Woot Subterranean Animism

Got the game running on someone elses computer and it looks pretty good. Takes a lot less to get up to full power… at least with mode 1 Reimu. The multiple modes is also a nice thing in a way. Would help me out more if I could read a little more of the menu. >.<; Can’t get past the second stage boss on Normal mode though so I don’t play too much, since I outright refuse to play Easy. I did like, part of what the Stage 2 boss does, I think… She fires those little pointy danmaku and you HAVE to graze. There’s no ifs, ands, buts, or going around you’ve got to try to squeak between two of them. Which is nice because typically there’s three ways around things, at least on normal mode. >.> But I can’t get past stage 2 boss’s… I don’t remember her name, first spell card -.-; The one where she fires those greenish blobs that follow you around the screen, -.-; I’m too used to not touching a freaking thing but no, sitting still is bad for your health against that move. Plus you have to keep an eye on where whatserface is or you time out -.-;

Not so sure how I feel about the new extra lives thing. When you knock out the health bar on a mini boss or a boss this little pink star pops up and if you grab it it gives you a piece of a star which are equal to lives… I kind of preferred the whole you’ve got three lives to work with and an extra one if you manage not to die too often thing. Not that it matters to me since I can’t beat level freaking two -.-;

Cirno once a day keeps the… on second thought let’s leave the rest of that unsaid.

I can’t help it I’m Canadian, I have a built in affinity for cold things. So my apparently random onset of Cirno fanboyism should have been expected. Of course if you take into account that prior to this my favourite character was Youmu <.< Maybe it is a little strange. :p Anyway, have some Cirno because I still haven’t watched any anime to blab about.

Tales of Symphnia Knight of Ratatosk

Well I picked this up two or three days ago and went to play it where I stayed ont he weekend only to find to my utter dismay that the person who packed my Wii up forgot to put the wiimote in. -.-; So I finally logged a couple hours today and well… I have a mixed opinion.

I looked forward to this game from the moment I hear dit was coming out and then lo and behold there it was on the shelf at Best Buy… where I was only supposed to be getting FFT-Lion War… Couldn’t help myself and bought it. >.<;

It’s nice to have another game in… what am I supposed to call the merged world? Tethalant? Silva’all? Sithelant? I don’t know, anyway, there’s some nice ideas with the people from the two worlds not getting along with eachother. I will say the english voice acting is atrocious as ever… Though Lloyd’s new (I think) va is even more annoying than his old one. Though Marta’s I like, but I like Marta all around. Lime… I mean Emil… annoys the hell out of me. He even one ups other apologitic characters who apologize for apologizing. He apologizes, get’s told he does so too much, starts to apologize, stops himself… then apologizes for almost apologizing after being told he apologizing too much. Yeah… and he’s just… annoying… Which is in total contrast to his crazy battle self.

Some other things annoy me. As one would expect it’s all crappy voice acting, recycled voice actors and things of that ilk.

On a plus note, there’s a wonderful new battle feature! Hold down Z and you can run, anywhere you want! So nice to be able to actually run the hell away when you want to.

The whole ‘monster raising’ aspect of the gaem I’m not sure if I like or not. I’ve only ‘caught’ the two you’re forced to ‘catch’. You can’t name them the game does that randomly for you. Lime… I mean Emile’s character design annoys me. Androgynous guy + a tight fitting shoulderless outfit = Oh crap that’s a guy?!

Marta on the other hand. Manages to somehow do twintails without actually tying her hair up. The flowers in her hair I don’t really care either way about… but the DFC is defenitely a good thing. ;p Characters attitude too, she bounces between archetpyes all over the place. The knife thing confuses me as it looks clearly to be something you should be throwing… but she wears it like a bladey glove…

But Lloyd is evil apparently… now anyway. I wonder how that happened. :s They work the main premise of their storyline well I think. ‘Ratataosk’ Was the king of the monsters (Gojira?!) prior to when the world was split in two. When that happened he apparently went into a jewel like dormant “egg” state. Now that the worlds been fixed his sleeping is screwing things up.

