The PSP sucks. Like Nintendo consoles since the dawn of the Gamecube, it has fostered nothing but a gaping void in its library where all of the good/interesting games should be. Practically half of its games seem to be Japan release only. It only has one joystick which essentially means every single 3D game is going to have a shitty camera in it. The battery power light sits under where my thumb sits on the button so I never see it change and then it just shuts off abruptly without warning. It’s a victim of Sony’s bullshit proprietary media conspiracy. If you want to have any reasonable amount of memory space on the damn thing, you have to spend upwards of $75 on a Memory Stick Duo Pro, (those memory cards that are used in… nothing else, maybe some kind of shitty Sony camera?) Nevermind that the PSP should have at least some built-in memory. It’s completely idiotic to have to buy a component separately that’s required for the device to function and at that price it’s almost like buying a second fucking PSP. Or you can just buy a Micro SD and put it in a Memory Stick adapter like I did for less than half the price. See, if Sony had a non astronomical price point for their presumably diamond-plated memory cards, I would have just bought one. Now since they left me no alternative they get none of my money because they are fucking greedy dumbasses. I mean they’re not even TRYING to be competitive with their prices. They’re just raping you straight in the eye.
All of that being said, HOLY FUCK DOES IT EMULATE! That is the ONLY reason and a damn good one to get a PSP. Because of the things it does that the company never intended it to do.
I finally got around to playing Patapon, not really knowing what to expect. It actually has the unique concept of being a rhythm real time strategy game. That’s weird. You control a tribe of little warrior guys called patapons by beating orders to them with a drum.
The most annoying aspect of this game is how fucking demanding it is on your attention. The volume has to be on. You need to be constantly engaged with the beat and giving orders to keep your combo going or you lose it and the amount of damage you do is greatly lessened until you can build it back up again. There’s no time to think or scratch your ass and there’s no pause button either. Even Guitar Hero has a pause. A big part of being a portable game is ease of access. In any other game I’ve played, I can find a nice spot in a level and put the PSP in sleep mode. Then when I come back, I can just pick up from there as if I never left. But Patapon doesn't play that shit. You need a solid uninterrupted block of time in the hyperbolic time chamber with no distractions. I have a wife, a two-year-old, a dog, school and a job. I can’t just tell it all to shut the fuck up because I’m trying to play Patapon.”
Whenever circumstances force me to put the game down, I usually just find myself quitting the level. I was mid battle and I just threw away my frenzy by stopping. If I put it in sleep and come back, I’ve lost all of my momentum and I’m just going to have to pick up the beat again and try to dig myself out of the shitty situation I created, (sometimes hopelessly) so what’s the point? Just start over again. All because of a momentary falter in my concentration.
The warriors are all blithering imbeciles. A single ordinary enemy melee guy can take out an entire unit of spear guys without taking a hit simply because spear guys are too retarded to use spears for close range or melee attacks. He’ll just stand there hacking away at them and they won’t lift a finger in self defense. It’s like in chess if you have a pawn and a knight next to each other. The pawn can attack the knight but the knight can’t do shit to the pawn until it backs up a couple of spaces. (Is that right? I’ve never played chess.)
Your infantry guys are just suicidal and are typically the first to die. Although half of the time they’re just used for blocking. The rangers hang out in the back, shooting arrows in a big arc over the rest of your guys. They’re last to die and also incapable of defending themselves at close range. They’re always falling in and out of range of the enemy and constantly have to move to set up again only to find that the enemy has since moved again and they must set up again elsewhere. God help you if all you have left is your rangers and they’re up against one last infantry guy who just strolls back and forth. These are the moments that you just want to put the game down and go get a drink or get on the internet while the rangers are dicking around but you can’t. You have to stay there and beat the fucking drum while two equally moronic parties scroll back and forth across the screen until chaos theory allows enough accidental arrow strikes to cause death. The only control you have over the situation is to just keep telling them to attack.
The horse guys do fuckall as far as I can tell so I never used them. I never even recruited any of the lumbering tank guys. My favorite though is the Megapons. They strut around with these sousaphone instruments and when they play them, it launches weird symbols or sounds that crash into the enemy. It looks like you’re hurling obscenities at them.
There are three types of levels; hunting, battle ground and boss. Hunting is easiest to survive. The objective is to just kill as much wild game as you can before they have a chance to run away. Infantry units are counter productive in these scenarios because they just chase animals away. Battles are the most fun because you’re just going through, mowing down fortified defenses and killing the evil bizzaro patapons. I really hated boss fights at first. Typically bosses telegraph their attacks to you by assuming a specific posture indicative of what they will do next. Maybe it’s about to slam the ground and you need everyone to jump back to evade it. Or maybe it’s best to just block whatever it is. What’s particularly annoying is that it takes four beats to input a command and then some for your guys to carry out the command, meaning there’s a humongous latency of four to six beats between each complete action your guys do. Way too often you don’t have enough time to finish the evade or block command before the attack hits you. You have to just follow the pace of the game’s beat regardless of how out of sync you may be with the boss. You might start putting in the attack command and then immediately see the boss assume his attack posture. Now just accept the fact that you’re going to get clobbered and can’t do anything about it because there’s not enough time to put in another command. Maybe if you act really quick, you can abandon your previous command and put in a new one but then you lose your combo which makes everything take longer. Either way it blows and there really isn’t much you can do about it except play extremely defensive/paranoid.
