First impressions of Blizzard's polarizing new game

Saying first impressions is a bit deceptive because I have actually beaten Diablo III on normal already, but I'm not in the mindset to review the game. I'm moving through nightmare difficulty with my first character, a demon hunter, and going through it the first time with my second character, a wizard. I've certainly been enjoying D3, but it has some flaws. Knowing Blizzard, they'll be updating the game bit by bit for years to come alongside an inevitable expansion pack or two, but saying this does not negate any current problems.

For now I'll briefly mention some of the main things that stood out to me. I think the game's interface has been improved and streamlined considerably from D2's, making for a smoother experience while removing some annoyances that just plain weren't fun. Health globes and more readily available resources to use skills keep the action flowing much more so than the game's predecessors. I like that I can customize my characters' skills anytime, allowing me to try new things and find combinations that work well rather than feeling nervous about every precious point I received to allocate in D2. My characters feel like they're powerful, able to handle the onslaught of foes before them, and this is a good feeling.

Now for a few things I don't care so much for. I don't particularly like that D3 is even more gear dependent than D2, although this isn't as big of hit against the game as it would be if this is something I'd merely heard before actually playing it. The auction house is certainly something I'm ambivalent to at best. What really annoys me though is that it must be played online even if I'm playing single player (which is how I play it), although this is something I knew about well in advance and prepared myself for.

Those are my first impressions in short. I have more I could add on what has been mentioned so far, but I'm holding off at least for now. Overall though I definitely like the game, but I am beginning to see why it has become very polarizing among its' players. I've heard from many people who really like the game and probably from even more who definitely do not. With the fame of D2 to live up to, it's understandable how the game is bringing out strong feelings.

A Diablo of a finer vintage

I admit I was pretty hard on Diablo (henceforth D1 with similar abbreviations, etc.) in my earlier post on it, especially because it was a game that very adeptly mixed many different types of gameplay for its time. The main thing I was getting at was despite this the game has not aged well and the biggest reason why is its sequel did so much to improve the formula that it made it difficult to go back to its predecessor. High praise for Diablo II actually. A more factual tidbit to support this praise is that to this day D2 remains on many top 10 lists for PC games and after 12 years it is still readily available pretty much anywhere that sells computer games. Outside of another of Blizzard's prize stallions, Starcraft, this is unprecedented.

It maintains the addictive mix of exploring, killing evil things and finding loot that D1 had and improves substantially on the formula. In D1, there's one small town and one very deep dungeon (essentially), but D2 is composed of four acts plus a fifth with an expansion and besides Act IV they are each individually larger in scope than the entire first game. The first major addition is the over world of large open areas to venture into the countryside, finding both essential and optional dungeons to explore along the way. Instead of painfully plodding along you can now run, moving faster from place to place and in combat situations. While I normally wouldn't count running as a big advancement for a game (I would think it'd be a given actually), it does wonders to improve upon D1. D2's predecessor, as I mention in my overview of it, was not only slow but extremely restrictive to move around in and this hampered gameplay significantly. No longer are enemies that can teleport or run away the bane of my character's existence; yes they still exist and are annoying, but they don't stop the game from being fun.

On the topic of fun, another big difference is the diverse number of ways the game can be played. In D1, the classes respectively specialized in melee combat, ranged combat and magic, but basically they could all do the same things (a warrior could use magic, a sorcerer could wield swords). The main thing separating them was their attributes affecting how well they could do various actions. D2 vastly improves on this by offering five classes, plus two with the expansion, that are vastly different from each other. Each have their own unique abilities and beyond that, their skills can individually be customized in many different ways. The sorceress for example has skill trees for fire, ice and lightning spells and generally players who use her will want to focus on specific spells within two of the three skill trees, but if you want to be creative it's possible to use all three or just specialize in one (although I wouldn't recommend it for higher difficulties).

I chose barbarian this time around because it's the only class I haven't bothered to go through the game with. Now having done so, I can't say I regret my decision to ignore him. It wasn't difficult to take him through normal, but I found him very dull compared to the other classes. His is a very gear-dependent class and one problem I have with D2 is when the right gear becomes necessary for a character to advance. Now when I say the right gear I don't mean the crap the NPC merchants sell or the majority of what enemies you kill drop, I mean stuff you have to be very vigilant or lucky to find. I don't want to run a section of the game ad nauseam, fighting other players on who can click on the good loot drops first (if playing with others), to advance. Now my barbarian had a bit of an inferiority complex to my Act II mercenary for most of the game and even though completing the game wasn't really a problem, I felt weaker than I should have for most of it. I'm not sure how many other players share my feelings on this, but as someone who has only intermittently played the game I've often felt very outclassed when it comes to gear. Even though it's meant to be a loot-driven game, there's something about how the formula actually works that I've never been happy about.

