What is a man?

A miserable little pile of pumpkin guts...

Dino Crisis

Dino Crisis is a survival horror game on Playstation/PC with a dinosaur twist. The game’s made by Capcom and it has a very strong Resident Evil feel to it. You play as Regina, a government operative. You and four other agents go to this island research laboratory in order to kidnap the head scientist guy there. Soon after landing by parachute, you lose a team mate and have to move on without him. Immediately after infiltrating the perimeter you realize that something is very wrong on account of the bullet casings and eviscerated bodies on the ground. Basically from there you’re trying to finish the mission and escape the island. Similar to Jurassic Park but a lot less interesting plotwise.

One thing I notice right away is that there’s a lot of audio dialogue. This is weird because most games from that era either had a small handful of sentences uttered or noises like gasping and laughter or just had no voice acting at all.

The other thing I notice is that the only thing I have to defend myself with is a small handgun and ten bullets. Though all of my team mates have awesome weapons. What’s with that? Am I experiencing the firearms glass ceiling or was I in the bathroom when they were handing out guns?

Gail: I call the AK-47.
Rick: I call the .50 cal sniper rifle.
*toilet flushes*
Enter Regina
Regina: What’s going on in here?
Rick: Here Regina, you get the stick with the pointy rock on the end.

When you come across your first dinosaur, (a raptor,) your first thought is probably to kill it. After all, you have a gun and some bullets. What else would they be for? You start shooting at it and then you get critically slashed across the torso. After about five bullets the raptor goes down. It’s not moving so you walk past it to leave. Then it springs to life, biting you in the leg. You shoot it about three more times and it finally dies. You’re not looking too good either at this point. At least that’s what you guess since Regina is now limping and bleeding but you don’t know how close you are to death because guess what; there’s no life indicator. Wasn’t that fun? You’re out of ammo and you just spent your first aid kit. Let’s hope that was the only dinosaur in the game.

As you progress, you find little ammo boxes with items in them. You find some health related things and some weird stuff like intensifiers and multipliers which you can mix with some items to upgrade them, (just like in Resident Evil.) But all along you’re thinking; okay, this ones going to have some ammo in it, right? But it never does. Eventually you accept that this might in fact be survival horror in it’s purest form; AKA just run away. But if that’s the case, why the hell did they give me a gun in the first place? I’m obviously not allowed to use it.

Later, you get a shotgun and a modest amount of shells. (And by “modest” I actually mean it would be almost as useful to beat the raptors to death with your shoe.) It takes a lot of bullets to kill anything, which is understandable since they‘re dinosaurs, but are you going to give me enough fucking bullets to do it or not?

Working your way through the facility involves a lot of running. The dinosaurs are all raptors which is boring but there are different ones later. In some of the halls there are these laser grids that you can turn on and off to form a gate that protect you from the raptors. When they run into the lasers they get zapped and fall over. There are various puzzles that you have to solve on your way through. They’re fun and interesting at first but then they start recycling them over and over. I had to fix about four generators, recode two keycards, operate two cranes, and crack I don’t even know how many door codes.

Those door codes are the worst. The system used to access certain doors in the building are locked by what it called the DDK lock system. Why it’s called that, I have no idea. I’ll ignore the fact that no facility would ever have their doors locked like this. First you have to get two things. One’s a key and I guess one’s a decoder or something. After you use both of them at the correct door you have to do this little puzzle where you decode a matrix of random letters with some kind of key code. It involves canceling out the wrong letters and being left with a password that you then type in and enter. They start out easy enough but eventually the rules to the decoding system changes and they become these horrible Mensa entry questions. Look at this…

Does that make any sense to you? It’s great how they put in Saturday Night Fever subliminally. That’s not distracting at all.

Around the building there are notes and documents lying out on desks that you can read. Most of them are irrelevant and a waste of time if you read them but some of them have crucial instructions, like how to use the DDK or operate the reactors or they have key codes for various locks. When you read these you either need perfect memory or a pen and paper to write shit down. Unlike Resident Evil and Silent Hill, there’s no document memo in the pause menu for you to reread something. You have to just know everything because if you come up to a lock and you find you can’t remember the code, you’re sure as hell not going to remember what room the document containing said code was in. I consider having to write stuff down for a video game a design flaw.

The items that you require to progress are always keycards, chips, disks or some other electronic device.

They all have stupid acronym names. See?

Now think, do any of those names give you the slightest clue as to what the item might be or what it’s used for? No, they don’t. They’re just a bunch of random letters. It would be easier if the names were all in Latin. But at least they give you a vague description at the bottom.

The names of the facility parts and the names of the keys and the devices are all so non-descriptive and similar that it’s really easy to get confused. And just when you think you’re getting somewhere, something bad happens and you have to do a ton of other things to fix it just to have something else happen. A common scenario in DC on the PSX and PC would be that you have a locked DDK door. You have one DDK input disk H but you also need the DDK code disk H. It’s in the level B2 main office but you can’t get in there without a C. O. pass card. So you go get the B2 key chip 1 and the B2 key chip 2 and you put them in a computer and enter in the code that was written on one of them. Then you use the F. C. device to collect someone’s fingerprint, put that into the computer and do a puzzle to rewrite the C.O. pass. Then take the C.O. pass to get into level B2 and get the DDK code disk H. Put that into the DDK door with the DDK input disc H and then do a DDK password puzzle. Then the door opens. Is that not the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard? Not only is that a giant hassle just to open a door but they’re like a hair’s breath away from calling the grenade gun a “GG” and a door a “D.”

About half way through the game you actually start getting ammunition. There are these glowing deposite boxes in the walls, either green, red or yellow. Green has medical stuff in it. Red has ammunition in it. Yellow can have anything. But you can’t just open the boxes. You have to get plugs which you find around and use anywhere from one to three to unlock a box. After that, you can put things in and take things out of the box and even access same-colored boxes you’ve already opened.

What’s annoying about this is that you can’t stack like items in your inventory. In the picture all I want to do is stack the 11 S&W bullets together with the 15 S&W bullets, (which would equate to less than the maximum amount allowed in a slot,) but it won’t let me. If I take out the 11 bullets they have to take up their own separate space which is bullshit.

