Star Wars: Episode II: Revenge of the Sith – PS2, XBox

Posted on July 6, 2015 by jplaj

The Duluth/Superior region has a Facebook group dedicated to letting people sell their old junk. I like to keep tabs on this, theoretically, because people occasionally post video games or even consoles. Unfortunately, the people who tend to sell these things generally have no understanding of the difference between good and bad games. If they paid $50 for it, then damn it, everyone will claw each others eyes out to get to the $49 used Madden game that they so generously offered to take a financial hit on. Oh, how will you ever feed your starving children otherwise? Word of advice, people, no one wants your shitty sports games. Not even people who buy shitty sports games. Used game stores might charge a token 50 cents for them, but honestly if you needed to assign a realistic value to them, don’t forget to include the negative sign! Also, your 25-year-old front-loading NES won’t fetch the $300 you think it will. Look these things up on eBay before demanding people stop not-buying your shit. Anyway, these people generally mix in a few licensed games based on movies or TV shows, which brings me to this week’s topic.

Despite my unfeeling metal body and legion of droids with heavy artillery, I will fight you with your weapon of choice, because having only two sith lords reduces the opportunity for lightsaber combat.

My regular readers will know by now that I’d rather crawl through a tunnel of razor wire towards a cliff dropping into the Dead Sea than play a licensed game. However, in the past I’ve admitted that Star Wars games fall into the golden territory of, and I quote myself here, “Meh. Not so bad.” And with that philosophy and a masochistic spirit worthy of homosexuals, women, and racial minorities who vote republican, I picked up Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith at Savers, expecting a mediocre gameplay at best–and the game wowed me…with how much it still managed to disappoint me with bland, uninspired and glitchy gameplay, and some identity confusion as to whether or not it wanted to fulfill its duty to its father and join the run-and-gun action genre, or whether or not it wanted to hang out with its rebel friends in more of a fighting game format.

I’ve definitely played worse, though. In fact, two minutes into the game, it almost felt just like watching the movie…mostly because they had actually inserted footage from the film as a cut scene, albeit with noticeably lower quality. And since anyone with a laptop less than ten years old can easily rip DVD footage and convert it to a format the PS2 can read, I can only assume the developer–some obscure company called “LucasArts”–had trouble getting their hands on a high quality copy of the game, perhaps developing the game as a bootleg edition. Either that or something went horribly wrong in the middle of George Lucas’ attempt to digitally replace all the lightsabers with walkie talkies, resulting in an explosion that gave him abnormal powers and turned him into a galactic super villain. Also, except for a brief quip in the middle of the final battle, they cut out any mention of Natalie Portman. Assholes. I swear, if you turned her into a walkie talkie, you’ll rue the day you ever….

Tell me ‘friend,’ when did Anakin the wise abandon reason for madness?

…sorry. I don’t usually develop crushes on celebrities, but as a nerd, I hold Star Wars near and dear to my heart, and Carrie Fisher predates my time by just a little too much. Anyway, much like I do with soft porn, the game skips over absolutely everything part of the plot without any action. It begins with the assault on General Grievous’ fleet, the duel with Count Dooku, and the Chancellor’s rescue, and then except for a short mission with Obi-Wan, I immediately found myself battling Mace Windu and bowing before the Emperor. But even though the plot seems to have taken a lightsaber to the head, even the Super Star Wars series took gratuitous license to shove violence and action into every orifice not already occupied by a lightsaber battle, light-speed space chase, or baby Ewok.

…damn it, Ben. I swear to god, if you say that one more time, I will telepathically call Jar Jar and tell him how much you miss him.

As a nameless run-and-gun, it provides a few hours of mild amusement. However, it doesn’t take long before the signs of a quick cash grab start popping up like a whack-a-womprat game. Characters glitch out occasionally, performing cirque du soleil Jedi contortions, enemies tend to get stuck off screen where you can’t kill them, and occasionally cut scenes will just forget to play, forcing you to restart the game to make any progress. Furthermore, for all their supposed strength with the Force, Anakin and Obi-Wan show as much intuition as a gay vegan publicly coming out of the closet at an NRA convention. The game’s targeting system seems to deliberately point me either at the farthest enemy from me or the one holding cattle prod while a nearby spaceship wants to make me a million pieces with the Force. I may have found it in my heart to forgive all this, but the developers also felt the urge to subject me to battle quips that might have worked better as a mild laxative, but even at the end of the game Obi-Wan feels so smugly witty about turning murdered droids into “another one for the scrap pile” that I miss the 3rd-grade joke book humor of James Bond.

The films tried to capitalize on Boba Fett’s cult following by literally cloning him a few hundred thousand times and setting up the elaborate back story of the clones as the Republic’s army, so in the context of the story it makes sense that they’d fight side-by-side with the Jedi. However, you can’t give me a lifetime full of Star Wars games that declare open season on anything wearing a white mask and then expect me not to spend half of every battle trying to slice off their heads. Sorry, but if they look like stormtroopers, my Jedi intuition will assess them as a threat, and meanwhile the inept droid will sneak up behind me and sodomize me with my lightsaber.

While switching play between Anakin and Obi-Wan may have sounded cool on paper, the developers seemed to overlook the fact that the two characters had a pretty epic throw down at the end of the film, as in, Obi-Wan threw down Anakin’s legs into a fiery pit of molten metal. To rectify this, players have the option of playing through the final duel with either character. By playing as Obi-Wan, you can unlock the regular ending of the film. Otherwise, you can play as Anakin and watch a scenario pulled off the dregs of the worst fan fiction the internet has to offer, while simultaneously unlocking a bonus mission from Episode IV that would make no sense considering the new ending. Either way, you get an extended duel demonstrating that while lightsaber parries make awesome noises and flashes in the movies, they just drag out the games, dealing no damage to anything except your free time before bed.

007 Everything or Nothing – PS2, Game Cube, XBox

Posted on June 29, 2015 by jplaj

Jaws had some awkward first dates, much like I, myself, did.

99? You don’t look a day over 86!

While growing up, I never really cared much for super heroes. Something about the black-and-white morality of Superman made me think hero worship would send me down the path of joining the boy scouts or becoming an altar boy, and I had this policy of actively avoiding people who wanted to molest me. So barring a slight interest in Batman (fueled by more than a passing interest in my own mental stability), I had to look elsewhere for impressive super-humans. As much as I’d like to say my interest in spies came from picking up Goldeneye 007 for the N64, but honestly, ever since 4th grade I’ve held Get Smart as the pinnacle of television programming. To this day, 99% of the women I’ve fallen for have held more than a passing resemblance to Barbara Feldon. But since this blog focuses on video games….Goldeneye 007, N64, yada yada, cute story about my past, segue into James Bond games.

I love James Bond, from his Batman-like gadgets to his Laffy-Taffy-style wit, his flashy theme songs and cadre of beautiful women. I even bought the July 1973 issue of Playboy on eBay, hoping to see a different side of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and Bond Girl (Come on, Barbara, you still have time to make an appearance!) So the fact that they only make new movies once every two or three (sometimes up to six) years, really gets under my skin. Damn it! I need regular doses of Cold War inspired action thrillers! Fortunately, I managed to find a copy of Nightfire….somewhere; I forget where…and I realized that original electronic Bond stories didn’t all have to end up as disappointing as Agent Under Fire. So let me tell you about Everything or Nothing instead.

