And I reciprocated with a Tokidoki jacket, shes a big fan

 

Definitely a good weekend, looking forward to keeping up with this LJ a bit more, but Im pretty busy after work lately... well see.

 

(not pictured: the chair that I put in the middle of the carpet for me to sit and play, haha)
 

Games are cool, lets talk about them.

HEAVENLY SWORD

So as part of the whole Black Friday thing (which is a horrible tradition that needs to disappear really, people avalanches in Walmart and yearly deaths is not something that is acceptable) we bought this on Amazon for $20, which honestly is about right, given the length.

Now the first time me Shelly and I played this was on its first showing at E3 in 2006. It was the Colosseum level and came away impressed. The game looked amazing, the animation fluid, the art phenomenal ... yeah, this shit was next-gen alright. Later after the show we heard the rumor that there was nothing else to the game, what we saw at E3 was all they had made. After beating the game now that makes perfect sense.

Now you can think about this in two ways. One, Heavenly Sword is a focused game that knows what it wants and gives it to you without game design fluff. Two, these developers fell in love with their tech and then one day realized that shit, they had to make a game out of it. The answer is probably somewhere down the middle and its something we've seen in many other games this generation (Motorstorm, Assassins Creed, Little Big Planet)



The game is spread into three sections: Beat'em up combat, Long Range combat sequences and two or three puzzles (literally) The combat itself is fine, flashy and encourages experimentation until later stages, were you realize that if you want to make it trough you need to spam just one combo (helloo, last boss! watch me press square, triangle, triangle, triangle, triangle, triangle, triangle en masse) The long range stuff is usually shooting arrows in slow-mo bullet time mode, and that's fun at all, but it gets old, the puzzles are usually hitting a switch that's far away by throwing an item from far away in the slow-mo bullet time mode I just talked about. The game tries to make itself feel longer by adding these puzzles and shooting segments, and somehow it succeeds but it really makes me notice how theres nothing else to speak of, no level complexity or exploration like God of War, if anything the whole experience makes me wish the game had stayed in dev time for a bout a year longer.

The art stays awesome though, save from some noticeable framerate skips the audiovisual experience is superb. Sweeping vistas, interesting designs, good characterization, excellent facial animation ... truly the saving grace of the game, and that's ok, at least its pretty to look at, you know? The game does try to make you care way too much about the characters, and its hard to when the experience is so short and it tries to focus on so many characters. Games like Portal are shorter and provide better characterization because they know what they're going for, 5 hours of gameplay and 1 or 2 characters to develop is plenty of time ratio wise. In Heavenly Sword they want you to care not just about Nariko, but about her friend, her dad, her antagonist, the son of the antagonist and the antagonists henchmen, oh oh oh! Also her people, lets not forget to remind the player what her people have gone trough, jaysus christ. Long load times are also frequent, so when you die its kind of frustrating, but he, theres been worse, still annoying though.

You can usually tell when developers have run out of time and/or ideas by the time you reach the endgame. Heavenly Sword is no exception. In a well developed and thought out game (ie: any Zelda) the last challenge of the game will require a collection of the skills you've collected throughout the game in order to become victorious. It makes sense right? Well in this here game you get the impression you need to do that, use the combos you've gained or vary your attack patterns from long range to close range, maybe even throw an item or two at the fucker right? Nah, I tried that for like, 5 times and by then I got annoyed, said "fuck it" and dialed the combo I knew would work for the entire fight. I kept 80 percent of my health and killed the asshole. Sorry guys, but that's not the best game design Ive ever seen, consider me spoiled.

All in all, it was an enjoyable game and I'm glad I bought it, but I'm also happy I didn't spent $60 on it when it first came out. Now that the devs have this tech in place I'm excited about what they can do in the future. If anything Heavenly Sword is a good demo reel of what these guys are capable of.

Just ordered these online, thank God its payday!

So I was trading some of my old yearly games and found this for the cheap. Now, I always meant to pick this game up and specially now that the sequel is finally in the US, so this worked out perfectly.
 

So far, Im about 5 hours in (Got done with Purgatory) and everything is EXTREMELY impressive so far:

-Battle system is ace. Starts off simple and adds a good deal of layers of complexity. Not on the God Hand level of awesome, but quite nice. Also there are TONS of usable items in the environment, pretty impressive considering this is before Dead Rising.

-Graphics are VERY detailed, the environments are packed with stuff and the fake shader stuff they pull off reflection wise is impressive.

This shot of the item shop I really like, its has great detail and looks really authentic
 

-Characters, while cliched, are likable and not annoying
- The dialog is great, sometimes hilarious since somebody is being called a motherfucker every 5 seconds but hey, I'm enjoying it. So far the story is developing as it should, no great plot twists or anything yet, but I'm very intrigued.

-NPC's will text message you and call your cellphone to hang out, which unlocks side missions. I recall some Grand Theft something or other pulling the same stuff in a much more annoying way and getting all the credit for it. You can also find girls and flirt with them, make them your friends, have them call you, etc, etc

Of course there are some negatives, the UI work is so-so, the pre-loading of the camera switches is annoying as shit and there's some overall clunkiness .. which instead of annoying me makes me really look forward to the polishing of the formula in Yakuza 2 and Yakuza PS3. Its kind of nice to see a Japanese twist on the free roaming genre, I like GTA and all, but I find this pretty refreshing.

Its kind of hard to find good images online, but the game is definitely a looker. My wife kept looking at the environment detail, noticing new things here and there (and now shes playing Infinite Undiscovery, thus blocking further Yakuza progress ...). Another nice aspect is just how much this looks like a Japanese city. Having been in Tokyo recently I got some insta-nostalgia thing going on. The level of fidelity is noteworthy.

There are definite issues with the game, as noted above, but so far the positives greatly outweigh the negatives, lets hope that's the case till the end.

 

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Bigger, for emphasis

Canon Pixma 9000