#oneaday Day 99: Yakuza time again

I’ve been making a start on Yakuza 5 alongside the other stuff I’ve been playing recently. I’d put off starting this one after playing Yakuza 0 up to Yakuza 4 pretty much back-to-back (and playing Kiwami and Kiwami 2 in place of the original PS2 games, and the PS4 remasters of 3 and 4) because I knew this one was the largest and most ambitious of the PS3-era games in the series.

One of the nice things about Yakuza games, though, is that they’re quite “dip” friendly, particularly if you’re the sort of person who likes to enjoy the side activities before moving the main story along. It’s perfectly enjoyable to play Yakuza 5 for an evening, not move the main plot along at all but still feel like some meaningful “progress” has been made.

Unlike its immediate predecessor, Yakuza 5 opens with you playing as main series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu, though following all the shit he’s put up with over the course of the previous five games, he’s now hanging out in Fukuoka under a pseudonym and driving a taxi for a living. As you might expect, this translates to a number of significant things in gameplay terms.

Because yes, Kiryu working as a taxi driver isn’t just for show; you have the option of engaging directly with his job. And his work in the taxis takes several forms, which is rather fun: regular taxi jobs demand that you drive sensibly and carefully, while “race” missions allow you to let loose on the highway while Kiryu attempts to take down some street racing gangs. The former types of job have quite realistic handling; you have to take care not to accelerate or brake too sharply, ensure you indicate to go around corners and try not to hit anything. By contrast, pretty much anything goes in the race missions, which are distinctly arcadey in execution — to such a degree that you have a boost that leaves trails of blue flames, and “Heat Actions” that can be used at various points on the course for silly, cinematic events that usually put you at an advantage over your opponent.

Outside of that, it’s business as usual for the Yakuza series, with this game once again being set a few years later than the previous one, now bringing us into the 2010s. You can go out, eat food, get drunk, play darts, play Virtua Fighter, hang out at cabaret clubs and chat up hostesses, get into street fights and pick up trash for the good of the community. The main plot has something about Daigo Dojima going missing but honestly I haven’t moved this along at all other than to get Kiryu into a position where I can do the taxi missions.

And, of course, there are substories aplenty to discover, ranging from the simple to the absurd. One thing I’ve always liked about Yakuza is that it recognises how it’s a video game, and thus it isn’t afraid to be very, very silly at times; it juxtaposes this silliness with the rather serious nature of the main narratives, and it’s always very effective. It’s a reminder that people are complex, and even someone as stern-faced as Kiryu has a more light-hearted side that he enjoys indulging at times.

Anyway, as I say, I’m not that far into the game as a whole as yet, but I’m enjoying what I’ve played so far. I’m looking forward to getting the opportunity to soup up Kiryu’s taxi a bit… I get the impression it’s going to be necessary to clear some of the later racing missions.

For now, though, it’s after midnight so I should probably sleep. Probably. Except you and I both know I’m probably going to watch an episode of Deep Space Nine first.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 80: Gaming specialism vs. generalised mediocrity

I decided to hop on board with a friend’s “high score” (well, “best time”, really) challenge over on his Discord today. The game? Sega Rally on the Saturn, a game (and console) I have precisely zero experience with outside of an occasional go on an arcade machine back in the ’90s.

Unsurprisingly, I am not yet at a standard where I can even enter the challenge, given that it requires participants to complete all three stages of the game and post a time on the game’s high score table. But I’m not mad about that. In fact, it brought something into focus that I’ve probably been aware of for a good long while, but which I hadn’t really thought about actively before.

A key difference between older, arcade-style games and the stuff we typically get today is that older games demand that you specialise — get really good at one very specific thing — while today’s games only demand that you reach a bare minimum acceptable standard in a wide variety of different activities.

Using racing games as an example, when you play Sega Rally, outside of stuff like the Time Attack and two-player modes, you’re always doing the same thing. You’re always racing the same three courses in the same order using one of the two same cars each time. Minimal variables. Minimal randomisation. Maximum scope for learning how to play the game well, and developing specific strategies that work for you.

Compare with a modern-day racing game. Leaving aside the fact that arcade-style racers barely exist any more outside of the indie space, today’s racing games are much more likely to give you hundreds of individual challenges to complete, and never really demand that you get good at one of them to a notable degree. Rather than specialising in one very specific thing, you are developing a standard of generalised mediocrity — enough to get by, but nothing more.

Of course, some players choose to take things a little further and want to top the online leaderboards or beat things on the hardest difficulty, obtain “S-Ranks” or whatever. But I’m willing to bet that a statistically significant portion of players of any given game featuring a wide swathe of content (ugh, I know, but bear with me) will play each thing the precise number of times they need to in order to mark it as “complete”, and then never touch it again.

I’m not saying either of these approaches is wrong per se — although I suspect a game as “content-light” as Sega Rally would be a hard sell as a full-price game today — but it is interesting how different those two types of game feel. My brief jaunt with Sega Rally this afternoon was genuinely exciting. I could see myself improving as my lap times got better with each attempt — and the successful completion of the challenge was within sight. Add the competitive element to that (once I’ve actually cleared the three races, of course) and you have even more exciting thrills.

This isn’t to say that games like this don’t exist in the modern day, either — although they’re less common. The last time I really feel like there was a highly competitive, specialised game that I spent a significant amount of time with was probably Geometry Wars 2 on Xbox 360, and that must be pushing 20 years old at this point. But it was the exact same sort of thing I was feeling today with Sega Rally: a specific, well-defined, non-randomised challenge, and the desire to do well at that one thing.

