Chrono Trigger's story

Long ago when I originally played Chrono Trigger, I tried to repiece together the storyline, and where and what Crono's effect on time really changed things. So I though I'd write it down today.

Here's how I can understand and/or speculate on CT events.

65,000,000 BC : Lavos crashes into Earth, which eradicates the Reptites, that should have won over Humans.

12,000 BC : Zeal kingdom thrives on Magic and technology, and tries to draw more out of Lavos, but fail at it. The result sends Janus and the 3 sages into other timelines. Trying to draw too much power from Lavos made it wake up and destroy Zeal, including all of the royal family, which led to the end of magic.

It's also shown that the destruction of the Mammon Machine with the Ruby Knife turned it into Masamune, but how it happened in the original timeline is not explained, presumably Schala or Melchior could have done it. It's also unclear how the Masamune went down through the ages, or how it received the two souls of Masa and Mune that were in Zeal before that.

600 AD : Queen Leene was rescued possibly by Frog and the castle guards. While Masamune was not restored in that timeline, Frog possibly led a secluded life. Magus tried to summon Lavos, but was quite possibly killed by it instead. Due to a simple disapearance rather than a defeat, Magus is still venerated in Medina village later on, and the feud between Humans and Fiends is never truly resolved.

1000 AD : Nothing happens just yet, it's the start of the entire story.

1999 AD : Day of Lavos

Now if you start at the point that Crono starts messing with the timelines.

600 : Queen Leene's rescue was changed due to the mistaken identity with Marle. It led to the whole undoing of Yakra, his false chancellor ploy, and was the reason that the prison was built in 1000 AD, which also led to the second false Chancellor in 1000 AD later.

Going to the future didn't affect anything. Going to 65,000,000 BC served one thing, it did serve to explain a link between the Dreamstone that Ayla possessed and the Zeal kingdom, possibly out of the same lineage of tribe leaders. This would make Ayla and Schala blood related though there's millions of years between then.

Restoring Masamune brought down Magus, which is the major turning point in the entire CT story. Instead of being killed, he was sent back to 12,000BC, where he acted as counselor, an oracle, since he already knew about events. His guidance finished up the Mammon Machine and the Black Omen, which were not supposed to be finished in the original timeline.

Magus' effect increase the energy draining potential and stablized it, so while it still destroyed Zeal, it left the Queen alive. Although we don't see it in the story, we can suppose that Janus and the 3 mages were also sent back during those events, although they differed from the original timeline.

Most of the other happenings are minor changes, like changing the greedy mayor to a generous one, or helping Lucca's mom and the forest. Medina village actually gets a little more mellow after they stop venerating Magus, but they are outright friendly when Ozzie is taken out as well in the optional sidequest.

If you tack on Chrono Cross's storyline to it it gets even more complicated.

Humans are called 'Lavos Spawn'. Lavos eradicating the Reptites had the effect that Humans became dominant. Without Lavos, Reptites would have dominated the planet most probably. Thus Lavos helped humanity.

Chrono Cross starts from that fact, playing off on alternate dimensions starting from specific events in time. Lavos is one of those pivotal moments, where Humans win over Reptiles and dragons. That's why you see Dinopolis opposed to Chronopolis, the two most advanced cities made respectively by Reptiles and Humans.

Schala being a major part of the story, I'm still unsure what part she played in the 'fusion' with Lavos into the Time Devourer, but one thing is sure, Serge ends up stopping both Dragons trying to eliminate humans, and Lavos trying to eliminate pretty much everything else. No pressure at all, right Serge?

Another more hazy part is the Masamune, we can't be sure how it reached all the way in that island group between 600 and 1020 AD, and how it got that evil blade reputation and power, although it may just be a prank from the souls of Masa and Mune for all we know, being bored out of their mind after Frog had no more use of the sword.

A reference to Robo is also made, as the giant computer that the dragons try to get rid of called himself Prometheus, allegedly built by Lucca. Prometheus was Robo's true name, which Lucca quite possibly reused as a memory. In CT's final anime cutscene, Lucca is even walking around with a mini-Robo she probably built.

It's all little ties that show that CC and CT are related. That you want to consider them true sequels or not is your choice, but the entire idea of time travels and alternate dimensions already says that the things we know from CT probably don't fully apply anymore. You could consider that CC is an alternate dimension of CT, where Lavos wasn't destroyed and lived on thanks to Schala's power.

Making CC go into time travel would have otentially messed up the already established story and timeline of CT, so the alternate dimension thing was a good idea in that aspect. It was a good way of keeping the 'time travel' to some degree.

Future Remakes?

Being at only a few days from another Remake *slash* Enhanced Port in the name of Chrono Trigger on the NDS, and almost done with Star Ocean PSP, I was thinking back of several good games from former Square and Enix that probably will never get a remake/port, but were still alot of fun to play. So here's a small list of those I remember.

Soul Blazer trilogy

I call it a trilogy due to some similarities, themes and ties in the stories and characters, it's almost unmistakable that they were done by the same groups. The trilogy contains Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma. Sadly, Terranigma never reached US despite English localization due to Enix USA closing doors during the SNES/PS1 eras.

The main theme went around souls and rebirth. Soul Blazer had you visiting worlds and dreams to rebuild the towns and their inhabitants. The main character was the envoy of 'god', which amusingly also had similarities with Actraiser it seems. You received the help of souls for spells and various abilities like seeing invisible things, and could talk to plant and animals. The theme was around rebirth, as various dead people seemed to be reincarnated as animals in the worlds you visit.

Illusion of Gaia had you visiting the world to dispel the cloud of darkness over it. The main character had the ability to transform into the bodies of warriors he borrows the souls from along the story, which makes you use their different abilities as you progress. While the theme was similar, the main thing that seems to tie in with Soul Blazer is when you collect the 50 red gems around the world. The extra dungeon it unlocks has for boss the very first boss of Soul Blazer, in a similar killing strategy and stage.

Terranigma also dwelled in rebirth, but this time on a whole new level. This time it wasn't a fantasy world, it was OURS. Opening Pandora's box literally throws you into a quest to bring back the world as it was, which makes you speed through the entire evolution of the world and the upbringing of plants, animals and humans, down to helping some important history figures to make their contributions, such as voting on the next King of France, helping Wright create his airplane or Edison with electricity. It probably holds the most enigmatic and sad ending I've seen.

Each of these titles would be worth a remake or a port. In fact, I'd love to see them, but seeing their age and te relative obscurity and lack of huge sales or visibility like the mainstream series received, maybe bundle them together a single NDS cart would be wise.

Secret of Mana

This one is not a surprise at all. Considering they took lenghts to actually remake the very first game from the GameBoy to the Gameboy Advance (originally Final Fantasy Adventure) to Sword of Mana. And seeing they decided to get Chrono Trigger out, why not Secret of Mana now?

Sadly while the mana series is popular, not sure they will consider it for a full remake. Maybe an enhanced port, seeing that's all they gave Chrono Trigger. It would still be a welcomed re-addition to the gaming world, as Secret of Mana definitely was an epic quest to play, and even better it could handle 3 players!

Any other title you think would be worth another chance?

Console Wars : A tale of fanboyism

The biggest reason for console wars is usually directly related to high costs of current consoles, combined with the fact that people don't always have the money to buy several consoles.

As a result, people tend to try to justify their hard-earned money spent by siding with that console. It's a bad thing in itself, it makes them blind to the qualities of the other consoles.

Not to say that I didn't do this before myself. When it was Nintendo vs Sega, NES vs Master System, SNES vs Genesis, I kept thinking that my console was the best, the SNES at the time. I still liked to play on my friend's Genesis though, but only because I love games in general. It helped me realize things later. But my tale of fanboyism happened when the PlayStation came about.

