Games
Bomberman: Act Zero
WTF. Bomberman (the character) got a makeover in 2006 and is now moar GRIMDARK than ever! Just look at it! AND IT’S TRUE.
How I think an awesome Dexter game should be.
According to Joystiq, there’s a Dexter (the serial killer, duh) game being developed for Icarus Studios (Heard of it? Me neither). They’re planning to release it on the iphone (wut) and the pc.
I’ve been thinking a while about this, and I think I know how an awesome Dexter game should be.
MOST IMPORTANT, it should be developed for the Wii (to make good use of the wiimote)
- It must be an RPG (in the purest sense). Think Hotel Dusk or Another Code.
- No leveling, or grinding. Just some sidequests to earn money (and they better not be repetitive).
- Money is used to buy tools (knives, bistouries, miscellaneous sharp objects).
- There are two parallel storylines (and a subplot of Dexter’s sister dating with that
guy, and if you pay attention to it, you may actually get to do some
sidequests with her boyfriend) going at the same time. They aren’t
dependant on each other. One constitutes Dexter’s normal job as a blood
splatter analyst and working on murder cases. The whole murder won’t be
solved by you, but you can track it until the end, and eventually, when
you clear enough of these (by analizing the blood spatter, talking to
other characters and filling the final report you send to Doakes)
you’ll get into the final one (the one involving Dexter’s sister).
Parallel and unrelated (until the end) to this one is finding criminals
to fill Dexter’s “Need” and at the end, both plots merge and you get to
either let that guy go (and start a whole new subplot) or kill him and end the game as an ethical murderer (yeah, right). - You
can choose your own victims by misleading the investigation team on
your blood report, or simply using a feature called “the Database”
which holds all cases (like the pub in FFTA, just with some quests that
might end up not getting any kills.) - You can choose wether
to adhere or not to the Harry Code (to only kill other killers) or you
can just rampaging with all the suspects you meet, but there should be
a way this can impact you, like a “Sanity” meter, if you kill anyone
you start becoming less rational (in dialogues) and ticking people off,
and to get back the meter at normal levels you should stick to the
code, but for every certain time you don’t kill, the sanity meter also
goes down. - You have to do the killing yourself (think
Trauma Center) , anyway you want to with any tool you managed to buy,
you have to clean up the place and in case you do a lousy job,
eventually you’ll be called to help at the very crime scene you made.
Retard. - The locations in which you commit the murders are also
arranged with the database of previously used and now abandoned crime
scenes. - Should be open (think No More Heroes).
And… That’s it.
The reason why I disliked Final Fantasy Tactics A2.
I never posted it on my blog, but I bought Final Fantasy Tactics A2 because I really, really liked Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. In fact, it’s not only my favorite Final Fantasy it’s also my favorite game. Ever. It had it’s own handful of mistakes but that didn’t stop it from ranking so high in my list. The story was great, and I miss that part of gaming. Seems to me like developers are thinking that story isn’t such an important part of a game anymore. Sure at first glance it might seem just like another one on the pile of “It was just a dream,” story. But it was anything but (I won’t go into detail over this here because it’d take more than the length of this post). It had fantastic music, which I still hear to this very day (The orchestra version on the OST, not the GBA version one, I’m not a masochist). It didn’t have groundbreaking gameplay, I won’t deny that, but it was a major change from the command-based FF standard. This was in 2003.
Fast-forward to 2008, I was still playing this game on long trips and in offline places. I had resigned myself to the possibility of a sequel. And then tragedy struck (yeah, tragedy). Looking around in wikipedia I found the FFTA2 page. “Impossible.” I was happy, thrilled on the possibility of such a game actually existing. What had they done to improve it? It never even crossed my mind that they could screw up such a game. But, once again, I was dissapointed. Maybe what people say really is true, you shouldn’t have high expectations of anything so you won’t be dissapointed. However, the bar I had set for the game was to be at least as good as it’s predecessor. Who’d have thought? A game actually living up to it’s hype? Even if it was my self-made imaginary hype. This was all when I was in Mexico. 2 weeks later I arrived at the US and was getting energy from pure joy. I needed no untasty food and flavorless drinks, the game alone was providing all the resources I needed to live.