The other benefit of games like this is that they’re much more friendly to shorter sessions. This makes it ideal for those of you who have been browbeaten into believing you “don’t have time” to play games any more, or if you only have a half hour before your food arrives, or before you have to catch the bus, or log on to Teams and pretend that you’re working or something.

There’s something to be said for the “no strings” aspect of these games; the fact that they don’t demand your commitment over the long term, and they’re not trying to bribe you into making that one game your complete lifestyle with things like Battle Passes, microtransactions, progression systems and other such shenanigans. On top of that, it often just feels like games that have a small number of very specific challenges to complete are probably better designed; if you only have three tracks in your racing game, you better make sure they’re damn good ones, whereas if you have 100 tracks, who cares if one or two are a bit of a stinker?

If you haven’t played a “specialised” game like Sega Rally for a long time, I highly recommend the experience. Boot it up, spend some time with it, enjoy the experience, then set it aside and do something else. Far from being a “waste of time”, as certain quarters of modern gaming might like you to believe, I think you might be surprised what a pleasantly invigorating experience it is… and how likely you might be to come back and try again later.

2314: Games That Deserve the Ys-Style Remake Treatment

Rather than pondering this as it occurred to me last night as I finished writing that day’s post, I thought I’d split this off into its own separate post, as it’s something that I think is worth thinking about in detail.

For the benefit of those who can’t be arsed to read yesterday’s post, my thinking is this: Ys I and II have had so many remakes over the years that their most recent incarnations are both recognisably “modern” and authentically “retro” at the same time. In other words, they maintain the feeling of the original games while incorporating modern aesthetic and mechanical standards to make them more palatable and enjoyable to a modern audience, as well as perhaps expanding on things like the overall script and story. This, to me, is a great way to bring a classic game up to date, so I started pondering what other old games might benefit from this treatment?

Here’s what I came up with. (Or rather, here’s what occurred to me as I wrote this post.)

Phantasy Star II

I played Phantasy Star I all the way through in its Game Boy Advance incarnation — actually just a straight port of the Master System original. I enjoyed it a great deal, despite the necessity of actually getting the graph paper out and mapping the dungeons.

Phantasy Star II, meanwhile, despite being enthusiastically raved about by a Phantasy Star-loving friend as his favourite in the series, just didn’t quite “click” with me for some reason. I liked its aesthetic, I liked its battle system, I liked its concept — I just couldn’t quite get into it.

Part of the reason for this was its dungeon design. By presenting its dungeons from a three-quarter top-down perspective rather than its predecessor’s first-person perspective, they became significantly harder to map effectively — and boy, you still needed to map them. The first big dungeon was a mess of almost identical-looking floors with transitions between them that sent you to all manner of different places, and I found it absolutely impossible to navigate effectively, and moreover, impossible to figure out a sensible, effective means of mapping it.

It’s not necessarily the lack of a map facility that was the problem, as both Ys I and II featured some fairly complex labyrinths that I nonetheless managed to navigate without mapping, but there was something about Phantasy Star II that I found irreconcilably confusing. A modern remake would perhaps benefit from a map facility, or perhaps even a rethinking of the dungeon designs — taking the latter approach would have the added benefit of making the game feel like a “new” experience for veterans, though purists would likely thumb their noses at the possibility. Perhaps there could be an option to have “classic” or “contemporary” dungeons according to your preference.

Aside from that, simply an update of the art would be lovely — and take Ys’ approach of improving the fidelity of the art without necessarily compromising its style; Ys I and II feature gorgeous ’90s anime-style character designs, and they look both lovely and distinctive, so I feel Phantasy Star II could benefit from such a visual update, too.

The Mercenary series

Mercenary and its two sequels Damocles and Mercenary III were defining games in my childhood. Some of the most technically impressive games of the 8- and 16-bit computer era, they were sprawling, open-world adventures that managed to tell an interesting story while giving the player an unprecedented degree of freedom to explore and just generally piss around in the world (and, later, solar system) that developer Paul Woakes had created.

They look very primitive today, though. Built on rigid grid systems with no more than one building per (pretty large) grid square, the environments were certainly large and sprawling, but rather empty-feeling at times. A modern remake could benefit from greater scenery density and perhaps an expansion of the dynamic scenery Mercenary III introduced in the form of its fully functional public transportation system.

There was actually going to be a Damocles remake at one point with full texture-mapped graphics and all manner of other goodies — this was a few years back, too, so I can only imagine what modern graphics hardware would make of this sort of game. Unfortunately, I feel that very few people have heard of this series these days, so I feel it’s destined to remain part of history rather than something that will ever get brought up to date and given to a brand new audience.

Shining Force

Sega’s classic strategy RPG already had one lovely remake on the Game Boy Advance, but it’s since disappeared from relevance everywhere except for the Sega Mega Drive Classics pack available on Steam. And while the Mega Drive version still works just fine, it would be kind of lovely to see a fully up to date version of the original Shining Force, its sequel and even the Game Gear version Shining Force Gaiden (which, fun fact, was also released for Palm devices, of all things).

Shining Force’s gameplay remains solid today, and with the popularity of Fire Emblem it’s not too much of a stretch to say that all it needs is a fresh coat of paint and a remastered soundtrack to make it something people would more than likely happily pay £15 to have in their Steam library or PSN downloads. Hell, I’d happily pay £40 for a physical edition of a Shining Force compilation, including modernised updates of Shining Force, Shining Force II and Shining Force Gaiden, perhaps even with upscaled versions of the various Shining Force III releases for good measure.

