tempest in a teacup

Just wanted to mention that

• I beat Beyond Good & Evil last night and started working through Lost Planet and
• This decision is retarded and will probably come back to bite Capcom in the ass somewhere down the road

That is all.

First Tatsunoko vs Capcom: Ultimate All Stars, then BlazBlue: Continuum Shift, and now Super Street Fighter IV – the newest fighting games are starting to get their first updated versions. It’s pretty interesting to read about the new characters and balance/system changes that are being implemented, and speculate about how my characters’ play styles will change.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is the whining by casual players about constant ‘rehashes,’ and how they’ll need to pay more money for ‘the same game with more characters.’ I have to say – this is still pretty hilarious. If anything it betrays how ignorant these guys are about how arcade games are developed and iteratively improved.

Oh well, perhaps they can’t tell the difference between one revision of GGXX and the next, but the actual players can, and that’s all that matters, really. The fewer flowchart Kens we have to deal with online, the better.

I’ve been trying to clear the list of games that I haven’t beaten yet so that I can get back to buying new ones without feeling guilty (particularly since the holiday release season is coming up). So far, I’ve managed to clear Assassin’s Creed off my backlog, and am pretty close to calling Beyond Good & Evil done as well.

Just to give you an idea of what I need to work through, here’s a list of stuff I’ve bought but have yet to finish, in rough order of ‘completeness’:

Beyond Good & Evil (PC) – just about at the end
Fallout 3 (PC) – about to head to Rivet City, but I have no idea how far that is in the game
God Hand (PS2) – cleared the first area
Company of Heroes + Opposing Fronts (PC) – 3 missions into the Normandy campaign
Fallout (PC) – yes, the original, fresh off GOG.com
Descent & Descent II (PC) – ditto
Resident Evil 5 (PC) – freshly purchased, played two missions in co-op
Oboro Muramasa (Wii) – beat one level

So yeah, wish me luck, I guess.

Add me if you have it and want to try some co-op sometime. My GfW Live tag is SonicTempest84.

On a side note, the mouse + keyboard controls for this game are actually really good. You hold right-click to aim and left-click to fire, and the aiming feels pretty responsive. There’s apparently a way to use classic PC FPS weapon selection controls if you want (the number keys) but for now I’m going with the RE5 ‘live’ inventory screen.

I posted a while back that I was rather unimpressed by what I had seen of LittleBigPlanet. One of the common replies I got was that I couldn’t make a proper judgement without playing it first, which is a reasonable response. I was loath to spend $50 to buy a game that I wasn’t sure about, though, particularly when my gaming backlog is already a mile long.

Well, Sony released a LittleBigPlanet demo on PSN last week, and I downloaded it and finally got to play through some of the levels. And…

(cue drumroll)

…I still don’t see what the big deal is. The platforming is pretty slippery, imprecise even. I mean, I can compare it to Sonic Unleashed and confidently say that even that game has tighter controls in its 2D sections. I can make precise jumps reasonably easily in Unleashed, whereas LBP’s ‘on ice’ movement and floaty jumps mean that I tend to be slip-sliding through levels rather than navigating through them with precise timing.

Stephen Fry’s voiceovers are great, though.

And for anyone who would retort that I’m missing the point because I haven’t played any of the levels online with four players – attaching a collaborative level design toolkit to Daikatana doesn’t magically turn it into Half-Life.

With that said, I suspect that’s the last I’ll have to say on the subject of LBP. Unless a copy ends up falling into my lap.

A new 2D Sonic, in HD, to be released in 2010

…

Dammit, I don’t want to get my hopes up, just to be disappointed yet again.

When this does eventually show up, I hope it’s more Sonic CD and less Sonic Rush – while I had fun with that game, it was more about ‘LOL HOLD DOWN THE BOOST BUTTON AND PRESS A OCCASIONALLY’ as opposed to Sonic CD’s expert mix of momentum-based and timing-based platforming.