Category Archives: The Android’s Casting Magic Missile (RPG)

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Favorites

Re-catching Them All

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Like everybody else, I played Pokemon as a kid. (Well, as a 13 or 14-year-old, because that’s about how old I was when it came out.)

I played Pokemon Red, the first in the series, religiously, and then when the second generation came out I played Pokemon Gold just as religiously. I loved those freaking games, and I imagine that I don’t have to go into much detail here because I’m sure most of you loved them just as much.

Something happened then, though. When the third generation of Pokemon came out, I had just started attending university. And it’s not that I grew out of Pokemon, because I certainly didn’t. And it’s not that that I didn’t have time for video games, because if I recall correctly that was the year I was pretty dang addicted to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. As in, I took my GBA to school and played it between classes and then doodled moogles on my notes.

Anyways, I think that maybe I just had too much on my plate. Eventually, I did buy Pokemon Emerald, and I messed around with it, but it never quite “clicked”. I’m not sure why. I quit playing after the first badge or something.

And so I didn’t play anymore Pokemon after that– with the exception of FireRed, which doesn’t really count because it’s basically just a graphical update of the original.

That changed last summer, though, when I went road-tripping for a family reunion. I’d be spending hours and hours on the road, and I wouldn’t be driving, so I’d need to do something to make the time pass.

So what did I do? I pulled out Pokemon Emerald, which I hadn’t touched in years. I didn’t even glance at my old save file, I simply started a new one.

As a matter of fact, I DO like them! Thanks for asking!

What happened next was magical. I merrily spent hours running through tall grass, catching Pokemon, training them, and battling trainers and gym leaders. I stopped keeping track of Pokemon after the second gen, you see, so I had no idea what the new species were, what they evolved into, or what they learned. Every time one of my Pokemon evolved, it was a surprise. Every time I ran into a new gym leader, it was a challenge. I didn’t have access to any sort of help websites or guides while on the road, so it was just me and my Pokemon. I was 26 years old and it honestly felt like I was 14 and playing through the original game for the first time again. It was sheer magic.

All things come to an end, sadly, and soon the road trip was over and I was thrust back into the adult world of working and paying bills. I kept playing Pokemon for a bit even after, but for some reason it wasn’t quite the same. Obligations kept pulling me away. So I never did finish that magical new Pokemon file. My Pokemon are all sitting pretty at level 38 or 39 or whatever I left them at. Waiting.

I look forward to my next road trip.

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Altoholics Anonymous

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Hello, my name is Mr. Adequate, and I’ve got a problem.

In any game where you can make characters who are quite varied in nature, well, I’m going to do so. Over and over and over again, and I’m going to abandon existing ones and start anew with a new character, no matter what I have achieved with a previous one or how far through the main plot I am. It’s especially bad in games like Morrowind and Fallout New Vegas; if I combined the time I’ve spent playing the former, I’d probably have a level 9001 living god. But every time I play, I think “Oh hey what if I made an Argonian who wants to join the Legion?” Then I do that, and then I think “Oh wait I totally want to make a Breton monk who uses unarmed, unarmored, alchemy, and restoration to get things done.” and off I go to do that, until I take a notion for something else.

So in actual fact I’ve seen the first half of Morrowind more times than I can remember, and the second half like twice. Oblivion is the same story. So was Fallout 3. New Vegas is somewhat better, perhaps because the writing is so strong and immersion so great that it’s hard even for me to abandon a character. MMOs are the same way; I start, play for awhile, then I want to be a Mage/Priest/Hunter/Whatever and off I go to do that instead of carrying on with my Warrior.

I know I’m not alone in suffering this affliction. Regale us with your tales of altoholism!

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

The Great City of Lenele

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Hey gang, I’d like to take a moment to show some appreciation for something underappreciated, and to springboard from that into a broader discussion.

In RPGs, you tend to go to a lot of settlements. And those settlements tend to be, well, tiny. Oftentimes they might imply a much larger population that you simply don’t get to access, but more often the entire settlement is actually incredibly tiny. The world, of course, exists only for your play experience, so why spend additional time designing and implementing redundant stuff?

Well, Summoner – an RPG that was a launch title for the PS2 – said screw that. It doesn’t have a lot of settlements, but the major one, Lenele, is truly massive.


I can’t find a map online so have this instead!