And localise the other two Shining Force III games while you’re on, Sega, while I’m dreaming.

Alternate Reality

I mention this game quite a lot, because it’s fascinating to me. I found it fascinating when I first played it as a child, even if I didn’t understand how role-playing games worked at the time, and I still find its complexity and depth fascinating today.

For the uninitiated, Alternate Reality was a proposed series of games that began with The City and continued into The Dungeon, but was ultimately scrapped before its other episodes were completed. The story deals with the player character being abducted by aliens and taken to another world, seemingly medieval in nature but with occasional whiffs of peculiar technology starting to become apparent, particularly in The Dungeon. The ultimate intention was for the player to discover the aliens’ plan — a Matrix-style virtual world designed to make its participants believe that they were living a “real life” in this other world, when in fact they were just existing as part of a simulation — but unfortunately this ambitious concept was never brought to fruition.

We have the graphical technology and programming knowhow to bring the complete Alternate Reality concept to fruition today, in more impressive form than ever before. Bethesda RPGs show that there’s very much a market for sprawling, freeform, open-world games that the player can tackle as they see fit, and the complete scope of Alternate Reality wouldn’t be any more ambitious than your typical Elder Scrolls game.

I would even be happy if it maintained its old-school “gridder”-style dungeon crawling presentation rather than featuring a true, fully modelled 3D open world — I just dream of one day seeing creator Philip Price’s original vision brought to fruition, and kind of wish I was able to do something about it myself!

2188: Neptunia Games I’d Like to See

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With Megadimension Neptunia V-II and Megatagmension Blanc and Neptune vs. Zombies on the way to the West, hopefully with Neptunia vs. Sega Hard Girls to follow in the near future, a Neptunia fan such as myself has to ponder what might be next for the series, particularly now it’s made the jump to PlayStation 4 and PC as well as Vita.

With that in mind, I had a think about some Neptunia games I’d like to see, particularly in the vein of “spin-offs” such as Hyperdimension Neptunia U Action Unleashed and Hyperdevotion Noire. Here are said thoughts, expressed in the style of a overly excitable PR blast, overuse of exclamation marks and all.

Hyperdimension Neptunia Infinity Dungeon

Gamindustri is in peril once again… and the CPUs are nowhere to be seen?!

Top Guild agent IF is assigned to the mystery and quickly discovers that the monsters pouring out into Gamindustri appear to be coming from a new dungeon that opened in the vicinity of Planeptune. Not knowing what to expect, she begins her quest to uncover the fates of her friends, the CPUs and the CPU Candidates. Just how deep does this mysterious dungeon, whose walls seem to shift and twist before her very eyes, really go?

FEATURES

The first Neptunia roguelike! Explore an infinite array of procedurally generated levels as IF and your favourite Neptunia characters as you attempt to discover the source of the Infinity Dungeon’s power!
An all-new twist on Neptunia’s crazy combat! Tactical turn-based movement allows for seamless transitions between exploration and combat; meanwhile, for the first time in the series, make use of the environment in creative ways to defend yourself and inflict massive damage on your foes!
Looking for a more direct route? Make your own! All of Hyperdimension Neptunia Infinity Dungeon’s levels are fully destructible, with IF and friends’ special moves just as likely to bash holes in the walls of the dungeon as they are to smash their enemies into oblivion!
Mix it up with Irregular Quest conditions! The Infinity Dungeon works in strange and mysterious ways; some floors will challenge you to clear them against the clock, while others will task you with defeating the enemies as stylishly as possible. Uncover and fulfil the Irregular Quest conditions to maximise your rewards!
A wide cast of playable characters! Explore the dungeon as IF, Compa, Neptune and the rest of the gang — plus a few special guests!

Coming soon to PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4, featuring Cross-Save support. Pre-order your Limited Edition now, featuring a 2CD soundtrack, artbook and fully poseable IF figurine.

Hyperdimension Neptunia U2 Action Unchained

Peace reigns once again in Gamindustri, but the world — and its CPUs — are restless.

Enter, once again, intrepid journalists Dengekiko and Famitsu, who once again have an offer for the CPUs and their Candidates: a means of entertaining both themselves and their people, plus a way to keep their fighting skills in shape.

FEATURES

Hack, slash… and think?! Hyperdimension Neptunia U2 Action Unchained’s dungeons are like nothing you’ve ever seen in the Neptunia series, combining challenging combat encounters with head-scratching puzzles that will require you to use your smarts, dexterity and a bevy of interactive items to progress. Nep-Nep might need some help with that last bit!
Custom combos GET! Edit your favourite fighter’s moves and abilities as you see fit from a wide palette of options that expands as you progress. Develop your own personal fighting style for each character and display your skills with a selection of different weapons, each with their own movesets!
Fight one-on-one or go toe-to-toe against the horde! Hyperdimension Neptunia U2 Action Unchained’s combat encounters range from challenging one-on-one battles against both monsters and incarnations of Gamindustri’s great heroes to large-scale battles against overwhelming odds. Can you stem a seemingly never-ending tide of monsters?!
Fight smart, and fight cool! It’s not just about beating your opponents; it’s about making yourself look great! Mix up your combos, SP Moves and EXE Drives to impress the audience and earn more Shares to maximise your favourite character’s abilities!

Coming soon to PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4, featuring Cross-Save support and Cross-Play online co-op for 1-4 players. Pre-order your limited edition now, featuring a 2CD soundtrack, huge wallscroll and collection of chibi Neptunia figurines.

