Listen to the Rain

What does one write about perfection?

Symphony of the Night is the game I've beaten the second-most times, just behind Chrono Trigger (which I'm sure I'll get around to writing about one of these days). I still remember the first time I beat it, in uriany's basement as we boggled at the choice of I Am the Wind as an ending theme. The gameplay leading up to it, I remember mostly in snatches. Farming for a Crissaegrim in the inverted library. Discovering that some weapons had special abilities you could activate using fighting-game-style button inputs. The way I was better at casting Soul Steal when it counted. Trying to do the tricks we had heard were possible--skipping Death at the beginning and keeping your equipment or dashing right at the beginning to end up outside the castle. They're both possible, but we never managed to do either of them.

Symphony of the Night is my favorite platformer ever. It doesn't have the purity of Super Metroid, and definitely not that of Super Mario Brothers, but it has plenty of madcap possibilities and it's those that make me love it. It's relatively easy to shatter the game's balance completely and end up either invincible or the next best thing, but that's the price of freedom.



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Like so many of the indie games I'm familiar with, I heard about Odallus through Rock Paper Shotgun. After playing Dark Souls last year, I was really interested in more games that recaptured that kind of feeling and Odallus seemed like it had a similar aesthetic. The Rock Paper Shotgun review that I read said:

Death comes swiftly but there’s no insta-gibbing and it definitely always felt like my fault. Lovely sense of exploration too.

...and since those are two of the major high points of Dark Souls for me, I put it on my wishlist and bought it during one of the Steam sales. When I got stuck in Gabriel Knight and was sick of talking to everyone about everything and clicking every item on everything, I booted up Odallus on a whim and got sucked in pretty quickly.

It's no Dark Souls, though.



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Some people played NES platformers, the Marios and Metroids and Castles vania that stride across platformer history like titans, and then moved on to the Genesis or the SNES and played Super Mario World, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Metroid, Mega Man X, and Gunstar Heroes. Some of the greatest platformers ever made, games that still stand the test of time even decades later.

And some of us didn't have either of those consoles and ended up graduating to DOS platformers.



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Imagine the perfect NES game. A game with the tight controls and world map of Super Mario Brothers III, the variable weapon choices and themed bosses of Mega Man, the item design of Castlevania, and the bounding pogo jumps and treasure hunting of Duck Tales. Imagine that it could be made for modern systems and wouldn't be bound by NES limitations like four-color sprites and no independent background scrolling. And then realize you don't have to imagine it, because the game I'm talking about is right there in the subject line and I'm not fooling anyone here.

I've known Shovel Knight was great for a long time since basically every review is blasting praise around like it's a game of Splatoon, but I have enough of a backlog that I wasn't willing to buy it until I found a sale on it, and that wasn't until around a month ago. And of course as soon as I started playing it I wondered why I had waited so long because this game is amazing.

This, uh, isn't going to be an impartial review.



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The problem I have with iOS games isn't anything conceptual or philosophical. I don't think they're ruining "real gaming" (whatever that means), and while freemium is a blight upon the earth, it's spread to all games everywhere now and isn't a mobile-specific thing. No, the problem is mostly that i never have time to play them. If I'm on public transit or in bed, I'm usually reading, and if I'm at home I have too many other games at my computer that I want to play, so those get priority. But as I write this I'm on a plane to Oregon for a two week family vacation, so before I left I took the opportunity to clean out some of my iTunes wishlist and loaded my iPad down with some games, and this is the first one I played.



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With this blog post, I can officially inaugurate my Nintendo Power Cover Game series. Based on how many other games I have in my backlog, I expect that it'll take me approximately twice as long as my remaining lifespan to finish, but hey, more than one constitutes a series!

Power Blade is another one of those games I saw in Nintendo Power as a child and thought it looked really neat, but for whatever reason I never managed to find a copy. Maybe I lost interest due to youthful (and eventually successful) attempts to beat Final Fantasy, or maybe I was renting Mega Man III for the dozenth time. Anyway, it sat in the back of my mind for decades until recently when, in the attempt to put off the looming behemoth that is Baldur's Gate II, I dusted off the memories, loaded up JNES, and started playing.

The first thing I learned is that Duke Nukem apparently took extra work to pay the bills between the first two games:



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When I was young, my parents bowed to my pleading and got me a subscription to Nintendo Power. I got on the hype train pretty early, around issue #9, and most of the cover articles were on the games you'd expect--Mega Man II, Super Mario Brothers III, Tetris, Ninja Gaiden II, Final Fantasy, and all the games that have stood the test of time. There was one game that doesn't quite fit in to that hallowed pantheon, however, that still got a cover and lit a fire in the imagination of young me: Metal Storm.



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I'll admit at the outset, it's pretty easy to win my approval if a game lets you play a sneaky ninja. That's pretty much the second character type I'll play in any game that allows character customization, either after I play my go-to character--an elf wizard of some kind--or initially if it's a game that has neither elves nor wizards. A sneaky sniper in Fallout 3, a sneaky archer in Skyrim, a thief in the Quest for Glory games, that kind of thing. So Mark of the Ninja didn't have a particularly long row to hoe.