There are various things that you need to collect on certain levels like a catapult to attack a castle or a new command that lets you beat another level. On one level you need to call rain down from the sky to cross the scorching desert. And let me tell you about that fucking rain. You need it but they don’t tell you where you can get the command for it. You have to do the beat written on this random totem in a random level. Then you get the “Dom” drum which just means that you can use the X button to drum now. Then it teaches you the sequence to call rain which is “X,X,X,X,X” Seeing that written out makes absolutely no fucking sense in a musical scenario. Its like me telling you to sing that one song that goes “dun dun dun dunnnn dun dun dun dun dun dun dunnnn.” The beat in the game is always 4/4 time. (It’s kind of hard to waltz into battle.) There are five notes to activate rain or whatever power so you can sort of deduce that at least two of the notes in “X,X,X,X,X” are going to have to be eighth notes or offbeats. But that doesn’t really help much. Do you know how many different ways there are to shove five notes in a 4/4 measure? A lot. On top of that, you can only enter it while in a frenzy. So in order to try to enter it just once, you have to string together a ten measure combo prior. If you fail to start the rain, start over from the beginning and try a different way. But that’s only half of it. After you successfully get a frenzy and then enter the command correctly, you have to do a simon says minigame where you copy the beats on screen to build rain clouds. After that sequence, you automatically lose your frenzy because you don’t know when the regular in-game beat is going to start again so you miss it. Then finally it rains. You have to do this every time you want to use a juju. Gee, I don’t think this is as convoluted, annoying and cryptic as it could be. Do you think there’s any way we can do it while balancing spinning plates and walking on an invisible tightrope in a wind tunnel?
I don’t feel like strategizing a lot of the time. If I come across something difficult, I’m probably more likely to just throw more guys at it than think about a strategy. That’s what General Ulysses S. Grant would do and he seems cool. sometimes you just need more powerful guys but there’s a limited number you can have of each type. You can’t make more powerful ones until you get rid of older shitty ones to clear space. I couldn’t figure out how to do this for a long time until I finally looked it up on the internet. You have to select the guy and press select to retire him. Select is clearly labeled on the screen as “Quit” AKA having nothing to do with it’s actual function. Except in that screenshot from the internet that I posted, it says "retire." Do I have a defective version of the game or something? No wonder I couldn't figure it out.
During levels, you can find weapons, shields, money and raw materials which are all typically dropped by stronger enemies. The problem is when you’re facing a horde of enemies and you kill one, you can’t get whatever it dropped until you clear the other enemies out of the way. Items disappear after a certain amount of time and that time is often too short so it will be gone by the time you get there. One of the stupidest cliches in video games is when shit disappears when you put it down or don’t pick it up in time. How many times have you accidentally thrown something on the ground in Harvest Moon instead of handing it to your girlfriend and then it vanishes into thin air? It’s such a fucking pointless mechanic and why would you even design it like that except to be an asshole? There should be one scenario where something is allowed to disappear: magic. Did a wizard magic that shield away to an alternate dimension? If the answer is no, then it needs to fucking stay on the ground until someone picks it up, like in reality.
Other than better equipment, the materials you find are basically what you use to upgrade your patapons. Each warrior type takes two specific object types and some money to create. The better the objects, the better the warrior but also the higher the cost, (and it goes up fast.) Money does not accumulate fast enough during the natural progression of the game so when I get to a certain spot that needs more warriors to get past, I end up having to grind for cash at the hunting grounds so I can make them. It actually gives you instructions on how to grind as a tip. This aspect could have been a lot less annoying if I could sell raw materials for cash but you can’t for some reason. You can’t sell your materials or even your old shitty equipment and as a result I have rare materials up the ass but I can’t do anything with them because I don’t have enough money to craft them.
There are some mini games where you can gamble, (or throw away in the toilet,) a material that you can’t use to win a better material that you can’t use. I’ve unlocked four of them and they all seem to be simon says type games. The one with the Bonbon tree, or whatever it is, is pretty easy. The xylophone in the rock baby’s toes; not so much. The biggest problem with it is that I can’t fucking hear it. The music is too overbearing and makes it nearly inaudible. I seriously have to turn the volume all the way up if I want any chance of picking up the xylophone tones. The metallurgy anvil one I tried once. Then I stopped because I didn’t feel like chucking away a bunch of rare shit just so I could learn the game well enough to be successful at it. For the cooking one, I was never even able to find whatever material they wanted so I was never able to play it. But rest assured, If I ever come across whatever apparently ultra rare material it requires, I’ll be first in line to piss it away on your undoubtedly contrite cooking minigame.
