Archive for July, 2008

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Pokémon Diamond

Sunday, July 6th, 2008

I kind of implied it in yesterday’s entry but you just won’t get a lot of mileage out of My Pokémon Ranch if you don’t have a copy of one of the DS games to connect with it. But, shocker of shockers, I certainly do have one of the DS games to link up with it.

You might be asking yourself why on Earth would I want to buy another Pokémon game. And to that I can only say that you apparently don’t know me very well. I just kind of like the series, that’s all. The games are as deep as you want them to be, and I have the opportunity to catch innocent wild creatures and force them to do my bidding, satiating my God complex… Okay, not really. I just like goofing around with it, trying out the different moves, checking out the variety of monsters, and generally trying to create my super-awesome nigh-unbeatable team… which actually usually turns out to be quite beatable.

There is a story in this game, but it really is just kind of a framework for you to work in that slowly introduces you to the world, its inhabitants, and the bizarre organized pokémon fighting culture that has somehow pervaded its world.

Or you could catch them and dress them up to participate in contests instead of fighting them. Or you could dispense with fighting completely and navigate the underground network and attempt to find hidden treasures.

But probably the most interesting part of the game is that it takes advantage of the DS’s wireless capabilities to connect to the Nebulous Internet. You can use this newfangled tech-a-nology to trade whatever you’ve collected with other folks around the world. The interface could use a little work. You can’t, for instance, search for something unless you’ve seen it first. This makes it kind of tough to ‘catch ‘em all’ since lots of the ones you’ll need to actually do that will never cross your paths without some… creative shenanigans.

You might remember that the DS, on the bottom, has a slot that will accommodate one Game Boy Advance cartridge. Once you reach a certain point in your DS adventure, you can utilize the kinda super-secret transfer method to move your monsters that you worked so hard to get in the Game Boy titles over to your DS game. Which certainly will help speed things along, but will definitely leave your prior-generation title bereft of all your hard-gotten uber-characters, which would make it kind of tough to go back and play it… if you were so inclined. Which, history has shown, will happen from time to time.

Of course, if you have a family member who gives you a copy of one of the GBA games that she found in the parking lot of some school, and the game was run over a few times, but still worked fine. Then you would probably not have any qualms about taking all of that kid’s monsters.

At least, I didn’t.

Posted in DS | 1 Comment »

My Pokémon Ranch

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

The games in the main Pokémon series are usually pretty good. The spinoff games, though, are pretty much hit or miss. But I feel this odd compulsion to try them out anyway.

With the introduction of WiiWare, Nintendo created a conduit where they could funnel games directly to me at a cheaper price, and since one of them had Pokémons on it, I guess they’d figure that they could make lots of sales on the thing, so long as it was passably mediocre, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

In the portable Pokémon adventures you capture and train little creatures to fight battles for you with the ultimate goal of being the best in the land. Problem is, though, that there is an ever-growing menagerie of creatures for you to capture, but the problem is that if you want to “catch ‘em all” you’re going to quickly run out of the kind-of limited storage space that you’re afforded in the games. The solution, then, is to buy some kind of add-on game that lets you satiate the desires of your inner pack rat.

Which is essentially what My Pokémon Ranch is. It’s just a massive storage utility in the guise of a ranch that you can send your pokémon to so that they can rest, relax and have fun. You can also send your Miis into the ranch to interact with your little critters. But you don’t really do much of the interaction. You just kind of watch them as they mill around and do their thing, which is every bit as exciting as it sounds.

So the ‘game’ kind of goes like this: you catch a whole bunch of beasties in your game, you transfer them to the ranch, then you just kind of sit there and watch them. Occasionally some ‘toy’ will fall into the ranch and you can bust it open to let the wandering pokémon play with it. And that’s pretty much the extent of your interaction with the game. Occasionally your monsters will do something spontaneous like creating a totem pole or something like that, but that’s not really interactive. Mostly you’re sitting around watching what amounts to a virtual terrarium.

But there’s a hook. A nefarious hook. The ranch-master, Hayley, will bring different pokémon to the ranch depending on a number of factors. As it happens, one of the conditions is that you deposit 1,000 pokémon into the ranch, and she’ll bring to you one of the super-rare and highly sought after creatures, Mew. Which really seems like a whole lot of work for the payoff, but I guess I’m going to end up doing it anyway.

Gotta get some kind of reward for my ten dollars.

Posted in Wii | 1 Comment »

Super Smash Bros. Melee

Friday, July 4th, 2008

The original Super Smash Bros. game was pretty fun and ended up getting a lot of play at my house. So when I heard that a new game in the series was coming out, I was pretty jazzed.

The new Smash Bros. game takes the premise set forth in the original game and just kind of polishes it up a little. There are more moves, more stages, more crap to pick up, and way more characters. After unlocking all the characters you have almost twice as many as in the prior game, representing a slightly wider cross-section of Nintendo’s history.

