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Apr 25th, 2006 at 04:58:11 - Shoot the Bullet (PC) |
Cleared 8-6 during my lunch break a couple days ago. This is the first Level 8 pattern I've cleared, although I have most of Level 9 in the bag already. Primarily 8-6 is an endurance card; it doesn't require extreme skill or clever tricks, but consistent skill under sustained pressure.
I need just 8 more cleared patterns to unlock the final level... The rest of L8 is pretty tricky, but I can probably go back and finish off Level 5 and 7 - I have one pattern missing from each of those. I may have to attempt level 10, but I've tried all of those before and they all seem pretty darn deadly.
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Apr 19th, 2006 at 12:20:35 - Shoot the Bullet (PC) |
I just re-installed this due to getting a new PC and started playing through it again.
Shoot the Bullet is yet another independent game by the prolific entity known variously as ZUN or "Team Shanghai Alice", and is the 9.5th (heh) game in the Touhou/Shrine Maiden series. Since Perfect Cherry Blossom (the 7th game) there have been 4 releases:
TH7.5 - Immaterial and Missing Power
TH8 - Imperishable Night
TH9 - Phantasmagoria of Flower View
TH9.5 - Shoot the Bullet
Fun titles, eh? Anyway, the integer-numbered games are the more straightforward shooters (although TH9 was slightly off the beaten path), and the ".5" games, of which there have been two so far, are generally considered spin-offs. TH7.5 was a fighting game of the Marvel vs. Capcom persuasion, developed in collaboration with another indie studio.
...Which brings us neatly back to Shoot the Bullet (StB for short). StB is a brilliantly clever and innovative take on the concept of a "shooting game", in that your shooting is done with a camera.
No, this isn't Fatal Frame. At first blush, in fact, it looks similar to your garden-variety shooter, until you realise that you can't actually shoot (in the usual gaming sense of the word). Instead, pressing the fire button causes a rectangular viewfinder to appear over the game screen, whereupon you can then release it and "take a picture". (Never mind that you sometimes get your own character in the picture. Suspension of disbelief is wonderful.)
So what sort of game effect does picture-taking have? Well, StB isn't structured like a traditional shooting game; instead, it's divided into about a hundred (give or take a few) different mini-challenges, each of which is a specific "boss attack" or series thereof. In other words, when you start a challenge, a boss shows up and begins a particular attack pattern, which will usually last throughout the challenge and will often intensify as time passes. Your job is to take a set number of photos of the boss - the number depends on the challenge. Getting hit at all, or letting the time run out (there's a 2-3 minute timer for each challenge) will immediately cause you to fail.
Sounds easy? Well, it isn't. For one thing, your camera is an antiquated model, so after every shot, you need to rewind the film (which is automatic and takes roughly 10 seconds) before taking another. You can go into a "quick-rewind" mode where your film rewinds much more rapidly, but in this mode your movement speed is incredibly slow. For another, the viewfinder usually appears over your character. If the boss isn't in the viewfinder, you could try moving your character closer before shooting - but that will often expose you to severe danger. The alternative is to use the "zoom mode" - that is, to hold down the shoot button. This has the effect of slowing down time and allows you to use the movement keys to move the viewfinder - of course, your character is immobile in this state. The catch is that the viewfinder begins rapidly shrinking when you're in zoom mode, and when it reaches a specified minimum size, the shutter automatically triggers, whether or not you managed to get the boss in the picture. And then, if you failed, you have to rewind and try again - while under fire.
The bright spot here is that even if you don't get the boss in the picture, any bullets you capture in the viewfinder when you shoot (hence the title) will disappear, allowing you to use the camera like a "smart bomb" to get out of tight spots.
Another element which deserves mention is the scoring system. This gives bonuses for a whole bunch of things, including (1) making sure the subject is centred in the picture, (2) managing to get yourself in the picture as close to the subject as possible, (3) taking a picture while flying dangerously close to a bunch of bullets, (4) taking a picture at "just the right time" (the game gives you an indicator of when that time is), and so on. However, the main scoring element is "how many bullets you get in the picture", which obviously encourages risky behaviour.
The game is positively brilliant, even though I kind of suck at it. The mini-challenge model is great for quick breaks, and the patterns are all different and mostly very interesting to beat, with a good mix of "memorization" patterns and "skill" ones. There are enough easy patterns to keep the game interesting for a beginner, too.
Currently I've managed to unlock most of the levels on my office PC (don't tell my boss!), except for the last set. On my home PC, I just started, and managed to clear the first 3 sets of levels.
