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

Party Game Sundays: Wacky World of Sports

I originally started this feature to tell the world all about the terrible games we were playing every single Sunday, but somehow we haven't played anything that was offensively bad since then. This past Sunday we continued with our surprisingly good games trend. I was told to pick a game out of the pile of games that Landers has at his disposal, and I chose Wacky World of Sports.

Looking at this box art I made an educated guess about the game. I figured it was a mini-game collection that was super terrible, but it was trying to overshadow that fact with it' over the top anime art style. Instead what I got was a surprisingly weird, but competent sports themed mini-game collection with an over the top anime art style.

Okay, I guess I use the term sports lightly, because none of the games are really sports, but they kind of are. There are ten of them, which range from things that could actually be considered sports like pole vaulting, to fanciful madness like rhythm based ironing. There are ten games, and each have a few variations. Surprisingly the variations actually make each mini-game seem different. For example one of them has the characters tossing fish as far as they can, while the first variation of it has you throwing the fish at specific targets to gain points. 

Get ready to toss some tuna!

I guess I've just become so used to Wii games having terrible controls, so it's always surprising to me when mini-game collections specifically control well. There wasn't a single time in this game that I felt like I wasn't performing because the controls were working against me. The only issue was with the instructions. Prior to each game the loading screen shows small icons with the wii-mote making the correct motion. The problem is that it's not always easy to understand, but we figured them all out eventually.

I actually really liked this game. The sports were all wacky just as they were advertised. My personal favorite was boxing. It starts off like regular boxing. You can throw out punches, block, and dodge. Dodging slows down time and allows for a counter attack. Where it gets weird is that at the end of each round a table appears in the ring and you take turns playing memory with cards. If you match seven pairs then you automatically win the round. If the matching round ends without a winner, then you have to go back to beating each other down. Extreme ironing was also quite fun. You're skydiving, while ironing. You gain points by thrusting the wii-mote and pushing A in accordance with the music that's playing. They're all just super weird and kind of creative games.

It took us a while to figure out the cheese rolling,

Sure, the games are fun, but my favorite thing about the whole game is the art style, which really contributes to the wacky world. Apparently in this alternate world the Wacky World of Sports is an organization and you're trying to become the new champion. In the beginning you can only choose from four equally ridiculous characters. One is a ninja, whose name is Sasuke. As you can probably imagine he speaks in a terrible Asian accent. I personally played as the weird lolli girl, because I always have to be the pretty lady when I play these types of games. Landers played as the huge lumberjack who seemed like he had some type of mental deficiency. He begins each game by saying "it's axing time", but it sounded suspiciously like "it's sexy time."

As you play through the game's story mode you can unlock additional characters who are all equally stupid. I personally really like the highfalutin British guy who's way into cheese rolling and always says "Upperclass". Somehow the art style meshes really well with the crazy world the game is trying to create. 

His name is Sasuke, but he looks like Naruto. Get it!?

Wacky World of Sports was actually legitimately fun, which was the exact opposite of what I expected from it. Next week I'll try my best to pick a bad game, because I feel like we've been on a good streak for too long. In the meantime I'll leave you with this hot screenshot we took while playing.

Party Game Sundays: Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games

Since it was Noukeo's Birthday we decided to play a game that we thought might not suck. In order to do that Noukeo purchased Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games. Prior to this past Sunday I had never tried a Mario & Sonic Olympic game, because I'm a very jaded person.

In the 90's when Mario and Sonic were in the middle of Nintendo and Sega's console war no one ever thought that they would be in the same game together, but if they were it would be the greatest game of all time. Instead the game that came out was Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games in 2007. Instead of taking the time to play it I wrote it off as a shitty mini-game collection. There must have been people who really liked it though, because they keep pumping them out now.

This image is amazing. I don't know how I was ever down on this.

Even though I was jaded in 2007, I am even more jaded now. I have lived through numerous Party Game Sundays and have seen true despair. I now realize that while Mario and Sonic could have come together in a cooler game this is completely fine. Nintendo at least puts a little effort into their games, because they want the Mario brand to mean something. That's not the case with most of the games we play on Sunday, so I'm always down for anything Mario related. More often than not the game will be pretty good.

