Category: Video Games

The Tale Of Eventide Island

The day before Switch and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild were released, I had a bit of a lapse in my spoiler-avoidance. I took a good, long look at the full map of Hyrule. Though it was completely void of any marks or notes, I did see some interesting buildings and landscapes that I decided that I would prioritize in my travels. One of those places was an island off to the southeast of the mainland, quite a ways out into the ocean.

It doesn’t look so bad from far away…

During the hours of gameplay leading up to me reaching that island, I quickly learned that Link could not swim very far before running out of stamina and being warped back to the last solid ground that he’d stood on. Much, much later, I discovered that rafts were common around larger bodies of water, and many more hours after that, I found that I could use a korok leaf to generate wind to sail those rafts around. And thus, I was finally able to access Eventide Island.

Little did I know, it would become my greatest nightmare.

Continue reading The Tale Of Eventide Island

The Mastery of Blastery

Did you ever play Blaster Master on NES? I have. Many times, in fact. And I’ve never managed to get very far because holy gosh is it ever difficult. Like, five minutes to Game Over difficult. Because I felt compelled to do a random Wikipedia check on it before writing this, I’ve learned that there are also like seven other Blaster Master games that I haven’t played.

But none of them matter in the slightest, because today I’m talking about Blaster Master Zero, the new reboot/remake/whatever for Switch (and 3DS, I suppose). I both started and finished Zero last weekend, so obviously it’s got a somewhat gentler difficulty curve than the game that it’s inspired by. Which is to say, it’s actually really easy up until the last boss. Well, the fake last boss. But I should probably circle back around and get to explaining that a little later.

If you don’t know Blaster Master, it’s a sort of Metroidvania, where you boot around an “open” side-scrolling world in a tank. Well, SOPHIA III is tank-esqe, anyway. It’s got wheels instead of treads and also it jumps like a danged kangaroo, so I feel weird calling her a tank. Oh, and also the world is “open” because you’re free to explore at you own leisure, but progress is actually very linear and I’m not nearly smart enough to have discovered any sequence breaks. So yeah, it really is just like a Metroidvania! Also the pause screen looks suspiciously like that of Super Metroid.

What sets it apart is that the pilot, Jason, can hop out of SOPHIA at any time and run around on his own. Sometimes you have to do this to solve puzzles, but mostly you want to disembark to enter caves. The caves are very different from the rest of the world, as the view switches to top-down and the game starts to play more like an arcade shooter. Your job here is to weave Jason around, shooting enemies and avoiding harmful obstacles, ultimately tracking down and defeating a boss monster to earn a power-up for SOPHIA. Said power-up is often the key to progressing through the larger world, and so the cycle continues.

Jason’s other big schtick is his really weird gun. You can collect power-ups to buff it up and completely change how it fires. The catch there is that getting hit will knock you back down a power level, which is annoying as all heck. Luckily, the second level gun can pierce walls, and very few enemies can respond in kind. This makes picking off enemies like shooting fish in a barrel, allowing you to easily power up your gun to the max, and the strongest version is a wave beam that has massive range and still pierces through walls. Also you pick up a shield early on that preserves your power level for one hit and regenerates after a couple seconds. So once you get in the groove, it’s really easy to not lose your gun levels.

Blaster Master Zero takes place over eight areas of the usual video game cliché environments; the forest, sewers, ice world, lava world, etc, etc. It all culminates in the only hard boss fight in the game, which is mostly only hard because the guy has a second phase that can fill the screen with projectiles and moves faster than Jason. I beat him after a couple tries, and sadly learned that I had gotten the bad ending. Ostensibly, there is at least a True Final Boss and maybe another actually-final final area. I have no idea how to earn said good ending (or any endings that may lie between), but I have a feeling it involves 100% item collection, as there isn’t a whole lot else to the game. The only optional collectibles are the life bar extensions and area maps. And maybe the gigantic frig-off laser cannon that I can’t imagine has any practical uses. It takes like fifteen seconds to charge and will get interrupted by a light breeze. It’s almost certainly there just because the animators wanted to do a gigantic frig-off laser blast.

To make this a bog-standard game review, I suppose I ought to touch on the production values as well. BMZ is developed by Inti Creates, so it’s got a delightful pixelly aesthetic, which people tend to call 8-bit, but it’s really closer to 16-bit, especially where some of the special effects are involved. You know, explosions, giant laser beams, all that good stuff. It’s not outstanding in any way, but everything looks nice. Of note is that the caves zoom in the camera, and as such, the “indoor” graphics are much bigger and considerably more cartoony. Jason’s noggin ends up being like half his total body mass, whereas it’s perfectly normally-proportioned in the realm of cutscenes. There’s a bit of dissonance there, but it stops being jarring very quickly. The music is great for bopping along to as you’re driving around blasting bugs and robots and floating zombie heads. However, it’s not at all memorable and I can’t recall even the title track, which I sat on the title screen to listen to on more than one occasion.

