Greggman.com Category (games_impressions)

GTA:SA

I've finally been playing Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas so here's some impressions

First off this is much better than GTA:Vice City. I couldn't get into Vice City. For one the world was boring. It was based on Florida and Florida is like the flattest state in the union so the city itself was not as interesting as GTA3. Then, the music really made GTA3 for me and although I love 80s music in Vice City there just wasn't enough variety. I really liked putting on Techno in a sports car in GTA3 for instance, it made me feel like going fast and there really was no equivalent in Vice City.

Well, I'm happy to stay much of that is fixed in GTA:SA. It's based on Los Angeles, San Fransisco and Las Vegas, the first part of the game taking place in the LA like area and LA actually has hills so it's much more interesting.

On top of that, they nailed LA. While it's not actually LA they did a great job of reproducing its feel. Without reading the map just driving around I know exactly where I am. Hey, I'm driving down the Sunset Strip or, hey, I'm in Santa Monica now. They've got the port, Redondo Beach, Venice, Santa Monica, Downtown, Hollywood, Hollywood Hills, East LA, West LA, and a bunch of other places. It's funny because "True Crimes : Streets of LA" actually used an LA map but True Crimes utterly failed to make it feel like LA. GTA:SA completely succeeds in that respect. Some of the effects are overboard like the red sunsets and the blinding sun in general but those are actual LA experiences so they do work.

The game is HUGE. I'm guessing the map is 9 times as big as GTA3. The first island alone seems as big as all of GTA3's 3 islands combined. Half the island is city, another half is country (behind the Hollywood hills) with small country towns, truckers and tractors etc. On top of which they've added a zillion little side games and toys. You can buy different clothing and accessories. You can get various haircuts and tattoos. You can get a car and then customize every part of the both for performance (engine, tires, etc) and for looks (paint job, bumpers, etc.). There is at least one working video game. You see the game in various stores, bars etc and you can walk up and play. There is target practice at the gun range. You can go in many more buildings than before to stealth steel stuff. You can even play 2 players here and there.

There are also stats. The more you drive the higher your driving skill goes. I believe the cars get easier to handle the higher your driving skill becomes. The more you run or workout (there is a workout mini game) the more stamina you have (you can run further without getting tired). The more you use your guns the easier they get to aim. If you can also eat and get fat and you can workout and lose weight. You can even get girlfriends and go on dates and kiss.

It all sounds great. Unfortunately it's just not working for me because it doesn't add up to freedom, based on the design it actually adds up to tedium :-(. For example, based on how slow my driving skill is going up I'd guess I'd have to play for 200 hours before I'd get close to having a top driving skill. Same with all the other skills. Feeling like I have to visit the girlfriends every few mission otherwise the relationship meter for them starts falling. Don't eat and health goes down, eat too much and you get fat. It's interesting but it's not actually fun to have to deal with so much stuff.

The missions are more varied than before which is good, there are stealth MGS type levels for example, but they are also too hard which is bad or maybe hard is not the word, the are long and the odds of surviving low and if you die you have to start over 2-3 minutes back. In one level you have to first go to a house, pick up your homies, then drive to the jail to pick up a friend, then drive him to some guys house who rapped him in prison, then chase the guy for 2 minutes on motorcycle (if you can't keep up the level ends), when he finally stops he's in front of 3 or 4 fellow gang members who gun you and the guy you just picked up from jail down. If he dies level over, if you die level over. Then, after you've kill him you have to drive the guy you picked up from jail all the way across the city to his new job and then you have to drive all the way back to your house to save! At any point something could happen that will ruin it for you.

It gets worse. They added an interesting feature where the map shows which parts of the city you control and which parts rival gangs control. You have to go to each part of the city and start a gang war (shoot 3 rival gang members on foot). Once the "gang war" starts you have to kill about 20 rival gang members in that area and then it becomes under the control of your gang. It sounds interesting except there are probably 100 areas just on the first map alone and the areas do not stay yours. Every few minutes one of your areas will get attacked and you have to stop everything you are doing and rush over there and defend it. Very interesting and very cool idea but it's not actually fun. As just a built in mission it would probably have been fun, and there are several missions about taking and defending your territory, but as a constant distraction and a long and tedious process it's not so fun.

You also have a respect meter, as it rises you can get more of your own gang members to join you so you can rush over to an area you control, pick up a bunch of gang members and then take them to defend an area and give them commands ala Rainbow Six. Again it's cool but I just don't have the time to do so much stuff.

Oh yea, you can also own property. There are buildings for sale all over the city. In GTA3 you got money for completed missions but in GTA:SA you rarely seem to get money directly. You get money by expanding your territory and by rent on your properties.

If the game was short this might all work but looking at how much time I've spent, seeing all the missions ahead of me, seeing that I'm still on the first island, IMO they really should have made it easier. Instead of being concerned that people would get through the game too fast they should have been concerned that people would get through it at all. Even if it had instant save like most FPS games so that I never had to repeat anything I expect this game would take over 100 hours to play! Without instant save it's going to be more like 200 hours which I just don't have. I also played some Jak 3 recently and one thing they did well is they put check points in the longer missions so if you die you start back somewhere in the middle. It's much less frustrating and the game is big enough that they didn't feel the need to make the missions harder just to extend the game play.

I don't know what the correct balance is. Maybe I'm not the target audience. Kids probably don't mind 200 hour games since they have more free time but then GTA:SA is not supposed to be played by kids.

Update: 2005-08-01

I made it past the frustrating missions and into San Fierro, the San Fransisco based city. From there the game was mostly no harder than GTA3. The gang turf wars turned out not to be an issue because once you get to San Fierro that part of the game turns off. I will say maybe a little more balancing might have been in order. The level it Smoke and chasing the train was a neat idea but incredibly frustrating since you, the player, are not in control. After reading a FAQ I managed to clear it.

I gotta say the game is amazing. I played through San Fierro, there was one very frustrating stage involving a radio controlled plane but at least you could restart the mission immediately. San Fierro did as good a job at recreating the feel of San Francisco as Los Santos did of recreating L.A. which is to say they did an Amazing job. All the different parts of the city are represented and of course many major landmarks, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge, the TransAmerica building, Lombard Street and many others.

Having cleared that I made it to the Las Venturas area which is the last major area and represents Las Vegas. Actually it represents kind of the Grand Canyon, desert and Las Vegas combined. I was a little disappointed though, although they do a pretty great job, the desert areas and the suburbs of Las Vegas are especially well done, the downtown area of Las Vegas or the strip was a little disappointing. I guess the problem is power. While they did a great job of reproducing the architecture and stuff, they've got Caesars, Excalibur, Treasure Island, the Luxor, etc, etc, it just is not gawdy and flashy enough to really feel like Vegas. There needs to be about 5 times more people on the streets and every sign needs to be animated and flashing. I'm sure they'll get there next gen.

GTS:SA is by far the best of the 3 I think with GTA:Vice City being the worst. There is just SOOO MUCH stuff in GTA:SA it's amazing. A *short* list of some of the things off the top of my head:

There various fast food restaurants and chains and within those different branches have staff with different attitudes from the "thank you for coming" to the staff that makes fun of you for eating such crappy food. There are strip clubs where you can pay the public dancers or pay for a private dance. There schools to learn things in. A school is generally a series of instruction and tests in the vain of Gran Turismo. One school teaches driving, another school teaches flying including planes, helicoptors and sky diving. There's also boating and motorcycle school. There are casios where all the games inside are playable including video poker, roulette, black jack, slots and others. Then there are all the places to explore. You can go up a 10 story parking garage, bust out on to the roof of the connected building and climb up to the helicoptor pad and steal a helicoptor. You can climb the highest mountain in the game, watch the sunrise and then basejump over the side. You can fly cessnas, bi-planes, WW2 planes, DC3s, Learjets, Seaplanes, helicoptors, and supposedly jetpacks and harrier jets. There are all kinds of cars and motorvehicles to ride from bikes to dirt bikes to motorcylces including Harleys and speed bikes. Everyday cars, classic cars, high end sports cars, farm tractors, bulldozers, jeeps, dune buggys, semi-trucks, busses, wheat threshers, low-riders and tons of others. Low-riders actually have control of their hydrolic suspection so you can make them hop. Drive a semi truck and you can connect it to various trailers. Go to the airport and drive a luggage trailer and connected it to multiple luggage carts. You can drive trains and play Densha-De-Go type of game. There are also all kinds of boats from inflatables to speed boats, patrol boats, hovercraft. It's this kind of variety that makes the GTA series so fun. With so much stuff to do just existing in the world of GTA is fun. You don't have to follow the missions you can just go explore. You never know what you'll find. Visit the truck stop in the middle of the desert. Search a ghost town. Check out the rock quarry where you can actually play submissions involving cranes and bulldozers. There's even an action RTS type of game in one segment. If you earn your driving skills you can start to compete in races. Not street races but actual stadium style races. You can also race BMX bikes, sky dive, be a parking lot attendent, be a truck driver and deliever goods, drive a fire truck and put out fires. It's insane!

If there were any requests, I'd like more resolution to the stories. I haven't finished the game yet but suspect many things will be left unfinshed. In part one I was in a gang in Los Santos but as soon as I made it to San Fierro that has pretty much disappeared. In San Fierro I had a car repair shop run by my sister and her boyfriend, now that I'm in Las Venturas there is no connection to them anymore.

