Horror Squad

I start this post with an obvious reference to Dawn of War’s Chaos Space Marines’ unit: The Horror Squad. Actually, I haven’t been comfortable at all with the makeup of the Chaos Space Marines. For those times that I’ve played them, it just makes me want to use the Space Marines instead. Being that guy who’s enticed by cool building animations, I definitely prefer pods falling from the sky than corrupted buildings rising from the ground. On a side note, the real thing I’ve been doing with Dawn of War as of late is practicing Imperial Guard, which for those who don’t know, is the other side of humanity. With Imperial Guard, you don’t get bulky and beefed up soldiers but more of the civilian type who just wants a piece of alien battles. I’m joking with that part but you get the point. Imperial Guard is probably the weakest race in the game although if you let them be, their late-game will kick all the other races’ ass. I like using them because they aesthetically look good (building animations of units and buildings rock), unit speech when you click them isn’t so shabby, the vehicles look very cool and they operate on a tunnel system where any unit can pass through two buildings in the map (just like in C&C Generals’ Tunnel Network and Starcraft 2’s Nydus Network). Honestly, is this type of unit transport becoming a trend?

That’s good enough for an introduction because in truth, Dawn of War is not what I really intended to write about. Right now, what’s really sparking in my mind is the horror genre, mostly in video games. I read a couple of days ago an article from IGN detailing the history of the horror genre in video games, about its failure in the 80s, its peak in the 90s and its current decline today. It was certainly an eye-opener, especially since I’ve really only played the horror games of the new millennium.

And now to the nitty gritty. What horror have I been playing as of late? The primary thing in this aspect is the revival of my Silent Hill gaming. I mentioned before that I downloaded a PC version since I didn’t really join the PlayStation bandwagon when I was a kid. Because of some stupid saving controls and whatnot of the emulator I downloaded, I managed to mess up my save file and because I couldn’t really take in the fact that I had to do all that horror again, I set Silent Hill aside. Right now, it’s revived and it’s better than ever. They say Silent Hill is a tad scarier than Resident Evil primarily because it deals with psychological horror more than that zombie infestation thing. Silent Hill messes with what’s in your head something that Climax Studio is trying to replicate with the Silent Hill remake, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (sounds redundant). I’ll only mention this because it’s related to what I was saying earlier. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is looking to be a pretty good remake especially since it’s Harry Mason all over again and this time, they’re literally going to use you, the player, as the subject. It’s a Wii game, and being a Wii fan, I’m sure to be getting this game. The only problem is it has an unknown release date. Now this pisses me off since I was ready to tackle this horror remake by the end of the year. Now, it’s looking like I won’t see this game until summer next year, which is a very long way to go. What’s worse is I’m finishing up high school this year and whatever freedom I had with games now might not be available next year. And that sucks.

Still, there’s still a lot to hope for since there is another game I should be able to play come early next year. I’ve mentioned this before and right now, it’s probably one of my top priority games when I get a good computer. I’m talking about Bioshock, the critically-acclaimed FPS-RPG hybrid. It has a science fiction setting that has me completely hooked, gameplay that is easy to get used to and very hardcore “boss” fights with the Big Daddies. That last one I completely love because I already relished those hard fights with the Hunters in Half-Life 2. Bioshock’s Hunters are the Big Daddies and I know I’ll love those fights with them as well. Because of this Bioshock desperation, I took the chance to try out Bioshock’s supposed “spiritual prequel”, System Shock 2. I can only give my first impressions here and the first thing I’d like to point out is its similarity to Doom 3 in terms of story beginnings. When I was running through the halls of the spaceship with a wrench in my hand opening doors that slide automatically, I couldn’t help but think “Not Doom 3… <sigh>”. What confused me more was the fact that it’s gameplay was similar to that of Bioshock although it was more difficult to grip because it had an “inventory vision” mode where you can’t turn around. When it all came down in my first hands-on with it was the fact that I just wanted to play Bioshock all the more. Sadly, I have to wait until graduation to get that gaming laptop I’ve been dreaming of buying…

