Number Two!

Pokémon SoulSilver
Released in 2010, Original release titled Pokémon Silver for Game Boy Colour in 2000

The series that absolutely dominated playgrounds and the handheld gaming scene through the turn of the millennium.

I mentioned a few posts back that I was always a social gamer from a young age. Well, as for a lot of kids in the late 90s, the Pokémon games taught me to game socially too. The Pokémon titles are a series of RPGs (Role-Playing Games) aimed for children, wherein the point is to catch every critter and become the ultimate Pokémon master. In the first two of the franchise, Red and Blue (Green was a Japan-only release), players were challenged to defeat eight “type”-specific gym leaders throughout their adventure, culminating in the confrontation of the Elite Four and your rival for the title of Pokémon League Champion. The game didn’t end there though – the real challenge came after the main adventure, where you had 151 pocket monsters to find and capture.

I mentioned earlier the phrase “game socially”. The next hook in the series is that it is impossible to catch every Pokémon in a single game version because each variation omits the ability to find every creature alone. In order to own all 151 you had to meet up with a friend and trade via link cable. This method was fine for the era, however looking back on it people would agree that this was quite arduous. Thankfully over the last decade technology evolved, and now we can connect our gaming devices wirelessly over a local connection or a global one. The games themselves also evolved; from a now-seemingly humble 151 different monsters to catch originally, we’re currently at a whopping 493 – and the roster will soon expand upon the release of versions Black and White next year.

However, of every version out to date, to me the best was SoulSilver for DS released in Australia on March 25th this year. As you could already assume it is a remake of the original Silver version (alongside HeartGold of the Gold version) of 2000, though the game is less of a rehashing and more of a vast improvement. Aside from the updated graphics the game has a completely refined user-interface over the generation before it (Pearl/Diamond/Platinum), an updated Pokédex to account for all 493 creatures, the brand new Safari Zone (located west of Cianwood City), Pokéathlon and more. One stand-out feature though is the Pokéwalker – a pedometre to clip onto your clothes that allows you to capture more Pokémon, find items and gain experience points just by walking in real life. The gadget communicates to the game cartridge via infrared located at the top of each device to exchange the earned data. The Pokéwalker acts much like a Tamagotchi, except you don’t feed your pets and they are unable to die.

HeartGold and SoulSilver also have the ability to let the Pokémon at the top of your party to follow you on foot, a feature only before seen in Pokémon Yellow over ten years ago.

The Silver and Gold generation of Pokémon games were the  most influential of the entire series due to additions like the item-hold mechanic in which Pokémon can hold equipment such as health items to automatically heal during battles and items that boost their stats, a real-time in-game clock system for night and day to adjust accordingly for certain Pokémon encounters and the Pokégear. With the Pokégear players were able to receive phone calls from encountered trainers, listen to the in-game radio stations for contests, music and information on routes for which Pokémon are herding in, and consult a map of the region. The biggest additions however were the expansion of the Pokédex from 151 monsters to 251 and the ability to venture from Johto (the region you start the game in) to Kanto (the region from the first generation of Pokémon games) upon defeating the Elite Four. Essentially this meant the main adventure was twice as big since you go from having to fight eight gym leaders to sixteen, and that you were able catch critters indigenous to each region.

This game was huge – Johto is on the left, Kanto is on the right separated by Victory Road in the middle.

SO, why is it my second favourite game of all time? Well, there’s two reasons – the first is the amount of additions to the mechanics of the game and the scope of it. It wasn’t only an improvement over Red and Blue, but it helped redefine the genre. It was the second game to completely engulf me in its world; when I wasn’t playing it, I was thinking about it. I even used to write notes to myself of which Pokémon were cross-bed from others and how to attain certain evolutions such as the whole Espeon/Umbreon thing. Also, it was the very first game to make me have a “holy crap” moment upon realising the adventure was only half-way through after beating the Elite Four. The second reason is that Lugia (featured on the game cover) is my favourite Pokémon.

A recount of the first half of 2010 – March and April

March: Plants vs Zombies, Beat it!, Pokémon: Soul Silver.

This month was mostly spent playing portable games. Plants vs Zombies is yet another great game from developer PopCap Games (the same folks who made Peggle). I bought the iPhone version since I don’t really play PC games anymore, and it’s just so much fun. The idea is simple; protect your home with defensive plants to fend of waves of zombies. It’s another simplistic tower defense game, but the humour and surprisingly vast amount of defensive options are enough to make this game feel completely fresh. It’s also surprisingly long, making the $3.99AU charge well worth the price.

Beat It! by Glu is an absolutely fantastic new take on music/rhythm games, and is my personal favourite in the genre thus far. It features the two things I love about video game music culture – 8-bit art and electronic tunes. The point of the game is completely different to most music games; instead of pushing buttons in time with some sort of on-screen representation to allow the song to progress, you listen to the tune and try to transcribe an exact copy including all of its instrumentation. Having studied music in school and university, I can tell you that this is a thousand times more preferable than sitting in an aural class (which I hated, by the way). If it’s not enough to just play through the game’s single-player mode, you can opt to write your own tracks using the in-game editor. And if that’s not enough, you can share your beats with or download new ones from others through Facebook via share mode. The game is equipped with a great amount of content plus a community to strengthen its replayability. The app was worth the price when I bought it for $4.99AU, but now it’s available for a mere $1.19. If you’re a musician and/or you love music games in general, do yourself a great favour and nab this one.

