R-Type Command: Don't Look Back

WARNING! This review contains spoilers...As if you were really gonna play R-Type Command...

Halfway through it, all I'd intended to write about this game was that it's a polished and perfectly competent turn-based strategy that made one glaring omission:


In the mission pictured above, you start at the top of a column and work your way down. Those ships are not running away from that wormy monster- they're about to fight it. Poorly...

And we're not talking about some constantly-walking japanese icons that are just going to swing a sword in any direction and jabber on anyway. Combat in this game is driven by charging big blast weapons, originating from the nose of one's ship.

But after playing through the whole game, this excessive linearity actually seems quite intentional and, I have to admit, rather clever.

The premise of the game is that a young commander is sent on a journey across the galaxy to find and destroy the source of the Bydo, an alien race (originally created by man, to serve man, blahblahblah) whose fleets are approaching Earth in a seemingly endless stream. All previous attempts to stop them have failed.

After 30 missions of mind-numbing Japanese exposition, the commander reaches the Bydo Core, and his entire armada is promptly mutated into Bydo. Somehow they don't notice. They just want to go home.

And thus starts another 27 missions as the other side, going right back the way you came, and every mission not understanding why all the other humans are trying to kill you. I've got to say it got old after the 10th pre-mission monologue, but it was compelling enough that I had to see what happened at the end of the loop.

Yeah, actually you've got about another 12 missions to go...

To make a painfully long story bearable: you finally get back to Earth, blow up a couple buildings, figure out you've become the Bydo, get sad, fly around all depressed while the credits roll, and then run away.

They could have gotten to the point much faster, but so could my mother...Granted, Commander Cucumber could have just picked up a mirror, but how much of ourselves do we ever truly see the way that others do? How often do we acknowledge that we're part of the problem, and do we ever get outside the glass house?

...Also, yes, that picture really does say "Untouchable Sergeant Cucumber's Residual Sanity."

Fieldrunners: are you a cannon or a footsoldier?

Where there is entrenched opposition in every direction and the only way out is through, a brave army hurtles toward hurt in the hope that everything gets worse before it gets better. Some of them may make it, but none will come through unscathed. They carry no weapon but persistence, and no goal greater than reaching the other side. Never has cannon fodder had such poor odds and wealth of zeal, but ask them why and they cannot articulate a reply. It’s just something they need to do.

Final Fantasy Tactics: the third rail of video games

Let me first say that I humbly apologize.

My last post kicked up a little shit storm on Gaming Reddit, mostly because the submission’s title implied I was talking about the original Final Fantasy Tactics when I was really reviewing Final Fantasy Tactics A2.

That was misleading and wrong of me.

And now that we’ve kissed and made up, let’s pick the scab:

The original Final Fantasy Tactics was an overrated approximation of a Tactics game. Its action was onerous, rules of engagement unadventurous, and if all I cared about were plot and its presentation, then I’d go watch a Deadwood. Clearly what’s left of Square isn’t blinded with nostalgia for FFT’s tangled web of high-falutin’ noble talk, given they followed it with not one but two third grade reading level knockoffs of The Never Ending Story, so why should we be?

My non-level-pumped game was saved and lost at Wiegraf too, people, and started over so I could shed a tear for Delita both times, so let’s just talk about this in gaming terms:

The entire job system, much less advancement past Wiegraf, was based on grinding. How hard can your decisions about spending job points be when walking back and forth is not only an option, but expected of you? And speaking of random battles, do you think that just maybe they might be a little more tolerable if you could skip the animations? The greatest improvement Tactics Advance and A2 made was not forcing you to fight…And yet they still forced you to watch…

And what of the battles? Even if you are on an even playing field with your enemy, what about that field and the rules in which you fight upon it affect your tactics? Besides height affecting attack power, where are the terrain influences? Where are the fields of influence around people that prevent you from just walking right past someone and stabbing them in the back? Who cares if someone dies when you can just raise them or use a phoenix down? Who cares if they aren’t dead forever, or at least face some kind of penalty? It’s not like gil doesn’t grow on trees. Come to think of it, I really wish gil would stop doing that.

