Learning the nature of Primal’s demon realms all over again

I made a grave error when beginning Primal, staying headstrong on this lofty goal of mine to beat five specific videogames in 2013. If I can see its credits roll, it’ll be the third title I can check off my digital list, which I’ll consider a fine achievement. However, that’s only if I don’t goof up again, like I did when choosing the lesser of my two PS2 memory cards to save the game’s data on. Could’ve really used some advice from Scree on that one.

If you’ll recall, I was able to snag a used PS2 memory card some years back, but there’s some corrupt data on it that I just can’t delete, no matter how many times I try; however, I’ve been able to save other game info on there just fine, like my vital progress in Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup and Secret Agent Clank. So it definitely isn’t completely broken. Just randomly, I guess. Alas, after playing for two hours of Primal and getting to just before the game’s first boss battle, my save data became corrupted and wouldn’t load. Eek. My heart turned to stone each and every time the “load error” message came up. So I had to switch over to my mainstay memory card and delete some info, such as Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 character save BS and whatever little progress I made in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit, and start all over again. At least this time around I knew puzzle solutions and could skip all the cutscenes immediately.

So yeah, I’ve played about four or so hours now of Primal–that’s the first two hours twice, and then a wee bit more once I got my saving stuff in order. It’s good. I mean, it’s always been good, but I think the game still holds up really well in 2013, mostly for its Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque story, cheeky characters, and larger-than-realm scope. Seriously, the realm of Solum feels absolutely massive even if, technically, it’s not, and I have already found myself getting lost going from the forum to the hunting camp to the colosseum, though you could probably also blame that on the lack of an on-screen mini-map. Granted, I generally associate dark, snowy worlds with time standing still thanks to The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and Solum comes across as a bitter, uninhabitable home full of strange people and customs.

Some of Primal‘s gameplay mechanics are not as awesome as I remember them, and now that I actually play it, controller cradled in hands, I’d prefer to have no combat at all, but that’s just a pipe dream. Like in Silent Hill 2, combat is an essential part of the game, even if it is clunky and obtrusive and strangely designed around the left and right triggers. Restoring and harvesting health from fallen foes is tedious, and the climbing, now spoiled by the likes of one-button speedfreak Assassin’s Creed, feels pretty cumbersome. But all of that can be dismissed simply to hear Scree and Jen talk, as their banter feels genuine, and you can really watch Jen grow closer to the little gargoyle in a natural way, which might sound odd, given that she’s technically dying in a hospital and has been taken to a realm between realms to do something heroic and find her stolen band boyfriend.

I’m approaching the part in Primal where I always stop and…walk away, much like I had in the previous two entries checked off my list–Chrono Cross and Silent Hill 2. I just need to power on and not be afraid to use a walkthrough when I get stuck because, surprisingly, this game doesn’t highlight interactive objects in a bright yellow glow or put a giant arrow over them like many gamers are coddled today. You have to be observant and aware and willing to think outside the castle wall box. However, sometimes the answer is not easy to deduce without any clues, and I’d rather have someone else tell me what it is then to give up on Primal yet again. I have to see this spunky goth girl, also a coffee bar waitress, discover her destiny. I have to.

Land the plane, bury the hatchet in Grand Theft Auto V

Hello again. I’m back to moan and groan about Grand Theft Auto V, but this time it’s not about a glitch, rather an examination of my inept plane-flying skills and strange, faulty mission design stuff on Rockstar’s part. Also, the stupid tug of Trophies, the poor man’s Achievements, both of which I keep telling myself I really don’t care about any more, but find myself still interested in unlocking nonetheless. Le sigh.

I’ve made a big push to see GTA V‘s main storyline come to a close–something I want dead and done before we ring in the new year because I want to move on to at least one of the other two new PS3 games I’ve recently added to my collection, namely Sly Cooper 4–and I think I’m a few missions away from the big finale. That’s good. So long, that is, as I don’t get distracted with side stuff or simply driving around, blasting Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time” and zooming through red lights. Anyways, the other night I finished up “Bury the Hatchet,” a story-heavy mission with some graveyard shooting and flying that sees a major revelation brought to light and puts both Michael and Trevor in dangerous, but interesting places. I won’t spoil the exact details of the mission, but the final section has you controlling Trevor as he flies his plane back to Sandy Shores.