Eventually you get to see some different enemies other than the T-rex and the raptors. There are pteranodons and compies. Then you come across these…

I don’t know what the fuck these are but I wish they were slower, weaker and smaller. They hurt you bad. Their fat asses block almost the entirety of the hallways, making it impossible to circumvent them without getting hurt. When they run into the laser grids they don’t fall over like the raptors so you don’t get a head start running past them when you deactivate the grid. Basically if they’re in the room they WILL get you somehow. And if they manage to knock you down, you’re dead.

In general the dinosaurs in this game are real assholes. Sometimes you’ll be running past a raptor and they’ll whip you with their tail, making you drop your gun. Now you have to go snatch your gun off of the floor and sometimes the raptor will be standing right on it. Sometimes you’ll enter a room and the dinosaur will be right there in mid leap at your face. You could literally walk in a door and die instantly with absolutely no chance to react.

Then there’s the shitty fixed camera. Often you can hear a raptor snorting off screen somewhere. If where you’re going happens to require you to run toward the camera, there’s no way to see what’s ahead of you because the camera isn’t going to switch positions. You just keep running and hope the raptor or whatever isn’t directly in your path.

Possibly the most annoying thing of all is that the dinosaurs respawn. At first I thought it wasn’t respawning but some kind of random thing to keep you from ever truly feeling safe, because the dinosaur doesn’t reappear when you leave the room, it actually comes in through the door. Later, when I had ammunition and was actually able to kill some of the dinosaurs, I noticed that every time I killed a dinosaur, left the room and went back in, a new dinosaur of the same species would always come in through a door. This is outrageous! Half of the game you can’t kill dinosaurs at all and then when you finally can, they just come back. THERE IS NO POINT IN KILLING DINOSAURS. You might want to to be able to explore a room without being constantly chased and there are a few times where you have to fend off the T-rex but other than that, the guns are completely superfluous. What a crock of shit. I had one expectation/goal when I started this game and it was to kill some damn dinosaurs! And for all intents and purposes it never happened! I didn't want it to be Turok but... I almost want to say it's false advertising.

The levels are boring. I mean they weren’t at first but after you’ve spent five hours running through nothing but laboratories and cargo bays, they are. I was expecting to go outside the facility at some point, maybe run through some jungle or something but you never do.

At a few points in the game you have to make decisions as to which course of action to take. Your two team mates, who are only ever present for cut scenes, always have differing opinions on what to do next. Now I know Gail is in charge so why would it even matter what Rick thinks? I don’t know. Anyway, some of the decisions will influence the ending you get. In the beginning I was going with Rick’s ideas because they involved avoiding the dinosaurs in exchange for having to deal with the facility and its shitty proclivities. Later, when I got fed up with collecting acronyms and repeating puzzles, I sided with Gail; opting to deal with the dinosaurs instead. Then I found that it really doesn’t matter which way you choose. THEY BOTH SUCK HARD.

At the end of the game you find out why there are dinosaurs on the island which, believe me, is really stupid. Lets just say I really enjoy Capcom’s quasi science. Then you escape the island. I don’t know what the other two endings are but in mine I was chased by the T-rex through a big hall while in an emergency escape helicopter. Luckily, the helicopter was carrying a bomb. Must have been the Die Hard or the Rambo emergency escape helicopter.

Chaos Legion

(on the back of the box)
“If you loved Devil May Cry, you’ll love Chaos Legion.”
--PSM Magazine

Me: Oh boy! I loved Devil May Cry! This’ll be awesome! *animated blue birds sing and the sun smiles down upon me as I skip home from the game store.*
Two hours later…
Me: What… What is this?
It’s a third person swordplay game with RPG elements made by Capcom but that’s about where the similarities end.

The main selling point of the combat and I guess the game in general is the legions. (Hence the name.) Think of them as poke’mon on PCP. You summon them and they fight next to you . There are seven different ones you can get, all with different attacks and deadly sin sounding names like Arrogance and Blasphemy.

A legion’s lifebar is powered by souls which come from enemies when you beat them. Every hit the legion takes from an enemy removes a little from the lifebar. Of course, when the bar reaches zero the legion’s crest breaks, it disappears and you can’t summon it until you regain a certain amount of souls.
Legions don’t really last too long in battle on average, which is annoying. But it’s actually a lot more beneficial in most cases to just not summon them at all. For one, you can run when they aren’t on the screen. But the second you summon them you’re forced to walk at a leisure mosey. Now it takes forever to get anywhere and you basically become a sitting duck. Second, there’s not a whole lot of difference between a legion and an enemy. You might have as many as six of the same legion on screen at the same time and really what that translates to is chaos and visual pollution. You’re no longer in control of the fight. You can’t focus on anything. It’s like trying to orchestrate a bar fight or a soccer riot.

You’re already on average fighting like thirty giant fucking spiders at a time but at least when the legions aren’t there you know who the enemy is and when they’re going to attack you. When you have them out they inevitably end up blocking your view of some enemy somewhere and then you get hit because you either had no idea they were there or you were distracted by some other asshole in the faceless crowd.
One nice thing though is that while the legions aren’t summoned you can use an assist attack which only summons the equipped legion for a couple of seconds to do a single attack at the cost of some souls.
Each legion is good for doing specific things. Some are better at fighting mechanical enemies or protecting you or shooting enemies from far away. Too bad there’s absolutely no way of knowing which ones you’ll need for a level until you play the level. You can only pick two legions to equip before the start of a level. If at some point during the level you discover that you picked the wrong two legions, well tough shit. You either have to restart the level and reselect the ones you actually need or just man up and slog through with your shitty choice, (if it’s even possible.)

The first legion you get is called Thanatos. He’s actually the strongest one of the seven, (nevermind that both it and you die constantly.) At the end of the first level it’s crest shatters into nine pieces which you can go collect if you want. And after that, the game actually asks you if you’d like to switch to easy mode to “just enjoy the story.” This struck me as funny because A: the story isn’t too compelling and B: I’m not a grandmother. Although it didn’t take me long to question my refusal to switch.