Nintendo was priming over for the N64, which was supposed to literally jump a whole console generation, going from 16 to 64 bits, jumping over the 32 bit consoles that Sega and Playstation developed. I didn't buy the N64 right off, but I will admit that I felt a pang of betrayal when I heard that Final Fantasy was moving to the PlayStation, when it was supposed to be Nintendo's property.

Of course, I was blind to the facts that Square owned Final Fantasy, not Nintendo. It just happened that Nintendo was the best platform for them to develop on at the time, and when Nintendo stubbornly clinged to cartridges instead of optical media, it was their undoing on the development of those titles. Square wanted to use the full size of discs, making the PlayStation a better platform for that purpose.

I bought a PlayStation, later a N64, but for different reasons. The PlayStation was to follow the Final Fantasy series, and at the same time game me the chance to play other quality games like Legend of Legaia, Xenogears and Suikoden. The N64 was for Zelda mostly, but I had fun with Paper Mario as well.

That ends my little backstory, so back on subject. It's when I was using my own money to buy games and consoles that I realized that the console wars and fanboy attitude was useless. And today it's even more pronounced. The consoles offer different games. The few multi-platform games are pretty much the same on each, so there's no reason to fight over it.

Basically, someone should buy a console because it has the games they want to play, not because it contains the higher polygon rate. Nowadays I'll admit that you can also buy consoles because of their multi-purpose abilities, like web browsing, BluRay reading, Virtual Console classic gaming-style, etc.

Buying a console because you think it's the end all be all is bad in that aspect. You close your eyes on the actual potential on the competing consoles.

Let's try to think objectively, looking at the previous generation of consoles, as an example :

Dreamcast - Playstation 2 - Xbox - Gamecube

These 4 were technically on this generation. I can't talk about the Dreamcast knowingly, so I'll avoid it. But the other 3 consoles were well known. Xbox arguably had the highest processing power. Yet it attracted mostly action games, first person shooters. Being american made it didn't get most of the Japanese made games, except for multi-platforms like Soul Calibur.

The PlayStation 2 continued in the steps of it's predecessor, and was helped by the fact it was a relatively cheap DVD player at the time. While not as powerful as the Xbox, japanese based and already well-known architecture made it keep most of the RPG series and games. It is the ultimate RPG console in my opinion.

Nintendo had some catching up to do with the GameCube, needing to be forgiven the N64 lack of 3rd party titles. Having the lowest processing power of the 3 consoles, it still had some good potential. It still didn't get alot of third party titles, but it showcased an extremely solid first-party line up, and pushed the 4-player aspect. Not much about action games per say, but alot of party games and pick'me'up games that were perfect for gatherings of all kinds.

So 3 consoles, very different definitions of gaming. Standing by a single console basically meant you closed your eyes to the other kind of games. This generation has a similar pattern showing up, the Wii keeping it's multi-player party games and adding a whole new row of games for more casual people. The Playstation 3 boasts the highest power (arguably) and the storage capacity of the BluRay. The Xbox360 started getting more attention from japanese developers due to being roughly the same as PC titles, and started to attract more varied genres of games.

Yet you still see people siding with their consoles and being enraged at news like Final Fantasy XIII going multi-platform. Can't you be glad that a game will be played by more people thanks to it? Sad that your console is losing an exclusive title?

It's a fact that people waiting passionately on a specific game probably own the console months before the release, the sales of a console are not affected solely by a single title of a single genre. People that are 'meh, maybe' are probably waiting until the last minute, and some of them will simply be glad they don't have to buy a new console for a single game.

But before you buy a new console, you should be thinking of a single thing : will it be worth the money I put on it, will it run the games I really want to play, right now? We can't say what the future will hold, FFXIII proves that things can change, a game can hop console or go multi-platform suddenly.

If you don't buy a console to play games right away, are you looking to only decorate your living room?

Enjoy your games, enjoy your console, but for the right reasons, not blindly like a merchandising sheep.

Link of the Day #2

I didn't have any inspiration, but here's a funny video. If they didn't do that scene on purpose, I have no idea what they were thinking!

Link of the Day #1

On off days that I don't know what to write about, I'll put up a random link to things I liked or found funny. Alot of these may come from GameFAQs friends as well, if you think it's familiar.

So the first amusing link... The Assumption Song! Thank you Ayasu (FFXI) for this one.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/460854

Games I play : Star Ocean First Departure

I kept pushing it off for a while since I wasn't very far into the game. Now I got the feeling I'm reaching in far enough to make it worth talking about.

As a little bit of background, this game was first released on the Super Nintendo, but sadly never reached US. ROM wise, it was also an oddity that required a special chip to be added that contained the graphical data, as apparently the game itself exceed the capacity that the SNES carts were able to hold data-wise. If SNES games were 4MB at most, this game reached 6MB due to that special data, which required some special patches from emulators just for this unique game.

It was also one of the few games that worked in any amount of voice acting on the SNES, although it wasn't that much either. A good part of the opening cutscenes had some voices in it, in English despite being a Japanese game (Star Trek influence?). Yet the SNES audio quality and the harsh compression imposed made the sound clips a bit hard to understand, but it was a step in that direction.

For the PSP, thanks to the capacities of this little machine, there are alot more than the opening that are voiced, and I must say the voice acting is pretty good too. I've played Star Ocean : Second Story, and many of the lines felt right off forced or out of line. Well, that was limited to battles only, but even if you limit yourself to battles in Star Ocean : First Departure, you'll notice that there was some polishing to the lines used, they feel tons more natural.

As for music, I can't remember if the songs are that much different than the original on the SNES, but they meet up with what I expected to hear from Second Story (PS1), so they are very good sounding. They are adequate for the cutscenes, upbeat for dungeons and fights, just the way I expect them to be.

Thanks to a better hardware, it also beneficiated from a graphic overhaul, bringing it on par with the Second Story. The overworld is a rotating 3D map with decent details. In towns and villages, one thing that I remember from Second Story was the detail put to lighting. Normally you'd expect a character to either be fully lighted or shaded. In this game, half-stepping into a shadow did make your character half-shaded too, a very intricate detail considering the amout of shadowy areas you may cross in a village.

From what I can see, this version also received that kind of attention, which is pleasing to see. Despite being sprites over pre-rendered backgrounds for villages and dungeons, the amount of frames of animations used for something as simple as walking is impressive, and you see the same amount of detail in fights as well.

The battles are also taken off from Second Story style, with a large area to roam. The original SNES was a little cramped due to the hardware limitations, but the following games retained the idea of having a real-time battle with positioning and chasing targets with better power at their disposal.

All in all, I found everything I liked of this series, better looking, better sounding. Even though I haven't played the SNES version more than an hour, I still have seen enough to compare and see that this was a great remake/port (whatever you want to call it all considered), and I'm happy of having it in my collection. If you have a PSP and like RPGs, this is a must have.

Games I play : Dragon Quest 8

Actually, this should be at the past tense, but it still fits the theme I suppose.

Dragon Quest needs little introduction. In Japan it was banned from being sold on weekdays due to causing a high rate of absenteeism at work and school, due to the flood of people going to buy and play it. The strong bonds between the 3 main creators of the series made it flourish. I can't say if it was the first game of the RPG genre, but it definitely set the bar for the later games, and each game tried to improve upon it.

Dragon Quest 8 : The Journey of the Cursed King is the latest installment of the series. It graced the Playstation 2 in November 2004 for Japan. USA received a futher enhanced version a full year later, with added contents like voice acting and extra animations (the famous Super Sayian-like High Tension). It was also the first game of the series to grave Europe, which is kinda odd in itself, considering Enix had dropped the US side of ports but kept Europe open for most of the SNES+PS1 era. The only difference is that Dragon Quest is unnumbered in Europe, which led to subtitling all of the new releases.

