Professor Layton vs Ace Attorney vs Dani

[Warning – this post was originally just about the one game, but now that it’s easily doubling the length of any other post so far, I feel I should mention that at least seven games get discussed, and all of them spoiled. And all of them are Professor Layton games.]

I love things that make me feel smarter – I love puzzles, brainteasers, riddles, trivia competitions, Trivial Pursuit, quiz shows (the British ones, too, because they’re clearly the smartest) – so along with Puzzle Agent, Puzzle Agent 2, an awesome DOS one from my childhood called Blockman, and just about every point-and-click game in existence, it was inevitable that I’d love anything Professor Layton. I’ve also read every Poirot book, so clearly Phoenix Wright would be my thing, too.

Well … sort of. The Layton games hardly ever gave me any trouble, but goddamnit, for a game that the Internet tells me is aged “10 and up” for complexity, Phoenix Wright kicked my arse. I got stuck on the third trial of the first game, then had to return it to my friend from whom I’d borrowed it because I was taking too long. She told me I’d need a walkthrough, and I didn’t believe her, so I staunchly refused to use one. On the one hand my pride is intact, but on the other, I never cleared Edgeworth of murder, so I guess my arch-rival got lethally injected, like, a year ago. Uh … victory?

Thankfully, Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney let you use Layton’s hint coins to help you with Phoenix’s trials, so I only had to consult a walkthrough once to find out when to present evidence – and that was only because I’d accidentally clicked the wrong thing, and then didn’t know if I’d mis-clicked or whether my real answer was just bad. I can’t believe how smart Layton makes me feel, while at the same time Phoenix makes me feel like I drank ferric chloride because I thought the iron boost would help my brain think gooder.

The game: Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney

Why I didn’t finish it earlier: Like Stick of Truth, I broke the rules and bought it last week. I knew it would only take a couple of days. But if something were going to stop me from finishing it, it would’ve been the ending. OH MY GOD WHAT GAME NEEDS AN EXPLANATION THAT LONG?

Comments: I haven’t really played enough Phoenix Wright to know how well this one performed in comparison to the previous games, so I’ll be mainly talking about the Layton side. That said, both lots of characters and playing styles seemed very true to the originals, so good on them for not totally sacrificing either.

Now, I won’t go out of my way to say that the Layton games are the best. I love them, but let’s just say if we were in a relationship, they’d be calling the police on me for abuse every night as I took them to bed, professed my love, and then threw them against the wall while ignoring their cries for mercy. I absolutely adore the first and third games, don’t mind the second and fifth games, kind of dislike the fourth game, and utterly loathe the sixth game. Jesus, I didn’t realize there were so many of them until I typed it. If you don’t know, the structure of the Layton games is basically, the Professor and his apprentice Luke arrive in some mysterious location (aptly named something like ‘St. Mystere’), discover that some weird crap is going on, and spend ten to fifteen hours solving small puzzles in order to find the solution to the overarching mystery of the weird crap. So, I only have three criteria for these games:

1. The small puzzles are good;

2. The big mystery has a good, airtight solution; and

3. The ending has to make me cry.

I’m not sure how many other people cry at games aimed at pre-teens, but I say it’s as acceptable as crying at a slightly worse written, somehow less plausible version of Toy Story.

I … tend to cry at stuff.

The first one (Curious Village) had excellent puzzles because the game was fresh. Finally, puzzle writers could exercise their creativity and unleash all their head-scratchers into the world! The overarching mystery had a satisfying ending that tied up all the crazy loose ends (turns out, the secret of the curious village was that it was robots). And I don’t remember if I actually cried, but it had dead parents and a sad orphan girl being looked after by freaking robots. Come on, the only thing that would make it sadder is if a seven-leaf clover and a dog with a time-travelling owner was involved.

The second one (Pandora’s Box) still had great puzzles, and mini games that were way cooler than the first one. Making tea for disgruntled villagers? Yes, please! Spot-the-difference? Hell yeah! But the overarching mystery was less cool. This strange town was weird because the residents believed a vampire lived in a creepy, old tower, but it turned out there was a massive gas leak and everyone who came near it started hallucinating and … thinking they were immortal or something. Still, the ending involved an old man who didn’t realize he was old meeting the granddaughter he didn’t know he had, and then maybe dying on her. My memory’s a bit fuzzy on this, possibly because I was watching it through so many tears. So it was pretty good; I just found robots more believable than mass hallucination.

The third one (Unwound Future) was about time travel, which immediately made it awesome. Also, by this stage I was used to the games revealing that whatever ‘magic’ seemed to exist was total bullshit, so I spent the whole time going, “Okay, it’s probably not really time travel. So how the hell do they have a future-Luke, future-Professor, and a whole goddamn future-London? And also, if it’s not really time travel, who the fuck is this future-Luke that brought me to the so-called future in the first place? I don’t care how smooth-talking and Yuri Lowenthal-voiced he is; I don’t trust him!”

And … well, I was so correct that the pride still hurts sometimes. It wasn’t the future: it was a massive underground recreation of the city made by some rich kid with enough money to exact revenge on people he hated. Otherwise known as, the ultimate fantasy of everyone ever. There was also a dead girlfriend involved, so hooray, more crying!

Then, by the fourth one (Last Spectre), things started going off the rails a bit. For starters it was a prequel, which rarely bodes well for anyone (I’m looking at you, Arkham Origins). Second, the puzzles were running out of steam: they’d used up all their tricks and classics and resorted to things like puzzles that involved counting cat silhouettes, an easier version of a Sudoku with cat-shaped paperweights, and running a cat through a maze. Even for Japan, this was overloaded with felines. Seriously, I haven’t even brought up the puzzles ‘Cat Catcher’ and ‘Coax the Kitty’, nor the fact that a cat is a somewhat-major character. But hey, when a franchise has given you almost seven hundred puzzles, some of them are bound to be duds.

