03
Jan
2020

Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within

categories: survival horror; word count: 375 words

In Japan, this game is known as Clock Tower: Ghost Head, for clarification.

A lot of people didn’t like this game because of the fact that it is a point-and-click survival horror game, but it was one of my first introductions to the survival horror genre as a child, and I managed to play it all the way through to the A ending (which is the best ending that you can get in the game, meaning that you played it all the way through). The one thing that stood out to me, and made the entire game worth it, was managing to get that far and realizing that you were actually playing the role of the antagonist without becoming aware until the very end. Without ever becoming aware until events at the end of the game forced her to become aware, Alyssa Hale was one of two “cursed babies” born to the Maxwell line, and she and her sibling were initially buried with the intent to kill them and stop the curse until who for all intents and purposes became her father, Allen, digs the children up and realizes that one of them is still alive. He raises Alyssa as his daughter. Alyssa, having the split personality of Mr. Bates — who could have been the soul of the baby who didn’t make it transplanted into her body, or just a side effect of the “Maxwell curse”, even though this is never explained — is the antagonist of the game, and although she is one of very few survivors at the end since her “father figure” shoots her biological father and demands that she escape the building that they are in before it explodes, she still manages to survive in spite of everything that happened.

One of the other redeeming things is the stellar soundtrack, especially what rolls if you get the A ending.

If you’re willing to put up with an old game that has some peculiar… semantics about it, especially the whole point-and-click bit, the fact that it strayed so far from the usual survival horror narrative actually does make it a good game. You just have to be willing to put up with the fact that for today’s graphics, it is an old game.

02
Jan
2020

The 3rd Birthday

categories: RPGs; word count: 546 words

Parasite Eve was one of the greatest games of the decade, even though it was released in an era where we praised pixelated graphics and regarded them as being some of the absolute best for their time (isn’t it funny how things change over the course of several decades?). It also had one of the best ending songs I’ve ever heard, not to mention some awesome remixes. It really paid homage to the novel that inspired it, and the movie that came out afterward actually wasn’t half bad. Everything that paid homage did so in a great way.

The sequel to it that came out in 1999 was a bit dustier than the original, but when you have something that groundbreaking to live up to, you honestly can’t — or shouldn’t, for that matter — expect it to be as perfect as the title that came before it. But it was still a good game in its own right. The graphics were more polished, the storyline was still decent, and the tweaks that had been made to the battle engine still made for a compelling game that made you want to play all the way through to the end. And just like the game that came before it, the soundtrack was brilliant. The end song doesn’t quite have the punch that “Somnia Memorias” did, but “Gentle Rays” is still an extremely good song in its own right, and you can tell listening to the songs in Parasite Eve II that a lot of time and effort was put into the soundtrack. Things were still good.

Sadly, all I can say that I liked about The 3rd Birthday was the soundtrack. I played it for completion’s sake, having been an enthusiastic fan of Parasite Eve, wanting to finish the series out when I found out that a new game in the franchise was finally coming out. And when I played through it, all I felt like I was getting was fanservice, the “Parasite Eve label” slapped on a game that desperately tried to bring back old-school fans of the franchise to a game with better, newer graphics, a sharp soundtrack, and perhaps the world’s worst plot (seriously, read up on it if you haven’t already played it or spoiled it for yourself… the plot has so many holes it’s practically Swiss cheese, and it is that bad). You can listen to the soundtrack here if you’d like, as to me, that is the only redeeming quality that the game has. It became a shoot ’em up that tried way too hard to pull old-school fans in to the game, which dismayed those who liked the franchise for what it was, and the fanservice was — is, depending on whether you’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater at this point — incredibly over the top. For Christ’s sake, the more damage Aya takes during battles, the more holes you see in her clothing, and this is done in so obvious a way that you can tell it was intentionally done. Jesus…

I don’t want any more sequels if this is literally how they are going to be handled. I don’t. Just stop them here.

(And the irony? Because the game’s supposed to be an RPG, that’s the category I put it in.)