And don’t give me that shit about this game being too busy “defining a genre” to care about such niggling tactical complexities- everything above had already been done:

Terrain Effects – Dai Senryaku
Field of Influence – Civilization
Death actually meaning something – Warsong
Resource scarcity – Fire Emblem
“Tactical RPG” character development without excessive grinding – Shining Force

In conclusion, I believe that the nostalgia we feel about FFT and the Final Fantasy series in general has let these games stagnate. Forget the phoned in plot – for FFTA2 to be so insultingly non user-friendly, unchallenging and simplified, or, gosh, fun to play, in a world where Advance Wars exists, is a crime. That crime began with the original FFT, and Square-Enix gets away with it because we let them.

Endwar: Turn-Based Monotony

That crazy jungle gym...I think I saw it on the last continent too...
Or was it when I played through this exact same mission as the blue army?

I bought a crate of, like, 217 peanut butter granola bar from Costco for $6 this one time. Probably the best deal I've ever gotten in my life, but given the chance I don't know if I'd do it again. I kept them upright on the floor in my closet by the door and grabbed one for breakfast each workday, bending just a little further down each week. I'd eat a bar in three bites and stuff my hands back in my pockets, shivering on the Dunellen train platform before the sun came up. Sometimes, between the cold closet and colder morning air, they'd harden and stick in my teeth, keeping me occupied almost all the way to Newark. Other times I'd be so tired, hungry, and hungover from last night's fight and drinking in the dark that I ate without tasting. But as sick as I got of seeing those bars, on days on the way to the end of that box when I'd forget to take one for breakfast, it was like a void in my morning.

That pretty much sums up how I feel about Endwar. My save says 84 percent done, and something tells me I'll have to bend pretty far to hit bottom. It hasn't gotten much more difficult than when it began, despite dividing the three campaigns into "easy," "normal," and "hard," and it hasn't thrown a new combat element or objective at me since the 12th tutorial mission. At worst playing it is nauseating, at best it can be played unconscious, but I've been playing the same game for so long now I can't imagine when it finally does end how else I'll be able to fill my time on the commute or commode.

Anyway, it's late and I've got to brush my teeth and play some Endwar before I pass out. Maybe tonight I'll make it to 86 percent completion.

Endwar: Makes me proud to be American

Americans haven't had much to gloat about these last eight years, but take heart that we finally now have a game where our boys are the coolest team in town...

...Of course each nation has the same units, with absolutely zero difference between their attributes, and the other guys are Russia and the European Union, so it's not like we have to stack up against Libya or anything...

But the point is that our inter-battle banter is way better than the alternatives. USA! USA!

BTW, I've been meaning to actually write a review of Endwar, but ironically it just will not end...

Wild Arms XF: Scratch n' Sniff

...Oh Japanese kink...

...you almost make the constant ellipses worth it...

...almost...

Field Commander: Private defense contractors, once again making the world safe for democracy

Got no complaints, I guess. The game lets you skip even more animations than Advance Wars and it kept me from tearing the cellophane on Days of Ruin for a good two weeks.

For uniqueness points, you can destroy terrain and degrade city resource production- not that there'd be any point in it- use stealth snipers, and lay mines. You've got a quicksave and, for the sweetest plum of all, a "next unit" button.

A while back I expressed amazement that another long-running strategy series could have forgotten the "next unit" button, but, in hindsight, at least Dai Senryaku VII had the experiential wisdom to know better than pretend to have a plot.

This is a weather machine. It's going to destroy the world.

Only you can stop it. Better not fuck up, man.

Ratchet & Clank - Size Matters: Supersize me...

Ratchet's not out to expand your gaming horizons with high-falutin open sandbox stealthy jumpy time-reversey space-shifting plot-twisting ellipsestic soliloquy. He provides a palatable product, whose quality consumers can depend upon to remain consistent and readily deliverable, regardless of iteration or environment, with kitschy unlockables, at good value, for the entire family. Like a Happy Meal. He's less the bipedal rodent with which you'd discuss Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy than the one you dial for a 4 am booty call.

