Thanks for getting Cat Stevens stuck in my head every time, game subtitle. *grumblecakes*
That, however, is the worst thing I can say about this little bit of crack in your DS card slot.
I never played the Game Cube incarnation of this, although my husband had it. His first semester of college, he bought a Cube and Animal Crossing (for the novelty? the memory card? who knows.). Apparently he was happy to play that game, and only that one, every day in his spare time. I still didn't give thought to playing it: it seemed like Harvest Moon without the farming, which I thought was supposed to be the main appeal of Harvest Moon.
Wrong! Harvest Moon is a torturous little brat in comparison, all making you eat ALL THE TIME and work with little reward. (Plus, after all that work of breeding a "star cow," it didn't even have a star on it. It was at this point I quit playing the game.) The soothing, breezy world of Animal Crossing feels positively liberating in comparison.
It's not too hard to describe Animal Crossing, but it is a bit challenging to explain why it's so engrossing. You play a human in a town full of animals, and you get to collect furniture/decorate your house, catch bugs and insect, dig up fossils, and design clothes and constellations. Your fellow townsfolk always have something amusing to say, and sometimes there are town contests and festivals. So I have just described a game of simple tasks. "So what?" you may be asking. I mean, I did.
One, I think, is it's a cute, harmless vicarious play-life, like the Sims, but without happiness meters and jobs. You just get to live a chillaxed existence of toodling around and improving your town and museum.
Another is the game compels you to pick it up every day for new items and new scenarios that you'd miss if you skipped playing it for a day. Every day new furniture and items are available at the shop of Tom Nook, mercantile and the raccoon to whom you are constantly in debt for owning your home. (Paying off debt = bigger house = more decorating space = unfortunate bigger chunk of money owed to Nook.) Different fish and insects appear at different times of day (and year), and darn if it doesn't get intense trying to get all of them into the town museum.
The stylus makes it really easy to play, too: you can just press a character to interact with them, rather than having to walk right up to them & press 'A.' It gives it a loose, natural, pleasant feel.
I can dig it!
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Drawn to Life (that is the name of a game)
At what point does a thing's dullness cancel out its endearing ways? (This is a cost/benefit analysis that I hope isn't performed too often on yours truliest here.) Drawn to Life – man, I got a lot of affection for the little platformer. It tries really hard to make the best of the DS and its unique potential. After a few hours, though, the novelty isn't enough to balance out that its gameplay is that of a platformer generic enough to be one of hundreds '90s shareware games (obvious exception: Commander Keen).
Don't let my intro rain too wet a blanket on this parade: its merits are strong enough to make it compulsively playable, and a good deal of fun. The main thing is you get to draw your character, as well as many other things in the game. You get a little template that shows you the boundaries of the character and where its little joints will bend (Todd McFarlane may want to note there are nine points of articulation). You then get to draw in a face, torso, and limbs with the stylus and around 16 or 24 different colors. You can make more than one template throughout the game: one of my characters is a confused purple duck, and another is a business man with an electrical socket face. You also get to draw, later on, their wings and their guns. (Don't worry, ESRB moms, the guns shoot acorns and snowballs, and your drawing doesn't show up large enough on the screen for it to look badass or threatening.)
The game explains that you draw the "hero" and other things in the town because you, as the player, are "The Creator" who has come to save the town from baddies. (It's up to you to determine whether the towns little mammalian inhabitants, the Raposa, are being blasphemous here.)
I suppose I was being a bit harsh earlier when I criticized the gameplay for being simple and generic (it reminds me of the Aladdin video game, of all things). It's the Raposa that make mild-manned me want to ANGRY and SMASH. Between levels, you go back to your town with the Raposa you've saved, and you're forced to do a lot of tedious running around by the little guys. "I think MINXY has stolen my FLOWERS. You need to talk to the MAYOR about this!" Even this wouldn't be so bad, if there were less of it. My breaking point was an inexcusable cutscene of a town concert wherein some pop-star Raposa performs a long and tedious rap about everything you did in every level up to that point. It's like a Greek chorus if they were retarded and you had to press "B" 67 times to get them to quit telling you what you just did.
Summary: if you can handle cutscenes, especially stupid ones, then you will have far fewer problems with this game than I did. If I was ten years old, I would definitely annoy my parents by recounting it in extreme detail during the rare moments I wasn't playing it.
