GUN2P: The one that's making Square look retarded.

Welcome to my new and hopefully long running series called: Games You Need to Play, or GUN2P for short.  In this series I'll be talking about overlooked games that you really need to check out, for various reasons.  I've always felt like when you have an amazing game that people are hesitant to try, it's like having the knowledge of what sex is like and you desperately need to try to fill your friends in on it.  I'll get into the main criteria of games; story, gameplay, sound, graphics, and replay (the pentagon of awesome as it would be) and then probably man-gasm over other parts.  Grab your tissues.

So......

For Volume 1 of Games You Need to Play, or The one that's making Square look retarded, is:

(Would just like to say whilst typing this I'm listening to Foster the People's Helena Beat, and it's punching me in the balls pretty hard so feel free to put it on while reading this)

Xenoblade Chronicles.  No matter what I say, 90% of people who read this will NEVER play this game.  Not just because it's a rare game that can only be bought from Nintendo's website or an extremely lucky Gamestop, but also because it's on the Wii.  Fucking Nintendo.  I'm actually butt hurt that this game isn't on an HD console, as the only real thing holding it back is the kinda feel that it's graphically equivalent to FF12.
This game is a masterpiece of epic proportions, and I owe many thanks to Project Rainfall (an online community responsible for bugging Nintendo enough into bringing it over here) for allowing me the pleasure of playing the #3 RPG of all time IMO.  Let's get into the basics:

Xenoblade is an action-RPG about this universe in which 2 titans serve as the only 2 living planets/continents.  The organic based titan, Bionis, and the machine based Mechonis fight until they incapacitate each other, which after sometime the story picks up centering around Shulk, his friend Reyn and a lot more.  Shulk's hometown is attacked by the Mechonis early on, which is the basis for the journey; where the group sets out to stop the attacks.


Story:  The story....the story of Xenoblade.....beats the ever loving shit out of anything in gaming.  When I talk about games, I try to be unbiased....I try.  I want you to play the game because I know you will like it, I don't want you to just think I'm recommending something personal that you might not get down with.  That said, I stand by the first statement.  You seriously can't  fathom how deep this story is.  It's so unbelievably deep and detailed that I cannot say anything about it at all in fear of spoiling the slightest detail.  This fucking game has more twists and turns than an M. Night Shamalan movie going down a spiral water slide with The Usual Suspects in the back part of the tube....during a hurricane.  There's specifically a part in there that makes me so fucking happy with the story that it just made the game for me.  Out of the fucking park.

The story does a great job of keeping you emotionally invested.  The very beginning of the game had my jaw hit the ground and had me burning up to beat the shit out of some Mechons.  That pace never stops.  Every time you think it's gonna drop off, it throws another thing in to piss you off (in a good way, at the baddies), almost make you cry, or feel motivated to save the world.  With a first playthrough that can easily take 100+ hours, that's quite a damn feat to never get boring the entire time.  I think Rocco from Mega64 said it best when he said something along the lines of 'I keep waiting for this game to slip up, but it just doesn't'.  It's a weird world and that might be kind of weird to get into at first, but the game will suck you in faster than [Insert That's What She Said Joke].

Contemplating how awesome to be.

Gameplay:
Xeno sports HUGE open world environments, some in scope bigger than zones in World of Warcraft, and keep in mind, there is no mount.  While this is amazing for exploration, it makes traveling between areas a pain.  OH WAIT NO IT FUCKING DOESN'T.  Xenoblade has an awesome fast travel system where once you have discovered a landmark, you can warp there any time.  It's design choices like these that really make me smile in a technical sense; you know they were trying to eliminate the annoying parts of the game while maintaining freedom and exploration.
Xeno uses a quest hub system, identical to World of Warcraft.  Main towns have most of the quest givers, you go to the field to complete them and come back to get more.  There are so many quests it's mind boggling.  As a completionist I did almost all of them for every area, but doing that hyper levels your characters and makes the next area very easy, so be careful if you do decide to scour the world for quests.

Combat is also a tweaked version of WoW.  It's real time, and there are auto attacks, but that's where the 'meh' parts stop.  You have an action bar with up to 8 moves to put on it, which work on a Cooldown system with no mana involved.  The moves are VERY strategic and interesting.  The main character, Shulk, is a damage dealer while Reyn is the tank.  Shulk's moves are almost all location based, meaning you get bonus damage from the sides or behind, while Reyn has moves that increase aggro and reduce damage.  My favorite part of the combat system is the Daze effect.  Basically you can daze enemies by combo'ing them up with specific moves, and each character has a piece of the combo, so you have to strategize how to knock them into daze (Flowchart would be A->B->C = Daze, so Shulk would use move A, Reyn use B, then Shulk land C).  The more characters you get the more hybrid styles you can form, and it's worth it to spend at least a few hours playing with every character to see if you like their playstyles (I found controlling the mage character myself I could create amazing combos and skyrocket my damage).

