Mega Derived

The more you put into Dead Rising, the more you get out. That’s just the way it was made. Multiple play-throughs are its bread and butter; your initial run-through is just practice. As of writing, I am on 43 (out of 50) achievements. I’m on my fourth trip through the game, now, and each one has proved nothing less than fascinating. What is interesting, for such a popular game, is how very few people have actually indulged themselves in the sheer volume of content that Dead Rising has to offer. If the average achievement score for Dead Rising is indeed 275/1000, then it’s pretty likely that most people don’t even go back for a second run.

For the record, I think Dead Rising is an absolutely perfect example of the Achievement system, with the game and its fifty achievements effortlessly woven together creating an entertaining and enjoyable whole. It’s the achievements, not your position in the games storyline, that determines your completion of the title. How many other games can claim that? Only Viva Pinata (which shares an identical achievement system), I think.

Part of me thinks that people choose to deny Dead Rising a second playthrough because of the intrinsic belief imbued in many gamers that more is infinitely better. Why devote another six hours, even if it would be a great six hours, to a game when you could be six hours into a different game?

Another argument is in the games ludicrous difficulty. It’s not a simple game unless you know what you’re doing, and you’ll only know what you’re doing if you invest a shed load of time or look up a FAQ. I’ve taken to using a bit of paper to co-ordinate my excursions through the game; a testament to the levels of foresight and planning that is required to enjoy what most of the game has to offer. My attempt at one achievement was destroyed when I overlooked one aspect of the game, reaching the mid-way point and not having enough survivors. Three hours wasted.

However, I find this game of game hugely rewarding. My satisfaction upon unlocking another achievement is immense and fulfilling and I would encourage anyone who has a penchant for slightly rustic, quirky games to check it out. Or, give it a second go if you’ve only completed it once. It’s worth it. Trust me.

Viva Pinata is a ghastly game. Sometimes it’s almost horrific to think of the terrible ordeals that Rare demands the player undertake. And, what’s worse, to think that this kind of unscrupulous bile is going to be forced into the hands of children. Maybe instead of making more games, Microsoft and Rare will just duct tape children to chairs, force their eyelids open with matchsticks and play a videotape denouncing the existence of Jesus, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy spliced between shots of hardcore pornography until there’s nothing innocent left in their young souls. Then, I don’t know, juice them up on heroin and pimp them out or something. It would be less twisted.

“Filled with Fun!” booms the opening movie about a hundred times; the first lie of many that Rare’s latest title will present. Oh, sure, it looks like it’s filled with fun, it looks like you’ve just been tasked with the job of maintaining a magical chocolate garden in a basic simulation game for the 360. Inside the little garden you’ll make paths and plant trees and crops and all kinds of generic genre stuff. The real focus of the game revolves around baiting little piñatas into your domain and subsequently encouraging them to breed. Such is the natural way of the world. As soon as you’re handed control of the garden, you’re made to name two worms that have just moved in. I named mine Terrence and Philip. Viva Pinata then demands that your two worms mate. Terrifying, maybe, but this issue is quickly cleared up; the Pinatas are genderless, silly! There’s nothing weird about forcing two male-named animals to go into their pen and perform a ‘romance dance’. There’s also nothing weird about then making the offspring of this liaison perform its own romance dance with one of its parents. Okay, maybe it is a little weird. By weird I mean ghastly. But it’s explained. So, all is well and good in the magic garden – status quo resumes - until the game starts forcing you to feed the piñatas some kind of “romance” candy which encourages them to mate again. That’s not natural at all! It’s the first trial of many the game will throw at you. The ‘fun’ doesn’t really happen until your garden reaches about level twenty, when you start to realize that the world isn’t “filled with fun” at all, all the piñatas aren’t great friends that get along and, in order to further your career as a piñata breeder, you’re going to need to execute some of your snuggletastic companions, a task which you accomplish by getting a shovel and beating the piñatas senseless, until they shatter into pieces. Rare want you, the player, to understand the depravity, the randomness, the sheer inherent evil contained with Mother Nature. Their motive is hidden. Maybe nobody bought enough copies of Kameo? For that reason, and probably that reason alone, they’re going to punish the younger generation for it.

Seriously though, the game is as addictive as hell. I can’t stop playing it. The graphics are colourful and vivid; it’s like being out of your mind on LSD in the 60s. The garden doesn’t have a real-time clock, like Animal Crossing, so I can do other stuff without worrying if my flower patch is overrun with weeds. The game is inviting, balanced perfectly between the needs of young players and the demands of an adult gamer. I don’t see myself not playing this for 50 hours. Each new Pinata is its own conquest in its own right, each new crop a challenge for me to nurture to perfection. Right now I’m determined to feast my eyes on all of the Pinatas, god damn it. Just don’t come crying to me if you let your kids play it, and then suddenly they want to know how Mummy and Daddy do their romance dance.

