Environments

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games does a pretty good job of making you feel like you’re there in Vancouver. The events are all held in virtual recreations of the venues used in the actual Winter Games this year. Skiing down a mountain, over moguls or blazing a path down a bobsled or skeleton run feels incredibly authentic no matter what character you’re choosing.

Events

The events felt a little more hit or miss for me. Some of them are compellingly accurate, such as the bobsled/skeleton runs and curling. This is especially true of the bobsled/skeleton if you happen to have the Wii Balance Board, which does a wonderful job of using subtle body and weight shifts to control your movement down the track.

Others suffer a bit more for their translation to the controller. Hockey and Figure skating are, by their nature, unable to be represented with as much fidelity as something like bobsled. It’s unfortunate and leaves us stuck with events that have extremely oversimplified controls. Given the audience for the Wii, it’s hard to take Sega to task for this. I do think it was the right decision to simplify the controls, but it does leave gamers like myself feeling that those events are lacking.

Dream Events

One fun element of the game that I appreciate a great deal is the ability to unlock various “dream” event versions of the regular winter events. These take the relatively mundane “normal” sports featured in the olympics and translate them into forms that might feel more appropriate in a classic Mario or Sonic series game.

The dream ski jump takes you right out into space, leaping through vistas last seen in Super Mario Galaxy. You’ll fly through the great void in the sky, avoiding small planets as you aim to land on your mark. Another has you skiing down an obstacle course that’s taken straight from Mario Kart, items and all.

These dream events seem a little gimmicky at times, and the game play doesn’t always fit the concept terribly well. The Mario Kart inspired racing for instance is just too slow to really do Mario Kart any justice. On another level it just doesn’t matter though; if you’ve ever played the games these dream events are based on, you will end up smiling big-time when Sonic bowls Bowser off his skis and into a snow bank with a green shell on a sharp turn.

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When I finished the original Mass Effect not so very long ago, I was in awe of how grand and cinematic the game felt. Knowing then that a sequel was right around the corner, I worried how it could possibly live up to what Bioware accomplished with the first one. I shouldn’t have.

Mass Effect 2 takes almost all of the fun that existed in the first game and amplifies it, while eliminating the tedium. In the process, they made quite a few interesting design choices.

The most obvious improvement is with the visuals. It actually looks like they use quite a few of the same models they used in the original game, especially for Shepard, who looks EXACTLY the way you’ll remember her (or him) if you played the first. The shaders used to enhance those models are vastly improved, though; I actually gasped when I saw how good the game looks.

Mass Effect 2 plays very much like a shooter. In fact it may actually be more accurate to call it a shooter than a roleplaying game at this point. But don’t let that put you off; as good as the shooter part is, they have managed to improve the cinematic quality of the dialogue even further in this installment.

The characters so far (disclosure: I haven’t finished playing yet) are extremely well developed, with each getting a considerable amount of “screen time” to be fleshed out beyond generic recruits for your grand mission. Much of this screen time is optional though, a good choice on Bioware’s part as not everyone will care about getting to know these people. This is their loss, as they’re well worth getting to know.

I do have two complaints about the game. One of my favorite elements of Mass Effect was driving around planet surfaces. The rover you controlled was tricky to learn, but a lot of fun once mastered. It is sadly missing from Mass Effect 2, though my guess as to why is that it eliminates potential frustration at having to drive around a large area searching for minerals and other discoverables.

In Mass Effect 2, you locate minerals by scanning planet surfaces. This is a fine approach and would work well if you spaced it out between missions. I, naturally, failed to do this. COMPLETELY my own fault, and something I regret, as I now need quite a few minerals to complete various upgrade and research projects the game gives you. Unfortunately the process does get very dull when you do a lot of it at once.

Still, these are really minor quibbles with a game that in my book is an early contender for 2010′s best.

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As of this writing, I’m about 30 hours into Star Ocean – The Last Hope (SO-TLH) for the XBox 360 and I’m enjoying it. I had wished, when I started writing this, that I’d be able to say I was thoroughly enjoying it, but there are a few concerns I’ve got that prevent me from saying that.