I've decided that the name of this game is too long and no longer want to type it. M&SOWG is actually a very fun game. As you may have guessed it has mini-games themed around the Winter Olympics. Things such as bobsledding, figure skating, and hockey are all available to play. The cool thing is that since there aren't an overabundance of these games each one is developed very well.

I want to go bobsledding in real life.

There were four of us playing, so we formed an Olympic team. We had to work together to score well and earn medals. We were playing in festival mode. We were trying to be the best team by the end of the month long festival. Each day would consist of playing two mini-games. We began by training in the game so that we could learn the rules. The event I remember the most at the moment was bobsledding. All four of us were in the bobsleigh and we had to tilt the wii-mote in order to turn. It was super weird, because if one person was being an idiot the whole sleigh would veer off course. The goal of most of the bobsledding events was to collect coins. It's always surprising to me when motion controls actually work.

Outside of the mini-games themselves the game was just well put together. You can go around the Olympic village and spend coins you've earned from events on various things. You can buy clothes and cosmetic changes for event objects such as snowboards and sleighs. If you play as your Mii you can even unlock sweet clothes. As you progress you can also unlock new music from both Mario and Sonic games and have it play during events.

I've always wanted to see Luigi snowboard.

We only played halfway through a festival, but I'd really like to play through the rest of it. We didn't get to play hockey, we just did the training. It was dumb, because we were just shooting the puck into ice blocks and not actually playing a game.

I could actually see myself playing M&SOWG on my own time. The newest game in the series is for the Wii-U and I'm sure it's of the same quality, if not better, so maybe I'll pick that up as well at some point.

Party Game Sundays: Birthday Party Bash

This past Sunday was a special day for two reasons. The first being that my brother came to Party Game Sundays for the first time due to the promise of cake. The second being that it was my friend Noukeo's birthday. In order to properly celebrate we popped in Birthday Party Bash and had ourselves a proper birthday party.

Before I started this feature Birthday Party Bash was one of the games we played that didn't completely suck. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that it's good, but it's okay. It was just fun enough that we have now decided to play it every time it's someone's birthday. Obviously the best way to celebrate someone's birth is to force them into playing a very mediocre Wii game about a birthday party. It's pretty meta.

It's not a party unless everyone has a WII-MOTE!

So in Birthday Party Bash you start by making a character. They can either be super young, or super old, and no matter what they look super creepy. You have to name them and choose how old they are. Instead of choosing our real names we tend to go with something vulgar and then set the age to 99. The real fun starts when you choose the party theme. There are a whole bunch of things like construction, princess, glamour, and medieval. This particular time we went with princess, because in real life we were dining on princess themed plates and drinking from shot glass sized princess cups.

After you pick the theme you then need to play the game, which is probably the worst part. The first time we ever played it we thought it was good, but every subsequent time we found ourselves moaning about how much each mini-game sucked. I'm getting a bit ahead of myself though. So yes, you do play mini-games, and yes someone wins, but that doesn't mean anything. See, there is no ranking system, so even if you win it doesn't matter. After each mini-game a new party element is added, like chairs or presents. There are a few rounds that really shake everything up. When you get the party hats your in game characters start to rock the hats during the mini-games. Even better is when you get the noise makers and can shake the wii-mote constantly to make super annoying sounds.

Open the presents as fast as possible, but beware of the terrible motion controls!

Outside of the mini-games everything is magical and funny. It's easy to laugh at the stupidity of a game about a birthday party. The mini-games themselves just aren't that great and most of them go on for way too long. There's one where you need to pop balloons. I normally give up halfway through it, because winning doesn't mean anything and jamming A for 3 minutes isn't very appealing. Some of the games don't have anything to do with parties, which you may have guessed from the balloon popping game. Some of them do though, like pin the tail on the donkey, which is actually pretty fun. You just have to be the closet to pinning the tail on the donkey. You can only tell how close you are by how much the wii-mote rumbles.

The best one by far though is the cake stacking game, which is somehow sponsored by the real cake mix company Duncan Hines. How they ended up getting a real sponsorship for a game this lame is completely beyond me. Perhaps they liked the mini-game as much as I do. You take turns dropping cakes onto a gigantic plate. If your cake falls off, or you make anything fall you're out of the competition. This always leads to everyone involved trying to drop the cakes at the most awkward angle in order to screw everyone else over. It sounds lame, but it's actually super fun.