The real problem with Last Spectre was that the big mystery – what is this spectral monster that rampages through the city at night? – doesn’t involve robots, nor hallucinations, nor spoiled rich kids. No; the solution to this one is that it’s actually a monster, just a slightly different monster than everyone expected. Um, right. That gave me no pridegasm whatsoever. Also, there’s a dying girl that people don’t like for some reason, who’s actually not dying for some other reason, and she probably lives happily ever after, but I didn’t care about her enough to really remember that part. There may have been some vague anti-pollution implications at the end, too. You think that’s going to make me cry, game? What do you think you are, Animals of Farthing Wood?

Jesus Christ. Just … I can’t believe that show existed.

Sigh. Okay, I decided to give the fifth game, Miracle Mask, a chance. And it was a bloody big chance, because I bought a 3DS specifically to play it. Looking back on it, I’m not entirely sure why I had so much faith.

Thing is, I really liked the overall story. Not necessarily the mystery about this amazing, magic mask (shock horror, it’s not magic, and doesn’t really do anything at all), but the fact that it’s all about Layton’s dead childhood friend, Randall, and the fact that his (Randall’s) butler got rich and married his (Randall’s) college girlfriend. Only, as they find out at the end, Randall wasn’t really dead, and he was pissed off. How good is that? I mean, dead-guy-who’s-not-actually-dead is overdone, but who cares? By the time it was revealed, it was pretty obvious what was going on, but just imagining all the horrible guilt and pain all the characters must have been going through as all the hints and signs came together … I wanted to write the goddamn movie.

Only, the game is a kids’-and-only-kids’ game, and as such doesn’t like to go too overboard with characters experiencing emotions besides inappropriate enthusiasm and mild bewilderment. So when Professor Layton finally came face-to-face with the man he now knew to be his long-dead bestie, he gave nothing more than a bemused frown and a chastising speech because Randall had been mean to the butler.

The puzzles were adequate, although weirdly action-y. I had to run away from spinning, slicing robots and ride horses through an obstacle course. Normally most of the Layton gameplay is staring at the screen, so I was not prepared for this amount of finger-moving and button-pressing. The overarching mystery was … well, irrelevant, really. The ‘miracle mask’ was of no value to anyone, especially me. So all this game really had was its cry value, and it had so much potential. Like, all the crying fuel in the world was contained in a few boxes of text, so much so that I wanted Layton himself to burst into tears. And when he didn’t, I was upset. I was angry that the opportunity had been wasted. I wanted more sobbing than my last Toy Story marathon, and instead I got all the sobbing of a Legally Blonde marathon.

You might think that meant no sobbing at all, but you clearly haven’t seen me watch Legally Blonde. There were still some sniffles here and there, but more at the concept of what the game could have been, rather than what it was. What it was, was an affront to emotion itself.

All the bad stuff aside, this one energized me for the sixth one, Azran Legacy – the first game that I ever watched Bill play over his shoulder just to see if he’d get as furious at it as I did.

It got high ratings on all the review sites, so I can only assume the reviewers had never played another Layton game, nor any game that wasn’t designed by molluscs in vaguely-humanoid form. There was practically no big mystery, only about three of the puzzles had any kind of difficulty, the mini-games were awful, and most irritating of all, the characters stopped to have a conversation or give you a tutorial on every single screen. You move from one back alley to the next – and believe me, in these games, you do a lot of alley-scrounging – and suddenly Layton is teaching Luke the wonders of tapping your stylus on garbage can lids or reminding him how feet work. Worse still, the previous installments laugh at you if you haven’t clicked on every man, woman, child and object at least three times, so you can’t possibly just skip over certain locations.

This just … wasn’t a Layton game. It felt so utterly different, didn’t even care about revealing that magic was fake, and didn’t make me cry even a little bit. Not one stupid tear.

So.

That was my last thought about all things Layton before buying Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney. I had been burned, but I remained optimistic. The tables had turned: now the game was my abusive partner that had somehow managed to convince me to not only stay, but also to give it heaps of money. And … it was all right.

Well, actually, I can say it’s all right now, but it’s the sort of game where if I go to read reviews and they’re all overwhelmingly positive, I’ll start to get annoyed and talk about how shit it is and how it’s insane that people don’t see it. Kind of like Final Fantasy, or The Dark Knight Rises.

I love the puzzles, and I love the trial mechanics, but let’s be honest: this game had problems. Weird problems. At one point it actually glitched out on me, not giving me the correct answer options for a puzzle. I didn’t even know hand-held games still had glitches, but then, I guess I haven’t been on the lookout for them since Missingno. Luckily, like the previous Layton installment, this game pretty much removes all possibility of actually getting a question wrong and gives you infinite attempts without any punishment, so it wasn’t exactly a GTA-style gamebreaker.

Another issue was the instructions in the puzzles. Normally this is very straightforward: you get a box of text on the top screen of the DS, telling you in about three sentences what you need to do to solve the puzzle, and a nice little picture on the bottom screen to admire and maybe click on.

Example.

http://firsthour.net/screenshots/professor-layton-and-the-unwound-future/professor-layton-and-the-unwound-future-shape-puzzle.jpg

Now admittedly, that was an easy one. But compare that to this one, in which you have to shuffle sixteen dolls of a variety of colours around a grid of rooms:

Or maybe that doesn’t seem too bad, either? Well, there’s always the fact that no, in this puzzle each doll does not speak for its entire colour set, and you have to only focus on one specific doll for the entire thing, ignoring literally all the others. If the blue doll said, “Don’t put me next to a red one,” then that just means one blue doll has to be not next to a red one. All the other blues and reds could deal with it. I mean, I thought that might have been an important detail, and that by saying the exact opposite the game was kind of lying to me, but whatever.

