A Great Story and Epic Epicness

The Mixed Feelings of the Paradigms and Battle System

Here’s what I didn’t like about the battle system: I didn’t appreciate having to have my characters “locked in” to the different roles (commando, ravager, sentinel, medic, saboteur, synergist) and having to devote time to switching roles with paradigms. There were many times in this game where many of my characters would die because they would get hit during the paradigm switches or right when they were about to save themselves. The last part is sort of expected with gaming, but, at least on the 360, pressing the left-bumper, along with the directional pad, wasn’t very responsive, so I would lose even more time pressing the same buttons over and over again trying to get my team to switch to healing or back to attacking. That is totally aggravating. I also didn’t like how, for every battle, that the first switch of paradigms took forever, but all the rest were quick. This is a classic “cool” thing we get taught in design school: it may be cool to put in for an effect that’ll be used a couple of times, but it quickly loses its charm when it’s repeated thousands of times. And it was repeated at least a thousand times. And then another thousand. While it fits in the realm of Final Fantasy, it does pretty much nothing to help the player, and that’s what I don’t like.

A smaller, yet just as annoying aspect of the battle system, is that you couldn’t tell the characters where to stand during battle. You can help tell them what they should be doing, but pretty much they are glued to the same spot the whole time. And, conveniently for the player, all the characters happen to stand in the same location, making it super-easy for all the enemies to unleash seas of AOE (area or effect) attacks on you, without pretty much any way to defend against them. That causes a lot of unnessecary deaths and a lot of frustration.

A Lot More of the Same

While I do enjoy the ability to jump into a game and the battle system, I have to say there’s a lot of the same. The same grinding experience. Over. And over. And over again. I was able to clear the game in a little over 70 hours, which is about par for a long RPG (it’s 3 discs, after all). But, for more than half of them, I was sitting in the same parts of the world, whether on Grand Pulse, in the mountains, on flying ships, or in fantastical realities just walking around and waiting for monsters to respawn. That’s because the characters I control didn’t have enough abilities/HP/attack to be able to take down a good proportion of the monsters. I got killed – a lot – because either they would 1-shot me, debuff me completely, or just have too much HP and outlast me. And I take care to max out my characters whenever I can, and when this happens, I know that the balance is tipped against the player; this is especially true when most of the monsters have 6 and 7 digits worth of HP. And don’t get me started about the final boss run – it was the first Final Fantasy bosses that actually gave me trouble, even when I was as maxed out as I could be; the designers did a very, very good job at knowing how to make the end as tough and as infuriating as possible.

I also am still contemplating about trying to 100% the game. Evaluating how much I have left to do – maxing out the crystarium (which is about 30 million or so points left to go for me), getting the best weapons and leveling them up to maximum level, and going after all of the hunts on Grand Pulse – will take me, at a conservative estimate, around 70 or so more hours. Before grad school and being at work for most of the day, I could be able to do this in around 2 weeks. Now, with the ability to play about an hour or so a day, and wanting to invest my time in other activities, I’ll probably get to this in about half a year when I’m really bored. Sorry, Square, but that is just a huge wall to complete, and the experience of the battles in this game and the extras is compelling enough for me to come back. I’d come back to make Hope’s costume, but that’s about it.

And this game used the typical bad guy motivation I’ve seen over and over again in many RPGs to destroy the world. While not writing this down to spoil the game for you, I’m really getting tired of this same motivation. Whatever happened to psycho bad guys, homocidal maniacs, or just the most evil people that we have ever seen? I’m hoping those return soon, as I don’t want to be able to guess how the story ends from the moment the final bad guy appears one-third through the game. I think this is one of the elements of many games that pulls me out of the experience of being absorbed in a great game and story and into just a regular game with different characters in it.

I may be a tough gamer, but I really want to help push the medium and the design of games forward. They rely upon building and delivering great experiences, but many times fail to deliver. I would hope they try and use more human-centric means to help build these experiences, and not what technology and sales say games should be.

Even with this in mind, the overall experience of FF13 was quite enjoyable, and I’d recommend it to you. Just make sure you have the time to put into the game, as I’d say you should be able to devote at least 2 hrs per session to get the most out of this game. That’s both its greatest power and weakness. And how to make this game even better? I’ve put hints at what I would have liked to do to help the player: take advantage of how the player wants to play through the battle system, help the player utilize their time better in a game full of grinding, and provide more cues to the player to help him/her not die as much.

