I’m also not motivated to “have it first”, so if I wait till something goes on sale or turns up used at a store, I’m happy enough. Failing that, I can always visit an Xbox room and play a game with friends when we have the time. I’m not even interested in Nintendo’s new hardware, which is a first for a while.

Hell, the last “game” I bought was an interactive recipe book for my wife to use on the Nintendo DS. She’s the last person that’s used the DS! Now that it seems I am officially a “casual gamer” (Oh, the horror), I’ve got time for all those flash games at Kongregate.com.

I’ve been a member of that site for a long time, but I didn’t really visit all that often except for the occasional game of Boxhead. The site has a great idea behind it. People that play games get to rate them. The more games you rate, the more points you get. Playing games and achieving certain tasks like a high score or something difficult gets you more points. Getting enough points gives you a certain level.  Leveling up gets you…nothing. Well, it gets you a little number next to your name for status I suppose. One of my friends must have been playing a lot of web games in the past year, because he’s way higher than I am!

The game I had been struggling with today was “Dolphin Olympics 2“. This game has a series of badges that are based on score, as well as distance or height jumped. I could not figure out the game mechanics. It was trick based, but the first badge was about score. The rest seemed much easier to accomplish, but I wasn’t coming close.

Then I thought about it for a moment, and youtube’d the game. It turns out people spend significant amounts of time on this flash game trying to get the high score, do all the tricks, or accomplish all the goals for the badges. Just when I think I find something casual to play, someone goes and makes it competitive and hardcore again. I used the few tips I learned, accomplished my badge for some easy points and moved on.

I like Kongregate because the best games are rated by the players, and you don’t need to sort through a ton of crap to find interesting games. For example, I found a new version of Boxhead, as well as a cool physics based thought puzzle game called Splitter all today. All this, for free? Wonderful.

Helix is a game that came out of nowhere, got my attention, and became an immediate purchase based on this review. The basic premise of the game is that with two Wii remotes tracking your hand movements, you preform gestures to the beat of music. A robotic dancer tells you how to perform the move, and you must mirror it with your hands. The typical move might be “Right Punch, Left Punch, Disco Pose” or something.

The game has 26 tracks of techno dance music. If you like this kind of music, you’ll like dancing to it. If you like dancing to it, you’ll like swinging your arms around like a madman. The easy mode is just basic moves at a slower pace. “Punch, wait,….wait, Punch”. The medium mode gets frantic enough that you don’t have time to wait between most sets of move, “Punch, Safe, Raise the Roof, Safe, Punch, Disco Move….rest…oh man, again!?”

I haven’t touched hard mode yet, but I feel I’ll be sore in the morning. I think I’ll add this to walking the dog and see if I can make an exercise routine of some sort. It certainly felt like a workout. I played the first five songs, and by the end of playing each, once on easy, then again once on medium, I had a sweat worked up. The music isn’t bad, and if I have some fun, that’s not too awful either.

The presentation is functional, but basic. The dancing robot gets across what move you need to do before the beat passes by. I didn’t get confused watching the moves it was doing, and keeping in time wasn’t that hard. When there are five or more moves cued up, it’s hard to remember them all, but that’s why you need to practice.

The two player mode is “Each player controls an arm, work together to try to complete a song.” That’d be fun for parties, but I don’t think I’ll get much use out of it otherwise. You unlock songs by playing on various difficulties. I’ve got a LOT to work ahead of me if I want to hear all the songs. It would have been nice for them to include a “jukebox mode” for people that just want to listen to the music. Perhaps there is once everything is unlocked. I don’t know.

If this is the first step to a series of these style games, I’m happy to get in on the ground floor. I can’t move my legs to a beat and finish a Dance Dance Revolution song, but moving my hands to the beat was pretty easy in comparison. I’ve got a few moves I need to work on, but the calibration setting on the game that records my moods should help me get better at it.

For 1000 Wii points, this game is a steal. I’d highly recommend anyone looking for a dance game, party game, or a fun exercise game to pick it up. Hell, you can practice your cabbage patch while you play this game. If that’s not worth it, I don’t know what is.