Speaking of Bioshock a bit, I want to just insert here that Bioshock 2 is looking to be pretty good. I was a skeptic at first because I believed putting the player in the shoes of a Big Daddy would make him too overpowered. Now that I’ve seen the basic gameplay that would surround Bioshock, I don’t think this way anymore. First of all, the Big Daddy fights from Bioshock 1 have now been turned to Big Sister fights. If in the first game you had to outmaneuver those big hunkering beasts while shooting, now you have to outmaneuver a fast agile monster while you hunker around in your armor. Not to bad of a replacement. What’s also good is that there are still Big Daddies in the area and I think you can still find those moderately challenging. Besides those “Big” bosses, you also get a “hold-the-line” kinda gameplay where you protect a Little Sister. Being the Big Daddy that you are, you still have those little kids to protect from the hazards of Splicers and such while she sucks ADAM from corpses. That’s all the information I’ve accumulated actually and I think all is looking pretty good for a sequel. Another addition that I have no information about yet as exciting is the multiplayer mode. I want to see how that aspect pans out.

For the grand finale, I have to refer to what I said earlier of my horror genre being mostly in video games. There is this one little thing that has me hooked these days and you can guess from all this implication that it’s an anime, namely Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. Pretty long title and all it means is When the Cicadas Cry (I doubt that’s the direct translation though). This anime series is based off a visual novel by 7th Expansion and it’s a horror anime at that. I assume that in the visual novel, you’re this guy named Maebara Keiichi who has to live in a country town of Hinamizawa. There’s an apparent illusion as everything at first seems normal, but as you finish up the Watanagashi Festival local to that town, you find something is not right. Now this whole part here is assumption since I haven’t seen the visual novel nor have I the will to search all the specific stuff out. The anime basically starts like this, but you get to see some bloody action in the first few seconds of the first episode. From what I could feel of this show, Higurashi can be akin to a slasher movie where a mysterious “cult” of young girls is out to kill anyone who defies the town’s ritual. This is just what I could garner from watching 5 episodes and it could more complicated as it goes. The weird thing about this anime is the fact that it’s divided into different story arcs, each giving off a piece of the truth about the town the main character is in. If ever I’m going to watch this series to the end, I have to watch the main character die at least 5 times before I finally understand what really happened to everybody. Besides all this death and gore and whatnot, it’s really painful to watch this series since it’s meant to deceive you. At one point, everyone’s laughing at jokes, playing around or maybe even falling in love. Then suddenly someone starts waving a knife around while grinning maniacally with those demonic eyes of theirs. It’s really creepy and I have to understand what’s really going on. The interesting bit that I find in this in series besides the horror-ness is the way you suddenly notice those crickets (or should I say cicadas) chirping every time something weird or horrific is going on, all because you know its title is When the Cicadas Cry. This show actually has a sequel and a spinoff (which is relatively new) so I have some extra 30+ episodes left to watch if I get really addicted to this.

As you can see, I’m currently in that phase where horror invades The Haven for the Obsessed. We have Silent Hill, System Shock and Higurashi no Naku Koro ni as members of the Chaos Space Marines’ Horror Squad invading Haven territory. I admit I’m not the bravest of men and things like this actually make me jump a lot but it’s all for entertainment, isn’t it?

P.S. FF4 is getting up pretty slowly but right now it’s at 99.01% completion. LOL, they’re pretty accurate with that kind of stuff. Hopefully, I get it to play it before December.

Retrograde?

It’s been more than ten days since my last post. During that time interval, I had this weird sort of change in mind, like a longing for the past. It’s the first time I’ve actually shrugged off a Nintendo Voice Chat podcast and it’s still pending for a listen in my iTunes list. I don’t think it’s something like less enthusiasm with gaming though. On the contrary, I’ve been wasting all my free time on a single game. But even with that, I still feel like I’m missing something. I think this has all been building up for sometime now. My lack of gaming all those hardcore games (e.g. Bioshock, Assassin’s Creed) plus failure at finding anime I want to watch has contributed greatly to this weird phenomenon. I should say, as case and point, that I didn’t finish Spice and Wolf, To Aru Majutsu no Index, Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and even Darker than Black.

I almost finished through Spice and Wolf but two things stopped me from continuing. One was my belief in the inevitable lame ending. I didn’t think anything would happen between Horo and Lawrence. I mean, what could happen in two episodes? I know I’m being an ass in saying this and I’ve been persecuted by friends for thinking the same thing during my first ToraDora run through. This is where my second reason comes in. Spice and Wolf’s second season began with a very interesting business scenario where a young merchant wanted to buy Horo away from Lawrence. I consider that to be a cool step up from season one, but after that it got downgraded to mere banter again (as far as I’ve seen). I’m not sure if they could really put something cooler in the final two episodes, so I stopped and it will be hanging dead like that until someone triggers it back again like what happened to ToraDora.

