season of oracles

even though i’d finished playing a zelda game recently (majora’s mask, as recounted here) i’d been itching to play a 2D zelda game for quite some time, so i started in on the next in line, oracle of seasons for the game boy color. i thought i’d just see how the series’ return to 2D would fare, but by the time i’d gotten the powers of all four of the seasons i was hooked.

it seems a fair amount of the game’s uniqueness is due to the fact it’s paired with the game oracle of ages, so i’m going to withold my final judgement until i play that game. but although i enjoyed playing seasons there wasn’t a whole lot that felt really fresh. the rod of seasons was entertaining but didn’t offer up that much variety; the second world didn’t have a whole lot to make it memorable; and there were a fair number of pseudo-new items, i.e. items that were ostensibly new but had the same effect as items from previous games. there were a handful of unique items that offered up some surprises, though, as well as some animal helpers (a first for the series, i believe, not counting epona), and it was fun to hear some of the tunes (and characters) from ocarina and majora make appearances here. i also felt nostalgic seeing the game engine, which was clearly based on the classic link’s awakening, and also from seeing the reworkings of elements from the original NES zelda including many of the bosses (and the “pay me for the door repair” man who is back with a vengeance haha).

the useless items to collect in this game are rings which potentially could have been much more interesting as each offers different abilities, but since most of those abilities give only a tiny advantage and you can only equip one at a time the overall benefits are practically nil. also, the game was intended to focus more on action while its companion, oracle of ages supposedly focuses more on puzzles. i’ll have to see how that ends up panning out, but it did feel that in general in this game the boss fights were a bit more difficult than usual, sometimes pointlessly so. all in all, though, this was a fun game and a classic zelda title, although not likely to end up as one of my favorites of the series. it might be that i prefer my zelda games to have less emphasis on action, so i’m looking forward to playing oracle of ages before too long.

season of links:
- walkthrough and FAQ at zelda.com
- the official site for the game is still up
- nice game site at midnight castle’s zelda site
- the entry at wikipedia includes information on how the two games interact
- review at IGN which recommends playing seasons first
- FAQ that compares the original japanese vs the localized english names
- page at zeldawiki.org, including a gallery of all of the enemies
- guide at IGN

he really is a mega man

another NES classic bites the dust. i’d played and beaten mega man 2 back when i was a tyke, and i think it was one of the few times my mom let me rent a video game. i really didn’t remember anything about it, but after the announcement of the completely retro, completely 8-bit-styled upcoming release of mega man 9, a brand new mega man game, that sent fanboys worldwide into conniptions, it seems like everyone’s been arguing about what the best game in the series is. well, it’s less like an argument and more like a chorus with a few naysayers, as it seems most everyone favors the second installment.

i had a good time playing through the game (on normal mode, b/c i just wasn’t in the mood for anything too taxing). this is a classic mega man game, so it comes with all the fun of getting to choose what order to tackle the stages in, and the graphics, music, enemies, and bosses are all as great as you’d expect. the added password feature def. made me more inclined to play the game in the first place, although i found the levels in MM2 to be noticeably shorter than the original game. the original was a game that i did own and knew pretty much inside and out, so it was hard not to compare them. and although most people prefer MM2, they also acknowledge that the first game is the more difficult of the two, and i’d def. have to agree. the only difference between the two difficulty modes that i’ve seen so far in MM2 is that the enemies take more bullets to kill, but otherwise the environmental puzzles (e.g. disappearing blocks, moving platforms, etc.), which seem to be the same, were rarely challenging to me. maybe the original game made me a pro at them, or maybe i’m just remembering the original as being more difficult than it actually is some twenty years later. in any case, with mega man back in my life you can be sure that i’ll be revisiting both games as well as reminding myself of the other games that followed and checking out the ones i never got a chance to play. rock on, rock man, rock on.

