The Closeout Warrior

Since I only came into possession of an original Playstation system, I missed out on a lot of its landmark games. So when Resident Evil was remade for the Game Cube, a system I actually owned, I jumped at the chance to finally play it.

The original game was a campy, gory story of a zombie outbreak. The new version loses some of the camp, adds some more gore, and succeeds at being really creepy.

The story goes something like this: there is a zombie outbreak, you take the role of either Chris or Jill (members of an elite military group, natch) and try to figure out what’s going on. En route to investigate the problem, and to figure out what happened to the other elite military group that was sent in to investigate first, the group is chased down by zombie dogs into a creepy mansion in the middle of the creepy woods. From there, they try to unravel the mystery and get out alive. It goes without saying that this game is quite violent and not for the kiddos.

What you’re going to notice almost right away is that to proceed, you’re going to have to solve some puzzles. The solutions to the puzzles range from the straightforward (put the key in the keyhole), to the slightly less obvious (wind the clock to open a secret panel), to the ridiculous (play Moonlight Sonata on a conveniently placed piano to open a door).

You’re also going to notice that this game looks amazing, especially for the Game Cube. It really adds to the atmosphere. Go ahead and play it at night, with all the lights turned off. Bonus points if it’s a rainy night.

I am occasionally amazed at the skill of the folks who put together promo videos for games. They managed to make P.N.03 look pretty enticing, and when I found it at my local Best Buy for less than $10, I couldn’t resist. Although, in hindsight, I dearly wish I had.

The game plays something like this: You run around a room, shooting things in front of you with your super-amazing power suit. Blow up everything in the room and you go on to the next, nearly identical room. After going through so many nearly identical rooms, you’ll fight a boss, get upgrades for your suit, and continue. Occasionally, you’ll get an almost incomprehensible bit of dialog that attempts to further the story.

I did manage to make it to the first boss, and the first save point before I was bored completely out of my mind. Making the heroine of the game sexy and limber with acrobatic moves is a cheap way to get some young male purchases of a pretty lame game.

Here are some impressions of this game that I wrote for my main site back in 2002. Amazingly, the game still holds up very well after all this time. The thing about the game is that on the face of it, it’s super simple, the only control you have is the analog stick. But the game quickly taxes your reflexes, your resolve, and your understanding of physics. It’s polish is masterfully done.

In fact, watch the video below. It’s pretty amazing what you’re able to do within the boundaries of the game.

Apologies for the quality of the movie, but it’s the only one that I could find without an obnoxious soundtrack dubbed over the top of it.

Where do I begin? Super Monkey Ball is a very peculiar game. To take a quote from the manual, you have to “guide the monkeys in the balls to the goal.” That simple description really is all there is to the game, but the game it really a lot more fun than that sounds.

The controls are very similar to those Labyrinth games where you have to roll a marble through a maze, only you control the maze instead of the marble. The same is true here. The only controls you need are the control stick and the A button to control the zoom on the handy little map in the corner.

Although the control scheme is simple enough, this game is HARD. They suck you in by putting some pretty easy levels on Beginner mode, but once you start on Advanced, the levels ramp up in difficulty fast. I tried Expert just to see how hard it was, level 6 defeated me and all my continues (I even took the warp from level 1 to level 5), and that mode goes all the way up to 50.

To sum up, this game is a lot more fun than you might expect because of the cute graphics, but it is not easy. If you grab yourself a copy, be prepared to engage in some stress reduction exercises. This game is maddeningly difficult.

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.

This review originally appeared on this site in April of 2005 and was one of the first reviews on this site. The game wasn’t that good.

Sometimes you’ll walk into a store and get an ominous feeling. Like there’s a game so bad that its aura permeates the air in the building. Carving a pathway through the miasma reveals a rack surrounded by signs that you should not seek to acquire anything on it.

But I did anyway.

Bad Boys: Miami Takedown is supposedly based on a couple of movies you perhaps have seen. Seeing the movies is certainly not a prerequisite for extracting the maximum amount of fun out of this game.

The game starts out like a generic cop-action movie: you’re treated to a cutscene of some “bad guys” making allusions to some vague crime. I was unable to play the game long enough to actually figure out who the Generic Criminals were or what exactly they had to do with anything.

It was about at this point that I was introduced to the… um… revolutionary control scheme. If you’ve ever held a Gamecube controller, try to follow along:

1. The control stick is used to move forward/back and to strafe left and right.

2. The C-Stick is used to aim your weapon, and by extension turn your character to the left and right.

3. You press the B button to hide behind something. The game is centered around this. Once you are behind something, you use the left stick to peek out and the right stick to aim.

4. The A button is your All Purpose Action Button(TM). This is the button you will be hitting the most to do just about everything, EXCEPT fire your weapon.

5. You fire by pressing the R button.

6. The other buttons aren’t all that important.

In the portion of the game that I could stomach to play, it was a nearly unending sequence of: duck behind something and kill everyone in the area, run ahead a few steps, repeat”. Now to fully understand the genius of the controls, picture yourself in the following: You are ducking behind, let’s say, a lawn mower and you want to kill the 10 identical twins that are shooting at you. You have to press and hold Up on the left stick, aim with the C-Stick, and press R to infuse the criminals with Hot Leaded Justice(TM).

This game also allegedly has objectives to complete, but gives you no real feedback if you’ve managed to satisfy the requirements or not. The only cue I was able to find was that when you’ve successfully killed enough people, the music will stop and you have to leave the area to trigger the next cut scene.

Oh, and let’s not forget about the audio. Throughout your adventures the main characters will say things to each other that are probably supposed to be funny. There’s only two minor problems: one is that they are the polar opposite of funny, and the other is that they are triggered all the time. Phrases like: “I didn’t give you permission to shoot me!” and “Shoulda stayed in school… PUNK!”

There really isn’t much good about this game. The theme song on the opening screen sounded OK, I guess.

Realistically, this is not a game you should endeavor to purchase. Even the $9.99 price tag isn’t nearly enough to justify the putting of this abomination in your Gamecube.

Game Name: Bad Boys: Miami Takedown
Platform: Game Cube
Purchased from: Target
Amount of money I wasted on it: $9.99
One word summary: Abominable