Game EXP: Final Fantasy VIII wrap up

As of this writing, I still haven't beaten the final boss of FFVIII.  This boss has *5* different forms, and I have gotten pretty far in the fight, but ultimately lost.  When that happens, I really lose morale, and I don't want to play again.  

I'm not sure if I will finish the game.  Honestly, I'm tempted to start all over again.  This time I will reference the guide regularly.  Disc 4 gave me a bunch of time to grind levels and abilities, and I was able to get a better idea of how to strategically build the characters. It would be nice to do that from the beginning and it would also be nice not to overlook any Guardian Forces along the way.  This game is incredibly deep, and I don't need to 100% the thing, but I would like to do better than I did this time.

Let's break FFVIII down a bit:

Visuals:
The Guardian Force summon spells look really good, especially when compared with the previous game in the series.  The same goes for the Full Motion Video scenes:  compared to FFVII, they look incredible.  They are also generally implemented better, I would say-they don't feel like FMV for the sake of FMV.
Creature design is standard for a Final Fantasy game, which is to say: pretty great.  In particular, the final form of the final boss is a pretty wild design.  I'm a fan of how bizarre Final Fantasy monsters can get.  (FFXIII was another game with great monster design)
Visual design of the towns and other instances is also fits the high quality standard of the Final Fantasy Series.  I find the PSX pre-rendered backgrounds to be very immersive, and I really enjoy them.
That being said, the overworld map is pretty uninspiring, with a lot of filler.  In general, I found the PSX Final Fantasy games to have pretty uninteresting overworlds, but I think it is the case even more so. 

Story:
I can't honestly say I like the story.  I enjoyed the first disc, when the world was being laid out, characters and motivations introduced.  It was a suberb first disc.  However, the second and third discs really didn't do much for me.  The action moved very quickly and the plot got convoluted, and I just didn't connect with the characters as much.  I would be interested to see a re-translation or complete revision of this story to see if I'm missing something.

Gameplay:
This is the place that FFVIII really shines.  I love the Junction system of this game, it makes grinding very satisfying.  It's pretty complicated, and any player would benefit from checking in with a guide during play.  The gist of it is that you equip a Guardian Force (the first three are Shiva, Quetzacoatl and Ifrit).  Guardian Forces level along with the player, and they master abilities that the player can then use.  These abilities are both passive and active abilities.  Passive abilities are bolstered by junctioning magic to various statistics:  Strength, Magic, Elemental Attack/Defense.  A lot of the time is spent consolidating spells to different characters in order to bolster their stats.  It's a lot of work, and I think the interface could use an update, but I got a lot of satisfaction from this part of the game.  Unfortunately I didn't really fully understand it until consulting a guide at the end of Disc 3. It is tempting to start a new game, with all of my new systems knowledge.  

Overall, Final Fantasy VIII is a mixed bag, and I can see why it's not one of the more popular games in the franchise.  It seems clear to me that the game grows with repeated playing, and benefits greatly from a guide.  This can be seen as a fundamental failure of the game, and maybe it is.  But there is a lot of cool gameplay available to anyone willing to do some homework.  And I would advise any player to reference a guide when playing this game-- even for the first time-- it would be very helpful and enriching of your gameplay experience.

-D

MIDI Week Singles: "Parts Shop" - Cyber Stadium Series: Base Wars (NES)

"Parts Shop" from Cyber Stadium Series: Base Wars on the Nintendo Entertainment System (1991)

Composer(s): Shigemasa Matsuo, Tomoko Sumiyama

Album: No Official Release

Publisher: Ultra Games

Developer: Konami

I played Cyber Stadium Series: Base Wars (Base Wars from here on out) a lot throughout the '90s.  I probably rented it a few times from Placer and then later bought the game used, from somewhere in Jr. High/High School.  Then I lent the game to a friend (the same one who borrowed Zelda II: The Adventure of Link) in High School who then disappeared and went to college back east, never to be heard from again; although I did try contacting him back in the days of MySpace, but we seriously digress.

Base Wars was a great game, combination baseball game, RPG, and science fiction story.  The gimmick in the game was that as you played through baseball games, you earned money and with that money, you could upgrade your players' weapons and convert them from one type of robot to another.  This is the music that would play while customizing your team.  Because balancing out your team was so important and integral to the game, I spent a lot of time agonizing over what type of weapon to affix to my robot, whether to change a player from a Flybot to an MCycle, or change the Hand Gun to the Fire Gun or the Battle Gimmick?  Should I spend the money on the Laser Gun for the Tank 1st Baseman or the basic Cyborg pitcher?  So much time spent on this screen, and it is a good thing that the music used here is as catchy as it is.

