Well. Never let it be said that I'm anything but predictable. Yet another Old vs New, yet another obvious comparison. But then the reason I do these is to see how far game design has gone in the passage of a few decades - or just seven years in this week's case. And what a case this is!(?) On the Old side, we have the not-really-that-old-at-all 2003 Ubisoft classic Beyond Good & Evil, recently rereleased in high definition for XBLA (go get it!). On the New, we have last year's perhaps overlooked, perhaps overrated Andy Serkis-fronted Ninja Theory/ Namco Bandai joint Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. Once again, this article came about entirely from completing the latter and reminiscing the former after the aforementioned HD version's Quick Look.
Setting
While there are some major differences into the why as far as the look of both worlds go (Enslaved's is an overgrown post-apocalyptic mess, BGE's is a besieged alien planet), their actual appearance is still very similar. There's plenty of bright colors and interesting wildlife, neatly contrasted with the dire straits both worlds are in from the perspective of the humans (or human animals). The buildings in the cities are half-gutted from calamity, whereas Jade's lighthouse and Trip's village have that kind of lived-in feel of a group of survivors and outcasts, with drawings on the walls and fixtures hastily repaired with whatever was at hand.
Characters
Each game has a trio of protagonists, with your playable character being assisted (and assisting in turn) at various points by the other two. Despite the actual playable character, both sets are as follows:
The Guy - A sort of loutish but good-natured heavy that can and will take any punishment to protect the others. While Monkey isn't quite the goody-goody hero, having been basically coerced into helping with a slave headband, he develops into something more noble as his arc progresses. Double H is far more gallant from the get-go, though one wonders if he hasn't hit his head once too often.
The Girl - The heroine is a very resourceful tech expert who is the main driving force of the central story's mission. Trip stumbles into "damsel in distress" territory when events become too much for her, but is as generally fearless and determined as her male compatriots when riled up enough. Jade's just a complete badass in petite stick-wielding form, unwilling to submit to the invading DomZ forces.
The Pig - A likeable but kind of gross porcine joker, with an array of handy gadgets, who is as loyal a friend as they come. Both Pey'j and Pigsy are present for less than half of their respective games' running time, yet both definitely make an impression while they're around. I daresay they're the best thing in either.
Combat
In both games, combat is performed with a bo staff, beloved of purple-costumed turtles everywhere. Though an unusual weapon in video games (where most protagonists tend to favor guns or swords), it makes sense given the context: Jade is a largely pacifistic martial artist, with a staff being an ideal defensive weapon. Monkey's staff is, of course, based on his mythical namesake's magical Ruyi Jingu Bang staff, complete with its ability to grow and shrink when needed. As such, the combat flows in a very martial arts-esque manner, with characters swinging their staffs in arcs and coupling them with their natural acrobat athleticism for dodges and feints. It's a combat style that lends itself well to dealing with crowds, which is ideal for these sorts of character action games where you're often beset on all sides.
Vehicles
In certain sequences, both games will allow you to ride a vehicle to cover larger distances, or in an occasional genre-shifting timed race to break up the platforming. In Monkey's case, he has his "cloud" - yet another contrivance based on the legend the game draws from. Jade has her small hovercraft, which can be frequently upgraded to expand the territory it can travel, Metroid-style. Oddly, both work best over water, though can also be used on land just as capably.
Other Gameplay Elements
Use of Stealth - Often desirable, since open combat isn't always as survivable as you might want. Usually, by sneaking to a vantage point, you can remove all the dangerous enemies without them ever knowing you were there. Of course, you can simply muscle your way through too, if you don't mind taking a few hits. Neither game is so difficult that a Gordian knot solution cannot be employed if taking the stealth route is too much of a hassle (unlike, say, with the Riddick games).
Companion Puzzles - A feature that persists from the halcyon days of Lost Vikings, where you need your companions to progress further, is the companion puzzle: Where you need to figure out how to get to point B and also how to get your friend to point B. This feature works best when A) Your companion can take care of themselves, or at least hide and B) They can help you out as well - otherwise it just feels like a dreaded Escort Mission. Fortunately, both rules apply to both of these games.
Spherical Collectibles - Okay, I'm reaching here. All character action platformers have spherical collectibles. I loooove them orbs.
The Ending
Obviously I won't go into detail here to avoid spoilers, but the conclusion to both games are notable for their abruptness. I hesitate to even include this paragraph in case people get offended, but it's a narrative feature most games don't use (they either have obvious cliffhanger sequel hooks or, well, an actual ending) so it's notable that these two games both take the "Well, that's it, that's all we got. Enjoy the credits!" route. Apologies if I just ruined everything forever.
Honestly guys, next week I'll bust out something that isn't an Old vs New. I can do other things!
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This is, perhaps, the dumbest idea for a compare and contrast I've ever thought up. Dumber even than Vinny's "Bufu vs. A Spell The Boss Isn't Immune To." I guess I should explain why I'm comparing these two games in particular: Simply put, it's the "easiest" JRPG ever created vs. the "hardest" (based on popular opinion. Of course, you might have your own ideas which are the easiest and hardest JRPGs - feel free to correct away in the comments.) Blame this on me playing nothing else but Demon's Souls this week and being creatively bankrupt. This might still be fun though, so let's jump in why not.
Basic Premise
In both cases, you play a random dude with no backstory who has trotted his way into a near-apocalyptic land of bad shit going down, with only the hints of an enigmatic weirdo telling you where to go. In a true "baptism of fire" or "why? why are you doing this?" moment, you're thrown into a battle with a gigantic monster to prove your worth. Where Demon's Souls diverges is that this monster will almost certainly kill you - this is where the story really begins. In Mystic Quest you trounce it in an extended tutorial, setting the tone for the rest of the game. When you meet it again as a regular monster, it's like level 30. Maybe the first one was just sick?
Characters
Well, first and foremost is your "Chosen One" protagonist, apparently plucked out of the narrative ether to take out the big bad and restore the land's former glory. Based on entirely no credentials or special abilities whatsoever. [Pointless Side-Note: My theory is that the "chosen ones" in these games are the only ones that save points react to, because that has to be a considerable advantage for any hero to have. To everyone else, those things are just giant floating glowy balls that do absolutely nothing but sit there and look nice.]
In Demon's Souls, this character is depicted as a wanderer who ventured into the land of Boletaria (more like Balls-up-etaria, am I right? No? Okay, fine) for gold and glory. After being killed by a giant whatsit with a stick, he (or her; the Vanguard is an equal opportunity murderer) is thrown into the Nexus - a hub world full of dead and not-so-dead refugees who are hiding out from the monsters in the world above. It's never clear if the Nexus is an actual place or just some pan-dimensional purgatory for wizards to sit around in and talk about how badly everything's fucked up in the realm above.
Mystic Quest's main character, similarly, is some chump called Benjamin who got stranded when the mountain he was living on fell over. Shit happens I guess. Likewise, he is duped into restoring the world's balance by defeating four elemental bosses and then some asswad with a crown. This game actually goes out of its way at the end of the story to say that you weren't so much chosen by fate to save the world as chosen by pure luck because you happened to be passing by. If only more games with the nebulous "chosen one" cliché were this honest.
As far as the enigmatic weirdos in Demon's Souls goes, you have several to choose from: A blind chick with a candlestick who allows you to draw power to level-up by touching her innate demon (which is kind of kinky if you think about it); a near-mummified magical Shaolin monk babby thing called the Monumental (a monumental what, though); a bunch of clowns you rescue from the world above who give you new spells and abilities; a blacksmith who is a complete asshole and the single sane dude who usefully stores your stuff for you. You can also rescue a dude with neat-looking armor from a cage who goes back to your home base and kills every useful NPC for you. I'm sure glad I saved him.
