And apparently, it’s terrible. But that’s not what I’m intent on talking about here – there are plenty of places you can go to find out about the problems with what Gearbox has just shat out (I recommend Rock Paper Shotgun’s take). No, my peeve has to do with how some people are reacting to the bad reviews – the same way a lot of people react to bad reviews of anything. One particular phrase.

“It’s good in its own right.”

Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?

To realise how silly that statement is, you have to think about what we mean when we say ‘good.’ There isn’t any universally accepted scale of ‘goodness’ – you can’t say that a cake is good because it’s a 500 on the goodness scale. On top of that coming up with a universal scale would also be very difficult because goodness is highly subjective. Therefore all judgments of quality are necessarily relative.

Given that, saying that something is ‘good in its own right’ is the same as claiming to be able to judge the quality of it without comparing it to anything else. Which is quite clearly nonsense. Even unqualified statements of quality have an implicit comparison embedded in them – for instance, when I say that the Duke Nukem Forever demo failed to convince me that the final product would be any good, I’m implicitly evaluating DNF’s mechanics against those from the best FPSes I’ve played, and realising that it falls short in several areas.

What I suspect that people who pull the above statement are trying to say instead is “I liked this game.” Which is reasonable – there’s no real accounting for taste. But to say that you like something is not the same as saying that it’s good. I mean, hell, I play games that aren’t quite as good as popular opinion would have you believe (for instance, Team Fortress 2). It’s entirely possible (and up to a point, acceptable) to say you like something while admitting that in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really hold up.

So please, by all means, go ahead and like Duke Nukem Forever, or KOF XII, or any number of games that were generally received poorly. But if you’re going to claim that they’re good by some arbitrary standard, then my inevitable follow-up question is going to be ‘compared to what?’

I’m a fan of 3D action games in general, and I’m currently working my way through two of them, which has inevitably led me to draw comparisons between the two of them. And as it turns out, one of them comes out on top of the other. Or rather, one of them completely curbstomps the other.

To start, let’s talk about Bayonetta.

I’d been looking forward to Hideki Kamiya’s first project after leaving Capcom, and Bayonetta absolutely doesn’t disappoint. It’s fast-paced and unforgiving, and the combat mechanics are great to play around with. The idea behind Witch Time is easy to understand at first glance, but actually putting it to good use is where the fun lies. Your attacks don’t put enemies into hitstun immediately (unlike most 3D hack-and-slash games), so weaving in dodges with your attack strings to activate Witch Time mid-combo is the key to keeping up a good offense. On top of this there’s the Dodge Offset mechanic that lets you attack immediately after dodging, which I’m still trying to figure out. On top of this, every level introduces something like three to four new enemy types and mixes them up to keep you on your toes.

My only complaint is the QTE sequences that seem to kick in at random intervals, often resulting in instant death if you fail them – an annoying blemish on an otherwise excellent game, especially considering that your end-of-level ranking is severely crippled if you have to use continues to complete the level. But otherwise, I’m really glad I bought this game, and I’m looking forward to playing a lot more of it.

That said, it vastly outshines the other 3D action game I’ve been playing alongside it – Metroid: Other M.

The game starts out strong enough, with a decent level of difficulty, although the one thing you notice straight away is that there isn’t really much substance to the combat. It’s fast-paced, to be sure, but Samus auto-locks to anything in a wide cone in front of her, and dodging is pulled off reactively rather than proactively (you press a direction on the d-pad when there’s an active enemy attack on the screen), so there’s very little risk of mistiming your dodges. The first-person mode is a little disorienting at first, but it works ok for the few times you need to fire missiles at enemy weak points.

Unfortunately it’s all downhill from there. As you collect powerups and, um, ‘gain’ abilities, the combat doesn’t really get any harder, and once you get the charge beam and diffusion beam you might as well put down the controller and walk away. You can beat most of the enemy encounters by just running around in circles, charging a shot, turning in the enemy’s general direction and releasing the button. And once you figure out that you can instantly charge a shot while dodging…well, yeah.

