NiGHTS disappoints
Sat 19 Jan 08 20:19 | Tags: Games, Reviews
Way back in April of last year, soon after it was finally confirmed that Sega was making a sequel to its oft-overlooked Saturn classic NiGHTS, I broke out my old Saturn, found a NiGHTS demo disc I had laying around (I had sold the full copy of the game I had owned earlier, regrettably), connected it to my video capture doohickey (my own Pepito, and recorded some footage to put on this blog. That entry became what is likely the most read RGR entry ever, thanks to some link love from Opposable Thumbs. As a fan of the original game, I was looking forward to the sequel, but at the same time apprehensive that the game wouldn't match my nostalgia-influeced expectations.
Well, that sequel, NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams has now been out for a month, and I personally have had it for about two weeks, though I haven't been playing it every day. The verdict? Unfortunately, I was right to be apprehensive.
It doesn't seem like it'd be too hard to replicate NiGHTS' success, really; just create a game that plays just like the first one, where you race through the circuitous levels, collecting chips to destroy the Ideya captures (the snowglobe-looking things), then fighting a boss. (If you haven't played it in a while (or ever), it couldn't hurt to watch the video to refresh your mind of the original's astounding gameplay.) And there are a few stages in Journey of Dreams which are like this, and they are the most fun to play. Unfortunately, instead of collecting twenty blue chips to advance in these stages, you now instead are expected to race through and catch up to a flying bird-like enemy, defeating it to collect a key which lets you advance through the next stage. Right there is a basic change for the worse in the gameplay; in the original, exploration through the levels to find caches of chips was encouraged, but in this game exploration is punished as it allows the bird-thing to fly further ahead; the best thing to do is to fly in a straight line as quickly as possible. But it looks and plays close enough to the original, and the boss battles at the end of these levels are so fantastic, that that's a forgivable change.
What kills the game, though, are the levels which deter from the original's gameplay, and those levels make up about three-quarters of the game. Now the original NiGHTS had a few gimmicky parts of levels, such as switching to a top-down view in the forest level or having NiGHTS transform into a sled in the snow level, but they were relatively short segments. Journey of Dreams' other levels, however, take these gimmicky segments and turns them into entire levels. Whether you're riding on NiGHTS as a boat or a roller-coaster, or winding through a city-styled maze restricted to a top-down perspective, or even doing 3D platforming as William and Helen alone without any flying segment at all; these are just no fun and feel like filler in between the retro-styled levels.
The storyline of Journey is pretty much the same as the original. Just substitute basketball-playing Elliot and singing Claris with soccer-playing William and violin-playing Helen. I won't go into it much further than that.
Allow me to go into lazy rant mode for the rest of my gripes with the game.
The game's levels take quite a bit of time to load compared to other A-list Wii games; and much more time than the Saturn version. Let me say that again; loading times for the Wii version of NiGHTS are significantly worse than the Saturn version. Granted, the Saturn game had unusually short loading times for its peers, but I can't particularly tell why the Wii game's loading times must be longer than its peers.
Another new feature debuting in this Wii version for the worse is dialogue. And unskippable cut scenes. Dang it, the first game did just fine without explaining just how Clarus and Elliot can control NiGHTS (they dualize! Oh wow!) or giving NiGHTS a voice like a British nanny. On a related note, there's an uncanny valley thing going on, I think, with the character designs for William and Helen; they look plastic and unappealing. The other non-human characters we often see, namely NiGHTS and a new character named Owl (he's an owl!), are unimpressively modeled and could use a few more polygons thrown their way. (Why are Owl's glasses shiny false-reflective discs instead of actually transparent glass? Even just modeling empty frames would have looked better than that.) The levels and bosses look fairly good, though.