The same degrading phenomenon happened to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The main reason I began watching that series was because I thought it could fill up my time, especially with a “season 2″ coming up. It turned out that the “season 2″ was a rerun of the “first season” with added episodes in between. Couple that with the fact that it’s pretty much a slice-of-life series with a mixed up chronology of episodes, I just gave up on it. Don’t get me wrong though. I think if they ever do a remake about this series, I’ll definitely give it another go. I find all that weird “Haruhi is a god” plot very appealing actually.

My final impressions for To Aru Majutsu no Index were a mixture of things I’ve seen from Law of Ueki and the development style of Shakugan no Shana. Truth be told, I began this series on the assumption that I’ll be seeing more of that Shakugan no Shana action. Disappointingly, I got something that could be seen from Law of Ueki. Strictly speaking, I can’t really compare To Aru and Law of Ueki since I think they belong to different sets of genres. I’m only saying this with a background a half-episode worth of Law of Ueki (it failed to amuse me) and three episodes worth of To Aru. Now that I think about it, To Aru probably had more interesting things in store if I had continued, but what really nailed me to not go on with watching this series was the fact that in all the fight scenes, I only see the main male character do the fighting. This is the prime reason why I made a comparison to Law of Ueki. Both of the main guys in these two series wear your usual school uniform and use their hands to draw some mysterious power in order to defeat a certain enemy. In contrast to Shakugan no Shana, the main female character is the one doing the fighting and she has to save his skin from all the hidden dangers of the world. To Aru has it the other way around with the guy saving the girl from the dangers of a hidden world.

With that said, now would be a good segway to my real retrograde topic: Shakugan no Shana. Recently, JC Staff released the first episode of a four-part OVA called Shakugan no Shana S. As far as I know, it doesn’t continue directly from the last episode of Shakugan no Shana II, but more of a set of events concerning our beloved main characters, Shana and Yuji. I watched that first part and it’s already enough to bring back all those good Shakugan memories of the past. If this first episode is any sign of things to come, I foresee an interesting development between the Shana and Yuji.

Before I end though, I’d like to talk a bit about that video game I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post. It’s an interesting little RTS that I intentionally skipped since Starcraft is way better than it. Of course, I’m talking about Starcraft’s most controversial competitor, Dawn of War (not Dawn of War II, mind you).  Before this past week, I have not seen any footage of Dawn of War. I remember seeing in Wikipedia something with pixelated graphics and reading about the same gameplay you’d find in Company of Heroes. With that said, I just shrugged it off saying that I have Company of Heroes anyway. I don’t need some second-rate crap. Turns out, I was wrong about what I saw in Wikipedia. This game has pretty cool graphics especially if you have that final expansion, Soulstorm, or even the second expansion, Dark Crusade, would do. I suddenly sparked interest in this mainly because people at school started to hype the game up. The gameplay, as I’ve mentioned a while ago, is very much like Company of Heroes where you’re resource points are located all over the map and you have to fight over those stuff. The difference though is DoW has a very primitive cover system compared to CoH and instead of two factions battling for supremacy during World War II, you have a total of eight races supposedly fit in a science fiction universe. More like in a fantasy world with pretend science fiction if you ask me. This little flaw here is the main reason why this game is so unlikable in my eyes. What kind of science fiction story tries to infuse “orcs” and corrupted cults into the story? It just isn’t my taste. But besides this very awkward “science fiction” scenario, the multiplayer aspect is very solid and as I’ve said, I’ve wasted countless hours mastering this game. The race I like the most is the Space Marines, the so-called “Terran” of Dawn of War. (The name “Terran” sounds cooler though) They have this pretty neat way of building buildings and making units where the stuff drop from the sky. It makes it all look science fiction worthy if you look at it in the aesthetic point of view. Not just the Space Marines have slick animations like this. I think all races have their own unique stuff and that’s one of the greatest points that this game has in my opinion.