So who/what is Bayonetta?

The Good Parts

The Annoyances and Frustration

In simple terms, this game is not for those who want something that is fun and mostly doable from the get-go. Just like Devil May Cry, this game is very, very punishing. If you don’t learn how to put yourself in and out of danger, you’ll find yourself dying every 5 minutes (which happened to me a lot, for many of the reasons that follow). This comes to my first critique: the inconsistent cuing for Witch Time. The game teaches you how to do Witch Time relatively easily in the first few levels: they put guards that come right up to you and swing relatively slowly. Then the framerate will drop for about a half-second. It’s at this point the player needs to press right-trigger (I’m on a 360) to evade and activate Witch Time. As the game goes on, this doesn’t always happen: with large projectiles like buildings and meteors that get thrown at Bayonneta, this camera cuing will happen, but pretty much ceases to happen against most of the regular enemies that she has to kill. Later on, though, to obfuscate this issue even more, Bayonetta gets the ability to negate damage by pressing right-trigger at the exact moment of getting damaged. Why is this frustrating? Because normally before this point I’ve already pressed right-trigger to evade the attack, but can’t really see that I’ve already gotten damaged. So this basically turns into a controlled evade-spam on the controller, which isn’t the most of fun.

And on another note, there’s a lot of button spamming during these challenges, especially to get to the best rankings. I also really, really don’t like having to press a lot of buttons over and over again, especially when I have to repeat the same challenges multiple times over.

The other main critique that I have is that this game transitions to other types of games at the drop of the hat, for many times of no apparent reason other than the game designers wanted it to be difficult or what they think is cool. There are: motorcycle events, jumping challenges, gunning events, and Ikaruga-like challenges, all of which inherit the same annoyances and challenges of the main Bayonetta experience. There was even a rafting challenge, and out of all of these random challenges (it was a boss battle), it was the easiest and most naturally-controlled out of all of them. During motorcycle events, thousands of things keep coming at you from in front, all of which you must destroy and avoid at the same time (all the while, to get the best rating, you should evade right at the point where it is about to hit you, which the game makes hard to time). This wouldn’t be too hard, except that Bayonetta’s awesome hat and hair covers everything in front of her: so by the time you see something you need to avoid, it’s already too late. I had to drive like a drunkard while holding down the shooting button to get any idea as to where I was supposed to be going. This was the same for the Ikaruga-like challenges, except throwing in the fact that the game doesn’t auto-invert the axes for you, so you’ll probably die or get hurt many times before actually getting adjusted to the new control set. The same also goes for the Angel Attack gunning challenges, but those weren’t too bad, as I ended up getting slightly used to having normal axes for this FPS challenge. There were also a couple of challenges were the designers had Bayonetta in a turret, where she has to kill not only the giant boss in front of her, but the thousands of missiles that the boss throws at her. Miss one, which happens a lot because the turret covers some of them (and also the explosions do too), and your life will pretty much instantly go down to zero. And no idea on how to activate Witch Time during this, even though sometimes it would randomly turn on as I would leave the turret. Good job, designers – more like fail.

Basically what this boils down to is that the gameplay especially reinforces the character design: what many male players might deem as complete perfection in a woman. And that type of play style leads to a game that is utterly compelling in its story, but leaves the player utterly destroyed if they don’t know how to understand what the game is telling them. At the end of the day, I had a good time with this game, but it left me shaking my head in frustration at how I can be able to play this game on any of the harder levels.

I’d recommend this if you loved Devil May Cry, or want a really, really powerful story involving the themes of love and protection. If you’re in it for the story, I’d recommend playing it on the easier levels unless you’re wanting to get punished, like I did. It’s not just a fanservice game like I originally thought, but a game about a protective mother who is fast and can take out legions of enemy angels.

The Premise

You get to play Isaac, a space commander sent out into the depths of space when reports of a planet-sized spaceship have gone awry. When Isaac and his crew get to the spaceship (more like a space station), his crew gets sucked into the spaceship, which is conveniently wrecked. Once you gain control of Isaac, you have to find out what has been happening on the ship, to the crew, and most importantly, get yourself off of the ship and back to safety.

