Halfway There...Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

It's just as I remember it. Finding Bagu's house in the woods to give his letter to the river man. Waking up the sleeping bat in the house. Getting the water from the fountain to give to the lady so I can get the Fire spell. " I AM ERROR." It's all right at the tip of my memory.

As the Angry Video Game Nerd noted in his review of this game, the difficulty curve spikes REALLY early in the game. After the relatively simple first temple, the game throws you to the wolves and says "F&*K YOU!"

In fact, I think the hardest temple in the game is the second one. You don't have the LIFE spell yet. Your life, magic and sword skills are dramatically underpowered compared to the strength of your enemies. Every other Temple I beat without using a continue, but for the second temple, I had to continue probably five or six times. Directly after that, you have to get through Death Mountain, by far the most difficult section of the game. This is a maze of caves and the enemies in these caves aren't effing around. They will ruin you until you level up a bit. So really, the game almost requires you to grind right after the first level in the game. That's insane. Even the first Final Fantasy didn't force you to grind so early in the game.

After that, the game eases up a little bit and the difficulty becomes more cerebral. Your goals and puzzles become more abstract. Finding your next objective and making your way to each temple becomes a little more difficult to figure out. Not to say that the physical challenge isn't still present, but it becomes a lot easier once you level up. In fact, there are times when the challenge from enemies is pitch perfect. Because the combat is much deeper in this game than in any other Zelda title, it takes a bit of practice to get good at stabbing and blocking with the right timing, and when you're surrounded by enemies and manage to block three projectiles from both directions at both a high and low level AND take out four enemies in a matter of seconds, you feel like a god.

I'm loving this (potentially) final playthrough of Zelda II. It is a fantastic game that is drastically underrated. I recommend you give it another shot without viewing it through the "Zelda lens". Take it on it's own merits. You'll love it.

Up Next: Zelda II The Adventure of Link

 

The black sheep of the Zelda franchise, Zelda II was my first experience in the land of Hyrule and remains to this day to be the only game in the series I have never beaten. This isn't because of any dislike for the game but purely due to the difficulty. It is without a doubt the hardest Zelda game in existence. The biggest issue is that when you lose your three lives, you're sent back to the beginning of the game. You keep all your items and keys and whatnot, but the journey to each temple is sometimes harder than the temple itself. I often wind up sacrificing one or two lives on the way to my destination. 

For this reason, and because it doesn't fit the mold of the other Zelda games, The Adventure of Link gets a pretty bad rap. Most people can't stand it and herald it as the worst Zelda game in existence. And while it's certainly not my favorite Zelda game (that distinction goes to Majora's Mask) it still has some great elements and is a genuinely unique game. 

Now despite not beating it, I have seen the end of this game several times. As a kid, this game was a little beyond my ability, but my dad was obsessed with it. I watched him beat it when I was about eight. I remember trying to figure out how to beat shadow link with him and I had heard from a kid at school that you had to duck in the corner and just keep stabbing. I couldn't wait to tell my dad, so over dinner I spilled the news and we both shoveled the remaining food into our mouths and rushed up to my room and turned on the NES. I sat on the floor with my legs crossed, entranced in the possibility of seeing the end of the game. Cheering my father's every littler victory on the way to the final temple. He beat that first giant blue hawk thing and then, out comes shadow link. We both held our breath. My dad rushed Link into the left corner, knelt down and mashed the B button. Shadow Link was finished. My memory of sharing that moment with my dad is more tangible than actually seeing the end of the game. In fact, I don't think I remember what happened after that.

So now it's my turn. I have to carry on the Murray legacy and finish the same way my father did, and his father before that, and his before that. We Murray men have a long history of beating Zelda II. All the way back to the colonial settlers. For real. 

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for NES. Let's do it.

Review: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

There's a mantra almost as old as the video game industry itself:

"Licensed games are never good."

And while there are certainly exceptions to the rule, games based on movies are generally built very quickly to coincide with the release of the film. Quality, story and ingenuity are at the bottom of the priority list when it comes to games like this. Kids will buy them because they just saw the movie and they are psyched about it. Once they pay their $60, it doesn't matter how good the game is. The publisher made their money.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets has too many faults for it to excluded from the list of "rushed to market" licensed games. That being said, the team behind this one put at least a little heart into the final product.

