DJ Max Technika Tune (PS Vita)

For a while now, it’s been rhythm games that have become my go-to for a challenge, and Technika is what captivated me most, no doubt about it. As a drummer, I tend to take very easily to these games and get slightly obsessive, so have beaten many of the big challenges of the genre – getting through the Dragonforce song on Expert in Guitar Hero, perfect-playing ‘The Singing Passion of Hatsune Miku’ in Project Diva 2^nd – as well as silly things like monopolising the scoreboards of the Taiko drumming game at the local arcade. But Technika is the one that really addicted me when I started it in its first arcade cabinet iteration – the bright colours, the catchy electronica songs, the adorable anime-style background videos, and most particularly the gameplay. In Technika, a line moves along the screen in two sweeps – one per bar – and you have to poke, slide or hold your fingers on different notes along with the music. It starts very simple and gets extremely hard, with all sorts of polyrhythms between hands, crossing wrists over and under one another and very fast tempos to contend with.

I got hooked, I sunk rather too much money into mastering the hardest version of ‘Son of Son’, only for still harder tracks and still harder versions to come out with monthly updates, all of which I happily devoured. I did all the challenges and finished all the sets, at one point reaching the top ten on the international region scoreboards (ie no Korea or Japan and perhaps a few other places) – though that’s because by then many Americans had upgraded to Technika 2 and couldn’t get the last set’s worth of points. Still, I was very good at it and top of the high score tables for my country’s one and only machine for a very long time.

Then the arcade closed down, the other one that got the machine didn’t put it online – making play rather pointless – and in all honesty I breathed a sigh of relief because the game pounded my wallet quite hard over the course of a few months. I put far too many coins into it.

Then came Technika Tune for the Vita, one of two games that transformed it from virtual paperweight to my constant companion, with my poor 3DS left low-priority (along with Project Diva f). I imported it as soon as I possibly could, and though it vied with Project Diva and Kid Icarus for my attention for a while, it soon became completely dominant and I’ve played little else since. Now that the very easy platinum trophy is mine, a very easy one mostly based on playing for a very long time, with the only ones I found tricky ironically being the ones you get for playing badly. I perfect-played all the Lite tracks, got into the top 75 in the other modes (could push that higher if I get the urge) and generally played the thing to death.

My only complaint is the lack of favourite songs. It has ‘Proposed, Flower, Wolf’, but not its second part, and I prefer the original ‘Oblivion’. Why keep the likes of ‘Fate’, ‘Access’ and ‘Y’ when you could have had ‘Sin’, ‘Blythe’ and numerous awesome Clazziquai tracks? Probably so download packs can come later. Of the new tracks (to me), I mostly liked the cute ones like ‘Shining My Boy’ and ‘Hello Pinkie’, and some cooler, faster tracks like ‘Bamboo on Bamboo’ and ‘Renovation’, good complements to the likes of ‘Fermion’, ‘Thor’ and ‘Xeus’, while disliking novelty ones like ‘Song of Sixpence’ (sung by children) and ‘Light House’ (mostly animal noises like those you get on children’s keyboards). I was tearing my hair out at the odd rhythms of Irish jig ‘Emblem’ when perfect-playing. But I definitely missed cute tracks like ‘Shining Shooting Star’ and ‘In My Heart’ and less cheesy ones like ‘Color’, ‘Hexad’ and ‘Supersonic’ – and would have liked ‘Heart of Witch’ from Black Square/Technika 2. Some of the better new songs were based on classical pieces – Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov – but there were also several horrible electronica pieces like ‘Dual Strikers’ and ‘AD2222’, as well as more cringe-worthy hip-hop tracks that make ‘Ruti’n’ sound cool, including one hilariously awful one about Toronto called ‘In the Tdot’. There were also a handful of tunes from Jpop band Kara, which were in general pleasant enough and easy to play. Overall, a very mixed bag with a few chores to play, but not at all bad and with some great tracks I’d not played before and thoroughly enjoyed.

