http://ettugamer.com
This is partially a post to state that I’m still alive and the site isn’t dead, partially a post to state that Magna Carta work is continuing, but mostly a statement of how odd it is to be awake while being terribly exhausted. A life of feeling heavy is not without lightness, I suppose.
This game has recently been dumped and is now playable on Makaron. However, the problem with it being playable on Makaron is that the conversion process is a bit complex. To speed said process along, I’ve already converted and tested the file. This version, along with Rev. X, are widely considered to be the “version” of Senko no Ronde to play (there were three versions before this one, Senko no Ronde, Senko no Ronde New Ver. and Senko no Ronde New Ver. A).
If you’re interested at all in newer emulation, you should give this game a shot with the Makaron emulator.
G.Rev will never produce this game again, because Rev. X somewhat outshined this version with a few new features here and there (that said, this is one of the faster revisions of this game, and the AI is considerably better than all previous iterations).
Link below: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=012QWE8O
I am interested in the layers of games, yet most games are dishonest about what they’re trying to purvey. Most of the time what you’re buying is how “great” the game’s mechanics are. Game mechanics themselves are not typically compelling and are normally obfuscated to make the game interesting. If you have to obfuscate mechanics, it should not be done because they are bad mechanics. The mechanics of the game should, ostensibly, be compelling before and even after they are obfuscated. If the mechanic becomes uninteresting to the player, it either needs reworking, or it wasn’t nearly as solid as you thought it was.
In the case of World of Warcraft (or WoW–a game where people often complain about the mechanics as being “boring, repetitious, or otherwise untenable”) I see Blizzard’s mechanics as fine, but I certainly don’t think a lot of people will have a taste for mechanics that are made with the assumption of repetition in mind. Even knowing that, it’s probably why people buy so many games. They fizzle out on one game’s mechanics and decide to move to the next set of mechanics (which is what happens to most WoW players too–the hook is that keeping them inside the game world are others who are acquaintances, real or imagined). If that set is good enough, it’ll keep them entertained for a while. But then they’ll get bored with that set, and move on.
Great mechanics would probably get the player obfuscating play on their own. At that point, the experience is different every time by the player’s own volition. But it’s difficult to get the player to give up their expectations via their own volition and probably requires such a degree of obfuscation that the player cannot recognize the mechanic as a mechanic at all. Silent Hill 2 approaches this conundrum of mechanics, specifically where you get FAQs that tell you to do something “a lot” rather than say, 5 times. It’s much easier (for the developer and usually the player) to either subvert or submit to a set of expectations throughout the play experience in regards to mechanics, to subvert for “shock” value, to submit for continual play. See Chrono Trigger/FFVII as examples of “shock” value, Modern Warfare 2 as submission to continual play. Specifically, see how they each handle death.
Bioshock 2 is kind of what happens when a game designer can’t decide what kind of game they want to design. It’s the definition of kitchen sink gameplay and mood. There’s a weapon for every type of playstyle, magic, lovingly called Plasmids, and a variety of repetitive things you can do with all of these. Hint: they largely involve you blowing your collective wad all over anything that moves in a gleeful waste of time and energy. Enemies respawn every few minutes and god help you if you need to back track (you will need to backtrack). The voice acting is never terrible but generally uninteresting and overtly preachy. What the game isn’t, largely, is enjoyable. So let’s get to it, the amazing review of the amazingly unapologetic game about being a “Big Daddy” to underage little girls and in any other context but videogames there would shortly be a police officer awaiting me at my front door, were I to finish the sentence with what one might assume to be the interaction occurring between these two parties.
