To the chagrin of FFVII fans everywhere, Square-Enix yesterday announced that they are remaking Final Fantasy X for the PS3 and PSV. Me though, I’m overjoyed. I might even get a PS3 one day now that it has a game coming out for it.
I love FFX. I wrestle over whether I like VII or X more, but I really think I have to say the latter is the better game. I love everything about it (Except certain moments of voice acting). The aesthetic, the setting, the architecture, the battle system, the Sphere Grid, the music, the characters, everything. So I’m pretty excited to see what they will do with this.
Though all these FF rereleases and such make it kind of hard to mock Nintendo fans.
It’ll be a delicate balance. FFX isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot easier to mess it up than to improve it. Of course we want more than just graphical updates; FFX has aged fairly well for a 3D game anyway. I must presume the stuff from the European/International edition will be included, but hopefully there will be more besides this, more monsters, more areas, just MORE FFX, without changing the core game.
I also hope they redo Blitzball. I don’t care what anyone says, it was the best FF minigame ever (With the possible exception of Mog House). But there needs to be MORE of it. Two dozen teams, thousands of players (Make every single person IN THE WORLD a potential Blizter), and make it into underwater FIFA in terms of gameplay, where the stats are hidden and things are more dynamic.
Also add a whole bunch of endgame content and more summons and change absolutely NOTHING about Wakka because he is truly a god among men.
What do you hope to see come out of this? And what games do you want to see remade, for that matter?
None of our readers will be remotely surprised to find out that most of my favorite quotes come from SMAC. I mean, really, were we expecting anything different? No. No we weren’t.
This is my all-time favorite quote:
I haven’t a clue why I love it so much. It tickles me in just the right way, though. I quote it on a near-daily basis (just ask Mister Adequate for confirmation on this.)
On a more serious note, have another quote from that game. I dare you to read it and not get chills:
I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld.
When I die, they will put my body in a box and
dispose of it in the cold ground.
And in all the million ages to come, I will never
breathe or laugh or twitch again.
So won’t you run and play with me here among the
teeming mass of humanity?
The universe has spared us this moment.
Anonymous
Beautiful, no?
Now it’s a little unfair to every other game to have have a blog post called “Favorite Video Game Quotes” and then spend the entire time lovingly quoting SMAC, much in the same way that it would be unfair to blog about the “Hottest Places in the Solar System” and then focus on the sun. So let’s talk about some other games.
For starters, Blizzard games have given us a multitude of memorable quotes, between “Stay a while and listen”, all the unit quotes from Starcraft/Warcraft, and, of course, so much stuff from WoW that I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
More recently, Deus Ex: Human Revolution has given us “I never asked for this”, another quote that I find hilarious for some reason.
This leads us to our obligatory pony image.
Video game writers have truly given us some great stuff, whether humorous or thought-provoking. What are some of your favorites?
The other day Pike and myself were looking back with fondness on a certain videogame company. It was quite stunning, once we actually sat and talked about it, just how many games they were responsible for, and not just games, but true classics, things that defined – even created – genres.
Which company am I talking about? Well, which one came to your mind when you read the above? In this case we were discussing MicroProse, but there are quite a few companies which could have been mentioned here and all would fit; Bullfrog, Rare (Of old), Codemasters (ditto), Psygnosis, etc. (And these ones are just examples from the UK!)
Tally ho, chaps!
Where are the equivalent companies today? Who are even candidates? You can point to people who have had huge impact – Bungie for instance – but one series of FPS games, however brilliant and however influential, does not put them in the same league as these giants who bestrode the 80s and 90s. Nobody that I can think of today has the ability to put out X-Com, Transport Tycoon, Master of Orion, Civilization, and Rollercoaster Tycoon. Now, okay, you look at any of these companies and they tend to have something of a narrow focus, at least in the games that really stand out, but still, nobody today seems to come close, regardless of focus. Maybe Blizzard and Valve, but the former seems to be determined to fall from grace, and the latter hasn’t released something that isn’t a hat since the Bally Astrocade was new. I’m not trying to say there are no good companies anymore or anything, but none seem to really have the scope and grandeur of some of these old-timers we so fondly remember.
Who is your favorite game company of yesteryear? Am I overlooking someone modern?
So recently, I’ve been playing through Breath of Fire III again. It’s not the best game ever made, it might not even be the best BoF (II is pretty damned great after all), but it really is simply, good old-fashioned fun that just emanates nostalgia from every orifice. I’m just going to copy-paste what Pike said in her SMRPG post:
a relic of a different time: a time when RPGs weren’t about who has the fanciest cutscenes or who has the most photorealistic hair or who has the most immersive fantasy world. Rather, they were about traveling from weird town to even weirder town, beating up random enemies for gear, and saving the world. No nonsense. Just beating the big bad guy at the end with all of the epic loot that you had to cross the universe to find.
