Pocket homage

Let’s take a break from talking about Final Fantasy and instead talk about a game that is a throwback to Final Fantasy… Sort of.

So Dragon Fantasy, at least at first, is really more a throwback to the original Dragon Warrior on NES. In fact, it’s structured almost exactly like Dragon Warrior, the biggest difference being that you cannot see the enemy’s castle from your starting point. It was kind of a big thing in Dragon Warrior, but video games on the whole generally don’t have those brilliant, subtle touches anymore. But that’s besides the point.

The quest begins with you hunting down a person of interest (DW: Princess Gwaelin, DF: woodsman) and bringing them back to the castle. Then you go on a fetch quest to collect legendary armor so that you will be strong enough to face the final boss. Each one has little differences of course, but the basic story progression is very similar.

The games are mechanically almost identical too. You’re a one-hero party that fights one enemy at a time. You level up and buy new equipment to get stronger, and are granted new spells at set levels. The spells are even all pretty much the same as in DW. The only way to have any idea what to do or where to go next is to grill every person in town and wander the world until you find new areas. The only noticeable difference is that bridges don’t denote where the random encounters get harder in Dragon Fantasy.

What sets Dragon Fantasy apart from its forebears is its sense of humour. While Dragon Warrior played it pretty straight and Final Fantasy was (probably) unintentionally goofy, Dragon Fantasy works every angle, from puns to pop-culture references to parody. A lot of the story dialogue is spent on making fun of the hero, Ogden, for being a washed-up old has-been.

 Of course, a retro-styled RPG with a sense of humour is nothing new. Breath of Death VII immediately springs to mind. Dragon Fantasy, as far as humour goes, is probably the best so far. I enjoyed Breath of Death more for its unique mechanics and genre subversions than its sense of humour.

Being that it hews so close to the Dragon Warrior template, Dragon Fantasy requires quite a bit of grinding. The only time where you probably won’t spend time walking back and forth fighting mooks is right at the end. Mostly because you won’t be able to clear the last castle in one (or even two, probably!) run, but also because the enemies there drop huge gobs of experience. Fortunately, like its major inspiration, Dragon Fantasy is pretty forgiving when it comes to death, and just puts you back at the last church you visited with all your XP and treasure intact, and your gold stash cut in half.

There are multiple quests in Dragon Fantasy, with more being added over time (free, not DLC). I’m not sure if you can choose from any right at the beginning, but once you’ve completed the first quest, you’re free to play the rest in any order you like. I’ve only just completed the initial game myself, and I was going to skip ahead to the Minecraft “homage” quest, but after watching the intro cutscene, it seems that the chapters have separate but interwoven stories that are leading into one big finale, so I decided that I’d play them in order. Then I started having flashbacks of Final Fantasy IV: The After Years.

Despite everything I’ve written here, the only thing that really matters when you consider buying Dragon Fantasy is this: do you like the original Dragon Warrior? If you do, this game will make your day. If not, I’d recommend staying far away from it.

A foreboding sense of impending crappiness

I’ve been out of the blog world for a while because I’ve been spending most of my free time watching all of Brickroad‘s video Let’s Plays. In the last month I have watched, in their entirety, the playlists for Revengers of Vengeance, Shantae, Spelunky, and Crystalis. I am currently about halfway through the Secret of Evermore set.

Needless to say, I felt like it was time to make my own Let’s Play. Hence the Spelunky video in the previous post. I knew it was a bad idea. I’m not the type of person who has charisma to spare, or interesting things to say. That and I really, really hate the sound of my own voice. But alas, I could not rest until the deed was done, and I spent the bulk of yesterday evening recording a video Let’s Play of MegaMan X.

Don’t get all excited by the prospect of watching the set and telling me how bad they are. I know how bad they are. It’s just… I wanted to have something of at least a little relevance on my YouTube channel. But yeah, it’s pretty bad. I had nothing to say most of the time, and every second sound out of my mouth is either an “umm” or an exasperated sigh. It was a neat project, and I had fun doing it, but the quality of the final product is a little disappointing. I don’t know if I want to post one a week to fluff my content level, or just post them all at once to minimize the pain.

On the upside, MegaMan X is one of the few games I know really well, and I was able to wrap it up fairly quickly and efficiently. There are no game overs, few deaths, and a handful of neat little things that I knew to show off. I skipped over a couple neat things (the hadoken, mostly), but covered pretty much all the game has to offer.

