2100 Microsoft Points, £15 delivered
This might have to become the new standard. It's only just over a pound more expensive than the old Tesco deal, but it seems like much more.
2100 Microsoft Points, £15
Podcast episode 8 delayed :(
Sorry folks, I haven't been able to edit the show for this week before I head out the door to go to this event in London. I'll get it up early next week. Sorry!
Lost Odyssey - Review/How I fell out of love with the contemporary Japanese RPG and became a disenfranchised, prematurly middle aged, gamer
Lost Odyssey, Xbox 360 - £14.89 delivered
Review by LewieP
Lost Odyssey is a bad game.
The problem is, it's a good JRPG.
Every possible step of the way, it tries to delay you. It artificially lengthens the game by either poor design choices, or worse, intentional barriers, which only serve to disconnect you from your experience.
And playing Lost Odyssey will be a disconnected gameplay experience. It has cut-scenes, I guess this is par for the course with any modern JRPG, but they are far more jarring in Lost Odyssey than they have been for me for a while.
The cut-scenes are for the most part very well animated. However, all this does is highlight how badly animated the game is when you are in control. Kaim basically has the same quality of walking animation as Mario displayed in his 3D debut. The collision detection is awful, the environments lack any depth of interactivity. You can walk up to some objects, and press a button if you like. Kaim will then jerkily kick the object, and a glowing spark flies out of the object, and aparently that is supposed to signify you "Acquiring" the item. This whole process takes a good couple of seconds.
There are load times everywhere. Everywhere.
Everywhere.
Once, I walked into a building (loading screen), walked upstairs and went to sleep (loading screen), cutscene (loading screen), walked outside (loading screen) walked a few paces, and triggered a cutscene, (loading screen) which was then followed by a boss (loading screen).
The cut scenes are (mostly) skippable, which is something. I guess.
The battles can be quite fun, but they are limited. Every time you enter a battle, one of your characters does their best ventriloquist act (in cut scenes, they lip sync, out of cut scenes, their lips don't move at all) and use one of their hilarious catch phrases, along the lines of "This'll be like taking candy from a baby", which wasn't that funny the first time, and gets no funnier with repetition. Each character has around 3/4 phrases. There will be hundreds of battles in any given playthrough. The battles themselves are basically all some variation on the same strategy - attack enemies until they die, but heal yourself before you die. Things are mixed up a bit, like how all JRPGs have slightly different battle systems, but the core gameplay is essentially identical to what you would expect from the genre.
Speaking of battles. They are random. The enemies jump, seemingly out of no where, and attack you in groups. They are pretty frequent. At first, I thought "Yes! They are going to have require interactive input", you have to hold down RT and let go at the right time to power up attacks. But that's it, there is no additional complexity to it, or different inputs for different moves/characters. Just one button.
I also encountered at least one boss where I had to grind to beat it.
The overworld is horrific. It's just a menu, not an overworld. Just a picture of a map, and a menu.
Also, for some odd reason, your party members other than you are not visible apart from in battles, and in selected areas. This is bad.
Despite (with the exception of the fantastic opening battle) the graphics only being acceptable, and the area's being tiny, and frequent loading times, the game still manages to have pretty bad framerate issues.
It also wants me to read. Now, I am happy to read, I love reading. But I don't want to spend this much time reading when I should be playing. Braid got away with having a large proportion of it's story told in text, because it did it well. It was quick, short, and didn't get in the way of the game, it enhanced it. Lost Odyssey throws a huge amount of text at you, and it just feels like they couldn't come up with a decent way of combining the narrative and the gameplay.
Also, "oh no, I have lost my memory" is not a plot device that you can get away if you are going to be that heavy handed with it.
The main characters are pretty one dimensional. Maybe that's not fair, but I certainly don't have any emotional attachment to any of the characters.
Without veering into spoiler territory, one of the main plot points is that the protagonist is an "Immortal". This means that no matter what, he cannot die.
Except he can die...if his health metre reaches zero in a battle. This disconnect between the 'gameplay' and the narrative is typical of not just Lost Odyssey, but the JRPG genre as a whole.
What I am getting at here is that Lost Odyssey probably ticks all of the boxes that it would require to be classified as a decent JRPG. The music is OK (although they could have done something other than the Final Fantasy Fanfare mixed up a bit for the battle victory theme) it has cut scenes in it, the characters all fit somewhere within the JRPG archetypes, as does the society, architecture, environment and fashion, and it relies on the same bullshit crutches that every JRPG in recent years has.
