Mechanics

The game is relatively light-weight taking up only around 700MB, and that’s fully updated, though this might be because it is currently ‘only’ in its open beta stages. I don’t know when the beta ends, but for now, I’m just enjoying it since it means that less people know of it and that in turn means always tons of space on the server. Speaking of servers, there are currently only two of them (though this is enough), each having four channels. When you create a character (you can create up to three) on a server, you are confined to that server (as far as I know), but you can move freely between the four channels.

Audio/video

While it’s cartoony-esque style might be off-putting for some, I find it an advantage since it translates to less processor butt-rape and let’s face it, we all want to avoid teh butt-rape… That aside, the scenery and details are quite impressive, especially on higher settings. Pallete swaps for monster are however abundant, which is a bit of a shame, but is to be expected. It would’ve been nice with some extra details on more dangerous fiends of the same genus rather than a darker shade of yellow. On the audio side, it is surprisingly good! I sometimes linger around some of the areas just to enjoy the area-specific music.

Character classes

The job classes are more or less the same as they are for most other RPGs, starting with the generic novice. At level 5 you then choose the “path” you want to take by becoming a Fighter (tank), Hunter (ranged), Spellcaster (magic user), or Acolyte (healer). You get a class ugrade again at level 15, which is essentially just a stat boost and more abilities unlocked for purchase, and then the same at level 30, but where you have a choice between two jobs within the same path. E.g for the tank path, it would be: Novice -> lvl. 5 -> Fighter -> lvl. 15 -> Warrior -> lvl. 30 -> Paladin OR Beserker.

Personally, I think the Beserker (tank) or Necromancer (magic user) are the best classes to go after, simply because the defense stat is next to worthless as far as I am able to tell, so pouring everything into offense is the way to go. I think they went with this to maybe balance out the other jobs more, so not everyone would just tank everything, but I honestly don’t know.

Social aspect

I have probably never played an MMORPG that tries harder to force you into being social and marking parties. I mean sure, the game has guild-only missions, but so do many other MMORPGs. Grand Fantasia, however, will have regular missions seperate into 3-5 parts, where the last part is always a boss fight that you have no chance of winning alone, unless you are the boss’ level x 1½, and even then it’s difficult. So you are essentially forced into forming parties, but since only one person can pick up the mission item, only one person per time can complete the mission, after which, they usually quit the party. So it’s a pretty poor marketing decision to have done this >____>

On the upside, I think they at least somewhat acknowledge the issue, as the regularly have timed Double Experience events where you in the one hour the event is ‘active’, you earn double exp for any kill and therefore level faster.

Sprites

A feature I had never seen before was the Sprite system. The easiest way for me to explain sprites are that they are in-game Tamagochis crossed with Pokémons or something. Why I like this system is that while many MMORPGs will have you waste time doing mundane things such as harvesting, foresting, mining, etc., these things are all performed by the Sprites in exchange for a very small fee (which you usually earn back by killing a low-medium level monster).

In addition to doing these mundane things, they can also perform alchemy and even forge armors and weapons. One sprite is however confined to forging one type of weapon or armor, e.g. only tank armor or only magic armor, etc. But the smart thing is that in addition to the Sprite you get in the beginning, which is also able to evolve at higher levels, you can also summon two additional sprites with special summoning items and have them forage for you as well.

There’s a bit more to the Sprite system, such as caring for the sprites, training them, and summining them to give your character stat boosts, but I’d rather not go into that much detail. You’ll find out when you play it.

Conclusion

Grand Fantasia is a fun game that tries to allocate the mundane chores to a pet system which actually works rather well. It also contains several interesting features not mention in the review, such as a player auction (in addition to just selling stuff at stores), mounts, PvP battles and PvP Wars, etc. because I simply didn’t have the time to cover all that. It is, however, advised that you start playing with some of your friends as many missions require parties to successfully pass, and the only guarantee of an effective and consistent party is to play with at least 2-3 people you know in advance.

Apart from that, it is an entertaining games with a few twists that sets it apart from many other cartoony MMORPGs, and with it’s relatively small file size, you should definitely give it a chance. While the missions might become a bit mundane in the long run if you’re playing solo, the nice surroundings and fantabulous music almost makes level grinding bearable. If you reach level 10 and still don’t think the game is something for you, then I’m sorry for having wasted your time, but personally, I think you can get at least a few weeks of playtime out of this game, probably months if you join a good guild.