Curse you, Spider-man!

Everything or Nothing marks Pierce Brosnan’s final and from what I can tell only video game appearance as James Bond. The story follows our super-spy tracking down a load of nano-macguffins from the Green Goblin. If Willem Defoe–whose name literally means “of the enemy”–didn’t particularly look like his entire raison d’etre amounted to playing a Bond villain, they named his character after Satan and gave him a chip on his shoulder because Bond killed Christopher Walken–the only human on earth voted “Most Likely to Play a Bond Villain” by his high school graduating class”–in A View to a Kill. Some girls show up. Bond travels the world. Richard Kiel reprises his role as Jaws, lending his voice to the infamously mute character. Things explode. Bond makes puns that would make Gallagher turn in his grave.

This mission employs Bond’s talent for plummeting.

The back of the box tries to sell the game on the merits of having “an unprecedented variety of missions,” which raises some interesting questions. For one, what precedents on mission variety have we already established? Will Everything or Nothing contain action shooter levels, a quick round of Tetris in Moscow, three levels of Bubble Bobble, followed by ten minutes of Goat Simulator? Unfortunately for those of us who always felt James Bond needed a goat sidekick, the purported variety means that in addition to the regular third-person shooter levels, you get to play levels where you drive along a road, drive around a map, drive around a track, drive a tank around a map, and drive along a road in your choice of vehicles. Of course, since I had just finished playing–sorry, attempting to play–Grand Theft Auto III, I couldn’t help but notice some strong similarities, especially on one map where the game literally asked me to steal a car and use it to break into a factory. Naturally, the GTA driving controls in place, this mission–along with several timed segments–turned into a game of Ted Kennedy bumper cars, with Bond’s Aston Martin flopping around the road as though someone had entered a live tuna in the Indy 500.

Take that, old bean! Yes, very good. Indeed.

The character combat…works? I guess. I did rather appreciate the full body view of the character, rather than floating through the game as a disembodied gun with severely impaired peripheral vision. The camera controls work with all the finesse and grace of Ted Kennedy’s Bumper Cars, and I didn’t find any option for auto tracking or even a Z-targeting method like in Zelda. Since no one seems to have told the aiming feature they scrapped the first-person perspective, it will only lock on to enemies if Bond faces the same direction of the camera and the enemy falls within a zone of sight that doesn’t include his immediate peripheral vision; after all, nothing says “international super spy” like unloading six rounds into a house plant because it looks more threatening than the man holding a glass bottle, eying up your head like a recycling bin. Granted, taking control of Bond gives players the chance to immerse themselves in the world of espionage, but can’t we give the character just a little credit for intuition? I mean, Bond may excel at hand-to-hand combat, but when someone shoves the barrel of an AK-47 in your face, you just might have a few more effective tricks up your sleeve than pistol whipping him with your very much loaded shotgun.

How many games did it take you to figure out how to not stand out in the open, trying to stop bullets with your lungs?

Rather than a traditional menu, Everything or Nothing gives you “Bond Senses,” which I guess attempts to make up for the otherwise oblivious senses he displays in combat. By pressing left on the d-pad (Gamecube version), time will slow down, you can cycle through your weapons, and anything in the environment you can interact with will radiate small red rings that you can target to tell you exactly how to interact with them. I found this a refreshing alternative to the standard flipping-through-google-for-a-walkthrough method, and rarely got stuck. I say rarely because I did spend the better part of a half an hour running through an abandoned hotel looking for a fuse box, only to find out later that I had to target a non-accessible area of the map to find it. Also notice I said “slow time down” rather than “stop time.” Note: bullets travel fast. Best to stay on your guard even in Bond Sense Mode if you don’t have a pressing need to aerate your spleen. I found that one out the hard way.

EA retained the idea of Bond moves from previous games. Any time you do something especially clever, witty, or otherwise on the lines of what James Bond would have done himself, the game awards you bonus points. These can include useful tricks like jumping a fence on your motorcycle, or shooting a ceiling connection to drop a catwalk onto a group of enemies. However, I think EA may have run out of creative mojo (crikey!) to think up new Bond moves, as occasionally they awarded me points for things like “hitting the badguy with your rocket launcher” or “touch the girl.” And while, yes, this might fall under the umbrella of “in-character,” it generally doesn’t take super intelligence to go massage the girl when she asks you to.

Look….I, uh, hope I wasn’t out of line with the crack about the big ape.

Generally, I liked the game. The lame accent Willem Defoe adopted made me think he didn’t exactly put his heart into this performance, and while I thought the game challenged me just enough to keep me interested without chucking my controller across the room, the final stage spiked horribly, so that I probably spent a good 10% of my total play time dying over and over again until giving up and dropping the game to easy mode–at which point it still took me three attempts. Everything or Nothing feels a little light in the story department, and even the girls only seem to make appearance out of perfunctory need to follow a formula, but as a game it held together without seeming like the usual movie-licensed cash grab that these games often degrade into. Plus, the game also features Judi Dench and John Cleese (or as I call him, Funny Q), and who doesn’t love to take mission suggestions from Monty Python?

Jurassic Park – SNES

Posted on June 21, 2015 by jplaj

All right. This will show up that smug bastard from Duck Hunt. Look at my retriever!

So I had originally planned to post about Skyward Sword today, but something came up: Jurassic World. Not only has Hollywood finally realized that they don’t have to write sequels by running the original screenplay through a shredder and then taking a dump on what comes out, but they chose Jurassic Park to learn this lesson! Back in 2007, they had announced plans for a movie about genetically engineering raptor-human hybrids for use in Iraq; then Michael Crichton died (*sad*) and Spielberg said, “Why not make a good movie instead?” And Jurassic Park! The movie that gave 10-year-old me more thrills than Michael Jackson at a boy scout convention. Every night, lying in bed, I’d watch my door knob, waiting for it to jiggle, and for the raptors to come in and find me.

Uh, sorry to wake you Miss Raptor, but, uh…I need to kill you.

Naturally, Jurassic World brought me back to my ten-year-old self, and since I doubt Spielberg will hire me to write JP5 (I have some ideas, Steven, and I’ll work for free, if you want to talk!), I decided to go back to some old Jurassic Park video games, in no way intending to capitalize off the recent surge of people searching for the movie, mosasaurus, velociraptor, indominus rex, Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Owen, Claire…have I missed any? Uh…cool Indian helicopter guy…meh. I’ll get them in there somehow. Anyway, since I didn’t plan this at all, and since I’d like to do occasional videos (watch out, JonTron!), I went to the game I had played most often and, of course, actually own.

In 1994, Ocean Software released Jurassic Park for the SNES to…well, to stores willing to sell the game. It didn’t make huge news. It didn’t develop much of a fan following. Developed at the tail end of the NES life span, versions for the NES, Game Boy, and several Sega systems all came out together. For all practical purposes, this game appeared as nothing more than another licensed video game cash grab. Gameplay involves…(what? Did you expect me to disagree with that? Say that critics vastly underappreciated it? Honestly, I think it earned the reception it deserved.)

