Game

Fat Princess is an addiction. The PS3 game is really too much fun, and… it’s like butter. Unfortunately, with the success or whatever of the game, they decided to bring it to the PSP. Here are my thoughts on the PSP:

I like rooting for the underdog, but come on. The PSP is by no means a bad system, but for some reason, Sony is determined that no one will ever like it. First of all, UMD? Worst idea ever. Noisy drive, little stupid looking disc things. Second of all, Games? Is there even an SDK for this thing? No one is making games for it. The thing has some great games, don’t get me wrong, but my local gamestop doesn’t even order new games for it anymore. There are like 3 games coming out a month for the system. I still have mine, and play it a little less than my DS (which is pink (don’t laugh)). Anyways, fuck Sony because they are doing really, really stupid things. Like the PSPgo… I think the Wonderswan had more support for the system. So yeah, as much as I play it, and keep one in my backpack nearly all the time, fuck the PSP.

And here are thoughts on Fat Princess on the PS3:

Fat Princess is like an online FPS for those of us who suck at FPS’s. I can’t aim with a controller to save my damn life, but Fat Princess bestows upon me the ability to teabag some 11 year old pre-pubescent kid and feel good about it. There is an option to have confetti come out of the little dudes when you cut them. The Princess’s voice gets deeper as she gets fatter. I played Fat Princess while walking on a treadmill for about a month. I tried to join a guild, but they pretty much broke up after I joined. My wife cries when I play the game; she identifies with the Princess because she can’t deny cake either. Things that suck about the game include: the way it connects people (or doesn’t),  the insane expectations for those last character tweaks, the AI of the bot players.

Let’s get to the portable version now. There are 2 major places where they fucked up. One: The control is all wrong. The PS3 version has these wonderful, gooey controls, with real weight attached to the characters. Aside from a few glitchy areas in levels, the characters play like a dream. The PSP version (not even going there with the little, round slidy bar thing) just feels like nothing. Any attachment to the game one might’ve had via the controls has been eliminated. Two: The graphics are horrible. The PS3 version had this beautiful, cell-shaded cartoony world. The PSP just looks like you took it, ran a Photoshop Smudge tool over the whole thing, and called it done.

Conclusion from previous paragraph: The developers of the PSP version (Supervillian Studios) not only have a stupid name for their studio, but also seem to have never really played Fat Princess on the PS3. They must’ve been showed 360p Youtube videos of the game. When asked if they could play the original, the Sony rep on the other line responded in Japanese because they were too embarrassed to tell the developer that they didn’t have the authority to send a free copy of the game. The developer didn’t understand Japanese, so he pushed the guy to answer his question, which embarassed the Sony rep further and his only recourse was to hang up on the developer. The studio, having spent their last lottery ticket on the PSP SDK couldn’t afford the game, so instead they relied on Titan Games produced FAQs and forum threads.

That’s about all I can say at this point, let’s score this bitch.

Starting with 5 points:

+1 – copying an awesome game

-1 – Being called “Fistful of Cake” when it obviously takes two hands to play a PSP, unless you’re playing the DOA Extreme game.

-1 – giving the US market a shittier box than the European one. Why would you do this? The PSP is totally failing the in the States and you’re trying to make people not want to buy this game???? Sony????

-1 – only supporting 8 players in multi-player. This game was not made for that few of people.

-1 – Supervillain Studios’ intro. Someone should’ve told them they were making a title for their studio, not an FMV intro for the game.

+1 – Only being $20. All PSP games should launch at this price.

Final: 3/10.

My Tip: Play the original, don’t waste your time with this.

Ps. The “Wasted Load” thing in the title was supposed to appear somewhere, in some sort of phrase mentioning masturbation, but halfway through writing this I realized that it didn’t really make sense. Still, this game feels like a wasted load compared to a money shot like the original…

I enjoyed the first Uncharted. It was one of those games that kind of surprised me. I’m not usually attracted to, what one might consider, “mainstream” games. I’m usually more into weird, obscure titles. But, I’d like to say that I can recognize a damn good game when I see it, regardless of its social position.