Mystic Quest's cavalcade of useless idiots who follow you around include: A guy on a cloud who points out where to go next and flies off (this is a game for babies don't forget); a nice girl; an ice girl; a retard in heavy-looking red armor who keeps jumping off cliffs and injuring himself and a thief with his own awesome leitmotif who takes the best weapon in the game from the first dungeon and runs off with it. I don't like that guy.
Realms of Wonders (Wonders, Lisa? Or BLUNDERS?)
Oddly enough, there's a lot of similarities to make here. Weird, huh? Let's go through some of them:
Earth Realm (no, not that one) - Demon's Souls' first realm is a quaint castle full of solid brick floors and walls that has been overrun by dragons, possessed soldiers and these annoying fat guys wearing pimp hats. It's where you're dumped unceremoniously by the game after dying the first time, and is not-so-coincidentally where most people give up. Picturesque though, I'll give it that. Mystic Quest's first world isn't quite so picturesque, having a giant dungeon full of bones and forests full of zombie minotaurs (whuh?), but it's certainly in the same spirit of "hey, this world's kind of messed up if you hadn't noticed."
Wind Realm - Demon's Souls has an actually quite beautiful set of ruins on a cliffside which is full of these tumbling skeletons and giant manta rays that try to impale you like you were the Crocodile Hunter (too soon?). You know, in case you thought your scenic view needed more somersaulting skeletons with katanas and manta spears in the periphery. Mystic Quest's Windaria is similar, with a nice little settlement overlooking a cliff that leads to a giant tower with Pazuzu inside. If you were wondering what Pazuzu looked like when he wasn't possessing Regan, he looks like a giant bird wearing jewels and a crown. Yeah, that movie sure got a lot less scary now, didn't it?
Water Realm - Oddly enough for the "hardest game ever", Demon's Souls doesn't even have a water dungeon. You'd think that was a given. What it does have, though, is the despised (by me) Swamp of Defilement: a venomous cesspool full of Skeksis-looking monsters and aborted babies reanimated as sludge monsters that pull you underneath the murky waters. Yeah, delightful place. Mystic Quest's water realm is iced over, because ice is scary. You eventually have to defeat the boss in his mystical ice pyramid full of mirrors. That's some full on Conan the Destroyer shit right there.
Fire Realm - Demon's Souls has a raging inferno of a volcano which is undergoing extensive mining work. It's a neat stage because the only way to go is straight down: Which means there's shortcuts aplenty for people who don't mind gravity so much. Mystic Quest's Fire Realm is a place of volcanoes and dragons too, because apparently that wasn't too obvious.
Tower Realm - Okay, so "Tower" isn't an element, but both the central area of Mystic Quest's world and the third realm of Demon's Souls has an eerie tower that stretches up into the sky. At the top of both is a demonic character with a big hat. Best thing about towers is that you can easily fall off them. Wait, did I say "best"? Because I meant "fucking annoying." My bad.
Bosses
The Bosses are by far the best part of Demon's Souls: As well as the colossal beasties you have to defeat with speed and use of cover, you also have the speedy beasties you have to defeat with skill and smarts. There's also a few puzzle bosses in the form of: the saintly Maiden Astraea, an almost pacifistic opponent that's still torture to get close enough to; The Fool's Idol, a four-armed woman that teleports around the room and creates clones of herself (you know, like every other trickster boss); a dragon god that has to be brought down with ballistae, requiring you to take constant cover from its fire as you activate them and a giant manta ray king that only shows up if you shoot down enough of its subordinates with an awesome wave-shooting sword. There's even a boss that will summon another player in to grief you, which I'd totally be amazed by if something hadn't hampered my PS3's ability to go online. Gee, I wonder what that's about.
If Mystic Quest has any singular "best part" to speak of, it's certainly not the bosses. Instead of the constantly inventive and terrifying (both in concept and in battle) bosses of Demon's Souls, you have instead:
A skeletal T-Rex, which would be scary if it wasn't called "Flamerus Rex". Jeeeez, are you serious Mystic Quest? You must be flamering us.
An Ice Golem, who actually melts while you're fighting it. There's nothing quite like hammering a giant popsicle with fire spells for a tense boss battle.
Dualhead Hydra, who has two heads. Most hydras have like eight though. This one just has a dual head. Oh wait, now I finally understand the name! Doy!
Pazuzu, the aforementioned magical jewelry bird wearing a crown. He actually evades you by being that kid in the elevator that presses all the buttons so it won't stop on floors. So that's intimidating.
The Dark King, a dark king who does the usual Final Fantasy trick of having four forms, each progressively more dangerous. In my experience, it's best to save all your strongest abilities and forms until last, when you have barely any health left. First he has six arms, then he's a spider, then he's.. a spider but with tentacles instead. And then he dies after hitting him with cure spells. Final bosses are difficult for designers to come up with, you know.
Besides covering something helpful like how the games play, which I won't be doing because I wouldn't want people accusing this blog post as insightful or practical, I'm done comparing these games. They've both got their weird charms and I love both of them dearly despite their faults, though I'm hesitant to recommend either: Mystic Quest because you'd think I was a dimwit and Demon's Souls because you'd think I was trying to give you a heart attack from all the stressful insanity. But go ahead and try them out anyway; maybe you'll enjoy them as much as I did. Big maybe.
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I need to stop calling things Mentospectives. According to the spellchecker, it isn't even a real word. I'm as shocked as you are.
From Software! We've all had fun with the "software from From Software" jokes, but what's the deal with these guys? Seriously, why did you make Demon's Souls so difficult dudes. Serious. It hurts. Turns out they're responsible for a lot of pretty important franchises: Tenchu - that thing with ninjas, Otogi - that thing with Demon Ninjas and Armored Core - that thing with robots, which may or may not also be demons or ninjas.
I've also got a lot of memories of very specific From Software titles, which I had no idea were all from the same company despite their shared penchant for slightly budget-y graphics and steep learning curves. Let's go back in time, shall we? *Wayne's World-esque doolooloo-doolooloo*
Sitting on a rock with a sword, looking away. You know, the classic pose. The first time I'd heard the name From Software, and the software I'd learned the name from, is this PS2 launch title. I'd recently acquired the PS2 close to launch - and in fact still own that same PS2, which still works - and figured I'd start with this fancy-shmancy next-gen JRPG. Hey, guess what? Terrible idea. This is an exceptionally poor game in which I simply could not figure out what to do for the life of me. Was it because I was a dumb kid? Sort of, as I was starting college at this time. Though I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason I didn't like it is because it's a bad game.
You get to control one of two characters, each with their separate story line: Darius, the swordsman on the cover, or "Sharlene", a homemaker. Man, tough choice. Though maybe Sharlene's story is the one that didn't suck. Maybe it was some funky JRPG Cooking Mama. As Darius, though, you're basically walking around picking fights with wandering monsters and getting instantly killed by half of them, or instantly killed by falling off the side of the planet, or instantly killed because I went the wrong way and have no idea what's going on. Hours of fun. I was lucky enough to also have Activision's Orphen in case this one sucked. That one sucked too. Then I discovered a huge number of PS1 JRPGs and I was pretty much sated in that department until FFX came out more than a year later, and all the fine PS2 JRPGs that followed.
So that was my introduction to From Software. Restrictive difficulty and sheer confusion. I wouldn't say it was a misleading first impression.
One Ring to rule them all... no wait, this is my fireball ring. Fireballs still rule, I guess. Having apparently not learned my lesson the first time, I picked up this interesting-looking first-person dungeon crawl from a bargain bin while looking for new games for my still sort-of new PS2. Eternal Ring isn't quite as bad as EverGrace, though it's still got that steep learning curve that From Software have pretty much cornered the market on. It also has deplorable voice-acting and a bizarre plot that kills off almost all the NPCs on the island it is set on. However, it's very much of an era lost to modern gaming: The western-style first-person RPG where you're given little direction and allowed to explore and construct the backstory from the stuff you come across. A dead person could tell you plenty about what's going on either with a note on its body, by spookily communicating its last thoughts or by trying to kill you with its skeleton powers.