Hyperdimension Neptunia Gamindustri Idol Project

“Is anyone else getting a distinct sense of deja vu?!”

A new foe threatens Gamindustri — and this time it’s not the fault of the monsters. No, the CPUs’ very power is threatened by the rise in popularity of idols — and this time there’s no Producer to help them out! Fortunately, old friend 5pb. is on hand to give the CPUs and their Candidates a bit of advice on winning the love of the people back…

FEATURES

Rhythm action gameplay developed in collaboration with SEGA and Crypton Future Media, developers of the Hatsune Miku Project DIVA series! Enjoy 35 songs, including classics from the Neptunia series and originals composed specifically for this game, as you challenge taxing note charts at four levels of difficulty!
Customise the CPUs as they aim for idol glory! A huge variety of costumes, accessories and stage props are on offer for both the CPUs and the Candidates; some even have special effects, but you’ll have to experiment to find out what works best for you!
Two ways to play! Take on a new story of the CPUs and the Candidates attempting to win back the support of the people of Gamindustri, or play for fun in Arcade mode as you try to top your best scores!
Take the battle for best idol online! Join the Guild online to track your progress and best performances against players from all over the world! Share your customised CPU Idols and stage setups as you attempt to dominate not just Gamindustri, but our world too!

Coming soon to PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4, featuring Cross-Save support and Cross-Play online functionality including social features, sharing and leaderboards. Pre-order your limited edition now, featuring a 2CD soundtrack, commemorative concert programme and collection of pendants, allowing you to proudly show the world who your favourite CPU Idol is!

Note: I know these games are not real. I also know that Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection is a thing. Thank you in advance for your time and your desire to point these things out to me, though.

2128: Point to Point

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I’m apparently on a minor retro kick at the moment, what with playing The Legend of Zelda and, also, downloading the “3D Classics” version of OutRun on my 3DS.

I love OutRun. It’s one of those games that I used to see in the arcade but, for whatever reason, didn’t play very often. (I feel it was probably something to do with my Dad baulking at the idea of paying 50p for one credit, but I usually managed to convince him that it was worth paying this much to play G-LOC, which at least had aeroplanes in it.) We also had the dreadful Atari ST port of Turbo OutRun, which I actually rather enjoyed despite its atrocious framerate, appalling load times (in the middle of a race!) and loss of various animations and game features if you had less than 1MB of RAM in your computer.

Despite all these setbacks, OutRun has always remained a racing game that I’ve been very fond of, and when the Shenmue series hit Dreamcast with a variety of playable Sega games right there within the game itself, I spent a great deal of time recapturing past glories (or, more commonly, indignities) on OutRun and Super Hang-On. When the PlayStation 2/Xbox era rolled around, I spent a lot of time playing the wonderful OutRun 2, which brought the basic gameplay of the original up to date with fresh graphics, but otherwise played just like an old arcade game. And when the Xbox 360 got a tweaked port of OutRun 2 on its downloadable Xbox Live Arcade service, well, of course I was going to play it again.

3D Classics OutRun is arguably a step back technology-wise from OutRun 2 and its spinoffs; it’s based on the original 16-bit sprite-based graphics rather than being rendered in full polygonal glory. This is true to the original game, however, and there are a few little tweaks here and there to bring it a bit more up to date. It runs at 60 frames per second, for one thing, making it look smoother than the arcade version ever did, and makes excellent use of the 3DS’ glasses-free stereoscopic 3D for some impressive visual effects. Possibly my favourite “pointless but cool” feature in it, however, is the simulation of the arcade cabinets’ movement that you can turn on; OutRun was one of the many arcade games in the period that had “Deluxe” cabinets featuring hydraulics that would cause your seat to move around as you played. Your field of vision on the tiny screen of the 3DS isn’t quite the same as literally feeling your car being slammed around corners, but it’s a decent enough approximation, and a fun (and optional) effect to play with.

But enough about the technical side of things; every time I play some variation on OutRun I find myself pining for this lost age of racing games. Not necessarily because of the graphics or the style of play or anything — playing racing games with strict countdown time limits can be a bit of a culture shock these days! — but because they feature a subtle difference from most modern racing games in that they are point-to-point racers rather than lap-based.

I like point-to-point races, and we don’t see nearly enough of them in modern racing games. There are exceptions, mind you: Burnout 2 had a nice little feature where once you completed the various events in one area, you then had a point-to-point race to get to the next one; Burnout Paradise was almost entirely point-to-point races; the Midnight Club series took an enjoyably chaotic approach to point-to-point racing by allowing you to choose your own route through an open-world city, so long as you hit the checkpoints along the way. But despite these examples, many of the racers we have today are lap-based.

Why is this something I care about? Well, lap-based racers are fun, of course, and allow you to learn the course, even within a single race. Point-to-point racers, meanwhile, have a wonderful sense of going on a journey, and in the case of games like OutRun, it’s immensely satisfying to successfully reach the next stage of said journey and see what new scenery there is to admire a little further down the road. OutRun even takes this one step further, by providing a fork in the road at the end of each stage, allowing you to continue in one of two different directions to create your own custom route through the game.

3D Classics OutRun isn’t a deep game in the slightest, especially when held up against more modern examples. But there’s a purity to the experience that you just don’t get in more realistic fare; it’s a game that revels in the enjoyment of taking a fast car on a rollercoaster ride and seeing how far you can get this time. I love it, and I’m happy it’s still a relevant game in 2015!

