First off I need to apologize for the lack of updates, the summer has been really bad for blog posting. The last month has been pretty much the worst too. A week of preparing, followed by a week in San Francisco (which is more meetings than “work”), then Sarah’s wedding, followed by a week of being sick. All the while trying to fit in a  massive back log of actual work. Well here we are, things are sane again and I am no longer plague ridden. It’s actually been a really good summer, lots of projects have moved forward and I’ve got a lot of back logged blog posts to finish and publish.

I figured I’d knock a quickie one out just to post the above update. While sitting at home sick this week I started and finished Cave Story + on the Mac. For those not familiar, Cave Story is an indie freeware platformer/run & gun in the modern Castlevania / classic Metroid sense. It is a fantastic deep game (storywise) with awesome gameplay and music. Developed (scored and illustrated) single handedly by Daisuke Amaya (aka Pixel) over 5 years and released in 2004, the original is a treasured classic and as of the last year or two it’s finally gotten the attention it deserves. It saw an updated version released on the Wii last year with updated graphics and music.

Well as of last week, that updated version was released on the Mac AppStore. In fact there is an additional level (and bit of story) making the Mac version the most complete way to play Cave Story currently. (There is even additional new content promised in updates!) While it will be coming back to the PC-world via Steam eventually, this is truly an impressive moment for Mac gamers! We actually have something really awesome FIRST! (Who would gloat about that though, ha) Anyone who says $10 is a lot to spend on an updated version of a free game really needs to realize how impressive this game is, and that it is a bargain of a monetization for the blood, sweat and tears that went into it. The re-arranged music in this version is freakin’ fantastic and the graphical updates are just beautiful (and that is coming from a pixel-addict), check out this side by side I threw together:

Buy it now and enjoy it, seriously awesome. (Just make sure you don’t play it on the easy difficulty, normal is actually pretty easy, though hard is pretty nasty. ) It’s worth your time and 10 bucks.

In a parody of Duke Nukem, Mega64 and GameTrailers have partnered to produce a trailer for Doug Huggem, a feel good game to be released soon… in March 2024….

