjoy the REALLY good ones first.

Technology Makes Me Feel Old

I'm 24 years old and I feel bad saying that I feel old.  I have friends who are in their 30s and beyond who would scoff at the idea of me saying I feel old but I don't give a shit, I feel old.

I started gaming when I was 4 with the Sega Megadrive and I got into my gaming history right away taking an interest in old home computers (with proper floppy discs) and older systems before eventually moving onto the more modern stuff.  It's only been 20 years since I started this grand hobby which really isn't all that much time except technology moves so fucking fast that it's much easier to be aware of your own age if you're into things such as games or computers.

It doesn't feel like all that long ago I was sat at home being absolutely awestruck by 2D games such as Sonic the Hedgehog or Donkey Kong Country 2.  But before I knew it I was sitting in front of my computer watching trailers with my friend for the DS, a PORTABLE system that had fucking 3D graphics and that blew my god damn mind.  Now look at where we stand, graphics out the wazoo and games that can be bought and downloaded off the Internet in just a few clicks.  Portable systems that have not only stupidly good visuals but fancy gimmicks such as touch screens and AR cards to make anime girls dance across your desk space.

I think a lot of people take technology for granted but if you stop and think about it, it makes you feel really fucking old.  I still remember when playing a game on the Internet was a big fucking deal, it was an event back then.  The idea of being able to play with someone who wasn't directly sat next to me made my head spin.  Nowadays being online is no biggie and a lot of games won't function or have features locked out if you don't have a constant Internet connection.

It's not just games either, if you think about anything electronic it'll give you that sense of age.  I work as a teacher and I was doing a lesson using a DVD.  It then struck me that all of my students wouldn't have a fucking clue what a VHS tape is.  I remember back when I was doing my A-Levels (which doesn't feel so long ago) and getting excited when the teacher would break out those old black tapes because it meant I could goof off for a bit.  I'm sure that same feeling is happening to today's students but it's when a teacher whips out a DVD rather than those old black rectangles.

I'm not all that old, deep down I know that, but fuck if being into games and electronics doesn't make you feel your age.

The Most Bullshit Game Mechanics I've Ever Seen

Recently I've been working my way though a huge backlog of DS games that I've had since I first got the damn thing and this has now resulted in me playing the above piece of shit.

I call it a piece of shit because I'm about an hour in and already it's found a few ways to REALLY irritate me, but I'm going to give it more of a chance before it write it off completely.  I thought I'd just take a moment to describe two mechanics in this game that are SO STUPID that they give me headaches.

1) Experience/Items

This is the first thing that I noticed and I can't help feel like the mechanic was introduced just to pad out the game.  When you are walking around the map you can change between a combat mode and a "virtue" mode.  When you are in combat mode you earn 0 EXP but gain items that you can sell and whatnot to earn gold and when you are in virtue mode you gain EXP and no items.

This is the dumbest shit I've ever seen because now it means I have to do everything twice and it pretty much guarantees the fact that I have to grind.  I have to fight all the monsters once in Combat Mode to get all the items and equipment I need and then AGAIN in virtue mode to make sure I'm a high enough level to fight whatever monsters are coming at me next.

Why can't the games just give me items and exp together?! Why do I gotta do all this crap?

But that's not the dumbest shit, the dumbest shit is....

2) Running

The reason why the running mechanic is so bullshit can be summed up in a short sentence.

RUNNING DRAINS YOUR FUCKING HEALTH

Running is something that most people want to be doing in RPGs.  The walk speed of a RPG protagonist is like someone trying to run the marathon while having concrete shoes on after being shot in the knees with Dirty Harry's Magnum.  I can't think of a single RPG where I haven't just slammed on the run button and never let go.

But not in this game, running slowly ticks down your HP so you really don't want to be doing too much of that.  To make matters worse, the walk speed of the characters feels EVEN SLOWER than your average RPG protagonists so it's even more bullshit.  I'm getting pissed off just wandering around the first fucking area of the game, I can't imagine what it's going to be like when I get into some bigger areas/dungeons.