Gameplay involves wandering around the park, blowing up the absurdly high population of predators, accomplishing missions to restore the park to order so you can evacuate and let nature reclaim it. Yeah, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, either, but I guess you need something to do. These missions include harvesting raptor eggs, fumigating the raptor nest, blocking raptors from entering the visitor center, and clearing raptors off a ship bound for the mainland (and also giving it orders not to sail, just in case). The game derives most of its disproportional hatred of raptors from the book, rather than the film, and even contains some animals, like the compies, that only appeared in the novel.

This mission assigned by Dr. Flintstone.

The film’s characters all issue hints and commands to you (as Dr. Grant) from a safe distance, presumably already off the island. Of course, none of them bothered to give you their ID cards before they left, and instead scattered them around the island, often in dark, claustrophobic rooms filled with dinosaurs and behind locked doors. Thanks guys. Furthermore, Dennis Nedry appears with deliberately malicious advice; obviously because an underappreciated, disgruntled computer nerd engaged in industrial espionage clearly cast his lot with the dinosaurs and wants all good humans dead.

Yeah. That stuff can make you go blind. Wouldn’t it suck if I couldn’t see the dinosaurs jumping out of the trees at me?

For all the messages you get from people, they never clarify any details, making them less helpful than Miss Cleo and an army of psychic friends. Block raptors from entering the visitor center? Maybe you could have told me that, in a game where you don’t interact with the environment, you gave me one piece of furniture that moves! A lot of times, their unsolicited advice pops up right over a dinosaur ambush. Tim pops up to say, “Don’t shoot the gallimimus! They might stampede,” and ten seconds later when the message vanishes from the screen, I find a raptor flossing with my intestines. (Almost as though she waited for just the right moment…clever girl!)

Giant beakers full of bubbling liquids. Because science.

While most of the game gives you an overhead view of Dr. Grant, it switches to first-person when entering buildings. Grant doesn’t have a lot to fear here, as the only damage comes from looking left/right when entering a room, only to find the dinosaur on his right/left. Raptors walk back and forth or charge straight at you, and dilophosaurs stand there and spit. Unlike their outdoor counterparts, they take significantly higher damage, and usually explode if you so much as look at them disapprovingly. Any challenge in the first-person segments comes from the labyrinth of identical rooms with no reasonable floor plan, map, or distinguishing features to help you figure out where to go. Most buildings have multiple floors linked with elevators, the largest of which–the ship–has five stories to explore and get lost in. Apparently they decided that skyscrapers have excellent buoyancy.

The computer interface makes up for its obnoxiousness by offering user settings, like desktop backgrounds. Because what can model chaos better than a Bush? (I think Jeb may have discarded that slogan…)

With no saves or passwords, the game can take upwards of four or five hours to finish, so make sure you don’t have anything going on that day. I first beat this game in 8th grade, staying up late, tag-teaming the game with friends. Jason had just got a dial-up internet connection and I guess game walkthroughs seemed like the best thing for people to upload at the time. Six hours after starting, Jason had control of the characters, I relayed information from ol’ dial-up Bessie, and Chadd sprawled out on the floor with a migraine from focusing on the screen. But we made it. At roughly 2:00 am, we finally got to the helipad and evacuated the island…only to find out that the game’s ending just played the introductory booting animation in reverse.

Uh…so…can I assume this means game over?

Meh. Whatever. I love Jurassic Park. I read the novel at least sixteen or seventeen times, and recently started reading it to Anne, who as a former researcher, occasionally stops me to explain that she used to do what Crichton wrote about, and how he accurately described science a quarter century ahead of his time. She has a thing for the compies, so one of these days I expect to come home to a herd of chicken dinosaurs. But while not all of the franchise’s installments live up to the novel or the original movie, I still get excited about dinosaurs in my thirties. Chris Pratt made an excellent Alpha raptor, indominus rex proved surprisingly effective as a villain, and while I like that the T-Rex came back for a cameo at the end, we all know that the mosasaur really saved the day. So I hope you enjoyed today’s entry; if not as funny as some of my others, hopefully you’ll appreciate the gushing over Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Jurassic Park 3, Jurassic World or, if the Mario trend in naming continues, the upcoming Jurassic Park 64 and Jurassic Galaxy.

I’ll let you know if Spielberg asks for my script ideas.

God of War 2 – PS2, PS3, PS Vita

Posted on June 15, 2015 by jplaj

Big things count for extra murder! Plenty of murder to go around, boys!

As a guy who drives a bright yellow beetle, cooks his own bread, watches Sailor Moon, performs in musical theatre, and enjoys a rousing game of Magic: the Gathering, I sometimes find myself curious as to what manliness feels like. Fortunately, I can indulge that curiosity from a safe, hair-growth-free distance with the God of War series, which features Kratos, a character overdosing on testosterone so badly that he makes steroid addicts back away timidly. Not all that long ago, most video game enthusiasts belonged to a class of people that would shyly wander school playgrounds alone, or sit quietly apart from high school cliques for fear that their interests would bring them mockery and bullying. Having a video game star grouchy old Kratos feels like Derek from American History X burst in on a Dungeons and Dragons game, dropped a box of guns on the table and said, “Okay you pansies, let’s do this right. Combat to the death, and we play for keeps.” The sheer amount of rage that goes into God of War games matches the emotional level of filling out job applications while standing in line at the DMV listening to death metal as a nearby television plays a news report about politicians pulling education funding for the orphans of homeless veterans so they can pay for tax cuts for millionaires.

Does this series seem to have an obsessive preoccupation with size?

God of War II continues the story of Kratos, after defeating Ares and taking his place as the god of war. His first day on the job, the Colossus of Rhodes comes to life and embarks on a Godzilla-style quest to destroy Greece. Having not murdered anything for the better part of an hour, Kratos gleefully adopts the task of obliterating the Sixth Wonder of the World. Alas, though, it turns out Zeus, who likes Kratos apparently even less than Ares, didn’t approve of Olympus’ most recent hire, and apparently felt the best way to remove Kratos’ godhood involved a convoluted plot that required an action sequence convenient for the opening stage of a video game. Kratos, who includes both the Hydra and Ares on his resume of “things murdered without use of god powers,” finds himself utterly powerless against a hunk of metal, but Zeus offers him an out. By channeling all his power into a sword, Kratos can somehow defeat the statue that proved invulnerable to those exact same powers only moments ago. Then, when Kratos has sufficiently humanified himself and killed the statue, Zeus (Played by the voice of Dale from Chip ‘n Dale’s Rescue Rangers) shows up, grabs the sword, and uses it to poke a hole in Kratos’ gut. While in the previous game, his escape from Hades required an extensive, tedious stage of platforming, this time he gets out through the sheer force of his angriness. Now properly reduced to a level-one character, Kratos then begins the quest to find the fates, which somehow will help him get revenge against Zeus. I don’t know.

