I Bring Nothing to the Table

The game they were mentioning in the podcast was Gears of War 2. I agree with that being kind of cool, but at the same time, we were all trying to really push ourselves and play the most challenging version of the game. Even if Simon had more experience, I still don’t think we would have been able to make it through the whole campaign on expert, it’s just too hard.

The game is $60 on xbox, $50 on PC, but it’s not as short as it seems. There may only be four campaigns, but you’d be missing the point if you thought that was all it had to offer.

Valve has gone on and on (and so did 1UP Yours) about the AI Director being an integral part of the game experience. Sure, there are only 4 campaigns (five maps each, so twenty levels), but no two playthroughs are identical. Item locations, zombie placement, even boss zombie placement is all set by the AI Director who analyzes current player healths, ammo levels, difficulty level, and how well you’ve been doing so far, ensuring a dynamic playback experience.

Also worth mentioning is that even just playing the first campaign, No Mercy, I’ve found myself thoroughly enthralled by a game and feel its $50 price tag is well warranted. If this was all that was there, I would play it ad infinitum (not literally, other games will pop up soon), but it’s not. Three more campaigns whose length will be extended by my refusal to play below Advanced and strong desire to conquer each on Expert (achievement points are great motivators) and a mode I haven’t even talked about will extend this.

That mode: Versus Mode. In versus mode you have two teams of four. Four are the survivors, four are the mutated infected. The object is for the survivors to do just what they do in the single-player cmapaign, only this time they’re being dogged by actual players instead of the AI. The players will be respawned on a timer and are able to antagonize the surivors using coordinated attacks. I’ve yet to play it, but it looks promising.

I think it’s more than worth $50, but I’ve heard some complaints from reviewers about it. My guess is that they were playing on Normal or Easy to try and get through as fast as possible for the review, giving a total playtime somewhere near three or four hours. I’d love to see all those editors and reviewers try that on Expert. Without some serious experience, that’s not possible.

It’s the second day of the zombie apocalypse.

No zombie can stand against Chicago Ted. How long does it take to turn after infection? Two weeks? Two days? 2.5 hours!?

That’s some of the flavor text littered around the safe rooms in L4D to add to the atmosphere and, despite never seeing another human being in the game, they effectively make us all feel like the world is actually lived in. Like there just might be other immune survivors roaming around, seeking help too.

Day 2 impressions is kind of a misnomer, since I played at midnight of launch day and at night the same day, but who’s really counting? Hasn’t society been wiped out by the Horde already?

I was actually able to play with my friends this time, but since some of us were newer to the experience than others and we actually wanted to pass missions, we dumbed down the difficulty to the penultimate difficulty level: Advanced. While still hard and rough to get through to Mercy Hospital (in the appropriately named campaign: No Mercy), I must admit that not being incapacitated and killed after two hits from a tank kind of irks me as a person who played many hours on Expert. I guess I’ll have to continue to build up my skills.

The final two missions that I’d yet to witness were both quite cool. The hospital proper and the rooftops both offered numerous challenges, especially the rooftops.

After fighting through wave after wave of zombies, it becomes time to take on a tank. This process is repeated three times. Fighting one tank is bad enough, thank you very much. Fighting it on the roof of a 30+ storied hospital is worse. Our first attempt featured me getting knocked by the tank, no big deal on our difficulty level, until I saw that there was no longer any floor below me as he had knocked me clear off the side of the building. perspective flashed to an exterior shot of the hospital as my body was flung clear. There is no resurrection on the roof. RIP Zoey.

Many unsuccessful attempts later, we found ourselves at the final tank. My friend SimonFrancis was dead, smashed by a tank. We silently thanked him for his strategy that helped us get this far, but grit our teeth with the knowledge that grief doesn’t kill tanks, bullets do. As EricBill (DarekLouis’s friend) and I ran around the rooftops pausing to shoot at the behemoth, I heard a silent cry from DarekLouis.

