Capcom Hates You - Breath of Fire VI In Development as a Phone/Tablet Game

Alongside a little under a dozen other titles revealed during a Network Game Conference by Capcom, focusing on mobile and social games, there's one that stands out quite a bit for several reasons.  That title is Breath of Fire 6 and though the title of this post has already spoiled it, this is the same Conference where Monster Hunter Frontier G was announced for the PS3 and Wii U, so there was some modicum of hope interspersed amongst the original few to learn of this.  It was for naught, as Breath of Fire 6 is basically being saddled with everything we don't want out of a game these days - It's going to have an online element, if not an outright online/social focus, it's being made specifically for Smartphones/Tablets and PC as a browser-based game and it's designed specifically for a touch interface.  Plus, it looks like the above screenshot that contains what I can only imagine is the main character, maybe.  You will notice that he does not have blue hair, nor is he currently a dragon.

There has obviously already been feedback because of this and none of it is positive in the least, but, well, I don't think Capcom much cares.  This isn't the first time they've gone full-steam into an unfavorable decision about a much-loved franchise and it likely won't be the last.  A lot of the outrage is much of the same, directed at the expectations and thoughts of the platform as a whole that they're taking this to, and they're not exactly unfounded.  I can't find concrete evidence as to -how- this is going to work (if there's going to be a single-player mode at all, if it's going to be an MMO or an MMO-like, if it's going to be microtransaction-based) but there really aren't a whole lot of examples of Tablet/Phone RPGs with online/social aspects working out well an intuitively to the player's direct benefit, and nobody's willing to give Capcom the benefit of the doubt on their attempt.  Least of all me, really.  I, like most others, can feel my eyes glaze over when I hear "browser-based", because....there's just not a lot of faith there when you don't have anything tangible of the game itself.  Even a download, when it comes to your PC, isn't present because of it being played via your browser if you're not playing it on a tablet or phone.

This won't be the first major departure that the Breath of Fire series has seen, as the last instance in the series was exceptionally polarizing - to the point where people took offense to calling it Breath of Fire 5 in the first place.  I haven't played it myself, but I've heard it likened to a Roguelike which is....interesting, but certainly not a classic Breath of Fire gameplay style.  Still, regardless of the opinion of that, I think everyone is more or less united in the opinion that it was at least a proper try, given its platform and the effort behind it (as well as carrying over BoF-specific things) which is hilariously a little bit of a unifying factor for the community for that game against this new one.  While this could be another case of history repeating itself in regards to we people who play games being afraid of change, it's also important to discuss whether or not there's merit.  There's definitely merit here as much as there was merit to question Dragon Quarter - after all, you can't turn Legend of Zelda into a Third-Person Shooter where Link exclusively uses slingshots, bows and crossbows and not expect people to say that it's not a Legend of Zelda game anymore.  There are certain 'requirements' placed on everything that necessitate their design and deviating too far from those sparks things like these.

According to a Eurogamer update, it's still up in the air as to whether or not the game will come to Western shores, and it's no surprise that people are of a mind to wish that it simply wouldn't.  Regardless, Capcom has done something they honestly can't take back - whether or not we like it, this game, however it turns out, is Breath of Fire 6.  Well, I suppose they could cancel it, they're good at that after all, but I highly doubt they're going to do that, nor are they going to drastically change its scope and platform, nor are they going to simply rename it to something else, -completely- divorcing it from the series in all ways and not just stylistic, gameplay-centric and traditional as it stands now.  Maybe.  To be honest, there's very little information about the game, and even less of it is reliable at this point, but at the very least, this was definitely not a good foot to put forward, and as we know from recent experience, that's all it takes sometimes.

I always like making "Capcom Hates You" posts, they're hilarious in a sad way

Get Fucked, Microsoft

I'm not supposed to be so outwardly negative.

I'm supposed to be responsible.  Supposed to try and take everything objectively and lay it out that way.  Supposed to have a certain level of separation between the news and my opinion of it.  I like to think I accomplish that more often than not, whether that's actually true or not.

Tonight is the exception.

Allll those things we were told in 'rumors' about the XBone that made it seem like this horribly ill-conceived idea that nobody really should've expected to go along with because they are that dumb?  All of those things that are so unbelievable consumer un-friendly that it has entered a realm of absurdity to assume they were true?  All of those things that should, by all logic and rights, be a fucking death wish for the product?

They are all true.

Internet Check-In Every 24 Hours or else your gaming console cannot play games?  Confirmed.  Officially on XBox.com.

With Xbox One you can game offline for up to 24 hours on your primary console, or one hour if you are logged on to a separate console accessing your library. Offline gaming is not possible after these prescribed times until you re-establish a connection, but you can still watch live TV and enjoy Blu-ray and DVD movies. 

Thank fucking Christ for the under-lined, though.  I mean, if you don't have internet for an extended period of time, at least you can use your $500 GAME CONSOLE to watch a fucking movie!  Because who needs to blow off steam with a video game when you can't do anything but watch TV/movies or read physical copies of things that this type of product specifically expects you to eschew.  Why buy DVDs/Blu-Rays when Netflix is right there with all sorts of stuff (Mogs Note:  Netflix does not actually have all sorts of stuff that you want.  Did you hear about South Park and old Bond movies being de-listed?  DIGITAL FUTURE!) until oh no, it's not right there because the fucking internet is out which is a common fucking occurrence.  But gaming?  Every 24 hours if you want to play it, which is fine and dandy if you live in wonderland where your internet ever ever ever goes out for more than an hour or so at a time.  Less so if you live in the real world.

Is giving your copy of a game to a friend or a store more complicated than it needs to be?  Confirmed.  And on XBox.com.

Today, some gamers choose to sell their old disc-based games back for cash and credit. We designed Xbox One so game publishers can enable you to trade in your games at participating retailers.  Microsoft does not charge a platform fee to retailers, publishers, or consumers for enabling transfer of these games.

In our role as a game publisher, Microsoft Studios will enable you to give your games to friends or trade in your Xbox One games at participating retailers. Third party publishers may opt in or out of supporting game resale and may set up business terms or transfer fees with retailers.

Cutting the bullshit out, what this all means is that 'certain retailers' (Meaning, likely GameStop, -maybe- Best Buy and/or Wal-Mart since they're in the Used business) will be able to take your XBone games when you want to trade them in and it will likely be fine.  And you can buy that game used and it will also probably be fine, maybe.  Because third-parties will be allowed to decide every single thing that happens with their game.  EA decides they don't want you to be able to sell your games?  Well, they opt out of supporting that.  That simple.  Activision wants to assign a transfer fee instead of just blocking resale entirely?  Hell, they're more than able to do that.  The optimist in me wants to say that most companies will maintain the status quo since, well, that is entirely possible with this method....I think, but the optimist in me is stupid.  Also, it...kind of directly clashes with something else that's being hailed as 'the good news' in all of this.

Your friends and family, your guests and acquaintances get unlimited access to all of your games.  Anyone can play your games on your console--regardless of whether you are logged in or their relationship to you.

Xbox One will enable new forms of access for families. Up to ten members of your family can log in and play from your shared games library on any Xbox One. Just like today, a family member can play your copy of Forza Motorsport at a friend’s house. Only now, they will see not just Forza, but all of your shared games.  You can always play your games, and any one of your family members can be playing from your shared library at a given time.

I'm gonna be honest.  I don't know what the fuck this is, but I certainly don't think it's as good as they're making it seem.  There's absolutely no way the XBone is designed in such a way that you can associate your account with someone else, stating that they're your brother or what have you, and then only one of you has to ever buy one copy of a game ever.  Mostly because it's this exact scenario that this draconian bullshit is meant to do away with.  Things like this, allowing people to experience a game without paying a dime for it, that is literally the only reason for this whole non-used game bullshit, so to say that it's possible leaves me wondering exactly what the catch is.  Normally, I'd say, you know "They have to be signed into your account", but the first part kind of cancels that out...somewhat.  I dunno, maybe you have to initially sign in as you, but then they can sign out or something.  I don't know, but that is just -weird- and goes completely against everything else.  There -has- to be a caveat.

Especially since this is still true.

Xbox One is designed so game publishers can enable you to give your disc-based games to your friends. There are no fees charged as part of these transfers. There are two requirements: you can only give them to people who have been on your friends list for at least 30 days and each game can only be given once.

Minding that the publishers -also- likely have control over this area, which means you will likely -never see it implemented-, this carries the company line....directly away from that last bit.  So you can let up to ten friends and family members play your games with 'no strings attached' but if you want to give a game to them, you can only do it with that -one- friend (they can't give it to anyone else), and they have to have been your friend for a month for it to activate?  In what world is this step necessary when the other thing is so wide open and friendly and such?  Maybe it's just me.  Maybe I'm just not seeing the correlation which makes this good and that bad.  Maybe I'm the only one who thinks they managed to fuck up one single thing in their otherwise clear and concise "Fuck you" letter to everyone.