The Last Hope is a fantastic Square-Enix RPG, no doubt. Anyone who likes Final Fantasy style Japanese RPGs will be into this. The title comes from the core of the story, which is that humanity has been up to it’s old tricks and taken warfare to such an extreme that World War III has occurred and left the Earth unable to sustain life, at least on the surface. Humanity has taken refuge under ground, but they can’t remain there indefinitely. The human race’s titular last hope is the search for a new world to call it’s own, hopefully one they’ll take care of a bit better than they did the Earth.

The characters are decent, if a little generic-seeming at the start. They do begin to come into their own as you get further into the game, which is a bit of a relief. Your primary characters are Edge Maverick and Reimi Saionji, humans from Earth’s underground who are determined to find humanity’s new home. They’re fairly typical anime/RPG character archetypes, the idealized everyman that you can identify with comfortably while a part of you wishes you secretly wishes that you could identify with them a little more closely. This makes it easy to slip into their shoes so to speak, but also makes them feel a little bland at the outset. As the game progresses they start to come into their own a little bit more with story events tugging on their personas and moulding them into something a bit more unique.

The combat is enjoyable, resembling other Square-Enix games in the broad strokes but with some twists that are new to this title. It took me a long time to get into the game’s Blindsiding system because I found it largely unnecessary, but now that I do know how to pull them off, I find I do them a lot more often. Blindsiding is a way your characters have of slipping past an enemy’s defenses to strike from their “blind spot” which always results in a critical hit for much more damage than a typical hit would do.

If I had any complaint about the combat, it’s the same one I have with all Square-Enix games – it’s often necessary to go “grinding”, or fighting endlessly for the sake of fighting to build experience up when you discover that you’re not strong enough to get past a particular encounter. This is not always a bad thing. In this game in particular I’ve found it less irritating than I have in other games, because it has led me to exploring the various planets I can travel to in more depth, and I’ve completed a large number of smaller side quests as a result. These side quests make for an effective alternative to grinding, in fact, because you can earn a fair amount of experience doing them,which levels your characters up just as effectively as the fighting.

Another nice side effect of the side quests is that many of them are crafting quests. People or shops will often ask you to find or make special items for them. The game contains a vast number of resources you can acquire in various ways. You can then take these resources back to your ship’s lab, where you can launch the crafting interface and create a dizzying array of items that range from weapons and armor upgrades to ship upgrades to useless bits of arts and craft that can be sold for more than the cost of the components you made them from. Like blindsides in combat, this was not something I jumped into right away, but once I did start messing around with it, it quickly became a fun passtime in it’s own right – and the more combat oriented items are yet another way you can reduce the need for grinding, as they can make those extra-tough encounters a lot easier to manage.

Visually… well, it’s a breathtaking game that often inspires me to just sit still and pan the camera around the world to take it in. I won’t go on too much about how great the game looks, because honestly, it’s not often you find A-list games these days that don’t look spectacular.

I have had some problems with SO-TLH that have driven me absolutely crazy. The game seems to be unusually crash-prone. I’ve had more problems with crashing games on the XBox 360 than on any other console, but this game in particular crashes more than any other 360 title I’ve played in recent memory. I’m not sure whether this is because the game is buggy, the console lacks stability, or because  my console is one of the earlier 360 releases, but no matter the cause, it’s frustrating to lose progress due to lockups.

It does say something about the compelling quality of the game that I keep going back to it though. I’m anxious to see where the story is leading; what more is going to happen with these characters? What more will they go through, fight through, endure through? It’s good enough to be worth a little frustration to see where things are headed.

Overall impression: I’d rank it a bit below Final Fantasy XII or Persona 3 FES, but still definitely worth a look for fans of this style of gaming.

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A Kingdom for Keflings is a very cute game for XBox Live Arcade that caught my attention because it’s one of those new games that makes direct use of the 360 Live Avatars in the same way that so many Wii games make use of Miis. The idea is that you play the game as your Avatar, who exists in the world of the Kelflings as a giant among small people. These small Kelflings want a great kingdom, and for some unspecified reason, you’re helping them achieve this goal.

