Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Memorable Melodies: Ring a Bell from Tales of Vesperia

English

Japanese

Song: Ring a Bell (Kane o Narashite)
Game: Tales of Vesperia
Artist: Bonnie Pink

Tales of Symphonia was the first Tales game I played to completion. I had dabbled with other games in the action RPG franchise, but never really got hooked. For years I sang the praises of Symphonia, but somehow managed to skip over the excellence that was Tales of Vesperia, most likely due to the fact that I didn't have an Xbox 360. After playing one of the new entries in the franchise, Tales of Xillia, I decided to go back to Vesperia and tried it out. I instantly fell in love, and I can say that without a doubt Vesperia is my favorite Tales game.

We're not here to talk about my favorite Tales game though. We're here to talk about the hot jam Ring a Bell that appears in the opening of Vesperia. When you first boot the game Ring a Bell is playing over an anime cutscene. The scene introduces you to the world and characters of Vesperia, and gets you pumped up for the experience to follow. Very rarely do I let scenes like this play every time I boot a game, but with Vesperia I just had to see it through each and every time. Bonnie Pink knows how to set a tone!

Bonnie Pink is a Japanese musical artist, and she sings both the Japanese and English versions of the song. They are obviously the same aside from language, which is why I have both embedded above. Normally I think that songs written in Japanese sound better that way, but she pulls it off in English very well. You can judge which one is better for yourself.

Ring a Bell is a song I turn to when I need to simultaneously pumped up and inspired. I think part of my feelings toward the song come from the accompanying anime cutscene. Rapide is such a badass. Who doesn't love a scarred up dog who fights with a knife in his mouth?

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Memorable Melodies: Klomp's Romp from Donkey Kong Country 2


Song: Klomp's Romp
Game: Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest
Composer: Dave Wise


Welcome to the first in a new weekly series called Memorable Melodies. As you may have surmised from the title I will be sharing my most favorite and memorable video game jams with you. People like to get caught up in the gameplay and plot when playing a video game, but sometimes it's just as fun to sit back and enjoy the music.

Man, let me tell you, I enjoy me some Klomp's Romp from Donkey Kong Country 2. There's always been something about pirates that has grabbed my interest. I can't tell you if it's their lust for treasure, free roaming spirit, or their sick pirate shanties. All I know is that when I think about pirates I tend to get pumped up. DKC 2 is all about pirates! That's the main reason I like the song so much, and it's certainly a tune I will always remember.

The song plays in the very first level of the game, and it perfectly sets the stage for what is to come. It starts off with just the sound of an old pirate ship creaking as the waves carry it along. Then, after a few moments a delightful little sea shanty comes in to accompany the sound of the waves. I like to whistle, and still often find myself whistling to this every so often. In fact, I'm whistling the song right now as I type this. It's just too catchy not to! It perfectly captures the games signature essence, which contains pirates, adventure, and conquest. Dave Wise is a top notch composer, so expect to see more of his work here in the future.

Monday, August 3, 2015

Game Time - July 2015

We're less than a month away from video game releases blowing up again, so in the meantime I've been playing some odd games. In fact, two out of the three are Japanese. One is a new release for July, and the other is one I've wanted to play for years now.

Oh yeah, I also played Godzilla on the PS4. It's not very good, but I think it's kind of fun. Check out a bunch of videos of it on my YouTube channel if you're interested.

It's been a weird month, so let's get right into it. It's game time.

N++

I played a bit of N+ on the PSP, but that was before I had gotten into twitch platformers. What I mean by that is that platforming games like N++ have become much more common since I was in high school. Games like Super Meat Boy have since come along to make the sub-genre much more appealing. I'm not saying that N+ wasn't appealing, but I just wasn't prepared for it's demanding jumps and precise timing. I've always liked platformers, but never been super interested in getting infuriated by intense difficulty. I think what Super Meat Boy prepared me for this type of game by giving me fluid controls. That way you know the game is hard, but fair. When you mess up it's your fault and not an unfair thing done by the game. N++ is the exact same.