“Smoker.”

Little did we know that he meant to say “HEY GUYS I’VE BEEN NABBED BY A SMOKER!”

Only once Eric and I noticed the Tank had been felled did we spot DarekLouis having the last of his life choked out of his poor body. DarekLouis, I didn’t know you well, but it was great to have you aboard. You always kept me from trying to snipe witches in the head. A wise idea.

The copter began its descent. EricBill was closer to the pad and began to make a run for it. The zombies swarmed him. I ran up the ramp behind, shooting zombies as I ran, but full of the knowledge that stopping means death. The Horde wants brains. We want escape. Conflict is inevitable.

As I rush past EricBill I beat away some zombies, shoot a few, jump and securely crouch in the helicopter. I shoot some of the zombies surrounding EricBill, but the damage is too much, he goes down. Before I can hop out and pick up the incapacitated EricBill, the copter decides to high tail it. I am the only survivor. The only one left to tell the tale. EricBill, you were good at finding new explosives, but freedom and safety come at the cost of running away sometimes. Sure, flight before fight isn’t glorious, but dead men tell no tales. Your thirst for battle was your end.

The copter flew away, the screen faded to black.

In loving memory of:

unarmed_gunman (SimonFrancis)
itsdareklol (DarekLouis)
strike (EricBill)

flashed on the screen. It’s brilliant, just like a movie whose casualties were my fellow players. The cast list followed.

ElCapitan BSC as Zoey
itsdareklol as Louis (deceased)
unarmed_gunman as Francis (deceased)
strike as Bill (deceased)

Some stats came by, many of which I led, but many of which I was second or third.

Finally, the closing message I leave to you, scrolled up on screen as we all laughed:

4,907 zombies were hurt in the making of this film.

Hey Dan, did you stay up until around 0300 today playing Left 4 Dead after it went live last night?

Uh…yeah…

But oh man, where to begin?

Valve does not rush a product. They don’t ever release a game that hasn’t been thoroughly playtested and optimized for consumption. It’s why the L4D demo is so brilliant, it allowed them to take a look at the last few things that needed to be tweaked and then release accordingly. Take the difficulty level. There was quite a bit of outcry about the difficulty of the computer version being far too easy compared to the console version. In fact, I’d been refusing to play any levels that were lower than the highest difficulty, Expert. Let’s just say that last night we were stuck on the second level for somewhere around two hours, endlessly being mauled by the zombie hordes.

All the stops were pulled out on this one. The first level used to be devoid of tanks and witches. I’m pretty sure we got rocked by a witch right at the start. Placement is BRUTAL. The tanks just rock everyone’s socks off, the only real valid way to kill them being to molotov and RUN LIKE HELL! It’s so tough that it’s super fun. Who can resist trying to kill these zombie bastards?

Then there was the greatest loop that Valve could possibly throw us. After a particularly difficult part in the second level involving waiting for a door to open and a Gatling gun, the second level usually had a safe room directly following it. Imagine our surprise as we limped into…any other room. They moved the safe room outside to the pawn shop. Naturally, we were rocked over and over again until finally, on the last playthrough, this one guy and I were the only two survivors alive and we scrambled into the pawn shop screaming as Hunters and Smokers chased us, my heart beating at an intense 1000 BPM all the while. The tension is so masterfully created it’s ridiculous.

The other huge heartbeating moment for me (not common in video gaming for me, by the way, I’m generally more sturdy, having seen just about everything) was within the third level (the farthest we got out of the five in the first campaign). There was a Tank and we accidentally aroused its ire. I threw a molotov at it, setting it on fire (and one of the other survivors, but his life was forfeit after seeing the Tank anyway, and began hightailing it back to the start, closing doors behind me all the way. I could hear the Tank lumbering behind me until it died. At this point, I was the only survivor left alive. I’d climbed jumped down the lift, but now I had to get myself properly to the other survivors to rescue them since they’d all respawned in a room nearby. As I make my way back up the lift, I hear not just the Hunter growl, but the Smoker fanfare. I’m thinking “I’m fucked…” After my heart just exploded out of my body running in abject terror from the tank, now I had to face these two zombies who could incapacitate me in one hit via pounce or tongue and cause us to restart.