1524: I Love DIVA

I was editing some Dark Souls 2 walkthroughs the other day, thinking to myself that the idea of spider enemies that cause instant death if they fall on you didn’t sound like very much fun at all, and that I didn’t really want to play Dark Souls 2. Then I contemplated what I have been playing recently — and, more notably, how I’ve been playing it — and realised that perhaps I’m not quite so different from the Dark Souls nutcases.

I am referring to the Vita version of Hatsune Miku: Project Diva f, a quite astonishingly excellent rhythm game starring the eponymous Vocaloid voice synthesiser personification and her similarly artificial friends. It’s a game that encompasses a broad spectrum of electronic music, and has one of the best feelings of getting “into” the music that I’ve felt since plastic instrument-wielding games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

Project Diva f is a rhythm game in the Japanese mould, in contrast to Rock Band and its ilk, however. This means that there is a strong focus on attaining absolute perfection, and then improving on it some more if at all possible. Specifically, there are two scoring systems at play: a “Grade” bar that goes from 0 to 100 per cent as you accurately tap or hold notes with the correct buttons or flicks of the touchscreen, and a more conventional numerical score that increases according to whether your taps, holds and flicks are “Cool” or “Good” (or, heaven forbid, “Safe”, “Bad” or “Awful”). In order to get a “Perfect” rating on a track, you have to hit every single note with a “Cool” or “Good” rating, including nailing two challenging “Technical Zone” sections as well as an additional “Chance Time” section which is also used to trigger bonus events in the background music video of a track.

I got reasonably into the PS3 version of Project Diva F (the PS3 version has a capital F for some reason) but the usual music game audio-visual latency issues rear their head at times, making it an occasionally frustrating experience. You can manually calibrate the latency, but without an easy test function a la Rock Band it can be difficult to judge. This problem is not at all present on Vita — plus there’s something a whole lot more satisfying about having the music right there in the palm of your hand. Consequently, I’ve got a lot more into the Vita version than the PS3 incarnation.

How much more? Well, I’m currently systematically working my way through the Normal difficulty and attempting to attain a Perfect rating on all the tracks. And I’m doing pretty well so far — though some of the later tracks are going to give me some grief, I can feel it. The challenge is something I relish, though; I enjoy the music, and the feeling of absolutely nailing a difficult track utterly flawlessly is hard to beat. Similarly, missing an easy note with a “Safe” is disappointing and a cue for an immediate restart. Yes, I’m being one of those players. But I’m having a blast — and this constant repetition, practice and improvement is just the same sort of thing that Dark Souls players are presently indulging in, albeit with more slobbering monsters rather than doe-eyed anime-style characters.

Once Normal mode is done with, it’s onto Hard mode, and possibly Extreme if I’m feeling very brave. These two modes are significantly more difficult than the already challenging Normal mode, but I’m looking forward to taking them on; unlike the seemingly impossible harder difficulties of Rock Band et al, I feel that Project Diva f’s harder difficulties are well and truly within reach — and that mastering them will be a gaming accomplishment to be proud of.

1498: Diva

I’ve been playing a bit of Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F on PS3 recently. Every time I play it, I’m reminded that I really love rhythm games, regardless of whether or not they have “famous” music in them. (More hardcore Miku fans than I would probably be able to do a better job of explaining how each and every one of the tracks in Project Diva F is famous, but I’m happy just knowing “the one from Nyancat”, “the one from Leekspin” and “the one from Black Rock Shooter” for the moment.)

It helps, of course, that Project Diva F is an excellent rhythm game. It doesn’t do anything too complicated with its gameplay — it’s just tapping or occasionally holding buttons to the beat, sometimes breaking for some analogue stick-flicking rather than button-pressing — but has a good scoring system that rewards you in a number of different ways: overall accuracy, successfully completing high-pressure “technical zone” sequences and unlocking the “true” end to a track by completing another special bonus zone. You can then bump up the challenge factor through a nifty risk/reward mechanic whereby it becomes easier to fail a track, but in exchange you get considerably more “Diva Points” to spend on goodies if you successfully make it all the way through.

I tend to judge music games based on how “in the zone” they make me feel. A good music game makes you feel at one with the rhythms in its tracks, and you feel like the buttons you’re tapping have a real connection to the song. This doesn’t necessarily mean just tapping out the beat — I recall vividly explaining to my friend Woody way back when that the various button-presses in Vib Ribbon didn’t necessarily follow the vocal lines or the drum beat, but were in fact more like what you’d do if you were drumming your fingers to the song, and the note patterns in Project Diva F are much the same way. Sometimes you’re tapping out the rhythm that Miku and friends are singing; others, you’re following the guitar line, or the drums, or something else that is prominent in the soundtrack. Learning each track is a matter of familiarising yourself with what you’re “playing” at any given moment, and how it fits in with the song as a whole.

In short, Project Diva F gets me feeling very much “in the zone” while I’m playing. It’s one of those music games that’s hypnotic to play, though the fact that notes come from all directions means that you’re not left with that strange “the whole room is scrolling!” feeling that I always got from lengthy Guitar Hero or Rock Band sessions. The background videos are a lot of fun, too, featuring Miku and her friends getting up to various misadventures just like real pop stars in real music videos.

And the customisation. Man. I have a thing for playing dress-up in video games, and Project Diva F does not disappoint in this regard at all. Each of the game’s characters has a hefty number of different costumes to unlock, with various accessories on top of that. Then you can decorate each of their rooms, and unlock amusing, silly cutscenes when they interact with the items. Some of the items even have a practical function — setting Miku’s alarm clock puts her to sleep, for example, and she’ll wake herself (and you) up when the timer expires. Arguably not all that useful on a TV-attached console such as the PS3, but a nice touch — and I can see it being cool on the Vita version we’re supposedly getting in the West relatively soon.

