Mini-impressions: Elite Beat Agents

It struck me a little while ago that I had never finished EBA on my DS. I never liked it very much, despite the hilarious presentation – it always felt fiddly and I didn’t like how often the real problem was seeing the next place to touch because it was hidden by your hand, resulting in me finally playing with a silly grip on the stylus, holding it right at its end so my vision was rarely obscured.

I was surprised upon finishing the tricky last level that there was a whole new difficulty setting beyond what I thought was the last one, called Hard Rock. Apparently you play the same thing as in the previous difficulty, only the hit markers are flipped from their former patterns, plus come up faster and need to be hit in a tighter window. Your life bar also depletes absurdly fast.

This became the main thing that I disliked about EBA. It’s the only rhythm game I’ve played where I can have a 100+ combo and still die, just because I’m hitting the beats slightly off and getting 50s and 100s instead of 300s (the equivalents of the usual ‘safe’, ‘great’, ‘perfect’ or similar). Because the bar depletes on its own, you can also be doing badly, but passably, only for a long silent passage (excluding the ones for little scenes, where your life bar freezes) to take your bar down to the bottom. It makes for an annoying, frustrating experience at higher levels, and necessitates too much memorisation. I probably only put the same amount of time into passing the last stages as I do most rhythm games’ hardest parts, but I lost far more often and for far more irritating reasons.

You can’t dislike a game that has such silly mini-stories and such fun, especially one with something like the Christmas song that totally subverts all your expectations about such a light and sweet-natured story. But I can’t say I want more.  

Kingdom Hearts 3D – Dream Drop Distance: first playthrough thoughts

The first Kingdom Hearts game on the newest gen of handhelds certainly blows all the games on its predecessor away – and surpassed my expectations – but in my view didn’t match up to the brilliant Birth By Sleep in any aspect, and suffered from some major problems.

These are my thoughts after my first playthrough, in which I unlocked the secret ending but otherwise did not explore very thoroughly, so there may be bits and pieces to add after I play again in critical mode. Since the secret movie was so easy to unlock, though, I doubt there’s anything too significant.

So where does this game leave us, post-BBS? Nomura stated that it was to be considered, much like BBS, as important plot-wise as a numbered title and not a side-game like Coded – and indeed, it’s likely that the plot of KH3 will make no sense without playing this one…though that can be said of Chain of Memories too, leaving only Coded and 358/2 Days as lesser side-games. Either way, I’m pleased that the title was actually meaningful, as seeing the younger character models and bizarre scenes of raining Soras in the sneak peaks I found myself doubting it would be – though my initial hopes upon starting the game that it would be about bringing Ventus, Aqua and Terra back ended up dashed. Perhaps we’ll see that in Birth By Sleep 2.

Nomura apparently looked at his sprawling mess of a plot for this series and thought ‘You know what this incredibly convoluted and confusing scenario needs? Time travel.’ KH3D is not for the uninitiated. Be prepared to concentrate on who Xemnas, old Xehanort, Young Xehanort (also known as ‘Terranort’ because he inhabits Terra’s body), Ansem and Ansem the Wise are, all of them except the last looking pretty damn similar, save the bald old coot. Be prepared to count off all the different aspects of Sora found in his heart: his anomalous nobody Roxas, the replica/false nobody/memory vessel Xion, and the disembodied asylum seeker Ventus. And now try to wrap your head around the trap Master Xehanort devised to get thirteen different aspects of himself from different times together in different (mostly possessed) forms in order to represent thirteen darknesses in opposition to seven lights, including an attempt to use Sora’s body. It’s a very, very tangled mess. And it’ll get worse once there’s an attempt to extricate Terra from the wrong side and when the two surprise-twist keyblade wielders who come to the fore at the very end of the game decide who fills the one remaining space (though the secret ending twist wasn’t…really a twist, but rather a strange omission up to that point).

But that’s only the game’s place in the wider series. It has a plot of its own, which is largely kept simple: Sora and Riku are accomplished keyblade wielders, but not yet masters. Thus Master Yen Sid (who for whatever reason is retired from using a keyblade and won’t be fighting) sends the two boys on a mission to restore previously destroyed worlds that have been left in a state of sleep. For some reason, they have to be sent back in time to do this (because otherwise they cannot learn any new skills, perhaps?), which leads to them inhabiting their younger forms – which I find a shame, because their KH2 designs are much more appealing and are after all included in the game, looking much better. They set about freeing the worlds and seeing the pasts of some familiar faces, fighting ‘Dream Eaters’ along the way, but of course Xehanort is on hand to intervene.

