What I'm Playing (Volume 56): Gradius III

Gradius III is one of the games that was included given to me when I rebought a Super Nintendo in college, along with a bunch of great games (Super Mario World, Star Fox, F-Zero, NBA Jam) and several terrible ones (Bill Walsh's College Football, The Incredible Hulk). I was immediately drawn to Gradius III upon completing fooling around with the really good games, and enjoyed it, although the difficulty absolutely crushed me. I recently came back around to it to draw to beat it, and failed, but I'll still review what I played here.

The game is, as you might imagine, the third game in the Gradius series, a Japanese side scrolling shooter (think R-Type, although Gradius came first). The original feature in the Gradius series is a weapon bar which gives the player choice over the upgrades he would like to give his ship. In a shooter like R-Type or Raiden, enemies drop particular powerups which confer specific benefits to the player. For example, grabbing a red powerup will give you homing missiles, while a green one will give you a more powerful main cannon. In the Gradius series, you pick up powerups like currency, and can spend them as you will. So for one powerup, you can increase the speed of your ship, while for two you can add missiles, three upgrades your cannon, and so on. Strategy is thus really important in the game, as some levels will require more or less speed, the use of missiles, shields, and other powerups. It also allows the player to customize his ship to his own playstyle, which is fun.

Gradius III took the series to a new level by not only allowing the player to choose between preset powers on which to spend his powerups, but also determining what those powers are before even beginning the game! This ability to edit your ship will allow you to build a ship that fits what you want to do, and then spend your powerups accordingly in levels.

The gameplay is generally exactly as you would think, with sidescrolling levels, projectiles everywhere, and enemies plentiful and challenging. In keep with the Gradius tradition, you will need to beat bosses by waiting for them to open up to your fire and then shooting the core. The feedback you get from this is usually good, so you can figure out when you're doing damage, and when you're not.

The music is extremely good, with some of the better tunes on the SNES. These will stick in your head for days, and you won't be disappointed.

The graphics are nice, if a bit unremarkable. As a launch title for the SNES, however, it's just fine.

The powerup system is fun, and I love the basic idea of getting to spend your currency when you want, and how you want. There are certain issues with it that I'll cover later, but generally I think its inventive and enjoyable. 

The game is absolutely brutally difficult. Having broken myself on R-Type, I will admit that it is not even close to as difficulty as that fiend, but it was still too hard for my taste. It feels like a game that is exactly as it is, an arcade port. Its attractive colors and music, combined with its fun upgrade system, make for an addictive experiment that would make you want to pump quarters into it, and the difficulty ensures that you will, in fact, be pumping quarters into it. I like that in the SNES port you have a limit to continues which ensures that you have to be pretty good at the game in order to beat it, but I think I would have liked it better if they had a mode where you could save your progress so that you could grind your way through it, as having to replay all of the levels you've already cleared just to get back to the part that killed you last time takes quite a long time.

The game's biggest weakness is it's typical SNES slowdown. When tons of enemies and projectiles are on the screen, the system really struggles to maintain a good framerate, which is a problem in a game like this where one hit can kill you. The game will frequently swap back and forth between solid framerate and extreme lag, so you can't predict with accuracy where all of the enemies and projectiles will be due to the varying speed at which they travel.

I felt like they could have gone a bit farther with the powerup system to help make the game's difficulty a bit smoother, and to reward good play. There were plenty of times when I'd have a full set of powerups, and collecting more would do absolutely nothing for me. It would be nice if you could stockpile them and save them to spend on multiple items after dying, as the game gets so tough when you die and then are left with nothing. Your powerups do remain after death, but after you spend on one thing, the counter goes back to zero, so this is really difficult. If you could take your 6 points and spend them on a speed up (1 point), missiles (2 points), and improved cannons (3 points), that would do a lot to improve your chances. But rather than being able to divide it up on multiple powers, you can only spend 6 on the max powerup, which is typically a one time use item that won't fuel you through the level.

In the end, I quit on Gradius III. The crushing difficulty level combined with the need to go all the way back to the beginning upon every game over made it just too much of a time commitment for me to complete. But I did enjoy playing what I did, warts and all. I think it's an above average shooter. I'll give it a 7.8/10.

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 55): Super Mario 3D Land

Super Mario 3D Land is a relatively new 3D platforming game for the Nintendo 3DS. I had 0 exposure to this game prior to starting it, but have just been feeling in a Mario kind of mood lately, and definitely not feeling any lengthy RPGs. So did the game scratch my Mario itch?

