I’ll be relocating my blog to Wordpress.com proper. Blogsome has been fairly good to me, but Wordpress looks to be easier to manage my content.

I’ll leave my posts / articles archived here, but I’ll be doing the remainder of my posts at:

http://pseudomacro.wordpress.com/

Peace out!

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while and never got around to publishing..oh well, better late than never, I guess.

There’s a fair bit of division over Crysis, aka Crytek’s “glorified tech demo”. I feel that people were unnecessarily harsh towards it. The game promised everything that was advertised - open areas, bleeding-edge graphics, solid physics and a suit that made you feel like a bad ass.

Crysis 2 has decided to move on from the jungle roots of Crytek’s original title and into the city. The opportunity for big set pieces and plenty of destruction is plentiful, but from what I’ve played so far it feels a little derivative. I’ve already seen what exploding choppers and crumbling buildings in Bad Company 2. Maybe I’m just a little desensitised after the epic sense of scale in Killzone 3.

The story is pretty bland (but I guess I’m asking for too much when it comes to a semi-decent plot from EA). For some reason there’s a virus in New York City, and the aliens are involved again somehow, as well as an organisation responsible for containment. Furthermore, your suit and the virus are magically connected. (Yeah, I don’t know either.) Naturally, everyone is out to get your ass, but no big deal - you’re more than willing to lay down some . Then again, chances are if you’re playing this game, you’re not in it for the sweeping narrative.)

The suit’s functions have been refined for the better. Gone are the separate strength, speed, armour and cloak functions - now, cloaking and armour are activated using hotkeys. Speed automatically kicks in when sprinting. Strength moves are activated by holding the melee or jump button. It feels much more intuitive and before, instead of doing the “mouse 3 wheel-flick” to juggle between different modes. Granted, a lot of the control is gone as a result - I miss sprinting in Speed mode and throwing North Koreans around in Strength mode - but for the most part the suit is a lot more functional. Perhaps a revision to cater for the console crowd?

As well as weapon customisations, there are suit customisations as well. By collecting Nano catalysts from dead aliens, you can add “perks” to your suit such as silent footsteps and adding tracers to incoming bullets. These customisations almost feel like you’re using a game hack of some sort.

The gameplay has lost some of its sandbox feel, but it’s still quite fun. Skulking around in stealth mode and assassinating enemies is as fun as flipping on the armour mode switch and raining some .50 cal death. Also, while the alien combat is fun, I found it was a lot more enjoyable completely dominating those hapless PMC soldiers. Aah, them crazy kids.

So, the changes in Crysis 2 are generally for the better. There’s enough there to give me that fuzzy ol’ feeling I got from the original Crysis, and yet the new features enhance it enough to convince me that it’s a fresh, new title.

Shame about the writing, though.

Okay. If there is any reason to sink thousands of yen into an arcade game (besides UFO catchers and, erm, purikura), this is one of them.

I first saw Kidō Senshi Gundam: Senjō no Kizuna on my first trip to Japan. It looked incredible. Four white pods sat in a silent group, the volume of each approximately the same as a Smart car. Peering inside, I could see a projector displaying an image across a screen that near encompassed a person’s peripheral vision. Two joysticks, covered with buttons, were deployed in an ergonomically pleasing way. Two steel foot pedals jutted from the floor.

A single terminal stood to attention nearby, displaying a giant LCD screen showing a real-time battle in progress. I checked the price - 300 yen for a pilot card, and 500 for a game session. Eep.

When I arrived in Japan for JET, my fellow ALTs asked me if I had played the “Gundam Game”.

I immediately knew what they were talking about.
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Hmm. I’ve been trying to figure out whether or not I like this game, and I’m struggling.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s not a downright horrible game. It looks amazing. It handles like any other console shooter should. The gun play and combat are fun. The new weapons are suitably bad ass. The new environments (i.e. arctic environments), while hardly groundbreaking, are beautifully rendered. It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be any cohesion in all the parts. It’s like a badly edited movie.

The story follows on from the climax of Killzone 2, which has you attempting to escape from Helghan. The game blurb boasts guerrilla combat, since you are stranded on an enemy planet, but it lasts barely for a couple of missions. The back story of the power vacuum in the Helghan Senate is mildly interesting when it comes to filler, but it feels like it’s presented in the form of bullet points rather than a proper narrative. (And I don’t want to give anything away, but let’s just say the ending surprised me. And not in a good way.)

The new features are more of a cheap novelty than a real enhancement to gameplay. Use of the jet pack is limited and wears thin. The Brutal Melee combat, which is basically a series of graphic animations showing you jamming combat knives into facial orifices, is gratifying at first, but shock value in general rarely lasts long.

The vehicle sections are mediocre. The Exoskeleton section, while enjoyable at first, handles like a glass cannon. The space fighter section feels like a frantic shooting gallery, where if you don’t fire missles fast enough your ship mysteriously explodes.

The multiplayer is quite solid, though. The variety of gameplay modes has carried over from Killzone 2, and the inclusion of a formal Botzone (including all perk unlocks) is a nice touch. Offline split-screen co-op is also a great addition.

So, after all that, I guess I do like Killzone 3, but probably not enough to have it stick in mind after a couple of months.

Recently, I’ve been attempting to play Monster Hunter Portable 3rd.

Attempting.

It’s awkward trying to get into a game of such depth and scope without a firm grasp of the Japanese language. One would think that after about 7-8 months of being more or less immersed in Japanese culture, language and lifestyle that one would pick up at least a bit of the language.

Alas, I am reduced to the following:

• Going through each and every single menu option to find what I’m looking for;
• Entering menu options that look practically identical to one another, but for some reason are different;
• Skipping through dialogue like nobody’s business (never before have I not cared about dialogue like this in an RPG);
• Re-discovering the tutorial section after several days of play;
• Being completely baffled as to why I’m flashing, sparkling, or have purple clouds spinning around my head (until I’m dead);
• Having a loot chest full of items (namely potions) that have relatively high Rarity levels, but I have no idea how to use;
• Eating the flesh of random monsters in the hope that it does something cool;
• Finding the option to combine obscure items to make items that are even more obscure;
• Attempting to glean information on items and the like from their tiny 5px x 5px icons;
• Beginning collection quests with no idea of exactly what it is I’m meant to be collecting;
• Attempting to describe to others the kind of monster I am hunting, and getting nowhere when I say, “It’s that big lizard.”

Still, it’s good fun whenever I break it out. I’m tempted to get a few of those Japanese PS3 titles as well for a bit of local fun.

1UP published a two-part article on what Japanese devs really think.

There’s some pretty interesting feedback here from what the Japanese industry is thinking right now. I’ll offer some comments on the points being raised, based on what I’ve seen here in the country so far. Granted, 6 months of casual observation isn’t exactly the most comprehensive study, but I figure it’ll be interesting to look back on this in 6-12 months.
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