31
Dec
2019

Happy New Year’s Eve, everyone!

categories: holidays; word count: 107 words

This was the best clip art that I could find under the circumstances given that there seems to be a dearth of New Year’s Eve clip art and an abundance of New Year’s Day clip art. But it was cute, so it will make do. Our family will do what we do best, attempt to sleep through various fireworks and festivities, and wake up the next day in the new year. Hopefully the surrounding neighbors don’t get too excited with the fireworks and cause the kids not to be able to go to sleep or wake them up, though. Or scare the dog. That would be bad…

30
Dec
2019

Why did Gravity have to do this?

categories: MMORPGs; word count: 486 words

One of the biggest appeals of the alchemist class in Gravity’s MMO Ragnarok Online was the homunculus, genetically altered pets of varying types that assisted you in battle. Through AI that Gravity allowed you to use, you could set the homunculus up to attack on its own without you having to manually tell it to attack whenever you wanted it to attack. This essentially gave alchemists a leveling partner, and at that, one that they could choose from — if they didn’t like the homunculus that came forth from their embryo, they could easily make another one. Until, of course, Gravity essentially nerfed the entire homunculus system by making it so that homunculus could no longer automatically attack on their own with AI, forcing those who still wanted to use homunculus to attack to manually make their homunculus attack on their own (or use skills on their own, for the purpose of this blog post being noted as “attacking on their own”) every single time. Returning to Ragnarok Online with Bub having been a proficient alchemist player in my own right, I find this problematic for no shortage of reasons. Not only does it weaken the alchemist class by far, effectively reducing them to “a swordsman without the skills” — as this has actually been said, and I believe it — but this handicaps disabled gamers who then have to input considerably more keystrokes if they wish to continue using their alchemist’s homunculus. Gravity’s alleged rationale behind this was that “too many alchemists” (which I don’t believe) were “using their alchemist’s homunculus to level while not actually being at the computer,” something that a lot of players will call AFKmisting… which can and will get you banned.

Anyone foolish enough to try to level up long-term AFKmisting needs to cop a well-deserved ban for that, quite frankly. First of all, prior to this (as when Gravity made it to where your homunculus could not auto-attack, they could not do this), homunculus needed to be fed at regular intervals. If they starved, they ran away. So anyone foolish enough to “set up camp”, even on a faraway map where they thought they could not (or “would not”) get caught, might run the risk of their homunculus starving to the point where they ran away, rendering this entire “bright idea” of theirs both pointless and fruitless. And secondly, homunculus only net their alchemist base experience, not job experience, which is generally more coveted. Thirdly… the whole ban thing. If you are well and truly caught AFKmisting, you will get banned. No questions there. It’s pointless.

For Gravity to stand up on a soapbox about this one thing and take away something that made having an alchemist character particularly great, I find perplexing if not mind-boggling. Not only is it not smart, but it will get you banned. Why handicap the alchemist character to such great severity? I still don’t understand it.

29
Dec
2019

Lumo

categories: platformers; word count: 282 words

If you’re looking for a really cute puzzle platformer, you don’t need to look any further than Lumo. It pays homage to the nineties when these games were being manufactured a lot more, and it shows in how isometric each of the levels (as well as the main character himself, a child who got sucked into the video game and now has to solve fourteen floors of puzzles to get out and find his way back home) are. The main character looks a bit like a black mage depending on what angle you’re looking at him from, and I suppose that might have been what piqued Bub’s interest playing alongside me — after all, he did look a bit like Vivi.

I found the game challenging, but not enough to want to make me put it down. And there are two different modes of difficulty, one giving you unlimited lives, removing the timer, and allowing you to save much more frequently for those of you who may want a substantially easier time gaming through it… that was the one that I chose, just to make gaming with Bub that much easier, as well as to make it easier on myself since I had never played the game before. It was just motivating enough of a puzzle platformer to keep me going, and keep me wanting to solve it, without being so difficult that it made me want to give up and stop playing.

And it was one that I did consult a walkthrough on for brevity’s sake. That really helped out a lot, too.

All in all, though, it was a really enjoyable game, and I would recommend that people play this one.

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