The gameplay here is a bit of a cross between Super Mario 64 and Super Mario World, and has been done a bit before. In the bonus stages in Super Mario Sunshine, you have little self-contained bonus stages within levels. These stages are generally pretty short and difficult, and feature creative takes on Mario franchise, including turning Mario into a ball in a Pachinko machine. The controls are more or less like Super Mario 64, including classic skills like ground pounding and jumping, but in a fully 3D space. The basic rules and logic of the game, however, are far more like the classic 2D platformers, in that getting hit makes you lose your powerups, the levels are generally shorter and have only one objective (completion), and there are lots of levels compared to the 3D Mario games, which generally have tons of objectives in each level to keep from having to create dozens of huge 3D environments.

Most 3D platforming games struggle for one primary reason, which is that you are attempting to simulate a sensible 3D environment on a 2D surface. Games like Banjo Kazooie, Super Mario Sunshine, and Crash Bandicoot all really struggle with this, and have to make precision platforming a small and forgiving part of the experience (Banjo), fail (countless failed 3D platformers), or just give tons of lives and embrace the frustration (the Crash path). The path to success for a game like Super Mario 3D Land is even tougher, however, in that all of this action is taking place on a small handheld screen. Getting a sense for depth and position of objects and enemies in this kind of game is really tough, and Super Mario 3D Land definitely struggles with this at times.

The 3D portion of the screen should, theoretically, make things easier for the player. Giving a true sense of three dimensions by having the background screen is a great idea, but I found it mostly not terribly helpful here. There were tricky times when it helped, but I kept it off for the most part. But the best ways in which the game helps out the player are the design tricks it uses to orient the player to their position on the screen. The first of these tricks is the camera perspective, which changes depending on the level to give you the best view to get a sense of depth. They finally figured out that a position behind the player is not always the best spot for platforming, and have made sure that the camera is ALWAYS in a good location. There wasn't a time in which I felt like I could have succeeded with a better view here. The game also uses shadows magnificently well and gives you time to line up your jumps using the shadows. You can always see a shadow underneath Mario, which is really helpful when you're launching yourself off of a cliff onto a platform well below. In Super Mario Sunshine, situations like this were a death sentence. Now, they're very manageable, and actually fun! The game also frequently will make sure you have access to the floaty tanooki suit to ensure that you can float down and correct if your shadow gets offline, which is a nice touch. The controls have also been wisely restricted a bit from full 360 motion. By this, I mean that if you hit right and slightly up on the control stick, you'll still go straight right, which is really important since it's really hard to tell if you're drifting towards the foreground and background in games from a side perspective if the controls are too responsive. This is also really important since the 3DS lacks a true control stick, so it uses the tech it has really well. The level design (more on this later), is also made to be pretty forgiving, so that you're rarely trying to drop on tiny patches of land, making a little deviation from the intended path acceptable. All in all, the experience isn't perfect, but you can tell that Nintendo put a lot of thought into developing this game, and made the changes necessary to reduce frustration and increase fun.

The visuals are absolutely beautiful, and are a primer in exactly how to make excellent graphics on a limited console. Embracing the cartoony nature of Mario lets them play seemingly endlessly with classic Mario visuals with slightly modernized polish, and the game looks great throughout all environments, whether you're floating through the clouds, jumping over lava, or swimming under the sea.

The music is fantastic, featuring plenty of callbacks to classic tracks from Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, and Super Mario World, but with several original tracks as well.

The level design is some of absolute finest level design of all time. I don't say this lightly, but this game is definitely in the pantheon of well-crafted levels along with Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Shovel Knight, and Mega Man X. Every last element of the game encourages learning on the fly, new elements are introduced all the time, and the game gives you great moments of fun feedback throughout each level. There are little tricks and secrets hidden throughout the levels which will encourage you to go back again and again. Even on challenging levels which you will repeat many times, you never stop having fun despite the fact that you're pushing yourself. This is a master class in good level design, and everyone should pay attention.

The game felt a little short to me...but then I found out that after completing 8 worlds of levels, you get 8 more worlds of levels! In all seriousness, the 8 now worlds are just riffs on the original levels, but add in new and challenging elements to them that will make them fun to replay at least once more. These include an array of awesome challenging, including having only 30 seconds to complete a level, increasing the number of enemies in the level, having multiple bosses, being chased by a shadowy Mario who will kill you if you ever stop moving or retread your own paths, and tons of other new twists. These special levels are an absolute delight, and I'm still working through them. I will never stop until I've beaten them all. I'd say the game is at a perfect length.