In my mind, the man responsible for Dead Rising is probably the exact kind of person you’d hate to turn your back to in real life, through fear of firing a round from his .44 into the back of your head. He was probably a mischievous little bugger as a child, squealing with a vicious delight every time he pulled a girls hair. If he didn’t go on to design Dead Rising, he’d probably end up a murdering rapist psychopath. It’s perhaps the most gratuitous game I’ve ever played. It’s a game, sure, but it’s also a good self-congratulatory wank by the developers. They’ve done exactly what they want, and they’re going to force you to sit through it, lousy voiceover work and all. You’ll end up experiencing the introduction bit about a thousand times, just like on old Megadrive games. Only it’s not 1991 anymore and I’ve turned into a crusty old bastard with ten years of quicksaving experience who can’t handle these kinds of changes. And you know what? We’ll all do it, all of us miserable old coots, we’ll superglue the controller to our hands and squeeze those thousand gamerpoints out of this game for two reasons:

1) Mowing down a horde of zombies is so cool that, after doing it, I briefly confuse myself with Fonzie.
2) Not completing Dead Rising is like admitting you’re old.

And nobody wants to be old, right? You start the game on Level 1, which is Capcom’s way of telling you that you’re about as useful as an abstinence awareness poster in a brothel. You’ll run about a bit and zombies will eat you. Game Over will flash up on your screen. Then you’ll get the chance to save your character and restart the game. Repeat until you’re about level 10, and then you can finally start on your quest to survive 72 hours in a mall whilst finding out just what the flippin’ heck all these zombies are about. The whole game is set in a mall, which is a great touch. I hate shopping, and I hate zombies.

Well, that’s about half of it. The rest of the game is basically a photography sub-quest, where capturing pictures of brutal murders and heart-wrenching drama scenes nets you a ton of experience points, levelling you up and giving you the various skills and abilities that mean you can mash a zombies head into the ground with your bare hands. Then there’s the bit where you escort the survivors in the mall back to the safe room and get more experience points, but that’s a bit fiddly and most of the survivors are so bloody stupid that it’s a marvel they lasted as long without you as they did.

Anyway, I’ve not really uncovered much of the game yet. I’m just starting the second day. It is both the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen and a complete pile of gibbering bollocks. Bravo, Capcom!

So, I recently took the plunge and bought a 360. I’ve been cynical of the machine, sure, and I’ll tell you why: over the last year it’s been overpriced and largely inferior on gameplay terms with many 2006 PS2 games. It’s true. This is unavoidable. However, a recent bundle deal at Gamestation coupled with the ever increasing affordability of second hand games (twenty to twenty five odd quid) has helped sweeten the deal considerably. £299.99 for a 360 Premium, a second wireless controller, PGR3, Xbox Live! Arcade Unplugged (free Geometry Wars!), a spare battery pack and Rainbow Six: Vegas. This is not a shabby offer. Compare it to the bloated price of the Wii, whilst remembering that it’s a more powerful machine. It makes sense. Since I purchased mine, Gamestation have even changed it to something like £340 with any three games of your choice. If you’re a lonely old tosser you can even eBay the pad for another thirty quid back but it’s basically one big admission that you have no mates, so I haven’t done that. Instead, mine is still in it’s inexplicably complicated packaging, waiting fondly for the day I have a buddy over.

Back to my purchasing experience, though. As I approached the counter, with My Chemical Romance’s last album stuck on infinite loop, I was met with a greasy, long haired, lip pierced young dropout who clearly had no social skills and, even worse, likely smelt bad. He never made eye-contact with me at any point in our transaction, looked flustered and confused when I asked for the 360 and stood with a slight hunch. After expressing my desire to spend a massive wad of cash, he quickly disappeared into the back-room and was replaced with a sharper, more eloquent, designer clothes strutting, expensive haircut wielding man with a real gift of the gab and an expensive Pacman belt buckle. He had a lip piercing, sure, you’re not allowed to work at Gamestation otherwise, but his looked like it actually cost some money to get done. He was much nicer, too. He even managed to sucker me into buying a Play & Charge kit alongside the console, the bastard. Now all I have to worry about is insurance, because these stupid expensive machines seem to break every twelve seconds. Oh, and the dreary moaning of a horde of fanboys every time I go on Xbox Live.