A couple of legions are pretty much useless. Arrogance is supposed to protect you but it’s nothing like what I had envisioned. Yeah, they’ll protect you if they happen to be between you and the enemy and I guess you could command them to stop and then hide behind them if you wanted to waste time but other than that, no. What they actually do is absorb attacks when they are hit, though it still does damage to them. The more hits they take, the more they charge their attack. You can command them to release their attack at any time and depending on how big of a beating they took they’ll shoot a beam that does proportional damage. There are of course several setbacks. Providing the legions survive long enough to even use their attack, their beams aren’t that long, their aim is horrible, they attack randomly if you forget to lock on something, they only travel for a short distance to get in range of the enemy and if it’s too far away they just give up and come back and the whole process of freezing the legions in place somewhere they can absorb attacks, keeping them alive, waiting for them to charge and actually getting them to successfully attack what you want them to attack is so arduous you just never want to use them. So they’re not good for protecting. They’re not good for attacking. What exactly ARE they good for?

Then there’s Blasphemy which takes the form of an orange bomb a little bigger than a soccer ball. Summoning it is about the worst thing you can do. All it does is waddle over to the enemy and explode on them. It really doesn’t do that much damage but every time it explodes it takes away from it’s life bar. So basically if you just want to waste all of your souls it’s great for that. The assist attack is decent though after a high enough level. You just throw it, (kick it,) like a grenade which seems much more effective for some reason. Still, I’m not going to ever equip this piece of shit because it doesn’t stack up to the other humanoid-shaped legions.

The attacks that your character actually gets are executed thusly; press the attack button. Press the attack button some more. Keep pressing the attack button. Swinging the sword is your one attack. As you gain experience and level up your legions, you can learn a few different moves through them. The problem with this is that you can only use the specific moves when you have the corresponding legion equipped. It really blows when you try to use a move, only to realize that you can’t because you don’t have that legion with you. Although after earning a ton of experience you can actually retain some of the moves without using the legions.

The first thing you notice when you start the game, (if you’re me anyway,) is that it’s kind of hard. In fact it’s REALLY fucking hard. Your measly life bar will sustain about three hits and then you‘re dead. The first level is an extremely boring and repetitive prologue. Everything looks the same. Actually the first five levels are all monochrome and interchangeable as far as their architecture and design. The prologue is supposed to be a learning experience but it’s way too long. I had the tutorial turned on, so every other thing you do brings up a tedious explanatory screen of text. Now that I think about it, this is the worst tutorial I’ve ever seen in a game. The explanations don’t explain anything. They’re worded badly and when they make reference to the button(s) you’re supposed to push, it says stuff like “press the assist attack button while in assault mode” or “use the shift button to switch legions.” Okay… That’s great. What the hell are you talking about? How am I supposed to know where those buttons are? You have to get out the manual to look up the function names and where the corresponding buttons are located. Now the reason I used tutorial mode in the first place was so I *wouldn’t* have to do that. If I wanted to read the stupid manual, I’d read the stupid manual. Why the hell couldn’t they just have a little picture or the default name of the button come up on the screen like every other game tutorial?

And another thing; why is the square button a confirm button? I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where square was confirm. It’s ALWAYS cancel. You really have to train yourself out of it quick too. Every time you go into the menu to use one soul or life recovery item you end up using two instead because you select it and press X to confirm and then square to leave but it’s not leave, it’s another confirm button.

Going back to the tiny life gage; there almost seems to be some kind of retarded bug with it. You rarely pick up healing potions and even when you do, you can only hold six small ones and two large ones. When you take damage and you’re about at half of your life, you wouldn’t think to use a potion because they don’t grow on trees and you still have half your life left. This is a 100% surefire way to get yourself killed. The next hit you take, no matter what monster it’s from, it WILL kill you. When you die you have to start back at the beginning or at the last checkpoint. The checkpoints are usually pretty far apart, so you’ll be repeating shit a lot. Luckily the game gives you back any items you used before you died.

The whole time you’re playing, you feel drastically underlevelled because everything is so difficult. There will be parts with thirty-some enemies on screen shooting at you and ramming into you from behind. There are machines that make enemies respawn after you kill them. You can destroy the machines but the only problem is that they’re completely surrounded by the same enemies that they make respawn. How long can you last? A lot of times you find yourself pussyfooting around. You go up, hit the enemy and run away because you can’t afford to ever get hit. That’s not fun, it’s fucking stupid. You can go back and play levels you’ve already done to make yourself and your legions stronger but you only get the ability to replay levels when you’re mostly done with the game.

Just when you think you’ve figured out the game, they make you play as this gunslinging girl that kind of reminds me of Lady from DMC3, only less badass and holding Trish’s guns… If Trish’s guns looked like humongous derringers. This turns out to be a completely different ball of wax requiring a whole new set of shitty tutorials. Initially I was very annoyed but soon found that even though I had no idea what I was doing, I was still doing a lot better with her than the main character. Unfortunately you only get to do this for one level. Screw this legion crap. Why can’t I play as her?

As you play through, you occasionally pick up level-up items. There are things that will increase your shitty life bar, things that increase attack and things that increase defense. When I first got one of these upgrades, I was totally mystified as to how to use it. It was in my inventory but it wouldn’t let me select it. Later I figured out that you don’t need to do anything. Just having it increases whatever stat. I have never heard of that before. Typically to raise a stat, you equip/wear an item or you use experience points. In the Diablo 2 expansion there were charms that you could keep in your inventory that did stuff if you wanted to be extra buff but in Chaos Legion it’s the primary level-up method. So every time you look in your inventory you see things like Defense Up X12 and Life Max Up X24. I’m not sure why but this bugs the hell out of me. It looks so sloppy. Why can’t I just use them to permanently add stat points and then they go away? Or at least put them on the stat screen so I don’t have to look at them.

At the end you have to fight the main antagonist who, for reasons unknown, is Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII. Okay, it’s not actually him but they literally copied him verbatim. They even used the same cinematography from Advent Children.


Continuing with the Final Fantasy theme, they rape you in the ass with three consecutive bosses. Just kidding… Final Fantasy would have at least four. Anyway, it’s bullshit and if you want my advice; go get Thanatos. Or don’t play at all.