The other is that I'd really REALLY like them to make a Japanese version. Although the game did okay here in Japan it was not a *hit* by any means. The #1 reason is because the localization sucked. About all they did was add subtitles to the cutscenes and change the in-game instruction to Japanese. Unfortunately that doesn't translate one of the most important parts, the radio, which I believe arguably takes the game from mediorce to exceptional. The Japanese don't understand English so they need the radio, all the spoken parts, to be voiced by Japanese DJs in Japanese. I really hope that Rockstar will make either a fully localized Japanese version of GTA:SA --or-- I hope that their next game will be set in Japan and they will release a Japanese version. I really think the Japanese market needs to be shaken up. A hit on a title as controvesial as GTA would really change things here in Japan but that's not going to happen without a fully localized product.

Metroid Prime: Echoes

I recently finished playing Metroid Prime: Echoes for Gamecube. I got it back in November when it came out but at the time I put it in, played for about 20 minutes, decided it was mostly the same as Metroid Prime and put it away for awhile while I worked on Tanjunka. Recently though I decided I had some time so I went back to it. Here are my impressions

Basically it's almost the exact same game as the original Metroid Prime. There are only a few noticable differences.

1) There is the concept of the light / dark world. While that's not a new concept it is new for Metroid. One thing that sets it apart, at least for me, when you are in the dark world it's almost as though the atmosphere is made from acid and it's eating your suit. Your hit points fall. But, inside the dark side are bubbles of light. The effect is quite nice. While you are inside a bubble you're relatively safe and your energy slowly climbs back up. It's a fairly new feeling to be running from bubble to bubble as fast as you can. You jump outside a bubble and it's PANIC until you make it to the next bubble. Very cool.

2) A mostly minor change, they changed the 3 of the 4 visors and 3 of the 4 weapons. It's not that it really matters. The 3 new weapons in Metroid Prime Echoes are just basically replacements for the 3 other weapons in Metroid Prime. Each opens a specific type of door, each effects a different type of enemy but really it's nothing new. The visors are a little different, I especially liked the Echo Visor which has a very cool effect. At least it's different. The other visors are really just subsitutes for the ones in Metroid Prime although their effects are nice.

3) They added the spin jump back in from the 2D series. It nice to see it although it doesn't really add much to the game.

4) It's even more beautiful than the first one and that's saying something. Many of the areas are just breath taking. The last area, a cyber, computer like area, was probably my favorite but even at the beginning of the game, the first room you walk in is full of larva and the second or 3rd is full of spider webs and bug eggs with moving stuff inside. It's really gross and very well done. I don't think I've ever been as creeped out just by the graphics alone as in Metroid Prime Echoes.

Some of the enemies as well are amazing. Slime based enemies that slide across the walls. A floating spider like enemy that rezes in and out of existance is amazing and scary. A Tron line "Bit" enemy that ruins your suit and makes everything look like a webcam on a modem.

On the downside, the more experienced or older I get the less I like dealing with stuff in a game that is out of place, that breaks the suspension of disbelief. Most games are guilty of this. Some, like Mario and Sonic are clearly 100% games and so you can put anything in their make-believe worlds of stripes and colors. Others though like Metroid, GTA3, Halo etc are set in a semi real-world like setting and so when things don't make any sense they stick out. Metroid is one such setting. In the original 2d, being more abstract, it worked well. But in 3d, as it gets more and more real it starts to become apparent just how silly it is that Samus is visiting a planet she's never been to and yet all the machines and levels are specifically designed for a power ball. What, did the original inhabitants carry around power balls just to charge their machinery or open doors? I know it's the convention for Metroid but still...

I'd have to say the beauty is probably the #1 thing that kept me playing. I mean, as a game it's as good as the first and it's arguably not as hard, I beat the last boss second try. At the same time it's not very new so if you played the first and you want more then check it out but if you didn't like the first one you are not likely to like this one either.

Still, looking at it with a techincal eye, they apparently have a system where they can use 2 layers of textures anywhere and everywhere and at least one of those layers can be scrolling. They use that simple ability to make the entire world come alive with moving things, glowing spots in walls, circuit systems, oozing slime monsters,etc. It's a simple effect that was probably available in some other engines but until Retro's artists got to use it no one had really understood all the creative things you could do with such a simple system. The beauty of the levels alone was worth it for me.

Space Invaders Anniversary

So I'm going to Shibuya today to meet some friends and as I get off the train I am greeted by posters saying something about a Space Invaders exhibit at the 109 building. Well, I've got 30 minutes to kill so I think, "sure, let's check it out". As soon as I get out of the station I see something I've never seen before. There are 3 giant TVs in Shibuya, one of them is 5 stories tall and it's playing Space Invaders live!!!!! It turns out they are running Space Invaders battles on the stage in front of the 109 building and they are displaying it live on 2 of the large TVs in front of the station including the live play by play annoucing from a cute Japanese hostess.

It's a special version of Space Invaders where the screen is split similar to most puzzle games (ala Tetris) except in each half of the screen is Space Invaders. Actually it's only a quarter of the screen because the top half of each column is an upside down mirror of the bottom half of the other player's column. The goal is to shoot through your invaders and then shoot the other guy.

It's all pretty cool and between games there's this way hip techno 3d flash like Space Invaders mix thing going on.

As I walk by the BIC Camera across from 109 there are Taito representatives pushing "Space Invaders Anniversary" (25 years) and it's selling for only like 1300yen (about $11) So, I'm like, yea, I'll take that!

Booting it up I'm hoping to get that cool techno mix but instead I get a kind of retrospective video showing some clips of the crazy Space Invaders places they had back when it first came out in Japan. Rooms full of table top Space Invaders Machines. Kind of interesting but I'm still hoping for the techno thing.

The game starts and you are in a 3D room with 9 versions of Space Invaders

1) The Table Top Monochrome Version
2) The Table Top Cellophane Version (same but with fairly lame similated cellphone to make it look like it has color)
3) The Table Top Color Version
4) The Upright Version
5) Space Invaders Part II, upright (can anyone name the difference?)
6) Space Invaders Part II, table top color
7) Space Invaders Doubles (new: two people, one playfield)
8) Space Invaders 3D (new)
9) Space Invaders VS Mode (new: the one I saw in Shibuya)

In most versions you can adjust the camera so for example for the table top versions you can face them head on or by default they are tilted back so you can see part of the table and have the view you would have probably had if you were actually sitting at a real table top SP.

While you play you can hear sounds coming from the other machines in the room. That's interesting for about 30 seconds, then it's just distracting. You can go to the options and turn it off as well as choose BGM from several other classic Taito games.

The 3D version just makes each enemy, shield and ship into a 3d transluent model and you can adjust the camera all the way down to looking directly up the screen but otherwise it's the same game.

One very cool feature is a history / making of section with an interview and pictures of various art, cabinets, game design sketches, manuals, etc. There's also a history of Taito arcade games section with pictures of most of their arcade games.

I guess I should have known it was not that fun. For some reason I kind of enjoyed the GB color remake but the original gets old pretty fast. The VS mode is also old pretty fast. Given that it was only 1300yen if you want to add something nostalgic to your collection it's not bad although I suspect instead of playing it on my PS2 I'm more likely to play it on my GBA or cell phone.

Gitaroo-Man

If you are a music game fan you need to check out Gitaroo-Man.

Just to start off let me state that Gitaroo-Man is probably my single favorite music game. That is, among the following games, Parappa the Rapper, Um Jamma Lammy, Space Channel 5, Rez, Space Channel 5 Part 2, Parappa the Rapper 2, and Vib Ribbon that Gitaroo-Man is by far the best of the lot.

But, I also have to tell you that Gitaroo-Man is probably not for everybody. It's harder than the other games and some people will give up early and not get to experience the joy that is Gitaroo-Man. If you are going to give it a try I suggest you do the following.

First, EACH TIME YOU START THE GAME SET IT TO EASY! The game starts in *normal* mode. That mode is too hard for most players (me included). You can go back and play again in normal mode (or master mode) later. For now, trust me, put it in easy mode.

Second, you'll probably pass the first stage no problem but the second stage is pretty hard. It probably took me over 20 tries to get it and that's a lot. Why I didn't get so frustrated and quit I don't know. Maybe I liked the song enough to want to hear the next one. Or maybe it's just how good the game feels when you do well. But, those 20+ tries prepared me for the rest on the game. I was able to pass every level after that in 1 or 2 tries except for level 4.

Level 4 is H A R D. So hard I almost gave up because after 10 or 15 tries unlike level 2 where I kept getting a little farther each time I played, on level 4 I kept dying at exactly the same place making zero progress. This is in fact what prompted me to search for a difficulty setting and how I found that there is an easy setting. Fortunately level 4 is short so once I put it on easy it was only a few more measures to finish.

So, with all that out of the way what makes Gitaroo-Man so good. #1 it's the music. Most of the music is just a pleasure to listen too. There are few execeptions. Stage #1 is pretty annoying and Stage #5 though interesting is a little out there. But the rest is just great. There's a jazz tune, a techno tune, a j-pop tune, a spacey reggae tune, a spanish guitar tune... This may also be the first music game with a ballad. It rulez!

The story in Gitaroo-Man is also better than average. Well, actually, at a basic level it's the same story as Parappa. Guy with little self confidence gains confidence and the girl through music battles. But, Gitaroo-Man does it much better than Parappa. Probably because a few of the songs really pull out the emotions (if you are into that kind of thing.)