In terms of presentation, the game is excellent, looking stunning on a little screen. It’s somewhat fiddly at first, but I soon got used to it, and though I had kinda hoped there would be held/repeating notes on the back AND front carefully-designed to be possible, once I realised the way they had adapted it, everything made sense and if anything it was easier (except times when a bit of hand would brush the back touchpad and cause an off-time note), plus the note and icon bonuses made it far, far easier to get perfect plays, along with fever – though I must say the vast majority of my breaks came when trying to activate fever and failing.

Definitely one of my favourite portable games – though I have to say, a shaky bus and that jerk when a train comes to a stop can ruin many an attempt at a high score. Highly enjoyable all around. 

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Mini-impressions: Elite Beat Agents

It struck me a little while ago that I had never finished EBA on my DS. I never liked it very much, despite the hilarious presentation – it always felt fiddly and I didn’t like how often the real problem was seeing the next place to touch because it was hidden by your hand, resulting in me finally playing with a silly grip on the stylus, holding it right at its end so my vision was rarely obscured.

I was surprised upon finishing the tricky last level that there was a whole new difficulty setting beyond what I thought was the last one, called Hard Rock. Apparently you play the same thing as in the previous difficulty, only the hit markers are flipped from their former patterns, plus come up faster and need to be hit in a tighter window. Your life bar also depletes absurdly fast.

This became the main thing that I disliked about EBA. It’s the only rhythm game I’ve played where I can have a 100+ combo and still die, just because I’m hitting the beats slightly off and getting 50s and 100s instead of 300s (the equivalents of the usual ‘safe’, ‘great’, ‘perfect’ or similar). Because the bar depletes on its own, you can also be doing badly, but passably, only for a long silent passage (excluding the ones for little scenes, where your life bar freezes) to take your bar down to the bottom. It makes for an annoying, frustrating experience at higher levels, and necessitates too much memorisation. I probably only put the same amount of time into passing the last stages as I do most rhythm games’ hardest parts, but I lost far more often and for far more irritating reasons.

You can’t dislike a game that has such silly mini-stories and such fun, especially one with something like the Christmas song that totally subverts all your expectations about such a light and sweet-natured story. But I can’t say I want more.  

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Kingdom Hearts 3D – Dream Drop Distance: first playthrough thoughts

The first Kingdom Hearts game on the newest gen of handhelds certainly blows all the games on its predecessor away – and surpassed my expectations – but in my view didn’t match up to the brilliant Birth By Sleep in any aspect, and suffered from some major problems.

These are my thoughts after my first playthrough, in which I unlocked the secret ending but otherwise did not explore very thoroughly, so there may be bits and pieces to add after I play again in critical mode. Since the secret movie was so easy to unlock, though, I doubt there’s anything too significant.

So where does this game leave us, post-BBS? Nomura stated that it was to be considered, much like BBS, as important plot-wise as a numbered title and not a side-game like Coded – and indeed, it’s likely that the plot of KH3 will make no sense without playing this one…though that can be said of Chain of Memories too, leaving only Coded and 358/2 Days as lesser side-games. Either way, I’m pleased that the title was actually meaningful, as seeing the younger character models and bizarre scenes of raining Soras in the sneak peaks I found myself doubting it would be – though my initial hopes upon starting the game that it would be about bringing Ventus, Aqua and Terra back ended up dashed. Perhaps we’ll see that in Birth By Sleep 2.

Nomura apparently looked at his sprawling mess of a plot for this series and thought ‘You know what this incredibly convoluted and confusing scenario needs? Time travel.’ KH3D is not for the uninitiated. Be prepared to concentrate on who Xemnas, old Xehanort, Young Xehanort (also known as ‘Terranort’ because he inhabits Terra’s body), Ansem and Ansem the Wise are, all of them except the last looking pretty damn similar, save the bald old coot. Be prepared to count off all the different aspects of Sora found in his heart: his anomalous nobody Roxas, the replica/false nobody/memory vessel Xion, and the disembodied asylum seeker Ventus. And now try to wrap your head around the trap Master Xehanort devised to get thirteen different aspects of himself from different times together in different (mostly possessed) forms in order to represent thirteen darknesses in opposition to seven lights, including an attempt to use Sora’s body. It’s a very, very tangled mess. And it’ll get worse once there’s an attempt to extricate Terra from the wrong side and when the two surprise-twist keyblade wielders who come to the fore at the very end of the game decide who fills the one remaining space (though the secret ending twist wasn’t…really a twist, but rather a strange omission up to that point).

