miffy495

Man, OssK, you have a fucking amazing job. Well done. Dan, sounds like you are far busier than I, leaving me feeling like a jerk for complaining about anything. I hope crap calms down quick for you, particularly on the housing front. Having just gone through a "Hey, get out in a month" situation in November myself, I feel for you. There is no better feeling than coming home to a reasonably nice place after that kind of crap goes down.

I thought they were shutting down the server's for Demon's Souls? That had me thinking that I may never play it, because the persistent online stuff seemed pretty integral to the game.

Just finished Enslaved. Good game overall, but what the fuck was up with that ending? That said, I enjoyed the game quite a bit when the clumsy-ass controls or frustrating camera weren't getting in my way. The animations seem to have been getting a lot of praise for this game, and they're certainly good, but it feels like maybe the developers went a bit too far towards making the game look good in favor of making it control well. Monkey looks great running around, but is really unweildy as well. The characters and story, up until the mind-blowingly inconsistent epilogue, were quite good, though not the best I've seen in games. At one point, Pigsy says "What could possibly go wrong?" and it made me cringe. A while back on the podcast, it was pointed out that one of Uncharted 2's strongest points was that it could deliver that overused line without sounding terrible. Enslaved did not pull that off. It was good, but uneven. It's been getting a tonne of praise, which I'm not quite understanding now having finished it. It was a very good game, but it felt lacking in so many ways. The traversal felt like Uncharted, but rougher. The combat felt kinda like Beyond Good and Evil, though still kinda rough. Everything was good-to-great, but nothing was particularly outstanding. The first big boss fight in particular was ridiculous. They built it up so much, having the thing chase you around for almost a whole chapter, and then when you finally fight it all you have to do is shoot it with a stun shot and then wail on it until it gets up. Shoot again, wail again. It never even fucking hit me. For something the game was trying to tell me I should be in complete mortal terror of, that was pretty weak. I played through the game on Normal, and while it wasn't a total cake-walk, the only times I actually died was when the camera was looking at a wall and I was being blasted by enemies I couldn't see, or if I wandered too far from Trip and she activated the "you're too far off the critical path" death headband. This is sounding more negative than I wanted it too. Enslaved was good, but not as good as I'd been led to believe. Make of that what you will. I'm certainly interested in trying out the Pigsy's Perfect 10 DLC when I get some internet hooked up at home, as the game left me wanting more. It feels like a perfect opportunity for a "original game was pretty good, sequel is goddamned astounding" situations (see also: Assassin's Creed, Uncharted, more that I can't think of right now) so I really hope they keep going with it.

Fuck me is the boss of Donkey Kong Country Returns ever hard. Like, 30 lives. What a bastard. Anyway, it's done. I have now seen the credits of DKCR, so it can be considered complete. I still plan on going back to unlock the Golden Temple (done by collecting the KONG letters on each level in a world, then completing the 8 bonus levels that that unlocks) so that I can do whatever is in there, as there are only 4 levels I don't have all the letters for and only 3 of those bonus levels I need to see. Whether I'll have the persistence to go through that, who knows. I may have finished it as much as I'm going to, and I did see credits, so on the list it goes!

Also, while Mario 64 (a launch title from 2004, and also a port of a console game) isn't portable, NSMB totally is. Fantastically so. And while the earlier Zeldas may not be that great at being portable, note that the person who said that also said that they haven't played the DS ones. I actually thought that Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks did it quite well. Not the best, as you'd still need to finish a dungeon in one go, but as I said back in my first or second post on this thread, the puzzles on a room-to-room basis were actually compartmentalized very well, in a way that I really wish God of War (for example) had been.

Nothing exciting, unfortunately. Just smack in the middle of the dreary February grind a couple of weeks earlier than it's scheduled on the calendar. Nonstop work every evening and most weekend days at the main job, while spending the day parts of weekdays looking for a second job to help me afford going back to school in the fall for my post-grad. I'm getting a bit of game time in at work on slow days, but there's been a bunch of stuff going on there lately too. I have an hour or so of time to myself a day, but it's usually from 1 to 2-ish in the morning when I get home from work. Haven't been getting anywhere near enough sleep, etc etc. I'm going to try to see the King's Speech tonight with the girlfriend, as Sunday night is when I can actually do things now and then, but what I want most in the world right now is a day when I just don't have to get out of bed at all, maybe bring the Wii into the bedroom or something, and just melt into my mattress. It's not even that anything is particularly hard. I like my job quite a bit, and love my girlfriend (after 3 and a half years, I'd better). I'm just really tired of having to talk to people and work with them constantly and would love to not do that for a day.

