I Play Porn Games For The Story // 22.04.2012
By Psycosis 9 Comments
Man has it been another week already? Seriously I thought yesterday was Wednesday or something. I guess that’s what happens when you have exams and coursework submissions due and you really haven’t started anything for anything! Anyway, welcome, I talk about visual novels and videogames, hope you don’t mind.
Videogames?
So like I only played like one or two things this week so I decided instead of trying to stretch segments on stuff I played for five minutes I’d lump them all into one and call it a day.
Street Fighter X Tekken is pretty great. I don’t own the game myself so I’m ignoring all of that gem nonsense and focusing on actually playing the game. The split between Street Fighter and Tekken characters is really cool even though I favour the Street Fighter characters a lot more. However, I think it goes to show just how well the game is made when I can use a Tekken character and, even though my knowledge of Tekken ended with the first Tag Tournament, still pick up those characters and use them well. Also the backgrounds are insane and I love them.
DJ Hero 2 has to be my favourite rhythm game, I was actually sad when Activision shelved the Hero franchises only because I felt the DJ Hero games were going in a great direction. This might be due to my fascination and experimentation with creating mashups, but I really enjoy the gameplay and the soundtrack to DJ Hero 2 above all other rhythm games. I really hope a third one will find its way out at some point, only because I really wonder how they’ll evolve the gameplay. In the first game there was a Daft Punk mix incorporating quite a few Daft Punk songs, I’d be really interested to see how they’d handle more than two songs being mixed at once, sorta Girl Talk or Super Mash Bros style. If only.
Super Smash Bros. Melee is a videogame.
Ok that’s that over with.
Daibanchou -Big Bang Age-
When I’m not playing Sengoku Rance (which I admit is a very short amount of time) I’m trying to play Daibanchou -Big Bang Age-. Both games are made by Alice Soft, and both games are visual novel in terms of story and then super strategic gameplay in between. Both games are about starting in a small territory of Japan and eventually taking over everything with an army. But the difference is; only one of them is good.
In the year 200X a giant crater appears in the middle of Japan, dubbed the Demonic Hole. It caused the land of Japan to be shifted and caused the appears of dark crystals that give people special powers, who were in turn dubbed Special Students. These Special Studnets ruled Japan out of violence and fear. The main character Zanma Rouga transfers to Seijou Academy and proclaims he will conquer Japan, and thus he bands together the Special Students at his school to restore order there, and then the entire district, then the entire nation.
The gameplay is split up into like 10 different stages, and that’s really where most of the confusion of this game takes places. Hell I don’t think I fully understand how each stage works but I’ll give it a go. First you have the option to load or save the game in stage one, then after that you get the traditional visual novel story aspect. Then you get a set amount of income every few turns, check your prison in case you want to recruit new members to your team, and then finally the main character’s brother informs you on any updates to the map or whatever. That’s like the first five or so stages and for the most part can be ignored. After that you can go explore a part of the place you control to trigger some character events and whatnot. Then you can talk to someone in your group to trigger events for them. Then you can send people to attack specific areas, and therefore finally the actually gameplay starts.
The battles are up to six members in each fight, and works on a point based system. If you land an attack you get one point, and if you kill an enemy you get two points. At the end of a fight, if you score more than 5 points difference, you get 2 control points in that area, otherwise you get 1 control point. Gain all the control points in an area to seize that area. After the battle the final phase is counter attacks, where enemy forces can attack places you control.
This is the order in which this game is played, and it’s incredibly unforgiving because of it. Sengoku Rance has a similar amount of shit to do each turn, in fact it probably has more, but the difference is you can do it in any order. Sengoku Rance did come out after Big Bang Age so it’s obvious Rance just refined these mechanics, but the way they’re represented here is way too confining.
I feel like if I gave this game enough time I’d end up liking it as much as Rance but even after sinking a considerable amount of time into it I’m just not feeling it. The gameplay is too constrictive and the game is incredibly unforgiving for beginners. But probably the worst part of it is how it handles the porn aspect. While Rance freely goes around raping, he is an incredibly likable character and everything is done in a very silly manner which makes it endearing. This game, however, it’s just the worst. The main character does get it on with quite a number of the girls, but a much higher percentage of the scenes are horrible. If I remember correctly in Rance there are maybe 2 or 3 of these scenes but they’re usually if you fuck up at some point. Here, however, you’ll get the choice to save one of two girls and you really don’t want to know what happens to the one you didn’t save.
