Seldom in over 20 years of gaming have I seen a game so divide people. The METACRITIC page attests to that. My reckoning though is, those who criticise it the most are probably younger reviewers still struggling to grow real MAN BEARDS like myself and Francis York Morgan have. Anyone from back in the day who played the games of Kenji Eno, from the 32-bit era onwards, should take a liking to DP. It’s also comparable to some of Suda 51’s works. Both of these men created games brimming with interesting, non-conventional design and story ideas. They were almost always heavily flawed as a result, and barely playable in the case of some of Eno’s work, but they were always interesting enough to persevere with and I ended up loving everything their studios created. SWERY of Access Games, the guy behind DP, is definitely a worthy successor to Kenji Eno’s legacy, now that WARP is dead, and DP follows a similar route of being conceptually and narratively really interesting, but without the expensive production values to back up the ideas.
DP has the same kind of bent appeal that D2 on the Dreamcast had – even down to almost Dreamcast era visuals in places. You need to eat, you wander vast expanses, and the story gets increasingly crazy. DP though has much better characterisation, perhaps the best I’ve seen in a game. Which leads me on to Heavy Rain.
Jim Sterling not only gave DP a perfect score of 10, he also said it was better than Heavy Rain. At first I thought his tongue-in-cheek piece was trying to get people to notice DP through gross exaggeration – but the more I play it, the more I think he was absolutely right, at least in terms of scripting and character development. David Cage tried so hard, too hard in fact, and HR ended up a pretentious, sophomoric overworked mess which telegraphed what it expected you to be feeling long before the fact. I loved it, but not for the reasons anyone else did. All the characters suffered from overwritten flaws: the grieving father. The drug addict. The rape victim. The prostitute mother trying her best. The psychotic bad cop. And so on. They were all surreal, exaggerated pastiches of characters from cheap films. Though extremely entertaining, none of them felt sincere to me (“oh Shaun, SHAUN, I LOVE YOU SHAUN! Hey, Maddison, want to have sex? My finger’s a bit shorter and I just killed a man, but that won’t affect my performance, honest.”).
This is SWERY, the guy who made Deadly Premonition... I think... I found the picture on Insert Credit.
Once you’ve acquired the radio from George in Chapter 2 (make sure it’s the first thing you do), you can select it via your items menu. Places you’ve visited are added to the list over time (though not always), so it continues to grow. It’s easy if you can read Katakana, since the script is used for foreign loan-words in Japanese. If you can’t, then it’s a case of trial and error. This probably isn’t a full list, since I’m only up to Chapter 13, but it’s good enough to ease you in and get to most important places. If you’re REALLY keen, you can also use the above list when reading the in-game map, which is also in Japanese.
Make sure to grab this Greenvale map too, which has everyone’s house name in English on it. Thanks to the guys on GameFAQs who put it together (I think it was Sinister XIII and some others).
Despite trying to work through a rather large PS3 backlog, my time has been taken up by three extremely excellent free 2D shmups of late (well, one excellent, one very good and one OK shmup)– read on for links and boobs!
A tremendous labour of love, Hydorah took Locomalito three years to develop (with help for music). Nearing Cave Story-levels of time and dedication, the effort put into this shows. The production values are some of the highest I’ve seen for a free game – the level of detail in the pixel art (which is a dying art in the commercial world) and animation of sprites is astounding. Ignore those who say the art style is boring – later levels’ bio-mechanical armada is stunning. The few screens shown here don’t even remotely convey the beauty of the game in motion. Furthermore, the soundtrack by Gryzor87 is pretty-damn catchy in places, with some really cool 1980s-style synth. Plus there’s the insanely awesome vocalised music tracks (in what I presume is Spanish), and voiced power-ups! Special mention must go to the brief snippets of voice acting, which have Spanish accents. I love the idea that Spain would amass a giant space armada to defend the human race – it’s a refreshing change from the America/Japan centric story many shooters have.