It’s an often bewildering plot, but it just about hangs together, and at least finally leads to the right place and supplies answers to most questions even if they’re far-fetched – though just how Lea and the rest somehow went back to being somebodies again is anyone’s guess. It facilitates a mostly straightforward game, and with the exception of the very dull Tron world, it’s fun to play through the story.

But there are a few big problems, chief of which is the gameplay. BBS really got things right, though shoot lock made things a little too easy. But each character was used alone and had moves that flowed into an increasingly deep play style. DDD’s seems…slapped together. Annoyingly, you have to use dream eater companions, which both confuse you in the thick of action (as they look like the enemies) and end up dying and needing to be revived by the player, which against harder bosses often means you end up having to prioritise getting a stupid snail back to life and die yourself. I wish they could be turned off. Then there’s ‘flowmotion’, which is incredibly useful at the start but soon gets very annoying, as a simple dodge roll too close to the door can end up with you being immobilised for a half-second, enough for tougher bosses to wipe you out on proud mode. It also feels tacked-on, as it means you more or less get the ability to fly from the start, so many carefully-designed stages with springboards and obstacles just seem like they were put together before flowmotion was introduced, because it makes them obsolete. Finally, there’s the cute little special attacks done with the touch screen – I enjoyed these, but there were only a handful of different ones, which soon got repetitive: it would have been much better had they been complex and varied.

What really stood out above all the rest, though, was the homoeroticism of the whole thing. The KH2 ending more or less dropped all pretence that the Sora/Riku relationship was anything but a love story, and here it’s the heart of the whole piece: they’re split apart but their strong bond brings them back together…and that’s before the innuendoes about Riku being inside Sora and the bizarre image of him collecting Sora bodies as he skydives are discussed. What’s remarkable is that the female presence in the game is almost non-existent. None of the characters significant to the overall plot of this game are female. The important female characters – Kairi, Naminé, Aqua – get next to no screentime, and a hint that one will be controllable in KH3 doesn’t cut it. In fact, the female character who gets the most to do is probably Olivia Wilde’s character in the Tron world…and it’s weird seeing Thirteen from House interacting with Sora!

Believe me, I don’t mind that this epic saga is basically a love story between adolescent boys. They’re a cute couple. But let’s see more of Aqua soon, eh? I really want some interaction between Sora and the BBS characters. 

Bioshock

I’m glad I finally decided to check out what all the fuss was about – even though it’s been many years since I’ve actually liked a first-person shooter. In my view Goldeneye messed them up, and they were much better when they played like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake. I half-heartedly played through Unreal, but since then, only Portal has engaged me, and that can only just be called an FPS – as after all, you don’t ‘die’, you're not using offensive weaponry and it’s more a puzzle game than anything else.

Bioshock is similarly different from the macho games about blasting away soldiers or spraying bullets into wave after wave of aliens. Its key elements are not its guns or action – they are the plot, the atmosphere and the melding of horror and sci-fi into a genre where it’s usually one or the other, and without nearly such a clever concept.

The story of Bioshock takes place in the underwater city of Rapture. Built in the 50s, with the story happening some ten years later, it is an amazing construction but creaky, grimy and themed on old diving suits and pre-60s entertainment. Rapture was also the site for various experiments – the use of ‘Adam’ to enhance human abilities and even give special powers, the necessary manufacture of oxygen, and the ‘vita chamber’ respawn points. At first you know nothing of who you are beyond that your plane crashed and you had no choice but to go to rapture, and just do as you are told by a stranger on a radio. Later, you find you have a personal connection to the founder of Rapture, and during a rather predictable plot twist, the way you have been blindly following orders (because it’s a game and there’s nothing else to do) becomes a rather clever and satisfying little plot point.

To be honest, I don’t think I played the game quite the way I was supposed to. I essentially hoarded all the ammo and hypodermics that I found, and killed 98% of the enemies, including bosses, with the wrench. This became progressively easier as power-ups made it more useful. The other 2% were big daddies, who I would just unload all my rockets and frag grenades on, knowing that I would be able to restock soon enough. Then there was the final boss, probably the lamest thing about the whole game, who I just strafed continuously, with more than enough ammo to finish him off five times over.

If anything, after the steep initial learning curve, I longed for the game to be harder. The big daddies were a challenge, and trying to take care of the last boss with just the wrench proved too much, but overall there was very little to hurt the player and what drove me on was mostly the story and atmospherics. In other words, I played the FPS like an RPG.

