Kuon is an obscure horror game. Its not exactly bad, but there are a lot of things that does nothing but piss you off. To quote wikipedia, "Kuon is based on an ancient type of Japanese horror story called Kwaidan." In other words its an old fashioned horror story. The game takes place in a mansion during the Heian Period of ancient Japan. The game in split into phases. You can either pick the Yin or Yang phase. Both phases of the story goes on at the same time but each centers around on a different character.
I picked the Yin phase which centers around a girl named Utsuki who went to the mansion with her sister to find her father an exorcist. If you picked the Yang phase you are Sakuya an exorcist who is the disciple of the father of Utsuki. If you picked the Yang phase it'll teach you how to play but since I picked the Yin phase I was wandering around blindly for the first part of the game. Different places that are locked off for certain characters are open in the other phases and other places that are open are locked off. If you beat both you open the Kuon phase. I haven't finished the game but so far the story is a little confusing.
This game is somehow oddly familiar with Rule of Rose. Most of my gripes with that game can be found here as well.
http://theorycrafting.blogspot.com/search/label/Rule%20of%20Rose
This game you run around blindly searching for stuff. Its almost another virtual scavenger hunt. There's no horror. Occasionally Gakis will come and start attacking you. Then you pull out your trusty knife and stab it. Not exactly stab, you awkwardly wave it around like you're scared and they sorta fidget around. When they do that they can't really attack so you keep tapping the X button until either they die or you get attacked. When you get hit you have to keep tapping the X button to push them off. After you push them off you keep tapping the X button to hit them and kill them. That's basically your combat for this game. Sometimes you meet enemies that kill you in two hits and come in packs. These ones you need to fight with range. Of course the first time fighting them you wouldn't know so you run in and get killed and turn the PS2 off in a rage as you wasted all your time. There are spells which uses magical paper with a drawing of a spell on it. There's your usual fireballs and summoning spiders and demon hands and the puppet lady and other bloody magical ghosts and shit like that. After a single use the paper is gone so spending it on regular gaki aren't very wise. You save it for bosses and then spam the shit out of them because you'll get killed in two hits. One thing I hate is you're allowed to use both the square and triangle for these paper but if you put both on you can't use your knife. You can only equip one if you want to use your knife.
About taking hits, you don't have a health bar. Why? I don't know. You have to listen to the heartbeat of the character. If you're scared it goes up, if you're hurt it goes up, and if there's gaki around it goes up. So what the fuck!? If your screen starts to blur it means the next hit will kill you. So eat up some medicinal powders or elixirs. You can meditate to recover your health, but that takes like 10-15 seconds so you can't do that in combat. One thing that annoys me is if you get scared by something you lose health. If you run you lose health. Yes if you run you lose health. Running also alerts gaki so they'll come out of nowhere and kill you. So do you want to waste your health or waste your time? Here's a trick though, if you keep tapping the O, which is the run button, you'll be able to run while walking. You don't move as fast as running but you don't lose health and won't attract gaki. You sorta have a seizure while moving. This really tires out your thumb though.
The good thing about this game those is the ambiance of the game. The mansion is dark, there are a lot of scratching and crying and sounds everywhere. There's also enough blood to make Dragon Age Origins jealous. When you see shit you can't help but wonder when something will finally come out and attack you. But, it rarely comes.
Now the most annoying part of this game is translation. It's not that bad, occasionally you have errors such as "you shouldn't believe everything you here." The characters never move their mouth when talking and the voices are all in Japanese. Some parts are never translated at all. Suddenly you run around and hear Utsuki going "Nee-sama! Nee-sama! Random Japanese shit" and you don't see any translations and you're there going what the hell is happening. Then you realize its probably something but you're never really sure. Then there are parts where Japanese were never translated and they are part of a cryptic puzzle. That's just brutal. You have a puzzle that you must do to get an item to continue on the game but you have puzzles that's entirely in Japanese? Fuck you. Something like something something in the East something something. Luckily for me I can read a bit of Chinese so I sorta got it. Unfortunately I still didn't get it, so off to Gamefaqs I go. There I found out you can keep randomly clicking until you hear the right sound and then you finish the puzzle. Great. Thank god for Gamefaqs!
Overall, this game isn't that bad but there are much better horror games out there. If you like the old style Japanese horror games with body crawling around like an upside-down crab with their heads twisted back and second faces popping out of their necks then you might enjoy the game. Don't expect a lot of horror though, and the storyline itself isn't that great. The ambiance is awesome.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Pros and Progression, Starcraft 2
I've been playing Starcraft 2 for a few months now, and while I was more excited near the early phases of beta, I became more and more disheartened by the trend of behavior exhibited by pro gamers and their feedback. Their influence has caused Blizzard to revert many of the new innovative interface features in SC2, and returned the game to a more clunky and primitive state. I've made many posts here before about the pitfalls of catering to the casual players, but sometimes even pro gamers are ignorant and misguided.
