This game has HOW many endings!?!

As I mentioned a few days ago, I recently finished Chrono Trigger. I learned shortly afterward that I had just witnessed ending #1... of 13! Oh, and that doesn't even count the variations that can occur inside of a single ending. Excuse my language here, but that's absolutely crazy-go-nuts.

Anyway, here are my final thoughts for the game:

Loved

• Premise. I REALLY liked the whole time travel idea. It was really cool to go to 600 AD, leave Robo to plant tree, then warp to 1000 AD and see a forest and a Robo shrine. The game used the mechanic very well and it was hands down what made the game as good as it was. If a game was made that was similar to this in length, weapons, features, etc and set in a semi-bland fantasy setting, the game wouldn't be half as good as Chrono Trigger.
  
• Variety. This game was exceptionally varied. There were tons of different weapons and armor pieces, a fair number of unique techs, dungeons that seldom felt like a copy of another one, and even the party members were quite different from each other. Very rarely as I was playing the game did I feel like I was doing something I had already done before, even when the game sent me back to the same area but in a different time. I'll definitely give kudos to Squeenix for putting so much stuff in this game, especially when you consider the original SNES version is 14 years old!
• Fun. Regardless of my criticisms of the game (and I have a fair number of them), I enjoyed myself. At the end of the day, I think there is a lot to be said for that.
• Volume of Content. There is a metric crapload of stuff to do in this game... even if you do basically nothing other than the main story you are still going to play for 10-15 hours. If you do EVERYTHING you could possibly do, you could probably play for 2 to 3 times that.
  

Hated

• Techs. I think techs were supposed to be the big selling point of this game, but I felt like they fell short. I already talked about it quite a bit, but the 2 and 3 player tech combos were extremely lackluster. For how hard they were to earn and pull off, they really should have been devastating, but they just... weren't. Additionally, there were a fair number of throwaway techs in the game, i.e. I hardly ever used the very first techs that I earned with each character late in the game. I always feel like every skill/spell I earn in an RPG should have some value even later on.
• Unmemorable Equipment. As I mentioned above, the game had a LOT of equipment... and I mean a LOT. I was so constantly upgrading everything, that nothing ever really stuck out as being good or interesting. I had to pull up the stats of everything to see if it was an upgrade or not. When you actually do get a memorable piece of equipment, Masamune the legendary sword, it actually stops being competitive before the end of the game. While there is a quest to upgrade it (I didn't do it), it still felt kind of lame to unequip Masamune for a rusty spell sword (or something... like I said most of it wasn't memorable). Furthermore, by the end of the game I had amassed so many "trinkets" (little items like a ring, etc that boost a single stat) that I had a hard time sorting through them or even finding new ones I had picked up in my inventory. I definitely think they should have toned down the equipment a bit and provided fewer, more memorable items.
• Endings. Chrono Trigger basically allows you to go and fight the end boss at any time you choose, and, depending on when you do it, the ending changes. While I'll freely admit that that I only saw the first, most basic ending, from what I've read you usually need to replay the game to see the other endings (you keep your equipment from the previous playthrough). Perhaps if I was REALLY bored or a 14-year-old kid with a limited gaming budget I would do that, but as it is I just don't have any desire. One ending (with some variations) was definitely good enough for me.
• Linear to Open Transition. Another one I already mentioned, they really should have done this different... probably providing more openness from the beginning. Not sure, but I didn't like it.
  

I could probably come up with more on both sides, but these lists are pretty good. It's definitely one of games where as I played it I could see why some people are so fanatical about it (*cough* Shums *cough*), but it just didn't quite do it for me. I don't regret playing it or anything, and I did enjoy the fact it was on the DS, but at the end of the day it just didn't impress me. If you have a DS and even a passing interest in jRPGs, play it; you won't regret it... just don't expect perfection.

Maintain your amateur status

Welcome to the first installment of Flash Game Friday. Each Friday I'll review/recommend a new flash game for you all to enjoy. This week's game: Dolphin Olympics 2.