The guy's no Sly Cooper, but Ratchet never disappoints. Except, of course, that the camera's about as cooperative as an epileptic on an anime binge until you figure out how to activate auto-strafing.

One thing I cannot condone, though, is the underhanded way they've greased you through since part 2 by rewarding repeated deaths with additional experience and money. Even worse than Puzzle Quest, Ratchet's implied lack of consequences will surely leave a lasting impact on the development of America's fat children into fat adults.

But we all have our guilty pleasures and secret vices. And for a man with such hording, miserly inclinations as myself, there are almost no more satisfying in-game moments than performing a wrench stomp, in a room full of crates, with a bolt magnet. It's something I'd gladly die to do again.

thanks for the photo, mom.

What is this Resigned Gamer?

We here at Resigned Gamer have been reeling from the increased traffic and attention we've gotten since being posted on both G4 and Kotaku. Our mom is certainly proud of us. I was planning to respond to some comments on my Crisis Core post that I found on reddit, but I think I can address them in what I'm writing today.

We started this site to write about the games we play. Not good or bad, just whatever was spinning in the drive (no offense to our solid state DS friends). The point is that we've been doing this our whole lives and it's gotten to the point where we find ourselves playing stuff just for the sake of playing something; anything. So what you'll often find on this site is really an attempt to rationalize the whole time-wasting enterprise of being a gamer. We don't get review copies of anything so more often then not what we review isn't current, plus we both have a backlog of stuff to get through so even when we buy a new game there's other stuff to win before we can get to it. Also we have jobs and girlfriends. So how do we review the games we own and still remain relevant?

Our game reviews don't dick around a lot, I think it's safe to say. You can go elsewhere to read the plot synopsis or the developer's history. I could tell you but I just don't care that much. I'll mention if the plot is crap or not, or if it enhances the gameplay, but I just don't see the point when anyone who makes their way to our site probably already knows all that stuff already.

Sir Cucumber and I concern ourselves with the details that affect us the most as we play a particular game. Instead of developing a tolerance, years of banging our heads against the same blatant design mistakes has heightened our sensitivity to things that ruin a game's experience. This is why we hate turn-based strat games with unskippable animations, game menus with 15 steps before you can even start, run-and-gun action games that make you press a button to pick up items on the ground, and unsortable inventory systems. There are other reviewers that note this stuff, but not many and these game-breaking details get lost in mainstream reviews that have to cover the gist of the game and get straight to the score, or grade, or whatever metric EGM pulls out of their collective ass these days.

I guess the only direct response I have to the commenters on reddit would be that Crisis Core is indeed a high quality production, but no amount of time spent with the game will fix the broken and misguided roulette system. I'm not sure how one can derive from my review that I only spent a few hours with the title. Hour one and hour nine are filled with the same unskippable "random" materia cinemas. I probably should have expected some run-of-the-mill Final Fantasy fanboy sniping, and I guess I'd feel a bit testy as well after watching Square rape the festering carcass of FF7 through every available orifice, including a cell phone game.

But at least the game loads quickly...On a modded PSP...

click for more about the resigned brothers

UPDATE: Let us know if there are any games you'd like to see covered. Yahtzee might not appreciate requests but we sure do.

Crisis Core: Spin that wheel!

The prospect of buying a new psp game is always a crapshoot. How much will I have to use the shitty analog nub? How slow will the UMD load? Will the main character think she's talking to God? Now that I've gotten a chance to play with Square-Enix's latest FF7 retread, Crisis Core, I think I can address some of these concerns.

If you haven't much time to read this, consider these questions: If you like unskippable, random tech-materia summoning animations, you are going to LOVE Crisis Core. If just thinking about Sephiroth's 8-hour long planet-destroying Super Nova magic makes you wet, and if your interface experience with the psp begins, and ends, with the X button, this is the game for you.

Zack Fair continues the fine JRPG tradition of big swords
and emo hairstyles...