tons of mega man love means mega mega man links:
- mega man forever is a nice fansite that has a nice page for MM2 w/ sprites for all the enemies and a great section with in-game and official artwork of all the boss robots in the whole series.
- the creatively-titled mega man homepage also has loads of great info and sprites including a completely complete game list and the answer to the question: “so how many mega man games are there?“. (the answer: a heckuva lot.)
- this ultimate mega man retrospective at gamesradar.com actually lives up to its name and recaps practically every game and boss in the series.
- someone made some totally alsome mega man hats
- IGN’s list of top 10 mega man robots of all time (and no, the much maligned wood man with his leaf shield power didn’t make the cut)
- interesting interview with inafune, the man behind the mega man at gamesradar
- a skewering of a feature from the olden days of nintendo power in which readers could submit ideas for mega man bosses, on i-mockery.com
- PDF of manual at replacementdocs.com
- a look at MM2’s infamous european artwork
- entry at mega man wiki
- entry at wikipedia

wright objections

phoenix wright: ace attorney, the first in the series, is another one of those games i’d heard a lot about and was looking forward to trying out. the idea of a lawyer adventure had me intrigued, and the game seems to have acquired a large fanbase online. the DS and now the wii have both seen a resurgence in point-and-click games, and although the original PW games were originally released for the GBA in japan the transition to DS certainly has its advantages and, as you can imagine, the gameplay must have become smoother as a result.

despite the game being firmly rooted in GBA style and presentation, the over-the-top characters, settings, and music are colorful and have a nice anime feel. for the few people who haven’t played the game, gameplay is separated into two parts. the first is typical point-and-click “move around and talk to characters and examine scenes for evidence”-type gameplay, although more suited to a detective’s job than a lawyer’s. the second type consists of the courtroom scenes, which are easily the best parts of the game. although parts of these scenes do get tedious, the act of presenting evidence in court to highlight contradictions in the witnesses’ testimonies is nicely done and doesn’t get old. and if the game doesn’t include much actual law, it does a nice job of giving a good semblance of it by incorporating legal jargon in a natural way and devising situations that highlight particular courtroom procedures.

overall, though, i didn’t end up liking the game nearly as much as i wanted to. i enjoyed the characters, and the protagonist’s rivalry reached archetypal levels. but although i enjoyed the twists in the overall story arc i just didn’t find the individual mysteries to be that interesting. i got tired of how dragged-out the stories felt, and at times the amount of text just felt endless, not to mention having a significant number of typos. and although games of this type always seem to have some disconnect between real-life and in-game logic, at times the logic here seemed even more farfetched than usual. all in all the game felt shallower in characterization, style, presentation, and plot, than the other point-and-click DS game i played hotel dusk (which had outstanding characterization and presentation), even though dusk was a more straightforward point-and-click adventure. the other two games in the main phoenix wright trilogy seem to have gotten similar scores as the first, and i don’t imagine the gameplay has evolved very much, so although i’m looking forward to finding out what happens to all the characters (particularly the prickly but somehow endearing miles edgeworth) i’m not really all that eager to tackle them just yet. but of course i will eventually.

some not-too-objectionable links:
- court-records.net: a great fansite which has screenshots, animated GIF’s, official artwork, and more
- craig harris’s review at IGN
- entry at wikipedia
- a walkthrough at IGN
- funny little online app where you can create your own “OBJECTION!”’s
- site on classicgaming.gamespy.com: includes recaps of all the games, some mp3’s, and some comparisons of characters’ japanese vs. english names

joe’s viewtiful world

this review’s going to be a bit weird, namely b/c i’m a big dork, i.e. sometimes i can be incredibly dense. so i played through viewtiful joe, a game that seems to be universally praised, particularly for its distinctive visuals, and at the same time universally damned for being old-school hard. i started out fine and really enjoyed the game’s presentation and its great central mechanic of slowing down time (a la the movie the matrix) and speeding up time, despite the fact that the first main boss kicked my *** repeatedly b/c of the game’s significant learning curve. but after that everything was going fairly merrily along, until i got to the later levels, which seemed endless, and the bosses, all of whom just seemed to take forever to beat. and then i got really bored b/c the game just dragged on and on and was taking so long to get through, and then i finally got to the last section and was finding it impossible to beat. so i finally consulted a FAQ online and realized that i’d been a big dork and had been playing the game completely wrong and was making it about 10 times harder on myself than it actually was.