That's just me, of course.  If you're in a position that the XBone's short-comings will never cause an issue for you, well, more power to you.  If you're -also- in a position where you want to support it regardless of all this, well, I can't stop you.  Unfortunately.  This shit is just damaging and there is a very, very real chance that absolutely no one who matters will care.  Because all of this used game business is -likely- a Microsoft power play since we haven't heard word one of a similar thing from the PS4, yet we knew all about this for the XBone months in advance.  I think I can't say it any better than I did on the Penny Arcade boards.

The way I'm thinking of things, it seems like Microsoft might think this was their way to keep the train going from this generation. Yes, the Wii out-sold them by miles and miles, but to Microsoft, competition was Sony. For a -long- time, they completely out-paced Sony and only here towards the mid-end was Sony actually catching up. Still, things like Sports games, big multiplayer focus games all sell better on the 360 because of whatever reason you could think of - 360 was out first, People really dig XBox Live, etc. etc. But with this new round, they know they're launching around the same time, so the slate is 'clean' and they have to have something to drive it.

So they go, "Games". And how do you get games? By sucking up to Publishers/Developers.

It is entirely possible that this is Microsoft's baby because it is a fucking huge power play. If you set up this system, it's enticing to the Publishers/Developers which brings them around for big exclusives (Respawn's thing) and great partnerships to make your version of a game more enticing (EA's Special Partnership). As many, many, many, many, many companies have proven time and time again, people who have objections about a product because this and that really don't matter in the least so long as that product is shiny enough to make a larger amount of people buy it and not care.

So, really, it is very possible that Sony will come out and win our hearts by saying "Off-line always is totally viable, no DRM", because the way Microsoft figures it, they've already won our wallets if that is the case. Barring big, big backlashes (not a bunch of people being angry on internet forums) that -might actually be the case-, since if you have the publishers, you have the games, and if you have the games, you have the customers.

For all you folks going "Oh, the PS4 is going to be just as bad!", well, there is your scenario that suggests it might not be.  We'll find out for sure at E3, hopefully, but Microsoft is going to be there in force with a load of exclusives that I'm willing to bet aren't -all- from EA.  What Sony shows off as exclusive will likely just be because of good old-fashioned money, which might just be the only card they have in hand.  Sure, maybe we can hope that the XBone won't do so hot, thus informing everyone involved that we don't want this kind of bullshit, but I'm really not expecting very many people to ignore the allure of Halo 5, Respawn's thing and, well, other Halos.  So I'm not really too hopeful for this generation.  But hell, I'll be set with my PS3, Vita and 3DS if nothing else, though I imagine a PS4 will eventually find its way into my collection, since I don't foresee any of this bullshit landing on it.

Quick Post - CenturyLink is Literally the Worst

My phone service, which is also my internet service because DSL is just so grand and the only option available for the area I live in, has been going out....only at night for the last two nights.  Which isn't suspicious at all.  It's not desperately shouting of "SOMEONE INCOMPETENT IS MESSING WITH THE INFRASTRUCTURE" or anything like that.  Of course, it could just be that the lines are literally frayed or something underground since service suspiciously gets spotty whenever there's a heavy downpour.  Or it could just be any number of things that are too stupid and annoying to really go on about.  Really, I've run all the scenarios in my head, and there's not a single one that accounts for them not being completely and totally in the wrong somehow since this is not an issue that is in the household or anything like that.  We did the whole, plug a phone directly into the box to see if -it- works thing, and no, no it did not.

Basically, the point is that when the internet keeps cutting out, it gets.....demoralizing.  Infuriating.  All sorts of negative things that sort of wreck the whole creative flow.  As such, it's hard to write something when the thing keeps coming up and saying "YOUR POST DID NOT SAVE" and that brings your attention to the modem that is rocking only two lights instead of four.  Which means that you just have to sit there and wait for the two to five minutes that it takes for the phone to magically start working again and the internet to follow-up.  So last night and tonight have been trying to say the least.  There's no rhyme or reason to when it actually goes out - sometimes it's on for hours, other times it goes out three times in ten minutes.  One technician was already out, but he apparently just plugged something into the outside box, scratched his ass and went "WELL, IT'S WORKING" before leaving to half-ass quarter-ass the next job.

So, you know, until it gets fixed my posting might be sparse.  Or I might just do short little posts like this one to at least -attempt- to keep going and whatnot while hoping for one of those periods where the phones decide to work for an extended period of time.  But the point is, it's obviously going to affect things until it's fixed or it miraculously fixes itself.  I wouldn't be surprised if the latter ends up happening since I doubt a technician is going to magically show up when the phone is actually not working, nor will he stick around for a time in which it stops working.  Which means we basically just have to roll with it, which is....just great.  Fantastic.  At least we're going to get a credit for the days affected.  I'll make sure of that.

shit, I totally could've made a 'phoning it in' pun about the technician, goddamnit

Grumble Grumble Raaaaaaage

So, ever since my Twitter gadget broke and I had absolutely no recourse but to remove it, which annoys me to no end still, I've been a little annoyed with things on Blogger.  Yes, I realize the Twitter gadget I was using was third-party, so Google technically has no need to assist in fixing it or even assure that it works.  Yes, I realize it is a very small thing and yes, I realize that I can probably find one that works beyond the list of gadgets that blogger 'supports' in the "More Gadgets" tab when you're looking to add a new gadget in the whole layout thing.  The thing is, it's fucking Twitter.  It shouldn't be a goddamn issue to imbed Twitter in my goddamn blog because social networking is fucking everywhere and especially Twitter is everywhere.  Everyone uses Twitter.  Hell Chance is even on Twitter!  That they can't have a third-party relationship that is enough for an 'official' gadget is just baffling.

But, you know, whatever.  That's a thing, it's not acceptable, but it is since there is technically some measure of it being out of respective hands.  I don't like it, but I understand.

What isn't acceptable, however, is when one of the official Blogger gadgets isn't working.  And especially not when all it is is a fucking custom search bar gadget when Blogger is owned by fucking Google.  This is an entire level of absurdity that I would never imagine in my wildest suggestions or ideas because this is elementary shit right here.

Go ahead.  Give it a shot.  The little gadget on the side that says "Big Enough to Need This Now" because my blog has over 700 posts now and damned if I'm going to search through them all when I need to find something I've referenced in the past is the one that I'm talking of.  You type in anything, "review", "Playstation", "Yakuza" anything that you know I've talked about before or anything and hit enter and it always comes back "No results found." for what is, and I'm being truthful here, no damn reason.  It has effectively become as useless as the Twitter gadget before it 'officially' broke in that -now- you can't even add it back as an element anymore, but before that, it was just a fancy "Follow me" button.  Which, coincidentally, they don't even offer that in the third party gadgets.  (Well, there is one Twitter gadget that has a few revisions....in spanish.  I think.)

Thank God there's three individual Google+ gadgets, though.  Don't know what we would do without those.

My only real line of thinking here is that perhaps it's not working because I have not update the layout in a while and I do believe that Blogger was pushing new templates -hard- a while ago, if only because I think I remember Chance talking about changing his up.  But I don't quite remember if he changed to something even newer than -mine- since his was...obviously before mine, or if he's using one of the same templates I had to pick from.  I would assume the former, given that his search bar works just fine, whereas mine....doesn't, but I really doubt that would be why.  All I really know, obviously, is that it's not fucking working and that's really bothersome.  So bothersome that it was really the only thing I could think about tonight.

So...there's that.  Raaaaaaage and all that.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is Also Dumb

Ever since I popped XIII-2 in after beating XIII and subsequently reviewing it, I have been trying so very hard to like it.  Because it's apparently good!  I mean, that's all I've heard about it since it came out at the start of this year and, after what was considered a 'bad game' like Final Fantasy XIII, the idea that the sequel was, then, good seemed like it had to have a -lot- done right to earn such praise.  In most cases, even when you don't particularly like a game that is praised as 'good' by the collective known as 'the internet', you can at least see why they judged such as they did, so at the very least, even if XIII is 'bad' and XIII-2 is 'decent' if not great, then hey, you've upgraded in any case, right?  So everything's sugar and rainbows no matter what, because at least, at least you're getting Final Fantasy XIII 'if it were good'.  Surely, I'm not really hammering in this point for any reason in particular.