Now, when I say Lenele is big, I really do mean it’s big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way from Org to the Crossroads, but that’s just peanuts to Lenele.

It is the only city I have ever come across in a videogame which is convincingly city-sized (Aside from ones actually set IN a city, like GTA or whatever). Now to be fair it’s not incidental, it’s one of the game’s major settings and one of only a handful of settlements, but it truly is VAST and it’s so, so glorious to run around and get lost down back alleys and have no idea where the heck you are because it’s just this massive warren of streets and alleys and finding some random store tucked away in the middle of it all.

So, what cities/villages/etc. in games have impressed you for one reason or another?

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Favorites, Uncategorized

Alpha Protocol

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Listen to this while reading and prepare yourself for a fairly shallow bout of sheer enthusiasm about a game I like.

If you’ve heard much about Alpha Protocol, an espionage-based RPG from Obsidian, you’ve probably heard things like “It’s okay”, “Buggy”, “Mediocre”, etc. Metacritic shows that the average hovers around 65% (Slightly higher on the PC version), and it generally has failed to inspire, as well as being confirmed not to have a sequel in the works.

You know what I have to say to that?

BULLHOCKEY

Mike Thorton knows how to blend in.

Alpha Protocol is AWESOME. It’s one of the better games I’ve played in the past few years, certainly outside my preferred Strategy genres. Yes, it is a bit rough around the edges due to time and budget constraints and yes, people have reported bugs aplenty (I haven’t encountered anything worse than a graphical glitch myself, but that’s an entirely subjective experience of course). The leveling isn’t perfectly balanced, with pistols and stealth being rather overpowered and some others falling by the wayside.

But these are minor nitpicks in a glorious game. Alpha Protocol has a great cast, a ton of missions, and everything – EVERYTHING – you do has some consequence or another. It might grant you a stat boost, or it might change the entire ending, but whatever you do it’s going to change something. You can choose to kill or spare pretty much anyone in the game, you can take different attitudes towards everyone, and you fight an 80s-obsessed Russian mobster who is coked out of his skull. Unless you do things in a different order and make friends with the right character, in which case you can just poison his cocaine and the fight goes way easier.

The depth and intricacies are amazing and well worth it by themselves, but the gameplay is still perfectly solid even if not exceptional and let me tell you, pulling off a perfect stealth run makes you feel like a total badass. So if you get the chance, don’t listen to the critics, listen to me and play it!

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's POG Collection (Retro)

Gimme Some o’ That Old Time Grinding

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Yesterday I had a really weird, specific gaming urge. Namely, I suddenly felt the urge to gather up a party of stereotypical fantasy characters and go around and hit monsters in the face with swords and fireballs.

…you guys DO know what I’m talking about, right?

Aww jeah.

The original Final Fantasy is straightforward and to the point. You don’t pick up new party members as you go along, you get all of them before you even start. The “story”, as much as there is one, is pretty much laid out at your feet in the first three minutes. Oh, and there’s grinding. There’s a lot of grinding.

Playing the game yesterday went something like this:

  • “Oh hey, I can buy all this armor and magic spells. It’s going to cost a few thousand gil. Kay, guess I’ll go grind monsters for a bit.”
  • Spend about a half hour grinding monsters.  Buy all the armor and magic spells I want.
  • Spend about three minutes traveling to the next town.
  • “Oh hey, I can buy all this upgraded armor and new magic spells.  It’s going to cost a few thousand gil.  Kay, guess I’ll go grind monsters for a bit.”
  • Spend about a half hour grinding monsters.  Buy all the armor and magic spells I want.

And it was at that point that I’d filled my oldschool JRPG grinding quota for the day and I saved and quit for the time being.

Now, you’d think that a system like this wouldn’t have a whole lot of appeal.  I mean, if you’re gonna spend the game grinding, you’d might as well pad it with some story and character development, right?  That’s how most later RPGs work, right?  I mean, if I was gonna play some classic FF, I should’ve picked IV or VI or something.  Right?

Maybe.

But there’s something deliciously simple about forgetting all of that and, just, I dunno… throwing lightning bolts and fireballs around for no reason at all, other than to buy some Potions.

I actually made these, a long time ago.

And besides, who among us can listen to this song with dry eyes?

