Cutting Corner Leads to Disaster

These days jaded movie goers can usually see a movie twist or cliche coming even before it's revealed. We have been trained to the point where the story is unraveling in our head as we watched therefore nothing really surprises anymore.

So there is this Wii action game I played sometime ago called Disaster: Day of Crisis, a Japanese game that mixes a lot of different element of gameplay like gun shooting, car chases and rescue missions - all the typical stuff you find in an action game (or movie for that matter). You play this rescue worker who loses a close comrade during a rescue at the beginning and then decides to quit his job but is thrown back into the fray when the deceased comrade's sister gets kidnapped by terrorists. How cliche is that?

 

Unfortunately, the makers decides to cut corners and use the same face/body model of the deceased comrade for the one of the lead terrorists. Now I may not know much about making games but I can definitely spot cut corners like these when I see them, it's the exact same character model except with the hair and eye color change. Since the friend died very early in the game, I knew there was a twist coming that he didn't actually die but re-emerges as the bad guy - what could be better that the final showdown when friend is pitted against old friend right? Unfortunately it turns out I was over-thinking the plot, the terrorist had no relations to the hero and is not his old friend reborn as the villain. 

The game isn't as low budget as you might expect, the graphics and cinematic doesn't give it away that this was an early Wii game in the library and the game-play switches up so you never get tired of playing the same thing over again. The Wii motion control is a bit tacky as you would find with most Wii games of this genre. But that ending that I dreamed up would have made the game story a hell of a lot better don't you think? 

The hero can't tell if he's looking at his old friend or his new enemy?

Hello Stranger, What Are You Buying?

The Resident Evil games have been pretty predictable these days when it comes to unlockable features after completing the game -  it's the usual offering of Mercenaries mini-game and bonus costumes. These are some of the series mainstays since the beginning and the theory of why fix something that isn't broken is a logical reasoning why Capcom never bother to come up with something different for each new game.

Jill wonders where The Mercenaries have gone on Revelations?

So naturally I was very intrigued when I unlocked the Raid mode upon completing Resident Evil Revelations as this was the first bonus mini-game that isn't the Mercenaries since RE : Code Veronica. All I knew prior to playing the game is that the story mode doesn't feature co-op but Raid mode does though you still have the option of playing the game solo if you like. 

After playing Raid mode for a bit, I quickly discovered it's nothing more than the same story mode with the cutscene removed and co-op mode tacked on. As the main game is designed for portable play, each chapter were made to be very brief so these chapters are now individual missions that you can play separately on Raid mode. The objective of each mission remains largely the same but now there are no cutscenes or loading time to interupt the game-play, thereby allowing co-op play. It's almost as if the main game was meant to have co-op play as there are always a NPC character in each stage but yet it was strangely omitted.

So in the end, it turns out Raid mode wasn't a brand new mini-game as I would expect and the Mercenaries isn't featured in this game probably because Capcom expects you to buy the standalone Mercenaries 3D game also  released on the Nintendo 3DS. Nicely played Capcom, you always know what your fans want (or don't want) and give it to them. At a price, of course.

You wanna play Mercenaries on the 3DS? Be prepared to pony up the cash

Talking About My Generation Games

Since it's NBA Draft Night and I'm in the mood of compiling my own selection of picks, I thought I shared my choices for IGN Game of the Generation Poll. I loved taking part in these polls and finding out the results even though IGN tend to be doing these Best of list almost every other month.

Now I gave quite a bit of thought as to which three games should make up the top 3 but not nearly as long for the rest on the list. Mostly I just knew the other games had to be there no matter what the order were, most were really early in the generation so no game had the benefit of making the list just because I recently played it. Well, except The Last of Us but I don't think anyone would argue it isn't a game for the generation.

1. Red Dead Redemption - Playstation 3

I wasn't as hyped up for this game when it came out, in fact I patiently waited for the GOTY edition before picking it up and really took my time to play and finish this. But it's pretty apparent this game did everything right even down to the DLC and multi-player mode. I was pleasantly surprised by how good the writing was, now I'm used to playing Japanese games so most of the time the story is just serviceable or sometimes things get lost in translation. Red Dead may be about outlaws and lowlifes but the conversations are never random babbling or meaningless chatters, and you don't have sit through a long cutscene most of the time too.

2. Super Mario Galaxy - Nintendo Wii

Mario 64 was my first 3D Mario game but it was years after release when I finally played it on the Nintendo DS. Let's just say the controls on the DS remake are not nearly as accurate as the original without an analog pad on the handheld. So Super Mario Galaxy was more like my first real taste of 3D Mario platform and the game works so well because Nintendo didn't just do a 3D version of conventional Mario platform levels like how the early 3D Castlevania games were.