So, before I address what is perhaps the least subtle thing I've said in the entirety of writing this blog, I would like to once again direct your attention to a recent post titled "How Final Fantasy XIII Could Have Been Better" because I pointed out three specific areas in which FFXIII came up short - Linearity, Poor Balance in terms of the Skill System and General lack of Focus with the story and elements as a whole.  I have stated, as well, in the past that the Battle System is an unusually good aspect of the game, that the Crystarium was not wholly bad and was, in fact, close to being good and that the characters, if nothing else, were fantastically established and grown throughout Final Fantasy XIII.  For XIII-2 to be praised so highly, you would think that it would at least fix a couple of the issues while strengthening the good parts, because that's generally how things work - a clear improvement gets a cheering.  And it is because of all that, that I think Final Fantasy XIII-2 is an amazing game, because it manages to take everything I just said, good and bad, and make it worse.  Frankly, I am fucking baffled and amazed at just how the hell that works.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a game that knows even less about what the hell it wants to do than its predecessor and that is saying something.  Being that it's a time travel story (spoiler:  FFXIII-2 has a Time Travel story), you go into it knowing that by the end of it, absolutely goddamn nothing will make sense because nobody knows how to write a competent time travel story that isn't Chrono Trigger, and I'm sure people will argue on that one too.  That, however, doesn't excuse the absolute laziness that goes through the rest of it, hitting on the parts that aren't even directly affected by time travel dickery.  For example, and this is pretty much the biggest example and the one I've been gritting my teeth against for the entirety of today in which I put many, many hours into the game, let me tell you about Lightning.  And when I say let me tell you about Lightning, I mean I am going to openly spoil Final Fantasy XIII so if you don't want to know anything, please move on to another post, sorry for the inconvenience.  I can't very well explain the laziness in the story without explaining the story, unfortunately, and I imagine most of the folks who want to play it, really want to play it, have already and know this anyway.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 begins with Lightning in a strange land that is quickly identified as 'Valhalla' where she and Odin are fighting some dude and it's all very epic I assure you and stuff is going on.  Then one of our protagonists, Noel, is introduced and speaks to Lightning who gives him a magical moogle (I am serious) and tells him to go find Serah on the other end of a time gate.  This is important.  So, blah blah blah, Noel finds Serah and they become TIME TRAVEL BUDDIES and BLAH BLAH BLAH, none of this is actually important, really except that the gist of it is Serah says "I had a dream that Lightning was in Valhalla, so I know she's alive" and Noel says "Yeah, I was there, she is" and Serah is genuinely fucking surprised by this.  They go on to meet old friends, discuss the situation and find more evidence that lends credence to the story of the guy who literally brought a fucking magical transforming Moogle that can talk and mentions Lightning through a time gate saying he saw Lightning.  And every.  single.  time. they 'realize', with great shock that Lightning 'might' be alive in Valhalla and that maybe they can get to her through a time gate.

I wish I was kidding.  I honestly do, because this shit is offensively stupid and it detracts from the overall experience which isn't too high to begin with.  Because the game can branch, in that you can go off and dick around in many time periods at once, I assume -some- of it can be contributed to the overlap in ensuring you establish a story no matter where the player goes, but after a certain point, you're literally somewhere you can only get after Point A and Point A included a portion where this whole Lightning bullshit was talked about already, and regardless, you have to play through everything eventually, so maybe you just need to manage it a little tighter in the narrative, which, after FFXIII is a fucking -riot- to say. 

But I can't really say too much of the story or the narrative overall just yet since I haven't beaten the game.  I imagine that when I do, I'll have an entirely larger post devoted to picking it apart completely and totally because I am very annoyed.  I guess the thing that's the problem is that I just really saw potential with FFXIII and with the assurance that XIII-2 was a good game, it had earned that by capitalizing on what was good about the original.  Instead, I am greeted with something that is praised for reasons I honestly, truly cannot comprehend on any level.  I am not having fun playing the game as I was with XIII towards the middle of it.  Maybe that will change later on, as I am probably still early on in it, but I really don't know.  I know that I'm very, very over-leveled for the area I'm in, so I'm absolutely steam-rolling everything which, honestly, kind of takes away from the fun too.  Odd as that might be, being able to stomp everything, including bosses, in your path isn't even fun in XIII-2.  Perhaps not yet, but certainly not now at the very least.

Storms and Fried Routers and Chrono Trigger DS Rants

So, as I warned might have happened on my Twitter the other night, the storm that we had was a rather nasty one.  It was pretty obvious that we were going to lose power and I unplugged things that I worried weren't safe, whereas things that I thought would be safe, I kept plugged in.  However, when the power went out and there was a rather loud 'Pop' noise, it was clear that when the power came back, something would reveal itself as a casualty.  The next day, when it came back, the problem ended up being the wireless router.  It was fried.  Like, plugging it in resulted in just the number "4" port lighting up as a light would come on during a horror movie - that practiced, tell-tale flickering that means something is either struggling to light, or simply struggling to -not- turn off.  On the cusp of life, you could say, but it was safe to also say that such a sign means the router is no longer going to work for its intended purpose; that of supplying internet.  So I have a new one set up (I won't be sharing what it is because I don't need the purchase criticized or praised; it's bought and set-up, not worrying about it anymore) and I presume it works, since before me is my Vita with a fully loaded up youtube video of Moto - BoA, but we shall see if it lasts, since it was almost -too- easy.

These outages are getting fairly taxing, as I'm sure you all realize, being as much affected by them as I am, but there's not a whole lot I can do against them.  The upside is that generally when they happen, either the downtime means that enough news is brought up in the meanwhile, or that I, without internet, am forced to do -something- that I can then talk about.  As you might infer from the above picture and the title, I am totally up for talking about Chrono Trigger DS which I picked up, much as I did the last time there was an outage and in my playings this time, I have made it to one of the two big things that was added to the DS port, and it is very clearly the single thing that pretty much everyone agrees shouldn't have been added in.  Or at least, I'm assuming everyone agrees because the Lost Sanctum, what I'm talking about, is unequivocally, universally terrible in design and execution and is a blight on gaming as a whole, not to mention the otherwise great game (and good, not great, port of it).  This is probably where you think I'm kidding.  The next few paragraphs is where I'm going to convince you otherwise.

As always, I'm going to blatantly talk about Chrono Trigger and Cross while throwing out plot points like candy in a parade, so if you're not into that, look away.  So, the Lost Sanctum is a place that exists not only in the Pre-Historic age (noted as 65,000,000 BC), but also in the Middle Ages (noted as 600 AD), denoting a 65,000,600 years worth of difference.  This is, unsurprisingly, important to remember since I specifically brought it up.  However, despite the two gates (they are gates, as in Time/Space gates on the map, so it's not like it's a finite, existing place in the world) being in those two eras (and no others, further denoting it as a non-finite place in the world of Chrono Trigger itself) it's only done so as a convenient excuse to have to time-traveling an excessive amount of times to accomplish goals, and Pre-History and the Middle Ages are pretty much the two places lacking the most reasons to visit.  (Antiquity, or 12,000 BC, should be on that list, but, well, the Kingdom of Zeal portion and the whole Lavos blowing errthang up kind of nixes any reason to consider the place for things.)

Regardless, as I have inferred, the time periods have little to do with it since I'm of a mind that the two Lost Sanctums aren't really 65,000,600 years apart.  There are various reasons for this, of which I will eventually cover, but the one prime among them is the fact that I am pretty sure that the Lost Sanctum is -supposed- to be Dinopolis in its early days (both times), which is pretty much based solely on the fact that Dinopolis is a place that existed where only Reptites lived (as they do in Lost Sanctum) and the port job just -loved- adding in superfluous things to tie it closer to Chrono Cross.  Having you do menial tasks for the folks who would end up getting transported into the proper timeline and trying to destroy the world with dragons sort of fits the bill.  And yes, that is a plot point from Chrono Cross:  'Time', in an attempt to bring balance to the world, brought in Dinopolis, a civilization of dinosaurs that never grew up technologically to counteract Humans using super-technology to accidentally time travel a super-advanced scientific facility that harbored FATE, a machine that controlled the world in Illuminatti-esque ways or something.  Because Dinopolis had Dragon Gods that stood absolutely no chance against FATE.  Try not to think of it too hard.

One of the strengths of Chrono Trigger is the fact that it uses on-screen monsters so that you can, in theory, skip most battles if that is your thing.  And when you're doing menial fetch quests, you generally like to just get from Point A to Point B with as little resistance as possible, since you just want to get it done.  Of course, one of the failings of the Lost Sanctum is that it takes this tenant and just kind of throws it out the window, in that the detection boxes or the forced battle boxes, cover entire paths.  In layman's terms, it simply means that the places surrounding the Lost Sanctum proper (as in, the cave where the Reptites live) all have at least a few forced battles per screen.  They're not even difficult battles, and some of them are simply insulting, like one of the Fetch Quest Mountain screens features a battle with an enemy called a Jadewing.  A single Jadewing.  You have to use magic to kill it.  It goes out with a single Dark Bomb if you're rockin' Magus, and likely goes out with a single magic attack from anyone else because it's a pissant enemy.  Those forced battles are both way, of course, since going up the mountain necessitates that you come back down it, obviously.