As well as these Western trappings, there's very much an Eastern aspect or two also: The main quest has you find a bunch of elemental gods that have been "corrupted" by whatever grand evil took over the island and destroyed the civilization that once lived there, and the antagonists are all possessed NPCs you're ostensibly there to track down - though the initial "go to this island to spy on researchers" plot is soon forgotten when the shit hits the fan. The game moves along by focusing on its large collection of rings, each allowing certain magic spells to be cast or passive effects to enhance your combat or exploration abilities. Some are necessary for further progress in true Metroidvania style, while others are well-hidden and requires some keen observation skills because rings are pretty damn small, y'all.
While not a good game by any practical metric, it wasn't completely terrible and I enjoyed it for what it was. And this is the not-exactly-promising philosophy that I've more or less applied to every From Software game I've played since.
Presumably they built the ancient city on the King's field. After getting his permission. More first-person skullduggery. The King's Field series wasn't one that was well known in Europe, hence the usual practice of excluding numbers in the title so we don't get confused about where the first three went (here's a hint: NTSC only). We didn't even get a Final Fantasy game until Mystic Quest for the SNES. Yeah, imagine THAT being your introduction to the series. KF4 was, again, rather janky in appearance and design, though was beguiling enough for me to stick with it until the end.
KF4 is big on the exploration and combat, and moves a lot slower than Eternal Ring. It was also far less JRPGish, and even more reminiscent of the Eye of the Beholder/Dungeon Master type spooky atmospheric dungeon crawls of a generation where people needed to draw maps for everything. In case you thought the cartography in Etrian Odyssey was some kind of elaborate joke that old game designer people were pulling on you, the "born in the 90s" people that seem to inundate this website. Get off my vector graphics lawn.
As far as my relationship with From Software was going, I still had no idea these games were all from the same company or that that very same company was constantly putting me through the wringer with janky JRPG-posing-as-CRPG action. I think the name "From Software" confuses people. I just looked at the box and thought "well, where else would all these graphics and shit come from? Doy."
Staring off into the distance on box art: A new Concept page? Around 2006, early 2007 I started picking up a bunch of cheap GameCube games, with the shadow of the Wii arching over that once proud system of mostly shovel-ware. Finding such almost-lost gems such as Chibi Robo, Geist, the X-Men Legends duo and, uh, this thing. Well, mostly gems.
Lost Kingdoms is the tale of a princess trying to reclaim her kingdom with magical cards. Like its " deck of many things" contemporary Baten Kaitos, the gameplay was entirely focused on the collection and application of cards with stuff on them. You throw a card like Gambit and shit happens. Lost Kingdoms, though, is no Baten Kaitos. For one thing, it doesn't have a dude who hits things with paddles. But another, more important difference, was that this game kind of blew.
It still had its charms though, with a real-time strategy monster-summoning approach to battles. You could send wave after wave of attackers at hostiles, though not another wave after that. Two waves was about it. Maybe three after you'd leveled up a bit. If you run out, you get kicked back to the world map and forced to restart. IIRC, it's not something I have many memories of, fond or otherwise. I never beat it but I did get a considerable way in before giving up because I had better shit to play, including those listed above. And that isn't nothing; that's something. That is something, you guys.
The oft-employed "human pyramid" box art design. In 2009 I began in earnest my achievement-whoring empire. As someone who has always taken every measure to get 100% for a game, regardless of endless grinding or farming for rare drops, shifting to the achievement-hunter mindset wasn't a huge leap. I'm the sort of dude that achievements were invented for. So send all hate-mail this way if you're sick of the things. All the way to Sick S-Rank Town, USA, where I'm at. Part of this achievement process was buying up a bunch of cheap 360 games I felt could want to play to that level of completion that weren't just complete junk, which turned out to be harder than I thought given all the online shooters and [Sports] [Year] types that make up the usual Xbox user library.
Enchanted Arms is a rare beast: Like everything else on this list, it's clearly been smacked several times by the Janky Fairy's wand. It's ugly, the animation's terrible, the voicework even more so and the game takes forever to start earnestly (though not quite as long as FFXIII does, to put it in perspective). All the while during this elongated tutorial section you had to deal with an asshole and an uncomfortably flamboyant gay best friend. In the "holy shit, there are still people out there who think gay people act like this?" sense of the word "uncomfortable". It's when the first big cutscene goes down, things go crazy-go-nuts and you're left to your own devices that the game starts to improve. You get full control over the monster-summoning aspect, and you can start employing the types of strategy this game got really good with: You're given a grid (enemies on one side, allies on the other - think Mega Man Battle Network or Radiant Historia) and most encounters can be easily defeated by deploying the correct monsters that are able to attack in specific patterns - if there's enemies standing in a three point triangle, you'll have dudes with powers that can hit all three and end the battle quickly. You still need to think about what to do and who to bring out, but these basic battles move so quickly that it's not a huge time-sink if you're besieged by random encounters or grinding for whatever. When it comes to bosses, the battle is constantly shifting - you need to be alert for changes and adapt as necessary. It was a lot more enjoyable than the crappy first impression indicated, though that's hardly a good defense for a game (according to FFXIII detractors at least).
This blurb ended up being a little longer than the rest, but that's only because it was the only legitimately gratifying From Software game I had yet played. Until now.
Hey, it's the Soul Form. That means you died. Get used to it. Demon's Souls, now notorious among JRPG fans and the PS3-affiliated Blue Dudes on Giant Bomb alike for its difficulty - well, not so much curve than a vertical drop. This is the first From Software title I actively sought out, because I hate myself apparently. So far, it's been a giddy rush of highs and lows. Many lows. Few highs. It's not a perfect balance but I'm satisfied that the highs are coming. They have to be. I have a badass longbow now, so it's going to get easier and more fun, right?
Demon's Souls, like the King's Field and Eternal Ring entries further up the list, all but much throws you into the deep end with very little plot: Some ancient demon called "The Old One" has escaped his extra-dimensional prison and is causing a ruckus planetside. Mostly everyone is dead, or a soul (which is apparently " mostly dead") or is corrupted by the demons under the Old One's control. That's it. You get more backstory by visiting the five main locations in the game and thoroughly exploring them, and from talking to NPCs hanging out in the sanctuary of the Nexus, which is where you'll end up to recuperate from the horror, the horror. That's about it. You slay all the demons, through a mixture of masochism, luck and sheer stubbornness, and defeat the darkness. Then do it all again, only now every enemy is even tougher and kills you far quicker. Honestly, though, there's been plenty said about this game already from everyone's favorite video game associated Italian (oh wait, I forgot Mario), everyone's favorite pirate radio announcer (oh wait, I forgot "Howling Mad" Murphy) and the many Giant Bomb users still discovering the game, myself among them.
Okay, we're back in the present day. Besides my clothes being on fire and Nazi Germany having taken over (odd, since we only went 10 years back), it's been a relatively painless trip through the annals of From Software history. Maybe I'll do this with another game company, and probably with fewer stops. Because this was a lot of words. But there's pictures now too! So I'm definitely learning. Now to work on that mascot idea...
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Wait, that title seems a little off... oh, well, I'll fix it in post. Hey! Metroidvanias! We all love those, right? Well I just beat Shadow Complex and I'm in the mood to write about them. So, Metroidvanias are games where.. oh wait, I forget, this is a wiki. This is a Metroidvania. Intro over, we're all done here!
Like I did with that hybrid dungeon crawler thing that went down so well last time, I'll cover three disparate examples of the Metroidvania sub-genre that currently exist and then come up with a few hypotheticals with the same formula. I'm stating now that none of these games will actually be a Castlevania or a Metroid, since that's way too easy. I'll pay my dues, of course, by saying that Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night are still the best Metroidvanias available. Think of them as Metroidvania 101 and play them before any others. Really. Go do it. Get you some inverted castle screw attack. This blog will wait. No it won't.
