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Soccer

Among other things, I saw this recently. It had some kick to it.

I also think that, collectively, Kill Bill is probably one of the best films made in the last decade. Not for the reasons you expect, though.

No, I don’t intend to clarify. Because. That would mean talking about it.

I bought a VCR today. The man said it came with no RCA cables, so he sold me some RCA cables that cost half as much as the VCR itself.

I assume you can guess the punchline.

We will take the cables back tomorrow.

Gladstone Comics is back in the form of Gemstone Publishing. Same people: Gary Leach, Susan Daigle-Leach, John Clark; it just seems that they have parted ways with Bruce Hamilton. They publish Don Rosa, William Van Horn, Daan Jippes, and everything. Seems that WVH now has a son named Noel, who does Mouse stuff. While he is not as interesting as his father, the influence is clear.

There are five books, in three formats, which more or less correspond to Gladstone 1′s original debut lineup: Uncle $crooge, WDC&S, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and DD Adventures. (Curious, on that last one, that they chose not to carry over the numbering from the first two Gladstone runs.) The first two are in the deluxe square-bound format that you might recall from the last year or two of Gladstone 2′s lifespan. The next two are in a standard, less expensive, more mainstream format. The final one is in the thick-n-small digest format (with which, you might remember, Gladstone experimented in the mid-late ’80s).

Were these not so expensive, I would have subscriptions to them all. This is important stuff. As far as I know, this is the only place where Duck comics are published in English. And there should be a sizey backlog of Rosa material, that he has built up at Egmont over the last half-decade or so.

For those not in the loop, this is the stuff which defines much of my personality, vocabulary, writing style, and knowledge of the world. Barks, Rosa, Van Horn, Taliaferro, Gottfredson. They, along with Tintin and Groucho Marx, are inadvertently responsible for the core of my being. Everyone who reads this, I recommend that you go to a comics shop and pick up an issue of Uncle $crooge — particularly one with a Rosa story. If you don’t already know what you’re in for, then you just don’t know.

There is… more.

(April 29th, 2004 @ 7:01pm)



17 responses

Igarashi: For the Nerds

A few things I don’t remember seeing mentioned anywhere:

When Leon renounces his title in order to go searching for his woman, he is forced to leave his sword behind. As a result, Leon is unarmed when he rushes into the vampire’s forest. This is why, when Leon runs into this Gandolfi fellow, Leon is presented with an alchemically-fortified whip (later, I assume, to be dubbed “Vampire Killer”), with which to defend himself.

It always did seem a bit out-of-place, did it not?

To go with the whip, Gandolfi then treats one of Leon’s gauntlets, giving it energy-absorbing powers. This allows Leon to block near any attack, and also to absorb magical power with every blow the gauntlet withstands.

Whenever the player defeats an Elemental (in the Dungeons & Dragons sense of the term), that Elemental’s power may then be applied to Leon’s alchemical whip. So the way you get a flame whip is to kill a fire elemental (modeled after Weta Workshop’s idea of a Balrog). Sort of clever.

You know those orbs that you collect after you defeat a boss in the older Castlevania games? They are kind of arbitrary, aren’t they. They refill Simon’s or Trevor’s or Juste’s life bar, and they mark the end of a level. That is about it.

In Lament of Innocence, the orbs are back. In this game, however, Leon collects the orbs; each contains a unique magical influence. Do you remember the Spell Fusion system in Harmony of Dissonance? The way it works is, Juste collects spell books — ice, fire, what-have-you — and then can apply those powers to whatever secondary weapon he might be holding. So if you have the ice book and the cross, a little ice crystal will follow Juste around and shoot at enemies. If you have the wind book and the dagger, Juste can throw a bunch of daggers really quickly.

Exactly the same deal here, with Leon — only with a logistical twist. Get a subweapon, equip an orb (claimed from a defeated boss), and you may use your gauntlet — and the power you have absorbed with it — to cast similar spells depending on which orb and which subweapon you choose. The important thing is, this relies on Leon’s enchanted gauntlet and on the old boss orbs. It… well.

I really like some of these details. It would take a while to explain why I find this as neat as I do.

The game is, indeed, getting more interesting now. That first level I entered — the one in the center — was bland and annoying. This second one — the one on the far left — has a lot going on (in comparison, if perhaps not absolutely). If the game continues to improve at this rate, it could be pretty darned satisfactory by the end.

Again, we will see.

(April 15th, 2004 @ 11:19pm)



7 responses

1up

The site has… not really fulfilled its potential. The reason, as far as I’m concerned, sits in coverage such as this.

Oy.

Good job, man. You not only noticed Mega‘s tiny booth; you found the courage to ridicule them for their obscurity. Use your knowledge well. Don’t waste it on bragging alone. Remember, you’re getting paid for this!

The sad thing is, what you see here is pretty standard behavior in the gaming media. On a good day.

(April 15th, 2004 @ 4:48pm)



10 responses

Neon Leon

I have progressed a bit in Lament of Innocence; I am now closing in on the end of the first level. All I have to do is beat the boss (I died toward the end of my first attempt), and I may move on.

The controls — I don’t know that there is any end of praise I can give to how they are designed. The only flaw I can find is that there is no way to cancel an attack with the block button. So if you see, say, an incoming spear, and your whip is extended, you can’t make Leon lift his gauntlet and block the attack until after his animation is completed. By then, it is usually too late.

Otherwise… well, I will dissect it all later. The mechanics are precise and splendid; they are exactly what I remembered from E3.