The game itself, I'm not sure I can properly put it into words. In my opinion, this game was probably the best RPG for the lifetime of the Playstation 2. Sure, there was some great ones, like Final Fantasy X, XII, Kingdom Hearts and Xenosaga, all were pretty and fun. But I don't know, Dragon Quest had something else, which is really a matter of taste and opinion in the end.

First of all, the music. The Playstation 2's ability to play music is nothing short of superb. Thanks to the quality that a DVD can hold, the soundtrack was well done and fitting from the begining to the end. It places you in the ambience of the world, the dungeon or the city perfectly.

Secondly, the world map. As far as RPGs are concerned, I noticed that the PS2 had a very odd pattern. Where as the NES, SNES and even PS1 RPGs all had the roaming world map, most of the PS2 went for other kinds, such as Final Fantasy X and XII that have a traced route on a general map, teleport points to move around, otherwise walking between points. That style is not bad mind you, in fact it's more realistic in a way that you need to physically move around.

But other games completly gave up any kind of roaming, such as Kingdom Hearts or Suikoden III. What was a staple of a map with the ability to enter town was now a thing of the past. In that aspect, I admire Dragon Quest 8's method. Without going with the 'everything is on scale' of Final Fantasy XII, the world was huge and gorgeous, colorful and with plenty of nooks and crannies to peek into, wether it's around a tree or atop a small hill.

The villages looked 'on scale' from a distance, but still were in a different area per say, which required loading, which is closer to the original world map systems. The characters are are scale with the surrounding world, and it feels huge to move around on foot. The world map also scales down when using different methods of traveling, like on foot or flying, yet everything looks the same, just perfect. Plus you can see very far away in the distance while traveling, making it very realistic in that aspect.

Of course, being drawn by Akira Toriyama, the entire world and the characters have a distinct cartoony look. In fact the game was made in cell-shade, which from my understanding is a method of using 2D drawings on minimalistic skeletons, instead of being a fully 3D skeleton like Final Fantasy XII for example. The result is more cartoony, but somehow more detailed as well, which fits Akira's style perfectly in my opinion. And it fits Dragon Quest's style just as well.

Storywise, it was very interesting to follow. The generic 'save the world' quest, but not quite either. There's more involved as the quest starts with the only goal to uncurse the king and the princess. But obviously it won't be so easy, will it?

The battles are elegantly made, the first Dragon Quest to actually let you see your characters in battle in fact. All of the previous games used the 'first person view' of the fight where you'd see only the monsters. This time you can see your characters doing their attacks, spells and special abilities, and even lean over tiredly when low on HP. Monsters received the same attention with various animations for their attacks.

All in all, this was an extremely good addition to my collection, and one I would suggest to anyone that enjoys RPGs. It's not terribly hard, not terribly long (50-60 hours), pure Dragon Quest style with some very humorous scenes and dialogs. A good balance of everything that brings it to the top of my list of PS2 RPGs.

Game intros

Not as much of a history lesson as a tribute to these.

By video game intro, I don't mean once you actually started a new game. Well, in some cases it may apply, like most Final Fantasy games. But in certain cases, it's when you don't touch anything at the title screen, you often get something extra. In certain games, it's the same intro as if you started a new game (like Final Fantasy X). In other cases, it's something completely different and often complimentary to the story.

The first game that used this out of memory would be the very first The Legend of Zelda on the NES. Waiting on the title screen not only let you hear the entire Zelda theme song, but also has a short version of the story up to now, and an extensive list of monsters and items you'll meet. It's not something amazing I suppose, but it's better than simply seeing the first few seconds of Super Mario Bros.' first level.

Zelda games got alot better starting with the SNES, where they added some cutscenes and text to explain the backstory in a better way. Many games used similar intros afterwards, including one of my all time favorites Lufia II : Rise of the Sinistrals.

With the PSX's increased memory storage and ability to play full motion videos, game intros got another push up. Final Fantasy VII had a cinemation introduction when the game is started, which has since then been remade into the PS3 demo that has fueled so many rumors of a full remake.

So what am I building to by saying all this? My personal favorites, the ones that I feel compelled to watch at least once before loading my game, every single time I turn the console on.

The first up is Wild ARMs. The first game had a very catchy song along with the animated sequences. I was pleased to hear it again for its PS2 remake, yet I'm not sure the animation was as good. Different style I guess.


Next up is its successory, Wild ARMs 2nd Ignition, which I didn't play to the very end, but I still loved the introduction, enough to find the japanese song. The US had cut out the lyrics from the music sadly. Even without the lyrics though it was a very pretty song and animation.


And since I'm on a roll, let's put up Wild ARMs 3, which had something even more interesting. As you played through the game, the opening animation actually changed! It changed to reflect certains events that either are about to happen or have happened already. It was an interesting touch that made you want to watch it every time to see what may have changed. To add to this, they also made this animation appear AFTER you start a new game or load a previous save, but you can skip it with Start button. Here's the first version of it, if not mistaken :


Next up is Suikoden. Now all of the games in this series alone could have gotten every mention here, but I saved it for one in particular. While it was not seen as the best nor the most popular one, Suikoden III had it's share of good points, and the anime intro and song is one of those. Its one of those intros I never skipped even ONCE when playing this game, it was that pretty.



And lastly, the very newest entry, that gave me the idea of this subject today : Star Ocean First Departure on the PSP. The song is catchy and the animation is great looking. I'm currently playing this game too!


This is all for today, cya around!

Games I play : NHL 09

Today's blog will be about this game, a bit about the series in general, as it celebrated it's 18th year if I'm not mistaken.

The first game of this style made by EA Sports was NHL Hockey for the Genesis. It was the most accurate portraying of hockey yet. Mind you the previous contenders were games like Ice Hockey and Blades of Steel, which were rather limited.

The SNES did get a version of this series on the next year, but without the NHL logo, so it was NHLPA 93, which had the teams and players, but none of the team logos. Starting with NHL 94 though, they had full license over teams and players since then.

The series started plainly enough, with exhibition mode and playoff mode. With the years they added shootouts, goaltending and full season follow-up. In more recent versions they give even more control and customization with character creation, team salaries balacing, trades and training of recruits.

NHL 09 is no exception to all of those and even more. The full roster of the American League even adds more depth as now you can 'Be a Pro' in the game mode of the same name. It allows you to get into the skates of a recruit, starting with the Merican League and working your way up toward the NHL. Your performances are graded, and each game results in experience points that can eventually be turned into stat increase.

In previous games you'd either get a set amount of points to distribute when creating your character, allowing you to maximize one aspect or another of your character. Another version gave you full control, but as a tradeoff made your base salary grow up exponentially, so evidently the team's max salary would be affected if you tried to play a season with it. The EXP system seems new and very interesting in many ways.

When playing Online, you use a similar system to the 'Be a Pro'. There is an exhibition mode that allows you to play 'the entire team' like previous games. Unless you locked yourself to a position you could use a button to switch to another player of your team. But in online Team Play, you only get to play your character at a single position, and get ratings as well, and eventually experience points to grew your stats. Unlike Be a Pro you're not limited to a single position, you can actually grow experience in both skaters and goaltending, due to being sometimes forced to play either.

I've got to play a few 6 on 6 games, and those are a blast online. When every player is controlled, if everyone is doing their position's work, the game is so much fun. But when you play with puck hoggers, it's bad. Sadly, I've had too many games where the 4 other teammates of my team had for only strategy to 'crash the net'. Literally, each time they had the puck they would ram the goalie and then hit everything hoping for a rebound. That doesn't work often.

The games I had with alot of passing to the defense at the point were fun. Passing the puck around really feels more like the ream thing, and simply shooting from every direction randomly simply doesn't work as well as you'd think. Yes the game allows for some rather stupid goals sometimes, but not often enough to make it worth shooting everytime you get the puck without passing and trying to either one0time it or have the goalie get out of position with a mistimed dive.