The Wii controls are not the best for this game. The more traditional way to play is to use the "nunchuck's" joystick to steer NiGHTS and use the Wii remote's A button to give NiGHTS a burst of speed. (The pointing or motion detecting capabilities of the Wiimote are not used.) You can also use the Classic Controller or a GCN controller, if you have one. However, the analogue stick on all of these controllers is in an octagonal well instead of being perfectly round. One of NiGHTS' basic moves is to fly him in a circle quickly to collect or kill the things inside that circle; the octagon makes it quite difficult to do this smoothly, as well as rather noisy -- clickclickclickclickclickclick! In contrast, the Saturn's analogue controller's joystick had a perfectly circular well which made it easy peasy to throw NiGHTS for a loop. An alternative control mode uses just the Wiimote to point a circle on the screen that NiGHTS will fly torwards, but this control scheme is just so far different from the original gameplay that I tried it for about ten seconds and promptly went back to the Wiimote/nunchuck combo style.
The game has a bleak and boring overworld between levels. Overworlds can be cool; this one is lame and just another interruption to the action.
So, all that aside… NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams is not really a bad game. I mean, it's very playable. It's just tragic that it falls so short of the original's glory because it far too much tries to do new things instead of sticking to the finely-tuned simplicity of the original. I will probably keep playing it until I beat it, but then it will be on the short list of games to trade in at GameStop. If you're a NiGHTS fan, maybe give it a rent, but otherwise save your money and hope that Sega decides to release its PS2 remake of the original NiGHTS outside of Japan.
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On a RoadTrip with my iPod
Mon 3 Sep 07 13:58 | Tags: Hardware, Reviews, iPod
My adventures with car transmitters for my iPod continue.
Recently I stumbled upon a great deal at Overstock.com - they're selling the Griffin RoadTrip transmitters for only $20. Granted, they're refurbished, but for less than a quarter of Griffin's original price, I decided to take my chances on used goods. (If you're not as brave, you can get it from Amazon for only $43.34.)
I think I got a pretty good deal. The sound quality of the RoadTrip is pretty good. It's been too long since I've used the NewerTech TRAFFICJamz to do a fair sound comparison, but I had no complaints sound-wise.
The RoadTrip is hangin' out. This photo shows it with all three arm segments connected; for regular use, I just use two of them.
The hardware of the device itself, however, is another issue. The TRAFFICJamz was a small stick-like module which plugged into the car power adapter socket (known in less PC times as the cigarette lighter) and had a cable a few feet long coming out the end with an iPod connector at the end. The RoadTrip, however, is like an iPod caddy with a bendable segmented arm on the back, with the power adapter at the end of the arm. The device comes unassembled, so you actually have to connect the arm segments together. You have the option of using just two arm segments, or putting a third segment between the two for added length and bending angle-age. All this means that the RoadTrip is significantly larger, heavier and more complicated than the TRAFFICJamz.
This is a bit of a serious concern. While parked, I would often stow the TRAFFICJamz in my glove compartment in order to hide the easily-stealable expensive electronics products from sight; with the RoadTrip, I have to cram it under my seat. More serious, though, is that the awkward weight and length of the RoadTrip means that it's prone to wiggling loose from the power socket when driving on not-so-smooth roads or over train tracks. This means I have to pull over and readjust the RoadTrip in my car's cheap-ish power socket, which leads to much cursing and frustration.
The larger screen and controls on the RoadTrip compared to the TRAFFICJamz are appreciated, though I find it strange that I have to manually push a button every time I start my car in order to make the RoadTrip start transmitting. The TRAFFICJamz would just start transmitting automatically.
I guess I can just mark up these concerns to just getting what I paid for, though, and in those terms I still think I got a pretty good deal. Just so long as this thing doesn't short out my iPod again, I'll be pretty happy with it.
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Jammin' with Joomla!
Sun 24 Jun 07 05:44 | Tags: Internet, Reviews, Software
One of the projects I'm working on at work is building a site using a content management system called Joomla! (I'm not overly excited about it; the exclamation part is actually part of the name, just like with Yahoo!) It was a bit of an experiment in that neither I personally nor the company as a whole had any previous experience with it, but I was told to give it a try for this one client and see if it was going to be something that we'd want to use for other clients in the future.
Joomla! is a fork off of an earlier CMS called Mambo. It's basically a PHP script which powers the creation of a web site in much the same way that blog software like Serendipity does, but it has a much broader scope; it can be used to make a blog-like site, but it can also build a site consisting entirely of static (unchanging) pages, or of periodical news articles, or of any combination in between. In addition, it has an extensive modding system with plenty of free and for-pay extensions which are fairly easy to install and include shopping carts, image galleries, and just about anything else you might need.