Finally, Gitaroo-Man has a unique control system. There are 2 kinds of play. There is button play (or defensive play). In this mode you have to press X, O, Square and Δ. What's cool though is they come from their corresponding sides of the screen to the center so Δs come from the top, Os from the right, Xs from bottom etc. That means you don't have to remember X, O, Square, Δ you just have to press UP, DOWN, LEFT or RIGHT depending on which way the symbols are coming from. It's much easier.

The other kind of play is Attack mode where you are playing the Gitaroo, a scifi guitar like instrument. In this mode there is a curving line that flows through the center of the screen. You have to push the analog stick in the direction of the flow. It's fairly forgiving, you only have to be within like 20 degress or so and if the line really waves you can pretty much ignore the waviness and just push in the general direction.

On that line are thick parts. When a thick part passes under the center of the screen you have to press O and hold it for the direction of the thick part. These two actions represent strumming on a guitar. The direction pad represents bending the sounds, a wha-wha type of effect. Pressing the button represents strumming the gitaroo and holding the button represents letting the sound continue.

The thing is, what makes this game so much better than the others, is that because of these actions you actually feel like you are playing some kind of instrutment. I'm not going to claim this is anything like actually playing a real guitar but regardless it feels like you are jamming the music out. That's something that none of the other music games mentioned above do. I suppose the BeatMania, Drum Mania and Keyboard Mania series might have that feeling to some extent, I never got into them, but I suspect the wha-wha curvy line thing really adds more .... emotion .... to your interaction.

If you are at all a music game fan check it out. I didn't do well in the market even with several good reviews so you can now pick it up pretty cheap. It's quite a bargin. I still break it out once in a while even after 3 months of playing it. I usually start from stage #6 and play to the end. I've also tried playing Master Level but that is just friggin impossible. Still, it's fun to try.

Metroid Prime

I recently finished playing Metroid Prime. It's probably one of the most perfect games I've played in a long time. It's hard for me to think of how to describe what makes it so good.

Metroid Prime may well be the most immersive game made to date. Almost every little detail fits inside the game. There are no long boring cutscenes, in fact the longest scene is the opening scene at about 60 seconds, the second longest is after the first boss, maybe 40 seconds. The point is this is a game you experience by playing, not by watching. You are the action. You are the story.

I'm not sure it would work for every game in fact I'm sure it wouldn't but the design of Metroid, not just Metroid Prime but all of Metroid, the story a lone person exploring a distant world, makes it all fit together in ways that other games can't because their settings are so far impossible to simulate. Metroid's world is possible to simulate and so it is possible to get immersed into the game.

And yet, at the same time it's still a game. I can't put my finger on why it works. Why it's excusable or believable. The most obvious issues are some of the morph ball sequences. Many of them come right out of like pinball games or pachinko but for some reason they are still fun, at least for me.

Metroid sets a new standard in all kinds of areas. Very few if any shooting games have had intersting bosses. You go play Quake or Doom or Half Life. Sure, the first time I saw the brain boss in DOOM I screamed but as far as game play it might as well just been any other monster in the game just with stronger firepower and more hitpoints. Metroid on the other hand sets a new standard for bosses in 3D, or maybe it's on the same level as Zelda. Bosses that are in 3D and yet each manage to play differently. To be honest, the first boss although visually cool, had me a little worried. There's actually not much to it and with the auto targeting I was worried, if all bosses were as simple I was going to feel pretty let down but suffice it to say I was not, each boss gets more and more interesting and more and more varied. The auto targeting is not a problem, in fact for the most part I think if they didn't have the auto targeting the game would be impossible to play. People that complain about it probably have not played the game that far yet. Sure it works in Quake or Unreal, the reason being the bosses and other monsters are just not that complex. Another being that in those kinds of shooters it's acceptable to die at any time since you can save my pressing one key at any time. I've always argued that a game that pretty much requires you to be able to save at anytime is a poorly designed game. Metroid with it's limited saves and auto-targeting I believe makes for a much better experience than saving after 5 seconds like people do on say Max Payne.

Another issues that many people bring up is the control. I'll admit, they are complex. At first I was a little worried but at about the time I made it through the first area I had pretty much gotten used to it. The controls are complex because Samus has so much equipment. 4 visors, 4 weapons, 4 combo weapons, plus the morph ball, it's various powerups and the grapple beam all on one controller, all instantly or nearly instantly accessable. No going to some inventory screen to switch weapons. That's probably another one of this issues that makes the game more immersive.

Like I mentioned before, there are little to no cutscenes. There are very shoot intro scenes, 10-15 seconds before some major events and that's about it. You are the movie, you through your actions. There is also a story imbedded in the game which you can chose to read or not. As you go through the game you can scan various ruins, computer terminals and other things that give you pieces of the story as you go. There are two main narratives. The narrative of the Chozo, the ancient race that used to be on the planet you are exploring and also the narrative of the Space Pirates whom you are trying to rid the universe of. Personally I found reading it made the game even more interesting since it puts your character into perspective into a larger story than just kill the bad guys.

One thing about the game, especially for a first person shooter style game. The graphics are some of the best if not the best yet. I know that next year several new titles come out that may have better graphics technically. Metroid Prime has a couple of things going for it. One is just some of the best art design in a long time. The place is just often eye popping gorgeous. The other though, and as a programmer I noticed this even on SNES Metroid, the world is, for lack of a better description, divided into rooms or areas. Each area is relatively small. What makes Metroid work is that that style of world fits the story. You can't turn a level based on Chicago into a series of rooms or at least I don't think you can. But it works within the world of Metroid. The technical advanatage is that each room can use a ton more details than any game that needs to have large levels. On top of that the game can appear to have no loading since only the room you are in and the room you are about to enter need to be in memory. That makes for some of the most detailed environments yet in a 3D game.

The music and sound effects are superb too. For the first half of the game I played with headphones in a dark room. It actually got too scary for me and I had to turn on the lights as I was getting too tense. It's fine to be tense for 40 minutes of a 90 minute scary movie but being tense for 4 to 6 hours is too much.

It took me about 28 hours to play the game. I think it maybe took 22 to get to the final boss and when he kicked my ass I decided I'd better go find some more powerups before I take him on. I want to point out here that unlike an RPG, finding more powerups is still playing the game. It guess it's just a pet peeve of mine but in many RPGs you are just expected to waste time powering up your character though experience. It's so bad that some of my friends will run an RPG in the Picture-In-Picture window on their TV while they are watching some other program. They go attack random monsters for a few hours while they power up their character. Why people find that fun I don't know. In Metroid, powering up requires actively searching for power upgrades. That is arguably still playing the game.

I'd have to put down Metroid Prime as one of the few pretty much perfect games I've ever played. I don't think there is anything I can think of that I would really change. I can think of one very minor issue, it was never clear to me from the map where one elevator connected to another. The elevators are labeled by where they go, example "To Chozo Ruins North" but there is no mark on the map for North so except to either study the heck out of the maps or write it down or memorize it there is no good way to know where an elevator will take you. I'm curious if that was by design or just an oversite from a team that probably new from building the maps which way is North.

The other sad issue is that it appears the game is somewhat buggy. I had it crash on me once at the first elevator I rode. It crashed in the same place on another friend of mine. I also heard from another friend that it stopped loading his saved game after he was 23% complete and that later he got stuck somewhere in morph ball mode. I was a little worried after my one crash. Metroid is not the type of game where crashes are acceptable. You might be able to get away with a crash in Mario Sunshine. Since it saves after each star the worst you could lose is one level. Metroid though, you could lose hours of game play which would be enough for a lot of people to just stop playing not wanting to have to redo a section.

You can tell the guys at Retro clearly did their homework. I've made it a point of studying what I feel makes a good game and what I feel makes many games bad. The guys at Nintendo, particularly Miyamoto, seem to set the standard and if you really study their games you can see what makes them different from the rest. One simple example is the purposeful inclusion of expectation / taunting. In Zelda and Metroid you see places you know you should be able to go but you don't yet have the right equipment. That kind of thing makes you want to keep playing and also gives you a clear path where to go. You see a place with a hole too small to go through, you keep playing trying to get find the morph ball upgrade. As soon as you find it you have 3 to 6 places you immediately want to go check out and as you are checking them out you discover 4 or 5 more places that you need a little more for.

Another is transportation. At first the world seems pretty large and it is, but after you've explored a little they start providing other ways to travel whether it's faster ways to go, stronger weapons so you don't need to worry about certain enemies anymore or even providing new connections that were not accessable previously because you lacked the powers to use them. So, as you progress in the game even though the world gets bigger it never really gets tedious to travel in.

The other major one is having the variety of enemies, weapons and obstacles, each of which have their own solutions. In many less well designed games, all enenmies can be taken down by all weapons for example. The only differece between weapons is strength. That may or may not be more real world like but it arguably less fun in my opinion than the have the variety that some weapons have no effect on certain kinds of monsters and obstacles where as other weapons are extremely well suited to certain things. It issue here is to make it very clear which ones have an effect and which ones don't. Metroid does this well.

This isn't any kind of mis-trust of Retro Studios but I'd really like to know how much of the design is their's and how much is Nintendo's. There's the obvious design that they are making Metroid so they used or carried over every idea from the original. According to an interview on Gamespot.com it sounds like Nintendo, not Retro designed the maps and left Retro to fill in the details. I suppose that is never stated clearly so I'm probably inferring it.

I'm hoping Retro will write up a post mortem for Game Developer Magazine with more details about what went right, what when wrong, what they learned, what Nintendo taught them. Did they originally make a more traditional first person shooter?