Here is the extended video of Jon St. John doing a recording session. Priceless

1. 3D is the new motion touch gimmick. Nintendo loves their gimmicks. The gimmicks bring in the casual gamers, and Nintendo is wildly profitable as a result. However I find because these things really are gimmicks for the marketing department, developers seem to treat them as such too. How many Nintendo DS games were hindered by thrown in usage of the second screen or pen controls? Far too many. For every game that really used the touch well, much to many used it for nothing but distracting motions that required breaking the flow of the game. (Compare this to the iPhone where most games use the touch well, with very few falling back to shitty on screen joypad buttons). It ruins the immersion to constantly switch control schemes between buttons and stylus, and frankly the stylus is a shitty way to play games. Game developers will use the 3D in gimmicky ways, ruining the immersion. While I generally find his movies to be awful, Michael Bay hits the nail on the head when it comes to the gimmicky use of 3D in *every* movie nowadays:“Right now, it looks like fake 3D, with layers that are very apparent. You go to the screening room, you are hoping to be thrilled, and you’re thinking, huh, this kind of sucks. People can say whatever they want about my movies, but they are technically precise, and if this isn’t going to be excellent, I don’t want to do it. And it is my choice.”Milk the 3D fad dry Nintendo…
2. The price is too high. Sure lots of people will argue that it has a camera, and storage, and a buncha other crap to explain the $100 jump over the DS, but at $249 USD its $20 more than an 8GB iPod Touch, which features more storage, a far richer software echo system (minus the AAA titles that Nintendo themselves always develop, really the only thing keeping serious gamers on their platforms), two cameras, and a gorgeous 960×640 IPS panel which is far better than the silly 3D + second panel which will surely look jaundice over time like every previous DS…
3. The battery lifeThis is a big one. One of my favourite things about the DS lite is that it has superb battery life, literally a week of my commuting and casual play. The official Nintendo rating on it is 15-19 hours. Superb. It’s a big reason why I enjoy the experience over the PSP which always had maybe 6 hours at the most (though thankfully you could easily carry two batteries for those overseas flights).  Iwata himself dismissed the PSP for having ‘sub 10 hour’ battery life at one point (I can’t find the quote). Here we are and the 3DS is quoted at 3-5 hours while playing 3DS titles. Yikes. That becomes a hindrance guys. My *laptop* pulls 12 hours of normal workload, my iPad pulls like 10 hours of HD video. This reminds me of the GameGear. I was so excited about it, until I realized it had like two hours of battery life, then you had to dump the six AAs… good thing most games didn’t have SRAM. With the 3DS reportedly taking 3.5 hours to charge… its all together possible you’ll have to spend more time charging it than playing it…
4. The 3D tech isn’t well suited to a casual handheld. So I really was excited about this since I hate 3D glasses, but sadly the Nintendo tech has its draw backs. First of all, the 3D effect depth slider is a bit weird. This itself ruins immersion. The reason they need this though, is to ] different hand holding positions. Yep, this means as you adjust yourself you will need to fiddle with the slider to get the 3D effect looking good again. Maybe its just me? but I am pretty fidgety when playing handheld games. Many people have reportedly complained of eyestrain, Nintendo has suggested you need to keep the unit steady while playing. Well if I was supposed to be sitting at a desk while playing, I should probably not be playing a handheld game. Nintendo has issued the usual eye-strain warnings and provided a way for parents to disable (and lock out) the effect for children under 6... sounds like the VirtualBoy all over again (I did have one of those when it was new, it was awful, and gimmicky)
5. Region locking is back. Really Nintendo? I thought you and I were passed this. One of the main reasons I loved this latest generation was that the DS, the PSP and the PS3 were completely region free. The Xbox360 has region protection but its up to individual publishers if they want to enforce it, and the Wii was shittily region locked. Some people like to play imported games. I am one of those people. My game library is pretty huge (near 1000 titles) and is about 50% is NTSC-J content. On the DS and PSP I was never forced to buy a second console just to play import games. Frankly I’m not nearly as hard core as I used to be, and probably wouldn’t double buy a console to play titles that don’t get localized, as sad as that is. Nintendo has decided the 3DS will once again be region locked, this is a regression.

Thats my rant. I’ll probably end up buying one when the next Dragon Quest title is out, the price has dropped, and it’ll sit in the 2D mode 90% of the time. Just slightly disappointed.

Both Nintendo (via the DSi) and Sony (via the PSP and exclusively through the ill-fated PSPgo) decided that downloads are the way of the future. Sadly both of these platforms have soured me toward it, DSiWare is pretty much all crappy mini games and fanservice shovel-ware, and PSN overcharges for what are essentially boxless PSP games. (It’s the Kindle dilemma, if you want me to not physically own something, you better make it cheaper, Kindle fails at this too). The iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad have tons of cheap and *good* games.

Frankly all of the above is a preamble to my list of awesome, must have, iOS games from this summer. Yes, in between my Dragon Quest 9 time, I’ve burnt all my gaming time on the following iPhone games:

Meow Meow Happy Fight! is both cute an addictive

Meow Meow Happy Fight

My most recent addiction, a pretty basic dual stick shooter that wins on fantastic style and wit as well as great difficulty. 5 hours in and I’ve unlocked 89% of the game. To get a feel for the flavour of the game check out some of the character bios. At $0.99 it was a steal, at $1.99 it’s still a bargain. I both look forward to more content updates in game (they’re coming) and future games from this developer. This game *begs* for bluetooth or wifi multiplayer, I hope to see it in an update, butwould gladly buy a sequel with this feature.

The Incident

A very unique game where you tilt the accelerometer to dodge falling debris. The pixel art style is even better on the iPad as it’s a Universal app. Very difficult game even a short while in. The music and art style are fantastic and give me a distinct EarthBound (Mother2) vibe, dunno why. Another bargain at $1.99.

