Old school FPS action with the Judge in Dredd vs. Death

Dredd vs Death was another game purchased recently just for the pure co-op lulz. Originally made over 10 years ago back in the heady days of the sixth console generation, the game feels a little clunky by todays standards but is still worth it for a decent co-op shooter romp.

Mega-City-One is again under attack from a malevolent force. This time it is the Dark Judges, a group of 4 undead Judge spirits from a parallel dimension who see all life as a crime to be judged. At the start of the game, they are safely imprisoned but manage to effect an escape and it is up to Dredd to find and stop them before they can destroy the city.

The game plays like any early 2000s FPS in that you move like a tank at a pretty much constant sprint. There are the usual plethora of different guns to pick up like shotguns, machine guns, grenade launchers and such, but the Judge's signature gun, the Lawgiver pistol is one of the best throughout the game due to it's ability to fire a wide range of munitions ranging from armour piercing to ricochet high explosive. This gives you a wide variety of options for different situations, but sometimes finding the right ammo quickly can be troublesome so it is not without it's disadvantages.

The game also gives you the ability to Judge people who surrender to you willingly. Once they kneel down with their hands in the air, you can cuff and Judge them where it shows the perp's crimes and sentences. These can be quite amusing as it seems damn near everything is a crime with such things as "Owning a goldfish without a license" popping up on some perp's details. You also get a law meter which shows your adherence to the law. If you only fire in defence and arrest rather than kill when you have the chance, this meter will stay high. If you shoot and kill everything without asking questions, then this meter will deplete and if it totally empties, it's game over. But I shot almost everyone I could see and this rarely happened so you need to be very very unlawful for this to happen.

One downside, which is common with older games like this, is that due to limited graphical capabilities and such, many areas look the same and are not sign posted. Combine this with often ambiguous and poorly explained objectives and it can result in a lot of time spent wandering around trying to find your next objective or simply ascertain exactly what the next objective is. Checkpoints can also be quite sparse which again, was quite common at the time but co-op adds to this problem because if one of you dies or fails an objective, you are reset to the last one. These are small annoyances though and usually didn't detract much from the murderous fun and hilarious no-nonsense gruffness of the Judge. Who is monstrously ugly in this particular incarnation and I wonder how his fellow Judges do not often shoot him mistakenly thinking he is some form of hideous monster.

Dredd vs. Death provided fairly standard issue but still entertaining co-op FPS action through and through with some minor annoyances along the way that are easily over-looked. A blast in the face from the past to be sure. Nothing new or shocking here, but still fun for those who like shooting dudes in the face.

14 years later, I finally finish a PS1 titan, Vagrant Story

As mentioned in the title, this is a game I acquired in 2000 when it first came out (near 14 years ago now) in the golden age of the PlayStation 1 when quality titles for it were abound and quite easy to come by. A large number of the PS1 games I acquired in those days I never finished and eventually retired but this one one I always wanted to keep because it always intruiged me. And I have finally finished it now, but sadly, it didn't appeal to me as much as I would have hoped.

Personally, I would think that the main problem I had could be summed up in two words:

Endless customisation.

Practically every weapons, piece of armour and piece of gear in this game can be dissasembled, reassembled, modified and retrofitted to make it into almost any item you want to. And while this sounds good on paper, in reality it means you spend more time looking for bits and pieces to do this and constantly tinkering with your weapons and gear if you want to actually make any progress. You can get by with standard gear for a while, but you pretty soon hit difficulty walls where you have to improve your equipment or die. So you are forced to scour for parts and experiment with your equipment until you find something that works on the monsters you are facing at the minute. Chaining is another very important part of the combat where you must time hits to make them successively land. I never quite got the hang of this and could never get a very high chain which seemed to further increase the difficulty level.

Gameplay takes the form of an action RPG where you move through small rooms set on a map. Along the way, enemies will attack you and at any point you can stop time and bring up an attack sphere to target enemies within your reach and then carry out the attack. From here, you can carry on to execute chains or special attacks with specific button combinations. You progress through the maps often doubling back after finding key items required to proceed or defeating bosses in your way. As well as a normal health meter, you also have a body health meter. So specific parts of your body can be damaged with adverse affects such as legs to reduce movement speed or arms to reduce combat effectiveness. You also have a risk rating which increases as your combo does and can lower accuracy but increase chance of critical hit. Balancing risk against combo size and leaving yourself open to counter attack is important to increase combat effectiveness.