What's cool about N++ and its predecessors is that the level layouts are very simple. They're something that I'd expect to see in a very basic flash game. Most of them are inside a small shape with only one or two jumps, but as you go it ramps up quite nicely. On average a course only lasts ten or twenty seconds, so the pace is breakneck. You play as a ninja who apparently loves gold. So your goal is to make it through each course and collect as much gold as possible, as fast as possible. The gold starts off easy, but now that I'm further along I hardly ever collect any gold, because it's set up to make you die.

This is one of the easier stages

Like Super Meat Boy, N++ doesn't want you to stop for a second. Once you die, you're right back at the beginning of the stage to try again. There is almost no break/ I think there's a setting you can change to have it take longer, but I don't know why you'd want that. The thing that makes or breaks these types of games for me is the control, and N++ has excellent control. The Ninja floats through the air with a solid weight to him, and gains tons of momentum on ramps. There's a great sense of speed.

I brought the game over to a friends house this past week to try out the multiplayer race mode. We ended up having a great time. You can have up to four players racing to the exit, with increasing difficulty. You have infinite lives until one player reaches the finish line. After that the other players only have their current life to finish. To make things more interesting whenever a player finished they get to control a missile in order to try and kill the other players. It's interesting that race mode has its own unique levels and there are a ton of them.

How do you even get all that gold?

N++ is fun, and even though it's tough I haven't found myself getting frustrated. As you play you unlock more levels, and color schemes for the game. It starts as black and gray, but you can get a whole bunch more. Some of them are cool, but a lot of them are too crazy for my eyes to handle. On a lot of them it becomes too hard for me to keep track of the ninja. There are a whole bunch to unlock though, but I doubt I'm good enough to get them all. I'm going to try my best though, so we'll see.

Taiko No Tatsujin: V Version (Taiko Drum Master)

I'm a big fan of rhythm games, in case you didn't know that. Much to my dismay very few new ones come to the U.S. and if they do they're far and few between. Due to this fact I get upset when I see how many games in this genre come out in Japan that I'm not able to play. Sure, Persona 4 Dancing All Night is coming out this fall, but I decided I wanted to play a new rhythm game this summer! In order to do that I pre-ordered Taiko No Tatsujin: V Version, or as it's known as in English, Taiko Drum Master V Version.

I actually have a U.S. Taiko Drum Master release on PS2 that came with a sweet drum peripheral. You had to use the drum sticks that came with it to hit on the left or right side of the head, and hit the sides for rim taps. It worked quite well, but I never got very good at it. These games are the same in Japanese arcades, which I hope that someday I'll be able to try out. Newer games in the franchise, like this one on the Vita obviously use the buttons. Like other rhythm games a note highway appears on screen where blue and red smiling drum heads appear on screen. When they reach the white circle at the end of the screen you need to press the proper buttons. Red buttons are head hits, while blue are rim taps. If it's a big blue or red icon, then you need to hit two head buttons at the same time, or two rim buttons. There are various button layouts you can use. The one I prefer has head hits on the face buttons and the d-pad, while rim hits are set to L and R.

The songs start easy like this, but get much more difficult.

As you may have guessed since I imported the game it isn't in English, but that doesn't usually matter for rhythm games, because you just have to push the buttons at the right time. Playing the actual game is no issue at all, but I did have some issues with the newly introduced RPG mode. Since I can't read Japanese I'll try to explain the plot to the best of my ability. You play as one of two living Taiko drums. The two read a book and get transported into a musical world that is being overtaken by evil. In the town they're transported to they meet a young girl who is fighting to save the land. They team up and begin to beat down monsters, This is all I've got. I did beat it, but there are villains who are introduced and other characters who I have no idea about. It actually has a lot of dialogue. That's not the part that caused an issue though.

In the RPG mode you play songs to complete quests. Upon completing quests you get items, which you can activate while playing songs. The weapons I could figure out. They had elemental icons, and stats that were easily discernible. You could also equip special attacks, and healing items and those I have absolutely no idea about! For example in my playthough I unlocked Lili, and Kazuya accessories. Yes, characters from Tekken. I found out that using them as my special attack will do damage. Those were the only ones I figured out. I got at least 40 other ones that seemed to have to effect. The Tekken characters made it easy to win quests involving monsters, but are not so much help on quests where you need to play so many notes in a row. It's hard to gauge, but I still managed to complete the game.

