Bit Trip

Released a year ago, the Bit Trip series has been taking up a fair amount of my time as I try to slowly hone my controller tilting skills to near rhythmic perfection. Gaijin games is also developing a fourth addition, called Runner, which I will no doubt log many hours on.

Details..... Three games, released for WiiWare between April and May in 2009, called Bit Trip Beat, Bit Trip Core and Bit Trip Void. Each has a wonderful 8 bit aesthetic that harkens back to my early days of gaming on the carpet. And like the games of old, each has a very simple core gameplay element that is explored in wave after wave of increasing difficult obstacles and timing.

I won't go into too much detail about each one, but I'll try to explain at least Bit Trip Beat. It's like pong, only one sided. Instead of a single square pixel to bounce off your paddle you have to deal with returning thousands of pixels, each one part of a sequence that contributes to the music. Quickly the game gets into very difficult situations as your trying to smoothly move down a slope of 12 beats and then snap back to to the top of the screen to hit that one that was speeding in. All this has to be done while tilting the wiimote like some kind of twisty remote thingy. Words have failed me, let me try again.

Controlling beat requires you to hold the wiimote like a ear of corn, and you must rotate this wiimote the same way you would nom on some delicious corn on the cob. Fun? Yes. Different? Most definitely. Problem? Potentially. Now maybe I'm just getting old, but holding on to this controller like that and trying to preform precise movement on the beat left me very tense. It was a good kind of tense, the kind that you don't notice because it's so much fun, but I noticed it later.

So Beat is basically a fun rhythm game that is even more fun for 2 players. At 3 players your paddles get significantly smaller to compensate for more players, which makes it much harder. I've only been able to complete 2 of the 4 levels, and I can only proceed this far with a single friend of mine who developed his skills in tandem with mine. This is great, because it's something that we can both come back to when he visits and try and push further.

Void and Core have their own neat game play features. In Void you have to balance growing huge, purging extra mass and avoiding white dots, while in Core it's rythem based pixel zapping but much, much more difficult than either Void or Beat.

Gaijin is next releasing Runner later this year, which looks like a side scrolling running game with similar aesthetic to the previous three. It looks okay, but without playing it who can really say?

Anyway, the current Bit Trip Trio are awesome wiiware titles. For $20 you can nab all three and Void and Beat are multiplayer. Each one is a deep exploration into their related way to play the game and you get some neat bit trip music to do it to. While no stories are really being told and you're not going to be blown away by the millions of polygons, you're still going to have a fun and consuming time learning the rhythm and feeling satisfied when you can nail tat 354+ beat streak (my personal best).

FFXIII

Oh boy, I've come around to buy another FF. The last one that I played was X2 and the one that I completed before that was with Squall Lionheart in FF 8. How does this one measure up?

Linear is the first word that comes to mind. The second is pretty. The game is wonderfully crafted as only Squeenix can. Beautiful characters, beautiful weapons and gorgeous environments. The game play is good too, quick and responsive despite being a pseudo-turn based combat system. You'll find your fights are mostly automated with a few that require some micromanagement. They also look great as well, with Lightning running around the field dispensing the justice.

However, the game suffers from being very linear. Most of the path ways are in a narrow corridors, although I haven't played through the whole thing yet. The skill tree is also very straight forward, and although you will have characters that specialize in their roles, their development is very one directional. This isn't terribly surprising considering previous FF's, but it does lessen the replayability.

Perhaps the worst part of the game is that I doubt I will want to play any part of it again once I've completed it. Since there is nothing that I seem to be able to do to change events, it reads like a book where the author has complete control.

The trade of for this is that the story is excellent. I'm captivated and interested in what is going to happen to the characters in a way that I seldom find in recent games. Sure Bioshock 2 is a good game, but I don't really care about Lamb or the little sisters. But FF13's story makes me want to get back to it, right now even, like a good book so I can find out what happens next.

But unless you like rereading books, you probably won't want to replay FF13.

So, its a very good Final Fantasy, but a Final Fantasy it truly is.

1st Post

This blog is going to be a place where I talk about the games that I've been playing. Maybe, a little about myself is in order:

I've been playing games since the Atari 2600. I remember that some of the games were too complicated for my young and yet unrefined skills. In particular, I could never figure out how to play Ghostbusters, with that orange and blocky stay puff marshmallow man moving through the streets.

From there I moved on to a NES, then a Genesis. Sadly, I missed the whole Super Nintendo thing in my own room, but ample friends allowed me to witness its majesty. There was some time spent with a 3DO, the doomed Sega CD, N64, and every other Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo system .

Throughout my gaming adventures I developed an appreciation for the idea of the interactive narrative. Interactive in the way that the player influences the events and occasionally the plot of the world in which they are immersed in. To me, this idea meant that there was freedom to do things that one could not in the real world, be them brave, dangerous, socially inapposite or any other way that you could dream up. Most of these games did little more that allow me to hone some obscure skill in thumb dexterity, but a few, a wonderful select few, were able to move me and I believe move other gamers in the same way.

Some of these games, like Metal Gear Solid, were able to move me through the story. Through interacting with this game I became more attached to the characters in it than I would with the characters from a book or a movie. Other games presented me with new ways to think and interact thought a multiplayer experience, General Chaos was an early example of this while Left for Dead is perhaps the most prominent in my recent past.

Enough history, the point is that I consider games and interactive media to be incredibly interesting and a media that has yet to understand its full potential. This blog will be my place to put my thoughts on the industry developments in this area. Most of the time I imagine that these thoughts will look like game reviews. So, pull up a chair and read stuff.