So honestly, if it were just a matter of getting requests from all the reptites, going out, doing them, suffering the forced battles and coming back to be done with them, it would be bad enough, right?  Some poor design decisions, assuredly, but nothing too dire.  That is why it doesn't end there.  Only one reptite thinks of a task for you at a time, meaning that you'll have to do them all pretty much in succession.  There is -some- overlap, as I have three requests, so to speak, open at the moment, but just to get to a place where I could technically do those three requests, I had to do another request that is an utter abomination in design and is pretty much what governs all of my anger at the port at this moment.  This, coincidentally, also reinforces my "This is not 65,000,600 years apart" theory, which kind of helps, but it also just makes everything another degree of stupid.  Simply because my position that it's not that far apart is -purely- conjecture, whereas one would assume that it is to be considered that otherwise.

One of the things that happens in the Pre-History Lost Sanctum is that one of the Reptites says "I need something from the top of the mountain, but a Nu is guarding the bottom of it".  So you go and beat the Nu and then go get the thing from the top of the mountain because the guardian was just -a- reason not to go, not -the- reason.  The Nu, after you beat it, says it's going to train for your next encounter, which I'm sure you can't guess where it happens.  So, for various reasons, you'll need to go to the 600 AD Lost Sanctum to go up the same mountain and when you do, the Nu is at the bottom because Nus live for several millions of years and challenges you to a fight if you make it to the top of the mountain.  You need to get to the top of the mountain anyway.  So he runs off and you head towards the top of the mountain.  There is a problem, however, as the first rope ladder you encounter has broken in the middle which is entirely a possible thing that has happened after sixty five million years.  Or, presumably, the Nu broke it because he is a dick.  You have to, of course, approach the ladder close enough so that your characters can stop and confirm that the ladder is indeed broken, instead of just turning around after seeing it is broken.

This is still sort of non-offensive at this point.  One of the reptites has gone on and on about ladders so you think he is an expert on them.  So you go to him and he's like "Well, there's some sturdy vines in the glade to the south."  The glade, in 600 AD, is what you have to pass through to get to Fetch Quest mountain.  In Pre-History, it's a swamp.  I'm sure this is how nature works.  So you get the sturdy vines which are in fact vines and not....you know...something else.  Something that could presumably be more sturdy than vines which are just vegetation which is known to rot away and such.  Especially over the course of sixty-five million years, if that's what they really expect us to believe.  (By the way, if that's what we really are to believe, then that Nu has been training for that sixty five million years and yet you are expected to beat him?)  So you think "Well, I have these vines, so I need to take them to the ladder guy" right?  Wrong.  If you take them to him, he will not acknowledge them whatsoever.  And you will probably be confused.

What you have to do is go back to the broken ladder to confirm that it is, indeed, still broken and to realize that there is no way you can hang the new ladder vines, since if you could hang them, you wouldn't need them.  You -need- to trigger this event.  It's literally like two lines of dialogue if that, but it's one of those event flags.  So you have to take these vines, once again going through all the forced battles all through this entire journey of going to this point on the mountain, through the glade and swamp, and go back to pre-history to go through the swamp again to the point where the ladder is broken....so you can move a foot to the left and drop the vines which make a carbon copy rope ladder.  Which is supposed to survive the apparent Sixty Five Million years between events.  And of course, it -does-, since once you go back to 600 AD -again- and go through the glade -again- to get to the mountain -again-, there is the vine ladder that looks like a rope ladder right next to the broken rope ladder that actually is a rope ladder.  And to top it all off, when you go up the vine ladder that looks like a rope ladder absolutely nobody remarks on it.

I'm not sure I've effectively quantified just how poorly this all is executed and, indeed, designed, but I like to believe that I have.  Ten Trips to a single area in a mountain for what is honestly just one request (beating a Nu's ass twice over the span of, again, apparently Sixty Five Million years) with at least two forced battles each way, I think, hammers the point in a little more effectively than I could hope to do otherwise, but it still doesn't really cover the soul-crushing tedium that is generated by the Lost Sanctum.  This is just -one portion- of the entire thing that was apparently so good that Squeenix thought it was just a fabulous idea to throw into this otherwise half-baked port of a great game.  "Oh, but Mogs, it's purely optional!"  Yeah, so is like everything else at endgame which is when this unlocks.  Getting ultimate weapons, going through the Black Omen, reviving the main character of the fucking game is all optional.  They're not entirely banal, superfluous and terrible though.  Still, if a selling point of an enhanced port is the 'enhanced' portions of it, as in the stuff that was not there originally, or the stuff that is changed, I would suggest that it's a little less optional than those things, even, since this is supposed to be the stuff that makes veterans of the game want to buy it.  So that poses the question:  Who the -hell- would want this?

Fez Is Busted, Will Remain Busted

Oh boy.  Strap in for this one, kids, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

This was somewhat of a hot story yesterday that seems to have died down because...well, I'm not quite sure why.  I believe I'll submit a few theories towards the end here, but let's just start off with the facts, shall we?  So, I'm sure you've all at least heard of the game, Fez, considering it apparently has about five years of development under its belt, with the last two of them simply being release date delays and the like for the casual outsider.  It did, eventually, release to the surprise of most people, on XBLA all the way back in April and, surprising absolutely nobody, it was really really buggy.  As in, 'game-breaking problems' buggy.  As in, corrupt your save buggy.  This is important, do not forget it.  About a month later, specifically May 17th, the long-awaited patch was submitted to Microsoft and failed certification about a week later due to two 'critical issues'.  Truly a good omen and not a sign of things yet to come.  So it took some time, but around June 8th, a new build of the patch was submitted and was finally released June 22nd to the tune of everyone stating in a completely flat manner: "Do not use it."

This is because the patch, finally released, did manage to fix a number of the problems that were in the game since its release two months earlier, but it also introduced another one that, surprise had the nasty side-effect of corrupting your save game.  Again.  The only suggested method was to clear your 360's cache which, I will be honest in saying I have absolutely no idea how that would help, clearly because I am not a brilliant developer, but aside from that, not a whole lot could be done.  Because of the issue which, at the time was said to be "fairly widespread" (seriously, it's in the post go look at it), the patch was pulled and Polytron set to work on trying to patch the patch.  It was all really kind of sad, I suppose, and it just seemed like Polytron couldn't catch a break.  You take a look at stories like this and go "Well, this is one of the flaws of the 'indie' team, in that you don't have a whole lot of people and resources to test as extensively as larger developers" which is a sad truth, but a truth nonetheless.  And clearly, trying to give the people who have supported you the best product you can make is the goal.

...Unless it costs money to patch it a second time.  Then everybody can go get fucked.  While a bit over-dramatic on my part admittedly, that is unfortunately the message that I read, even though I'm not part of the people who are affected by the 'fairly widespread' problem.  Which apparently wasn't 'fairly widespread' if you believe Polytron, who are saying that the issue only affects under 1% of the people who played the game.  Which seems totally legit and I can't see any reason why that would be a falsehood at all or anything.  I would, of course, like to know just how this information was ascertained since I am apparently not savvy enough to know just how your save game getting corrupted can be reported back to the developer without going to loony "Big Brother" types of lengths.  Apparently included in this less-than-1% of people are generally people who have either beaten Fez or are close to the end of the game, which means that they are apparently people who have 'pretty much seen what Fez has to offer' which the implication is that they are fairly low-priority because of that.

We believe the save file corruption issue mostly happened to players who had completed, or almost completed the game. If you hadn’t already seen most of what FEZ had to offer, your save file is probably safe.

That's how that reads to me at least.  Maybe, again, I'm looking a little too hard into it and picking out stuff that isn't there or whatever.  But this is my post and this is pretty much where my editorializing starts, since I pretty much laid out the 'facts' as they are over the course of the end of Fez's journey through development to release to post-release support, such as it is.  Regardless, all that the above means is that the patch that was pulled because there was apparently a reason that it had to be pulled was put right back out for players to download against all previous warning because it's 'good enough'.  Because getting to the end of the game, going off to do....you know anything and coming back to a corrupt save is totally acceptable and we should all just go "Oh, Polytron, you jokesters, now I get to play your game again so I can see the ending!" Likely as canned laughter comes out of somewhere and the credits begin rolling.  Because this is not a realistic situation, you see, that's the joke.