At any rate, if you like Hockey, online play and have a PS3 (or whatever, I think the online part is multi-console, not sure), look me up for a game sometime. I got a rental, but I'm pretty sure I'll buy this game now.

Games I play : Zelda Twilight Princess

Wether or not it's an RPG, nothing will ever tarnish down the waves that Zelda makes in the video game world. It was more or less the reason I bought a GameCube (for Wind Waker, but got a Metroid Prime bundle), and it was pretty much what made me buy a Wii on the opening sales day. Number 99 out of 100 on sale at the store I went to, November 19th 2006.

At any rate, while I did already finish this game up almost 2 years ago now, I decided to play it again recently, after getting everything needed to play in HD. I got a new HDTV 40' that runs in 1080p quality. Too bad the Wii doesn't support that, but widescreen + proressive is already smoother.

Playing it again reminded me of the whole charm of the series, and even more of Twilight Princess. While the game was built for GameCube, it certainly was no pushover in graphics. The lens flare, lighting and overall world had no lack in quality. Even if you can poke a bit of fun at some polygonal issues like Link sheathing his sword through his hat in the cutscenes, it's not like it distract from the game itself.

I'm currently moving through the second half of the game, spending a bit of time doing extras before tackling on the next dungeon area (the desert, for those that played it). There's so many things to do, places to look at... Overall Twilight Princess felt smaller than Ocarina of Time, and even smaller than the vast sea expanse of Wind Waker, but when you take the time to cover it, you realize that it's much bigger, just spread into different sections rather than one connecting field. And each inch of the map is detailed.

The tool selection is also the most varied of any other game. Some tools get upgrades, and none of the 'longer chain' kind that Ocarina gave to the hookshot. We're talking upgrades that actually change the way you use the same tool, like Dual Claws. Not to mension the variety of objects. Actually, Majora's Mask had more tools only if you consider every mask as a different tool, but most of them were useless save for getting a single heart piece. This game only has tools and a few varying things like Arrow-Bombs and the mask that acts as a zoom that can combine with it.

Dungeon wise, I must say that it probably felt like the 'easiest' Zelda up to date, but that's probably only because of my experience with all of the previous ones. As I played through this one, I tried to go from memory, and some puzzles were easier due to knowing where to look for the solution/clue. But then I realized that this game is FILLED with puzzles, which is no different than most other Zeldas as to dungeon progression. Yet I felt that I did a whole lot more running around than other Zeldas to find the keys, tools and rewards every dungeon had, and that's where Twilight Princess still feels fresh.

Additionnaly, I'll say that the puzzles and dungeons are very fun and ingenous. Especially the Goron cave with the magnetic walls. It's one thing to think in 2D (aka Link to the Past). It's another to work in 3D (Ocarina of Time), but it's an entire new concept to think 3D and in every direction like over walls and upsidedown. So it may not be the first game that plays in 3D, but it surely is one that pushed the 3D uses further.

Plus the nostalgia is there. If it's extremely hard to put the games in a perfect timeline, there's still plenty of clues left around that provides clues and historical evidence of it's placement. And Twilight Princess doesn't escape that. The entire map has landmarks more or less placed like Ocarina of Time, at least on the GameCube since the Wii version was mirrored to help with the right-handed swordplay.

For example, Kakariko and Death Mountain are due east from the castle. The castle's placement is different being dead in the center, but that's the same as Link to the Past I suppose. Lake Hylia and other features are also positioned roughly like in Ocarina of Time. While placement is the same, the worlds couldn't be any more different in feeling though.

There's some people that seems to had disliked this game for 'being too much like Zelda', which I find ridiculous of an opinion since it IS a Zelda, how could it be anything else? Zelda defines the Action Adventure genre, and I wouldn't want it to be any different. If you haven't played this game yet, what are you waiting for?

Games I play : Perfect World

A relatively new game for me, as I already spend most of my gaming time in Final Fantasy XI, I sometimes need a change of pace, so I look at other games. It mostly depends on how I feel though, wether I play online or solo on consoles or handelds. And this is one of the online ones.

Perfect World International is a free to play MMORPG. How is that possible? Well, there's plenty of them around nowadays, it's a system called Micropayment. Basically, rather than pay a price per month, you can use your money to buy in game items. Those will range from simply cosmetic to adding bonuses you couldn't get otherwise. But essentially, these are absolutely not necessary to playing the game.

Perfect World seems to be based off ancient china for the most part, but in a fantasy setting. The choice for character creation is limited to 3 races, which split into 2 jobs each for a total of 6 jobs available. The bases are there : warrior and tanks, archers and healers, mages and pet masters. Like most of the MMORPGs, the game is split between doing fetch quests that requires you to kill a certain amount of monsters, or killing said monsters. Each increase your experience points, spirit points and money, as well as random equipment drops.

In a Diablo-esque style, equipments can also have added bonuses that may need to be identified by an NPC first for safety. Skills are bought using both currency and spirit points, and their learning rate depends on your levels and progression within your class. Some quests are necessary to upgrade your character toward greater 'divinity', and certain skills cannot be learned until you do.

Also, flying abilities like wings or mounts can be obtained at level 30 for any jobs, but Winged Elves have a basic rather slow flying at level 1. Flying is the way to go to avoid any kind of encounters, but amusing you cna carry out battles while flying, though it eats your MP for every second of combined flying and fighting, while it costs no MP to simply fly around.

What I liked about the game compared to other MMORPGs in the same style is the character creation process. Most of the time free MMORPGs get this very limited creation system, like 2 hears and 3 hair styles or 2 skin colors, not much different in all honesty. Perfect World allows you to upload a picture on screen for you to compare, and modify all finer points, like the size and position of nose and eyes, their rotation, width, color and such. The only thing I felt was missing was the character's height, which ends up being static. Fortunately, your gender is also not enforced by your job or race (I've seen it in other games, yuck).

For those interested there's also controlled PVP possible. Meaning you actually got to set yourself as PVP, and a color system on the characters name tell you if a character is a renowned PKiller. Being killed in PVP gives no exp or item loss, except if you have some reknown, in which case being defeated may result in exp loss and losing pieces of equipment you were wearing. Basically, you can PVP, but at your own risks if you overdo it. Killing normal monsters and completing quests apparently lowers that reknown steadily if you think you accumulated too much of it, so it's also forgiving to a degree.

At any rate, if you feel like trying it out, it's free to play (just a relatively hefty download I suppose, 2.5 gb or so), so take it for a spin. If you want, follow this link, which will give me a referal as well : http://www.perfectworld.com/referral/key/b850bdc39a986536b3cd72e995336486

The info on what referals offer are on the site, but basically it will give me some ZEN to buy some extra items like I talked about earlier. I'm not begging you or anything, as I said before those are not necessary. Just a small bonus to a friend I suppose. If you do join, I have a female Cleric named LifaLockhart on the Sanctuary server (PVE).

What defines an RPG

This is another subject I wanted to talk about in more details. There's been several debates on forums about what constitutes an RPG game.

The term RPG litteraly means "Role Playing Game". The term was created for the Dungeon and Dragon tabletop games at first, and then used for computer and console games that used a similar system of stats and level up progression. This is opposed to action games like Super Mario Bros that is all about jumping and evading obstacles.

But the freedom of action of tabletop cannot be converted fully into a programmed game. The coding that would allow to destroy any object, burn any peasant and do any action regardless of story would be impossible to code down. Or else you'd be in the Matrix.

Thus the term RPG was divided into two categories : Pen&Paper, and Console. Pen&Paper is never used, but RPG still mostly defines this kind of game fully. Console RPG is the term given to any kind of computerized RPG. But commonly speaking, not many people will call it "Console RPG", they will just short it down to RPG. The same reasoning applies to video game creators, like Nintendo or SquareEnix, that only create computer/console games, thus it would be redundant to call them "Console RPG" in their advertisement.

