Party Game Sundays: Start the Party!

This past Sunday I was out of town, so we did not play anything new. I have however, neglected to talk about the game we played two weeks ago on Sunday, so I'll do that now!

As you may have surmised from the title of this post we played Start the Party. You may remember from the Sportsfriends edition of Party Game Sundays when I said I never wanted to play a PlayStation Move game other than Johann Sebastian Joust. That dream was shattered by Start the Party.

I kind of just want to type Start the Party over and over, because it's such a stupid name, but I guess I'll actually try to be informative and tell you what it's all about. I realize I sound super disdainful already, but the game was actually fine. It's a mini-game collection that uses Move controllers. 

Yeah, this is the box art...

You start the game by taking a picture of your face with the PlayStation camera, and then say your name. When it's your turn to play the game will pop up your face and replay your name. They change your voice a little bit, so everyone ends up sounding a lot like the announcer from the N64 classic Diddy Kong Racing. 

Once you set up the players you choose how many rounds you want to play and the game is off. You'll play through various rounds that all have slight variation on what you're trying to do. You might want to last the longest, get the most points, or try and steal points from other players. This is all done by actually playing the mini-games.

What's crazy to me about the PlayStation Move controllers is how well they work when paired with the PlayStation Camera. They make the motion control of the Wii look like complete garbage, which it pretty much is. Since the camera is tracking the movement of the Move controller you can see yourself on screen, This helps, because you need to move closer or farther away from the TV depending on certain scenarios. 

This girl does not look like she's having fun.

One of the games has you using a magnifying glass to find bugs. The closer you get to the screen the bigger the search area is, just like a real magnifying glass. The onscreen image of the move controller is replaced by a three-dimensional magnifying glass so you can see what you're doing. What's really cool is that if you turn your wrist the object in the game will rotate as well, so how you're holding the controller in relation to the camera matters.

In theory this game is really cool as a tech demo for the way PlayStation Move controllers work. The problem is that once again it's a mini-game collection. It has you doing all kinds of things from brushing an alligator's teeth to catching toppings on a pizza. It's all things that we've seen before, but with the added bonus of using a legitimately cool piece of technology. While I did have fun playing the game it just made me sad about the wasted potential of the Move Controllers. I understand that companies make games like this because they're easy to produce and sell, but it's just not fun if you play it more than a few times. 

The most upsetting thing about it to me was that I had the most fun re-recording my opponents name to "dickface" between rounds so that I could hear that whenever it was Noukeo's turn. The gameplay should be more compelling than me being able to yell obscenities about my friends.

Party Game Sundays: Sportsfriends

I've been waiting to play Sportsfriends for what seems like a lifetime now. I did not personally back the Kickstarter, so I wasn't able to play the beta builds on PC and all that fun stuff. I have however watched people play Johann Sebastian Joust and BaraBariball numerous times on the internet. Tuesday the 6th I finally got Sportsfriends when it was released officially on the PS3, PS4, and PC. I began playing it with Noukeo, but we quickly realized that we needed to be playing with the maximum amount of players in order to have the most fun. We grabbed my brother and called up Landers so that we could have Party Game Sunday on a Tuesday. We then played it again on actual Party Game Sunday.

So for those of you who don't know Sportsfriends is a collection of four local multiplayer games. If you don't have at least two people present you can't play any of them. The developers of each game made a conscious choice to not include any kind of AI opponents, because in reality these types of games are best when played while sitting next to other people. It is way more satisfying to trash talk someone to their face after all. The four games are Hokra, Super Pole Riders, BaraBariball, and Johann Sebastian Joust. 

Hokra

Hokra is a very minimalist game. You control a square, which is either green or purple to differentiate you from your opponents. There is a small black square, which I believe is supposed to be a ball. When you move over the "ball" you pick it up. When you're in control of the ball you want to have it inside the area that is the same color as you.

There are multiple stages to choose from, which are all weirdly named after real life cities. They have varying shapes and patterns of purple and green on them. If you're green you want to have the ball on the part of the stage that's green. As you stand there, or the ball passes through it, it begins to fill up with a darker shade of green. Once the entirety of the green space is filled up you win. 

