Drakengard

Another game I got to play from Gamefly was an older PS2 game called Drakengard. I can remember the commercials back in 2003 which showed how awesome this game was supposedly supposed to be. Now that it is summer, I got a chance to play it from Gamefly, and boy was I let down, even though I finished the game pretty fast. Here’s my experience, written down for you:

So this game is a simple brawling/fighting game (think of the Gauntlet series, but not as fun), where you play a man named Cain who has to save a kingdom from an evil magician, but ends up getting killed in the process. He then ends up making a pact with a dragon (also about to die) to keep them both alive, and save the kingdom. You then take him through the kingdom, trying to remove all of the thousands of men the evil magician has brought to take you out. Sounds exciting, right? Quite far from it.

The game boils down to simply pressing the X button tens of thousands of times to take down every single person in your way to complete the level, as each person is worth experience points. Also, the game makes each level so hard, that you’ll have to kill every single enemy to make it through the level barely. Oh, and each level takes roughly an hour to complete. And the levels are even exciting or done well graphically to keep me entertained (and probably you, as well). When one actually gets through a level, one gets long screens of text, or a very rare cutscene (shown below).

Overall, the game is describable by “meh”. It was just not special, and just monotonous. And the other letdown was that it has Square Enix’s name on it. If you can, avoid this game – or you’ll fall asleep while playing it and wishing you can get your money back.

A New Fast Food Experience

On the way back home, before I went to the airport, a good friend and I went to a fast food restaurant I haven’t been to in awhile – Hardees. I have been getting their coupons lately, and have been wanting to go, but this was one of the opportunities I have gotten to come close to going.

So when we first walked in, I was quite surprised at how big and open the place was. Even though it was 11 in the morning, there were still some people around. We even got to see the employees change the menu over from breakfast to lunch – it is something you should try to see. Unfortunately, the menu is just a simple turnstyle, and not a digital menu. Anyways, we were able to sit down after ordering our food, and while we waited, we were able to watch some television on a large HDTV. This was quite interesting, as it especially brings home the fact of how more affordable technology is and how, for some, television can enhance the food experience.

After watching the television for a little bit of time, we decided to get something to drink from the vending machine in the store, and were quite surprised at the many different choices available to us. Not only were there the traditional choices, but there were a couple of nozzles that allowed us to choice from 3 drinks at the nozzle. If this were to continue in the future, not only will it be great to have so many choices, but it will also be confusing to find which drink to pick from. Hopefully, this will remain simple for the future, as this is an interaction I would like to keep simple.

In terms of the food, the food at Hardees was surprisingly good. It came in a basket akin to that from Friendly’s, and the cheeseburger and fries were better than most of the fast food restaurants I have been to. It was just something about how they cooked their burgers that just made the experience special for me. If you get the option to, try giving this place a try – order the little thickburger combo – it’s the one in the picture.

Happy eating!

The Redbox Kiosk

When I went home this July, I was fortunate enough to stumble across something I could comment on for design purposes – the Redbox Kiosk. If you haven’t heard of this company, its basic premise is akin to Netflix – you can rent movies from this company for low prices. I won’t give the buisness spiel, but if you are curious, you can go on ahead and check them out at redbox.com.

The kiosk is very simple, and equipped with a touch screen interface for you to find the movies you want to rent. You swipe your credit card, and in a second, the movies you want are immediately given to you from this little slot on the side of the kiosk. Getting movies very quickly from this machine is awesome, and I give the people who designed this part of the interaction a thumbs-up.

Returning movies, on the other hand, I personally had trouble with. There’s a label on the side of the machine that says to return the video, you insert the video in the slot and the machine should take it. So I did that, and the machine wouldn’t do anything. And then I thought – “maybe I need to push it in for it to accept the video” – and then I tried that for a couple of minutes, and it didn’t work. Boy, was I not happy at all with this machine. Turns out, there’s a label on the other side of the machine that tells you to return the video by selecting return on the touch screen. And then I felt extremely embarrassed, as I was in front of a giant grocery store pushing and shoving at this machine, with people staring as I was in epic fail mode.

Hopefully other people don’t have this trouble, but I thought I would let you know of this trouble I had, and that this interaction should be simpler than having to tell the machine to be set into receive mode – I should be able to just return my movie into the slot, just like I have done before when I actually went to a real video store. Those were some good times…

Have fun in the real world!

DDR X

Dance Dance Revolution is one of my favorite games to play. Not only does it have mostly good music to listen to, but it is very good at giving a nice cardio workout. I have lost roughly 60 lbs. playing this series, but now I’ll be talking about the newest home mix that I got to play – the X mix, for 2008 being the 10th year DDR was around.

When I first picked up this game, I was pretty excited to see what this game offered me. After I got a chance to play it, I am sorely disappointed at it, mostly for its execution and song selection.

The Good

So there were actually a couple of good things about this mix. If you actually care about knowing a little bit about the dancing characters that appear behind you as you’re dancing, then the story mode will be your favorite, as you’ll get to experience a story featuring each character, which will end up unlocking all the songs on the disc. If you don’t care about the story mode, you’ll basically end up playing this for at least 6 hours hating every minute of it to get all the songs, without using cheats.

Here are the songs I liked a lot on this mix, not in any order of preference:

The Bad and Ugly

There is a lot left to be desired from this mix. The story mode was quite long (though I enjoyed it), and you had to play through every character in order to unlock all the songs. This made you play through a lot of songs on low difficulties just to get the right to play them in the regular mode. Also, extra stage on this mix is not set to oni life mode of battery level 2. This means that one can only break their combo 2 times on the extra stage (which is already poorly synced to begin with), and not the traditional no recovery mod on. Also, many of the songs are synced poorly – they either have arbitrary stops in them, and fluxuate in the scroll rate, even though the song doesn’t change tempo. That highly irritates me – I’ll have to spend more work resyncing it to be playable on Stepmania. Also, most of the songs aren’t that awesome, and are just kind of “there”. The worst offenders are listed below, some of them hyperlinked so you can see how bad they are.

Also, this mix is heavily weighted to low 6 and 7 foot difficulty, with only a few songs at supremely high difficulties. This provides few opportunities for someone to build up their stamina and speed to play the harder boss songs. In addition, the higher songs are stepped for the elite – making this mix one of the hardest top end mixes out there, with long streams of 800 BPM steps, sometimes with crossovers. In addition, the game still feels like it triplets aren’t quantized correctly, even though the game has 10 times to try and fix this syncing error. Hopefully this will get fixed soon, and also the mixes will be better balanced for both the beginners, and top end players, as I feel with the current path of songs and syncing, this game will probably lose it charm and appeal to those who aren’t already players.

Now here are the “bad songs”:

Have fun with this, and please feel free to comment.