On top of that the game forces you to use this ridiculous Wiimote-only control setup that makes you use the d-pad to dodge, one button to fire and one button to jump. Would it have been so bad to include a GameCube controller or Classic Controller setup? Hell, a proper controller would have probably forced the developers to come up with a more interesting combat system.

Honestly the only reaction this game elicits from me is ‘wow, did Team Ninja really make this game?’ I still remember how the Ninja Gaiden Sigma demo kicked my ass, so seeing a game like this come from them makes me feel like I’m being trolled. I know that drawing comparisons to Super Metroid is silly since the two games are in different genres, but if there was a game that could have shown how to do a free-roaming 3D action game with the same veneer of non-linearity as Super Metroid, this could have been it. This should have been it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

(I’ve got one more ‘Comparison Theatre’ coming up soon…if you want a hint what the topic will be, here’s a hint: YOUはSHOCK!)

Looks like King of Fighters XIII is en route.

(logo yoinked from Dengeki Online)

To be clear, I didn’t like KOF XII at all. I did pay $60 for the game, but in retrospect, my money would have probably been better spent on something else. And no, my complaints have little to do with the lacklustre console port – they all centre around what was done to the game system itself. General dumbing down, removal of anything that might be potential interesting and highly stripped-down movelists that made even my usual go-to KOF characters boring as hell to play. Oh yeah, and the stuff about the sprites being upscaled didn’t really help either.

To be honest, the fact that everyone’s complaint about the game seems to be ‘the game plays fine, but the port sucks’ just astounds me. I have to conclude that these people never really played the games that came before XII (the great KOF XI and KOF’98 Ultimate Match) and what came after it (the equally great KOF2002 Unlimited Match). I regard all of those games as superior to KOF XII in every way, simply because their systems were far more interesting. They may not have fancy fake-HD sprites with tons of frames, but they make up for it by actually being fun to play. XI took 2003’s incomplete tag system, fleshed it out and made it awesome; ‘98UM added new twists to a classic formula without breaking it (I actually have a reason to try and use the Extra mode meter and dodging now) and 2002UM addressed my only problems with the original game (crappy aesthetics and stripped-down movelists) while making enough system tweaks to be interesting.

Out of the new stuff KOF XII added, I only regard the Guard Attack and guard crush CDs as interesting, and the latter already made an appearance in KOF NeoWave (albeit in a slightly different form). Critical counters and deadlocks are too rare and too difficult to get to be of any consequence, and the changes they made to how close and far attacks work is just off-putting. Why the hell would I want Shen Woo’s close C from a full character length away?

Anyway, what does all of this have to do with KOF XIII?

Simply put, I’m not super confident about it. Based on a comment from Falcoon back in 2006 (shortly after XI’s arcade release), they worked on KOF XII for 3 1/2 years before releasing it, and the end result of that was a game that felt stripped down in every single way. Given also that the first build of the game at AOU 2009 didn’t even have super meters and most of the subsystems implemented, I’d say that the bulk of the time was spent on drawing those fancy new sprites. They’ve had a year to work on the game since then, but given that these sprites take so long to draw (SNKP themselves said it’s 16 months per character in terms of man-hours), I’m not expecting a major shakeup in the game system. Maybe everyone gets a new move or two, and we get 2-3 new characters at most.

Hey, maybe they’ll add super cancels! Or a multiple-level power meter! That’d truly be revolutionary.

…

So yeah. I’m keeping an eye on it, but I’m not holding my breath.

Nice logo though.

One quick run of memtest86 later, and the result was clear – one of the sticks was bad. In fact, ONE BIT on that stick was bad. It would have passed the complete test suite had it not been for the random number test where that bit failed to get flipped correctly.

The aggravating part is that this happened to me one year ago with the RAM I originally bought to build this machine. The same exact problem – one bad stick of RAM.

On top of that, my five-year old Creative speakers finally gave up the ghost this week, so it looks like I’ll be needing a new set. I’m not into 5.1 or 7.1 setups that much (I used to have a 4.1 setup way back in 1999 but I kept tripping over the rear satellites), so I’ll probably pick up a cheap 2.1 set. There’s a Logitech set on Amazon going for $30 that’s gotten some good reviews.