It sums it up pretty well. One of my party members is an ambulatory onion mutant thing.
He's also the toughest sumbitch in the game
It’s all around just a solid, fun game that knows what it is, doesn’t try to hide it, but sometimes throws something subversive in that makes you stop and think “Wait a second…”. Like when you come across the disabled guy who has been placed in a chair by a window, the sun streaming in. He just mumbles, but if you talk to another person in the room you learn that he was injured in an attack by a dragon years earlier. That is to say, he was one of the first people in the game you fought, and he was just a guy doing his job, mining to make his living. Every so often it’ll hit you with something like that, something brutal or just a bit cruel, never hammering it into you too hard, just letting you think about it.
No, I really did. A couple of nights ago, I had a dream wherein I played a remake of X-Com. Let me tell you about it.
This was my reaction when I woke up.
It was in glorious 3-D, still intended to be played as an isometric game, but you could move the camera around freely and stuff, and when you took a shot it would sometimes go into an over-the-shoulder camera or something (Think Fallout’s VATS camera, used fairly sparingly). It was turn-based, but because the characters had little animations and stuff based on what was going on it felt extremely active and fast-moving (e.g. ducking at the sound of gunfire, kneeling behind nearby cover, etc. – kind of how Company of Heroes does things). Also, though the basic calculations seemed to remain very similar to the original, your guy and an alien would look like they were having a firefight, and others on the field would give supporting fire which I don’t think actually hit anyone, but which could give some bonuses and stuff? Also it seemed like you almost always had reaction fire when fired upon, and your chance of success in that was determined by your remaining TUs. A character with 0 would just spray’n’pray and have maybe a 1% chance of hitting, but the added effects of it all really contributed to a sense of combat.
I only dreamed one mission, in which I had downed an enemy UFO and was doing the usual cleanup. As it turned out it was on the edge of a medium-sized town; the UFO was crashed in the forest and we had to fight through that, but several aliens had retreated into the town itself and were holed up there, meaning I had to chase them into it. The map was huge, but you could get around by commandeering vehicles and stuff; one of my guys rode into combat on a freaking motorcycle which promptly got blown right up by an alien grenade or something.
I was only fighting Sectoids, but they were really really vicious and tough to kill. It was a gloriously difficult fight and one which resulted in my guys getting slaughtered horribly. We finally made it through to the city streets; the civilians were inside, but a few bodies suggested they and the aliens had had a fight (At least one alien was dead in the city when I arrived, far from the crashed ship.) These last couple were really hellish to fight though, they just kept blowing my guys to hell no matter what I tried, it was obscene. Then they ran out of grenades or whatever and I won. Then I woke up, and I thought “Wow I can’t wait for this to come out!” and looked like Rarity, then I realized the horrible truth. And cried.
I’ve dropped hints about this game before but never actually dedicated a post to it. I didn’t even do a Classic Video Game Monday about this over at Clockwork Hare because I wanted to wait until the time was right, and then I never got around to it.
Okay then. Here, I’m going to talk about my favorite RPG game of all time, my favorite Mario game of all time, my favorite Super Nintendo game of all time, and my favor– okay, do you see where I’m going with this?
The only game I like more than this is SMAC. And that’s saying a lot.
It’s hard to pin down what, exactly, makes this game special for me. I can give you an idea, though. Think of mid-to-late-90s Squaresoft. This game is the epitome of that. Now either you know what I’m talking about here, or you don’t, so here’s a quick rundown, in case you need a refresher:
Music that can be beautiful, haunting, or fun
Characters with real personalities, stories, and motivations
A long and convoluted storyline that takes you all over the world and has you visiting a variety of cultures
Minigames
Hundreds of random items that you may or may not need during the course of your game
Final bosses that have two or three different “forms”
Magical attacks that look like they should wipe out everything on the screen but actually only do seven hit points of damage to this one guy in the corner
And so on. But, above all, I think, you have that story. THAT STORY. This was the first RPG I ever played. Back then, I had never, ever, seen a story this deep before in a video game. And it left an immense impression on me.
A small sampling of the characters you will meet on your journey.
In other words, it was all that old-school Square quirky charm combined with a solid story and characters that really drew me in.
Okay, now I’m going to tell you about an optional boss in the game, called Culex. Culex is hard. Really hard. He’s like the equivalent of Mewtwo in Pokemon; he has nothing to do with beating the game, but you go after him as an extra challenge.
Culex has this whole mysterious presence going on that really has nothing to do with the rest of the game, and so he’s a bit of an anomaly. He’s a self professed Dark Knight with a a bunch of Elemental Crystal companions; he’s certainly nothing like we’ve seen in a Mario game before.
…that is, of course, the point. Culex gets a special boss battle theme that you don’t hear anywhere else in the game. It goes like this:
…sound familiar? No?