I haven’t even touched the frankly terrifying Edit Mode yet, in which you can cut your own music videos and set up your own playable note patterns to your own music. If I jump down that particular rabbit-hole, I can see myself getting thoroughly lost, so I’ve held off for now. But I’m sure I’ll investigate at some point in the near future.

If you’re a fan of music games as I am, be sure to check it out; don’t worry that you might not know many of the songs — you’ll pick them up by the umpteenth time you play them to perfect your score!

1097: Five Reasons Kotaku Made Yakuza Fans Angry Today

Fan of Sega’s long-running modern-day JRPG series Yakuza? Then you may want to give Kotaku a wide berth today, as they published an article (FreezePage link so as not to direct traffic to the piece in question; petty, I know, but I know a few people who won’t click Kotaku links on principle) which has incited the ire of an angry mob of Yakuza fans. And since Yakuza is a fairly niche game with a dedicated core of fans keen to see Sega continue to bring it to the West, they’re pretty passionate about the series that they love.

The main issue with the article is that it is clearly written by someone who has very little knowledge of the Yakuza series at all — the author even states this up-front, noting that prior to taking Yakuza 5 for a spin they had played nothing more than the demos of Yakuza 3, 4 and Dead Souls and hadn’t felt inspired to purchase or try the full games. Leaving aside the fact that he was coming in at the fifth installment to a series that is very strict about its chronology — each subsequent game follows on directly from the previous one — the bigger question is why on Earth this writer was picked to write an “Import Preview” for this game when his familiarity with the series is questionable by his own admission?

Of course, there is merit in judging the accessibility of a long-running series to newcomers, but just as certain series of books, movies and TV shows expect you to start from the very beginning and work your way along, so too are there series of games that demand the same of their audience. Yakuza is one of these, though it does give a cursory nod to newcomers in each game by allowing them a sequence where the protagonist “reminisces” about the events of the previous installment. These are primarily intended for series veterans who have endured a significant wait between games, however, and are designed to remind them of the key events rather than the actual experience of playing through a Yakuza game. They are not really designed to tell the entire story of a whole game in 30 minutes of cutscenes. You want to know what happened in, say, Yakuza 2? Go play it — it’s still out there and (relatively) readily available.

I won’t go through and address all of Eisenbeis’ five points in the article one at a time as that just seems somewhat petty, but it’s abundantly clear from the things he says that he is unfamiliar with the series and its conventions, and has also not spent a significant amount of time with it to discover its hidden depths. Pleasingly, the comments from Yakuza fans beneath the article have mostly been relatively respectful (if incredulous) and systematically point out how most of his arguments are flawed or, in some cases, completely incorrect.

I will address one point specifically, however, and that is the matter of “unskippable conversations”. This is a particular bugbear for me. Yakuza is notorious for being a story-heavy, character-focused game in which the moments when you’re kicking back in a hostess club attempting to woo your lady of the hour are just as important as the times when you’re punching goons in the face and smashing traffic cones over their heads. If anything, they’re more important, as they’re where the characters get to demonstrate their hidden depths — far from being generic, silent protagonists, the playable characters in the Yakuza series are all very complex people with interesting motivations and outlooks on life. More interestingly, they’re all grown-ups.

Brief aside: a friend and I were discussing this recently, and we thought it would be very interesting if there was a Japanese-style role-playing game that instead of featuring your usual band of Plucky, Idealistic Teens Who Are Always Right getting to save the world from Some Great Evil, put the spotlight on a group of older, more jaded and cynical adults who maybe had more complex motives for embarking on whatever the game’s “quest” happened to be. The Yakuza series provides just that sort of experience, with characters who age and evolve as the series progresses, giving the complete franchise a truly remarkable feeling of coherence and changing with the times. At the same time, however, certain things remain constant — Kazuma will always care for his adoptive sort-of-“daughter” Haruka; Kamuro-cho will always be by turns beautiful and terrifying; Majima’s sanity will always be somewhat questionable.

Anyway, my point with all that was that the very essence of Yakuza is in the story, so why would you skip it? I’ll allow you the answer “because I died on a boss fight and I’ve already seen this bit”, but anything beyond that — such as the reason Eisenbeis gives in his article — is very much missing the point. “I started to dread playing through the plot, knowing that the game’s pace would be about to grind to a halt,” he writes. Good grief, man. The point is the plot. If you were hoping for a brawler or character action game — or even a Grand Theft Auto-alike — there are plenty of other titles that will better fit your needs.

One thing I will say at this point is that I’m not attempting to convert anyone to the Yakuza fold who isn’t already there. As has probably been made clear by the fact I’m writing this at all, you’re either “in” or you aren’t, and getting “in” these days involves playing four (possibly five if you count Dead Souls) games of between 10-40+ hours that straddle the generation gap between PS2 and PS3. From the second game onwards, you also have to be able to deal with the fact that there’s no English dub, either — it’s all subtitled with Japanese speech (and is an infinitely better experience as a result, I might add). It’s a worthwhile experience, but equally it’s one I’d understand people forgoing as the perceived barrier of entry gets higher.

