tempest in a teacup

Surely I’m not the only one who thought “is there a version you can wear on your right hand?” after reading about this?

Fear the day when otaku start designing operating system kernels. :P

I just beat Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition. Yay.

I thought it was kind of funny that the post-boss jet ski escape killed me more times than the actual boss battle (4 times vs. 0 times). Still, good game overall. It is probably a bit easier than the GameCube and PS2 versions because of the Wii remote aiming, but stuff like sniping still requires you to use the stick to aim (@!@#$ Regenerators).

The writing continues to be as ridiculous as ever (midget Napoleon lol) but it doesn’t detract from the action in the slightest.

Oh well, one less game to worry about for next month’s list of doom.

I’ll probably chuck a low-priority item on the backlog to complete the Ada sidestories at some point.

Here’s last month’s edition.

Games that have been knocked off the list due to completion:

• Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition - well, Dante’s route on normal anyway. I’ve started a Vergil playthrough, but it’s more like something I can do if I’m in the mood. With this I can finally claim to have beaten a DMC game!

And that’s the only game I managed to beat last month.

• Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition - Still on Mission 5-2.
• Zack & Wiki - No progress here either.
• Super Mario Galaxy - Took a few stabs at clearing that Luigi coin mission, and the closest I came was 80-something coins before my reflexes failed me.
• NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams - I set my sights a little lower and decided to go for all C-ranks first so I could unlock the true ending to the game. Unfortunately this is easier said than done because some of the side missions are really fucking stupid.
• Advance Wars: Days of Ruin - Gathering dust. For some reason I simply can’t bring myself to finish that particular mission.
• Sonic Rush Adventure - Set a few more personal records in time attack, but otherwise nothing else. I’ve noticed that the physics in this game are quite broken (at least as far as Sonic games go).
• Mass Effect - I’ve unlocked my character’s specialised class (went for Shock Trooper) and after spending ages on sidequests I’ve finally started on the main story quests again. Still pretty good so far - the universe is interesting, and conversations with the supporting characters tend to reveal some interesting nuances over time.
• Beyond Good & Evil - Played a bit more. This feels like a Zelda game with most of the tedium/treating the player like he’s five years old stripped out. So far, having a lot of fun with it.

The only “new” entries on the list?

• Diablo II: Lord of Destruction - Nostalgia got to me after the Diablo III announcement. I’m rebuilding my old Zeal/Fanaticism Paladin (boring build, I know, but it was the first D2 character I ever made). In addition I’m playing a summoning Necromancer for playing online with PenPen.
• Devil May Cry 4 - So far it’s definitely easier than both Devil May Cry and Devil May Cry 3, but still rather fun. The Devil Bringer isn’t quite as interesting to me as the instant rev and other frame-specific moves like Table Hopper and the instant Exceed, which are the main source of depth in Nero’s play style.

Stay tuned for next month’s update, when I reveal pretty much the same list with no changes whatsoever!

I’ve mentioned before how SNKP dumping all the new things they introduced in KOF XII irritated me. Capcom has been doing something similar with Street Fighter IV, and needless to say that move has puzzled me as well. It’s not that I don’t understand the motivation behind the move - it’s that I think that it’s not going to help at all.

Ostensibly the idea behind returning these series to a time when they were less loaded with subsystems to master is fairly obvious - to make them more “accessible” to beginners. There’s nothing wrong with making games easy to learn - as long as they remain difficult to master. That is the key thing that keeps people playing these games for so long. And when you think about it, a game like Guilty Gear XX really is no more accessible than Street Fighter II, since at the lowest level, they are based off the same principles.

Anyway, back to Street Fighter IV. Capcom is trying to draw in the people who played Street Fighter II back in its heyday, yet who didn’t stick with the scene after that. I have to say, I’m highly skeptical that this will work, and the evidence on the Internet doesn’t really help to convince me otherwise.

For instance, take a look at this video on Youtube. It’s a video of a Ryu player in Street Fighter IV (the video uploader claims it’s Daigo Umehara, but that hasn’t been confirmed). Still, it’s pretty clear that the guy knows what he’s doing. However, the comments on this and other videos are rather revealing:

it’s not that hard to do fire ball over and over again then kick a few times . I hope D dark is on this game so I can show you a real beast.

How is this guy good? He constantly spams a load of Hadouken. The guy is aweful.

good?…all he does is spam hadouken.

