PSP

Prinny 2: Dawn of Operation Panties, Dood!

January 10, 2011

PSP / Reviews / by Mike Clark Make a comment! / Tweet it!

A high-fatality action-platformer where you play as a demon penguin with peg legs charged with recovering the stolen panties of your succubus master? Prinny 2 delivers quite the wacky premise and seems to promise a fun time. Actually playing it, though, falls short of expectations. 

Challenging platformers like Super Meat Boy, N+, VVVVVV and The Deep Cave share a common quality that Prinny 2 lacks: good jumping mechanics. It’s practically expected that when you go into one of these games, you have tight jumps that both work and feel right. You’re given great tools to try and beat the game with, so it comes down to player experience and skill.

Prinny 2‘s jumping mechanics instead work much like Ghosts ‘n Goblins and the NES entries of the Castlevania series: you can’t move in mid-air. If you jump while holding right, you’re stuck going right. Make a slight error? You’re dead, or at least taking damage. This frustrating mechanic is somewhat alleviated by the player having a thousand total lives for the course of the game, but only seems to bandage the situation instead of remedying it.

The jumping mechanics were the only real negative thing I could find about Prinny 2, though. Each of the stages are very detailed and look great, with the time-of-day system giving a ton of variety to each of them. The music is incredible, and alongside that is superb voice acting. It set my expectations high with what it advertised, but only met them partway.

Prinny 2 is a great game in every area except the most fundamental of gameplay mechanics. That jumping style can make or break the player having a good time, and I spent too much time being frustrated at missing jumps that could have been made in many other platformers. While everything else about it is easy to digest, that core mechanic is a very bitter pill to swallow.

 

NeoGeo Heroes: Ultimate Shooting

January 6, 2011

PSP / Reviews / by Mike Clark Make a comment! / Tweet it!

For years I’ve been at odds with bullet-hell games. The high-tension twitch-based gameplay entices me, yet with every new game I’ve picked up I’ve been let down. What I’ve been looking for is for fullfilling gameplay where the focus is to beat the game, much like the Gradius and R-Type games. Instead, I’ve found short experiences where the goal is to memorize the stages and get high rankings. NeoGeo Heroes: Ultimate Shooting ends this disappointment. 

The second bullet-hell, (or “danmaku”) game released by SNK Playmore recently, Ultimate Shooting sets a lofty perception of itself with that name. Yet in contrast to most of this genre’s games, which only have a single set of stages in one mode to play, this game has a ton of variety. Instead of one character or ship, how about ten with a large variety in attack types? And instead of one linear path of stages to just replay constantly, how about 15 total stages for the main Story mode with 5 end-bosses and endings for each character? That’s 50 potential playthroughs filled with variety and that’s just the Story mode.

There’s also the Challenge Mode, where the player can do a survival-based boss rush, or Subject Mode, where the player is tasked with achieving certain objectives during the course of gameplay. Thought just surviving a stage was bad? Now try to beat it while not dying, collecting 30 of the best score-raising items in a row and staying in the top two-thirds of the screen!

In addition to the main game, the arcade version of KoF Skystage is also packed into the game. Two games for the price of one, both with a large cast of characters who come from fighting games and bring all of their special attacks and taunts with them. A variety of gameplay modes, a large Museum to fill out with unlockables, and full control over the game’s options right down to changing the display size and style on your PSP. Is holding it normally making the screen too small? Shift it sideways and play on a larger screen with all the controls appropriately remapped to the d-pad and analog stick.

NeoGeo Heroes: Ultimate Shooting has finally provided to me what I’ve been looking for in a bullet-hell shooter: tons of characters, variety, play modes, and unlockables all wrapped up into a gorgeous package.

 

A Space Shooter for 2 Bucks!

January 6, 2011

PSP / Reviews / by Lillian Harle Make a comment! / Tweet it!

If there’s one genre that’s solely lacking on the Minis market for the PlayStation Network, it’s shoot-em-up games. A Space Shooter for Two Bucks‘ description touts it’s “the best deal EVER” given that it’s price is in its title. Does it live up to its claims of being the best?

From the get-go, the game is tongue-in-cheek with its difficulty levels and introduction – an introduction that is thoroughly unneeded with a younger version of your protagonist terrorizing a random nameless nerd. The humor continues throughout the game, with the main character badmouthing every Alien General (the main bosses of the game), his navigation system (an old butler), and his constant hitting on the shopkeep (whose voice doesn’t come close to sounding like it belongs to the wrinkly chain-smoker on screen). 

But people don’t play shooters for the plot. The game is a very competent vertical shooter with various enemy ships that all have set designs and attack patterns, making learning how to avoid certain attacks very streamlined. As the game goes on, the screen becomes more crowded, especially as you gain power-ups. After defeating each of the five Alien Generals, you gain their special attack (a la Mega Man); beating each of the non-boss stages raises the health of your ship. A checkpoint system is in place in every stage, though in the later stages, they don’t occur as often as you would like.

With sixteen stages, the game lasts from three to five hours, depending on your skill level. There are also a multitude of upgrades to buy as well – most of them are actually required to effectively deal with certain stages, which requires you to actually do some stages multiple times so you can grind for money, given the relatively high cost of a good number of the later upgrades.

On the whole, the game can be fun, but it suffers from a couple of design oversights that make it a chore to play. The learning curve isn’t too steep, however, so as you are able to get upgrades, the game does get markedly easier. There are, of course, much better shooters out there, but for two dollars, this is certainly a decent investment. 

