10lives, A Realistic Way To Review Videogames

I had to pick up Super Smash Brothers Brawl a bit later then everybody else, and for some reason I wasn’t too worried about that “first week hype” that seems to revolve around games all the time. Ironically, with Melee, it’s predecessor, I had purchased the game on it’s launch day and played it like hell. Then stopped playing for 5 years, and then repicked it up again once I met some people in the pro-gaming scene that played this game. From that moment I learned how great Melee really was in terms of depth and technique and why it’s one of those rare games that has garnered such a harcore community. Granted, I never became more than a beginner player… and even after a year of practice I couldn’t even wavedash more than half the time… but I really saw how great the game really was on a competative level. So, what’s a week compared to 5 years?

The first impression I have of Brawl is that it has a ridiculous number of modes of play. You can do Classic, which is the single player experience from the last game, the new Subspace Embassy mode, Break some targets, home run contests, build a stage, events, challenges, online with friends or random people, multiplayer brawl, with items, without items, all with more stages, music, and characters to unlock. A lot of these modes can be played 2 player which is a great boon to those who have either a brother or sister, or even a girlfriend (or boyfriend) to experience games with!

• Insane amounts of modes. Definite fan service that serves to Nintendo Fans everywhere!

However, it doesn’t take that long after playing to realize that Sakuri, the creator of this game, stripped the game down in terms of gameplay. The game feels slower and, at least on the surface and as far as first impressions do go, less deep. This is better for newer gamers into the foray but it just feels like a step back for those of us who did spend a long time in the old game. If I can tell the difference then hardcore nuts for melee surely can even more, especially those who probably make a lot of money at tournaments. Also, some odd decisions that just hurt this game. They brought back ALL of the characters from the old games, except replaced Mew Two with Lucario, and changed the way some of the core characters played, particularly Falco, and no Dr. Mario?

Friend codes also hurt the gaming experience. Having to imput digits for every single friend you want to play and hoping they imput yours before you can even get a room started is just exhausting. Yet, at least once it is set up it works fairly well with little lag unless someone is on a horrible connection. This is nothing compared to the random battles you play against people, where even their gamer identy (the 5 letter combination that you can input to identify your character gets stripped) as well as any of the myriad of options you can normally choose to play disappear. You are stuck as the nameless with only 2 minute K.O. fest to play, over and over again. You might as well play with the CPU.

• No MewTwo, Dr. Mario, and unwanted changes to existing characters to make them feel too different
• Horrible Online interface - Friendcodes are just downright annoying.
• Stripped and slowed game play. All of the advance tactics are gone, or at least most seem to me missing.
• Random Matches are extremely pointless!

So far these are my initial findings and ramblings. Overall the production values are up there and there is just so much to explore that I have yet to really comment in more depth to any particular mode yet. It might be good to note that I’ve only played enough to unlock two new characters. So I have time to change my thoughts as this game unfolds itself. I’ll be starting Subspace Embessy soon, probably will string my girlfriend along for a two player experience.

Wish me luck!

• Storyline keeps the chapters fresh and lures you back in for just one more battle

• Battles are repetitive, and while some have unique goals, they all almost play out with the same strategy.
• The AI is atrocious and do not even try to actually win battles. Often a few attacks to a small army will be enough to make them retreat.
• Suffers from “too many playable characters” syndrome that often force you to just use any characters that has strong area of effect specials or ones that raise heroes. I would assume a poll of the most played heroes would result in pretty much the same character sets.
• Levels that are hard only because you are underleveled for having never died are pointless extensions of gameplay, especially when they are part of the storyline!

I can safely say that this game is somewhat addictive in small bursts. Being portable, I often find I play this game when I am either riding somewhere or waiting for something, and it’s ironic how far I’ve gotten into this game without taking time to reflect on why I am still playing this game. The secret lies in success in small chunks and repetition, much like games of ole. It gives you enough information in the story to play the next chapter which leads to a nice transition from act to act.

The 100 Word or Less Summary:

The general story takes place a year after Final Fantasy XII for the Ps2, and the central characters Vaan and Penelo has fufilled his role as a Sky Pirate by commandeering (stealing actually) his own ship. In doing so he travels to the floating continent of Lemurés above the clouds where he learns to summon monsters using auricite crystals. Throughout 10 chapters he fights his way with his friends and allies in a real time strategy game that has a decent amount of action but not very much challenge and depth.

