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Malik
(9/8/04)
So, I've been out for
a couple of days. It was my vacation time (I know, I just had a week
off, but considering I only had a total of 4 days off last year, I'm
more than over due for some serious relaxing), and I was enjoying it
to the fullest...or something like that. On that same topic, I must
say that the odds of a new issue of Malik's Bitchings coming up this
week is less than likely. Considering that I spend the entire week
usually working on the column and I don't have anything as of
Wednesday afternoon...yeah...you see where this is heading.
However, I will have
something this week, which is quite overdue. I shall have a review
of CoH running in the next day or two (the review is good to go, but
I want to start doing things right...), after I get some nice screen
shots prepared. Until then, I don't have too much in the serious
posting department...yet.
On the note of CoH, I
was a little on the absent side of things this weekend (my weekend
ended yesterday). I ended up with about a total of 2 hours of CoH
between Friday night and Tuesday night. While I was planning on a
task force mission, my friend who was going to pull the main tanking
duties had a couple of minor problems with this (well, I didn't ask
him, but I assumed); he was sick, but more importantly, he's on a
short term stress-test of the World of Warcraft beta. So, instead of
going through the obvious refusal of a CoH task force, I let him
continue his WoW obsession, uninterrupted. This would probably be
for the best, anyway...I'm at level 11 right now with my tanker, and
I should at least get up to 12 or 13 before I do a TF with a level
14 tanker so we can afford an additional s/k in case we find only
low-levels for the mission (better safe than blown to hell by some
suicidal Embalmed Cadavers).
However, I did get in
some geek time in another realm...the battle lines have been drawn
by the publishers, and we geeks have to chose which side of each set
of lines we will fight on. So, yesterday I decided to define, a
little more clearly, which battles I'll take part in. I decided, on
top of my already pre-ordered Fable and GTA:SA to buy Star Ocean 3.
I figure, until Fable comes out, that I need a little plot (which is
something CoH cannot fulfill) to fill the void of MMORPG time. Plus,
since Fable is supposed to be fairly short and quite addictive
(which leads to only a week or so of gaming), SO3 can fill in the
void before Fable is released and in that nifty time between my
beating of Fable and my addiction to GTA:SA (which will only last
until I get tired of buying hamburgers of Carl Johnson).
So far, I'd have to
say that SO3 is a fairly solid game that's seriously lacking in a
few key areas...the main one being the combat engine. After playing
both Tales of Symphonia and SO2 in the last half year, I'd have to
say that this is about the lowest a action orientated RPG battle
engine can be. True, I've only played about 4.5 hours, so the combat
system may just have a long learning curve, but it seems cluttered
to me. For example, you have two buttons for actions in combat; the
X and the O buttons (X for normal attacks and O for slower but
stronger attacks). However, your special moves are also tacked on to
the same two buttons (for a total of two specials and one normal
attack per button)...if you hold X at short range, you'll do one
special, hold it at long range and you'll pull a second special, and
then tap it at any range and you'll run up to the enemy and smack
them. This is just confused and cluttered use for the buttons
compared to the simplicity of games like SO2 and ToS. On top of
that, your special moves all drain your HP to use (unless it's
Symbology...the equivalent to magic in SO3, which uses MP). If you
lose all of either your MP or HP you will die. So, you have to
consider a little too much of the effect of too many spells or
skills in comparison to the damage you expect to receive, which is
asking a lot in a high speed combat engine.
Anyway, I will be
preparing a review shortly (after I get more geek time in) for SO3.
However, in the mean time, I will keep you updated on the finer
points of what I like and (so far most obvious as I play) what I
dislike. It's not that this game is complete crap, but it definitely
pulls a FFX...that is, like how FFX felt nothing like the predecessors
in that series, SO3 feels nothing like SO2 (or the little bit I
played of SO1...it never came to the US, so I never got too much
time with that classic...but, damn, that was a fun hour or so I
played, even if I couldn't read the Japanese text). I'll also have
that review of CoH up real soon. I'm doing a bit of a graphical
overhaul of my PC, including some catch up work on getting some
screen shots, and also getting my video capture device up and
running (this time it's for real) so I can show off the nicest part
of SO3 (the visuals...which is sad since an RPG should not be about
visuals).