Some puzzles’ instructions, I just didn’t even understand. I’m not sure what was going on, but it felt like the Japanese-to-English translators had given in their two weeks’ notice and had just stopped giving a fuck. And some of the puzzles introduced mechanics that were never explained, nor ever used again – right at the end there’s one where you can scroll left and right between multiple screens, and it took me far too long to figure that out, but seriously! I spent the entire game not scrolling, why would I suddenly do it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world now?

I just never had this kind of trouble with the other Layton games. They made sense. The instructions were clear, and if they introduced any new methods of puzzle-solving, they at least strongly hinted to you what you were supposed to do. I may have had issues with the stories, but the technicalities were always solid. I’m not sure what was different here. Maybe if I actually read the credits I’d be able to pinpoint whom to blame.

Okay, enough about puzzles. Let’s get into the incredibly mediocre story.

Basically, the main characters from both original series get sucked into a book that takes them to a weird village. The weird village is medieval and likes to hold witch trials and murder adolescent girls. The characters happen to take a shine to the most witch-accused girl in the village and spend the game trying to prove her innocence, while also getting accused and murdered themselves.

Now obviously, with my Layton mindset, I assumed all the magic was bullshit and there’d be some eccentric rich guy paying a lot of money to kill the women he didn’t like. I mean, you actually see women getting locked into boxes and thrown into flames; they wouldn’t put that kind of brutality into a kids’ game, would they? But the thing is, I don’t know much about the Ace Attorney games, except that one of the characters is an honest-to-god spirit medium who can channel the soul of at least one dead person into her body. Would the writers of those games object to having real magic in this one? So I had to be tentative about calling bullshit.

And, well, the magic at the start was pretty convincing. Statues come to life and start attacking a guy’s car, crazy alien-looking witches fly around London, and you actually see the characters get sucked into the book after seeing their own pictures in the illustrations. I don’t think there’s any non-magical way to explain away all that.

Well, this game has a very nice, neat way of getting around that little problem. Queue drumroll…

and…

They just ignore it!

That’s right. Of course, the witches and murder in the mysterious book-village are all fake and given an extremely tenuous explanation involving hallucinogenic flower juice and the inability to see the colour black. But the thing is, all that only applies to the book-village, which of course is actually a top-secret government research facility. The entire introduction to the game takes place in normal, everyday London, and not a goddamn word is said about how witches were able to fly around the Tower Bridge? How the fuck did regular English statues come to life to attack a protagonist’s car? Because that was kind of the moment I assumed that at least a little bit of magic was real, and I feel pretty ripped off that my right to correctly solve the game’s mystery was impeded by a total plothole.

Googling ‘Layton Ace Attorney plot hole’ yields a number of results that must be awkward for the designers, but quite frankly most of the complaints are things that even I know you have to let go. Layton games are based on the premise of ridiculously-implausible-but-kind-of-possible-I-guess, so issues like, “Why didn’t anyone ever run into the invisible machines?!” aren’t really on the same level as, “If the magic was a result of invisible machines and hallucinogens, how did Layton see the magic before he’d set foot near a machine or inhaled a whiff of hallucinogen?”

As a side note, to all those people posting on forums that the court cases were too easy: fuck you. Seriously, fuck you all hard.

I had other gripes, of course. Mainly about how they completely disregarded the coolest character in the game, Inquisitor Barnham, after all the awesome work they did building him up at the start. He was the prosecutor in almost all the court cases, hell-bent on burning the witches, yet also sympathetic to Phoenix Wright’s insistence that truth is more important than creating more teenaged girl ashes. But then at the last moment, one of the maybe-evil characters has him arrested so he can’t be involved in the final trial. And then... nothing. He just kind of sits around in jail until a cutscene right before the credits shows him driving a boat. Um, good for him, I guess?

Also, while most Layton games involve a little bit of cry-worthy death, in this one, death was handled kind of clumsily. While no witches were actually burned, a shit-ton of people die. A dude commits suicide and is subsequently strangled by a kid who didn’t know he was already dead, for one thing. More importantly, the whole witch fiction exists in the first place because two girls accidentally caused a fire that engulfed the entire fucking village, killing everyone who lived there and traumatizing the aforementioned girls for life. This is serious business. And yet, the only time a main character is faced with death, the interaction goes a little bit like this:

DYING GUY: Daughter, I’m dying.

DAUGHTER: What? But our fraying relationship was just starting to get better!

DYING GUY: It’s incurable.

DAUGHTER: My fragile heart is breaking!

DYING GUY: But don’t worry, I was lying about it being incurable. I’m going in for treatment tomorrow.

Yeah.

It’s easy to talk about the bad parts of a game. Usually more fun, too. But to give credit where it’s due, there were some things I really loved. They balanced out the Layton bits and the Phoenix bits quite nicely, crossing them over well. I loved having Layton in court and Phoenix solving puzzles. It was extra great when the characters were split up due to geography or being fake-murdered, so you got to laugh a bit at Phoenix being crap at puzzles. And when Phoenix was sucking in court, it was amazing when Layton came to the rescue. Actually, a lot of the game was at Phoenix’s expense. I’m okay with that.