Xeno also has augmenting styles.  Throw special gems in your equipment to boost stats, spec into talent trees, level up specific abilities, create said gems from finding them, etc.  It's fucking great having so much to tweak to your own preference, but it can also mean a solid hour of setting up equipment once you hit a new vendor....

Look at this guy, how could he not have an English accent?

Sound:
I think this may be the one hitch that may weird people out.  The game never got localized because either the dev or Nintendo were cheap bastards, so get ready to deal with the story told through the eyes of the UK.  It threw me off for a bit, all of the voices sounding like they were from various parts of Europe, but honestly you start to acclimate pretty quickly.  There's a Japanese option that I thought was awesome that they put in, but I stuck with the English.  In battle you have no idea what they're saying in Japanese, and I feel that the cast for the English voices actually did a pretty good job.  Shulk's voice actor kicked ass, and hits a ton of vocal ranges.

The main soundtrack of the game though is pretty similar to Mr Uematsu.  It feels like a Final Fantasy with the music, but with something slightly different.  It's hard to describe sound with text, so just take it from someone who's played almost every Final Fantasy, the music is awesome, well timed with cutscenes, and does a great job of catching the moods with the current zones.





Graphics:
The graphics are the only real bad part of the game.  Don't get me wrong, there are times when the scope of the zones are still amazing, but you can't help but feel like you're cheated out of HD graphics when you see the very obvious limitations of the Wii.  You'll be begging for HD after just a few hours.  Watching the characters mouth do that weird flash animation stretching thing makes you want to have the camera back up a bit. Still, it's not really fair to compare it to something like FF13, for the Wii they are VERY impressive, especially with the size of the zones.

That stuff in the distance is actual part of the zone, not background.  The stuff in the sky is the other titan, not background.  Once you see it in game it's breathtaking and almost unbelievable.

Replayability:
The thing that gives this game it's longevity is not replayability, but it's main playthrough.  I played about 3 or 4 regular RPG's worth of content, still had about another at least 20-30 hours of end game content I could've done, and just decided to finish it at 99 hours.  At times, the content of this game can be EXTREMELY overwhelming, but that's hardly a bad thing.  Oh no I got too good of a value for my game waaaaah.  It is simply a game jam packed with content wherever it can possibly fit.  It feels like the devs had a ton of polish time to just throw in all tons of extras.
Replayabilty though, there is a new game plus option, but there's really no point to it.  There are no seperate story paths like Mass Effect to take advantage of, and the monsters don't level for the 2nd playthrough, meaning you'll tear through everything.  The only way I think I could ever use NG+ is if I wanted to relive the story again and not have to deal with all the random quests to level up.


Why you need to play this game:
Because they make Square look retarded.  Playing this makes me wonder why the hell Square can't do anything right at all anymore besides Kingdom Hearts.  They do everything right in an RPG.  You get that classic JRPG feel, you get the exploration of a Elder Scrolls, the combat is fun and engaging, the fact that you absolutely will be blown away by the story that you can't predict, and so much more.
If you're an old school gamer like me, or a collector, this game is a MUST HAVE.  This game will be rare one day, like Chrono and Earthbound, and just owning it tingles my giney.  It makes you miss Squaresoft (not Square-Enix) and the glory days of amazing RPG's on the SNES and PSX.  Just like future games on this list, it's not just a game, it's an experience.  No other game shoots so high and stays on target.

And don't forget, IT'S REYN TIME!!!1

And yes I actually own this shirt.

Xenoblade Metacritic Score  - 92/100.

Xenoblade video review by Gametrailers - 9.3/10

Nintendo Power and the Infinite Sadness

Nintendo Power is no more.

Man, that really blows.  I was getting sad enough with EGM, GamePro and all that closing down....but now the Big N doesn't have a magazine anymore?  Not only A magazine, but THE magazine?!

For anyone under the age of ~20, this probably doesn't mean much to you.  For us old school geezers, it's saying farewell to an era.  Nintendo Power was a friggin awesome magazine, it had so much good stuff in it.  All the secrets and codes you couldn't get as the interwebs hadn't been created yet.  I still remember keeping the issues close by which had the finishing moves of the Mortal Kombats on it.