Story
This is one of the games shortcomings. If you read the book, or saw the movie, or both - you will be extremely let down by the way this game's story progresses. For a game whose title alone infers mystery and wonder, there are maybe four missions associated with the chamber of secrets - including the final battle in the chamber. The rest of the game focuses on meandering around the castle, going to class, fetch quests and other drab tasks that suck the pacing out the window.

Additionally, the way the story is delivered is so haphazard and inconsistent that you feel like this project was completed by three completely separate teams that didn't talk to each other. Sometimes the story is delivered through cutscenes with atrocious writing and acting. Sometimes the camera stays locked in one spot while a portion of the (admittedly great) audio book plays. Sometimes you're given no story at all even though you're expecting something.

Yeah, me either. This story blows.

After the final battle, you won't feel like you accomplished much. There is no build up and no real motivation from the story that pushes you forward. The recognizable movie elements were so neutered and coated with candy that they didn't even make sense. For the most part it's a series of random tasks that just happen to include some mysterious chamber, that may or may not contain a secret or two.

Gameplay/Design
OK - while this isn't saying much, the gameplay and design were the game's strongest assets. As is the case with many licensed games, the developers took an existing, successful formula and slapped the the treatment over it. In the case of HPatCoS the borrowed formula was Zelda, but they did manage to give the game it's own distinct feel as well.

Assignable Buttons

 The most obvious Zelda element is the assignable buttons. As you progress through your game, Harry will discover new spells like Incendio (fire spell), Exelliarmus (reflect spell - not a disarming spell), Avifors (transforming spell), Scurge (de-gooify spell) and so on. Each of these can be assigned to a one of the face buttons like you would assign your items and gadgets in Zelda. The other big Zelda element is the target lock on - pressing and holding R1 will lock the camera onto your enemy and direct your spell at that target. This is fairly clunky in implementation though as you already have to be facing the target to lock onto it, which effectively eliminates the need for it altogether.

The majority game is broken down into three distinct segments: Classroom dungeouns, castle exploration, and Quiddich matches.

The classroom dungeons are similar to the temples in Zelda, though much shorter and less involved. Each of the four could be bested in about 30 minutes. At the heart of each dungeon was a book that awarded you a new spell, sometimes you got to use this spell to escape from the dungeon and fight a boss, sometimes you didn't. And really, I would have preferred the game to have no bosses, or any fighting at all for that matter.

The exploration aspect of the game was so joyous that the fighting just seemed to be a roadblock to getting back to sneaking around the castle and finding hidden magical items. The most common find is one of the 101 Witches and Wizard collectible trading cards. For every 10 you found, your health meter would expand a bit kinda like the heart pieces in - say it with me - Zelda. You could also trade these cards with other Hogwarts kids, but that aspect felt pretty unnecessary.

There were little nooks and crannies hidden all over the castle and looking for and eventually finding them was one of my favorite parts of the game. If you do your exploring at night though, things become a little more difficult.

The game is broken into 6 days and 6 nights. During the day you do your classes and Quiddich and stuff, and at night you do the rebellious stuff. Sneaking into the restricted section of the library, taking polyjuice potion and turning into Doyle to get the skinny on Malfoy, sneaking out to Hagrid's hut and other various bouts of mischief. However these cooler tasks come with greater risk. There are hall monitors roaming the halls of the castle and if you're caught by one, they deduct five house points from Gryffindor, and you're sent back to the start of the room. All this sneaky stuff is cool in theory, but really difficult and frustrating in execution. You didn't have much control over the camera, nor did you have a radar screen like you would in Metal Gear - so trying to figure out where the hall monitors were and which way they were facing was really difficult, and I would often just blindly get through the room on a trial and error attempt.