Now, I look at my long shopping list of complaints, and try to think of a JRPG I like. No, love.
I have to go back pretty far.
Let's say, back to Chrono Trigger.
Chrono Trigger has the following qualities:
Basically no load times,
Consistent overworld/battle scene,
Charming animation,
Few cut scenes (and all done with in game assets, from in game perspective),
Little redundant or repetitive dialogue,
No random encounters,
Little/no grinding needed
Great overworld,
All party members visible,
No framerate issues,
Characters I connected with
The plot and the gameplay were really well intertwined.
Now, I don't know if that's a fair comparison to make, and probably more than likely I am either looking back with a heavy twang of nostalgia, or at least I was a dumb kid when I first played it, and put up with all of its flaws.
But in my gut, it just feels plain wrong that we have moved so far backwards. With all the money, and all the hardware we have today, how can a game attempting the same thing do such a worse job of it.
It's not just Chrono Trigger either. A bunch of games from that era too. Earthbound, Final Fantasy III and to a lesser degree Pokémon are all good JRPGs and highly playable games.
Tell me, am I right here? Are new games broken and has the world gone shit?
Lost Odyssey has almost certainly got some good ideas in it, but they are lost in the bad design and blind following of the trend. I've not even completed the first disc of Lost Odyssey, but I am not hugely compelled to carry on. Why should I give my time to a game that shows me such little respect.
There is no reason that JRPGs should be excused of their failings just because they "come with the territory". I would love to see a wave of new, progressive, games, which push the genre forwards, instead of pandering to the audience.
Gamers are probably as much to blame as developers. We should demand more from our games, and more from our developers. If Lost Odyssey is the best the genre has to offer, then the genre is stale stale stale stale stale.
And yes, I have played TWEWY and that is exactly the type of progressive game I am talking about. Hats off S-E. Now lets continue to push things forward.
Elite Beat Agents, DS - £9.99
Elite Beat Agents, DS - £9.99 delivered
One of my favourite DS games. I would say a it's a must own for anyone with a DS.
FIFA 09, PS3 - £24.99
FIFA 09, PS3 - £24.99 in store at Morrisons.
I've heard from several people that Morrisons are selling FIFA 09 on the PS3 for £25. Might be on the 360 too. Let me know if you have any luck.
SNK Arcade Classics - Vol 1, Wii - £17.99
SNK Arcade Classics - Vol 1, Wii - £17.99 delivered
Includes:
Art of Fighting
Baseball Stars 2
Burning Fight
Fatal Fury
King of Fighters '94
King of the Monsters
Last Resort
Magician Lord
Metal Slug
Neo Turf Masters
Samurai Shodown
Sengoku
Shock Troopers
Super Sidekicks 3
Top Hunter
World Heroes
Scene It? Box Office Smash Bundle, Xbox 360 - £29.99
Scene It? Box Office Smash Bundle, Xbox 360 - £29.99 delivered
Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise, Xbox 360 - £19.99
Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise, Xbox 360 - £19.99 delivered
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Xbox 360 - £4.99
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Xbox 360 - £4.99 delivered
SOCOM - Confrontation, PS3 - £29.99
SOCOM - Confrontation, PS3 - £29.99 delivered
Includes a wireless headset
FaceBreaker K.O. Party, Wii - £14.99
FaceBreaker K.O. Party, Wii - £14.99 delivered
Almost certainly going to be even worse than the 360 version, but it is also even cheaper.
The SavyGamer Podcast, Episode 7
Lucky number seven - the SavyGamer Podcast is getting closer and closer to being available when advertised. This week has pretty much been Nintendo Week and so we address that pretty thoroughly. Also this week - games that annoy us! I'm also toying with a new style of shownotes for this week - let me know what you think.
Show notes (Highlight to view):
00:00 Opening
00:37 Welcome
01:04 NEW PODCAST RSS FEED. Please update your feeds according to the details in this post.
02:40 Actually talking about games!
54:10 What we've we've been playing
1:07:35 Bargain of the Week
The Red Star, Burnout Paradise
1:12:14 Contest winners!
1:16:31 Meet the SavyGamers in London this month!
1:08:27 Close
1:18:36 Bonus: Excerpt from Two Drink Mike, by comedian Mike Birbiglia
Contest winners:
Congratulations to Caroline, who won entry into the LittleBigPlanet beta. Her entry really captured what a Sackboy(girl?) is all about and the detail was extraordinary.
