Review #391: Wild Arms - Alter Code: F

 What a missed opportunity...

 Wild Arms is pretty darn mediocre. Wild Arms 2 was pretty great. Wild Arms 3 was bloody fantastic. The original game is more of a case of having aged relatively poorly, particularly in comparison with its sequels, which only got better and better. Alter Code: F is Wild Arms 1 running on Wild Arms 3's engine, what could go wrong? A lot.

 The story is pretty much the same as Wild Arms 1, which I wrote about previously, so there's no point for me to write the same blurb. That said, the remake's strongest feature is the new retelling. Sure, the translation is as bad, sometimes even worse, as the original game's, but they added more dialogue which adds more depth to villains as heroes alike, as well as better explaining some of their motivations and ideals. The plot twists are better set up as well, making them more impactful and interesting. The new facelift also does wonders to how the game tells the story. There's no denying it, as far as the story goes, this one's got beat the original by a landslide. The game also makes playable Jane and Emma, as well as a certain other character, but the only join the party at the end of the game, so you'll only use them for the bonus boss fights, if you decide to tackle them.

 The first thing that will catch you by surprise is that they did away with equipment. Equipment is one of the most fun aspects of an RPG, the promise of finding rewards inside dungeons, or buying new equipment and growing stronger. That's gone. Sure, Wild Arms 3 didn't have equipment either, but you could equip guardians with abilities and then equip these Guardians to your characters, plus, you could customize all four characters' weapons, so they grew stronger as you went along. The only way to increase your attack power is by leveling up. You can customize your characters by finding and equipping Skills, but they are not as varied as Wild Arms 3's(None increase Attack power!) or as rewarding to use. You must farm for repeat Skills if you want to increase its level on a character. Laaaaaaaaaaaaame.

 No way to increase your attack power means that you'll be underpowered pretty much all the way throughout, which means that random encounters can take a while. You can use spells and abilities to do more damage, but these run on limited resources, and pretty much the only way to replenish them is by sleeping at an Inn or leveling up. Eventually your level will grow so high that counting on level ups will be impossible, so get ready to tough it out! The cherry on top is that the encounter rate in this game is ridiculously high.

 The game borrows WA3's Migrant system, so you can dodge random encounters at the cost of some gauge from the migrant seal. Problem: Encounters are plentiful, so it will run out, and if you decide to skip too many of them, enemies will simply ambush you, which is unavoidable. You can equip a few items to prevent ambushes, but EVERY single member of the party needs to equip it, else it won't work. Oh! And you CAN'T RUN AWAY FROM BATTLES. Well, you can, there's a spell to escape, but that means wasting a precious Crest on such a dumb spell. Basically, the game wants you to fight lots of random encounters, since the encounter rate is so high and enemies will eventually ambush you, but that means spending MP and cartridges, so you'll run out of resources for bosses. And while you can count on level ups, once your level reaches 40 this won't be such a simple commodity. It's so stupid!

 Let's talk about the enemies for a bit. While this game is a remake of Wild Arms 1, most random encounters are borrowed from Wild Arms 3! Oh, and enemies LOVE inflicting status effects on your party, luckily you have spells. Wrong. For whatever reason, YOU CAN'T USE SPELLS OUTSIDE OF BATTLES. What where they thinking?? If I have the goddamn MP, let me use the goddamn spell! At least items are relatively cheap, but run out of them, and you will since it seems as if enemies only want to inflict status effects on you, and you're screwed. Brilliant. Don't even let me get into the fact that every area of the game features 3 enemy types at most. AT MOST. I'm absolutely speechless.

 Now let me segway into Wild Arms 3, a game I've mentioned a lot and the game it shares an engine with. It's true, you can't use healing spells outside of battles as well... But Wild Arms 3 has an excuse: Everything runs on FP, a limitless resource that's gained and spent during battle. There's also the fact that you can increase your attack power pretty easily, so you can make short work of random encounters: They don't take nearly as much time nor resources. I popped Wild Arms 3 for a bit in order to compare, and even the Encounter Rate is more lenient.