(Note: I got this game from a friend, who got it because he found someone's DS (with this cartridge) at a record store. Moral: do not leave things at record stores. The employees are invariably a sausage party comprised of unscrupulous vultures.) (Record Store employees of the world: you know I love you guys. Mostly.)
Don't let my intro rain too wet a blanket on this parade: its merits are strong enough to make it compulsively playable, and a good deal of fun. The main thing is you get to draw your character, as well as many other things in the game. You get a little template that shows you the boundaries of the character and where its little joints will bend (Todd McFarlane may want to note there are nine points of articulation). You then get to draw in a face, torso, and limbs with the stylus and around 16 or 24 different colors. You can make more than one template throughout the game: one of my characters is a confused purple duck, and another is a business man with an electrical socket face. You also get to draw, later on, their wings and their guns. (Don't worry, ESRB moms, the guns shoot acorns and snowballs, and your drawing doesn't show up large enough on the screen for it to look badass or threatening.)
The game explains that you draw the "hero" and other things in the town because you, as the player, are "The Creator" who has come to save the town from baddies. (It's up to you to determine whether the towns little mammalian inhabitants, the Raposa, are being blasphemous here.)
I suppose I was being a bit harsh earlier when I criticized the gameplay for being simple and generic (it reminds me of the Aladdin video game, of all things). It's the Raposa that make mild-manned me want to ANGRY and SMASH. Between levels, you go back to your town with the Raposa you've saved, and you're forced to do a lot of tedious running around by the little guys. "I think MINXY has stolen my FLOWERS. You need to talk to the MAYOR about this!" Even this wouldn't be so bad, if there were less of it. My breaking point was an inexcusable cutscene of a town concert wherein some pop-star Raposa performs a long and tedious rap about everything you did in every level up to that point. It's like a Greek chorus if they were retarded and you had to press "B" 67 times to get them to quit telling you what you just did.
Summary: if you can handle cutscenes, especially stupid ones, then you will have far fewer problems with this game than I did. If I was ten years old, I would definitely annoy my parents by recounting it in extreme detail during the rare moments I wasn't playing it.
(Note: I got this game from a friend, who got it because he found someone's DS (with this cartridge) at a record store. Moral: do not leave things at record stores. The employees are invariably a sausage party comprised of unscrupulous vultures.) (Record Store employees of the world: you know I love you guys. Mostly.)
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Contact v. Earthbound
Maybe some of y'all have heard of the loving cult surrounding SNES RPG Earthbound (aka "Mother 2," its Japanese title, if you want to yield a few more Google search results and/or sound like a complete self-righteous RPG snot). It was a flop in its heyday, but big big love has smoldered since for its amazing humor, exciting gameplay and sort of transcendent elements (lol a self-righteous sezwhat?). I've played it through three or four times since I discovered it about 18 months ago (on an emulator, no way am I paying $60-80 on eBay for the cartridge). It's also coming out for the Wii virtual console. That deserves a toast from the world.
When I was in seventh and eighth grade, I discovered the Beatles, and after replaying all their albums so much that my blood is mostly composed of the drumline in "Ticket to Ride," I had all the fix I could get. Was there another band that was basically the Beatles, exactly as awesome and good, but not actually the Beatles because I had already memorized the Beatles? Badfinger? No. (A thousand times no.) Harry Nillsson? Very close.
And again, now, with Earthbound. Could I find the RPG equivalent of Harry Nillsson to Earthbound's Beatlemania? Promise was in the air, from the main Earthbound fan site no less, that the DS game Contact was Earthbound's freshborn spiritual kin.
Maybe you want to hear about Contact not as an Earthbound simile, but rather on its own merits. Too bad! As my poor husband can tell you, that besides early epidemiologist Joseph Goldberger, there is little I discuss more than I discuss Earthbound. So.
Contact, then. Here's what I liked about Earthbound, and how Contact compares.
• Battle system. In Earthbound, it was straight-up post-Dragon Warrior "you have killed X, you get Y gold and Z experience points." The unique element there was your HP went down on a little odometer-style meter: if one of your characters was totally slaughtered, you could stop them from hitting zero HP and dying by getting out of battle quickly. The battle system in Contact is most similar to the abomination of Tingle's Freshly-Picked Rosy Rupeeland (described in last post): you point at a baddie and they just kind of duke it out while you watch, occasionally using an HP-increasing item mid-battle. Grinding is boring enough, but it's practically a soporific when you don't even get to make any strategic decisions. Video games should only be a spectator sport when your brother or your boyfriend is hogging the controller. (NB: if you are dating this selfish man, it's nigh near time to pen a Dear John letter.)