Although I can’t understand why developers thought this cute little bundle of murderous rampage would appeal to the average video game connoisseur, I have to admit that it doesn’t entirely turn me off, either. As a mythology teacher, I do enjoy the concept, and now that I’ve played all three of the main series games, I can say I prefer God of War II to the original or III, mainly because a three-minute cut scene explaining the story of Zeus defeating Cronus marks the longest uninterrupted period of accurate mythology in the series. Naturally, after a beautiful rendition of Zeus’ war with the Titans, they chucked all semblance of literary value into the fiery pits of Tartarus in favor of over-simplified scenarios that give Kratos an excuse to murder mythological figures. In an early stage, Kratos comes upon Prometheus–who shortly thereafter will beg Kratos to murder him–and asks “Prometheus! Who did this to you?” If that didn’t immediately make you shift in your seat and avert your eyes awkwardly, read this. Uh, Kratos…you did. In fact, the play makes you out as some kind of rage-filled dick. At least that qualifies as accurate.

Beyond a vague influence from Greek mythology–much in the way that the dinosaur asteroid influenced the game Asteroids–the game really doesn’t offer much beyond an overdose of violence. Initially, making Kratos spin his chains holds a type of graceful enjoyment, but I quickly noticed that it dealt damage to enemies roughly equitable with the damage chopsticks would do to cast iron, and sitting in mandatory battles against hoards of monsters that require you to beat on them like you want to drill a hole through a glacier just makes it feel padded. I do enjoy playing a game, but I prefer stuff to actually happen, rather than fifteen minutes of cyclops murder only to get creamed by two more cyclopses using their combined power of depth perception to send you back to the beginning of the fight.

If you press square by mistake, Kratos pulls out a banjo and starts singing “Ain’t Misbehavin'” And then the minotaur kills him.

And quick time events! Dear, Zeus, you have answered my prayers! I remember playing Resident Evil 4, just wishing I could mash X to run from even more boulders, or press L1 and R1 to dodge even more monster tentacles. Well, God of War uses quick time events for everything. Trouble with a cyclops? They’ll give you buttons to press instead of something more involved and fun! Want to kill that gorgon? Simply wiggle the analog stick in the indicated patterns! Have you always wanted to wear down the life of your controller simply by opening doors? Forget pressing circle; try mashing it fifty times per second! (I miss the good old days of pressing “up.”) Did I miss anything? Kratos looks like a guy with a high-meat, low-fiber diet; should we maybe add a bathroom scene, with Kratos on the toilet, mashing the circle button to empty his bowels? Hera almighty! Have people ever liked ignoring the actual action in favor of concentrating on the upcoming buttons to press? Ever? Well, maybe in the bathroom…

FIghting the Kraken in his natural habitat…the sky! Because Greek myth doesn’t have flying monsters?

For that matter, what about puzzles? God of War seems to hit (hard) some of the biggest cliches available, including the sliding-blocks-into-place puzzle, the dropping-something-heavy-on-a-switch puzzle, and my personal favorite source of aneurysms, the pull a lever and beat the clock. Unfortunately, to overcome the challenges of using such a worn-out and hated method, God of War keeps it fresh and exciting by making it unintuitive and convoluted. How should I know if I have to race against the clock or find something to block the gate? Or which bosses I can actually damage and which ones require puzzle solutions? I don’t know if the game expects me to just *know* that the kraken’s tentacle hides a switch that I need to load down with a corpse when he lifts it slightly, or if it honestly thinks people still buy strategy guides rather than pop up Google and see what the Internet has to say.

The game works, I guess, as a time killer or a space filler. It has flaws, with convoluted puzzles, extended fight scenes, and a weapon upgrade system that has as much effect on combat as using a magnifying glass for shade on a hot day. But I played all three of them now (buying the collection used, apparently, does not give you access to the downloadable handheld games. Cheapskate jerks!). I’ve traveled to Hades and back three times, and carried several heads in my pockets. God of War has at least a novelty value to it. I just suggest playing it in small doses, and not during any stressful life events, such as, lets say, grading student papers while trying to buy a house and simultaneously waiting to hear back about acceptance into a phd program and alternatives. Adding God of War to that mix just focuses rage, down into one tiny bullet point of hate until it all bursts out of your forehead in a gory explosion of blood and brains. Fun and delicious!

Grand Theft Auto III – PS2, XBox, PC

Posted on June 8, 2015 by jplaj

Back in my undergraduate days, I worked at a Sam Goody. Never heard of it? Well, that just goes to show that charging $5 more per CD than anyone else selling music doesn’t constitute a particularly solid business strategy. But in trying to make up for dropping sales in overpriced music, they tried selling video games. Shortly after remodeling the store, adding the demo consoles, and gussying up the place all nice and pretty, I began to notice trending video games, two of which pop into mind as phenomenally stronger than anything else I sold to unsuspecting customers. One of these, Madden games, tricked people into buying the same shitty game year after year, only to disregard it as soon as the next installment came out. But even more popular than games doomed to life as a second-rate coaster, Grand Theft Auto III simply would not stay on our shelves.

Of course I took note. “Why does everyone want this game?” I asked. “Should I play it to find out?” Well, I didn’t. But I did hear about it. Open-world. Free-ranging. And prostitutes. Lots of prostitutes. Also, controversy. Controversy always makes for a good game, right? Well, I’d like to pose a question to any readers who may have played the game in the early 2000s–did you actually like Grand Theft Auto? Can you still pop in the disk and relive the good times? Or, like Goldeneye, do you look at it and puzzle over what the hell you ever saw in it?

Naturally, in a game revolving around car theft, you can never find one when you need it. I spent about 25% of my time running after cars like a dog.

Reading reviews, wikipedia articles, and the like make GTA III sound like the messiah of sandbox games. Freedom! Non-linear gameplay! Wide-open world! You can do anything you want! To a certain extent, I see how they can make those claims. GTA III gives the player complete freedom to steal any car and drive around any street and hit anyone you want! Some examples of the variety of things you can do here include: Steal a taxi and get paid to drive people to their destinations, steal an ambulance and get paid to drive people to the hospital, steal a police car and get paid to drive around looking for criminals, or steal a fire truck and get paid to drive around looking for fires. I don’t want to describe this game as stupid, but what it lacks in imagination, variety, and any enjoyment whatsoever, it more than makes up for in tedium, repetition, and boredom.

I know this looks bad…but this still turned out better than a lot of dates I went on in high school.

I went in expecting a crime spree game. Something like Scarface pointing Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels at the Godfather while Mr. Pink runs off with the diamonds, some L.A. Confidential, Pulp Fiction type stuff. Instead I get Cars, without the cute CGI or Pixar wit. GTA III basically reinvents the driving/racing genre. Imagine Mario Kart, if every so often Mario pulled Toad out of his car and stomped on his face. The game also uses the exact same driving physics and controls as every driving game ever. The challenge in driving under this system lies somewhere between “playing a 3D platformer while blindfolded” and “trying to steer a hockey puck with a leaf blower during a hurricane.” Despite the amount of time the game puts you in the driver’s seat, it does occasionally let you get out of the car and engage in a rudimentary form of good, old-fashioned gang violence, but the awkward interface makes aiming feel like target shooting during a grand mal seizure. Despite the contract you took out to assassinate…apparently a ramen vendor…the game’s target selection program generally assumes that the innocent bystanders pose a greater threat than the thugs charging at you with automatic rifles.

Cars, in this game, like this one, only slightly improve on the quality of car I can afford to drive in real life.