 Back to Wild Arms Alter Code: F, did I mention that they kept some of the most annoying parts from Wild Arms 1? Remember all those moments in which the game basically told you to 'Go explore every town and hope to find your next objective'? They kept them. And this game uses the Sonar/Radius system from Wild Arms 2 and 3, so you have to find towns yourself on the overworld, and they won't show on the map until you talk to the single right NPC on the correct town that will tell you about its location. Fun. At least in the original game you could come across dungeons and towns by yourself.

 As not to end on such a negative note, I can at least praise the new puzzles. As per Wild Arm's norm, while inside dungeons you will have to do a lot of puzzling while using various different tools, four for each main character, for a total of 12. In the original game, these puzzle felt more like obstacles 'Oh, a flame, put it out with the vase', this time around they are proper puzzles, and some will put your brain to the test. The combat was kept more or less the same, it's still turn based, and characters can use items, perform normal attacks or perform spells/shots(Shots consume cartridges and spells consume mana). There's also the FP mechanic, which increases as you deal and take damage and lets you use even stronger skills.

 Wild Arms - Alter Code: F started oh so promising, but it quickly turned into a tedious borefest. It's hard to have fun with it when the game is constantly trying to waste your time with continuous, endless amount of needlessly taxing random encounters, marred with poor design choices that work only to vex the player. I wish I could tell you that this game was the way to go with Wild Arms 1, but I can't.
 4.5 out of 10

Review #390: Bionicle

 A hour-long snoozefest.

 You've heard the name Bionicle before, you simply did, no matter who you were or what your age was. Bionicle was kind of a big deal for Lego, and it quickly became a story-drive toy franchise that delved into other forms of multimedia. Not only is this game a tie-in with the toys, it's also a tie-in with the direct-to-dvd movie, oh boy, are we in for a ride!

 The game, supposedly, follows the story of the Mask of Light movie, but I couldn't make heads or tails of the plot. On the first two stages you collect two colored masks which triggers a cutscene in which said masks fuse...? with other colored masks and the protagonists transform because reasons. And then, in subsequent levels, you find even more of these masks. I don't even. Maybe if you are invested in the franchise you'll get the gist of most of the story, since it uses a lot of in-universe terms which were enigmas to me, and if you've seen the movie you'll probably make sense of the whole ordeal. Regardless, the entire game can be beat in just an hour or so.

 The game is a 3D platformer some times, most times maybe? In an effort to add variety, every stage has some sort of gimmick or style. The first level is your standard, dull 3D platforming stage featuring the Toa of Fire. The next level makes you play as the Toa of Ice, skating down an icy slope. Afterward the characters turn into the Toa Nuva, and you'll be playing as the Toa Nuva of Water alternating 3D platforming and awkward swimming sections. The next level is a minecart on-rails stage as the Toa Nuva of Earth. The Toa Nuva of Rock comes next and he has a 3D platforming stage that requires you to push things on top of switches, which is pretty wonky. The Toa Nuva of Air has the worst and most annoying level in the entire game, featuring choppy gliding mechanics and terrible vine-swinging segments. The second-to-last level pits you as the Toa Nuva of Fire on a race of sorts against an enemy, and the final level is a boss fight against Makuta, playing as the Toa of Light.

 Moving around and jumping around works decently, there isn't any depth or complicated maneuvers, but it works well. The gimmicks are pretty bad though. It's easy to mis-judge your jumps with vines, and some of the gliding segments are hard to land, thank god for unlimited lives! The pushing mechanics in the Toa Nuva of Rock's stage is laughably bad, pushing something has never been so choppy, and the entire boss fight is made up of you awkwardly pushing stones on top of vents. The camera is pretty bad too, although, to be fair it never got me killed. Something I found fascinating was how short levels were... yet how long they felt because of how boring and bland they were! The art direction was pretty neat, levels are nice to look at, and, maybe, if they had spent their time polishing the platforming and level design and did away with gimmick stages, we could've had a more decent game!