I think the fact that I've said many times now that I'm playing Final freaking Fantasy on my DS speaks to my not just wanting Angry Birds. I've been using it as an example of how one could design a huge RPG to fit into the portable mentality. As in, I'll play for a bit, run a few levels of the dungeon I'm on, and then quicksave and turn off the system. It's a great way to condense the super-epic game experience into a portable constraint, and I've put over 20 hours into the game at this point by doing just that. Long, epic games can work fine, provided that they are compartmentalized. As long as I'm not feeling like I'm leaving some urgent task unfinished when I save and quit, I'm happy. God of War did that all the time, which was what I was trying to get at in the parentheses where I described its save system. It felt like every save point in that game was right before something important, and that the game was almost chiding me for not being hardcore enough to get to that bit right away. It's not that I feel I should be done everything when I save and put the system away, it's that I don't want anything immediate hanging over my head. It can be as simple as putting the save right after a boss fight rather than right before it, letting me feel like I've accomplished something and can take a break now. As I've said, while there are plenty of Arcade/Retro things on the PSP, they're not the banner titles that represent the system to the world. The games that do that are not, as I take them, portable games.

I'm away from home right now, so I can't look at my library, but I think the contrast between FFIV for DS and P3P for PSP is a pretty good look at the distinction. FFIV lets you quicksave any time that you're not in a battle, and with the exception of boss fights, battles typically resolve in under a minute. P3P only lets you save at specifically ordained points that, especially during a dungeon run, are at least a half hour of play apart. I actually don't think Mario 64 is a great portable game, but because it's a console port, I don't mind as much. What's in my bag right now for the DS is Tetris (it's tetris, you can put it down whenever), Super Scribblenauts (1-5 minute levels that autosave whenever you complete them), FFIV (like I said, save anywhere that isn't in a battle), and Pokemon Gold (also save anywhere that isn't a battle). Contrast this with the last few games I played on PSP, which are Ghost of Sparta (save at predetermined checkpoints which are often placed right in the middle of doing something, leaving you feeling like you should have finished your task before stopping), Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops (20-30 minute levels with long cutscenes around them, no saving mid-mission), GTA Vice City Stories (GTA style, running from missions to safehouses and back, very unforgiving to quick plays), and now P3P (as described earlier). All of those are great games, but I think I would rather have played each of them on my PS3. That's not to say that the PSP does not have great portable experiences. Particularly the more indie stuff that you seem to go for, Tanu. But those are not the banner titles for the system. The titles that get associated with it by the gaming press and mainstream audiences. The ones that I named for both systems are games that are commonly thought of when thinking of the system, and I definitely think that the difference in design approaches is clear when you look at them like that.

A difference between you and I is, at this point with how much crap I have going on, I would have said that with pride.

Both have a sleep mode, but one feels much more necessary than the other. I'm not talking about every game on each system, but in general I'd feel much less slighted if the DS didn't have a sleep mode than I would if the PSP didn't. I use the DS's only very rarely, in most cases I'm able to power down whenever I need to and lose little to no progress, and also not feel like I'm going to have any difficultly coming back to it. On the PSP, if I couldn't put the system to sleep I would absolutely hate the thing because the games are just not designed to be playable in short bursts. That's not to say I haven't had marathon sessions on both systems, it's just that on the PSP they needed to be, whereas on the DS it was only because I was having too much fun to put them down. 10 minute cutscenes are also far more prevalent on one system. Guess which? Again, I really do like my PSP, and both types of games have their place. I just believe that the place of most PSP games would ideally not be on a portable system. It's not any one thing I can name as being what makes a game "portable," but when you compare the libraries of the two system it does start to become apparent that the games are designed with different people in mind. One goes for the larger, epic-sized experiences. The other for the short bursts of fun that I'm generally looking to a potable for. If you don't mind that PSP games aren't great at being bite-sized, that's a different issue. I'm certainly willing to look past it in order to have played a bunch of really great games on the system. Still, as I said, most of the really great games on the PSP I would have preferred to have played on a console, while the really great games on the DS I can't really imagine playing on anything else.