Summer Wars
So my friends got me to watch Summer Wars this week. I had heard of it before in passing on the internet but never bothered to actually seek it out, so I actually never know what it was actually about. It’s a rare treat going into a movie almost completely cold, especially with my rampant use of the internet. Anyway, the movie.
Summer Wars is about a giant network called OZ, which is pretty much that universes version of the internet. Imagine if Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and, like I don’t know, Habbo Hotel, all joined together and was this giant system that almost every single person is connected to, that’s what OZ is. The movie stars Kenji Koiso, a talented mathematician, who gets roped into pretending to be Natsuki Shinohara’s fiancé for a family reunion. While there, he receives a text message featuring a math problem, which he easily completes, and accidently decrypts the security of OZ in the process.
The story balances a giant family reunion and this ‘giant social video game world’ rather well, especially with Kenji and Natsuki’s second cousin Kazuma trying desperately to fix OZ and prevent what spirals into the destruction of the world, while certain members of the older generations present consider them wasting their time playing a videogame. I will admit a lot of those kinds of interactions really made me laugh, especially one person getting punched for saying “It’s just a game”.
The story does that whole Truman Show thing of showing how easily our current path as a society can bring about a lot of terrible things. Where The Truman Show focused on reality TV, this applies that similar logic to social media. Thanks to OZ’s security being decrypted, an entity known as ‘Love Machine’ enters and steals accounts. Now before that wouldn’t’ve been such a big deal, but in this world not only does each account have the personal information of the people that created them, but also the same permissions, such as gaining access to the account of the guy in charge of the power grid, you’d have access to the power grid. While obviously if something like this happened in today’s world, the results wouldn’t be that drastic, but it’s definitely in the same vain.
Though the weird thing is we were watching the English version. I say weird because, well, to me I just find anime dubs to feel weird. The dub itself was pretty well done, the voices suited the characters and it felt like a lot of work had been put into it, but it’s still off putting. I haven’t seen the Japanese version, and I think when I re-watch it I will watch that version instead. Am I the only one who acts like this? I’ve never minded subtitled foreign movies be it anime or live action, and prefer them to re-dubbed attempts. I used to believe this was because usually the dubs aren’t good, but even in this case it still felt disjointed.
So yeah I really enjoyed this movie, and I’d really recommend checking it out. Although now that I’ve talked about it you won’t be going into the movie as cold as I did, so hey who knows that might affect something. Cause really all I needed to convince me was “Hey Psy the bro who did those Digimons and the Girl what leapt through time gone done made a movie”.
Animal Crossing
A week ago or so my friends and I were debating what the most accurate video game adaptation to movie is, we were pretty stumped and just defaulted to Mortal Kombat. Then all of a sudden, I’m informed this movie exists. “How the hell could they make Animal Crossing into a movie?” I pondered. Surely that’d be impossible considering nothing happens. They would have to make it nothing like the games to make it enjoyable.
Long story short the Animal Crossing movie is the most accurate video game adaptation ever made.
And it’s pretty great.
There’s really no need to explain what happens in the plot. A girl called Ai moves to an animal village during the summer. She gets a house there and to pay it off she does chores for Tom Nook, she befriends some of the villagers and plays around with her friends. She finds messages in bottles on the beach. She and the other human, a boy named Yu, and their friends go looking for fossils, they go to a K.K. Slider show, go to the bar for coffee. Resetti shows up every so often to lecture them.
Guys this is Animal Crossing.
Like eventually near the end there is plot, but that’s more in the sense of they needed something to be an ending to the movie. Now I’m not saying it’s an amazing movie experience, I’m just saying this is an incredibly accurate movie. I myself am a huge fan of anime like K-On, so it doesn’t really say much when I say I enjoyed this movie despite the almost nothing that happens in it, but they somehow made an Animal Crossing movie work, and that in itself is pretty impressive.
And I guess that brings me to the end. I always find the endings of these blogs a lot harder to write than anything else, mostly because I just wanna go “yeah that’s it bye” but that’d just look weird. Though maybe talking about what to write is even weirder... Oh well, this is already typed and I’m too lazy to backspace through it all.
...Yeah that’s it bye.
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