As for the Wii side of things, I have nothing to discuss actually except the fact that the Fatal Frame 4 English translation is almost completed (98.2% hooray!). It’s one of the things I’m waiting for this year, and it isn’t even official. Besides this, I can’t remember playing at all last weekend. Probably an effect of this whole retrograde thing. Rock Band 2? Don’t remember. Metroid Prime Trilogy? I think I touched a bit of that. Guitar Hero 5? Weird memories… XD

[FF4 link:ZERO4]

Railguns, Arc Welders and a Little Remuneration

After two weeks of hell, I’ve finally gone through our periodical exams. Right now, I’m either in a relaxed entertainment mode (aka anime/games) or sleeping the day out. I’ve lacked sleep these past few days, but I think I’ve recovered enough.

So, what’s with this freakishly long and complicated-looking title? Well that phrase right there suggests the topics that I’m about to discuss today namely To Aru Majutsu no Index, the Dead Space franchise and Darker Than Black. The italicized titles represent the two anime series that I recently found. Technically speaking, I’ve heard of these two a long time ago with To Aru being the most recent find that I just dug up on the internet. Darker Than Black was something I heard of during my Death Note days, when people would mention it in their messenger stats. I think I remember considering it for a bit, but since I was more of a gamer back then, I didn’t really hit me that hard. With Dead Space, there’s my usual addiction revived because of the recent release of the Wii on-rail shooter: Dead Space Extraction. It’s the prequel to the first game which was a third-person survival horror game, obviously a complete shift in genre. But more of that later. Let’s take these three on step-by-step.

Basically, To Aru Majutsu no Index is all about A Certain Magical Index, and I mean that literally. I’ve only watched the first episode which, as always, is the intro to the main characters. The main main character’s a guy named Toma Kamijo and the whole setting of this anime is a fictional city called Academy City. 80% of the residents in that city are students and special students at that. When I mean special, I mean the supernatural, magical way, so that means the people in this story have magical powers like storing 103,000 books in your head (as far as I can infer), a power-negating right hand (which proved to be more unfortunate than cool) and of course, the strength to throw something the power of a railgun. It was a very weird introduction which showed some cute girl who attempted to kill our main character with her railgun power. This was the very first thing I saw of To Aru Majutsu no Index and it doesn’t fail to entice at all. The bad thing I’ve read about this To Aru though is that throughout the whole series, people are just being introduced, powers are being shown and histories are being told and then, it ends there. It’s me just speculating based off a review I read, but it seems like this anime ends up like that. Well, that’s all there is of To Aru so far. The reason I suddenly watched this was because it was recommended by someone I knew at school and a spin-off series was just released this month entitled: To Aru Kagaku no Railgun. This spin-off details more clearly what happened to that railgun girl I was talking about earlier. I don’t know if I’ll end up watching this, but we’ll see how it goes.

Now on to Dead Space. I missed last week’s chance to finish up a post I had already prepared about this franchise. I just finished playing through Dead Space Extraction’s story mode and I was once again invigorated with that same old USG Ishimura spirit. The one coolest thing I found about Dead Space Extraction is their implementation of the character’s dementia. You’re going to see through your character’s eyes the many things that haunt him/her, cryptic symbols will appear before in flashes, and you’ll hear whispers of people all around you even if you’re all alone. After playing through more than 2 hours of this dementia-filled ride that night, I feared not ghosts or monsters lurking in the dark but the prospect of suddenly becoming insane. That’s what makes this game hardcore in my opinion. It’s only survival horror in the sense that it’s scary to be driven mad. Now that we’ve established Dead Space Extraction’s hardcore setting, scenario and story-telling, time to delve into the gameplay mechanics. As an on-rail shooter, it did everything pretty well: diversified weapons (with that neat alt-fire mode), not-too-shaky camera, interesting reload function and a not-too-shabby upgrade system. Besides those, it included Dead Space’s famous Strategic Dismemberment. If you’re tired of trying to ace those zombie headshots, this is the game for you. To defeat enemies and conserve your ammo, you have to rip off the necromorphs arms and legs, an interesting diversion from the norm. Each gun in the game has its own neat trick to help you do this. This concept has been around since the first game so it’s really nothing new to me. For Dead Space Extraction, they added a couple of new weapons not seen in the first game namely the Rivet Gun (the puny infinite ammo gun), the P-Sec Pistol (the gun that failed to show up in Dead Space but already existed in that universe) and lastly, the Arc Welder (or electricity gun). Everything’s good and all until you notice that your reticule is too freaking big. It’s hard to dismember properly if your enemy’s far away and I had to resort to spamming my Rivet Gun to get those encounters finished. Besides this one little gripe, there’s everything to love about Dead Space Extraction. If you’re a Dead Space fan like I am, you have to get this game no matter what.