Don’t much like it though. We’ll see if anyone else thinks differently.

Rated M for potty mouth

 

I don’t know what I’m doing. I kind of feel like I should hop on the Let’s Play bandwagon, but I’m no good at the talkies. Or Spelunky, apparently. Anyway, this was mostly just to play around with Camtasia for a while before I actually started recording the world’s worst LP. Also, I swear a lot when I play games alone. So yeah, don’t let the little ones be watchin’ this.

I have a terrible voice too. Getting kind of used to it though, after watching this thirty-seven times.

Lara Croft < Bears

I plugged away at Tomb Raider for a couple hours this weekend because it’s been sitting on my PSP’s memstick for ages now and I’ve barely touched it. I’m not entirely sure, but I have this gut feeling that I hate Tomb Raider.

It’s not really Tomb Raider that I hate though. The concept is fine. Indeed, I actually quite liked Tomb Raider: Legend (though not enough to complete it), but I cannot fathom how people enjoyed the older games. Moving Lara around is just such a hassle. Even back in 1996 I don’t understand how people found the awful, awful control scheme acceptable. I mean, people knowingly played this game instead of… well, anything else? I imagine that playing Tomb Raider is roughly as painful and annoying as jamming a fork into my thigh repeatedly.

Anyhow, after roughly five hours of gameplay I’ve only just completed the Lost Valley, which goes to show how much trouble I’m having here. There was a bear at one point that mauled me to death nearly a dozen times before I was able to get past him. The little dinosaurs didn’t give me too much trouble, and the T-rex didn’t even hit me, but I stopped counting how many times Lara crumpled to the ground dead because of a misstep or when she decided to walk off a cliff despite the fact that I did indeed press the jump button.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to stick this one out, guys. I can’t imagine that the game is very long, but it’s just so bad. And not Power Glove bad. I feel like I should pack it in and go back to Final Fantasy XIII-2, which is a game that wants me to win. I like those games.

(This post is terrible because I’m overtired and pissed off at Tomb Raider.)

The return of X, again

It hasn’t been a thing lately, but if you’ve combed through much of my site’s backlog, one of the most prominent themes is me being a huge MegaMan fanboy. In recent years, the love has waned a bit, mostly due to Capcom not really doing anything interesting with the franchise. MegaMan 9 and MegaMan 10 were fantastic throwbacks to the golden age of gaming, but that’s really about it. The MegaMan Star Force were just gussied-up versions of the dried-up Battle Network series, and the cancellation of MegaMan Legends 3 was a huge blow to the small but loyal contingent of fans of that particular series. MegaMan Universe just never interested me.

So I guess really the best thing that Capcom could do was port one of the best MegaMan games to iOS. MegaMan X was a landmark game that hewed closely to the tried-and-true MegaMan formula, but pushed it to the limit, making the game faster and more exciting. All these years later, it’s still one of my favourite games ever, and by far my most-played SNES title. Why wouldn’t I want to play it on my phone?

Oh, right, because Capcom released a near-perfect remake of it on PSP some years back. MegaMan: Maverick Hunter X was the reason I bought a PSP, and it’s easily the definitive version of the game. MegaMan X’s iOS port is mostly faithful to the SNES original, but you’ll notice that the graphics have been all smoothed out to help make it look a little more contemporary. They certainly look nice, and the sleeker presentation is in no way a knock against the game, but to me, X looks a little weird when not presented in chunky SNES pixels.

A handful of the other major changes are definitely for the worse. The most blatant one being that you’re playing a SNES game with a touch screen. We all know how much I hated Secret of Mana‘s iOS port for that. And Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. My opinion is the same as it was when I wrote those posts: touch screen controls are not a good idea for games designed for buttons. MegaMan X makes a little concession to that end by giving you an easy mode, but if you don’t know every pixel of this game like I do, the rough controls will probably cause you more than a few pains.

One of the really cool things about MegaMan X -and it’s something that didn’t even carry into the sequels- is that by defeating certain stages, you’d trigger environmental changes in other stages. The most prominent being that the lava in Flame Mammoth’s stage turns to stone if you’ve beaten Chill Penguin. Most of the other effects are less obvious and less functional. But that doesn’t matter, because they don’t happen here. Flame Mammoth’s stage? Lava’s always burnin’. Spark Mandrill’s stage? The airship never crashes. So on and so forth.