You start with a few Keflings and a large amount of resource-rich land. As a giant, you’re able to work reasonably quickly to harvest basic resources and get the building process under way. This is essentially a resource management game; you could almost see it as  real-time strategy game, except that there’s no opponent to fight. Much like Warcraft and it’s ilk, you’ll spend time chopping trees, mining stone and crystals, etc. all in the name of constructing buildings to unlock more advanced technologies to improve your kingdom and your Keflings themselves.

Though you are capable of gathering the resources you need yourself, you’re better off putting your Keflings to work for you to handle resource gathering. This frees you up for the task of actually constructing all the buildings the new kingdom is going to need. That’s something the Keflings can’t do, so your time is much better spent focused on that.

In addition to the resource management part of the game, there’s a bit of a collecting game as well. You can explore the land around your growing kingdom to find new tools that will help you gather different types of resources. Generally they’ll be found smack in the center of a resource patch, requiring you to do some work to clear a path to the tool.

There’s also a bit of a quest component. Once you’ve built your kingdom up to the point where you have a town hall, keep or castle, you’ll be able to get quests from the Kefling you’ve put in power. These are largely resource quests, along the lines of “I need 50 magic gems, can you put them in the contractor’s office for me?” So you’ll go off, get the resource requested, put it in the building requested, and be rewarded with love.

That may not sound like much of a reward, but Love is actually another resource in and of itself. You need it whenever you build a new house to increase your Kefling population. Building a house is all well and good, but Keflings won’t want to live in it until it contains love. Build a house, put love in it, and you get new Keflings to do your bidding. Quests are the primary means of getting Love, so you’ll need to undertake them once in a while.

Constructing buildings is a pretty interesting process. It’s not too heavy on the micromanagement, but not simplified to the point of pointlessness either. Among the many buildings you’ll construct for your kingdom are various types of workshops. These workshops will take resources of various kinds and enable you to place orders for building components. The components are assembled and placed outside the workshop. Your giant then goes and picks up the component and you can put it wherever you want in the world. You arrange the components in the proper configuration (which you’ll be able to see on the building’s blueprint,) and when you have all the components in the correct configuration, the building is automatically finished off.

This may sound really simple, but you have a limited population of Keflings harvesting resources for you. You’ll also have Keflings working at transporting resources from location to location, and others processing one type of resource into another. For instance, you may have one Kefling chopping trees into logs, one Kefling working in a saw mill, and a third Kefling transporting cut planks from the sawmill to your contractor’s office. Your contractor’s office is just one type of workshop though, you may have half a dozen others in your kingdom, and all of them need to be fed a variety of resources to create all the building pieces you’ll need. Making sure you have all the resources you need where you need them can be a bit of an optimization dance. It’s not too punishing if you mess up though; you can always have one workshop “build” a resource stockpile for you, which your giant can then move where you need it in a hurry. It’s just tricky enough to be interesting but not so tricky as to be frustrating.

I started playing this game with the demo just last night and quickly found myself compelled to spend the 800 Microsoft Points required to upgrade to the full game.  It didn’t claim ALL of my attention; Star Ocean – The Last Hope took the lion’s share of it. But I did find myself playing it far more than I expected I would, given the fact that I had Star Ocean there waiting for me. That’s a pretty good sign.

Speaking of Star Ocean – The Last Hope, that one is next on my Impressions list. Watch for a new post on it very soon.

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Right off the bat I’ll admit this is not the most timely impression. The game has been out for a couple of years, but I thought I’d write about Tree of Tranquility because I’ve recently had cause to start looking into what makes the Harvest Moon series tick and get familiar with it’s mechanics.

I’m not a complete stranger to the series. I do have and enjoy a related game, Rune Factory,  for the Nintendo DS. Rune Factory involves a heavy dose of fantasy swords and sorcery though, which puts me much closer to it’s target audience. The Harvest Moon series is all about building the biggest, most successful ranch possible by farming, raising animals, courting a potential spouse, getting married, and having children.