Odd as this may sound, GTA III feels less like a video game and more like a board game. I didn’t see much of a story line going on, other than the main character robbing a bank, his girlfriend shooting him, and then his friends busting him out of prison. From there, you look for work, and you visit certain bosses over and over, taking missions in a pre-determined, very non-non-linear fashion, until that boss has no work for you anymore. You can lose these missions in a number of ways, such as running out of time, getting shot, your car exploding, or getting caught by the police. These don’t really pose a threat so much as a minor inconvenience. Getting killed just makes you start over at the hospital, and despite your recent jailbreak, the police seem to have more of a catch-and-release program going on, and a string of murder, reckless driving and grand theft auto merit no more punishment than having to go slightly out of your way while running errands.

Yep…get used to this.

Also, veteran players may have noticed odd claims by now, so in full disclosure, I didn’t actually beat this game. In fact, I didn’t get very far in it at all, for a combination of two very good reasons. First of all, I didn’t find myself enjoying the game very much. Driving sims just don’t do it for me. I can barely stomach the thought of real driving. But I’ve finished boring games before. However, ramping up the difficulty to “harder than Charlie Sheen on a Viagra overdose” may not have endeared me to completion. After three days and roughly ten hours of gameplay, I had completed maybe seven or eight missions total. Maybe I just needed more practice, or more experience with driving games. Or maybe the damn game shouldn’t make you repeat absolutely everything every time something bad happens. Oh no! Ran out of time! Looks like I have to visit the boss again, watch the cut scene, go steal a car, look for the gun store, find a gun, look for the ramen stand, aim for the bad guys, shoot a few pedestrians by mistake, then get shot to death while the ramen noodle man hops in his car for a car chase that won’t happen. The sheer amount of time required for each individual mission, combined with the fact that I didn’t really enjoy the missions to begin with and the rage-inducing effect of the game’s shitty soundtrack of radio stations, indicated certain health benefits in walking away from this one.

And not even the good kind of wasted. Although both often require medical attention…

Grand Theft Auto III which wins my coveted “Sarah Palin Award for Intelligence in Game Design,” cost me $2.99 at Savers. I think I paid too much. However, I also picked up a $2.99 copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. So…I at least have to make a perfunctory attempt at that one in order to clear off my shelf full of games I bought and haven’t yet played. Joy.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds – 3DS

Posted on June 1, 2015 by jplaj

Now in two stunning dimensions!

Change scares people. Let’s face it, Obama ran for president on a platform of change, and despite his as-yet-unfulfilled promises, half the country still envisions him with a pair of horns, sitting around a lavish palace of flames adorned with the skulls of aborted fetuses, plotting the upcoming battle with the Messiah (who also has some as-yet-unfulfilled promises to return). But whilst I mock Republicans, the Tea Party and Fox “News,” let’s not forget yet another group of people so resistant to change that they quail in terror around public wishing fountains: Shigeru Miyamoto and the Legend of Zelda development staff. I’ve written a handful of articles about other games in the series, and I’ll probably write several more, but even I have a limit of how many different ways I can comically discuss the same damn elf throwing the same damn boomerang at the same damn octorok.

Also returning to series roots: Link’s sideburns.

However, if the cesspool of Zelda ideas has grown a little too stagnant, the 3DS installment, A Link Between Worlds, has come along to develop new and exciting ways to re-create the same games that earned them so much adoration in the past; namely, to re-create the same game that earned them so much adoration in the past. Let me explain: with minor changes, the map for Link Between Worlds replicates the overworld maps from A Link to the Past, whilst purging any possible secrets you hoped to find by virtue of having played Link to the Past twenty years ago. The player can use many–but not all–of the items from Link to the Past, with two or three new ones tossed in for fun. And probably most absurdly of all, one of these new items allows Link to change into a portrait and merge with walls.

Let that sink in. The Zelda team took a device praised for innovation in three-dimensional viewing…and featured a game with a two-dimensional hero. I don’t think a game company has missed the point by quite this much since Midway started porting its classic arcade games for the Playstation. What other technologies can we downplay horribly? Side scrolling platformers for the Wii? Pong for the PS4? Microsoft Word for the Occulus Rift? (And yes, I do realize that they intended for the 2D aspects of the game to emphasize the 3D. I just wanted to clear that up before anyone leaves any nasty comments. Or any at all…)

Because Moldorm. Zelda games seem to have developed an addiction to this guy.

Actually, though, I only make fun of the philosophical irony of glorifying two dimensions when you have three available (four, if you have an hour or two) because I actually can’t find anything else to make fun of. I loved the original, right up from its worm-infested Death Mountain tower right down to the bottom of its cold, frozen, dungeon eyeballs. And while at any time I could fire up my SNES and slog my way through its surprisingly expansive dungeons, I sure would appreciate if someone could concentrate the pure essence of Zelda-y goodness, then market it in a nice, easy, just-add-water powder to mix in with something new. Okay, yes, I tried a little to hard for that one, but the point remains that the game took the best parts of Link to the Past…and then stopped. Everything else, they added fresh for Link Between Worlds, and it works.

Bunny man, capitalizing off of end-of-the-world sensationalism.

So what can I actually say about the game? You go through dungeons. You rescue sages. You travel from one world to the next. You look for the Triforce–courage, of course. But rather than finding items in dungeons, you have access to nearly all of them almost from the beginning of the game, to either rent or buy from some weird dude in a rabbit costume (spoiler alert….remember what happens in Link to the Past if you don’t get the moon pearl in the Tower of Hera?). Renting lets you access them until you get yourself killed, at which point the profiteering bastard sends his fairy companion to swipe them from you without so much as a “Look!” or “Listen!” Buying circumvents this entirely. All items work on a rechargeable gauge, which saves the time scrounging the bushes for refills. I guess it makes sense that Link might get exhausted pounding things flat with a hammer, but I don’t really know if I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept that bombs recharge and arrows grow back.

I get it! Because you can walk on the walls and it looks like Link wearing Majora’s mask! Clever. No, wait…the other thing. Pointless.

The dark world has survived, mostly unscathed, although it now bears the painful moniker “Lorule,” a pun that in itself can curdle milk within five minutes, stronger than any of the bad puns the internet can muster. Like the swamp and death mountain in Link to the Past, the entire Lorule….[sigh]….can I just call it the Dark World? The entire Dark World map prevents Link from moving from area to area, a tactic to force you to look for warp points (i.e. slits in the wall) in different locations. This has all the purpose of a male nipple, though, considering they don’t exactly take Carmen Sandiego level skills to find. Overall, though, I rather enjoyed the difficulty. It may have coddled me somewhat, but you know what? It turns out I really have a good time playing games that don’t require me to staple a walkthrough to my wall for easy reference. I know I can get, uh…somewhat temperamental…over the appropriate level of challenge, but for the first time in ages I felt like I had bought a game, rather than a Nazgul of Capitalism, attempting to force me into the limbo world of shelling out cash for strategy guides and DLC. Such a novel feature, the ability to play a portable game system without constant access to the internet. They may almost make this a useful system if they don’t watch out.

Fatter cuccoos = even more 3Ds! So many Ds, it will awe even the most rabid of chickens!