Even with my initial bias toward it, I was surprised at just how much I liked the game. You start it up and the story is conveyed in a few seconds: you're a ninja, your clan is under attack by bad dudes, you better get on that, son. And within a few moments, you're hiding in the shadows and sneaking past guards and climbing on walls and ceilings and, once you get your weapon, flipping out and killing people. If you're into that sort of thing, anyway--the game is theoretically completable non-violently, though the tools you get to wreak mayhem are so much fun that I abandoned that approach after the first level.



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I bought this something like three years ago, played a level, thought it was kind of neat but really easy, and then put it aside until last weekend, where I played through all of it except the last two levels. Had I realized that it was that short I probably would have played it earlier, but then you wouldn't have this review.

Capsized is a side-scrolling platformer with all that entails, though its particular shtick is that there's a lot of verticality to the levels and your little space dude has a grappling beam that lets him move around a lot, as well as a jetpack that you can find fuel for. The parts of the game that aren't about murdering everything that moves with your variety of weapons are mostly about using the grappling beam to move rocks around to get to new areas or swinging yourself to higher ledges or across pits. Fortunately, there's no falling damage.

There's plenty of other damage to go around, though. While the early levels are very easy, around level six the difficulty level spikes rapidly. Initially your space dude only has to deal with alien fauna and alien tribal guys who throw spears, but then you run into swarms of bugs, or aliens with bullet-resistent shields who throw exploding green goo at you, or alien priests who can fly and hurl fireballs, or huge alien grunts that shoot lasers and teleport all over the place. How does that work? I don't know. Nanomachines, son.

The art style is really good:


It reminds me a lot of a Aquaria, with all the rich colors and half-seen terrain features in the background as well as the prominent use of flora. And anything that reminds me of Aquaria automatically gets props from me. Also, you should buy Aquaria right now.

The story is...well, you can probably learn nearly everything you need to from that picture and the fact that the game starts with a crash landing. After genociding your way through enough of the planet's population, you manage to make contact with another ship and get off the planet. The end. But like Mario or Bionic Commando, you don't play these games for the engaging story. You play them to jump on goomba heads, or whatever the local equivalent is.

The amount of flying aliens and flying monsters and flying projectiles combined with the verticality means that sometimes the screen gets really crowded with things trying to kill you, and it's quite easy to swing the wrong way while grappling somewhere, collide with an alien, and get knocked into more aliens or alien bullets or alien spears or alien fireballs or alien gas or alien squidbats. It took me quite a few tries to beat level 11 because of that. schoolpsychnerd will tell you that I'll fight the same battle in Fallout 3 or Oblivion 15-20 times until I win without complaint or even really any recognizable expression or acknowledgement of what's going on around me, but that definitely didn't happen with Capsized. I suspect the difference is that I always felt like I died because I screwed up my strategy in Oblivion, whereas with Capsized I felt like I died because of stupid random bullshit.

Admittedly, dying due to stupid random bullshit is an integral part of the side-scrolling platformer and part of becoming skilled at those games is minimizing the circumstances where you are subject to randomness, and that's eventually how I beat stage 11.

Overall, the gameplay is fun enough, but it's nothing special. There are times when I'd execute a jetpack+grapple maneuver that let me run rings around the aliens and feel like a badass, but equally there were times when the physics would go wonky and launch me at high speed in a direction I didn't want to go, leading to my hideous demise--sometimes one after the other. The weapons are pretty generic, and while there's a good balance of scarcity that requires you to switch weapons, I often just shot everyone with the basic pea-shooter to conserve ammo, and some of the weapons are so situational in the context of high-velocity grappling or jetpacking around that I barely ever used them because I found them ineffective most of the time.

So, yeah, middling marks. Fortunately, there's a demo, so you can see if you like it before you buy it. Just remember that the first level is not really a good representation of the gameplay of the entire game.

One of the best NES games is called Blaster Master[1]. Jason's pet frog jumps down a hole in the ground after being mutated to enormous size, and he follows it and finds a big metal tank hidden down there, which he immediately gets in and starts driving around because plot (although hey, big metal tank with the keys in the ignition, teenager...). Seeing the giant horde of mutants that live within the bowels of the earth, he decides the logical thing to do is fight them all to get his pet frog back. Of such elements were the stories of NES games made.

Note that the story of the Japanese version was totally different, with nary a frog to be seen.

It was hard. Not because the moment-to-moment gameplay was hard--it was a fairly standard Metroidvania[2] platformer, though with the addition of top-down dungeon segments when Jason left the tank and walked around and shot things--but because the bosses were brutal and there were limited continues and no way to save. A few of the bosses had a special cheaty way to beat them, whereby you could throw a grenade and pause the game and the grenade would continue exploding and doing damage even while the game was paused. The game even looped the hurt sound effect during the pause screen, so I'm not sure how this bug made it into the final game, but nonetheless it did. Not all of the bosses were vulnerable to it either, and one of the bosses that wasn't was the boss of Stage 3.

