200 games: A history.

So, I've beaten 200 games, according to my Backloggery. That's not a huge milestone compared to some people who have broken 1000. However, it's still a pretty big number for me. About half of those are RPGs or RTSes or TBSes that require much more time than your average game, so that still represents a huge time sink. Wait - A time sink? Really? Nah.

So, how did I get started in gaming? Well, one of my earlier memories is, while the rest of my family was eating dinner, crawling into my older-by-16-years brother's room and playing Super Mario World. Another great one is watching him play FF2, and seeing him beat Milon, who, at 5, I had trouble with. My older brother was always into video games. He, actually, got my grandmother into the Dragon Warrior games on NES. My grandmother and I played the everloving crap out of Dragon Warrior 3 and 4 over the years. We found 1 and 2 as well, but didn't play them nearly as much.

I actually learned how to read from RPGs. Back in the day, I'd ask my grandmother to read all the dialogue to me. At some point, she said to me, "I've read what that person says to you so many times you could probably tell me what he says.". And I could. So, we went from there. I learned how to do math from RPGs as well. Figuring out how much money needed to buy equipment for the party. (Cue Piccolo from DBZ Abridged: "Neeeeeeeerd")

As well, my dad and I used to play games together. We played through FF1 (... How we got through that game back then, I'll never know) and played against each other in Super Mario Kart (At first, I'd beat him handily. Then, it became I could only really beat him on a single track - Koopa Beach 1. He was using a superior kart, though, DK, to my Yoshi. But, damnit, Yoshi is awesome, so I had to use him.) and F-Zero (This was no contest. He'd beat me every time). He'd also play 2 golf games he had gotten, PGA Tour Golf (Where he could get -50 in a tournament consistently) and HAL'S Hole In One Golf, and The Hunt for the Red October. Ah, wait, no. That's not true. He and I did play through Lufia 1 together. Though, when we bought Lufia 2, he didn't have as much interest in it.

Heh. Speaking of Lufia 2 - Tangent. That's the game that led me to GameFAQs. Ohhh, GameFAQs. I've been going to that site for probably about a decade now. Maybe more. I remember, one day, noticing, "Oh, huh. There's a poll on the site now." Thanks to that site, I've found a lot of friends. The message boards, the FAQ writers, a great community. It's changed so, so much, though. I remember when each update way CJayC himself writing something. It was better, back then. But, ah well.

Magazines, too. Whew. I got Game Informer, back in the daaaaay, way back when. And then OPM for the demo discs. Maaan. So many games I tried out due to those demo discs and then bought. Good memories of those olden days. It's thanks to those that I picked up a few games - Grandia, Suikoden. My interest in rhythm games starting before DDR in Gitaroo Man on a demo disc. Etc.

Ah! So, where was I. Well, I have to thank my brother most, I think. He gave me a lot of the games I played on the NES and SNES as a kid. I have a semi nice collection of rare old games that I value more than their resell value has ever been. FF1, some of my Dragon Warriors, my SNES RPGs, etc. Great, great stuff. Inspired me towards the games I've played ever since. I ended up siding with Sony due to him, really. Thanks to FF7 going to PSX, my brother got a PSX, and so, I ended up getting one. I went where the RPGs went. Aaah, memories of console arguments, about which would win... (I was right, at least!). Before that, I had both an SNES and a Genesis, so I liked both.

My brother in law mostly got me into PC gaming. That and Shareware. Though, I didn't have much shareware, just some Epic games stuff. I actually bought one of them - Castle of the Winds. My first Roguelike. :3 Ah, Roguelikes.... But, one day, I played Warcraft 2 on my brother in law's PC. I got slaughtered, as I picked a scenario and had no clue what I was doing. I ended up getting WC2 as a gift from him shortly afterwards, though, and there started my love of RTSes. But, back when we only had a 486, he gave me a CD with an NES emulator and some games. The 486 could only handle some of the NES games. Later when we got a better machine, he gave use a disc with MAME (Yep. MAME was around in the Win95 days) and ROMs. My dad and I used to play those all the time: Tapper, Popeye, Dig-Dug, Burger Time. He also would burn me PC games and eventually got my PSX modded. I ... sorta knew this was illegal back when he did this, but it never really triggered in my head. I've always been around piracy, heh.

