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Posts tagged demo demo panic

Demo Demo Panic- Moon Diver

Demo Demo Panic- Moon Diver published on 1 Comment on Demo Demo Panic- Moon Diver

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.

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.

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