I’ve always felt that hori-shmups, as opposed to overhead, are a little underrepresented in the overall shooter genre, so it’s nice to see Hydorah take a side-on approach. It’s very much a throwback to older-style shmups like Gradius, Axelay, Keio’s Flying Squadron, and so on, before hardware started allowing for near-infinite projectiles and increasing numbers of shooters adopted the danmaku (bullet curtain) approach. Someone on another forum aptly described Hydorah as an adventure – there are 16 stages laid out on a map with branching pathways (not quite Darius, but an appreciated effort) with 30 bosses of which I’ve only seen a fraction. This is coupled with a selectable weapons system where new weapons are unlocked in each stage, and all require levelling-up RPG fashion. Each stage has its own story and architecture to navigate, plus numerous clever ideas (even if some are borrowed), and overall it does an excellent job of balancing good shooting mechanics with ambience and story.
So many shooters in recent generations have had rather banal designs, focusing on complex patterns and score mechanics, but totally lacking that sense of exploration you feel, for example, when first penetrating the Bydo ship in R-Type. There are some great moments in Hydorah, such as flying above a planet surface during a sandstorm, which affects control, before delving deep into a forgotten enemy factory, or traversing a space graveyard populated by flesh-eating insects.
What I especially like is that Hydorah only has one difficulty level, ensuring that everyone has the same experience and that people’s skill with the game is easily compared (as opposed to discussing one’s ability spread over 3+ difficulty levels like most shups). This presents Hydorah as a singular, unified experience. I’ve heard that the difficulty actually augments itself depending on how well you’re playing, but I’ve faced bosses both fully powered and without anything, and their attack patterns seemed the same to me! Please correct if I’m wrong in this assumption.
Super Metroid meets Dropzone in duotone is the simple analogy for this one. You’re tasked with exploring a maze inside a giant asteroid filled with bio-mechanical enemies in order to stop an immortal war machine. The plot is pretty damn awesome, and pleasantly melancholy in the end. Increased map exploration is facilitated by acquiring ability-boosting items from defeated bosses. Lesser enemies are merely a hindrance and should be ignored, making it something of a boss-rush with added corridors to navigate.
What’s really awesome about this is that the different difficulty levels actually present different level structures, encouraging repeat playthroughs. As the author states:
While listening to the entire back-catalogue of the uncomfortably excellent Warning! A Huge Podcast series, Shidoshi mentioned a Strike Witches game for the 360 and, seeing as I had been taking notes to later look things up, went Googling for more info. Turns out there were a lot of Strike Witches games either released, or in development. I also stumbled across a very old post on Sankaku Complex (definitely NSFW) detailing two doujin releases of SW for PC. The Hori shmup is too crudely made to interest me, but the vertical one has reasonably high production values.
The plethora of characters are mostly redundant, the game is extremely easy if you exploit the weapons and shields available, and the scoring system is impenetrable – I also still haven’t fully worked out the controls. But it reminds me of Axelay and has an awesome distortion effect. It’s also a lot of fun - especially if you have a biased predilection for anything shmup-based - with several neat ideas.
I just wanted to throw this out there because I’m sure it was mostly overlooked and is now forgotten amongst the THOUSANDS of free PC games available. It could probably do with an article, looking at the entire Strike Witches franchise (chicks as anthropomorphised battle planes, eh? Kinky!), but I’ll damned if I’m not too lazy to do it.
Having recently received several packages all at once, I now stand on an even bigger pile of games/films/books which I will at some point be experiencing. The question is, do you want me to write about Boku no Natsuyasumi 3 on PS3?
Months later I read Nick des Barres review in PLAY magazine – please have a peruse of the scan above. Nick normally writes pieces which I would describe as very important, since he tends to document things which would otherwise go unreported, or even if they are covered elsewhere, are covered by people without the Japanese language ability or insight to do so properly. His Folklore review in PLAY, for example, expertly described the international situation that videogames are now in, with Japan being ignored in favour of western games despite still being able to produce such high-quality titles. Nick correctly predicted that few would appreciate it. Three years after release I am still in awe of Folklore, both for its majestic beauty and its substantial combat mechanics with plethora of attack options. In terms of visuals, story and gameplay, I took as much satisfaction from Folklore, if not more, than I did from Uncharted 2.
