Greg

Persona 4 thoughts

2009-06-01T04:51:08Z

I had this game recommended to me from a few sources, so I bought it and played it. I won't try to describe it in detail since it's been reviewed everywhere.

The game has basically two parts: the dungeon crawl part and the high school sim/murder mystery plot. I played through in hard mode; this made the dungeon crawl and character building elements more interesting, but I think their hard mode should have scaled enemy health and damage instead of just damage. As it stands, the random encounters were too offensively oriented--more about "how can I use the minimum amount of resources to kill them while giving them very few turns" than anything else.

The high school simulation was embarassingly addictive. Ultimately I found the time limit element more stressful than I would have liked, and wound up relying on external information in order to see more of the social plots. The main storyline was thought-provoking and made more sense than I normally expect from a Japanese RPG; elements I would ordinarily have expected to remain unexplained were revisited, reanalyzed, and eventually made clear. Towards the end, the game designers get a little mean, shutting you out of several story arcs if you don't find the magic dialog choices which let you continue on.

I spent something like 130 hours playing, which I think makes this the single-player game I've played for the longest since WoW launched. That was with just about every excuse taken to repeatedly crawl dungeons; I suspect on regular difficulty with a less completist attitude the game could take half as long.

Late-night video game ponderings

2009-02-15T08:27:13Z

Fallout 3 has had me thinking about nonlinear games and their pitfalls. Don't take anything in here as recommending that anyone skip Fallout 3 if it sounds interesting. It's a good game with high production values. It just didn't hold my interest as long as it could have. The Zero Punctuation review (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/420-Fallout-3) pretty much nailed its good and bad points, in the usual NSFW fashion.

One of the big ones is variety of gameplay. There can be a hundred different places to go, but if you're going to do pretty much the same thing no matter where you wind up, the game stops being interesting long before you explore them all. Fallout 3 had this problem to some degree. The game gives you a few different ways of engaging enemies (sneaky or heavily armored, and a few different types of weapons) but once you've gravitated to one, you generally use it just about everywhere. Character interaction ("quests") can help break things up, but too many of the places you'd stumble into in Fallout 3 were thump-and-scavenge affairs. The previous Fallout games from Interplay didn't suffer from this as much, I think, while the previous Elder Scrolls games did, unsurprisingly. GTA 3 was pretty good about offering different kinds of gameplay in different parts of the sandbox, although some of them were awkward.

Variety of graphics can also suffer from the production demands of making big worlds. Morrowind's world was richly developed in concept, but graphically it was uniform, alien, and bleak, making it a litle difficult to care about the fate of Vvardenfell. Oblivion did a better job in this department, but Fallout 3 backslid to some degree; there isn't a lot out there besides ruins, vaults, and subways.

Lots of nonlinear games struggle with the difficulty curve. If you can go anywhere, what happens if you go straight to the fortress of the big bad, or somewhere equally far along the main plotline? Is it okay for 90% of the world to be much too threatening to a starting player? Oblivion took the unusual approach of making enemies level up as you do, which meant the world was about equally difficult no matter where you went, and the difficulty of the game depended on how well you minmaxed the character development system. If you didn't know what you were doing, levelling up could make your life substantially more dangerous even in places you'd previously been able to handle. Fallout 3 took a more tempered approach; humanoid enemies are better equipped as you gain levels, but enemy health depends purely on type. So you aren't ready to take on super mutants and deathclaws at the start of the game, but raiders can still be mildly threatening at max level even though you've been able to kill them since level 2. I'm glad that Fallout 3 backed off on the automatically-adjusting world; I prefer the sense that levelling up increases your ability to take on challenges you couldn't handle before.

The reward curve can also be wonky. In Fallout 3, you start out scrounging for the bare necessities to survive, but then after a while you build up a huge surplus, to the point where you could really start to care less about all the stimpacks and ammo you're picking up. Levelling up also felt pretty linear. Too many of the perks boiled down to "increase this stat or skill by a few percent"; there wasn't much sense that they were allowing you to do things you couldn't do before, only the same things a little better. Other games have done better in this regard, even previous Elder Scrolls games (in particular the nonlinear "mastery level" benefits when you level a skill to 25/50/75/100 in Morrowind and Oblivion).

Perhaps the most subtle pitfall is the game music. A linear game is in control of its pacing and can fit the music to match. Nonlinear games often fall back to "relaxing" and "exciting" music, sometimes with jarring transitions, or will delegate control of the music to the player rather than the game (like GTA 3's car radio or Fallout 3's Pipboy radio). It's easy to gloss over the quality of a game's music, but most of video gaming's timeless favorites have had great music tracks--and sometimes not a lot more.

Road test

2008-10-17T18:27:36Z

I took my road test for my driver's license at the Melrose armory.