The game's first run is definitely too easy. When I completed the game, I had about 70 lives left over, which is a good sign that it didn't challenge me enough. I don't mind that too much as long as the game is fun, however, and this one was unbelievably fun. The worst part about the difficulty level was an absolutely spineless move by Nintendo to give out absurdly overpowered powerups after dying a few times. Once you die 5 times, you get a tanooki suit combined with a star that never wears off, which basically makes every level impossible to lose, unless you fall in a pit or lava. I'm fine with the Crash Bandicoot 2 (at least I think it's 2) approach in which after dying a few times you get a little powerup to help you get through, but becoming eternally invincible while being able to float is way too strong. As if that wasn't enough tepid handholding, apparently for those of us who are so brainless that we would die after 5 more attempts while being able to float and be invincible, the game automatically teleports you to the next level. This never happened to me, but it infuriates me that it's even a part of the game. Don't bail people out, especially when you have infinite continues, the challenge is part of the fun, and you can always go back to old levels to farm lives!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <end rant>

The only other small objection I had to this game was the boss fights. While the boss fights are all fun, especially the fights against Bowser, there are only really three fights in the game, and these rotate with minor variations throughout the game. It's not like these were super complex fights either, so I thought they could have easily come up with a few more bosses (Mouser or Wart, anyone?) to enjoy.

Anyway, besides the natural difficulties of 3D platforming, disappointing diversity of bosses, and the pathetic rescuing of inept players, I absolutely adored this game. It realizes its weaknesses (for the most part), does a great job of accounting for them as best it can, and doubles down on its strengths to great effect. This is an unquestioned "must own" 3DS title, and I hope that you all enjoy it as much as I did. I'll be spending many more hours in this version of the Mushroom Kingdom. I'll give it a 9.3/10.

Up next is another platformer I'm looking forward to! It's been really relaxing not needing to commit 30-40 hours to a game, so I'm hoping this one delivers as well.

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 54): New Super Mario Bros.

Continuing on with my trend of moving on from lengthy RPGs to more manageable games, I recently played and finished New Super Mario Bros. I had very little history with this game, although I kept getting a strange sense of deja vu at points in the game, so I may have borrowed it from someone at some point. But the focal point of my collecting goals for this year is to get a complete set of all of the Mario games, now that my set of Final Fantasy and Zelda is complete (or was complete until they went and made new games in those two series...), so I'm going to try to clean up my completion record on some of the newer games, having beaten all of the mainline titles from Super Mario Bros. up until Super Mario 64.

New Super Mario Bros. is a 2D side scrolling platformer, which puts it in company of some excellent titles, but also against a lot of competition! The 2D games are generally very good across the board, save for the one average title in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. Man, my reviews used to be way shorter. So how does this one stack up?

Graphically, the game looks really nice. It doesn't have the sprite work of the older games, and I wouldn't say it looks better than either of the games on the SNES, but it's appropriately cute, and using computer animation rather than sprites opens up a lot of visual options that the game uses pretty well. It's one of the better looking DS games out there, so no points off here.

The music is really good, as is usual in a Mario game. Kondo doesn't serve as the primary composer here, but his replacements do a very nice job in his place, and he did compose one track for the game, which is nice. The general sound effects are also quite good.

The controls are very good, although the game's physics are slightly lacking, as I'll explain later. Once you get used to the physics, Mario performs exactly as you'd expect.

There are many really fun levels in the game, and this is definitely the game's strongest point. They frequently use new features, such as the ability for Mario to ground pound and wall jump, to create new and different takes on classic Mario designs. They also use the DS' power very well to come up with some new and unique possibilities in platforming that previous games really couldn't touch. Following Super Mario World's lead, the game has a lot of secret exits that unlock cool new levels and shortcuts. 

The game's bosses are really fun and diverse, with very little of the rehashed boss approach the plagues some earlier Mario games. What makes some of the bosses even more fun is that defeating them as mini-Mario opens up entirely new worlds for you to explore, which increases the challenge of the game, as well as the number of levels available to you.

Criticism of this game has generally focuses on its similarity to previous entries in the series, and I think this mostly misses the point. People ultimately want some similarity when they buy a new entry in a series, but they also want the new tweaks to work. And here, some of the new stuff completely bombs. The mushroom that turns you super huge almost never appears in the game, and when it does, it's awesome! But with only a handful of appearances, it doesn't really make it's mark on the game in any discernible fashion, despite its prominent branding on the front cover. Also troubling is the inclusion of another useless new power up, which gives Mario a blue Koopa shell. The workings of this shell are still confusing to me, and I guarantee that getting this item will kill you more often than it will make your life easier. I thought the mini mushroom was cool, but like the big one, is rarely included in the levels, and not really incorporated into the level design other than for use in beating the bosses and unlocking secret areas, as well as finding some secret exits from the levels.

The physics also bothered me. One of the best things about Super Mario Bros. (and that's really saying something) is the genius of adding weight to Mario. Before this game, platformers really didn't exist in a modern sense, or if they did the characters just didn't feel weighty or real. Super Mario Bros. captures a bit of realism while still keeping it fun so that you can use your momentum to your advantage, and in a sensible way. New Super Mario Bros. makes Mario way too weighty, however, making it so that if you make a mistake, it's very hard to correct it. There's a balance here, but unfortunately for this game, Miyamoto and co. kept nailing this balance time after time until this game, which is disappointing.

