Archive for August, 2007

Tales of Symphonia

Saturday, August 11th, 2007

The following was written for my other site shortly after the reviews stopped on this site. It made its debut in January of 2006, and I am in no way putting this up here because I’m strapped for time today.


Tales of Symphonia

It’s been a while since I played a good old-fashioned RPG. When I saw that Tales of Symphonia was down to $20, I decided to pick it up and give it a whirl.

The meat of an RPG is the story. Tales of Symphonia puts you in command of Lloyd and his troupe of adventurers on their quest to ‘regenerate the world’. Without giving too much of the story away, I’ll just say that there is a long, fairly complicated, story that grows in scope as you progress. In the end it becomes much bigger than at the outset and it leads to a resolution that is a bit open ended. Typical RPG stuff.

In playing through the story, you will notice the overt commentaries on racism, corruption in religion, and facing your problems. Occasionally, the story will stop just short of bonking you in the head with the Morality Stick(tm), but those instances are few.

Occasionaly during your game, you will see a trigger for a ’skit’. A skit shows the characters in your party discussing something, usually the situation at hand, but not neccesarily so. Some of them are in the game just to provide some depth to the characters, which is a nice touch. Most of the skits are completely optional, so if you don’t like the flow being interrupted or just don’t care to watch them you are not forced to.

If the story is the meat of an RPG, then the battle system is the potatoes. The avatars of the monsters are visible at all times wandering about the map, and if you run into one, you will fight its group. You have the ability to stun some of them and (or) run around them if you wish to try. Entering a battle transforms the game from 3D role-playing game to more of a 3D action game feel. In the battles you directly control one character of your choosing and indirectly control up to 3 others. You have the ability to move anywhere on the battlefield, and will have to do so in order to attack enemies and avoid attacks. Your buddies are computer controlled, but you can control what they do by issuing orders such as fall back, go all out, all attack the same monster, keep some skills in reserve, what spells can be cast, etc. Your friends are fairly competent, although you will have to keep an eye on their stats. You can also plug in some controllers to have friends play with you, although this has limited appeal since the camera is trained on whoever holds Controller 1.

The main characters in the game are all distinct and unique. Their avatars are large and colorful, and definitely stand out against the decent locales. There are a few camera issues, most notably in the battles (although that’s really only an issue if you’re playing with more than one player) and on the overworld map. The camera will follow the contour of the land, but will not change its distance from your character. Because of this, should you walk by some mountains, the camera will go nearly directly overhead, leaving you very little ability to see where you’re going. In dungeons and towns, this is mostly alleviated by having the camera in a fixed location or putting it on rails. Of course this also means that you cannot move the camera to get a better view of the lay of the land. Thankfully, this urge to move the camera came up very few times during the course of playing through this game. The views that I was presented with were for the most part spot-on.

The back of the box states that this game has eighty hours of gameplay. I managed to complete the main story in just over 40. I looked over some of the side quests that I skipped over, and I doubt that they will take me an additional 40. Perhaps I can pad that by another 20 or so. One feature that helped immensely is the Synopsis. The Synopsis gives you a summary of what’s happened up to the point in the game you’re in, and gives you a slight push toward your next objective. I found this to be absolutely indispensable after I took a two-day break from playing and was able to pick up right where I left off without trying to remember what I had done two days prior and what NPC I was supposed to talk to next.

What RPG would be complete without cutscenes? There are two lengthy pre-rendered cutscenes (one at the beginning and one at the end), that are in an anime style, which is a refreshing change from the computer-generated cutscenes I’ve grown accustomed to seeing. Most of the plot-establishing cutscenes are shown using the game’s engine, and several of the more important ones have competent voice-overs signaling that you should pay extra attention to them. Most of the voice-actors are veterans with numerous works under their belts, and will likely be recognized by players and animation geeks. The character of Kratos, for example, is voiced by Cam Clarke, who voiced Die Fledermaus in The Tick animated series.

Tales of Symphonia is a solid game. It’s got just enough old-school RPG elements mixed in with new features to make for an enjoyable experience.

Recommended.

XBand Video Game Modem

Friday, August 10th, 2007

While not technically a game, the XBand modem was certainly a unique piece of hardware that deserves recognition.

The XBand itself was a large purple cartridge that stuck out of your Super NES by about twice the amount that a regular cartridge did, and you put a game on the top of it, creating an impressive tower of plastic. Once you turned on the system, you had several options at your disposal: a buddy list, newsletters, email, and a matchup service, plus several more sundry activities that I’m not going to go into here.