There is one more method of exploration - by broomstick. About 1/4 of the way into the game you're given access to your Nimbus 2000 and from there you can fly around the entirety of the exterior of Hogwarts Castle. This was by far the best part of the game - and while there really wasn't much to find outside, the design team just nailed the broom controls to make it such a fun thing to do. Every time I found myself outside for a mission, I would always hop on my broom and take a ride around the castle. But exploring isn't the only thing you can do on broomback - flying practice and Quiddich are also available, but not nearly as fun.

Ever play Superman 64? Remember flying through rings? Yeah - that's what Quiddich is. You fly through rings and try to catch the snitch. You don't have the option to play any other positions, which is kind of a let down, but it's still a nice addition to the game.

One more thing I have to mention, and this is my biggest gripe about the game: load times. They are atrocious. While the interior of Hogwarts is pretty large and complex, it shouldn't take a full 20 seconds to load every time you open a door. My final playtime was about six hours and I would venture a guess that probably a solid hour was that was spent waiting in loading screens. Unbelievable.

 Come on...come on!!

If the loading times weren't there, or even if they were cut in half, it would bring the game up a full letter grade for me. All the elements of a solid game are there, and the broomstick flying is one of my most memorable experiences in the adventure so far. But the load times just choked all the fun out of the experience.

Presentation
All things considering, the game looks pretty good for something that was rushed to market in 2002. Hogwarts Castle is modeled very well, the kids look like the kids from the movie and the spells and special effects animate the way they're supposed to. On the other hand there were what I call "herky jerky" moments in the presentation - especially during cutscenes. There never seemed to be a proper conclusion to a scene and they all just kinda chopped themselves off at the end. Even the final scene of the game ended abruptly and awkwardly shoved me back to the main menu.

The sound design is pretty atrocious overall. They didn't license the wonderful music from the HP movies and while the music was OK, it was a disapointment to not have the main Harry theme. The voice acting is really where the sound showed its diseased underbelly. Again, not getting any actors from the films, the stand-in cast had no business acting anywhere at any time. Once in a while, when you were involved in a lighthearted mission, the acting didn't stand out as bad, but as soon as there was any gravity to the situation, the acting stuck out like a sore thumb. There was no range of emotion in any of the voices - the actor playing Ron would deliver these two lines with the same exact jolly tone:

"Hi Harry! Let's go to the Quiddich stadium for your match against Slytherin"
"Harry! You were almost eaten alive in the Chamber of Secrets! Thanks for saving Ginny, my sister, by the way!"

Decent graphics, but the voice acting and music brought the presentation way down.

Stuff I Liked:

• Castle exploration
• Broom flying
• Zelda elements

Stuff I Hated

• Atrocious voice acting/writing
• Clumsy battle controls
• LOAD TIMES! 

Just as I predicted, in the end the game was "edible". I didn't throw up as soon as it touched my tongue, but I didn't say "Oh man! Call the chef over! I need to give him a tip!" There were good elements, there were terrible elements. This spirited attempt at making a fun licensed game fell just a bit short.

Review in Ten Words or Less:
Play it only if you get it for free

Finished: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

 I did it...

Final Hour Count: About 6 Hours
House Cup: Slytherin
Quiddich Cup: Gryffindor

Cross another mediocre game off my list.

Still Playing...Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Alright - so I'm about four hours into 'the chamber', and I'm a little less optimistic about my enjoyment of the overall experience.

The voice acting quickly became grating, the aforementioned load times have become a relentless nuisance, and the gameplay is often clunky and obtuse.

I'll give you a prime example of how annoying the load screens can be. There are two main types of missions in the game - day missions and night missions. Day missions include going to your classes, playing Quiddich, trading wizard cards and the like. At night, a lot of other things open up, but the hallways are also patrolled by prefects, or "hall monitors" for you muggles.

So because you lose house points if you're caught out at night, you need to put on your metal gear hat and sneak around the guards. And like metal gear, if you're seen you can quickly leave the room and come back in before they catch you. BUT. Everytime you open a door, there is a 15-20 load time. So I often find myself being like "Yes! I got away...awwwwwWWWWWW!" as the stupid load screen pops up.

The game even has to load after you assign a spell to a button. Imagine playing Zelda and every time you equipped your bombs, a 5 second loading screen popped up.

ANNOYING!