So if I want to run around, that means I have to spend MORE time grinding out items so I have the money to buy recovery shit (because MP costs on heal spells are also stupidly high for no reason) and I have a feeling that by the time I do the first significant event I'm going to be about 8 hours in.

That's it, 2 of the dumbest things I've even seen in a video game

But I'm not giving up on Lunar Genesis
I'm not letting this shit beat me!

Getting Excited For Murdered: Soul Suspect

It's not very often that I get excited for upcoming games much any more and I haven't seen all that much of the game I'm about to be talking about but never the less I'm still very excited for it.

For anyone who is less in the know than I am, Murdered: Soul Suspect is a game coming out very soon developed by Square Enix Japan and Airtight Games (apparently, at time of writing, it has already been released in North America).  From what I know about the game it's about a cop who is killed at the start and it is up to him as a ghost to solve his own murder so that he may move on to the after life.

While that is a really interesting premise the main reason I'm so excited for this game is because it reminds me ever so slightly of something else....

That's right! Goddamn, motherfuckin' Ghost Trick on DS! This is easily one of the best games on the DS and it basically shares the same plot as Murdered: Soul Suspect so if they are even just a little bit similar, Soul Suspect is gearing up to be a bloody good game.

Ghost Trick was very much a puzzle game where Soul Suspect appears to be more of an adventure so it'll be interesting to see how square takes basically the same premise and runs it in a different direction. 

So for anyone waiting for Soul Suspect to come out or for anyone who doesn't have the money to throw down on a brand new release, go find and play Ghost Trick.  It's a wonderful little puzzle game with a great plot and some of the best graphics I've seen on the DS, everyone should try this game.

Then we can all hop on Soul Suspect together and hopefully have another great, ghostly murder mystery game to have fun with!

The Problem With Metroidvania

Today I polished off a replay of Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia and really there is this huge glaring problem with the whole "metroidvania" thing that I feel the need to express my opinion on because I'm a bit of a self absorbed twat.

Anyway, the first thing to mention is that I fucking love these games.  Aria of Sorrow being my personal favourite, but really I love new school "metriodvania" as much as I love old school side scrolling Castlevania.

So if I love these games so much, what could the problem possibly be?  Well let's think about Metroid for a moment since they are quite similar in game play.  In Metroid you explore a large 2D world, collecting powerups and special abilities in order to move forward, basically the same as new school Castlevania right?  Well the difference between the two games is that every single power up in Metroid feels useful in some way.  A life boost or a missile boost is always welcome, while in Castlevania not everything you get is very good.

In fact, while I was playing Order of Ecclesia I was collecting all the different glyphs that can be used as weaponry, but pretty much through the whole game I stuck to the same 3 and didn't really have much trouble at all.  I would constantly find new weapons, Armour and accessories throughout the game but I would end up ignoring most of them just because what I was currently using was a better anyway.

This problem really affects the game play sometimes because exploring starts to feel like a bit of a chore after a while.  I don't care about searching 100% of a map for that extra item or chest because I know that I'll end up not using it anyway.  I did explore 100% of every map because I'm a bit OCD like that, but your normal player might just get sick of being given sub-par "power ups" and just sack the whole exploring thing and just make a dash for the boss room.

Still, there is plenty of verity in the Castlevania equipment lists so you can always play pretty much exactly how you want, which is a plus.  To me these problems aren't game breaking, just a minor annoyance but I can imagine for some it really turns them off these kind of games.

The Phoenix Wright Movie

So last night I was sat around watching TV with the family and we end up being engrossed in this Japanese court room drama called Legal High.  Legal High is an extremely light hearted and somewhat ridiculous drama about lawyers and if you could compare it to anything else it would be Phoenix Wright.  That's when it struck me that last year (I think) Phoenix Wright got it's own movie adaptation so I hunted it down an gave it a watch.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (or Gyakuten Saiban 逆転裁判 as it's known in Japan) is a series of mystery solving video games that are half visual novel and half point and click adventure.  You play as Phoenix Wright, an up and coming defence lawyer who takes on various cases for people who have been wrongly accused of something that's usually murder.  You spend half the game trotting around various locations talking to people and collecting evidence and the other half of the game in the courtroom having a sort of evidence war with the prosecutor.