There are various rumors. In the summer of 2000 I was actually contacted by Retro for a job just after I quit Naughty Dog. They mentioned they were working for Nintendo but they did not mention they were working on Metroid. Had they maybe I would have considered moving to Texas :-) But, at the time they had 3 titles they were working on and I suspect they wanted me for one of the other 2. The thing is, those other 2 titles were cancelled. I'd be very curious to know why. Did they bite off more than they could chew? Were they over optimistic about what they could get done? Was it a matter of not being able to find talented people? There were also rumors in summer of 2001 that Nintendo was very unhappy with them. Is that just a rumor or was it true but somehow they pulled it together and came through. Maybe we will never know. Regardless of how it happened though they did it. They made the perfect Gamecube Metroid.

I'm sure it's not for everybody, it probably to some degree depends on what expectations you bring to the game. If you are expecting a first person shooter like Quake, Unreal or Halo you might be disappointed. Hopefully you'll get past that though and give Metroid Prime a try on it's own terms, Put on some headphones, turn the lights down and immerse yourself in the world of Metroid and I think you'll have quite an experience.

Sly Cooper PS2

just finished playing Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. Is that one of the worst names ever or what? Sly Cooper is good, the whole name though is quite long and not easy to read. Just my opinion.

I really want to be nice to this game. It is extremely well done and very very polished. In fact I can't think of any rough edges. It's got great cartoon intros between levels done in a very cool style that kind of reminds me of Batman the Animated Series with it's high contrast, sharp edges and extreme lighting. The option screens, fonts etc were clearly made with some thought instead of done at the last second using rushed art or even programmer art like some other titles I know. All the levels seem polished and interesting without large boring or ugly areas you find in many games.

Sly Cooper is a character action platformer. Ie, Mario, Crash, etc.. In this case you play Sly Cooper, a master thief from a long line of thieves who only steal from other thieves. I guess that's supposed to make it okay to be a thief. The story is your ancestors made a book detailing all of their thieving skills. 5 bad guys stole it from your dad, killed your dad and each took 1/5 of the book so you have to travel around and get the piece of the book back. Each time you find a piece of the book you learn a new move.

One thing that sets this game apart is it's usually a one hit game. One hit and you die. That sounds frustrating and I guess sometimes it is but clearly the game has been designed knowing you can only take one hit. As a play mechanic it works but as a logical issue it quite often doesn't. For example there are some enemies that just stand there and take a swing at you every 3 or 4 seconds. As a one hit game, right after they take a swing you run in before their next swing and take them out. The problem is those enemies look pretty stupid just standing there waiting for you to hit them. And, as they do just stand there, you can walk right up to the edge of their attack and just stand there indefinately and they won't budge. Still, if you ignore that it's silly it's not un-fun.

You can actually find extra hits. They are called Lucky Charms and a represented by a horseshoe on your back. You get one for every 100 coins you collect or sometimes you can find them just lying around. If you have one and you take a hit or fall off a platform you'll be bounced back just before you got into danger. It's an interest way of using the hit feature because it not only covers enemy hits like most games it covers falling to your death. It works and I supposed if some level was too hard and you had the patience you could go to an easier level, earn a few lucky charms and then come back to your hard level.

The graphics are outstanding. There's alot of style and alot of creativity. There are little details all over from sparkles, smoke, swamp gas, oozing stuff. The game rarely feels emtpy or lifeless like many games do.

As Sly progresses through the game, after the basic moves, running and jumping, he learns several others. One, he can grab on to hooks and rings with his cane and swing from them. Another is that he can climb various small pipes like you'd expect a ferret to be able to do. Another big move is the ability to slide along thin slippery surfaces. This move feels like something out of the Disney cartoon, Tarzan or from Jet Set Radio. It's fun. Another is the ability to plant your landings. This is very interesting move. In most games in order to make a hard jump you just have to be super skilled. With Sly, once you have this move you can just press circle while you are over the spot and he'll land on the spot in question. It works and it feels good although sometimes it frustrating when you thought you pressed the button in time and he doesn't land on the spot. It suppose if it was more easy it wouldn't feel like there is any skill involved.

Most of the levels have more than one goal. The main goal of most levels is to collect a key at the end of the level but on the way, somewhere hidden in the level there is a safe. To open the safe you need to collect all the bottles in the level, each containing a *clue*. That's just wording, you just touch the bottles to collect them. The story is that once you have all the clues your buddy Bentley can figure out the combination to the safe and you can steal what's inside.

For the most part I pretty much ignored the bottles while playing the game. Collecting every last thing in a level is usually left as one of those things you do after you've finished the game the first time. But, the cool thing is that what's inside each safe is a page to your family's book detailing a new move. Some of those moves would have made the game alot easier. For example one move is, for lack of a better description the ability to swim. Normally you die in water. Having this ability, while you can't actually swim, you won't die. You'll just be put back where you fell off like when you have a lucky charm.

Another is that you have binoculars which you can use to look around the level and zoom in/out. One of the new abilities is that looking through your binoculars will highlight all the collectables in the area. That makes it alot easier to go find all the other bottles.

Another is that all coins will just magically get collected when you are near them and then there are various attacks, jumps and other movies including one which is exploding hats you can use like remote bombs. I guess that would make some of the enemies pretty easy.

Unfortunately the biggest complaint about the game is it's too short. Just 6 to 8 hours. I'm not sure why. It's not a small game by any means. There are something like 30+ levels. I guess it's just that each level is pretty easy.

My personal problems with the game come in only a few areas. All the bosses are very creative and I was very happy for that. At the same time several of the bosses and several of the bonus games I felt were more a matter of luck or trial and error than skill. It's possible I'm just old and impatient but the first 3 bosses, the shooting gallery levels and the collecting levels all felt frustrating with too much luck involved or too much just memorization.

For example the shooting gallery levels, some character runs around the level and you use a cannon to take out enemies in his path. It's a great idea and it's fun to watch but mostly you just progress one or two enemies per death. Meaning you watch your buddy run, you take out 2 enemies, you don't know where enemy #3 will appear so your buddy gets killed. You start over, knowing where enemy #3 is now you can take him out but you buddy will get killed by enemy #4. You repeat until you make it to the top.

The first 3 bosses felt similar to me. Maybe the problem is the one hit death meaning that if you had an extra hit you'd have a chance to recover the first time a boss did a new move. As it is you'll most likely have to die once to find out what his next move is. That didn't happen for me with the last 2 bosses. Still, you basically have unlimited lives. You get lives. The difference is if you die you start at your last checkpoint, if you run out of lives you start at the beginning of the level. I never really found that to be frustrating. Maybe it's that the levels are short so it's only 30 seconds to a minute until you are back where you left off.

My only other complaint relating to gameplay was the very last level, just before you reach the boss there is a level with a bunch of fun tricky jumps. It seems like maybe that was the last level done and there wasn't time to tune it because the second jump in the level took me about 15 tries to get. Each time I jumped either it wasn't far enough or it was too far. No other jump in the game gave me that problem so given the difference it was frustrating.

This is probably a non issue but for some reason I was a little upset at the standard stereotypes. There's the scrawny nerdy brain, the dopey stupid fat guy and the handsome hero. It would be nice to switch that around. I guess I just take that personally since I was labeled the scrawny nerdy brain in school and when I was neither scrawny nor nerdy but the stereotype gets applied regardless so if you are smart you are therefore a nerd and it's these persistant stereotypes that keep that image going.

I want to emphasize how polished the game feels. The animation is great, the voices are great, the fanfare for completing a level is great, the glue between levels is great, the setup cartoons before each level are great, the art style is great, the music is limited but appropriate unlike many games, the creativity in 3D art, in level setups. It's all great.

Sadly my impression is it's not doing that well. I hope I'm wrong. My only thought in that direction is that even though it's so well done there was a part of me feeling like "it's just another platform game" as I played. As well done as it is, I wasn't as excited about it as I was with Mario Sunshine and Mario's completely new moves. Maybe it's that feeling, that though well done it's not really anything that new, that is one thing that is keeping it from being the hit it seems like it deserves to be.

If you like platform games, you must checkout this game.

The Ultimate History of Video Games

My friend Dan got me this book, The Ultimate History of Video Games and I can't put it down!

It's not just some essay on the history of video games, the author, Steven L. Kent, interviewed several hundred people. Every page of the book has quotes from various famous and important people in the industry with the real stories and not just the rumors.

I'm sure many of you know the standard trivia like Space War was the first video game but did you know that Pong was originally by Magnavox not Atari. Did you know that Steve Jobs worked for Atari and was always unclean and smelled bad and no one wanted to work with him or that he was asked reduce the number of chips used to build breakout. Jobs asked his friend Steve Wozniak to help him. Woz did the whole job by himself in 3 days. Jobs did nothing. Jobs got $30K. He paid Woz $500. Woz found out his *friend* had taken advantage of him when someone else at Atari asked him what he, Woz, was going to do with all that money.

There's all kinds of stuff. Namco was started by Masaya Nakamura by putting two used mechanial horse rides on the top of a department store. That Coleco stands for the Connecticut Leather Company, that when Atari got their first big order they were desperate for labor. They hired everybody at the local unemployment center and ended up with people smoking marijuana at work, shooting up in the bathroom and stealing monitors for their drug habits.

The best story so far is how Universal Studios sued Nintendo over Donkey Kong claiming it was a rip-off of King Kong. What Universal forgot was that just a few years ago they were sued by RKO, the makers of the original King Kong and that Universal had proved in court when Univeral made their remake of King Kong that King Kong was public domain. Even funnier, Universal had licensed with Tiger to make a handheld Donkey Kong clone. Nintendo not only won the case about King Kong but they also won the suit against Universal and Tiger over the cloned game.