But story is what I like most about any game, and I’m very happy I spent the time with this one. I liked the creepy sections, where out-and-out horror scare tactics were used, and some of the more unhinged residents of Rapture were very memorable, like the artist who made a very silly masterpiece and demands you help him finish it with a murder spree.

There are three endings, and I was a little sad to discover I’d shut myself off from getting the good one after only just getting through the exposition. I would certainly have saved all the little sisters if I’d known, as the rewards they gave you really weren’t that good and by the end I had nothing to do with the Adam I got.

The game triumphs in its little details. The big daddies are of course iconic (and I would have preferred only bouncer-types, because the rosies were a bit lame) and I love the little sisters’ babble when they’re around them. ‘Hop hop, Mr Bubbles!’ The splicers are interesting, and though I can see how it would annoy a lot of people and it’s bizarre how all the action completely stops while you do it, I really liked the hacking mini-game. The creepy vending machines, the stupid flying guard bot things…all came together to make a charmingly unsettling game that I’m glad has a sequel and very possibly a movie in the works. I’ve already bought Bioshock 2 for the PS3, so I’ll get around to it before too long…

Arcana Heart 3

Fighting games used to be the main thing I would play. Hours went into games like Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo and Mortal Kombat 2. I knew all the moves for everyone in Tekken 2 and I loved the story mode of Soul Blade. I even gave a lot of time to Killer Instinct and, yes, Kasumi Ninja. I love Psychic Force even fully aware it's rubbish. But at some point, around Street Fighter 3, I lost interest. 3D games were getting repetitive and more gimmicky. 2D games seemed more poorly-made, with unlimited combos and an emphasis on stupid super combos that went on too long and could spoil a round. These games became fun at a party but not for learning. I liked Guilty Gear and Melty Blood, but felt I came to them too late, and was annoyed at how high level play often meant watching a character eat a combo for 30 seconds. I missed sf2's short chains. SF4 and Mortal Kombat 9 were just fun party games.

Then Arc and Examu made Arcana Heart 3 and actually released it in the UK. I hadn't liked BlazBlue much, finding the cast limited, the humour rather much less original than Guilty Gear's and never found someone whose style suited me. However, at a tournament I saw AH3 and finally found something to love again. I liked how the arcana system made everyone so varied, how balanced it was, and how funny. I wanted to main adorable Dorothy, but Eko suited me better - better than any character I picked up since Urs in Battle Fantasia. And what's more, every fight was funny.

Eventually it got frustrating. Ridiculous combos and loops were found. But there were ways to disrupt it all. And it was always fun, always entertaining, always challenging. A shame so many avoided it as creepy, girly or Japanese. Because as a game engine it stands way above just about everything else currently around.

Project Diva: Dreamy Theater 2nd

Project Diva: Dreamy Theater 2nd

Dreamy Theater 2^nd is more of the same, perhaps unsurprisingly – but also everything its predecessor was but much more. Indeed, every song from the first game is included in this one as an extra, which is nice (though makes the trophies take longer to get) – the only reason for me to keep the first game, which unlike this one still needs the PSP attached to even start, is that I have a nice collection of edit songs on it.

The gameplay is much the same, only now there are doubled notes and held notes. The doubled ones require you to not only press the right button but also the d-pad button that is its equivalent – up with triangle, right with circle and so on. The held notes were the bane of my life getting perfects in this game – they not only register your timing when you press down but also when you release, which for whatever reason I found that much harder to do accurately, making for many an annoying moment. If there were one part of this game I would change, it would be this.

The graphics are even nicer than before, and of course there are more characters, with more outfits, and the chance to have two on the screen at once, which the first game lacked. Edit mode is thus more fun to play with and this time I really enjoyed making a video of my own.

The game is also much more fun because it’s much more challenging. The first game was really too easy, with only the Christmas Song’s fiddly solo proving hard to perfect. This one has an ‘extreme’ mode that is way more fun than anything the first game offered, and though some tracks were frustrating and needed several tries, the thrill of getting through a tough song and getting a perfect on your first attempt was as much fun I’ve had with a rhythm game since Technika.

It took two long sessions to get a perfect on the very last song, the 32^nd-note-plagued ‘Hatsune Miku no Gekishou’, and the reward, criminally, is only a gold trophy and not a platinum, but it’s a challenge I’m very pleased I undertook and managed to overcome. It was the hardest gaming challenge I’ve tried in a very long time, certainly harder than hidden RPG bosses or ‘Through the Fire and Flames’ on Guitar Hero 3 (though if the challenge were to get a perfect on that it would have been much harder). That’s enough now, until Extend goes to PS3, if it ever does. My next rhythm game will probably be Rhythm Thief on 3DS!