But that’s only the game’s place in the wider series. It has a plot of its own, which is largely kept simple: Sora and Riku are accomplished keyblade wielders, but not yet masters. Thus Master Yen Sid (who for whatever reason is retired from using a keyblade and won’t be fighting) sends the two boys on a mission to restore previously destroyed worlds that have been left in a state of sleep. For some reason, they have to be sent back in time to do this (because otherwise they cannot learn any new skills, perhaps?), which leads to them inhabiting their younger forms – which I find a shame, because their KH2 designs are much more appealing and are after all included in the game, looking much better. They set about freeing the worlds and seeing the pasts of some familiar faces, fighting ‘Dream Eaters’ along the way, but of course Xehanort is on hand to intervene.

It’s an often bewildering plot, but it just about hangs together, and at least finally leads to the right place and supplies answers to most questions even if they’re far-fetched – though just how Lea and the rest somehow went back to being somebodies again is anyone’s guess. It facilitates a mostly straightforward game, and with the exception of the very dull Tron world, it’s fun to play through the story.

But there are a few big problems, chief of which is the gameplay. BBS really got things right, though shoot lock made things a little too easy. But each character was used alone and had moves that flowed into an increasingly deep play style. DDD’s seems…slapped together. Annoyingly, you have to use dream eater companions, which both confuse you in the thick of action (as they look like the enemies) and end up dying and needing to be revived by the player, which against harder bosses often means you end up having to prioritise getting a stupid snail back to life and die yourself. I wish they could be turned off. Then there’s ‘flowmotion’, which is incredibly useful at the start but soon gets very annoying, as a simple dodge roll too close to the door can end up with you being immobilised for a half-second, enough for tougher bosses to wipe you out on proud mode. It also feels tacked-on, as it means you more or less get the ability to fly from the start, so many carefully-designed stages with springboards and obstacles just seem like they were put together before flowmotion was introduced, because it makes them obsolete. Finally, there’s the cute little special attacks done with the touch screen – I enjoyed these, but there were only a handful of different ones, which soon got repetitive: it would have been much better had they been complex and varied.

What really stood out above all the rest, though, was the homoeroticism of the whole thing. The KH2 ending more or less dropped all pretence that the Sora/Riku relationship was anything but a love story, and here it’s the heart of the whole piece: they’re split apart but their strong bond brings them back together…and that’s before the innuendoes about Riku being inside Sora and the bizarre image of him collecting Sora bodies as he skydives are discussed. What’s remarkable is that the female presence in the game is almost non-existent. None of the characters significant to the overall plot of this game are female. The important female characters – Kairi, Naminé, Aqua – get next to no screentime, and a hint that one will be controllable in KH3 doesn’t cut it. In fact, the female character who gets the most to do is probably Olivia Wilde’s character in the Tron world…and it’s weird seeing Thirteen from House interacting with Sora!

Believe me, I don’t mind that this epic saga is basically a love story between adolescent boys. They’re a cute couple. But let’s see more of Aqua soon, eh? I really want some interaction between Sora and the BBS characters. 

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Bioshock

I’m glad I finally decided to check out what all the fuss was about – even though it’s been many years since I’ve actually liked a first-person shooter. In my view Goldeneye messed them up, and they were much better when they played like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake. I half-heartedly played through Unreal, but since then, only Portal has engaged me, and that can only just be called an FPS – as after all, you don’t ‘die’, you're not using offensive weaponry and it’s more a puzzle game than anything else.

Bioshock is similarly different from the macho games about blasting away soldiers or spraying bullets into wave after wave of aliens. Its key elements are not its guns or action – they are the plot, the atmosphere and the melding of horror and sci-fi into a genre where it’s usually one or the other, and without nearly such a clever concept.