Monster Dash

A side-scrolling rail shooter from the people who brought the very amusing Fruit Ninja game, Monster Dash is a charming endurance run where you see how many monsters you can slaughter and how long you can stay alive. Very polished and more content is on the way by the looks of things, an absolute steal at $0.99.

Cows are good filler in between the filthy humans in Super Mega Worm

Super Mega Worm

Currently on sale for $0.99, this very 8-bit game pits you as a giant worm in the future against the inhabitants at earth. Nothing says fun like hearing a pixel woman scream ‘Ahh! My Baby!’ as you take out her baby carriage. Humorous, quirky and definitely addictive.

DoDonPachi Resurrection

Cave keeps up its onslaught of hardcore SHMUPs to the iPhone, and like Espgaulda 2, this does not disappoint. The control scheme is surprisingly great, and the game does not lag whatsoever, more than can be said about many of Cave’s PS2 ports. Maybe a bit more than most people want to spend at $8.99 (though well worth it) but wait for it to go ons ale for $4.99 again.

Phoenix dishes out justice at bargain pricing on iOS

Phoenix Wright

All 5 of the GBA cases of this classic now available on the iPhone at 1/8th the price ($4.99), and recently on sale for $2.99. These are absolutely fantastic games, and work even better on a big iPad than they ever did on the GBA. Full of all the wit and 16-bit style that the originals had, Capcom’s support of iOS is fantastic. (Heck StreetFighter4 came out for the iPhone this summer, probably more major than all of these, but not my cup of tea)

Castlevania Puzzle of the Night

Konami’s entry into this mix is an RPGized clone of Super Puzzle Fighter. Very addictive puzzler where you build your character by playing a variation of Columns/Tetris through Dracula’s castle. Great game at $4.99, incredible when on sale for $1.99.

Knights of the Phantom Kingdom is unique and definitely designed for the multi touch

Knights of the Phantom Castle

Hudson’s entry into this mix isn’t really a summer title, in fact it was a very early iPad game. But this summer brought an update converting it into a Universal app so iPhone users can enjoy it as well, as well as a price drop to $4.99 (and a sale for $1.99!). This micro-management heavy click, flick and drag RTS has a cute little story and fantastic graphics and music. Highly recommended, and looks absolutely gorgeous on the iPad.

I guess my complaint is that there are so many awesome job classes, abilities and equipment, but you don’t *need* any of it to finish the story. Not even close, in fact my party was lacking such abilities as ‘Kazing’ and ‘Kaboom’ at the time of beating the final boss, in fact I learned ‘Multiheal’ about 5 minutes before reaching it. I’d love to alchemize more awesome weapons, build up a couple Sages, and teach my hero a fourth skill set (he already had Paladin, Warrior and Minstrel) but theres no point. No motivation to grind (didn’t sign up for an MMO) and with tons of great games to play and very little time to play them… no thanks. The story should have been at least 50% longer, at least to cover more of the character building the game possess.

Having said all that, it’s a great game, and worth your 40 USD and 40+ hours of time. I’ll say it thusly:

upside

• Solid story, albeit short
• Great classic music and sounds
• Excellent character design and visuals

downside

• Main story is hardly challenging (and short)
• No point to building awesome characters
• Focus on multiplayer and MMO-esque fetch quests

Buy it, play it, but I pray DQ X is single player only and more of a throw back to the story length of DQ7 and story depth of DQ8.

As many people who will read this already know, I am a Dragon Quest fanatic. I have always loved the fantastic stories, tongue and cheek humour, Toriyama character designs, heavy grinding and awesome difficulty level. DQ7 on the original Playstation may have been the pinnacle of the series for me, with its 100 hours of gameplay without going for any of the lunatic challenges and proper difficulty level. DQ8 was a fantastic game, 3D graphics and 3rd person perspective included, despite a very mixed localization from new owners SquareEnix (pluses: re-orchestrated score; minuses: new sound effects, voices (disable-able thankfully),  some new animation, removing of christian symbolism and tweaking of gameplay balance), the only real let down of the game was the rather lax difficulty. My rule of thumb is that any game where I can beat the final boss on the first try without any grinding first, is anti-climatic and too easy. What concerns me the most is the number of forum posts I’ve read between 2005 and now claiming DQ8 was a very difficult game. Sigh, this younger generation of gamers… The DS remakes of DQ4, 5 (and surely the upcoming remake of 6) have all been easy-ied up as well to Nintendo-ize them. Thankfully they too are such fantastic games that this doesn’t really matter. (I cannot wait for the DQ6 remake, as it was really a fantastic game too)