The voice acting, even though there wasn’t much of it, was actually really great. It’s really weird being so used to high-class English Layton and then being given a giant dose of American in the form of Phoenix, but I liked it. There was one particular actress, Carina Reeves, who voiced one of the main witches, and there’s a fantastic scene of her character being interrogated in a trial, when she just snaps. She’s laughing maniacally, repeating her defence over and over again while taunting you that you can’t find any holes in her story. And she just sounds excellent. It was only like three sentences, but it was a real highlight for me.

Finally, you can’t ignore the fact that this game is a crossover, and any crossover has to have massive amounts of gratuitous fanservice. Not, like, in the cleavage-y sort of way, but more in the Thor-fighting-Captain-America way. The audience wants Layton in a court room, and that is what they get, and it is freaking amazing. Layton shouts, “Objection!” Layton and Phoenix yell, “Take that!” simultaneously. There’s one point where Layton hints that he’s going to go against Phoenix in court, and when I saw that, I got little happy chills. Then it actually happened, and I started squealing with happiness. In the game Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney, they actually did go versus each other! It was wonderful. Layton wasn’t as ruthless a prosecutor as would have been hilarious, but still. What more could you want?

I mean, y’know, apart from all that plot and puzzle stuff.

It was very good, apart from that.

Aaaand maybe the ending was a bit too ridiculously drawn out. I also lost the last trial on the last possible decision of the game, and had to go through all the explanation of the entire solution twice. That was a bit of torture.

Aaaand one little thing that bothered me was that there was a baby in the book-village research facility. Who lets a baby be born in a research facility centered around hallucinogens? What a bunch of psychos.

Aaand the game was a little bit sexist. I get that Layton’s all ‘gentlemanly’ and ‘chivalrous’ like he is in the other games, but in this one he turned it into overdrive and didn’t think girls were capable of doing anything for themselves.

But somehow that moment of Layton and Phoenix shouting, “Take that!” makes it all better.

The Censorship Totally Made it Better - Dani

Maturity comes in many shapes and forms. For instance, I am a married woman, but I still laugh awkwardly and get a weird lump in my throat whenever someone calls me ‘Mrs’. I’m old enough to buy my own dog, but if anyone describes me as that dog’s mummy, I go through a sort of white-out experience. Once, while tutoring some kids, I accidentally said ‘nipple’ instead of ‘nibble’ and I didn’t get so much as the urge to snicker, but I still make a happy mental note every time I see the number sixty-nine.

As for where South Park fits into that… well, let’s just say that I stand somewhere in between Backdoor Sluts 9 and Human CentiPad. I wasn’t allowed to watch the show as a kid, so when I was sixteen and I finally realised the freedom of having a computer in my bedroom, I binged on all eleven (at the time) seasons. I’m not immune to being grossed out, but I think I have pretty acceptable tolerance. Not to brag, but I do have photos of a dissected possum on my phone from my third-year biology class that I use to surprise people scrolling through to find cute dog pictures. So I kind of figured that Stick of Truth would be a pretty good candidate for the first game to break our oath to not buy any new ones until we finished all our existing games.

We knew it was a short game, so we kind of figured that if we finished it quickly, it wouldn’t count as breaking the rules. Besides, I really needed a break after seventy-something hours of Final Fantasy X. Apparently I forgot a destruction sphere and now I can’t get Anima unless I beat Dark Valefor and … ugh, well, that’s a discussion for another post.

South Park: The Stick of Truth

Status: Complete.

Why I didn’t finish it earlier: Hey, I only bought it like a week ago. I haven’t played anything else since getting it. I think I did fine.

Comments: Honestly, I thought it would be a bit of fun, but also kind of cheap. Maybe a few throw-backs to jokes from old episodes, very few actual laughs, and a mediocre story. And glitches. I expected a lot of glitches.

I don’t really know how else to begin critiquing this besides by saying I loved this game. It was so true in spirit to the show that I felt like a fangirl just by walking around the town, raiding people’s cupboards. One of the first lines of the game made me laugh out loud, as did the entirety of the last long cutscene.

http://au.ign.com/wikis/south-park-the-stick-of-truth/Jesus

And Jesus. When is Jesus not funny?

In the second act (I assume I don’t need to say it, but there will be pretty intense spoilers here), I actually felt intense, radiating happiness at betraying Cartman for Kyle. I wish my friends were as awesome at LARPing as these kids, because they’re better at it than the professionals. There are professional LARPers, right? Well, they suck compared to the South Park kids. Like Craig. Freaking Craig, that kid is so awesome. His detention mission felt like a goddamn heist movie and I loved it. When I was in year four, the only dressing up I did was a self-made eye patch for the time I got conjunctivitis.

The game wasn’t perfect, though, and in ways I kind of expected: namely, in the gameplay. They put such a huge amount of effort into the story and into keeping the atmosphere authentic that a couple of technical issues may have slipped through the cracks. Combat wasn’t exactly difficult, but there was a very specific section at the start of Day Three but before reaching level fourteen and getting the katana, in which my warrior could do virtually no damage because every enemy was super armoured. I just had to set them on fire and wait. Meanwhile Bill, playing a mage, could completely ignore all armour and defence while simultaneously setting them on fire and freezing them for quintuple damage. Oh, and healing him at the same time, so he could literally never die.

I know the warrior has some abilities that could have potentially helped me here, but even by the end of the game, I still never managed to successfully pull off the very first ability you learn. Or the second. So you can understand why I was a bit soured off them by the time I got the armour-destroying third one. Or was it the fourth? I lost track of how many I sucked at. Meanwhile, the mage’s first ability just needed you to mash the A button.

My point is, warrior was way harder than mage, and Bill is not just better at games than me.

I think some of the enemies could have been a bit more exciting, or required a bit more tactical sense on the player’s behalf, because I was pretty much following the exact same routine in each battle. Except at the beginning when Butters was my only companion and the enemies were riposting, but I had no choice but to attack with him anyway and watch him almost die.