Maybe it is because the music was composed for a Konami game on the NES, but this music (as well as a lot of the music from this game) reminds me of the music Jun Funahashi composed for Konami's 1989 release of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, also on the NES.  Maybe it is the guitar sound and the bass/snare drum kit used is similar/identical to the one used in TMNT, but I get familiar vibes from this song too.

Now if this game received a remake along with updated music (using the same score mind you), that would be something to throw money at.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

And The Battle Rent the Ether

First Impressions: Resident Evil: Revelations 2 - The Struggle (NS)

For those of you just joining us, "The Struggle" is a DLC extra episode for Capcom's 2015 release of Resident Evil: Revelations 2 played on the Nintendo Switch.  This episode occurs between episodes of the main game which is told in four separate episodes, separated between Claire Redfield & Moira Burton, and six months later with Barry Burton & Natalia Korda.  If you want to get caught up on this series from the game, you can find our articles here, otherwise, you are welcome to jump right in below; also there are going to be spoilers.

Presumably, this episode will only happen if you play the game in a way that allows Moira to survive the collapsing of Red Tower (no, I will never not call the tower Red Tower because it doesn't have a name in-game other than "the tower" and it really needs one).  You could hypothetically play this episode if you did not get the (or one of the) good ending, and who am I to tell you that you can't play something!?  What I found interesting about this episode was that it is broken up into four sections, each with its own semi-distinct play style.  Section One deals with a new hunting mechanic, Section Two is like an enemy/boss rush mode, Section Three deals with stealth, and Section Four is another enemy/boss rush mode but with more and larger enemies.  So prepare for a semi-long article.

The episode opens with a warning that the mechanics in this episode will be significantly different than the rest of the game, by introducing Rations which are used to restart after you die or fail a particular section of this episode.  If you run out of rations before completing the episode, then your file is erased and you will have to start over from the beginning.  This idea of semi-permadeath followed by having to start over from the very beginning was pretty intriguing and one that I do not think has been in the Resident Evil series outside of specific difficulty settings.  Here when given the choice, I did choose "Casual" as opposed to "Survivor" because I did not feel like getting an hour or two into the game and then dying too many times and having to restart.  I mainly wanted to experience the story, so casual it was, although casual difficulty still offered a pretty decent challenge that nearly had me dying at the very end, but we will get to that later.

Moira already having been rescued from the partially collapsed tower by Evgeny Rebnic, the old man C&M meet during Episode Three who is held up in the sewers.  There is no explanation of why/how Evgeny found Moira, but I can assume that he went there to look for supplies since hunting/gathering is a major part of "The Struggle."  After the opening cinematic where Evgeny explains to Moira the basic mechanics of how this opening section operates.  She is to help out with the hunting of sources of food on the island, including rabbits, snakes, and rats.  While scouring around in bushes, I was attacked by some of the spiders and Evgeny said that spiders could also be consumed for food.   The other aspect of this stage is that there was a timer warning you that sundown was approaching and that creatures came out at night and that was when you would have to seek shelter, so I enjoyed the explanation why you could not just hang out all day.

Moira's About to Learn There's Only One Way to Cook a Brace of Coneys.

One thing though that was not clear at first was that you were supposed to travel from Point A to Point B.  I was under the impression that you were just supposed to hunt in this particular area and then make it back to where you came from before the timer hit 00:00.  So with about 4 minutes left on the timer and feeling like I was running around in circles looking for game to kill (that was not showing up), I realized that I was supposed to move on through two additional areas, areas that I would later explore with Barry & Natalia in their story.  Had I had this intuition earlier, I might have been able to explore the mill (the last area) a bit more maxing out my Rations and ammunition, but instead, I finished with three full rations and only a somewhat decent amount of ammo stockpiled.

Well After This Lot It Will Only Be 26 More!

The next section and I would learn the transition between story points in "The Struggle" was a narrated introduction by Moira giving context to what was going on when you started.    Here we are told that while out exploring/gathering supplies around in the sewers, Moira accidentally led a whole swarm of enemies back to Evgeny's bunker.  So this section essentially turned into an enemy rush/survival mode where wave after wave of enemies funneled through an area and you had a line that they could not cross.  A couple minutes into this event, I noticed that there was an "Enemies Remaining" counter, and when that hit zero I thought the stage was going to be done, but instead, it automatically transported you deeper into the sewer to do the same thing all over again.  This I thought was not handled very well where instead it could have just put the orange/blue map arrow directing the player to proceed further into the map instead of instantaneously moving them.