At first, I was skeptical of Joomla!, and didn't really like it when I started digging into it. It feels like it really does too much sometimes. It takes a bit of time to wrap your mind around the way that Joomla! works; for example, before you can add any content to your new site, you have to create at least one "Category," then one "Section" under the category; I'm still not entirely sure why this two levels of content categorization is really necessary. (Joomla! has an option, on by default, to automatically set up categories and sections and add some content to them when you install it, but I would actually recommend turing that off because you'll just have to go back and delete all that content later.) Also, when creating new Sections and Categories, you're prompted for both a "Title" and a "Name" for them, with no apparent explanation as to what the difference is between them or how they will be used. Weirdness like this give Joomla! a bit of a tall barrier to entry. Also frustrating are two things that I also found frustrating with WordPress; you're locked into using the unspectacular MySQL database system, and the "templates" are actually just PHP files which mix PHP code and page content and design, a poor programming practice.
However, the more I used it, the more Joomla! grew on me. Once you get over that initial hurdle of figuring out just how stuff is supposed to work, the simplicity and efficiency with which you can create new pages, add new content, and install new module features without ever having to touch a lick of code is quite pleasant - and will be greatly appreciated by our non-programmer client, who wants the ability to add content to his site by himself once we get it completely set up.
If you're going to try Joomla!, one extension that I highly recommend installing would be OpenSEF, which allows you to use URIs which are packed with keywords for search engines to index - not to mention making them easier to type for humans. Joomla! offers up some pretty gnarly URLs by default, such as (and I'm not making this up):
http://domain.xyz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8&Itemid=9
As our client is a guy who offers fishing tours of the local rivers, we're going to use OpenSEF to have an address like this instead:
http://domain.xyz/tour-packages-and-prices.html
Aah, much better. We're also using the RSGallery2 image gallery extension.
Anyway, just because you can create a Joomla!-powered site without any coding by all means doesn't mean you have to, and I sure wasn't one to shy away from a text editor for this project. For one, we needed to create a new template that'd be relevant to the client; after getting a mock-up image from one of our designers (that is, one of the guys that actually has some artistic talent; not my forte), I converted it into code and integrated it into Joomla!'s template system. I'd love to show it to ya, but it's not quite finished yet, so I can't link to it just yet.
One frustration that I had was that Joomla! does not have something in its back end to customize <title> tags for a page. It'll automatically create a title by taking the site name and appending the page's title as defined when it's created in the CMS back-end, but that wasn't really what I wanted for cosmetic and (especially) search engine optimization purposes. I figured there must be a way I could tweak the template to create a custom title depending on which page it was displaying. Finally, I found the $mainframe object, which contained a bunch of info about the current page that Joomla! used for various purposes. By doing a var_dump() on it, I found that the page's ID number was stored as a string at $mainframe->menu->id. So I whipped up a bit of PHP code and put it in the template near the top, before the mosShowHead() call.
<?php
//Better title-fier
if($mainframe->menu->id=="1"){
$mainframe->_head['title']="Client Name Guide Service - River Fishing Tours in Humboldt County, Northern California!";
}
elseif($mainframe->menu->id=="6"){
$mainframe->_head['title']="Client Name Guide Service - California Fishing Tour Packages & Prices";
}
elseif(…){…}
?>
(Yes, smart-alecks, I could use switch instead of a bunch of if/elseifs, but I think the syntax for switch structures sucks.)
It's not easy to get started, but Joomla! is slick enough that I'd recommend it for people who want to get an easily-customizable site up and running quickly - though admittedly, you'll be setting up your second Joomla! site up an order of magnitude faster than your first one. Joomla! is free and open-source, so it won't cost you more than your time to give it a try.