– Pleasant similarity: In both Earthbound and Contact, enemies that can be defeated in one hit run away from you, so if you don't want to deal with the equivalent of the blue slime at level 53, you don't have to.
• Music: Contact has the most generic music that I can't remember having heard in a long time. (Help parsing that: the music in Contact is so nondescript that I cannot remember anything about it, or how it sounds, save that it is unremarkable.) I'm definitely not one of those people that buy game soundtracks or anything, but isn't it great when a game like Katamari Damacy comes out and the music is a fun, exciting knockout? When I was playing Earthbound, I'd fall asleep with those tunes in my head. I'd think of them at work and smile. If one is trying to achieve an Earthbound vibe, don't skimp on the music. Sheesh.
• Items, towns, NPCs. Earthbound's first three levels are Eagleton, Twoson (lols), and Threed. Contact attempts to do the same thing by calling its first level...Fort Eagle. Uh-huh. That's a Badfinger move, guys, not a Nillsson move. Similarly, Earthbound had parodies of typical RPG weapons: as a little American boy, title character Ness equipped items like frying pans and slingshots as weapons, things kids had access to. Contact does this by letting your character equip such items as a frying pan and a slingshot. I realize every RPG has "leather sword" or "spike whip," but if Contact is trying to be original, it shouldn't straight rip everything unique in Earthbound. In fact, I think all the "holy Hannah it's the new Earthbound" hype is born of this dullsville "homage" (aka stealing).
– Difference: While Earthbound's NPCs were idiosyncratic and hilarious or mysterious, the NPCs of Contact are not. You can kill them, however. That's novel.
• A weird need to encourage kids to play outside. Earthbound did this by having your dad call you periodically and remind you to maybe stop playing and go talk to your mom. Cute, weird, non-intrusive. Contact, however, does this by making journeys between "levels" long and dull. You travel from place to place on a sailing ship, and it takes upward of five minutes to get to wherever it is you're going. In the meantime, you get to stare at the stupid ship or occasionally check in and be told "we've got a while until we get there." Argh! It encourages me to get really mad. I believe a person can be killed in less than five minutes. Should a game be making me think this?
I haven't gotten very far in Contact. I can totally handle that it's not Earthbound – I knew it wouldn't be – but it has no excuse being completely passive and yawn-inducing. Go to charm school and earn some kind of certificate of goodness, Contact, and I'll try again.
When I was in seventh and eighth grade, I discovered the Beatles, and after replaying all their albums so much that my blood is mostly composed of the drumline in "Ticket to Ride," I had all the fix I could get. Was there another band that was basically the Beatles, exactly as awesome and good, but not actually the Beatles because I had already memorized the Beatles? Badfinger? No. (A thousand times no.) Harry Nillsson? Very close.
And again, now, with Earthbound. Could I find the RPG equivalent of Harry Nillsson to Earthbound's Beatlemania? Promise was in the air, from the main Earthbound fan site no less, that the DS game Contact was Earthbound's freshborn spiritual kin.
Maybe you want to hear about Contact not as an Earthbound simile, but rather on its own merits. Too bad! As my poor husband can tell you, that besides early epidemiologist Joseph Goldberger, there is little I discuss more than I discuss Earthbound. So.
Contact, then. Here's what I liked about Earthbound, and how Contact compares.
• Battle system. In Earthbound, it was straight-up post-Dragon Warrior "you have killed X, you get Y gold and Z experience points." The unique element there was your HP went down on a little odometer-style meter: if one of your characters was totally slaughtered, you could stop them from hitting zero HP and dying by getting out of battle quickly. The battle system in Contact is most similar to the abomination of Tingle's Freshly-Picked Rosy Rupeeland (described in last post): you point at a baddie and they just kind of duke it out while you watch, occasionally using an HP-increasing item mid-battle. Grinding is boring enough, but it's practically a soporific when you don't even get to make any strategic decisions. Video games should only be a spectator sport when your brother or your boyfriend is hogging the controller. (NB: if you are dating this selfish man, it's nigh near time to pen a Dear John letter.)