Also, I don’t know how much I appreciate having my level capped. If I want to drastically overpower myself, I think I should be allowed. As it was, I just had no reason to get into fights (which the game helpfully pointed out), so I ran out of side missions much quicker. And with no extra cool post-campaign quests, running out of side missions was a big downer.

I felt I was pretty lucky with glitchiness – I only had one problem, in which Cartman had a line that he didn’t actually say, like he’d been temporarily muted. It was kind of a crucial line for the story, too, so it was lucky I had my subtitles on. Well, that was my only problem, until right at the end, when trying to abort the Snuke. I looked it up and saw that many people had problems during this sequence, but none the same as mine. In the third step of the abortion process, my vacuum just didn’t work. I couldn’t change the direction it was facing, so it just sat there, with me feeling gradually more awkward as the minutes passed, wondering, “Um… is this going for really creepy realism or something?”

From what I saw, Bill didn’t have many issues either, though when he did have them they were pretty noticeable. He was invisible for the entire gnomes cutscene, and his bed vanished for half of it as well. And of course, he just had to get the Hasselhoff makeover, which appears to trigger the most common glitch in the game by screwing up the aesthetics in your next save file. And that is why plastic surgery is evil.

All in all, I think this game is freaking awesome, and even though I have serious doubts about its replayability I fully intend to play again as a thief on nightmare difficulty, because I read that thief is the hardest and I’m a masochist.

http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2014/03/South-Park-AU.jpg

I hope one day to show my parents the bossfight in the abortion clinic and say, “And you thought watching South Park would mess up my morality and decency!”

A Two-eyed, Two-horned, Flying, Purple, Rhynoc Eater. -Bill

Have you ever had the experience of playing through an old game, one that you know and love, and thinking, "God, if I could forget everything I know about this game and just experience it again for the first time, I would be so happy"? Well, in a weird sort of way, I got to live that dream with Spyro on the PS1.

The Game: I- I just said... well whatever. It's the first three Spyro Games for the PS1. That's right, the full trifecta of scaly-purple-firey-platforming-3D-ohmygodwhywon'tHunterstopmakingnoisesoutofhisstupid punchableface-goodness.

Why I never finished: Through my youth, I was never a playstation guy. For tiny Bill it was nintendo and PC, and hours of arguing about graphics and games while trying to give off an impression that I had any clue what I was talking about. Dani, however, was a playstation gal (I know, a mixed marriage! Shock horror!) and so when we wed I received a full dowry of pixelated classics (and NHL '98 for some reason...).

A truly unforgettable classic. 

So while Dani frequently replayed these childhood games, I would look on and occasionally try a level, but never actually sit and play. But they're on the list, so play them I must, and find out if these games can stand on their own merits without the comforting rose-tinted glasses of childhood nostalgia.

Getting Through It: I really wasn't sure that I would like this game; as I was starting it up I was mentally preparing myself to tactfully explain my displeasure to my wife: "Dani, your childhood is just plain wrong, I don't know how you ever managed to smile without making a large red bird carry an anthropomorphised bear up a hill..." seemed a little harsh. But, to my slight surprise and great relief, I actually really loved it!

There were some definite noticeable differences between this and the 3D platformers I was used to, with the most interesting one being the way the levels were designed. That is, in Spyro you played on a doughnut, but in Mario 64, Donkey Kong and Banjo Kazooie, you play on a pizza.

Pictured: Level Design... maybe I could have made this clearer...

See in the games I was used to, a level was a big open playground, with stars, or bananas, or jiggies sitting scattered around the level like those olives above (I guess the cheese is coins and notes, while the onions represent enemies) able to be found at your leisure. Spyro, on the other hand, designed its levels so that you always felt like you were going forward, but ended up back where you came from. Collectibles (sprinkles maybe?) always required some deviation, but there was a definite path between them, and once you came back around to the start, you could collect all the ones you missed. This made the whole feeling of the game different, like you have a mission and a drive to get through the level, rather than a sense of searching for your goal. Now, I'm not really sure which is better, but I do think that Spyro definitely had more focus.

Of course, Spyro is still a platformer, so there was the inevitable rage of jumping. My dog spent more time cowering under the table than ever as I screamed in frustration at the TV because fuckyouImadethatjumpIdidn'tHITTHELEDGEYOUBASTAR!##UINKJAIUASBFKJADSFN.

This was not made any easier by the jerkiness of the controls. In the first game I  never felt like I enough control over Spyro's movements, and so things that should have been easy were infuriatingly difficult. I can't even count the times I slowly spun in circles trying to set fire to a bunny so it would release its sweet sweet butterly to heal me (this game is weird) but missing every time. In the second game the controls felt a lot smoother. By the third game, I had absolutely no problems, and I could smoothly fly around until I hit a wall after failing to jump while Dani laughed visciously in my face.

The other big thing the second game introduced was a little treasure compass. By pressing the R and L buttons you can force your dragonfly companion to point his tiny face at the nearest gem to collect. This was wonderful, and let me reasonably do something I never have the patience to do: get 100% completion. I managed a 100% in the third game too, but the first one, with its poop-faced controls and lack of dragonflycompass, I just ran through and got to the end as quickly as possible.

Overall, the gameplay was simple, but fun. But the big thing that set this game apart for me, in terms of the platformers of that era, is the characters. One of the big things that let this happen is the voice acting. Having a N64, I'm not used to the idea that platformers are allowed to have voices, but Spyro (with its cool-guy PS1 technology) had voices galore! I grew to really love some of the characters, and some were just perfectly hate-able, just the worst creatures on the planet, evil people who exist solely to rub your failure in your face and mock you with their stupid shorts and dumb skateboard...