Uncharted was one of those games. The controls were tight. The cinematics and camera controls were new and interesting. The graphics were absolutely amazing. Playing it was just fun. There was something remarkably intuitive about the whole experience. The game makers were also game players, and they tried to make a game they wanted to play.

So, when Uncharted 2 came out and all kinds of awards were bestowed, I knew what to expect. I thought it would be good, I thought I would like it, etc. I borrowed the game from a friend when he finished it. I stopped halfway through and forgot about it… but eventually finished it for the sake of completion.

Uncharted 2 is too long. And it’s not just that it is to long, it’s that it feels too long. The big boss guy says something like “do you know how many people you’ve killed…” and it rings a little true. You kill and insane amount of people. Like, piles and piles. Digging the graves would take billions of years. Actionbutton.net (one of my favorite sites) reviewed the first game by referring to it as the reason “why video games are referred to as ‘murder simulators’”. I will at least say that I didn’t get that <i>feeling</i> when I played the first one, although looking back it is totally true. But Uncharted 2 really does <i>feel</i> like a murder simulator. You feel awash in blood. You start hearing “There he is!” in a sorta Spanish accent when you’re taking a piss at the toilet (or out back. whatever you’re in to). Red lines make you nervous. There’s just way too many enemies.

Here’s why Uncharted 2 <i>feels</i> like it’s too long, too much murder, too much climbing, too much back and forth with chloe and running around and shit. Because I’ve already played the first one… And most other people have too. The second Uncharted is an improvement on the first, but only as the second Mario (lost levels or some shit in America) was to the first. It’s just more levels with more stuff. If played back to back, you’re playing the same game. Once you’re into, say, the 6th or 7th hour of duck, shoot, climb, move, shoot, climb, repeat, your’e bound to get sick of it.

Uncharted 2 is desensitizing. Like watching Faces of Death in 4th grade at your friend’s house. Somehow, you’re able to start laughing at the way the guy’s body just flopped around after his head was cut off. Eventually, the game goes from being a ‘murder simulator’ to being a ‘job.’ A game that started, back at the beginning of the first one, as refreshing becomes the bad taste in your mouth after coffee. It’s the reason I just stopped playing the game. Why do I want to keep doing the same thing over and over? Instead, I did the dishes, because at least there’s different shit crusted on the plates each time…

But why did I finish it? Because I’m a completion junkie. Sometime in my first few years of university, I realized that I started a lot of things but finished few. I made some sort of internal, blood pact with myself that I would finish more things. Somehow my brain shorted and included video games in that pact (the intention was for me to complete <i>meaningful</i> things). So, I finished Uncharted 2 to say I had completed it, and to return it to my friend. I finished it, and gave it back to my friend. Yes, to restate, let it be known that I have completed Uncharted 2 in its entirety. I even completed that shitty last battle with the dude on sap-steroids.

The best way to express my dissatisfaction with this game is a metaphor + explanation. I love short songs. As I get older, I like my music to be shorter and faster. I view the perfect song length at under 1 minute. Any masterful song writer can express everything in that time that is worth expressing. I would be okay if its a little longer (1.2-1.5 minutes can be okay too). But the reasoning is the same, why put in filler? There’s a million bands, there are a billion songs, so why waste the listener’s time with anything less than awesomeness? The same applies to game design. Don’t have the player doing anything more than they should. You should have a concise (artistic) reason for doing things (artistic added because ‘making money’ should never be critically applauded as a reason to make art). Uncharted 1+2 is similar to a little PSP title name, WTF. Specifically, the mini-game where you put the tops on pens.  The point of the game is to make money by doing repetitive actions over and over. Why do you make money? To get virtual toys out of gacha-gacha machines. Yes… this is the basic idea of Uncharted.

Okay, okay, one more thing. Here’s something comparable to Uncharted. You’ll need two TV’s and a roll of bubble wrap. On one TV, put on an Indiana Jones movie. On the other, put on Rambo. Now pop the bubbles. When you finish popping the bubbles, go back over the ones you’ve popped to make sure they’re all popped (this is a little comparable to a second play through, or the second game). Now, you’ve pretty much played through both games. You can tell someone that you’ve completed them, I give you permission. If they ask you why they don’t see any trophies for the game in your PSN account, tell them you were playing with your Japanese account.