My favorite memory of Nintendo Power is awesome though.
I was playing though this new N64 game called Mischief Makers, and it kicked ass.  However there was a puzzle I just didn't get.  Hours of trying to figure it out to no avail.  So I decided, 'hey, I have a subscription to Nintendo Power, they should be able to put this in their magazine maybe?'  I wrote some snail mail with terrible handwriting, and my mom shipped it off for me.

Around 1-2 weeks later I got a letter back from Nintendo, very official looking.  I had that christmas-tier level of excitement as only a little kid could have.  I eagerly shredded the envelope to see what they had sent back to me.  Keep in mind this is probably around 1998 or so, and computers were barely just starting to get popular, and like I said no one had internet really.

Nintendo Power had sent me a 4 page step by step custom letter, with color pictures, all about how to solve the puzzle!  I couldn't believe it!  Did Nintendo just personally take time out of real work to construct a puzzle solution for a 12 year old kid?  It makes my boner more enormous thinking that someone had customized something piece by piece so I could have something super awesome looking, and not just pkaing text on printer paper. My jaw dropped and I was soooooo excited.  To this day I deeply regret not keeping that letter......and figuring out how to solve the puzzle while the mail was in transit *sadness*

Well anyway, thanks for all the memories Nintendo Power!  You and your writers certainly made a mark in many kids lives', more importantly mine!  I'll have a drink in your honor!  Maybe a Chianti in celebration of the rich Italian heritage of Mario.

Deathmatch!: Story vs Gameplay

First real post, better make it good then.  Fat disclaimer that I don't type a script or anything like that, I like to let it flow au naturale.


Gaming as a medium is starting to grow up.  No more Super Mario 3 underwear, we've moved onto Commander Shepard hoodies.  We're not nearly there though, although mad props to us for beating out the movie industry (wootz), the industry within itself is trying to find it's identity.  Where does it belong in the market?  Should we emulate movies to gain credibility, or should we follow a different path and take chances?  Stuff like that.  I think one of the biggest components of gaming's future is it's use of storytelling and gameplay, but what to make it's primary focus?


I grew up in the 8 bit and blast processing era.  When I was playing games, they were about saving a princess from a castle, stopping an evil madman, or beating Mike Tyson.  Story was not only hardly used, but hard to pull off given the limitations of the console.  You may think sitting around watching cutscenes now may be rough, try watching all the cutscenes in MGS4 with the volume turned down and the subtitles on o_O.  So in it's infancy, developers made games as pretty much a single tool to show off a gameplay mechanic they made.  Mario was the greatest jumping mechanic ever, Zelda was a dungeon crawling mechanic, Little Nemo was a gameplay style swap mechanic and so on.  That said, those games were and are still loved by people who play them, regardless of their almost non existent story.

Here's your damn story.

For people who are really gung ho bout story in their games, do you really need a story to play Mario?  Do you need a reason to fight through hordes of monsters?  It's about fun, and isn't that what games are about?  If you're playing a game and are complaining that the game sucks because of the story, I'm gonna go ahead and point you in the direction of what we in the land of OZ call "books".  Maybe that's more up your alley.  Come to think of it Pure Pwnage did a hilarious parody of Zero Punctuation on this I'll have to link.
I think that they hit the nail on the head when they said "we should be making the next chess".  Shouldn't we as gamers be striving to make the most fun game ever made?  Forget the reasons why, make it simple, and addictive, because that's what games are, right?

Well maybe, maybe not.  Sure the NES days were cool, but look at the stage now.  Jesus Christ we've got shooter games topping the charts for best selling MEDIA, not games, MEDIA.  My god.  The industry's got tons of resources now to make story, so why should we holdout just to make good gameplay experiences when we can have a shot at creating compelling stories?  Sometimes stories are so good or at least interesting in games that they are compelling enough to keep someone through the bad game just to see how it turns out.  Ironically I lent my copy of Assassin's Creed to a buddy who's just getting into it and he's experiencing the same thing (Big shoutout to MKUltra of World's Ugliest Dog).  He's sick of the game but in order to really get the story, he's gonna stick through it.  I think the biggest perpetrator's of that kinda crap though are RPG's.  I know everyone's played at least ONE Final Fantasy where they were wishing it would JUST FRICKIN' END.
A big part of story is getting it translated from voice actor's to the game.  Shoots can go well there at the time, but if it doesn't translate well to Marcus Fenix's almost adamantite immovable expressionless face, then it just comes out looking like a military shooter, rather than a compelling experience where John DiMaggio busted his balls to do the best VO possible.
With that said, industry's got a lot of difficulties, and while it gets criticism right now, we just need to grow more and learn more so we can make story and characters more authentic and compelling.  Instead of JUST making games, shouldn't we be trying to make compelling experiences for the player?