The one upside here is that since the heart tank in Flame Mammoth’s level used to be on the lava and only accessible after freezing the place (by defeating Chill Penguin), it’s now placed on the floor directly above where it used to sit. It takes absolutely no effort to gain it now, but it does cut back on the amount of backtracking you need to do to 100% the game (you need the Fire Wave to get the heart tank in Chill Penguin’s level, meaning you’d have to replay one of the stages).

Another concession to level design was made to the iOS version of the game. Sort of. Before, stages were single, smooth scrolling maps. Not they’ve been chopped into bits, with stark transitions between screens. The transitions don’t really bring down the value of the game, but they’re a little jarring to me since I’ve probably spent more time in these levels than in my own backyard.

Lastly, while this version of MegaMan X sports some slightly updated graphics, the music is ripped directly from the SNES version. This is awesome, because MegaMan X has a terrific soundtrack. The remixes found in the PSP remake are also available. The catch is that you have to buy them. With real money, like. It’s not really a big deal because the original tracks are better, but I couldn’t help dropping the two bucks to have the remixes available. You can buy all the weapons, armor parts and heart/sub tanks too, if you’re retarded and can’t find them for yourself. That’s kind of a waste of money though.

It does get better though! One of the things that really stuck out to me was that most of the dialogue has been rewritten, and it’s not too bad! I didn’t play Maverick Hunter X enough to know if it’s the same dialogue as from that version, but it’s sure different from the SNES original. Some of the best corny lines (see the screenshot above) have been retained though, which is just gravy. The “hadoken” scene is rewritten almost entirely, and it is magnificent (see screenshot below). The odd thing is that the dialogue font is tiny and a full paragraph barely fills up half of the text box. Not really a problem, but it stands out as kind of an odd design decision.

Speaking of odd design decisions, there are no extra lives in this particular port. At first I thought I had just remembered the extra life locations incorrectly, but I know for a fact that there is one not far above where you find the helmet parts in Storm Eagle’s stage. It’s not there. Instead, you just get two lives every time you begin a stage. Not that you should really need more than two lives to beat any single stage in MegaMan X, but it’s just another weird little change.

Also included are Game Center achievements. Being an admitted achievement whore, this makes me very happy. The highway stage even has its own set of achievements (which oddly do not count in Game Canter) that unlock pieces of a puzzle as you earn them. Most of the GC cheevos are stupidly easy to get (Defeat Chill Penguin, Defeat Chill Penguin with his weakness, Defeat Storm Eagle, etc.), but a couple are genuine achievements. Beating all the robot masters without taking a hit would be pretty breezy on the SNES, but with touch controls? Super hard.

Capcom saw fit to make a handful of other additions to the game. The aforementioned easy mode is counterbalanced by an unlockable hard mode, or so I think. It’s still a grey [locked] square, and I assume it will come in an update. Hopefully not in exchange for moneys. There is a new ranking mode that contains time and score attack modes, and a survival mode (which may or may not be a boss rush) which are mostly there as an excuse to have Game Center leaderboards. The score attack and survival games are also [locked], and I’m not sure if they’re going to be in an update or if I just need to clear all the time attack stages to unlock them. I really don’t care enough to actually play time attack. The regular game is fine with me, thanks.

So what’s the final verdict on the iOS port of MegaMan X? It’s your quintessential 16-bit iOS port. It’s got a few improvements, a few odd changes and extra features, and kinda broken touch controls. But it’s nice to have a version of MegaMan X that I will quite literally be able to play whenever I want. The PSP remake might be a more solid effort and more playable, but most of the time I play my PSP at home, whereas my iPhone is always with me. $5 is a pretty steep price for a questionable SNES port, and the fact that it’s a quick and dirty port that pushes microtransactions may sour a few on it, but I’m happy to have MegaMan X in my pocket.