In comes Dragon Quest 9. Back is the top down view, back are the classic sound effects. The looks are along the lines of the DS remakes, but where player characters and certain important non player characters are 3D. The hybrid of 3D and 2D characters works well 90% of the time, occasionally a tight camera shot with some 2D NPCs moving around a corner will look a bit out of place but it doesn’t really detract. It looks like a Dragon Quest game, sounds like a Dragon Quest game, in general, I approve.

The story is certainly enjoyable, and the pacing keeps you interested for the long haul.

Next comes game play. It’s a very fun game, but definitely has been modernized westernized (i.e. made easy). Grinding is way off from previous games, in fact aside from being out at sea, there are no random encounters. Yes, it amuses me that Dragon Quest has borrowed the system seen in Dragon Quest parody series Mother for encounters: enemies will see you on the map, rush toward you if they pose a threat, run away if they are trivial. As such the encounter rate is much too low 90% of the time. Not that this is a bad thing, but to counter this, you get a ton of experience and money, both of which are slightly flawed in DQ9.

First off let’s talk about money. In Dragon Quest games you are historically dead broke travellers through all but the last stretch of the game. This works well as it keeps you struggling. The economy in DQ9 is so trivial you will never really be strapped for cash. Problem 1) you get way too much money constantly. Problem 2) you never need to spend that money reviving your party after you are wiped out. Yep, gone are the times of dragging around 3 coffins because you cannot afford to bring them back, if you are wiped out the entire party starts at full health (sans the usual 50% of your cash). However if you use a bank this penalty is negated so dieing is not a huge pain like it was in previous games. I find this overflow of money is most seen in healing items. I have never (in 30 hours) found myself in a dungeon, deep in, worried about running out of HP or MP, as even MP items (usually very hard to come by in DQ games) are pretty affordable (500 gold / 30 MP). This sort of resource management and having to keep your HP/MP up while adventuring was a big part of the Dragon Quest experience and is totally non existent in DQ9. You will be so rich you will never ever be starved for the latest equipment and supplies. No challenge sadly, and I miss this.

Nothing says ready for a fight like a big steel beam and blue jeans.

Now the game isn’t modern Final Fantasy levels of easiness, bosses certainly (though sadly not anymore for me) have some difficulty. I find myself never hurting for HP/MP like you should in a Dragon Quest game, and I’m never wiped out by random encounters. I imagine both of these things can be difficult frustrations for younger gamers, but they were a big part of the enjoyment of the meat-and-potatoes of the series for me, i.e. DQ4-7.

The big sell in the North American marketing was the character customization. While they sell it as new levels of character customization, it really translates to: whatever you equip your characters with, you see on your characters in combat and while walking around in the field. This is very well done and certainly a welcome addition to gaming in general. Sadly, and maybe the only time I wished the game wasn’t on the DS, the characters are pretty small and the coolness of most pieces of equipment was totally lost on me. I sorta stopped caring like 10 hours in what they looked like and just ran around with whatever the best equipment was at the time.

Lastly I’ll touch on the side quests. Since Square wanted to make this game easily enjoyable for multiplayer, there are tons of non-linear side quests to do. Even if you have no intention of ever playing multiplayer (like me) these provide lots of added enjoyment, quirky little story bits, and plenty of challenge along the way. There is also the addition of treasure maps, which provide locations to grottos which are essentially side-quest dungeons. These dungeons can provide real challenge, something thats sadly missing from the main story. Never the less an awesome addition to the game.

