July Together Retro: I ❤ the monster hero!

[MrPopo]

So I started playing Giants: Citizen Kabuto last night and remembered why I had put it down a while ago. It's a game that has neat ideas that are hampered by early 3D gameplay. It's a third person shooter with some RTS elements (that I haven't gotten to yet), but everything is just a little floaty. It's reminding me a bit of Outwars, but Outwars was floaty enough to give you real freedom of movement, so it worked; it might have been hard to hit stuff, but you were hard to hit. Here, you're floaty, but only enough to make things harder; you still have movement ploddiness. The humor also isn't really landing for me; it was made by a couple of ex-Shiny devs and it has that sort of weird humor, but it being a 3D game means it doesn't quite go absurd enough like Earthworm Jim did.

[pierrot]

I beat Akumajou Special: Boku Dracula-kun on the Famicom. Wasn't impressed. It looks good, but it doesn't run very well (copious sprite flicker, and loads of slowdown). Already don't remember any of the music. Didn't really engage with the gameplay, or was just frustrated by all the manic bullshit in the levels: Turtles in stage 2 that drag you off the jet propelled shinkansen ride, with very little time to stop them from doing it, and no way of getting back to safety if they do; Water bullshit in stage 3; Ice bullshit in stage 4; Annoying enemy patterns on the subway in stage 5; Pretty much all of stage 7, up to the boss; Pretty much all of stage 8, up to the boss; Just, fucking everything in stage 9. I'm sure there was a bunch of bullshit in stage 6, too, I just don't really remember that one. The controls kind of occupy some weird, hybrid space between NES Castlevania, and Mega Man. Knock-back is somewhat minimized, but it pretty much paralyzes young Dracula for way too long, and often still leads to a slow death, where you're holding the direction away from the ledge as hard as you possibly can, but it just doesn't matter. Dracula's going to fall off that ledge, and he's going to die, and somewhere, the programmer is saying that it was your fault he died, but it wasn't. It was that asshole's fault. He did this--.

I'm not really sure what the boardroom meeting went like when they pitched this one. I can't imagine anyone would look at this character, at the time, and say, 'Oh, yeah, that's the Dracula I know from the Castlevania games. He's just a kid, is all.' Maybe there is something in the manual (at least the ending seems to indicate there's a bit more narrative setup to the whole ordeal), but almost everything about the game feels completely alien to main series. I mean, it's supposed to be a parody style adventure, but even that feels like it's in name only. Like, without telling me that it's young Dracula, I'm not sure how it's even apparent that the main character is supposed to be an antagonist. The ending starts to talk about him as if he is, but it feels like an afterthought, at best. Most of the bosses and enemies are really out of left field, too. I'm not sure what Dracula's "character," and the Castlevania property really do for this game. It almost feels more in line with something like Boku-tte Upa.

That was a very "meh" thing you did, Konami. Very "meh," indeed.

[pierrot]

I've decided to try to play After Armageddon Gaiden, and stream it as I go, for the next few weekends. I'm going to start it up in a little bit. I'll be aiming for 1:00pm starts, Saturday and Sunday, and going until I can't really stand it any more. I've only spent a few minutes with the game in the past, so that could be pretty quick, I guess. We'll find out.

[Nemoide]

Played more Twilight Princess; I cleared the first temple (which is where the game starts to really feel like a Zelda game) and then went Kakariko Village, which was taken over by the twilight and so I reverted to wolf-form. Found a bunch of bugs to restore the light to the area, and I'm a human again!

I feel like the werewolf aspect of this game isn't REALLY all that monster-y, but it is spicing up the standard Zelda formula in a way that helps this game stand out from its predecessors.

[MrPopo]

So turns out there's an unofficial patch that unfucks the mouse acceleration in Giants: Citizen Kabuto. The base is like your mouse is an analog stick, so you have a really bad deadzone and then when you're moving too fast it finally moves, making it incredibly hard to do any precision aiming. The unofficial patch combined with a command line option gives you actual control. Thanks to that I was able to get through the first third of the story. The last mission is your first base building mission, and it's a complete pain in the ass. The basic loop is you collect some workers, then keep giving them food so they can build up the base. You have to build every single structure available in order to unlock the item you need to then take to the enemy base and blow it up. Meanwhile, the enemy keeps sending waves of enemies at you, and you have almost no defenses that aren't just you. There's some shitty turrets, but it's mostly just that your walls have high health, giving you time to get there. I ended up failing several times because I kept killing myself with the explosive weapons that were basically required to deal with some of the larger hordes. The RTS from FPS idea definitely needed more fleshing out (C&C Renegade does it much better). Now on to the second campaign, with a different protagonist who handles differently.

[noiseredux]

I'm hoping to find some time to fire up Decap Attack tonight if it's cool w/ the baby.

[marurun]

I'm hoping to find some time to fire up Decap Attack tonight if it's cool w/ the baby.

I mean, as long as you're playing on a TV or handheld and not trying to recreate it in real life WITH the baby, I think you two can probably work something out.

[prfsnl_gmr]

@pierrot

I agree with you regarding the Famicom version of Kid Dracula. It is very, very meh. (I did really like the section where you ascend to the spaceship, though.). If you get the chance, try out the Gameboy remake/sequel sometime. It is much better, a little more forgiving, and more polished. I ended up liking that game despite being lukewarm, at best, regarding the Famicom version.

[MrPopo]

So I'm on to the second faction in Giants, and you jump into base building much faster. The first mission is the "this is how this character controls" mission, and then the second introduces base building. And unfortunately, this faction isn't any better. I trade in a selection of standard FPS weapons for a sword (which is quite good, but obviously melee), an awful unlimited ammo bow (it does the same damage as the Mecc pistol at half the fire rate) and then a handful of other bows that function as bog standard FPS weapons with a piss poor fire rate. In trade I get a selection of spells. These have been mostly not very useful due to limited casts (up to three) and not super useful effects. The main useful thing is instead of a jetpack I can dash forward; this gives me a lot more speed and can be aimed at a slope to climb a cliff, so the mobility feels a bit better (the Mecc jetpack had a ton of inertia to it).

[Nemoide]

I'm glad to know about that unofficial patch for Giants: Citizen Kabuto. Too bad it sounds like the game has been less than stellar so far.

I played that game at a LAN party back when I was in high school and had a total blast. I bought it afterwards and gave up on the single player game pretty quickly. Still, there's a part of me that would like to give it another shot, especially since I know there's an option for improved controls.