Having spent about a week with the console, I’m mostly satisfied, too. The thing is pretty slick when you’re playing it, but obtrusive “XBOX FRIEND IS ONLINE” messages quickly become annoying. So annoying that I’m determined to wade through the maze-like menu and find a way to turn the bloody things off. “Achievement Unlocked” seems to pop up about every five minutes, probably because I’m a gaming force to be reckoned with, but I’d rather I didn’t have to be reminded by the console all the damn time. So far it’s mostly functioned as an unofficial Ubisoft content delivery platform, seeing as the only two games I’ve really dabbled in are GRAW and Splinter Cell: Double Agent. I’ve dipped into Gears of War and am about to start Dead Rising. I like relaxing out with either Ridge Racer 6 or Project Gotham 3 when I’m in a chilled out mood, too. The fact that I’ve just named six games in two sentences reveals the kind of content availability success story that took just over a year for the console to accrue.

Overall, I’m enjoying it. It’s not as good as some of the moaning, insipid 360 fanboys would want you to believe, but it’s currently selling for a good price and the second hand game market is warming up nicely. It’ll still be a cold day in hell before I fork out fifty quid for a game.

Final Fantasy XII (that’s twelve) is a delightful and, at times, odd mash-up of traditional Japanese RPG conventions meeting a westernised approach. What does that mean to us? The game looks like World of Warcraft, but plays like Final Fantasy. It’s a striking decision and it marks a big departure from a very established series yet, at heart, it remains true to the former games whilst managing to work a new approach that should entice many new fans as well as encouraging fans disgruntled from former games to shell out another thirty quid.

The two opposing schools of thought that have been running in Final Fantasy games are choice against structure. Games like FFVII and VIII allowed you to customise your party to, pretty much, your own specifications. For instance, each character could perform magic attacks, provided you had enough free materia slots in your weapons. FFVII operated in a way that forced the character to bind (temporarily, these choices weren’t permanent) various spells and abilities to the weapons themselves before they were allowed to be used in battle. You could pretty much run around however you wanted. VIII continued and expanded on this ideal, creating a rather convoluted system of ‘drawing’ magic out of various enemies before you could use it in battle. This afforded us, the player, greater sense of freedom in comparison to games like FFIX and X, where your hand was forced into character classes. Yuna from FFX is the healer of the party, Vivi from FFIX can only function as the offensive magician. Even the weapon choices are fixed: Steiner (FFIX) can only equip swords made explicitly for Steiner. There are ups and downs to both systems and, indeed, middle-ground games such FFV – where your characters can pick and choose from certain classes to be during the game itself – that mostly come from these various contrasting ideologies: by allowing the player freedom, the developers afford us a greater sense of exploration and adventure but remove the sense of purpose, simplicity and individuality that the rigidity that a fixed-class system allows. As the first real sequel to FFX, then, FFXII serves as a foil to FFX’s rigidity: characters are now free to perform whatever tasks they wish, however they would like it. My healer, for instance, ran around for the entire game armed with a gun instead of the traditional staff. And I very much enjoyed having my shotgun-toting princess firing off a powerful boomstick in-between casting Curaja. The game, however, makes no effort to explain this system to you. If you’re not willing to explore the various weapon classes, the game is unapologetic. But it’s worth it, believe me. It’s almost impossible to get a good grasp of the weapon system without consorting an FAQ (although I’m sure the developers would prefer you purchase the official licensed strategy guide) as the games “attack power” rating on weapons is useless when you compare them to one another. If you’ve got a gun with an attack power of 30, it could do similar damage to a one-handed sword with an attack power that’s doubled. So you’re left alone, to your own devices, in a world of multiple weapon types and limitless opportunity to equip them onto any of the six members of your party. Bewildering? Certainly.

Combat is handled in a seemingly real-time affair, looking suspiciously similar to World of Warcraft in its third person, one-character centric view. Soon it becomes obvious that this is just a clever way of presenting the established Final Fantasy combat, as the familiar ‘small bar at the bottom of the screen’ fills up to completion, signalling that your character (of which you can have three active at any one time) can now attack. The only thing they’ve removed is the box that asks you every single time the bar is full if you want to attack or not, now simply assuming that, yes, you’re very much into the idea of smashing your current foe into itty bitty bits and just gets on with it, leaving you to pause the combat with a tap of the X button when you want to issue new commands. It creates a much more fluid gameplay experience and a very enjoyable one. Characters can even be ‘programmed’ with Gambits, a fancy if/then system placed into the game. All of the characters can perform certain tasks: if a party members HP is below 40%, for instance, you can set another character to automatically cast Cure on them. Characters can be told to attack the nearest foe instead of waiting for you to tell them what to do. Things have become more streamlined, leaving you more time to watch the battles unfolding than scrolling endlessly through menus. Whilst it sometimes puts itself in danger of having the player do absolutely nothing apart from run forwards until the end of the dungeon, the game never makes this feel like its boring. For some bizarre reason it works. And it’s good.