Then there was Pokémon: Soul Silver. Everyone knows when the next installments of the Pokémon universe get released, everyone pays attention. Pokémon Silver from 2000 was my most favourite in the franchise, since it introduced me to my favourite Pokémon Totodile and Lugia (fun fact: I named one of my cats Lugia), however this is not the only reason. I remember my mind being absolutely blown upon collecting all eight Johto gym badges, and then being sent back to freakin’ Kanto to collect the original eight badges again with an entirely new storyline! For those who for some reason never played a Pokémon game before, this was huge considering in Red/Blue/Yellow the journey was long enough to sustain about thirty to thirty-five hours of just completing one region. I’d been anticipating SS since buying Pearl back in Christmas of ‘07 when I was getting back into the Pocket Monster universe, and this re-make definitely does not disappoint. If I was to list every new feature of Soul Silver this blog entry would last forever, so if you do want to know I suggest running a Google search for a real review and have a good read. However, I will talk about the inclusion of the Pokéwalker, which is basically a Pokémon pedometre. You can upload a captured monster to the device via infrared on the top of the game cartridge to level it up by walking/exercising. I love this feature since I used to walk to the train station everyday (a good 1.5 kilometres), and not only does it help to gain experience but you can also find items and catch more critters. As I mentioned earlier, Silver was my favourite entry in the Pokémon franchise; but Soul Silver easily takes the cake now.

 

April: Final Fantasy XIII, Heavy Rain, God of War Collection.

Okay, so let me start this off by saying that even though I have begun, but never finished, many Final Fantasy games before I still had a lot of respect for the franchise and for Square Enix. That’s right – had. Final Fantasy XIII is one of the most boring and ridiculously repetitive games I have ever played. I don’t care what any FF loyalist says – to play through twenty to twenty-five hours of absolute linear garbage just to get the “good bit” where the world finally opens up is just plain ludicrous. The reason why I’d never managed to complete a previous game was because I eventually no longer found myself engaged in the story/characters/gameplay after perhaps 80% of the journey. In FFIV I gave up because I took a break for a few weeks and found myself no longer connected to what’s happened; in FFVII I hadn’t leveled up my party quite enough to defeat a boss (don’t remember which one anymore); and in FFX I actually reached the final boss Sin, but by this point was completely drained of effort to even bother trying to finish. And despite all this I was still fond of the experiences and stories of all of these games for some reason. Perhaps the gamer inside of me just wanted to like these games because everyone else did. I don’t know where I’m going with all of this, so I’ll bring it back to the case in point – FFXIII had me bored since the first hour of gameplay, and I’ve managed to pull myself through nineteen hours into the excruciatingly dull and non-sensical adventure (just finished attaining Sazh’s Eidolon). Also, for those of you who might flame me for calling it non-sensical, here’s a short list of things that have not made any sense to me so far, with me filling in some blanks using the power of assumption:

- Why is Lightning such a bitch? [‘coz she was born a bitch]
- Why is Hope such a pussy? [‘coz his Dad is rich]
- Who the hell is Snow? [some douchey surfy guy in a trench coat who leads some resistance against some faction for some reason]
- Who the hell is Sazh? [a black guy with two guns. He also lets a bird live in his afro]
- Who the hell is Fang? [some chick with an Aussie accent]
- Who the hell is Vanille? [jailbait with an Aussie accent]

These are things that should have been cleared up within an hour or two of introducing each character. If there’s supposed to be some sort of plot-twist in relation to the backgrounds of each character that’s fine, but I would at least like to know their agendas for either their personality or role in the game, and why the hell I should even care about them for that matter. Also, battles have been re-designed to control badly. An RPG should utilise a fair amount of strategy to overcome your opponents – this game hardly does that. I can tell you now this’ll probably be my final Fantasy hurrrrr.

On a total up-swing on the topic of character development, understanding, caring and interaction, Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain is a great thriller based around emotional engagement and intense action. What surprised me the most about this title is the use of quicktime events felt incredibly fluid and natural. Having followed this game for quite a while leading up to its release and watching various videos of gameplay, merely observing the action packed moments are enough to make you feel almost intimidated to play it due to the quicktime controls. However if you played this game for perhaps just an hour you no longer find yourself even thinking about having to push and hold a combination of buttons – you find yourself just doing it instinctively. Also the amount of choices, mistakes and possibilities of killing off certain characters is quite daunting considering the impact it has on the story and endings you’ll create. One of my complaints about the game is that controlling your characters’ movements make you feel like a tank almost like the Resident Evil games. Though unlike the RE games you’re not forced to run-away from hordes of undead so the movements can be overlooked. This game was great while it lasted.

Lastly this brings us to the God of War Collection. The collection consists of the first two GoW titles for the PS2 with the inclusion of trophies (up to a Platinum for each game) and high definition up-scaling. Despite having some of those “ugh” moments that most action-adventure titles (I’m talking more about the puzzles and the spiked spinning columns in Hades in GoW 1) the game makes up for it in gorgeously vast locales that still look great even by today’s standards. Also even though the combat is quite shallow (face it, it’s mostly just button-mashing) it’s still satisfying taking down the larger foes like Minotaurs, Cyclopes and Medusa demons. And then there’s boss-battles… Good God (no pun intended). These fights are incredibly epic, especially the moments you engage in quicktime events to ultimately smite them. I personally found the storylines to be well thought-out and entertaining, however the same can’t be said about the protagonist Kratos. Sure he’s been ultimately betrayed by the Gods of Olympus and sure he’s seeking revenge against them, but after all he is human. There just isn’t enough to show it. Though with a game that’s all about kicking ass and doing it in epic fashion, the fact Kratos sounds like a disgruntled case of testosterone (oh wait…) is a small downer compared to an ultimately fun series of games.

 

Next update: May, June and my thoughts on E3.