In conclusion, it is my semi-professional opinion that Blaster Master Zero is a very sweet game. It skews a little bit too easy, but that can be forgiven, because it’s fun to win. I very much look forward to diving back in to finish up the good ending, and to maybe unlock whatever that ????? is under the Extras section of the main menu. Should you buy it? Heck yeah! At roughly 12 Canada Dollars, BMZ is an absolute steal! It’s a great game to have on your Switch, and if you aren’t rocking one of those beauties quite yet, it’s on the dependable ol’ 3DS as well. So you’ve got options. But not many, because it’s currently exclusive to said Nintendo machines. Will it end up on other gaming things? Who knows!? On one hand, I think that would be nice because it’ll make this great game accessible to even more people, but on the other hand, I kind of hope it stays Nintendo exclusive because schadenfreude.

On rapping paper dogs

I was browsing the PSN store about a month back, to see if anything good was on sale. When clicking into the PS+ deals, I noticed that I was able to pre-order a remastered version of PaRappa the Rapper at a discount. I didn’t really stop to think about it, and immediately locked in that preorder. I love the soundtracks to PaRappa and its spin-off, Um Jammer Lammy. Why would I pass up the opportunity to get an HD-quality version of the game?

The game was released this past Tuesday and the answer to that question, my friends, is that PaRappa the Rapper Remastered is almost unfairly difficult, and as a result, is not all that fun to play. It’s a rhythm game that arbitrarily rewards or punishes you for matching the rhythm, despite that ostensibly being the goal of the game. This was the same thing that kept me from ever really getting into the original release.

Now, if you are completely unfamiliar with this game or perhaps the genre at large, it’s actually very simple. Each stage is a song, wherein a character will rap a phrase, and then you have to rap it back at them. This is accomplished by pressing corresponding buttons that appear on a bar at the top of the screen as PaRappa’s icon passes over them. Typically, you want to hit the button right on time, but every other rhythm game will allow a little wiggle room in either direction. You know, because rewarding only perfect timing would be more maddening than fun.

PaRappa… doesn’t follow these rules at all. I spent maybe and hour and a half with the game, and I still have no idea when it actually wants me to press the buttons. It seems completely arbitrary, as even when I hit every note with (as far as I can tell) perfect timing, there’s a 50% chance that the game will see fit to detract points from my score. Sometimes it seems like the game would prefer me to hit the button a little bit ahead of the cue, sometimes a little bit after. This appears to change not even with every song, but with every phrase. It’s literally impossible to suss out what the game really wants from me. At this point, I think it might be actively trying to infuriate me.

Compounding the problem is that PaRappa’s vocals will accompany each button press, and they will totally throw you off. If your timing is imprecise, his raps will be stuttery and incomplete. If your timing is perfect, they’ll flow like a river. But in my experience, the better his rhymes flowed, the more likely the game was to penalize me. For whatever reason, the jumpy stutter-rapping scored better more often. There are options to “Feel the Beat” (enable rumble) and “See the Beat” (I noticed no difference), but they didn’t help at all in figuring out the correct timing.

It’s all really too bad, as the rest of the game is wonderful. The weird paper style of the visuals is a little dated, but I still think the game looks rad. The story that goes along with those visuals is a little formulaic, but it’s cute and usually pretty funny. And like I said before, the music is excellent. These are tracks that I often listen to independent of the game.

If PaRappa was a little more forgiving, I could see myself going back to it to play for trophies and maybe even just for fun, but as it stands, I almost feel like I’ve been swindled on this one. Admittedly, I should have known better, because I’ve been frustrated with PaRappa before on more than one occasion, and I’ve spent countless hours trying to get in the groove with Um Jammer Lammy, which has all the exact same issues. I suppose that I was just hoping that the HD remaster would have a softer touch.

The worst thing about it all, though? I’ll absolutely buy Um Jammer Lammy Remastered as well, if it should ever happen.

Foreign Heroics

One of the coolest little features about Nintendo Switch is that is 100% region-free. This is a nice change from 3DS and every Nintendo home console since the Gamecube. Not that I import all that many games, but it’s nice to know that I can, should there ever be something worth the effort. Mark my words, if Nintendo ever releases another Ouendan game, I will be there day one.

The various Switch eShops of the world have been nearly identical in terms of games available, with the occasional discrepancy usually clearing itself up within a week. So I haven’t really had a reason to set up foreign accounts as of yet. But my curiosity had been building up for a whole month, so I finally released the load and created a Japanese Nintendo Account. It was almost unbelievably easy, and took roughly five minutes from start to eShop. Well, aside from the hour I had to wait because I just so happened to get to the eShop part while it was down for scheduled maintenance.

Continue reading Foreign Heroics

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – March 2017

~ Game Over ~

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch) – Amazing game. Still so much content yet undiscovered. I look forward to diving back in after taking a short break from Zelda-mania.

NieR: Automata (PS4) – So far, it’s been a wonderful follow-up to NieR, and a huge step up in quality from Drakengard 3. Boar drifting is still a thing! I’ve completed Branch A, and picked up a handful of the 21 “joke” endings. Really liking how differently Branch B plays.

Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment (Switch) – You should already know that I like this one.