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There are some genuinely good aspects to Crisis Core. Character art, dubbing, and music are all top notch, but presentation has never been a challenge for Square. Spend some time with the game though, and you'll be turned off by repetitive missions, textures, and an annoying spawn system. You always know when enemies are going to attack, and given the linear nature of most maps, if you beat a group of enemies, then turn around accidentally and reenter the spawn point, you have to fight them again.

Leveling up in Crisis Core doesn't make much sense. A roulette wheel (sorry, Digital Mind Wave) constantly spins as you fight, sometimes kicking out scores that give you temporary powerups, or triggering the aforementioned unskippable spells. This system also determines when you raise levels, and it is here that the randomness of the the roulette wheel is shown to be total bullshit: you only raise levels when you fight big enemies or tough groups. No amount of grinding makes a difference to your character's development.

I found myself avoiding fights as much as possible since low-level enemies never earned me anything more than a potion or some gil. Even when you do raise a level or get an attribute buff it doesn't feel like any sort of accomplishment.

...This will make the fanboys happy...

Square-Enix's merger may have been good for the bottom line, but I don't see how it benefits gamers. If I wanted to watch unskippable animations I'd pre-order Metal Gear Solid 4. If I wanted to mash the X button endlessly I'd have finished Dungeon Siege. But, in the end, considering the particular standards for excellence of this blog, I'm sure I'll bring Crisis Core on my next trip to the crapper.

...It wouldn't be a Final Fantasy game without some androgyny.

Final Fantasy Tactics, part 3

Foolish mortals, I have drawn you into the depths of hell! Now face the wrath of my hydras, behemoth, and...chemist!

Final Fantasy Tactics, part 2

I've never been much for Judeo-Christian morality, but I do believe in consistency, and find it sinfully incongruous that "atheism" is a status effect with neither completely good nor bad connotations, like, say, "poison," or "regen," while "charm" is only effective on members of the opposite sex.

PSP Firecrotch

From Kotaku: PSP Sets Fire To Schoolboy's Pants

"At the Warner Middle School in Farmington Hills Michigan this morning a fire broke out in a young boy's pants. According to police, the PSP in the student's pocket overheated and exploded, burning hole in his pocket and causing minor burns on his legs."

Looking at the comments in Kotaku's story people seem to be blaming the fault on a 3rd party battery, which are known to cause problems. I wonder though if he left a game running when he pocketed the PSP. Those spinning UMDs tax the battery something fierce. Perhaps if he'd installed custom firmware and ripped his games to the memory stick like any sane person does, this whole horrible situation could have been avoided.

Goes to show what happens when you obey the rules: Lose your PSP and the pants you carry it in.

Final Fantasy Tactics, part 1

Sit still damn it! All this walking in place is making me nervous. Just...Stop...Moving!!!

thanks to jnz and somethingawful for the pic

Final Fantasy Tactics, the War of the Lions: Palaverous vivification

When I was 15 I must have had the patience of a saint.

In my clouded memory, the original Tactics has shone like a beacon of integrity amidst a sea of unskippable self flagellatory battle sequences for nearly a decade, so naturally I felt its new and improved PSP version deserved another go around.

And I should know better than to think any Final Fantasy would indulge my predilection for not wasting time on repetitive twattle, but I guess I'll never learn.

A trip to the options menu (always the first place I go, as a matter of policy) allows us to increase the speed of the menu cursor, multi-height selections and text scrolling, and shave seconds off each move by disabling the boxes which say the name of every action, and then whether that action caused any kind of status effect, as well as the number of experience and then job points earned by every single character including enemies. In fact, you can skip basically everything except the stupid animation sequences.

Oh and since there is neither a quicksave nor a retry option, you have to reset the game before you can load and can't skip the talking before every battle no matter how many times you've had to sit through it.

But any amount of compulsory observation is easily offset by the game's beautifully rewritten script. Have you ever played anything else where people called each other "whoreson dogs" and "milksop rabble?" I didn't think so.

