Affectionate Diary

I quite like it, but my 360 fucking hates it. Three “To play this disc, insert it in a Xbox 360 console” screens, two unreadable disc errors and a fuckload of judders, RPM drops and other drive-related shit.

At least I could sort out my suicide-reset Dreamcast by literally taking it apart and putting it back together again. I can’t do that with my 360 in case it ring-of-reds me, which it’s bound to do at any moment as the drive is well fucked and must be getting really fucking hot. I suppose that does add a bit of excitement to Mass Effect’s impressively fucking boring conversations and cutscenes.

You know the fucking rules, Bioware. Unskippable cutscenes are the worst crime you can commit in game design. Only MGS is allowed to have them, as a mark of respect for putting in shit like blowing up soldier’s food supplies to make them complain and fight worse and being able to look at girls’ areas during said unskippables. But yeah, a fucking lesbian kiss that I have absolutely no erotic interest in seeing is not going to forgive the amount of joy-sapping dialogue and overblown cutscenery you’re forcing me to go through.

I’ll mention Edge at this point, becase N’gai’s column about the new narrative language of games, basically totally dissing cutscenes for being the outright bullshit they are, was one of the best things I’ve ever read in Edge. This guy totally knows his shit, right, as I’ve been thinking pretty much what he expresses in that column for the last fucking decade. Cutscenes are the videogame version of when they put cards with writing up to express dialogue and perform narrative exposition in silent movies. Rather than learn to tell the story through the new, potent medium they have, they lazily rely on the methods of the previous dominant narrative form. Fucking PRICKS.

At least Mass Effect has some reasonably engaging violence (although nowhere near enough of it at the moment) and I’m feeling some nice gear lust starting to form. But fuck these fucking conversations for fuck’s sake.

-10,000,000/10

Any game that you can only play for an hour and then you’re exhausted and need to have a shower is ALRIGHT WITH ME.

There’s some crazy structural choices, with unlocking that you have to do in single player, but even the stuff available from the moment you turn the machine on is incredible. Not including the table tennis, which is not only shit, but takes ages.

FACT - all you really need is the 100m. I mean, the swimming is ace, and watching someone else do the breast stroke is maybe funnier than watching someone play an Eye Toy game because they look focussed as well as stupid, but the 100m is enough. Everything else is a bonus.

Disgaea is obviously the greatest strat RPG of all time. However, it’s also perhaps the most complex and least forgiving. It makes little effort to educate the player in its wiley ways and assumes you will go to GameFAQs if you want to know anything. And when you get there, HOLY FUCK. It’s not as bad as Pokemon, but it’s not far off. And you’ll be faced with tables of data and lists of items and starting stats and and and STOP.

It’s too much. And you could argue that it doesn’t matter what you do, since aside from ally-killing, you can’t really do anything wrong. You can only be more or less efficient. I would rather you were more efficient, though, so here is my guide to what to keep in mind as you play through your first few hours.

Focus on one character.
If you have one mega character who is stupidly powerful and you hit a wall, you can use that character to level other characters more easily. So always have one character who is God-like. Which one? Laharl. 

It’s all about Laharl.
Laharl, Laharl, Laharl, Laharl. He starts with a sword and should always have a sword. It’s usually better to use the item world to level a rubbish sword then it is to buy a good one. The chances are, by the time you’re strong enough to head into the Dark Assembly and raise the shop level (more expensive items) high enough to buy a sword better than that, you’ll be earning those swords on the Bonus Gauge, so level a lower sword.

What kind of sword?
A sharp pointy one, ie any sword, really. The weaker the sword, the easier it is to rape its item world. And the item world is your friend. But when choosing a sword to level, choose one with the right kind of specialists in it, and make sure you kill (subdue) those specialists, because specialists are the key to uber-levelling.

What’s a specialist?
Every item has slightly different stats, you will notice. Some also have specialists (little grey dots) that have names like Armsmaster, Gladiator and suchlike. Each specialist has a level, and the higher the level the higher their effect on the item and the character who has equipped that item. You should care about the following two the most - Statistician (more EXP on each kill) and Armsmaster (increases weapon skill gain and thus gives you access to weapon-specific skills sooner). This is because later on, you’ll want to create an uber sword and pass it round to different characters for power-levelling. You might also care about Gladiators (increase ATK) and I like Hypnotist (sends baddies to sleep). There’s tons more and you might go for different ones than me, but I think EVERYONE should be after Statisticians and Armsmasters.