I too use sleep mode all the time. As I said P3P is on sleep mode all the fucking time because it doens't have a good save system that will let me actually turn the system off. In fact, my PSP is asleep in my pocket as I type this. It will probably need to remain asleep until Monday, as my girlfriend is picking me up from work and I don't play portables when I'm talking to her. I do however, have a 40 minute bus commute to work, and the PSP is what I mostly do during that. It is infuriating to get to work and have to put the thing to sleep instead of being able to turn it off. I have a PSP1000, and on the original battery it would not last through the work day like this. I later replaced the battery with the longer lasting one when Sony made those available. It will probably last until Tuesday or so thanks to this. I also don't have the chance to charge it every night. It's kind of a cop-out to say that poorly designed games are ok just because the console has a sleep function. That's not to say that all PSP games are like this, but I do notice it FAR more frequently on the PSP than the DS, and it seems symptomatic of the design mentality I described earlier. You're not entirely wrong in saying that the PSP caters to both, with things like GTA:CW and Half Minute Hero on there, but those are pretty much the only two that spring to mind from the last while, whereas the DS has a wealth of games of that type. I believe the argument for portable games to be portable is a pretty valid one. As was said on the podcast at one point, if I'm sitting on my couch for a long gaming session and have the choice between (for example) playing the full-on PS3 Uncharted games or the PSP2/NGP Uncharted, why would I opt for the one which has to make sacrifices to get it to fit on a portable? That's not to say that those games can't be great. In the past 3 months I've played both God of War Ghost of Sparta and God of War 3, and vastly preferred the former, but I also played that on the bus (using sleep mode liberally again, as it too falls victim to the "not really that portable" thing) and didn't care to do so on my couch. You say later that success stories like God of War "aren't to be ignored" and I agree. There are some really fantastic games. I also think they fail at being portable experiences. I play them on my PSP begrudgingly, thinking of how nice it would be to chill on my couch and see it on my big screen. DS games I just love as DS games, without ever having to think about that. The crux of my argument remains: Nintendo caters to the portable market with games that are designed to actually be portable. Sony caters to the hardcore crowd by making excellent hardcore games that aren't necessarily portable. As a transit commuter, I much prefer the ability to be able to actually turn off my system when my bus reaches the destination than to have to put it into sleep mode. There is also the issue of designing your games so that don't make you feel like you're missing out when you have to turn it off while still rewarding you when you turn it on. The games that make up the majority of the PSP's catalogue are great, but don't fit those needs. They also constantly make me think about how much nicer it would be on a PS3 or 360 rather than a portable, which would not be a problem if they were actually good portable games.

And there's the problem. I'm one of those people who does go for the 100% (have it on the first three worlds. I go back and clear out earlier levels when the later ones start to frustrate me) and in order to do that you need to be rolling with perfect timing quite often to grab errant puzzle pieces and KONG letters. In fact, I would recommend getting all the KONG letters even if you don't care about puzzle pieces, as when you have all of the letters in a world it unlocks a really cool bonus level in a temple. I have beaten that level for worlds 1, 2, 3, and 6 (got all the letters on that one in my first run through some fluke of luck) and while they're way harder than the regular game, they're also incredibly exciting and fun. I do intend to 100% this game, and am actually making a decent run at it, it's just very painful to do so at times. Nappi's co-op issues hadn't even occurred to me, but I can certainly see how they would crop up. I'll be playing a bunch of this game co-op in a week drunk with some buddies, so it'll be interesting to see how that goes. Of course, I intend to have the game beaten by then (probably not 100% though) so it won't be an issue that impedes progress.

I hated the horse controls and that long arena combat section was terrible. Also, dodging the worms before getting the horse was handled in a really shitty way. I appreciated that they mixed it up, but they mixed it up with shit. That said, going around those towers and activating them was pretty cool.