Let it be known: I hate flying planes in videogames. I was only ever okay at it in Saints Row: The Third, but mostly because no one designing that game cared a lick about treating vehicles right, putting fun first and realism last. However, that is not the case in GTA V, as one small tilt to the left can bring your plane nose-diving into Los Santos.

That said, I couldn’t finish the mission. I tried four times, but could not land Trevor’s plane. The first two times saw me overshoot the landing strip, crashing into whatever. I landed on the ground with the third attempt, but nowhere near the yellow targeted marker, and I thought I could just have Trevor hop out of the plane and run over to finish the job–nope, nope, nope. The fourth time, well…let me mention that the last checkpoint in “Bury the Hatchet” is pretty far back, and you have to fly straight for a few minutes, listening to mildly different dialogue between Trevor and [redacted] until you get near the airfield again. It’s frustrating and really harkens back to Grand Theft Auto IV‘s poor structure. So, for the fourth attempt, I simply crashed the plane into the ocean and opted to “skip mission,” just like I had a few times in L.A. Noire, an option presented to you after one too many failures. Not ideal, but I wasn’t interested in spending another 15 to 20 minutes attempting this touchdown. The “mission complete” screen came up with the general list of stats, I saved my game, and kept playing.

However, no Trophy unlocked. And I know from perusing some websites, that this is one of the few main storyline missions that rewards you with an Achievement/Trophy at the end, so you know your progress in all the main path stuff. Alas, I got nothing. I did 80% of the mission, failed four times at the end to land a plane, skipped it altogether, and got gipped on a supposedly unmissable digital reward. When selecting to skip, there was no indication that this would happen, no warning; if there had been, surely I’d have kept trying, scared to break the chain.

Evidently you can trigger this mission with either Trevor or Michael, but it really only affects the beginning part of the mission. If I’d gone with Michael, I’d have cut down 50% of the flying stuff, but it wouldn’t have matter because I’m definitely more of a pro at take-offs than landings, which I’d still have to do to properly complete “Bury the Hatchet.” Boo hoo and a bunch of Trevor’s curse words, too.

Unfortunately, I’ll have to “replay” the mission tonight because a part of my brain refuses to finish this game with mission-specific Trophies unlocked for everything but one mission. I guess Rockstar did this so Achievement-whores couldn’t just skip through everything and rack up those sick e-peen scores in their journey to have the largest, most meaningless number ever, but I’m not in it for that. I like seeing proof–however you want to call it–of my spent videogaming time. To this day, I’m still really annoyed with Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter for not giving me the “you beat the game” Achievement after I totally beat the game.

In short–what have I become?

Having trouble surveying the score in Grand Theft Auto V

I slip back into Grand Theft Auto V every now and then to drive around aimlessly, look at a few jokey billboards and websites on the game’s internal Internet, and do a main story mission or, at the very least, a random event. Truthfully, I’m always on the lookout for a new Strangers and Freaks mission, really zany one-offs, but they seem few and far between these days, especially since I’m maybe now halfway through the story. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell without looking up online and spoiling myself percentage-wise, so we’ll just pretend like I know what I’m talking about and say that GTA V‘s glass is currently half empty. Or half full. Whatever.

As much as I hate glitches, especially ones that bring a gaming session to a halt, such as Half-Life 2‘s Nova Prospekt level and the randomly spawning Alpha Male Deathclaw in Fallout: New Vegas, I still do find them fascinating pieces of broken tech and marvel at what they can do to a system, both visibly and behind the scenes. So far, throughout my decent amount of time with Grand Theft Auto V, I’ve not come across many, and if I did, they were pretty minor stuff, like a pedestrian getting caught in a walking animation against a wall or being unable to switch characters for seemingly no good reason. Nothing game-breaking, and so I continued to carry on, little by little. Please note that I’m not including my troublesome time in the early days of Grand Theft Auto Online in this analysis, which was a hot mess of server problems, but also some strange connectivity glitches.

While Giant Bomb streamed for 48 hours over the weekend to raise money for Extra Life, I tried to do my part at home as well, staying up with them and playing some games. Granted, I didn’t last terribly long, but I tried to keep things fresh, jumping between my Nintendo 3DS, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Ni no Kuni, and, our topic du jour, Grand Theft Auto V. I haven’t really played in a couple of weeks from the look of things, and as far as I can tell, the next main story mission is called “Surveying the Score,” which involves all three of our colorful characters–Trevor, Franklin, and Michael. It’s basically a reconnaissance mission, there for the characters to observe their next target, the Union Depository, and plan how to strike it based on the number of guards they see and its alarm system. That’s all well and good, but I can’t seem to start the mission, and the one time I did, my game glitched hard, with Franklin literally standing inside the car, unable to leave, unable to switch out over to Trevor or Michael.