My love of TBSes was a bit different. I ended up buying asking my mom to buy me Civ2 back in elementary school. As good of a gamer as I was back then*, it was beyond me. I tried to read the manual and play, but that didn't work out too well. I kept trying every so often, though, and managed to win a game a couple years later.

*Okay, so, it took me like 3 times starting FFT to beat it. I didn't realize people died permanently when they crystalized/turned into a chest. And then the second time I thought 4 Knights + Chemist was a good team. I got it like right after it came out, so I was like 9, damnit. Was my first SRPG, too.

So... That's roughly where I am today. Something like that. My tastes have only grown since I started. I skipped over some important events, probably, but... Well, I can't cover them all and have this be of any reasonable length.

Castlevania: Curse of Darkness

I'm not sure how much I can say about this game. It was generally pretty fun. Which, actually, surprised me. 3D Castlevania? After how horrible I had heard the ones on N64 were and given my tendency to liking 2D games better (Even in this day and age), I didn't hold out too much hope. However, like my discovery that 3D Zelda and 3D Mario weren't horrible (and were even pretty good), I find that Castlevania is capable of good 3D games as well.
Let's do a rundown.

Plot: ... It's Castlevania. Set out to fight Dracula, encounter a few twists, probably work right into someone's plan, kill Dracula. ... yknow. I said this exact same thing in the last Castlevania review I did. Ha. Though, one of the characters, Saint Germaine, is pretty cool.

Music: Done by Michiru Yamane. Not *quite* as good as the SotN soundtrack, but a decent soundtrack. There were a few times when I noticed the music in a good way.

Graphics: Not great but not horrible. The people (of which there aren't really that many) have a bit of an odd look about them, but that's more of an art direction thing than a graphics thing, really. The monsters tend to look nice, though. The style is very Castlevaniaish. The areas tend toward dark and gothic, but don't fall into the only 3 Black, Grey, and Brown that some games do.

Gameplay: Ah, and the reason Castlevania has survived >20 years. As you don't play a Belmont in this game, your weapon repetoire is more than just a whip, and the game does multiple weapons really well. Like in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence (and, as a more played example, Dynasty Warriors), you have a normal attack and a Strong attack. The Strong attack in this game tends to be combo finishing moves, but not always. This is one of the few games I've played where the weapons all feel really different and seem like they all have their own unique niche to fill in. There are: Swords, Huge Swords, Fencing Swords, Axes, Huge Axes, Spears, Knuckles, and Special. Special is weird and tends toward useless for 95% of the game. Now, the rest: Axes and Swords are pretty similar. Fastish, decent crowd control, decent against one thing. Huge Axes and Huge Swords are slow (Against fast enemies, you feel slugish as they dance around you - It's neat), deal a huge amount of damage, and can clear the area around you out with certain combos. Huge Swords also have a combo that works decent at single enemy focus. Fencing Swords are damned fast and are good at both single and crowd control, but they're weak. Knuckles are the fastest, weakest, and are bad at crowd control. But, oh, against a single enemy, you can stunlock the bastard until it dies. Spears are easily the best crowd control weapon, and, in that aspect, they're a bit slow - They have large sweeping attacks that put you a bit overextended. However, certain combos speed it up and can focus on single enemy attacks. They're pretty dynamic, it's cool. Now, each of those 8 categories has its own set of combos. Combos work like this: The normal attack button combos a set length combo. Hit the strong attack/final attack button at any point and you'll do a finishing move that changes depending on where in the normal attack combo you activate it. Each weapon has a wide range of different moves. They all feel unique and useful - Which is something that most games with a wide range of weapons really sort of fail at doing.
Other game aspects include: Being a Blacksmith. You make all the weapons and armor that you use in the game. You get material for this via enemy drops, chests, and stealing from enemies. The careful explorer and dedicated thief will be rewarded with high quality items. Though you can get by without just on enemy drops. I feel somewhere in between. I rarely stole, but did occasionally when it was easy. I managed to get a pretty good set of equipment throughout the game.
Being a Pokemon trainer. Er... You get familiars as you advance through the game. There are multiple types that cover healing, support, and combat roles. While I really disliked this idea at first, as it didn't seem necessary early game, the battles got tougher and the familiars got cooler and I accepted it. Turns out, I enjoyed the mechanic by end game. You evolve them by getting a drop depending on what weapon you use (Which actually isn't a pain in this game!) and they learn skills based on what evolution path they have. Some evolution paths give you abilities needed to get to secretish rooms/areas. I'd sorta recommend looking up evolution paths and such to make sure you get useful evolutions. Some of them are sort of bad - No skills to get to different areas *or* useful skills for combat. You can likely get by without on sheer luck, though. I managed it.