Who doesn't enjoy going ham on a pinata? 

Birthday Party Bash is stupid, but that's what makes me like it. The dumb ending may be my favorite part of all. When you complete all the games a birthday song sing-along takes place. The words appear at the bottom of the screen, but the game says no words. You and your friends have to try and sing the song, which is pretty much impossible. There's no sense of rhythm in it anywhere and the timing appears to be different with every single repetition. They had to make up their own song, because using the real Happy Birthday is always out of the question. It's just a dumb game that's kind of fun. I actually look forward to playing it again. Lucky for me my Birthday is in June, so I'll get my chance to be the party leader soon enough!

Party Game Sundays: National Geographic Challenge!

This past Sunday I had to go to a stupid meeting, so I arrived to Party Game Sunday a bit late. Due to that fact we ended up playing a few board games instead of the usual video games. Lucky for me I didn't write about the games we played during the previous Party Game Sunday! Now I get to do that, which is exciting for everyone.

The first game we played was National Geographic Challenge for the Wii. The case for the game makes it seem like some kind of adventure game where you travel across the world and play various mini-games, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. Instead it was a game almost entirely about geographical trivia, and shitty puzzles.

GET READY TO PARTY!

The goal of the game is to claim the most countries in the world. To start you choose a mode of transportation and a starting country. You then move around to other countries. You can move to the one next to where you are, or one a few countries over. If you go a few over you'll need to answer a travel question for each country you pass over. The questions all have to do with the country you're passing over. They range from insanely hard to painfully easy, so that's fun. Once you reach the country you need to answer either a series of questions about the country, or put together a dumb-ass puzzle.

It may sound like I'm being kind of harsh on the puzzles, and that's because I am. They suck. You either need to put pieces onto an already displayed image, or fill in blanks. There's also a dumb one where is shows some of the image and then you need to guess what it is, but the choices are never in the image shown. That's because it's only showing a portion of a larger image.

*Face palm*

The same things happen if you're trying to take a country from another player, except that you both figure out the puzzle or answer multiple choice questions.

When you take the game as what it's supposed to be then it's fairly competent. It's a decent quiz game for learning about geography and learning various factoids about the world's many countries. It's just not fun. Sure I got a little excited when I answered questions to take countries from someone else, but that's because I like winning against my friends.

This is a game about learning and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that I'm not attending Learning Time Sunday. I show up for the party and this game certainly didn't bring that.

Note: This game is also for the PS3 and 360, which is totally nuts, because the graphics suck.

SUPER PRESS START

I saw this earlier today and decided that it had to be shared. Youtube user NickSplosionFX has put together every single Super Nintendo start screen and it's an amazing 9 hours and 3 minutes long.

It's amazing how much nostalgia I can feel for a 3-5 second start screen in a video game. When ActRaisers music came on I got a warm fuzzy feeling inside. The second it started playing I knew it was ActRaiser. I didn't even need to see the title card.

Perhaps if you have 9 hours of free time you should check out this amazing video, or you know, just check it out for a bit.

Game Time - March 2014

I'd be lying if I said that I didn't spend a majority of this month playing Dark Souls 2. In fact I'm taking a break from it right now in order to write this. I've decided to not write anything about Dark Souls 2 yet, because I haven't beaten it. I have a feeling I'm very close to the ending, so when I get there you can bet I'll have a whole lot to say about it.

There were a few things this month that tore me away from Dark Souls 2 though, which is what I'll be telling you all about in this installment of Game Time. InFamous: Second Son came out, which I believe to be the first true next generation game for the PS4. It looks incredible for a console game.

I finally got around to playing Fez too, now that it has been released on PlayStation consoles. I bought the PC version for like $2 a while back during a Steam sale, but only played it for an hour or so. This time I downloaded it on the PS4 and actually completed it. I now understand why people praised it so highly when it originally came out.

I also played the newest addition to the BlazBlue franchise, but I'm not very enthused with it. It's another BlazBlue game and I find it harder and harder to get excited about the franchise. It's even harder now that ARC System Works has shown Guilty Gear Xrd Sign. It just made me realize how much more I like Guilty Gear than BlazBlue. That's not to say that BlazBlue is bad, I'm just not as into it as I once was.