So I might as well start with the game I just beat. Shadow Complex tells the story of Nolan North Clone #2141, designation "Jason Fleming", as he takes out an entire facility of mysterious masked Commie-Nazis planning to "liberate" San Francisco. He does this by gradually upgrading his equipment and weaponry while sneaking around the many vents and secret tunnels, in much the same way as other Metroidvanias. The game sets itself apart by allowing standard 3rd person combat--involving cover, headshots and the liberal applications of grenades--with the standard Metroid elements of double jumps, super-speed and color-coded doors. A neat feature, though kind of confusing to aim, is the ability to shoot into the background, with several rooms stretching out some into the distance. If you're the type of manly man who absolutely refuses to play as a woman or an effeminate dhampire--and chances are if you're an Epic Games fan that's more than likely--it's a good, modern (and cheap!) gateway to the genre.
Another budget game, and representing the Indie Metroidvania crowd, is this underwater Metroidvania. The most significant difference to other Metroidvanias is, of course, the fact that almost the entire game is underwater. As such, movement is far freer and affords more exploration: For example, you can go up. Without worrying about platforms or timing those Morph Bombs perfectly for lift. You just swim up. Really, there's so much to cover here about the gameplay differences that makes it unique, but I'm kind of fixated on being able to go up. Go figure. Most of the power-ups that facilitate progress are songs, since the Little Mermaid was all about that shit, which you can either try to remember like Ocarina songs or you could just quick key them. Man, do I love PC gaming at times. Naija is a little more compelling than Ariel the Mermaid (though maybe not Hipster Ariel, who prefers to be called "Helvetica"), and there's some neat story beats and contextual narration as Naija passes by points of interest. If you like singing to dolphins, or greedily devouring innocent aquatic life, this game's got it.
Why hello there controversial entry. "This isn't a Metroidvania, blog fail" - not so fast there imaginary Giant Bomb comment leaving person (also, what the hell, man?), Vagrant Story is a third-person action-adventure with RPG elements, where a protagonist must explore the huge island Lea Monde and its ruins full of keys and puzzles which he has to track and backtrack across to find everything. Sounds Metroidvany (Metroidvaniac? Metroidvanical?) to me. Ashley Riot, high school punk band and intrepid government "Riskbreaker", infiltrates an island of mystery to bring down a devious cult led by a Sephiroth-esque David Koresh. Along the way he encounters various dubious types, such as Templar knight Guildenstern and fellow Riskbreaker Rosencrantz (hey, what are the chances those two characters should meet?), plays Sokoban a lot and fights many enemies that are often completely immune to all his weapons. Which brings us to the customization system, where weapons are given inherent bonuses against certain enemy types dependent on the materials used in the weapon's creation. You can spend many a good hour in Lea Monde's many handy blacksmitheries, making a weapon for every occasion except one that kills ghosts because you ran out of room. Then you meet a ghost. Despite the micromanagement, though, it is at its heart a more action-y RPG and a fine example of both Squaresoft's ingenuity in the early 90s and a Metroidvania which is so divergent from the usual mix it might not even count as a Metroidvania. But it totally does.
Okay, so I've written quite a lot of words and that one guy says no-one would read a wordy blog without pictures, which I haven't included (I didn't even make any neat banners or hideous chickenmen mascots. I'm going nowhere fast in the GB blogging community.) So I'm going to just have the one hypothetical Metroidvania to cap this blog off in style.
And since I'm lazy, I'm just going to update a classic. Yup. Game industry in a microcosm, right here.
Abadox is a NES shmup that either scrolls horizontally or vertically (Battletoads did something similar, but less shmuppy and more toady), taking place entirely within the body of a hideous alien creature floating through space. The protagonist clears out the various enemies residing within, destroying the creature from the inside out. It definitely wouldn't take a huge leap to turn this horizontal/vertical shooter into a Metroidvania, with the main character getting around by jetpack, adapting their equipment upon discovering former explorers (both human and alien) and needing special gear to get past certain bodily barriers like the dangerously fast-moving bloodstream or toxic stomach acids. The overall mission would involve taking out a series of bosses that represent the alien creature's heart, lungs, liver etc. It probably won't be the most pleasant looking game, but it'd be pretty neat for the map to start resembling the outline of a body as you explore more of your gracious host. There'd be so many nasty ways to die too, and you know how much the kids like squicky gore these days. The only issue is figuring out how to insert several save points without them being totally jarring. Not that giant floating polygon coffins or Chozo regeneration pods weren't jarring, mind.
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Another entry in this ongoing waste of everyone's time (I mean, "blog series") where I compare games of old and new for significant differences in game design trends and its evolution. This week's plus one swords of scrutiny are Bioware's Dragon Age II and, uh, Bioware's Baldur's Gate II. Like those Final Fantasies I did a while back, using two similar games made by the same developer is a handy way of avoiding the "yo, this game totally ripped off this other game" undercurrent that sometimes pervades these comparisons. It's completely okay if a game series rips off itself. Borrows. Pfft, semantics.
Oh right, the comparisons. Here we go (protip: there may be mild SPOILERS):
Blight Knights, Big City
So the first big similarity between these two games is that they, for the most part, take place in and around a huge city full of a diverse assortment of people and things. As well as meeting regular fantasy RPG trope archetypes, like the usual thieves and mercenaries, you'll also contend with the city's elite as your reputation grows and you become a figure of importance to the city. In Baldur's Gate 2, this city is Athkatla, the imposingly large capital city of the nation of Amn. Dragon Age 2, of course, has Kirkwall: A port city fond of giant bronze statues of bald people and racism.
But the similarities run deeper than just a persistent metropolitan setting: In both cities there is a major schism between those who use magic and those who are distrustful of such power, who prefer to lock their mages up on a prison island under heavy guard. Sort of like an Abracadabratraz. DA2 and the first Act of BG2 more or less have you infiltrating this island fortress of a prison to take down a clearly mad antagonist. This is also pretty much the plot of Batman: Arkham Asylum too, so maybe it's a story arc more common than it first appears.
PANTALOONS!
This is more about the types of in-jokes that tend to surface in BioWare games. The most prevalent, and overt, are the references to the fabled golden pantaloons of the original Baldur's Gate, which could later be used to construct a powerful armor towards the end of the final game of the series (provided you kept them by importing your character each time). Other in-jokes in the original series include stealing weapons from Drizzt when his back is turned (and him demanding them back in the next cameo) and the continuing misadventures of Minsc's miniature space hamster. Dragon Age 2 keeps up this tradition of neat legacy gags, such as Alistair complaining about "the old ball and chain" if you happened to play as a Human female noble who married everyone's favorite smartass in the first game. And, of course, the pantaloons get their due once again as part of a smaller side-quest.
"Know this, interloper! You trespass on the domain of twin demon lords Kataarl'Cee and Kataarl'Vee!"
The biggest complaint leveled at Dragon Age 2 was how amazingly similar everywhere looked. Almost as if every area in the game came from the same basic five or six templates, slightly edited to suit the situation. The "mansion" template was used for a haunted house, a brothel, an empty house that the moody elf sits and drinks wine in while mumbling about "blasted mages", an immaculate house used by cheese-eating surrender-monkey Orlesian nobles and a notorious gang's hideout. In each case the map was edited to make certain rooms inaccessible (though still visible on the unchanging mini-map graphic). It smacked of sheer laziness, which might've been due to time constraints rather than the developers doing idle-ass antics like sitting around watching old episodes of the D&D cartoon, or throwing darts at a photo of Bobby Kotick (I have to believe more of that goes on at Activision itself though) or reading some nobody's blog on Giant Bomb. Possibly. Baldur's Gate 2 isn't totally immune to criticism in this regard either. The philosophy seems to be "once you've been in one giant-ass deluxe mansion, you've seen them all", which makes me think I should've tried harder to be a game designer. Up to their knees in manses, those guys.