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action)

Dead Island thoughts

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So as you may or may not have seen, there is a new video out regarding Dead Island, the game which caused some interest and excitement recently with their rather good announcement trailer. The new one features plenty of gameplay footage, so I thought I’d take a look at it and give my thoughts, being a lover of all things shambling and flesh-eating.

Okay. Let me start out by saying that this isn’t Dead Island, this is Left 4 Borderlands: Far Cry Edition. And that’s okay! It does look like a great game, I will almost certainly be picking it up when it hits. But I will admit to being somewhat disappointed because the vibe I got from the first trailer, and from what I had seen of developer comments so far, it was going to be a bit less action-oriented than this and a bit more concerned with survival and so forth.

The one thing that is really bothering me though, is what happens at 2:50. Yes, she blew up a propane tank by throwing a nail bat at it. This really, REALLY pushes my suspension of disbelief over the edge to a jagged cliff far below; I’m all for a game which is action-centered, and I’m all for killing zombies in ludicrous fashion (Hello Dead Rising!) but seriously, come on.

That rant aside, there’s not a huge amount I can find to complain about if the game is taken on its own merits rather than what I was hoping it would be. The animations need work for sure (That kick, oh my), and the HUD is incredibly obtrusive, but really, a game which is centered around open-world zombie slaughter using customizable weapons (“Explosive Homemade Knife of Concussion”) and locational damage? Yeah, I can get behind that. I can get behind that BIG TIME. What will be really interesting to see is how much you influence things on the island and to what extent things can happen dynamically. I cannot begin to elaborate on how much I want a zombie game where you can lose entire quest hubs to zombie onslaughts and you can’t do anything about it.

Another thing I’m deeply interested in is how good their mod support is going to be. A foundation like this means that, with powerful mod tools, even if the game proper doesn’t provide exactly what I’m looking for, it’ll still be possible to implement something like it. Like taking out the ability to detonate propane tanks with melee weapons.

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's POG Collection (Retro)

Pokemon Gold/Silver is Brilliant.

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What’s this? We’re back? Not raptured? Oh well. Maybe next time, eh?

Anyways, I’m here to tell you that Pokemon Gold/Silver is brilliant. And this is why:

You beat the game by beating the Elite Four. Typical Pokemon game, right? You beat the game, the credits roll, and you get the Game Over screen.

…that’s not the end of the game. In fact, you’re only about halfway through the content at that point.

“Now hold on a minute, Pike,” I can hear you saying. “I’ve played [insert game here] and there’s plenty of content after you beat the game. It’s got all sorts of replay value.”

You know what? You’re right. There’s a lot of games out there like that. But none that I have played so far have come close to pulling it off the Way Pokemon Gold/Silver did it.

You get the box art for Gold because that's the one I played. NOSTALGIA CENTRAL.

See, let’s go back in time a little. You’ve played the original Pokemon Red/Blue a million times. The sequel comes out, and you can’t contain your excitement. You load up the game, hoping for an adventure just like the first, but bigger and better. You’re greeted with a different world and different Pokemon, which feels just a little off to you somehow, but you play anyway and soon you love this new game as much as the last.

…but something still feels ever so very “off”. Namely, that initial desire you had to revisit the friends and places from the Pokemon games hasn’t quite faded away. You’re just a bit homesick.

Then you beat Pokemon Gold/Silver and guess what?

You actually get to go back to the world of the first game.

Your mind is blown to pieces by this revelation, and those pieces are blown into further pieces when you realize that you can go through and re-challenge all the gym leaders from the first game. You’re older and wiser now, and so are better prepared, and so are your rivals. You’re absolutely giddy at this notion and carefully go through and battle all of your old opponents.

But even that’s not the end, because then you go through a dungeon very similar to the ones you carefully crawled through back in the day and then you fight… yourself.

That’s right.

The climactic fight of this game is to battle the protagonist of the original, probably using a bunch of the Pokemon you, yourself, used back then. Oh, and they’re all, like, level 80.

I don’t think anything I type here can fully express the way you feel when you first stumble across this battle, so I’ll just leave these pictures right here:

I think it’s this whole second half of the game that cemented it as my firm favorite of the Pokemon generations and that still continues to blow my mind a decade later. I can’t think of another game that has done “post-credits content” so very well. If you can think of one that has, please direct me to it, because I must play it immediately.