Sounds pretty cool, right? You even get to see how this game takes on the dimensions of the Alien universe, bad B-rated horror movies, and how the occult in outer space merge together in this very fun and interesting third-person shooter.

The High-Points and Fun Aspects

There was a lot of really good stuff in Dead Space. From an interface and control aspect, the designers put in many tools to help the gamer get through the ordeals they set up for you. First, they gave you the “mystical blue line that tells me where to go”. By tapping on the right control stick, Isaac puts out his hand and a blue line appears, telling you the direction you have to go. This is very handy because the environments are quite large and dark, and can also help in preparation for many of the ambushes the designers have set up in advance. Another cool aspect is that all of the necessary information from a gaming standpoint (i.e. health, ammo, stasis (the ability to slow enemies down)) was all on the body of Isaac: his spine was his health, his stasis was on his back, and his ammo was displayed whenever one is readying the trigger. Isaac also had some pretty cool telekinetic powers, too.

The designers also did a very good job setting up the mise-en-scene for the game. The lush environments are very reminiscent of the Alien movies, and all of the setups that come from that universe (e.g. scariness and cheap scares). The sounds and the music made me feel like I was actually in the derelict spaceship and I felt a little tense, even though I knew I was playing a game with many cheap B-horror movie scares in it (it got close to the feel of playing Silent Hill, but didn’t get all the way there in terms of scary/creepy). Each chapter (read “level”) was also a convenient section of the spaceship, which you had to explore because new things would go wrong with the ship and Isaac was in the convenient section of the ship to take care of the problems.

All of these great aspects of the game, including relatively simple and straightforward puzzles, kept me interested in this game and I rarely put it down. These great aspects covered some of the parts of the game that ruined many parts of the game for me and turned a great movie/game into utter frustration and horror.

The Let-Downs

While these may be an equal amount of let-downs to the greater aspects of this game, these flaws are pretty obvious and should be brought forward to help other games improve upon them. Isaac’s controls weren’t the best. I found myself fumbling through their controls (but thank goodness I was able to invert the y-axis) and using up my stasis power at times where I wanted to use the telekinesis (pressing left-trigger and X was stasis, and left-trigger and B was telekinesis – their locations were so close and not expected that I would fumble through them and take damage often from this confusion). Isaac was also ridiculously slow – he can stomp enemies and swing at them, but would take an eternity for him to wind up and swing. This was horrible, because there would be many times I would run out of ammo, and the game mentioned to use these tactics if necessary (they mentioned to save ammo, which also means it’s a valuable means to deal damage as well). Also, the mechanism to hold the gun and shoot was horrible as well: using left trigger to aim and the right trigger to fire. Yeah, you read that right – double trigger. If anything, since this game looks like Resident Evil 4 and 5, except that Isaac is on the other side of the camera, I should be able to use the right-trigger to aim and then A to fire, which is certainly more natural and responsive in desperate situations than the double trigger approach (there are A LOT of ambushes in this game where quick timing is necessary for survival).

So, it may look like I may be ranting more about some small details about the game, they are indeed quite large ones that I feel are still prevalent in the gaming industry. Maybe I’m just blowing things out of proportion, but these small things are the things I look for in the gaming experiences to make me enjoy them even more.

I’ll have more thoughts on Bayonetta, which I just finished, too. And that game has a large reflection waiting for it too.

Every time I get an RPG to play, I’m usually excited. There’s always a good story to look forward to, a battle system to learn and get used to, and a wide range of characters to know and find some favorites. That’s at least what I was thinking when my copy of The Last Remnant came to my mailbox last week, but I was quite saddened and annoyed after playing it (title screen on the upper-left and a cutscene on the upper-right).

A Possibly Good Story

I’ll be upfront with this: I sent the game back after playing around 5 hours of this game. It started off with a good premise: Rush, the main character, is quickly swept into an epic war between two large armies as he is trying to find the evildoers who have kidnapped his sister. In this world, remnants are capable of being used to wield a wide variety of magics, with Rush being special to be able to control them all (at least that’s my guess). There are possibly hundreds of other different characters to learn about and level up. One of the coolest was Lord David (Da-veed pronounced in this game), who wore some cool armor and wielded a gun that could send large blasts of magic down from the sky and wipe out anything that moves. The game most likely followed Rush’s tale across the large 2 disc world to find his sister, complete with twists and turns, but I didn’t get to see those.

