Backloggery - For The OCD Gamer

If you're like me (and you probably aren't), you play way too many video games and over the years forget which ones you have or haven't completed. In ye olden days I used to keep a spreadsheet with all the games I'd beaten and when saved on my computer at all times, but this is the year 2014 so I'm here to bring you THIS:

The front page, where you can see the most recently updated backlogs

The main page of my personal backlog

As you can see, the Backloggery is a site where completionists can list all the games they've played or beaten over the years and show them off to friends. The site allows for showing the number of achievements in a game you've beaten, listing DLC, adding small reviews and notes and more. There's also a friend system where the right side of your main page is updated each time a friend updates their own backlog, and this is great for keeping up on what your friends are playing or how far along they are in a particular game.

So yeah, give it a try if you're as anal about keeping track of what you've done as I am, and feel free to add me while you're at it! My Backlog can be found here: http://www.backloggery.com/verranicus

Gaming Progress Report - March 12, 2014

Shining Ark:

Still chugging through Shining Ark! I just made it to Chapter 4 yesterday, and while I still adore the art style I'm beginning to lose my interest in the game. The battles are really, really short and have massive chunks of text both before and after them, and it's really not doing much to hold my attention. That said, the ship battles are pretty great and I wish they happened more often. Having to balance using the cannons while fighting enemies off your deck is tense and these fights were the only point I even came anywhere close to dying.

The game keeps throwing new characters at me that are essentially inferior to the ones I have in every way. I rotate them around for variety but elf chick and dog dude are miles more useful than the others.

Lost Planet:

So, this game. I've been wanting to play this since it was first announced for PS3 back in the day, it looked like a fairly cool 3rd person shooter, which I'm definitely into. The reality, however, is that the game is just kinda boring. Rather than a well scripted 3rd person action game with fun gameplay it's ended up being something of a slow, monotonous slog from the start of a mission to the irritating but easy boss battle at the end.

At the very least the game still looks great despite being several years old, and while the boss battles are kind of lame, they're still great to look at. Plus, the game has giant robots, and I'm pretty sure everyone knows how I feel about those.

Final Fantasy Type-0 Translation - Release Date Announcement

 

So for the longest time now I've been following the fan translation project of Final Fantasy Type-0, salivating at the thought of play a new Final Fantasy game that doesn't belong to the awful XIII sub-series. Generally I would check the most active forums that handle that sort of stuff once a week, and imagine my surprise when I check a day or two ago to find a dozen new pages of jubilant and raving people going on about a supposed release date. The supposed date is August 18th of this year, though I wouldn't be surprised if it changed as these things often do. Many people were happy to have a concrete timeframe, but just as many were irrationally angry that the game wasn't being released much sooner given that it's currently being beta tested. Personally I can wait, and I'm glad to no longer have to check those websites all the time, but it will be tough to stay patient given how much I've been wanting to play this.

Here's the teaser trailer that the translation team released, and yes, I plan to do a playthrough of this the moment it gets released.

Type-0 Translation Teaser from SkyBladeCloud on Vimeo.

 

Last Ranker

From the videos and screenshots I'd seen of Last Ranker I wasn't especially impressed, and I was really only playing it to check it off my my backlog. I expected a dull and clunky if somewhat unique RPG, but what I got was sooo much better. Never before has a slowly dropping number captivated me so much.

Story: 

As always when it comes to Japanese games, I have to say that I don't understand the language completely and basically get by on what I've picked up from playing imported games since the SNES era, but with help from a guide on GameFaqs I think I got a general idea of what was going on.

Last Ranker follows the story of Zig, who leaves his home village after becoming tired and disillusioned with their way of life and opts to travel to the city and join with an organization called the 'Rankers' that are all about rising in the ranks and training strong fighters. He eventually gets caught up in the plots of the corrupt 'Knights of the Seven', who are the top seven fighters in the city and essentially in control of the government, and later does the whole save the world thing.

I genuinely liked most of the characters in this game, especially the villains. I've always been a sucker for well done evil organizations with gradually strengthing members as you go up the hierarchy, and Last Ranker managed to have them all be at least somewhat interesting and fun to come into conflict with.

The animation quality of the characters was pretty great

Gameplay:

Last Ranker has a pretty unusual battle system when compared to the usual JRPG, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Rather than just have a menu that you navigate to select attack, magic, item, etc, Last Ranker uses a more action/timing based approach, almost similar to Super Mario RPG/Paper Mario.

You can assign abilities to certain buttons such as attack, guard and the like, and in combat you're encouraged to do what you can to time your attacks for when the enemy drops their defenses, guard powerful attacks, use special abilities to interrupt your opponent when they try to do the same, and so forth. All in all it makes for a more engaging and tense system than the norm, and it goes a long way towards making the otherwise bland (there are very few unique monster types) random encounters fun.

The best part of the game, at least for me, is the rank indicator that's always at the top of your screen. This number keeps track of Zig's standing in Last Ranker and steadily goes down as he defeats other Rankers like himself. It became something of an obsession to see this number go down, and each Ranker battle was a pure joy with a few exceptions (enemies that constantly counterattack were really irritating).

One of the many 'boss' encounters, with Zig's current rank at the top left

Summary:

Last Ranker was the first Japanese PSP RPG I picked up when I started binging on single player games recently, and was good enough to get me hooked all the way to the end and leave me wanting more. Presentation was great and the gameplay was varied enough that it never felt like I was grinding. Audio-wise it was a mixed bag, but there were more good tracks than bad. Definitely grab this one if you're looking for a JRPG that's just a little bit different.