It's amazing to me just how fresh some of the memories are. It mentions the game Reactor, I can still hum the music to at game and I had not thought about it in years.

I think the best thing about this book though for me is that it brings most of the people down to earth. I happen to be lucky in that I know of many of the people either through reading about them back in the day or a few of them I have actually met. Reading about their beginnings it really brings it down to earth. It's inspiring in that most of them don't seem like *special* people they just seem like normal guys that succeeded.

I highly recommend this book :-)

A few other notes: The books is also one of those lessons in publishing. I've been told it's not sold well and that instead, the book Joystick Nation, which admitedly has a better title, is selling much better although it's not supposed to be nearly as interesting according to friends that have read it and according to reviews on Amazon. It's all about promotion, and style. Joystick Nation has it, the book above does not.

There's couple of another books I bought which are more coffee table books. One is a large soft bound book called Game On. While the books above are pretty much all story, Game On is nearly all pictures. Game On covers from the beginning all the way up to this year including games like Jak & Daxter and Grand Theft Auto 3. But, as it's mostly photos and design there is not much detail. Still the images bring back memories.

The other is a huge 440 page long, inch and half thick hardback called Supercade and is the ultimate coffee table video game book. It's probably 90% images and only covers the old stuff, 1971-1984. If you want to wax nostalgic at just a glance check out this book.

Tokyo Game Show and JAMMA impressions

I just went to both the JAMMA show and the Tokyo Game Show.

The JAMMA show is a trade show for game centers/arcades. The show was pretty down/low key this time. Arcades seem to be quickly losing their appeal. There were very few games and they were mostly old stuff.

I saw two gun games. One was House of the Dead 3. The other was a Konami game called World Combat. It's special feature was that 4 people could play at once although you had to really crowd around the machine. It had a soldier theme.

I saw two soccer games. One by Sega, one by Sammy.

I saw some 3D Street Fighter at Capcom. I didn't stick around to check it out. It just looked like more of the same though.

I saw 2 driving/racing games. There was nothing appearent to make them look like anything special.

And that's about it for arcade video games. There were several smaller titles like puzzle games. There were also lots of UFO catcher type games and other prize earning games although nothing really outstanding. I guess I saw one where each prize was on a balloon and you would try to pop the balloon but it was kind of random. You'd press and hold one button to make the needle go up, another to make it go right. Then it would move randomly about an inch in any direction before it would try to stick the needle into the balloon. The ballons were behind glass except for a hole about 1 inch or less so in other words it was not easy to pop a balloon and get the prize attached.

Otherwise about 40 to 50% of the space is for casino like games. I don't find those really interesting so I didn't look. That was Yesterday (9/19)

Today (9/20) I went to Tokyo Game Show. I wasn't sure what to expect this year since I had heard some companies that are usually there might not be there. To be honest I really didn't see anything that really made me want to run out and buy it.

A couple of people at the Microsoft booth told me this Christmas they are going to make a comeback in Japan. I personally didn't see anything that would make that happen. In my opinion, the only thing that would make XBox sell in Japan at this point is if Microsoft bought a company or paid for one of the famous RPGs in Japan to be XBox exclusive. For example if Microsoft bought ENIX and made them make the next Dragon Quest XBox only that would pretty much guarentee 1 million XBoxes would be sold. Another might be the next Tokimeki Memorial or the next Sakura Taisen (Sakura Wars). The people that play those games are HUGE fans and so would be forced to get an XBox. Sadly, I don't think Microsoft will do that and so I'm pretty sure XBox will not succeed in Japan.

For those of you that don't know it, XBox is selling less than 3000 units a month in Japan. That means a total of 36000 units a year. At that rate it would take them 30 years just to have a million XBoxes in Japan. PS2 is already at 20 million? 40 million? I don't remember the number but it's a lot.

Otherwise, at the show there was all the usual crap. 5 or 6 more RPGs. They didn't look any different than any other RPGs from the last 3 or 4 years. There were a few racing games, a few character action games although nothing stood out.

Capcom (or maybe it was Konami) had one game that looked different. It was a Western game. Cowboys and stuff. That seemed different. Unfortunately it looked boring. Like a brawl game. Thing Zombie Revenge, Streets of Rage...

One booth stood out for me. That was the Tecmo booth. They had Ninja Gaiden which looked pretty sweet. It seemed very similar to Sega's Shinobi but for some reason it looked more fun to me. I didn't play either of them though so we'll have to wait and see. They also had several other games that, at a glance, looked different, more creative than stuff I saw at the other booths. Unfortunately I was in a rush so I didn't get details. There is of course Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball other wise known as the Letch game since it's soul point seems to be to watch bouncing breasts.

Sega had probably the biggest and busiest booth. They actually had a stadium complete with bleachers on the second story about 5 or 6 rows deep. The center of attraction was a giant screen and 3 cheerleaders in front cheering on Sega's line up.

The other booth that was interesting from a design perspective was Sony's both. It had a stage area with a 90 degree view. In other words, take 2 walls, make a plus mark, put the stage in one corner of the plus. The thing was, every 30 minutes the stage would rotate 90 degrees, the plus walls saying put. So, every 30 minutes their booth was featuring a different game.

When I came up to the booth they were featuring Ratchet and Clank. It looked like that was the only game they were featuring but then after a few minutes I caught the stage rotating to feature the next game.

The other 3 games were Dark Chronicle, a semi Action RPG. (less action than Zelda, more action than Final Fantasy). They were giving away trial CDs for that. Next was some game featuring a bunch of silly games dealing with traditional Japanese stuff. This was aimed squarely at Japanese families and will probably not be sold outside Japan. Write now I'm drawing a blank on Game #4. It might have been Minna No Golf Online. Not too exciting.

Hudson was there showing off 4 player 2D/3D Bomberman! By 2D/3D I mean the game was traditional bomberman but the characters were 3D instead of 2D sprites. I didn't sit down and play so I don't know how well balanced it is. Everybody has their favorite version. Mine is still the Super Nintendo version on the first multiplayer level with the *punch* powerup.

And really that's about it. Nothing at Square excited me enough at a glance to look deeper. Same with Capcom. They were showing Devil May Cry 2 but at a glance it just looked like more of the same. Konami was showing Metal Gear Solid: Substance which looked like repackaged MGS2. They were also showing Silent Hill 3 but again, it looked like more of the same and Silent Hill in particular is not the kind of game you can evaluate with 120 decibles of other game noise around you. And they were showing "The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2" which is an interactive "Making Of" thing of PS2.

Namco was showing the home version of Taiko no Tatsujin (Taiko Drum Master). I love this game at the arcade. It's music game (Beatmania, Pop-n-Music, ..) but in this case you play Japanese taiko drums with big taiko drum sticks. Unfortunately I don't think it translates to the home much. They will be selling a taiko drum controller but the one in the arcade is heavy and you hold pretty solid drum sticks and really bang that thing which I think is part of the appeal.

As of this post, if you go to these sites they have images and/or live movies of many of the games and scenes from Tokyo Game Show.

Sony Entertainment Japan
Konami

Playing Halo

Some of my friends told my I just have to play Halo. Some of them even claimed to have had no interest when it came out. "What, another first person shooter (fps)? Why would I be interested in that?" Their friends insisted that they give it a try and now all of them are Halo fanatics. Some of them have played nearly every day for 6 months or more.

So, I decided I should check it out. I got an XBox and Halo. Probably the only game I'll be buying anytime soon for XBox. Here are my thoughts as I play.

Mario Sunshine Revisited

I was going to wait until I finished to post my current impressions but I wanted to write this while this stuff was fresh in my mind.

Mario Sunshine: What can you say? It's still Mario but with the new main moves, hose and jetpack it is a new game and not just Mario 64 with new levels. But, dang!!!...it's hard! Maybe I just get more impatient the older I get. Most levels have only taken a 1 to 3 tries, only a couple up to 8 or 9 but it often just feels hard.

Part of it is being in 3D you often have to fight with the camera. There's one boss that flies around the level. You have to chase him down, get somewhere high like a roof top and hose him down. The problem is you have to keep pausing and picking the look around mode and find out where he is. It's new I guess but it's tedious.

Speaking of which, the camera is one of the worst ever in a 3d game. In Mario 64 I think they said one programmer spent 10 months doing nothing but camera programming. In Mario Sunshine it appears in order to save money they didn't have any programmers programming the camera and it shows.

I just played two levels that seemed like they were made by nazis! One of the lessons from Miyamoto to the rest of the game playing world has been that a game should be fun, not frustrating. Many beginning designers are always trying to "get the player". For example putting some coins on screen just over a pit of spikes off screen so the player will jump for the coins and die. The designer thinks "yea!, I got 'em". The player throws his controller down and curses the game.

Well, Mario Sunshine has several levels that are clearly by beginning designers. Mario Sunshine was supposedly not designed by Miyamoto and it shows. (not that any games by Nintendo are anymore).

In several levels you have to walk all the way to the opposite side of a level from the starting point, then navigate your way to something else and if you mess up (fall off) you have to start over. Total frustration, totally un-fun.