The gameplay initially feels more advanced then what you expect from a DS game or any Final Fantasy game for that matter. Everything happens in real time and you sometimes control up to 30+ units. At the beginning of a battle you are given mission goals, which can be defeating all enemies on the map or sneaking to a specific spot. You are given a chance to see the units the enemy will have. All units are classified between ranged, melee, and flying units and the entire game revolves around a rock-paper-scissor relationship of which one type defeats another. Ranged dominates flying, flying dominates melee, and melee dominates ranged. In addition all units have a type of element, and each element has another element that it is strong or weak against.

In addition to these attribute types for units, you have levels and are limited by only bringing 5 types total to each battle. Each character commands a troupe of whatever units you summon for them, generally consisting of their own battle type.

For early battles all of this feels very daunting, but after a few chapters you start to realize the game is easier than it looks and has very little depth, at least compared to how much is almost promises.

Once you get the hang of the ds controls, which do a fairly good job at allowing you to micro manage your units (although not a great job), you start to find that any battle that gives you a summoning crystal needs almost 0 micromanaging. Even if you commit suicide, as long as you keep on hero alive you can usually rally and make a comeback as there are very little resources that prevent you from building back your armies. The only mission types that offer a challenge are the ones that have no summoning crystals which means that unless you resurrect your hero with another hero, you will not be able to come back. In theory this sounds like a challenging situation, but generally if you spam area effect attacks and just keep summoning more espers… the AI never adjusts and you win. Unless of course the units are 20 levels ahead of you, to which the only thing you can really do is play even cheaper and send “bombs” (a type of esper that commits suicide once hit to deal a lot of damage) over and over one by one until you clear most units and then run in to win. This… of course… is only effective until you come across units 40 levels ahead of you, which then your only choice is to level rather then even play the fight to begin with.

Luckily, the art style, dialog, and story keeps this game lovable and passable. There are occasional times where the fights are fun, usually in the earlier stages before you unlock stronger weapons and level 3 espers. I am interested in finishing this game, but I am not sure if I have the stamina to get to 100% completion. I’ll keep you updated!

• Pricepoint Makes this game worth it before even playing it.

• Introduction is spotty and difficult as it asks you to do things that you do, but get stuck repeating them over and over again even though you are doing what the game asks.
• Process of gaining new abilities feels a little too slow. Any new player who gets struck before the dodge chant will most likely quit due to its….
• High difficulty. Nay, Early High difficulty. High difficulties are decent as long as you keep it hard towards the end or on extra missions.

I only bought Patapon for it’s pricepoint. Plain and simple. Sure, the idea of a rhythm-based-rts-sidescroller with eyeballs sporting legs and spears sounds enticing in some world on it’s own, really, the game new costs $19.99. You just can’t really beat that.

Although I’ve heard rave reviews about this game, I just did not trust them ever since LocoRoco game out for the system.  Having never played the full game, I can’t really say I hated that game too much, but from the 20 minutes I did play I found it’s cutesy singing appeal to be quite annoying and the entire game felt like an annoying “let’s make this more tenuous then it needs to be” platformer. Ironically, 4+ hours later with Patapon, I have quite a different taste in my mouth.

In early stages you don’t have much to do. Each button correlates to a different type of drum and the only song you are given is a basic move forward song. You play your drum for 4 cycles, and depending on what cycle you play, your patapon troops will sing back to you if it’s a valid song….  Pata-Pata-Pata-Pon….. Pon-Pon-Pata-Pon….. which is  simply the basis of this game. If you can keep the same cycle going for a while without messing up, your patapons will jump into fever, where they, in a very cute way, start chanting in harmony while performing better! To attack, you just change up your cycle to the attack cycle…. Pon-Pon-Pata-Pon……. Pon-Pon-Pata-Pon…..

And this is Patapon. Very simple, very adictive, but very hard and unforgiving for the casual player. You will find yourself backtracking to get better gear or more money to get more numbers in your troops. If a patapon dies, especially if you were lucky enough to purchase a rare-patapon while being unlucky to retrieve their hat (needed to bring them back) then you might as well reset the game so you don’t waste your time rebuilding your troops all over again.

Pon-Pon-Pata-Pon…… Chaka-Chaka-Pata-Pon!

More on this game later!