Of course somehow his ‘egg’ attached itself to Marta’s forehead. (Knowing how eggs work I can’t help but ponder how one would fertilize the egg in that location. ) He had these little underlings called Centurions and they too usually sleep in crazy little jewels aka cores aka eggs… they’ve been called both. There’s more confusingness that goes on but it’s not important. Well some of it is but >.> I can’t blab about everything.

Controls are pretty good. Two or three different ways to run around, using the wiimote and holding B, or usign the nunchuks joystick. You NEED a nunchuk to battle properly, unless maybe if you use semi -auto or auto mode.

Amongst other things.

New skill system… kind of cool. As you level you learn skillz… then you use SP points to turn them on or off.

rage, rage against the dying of the light

Please share a moment of silence with me whilst I mourn the fact that while my computer WILL in fact play Subterranean Animism… it’s at 2fps… which makes it by far not worth it. T^T

Get it here if you haven’t already.

Retro letdown/ Ratings rant

You know what, going back and playing one of those games you thought would be awesome but never got to play… yeah bad idea. You wind up like me after just playing Bushido Blade 2. -.-;

The game, if you never heard of it, was (obviously) second in a line of 3D fighters by Squaresoft. Yeah, pre squenix (That’s a rant for another day) it was for the psx and well I remember thinking dude this game would be so awesome. But I didn’t own a psx at the time and when I got around to buying one it was only about a year or so before the ps2 came out. I did get some of the need to have games mind you. FF7, FF Tactics Capcom vs SNK pro …and that pretty much sums it up. :p

Anyway the premise of Bushido Blade games is to be as realistic as possible. Whichmeans if you put a sword through a guys face he dies; Fight over. Now the second one did away with leg damage apparently. I’ve heard that in the first if you took a slash or two to the legs you hobbled around and fought from a crouched position. Anyway through the course of Story mode you fight numerous random ninja’s from a Rival School. Allow me to pause for a giggle fit at that joke. … … okay. You eventually get to what I thought was the most annoying part on my first play through. I suppose you need to keep in mind how I do things. I don’t read manuals, so even if I had one I wouldn’t have looked at it. I get in game and push buttons and we go from there. I may later flip through the manual but it’s not the first thing I do. Partially because my way is more fun and the rest because I think manuals stink, in a literal sense. Whatever they print that stuff with man…

Anyway (again) You fight a chick with a machien gun. You have a sword of some form, possibly a yari or a naginata (those two are dependant on what school your selected character is allied to) She shot me, and shot me and shot me and eventually I had to resort to training mode and moving and pushing buttons until I found out holding R1 makes you run. After hacking and slashing my way back to her, much faster I might add. Well she was no threat… You do more random running and stabbing and slashing and general causing of bodily harm resulting in mortal injuries before coming to a guy I can only presume is the final boss. (I have no idea what time frame this is supposed to take place in as you’ve got people with swords running around killing eachother and still machine gun girl and some disco dude…)

And this is where I got mad. You hit him and… he disappears and appears somewhere else. And you can do that over and over and over and he doesn’t even take damage. In order to hurt him you have to hit him and then after he teleports to some random location you have to hit him again before he recovers or he just teleports again. Not too bad as far as final bosses go except he can still kill you with one hit. You have no block button and about the only way to defend yourself is to kill the other dude first or rig it up so your weapons collide… or run like a rabbit.

My major malfunction? What the hell is the point in a game touting realistic swordplay isf you have people in the storyline who don’t follow the rules of realistic swordtofaceology? I can comprehend the desire to make the final boss a toughie. I don’t think that should mean violating the base concept of your game though.

That said I’d love a Bushido Blade 3 for the ps2 or 3. As long as they give it a rating above teen. I want a bloody messy de-limbifying game out of this.  Like Soul Calibur meets Blade of Darkness. If the guys arm comes off you can pick it up in your off hand and club him with it.

This will be more first use of the ‘more’ button… Teh rest of my complaining which will be a totally different topic will be below.

Arcana Heart

I thought about whining about Mana Khemias two whole flaws, that I’ve run into anyway… but I’m kind of busy doing that somewhere else and so I figured I’d blurb about my other latest aquisition… Arcana Heart.

