Mario Kart war journal, entry the first

Friday, November 25, 2005 »

120318 579651

I've now been able to play Mario Kart DS online for about a week, and for the most part it's been fantastic fun. Nintendo's Wi-fi Connection is fast and painless to set up and it's usually pretty easy to find a game. I did have a little more success finding 4-player matchups and connecting to friends with my old router that died last week, but I'm hoping my current connection issues are just due to some switch in the router setup that hasn't yet been thrown. I've been looking at different forums and many people are having similar issues, but so far there aren't any definitive solutions.

The races themselves have been pretty intense. With four players competing and shooting items around, the outcome is really up in the air until the last seconds of the final race. Many times I've passed the guy in 1st right before crossing the finish, or have gotten hit with a red shell just feet away from the line. But that's Mario Kart for you.

There are only a couple problems I've encountered playing people online. The first is the people who disconnect during a race rather than have a loss added to their score. This is especially prevalent in 1-on-1 races. Although it would potentially harm people with unreliable connections (like me), I would rather Nintendo have counted each disconnect (and maybe only those occurring after the first race) as an automatic loss and added some kind of forfeit option for people who don't want to finish the game. There are always situations where someone is so behind point-wise that there's no hope of them winning. If they chose the forfeit option instead, maybe it could just add to a separate forfeit tally and the leading racers could still get their points. It'll be interesting to see how future Nintendo Wi-fi games handle disconnectors.

The other problem is snaking, which is either an advanced racing technique or a cheap exploit. A player who snakes constantly powerslides to get the mini-turbos, especially on straightaways. I tried this in a time trial match and, while it does require some practice and concentration to use effectively, if someone decides to use it online it basically turns the match into a snaking competition. And that means whoever didn't pick the one or two carts with powerful mini-turbos is out of luck. What's even more obnoxious is that the snaker I ran into online constantly voted for the Figure-8 Circuit because of its wide, lengthy straightaways. I'd like to be able to pick whatever kart I feel like using and have an interesting race and not worry that the match is going to be decided by who's spent more time swerving back and forth.

Of course, I did mention that I've played against a lot of excellent racers who stayed on through the final track. Are a couple lists of people I played (whose names I managed to remember or note down).

The honorable competition
BiG BeNz
David
jamie
jocean
nal0083
Nathan
Nico
P-stic
SPIKE
strater (spelled with button icons and katakana)
waKak
zeta

These people disconnect when they start to lose
flash_fox
Johnyc
Jonny 5
MACHIBA
Mattomonex
MetalSlugX
Oliveros
OniZer0

This guy snakes and only wants to play Figure-8 Circuit
SSBM Lord

Final Fantasy XII demo impressions

Thursday, November 17, 2005 »

I just finished the sadistically short Final Fantasy XII that came with my DQ8. After reading so many previews for the game that describe its revamped battle system as being completely different and (shock!) MMORPG-like, I was a little hesitant to start it up. I desperately want this game to be good, as it's being handled by the same team as for my two favorite PS1 games, Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics. Normally I'd have the utmost confidence in them, but the news of the goofy battle system had me concerned. Thankfully, the demo has put all those fears to rest.

First of all, I learned to no longer be afraid of the battle system. While it was intimidating at first, in practice it's not actually too far removed from the Active Time Battle system of previous Final Fantasies. Some early previews made it sound like you controlled only one character with the other two in your party relegated to autopilot mode, but you can actually step in at any time and give commands to them, which they execute as soon as their ATB meter fills. (Sort of the reverse of how things happened under ATB, actually.) The demo makes it clear that in the full version each character's "gambits," or autopilot instructions, will be customizeable. In that way, FF12's battle system is sort of a streamlined ATB. It's very similar to the system in Knights of the Old Republic, although the interface uses the FF menu style, which I much prefer.1 It seems like, once the player gets used to the new system and sets up appropriate gambits, battles will proceed pretty smoothly and at a brisk pace, with the opportunity to pause and insert a cure or blizzaga spell here and there. For the more adventurous type, there's always the active mode, where, as you would expect, monsters keep attacking you as you page through menus to give commands. One advantage of using gambits is that, in active mode, your other two characters will continue to attack as well. I have to admit that when the demo was in active mode it was a lot more frantic and stressful, but maybe I'll get used to it after a few hours' experience. (I did get the hang of Final Fantasy X-2's lightning-speed battles, after all.)

