Ok, here’s a first- I’m going to encourage all you guys to chip in on an article and get your screens posted up for all to see! All you have to do is risk your good name forever being attached to Nazis.
Yes, you can have some time to think it over.
So, what is it? I want all you guys to try out the Hitler Test. All you gotta do is take any game with a robust character creation system, then see if you can create a Hitler. The closer the end result, the more successfully the game has passed. For example, you can make a Hitler Mii really easily, but ModNation Racers lacks the critical ‘stache. I have a feeling the moustache factor will weigh heavily in the end…
Since not a whole lot good has come out lately, I’ve been trying to put a dent in my gaming backlog. I think this is probably why I take every chance I get to bitch about the fact that every game released these days is measured in hours rather than levels- even a beat-em-up like Bayonetta (Let’s face it, the game is basically Battletoads with tits) takes a ‘mere’ ten hours or so of play to complete, and we have people who complain about games with a story mode that only takes six. Grah. Grah, I say to anyone within earshot!
Which brings me to the problem at hand: I used to have a bad habit of snagging anything remotely interesting up off the clearance racks at electronics stores. As PS2 got more and more displaced, that means I’ve got at least a half-dozen epic length RPG’s, backed up by action games of questionable quality that I just haven’t had the patience to sit through. Then there’s the stack of PS1 games I ‘inherited’ with my friend’s old console, not to mention a stack of DS and PSP RPG’s I grabbed up on release expecting them to get horribly rare. Well, I’d like to thank the gaming industry here for not releasing much of anything I give a crap about long enough for me to kill off some of these things. I’m pretty happy to say I’ve beaten more games in the past few months than in a couple years. That said, that backlog includes three Nippon Ichi games.
Moon Diver... you've been... ninjas too long in the... got nothin'.
I guess if I’m going to make Demo Demo Panic into a series, it should have more than one installment. Tonight I gave another of the many PS3 demos sitting on my hard drive a whirl to see if it’s a hidden gem, or just another slapped together attempt to pander to people who miss 2D gaming.
So, basically we have here a game that’s something of a mix of Castlevania HD and Strider, featuring a handful of ninja warriors attempting to retake their homeland from an evil empire. So, let’s dive right in to Moon Diver.
One thing to say going into this is I’ve also been playing Hard Corps: Uprising, the Arc System Works take on Contra, and it is excellent. In single player. The game has some real dickish tendencies with respawn locations, and the one time I finished the game with a partner (without the PSN slowing to a crawl and disconnecting between stages) I lost all my lives to respawning over a pit during a section involving some of that wonderful missile-to-missile jumping that’s been mandatory since Contra III. One of the things the game added was a DLC character named Sayuri, a samurai chick who brings a sword to a gunfight and does amazingly well. In fact, she’s probably the easiest one to power through the game with , since her sword does massive, swift damage to everything and the charged shots pass through walls that even the Plasma charge shot doesn’t. It makes for a different game, one fun enough that I found myself wanting to play an entire Contra game melee style.
What a coincidence then, that we had a 2-D hack and slasher game show up on the PSN shortly after. Then become unavailable as soon as I heard about it thanks to that lovely little service blackout.
Really, there isn’t a whole lot to say about the demo. It gives you a tutorial style look at the first level of the game, where you mow down a lot of identical looking enemies in different colors. There are blade arm dudes, yellow, exploding blade arm dudes, wasps, and SWAT looking dudes who die in one shot, as well as some gun emplacements and lakes of poison or something to fulfill the 2-D Game Quota Of Inanimate Objects that Hate You. You can slash rapidly, charge up for a big, slow, powerful slash by holding the same button, and use special (ranged) slashes with a tap of Circle that consumes some of your MP. Interestingly, you also have automatic slashes tied to your special maneuvers- flipping up onto a platform from a hanging position, double jumping, and sliding are all accompanied by a subtle ‘blade’ effect I didn’t even notice until the tutes mentioned them. All in all, it does a remarkable job of making you a highly mobile slaughtering machine, which is just what a ninja ought to be. I do wish that the player status info stood out a little easier at the top of the screen. At one point, I took some damage on purpose trying to figure out exactly where my life gauge was supposed to be on the top of the screen. You don’t die easy, at least not in the demo. I didn’t get to play the online version, assuming it even works in the demo, but it sounds kind of cool that your special ‘moonsaults’ can be joined with other players’ special moves for bigger, flashier combos.
All in all, I liked the demo for Moon Diver, but not quite enough to splurge on it. I didn’t hate it by any stretch, but it has the same insubstantial feeling to it that I get any time I play a shmup with 2 1/2D graphics these days. It seems like cel shaded imitation sprites just lack the ‘impact’ old school hand-drawn ones do.
I wanted to comment on the Fallout: New Vegas expansion Honest Hearts after doing something on Dead Money, but this afternoon I stumbled upon a glitch that scared the crap out of me more than the Ghost People could hope to.
So yeah. Fallout 3 and NV are pretty notorious for glitches, though I thought something was up when every time Waking Cloud spoke, the camera would pan into the ground or a wall instead of facing her, and I really only saw her from behind after our conversations, then she ran up to me to join as a companion, and then uh… this.
I’m finishing up my certification classes after this week, so hopefully I’ll have some time free (and not… dead) to get started on a couple things I’ve really wanted to do with the site lately. Still working up the nerve to try and play Star Fox Adventures for the feature, though. I considered taking the lazy halfwit (but still very handsome) coward’s way out and saying, “Well, it wasn’t INTENDED to be a Star Fox title, so I choose to ignore that game,” but no, you people read gaming sites like these to watch the writer squirm.
The thing is, when it was new I did skip that installment, so I have to actually play it some more before I go rambling about it. While I can dive right into Assault and Command (wait, didn’t I review that already), this is new, scary territory.
Meanwhile, how ’bout that Playstation Network shit, huh? I was aggravated with being unable to access (delete stuff from) my profile after the Great Hacking of 2011, but cripes. I heard from a handful of people planning to go to GameStop and trade their whole game collections in towards the Xbox 360 versions of everything. I picked the system for its exclusives and free networking, personally, though most of the games I play are offline anyway so the outage didn’t affect me too much, other than spoiling Hard Corps Uprising and not being able to get the next New Vegas expansion. I spent the time going back to conquer Armored Core 4 (vanilla) and found it a lot better done than I remembered.
That said, for crying out loud, fuck overly bright sunsets and bloom effects in a mission where you’re fighting almost nothing but aerial opponents.