The story takes places in the dead city of Leá Monde in the kingdom of Ivalice. This is the same kingdom that other Square games such as Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics A2 take place in. You play Ashley, an elite riskbreaker warrior who is sent in to investigate a cult leader called Sydney who is in possession of mysterious powers and his possible connection to a politician. Along the way you meet other characters some of which are friendly and some of which are not in your mission to unravel the mysteries of this ghostly town that seems to have the power to bring the dead back to life as well as Ashley's own past which he has seemingly lost.

The game has quite a lonely feeling to it because apart from these few aforementioned characters, you do not meet many other living people. There are also no shops and no NPCs to interact with so there is a distinct feeling of isolation and loneliness as you make your way through these dark tunnels and underground passageways. The only respites that you will find are the save points and work benches where you will spend a lot of time tinkering with your equipment.

There are a huge variety of enemies to hinder your progress as well as as imposing bosses all over the place. You can barely go 6 or 7 room sometimes without running into one. Especially in the end game where almost every other room contains a boss.

Sadly, for me, Vagrant story did not live up to what I hoped it to be and I found it a bit too obtuse and difficult to make progress without large amounts of experimentation. Endless customisation is a nice thing to have as an optional side endeavour for those who want to wring every last ounce out of a game, but it doesn't feel right to make it mandatory just to complete the main story. I think I would have preferred this more were it less of a trial to make it through with normal equipment and have the option to tinker should you feel the need.

I much prefer a sense of momentum when I am playing a game. I want to be able to feel events unfolding and a sense of making progress. All too often in Vagrant Story it felt that progress was forcibly being grinded to a halt in the aim of more tinkering. But if you are into endless tinkering, then this will be right up your alley.

I try out a JRPG other than Final Fantasy with the epic Suikoden V

Long have the Suikoden games lingered on my backlog. I acquired all 5 of the main titles at various stages either out of curiosity for myself or for others to play but I have never got around to playing any of them. I came dangerously close to culling all of them due to lack of interest at one point, but a good friend convinced me to try at least one of them to see what I thought of the series and number 5 was suggested to be one of the strongest so I decided to give it a try.

Things start off in the usual way for most epic tales with everything being fine and then it all suddenly goes to shit. You play the role of a young prince in a Royal family who lays claim to an artefact known as "The Sun Rune". This powerful mcguffin weilded by the Queen has the power to scorch the land with the sun's rays. This power had been used on a neighbouring town before hand and this is where the game starts off with you going to visit said town to try and repair relations. The plot quickly advances with the Royal family being betrayed and fucked over, your characters being cast out as traitors and then you must go about building a rebel army to repel the invaders from your homeland.

You do this by travelling all over the land and trying to rally support of various groups, races and nations. Sometimes this is easy and some will join simply after being asked. But most are not so simple and will require you to do something for them first before you can secure their services. This travelling around the country gives the good feeling of being on an epic quest as you visit many different places and peoples along the way in order to amass a sufficiently sized rebel army.

As with most traditional RPGs, there are several modes of operation in the game:

The world map: where you do most of your travelling moving from places to place either on foot or by a vehicle. Viewpoint is zoomed out to a large scale and when on foot, you are vulnerable to the usual RPG random encounters.

Towns and buildings: where most of the dialogue and story telling occurs. The viewpoint is zoomed in much closer here and you can walk around free from random encounters to talk to other characters, visit shops, etc.

Battles: the meat of the game. Every battle is fought on this field in a traditional statistic based style such as the older Final Fantasy games where both you and your enemy select their moves and they are then performed in the order of which characters have the highest speed rating. These battles allow you to have up to 6 characters in your party which I liked as it produced a sense of action and event that there was so much going on. While in battle, you can do the usual attack, magic, defend, items etc commands but there are also a few new ones worthy of note. Certain pairs of characters that have relationships to one another can do co-op moves which use up both of those characters turns, but usually do more combined damage. There is also an auto-battle feature which will just make everyone do their default attack to allow you to speed through easy battles. Again, I found this quite useful in saving time on the smaller and easier engagements.