One other thing annoying thing about this format was that it felt a lot like the optional Raid Mode where you fight a predetermined number and type of enemies, almost like a puzzle in that you have to either just gun your way through the stage, or figure out the best way to use the available ammunition against enemies with varying load out of weapons.  The types of enemies in this section of "The Struggle" were basically a mish-mash of enemies from the game, from basic Rottens to Ironheads, to Sploders, to Vulcan Blubbers, as in multiple Vulcan Blubbers; bastards.  It really just felt like a menagerie of monsters that were being selected for the sake of throwing monsters at Moira and Evengy without any reason for these specific monsters being there.

Don't Try To Attack The New Monsters?  Gotcha.

The third area was a return to the fishing village, which introduced the Revenant to Moira and Evgeny and was the most aggravating and partly confusing stage in the whole episode.  When the stage starts you are given a timer of 14:59 and Evgeny prompts Moira to stay away from the new monsters that recently appeared on the island (Revenants) that she should not fight them and if one of them comes after her, that she should run.  For me, this level presented the most problems and I nearly lost all of my rations and forced to restart from the beginning, but more on that later.  The point of this section is to continue the hunting mechanic from the first section, but now you have the added burden of Revenants patrolling the village, and I do not know if their senses were enhanced for this stage, but they definitely seemed like they were more attentive to you and were able to detect Moira a lot quicker than in the main game with Barry and Natalia.

Once one of the Revenants spots you, your timer immediately drops down to 0:30 and you have that amount of time to flee the area and escape.  But you are never told specifically where you have to escape to aside from the little blue arrow on your radar map.  The problem I had here was that I do not recall this exit being accessible in C&M's first journey in the village (not that they would have used it, but it felt like I was expected to know where this exit was.  So on my first attempt, I found out that the Revenants were hyper-aware and was spotted by the third one I saw after shooting and gathering a rabbit.  The timer did its jump down to 0:30 and I started running towards the blue arrow only to have it seemingly double back and pointing in the direction I had run from.  My timer ran out and I dropped from five rations down to four.  This process continued until I was down to one full ration and I turned the game off before I saw the little blinking autosave light down in the corner of the screen.  At this point I was not sure if it did count this run against me, so I went to YouTube to see how you were supposed to get through the level and/or where the exit was. 

Wait!?  You Can Totally Attack Them?  Evgeny, You Lying Sack of Shit!

That was when I found out you could kill the Revenants just like Barry did in the B&N chapters.  But didn't Evgney say that you should not attack them?  But here was Moira knocking a Revenant in the back and stabbing it in its pulsing weak spot with her crowbar.  With a renewed sense of purpose, I started the game back up and I found that I avoided losing a ration altogether.  Essentially I cheated.  And I essentially cheated four more times as I worked my way through Revenant after Revenant.  I made it about eight minutes into the stage on my final playthrough before being caught, all ready to turn it off if I did not make it back to the exit before the time zeroed out, but I did make it back, and so I continued.

Despite How It Looks, There's Really No Glass In That Window.

The final section (which was a surprise) involved Moira and Evgeny going to the mine stage (that B&N would visit in Episode Three) to find out information on his missing daughter Irina.  This stage played a lot like the enemy/boss rush mode in that there was an enemy countdown timer that would push you forward once you hit zero.  For whatever reason, I was not expecting this and just stood out in front of a building killing wave after wave of Rotten and Afflicted as they came crawling over and through the building.  This mechanic only dawned on me (again) when I killed the last enemy and went running inside the building to loot it (you can see boxes of ammunition through the window) and I was transported to the opposite side of a closed gate.

Yes, You Can See That Correctly.  Two Fucking Durgas In The Same Screen At The Same Time!!

The next section was a ridiculous romp of stupid proportions.  Remember that Durga from B&N's chapter that was the end-level boss?  Well, that boss showed up in the first area.  And you killed it, granted with less hits required to kill it than when I first fought in with B&N (although chronologically speaking this event happened first).  But then it showed up not one more time, but THREE GOD DAMN MORE TIMES in that last area.  Now, I thought this boss design was pretty cool, more so when I found out what it was actually supposed to be comprised of and having it be a unique end-boss made it even slightly cooler.  Having it appear four times in one stage is overkill to the point that Capcom should have just had Mutant-Pedro show up again along with Mutant-Neil.  Granted the Durga is not a named-character-turned-enemy but just a large boss-turned-mini-boss, and throwing more than one at Moira is silly.  And on top of that, having two at the same time was just stupid.