There are 80 levels in this game, but it still felt too short, and too easy. I don't know if I'm spoiled or not, but I feel like it could have used 10 more really good levels to boost it up to an excellent game. The game was definitely too easy, however. I ended up with over 80 lives at the end of the game, and that wasn't because extra lives are plentiful, like in Super Mario World. It was far more likely that I would clear a level on the first try than after a few tries, even at the very end of the game.

New Super Mario Bros. is a fun platformer, and definitely one of the better DS games out there. But in the shadow of titans of the genre like Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros 3, I found it more disappointing than it probably deserved. I'll give the game an 8.6.

Up next for handhelds is another Mario game that I recently acquired, and am very excited to review! Here's a quick teaser...

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 53): Goldeneye 007

Goldeneye 007 is one of the primary reasons I had a Nintendo 64 rather than a Playstation in the mid '90s (in retrospect this is probably a bad call). I had grown up playing the occasional FPS on PCs, especially Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D, but mostly stuck with console games, as I always had very dated computers, and I generally enjoyed playing platformers and sports games more, genres which were generally better on consoles. My general distaste for FPS remains to this day, although there are definitely standout titles I enjoyed a lot, and still do. But one of the best things about the FPS is multiplayer, and the games that generally hold a lot of appeal for me in this genre are ones I was able to enjoy with friends, and among these, none stands out more in my memory than Goldeneye 007.

It was such a multiplayer experience to me that up until this weekend I had never even beaten the campaign! And it's definitely true that the real selling point of the game is in it's multiplayer, and it's really what separates the game from its PC peers. Technically speaking, it's hard to argue that Goldeneye 007 represents a superior experience in terms of gameplay to a game like Doom or Doom II. The mouse and keyboard combination makes for a much more precise and user friendly control scheme than does the single stick autoaim of Goldeneye 007. Was it possible to play Quake or Doom online in 1995? Definitely! Was it possible to play those game on LAN with your friends? Absolutely! Was it easy, convenient, or affordable to do so? Not even close!

Goldeneye 007 represented the first time that four people could play shooters together without thousands of dollars of equipment (go look at the price of a PC that could play Doom back then, and then multiply that price by how many people you wanted to play, LAN cables, mice and keyboards, monitors...) or still unreliable and laggy internet. With Goldeneye 007, you could have an excellent multiplayer experience with four people for probably less than $400, which included the console, game, and controllers. The frame rate was excellent for the time, given that they were outputting 4 players at once. The controls were good enough. The music was superb. The graphics were clear enough, even on small cubes of the screen, to tell what you were doing. The game modes were seemingly endless. The maps were iconic and provided for a wide range of strategies and playstyles. There were a huge number of weapons to pick from. If you like FPS, you almost certainly have very positive experiences with Goldeneye 007, unless you were an extremely entitled and spoiled rich 90s kid with the internet and top of the line computing power in your house. Would you put up with it now? Definitely not. But it's a true trailblazer, and deserves probably even more credit than it traditionally gets for laying the tracks to the next generation of multiplayer console FPS as exemplified by Halo. And the game was launched much earlier than people think, coming before even Quake and well before Unreal Tournament and Half-Life, which were the ultimate content inspiration for the modern shooters like Halo.

But this review is ultimately about my first real tangle with the single player campaign of the game, with the assumption that the multiplayer is an all time classic, and worthy of a near 10 score. I was actually really impressed! I bought into the narrative that Goldeneye 007 is unplayable after the release of Halo, but I didn't find that to be true upon experiencing it for myself. It definitely doesn't shine quite as brightly as it did in 1995, but that could be said for almost any game from that awkward era of transition from 2D to 3D.

The missions are really big and impressive, with a ton of different things to do in each. Having grown up playing the formulaic approach established by Wolfenstein 3D, in which you must cut through enemies, grab key cards to unlock doors, beat a boss, rinse, and repeat, Goldeneye 007 was a really fresh approach at the time. The game isn't just about getting the end of a hallway or navigating a maze. You must consider the innocent civilians in your level, destroy certain strategically important objectives along the way, meet up with characters and have discussions, and use your fancy secret agent gadgets to James Bond your way to victory. There are a ton of missions, and all are very bite sized and encourage you to experiment with the best paths along your route in order to find the best equipment and locate all of the objectives. The levels feel like real buildings, rather than linear stages. There are tons of rooms in which there is nothing to accomplish, and you'll frequently have to go out of your way to find where to go.

Each mission also has multiple difficulty levels, which adds more and more objectives to your tasks, as well as increases the challenge of killing all of the enemies contained within. Completing these higher difficulty levels will reward you with special cheats that can be used in multiplayer mode, encouraging you to push yourself to accomplish bigger and better things.

The visuals are actually quite good for the time. There's plenty of awkward looking characters and textures, but you can basically determine what everything is, and a lot of the design is taken from the film, which is a nice touch.