These are the people Capcom is trying to sell this game to. Good luck with that.

If anything, they’ll think “omg, this is going to be just like Street Fighter II!”, hop on Live/PSN and get their asses kicked a bunch of times by players who stuck with the scene over the years (and have thus become really good), chalk it up to people being cheap or not “playing for fun” and quit the game for good. Which is probably why they stopped playing Street Fighter II, come to think of it. There will probably be a few who will attempt to learn the system and actually get better at the game, but I doubt they will be in the majority.

Disclaimer: I don’t claim to be an expert at fighting games (anyone who has played against me knows what a pushover I am) but I do like to think that I know why people continue to play these games, and thus why trying to attract new players with misguided attempts to rekindle nostalgia isn’t going to work.

(I’ve been writing way too many negative posts lately, haven’t I? I’ll try to think of something more positive to write about next time)

I suppose I am, at least when it comes to Sonic games. I honestly believe that my cynicism is justified, though.

There’s an old Tamil proverb, a personal favourite of mine, that can roughly be translated as “If you endeavour to do something, do it such that everyone will praise you; or you are better off not doing it at all.”

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WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING SHIT LIKE THIS

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

Have you learned NOTHING?!

This stupid thing makes the werehog look awesome in comparison, seriously.

It’s times like this that I wish I drank alcohol, so I could drown my sorrows in it.

Weeeeeee~

All 13 episodes of ARIA the Animation, in one box set for $50, being released on September 30th. I approve of this news.

In other news:

School Rumble manga is finally ending

I thought the later chapters of the manga were rather lacking, and from what I heard it only seems to have gotten weirder from there (Tenma and Karasuma appear to have been shunted off to the side with Harima, Eri and Yakumo as the main characters).

I still have volume 1 of the manga on my shelf…after seeing how the rest of the manga turned out I kind of lost interest in completing my collection. Now that I know it actually has an ending, maybe I should reconsider.

Reminds me that I never did finish watching School Rumble Nigakki and Sangakki is around the corner…

Nintendo: Hey gamers! We’re just going to talk about how awesome we are and about how we don’t really need you any more since we make more money selling shallow waggle-fests to people who really don’t know any better :D

Sony: So uh we have all this shit that’s coming out at some point and it’ll be really awesome! In the meantime have all these repackaged versions of our existing hardware!

Oh, and Sega?

So apparently Sonic Unleashed is part Sonic Rush/Secret Rings, part…stretchy hands combat game.

…

Worst E3 ever.

There were only a few things I was looking for out of the gaggle of E3 propaga- er news:

1. Mirror’s Edge news (this game still looks bloody awesome)
2. Sonic Unleashed news (hopefully my dreams don’t come crashing down around me)
3. Any news out of Valve (this had better come to Steam, damn it… and Episode Three details kthxbai)

Blizzard is a no-show because they just held their Worldwide Invitational where this little game called Diablo III was revealed, and where Starcraft II was shown off in a competitive match for the first time.

Anyway, on to the few other tidbits that caught my eye.

Apparently Nintendo has announced some thingamajig that will improve the motion sensing of the Wii remote. How it does this, I have no idea. I’m more concerned about the fact that plugging that thing into the remote seems to preclude the attachment of a nunchuk for smoother aiming in Resident Evil 4.

Microsoft’s presser was largely uninteresting to me since I don’t own an Xbox 360 and they hardly mentioned PC releases. The reaction on the Internet to the news that Final Fantasy XIII would be coming to Xbox 360 has been hilarious, though. It’s a repeat of the NERD RAGE that erupted when Devil May Cry 4 became a multi-platform title instead of a PlayStation 3 exclusive - somehow they feel betrayed because Square Enix decided to widen the game’s potential market. Whatever. I’ve given up on trying to analyse the psychology of lunatic fanboys.

Oh yeah, that two-player co-op in Resident Evil 5 is pretty cool. I doubt I’ll buy it unless that rumoured PC version materialises though. For the life of me, I just can’t aim with a thumbstick at all. Don’t ask why.

For some reason I added a widget off to the right that lists stuff in my Amazon wishlist. I highly doubt anyone is going to buy me anything, but I can dream, can’t I? :p

EDIT 7/14/2008: I replaced the list widget with a normal button, because it didn’t really go well with the rest of my layout and the links to the full wishlist weren’t working for some reason. It might be a good idea to bug someone at work about that…