Now, something that I feel I should put down before I go on any further; is everything on Microsoft's side perfectly acceptable, considering I'm of a mind that Polytron's position is not?  Of course not.  Many developers have said that the patch certification process (for the second and beyond patches to a game as everyone gets a free one, which I've stated) can be as expensive as $40,000, which is the number everybody is throwing around regardless.  While I understand that the members of the certification process have a very specialized task, are numerous in number to increase their overall effectivity and must be paid for their time, I really doubt they're seeing, as a whole, a good portion of the alleged $40,000.  I would go so far as to suggest that they barely see any of it, as QA testers (which I assume the Cert. board basically is) do not really have an enviable job in any aspect as the work is tedious, the conditions are often less-than-stellar and the pay is not supposed to be all that great.  So clearly, if the number is indeed $40,000, it's entirely too high, especially if that is attached to patch number two, number three, four, etc. individually.

So honestly, from a pure logistics angle, I can't -really- blame Polytron and/or Phil Fish (seeing as he gets tossed out regardless, he seems to have been thrust into a spokesperson seat for the developers and thus is held responsible accordingly) since if the numbers they're using are true (which we might as well assume they are, considering we're probably never going to get any other 'truth' of the situation) then it's ridiculous.  Let's use the 100,000 copies sold figure that was tossed out as the early earnings figure.  Obviously they've probably sold quite a few more of those, but it's a nice, easy number for math purposes.  (You didn't think you'd get out of a post like this without math from me, did you?) 100,000 copies at $10 a copy (yes yes, Microsoft points, blah blah, it's ten fucking dollars) is, obviously, a cool million that Polytron probably sees, like a half of, conservatively.  If that.  Using the <1% figure, that means that less than 1,000 people are affected by the issue.  Does it suck to be in that group of 999 people?  Absolutely.  But from a purely numbers stand-point (I have to stress the numbers part since I will be making a radical 180 next paragraph) it's very minute, considering that $40K is 8% of the, again, very conservative estimate regarding the net gains Polytron saw from Fez.

Here's the thing, though.  Just because it doesn't make sense from a numbers standpoint, that doesn't mean you get to be a dick about it.  Marginalizing people, looking at cost vs. profits and the like is a big part of what people dislike about big developers/publishers, and it's likely one of the driving forces behind Indie Gaming as a whole.  Since it's supposed to be about a person or small group of people with a vision and a little bit of programming talent bringing that vision to all of us in any manner possible.  In that vein, it's how we've seen such games as Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World from Zeboyd Games, and other such Indie 'darlings' as they've appeared over the last couple of years.  Just people who said "Hey, I want to make an awesome game" and then did so.  Steam was the most accommodating service for these people, apparently, so a lot of them went that direction.  Others (yes, like Zeboyd) turned to XBox Live Indie Games, considering it was a game development platform put out there for the very specific purpose of delivering the tools to make a game to Indie Devs and then giving them a platform to sell it from.  Of course, Microsoft doesn't seem very good at the latter part since XBLIG seems to get little attention, but that's a whole other story.

Saying "Thanks for the money, hope your save doesn't get corrupted, good luck!" is the very epitome of something you don't get to say in -any- circumstance if you are a developer.  No matter if you're an Indie Developer, a big-name one, or whatever, this is simply something that you don't get to do without expecting justified backlash.  The fact that Microsoft is a big company and expects you to pay when you screw up absolves you of exactly zero.  And honestly, the thing that annoys me the most with this whole situation is that instead of just thinking for precisely -one minute- or any other quantifiable amount of time, Polytron dusted off the Indie soapbox and hopped onto it, despite how silly doing so is, all things considered.  "THE MAN is oppressing us!  This is why Indie things are superior!  RA RA!  They want a large sum of money so we can fix our thrice-bugged game!"  All said after paying for the XBLA exclusivity (which entitles, among other things, a rather sizeable amount of advertising, thus ensuring your game likely sells fairly well) and going on record as saying they went with XBLA purely because Fez is a console game, one that you have to play, and enjoy, on a console whilst sitting on your couch or such.

“Fez is a console game, not a PC game,” he states, emphatically. “It’s made to be played with a controller, on a couch, on a Saturday morning. To me, that matters; that’s part of the medium.” I get so many comments shouting at me that I’m an idiot for not making a PC version. ‘You’d make so much more money! Can’t you see? Meatboy sold more on Steam!’ Good for them. But this matters more to me than sales or revenue. It’s a console game on a console. End of story.”

Obviously, Fez is about the experience, man, and not the money.  No sir.  And when the timed exclusivity expires, I'm sure we won't see the game hit Steam because who cares if "the game would have been fixed two weeks after release, at no cost to us.", because money doesn't matter!  No amount of money, no tens of thousands of dollars, matters!  Because it's about the -game-, goddamnit, because this is Indie Gaming.  It's about the principle of it all, which means standing up for the little guy who gets ignored when it's not profitable to help them!  So, seriously that settles it.  You won't be seeing Fez on any other platform even after the exclusivity runs out, because it's purely about making sure everybody gets the full experience of the game and not like....most of the experience.  Minus the ending.  The whole experience.

It should probably be illegal to have that much snark condensed in a single paragraph.  I think it sums up my thoughts on the matter rather nicely, however.  Now, if you will excuse me, I'm going to resume playing a game where a patch has completely improved the experience without adding any game-breaking glitches.  Which is apparently an impossible process.

Power Up!

There's no real reason for this picture aside from the whole power theme of the first couple paragraphs.

So!  As you may or may not know, people on the east side of the States have been getting hit pretty hard with some pretty rough storms lately causing massive power outages and the like.  That is what's been up with me since, uh, Friday.  It was not fun.  It continues to be not fun because it's still hot as hell despite the fact that we actually have power and thus Air Conditioning again, and it will remain not fun because it's still friggin storming like every day.  It will continue to do that for a while, so some disruptions in Kupowered is still possible and if at all possible, I will actually forewarn of them this time.  Of course, the only reason I didn't this last time was because the Meteorologists with their fantastic weather machines that cost more money than most small businesses earn yearly didn't really predict that the storms would unfold as they did.  And they're like "Oh, how could we have ever expected it to be this bad?", to which I just have to kind of scoff at.  Because I don't know, it's kind of your fucking job.

Anyways, no power and also no internet kind of puts a damper on maintaining a thing which requires both power and the internet to run, hence why there was another one of these unplanned hiatuses (which is apparently a word, according to spell-check) that sucks.  It has also left me with kind of a clusterfuck of issues considering there was a ton of news in my absence and I am also sort of rusty after the whole not writing for six days thing.  Since for some reason I am just not as good writing things physically as I am with typing them.  That is....kind of an issue that I have never really considered too much since I -have- been able to write things physically before, it's just a little easier to lose what I'm going for.  Also it's almost never an issue unless it's a -big- issue which, well, if it's a situation wherein it's a big issue, it's a bit too late anyways.  Oh well, something else to think of in the future.

Anyways, living without power aside from the assist of a generator simply there to power a little TV with local channels available is about as interesting as it sounds in that it's not interesting at all.  Passing the time in the extreme heat was something of a challenge since it seemed to crawl by and my hobbies didn't really facilitate an expedition of the flow of time whatsoever in feel.  Putting together jigsaw puzzles, doing sudoku puzzles or simply watching TV shows that I don't like (aside from a few that I -do- like now, like The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson because it's awesome) made me feel like....well, that I wasn't actually myself, really.  Granted, I -like- doing all those things, but not because there simply isn't anything else to do.  The only Mogs-like thing I found myself doing was using the DS Lite's battery of the Gods to replay Chrono Trigger DS as my other DS games are all....well, a bit played out.  No less than Chrono Trigger, of which you all know my fondness for, but at least CT is one of those 'timeless' (no pun intended) things that I can play pretty much whenever thanks to my attachment to it.

Well, to the original, at least.  As you all may or may not know, my fondness for the Chrono Trigger DS port is well documented and playing it again basically cements that.  I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why anything that went into this port actually happened.  The new script, the new gameplay sections, such as they are in the loose sense of the word, none of it really makes sense in any shape or form.  The staple answer, of course, is simply "Money", but I have to question the validity of that when it was A.) simply an enhanced port of a well-liked SNES-era JRPG (making it more or less just a 'Cult hit' almost by definition) and B.) the same price (or more) as every Pokemon and Mario game on the shelves.  You know, the games that actually sell, thereby making it easy to have that price-point.  There is no reasoning, no actual logic (not even flawed logic) to have expected that Chrono Trigger DS, at the $40 pricepoint it was introduced at (and remained for....quite a while) would sell anywhere above moderately at best.

So if not money, then, what?  Brand loyalty?  One could assume that the intention of Chrono Trigger DS was an attempt to gauge the popularity of the franchise to see if it was further exploitable or something that was simply better left alone.  If that's your aim then, for the above mentioned reasons, it was a rather poor attempt, which suggests that that....might not have been the goal either.  It was certainly -a- goal, I should say, since Shinji Hashimoto, Senior Vice President of Squeenix or something was quoted as saying "If people want a sequel, they should buy more!" meaning that Chrono projects were certainly on a board somewhere, but only half-heartedly at best.  It almost seems as if it was an in-joke for the company; someone put down a bet that said a Chrono Trigger revisit would sell gang-busters and, if it did, they could build on that with even more unnecessary revisits and remakes and sequels that don't make any sense whatsoever.  Clearly he was wrong in that, as apparently everyone -but- him expected, and the end result is 2008 being the last time we've seen anything out of the franchise, both since then and likely indefinitely.