Drakengard 3 (PS3) – Powered through the impossibly difficult final boss rhythm battle, which may be the greatest achievement of my life. Also, played through all of the DLC chapters and got that sweet platinum trophy. It’s finally time to close the book on this one, thank goodness.

Dragon Quest VII (3DS) – IT’S FINALLY OVER.

Shovel Knight (Switch) – Played through yet again to experience Body Swap mode, wherein I flipped the gender of every major character. Mostly to see the Order Knights’ lady-style redesigns.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – March 2017

NieR-ly a week later…

Having seen the ending of that big explore-’em-up game on that new-fangled games machine that I can play on the toilet, I opted to finally go back to spending time playing games that were not Zelda. The first one on the list is the highly anticipated (by me) NieR: Automata.

You may or may not recall that NieR is one of my favourite video games of all time. I’ve probably mentioned this many times already, but I think it bears repeating, as most people don’t even know that NieR is a thing that exists. Fewer still understand why it is such an outstanding video game. After all, the gameplay is janky, the graphics weren’t anything to write home about even at the time, and it necessitated an inhuman amount of grinding to reach the final ending.

Back to the point, though. I’ve been pretty hype for the sequel. And after dunking nearly an entire week’s worth of evenings into it, I can confidently say that NieR: Automata far exceeds my expectations. It’s very pretty, the story has been 100% bonkers so far, and the combat has been made considerably more enjoyable thanks to Platinum Games’ experience in the field.

The games journalism industry has taken to calling NieR: Automata an open-world game. That’s only somewhat true. It’s actually fairly linear, in the same way that the first game was. You’re given a vast world to explore, but certain areas are only made accessible after certain events. You can’t just go anywhere you please right off the hop like in, say, Fallout 4 or a certain recently-released game from a 31-year-old series that has been getting perfect review scores all over the place. There are plenty of places to go at the beginning, but I didn’t bother exploring too far off the beaten track because I realized how the game worked early on. Also, they dole out game mechanics (like fast-travel) after certain story beats, so that’s another good reason not to stray from the plot for the first few hours.

The game begins with the same factory sequence that was in the demo, but with a few changes. Mostly there’s just an extra shmup sequence at the beginning. I don’t know if anything else had changed, as it all seemed fairly familiar. I think the music changed when you fight the first buzzsaw boss, as I recognized it as a remix of “Song of the Ancients” and I don’t think that was the case in the demo. I feel like it would have been hard to miss for someone who has listened to the NieR soundtrack as much as I have.

What has blown my mind the most is the revelation that NieR: Automata has a whopping twenty-six endings. The Drakengard games and NieR all had four or five each, so this is an unprecedented increase. I have looked at no further spoilers, so I have no idea what kind of criteria is necessary to achieve all these endings, but I am very anxious to find out. I’ll just have to burn through to Ending A (presumably) so that I can even consider digging up a road map to all the endings. But even that seems like it’s probably quite a ways off!

I’m not in that big of a hurry, though, as I’m really enjoying my time with the game. If it’s another 70-hour journey, so be it! The Dark Id has allegedly reached all of the endings already, if his Twitter feed is to be believed, so I’m not too concerned that I’m going be spending several months playing nothing but this. But hey, that really wouldn’t be the worst thing…

Let’s talk about VR, baby

I spent last Sunday afternoon playing with an HTC Vive again, and much to my chagrin, I am now sold on VR.

Well, not literally sold, as VR is still way too expensive for me. But I’m willing to accept it as a legitimate thing that is cool, rather than just another silly flash in the pan.

I played a whole bunch of different games, so let’s take a brief look at each of them. Or at least the more notable ones. I should note that I think nearly everything I played was just a demo, and that I didn’t spend more than about 15 minutes with any one piece of software.

Continue reading Let’s talk about VR, baby

Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment

One of the Switch’s launch games was a timed exclusive of the next hotly anticipated DLC expansion for Shovel Knight: the new Specter of Torment campaign. While I did get constant development update emails because I was a Kickstarter backer, I decided to ignore them for the most part, and went into this one almost completely blind.

To set up the story: Shovel Knight is right up there on my list of favourite games of all time. I loved it to pieces when it launched in 2014 and have played it routinely every few months since then. The first expansion was Plague of Shadows, which released in September of 2015. It added a entirely new story that ran parallel to the original, and Plague Knight had a completely different play style, making the game feel totally fresh even though it was mostly the same, save a few small new areas and a new final boss. Although it was a masterful expansion, it was still just that: an expansion.

Knowing basically nothing about it pre-release, I assumed that Specter of Torment would follow roughly the same rules: play through the same stages with a handful of new rooms and the same old bosses, enjoy a few revised challenge stages to test Specter Knight’s unique abilities, and then a showdown with a new final boss. But I was wrong. I was oh-so wrong.

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Unfortunate headgear

One of the best features of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is how it allows you to approach nearly any situation in any way you like.

For example: the super dramatic scene where Link pulls the Master Sword from its pedestal, which I completely ruined by making him wear a goofy rubber fish hat.

Okay, that’s a terrible example, but I thought it was funny.

Also it would have been better for you, the reader, if the camera had been a little closer to Link, so as you could actually see the goofy rubber fish hat. Alas.