The original Dolphin Olympics was a game I stumbled across a couple of years ago. I distinctly remember playing it very obsessively for like 2 days then basically forgetting about it completely. Well, last week when I was mentioning to my friend/editor, Shums, that I should write about fun flash games, he immediately recommended DO2. The next thing I knew, two hours had passed and the skin on my middle finger was sore from holding down the up button on the keyboard.

Dolphin Olympics is a deceptively simple game. The basic premise is that you control the dolphin as he jumps out of the water. While in the air, you can rotate him around both of his 2D axes to perform various tricks. By combining tricks, you can string together a masterful Tony Hawk style combo. Furthermore, if you reenter the water at the correct angle and quickly jump again, your combo not only continues, but you get a bit of a height boost to your next jump. The idea is to do as many varied tricks as possible while continually entering and exiting the water as perfectly as possible. The game is also deliciously bite-sized: each round lasts only two minutes.

Seems pretty basic, right? So why is it so addictive? I think it's the desire to pull off a perfect run. You can have perfect jumps for a minute and a half and then belly flop and lose all your momentum. Each time that happened to me I would immediately restart the game… and boy oh boy, did it ever happen. Instead of getting discouraged, I would just try again. And again. And again. In fact, while writing this blog entry I played it 5 or 6 times.

The ultimate goal in the game is to get as far into space as you can. While I've only made it to Mars, Shums says he reached the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a fantastic Douglas Adams reference that fits perfectly with the dolphins (you HAVE read "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,"right? Right?).

Just to save you the trouble, DO2 is superior to the original DO in pretty much every way. Seriously, don't even bother.

Now, go play Dolphin Olympics. I’m serious. Oh, and many kudos to Alan Rawkins for making such an addictive game.

Alright, now I have to get back to… crap. Another belly flop. Hmm… maybe I’ll just go one more time…

Throwback Thursday

I decided to start a couple of theme days on my blog, the first of which I'm calling "Throwback Thursday." Every Thursday I'm going to discuss an old school game: an old PC game, something from the 8/16 bit eras, etc. I decided to retroactively start it last week with my post on gambling in Diablo 2, but this week I'll be discussing my time in Chrono Trigger which I conveniently just finished last night.

Chrono Trigger DS is a remake of a SNES jRPG from the early 90's. It has a rather interesting time travel premise that plays a huge part in the game; you essentially visit the same world in 5 different eras of history spanning from 65,000,000 BC (BC? Did the world of Chrono Trigger have a Christ? Why didn't HE save us from Lavos?) to a post-apocalyptic future. As far as a game premise, it's actually quite clever and works pretty well. Early on, your time travel escapades are limited to entering and exiting times at very specific locations, while later in the game you get a ship that basically lets you fly anywhere/anytime you want. The combination of the two is perhaps my first beef with the game.

The vast majority of your time in Chrono Trigger is relatively linear; the game actually blocks off your time travel portals on a number of occasions forcing you to complete some sort of goal in the time you're in before you can resume time surfing. While I generally prefer more open ended RPGs, I thought it worked pretty well here. It was pretty much always clear where I was supposed to go while still giving me a bit of freedom. Once you get the time travel ship though, perhaps 5/6th of the way through the game, the game opens up dramatically. Generally I would think that it would be a good thing, but it was such a stark contrast with relatively little explanation, that I suddenly found myself having no idea where, when, or what I was supposed to be doing. The game also throws you a handful of option sidequests at this point, which, once again, I felt weren't quite clear enough in a lot of their goals. Also, this all happened so late in the game that I almost felt like there was just no need; my gear was quite good and I was already at a decent level. If all these side quests had been available in some shape or form throughout most of the game, it would have been excellent. Perhaps I just took to long to play the game, but by the time I got to that point in the game, I was pretty much just ready to be done.

There was another thing about the game that just didn't quite live up to hype: "techs." Techs (or techniques for short I guess) is the magic/special moves that your characters can perform. As the game progresses you earn dual and even triple techs that your characters can perform together. It sounds like a great idea on paper, but in my experience the power of the dual and especially the triple techs wasn't any more (and sometimes less!) than it was to have each character do a tech on their own. If you are going to go through the effort of leveling up 3 characters together (or even equipping a special item for lots of the triple techs), they should be AMAZING, but they just... aren't. I'm pretty sure I could count on one hand the number of triple techs I performed in the whole game and on two the number of dual techs. It was disappointing to have such an interesting feature be so utterly worthless.