It’s hard to dredge across a fifty hour experience without a good hook, however. The visual style shines through in FFXII, lifting the game into a visually enticing nugget of traditional Japanese-fuelled soap-opera tales of woe, rebellion and destiny. The protagonist this time round is perhaps the least mentally disturbed of the whole party, assimilating himself into a ragtag group of citizens fighting an empire whom invaded and conquered their country two years previously. The visual styling is magnificent, with grand cityscape’s spiced up by the addition of flying vehicles, a seamless juxtaposition of sci-fi and fantasy. CGI scenes that are epic in their construction bind the game together, presenting a feeling of grandeur similar to that of Star Wars. It looks good even now, in an age of HD gaming on consoles that far outperform the capabilities of the PS2. Character designs are enticing and, even though you get minimal time to learn about them via cutscenes – at least in comparison to previous Final Fantasy games – they will win you over. The only insufferable one is Penelo, a girl who has no purpose from the minute she’s introduced in the game to its conclusion. Still, the other five are fantastic. Good art design can compensate a lack of graphics, and it’s shown here. The script is beautifully translated, too; chock full of archaic language and the voice actors work well alongside it to seal the deal. There are a few minor problems. Compared to previous games, the plot can sometimes feel a bit thin and it’s not until the end of the game that you know exactly what’s going on. For some that will create an air of intrigue but it will distance others. Also worth noting is that much of the main quest is quite simple to play after you’ve learnt a few basic tricks, as you can just repeat them endlessly. If you try it on the optional bonus quests you’ll get destroyed, however. But, still, minor flaws aside, Final Fantasy XII sounds good. It looks good. It plays good. Squeenix have created what is, quite probably, the most fun you’ll ever have watching a game virtually play itself.

I love Lumines II. And Lumines I, for that matter.

Later tonight/tomorrow/this week, I’ll do a post defending the PSP. It’s about time somebody did one. It’s not that bad, people! Infact, if you play with it a bit, it’s actually quite good! Seriously, I haven’t gone mental. I’ll just talk about it later, that’s all. What I want to devote this post to, my friends, is Lumines.

So, I’ll get to the meat of the issue: I love Lumines. And Lumines II, for that matter. I’m a year or two late, sure, but it’s fashionably late.

For those that haven’t played it, you get two coloured blocks. They might be, say, orange and grey, depending on which ’skin’ you’re playing on. The drops descend from top to bottom, and to clear them off the screen you have to make quadrilaterals out of them. In short: Make big squares to score big points. If you get to the top, you’ve died. Added twists are the fact that fancy music plays in the background, and when the level changes, so does the music. It’s very cool.

They’re just divine. An eclectic mix of music, coupled with a high score-driven puzzle game? Why, that’s about all the addictive I can take, Mr. Game Designer! Wait, you’ve added more? You’re adding…. unlockable content? Oh god, I just don’t think I can take it.

Here’s a fun story. It’s early December. I’ve just spent an hour on the toilet. I started at 3am. I was done with the, you know, toilet, by about 3:05am. Maybe even earlier. I did not, however, leave my bathroom abode until 3:55, and that was only because the battery in my PSP was dying and needed to be stuck on the charger again. To make matters worse, i’m only up this time of night to do important revisions to my coursework essays, due in at 9am this morning, which account for 60% of my grade on the modules I have spent twelve weeks studying for. Grr!

To conclude: Lumines is one of my favourite games and it has enriched my life.

Happy New Year! Hi. I’m blogging again. I’ve decided to start blogging again because I enjoy it. I’d like to go for a new angle, though. In the past I’ve been very focused about writing about games and gaming media with a rather critical, bitter eye. I still think like that, but I’d like to write in a more personal tone. I’ve got some ideas lined up that I think I’ll enjoy writing, and I hope that people will enjoy reading. Maybe. I should probably find some readers first.

I think it’s worth saying that three months of not playing games is enough to put things into perspective. I feel reinvigorated towards them. Cliché, perhaps, but true. It’s important to take a break sometimes, I think. I found out the other day that a friend of mine is still plugging - clocking 8-10 hours a day - his life away into various online games. And that’s sad. For him, anyway. He’s a crap friend, I’m not going to feel sorry for him.

Still, he’s a perfect argument for the idea of only using games to supplement your other hobbies instead of having them function as a replacement for everything else in your life. A lesson we should all think about, really.