Buddy List

The feature that I used most frequently was the game matchup feature. You could choose to search for an opponent either in your local calling area or nationwide. If there was an opponent waiting to play someone in the same game you were seeking with, then your SNES would dial up their SNES, you would connect, and play would begin. Sure, that doesn’t sound too impressive now, but this was before most people had even heard of the Internet, much less had access to it outside of their local library. The system, it should be noted, did not use the Internet at all, but rather directly dialed your opponent. This was fairly important as it helped reduce latency (the time between when you press the buttons and when it appears on the screen), but caused two big problems in my house:

  1. When I was in the queue, folks would dial my number to play. If I didn’t tell everyone in the house what I was doing, there was a near 100% chance that someone would answer the phone, completely screwing up the connection.
  2. While dialing out, I could disable call waiting by prepending a sequence of numbers to my dial-out number. This was fine unless I had to wait on a call. When someone called me, I had no way to disable call-waiting. This meant that inevitably someone would call, there would be beeps on the line, and I would get disconnected

Each match you won gave you a certain amount of points, these points weren’t really for anything except for giving you some meaningless ranking on your profile screen that only you could see. Unless, that is, you had access to the Internet. The site, which is now long-defunct, allowed you to look up players by name and see their stats. It was pretty bare-bones, but pretty useful for seeing if the person that trounced you in Game X was a veteran or just getting started.

Super Mario Kart Record

There was a fair selection of games supported by the service, though the only ones I ever played were Super Mario Kart, Kirby’s Avalanche, Killer Instinct, and Super Street Fighter II. There were also several sports games like Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball and NBA Jam, but I couldn’t imagine tying up the phone line for the length of time it would take to complete just one matchup in those games. Late in the life of the service, support for Super Mario World and Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past was added, though neither allowed you to play the games. Mario let you dial up a random user and chat with them with the built in chat interface (think Instant Messenger with only one person available at a time), and Zelda allowed you to compete with someone else in a silly maze game. These late additions, in hindsight, were probably meant to bolster the use of the system.

Even at its peak, which is right about when I joined, I had trouble finding people to play with. There were virtually no other players in my local area, there were two other then the three I made buy one, and searching nationwide took upwards of 10 minutes to find an opponent, if I could find one at all. After a couple years, the service tanked and the company was absorbed by MPlayer, who was, in turn absorbed by GameSpy. The system was immediately shut down, and now exists only in the memories of those that played it. If you look hard enough, though, you’ll find the occasional player whose eyes will light up at the mention of the ground-breaking service.

Bubbles

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

I can’t remember ever seeing Bubbles in any of my local arcades, and I never heard of it when people get all nostalgic about the ‘good old days’ of arcade games. So imagine my surprise when I cracked open my copy of Midway Arcade Treasures and found this game staring back at me.

Protip: It wasn’t the good kind of surprise.

Bubbles

In Bubbles, you play as a soap bubble (probably named ‘Bubbles’) that is tasked with cleaning up a series of sinks. You can absorb (i.e. clean) anything smaller than you which will make you grow slightly. Clean enough things and the drain in the middle of the screen turns green and you go down it, somehow ending up at the next sink. Hit a cleaning brush, or something bigger than you, or something sharp (like a razor blade) and you pop. (Popping = you dead). You keep going until you either run out of lives or run out of interest with this game. Both of which I’d suspect will happen relatively quickly.

The main problem I have with this game is that the controls are a bit… erm… slippery. I suppose that’s the nature of controlling a soap bubble with a face on it, but it makes the game much more frustrating than it needs to be. Playing for about 10 minutes, I was able to discover why I never saw this game in any form until over 20 years after it came out. While the 1980s were certainly a fantastic time for video games, and we got a lot of classic titles out of the boom, there were a lot of clunkers. This game included.

Rush ‘n’ Attack

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007

I guess that games set in wartime are popular for the same reason that movies set in wartime are popular. Folks like seeing some super-macho tough guy defeating an army that’s armed to the teeth (possibly even to the gills). Rush ‘N’ Attack is no different.

In Rush ‘N’ Attack you control a guy that’s armed with a knife. He has to run to the right, brutally murdering everyone in his way as he searches for P.O.W.s. Most enemy soldiers can be killed with one knife stab to the stomach. You’re equally as fragile, as you can be killed by one touch from anything: kick to the head, dog’s teeth to the face, flamethrower to the front, rocket to the chin, etc.

The big challenge in this game comes not solely from the fact that your character is about as tough as a wet piece of tissue paper hanging from a clothesline on a windy day. It comes from the crazily ineffective controls. Enemies have the uncanny ability to leap onscreen just out of range of your sharpened letter opener, and kick your face off. Without a ludicrous amount of memorization and laser-sharp reflexes, you’re going to lose a lot.

I got tired of losing around the end of stage 2, and hung up my fatigues and butter knife.

Chopper Command

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

In the heyday of the Atari 2600, there were a lot of games that I only played a time or two. These were the games that were passed around my neighborhood to everyone that had systems because we couldn’t afford too many games, but we could each afford a few different ones each.

One of the games that made its way through my doors was Chopper Command. It, like a lot of games for the system, is pretty straightforward. You have a convoy of trucks at the bottom of the screen that you must protect from enemy fire. You control a helicopter (a choppa!) that is quite maneuverable and has a gun powerful enough to vaporize the enemy aircraft with one shot. Once you eliminate all of the enemies you go to the next stage where the game gets slightly harder.

It’s kind of fun, but it’s a whole lot like Defender. If you’ve played that game, then you know what to expect here… more or less. If you haven’t played Defender, you might want to give this a try over that one, it’s slightly less complicated.