So what does Tree of Tranquility have to offer me, a guy who likes Half-Life 2, Burn Out Revenge, and Mario Kart? Well I also like The Sims series, so there’s some common ground there. Harvest Moon is a similar life simulation game, just more stylized and specialized.

As the title suggests, Tree of Tranquility is a very tranquil, relaxing sort of game. You’re a young rancher just moved to a new island, ready to begin a life for yourself. You start with your choice of 3 plots of land to work, and can buy more land later when you’ve gotten your feet under you.

Your early days on the island will be spent preparing your first fields for planting, a grueling process that will drain your character’s endurance pretty severely. Eventually you’ll have enough land cleared of rocks, weeds and other impediments to plant some proper crops and start earning some money. The longer you play though, the more experience your character gains with each tool that he (or she) uses. You’ll level up your tools individually; spend a lot of time watering crops and your ability to use the watering can increases. Plow a lot of land, and your plow skill increases. Use a scythe to clear weeds, harvest grasses and other produce, and your scythe skill increases. Fish a lot and your fishing rod skill increases, etc.

Leveling your skills in these and other tools is critical. The higher your skill, the more you can do with the same amount of stamina. Controlling the amount of stamina you use is central to the game, so anything you can do to cut down the stamina required to earn money will get you ahead. In addition to building your skill at using the tools, the tools themselves are upgradable either by paying for better types, or upgrading existing tools at lower cost, but with the requirement of supplying the increasingly rare ores needed for the work.

Once your skills have leveled up a bit you’ll be able to finish most of your chores pretty quickly in each day, leaving you time to explore other elements of the game play. One of the chief elements you’ll want to investigate is the ‘courting a wife/husband’ story line. Getting married and having kid(s) is one of the big criteria for the eventual success of your ranch, and one that’ll take a long time to complete. I’m only a couple of seasons into my game at the time of this writing, so I haven’t gotten very far in any individual story line, but I have learned that courting someone involves visiting them frequently and giving them a lot of gifts after you learn what they like and what they don’t.

As I get further into the game, I’ll post more about it. For now though, my impression is that it’s an interesting “relax time” game with elements taken from RPGs, time management, and resource management games. Unlike most time management games though, you get the experience without the stress of any actual time pressure. It’s a good way to spend a lazy couple of hours.

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A quick note to begin with. This blog documents my impressions of Persona 3 FES, as opposed to Persona 3. The two are not entirely the same game;  Persona 3 FES contains extra content not available in the original Persona 3. However, for the sake of my aching fingers, I’m going to just call it Persona 3 or even P3.

Yes, the name of the game really is Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3 FES. What a mouth full! With a name like that, you just have to guess that it’s a  Japanese role playing game, and you’d be very correct. This is no Final Fantasy though, and that’s a good thing.

I love the Final Fantasy series, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes I need a break from that style of play, and Persona 3 has given it to me. This is not  a game of physical exploration, wandering from place to place in a vast fantasy/sci-if environment, meeting strange creatures and killing them.

No, this is a game that takes place largely within a few specific locations in one small town. The physical exploration takes place within a vast secret tower in the town, while the bulk of the exploration is more social – exploring relationships between your protagonist and the various friends you make in  and out of school during the course of a full calendar year.

You do your explorations in the role of the Main Character, or MC as he’s often referred to online. In the game, he’s referred to by whatever name you  choose to give him.

MC is a fairly typical high school student, or at least he seems to be at first. His life can take any number of turns depending on how you play the  game. Is he going to be a straight-A student with incomparable academics? A social butterfly that can charm the socks off the ladies? Maybe someone very brave in the face of danger and dating? Manage your time well and you can make him any or all of these, or not, as you prefer.

It all depends on how you want to play him, and the game as a whole. Your socialization with other characters and groups that you meet will have a strong effect on your combat performance in the dungeon parts of the game, thanks to an interesting experience system based on the concept of “Social Links” that power the various personas you control. The stronger your social ties, the more experience a related persona gains when you create it.