I first spotted the Hunter. My group kept imploring me to ignore them both and just try to rez them, but I knew that if I did, they would get me, without a doubt, and make it all in vain. After a dodge and some great rifle fire, I’d dispatched the Hunter, but the Smoker used that time to get good position on me. He was above me where I’d never be able to see him until it was too late. Time to make a break for the hole in the floor where I would find my compatriots. Running, jumping, falling through the hole, my partners said that the tongue just barely missed nabbing me as I fell through the final hole in the floor and freed them. It was exhilarating.

One last thing about my first night of playing: Valve is great at using the visual medium to tell a story. In most safe rooms you can find little notes from other people who have passed through warning you to evacuate the city, looking for family, claiming that there’s no survival, assigning blame for the plague. It’s brilliant.

Yesterday as I left work, I saw a license plate in front of me. It read Zombied.

I tell ya, it’s been a good long while since I’ve had to write a post that’s not really about baseball and it’s got me rather at a loss of what to do. Instead of focusing on one topic today, instead let’s look at a variety of things going on that I care about:

Peter Molyneux has got a problem. You see, he’s one of the movers and shakers in video game design and his ideas have more or less shaped the industry as a whole. For example, while you can argue that Ultima or Fallout did it first, Peter and his boys at Lionhead popularized the whole good vs. evil aesthetic that so pervades the medium right now with his landmark title Black & White. You can’t really argue that his game made it cool for the visual look of a character to change dynamically with alignment that Bioware eventually used in their epics Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect.

The problem though, comes when you realize that Peter is more of an ideas man. Black & White sold tons of copies, but was generally tepidly received or remembered due to its feel as more of a sandbox game or a tech demo. Its unfocused nature. The idea was gold, the game wasn’t there. Fable was promised to be an epic story where things you did from day 1, like planting a tree, would radically change the future. It didn’t. The list of things promised for Fable that weren’t delivered was so long that it became a media point to say that what Peter says doesn’t necessarily get into the game, no matter how enthusiastic and brilliant he may sound saying it.

Today I’ll be picking up my pre-order of Fable 2. Will it satisfy or will it fall short of his promises? You can be sure that I’ll let you know here once I have a solid conclusion.

Also on the table for today: I tried adding some Just Bunches to my Honey Bunches of Oats and I’d have to say the result was stellar. The addition of more bunches really makes the cereal better without overpowering the other elements. A great idea, but not one I’ll be repeating by buying another box of Just Bunches in the future.

Little Big Planet, if you hadn’t already heard, was delayed until next week due to a controversial music track included in the game. The game had, I should say, a track in which passages of the Qur’an were recited in the background. Muslims claim that it is offensive to include passages in the Qur’an in art, so Sony decided to push back the game’s release date and Media Molecule, the game devs, removed the track from the discs. Some say that Muslims need to learn to chill out if they want to be respected in the global, free world, others say that they’re in the right to ask that their religious texts not be used. I agree more with the former, but I also understand why Sony did what they did and I do think that they at least made a good business decision, since they get pretty good sales in the Middle East.

Yoshinori Kitase has huge shoes to fill. As the producer of Final Fantasy XIII he’s looking at doing a job last held by Horonobu Sakaguchi in Final Fantasy X. Ok, Sakachuchi was technically the executive producer of that game, but with no other producers announced for XIII, I’m gonna come out and call him the EP.

