New Music Track: Vidya Games on Unicycles

My apologies for not posting much, but there is something I've done recently that I'm actually sort of almost proud of. It took almost eleven months due to near-constant writer's (musician's?) block, but here it is. Now you can headbang to Uniracers music. Not that you couldn't already because Uniracers has awesome music, but still.

The Bloody Roar Retrospective: Bloody Roar: The Fang

Have no idea how to read Japanese?  Me neither, but let's try to understand anything from this alternate universe in which bats actually look like bats and Not Yugo sucks at video games.

SC On Kamen Rider Dragon Knight (Wii)

I could grate so many blocks of cheese with his face.

I'm not a Kamen Rider fan.  It's not that I don't like it, I just don't give a shit about it.  My only exposure to it is listening to Zeromaster and Wizwar ramble on endlessly about it in Skype chats regardless of what the original topic of conversation was.

That and Masked Rider.

I watched a whole three episodes, usually while waiting for Spider-Man to start.

 This is basically a fighting game with a bunch of riders from the Kamen Rider series, with Dragon Knight being the title character.  Forgive me if I find it hard to get into the characters of a series I don't follow, but the way they're presented leaves a lot to be desired in terms of drawing in someone who's new to Kamen Rider, especially if you play Arcade Mode first.  Some of the victory quotes by certain characters reference their backstories or happenings from the series, all of which went over my head.  Looking back at it now, I'm still not sure who from the 15 selectable characters are good guys except for Wrath.  Guess what Wrath is?  Hint: his name is Wrath.

There is a place where the backstory becomes clearer, but I'll save that for later.  And besides, as I was playing this game on a live stream Zeromaster seemed to end a lot of characters' backstories with "he dies after a couple episodes."

Omoshiroku narimashita ne?

The controls are about as simple as you'll get in a fighter short of Evil Zone.  There's a button for light attacks and a button for strong attacks.  That's it.  Mash either of them while holding a direction to do a 2-4 hit combo that knocks down your opponent until you win.

Okay, it is a little more complex than that.

Some of the combos for certain characters are faster or slower, and some incorporate uppercuts to knock a Rider in the air and juggle them or leg sweeps to keep them on the ground more than they already would be.  There's also a button specifically for cancelling combos and- yeah, you can tell where this is going.

Combo cancels, however, take down the Advent Gauge.  I don't remember if that's what it's called, but it's linked to attacks called advents or vents so we'll roll with that.  It's a gauge that fills at the bottom of the screen and can trigger things like combo cancels, advent attacks (where the animal/robot/thing representing each Rider attacks the opponent), advent guards (see advent attack, except it just pushes back the opponent), and the obligatory flashy finishing moves called Final Vents, all of which deal about the same 1/4 life bar damage, are done by having the Final Vent card selected, initiating the vent by shaking the Wiimote (not as annoying or counter-intuitive as it sounds) and hoping you're not only within grabbing distance, but won't be interrupted or dodged.

Because.

Oh right, cards.  Each Rider has a certain number of cards which trigger certain effects or moves when the Advent Gauge is filled.  There's the Final Vent card, but also cards that do things like reduce damage, summon weapons, lock a card of the opponent from being used, or turn back time to regenerate your Rider's (and only your Rider's) health.  You'll usually only get a chance to fill the gauge all the way once during a fight though, so in Arcade Mode the variety of cards isn't usually as effective as just leaving the Final Vent up all the time.

The catch about these cards is that you only start off with the Final Vent card for each Rider.  You unlock the rest by playing through Mirror Mode, which is a lot like playing Weapon Master Mode in Soul Calibur 2.  You progress through a series of one-on-one fights against certain Riders (they are determined by who you select and what the fight condition is) while completing conditions like doing an Advent Guard, defeating them with Final or Advent Attacks, or winning in spite of the opponent having doubled attack power, double the health, or constantly being in Advent Guard mode.  This last one will make you want to punt babies if you're playing on Hard.

PANDAMITE HEADY!