So, what else about the demo? It probably goes without saying, but the visuals are incredible. I expected nothing less (it's a Square game, after all), but FF12 is a quantum leap past FFX (1 and 2). The environments are gorgeous (especially the brightly-lit beach), the characters are detailed and animate fluidly, and the spell animations are presumably jaw-dropping. (I forgot to watch spells going on during battle, but the esper2 I used paused the action to do a typically-elaborate attack animation, and it was unbelievable. I can only assume the regular spells are just as shiny and impressive, if on a smaller scale.)

Lastly, Hitoshi Sakimoto's rich, orchestral score didn't disappoint. The pounding theme played on the beach seemed a little out of place given that I spent a lot of the time ruining the mandragoras' afternoon, but I overlooked that easily. The boss theme was more suitably epic, and I can't wait to hear more. I expect the final game's music to put the previous series' soundtracks to shame, but I'm also completely biased.

There were only three things that were noticeably absent in the demo:

1. Any idea of the game's major gameplay system (e.g. the sphere grid), but usually stuff like that doesn't show up in a demo, anyway.
2. A release date, as in month and day. They had the year3 covered, though.
3. The sadly-underhyped rocket recliner.

1 Also, nobody had any Force Lightning abilities to make the other two party members completely irrelevant.
2 E S P E R S  A R E  B A C K
3 2006 seems like a long way away.

Dragon Qarrior VII

Monday, November 14, 2005 »

About a month ago I set off to beat 2001's Dragon Warrior VII before the sequel's release. Well, this weekend I finally did it, just in time to pick up Dragon Quest VIII tomorrow. It was a lengthy ordeal, although it turned out that the much-hyped promise of "100 hours of gameplay" was a bit of an exaggeration. Dragon Warrior VII is not really a 100-hour game.

It's more of a 92-hour game. And that's without even doing the sidequests—the town-building, the monster-catching, the class-mastering, etc. Sure, I spent a few extra hours in the casino and in the field learning new class abilities, but, other than that, most of those 92 hours were just me making my way through the main story. There were a few times—probably in the 40-60-hour range—when I actually felt exhausted. I felt like I had called the game's 100-hour bluff, not knowing that it actually was holding a royal flush. (Or a 5 Slime, in this case.) Somehow, though, I kept at it.

I think it's probably because the game is just fun. It feels like playing an old, 16-bit RPG, before they all turned into lengthy, 3D opuses with gratuitous spell animations and sinister, conspiring religions. Sure, some shiny graphics would have been an improvement over DW7's horribly-scaled 2D sprites and chunky 3D environments, but (and this is going to sound so clichéd) the gameplay is the real star here, as has always been the case with this series. The battles are as strategic as ever, and the class system has been given a great overhaul since the last time I saw it in Dragon Warrior III. There's a lot more of an incentive to switch classes, plus there's no longer a level penalty for doing so. The game's island format dampens the sense of exploration that I enjoyed in the previous titles, but all the dungeons and towers and shrines fanes are pure Dragon Warrior.

And then there are the puzzles! The first dungeon alone had more puzzles (albeit simple ones) than all the RPGs I've played since Vagrant Story. (I refuse to acknowledge Final Fantasy X's inane Cloisters of Trials.) The frequency dropped off steeply after that, but they didn't disappear completely. At the end of the game there was even a puzzle in the form of the dungeon itself, which began roughly as a 3D cube you could walk over all of the faces before expanding into more complicated shapes, some regions of which could only be accessed by finding the right route across the faces. Pretty clever use of 3D, Enix.

Finally, DW7 has a totally bizarre sense of humor that wasn't in the first three games. When you talk to one of the villages' elder, for instance, he hints that he can't wait for your party of travelers to leave so he can get it on with his nubile young maid, who's dressed up in a pig costume for the village's animal festival. Except then you see the maid later and it turns out she's been out of the costume for hours, and, yeah. It was definitely a defining moment of the post-SNES era.

So while the light-hearted approach to the dialogue is a definite plus in the humor area, the way some of the plot events were handled made me wonder if Dragon Quest would benefit from a more dramatic approach. Pretty late in the game there's a town where the last few generations have been covering up a terrible wrongdoing committed by their ancestors. When you bring evidence of the incident to the mayor, he comically destroys it with a couple of cheesy axe-chop animations and a really 8-bit sound effect. Surely they could have taken the entire village sequence—especially that one scene—and directed it differently to bring out the drama without turning it into some overwrought melodrama. Final Fantasy VI (and even FF4) had plenty of dramatic moments, even though everyone was just sprites.

Then again, maybe the general silliness is one of the essential elements of Dragon Quest that give it its character. I wonder which direction the series will head in with its latest, fully 3D and voice-acted installment. (Actually, I already have an idea because I tried the demo, but I'll wait a while before passing judgment. I'd say at least 50 or 60 hours.)