The guy had me turn on the car and operate my turn signals and brakes while he checked the front and back blinkers and brake light. Didn't have me demonstrate the headlights or hazards or anything else.

The test was mostly conducted on quiet but narrow, unmarked, and poorly maintained roads. He had me do a three-point turn on a narrow road; the Mazda 5 has an excellent turning radius so it was pretty easy, though I hit the curb with my undercarriage. At the intersection after that I asked which way I should turn, and he said "you decide." I arbitrarily chose right; apparently I missed a "do not enter" sign to the left and I would probably have autofailed if I had gone left. Yay winning the coin toss. He had me pull over up to the curb and then back up along the curb for a while. He had me pull over and park on a hill (so, know which way you're supposed to turn the wheels when parking on a hill from the driver's manual; I guessed and I think happened to be correct). He had me parallel park behind a car; I did a somewhat lousy but workable job on the initial approach, and he didn't wait for me to adjust before having me pull out again.

That was about it. He didn't tell me if I lost points for anything, just filled out the "you passed" paperwork. The whole process was pretty fast; I showed up half an hour early and was done before my scheduled time.

Re-learning how to drive was pretty easy. Learning how to parallel park was not. My advice based on my experience:

1. The driver's manual contains a precise, rigid formula for parallel parking which makes it sound easy. Ignore this; it won't work.

2. If you're having any issue clearing the rear left corner of the car you're parking behind, start further back, or don't turn the wheel all the way to the right until after you've started backing up. Your primary concern should be your distance to the curb when you unturn, and you don't want the additional constraint of not hitting the car in front of you. (In real life, if you're parking between two cars with a tight space between them, starting too far back will cause you to fail, but when you're first learning you just want to be parking behind a car with lots of space behind it.)

3. Don't try to get your parking perfect on the initial approach; instead, try to be about 18" away from the curb, and get good at adjusting. If you aim for 6" from the curb and wind up hitting the curb before you're almost done unturning, you've lost; but even if you wind up three feet from the curb you can laboriously adjust your way to parked.

4. A large part of the learning process is getting a good feel for navigating a car backwards. It might be helpful to practice doing that in an empty lot. I didn't wind up doing that personally.

Heroes

2008-09-24T05:28:46Z

I'm having trouble remaining attached to the Heroes world. It's too doomed. It's as if someone managed to replace all of the world's pacifiers with miniature suck-activated nuclear bombs--at some point, you have to give up and admit defeat.

Another video game review

2008-09-13T18:32:45Z

Okami is a PS2 game from Clover, the same studio that did Viewtiful Joe. It came out in 2006 and was reviewed very highly, but didn't sell very well. More recently there's been a Wii port of the game. I've been playing the game off and on for the past six months or so, and finally finished it today.

The game's biggest draw is artistic. Its visual style is based on Japanese ink illustration and is beautiful from start to finish. It really looks like an animated watercolor painting, and it's pulled off very well. The music is also good. Dialog uses the artsy "voices speaking in gibberish" style used in a bunch of games such as The Sims and Ico.

The gameplay style is "action-adventure," meaning it's very reminiscent of Zelda games. You run around in a 3D world as a wolf, jumping and beating up monsters using weapons you wield from your back with some kind of mysterious wolf fu. Being a god, you also have the power to alter reality with a growing arsenal of "brush techniques," which you use by freezing time and drawing on the screen in specific ways. In the Wii port, you obviously use the Wii remote to draw. I played on the PS2, where you hold down a modifier and use the controller analog stick. The game isn't especially challenging but does make you think about what power to use on a fairly regular basis.

The storyline is fun and at times moving. I wouldn't say it's deep--evil god of darkness comes to wreak havoc on the mortal world, is opposed by plucky but temporarily weak wolf god--but it's varied and entertaining with interesting characters.

I spent a little under 60 hours on the game according to the final tally. I wasn't terribly completist about it.

Overall, I'd rate this higher than any Zelda game (better story, better art, better gameplay) though I've enjoyed games in other genres more. Definitely worth picking up if you have a PS2 or a Wii and some free time.

For variety, a video game review

2008-07-28T07:03:46Z

So, apparently Metal Gear Solid 4 is the best thing in the world, or maybe the second best after Dark Knight (which I haven't seen yet). But I don't own a Playstation 3 and I hadn't played MGS 1-3. I decided to be patient and wait for the next price drop to remedy the first problem; in the mean time, I went out and bought a boxed set to fix the second.

These are actually games 3-5 in the Metal Gear series. The first two games (Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2) are old 2D 8-bit games with very primitive graphics, and would probably be too painful to play for most of today's gamers including myself. I did miss a bit of back-story by skipping them, unfortunately; I've read summaries which were a little on the thin side.