This barely looks like a game, but it definitely is.

In order to spice up the very simplistic gameplay there are a few things you can do. Like in any sport you can pass the ball. This is helpful to get the ball away from your opponent, or get the ball to a teammate. I personally like to pass to the wall and juke around the opponent to catch the ball myself. When you don't have the ball you can dash in order to make it so one team doesn't completely dominate. 

Hokra is really cool, because I think that anyone could figure out how to play it almost immediately without being told how. It takes the most base concepts from what we perceive to be a sport and makes them even more simple. The entire game is made up of colored squares. You're a square, and you need to get the ball into your goal. The fact that it's so simple and easy to pick up is what makes it very competitive, which is awesome.

Super Pole Riders

Super Pole Riders is insane. I don't know how else to put it. It controls super weird, and everything about it is just ridiculous. For starters one of the characters you can choose to be is named Stone Cold Heather and it's a man. You can also be a man with a bear head. You can also play at such locales as Princeton, or a weird version of Mario Kart's Rainbow Road.

You are a pole vaulter, and above you is a ball on a rope. It goes across the entire stage and there is a goal on either end. What you want to do is either kick, or push the ball into the goal opposite where you start. It sounds straightforward, but it certainly isn't. I can't even really explain how you control the game. You use the right stick to move the character and the left stick to rotate the pole. Instead of the pole being solid it's more like a pool noodle, because it bends like crazy. So you can hold the pole up and push the ball towards the opposing goal, or figure out how to plant the pole and kick the ball.

The poles are way more bendy than you'd expect.

Kicking the ball sends it flying pretty far, which is what you want to do most of the time. Sometimes you can't do that though, because your opponent is holding you down with their pole. In order to get rid of your pesky opponent for a bit you can kick them. Whoever is higher while kicking will knock the other person out for a little bit. This allows for some uninterrupted hitting of the ball, which is prime time to just use your pole to push it right up into your opponent's goal. 

I know how to play Super Pole Riders, but when there are four people onscreen everything usually just devolves into total bedlam. When we were playing there was a lot of screaming and accidental kicking. The control is easy enough to get down, but when there are other people moving around you can't really predict what is going to happen. I never got angry playing Super Pole Riders and I didn't even feel bad when I lost. It's just so goofy that I found myself laughing at almost all times.

BaraBariball

For some reason I first heard about BaraBariball during a stream of a fighting game tournament. It's the kind of game that looks simple on the surface, but it has a high skill ceiling. In that way it's well suited for high level play, but I'm certainly not ever going to be playing it at a high level. I'm generally pretty terrible at it.

You pick one of three characters. There's a the heavy Popo, the all around Sari, and the speedy Joshi. BaraBariball is a sport that takes place both in and around water. Like Hokra, your character is either colored green or purple to show what team you're on (You can switch to blue and yellow as well). Each stage has an elevated central landmass, that has water on the bottom. Each half of the water is colored like the two teams, which are your goals. You want the ball to fall below the screen when it's in your goal. 

This is how you score.

It's actually incredibly hard to score in Barabariball if your opponent knows what they're doing. Rotating around your character at all times are a few colored orbs. Each orb you have denotes a single jump, so in a standard game you can jump five times. Once you run out of jumps you have to get back on the ground in order to regain them. This allows for people to fall in the water, retrieve the ball, and get out with jumps to spare. This is why you need to hit your opponents as much as possible. If you hit your opponents when they have no jumps left they will break, which makes it so they can't do anything for a few seconds. 

When you score it nets you two points. If anyone on your team dies by falling through the water you lose a point though, so you have to manage your jumps carefully. If you want to make it either easier or harder you can adjust the number of jumps you have. The high skill ceiling is where I fall off on this game though. I have fun enough messing around with my friends, but there is so much more to the game. You can charge attacks, cancel moves, unleash special attacks, and a whole bunch of other ridiculous things. The BariBariBlog, which can be found here lists a tons of advanced techniques that I didn't even know existed.