Kitase had this to say (in this IGN article) about the new game and directions they’re taking:

Kitase spoke about carrying the Final Fantasy torch and commented on how this game will be unique, yet familiar. “In the grand scheme of things, Final Fantasy XIII is probably very different and new from anything you’ve seen in the series before. But, everybody on the team has played XII and the previous titles and there is an unseen connection there among the series.” He then went on to tell a story about a conversation with Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series. In it he asked Sakaguchi about what makes a Final Fantasy game a Final Fantasy game. Jokingly, Sakaguchi told him that as long as you have white text on a blue background, you should be fine. Final Fantasy XIII doesn’t have that, but Kitase says it’s still a continuation.

As funny as it is to mention the blue background thing, I think that a new direction is not a bad idea. FF games have, quite frankly, been getting a little stale for me of late. I worry a bit about XIII since its director is the same one from X-2 (Motomu Toriyama), but I’d like to see them stray.

One of the other cool things about the game was the mention of a different cast take with the character code-named Lightning. She supposedly is going to resist forming a party and try to be a loner. Hopefully she’s not a female version of one of those emo Squeenix protagonists, but it’s good to see that they won’t be partying from the get-go.

There’s one huge fact about the Xbox 360 avatar system that makes me want to tell Microsoft to shove it: having to pay for stuff to outfit your avatar. Not content with milking money from users in every other way, Microsoft has decided that avatar customization will not be a free affair. What utter crap.

Many a developer has come out saying that console exclusives just don’t make any sense in this new, expensive game development environment. That being said, I’m pretty sure no one on earth outside of Square Enix could possibly have predicted that Final Fantasy XIII will be simultaneously launching on both the Xbox 360 and PS3 in North America and Europe (whenever the game launches).

To help give this mind-blowing announcement some perspective, the last main series Final Fantasy game (that wasn’t a remake or port) to be released on a non-Sony platform was Final Fantasy VI for the SNES back in 1994.

It should also be noted that FF XIII will NOT be multi-platform in Japan. It’s only coming out on the 360 in the states because of the substantial US install base compared to the eastern market.

Remember, stay tuned to this blog for more E3 updates that I deem interesting or important as they become available.

If you read my 8-bit All-Stars feature you know I love me some Mega Man 2. There was just something sublimely perfect about that game with its polished level design and great boss battles.

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a real sequel to a Mega Man game. The last canonical MM game was MM 8 for the PSX in 1997, with the X series taking over with about eight installments that have also stopped coming out.

Imagine the world’s surprise when Mega Man 9 all of a sudden showed up on an ESRB classification website. Could the beloved franchise be making a return in all of the splendor of the current generation’s technological advances? And then we saw the first screenshots and trailer…

Cue some controversy. I’d say that a large number of dedicated MM fanatics were happy with this new direction, but many were perplexed by Capcom’s choice to go way old school with this new installment. Personally, I’m a fan of the new direction. When you look at the disappointments that have been the more recent MM games, it seems clear that a conscious effort to get back to the roots is just what the series NEEDS. Not to mention the fact that old school, 8-bit Mega Man music is great.

It’s not exactly a straight NES-style game though, it does have some technological advances. If you look closely you’ll see that the game does have some fancy-pants effects that weren’t possible on the NES. Personally, I’ll be happy if the game manages to not drop framerate when a bunch of enemies appear onscreen.

Another neat little change in the Mega Man conventions is that MM 9 will feature the first female robot. Splash Woman is the first non Man robot in series history. Some purists are very anti-Splash Woman, but I’m pro-female evil robot rights.

If I’m not mistaken, Mega Man 9 is slated for a Fall release on WiiWare, Xbox Live, and PSN.

SPOILER ALERT: This review may contain story spoilers. Read at your own risk!

Sakaguchi’s new company Mistwalker has had its share of problems. For very perplexing reasons they chose to chiefly develop for the Xbox 360 with side development on the Nintendo DS. As a result, nothing they make for the home console, no matter how good, will ever sell all that well in their home country. His first 360 game, Blue Dragon, sold 200,000 copies in Japan, which may sound good at first, but when you look at Final Fantasy XII’s two million sales in Japan, a whole order of magnitude more, it suddenly doesn’t seem like Sakaguchi is getting a fair shake. In fact, both Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey are no better or worse than a typical Square Enix game, but their sales are typically much lower, with Lost Odyssey only selling around 100,000 in the Land of the Rising Sun.

