Smothered in hot sauce, Buffalo-style

Time was, I used to pick up any video game that look reasonably interesting whenever I went shopping. More recently, I’ve chosen to be a little more circumspect. The problem isn’t money, really, but time: I’m still sitting on a couple of original PlayStation games that I’ve not ever really had the time to tackle. If I never bought another video game in my life, I’d probably still have enough to keep me occupied until I retire. I still buy games, of course, but seldom with the impulsiveness I once did. On Black Friday, for instance, I bought Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja and Hoshigami: Running Blue Earth Remix for the DS based on a review from a friend and an gaming site I generally trust, respectively. Both games have been out for months, and I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into in advance.

I did, however, buy a third game that day, against my better judgment. It was a new release, and I’d not read a single review or even heard any word-of-mouth coverage of it. The game was Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, which goes to show you how much of a sucker I remain for the “Final Fantasy” brand. I knew it wasn’t a traditional RPG, and I’d been following some of the news of the Japanese release, but I was a bit nervous about blindly taking the plunge. But I was burning off my turkey-and-cranberry-sauce high from the day before, so I threw caution to the wind. Now that I’ve had some time to play, I figured I’d share my preliminary thoughts.

The game is actually a pretty impressive melding of Final Fantasy XII’s hack-and-slash gameplay with the RTS genre. You get a party of five characters to control, and each of those five characters gets to command his or her own group of disposable troops. The gambit system returns, in greatly simplified form: each of your five characters has his or her own special abilities, and you can set one of those abilities to be performed automatically. There’s also a resource-gathering element to the game, where the resources you gather are used to craft new equipment for your characters. The structure of the game itself, with mission boards and chapters, is strongly reminiscent of turn-based tactical RPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea.

As for the story, it’s a direct continuation of Final Fantasy XII, with appearances from most of the main cast of that game. I’m not that far into the game yet (third chapter), but the plot itself doesn’t strike me as particularly revolutionary. The script is quite good, though, with the same antiquated-English style. Visually, it’s about as impressive as one can expect from the DS, looking like a fairly early PS1 game.

My biggest complaint is the heavy use of the DS stylus. This is the first DS game I’ve purchased that actually requires the stylus for play: most games seem to stick stylus-support on as something of an afterthought (the Phoenix Wright games or Final Fantasy III) or just omit it completely (Izuna), but this game provides no way to control your troops without at least some use of the stylus. On one hand, I understand that doing the sort of things the game wants you to do with a traditional D-pad setup would be tricky, but on the other hand, I hate the stylus! It’s an awkward, uncomfortable control mechanism that becomes even more awkward and uncomfortable when you try to use it in the car or bus. Call me old fashioned, but I’m still a firm believer that a portable handheld system should be usable on-the-go. I can get used to using the darned thing for this game, but I’m far from thrilled about the situation.

Ultimately, I’m enjoying the game quite a bit. My inexperience with the genre and occasional frustration with the control scheme, however, make me worry that I’m going to hit a brick wall at some point before reaching the end. If I do, I suspect I’m going to put the game aside and forget about it until some indeterminate point in the future, like I’ve done with various other games. But there’s enough to like about the game that I don’t regret buying it either way.

Pardon me for a moment of self-indulgent whining

Okay, I’m suspect this is going to turn out atypically depressing. Honestly, I’m not sure why I’m writing it: I can only see it garnering two kind of reactions, and neither put me in a good light. You’ll either think I’m being overly pessimistic and possibly even worry about my emotional stability, or you’ll actually agree with what I have to say, which would do nothing to make me feel any better. I guess, under the circumstances, I’m lucky that no one reads this thing.

Anyway, as I may have let slip in a couple of prior postings, I’m a proud left-winger, politically, economically, and socially. In general, my attitudes would probably be classified as radical as things are determined here in the U.S.A. Obviously, the United States of America nowadays is not the most encouraging environment for an extreme left-winger, but I’m used to that sort of displeasure, and if I didn’t admire and respect the ideals on which my country was founded, I wouldn’t still be here. But for a variety of reasons, both personal and political, 2007 has been an unusually upsetting year for me.