Which, for my part, all I can say to that is good.  If Chrono Cross and even the DS port of the game is any indication, Chrono Trigger is simply bigger than the sum of its parts.  It's lightning in a bottle and Squeenix has no idea what to do with it, if in fact, anything -can- be done with it at all.  I understand that I'm extremely biased in this, and it simply seems that the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia are clouding my perceptions, but for my money, Chrono Trigger in its original form is simply a level of quality that Cross, the DS port and even Radical Dreamers simply cannot compare to.  And it's not for any one particular reason, but, as I said, because it is just greater than all of its components.  The story isn't spectacular, the characters aren't as wonderfully developed as we've seen can be done, and the gameplay of it is, well, archaic -now-, considering how things have simply grown.  But it has a quality to it that simply cannot be harnessed to be placed into other things bearing the same moniker.  So I would surmise that anything new to be entered into the Chrono franchise would simply not be able to carry that, even if it was made by the Square of old.  Simply because the Square of old tried already and failed on most levels.  But we'll never really know for sure, as all we have is the original, the port, and the sequels (is it plural if one is a really really big re-imaging of the other?) will likely be the only things we have as evidence to either side.

Unfortunate Downtime with Dynasty Warriors Next

So, if there was one thing that I expected with 2012, it was certainly not having a period of downtime in terms of gaming, yet since I beat Trails in the Sky, that is precisely what I've found myself in.  This is only because I can't/won't play my PS3, of course, since my backlog mostly exists there and the damned heat of the Spring/Summer prevents me from taking a shot at it, and I don't have a lot of Digital Copies of PSP games and the one that I do that I would be playing (Phantasy Star Portable 2) doesn't work (goddamnit, Sega).  So I'm stuck with the PSP games I do have digital copies of (Persona 3 Portable, Final Fantasy Tactics:  War of the Lions and, of course, Legend of Heroes:  Trails in the Sky), and my two (three) Vita games.  I have no reason to throw Uncharted:  Golden Abyss back into the Vita, and minutes with MotorStorm RC shaved entire months off of my overall lifespan, so that leaves the last choice with.....Dynasty Warriors Next.

Sigh.

I have a very love/hate relationship with the game as you might be able to figure out, even if you haven't read the many many posts I've written about it, but considering I have $3.07 to my Playstation Wallet and the money in my actual wallet committed elsewhere, meaning no way to any other games, I'm pretty much stuck with it until Tuesday.  At that point, I'll get Resistance:  Burning Skies that will likely have bullshit Multiplayer trophies that will keep me quite busy until the next thing that I want comes out, namely Gravity Rush.  (By the by, we're getting the Gravity Rush demo this week as well.  Eeeeeee~)  And so on and so on - Hopefully in the break between Gravity Rush and LittleBigPlanet (or, with any luck, the Beta for it) I'll get access to a little more cash to throw down on another PSP RPG or something that will be a good time-user (not waster) so that I won't have to worry about this whatsoever.  Because falling back on Dynasty Warriors Next is less than optimal as you might guess from my previous rantings.

The only reason that I'm not done with Next is the fact that it takes 54-78 hours for a few of the trophies meaning that it's a semi-endless grind.  Having that means that it's 'convenient' as a game to pick up every now and then for a few hours of gameplay that ends up with minimal progress.  A second Officer card or two, some weapons, a few sworn/spouse relationships, yet when it's held up against the great wall of necessary progress, it's almost infinitesimal.  And of course, with forced duels in every single map you play, any fun that could be derived from the actual playing of the game is drained rapidly, leaving you with a husk that used to be fun and almost makes you realize just why the series is despised by game reviewers.  Almost.  Of course, their reasons are not these and merely cosmetic at best, so all you share is a dislike for the game, despite the wildly different approaches for it.

Regardless, seeing as there's not enough time to pitch back into Persona 3 Portable or mayhaps even a Trails in the Sky NG+, yet there's too much time between now and Burning Skies, I find myself at quite the impasse.  Given how many times I've come back around to saying this, I imagine you can understand the frustration that this is a game in a series that I enjoy, not to mention a portable version of it that I can technically enjoy, and yet in playing it, I simply....don't.  In what was originally just a minor annoyance, the Dueling system has evolved into something that truly makes me loathe the play the game, when if it was not there, I would merely resent the style in which I have to play to ensure that I get the most 'bang' from my playthrough 'buck' as it were.  Barring the other unfortunate side-effect of the randomizer in Force Numbering on top of the Dueling, the game would be enjoyable to start and devolve into merely 'playable' for the last bit of the grind, yet those two items make it a chore, and one that I don't want to invest my time with, honestly.

Regardless, when the game isn't sucking my soul out painfully, I am happy to say that I am still making progress with it in the only way that's completely possible.  After wrestling with the way Second Officer Cards work (which is...uh....not at all like it should be.  You'd think that having one person in play means they can only show up as their alternate, but apparently you can have three of one person on a board at the same time as I did with Wang Yuanji) I got about four or five plays in before I just became bothered with it, leading me to turn it off.  Those plays meant that I filled out a few weapon slots, I got Wang Yuanji's Second (and only her; this is so much more of a pain than it has any right to be) and formed a handful of new bonds.  Actually, I learned something on that front as well:  Using Daqiao as a ruler for a handful of female sworn officer bonds, I discovered that it is actually impossible to form a Sworn Sibling oath with her sister, Xiaoqiao.  This is a level of detail that is all at once astounding and terrible, as it makes -far- too much sense and actively impeded progress for me earlier.  Of course, this will not be an error I will make again in the day or so left I'll spend with the game.

God, Do I Hate Spring

I say this a lot, and I do mean a lot and while I honestly hate repetition in spoken statements like that, I feel that I have to keep stating it because it's always true and relevant:  I hate Spring.  I hate how, aside from E3 leaks and random announcements here and there, there's not really a whole lot of gaming news, as is referenced by sites feeling the need to tease and reveal games that will never be released and then follow up said 'reveal' with a whole lot of information about the game that will never be released, obtained presumably because the game will never be released.  (Keep an eye out on that post, kids, because I'm going to update it one of these nights with the last recent update which is mind-blowingly stupid)  I hate how the ever-shifting weather, allergies and heat take my normally good-at-doing-things (like using vocabulary) mind and throws that out the window, leaving me sitting for hours trying to think of things that would take mere minutes on a cooler, better day.  And I hate how, on those rare nights where it might be cool enough, or where I might just be lucid enough, to do something relevant to anything (like post here, or get some good post material), it's usually fucking storming, meaning I'm stuck with DVDs or purely portable gaming.

In a word, I just hate how Spring makes me feel:  dull.  Sitting about, unable to come up with anything really positive and interesting to talk about despite a full two hours or so passing by, and then figuring out something that I can actually articulate about somewhat, only to be a little dissatisfied with the way I ended up saying it, yet unable to go back and change it, it's kind of painful.  This is pretty much precisely why I make no guarantees during Spring (and Summer) because it's a complete toss-up as to whether or not I'll honestly be able to sit down and write something up in a given night.  I do everything I can, scour every source and try to think of anything and everything that might be interesting enough for me to talk about for four or so paragraphs, but sometimes they just come up empty.  This would be one of those nights, honestly, despite a few ideas rolling around in my head.  This is purely because I couldn't think of a good way of expressing them because I'm just 'bleh' tonight as I am most nights with this goddamn heat.

I will say that it bothers me much more that I can't write and I want to, rather than what it might seem in that I can't write and I feel obligated to which I don't by any means.  Outside of self-obligation which again is more want than anything.  After all, the whole reason for this blog is so that I can write things on a regular basis to try and hone my skills.  While these conditions simply add more challenge, they...well, add challenge and are thus able to give me pause if not outright halt sometimes.  The added challenge to that is to come up with things that I can always talk about, which I sort of have in Music! and other such posts, but at times, I can't really think of appropriate themes for those either.  It's fairly rough, I confess, and made no easier through the whims of mother nature.  Still, I'm working at it and will likely continue to do so through the season, hopefully coming up with something before it ends.  With any luck, the other side of Spring and Summer will see a brisk Fall that will allow me some leeway.