Now, any of you people who’re gamers probably recall a little thing from a while ago known as Rumble Roses… okay maybe I should stipulate just a little more, any of you who are gamers, and male… though that is the majority… vast majority… sadly… It was a wrestling spinoff game with an all female cast. Complete with ‘humiliation’ moves and mud wrestling… although on the ps2 version the mud looked like a completely different semi-liquid that only scat fetishists would get turned on by… That and it was completely devoid of loli… -.- However it was nice for those of us who wanted wrestling and not look at huge mostly naked steroid engorged men who would prance around the ring flexing and cussing for twenty minutes before each match.

That’s why Japan, in all it’s sometimes strange wisdom, invented Arcana Heart. Take Street Fighter and add a dash of Guilty GEar and then the very base idea from the aforementioned Rumble Roses… All female fighting game. But no, that’s not all, let’s take all the characters with their own skill sets and then mix in another set of ‘characters’ to choose from… so that each character has a total of eleven different freaking things to pick from… Which as their promotions keep throwing at us, (as if we can’t do simple multiplication, or in my case some complicated addition) adds up to 121 different setups you could use altogether.

The great thing, in my opinion is it jump starts the 2d fighter market, I hope anyway. Sure there’s the ever present Street Fighter, sure they dabbled in the 3d fighter buisness and they haven’t put out a new game in… a long time… (I don’t count things like Capcom vs SNK) but heck they’re what you think of when you hear the words arcade and fighter… well either that or King of Fighters … Anyway, a while back ‘they’ made Guilty Gear and it was awesome… and it had… what four or five installments and if I recall correctly it hasn’t done anything as of late. But one thing it did new, aside from more cartoonish art style, which was awesome as Capcom’s sprites haven’t changed in the last… forever… (Though I will stop and say that SNK’s sprites are frikking awesome) Where was I? Oh right Guilty Gear added music, not just background music though. Good Background music, music good enough that I think I have some of the songs kicking around somewhere on a disc. Guitar heavy and just… well awesome.

So anyway Arcana Heart… kind of like Guilty Gear and Street Fighter and KOF all rolled into one and as mentioned, all female. But it doesn’t really end there, because all the characters are anime archetpyes… more or less anyway. There’s a twelve year old in a school swimsuit with one of those little red backpacks… there’s a different girl in a school uniform witha sword, dog girl ninja (named Konoha). There’s a glasses girl witch complete with stupid pointy hat and absurdly large SENTIENT staff… robot chick… absurdly happy girl… maid with a BIG sword uhm… goth loli… I mean you’ve seen all these before just neevr all in the same place trying to kick, stab, maim eachother.

Heck I’ve not even played story mode yet so I don’t even really know WHY they’re all trying to kill each other. Yes, I’m not even sure what the game is about yet. >.< I saw a promo video over on gamefaqs.com and saw Kira Daidohji being all cute and eleven years old and in you know… mizugi >.> *cough* So I bought the game… and my research whilst awaiting shipment threw sword girl, maid girl and Aino Heart at me…

The game has a steep learning curve. But no in the usual upward direction of fighting games, where there’s your easy stuff and your absurdly hard combos. Anyone who has even played Street Fighter has the general idea of what to do in Arcana Heart down. But as I’ve experienced, Street Fighter was a whole lot more forgiving than Arcana Heart. It’s kind of particular about how you do your joyctick/dpad movements and your button input… which means when someone like me tries to play Maki (I think that’s sword girls name anyway) and we try to super move we may be doing different motions but we wind up doing the same move over and over and over because doesn’t like the way we did our dragon punch and so defaults it to a fireball motion. -.- Anyway it starts simple and then it spikes upwards while you learn what to do with whatever Arcana you’re trying to use and then skyrockets some more whilst you try to comprehend ‘homing attacks’ and ‘homing cancels’ and then clashing which you’re sort of used to anyway if you’ve played Street Fighter 3 Third Strike, or Soul Calibur… (just without impact guard) That’s where all the learning happens which is why I call it a downward sort of slope.once you figure that out it’s all downhill since you know all this stuff already. If you’re totally new to fighting games… grab a few quarters and head to an arcade and look for a street fighter or a capcom vs snk or a marvel versus capcom or a marvel versus streetfighter or a… you get the idea. ;p

Now I’ll break things down into a pros and cons list and wrap this up so I can go watch MacGuyver (which is 305 of why I have no anime updates atm.)