A ridiculously awesome, and gory zombie claymation.

(I don’t want to spoil the awesome end by telling you the title.)

House of the Dead Overkill

Sega’s goes with the Grindhouse asthetic.

It’s a good day to loathe the undead. In particular, the House of the Dead Overkill trailer captures the whole B-Movie asthetic perfectly. That entire series of shooting games is over the top and ridiculous, but if you put the idea forward as, “Yes, we know 2 people gunning down thousands of zombies is awesome, do you want to dual weild Wii remotes and slaughter the undead or not?” then you pretty much have to agree. I think it’s the first game I’d pick up based on the marketing, boxshot, and trailer alone. So sweet.

Bonus: Juzt Mizunderztood is the best Emo Zombie song ever.

The World Ends with You was the only game I’ve played for the month since my friends from the United States brought it with them. I wanted to finish the game before I moved on to something else with a story so that I didn’t get confused. The game is very linear, and it’s almost impossible to get lost as it turns out. This strenghtens the story to a degree, but weakens the replay.

The game play remained strong throughout the entire game. There was always a carrot for me to try to reach. Either a new pin would level, my character would level, or my battles would consume the food that would boost my stats. Even when I didn’t play the game, I earned a few points to level up as long as I touched the game in seven days. That’s a really nice feature.
Now that I’ve completed the game, I’ve unlocked the final mode and can tackle any of the levels in any order. There is some sort of secret you can unlock by playing the difference sequences and finding the correct path or whatever. I’m not going for 100% completion, so I don’t think I’ll be diving into this mode any time soon. The ending does the typical “Final battle that does follow the regular game mechanic” routine. In the story it made sence, but when I actually went about trying to beat the final three bosses, it seemed like I was just randomly flailing about, not really winning. Otherwise, the game mechanics were great.

Today was also my first attempt at trying to Dungeon Master in D&D. I am very weak on the mechanics, and I think I made a few mistakes. I’m a little too willing to reveal information, and I made some strange decisions with a particular creature that the players dealt with in a surprising way. I advanced the plot of the larger game without intending to because of one of the “hooks” I set up in the game to explain the characters being in one location. The next DM will probably also do a “side quest” sort of mission, and the main story will catch up in a month’s time or more. It’s cool that I added to the overall story with a throw away dungeon crawl adventure without intending it. I’ll have to wait and see how much the plot of my story is actually mentioned in further adventures, if at all.

I think I need to improve on the mechanics of the game a little more and also need to make better decisions dealing with monsters and attacks. I also need some clever traps. I’d also like some confirmation that what I was doing wasn’t bad or completely strange. I have zero ideas for a follow up adventure, so I really want someone else to take over for me. Luckily someone else has something set up, more or less.

My next game is Shiren the Wanderer on the Nintendo DS. It’s a roguelike with randomly generated dungeons and has a close relation to the Pokémon Dungeon series.

Since this was a “secondary” sort of campaign, more or less “filler”, my story line as the ascending “Lord of Blades” didn’t get advanced directly through the DM’s actions. What did happen was that we, as a group, slaughtered nearly an entire goblin army without reinforcements.

At one point, I had an epic cleave streak going. I had used my barbaric rage to boost up my stats, then SLAUGHTERED dozens of goblins. Before my streat, we were at the point where the party was surrounded might even need to retreat to protect it’s weaker numbers. Then I started rolling kill shots and it was a bloodbath of Brock Samson proportions. We went from being surrounded by Worg riders to putting their forces into a panicked retreat. While everyone did their part to keep the party alive, everyone was yelling “HOLY SHIT” when I started slaughtering dozens of goblins a turn. I certainly felt like the bad ass tank character they hoped for at that moment.

Due to the epic slaughter, I got to level up once again. I took a new feat, Leadership, which means I can start to gain followers. This was a story line decision as much as it was a player decision. I like the direction the DM wants to take the character, and I’m embracing the whole “Will lead his people to a glorious future battle” thing we’ve got going on. Picking Leadership was cool, because I got to pick up a new secondary character to play in addition to the bad ass killer I play now. This new follower got to be anything I chose, and I got to fit him into the story line and play a different style character.