Fortunately we have a pretty good returns service, so I’ve already asked for a replacement, and will be shipping this dud RAM back to Amazon for a refund. I hope they don’t mind that I snipped off the bar code to submit for my mail-in-rebate, though…

I’ve heard horror stories of people who get stuck for weeks waiting for their passport to be returned to them…I have my fingers crossed that my interview goes smoothly.

This has pretty much been the only thing on my mind for the last month or so.

Otherwise, not much else is going on. Playing TF2 every night with Perfect Stranger and his friends, going to work as usual and otherwise pretending that my continued legal status in this country is not down to the decision of one guy in a building in Vancouver.

Only to have it, with its dying breath, somehow fuck up my Windows registry, preventing Windows from starting at all, except in Safe Mode.

I booted into Safe Mode and used System Restore to bring my computer back to the last point where I could guarantee that it was working. Unfortunately, System Restore also apparently rolls back installed programs. Meaning the copy of Diablo II and its expansion set that I had downloaded and installed from Blizzard’s online store are now gone.

Guess I won’t be playing any TF2 tonight while I download both games all over again :|

For some reason my game directory (with my save data apparently intact, otherwise I really would have lost it) still exists, backed up under another name, but the .exe files and Start Menu entries are nowhere to be found.

I guess AVG wanted to leave me something to remember it by. -_-

So yeah, I was a little tied up.

That new 3G iPhone looks awesome, though.

I think I’ll go blow up some random douchebags in Team Fortress 2 to vent.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, one of the games on my backlog is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the 2003 reimagining of Jordan Mechner’s classic platformer. At the time, my completion rate was 65%; since then, I’ve reached 81% completion, and the game hasn’t lost its lustre yet…except for one problem which you might have been able to infer from my previous post – that the camera is incredibly dodgy.

Most of the time, when you’re running on walls, making death-defying leaps and swinging on poles, it works perfectly, and maintains the perfect angle for you to see what you’re getting yourself into. However, during combat, it takes an incredibly inconvenient angle, moving around jerkily, pivoting 180 degrees for no reason and generally behaving like a douche. This is a problem not only because camera orientation determines your control mapping, but also because it changes your field of view, meaning that I can’t see the huge guy with the scimitar just so slightly off screen who’s about to leap over and tear me a new one.

Exacerbating the problem in this particular case is the fact that you need to protect someone while on this elevator, someone whom the camera excels at keeping out of my field of vision. I don’t know what the general consensus on escort or protection missions in most games is, but based on my experience here and in Resident Evil 4, I would say that they need to take a flying leap off a bridge. The so-called “artificial intelligence” is terrible at keeping itself out of trouble, and in the case of Prince of Persia, said character’s inability to keep herself alive forces me to remain nearby, in a walled-off area of the elevator, eminently suitable for all the enemies to gang up and introduce me to their little friends, simultaneously.

The combat itself is functional, if rather bland, but the camera has proved to be the source of much of my frustration so far. I’m hoping it doesn’t end up putting me off completing the game altogether. ]]> http://www.sonictempest.net/2008/05/18/some-clarification-as-to-aforementioned-spastic-monkeys/feed/ 0 http://www.sonictempest.net/2008/05/07/beating-the-dead-horse/ http://www.sonictempest.net/2008/05/07/beating-the-dead-horse/#comments Thu, 08 May 2008 01:53:15 +0000 sonictempest http://www.sonictempest.net/?p=73 I was hoping that I could write about something unrelated to gaming today…it’s not like I’m lacking for topics in any way.

But then EA goes and pulls a stunt like this with two of the biggest upcoming PC releases; games which I had been very much looking forward to.

I guess the appearance of security (and mind you, it is only for appearances – the probability that this copy protection will be broken by an enterprising hacker is pretty much 100%) is far more important than customer goodwill.

(BTW, anyone who suggest I should buy a 360 to play Mass Effect can go die in a fire)