There Can Be Only One

There is currently an internet poll going on at Gamespot that will undeniably and irrefutably decide the greatest video game hero of all time. Typically I wouldn’t comment on something as trivial as an internet poll, (because everything else I write about is very serious business,) but this is an interesting insight into a weird subculture coupled with a shocking, (and hilarious,) statistical anomaly. Round one recently ended and as it turns out, the iconic Halo character Master Chief has been defeated by…

Bub and Bob. Yeah, remember them? I know you’re probably thinking, how the hell did this happen when Halo has such a rabid fanbase? Well let me explain. I first heard about this poll while browsing the video games board, (or v,) on 4chan. The point of the thread was to basically tell people to vote for B&B and destroy Master Chief. I went to the poll and saw that the two dragons were already ahead of MC, (possibly legitimately.)

It didn’t take long for everything to go south from there. 4chan users on v generally have an irrational and intense hatred for Halo. Myself, I never really played it that much. It seemed average. Also I don’t think I ever played Bubble Bobble. I have played Bust-a-Move though in many an arcade. So anyway, v starts voting for B&B, but they don’t just vote normally, they keep refreshing their IPs so that they can vote multiple times. The dragons pull away and soon they are ahead by ten percent.

Under every character match is (was) an area you can post comments, backing either character. Needless to say, this became a medium for a humongous shitstorm. The Master Chief side was full of whinny-ass Halo fanboys crying. The Bub and Bob side was full of old school gamers and trolls. It was a sight to behold; one of those special experiences only procurable through the wondrous internet. Though, as expected, that forum disappeared REAL fast. In fact all chat was turned off, period.

Most of the MC comments seemed to either say that Halo is a revolutionary art form or list reasons, (including saving the world,) why MC is the best hero, following up with “what did Bub and Bob ever do?” Well maybe their accomplishments are a bit more simplistic but there is one very important element that B&B have that Master Chief probably never will and that is… a fucking face.

As it is, a first person shooter makes you really detatched from the character because the character almost ceases to exist. YOU are the character. But on top of that, Maser Chief is a John Doe that looks exactly like every other guy in Halo . It’s really hard to care about someone completely walled off behind a bunch of regenerative armor. The helmet never comes off. He doesn’t even have a real name. He could be a robot for all I know. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter what he accomplished because I have no way to connect with him.

Then you look at Bub and Bob. Daaaw, look! They’re so damn cute! I like them. They don’t even have to say or do anything. They’re already awesome.

Social sciences aside, it was quite delightful watching the pains of one of the most annoying fanbases in existence. All I need now is the Sonic and Cloud fans to cry, (both currently losing.) Also Donkey Kong should go. He sucks in Smash Bros. He sucks in sidescrollers. He sucks when he’s trying to kill you with barrels.

Yes, the poll is overly charged with animosity when all it is is a web poll. I won’t cry when everyone I care about eventually loses (like always.) I’m betting that either Link or Duke Nukem will win the whole thing, and I‘d be Okay with that. I just hope Mario doesn’t win. That would be the lamest thing ever.

Come on Dante! MOVE YOUR STUPID ASS!

Dracula X: Rondo of Blood

Ever since I played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night I wondered about the game that came before it. At the beginning of SotN the first thing you do is fight Dracula from the previous game using the previous protagonist Richter. That’s kind of cool. How many games exist that have what is essentially a fully interactive recap? I wanted to play the previous game just so I could hear Dracula’s “What is a man?” speech again.

Then I find out that the game before it was “Dracula X.” This seemed weird to me since I can distinctly remember already having played that game a long time ago and I don’t remember the final fight with Dracula being ANYTHING like what was in the beginning of SotN. A couple of Google searches later I find out that the Super Nintendo Dracula X that I played was actually a shitty port from a PC engine game called Dracula X: Rondo of Blood which was only released in Japan, not counting the ‘07 PSP remake.

So I… acquire the game and boot it up. Naturally I’m expecting it to be in Japanese which puts me off because I assume the characters are actually going to be speaking to one another unlike in the port and I’m not going to understand any of it. But my mind is instantly blown when a black screen appears and I begin to hear a German narration with Japanese subtitles. What the hell? Why German? My only guess is that I’m in Germany. I mean anyone named “Richter” has to be German right? But why’s Dracula in Germany? I thought he hung around Wallachia or whatever… Transylvania. Though I guess his castle does have a tendency to appear in random-ass places. But in the port it actually says you’re in Transylvania so I don’t know. After that I’m only further mystified when I find that the beginning menu screens are all in English. Well that’s nice for me but how many languages are going to be in this game? I haven’t even started it yet.

Unlike past Castlevania games this one lets you create a file and save your progress instead of having to use passwords. When you start a new game you get to see a cinematic of a village getting attacked and Richter coming to town to kick some ass. The whole thing looks like some cheesy early 90’s anime, which is… awesome. Richter looks exactly like Ryu from Street Fighter.

There were no cinematics like this in the port which is lame. You get one explanatory one if you wait at the start screen and another one at the very end and they aren’t nearly as impressive; they also lack dialogue but it’s not like I could understand it in Rondo anyway.

Once you start playing you immediately notice that everything’s different. A lot of the stuff is similar but they also changed A LOT of things. It’s like déjà vu. You’re in the same burning town with slouching skeletons attacking you but the background is less detailed. There are enemies you’ve never seen before and the entire level has been redesigned. At the end of the level in Rondo of Blood you fight a fire-breathing dragon. In the port you fight a fire-breathing cerberus panther thing. Why’d they change so much stuff?

Now the reason that Richter is in the castle is because his girlfriend and her sister, (who also bares a strong resemblance to another character,)

were abducted by Dracula. You can rescue them in both versions of the game, (albeit a completely different ordeal in each of them.) The thing about Rondo though is that you get the option to play as Maria which means throwing cats and birds at skeletons and bats. What’s stupid is that you can’t switch between characters except at a game over screen. It would be nice to just be able to switch characters any time for particular obstacles along the way but no. In Castlevania III you could switch between characters by just pressing “select.” But what was stupid about that was that the characters shared the same life bar. They’re not one person. They should have exclusive life bars.