On a final note as I
take off to overhauling my PC, check out the review
of Burnout 3 on Gamespot.com. I can't believe how sweet this
game is sounding. I was planning on ignoring it until the price got
closer to $30, but now...damn, there are way too many quality games
coming out...which means practically everyone will lose this holiday
season (except Rockstar and EA).
Malik
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Malik
(9/9/04)
Before I start pissing
off any fanboys, I'll start with a bit of good news for you all. The
long awaited and promised City of Heroes review
is up and running, complete with some nice screen shots. I'll
mention it now, since I didn't bother in the review, but there are a
good deal of features in CoH that I didn't even begin to touch in
the review...with as many features as CoH has, I either would have
to pick and chose the best (and worst) ones to discuss, or I'd be
working on the review for the next 3 months (yes, there is a lot to
the game). I also have the good news of another review coming in the
next week or so. Also, since I have only been playing some really
good games lately, and thus have only been giving good reviews
lately, I promise some bad reviews are coming. Namely, reviews for
Super Mario Ball (Japanese version) for the GBA and Star Ocean 3.
Ok, now that I've broken the ice, let's piss off the fanboys.
I'll start with Super
Mario Ball (or Mario Pinball as some people call it). Just click
the link. I originally started to just ramble about this pathetic
attempt by Nintendo to run it's most popular license into the
ground, but after a few minutes I realized another review for today
had appeared (for those who say I post too few reviews, you can suck
it! Not only do I have two reviews, but one of them is for a
game not even out yet...BOOYAH!). This one, quite nicely, serves as
a balance for the review of CoH...I mean on the CoH end of things,
we have a wonderful game, and on the SMB side of things, we have
about the biggest pile of portable crap I've ever had the misfortune
to play.
Ok, now to the
Square fanboys. Since I haven't put in the time yet to meet my
personal requirements for a review, this will only be a sneak
preview of what will probably become my final review next week...so,
without further ado, some more of my early Star Ocean 3 impressions.
True, I have not
had too much time in SO3. Definitely not enough to get a final and
definitive conclusion on the game. However, there are some horrible
problems that I cannot keep quiet about.
Before I begin, I
just want to clarify something. I'm going to say "Square"
a lot instead of Square Enix, and there's a solid reason behind
this. Originally SO was an Enix franchise. Also, originally, the SO
series was solid and fun from the beginning. However, Square had a
bad habit of taking something fun and fantasy built, and trying to
give it an unhealthy dose of reality. That is what has befallen SO3.
While the basic world setup is similar and the history of the
universe you play in (which would be our universe in the future) is
constant, the level of "realism" has gotten to be quite
dysfunctional in a way which only Square could do with such crappy
games like FF8 and FFX (and FFX-2). The original feel and style of
SO, which felt quite Enix derived (which was a good thing), has been
replaced with a more Square feel. So, when I call this a Square
game, it's not to give the Square part of Square Enix extra credit
or to ignore the mighty Enix legacy...rather, it's an insult. That
was blunt enough, right?
Beyond the
problems I've mentioned yesterday (most importantly being the battle
controls), there are more control issues to be found. First off, in
a dungeon, on the map, or in a town, the walking controls are so
damned unresponsive. It's not hard to give fluid control to the
player when walking on the map, yet Square messed this up nicely.
Now, if you're just trying to move your character a small 5 feet to
open a treasure, you might have to spend a bit of time as Fayt (the
protagonist of SO3) jumps around in all the wrong directions. For
those who played the original Doom...think of Doom on a 386.
Beyond that,
there's another flaw in the controls...this time it's the battle
controls (thankfully it's not that problem I just mentioned...other
wise the high action battles would be a true headache). Basically,
it comes down to the theory of playing Smash Melee on the GCN with a
team of three Foxes vs. one Pikachu. For those who aren't aware of
this event...well, basically Fox can juggle like a pro, and a team
of Fox would juggle beyond tolerance and turn the game into a pile
of shit to the poor Pikachu. That is how the battles work on
SO3...and you're Pikachu.