Our monsters are different.
In an effort to deviate from the vaguely Tolkien/D&D worlds they were inspired by, the Dragon Age setting (or "TheDAs" for short) changes things up a little for the various non-human hostiles you come across. Demons are now treated as some sort of non-sentient manifestations of sin, with wrath, gluttony, sloth, lust and pride aptly represented by fire blobs, black blobs, purple blobs, purple floaty ladies and a giant purple Chimera from Resistance: Fall of Man. Purple means evil, which makes sense considering the sun's light is depicted as a force of good, and everyone knows the archnemesis of Sunny D is Purple Stuff. Solid theology there. The Darkspawn are your usual orcs and ogres, sort of sidelined after the last game's blight and wheeled out in the tutorial to be made fun of by exploding messily when your level 1 guy hits them with his stick. Finally, the game also has perfectly normal dragons, giant spiders and undead (which are now demon-possessed husks). Like it does with a great many other things, it feels like the Dragon Age universe is streamlined to only include the five basic monster food groups: Demons, Orc-kind, undead, dragons and giant spiders. They're pretty much the only important D&D monsters, right? Fuck an Otyugh. Beholders? Get the hell out of here.
"You Must Gather Your Party Before Venturing Forth!"
Hours of fun. Everyone remembers that message being sternly delivered to your stupid, stupid face whenever you tried to move from one major area to another with a party that wasn't standing inches away from each other. Dragon Age 2 doesn't have that problem, largely because you couldn't split the party or do anything like the detailed strategies afforded by the Infinity Engine. But at least it made subtle fun of that dumb "gather your party" message, right? Yeah, that's progress.
"You Have Been Waylaid By Enemies And Must Defend Yourself!"
In case that last blurb seemed a bit too critical of DA2 (like the rest of the article so far, really), this is an instance where DA2 took something annoying from Baldur's Gate 2 and made it more interesting: Every "random encounter" your party suffers while moving between destinations is actually linked to one quest or another, and thus none of them are truly random. It's a neat way of getting a player all annoyed that they've brought that feature back before they realize what's going on and follow the quest thread that it started.
On A&E Biography tonight: Your Sword
One of the things I'm glad persists between these series are how every major piece of equipment seems to have a backstory. These aren't just swords of asskickery; they often have detailed accounts of where they've been and whose asses they've historically kicked. In BG2 you needed to have all powerful magical equipment identified by an expert, or some random bard, before you knew what it did, with the biography apparently thrown in as a bargain. In DA2 everyone instantly knows that this was the shield that protected some templar hundreds of years ago in some city thousands of miles away as soon as they pick it up, though given the whole game is a story told from Varric's point of view he probably researched it since then. It'd be amusing if it turned out none of the others had any idea what the stuff they found actually was. "So that's why Hawke used the priceless dagger that assassinated the eleventh Antivan King to scrape Mabari dookie off his boots for seven years. Because I thought it was funny and didn't tell him."
What's with all the red circles guys? ...Guys?
The biggest, and unfortunately common, "Oh shit!" moments in BG2 is when everyone in the room suddenly goes all red ring on you. This doesn't mean that they've ceased to function days after their warranties wear out, but rather that they've all turned hostile because you dared to steal from a bedpan or something. Most NPCs simply run away from your well-armed party, to be immediately replaced with two or twenty pissed-off guards, which generally leads to a player cussing and then resetting to before they fucked up. DA2 won't do this, again because the system is less sophisticated (or more sophisticated? Offers less freedom, let's say) but you can get all the once-friendly Dalish annoyed at you if you kill their leader. Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first visited the Dalish that that sort of thing is frowned upon...
Eight is probably enough. Or so I've heard from television. So I'm wrapping this up for now. I'm sure you've all been told from many other sources too how dumbed-down Dragon Age 2 feels compared to its predecessors, but I've always thought you need both games like Dragon Age 2 to tell its branching, interactive stories to people not so great at complicated video games in general, and games like Baldur's Gate 2 for those diehard strategy geniuses who want to earn their happy wizard ending (NB: Order a happy wizard ending at a massage parlor to see something fucked up. Or so I've read.) There's room for both, so I'm kind of hoping the latter hasn't gone for good.
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Hey guys. It's a new blog talking about a video game thing. I swear I'll do a new Old vs. New at some point. I just need to start playing Dragon Age 2 proper for snark fuel.
In the meanwhile, and related to DA2, I'll discuss dialogue trees. They've been present in video games as far back as text adventures and most of the time have two specific uses from a gameplay perspective:
1) It allows the player to gather information. 2) It allows the player to roleplay their character's chosen traits and personality, treating NPCs how they'd likely treat them.
Dialogue Trees have a massive effect (so sorry) on how people in your video game machine talk to each other.Once again, Giant Bomb saves me a job by conveniently having an elucidating wiki article about the phenomenon, allowing me to skip most of the explanation and go straight into the opinion stuff. I love opinion stuff.
First, I want to discuss Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (the graphic adventure game). LucasArts would end up creating many a fantastic adventure game throughout the 90s, as anyone who has played a SCUMM engine game can attest to, but for the purposes of this article I will contain my admiration to a few choice examples that used dialogue trees in a particularly interesting way. For the Indy license game, this is the whole chapter when you're sneaking into the Nazi-owned castle to rescue Henry Sr.
This section is a bit like an homage to the original Castle Wolfenstein where you ran through rooms and corridors in a top-down view either avoiding Nazis or killing them. Like in that game, Indy does not have an endless fount of health with which to fight his way past them all, and the fighting sub-game isn't exactly easy to win in the first place. More often than not, Indy had to trick the guards into letting him past. Indy had a choice of dialogue starters with which to fool the guards, and only one branch worked for each guard (including the now infamous "I'm selling these fine leather jackets" excuse for his decidedly non-Nazi clothing). Some Nazis couldn't be tricked by the dialogue no matter what, while others could be snuck by or be done away with with regular adventure game puzzle logic - such as getting one particularly beefy guy incredibly drunk to reduce his health for an easy KO. While choosing the right responses for these encounters were often a crapshoot, they tended to be amusingly written enough to be worth trying again and again regardless.
My second example from the LucasArts canon is the very well known Secret of Monkey Island insult-fighting, which future games in that series attempted to build on with mixed results. Insults could be learned from random fights all over the island, and by using the correct rhyming response one could trounce their opponent. There's no reward or huge meta-game element to it, it was just necessary for one of the recruitment puzzles. At no point is the player expected to do any of the fighting themselves (unlike in the Indy example), as the dialogue choices dictated the entire process.
Since the rule of three is always in full effect for these blogs, my final example of a dialogue system done well in a game - one that wasn't particularly as well thought out in its other aspects - are the interrogations in Fahrenheit (or Indigo Prophecy, if you live in a region where the game was named after a band in the New Romantics era for whatever reason). In this, the player is presented with a few topics and a countdown timer: The player could only ask the most pertinent things in the small time allotted, because that's mostly how conversations go in real life. A person won't sit there while you stare at them with your cold, dead mannequin eyes (I'm picking on Bioware games again, sorry) trying to decide between sarcasm, being a goody-too-shoes or asking the wizard how strange the situation appears to be. You'll generally get a brief window to squeeze a few questions in before the witness is too overcome with shock to continue, or runs out of things to say. The same is true for answering a question: You get a few seconds to say "yes" or "no" before your cop friend decides he's not waiting around forever to hear if you want a coffee and donut too.
When one considers how dialogue trees in the more action-oriented WRPGs of today have been reduced to mere info-gathering and "I'm good/evil! Deal with it!", it sort of makes me pine for the days when they were more than that. The writing's as good as its ever been, but the trees feel like they're treated as some compulsory feature a designer has to work around to deliver the script, rather than fully embrace with an intelligent new twist or gameplay application. Adventure games are coming back, though, so maybe there's still hope.