Mirror Mode also has beat-em-up sequences, in which the guys you fight are dumber and more apathetic than the average Dynasty Warriors enemy.  There are also "?" spaces which either generate another fight, give you life, Rider Points used to unlock cards, or sends you back to the start of the map.  The entire thing is timed by the way, but there's usually more than enough to get through the whole mode well within the limit.

The pain in the ass here comes with how cards are unlocked.  You have to fight and defeat that specific Rider when they have that card on them.  This isn't as big a problem for the regular characters, but some characters like Survive Mode Wingknight only seem to show up against one specific character in one specific match type.  I only found that out after unlocking everyone else's shit and going through each Rider in Mirror Mode one at a time.

I didn't mention it earlier, but when you select a Rider for this mode it gives a brief synopsis of their background and what motivates them to fight.  It also does this after completing Mirror Mode by defeating Xaviax (also the Arcade Mode boss).  All but a few Riders' stories can be summed up with 'Xaviax promises something to <insert Rider here> but lies.  <insert Rider here> finds out and turns on him.'  Bam, back story.  Some of the translations and word choices are unintentionally funny, though.  Maybe it's just me, but the phrase "Chris defeated Xavias despite his asthma" is a hilarious way to end someone's Mirror Mode run.

Take that, Asthma!  Your name is Asthma now, by the way.

In the end, there are only a couple people I can recommend this game to: Kamen Rider fans and people who like fighters that don't have a lot of complexity to them.  Other than that this game is a quick rental, or if you go through and unlock all the cards a relatively quick rental.  Good luck finding it too, as a quick search on their website showed that there are no GameStops within 120 miles of my home (which essentially means the state of Ohio) that have this game new, and mu-tsu dake hurui no wa arimasu yo.  Chotto omoshiroi da kedo, chikai uchi ni tsumaranaku narimasu nee.

Komatta naa!  Eego wa tsukai-dekimasen! 

Chigaimasu!  Chigaimasu!

Five Dollar Gaming: Cold Fear (PS2)

How many Tom Hansens does it take to headshot a dead Russian zombie?

SC On Saint (Wii)

Dragonball has nothing on this shit!

 It's the first sentence of this blog and I've already resorted to crappy sarcastic Dragonball remarks.  That is what this game has reduced me to.

Okay, let's get a grip for a moment.

Saint is a game developed by a Japanese company that's been around since 1993, and published by an American company that's been around since 1999.  That sounds encouraging since they've been around so long, right?  Well the former is Starfish, a company known mostly for fishing games and children's storybook games, and the latter is UFO Interactive, which has published such illustrious titles as several Chuck E. Cheese games and the Smart Boys'/Smart Girl's/Smart Kid's series.  So of course these two should team up and help bring the world a side-scrolling shooter right?

Wait, what?

Co-produced by random newgrounds.com users!

Well, this will be a short blog entry.

I might as well say that I'm not that pissed off about this game existing.  It's a budget title, namely a budget title that not even GameStop could justify charging $10 or more for and one that I held off on writing about for several months.  As such I have forgotten most of what I saw when I played it.

Most, but not all.

Saint is about the mythos of the monkey king (which I've never read about, or cared to) and as such I can't properly judge the story.  You play as Goku flying somewhere on the back of some transforming girl-bird-thing to... defeat evil I guess?  It's told exclusively in oddly-drawn illustrations between every level with flavor text of who says what.  Bam.  Story section done.

Controls, meh.  They work.  That's the highest compliment I can possibly give.  No motion controls or anything, just the usual sideways control scheme.  They're functional.  Controls section done.

Graphics?  It looks like a flash game from 2006.  Paying for this is like paying for air.  Damn, if I hadn't been so long-winded at the start this might be half as long.

Sound?  It sounds like a generic SNES/PSX-era shooter.  Except it's a Wii game.  From 2009.  And the death sound is a cartoonish BOING sound effect. 

Gameplay?  Oh... this will take a bit.

Let's get physical!  Physical!

 Like I said, this is a shooter.  A fairly basic one at that.  However, it's the kind of shooter that, seemingly at random, flirts with being bullet hell-esque.  You have a health bar, but on difficulties higher than Easy it hardly seems to matter.