The issue with Durgas is that they block their pulsing weak spot, which makes them not so much of a bullet sponge as it does a bullet-deflecting annoyance that you have to shoot at even if you do not see a 100% clear opening because you just might be lucky enough to land a hit.  By the end of this stage, I had two Durgas (the two pictured above) chasing me throughout the level with zero ammunition, and because this bonus stage does not take into account all of the skills I had purchased using BP points, Evgeny was using up his rifle ammunition throughout the game and also had zero rifle ammunition.  So I ended up crowbarring to death the two Durgas in a desperate attempt to beat this stage.  Thankfully it worked because I was not at all mentally prepared to start this beast of a stage all over again.

Found Him!!

You are then shown a cut scene, just like the rest of the between-stages, but this one was more video focused and less Moira explaining a situation.  Moira sees Evgeny succumbing to whatever coughing illness he had and Moira realizes that she cannot die on the island like him, and must not "do this to my dad."  Maybe I am just being cynical, but it seemed like You then see Evgeny locking himself in their bunkerMoira picking up Barry's wallet that fell after being knocked over at the end of B&N's Episode Three.  This somehow then leads Moira to follow whatever trail B&N left behind so Moira finds them although when she does, she seems surprised that they are there.  So maybe she was not following them at all and just by chance came across them during the penultimate battle right before Alex Wesker could crush Natalia?

And then the game ends.  That is it.  Which only makes sense if you felt like the game should be over.  I feel like this last part of the story could have been structured just a little differently and in slightly different order.  Perhaps have Moira experience Evgeny's closing her out of their main hideout, then the level starts with the player controlling Moira (although this would not make sense if you were playing co-op) on her way to another hideout because to me it seemed like Evgeny had more than one location on the island, then along the way she finds Barry's wallet.  Moira then follows a trail of corpses (or follows another path) where she ends up coming across the penultimate fight scene just in time and the game goes into the final cut scene.  To me, this scenario just seemed anticlimactic, or at least the last area seemed that way.  Maybe it falls under the Tell Don't Show, or in this case, Play, Don't Show?

I did actually enjoy a fair amount of "The Struggle."  I liked the introduction of the hunting mechanic and how it related to your being able to continue if you failed in a mission or died.  I also liked that in subsequent levels you could still find food and that it was not just a mechanic relegated to the first area.  While I ultimately was not fond of the two boss rush levels, I did actually like the mechanic, but the enemy choice felt too much like the Raid Mode, especially the four Durgas in the last stage.  And had there been a fifth stage that you played through, or eliminated the first boss rush stage (being Stage 2) bringing Moira to the end of B&N's chapter because I never felt that that storyline did much to advance the plot, I think that this DLC could have been a lot stronger than it turned out to be.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

All Are Gone, All But One

P.S.

And here is my score for this episode.  While not entirely accurate as I did turn off Switch a couple of times before the autosave kicked in while playing the stealth-based section of the game in the fishing village.  So the score should probably be lower, but oh well. But hey, at least my accuracy was S ranked at 87.7%, that's got to count for something right?

First Impressions: Resident Evil: Revelations 2 - Episode 4: Metamorphosis [Barry & Natalia] (NS)

Welcome to the final chapter in Episode Four: Metamorphosis for Resident Evil: Revelations 2 from Capcom on the Nintendo Switch.  This article will cover Barry Burton and Natalia Korda as they work to find out the truth behind Moira's disappearance/death, their escape from the island, and the epilogue that indirectly ties to Resident Evil 6.  There will be spoilers if you have not yet played the game and are looking forward to it.

With Claire & Moira's chapter only lasting 20 minutes, I was only a little worried that the same would be true for Barry & Natalia's chapter.  I was pretty sure that Capcom would not have an entire episode from an episodic game last fewer than 60 minutes when they would typically play for 3+ hours collectively.  Taking into account the length of C&M's chapter though, it definitely felt like Capcom then over-compensated by making this final chapter for Barry & Natalia nearly three hours long; or at least my playthrough was 2h47m.  There were so many locations and events that happened, not including the tiered final boss battle and the epilogue that I had completely forgotten about some of what I did until I went back through the screenshots I took in preparation for this article.