Social links are only one method of improvement, however. The charm, academics and courage stats that I alluded to earlier are another form of social advance; your progress on those three stats determines how strong your relationships can get with three particular characters that are of critical importance to your game, and may have other effects as well. I’m not quite at the halfway point in the game yet, so I can’t really say authoritatively what those possible other effects would be.

Like most RPGs, your main character has hitpoints and spirit (magic) points, but lacks most other common stat types; strength, endurance, magical potency and the other “vital” stats are not associated with MC himself. Instead, they are associated with the various personas MC can make use of. This means switching personas in the middle of a battle has a much greater impact that just changing your selection of special abilities; the fundamental traits of your character change as well. You might switch from an exceptionally high strength with one persona to one that’s very physically weak, and find yourself doing far less melee damage as a result. The tradeoff may be that your magic potential is hugely boosted. This is a pretty fascinating system that makes the choice of personas all the more strategically important.

Not having finished the game yet, this isn’t a full review, but just an impression. I’ll leave off at this before I get into anything too spoilerish, but I’ll invite anyone who’s interested to comment or write to me with questions. If I can answer them, I certainly will.

My impression so far: This is a beautiful gem of a game, not to be missed if you can handle going back to the last generation of console games and picking up something for the PS2 ninstead of the shiny and new PS3.

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When I last wrote about my Windows 7 adventures last weekend, my system was in a mostly usable state but with several big question marks hanging over it.

1) I had no sound, since I could not convince my X-Fi sound card to work with Win7.
2) My system was initially crashing, something I’d been experiencing for a couple of months in Vista as well.

I’m happy to report that issue 1 is now resolved; it was a relatively simple matter to fix. I simply installed the Windows Vista X-Fi drivers using compatibility mode, and much to my surprise, they worked fine; I can look forward to some testing of various games over the weekend. (My hit list of choice: Half-Life 2 and it’s various episodes, Portal, and Fallout 3. I’d try The Sims 2 as well, but there aren’t enough hours in the weekend.)

As far as issue 2 goes, the system has been rock solid since I blasted years’ worth of dust out of the fans. Funny how that works, huh? I can’t say for sure yet that it’s fixed. The machine did run for a good 2 weeks straight over the holidays under Vista. But at this point, I’m pretty confident in saying Windows 7 is very stable and my machine is definitely liking things as they stand. Stay tuned for my post-gaming report sometime early in the week.

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Usability land isn’t all rosey good news, though. The first program I tried to get set up was Google Chrome, my favorite browser. It turns out it has known compatibility issues though, and while technically it will run, it can’t render pages, making it kind of useless. So I installed my second choice, Firefox 3. That one, I’m happy to report, does run perfectly well right away.

Windows 7 has a lot of new features, and I won’t go into them all here because, well, because Microsoft isn’t paying me for this. That, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s changed in this thing. The new task bar is both good and bad. I like how you can pin applications to it, similar to the way MacOS works. I like the preview windows; they’ve improved over Vista’s previews and now act as a selection mechanism for apps that have more than one window open. I don’t, however, like the fact that the quick launch icons are gone now. I can understand why, since you can pin shortcuts to the bar, but as a creature of habit, it’s going to take me some time to get used to that change.

I’ve had some issues with audio as well. At the time I write this, my Creative X-Fi sound card isn’t supported, so I won’t get to test out Fallout in the immediate future. It’s a good thing the games I’m actively playing right now are console games; Animal Crossing: City Folk on the Wii and Persona 3 FES on the PS2 are going to be getting most of my gaming attention for a while, I think.

The Win7 interface has been cleaned up a lot from what we got in Vista, and for the better as near as I can see. I haven’t dug too deeply into things like changing network configurations and other nitty-gritty details yet, but I was up and online with it in no time, and those things I have tried to configure have been pretty easy to get to. My adventures with Windows 7 are just beginning, and I’m sure I’ll have more stories to tell, both good and bad, in the coming days and weeks.

For now, thank you for putting up with my long-windedness!