But in the last two years of writing, I don’t think I’ve encountered a game that I can actually praise as much as this. I felt as though they fully revitalized one of my favorite games of all time, making it into a brand new experience. But not too new. We wouldn’t want another Adventure of Link on our hands.

…Or would we?

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (part two) – PC, PS3, xBox 360

Posted on May 25, 2015 by jplaj

You will welcome this sight at first, before you have to finish twenty other stages with the exact same layout and objective.

I’ll make this short. After two months of play, two or three dozen quests and an equal number of times accidentally nuking my vampire by taking her out in broad daylight, three or four times when an enemy disarmed me and I had to restart because I couldn’t find my sword on the ground, the most epic final boss battle a game has ever permitted me to watch without actually participating in, and one final bug that prevented me from receiving the prize for finishing the main storyline, I have finally finished Oblivion. And I find I have absolutely nothing to say about it. Having spent the final forty hours pretty much the same way as I spent the first sixty, with the notable exception of a nagging feeling of repetition, as though I’d traveled through the same dungeons killing the same monsters for the same meager handful of gold coins, armor too heavy to carry, and weapons too cheap to make it worth carrying them to the nearest shop to sell them for yet another shitty handful of gold coins. Congratulations, Bethesda, you took the time and care in making an RPG with a skillfully crafted world that still somehow feels like a randomized-dungeon crawler.

Once I discovered the Shivering Isles, I stayed there for the next fifteen hours just because it didn’t look like the same old caves I’d explored thirty times in Cyrodil.

As Anne has already suckered me into a good forty hours or so of Minecraft since I finished the Elder Scrolls, I have to admit that the open-world, free-form game play does offer something therapeutic compared to the shorter, more directed games….Don’t expect me to explain it, though, as I just spent about ten minutes avoiding that question hopping from link to link on Facebook. (By the way, no, internet, Haley Joel Osmont did not grow up and become “super attractive.” He looks like a potato swallowing someone’s face like an amoeba.) Games like that, though, don’t need to rely on a well-written story or intricate game play, but with that same logic I could also say that Mega Man doesn’t rely on deep, philosophical introspection and God of War doesn’t rely on an anti-violence message or anger management techniques. You see an enemy? Hack it with your sword until it dies! Or maybe cast a spell on it. Which spell? It doesn’t matter! They all do the same thing! Just pick out the one that does the same thing more powerfully than all the rest!

Yep. Sure looks pretty. Can we try a desert? Or a jungle? Maybe? Something a little new?

Bethesda, as I mentioned in part one of this series, has made a name for themselves by making the same game at least four times (I haven’t played Morrowind…maybe five). They’ve also made a name for themselves in expansive, open world, hiking simulators and pathetically lame boss fights. Yeah, by crawling through RPG Maker in what little spare time I have, I’ve learned the stool-hardening madness inspired by crafting bosses as interesting battles rather than simply a thirty-second-long random enemy encounter with special music. Still, could we at least ask for a boss with slightly higher stats than the average enemy? A specialized attack pattern that requires more than “run up, hack with sword, back off, repeat” to kill? At least with the Elder Scrolls games, you don’t have to worry about finishing off the battle with a quick glance at your V.A.T.S. system.

Yep. Just chillin in third person. Jake does that sometimes.

Cut out all the inventory maintenance, travel time, consulting the map every thirty seconds, and questionable emphasis on combat, and poorly written quests that generally amount to “go there, get stuff, come back,” and Oblivion boils down to a character void of any personality, exploring a huge open world of trees, caves, and other natural wonders, who enchants armor, brews potions, and carries a sword to fight off obnoxious skeleton archers. Congratulations, Bethesda, you made a high resolution version of Minecraft. Who would have thought that you could have made tons more money if you had only half-assed the graphics?

Fuck you, order! I fight for madness and chaos! Like the freaking Joker! Up yours, shiny metal Batman!

Again, not that a game that offers aimless exploration with a handful of fringe benefits has to suck goblin nuggets. Games strive for a simulated experience, and even living on the cusp of the wild, untamed glacier of Northern Minnesota, I often feel way too wrapped up in our modern urban world, yearning, like Tolkien before me, to go “back to trees.” I think that people who read Tolkien and don’t see anything in it beyond “people walking” might not get the value of taking in the world for its wonders, which I think captures the true meaning behind Oblivion. So Bethesda, if any of you read this, stop releasing DLC and get the licensing to do a game set in Middle Earth. And then someone needs to develop immersive virtual reality so you can release your next game on a VR console. And also VR Minecraft.

Hellooooo….imagine meeting a mod like you in a place like this.

Link’s Crossbow Training – Wii

Posted on May 11, 2015 by jplaj

Walking. How novel!

As one of my earliest memories of watching video games, I remember thinking the bait and the bombs from The Legend of Zelda looked like a toy soldier. I moved mountains to buy my own copy of A Link to the Past, and bought a shoddy old NES from a secondhand store just to try to play The Adventure of Link, which I never had as a kid. I bought an N64 just so I could play Ocarina of Time, and recognized that I’d have to buy a Game Cube solely for Wind Waker. I have used arrows, boomerangs, bombs, bottles, bows, candles, canes, capes, deku leaves, deku shields, deku sticks, gauntlets, giant’s knives, gloves, and on and on through Zora’s flippers and Zora’s scales. And in all the code brought to life as Hyrule, I have never seen Link use a crossbow. I suppose though, if he had any experience in it, he wouldn’t need the training.

A latecomer to the Wii, I picked up Link’s Crossbow Training for 49 cents (43 cents after my Gamestop member discount!). Before playing it, I decided to do it right, so I bought a zapper on eBay for about $8. That ought to make Nintendo feel good. Probably a year’s worth of development and an entire disc full of coding, and people spend 16 times the value of the game on a mostly solid hunk of plastic. Meanwhile, I see someone online trying to sell used Madden games for $10 each, and I think our planet has officially lost touch with the concept of “value.” To top it off, after buying the zapper, I found a bunch of reviews complaining about it. Yes, I believe you when you say ditching the zapper makes the game easier. And I got to level 99 in Duck Hunt once by playing six inches away from the screen–when I should have played it next to an unshaded lamp. I liked the zapper. I couldn’t quite look down the sights because of the Wii’s setup, and I didn’t exactly sneak around my house like James Bond on a stealth mission, but for the sake of virtual realism, it felt like holding a crossbow, and I figured “Why the hell not!!”

Link would make King Edgar proud.

Anyone who ever swore furiously at the old man who wants to “play money making game” will know that the Zelda franchise has embraced mini-games right from the get-go. Fortunately, they’ve gotten a little less random and a little more fun as time has moved on. Link’s Crossbow Training feels like a mini-game that grew too big for its bottle. With no story of its own, the game utilizes scenes from Twilight Princess, finding excuses for Link to pump all manner of monsters, targets and…gorons wearing targets on their stomachs?…full of lead…tipped arrows. Okay, so the lack of a story kind of excuses the absurdity of friendly races standing confidently as targets without the luxury of cast iron underwear (or so much as a ragged loin cloth). But the crossbow itself, a stylish, well-built fully-automatic number capable of firing 30 rounds per second, really crowns the achievements of this game. After all, not only does it let me indulge my desire to mow down cuccos like a gangster with a tommy gun, but the sheer mechanics of a crossbow working that fast make me think we ought to have Link head up NASA for discovering materials and/or mechanics that work that way.