Big Daddy problems aside, the game certainly has “issues” with who its daddy is in terms of gameplay. God help me, I’ll probably be using these terrible puns for the entire review because they’re so incredibly pervasive as bad jokes and I’ve been inundated with so many in my brain that I’ll have to write them down. So first, the game can’t really decide if it’s a Survival Horror game (emphasis on Survival, the game’s not scary unless you’re afraid of sea kelp), a shooter, or some spell-wielding game where combos are better than everything else. The answer is that it’s all of the above, sort of, but the reality is mostly a you get to choose sort of answer, except that spending into one choice means you’ll be restricted to it for the entire game. So if you decide to use magic, your guns won’t be all that useful, if you decide to use guns your magic won’t be all that useful, etc. But the more real problem perhaps is the ease with which certain weapons and abilities dominate enemies. Anti-Personnel Rounds bring down targets in three hits, but hitting a squishy target in the head three times with a non-personnel round will not result in similar success. Largely, I chose to go with magic, because it’s a catch all tool and easy to use after a certain point. Essentially, bullets became moot for me, I spent all my time burning enemies to a crisp because it saved time and the fire could spread to other enemies. The problem here isn’t the hit detection, which is strange to say the least, but it’s the fact that inaccuracy is rewarded. You can miss something by a mile but because of the environment and the general forgiveness of the game’s aiming, it’s likely that you hit the target and just didn’t know it. There’s actually auto-aiming that occurs as well, but it doesn’t really get annoying until later in the game, where you’re facing multiple Alpha Big Daddies (yeah all Big Daddies are apparently the same kind of giant sperm banks who are filled and controlled with Adam goo, we’ll get to that later) and the bad hit detection can also play to your disadvantage. Nothing quite so terrible/annoying as getting hit by a grenade while hiding behind a wall. Death is not common, but it is annoying in that you might as well just reload because you’ll probably get better results from playing a sequence the second time rather than surviving through a Vita Chamber. Read the rest of this entry »
I would say that there’s no importance in objective measuring of a game’s quality, because such a thing is impossible. Metacritic is basically the site that exemplifies how bad this is, but also that there’s an industry pressure to put numbers to something which can’t be presented in such a manner.
There’s also a problem with the separation of journalism vs. critics vs. news junkies. 1) Journalists are basically those who report on unknown news. 2) While game critics are basically those who analyze. 3) And news junkies are essentially those who wait for the associated press.
Now, the problem is we think that games journalism encompasses 1 and 2 (though more accurately, most think it probably encompasses 1 and metacritic), when it basically encompasses 2 and 3. This is the reason for the vitriol towards the idea of games “journalism,” because it’s not really journalism, it’s simply waiting to receive slop from whatever various news source will provide it. Unfortunately, news services also fellate those who will provide said information to a particular website (typically being the content producers themselves). This means that, for a long time now, the system has become one of master and slave, where the writers are being dominated by demands from their news whoring masters, who have been able to control the system of information by exclusivity. The problem goes so far as to stretch onto game critics, who are similarly subdued. More than this, the problem is the lack of separation of these three things, and I’m not talking about physical separation, I’m talking about awareness. People merge these things together as if they’re related, as if they’re similar, when they’re clearly not.
The closest thing to actual games journalism, is mostly on Hardcore Gaming 101′s blog, and it typically has to do with stories about videogames in places like Egypt or China or Korea. Stuff that gets no American media attention, because that’s basically what journalism is; bringing to light stories that are important, but that no one is talking about. Typically, because there’s some belief in the media that it’s not “worth” talking about.
You’ll be fighting a lot of these blue guys.
So Mass Effect 2 So Mass Effect 2. You’re basically Shephard again and this time you’re saving the galaxy from a big evil. That should probably be obvious by now because every game that’s objectively “big” has some equally objective “big” evil. That annoys me somewhat in that I would like for a big game to not be much about huge threats, but maybe at the same time not also be The Sims or Second Life. Still, there’s quite a fantastic back story here at least, so the game has something to build on. Your reputation precedes you and has some reasoning behind it. You start out as baddest motherfucker in the universe, but since get vaporized five minutes in you now have to rebuild all your know-how again. Strange that you’re a cybernetically engineered super-soldier but don’t really seem to have any super-soldier abilities, aside from your namesake. Which isn’t necessarily a bad argument (the right person in the wrong place can make all the difference after all). Martin Sheen, who makes me have wet dreams as he plays the grizzled Illusive Man, certainly seems to like the argument of your namesake being the reason you exist. Read the rest of this entry »
Games seem to lack flavor in terms of how they deal with shapes. Not merely the polygon count (in that more is better), but the favoritism of flat, planar shapes and spaces. For a long time, some of my favorite games have also been some of the most amorphous, my favorite probably being Tetrisphere. Others include games such as Nights, but honestly, I’m having difficulty thinking of games that actually do interesting things with shapes or space. Even the two games above which have the appearance of spheres are essentially multi-faceted planar surfaces. Senko no Ronde plays with circles in a novel way for its genre, but it’s still a flat surface. There’s Mario Galaxy to consider, which is an interesting idea, though the execution is somewhat awkward in practice. World of Warcraft has a few fights where you actually move around in 3D space, though it’s essentially the same as fighting on the game’s ground, thus making it a frill more than an actual method of play. A game with great execution is Ghost in the Shell for the PSX, yet that’s also not a spherical shape, just multi-faceted planar surfaces which the player interacts which. There are also other interesting spaces to consider, as in Heroine Anthem II there’s an Escher maze section which is really interesting as it’s easy to get lost, because the access points are not linear. So it’s sort of like a mini-Rubiks cube that can become more or less complicated as you progress through it. Continuity and Alice in Wonderland deal in the manipulation of play space. A sphere is obviously a difficult piece of geometry to approach in a novel way for computers, and probably for people, but somehow it seems unfortunate that there aren’t more games that are novel in playing with shapes and geometry, spheres in particular.