See, I have no idea what this special is doing!

There are still a ton of sidequests I can do, but I think I've reached me skill ceiling. There are four difficulty levels in the game, which are easy, normal, hard, and oni. I can trounce songs on easy and normal. Hard is a mixed bag. Some stages are fine, but others are nigh impossible for me. Then there's oni, which my mind can't even begin to comprehend! The notes come out so fast I can't keep up and my fingers certainly can not move that quickly. The main issue is that the game wants the equivalent of drum rolls, which require you to push the buttons super rapidly in succession. I can't do it to save my life if there are more than three hits involved.

It's a super fun rhythm game with an extreme variety of music. There are songs from a lot of Namco Bandai games and a few Sega ones. I really like all the J-pop though. It's all super upbeat and very catchy. There's a lot of vovaloid stuff like Hatsune Miku as well, which may be my least favorite songs in the game. It has a total of 88 songs in it and a bunch more as DLC. While the Vita isn't region locked for games, DLC is. So I can't access any of the free DLC I got for pre-ordering the game, which kind of sucks. I'm still having a lot of fun though.

Phantasy Star Online 2

Phantasy Star Online 2 was supposed to get a U.S. release. It was never outright cancelled, but it's been years since Sega has said anything about it, so we can assume that it will never receive a release in this country! To make matters even worse an English translation of the game was released in Asian territories, but U.S. IP addresses are blocked. Much to my dismay that IP ban was let down for a few days. It was long enough for one of my friends to convince me to play it and get hopelessly addicted to it before the servers were fixed and I was banned once again. The Japanese version is much farther along than the Asian version, but obviously not in English. Well, not in an official capacity anyways. There is a very dedicated group of individuals who run a proxy and translate as much of the game as they can. So now I'm a level 40 RaCast in the Japanese version of PSO2!

Let's back up a bit though and give some context. When I was twelve I saw Phantasy Star Online advertised in a Nintendo Power magazine for the Gamecube. It looked cool and I wanted it. There were also a few other games I wanted around that same time. On my thirteenth Birthday we celebrated my brother's baptism and my birthday with a party. I convinced my brother he really wanted PSO so he could get it as a gift and I could play it. It worked and I still own that copy to this day. I don't even think he knows it's his game.

Man, robots in the PSO universe look so dope.

So what is PSO you ask? Well, it's a pseudo mmo that's more of a loot driven action RPG. At one point it was online, and still technically is. You can play the PC version for free on a private server, which I did for a long time during high school with some friends. I don't know what it is about PSO that draws me to it, but I just can't get enough of it. You essentially play as a mercenary who is hired to get rid of monsters in order to make planets inhabitable. You have an attack that if timed perfectly can be made into a three hit combo. There are swords, lances, dual pistols, rifles, rocket launchers, wands, magic, and much more. There are various classes you can play as and each have a very different style. The main component to the game is collecting sweet loot to improve your character. With your loot you travel through various areas and defeat enemies on a quest for greatness.

PSO2 is very similar, but takes some aspects of the game that came before it Phantasy Star Universe. PSU was a very short lived game that didn't receive as much love as PSO. It took the same basic concept and added special moves called Photon Arts to the equation. PSU was still active my first semester of college and I played it a little bit. As far as I know there are no private servers for that game.

Monsters can get to be pretty big.

Now we're here in the year 2015 and I'm playing a sequel to my beloved PSO. It's largely the same as the original, but now there are many more MMO like elements, because it's a free to play game. You can pay monthly if you want in  order to get special access to things, but it's not required. It's still the same type of action RPG loot grind goodness I crave. Oh yeah you can also still feed your mag, which is a little robot that follows you around and boosts your stats. I love pet things like that in video games!