Score
								Totally	awesome!

Well, if your one of those closet gamers that never gets out of your room except for the delightful task of going to school/work just to make your parents feel that you are trying to fit in with societal norms when all you really want is to get back inside so you can get that 3 thousandth frag in quake 3 1on1 against Klesk, then I think you might agree with me on two points.

1. Portal was a game so short that if the community doesn’t get creative with nice maps for it then it can only be seen as a lovely manifestation of the latest “suspense waiting game” for a game that lasted so long that even my microwave popcorn could have outlasted it.

2. The game is too easy, but the real challenge arises at the “challenges” part of the game, which actually weren’t so hard, but by then I had grown so tired of the maps that I didn’t even care to complete all of the challenges.

What about all the new technology, I mean Portal gives us the opportunity to play games in an entirely different way! Isn’t that fancy! Well, from the viewpoint of the gamer, I would say sure, portals are something new and exciting, but they were just used as the sell point for a game that was overall bland, but I was glad I played it. At least we can agree with one thing. All in all the game was remarkably simple, easy and short. So you might be thinking that I hated the game like so many others? No. There is only one reason for this. Who ever in the valvE team developed the charachter for Weighted Companion Cube deserves a medal. That box was made of pure love and emotion. I spent hours online reading about Weighted Companion Cube (note I capitalize the letters due to warm and fuzzy feelings inside me that make me do funny things when ever I think of that <3 cube).

Its not to say this game is not brilliant, the voice acting, the story, the environment, and the end credits were fantastic! Also the advanced maps gave the game some more longevity, but it still had me wanting more (which is arguably a good thing), but in the end I just found myself thinking about the lack of multiplayer maps, where racing with portals could have been extremely fun to try! I recommend you get the game, even though it has a short lifespan if you like games though, because it provides something new, but I don’t recommend you get it if you are expecting hours of fun on end.

For those of you reading this, and have even made it this far, I give you the first of many to come. Fan art brought to you by 4chan.org. God I love that cube. Fucking makes portal 20 bucks worth.

Like their catchphrase says, it really DOES seem that you can solve everything by writing anything. Profanity and objects that are trademarked does not seem to work though, so a Coca Cola vibrator is probably out of the question, but stuff like the Kraken, God, and even Longcat, have all been implemented in the game. Only your imagination (and trademarks) seems to be the limit! I’m so gonna get this game and try to complete everything with Chuck Norris, if possible XD ]]> http://m-27.com/post/scribblenauts-oo/feed/ 2 http://m-27.com/reviews/street-fighter-iv/ http://m-27.com/reviews/street-fighter-iv/#comments Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:19:47 +0000 Hecko X http://m-27.com/?p=1843 NB! Before starting off, I’d like to note that I am a Tekken-gamer, not an SF player, so my opinions might be “tainted” by that. I will however try to give the game a fair review in spite of this.

Street Fighter IV was released roughly a month ago (mid-February 2009) for the Xbox 360 and the PS3 and is the newest in a long series of Street Fighter games. Having only had limited exposure to the Street Fighter series due to my dislike of “projectile fighting-games”, my first impression of the game was that it was just Street Fighter II with a visual upgrade and maybe a system-tweak or two that I wouldn’t be aware of anyway, so I went into it with a rather bleak perspective. The only real reason I bought the game, seeing how I dislike fighting-games where you can inflict damage from across the screen, was because I figured it would be perfect practice for getting used to playing on an arcade stick, so that I’ll be ready for the time Tekken 6 comes out for the Xbox 360.

Anywho, like already mentioned, the graphics are pretty awesome when you keep in mind what kind of feel they (Capcom) were going for (less realistic and more cartoony/”hand-drawn”). All characters are rendered full, cel-shaded 3D while everything else is 2.5D, and while it has a cartoony feel to it, like already said, it looks pretty awesome. They even gone into various details such as how the Hadouken disperses when it hits the opponent and whatnot. There are however still issues with polygons overlapping eachother on grabs, e.g. arms going through the opponents body parts, but you only ever really notice it when gameplay slows down during a KO. The graphics for the game intro (seen on the left) and for the official artwork feature various “inkblots”, a style inspired by sumie (墨絵 ink paintings), which I personally think looks fucking awesome. It’s probably the best intro I have seen for a game, ever.