Warhammer 40,000, Squad Command: Did not suck that bad

So either this GameSpot writer was having a bad day or THQ should have bought more ad space, because Warhammer does not deserve such low marks.

Sure it’s got warts- who hasn’t? I’ve got one on the back of my right hand!

Yes, it’s hard to be precise with movement orders in the absence of a grid, but you’re playing without a fucking grid!

Yes, “Many times there is no way to determine how a shot will turn out unless you simply give it a try and squeeze off a round, which of course is a big waste of action points in a game where you need to hoard them like gold,” but you get to choose the odds when deciding how much action to invest in a shot, and what game doesn’t involve an element of chance? Would you rather have to push a button at the right fucking time, every time? Didn’t you ever play Jagged Alliance?

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No, the camera can’t zoom out and rotate 360 degrees to give you complete visibility of the battlefield, but maybe if you weren’t such a fucking moron you wouldn’t need this to keep from getting your stupid head blown off.

And so long as we’re harping on “interface and control issues” and bemoaning what this games lacks: It doesn’t ask you to lick a button to confirm every single waypoint selection, attack order, unit facing, unit stance, or turn completion. All glaring omissions, clearly.

I actually never did “wonder why RedLynx didn't swap the controls.” If you believe it would be “a lot easier to use the analog pad” than the D-pad for anything on the PSP then, I don’t know, go play Wipeout or something.

What I do wonder about is how anyone could say turn-based strategy games “don’t easily mesh with handheld systems.” Are you kidding? FF Tactics. Jeanne D’arc. Field Commander. Battles of Prince of Persia. Advance. Fucking. Wars. Or do you not consider these “tactical simulations” because you can’t blow up walls and barrels? Douchebag.

I take back the part about this GameSpot writer having a bad day. Clearly every day is a bad day for Brett Todd. What kind of a name is that anyway? It’s still not too late to fire this guy and juke the stats!

full disclosure: The lowest review of this game actually came from IGN but I link to GameSpot for comparison reviews because on the whole my inclinations tend to line up most with them...And Ryan Clements is a semantics-obsessed dickwad whose strongest rhetorical nut was that a game called "Squad Command" couldn't let you effectively command your whole squad at once. Who'd want to do that anyway?

O PSP, where art thou?

It hasn't been the best of weeks for Resigned Gamer. After waking up at 3 am to catch a 6 am flight to Cleveland to attend a day of meetings about "the future of database journalism," which devolved into sitting through a sales pitch for a product our company already intends to buy and wondering why we're willing to burn $832.80 to fly me last minute all the way out to fucking Cleveland and back for this but not spring for some decent little sandwiches and more than one pot of coffee and pint of half and half, I lost my PSP.

I just got on the plane, fell in the seat and passed out. Woke up and stumbled off, leaving it in the seatback pocket in front of me. Continental says it hasn't turned up, so I'm looking at you, guy who cleaned seat 21D on flight CO625 on Monday, December 10. Merry fucking Christmas.

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Now anyone who isn't a drooling idiot (read "casual gamer") knows a PSP that isn't cracked isn't worth having, and anyone who isn't a superficial Reggaeton blasting skullfuck (read "Madden fan") knows dem slimz a bitch to mod and the battery sucks ass anyway, but turns out it ain't that easy to get a new PSP Fat these days.

Bought one used at Gamestop but after Doomeru spent half the night charging the battery so he could crack it we discovered the L button didn't work and for some reason the D-pad wouldn't make selections when you pressed the Home button. In retrospect my spidey sense should have tingled when the clerk first handed it to me without a battery cover and rolled his eyes when I inquired about getting one, but it had been over 24 hours and my judgment wasn't at its best.

Brought it back today and- thank god- it was the fat pimply wheezing curly headed white guy's shift (read "not a Madden fan"), who on hearing my dilemma said, "Yeah they gave you a bad one. We always give out the bad one's first," and replaced it with a pristine one from the same drawer.

Still gotta get Doomeru to crackin' but fingers crossed...