In the beta relaunch patch, the rally system was changed to move, rather than attack move. This is already on top of a slew of other intentional interface deadweights in SC2, such as the 1 second delay before off-screen alerts are audibly sounded. I know the arguments on both sides for this, but ultimately, this is a game built to test a specific set of skills, namely strategy and tactics. While pro players will demand for a higher skill ceiling to separate themselves from the common group of players and to make their territory more well-suited to their niche, I feel that they are misguided and... frankly, they don't even know what they want.
A well designed program, or game, or any function that has an interface, seeks to minimize the distance between the user's will and the effective outcome. A car with good handling does exactly that: delivering the driver's intent to the vehicle's movement. But would sports racing be more competitive if all drivers were forced to drive vehicles with staggeringly poor handling and had to wear goggles that only allowed them to look backwards? Does intentionally impeding controls and the intentions of the user exhibit meaningful skill?
If it was true, then why do we not see highly competitive and skill-dominant sports where chains were shackled to the feet of the players? Funny that a game like a three-legged-race where poor control is an established feature is not considered to be competitive or impressively skillful at all. In fact, the opposite is true: competitive sports at a globally-presentable level involve attitudes that continually strive to decrease the gap between user will and outcome. Simply put, intentional flaws of the interface are not a characteristic of professional sports (or sports with high skill ceilings, whatever).
Taken to either extreme, there can be problems: a sport with perfect control interpretation would be purely a thinking game (although that's what TBS are); a sport with poor control interpretation would be as tedious as having to move every individual component yourself. But in former, you have competitive, strategic play, and in the latter, you'll have no one willing to play, and nobody to consider it skillful.
Pro players and Blizzard alike need to realise that the skill of the game is beyond the ability to sift through the muddled controls and interface disabilities. The objective is to always design a system that enhances the players intent as much as possible, and then allow players to flourish in their ability from there. If the game is truly one of skill and mastery, then champion players will only have their abilities further maximized by the new capabilities at their hands.
Pros want a game that requires constant immediate attention to even menial tasks that are repetitive and simplistic in nature, and have instead a continued sequence of commands inputted by the player, when one simple constant command would have sufficed. (Specifically about the Rally Attack Move.) Pros are misguided in their reasoning, as a game with tedious manual controls in every facet is unreasonable, unrewarding, and never seen as 'skillful', and thus, unworthy of reaching a grand level. If Pros want to give SC2, or any game, a higher skill ceiling and more global acclaim, they would not choose to impede the improvement of game interfaces.
In the beta relaunch patch, the rally system was changed to move, rather than attack move. This is already on top of a slew of other intentional interface deadweights in SC2, such as the 1 second delay before off-screen alerts are audibly sounded. I know the arguments on both sides for this, but ultimately, this is a game built to test a specific set of skills, namely strategy and tactics. While pro players will demand for a higher skill ceiling to separate themselves from the common group of players and to make their territory more well-suited to their niche, I feel that they are misguided and... frankly, they don't even know what they want.
A well designed program, or game, or any function that has an interface, seeks to minimize the distance between the user's will and the effective outcome. A car with good handling does exactly that: delivering the driver's intent to the vehicle's movement. But would sports racing be more competitive if all drivers were forced to drive vehicles with staggeringly poor handling and had to wear goggles that only allowed them to look backwards? Does intentionally impeding controls and the intentions of the user exhibit meaningful skill?
If it was true, then why do we not see highly competitive and skill-dominant sports where chains were shackled to the feet of the players? Funny that a game like a three-legged-race where poor control is an established feature is not considered to be competitive or impressively skillful at all. In fact, the opposite is true: competitive sports at a globally-presentable level involve attitudes that continually strive to decrease the gap between user will and outcome. Simply put, intentional flaws of the interface are not a characteristic of professional sports (or sports with high skill ceilings, whatever).
Taken to either extreme, there can be problems: a sport with perfect control interpretation would be purely a thinking game (although that's what TBS are); a sport with poor control interpretation would be as tedious as having to move every individual component yourself. But in former, you have competitive, strategic play, and in the latter, you'll have no one willing to play, and nobody to consider it skillful.
Pro players and Blizzard alike need to realise that the skill of the game is beyond the ability to sift through the muddled controls and interface disabilities. The objective is to always design a system that enhances the players intent as much as possible, and then allow players to flourish in their ability from there. If the game is truly one of skill and mastery, then champion players will only have their abilities further maximized by the new capabilities at their hands.
Pros want a game that requires constant immediate attention to even menial tasks that are repetitive and simplistic in nature, and have instead a continued sequence of commands inputted by the player, when one simple constant command would have sufficed. (Specifically about the Rally Attack Move.) Pros are misguided in their reasoning, as a game with tedious manual controls in every facet is unreasonable, unrewarding, and never seen as 'skillful', and thus, unworthy of reaching a grand level. If Pros want to give SC2, or any game, a higher skill ceiling and more global acclaim, they would not choose to impede the improvement of game interfaces.
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