I played Rondo on PC, not through an emulator which meant no save state. I was reduced to doing it the old fashioned shitty way that the game makers intended. AKA play the same thing over and over and over until every minute detail of the level has been burned into your mind before finally beating the boss and advancing. This is typical of every Castlevania game prior to SotN and it really irks me. You get three lives and as you go through a level there are a few check points that you can respawn at when you die. There’s always a checkpoint just before the level boss and however many lives you have left after the level is how many shots you have at killing the boss. Once you’re out of lives you have to start at the beginning of the level. Why do you have to do that? I already passed the level. I don’t want to do it again. It’s not fun to have to keep doing it over and over every time you come across some ludicrously difficult boss. It’s just fucking annoying and a waste of time. Shinobi on PS2 is one of the most difficult and cruel games I’ve ever played but even they had the sense to have infinite boss retries without having to play the whole level again. And It’s not like I just use save state to cheat in all the boss battles I just don’t want to replay the fucking level every time I fail.

There came a point where I couldn’t stand it anymore. Stage 6 was where I decided it would be much more fun to stop playing. The nice thing about the level is that there IS no level. It’s just a boss, or bosses. When you go into the room the dark priest Shaft is there… doing something. He disappears and then brings back the boss bat from the first Castlevania. Then you have to beat it. When he’s dead the medusa/gorgon thing from the first game appears. (They’re all from the first game.) After that, the mummy appears. I assumed this would be the last boss just because it’s the third one. I don’t know… It made sense to me. It took me like 20-30 tries to finally beat all three of them. When I did I was very pissed off to find that Frankenstein’s monster appeared and killed me. OK, so there are four bosses. You know, it’s kind of dumb that all these bosses are like 1930s Hollywood monsters. What the hell is Frankenstein’s monster even doing here? I thought this was DRACULA’S castle, not Dr. Frankenstein’s. Did Dracula kidnap him too? So like 15 tries later I beat him as well. Good, now I’m done. No, Shaft reappears and I die. What is this shit?! Will it ever fucking end? Putting two bosses in a row is a dick move unless one’s really weak, but five all in a row with no checkpoints? That’s completely unreasonable and logically you’d think Dracula would be even harder than that. Fuck this shit! Where are the cheats? Give them now!

There is only one cheat as far as I know. It gives you the ability to select any stage. So I go straight to Dracula and… it’s still not like the scenario in SotN at all. They both have floors, which is more than I can say for Dracula X. (Dracula’s actually harder in the port than in Rondo) Richter and Dracula don’t talk. It’s a lot harder than it was in the recap. Maria doesn’t come to save you if you die. (I realize this is a necessary change because it would be stupid to expect you to just beat Dracula first thing without a handicap.) There are moves that Richter can only do in SotN like running, twirling the whip and the slide kick that he can’t do in Rondo or its port.

After beating Rondo Dracula, (much easier that beating five fuckers in a row or that stupid room with all the pits in the port version), I came to three conclusions.

1. If you only played Rondo and then later played SotN, you’d be confused.

2. If you only played the port and then later played SotN, you’d be like “What the hell is this? I’ve never seen this before in my life.”

3. They really fucked up the port. How can they even call it a port when they changed nearly everything? Why would they EVEN change anything? It’s easy to just translate a game and do nothing else to it. Maybe the Super Nintendo wouldn’t be able to handle the cinematics/dialogue but why did they put so much effort into making everything else shitty? It’s mind-boggling. Well, it’s not like Dracula X was a terrible game but the game it’s supposedly ported from makes it look like a concept model. It’s like if Super Mario Brothers 3 was “ported” and you ended up with Super Mario Brothers. It just removed a whole other dimension for no reason.

From top to bottom: Dracula X, Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, Symphony of the Night

Whatever happened to consistency?

Keepsake

Typically I would just pirate an adventure game. The problem I have with buying them is that they have no replay value and then you get instant buyer’s remorse from shelling out $35 for eight hours of puzzles. But there is always an exception. I bought a pack of five Adventure Company games at Walmart on closeout for only seven dollars; no doubt a goldmine of anatomically questionable characters, uncomfortable voice acting and half-assed cut scenes. In the pack where Dead Reefs, Nibiru, Keepsake, Tunguska and Mysterious Island. Nibiru and Tunguska look more like my kind of thing but I hate to do the best things first so I pick something that looks about medium to me…

Keepsake is a point-and-click adventure that is fantasy based, (AKA badly integrated puzzles.) You play as a girl going to the Dragonvale Academy to learn magic as well as meet up with a long unseen childhood friend, Celeste. When you get there, you find the doors locked shut and all the students and faculty missing. And that’s the main deal, trying to figure out where everyone is.

The only person you get to interact with, other than the peddler man outside, is actually a wolf that you find locked up in a cage. You set him free and then he explains that he’s actually a juvenile dragon but some students turned him into a wolf as a prank. Note: He’s really an ugly dork human. He serves as your guide throughout the game.

The academy is ridiculously enormous and somewhat difficult to navigate even with a map. At some point you get involved with these convoluted networks of color coded warp pads. For the most part it’s useful but what’s with this?

What the hell is the point of this hub? Do people just feel like stopping mid warp to be trapped in here? What am I going to do here? Just take me where I want to go.

Also, one thing you’ll notice is the thousands of dragons decorating every room. I realize it’s Dragonvale Academy but this just makes me want to puke. They’ve got dragons up the ass. They’re on doors, the floor, the wall, lights, chairs, tapestries, books, statues, fountains, windows and virtually everything else.

For being a game with practically two people in it there’s a hell of a lot of dialogue. You can’t find a new puzzle without asking a stupid question and sparking a ten minute long conversation about what that funny glowy thing is. Sometimes you’ll just be walking along and suddenly someone will spontaneously make some sort of horribly introspective remark and voila; you’re not playing a game anymore.
This ghost appears later and you have to talk to it… unfortunately. He talks slower than my grandpa. Luckily It gives you the option to fastforward through dialogue. I can read his entire box of text before he finishes the first syllable. I’m not even exaggerating.

The puzzles in the game are pretty calibrated to my fancy. They aren’t so easy that I feel like I’m playing a game for three-year-olds and they aren’t so hard that I feel retarded. There’s also a hint system with three different degrees of information divulged and even an instant solution button for candy-ass gamers. (Yes I used it.) However, toward the end of the game, the puzzles really began to turn to shit.

