The Video Game Revue

December Updates

My gaming landscape hasn't changed a whole lot over the past couple of weeks. I'm now over the 30 hour mark in Twilight Princess, and while my general interest in the game is still running strong, I'm no longer keen enough on it to play four hours at a stretch every day. Other games are starting to see attention, although so far no other Wii games. Wii Sports rarely crosses my mind, although I do find the occasional game of tennis amusing, and I did manage to bowl a 210 game once. I have yet to buy another Wii game, but the only one that seems to be a likely candidate at this point is Trauma Center: Second Opinion, which I've watched the GameTrailers.com review of to assure myself of its worthiness. Call of Duty 3 and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz are still tempting, but I doubt my own resolve to play them; I'll probably end up renting them rather than buying them.

On the PlayStation 2 side, the only game that's been in my console for the last full month is Guitar Hero. I've played through the entire campaign on Hard difficulty (and most of the bonus tracks too), and I've made it all the way down to "Crossroads" by Cream on Expert difficulty. I'm still practicing for roughly an hour a day on average, and I'm steadily improving towards being able to clear the game outright. Although the game remains addictive and alluring, I think I'm starting to burn out on it just a little. Eventually I'm going to get Guitar Hero II, but not while I'm currently somewhat tired of Guitar Hero in general.

Final Fantasy XII has been horribly neglected. I reviewed the Player's Guide about a week ago to refresh my memory of where I'm at in the game and all of the awesome story events that have unfolded so far. At literally any moment now I'm going to jump back into it and continue the adventure, but for complex internal reasons that I haven't been able to wrap my head around, I've been procrastinating. It's probably a simple matter of having spent too much time with Zelda and Guitar Hero to have energy left ofter for FF XII. I think that part of me dreads that once I'm back into FF XII, I'll burn myself out on video games completely.

Matt and I have been playing a fair amount of Counter-Strike: Source the past couple of weeks as well--roughly three or four hours per week, total. I absolutely love how the game looks and feels on my recently assembled gaming PC. Whenever I have a tinge of feeling like I'm missing out on the "next gen" (that is, the current gen) with the PS3 and XBox 360, I remind myself that I already have a decent PC gaming rig to rival that stuff, and fairly nice monitor to go with it. The visuals that I've been getting out of games like Counter-Strike: Source, Company of Heroes, and World of WarCraft still consistently manage to turn my head. (I really have to get F.E.A.R. installed and replay that sucker. It's on my "To Do" list.)

Speaking of World of WarCraft, there's been major developments there since the 2.0.1 patch (or whatever they're at) was released--which you're no doubt aware of if you've been playing it. I haven't been, but Sunny has been playing tons of WoW; her alt is now level 56 and she's been discovering the new Arena Battlegrounds system. I've been away from the game for a fair stretch now, but I can easily see myself getting back into it. I just need the time and energy. :)

I was reading some stuff via Penny-Arcade recently about the Firefly MMORPG that's being developed, and I remarked to Matt that MMORPGs are really fun, but I still find them to be too expensive for my taste. Guild Wars has a thoroughly acceptable pricing scheme: a one-time fee to buy the game and no subscription charges, just like a regular multiplayer game. The WoW client is a lot cheaper now (about $20) than it was only a few months ago ($60), but the monthly subscription charge of $15 is still a lot to take. If WoW was anything less than the greatest video game ever made so far, I wouldn't be willing to pay so much for it. Contrary to popular belief, WoW is not the greatest game of all time because it's an MMORPG, but rather because it's so well designed; to say otherwise is a lot like saying that the iPod is a huge success because mp3 players in general are great, which is obviously not the case when you compare how other mp3 players measure up against the iPod.