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That is a terrible title. Why am I starting an article with.. oh hey there! Since I discussed dungeon crawlers (or the hybridization thereof) last time, I figured I'd move onto how games of this genre (and its other RPG contemporaries) allow players to interact with the treasure they find, specifically focusing on the relative merits of simple convenience vs. in-depth inventory micromanagement.
RPGs are all about the treasure right? Well, alongside the character development, strategic combat and those fanservice parts where the female protagonists put on bathing suits at the hot springs because Yosuke is a horndog. Mostly treasure though. To the extent that even if the developers are deliberately concentrating on the aforementioned characters/battles/jiggle physics, they still need to be mindful enough of a player's inherent desire for shiny things to have an extensive system in place for the acquisition and management of same.
So in this article I'll explain the general steps games take with their inventories and treasures, citing particular examples that either try something unique or just happen to have a particularly good/bad system in place. Starting with inventory systems:
Inventory - The Inventory wiki page adequately covers the three basic types of item management: The "Unlimited" system, usually employed by JRPGs and games less committed to realism over player convenience, the "Weight Allowance" system that limits a player's carrying capacity based on a physical characteristic often favored by the type of WRPG that is based to some extent on curiously pro-jock D&D encumbrance rules, and the basic "Fixed Capacity" system that limits a character's inventory to an arbitrary fixed number, usually represented visually as a series of boxes filled with each collected item - this system is the most often employed by video games on the whole, including games outside the RPG genre such as Dead Space or Resident Evil 4. This system of box-filling occasionally goes a shade too deep into some kind of abstract Tetris puzzle game, which makes me wonder why someone hasn't built a Tetris game with Diablo's weapon and armor sprites as a joke. Possibly because most people talented at coding don't have the free time that I do.
The Bard's Tale - In this sixth-gen adaptation of the early Bard's Tale series for old people computers, the game takes a refreshingly blasé stance on inventory management by automagically transforming vendor trash into money. The game will also automatically sell weaker weapons and equipment once found, and will replace stronger equipment with whatever is currently equipped and sell the old equipment, which of course wouldn't work in a more complex game. Ostensibly, this system was introduced to avoid bogging down the player with too much "game" to deal with, due to its status as a light-hearted pastiche of action RPG tropes, but all the same it's still a surprisingly effective system that cuts out a considerable amount of unnecessary busywork. Like the spiral text-input of Beyond Good & Light, it's a one-off feature that makes you wonder why it isn't more commonplace.
Torchlight - Torchlight's most interesting feature regarding item management is the ability to send one's pet into town to sell useless treasure. Doing so hardly interrupts the gameplay and is a huge time-saver. The game does become a little tougher without the pet's help however, so this trick isn't without its perils.
Fable 3 - An example of a novel system that doesn't work so well is Fable 3's pocket universe inventory, which more often than not adds unnecessary steps to checking one's inventory and makes it difficult to find many item types. Terranigma uses a similar pocket universe feature, though it can be navigated like a normal menu system in most cases.
Now for treasure variety. I've taken the liberty of ranking these from commonest to rarest (sort of like how the games themselves do it, which kind of make me wish you can change the font colors on Giant Bomb):
Gold - Obvious enough. Currency is needed to buy anything and is the most valuable commodity available in practically every game that uses it. Games will occasionally change the name to keep things interesting though. I hear the Gil -> Zenny exchange rate is ridiculoid right now. Equipment - A necessary part of any RPG character's inventory is the stuff they're wearing to fight bad guys. Some RPGs will scale equipment drops to the character's level, or to the difficulty of the dungeon you're in, meaning any given piece of equipment you find is comparable to what you may already have equipped. Others will have you routinely stripping dead enemies for their mediocre armor (it didn't do them any favors anyway) for selling. What's more interesting is how the game decides how many pieces of armor a character can equip (occasionally getting ridiculous with leggings and arm bracers), and whether or not it still takes up storage space if it's being worn. Consumables - Potions and the like. Though incredibly common in some games, where a player's health potion stash starts to number in the hundreds, they can also be very rare and valuable tools in others and players often need to save them for when absolutely necessary. I'll also include ammo here, since characters that use it consume it at quite a rate (though perhaps more commonly they simply fire them from their bows or guns). Junk - These items have no other use than to be sold for cash. This seems slightly pointless; like getting pocket change while trick or treating to later buy candy with, adding an extra step to one's Halloween process. It does add to the variety of things you can find, though, and you can happily sell this stuff without worrying about it being useful further down the road. In most cases. Crafting Ingredients - Occasionally indistinguishable from the sell-only stuff, the materials you can find while adventuring have their uses in the game's crafting system; turning useless scrap into something useful. Most of the time these items are parts of monsters that either fell off mid-battle or that the characters took their time to remove from the corpses with knives/pliers/ice cream scoops, though there's usually a lot of harvesting ores and plants and such too. MMO jaunts tend to get unfortunately weighed down with hunting for this shit. Fish - If there's a fishing mini-game, it's likely that these piscine peeps will show up. I guess it depends on what, exactly, you're fishing for, but in most cases it's usually fish. Fish will either act as a crappier alternative to potions or will occasionally have unique benefits that apparently only aquatic life can offer. Like Omega-3, perhaps, or that thing that makes sharks immune to Alzheimer's that Deep Blue Sea was all about trying to find before people started getting ate. This is kind of a departure, so let's move on. Collectible Playing Cards - Your guess is as good as mine with these. People like CCGs, I suppose, so it makes sense that monsters would go out of their way to craft cards in their own likeness and leave them to be picked up upon death as some sort of memorandum. Total sense. This also includes figurines or books. As long as they don't make the drop rate abysmal, it's actually a neat (if completely incomprehensible) way of getting to know the monsters and the wider world which they inhabit. Glass Bottles - Why the hell are these so rare? Poor Link could've been farming fairies for the end of days (which for him is occasionally half a week away) if fate ever let him find more than four. Woe betide his enemies if he ever stumbles upon his local recycling facility. I suppose anything that can take down Ganondorf should be meted out sparingly.
So like many Europeans, I received my Nintendo 3DS from Amazon this morning. I was quite jubilant. Of course, it needed charging before I could do anything.
After letting it charge for its customary 3 and a half hours (which it'll need to do after five hours of action, meaning it has a work/sleep ratio that's even worse than my own) I did a grand tour of the 3DS' features. Here's what I found so far:
3D Camera
This thing's a little trippy, but not any more than the rest of the 3D stuff. It does that stereoscopic thing that I'm sure everyone's read about at this point, and apparently the memory's sufficient for 1200 of these 3D photos which is kind of impressive (that's like ten MyNotebooks!). Other than that, pretty standard lowish-quality phone type camera really. I don't see myself using it much.
Mii Maker
Same old Miis. The face recognition stuff for this seems a little janky, but then it might just be that I have a janky face. It seems pretty identical to its Wii counterpart for all intents and purposes and will probably be ignored by me in a similar fashion. Unless I can download a load of good ones from some enterprising person on my friends list. The Miis here also fit into the Augmented Reality stuff too, as well as StreetPass stuff but I'm even less inclined to try that. Though I did just read about that RPG thing so maybe I should try that before continuing this blog. Ah whateve-
StreetPass
Never going to use it. I don't go outside. Not anymore. Not while they still have me under surveillance.