So I picked this up a couple of weeks ago with an EB gift card my sister gave me, and am now 5 levels away from completing it. I gotta say, somewhere around world 6, this game just presses the explode mode button and becomes brutally hard. Most of my sessions since then have devolved into fits of hysterical laughter at how cruel the designers could be. I will run into situations where I'm stuck horribly just after the checkpoint, try 20 or so times, finally nail an absolutely perfect run and feel fantastic about myself, and then what is more or less the Monty Python foot will literally drop from the air and crush me, sending me right back to try again. The level designers at Retro are complete fucking bastards, but I love them for it. I'm still frustrated by "waggle to roll" as rolling is essential to high-level DKC play. The other waggle controls aren't so bad, as the ground pound and blow are used pretty much exclusively to uncover bonus items and maybe defeat one class of enemy each, but rolling should really be a button press. It's just not something you want to allow any kind of inaccuracy with. Having three actions mapped to waggle, while the C button is unused and both the Z and B button are both mapped to exactly the same actions is really dumb. One waggle (the ground pound, because it's awesome to do), and the other two buttons actually doing something please. Still, this is a rad old-school platformer. Something about it feels sort of hollow, in the same way that NSMB did to me though. Honestly I think it's just that my brain has trouble accepting a traditional platformer with real-time 3D graphics. The enemies are awesome, the style is all there, and the level design is devious and totally ready to make any player not up to the challenge weep. I just wish that it was rendered 3D turned into sprites like on the SNES for some reason. Kirby went back to a 2D art style last year, I want more things like that. That said, everybody who likes watching a monkey jump around and ride rocket barrels (simultaneously some of the hardest and raddest levels) should check this out.

That was the part that sucked. Congratulations, the rest of the game should be pretty good. I also believe that those retro levels are the best part of the game, so feel free to disregard my opinion. That said, I came ridiculously late to Mario 64 (my first experience with it was the DS remake) and still found it a fantastic game. I found Sunshine to be mechanically superior, but preferred the variety of goals and environments in 64, so make of that what you will. If you'll be playing 64 on a Wii with a classic controller, I'd say go for it. As much as I loved the N64 controller in the day, my hands have been too trained by modern games (and are much larger than when I was 10 and playing N64) to go back.

This. Also, what I said about the differences in design between Persona 3 Portable and Final Fantasy IV on the DS. Both are huge JRPGs which I have put more than 20 hours into at this point, but one is much more portable-friendly. It's not a question of whether the game is huge and engrossing or not, it's a question of allowing your players the chance to put it down when real life calls. Presumably real life will call now and then when you're playing a portable game.

Having been 10 when the original version came out, this will be my first chance to experience it. I can't help you with that one.

So it's like the original DS, but they may actually use the ability to save new things to the card?

Two done this week. Monday night I finished Darksiders on PC, and then yesterday afternoon I finished a 22 hour replay of Paper Mario 1 on the Wii's Virtual Console. Thoughts to follow. Starting with Paper Mario, because it'll be nice short impressions. I beat it when it came out, borrowing it from a friend in Junior High School, and have always remembered it fondly. As such, I was sort of frightened when it came out on Wii. I really didn't want it to be another one of those games that I love in my memory but is actually not something I'd ever want to play now. Holy crap was I wrong. That game is so much goddamned fun. There is actually nothing about that I found lacking even 10 years after its release. Even the graphics look current thanks to the pop-up book aesthetic. The only thing dated about the game at all is a few instances of obvious aliasing. All told though, holy crap this game is good. If you have a Wii and $10, you need to play this game. Especially if you haven't before. Darksiders also cost me $10, thanks to a discount on Steam over the holiday. It was both good and infuriating. Ultimately I think I quite liked it, but I'm definitely more of mixed mind than on other games. For those who aren't familiar with it, it's essentially Zelda, but everything is either on fire or bleeding. For example, in Zelda, you will come up to a locked door in a dungeon, find a small key somewhere, and open the door with it. In Darksiders, you will come up to a door with some phantom eyeball sealing it, find a mystical dagger somewhere, and STAB THAT FUCKING DOOR IN THE EYE. This carries over to pretty much everything in the game. You get a boomerang, but it's some four-bladed glaive that slices the ever-loving fuck out of your target. You get a bow, but it's an extreme revolver. You get a lens of truth, but it's a mask that gives you crazy glowing eyes. It's all that sort of thing. None of it is bad, but most of it is laughable. On the other hand, I was willing to forgive a lot of things from that game just for the opportunity to play a Zelda-like experience on a non-Nintendo system. There are a lot of things that Zelda does that those that imitate it just don't get. Darksiders, for the most part, gets it. It also adds a very nice combat system which is accompanied by a very broken camera. The amount of times I lost three or more life bars due to staring at a wall in the middle of combat and completely losing sight of my enemies was more than I could count. Also, the horse sections were terrible. The fact that they made you fight a boss on horseback was the worst decision. Actually, most of the third dungeon was a mess of terrible in an otherwise very enjoyable game. This is about halfway through the game, so my enjoyment curve of Darksiders would be a line in the "hey, this is pretty fun" area of the graph with an incredibly sharp drop in the middle and then right back to fun. Play the game if you're hard up for a Zelda, as it's a pretty good one. I do not recommend paying more than $20 or so for it, but lately I've noticed that what I'm willing to spend on a game has been dropping dramatically so adjust accordingly. All in all, a good week. I love Paper Mario, and have just psyched myself up a tonne for the new 3DS one they'll be putting out this summer. I intend to replay Thousand Year Door (which is one of those games where I have a save file AT THE DOOR before the final boss fight but have never beaten it) and Super Paper Mario (actually beat it when it came out) in the meantime, so hopefully that will give me enough time to save up the cash for the system and game. Darksiders, good but not great, though I certainly enjoyed myself with it. Those who do not find ridiculous straight-faced extreme-ness either hilarious (me) or legitimately awesome (a sad person, or age 13) need not apply.