Solarium Puzzle

In this puzzle you’re supposed to grow three specific plants in the school solarium. The solarium has a device that allows you to choose what season you want it to be inside of it. The season dictates which plants you can grow in the three pots. Each season has about five different plants associated with it and some of them overlap into other seasons. The first problem with this puzzle is the tapestry that supposedly tells you what plants you need in which pots. I thought I screen captured it but I guess not. But I swear to you that the puzzle will be easier for you having not seen it.

The second problem is the plants. Every time you cycle from one plant to another it has to go through an extremely tedious 10 second animation where the plant you were on shrinks back into its seed and then the next plant slowly grows in its place. You just want to get from plant A to plant E but you have to pay witness to everything in between as it waxes and wanes.

The third problem is the location of the season control for the solarium. Please take note using this helpful map…
Why didn’t they just put the controls in the next county… or South China? Not only does this not make any sense from a gaming standpoint, it doesn’t make any sense from a school construction standpoint. It would be like putting the light switch for the principal’s office on the roof of the gym, or having to go to the baseball field to flush the faculty toilet. It’s a two minute trip from the solarium, (where you cycle the plants), to the stupid controls, (where you cycle the seasons.) Assuming you start at the solarium and know exactly what you’re doing and where you're going, it can’t take any shorter than six minutes to complete the puzzle. That will never happen of course. Imagine just trying to get your bearings on the effects of the various seasons. Cycling through all seasons and plants takes about 16-18 minutes. And you haven’t even started trying to solve the puzzle yet. I could overlook the distance factor if they just had a warp pad going between them but no, the school contractor thought it would be much more useful to have a warp pad that teleports you three feet to a hub where your only choice is to continue teleporting on the same color pad.

Telescope Puzzle

This puzzle is not only overly complicated but very time consuming as well. You’re supposed to enter in each row and column of numbers in the box into the weird gyroscope to look at things in the telescope… I guess. You do that by fiddling with the individual rings. Each ring moves corresponding numbers in a certain way. Each time you press a ring you are subjected to a long-ass animation of the thing twirling around. You may have figured it out but now you have to sit there for an hour entering numbers. What’s the point of making you do the same thing 12 times? After 20 minutes of lining up coordinates for the telescope and not even being half way done, I was ready to press the instant solution button, (and I did.)

Forge Puzzle

This third puzzle is the worst of all puzzles. It’s defective. You get this thing…

Then later you go to a forge and there’s this puzzle with corresponding characters. Obviously since it’s a forge you’re going to enter the word ‘fire’ right?

Wrong. Nothing happened. I spelled ‘earth’ and ‘wind’ too but still nothing. I was going to try ‘water’ too but I couldn’t quite get it. Every button you press makes the surrounding buttons alternate to the opposite of what they just were, so it’s not like you can just punch it in like a typewriter. Naturally I’m stumped because there’s no other logical solution. So I press the instant solution button and turns out the answer is this…

Now I’m even more confused. That sequence isn't even on the legend. Why the hell would I ever enter that sequence? Is there some other legend that I was supposed to be going off of? I looked at three different walkthroughs on the internet and they all said fire was the answer but you were supposed to spell it like what the solution button had rendered. Then I noticed that each symbol on the legend corresponds to a specific letter in the alphabet. In other words it's not just a pretty picture. Each sequence of symbols translates directly and actually spells out one of the four elements. Going back to the solution that everyone agreed on but me. The symbol sequence for the game’s solution was five characters long. The word ‘fire’ is of course four characters long so those symbols *can’t* mean fire. In fact if you translate it it says ‘whfra’ which doesn’t mean shit. I kept looking at walkthroughs and finally found this picture.

Well that corresponds with *my* answer but this is for a different version of the game. I can’t even recognize the language that it’s in. So maybe I have some kind of screwed up hybrid. But then why is it still able to spell ‘fire’ in the English version?

So after entering in WHFRA like it wanted, the puzzle unlocked and then the camera cut out to a wider angle. Then, just for one last kick in the crotch it does this…

IT FUCKING SWITCHED BACK TO FIRE, MY ORIGINAL ANSWER. Thus my brain exploded and I had to be hospitalized. The end.

Nocturne

Nocturne is an action adventure game with a horror twist. It plays a lot like Alone in the Dark IV. That includes the terrible fixed camera angles. The plot is that it’s the 1930’s and you are an agent working for an agency that deals with paranormal occurrences. It’s kind of like Hellboy or Vanhelsing.

You play as “Stranger.” Quite possibly the most awesome videogame character in existence.

He’s like a cross between Sam Fisher and Agent K, only with a broken grumpiness inhibitor.

The game is broken up into four parts which you can play in any order, but the overall story still make the most sense when you do them in numerical order. The controls suck, but I blame myself for part of that. I spent probably half an hour trying to calibrate a controller to it but got mixed results. Eventually I settled on a semi-custom keyboard and mouse. I also put autoaim on because the camera makes it hard enough.

Part I: Dark Reign of the Vampire King
Monsters: Werewolves/Vampires

You’re sent to this little town in Germany, to deal with the reappearance of werewolves in the area. Before that though, you have to go through this long tedious debriefing at HQ. You get paired up with a female dhampir named Svetlana. I went through the talking with every character and got some weapons. I headed to the door to leave with Svetlana following me and, much to my annoyance, became trapped between her and the wall. She wouldn’t fucking move, so I had to restart. This is a theme that happens occasionally throughout the game and the funny thing is that you don’t even need a retarded NPC to do it. You can get permanently lodged in between two grave markers or stuck on a chain link fence all by yourself.

Once you actually get to play, the game is just OK. I was turned off by most of the combat in the town and the castle. It’s hard to see what you’re doing when you’re in a mess of buildings or a narrow corridor with a bunch of doors and then you have something the size of a horse flying directly above you that you need to shoot but isn‘t even on screen. Also a lot of the levels are huge and elaborate which is typically good. But you’ll think you’ve been everywhere and you still can’t figure out how to progress. Then you find that you were supposed to go through some tiny alley that’s completely obscured from your vision by the shitty camera angle.

However, the forest in between the castle and town is awesome. You go in at night during a thunderstorm knowing it’s infested with werewolves. For a long time nothing happens. You find a wrecked carriage with a dead horse and you can see the wolves sometimes moving around behind trees in the dark. Then suddenly, without warning, you get gang raped by like five of them at once. So with that in mind, the level is still good.