My conclusion:  Both are wrong, both are right.  Weird.
We're in an age where gaming is just starting to grow roots and figure out it's possibilities.  While I like games like Gears of War and Final Fantasy just as much as anything else, we should aim for more.  We're not movies, and we're not books, we're video games, and the great thing about that is, is that we don't have physical parameters for what we can or cannot be.
What's stopping us from making a story as compelling as Dexter, with interactive gameplay elements so awesome, that we've just created a new medium?  Why can't we have a movie theater with interactive elements that you can access from your seat?  Why can't we have a game where it progresses based on where you've traveled in the world?  To get to the next level, look for clues in New York.

EVOLUTION!  Gaming is the greatest industry in the world, because gaming has always been in charge of making people happy.  Imagine all of the great things we can do in the future with future tech and all that.  I mean, the creator of Doom, John Carmack is making VR a frickin' actual thing.  He wants to get it in the hands of people so bad, that he demos his version of Doom 3 with a pair of VR goggles held together with duct tape!  Our industry will never lack visionaries, and as long as we share that vision of creating more, this industry will never stop growing, and never stop getting better.

......Unless EA, Capcom, and Activision take over......oh god......

Been a pleasure ladies and gents, til next time.

NEXT TOPIC:  Games you really really need to play, Vol. 1

The intro cutscene

Alright, let's give this a shot then.

My name is Craig, and if you're unfamiliar with my facebook rants, I play games.  Maybe more than just play, well that's the hope at least.  I've had a love for games ever since I was 3 or 4 years old and being introduced to my first video game ever, Mega Man 2.  I was blown away!  How frickin' cool is this?!  I get to be a cyber dude with a gun arm (that cover art was VERY confusing by the way, you cheap Capcom bastards) and blow up robots to save the world, all while listening to this super awesome 8 bit symphony?

*thunk*

Oh that was the sound of 4 year old me throwing his baseball glove in the trash.

Safe to say though, that was the beginning of a truly amazing experience that has already gone on over 20 years, and I hope will remain until this body quits on me (I sometimes has visions of my family standing around my death bed, frustrated because even though it's my time to go, I still need to find a save point, no way I'm losing all of that progress just because my heart's wussing out).

It's been a pretty big journey now that I'm thinking about it, NES to now, watching gaming trends come and go, kids not being familiar with the classics.  I used to dream about being a game developer as a little kid, marveling in my own "creativity" as I would tell my friends, "I THOUGHT OF A GAME OMFG, THEY SHOULD MAKE AN NBA JAM GAME.....BUT WITH FOOTBALL!!!"
Now, I still have that dream, but I'm starting to really realize that passion, maybe with some better ideas (I got this really good one for a Smash Bros style game with the star characters from the Playstation!) and a little effort, I can realize my dream, and make something kickass!

So what will this blog be about?  I'm not sure yet, how about whatever comes up?  The way I figure it, if anyone actually reads this thing, I'll want to keep you engaged, so screw a script, let's keep it fresh and sexy.  I'll try to get into gaming politics, past versus present, reviews, industry news, and whatever else I can think of.  I'm totally gonna nostalgia out on some of my favorites for funzies too, this blog is supposed to be FUN right?  Tell me what you wanna see, and maybe we'll make it happen.  So, to end this introduction, instead of telling you who I am personally, what kind of games I'm into, and what I expect, I'll just post some of my all time favorite games, and then let you guys figure it out, and we'll see if it matches up.

Mega Man 2

Tecmo Super Bowl
Donkey Kong Country
Super Mario RPG

Secret of Mana

Chrono Trigger
Final Fantasy (just about everything up until XI)
Star Fox 64
Halo: Combat Evolved
Half Life Everything
Team Fortress 2
Marvel vs Capcom 2 and 3
Street Fighter 2
Command and Conquer Red Alert: All
Mass Effect 2
Plants vs Zombies

Xenoblade

And a lot more, but I won't drag this on more than it needs to be.

Ladies and gents, it's been a pleasure, til next time.

NEXT TOPIC:
Storytelling vs Gameplay