Loading Screens Galore

The aspect of this game that broke the experience of a possibly-great RPG. Now, RPGs are normally built with having multiple loading screens, as cutscenes, towns, and other aspects of the world need to be rendered when appropriate. But this game took this aspect a little too far (general loading screen on the far left and battle loading screen on the left). There were loading screens for every town. For every time the map was brought up and I wanted to go to a different part of the world (or town I was in). For every time I started a battle (and there were many, many battles – about 6-7 per submission, but no respawning enemies). So, that might not make the case for you, as you may be used to playing RPGs that have this many loading screens. It wasn’t bad at first, but each time there was a loading screen, it took anywhere from 5-10s to load and let me continue playing. In the gaming world, that’s a really long time. The loading screens also weren’t too helpful in determining how long the loading time was going to be either. I would either receive a tip I knew many times over, or receive a pulsing, glowing screen before every battle. With this happening all of the time, as the game is based upon battling to level and finding new towns and locales, I could not see myself staying for the duration of two discs. Sorry, Square Enix, but this was one of your games that I won’t play (even though it was released in 2008).

Other Let-Downs

And to top all of this off, whenever there were more than 5 people on the screen, the game’s frame rate slowed down to a crawl, so you would just see an explosion/a player’s action take about 3x longer than it should have (or explosions that would clutter the screen and just become pixellated or just be smoky).

The battle system was also quite different than I’m used to and didn’t make too much sense to me either. You control up to 25 people on the field, arranged in different units of 5 people. The unit is measured in terms of HP and AP (hit points and action points for health and magic/actions, respectively). Whenever the unit runs out of HP, the whole unit dies, regardless of whether one of the 5 received all of the damage or all 5 took a little bit of damage equal to the unit’s health. This is something I have never, ever seen before and still confounds me even while writing about this. Another aspect of the battle system which annoyed me was that at completely random times, if I can press a button within a time window presented to me on the screen (this events were critical attacks and critical defenses), I can be able to do some really, really cool stuff. But, these events went by usually way to fast, or came at a point where I wasn’t paying attention (which happens a lot when I play mindless battles in RPGs) – even though the game presented a short window of time for me to press the right button: it would show the controller, and highlight the button it wanted pressed, indicating when the critical event would execute. The designers were cool enough to let me know there was an auto-critical feature, but I could never find it in any of the menus.

If you would like to play this game, by all means go ahead, but just beware of the things I’ve mentioned here. You may be sitting there in front of your TV like I did, sleeping while waiting for action to start.

The Fun Aspects

The Darkness did have a couple of fun aspects to it. The basic premise was interesting and did provide a couple of moments. You are Jackie Estacado, an orphan turned professional hitman. One day, things go sour and the other goons turn a hit on you (the traditional setup). Jackie finds his way out of his fix when the Darkness, a mythical demon, bonds with Jackie. Jackie then turns his sights to avenge not only himself but his loved ones as well (without any spoiler, there was a brutal sequence with the final bad guy and Jackie’s girlfriend). That was pretty cool. In addition, Jackie gains power from standing in the darkness and can then use the powers of the Darkness (tentacles, guns, black holes, and summoning demons) to take down the thousands of hitmen and stereotypical thugs that come Jackie’s way. I actually spent more time (and had more fun) finding the bonus phone numbers in the game to call the random people of NYC and listen to their answering machines (this was linked to “Bonus Content”) – there were about 100 of them to find, but I didn’t find them all. This was something I enjoyed and looked forward to while playing this game. Unfortunately, that was about it.

A Broken Experience

There were many different aspects of this game that ended up breaking the experience. While this may look like it is in rant form, it is in the best way for me to remember and chronicle these parts of the game which made me not enjoy it. The story had a couple of “random” aspects which made me scratch my head and pulled me out of the experience. While the overarching themes of revenge and love kept me wanting to know more, Jackie ends up getting pulled between the past (in the Darkness’s mind) and present-day NYC. It happened frequently (and you even shoot zombie Nazis) and didn’t give me a chance to adjust to what was going on; I turned into a player that would keep going until the next animated sequence, which I think shouldn’t be the experience to strive for.