Still, there's plenty to look forward to in terms of Portable Gaming, as we've covered, so that'll handle a good amount of posts with that alone.  I'm especially looking forward to Resistance:  Burning Skies as it'll be the first real look into what an FPS on the portable system can be, which might give us an idea for future titles.  (Killzone Vita, Bioshock Vita, Call of Duty Vita, etc.)  I haven't looked into it too much as I hope to buy it on-sight to sort of make up for skipping 3 (which I still regret), though I also hope that in doing so, I don't take anything away from 3.  While I doubt it's a real possibility, it's still one, but it's one that I'll have to deal with.  I really doubt there'll be any way I can buy, play and finish Resistance 3 between now and, uh...a couple weeks from now.  Stranger things have happened, however.  We'll just have to see by the time I have that shiny little blue case in my hands.

It occurs to me now that I spent four paragraphs talking about how I couldn't think to write.  And then the word "paradoxical" comes into my mind and I smile because I don't get to use that word enough.  Here's hoping for less random mumblings next time however.

Just Cause 2 is Just Bottomless

After playing Just Cause 2 for hours upon hours at a clip, jumping from location to location and not leaving any until I have 100% complete of that area, I'm hesitant to believe that this will ever, in fact, end.  This is despite direct knowledge that it will - it simply feels that way because no matter what I do, it's simply a drop in the ocean.  Strangely enough, it does not discourage, but encourage further playing, since I do realize that it adds up and I do know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  Still, it's quite an imposing thing, having as big a map as the one in Just Cause 2 with as much to -do- in it, since it is far and beyond what other games would logically have.  I suppose I could say this as a positive and a negative thing, whereas some other aspects of the game unfortunately come across as merely negative.

One of these aspects is the rather lop-sided reaction of the Panauan Army, which I have come to loathe tremendously through my experiences with location hopping, as it directly interferes with my ability to do so in an enjoyable fashion.  You see, to explain my circumstances, I feel I have to explain the game a little, so allow me to do that really quickly.  The locales of the game can be categorized pretty easily:  you have (Military) Communication Stations, Military Bases, (Military) Harbors, (Military) Airports, Cities and Towns.  (I might be forgetting something, but if I am, it's not important right now.)  Now, as you might realize, they're fairly differentiated by what you would expect the most military resistance from and what you wouldn't expect a lot from.  As in, if I were going to storm a Military Base to blow stuff up, or run into a town and blow up a solitary Propaganda Truck, I would expect the former to be the more difficult task.

Just Cause 2 thinks otherwise.

I can storm a Military Base and spend ten to twenty minutes looking for everything contained within, and not have so much as a call for reinforcements come across the radio.  Even as I'm shooting guard after guard in the face with my Super Shotgun and blowing up giant tanks of gas and shit, nobody thinks I'm causing enough of a problem that they can't handle it themselves.  Or....something along those lines I guess.  The point is, from start to finish, I can 100% a Military Base with no problem, getting, at most, Level 3 Heat for my troubles.  I guess, on its own, this isn't too surprising, nor is it something to seriously consider or worry about.  After all, level 3 in a 5(?) level system is pretty high after all, and the upper tiers are likely reserved for story purposes and times when you just do not stop causing chaos.  At least, that's what you might think.

The problem comes in when I see a Propaganda Truck in a town or a city.  It is a problem because they are usually flanked by a couple of soldiers which, on their own, isn't too bad, or barely any resistance if you have a fully upgraded shotgun.  However, approaching said truck invokes a reaction that confuses and infuriates me, as I can literally watch the Heat Gauge go from one to two to three before I even throw a grenade inside of the truck and when I do and it explodes, I have level Five Heat out of fucking nowhere.  Because I brazenly blew up a truck that was spewing a recording of the President to the townsfolk who, by all accounts, have probably learned how to tune it out, what with having to live with it and all. 

From this moment after the truck detonates, the game harkens back to the days of yore, the days of Grand Theft Auto III, when the commonplace was to cause chaos until you had a five or six star wanted level and make a dramatic last stand because there was no fucking way you were surviving that.  While not quite that impossible, Level 5 Heat has afforded me plenty of experience in hijacking helicopters (one session giving me nine hijackings, on top of the likely half a dozen helicopters I simply shot down from my own copters) simply because they will not stop fucking sending them after me and the whole while I am simply left in shock of the fact that I am getting shot at by three military helicopters at the same time because I blew up a truck.  There is something wrong with this.

As you might imagine, this exercise in frustration has given me pause when it comes to completing Villages as locations as, if there is a Truck present, I simply have to destroy it, and of course in doing so, it means that I will then be stuck spending the next fifteen or so minutes fighting and evading my way out of a level five heat so that I may continue playing the game without having helicopters trying to examine my head with rockets.  Conversely, I exhale a sigh of relief every time the next undiscovered location turns out to be anything else, as it means that I will simply not have to deal with that awfulness, but rather, I look forward to the eventual cat-and-mouse game that surfaces at 92-97% completion, wherein that last piece of something beckons me from its hiding spot, as if some perverse game of Hide-And-Seek, wherein the goal is to find and consume or destroy, depending on that which is sought.

Still, the important part is that Just Cause 2 is fun, even after all these hours I've put into it.  I may have, in anger, once exclaimed at my television, "THIS.  SHIT LIKE THIS IS WHY YOU'RE TWENTY DOLLARS!", but I do consider it a success for gaming if just because it has raised the bar in crafting an open world that is truly that, as well as giving you the means to explore every inch of it in a way that is both enjoyable and interesting.  While the world isn't bursting with life, it has its own quirks and it has raw size if nothing else to make it feel like something worth celebrating in this particular way.  In many ways, I look at Just Cause 2 as something to show off potential more than anything else, since where the game isn't tight enough for me to consider it 'great', it's good enough to be quite fun, and it offers me plenty of times to say "Man, if only someone who churns out top-shelf quality could get a hold of this", to drool at the possibility therein.  If only, indeed.

So, I Started Demon's Souls

All at once, it was everything I expected, yet completely different than I anticipated, and I'm left feeling a little mixed about it all.  Demon's Souls is a brand of difficult that you simply cannot fathom until you've experienced it for yourself and even then, it's hard to condense into words.  It's even harder to form sentences elegantly with those words in a way that sufficiently expresses the 'Demon's Souls Experience' as it were, but I feel like I have to try it anyway.  At least, I -want- to try it, which is surprising and expected all at once as well.  In all reality, that's kind of what Demon's Souls is, or what it engenders - seemingly opposite things being used in the same breath as a valid form of explanation.

I honestly kind of hate Demon's Souls, but at the same time I think I will come to like it as something very very special.

My first experience with Demon's Souls is likely not my own, in fact, but the same experience so many first-time players have had.  I spent about fifteen to twenty minutes crafting the face of Mikhail Metzinger (Unfortunately, the character limit forced me to reduce this to Metziner), set him in the minimal garb of Barbarian because I liked the look of its Strength and Magic stats and started.  Just past the introduction, I began, stumbling through the controls in the tutorial area comprised of what I can only assume are practice dummies that can walk and, should you do absolutely nothing, kill you because that is, indeed, how Demon's Souls rolls.  I wandered without direction other than the path that seemed correct and eventually stepped through the veil that took me to the area with Vanguard, that which instantly makes what type of game Demon's Souls is obvious.

Harkening back to the olden days, Vanguard is a foe that you are not -supposed- to defeat, but despite this you may yet have a chance.  Personally, I died with a single hit to him, but I've heard tell that it is possible to kill him at that tender, starting point.  Wherein most games, you would have some sort of reward at this point for doing that which is 'impossible', the reward for doing such a thing in Demon's Souls, or so I've been told, is a foe even stronger, even deadlier.  You see, Demon's Souls wants to kill you.  And it will succeed, one way or another.  Now, I could say that this is because the game has a reason for this, which is to introduce you to the Nexus and to the core mechanics of the game itself, and that might be part of it, but make no mistake, it is not the whole truth of it.  Demon's Souls simply wants you to die.  Over and over again.  And over and over and over again.

I was not so ignorant of Demon's Souls to find the death to Vanguard surprising; in fact I expected it.  I welcomed it, for it was the initiation.  The trial by fire necessary to steep you down into the mechanics and into the game proper.  I had hungered for that moment for longer than I had realized and when it came, it was swift and it was sweet.  I had a moment of revelry alongside the game because it meant that it had now officially started and I was free to enjoy it as the vast majority of the internet insisted that I should, that I would.  After an unfortunate false start with Boldwin (I, er, didn't realize hitting the crates next to him would also -hit him-) I began with the archstone and went to the first real level.  That's when the enjoyment of the game came crashing to a halt.