Gaming Progress Report - March 8th, 2014

My girlfriend has been away for the weekend visiting family so I've been able to burn through more games than I would otherwise, and despite feeling generally ill over the past few days I actually managed to check a few off my backlog and beat them.

Costume Quest:

This little piece of awesome had actually been sitting on my backlog for years with me constantly telling myself I'd get to it eventually. Let me tell you, it was worth the wait. Costume Quest easily blew my expectations out of the water and I was so entranced by it I even grabbed the lone DLC and played through that as well. I think I blew through both in a combined total of 4-5 hours, but I enjoyed every minute of them.

Why can't they make more console style RPGs for the PC? They don't even have to be serious affairs like Final Fantasy or whatever, this game proved that! I'd love for more games like this to be released, because it's getting harder and harder for me to play newer console style RPGs on actual consoles (on account of my not having any of the new ones).

Homefront:

I almost feel like I'm doing a bad thing by putting this average-on-its-best-day FPS in the same update as Costume Quest. But yes, I played and finished Homefront. It looks and handles identically to every other modern military FPS, but it's single player campaign was somehow even shorter and jankier than Call of Duty and the like. A real shame, too, because the setting for the game was fairly interesting, and the introduction sequence actually had me pretty well hooked despite it being completely unrealistic.

Apparently a sequel is in the works despite the average to negative reviews the game got, though, so maybe that will improve on a lot of the things that held this one back.

Sol Trigger

This game, oh man. It took me days, maybe weeks to find a build of PPSSPP that worked properly with this game. One version would have freezing issues, another wouldn't play certain audio tracks, the next would play all voice audio at the lowest volume possible, and so on. Thankfully, I think it was worth the effort.

Story:

Sol Trigger is in Japanese aside from some of the menus and character names having been fan-translated, so I can't say that what I gathered of the story from playing it is 100% accurate (in fact I can promise you it isn't), but after reaching the end I feel as if I got the gist of things.

The game takes place in the city of Kaiserhald, where the eponymous resistance group 'Sol Trigger' fights a secret war against the Machine Church who rule everything. The Machine Church uses a power source called Sol to power everything from streetlights to horrible robot monstrocities, but what the general populace doesn't know is that Sol is extracted from living people, and thus the reason for the resistance.

You play as Farel, who leads Sol Trigger after the initial leader is killed during a mission, and embark on a series of operations to disrupt the Machine Church's harvesting and manufacturing of Sol. Things obviously get more complicated than that, but I'd like to avoid anything to spoiler-y.

The cutscenes in the game are amazingly well done

Gameplay:

Sol Trigger handles very similarly to games from the Shin Megami Tensei series, with a first person view during battle and a system that maps out the fairly convoluted dungeons as you explore them. Where it differs, however, is what makes the game so great. Animation quality for just about every ability is superb, and I found myself using abilities that may not have been optimal just because they looked cooler. Abilities even change appearance once you've leveled them up to their cap, which gives a bit more incentive to varying how you play.

Another unique aspect of the game is that you can use your parties Sol (basically MP/SP) to power up their abilities. Say ability A cost 50 Sol to use normally, you could power it up to use 75, 100, 200, etc. and the damage or effects it did would vary accordingly. Very cool, and it allows for a much greater range of control over how you handle your battles.

One negative I will say is that there are two characters in both halves of the game that are so game breakingly useful that you're almost forced to use them in your party 100% of the time despite always having a decent sized group to switch in and out. Cyril with her group wide defense/attack buff and heal over time along with Sophie/Wilma's ability that eliminates the Sol cost of the groups other attacks are just leagues better than most of the alternatives, so not using them feels like deliberately handicapping yourself.

Despite the first person battle system, abilities all have really nice looking animations

Summary:

If you can get past the fact that the game is in Japanese, I'd say this is easily one of the best JRPGs on the PSP. It managed to keep me interested throughout and there were even some genuinely emotional moments here and there. Definitely pick this one up if you can.

Gaming Progress Report - March 5th

I'm actually at a point right now where I have way too many games going at once and I'm in pretty desperate need of hard drive space, but can't pick any one game to delete because I haven't finished any of them yet. I should just buckle down and pick one, but I'm indecisive by nature. Anyway, some thoughts on a couple of the offending titles.

Unrelated to what I post below, here's a link to my youtube channel. I upload far too much and I'm always happy to get new viewers: FlamingGnats' Channel - YouTube

Defiance:

This should be the perfect game for me. 3rd-person shooting in an MMORPG setting with Guild Wars 2 style public events? Hell yeah, that sounds awesome, and for the most part it's not half bad. However, my first foray into the PVP side of things kind of left me with a bad taste in my mouth and I haven't felt like logging back in for a few days now. 

Essentially the PVP is dead, but those dedicated enough to wait out the 10+ minute queue times to get into a battleground are treated to being consistently killed in a single shot by people with literally 50x their EGO rating, all sporting the same semi-automatic sniper rifle and stealth ability. This has apparently been a major problem for the game for a while now, with most of the community abandoning PVP altogether because the devs have done nothing to fix things. I don't blame them, and I won't be trying it out again.

TESV: Skyrim:

Yes, I'm going to play this again. I spent a good chunk of yesterday downloading far too many mods and I just finished installing them all this afternoon. I've done this many times in the past and have only ever beaten the game once before (and even then, I ended up rushing through the main story about halfway through) so hopefully this will be different and I will be able to complete everything. I'm hoping the fact that I have a much better GPU now than I did the last time I played will make it easier to get into the game, but we'll find out for sure soon enough.