Now 9 times out of 10, video game movie adaptations are a pile of complete wank, but Phoenix Wright is actually pretty good.  If there is one thing that I can say about this movie, it's that for the most part, it stays faithful to the games.  The story follows the I think the second and final cases from the first game but they do a good job of setting everything up so if you haven't played the games you'll still be able to follow the murder mystery.

The characters are well acted and the costume and makeup work is really really good.  It's not completely perfect with Dick Gumshoe being a little bit too thin and competent for what I'm used to and Maya not quite matching her in game personality 100%, but it's not changed enough to the point to be offensive.  The core character is still there and when it's backed up by costume design that would make even the best cosplayers green with envy it's a lot of fun to watch.

They also do a good job with the camera work trying their best to mimic the shots that you would see from the game.  Granted the actors do move around a bit more than they would in the video games but if it was just 3 people behind desks talking and slamming tables it wouldn't really be all that good for a movie.

Really it's the care that was taken to make this movie resemble the games as close as possible is what makes it so good.  If you're a fan then pretty much everything is here and you'll feel really familiar with all the characters right off the bat.  All the key scenes are there too including the infamous cross examination of a fucking parrot so you there aren't any points where you'll feel frustrated because key points from the games are excluded from the movie.

Finally, the movie does take some liberties with the setting a little bit.  The courtroom has this steampunky projector system that they use to present evidence with.  I see why they did it but it just seems out of place within the setting.  Also there are parts of the movie that seem a bit dark and grim where they shouldn't be such as the visiting room in the prison.  In the movie it's a really dark, dank and horrible place but it's never shown in such a way in the games.  Also the shoehorning in of the police mascot was a little silly but it didn't really ruin anything.

So to round off, Phoenix Wright is quite frankly, the best video game movie that exists right now to my knowledge.  If you're a fan go watch it, you'll get a kick out of it as you see all your favourite parts from the first game acted out.  If you're not a fan, go watch it anyway since you'll still be able to follow it and it's a pretty good murder mystery movie if not a little bit on the silly side.

A Free Idea to Nintendo

I had a rant planned for today, but I'm in a stupidly good mood so I'm going to write something that's probably really stupid instead.

Right, if you owned a Gamecube then you may remember that piece of gear in the above picture.  For those that didn't own the system or for anyone who hasn't seen that before, that thing is the Game Boy Player.  It would fit to the bottom of your gamecube system and would allow you to play Game Boy Advance games on your TV, it was pretty cool.

So while I was taking a shower today, I had this stupid idea that I thought might help boost WiiU sales.  I don't know how viable this would be but a DS/3DS player seems like it would be an awesome idea to me.

Think about it, your TV would act as the top screen and the WiiU controller.  Maybe you could put some kind of support to have split screen on your TV and manipulate the touch from the pad if you didn't want to stare at that thing all the time.  Hell, if the game had a focus on the bottom screen (Trauma Centre for example) you could just swap em round too because obviously you want to the most interesting part of the game put on your big TV, staring at stats or timers wouldn't be fun.

The only reason I made this stupid post is because I would love to do a play through of The World Ends With You, but maybe if they could actually pull something like that off it would boost sales, who knows?

Someone send this to Nintendo because if something like this did become a reality I'd be so down for buying a WiiU ASAP

Visual Novels! Not Games, Still Fun

I think a lot of gaming enthusiasts are aware of these but I doubt many pay much attention to them since they can just go play proper games instead of spending 5 hours glued to a screen reading.

That said, the whole visual novel thing is something I've been trying to get into for a while now as I've been told there do exist really good ones.  You see, my view on visual novels is a little skewed since all I ever see from the genre on store shelves for the PS3/PSP are stupid, semi dating sim love stories set in high schools.  Either that, or stupid shit like Milky Holmes which looks so insufferably annoying I couldn't bare to sit down and translate the damn thing.