 Look at how badass these Toas look with their weapons! It's a shame they don't use them in lieu of shooting energy from them. How awesome would've it have been to have them slash and dice their way through stages!... but seeing how bland everything is, it's probably for the best that they went with simplicity. Circle shoots energy, and it usually lands on target thanks to automatic targeting. Your energy bolts run on energy, and once depleted you have to hold square to charge it back... or wait for an enemy to shoot and put up your shields in order to absorb it. Whichever the case, you'll have to wait, either for your energy to recharge or for the enemy to attack. For what it's worth, the combat system is kinda ingenious, absorbing energy from enemies in order to recharge your own weapons and the such. It's probably the game's best feature, but it's bogged down due to how easily enemies are dispatched, not requiring much thought or planning.

 Bionicle is not a good game. It's terrible at its worst and it's subpar at its best. That said, I think, I think that it might be an entertaining game for its target demographic: Little children. Although, even now I can remember how disappointed I was when I was younger that you didn't get to play as every Toa on foot. Look, even if you're a fan of the franchise, if you're older than 8, this game is a pass.
 3.0 out of 10

Now Playing: Wild Arms - Alter Code: F

 Maybe just what I wanted?

 So, I played Wild Arms a few days ago, and I was less than impressed with it. My biggest gripes came with how outclassed it was by future games, well, this game might have me covered. It's Wild Arms 1 remade with the Wild Arms 3 engine. So, hopefully, the puzzles will be better, combat will be better and there will be more customization.

 The dialogue is a bit awkward at times, not unlike the original game, but I can already tell that they are being very cinematic with the presentation, so, hopefully, it will deepen into character's personalities, which were pretty flat in the first game.

 While the new graphics are a big plus, character models look a bit weird, I think their torsos are too big for their tiny legs. Also, the new Surf village was rather pathetic, there were only three houses and barely any NPC, a far cry from the first game, and I'm worried that the other towns will be smaller too. But then again, a lot of the buildings and NPCs were merely filler in the previous game, so maybe having more mainstreamed towns will be better in the long run. I remember how easy and fast it was to explore a town in WA1, but now, thanks to the newer, better graphics... we've load times to contend with, which is the norm on PS2, but I got used to the faster exploration in the first game!

 The battles I hope will show their refinement later, I've only just finished Jack's prologue, which by the way is very lame how we've to play them in order now! and they lack the way FP worked in WA2 and 3, however, I can already tell that the new FP mechanics will prove to be more flexible in the end, I think. Equipment has been removed, which sucks, but if I can enhance my weapons like I could in WA3, I'll be OK.

 It looks promising! This remake looks oh so very promising, it might be exactly what I needed: Wild Arms 1 with the refinements the series would get with subsequent installments.

Review #389: Dead to Rights

 Just your everyday afternoon cop TV soap opera.

 Exciting. Frantic. Kinetic. Chaotic. Those are but a few words I could use to describe Namco's 2002 third person shooter Dead to Rights, a game clearly inspired by Max Payne, but opting for police drama instead of detective noir. It's a game nobody talks about nowadays, but golly, has it aged well!

 You shouldn't be playing this game for its story, but, in case you are, the game follows Jack Slate and his dog, Shadow, as they try to avenge Jack's father. Along the way he'll get framed, he'll escape jail, face betrayal, discover corruption and follow the entire gamut of action-cop movie tropes you think off the top of your head. The story is silly and cliched, the game knows it and it never takes itself seriously: you'll face thong-wearing ninja twin babes, a mad shooter that heals himself by drinking liquor and a cartoonishly abusive jailer. It's dumb, it's fun.

 Dead to Rights is a very linear game, so you'll be traversing stages as you shoot and punch your way through sometimes endless hordes of mooks. This game was from an era before Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, so manual aiming is more or less impossible(Although you can enter a useless first-person aiming mode by tapping R2), so you use R1 to lock-on to enemies, and the right analog stick to switch between enemies. The color of the targeting reticule indicate how likely your shots are to land. It works rather well, and dispatching enemies as you strafe around is pretty fun.