Which character classes should I create?
All of them. And don’t transmigrate one class into another until much later. And have Laharl create all your characters, because as they level he will become more powerful (thanks to the master/pupil mechanic) and the more powerful he is, the easier it is to level them. Also, never create monsters (at first). Just capture them. And the more characters you have, the easier it is to capture monsters. More character classes will appear as you level your characters (and you fulfill the criteria) and transmigrating one class into another will only hinder this process. Later on you might want to, say, take a high level Star Mage and transmigrate her into a Cleric so that you have a healer with offensive capabilities, but that kind of thing is a lot of work for little gain until your team is in its 30s (at least).

So how do I level a non-offensive character?
First things first - always check the Bonus Gauge. If it starts with an EXP gain, as you’re about the clear the map take your weak characters out of the base. Anyone on the map will get the bonus upon completion. Or, you can have them take part in a team-attack that finishes a bad guy - EXP is shared out equally among all characters in a killing team-attack (when characters are next to each other). You can increase a character’s chances of being in the attack by having them equip the same weapon as the attacker. So, have your Cleric hold a sword (it doesn’t matter if they hit or not), and if they’ve been created by Laharl and are standing next to him, they should have a 99% chance of taking part in the attack. Just make sure Laharl kills them in his first blow, because if it goes to counters, your Cleric won’t get the EXP. There’s a good level in the fifth world to do this, as all the squares are invincible bar one, so weak characters can stand next to Laharl as he BATTERS a high level dude who has been thrown onto the one vulnerable square. Throw several dudes into the same square to get one mega dude if you want (I’m not sure if it works out more exp, but it’s faster). As long as Laharl is powerful enough to take some damage, you’re onto a winner. Taking a cleric from level 1 to 10 in a hit feels pretty good. Of course later you’ll take someone from level 1 to 1000 in a hit, but hey. This is just for now.

Didn’t you say you can capture a monster?
I did! And you do that by throwing the monster into your base square, where it will fight everyone in your base one after another. If you win, you get it, if you lose, you lose your base square and have to finish the map or DIE. A couple of things here. When you throw a monster into your square, it will first let loose an SP explosion. So if it had 100SP when it got thrown in, it will dish 100HP out in damage to a random assortment of characters. So it pays to have lots of characters when doing this. The more you capture the easier it will get, but you can make life easier for you if you fight the monster first, taking some of its HP and allowing it to spend some of its SP. You might see a way to earn a monstrously high level dude in a short space of time here, but I’m not doing all your thinking for you.

So, to recap -
Laharl! Level him, level his sword, get Armsmasters and Statisticians, check the Bonus Gauge, have loads of characters, capture monsters and then use your power to RAPE ALL ENEMIES.

Word.

**************
STOP THE PRESS
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What you actually should do with this game is focus on getting your shop rank to level 8 AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. With your customer rank at 8 (from buying loads of stuff) you can raise the shop level to 8 in the Dark Assembly. Then buy a Foresight with maxed out Armsmaster and Statistician. Then the real work begins.

Basically amazing. It’s Disgaea, but it’s got some extra collecting and shopping stuff, and it looks AMAZING on PSP.

Finally, Disgaea is on the only format it should ever have been on.

Text is perfectly legible and everything seems to be present and intact (including Japanese voices, which weren’t on the UK release, I don’t think). I’ll post again in 100 Disgaea hours when I’m about half way through and give a first impression, but even then it’s probably way too early to tell.

If you’ve not played Disgaea before (you fucking COCK FUCK) then get this now - it’s the game the PSP was built to play.

So today I started Mass Effect AND Crysis. I’ve not even finished Super Mario Galaxy yet. Or about a million other games.

Mass Effect seems to be a well-produced Bioware-by-numbers. Nice voice acting, seemingly hackneyed story, amazing space scenes. Really amazing space scenes. There’s some cover/shoosting mechanic which I would have thought sits quite oddly with the dice rolls that I feel are going on behind the scenes, but maybe that’s the Tabula Rasa coming through. It works quite well, I guess. It’s not particularly exciting. The characters are the standard procedure cliches and there’s a panto atmosphere to much of the story I’ve seen so far, but I suppose it’s to the game’s credit that I’m even bothering to pay attention to that stuff.

Crysis has guns that are so weak, you need to shoot people about a million times before they die. Or one head shot, I suppose, but I just shot a guy TEN TIMES in the chest and he didn’t go down. He just staggered. I know it’s ten times because the gun is set to single bullet shots and I counted. It’s strange that I’m supposed to be an ultimate badass but my guns are fucking pathetic. Nice foliage, though. And it’s nice to play a shooter on my PC that isn’t brown or grey. And every Korean I shoot dead I imagine as being the guy from Lost, because I hate fucking Lost. I give it leaf out of 10 so far.