Battlefields: a rarer features in RPGs. In many places in this story, you are called upon to command a number of units in large scale ground or naval engagements. These happen in real time and use a rock-paper-scissors approach where there are 3 types of unit and each is weak, strong and normal to attacks from each type. here the races, groups and people that you recruit for your army really come into play as they will bring more units for you to use as well as boost stats and provide special abilities. The goals for these battles can range from wipe out all enemies to survive for X amount of time to get to X point on the map. While these battles seemed fun at first, they became less fun over time as they usually were quite long and slow and started to feel over-used as the game progressed.

You can also recruit optional characters to further boost your army's power through various side quests but this is entirely optional as the units you get through the story are more than adequate.

A couple of other note worthy features were that besides from the 6 main characters you take with you into battles, you can carry an extra 4 alternates should any of these 6 be neutralised and you cannot revive them or if you need to mix up your skills for different engagements. You can also carry 1 non combatant support character who provides you with various skills like a mobile shop, healing after battles and such. Characters can also choose to specialise in 2 areas each. Selectable skills include such things as defence, attack, defensive magic, sword magic and so forth. Characters can be equipped with quite a slew of gear with each one taking up to 6 pieces of armour/accessories. However to balance this, each character keeps the same weapon throughout the whole game and it is improved at various shops throughout the course of the adventure. All these extra twists on the battle system provided something a little different than the usual which I found quite interesting.

But still, having said all that, it didn't draw me in enough to continue on playing more games in the series. It was a fun RPG while it lasted, but didn't fill me with much of a desire to continue playing more in the Suikoden series. I'll just leave it there, I think.

I finally dive into the world of Kingdom Hearts. But I don't think I'll stay too long

This was given to me for a birthday 11 years ago back in 2003. And I have finally finished it now after putting it off for so long due to fear of it's length and the hype built up around the series in general.

Kingdom Hearts as a series has an enormous following. It may be because it is the perfect combination of video games and cutesy Disney characters for those that are into that sort of thing. Myself, I'm more into games. It's not that I dislike Disney but nor does it make me gush at the mouth. That being said, it was still cool to see many characters from my childhood show up in this game like Donald Duck, Goofy, Ariel and more.

The basic game-play of Kingdom Hearts follows basic action RPG premises. You go through a number of areas battling enemies that gradually get tougher as you progress, fight bosses at the end of most of them while along the way, earning experience to level up your characters and hunting down new gear to make them better in combat. There are the usual tropes of melee combat and magic so none of it is that surprising. Along with Sora (your character), for the majority of the game you will always have 2 other characters with you. These start off with Goofy and Donald, but as you travel between planets, which represent different Disney worlds, you will pick up new characters along the way like Ariel, the Beast, Jack Skeleton and many more. You will also encounter some characters taken from the SquareSoft side of things such as Cid (FF VII version), Squall, Aeris and Cloud himself.

The plot revolves around trying to find "King Mickey" who has gone off on some kind of mission and stopping some jerks called The Heartless. These generic shadowy enemies form much of the cannon fodder that you fight throughout the game but these are being controlled by eviler jerks from the Disney films such as Jafar from Aladdin, Hades from Hercules, The Boogie Man from Nightmare Before Christmas, Captain Hook from peter Pan and the Witch from Snow White. Some of these you get to fight and some you do not but it's always nice to lay the beat down onto well established bad guys. The aim of this group is to capture the 7 Disney Princesses (such as Snow White, Cinderella, Belle, etc) to unlock the Kingdom Hearts itself making them all powerful. The heartless (and these other evil jerks) but be stopped by Sora and his friends because only they have the heart to do so (get it?). It's usual fairy tale stuff and can feel a little cheesy at times but is all in good fun.

The basic flow of the game consists of arriving at a new world, moving through it and killing enemies to find some kind of dilemma usually involving one of the aforementioned princesses and attempting to rescue her. You then use the "Gummi Ship" (made by the Chip'n'Dale Rescue Rangers) in a StarFox-esque segment where you fly through space to the next world shooting down obstacles and enemies in your world. While this cycle does get a little repetitive after a while, it's always a little exciting to see what film the next world will be based on and what characters you will meet there.

Kingdom Hearts proved to be overall, an enjoyable animated romp through a lot of familiar places but often with new twists on them and a new element of interactivity that Disney films obviously lack. However, while it was an enjoyable game, I don't think I have fallen for the series as hard as many of it's fans have and do not have much of a desire to continue playing other entries in the series. For me, the journey ends here.