Like D1, D2 certainly looked good for its time and to this day its' relatively detailed sprites give it strong visuals and art direction. I'm not the biggest fan of rendered graphics, which is what Blizzard used for both D1 and D2 along with Starcraft. For those who don't know, rendered graphics involves first making a 3D model of something like a character and then creating a 2D sprite of that model. It allows the game to display an approximation of the 3D model without causing the demand to actually render it. Rare of old had considerable success with this for the Donkey Kong Country games on the Super Nintendo. The Golden Sun games on the Game Boy Advance also made passable use of the technique. Although as I said I'm not big on this method in general, Blizzard is certainly experienced at rendered graphics and D2 may be the game that used them best.

When it comes to sound, D2 is again very similar to D1 with largely atmospheric background noise and music belittled by the number of whacks, spell flinging and groans you are more likely to hear. The amount of character dialogue is considerably increased and this is welcome. Besides Deckard Cain and very occasionally the witch Adria, nobody in D1 had much that was terribly interesting to hear. Plenty of new characters occupy D2's few safe havens and most have remarks to pass on about the world and the story, although I imagine most people completely bypass this section of the game.

Despite all the good, I'll admit I've grown a little tired with the game. I've played through it about four times with my favorite class, necromancer, and at least once now with all the others. However, the game has amazing replayability and even now I would still like to try out some of the available characters in different ways. It's just that I have to be in the right mood to play (same as everything really) and these moods are becoming more infrequent.

I am somewhat disappointed in Blizzard's present lack of support for the game on modern operating systems like Vista and Windows 7. Yes, the game is 12 years old and normally I'd give a developer a pass for not keeping a game up after so long, but D2 is still widely available in a battle chest where computer games are sold as I mentioned previously. I don't understand how they can continue to keep the game in stores but leave it a nightmare to get to work correctly on modern computers. Choosing to run it in compatibility mode didn't even begin to fix it for me or for many from what I've read. It took quite a bit of research to find a solution after going through multiple ways others used with the same operating system version as me.

Now that I'm finally finished with D2 I'll at long last be getting Diablo III. Hopefully my computer will be able to handle it well enough. I've been a bit torn between choosing the demon hunter or the wizard as my first character, so depending on how things go I'll post next weekend on my first impressions of the game.

Update on this blog thing

So it has been about a month and a half since I started 8-bit Smirk. I think it's been working out alright, although it feels like there's always so much I have to do and so much else I want to do. That's pretty typical though. I started the blog to essentially be a journal of sorts and in this respect it's been a success. Not so very long ago I had a friend tell me he wanted to start cutting gaming out of his life to focus on other pursuits, not least of all the noble goal of improving himself to be a more well rounded and knowledgeable person. I respect that decision, but it's not one I would ever see myself making. If this makes sense, removing gaming from my life would amount of removing much of me from myself. Gaming is more than just a hobby, it's one of the few things I have passion for and gives me motivation to deal with the things I don't want to be bothered with. More than that though, it is one of the things that defines me as a person. I am a writer, I am an outsider, and I am a gamer. For a more general defense of gaming, refer to my introductory post.

It often feels like there are so many games and so little time, especially when I think of big series I've yet to really explore like Mass Effect and Persona, and when it comes to writing this blog it seems like I'm always getting behind on what I'd like to get posted. That has particularly been the case for about a month now due to some major disruptions in my life. I had to change apartments and I have also been undergoing what I would term epic computer problems. Due to these things I was a bit scattered in what I felt like playing while my Diablo project fell by the wayside.

Recently I started a third character, a mage, in the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. While I liked playing from a new perspective, the character has been the most difficult to play as and so far the least enjoyable. I've played and beaten all the main Elder Scrolls games and I've never really enjoyed magic-using characters in the series, so it's nothing new for me. Eventually I want to do a whole writeup on Skyrim and really get into some details, but that time is not now. Perhaps sometime around when the first DLC, Dawnguard, is released. I will say at this time that the game will be a strong contender for one of my top favorite games ever, although that's a decision for after some time has passed.