Since I’m the aspiring “Lord of Blades“, hoping to slaughter those of my kind to acquire my original parts and get new abilities, Pokémon style, I naturally decided my companion was going to be a fellow Warforged. For contrast, instead of an armored badass, this one will be weak, trying to perfect his body and become more humanoid instead of more monsterous like my other character.

I decided to go a comical route with his class. Since he is supposed to be a loyal follower, I decided he’d be my bard, singing my praises to the unconverted masses. “Brave, brave, brave Sir Robin…” Since the Warforged are humanoid construct beings, I decided the theme would be “Terminator with a guitar”. He’ll carry around a guitar and assult our enemies with awesome 80’s glam rock. He’ll play songs to boost my party’s stats and try to lure monsters into his power ballad thrall.

I’ve emailed the sheet I used to create him to the DM, and it’s getting worked into the next play session. This new character is a complete 180 from my main “Story Line” character. I’m already imagining all the trouble this new character will bring about by being this rocking bard. As much fun as slaughtering everyone is when the dice roll your way, it might even be more fun to have a sillier character sitting around too.

Want to know what I was doing on every train ride, bus ride, or any sit down private time I’ve had since my friends have arrived? I’ve been playing The World Ends with You. I told my friend to pick this game up in the United States for me since it’s been sold out online consistently since release. This is a Japanese Role Playing Game, something that is usually very hit or miss with me. Either I get really involved in leveling my characters, or I tire of the story and stop caring almost immediately.

This has been one of those “hits” for me that makes me need to charge my DS multiple times because I’ll play so much. When I sit down to play this game, I’ll usually wear headphones and zone out the world for hours at a time.

You collect “Pins” that give you different attacks depending on the actions you do. For example, I collected a pin that shoots graffiti like ice beams when I stab upwards, but when I scratch sideways, I can run up to a “Noise” and beat it down. These pins upgrade and evolve, unlocking new attacks to use. This is the carrot that keeps me playing. The “one more battle will upgrade that pin” aspect is fantastic motivation to try out new combinations.

I absolutely adore the combat system. Battles take place on both of the DS screens. On the bottom screen, you control Neku, who is your main character. He is controlled by scratching, circling, or poking the stylus on the screen.

On the top screen is my partner, who attacks using a D-pad to string together combination attacks. By watching the combo I can end it in different points. If these points match some cards on the screen, I can get bonuses, collect more pins, increase my attack, or set up a special attack that covers both screens.

The basic flow of the battle is aided by a “combo puck” that passes between both screens. Beat someone down with Neku on the bottom screen, then pass the puck to the top screen for your partner to increase their damage. You can keep the puck going to get insane bonuses.

Usually I’m kicking so much ass that the battle ends too early and I want to keep fighting to see how far I can keep combinations going. Usually the WORST part of an RPG is the battle system, because it means you just have to push the “Win” button repeatedly and the monster simply takes up your time until the next plot point. In The World Ends with You, I can string together a series of battles so that I can fight multiple enemies in a row to increase my chance of getting better pins.

There are other ways to control the difficulty. As you level up, you can choose to forego the extra hit points using a sliding scale on one of the menus. If you choose to keep at a lower level and make the battles more difficult, you’ll get more experience and more great pins. If a boss battle is too hard, you can slide the level back up and take the monsters on at full strength. I just unlocked the option to make battles even HARDER and have them drop even MORE great items.

You can control the difficulty of the game on the fly, which means you never really get stuck, and you never have to fight a boring battle you are overleveled and can easily beat if you so desire. I typically fight five to six levels under my current level just to give myself more of a challenge and get better items.

The story takes place in modern Tokyo, with a twist. I’m not going to give away any plot, but because of the setting, the typical RPG tropes have been updated. You don’t drink potions. You eat junk food and get stat bonuses when you digest them after battle. You get to wear outrageous clothes that boost your stats, but only if you are brave enough to wear them in public. You can wear anything you want around, no matter how silly, but if you aren’t following fashion trends, you’ll look stupid and have stat penalties. I really enjoy the twists this modern setting brings.