so what was the problem? well if you’ve played the game you’ll prob. laugh when i tell you that my problem was that i’d completely ignored the most powerful move of the game, the slow zoom punch (apparently a.k.a. the slowRHOH, i.e. the slow red hot one hundred), which does twice as much damage as the regular zoom punch. i must’ve learned the move when it was introduced in the game, but after trying it out and not really seeing much difference on the grunts, i had just chalked it up as being a fairly useless move like the “red hot kick” move and the zoom down/up moves and never used it again. so no wonder i’d thought the levels and all the bosses took way too long to beat, b/c if i’d used that move they would’ve taken me 1/2 as long. as it is, once i found out i should’ve been using that move from the beginning i breezed through the last stage of the game, and i’m sure that if i’d used it earlier i would’ve finished the game in a fraction of the time it had actually taken me. i’m not sure how much of this i can blame on the game itself and how much on my own stupidity, although part of the blame may be due to my habit of playing through the first couple of hours of a game and then setting it aside for months before picking it up again, by which time i’ve generally forgotten all the basics of the game. hopefully someone out there will tell me they’ve done the same thing so i feel a little less idiotic. i did feel better when i read about this guy who hadn’t realized that buying the life item actually extended his life meter, which prob. made his playthrough almost as much harder as my playthrough.

b/c of my skewed experience it’s a bit hard to give a fair assessment of the game. there was a lot i enjoyed, and the game would’ve been a pretty good length and not nearly as much of a challenge if i’d played it properly. all in all even if i hadn’t been an idiot i prob. would’ve given the game slightly higher than average marks. it has about as much variety in enemies and gameplay as the average beat ‘em up and could’ve used more, although the ranking system and combo system are unique pluses. i’m not overly fond of beat ‘em ups, but i’ll prob. play through the sequel at some point. and i should def. check out the cartoon as well sometime.

some viewtiful links:
- guide at IGN
- entry at wikipedia
this rainbow V challenge in adult mode FAQ at IGN also includes some info on advanced techniques (although it’s not a challenge i have much desire to tackle)
- the only video i could find of gameplay as silvia and a tiny bit as sexy silvia

evil passing through

finished resident evil 4 last week. i’d read in a lot of places that a lot of critics regard this as one of the best gamecube games and one of the best games ever, and although i enjoyed a lot about the game, overall i def. don’t count this among the best games i’ve played this year. i’m not at all familiar w/ the “survival-horror” genre, and it seems that a lot of the praise for the game comes from capcom’s decision to break the conventions of the other games in the series and move in a different direction. but just coming into it as a newbie i found the game, while atmospheric and quite excellent during the first two chapters, really dragged its way to the finish. this was largely due to the fact that by then much of the enemy variety had been exhausted, the difficulty lessened somewhat, and some of the showiest environments were packed into the beginning (e.g. the village, swamp, and besieged shack). there were also some areas in the castle section that distinctly reminded me of castlevania 64, which i had played earlier this year, including one place where the music was eerily very similar.

one thing worth noting is the excellent voice acting. kudos to paul mercier as the hero leon, and carolyn lawrence as his whiny sidekick ashley. and how’s this for a bit of trivia: carolyn lawrence is also the voice of the squirrel “sandy cheeks” on nickelodeon’s spongebob squarepants. awesome.

anyway, i won’t be replaying this anytime soon, although people have been raving about the wii-make which might be worth a playthrough. it’s interesting to note that on the IGN resident evil messageboard it seems that many fans prefer resident evil 2 or the remake of the original resident evil, both of which i’m interested in checking out. eventually!

one li’l link:
- good guide at IGN