The face of evil.

 

I don't even like cake that much.

So, not only is Dragon Age: Inquisition coming out sometime soon-ish, Arkham Knight has been announced, to be released just after my birthday. Now, since I’m not allowed to buy any new games under these stupid rules, if somebody doesn’t get me that as a present, I may die. Really. It’s a very serious concern for me at this point. I’m not one of those people who can sit back and wait for a game to depreciate before buying it. Did Harry Potter fans wait a few months before buying Deathly Hallows? Of course not, because that would have made them stupid.

I’ve been super slack for the last couple of weeks (read: months). I haven’t been playing any games. And it’s not because real life was getting in the way or anything – it just felt like even lifting up my hands was a massive difficulty. Instead I’ve been lying on the couch, surrounded by junk food, shoving away a dog that really wants to eat said junk food, and insisting that Bill play the first three Spyro games while I watch. I may have also started replaying Spyro 3 myself since the fourth one was eating my soul.

But I finally finished another game!

Portal

Status: Complete.

Reason for not finishing earlier: Got stuck on Test 18. And it wasn’t because I couldn’t figure out what to do, I just lacked the mouse coordination to make it happen.

Comments: I know, I was super late to the Portal party. Everybody played it before me, and I had the Internet, so I knew all the damn cake quotes. I started playing this one in 2011 or ’12, made a ton of progress despite constant flailing and no use of a walkthrough, and then just gave up because I couldn’t handle momentum-based puzzles. Probably because apart from TF2, I don’t actually play that many games on computer, having been raised almost solely on consoles. I’m not very good at computer controls. Using two hands on the one controller is easy, but one hand controlling the mouse and the other controlling the keyboard? That’s like patting your head and rubbing your stomach, only instead of patting, it’s reading a Fifty Shades sex scene without laughing.

That might sound stupid, because you think playing computer games is the most natural thing your hands do, but keep in mind I used to cry whenever I got behind the wheel of a manual car. And that wasn’t all that long ago. Doing multiple things with several hands and/or feet is hard for me.

Anyway, after getting stuck in Test Chamber 18, I quit for two or three years. Last year, on an evening I had to myself, I figured that I knew enough about how Portal went to enjoy Portal 2, and surely by that point my coordination would have improved a little. So I played that for about six hours until two in the morning, and I had a grand old time… until I got stuck on a puzzle involving the red speedy paint. So I didn’t play that for several months.

Today at lunchtime, with a rare spike in my motivation, I loaded up Portal 2 to get past that red speedy paint. I figured, my intelligence at two in the afternoon must surely outweigh my intelligence at two in the morning, so maybe I’d find it easy this time. Somehow, that turned out to be correct and I busted through two puzzles.

Unfortunately, Portal 2 seems to have made enemies with my computer while I’ve been avoiding it: the game crashed on me four times in the space of those two puzzles.

Bugger.

With a bit of resentment, I instead turned to original Portal. I hadn’t forgotten that stupid momentum puzzle I was stuck on, and I suspected that I’d rage quit after a few attempts.

Or… I’d get through it on the first attempt, and have only mild difficulty with the rest of the game.

It was a pleasant surprise, really. Apparently between the ages of twenty and twenty-three I’ve managed to get smarter or more dextrous. There were a couple of moments when I started wistfully fantasising about walkthroughs, but I resisted the urge. Granted, I can’t remember at all if I used a walkthrough in any of the first eighteen levels, but I consider this an independent victory with no one to thank or congratulate but me.

Don’t hold your applause. Please. I like being applauded.

Dark Souls - Part 1: Retracing My Steps. - Bill

The Game: Dark Souls

Why I never finished: By the time I had gotten around to playing Dark Souls, I only knew one thing about it - it was hard. The mention of Dark Souls always brought forth the same two responses: a group of people bonding over the powerful enemies and unforgiving bosses, and the ubiquitous smug one saying, "well, gosh! I didn't find it hard at all, I guess I'm just amazing" (while agreeing with everyone else in their head). So I played it, and yes, it was hard.

Funnily enough though, this isn't a game that I stopped because it was too hard, I stopped for a far more annoying reason - I lost my saved game. I think it was when I was trying to change the name on my Windows Live account, one second I had my hardened, black knight sword wielding warrior ready to go down to the depths of the world, and then I didn't. Well, not to worry, I thought, I'll just start a different type of character and play again. and so that's what I did.

Maybe you're a little... too different...

But from this point on, I found that Dark Souls no longer held the same fascination that it did to me on my first play through. Most of the fun of the game rests in two elements - difficulty and exploration. But by starting the game again, I had no new things to explore. By having worked out how to kill each of the tough enemies, the game was much less of a challenge. And so I spent a while making a new character every few weeks until I eventually just stopped playing.


Coming Back the the Game: Taking a long break from this game was just the thing to get me interested again. While I had been trying out different characters and styles of play, I realised that I still got the most enjoyment from the first character I had ever played with, and decided that on this playthrough I would go back to what I am comfortable with. So I created Bella: a lovely gal who won't take "no" for an answer, especially if the question is "is this sword too big?"

And on this playthrough, I actually did really start enjoying myself. I no longer had the thrill of discovering the best tactics for killing the large armoured knights, or the large armoured boar, or the much larger but far less armoured demons, but I still enjoyed getting through them as fast as I could, armed with the hard earned skill from the previous game, as well as an array of wonderful weapons. The difficulty was gone, and things that had taken me dozens of tries with my first character went by far too quickly, but it had been long enough that I was still excited by it. And of course, I wasted much less time being a nervous idiot.

