taking a shot at early 2-D shooter xevious

i had heard about namco’s classic early shooter xevious but didn’t have much interest in it until a 3-D version of it was ported over to the 3DS. in preparation for tackling that version i spent some time getting acquainted with the version of the original that appears on namco museum megamix for wii.

the game has a unique feel due to the distinction between enemies in the ground vs. the air, and hardcore gaming 101 notes that “it was the first vertical scrolling shooter to have backgrounds graphics that weren’t a simple starfield”. they also point another of its unique features, which is that:

Xevious is programmed to react to the player’s behavior. If you’re too proficient at killing a certain kind of enemy, the AI will send other kinds. Similarly, when your score increases, the waves of enemies intensify. Bombing a nearby Zolbak will reduce the enemy forces’ aggressiveness for a while, making this otherwise harmless object a priority target for survival.

they also note that “Another fine example of Xevious’ well implemented difficulty setting is its sophisticated checkpoint system: if you get through more than 70% of an area and die, you’ll start your new life from the next one, thus reducing frustration,” and that “The massive enemy flying fortress Andor Genesis is considered one of the first bosses ever in the history of videogames.”

putting historical appreciation aside, from a modern perspective i found the game to have some major drawbacks. the single boss character is difficult to get past, and there’s one set of enemies in particular (called zakato apparently) that explode almost on sight and i found almost impossible to avoid. the version on namco museum megamix provides a stage select which was welcome, but otherwise the game feels like it was designed to munch quarters. i don’t see the point in the randomly hidden bonuses, and the controls felt a bit sluggish, although that could’ve been in part due to the version i played. i did enjoy the interplay between the air vs. the ground enemies and the enemies’ unique behaviors in general. the seamless transition between stages is noteworthy, but when combined with the “skip a stage if you die more than 70% through it” it did make tracking my progress a bit difficult.

all in all not my favorite arcade game, certainly, but enjoyable enough and a historically interesting early 2-D shooter.

take a shot at these xevious links:
- hardcore gaming 101 provides an overview of other entries in the series
- entry at strategywiki.org with images of all the enemies and the game’s elaborate backstory (not sure where the story comes from, though, since this was an arcade game)
- guide to all the hidden SOL towers
- racketboy’s recent “Games That Defined the Shmups Genre” article highlights xevious as an influential early classic
- entry at wikipedia
- a “let’s play” video series at 8bitcity.blogspot.com

checking out the soul of soul calibur

the original soul calibur on dreamcast is yet another one of the all-time greats that has been on my list of games to play, and it was actually one of my main motivations for buying a dreamcast. i’m not a huge fan of fighters in general, and although i had played and enjoyed soul blade for the original playstation a couple of years ago that game didn’t make me a convert to the series. unfortunately, although there was a lot i admired about this entry, it hasn’t drawn me in the same way that the smash series, or even the street fighter series has.

somewhat surprisingly the game doesn’t feel that different from the original in its fundamentals. the graphics are definitely a leap ahead and hold up extremely well, and the pace is much faster. the animations are all silky smooth, and the new characters are great. the sound and backgrounds are also well done. the addition of the 8-way run makes the game feel more dynamic but didn’t really feel essential, and namco seems to have removed the rock-paper-scissors-like mechanics of the original which took the form of horizontal and vertical moves and sidesteps. but at its core the game failed to engage me for the same reasons as its predecessors: the movesets tend to be repetitive, the stories are given a barebones presentation and are only mildly entertaining at best (although that’s true of most fighters), and being able to chain a follow-up attack whenever a character gets downed seems pointless. the restrictions in the mission mode are entertaining for the most part, although the majority of the 5* difficulty missions feel completely pointless. this time around it also seemed to be too easy to spam one move over and over again. also, even though it’s fairly easy to perform a wide range of flashy moves, the number of moves seems pointlessly excessive. maybe at tournament levels of play they become essential, but even though i can see why most people would love them, for me they just feel like crowd-pleasing padding.

well, certainly not of my favorite games, but i enjoyed the game overall and i can see why others praise it so highly. soulcalibur II is also on my list, so i’ll give that a go, although i’m not sure that i’m going to bother with much more of the series after that. we’ll see. oh, and in case anyone was wondering, i spent most of my time with kilik, who is apparently good for newbie players, although i beat the game (on varying levels of difficulty) with all the characters.

