Category Archives: Xbox

Peach Owes Me Bigtime Now

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As expected, I finished off both Braid and Paper Mario: TTYD today. Some of the later puzzles in Braid are fairly devious, but I wasn’t stuck for too long on most of them. There was one though, in world 5-4, that I had to get a hint for from a forum. I would never have solved it myself, since I wouldn’t have even thought of the trick necessary. The final world was fairly clever, with one long ‘chase’ sequence that winds up being the game’s big emotional reveal.

And the ending is…rather difficult to interpret. You can read in all sorts of metaphors about loss and guilt and experience, depending on your own perspective, but I’m not really enough of a smarty-man to fully evaluate it.

Paper Mario: TTYD took a bit longer than expected, and I almost failed to finish it since I wasn’t really well-prepared enough. Grinding levels turned out to be extremely slow, so I just barged ahead with the final chapter. It was full of the requisite puzzles that require you to exercise all of the skills and use all of party members you picked up along the way, of course, but at the end was a sequence of boss fights that depleted a few too many of my healing items. The final fight was fairly long and had two stages to it, and I wasn’t very confident of success at the midway point since I was almost completely out of items, but I just barely finished the boss off, with stats low enough that I probably would have only survived one or two more rounds. I had a similar problem with the GBA Mario & Luigi game, where I have a save right before the final boss but still haven’t beat him in the few attempts I tried.

But it’s over, at least, even if it’s a fairly traditional everything’s-back-to-normal Mario ending.

I Hate My Shadow Self

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Not much gaming tonight as I got caught up in watching the Olympics, so I just popped into Braid long enough to pick up another five or so puzzle pieces. World 5 is tricky in that reversing time causes a shadow copy of you to appear and go through the same actions you just rewound, so you have to help yourself by performing the second part of what you want to do, rewind, and then go perform the first part and try to sync up with your clone.

The goal this weekend will be to finish Braid (shouldn’t take much longer), finish Paper Mario: TTYD (on the last chapter), and…okay I’m not quite close enough to finish The Witcher, but I should at least get back to it.

Edit: This entry seems to be attracting Google searches about defeating the World 5 level Lair, in which case I suggest: make the shadow do all the work.

Enough Of This And I’ll Be A Time Lord

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I finished off worlds 3 and 4 in Braid tonight, after a few more “aha!” moments. Platforms and enemies that seemed to be completely pointless at first glace often turn out to be the key to the puzzle in hindsight. I wish I could say more, but it’s a game that really should be played without any spoilers. Completing a world also lets you piece together a simple jigsaw puzzle for that level, creating scenes that will probably turn out to be meaningful once more of the story is revealed.

I also tried out the demo for Pixeljunk Eden on the PS3. It’s an…interesting game, even if I barely had any idea what I was doing. Too interesting for me, probably, as I never do well with games with weird control schemes like the tethered swinging around in this one.

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…

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.

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.

Next Up: Mother Goose

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No gaming yesterday, as my arms were still a bit sore, so there was a bit of catching up today.

The first episode of American McGee’s Grimm was released today, for free within the first 24 hours. It’s a good thing too, since I certainly wouldn’t pay for it. It claims to go for a more ‘mature’ retelling of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, but it comes off as taking the juvenile interpretation rather than an adult one; fart jokes abound. The gameplay is a slightly different take on the Katamari games, where you spread filth and taint the objects around you in an ever-growing sphere, gaining the ability to taint larger and larger objects the more you’ve already touched. It gets rather repetitive and is trivially easy, though.

Fortunately, it was canceled out by Geometry Wars 2, which is fantastic. It has six different modes now, all of which play very differently: in Deadline you have infinite lives, but have to score as highly as possible within a three minute time limit; in King you can only shoot from within protective bubbles which fade away after you enter them, forcing you to try and clear paths between them and run for it; Evolved is largely the same as the original game, with a few new enemy types and other minor differences; Pacifism takes your guns away and has you killing enemies indirectly with the explosion of passing through gates; Waves throws, well, waves of lined-up enemies at you, forcing you to blast holes in them to avoid getting overrun; and Sequence takes you through a series of battles set up in specific patterns. They have to be unlocked in order, but it didn’t take very long.

The other major difference is that the multiplier increases by picking up ‘geoms’ left behind by destroyed enemies, which makes you keep moving to pick them up, and the multiplier doesn’t reset when you die, so scores are higher overall than they were in the original. The achievements are somewhat saner now too, and I’ve actually managed to get a bunch of them already. And there’s a four-player multiplayer mode, though it’s local-only.

I may not be very good at it yet, but it’s a big improvement over the original and well worth it.

Toys For Robots

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I finished off the new levels in the first N+ pack tonight. Again, most were fairly easy, but a few did give me a bit of trouble. Especially “Dances With Rockets” — I am apparently not good at being chased by large missiles. Hopefully it won’t be long before the other packs arrive.

I also spent a bit more time in Hellgate: London again, though this time I was looking for something specific. My drone has been using the same weapon for ages now, and the amount of damage it does isn’t really all that great. The drone’s job is mainly to tank though, and I deal all the real damage, so I thought it would be better for it to have a ‘utility’ weapon instead. I’m already hitting enemies with the Ignite effect with my weapon, but it would be useful to have the Phased effect as well, so I’ve been looking for a good weapon to do phased damage, with a strong phase attack rating.

After a bit of searching, I tried a couple, and I think for now I’m going to try using a ‘phase cannon’ grenade-launcher style weapon on my drone. The range is a bit short, but it has a very high phase attack strength and splash damage. The main problem now is fitting it into the rest of the drone’s equipment; after adding a couple skill points and some free stat points to the drone, I was able to squeeze it into its existing equipment, but the stat feed requirements are supposed to be overhauled in the (hopefully) upcoming 2.0 patch, so I may have to rearrange the equipment yet again. Fortunately, the patch will add a stat retrainer that will reset the drone’s stats too, so I can respend its stat points and avoid wasting any on unnecessary stats.

If 2.0 ever arrives…

Ninja Needs Gold, Badly

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There was an N+ level pack released today, and fortunately they’re an easier set of levels, as I’d hit a difficulty wall in the standard set of single-player levels. And there are two more packs on the way, also pretty cheap, so it’s a good deal overall.

I also tried out the trial of 1942: Joint Strike, but was rather underwhelmed. You only get to try out a single mission, and it went straight from being relatively bland and easy to a nearly game-ending bullet hell as soon as I reached the first boss. Pass.

What’s Another Dozen Songs?

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I couldn’t resist getting the Who pack for Rock Band today (I’m going to need a bigger hard drive at this rate), and the songs are pretty good overall. The two most notable bits were the start of Baba O’Riley, which is completely silent for a good minute or two on the guitar track, and Eminence Front, which has a hell of a lot of notes even on medium difficulty.