So I've been making careful picks and I'm actually quite impressed with the results I've had so far.  I've played 2 in Japanese and 2 in English and I've enjoyed them enough to be arsed to seek out more.  The two English visual novels that I played were 999 and Lux-Pain both on the DS.  999 is pretty well known for it's quality and Lux-Pain, while having a terrible English translation still had quite an interesting premise.  The two Japanese games that I've had a crack at are Silent Hill: Play Novel and Kamaitachi no Yoru which are both extremely interesting if a little difficult for me sometimes,  Mainly due to lack of Kanji ability

I've also heard good things about Dunamis 15 and Steins Gate which are titles I really want to try.  The problem is that if you want to play the really good ones then quite a good command of the Japanese language is required.

I want to go into more detail about these games in individual posts but the game play across the board is basically the same.  You have a story with choose your own adventure style choices at certain points along with minor puzzling so that you're really not just reading a book on your PSP or DS.

So to anyone who may dismiss the VN because of it's lack of game elements, I'd urge you to give them a try.  The good ones are actually really interesting and I would easily recommend 999 to anyone as it's one of the best ones with an English version.

Watch this space for more detailed articles on individual titles.

Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure

Henry Hatsworth is a very silly, yet really very good platform game for the DS that I bought ages ago and never beat.  Now that I'm coming to the end of this game, I thought I'd do a little bit on it.

The plot of this game is very simple.  A long long time ago, there was a suit that was so classy you could rule the world with it.  Some guy known only as The Gentleman ruled the world with this suit and when his time came to an end, he spread the suit all over the world to prevent anyone getting their hands on it and fucking everything up.  That's where you come in, as Henry Hatsworth, the extremely British adventurer as you must go gather all the bits of the suit.

Despite the stupid sounding plot of this game it's actually rather charming and doesn't really get in the way of the game in anyway.  There are a few cutscenes dotted between each world as an excuse to crack a few jokes but plot really isn't all that important in this kind of thing anyway.

You may be asking yourself right now, whats so "puzzling" about this adventure.  Well here's the thing, when you find the first bit of the suit, you open up a rift to the "puzzle dimension" and cause a load of monsters to start pouring out of it.  In game play terms, this means there is a upward scrolling field of coloured blocks in the bottom screen of your DS.  When you kill a monster, it doesn't die completely, it returns to the puzzle where you must then match it up with 2 other blocks of the same colour to get rid of it for good.  Any monsters that reach the top get another crack at trying to kill you before they blink out of existence.

The platforming in this game is really good too with some great level design and really tight controls.  There is also some room for some exploration as there are a number of secret levels that dole out some nice rewards if you bother with them.  On top of that there is a shop where you can buy upgrades for Henry which gives you good reason to actually take on enemies rather than just find ways to rush and avoid them.

I will say though this game is really fuckin' hard.  The platforming can be really tricky sometimes and the enemies will really do you over if you're not careful.  Also the secret levels are insane so if the main game is too easy for you, there is still something that will really challenge your platforming skills.

So if you didn't play this game when it was new, go find a copy.  Easily one of my personal favourite games on the DS.

Difficulty is NOT a bad thing!

So a few days ago I started playing Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on my PC and then today I started playing Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure on my DS.  Both of these games are fucking fantastic and I will go into detail about why these games are so good in future posts.

But for now, I've come across a problem with today's gaming community, and my problem is that there is a vast majority of people who have all become little nancy boys afraid of a little difficulty!  Now to be fair, I don't blame them, games today ARE a lot easier than they used to be, but for good reason.  Modern gaming gives you experiences upwards of 8 hours while older games only really had an hour or two worths of time on the cartridge or whatever, so older games were made really hard so that you'd play them longer.

But a challenge is fun right?  Part of the appeal of this hobby is that you are kind of being issued a challenge by the developer to beat their game, they've spent time programming shit to try and stop you, so you have to overcome that, right?

Well apparently I'm wrong and being challenged and being made to learn to play well is too much for people today.  Dark Souls AND Henry Hatsworth have both had criticisms thrown at them for being hard and having "unforgiving" or "frustrating" difficulty.

Now there do exist games which are "bullshit" hard, but Dark Souls and Henry Hatsworth are NOT that, yet people still get upset when the game throws up a couple of road blocks.  I mean come on, what the fuck happened?!  Back when I was a lad, when we played a hard game we wouldn't throw up our arms and say that the difficulty was a problem, we'd band together and come up with techniques and strategies to get to the end of the game!