We now move on to this final segment: Darker than Black. Once again, I encounter another anime that has characters with superpowers. This gig however, is in the line of the Death Note style of story-telling, with a hardcore plot and all. To Aru Majutsu no Index is more of the harem/ecchi type of anime compared to Darker than Black. Darker than Black is set in modern Japan during a period where a series of mysterious happenings have been going on all over the world. A weird void-like zone has appeared near Tokyo called “Hell’s Gate”, a seemingly uninhabitable zone for humans. No one knows what this meant or how this occurred. Along with this event, “superhumans” and “subhumans” have begun to appear in the general populace. The superhumans, called the Contractors, have special abilities that they can use at their disposal. To use their powers though, they have to give in “payment” a certain predefined action, their remuneration (e.g. line up stones, smoke, drink alcohol, mark pages of a book, etc). The subhumans are the Dolls, humans devoid of emotion and can “feel through” their specific element, pretty useful for surveillance of a wide range of areas. As far as I can see it, this is only a fraction of what’s really been happening in the world. Darker than Black is one of those anime that won’t directly give you the setting and scenario. It’s more of the reveal-a-little-each-chapter type. Interesting as the setting may seem, I haven’t seen an actual plot development yet. It’s just new people each episode attempting to do something and being foiled by the main characters. It’s almost slice-of-life if you look at the past five episodes I’ve been watching. The main character by the way is a Contractor called Hei (which means black in Japanese and explains the title) who works a secret organization of Contractors, the Syndicate. Their objective in the first two episode was to retrieve some sort of package which I believe turned out to be a hoax. The next two chapters dealt with a girl who happened to be a “dormant” Contractor, if I may say so and how she awakened. The latest chapter I saw was about a Contractor who lost her powers and I don’t know what else. These three events look unrelated but I think since this is the reveal-little type of anime, the whole plot will make sense in the future episodes. Oh, by the way, did I mention that Hei’s power is that of electricity? Anybody he comes in contact with, may it be physical, through water or through a wire, he can electrocute. And what’s very mysterious is his seeming lack of remuneration. He eats a lot though.

And those three make up the feature for tonight’s blog post. I actually have planned a lot more in my head, but this came to fruition first. I’ll be continuing on watching those two anime series that I found out and I’ll post about it if there’s any new impression I want out there.

TRIVIA: If you noticed, all three objects that highlight this post contain at least a little electricity. Railguns, Arc Welders and Remunerations are electrically-charged in this post. HAHA!

Feeling Anime-ish

One free week is finally coming to an end. The recent typhoon ripped most schools apart including ours which caused a capital-wide suspension of classes for one whole week. I took the most of that time with of more of anime and the like. I said “the like” because either I was just refreshing myself with old anime or doing something similar to watching anime. That’s basically what’s been happening lately. I know I have a couple of things which I have yet to discuss from that post a few weeks ago and I dunno if I can still promise to write anything about those, but we’ll see in the future. Right now, I’m just feeling a little too “anime-ish”.

First off, I’d like to give impression of a game that 100% fits the title of this post: Murmasa: The Demon Blade. Yes, I was finally able to play this game after letting all of you down last post. Safe to say, this game is a pretty decent offering for a 2D game. It has pretty nice environments which aren’t bland and which you can even gape at and drool. I’m saying this while I’ve played on 480i settings. I’ve yet to see what 480p would offer. Probably an explosion of graphic imagery. Anyway, Muramasa: The Demon Blade is a 2D fighting RPG and controls as tightly as Brawl does. Storywise, this game centers on the blades of Muramasa (as the title implies) and the adventures of the two main characters across Japan. It’s pretty interesting since there are tons of blades each with different special abilities so you definitely won’t get bored with the gameplay. For the easy setting, you just mash away with the B-button, although I guarantee you that that won’t get you anywhere fast. I’ve died a couple of times with that tactic and I had to like think of my moves at some point. But generally, easy mode is doable (so far) with button mashing that single button. I believe the harder difficulty setting would entail more thinking on your part. Now, I’ve noticed I haven’t mentioned why this is so anime-ish. Yes, the game takes place in Japan, but not just plain old Japan. The game takes place in ancient mythical feudal Japan with a nice set of monsters, ninjas and your favorite deities. This game features a lot of things which I’ve noticed pop up in a lot of anime I’ve watched. There’s your regular hot spring which serves both your rest area and a little fan service. There’s also the very lively restaurants with those sushi, tonkatsu, tempura and all that jazz. To top it off, all the dialog is in Japanese with your accompanying English subtitles. It’s just like an anime! The only gripe though is that you read faster than you hear so it’s either you try and last out what they’re saying (which sounds like gibberish to those who don’t understand) or you cut them off mid-sentence with a press of a button. It’s not a big thing, but for anyone who hates the Japanese language, I suggest you don’t buy this game (as if the name doesn’t sound Japanese enough).