Johann Sebastian Joust

When it comes down to it Johann Sebastian Joust is barely a video game, but it is by far my favorite game in this collection. I tend to think that the PlayStation Move is no good and I wanted nothing to do with it. This game alone made me purchase two move controllers and I couldn't be more pleased with my decision.

If you were watching the screen during Joust you wouldn't really be seeing anything. The only things displayed on the screen are colored musicians and the occasional word. The real actions happens off the TV, which is what makes it so fun. Each player holds either a Dualshock or a Move controller. The Dualshocks work well enough, but you really want to be using a Move controller to get the best result. 

The goal of Johann Sebastian Joust is to get your opponents to move their controllers quickly. The ball at the top of the Move controller will be lit up as long as you're alive. If you start to move too fast then the light will blink and rumble a bit. If you keep going after that, then you'll be eliminated from that round. You'll want to keep your controller as still as possible while doing whatever it takes to make everyone else move quickly.

This is all you'll see on-screen. The real action happens outside the TV!

Joust could end up being a game where everyone stands still and keeps their hands to themselves, but in my experience that's not really the case. Classical music is playing the whole time and the tempo dictates how quickly you can move. When it's slow the sensitivity of the Move controllers will be much more sensitive, but when the music speeds up it facilitates charging your opponents.

I'm not going to lie, Joust can get quite violent. When we played there was a whole lot of hitting and some of us even got hurt, but it's one of the most fun video game experiences I've ever had. Rounds go quickly, and it takes seconds to start another. Just playing vanilla Joust is fun, but you can add all kinds of rules to shake things up. You can add in random freezes to the music, so that no one can move for a bit, there is also the option to give players a few seconds of invulnerability while holding down a button on the controller. 

It's a really cool game that uses the PlayStation Move controllers in a way that's super innovative. 

Amazing!

Sportsfriends is an amazing package for just $15. If you buy it on the PS3 you also get it for the PS4. These four games are all very fun and super replayable. I can see myself coming back to this package quite frequently. Joust seems like something that would be particularly awesome at parties, however with alcohol involved it might get a bit more dangerous. That might make it even better though, who knows.

I'm glad that local only games are making a comeback, because it means that we can continue to have Party Game Sundays for a long time to come!

Sly Cooper References in InFamous: Second Son

Now that you can copy screenshots to a USB drive on the PS4 I decided I should do that.

Back when I was playing InFamous: Second Son I took screenshots of all the Sly Cooper references I found in the game. Here they are for your personal enjoyment. The quality of the images is actually quite high for how small the files are. I'm very impressed. Now I can take my own hot screenshots for PS4 games I write about.

Game Time - April 2014

This past month I played a whole ton of Dark Souls 2, and I was finally able to complete it. I haven't written anything on it yet, because I've been debating whether or not I want to do a new game plus run. Turns out I've had my fill of Dark Souls 2, so I can lay it to rest for a little bit. Sometime within the next week or so I'll definitely try to write something about it. I really liked it, but not nearly as much as I liked the original.

Going against my predictions Namco Bandai localized Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, which was released here in the U.S. last week. I don't know why, but even after playing the Japanese version for a ridiculous amount of time and buying all the DLC I'm more than happy to go through it all again now that I can actually read what everything is saying.

The other two games I played were both oddly enough made by Ubisoft. I finally broke down and bought the PS4 version of Rayman Legends, which I absolutely love. Ubisoft Montreal's weird JRPG inspired RPG child of light came out as well, which is not so amazing, but I am enjoying it.

In terms of reading this month's edition may be a bit light. I need to pace myself if I want to write about the insane amount of games coming out in the next two months. It's game time!

Rayman Legends

I always wanted to buy Rayman Origins, but I never got around to it. Then when the sequel Rayman Legends came out I passed that up as well. Back in February Ubisoft decided to use Snoop Dogg to announce a PS4 and Xbox One version of Rayman Origins. It took me a while, but I finally decided to buy it, and I'm angry I didn't buy it sooner. It's legitimately amazing.