The best part about PSO and PSO2 is that you can easily get together with your friends and complete a quest while having a good time. It doesn't take a huge time investment, and it's fun. You can do a quest real quick with a friend, or just do the entire game by yourself. There are quests in PSO2 meant for larger groups of people, but you don't have to do them in the regular progression of the game. I've been playing it a lot as my favorite class the ranger. I go around and blast people with my sweet rocket launcher and it's a whole lot of fun. I'm thinking about doing a feature about my adventures in PSO2, but we'll have to wait and see.

30 minutes left

As I'm typing this it is 11:30 PM August 3rd, which means that Galak-Z will unlock on PlayStation 4 in 30 minutes. You can bet that I'll be writing about it in the August edition of Game Time. My hype for this space shooter is unreal. Then tomorrow the Rare Replay collection for Xbox One will show up, and on the 20th Little Battlers Experience for the 3DS will show up.

I'm getting some pretty solid games in August and I'm very excited to play them all. Watch out for all of this and more in the August edition of Game Time!

Game Time With Manny: Status Update

Hello everyone who consumes any kind of media I put on the Internet,

It's been five or six months since I posted a general update, so I feel like that time is upon me again. I let you guys know that I'm tweeting much more often, I continue to stream on Twitch, I upload videos to YouTube, have a Google+ page, and record podcasts. I've been trying my best to update everything as much as possible, but as always some things fall to the wayside. This isn't intentional, but I only have so much free time to dedicate to all this stuff.

Yes, I stream Inazuma Eleven every Wednesday, and I stream Thursday Throwback every Thursday. These are two things you can count on every week (With very few exceptions). You can also count on me posting a new edition of Game Time to the blog every month. Yes, sometimes it's a few days after the month is over, but I do get it done. For instance, I haven't posted anything for July yet, because it will be going up in an hour or so. It's almost done I just have one final game section I'm working on. So these things you can always count on me having up.

As for everything else I'm all over the place and I apologize. I started off the podcast train pretty strong, but fell off hard. I then tried to get back on the train, and only did two episodes before falling off again. When recording episodes 6 and 7 of the podcast I had every intention of making a new podcast every two weeks. That's realistically not going to happen, especially if I want them to be an in depth discussion. So in order to make them less sporadic I've decided to give myself a schedule of one podcast a month. This gives me time to actually record something, and give you a reasonable time frame to expect it in. So you can expect a new podcast before August is over.

Then there's Party Game Sundays. There was a time when we would actually play a party game every Sunday. That time has passed. We still do play games on Sundays, but they tend to be good local multiplayer games now. I have a ton of games to write about that we've played I just haven't gotten around to it. This coming Sunday I will be putting up the first one. So since we stopped playing party games I wondered if I should even keep doing the feature. I have decided to keep it along with the name, but won't promise something every Sunday. It will definitely be happening a few times a month though.

The main thing I regret is not typing enough on the blog. This all started as a gaming blog and then I branched out. Posting on here only once a month is too infrequent. So along with Party Game Sundays making a semi-regular return I was thinking of doing a weekly feature about game music I am fond of. I still need to think of a good name, but it would be generally easy for me to write up a bunch of short things about music and have them auto post once a week.

As for YouTube I am of the same mindset I was before. I like uncut video. That's why I post all of the Twitch archives on my channel. Within the past few weeks I came up with a new series called Scrubbin' it Up, in which I play various fighting games online. Right now there is only one episode up and it's me playing Godzilla on the PS4. I was planning on doing some with the Street Fighter V beta, but that plan was ruined. So yes, I am still going to update the series, but it will be starting next week (or soon after) and then going every other week.

So let's review what's going on with bullet points.


  • Inazuma Eleven Streams every Wednesday
  • Thursday Throwback stream every Thursday
  • Podcast once a month
  • New edition of Game Time on the blog every month
  • Party Game Sundays on the blog every other week
  • A new musical related blog feature every week (Starting soon)
  • Scrubbin' it Up an online fighting game video series on YouTube every other week
I like doing all of this stuff, but over the past year I've found that free time is at a premium and I can't do everything I want to. So thank you to everyone who reads the blog, watches my videos, and listens to the podcast. I appreciate each and every one of you.