In my first run, I spent hours working up the courage to fight this intimidating green knight... who turned out to be a friendly and important NPC.

This "friendly" and important NPC was just as scary, but I was a little more confidant at the time... so I straight up murdered him.

After climbing up to the top of the world and ringing the first of two bells (that sounds far less impressive than it could) I was entering territory that, while I had played through it, began to become less familiar. I knew that in the very near future I would be dealing with forests, hydras and other terrors, and I was looking forward to trying out new ways to stay alive, and hopefully, finding new ways to die. The difficulty was coming back.

My children's children's children. -Bill

The Game: Rogue Legacy

Why I never finished: The final boss. After about a dozen failed attempts, I just put my controller down and said I'd get it done tomorrow. Tomorrow became next week. That week became a month. And so here I am, with a list of unfinished games and a little pixelated knight staring contemptuously at me from the desktop of my computer.

Getting it done: Now, unlike some of the other games I'll need to slog through as this endeavor goes on, I actually really like this game. As the sharpest of you may have worked out, Rogue Legacy is a rogue-like game, in which you explore a randomly generated castle, fighting for you life and grabbing loot until you inevitably get killed. But fear not! For during their life of adventure, your character has fathered (or mothered... that really doesn't sound right...) an heir, who learns nothing from their parent's demise, but will happily take their belongings and savings to lead their own quest. This continues on, as you collect money and become more powerful, unlocking new classes of heroes and finding an assortment of powerups and items (all the while dealing with your progeny's shortsightedness, or irritable bowel syndrome, or hypochondria) until you have cleared the castle of its most feared denizens.

After playing this game for hours and loving it, I managed to finally drag my insufficiently skillful self to the final boss, which as I said earlier, proved a little more than I could handle. Coming back to the game though, I found this battle to be... annoyingly easy? With the right items equipped, I managed to get the boss done in about 4 tries, with most of my problems being with relearning how to control my little avatar of death.

That's not to say I wasn't satisfied with the ending of the game. The final boss, though easier than I remembered, was still a great boss to fight against, and the ending credits of the game - showing all the enemies I had killed, and all the children who had lost their lives in this meaningless and unending struggle - were really satisfying to watch.

So now I can cross off the first game on this list (which is already growing past the original 271 as I dig up old games I had forgotten) and set my sights to loftier goals... I never did get around to finishing Dark Souls...

Dragon Week - Dani

Already I’m having a lot of trouble sticking to a single game long enough to actually finish it. It’s only been a couple of days, but already I’m starting to realise that the reason I have so many unfinished games is because I know my limits. I know exactly when a game has gotten too hard or too tedious for me to continue, and I shelve it accordingly. It has nothing to do with weakness or laziness at all; there just happens to be a lot of games that suddenly, spontaneously, turn terrible about 80% of the way through.

Also, I’m not approaching this very efficiently. I’m not starting with the most enjoyable games and working my way down the fun list like Bill is. I leapt right into the deep end of the ocean. Not the deep end of the pool, but the entire goddamn ocean. Already, I have seen things I would not wish upon anybody, let alone someone with my particular game-orientated rage issues.

But every entry must contain some sort of happy ending, so here I shall present the three games I’ve been playing so far this week, one of which I actually managed to finish, and I’ve decided that the common link between them is ‘dragons’. We have…

•           Fire Emblem: Awakening;
•           Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly; and
•           Mario & Luigi Dream Team.

Okay, I get that Bowser isn’t a dragon and therefore my dragon theme was so tenuous that it couldn’t even survive three dot points, but he’s big, spiky and fire-breathing, so CLOSE ENOUGH. Anyway, let’s go into a bit more detail about these games – and I’m sure I don’t need to give this warning, but you should anticipate any and all games to be spoiled here.

Fire Emblem: Awakening

Status: Complete.

Reason for not finishing earlier: Bill destroyed my quicksave.

Comments: Even if my quicksave hadn't ‘mysteriously disappeared’ while Bill was playing, I probably would have abandoned this game anyway. I was pretty close to the conclusion, but by the time I reached Chapter 25, I was getting bored. I like long games, so I wasn't begging for it to end or anything, but I’d begun to hate all the characters and all their stupid children and the Risen could just eat them for all I cared. Everything was so repetitive and enemies did zero damage unless I acted like a complete idiot.

So, when I picked it up again over the weekend, I of course acted like a complete idiot.

This led to my son Morgan dying – not just ‘retiring’, like so many other characters, but fully dying. That hadn’t happened to me in this game since that idiot Donnel. As a result of this grizzly death at the hands of an unimportant zombie, Noire was left a lonely widow living with her ‘retired’ witch of a mother. Lucina was left without a brother and a parent. My entire party’s morale was shattered.

Anyway, life goes on, yadda yadda yadda, and I ended up beating the final boss in a single hit. I spent about ten times longer getting through the final credits. Truthfully, the epilogue material and statistics during the credits were more interesting than the whole second half of the game.

In total, I think finishing the last one and a half chapters of Fire Emblem: Awakening took about half an hour. I probably should have done it earlier.

Mario & Luigi Dream Team

Status: Incomplete.

Reason for not finishing earlier: Because it should have been over already. Like, ten hours ago.

Reason for not finishing right now: Because screw Bowser. Screw him hard.

Comments: Again, I abandoned this one pretty close to the end. But, like when I attempted to read Eclipse, the repetitiveness and unnecessary exposition meant I had to put it down after every ten minutes, which meant I kept forgetting what I was doing and how to do all the strong attacks. And every boss battle is so freaking long that when I inevitably lose the first time, after having just figured out the tricks to it, I just can’t be arsed starting all over again. This is especially the case with any of the ridiculously slow Big Luigi battles.