Basically, you have to go to the Vanilla Unicorn, which Trevor owns, and find him in the back office to kick things off. However, something is seriously wrong in my game. The outside door that supposedly leads directly to the back office is locked, and I don’t think that’s right. If you try to go through the strip club, body guards will chance you when you cross into the back room area, and they shoot to kill. I died three times trying attempting this, but was once able to reach Trevor’s office to begin “Surveying the Score”–with body guards still in tow. I think that had a serious effect on the mission going forward, the system confusing itself, which led to Franklin stuck in the car, kind of clipping out of it, but unable to do much else. Grrr.

I turned on the DownloadStation 3 this morning to snatch up my free copy of Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen and noticed that there was a new patch available for Grand Theft Auto V. Alas, I think that’s mostly for Grand Theft Auto Online stuff, but maybe there’s a Vanilla Unicorn fix in there, too. We’ll see. I’ll keep playing until I run out of other missions on the map to do, and then I’ll try again; if I can’t get through Trevor’s strip club unscathed, I guess my dream of completing a GTA game for the very first time ever will come to a sad, but inevitable conclusion.

Batman vs. The Joker and an army of ventilation gates

As you probably already know from the previous post, I beat Batman: Arkham Asylum over the weekend. It was really enjoyable and constantly full of stuff to do, even if there’s a few aspects of it that I found bothersome–more on that in a bit–and if someone had simply told me it was more or less Super Metroid plus Deus Ex: Human Revolution sooner, I would not be as late as I am to this crazy shindig. But whatevs, I did it. Not like I’m opposed to catching up on older games. But truthfully, I think I’m now good with Batman for a bit, not feeling the need to bat-glide right over to Arkham City or Arkham Origins. Though maybe that 3DS game has potential…

At the time of kicking The Joker’s clownish ass back behind bars and completing the game proper, my final stats were as follows:

• Challenges – 2%
• Riddles – 142/240
• Upgrades – 18/20
• Character Bios – 31/42
• Completed – 73%

Not bad, not bad. But could be better overall. I’ve since gone back and upped all of those stats, now sitting at an 85% completion rate, with everything in the main campaign found, unlocked, and listened to. Whoop whoop, go moi. However, that means, in order to earn the remaining 15%, I have to not only finish all the challenges, which come in two forms, but also do them perfectly for all their medals. Which seems extremely difficult. In the Combat challenges, you fight against four rounds of enemies and earn points by combo-chaining attacks together, never getting hit, and using a ton of variety. In Silent Predator, you are tasked with taking out a group of enemies in a room from the main game itself, with three specific tasks to accomplish along the way. There’s a handful of each of these, and the difficulty between one and another appears to ramp up dramatically. I’ve tried a few and done simply mediocre on ’em, so I can officially wave goodbye to a 100% completion rate.

What I’m really here to talk about is how much you are required to mash the X button in Batman: Arkham Asylum. It’s ridiculous. For all his brawn and muscles and high technology, Batman still has to mash on the X button to pull open/kick out ventilation shafts, rip down glass walls, and topple The Joker off a ledge multiple times during the final fight. That latter reason, I get–truly. But everything else feels unnecessary and is quite tiring, especially when you use the upgraded Batclaw to rip open glass walls from afar, which seem to take more button presses than anything else. Throw in the notion that you’re also, sort of, mashing X a lot during combat to dodge out of the way, and well…that button is getting some seriously loving. I’m not generally opposed to these kind of mini-mash QTE festivals, but Batman uses vents a lot, certainly more than doors, and I don’t understand why it couldn’t have been a simple single button press to open the vent. Is it more interactive? Sure, but it’s badly designed and does not make me feel like a badass superhero.

If you’d like to really stave off any sliver of interest to see how Arkham City and Arkham Origins play out, just let me know if this mechanic is still there. If so, I’ll pass on the mash.