Oh, maybe the movies should be in Blu-Ray.

So, let’s start a rating system with this review. We’ll go out of 10, that’ll work, start with a 5. Each point will be explained:

+1 – being a game my wife doesn’t mind watching me play

+1 – having good art design coupled with insanely detailed graphics

-1 – being too long

-1 – having to do the same thing over and over

-1 – being too hard for me on normal difficulty (I don’t wanna play a game on easy, cause that’s for pussies (aka. little kids))

-1 – having girls with glassy eyes that make them look like those life-size robot female things that rich otaku are buying in japan.

That… seems about right. 3/10. I liked the first game, I did, but it’s really like the difference between a good idea and good execution. Uncharted was a good idea with bad execution.

I have an interesting memory. I remember things in spurts, not entire periods of time. And I’ll have huge blank spots around certain times, but other times are extremely vivid. Thinking back through my life, one type of thing consistently sticks in my memory and that is video games. I remember games based on where, when, and how I played them. I remember everything around the game, how I felt, how the lighting was, what TV I played it on, what music was going on. I don’t remember every video game, but some are extremely vivid. In these forthcoming posts, “Great Moments in Gaming,” I’ll reminisce on some of these memories and try to flesh them out. Hopefully, it will be interesting. Bear with me and let us begin…

Somewhere around 2005 or 2006 my wife’s (girlfriend at the time) grandmother divorced her husband of 5 years (I know…). During the divorce and process of selling their house, the grandmother (hereafter called NeNe, I don’t know why she likes being called that) didn’t want to be in house alone. The family had a choice to stay there with her themselves or pay me (I was chronically strapped for cash during my school days) to stay with her. For about 2-3 weeks I went over to her house every night around 8 or 9pm and stayed till I left for school in the morning.

Before we continue, let me explain my gaming situation at the time. I still had my Nintendo & Genesis from when I was a kid, but owned no current gen system (this was the time of PS2’s and XBoxes). I was extremely broke during school, since I only worked part time and still had to borrow money from my parent’s to pay for my rent ($250). I couldn’t afford video games, so I mainly scavenged older consoles and always looked for deals. I did have a Dreamcast, and that is what I played.

Staying at an elderly person’s house sounded extremely boring to me and so I brought my Dreamcast. In honor of the new gig, I splurged on a spool of CD-R’s, downloaded lots of DC games over hijacked internet, and had  a fresh supply of games! Going through them, I found a few fun games: Powerstone, Record of Lodoss War, Skies of Arcadia. But the game that grabbed my attention and filled this memory was Phantasy Star Online.

When I first booted up the game, the first thing that grabbed me was the music. It felt so… open. I’m a total internet junkie. I love the feeling of being connected to the world and actually get depressed when I’m not connected. Somehow, this game made me feel online & connected, even though NeNe’s house had no internet. How? The atmosphere of the game, created by the graphics, music, and story (if you could call it that) create this feeling of openness and possibility. It’s almost ironic that an online game could feel connected even when it’s not.

What’s even more ironic is that so many “open-world” games that are supposed to feel like the world is open actually feel more closed than Phantasy Star Online (okay, it’s abbreviated to PSO from now on). Examples are GTAIV, Infamous, Prototype. Nothing against the games, they’re not bad, it’s just that they don’t feel open. It’s obvious that it’s all AI and that it’s just a video game.

I played through the entire game at NeNe’s house. It was way too short for an offline game, and I felt a little sad when I’d finished the last quest.  Sitting at the dark house and finding that there was nothing left to the game, I contemplated starting it all over.

A few years later (ie. last month) I somehow happened to download the soundtrack to the game. The songs instantly took me back to that world. The design of that game’s environments was so amazing. Dreamcast graphics be damned, that game sucked me in.

I’ve got Phantasy Star Universe & want to get Phantasy Star Portable. Reading reviews, I doubt that either game will supply the amazing experience that the first one did, but hopefully there will be enough nostalgia in either game to remind me of PSO.