Pros:

Great Character Design

Great Artwork on both sprites and backgrounds

Big arenas, in a vertical way more than horizontal

Arcana can make even a character you know how to beat a pain in the neck (yes I count that as a pro)

Cons:

First off, no custom palettes. After several years of capcom vs snk pro I kind of require a palette editor so I can colour anyone I don’t like absurd colours. BUt in the games defense there’s eight colour sets for each character.

Secondly: THere was supposedly more audio for the game, in the way of between battle taunts. THese have been cut down to text in the english release. But I’ve never played the arcade version so I can’t really vouch on any claims about it. But on the chance it did once exist and was removed… WE ARE HIGHLY UNAMUSED! Any sequels should have that stuff left alone. The vast majority of us actually want that in there, sure a very large chunk of the portion that wants it doesn’t actually understand it… but you don’t go choppign out taunts and move names just because it’s not in english do you?

Mehs:

Dash is completely and totally whacked out. There’s still double taps but it’s not for running it’s just for hopping in and out of the way of things ‘running’ is done with a dash button.

So now, before I leave I’ll cross my fingers and hope there’s an Arcana Heart 2 and that it gets released here… and that they don’t cut out the between battle character audio.

Upcoming?: I just tracked down a couple older titles, Magical Shopping Complex Abenobanshi and Shrine of the Morning Mist… they might be what I blab about next… they might not be. No promises.

Bootfighters!

This has nothing to do with shoes, or boots, or footwear for that matter.

It’s all about mecha, and well fighting. Kind of like Custom Robo from the Game Cube but with more Virtual On looking mechs, although 98 does look very very Gundam. Looks kind of like a Leo imho. Anyway Each mech is named after some form of OS there’s 98, a couple XP’s, a few Linux versions and a couple I’m not sure what exactly are. No, there’s no mac, sorry, no I’m not actually. The games got a couple of default pilots, three because the guy who translated added one of him. (In name only, the pictures some b&w lineart from One Piece. Yeah he added his own custom pilot, and you can to it’s really easy after a quick look through pilotdata.txt and you can add pretty much anyone you want and even add your own sounds. Which s pretty wicked. I haven’t added any with sound yet but I have added a few. Saber, Lt. Columbo, Vita and Keiichi being among a few. I’ll mention Lolivader too, who is like her name sounds, Darth Vader… lolified. Yes, my oddness knows no bounds. Anyway games pretty simple and I suggest looking through the manual pdf since it tells you what buttons do what, unless you’re like me I just fired it up and pushed staple doujin game buttons. (z,x,c so on and so forth) and well figured out everything on my own for the most part. Manual told me how to do an instant attack from guard stance though… so it’s not useless. So first thanks a whole bunch to mirrormoon.org for doing the translation on this. Now, a link to the game. Bootfighters.

Have at ‘em.