While there were certainly plenty of things that I didn't really like, the game as a whole was definitely a pleasant diversion. It provided over 20 hours of game play for a direct play through, which is a pretty big helping for a DS game.

Expect a full set of final thoughts on Saturday, while tomorrow will introduce my other new "special" daty: Flashgame Friday. See you then.

In the meantime, feel free to suggest any old school games (preferably ones that you think I've played, although I'm not opposed to firing up an emulator) that you'd like me to discuss next week.

Fill in the blank

I haven't been playing much on the PC lately, partially because I was out of town for the weekend and partially because I just don't have any PC games I'm really excited about. I decided to pick back up Chrono Trigger for the DS, a game that I had originally received for Christmas and just sort of stopped playing a few months ago. I'll probably writeup a full post on the game later, but for now I want to discuss one of the games "features:" the ability to change the names of the characters.

In case any of you are not familiar with the game, when a character joins your party, the game gives you the ability to change the characters name. I guess it's really just giving you the ability to set the name of the character, but in a couple of instances, the game has previously referred to him by his "real" name. For instance, early on you meet a character named Marle who later joins your party. At that time, it brings up the name screen and allows you to put in whatever you want, with Marle being already filled in as the default. I have NO idea why this feature exists. I can just imagine a conversion between two tweens back in the early 90's when this was released:

Tween1: Wow! I love the fire attack that Accul has when you combine it with Elram's ice.
Tween2: Umm... you mean Lucca and Marle?
Tween1: No. Accul and Elram.
Tween2: You're an idiot.

See? Recipe for confusion.

Okay, I think perhaps I'm missing the real beauty of this: Chrono Trigger madlibs! I think I should play through the game again after having set all the characters names to various body parts with the word "My" infront of them. Then perhaps I could have seen comments like this:

MyFace: We must follow MyNose!
MyLeg: I can't believe MyKnee is gone...
MyButt: I have an amazing fire attack!

And so forth. Two words: Comedy. Gold.

Well, that's all for now. I have to go see if I can use Maginicus, Amphibio, and Anaylium to finally save Cronicial... or something like that.

New Domain Name!

Godaddy.com was having a deal for $2 domain name registration so I registered Morinar.com and pointed it at the blog. You can now get here merely by typing www.morinar.com into your browser.

Caveat: typing "morinar.com" on it's own (without the www) doesn't seem to work, due to some wonko-ness in the DNS CNAME mojo.

Bonus points: anybody know how to make "morinar.com" work with Blogger?

Edit: I figured out that there are multiple ways to do it, including via Blogger itself. Of course in my monkeying around, I set stuff up wrong and now it's broken until things update. I turned off the domain name until then.

Penumbra - Final Thoughts

Penumbra was definitely a crazy roller coaster ride with plenty of ups and downs. Here's my break down:

Loved

• The physics system. The drag a door/spin the valve/flip the switch mechanics were just a whole lot of fun. It's something I had never seen in a game before and added a lot to the tension. There were a couple of moments for me that were made more awesome simply by my trying to move stuff out of the way and drag a door open in time.
• Old school feel. Penumbra felt like an old school adventure game. It had inventory combining, puzzles, and even a spot of pixel hunting. It truly felt like a throw back to the old days of adventure gaming. I think it was the only adventure game I've ever played that combined a first person view with world interactions in such a way.
• The setting. The whole cave/installation system was a great place to set this game. It was a perfect explanation for it being dark most of the time while definitely adding to the tension.
  
• Horror. This had both nervous, heart beating moments and as well as jump out your chair scares. It think it's incredibly difficult to make a game that is actually scary, but Frictional definitely did it here.
• Price. I paid $5 for all three on Steam... I declare that to be the deal of the year! Honestly, even at $10-$20 for all three, it's still a solid value, even if the individual episodes aren't more than a few hours each.
  