The Half-hour Hitbox: October 2013

I can’t believe we’re already on the third iteration of this passably new Grinding Down feature, which, in retrospect, I should have put together years ago. The months surely do seem to be flying away, but even that won’t stop me from writing a wee bit about the handful of games I got to play a wee bit of in the last thirty or so days. Again, this is probably not everything, just the ones that stick out like bright red sticks in the mud, and I solemnly swear to return to several of these at some point. Heck, I might even still be playing a few of them right now. Besides, I always seem to get a lot of gaming done during the Thanksgiving break, as I rarely go out shopping, preferring to spend those chilly days warm inside, hands on a controller, eyes somewhere far away. Which is all just to say that appearing on the Hitbox does not mean you’re a one-hit wonder, destined for forgetting.

Okay. Here’s October, in a nutshell.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Many moons ago, on the Xbox 360, I downloaded and played the huge demo for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. I swear it was around 2 GBs or something near that. Anyways, I found it an okay experience, with the bright, fantasy-ready colors being my favorite part of the standard action RPG fare. However, it suffered from tiny text syndrome, which made the lackluster dialogue and subsequent dialogue trees even harder to endure. A shame, as I am always mildly interested in big, epic RPGs, the kind that hold more than enough to keep one busy for a few months. Thankfully, this month, the game was given out for free to PlayStation Plus subscribers, and so I got to try again, and the tiny text is no longer a problem. However, I have only played a sliver further than I did in the demo, and I just can’t commit to it right now.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes

A puzzle game with a surprising amount of attention spent on story and characters. The actual puzzle part revolves around grid-based battles, wherein you have to move units around to create super units to deal damage and protect yourself. It’s easier seen than described, and I thought I was doing well with it, but the difficulty ramps up dramatically fast after the first chapter, leaving little room for error. Might & Magic certainly has a lot of style, but its hooks aren’t very deep in me; I also tried battling online and got my tush handed to me by, what definitely sounded like, two little boys.

Tetris Blitz

Another free game on my Windows 8 phone. It’s Tetris on speed. Speedy Tetris. Speed the Movie: Tetrisication. Whatever you want to call it. Basically, you have two minutes to clear out as many rows as possible and score big. This is helped immensely with power-ups. Of course, since it is a free-to-play title, there’s microtransactions and ads for them everywhere, and it seems sort of hard to get a really high score without paying a little money for those killer power-ups, which are quite expensive if you are attempting to pay for them with the in-game currency. Meh, that’s not me. But it’s a decent two minute killer, and who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky and score over 200,000 points all by my lonesome one day. Stay tuned for that…

Halo 3

Another month, another Halo game tried. This time, it’s Halo 3, given to us petty Gold members for free from the Microsoft overlords, and I played the first two levels on whatever the default difficulty is–and it went all right. Not really following the story much, since I never played anything in the series before it, but Master Chief is found on some planet, told to go forward and shoot aliens, and, well…there you go. Died a bunch of times, actually, as I don’t yet have a grip on the combat. And at some point, Tara came over and said, “You’re playing this again?” She thought it was Borderlands 2. Not sure what to make of that.

Poker Night 2

Already wrote a bit about how bad technically Poker Night 2 is, and I’ve not really gone back into it since then. Sorry, Brock and Claptrap–not your collective fault. Though now I am tempted to at least check out some of those Sam & Max games I have on Steam…

Dead Island

There’s a good amount to like about Dead Island, but I just can’t get over its breakable weapons. Now, for starters, I’m actually okay with weapons having durability and such; in fact, some of my favorite games, like Fallout: New Vegas and Dark Cloud 2, have you constantly repairing your gear to ensure you are in tip-top shape. However, on this island of living dead things, your weapons break fast, and you can only carry so many with you, which left me a number of times empty-handed and surrounded by enemies. Not an enjoyable system, especially when you can still lose a weapon you spent a lot of money on improving and upgrading. I get that it’s more realistic, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Otherwise, it’s good, with plenty of side quests to keep you busy. Love the kick button and looting every suitcase I come across. Some of the voice acting and character models are sub-par, but the zombies are effective and varied. Also, I’m going to admit that it took me several tries to get a vehicle moving, as for the longest time I didn’t realize the steering wheel was on the other side. Oops!

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Despite my lackluster love for Batman as a superhero character, I’m quite enjoying my time exploring the inner (and outer) workings of Arkham Asylum in…um, Batman: Arkham Asylum. It’s a mix of Super Metroid, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and the combat from the more recent Assassin’s Creed games, and it’s totally a blast. The attention to detail is perfect, and everything really gels with one another, from the Riddler stuff to the exploration and even the boss fights. Alas, of the bunch, this one seems like the best, so I’m trying to take my time with it.