Another aspect of this game that really didn’t work out was that it tried to be a mixture of a traditional mafia movie, FPS game, and RPG. I had to constantly run around the subways and streets of NYC to find other people to help (because they have no means to protect themselves), enduring lots and lots of load screens (which were cool at first – it featured Jackie ranting or giving aspects of his background – but then got super-super-repetitive), and trying to shoot many, many stereotypical mafia goons. People named Paulie and such were used all the time, making me not care at all about the people I was helping (or shooting). In addition, the game was loaded with (I think) unnecessary ice cream scoopfuls of f-bombs and other epithets, reminding me of the many bad b-movies I’ve seen (especially the ones on the SyFy channel), and making me care even less about the people in the game. With these elements, I was such removed from the game and caring about the people in the game that I just shot pretty much at anything (or used the tentacle powers) that moved.

Some of the major mechanics of this game also really irritated me and made it more clear I was playing a game that could have been executed better – much better. Everywhere I went, in order to use the powers of the Darkness, Jackie has to be in the dark. But, there’s lights on EVERYWHERE. I had to shoot every single light bulb I would see, lest I couldn’t use any of my powers to keep me alive. The light bulbs didn’t take away me health, but another reason why I did this was because Jackie had pretty much no life whatsoever. Any more than 4-6 shots and Jackie would die (but he is supposed to be stronger and can come back from the dead with the power of the Darkness – some superpowers ). James Bond from Goldeneye would last 8 shots on 00 Agent, and he didn’t have any supernatural help. One of the last aspects of the game which could have been improved was the aiming. I like to aim, but if the game presents an auto-aim, which it did, I don’t mind using it. It was especially handy (sometimes) to take out the lights in this game. But, about 80% of the time, the auto-aim would take over while I was setting up my shot, and then revert back to manual aim while I was pressing the trigger. I ended up losing a lot of ammo trying to shoot at lights that the game was trying to aim at. I ended up extremely annoyed at this any would actually talk to the game, asking it why it would do such annoying things.

Overall, though this game is better than some I’ve played, but far, far worse from many of the other FPS games I’ve played. If you’re bored, I’d say go for it, but if you’re looking for a compelling FPS and a story to keep you shooting, I’d say go look for something else.

Even though I’m not at E3, I’ve still been keeping up through Google Reader on the latest and coolest action there. One of the things that has been getting my eyes and ears ready for some epic epicness is the new game coming out for the Connect from Harmonix. It’s called Dance Central, and I’m pretty excited (as you can already tell).

Coming from the perspective of a long-time DDR and ITG player (check out the link to DDRecall at the bottom page if you would like proof), I’m excited for the opportunity to be able to exercise to some good music, but to also get other parts of my body involved in the action. While there’s nothing wrong with playing all of the 10s, 11s, 12s, and 13s in the normal arcade setting, the play does end up getting a little boring by oneself and just playing to test one’s own skills. Being able to incorporate the other limbs (I’ve gotten to play ParaPara Paradise before and really thought that it was cool to get the arms and legs involved!) presents a great opportunity for fun, the chance to incorporate other people into the fun, and also a way for players and families to push themselves for exercise. I think exergaming is a great way to have fun, get into shape, and provide the basis for a healthier life, and I would love to help design these games, as I’ve lost 60 pounds playing DDR and ITG (in the groove if you’re unsure of this acronym). I also hope that there will be awesome DLC to continue keeping the game fresh, along with combining multiple players through XBOX Live (as I wouldn’t mind encouraging any other players out there to exercise!). Even having the ability to record one’s own routine and possibly incorporating homemade music into the mix may also bring about an opportunity to bring people together through dance, gaming, and exercise.