There are standard sorts of “quests” you have to do each day of the game. You want to pass these tests, but so far they aren’t very different than any other role playing game. Instead of killing dragons, you read people’s minds and implant thoughts to get characters to say the right thing, or collect a certain item for someone.

The rest of the plot is original enough that the game amuses me. The localization is also superb. While the two screen combat can overwhelm at first, everything is introduced gradually, and you’ll realize you are doing better and kicking more ass each time you try it. Even if you set down the game for a while, the game will upgrade your pins for every minute you spent away for up to seven days. Putting the game down doesn’t mean you are falling behind completely! I highly recommend The World Ends with You. It’s one of the most original JRPG games in a while, an original franchise, and a WONDERFUL Nintendo DS game.

My first WiiWare purchase was a bit of a surprise. I ended up picking up Dr. Mario Rx last night. My wife and I had been sitting around trying to think of something to do. She said she’s willing to watch me play Wii Sports, but she didn’t want to play a “sports game”. She’s like the most fun hating person EVER, because I don’t watch sports yet am greatly amused by Wii Sports.

Anyway, the ONE game she does like if she’d HAVE to pick something is Puzzle Bobble. Seeing as that has yet to drop on WiiWare (It’ll happen eventually), I decided to look into whatever was friendly enough to play cooperatively or competitively with handicapping to even out our different ability levels. It also had to be simple so that I didn’t have to spend any time explaining rules.

The first mode we played was “Virus Buster”, which is a Wii specific mode where you grab the falling pills by pointing the Wii remote. The pills can be dragged, flipped, and positioned with the remote, but once they fall, they can’t be raised. This means that someone can grab the pill, move it, and if they make a mistake, good luck fixing it. It’s probably a good idea we stopped playing this mode. I could see friendships lost and marriages irrepairably damaged because of this mode.

“Why! NO! NOT THERE! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!” The best part of this mode is that four people can control the pills, and they drop multiple pills at the same time. Four people whipping around multiple pills would be chaotic fun.

If you want a puzzle game with handicapping features that can balance out a match, Dr. Mario Rx is PERFECT. The difficulty of the game is determined by pill speed and virus concentration. By manipulating both of those, we found a level where we were both very close to victory at any time. I will admit to being a very bad at Dr. Mario, but it was fun to play.

I won’t go near the online battle mode for fear of being crushed my Japanese housewives, but finding a game my wife and I can both play is very rare. I’m going to casually encourage her and hope to build on my success. If my wife likes, there has to be something really fun about it. Lucky for her, we have a spare Game Boy SP that has a Dr. Mario and Tetris Attack GBA cart for her to practice with on the subway if she gets bored.

Having the chance to download new games at any time with a Wifi connection when the mood strikes us is really nice. I don’t care if the game is casual or hardcore as long as it’s fun. The game I am most looking forward to, “World of Goo” has yet to be released though. Maybe that game will spur more interfamily gaming.

The hardest part of a rogue-like, besides looking at a screen full of text where “@” represents a player, is getting a handle on the interface. Everything is done with the keyboard with shortcut keys representing commands, and not only that, the shift and control keys modify the commands. You have multiple menus and overwhelming options to begin.

Very often there are options you don’t know about that would have prevented your death, but due to the interface being a mass of keys, it’s often hard to know about different options. Sure, there is a readme file with lots of helpful key bindings and stuff, but you need to know what they are even talking about by playing the game before you would ever know why one thing or another is bound to what key. Don’t even get me started on classes, races, and god choices in the game. It’s enough to make any person feel lost.

For the longest time, I would traverse the dungeon by pressing the directional key, following a wall, and simply keeping in one direction until I ran out of hallways to explore. Then I’d go down a level, get slaughtered, and start over. I learned this week I can press “Control-O” and auto-explore everything in one level of the dungeon in one to five key presses.

If I discover anything, I automatically stop. If I see a monster, an item, an object, or an exit, I get command back and I’m able to act as freely as if I had pressed each individual keystroke as before. This alone has made the game 100% easier, faster, and more fun. I didn’t KNOW about this option until I had dug into some menu for some other key combination and found out about it. Now I consider it a necessity, and can’t imagine even tolerating the game before I knew of it. And yet this is the second or third time I’ve come back to Crawl. No wonder I quit, frustrated last time.