In, again, what I imagine is not an experience solely of my own, I steeled the first section rather easily, expecting the soldiers to burst from the wooden blockades along the edges of the area and meeting them with brute force, the crush of wood against flesh, followed by looting those that bore anything and moving on to the next one.  At the giant doors, I went left as is the only way a new player can go, and a message emblazoned on the ground gave a rather cryptic message:  "Beware of an ambush" with a fairly decent rating.  I believed it, and, after a few moments of waiting, figured there was no such thing, at least not right here, and crushed the nearby barrels, hungry for hidden loot.  And it was then that a crossbow bolt to Mikhail's spine lead to his first non-Vanguard death.

That was fine.  Whatever, it was a death, if I'm going to play the game, I have to become immune to these things.  So I got back to the spot of my death with ease and charged down the alleyway, spotting the crossbowman early enough this time.  I circled around up the platform and clubbed his face in, finding a macabre satisfaction in the action and turned that same thirst to the two soldiers in the area.  Well, rather, -one- soldier, as the other unfortunately threw himself down the convenient pit of doom right next to this raised platform.  Entering the building nearby, I moved past the table to engage the soldier that showed up, but the ambusher from behind caught me off-guard and in my haste to try and maneuver myself in prime position to take them both out, I accomplished the exact opposite and met my demise once more.

This cycle repeated again and again - I would get further in and die, find my body and get further in, and as I did, my frustration grew.  This wasn't a challenge, this was trial-and-error; throwing yourself off a roof again and again to find where the ground was softest.  Eventually, however, after fighting a knight enemy atop a castled area with catapults and going through the fog beyond, only to die because I stood too close to an exploding barrel that I couldn't see until a thrown firebomb was an inch away from it, this was when I found my breaking point.  Filled with a bloodlust that could not be sated, I rushed the first grunt in the starting area and clubbed him across the face at the tail-end of a charge.....only to have my weapon break.  Unable to do anything beyond use it, which went as well as you can imagine, I died right there as three more grunts sought vengeance for their slain comrade and they found it in my rather untimely death.  Having lost all those souls, including those from killing that Knight-looking fellow twice, I was done.

Infuriated, I turned off the game, and turned to people who knew the game, recanting my tale to them and finding no solace in their words that this was normal.  Already, I knew it was and it offered no amount of comfort, nothing to soothe the pure -rage- at what I saw as design stuck too far in the past.  Because I didn't see it as a challenge, but simply tedious - You go until you die, find your body and use that knowledge to get a little further.  Again, it's not playing, it's merely throwing yourself at a wall until it breaks and it's not fun.  Of course, that was thinking grown out of frustration and I don't really think I consider that to be my final opinion on the game.  In fact, not but half an hour after I quit the game, I felt the urge to get back into it, which I've stemmed since that night, mostly by enjoying Just Cause 2 when that game isn't throwing entire fleets of helicopters down my throat for blowing up a fucking propaganda wagon are you serious I just obliterated two entire military bases and you get pissy when I blow up a van in a town?!  But I will get back into it.  Mikhail's journey is not over, not even close.

What's This "No Games" Crap?

This is going to be another one of those unfortunate occasions where I let my fanboy flag fly free (yay alliterations!), but I assure you that it's only because I really really get annoyed when people like to pretend that things are so much worse than they are.  As such, with all the whining and bullshit going on with the Vita (that launched two months ago, officially mind you) has made me a grumbly person lately because of all the doom and gloom at, uh....certain corners of the internet.  Because it's a Sony product or because people don't really, uh, have good pattern recognition skills or something, the fact that fifteen AAA-quality games haven't come out for it yet means that it's failing and it's selling poorly because there are, ahem, 'no gaems' for it, which means that it's the worst thing ever, etc. etc.  So, I've taken it upon myself to sort of root out just how the releases have sort of worked out between the 3DS and the Vita.

So, let's talk launch line-up where most everyone, even detractors, will give the Vita the win or at least the benefit of the doubt here.  It's well-deserved, since the line-up was fantastic by any measure, much moreso in comparison, but you'll get those people who say launch games don't really matter.  Mostly because their chosen system had shitty launch games, assuredly, since a good launch line-up just really doesn't come around that often.  Still, let's take a little look at some of the games that launched on March 27th, alongside the 3DS, shall we?  Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition, Nintendogs + Cats (One of three versions, apparently), Pilotwings Resort, Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars, and Samurai Warriors Chronicles.  Those are the five top scoring games via Metacritic at launch and they go from 85 to 61, which is fairly respectable, all told  since launch games aren't usually, er, spectacular.  A 61 for a launch game isn't particularly the same thing as a 61 for a game that comes out a year or two into the system's life.

Now, let's take a gander at some of the Vita games on (or before) launch and see how that works out.  Rayman Origins, Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack, Lumines: Electronic Symphony, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend, and Super Stardust Delta all ranging from 88 to, uh, 82.  But you're like "Gee, Mogs, there are like three ports out of those five games and that's a bad thing!" and I go, "Well, so is the 3DS picks?  But, okay..."  So cut out Street Fighter IV, Lego Star Wars III and Samurai Warriors Chronicles (Because I'm sure it reuses assets, or if not because I'm being generous and not cuttings Nintendogs+Cats), and cut Rayman Origins, Lumines and BlazBlue, and you still have Uncharted: Golden Abyss (Not to mention the non-ports in the list) at a solid 80 above the 71 for all three versions of Nintendogs + Cats.

So this is where people will tell you that launch games don't matter.  Who cares that a major first party game was released at launch (because Nintendo didn't really do one), it's all about the follow-up, it's all about the games that come out afterwards, when the first big ones start cropping up, -that's totally what's important-.  Okay, whatever, so this is when we look, and the next major release would be The Legend of Zelda:  Ocarina of Time 3D.....or it would be, but, as we've discussed, ports are evil and terrible and ruining the industry and such, etc. etc. so it doesn't count.  Resident Evil:  The Mercenaries 3D came out on June 28, 2011, a full three months after the 3DS' release....to some poor reviews and really, really dumb save game ideas, so maybe we shouldn't count it, yeah?  So the next 'big' things would be Shin Megami Tensei:  Devil Summoner Overclocked for third party and Star Fox 64 3D for first party which released on August 23rd and September 9th respectively.  Both are ports/remakes, so again, we don't count them in the interest of fairness.

It's not until December 4th, a full eight months following the 3DS' release that a 'major' game is released for the 3DS in the form of Mario Kart 7, which I'm counting as a wholly original and new game because jesus christ if I don't I'll be looking forever.  There are a few things before there that I would personally count for myself, but they're hardly big draws to the system - Harvest Moon:  The Tale of Two Towns most specifically.  Mario Kart 7 was really the first hard throw into the 3DS and ever since, they've been doing better, but fuckin' eight months of console ports, remakes and assorted drivel alongside niche or low-profile games does not a game library make.  Mind you, the 3DS was still selling for $250 for four and a half of those months, which clearly plenty of people were happy to pay for reasons that are pretty much beyond comprehension aside from "It's a Nintendo Handheld".  People are pretty forgiving of having no real games when it's not a Sony Handheld apparently!

So let's return to the Vita now which has been out for two full months.  I feel like I have to reiterate this fact a few times just so it sinks in.  Because, again, two months is not a lot of time in which a system should be, or could be, saturated with games, despite what anyone thinks.  We've already covered the launch games (aside from me stating directly that there were 26 of them), so let's move beyond that, yeah?  In the span of the two months since we've had the Vita, we've had the following releases:  MotorStorm RC (for free, mind you), and Unit 13 (which admittedly has some technical problems, apparently and was Zipper Interactive's swansong, unfortunately) which either use Known Entities in the form of Branding (MotorStorm) or Studio (Unit 13 with Zipper), making them fairly high-profile games.  Also we've had MLB '12:  The Show and Disgaea 3:  Absence of Detention which I won't link nor mention beyond the mentions all the above ports received.  Not only that, but in the next few months, we have Gravity Rush (First-Party title), Resistance:  Burning Skies (First-Party title that makes use of an existing brand), Mortal Kombat (Yes, a port, but I mentioned all the other ones), and, unless it gets announced otherwise, LittleBigPlanet (First-Party title that makes use of an existing brand).  If none of that changes, that's all between May and the end of June which would put it at four months after the release of the system.

I guess the problem here is that there's not really a whole lot of fluff coming out for the Vita every week like, well, every other system that's been out for more than two months.  I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this is because Developers looking to put fluff on the system are just now getting or putting in for their Dev Kits, meaning that they won't be releasing for a few months yet.  It's the classic Quantity over Quality argument given new form in 'Console Warz', and it's quite frankly bullshit.  I know people who are going to tell you that the Vita 'has no gaems' aren't interested in little things like facts, and it seems that those are the majority at the moment, but that doesn't make it true.  So if you take away anything from this, then, hey, take away the facts here, double-check them for yourselves, even.  I understand opinions differ and can make all sorts of things seem true or not, but they're only opinions; no more.  Of course, if I'm wrong in anything I've presented here, do feel free to let me know.