Part II: Tomb of the Underground God
Monsters: Werewolves/Zombies/Insect Hellspawn

This is how the whole game should have been. You start out on a train that gets attacked by vengeful werewolves from part I. This doesn’t seem to be much of a problem considering that for every one time you get clawed by a werewolf you’ll fall off the train and die about 15 times.

So you make it to your real mission which has to do with a western ghost town overrun by zombies. Well, a few people still live there actually. You have to find the remaining townsfolk and take them to the church. This didn’t really make much sense to me because if the dead are rising, why would you want to be in a building that’s nestled in a cemetery? Typically I absolutely hate escort missions but at some point while leading an inbred she-beast in a muumuu and her American Gothic of a husband through a field while fending off curious zombie cows with an axe, I decided that this is actually the most fun I’ve had playing a videogame in a while.

Of course it wasn’t without it’s problems. I kept on getting shotgun shells but I never actually found a damn shotgun. This was also a problem in the castle in part I. I found a ton of wooden stakes and bolts but no crossbow. It wasn’t until the end of the level where I had basically eliminated every possible location and then decided to backtrack outside the castle to see if I could find it out there. When you first get to the castle you go one of two ways through a bunch of ruins before reaching the door. I chose the left which happened to be the way in. The right path goes to the crossbow. After accessing the castle I completely forgot about anything outside. If I’m already in the castle, what reason do I have to back out and snoop around some more ruins? There’s also a critical melee weapon that you can’t win without located in the same area. If I had gone into the dungeon without finding that, I would have been screwed because there’s no way out of there.

Part of the problem is that I either think too much or I think opposed to what I’m supposed to. At one of the houses in town I found a cellar in the backyard. My thought was that there were survivors inside and I needed to get the door open. When you try to open it, Stranger says it’s locked and he can’t break it down with the axe. Then I think, what *can* break it down? I found a box of explosives right inside the house and stuck it in front of the door, which was at the bottom of some stairs going into the ground like a bunker. I spent quite a while trying to find an angle I could shoot it from without blowing myself up. There isn’t one. I took it to a boarded-up mine and tried it there. I survived the blast but nothing happened to the door. Flustered, I went to the church and was told there were kids in the cellar and that they’d only open with a special knock. After I saved them, one kid opens the mine for me. Well, what the hell? Why were the explosives there? It’s like they just put it there to confound me and waste my time.

Deep in the mine there are a bunch of chambers where you have to find various stones and get past simple traps. At least they would be simple if they didn’t usually require you to jump over something. Stranger jumps like a blind kangaroo on PCP. He jumps too far. He jumps crooked. He jumps twice? They’re in absolutely no position to make this into a platformer with these godawful controls.

Part III: Windy City Massacre
Monsters: Zombie Mobsters with Tommyguns (You heard me.)

This is where the shit hit’s the fan. You go to Chicago to stop Al Capone from continually raising his dead mobsters back to life as zombies. The entire city is plagued with these assholes. They’re on top of roofs and riding around in cars. They’re constantly shooting at you and there’s almost nowhere you can go where they can’t hit you. Going back to the camera angles, this is where it becomes absolutely crippling. The fixed camera system works well for enhancing horror; not so well for a fucking gun fight. Imagine that you’re playing Grand Theft Auto and you just pissed off about 30 triads and you can’t get off their turf. They respawn. They’re on top of every building and you can only actually see about two of them at a time because the rest are shooting at you from off screen and there’s nothing you can do about it. You have to run around the city lost, all the while being hit by bullets. It’s not fun at all. It’s just horribly annoying. And it only gets worse when you have to escort a slow-ass guy all the way across town.

At the end of the level you have to blow up the zombie factory and escape while it’s exploding around you. The explosions cut off your escape if you‘re one second too slow. If that wasn’t bad enough, dozens of new machinegun-wielding zombies suddenly just appear where there were none before. If you touch any fire at all, even the slightest, you die; because your trench coat is made of papier mache drenched in kerosene.

Part IV: The house on the Edge of Hell
Monsters: Everything

The title is slightly misleading. The house isn’t actually on the edge of hell. The house *is* hell. It makes Windy City Massacre look perfectly delightful. The pretense is that the owner of the house calls you there to deal with a manifestation of paranormal shit in his graveyard. You can kill the imps but the skeletons just come back. At least they’re slow. The first puzzle involves searching the monsters for stolen crypt keys. Supposedly there are three keys but I only found two. I opened two crypts and then had to find two crosses of certain shapes to put inside them. One looked like an Egyptian ankh. That one was easy to get because there’s only one in the whole yard. The other one was a generic Christian cross which is everywhere. I don’t know how long I spent trying to locate every single one, thoroughly checking them all and attempting to jump to ones near impossible to get to or just impossible to get to. It was a long time. After reading some extremely vague walkthroughs, I found it.

Not this one.

Not this one.

Not this one.

Not this one.

Not these.

Not this one.

It's actually this one. See it? Isn't it so obvious? They all look exactly the same! What difference does it make if I use this ugly cement cross or that ugly cement cross?!

After that, I was in no mood to go find a fucking key that probably landed somewhere on the ground in between two camera shots and underneath a bunch of dismembered imp flesh chunks. So I used the skeleton key cheat.

After some more retarded crap, you figure out that it was all an incredibly aggravating ruse to get you to drop by and then the guy knocks you out. You wake up in a torture chamber and then…

Hello Stranger. I want to play a game. How many monsters have you killed working for Spookhouse? A thousand? Ten-thousand? Did you ever stop to consider the baby orphan werewolves? Or think that maybe Al Capone was running a legitimate business? A zombie, no matter how brain dead, can still value life. You, however, only destroy life. You have two options: play the most terribly convoluted, confusing and unfair level ever designed or suicide. If you chose death, the device in the corner will twist your body in half in approximately ten minutes while grinding your face off with rusty forks. Make your choice.