– Pleasant similarity: In both Earthbound and Contact, enemies that can be defeated in one hit run away from you, so if you don't want to deal with the equivalent of the blue slime at level 53, you don't have to.
• Music: Contact has the most generic music that I can't remember having heard in a long time. (Help parsing that: the music in Contact is so nondescript that I cannot remember anything about it, or how it sounds, save that it is unremarkable.) I'm definitely not one of those people that buy game soundtracks or anything, but isn't it great when a game like Katamari Damacy comes out and the music is a fun, exciting knockout? When I was playing Earthbound, I'd fall asleep with those tunes in my head. I'd think of them at work and smile. If one is trying to achieve an Earthbound vibe, don't skimp on the music. Sheesh.
• Items, towns, NPCs. Earthbound's first three levels are Eagleton, Twoson (lols), and Threed. Contact attempts to do the same thing by calling its first level...Fort Eagle. Uh-huh. That's a Badfinger move, guys, not a Nillsson move. Similarly, Earthbound had parodies of typical RPG weapons: as a little American boy, title character Ness equipped items like frying pans and slingshots as weapons, things kids had access to. Contact does this by letting your character equip such items as a frying pan and a slingshot. I realize every RPG has "leather sword" or "spike whip," but if Contact is trying to be original, it shouldn't straight rip everything unique in Earthbound. In fact, I think all the "holy Hannah it's the new Earthbound" hype is born of this dullsville "homage" (aka stealing).
– Difference: While Earthbound's NPCs were idiosyncratic and hilarious or mysterious, the NPCs of Contact are not. You can kill them, however. That's novel.
• A weird need to encourage kids to play outside. Earthbound did this by having your dad call you periodically and remind you to maybe stop playing and go talk to your mom. Cute, weird, non-intrusive. Contact, however, does this by making journeys between "levels" long and dull. You travel from place to place on a sailing ship, and it takes upward of five minutes to get to wherever it is you're going. In the meantime, you get to stare at the stupid ship or occasionally check in and be told "we've got a while until we get there." Argh! It encourages me to get really mad. I believe a person can be killed in less than five minutes. Should a game be making me think this?
I haven't gotten very far in Contact. I can totally handle that it's not Earthbound – I knew it wouldn't be – but it has no excuse being completely passive and yawn-inducing. Go to charm school and earn some kind of certificate of goodness, Contact, and I'll try again.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Tingle's Freshly Picked Rosy Rupeeland Rocket Slime Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Yeah Yeahs Hey Jude (srsly dudes, what?)
MAYBE you fastidious readers of the outrageous world of the DS have heard of the probably-not-ever coming to America game devoted to all's least favorite, Tingle of "Zelda" fame. In what appears to be a growing DS trend, it's got a ridic wicked long name: 'Freshly Picked: Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland.' If people are mad hating on a video game character, if it's so weird and, er, 'fey' that its company decides to ignore an entire continent, then is my curiosity ever piqued.
I wanted to play the thing! Japan has it, in a language I can't speak, and about a year ago, it got shipped to the home of Stephen Fry and cross-dressing Pythons: thee U.K. If you are easily charmed by their old-fashioned manner of adding an extra letter 'u' to all kinds of words, well, then you'll be easily charmed here.
So, now I'm playing it, and it is downright exhausting. It's got all the wacky that's associated with "Japan" in content, humor, originality of premise, etc. One of the NPCs, a construction worker, is clearly supposed to be (non-leather) Hard Gay, Japanese TV guy and internet sensation who I do not find amusing. (sorry?) So that's all cool, all fun.
What is not cool and fun? The game is largely a bunch of frustrating drudgery. Tingle's sole focus is Rupees, and so is everyone else's, and that's kind of all there is to the game. Want to see what a shop has to offer? You have to pay the NPCs an unspecified amount of rupees to even talk to them (beyond terse comments like, "No money? Go away!"). You make an offer: if they don't like it because it's too low, they laugh at you and then keep your money. At which point you up the ante, and they laugh at you for paying too much, and they keep the rest of your apparently exorbitant offer.
The battle system, too, is a wicked, passive shame. You press the stylus on a baddie, Tingle attacks the baddie, rupees flow from your savings, and items pop up. That's right, you watch the battle. And that's it.
In sum, this game is maddening. Anyone who says otherwise is succumbing to the sunk costs fallacy, especially any U.S.er (or Canadian, etc.) who got this thing on import. Caveat emptor!