Welcome to Game Time.

InFamous: Second Son

When a new console comes out, I find myself wanting to show it off. When the PS4 came out this past November there really weren't any games I could do that with. If I was going to do that now though I would definitely use InFamous: Second Son. For a console game it looks incredible. The graphics are amazing, but they're accentuated by the ridiculously awesome motion capture of all the actors. Delsin Rowe, the main character of Second Son is a Native American in his early to mid twenties. The way his body and face move it's almost like he's a real person. It's weird though, because it doesn't have an uncanny valley feeling that games like Heavy Rain had. It probably helps that he's actually a decently well written character while Cole, the protagonist in the previous 2 games, was generally pretty awful.

Second Son takes place in Seattle, Washington. The city itself is nothing special, but it sure looks good. It's like any other open world city really. You traverse the world in order to go from mission to mission while random events take place. Like the previous games you can choose to be either good or evil and the events will help you work towards either side. What really impressed me about the city is that the textures on everything didn't look like total shit. If you walk up to a sign you're actually going to be able to read it and it's not even blurry, which is some next level stuff.

Look at the texture on Delsin's hat. That's true next generation right there!

I wish I could say that InFamous: Second Son had a whole lot to offer outside of its awesome visuals, but I just can't. In terms of story it's the same kind of thing that always happens when super powers are involved. Some people think they're really cool, while other people feel that anyone who has them is evil and should be imprisoned. In the InFamous universe people with powers are called conduits, but the people who fear them call them bio-terrorists. Delsin discovers that he's a conduit when he comes into contact with a conduit who has the power of smoke. Turns out Delsin can take the powers of other conduits and use them himself.

As you may have guessed since Delsin can steal powers he receives a few different powers throughout the course of the game. He has to seek out new powers so that he can fight an evil lady with cement powers who is imprisoning conduits. Oh yeah, he also wants to get the cement shards out of his family and friends so they can walk again. I don't want to spoil the powers, but I will say that they're all pretty cool. You start off with smoke, which lets you go through vents to get up buildings, dash through fences, and shoot fire from your hands. It all handles very well and makes you feel like a proper superhero. You can get up buildings easily and move around with little effort, which makes traversing the huge city of Seattle fun. It feels a lot more smooth than the other InFamous games, which is nice. The only downgrade is the climbing. Previously you could just mash the jump button to climb up a building, because you'd stick to almost any ledge. This is no longer the case, so climbing is rarely ever an option.

Smoke is a cool power, but I like the second power you get the best.

I really like InFamous: Second Son, but at the same time it's extremely disappointing. The story was pretty good for the first half and then it starts to go downhill. The second half has a few missions that don't really seem related and then all of a sudden the final showdown is happening. The whole second half felt very rushed and the ending is super abrupt. What's even more disappointing though is that the only really cool thing about this game is that it looks awesome. Sure that's great and all, but I want the PlayStation 4 to bring new gaming experiences to the table. I realize that this is very early in the console's life cycle, but Second Son is just more of the same with a new character who has a different set of powers. Yes, it does control better, but that would have come with iteration anyways.

Second Son is a fun ride that looks pretty, but it's short lived and ultimately the same as the previous 2 entries in the franchise. If you have a PS4 it's definitely something you need to check out, but I have a feeling that once more games are released for the console it won't be remembered for very long.

BlazBlue: Chrono Phantasma

I'm not good at fighting games. This is something that I've come to terms with over the past few years. I'm decent at Super Smash Brothers Melee, but that's a very different beast from your traditional fighting game like BlazBlue. The only fighting game that I ever got remotely good at was the original BlazBlue. I could actually do a combo, which is something that I certainly can't do anymore. I used to like buying new fighting games to try them out and have fun, but I can't really do that anymore. A lot of the people around me are on a much higher level than I am, so there isn't ever really a period where we're on a level playing field. I get destroyed on the regular and don't really have any fun doing it. The last fighting game I really had fun with was Jojo's All-Star Battle, but since it's not a competitively viable fighting game no one will play it with me.