 Luckily, Jack has a ton of maneuvers at his disposal to make short work of his enemies. Tapping circle while unarmed will perform an instakill that disarms his enemy, and tapping circle while holding a gun will let you grab an enemy and use him as a meat shield. The triangle button can be use to dive, and if you've stamina, you can dive in slow motion and pump your enemies with lead. You an also use circle while next to a wall to stick to it and take cover. Lastly, there's a fourth gauge, below your health, stamina and armor: Shadow. When full, you can use shadow to instantly kill an enemy and have Shadow bring you his weapon. Everything works really well, and it's a blast to play because landing bullets feels good, and once you get a hang of every mechanic, it turns very stylish as well.

 There's also melee combat, and it works relatively well. Once again, landing blows feels very crunchy and satisfying. That said, it's not the most in-depth of combat systems, but as a complement to the shooting? It's great. Sadly, the developers might've bit a bit more than they could chew, since they also added minigames. Disarming bombs and lockpicking, while somewhat out of place, are relatively fun... but there's also a very weird exotic dance minigame, a weird lifting weights minigame and... punching a sand bag? Most of these are rather boring, and while I appreciate that they might've wanted to add some variety... it wasn't needed, and they work against the game. The game is relatively short(4:30 hours or so), so it ends before it gets boring.

 My biggest annoyance with the game was that sometimes enemies will respawn indefinitely. It's not unusual to be picking up weapons after a firefight only for an enemy to respawn behind you, heck, some of those times they respawn from areas you just completely cleared out of enemies! While I never died to a random respawn or during the endless waves on certain missions(Mission 15 being a big culprit, since until you realize that you're supposed to go through a certain door, you might be tempted to try killing everything) they certainly were annoying.

 I had a blast with Dead to Rights! Everything that matters works swimmingly, and it's only a few little kinks and issues that hold it down from its full potential, and a few extra levels could've helped, since I was left wanting more!
 8.0 out of 10.

Now Playing: Dead to Rights

 Amazing,

 Third person shooters haven't aged very well, you can blame games like Gears of War and Resident Evil for that, but, Jesus Christ does Dead to Rights still has got it! The shooting feels so good, and plays so well, there're many interesting mechanics like disarms or diving and slow-mo diving, and the aim button works pretty well, clearly, the game was designed to make the most of not having to aim with the right analog stick. The melee combat also feels pretty good.

 That said, there're some rather... uneeded minigames included. The Exotic Dance minigame was kinda weird, the weight lifting was just silly and the punching bag one was dumb. The game could've easily done without them.

 All in all, the game's pretty much brilliant, I'm having a blast.

Review #388: Wild Arms

 Ain't a wild ride.

 I love the few Wild Arms I've played. Wild Arms 2 is bloody great, while Wild Arms 3 rests highly upon my favorite JRPGs ever. Some people consider Wild Arms 1 to be the best one, so of course I had to try it... It was not what I expected.

 You play as a team of Dream Chasers: Rudy, the dull mute hero type who has the power to wield the fearful ARMs, Jack Van Burace, the victim of a poor localization who's got a few skeletons in his closet, searching for 'Power' and lastly, Cecilia, the princess who loves escaping out of the castle, because every JRPG princess loves escaping her castle. While Wild Arms 2 and 3 had this fantastic and original Spaghetti Western theming to them, Wild Arms 1 is more of a generic fantasy game. There're golems, ancient steampunk-ish technology waiting to be found, princesses, castles, an ancient race of elves-equivalents named Elw and, lastly, the enemy race: The Machines. While there're a few twists and turns, a few more obvious than others, the story was a bit too 'me-too' as far as RPGs go for my liking, and characters were too one-dimensional. It fails to engage the player, but at least it has a few interesting ideas.