The story of Bioshock takes place in the underwater city of Rapture. Built in the 50s, with the story happening some ten years later, it is an amazing construction but creaky, grimy and themed on old diving suits and pre-60s entertainment. Rapture was also the site for various experiments – the use of ‘Adam’ to enhance human abilities and even give special powers, the necessary manufacture of oxygen, and the ‘vita chamber’ respawn points. At first you know nothing of who you are beyond that your plane crashed and you had no choice but to go to rapture, and just do as you are told by a stranger on a radio. Later, you find you have a personal connection to the founder of Rapture, and during a rather predictable plot twist, the way you have been blindly following orders (because it’s a game and there’s nothing else to do) becomes a rather clever and satisfying little plot point.

To be honest, I don’t think I played the game quite the way I was supposed to. I essentially hoarded all the ammo and hypodermics that I found, and killed 98% of the enemies, including bosses, with the wrench. This became progressively easier as power-ups made it more useful. The other 2% were big daddies, who I would just unload all my rockets and frag grenades on, knowing that I would be able to restock soon enough. Then there was the final boss, probably the lamest thing about the whole game, who I just strafed continuously, with more than enough ammo to finish him off five times over.

If anything, after the steep initial learning curve, I longed for the game to be harder. The big daddies were a challenge, and trying to take care of the last boss with just the wrench proved too much, but overall there was very little to hurt the player and what drove me on was mostly the story and atmospherics. In other words, I played the FPS like an RPG.

But story is what I like most about any game, and I’m very happy I spent the time with this one. I liked the creepy sections, where out-and-out horror scare tactics were used, and some of the more unhinged residents of Rapture were very memorable, like the artist who made a very silly masterpiece and demands you help him finish it with a murder spree.

There are three endings, and I was a little sad to discover I’d shut myself off from getting the good one after only just getting through the exposition. I would certainly have saved all the little sisters if I’d known, as the rewards they gave you really weren’t that good and by the end I had nothing to do with the Adam I got.

The game triumphs in its little details. The big daddies are of course iconic (and I would have preferred only bouncer-types, because the rosies were a bit lame) and I love the little sisters’ babble when they’re around them. ‘Hop hop, Mr Bubbles!’ The splicers are interesting, and though I can see how it would annoy a lot of people and it’s bizarre how all the action completely stops while you do it, I really liked the hacking mini-game. The creepy vending machines, the stupid flying guard bot things…all came together to make a charmingly unsettling game that I’m glad has a sequel and very possibly a movie in the works. I’ve already bought Bioshock 2 for the PS3, so I’ll get around to it before too long…

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Arcana Heart 3

Fighting games used to be the main thing I would play. Hours went into games like Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo and Mortal Kombat 2. I knew all the moves for everyone in Tekken 2 and I loved the story mode of Soul Blade. I even gave a lot of time to Killer Instinct and, yes, Kasumi Ninja. I love Psychic Force even fully aware it's rubbish. But at some point, around Street Fighter 3, I lost interest. 3D games were getting repetitive and more gimmicky. 2D games seemed more poorly-made, with unlimited combos and an emphasis on stupid super combos that went on too long and could spoil a round. These games became fun at a party but not for learning. I liked Guilty Gear and Melty Blood, but felt I came to them too late, and was annoyed at how high level play often meant watching a character eat a combo for 30 seconds. I missed sf2's short chains. SF4 and Mortal Kombat 9 were just fun party games.

Then Arc and Examu made Arcana Heart 3 and actually released it in the UK. I hadn't liked BlazBlue much, finding the cast limited, the humour rather much less original than Guilty Gear's and never found someone whose style suited me. However, at a tournament I saw AH3 and finally found something to love again. I liked how the arcana system made everyone so varied, how balanced it was, and how funny. I wanted to main adorable Dorothy, but Eko suited me better - better than any character I picked up since Urs in Battle Fantasia. And what's more, every fight was funny.

Eventually it got frustrating. Ridiculous combos and loops were found. But there were ways to disrupt it all. And it was always fun, always entertaining, always challenging. A shame so many avoided it as creepy, girly or Japanese. Because as a game engine it stands way above just about everything else currently around.