Mario's 25th

This blog is not intended to be a source of game news, but I felt that Mario's 25th birthday was pretty important to the gaming community. It's almost a cliche now to say that everyone grew up on Mario, but it's true. I'll bet that 90% of 25-30 year olds' first gaming experience was of the blocky plumber's trek through the Mushroom Kingdom. The enchantment we all felt when we beat world 1-1 and descended into a dark, underground area with creepy music.

I have a memory - about as vivid as you could get - of my dad coming home from work one night all excited. I was probably six at the time. Before explaining anything about his giddiness, he rushed up to my room and turned on my NES. As he cruised through the first level which we had both memorized at that point, he revealed the reason for his excitement: his friend at work told him about the secret 1-Up mushroom in the ceiling in world 1-2. He didn't remember exactly where, so after about five minutes of passing the controller back and forth, he jumped right into it. The iconic sound of a mushroom escaping a question mark box emitted and we couldn't believe it. How many more of these were hidden in the game? What else was hidden out there in the vast eight worlds of fantastic, perfect gameplay?

One more memory. Mario 3 had been announced but was far from a US release and playground rumors were spreading about what it was and how many graphics were in it (hey - I was 8), and then one day, my dad took me up to our local Easy Video to rent a game for the weekend. I saw something on the shelf that made me freak out.

"DAD! Come ere!"
"What's up?"
"LOOK!"

It was Mario 3. The Japanese version. Available to rent probably a good six months before it came out in America.

We. Were. So. Pumped.

We played through the first two or three levels, marveled at the gameplay and graphics and music and how cool it was that we could FLY! Then we got to the first toad house where he tells you to open any box. But it was in Japanese, and we had no idea what to do, so that's where we stopped. But man was that a feeling to play the game before everyone else. 

So let's all raise our glasses in a toast to Mario and Luigi. Two Italian plumbers who have never used a plunger or wrench in their lives, but have effected people across the world in such a dramatic way.

Here's to you Mario Bros.

Salut.

Up Next: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

I know, I know. A licensed game. A licensed Harry Potter game, no less. Let me explain myself.

I bought this game for $4 after reading this Destructoid article from last year - part of a series called "Games Time Forgot" that I loved reading but it seems they have since abandoned the series. In this article, the author says that this is the best Harry Potter game out of the lot of them on the market, and said it drew its inspiration very heavily from the Zelda franchise.

Well, I thought, I'm a pretty big Potter fan, and a pretty big Zelda fan, and a pretty big fan of only spending $4 on a game. Sold. 

The game is OK. The inspiration from Zelda is definitely apparent, and EA did an admirable job in making the game feel distinctly Potter-esque, but the game is not immune to the maladies of a movie licensed game. Loading times are frequent and lengthy, camera angles are often difficult to work with, voice acting is "meh", and the writing is "barf". 

It's certainly no Donkey Kong Country, but neither is it a Mario Galaxy (my favorite game). It's "edible" to put it in food terms. Not delicious, but not rancid. I'll eat it and probably be full afterwards. 

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for PS2. Let's do it.

Review: God of War III

God of War III had a lot to live up to. The first two games are considered among the finest on the PS2 and both had won many game of the year awards. Could lightning strike thrice? Is it possible that all three games in a trilogy are all better than the last?

Story
You are Kratos. You must defeat the God of War. That was the tagline for the first game - a pretty simple premise, but the first game's story took so many twists and turns you felt as though you were watching a piece of Hollywood cinema. In God of War III, you are still Kratos, but you must defeat the God of Gods - Zeus.

The story picks up right where the second game left off - with Kratos riding the back of titans while they climbed Mt. Olympus, all to take their revenge of Zeus for his awfulness. About thirty minutes into the game, you are face to face with Zeus. At this point, I was thinking that I would fight and kill him early in the game and the story would take a much different path - a "curveball" as they say in the industry. Unfortunately, no curveballs were thrown, at least at that point. Zeus knocks you off the mountain, and you spend the rest of the game trying to get back to him. That's not to say the rest of the game is boring.