 This, being a JRPG, plays like one to a tee. Run around, explore towns, traverse dungeons, fight a few random battles and defeat some bosses for good measure. What's interesting about Wild Arms is how they deal with exploration: All three characters have their own set of 4 tools, which are used to solve puzzles while inside dungeons, Take Rudy, he can use bombs to destroy cracked walls, or use the Power Glove(It's so bad) to hit stuff, while Jack can use a grappling hook or send his pet flying mouse to grab stuff from afar. It really sets Wild Arms apart from other games... but, sadly, this time around puzzles are rather lame and simple, to the point of the use of tools feeling more like sorting obstacles than figuring out how to deal with situations. The series will really get the most out of the Tool system in subsequent games.

 But what's really puzzling is how the game progresses. More than once will the game expect you to just roam around, suffering dozens upon dozens of random encounters, until you somehow bump into where you are supposed to go next. It's poor game design, add to that the poor translation and you've a recipe for annoyance. Some puzzles are a bit too vague as well. There's this instance in which you have to speak with a nun, of course the game doesn't tell you that you need to, but she's blocked off by a kid that mentions being scared of the giant rat monsters. Somehow you have to realize that you've to use the flying mouse on the kid to get him to move and then talk to the nun... Seriously?

 Combat fares much better, using a more primitive set of mechanics than future games. Battles follow the traditional turn based system, and on each turn you've a decent variety of things you could do. You can swap out a character's equipment, you can use items, use spells/skills, attack or use FP attacks. FP is built as you take and deal damage, there're four levels to the FP gauge, and each character has four unique FP skills they can use. It's a rather fun system that works really well... .and which would be refined to a shine in latter games.

 It's interesting to see Wild Arms' origins, but this first game leaves a lot to be desired. Sure, battles are fun, but not as fun as they are in future games thanks to all the added bells and whistles. It lacks the fantastic customization that you could do on your party, and while I'm sure the tool system was original at its time... the puzzles get SO much better and so much more creative than this game. Heck, even their stories are much more engrossing and original than this generic pastiche of tropes. Wild Arms 1 is not a bad game, but it stands eclipsed by its much superior sequels.
 5.5 out of 10

Review #387: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3

 Who'd knew The Force was fond of skating?

 There's no denying that Tony Hawk 3 was the bees knees at the time of its release. It was the culmination of all that was Tony Hawk, and a brave new step into the next generation. And while the game has stood the test of time... Tony Hawk 4 and the other sequels happened.

 You can play either Career, Single Session(2 minutes to score points), Free Skate(No time limit, fool around any level), create your own skate park and a few two player modes. Career has no story, no fat. It's just you, 8 levels, 2 minutes and their goal lists. If you ask me, it's rather... archaic. Mind you, I adore arcade-like games, but you need to finish a certain amount of goals in order to progress to the next level, and considering that about 70% of the goals require you finding something or figuring out how to do it(Because 'Start the Earthquake' totally means grinding 4 rails), and running on 2-minute limits is rather tedious. This was tweaked with Tony Hawk 4's mission based approach, which I think works much better. Regardless, the game's levels are distinct, fun and well crafted, and the goals on each are very varied.

 While some may argue that subsequent games overdid it with mechanics and what not, and would claim that Pro Skater 3's mechanics are all that's needed... I digress. Climbing stairs is a pain in the butt, and if you messed up, you are better off losing time and finding another way up instead of trying to fight gravity and grind a rail upwards. This was fixed with the ability to get off your board. Sticker-Slapping/Wallplanting was another fun mechanic that would be added later that would let you continue combos even when riding straight into a wall. What I mean to say is that, yes, the mechanics present in Tony Hawk 3 work, and work well... but future games added so much more to the game, and mostly fun or useful tools, it's hard to come back to this one.

 If you don't care about unlockables, you can be done with the game in little more than half an hour. In order to unlock every secret skater you'll either have to complete the game 100% with every skater or... use cheat codes. The extras are worth it, what other game lets you skate as Darth Maul or Wolverine!?

 Is Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 still a good game? Undoubtedly. Has it aged poorly? Not at all... but as far as I'm concerned, the subsequent games are all much, much more fun to play, and offer a whole lot more than simply 'bells and whistles', they improved and evolved the formula. But, hey, if you still prefer the older format, this one still plays like a dream.
 6.0 out of 10