When I am out and about on the weekend I typically like to keep a pick up and play sort of game with me, and for the last couple weeks that game has been Castlevania: Circle of the Moon in my trusty Game Boy Advance SP. Sometime I'd like to really write on the Castlevania series, which has many games that rank highly with me. Circle of the Moon is among this number and it's position has considerably improved over time. When it came out alongside the Game Boy Advance, the system it was designed for, played it in a way that was just barely visible. Every other system afterward that could play GBA games has been an improvement on visibility and this has helped the game greatly. It also has great replayability: I'm currently toward the end of my fourth playthrough. How the different unlocked modes switch up how the game plays offers some good variety. The player character, Nathan Graves, is also among my favorites of the series' vampire hunters. He has a great name, great look and he pretty much ignores the game's annoying rival character who eventually just ends up embarrassing himself basically. Anyway, great game.

I mentioned my Diablo project a bit ago, which I will be resuming where I left off at now that I have a computer I can use for it. First I will be completing Diablo 2, which I stopped playing shortly after the end of Act I when the epic problems began more than a month ago, and write a similar overview of my thoughts on it that I did for the first game. Don't worry, it'll be quite a bit more positive. The idea of the project was I fully go through D1 and D2 before finally getting to Diablo III. I'd intended to be ready for this eagerly anticipated game when it was released May 15, not a month later, but as Philip J. Fry once said: time makes fools of us all.

R-Type-ing

While I wouldn't say the side scrolling (or vertical) shooter genre is one of my favorites, it is one I have some nostalgia for. Within the genre itself there is no series this is truer for than R-Type. Super R-Type on the SNES was my introduction to the series, and an unforgiving introduction at that considering there are no midway checkpoints in the stages for when you die. I put R-Type Final in recently and started just messing around on my save with a completed ship library, but when it came to trying to get through some of the later levels in my unpractised state I decided I wasn't really in the mood for dying over and over to get good enough to proceed further. So I decided to move on to something else, and yet shortly afterward I found myself downloading R-Type III: The Third Lightning on the Wii's Virtual Console. Apparently I did feel like dying over and over in a game. Excessively so.

R-Type III is one of the few games I just gave up on trying to beat. I don't recall every game that would make this list, but Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage for the SNES is also a prime member of it. While I was able to complete R-Type III once upon a time by cheating basically, the thought of getting through the lava flow nightmare in the foundry level alone filled me with the gamer equivalent of mortal dread. I wouldn't say the game is my white whale, but it's within that ballpark. So anyway that's the game I decided to start up and within a 24-hour period I somehow managed to beat it. It was certainly a proud moment. I managed both forward and backwards through the lava flows, through the fifth level of corridors that morph into enemies, and then defeated what I'd previously believed to be a nightmarish final boss. Oh I died many, many times, but I persevered like a kid on the weekend without a single other thing to do. As epic as the final boss is it wasn't nearly as hard as I remember it. I think psychology played a role in that. To begin with things are pretty standard until you think you destroy it, blowing its limbs across the screen, but then you discover victory was premature as the limbs dart around trying to take revenge for the death of their body. Just as it starts to feel hopeless firing at the deadly limbs with a life of their own, you discover the final boss is still very much alive, tearing a dimensional hole in space as it chases after you. So yeah, epic.

To critique R-Type III a bit, it is a very strong entry in the series. Despite its brutal difficulty it at least is mostly generous when it comes to checkpoints and continuing. It has very nice looking sprites, a great soundtrack, and the controls are precise. The player's R-Type ship is a powerful little bastard and its available choice of three forces was the series' first attempt to offer some real variety in play style. As brutal as the game is, it would be impossible without the ship's extremely potent wave cannon.

After finishing the game I was still looking for more from the series, so I started on R-Type Delta, which is my favorite entry in all ways besides the massive number of playable ships in R-Type Final. Visuals and audio are both quite good, but the levels are where the game truly shines. There's something about them that is nostalgic yet fresh, exciting yet laced with atmosphere. You also get the chance to fight some really interesting things. It is R-Type though so of course it is hard, but unlike many other entries the difficulty rarely feels unfair, although there is a stretch of the fifth level that is absolutely brutal on any difficulty but easy. Years ago I had the game down very well and it was a learning process to get even close to my previous skill level, which unfortunately I don't think I was able to achieve. Excellent game though, one that is readily accessible through the Playstation Store.

