2014 Game Completed Comics, #25 – Beyond Good & Evil HD

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Every videogame that I complete in 2014 will now get its very own wee comic here on Grinding Down. It’s about time I fused my art with my unprofessional games journalism. I can’t guarantee that these comics will be funny or even attempt to be funny. Or look the same from one to another. Some might even aim for thoughtfulness. Comics are a versatile form, so expect the unexpected.

Removed two more games from my Xbox 360

The title of this post says it all: Beyond Good and Evil HD and Torchlight got removed from my Xbox 360’s hard-drive space to help make room for future games and content I’ve already paid for, such as the remainder of Telltale’s second season of The Walking Dead, if they ever get around to releasing another episode. I think I ended up freeing around 2 GB of space, but I plan to tackle some more arcade titles I have sitting untouched for awhile to see if I can polish them off enough for me to consider to removable. Previously, I polished off Shadow Complex and then immediately uninstalled it. We can all blame this on my neurotic nature to use every oodle of storage space I have to its full potential.

For Torchlight, though I had long beaten the game back in 2011, I was sitting pretty at 11 out of 12 Achievements. The last one to unlock was called “Superstar” and requires you to “achieve maximum fame.” You mostly earn fame by defeating unique enemies in dungeons, and you can always tell these apart from regular grunts because they have names like Moggath the Dragonkicker and Sh’gorl the Darkstink. In short, you probably need to kill around 200+ unique monsters to hit this target, and my saved game showed that I had only killed, at that point, around 125. And so I grinded, which was not the most exciting task, but it was mindless enough, and I had plenty of potions and healing spells to keep me going. Only took a few hours of going at it and ignoring picking up new weapons, enchanting gear, and worrying about what skills to enhance and so on.

This also served to remind me that Torchlight II is much better than Torchlight, especially because I built a range character there with the ability to create random chaos whenever making a critical hit. It was much more taxing to grind as a melee character for the “Superstar” Achievement because it meant getting in close and taking more HP hits. Though I do like the idea of these “clicky” action RPGs on consoles; maybe I should look into Diablo III one of these days.

Next, I moved on to Beyond Good & Evil HD. Now, I played and completed the original Beyond Good & Evil on the PlayStation 2 a long time ago; in fact, it’s one of the first games I wrote about back when I got into writing about entertainment media on the side, over at my stupidly named Blogger site Game Beliefs. In 2011, a Cyber Monday sale for XBLA had the HD version of the game priced at $3.00, and I happily paid for it a second time, fondly remembering how many photos of strange wildlife I snapped during Jade’s journey to stop the DomZ from stealing away the inhabitants of Hillys. I played a little bit of the game then, and then nearly finished the whole thing a second time in June 2012 when I was permanently stuck on the couch for an entire weekend with really bad back pain. I got all the way to the end section and…well, just stopped. Not really sure why, but I guess my back got better and I was so excited to leave the couch that I just dropped everything off my plate and went elsewhere.

Anyways, the last section of Beyond Good & Evil HD basically involves some “reflect this light properly to open the door” puzzles, a spat or two of direct combat, some flying-but-on-rails ship battle, and a surprisingly difficult final boss. I don’t remember the final fight being so difficult last time, but I suspect the fact that I went into the fight with only a small number of health-healing items played a major part in its difficulty. Without spoiling what happens, the controls for Jade during combat get reversed, and you basically have a split second to hit the boss and/or dodge out of the way, and the reversed controls take some time to get used to. Took me several attempts, but I did it; I saved Hillys all over again. I missed unlocking four Achievements, but they didn’t seem like any fun–more grinding, and not in a do-able, mindless way–so I just watched the credits, appreciated the soundtrack once more, and removed the game entirely. Oh well. Bring on Beyond Good & Evil 2; that was a joke, by the way. That game is never becoming a real thing.

So that’s three games now played and polished off enough for me to feel okay with uninstalling and never looking back. I’ve got more to go after, but for now I at least have enough room for the next episode of The Walking Dead, which I think drops sometime in March. Whew.

To infinity and Beyond Good & Evil HD once again

Beyond Good & Evil was one of the first videogames I wrote about publicly during my first attempt at videogame journalism. That was…about four years ago. And the game itself came out in late 2003. So, like eight years later, thanks to a crazy good Cyber Monday sale, I happily tossed down $3.00 for Beyond Good & Evil HD, which is the same game that I played on the PlayStation 2 back in 2007, but now with a shiny coating of high definition. To me, it kinda looks the same, but that’s probably because I don’t have an HD TV and therefore can’t pinpoint the differences.

Well, there is Achievements now. Here’s the two I’ve popped so far:

Hovercraft (5G): Power up the hovercraft

Gamble King 1 (5G): Win 3 times in the coconut shell game against Peepers

I kind of forgot how much I loved this game. I love the short musical cues that play when you enter the lighthouse or when you discover a new item; I love how Latino AI Segundo pronounces Jade’s name as Yade; I love collecting photos of strange Hillys wildlife and earning money for them; I love getting emails on the fly; I love the Star Wars vibe that a culture of homo sapiens, rhino people, and sharkfaces can live in mutual harmony; I love the give-and-take relationship that is Jade and Pey’j. I love lots here.

That said, some parts haven’t aged well–such as mouth movements not being synched to spoken dialogue–but it’s easy to overlook this kind of stuff when the game is so welcoming and enchanting. It starts fast, and really doesn’t slow down unless you want it to. There’s races to win, looters to chase down, photos to take, and security buildings to infiltrate. I paused last night before starting the mission to rescue Double H and find out what went wrong on his last mission for the IRIS Network. That starts the sneaking stuff, which is a blast, but Tara and I had to give LEGO Harry Potter, Years 5-7 some attention for a bit. To further hit home how much I love me some Beyond Good & Evil, I was wishing the entire time LEGO Mr. Weasley and LEGO Tonks were putting out LEGO fire that I was back on Hillys, snapping photos and skipping across glimmering water.

However, I’m not looking forward to winning the pellet game against Francis for his Pearl. Not one bit.

But yeah, $3.00 for a game I already own and paid over $20.00 on years ago…yeah, it’s love. Shame on you if you didn’t pick this up on Cyber Monday. Shame, shame, shame.