 

Knights in the Nightmare

November 24, 2010

PSP / Reviews / by Mike Clark Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Everything about Knights in the Nightmare seems to deviate from the normal conventions of strategy RPGs. For starters, the genre of “strategy RPG” cannot begin to cover it. “Bullet-hell-meets-real-time-strategy-meets-RPG” starts to get there. To fully describe the game’s mechanics could take as long as going through the large amount of tutorials it has, but this necessarily is not a bad thing. Once you get over the learning curve, the game picks up and becomes much faster and streamlined.

You play as the Wisp, an amnesiac lost soul who can raise the scores of dead knights in the game’s kingdom to fight for you. Each map is grid-based, like a classic strategy RPG such as Disgaea. The enemies you fight move around randomly on these maps while you position your own recruited knights. Only two of the seven classes actually move, thus making the bulk of them stationary. Each of these characters you recruit can be leveled up, the weapons they use can be fused and upgraded, and strength is stat-based.

The execution plays more like a real-time strategy game though. Each turn of battle has two steps: set up, then go into action. As you set up and execute attacks in real time, enemies will also attack in real time. The difference is that the player activates their knights to hit enemies, while the enemies spam bullet-based attacks a’la Ikaruga to hit the player and deplete your available time. A turn ends when you run out of time, and if you cannot achieve your objective in a certain number of turns you lose the battle.

All of this barely scratches the surface of the complexity of the game. It does take a bit to get through the tutorials and learn how everything works, but once you get the fundamentals down, the game becomes streamlined and like a second nature. In other words, it’s an acquired taste.

Controls have been updated since the DS original, removing the dual screen and touch support in favor of a more streamlined user interface with several touch screen functions mapped to various buttons for the better. In the prior version, you could accidentally activate knights at times while trying to shift from the Law phase to the Chaos phase, and while in the PSP version a button press does this for you. Another change for the better is the actual movement of the Wisp. Whereas in the DS version you’d move with the touch screen and stylus, precision has been added with the use of the analog stick on the PSP.

On top of all of this, Knights in the Nightmare presents detailed visuals, including great character sprites, an excellent audio presentation, and an incredible amount of replayability with major differences for your second and third playthroughs.  

Overall, Knights in the Nightmare takes a bit to get used to, but ends up shining as an incredible deviation from its core genre’s norm. Learning the game takes a while and might deter a player at first, but if you persevere you’ll be rewarded.

Pros: Wildly original take on the genre, plot leaves you asking for more

Cons: Lengthy tutorials can be a major deterrent, recruitable characters don’t have much depth

 

Ys: The Oath in Felghana

November 16, 2010

PSP / Reviews / by Mike Clark Make a comment! / Tweet it!

In 1989 the world was introduced to the third installment of the Ys series with Ys III: Wanderers from Ys. In 2005, Nihon Falcom Corporation took Ys III and did a complete overhaul on the game, remaking it and updating the features within. Move to 2010 and add even more to the game and you have Ys: The Oath in Felghana.

Series hero Adol Christin and his companion Dogi return to Dogi’s homeland to find trouble afoot, which leads into an upgraded retelling of the Ys III tale. From beginning to end the player is taken for the ride through this adventure with very streamlined action-RPG gameplay contained within. 

Unlike other action-RPGs – such as Kingdom Hearts – Ys: The Oath is more streamlined with a heavier emphasis on the action and platforming aspects. Item management isn’t as strong in contrast with other games and feels more fluid as a result. Traditional RPG consumables aren’t even purchased but rather found and instantly used upon killing enemies. This, together with its simplicity, creates gameplay that is easy to pick up and that has a fast-paced intensity to it that other action RPGs seem to have only sporadically.

Adol only gains two kinds of attacks: Either mashing X to physically attack with his sword, or using magic from one of three elemental armlets he acquires over the course of the game. Not only does the auto-regenerating magic help in combat but they also function in the platforming and dungeon exploration: fire can hit switches, wind helps you cross large gaps, and earth can break through fragile walls a’la bombs in Legend of Zelda games.

The boss fights feel straight out of an action platformer and are relatively difficult. There are infinite retries, and after a certain number of deaths the game will ask you if you want to lower the difficulty but these battles are about learning boss patterns and adapting to them. On Normal or higher, you’re almost expected to die unless you have prior experience or knowledge.

Visually, the game looks great. It moves with fluidity, the backgrounds and dungeons are detailed nicely, and despite crunching a PC-sized game into a PSP screen, it still looks and moves well. In fact, the only visual thing that was slightly problematic to me at first were how tiny the enemy item drops were. But after getting used to the flow of combat and making item acquisition into a subconscious habit, it ceased to be a problem.

In concurrence with the visual, the audio is just as good if not better. The player has access to two different soundtracks from the Ys III releases and a remixed standard soundtrack made for the remake. The standard soundtrack alone was great and it went well with the action the game provided. The voice acting was also very well done with only a few characters being annoying to listen to. Luckily for those who don’t care for english VA, there are options to change or remove the VA.

Ys: The Oath in Felghana is excellent and a shining example of what a proper remake should be like. However, the difficulty can be a little off-putting to the average player and could serve as a deterrent. Beyond that it shines as both a great remake and a tough challenge with loads of replayability. With six total difficulties to choose from, alongside a time attack and new game plus features, there’s always more challenge to players who hunger for it.

Pros: Visually beautiful, great music, fast streamlined action gameplay with RPG features, tons of replay potential.

Cons: Some graphics seem a bit too small at times, the game’s bosses are rather challenging.

 

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