The music is a bit… I dunno… The songs/character themes are good and can almost be considered modernized video game classics, but truthfully, you don’t even notice them when you’re playing. This is because the stages are two dimensional, which severely hampers dodging opportunities to anything other than jumping, and because of the rather small number of moves available to each character, which leaves no real opportunity for a player to get a feel for his/her opponent by sidestepping/back dashing and making quick jabs. Instead, you have characters screaming special attacks all the friggin’ time, plus the sound effects of the effects themselves, plus the sound effects when a character is hit or blocks, which essentially drowns out the background music. This is a crying shame because the music is actually pretty good.

Gameplay-wise, everything appears to be more or less the same, though I’ve heard that it is the most balanced (in terms of character strengths and weaknesses) Street Fighter game made thus far (though despite that, the online character demographic looks somewhat like this). You start of with 16 characters and have 9 more that can be unlocked via Arcade Mode (one boss character, two “hidden” characters, and six characters that were added to the console version of the game by popular request from fans). The game also introduces six entirely new characters, Abel, Crimson Viper, Rufus, El Fuerte, the boss character Seth, and the “hidden” character Gouken (Ryu’s and Ken’s teacher and the brother of Akuma/Gouki), as well as two new features: Ultra Combos and Force Attacks.

Ultra Combos are like the diametric opposite of Super Combos because the gauge for it fills every time the player takes damage (instead of inflicting it). It becomes active once roughly 60-65% of it has been filled, but as the gauge increases, so does the damage it can do once unleashed. As for Power Attacks, explaining what they are and how they work would make this section much too long, so I’m leaving that to Wikipedia. I will however say that it is mostly worthless since most combos in SF starts with two attacks in quick succession, meaning the first would cancel the armor and the second would interrupt the attack which means you’re setting yourself up to take an ass-whooping if you use it. I’ve only ever seen one person use it skillfully (he absorbed Hadoukens to get health and then dashed backwards to cancel the attack animation) in the +200 online matches I’ve had, since most special moves that aren’t projectile in nature either have Hyper Armour breaking properties or simply do multiple hits (or even both) which means that most people simply won’t use it.

Quickly moving on; the game has all the modes a fighting game needs in this day and age. An Arcade Mode, a Versus Mode, Xbox LIVE Battle (online versus), a Challenge Mode (the Trials in Challenge Mode are actually an excellent way of learning how to effectively use a character), and finally a Training Mode. It also has a Gallery mode where one can see all the videos and artwork one has unlocked and Player Data, for those interesting in their leaderboard standings and other stats. Anywho, as for online play, it works fine for the most part, but some battles will have an input delay (probably due to lag) which can annoy you to no end. The servers are cross-continental, meaning that it is possible for someone in Europe to play someone in the Americas or in Asia, and the lag is minimal to non-existant if both parties have a decent connection. In fact, all three matches in the video to the left was against people living in Japan (I live in Europe myself), and as you can see, there was no lag. But while fights online work great, actually getting to play can be a hassle since 2/3 of the time you’ll get an error message (as seen in the video), i.e. it may take several tries (up to several minutes worth, if you’re unlucky) before you successfully join a session.

The 1000 Achievement Points are spread over 48 achievements (technically 47, since one of them is worth 0 points and unlocks automatically when you get the other 47 achievements) of which 27 of them, worth 540 AP, can be gained through offline play and 20 through online play. I estimate that about 650-ish points can be gained with online very basic skills and spamming Zangief’s Double Lariat like a bastard, another 250-ish which actually require a somewhat decent degree of skill, and the last 100-ish, you have to be freaking insane to get. The time it would take to get the 900-ish managable achievement points depends heavily on how skilled you are/get, but I would say it would take about 18-24 hours if you are totally freaking insane at the game, 30-40 hours if you are about my skill level (mediocre), and for the 650-ish AP if you just plain suck would probably be around 50-70 hours.

And now for the conclusion! Street Fighter IV is a fun game and all, but like I already said in the very beginning, the Street Fighter series has never appealed to me and I can’t be bothered to learn its input buffing and negative edge system well enough to use it flawlessly, and I believe newcomers to the series will be to annoyed enough by it that they’ll put SFIV aside completely (as in “never get back to it“) as soon as they buy a new game. The graphics are decent and the music is good, but you don’t have the time to actually enjoy them during the battles, which is a shame. A vast majority of the achievements can be achieved and they all aim at different skill level, however, must can be achieve with only basic skills, time, and Zangief’s Double Lariat attack, so if you just want to boost your gamer score, there are 650 easy points to get here. However, it still deserves a decent score because if you can get used to the system, playing it online can be pretty fun, so I gave it 7 ♥ out of 10. However, I am sure most fans of the series would give it 9 or 9½ ♥, but my score for it is lower since it isn’t exactly rookie-friendly. Because to this, I recommend people who are considering buying the game, but have never played SF before, to rent the game or borrow it from a friend for a test-playtrough first.