Every time I get back into this game, there are things I discover. For example, if you have necromancy skills and raise the dead (depends on your spell or god) you can command them to attack your enemies (that’s AWESOME!) by pressing the exclamation point key! I was playing a mummy character, and I was able to raise pet zombies, but I had no idea of their purpose until I found out about THIS menu. Pets went from a neat toy to a killer sidekick.

There are TONS of secrets to discover, and a LOT more for me to learn in this sort of game. I usually get frustrated, since I haven’t even seen past the beginning levels with a character, but I’m slowly getting better. I’ve also started watching games on http://crawl.akrasiac.org/ via PuTTY at work before classes start. I’ll have it in a small window as I create papers and prepare my materials.

I throw it up and it’s like the Matrix for everyone else. ASCII flying around, text rapidly updating, all sorts of weird symbols on the screen that don’t seem to make sense. Only I can decode what the hell is going on when other people play the game, but I’m learning a few things about different races, combinations, and what NOT to do in the game.

Eventually I might even get an Orb of Zot and complain about how difficult something other than the very beginning of the game is for once. Either that or I might get a character that survives for more than one sitting. One thing at a time. Probably not.

When looking for information about the latest Final Fantasy release on the Wiiware service, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicals: My Life as a King, I disliked the design choices that underpin the game. I started thinking about why I find some games rewarding, and others pointless.

FFCC:MLaaK is a marked departure from the typical RPG. In this game, you play a King confined to his castle. You have to rebuild your kingdom by harvesting the minerals found in the dungeons. This is a pretty cool concept. When I first heard of this, I thought, “It’s more of a resource management game. Neat. SimCity + Final Fantasy + Dungeon Crawling. Awesome.”

In SimCity, you needed to allocate resources wisely, because if you didn’t collect enough taxes, you couldn’t keep the city running for the next year. Then things started getting worse and worse, and you could only hold on so long before something came along and wiped you out. FFCC:MLaaK removed all the “risk and failure” from this model of game design, and I’m scratching my head why anyone would want to play it.

When the idea of FFCC:MLaaK was introduced, I thought that there would be a certain building you needed to build at a certain time to equip your forces with what they needed, and that if your troops were defeated, you’d lose the game. There had to be some sort of time limit driving you to work fast, otherwise you could just sending your forces to lower level dungeons to level them up, then clear out harder dungeons easily. If there is no consequence for failure, like the inability to raise taxes in SimCity, why continue?

Instead of controlling the people you send out to collect the materials (AKA, gain income on your own) in the dungeons, adventurers simply send back reports from the dungeons. If they come back with the materials by killing the boss, success. If they fail to defeat the boss, they come back wounded and need to rest for several days before returning to a dungeon. There is no time limit for when quests must be completed. There is nothing you can do to change the outcome of beating a boss to get income for the kingdom other than leveling the troops by sending them to easier dungeons. The only other way to use money is to donate it to the buildings in town to make better items to increase their chances of succeeding the first time.

Later, you can group the troops in different configurations with skills and medals to support each other. They still fight on their own without your help, but they pass or fail as a group. If you give them medals for achievement, you can manipulate statistics to further increase their rates of success. You still don’t directly control them. Your are the king in the castle. You don’t want to soil yourself with the “adventure”. You get to construct buildings that influence the townspeople. Now THAT’S exciting.

There is no danger of going too slowly. There is no benefit to going quickly either. Finish fast or slow. It doesn’t matter. Fail a quest? Try again. It doesn’t matter, you aren’t actually going to the dungeons, your adventurer proxies are fighting for you.

Beating the game opens up “New Game+”. The only difference here is that the higher level dungeons take a longer time to open up. This means that as long as you put time into the game, eventually the troops you are sending will level up and defeat the boss. Any outcome of the resource scarcity introduced by the game is handled by the game itself. There is no strategy, because all you have to do is try again and your chances will increase each time because your adventurers level up between battles.