Oh, and some of the gameplay mechanics have been tweaked a little bit, but not in any way that most folks are going to care about. All you really need to know is that this game is just an excuse to have Nintendo characters beat each other senseless while they try to knock each other out of the arena.

Also introduced in this game were ‘trophies’. Which are little models of characters from just about every corner of the Nintendo universe. There are hundreds of the things, and they could pop up pretty well anywhere. So you have this meta-game of trophy collection to do while you’re engaged in the main game of pummeling characters senseless.

And the pummeling each other senseless really shines as a multiplayer game. It’s super-easy to pick up and just play, but actually deep enough that you can spend a lot of time plumbing its depths to learn the intricacies of combat. I never really made it past ‘passably mediocre’ at this game, even though I’ve invested over a hundred hours into the thing so far. But I’m not complaining or anything. I had at least as much fun reveling in the Nintendo nostalgia as I did actually playing the game. So it’s win-win, really.

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Double Dragon II: The Revenge

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

You go through all the trouble of rescuing Marian in Double Dragon only to have the evil Shadow Clan come back around and kill her off for some reason. Needless to say, the Double Dragons are a little bit cheesed off. So they decide to get some revenge on the Shadows by wandering headlong into their ranks and slaughtering them all using their martial artistry.

Somehow the game manages to have a slightly more violent premise than its predecessor.

But it’s also a whole lot like the first game. You walk slowly in the direction that the disembodied hands tell you to go bludgeoning thugs with whatever you can find, though your fists and feets work pretty well if you can’t find any goodies. What’s kind of different, though, is that you don’t have to bother with that ridiculous experience point system in the first game to earn your best moves. You can do all of them from the outset… assuming you can figure out which combinations of buttons to pull them off.

Like the first game, this one’s got four stages, and, also like the first game, the game isn’t too tough until you get to the end of the game, where it ramps up in difficulty so far that you’ll get lightheaded from the sudden dip in oxygen.

It’s about that point that you’re going to be really glad that the NES controllers were made out of some kind of space-age plastic that’s nigh-indestructible… unless you have those new-style ‘dog bone’ controllers that just kind of feel flimsier. Then you’ll have to start exercising some self-control. Though they do feel flimsy enough that your controller might disintegrate on impact with your TV, but I wouldn’t recommend trying it.

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Battle Chess

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

For a time when I was in middle school I was a member of the Chess Club, and while that didn’t really bring me the fame and adulation that I really wanted, I did have the chance to play a kind of interesting video game version of our chosen pastime.

Battle Chess is actually a pretty humdrum interpretation of the ubiquitous board game. So there’s really nothing to say there. The thing that makes this stand out is the battling. See, in normal mundane Chess you capture a piece and just gets taken off the board. But in Battle Chess the pieces actually fight it out (to the death, even) and the winner captures the square. Not that the battles have any actual bearing on the results or anything. It’s just a silly way to make the game a little more exciting. Well, as exciting as playing Chess on a computer in the early 90s could be, I guess.

I only played Battle Chess one time after school during a Chess Club meeting. And I didn’t even get to finish my match because I had to leave the meeting early. But what I did play I thought to be reasonably entertaining. Mostly because I was never really that good at Chess, but I got to see characters representing my little Chess-guys get brutalized in the name of a fun after-school activity, and that’s a hard thing to accomplish any more.

Posted in DOS, PC | No Comments »

San Francisco Rush 2049: The Rock

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

At first glance you’d probably think that the San Francisco Rush games would be about straight up racing, and you’d be kind of right. It is a racing game, but it’s kind of a backhanded slap to your racing game sensibilities.

Now you could race around the tracks against the computer-controlled opponents, but that’s not going to do you much good. Your car, for some reason, is absolutely incapable of attaining the same top speed as your opponents, which makes the race kind of tough to win. To make any kind of headway you have to make exorbitant use of the shortcuts placed around the track. But the thing is, these shortcuts require ridiculous amounts of dexterity and a little touch of luck to successfully maneuver through them. That’s all assuming you can even find the things. The shortcuts are frequently placed in apparently inaccessible or in insane places to get to so you kind of have to race around the track a few times just looking for places to drive off the beaten path to find the correct combination of secret passageways that you have navigate with ridiculous amounts of skill to maybe not come in last.

Translated that means that this game is going to cost you a lot of money to get good at.

Yeah, you could race through the game and not hit any of the shortcuts and have a degree of fun with the game. But also in those shortcuts are these weird coins that you can collect. Collect enough of them and you get to unlock stuff like extra cars. Of course, it’s an arcade game, so there’s no way to save your progress, right?

Wrong!

This game asks you to put in a 10-digit PIN (like your phone number) to use when you’re sitting at that particular machine. And what that did was to track some stats on that machine. Which was actually pretty awesome. Once you go through the registration process one time, every other time you sit at that machine you could just throw in your phone number and away you’d go with your stuff unlocked that you’ve worked so hard to get. Of course that also meant that you’d be spending a lot of time at that particular machine unlocking everything, which was really only good for lining the pockets of the arcade owners. Which I was willing to do fairly regularly.

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