Short Phantom Hourglass (DS) Review
To be brutally honest: The only reason I finished The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is because I was away from home with only my Dsi XL and nothing else to play. Otherwise I would have given up on it long before I got to the end. If Nintendo was to revisit that game, I think it could be something great though!
I have two major problems with this game:
I still had fun going through the game's various dungeons and puzzles. It looked OK on my DSi XL's screens. I played most of the game with the sound off, so I can't say much about the music, other than what I heard was pretty bland.
I'm still glad I played it. Due to the platform it was made for, I get the impression that this is a Zelda game that will get lost to time (along with Spirit Tracks). This is unfortunate. With a few tweaks, this game could really be a great, short Zelda game! As it is now though, I have no desire to ever play it again.
Categories: reviews
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd
As I was going through the game, I kept thinking that the story of Trails in the Sky the 3rd was somewhat structured like Final Fantasy XIII: You're going through disjointed maps, linked together by mostly random plot points. The main difference is that here, you can go back anywhere. Not so much in FF XIII.
And, in both cases, I will admit I did not care for the story. I was expecting a story that would focus on the activities of the Septian church (which, so far, has been an organization of the Trails universe that has not received a lot of attention, and the atheist in me is very suspicious of it, as I am of most organized religions). We got a bit of that, but not that much. Instead, we get a story about a minor character, Kevin Graham, from Trails in the Sky SC that, to be fair, I did not really care about. I did come to like him in the end.
There are some good story bits here and there (the Renne backstory section stands out as a highlight, but one that should come with a trigger warning for child abuse, and has links with Trails from Zero that I completely missed when I played that game last year), but overall, I think it's totally skippable (unless you really like Kevin, I guess). Having played the Crossbell games, I found it interesting to see how some of the characters transitioned from their situations in Sky to where they are in Zero and Azure (Lechter and Kilika, in particular).
Graphically, it looks exactly like Sky FC, Sky SC, Zero and Azure, with 3D maps and sprites. It's perfectly fine. It reuses some assets from Sky FC and SC, but I believe most of the dungeons are new assets.
Overall, I'd say the game was fine but, unless you're a huge Trails fan and want to consume every single bit of content, I'd say it's skippable.
Categories: reviews
Random backlogging thoughts
I had a thought this week: What if I had no backlog?
I have to be perfectly honest with myself: I will never play all of the 250+ games that are currently included in my backlog. Even if I was able to retire today, at the age of 4243, I would have to do nothing but play games for the next 20 years to get to the end of it. And that's if I don't buy anything new.
I keep a carefully updated spreadsheet of all the games I buy and intend to play someday sorted alphabetically, with columns for platform, genre, year of purchase, estimated hours for completion, year of publication, and the occasional comment. In the same workbook, I keep a separate sheet for the games I buy, with prices, by year. And another sheet for the games I beat, with the approximate number of hours it took me to beat them. (I like making lists, don't judge me.)
I've used Backloggery and How Long To Beat to keep track of my backlog in the past, and yet I always go back to my spreadsheet. I've considered writing my own app to take care of it, with various frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django, but eventually gave up on all of those attempts when I realized that the spreadsheet is a fine way to keep track of games I buy and haven't either beaten or given up on.
So, what if I grabbed that spreadsheet file from my OneDrive, dragged it to the Recycle Bin on my desktop, and then emptied the Recycle Bin, without keeping a backup of it anywhere?
I am going to be honest: Thinking about it fills me with dread. And I don't know why.
In the grand scheme of things, what are the consequences of not playing all the games on it? The truth is: There aren't any.
While there is some fear of missing out, I think the actual mental block is due to sunk-cost fallacy. I've paid for those games, so I should play them. The keyword here, I think, is "should". It sounds like an obligation.
It's not.
These are game, not items on a work to-do list. I do not have to play Alpha Protocol. The reviews at the time were pretty mixed. And yet, here it is, between the column header and Alundra, a PS1 game virtually no one remembers.
So, am I going to do it? I don't know.
What would it be like to live without having a backlog? I don't know, but the idea sounds pretty appealing!
What I might do is get rid of the backlog itself, but keep the list of games I buy and the ones I finish. I like being able to go back to the list of games I've beaten (or dropped) in a year, and to have an idea of what my game spending habits are.
If I do go ahead, though, it will be at the end of a long and painful thought process.
Categories: random-thoughts
Short Xenogears (PS1) review
Just finished Xenogears for the second time. (I think I finish it back in... 2001? something like that). I think the game can best be described as a fascinating and unfinished clusterfuck.
And yet, I think I loved it?
I think a good chunk of what is on the first disc could have been either cut or shortened significantly to allow the second disc to be more fleshed out than it is. It makes me wonder whether the writers actually had the whole story planned from the beginning, or if they made it up as they went along.
Graphically, it's a PS1 game, and navigating the 3D environments is not always obvious. Some areas have maps, and they're useful, but I wished they could have been integrated in the main game's UI. The platforming sections (particularly the infamous Tower of Babel) are pretty bad. I found the sprites to be pretty well done though.
With SquareEnix recently re-releasing some of its PS1 games (Chrono Cross, SaGa Frontier, Legend of Mana, Front Mission 2), I can't help thinking Xenogears will be receiving the same treatment at some point. Since SE took the time to add some of the cut content in the original SaGa Frontier for the re-release, I'm hoping they can do the same for Xenogears. While it's not exactly a masterpiece, I think it is still pretty good, and deserves another chance to shine.
I played most of the game in Retroarch with the Beetle PSX HW core, streaming from my PC to my Chromecast with Google TV and the Android Moonlight app, and the whole thing ran like butter. I've read that one boss fight in the second disc can cause soft locks with anything that is not an actual PS1, but did not encounter it in my playthrough.
Categories: reviews
Testing Moonlight on Chromecast with Google TV
For whatever reason, I suddenly decided that I wanted to consolidate my old Chromecast and the Retropie into one device. My initial idea was to get an Apple TV and use Xcode to load Kodi and Retroarch on it, but after a bit of research, I realized that this was a stupid idea. Asking around, someone suggested using a Chromecast with Google TV. I looked into it, and decided to give it a shot.
So far, so good! I had no issue connecting a DS4 controller to the device, and Moonlight seems to be working as well as it did on the Retropie and, unlike on Retropie, the list of games refreshes automatically. (I had connectivity issues initially, but rebooting my router fixed them, which may be a sign that I need to upgrade that thing, especially considering it's no longer getting security updates.)
The main issue I had was getting my ROMs on the thing, but after trying a significant number of apps from the Play store, I found one that allowed me to do it. Storage space is very limited though, so if I decide to give PS1 games a shot, I probably won't put that many of them on it.
Categories: in-home-streaming