I…uh…the gorons seem to trust…uh…why would they do this? Do gorons even have groins?

The game organizes itself pretty predictably. Each level has three stages. Link usually shoots at targets in the first, fights off enemies coming at him from all sides in the second, and then wanders around a map blasting unsuspecting monsters in the third. They do vary the pace, sometimes letting you hit targets while stationary, or moving like a rail shooter, or chucking skulls into the air like skeet (keep it classy, Link). Near the end, the game introduces bosses, one darknut and the stallord. They both go down rather easily, though, and I finished the final level on my first attempt and with a higher score than any of the other eight levels.

He looks nasty, but flash him your big, twinkly eyes and he melts to big, soft putty in your hands. Then you plant a quarrel in his fuckin’ face!

Each stage lasts roughly a minute or two (insert sex joke of your choice here). Sometimes the wild blasting of monsters gets exciting, and the length of the level feels frustrating when you have a pile of bolts left and several dozens of monsters without quarrels in their foreheads, but when the game sets your target score at 40000 and you get 300, the brevity doesn’t discourage you from replaying the level. However, this also makes the game short, and with a steady arm you could get through it in about two hours, less with prior practice. But hey…49 cents. Otherwise, the only disappointment comes from the cucco, who deducts points from your score when you shoot it. I expected nothing less than a swarm of rabid chickens set out to re-enact Hitchcock movies. But no.

Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (part 1) – PC, PS3, xBox 360

Posted on April 27, 2015 by jplaj

Yep…I’ve discovered yet another Medieval-y looking town.

Captain’s Log: Morndas, Morning Star 19. Sixty hours into Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, I can see no end in sight. I occasionally pass the time by wandering through caves and fortresses, but most often I manage inventory. Encountered a bug today. Had to restart. Cost me an elven helmet I found after saving. At one point, I dropped my sword in some grass. Couldn’t find it again, so I had to restart then, too. Maybe I’ll walk around the map for a few hours. Perhaps I’ll stand in one place and jump to raise my stats. I don’t know. One of these days, I will find a way out…

Bethesda Softworks built their name around Oblivion. Or maybe Skyrim. No, on second thought, I think one of the Fallout games…What about Morrowind? I never played that. Maybe they built their reputation on that. I don’t know. It might do more justice to say Bethesda has risen to fame by making the same game at least four or five times. Kind of like Madden or Fifa for sci-fi/fantasy nerds. So you know what to expect: long hours of exploring a highly detailed world, accepting quests from a civilization full of people who want some random object in a dungeon somewhere, an inventory frustratingly limited by weight, and more bugs than the Temple of Doom.

Oblivion tells the story of…someone…who gets sprung from prison by the lackluster Emperor Patrick Stewart as he flees a group of assassins. The secret passage out of the city happens to go through your jail cell, and Emperor Xavier’s guards verbally decide not to close the door behind them “because it doesn’t open from the other side.” Because apparently, turning around and running back to assassins remains a better option than hiding your escape route from your pursuers. After getting sprung free, Emperor Picard drops a heavy quest on you–find his lost son and stop hell from overtaking all the world. You then do exactly what one would expect in a Bethesda game: you begin wandering aimlessly, accepting odd jobs from people with bizarre requests while giving a slight passing interest to the whole end-of-the-world thing every so often when it might not take too long to complete an objective.

Patrick Stewart as Uriel Septem, also known as “Sir Not Appearing in this Game.”

Given the absolute freedom to roam around the medieval fantasy world of Cyrodil, I immediately took in the sights, killed a bunch of monsters, wandered through what I would eventually recognize as bland, generic ancient ruins, and of course, contracted a horrible and incurable disease. I can proudly say I wrote the draft of this section in REAL TIME, as I actually “played” the game! See, out of all the quests in the game, the longest and by far the most obnoxious tasks you with curing the vampirism of the Count of Skingrad. And, for unfortunate bastards like myself, who spent the better part of a half hour adjusting the perfect face for a character only to contract hemophiliac porphyria, and to have the generic ugly vampire’s head swapped in its place.

So how does one cure vampirism? Well, considering the severe sunlight allergy you develop, you start by waiting indoors until night and then making a mad dash for your next destination, occasionally taking refuge in a cave or a shop. Asking around to the handful of people willing to talk to you without fleeing in terror or reaching for their wooden stakes, you learn about the Count of Skingrad, a quaint little village where everyone lives in lovely stone houses with reinforced steel doors. The count assigns you to go look for a witch who can supposedly cure the disease. She lives, surprise, surprise, on the opposite side of the country. Lacking the gypsy resources of Count Dracula, you’d better invest in a good pair of Nikes. So the witch asks for payment, which of course involves locating five extremely rare items without giving any indication of where you might find them. Then when you’ve paid in full–and advance–she sends you on the mother of all fetch quests to locate more super rare items. Once you have literally gone to Hell and back for her…you find out that the Game of the Year edition has a bug in it that prevents her from accepting one of the items, thus condemning you to live as a vampire forever.

Spent a half hour tweaking facial characteristics like a plastic surgeon…end up so disgusted with vampire face that I cover up with a helmet.

Turns out, you can manage your vampirism, much like diabetes. Regular feedings will keep your photo sensitivity at bay, and people will gladly tell you how sick you look to indicate when you should hunker down in the mage’s guild living quarters until everyone goes to sleep. The bit about writing in real time? I got stuck in the witch’s house one morning, after twelve hours of questing for nothing. She wouldn’t go to sleep so I could eat her, and another bug in the game considered me a trespasser, thus rendering the “wait” feature inaccessible, and I had to stand there as the game’s timer ticked away to 8:00 pm. Fuck you, Bethesda. The entirety of God of War took less time to complete than this one quest. But no. I would rather sneak into a castle to pickpocket a key, dive to the bottom of a lake, search for the hidden trapdoor, make my way through three connected dungeons, and look for a random table, after which I have to locate a quest which opens a quest which opens another dungeon…all to get the one fracking ingredient that the witch won’t accept.

“Very Easy” my ass! Subjects of Tamriel must make lock picks out of pretzles if they break after every failed attempt.