The need to call the games RPG or not is mostly for categorization purposes. Alot of people will take a better look at a game knowing what category it belongs to, such as First Person Shooters, Platformers, Puzzles or Sports. In reality, most serious gamers with access to the internet will know the genre of the game without needing it to be explicitly written, due to impressions, reviews and such. The categorization ends up being used mostly by casual gamers, a bit like people looking at the ESRB rating.

But what defines an RPG, or rather a Console RPG? With the progression of consoles, stronger CPUs and better graphics and sound, some games break the mold and dwelves into different genres at the same time. Let's look back at the basis :

Dragon Warrior was released in 1986 by Enix. Instead of having our hero hop on monsters or shoot from a toygun, our hero sets out in a quest that involves talking to people for clues, battling monsters for exp and gold, buying your equipment and lodging, seeking ot treasures at the bottom of dungeons. Instead of going from point A to B like in most platformers of the time, the game left it to the player to figure out where to go next, thanks to the various clues left.

A similar game was released by Nintendo, but had a much different gameplay. The Legend of Zelda was equally non-generic by the progression, yet differed in many ways, like the hero only grows in strenght thanks to tools found in dungeons. The NPC interaction for clues is practically non-existant at the time, turning it into a task of 'burn down every tree' to find the next dungeon entrance, only to go through it and realize you can't progress due to a missing tool that is in a different dungeon, meaning you went in the wrong order.

While the two shared similar aspects, there was only fundamental difference that I believe makes the entire difference between the two games : Random.

In Dungeons&Dragons, the idea was to replace physical and mental stats into numbers. That was due to the fact that you can't simply use real life strenght to pose an action from a make-belief world. and your character can vastly differ from your real life persona as well, thus the basis of a Role Player Game. To translate the various factors that goes in the process of a successful action or not, they used Randomization with dices. The success or failure translates outside factors like stress, misjudging distances or slippery surface of terrain or tools.

In video games, most people will consider 'RPG elements' when it contains stats, levels or menu based interface, yet those do not make or break the RPG genre alone. Alot of games well known as RPGs will also use various gameplay features to make the game fresh and new, rather than a copy of another game with a different story.

For example, the Tales series is one that changed out the battle system from strictly menu and turn based to a more dynamic street-fighting style of fight. Final Fantasy 4-5-6 chaned the team-turn base system to a speed-based system that allows speedy characters to get more attacks than monsters. This is not considering the more Action games that incorporate RPG elements, such as Dynasty Warriors using levels and experience points, or Dirge of Cerberus that is essentially a First Person Shooter that uses levels, stats and money.

For stats, levels and experience points, not all RPGs will even use these. Final Fantasy II and X for example don't use any levels, FFII doesn't even use any experience points at all, while FFX changes those into Sphere points and level, which essentially acts the same but allows the player to progress in different paths for both stats and abilities gained. Other games like Final Fantasy : Crystal Chronicles replace levels entirely by items you gain after certain levels.

So if Stats, Levels, Experience points and Menus don't constitute an RPG alone, what will ALL RPG games have in common? Yes, I said it before. Random.

Take the Tales series again. The battles are street-fighting, yet you have little to no bearing on wether or not an attack will land, and most attacks you won't get to evade either. Yet the game will randomly decide if you land a successful attack, or if you block an incomming attack.

In Dirge of Cerberus, even a point blank shotgun attack can result in a miss, or a critical hit even if not aiming for a vital point like the head in most First Person Shooters. Also, damage dealt by attacks are entirely random and dependant on your stats.

In Dark Cloud, the characters don't even have stats properly, everything is from your weapons. You find items to increase your HP as well. Yet your attacks can still miss and your damage will vary with some amount of randomness.

There's a difference to make between randomness of stats, damage, accuracy and evasion, the the randomness of monsters behavior. For example, Dynasty Warriors may contain random elements like officers blocking your attacks or different soldier placements, yet damage, accuracy, blocking and evasion are consistent with your button press. There was no such buttons to block or evade in Tales game, as a comparison.

Random monster pathing has been part of alot of games, like Zelda. Yet Zelda is not an RPG due to the lack of any randomness. Your damage dealt and receive will be unvarying from the same attacks, different attacks will obviously deal different damage, but there's no variance whatsoever between two of the same attack.

Your own damage progress with the sword/tool used and the type of attack, but otherwise is also static, two of the same monster will need the same amount of hits. Attack, defense and evasion are entirely at a button's press. Zelda pretty much created the entire category known as "Action Adventure", which other games like Castlevania and Metroid share similarities with.

As a conclusion, the category may be a tool to help people pick games of their taste, but with the genre broadening, stretching into other genres and constantly trying to make new things, games are hard to fit into a single category nowadays. Most games seem to be hybrid of several genres, very few entirely are 100% pure action or pure RPG with nothing else. It begs the question :

Does it really matter?

Port vs Remake

Yes, two posts in two days! I'm on a roll.

*ahem* Anyway, today I decided to write down once and for all my stand about what makes a port and a remake. It's a subject of many debates on the forums as wether a game should be considered a port or remake. In the end, it's just your personal opinion on it, but I think it's better when you can offer an educated opinion at least.

Let's start with the very basic definition of them :

Port
A port is when a game is taken from one console to the other, without a generation gap or little differences. For example, adapting an Xbox game to the PC is a port.

Remake
Remakes are when a game is made on a console of a different generation, which requires some changes in the way it's coded. A good is Wild Arms : Alter Code F, from the PS1 to the PS2 version.

Now that's fine and all, but when you look at the very basic definition, that's where some confusion can be created. The definition of remake implies that if they are created on another younger console, it's a remake. Thus Final Fantasy 4-5-6 on PS1 were remakes. Most people will agree that it hardly constitutes a 'remake' when you play it, and they are right. But we're talking about the basic definition here.

In reality, most people will consider a remake if it changes the game in major ways while keeping the story and basic gameplay the same. For example, Final Fantasy 1 from it's NES days didn't change much when it was ported to the MSX and PC in Japan, but the Wonderswan version had alot of changes. We're talking mostly bugfixes along with an upgrade in graphics and music. The PS1, GBA and PSP versions were essentially ports of that Wonderswan version, but still can be considered remakes of the original for all intents.

We could add to the remake definition that it also requires recoding the entire game. The FF4-5-6 on PS1 had no such thing done, only small additions for saving to a memory card. Otherwise, the game was more or less a ROM slapped on a CD, complemented with FMV and art galleries. Graphically, musically and gameplay wise, nothing had changed, not even most of the bugs and glitches.

On the other hand, the GBA version of these same games seem to constitute a remake in that aspect. The code looks like it may have been redone rather than adapted, as most of the bugs were fixed (and in certain cases new ones appeared). Graphically they are essentially the same, musically they needed to be downsized from the strong SNES music player to a more limited GBA music player, but otherwise the game looked and sounded so alike that people wouldn't think about it being a remake.

To add to the confusion about the whole port versus remake, let's hop back to ports. Ports are supposed to be when games are made on the same generation of consoles, for example if you took the various versions of Super Street Fighter 2 on SNES and Genesis, they had very little differences. Some ports were a little more odd, like Bart vs the Space Mutants that was on the NES and the Genesis, talk about a generation gap!

Nowadays it's even worse. The 360 and PC essentially are made on the same architecture, making ports easy between the two. Change a few things, add some graphic options and there you go, PC version. But the PS3 is built on a more complex architecture, and alot of developers have troubles porting their games to PS3 because of it. For example, while there is a Dynasty Warriors 6 on both PS3 and Xbox360, Warriors Orochi 1 and 2 were made on Xbox360 and PC, yet only on the PS2. There is no PS3 version, which seems to indicate that they didn't want to bother with recoding or adapting the game for the PS3, while they could just reuse most of the graphics and the engine they built with the previous games on the PS2.