So Barry and Natalia start off kind of separated with Barry having been thrown off a not-too-high cliff by Alex Wesker (in her mutated not-quite-dead-Uroboros-Virus-infected state) and just fled after trying to kill Natalia.  The majority of B&N's chapter is them exploring, escaping parts of the island that had not been explored before in any previous chapter, which was a nice touch because going through the same area as other characters (like the sewers but slightly different because the water had drained out) felt like Capcom was cutting corners.  One area was the water/slues-gate area that felt like it could have more going on, but it just ended up being more of a location that you passed through.

Then there was the first major puzzle of the chapter, being what I think was supposed to be a shipping container crane-type device.  This area involved moving platforms, pushing buttons to unlock access further down the crane and traversing obviously rickety platforms while working your way through the area.  Thankfully there were not any Afflicted, Glasps, Slingers, or anything else to get in the way of the puzzle, but it really felt like there should have been more going on here.  Granted there was a Gold Medal Achievement that claimed you could solve the crane puzzle in a few a three moves, whereas I probably took upwards of 15-20, just because I spent a lot of time backtracking and figuring out how everything worked.  But no, the puzzle started out fun as I figured out what exactly I was supposed to be doing and how to make my way through it all, but about halfway through it just felt cumbersome with all of the backtracking and pushing buttons to solve the thing.  Maybe if you did not try to get all of the items hidden in boxes or hidden items found by Natalia you could solve it in fewer than 15+ moves, but I would rather have a few extra exploding bottles and 1000 BP from earning a Gold Medal; I don't actually know how many BP that medal was worth.

The next section leads to an underground tunnel system that introduced a new mechanic, or at least I believe it was a new mechanic that I at least do not recall happening earlier in the game.  For a large section of this specific area, there was a toxic gas that would not immediately kill B&N, but it did give them coughing fits and their vision would start to degrade; in-game this was translated to the game losing color and saturation as well as developing tunnel vision making finding your way through the tunnels progressively more and more difficult.  The format for this area was that there was a central hub that contained platforms allowing the player to get out of the toxic gas and contained several tunnels that shot off in different directions, forcing the player to go out to collect items, unlock deeper passageways and then head back before the gas took effect.  Then on top of all of this, there would occasionally be Rottens lurking around corners, and even with Natalia's enemy-detecting abilities, they would still pop up; some of the enemies were permanently grounded and would never get up in this area, presumably to confuse the player from the ones that would actually get up and attack.  I did die a handful of times in this area due to the gas causing my vision to deteriorate and got turned around in the tunnels more than once.

Following the underground tunnels, B&N were led into a large mansion because Resident Evil.  Yes, the mansion seemed very out of place after the look and feel of the rest of the game, but at the same time, it didn't because it is a Resident Evil game.  Its inclusion was probably for the sole purpose of banking on the player's nostalgia for the first Resident Evil game and the feeling of exploring the Spencer Mansion, or the police station in RE2, or the mansion on the island in RE: Code Veronica X, or any of the other mansions that seem to make it into this series.  Was it a welcome one?  Sure, I am not going to complain because it did, in all honesty, remind me of the first game to a certain extent.  There were locked doors behind emblems, there was backtracking through rooms, there were keys, there were stairwells down into basement areas.  You know, Resident Evil.  At the same time I did feel pandered to, so there was that as well.

The next area was more of a transitional hallway, but for me, it was not as creepy as I felt that it was designed to be.

Since in an earlier cutscene the player was told that Alex Wesker had used Natalia as a sort of soul/consciousness-host-type-thing (or at least that was how I understood it to be), I guess that the inclusion of dolls that B&N came across at the end of Episode 2 could be connected to Natalia being a child?  And in Alex's insanity post suicide and "brought back / healed?" by the Uroboros-Virus, maybe she decided to string up parts of naked dolls all over the place?   Maybe Alex sees Natalia as a doll herself, an object to hold her consciousness, and that these burning dolls are effigies of Natalia, hence why they are on fire?    Then you also have to wonder when Alex went around lighting all of these candles, but that's a common fallacy in video games, so we will ignore that for now.

The penultimate area was the inevitable boss battle against Alex that was two-tiered.  The first half was your standard boss battle in a large area, taking shots at Alex as she scurried up through ducts and vents to throw projectiles at you and swipe at you when you got close enough.  It is battles like this that make me wonder how this would go down in a two-player co-op game.  Maybe have Natalia throw bottles at Alex because I certainly did not see any bricks and I cannot imagine that they would have much of an effect.  Both attempts at this battle I took control of Barry and was thankful that I had a pretty decent surplus of magnum and rifle ammunition because I had those guns decked out with mods so they were each doing upwards of 1500 damage with each hit whereas the starting handgun does only 100 damage; I just found out that there are damage mods that go as high as 20, but during my playthrough, I only found the Damage 3 or 4 mod.

