Guys, I’m here to tell you a story about this nasty little bugger called a Hill Gigas:
This guy.
They’re in Final Fantasy 2 and they are not pleasant customers. See, I was doing a dungeon the other day and not just one, but two of them popped up as a random encounter. Expecting your typical random fight, I started wailing on him.
A couple of turns later, two of my party members were dead and the others could hardly put a scratch on the monsters, because they’re immune to Mythril Axes or something.
It was a good ten minutes before I managed to defeat these guys. It was a battle more difficult than any boss fight in the game thus far and I used up probably about 75% of my party’s total mana, but I did it. Feeling pleased with myself, I healed up and continued through the dungeon.
About ten steps later I ran into them again.
See, these guys are a recurring enemy in this dungeon.
I had figured out a method, though. It involves casting first Blink, and then Protect on my entire party, and hoping for the best. The battles are then long and slow, but manageable.
Slowly I inched my way through the dungeon, fighting these Hill Gigas monsters left and right. When I finally got to the dungeon’s boss, a chimera, I prepped up for the fight in the same way I’d prep up for a Hill Gigas fight and was then shocked when the boss went down in about a quarter of the time it took to fight the common Hill Gigas.
Then I teleported out of the dungeon and felt grateful to be alive. What a dungeon. What a monster!
What are some deliciously difficult monsters that you’ve encountered in your gaming journeys?
In case you’ve been living under a rock on Mars with your fingers in your ears, Skyrim came out today. Skyrim is the latest in the ever-more-popular Elder Scrolls series, whose most basic principle is to present you with an open world and set you loose to do mostly as you please. I never played the first two, but the third one – Morrowind – because a game I love fiercely and which is deeply ingrained in my memory as an all-time classic. It wasn’t actually tremendously good in pure gameplay terms. It was just so vast, so expansive, so atmospheric and alien, so unapologetically ambitious, that its flaws were irrelevant, indeed they became charms at times.
TES IV, Oblivion, was another matter. The fighting was much improved, true, but everything else just seemed to be lacking. The better graphics were only applied to a very generic fantasy world; the portals to Oblivion were impressive at first but quickly became repetitive and tedious to explore, and presented anyway no sense of danger to the world. It was just a hollow game, and even with mods (barring Nehrim) it never became something I spent a huge amount of time with.
Here, then, is Skyrim. At first I was leery of what they were saying about it. Better AI? Better questing? Hah, okay, and I’m the Pope (Outside of Europa Universalis III, I mean). Only… that stuff does seem to be true, so far. Melee combat is much as it was in Oblivion, if a good bit more polished, but the alternatives, namely magic and archery, are truly brilliant. The interface, on the 360 at least, is slick and polished. I hear bad things about the PC’s UI though. I was worried about the simplification of skills, such as removing acrobatics and athletics (And I do still dislike that) but what is there is great, primarily because of the new perk system. Every level you get one point that you can put into getting some significant bonus in a given skill tree. I first chose, for instance, to halve the cost of my novice-level Destruction spells, and this made a tremendous difference to how I was going about fights.
What I’m finding is that I want to tell you not just about how I came upon some bandits, killed one, resurrected her as a zombie, and let her fight her former comrades while I burnt them from afar; I also want to tell you about how I found a treasure map on one of their bodies, and it was just the right amount of detail to show me where to look without being too easy. I want to tell you about how I walked into a store during an argument, asked about it, said I could help retrieve something, and this was reacted to in a natural way – they kept arguing, but the topic shifted slightly. I want to tell you about how I scarfed down a whole load of random ingredients to learn their alchemical effects, only to find I had crippled my stamina for a moment. I don’t just want to explain fighting mechanics, I want to relate stories to you, stories that I experienced in this world. And it is a world, and that is the magic of it. I ascended a fairly small mountain and as it grew stormier and snowier, I felt physically colder in my room. That’s when I decided I had enough to make a preliminary blog post on the game.
All this from two hours of play.
Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Alec Meer not only called Skyrim GOTY, but said “I’m sorry Morrowind – I love you, but I don’t need you anymore. I think, at last, there is a new Best Elder Scrolls Ever.” This is high praise indeed.
It’s very early for me to make any serious judgment on this game. But he might be right.
Also, Saul Tigh voices one of the characters. I am MORE than okay with this. Will someone turn off that DAMN MUSIC?
Way back in the day there was a game called Robotron: 2084. I played it a little as a kid– not much, though. This game was not easy, you see. For starters it had a two-joystick control scheme, so you could move and shoot in two different directions– this was the first game to do that. Combine that with weird unworldly sounds, flashing neon lights, and gameplay that just threw you into the middle of the action without so much as a countdown or warmup period, and you can see why this game was fairly unforgiving for a younger player. (It also scared me, but that’s beside the point.)
It was widely hailed as a pretty genius game, though, and now that I’m older I’m able to see why. Not surprisingly, it has spawned several homage games and “Robotron-likes”. Voxatron is one of those games.
Voxatron is not complete. It’s not even in beta. It’s currently in alpha, and even so it’s one of the most fun games I’ve played in a while. A screenshot isn’t really going to do it justice– heck, I don’t know if a video would really do it justice, but here you go:
Basically, the game is Robotron, but with plenty of weapon powerups and 100% destructible environments. Level after level you’re fighting nonstop waves of enemies. Your objective? Survive. Just… survive. If you don’t survive, you restart the level and get to try again. You’d be surprised how many times you’re willing to try again once you really get into the game.
Oh, and there’s a level editor, too, if that’s your kind of thing.
Anyways! For an alpha, this game is extremely promising. It works natively on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and for the next six days you can pay what you want for it as a part of Humble Bundle. I highly recommend it!
I look at gaming currently and I look at gaming in the past and I just see such a big gulf in terms of how important the “big new things” are. Maybe I’m somewhat abalone in this but I just can’t work up a lot of excitement over recent developments. The iterative process of making computer hardware more powerful continues, as always, and is not used for terribly much aside from better graphics, as always. But I’m thinking specifically here about control schemes.
When I was but a lad, when there were only 151 Pokemon and arcades hadn’t quite died out yet, we were very impressed by the move to 3D and saw that it had potential. (Also screw Mario 64, Jumping Flash was the best 3D platformer ever.) But what was just as amazing was this newfangled thing called a DualShock, or more properly Analog control. We sometimes forget this today but there was a time when controllers did not have such things as analog sticks, just the D-pad and some buttons. Now it’s not like analog control itself was a new thing – heck, even Pong’s paddles probably count. Not to mention the PC joysticks and meese and trackballs, all commonplace at the time; but on consoles this was something else (If you mention the neGcon I will find you and punch you).
But Sony weren’t content with just having a new thing. No, they knew they needed something to show it off, to demonstrate why this new thing battered. They needed…
And now the true purpose of this post is revealed; Puns.
Ape Escape (Another platformer better than Mario 64 incidentally) wasn’t just a great game, and it wasn’t just a demented dose of Japan for my quaint British brain, it was a game that did – or at least convincingly pretended it did – something that you could not do without analog sticks. And that was the key. Not just selling a game that needed a DualShock controller to play, but one which showed you why you needed it, why it was a serious development that would influence games. So it did. Can you imagine a console today without analog controls? Everyone who didn’t already have it on the drawing board scrabbled to ape Sony. As for the cusomters, well, it might have cost a few squid to get the new controllers but tanks to Ape Escape it was demonstrated to be worth it.
See, this is what new motion controls have failed, and are failing, to do. They aren’t showing us what they can do that our existing schemes either outright cannot do, or can only do to a much lower standard (DooM was ported to the SNES remember, no analog there!). There are games which you can’t play without the motion controller but the few which seem to actually do anything that is both a) fundamentally new and b) fundamentally engaging. It doesn’t take a brain sturgeon to see all this! Actually, we can go back to the verboten neGcon here; it offered analog controls but who the heck even had one? Now the Wii and Kinect might be successful but that is very much more down to marketing than having an actual solid library of games backing them up. The few attempts to do something that can’t be done elsewhere, like Red Steel, just seem to consistently be macaquehanded.