[just a footnote, i tried to find out how to properly punctuate soul calibur, i.e. whether or not it should be soulcalibur without a space. i did a quick survey of links online and on namco's sites and in their instruction manuals, and it seems that the original soul calibur was generally punctuated with a space, and that the subsequent releases were punctuated without it (even though the name of the series refers to a sword in the games that does have a space in its name). so for now i'll go with that assumption unless someone can present a strong case for the other side.]

some soulful soul calibur links:
- soulcalibur.wikia.com
- entry at wikipedia
- good FAQ at gamefaqs.com
- entry at gamerankings.com
- pretty funny “characters that fit snugly into ivy’s bra” feature at gamesradar.com

pac-attack attacked

it feels like it’s been a little while since i’ve played a pac-man game. actually i’ve played a few off and on, but i haven’t sat down and “finished” one in a while. one game that i’ve come back to several times but finally sat down and spent a concentrated amount of time with was pac-attack, as it appears as part of pac-man collection for GBA (a SNES version was also released, and a version also appears as a bonus (in a remade version) in pac-man world 2 for gamecube and other platforms). this is the third game of that set of four that i’ve played, and of the four it’s the one that suffers least from being scaled down to the GBA’s tiny screen. unlike the other three games in the collection which are based on the classic maze-based pac-man gameplay, pac-attack is actually a tetris-esque puzzler and as a result doesn’t have to rely on a tiny zoomed-out perspective or a board divided across multiple screens.

i haven’t played much of the other versions, but on the GBA the game looks great and not painfully small. lest you think it’s a mediocre tetris clone, let me be quick to say that the game is actually one of the better tetris-based puzzlers, and for me ranks closely behind the classics panel de pon (aka tetris attack) and puyo puyo. despite it being similarly addictive, the game isn’t nearly as immediately gratifying, and the pace of it feels slower, in part due to the fact it doesn’t really have any combo system. instead, the game provides three-character blocks which consist of all blocks or all ghosts, some combination of ghosts and blocks, or a pac-man plus two blocks, and its main objective is to line up a trail of ghosts and then unleash your pac-man to gobble them up and cause the subsequent falling blocks to form rows. since a block containing a pac-man comes regularly (every fifth block), when forming long chains of ghosts part of the task is to discard the pac-men you don’t need while not screwing up the big score you’re creating. also, it seems a bit counterintuitive, but eating a long chain of ghosts doesn’t seem to net you a lot of points; rather, your focus has to be on the blocks falling into place into rows after you’ve cleared the ghosts. this obscured objective definitely makes the game harder to get into. also, the strategy for placing the blocks is itself more like games such as pipe dreams where blocks have functions as end pieces or middle pieces (in this case, of a string of ghosts), and again, having to think about these uses of the blocks while positioning them does make the core gameplay more of an effort than most others.

still, once you absorb the nuances of the gameplay the game is quite fun. but even though the gameplay is solid and satisfyingly challenging, even after playing for many enjoyable hours the game just doesn’t quite reach the level of the greats. like games like wario woods, pac-attack is fun but the mechanics are just a bit too fussy. nevertheless, i enjoyed my time spent with it and feel my skillz definitely have room to grow. i achieved a high score just shy of 500,000 so i’ll definitely be picking it up again at some point to at least break that barrier.

attack of the pac-attack links!
- entry at wikipedia
- review of VC SNES version at nintendolife.com
- the game’s apparently actually based on a game called cosmo gang the puzzle. the game baku baku by sega that followed pac-attack by a few years features somewhat similar gameplay.

checking out soul blade‘s caliber

completist that i am, instead of starting in on soul calibur i went back to the very first release of the series, called soul blade for the original playstation. the game was highly praised when it came out, although the series’ first success has since been eclipsed by its hugely popular sequels.