How about now?
Yup.
That’s not all Culex gets. You get a special victory fanfare when you beat him (three guesses as to what that fanfare is), and you get yet another special song after that. It is at that point that Culex breaks the fourth wall and says “Thank you, brave knight. I will treasure this memento of my journey here. Perhaps in another time, another game, we may have been mortal enemies… Let us part as comrades in arms.”
There are a lot of theories as to what Square was trying to say here, ranging from Culex being a reincarnated Final Fantasy enemy to simply being a mere fun homage. Well, I dunno about you guys, but the whole Culex thing and his conversation at the end always just gets to me. There’s something touching about it. It’s Square giving you this whole special enemy and boss fight because they know it’s what you want. It’s their one last huzzah before leaving Nintendo for years to come– this was the last game they produced for Nintendo before hitching up with PlayStation. It’s a genuine thank you from the game developers to the players, a respectful handshake between both– all done through the interface of the game itself.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Who knows? It still gets to me, though.
Meanwhile, Pinkie Pie proves that she would be the ultimate Final Boss
Now Super Mario RPG came out to largely rave reviews toward the end of the Super Nintendo’s lifespan and then promptly disappeared and no one heard from it again. There have been no sequels (beyond its spiritual successors in Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi), there have been no rereleases except for one on Virtual Console, and most of the original characters made for the game also have not been seen since. The typical explanation is that Square and Nintendo have some sort of weird copyright drama preventing either of them from really doing anything with it in the future.
Perhaps it’s better that way. Super Mario RPG is a relic of a different time: a time when RPGs weren’t about who has the fanciest cutscenes or who has the most photorealistic hair or who has the most immersive fantasy world. Rather, they were about traveling from weird town to even weirder town, beating up random enemies for gear, and saving the world. No nonsense. Just beating the big bad guy at the end with all of the epic loot that you had to cross the universe to find.
Oh, and Geno is the greatest character of all time.
I really like this game, so I’m going to write another post about it in case my little tale didn’t hook you.
Basically, PZ is a zombie survival horror game. Now, we’ve had an abundance of zombies lately, but the very great majority of them have been centered around action, killing zombies, gunning them down in hordes, all that stuff. All well and good, everyone loves a good game of Dead Rising, but there seemed to be a huge and obvious gap here. Zombie games are, as it were, zombie games. That is to say, the game part came first. The zombies were almost incidental and could generally be replaced with another one of vidya’s favorite standby enemies. PZ is different. It’s a zombie movie. Caesar likewise approves.
What I mean by this is that it’s very much about the things you typically see in a zombie film. It’s about hiding, survival, and paranoia. It’s about running out of food, needing to scavenge painkillers, and getting shot by desperate lunatics. Worrying whether that scratch has infected you or not (Bites infect 100% of the time and there is neither a vaccine nor a cure.) It’s not about killing as many zombies as you can – the game doesn’t even keep track of this. The high score is to survive for as long as you can. Admittedly in the pre-alpha demo that’s out now this isn’t hugely challenging once you’ve played it a couple of times and know what you’re doing, but the principle is a vital one – you’re going to die. The opening of the game tells you straight up, there is no hope of survival. This is how you died.
It’s something a lot of us have been wanting for a long time. A zombie game in which you were an average joe rather than an immune superman, in which survival is the main concern rather than an afterthought you can fix with waiting six seconds, in which you’ve got to think about your potential hideouts and assess them for suitability and where preparing them further can attract zombies due to the noise.
They’ve got all sorts of plans for the game in the future. The current update has been very slow to arrive, for a variety of reasons, but if even half of what’s planned goes into the final game it’s sure to be an extraordinary ride. Once again, the relevant links:
Kate… I had to do it. I just couldn’t protect us both in that house. Her wound was getting infected, who knows if the disease really would get into her? I couldn’t leave her to die, I couldn’t shoot her. I smothered her with a pillow. Gathered what few things I could carry and hoofed it across town.
I don’t know how they knew I was in there. The windows were all boarded up. There was no more power to use the lights. I crept around. But after three days safely ensconced in a small duplex house, where I had managed to secure some decent supplies, I heard them. Hammering. Pounding. I went down to check; the door shook with each rotten fist that smacked against it. It would hold, it would hold for a long time, but they would get in in the end. And there was no other way out.
So I decided to do the only thing I could: I was going to fight. I waited, shotgun in hand, whiskey in belly, for what I was sure would be my end. And I won. I killed them all, there must have been thirty or so of them, and I destroyed them. Quickly, I boarded things up again and retreated upstairs.