Soul Calibur IV

Offending Material

Now I’m a fan of Soul Calibur. Have been for a while. I played Soul Edge in the arcade a few times, Soul Calibur itself on the dreamcast. I bought SC2  for the Gamecube, and I own SC III, which is only for the PS2. I know characters have been pulled in from other games and such before. But they always did it smart. Yoshimitsu gets toned down to a one armed samurai when we all know he’s a cyborg pirate ninja with a laser sword. At least up until Tekken 4 when he has that freaky bug costume. They’ve brought in Heihachi also from Tekken, he’s a fist fighter as pretty much everyone in Tekken is, so again no problem. Spawn, Link none of them break the games setting of a world somewhere between the middle ages and the renaissance. So what’s my problem? Easy, Soul Calibur IV plans to bring in Darth freaking Vader and Yoda… yes, star Wars characters. It’s stupid it’s ludicrous and it completely sends the games world to the crapper. The jedi powers are fine it’s the fact that Vader is still his cyborg self and both of them tote lightsabers. Now we’ve seen the movies we know you can bloodlessly remove someone hand with these. Carve through spaceships and anything in between. Yet Mitsurugi and Vader clash ’swords’ during the trailer and what’s this Mitsurugi’s sword isn’t cut in two along with the rest of them like we all know he should be. So they just toned down the weapons. Great, way to screw up Star wars now too. The only other time SC has done this is with 3’s create a soul mode where you could make a character that looked like KOS-MOS but at least she didn’t whip out her gatling guns or those laser blades she has. No, you had to equip her with a practical (mostly) melee weapon. Because that’s what is available to everyone else. Adding these two like they did kills that and any of the credibility the story had. I mean aside from the demons, zombies and sentient shape shifting mind controlling swords among a few other things. They had a setting they’d been adhering to for the last what seven years, eight counting this one. There does look to be a new character using a spear style, she has a very ornate armour that some people find nice but well I don’t care much for it either way. Astaroth I find looks spikier than usual but as I mentioned in a post somewhere else at least he doesn’t look like a hardware store exploded all over him. Siegfried, my personal favourite character through every game aside from 2 which made me play him as a re-skinned Nightmare is also on my do not like list. They just made his armour look, blah, very blah. All they really did was extend the shoulder armour and make it a bit spikier and ornate but I really dislike how it looks. Siegfried always had functional armour, which is probably why I liked him. Soul Calibur 4 was one of the titles I was looking forward to seeing released. If I bought a system it would probably be one that included this game. Now I’m not so sure, if I do get it you can bet your marbles I’ll have demo’d it first. But right now I’m just upset that the setting in one of my favourite games just got raped by people from the future.

Ether Vapor

Of the many things to come out of C73 was Ether Vapor. I only just began playing it earlier this morning and found it to be a great game all things considered. The first point being that in size it’s only around 140mb… now, keep that in mind while I show you a few screen shots.

… yeah that’s what I said. The game is very nice graphics wise being done totally in 3-D and yes, you may have also noticed the view rotates. On occasion you’ll be looking at the top of your plane while flying side ways through enemies while shooting at a larger mini boss… One thing these pictures don’t show is the third mode of fire, which consists of the generic style bullets and your ‘options’ locking onto things and shooting blueish lasers at them. It’s how you deal with things that aren’t right in front of you… Or when the boss hugs the left side of the screen, like I tend to, that or the bottom. Technically there’s a ‘fourth’ mode that is actually a bonus stage and I’m not at all sure if it repeats at all but you lose control of the plane and start going fps style with a target circle on some missiles, pressing fire shoots the same blue lasers as your third firing option. The first image actually shows the second firing type which is nice for when enemies are spread out, holding it down until the small gauge on the left side of the screen fills turns it into a sort of AoE attack that I don’t particularly care for. The first shot style is more focused and when charged shoots a huge laser beam directly ahead of you which does somewhere in the range of 500 damage… No enemies around, good time to charge that up. Some larger enemies will also go into an overkill state when destroyed which basically means you shoot at them more until they explode getting more points and if I was seeing correctly dealing explosion damage to other nearby enemies… Nice to a point but they also act as shield for those guys. The game’s pretty fast paced, and the AI is pretty predictable, at least when it comes to bosses. Which is good since you can take a whopping three hits before you explode, assuming you don’t earn an extra bar of shields. I still haven’t made it past stage four though… and there’s seven altogether unless there’s extra stages after that. It’s a bit of a pace change since I’ve been mostly playing Touhou games recently. In the style of most ‘danmaku’ shooting games you are allowed to graze a bit but as far as I can tell nowhere near as much as a Touhou game and you get absolutely nothing for it. I may be wrong though as if I was doing this I was busy trying not to die instead of watching my score. Now… if you think this game looks up your alley and you’re not currently in Area Eleven? I’m sure if you look around you’ll be able to find it.