Monthly Archives: August 2008

Can I Rewind To Before Last Tuesday? I Want To Change My Lunch.

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My net connection was out yesterday, so I couldn’t catch up on the Rock Band releases until today, and I picked up the new songs this week (SOAD and some other random guys). Since they’re all ‘metal’, they were a bit more difficult than your average songs, and I failed to 100% any of them. I’d hate to see what they’re like on Expert…

And I also bought Braid on XBLA today. There was a lot of positive hype about it on the forums, and…they’re exactly right. It’s a profoundly different game in that it initially looks and plays like a Super Mario Bros-ish platformer, but at it’s heart it’s really a fiendish puzzle game. You have to collect jigsaw puzzle pieces in each level, but many of them require some trickery to reach, and the trick is that you can manipulate time and have to do so in all sorts of different ways.

You can rewind time, which is useful not just for undoing deaths and mistakes but is sometimes necessary just to revert back to a certain state once you’ve done something else, like picked up one of the keys or opened one of the doors that glow green (a sign that they’re unaffected by time effects). There are also world-specific effects, like one where time is affected by your own movement and only proceeds forward when you move right, and rewinds when you move left. There, you can’t simply wait for enemies to move out of your way because they won’t move until you move.

It’s a hard game too, where many of the pieces look like they’re totally impossible to reach, even after you’ve fiddled with the time effects for a bit. But that just makes it all the more satisfying when that “eureka!” moment hits and it suddenly makes perfect sense. I’ve fully completed World 2 so far, but the rest are going to take a bit more thinking…

The Moon Is Full Of Surprises

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I’m on to the last chapter now of Paper Mario: TTYD, as Chapter 7 turned out to be pretty short and I finished it off in one go tonight. It was a fairly simple revisit-each-previous-area quest to find someone, and then a trip to the moon to infiltrate the X-Naut base. The weirdest part here was encountering another Thwomp in the base, upon which a quiz show broke out…

Before going on, I think I’m going to grind xp a bit (I’m still a few levels below the recommended point), and do a few other things like climbing the wrestling ladder again and doing the Pit of 100 Trials, since I suspect this will pretty much be the point of no return.

Wandering Over To Hawaii For A Couple Hours

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Spurred by a forum post, I also dusted off Test Drive Unlimited for a bit tonight. I’ve already done all of the challenges in it, but there were a handful of cars that I hadn’t bought or driven much yet, so I just casually drove around the island for a bit in each one. And by “casually” I mean “tore through at 150+ MPH”…

There were about 8 cars I hadn’t bought yet, and I thought there’d be more, but I guess I never did buy any of the add-on vehicle packs for it. As tempting as that might be, it’s a bit late for it now alas. Ah well, I just hope they’re working on a TDU2.

Pow, Straight To The Moon

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I got back to Paper Mario: TTYD today and finished off Chapters 5 and 6 in one shot. The most notable bit of this stretch was a segment where you solve a few mysteries on a train ride, right out of the old detective novels. Well, with less murder, this is a Mario game after all… It did turn into the usual bit of exploration and combat at the end, but at least it didn’t make me backtrack a half-dozen times like other chapters have.

I must be pretty close to the end now, as there’s only one more star to collect. For that, I apparently need to convince a village of Russian-like bob-ombs to shoot me out of their cannon…

Haven’t Seen Any Ghosts Yet Though

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Since I’m a sucker for SRPGs, I picked up Spectral Force 3 today. It’s kind of a mixed bag, though. The story may as well have been ripped straight out of Generic Fantasy Anime #83, right down to the cutscenes, mediocre voice acting, dialogue full of overwrought melodrama, etc.

It looks like there might be some decent depth to the combat system, though. Nowhere near, say, Disgaea’s crazy array of options, but there’s an emphasis on setting things up for combo attacks in different ways: assists, where you can get a nearby teammate to join in mid-attack; teamwork attacks, which seems to give another teammate an extra turn for the round; and battle formations, where the entire team attacks. The different levels of attacks (light, medium, heavy) can have different effects tied to them, so for example the medium attack might do elemental damage and the heavy attack might knock the enemy back two squares.

There’s a bit of a strategic part to it in that there are multiple kingdoms fighting each other over territories on a world map, and you have a friendship rating with each one and can help them attack other kingdoms or just hunt monsters in their lands. I’m not sure if there’s any real effect or long-term aspect to it other than just determining which areas of the map you can hunt in, though. You can even work for the ‘bad guys’ if you want, but again I’m not sure if there’s any real consequence to it.

The most annoying things so far are that exp is awarded mainly for kills, so you wind up with certain characters that leap ahead of the others (some exp is awarded for healing and buffing, and there’s a bonus exp pool to spend freely, but not nearly as much), and the healer you start out with is a bit tricky to use. Get him close enough to the others to cast, and he often winds up getting swarmed, and he has to stay alive for the combo attacks to work.

It’d probably satisfy you if you’re just itching for an SRPG, but it’s kind of pricey at the full $60. It just doesn’t feel polished enough to sit at that price point unless you’re a fanatic.

Simulating The Future

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I played around a bit more with rFactor today, seeing if I could simulate tomorrow’s GP race ahead of time. There were a couple problems, though:

1) FSOne 2007 is one of the best mods available for it, but it only has the 2007 teams, of course. I managed to hack together a slightly modified version that put the drivers on the right teams for this year, even if the bodywork and liveries are wrong, but close enough.

2) Finding the right settings. I increased the aggressiveness and AI level, but that just wound up creating pileups like the one I posted yesterday, so I toned it back a bit. I also had to turn mechanical failures off, or the entire field would eventually fall prey to engine or gearbox problems, even at the ‘normal’ setting.

So, with those solved, who does rFactor say is going to win tomorrow at the Hungaroring? The first run came up with Raikkonen first, Hamilton in third, and in second is…Kaz Nakajima? That seemed a bit off, and I discovered I’d forgotten to create a driver profile file for him, so it must have been using some high-skill default settings. After creating one and doing a second run, the top five were Massa, Hamilton, Raikkonen, Kubica, and Kovalainen. I guess I’ll find out how accurate it is tomorrow…

(Update: Well, at the halfway mark the first two places were right, but a couple of mechanical failures mixed things up and in the end the only right call was Raikkonen in third.)

You Would Have To Be Crazy To Drive One

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I experimented a bit with rFactor tonight, trying an all-AI race with the AI skill and aggressiveness cranked up quite a bit. Unfortunately, that tends to end badly in the first corner… I had to reduce the aggressiveness to 75% in order for them to start the race properly, but then two more pileups 10 laps later knocked everyone else out of the race and left me alone on the track.

(Plus: bonus Ferrari vs. tire action.)