3. Catherine - Playstation 3

This was a first day buy for me despite not having played much of Atlus' previous games. I bought this game after being intrigued by  the premise and characters but the only reason I replay this game is solely because of the addictive puzzle/block-climbing. In fact, I wish you could just skip all the evening drinking session because once you played through it once, those nightly sessions can be a chore.

If you look at the rest of my picks, you may think I deliberately left out any Capcom's games but the truth is, most of their game released this generation just weren't very good though Dead Rising is noteworthy exception.

Fear The Camera

As hard as it is to make a good horror game, it's probably even harder to make a decent one on a handheld system. Many of this generation more established handheld horror games consist of taking what works on the console and shrinking it down to fit on a handheld system  like Silent Hill Origins. While it's not necessarily a wrong approach, it doesn't set the game apart from the console games with the exception of poorer graphics.

Spirit Camera, the 3DS game from the Fatal Frame series is the exception to the rule: it's a game that honor the series legacy but can only be played on the 3DS. Basically it puts the camera obscura onto the palm of your hands by transforming the handheld to the infamous camera. It isn't very scary (then again most of these games tend not to be) but it sure feels fun swinging the handheld around trying to locate the supernatural. It also deploys Nintendo AR scanning feature where you can basically scan a printed image with the camera and create some sort of a 3D image on screen. 

Finally captured Maya with my own hands

Some fans might have been disappointed that this wasn't a traditional Frame Frame game but it hard to fault the makers for trying to ultilized every unique feature of the 3DS handheld. Hopefully the newly announced Fatal Frame set for the Wii U will be something truly special for the series and the platform, seeing the lack of such horror games on the system.

Justice for All

Since upgrading my Nintendo DS to 3DS XL, I felt the need to clear the backlog of unfinished games on the old DS especially an ongoing series such as Capcom's Ace Attorney. So I spent the last month resuming my save game of Apollo Justice which I probably first started more than a year ago and finished the last two remaining cases over the weekend.

Now Apollo Justice was the first real installment of the Ace Attorney series made for the Nintendo DS as the previously 3 games were originally Gameboy Advance games that never made it out of Japan until they were ported to the Nintendo DS. If you never knew this, you wouldn't be able to tell after playing all four games as Apollo Justice doesn't look very different aesthetic wise from the earlier games. The interface remains the same, sprites of old characters like Phoenix Wright looks identical in the flashback sequence (he has aged in the present story you see) and there isn't much changes introduced apart from new characters.

Capcom bundled the first 3 games and ported them to the 3DS, so it's a port of  what was already a port. 

The real draw of the Ace Attorney game is the story and in that sense, the fourth game does the series justice in the final case where events from 7 years ago all come together to explain Phoenix Wright's involvement in this one. It's hard to remember why I took this long to finish Apollo Justice, I guess the fatigue of playing all four games in a relative short amount of time on the same system eventually wears you out. Like remember when Capcom ported all of the previous RE games to the Gamecube after doing a full blown remake of the first? Same thing with the Ace Attorney games and eventually you get underwhelmed with game's dated graphics running on more powerful hardware, no matter how good the games were back in the day.

Blackout in Kamurocho

I managed to track down a used copy of the first Ryu Ga Gotoku to add to my collection, having never played the first game in Japanese voice-overs since Sega wisely decided to dub the game for Western audience. Even then I didn't have much complaints about the English voice-overs, as a matter of fact I remember most of the main characters were really well done but Sega did used one too many celebrities for this one.

Before she was WET, she was Kiryu's first love interest

I missed having Kiryu at the center of the story, these days in the newer games he tends to just show up at the end of the story to beat the main bad guy because he's after all, the face of the series. I also missed gritty feel of the yakuza society, these guys are not nice people and the original writer set the tone in these first 2 games which team RGG have since failed to keep up and do justice to his characters. 

The loading time is not as bad as I remember and the graphics still look pretty good for PS2 games, I like how every cutscene looked consistent because there is only one engine to render all cutscenes (save for the FMV videos which SEGA used very sparingly). In the PS3 games, the story sometimes unfolds using the video cutscene and game engine cutscene but there is always an awkward fade-out black screen when switching over and it can get annoying when there are numerous switch overs. SEGA needs to create a more seamless transition between these or just stick with one form of cut-scene because it looks very outdated for a modern game like Yakuza.