Augmented Reality
This is what takes up most of the bulk of the built-in apps, separated into several modes and including the Face Raiders game which I'll go into in a moment. Star Cards: Just basically virtual figurines. Mine came with Mario, Samus, Kirby, some Pikmin and Wind Waker Link. Dunno if that's the traditional set-up, but from I've seen from promotional pics elsewhere it is. They can do little poses and you can take photos of them doing little poses. If you wanted to do that for some reason. Seems kind of pointless, but its a nice inexpensive gesture if each Nintendo game gave out more of them. They're numbered, so it's not like they couldn't turn them into a collectible card side-gig either. AR Shoot: Hitting targets. You do have to spin the camera around to find some of them, so it works best if you're setting the AR card down on a coffee table or something similarly central in a room. A cluttered desk or your own knee is a little more problematic (as I discovered), unless you simply manually move the card around yourself. The game ends once you shoot a dragon that randomly pops up. Because everything needs a boss fight these days apparently. AR Golf: (Not its real name, but the real name Shot is ambiguously close to Shoot) This one's a little goofier, since terrain will suddenly spring up and it becomes something of a golf/billiards physics puzzle. It reminded me a lot of Kirby's Dream Course, actually. And the dragon shows up again. I'm wondering if all this dragon chasing is code for something. AR Fishing:Pretty basic fishing game where you only need to snap the 3DS up once to catch something after it bites the line. It seems to have plenty of different kinds of fish to hook though, so it's entirely possible my completionist tendencies will get the better of me and I'll play more of it. I got quite excited when one particularly large fish shadow showed up, only to find it was that friggin' dragon again. C'mon dude, I'm trying to relax with some fishing here. Face Raiders: Hands down the most terrifying game I've ever played. And I've played Drakengard. Setting aside any easy jokes about one's homely countenance (I've done that once already), the game's downright eerieness comes from the expressions the face ball things make as they attack you (or just goof off in the menus). They come at you from all directions, wearing your face, trying to murder you while laughing with their weird diamond-shaped Andross mouths. It's seriously like a scene from Lawnmower Man. Or a postcard from the Uncanny Grand Canyon. I won't be revisiting it if I can help it. Most troubling, I think, is that the face recognition software had me pegged as a 12 year old girl, despite not shaving recently.
3DS Sound
This one's a little odd. I kind of just expected it to be a music player (which is already an odd thing to use your DS for, though it kind of works if you're intending to take long walks for coins and need something to listen to) but it's apparently a sound recording studio type thing as well. It's more or less applying filters to music and recorded sounds, like making everything resemble 8-bit NES music (which sort of sounds wrong). I dunno, I don't think it'll replace the vastly superior sound mixer software that exists already in DS form.
Activity Log
Self explanatory. Mine was kind of empty, but then I've only had the 3DS for a few hours. There's lots of neat little infographics options though for whatever reason, so it's kind of like having your own little PSeG wherever you go.
I dunno, this is mostly information people have already heard from Jeff and other game/tech journalist types. I'm thinking now that this whole blog idea was a subconscious attempt to show off my 3DS-having status in a way that didn't seem too douchey. Fission mailed. But seriously, these apps are neat and there's quite a lot of them, cool of Nintendo to go all out for a bunch of proof of concept novelties. Now the long wait for the eShop begins. Nothing stops etc. etc.
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This week, I'll be discussing my favorite sub-sub-genre (seriously, genres are fucked up) and its merits over similar games without the hybrid element.
If you're wondering what manner of nonsense I'm talking about, the creation of a hybridized dungeon crawler is as follows: 1. You take a perfectly functional dungeon-crawler - think Diablo or Torchlight, or anything designated as a " Roguelike" or said to include procedurally generated dungeons. These dungeons are varied in their size and aesthetic style (their look, in non-pretentious wordage), full of treasures and monsters, and are to some extent generated on the fly by some sort of inherent algorithm and other coding jargon I've long since been unable to figure out. 2. You add to this dungeon crawler an equally full and functional second game genre. Currently, there doesn't seem to be any theoretical restrictions on what this second genre is, only that it needs to be something that can directly complement the dungeon crawler element in some way - so money earned in the dungeon would have second-mode applications, and you can do stuff in the second-mode that will assist or direct the dungeon crawling. 3. Important to note that the dungeon crawling and second mode should remain separate: It isn't just the same game mode throughout. So something like Borderlands, which is pretty much a hybrid of a dungeon crawler and an FPS, wouldn't count in this instance. Though I guess they'd have to be called the same thing. Genres are fucked up.
The idea is that the dungeon crawler element is captivating on a sheer behavioral level of "kill monster, find shiny", which after a while will lose its sheen and begin to resemble a pointless chore. The second mode alleviates this "enjoyment entropy" by giving players the distraction of a separate gaming experience for a while, so they cam re-enter the dungeon mode refreshed and the initial captivation intact, with this cycle perpetuating ideally for the length of the game. At least that's the theory, but considering how successful some of the games on this list became, it's clear this system works when handled correctly.
I'll briefly cover some examples of what I'm talking about:
The Persona games famously divide their playtime between the dungeon crawling and the social dating sim aspects. The dungeon crawling moves the game forward, with deadlines imposed and met to further the storyline. The social element allows the player to increase their prowess in the dungeons via some sort of spiritual power leak from the strength of their relationships with friends and lovers. Thus, building these relationships between dungeon excursions is highly beneficial as well as being an entertaining series of vignettes focusing on the development of a side character. These little stories are the perfect foil for the randomized dungeon crawling, creating solid, believable character arcs that stand out especially against the indiscriminate chaos of your Tartaruses and TV Worlds.
The Dark Cloud series follows the adventures of a world-building hero, who needs to descend various dungeons for the inspiration and raw materials to recreate a series of locations. The first game largely takes the Soul Blazer route of having certain buildings and people of the overworld unlocked based on the player's progress through the dungeon, though the player is responsible for the placement of these overworld pieces to suit specific requisites. Dark Cloud 2 is slightly more open, giving you the resources (or funds) needed to rebuild entire villages complete with buildings, walls, fences, pathways, rivers and stage-specific fixtures like mechanical cranes. The sequel also goes one step further by introducing many side projects to the dungeon crawler, including a photography subquest, character specific requests and fishing and golf mini-games that can be undertaken once a dungeon floor is cleared of enemies.
Simple enough: Harvest Moon with dungeon crawls. The resources you claim from dungeons, mostly tamable monsters, are as integral to building a profitable farm as the diligent planting and harvesting cycle of your edible flora. Doing too much of one or the other isn't necessarily going to ruin your farm, but a balance is recommended. It's hard to say if this improves the Harvest Moon experience too much, since I'm not sure who buys these games besides farming enthusiasts (the ones that aren't all flocking to Farming Simulator 2011, of course), but it now has five games in the series so obviously farming and treasure are a potent combination for somebody.
Now I'll go over several theoretical "second mode" genres and how they might be combined with a dungeon crawler, and see if it creates a fun Frankenstein's monster, like Frankenberry, and not a scary bad Frankenstein's monster, like Frankenstein's monster.
Dungeon Crawler + Shmup
Shmups don't seem like they'd be impossible to procedurally generate - it's basically waves of enemies and glowy bullets to avoid - either in the traditional horizontal/vertical scrolling format or the currently popular single-screen dual-stick format. While you could build a game that had shmup stages separating the dungeons, similar to Kingdom Hearts Gummi Ship sections, I'm wondering if you couldn't have a game where you'd just simply switch between these two modes whenever you had the compulsion to do so. While dungeon crawling is a slow(ish), methodical sweeping of a series of halls and tunnels, the shmup equivalent of same would be a lot faster paced but also a lot more treacherous without that measured sense of caution. Players could switch if they find their crawling experience flagging, or if they find they're dying too much against the enemy hordes on this level. Both modes would have all the treasures and monsters native to dungeon-crawling, so it'd be more or less just a switch-up of pacing.