You can pick up various power-ups to upgrade your weapon, whatever the hell it is, and hit checkpoints at which you can select special weapons to fire along with your main... gun?  Staff?  Whatever.  I just kept choosing the one that caused long strings of "bullets" to shoot across the screen because, well, it worked.  There's also one power-up that causes a huge spinning... thing to fly across the screen.  It's supposed to be one of if not the strongest, but there's a huge delay on it that doesn't make it seem worth picking up.

In addition to the usual sidescrolling sequences there are also certain stages, usually right before a boss, where the perspective changes and you're behind Goku, flying to wherever the boss fight is.

Some of you already know what I'm going to say, but screw it.

Why is it that after all these years developers still think that having this perspective when you're trying to shoot enemies without getting shot yourself is a good idea?  Actually, it's worse here as your shots always fire toward the center of the screen, just at slight angles.  This makes it a pain in the ass to hit jsut about anything that comes flying at Goku in Mode 7-like glory as they all fire at the same time (usually).  Add in bullets that come seemingly out of nowhere and explode and these sequences can eat up lives.  Fast.

The worst part of it though is that dying clears out all your power-ups.  Yup, this game shares one of the worst aspects of Silver Surfer for the NES.

Then again, sometimes the AI, even on Easy, does something like this:

It's like fighting Professor Xavier without his mutant powers.

I think we're done here.  Even at $5 this game seemed like kind of a waste.  But hey, at least I'm not one of the people who paid full-price for this.

That's what I keep telling myself to make it not seem so bad. 

SC On: Heavy Fire: Afghanistan (Wii)

 FOR AMURRICA!

About 12 hours: the length of time this game was in my possession, from when it came in the mail via GameFly to when I drove to the nearest post office and dumped it in a mail box.

1 hour 45 minutes: the approximate length of time it took me to beat this game, if you include waiting for story dialogue, navigating menus, and in-game cutscenes.

If there was ever any doubt that Call of Duty and similar games are watering down military shooters, and shooters in general, look no further than Heavy Fire: Afghanistan.  I don't really know where to begin or end with this game as it left very little of an impression in the time I had it.  It's one of those games that just sort of happens and you forget about it after a while.  Hell, I only returned the game a few days ago and I have to go back to the stream recording I made of it just to remember certain basic things.

Like, for example, there's a story to the game.  Hell if I could tell you the details of it because it's one of those generic "Ra-ra-U-S-A-get-them-terrorists-I'm-a-good-soldier-fighting-for-my-country" deals (I think,as most of the "story" is just briefings for missions) and it seems to shift from one soldier to another.  I say "seems" because I got lost as to who I was playing as somewhere between the armored jeep, the helicopter, and the ground unit.

*saxomophone*

Getting to the actual game, it's a rail shooter.  Yup, a rail shooter.  You go on a set path through a shooting gallery of terrorists of many kinds, including the stereotypical Middle Eastern guy, the dude wearing a balaclava who doesn't look like he fits in the environment at all, and... actually, that's about it.  I'm sure there's at least one more, but most of the enemies are so far away from the player that the only way I saw them was by waiting until they shot at me so I could pick out their gun flashes.  This was a constant problem, regardless of terrain or time of day, which is amazing since most of the time you're standing perfectly still.  In theory it should be easy to see them when they move, but not so.

Then again, sometimes enemies (and by "enemies" I mean the balaclava guy) will try to walk up to you and knife you with one of the most awkward and slow attack animations I've seen beyond the early Playstation days.  Said enemy even disappears from the screen entirely for a split second after getting shot.  Surely great care was put into the creation of this title.

Not only that, but framerate drops and enemies and environments popping in are commonplace for this game.  Remember how I keep saying I don't care about a game's graphics so long as it doesn't affect the gameplay?  This game is a prime example of that distinction.

 No, dammit!  I said GRAPHICS, not CONTROLS!