i’ve dipped into some of the soulcalibur games a bit, but for the most part i came into this game without too many preconceptions. i hadn’t played any of the tekken (also by namco) games either, and apparently the two series are similar. both series were part of the time period when fighters ramped up the difficulties of the street fighter games and also when it became customary to include practice modes and command lists in games. i’ve grown to rather enjoy fighters, and so i didn’t have any problems getting into this one. one thing i found annoying is that you have to use separate blocks for low attacks vs high/mid attacks. also, another thing that was somewhat annoying is that this was the first fighter where i felt that the button combinations require you to either hold the controller in an unnatural way or get an arcade-type controller. i’m sure many people find it absolutely normal to use an arcade-type controller for a console fighting game, but i’m not into them enough to actually go out and get one anytime soon.

anyway, i played through the normal level with all the characters and for the most part found the experience to be enjoyable. the graphics are quite good for the time and have actually aged fairly well, and the character design is also notable. i found that in general the actual movesets ended up not feeling like they had that much variety, although there are some definite exceptions, including voldo and cervantes. i was also surprised there were so many korean characters, which i think is the first for a video game that i’ve played.

the game has a weapon gauge where your weapon can break, leaving you to fight with your bare fists, but that mechanic is underused. and i don’t really see the point in the extra weapons you can accrue which for the most part have only minor differences in stats (strength, durability, etc.). the story mode’s challenges added some nice variety, even though the stories themselves weren’t particularly memorable. the only other main complaint i had about the game is that the game puts too much emphasis on knocking down your opponent and then following through with an attack. not being able to immediately recover when you’re knocked down and knowing your opponent is always going to get another hit in just feels like some sort of pointless combo and it slows the game down and makes the pacing of the matches feel jerky. after i played through this game for awhile i tried out soul calibur again and that game has eliminated this long delay after a character gets knocked down, and as a result feels much more responsive and natural. i’ll definitely be exploring that game more in the future, although i enjoyed this one enough to come back to it as well. oh, and if anyone wants to know, i focused on mitsurugi this time around, although i just chose him randomly. he’s pretty cool, but i’m probably not going to continue with him in soul calibur even though it would be interesting to compare the movesets.

soul blade links for the fighting soul:
- good FAQ on unlockables, endings, etc. at gamefaqs.com
- here’s a very thorough movelist including the type of each attack (high, middle, low) and the amount of damage
- review at videogamecritic.net
- entry at wikipedia

pac-man madness

it always amazes me how little time reviewers spend with some games; case in point: pac-man collection for the GBA. even though the release is a collection of previously released games, it seems to me that there’s still a fair amount one could say about the particular versions of the games presented. maybe it’s just me, though (definitely not an unlikely possibility, seeing as how i just recently mulled over the differences in gameplay resulting from the difference in well size (6×9 vs 6×12, respectively) in the GB and SNES versions of the same game, tetris attack.)

i’d played through and enjoyed the version of pac-man arrangement that appeared in the collection, and even at that time i’d had my doubts about another game in the collection, the 3D novelty pac-mania. nevertheless, i decided to give it a closer look, and although none of the reviews i’ve read about the GBA version say much beyond that it’s a 3D version of pac-man in which the man has the ability to jump, it soon became pretty clear to me that this game’s port to the GBA makes the game extremely frustrating.

first off, gamespot’s reviewer’s comment that “… the GBA’s screen is zoomed in a little more closely than that of the arcade version” is a complete understatement. like the GBA-ized pac-man arrangement, pac-mania pretty much cuts the size of the original screen in half. this made the former harder but certainly not unplayable, as you still had a pretty good sense of where the four ghosts were at all times and it was fairly easy to find any stray dots you had left behind. but since the original pac-mania was already set to a zoomed-in view so that you could only see about 1/4 or 1/5 of the board at a time, halving that means that in the GBA version you’re only seeing about 1/8 of the board at a time. this is a huge disadvantage, and you’ll find that you’re constantly running headfirst into ghosts.