MGS 1 is a Playstation 1 game. For the technology era it came from it's pretty impressive, but that's a very relative judgement. It was kind of hard to play, so I went through it quickly on easy mode following a gamefaqs walkthrough. There's also a Gamecube version with better graphics (but worse voice acting), but I didn't know about it at the time I bought the boxed set.

MGS 2 actually felt like the most polished of the series. Since it's a PS2 game, the graphics were much improved, and the gameplay was smoother. Like the first game, it did not have a player-controlled camera, but the "active radar" (a 2D minimap representation of the playfield) mostly makes up for the frustration you'd expect from that.

MGS 3 took a very different approach to gameplay and graphics. It has a player-controlled camera (in the Subsistence version, which I played) but doesn't have the active radar. The graphics are much grittier in contrast to the cleaner environments of MGS 2; I don't think that works especially well in the low-resolution environment of a non-HD console game.

All three games are very plot-intensive. You spend about as much time watching cut sequences as you do playing the game; think Xenosaga, if you've ever played that. The gameplay is mostly stealth, although in MGS 3 you can pretty much ignore the stealth gameplay and brute force your way through the enemies, which I did. Every so often there's a boss combat, which hinges on figuring out how to control your character well enough to dodge the enemy attacks and land some of your own. The control system can be frustrating at times; for instance, in the third game I was constantly failing to stand up from a crouch when I wanted to and instead switching to a crawl on my stomach, wasting precious time. The final boss battle of the third game was simply too hard for me; on my best try, I managed to get to the point of needing just one more shot with three minutes remaining on the timer, and just couldn't land it. So I youtubed the ending and declared myself done.

That said, the gameplay is also amusingly quirky and full of interesting gadgets. In MGS 1 you can acquire a selection of cardboard boxes; one of the shortcuts for getting around the play area is to climb into a truck, hide in one of the boxes, and get yourself delivered to the destination written on the box. In MGS 2, if you crawl through an area infested with insects, they will start eating the rations you are carrying, and you have to "shake them off" using the item selection control. There's stuff like that all over all three games.

Of course, my goal was to experience the stories, which are interesting if not masterful. They are over-the-top and sometimes cross the line into pointless drama. The characters, friendly and unfriendly, are very colorful. MGS 1 boasts one of the best enemy mid-bosses of any game, Psycho Mantis. Frequently the plot digresses into the philosophy of global conflict in the nuclear age, sometimes using real-world footage, in an odd contrast with the fantastical nature of the story arc. I think the storytelling quality improved a bit in MGS 3, and I'm hoping that the story of MGS 4 lives up to the hype.

Another webcomic review

2008-07-28T06:34:52Z

Punch an' Pie is a follow-on to Queen of Wands, which used to be in my daily rotation. I managed not to hear that it had started for about a year, and I only recently made the effort to read it from start to current.

While Queen of Wands was drawn by Aeire, this new one is drawn by Chris Daily of Striptease. (Which I used to read and which still seems to be going but which fell out of my rotation a few years ago. Oops. That's a tough situation to correct.) I prefer Aeire's artwork; Chris's rendition of Aeire's characters isn't as attractive as either Queen of Wands or Striptease. But it's not bad.

Aeire's storylines are a little odd. About 80% of the strips seem to be one-off gags where the characters interact with each other in normal ways with a little bit of wittiness thrown in. Then every so often all of those innocent conversations turn out to have caused some subtle tectonic shift in the way the characters relate to each other. The stories are mostly about people learning how to be people, which was more relevant to my life a decade ago than it is now, but it's still fairly engaging.

A webcomic review

2008-07-16T08:22:49Z

I ran into Penny & Aggie the other day. Normally I'm terrible about catching up on webcomics to the point where I can put them in my daily rotation, but this one was compelling enough to hold my interest through the 700-odd existing strips.

The genre is TV-style high school drama. It's over the top in all of the expected ways. Most of the characters are absurdly attractive and dress in designer clothing which costs more than my car. They concoct elaborate social plots and are all Machiavellian masters of psychological manipulation despite being sixteen years old. They seamlessly alternate between doing shockingly unethical stuff with no consequences and being wracked with guilt over minor infractions. Things like that.

The art quality is good for a black-and-white webcomic. The cheesecake factor is a little high but not too bad. Sometimes it can be a bit hard to tell characters apart; there are a ton of them, and it's probably tough to come up with twenty-plus distinct hairstyles and face shapes without using color. The writing quality is variable, like all webcomics, but I think the writer does a good job of pulling things together into interesting plots. He also seems to know where he wants to go well in advance.

It's not very geeky, and where it is geeky, it's lit-geeky. There's no stigma attached to being smart in this particular fantasy high school but, aside from everyone owning iphones, computers don't really exist. That's fine; there's no shortage of geekiness in other webcomics.

ghudson @ 2003-01-30T02:32:00

2003-01-30T07:37:06Z