Once you hit an
enemy, you may be lucky enough to get another successive attack in.
However, if the enemy hits you, you can expect to take about 40 more
hits in a row as the enemy/enemies juggle your pathetic ass without
remorse. So, in the end, your only hope of escape is for one of your
other players to break things up, or become the new victim of the
juggle. A weak and pathetic enemy can become the god of war with one
small hit if they go crazy with the combo action. In the end, this
turns battles into less of a matter of gaining levels and becoming
more powerful to overcome a strong enemy and more into a matter of
gaining levels so you can deal damage but also learning that the
limited number of 20 of any item is going to hurt (because you will
go through your healing items like mad if you have one bad battle).
This turns a long dungeon into a giant chore as you struggle to beat
every enemy without letting down your guard for a minute. It's
easier to take on a geek at random at a DDR machine than to keep
your guard up for an entire dungeon in SO3 (the dungeons are
freakin' huge).
Speaking of which;
my final complaint for today would be the size of the game. Well,
not the game itself as much as the towns and the dungeons. A town in
SO3 will make a megalopolis in Sim City look like a small village.
Once you enter a town, not only will you have a giant maze of dead
end cross streets to deal with, but you'll also have to deal with
usually dark environments and a complete lack of distinguishing
landmarks. Not only that, but most buildings in a town are not ones
you can enter, so in the end, you will have a giant maze that serves
no purpose beyond trying to make the world feel more realistic (I
hate you Square), since a small town like you'd see in the old SO
games would only seem fake...and more enjoyable...
So, beyond wanting
to play enough to write a fair review, why would I want to continue
this game if it's so horrible to play through? Because it does have
one thing going for it. Is it the lack of colors (most environments
are dark, gray toned, and contain only a few different
colors...usually brown and dark green)? The lack of textures (in
towns or dungeons everything looks the same and the areas are so
large, and if it wasn't for the built-in auto-map you would stand no
chance of playing this game without a strategy guide and a bottle of
Advil)? The annoyance of using the map (it is definitely not the
best of in game maps I've ever seen...in fact, it's the worst one
I've seen)? The repetitive and annoying music (two people have seen
me play this game, and only for a couple of hours each, and both of
them said how damned annoying the music is and how the choice of
music is never appropriate for the situation being played at the
time)? Actually, it would be the little bit of the plot that
shows.
The plot is
usually thin and hard to detect...however, when it comes through, it
definitely shines. I won't go into too many details (mainly because
I have trouble telling what's going on since this story is as vague
and cryptic as the plot of the FF movie...but more enjoyable) now,
but it does fill in about 10% of the gapping void left by the poor
game play and super-sized towns.
Anyway, I am going
to try my luck with a little more SO3. If I'm lucky, my PS2 will be
alive at the end of an hour or so of playing...and if not...well,
Mr. PS2, along with SO3, will see what it's like to go flying 12
floors to the concrete below as I chuck them out my window in a mix
of rage and satisfaction.
Malik
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Malik
(9/10/04)
Too much damned
randomness for one day...Well, it's Friday once again, but things
are going a little differently this week. Instead of giving a new
column of Malik's Bitchings this week, I've decided to just make my
posts this week into an informal Bitchings. In other words, just
read my previous columns for the week to see what would have been a
full column if I wasn't so involved in my two days off and my two
reviews I've posted this week.
Before I jump into
things too much, I just want to throw out there that too many people
seem to not get the general idea of how things work around here.
What I mean by this is that too many people have come here looking
for specific info (usually on Tales of Symphonia) and have left
without doing the simple act of going to the forums. This would be
why that nifty game help link on the left goes to the forums. To put
it more bluntly; if you're looking for help on a game, go to the
forums, then click on geek talk, then click on the forum that may
contain the info you want. If you can't find said info, then either
post in a forum that's appropriate (there's one just for ToS) or
make a new forum. It's that freakin' easy. Blah, no one listens
anyway. It is amazing how many people will come to a web site from a
search engine, look at the site for about 2 seconds before they give
up and go to another site to only do the same damned thing...over
and over.