So basically, a PS3 game needing to be recoded would almost constitute a remake rather than a port. Confusing enough yet?

In conclusion, how about you call it whatever you feel like, and stop trying to categorize it? Are you going to play it if it's not a port or a remake? If you're not going to play it, don't bother us with it either! If you're going to play it, what does it matter if it's a port or a remake?

Still alive

Yeah, I haven't forgotten about this place, just lacked the time to write in it. So let's try this again with something else. Still about games, don't worry.

Today I wanted to talk about one of my favorite games, not necessarily the best ever, but the kind that you should play at least once. It's always a matter of taste when it comes to games after all.

My review for today will be : Dark Cloud 2.

My first experience with Dark Cloud was from a friend, let me try his copy of Dark Cloud (the first). While there was some interesting Action RPG aspects, plus some amount of simulation, the game didn't keep my interest due to various factors, mostly the weapon creation system and the thirst system in the dungeons. Those really annoyed me. But I'll explain those in more details later.

Dark Cloud 2 was a gift from a friend that didn't like it, and I must say that it blew me away. Most of the issues I hated with the first game were gone, and replaced by a very good storyline that kept my attention enough to do two different playthroughs of near 80 hours each, and that's a feat in itself.

Story
The story is somewhat about time traveling. There's an evil demolishing cities in the present, which makes them disappear in the future. Monica, a princess from the future, sets for goal to rebuild or save the towns again to fix the future ones.

The story is a tad Disney-ish when it comes to the bad guys, most of them ending up being 'misunderstood' or 'controller' rather than evil, but it all fits well in the storyline. The voice acting was on the notch, and very fitting with the action.

Gameplay
Obviously, the bulk of the game doesn't come from the story though, the gameplay is rock solid. There's so many things that makes this game, it's hard to pick what to talk about first. So let's go for battles.

Battles are either carried on by Max or Monica, a typical ActionRPG with autotargetting and HP, but no experience points come to build your levels. Instead monsters defeated add points to the weapon used to kill the monster, and in turn allows them to be turned into crystals to fused into other weapons, or get other items turned into crystals to fuse unto weapons. The weapon need to gain levels to allow more fuses to be done with it. There's several weapon types to take account of :

-Max uses a Hammer and a Gun. Each of them level up separately depending on which you used to defeat each mob.
-Monica uses a sword and a magic armband.
-Max and Monica both have an alternate 'summon' to use, which also requires separate experience points. Max rides a robot armor, that can be outfitted with different kinds of weapons, bodies, defense, batteries and such.
-Monica morphs into one of 12 different monster types that all have different exp and levels.

Weapons and summons have a duration to them, a certain amount of attacks they can perform before they 'break', but fortunatly breaking only limits to being unusable until repaired, dealing no damage, unlike the first Dark Cloud where a broken weapon was permanently lost. Certain monsters take more durability out of your weapons because of their defense, and all monsters can be more weak to a certain kind of weapon as well.

Weapon upgrades require that your possess a weapon that has high enough attributes, which creates a huge tree of possible results. Fusing more materials to them increase their attack power and stats, and once they reach certain levels of each stat they can be morphed into stronger versions with higher maximum stats. Also fusing them allow to carry certain abilities, like increased resistance to breaking, elemental damage or knock backs.

The levels carry out by random mazes that are automatically mapped for you as you explore it. Each level usually require that you find the monster that carries the key that opens the exit. But once all monsters are defeated in a maze, that's where the fun part is :

You can collect medals as rewards in every stage, which are used to buy new outfits for Monica and Max, it's more for the amusement factor than usefulness though. Each stage has various conditions for those medals as well. There's a 'clear within X amount of time' on every stage, but also 'kill with a specific weapon' only. Plus you can get an extra medal by completing the mini-game, Spheda, on each stage.

Spheda is available when you clear the stage, and you only get one game of it per stage clear. Each stage will have a reward for completing Spheda as well, as materials and items. Spheda is a sort of Golf game, with different rules as the ball and goal change from Red to Blue. The ball changes color by hitting obstacles or walls, and will be attracted by the opposite color, repulsed by the same color. You have a set amount of hits allowed to reach the goal, so you need to reach it on the opposite ball color within that limit. Certain stages are near impossible so you may have to repeat the stage often to clear it. But all in all, Spheda was my favorite part of this game.

Also you can get into Fishing on most stages, which allows you for some Fish races back in the hometown. I haven't dwelled into that one much though.

Lastly, another interesting part of this game is Scoops. Scoops are basically taking pictures of objects or specific events, like a certain monster attack. Scoops are then used to create recipes, that will allow you to create more items, weapons and parts for your robot. But you don't get a clue about recipies, you mostly take random items you photographed and mix them up until you get results. Following a guide is almost required to find all recepies and scoops as a result.

I could probably talk alot more about this, but I'd say, go try it instead. It's a PS2 game, if you find it at bargains or rentals, take it for a spin!

Games I play : Final Fantasy XI

Today I decided to dedicate this to the games I play. I did say I'd post whatever comes to mind, and I've been putting it off for too long I suppose!

So today, Final Fantasy XI. I've been a regular player since the US launch in October 2003, technically November since with delays in shipping and stuff I only got it installed by the 31st and started on November 1st.

At first I had a random server and city, not really knowing anything. My computer also had a rather craptacular framerate. The Official Benchmark could barely get 1500 points, a minimum of 1000 was almost required to play at the expense of just everything. It prompted me to get a new computer, which I didn't regret doing either.

From a P3 866mhz I went to a Athlon XP 2500+ (1.8 ghz or so), which was pretty good at the time as the chips were stretching past the 2.5 mhz mark and no Dual Cores yet. That increased my benchmark score to over 3000 right there. That computer lasted me over 3 yars before I got my latest gaming computer, which is a Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 (x2) ghz.

Anyway, at the time, the webcomic Real Life had a grouping planned that weekend on the Phonix server, in the starting town of Sand'oria. Using a little trick to re-randomize what server you end up on (took me a good 25 tries too), I got there a whole day late, and then the group was so big that they had to make a subgroup, so I never managed to get a hold of any of them, and trudged my way with random groups (called Linkshells), until I met up with Madsen from LittleGamers, a Linkshell that lasted over 3 years before drama just broke it apart.

From the start I wanted to be a Paladin, but getting there takes some patience on its own. My personal goal was to gain some notoriety, some fame, which for an online game is not always easy with thousands of players around. Not necessarily being a legend, just the kind you spot the same and go 'I know that guy'.

I had a break of over a year along the way, but it took me almost 3 years after I joined to get my Paladin to level 75, the maximum attainable. The feeling of being there is quite unique, and dramatically changes your outlook of the game from there on. You look back at all the work you did and you can only keep going back for more on other jobs.

Yes, this game allows a single character to have more than one job, so I also have White Mage, Red Mage and Bard all at 75. I'm nowadays more often a Red Mage due to needs in the groups. Even if Paladin will remain my favorite job, I always enjoy being able to offer what jobs I have available for the greater good.

So here it is, a picture of my character made with a modelviewer that allows you to play with the poses a bit. This was used in my sigblock that I'll link right after.

I'm currently wearing the entire relic set of armors for Paladin, the Valor set. These are time and gil consuming to acquire due to their relative rarity and difficulty to get. I might talk about that in more details later.






And there's the sigblock, which I try to keep updated with my current levels and progress in the game. I created the basic model of it, but Ayasu of Phoenix made it look even sweeter with his superior Photoshop skills, hehe. It represents nicely my 4 jobs, and a bit of humor from a Phoenix Wright fan.