The second half of the battle (because of course there is going to be a second-half) occurs after it is revealed that Moira did, in fact, survive the fall of Red Tower (due to the decision(s) I made in Claire & Moira's chapter.  Barry, Natalia, and Moira leave the battle arena and find Claire outside the cliff waiting with a helicopter (something I feel like will be explained in the final bonus episode, "The Struggle."  This is when Alex-Mark II shows up in all her Uroboros-Worm-Filled-Body and then Barry makes the dumbest decision of his career.  He tells Moira and Claire who are on the helicopter and outfitted with some heavy firepower, to fall back and that he will take care of Alex all by his lonesome.  I could see Barry making this decision if Moira had in-fact died, being a final act of revenge, telling Claire to take Natalia to safety while he has a final showdown with the monster that killed his daughter, then sure Barry, play cowboy.  But taking on the monstrosity that Alex Wesker became is just stupid.

The level design here was that you run through caves/mines in the side of the mountain, taking shots at Alex as she chases you and when you make your way out, you then take control of Claire from the helicopter and shoot at Alex with a sniper rifle.  This part was rather difficult with the Joy-Con, mainly because it was a controller (as opposed to mouse/keyboard) because Monster Alex is moving, the helicopter is moving/bobbing and there are terrain obstacles that obscure your view of Alex.  What I did like about this transition though was that if felt like Barry was nearly invincible, either not taking any damage while the player took control of Claire, or could not be killed.  Taking this into account, I tried to sprint through the mine/cave areas as quickly as possible, in one instance even backtracking through the same way I entered thereby shortening the amount of contact time Barry had with Alex.  Eventually after dealing enough damage from both Barry and Claire, Barry prompts Claire to break out the big shit and you fire a rocket into Alex.  I do not know if it is an auto-lock-on mechanism or if you can take multiple shots, but I thankfully did not have to find out and hit her with my first shot.

The game then goes through your standard sequence of events.  Barry heroically walks back and boards the helicopter while having a moment with Moira, seemingly having repaired their damaged relationship and everyone is all smiles.  The epilogue contains information about Resident Evil 6 told through Claire communicating to someone (I haven't played RE6 yet), then through TV reports and brief glimpses of newspaper articles of the events in China.  Upon reaching the Burton home, we see Natalia who has now been adopted by the Burtons upstairs reading a book by Franz Kafka who had a major influence on this game, stating pretty straightforwardly that Alex's mind/psyche/soul is becoming more present in Natalia's body or has taken it over completely.  So Alex Wesker kind of does win in the end, or at least her ultimate plan was successful.

With the game and story ending in this manner, it obviously is opening up to additional sequels, either in the Revelations series or including them in future RE games.  I would imagine that they will have to wait some time because unless Capcom decides to go full-in on infanticide or have Natalia fight the take over of her body, Big Daddy Barry is going to have to kill a child; or it could be Moira if it's decided that she will become a mainstay character.

Now, all I have to do is play The Struggle episode before I come to my final conclusions for the game in its entirety.  So stay tuned for that article to appear sometime in February as I do not see myself being able to find the time to play that story and write the article before the end of January.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Give Me Just One Night


P.S.
And like all of the previous articles, here is my score for this episode:

You know, having 72.9% accuracy considering how bad I felt I was shooting Alex from the helicopter, I think I did a halfway decent job.  I still have no idea what the flea-looking-blob-things were, but at least I was able to find three of the Tower Medallions and I am willing to bet that there were some in the caves/mines that I absolutely had no time to look around for.

MIDI Week Singles: "Echoes of Sorrow" - Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (NS)

"Echoes of Sorrow" from Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon on the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo 3DS, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One (2018)
Composer: Ippo Yamada
Album: Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon Official Soundtrack
Label: Limited Run Games
Developer: Inti Creates

It has been a while since I first/last played Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, the 8-bit-ish story involving a lot of the same characters in Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.  I do love a lot of the music that Michiru Yamane and Ippo Yamada composed for the game and today we are featuring one of the songs composed by Ippo Yamada.  "Echoes of Sorrow" occurs during the fourth stage in the game after you have encountered all three of the other characters that Zangetsu meets on his journey.  I do not know if potentially having a full party was taken into account when using this music, although if there was this thought, it might have been more of a heroic than the melody actually is  That is not to say that the music is less catchy because it does not have a "The Ring Goes South" hook to it, but the melody from 0:23 is when my ears perk up. 

