Video game stuff
Sep. 21st, 2008 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amethyst73• The huz has beaten Okami! He liked it. There were some kind of painful platforming-style chunks in the last quarter or so of the game which I'm not looking forward to, but hey. I beat Blight last weekend - he whacks hard! But now the city is safe and happy and I can wander around and explore and stuff. And I have nice toys that I bought with my Demon Fangs.
• We're now working on the last level of Zack & Wiki. I'm afraid to say that our feelings about the game have been very mixed, especially in the last third or so. Levels are more difficult than earlier (which you would expect), but unfortunately that's almost exclusively through what we both think of as cheap tricks: the solution to one puzzle lies with an element that you can't even see on screen at the time that you're supposed to manipulate it; a number of levels have Instant Death as the punishment for failing to solve each successive part of it; in one of the cases of the latter, the solution lies in (1) being very observant during one particular split second, while (2) it's difficult to see all the bits that are important for you to see! Another level makes you die at the very tag end of it if you don't do the right thing at the right time; this forces you to replay the entire level, which is really pretty tedious. We both would have preferred that the difficulty be ramped up in a different way than these. Don't get me wrong - a lot of the levels are really neat and well-done. But there's enough levels that have Stupid/Unfair aspects to them that we have to disagree with IGN's rating. We're not done, but I'd be hesitant to give this game more than about a 7.
• Having finished Okami, the huz has gone back to Super Mario Galaxy. The later levels appear to be really quite difficult, both in terms of the precision of execution the player has to have, and the camera angle goes bad a frighteningly large portion of the time. In the final level, which he's currently working on, when you die during a particularly long evil-platforming segment you're not regenerated somewhere along it as you usually are in other levels: you have to go back to the beginning of the segment. I have no idea how near he is to the undoubtedly nasty final Bowser fight. I find the apparent level of frustration in Galaxy more than a little off-putting; I have few enough game-playing hours that I want to generally have a *fun* level of challenge, not be stressed and upset by it.
And I has mild cold. Ech. Hopefully will be better soon.
• We're now working on the last level of Zack & Wiki. I'm afraid to say that our feelings about the game have been very mixed, especially in the last third or so. Levels are more difficult than earlier (which you would expect), but unfortunately that's almost exclusively through what we both think of as cheap tricks: the solution to one puzzle lies with an element that you can't even see on screen at the time that you're supposed to manipulate it; a number of levels have Instant Death as the punishment for failing to solve each successive part of it; in one of the cases of the latter, the solution lies in (1) being very observant during one particular split second, while (2) it's difficult to see all the bits that are important for you to see! Another level makes you die at the very tag end of it if you don't do the right thing at the right time; this forces you to replay the entire level, which is really pretty tedious. We both would have preferred that the difficulty be ramped up in a different way than these. Don't get me wrong - a lot of the levels are really neat and well-done. But there's enough levels that have Stupid/Unfair aspects to them that we have to disagree with IGN's rating. We're not done, but I'd be hesitant to give this game more than about a 7.
• Having finished Okami, the huz has gone back to Super Mario Galaxy. The later levels appear to be really quite difficult, both in terms of the precision of execution the player has to have, and the camera angle goes bad a frighteningly large portion of the time. In the final level, which he's currently working on, when you die during a particularly long evil-platforming segment you're not regenerated somewhere along it as you usually are in other levels: you have to go back to the beginning of the segment. I have no idea how near he is to the undoubtedly nasty final Bowser fight. I find the apparent level of frustration in Galaxy more than a little off-putting; I have few enough game-playing hours that I want to generally have a *fun* level of challenge, not be stressed and upset by it.
And I has mild cold. Ech. Hopefully will be better soon.