They story effectively weaves in details from the first two games to complete the larger story arc of the trilogy as a whole; like what were the implications of Kratos opening Pandora's box in the first game, and the consequences of the Gods and mortals he killed throughout the series - all told through 2D pop-art flashback sequences which were beautiful to watch and really added a sense of grandness to the story as a whole.

The fantastic 2D flashback art. 

On the downside, the story didn't crescendo like the last two games. There was usually one giant task to complete in these games - killing Ares, finding the Sisters of Fate, etc. but in  I and II, the story really felt like it built and built upon itself until I was about an hour from the end and the tension and action were so frantic that not even God himself could rip the controller from my hand; like a roller coaster that climbed and climbed and climbed for six or seven hours,building anticipation and tension and then sent you careening over the edge to a wild and exciting conclusion. 

God of War III seemed to clunk around itself, sending you on random fetch quests and (ugh...) escort missions, to reach your main objective. I never really felt that sense of urgency or that palpable taste of revenginess that coated my brain in the other entries in the series. 

Meandering story aside, the development team really did a great job of tying up all the loose ends, so when you finished the game you weren't left wondering about anything at all. They touched on everything from Kratos' past present and future, and after the last scene, you will truly feel that Kratos got his revenge that he so desperately wanted.

Gameplay

If you've played a God of War game before - you know what to expect. Pitch perfect controls, a finely tuned automatic camera, a nice smooth difficulty curve and top notch enemy design. All of those things are still very much in tact, and they somehow made the controls even tighter. With the exception of the rare case when the camera isn't quite in the right spot, you never feel like you have to work against the controls to get through the game - your ability to fight your way to the final battle is purely based on how good you are. That's not to say there aren't frustrating sections. 

There are these new segments where you are flying up, or falling down a long pipe or tube. During these sections your only objective is to avoid hitting obstacles. The problem with these parts is there are often obstacles very close to one another, and once you crash into something, your visibility is cut down to zero with the subsequent cloud of smoke that comes out of everything you hit. So if you hit a single thing in one of these tight sections, you're hitting all of them - there's no sense in even trying to realign yourself. These sections are really about memorization, which is something I despise in most video games. But this was really my only gripe with the game design. 

One of the most satisfying things in this game was the new arsenal of weapons. In the first two games, I never used any of the secondary weapons - the blades were just too awesome. In this game, however, you're given three additional weapons, each with their own magic spell, and all of them were awesome. Early in the game, you get a set of new blades from Hades. These are similar in design (swingable blades on chains) but they behave very differently, so it really changes up the play style if you swap to a different weapon. The other weapon I'll mention was my absolute favorite - the greaves. These huge, lion shaped iron gloves were like hand held wrecking balls. You really felt like you were wielding some seriously destructive gear because hitting an enemy with these caused them to fly halfway across the screen, and the vibration in the controller really punctuated each punch.

 The sweet, sweet punchification of Greece has begun.

The puzzles in the game were few and far between, but most were pretty clever. They all seemed to draw from other, modern puzzle games. There were ideas from Portal and Echochrome and even the movie "Cube" (which is awesome). Of course this is an action game, not a puzzle game, so these felt like Portal-lite and Echochrome Free Edition, but the casual nod to those games was pretty cool nonetheless, and really broke up the action in a nice way. 

As with the other God of War games, the pacing was fantastic. And while I feel like Uncharted 2 is the new king of perfect pacing, God of War III certainly gave me that "OK, I'll play to the next save point" feeling. Then of course I would play for four more hours after I said that. A testament to great game design and spot on gameplay. 

Presentation

The first and second games pushed the PS2 hardware as far as it would go - to the point where you were amazed that you were still playing a PS2 game. God of War III certainly doesn't disappoint in the visuals department, but there are better looking games out there. I'm not a graphics nerd by any stretch of the imagination; as long as the art services the game well, I'm happy with them. And this game's graphics were way above serviceable - they were fantastic. But as we nerds, know, it's not only graphics that can prove how much cooler a PS3 is over a 360. 

The framerate ran at a constant - and I mean constant - 60 frames per second. What made this even more impressive was the amount of enemies they crammed on the screen at certain points. I never actually counted, but there were definitely times where there were at least 30 dudes on the screen at once - plus Kratos - AND SOMETIMES A BOSS - all animating and reacting independently. At 60 frames per second. Damn.

