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I am playing two relaxing games, whose value seems to derive mainly from their graphics & character:

LSD: Dream Emulator

and The Misadventures of Tron Bonne.

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I made 1,000,000 zenny!
I scored over 50 points on training course 1!

The Misadventures of Tron Bonne

I rescued Farli!

Stonekeep

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Picked up Pokémon White again over the weekend - it's fun in a gentle, relaxing way. I had stopped playing at the same place I have stopped playing each of the 3 pokémon games I have owned - at the Elite 4. I guess I'm not too good when it comes to battling, but I'd really like to complete the Unova Pokédex by obtaining every monster.

At the moment I have seen 138 and obtained 110, and I can get about 30 by evolution, so it seems like I'm fairly close. I'm currently raising Archen & Larvesta as their evolved forms are still a mystery. My progress will probably be determined by how often I can't sleep - wandering around trying to level up pokémon is probably the best cure for insomnia i know of.

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The spell is broken. I took the Dark Souls disc out of the PS3. And replaced it with... Tomb Raider: Anniversary.

It's interesting because they nearly get it, and then it's bemusing and awful when they do things like turn the lost valley level into an arena boss battle, bookended with QTEs. The game has unlockable commentaries which so far have been pretty interesting - once unlocked they appear as crystals (actually I think they are the save point gems from the console versions), and when you use them you hear the commentary audio while you continue playing. Here's the final exchange in the Croft Manor level, between creative director Jason Botta and Toby Gard, the orginal designer:

Botta: The music room was originally right off of Lara's bedroom in the original Tomb Raider, but we made its own room in the remake. It's the last room that you unlock when you're playing through the mansion level in the game. But we kept all of the things in there, the piano's there, the harp is there, we did take out the workout mat though. We were questioning why you had a workout mat in her music room when we were remaking it.

Toby: Well... It was just, you know, why not? Maybe she gets Winston to play little tunes as she's doing her forward rolls or whatever.

Botta: Yeah, now we've moved that into the gym now. Seems like a more appropriate place for it. And Winston can still play some ditties.

(i took this transcript from this site)

...

I can't tell if Botta is genuinely puzzled by the workout mat, or if he's trying to set up a nice question for Gard, which the latter totally misses. To be clear, almost the first thing that you are told to do in the orginal Tomb Raider tutorial is to go into the music room so that you can practice some tumbling. It's almost instant characterization, and tells you a number of things - not only is the character more interested in honing her physical skills than her musical scales, and is more focussed on her personal interests than maintianing the trappings of minor nobility, but she is also an unreasonable woman, willing to adapt the world to suit herself.

I know moaning about this is really petty & far too cynical but I've written it out now. Oh well. Most of the game so far is good, it's fun and the commentaries have been interesting to hear. There's a time attack mode with no instant restart! There are awesome (apparently pointless) acrobatic moves! Sometimes I end up just running Lara in laps around an open area (there's no sprint button - she's a distance runner) and wondering if I would actually play a jogging game set in an empty, utopian city at night.

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I have now owned 130 of the Unovan Pokémon. I finished the main game too.
Trying to trade Zoruas for some of the evolutions I don't feel like raising.

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SPOILERS but it's an old game so I'm not using tags.

I finished the Tomb Raider: Anniversary remake recently. It's fun, nicely made and mostly respectful to the source material. There's some QTE stupidity but generally these come at the end of the level and can be redone on their own. Most of the time you are doing what the designer wanted you to, but the restrictions don't feel as arbitrary as they can in Underworld and Legend.

The contrast between shooting hundreds of people in those games and the 1 person killed in this game is pretty jarring. The scene in which Lara Croft kills that person is pretty interesting - it comes in a cutscene towards the end of the game, by which point it's already been established that she is perfectly capable of disarming him. But instead it starts a QTE in which you have to press the same button three times to shoot him dead. Failing to do so kills Croft and makes you redo the scene. I thought this was kind of interesting as it used the dissonance of QTEs ("It's not me actually doing the actions - I'm just responding to button prompts to further the game") to split Lara's actions from those of the player. Croft decides she is going to kill the man and you don't get a say in it. There's no moral decision, and the player is not implicated. This is also the part of the game Toby Gard seems most responsible for, so perhaps can be seen as a criticism of the psychopathic development of Lara Croft after the first game.

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Getting close to completing my Pokédex, I've obtained 141 of the Unovan Pokémon. I'm working on completing some two-evolution families, I need a Jellicent and a Bisharp, and then I think I'm left trying to figure out how to get some of the higher number ones (no idea where I will find a Reshiram). And there's still a mysterious 2 pokémon gap in the Pokédex ...

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Found someone in Brazil named ASHER who was offering a Reshiram in exchange for Klinklang. I'd spent some time evolving my Klink a couple of weeks ago, so I had one. I thought about catching or raising a new one but I've done that several times only to find the monster has already been traded to someone else. So I traded, and got the Reshiram. On reflection I feel slightly weird about it.

During the early part of the game I was able to aquire a Basculin which someone (あゆり - Ayuri) had thoughtfully taught Surf to - this let me sequence break and explore a fairly large section of the game before I was supposed to. (I just realised that the Basculin has the custom name "あかいめ" (akai me), which means "Red Eyes" .. I always like it when people bother to name their monsters. Thanks Ayuri!)

Anyway, I caught Klink during that trip and it helped me out quite a few times when having a Metal type was useful. I don't especially like its form, and I hadn't used it since it helped me win my Freeze Badge, but it was a Good Pokémon. I feel like perhaps I let it down by trading it. Obviously, that makes no sense as the pokémon isn't in any way sentient - it's a set of data, with some parts created by my interaction with random factors. The game has encouraged me to think about it as an actual creature by using things which are not related to the gameplay - for example, the way people in the game talk about pokémon, or the way the creature is animated.