Due to the massive size of the game (which estimates online place at about 1036 km squared), I thought I should split the post up into at least two sections. So in a few weeks I’ll post about the remainder of the game (if Anne doesn’t sucker me into playing Minecraft for the next week while I prepare for the beginning of the semester). In the meantime, look at my estimated breakdown of the first sixty hours of game play:

2 Hours: Awesome world! More colorful than Skyrim…but not quite as HD.
3 Hours: I like how Cyrodil residents didn’t build all their fortresses and caves in straight lines…like in Skyrim. And look how unique they look! Skyrim seemed to repeat the same dungeons over and over.
0.5 Hours: Wow…Oblivion just repeats the same dungeons over and over…
1.5 Hours: So…when will Patrick Stewart come back? Did they honestly just hire him for the first scene?
12 Hours: Fucking Vampire Quest! Just let me go out during the day!
5 Hours: Fucking Vampire Diabetes! Should I even keep playing?
0.5 Hours: Of course I’ll play…I have an addiction.
5 Hours: Go into the cave to collect the treasure to buy the house so I have somewhere to put the treasure that I pull out of the caves.
0.5 Hours: Maybe I should spend some time on the main quest.
1 Hour: Oblivion! Hell dimension! Awesome!
0.5 Hours: Holy shit! The Siege of Kvatch monsters just won’t take damage.
1.5 Hours: Holy shit! I hate all the stupid, angry people on the internet giving advice for the Siege of Kvatch.
6 Hours: Shivering Isles? Score! It feels like a whole new game!
1 Hour: Looking for lockpicks after I broke all mine trying to open a chest that had six gold pieces in it.
20 Hours: Managing Inventory

Top Ten Best RPGs

Posted on April 13, 2015 by jplaj

Sorry to say this, but I’d like to take a short hiatus for a while. Oblivion took a lot out of me, and with the new semester in full swing and 90 helpless students under my care, I don’t have quite as much time to write as I’d like. Fortunately, since I’ve posted ahead a few months, I’ve finished Oblivion and a few Zelda games, so rather than just cut out completely, I’ll update every other week, and go back to posting every week after finals. Because unemployment. Hooray for part-time teaching work. Anyway, this also gives me the chance to try out a new feature, top ten lists. No pictures this week. Again, sorry.

10. The World Ends With You
While the story kept me riveted, the artwork kept me mesmerized, and the villain with mathematical Tourette kept me…well, really confused, but amused beyond belief, this game deserves praise for the enlightened trance you reach when you finally figure out how to simultaneously control one character’s movements and attacks with just the stylus and inputting combinations with the D-pad to control another character on the top screen on an entirely different battlefield. I think I became telepathic while playing this game.

9. Secret of Mana
A Final Fantasy spin-off game that replaces air ships with riding on a dragon and chucks out chocobos in favor of shooting you out of a cannon. It features weapons and magic that level up with use, and a combat system halfway between ATB systems and the Legend of Zelda adventure combat. Plus you finally get to put Santa in his place in an epic ice-palace show down. Leave me coal five years in a row, will you? It has only served to fuel the fires of my rage! I’ll have my revenge on you, old man! You can’t hide behind krampus anymore! You’ll rue the day…

8. Lunar: The Silver Star Story (Complete)
Sadly, I can’t say I ever played the original Sega CD game, but with the Playstation freeing me from the oppression of Nintendo’s censorship, Lunar took full advantage of that. With cross-dressing exploits, bathing springs, and dialog like: “Thespian? I thought I wasn’t the right gender for that,” Lunar pulls no punches. Ten out of ten for comedic effect.

7. Shadow Hearts: Covenant
Want to know how to get hundreds of views for a single blog post? Talk about its BDSM aspects and the dominatrix villain. Not that I want to downplay Karin’s magnificent rack, or Yuri’s perverted sense of humor, mind you. In fact, I expect that last sentence to increase viewership of this post by tenfold. But the game stands on its own merits as a beautifully dark, Lovecraftian, yet meaningful story told against the backdrop of World War One.

6. Fallout 3
What? You mean we don’t need fantasy worlds and magic in an RPG? That idea scares me! New things make me uncomfortable! I hate Fallout! Hate it I say! Actually, no, I think this game stands out as Bethesda’s gem.

5. Final Fantasy X
Hated Tidus. Loved Yuna. However, I understood the need for both characters in the story. In fact, I’ve never understood a video game storyline quite as well as FFX. If I could only find a way to force my students to play through it and take notes on themes of sacrifice, the role of death in society, conflict with parents, and religious corruption, I might not have to assign those painful classics like Moby Dick or Pride and Prejudice anymore.

4. Final Fantasy VI
None of the lists of the best RPGs that I’ve seen ever ranks Final Fantasy VI higher than third place, except for one that gave it second. I hate that. This game deserves first place! It introduced me to the world of role-playing. It provided me an outlet for my lust for fantasy when I didn’t know the genre even existed outside of Tolkien. This came out during my sixth-grade year, and I didn’t know how much it revolutionized the genre, adding in a steampunk setting, an ensemble cast of characters, and a non-linear second act. Plus, you get the world’s first playable moogle (not counting humans transformed into moogles or wearing costumes) as a hidden character!

3. Final Fantasy Tactics
With an in-depth story about class warfare between the rich and the poor, a war manipulated by the church and giant zodiac-apostle monsters, only a system of highly customizable characters with unique, interesting and versatile abilities could improve this game. What? It has that! Excellent! This game may have reached the peak of RPG perfection. What? Why did I put it at number three? Mind your own damn business, Torquemada!

2. Chrono Trigger
Blasphemer! How dare you make a list of the best RPGs of all time and not put Chrono Trigger in the number one spot, as is its birthright! Relax, I actually sweat long over this decision. Chrono Trigger deservedly tops a lot of lists, and for some reason, I don’t get tired of anything time-travel themed. Well, Doctor Who doesn’t exactly do it for me, but mostly because the Doctor has never stood up to anything nearly as threatening as Lavos or Biff Tannen. But still, this game has an excellent high-stakes story, an expansive 4-dimensional world, no random encounters, and a soundtrack that puts John Williams to shame. Plus I’ll always think of Marle as “The one that got away.” But at least fictional girls can’t reject me, dump me, or deliver death threats attached to jars of ashes. I love this game, and so does anyone else who plays it. However, it does top everyone else’s list, and I honestly believe one other game outclasses it.

1. Xenogears
As much as I love all things time travel, this game beats Chrono Trigger on just about every front. Yasunori Mitsuda’s brilliant score beats the pants off the talentless schmuck who composed for Chrono Trigger, and it introduced a combat interface –for both character combat and mech combat–that made repetitive RPG combat enjoyable much in the same way that shovels must have improved the occupation of ditch-digging. But the story shines above all of that, asking profound philosophical questions about the nature of god and whether his presence improves our lives the way we believe it does–you know, the same philosophical questions raised by seeing Tea Party Christians interviewed on Fox News. Except I actually enjoy Xenogears.

Honorable Mentions:

Final Fantasy IV
Both one of my favorite games of all time and historically significant for realizing “D&D plays like shit on a computer,” FFIV introduced the world to RPGs with plots and characters with conflicts and personal growth. Also they travel to the moon. Hey, I didn’t say they thought out the story, just that they had one. I probably should have included it in the list, but honestly, after roughly seven dozen ports, re-makes and re-releases, Square may want to consider retiring this one.

Final Fantasy IX
How do you improve upon a series of hit after hit (and then FFVIII)? Strip down all the old games, take only the good parts, put those together around a well-written story about finding meaning in life and death. Often underappreciated, I consider FFIX the best in the series. What? Why only an honorable mention? Because shut up! …yeah. Put you in your place, didn’t I!

Didn’t see the game you wanted? Screw you! Also, I probably haven’t played it. Drop a suggestion in a comment and I’ll hunt down your favorite RPG and play it. And no, I don’t consider Zelda an RPG. Not even the Adventure of Link. I had enough trouble narrowing down my selections, thank you.

Video Game Underworld

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