It's about time companies started making MORE hard games, not less, and it's also about time that people started actually started earning those endings instead of just giving up after they realise they can't win if their brain dead playing doesn't work.

We need a balance of hard games and games that can be played just to chill and relax, and right now we don't have it.  But we're never going to achieve that balance if critics keep pointing out difficulty as a negative point.  Call it out if it's bullshit, but games like Dark Souls and Hatsworth are NOT bullshit, so fucking stop it.

Can't give a shit about the WiiU

Read the title again just in case you saw it and got angry.  It's not "don't" give a shit about the WiiU, it's "can't" give a shit.  I've been trying really hard to get myself hyped up for this new bit of hardware from Nintendo, but I just don't give a fuck and I can't bring myself to give a fuck.

Initially, I was really interested in this thing, mainly for it's controller with a screen in it.  When I first saw it announced and got a glimpse of that thing my mind started thinking about all the cool concepts that could come out of a bit of gear like that. 

But I'm not really one for following hype so the WiiU dropped off my radar for a while, then I eventually got round to looking at a list of launch titles for it and good lord was I disappointed.  Everything that's coming out for this damn thing already exists on another system, is garbage aimed at non-gamers, or is just not very interesting.

ZombieU was the game I paid the most attention too, but it still doesn't seem all that interesting to me.  The controller screen stuff is cool, but you don't NEED the controller screen to have those features, it feels like a gimmick and nothing more.  That's the problem with the WiiU I think, for me at least, it feels like a gimmick.

That said, I thought the exact same thing about the DS and the exact same thing about the Wii, and after it gained some steam we got some really impressive games out of those systems.  So, either hurry up and come up with a really cool game concept with that controller screen thing OR release a Trauma Centre, because that'll do it really.

The World Ends With You for iPhone and iPad

So if you are into anything like video games, movies, comic books and stuff like that, chances are you are a jaded, bitter, angry individual because all companies seem to want to do is take stuff that you love and take a massive steaming shit all over it.  This is what has happened with the new The World Ends With You announcement.

Now I tend not to pay too much attention to hype trains, I like to play a game with a clear head and form my own opinion on it, but about a week ago I was linked to this website

www.square-enix.co.jp/subaseka  

All this website was the time I first viewed it was a countdown timer and some remixed songs from the original World Ends With You soundtrack.  I got pretty excited for what was going to come at the end of this countdown, I was under the impression that if you hype something with a timer, then the thing at the end of the timer is going to be good, right?

FUCKING! WRONG!

All we got was this piece of shit, a fucking port for iPhone and iPad.  First of all, the iPhone is not a good system for gaming, it just isn't.  Sure, shit like Angry Birds works really well on this system, but big meaty RPGs like this aren't going to attract your average iPhone gamer.  Most importantly however, the thing that made TWEWY such a good, interesting game on the DS was it's amazing battle system that utilised both screens.  So way to go and fucking ruin that with your piece of shit one screen combat.  The idea of having combat on one screen just basically ruins some of the interesting and challenging battles as a few of the fights would revolve around the dual screen mechanics (E.g. Taboo Noise, for those that know what that is)

It also fucks the game right up from a story perspective too.  The reason the combat was on 2 screens story wise was that despite the 2 characters being linked, they had to fight the big nasties alone.  If they killed the enemy, it would die for their partner too, but if they took damage, the partner would suffer as well.  It was a cool concept that made the idea of combat slightly frightening from a story perspective, but now all that has been thrown out the window since they can just fight together now on one fucking screen.

There are lots of other things I could talk about that make the game seem shit, but I have to remember that despite all my ranting and raving, I haven't played it yet, so my opinion is generally not worth shit on this matter, but it just seems like a bit of a betrayal here.  It might be pretty good, but I won't know for a long time because if square thinks I'm dropping 20 bucks on a fucking shitty iPhone port of a 2008 DS game, they have another thing coming.

Here is the trailer, people panned this shit so hard they removed comments and ratings.