If you wonder, the 3 letters are the abbreviations for the jobs in the game, currently 20 existing : Warrior, Monk, White Mage, Black Mage, Thief, Red Mage, Bard, Beastmaster, Dragoon, Paladin, Dark Knight, Ranger, Samurai, Summoner, Ninja, Blue Mage, Corsair, Puppermaster, Scholar and Dancer.

More details on the game some other day perhaps :)

History Lessons #3 : Music part 2

Been a little while huh? Well still alive, and here for more. Today I decided to continue on the music side of the gaming evolution. Last time I went through the MIDI standard. This system was used in most consoles up to the NES, as systems would have their built-in instruments and/or sounds. Only a few exceptions had some samples on the cartridge, mainly voice samples. The next generation brought numerous changes.

Starting with the SNES era, games started to increase their size, and allowed for a new system for music to be used. Sound samples would be stored on the cartridge, and then read at different pitch and speed to simulate instruments. This was called Modulating. This system is still in use in newer generation consoles, although thanks to better compression and higher CPU power they are also able to use higher quality sound files (like MP3s) in certain games instead.

When I hopped on the internet some 10 years ago, one of my main interest was collecting these music of games. That's where I learned about these different systems for music. There was a website, now defunct, that concentrated on collecting these files, and then fanarts and stories. It would eventually evolve into what is today's RPGamer, but at the time it mainly concentrated on Final Fantasy music, since it was such an inspirational source.

Similar to MIDI files, most of the music files hosted were fan created. This was well before the MP3s and small file sizes. At the time, a CD-quality 3 minute song could easily take upward of 25 megabytes. That looks ridiculously small with today's gigabyte hard drives, but when you worked off a 56kbps dialup modem at 5k/s download, and using 1.4MB floppies, those were huge to carry around. Today, a MP3 takes roughly 1MB per minute of music with relatively high quality compared to what we had back then.

Thus fan created sounds attempted to recreate the music as close as possible without blowing the filesize out of practical range. The first was MIDI, the second was Tracking, otherwise known as Modulating. The programs were numerous, from FastTracker to ModTracker, with equally numerous file extensions, many programs worked to reproduce the sound system consoles used with varying features.

The basis of Modulating/Tracking is like this. You take a sound sample, let's say a guitar string. The tracker would create an instrument from it, and then you'd need to tell the program on what 'key' to play it, which would slightly modulate the sound sample faster or slower to simulate it. That sounds simple, but then you have to consider that a song is not a single instrument but many. In fact the SNES had 16 channels total that it could use.

A single channel can only play one sound sample at a time. It may change instrument, but not while 'holding' the note of another. Thus you were technically limited to 16 sounds played exactly at the same time. You had to give the program the right BPM to make the rhythm work, put the notes into sheets to recreate the melody.

Unlike Midi where you need to literally make the musical score in a single line, in Trackers they were divided in sheets. So if a certain part repeats itself often during a song, you could play the sheet instead of playing the same notes again. The tracker would technically read the sheets in the order it was told, which also allowed for loops to be created.

You probably noticed the problem with MP3s of repeating a single song over and over, there's a pause or some 'intro' to the song that you simply can't skip. In Modulating you could create a loop point and listen to it forever, just like you would in the game if you left it on.

Since it's fan created, the songs obviously are not 100% the same as the original or the MP3, ut it still allowed for much smaller files to be created to play this song at home. One particularly great Tracker was known as TSSF (The Super Street Fighter), which had an impressive collection of songs he modulated. There's one song that comes to mind as his most impressive feat.

Using simply what we could hear in leaked videos and demos, he managed to recreate down to perfection the FF7 Battle music. At least the beat of the song, as he used the closest instruments he could find. He put in the comments that he wasn't sure of the loop point either, but he still managed to nail it right on. And this was done months before the game was even released.

So here's to compare with your ears the differences between the sound of the 3 formats. I picked the 3 battle themes for Lufia II :Rise of the Sinistrals (Battle, Boss, Sinistral), one of my favorite games. The first is the original song in MP3, the second is in MIDI, and the last one is the MOD version. All can be played with recent versions of Winamp.

Battle : MP3 MIDI MOD
Boss : MP3 MIDI MOD
Sinistrals : MP3 MIDI MOD

You can get many MIDI and MODs (and a few remixed MP3s) for Lufia games on the excellent Forfeit Island website.

Video Game Logic #2 : Level Design

Now don't take me wrong, actual game physics are not the subject here. If you consider that games aren't not exactly set in our world, you can forgive things like most characters jumping 2 floors in height or breathing in space/underwater without any devices.

The point here today is the logic behind the level design. This was outline in this comic here, that I found hilarious due to breaking the 4th wall quite often in regards to games :

Dictatorship training 101

Ah, the funnies. This is the little problem we run into when we try to compare real life situations with video game logic. You see, a game would not be fun if it was totally impossible to complete, that's an obvious fact. But if you think back into the game, why would the head honcho give you a CHANCE of survival by putting a much useful health refill right in the boss room?

As Gnarl in the comic so nicely put, why bother putting walls that are just the right height for us to jump over? Or even bother putting a boss in a closed room, let them die alone in it! Turn one stage into a gigantic pit. Even if the character has a hover, don't give them a powerup to refill it along way (I'm talking about you Wily!)

This is the kind of comparison that leads to the funnies at least. The video game logic is there so the game is enjoyable, not for it to make sense. That doesn't mean we're not entitled to poking fun at it!

Video Game Logic #1 : Everything kills you

This was the title of an article I found a while ago, that I found very interesting. It came to me as a link from another game I downloaded, that was frankly... how can you say... unique.

The game is called "I wanna be the guy", and it's quite possibly the hardest game in the world. The article I'm talking about made mention of this game as well as several others like the Leisure Suit Larry style of games, and other older NES games. This game was made to more or less outline the ridiculousness of these games by having literally everything out to kill you.

The article had a description of this game along these lines : The moon can crash on your head, spikes on the floor will grow a set of wheels and chase you, and even the save point right before the final boss will try to eat you. This game is an over-exageration of the sadism seen in games, but honestly you should try that game because that's what makes it funny.

Back to subject at hand, this game is just one of the many examples that just about anything can kill you in games, because the game was made that way. The NES games were particularly at risk of this phenomenon, probably because of technical limitations or the fact that video games were still in their infancy. Back then games were not made to make sense, but rather to have fun.

How else can you explain a pair of plumbers lost in a land of mushrooms and turtles without the use of illegal substances? Those were already more dangerous than some other games at least, that any contact with a beach ball could burn the skin off your skeleton.

Then again, if you hop just a little back in time, you'll also have Burgertime, that literally had sausages and lettuce running after you to try to... well I'm not sure what they wanted to do with you, but anyway pepper sprays could have taken their idea from this game, as it was the cook's sole method of defense.

How about games like Back to the Future? Despite being an horrid rendition of the movie, you had bees and birds trying to dart at you, people moving an near-invisible glass window and arbitrarily placed flowerpots and park benches in the middle of the street, plus the very high quota of manholes-per-feet must be a selling point of getting a house in Hill Valley.

A last interesting example of how everything wants to kill you in video games would come from paperboy. It was a rather addictive little game overall, but did you stop to count the amount of obstacles the delivery boy has to face? Rabid dogs attack you for no other reason than you're wearing blue. Lawnmovers suddenly roar to life and try to cut your shoes off at the precise time you roll past them. Cars that apparently are driving on the wrong side of the street for the off chance that some random newspaper boy might have a death wish by cycling off the sidewalk for a second as they try to avoid a tornado that just happened to be there.

You know, when I was young I delivered newspaper, and I'm glad I wasn't in the Paperboy's neiborhood, all considered.

History Lessons #2 : Music

Ahhh, music. Personally, the one thing that sticks to mind the most about a game, beside the story for RPGs, is the music. Ever since I got access to the internet, one of my interests was finding music from my games. But there is an evolution behind it too, believe it or not.

