December 29, 2008

• i hope everyone's holiday season has gone well, i know mine sure did.  this is perhaps the first time i've gotten a case of the Monday Blues since i started working at stratify.

  i got a lot of good swag for x-mas, including a couple of games: Beautiful Katamari and Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.  OoE is damn fantastic, beyond what i was expecting out of it.  it really is a return to form for the Castlevania series.  everything from the graphics to the artwork to the music is beyond my expectations, and i couldn't be happier with it.  one plus is its return to the punishing difficulty found in previous castlevania games.  after SotN came out and the leveling and weapon-drop systems became the norm, it almost felt like the designers took that as a cue to ramp things down a bit by allowing your character to become ridiculously overpowered with very little effort (see: crissaegrim and ring of varda).  it basically removed any challenge from the second half of the game.  OoE has apparently turned that on its head, as it poses an actual challenge for me.  this is very welcome.

  on the flip side, Beautifil Katamari takes it one step too far.  previous katamari games haven't been easy, but each of the levels usually had some kind of trick or path to follow, and once you found it the level was cake.  sometimes that was just a matter of following the katamari golden rule: "roll shit up as fast as you can."  i was able to finish the original katamari without a single game over.  i finished we <3 katamari with one or two game overs.  i got to a stage in beautiful katamari that is probably impossible unless you roll on a precise line and never waver from it and even then i'm not sure.  i have game overed maybe five times on it in one sitting.  the objective is to roll up hot things to make your katamari 10,000 degrees C.  if you roll up cold things the temp goes down.  this also includes falling into water, and there happens to be a small lake outside that the people don't mind knocking you into.  also there are vending machines that spit out soda and ice cream and if you bump them they drop enough onto your katamari to take it from over 4,000 degrees to 0 degrees.  and if you hit 0, it's game over.

  the difficulty has been ramped up big time in this game, leaving you maybe five or six minutes to finish a level that you were previously given close to ten minutes to finish in earlier games, along with a distinct shortage of large objects to roll up.  the game has been upgraded from "challenging" to "frustrating."  but finish it i shall.

  also yeah Dokuro-chan is out in the states.  undubbed.  with both series in a 2-disc set in a regular-sized DVD case.  for about $20.  score.  too bad all anime can't be priced and sold like that.

  • 9:45 am
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