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The Half-hour Hitbox is a new monthly feature for Grinding Down, covering a handful of videogames that I’ve only gotten to play for less than an hour so far. My hopes in doing this is to remind myself that I played a wee bit of these games at one time or another, and I should hop back into them, if I liked that first bite.

My serious complex with Shadow Complex

We all have our neurotic moments, and one of mine took place over the weekend. See, I am still operating under the very same Xbox 360 that I pinched pennies for and bought way back in 2008/2009. That 360 came with an internal 20 GB hard drive, which, thanks to downloadable games and saves and countless patches, has been filling up over the passing years at a steady clip. It’s nearly full, and I’ve had to reformat an external hard drive I wasn’t using to be able to download some other stuff. That “Gaming With Gold” program has steadily provided me with a new free game every two weeks now, and some are big boys, ranging from 6 to 8 GBs. The point is this: there are several games in my collection that I am done with–or nearly done with or haven’t touched in years or don’t even remember or can confirm in my brain that they were a once and only once kind of experience–and to make space…well, it’s deleting time. See ya, Limbo, Bastion, and The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom; it’s been real.

And I was almost ready to remove Shadow Complex without blinking before I realized that I was just one Achievement away from having unlocked them all. According to the “Serious Complex” Achievement, all I had to do was level up to 50. Hmm. That sounds easy enough, and I wondered why I hadn’t, as, during Shadow Complex‘s time, I ate that game up. Pretty sure I completed it at least three times. After loading up my last save, I discovered I was sitting pretty at LV 45 and playing on Hardcore difficulty. That meant…well, only five more levels to go. Totally do-able. I could totally do that, I told myself rationally, and then I’d have all the Achievements and could erase the game from my 360 knowing fully that I experienced that game fully before it disappeared. Remember, I owned up to all this crazy at the start of this post: my neurosis.

It was not an easy climb to the top, surprisingly. But I guess it never really is. Shadow Complex‘s Hardcore difficulty means you lose a lot more health when shot by enemy soldiers and don’t gain back as much from health packs. I don’t have to worry about ammo as I have a lot of infinite perks already unlocked. It took me a while to get used to the controls again, as well as reacquaint myself with the sprawling, color-coded map. There was a lot of wandering to and fro, finding unneeded collectibles and some boss encounters and remembering how fun it is to run super fast from one side of the map to the other. I died a lot, and I gained a trivial amount of XP along the way. Like, pennies and nickels. That is, until I found an exploit, which helped me gain the final two levels in maybe 15 minutes or so.

At the top of the map, a little ways off from where you fight the final battle, you can gain a MAX BONUS for XP by punching seven or eight soldiers in a row and then exploding some kind of war-robot by launching a missile up its metallic butt. This nets you a really good size chunk of XP, and there’s a Save Room right near the area. So what I did was make my run, get the XP, save, reload my last save, and do the run again, save, reload, and so on and so on. It’s simple and boring and kind of has to be perfectly timed, but it worked and was a better XP guarantee than just plodding around, room to room, popping a soldier here and there and watching that XP turtle forward.

And then the Achievement popped, allowing me to add Shadow Complex to my list of green-starred names over there in sidebar county. I exhaled, checked a few things…and then deleted the game from my hard drive. It was fun going back for a bit to this modern Metroidvania, and the game still plays fantastically, but at this point, I’ve now seen nearly everything from the game. I beat it with 100% of the items and with 13% of the items. I beat it fast, I completed it slow, I unearthed everything. I played with the hook-shot and found ways around enemies, I kicked a lot of spiderbots, and I tried out all the golden weapons. This is just basically me justifying to myself that I did all that I could with the game, and that there was no reason to keep it on the system, when other games, like Clash of Heroes, needed the space.

I suspect this sort of OCD is going to come into play with a few more titles on my Xbox 360, such as Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and Torchlight, as they both only have one Achievement left to unlock, both attainable, but, just like with “Serious Complex,” might take some time. Some pre-planning. We’ll see when I turn neurotic next.

Grinding Down’s Chrono Cross week – Miscellaneous

Well, here we are, at the end of Grinding Down‘s Chrono Cross week. Hope you’ve enjoyed my wee analytical posts so far, and I definitely have other videogames I’d love to examine piece by piece like so somewhere down the line. Maybe Suikoden II, perhaps? Super Metroid? Unlimited SaGa?! That last one was a joke, for those scratching their noggins.