The difficulty, too, was pretty much just about right. There were a few hard bosses (and one that annoyed me, as you only have to do about 1/8th of his lifebar to end the fight), but none that were absurd. The monsters that filled the games environs, as well, were varied and fun to smash the crap out of.


Also, oh hay, look at that. I've beaten 200 games, according to my Backloggery.

Wild Arms 4

As a big fan of the Wild Arms series, I've finally gotten around to Wild Arms 4. I ... don't really know what to say about the game, though. It ... was a good game. I never got tired of it and wanted to stop, but then there was never really a drive to play it. The story wasn't amazing (though, it did have a few really trope breaking moments and a few awesome scenes.. Though, it also has a lot of trope enforcing moments, so I suppose it balances out), I read it, but didn't horribly care. The music was good, but not too special. The tracks that Naruke did stand out, but the rest ... Meh.

Being a Wild Arms game, there are a few things that return to the series, as expected. The horrible forcing of a term to the acronym ARM; the Force Gauge, a gauge that builds up in combat that increases as you take or deal damage (though, the one in this game is party shared); puzzles in the dungeon (though, tools are unfortunately gone). Guardians are gone, sadly.

The combat was fun, though. The normal battle system brings in a bit of SRPG and is set on 7 hexes, a center one, and 6 around it. Your characters start randomly disbursed (for random fights) around them. You can melee attack adjacent hexes and magic and other unique abilities do any square, surrounding squares, or a line of squares. Status effects and buffs affect squares instead of individual units, and you see the exact combat order, as well. It makes for a bit more strategic combat. The system doesn't drag on, either. Random battles go by in about a minute or two, so no longer than in any other system. Unfortunately, one of the characters, Raquel, is absurdly broken, and takes just about all the difficulty out of the game. She's absurdly powerful and has a Force ability that lets her act an additional time per use.

The method of character customization is new in this game, too. Each character has a set of abilities that get learned over the course of the game, in their Crest Graph. However, they have to have a certain number of points allocated to them to be learned. Each level, every skill has a permanent point allocated to them, and you gain another point that can be moved around into any of the skills. However, if you don't use all the movable points, you have more HP and MP. These points are, actually, the only benefit you get from leveling up. You gain stats by mastering a set of abilities in the Crest Graph, 'Class Level Up'. The system only really allows for freedom toward midlevel range, though. There's not that many abilities, though, so there's not that many choices. You tend to just be able to choose what ability you get early.

There's a good amount of post game stuff to do, as well. Optional bosses and absurd synthesize strings and such. It's not a long game, though. I beat it in about 25-30 hours of actual play. Was a very, very linear game, though. I don't think I encountered a side quest in the entire game. There's also no exploration. It is literally just "Go here. Kay, now go here. Kay, now go here." on the world map.

It's a decent game. Fun, but nothing amazing. Fans of the series would like it. Everyone else, pick it up if you see it for cheap.