Hated

• Enemies. In Overture they were absolute pushovers and I dispatched every single one I came across with my pick. In Black Plague, I had no way of attacking them at all, and I just ran from all of them. They should have combined the trapping idea from Overture with the no weapons of Black Plague. In Overture, there were crates to trap the dogs in as well as fenced areas where you could lure the dogs and then turn on some steam. There was no reason to ever lure a dog into either, as the dogs were just so easy to kill. If that had existed in Black Plague, however, I would have gone out of my way to get rid of the infected one at a time.
• Inconsistencies Between Games. On a 1 to Scary scale, Overture was like a 5, Black Plague was a 9 or 10, and Requiem was probably a 1. The inconsitency in scariness made the games feel really disjointed. The enemies were another huge discrepancy. In Overture, there were spiders and dogs, in Black Plague there were infected only, and Requiem had no enemies at all. Seeing spiders in Black Plague or infected in Requiem would have helped tie the games together a bit more I think.
• Requiem. While probably not a bad game on it's own, Requiem was a HUGE let down after playing the first two games. I won't rehash it's short comings too much as it was the topic of a previous post, but they definitely should have done something different there. If Requiem was the first game in the series and it was used to introduce you to the game play mechanics, I think it would have worked a lot better. In fact, it would probably be worthwhile to play it as the first game in the series. The story elements won't make sense and could possibly spoil something for you (not sure if it would), but the excitement/fun would steadily ramp up as you went through the other two games.
  

All in all, the 3 Penumbra games are excellent. I would recommend them to anybody who likes a good scare and especially people who enjoy puzzle games.

Still not sure what I'm going to play next, but hopefully I'll have something for you all in another day or two.

Gambling for Gear

I haven't started into any new games recently, so I figured I'd post something I've been wanting to since I started this blog. I want to gab about the glories of gear gambling.

A friend of mine (Plisskin in the comments here) and I recently decided we wanted to play through a co-op game together. After comparing what we both had and were willing to play, we settled on Diablo II.

For those of you who aren't up on your gaming history, Diablo II was released in 2000 and it's expansion was released in 2001. At this point, you are probably saying, "YOU WERE PLAYING A 9-YEAR-OLD GAME!?! ARE YOU CRAZY!?!" To which I would respond, "Yes, yes I am, but that has nothing to do with Diablo II."

Diablo II has held up better than just about any game I've ever played. I played it back in 2000 and I've played it a handful of times since then. Now, there have been plenty games that have tried to be Diablo but with better graphics (Titan Quest, Sacred, etc), but, in my opinion, they all pale in comparison to the original... 2D graphics and all.

Diablo II is delightfully fast paced with a basically never-ending horde of enemies always coming in the from the edge of the screen. The classes are diverse, the spells/abilities are relatively interesting, and the game is completely random in both loot and dungeon layouts. Diablo II is a classic example of wanting to play just a little bit longer to try and get that new bow or a unique helm, which brings me to the title of my post.

For those of you who haven't Diablo II (Wait. You haven't played Diablo II? Stop reading and go buy it. NOW), there is a fantastic feature in the game that allows you to spend money for a chance at getting a new piece of gear. You get to choose what type of item to gamble for (belt, ring, sword, etc) and told how much it will cost you (it's generally a LOT), then you click and hope for the best. After you get done holding your breath and look at what you have received (you HAVE to hold your breath when you gamble in Diablo II... it's a rule), you say a little swear word and then sell that piece of garbage back to the vendor (NOTE: if the suffix of the item is "of worth" it's a guarantee that the item is not worth much). This you do over and over and over again until the stars align and you get a mystical rare bow... which of course isn't as good as what you are already wielding.

What then is the appeal of gambling in Diablo II? I DON'T KNOW. I hardly ever get anything I can use and I tend to just waste a lot of money. I do know one thing though... I CAN'T STOP DOING IT.

Here's my general plea to game developers: put this feature into more games. It's awesome and it gives me something to do with extra cash in the late game, something that seems to plague nearly every RPG (even MMOs!) ever made.

Ohh.... imagine if I can gamble for Tier 9 gear in WoW... or for a purple lightsaber in SWTOR...

Drool...