Click to view full version
And congratulations to Alex, who has won a copy of the Collector's Edition for Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 1. Here is his comic entry:
Click to view full version (NSFW, expletives)
Entry based on this comic (also NSFW, expletives)
Link dump:
Joystiq's coverage of Nintendo's Media Summit
DSi in Europe Spring 2009?
Clarification: Wii games can be saved to SD, but not read from.
Experience issue in Halo is now fixed
Screenshots from our Annual run
The Pandora
Total Runtime: 1:18:44
Total Filesize: 73.8MB
Got feedback on the show? Post a comment, or email us:
LewieP - lewiep@savygamer.co.uk
Will - willeth@gmail.com
Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball, XBLA - Review
Whose side are you on? It's one or the other. It's a debate that's raged for centuries. But do you care?
Gamecock and Blazing Lizard certainly hope that you do, with their release of Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball on Xbox Live Arcade. 800 points (just over a fiver, depending on where you source your points) will net you a game that, while fun, will probably only last the life of the meme.
There's nothing deeply wrong with PvN Dodgeball. There's a cute story behind it with some genuinely funny moments. It's a fairly solid mechanic and I can see it being fun to play with other people once everyone fully understands it. But it's the little things that let it down.
For example, throwing the ball at the apex of a jump will result in a powerful throw that can't be caught or parried. However, I've found that it's extremely difficult to do this consistently, whereas the AI seems to be able to do it with almost every throw. Coupled with that, blocking requires extreme precision, and you have to be facing in the direction the ball is coming from, something that the game does not tell you directly. This can be very frustrating and leads to all too many cries of "Dammit, I pressed X!"
The ball can be difficult to distinguish from the stage on some occasions. As in some game modes the opponents can cross the centre line, this means that the AI can simply continually throw the ball at you and retrieve it while you're still wondering where it bounced. A simple glow would have fixed this but it not present.
I'd consider all this a little too critical except that if these were fixed then I can see a great little game underneath. Within a few minutes you could have learned all the controls and can been battling the other teams with your friends (there's Pirates, Ninjas, Robots, Zombies, and a 'secret' unlockable character team), except with the way it is now there are too many moments that feel cheap. When a game is this simple it needs to be balanced well, and it's too unforgiving.
I've never been a fan of the argument that 'you need to spend a little time with it and learn the game before you start to enjoy it.' Simple games like this - hell, most games that are designed for Xbox Live Arcade and similar services - are designed with ease of use in mind. But once you have spent a little time with PvN, it does show its true colours and I some of the battles are very entertaining. However, it still feels a little hollow. I shouldn't have to fight through that layer of frustration to find the gem underneath.
If you're paying 800 moon pounds for this game it feels like it should be a little meatier. It's not that this game isn't worth five quid or so, but the fact that for the same amount of money you could get an experience like Geometry Wars or N+ brings down the value. As of right now, it feels like a minigame that you would look forward to in a game like Mario Party. You wouldn't necessarily go out of your way to play it, but when it pops up, everyone enjoys it.
New Podcast RSS
If you use RSS to get the podcast then please note there is a new feed. This feed only contains the podcast and not the rest of the SavyGamer content. It is not a replacement for the main site feed - that will continue to exist - but if you only want the podcast, then there is a now a separate feed for that.
This is because some podcatchers read feeds in a way that expects only rich media files, and if there are a significant amount of posts in between podcast posts the podcatcher will only see the most recent episode. As SavyGamer sees a ton of posts per week this means that this was happening with our podcast, and so if anyone wanted to listen to an old episode they couldn't do it through RSS or iTunes.
So there you have it - choose which feed is more appropriate for you. If you want to see all the site content, then continue to use this feed. If you only want the podcast through RSS, then use this one.
If you use iTunes then you do not need to change your feed subscription at this time, but will need to once iTunes lists our new feed in order to retrieve the older episodes.
Thanks!
LittleBigPlanet, PS3 - £34.89
LittleBigPlanet, PS3 - £34.89 delivered
Preorder, released on October 24th.
Sainsbury console price drop
According to mcvuk.com, Sainsburies are going to be dropping the price of the Xbox 360 and the Wii in store as of tomorrow.
The Wii will be £149.97
The 360 Arcade will be £99.97
and the 360 premium (60gb) will be £139.97.
Cracking deal. Now is the time to pick up whichever of there you are interested in.
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