Let's go back in time, in the 80s. If you checked my first history lesson, you already know about the Coleco. While I haven't done any tribunes for other systems, they did have common elements on that side.

The first generation of video game music was limited if any at all. Most of the games had a little jingle for the opening screen. For example, almost everyone remembers Pac-Man. Yet, does anyone remember that the game itself had no background music?

Wether it was because the evolution was not there yet, or simply because of technical limitations on those systems at the time, most games had little to no background music. Popeye and Burgertime for example did have a little 'bip boop' rhythm in the back. With nowaday's standars would be simply nothing else than a heart beat to check if the user is still paying attention to the game. Back then, it's all you had.

The only time you had actual music of any sort was during powerups. Pac-Man and Popeye had such power modes, accompanied by a little music that would die off when done. It would be the sole indication of such powered mode most of the time, outside of slight screen color changes.


The first generation of gaming systems also had one severe technical limitation to work around, which was the sound samples. In pretty much every case, they had samples pre-defined and hard-coded into the console itself. The cartdriges held no other data than what note to play on what rhythm.

This system also existed in the first computers. At first it was simply a single beep, but then it evolved into something similar to the consoles, being able to modulate the samples into something that becomes a melody. That system was called MIDI, which also was a standard for electronic organs/pianos. The MIDI system used samples that were on the computer/organ that played it.

When I started on the Internet nearly 10 years ago, there was something called XGMidi (I think), which was a MIDI player that contained it's own set of samples, rather than using the ones from the computer itself. The difference was surprising.

Nowadays most computers come with much better MIDI samples, and most sound cards have options to pick different qualities and sets of samples as well. But that also means that two computers won't run the same MIDI music exactly the same. Some MIDI songs actually sounded horrible on XGMidi, yet were perfect on normal MIDI, and sometimes they were better on XGMidi. It depends on the samples and their modulation. Sometimes it doesn't follow what the author inteded for it.

But up until the NES/MasterSystem, the principle was the same. And the impossibility of changing those samples made sure that everyone would hear the same music. There was only a handful of games that used exterior sound samples. Two examples I remember from the NES was Smash TV (Good luck! You'll need it!) and Star Wars (Luke! Use the Force!). The sound quality was horrendous and ear-splitting though, but that's the best you had.

I'll expand more next time, but before ending I'll leave you with two sound samples that you can download. For fault of having better examples, here's the battle music from Final Fantasy (the first).

First the MP3 format so you hear how it was out of your TV. Then two samples of the same song in MIDI. Since MIDIs are usually done by fans, it won't exactly sound the same, but you can note the difference in the instruments used. Out of the two samples, depending on your computer, one will probably sound better than the other.

FF1-Battle MP3
FF1-Battle MIDI 01
FF1-Battle MIDI 02

PS : I prefer the first MIDI to the second ;)

History Lesson #1 : ColecoVision

Out of the many subjects I intend to eventually blog about, one of them got some amount of interest by a few users on GameFAQs, which I hope to find in the comments later as well. The evolution of gaming, from a player's point of view.

My little history started when I was around 5 years old, my parents bought a ColecoVision. That was pretty much the base of video gaming :

-The controllers were made with with an analog joystick (kinda, the games didn't really respond analog-like like PSX/PS2 though), two buttons (that were one and the same for controls) and a numeric keypad that main use was to select the amount of players and difficulty. In certain games it could be used in different manners, but for the most part it was never used.

-The console itself was bulky and square. It even had slots to insert the two controllers into them. Since the controllers were about as big as two packs of cigarettes put side by side, you can imagine the size of the entire thing.



For a first generation console, it made alot of ingenious things thought. There was a trackball add on for certain games, that also put to use two buttons instead of only one. The trackball was truly analog compared to the other controllers, yet I only know of one game that used that feature. The game was called Slither, which was more or less a Galaga-style of play, except you could shoot up or down

While the trackball unit hooked to the controller ports of the main unit, it was about as big as the main console itself and had it's own controller slots since you were using the main unit's. Problem is, they never thought about making them stack or fit together to look cool or even save space, so it was a mess of wires.

Aditionally there was an Atari-converter, which basically allowed you to play Atari games on your Coleco, the first backward compatbility feature ever. Although it was completly different as Atari was actually a competitor at the time, and even tried legal actions. But in my 5-8 years old mind, I thought it was cool and asked my parents for an Atari AFTER the Coleco, thinking it was the better system. In reality, Atari was just a notch under Coleco powerwise.

Gamewise, it came with the old time classic of Donkey Kong, but we owned many many games for it, such as Donkey Kong Jr, Gorf (space shooter that I adored), Ladybug, Pacman, Zipper (Hitchcock music O_o), Smurfs and many more. There was only two styles of play at the time :

-Tiny characters on huge grounds : Spelunker or Donkey Kong fits that style where you can see the entire area at a glance.

-Bigger characters with screen switching : Smurfs for example.

This system defined linearity. At this stage in gaming, if you weren't stuck on a single screen, you had only one direction to go : to the right of the screen. Controls were as simple as they ca be with a single button press.

The only exception to this was the awesome Baseball game, that was using the special Action controller. It was much larger than the original controller, the keypad was smaller, and it was held like a handle instead. Your 4 fingers would hit 4 different buttons placed like triggers inside the unit, which was mostly hidden of view on purpose. The top near the keypad had two small wheels to control vertical and horizontal.

In practice, the baseball game would be played like this with that controller : The four trigger buttons were hidden so you wouldn't show your opponent what kind of ball you're be throwing. A mix of the directional handle and the 4 buttons would control the ball in 100s of different manners, although all that was really affected in this limited perspective was height and speed, which was still better than many NES baseball games in all truth.

The 4 buttons would also control which base you'd be throwing the ball to, or which fielder you'd be controlling. You'd keep the button pressed to move the fielder to catch the ball and press the button again to throw it to another base. The wheels would control the runners on base, pressing a button would dictate them to 'run to that base', so pressing the second button would force all of them to run to second base.

It was very complex, and ahead of it's time considering that 4 buttons joysticks were not used until the SNES afterwards. The ColecoVision was a pioneer on that side, although the popularity of console gaming did not lift up ina major way until the NES. Atari also arguably had a much bigger success at the time and a firm hold on the market for several years.

This concludes the first part of this little history lesson.

First Actual Blog soon

Tonight I will be writing the first actual blog, but this isn't the one, it's just a little disclaimer.

No, I don't believe I'm perfect nor does everything I say supposed to be taken as facts. I am opinionated as much as anyone else, but I do try to look at things from a neutral point of view when I can. But you'll see my writing style anyway.

Secondly, being French speaking as a first language there's obviously no perfection in my English. Yes I do believe it is legible enough to be understood. Yet I don't mind being told of my mistakes either, how else can I learn? There's are many idioms I'll slip in even today.

Thirdly, as you saw in the comments of the introduction post, the one we know as Dash_Jr is also here, just don't pay him any attention. If he gets too disturbing it's a technicality to simply delete his posts.

Now on to the main course!

Welcome to my mind

Welcome again. A simple place, at first glance, another blog on the face of the web. Where should I start? Let's start what I am here for.

The blog's aim is a simple place to throw my mind into. The subject? Well mostly video games, but you never know what might pop up next either. I have basically grown with video games, from a pong paddle that a cousin had, to ColecoVision that we owned when I was 5 years old, to today's more modern consoles that I can now buy on my own, I've seen most generations, but didn't play every game obviously!

Yet there are many subjects that can stem from video games, and not just just individual games either. Those leads to random thoughts that I get, and that I will record here. Those that read this are quite welcomed to comment and contribute, even if technically I man the main show. Without feedback, this blog will be quite boring honestly.

So again, welcome, and make yourself home!