The controls are far better than I expected, with a generous auto aim feature that allows you to continue to maneuver while aiming/shooting. Sometimes you'll get "stuck" pulling towards a target in which you're not interested in shooting at the moment, but it works pretty well if you can get your reticle in the ball park. The C-Buttons also work reasonably well as a second analog stick, and I found myself using them quite a bit in times where precision shooting was required.

The game has a delightful level of detail and love obviously poured into it. Shooting an enemy in the hand or arm can result in them dropping their gun, while shooting their foot will cause them to fall over. Getting in elevators replaces the intense James Bond themed music with cheesy elevator music, which always makes me smile. Gunshots leave marks on the walls, and cause all sorts of zany sound effects depending on where they're shot.

The game has definitely got it's quirks and problems, but some of them are now more funny and charming than problematic. The AI can be extremely stupid, making it so that the enemy can't really shoot you if you're standing right in front of them. They'll also do this incredibly dumb sideways roll technique, and if you kill them during the roll, they'll finish the roll, stand up, and then die! On the other hand, there are also examples of when the AI is pretty good, such as when the soldiers will run back to trigger alarms to signal other soldiers upon sight of you.

The missions can be a bit too open and fluid for the player, necessitating multiple playthroughs of missions to get it right. For example, one mission asks you to destroy a satellite, but there are multiple objects throughout the mission that look like they might be satellites! There's also little annoying things in missions that basically demand that you lose at least once. In one mission, Boris shows up and talks to you, but then pulls a gun on you. Your natural response is to shoot, until you see that he fumbles his gun, and then your partner will no longer help you anymore due to killing Boris. In another mission, you partner gets kidnapped by bad guys, and if you go in shooting to try to save her, they'll kill her every time.

All in all, I really enjoyed playing through the game's single player mission, and the game remains a true light year jump forward for multiplayer console gaming, along with it's N64 peers Mario Kart 64, Super Smash Bros., Mario Party, and Perfect Dark. Long live couch multiplayer! I'll give the game a 9.4/10.

I need to replay a few old favorites for spiritual reasons before I get to another review, but I'm still working on Mass Effect 3, and my next retro console review will be for this game:

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 52): Vectorman

I wrote fairly recently that The Legend of Dragoon was more oldest remaining gaming challenge from my youth, and later thought that that was incredibly stupid, given that there are still several SNES/Genesis games which I had always wanted to retire. Perhaps the oldest of these (I may remember more) was Vectorman, a game that delighted me as a kid. I would go over to my friend's house across the street, and was absolutely captivated by the pretty pre-rendered graphics and smooth animations, and enjoyed the pounding EDM soundtrack. We never beat it though, historically getting caught up on the 4th or 5th level, or running out of time and needing to turn it off.

Vectorman is a run and gun platformer that is a bit of a hybrid of Contra, Sonic the Hedghog, and Donkey Kong Country. The core game play is very similar to Contra in that you move throughout a level, gunning down everybody you meet, and upgrading your firepower. The game borrows the non-linear and branching level structure from it's Genesis cousin, and the pre-rendered faux 3D graphics from Donkey Kong Country.

The game looks absolutely amazing, even today. The graphics look fantastic, with nice pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D looking sprites that have aged extremely well. The animations for the main character and bosses are great, with the titular character having very appealing animations, and the bosses taking on a more unnatural and robotic character that sells their villain nature well.

The levels are massive and feature ridiculous numbers of branching paths that put Sonic to shame. There's just so much to explore that I don't think I even scratched the surface of this one. Checkpoints are put at sensible locations, so you'll rarely be put back too far in the level upon death, and the branching paths offer real rewards for your exploration, encouraging you to do more on subsequent playthroughs. This theoretically gives the game a level of replayability that is definitely higher than for a game like Donkey Kong Country.

The music is just fantastic. This game uses the Genesis' excellent sound hardware to great use, and is to my knowledge rivaled on the system by only the games in the Sonic series (although my level of Genesis education is not as good as my Nintendo knowledge). The sound is also excellent, featuring really weighty sounds when you come back to the ground after jumping and excellent sounds for your gunfire and jumps.

The game, however, is definitely not as good as a game like Donkey Kong Country. It has sixteen levels, but several of these are bonus levels that can literally be finished in 10 seconds. Compared to a game with 40 levels like Donkey Kong Country, this feels pretty insufficient. It's hurt in this regard by not having a save function, which necessitates a more brief approach. I completed the game in slightly more than an hour after a few practice runs, so it definitely doesn't have the girth to it you would have expected from a AAA game in 1995, especially after the release of Donkey Kong Country.