Which reinforces my belief that contrary to what the world is saying, Japan is in fact doing just fine in terms of creativity. She’s still making great stuff, but we in the west are defiantly stamping on her still-breathing face declaring, not so much with mourning but rather a demented schadenfreude, that she is at last dead and irrelevant. The Eastern serpent is slain, long live the devout Western followers of his Holy Roman Emperor, David Jaffe. And the more I hear it, the more confused I feel, because I have more cool Japanese games to play than I have time for – and I don’t even own a 360, which has several exclusives. It’s sad, when you read about Japanese companies like Marvellous Entertainment on the brink of bankruptcy, despite having been involved with numerous excellent titles, such as Muramasa, No More Heroes, Little King’s Story and Red Seeds Profile (yes, Deadly Premonition is excellent). Long-time localiser Jeremy Blaustein summarised western attitudes quite aptly in an interview I did with him.
But back to Boku no Natsuyasumi 3. Nick’s exquisite write up encouraged me to keep an eye out for it, so when a forumite I knew was selling it, along with the Japanese guide book and bonus diary booklet, at a very low price, I had to have it. This is probably not the game to prove my statement about Japan’s continuing ability, and based on my impressions of the second this is very much an acquired taste (you need to be into playing foreign RPGs), but as the review states: games don’t always have to be about guns and tits. And while I won’t be able to appreciate the implied nostalgia factor it’s aiming for (I wasn’t a child in Japan circa 1975), I’m very curious to imbibe the historical and cultural snapshot which it provides. Hey, maybe it should be recommended playing for Western University students studying Japanese anthropology?
I won’t be starting BnN3 for a number of months still, but I wanted to gauge interest to see if people would like daily diary entries, in much the same way your character in the game writes them. I once wrote a Seaman Diary (for the Dreamcast title), and while I won’t replicate the Mr Biffo/Digitiser style of that, my hope is that regular entries should motivate me to play the game more than I did the second title on PS2. There’s every likelihood I’ll get distracted after 3 entries, but hey, maybe it encourages me to go the distance for the game?
Already out in Europe and due out in the USA on 27 June, and no doubt covered in US mags by now, I thought I’d share my early Euro views on this stunning gem from Treasure. (also, check out that awesome reversible cover art)
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I saw a UK advert for the release of Sin and Punishment: Successor of the Skies on Wii, where for a rare change Europe received something nearly two months before the USA (well, there’s also Disaster and Another Code R – but it’s not a common occurrence).
Being a proper, old-fashioned shooter, mixing on-rails with 2D hori gameplay (think the original Starfox meets Forgotten Worlds), a lot of people on forums have commented on wanting to wait for a price drop. Personally I traded in some games to buy it at full price and show support for such a maligned genre – games like Uncharted 2 and Modern Warfare, with their slick production values and 60+ hours of gameplay, receive more than enough first-week sales, and it’s sad to think that this, which is technically very accomplished, is likely to be overlooked not just because of the hardware it’s on but also its genre.
My manual was in French so I lost all the backstory, but it’s set some time after S&P on the N64, with Isa being the adult version of the boy you protect on the New York subway train in stage 3-3’s 10-years-in-the-future-flash-forward, who turns out to be Airan and Saki’s child. Kachi in the Wii version doesn’t seem to be directly related to either Kachua or Achi from the first game – though presumably is a similar alien entity to Achi. Who knows?!
Stylistically and thematically the game is extremely reminiscent of the Panzer Dragoon series – and not just because of the on-rails comparisons. Taking place on Earth IV, the world is described as having been ruined by mankind, and is now roamed by synthetic creatures which act as the planet’s immune system, wiping out perceived threats. Stage 1 is a decayed city infested with swarms of flying creatures, and crab-like animals scuttling over buildings amidst human survivors. Stage 2’s underwater tunnels meanwhile are strongly reminiscent of the Ruins of Uru, Stage 4 is like Zwei’s forest stage, while Stage 5 has you flying over a desert highway battling mutated creatures. Stage 6 actually seems like a homage to the Lava Stage in Konami’s Axelay – which might or might not be a cute reference to the two companies’ former connections.