Anyways, I’ve now covered what I consider to be the big four topics when talking about this classic Squaresoft RPG: story, characters, the battle system, and music. This final blog post is meant to be a grab-all in terms of smaller topics to cover, as I still–surprise, surprise–have things to talk about when it comes to all the parts that make up the unconventional puzzle that is Chrono Cross. Hopefully I’ll touch upon everything I want to here, as I’d like to move away from the game for a bit, let it quiet down in my skull, and start tackling the next game on my list of “must beat in 2013,” which is probably going to be Silent Hill 2.

That said, on with the further musings.

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Window Frames

I remember fondly changing the color of the window frame in Final Fantasy VII from that default blue to a soft green to a zany gradient-inspired explosion of rainbow colors and loving it for the remainder of Cloud’s journey to take down Sephiroth. I wish more games allowed for fun, optimal customization like this. Now, in Chrono Cross, you can’t change the color of your dialogue box, but you can find special frames to replace the standard one. Personally, most of them are ugly as heck, but I did try out the My Favorite Martian and Shellfish frames for a tiny bit, but eventually switched back to something less eye-busting. It’s more fun finding the frames than using them, but it’s nice to the have option nonetheless.

Money

For the most part, money is useless in Chrono Cross. You acquire it with every battle, but you barely spend any of it, and I suspect that, even if you tried, you’d find difficulty in emptying your pockets completely. I wish I had written down how much I had by the end of the game, but it was probably in the 120,000 to 150,000 range, and when you consider that most Elements cost less than 500, with the highest going for maybe around 3,000, well…you have plenty of money to splurge on other things. If only other things existed or were worth it. Which leads me to our next topic of discussion…

Forging/Disassembling

In certain towns, you can speak to blacksmiths who can help forge weapons, armor, and accessories for Serge and his companions. Later on, you also get an item to allow you to do this out on the overworld map. To forge something, you need some a paltry sum of money (see above) and the correct components, and then boom, you have a new thing. Some components are harder to come by, like mythril and rainbow shell, but for the most part, you can make a lot of stuff just using items won from battle. The long and short of this all though is that these weapons and armor are not worth going the extra mile, and some are actually found in various dungeons. There are a few good accessories to make though. Disassembling breaks down weapons, armor, and accessories you’re not using into components, but you’re better off saving them for when you need to equip a new character you haven’t used yet with gear.

Component trading

Um…I have never even attempted to figure this out. Basically, you trade a certain number of Element levels for things like eyeballs, feathers, and scales. Again, just doesn’t seem worth the effort, and trading in useful Elements for components you can earn in battle which are only used for forging items, which I just mentioned are not needed…well, I…wait. What was I saying again? Um, just skip this.  There are two of these trader types, anyways, so they are easy to miss. The first appears in both Guldove and Termina (Another), and the other is in Zappa’s house in Termina (Home).

New Game+

I don’t do many New Game+, mostly because nowadays I just don’t have the time. Though some games like Borderlands 2 really make it worth the effort, offering more things to see and do and become. Chrono Trigger has New Game+, but I’ve not gone back since I beat it last year, and I doubt I will try the New Game+ in Chrono Cross.

I love this RPG, truly I do–it’s just I don’t see what the point is other than viewing alternate endings. Sure, now is a great time to go back and get all the characters you missed out on during your first run because you picked Kid over Leena or Nikki over Guile, but as I lamented earlier this week, those side characters are pretty thin personality-wise. The game will play out the same way–until the ending, depending on when you fight the TimeDevourer–so that’s not very exciting to see all over, though you can speed up the gameplay to fast-forward cutscenes and so on. Let me take that one step further and fast forward us over to YouTube to watch all the different endings and save us hours upon hours.

I suspect I will return to Chrono Cross some time down the line, but not for a long while. Couple of years, at least. And when I do, I’ll probably just play it again from the beginning on a blank save slot–because that’s how I roll. I’m thrilled to have finally experienced it as fully as I could, but now I need to move on and let this experience reside quietly in my brain until something stirs it from its slumber. When that time comes, someone please remind me to ditch Kid early on and see what world-traveling life with fishing girl-next-door Leena is like. Okay, okay…I’ll give Poshul a fair chance, too.