Speaking of iPods and the like, the hand-held world has been a hotbed of new developments as well. In the last month I've acquired Children of Mana, Final Fantasy III, and Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin in addition to continuing to play Trauma Center: Under the Knife and the occasional games of Mario Kart DS and Tetris DS (I've even been tempted to plug-in to Metroid Pinball and Resident Evil DS lately.) There are also two GBA games that I must have but have yet to buy: Final Fantasy V Advance and Yggdra Union. I also own a copy of Riviera that I haven't played, and I'm rougly half-way through a playthrough of FF IV that I want to finish--both of these being situations that need to be remedied.

I've made it to Chapter 6 in Trauma Center, which is the final and most difficult chapter. So far my skill level is not up to the task, but with regular practice I hope to eventually polish that game off, for now. One of the most impressive things about Trauma Center is what a deep emotional attachment I've developed towards it. Even though I don't find the specific characters or storyline all that compelling, the game design in general manages to create a strong draw, and I find myself getting emotional when I even simply hear musical scores from the game. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Trauma Center is among the finest Nintendo DS titles currently available.

I've only played a little bit of Children of Mana, but that's mainly because I don't like it. It's almost as big of a disappointment as Lunar: Dragon Song, although it doesn't suck nearly as much. My primary complaint against Children of Mana is that it doesn't feel like a proper Seiken Densetsu game. I was hoping for something to remind me of Secret of Mana, and although Children of Mana has a lot of the same sprite designs, it somehow manages to both look and, especially, feel like an entirely different game--and not for the better. I haven't played any multiplayer with it (it requires each player to have a copy of the game), and I can see how that would be worthwhile in much the same capacity that Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is worthwhile as a multiplayer game. But I worry that this game was designed too much with the multiplayer aspect in mind and it doesn't work as well as a single player experience.

The dungeons that I've faced so far have a tediously linear feel, and the game seems entirely too focused on hack n' slash and building up your characters. I don't think that there's a problem specifically with the characters, setting, or plot, but rather with the presentation and design work as a whole--essentially, the way that the whole game hangs together. Instead of feeling like I'm lost in a full-blown fantasy world (an illusion that Secret of Mana constructed masterfully), I feel like I'm simply warping from a simple base-camp style town to various dungeons that have more in common design-wise with the levels of Double Dragon than the levels of, say, Zelda. Games like this make me angry that there aren't more action RPGs harkening back to the likes of Illusion of Gaia or Alundra.

Action RPGs used to be one of my most favourite game genres, but games like Crystal Chronicles and Children of Mana have really sucked a lot of the joy out of them with their awkward play mechanics and tendancy to treat themselves as arcade-style games rather than full-blown RPGs. Just the summer before last, Fritzkrieg and myself sat down with my old (and still functional) SNES to play Secret of Mana from start to finish, and it was just as entertaining as it's ever been. I also played through part of Alundra only a couple of years ago--a game that I had neglected for years--and I was thoroughly enchanted with it. PC games with real-time elements like World of WarCraft and Neverwinter Nights could be considered Action RPGs, but while they are excellent games, they're not the sort that I'm talking about; I yearn for the console style action RPGs with their simplistic game mechanics and amusing sprites, rather than PC RPGs with sophisticated game systems behind them. The closet thing to the Action RPGs that I want to see these days are games like Zelda and Castlevania.

Speaking of Castlevania, I've started on Portrait of Ruin and it is wonderful. There are a lot of Castlevania games available for the GBA and DS platforms, and while none of them are bad games, some are better than others (Aria of Sorrow, for example, is particularly good.) Dawn of Sorrow was definitely solid, but there was something about it that bothered me a little; it seemed to lack the punch of it's predecessor, in spite of its superior graphics. Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin strikes me as a stronger title, and not simply because of the novelty factor behind its new dual-character mechanics. I'll need more time with it to be certain, but so far Portrait of Ruin feels very "right," and I'm having a great time with it.

I haven't played Final Fantasy III DS yet at all, but I'll get around to it. :) It's good to have options in terms of what you want to play next.

posted by Parappa @ 11:55 AM