My big problem with the fights in this game – and a lot of games – is that I hate not being able to see my enemies’ health. It made me hate Final Fantasy, Lost Odyssey, and almost every turn-based Mario I’ve played. It’s just a weird personal issue I have; how am I supposed to adequately prepare for battle if I don’t know how long it’s going to take? What if I’m on really low health and tossing up between a last-ditch attack and retreating? I should know how close I am to victory before I have to make that kind of decision.

Especially if that goddamn arsehole craphead wankerface Bowser can heal. I have a right to know. And don’t tell me this is done in the name of realism: if the game wanted realism, I’d be able to see his crushed ribs sticking out of his sternum from how many times I’ve hammered them. His stupid arms wouldn’t magically regain their use every few turns, but would hang their limply, ineffectually, as he realises his impending quadriplegia. And I would enjoy it. I would enjoy his screams of mutant turtle pain.

Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

Status: Incomplete.

Reason for not finishing earlier: It’s a stupid game.

Reason for not finishing right now: It’s a stupid game.

Comments: Okay. Deep breaths. I need to take several deep breaths before talking about this game because otherwise my brain turns into a garbled mush of hatred. To sum up my experience, I will tell you that whenever I turn this game on, I end up yelling at my TV so hard that my puppy runs out of the room, scared. It is so rage-inducing that I estimate that my blood pressure has just about doubled since attempting it.

Look, I’ve played the first three Spyro games, the ones on PS1, more times than I can count. I can do various segments with my eyes closed. When Bill plays them and fails at something, and I sympathetically say, “Yeah, this bit’s really hard,” I’m lying. That bit is easy. Those are my games. So although I remembered Enter the Dragonfly as a piece of crap that controlled about as well as a car with marshmallow wheels, I figured it wouldn’t take that much effort to make it to the end.

Good God, I had no idea.

It’s like the game itself realises how bad it is, and therefore is trying to forcibly stop me from progressing and figuring out that it only gets worse. I have nothing good to say about it except that the Amazon reviews page for it is a satisfying read. At least one person has called it ‘an unplayable trainwreck’, and most of the others instruct you to rent it, not buy it (hey, video stores still existed back in the early ‘00s). The more recent reviews, from 2013, are actually much more forgiving; I can only assume they approached this game with the attitude of, “Bad graphics and bad gameplay? Well, all old games were like that, right? Five stars!” But no. All old games were nothing like this.

A lesson that anyone whose favourite franchise has been destroyed is able to tell you is, DON’T SELL. Don’t sell, because it screws everything up. Don’t screw with Rareware, don’t screw with Naughty Dog, and absolutely for crying out loud don’t screw with Insomniac. I didn’t want this humble rant of mine to turn into a full-on review and finger-pointing session, but from what I can tell, the new company who produced the fourth Spyro game has only done one other project apart from this game, and it got cancelled.

I haven’t yet finished this game because I need to catch something like thirty more dragonflies until I can progress to the next level. Also, there are only nine levels in this entire game, compared to around thirty-six in the original. Also, catching those dragonflies is nearly impossible because the controls don’t work, you can fall through every second platform, and the game shuts itself down whenever it feels like it.

Seriously. I tried to enter a level for the first time, and this is what I saw:

Obviously, that’s just a stock photo of a TV, but that’s exactly what my screen looked like. Some of the game’s sound effects were still working – like, I could hear wind blowing – but I certainly couldn’t move, or pause, or quit. So I had to reset. Thus far, I’ve had to reset three times, and all for slightly different reasons:

1.      Inexplicable black screen instead of level.
2.      I tried to skip through dialogue and got trapped in the cutscene.
3.      I died while catching a dragonfly, so it tried to respawn me but this somehow broke the camera and it refused to follow me.

On top of this, here are my complaints from the first level – the first level only – of this game:

•          I turned off tutorials, but I see no evidence that the tutorials have stopped.
•       My normal flame accidentally got stuck on superflame, somehow. I don’t think I’ve even seen a superflame yet in this game.
•         The noises the bad guys make have been ripped exactly from different bad guys in the third game. (I later discovered the same is true for good guys, too.)
•          Huh. This level started out Japanese, now it’s turning Chinese, and now Vietnamese. I’m not very quick to pull the racism card, but this just screams of some director shrugging, “Eh. Close enough.”
•          The frame rate. If you so much as move, the whole game slows down.
•          Some people praised the graphics, like the water rippling as you swim or the grass bending as you walk through it. Well, those things also happen if I’m nowhere near the water or grass.
•          There are portals that lead to mini-games, and also a portal that leads to the exit. In Spyro 3, the mini-game portals were black and the exit portals were, like, purple. In this, they’re both purple and the only difference is a slight shape redesign of the exit portal.
•          You can’t catch some dragonflies. The ability you’re meant to use just straight-up doesn’t work sometimes.
•          Also, why are the dragonflies taunting me? They’re meant to be my friends.
•         Now I’m in a tank. The aim appears to sometimes be heat-seeking, and sometimes ground-seeking. It varies.
•          Oops, glitched out. Reset time.
•          Oops, the background glitched and now the whole level is purple space.

·         Incidentally, the whole storyline of this game makes absolutely no sense. This isn’t a complaint about the level specifically, but it really needs to be mentioned. They brought a bad guy back from the dead, he tried to capture the dragonflies but failed and scattered them around the world instead, my ally tried to give me superpowers but failed and scattered them around the world instead, and these sentient dragonflies can’t get home without me, yet they run away from me and taunt me when I try to catch them.

And THAT is why I haven’t finished Enter the Dragonfly.