Next up is the latest bunch of anime I’ve been watching. First off is ToraDora, which I watched at the beginning of the year. I kinda regret watching it then because I was duly affected by my Love Hina fever, the tendency to compare everything to that amazing series. Right now, I’m reliving those days without the fever and hopefully I’ll come out more fulfilled than I was after my first watch through the series. Secondly, I just begun with a series that my friend has long recommended to me. This series was also affected by my Love Hina fever which was why I wasn’t hooked at all when I came across this at the end of 2008. Now that I came over that, I was finally able to grasp the premise of Spice and Wolf. My first impressions on this back then was that it was full of economic gibberish, which is a real downer because I can’t already understand the dialog in the first place. Good thing, we have economics class this year which means I get standard education on the stuff they talk about in Spice and Wolf. I’m actually almost finished with the first season which means I’ll be diving into season two soon.

I also have some minor stuff about anime which I want to talk about. I haven’t progressed much with my Love Hina manga reread which might change in the following week. Plus, the Fall 2009 anime release is picking up fast. I might pick out some new ones from the list which might make an appearance on this site in the future. I already have something in mind but I still have to see how good the following episodes would be.

And I think that’s it.

P.S. I think I might’ve sounded really extravagant this post, with all the extra comments and whatnot. I might’ve digressed from my normal writing style a bit in favor of a more liberal if not insulting style.

Legion of Heroes

Usually, people would go about saving best for last. That hardly applies for this instance, since you guys already expect something really cool. So here goes:

It’s me, as Travis Touchdown! I did this little cosplay because we recently had our batch graduation pictures. There was this part called creative shot wherein you dress up however you want. I chose Travis Touchdown because he’s one of the coolest video game characters I’ve seen. Here are a couple of more pictures:

These three pictures so far were taken at home, the night before the graduation picture-taking. As you can see, the sword isn’t really pretty to look at and it doesn’t even light up that well. If I may say so myself, the real thing I was after when making the sword was the frame. If you look at it closely, I think it looks pretty neat. Besides that, I think I covered most of his attire properly. The shades weren’t the exact thing but it looks cool either way. The jacket and the shirt were the most accurate though. You can see his favorite anime ironed on the shirt (Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly). I don’t know if I got the hair right, but it ain’t bad.

Besides my solo pictures, I was also able to get some pictures with some of my classmates. Hell, we even had this “Watchmen” picture with all the good poses and stuff. That’s the main reason I named this post “Legion of Heroes”. That’s basically what we looked like.

(From left to right) Travis Touchdown, Cho Hakkai, Tony Stark, "Good Boy", Vincent Valentine, Gambit

Basically, what a lot of people did during our graduation picture was cosplay some interesting characters. Our class was the second-to-the-last to take the picture which meant that we had one of the longest time periods to prepare. As you can see from the pictures, some of us really worked hard for to make the creative shot awesome.

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We now move to the second part of this post which deals on the games I promised to talk about a week ago. First off, there’s Metroid Prime Trilogy. Since I only became interested in the franchise recently, I totally missed the hype surrounding Metroid Prime 1 and 2. Sure, I heard whispers of the game back then, but it didn’t really matter since I had no GameCube. When I got the Wii, Metroid Prime 3 was one of the first games I bought and it was also the first game to introduce me to the adventure genre. So far, I’ve only played about 30% of Metroid Prime 1. Even so, I can already say a lot of good things about this game. If you were watching me from a month or so ago, you probably know that I had a little obsession over adventure games for a while. I remember I was really hyped for Metroid Prime Trilogy because I like Super Metroid a lot. Well, I’m glad to say Metroid Prime 1 was the realization of Super Metroid in 3D. It’s like an exact clone when it comes to level design and non-linear style. The sad thing though is that over that course of waiting for MPT’s release, my love for the adventure genre has taken quite a dip. I remember the last thing I played was Cave Story and I didn’t even finish it. I believe a couple of other games were responsible for that, but in any case, that isn’t the topic of discussion for this post. Rest assured, I’d say Metroid Prime 1 is a really good game and there’s plenty of reason to explore every room since you have equipped a neat scanning visor. For impressions on Metroid Prime 2 and it’s packed-in multiplayer, you guys have to wait a while until I finished Metroid Prime 1.