The very second I stepped out of that (damn slow) airport, I directed myself to the nearest gamestop and bought the hell out of that game. I bought the game, the strategy guide, and a hot pocket+pepsi_light. I bought the hot pocket out of pure necessity because when I arrived at the airport I had been traveling for about 12 hours (had to take a detour in panama… :/) and joy alone wasn’t going keep me awake.
I opened the game with joyful rushment, and took my DS out, throwing on to the ground whatever placeholder/shitty game was currently occupiying it. I inserted the cart and booted the DS up in what seemed to be the longest 3-and-a-half seconds of my life. But then… Then the horror commenced.Huh? What’s this? Did they just seriously copy-and-paste the main theme? Well, ok, don’t mind that. About one “New Game” later I was dumped in a 10 year old kid’s thought stream about how school was lame, and something about her aunt and then a seemingly useless poll. What will you do this summer? Do you have a goal for the summer? And something else I can’t (or won’t) remember. Then, this teacher annoys the main character for being late THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL.
But what? The library? All right! The Grimoire! And what’s that?! A teddy bear? A reference to the previous FFTA! Press A; Read; Press A; read. I wasn’t aware of the horror until much later… Until about 4 missions later in the story and after you meet a annoyingly cute character (unlike montblanc who was simply annoying) that goes by the name of Adelle, you get some info about what you’re doing here, etc.
Long-story short, the way to leave this world (which the main character was totally against, as any rational person *cough*fuckyoumarche*cough*, excuse me I need some cough drops) is by filling the mysterious journal. How do you that? By doing stuff (i.e missions). Yeah, digest that for a second. The premise is that to get out, you have to do missions. That’s the storyline.
“You’re shitting me.” I thought.
The gameplay was similar enough. Most jobs returned, some new ones came back and two new races appeared. From a purely gameplay-driven perspective I’d say that the new races weren’t needed. They have few jobs and they could have been assimilated by other races. There are new enough jobs that the innovation is palpable but there is also a new system that doesn’t allow you to access certain jobs unless you clear a specific quest. There were also some new items in the isometric battle maps, like traps and chests. Nice additions to the gameplay. I can’t complain here (even though I want to).
The music didn’t really change from FFTA 1 to FFTA 2. But I love that because Hitoshi Sakimoto’s music is really awesome, even if it’s sometimes repetitives (like from game to game, hehe).
The graphics are better, but I really disliked the new direction the “detailed” portraits took. The “anime” looking avatars for each unit are now… I don’t know. More whimsical? They’re different and while that isn’t bad by itself, it is when you mess with a perfectly good part of the game. For example the viera now have extremely long ears and an opaque pink blush points in each cheek, and every character now has a pointy chin and a long face. In FFTA the difference was the heads shape (smaller and more defined) and the ears, which were moderately sized contrasting the HUGE ears they have now. Although FFTA2 isn’t the only ones to have this vieras, though.
Looking through all these points you might deduct the truth: I don’t hate the game. I enjoyed it. BUT it dissapointed me the same way Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (not just because it didn’t “feel” like FF) did. It didn’t fill the void for a sequel that I was hoping to get. Maybe this game aims for a younger demographic, maybe they decided that a complete plot was too hard to involve with the gameplay. I’m not sure. The only thing that I hated was the story, but that’s the most important thing in games for me (well, I’m more flexible when we’re not dealing with an RPG; remeber that game about that plumber saving the princess from the fire-spewing, spike-shelled turtle?).
That was a long post wasn’t it? Ok. TL;DR version: I got the game, didn’t like the story, BAWWW’ed about it.
Ryan Payton to be Creative director in Halo: Chronicles.
Waaat, an MGS4 co producer working with Peter Jackson for the new Halo? Expect dinosaurs, 90-min long cutscenes and a plot that you will never even get the chance to understand.”F
From xbox360fanboy.