Professor Layton and the Lost Future / Unwound Future

I thought that Unwound Future was likely to be my least favourite of the Layton games. They’d had some far-fetched concepts before, but usually confined to the ends of their games, but this one looked likely to have the silly idea of time travel throughout, which always ends up with plot holes and usually contradictory theories coexisting. Besides, it seemed the most surreal effort yet – sure, there was a hamster with a funny voice in the last game but that was confined to a minigame and you sort of thought that Luke could just be interpreting the voice internally – but this one not only had a talking parrot minigame (fair enough), but a genuine talking rabbit with a tale of woe to unfold and an annoying talking bee that gets swatted halfway through and is presumed dead right up until the credits.

And yet – it’s actually turned out to be my favourite of the trilogy. The essential gameplay is of course the same – you go from place to place solving puzzles that are by and large only tricky enough to divert the player for a few moments, but still hard enough to give a sense of satisfaction. So that leaves the overall story.

I like the setting the most of the three – the first’s village was cute but limited, the train of the second rather repetitive, leaving a strange but very much recognisable London for this one, which works well. Some way through, Luke had a little scene in front of a statue that was very subtly done (if you didn’t stop to watch his standing animation before clicking him with your stylus, and didn’t read the journal entry afterwards, you may not have realised what he was doing) that made me think this might be my least favourite Layton game with my favourite scene in it, but then the final twists came. The final twists have rather been the weaknesses of Layton games. The first game’s makes sense within the world in hindsight, but at the time I was hoping for something that required much less of a sci-fi leap of faith to believe, while the second relies on everyone affected by hallucinogenic gas to perceive the exact same hallucination – not just for a moment but long-term. This one, aside from a rather mawkish bit to try and have the traditional tearjerking ending, actually went in reverse: it twisted an unbelievable supernatural premise to one that again required absurd sci-fi, but at least made everything logical.

The series continues to be one of the best handheld games around, and obviously for a relatively low budget – I’m annoyed at the next game excluding ‘London Life’ for the UK release (but having it on the US cart) so for the first time will likely not buy a copy, but I’ll certainly be playing it. I’d just get the US version – but then I’d have to put up with that awful voice they have for Luke. And it doesn’t even have the advantage this version’s US release had – a rather better title.

Super Mario 3D Land

The 3DS is now generally considered a success after a difficult period after its launch where there weren’t really many games to play. In Japan, it’s Monster Hunter that took it from a portable it was possible to ignore to must-have. Here, what really boosted the Christmas sales were the release of the two updated in-house classics, Mario Kart and Super Mario Land. Mario Kart is a very addictive game that’s the best in the series for a while, if slightly frustrating. What, then, of Super Mario Land? I just finished it yesterday, getting four stars in the end. To get five I’d have to redo all the levels with Luigi, which I have no interest in doing, and to make them golden I’d have to start all over again, so I feel I’ve finished with the title.

First impressions were great – lovely slick graphics, smooth gameplay and the charming old world full of things that remind me of the first time I turned on my SNES with the Super Mario All-Stars bundled with it in the cartridge slot, and I was forced to accept that it was much better than The Great Giana Sisters. The 3D effect, still somewhat iffy in the cinema, works superbly on my 3DS and the subtle ways it enters into the gameplay pleased me. I spend a while around Christmas getting through a world each evening, and though it was all a bit easy, I felt sure that there would be harder levels to come.

Unfortunately, it was the bridge between silly, hand-holding casual game to challenging brain- and reflex-tester that let the game down. I’m happy that the whole game wasn’t easy, but where the game became more challenging, I found it only irritating to play, fiddly and with many instances of artificial difficulty.

The last Mario game I played with any seriousness (at least as a platformer) was probably Super Mario Bros. 3 in that compilation, when I was still a pretty small kid. Since then Mario has always been there on the gaming scene, but I’ve paid little attention. Super Mario 64 was heralded as a great advance in gameplay, one magazine I read keenly back then going so far as to award the game an unprecedented 100% in the reviewing system of the time, which made a bit of a mockery of percentage reviews thereafter. I never had an N64, so played the game only a few times, and thereafter wasn’t very interested in the likes of Sunshine or Galaxy, which dispensed with the open level design, preferring more direct and clear-cut level goals, which carried over to this version. It wasn’t that I disliked the games, I just never felt very attached to the properties and had started to prefer games with very strong plotting and characterisation – most of Nintendo’s in-house titles, including the Zelda games, have an archetypal plot and extremely simple characters, focusing on gameplay, and at the time that just didn’t appeal.