Next topic is about a little game called Cursed Mountain. It’s, as you can tell, a horror game. And as far as I can say, this game is halfway decent. I’d say there are a lot of things worth nothing whent it comes to this game. It’s a pretty interesting scenario for a horror game: a mountaineer named Eric Simmons is on a journey up the mountain to find out what happened to his brother Frank Simmons and along the way, Eric meets a number of crazy happenings and apparitions. For all intents and purposes, this story is pulled off quite nicely. The atmosphere is nice and scary in this game and the appearance of the ghosts are enough to give you the creeps. What this game suffers from though is the slightly unbearable controls. There were a number of instances wherein the motion-based part of the game doesn’t work at all and you would have to result to random waggle until you get it right. What’s worse, in an attempt to pull off realistic mountain hiking, the developer Deep Silver implemented a slow-moving character. At his fastest, Eric still moves pretty slowly which especially becomes evident when climbing up or going down slopes. It might look realistic and it’s probably like that in real life but for a game, this is just no excuse. I think I’m glad I’m not too picky about this and my love for horror games completely undermines these issues. The game works on a level-by-level basis, very unlike Resident Evil or Silent Hill. In other words, the game is divided into segments and each segment represents Eric’s advance to the summit. When I look at this design choice, I think this could’ve been the best one because having him climb that whole mountain at the speed that I mentioned just earlier would be one hell of a chore. Most of the game’s plot is revealed through comic style cutscenes. Apparently, the game’s engine can’t handle in-game movies. One more thing which the game suffers from is the sometimes awkward and startling camera angles. I’ve seen it do this a few times to emphasize certain key locations in the landscape but even so, I’m not such a fan of such needless stuff. Overall, Cursed Mountain ain’t too good nor ain’t it too bad. What it all comes down to for me is the fact that it’s another interesting horror game made for the Wii. Not bad…

The next one’s the game I was so eager to talk about last Friday. Of course, this one’s called Batman: Arkham Asylum. Before I begin with my impressions, I’d like to say that according to aggregated reviews, this game has now been rated as the best superhero game ever made, besting the previous title holder: Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. With that fact in mind, playing this game felt like I was handling something majestic and glorious. Simply, this game did everything right when putting you in the shoes of the Dark Knight. You literally feel like Batman during your whole playthrough, from that perspective-changing Detective Mode of his to the flawless FreeFlow Combat System that compliments Batman’s fight style pretty nicely. It’s a complete Batman package fit with a nice balance of gadgets, stealth and combat. To top it off, it follows a pretty intriguing tale of the Joker’s attempt in taking over Arkham Asylum. I believe it’s a complete fan service to all those who love Batman. Lots of those important villains make an appearance in this game. Since I’m not really that much of a Batman fan, I can’t really appreciate all of developer Rocksteady’s efforts in making the story 100% Batman. Despite this however, the most amazing thing that I can say about this game is its ability to entice any gamer even if they aren’t into Batman at all. Batman: Arkham Asylum formed the perfect balance between being a game and being something worth the “Batman” in its title. Rocksteady really nailed it right and that has awarded them pretty nicely.

That’s probably all for now. To add a little tidbit of information, I’ve just finished playing my first playthrough No More Heroes. My return was most probably triggered by my recent cosplay and researching the various stuff which I never knew about No More Heroes. Now, I’m replaying the whole game on Bitter mode and it’s kicking me hard. This is just a little something while waiting for next year’s release of No More Heroes 2, which reminds me. This newest trailer from TGS 09 is hardcore awesome:

TGS ‘09 No More Heroes 2 Shinobu Trailer

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P.S. I promised this to be posted on Saturday, but the endless downpour of rain yesterday caused us our electricity. So I’m posting this on Sunday instead. In addition to this, I have more than 1000 views already in my Counter-Strike-Counter.