With the advent of another music game, I still have some reservations about how the gameplay will be like. From my experience, “easy” and “medium” are pretty good exercise routines, mapping pretty well to the music, but “hard” and “expert” really challenge the player and put much more moves/steps in the chart than what most people expect/can handle. With this in mind, I hope there is a lot of playtesting to make sure that all of the moves map well to the music and don’t place many arbitrary “things” into the mix just to make things hard. Examples of these are: making notes not match the music (see “Two Weeks”, Drums Expert, Rock Band), making the scroll rate multiples faster/slower than what the actual music is rated (see any of the Maxes, DDR), or assuming that all music placed into the game will be in 4/4 (that’s a common time signature – see any songs by Rush/Soundgarden in Rock Band to see that asymmetric time signatures don’t work so well). These are the biggest aspects of the game that I think pull the player out of the experience of having fun and exercise, forcing the player to concentrate on the game aspect of the game, rather than enjoying the music and becoming a part of the experience for the audience and other performers (granted, for the hardcore, this is what the experience they want, but as someone who can play the tough stuff, it irks me to no end). That’s the type of play I’m hoping for in this game, and you can find me at the end of this year most likely playing it. I look forward to it, and exergaming with you, the reader, if you are up for some epic music and exercise.

I would also love the opportunity to be able to playtest it, but that doesn’t seem to be likely any time in the future. In the meantime, I’ll keep exercising in the gym and in the arcade to keep my weight down and tone my body for the next costumes I am making .

Have a great one!

(images from joystiq and destructoid)

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Last week, I had the luxury of being invited to go on a road trip to Cincinnati to see Video Games Live (Wikipedia Link). They play orchestrated versions of popular video game music. It took around 3 hours to get there, and we also had the luxury of stopping at a Skyline on the way there (they have good chili if you like chili). The trip was a little long for me, as I was a little scrunched in the back of a Mini-Cooper, and there wasn’t anything exciting for me to watch on the way to and from the pavilion which was hosting the show.

The show was fantastic, and I recommend going if you like either video games or orchestras playing music (or both). Most of the set was from the big names in the industry (like Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Halo, etc.), and was quite entertaining. The show lasted for around 3 hours, and I had the chance to go backstage and see the performers and the host up close and personal. They even gave a double encore, which was even more worth the trip there. It was just that awesome. The pictures posted tell even more of the story.

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.

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:

• On the Bounce – Neuras
• 30 Lives (up-up-down-dance mix) – The Motion Sick – song video
• Big Girls Don’t Cry – Purefocus
• Boy (dj irene rockstar mix) – Book of Love
• Till the Lonely’s Gone – z-licious
• Dream Machine – Darwin
• Flourish – sonic-coll. feat. frances maya
• Puzzle – nippon shonen
• Tracers (4beat remix) – ruffage and size
• Uranus – tatsh sn2 style

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”:

• Pluto
• Pluto Relinquish
• Saber Wing – (akira ishihara headshot mix) (EXTRA STAGE)
• Trigger – the new “hardest” song
• Girigili Burning 24hi
• Poseidon – good song, just synced poorly
• Saber Wing

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

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I had a good experience with this game, and all the frustration it provided me. I really hadn’t realized how hard the original Mega Man games were until I got to play this game (this PS2 disc is actually an emulator for Mega Man 1-8, and 2 bonus games) – I just remember playing Mega Man 2 with the Game Genie. Each of these games is based around a simple story: the evil Dr. Wily is threatening to destroy the world with his robots, and it is up to Mega Man to stop him (with slight variations on the length of the story, depending on the game).

The games featured simple controls – spam the attack button to shoot up to 3 “bullets” at a time on the screen, and jump onto platforms in the levels and avoid falling down the holes. Sounds easy, right? Unfortunately, the design of many of levels will cause much frustration, as things will jump out of the holes to attack you as you are jumping, knocking you down into the hole EVERY TIME. These games also feature a nifty feature – beat the bosses and you can have their weapons. This is nice, until you start to get to the end of the game, where all of the bosses require precise timing and weapon control to beat them – in other words, if you use a weapon to attack a boss and die – you won’t have a chance to beat him, unless you restart the game from the off position. This little fact made me pack up the game, because I just didn’t have the timing to kill off the last bosses in some of the games.

Overall this game was quite fun, as I never got a chance to play all of these games, and I am glad I got the chance to now. I would recommend this to someone who would want to play these games, and is willing to put up the frustration that will ensue. Also, this game lets you have more lives and saves your energy tanks as you play (and while the power is still on), so you can use those to your advantage. I’ll leave you with some footage from one of my favorite parts. Enjoy!