Despite knowing all of this I bought BlazBlue: Chrono Phantasma anyways. I mainly got it for the story, which I suppose I'm still interested in. The entire series I've been waiting for my favorite character Jubei to become playable. He's a cat-man with a huge sword and I think he's awesome. Somehow, despite being a main character in the story he's still not playable and it's killing me! Somehow they can make up totally new characters who are playable in each game, but leave out a previously existing character who plays a major role in the story!

I just want to play as Jubei! *Weeps*

So far I haven't played a whole lot of the story, but I do enjoy it. It's in the form of a visual novel. High-res character art of two characters appear on either side of the screen with a text box. It's all voiced and fairly well done. At times it can be a bit unbearable though, which is what's really bogging me down. Sometimes the game can be just a bit too Anime. The characters interactions can be super dumb. It gets even worse when you stumble onto a joke ending. I don't think they're funny and I find it had to believe that anyone thinks they're funny, but I'm sure someone must otherwise they'd stop doing them. I hope they stop doing them.

I'm going to enjoy the story. I just don't know why I keep buying these games. I don't enjoy fighting the computer and get frustrated with my general ineptitude. Hopefully I can re-ignite my passion for fighting games. Guilty Gear Xrd Sign might be the game to do that, because it looks amazing. Also I really like Guilty Gear.

Fez

I wasn't a part of the Fez zeitgeist, but after playing it I wish that I was. The game is amazing. I thought this was going to be one of those indie titles that I finally get a chance to play and then find out it was blown way out of proportion. For Fez that certainly wasn't the case. Everything is awesome whether it be the music, art style, or gameplay mechanics. Everything in the game congeals to make a completely unforgettable game. Fez is the epitome of a polished video game. You can tell that every fiber of Phil Fish's being was put into creating this awesome game.

Fez at first glance is just a 2D platformer, but the protagonist Gomez quickly gets the power to rotate the world with his magical Fez. He is given the knowledge that the world is truly 3D, which makes the game very interesting. In order to make it so that Gomez can get to his destination you must rotate the world, which is in actuality 3D. When you rotate the world you can use new objects as platforms. If you see somewhere you don't think you can get to there is a high probability that you can actually get there if you rotate the world just right. Describing it makes it sound sound really boring, but in action it's really something amazing. It adds something to a genre that's been done to death.

It blows my mind that this image is just one of four possible options of this game state.

In order to advance in the game you need to collect golden cubes. You can also collect anti cubes although they're much harder to get. Golden cubes you can get by picking up bits of cube, or by completing platforming sections. Anti cubes require you to go a layer deeper into the game and figure out its ridiculously deep secrets. For one of the anti cubes I got I had to download a QR code reader on my tablet that gave me a button combination to enter on the controller. What's nuts is that that's one of the easier things to figure out. A lot of them have to do with a language derived from what look like Tetris blocks.

Once you beat Fez the journey isn't over, but it might be for me. There are all kinds of secrets to be discovered and the additional powers you get from completing the game allow for you to do some pretty crazy stuff. It makes you realize that nothing in Fez is just an art choice, or a piece of the background. Everything means something and it's up to you to figure it out. When the game first came out I remember the internet collectively working to figure out how to unlock all the secrets the game had to offer. I don't know if I'll ever get around to decoding the games crazy Tetris language, but it's cool to know it's there. I'm thinking about looking up a FAQ just to go through the insanity that happens after the game is "over."

I love the Fez Soundtrack so much.

I feel weird talking about Fez because it's so old now. I can't believe it took this long for it to come to PlayStation consoles and I don't know why I never bought it on the Xbox 360. It's a very immersive game. I originally planned to play it for an hour or so, but ended up not stopping until I had beaten it, which probably took around 6 hours. Most people have already played Fez, but if you haven't then you really need to. At least look up some of the amazing tracks on the soundtrack.

What's coming out?

I don't think I have any new games I'll be purchasing in April, which is good because I need to catch up with the ones I already have. As I mentioned at the top I'm still deep into Dark Souls 2. I've also started playing the HD remaster of Final Fantasy X for some reason despite the fact that I hate Tidus with every fiber of my being. It's even more annoying that they pronounce his name Tee-dus.

I'm sure I'll play a whole bunch of stuff, so we'll meet back here next month to talk about it.

    -Manny