24 sentences of materialism

Alright kiddies! I totally forgot to do a “24 Days of Materialism” feature this year, and the best thing I could come up to sort of replace it is this: The 24 Sentences of Materialism. It’s basically the same concept, I choose 24 things I like and tell you to buy them, only this time I’m ripping off the long-dead Video Game Article‘s “One Sentence Reviews” feature. So here’s a list of video games, albums, books, and TV shows that I love and think you should buy for yourself or your loved ones (and also a link to a related webpage for each). Honestly, I think this is the hardest thing I’ve ever written. It’s terribly difficult to express everything I want to say about a product in only one sentence.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – Take one part Ocarina of Time, one part Wind Waker, mix well, and then tweak everything just slightly: provides a surprisingly fresh Zelda experience!

2. Monster Hunter Freedom Unite – Why not help persuade Capcom to bring MH Portable 3rd or MH3G by picking up what is easily the best game in the series to date (that is available outside of Japan).

3. Groove Coaster – A rhythm game that’s incredibly simple, but will still suck you in with its trippy visuals and eclectic track selection.

4. Volchaos – A rather superb Xbox Indie game that brings back the glory days of video games: short, challenging levels, and a great sense of satisfaction when you get them right.

5. Fallout 3 – I don’t know why I don’t spend more time with this game; it’s so unlike anything else I play and all the more wonderful for it.

6. Super Mario 3D Land – The game that justifies the 3Ds’ existence.

7. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island – Getting this game (and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap) for free because I paid too much for my 3DS makes it totally worth it.

8. Anima: Ark of Sinners – It’s not really very good, but you can see potential shining through the blandness and kludgy controls.

9. Tron Legacy Soundtrack – Oddly enough, this is probably my favourite music to listen to while playing Minecraft.

10. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – The Live Anthology – Just slightly less than four hours of pure delight.

11. Bound Together – Who could ask for more than an Earthbound tribute remix album?

12. Back in Blue – I love OC Remix but don’t generally love their albums, but this Mega Man 9 tribute is awesome all the way through.

13. Private Line – 21st Century Pirates – There must be something in the water in Finland, because they’re so good at hard rock/metal.

14. How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack – This one really should be mandatory reading for every human being.

15. The Forever War – Best novel I’ve read in… forever?

16. 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth – This comic collection goes beyond hilarity and does its best to teach you some very important lessons.

17. GameSpite Journal 10: The SNES Turns 20 – What kind of gamer wouldn’t want to read a book all about SNES games?

18. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Collection Vol. 1 – A huge, beautiful history lesson.

19. Futurama Season 6 – The first few episodes are kinda weak, but the quality shoots up after that and has me very excited to get BD set of the second half.

20. Community Season 2 – Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas.

21. Criminal Minds: Suspect Behaviour – It’s like Criminal Minds if Criminal Minds sunk all the budget into the script and had first-year college students do the rest.

22. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (80’s) – Campy, cheesy, corny; whatever you want to call it, it’s all goofy nostalgia.

23. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood – I liked the original series, and this one is better in every conceivable way.

24. Fringe Season 3 – Somehow this show has gotten to a point where I feel it might be better than LOST.

Attack of the Supper Squid

Ah, this November just gets better every day. Matthew Good was great of course, but I have even cooler news.

Remember how last year the kids at Talking Time made their own game with the Super Mario Bros X level editor? And how I was super excited about it? And how I contributed three levels of varying quality? Super Talking Time Bros. 2: SUPER SQUAD is now in production, and should be ready to roll early next year. I have of course submitted a stage, and the flame of my passion for creating Mario levels has been reignited.

The first stage I submitted is this one, and I quite like it. Zaidyer’s a fan too, which is good because he’s the project lead. It’s sort of ripped from my personal project, but totally redone. Because it sucked before. Now I’m pretty proud of it. It’s certainly more exciting than anything else I’ve made.

I submitted this one too, which I’m less proud of. I can’t exactly point out why I don’t like it much though. It was already made, I just changed the goal area to meet TTB2 requirements. Really I think I just submitted it because I wanted to have more than one level in the game. I think I’ll hit the drawing board again this weekend and put something better together.

My point here is that if you have a computer and even a mild sense of what would make a fun Mario level, participate! Even if your thing is a sucky bag of sucky suck, we have a peer review process that will help to make you a better level designer! It’s what kept the first game from being just another mess like RMN Bros. The original Super Talking Time Bros. sturned out great, and to be completely honest, I’m a little more excited about TTB2 than Super Mario 3D Land. Crazy, I know. But if you’re a Mario fan, you owe it to yourself to check these out.