So now that I’ve more or less made it clear that LO is about as good as any Final Fantasy game, lets delve a bit deeper into it, because there are some differentiating aspects that actually out-Final-Fantasy Final Fantasy.

The Story

Some of the greatest buzz about the release of Lost Odyssey revolved around the fact that its story was penned by the famed novelist Kiyoshi Shigematsu. You’d be correct to be skeptical about this, bringing in outside, famous talent does not make a great story by default. So, does it fall flat on its face? Yes and no. The actual, plot-driven story is nothing you haven’t seen before. It’s about as Final Fantasy, clichéd of a story as you can find with an evil retainer, sorcerer dude who takes over a country, blah blah blah. I was able to predict most of the twists, which was disappointing, but there the real allure to the story comes from two things: the permise and the short stories.

Let’s start with the premise:

The main character, Kaim, is an immortal. He’s been around, as of the start of the game, for a thousand years. This factors into gameplay in a rather neat way, but also makes Kaim and his fellow immortals very compelling characters (unfortunately the only ones of the bunch). Kaim also suffers from amnesia (ugh…RPG cliché #1), but this actually informs and enhances our brand new gameplay mechanic: short stories.

What happens when you have an author write your story? You end up with short stories in your game. Depending on what part of the game you are in and what part of the map you walk by, you will trigger one of Kaim’s lost memories. These play out as breaks in gameplay as you read these expertly written short stories illustrating the various themes of the game. This is basically hell for gamers like my buddy Phil who hate gameplay interruptions like cutscenes, but for me these great little stories really flesh out the characters that would otherwise be pretty generic.

Lost Odyssey succeeds because its storytelling methods are so innovative and far-reaching. While the plot itself and its resolution is more or less mundane, the idea that these characters have literally been around for a thousand years and bring with them maturity and characterization to go with it makes for a satisfying experience.

Something should be said about the non-immortal cast though. Aside from Jansen, the rogue-ish comic relief (in personality, not in class. He’s a black mage), the mortal characters range from lame to downright irritating. The wonder twins, clear ripoffs of Palom and Porom from Final Fantasy IV, are the spunky girl that we’ve seen way too often and the shy, quiet, ANNOYING boy that comes from anime. Tolten is the whiny, un-confident, whiny (it needs to be said twice) king-in-training and Sed is just the uninspired grizzled old guy, although he’s the best of the riffraff.

Gameplay

This isn’t anything that radically different from any other turn-based RPG. You have the usual spells and techniques, with two small wrinkles.

The first of these gameplay differences comes from equippable rings. These rings that you equip can add effects to your attacks, from added effectiveness to enemy types to elements or status effects. In order to activate these effects, you must hold a trigger and time the intersection of two rings. Perfect alignment leads to higher damage or more probable status effects.

Immortals make up the next significant gameplay change. Since none of the immortals can die, according to the story, none of them can really die in battle either. If an enemy manages to fell one of your immortal characters, they will go down for about two turns, then automatically resurrect with close to half of their health. If everyone in your party happens to be down at the same time, you do lose the battle, but it’s a pretty nice to know that if an immortal goes down you can just wait it out. Tied into the immortal system is the way that skills are allocated to immortals. Partying with mortals allows immortals to “Skill Link” and learn the specialty skills of the rest of their party. These skills can then be implemented by the immortals at any time once learned, even if the mortals aren’t in the battle with them.

Like I said earlier, everything else is what you’d expect from a turn-based RPG, no surprises there.