The levels are also not as original and tightly crafted as the levels in Donkey Kong Country. Several of the levels feel like rehashes of older levels, especially as you go on in the game. Slight color changes are used to cover this fact, but the background art is essentially the same with different lighting, and the same enemies and objects are used, but rearranged in different combinations to give an original feel. There are "surprise" enemies littered across the stages, and your view is so limited that a simple jump up into an area can result in taking damage from foes you can't see, and the same is true when dropping down from a platform. This "Mega Man" style of challenge exists purely to drag out the experience and forces an iterative style of play, which is probably necessary in an hour long game with no save feature, but it just feels like 1995 offered greater technical ability to produce better levels, and more of them.

The controls are also frequently weird, with your ability to change your direction of fire not feeling great. Hitboxes are uncertain in this one, and the imprecise controls don't help.

The bosses are all incredibly easy once you know their exploits, and take way too many shots to kill. A shorter and more challenging approach would have been better for these bosses, in my opinion.

I feel like a Miyamoto-esque attention to level design and tight controls would have taken this from being an original game with a lot of charm and several flaws to an all-time classic. This game had a lot going for it, but ultimately feel short of the success of the high flyers on the Genesis and the SNES. I'd like to mention it in the same breath as the Sonic, Mario, and Donkey Kong Country series, but it doesn't quite get there. It'll always have a nice place in my heart, and I'll definitely circle back and play Vectorman 2 at some point, but I must admit that this game was merely good rather than great. I'll give it an 8.4/10.

Up next is a game I've already completed at the time of writing this (it was a successful weekend), and is definitely another one that predates The Legend of Dragoon. For shame!

 

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 51): Mass Effect 2

I'm now continuing on my quest to beat all of the Mass Effect games again, and give some quick reviews of them. I gave a pretty detailed review of the concept of Mass Effect last time around, so I'll be able to move through this one a bit quicker.

Mass Effect 2 is way sexier and more polished than Mass Effect, and there's a reason it's generally held in high regard by most gamers. You continue to follow the story of Commander Shepard in his quest to stop the Reapers from conquering the galaxy, albeit this time with a private organization called Cerberus rather than with the military. I won't spoil how you get there, but the game is nearly ten years old at some point, so go pick up a copy and find out!

The presentation of the game is much better than in the first, with sharper graphics and more detailed character models, better facial articulation and voice acting, and even more dialogue than the first (the first had a staggering amount of dialogue).

The combat is much better, due largely to the improvement in the AI. Your allies in the first game were no more than meat shields, but in the second game, they seem to use their powers more actively, find cover, actually shoot people, and contribute in a unique manner based on their character and powers. Combat, and the game generally, are much less buggy this time around, although there are still a handful here and there. I would occasionally just get stuck, unable to move, shoot, or reload, and only capable of looking around.

Mass Effect is one of the best written games of all time, but Mass Effect 2 is somehow much better than its predecessor. Despite a gargantuan cast of characters (maybe too big), each character is well defined and interesting, with excellent voice acting and superbly written dialogue. Some of the loyalty missions (personal quests given to you by your crewmates to help resolve a personal situation and flesh out their storylines) are positively captivating in most cases, giving a delightful level of love and attention to each and every character. Even little side missions contain a level of ethical challenge and heart tugging writing that will get you more than once throughout the game. The main plot will consistently capture your attention, and there's an absolutely huge amount of narrative to explore in the game.

The music is again very good, although I think I prefer the first game's music by a hair. It's hard to find too much to complain about, however.

Mass Effect 2 is a landmark achievement in the process of having video games recognized as art, but it does have a handful of weaknesses. The first and primary complain I have about this game is that they dumbed the RPG elements of the game wayyyyyy down. The first game had a character development system that was essentially like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, only without needing to roll for stats. Each character had 10 different skills which they could level up, which gave you a huge amount of developmental possibilities for your characters. If you wanted your character to focus primarily on battle ability with a sniper rifle, you could. If you wanted to focus on the active skills, you could do that as well. Here, you're pretty much limited to leveling up a grand total of about 4 abilities, and the experience gathering is positively dreadful. Rather than the grindy delight that is Mass Effect, in which you got experience for hacking terminals, completing missions, killing enemies, and just about everything you could do, Mass Effect 2 basically just gives you 1000 experience for every completed mission, and 1000 experience gets you a level up. This keeps the difficulty curve of the game on point, but at the cost of feeling genuinely in control of your character. Rather than feeling like Shepard is you, he's a much more factory made model in this game, and it makes leveling completely dry, and doesn't reward going above and beyond to seek out side missions and extra combat in the slightest. This is also true when considering the weapons and armor system, which couldn't possibly be more basic. Rather than the dozens of different types of weapons and armor you could get in the first game, you'll find 2-4 of each type of weapon, with absolutely 0 ability to customize any of them. Again, it feels like BioWare really cut back on the role playing elements in this one to appeal to a more mass audience, and I didn't find it terribly helpful in allowing me to truly role play as Shepard.