So while a game can be reduced to raw mechanics, the way an element is presented can indicate to the player how they are expected to interact with it. And I think it helps one's enjoyment of the game if one plays along with the games intentions. Perhaps I would have more fun with some games if I played along with them more, instead of trying to impress my own psyche onto them. On the other hand, the idea of playing as the lead character in most action games makes me shudder slightly, so maybe it's better to conclude that those games aren't for me.

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LINEAR??????

shit. there goes the game i was looking forward to ;;;

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I bought Soul Calibur 5 with some vouchers I needed to use up, despite not really liking fighting games or the aesthetics of the Soul Calibur series. Playing the single player mode I was struck by how intensely I didn't care. Not about the story, and not about pressing buttons to make things happen. But then I made my own character and had fun playing online against other beginners, so it sort of evened out (?). The experience crystallizes how important player agency is for me, and what a difference it makes to have matchmaking that lets you play with people of your own skill level.

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Come and visit my online Style Boutique shop!!

Unnr
Floor 164
Twill Tower
Satin City

(Probably PAL territories only, not sure)

I thought the developers had created an excellent way to let people know which shops were active (by swapping flyers) but that only works in local area mode. There are 5 cities, each with 10 buildings which can have up to 200 floors, and each floor can house 10 stores ... so it's pretty unlikely anyone else will ever see my shop without some promotion.

Here's an Iwata Asks about Style Boutique.

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My zombie game (Dead Rising 2: Off the Record) arrived. I feel slightly ashamed that I gave money to people who make Uranus jokes whilst making an 18 rated game, but otherwise it seems pretty enjoyable so far. Keeping up with the story was too hard for me, so I started concentrating on rescuing people, and had a really fun couple of hours trying to get two survivors back to the safe house. It wasn't very hard, but I'm not very good, so I got the feeling of only just succeeding, and it was kind of cool kitting out the survivors with weapons and figuring out a route back across the complex.

The sandbox mode is quite aimless but I'm totally ok with that. Killing zombies is generally very easy - difficulty in the main game seems to be related to time limits, crowd control and weapon management. As with many (most?) violent games, there are no children present, which might make Dead Rising 2 (in which the protagonist has to protect his daughter) feel pretty strange. I don't know if the flipant tone of the gameplay would sit ok with more serious story elements.

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I got fucked over in the story mode of DR2: OTR by a combination of bad savegame usage and not realising that the time limit for case 3-2 would come out of the same bank as case 3-1. So I can't get to the next objective in time and will have to start again.

After further play, the sandbox seems quite shallow - there are a lot of things that I can do (altho' they mostly involve killing zombies in different ways), but not many interesting things seem to arise out them. I'm not sure why this is, the zombie behaviour is pretty limited (essentially just Move Towards and Attack), but so are the actions of the player. For example, I've encountered effective barricades but it's difficult to place things accurately to construct them myself.

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If it was someone from here that bought clothes from my shop in Style Boutique, thanks! It made me feel better after I lost to Grace in a travesty of a fashion contest.

I tried to play some Binary Domain online the other day but every time I joined a game, no-one could kill each other &| no enemies appeared. It was kind of cool but not what I expected.

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SEEN 153___________OBTAINED 153

I caught all of the Unovan Pokémon that it's currently possible to collect in my region. I feel I should report this even though I feel only a little pride & excitement about reaching this goal. It's just something that eventually happened while I was playing the game, which is just something I was doing to take my mind off other things.

Thanks again to sponkmonkey and Mime Paradox for trading me the pokémon I needed from Pokémon Black.

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Civilization V is great but it keeps crashing the whole computer which is bit of a downer. Also i set the difficulty too low and no-one has ever attacked me, so after a while i started totally ignoring military options. I suspect that a correctly timed attack from a neighbouring civilization could take my capital fairly easily but i also suspect that they are never going to try. I'm friends with Genghis Khan and he's the only one who gives me decent trade deals. Maybe i should start a harder game.


I Just got to the second strata in Legend of Grimrock. I'm enjoying it a lot at the moment, at first i thought the level design was a little unfocussed but some exposition and a decent gimmick level have sorted that out. The monsters of the 1st strata seem quite well designed - they can't be beaten easily in a stand up fight, so moving around them & striking blows before they can hit back seems encouraged, and that makes combat more exciting than just clicking each of the characters attack buttons in turn. Multiple enemies become more dangerous because moving around enemies means giving up the control of the 'safe' part of the dungeon previously explored and can risk trapping the party between the monsters, which is often fatal. I'm enjoying making maps too.

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I just accidently stayed up for 4 hours playing a game! By this metric, Saints Row the Third is about twice as good as APB: Reloaded.

Weird name tho'.

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"Only the Polynesians would build a place like this in the middle of the jungle. Only the Polynesians would want to."

I spent all yesterday evening fighting an intractable 1000 year jungle war against Carthage in Civilization V. Then Rome launched an attack against my budding desert city of Passing Breeze and I went to bed. I ... I'm not sure what I want from this game. Well, I want everyone to leave me alone and let me build things in peace but that's what happened in the last game and it got a bit boring. So maybe I want the game to be just hard enough that I can suceed most of the time, but that seems a bit self-satisfying (is that really a bad thing?). I'm not interested in beating the computer, and playing against random humans means eating a series of humiliating losses. I enjoy the fiction of creating a civilization, but that's meaningless, and satisfying optimization is difficult when the events of the future are unknown.

I'm not really complaining, there's just something about this type of game - the frustration of losing and the ultimate pointlessness of success, compounded by the knowledge that in forums a few clicks away people are analyzing the game to a degree I could never match.