It has happened. GOG () has The Last Express. My laziness in not buying it on DotEmu for the past 2 weeks has paid off! To the inter-shops!

Well, I'm definitely more interested in the 3DS before this, but it does look cool. I expect I will end up purchasing one sometime in the latter half of 2012. From the games listed though, it does seem like people are making the same mistake that irks me with the PSP. That is, designing games that would be best played from the couch and then putting them on a portable. Much as I do love my PSP and the games on it, they (with a few exceptions) very rarely feel like they were designed with a portable in mind. When I play my DS, I get a short blast of fun that I can just clap closed at any time that life calls. Say, for example, I've hit my bus stop and need to get off. I find it much easier to do so with my DS than with my PSP. Lately I've been going back and forth from Final Fantasy IV on my DS and Persona 3 Portable on my PSP, and even with both being huge JRPGs, the DS seems far more designed to be a portable experience. At any point on the DS, I can do a quicksave which will let me power off the system and then resume my game exactly from that point when I turn it back on. My PSP on the other hand is currently in sleep mode because I'm in the middle of a run through levels 25-36 of the tower and happened to need to stop playing around level 31. No way to save and resume the game except at very specific points in that one. This seems to be the general design philosophy difference in the two. Even with something like Zelda, where you don't want to save and quit in the middle of a dungeon, the puzzles are compartmentalized into what seems like individual rooms. Contrast that with something like God of War (either PSP one) and there is no real clear division in things. I know a lot of gamers seem to prefer it if a game does not allow them to feel like there is a point where they can just set the game down and walk away, but I find that to be a strength of a portable, and one that Nintendo has and Sony seems to ignore. With a new Uncharted, Killzone, Resistance, LittleBigPlanet, and Call Of Duty, I can't see them wanting to go for the short burst of gameplay model, but rather the "EPIC NEXT GEN EXPERIENCE" that those series seem to represent on PS3 and other. Not necessarily a weakness in general, but certainly the main factor in my lack of excitement compared to a new Nintendo portable. I'm sure the PSP2/NGP will have great games. I'm also sure I will prefer to play them on my couch rather than as an actual portable game.

At the Telltale PAX panel, Jake (I think) said something along the lines of "How much would it ruin everyone's life to know that we have the entire season of Puzzle Agent storyboarded?" so I believe that it was intended to be a cliffhanger for more story to come. And Jake, yeah it ruined my life a bit. More Puzzle Agent please.

...maybe stop buying games for them?

The old Sam and Max game had me searching madly for the Surfin the Highway compilation for years, which I was finally able to get ahold of after it was rereleased through Telltale's store. I also did see Riddick for the first time simply because I liked the game. I don't think anything else has made me check out the source though. I had only read the first three volumes of Bone when I played the games, but as they only went through the first two, I don't think that counts.

I played The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay about a year before seeing either of the films. I now have a deep affection for all things Riddick-related (Pitch Black is just a good movie, and Chronicles is stupid, but I still love it in the way I love a bad Bond movie) based on being completely astounded at how unexpectedly good the game was. Still haven't played through Dark Athena, though I do have it on Steam. Also, on a semi-nitpicking note, I'm not sure I would consider playing Superhero Squad without having watched that specific Marvel show playing the game without being aware of the subject matter. I'm pretty sure that at this point, everyone at least has a loose grasp of the big name Marvel characters. I know I do, despite having little to no interest in superhero comics.