Well, this copy came with my 3DS, and it seemed a great way to get used to the system. As usual, Mario discovers that Peach has been abducted by Bowser, so goes to get her back with the use of various mushrooms, fire flowers, super leaves and little boxes. During the easy first half of the game, if you die five times you get given a power-up leaf that makes you totally invincible, while after ten deaths you can be teleported directly to the end of the level.

It’s totally understandable that games reviewers give the game such high praise – they have deadlines, and the first few days of gameplay, even if intensive, are going to be incredibly good fun. This game is excellent for people who don’t care to finish what they’re playing and casual gamers. The problems come much later on, when a bit of precision is needed, or an evil Mario clone three times your size is chasing you all through the level.

It’s then that the inadequacies of the controls are highlighted: you are expected to perform jumps with great precision, to land on little platforms and get moving before your clone lands on you, or to land on little ledges that switch every time you jump. Sometimes the fake difficulty is ramped up by making you jump towards the camera, especially if you want to collect all the bonus coins that give you starred ratings. And the controls are just made that bit too fiddly. The amount of run-up it takes for Mario to jump farther never seems well-defined. Often it’s just very hard to see where he’s going to land. The collision detection is often highly suspect, especially when it comes to the large Mario shadow clone, and generally making little corrections to your jump as a 2D platformer may be used to will ruin your momentum and result in pathetic little jumps that end with you dying horribly. If there’s a use for that stupid backflip move Mario does if you change your direction after running and press jump, I have no idea what it is, but all it ever did was get me killed by my clone.

Ultimately, it held my interest almost long enough to get me to the very end, where your only reward for perseverance is a final level that’s just the (spectacular) final level of the first half again, only with no chance of getting the items that make it incredibly easy, and then the same ending with one extra image of Peach in a Tanooki outfit. It just got that bit too annoying at the end by being tricky in the wrong way, by testing my luck rather than skill, or simply annoying me by killing me off when I didn’t feel it had any right to. It was also bad when a level was very hard without a super leaf but could be breezed through in moments with one, especially since they were almost always readily available in toad huts.

This is a Mario game with a whole lot of charm, with great 3D effects, a beautiful world, great use of familiar Mario elements and a few inspired bits of level design, especially when it came to levels with Boos and large rotating platforms. But it just wasn’t quite as playable as it ought to have been when the second half of the game, the game actually aimed at people who like a challenge, opened up and made things that little bit more difficult.

Mario Kart 7 (3DS)

It’s often hard to know when to consider the one-player part of a game like this finished, but now that I’ve got 3 stars for every cup, including the mirror ones, and now that I’m a little sick of it, I think that’s enough time. It’ll remain a fun multiplayer game, but that’s the only way I’ll need to play it now. It got a lot of hours of play out of me in a short time, though, and is definitely the racing game I’ve enjoyed the most in many years…probably since the first WipEout.

Though I’m not a big racing game fan, the original version of Mario Kart was a fixture of my life on the SNES, one of the few fun things that brought all the boys in my least fun secondary school together. The older boy who had brought it with him was a real expert, knowing all the shortcuts and having a grasp of the powerups that still amazes me today. He could hit you going around corners with a thrown banana every time, he could shoot you backwards with a green shell while going around a corner with perfect aim and red shells almost never worked against him because he knew exactly when to hop. I learned from someone very, very good.

And then I never liked another Mario Kart game until this one. The N64 one was fine, but the controls felt so different. The Gamecube one I only just tried and utterly hated, expecially how you cannot hop. The Wii one with its wheel controls is a totally different thing. And I just got my DS too late to be very into that version.

This one, though, I played at just the right time thanks to a timely gift, and got a bit obsessive over. It has its significant differences from the SNES original – on the negative, there’s no feather for super-jumping, you can’t hop over shells if your timing is great and the infamous blue shell is of course an element of random luck that ruins many a three-star run on a cup. On the plus side, the tanuki tail you get from the feather is useful, the drifting mechanic works well and it’s nice to be rewarded rather than penalised for longer, sharper drifts, coins are no longer necessary for maximum speed and of course the thing is beautiful to behold, especially in 3D.

I have to say I’d like a version that plays exactly like the SNES version. I’d like to be drifting only in short, sharp bursts. I’d like to be able to hop red shells and bananas again with good enough timing. I’d like to be able to hop over the right brick wall with a feather if I had it at the right time, and I’d like to no longer drop from first to fifth moments from the finishing line because of a lucky blue shell. But this comes much closer than any other version, and I’m very happy with it.