the original game ameliorated the fact that you have a limited view of the board by making the ghosts’ movements more predictable and by laying out routes that the ghosts tend to follow. this certainly would have helped balance the original game, but it definitely wasn’t enough to compensate for the drastically smaller view in the GBA game. and besides, with the smaller view it’s much harder to even recognize the patterns in the first place. given more time i may have more fully mastered the details of the ghosts’ patterns, but by that time i was already frustrated by the other feature inherent in both versions of the game: the number of ghosts. in both versions of pac-mania the boards take longer to navigate than most other pac-man games (e.g. the original pac-man and ms. pac-man) just by the nature of it being in 3D, so to make things more challenging the game adds more ghosts than the usual four. the number of ghosts varies but it quickly ramps up to 6 or 7 and reaches its maximum of 9 at the 23rd (and final) stage. i can imagine that avoiding all those ghosts would have been barely manageable in the original version, but in the GBA version the number of ghosts makes things completely impossible: in these later stages there are ghosts everywhere running around at full tilt, and because you have no idea where they are poor pac-man is constantly getting tackled, sandwiched, and headbutted.

unfortunately those weren’t my only complaints. the game includes two types of ghosts that jump, one green and one dark blue, but oftentimes in the midst of the frenzied gameplay the dark blue one looks too similar to the regular blue one and the purple one. this may also be more manageable with a bigger (and better-lit) screen than the GBA’s. another drawback is that there are only 4 boards, and one of those is the regular classic pac-man board. also there are two powerups, one that works as a short power pellet (but with added points) and one that gives a speed boost, but they show up relatively rarely and it’s too hard to get back to the center of the board to collect them, so the majority of the time it’s just not worth the effort. on the plus side, though, the game offers unlimited continues, and as with the other games in the collection it lets you change some settings, one of the more useful being that you can choose to end the game after 11 rounds instead of 23.

all in all not a great gaming experience, unfortunately. i don’t doubt that playing a full-screen version will definitely be a big improvement (there’s also an NES version that i’ll have to check out at some point), but even then i don’t see this as becoming a great favorite. the game was a nice change of pace, though, for the series, and i’m still as big a pac-man fan as ever. i’m betting that my next pac-man game will be a much more enjoyable experience.

wakka wakka wakka: manic pac-mania links:
- great FAQ at gamefaqs
- entry at wikipedia
- japanese site with pictures of sprites, comparison of the english vs japanese versions, and a link to this site, which has maps
- linked to this before, but still worth noting: the best pac-man clones and spinoffs, at racketboy.com
- a random sketch on youtube: “Lily Tomlin and Her Struggles with Pac Man Addiction”

galaga’ed

i’ve been playing the original NES version of the 80′s arcade classic galaga for a while now. there doesn’t seem to be much info specifically on the NES port, but there are some interesting differences. one trivial difference is that the game was subtitled “demons of death” on the cartridge for no apparent reason other than to titillate would-be purchasers i suppose. aficionados will also notice that the graphics take a minor hit compared to the arcade version, and there’s also a notable difference in gameplay in that your ship is only allowed two bullets onscreen at any one time. this change, no doubt due to limitations of the hardware, makes the game a bit harder and will cause those used to the arcade version to have to adjust their strategy, but to compensate there’s an additional feature where if you press the A button you’ll automatically fire two bullets in quick succession. this really saves your thumb, and i found myself switching back and forth between the two-bullet fire and the regular one-bullet fire, depending on the situation. one other minor change is that the stage and # of ships remaining info has been moved from the bottom of the screen to the right side. this also takes a bit of adjusting since it’s harder to see exactly where the right edge of the playing field is, but i found i got used to it after a while. all in all even for die-hard fans of the original version this is still a very good port of the classic game we all know and love.