Gumshoe

Monday, August 6th, 2007

I had always heard the name Gumshoe bandied about when folks talk about old NES games, but never really played it or knew what it was. The other day I got my chance to play it, and it turns out to not be that good.

Gumshoe is the story of a guy, a former Private Investigator of some sort. This guy has had his daughter kidnapped and he must get some black diamonds to get her back. As is happens, the diamonds are in the hands of some kinds of enemies, enemies that can be reached by running to the right.

When running to the right, your guy has to avoid obstacles and collect powerups. Pretty standard fare, really. Where this game differs from the norm, however, is the way you control your character. You don’t directly control your character. You control the game with the Zapper. You shoot some of the obstacles to remove them from play. To avoid the other obstacles and to collect the powerups you have to shoot your gumshoe friend, since shooting him will make him jump.

I don’t really know any more than that, the clunky controls made this game pretty unexciting to play and I gave up partway through stage 1.

Micro Machines

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

If you’re a child (or an adult) of the 80s, then chances are good that you remember Micro Machines: little toy cars pitched by the world’s fastest talker. And like just about any toy popular in the 1980s, someone decided to make a video game about it.

Since the Micro Machines are tiny cars, it only makes sense that you’d want to make some kind of racing game. Some kind of racing game where the cars are in properly-sized environments. That is: tiny cars, giant courses.

One player mode in this game is pretty good. You take your little car around a series of courses, racing to be first. Finish acceptably and you get to go to the next race. There aren’t really too many courses, but it’s fun for a bit.

Since racing against the computer can eventually get pretty boring (the artificial intelligence isn’t so good), you get a two player mode. Two player mode is a little bit of a let down. The main problem is that there is no split screen, both cars race on the screen, which is not too bad until the trailing player gets so behind that he falls off the screen. When this happens, the race stops, the cars reposition themselves, and the race starts again from that point.

Micro Machines

I only rented this game one time, finished just about all of it, and haven’t had the urge to play it again since if that tells you anything about it.

Ninja Baseball Bat Man

Saturday, August 4th, 2007

It’s hard to see a game with a title like Ninja Baseball Bat Man and not be intrigued. Just the title should send wild images running through your imagination. Can the game live up to what you’ve already concocted? Let’s see!

In the world of Ninja Baseball Bat Man, 5 ‘baseball items’ have been stolen from the Baseball Hall of Fame, and it’s up to an elite squad of what appears to be robots wearing ninja garb and wielding baseball bats. This game is a side-scrolling beat ‘em up, so you and up to three of your buddies walk to the right (or in some cases, to the left) brutally beating everything in your way to an unrecognizable mess and searching for the missing baseball items (a bat, a ball, a glove, a pair of cleats, a hat, and a statue of ‘Babe’ Ruth). You have to fight all kinds of baseball-themed enemies: baseballs, gloves, sets of catcher’s gear, and etc. Lots of etc.

Ninja Baseball Bat Man screen shot

This is the kind of game that I could easily see some kind of Saturday morning cartoon show based on. A ridiculous team of heroes in a world with a ridiculous premise? Prominently featuring baseball? Mindless Violence? How could it lose?

Duck Hunt

Friday, August 3rd, 2007

Since it was one half of the pack-in cartridge for a ton of Nintendo Entertainment Systems, Duck Hunt is probably the game you think of whenever you see a picture of a Zapper.

Duck Hunt, like a lot of light-gun games of the time, is exceedingly simple. There are two things you can do in this game: shoot ducks and shoot clay pigeons. When shooting ducks, your dog will rush into the marsh and flush out the ducks, either one or two at a time depending on the mode. You have three shots to shoot them all in each wave, and must hit a certain number of ducks to continue. Hit them and the dog will pop up with your duck(s) in hand. Miss or take too long and the dog will laugh at your pathetic marksmanship. This frustrated just about everyone I knew that played the game, and they desperately wanted to shoot the dog for laughing at them. While it wasn’t possible in the NES version, Wikipedia claims that it is possible to shoot him in the arcade version, though I was not able to figure out how to do that.

The second mode you could try was shooting clay pigeons. They would fly out from the bottom of the screen two at a time into the distance. You had to shoot them before they hit the ground and, like the ducks, have to shoot a certain number of them to make it to the next round.

I spent hours with this game, simple as it was, mostly because I didn’t have any money for anything new for a few months. This isn’t to say that it’s a bad game, it’s not, really. It’s just at this point, I’m pretty much done with it.

Mario Clash

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

As I’ve mentioned before I have a Virtual Boy and didn’t hate it. I talked about Mario Bros. yesterday so I could talk about Mario Clash today.

Mario Clash is almost completely identical to Mario Bros. with one major difference: the game is in pseudo 3D (no big surprise here). The game is mostly the same: various vermin come out of the pipes and you have to hit them to flip them over and kick them while they’re down. This game, though, introduces a foreground and a background and a new play mechanic, the ability to pick up and throw shells.

You can throw the shells left and/or right like in a boring, not 3D game or you can throw them from the foreground to the background and vice versa. This makes the game slightly tougher since you have to have not only a good sense of timing, but a sense of timing in 3D space. Other than that, it’s basically the same game. Not quite a sequel, but still a good way to waste a couple of minutes.