Dungeon Crawler + Sports
Well, I'm the last guy to play a sports game, because if I did that I'd be a jock and therefore my own worst enemy. Over here in 1980s highschool movie cliché land. Honestly, I just don't find them all that enthralling since they tend to be so dry and shoot for realism. One exception are the Mutant League games, which combine the usual rules and plays with horrific zombie-on-alien violence and lots of dark comic humor. A Sports/Dungeon Crawler based on that type of world would involve capturing monsters and training them for roles in either some fictional medieval sport or perhaps a real one like soccer or football (or football and American football, depending on your geography). Certain monsters could be used for "defense" and "offense" depending on how rock-solid or pointy they happen to be, though they'd need enough intelligence to follow orders. You could also use the funds from dungeon crawling to hire and trade pre-existing players. Adversely, the monsters would assist the player in the dungeon crawling aspect, increasing their skills in the blocking/tackling/kicking fields as they level up.
Dungeon Crawler + Empire Building Sim/Strategy
In this hypothetical game, the dungeon crawling boosts a would-be conqueror's armies and territories. This is partly done by simply raising funds and finding weapons and equipment for their troops by exploring ancient fortresses and forgotten dungeons on a larger "take everything that isn't junk" scale. The end goal of each large dungeon, though, would be to reclaim some artifact of power with an actual global effect on the player's abilities as a monarch. These could range from icons that affirms their right to rule (increasing fame and relations with rival despots) to advanced lost technology that increases the strength of their troops a la Civilization, or magical artifacts that give the player unique benefits when creating cities or fighting wars. The player would move around in dungeons with a larger excavation team of warriors, engineers and stout peons for the heavy lifting. Instead of one or two weapon or armor drops, they'd be emptying entire armories of hundreds. Instead of just taking piles of gold and jewels, they'd be taking all the furniture and fixtures that haven't completely rotted away. It'd be an interesting (even if I do say so myself) twist on the usual small scale one-man dungeon crawl.
So what do you guys think about combining dungeon crawlers with other game types? Are they more fun or less fun than core crawler games like Torchlight? Any other (hopefully better) ideas for combinations? Do you think these blog posts are weakened by having a bunch of rhetorical questions at the end? Is this a rhetorical question? Where are my pants?
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Hey all. For this blog I'll be going over Let's Plays, because Yahtzee just did something similar and this whole video game blogging business is a "follow the leader" industry. By which I clearly mean that I intend to give my own standpoint on this continuing internet 2.0 phenomenon irrespective of the ramblings of some maniacal ex-pat. I guess I should probably write " ZP response blog" somewhere just to be safe. Ehh, maybe later.
A Let's Time and a Let's Place for Let's Play
That's a catchy and non-stupid sub-topic title! The value of a Let's Play is hard to accurately define, unless you believe internet dollars are real things, so we'll say it is entirely dependent on its educational and entertainment value. Preferably with a mix of both, but one or the other is fine if it's at an acceptably high standard.
Now for some stuff that isn't a retread: The games that work best with decent Let's Play coverage. Most examples are pulled from SA's external non-subscription (hey don't subscription sites suck, by the way? Am I right guys? Guys?) LP archive, called imaginatively enough the LP Archive.
GOOD
SURVIVAL HORROR Best Features of a Survival Horror: Scary shit, story. Worst Features of a Survival Horror: All doors seem to be locked either with sliding puzzles or keys currently situated a mile away in some nurse monster's gullet. Survival Horror is easily the most entertaining of the Let's Plays to watch, simply because it excuses you from the nerve-wracking experience of running around for keys in a haunted building and lets some other chump do it while you reap all the scares and story beats. Plus you get the benefit of watching said chump lose his shit if it's a blind run.
Example: This Forbidden Siren LP is informative, keeping the commentary to an understated subtitle track (can't spell "subtitle" without "subtle", y'all), while handily navigating the player through annoying stealth section after stealth section and letting them experience the game's creepy-as-hell atmosphere and story. There's no way I'd have the patience to play this game myself. The sequel's LP by the same dude is also worth a look in as it covers a game never released in the States.
INTERESTING FAILURES Best Feature of an Interesting Failure: They're interesting. Possibly unique. Possibly unique for a reason. Worst Feature of an Interesting Failure: Actually trying to play them. There's usually plenty of genuinely imaginative ideas that simply could not be realized fully by the under-experienced or under-funded development team, creating something only a fool would love. Fortunately, the world has enough of those amusing fools to create a Let's Play memorandum for these forgotten non-gems. Fun for MST3k-ing, but only if the LPers are actually funny (Unskippable take note).
Example: This Jurassic Park: Trespasser LP is fairly famous in LP circles for the host's Brad-like sardonic southern wit covering the sheer debacle of this early physics-and-dinosaurs-based shooter/thrower. He finds plenty of good things to say about the game, however, including how it blazed a trail for games like Half-Life 2 to follow with all its hoity-toity notions of competency and fun. The Yahtzee article also mentioned the Daikatana LP which is even more famous, especially if you like no-clipping and frogs. Oh yeah, I heard there was a good playthrough or two of that Deadly Premonition game somewhere as well.
GOOFY ASS MULTI-PLAYER Best Features of Goofy Ass Multi-Player: It's a lot of fun, even from a spectator viewpoint. Beefs are born as quickly as they are squashed. Worst Features of Goofy Ass Multi-Player: Not always easily available, especially if you're a hermit. Occasionally becomes an annoying and incoherent cacophony. The Goofy Ass Multi-Player experience seriously depends on one's tolerance for stupidity. Fortunately, rather than flailing moronically at the game's challenges (which is frustrating for everyone) they're mostly flailing moronically at each other. With the right game and the right crowd, it's one of the best types of LP for sheer entertainment value.
Example: Those likable dolts of the Freelance Astronauts covered the New Super Mario Bros Wii (that's a title destined for obsolescence) in suitably chaotic form, with a ful playthrough using all four players. As expected, they barely survive most levels, the largest obstacles to their success naturally being each other.
FILLING IN BLANKS Sometimes you just want to play a game because it reveals a lot of information that would be spoiled by a sequel, with said sequel either an imminent release or a recent purchase. Often, though, the earlier games in a series are far less polished and are a chore to get through, especially if there's a significant time lapse between it and its sequel. This is where LPs become valuable historical records for games either too difficult to obtain or too horrible to play.
Example: SA user and LPer "The Dark Id" often covers games of this type, usually in a screenshot format that neatly summarizes the game rather than subject the viewer to endless hours of terrible in-game action. While some of the games he covers are objectively quite good, most are merely mediocre. The benefit of reading these LPs is that these games are often part of a larger series of much higher quality, so the LPs are a more entertaining method of catching up with the prequels and gaiden games than actually playing them. Specific examples include FF7's melancholy shooty vampire spin-off Dirge of Cerberus, deeply unpleasant dragon-sim and sort-of prequel to Nier Drakengard and Resident Evil's frequently baffling zombie excursions which include pretty much all of them up to #4 if we're talking about the bad ones, but for generosity's sake I'll just post the LP of one of those horrible rail-shooters.
ENDURANCE RUNS OF LONGER GAMES Best Feature of Longer Games: Longevity, first and foremost. There's usually a lot of worthwhile content buried in an even larger amount of repetitive dreck. Worst Feature of Longer Games: Players (usually older ones with jobs and such) often lack the patience or free-time to play these goliaths from start to finish. The longer game can be a bit too cumbersome for most, who prefer their gaming in short bursts. Having long stretches where the game seems to go on forever without a save point or a reprieve can make a person's eyes glaze over, and any and all goodwill towards the gameplay or story are eventually forgotten as the tedium sets in. Fortunately, someone else's endurance run of same will cut these playthroughs down into manageable chunks to view at one's convenience and pleasure.
Example: i dunno much about endurance runs other than.. other than the one we got at this site vinny used bufu on things and i watched it MORPHELGORBL
Dudes, totally feel free to respond with your own thoughts and LP recommendations. For the record, I actively detest any LP that is: "creatively narrated" (fucking English majors) or "wacky/insane" (sort of a little pot kettle black, granted).
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