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Let A Terrible Flood into your ears
Sun 20 May 07 19:29 | Tags: Reviews, iPod
I often listen to electronic music when doing computer-related tasks such as coding; when I need some tunes to get the brain waves going, but can't be distracted by listening to lyrics. I can't pretend to be an expert at this sort of music, but I know what I like. So when Esselfortium, an acquaintance from message boards and IRC channels, told me he was self-publishing his own album of electronic tunes, entitled A Terrible Flood, I was interested in giving it a listen - and quite surprised by its quality.
Puny Earthlings! I precipitate upon you!
I had originally asked Essel a bunch of questions a while back in preparation for my article, but it turns out my IRC client was not logging the conversation like I thought it was, so let me try to recap what I can recall. Esselfortium, known in meatspace as Michael Mancuso, began releasing electronic music albums in his first year of high school, though he does not think they were very good in retrospect. Now seventeen, he's had a few years to hone his talents and stabilize his quality, and he's now making a more serious effort of getting an album on the market. Armed with his MIDI keyboard and a copy of the music production software Reason, he's created an eighteen-track CD which causes a standard 74-minute-capacity disc to nearly burst from its seams. A Terrible Flood (not to be confused with They Might Be Giants' perennial album Flood) is mostly comprised of a rhythmic, downtempo sort of electronic music which might be tough to dance to, but which makes great headphone music - intelligent dance music, to use the parlance.
Essel has five of the tracks off of his album available for your listening pleasure. "Startan3" is the opening track, and one of the more uptempo tracks on the disc; it's somewhat video-gamey and somewhat spacey. "The Airport" is personally my least favorite track; the highly electronic music with east Asian accents is unfortunately accompanied by samples from what sounds like a Cold War-era film strip about an airport which repeated a bit too much for my taste. "Chilled" and "Table Rock Sunrise" are abrasive and slightly scary downtempo tunes; the latter ends with a warbly, lonely piano solo evocative of a dusty ghost town, in my opinion. Then there's "epad.rns," a scratchy, somewhat minimalist tune with a strange sound or instrument of some sort which, to me, sounds like the desperate crying of one whose words can't quite be made out clearly. Of course, the non-free tracks are pretty good too; "Elevator Breaks" starts with crowd noise and clanging machinery, evocative of a crowded factory. "Kaianide" is another great video gamey track which wouldn't sound out of place in an action-packed Genesis game. And "Torpedo," the most uptempo track on the disc, is also the most energetic and happy; optimism in musical form, with a loud splash of water at the crescendo - a literal flood, though not necessarily terrible.
Sound good to you, too? A Terrible Flood is currently available for purchase on CD from CD Baby for $15; or, if you scoff at the quaint idea of purchasing music on a plastic disc, you can pick it up on iTunes Store for $9.99.
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Review: SNK vs Capcom: Card Fighters DS
Thu 17 May 07 20:25 | Tags: Games, Reviews
The original SNK vs Capcom: CardFighters' Clash (or Card Fighter's Clash, if you read the game box's spine or some of the literature about the game) was a game for beleaguered SNK's last-gasp portable system, the NeoGeo Pocket Color. The system didn't make much of a dent in the American video game marketplace before SNK's hardware division tanked in 2000, but it had a disproportionately high number of quality games for its short lifetime, including this one.
The game was made somewhat in the spirit of Nintendo's behemoth Pokémon franchise; your character was a young "cardfighter" hoping to rise though the ranks by beating champions at a card game. Instead of Pokémon's cute, oddly-named creatures, the battling in this game was done with cards featuring characters from SNK's and Capcom's respective games; the card battle system was much deeper and more varied than Pokémon's simple menu-based battles, and could have worked on its own as a "real" trading card game. Beating opponents allowed you to earn better cards for your deck. You were also able to explore levels and find other people to trade cards with, or even use "trading machines" and slot machines that operated with cards instead of coins. I put hours into this game, just as my little sister does with her Pokémon games. So when I heard that a sequel was coming out for the Nintendo DS, I was quite overjoyed to get back in on the card battlin' action with SNK and Capcom's classic characters.
Everybody was card-fu fighting. Those cats were fast as lightning. In fact, it was a little bit frightening…
SNK vs Capcom: Card Fighters DS was released stateside on April 24, and I picked it up soon after. The great card battling mechanics are back, but there's a few changes from the NeoGeo Pocket version, and they're not all for the better.