I’ve often read people saying that with a shooter story is unimportant – but I don’t like this view. Although the story doesn’t impact the gameplay mechanics, which has always been Treasure’s strong-point, the company has also always done very enjoyable videogame stories. Take the Love Love Dancing scene from Gunstar Heroes, or the silliness of Dynamite Headdy’s theatrical stages, or the complexity of Radiant Silvergun’s time-travel shenanigans. These are always cool. Although never essential, a Treasure game just wouldn’t be a Treasure game without a funky story (which is why I absolutely hated Bangai-O Spirits).
At the time I thought the N64 iteration’s controls were sublimely intuitive, but after clocking the sequel the original seems clunky and barely playable. You can use either the Wiimote/Nunchuck, Classic Controller, Gamecube pad, or Wii Zapper. The Wiimote allows for some very fast and precise cursor control, since it acts like a lightgun, but I also found that some bosses benefited from using the GC pad (my preferred control method throughout). The game allows you to switch between them mid-game, though, which is awesome.
What I love about this game is that it’s not just pure into-the-screen shooting, and like many Treasure games mixes in other genres. In several stages the game switches to a side-on-view with you able to fire in 360 degrees, as well as into the background, giving it the feel of old scrolling shmup Forgotten Worlds. Other stages directly copy Senko no Ronde/Psychic Force’s floaty melee combat, while one later boss suddenly turns into a 2D Street Fighter-esque beat-em-up with you handcuffed to your opponent.
In many instances there’s a beautiful dynamic between aiming and shooting at background elements, while at the same time dodging and melee attacking enemies in the foreground. Needing to concentrate on two separate planes of gameplay keeps the gameplay intense, and it’s tremendously satisfying when you hit the zone, dodging, rebounding missiles and tearing stuff up with a massive score multiplier and not a lick of damage on you.
There are 6 stages, but each is very long with several checkpoints and, assuming you play a perfect game, offer several hours of content. Though if you like the genre you should expect and enjoy replaying stages. Different difficulty levels alter various aspects of a stage – for example in Stage 3’s floating factory, you have to manually shoot the mechanical laser barrier at the halfway mark on normal difficulty, in order to protect yourself, whereas on easy it moves on its own.
Normally when playing a shmup I view it as being either a score attack game, aiming for the biggest number as quickly as possible, or one of survival as you attempt to 1CC it. I normally ere towards the latter, even if means I end up with a very low score, which is probably a cognitive throwback to wanting my arcade money to last as long as possible. I had a bit of a score competition with a guy on a forum who clocked 84 million before dying on stage 4, and I was rather pleased to get 94 million by Stage 6. After someone told me they’d got 270 million by that same section, I decided to forgo score-attacks and return to my 1CC attempt.
There are opportunities for some really insane scoring through. Each time you hit an enemy your score multiplier goes up, seemingly slowing down after 10x, but with so much background fodder it’s easy to quickly hit 10x and then not too long after 16x (my highest, on stage 2). The trick is not getting hit, since this knocks it way down. But if you can finish a stage unscathed, you’re looking at potentially much higher than 30+ million (my highest was about 27 mill on stage 2).
Several sections in Sin and Punishment 2 are extremely reminiscent of Panzer Dragoon. Stage 2's underwater tunnel for example, reminds me of PDS' Ruins of Uru areas.
For many this will incline them towards that price-reduced purchase – but if you like classical shooters, or Treasure games in general, it’s essential to experience and worth supporting. Personally I have so many games to play through, I don’t mind that I can practice and totally rinse it in a week of playing. It’s fun, challenging, and filled some really incredible set-pieces which you’ll want to replay. My favourite was Stage 5’s desert bike-ride, which sees you hurtling along at high-speed, passing explosive gas canisters by the roadside. The trick was to frantically attack nearby enemies while waiting for precisely the right moment to fire a single shot at the canisters, thereby taking out an entire swarm of fodder and boosting your multiplier.
For further reading, let me recommend Tim Roger’s ActionButton review, which I think is one of the best things he’s written and full of panache. Also, check out this video interview with the extremely talented people who made the game. In a world where development teams are in the hundreds, I love how they proudly claim to have started on S&P with only 4 members of staff.
So, get cracking then, and the best of luck to you!