Of course it’s not that these things don’t actually have some potential. Wired has covered some pretty amazing things done with the Kinect. They just aren’t getting translated into games like Ape Escape. This is a real shame because gibbon half a chance these new systems could actually be the revolutionary ones they are trouted as being; or at least be a very nice compliment to what we already have.
I’m so sorry but when the opportunity arises I can’t kelp myself, no matter how out of plaice the puns might be. I will try to keep them to a minimum but I can’t promise this will be the sole post packed to the gills with such awful puns! But I shall at least try to keep them to a minimum. Shall we agree to no fish puns on any day of the week, barramundi?
… Address all complaints to – ahem – Pike.
We're not foals. We know what the mane attraction of our blog is.
Between publishing a book, writing a new book, and working, I’ve been slowly working my way through Final Fantasy II (note that I mean the original FF2, and not what was actually FF4.) Despite going into it a bit apprehensive because people had warned me about it, I’m LOVING it thus far. I’m a good few hours into it and having a blast.
Yeah, it's something like this.
I love the weapon and spell leveling system. I’ve love the keyword system, which seemed gimmicky at first but was quite ahead of its time and still works nicely once you get used to it. I love the plot, which actually reminds me a lot of the aforementioned book I published. Really the only thing I don’t like about it thus far is that the character I have dubbed my mage has basically no mana points and ethers are pricy as heck. Fortunately, she can whack a mean punch with her staff.
All in all I’m having a lot of fun so far. I’ll admit that the first hour or so of the game was a bit of a rough wake-up call if you’re coming into it directly after FF1, but if you can get past that then this game is a real gem. We’ll see if it stays that way!
We do apologize for the paucity of updates this week; Pike has had various matters of consequence to attend to (more here) whilst my Internet decided to be nonfunctional for almost a full 24 hours, then I came back online and just watched Saints Row The Third trailers until I remembered we have a blog that should probably be attended to!
Honestly I’ve not been doing much special in videogaming terms lately. I’m playing Baldur’s Gate, playing Saints Row 2, and messing around with my usual array of 4x/grand strat games. There are a couple of things that might be worth relating though!
First is that I still can’t wrap my head around how great Master of Orion 2 is. I mean I’ve heard all the hype and stuff for years, and I finally got around to playing it, and it lives up to every word. It really is that good. And it has an amazing soundtrack as well!
You may or may not have heard that Sword of the Stars 2 came out this weekend, and that the release was the very definition of a clusterfuck. Kerberos not only uploaded a beta version to Steam but, once they fixed that and had a real version up… it was no better! They’re working hard on getting it up to par, and I’m sure they will given the gulf between SotS at release and SotS today, but Kerberos + Paradox making a game was a pretty amazing recipe for disaster. I think they’re trying to top that time CCP deleted everyone’s boot.ini. Kerberos' Face When
As I said I would I’ve spent some time with Hearts of Iron 3, and I can safely say it’s really not my cup of tea. I’m not a fan at all and I feel that I have given it a fair shake now; I can see what they were aiming for but it just didn’t work out that way, sadly. Oh well, it’s not like HoI2 has gone anywhere!
But we’re moving into the busy season now, so hopefully we’ll have plenty to say over the coming weeks! And of course what we’re going to talk about is old strategy games. Funny story, when Pike and me first planned this we considered making a strategy gaming blog, but considered it too limiting. And now look at us!
Oh yes, and there was the GTAV trailer, wasn’t there? I’m blown away by the graphics and San Andreas is a great setting. I’m actually not too worried if they’re taking a serious route with it; that’s a perfectly legitimate thing for them to want to do, and R* do it very well. But I have to admit, I’m more excited for Saints Row nevertheless.
(66% of consoles have 100% of the games; #OccupyMS+Ninty)
