We’ve got a line in the sky

The past 24 hours have both strained and bolstered my love for Nintendo. Not equally, but we’ll get there. For now, let’s just focus on the worst of it, and then end on a positive note.

Yesterday we were promised a system update for the 3DS that enabled, among other things, the eShop. This is a feature that should have been included at the release of the hardware, but I can understand that they wanted to make sure it was as good as it could be, and delays are always better than half-assed product. But then the update was pushed back and back again up to yesterday. And then I got a message saying it would be available in the evening. I waited all damn day, and when did the update go live? 11:40. PM. If not for the fact that I love my system update, I might still be a little bitter about that one.

The eShop, however, is the glorious ship upon which all my hopes and dreams ride. See, ever since before the original Wii (more on that later) launched, I’ve been dreaming of a time where classic GameBoy games would be provided via some sort of download service. And now they are! Yeah, maybe the only ones worth a look are Link’s Awakening DX (still my favourite Zelda ever) and Super Mario Land (debatable), but some day Pokémons in all colours of the rainbow will be available, and maybe more importantly, the Wario Land series. And Donkey Kong ’94! Oh, and the Kirby’s Dream Land and Final Fantasy Legend series! And Metal Gear Solid! …I could go on like this all day. For now I’ll just revel in my favouritest Zelda and the fact that I actually really like Super Mario Land.

And now, about today’s overload of Nintendo goodness. Where to even start? To put it simply, I think the 3DS is about to really come into its own. The first-party lineup alone is more than I need, nevermind the love Capcom’s showing: two Resident Evils and the all-important MegaMan Legends 3. But that Wii U? I am ever so excited about it! With the first Wii, I admit, I was just as skeptical as everyone else, but I have no doubts that Wii U will deliver on every count. USB hard drive compatibility? Check. Awesome new tablet controller? Check. Some decent horsepower? Check. Console that’s an adorable cross of Wii and 360? Check and double check.

Let’s just get one thing straight; I think that the name Wii U is so, so terrible. That is not the name of a game console, that’s the sound a fire truck makes!

But on the plus side, we’re going to have a plethora of great games to play! Think about it this way: Four Swords could get a real revival! And not like I’ll play any of them (Arkham City being the only possible exception), but there are a buttload of “core” games headed to Wii U too, which nearly knocked me off my seat. Anyway, I should go and actually watch that press conference now. Following like five live blogs of it was all well and good, but I’d like to see some of this stuff in action.

They’re preaching lies

I’m sitting here trying to finish up Secret of Mana on my phone, but it’s getting to a point where I just don’t think it’s possible to continue. It’s really bad because I’ve beaten this game several times before. I wish I could just say that it’s because I’m getting old and suck at games now (which may be more true than I want to admit), but it’s actually because SOM for iOS is so, so badly balanced.

In the Super NES version, the game was pretty easy. If you get stuck somewhere, it’s because you forgot to buy the better armor at the last town. Maybe you played too fast and didn’t level enough (though level gains aren’t nearly as important as in, say, Dragon Warrior) and need to go back and grind a handful of bees or chobin hoods. Bosses were the only real challenge, and that was until you realized that spamming magic would essentially end the fights before they really began. What I’m getting at is that I never really faced a sticking point before. But now they’re everywhere! The game has been totally rebalanced in the enemies’ favour, and now the bosses are usually where you find respite from the terrible onslaught of death.

Mooks have been way upgraded for the iOS version of the game, their attacks doing a whole hell of a lot more damage than ever. Magic is even worse. And that wouldn’t be too bad on its own, but your character’s hit rates have gone way down. I swear nine out of ten times your attacks will whiff. I first got stuck in the upper land forest, where the combination of overpowered caterpillars and unhittable moles and fish ripped me a new one over and over again. I don’t remember ever using cups of life outside of bosses back in the SNES days, but by God, the merchants are sending their kids to college on my cup of life purchases alone this time around. It seemed like for most of the mid-game that every time I walked onto a new screen the sprite would be dead within ten seconds.

But a combination of grinding money and buying the (awesome) Gold Island armor as soon as possible really made the areas between getting Flammie (SOM’s airship stand-in) and entering the underground city really easy (or at least bearable). Now, in the underground city however, things have gotten retarded hard again. My armor is no longer game-breaking, but merely enough to keep my dudes from dying in a single hit. Making my way through a single hallway is tough, and getting from one end of an entire screen to the other without a casualty is nearly impossible. It gets worse too, because I’m stuck right before a boss with no supplies and no MP and he’s apparently immune to physical attacks? I definitely don’t remember this guy. So basically I have to work my way back out of this area (which is one of the longest dungeons) to get stuff, but getting out alive in my condition is going to be yet another nigh-impossible challenge (see the image above, and that’s right outside the boss room).

I remember a long time ago, when Secret of Mana was fun. But now it’s tedious and unfair and frustrating. I don’t like the iOS port, and until they put out a patch that at the very least puts my hit rates back to a reasonable level, I don’t think that I can finish it.