Beware. Extremely violent spoilers inside.

The other thing that must be mentioned is the sound design. The epicly orchestrated score from the first two games makes its immaculate return in the third game. The music is a perfect fit for every moment of the game and really rose and fell at the right points. The sounds of the weapons and magic spells all were dynamic and unique. There was never a sound or song that took you out of the fantasy. 

The voice acting was mostly excellent. Kratos is still voiced by the same subtle-as-a-nail-bomb voice actor, but the other characters were fantastic. Specifically, there is this God named Hephaestus (voiced by Rip Torn) who was by far my favorite character in the game. This is one of the few sympathetic characters we meet - punished to a life of torment and pain by Zeus, I truly felt for this guy and he sat at the edge of Hades, doomed to work for all eternity. His character's voice performance was about as perfect as you could ask for. He sounded like a genuinely nice guy who had fallen on hard times (really hard times), and I felt myself actually having real sympathy for him, and kind of wanting to hang out with him.

Hephaestus and his sweet beard. 

Stuff I Loved: 

• Awesome combat - still made me feel like a man. 
• Epic music and spot on voice acting, especially Haphaestus. 
• Satisfying conclusion to the three part story. 

Stuff I Hated: 

• Flying sections.
• Meandering story.
• Not much else.
  

In the end, I was totally satisfied with this game. I don't think it's the best in the series, but certainly a more than adequate conclusion to an extremely excellent trilogy. 

Ten Words or Less Review 

Awesome controls, graphics, music, and design. Story was OK. 

Finished: God of War III

Final Hour Count: 11:20
Difficulty: God Mode (Normal)

Yes. I was determined to beat this thing last night. It took me until about 3:15 AM, but it feels good to take another game off my list. Here is proof of the accomplishment:

Yeah - I died a lot.

Almost There...God of War III

Oh man. This game has been so freaking good. I'm getting very close to the end - I'm just over 7 hours in and I have been loving every second of this masterpiece. The boss battles, the puzzles, the scale, the combat - everything is so finely tuned that you never feel like you're working against the controls or the design or the camera or anything! It's one of those games where the controller becomes an extension of your mind and everything just melts together.

At the same time, though - I'm not feeling the crescendo I thought I would be feeling this late in the game. As I remember them, the first two games really built the intensity to a fever pitch toward the last quarter of the game. And similar to the other two, your main goal is to find this one artifact that will aid you in beating your final nemesis (Pandora's Box in GoW and the Sisters of Fate in GoW II). In the first two games this task put you on a track of increasing "badassery" that got more and more insane until you finally got your artifact and sought out your foe. In 3, the artifact is "The Flame of Olympus" which is cool and all, but you start out the game about as bad ass as you can get, and it just never feels like it builds like the others.

The other thing I noticed is that the designers never give me a chance to really hate a boss or enemy. Perfect example:

SPOILERS GO

Last night I had a run-in with the wife of Zeus, Hera. After about a one minute conversation of her belittling Kratos, he begins to walk away when she says something like "Good luck with that little whore Pandora." (You're also looking for Pandora in this game). Now, with Kratos' past of killing his family (whoopsie) this struck a nerve in him - and also in me. I was like - oh what a bitch! 

Then, just as I was starting to really dislike her - cue a cutscene of Kratos snapping her neck. The end. 

On the contrary, there was a boss in Chains of Olympus for PSP that I HATED. He was super difficult and it took me probably a dozen attempts to beat him, and when you finally cues the QTE, you got those huge metal punching gloves, and the game made you rapidly press circle. This caused Kratos to pound this dude's face into oblivion, until his head was a bloody pulp of deadness. What vengeance I felt! What victory! But with Hera I was like "Oh I hate her so mu-...oh...ok..."

SPOILERS STOP

Not to say that the story and the game as a whole aren't awesome - they are. But I'm just feeling a little deflated as I near the end of the game. Hopefully the finale will change my mind. Hopefully I will get there tonight...wish me luck.