Editorials

The Handheld King

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I see a lot of people who have a problem with paying the price of a console game for a handheld game but I have no problem with that at all. Why? For some reason I find handheld games much easier to play for long periods of time.

I love a good adventure, but despite this I’ve never finished a traditional console RPG. I’d put Skies of Arcadia, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, and Final Fantasy IX in amongst my favourite games of all time, but I have saves for all of them abandoned around the 20-25 hour mark. On the other hand you can give me a GBA or DS RPG and I still might not finish it but I’ll almost certainly come close, usually stopping when I get stuck on a difficult final boss.

The only reason I can really think of is that, like when I preferred Animal Crossing on a handheld, I just don’t want to be tied to the television. When I get into a handheld game like I am now with FFIV and was recently with Fire Emblem I’ll be taking it literally everywhere and get a few minutes in wherever I can. For some people the quick fix games are what they want in a handheld game (not that I don’t love those too), but I love something on them that I can really get my teeth into.

This seems like a weird thing to be talking about but FFIV really got me thinking about it. While the ongoing success of the DS might be encouraging developers to focus on the quick fixes, but I hope they keep the long and engrossing adventures coming to portables.

How about FFVII on the PSP? Then I might actually finish it and use my PSP.

Impressions

You Spoony Bard!

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I’ve spent a few hours over the last couple of days playing Final Fantasy IV Advance and I’m actually surprised by how much I like it. I’ve barely touched any of the pre-FFVI games because I’m definitely not a fan of high fantasy and found the later modern and, in the case of VI, steampunk settings far more interesting. Incidentally, I loved FFIX which renders my complaints about fantasy kind of irrelevant.

Anyway, while the game isn’t particularly pretty (it’s a port from 1991, after all) and since it can’t compensate with flashy FMV like the PSX ports newcomers will have to make do with character portraits and a new translation, designed to be more true to the original Japanese script. It therefore relies on the gameplay and story to sustain it, and since the FF games really haven’t changed the basic gameplay all that much it’s the story and characters that differentiate them.

High fantasy or not, the story is strong so far, with an elite knight stripped of his power for questioning the authority of his king when forced to kill innocent people, and then tricked into carrying out a catastrophic attack on a village of innocent summoners, somehow leaving one survivor, a young girl with the handy ability to summon monsters. I’m sure you can guess where it starts going from there.

The real test will be whether or not I bother to finish it during the wait for FFVI Advance, having never finished a single Final Fantasy. We’ll have to see on that one…

Best of 2005, GOTY

Best of 2005 #4: Lumines

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Lumines

I own the Japanese version of Lumines (pictured) which came out in 2004, but since it came out everywhere else and I bought it in 2005 it gets in, and deservedly so. It’s one of the few challengers to the Tetris throne that even comes close, and it’s still the best game on the PSP by some way.

Lumines is essentially your common or garden falling block puzzle in which coloured blocks fall from the top of the screen, and by matching up four or more of a single colour they’ll be removed by a bar that sweeps horizontally across the screen at varying speeds. It’s as simple as all the best puzzle games and is maddeningly addictive (even when matching your high score can take a couple of hours of solid play), which is really all you need to make a good puzzle game for a handheld.

That’s not all you get, though. Like Mizuguchi’s last game, Rez, music plays a central role in the game, and every few levels you’ll come to a new “skin”, changing the backgrounds, block colours, speeds, and the music. It’s the same sort of music that you’ve seen in Rez (good thing) and makes headphones a necessity to fully enjoy the hypnotic beauty of the game. Even if saying that that this is the best game on the PSP isn’t really high praise at the moment, saying that this is one of my favourite puzzle games ever made certainly should be.