My other main complaint has to do with the resource gathering in the game. As you go, you get to find different upgrades for your ship, shipmates, weapons, biotic abilities, etc. In order to purchase them, you need to find tons of resources. While some resources can be found in the course of your missions, upgrading fully will necessitate mining planets for resources, which involves a minigame which gets very dull after a while. This time around, I didn't mind it as much, as my wife really enjoyed the minigame, so I just let her mine for an hour while I played Hearthstone. But I don't think it's an exaggeration to suggest that I had to mine for about 2-3 hours to be able to afford all of the upgrades, which is a substantial chunk of a game which took me roughly 40 hours to complete, and that was with doing absolutely everything in the game, including DLC.

Mass Effect 2 is definitely the best Mass Effect game, but it never quite managed to capture my heart quite the way the first one did, based primarily on the kiddy role playing elements. It's definitely the most accessible, best written, and most fun game, but there's a certain RPG charm that the first one has, while the second feels like a shooter first, and an RPG second. But you can't deny its greatness, and I must admit on net that it is better than the first game in the end. I'll give it a 9.7/10. Next up is my destined completion of Mass Effect 3!

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 50): Project X Zone

It's pronounced "Project Cross Zone", which is slightly more sensible than "Guilty Gear Exard Revelator"

 

When I first heard about Project X Zone, I was immediately enchanted. A tactical RPG? With anime style visuals?? With the greatest heroes from Namco, Capcom, and Sega as protagonists??? With little damage numbers racking up while Ryu does tatsus and 150 hit combos???? It sounded like Marvel v. Capcom mixed with Super Smash Bros. mixed with Final Fantasy Tactics. After smashing the order button on Amazon and calmly changing my shorts, I dove in head first to a two month long slog.

All of that is to say that Project X Zone had everything I should want in a game, so I anticipated needing to make a ton of apologies for fawning over it in my review. So how did this video game wet dream pan out?

The game features a huge cast of characters from the three stables, including most of the characters whom I would consider to be essential. These characters are divided into duos that you can't switch up, but you can pair them with a single support character. Usually these supports are derived from lesser known franchises, franchises with only one notable character, or to add a third character from a franchise. So, for example, Ryu and Ken serve as a duo, but they can pair with supports as diverse as Tron Bonne from the Mega Man universe, Heihachi Mishima from Tekken, or fellow Street Fighter pal Juri. The cast is titanic and certainly aimed towards the Japanese audience, and draws heavily from the RPG and fighting game franchises run by each company, which skews the choices in a weird but defensible way. I'm sure they chose this because it's much easier to imagine fighting moves for a character like Kos-Mos from Xenosaga than it is for, say, Sonic the Hedgehog. But speaking of Sonic, they really dropped the ball by omitting a number of truly iconic characters featured. Off the top of my head (and I'm sure I'm missing some), not having Sonic in the game is pretty indefensible. If you can put him in Super Smash Bros., you can put him in here. Other notable omissions include the utterly rage inducing absence of Pac-Man (this would be like making a Super Smash Bros. game and leaving out Mario), and a range of important Mega Man characters which should have come before Tron Bonne, including Dr. Wiley, any of the Robot Masters from Mega Man, and Proto Man. But you absolutely needed a Sonic and Tails team (with Knuckles support), and a Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man team to give this credibility. There's no way that these characters are less vital to the modern vision of Sega and Namco than, say, Akira and Pai from Virtua Fighter or Kos-Mos and T-Elos from Xenosaga.

The visuals in battle are really good, though, and really capture the heart of all of the characters from their various video game franchises. Each character unleashes some variety of signature move from their franchises, and piece them together in fun little combos that don't ever lose their visual appeal. There's some pretty over the top fan service put in as well, so if that bothers you stay away, but it may be a selling point for some. Outside of battle, though, the visuals suffer. All of the character models look pretty wooden and boring, and the camera angles for the map make it tricky to see characters' health, whose turn it is next, and certain important features of the map.

The music is one of the highest points of the game, featuring a lot of nice cuts from the various franchises, along with a few strong original tracks. The sound is also pretty good, especially for Japanophiles, as they've maintained all of the original Japanese voice actors, and have some nice voice work thrown in which will make you smile.

The combat is really fun, at first. Each character has access to five basic combos, and fills up a meter by hitting attacks or being attacked. After each combo, the enemy will be flung into the air or bounced off the walls, and return to you. If you trigger your next combo at the right time, you'll get a critical hit, or at least keep your combo going higher and higher. You can also call nearby units to help, as well as the support you have equipped, making 100+ hit combos a regularity. Once the meter hits over 100%, you can unleash a super attack, typically laden with fan service for some of the more over the top female characters. Timing everything correctly is rewarding, as chaining together bigger combos, getting critical hits, and finishing off enemies with your super attack all yield more experience for your characters. The incentive, thus, is to use your meter as often as possible, making the game more fun and over the top, rather than incentivizing hording your meter for big fights, especially as your meter will fill up roughly every other battle. The timing was also fun, as each character duo has a completely different required timing to hit critical hits, necessitating a lot of experimentation to figure out the optimal strategy with each team.