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Project Diva: Dreamy Theater 2nd

Project Diva: Dreamy Theater 2nd

Dreamy Theater 2^nd is more of the same, perhaps unsurprisingly – but also everything its predecessor was but much more. Indeed, every song from the first game is included in this one as an extra, which is nice (though makes the trophies take longer to get) – the only reason for me to keep the first game, which unlike this one still needs the PSP attached to even start, is that I have a nice collection of edit songs on it.

The gameplay is much the same, only now there are doubled notes and held notes. The doubled ones require you to not only press the right button but also the d-pad button that is its equivalent – up with triangle, right with circle and so on. The held notes were the bane of my life getting perfects in this game – they not only register your timing when you press down but also when you release, which for whatever reason I found that much harder to do accurately, making for many an annoying moment. If there were one part of this game I would change, it would be this.

The graphics are even nicer than before, and of course there are more characters, with more outfits, and the chance to have two on the screen at once, which the first game lacked. Edit mode is thus more fun to play with and this time I really enjoyed making a video of my own.

The game is also much more fun because it’s much more challenging. The first game was really too easy, with only the Christmas Song’s fiddly solo proving hard to perfect. This one has an ‘extreme’ mode that is way more fun than anything the first game offered, and though some tracks were frustrating and needed several tries, the thrill of getting through a tough song and getting a perfect on your first attempt was as much fun I’ve had with a rhythm game since Technika.

It took two long sessions to get a perfect on the very last song, the 32^nd-note-plagued ‘Hatsune Miku no Gekishou’, and the reward, criminally, is only a gold trophy and not a platinum, but it’s a challenge I’m very pleased I undertook and managed to overcome. It was the hardest gaming challenge I’ve tried in a very long time, certainly harder than hidden RPG bosses or ‘Through the Fire and Flames’ on Guitar Hero 3 (though if the challenge were to get a perfect on that it would have been much harder). That’s enough now, until Extend goes to PS3, if it ever does. My next rhythm game will probably be Rhythm Thief on 3DS!

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Professor Layton and the Lost Future / Unwound Future

I thought that Unwound Future was likely to be my least favourite of the Layton games. They’d had some far-fetched concepts before, but usually confined to the ends of their games, but this one looked likely to have the silly idea of time travel throughout, which always ends up with plot holes and usually contradictory theories coexisting. Besides, it seemed the most surreal effort yet – sure, there was a hamster with a funny voice in the last game but that was confined to a minigame and you sort of thought that Luke could just be interpreting the voice internally – but this one not only had a talking parrot minigame (fair enough), but a genuine talking rabbit with a tale of woe to unfold and an annoying talking bee that gets swatted halfway through and is presumed dead right up until the credits.

And yet – it’s actually turned out to be my favourite of the trilogy. The essential gameplay is of course the same – you go from place to place solving puzzles that are by and large only tricky enough to divert the player for a few moments, but still hard enough to give a sense of satisfaction. So that leaves the overall story.

I like the setting the most of the three – the first’s village was cute but limited, the train of the second rather repetitive, leaving a strange but very much recognisable London for this one, which works well. Some way through, Luke had a little scene in front of a statue that was very subtly done (if you didn’t stop to watch his standing animation before clicking him with your stylus, and didn’t read the journal entry afterwards, you may not have realised what he was doing) that made me think this might be my least favourite Layton game with my favourite scene in it, but then the final twists came. The final twists have rather been the weaknesses of Layton games. The first game’s makes sense within the world in hindsight, but at the time I was hoping for something that required much less of a sci-fi leap of faith to believe, while the second relies on everyone affected by hallucinogenic gas to perceive the exact same hallucination – not just for a moment but long-term. This one, aside from a rather mawkish bit to try and have the traditional tearjerking ending, actually went in reverse: it twisted an unbelievable supernatural premise to one that again required absurd sci-fi, but at least made everything logical.

The series continues to be one of the best handheld games around, and obviously for a relatively low budget – I’m annoyed at the next game excluding ‘London Life’ for the UK release (but having it on the US cart) so for the first time will likely not buy a copy, but I’ll certainly be playing it. I’d just get the US version – but then I’d have to put up with that awful voice they have for Luke. And it doesn’t even have the advantage this version’s US release had – a rather better title.

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