The real problem — again! — seems to be in level design. See, now I enjoyed the E3 demo. It was just room, room, room, room, room, room, boss. Clear all of the monsters; move on. Clear the room; move to the next room. Occasionally the player would face a small puzzle room or a platforming section; then he would move on. At the end, the boss.

That was it. It was fun! It was mindless, yet wholly entertaining. It was a straightforward action game, as with the original Castlevania, yet organized like the first well-made 3D brawler I have played. Castlevania: Fists of Fury. No nonsense. Just leap into the game and have fun with it.

When people complained of how shallow the full game was, I scoffed. Well, duh. Igarashi has already said that he intended the game to be a shallow hackfest. And it looked like he succeeded in making an enjoyable one. If the demo was any good representation of the finished result, then I did not see how a person could confuse the game’s ambition for anything else.

The problem with the full game — from what I have so far seen — is that it is no longer so focused. Now there is… wandering. And it is not particularly enjoyable wandering. It is not the sort of “backtracking” that one sees in, say, a Metroid game — which consciously exists to create a coherent sense of place, for the player. It…

Well, take the first level. There are two doors you need to open, to reach the boss. To do so, you need to go out of your way and flip six switches in far, unmarked corners of the level. To do that, you need to zigzag across the same collection of flat, almost wholly non-interactive (if pretty) rooms over and over and over again, fighting or avoiding the same respawning enemies over and over — to no benefit, given that the game contains no experience points (since it was supposed to be more of an action game).

There is almost no verticality to the rooms. When there is, it is usually just to hide a money bag or some other trinket; there is nothing vital on the upper plane. There is no sense of coherence, as the player wanders from one room to the next, as there is a scene transition every time the player opens a door. This, again, is because the game is supposed to be an action game: room, room, room. Clear a room; move on.

That ain’t how the levels are built, though. Instead, it seems like somewhere along the way, someone became worried that the game was too linear. So the rooms became connected to each other in a big enough network as to necessitate a map. In order to encourage the player to explore every corner of that map, the designers threw in obstacles such as those doors and switches. Puzzles now, instead of existing as a relief from battle, act as yet another hinderance, preventing the player from just trudging forward as she is supposed to.

At this point, I think you can see the problem as well as I: it is that Igarashi did not stick to his original idea. If he had just made the game he wanted to make, I am confident that it would have had a bunch of energy and would have been a blast to play. This is just tedious, though. Either someone interfered, and told Igarashi to make the game longer and more complex — although the game was not designed to work that way — or Igarashi himself lost confidence in his design somewhere close to the end of production, and tried to spice it up.

Not a good plan, that — as I am sure you are aware by now.

Oh well. Igarashi does have him some great ingredients, anyway. And heck, maybe the game gets more focused as it progresses. We shall see.

(April 15th, 2004 @ 3:30pm)



2 responses

Sunderland update!

I guess Joanna is right again: James’s problem must be his bum knees. Today’s predicament centers around a dry pool. Behind it, specifically. The map shows a gray dash — which, under normal circumstances, signifies a doorway that the player might try to enter. If the player may enter, it remains gray. If the door is locked, the gray dash will be covered with a red line. If the door is found altogether unpassable, the gray dash will be crossed out with a red squiggle. In the game field, that gray dash corresponds to the door of a suspicious shed. All seems to add up. All, except that the game seems uninterested in allowing me to access this doorway: there is no clear path that it seems I may take, to get to the door.

Under normal circumstances, this would be fine. The thing is — well. Let me see if I can describe the situation to you. James stands in a courtyard, with a good-sized pool in the corner. The pool is surrounded by a chest-height chain-link fence. The skirt of the pool — where the deck chairs and umbrellas are arranged — sits a foot or two above the pavement level of the courtyard; a few steps on the left side allow James to walk up there, and explore the immediate pool area. The back and the right sides of the pool area are jammed almost directly against the outside fence of the courtyard — a high, wooden fence that serves as an obvious barrier. The only exception to this is a narrow squirm space to the right of the pool and on the other side of the chain-link fence, where the shed is wedged. A short passage extends from the courtyard path, to the shed. A chest-height gate or subsection of fence extends out from the main rectangle, to block that passage off from the path. You can clearly see the shed, and the door, through the chain link. That is the only barrier.

Offhand it sounds like the fence/gate section across the path is a door, to which the player might have to find a key. Right? Apparently not. From all I can tell, it is just background. It serves no gameplay function. James does not react to it. It does not register on the map as anything of interest. It is just an arbitrary wall. That is puzzling, yes. What is more puzzling is that the courtyard path — including the section which juts behind the pool area — is skirted by a two-foot-high curb. The fence/gate only stretches across the path; everything to the right of the curb is left open.

There is at least a yard of clearance to the right of the curb. This space contains nothing but grass.

This means that James could easily lift his leg, step up onto the curb, then walk around the barrier.

There is nothing else in the way.

It would take no effort.

Just… step. Lift those knees!

Or, alternatively, if that is too much strain, James could retreat down the path, go up a few steps to the level of the entranceway to the adjacent apartment building, and step up ONE HALF-INCH off the path, to the level of the grass. He then could walk on the grass across the courtyard, and hop down on the other side of the fence.

His legs must really be killing him.

Soon after, I encountered a lengthy cutscene in which James steps out across a six-inch gap between two buildings. He hesitates. He lifts a leg. He lowers it. He lifts again, and makes a tentative step. After a moment, he decides to shift his weight. Slowly, slowly, he pulls himself across. He lowers himself through the window on the other side, as if coddling a newborn.

I take it this counts as character growth.

Some day, he will be bending his knees all over the place!

…

Am I meant to enter this shed? I really can’t tell.

(April 15th, 2004 @ 2:40am)



24 responses
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