I wanted to play the thing! Japan has it, in a language I can't speak, and about a year ago, it got shipped to the home of Stephen Fry and cross-dressing Pythons: thee U.K. If you are easily charmed by their old-fashioned manner of adding an extra letter 'u' to all kinds of words, well, then you'll be easily charmed here.
So, now I'm playing it, and it is downright exhausting. It's got all the wacky that's associated with "Japan" in content, humor, originality of premise, etc. One of the NPCs, a construction worker, is clearly supposed to be (non-leather) Hard Gay, Japanese TV guy and internet sensation who I do not find amusing. (sorry?) So that's all cool, all fun.
What is not cool and fun? The game is largely a bunch of frustrating drudgery. Tingle's sole focus is Rupees, and so is everyone else's, and that's kind of all there is to the game. Want to see what a shop has to offer? You have to pay the NPCs an unspecified amount of rupees to even talk to them (beyond terse comments like, "No money? Go away!"). You make an offer: if they don't like it because it's too low, they laugh at you and then keep your money. At which point you up the ante, and they laugh at you for paying too much, and they keep the rest of your apparently exorbitant offer.
The battle system, too, is a wicked, passive shame. You press the stylus on a baddie, Tingle attacks the baddie, rupees flow from your savings, and items pop up. That's right, you watch the battle. And that's it.
In sum, this game is maddening. Anyone who says otherwise is succumbing to the sunk costs fallacy, especially any U.S.er (or Canadian, etc.) who got this thing on import. Caveat emptor!
David Hume described his books as "stillborn at the press"
Hopefully this blog won't be, eh? Eh? Amirite?
Ever since I found out Nintendo was making a crazygonuts stylus handheld with two screens of glory, I all started breaking the tenth commandment and coveting like mad. This was 2005? 2004? Whenever it came out, natch. Two years ago I bought a white DS lite (they look like cuets baby versions of the iBooks circa 2003? 2004? The white ones. You know what I mean.).
Totally worth it. Totally my favorite console ever (sorry we had to break up, SNES, but you still have a soft place in my heart). Totally kept coveting gamezzzzzz. A lot of the ones that looked unique/fun in that crazy DS way, like Phoenix Wright...well, word on the grapevine was their 'play time' was kind of weak, in the 10 hour range. And being: 1. paycheck-to-paycheck poor college babe and 2. severely indoctrinated to be frugal, I didn't want to drop $35 on these awesome, exciting, but brief pleasures.
Recently, I got hitched, and some friends gave us each 'Edge' cards, micro SD cards...Homebrew ROM madness setup. That pretty much knocked us out of the water (not that I didn't dig the Foreman 'Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine,' sis-in-law). So since then...June 30, when I got home, it's been work/DS/sleep/sometimes eat.
I reckoned I would get all 'opinions 4 u' on the world and share my thoughts on all the DS games; so, so many of them, so you can know whether they're "boss" or "toss," "spin it" or "bargain bin it," etc. Hope you dig!
Ever since I found out Nintendo was making a crazygonuts stylus handheld with two screens of glory, I all started breaking the tenth commandment and coveting like mad. This was 2005? 2004? Whenever it came out, natch. Two years ago I bought a white DS lite (they look like cuets baby versions of the iBooks circa 2003? 2004? The white ones. You know what I mean.).
Totally worth it. Totally my favorite console ever (sorry we had to break up, SNES, but you still have a soft place in my heart). Totally kept coveting gamezzzzzz. A lot of the ones that looked unique/fun in that crazy DS way, like Phoenix Wright...well, word on the grapevine was their 'play time' was kind of weak, in the 10 hour range. And being: 1. paycheck-to-paycheck poor college babe and 2. severely indoctrinated to be frugal, I didn't want to drop $35 on these awesome, exciting, but brief pleasures.
Recently, I got hitched, and some friends gave us each 'Edge' cards, micro SD cards...Homebrew ROM madness setup. That pretty much knocked us out of the water (not that I didn't dig the Foreman 'Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine,' sis-in-law). So since then...June 30, when I got home, it's been work/DS/sleep/sometimes eat.
I reckoned I would get all 'opinions 4 u' on the world and share my thoughts on all the DS games; so, so many of them, so you can know whether they're "boss" or "toss," "spin it" or "bargain bin it," etc. Hope you dig!
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