A cheap-looking Metal Gear Solid-esque red exclamation point appears over enemies that are about to shoot and hit you, and I never did figure out how long I had to kill them before taking a hit and causing... someone... to yell... something... as I lost a point of health and a .png file of a bullet hole in glass appeared on screen.  Sometimes it was almost a full second.  Sometimes I almost instantly took damage.  Sketchy hit detection doesn't help here, either, nor does the helicopter stage where your pathing makes it nearly impossible to hit some enemies you need to kill to advance, causing the helicopter to drunkenly sway back and forth over the terrain and thus making it even harder to kill them.

It hardly mattered though, as there were health and ammo pickups everywhere.  I only died two or three times due to my deliberately wasting ammo and avoiding pick-ups and/or not knowing where an enemy was until it shot me.  The first wasn't even much of a problem, as when the default machine gun runs out of rounds, you switch to a pistol with infinite bullets.  Sure you can't mindlessly spray bullets anymore, but it doesn't make the game that much more difficult.

Oh, aside from the rocket launcher in the last level, some grenades, and the rare machine gun turret, these are the only weapons in the game.

The DLC melee weapon!

And to top it off, I played through most of the game with the Wii Zapper controls.  The catch to this is that I don't own a Wii Zapper.  I was using the remote and nunchuk with the control scheme for a different peripheral because its control scheme suited the remote and nuchuk better than the remote and nunchuk controls.  Why would you have grenades assigned to the awkward-to-hit 1 button instead of, say, A, Z, C, or the + or - button?  Why are there two buttons assigned to reloading?  Why is every quick-time event (yes, they're here too) done by lowering the Wiimote when it involves everything from vaulting cover to sliding under things to fighting off a terrorist to jumping?  It's as if they decided to design the game around the peripheral most Wii owners don't have and doesn't come with the game (like certain hunting titles) instead of the basic controller that nearly everyone has. 

As for the game's interface, it consists of a couple graphics in the lower left showing your weapon, score, health, and ammo, all of which look like they were photoshopped in at the last second.  The score obviously goes up for shooting terrorists, but also for shooting random shit in the background.  Not only that, shooting these random objects, most of which don't distinguish themselves in any way from the rest of the level, sometimes yield certain on-disc "achievements" of sorts.  These are kind of like the dog tags from Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes in that they have no function and don't unlock anything, but without the novelty, challenge, or fun of collecting them.

There are also bonuses for doing things like not getting shot in certain areas and getting long-range kills.  Wait, why does the game reward long-range kills when the enemies never move aside from sometimes going behind cover and you have to kill them anyway to advance?

For each stop on the path of this Middle East shooting gallery there's a Time Crisis-like cover system at work.  The player can continually go into cover to reload (manually), though there are often enemies in areas that can still hit you while in cover.  Having multiple cover areas to hide behind only made the problem worse as the enemies on the opposite side of the screen took their turn to peg me with rifle fire.  This feels like something that was created with good intentions, but which backfired in execution.

Speaking of execution, hit detection at times is either way off or non-existent.  I've had both shots five feet to the side of a terrorist score a kill and a tank that did no damage after scoring a direct hit on a truck.

My thoughts exactly.

I should mention that this game actually has a few decent things going for it.  There's an option for co-op or head-to-head multiplayer (local only) and an online leaderboard for high scores.  There's an upgrade system between levels which allows you to choose between things like hold more grenades, get boosts to total health, and speed up reload time-

Actually, by "speed up reload time" I mean "drop frames of animation."

And there are a lot of levels.  I thought at points that the levels were really long but in truth none of them lasted more than ten minutes, except one where I spent three minutes trying to hit a guy in the previously-mentioned helicopter stage.  As a result the game can be finished in less than two hours, but there are two catches.  One, the game essentially tells you to replay all the levels again in a new-game-plus type mode where there are fewer ammo and health pickups.  Uh, no thanks.

Second, this is what the ending looks like:

That's a wrap!  We're done here!

And that's the story of how I learned to stop playing and love games not named Heavy Fire: Afghanistan.

The Bloody Roar Retrospective: Bloody Roar 3

Not even the power going out for a week could prevent me from uploading this only a little under an hour after my deadline!