I’m at a bit of a crossroads in my personal life, having just finished grad school and started looking for not just a job but a career for the first time in my life. I feel like I’m in a really unstable position, looking at an uncertain future and twenty years of student loan repayments. I’ve got a fair share of health problems stemming from a poor hand dealt to me by genetics, and I’ve had numerous run-ins with a health insurance industry that vacillates between disingenuous concern for my wellbeing (“we worry about you: let us send an adviser with limited medical training to assist you in taking care of yourself”) and downright hostility to my attempts to get them to cover my medical expenses. I still can’t find any other logical way to connect these two positions without resorting to malicious conspiracy theorizing. Given how little my insurance seems to care about covering the medical supplies necessary to keep me alive, I’m not sure what an insurance-provided “health coach” (or whatever the heck they call them) is going to do except to try to convince me that I don’t really need to see a doctor about any gaping head wounds I may contract in the future.

That’s not the extent of my worries, though. As bad as my health concerns are, I take some small comfort in the fact that they are, at least, my health concerns. I may not be able to control them, but at least I can take out my frustration directly with typically unhelpful telephone support people. I also worry about things almost completely out of my control. Like, for instance, the environment. I do everything in my power to have as little impact on the environment as possible: I don’t drive, I rely on public transportation. I try to avoid unnecessary heating in the winter, and air conditioning in the summer (which, given how much I hate hot weather, isn’t easy). But none of these measures practiced on the individual level does much to change things, and doom-and-gloom predictions of catastrophic global climate change and peak oil-induced economic disaster seem less outlandish every day. And all of this feeds back into my overall sense of uncertainty. It’s bad enough that I’m not sure how I’m going to make it with the world in its current state. I can’t begin to imagine how I’ll survive following periods of persistent economic downturn, global pandemic, and mass food shortages.

I realize I’m not unique in experiencing some minor anxiety and depression about the future. And I hate to think how self-absorbed and whiny this all sounds. I guess what I’m really trying to do here is to exorcise my personal demons. I don’t want to dump all this on my family or friends directly, but I need to get it out there somehow. Undoubtedly, all of this will fade from my mind, and this ebb and flow will have very little to do with whether my situation has worsened or improved. The holiday season is supposed to depress people, so I guess I share that with everyone else.

It’s only Mega and Roll (but I like it)

While I’ve been busy grinding my way through Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness on my PSP, my brother has been busy with Mega Man Powered Up on his (when he’s not busy emulating NES games). I’ve messed around it with it briefly, and I figured I’d share my thoughts.

First of all, the super deformedness (not an actual word, Firefox’s spell checker informs me) is a little disturbing, honestly. I like cute things as much as the next guy, but you can have too much of a good thing. But the character designs are better than they could have been, I suppose, and overall the game is pretty impressive looking. As another of the PSP’s seemingly endless supply of remakes of older games, it’s actually a pretty impressive work. Truth be told, it’s more of a reimagining of the NES’s Mega Man than a true remake. The levels have been totally redesigned, and they’ve brought in two new robot masters to bring the total number of bosses up to the series-standard eight. That being said, they’ve introduced none of the additions from the later games in the series: there’s no Rush, no Mega Buster, and no sliding. And they still have the point counter from the NES original, and, yes, it’s still as completely pointless as it ever was.

The other major difference from the original is that the original game was sadistically difficult. This… isn’t. It has the benefit of three difficulty modes, but even though the hard mode is still more than capable of kicking my ass, it’s much less cruel about it. I can actually beat four or five stages in easy mode, which is something of a triumph for me. I know there’s plenty of gamers out there who’d bemoan the dumbing down of contemporary games, but I’m not one of them. The fact that I can actually make some headway in this thing is a major selling point for me.

Also kind of neat is the ability to play the game as one of the robot masters once you’ve defeated them. It’s all quite well done, and adds a lot of depth to the game. It’s also led both me and my brother to salivate over the prospect of Powered Up 2, since we both want to play as Metal Man. Also noteworthy is the fact that, when you’re playing as one of the bosses, Mega Man takes his place in the lineup. To denote the fact that he’s now eeeevvviiilll, he wears a cute little red cape, which I’ve decided is by far the coolest fashion accessory in the long history of the franchise.

The voice acting is pretty good, and the new cutscenes actually add an enjoyable, if not particularly deep, layer to the story. There’s nothing really revolutionary here, but it’s the whole package is pretty slick, and it’s made me nostalgic for the old days when you could expect a new installment in the Mega Man series every winter.