Slaughter the bourgeois with speed in Proletarian Ninja X

It’s probably a really good thing that I don’t follow game jams too closely, especially after they end. Instead, I pick up a name or two of an interesting title to check out from some other source (usually Indie Statik), do so, play for a bit, write a thing, and happily move on. Otherwise, these things are like bottomless pits, and you could spend days trying them all out to see which ones click and which ones sink. Truthfully, I had intended to look at more creations from Ludum Dare 26, after enjoying Gods Will Be Watching and TOOM, but then I blinked, and here we are now looking at games from the next game jam session: Ludum Dare 27. Really, where does the time go?

First up is Proletarian Ninja X. It is 1930, and capitalists seem to have taken over Earth. You are the Proletarian Ninja X, and your mission is to kill every single one of them. There’s a problem though; your “kill list” is as long as I am tall, and you only have 10 seconds total to kill all the fat cats in the room. Left-clicking with your mouse moves the ninja and kills a snootypant when next to them, and right-clicking throws a shuriken with deadly intent. All the rich have enlightened cones that show where they are looking, and if they spot you or another dead body, it’s game over. Thankfully, it’s very Super Meat Boy-like in starting you over again quickly, so while you might make many mistakes, it is easy to learn from them.

Everything about Proletarian Ninja X is amazingly polished. Evidently, deepnight has participated in game jams before with many successes, and it shows. In fact, I’ve already played one of their (his? her?) games before: Last Breath from Ludum Dare 22. Anyways, moving the ninja from room to room and over desks is easy and tight, the sound effects are wonderfully pleasing, especially when you kill a rich fella, and the pixelated art style fits very well for all that mass murder. That 10 seconds really makes every action count, and you will quickly learn this, as the difficulty seems to ramp up on like the third room. I got to the fifth room and gave up after failing to chop all those high and mighty to bits fast enough without getting caught. This is no Mark of the Ninja (or even Super Ninja Slash), where you can wait almost indefinitely to make your move, but I think the time restraint forces you to try different tactics and makes that final kill all the more rewarding.

I’m looking forward to popping back into this later, and I could totally see this evolving into a full-fledged title. Though I’d like to see some larger rooms with a longer time limit, maybe 30 seconds or so, just to allow for some hesitation and pre-planning. Either way, really good stuff. Always fun to give the upper class their just desserts.

Friendly fire is not be tolerated in Battlefield 3, so they say

When it comes to war-based videogames, I’ve always kept my distance. This is a twofer: a severe disinterest in using a digital gun modeled after a real-life version and shooting a digital person modeled after a real-life counterpart, and stories that all seem to blend together, usually constructed around the ideas of straight-up terrorism and accented patriotism. It’s not that I don’t love the country I live in, it’s just that I don’t love it enough to want to blast open someone’s face with an M16A4 and then high-five my buddy and toss back a beer.

In all honesty, I can count the number of interactions I’ve had with war-based videogames on a single hand. First, I once dabbled in Battlefield 1942 back in my summers off during the college days, as a friend then constantly had it running at his house, and all you ever had to do was sit down in front of the computer and start playing. I was never any good, but we always had a laugh when trying to fly a plane only to end up crashing three seconds after takeoff. Think I also watched some friends play SOCOM. Then there was that time I tried out the demo for…um, it was a Call of Duty game on the Xbox 360, but I really don’t remember which one. There was snow and falling in snow and maybe infiltrating an airbase of some kind. Maybe Modern Warfare 2? And my third dip into the political warfare pool has been with Battlefield 3, given out for free the other month to PlayStation Plus members.

I found it to be a mindless, but educational experience. As well as reconfirming. Battlefield 3‘s single-player campaign is both traditional and not; the story it tells is generic “save the world from the bad guys” stuff, with you know who playing their respective roles, but its narrative structure will toss your mind overboard. You begin at the end, playing as Staff Sergeant Henry Blackburn in hot pursuit of a man behind some terrorist attacks. However, you then hop back to eight months before all this goes down, investigating a possible improvised explosive device in Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan. Things happen from there, and eventually you end up playing as a couple other characters, some shadier than others: Sgt. Jonathan “Jono” Miller, a M1 Abrams tank operator deployed in Tehran; Lt. Jennifer “Wedge” Colby Hawkins, an F/A-18F Super Hornet Weapon Systems Officer; and Dimitri “Dima” Mayakovsky, a Russian GRU operative. These side stories all eventually form a bigger picture. Levels are varied in location and objective, but more or less, other than driving a tank or flying a Super Hornet, you are running down a corridor, shooting enemies until they fall down.