My last real stop was a game I'd have my eye on for quite some time, R-Type Dimensions. The game, downloadable for the equivalent of $15 on Xbox Live Arcade, is both a faithful port and remake of the two arcade titles that started the entire series. Players can change at the press of a button anytime during gameplay between the original graphics or new 3D ones. However, even R-Type III has nothing on the difficulty of its arcade predecessors. These games were not just designed to take quarters, it seems like they were designed to take all the quarters and still leave you on a screen with a boss that just refused to let you kill it. Very fortunately, there is an unlimited lives mode where the only penalty is the depressing thought of just how many ships it takes to make it through the harder levels (essentially every level after the first or second stages). Instead of going back to a checkpoint a new ship immediately appears in this mode. While the control is precise for the ship, control of the force leaves a bit to be desired compared to later entries, but I suppose that's part of it being a faithful port. None of the music or sound effects were updated and although I wouldn't have said no to redone music, it's not something that bothered me. Something that does bother me are both included games' final bosses, which I guess technically glitch in unlimited lives mode if not killed quickly enough. These things were not meant to be fought without power ups and eventually they just kill you instantly over and over as new ships appear since they are unable to keep up as the difficulty of the fights escalate. Was R-Type Dimensions worth $15? Honestly, probably not, but despite that I'm glad I have access to it all.

So there you have it, my recent foray into my favorite shooter series. The mood to play R-Type will again someday rear its head out of the chest of Dobkeratops and when that day comes I will be ready to pilot an R-9 again.

Apparently monkey catching

Ape Escape 3 was my next miniature project following Klonoa and unlike Klonoa I'd been having it waiting in the wings for awhile since I purchased it used not very long ago. I haven't played Ape Escape 2 yet, but I did play the first and in general not much seems to have changed. That's not really a bad thing, although I can't say I particularly like the analog stick-focused gameplay. In a way that's saying a lot of my feelings for the game in a nutshell, because this type of gameplay is such a prominent feature of the game. However, despite not being very fond of the controls it was still more or less enjoyable. It's still fun to frantically run around catching or sneaking up on the game's monkeys with all the same gadgets.

One strong, positive feeling I have of the game is for the level design. The premise of the game is that monkeys are using TV to take over the world and put everyone into a trance. Levels the player visits are all movie sets responsible for the broadcasts. The number of genres and environments represented as well as references to specific movies and shows is staggering. While the individual levels each follow a sort of theme, even within individual levels there is a great deal of variety. An example is a level that starts off with kind of an Indiana Jones theme in sort of a rugged, mountain area with a water fall. Up from this area are some ancient ruins, and beyond those is some sort of transporter that goes up into the sky to an Olympus- or heaven-like area with angel monkeys flying around.

Graphics are simple looking and generally cartoonish, but that's not a bad thing. The look works well for the game. I've already talked about the levels, which are a plus for the graphics because so much looks fresh when you can see it rather than the same thing over and over. Music is mostly upbeat and somewhat catchy. The English voice acting is where Ape Escape 3 hits a big snag when it comes to sound though. Just by playing through the levels I can tell the game is supposed to be completely ridiculous and funny, but the generic and lifeless voices given to the characters are adept at sucking away all possible humor whenever they pop up in cut scenes and tutorials. On that topic, the tutorials are needlessly redundant and numerous, although at least it's not usually a big problem to skip through them.

A new element to the Ape Escape series this game brings is the morph ability, which allows the player to temporarily become something like a knight, ninja or western gunslinger. Each offers corresponding abilities that are generally an upgrade to both catching monkeys and doing damage to the rare boss. I guess I can't exactly say I dislike these morphs, but there is something about them I'm not crazy about even though it's hard to describe what exactly that is. It almost feels like cheating to become one and then spam one technique over and over to bypass the regular gameplay. They do go along with the game's theme of traveling through many different TV genres.

Overall Ape Escape 3 was a better game than the first if only for the diverse environments. Otherwise, it's the same monkey catching action, which as I've said isn't a bad thing.