You can make the characters in the game happier by building bakeries or parks. This might make it easier to beat the game, or not. I guessing you’ll need to build each item possible to progress through the game, because that justifies the quests into the dungeon. Each demand of residents means you need to continue with the questing portion of the game to get more resources. The resources you get are determined by the adventurers you send off into the dungeons, but don’t actually control. The game demands something, then gets it for you if you’ve played long enough.

All you do is press a button to complete the loop. It is basically masturbation in video game form.

Basically, the lack of consequence for failure or strategy mean the game is entirely pointless. I play games that have heavy consequences for failure (roguelikes= permadeath of characters), or heavy strategy (Magic the Gathering). Removing one of these elements of game design can still be fun, (card games without keeping score) but I can’t wrap my head around someone who would want to pay money to play a more active version of Progressquest.

When I asked about the gameplay for some clarifications to see if there was more of a point, the best response I got was, “All RPG games are just time sinks. It’s joy to play and looks pretty, and isn’t that enough?”

If I don’t control the outcome, and there is no strategy involved in the game, no it’s not really enough for me. It is pretty. The character art has a good design. You can even pay more to buy new costumes for your characters that do nothing. There are new dungeons to download, and different races to unlock, but you never actually fight to acquire the resources you need.

If there is no gameplay of consequence, why do I care?

I. don’t. get. it.

(EDIT) It’s been brought to my attention:

Some quests can only be defeated by certain classes, so you need SOME strategy in troop deployment (AKA, Reading a report to know why the person you sent before failed, then sending a different class.) If you fail a mission 13 times, you don’t lose the game, but there seems there is a Ranking system based on how you completed the game.

There IS a consequence, however slight, for being faster and or better at completing the game. You get graded on the happiness, speed, and other factors of how you managed the kingdom. Getting a better score MIGHT even unlock different content, but no one knows. There is a “point” to completing the task, if you play a game to get a ranking.

photo credit: Matthew Ev

The single player adventure mode Subspace Emissary has been defeated!  The final level of the adventure mode, “The Great Maze”, is somewhat infamous already. People that rushed through the game just to get the characters for their multiplayer gaming were complaining it was too long. It was something like a Metroid map, with lots of interlocking levels that required to to fight previous brawlers. I thought it was fun. I actually liked it more than the “normal” stages through the rest of the adventure mode. There was more action and it was fun to try to find all the doors to the “corrupted” characters.

I liked it all except the final boss. Fuck that guy. Giving a boss character a “One hit kill” move doesn’t make me smile. It’s cheap, and it’s not fun. Anyway, after two tries on the “normal” difficulty, I beat him. Now that it’s completed, I’ve got two more characters left to unlock. I’m not going to go back and try for harder levels or more points or anything. I’m perfectly happy to call this mode “done” once I get it finished properly.

I got kicked off the television tonight so my wife can watch her drama, so I’ll probably get all the characters in under a week of receiving the game if I am successful tomorrow. The last time around for Melee, it took weeks, and I unlocked the characters by chance going through some of the modes because I was bored. Mr. Game & Watch took a LONG time to unlock last time around.

The last 50% of the game I used the same four or five characters. Diddy Kong, Kirby, Wario, Pit, and occasionally Luigi. Luigi was who I was best at in Melee, but I’ve never considered myself “Good” at the game at all. I dropped using the Wii “classic” controller, and now play the game with the Wii Remote and Nunchuck attachment. I’m very happy being able to customize my controls. The defaults don’t work for me, but I’ve got a set up that feels pretty natural now, and I don’t even need to keep a Wavebird plugged in anymore. Now that I’ve got a handful of characters I really enjoy playing with, I’ll go through the other single player modes, try the events, then get better in the multiplayer.

However, before I am able to play online, I’ve got to have some people add my friend code. My Brawl Multiplayer Friend code is 2105-8569-3462. I haven’t been sucessful connecting to anyone in the United States (The region of my console), but if any Korean import Wii owners want to play some Brawl, add your own code in the comments below and we’ll try to work something out.

Very happy with my purchase. Highly recommend it to any Nintendo fans, or casual fighting game fans.