...And if it doesn't work out I've always got another one coming from Half.com...No way I'm letting this happen again.

Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops: The sequel to the prequel to the reinvention of the original

Mark down another Metal Gear finished without knowing why I even started in the first place.

Was I curious about the new capture & convert feature, used to build and command an entire team for pseudo-turn-based strategic resource management? Not particularly, and it turns out the real reason you recruit enemy soldiers to walk unnoticed amongst the enemies is because the 3rd-person camera is so gropingly myopic as to render stealth a futile joke. And though having to predict, without so much as a shred of context, which uniform will let you blend in on any given level may reduce Portable Ops to a three-dimensional prescient put-the-round-peg-in-the-round-hole game where the greatest challenge is running around without bumping into people, it's still Metal Gear, right? God damn right.

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Was I curious about how this installment would bridge the gap between Metal Gear Solid 3 and the original Metal Gear Solid, not to mention the highly anticipated Metal Gear Solid 4? Fuck no. All you need to know is there are some guys called the Patriots who used to be called the Philosophers who want to use Metal Gear REX or Metal Gear RAY or Metal Gear RAXA, D, or TX-55 to launch a nuke at America or at Russia or at America and Russia and only Solid Snake or Naked Snake or The Boss or Big Boss or Raiden can stop them, but only acting actually as pawns of a larger plot orchestrated by Revolver Ocelot, formerly known as just Ocelet or as codename ADAM and eventually known as Liquid Ocelot, who is secretly in league with the CIA or the KGB or the President but really works for the Patriots. Also you wear a sneaking suit.

So why did I clog up my 4 gig PSP memstick with this game when I could have been playing Final Fantasy Tactics or Field Commander? Because sooner or later the well runs dry and leaves you with nothing but the choice of starting Harvest Moon Boy & Girl or finally finishing Exit and when that day comes it's not gonna be pretty so by god I'm gonna do what I can to make it last...

...Maybe it's about time I got a good book...

AVP Requiem: Interpretive Predator

Doomeru: Predator's only weakness? Crap videogame adaptations!

Doomeru: He.runs.so.bad!

Doomeru: And why in fuck are there no trees for him to hide in? Predator does not stroll around shooting shit. He's a scalpel not a mallet.

Doomeru: it’s like they never saw the movie!

Sir Cucumber: it's like they took Gun, put it on Mars, and gave you a triangle aiming reticule...

Jeanne D'arc: Crazy bitches will only let you down

...yes, meh.

Loopy tart was so hot in armor but after wining and dining her I'm afraid she went limp. (her. not me.) I started flagging about 3/5 of the way through but saw it through to the end. Never did get hard again. (Her. not me.)

Oh sure the old toasted marshmallow and I had some good times- like when she thought god was talking to her or convinced me she was dead, but relationships require growth from both parties and eventually it seemed she just wasn't trying anymore.

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Look, I know it's nice to keep things simple by making 100 EXP = one level up every time. I get that. And I know Jeanne isn't the first liberal mollycoddler to indulge experience points for inflicting a flesh wound on an enemy or healing yourself, but come on. Where's the EXP AWARD = EXP AWARD/CHARACTER LEVEL modifier? If I can't start leveling slower why can't my enemies start leveling faster? It's cool for characters to be chemically imbalanced, but when it comes to the game itself a little Stoichiometry is in order.

Cause I tried- I really tried- to keep the spice in our romance. I never ran around behind your back for any "free battles." I even gave up drinking...augmentative potions...But when I'd turn off the lights, climb into bed and pull you close it was like you weren't even there.

Friends and family clucked over our troubles, "In this stage, at your age, it should be easy. The hard part comes later."

And oh how I longed for the hard part!

But later, and later, and 24 hours and 33 minutes later, still you wouldn't commit. We fought about it but you'd just roll over. Let me win, like you didn't care.

So now I'm back at the blackboard, a free radical. Time may build new bonds, but it won't answer the question I fear I'll never figure out:

At the core of every RPG is a numbers game. So why can't any do the math?