Score
							IS	that	crappy!

Achivement points gotten	# of Achivements gotten	Game “status”
800 Points	42 out of 48	Playing now and again

Gameplay

The gameplay is very much like other music/rhythm games; a note slides by the screen and when it reaches the hit area, you press the correct button. Daiko no Tatsujin is however limited to two commands; top of the drum (orange faces) and edge of the drum (blue faces). The bigger faces require you to hit a specific part of the drum (center of the top and exactly on the edge, respectively), but while all this sounds pretty simple and straight forward, the harder difficulties will seriously mess up your timing.

Song list

The songs are many and varied, both in genre and difficulty. I’ve made a short list below with all the songs (in romaji) divided in the same way they are in the game. I’ve omitted the artist names due to lack of space, but will be adding videos as soon as a mail goes through and I get access to a beta of a plugin~

Unlockables

It is possible to unlock items in order to customize your character (WadaDon), who is seen dancing on the top screen during songs. In the beginning, you can only change the colour of the drum (as can be seen on the drawing I made), but as you play the game, you will also unlock specific costumes that you can dress WadaDon up in, such as a pirate outfit, various animal outfits, food items, etc.

But costume items aren’t the customize items you get; you will also unlock items to customize the sounds made by your drum when you play it. So instead of the normal taiko drum sounds, you can hear farts, sumo sounds, pacman game sounds, baseball sounds, etc. Some of them are super cool and make the song sound even more awesome 8D

Modes can also be unlocked in order to amp up the games difficulty. In the beginning, four modes are unlocked: Auto, baisoku, sanbai, and nashi (none, i.e. the off setting). Auto is used to get a feel for the song by having the CPU play it perfectly, while baisoku and sanbai increase the speed the notes on the screen fly by with (2x and 3x, respective). You can unlock 4 other modes by clearing the songs (getting an accuracy rating of 80%): Yonbai (4x speed), Doron (removes the coloured face clues, leaving only the below hiragana), Kanpeki (Perfect; song will end if you miss a note), and Abekobe (Inverse; changes the orange Don to blue Ka and vice versa).

Conclusion

I absolutely LOVE the game!! There are a lot of varied and fun songs, and once you start thinking it gets too easy, you can just one-up the difficulty. It even has a secret unlockable difficulty called “Oni” (Ogre/Demon) which is just friggin’ insaaaaaane!

Also, due to the nature of the game, it’s a perfect pick-up-and-play game; there’s no story, nothing you have to know to understand the rest, so you can just pick it up at anytime, play a song or two, and that’s it.

While it -is- a fun time killer for when commuting, there’s not really anything there to motivate you to get better at the game. There are occasional random missions you get with the mail which will let you unlock more customize items or songs + the daily “Test your drum skills dojo”, but that’s pretty much it. I think it would be more fun if you could have missions or objectives to beat on all the songs on various difficulties, since that would want to make you play all the songs several times over and you’d be driven to get a better score or more accurate presses, etc.

All in all, a wonderfully funny game that I heartily recommend. You can play wireless 4-player mode (via download play, I think) so it’s a great games to play with your friends too.

Score
									awesome!

Offline Mode

One of the things Namco advertised with before Tekken 6 was released was that time released characters was now a thing of the past and that Tekken 6 would have all characters available right from the get-go. This was only partially true. In all the important modes (arcade, vs, online battle, etc.) all the characters were indeed unlock from the second you load the game, which is a BIG plus.