Graphics

If you thought that Sakaguchi did some beautiful work on the PS2, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The second of his 360 RPGs and the first to feature more realistic characters (Blue Dragon’s characters were more anime-like, created by Akira Toriyama), Lost Odyssey is about the most gorgeous game I’ve ever seen. I just got a hold of a new, large, 1080p-capable television, and let me tell you, it looks fantastic. Let me also say that it’s not perfect, especially due to the Unreal engine that’s so in vogue nowadays.

As an Unreal engine game, Lost Odyssey suffers from most of the same shortcomings of other games of its type. Load times are long, framerates are far, FAR from stable. The game frequently stutters and is sometimes unstable. In my 60 to 70 hours of gameplay, I had the game freeze on me at least twice. The beauty and flexibility of the Unreal engine comes at a real price, but at least its not like the typical dark, drab, brown shooters mostly put on the Unreal engine, there are some genuinely bright and colorful vistas and locales.

Sound

A close friend of Sakaguchi, Nobuo Uematsu composed the themes and music of Lost Odyssey, but he doesn’t do anything super-special in the score for this game. In fact, it’s more or less a forgettable soundtrack that I mostly kept turned down in favor of listening to my own music. Everything else is pretty crisp and clear, but the English voice cast is pretty boring and annoying. Lucky for you and anyone in auditory range, you can elect to listen to the Japanese voice cast, but you end up with odd lip syncing and subtitling since they are aligned to the English vocal track, not the Japanese one. This is disappointing to be in both video games and anime, since it means the subs cater to the dubs, meaning they aren’t translations, but transcriptions. The difference is subtle, but, like I said, disappointing.

Final Verdict

Final Fantasy XII was a pretty far departure from the typical Final Fantasy fare, with real-time combat, a different loot system, and a shift away from the more recent Final Fantasy narrative style. In a sense, Lost Odyssey is the true Final Fantasy XI. If that’s what you’re looking for, pick this game up. The concept and characterization of the immortals is spot on and the short stories really do flesh out the game’s story and make it stand apart. Lost Odyssey isn’t going to blow you away with its gameplay and story, it’s just gonna fill that RPG-shaped hole in your heart, especially if you only own an Xbox. While a bit lengthy for a rental, it’s more or less a one-playthrough event, so rent or buy used if this sounds appealing. It’s definitely a good game that’s worth playing if you can get your hands on it and love JRPGS.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled sports updates to bring you trailers of three Square Enix announced RPGs for the Xbox 360:

The first is The Last Remnant:

Next we have Star Ocean 4 (AKA Star Ocean: The Last Hope):

And last we have Infinite Undiscovery:

Of the three, The Last Remnant impresses and attracts me the most. Star Ocean has never really been a franchise that calls to me, but it also looks kind of neat. Infinite Undiscovery, on top of being an Action RPG (confirmed by IGN), seems to have pretty weak production values compared to the other two. Granted, Star Ocean didn’t really show any in-game footage, but its pre-rendered stuff looked better too. Maybe Infinite Undiscovery is always running in-engine?

All of these games are being released “For the Xbox,” but Square Enix has been relatively dodgy on the question of exclusivity with some games and I think they’ve even confirmed that PS3 versions would hit at some point with others (I’d have to go check and, well, I don’t care that much. The implications are clear though: Square Enix wants a greater market share. There could even be some Sakaguchi animosity hidden beneath their decision, since he’s more or less enjoyed a monopoly on the Xbox 360 JRPG market.

In other gaming news, Metal Gear Solid 4 comes out tomorrow! Two new MG Retrospectives have come out since I last wrote about them:

Part 4:

Part 5:

And last, some sports news:

Hanley Ramirez has finally been swinging that bat and knocking the ball over the fence. The past few games have seen his homerun count put him in the top 25, last I checked. Keep it up buddy.

This current series with the Phillies will be a vital test for the Marlins. With the Phils in 1st place, each game we lose will push us further away from the coveted top spot. We started out strong last night with a 5-4 win. Let’s keep it up for the next two.