You’re mad

Still plugging away at Final Fantasy on my iPhone, not really sure what I should do next, because I got the airship right after Lich, and then went on to get my class changes right away. Thought Pants might be better off with magic. He’s not.

It’s been a long time since I’ve played this game too, and that was the first time. Having gone so far off course on my second playthrough makes me feel really cool because I don’t really think about sequence breaking when I play games. But it’s so easy in Final Fantasy! If you wander around enough (and have a vague idea of what you’re looking for), the game basically cracks right open once you kill Lich and get that canoe.

Oh, and check this out! During my first outing, I played FF1 pretty rigidly, always using my fight commands and saving as much of my black mage’s MP for bosses as I could. Large mobs were annoying and took several rounds to defeat. It was not efficient at all. This time I’ve been wantonly blasting whoever I can with magic, and it turns out that you generally will have enough MP to go around anyway. And then I got the Gauntlets and Healing Rod.

I never realized that items like these were in the game; you can equip them for weak stat bonuses, but really what you want is to use them as items. When using these particular pieces of equipment in battle, they cast thundara and heal respectively. With no MP cost. And they never get used up or go away. So now that Gus can cast thundara every round with no MP drainage, cannon fodder enemies are rendered completely moot. Even nine-monster squads are vanquished in a single turn. I don’t know why the game even bothers to keep sending them out.

I honestly cannot wait to see what other items like this I can find. Something that casts healara would be nice, because while ~50 to the team each turn is more than enough for dungeon crawls, it’s not quite enough to keep up with the bonus dungeon bosses and their unusually strong magic. But then again, I suppose that’s what all my unused MP is for.

I ain’t gonna be easy

I know that when you make a game that revolves around issuing commands that has a touch-only interface, you’re probably gonna have to represent some of those commands with icons. But why, exactly, is the item icon in the iOS version of Final Fantasy a teapot?

I mean, okay, I guess a teapot in general might be classified as an item, but never in the game do you gain a teapot as an item. Your characters never interact with an teapot. There are no enemies shaped like teapots. I don’t even think NPC houses have teapots. I suppose that the teapot is a little less generic than using a bag or maybe a backpack as the item command, but it’s still completely irrelevant.

The teapot doesn’t even represent any items you can carry. Why not make the item icon a potion? That’s likely the most common item subset you’ll be using. Why am I thinking way too hard about this? And where do you go after beating Lich?

I’ll be a pharaoh soon

Since the time I first decided to buy into the hype and start watching it, I’ve been a pretty big fan of Fullmetal Alchemist. Some of the fandom is because I’ve always been interested in the concept of alchemy, though the show kind of fantasizes the idea. If you’ve never watched it, it’s basically magic with a loose scientific explanation. Given that physical alchemy is currently viewed as a sort of front for a type of spiritual growth, maybe it’s not too crazy that here it’s portayed as the ability to alter matter by scribbling shapes on a nearby surface.

I’m also really keen on the characters. Yeah, it’s an anime, so they do often fall into the common tropes, but on some counts, they feel very original to me. Mainly the principal characters, Ed and Al. The two are brothers who tried (and failed) to resurrect their mother via alchemy as children. The botched transmutation cost the former and arm and a leg (ha!) and the latter his entire body. The big thing that separates these two from the bulk of anime heroes is that they don’t have a grand cause. They aren’t out to save the world. They aren’t trying to win over the hearts of their romantic interests. They aren’t training to become the world’s greatest pokémon trainers alchemists. Nope, their only goal is to restore their bodies and make up for their mistake. With a twist of guilt as well, as either brother always seems more concerned about getting the other’s body back to normal than his own. Ed especially, as he was the one that led the charge into the realm of tabooed alchemy, which left his brother’s soul tied to a magically animated suit of armor.

The villains are pretty neat too, being false humans (known as homunculi) created by… well, that’s a fairly important plot point, so I won’t spoil it here. But the idea is that they don’t want to rule the world or take revenge on the human race or anything big like that. They are simply soulless creatures living as human husks, and as such their goal (or at least for the ones with the majority of screen time) is a humble one; to find a way to make themselves true humans. While that would rob them of their immortality and totally sweet super-powers (imagine goth X-Men), it would seem that being able to live forever just isn’t good enough for some supernatural beings.

Anyways, more to the point, I’ve been watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which I was informed was different than the original series, but as far as the first ten episodes, it seems like more of an abridged version with slightly better artwork. I’d read that the original run had its own story, different from the manga it was based on, and that Brotherhood was a more precise adaptation. I’ve never read the manga myself, but the main difference I’ve seen so far is that Brotherhood skips a lot of the filler episodes and focuses on the events that further the overall plot. This isn’t to say that I’m disappointed with how the series is so far, I just imagined there’d be some more stuff in there that we haven’t already gone over. Like the first episode. And the new(ish) conclusion to the (first? I forget) Liore incident.

I might have to look a little closer into how it all unfolds before I invest in the rest of the blu-ray sets, but the original run was 50-something episodes long and this one 60(ish?), so maybe it branches off a little farther down the line. Even if it doesn’t it’ll nice to have a crisp, high-def collection of the series.