In another level you have to push a giant watermelon from one side of the level to the other. The watermelon is like a balloon. If it touches pretty much anything it pops and you have to start over. There are enemies everywhere and you can't kill them!! F-R-U-S-T-R-A-T-I-O-N. I'm sure it seemed like a great idea. It's very next-gen. Previous platforms didn't have the power to do good physics so things like that didn't happen. But, it's not fun it's just tedious. I think an older Nintendo would have either worked on it until it was fun or cut it out of the game.

Worse, and this brings up another issue, it's BUGGY!!! The balloons jump through things they shouldn't. You push them one way, they touch something and magically (buggily) get displaced 10 feet to the left or right. What the f?

On the amusement park level there are swinging ships. When they get too steep you don't fall off, you fall THROUGH!!! This is not the only place this fall through bug appears.

In another level I finished the goal, the shine appeared and as the camera zoomed back in on me so that I could collect the shine the game had put me underground!!! As soon as I was given control again it declared me dead. That was a hard level too. It had taken me 15 minutes of chasing down a big enemy to finish.

In Mario 64, if I remember correctly, each level had several goals and you could do those goals in any order. In Mario Sunshine each level has 8 goals but in reality you can consider each goal it's own level. When you go into the level you are told what the goal is, the level may have been slightly reconfigured / altered for this goal. I suppose if I think about it that allows them to do more interesting things for each individual goal but it also means you cannot choose your goal. If you are going for shine #3 in level #2 you cannot try for shine #4 until you have shine #3. If shine #3 is too hard to bad for you.

Assuming I'm on the final level, it seems unfinished. In fact lots about the game seems just slapped together. No design, no aesthetic. But the last level is almost like programmer art it's so ugly.

I don't want to get down on the game. It's still way more fun than most any other platformer. Mario is still fun just to be Mario, no goal required. Yoshi is pretty awesome too and through his sounds he's cuter and feels more fun to ride then ever before.

There are inspired game play elements here and there. And there's fun stuff too. Jumping off a wall has been made easier then Mario 64 (or Super Metroid) and there are some levels that require alot of it. It's extremely rewarding to play these levels as you feel like a super pro as you pull them off. Back in the day, when my friends and I used to play Donkey Kong we would all try to compete for "tricky tutorials" as we called them. That was trying to do as many stunts as possible (jumping backward over stuff for example) and trying to play it all smooth and gracefully (never pausing). Well, the levels in Mario Sunshine based on wall jumping totally bring back that feeling.

Another is there are several levels where your waterpack will be taken away and you are just regular Mario. Most of these levels have a theme based on a previous Mario game even all the way back to the various NES an SNES Marios. These levels are all about tricky fun puzzles/moves. Some of them can be frustrating but generally they do bring back the basic fun of what has made Mario so cool in the past.

Over all I still completely recommend this game. I think it's just that of the entire series so far it seems the least polished, the least finished. It might be so. Gamecube has really had no must buy AAA+ game licenses out for it yet and so I'm sure Nintendo was in a rush to get it out. In the past it seems like one of Nintendo's differences from all other companies in the industry was their willingness to miss a shipping date in order to make their games perfect. That has always appeared to work for them. This time though it appears they didn't wait. It will be interesting to see if that was really a mistake on their part. Mario Sunshine is not selling as well as they had hoped. It seems like just a little focus testing would have revealed that the still had some work to do.

Super Mario Sunshine

I picked up Super Mario Sunshine this weekend!

Again Nintendo shows the way. Mario is full of stuff you haven't seen in other games. Liquid is everywhere. The water looks amazing. Enemies are covered with paint. You can get paint on yourself and on your friends.

Another thing that sticks out though. It's HARD!!!! I'm sure I'll get used to it but so far that's the thing that sticks out the most probably. The reason is you have this water pack that at the start can be used to hover for a short time or to hose things down like hosing the paint off walls or the the ground or hosing down enemies. The same button is uses for both function with another button switching whether you are in hose mode or hover mode. You often need to switch and you often forget which mode you are in so you take a jump, hit the button expecting to hover and realize you are in hose mode.

Another issue is to use it you press the R key. When you are hosing, if you press the R key all the way down you will stand still and can aim. If you press it only partly down you will continue to run hosing in front of you. It's great idea but it takes some getting used to. But like I said the more I play the more I get used to it. I'm sure it will become second nature soon.

One thing I noticed about Mario vs pretty much all other character action games.

Every Mario is different. What do I mean by that?

Well pretty much, since the original Mario Bros, every version of Mario has changed it's gameplay, what you do, what your main moves are, what you spend your time doing in every new version. That is not true of pretty much all other character action series.

For example on Sonic 1, 2 and 3 you run Sonic around collecting rings. The basic moves are jumping on the back of enemies while you are in a ball hitting them with your spikes. The other is crouching into a ball, revving up and spinning very fast. That same behavior is the main thing you do (other than run and jump) throughout the entire series. New levels in each game, new monsters, a few new bonus games but the main play never changed.

The same is true of the Crash Bandicoot series. You spin to break boxes. That's about it. Throughout the character action series, 1, 2, 3 and 5, 70% of your game play is exactly the same. All that's change is the locations and a few bonus games.

Gex is also similar. I'm sure there are other examples. Megaman for example although that's a shooting game.

Mario though, in each game has changed your basic movies to the point that each game is a new experience.

Mario Bros

In Mario Bros the basic move was jump under an enemy to flip it over on it's back, then run up to kick it off a ledge before it turned back over.

Super Mario

This one is what most people might call the first of the series. Gone are the flip over enemies. Now you jump on top of them. New main move, new feel to the game. Also added was big and little Mario which changed the basic feeling of the game. When you are big mario you take chances since you can take a hit. When you are little mario you are more carefull and change your focus to finding a mushroom to make you big mario again.

Super Mario 2 (Mario USA in Japan)

In this game the basic move is jump on top the enemy then pick him up and throw him at another enemy. Again, new basic move.

Super Mario 3

Here they added a map so you could pick your levels. If one way was too hard you could try another. As for basic movies, ever level had powerups.
Tanooki-Mario

The most common was the tanooki powerup which have you raccoon tail. This let you float down a little and if you got enough speed you could fly.

Frog Mario

allowed you to swim easily underwater

Hammer-Mario

let your throw hammers left and right

Shoe/Sock Mario (I forgot the name)

let you walk over spikes

Statue Mario

turned you into a statue which the enemies would ignore so you could let them pass by you.

Mario 3 also added items/inventory that you could use in various places on the map making you want to search for them.
The over all effect is that again, Mario 3 is significantly different from its predecessors

Super Mario World (SNES)

Added Yoshi which had his own way of playing and added flying with the cape. Both again changed a signifcant portion of the basic gameplay.

Yoshi's Island

Some people might not call this part of the series but it was the next character action game in the Mario world.

This one was completely different. In played Yoshi protecting a baby mario that road on your back. You could eat enemies and then you'd lay an egg. You'd drag the eggs behind you, up to 8 of them and you could shoot them around the screen using a targeting cursor. If you got hit by an enemy baby mario would go flying off and you had upto 10 seconds to get him back or you lost a life. Talk about COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

Mario 64

Next up was Mario 64. Being 3D made it a completely different game. Now the play changed to exploring and finding stars. 4 to 8 per level. Some were hidden, some required doing special things like carrying a baby penguin back to it's mom.

Mario Sunshine

Now Mario Sunshine just came out and Mario now sports a water pack on his back. He can use the water pack to shoot enemies, to clean up the mess in a messy level, to fly for short periods by shooting water down like a jetpack, to shoot way up in the air like a rocket. The point is again, a very basic element of the game has changed making this a new experience.

Obviously the games are well done just in general but I think one thing that keeps the series so strong is that constant change in basic moves. I don't remember if Sonic added a single move during the entire series. Crash added a few moves over his series but that basic play didn't change, 2 of the moves, body slam and burrowing never needed to be used. 70% to 80% of the time the game play was the same was the first Crash 1. Gex changed from 2d to 3d but I believe his basic move set stayed similar from #2 to #3. I haven't played the Rayman series.

Obviously it's risky to change something that was working. I wonder how Nintendo does it. Are they just geniuses or do they try many different things throwing many ideas away until the come up with something new in the basic move set that's fun.

GTA3

Next in my list of overdue games, I finally got to play GTA3. I was not much interested in this when it first came out because I was never a fan of the first 2. If you don't know, GTA3 (Grand Theft Auto 3) was the number 1 selling game last year and got tons of critical praise was well as being called one of the best games in years even though it was rated "M" for violence and therefore for example not sold at WalMart which will not sell M rated games and usually accounts for like 30% of all video game sales.

The controversy though is that it's about being a car thief and a henchman for the mob. You go around stealing cars and killing people. It's strange, it's fun to play the game and it can get pretty intense but when I stop playing a almost feel dirty.

Cars get wrecked pretty often so to get a new car you car jack one. Run up to a car, your character opens the door pulls the driver out, tosses him on the street and you get in and drive off. As their are rival gangs it is possible for you to try to car jack a car and have that guy beat the crap out of you or chase you down or call his buddies on you.

You can drive over to the car dealer, bust through the glass and steal a fast new sports car if you want. The last mission I played I was told to run an armored car off the road, once I did that the people in the car would run for their lives so I was supposed to grab it and drive to to some special location. The thing was it was very hard to run it off the road and after bashing it for a few minutes the cops were notified of a car chase and then cops were coming in everywhere. All the cars in the game have a limit to how much damage they can take past which they light on fire and you have 10 seconds or so to get out before they explode. My car lit on fire so I jumped out, police everywhere, the closest vehicle just happened to be a FIRE TRUCK!!! I ran over and sure enough I was able to drive off with a fire truck trying to bash the armored car, police everywhere, I flipped the truck, couldn't get out in time and it exploded. Whoo Hoo! :-p

When you *die* you just get put at the hospital with some of you game money missing and possibly a few items. Same if the police catch you except you start at the police station.