I like platformers that give you unparalleled control over the character and Rayman Legends certainly brings that to the table. The last game that felt like this to me was probably Super Meat Boy, which is still one of my favorite platformers. There's something about the way Rayman moves that just feels right. When running and jumping he gains momentum as you'd expect, and actually feels heavy. It's ironic, because he can hover with his hair and has no limbs. He just has his floating hands and legs.

I wish more than anything that this was in the game.

The game starts with this weird alien looking dude waking Rayman up from a long slumber. The dark teensies are causing trouble and they need to be stopped. Rayman begrudgingly wakes up and then you're in the game. That's the whole story. You're thrown into a hub area with a whole bunch of paintings. You jump into a world painting and you're taken to a separate room with a whole bunch more paintings for levels. There are a ridiculous amount of levels in this game. It helps that at least half of the levels from Rayman Origins make an appearance, which is cool because I never played it.

The game overall just has a ton of content and replayability. Every standard level has ten teensies to rescue. Each level also has a bronze, silver, and gold trophy. In order to get the gold trophy you need to have 600 lums at the end, which are the Rayman universe's equivalent of coins. Upon completing levels you earn scratch-off tickets, which can get you lum spawning creatures, Rayman Origins levels, lums, and extra teensies.

Even without limbs Rayman kicks ass.

The replayability in my eyes mainly comes from the challenges. There are daily and weekly challenges, and extreme daily and weekly challenges. These have you fulfilling various tasks to see how you rank against everyone else in the world playing the game. There are two variations. One has you trying to get as far as you can in an endless level, and the other has you collecting a set amount of lums as fast as you can. Every day I end up playing these challenges over and over until I get the best possible score I can. When you start playing there are five or six ghosts of other characters on your screen as well so you have something to compare yourself to. At the end of the day you'll either be ranked bronze, silver, gold, or platinum depending on how well you did in comparison to everyone else. You might stop playing when you have a silver medal, but if more people play you could go down to bronze.

The next day the game pops up a message saying what you won and how many lums you were awarded. The lums are added to your running total. Various lum milestones will unlock new characters for you to play as. Sadly there is so Snoop Dogg character.

You have to rescue all the Teensies!

There's something special about Rayman Legends. It has a crazy amount of charm and I hope that they continue to make these types of games. Rayman took a long break, but he's back and better than ever now.

Child of Light

Child of Light has grand ambitions, but in the five hours I've played it hasn't fully realized them. As you may have heard I like my JRPGs to be grandiose and filled to the brim with side content and unlockables. I personally play RPGs for their story though. Generally they are able to build a very well realized world. While a large part of that comes from the writing, the ridiculous play times they tend to have help as well. The more time you spend in a world the easier it is to throw out more bits of story and information to help build that world. Sadly Child of Light falls short in both of these departments so far.

The exact time the game takes place is never said, but we can assume it's in the Victorian era. A young princess Aurora falls ill and is transported to a magical world, which she must save from the evil witch who is terrorizing the land. She finds out that the plight of this new world she finds herself in is having adverse effects on the real world. In order to help out and eventually get home she embarks on a grand quest filled with whimsy and adventure. All of this is well and good, but so far the story seems like nothing more than a bare outline used to throw the player into this world.

Child of Light looks like a watercolor painting.

All of the characters talk in Rhyme, which is cute at first, but quickly becomes annoying. It seems to me that the quality of the writing was sacrificed in order to have all the lines rhyme. Very little information is given and a lot of lines seem to be spoken just so that there is something to rhyme with. That alone wouldn't be terrible, but the characters don't really interact with each other often either. There are a ton of characters that can join your party, but they don't really have outstanding personalities. Your party members only interact with each other once, which happens after the first battle they've joined the party. You fight five or six battles in order to see the characters interact for about three lines and it never really has any meaningful impact. It's just things like "Oh damn, you're good with a bow. Is it true that your name is Moe?", and other such idiocy (That's not an actual rhyme from the game).

