The DSi got another half-decent download title recently, a little game called Ninja Karakuri Den, which is Japanese for Disgruntled Ninja Watchmaker. You play as… Ninja, I guess is his name, as he bounces around disappearing platforms, slashing gears to open the next stage exit, and occasionally dueling a robo-ninja boss. It’s pretty simple, but damn addicting, especially now that I’m getting the hang of when to use the special dash-slice thing. One thing’d been bothering me, though, on the top with the scoreboard, there was also a mysterious timer! Was it counting down my time limit? Clocking how long I spent in the game? How long my current session was? Well, glancing between my laptop and the DS, it finally dawned on me the game just has a clock display set to system time.

Man. RPG’s need that.

The only way to deal with vegans, really.

You know, it’s kind of surreal to have seen Scott Pilgrim turned into a major motion picture complete with a video game tie-in this year. I only really got into the whole thing fairly late, but I wouldn’t be among the people who heard about the movie and flocked to get the books. I had heard a lot of hype about the series being good on a forum I frequent (and really, the only forum I frequent) and I happened to notice a few of them on a higher shelf while I was trying to get my hands on the library’s only god-damned copy of Watchmen to re-read before that movie. Here’s an idea of what my expectations were going in: I thought Scott Pilgrim was the author’s name and everyone was going on about him alongside other indie comics. Well, I gave it a shot anyway, and ended up liking it. I can see why some people wouldn’t, what with the whole slacker self-glorification thing and constant Nintendo references. It’s basically a webcomic that debuted in print form first instead of being tossed up online then collected as a cash-in later.

It’s really kinda hard for me to put a finger on why the whole thing ‘works’ for me. Maybe it’s the way that the game elements kind of form a ‘setting’ more than just occasional ‘nudge nudge’ moments a la VGCats and the like. A backdrop, rather than a punchline, while they focus on the main plot. But I’m not really here to talk story stuff, this is a gaming site… mostly.

The Scott Pilgrim game has been a pretty awesome experience, and I don’t just mean that in a fanboy way, it kind of recaptures something. Instead of sitting there going “Oh ha ha, there’s that guy, doing his thing in the background there,” and just kind of tolerating the game itself looking for the jokes. It’s just a good old fashioned beat-em-up, and it’s giving me all kinds of flashbacks to the time some friends and I went to a bowling alley as kids and spent a chunk of the night beating the crap out of the Simpsons arcade game. Basically, if you want a game with big, bright retro graphics and an endless amount of stuff to break and beat up on, get this. If you like Paul Robertson’s bizarre sprite movies and have ever wondered what it’d be like to actually be in control of one… get it.

But for the sake of being my usual unpleasant self, there are some pretty annoying things wrong with it. For some reason, it seems like Kim’s game in particular seems buggy. Weird shit like the screen not advancing, or the next wave of enemies not spawning so you get stuck on the same screen. I’ve also run into music not loading and some cheap ‘infinity hole’ situations in most every scene that involves the big metal balls. The game’s also pretty cheap, especially playing solo before grinding. That said, it’s way easy to just buy stat enhancers or power level yourself. Level grinding just isn’t the first thing that comes to mind in an ass-kicking game, but it is drawing pretty heavily from River City Ransom’s mold. The thing is, in RCR, you can do alright without upgrades and such, but Scott Pilgrim starts you off with a pretty brief move list, then makes sure the enemies come at you in ways that make those later skills really useful. Your first time with a character through Level 1 is going to be a long, aggravating slog, unless you have other players, anyway.

Course, once you max out your Strength with a mere 2 Bionic Arms, you too, can enjoy bitch slapping people all over Toronto so hard they bounce off the walls. Wheeee.

I’m not really sure why I do these things to myself. I just found myself thinking, completely unprovoked, about this game after years of blissfully having finally shuttered it from my mind. I was one of the kids who didn’t like Zelda II much because of its toughness, change of format, incomprehensible townsfolk, and not having the innate dullness of adulthood to make level gaining tolerable. However, being still kind of a nerd, I was really into Greek mythology for a while, especially all the bizarre monsters they came up with. So, when I was looking around Blockbuster looking for something to try I hadn’t already, this game just happened to jump at me.

Continue reading 3/2 Goes Greek

So, I’ve been shuffled around a bit at work of late, filling in at other stores in the chain since they’re running out of people who can handle a ‘wet’ picture center. Normally I’m within walking distance and in my home town, so this isn’t a factor, so just between you and me, I have the worst sense of direction in the world. So on my first day at each new locale, I usually wind up a half hour or so late after getting ridiculously lost. Not so this last couple times, though. It’s kind of reassuring for once. Especially after the unholy fuckness that my last fill-in position was.

Huber Heights is a town I usually don’t delve into aside from the movie theater and art supplies once in a blue moon (seeing as how nearly everything I’ve been drawing has gone digital or been on cheap sketchpads), so I was kind of wondering why my friends all seemed to hate going there- and that kind of kept me out of there in itself. Well, it turns out that the town is full of pushy a-holes who like to cut you off from the lane you need, and when you miss a turn, a MAGICAL PORTAL opens up and transports you into a cornfield. Seriously. It’s a densely-packed shopping center surrounded on all sides by the boonies. One missed turn puts you on a country road- and not the good kind either, the kind that’s all two-lane road with steep ditches and narrow-ass gravel driveways about a half a mile apart from each other. I thought people who lived off those kind of roads needed massive, looping drives for their threshers, ATV’s, and incest*.  The weeks I spent working out of the Huber store usually meant a 30-45 minute trip to and from thanks to it taking 5 minutes to find a place to turn around each time I got blocked out of a turn and ended up lost, which was on the first couple days, basically any time I had to turn.

So, while the most recent fill in may have been pretty boring, the commute was easy, and actually pretty relaxing. It was kind of nice to have my brain wander off to something other than brainstorming fiction ideas, video games, looming deadlines for projects, work itself, upcoming classes or becoming monstrously lost. Just me and a curvy state highway instead of stop and go downtown gridlock or the endless monotony of the freeway.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why exactly I haven’t been posting as much lately. It’s true I have been pretty busy, but no worse than when I was putting reviews up pretty much weekly. I guess part of it goes with all the modern games I’ve been playing. Wonderful, wonderful ‘modern’ games where play is measured in hours and everything has to be sweeping, epic, and cinematic. You know, in other words, endless time sinks. With something like The Lost Word of JeNnY, I could put a couple hours into prodding it from every angle and sit back thinking “well, that was screwed up. But it was short.”

Well, that said, I’m gonna try and get more back into form soon here. Hope ya enjoy. Mwahaha.

It took me long enough to get around to this one, but there’s just something about high-action current gen spectacle brawlers that makes them kind of exhausting to sit through, no matter how much awesome might be delivered. I loved Platinum’s prior kill-sim, MadWorld to death, but I played that one a stage a night, which actually kinda helped with the ‘fictional death sport OF THE FUTURE!’ theme by breaking it up into episodes. Basically, in short sittings, I’m all for mowing down legions upon legions of four or five of the same enemy broken up by over-the-top QTE’s and cutscenes, but if I wanted to sit down and play Bayonetta from beginning to end in an afternoon, I’d probably yank all of my hair out the sixty-five thousandth time Two Little Angels And A Big Angel appeared after I thought I was free to continue down the hallway. Continue reading Nonstop Climax Innuendo