A few things stick out that make the game so much fun.

It's so open. Although you can get missions from various crime bosses (go knock this guy off, go get this armored car, go take one of his working girls to the policeman's ball for some work), you can also just drive around town for fun. Grab a car and drive. Every type of car feels different. Vans, sudans, station wagons, trucks, old taxis, new taxies, police cars. Smash other cars, run red lights, drive down the sidewalk, through parks, crash into trashcans, people, light poles, weave through traffic, drive down the wrong side of the street. If you steal a taxi you can actually grab fares. In this case it works like the game Crazy Taxi. You have so many seconds to get your fare to their destination our you lose your them. Also you can drive crazy but if you hit too many other cars/people the fare will bail.
The city is pretty well done. It's not the best graphics on the PS2 by far but it works. It feels like a city. There's various areas, the waterfront, the warehouse district, the red light district. The city is pretty large although at this point in the game I only have access to 1/3 of it. There's also a subway and an elevated train you can ride.
The atmosphere is good. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it's foggy and the lights seem to effect the fog like you'd expect. Night, dusk, dawn, day all come and go. It's not perfect. For example the stop lights light up the ground green if they are green, red if they are red etc. I don't think I've ever noticed that effect in real life.
The MUSIC/Soundtrack. This for me is probably the most effective part of the game. When you are inside any car you can listen to the radio. There are like 9 to 10 radio channels which with its own format, DJs, commericals etc and although all the commericals are jokes the whole thing sounds exactly like big city radio. There's the top 40 station, the rave station, the classical music station, the talk station. Each program is proably 20 minutes longer or more so as you are driving around it totally feels like it feels when you are in a real car driving around a big city. The music is all real bands or sounds like real bands (not just game music). It really works. For me, this one feature is the biggest significant difference from all other games.

I don't know yet if it will hold my interest enough to finish. One of the last missions was hard for me. It took about 8 tries. I asked a friend that has almost played to completion how he made it through and he gave me some tips so maybe once I try them I'll keep going.

One thing that was intense. You can find a Rampage icon. Grab the icon and you are given a machine gun with unlimited ammo. You have I think 1.5 minutes to try to kill 120 people and the gun has a scope. To be honest it was pretty fun. After a few second the cops get called in and you have to start taking them out or they'll get you. The best way seems to be to put 20 or 30 rounds into their cars and the cars blowup taking anybody within a few feet with them. It was interesting to see how far you could make it until they take you out. Of course I suppose if you get good at the game you can not only take out 120 people but evade the cops as well. The more random acts of public violence you commit (like shooting people or running over people) the higher your thug rating goes up which means that cops will hunt you down. There are anti-thug icons around the town you can collect to lower your rating so I'm guessing after a rampage you'd need to find some of those quick. I gotta say I felt a little weird after my rampage. Why that's a different feeling from shooting someone in Half Life or Quake I'm not sure.

Another interesting thing that came up is my Japanese friends' reactions. Mostly they have been disgusted that such a game exists and judgemental as in "that's the kind of game only an American would like".

Maybe it's true, I'm not sure. The PC version of that game will come out here but not the PS2 version because parents would get upset. I pointed out that in America that game is rated "M" which is supposed to mean it's for adults only just like all the porn and violent movies that Japan puts out. But, Japan is not really that strict about that stuff when it comes to kids seeing it. I suppose in some ways it might not be any different than what you see aimed at kids in America on MTV except that MTV is aiming at the college crowd. Young Jump is squarely aimed at teens though. I don't quite get the logic. Plus, Japanese manga is full of massive violence, people being beheaded, cut, slashed, girls getting tortured and raped. Even in games the most popular games in Japan are still fighting games with people beating the crap out of each other and all the special grabs that end with snapping limbs or backs or necks. Anyway.

Regardless, I suggest you give it a try. Totally guilty pleasure. :-D

ICO

Now that I finally got my American PS2 I finally got to play ICO. WOW!!! Amazing!!! If you haven't seen it it's about a kid born with horns who, as all kids born with horns, is taken to this abandoned magic castle to be sacrified by being entombed alive. Except that by luck, his tomb is on shaky ground and happens to tip over and spill him out. He finds young woman who doesn't speak the same language that appears to be a prisoner in the castle, possibly also to be scarificed and he decides to help her escape. That's the premise. The game is finding your way out of this magic castle.

The castle is HUGE!!! and it's towering over the ocean a couple of 100 feet up. The castle is on a island just a couple hundred feet from a cliff lined coast. It all makes for some amazing views.

I suppose there is no one thing you can point do that makes this game better than another but just overall it works. It's extremely beautiful. It's well put together. It's not too frustrating. There were only 2 points in the game where I though I should consult a book and then I decided to just look a little harder and I found the solution. It's not too long. It took about 8 hours to finish. I don't mind long games but I suppose one thing about this game, it's not got alot of variety so at just about the time I was tired of climbing over stuff it ended. It's just so well done though that especially if you play without distractions you can get really sucked into the world of the game. There are almost no *game* issues like inventory screens or hit points or other game like things. If you haven't seen it check it out.

Space Channel 5 Part 2

Space Channel 5 part 2 came out on Valentine's Day this year. I joked to my friend Jake who is on the team that made it that I was worried I would be home with Ulala, the main character for Space Channel 5 on Valentine's Day because I had no girlfriend to take out that night. Fortunately I managed to make a real date for Valentine's Day so I didn't actually have a chance to play until now.

This game is AWESOME. Of course if you don't like watching cute women playing music and doing sexy dances in front of you or musicals then I maybe this is not for you but I love it. It's even better than the first, at least so far, and I was completely addicted to the first one. So much so that I bought the soundtrack, the mix CD, made my computer desktop a shot from the game and I made 3 clocks *1*, *2*, *3*. Two of which I sent to Sega, one for Jake and one for the art director, Miyabe-san who, according to Jake, keep in on her desk.

Playing Rez

I picked up Rez yesterday. I think the easiest way to describe it would be if you were able to actually play a visualization from Winamp or Sonique ;-)

You can download a movie(wma) of it here which I suggest you do to check it out or if you have a slow connection you can check out the screenshots. Imagine the end of 2001, Johnny Mnemonic, Lawnmower Man and Tron all rolled into one game.

It's basically a 3D shooter. Think Einhander or Raystorm except that this one is way more abstract and when you lock on and when your shots hit the enemies it's timed to the techno music so most of the time it sounds like you are actually playing part of the music while you play the game.

It's clearly a game for the rave generation. I would suspect my rave friends would enjoy it quite a bit. There's even been a view rave events featuring it and a few more coming up like this one.

The only downside is it's short. In fact as far as I can tell there are only 5 levels. I fininshed in under 2hrs. There are a few more secrets to unlock and I'm not sure what I need to do to unlock them but they appear to be things like special modes like for example playing the game with infinite hitpoints so basically you can just set the stick down and watch the game.

The other gimick which I mentioned before it there is an optional shock pack or Trance Vibrator as they call it. My friend Jake who worked on the game tried to convince them that was a bad name. He thought they should call it the Rezinator. Certainly better than calling it a Vibrator. But anyway, it plugs into the USB port of the PS2 and vibrates to the music. It's about the size of a computer mouse and comes with a fuzzy pouch to put it in. You put it where ever you want. I was watching Gamewave, one of the TV programs here about video games, and the host sat on it as he played. :-D

Pikmin

So of course I picked up Pikmin last Friday. You can see a video of it here if you haven't seen the game. Like I mentioned before they are advertizing the crap out of it with very cute commericals.

If you want to see one of the commericals you can download it by clicking on the Pikman2.zip link on this page. The words are something like this

We are Pikmin, we'll tell you about us.
Carrying, attacking, increasing in numbers and getting eaten
We are living in many different ways on this planet
Carrying, attacking, increasing in numbers and getting eaten.

Nintendo Gamecube. Pikmin

There's another on this page. Personally I think those particular commericals are trying to bring in a female audience by making the game appear to be very cute.

It's hard to say if it's *good* or not. I've never been one to get into strategy games. I had many friends get addicted to Sim City on Super Nintendo or PC. I tried playing once but I didn't see the point. Similarly I never got into Diablo, Warcraft, or any of those kinds of games. I tried playing C&C a little and though I had some fun playing networked I never really got good at it and single player just bored me. Then there's Populous, The Sims, Black & White.

So, aruably Pikmin would fit in a similar category as you control and direct lots of little Pikmin. I am finding it fun but because I'm playing the Japanese version, everytime an explaintion comes up I have to pause for 5 to 10 minutes while I try to figure out what it says and I'm not always successful since the kanji fonts are too small for somebody that doesn't already know kanji. You do have the option of making the messages for kids in which case there would probably be no kanji and less adult vocabulary but it seems like that might be less useful so I chose adult messages.

There are several things that stick out to me. One, the game is clearly designed NOT to be played with a mouse which is probably a first for these types of games since most of them started on PC or Macs.

The story is you are flying through space and you bump into a meteor and then crash land on some planet. As you are falling from the sky, parts of your ship get scattered all over (sounds familiar ;-)) and so you need to go find all 30 pieces within 30 days. I wasn't quite sure what the story's explaintion for the 30 day time limit is.

