Thursday, May 1, 2008

Game Log #1

After having my house nearly destroyed by a tornado (it actually missed my house by several miles), I'm here, on this blog, writing this first actual Game Log. And what, pray tell, have I been playing?

I finally bought something on Xbox Live. I felt like I had to get my money's worth, so I decided to get something I knew you couldn't just buy on some $10 collection for the PS2 with twenty other games. So, with a twenty point card in hand, my first choice was Symphony of The Night. SoTN is a game that's been on my "Need to Play" list for years now, mainly as a result of my undying love for Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. Call it Metroidvania, call it Castleroids, call it whatever the hell you want. The gameplay style is my cup of tea, and I gravitate towards and game of that style that I find (Super Metroid, Cave Story, etc.) Combine that with the rather complex item systems and RPG stats, and you've got one damn fun game. I knew about SoTN. About how director (now series producer) Koji Igarashi essentially formed the basis that every hand-held Castlevania would follow with SoTN. I had to play it. And after years of not actually doing it, I did. I admit that some of my experience of this game is definitely colored by my past experience with Dawn of Sorrow, and I've noted several comparisons (good and bad) during my playtime. Thusly, I can't at all consider this a proper review of Symphony, but rather my experiences as someone who loves a game from the same series years later. That sounds like complete gibberish, but I'll go for it. Some notes on my experience thus far:
  • The game is far more freeform than Dawn. Dawn had a very set structure overall of New Area-> Boss Battle-> New Item Gained From Boss Fight-> Enter Next Area By Means of New Item. I have to imagine that part of this is because of the game obviously being geared toward a younger audience (it's on the D.S., the style is a little more kid friendly animesque, etc.), because Symphony is all over the place. Sometimes you'll find highly important items in rooms you'd very easily have missed. Sometimes you'll find very important items needed for completing the game in the games one shop.
  • The item system is excellent. It completely reestablishes part of the biggest draw for me to DoS: collecting new items, finding the best combinations therein. But so far, item combos seem to be an area where DoS fell flat in comparison to SoTN. There were cool effects you could get from using a specific set of equipment at once in DoS, but none really to the extent of Symphony. By wearing all of the Alucart (typo?) gear, my luck stat gets a +30 stat bonus. The Alucart gear is all the whole weaker than many of the items I had by the time I found the set in the clock room, but the added bonus of increased drops and increased chance of critical hits makes the sacrifice more than worth it. The shield rod is only a decent weapon until I equip a shield in my left hand, which gives it a fierce attack boost. The number of equipment I've found with added benefits (i.e. the Blood Cloak, which converts damage taken into hearts) is pretty amazing as well, and left me wondering where the hell all this was in Dawn. I'm really getting a feeling from this game that there's a lot to master and, even better, I actually want to.
  • I need to remember to save whenever I get my hands on a rare item. I found the Medusa Shield early on, and I died a few minutes later before getting to a save point. I haven't been able to get it again since.
  • As I'm pretty terrible at preforming moves in fighting games, I'm terrible with the magic system in Symphony. Albeit I don't have many spells yet, but I can barely use the ones I have.
  • I sort of had mixed feelings on the soundtrack. I think overall it's great; absolutely fits the mood. My one problem is how completely ugly some of the synthesized orchestra material sounds. Most of the stuff with real instruments (guitar, organ, etc.) sound just fine.The orchestra often sounds like something I could do on my $200 Yamaha keyboard. That's not to say the voices never work. They just often times sound really off putting. On some of it (such as the theme to the second area of the game after leaving the entrance to the castle) sound like they'd be absolutely amazing if it was a real orchestra preforming it. And it's not even that I'm inherently opposed to synthesized orchestra sounds. Some of the old RPGs like Chrono Trigger sounded crazy good with what limited hardware they had. Maybe it's just a preference I have for the sort of voice the SNES chip has, and not so much for the sort of voice most cheap keyboards have. Still, that Colosseum theme is rockin' good.
  • Game Over screen: SO SLOW.
Those were the few thoughts I could muster in relation to this game so far. I'm still relatively early into the game (just got the mist transformation relic), so I haven't completely decided how I feel about the game. So far it's been a blast, which is somewhat more than I can say for my return to the world of Crackdown today.

I really don't know what to think about Crackdown at this point. I like it, I really do. But that like used to be an intense "this is freakin amazing" feeling, and even now I feel it's burning out all candle-like. The highly visceral feeling I get from the game is still there, more or less. And who doesn't get an awesomeness overload anytime they blow a field of cars into the sky with their rocket launcher? Or how about finding that next agility orb, or knocking some innocent civilian fifty feet away with a kick?

It's all still there, but the nagging voice of "this is it?" is getting louder by the minute. Because really, there's nothing else to this game. The environments barely pass for interactive or even interesting save for the propane tanks and other destructibles strewn about the city. The game itself is a sequence of set pieces designed to make you look cool. And for what it's worth, they get the job done. But that job really only counts for so much. It's sort of unfair that you have to compare this, a budget title more or less, to Grand Theft Auto, but you sorta have to. The multitude of other things GTA (which is really the template Crackdown is working from, make no mistake) has is really the draw. The combat in both GTA and Crackdown are admittedly pretty shallow. This is much less so, I think, with Crackdown, but it's still pretty unfulfilling. I can personally make the excuse for GTA that because it's a combination of so many things, the combat, the open world, the driving, the missions, the great story, all the other little things, the mediocrity of the combat and the broken controls (which, thankfully, appear to be fixed with IV) don't matter in the context of the game itself. Crackdown really doesn't have much at all going for itself other than the immediate gratification of the carnage you can create.

I've lost all desire to actually play through the main story. The game's "bosses" are really the most disappointing aspect. I really have no interest in fighting them at all. Give literally a regular thug from the game a bigger life bar and maybe an explosive weapon, and you've got a boss. Killing bosses is an exercise in patience, while the only damage you'll be taking is from the billions of bullets from every direction in the mission areas. About the closest I got to a creative boss fight was demolishing panels in order to blow up floors in a building and draw the boss out. And even that ended in "gun this dude down as quick as possible". The strict combat focus really wouldn't bother me if it wasn't such a "point at this guy and fire till he's gone" sort of deal. And then there are the little things that just bother me about the game. Like how half of my pile of burnt-out cars just disappear anytime I walk a few steps away. And how in this city I'm in, everyone, even the minivan-driving soccer moms seem to be listening to Mexican rap music. My, what a strange world.

And whats weird is that beyond all that, I'm still into Crackdown. I LIKE making shit blow up. I like the obsessive orb hunting. I even like some of the racing. The problem is that blowing shit up, at this level, isn't keeping me in as much as I wanted it to. I'll try playing it again when I get the chance.

NOTE: I'd just like to mention that this particular Game Log is a lot longer than (hopefully) the subsequent Game Log posts will be. I wrote these after being well into both games I mention here, so I had a lot of writing to do about each. I hope to keep a more timely schedule so I won't have to write a billion paragraphs about what I played today. Cheers.

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