First, let's talk about the card fighting system, because that's where you'll be spending most of your time. If you've ever played a trading card game such as Magic: The Gathering or the Pokémon card game, you'll probably find things familiar, but the system is unique enough to stand out on its own. There are three types of cards; character cards, which you'll attack and defend with, and which stay in your ring after being called; action cards, which provide a one-time benefit for you (or disadvantage for your opponent) when you play them during your turn; and counter cards, which work much like action cards, but can only be played when defending an attack by your opponent. The character cards feature great anime-style artwork of various common and uncommon characters from SNK and Capcom games, and some also have added benefits that can work like action cards, either at your command or at certain specific times such as when the card is brought out, when it is KO'd, etc; sometimes, it can be tough to remember off the top of your head which card does what. Fortunately, the DS's dual screens make it easy to read up on what each card's strengths and abilities are without disrupting the gameplay too much. The cards have a "color" system much like in Magic, but there's no equivalent to Land cards; instead, the cards you have in your "ring" (in play) themselves provide color points. You can also discard cards from your hand to cash in their points, which will allow you to play other cards; sometimes you'll have to sacrifice a strong, valuable card by discarding it from your hand just so you can bring something weaker into play to defend yourself with.
Yup, the card battling is pretty fun stuff; this makes it all the more disappointing that there's no online play mode. There is a local wireless play option, but it requires both players to have their own copy of the game, and given that this game isn't quite flying off the shelves as Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, which was also recently released (and which the gamers at AnRe won't shut up about sometimes…) I don't know if I'll ever actually meet someone else that has this game. That means most people will only play the computer, which just isn't much of a challenge sometimes. The computer is prone to making foolish mistakes such as attacking with all of its cards when I have a ring full of much stronger cards; I'll KO all of its cards and still have plenty of mine left over, leaving the computer defenseless for the next two rounds. I've found that you're pretty much guaranteed a win if you play defensively; let the computer attack first and defend as well as you can while you build up a large ring, then, after your character cards outnumber the computer's, go on the offensive and overwhelm it. I'd really like to see how another human would play.
However, even more disappointing is what's outside of the card battling part of the game. Gone are the various buildings and rooms to explore of the original NGPC version; gone are the machines to interact with and the secret areas to find. In this game you're stuck in a single tower, with only two things to interact with; people, with who you battle or trade, and elevators, which take you from floor to floor. And you don't even really "walk" to them; you just select the person or elevator you want to walk to from the touch screen, and your character walks there automatically. I don't know why the decision was made to remove all exploration aspects from the game, but it's definitely for the poorer this way. Compare the screenshots from the NGPC version on this page or this page to the ones on this page from the DS version to see how much more bland the non-card-battling parts of the game look (and are). It's really a bummer if you're stuck like I am; I currently need a certain card to trade to a computer character to progress in the game, and the only way to get cards in this game are to buy them from one of the card stores located throughout the tower. And to earn money, I have to win card battles. So all I'm doing is repeatedly fighting the character which I can earn the most money from beating, then repeatedly heading over to the card store and repeatedly buying new packs of cards (and repeatedly not finding the card I'm looking for). There's nothing more I can do.
The translation job done on the game is worthy of note too. Half the time things are decent, but sometimes the dialogue comes off quite strange or awkward, or sometimes the text on the cards can be so Engrishy and confusing that I can't figure out what it's supposed to be saying. When you win a battle, the game tells you "Congratulation!" in the singular.
Fortunately, though, the card system at the heart of the game is so darned fun that I can't not recommend the game to those who like trading card games, or even just those who like SNK and/or Capcom's characters. You might find it more worth your pennies if you wait to find it used or in the bargain bin, however. Later this month, Konami will be publishing the Marvel Trading Card Game, a similar type of game for the DS and PSP which will offer online play; I just might be picking up that game too. Hopefully, I'll be able to finish this one first!
Card Fighters DS is rated Teen for the sole reason that many of the female SNK characters are quite scantily clad in the in-game art, as they traditionally are. I'm totally not making this up.
Find Card Fighters DS at Amazon.com
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