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Demo Demo Panic! Vol. 1

Demo Demo Panic! Vol. 1 published on No Comments on Demo Demo Panic! Vol. 1

A hot new series about complaining about free things

Every now and then, if my PS3 is turned on and for some reason not occupied by Fallout or BlazBlue, I like to log into the PSN Shop and see what I can get free demos of. It’s a good way to test out the latest big name ti-who am I kidding, I own a current gen console and still devote most of my interest to remakes of old stuff or indie games of varying quality. For crying out loud, you want to know what my current PC desktop is? It’s a GameBoy Micro. Well, I’m kind of pleased to say that Thexder NEO seems to carry on many design choices of the NES era. Sadly, they’re choices that probably should have died already.

So yeah. You are Thexder, I guess. In this remake of the classic that nobody I know personally has actually played, you control a transforming robot that flies around and murders aliens and other kinds of robots with his death lasers. Sounds pretty sweet, doesn’t it? You don’t even have to aim. The death lasers hate life so much they automatically lock on to the closest possible killable thing. Robots are pretty cool on their own, naturally, and transforming robots only kick it up a notch. So why did I hate the demo so much?

For starters, the game measures your life out with a simple ‘Energy’ gauge. This gauge depletes when you take hits. Duh, right? Well, they also have your weapons tapping the same source, so if you go around recklessly using your death rays, you can run your battery down to nil and kill yourself. So even though the levels are pretty wide open and you can fly about (kind of) freely, your steadily depleting life battery forces you to figure out not just the way out of the stage, but the most efficient way out. I’ve played a few dungeon crawlers and roguelikes, so I can kind of get the appeal of managing your resources for survival’s sake and pushing just a bit further on, but in those games, you have time to consider your moves, whereas in this one, you’re in control of a large hunk of metal hurtling chaotically through the air with a leaky battery. Now, you do have a shield that lessens the damage you take from enemies. It does add a bit more in your favor since you can power on your shields before taking on a cluster of enemies, and you can pick up more juice by killing them. I still kept reaching a point where I would need to blast a block to move on, then keel over dead from energy loss.

Enemies are of the classic “Ok, so what’s that thing?” stable that plagued old games, especially anything involving aliens. I guess having alien species around lowers the bar for recognizable, believable enemy designs. I recall the point where I gave up was about the time I ran into a small dark hallway patrolled by a pair of spinning, colorful dildo things that seemed pretty much invincible and ran directly at you, and lingering too long to let them pass usually lead to small, endlessly respawning ‘thingies’ coming for you.

You know what Thexder needs? A fucking extension cord. It worked in Evangelion. You could even make puzzles around ‘how the hell do I get past this section when my cord hangs up on the sofa?’

At one point I thought I had found a princess or something to rescue. She morphed into a hideous death beast and killed me for my trouble.  Women.

3/2 Goes Greek

3/2 Goes Greek published on No Comments on 3/2 Goes Greek

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

Second Opinions: FFTA2

Second Opinions: FFTA2 published on No Comments on Second Opinions: FFTA2

When I heard there was going to be a sequel to FF Tactics Advance, for the DS, I was pretty stoked. I pre-ordered it, snapped it up on launch day… all that. Then, according to the timer, I played about 24 hours in and stuck it in its case for nearly two years. Can’t really say why, but better things ended up coming out.

So, randomly, I decided to give it another shot. Maybe just because the Tactics Advance games seem like the red headed stepchild of Final Fantasy spinoffs and nobody other than Gamespite seems to analyze them like gamers do the main chapters, and I needed material. Or I was looking for things to trade in and realized I hadn’t given it much of a chance.

FFTA2 is… Weird, to me. It almost feels like some kind of knockoff or cash-in version made by a a random outside developer for Square. It’s made up of various Final Fantasy related things, but there are little things that feel… off. Like Magic with a K on the end. Which leads to permutations of that like the word ‘magickal’ which doesn’t look right and my spell checker assures me isn’t a word. There’s some new arrangements of old Tactics music- but a few too many as if they couldn’t be bothered to compose too many all new bits. Then there’s the matter of a couple new races just popping out of the woodwork that nobody had mentioned beforehand, even though you’d think that the Gria in particular would stick out, even if Seeq could pass for morbidly obese Bangaa.

So, to cut to the chase, I started playing it again, eating up the enhanced sound and visuals, but there always feels like something lacking. There’s some pluses, sure, and the general pointlessness of the plot seemed to not matter so much after I’d been out of the game long enough to forget what the hell was going on and just consider it a series of unrelated missions to kill time. Then I got to one of the newspaper missions, one of the handful of non combat but still turn based missions of the game.

Dear god.

So turn, by turn, by turn, you have to walk around town asking everyone their New Years resolutions. Not just the stationary NPC’s, but you have to knock on the doors of all the houses in the stage as well. Naturally, you can’t reach them all in one or two turns. And they stay neatly in place, marching in time to the oddly grim battle theme the mission had picked. When all your units had made their moves, then you had the pleasure of sitting through the AI taking three or four seconds per character to decide how best to REMAIN STATIONARY until one of your guys’ turns came up again. Once all of that riveting work was done, one unit has to report back to the newspaper guy, one of those NPC’s I assume was designed to make you love to hate them. He asks you what the most popular resolution of the year is. Now, I was bored out of my MIND just reaching these characters to interact with them, so I didn’t really pay attention to what any of them said (even though two of them were recurring stalkers of a pop band, oddly enough.) I answer wrong.

The mission, which took about 15-20 minutes of violence free, turn based walking is marked a failure, and I’m unable to retry it, presumably until next game ‘year.’

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