You may be wondering why I haven’t written anything about anything Playstation 3 related. Well. Clearly it’s because I hate the system!

I jest.

The truth of the matter is that I decided not to get a PS3 at launch, knowing that the system would actually worth buying when it hit a certain amount of milestones. I’ll list them and color code them for your enjoyment.

• Games actually came out for it,  exclusively mind you, particularly (for me) a good RPG, Socom, or a new Tekken. Gran Turismo might be enough to make me purchase this baby as well.
• The price went down. And it went down but I think it may go down again sooner than later.
• They started rolling out their PSP / PS3 features that lay dormant in firmware for what seems like years. Wait. It has been years hasn’t it?
• When Blue-Ray won the war.
• When home and it’s Xbox-Live goodness decided to grace us with it’s meaty presence.

So three out of five reasons ain’t bad. Maybe I should finally get myself one? Nah. I’ll wait for at least a decent game to come out that I look forward to. Then I’ll go back and play the few that looked decent that I missed, particulary Drakes Fortune and Jak and Dexter.

• Retarded Achievement Syndrome - When a game that has a 0% probability of staying popular longer than 6 seconds on xbox live has achievements that try to force people to play it’s multi player!
• Repetitive Game play - I enjoy going to work 5 days a week looking and doing the same thing every day. Not! I don’t enjoy doing the same in my video games either.
• Very Very Messy Game Design - When a games core mechanics feels like it was inspired by my desk and room, which mind you, are usually very very messy.
• I need glue - To hold one or more button down that I constantly need to press to play this game, usually for an action that through better user interface design could have been utilized differently.
• Horrible Targeting System - I base all targeting system comparisons with GTA3. If a game’s targeting system is worse than that game, then it’s pretty bad and deserves to lose a life.

I rented this game. I have a soft spot for games that either involve dungeons, fantasy type role playing, or look like it may be some sort of RTS or Minion type game play. When getting these types of games, I often explore the multi player options a little bit early just to check and see how many people are playing at any given time. Warcraft 3 has been out for like a bazillion years, as well as Starcraft, and there are always tons of people ready to play in most of the game types available. So when I checked to see overlord was released last year some time, I expected at least 10 people playing some type of multi player. I was wrong of course.

For you achievement whores out there. This is bad news seing around 100-150 points that you can get revolve around playing multi player games. Some have you needing to play at least 50 games, of each type of match, which will just be impossible for you unless you know someone else with the game that has the time to play 150 matches with you just so you can get said achievement.

That being said, I’m only like 3 hours into this game. The core ideas in this game are nice. You control an overlord to do evil across the land. In doing so you gain control of minions who pretty much run around and kill and destroy anything you tell them to. What is annoying about this game already is that you pretty much just have to press the R button to get them to do everything. You just hold it down… forever it seems… and they run around and kill what you look at. Sure, there is a targeting system, which is pretty horrible, but until later parts of the game holding down R does it until you gain new minions to control.

As you unlock new minions you gain access to new abilities and uses for them. There are fire minions who pretty much control all things fire. So if an object you need is on the other side of fire you can pretty much imagine what you need to do next. Then there are water minions. And green ones, of which I haven’t unlocked yet, but I can imagine have something to do with plants or wind. This game is pretty much pikmin, but with worse controls, all tied into a Medieval hack-and-slash. Promising at first but lets you down really early. Only hardcore players are going to want to play this game in it’s entirety. It’s already down to 5 lives, which is enough for me to quit playing at any time. The only bonus this game gets to get me to keep playing it is that..well, i rented it, so I might as well try to get as far as I can get in just a few days.

The only really positive thing that I can say about this game so far is that the dialog is witty. It keeps me entertained and i often stop playing just to hear what some of the people have to say.

I am a huge fan of RTS games. I am also a huge fan of the Nintendo DS. How can this game go wrong?

The answer is, in lots of ways. I find that RTS games require a lot of micro-managing and hot-keys to be even slightly worth playing. A bad user-interface or shoddy touch-screen interaction can greatly kill the fun for this game. It seems to be garnishing decent reviews using your usual way of reviewing <insert random pointless number for a rewiew score>, but here at 10lives I’ll be reviewing this game in a way that matters. Will I play this game in it’s entirety and/or will I have fun with however far I get.

Some games have mojo, and others don’t. I hope this does!