General

Newsflash: Even GT4 Isn’t Realistic

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Tonight’s edition of Top Gear (possibly the best show on television, and I’m not even interested in cars) had an interesting games-related item which seems like an obvious idea but I’d never seen done. Jeremy Clarkson is something of a luddite when it comes to anything that doesn’t have an engine, so he drove a lap of Laguna Seca in a Honda NSX on Gran Turismo 4, achieving a lap time of 1:41, and then tried the same car on the real track incarnate to see how he did.

To be honest I’m not all that surprised that he found it was nothing like the game because anyone who’s ever driven a car knows that it’s completely different to getting behind the virtual wheel, but after several attempts and with the help of the track instructor on the real thing he could only manage a time of 1:59. Trying some of the driving techniques easily possible in the game left him leaving the track or spinning out, and braking in the way that you can to get around the infamous Corkscrew gave him nothing but the strong smell of burning brakes.

Just goes to show that for all the flapping that goes on about tracks with satellite imaging and thousands of hours spent test-driving various cars, a game still can’t accurately simulate the experience. If an experienced driver can drive a lap in the game in 1:41 on their first attempt but is 19 seconds slower in real life when they spend a day racing the track you can tell that something isn’t right.

Best of 2005, GOTY

Best of 2005 #5: Splinter Cell Chaos Theory

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Splinter Cell Chaos Theory

Metal Gear Solid may have popularised the stealth action genre but I’ve always thought that the Splinter Cell series did it better, with all the post-modernism thrown out and a fully 3D camera, which I find essential to any game requiring the awareness of your surroundings that a stealth game does. The camera was the main reason I gave up on MGS3, as without the radar but with the anachronistic camera I found it frustrating beyond belief to have to keep switching to first person to see beyond the top of the screen.

Pandora Tomorrow expanded on the first game and added that fantastic multiplayer mode, but suffered from annoying difficulty spikes that detracted from things. By handing development back to the original team for Chaos Theory, we got significant improvements to the gameplay as well as some of the best graphics of that generation. The campaign was long and had variety (the Seoul level is a particular standout moment, and its setting in an urban war with you as a neutral shows similarities to MGS4), and the way that you were ranked on your ability to go undetected and avoid killing anyone encouraged perfectionism that’s unusual for me, actually getting me to go back and replay the game when I’d finished it.

When you factor in an improved version of the multiplayer and an entire co-op campaign with online play, this is one of my favourite action games ever made. Splinter Cell Double Agent is going to have a lot to live up to now and I really hope it can manage it.

Impressions

Animal Crossing: Wild World Impressions

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The Animal Crossing series is a strange one. There’s essentially three versions of the same game, released on three platforms (the N64 version never made it outside of Japan), and all receive the same critical acclaim coupled with bemusement over what exactly makes these such compelling titles. I’ve got the same bug, but on a portable format it’s far more palatable.

I imported Animal Crossing for the GameCube, played it daily for a few weeks, loved it for that time, and then flogged it on eBay when it was announced that it wasn’t coming out here for two years, making a nice profit in the process (life imitating art simulating life?). At that time I can clearly remember enjoying messing around in the game immensely but just thinking that it would make a much better handheld game, as having to be at home in reach of the GameCube made playing beyond a certain point when other console games came along a hassle.

So here we are, three years later with a pretty faithful handheld version with a few tricks of its own. There are already plenty of reviews if you don’t know the basics, but I’ll just say that this is probably my favourite version. It looks as good as the N64 version (the GameCube one is much smoother, but it has no effect on the game), it controls decently whether you use the touch screen or the buttons (touch screen is slightly faster when navigating menus), and the gameplay just lends itself better to a handheld format so that you can jump in and out as and when without having to be tied to the GameCube.

The online mode seems pretty throwaway to me, emasculated by Nintendo’s over-protective attitude to online play, so it’s not the killer feature that it could have been. Otherwise this is a great version of one of the most charming games on the market, and one that probably won’t convert those who didn’t like it on the Cube, but should win plenty of new fans. If you want something for the kids to play I’d easily recommend this over fucking Nintendogs.