In the zone

Having finished Brutal Legend (which is a totally badass game, BTW), I started playing Dead Rising 2 last week. Not more than a few hours in, I discovered an adult shop on the main strip of Fortune City. Inside was a shelf full of the item you see above (in several exciting colours!). In the game, it is called a “massager,” but we know that’s not the whole story.

To recap: in Dead Rising 2, you can beat zombies with dildos.

What’s even better though, is that later on I found a survivor in a tanning salon. Her predicament was that she accidentally stayed in the tanning bed for too long and got a little extra crispy. She then needs you to fetch her a drink to rehydrate, and you have to carry her deep-fried body back to the emergency shelter. It was just before I left to find a beverage for the young lady that I noticed one of these massagers on the tanning bed that she had previously occupied. I guess there’s no mystery as to why she was in there too long.

Bass!

I complain about it sometimes, but I don’t hate my job. It’s not very challenging, and it’s often quite boring, but I get by. Lately, it seems that getting by involves reading a lot of random Wikipedia articles. Like on Thursday when I read that last year somebody thought it would be a good idea to port Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 to iOS. And I think it would be a good idea to give this person a nice, long handy jay.

Needless to say, I downloaded it right away. I may not have ever mentioned this before, but like many, I was pretty obsessed with the THPS series in its formative years. These days it’s crap, but THPS2 is the cream of the crop. It was the perfect sequel for a fledgling series; basically the same game as the first but with a few gameplay improvements and loaded down with more content. By the time THPS3 rolled around it was beginning to get excessive, and I just didn’t feel 4 at all.

I lost interest by the time Tony Hawk’s Underground hit the scene, and though I think Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland is an all-around stellar game, it still doesn’t compete with my undying love for the second entry in the series. Which I am now playing on my phone.

Normally, I wouldn’t bother getting the THPS2 app, but it was two dollars and somebody lost my PSX version disc years ago, so really I had no choice in the matter. After all, this is one of the two games (with Megaman Legends) that forced me to break down and get a Playstation all those years ago. I’ve spent about two hours with the game over the course of today, and I have both good and bad news.

Firstly, the bad news. And it’s really bad. I am very upset to report that Activision replaced the entire soundtrack for the iOS port. This is a terrible thing, because the original THPS2 soundtrack was awesome. I wish I could make that awesome more bold, because I mean it more than anything ever before. The THPS2 soundtrack was such an epic thing for me that I feel it necessary to pour some beer on the curb for my lost friend. This was the time after Napster, and I was still only starting to learn about music beyond the radio’s limited and stagnant output. The 15 songs included on the THPS2 disc led me into new and exciting genres, like punk, good hip-hop, and Rage Against the Machine. The iOS port has a bunch of soulless, generic garbage by bands/rappers that I could not identify. In fact, if I hadn’t just watched the in-game music credits, I would have hypothesized that Activision just went to the closest record label and asked for their 10 (9? I forgot to count) cheapest songs. But it gets better! There is apparently a workaround that installs the original music! I haven’t tried it yet, but the fact that it claims that it can be done without jailbreaking my iPhone fills me with delicious hope. (EDIT: It works!)

The other downer is, as with many of the apps I’ve downloaded, the touch controls. You’d think I would have learned after Secret of Mana that they just don’t work well for action games. And SoM is a fairly slow action RPG. THPS2 requires much more complicated and precise inputs. The touch interface is unreliable and inaccurate, making this game in particular very difficult. With a wonderfully tactile controller and buttons, I could have achieved the SICK score in the first stage after maybe one or two warm-up runs. It took me almost all day to get it with the sloppy touch screen controls. There is an accelerometer option, but I think that would end up even worse, seeing as it doesn’t even work great with I Love Katamari, which doesn’t need button presses in addition to tilts.

The good news is that other than the inferior soundtrack, the game is represented in its entirety. Or at least as much as I can remember. It lacks create-a-skater and park editor modes, but I find those superfluous anyway. All the skaters, venues, tricks, and gaps are accounted for, though I can’t speak for any unlockable stuff. Not that far yet. Also, once you get used to the controls being more than a little wonky, the game is still awesome fun. And why wouldn’t it be? It’s the best Tony Hawk game, and now it’s portable. And it’s two dollars. Did I mention that it’s only two dollars?

Sleeping about 18 hours a day

I’ve been watching the 80’s G.I. Joe animated series, and it started fairly harmlessly. It was G.I. Joe battling against Cobra over superweapons and while maybe it asked me to suspend my disbelief a little higher than usual (re: weather dominator), it was all pretty on the level for a cartoon. Later on, things got a little out of control, with plot elements like alternate dimensions and city-destroying vegetables and gigantic Egyptian gods. It was getting really sci-fi up in here, but nothing ever really made me sit up and say “hey, now this is just ridiculous.” Until this particular scene.

I don’t know what it is, but something about Cobra Commander sitting calmly whilst having a strategic discussion with a parrot really struck me as odd. Maybe because the parrot is standing on his desk. Parrots don’t stand on a desk, they perch on something. Anyways, just thought I’d share that.