The game's available from the usual sources - www.paletweb.com and www.himeyashop.com . Unfortunately, no demo is available. Understanding of Japanese is helpful but not required.
Summary: If you only buy one Japanese indie game EVER, this is probably a pretty good pick.
Oh, and some guy with a lot more time/skill than me posted some videos of the more difficult bits in the game on Daily Motion:
http://www.dailymotion.com/Dracil
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Jan 7th, 2006 at 01:31:36 - Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! (DS) |
I'd have posted this earlier but for the fact that I was too involved in playing the game to blog about it.
In short, this game is absolute genius. Even if you don't normally like rhythm games, or can't read Japanese, or both, it's pretty damn amazing.
The premise behind the game is that there's a squad of male cheerleaders (which are far more common in Japan than in the West) who go around Tokyo helping people in trouble. When someone yells for help, they show up and do a song-and-dance routine to motivate the unfortunate individual.
This is where the player comes in. The game is kind of a mix of a rhythm game and Virtua Cop - if that makes any sense - in that the player has to tap "targets" on the screen to the beat of the music. It sounds straightforward at first, but can get pretty hectic. As the beats are tapped out (with cymbal and whistle effects), the Ouendan go through their routine in the background of the lower screen, while the upper screen shows how the motivate-ee is doing. Naturally, there is a life bar (representing the morale of your client), and if it runs out, the game is over. The way in which the stylus and touch-screen are used lends the game a very tactile feel, unlike similar games like Amplitude.
The real genius of Ouendan is in the way that it meshes a layer of narrative with the standard rhythm-game format. Each song corresponds to a particular client and their own little mini-story, which can range from mundane (helping a student pass his university entrance exam) to wacky (helping a pair of slacker cops defeat an invasion of alien robots) to all-out bizarre (travelling in time back to ancient Egypt to help Cleopatra go on a diet). The visuals look like they could have been pulled straight from a retro manga, only with colour, and the comic-book style makes the stories immediately obvious even if you don't understand Japanese.
The difficulty curve of the game is pretty near perfect; I'm not good at rhythm games, and yet the game managed to guide me all the way to finishing the last level on the highest difficulty setting. There's a slight caveat: the last level on each difficulty setting is significantly harder than the rest of the levels, so be prepared for a bit of pain if you're not great at rhythm games. Still, it's engaging enough that you WILL want to finish the whole thing.
If you can't stand J-rock or wacky stuff, the game may not appeal as much to you, but I found it to be amazing. This is probably the best game I played in 2005, and may well gain that honour for 2006 as well.
Three minor flaws do exist. First, it's almost impossible to see the little animations which play in the upper screen during gameplay, as one's attention is fully occupied by the lower screen. Second, the game only has about 15 songs, each with 4 difficulty levels, so it's relatively short. It is, however, worth coming back to, both to better your score as well as because it's simply great fun. Finally, at times some of the icons on the touchscreen may be obscured by the player's own hand. Using a longer stylus or some similar implement is one way to work around this problem, although practicing the song will often allow you to predict when those beats appear and shift your hand to compensate.
To see a gameplay video in Flash (note: this is on Hard difficulty; Normal isn't nearly as tough), head to http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ds/aosj/175r/index.html and click the red button at the bottom.
Summary: I can't recommend this game highly enough. It could well be the most fun I've ever had with my DS.
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Apr 9th, 2005 at 03:33:44 - Xenosaga Episode II (PS2) |
More good stuff, more bad stuff, and more un-ugly stuff.
The good: Episode II's battle system remains fun, and the fights are really tightly designed. The boss fights are especially good. When was the last time you got white knuckles whilst playing a turn-based game?
Also, I think I've become used to the weird juxtaposition of realistic characters and mediocre animation. Either that, or the animators finally realized they couldn't slack off any more.
The bad: The mecha (E.S.) sequences are poorly thought out. Sure, the fights are pretty good (as noted above), but at the same time the E.S. system feels somewhat like a dumbed-down version of the regular battle system (although it does have a few little extras that make it interesting). The field maps are excruciating because the designers made the E.S. move like they're on Valium. Reality check, Monolith: these are not Mechwarrior 'mechs. They are supposed to move FAST. As it stands, my grandmother could run faster than one of these things.
The un-ugly:
(1) One particular event during a boss battle made me, as well as a friend who was watching me play, burst out laughing incredulously. It's probably the coolest boss attack ever. (Thankfully, my party survived.)
(2) If Gran Turismo is "car porn", then many of the cutscenes of this game have to be classified as "mecha porn". They're that good, which makes the sedate nature of the actual E.S. battles even more sad.
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