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!