The gameplay itself is pretty mediocre as well. It's a turned based system very similar to Grandia for the original PlayStation. Your character's heads are all on a line. The first 70% of the bar is blue, and the remaining 30% is red. When they get to the line 70% through the bar you get to choose their actions. Once you do that, it takes the remainder of the bar for them to complete their action. The enemies are shown on the bar as well. If you attack them while they're trying to complete an action they'll get interrupted and have to start over. There's an added strategy element to the battles as well. Aurora has a little sprite that follows her around, which you can control with the right stick in battle. If you send him over an enemy you can puff him up with L2, which will slow them down so you have more chances to attack and interrupt them. It works well, but there's very little challenge to the battles, so it gets stale quickly.

Ughhhhh.

Most of the time games like this can fall back on their shortcomings with loot, but Child of Light doesn't have that to fall back on. You don't get new weapons, or armor. Yes, you can collect gems that give minuscule stat buffs, but if you never equipped any of them it wouldn't really matter. Maybe later on everything gets much more challenging, but judging by the way I steamroll everything it probably won't. I'm already five hours through what is supposed to be a ten hour game.

The thing the game does have going for it though is that it looks amazing. The entire world looks like a watercolor painting. If I had to guess this game is a proof of concept for Ubisoft's Ubi Art Engine that Rayman runs on as well. They originally announced it as an open source engine that people will be able to use to create games, but prior to this only Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends have used it. Now they've shown that any type of game can be made with the engine, so perhaps we'll get to see a bunch of cool smaller games coming out of Ubisoft. Child of Light is interesting, but it could have been so much more. It just doesn't reach its full potential, which is a shame.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle

I finally decided to import a Japanese game and then it ends up coming out in the U.S. To be fair I think my reasons for doubting a localization were sound, which you can read all about in the piece I wrote when I initially imported the game. As I predicted they changed almost all the names that would cause them legal issues. The work they had to do for that was minimal though, because they left all the spoken dialogue in Japanese and just translated all the text.

I tend to only play as a character who doesn't have any musical references associated with him, so I don't know if Akira Otoishi still screams Red Hot Chili Pepper every time he summons his stand. It definitely doesn't say it in the text though. Once of the more annoying name changes is to one of my favorite characters. His name is Jean Pierre Polnareff, and that was also his name in the English translation of the part 3 Jojo's manga. For some reason they changes his name to Jean Pierre Eiffel, which just doesn't seem right at all. These are just name changes though, which is a small price to pay for the game actually getting a release outside of Japan.

This is the majesty that is Jojo's Bizarre Adventure!

There is one major thing I don't like about it though, and that's the way the English text looks. The font of the Japanese text is very obviously stylized to be exactly like the text in the manga. The English font looks super boilerplate and out of place almost everywhere it's shown. It's weirdly large and doesn't look good at all in contrast to everything else. I don't know if they even tried to stylize it, but it certainly doesn't look like it. Other than that though the game only has one difference from its Japanese counterpart.

They added arcade mode, so if you want to fight against terrible AI opponents for little to no reward you're more than welcome to do so. If you don't have the Japanese version of the game and you like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure then you should definitely pick this up. Getting a physical copy might be rough, because you can only get them from Amazon and Namco Bandai's store. There's always the chance to snag a digital copy off the PlayStation store though, which I highly recommend. Also, if you want a much more in depth look at the game check out the article I wrote when I initially imported it, which can be found here.

It's heating up!

At the end of May a bunch of stuff I want to play is coming out. Watch Dogs will finally be released, which should prove to be very exciting. It could be amazing, or the more likely scenario is that it will be super average. Transistor comes out as well, which looks incredible. I'm on board with anything Super Giant Games is going to put out there.

Then in June Tomodatchi Life will be dropping for the 3DS. Murdered: Soul Suspect the weird murder mystery game being published by Square Enix will be hitting the PS4. Then of course E3 will be happening the second week in June, which is always great.

Look forward to a whole lot of awesome stuff coming up. See you next time.

     -Manny