So, the biggest thing I learned from my short time with Battlefield 3, and probably all other realistic-looking first-person shooters, is that I would make a terrible soldier. Now, it is common knowledge that my eyesight is worsening every day, but I got new glasses last year, upping my ability to see things father away much clearer. However, in a game with super realistic graphics and lighting and a lot of shadows, I had a hard time deciphering friend from enemy, often shooting a team member thinking they were evil. When you shoot a friendly person, a message pops up: FRIENDLY FIRE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED! This would alert me to my mistake, and I’d target somebody else. Further down in the mission, I’d get the message again. Rinse, shampoo, lather, whatever…and so on. Evidently, if you cause too much friendly fire damage, you’ll fail the mission, but I was never that consistent. To me, it felt like a warning that was never acted upon. That said, I’m glad I was allowed to get by with so many blind bullet mistakes because otherwise I might never have made it out of those darker levels.

Oh, and I’m not afraid to admit it: I played the game on Easy difficulty. That’s what it defaulted to, and so I kept it. Considering how fast you lose health and can frak a mission, I doubt I’d have gotten very far on a higher difficulty. I’ve not yet–and probably never will–touched the multiplayer aspect of Battlefield 3. Some wars just can’t be won.

It’s hard to stay alive in a horror-ridden basement

I love trading cards, and I mostly blame Magic: The Gathering for it, but this affection traces back further than that to when I was a wee lad, collecting Fleer baseball and Marvel cards with a vigor I’ve never since seen again. I still have much of my collection stashed away in boxes and binders, but have mostly fallen away from collecting cards due to the cost these days and the fact that, part of the fun, is trading X and Y for Z with other collectors. Alas, I can count the number of real-life friends I have on one blender-mangled hand, and none of them are down with this type of lifestyle.

That all said, Steam now has trading cards, and while I still don’t fully understand how the system works, I find it fascinating nonetheless. Also, with these being digital trading cards, I no longer have to worry about accidentally bending or nipping them, as well as how to store them safely amongst everything else crowding up my studio space. Basically, you play a specific game, and a new trading card is added to your inventory roughly every 30 minutes. However, you can only earn so many, say 5 out of 9 cards, and thus have to either trade with other players or sell/buy cards online. Once you complete a set, you can craft a badge which gets you some background art, new emoticons, discounts on other Steam games, and XP to level up. It’s an odd meta game that I have a hard time ignoring. Thankfully, I haven’t gone full tilt yet, selling only one duplicate for $0.27 and sitting on it while I figure out my plan of attack.

I was able to give Grinding Down long-standing compadre Greg Noe some of my extra cards from The Binding of Isaac, allowing him to craft his first badge. It was both exciting and not. Like when you’re seven, and you are watching your best friend opening his birthday gifts. I believe he has some Stacking cards for me, too, but last time we attempted to trade the system kept glitching out. Another time, me hopes. I’m also pretty close on completing all the cards for Super Meat Boy.

Anyways, even though I got all the cards that I possibly could to drop from The Binding of Isaac, I’ve been playing a lot of it lately. Like, first to relax and just mindlessly see how far I can go, and then immediately after try my hardest to actively reach the end. Unfortunately, I’ve still not gotten past the Depths, but I feel like I’m getting better with every run. However, getting far actually requires a ton of luck, in that certain items will be more beneficial than others. Noe mentioned that a friend of his beat it on his first run, to which I replied, “Fuck him.” Trust me. When I beat The Binding of Isaac on my 157th run, now that will sound impressive.

Bosses that I just can’t seem to grok:

• Widow
• Pin
• Chub

But it’s not actually the bosses that often slow me down or bring my flight of fancy to a grinding halt. Just your day-to-day room enemies are enough to give you grief if you don’t know how to handle them or can’t hit the keys fast enough, and I particularly hate entering a room to find it filled with charger maggots, hoppers, knights, keepers, and globins. On the other hand, I’m a pro at dealing with flies and piles of poo.

Hopefully, luck will be with me one day soon, giving me the best items from the get-go and opening a clear path to Mom. If I can just beat The Binding of Isaac once, I will feel a great wealth of accomplishment, because it really isn’t a simple task. I do have to wonder if I’d be any better at the game using a controller, but I don’t think, unlike Hotline Miami, another tough title requiring quick reflexes, that it offers gamepad support.