That is really all I have for this song.  I did not intentionally choose a song that was not composed by Castlevania veteran Michiru Yamane and in the process, I am glad that I have learned the name of Ippo Yamada.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack

You Can Save What You Are

Game EXP: Final Fantasy VIII - Disc 3 & 4

Uh oh.  

Yes, uh oh.  Disc 3 is when I finally decided to refer to a walkthrough.  I had encountered an enemy I just couldn't beat.  And upon referencing said walkthrough, it became clear that there was a bunch of stuff I missed leading up to this point.  Oops.  

I could be mad about it.  It seems like a dirty trick to make so many helpful items and things something you can just completely miss and never be able to get again.  One of the earliest fights in the game has a Guarding Force that you can Draw out from the boss.  If you didn't?  -  Tough luck, you don't get it.  And in this game, the Guardian Forces are the core of what you are doing, they give you access to abilities and upgrades that are central to how you play the game.  FFVIII is a tricky game because leveling up doesn't really help you all that much - enemies level with you. It's raising your AP, learning abilities and junctioning magic that improves your stats and makes you more effective in battle.  

It is clear to me now that for my ideal play experience, I should have reviewed a walkthrough at the beginning of the game.  I don't need to follow it step by step (the walkthrough on this game is incredibly detailed), but it would have been nice to pick out a couple things, to check in every so often to see that I stay on track.  Really, I only want like 1/10 of the obscure items in the game.  

So, anyway, this has put a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.  I'm mostly concerned that I will at some point get stuck, and not be strong enough to finish the game.  That would be  real bummer.  Thinking about it now, I realize that's what happened the last time I played- I never beat it.  Maybe when I'm finished, I'll put together a simple outline of things to know before playing FFVIII.  It's not like I read an instruction booklet, afterall.  

The Plot of Disc 3 gets pretty convoluted.  In classic JRPG fashion, the villain is not the villain, it's someone else.  But also there's this other villain.  And weird magical technology, and space and the Moon.  And like... huge, seemingly important details (monsters come from the Moon?) that are just sort of tossed off without much care.  It's clear to me that the Junction and Guardian Force system is where most of the fun of Final Fantasy VIII lies.  While the plot isn't any more or less crazy than any other FF game, it just isn't my favorite.  

The 4th disc is similar to FFVII's third disc.  There isn't any new plot, just a final dungeon and the ability to traverse the world and tie up loose ends.  I just tried and failed to beat the final boss, so I am going to spend some time leveling up my new Guardian Forces* (they give you access to almost all of them in the final dungeon, so that counts for something). 

-D

*I haven't mentioned this, but the Summons in general in this game are excellent.  It's pretty impressive how much better they look than FFVII.  My personal favorites are Diablos and Leviathan.  

#IndieSelect: Nicky The Home Alone Golf Ball (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received a free copy of Nicky The Home Alone Golf Ball by MiniMal Lab on the Nintendo Switch from QUByte Interactive through Xinthus' #IndieSelect event earlier in the week.  The game was given and received without expectation or promise of a positive review, only that the game be played and the experience be shared through social media channels.  All of the words and pictures in this article unless otherwise noted, are my own and form my own experience playing the game.

Based on the trailer for Nicky The Home Alone Golf Ball (hereafter referred to as Nicky), you get was is advertised, but only to a certain extent.  Before even starting the game, you can customize your playable golf ball, Nicky, with hair including facial hair, glasses, hats, and bling, and you are thankfully told that these cosmetic effects have no effect on the actual gameplay.  This is good because I obviously put the Viking hat on my Nicky and we all know from games like Katamari Damacy that pokey-things on rolling objects is a real hindrance.  Once you do start, you are greeted by a digital voice that sounds like it was compiled of audio from British comedian Matt Berry (The IT Crowd, Worms Revolution) and you start off on your adventure, leaving the box of golf balls in a house and headed back home to the local golf course.