Anyway, to
continue with my bitching yesterday and Wednesday, I will continue
with my initial Star Ocean 3 impressions. For those who played and
loved number 2 (which was one hell of an under appreciated RPG), the
saddest part of SO3 is the lack of real skills. Instead of having
access to magic, battle skills, and miscellaneous skills, you now
only get the magic (symbology) and battle skills. You do gain skill
points like in SO2, but you don't use those for some awesome greater
purpose, like creating new items, making weapons, cooking, or
anything of that fun nature. Instead, your skill points serve one
purpose; you can boost your HP, MP, attack, or defense. In the end,
this feels so anti-climatic after the skill system of SO2.
When it comes down
to creating new items, you have to use a invention center or
workshop. In these places, instead of creating new items, you unlock
new items that will be available through merchants. Meanwhile, as
you do that, there are NPC inventors doing the same. So, basically,
you could actually get away with little to no workshop use and still
take care of business. In the end, this means that the wonderful
skill and talent system of SO2 has been reduced to nothing beyond a
minor afterthought. Plus, all the items used in creating new things
basically come down to being lumped into rather unimaginative
groups. Do you want to cook some meat? Well, in SO2 you would need
to find said meat. In SO3, you simply need "Cooking Ingredients",
which contains a large grouping of cooking ingredients.
It's like all
attempts to include creativity in SO3 were stripped away. In the
end, the worlds are very realistic in look and feel, the idea of
magic has been toned down to a more-or-less scientifically explainable
"symbology", the skill system is nothing beyond a stat
raising system, the towns are gigantic and filled with many
buildings you cannot enter (which is more realistic...and makes all
past RPGs look like paradise as you struggle to explore a maze of a
town with a rather annoying map system and a rotating camera that
makes you always feel disorientated)...in the end, it's all quite
uninspired. All of this originality that's missing makes me think of
other crap-tacular titles that suffered the same problem, like FF8.
If there is one important lesson that's been taught over and over by
RPG designers it's that creativity and fantasy are king. If you lack
these two elements, you come down with a "realistic" RPG,
and in the end, after a long day of work or school, chores, and
other responsibilities, who in their right mind would want to be
further reminded of reality? Well, besides Square fanboys; who can't
get over mental unbalanced daddy's boys who cannot mack on the woman
next to him properly as he would rather think of his uncaring
father? No one, that's who.
However, I did
learn that SO3 has a few good points. While the plot is not
completely unbearable, even though I would rather play something
creative over realistic any day (if I want realism, there are plenty
of Tom Clancy games on my shelf, waiting for me), there's even a fix
to one of the worst issues of SO3. That being the visuals. The
visuals look rather nice, but they suffer from being almost monochrome
in design. Most towns or dungeons or maps all have one key color, in
varying shades, and very little to actually stimulate the eye. This
makes traveling through a town into a coma-inducing nightmare as you
struggle through a maze of a town with the only landmarks being
something along the lines of "the light gray house next to all
the medium gray houses" or "the room with three rocks on
the ground instead of two".
Anyway, as I
learned last night, this is a game that can only be played in
absolute darkness. After the sun went down, and for once I was able
to play in the dark without hearing complaints from Velveeta, for
once, about not being able to read in the dark, I was able to fully
see the world of SO3. After all background lights are eliminated,
it's a lot easier to tell that light gray house from the medium gray
ones around it. It still sucks putting up with this horrible visual
style, but it is more bearable without ambient lights.
Sadly, while I learned
this fact, I also learned another fact that usually can piss me off
like few others. This feature being the FFX style of world map.