Consequently, I’m not denying that some of the criticisms Eisenbeis makes of Yakuza in his article are valid; many of them are, and yes, they’re offputting to series newcomers. However, this article really didn’t need to be written, and in the worst-case scenario, it may have done some damage to the already-tenuous chances of Sega bringing this latest installment to the West. The piece’s content essentially boils down to “Guy Who Doesn’t Like Yakuza Doesn’t Like Latest Yakuza“, which is a matter for a personal blog, not for one of the world’s most heavily-trafficked video games websites. Fans of the Yakuza series who see the “Import Preview” header would likely have been hoping for some insights on the ways in which the new game has evolved its systems and what has happened to the characters in the intervening time since Yakuza 4 and Dead Souls; instead, what they get is a poorly-researched opinion piece that does nothing but frustrate the people who are most likely to read it.

I’m sorry that Eisenbeis didn’t enjoy his time with Yakuza 5, but it’s his prerogative to dislike it if he pleases. He should clearly not, however, have been given the opportunity to write about it in the way that he did, as it does a great disservice to both the game and its fans who were hoping for some genuine new information. I hope that Kotaku will think much more carefully about who they assign preview articles to in the future, but I won’t hold my breath.

#oneaday Day 839: So Binary Domain is Kind of Awesome

I got a few games for my birthday this year from generous people taking pity on my advancing years. I’ve waxed lyrical about A Valley Without Wind for quite some time now and I haven’t yet got to Legend of Grimrock (oh, but I most certainly will) so that leaves Binary Domain to talk about.

Binary Domain is a third-person shooter from Sega. Created by Toshihiro Nagoshi, the producer of the excellent Yakuza series, it spins an interesting sci-fi tale about “Hollow Children” — robots designed to look like humans and programmed to believe they are human. Taking on the role of one Dan Marshall (not, sadly, the British developer of point-and-click adventure funfests Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentlemen, Please!), it’s up to the player to kick lots of robot bottom on the way to tracking down the supposed creator of these illegal, ethically questionable droids.

Binary Domain could so easily have been shit. It’s a game about futuristic soldiers shooting robots — you can’t get much more cliched than that, after all. And yet it has a huge amount of charm coupled with an addictive quality that keeps you playing just to see what happens next.

Technically speaking, Binary Domain is a squad-and-cover-based third-person shooter, which probably makes it sound very much like Gears of War, a series which I loathe and detest. (Well, to be fair to it, I only loathe and detest the first one, but that put me off ever playing the other two.) But in execution it manages to be so much more than the thick necks and testosterone of Epic’s title, and in the process it highlights the differences between Japanese and Western development. It’s also helping further cement the feeling I’ve been having recently that Japanese games are, for the most part at least, preferable to Western — for me, anyway.

But what sets it apart from Marcus Fenix’s opus of “eat shit and die”? Quite simply, characterisation. Dan begins the game as a bit of a dick, but in an endearing way rather than as an unlikeable, bland macho asshole. He’s accompanied through the introductory mission by “Big Bo”, a walking tank of a man who has a bit of an attitude himself. When the two are together, they crack jokes and make irreverent comments just like they’re a pair of best friends in a bar together. They have a relationship beyond “Cover me!”, in short, and that makes them interesting to hang out with, even if they’re both quite sexist, a bit racist and generally loutish in their attitudes.

A short way into the game, Dan and Bo meet up with the rest of their team, which includes the businesslike ex-MI6 dude Charlie (who doesn’t know who James Bond is); the strong, silent Brit woman Rachael; and the sexy Chinese girl Faye. These disparate characters’ personalities all clash a little with one another, which again makes their interactions extremely entertaining to witness.

“Hmm, she reminds me of someone,” says Bo to Dan upon meeting Faye for the first time. “A movie star or something.”

“C’mon, Bo, you and I both know the only movies you watch are porn,” chuckles Dan, who promptly receives a sharp dig in the ribs from his friend. “Oh… OH. Right.”

Once the team is assembled, Dan is regularly invited to take two of them with him, and each have their own unique conversations with each other and our hero. Again, these exchanges are a real highlight of the experience, and show what a massive difference it makes when you bother to spend some time on your characters. If you’re going to be battling giant spider robots with people, it’s better they be people that you actually like, right?

There’s an interesting twist, too — when characters speak, Dan can respond to them either by using a simple multiple-choice system or by actually speaking his response into a gimmicky voice-recognition system which I switched off almost immediately. (When your voice-recognition system picks up gunfire from the game and thinks you’re saying the word “fuck”, you have a problem, as entertaining as that might sound.) Dan’s responses will affect the other characters’ “trust level” with him, with them being more likely to successfully follow his orders if they trust him more. I’m guessing there will be some sort of story payoff for high trust levels, too, though I’m not far enough into the game to say with certainty yet.

As the different characters all clash somewhat, though, certain responses might piss one off while pleasing another. Crack a joke with Bo about getting crabs from a hooker and Faye might get sniffy. Tell Charlie to go fuck himself with his overly-serious military-speak and he’ll get annoyed, but Bo will laugh. Your performance in combat affects these trust ratings, too — clip your teammate with a bullet and they’ll get angry, but save them from certain death or pull off a particularly impressive feat and they’ll give you the credit you deserve.

In this sense, Binary Domain sometimes feels like it’s a role-playing game very vaguely following the Mass Effect mould. This feeling is further compounded by the ability to equip characters with stat-boosting nanomachines and upgrade weapons as well as the inclusion of “social” areas that are just about walking around talking to people, but when it comes down to it, the game is unashamedly a linear, Japanese, third-person shooter. While not quite as insanely frenetic as Sega’s previous shooter title Vanquish, Binary Domain has its fair share of ridiculousness, usually in the form of giant robots which must be defeated by dropping heavy things on them, blowing bits off them, leaping onto their back Shadow of the Colossus-style or all manner of other shenanigans. It’s a spectacle, as thrilling to watch as it is to play, and I’m having a blast with it so far.