So you’re in this guy’s huge mansion which consists of nothing but monsters and deathtraps. It’s actually a lot like Saw II or Cube. You go from room to room to see what horrible bullshit you have to face next. Probably about 90% of the traps are impossible to not get killed by the first time. And even after that you have to figure out the right path, or the correct switch, or the right combination. It’s always, step in the wrong place; you die. Press the wrong button; you die. Open the wrong door: you die. Wrong room: you die. Too slow; you die. Touch something; you die. You cough; you die. Do anything; you die. You’re constantly being electrocuted, shot, burned and drowned. You fall in pits, get attacked by shit flying out of the wall and things crushing you from the ceiling. It’s fucking ridiculous. You can’t go ten seconds without being impaled or getting assaulted with full frontal nudity.

How ‘bout some fireplay, bitch.

These aren’t the kind of traps that make you feel smart once you get past them. It’s nothing but endless trial and error drudgery. It really wears on your nerves after a while. All of your weapons are gone and after about an hour of nothing but melee battles with zombies, electrocution and hundreds of doors that don‘t lead anywhere in an overwhelmingly large house, I decided I shouldn’t have to play fair anymore and used the all guns/ammo cheat.

The fuck is this shit?

There is an overall series of puzzles you have to solve and keys you have to get to finally get to the guy responsible. You eventually meet another agent that was imprisoned in the house and you basically get him to kill him. He tells you meet him in the guy’s control room on the third floor. What a brilliant idea! Don’t you think if I knew where his fucking control room was, I would have already killed him? And telling me to go somewhere on the third floor is about as specific as telling me to meet you at 'a bar' in New Jersey. Anyway, you kill him and win. Then you get emotional and weepy from the shell shock.

The ending leads you to believe that there will be a sequel. It’s been ten years and there still hasn’t been one. Had this game been executed better, it would probably be in my top ten favorites. If only parts three and four never existed. If and when the sequel happens, I’m going to have to check it out.

Kodomo No Jikan

This show is retarded… Though I knew I would hate it from square one. The plot is centered around this wuss teacher that just started teaching a third grade classroom at a new school. Actually I think it’s his first time teaching ever. So naturally the students walk all over him for about the first half of the series and then it becomes slightly lessened. The other main characters are these three school girls…
This whore, who flat out asks the teacher to do her. (I’m not even exaggerating.) Sixty percent of her is made of hair. She’s the main girl and “love interest.” Keep in mind that she’s in 3rd grade. The whole show is based on this fucked up relationship that can’t happen. The whole point is that the girl wants to go out with the teacher and the teacher is trying to keep her at arm’s length and himself out of trouble.

This violent dyke bitch. She has a crush on Whore because apparently there was some mandate in Japan recently put into effect that requires all anime to contain pointless homosexual themes. She wears the stupidest shit to school.

Who would have not just one but two sets of different ears? Are the black ears her formal ears? A polka-dot bowtie? And a parasol? Really? This is why schools have uniforms. Kids are too fucking retarded to dress themselves. She’s verbally and physically abusive to the teacher, basically making her one of the worst characters ever. On multiple occasions she kicks him hard in the crotch. I don’t know what the deal is at *this* school but where I come from if you pull that shit once you’re gone. Dyke is conflicted with being secretly in love with Whore and Whore being in love with the teacher.

These huge glasses. She’s the normal nice one. The only point of her existing is so people like me have a non-shitty character to identify with.

So on the new teacher’s first day he walks into his homeroom only to find that all the girls in his class are changing clothes there. Why they don’t change in the locker room is a mystery. Maybe it’s a special ed classroom? Whore of course doesn’t mind being seen nude by anyone at any time. Though at first she’s apprehensive about him but 15 minutes later she wants to have his children. Queue the NSFW comments and sexual harassment. The worst part of this is the teacher’s stupid reactions. Sometimes he’ll get mad and chase her. Sometimes he’ll just blush and stammer. There are never any consequences for anything. Everyone’s free to kick or fondle his crotch at their discretion. In reality he should just tell her to shut the fuck up or go see the principal.

There is a female teacher that is meant to be the obviously reasonable choice in relationships. Whore is jealous of her because she not only detracts attention from her but is superior in every way. Though every time they plan on doing something together he always runs off like a dumbass. And it’s always because of Whore. They’re about to leave to go drinking and he’ll go, “Hey, who’s that? Is that Whore? What’s she doing? Looking out of a window? Awesome! I’m so there!” Then he’ll amble away with no explanation at all to his date about where he’s going or what the fuck he’s doing.

After a while Whore becomes a clingy stalker. The teacher finally sets her straight on the *I‘m going to prison if you continue to touch me* issue. Of course she doesn‘t care. She gets pissed off and mopey when anyone sees her for what she really is; a manipulative child and an asshole. Yes you’re a kid; deal with it.

Later she decides to dress up like a boy because she notices that boys get to crawl all over him during recess. So she dyes her hair black and shoves it into the back of her shirt to make it look shorter. Apparently there is some sort of wormhole in her shirt that leads to an alternate dimension because I think her extra 30 pounds of hair would be impossible to hide otherwise, even without the eight stupid croquet balls attached to it. The guise only lasts for a little while until she finds that she’s to girly to take being thrown about and shoved in the mud. Awesome! If only she could be trampled to a bloody pulp it would be perfect.

Everything else is just the teacher enduring horrible punishments from Dyke and Whore.
Oh boy, I really want to start a serious relationship with a 3rd grader that shoves me in the pool and ties me to a railing.

Where exactly do you buy lingerie for children?

Whore’s home life kind of sucks. Her Father left after a divorce and her mother died of cancer. The person that takes care of her is her… cousin? No, it was her mom’s cousin. So what the hell does that make them? Anyway, he was there for some reason and her mom was raising both of them. Or maybe he just lived with them. They really didn’t explain this shit well enough. But the point I want to make is that the cousins were screwing behind Whore’s back. Her mom’s dying wish was that he ‘protect’ her. He brings this wish to fruition like he was a robot with a single prime directive, letting everything else fall by the wayside. He’s very overprotective but for some reason it only becomes apparent in the last two episodes. You also find out that they sleep in the same bed.

They never give any evidence of molestation. Not that it matters anyway. We’re all just victims of society and shitty parenting so it vindicates us of perpetuating the terrible behavior, right?

The ending was predictable; the classic NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS ending. Really, what did you expect? Teacher and student running away to live on an island together? At least one thing was realistic.

Don't stand so close to me.