Anyway, you find out there are these little creatures on the planet that look like onions and you decide to call them Pikmin and that for some reason they obey you. There are 3 different types. Red, Yellow and Blue. I haven't gotten the blue ones yet but each type has it's specialties. The Yellow ones can carry little exploding rocks they find and they can be thrown twice as high as the other kinds. The blue ones can swim where as the other two kinds drown if they fall in the water.

Separate from that, each Pikman goes through 3 stages of growth. Leaf head, Bud head and Flower head. Those basically correspond to strength and speed. Pikmin are created / birthed when your Pikmin carry either a pellet or the body of a killed animal back to their ship. They pop out the top and plant themselves in the ground. If you leave them planted all day they might grow into the flower kind. If you pull them out early then you have to get them to eat this yellow goo if you want them to grow up which you can find from various sources.

So, you lead them around getting them to attack animals, pick up pellets, knock down or blow up walls, build bridges etc. You can lead upto 100 at a time around the level. You only have from morning until dusk to work because at night the big monsters wake up and will eat all Pikmin so before the sunsets you need to get them all back in their ships and take off.

The graphics are pretty cool. Pikmin are supposed to be like 1cm tall and the main character is like 2cm tall so it all takes place in grass and bushes with puddles and stuff. Even with 100 Pikmin on the screen and 20 or so monsters I've never seen it slow down. The water is probably the best real looking water I've seen so far though they are similating a puddle and not a lake or the ocean. The textures are great, detailed and multi-layered so for example the canopy of leaves above the level is casting swaying shadows on the ground.

A couple of things that I'm less than thrilled about. Playing the 30 days in game time would probaby be 5 hours, maybe 8. So, if the 30 days end before I can find all 30 pieces will I want to start over from the beginning? You can save your game and you can copy your save but then the question is how far back should I start over from. From day 20? From Day 10 etc. Maybe from day 20 I just don't have enough time so I try again and fail again. It's probably one of those things that only would get to me more than most people.

But anyway, for me, the most inspiring thing is that I can see a game I want to make here. Since before I went to Crystal in 93 I wanted to make a game about a little space character on a zelda like action adventure. Of course back then I was thinking of a 2D game. PS1 game out and I think I was still thinking 2D although maybe 2D like Diablo. But now, seeing a 3D world this detailed with 100 pikmin running around and a main character and several cool looking well animated monsters I can now see the presentation that I would like my game to be. The only bad part is that the main character in Pikmin, "Orima", is a little space character so if I made my game with a little space character people would probably think it was a rip-off even though my game would play nothing like Pikmin.

Max Payne

I just finished Max Payne.

Couple of interesting things, as an example of how small the PC game market is in Japan, when I went to Sakuraya to get it 1 week or so ago they had 3 copies just stuffed in the shelves with the rest of the games. I'm not sure how big it was in the states but there's no place like Best Buy or Fry's with 100rds of copies of PC games here.

I finished but the game is way to damn hard. I only made it 1/6 into the game before I put it in god mode. Maybe if you are one of those Quake guru's who can spin on a dime and make every single shot you could finsh this game without cheating but even then I doubt it. As an example I am able to play Quake 2 without cheating but no such luck here. Part of the problem might be that it's a 3rd person game, not 1st person like Quake. By default there is a dot on the screen showing where you are aimed but for whatever reason in the heat of battle that's not where I'm looking. I'm often looking at my character thinking he's aimed and then noticing the dot is 3 inches down the screen below were I needs it to be.

Another problem is it takes only about 4 hits to be dead and there's very little health to be had.

About 1/6 of the way though is where you meet the first boss. Just another human but he takes like 5 to 10 times the hits as anybody else. After 10 or 20 tries I put it in god mode. I tried putting it back but it was just too hard and annoying. Basically to make it through without cheating would require saving just before entering each room, running in, shooting, dying, restarting and waiting until you got lucky enough to kill everbody in that room without dying. AND, the game gets progressively harder and I was only at 1/6th the way through the game at that point.

But, as an experience there were some cool things about it. The writing is over-written noir but it's kind of entertaining if cheesy at times. The voiceovers are pretty good. Also a little over the top but mostly at least fun to listen to. You've probably read that most of the dialog happens over a graphic novel kind of display. That acutally works pretty well. Also, lots of the characters are having conversations before you they notice you. Some of them are pretty long and funny so if you wait outside the door or just around the corner you can listen in.

There's also a couple of nightmare levels (as in inside a nightmare) which were pretty darn freaky. In fact they were freaky enough that I could imagine somebody making a virtual torture game to drive somebody crazy. Of course I did my best to get into the game. I only played at night. I turned all the lights off. I had my headphones on so it's loud.

There's a burning building level that's pretty neat. The graphics are just okay. I really couldn't tell what was better about this vs say Quake 2 or Half Life except maybe larger textures. There are some notable missing technical items. There's no animated water so in a few levels there is water but it's just a still texture. Not, scrolling, rippling, nothing. There's also very little if any dynamic lighting so even a grenade, although the explosion is nice, does not light the room nor are there many flickering lights or light sources. There are a few levels with red warning lights that fade the whole room red/black but Quake 2 had dynamic lighting, like when you shoot a rocket down a hallway, so it seemed missing from here. It was there just not used much. For example there are TVs you can turn on/off and they effected the lighting but for some reason it just seemed missing.

The whole bullettime thing is getting old in that every friggin game is putting it in, at least for death squences. Kill an enemy and the camera spins around the enemy in slow-mo mode, accelerating in to 180 degrees then back out the last 180 degress. It's in at least 3 other games I've seen. As for the play part of bullettime. It's pretty cool but also poorly done, at least for me. You only get like 10 seconds, maybe only 8. Of it which it's usually, at least for me, only enough to kill 1.5 guys. So, you turn it on, shoot one guy, start shooting the other, then run out and get killed by him and the 3rd guy you haven't even started shooting. To get more you have to kill more guys. Probably 8 to 12 guys to get fully recharged again. If there was a cheat for unlimited bullettime it would have been more fun, at least for me. It is kind of cool though when you are actually in it. They took the sounds directly from the Matrix for going in and out of it and you hear a heartbeat while you are in it which works. Also, all the bullets have trails etc so you can see them wiz by. They are not slow enough that you can choose to dodge them but if you are running perpendicular to an enemy you can see them miss you. While in bullettime everything moves slow, you, them, bullets, explosions but you can aim at full speed.

I would suggest checking it out for the story, dialog and for the nightmare levels I guess.

Luigi's Mansion

I finished Luigi's Mansion today. I think like I said before, it's hard to call it a platform seller but I'll give it 5 stars for creativity. At least it's not just another run and jump platform game.

I'm guessing I played 10 to 15 hours. There's just the one mansion, it's 3 floors plus a basement and a roof. It's divided into 4 "areas" where each area ends in a boss and a key to the next area. An area might consist of part of floor 3 and part of the basement for example.

It's definiately at least a much check out game. For some reason I was under the impression that it was made by an American developer but upon finishing it all the credits were for a Japanese team.

One thing Nintendo really seems to have down is making the their main characters fun to play with separate from the game. Meaning that just walking Luigi around is fun. Is moves, his sounds, his voices, and the act of vacuuming, sucking up all the dust, sucking up bedspreads or curtains or water etc. He's pretty funny saying little things like "Oh yea" and "Gotcha, ha ha" and walking around in the dark huming the theme song as he studders and shivers from fright.

Another thing Nintendo seems to be good at is making the environment fun by making it interactive. That means there is a minimum of stuff that you can't at least wiggle. You can swing chandlers, open drawers, move curtains, bedspreads, table cloths, shower curtains. You can vacuum up water from sinks, showers, toilets, mist from fridges, water plants. get fire from fireplaces. etc. I've always thought, for at least some of Nintendo's games, they make a conscious decision to do that which means that either (a) they decide to make most stuff interactive or (b) they decide NOT to put in stuff that is not interactive. Personally I think it's more of the later at least compaired to most teams I've been on where what goes in the game visually is kind of just left to the artists to make up as they go instead of having a larger plan that says if it goes in has to be interactive.

Rimo-Cocoron

Today I picked up Rimo-cocoron. It's kind of cute. Basically you see a setting of people, like a room or a town. You can zoom in to very small details or out to see the entire scene. The people are going about their business and it's your job to help them by giving them inspiration. You do this by seeing their thought bubbles (like "I wonder what I should make for dinner") and then for example you take a picture of a meat store and beam the picture into the person's head at which point he will walk to the meat store and buy some meat. It's all 2d vector graphics and pretty cute.

Gameboy Advanced Update + Zelda

Okay, the display is not so bad. It's still not great but it's not has bad as the Color Wonderswan. There's no contrast adjust like a Gameboy though. Not sure if it needs it or not.

The carts are SMALL. Half the size of a regular Gameboy cart. Small is cool. You can carry more.

Finally, Zelda Strange Fruit Time Chapter. I'm not sure how to translate the title which is a Color Gameboy title, not a Gameboy Advanced title. (1)Looks great on this thing!!! (2) It's a NEW GAME!! Horray!! It's not the old Gameboy Zelda. At least it doesn't start the same. Of course it looks like the same engine but that's fine with me. I've only played it for 20 minutes so far. Now I have something fun to look forward too as soon as I finish my finals in two days! :-D

On the other hand I played Mario for 5 minutes and so far it's exactly Mario 2 NES with really minor stuff added (like the enemies spin when you kill them. Big wup) :-( I didn't play very far.