Two days passed. Nothing. I didn’t know how they had missed me; that shootout made more than a little noise. I guess all the ones nearby had already been attracted and then killed? I don’t know. But I was running low on food and it was time to start thinking about what next. This place was… safe-ish, and it housed many supplies I had gathered. It would take two, maybe three runs to relocate everything, so I would either have to take a lot of risks, I would have to keep this as a base, or I would have to BAM! BAM! BAM!
How? How did they find me again? And why did it take so long? If any had seen me go in, or heard me shooting, they should have arrived at most a couple of hours after I retreated. I don’t understand it. It doesn’t matter; this place is no longer safe, the doors are falling apart and I’m almost out of wood to barricade them with. Okay. Only one solution. Take what I can carry, fight through the horde, run. Find another place to hole up.
Is this going to be the rest of my life?
I opened the door. Shotgun in hand. They poured in, a lot more than just thirty of them this time. Seventy, maybe eighty. The shotgun tore them apart, but it wasn’t quite enough. They got closer. And closer. I avoided their bites, but a couple of them scratched me, one on my leg, one on my arm. I finished them off, went out of the house, and ran without looking back.
Found a small apartment. Had a zombie in it, took care of him with a baseball bat. Nice and quiet. Very messy. Looked around; enough food for a couple of days here. Saw to bandaging up my wounds, they weren’t major but it was better to try and be safe than sorry. Took some painkillers and a sleeping pill once I had used the last of my wood on barricading things. Slept for about 12 hours.
Sick. Stomach churning, head spinning. Threw up in toilet bowl. Grim. Probably the infection, from a scratch or blood that splattered on me or something. No hastiness though. Don’t be hasty. Took some more pills, ate more than I could really spare, found a book to read and enjoyed it by the evening light with a fair amount of booze. Not a bad day in the circumstances.
Sicker. Dwefinition the virus. Hear pounding, but door is holding. Another surviver they found? Just beating doors for no raisin? Don’t know. Still reading, good book. Atwood. I like Atwood. Virus there too.
Sleep. Wake. can’t see words now too blurry. bread andples not tasty. eat steak. not cook, tastes good, fills belly. Drink. Drink lots and lots. Okay. Get it together. Blaze of gory bob, blaze of glory. Load up. 65 shotgun shells. Bottle of booze. Another steak. Bat with nails.
Open door. quiet, eserted. Stride around town like the duke of new york. hardly any zombies. the fuck? where were they all they were ruining my last stand. FUck it, going to get drunk. Found a bar, raided it, got completely smashed. pills too! might die of od hahahaha hope you all get poisoned by my corpes you fucks
i dont rememberthe alst few days that’s a lot of corpses and fire though what the hell oh god my head
4 itchy tasty
Project Zomboid is an indie survival horror game, one which is seeking to really focus on the survival rather than slaughter side of things, with the intent of it becoming a open-world sandbox which will eventually kill you. It’s glorious. There is currently a free demo, and purchasing is intended to work Minecraft style where you pay less the earlier you buy, and get access to later updates. They’ve had some troubles lately with Paypal and Google and stuff, but they’re top folks and are making an amazing game that I urge everyone to check out.
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’m less inclined to be political about these things and try to respect other people’s opinions, so I’m just going to be wantonly belligerent towards her! Huzzah!
Let’s go over a couple of things she brought up. Zelda. Zelda Zelda Zelda. Where to begin? I’ve played most of the Zelda games over the years and I divide them into two categories – “Why are people making any kind of fuss” and “This is very good but not to my taste”. The former is where all the 2D Zeldas fit, and the latter where the 3D ones go. Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against 2D (I’ll come back to this in a moment) but the thing just does not work for me at ALL in 2D. In 3D, games like OoT and WW are ones I can see the appeal of, I’ve played quite a bit of them, but they never hook me and I get bored long before the end.
When it comes to top-down adventure, in the 2D Zelda style, I have long maintained that the genre has been far, far better done and that Alundra is truly the pinnacle of the genre. And I know what a hipster I look like saying this! But it really is glorious. It has the charm, depth, clever puzzles, and all that other stuff that people ascribe to Zelda but which I have never seen in that series.
Because you've probably never heard of it
As for Sega vs. Nintendo, Pike covered it quite well. I grew up with Sega and she with Nintendo, so of course we’re going to have diverging opinions and direct our nostalgia differently. Actually, whilst I regard the Mega Drive (Genesis) and SNES as fairly equal (Though really, how good can a console without Treasure’s Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier actually be?), I think it was later on that Sega triumphed, because the Dreamcast was the best console ever made and it beat the crap out of all the competition combined, from BOTH generations it overlapped.
Finally, Minecraft. Well, all I will say is that Pike’s time spent would be a lot closer to mine if her shame didn’t cause her to ‘forget’ just how much of it she plays (It’s about three times as much as she admits. I know because I hear her on Skype when she’s playing it).
And she thinks Warcraft III had mediocre gameplay. I hardly need to point out how ludicrous this is.