That boss was a square that teleported around and moved between various avatars while shooting you. As you shot him, he a) started moving faster b) started teleporting at more frequent intervals. That took me a lot of practice before I could reliably beat him, and there were several playthroughs that ended at that boss or not long after due to how many lives I lost trying to kill him.

(Skip forward to 2:00)

Watch on YouTube

Yeah. It's like that.

Okay, now put on this music to set the mood, because it's fantastic and is also relevant to the story:

Watch on YouTube

Stage 5 mostly took place underwater, and when you first get there the tank can't navigate. It can jump higher underwater but can't swim, so the stage is mostly just a continuous process of descending to the bottom of a gigantic underwater trench and fighting the boss at the bottom, who gives you a module to install into the tank that lets it swim, thus allowing you to make the climb all the way back up to the top. On the way down, you have to destroy a barrier using your tank's gun to descend to further depths. This will become important later.

The boss of Stage 5 was a Giant Crab Thing that shot bubbles at you. That sounds ridiculous, but it was actually quite difficult:

Watch on YouTube

Note the "zero gun" challenge bit there. That probably needs some context, so let me explain. You could power up your tank only by killing bosses and getting the enhancements they dropped, but you could power up your character by finding powerups in the dungeons. Obviously there were health replenishing powers, but there were also gun powerups that would power-up your main gun, so it went from shooting tiny bullets about 30 feet to shooting bullets across the screen to shooting bullets that moved in a wave pattern to shooting bullets that moved in a wave pattern and went through walls. If you got hit, your gun lost power, and the scaling was unequal--it depowered faster per increment than it powered up. I'd usually power my gun to max in an early dungeon[3] and try to avoid getting hit for most of the rest of the game, because a fully-powered gun makes the game vastly easier.

Well, it turns out that filling the whole area in front of you with bubbles while having your only weak point being the mouth from which the bubbles are actively shooting out of is a pretty effective counterpoint to a gun that shoots wave bullets through walls. Even assuming that I had managed to maintain my gun level, it was hard. And if I hadn't, or if I died? Forget it. Any game that managed to make it past Stage 3 died at the boss of Stage 5.

Except for one. One game, I was dodging bubbles and throwing grenades and fighting and all of a sudden, the crab started exploding. I think I kept shooting for a couple seconds because I couldn't believe it. I mean, the boss of Stage 5 was unbeatable, right? Well, apparently not. And I grabbed the tank powerup that allows the tank to swim and left the dungeon.

When I got out, I started swimming. See, this time I had left the tank farther behind than I usually did, just to see if I could make it all the way down to the bottom of the chasm without it. I mean, I wasn't going to beat the boss anyway, so I was setting other challenges. But then when Giant Mutant Crab was dead, I had to swim up back to the tank, so I did. I swam up and up and up, halfway up the trench, and that's when I found the wall. I had left the tank on the other side of the barrier that you had to shoot through to progress, and when I went into the boss dungeon, it had regenerated. The tank was there, mere feet away, but may as well have been as far away as the moon. I had one life left, but if I tried to die to restart with my tank, the game would end and I'd lose all my progress.

I stared at the TV for a few moments, turned the game off, and never played it again.

[1]: Though with a much better Japanese title. "Super Planetary War Records: Metafight"? Awesome. It's like how Crystalis is "Godslayer: Sonata of the Far-Away Sky" in Japan.
[2]: Pre-dating the term! It has the same "get powerups, backtrack, now you can go new places" mechanic, though.
[3]: That dungeon had enough powerups to take your gun to max and the enemies were so weak you were highly unlikely to be hit; a combination that was rare to nonexistent in any other dungeon.

I used to listen to angsty, depressing music, like the Cruxshadows.

Then I started listening to happy music, like Utada Hikaru and video game soundtracks.

Now, I listen to happy-sounding music with angsty-depressing lyrics. Things have achieved a balance, of a sort.

Watching this video has made me want to play Symphony of the Night again. For a platformer, it was pretty damn good. It had plenty of RPG elements, which is something I'm a huge fan of (I even went and found a mod that added RPG elements to Unreal Tournament. I don't know anyone else who used it, and the bots weren't the best at point allocation, but it was still fun), the castle was huge, there were all kinds of moves you could pull off...SotN is basically the Castlevania game against which all others should be measured. It should be fun to play again. Now, if I could just manage to beat Xenogears...

I saw The Illusionist tonight...again. It wasn't bad, though I liked The Prestige better. Not that the two movies are really comparable, except insofar as A) they're about magicians and B) a lot of the movie seems to be about one thing but is actually about another. The Illusionist didn't have sci-fi elements, though (well...not really), which does make it better as a period piece. They're both worth seeing, regardless. :)

Wedding invitations have been assembled. We'll be sending them out soon.