as for galaga in general, call me a retro gamer but to me this game truly stands as a monument to practically perfect classic gaming. the controls, graphics, and music/sound are all great; the pacing at which the difficulty increases is spot on; and the gameplay is simple but beautifully clean and elegant. there’s also a constant variety within these parameters that keeps you coming back for more. the most obvious are the challenge stages interspersed throughout, of which there are eight total, and most of which take some mastering to achieve perfect scores (i.e. 40 out of 40 enemies defeated). but there are also other variations as well. there are several different enemy entrance patterns, and if you do well (i.e. defeat a lot of the enemies as they enter) the main part of the stage in which you face off against the enemies you didn’t defeat is significantly easier. then there’s the main part of the stage in which you dodge the swooping enemies and their bullets, with the added event where one enemy morphs into three special enemies that give a sizable bonus if you defeat all three. the most eye-catching feature is the ability to win back a captured ship to double your firepower, although i ended up not using it that often and i doubt most hard-core galaga players do.

galaga seems to be one of those games that everyone’s played but it seems it hasn’t been given enough love lately. if anyone’s hesitating about getting the NES port on the virtual console i can recommend it wholeheartedly, and i hope it renews your love for this classic as much as it did for me. my goal this time around was just to break 200,000 (which seems to be fairly modest, since i’ve seen scores well over a million and as high as 3 million, according to sources such as nintendo power v. 13). my next goal is to make it to level 31, which is the last challenging stage before they start repeating. isn’t it nice to have goals in life?

galaga links attacking from outer space!
- great fan site that details strategies for all the challenge stages, complete with animated GIF’s
- some misc trivia at gamefaqs
- review of VC release at IGN
- list of galaga xbox360 achievements
- entry at wikipedia

pac-man artfully arranged

i’ve had pac-man collection on the GBA for quite some time now, and it’s an enjoyable, albeit somewhat flawed, lot. i’ve been a fan of the ol’ yellow hockey puck ever since the chuck e. cheese ms. pac-man days, and i had the original NES version of pac-man as well (w/ patterns, it should be noted, that are quite diff. from the arcade version). anyway, you can read about the games included in craig harris’s good review at ign.com. after playing through all four for a while, i focused on the first, the 1996 re-make pac-man arrangement, featuring 22 different boards, plus a “boss” stage. the game itself is a great sequel, as it features power-up pills, jump (i.e. teleport) and dash abilities, and “super ghosts” w/ various powers to annoy you. all the additions work extremely well in expanding the gameplay w/out straying too far from the original experience. as w/ other games w/ unlimited continues it’s not too hard to beat the game, but it’s rather more challenging to get to the final stage on one continue. figuring out patterns will def. help, but your regular pac-man strategy is what you’ll find yourself relying on.

the GBA version is limited by having to split the screen and scroll up and down to move from the top to the bottom, and no doubt the adjustment makes the game harder. but all in all it’s not too much of a problem to keep track of where the ghosts generally are at all times. i found it hard to play on the small GBA screen, and the DS directional pad was way too stiff for me, but using the gamecube game boy adapter and the d-pad on the gamecube controller proved to be the best combination for me. at some point i’ll pick up the namco collection that includes it, but w/ the exception of not having the split screen i doubt it’ll offer much of a new experience.

i’m looking forward to delving into the other 3 games in this set to a greater depth, though. i found the split-screen version of the orig. pac-man included hard to play, and the full-screen version is impossible on the tiny GBA screen and awkward using the cube adapter. as you’d expect the full-screen mode is very strangely calibrated and doesn’t feel very natural to play, although i suppose you could get adjusted to it. “pac-attack”, the tetris pac-man game, was quite fun, and i have def. plans to play through the puzzle mode (although you should note that in puzzle mode to make the order of the pieces the same for each board you have to manually change the setting. in the instructions it says to do this: “… highlight Puzzle, hold right on the Control Pad, and press the A Button”). still not sure how the 3-d “pac-mania” is going to fare, but i’ll try to keep an open mind.

and a thought to leave you with today, as namco says at the end of pac-man arr: “the game is never really over. someone … somewhere … is being chased by monsters!”

some pac-links:
- pac-man arrangement on wikipedia
- racketboy.com: rundown of the best pac-man clones and spinoffs
- codes for pac attack