Instead of having a nifty world map to walk around in for quick
access to different towns and dungeons, you will walk
everywhere...at least for the first part of the game. Usually, there
will be only one path to follow, which includes to options of, like
in FFX, going forward or backward. There are rarely any side paths
you can take (and if there are any, expect them to be locked for a
long time). This means you will have to, in effect, go through a
dungeon-worth of outdoors to go from one town to another town
instead of simply walking quickly over a nifty map screen. It also
means you will not have a good idea of the lay of the land (I know
there was a gorge on that over world "dungeon", but is it
a big gorge, a canyon, a dried river bed? Does it play a key in
defining the lay of the land for miles around?), which is annoying
as hell when you're informed that a certain land is not fertile with
it's many mountains and all you can see is a small stretch of land
from one town to another.
I have read that
SO3 is supposedly really crappy until you hit the end of the first
disc (2 DVDs make up SO3), so my thoughts on how crappy this game is
may be equally founded and unfounded. However, if this is true, and
the game picks up in a dozen more hours of playing, then for one
thing I'll be quite happy...I'm determined to finish this game and
not just chuck it onto the pile of crappy Square titles that I've
given up on in the last couple of years...I mean it would be hard
for the game to get worse with more playing (hard, but not fully
impossible). However, on the other hand, this is not exactly making
me happy since it means that Tri-Ace/Square/Square Enix messed up
along the way and released a game that sucks for at least 1/3 of the
overall game time. This is not too uncommon, but it is not, by any
means, acceptable. I mean I paid for a full game, and if a good deal
of it sucks, then it doesn't matter how long the game is and how
long the fun parts are as long as I know that I wasted my time and
money on the first chunk of the game...blah.
On a totally
different note; I got an invite from one of my friends to join in
the test of Google's Gmail service. The first thing I need to say is
that the rumors of those horrible pop-up ads in the middle of an
email are way out of line. Are there ads? Yes. Are they as obtrusive
as the damned "Get more out of Yahoo" crap that appears at
the bottom of a Yahoo email? Not at all. The ads in gmail are simple
little text ads that show up on the right side of the screen and are
hardly distinguishable from the standard crap that appears on the
side of of a typical email window. The ads are the standard Google
ads (if you haven't seen them, these are usually about 4-5 lines of
text written with a tiny font and contain no pictures, no java, no applets,
no hassles; and they typically come in groups of 2-3 ads stacked on
top of each other or lined up side by side), and best of all, they
don't show up in the email you sent or received, only on your screen
at the far right side when you are in your Gmail reading an
email.
After using this
new service for about a day, I have to say a few other things. The
first would be f*** Microsoft and they bullshit of claiming that
they would upgrade all of our Hotmail accounts to 250MB "in the
next two weeks". I got my promise of upgraded inbox space over
1.5 months ago...my mother got one at the beginning of June. So far,
Microsoft has just slept on this empty promise (when I contacted
Hotmail support about this, all I got in response was equivalent to
"I have no idea if we'll get off our asses"). I think
Yahoo (with 100MB) and Gmail with 1GB have shown that Microsoft has
no excuse for their tardiness in joining the standard of the year
2000 and beyond.
Also, on the same
topic of Gmail, I just have to say that this service kicks some
major ass. The ease of looking at all messages contained in a series
of replies at once is hella convenient. The ability to search your
emails for keywords (like an Internet search) is simple and so very
effective. In short, Gmail adds a lot of new features to standard
web-based email that should have been implemented long ago, and I
guess it took someone on the outside, like how Google was, to see
what needed to be done and to get it working. Bravo Google.
Anyway, I'm
planning to get at least enough SO3 in this weekend to start working
on a review as early as next week. Considering that the game is
supposed to pick up after a considerably amount of game play, I may
have to update this review as I go along, but I'll at least get a
formal first impression up in the next week or two (depending on if
the game actually picks up or remains at the same crappy pace). I'll
also get a formal informal Malik's Bitchings up next Friday, but I
think my posts did the job nicely this week with the stress of two
reviews and only 3 work days. Anyway, that's about it for me for
this week. Gracias, again, to my Gmail hook-up.
Malik
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