There’s Gear and Cogs though. Interesting that the big winners for this year’s Indie Games Challenge were both puzzle games. Still, these are also planar games, and are sort of mini-Rubiks cubes of their own. Maybe we’ll see more from the professional scene later this year in approaching shapes.
Leona Lewis is the singer who is responsible for the replacement song track of Final Fantasy XIII, and while there are many complaints as to the appropriateness of replacing voice tracks where they are available at all, I’ll leave that discussion for others who care more about it. Instead, there’s something here that’s far more interesting and it’s done with an unlikely transplantation. Here we see an artist who actually transcends the game itself and leaves the game in a place that’s both better and at odds with the actual goals of the game.
Final Fantasy XIII is another harrowing tale from Square Enix, depicting a usual band of ruffians doing the usual things ruffians do. Stereotypes abound, the language and discussion is often odd, but for all of the muck that must be tread through, Leona Lewis and her song, My Hands, improve and even serve to bolster the story’s seminal ideal. In doing this however, the music itself transcends the game, becoming something out of place not because the music does not fit. Indeed, the music fits like a glove and seems to work at all the right emotions at the moment it starts spinning off the disc. The problem is that it’s actually too good. The moods evoked by the characters, by the environment, by everything around the song, can’t actually carry the song’s strong message. The message of unity is brought into stark contrast against the constant faltering and wallowing that these characters represent, that when they finally band together, there’s no ability for the player to relate to the complexity and evocative voice that Lewis has put against the dull, lurid rhetoric of the game.
In fact, the game is playing this song when the characters are doing something so antithetical to the song’s message that it’s honestly no surprise that the player would be offended, even if they can’t quite put their finger on why. The strong, assertive, tonal rhythm overshadows and is actually overbearing on the message of unity and being able to actually understand someone else. In contrast, the game is exploring individual relationships far too quickly to make sense out of them. Essentially, the exploration taking place puts the characters at odds with each other constantly only to have them curtly make up thirty seconds later. Most people have trouble relating to schizophrenia, particularly in the context of characters who are ostensibly sane. In the on again, off again relationships occurring, the game attempts to promote individual sacrifice for the sake of group unity, yet the music speaks solely to the desires of salvation, particularly through love, a complex emotion that is not examined except in passing, by means of our characters constantly chasing, rather foolishly, after it. This is not to say chasing love is foolish (I’m as much a romantic as the next person… I think), but that the manner in which love is being chased here is a poor representation of the tribulations of someone trying to make love work.
These thick contrasts that continue to appear allow the music, clearly the stronger of the two competing narratives, to overtake and promote the idea of the individual over the group. Seminally, because love is something that one has to work towards, there is a promotion of struggling against inevitability. In My Hands, there’s a deep melancholy voice that’s attempting to discover where we can rediscover love, both in ourselves and others. My Hands, essentially, transcends the promoted ideals of the game itself, its statements contrasting so sharply that the tug of war must grant leeway to one. Final Fantasy begins losing when the characters weaken and weaken and weaken when it comes to their goals, but the player is never allowed to really relate to the problems these characters face. The veneer is shined well, it’s thickly polished, but that narrative can never blind us, as readers of cultural artifacts, from the crumbling, weakly construed relations that the player is immediately aware of by simple interaction. Final Fantasy XIII is defeated by both its indecisive direction and the musical choices made to meet them. Lewis transcends the problems by being in stark contrast to the lack of genuine suffering that is played out on screen. As we weep, for all the artifice, we are made viscerally aware that the substance lies in My Hands.
Here are some links to get some of the great Naomi games of the past, pre-made for various emulators. Wouldn’t it be great if they all decided on just one image format?
Senko no Ronde New Ver. A Mediafire mirror The image above is pre-made for Makaron, I post it here because I could not find a pre-compiled version of the game on the internet, or rather, not this version. I consider it better because of the revisions to the gameplay that make the game considerably more enjoyable and challenging. Makaron roms Above are various Makaron ROMs, from quiz games to shmups. demul roms Above are various demul ROMs, these are basically the same as the Makaron ones, they’re simply compiled for the particular emulator.
Until next time!