Binary Domain received middling reviews on its original release, with the PC version (which I’m playing) catching particular flak for including most of the PC-specific visual and control options in a separate program rather than in the game itself. I feel that this has been focused on rather too much, frankly, as it’s an issue players will encounter precisely once, before they even start playing. Once the game is set up to your liking, it looks great, sounds great and runs smoothly, which is all I ask for.

These middling reviews, however, are likely to see the game relegated to obscurity before very long. Already people are saying that they’ll wait for it to become a “bargain bin title” before picking it up, purely based on reviewers’ comments. And herein lies the problem: people criticise the increasing “blockbuster culture” of video games, pointing to titles like Call of Duty and Halo as symptomatic of everything that is wrong with the industry, but as soon as something that provides a different take on an established formula comes along, like Binary Domain does, no-one is willing to buy it new and take a chance on it. Thus these great games get pushed to the back of the community’s consciousness, while those with the biggest marketing budgets continue to dominate year after year.

From my couple of hours’ experience with it this evening, I can happily say that Binary Domain is well worth picking up now, since it’s a fun, entertaining, spectacular and satisfying game that, sadly, looks set to join Vanquish and Alpha Protocol in the box marked “Sega Games That Were Actually Brilliant That No-One Played”.

Make a difference. Vote with your wallet. Support awesome new games that aren’t “blockbusters”. Please?

Sonikku za Hejjihoggu

I know I said I was going to talk about Persona 4 and City of Heroes, but indulge me for a moment if you would. I’m going to talk about Sonic again, since I’ve been playing the Mega Drive/Genesis Ultimate Collection thing some more. Specifically, I’ve been playing a lot of Sonic 1.

Replaying Sonic 1 a number of years after I last “seriously” played it (in my case, when it first came out on the Mega Drive) was an eye-opening experience. Firstly, you forget how difficult old platform games are when compared to the hand-holding that modern games offer. Secondly, you forget quite how many swear words are actually in your vocabulary.

Sonic

I have a confession to make here – Sonic used to scare me a bit when I was a kid. Not “jump out of your skin” scared a la Resident Evil, but “edge of the seat, worried, frantic” kind of scared. I could never really pin down why this was when I was a kid – I just knew that, although I enjoyed playing it, it freaked me out a bit too.

Now, I have one word to say why: traps. Or more specifically, spikes. One thing I don’t remember having seen in many games I’ve played recently on next-gen consoles is a good old-fashioned pit of spikes. Or a big heavy thing with spikes on it that drops on your head. Or a wall that suddenly shoots out spikes and impales you on them.

Sonic is full of spikes. And their simple presence makes the whole experience of running, jumping and collecting things that much more tense, because you know that they’re one of the things that can lead to premature death, even if you have shields and rings in place. Plus, when you think about it, impaling something on spikes, or dropping spikes on it, is a pretty unpleasant way to die, isn’t it?

Thinking about it, an awful lot of these old games featured incredibly unpleasant ways to meet one’s demise, usually involving spikes, being crushed, falling down a big pit or, in extreme circumstances, a combination of all of these things. Sonic isn’t by any means the only one to feature painful-looking death-makers. Mario also had plenty of spikes and crushy things to contend with, as indeed did pretty much any 2D platform hero of the time. And even though these games aren’t gory at all, having a spike penetrating a place that is not supposed to be penetrated by sharp things looks painful!

Enough about my spike phobia (and Jane’s, incidentally – she actually can’t watch me play Sonic for fear of the spikes) – I had another point. Sonic’s design understands player psychology perfectly. Each level is crafted to play with your expectations and make you want to slap yourself in the face when you fuck up the same bit for the fifth time.

A particular case I have in mind occurs in the Labyrinth Zone, which is full of spikes and long underwater stretches where you can drown, along with swinging ball-and-chain things and bottomless pits. It’s one of the least “friendly-looking” zones in Sonic, and (for me at least) one of the more challenging ones. The bit I’m thinking of sees you tempted by an invincibility powerup… only to clonk you on the head with a big spiky ball and chain if you mistime your approach – i.e. if you charge straight in without pausing to see if it’s safe! Later in the same level, there’s another invincibility powerup closely followed by a nasty bottomless pit. Naturally, when you grab the invincibility powerup, you feel invincible, so you take rather less care than you would normally, leaving you highly likely to go barging straight into the pit. It’s frustrating and results in some colourful language but the key thing is, each time you mess up, you know it’s your fault for falling into the psychological traps left by the level designers.

Labyrinth Zone Coming at this from a modern, more experienced and world-weary perspective, it’s been a real pleasure to re-experience the whole game and understand a little better what they were doing when they put them together. Good level design makes the difference between a game that is “cheap” and a game that is “challenging”. When I first started replaying Sonic, I was all for screaming “cheap!” at it – but now, having put a bit of time in, I know what they’re doing. I still make mistakes, but I know they’re my fault now, not the game’s.

This is in direct contrast to the recent Sonic games, where deaths are just as (if not more) likely to be caused by poor game mechanics than by player error or design psychology. It’s been sad to see Sonic lose his way over the years, but it does make me feel a little bit better to go back to the Mega Drive originals and find that they really are timeless.