Suddenly inflating with Klonoa

Klonoa: Door to Phantomile was even more random of a pick of what to play next than Beautiful Katamari was. I was in somewhat of a hiatus and I didn't feel like much of anything, so I started throwing ideas around my head. One of them was Klonoa, which I noticed had recently become one of the PS1 games available on the Playstation Store. I really didn't know much about Klonoa. The only way I knew the character and its games existed was due to some sort of cameo he made in one of the Tales games. I'm not even sure which one, but it may have been Tales of the Abyss. Anyway, I wanted to try it out eventually considering that from what I could gather it was a critically acclaimed 2D platformer.

As much as I liked the game, I don't think it has left a terribly strong impression on me, but I can certainly see why it is liked. Strong graphics, strong music and strong gameplay is a good combination. The story and the characters were a little inane, but at least the characters all have gibberish voices in the semi-frequent cut scenes (the voices could have been much, much worse). The game also has two main drawbacks. First, it's short. As good as it is it really didn't last long and I ended up getting the majority of the optional stuff with very little backtracking (the collectible is rescuing random characters). Second, I encountered glitches. This may be only for playing it on the PSP, but the game froze up in several cut scenes and without fail during the end level fanfare of 2-2. After doing some checking online it seems I'm not the only one to have had these problems. Eventually I just learned to always skip the fanfare as soon as possible to avoid any chance of the game freezing after I finished a level. So, it wasn't insurmountable, but I did end up repeating 2-2 about five times between it freezing during a cut scene and then systematically after I completed it. It nearly ruined the game for me because I was about ready to put it down in frustration.

Fortunately I didn't because I encountered few problems through the rest of the game. The gameplay mechanic of inflating enemies and either using them as weapons or a double jump is fairly unique, although it also never really stopped feeling a bit odd. I wouldn't mind playing the Wii port of the game to see how they updated the graphics and I'd also like to hunt down Klonoa 2 on the Playstation 2 eventually. Considering the glitches, I wouldn't recommend playing the game on the PSP like I did assuming there is a widespread problem, especially if you can play it on something else.

Randomly rolling

Sometimes you just feel like rolling. Rolling a Katamari that is. Once the compulsion hit me I decided to direct my efforts toward Beautiful Katamari, mostly because it's the only Katamari game I haven't quite played out yet. Unfortunately, as I do not have a Playstation 3, Forever Katamari is not among the games I have access to. I have an inkling that it's better than Beautiful Katamari however.

Beautiful Katamari is one of the weaker entries in the series I think and a significant reason for why is it easily has the weakest soundtrack. Not a single one of my favorite music tracks from previous games made it into the score, and although there are a few decent songs nothing really stands out. There are even fewer tracks I want to listen to repeatedly or for as long as some of the courses last. Considering in my last post I said I don't really have an ear for music, this may sound like a reversal, but music has been a unique strength of the Katamari series and is pretty important to enjoying the gameplay for me.

Fortunately, the gameplay remains very good and Beautiful Katamari does introduce some interesting new environments to roll in. The interior areas that smaller Katamari have access to like the restaurant, store and supermarket are fun and interesting. The themes of the stages this time around are pretty easy to ignore and for the most part you really only have to worry about making the Katamari as big as possible as fast as possible. There are some unique exceptions, like trying to roll up the cheapest or lowest calorie items in the supermarket to make the biggest Katamari possible, but usually you can ignore what the King of All Cosmos says. I consider that a plus, considering I like to actively ignore him. On the other hand, it doesn't have the variety of wacky levels that We Love Katamari has. One of the main things I'd yet to do in the game since I first played it were the DLC stages, which were rather expensive last I looked. They've now dropped in price to about half of what they were, which is more reasonable. So I tried them and enjoyed them for a period of time, but not so long as to really make it worth even the lowered prices. The graphics are basically unchanged from the games on the Playstation 2 from what I can tell. Screen resolution and how clear smaller objects look seem to be the only major changes visually, but that's fine considering the unique look of the game has aged well.

It's still a decent Katamari game and the regular content is worthwhile if you can find it for a lower price. A better game in the series is Me & My Katamari, oddly enough, which remains my favorite just under We Love Katamari. Me & My Katamari has a very nice selection for its soundtrack and a good assortment of levels too. The PSP controls take some getting used to, but they end up working surprisingly well. The only real problem I have with that game is the tendency for some levels to transport you from one area to another after getting to a certain size, rather than the more seamless method featured in every other Katamari game.