Stella (Sandy in .jp) actually grew on me as the story went on

UPDATE: Another complaint I have which goes to the general easiness and lack of having to manage your resources is dungeon length. Dungeons are very short, even 30 hours in. Having to back track because you died on a boss is trivial, and you will never run out of HP/MP curatives in the first place.

A bit of background first. Ubisoft is a game developer who makes games that I largely don’t care about. Their most recent DRM (Digital Rights Management, previously known as copy-protection) required a constant connection to Ubisoft’s server farm while playing. If the connection dropped, your game would be paused until it came back. That means if your connection is flakey, you aren’t going to have a good time; if Ubisoft connection is flakey, you aren’t going to have a good time; if there is a major internet deroute, you aren’t going to have a good time. I chose to ignore those who don’t have a persistent internet connection because this is 2010 and thats just barbaric! It’s awful DRM and makes for an awful user experience.

DRM in the PC world is largely anti-user. PC game publishers deliver games with compatibility issues solely due to DRM, and in that sense, DRM is awful. However I have a problem with the crowd that thinks DRM is bad because piracy is good and that software should be free.

More background though. I spent my early years in the pre-internet days trading cracked games on BBS’, followed by my high school and university years spent in a top-level cracking group releasing video games. This may seem hypocritical to now have a problem with software piracy but let me explain. Back in the day, the cracking scene was a very small group of individuals, at first hundreds, then thousands. They were kids competing to see who could crack a game first. It wasn’t really about free software, it was a game itself. A mere drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions of people who steal software nowadays. Thats the problem. Piracy is ubiquitous with software and media amongst the current generation of high school and university students.

A generation of kids have grown up consuming all the software and media they can handle for free. Movie rentals? Why bother, just hit up a torrent site. Borrow a friends CD to see if you like it? Why bother, hit up any number of p2p sources. Need a new distraction from exams? Just download a dozen new games and see if you like any of them. The problem is that people expect everything for free on the internet. Many people argue that these people stealing the software/media wouldn’t have purchased it anyway. This is partially true, people now consume a lot more media and software than they’d purchase, but they would have purchased some. The problem is that piracy has become so pervasive in the internet culture, many people aren’t buying anything. Adults who pirate games will buy the ones they like, but thats our generation. The younger generation has grown up not buying media, they will continue to buy nothing. Thats right, I am asserting that this current generation is not pirating games as a form of try-before-buy, they just want free games…

People get angry that PS3/Xbox360 games are too expensive, they are not. SNES and N64 games reached $90-100+ CAD in the mid 90s. $100 10-15 years ago was a lot more money than it is today, so $70 in 2010 money isn’t really that bad… It is suggested that another business model is required. High quality games cost money to develop, a lot of money. More money than could be generated through ad supported software, so that model won’t work. The open source model has worked for amazing software packages like Linux, Apache and MySQL, and indeed would work for decent games given you could find talented artists, musicians and writers with enough free time; but the bulk of people are going to reach an age where they want to use their free time for something other than another job.

So my argument is that people nowadays just steal too much, and too many people just buy nothing. Maybe another business model is required for software sales, but that model does not exist. We are a capitalist society, most of us earning a living enjoy that, whether we are empathetic or not to those who don’t. The real problem is that PC DRM in its current incarnations are not the answer.

DRM on the PS3 is great. People argue that it stops homebrew and personal backups, but these are niche. Homebrew is nice, but there are lots of great platforms to write emulators and run linux on. The greatest of these is known as the PC, you already have one. After all, your PS3 was sold to you as a video game console, not a personal computer. Personal backups is a term heavily abused. Some people have this notion of personal backups that dates back to the time of floppy discs, which did readily wear out. DVDs, don’t, unless there is something drastically wrong with your hardware. However the majority of people who claim to desire personal backups just are saying they want to pirate games.

In the end I obviously don’t have a solution. My only point is that both sides demonize the other stupidly. Wide spread piracy is not acceptable, nor is DRM that does nothing but hurt legit consumers. Another sales model for games would be acceptable, but changing the culture that demands everything for free is likely a better solution. Until then, PC gaming will continue to die.

(Sorry for the bold, I just feel ranty)