Nicky takes a mechanic similar to Angry Birds and Midnight Deluxe, where you slingshot/golf-shot an object towards a goal.  The difference though in Nicky is that you cannot see the end goal, and are instead following arrow signs pointing you in the right direction to shoot as you make your way through obstacles.  There is a bit of platforming going on, trying to shoot Nicky onto bookshelves, lights, telephone poles, windmills, and through car windows.  As is the case with slingshot and golf games, you can direct the shot as well as the amount of power you want to use, but I genuinely found that I would either use full power or some amount between 1/2 and 3/4.  I found that when I used less than half power, the ball would hardly travel in the direction I had intended.  The game can be played with the controller or with the touchscreen, but I found the controller to be comfortable and easier to track Nicky, especially when the ball was rolling on the screen and I wanted to take another shot immediately before stopping.  Also, any chance to not obscure the viewable area, I will usually take.

If I had to look at this for the entirety of the game, you
have to look at it for the entirety of the article.

Like golf, Nicky keeps track of the number of strokes you have made with the goal being to have the fewest number of strokes by the end of the game.  The game constantly reminds you of this fact by having a worldwide leader board permanently plastered in the upper right portion of the screen.  To remind you that that stroke you just took, now totaling 186 is still too high to beat Sarah who is sitting firmly at 147.  I found this a bit distracting because, on my first playthrough, I had a general sense of what I was doing and the direction I was going, but I definitely hit a wall where I got frustrated and just started taking shots haphazardly and probably wracked up 20 plus strokes out of frustration.  Plus learning the mechanics of the game, how much power actually affects the ball, how to best shoot at/around the birds, how fast the ball travels towards a car window that keeps opening and closing.  Maybe have the option to turn off the leaderboard or be able to view it in the pause screen?

As far as content goes, the game is comprised of just one level/world/stage that is actually pretty large.  The areas consist of a house, the roof, telephone poles, a street with cars, trees, windmills, a stealth area involving a stressed-out dog, and a mini-golf course.  In all honesty, I felt that the playable area was too big, especially since more often than not, I would shoot at a 45° angle at full power since most of the game was about distance and less about chipping and putting technique.  There were moments when full power played a hindrance, but with the   But there are more feelings about this than, "Woah, big world," and I am going to be jumping around a bit so try to keep up.

Wait, what!?

One final criticism is that I often found myself shooting into an area that I could not see.  You are able to move the camera a little bit, but you cannot see the entire playable area, or at least, the area where your ball could land.  Have the viewable area somewhat limited I could understand otherwise the player could just look at the entire world to see what was up ahead.  Combined with not always being able to see where you are shooting, often times the camera is unable to keep the ball in frame long enough to see what happened to you.  Maybe this was an attempt to be similar to the camera operators in real golf games who have to track the tee shots, but that might be giving too much credit.  In the picture here, I shot off a telephone pole then bounced off of something, possibly one of the birds that littered this area because there was a tell-tale squawk right before the bounce.

The game sells for $0.99 and is currently (as of 01/16/2020) on sale for $0.49, which is a decent price for what the game is.  Had the game been broken up into say, nine individual areas, even if the developers used the exact same world as it stands in the game, it could add to the perceived value of the game.  With there being just the one world/map/area, it feels like there is not a lot of game here.  And with there being only one world, it makes practicing on certain obstacles like the backyard stealth area or the windmills very difficult to improve upon.  Had there been individual levels (unlockable as being able to play them individually after completing the whole game), it would allow players to practice stages before attempting to make a run for the leaderboard, which would only tabulate scores when you play the entire course (as opposed to jumping around).  Using this format, I could see the game selling for $4.99, or do the frequent sale thing for 75% off at $1.25.

As it stands, Nicky The Home Alone Golf Ball does feel a lot like a proof of concept, something that the developers would show around to publishers as a sampling, that there could be more on the way, but alas, this is the entire game.  Even though the game encourages you to replay multiple times to challenge the top scorers on the leaderboard, I do not see myself replaying the game much at all after this first playthrough.  It was a decent experience that lasted just over an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half at the longest, but even then, I might be more inclined had the world been broken up into more easily to digest chunks.  You know, like the front nine of a golf course, rather than playing a single obstacle-laden course stretching some 3,138 yards to a single hole at the end.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

Oh Let Me Make Sure The Camera Doesn't Quite Get It


P.S.  I realized pretty early on in my playthrough that I would not be able to make a run at the leaderboard, and a final score of 410 I was semi-happy with despite getting frustrated with the windmills and just shooting without a specific care.

Final-final critique about the leaderboard is that it obscures the in-game congratulatory text.  Maybe it's just bad UI when the game was in development, not taking into account a full list of 10 players, but that's just me.