More as it happens!

There’s way too many games out right now to warrant any kind of cohesive post, so here’s a collection of things to fuel your belief that we are wankers at Affectionate Diary.

Mario Galaxy - brilliant, obviously, but the hub world is a bit boring and he’s less responsive than ever. His improved aftertouch is nice, though - it makes crazy long jumps around a planet’s surface easy to correct when you jump the wrong way, which is probably going to be quite often. That’s not a bad thing, though. Toy Time Galaxy is the best world in ay Mario game yet, Spring Mario and Bee Mario are probably the worst Mario outfits ever. Boo Mario seems to be basically shit as well, but it’s early days for me on that one.

Excite Truck - the best N64 game I have ever played.

Picross on DS - finished all the Normal puzzles.

Disgaea PSP - has a vs. mode I’ve yet to test (for that read: will never test), but that has to be broken. And brilliant. But broken.

Assassin’s Creed - I spent two hours doing nothing. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to find out if it gets better. How can the team that made Prince of Persia spend years in development and end up with this? I’m not sexist, but this is a GIRL’S fault, and we all know girls are rubbish.

Virtua Fighter 5 - STILL BRILLIANT.

Hardwood Backgammon - STILL BRILLIANT.

Tabula Rasa - there’s more interesting things going on with the combat than I first thought. It’s all about getting the range right and then taking the time to crouch and then draw a bead and then doing MASSIVE DAMAGE before they get close. That’s with the rifle class. If they’re close, switch to an imprecise weapon, like a shotgun, and blast multiple opponents. So the combat is actually about choosing the right gun for the job and switching to it, as well as choosing the damage type (electric, fire or whatever) and forming your weapon loadout around that. I’m down for that.

Skate - “there are over 30 tricks accessible via the flick it system”. Yeah, but they’re ALL THE FUCKING SAME TO DO - hold the stick in one direction and flick it to another. BORED of Skate’s trick system, though not of the way momentum and motion are important, nor the colourful presentation.

Soul Calibur Whatever - people are saying they’re surprised that it’s not very good. HAS ANYONE EVEN PLAYED THE LAST TWO SOUL CALIBURS?

Sharing your one component socket with three different consoles and no switcher box - shit. Someone buy me a hi def job with a million inputs, please.

Tokyo - still full of hot girls.

Capcom’s US blog - confirmation that Capcom is the greatest company at the world to work for if you like games.

That shit in the plane with the black and white shit is like the coolest fucking shit ever.

10/10

Jesus fucking christ. The cutscenes. Jesus fucking christ.
-10.6 Billion / 10

Or, to be technically correct, rebalancing Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. Capcom is re-releasing Super Street Fighter II on XBLA, it’s redrawing the sprites (!!!) and it’s taking years of tournament play experience and using it to make the game even better. To be specific, David Sirlin is doing that. His blog starts here -

http://blog.capcom.com/archives/542

I’m not even sure why they’re doing it. They could just have taken the original game and put it out on XBLA and everyone would have bought it anyway. They must be doing it because they care about their games.

It’s not often you get to say that about a games company.

HOW EXCITING IS THIS?!! I remember when I first played SNK’s Garou: Mark of the Wolves. I was astounded to find out that all the characters used the same commands to activate their special moves - quarter circles, pretty much. That’s not right, though! That means that pretty much anyone could play the game and appreciate a level of tactical play. Anyone could “be” any character, not just the character whose moveset they could do. I remember thinking that that was a step in the right direction. Nobody really took any more steps like that, though, and 2D fighting games fell into their hardcore niche and thus obscurity. Well, they maybe already had, it’s hard to call.

So it’s looking quite exciting. And with sticks on the Xbox becoming more and more common, it’s looking like XBLA might be the start of a fighting games rebirth. The irony being, of course, that over the internet is the worst possible way to play a fighting game.

If only there was a fighting game where all the characters’ moves were triggered by a button press and a direction, or maybe two directions at most. Then everyone could play on an even footing, physically. Skill would be determined by tactical play, not wrist dexterity. You could even include one obscenely complex character to satisfy those that need to practise for hours each day. And what if it was in 3D, and you could dress your character up? Oh wait, there is a game like that.

VIRTUA FIGHTER.

Sonic Mario Galaxy more like!!!