However, none of these modes will unlock ending movies or prologues. To do this, you will have to go through the all new mode called Scenario Campaign (it’s like Tekken Force mode, but with a storyline), wait until you actually encounter that person as the stage boss and then defeat them before they’re unlocked in the Arena (the T6 version of Story Mode, or something :/), which you then have to play through with the character in order to get the ending movie. Big sigh, since to unlock all 38 characters, you have to go through like storyline 35 stages (about 3-7 hours, depending on how good you are) and three bloody annoying bonus stages. Also, like 70% of all the achievements are unlocked via SC, so you are pretty much forced to play it if you want endings, prologues, and achievement points…

Despite this, the story of Tekken 6 and Scenario Campaign is actually pretty good considering it’s a versus fighter game, and it’s much better rounded off than previous Tekken games. Another thing I liked very much about Scenario Campaign is that it lets you pick up items (random drops for defeating enemies) for the character you are playing as, which means you get to save a ton of money on custom parts for your favourite character’s outfit. And yes, I am SO pretending to be X-Zibit in “Pimp up mai Mokujin” 8D

Online Mode

Not owning a PS3, and thus not having been able to play Tekken online before, I was ecstatic to finally be able to play against awesome Tekken players from around the globe, or at the very least Europe. However, while I was, and still am, happy about the online feature, it has several flaws that needs to be fixed as well as one thing that strikes a nerve with all online fighting game players; movement lag. For those of you reading that don’t know what movement lag is, it is when you input a movement command on your controller, but the character doesn’t perform the action until a few milliseconds later.

Regardless of how great the connection with the other player was, I always encountered movement lag. Some times bearable, most of the time not. Out of 10 matches, 1 would have movement lag of ≤0.1 seconds, 2-3 would have movement lag of 0.1-0.4 seconds, and the rest would be >0.4 seconds (a recent match I played had a full second of lag!). Now, for people not really into the game, something like 0.4 seconds may not sound like much, but I’ll break it down to you.

In Tekken, the difference between a win and a loss often literally lies in a single frame of frame advantage. There are 30 frames in a second (the game is in 60 hertz), i.e. a single frame is 0.0333 seconds. So for any player who plays with a defensive (turtle) or interruptive (poker; breaking the opponents flow with quick jabs) style, even a 0.1 second movement lag can be friggin’ devastating. Aggressive players can usually use this to their advantage since even if the defending player sees the attack and responds to it, due to movement lag, jack shit happens in time and the move will connect, so you can bet your ass they’ll spam attacks you otherwise wouldn’t have problems countering (see example of this in the video on the left).

To make matters worse, you can’t search for opponents based on their connection to you like you can in e.g. Street Fighter IV. This is especially crappy in ranked matches, since you don’t wanted to be a turtle or poker and then end up against someone with a shit connection and lose just because of that. If you lose, it should either be because the opponent had more skill or luck, not because of fucking movement lag and an opponent spamming shit you respond to in time, but jack happens. Hopefully, Namco will realise this and add the search option in a future update. EDIT: I heard today that an update was in the works to “improve the online game experience for players of Tekken 6“, so I hope that is what the update is about. EDIT 2: It was \o/ The game is getting an extra half heart.

Despite the issues, I still very much(!!) enjoy being able to play online and have had several enjoyable matches. But again, because of these things, I strongly recommend that if you find an opponent you don’t lag against, make them a preferred person, make them your online buddy, do WHATEVER to make sure you can play some online sparring matches with them every now and again, because the CPU will often fall for things no human would fall for, and often block things most people would never anticipate.

Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention: Back in Tekken 4, it was possible to save the replays of a battle. That feature is now back, and I LOVE IT!! It only applies to Ranked Matches though, which is a bit =( but I get by on it. What’s even more awesome is that you can make them available for download so your friends (and other peepz) can watch your matches as well (and it’s all lag free, even if the match wasn’t!) 8D You can also download the ghosts (an AI that plays and reacts in theoretically the same way its owner does) of your friends, but you can unfortunately only play against them at random, which is a bit sux.

Achievements

There are a grand total of 50 achievements, 45 of which are offline (worth 900 points), and the remaining five are online (worth the last 100 points). With the exception of maybe four of the achievements, no real skill is needed to get them and you can do it in less than a day if you really wanted to. So if you are just an AP harvester, this would be a good game to rent for 800-ish quick points. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, the easy achievements also mean no bragging rights for being awesome and unlocking some semi-impossible “Break the Survival Counter by winning the 1,000th survival match in a row while only using a basic, standing left jab for attacking” achievement.

Conclusion

In conclusion, awesome game, albeit somewhat flawed. I absolutely love that you can save, upload, and download replays, and that you can get customize items by just playing Scenario Campaign. Another great thing was that ending movies would randomly unlock after completing SC, which is great since many players have those 7-8 characters that they just CANNOT play for shit with, so defeating Cheaposaurus Rex (aka Azazel) with them would otherwise have been a pain.

Score
									Awesome.