It can't all be nice, though. The single biggest weakness of this game is its length. I was enjoying it at a more than average rate through about 15 stages (took me about 15 hours), and was expecting it to finish up around 20-25 stages. The game is an abysmally miserable 41 STAGES, and took me over 55 hours to complete. The older I get, the more I abhor long games, especially when they get as dull as this one does. If you're looking for a quick spin with some familiar characters, go play Marvel v. Capcom 2 or Super Smash Bros. This one isn't for you, and it wasn't for me, either.

While I'd gladly have played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or Super Mario World for 55 hours, and have certainly done that with the latter, Project X Zone was inanely repetitive and dull, making that 55 hours and two months I spent on this game feel more like 100 hours and four months. There are about 12 bosses in the game, and they just rotate and reappear each level. There's no charm to these levels, just fighting your way through a "surprisingly" small amount of bad guys, having dozens of new bad guys show up with a new boss half way through the level, having to fight through the new guys, killing the bosses, and finishing. There are no wrinkles or changes between levels, so the surprise reinforcements just become anticipated. What's more, there's no real challenge in this game, as you get healing items in every fight you do, enabling you to keep your force at full health throughout each and every level. I never even came close to running out of items, which dragged the contested feel of the game play more a matter of you against time rather than you against your enemies.

Unlike brilliant tactical RPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics or the Fire Emblem series, there's essentially no tactics to any given battle, thus missing out on a huge amount of the draw of a genre that features the word "tactic" in its name. Final Fantasy Tactics lets you engage tactically by choosing between a huge number of jobs for your characters, having them take the role of glass cannons, tanks, or supports. Balancing the right number of each kind of character can be critical to success, and misreading the balance of your opponent's team can prove fatal. Fire Emblem uses the weapon triangle to make it so that engaging in battle with the wrong character with the wrong weapon can result in instant death, whereas choosing your targets wisely is the difference between breaking the enemy's lines and having them permanently kill your characters. Project X Zone, on the other hand, allows every character to heal anyone with items and gives roughly the same damage output and defense to all characters, essentially erasing any difference between characters other than the timing of their attacks and their animations.

The writing and story was impenetrable unless you knew the backstories of all of the characters. There was the occasional funny moment, such as when Arthur from Ghosts 'n Goblins "sacrificed" himself to save his team, only to show up a few moments later in his boxer shorts, but a lot of this felt like really inside baseball. And if you'd never played Ghosts 'n Goblins, you wouldn't even get that. Especially for the American player, who has likely never played series like Sakura Wars, the Shining games, or .hack, there's a lot here you won't guess unless you're a huge fan of import or more obscure JRPGs. There was way too much text between battles, but this is likely due to the fact that there's about 60 characters, and they all need a chance to say something. If you're likely me and are interested in characters from the most popular franchises in America (Street Fighter, Tekken, Mega Man, Resident Evil, and Devil May Cry), prepare to weed through a whole lot of dialogue from characters about whom you know nothing.

I'm the very person to whom Project X Zone ought to appeal, and darn it if they didn't get my money. But more importantly, I really regret losing my time to this monstrosity, and have committed a rare good move by striking Project X Zone 2 from my list of games to acquire. There are better crossovers and better tactical RPGs on which I should have spent my time, and I can't recommend this to hardly anyone, unless you plan on enjoying the fun combat until the sheer dull nature of grinding you through the campaign drains your soul, and you wisely abandon it before completion. I'll give it a 5.0/10.

Up next is a game I expect to have some actual fun with, and maybe finish in a week or so! I'm swearing off RPGs for a while here. I'm completely burned out by these 20+ hour epics, and I'm way behind on my 50 new games goal for the year. I've only finished 6 games in 2 months, meaning I still need to finish 44 in 10 months, which requires me knocking out a few 5 or 6 game months here in the next few months. Here's a quick and obvious teaser for what I'm tackling next on the handheld, and hopefully more joyous front.

-TRO

Song of the Day (Volume 46): Spheres of Madness

Death metal is at the top of my list of genres which I probably should like but just can't get into. There are a few exceptions, but most of these merge other genres together with death to create a less punishing but more rewarding experience with more contrast (a la Opeth). But this record from Polish tech death masters Decapitated is no apologies death metal, and I really enjoy it!

-TRO

Song of the Day (Volume 45): Spacegrass

Clutch has had a lot of eras in their distinguished career, but count me as a big fan of the early spaced out stoner rock period. I have never been high before, but if I decide to elevate at some point, this will likely be the first song I play. "JESUS ON THE DASHBOARD"!

-TRO