Three mercenaries arrive to Hong Kong with the purpose of retrieving the daughter of the Hong Kong mafia lord. The initial catch is to do it before the mafia men do so, to ask for ransom. The whole plan gets out of course when instead of fighting regular humans the characters find themselves fighting all sorts of weird creatures too.
The game is a survival horror game (Resident Evil, Dino Crisis) that uses cel-shaded graphics. Instead of pre-rendered backgrounds, Fear Effect uses looping videos as enviroment. As a result everything has a comic look but at the same time it's rather vivid and sets a movie like atmosphere for the plot to develop.
The game has nudity, violence, you name it. Combat is more common than in other survival horrors games. In fact, you usually want to eliminate enemies instead of running by them, as they usually leave more ammo, or items you need to advance.
The puzzles are neither better nor worse than Resident Evil's, but they are better integrated. You will need to find something to do something usually related to the story, not turning some statue to make it point to a mosque for a door to open. They are really relevant to the game. The only example I will give to prevent spoilers if one of your partners is attached to a bomb and you need to defuse it before it explodes. The camera makes a zoom and there you are: red, green and blue wires and the clock ticking.
Another thing that differentiates it from other games of the genre is that characters move more freely. They can roll in any direction, sneak, shoot while moving and climb ladders without an 'intermission'. Characters can't aim two enemies at the same time if they have dual weapons. Weapons are changed in-game and there is not pause while doing so and as a result players need to be quicker when fighting. Rolling, changing weapons and reloading in fights is not rare.
Blade Runner? No! Fear Effect!
Characters can also shoot while moving. The stealth side of the combat involves using the sneak button to reach en enemy from behind to kill them with melee weapons, or with just one shoot, to save ammo.
The health bar in the game is replaced by an electrocardiogram. When we get hit or shot, the wave goes erratic (that's were the game's name comes from). To go back to normal the player must do something that tranquilizes the character: defeat enemies using stealth mode, solve puzzles, kill a horde of enemies, etc.
You get to use all the three characters during the story. Each player is kind of a stereotype: Hana a sexy but tough girl, Glas a charismatic American killer' and Deke, a silent but brutal partner. During the game the characters are usually split and the story goes from one to another. Character A might be on his way to save character B from something character C told him was about to happen (I just made this up, but you get the idea). The plot makes really good use of time and space to keep you intrigued about the next event.
The cameras contribute a lot in making the game seem like a movie, though it might make controlling the character a little hard on some particular scenes it's more whats gained from it than what is lost.
The music follows the whole Chinese theme the game has is it. The graphics are different but one of the best in PSX at the time.
The controls might seem a little underwhelming at first. Folding your weapon to get out the key you need to open a door and suddenly being attacked might seem too much at the beginning, but it adds a thrilling element to the gameplay.
If you try it, at first it will seem that the story advances slowly and the controls make it kind of hard to advance. But hand on there because Fear Effect is about to give you a hell of a ride!
Yay
Everything is great: concept design, graphics, characters personas, sounds, backgrounds, everything blends to make a great movie-like game!
Excellent puzzles.
Once the story picks up, action never stops.
Intriguing plot that will get you hooked!
Nay
It has almost no re-playability.
Poll: You should play this game... (Vote): right now! (Vote): only if you like the genre. (Vote): never.
The opening scene can explain the story in less time and make it more entertaining than me. The Oddworld series (at least the two titles released for PSX) are probably the best platform games I have ever played, and if they are not, well, they come close.
With fixed scenes, we travel around different frames of the installations of rupture farms (and many other places), helping our clumsy friend Abe to escape. But nothing is easy here! Abe has nothing but his (your) wits to do so: he doesn't have weapons like the guards and the place is filled with bombs, lasers and all sorts of stuff that will kill our hero in the most dramatic ways.
Abe can jump, roll, sneak, throw rocks (if he finds any), release homing farts and all kinds of crazy stuff, but more important is that he can use voice commands to speak with NPCs.
These NPCs are nothing but your fellow Mudokon friends, who like you, are slaves in the meat grinding factory, and as they were born in slavery, they will do whatever you tell them to.
The game is incredibly simple, but very fun to play. By combining simple things as some levers and some traps we can dispose of guards and hopefully get our friends alive to an escape point.
FREEEEEEEDOM
Abe can for example blend with the shadows some objects produce to hide from guards and he can posses their bodies and use them at his will (At least when no enemy machinery is preventing us from doing so).
This game has no lives, no continues, no user interface, nothing. the instructions are within the game presented as flashing signs, TV ads and that sort of stuff.
Mudokons are fragile, and as a result (and the lack of health bars) you die on contact with anything hazardous between you and the next screen, be it a very long fall, a meat grinder, one bullet, a wild animal or a mine. You can hard save only at certain points of the game, though in Abe's Exoddus you can use a quicksave command that overwrites itself each time you use it, and acts as a check point while the power on the console is on.
There's two ways to play this game:
You can just go from one screen to the next and try to escape all alone or you can save your (very dumb) friends while saving yourself. The number of mudokons saved in each area is displayed on signs in the background like every piece of information in the game. Depending on the number of Mudokons we save, we get a different ending.
Both games are hard at some points but not impossible. The skills and movements Abe has at his disposal are very simple to use, but extremely versatile at the same time. Sometimes when a new screen is shown you sit for some seconds and wonder how the hell are you supposed to save the mudokons if they are surrounded by guards, mines, meat grinders and there's a flying guy shooting grenades at you, but there lies the beauty of the game. Simple to play, but very hard if we choose to save all the Mudokons.
The sequel has a number of differences besides the quicksave feature. In the second part fellow Mudokons have emotional states and status ailments that affect how they respond to our voice commands. They can be angry, wired, depressed, sick, or blind. If a mudokon is angry we have to say sorry to them or they won't follow our orders. If he's wired we need to calm them before they attract the guards or step on a mine, and so on.
Other changes include new voice commands, new traps and obstacles such as motion detectors and guard dogs, new enemies and the ability to control not only guards but wild beast and some other thing I won't spoil for you .
The scenes are filled with black humor as comedic relief, or the story would be depressing . There's plenty of details on the screen at all times: from characters behaviors to animated backgrounds. The voice acting is pretty good to tell you how each enemy is. Music changes according to situations and there's always new things to do with the same abilities you start with. And I guess I could write two or three more paragraphs about good things the game has, but it will be faster telling you the bad things it has: nothing.
"delivers innovative, strategy-filled gameplay" said GamePro. "balances its action and puzzle elements perfectly" GameSpot had to say. "If you never played it, get a copy and do so right now" I'm telling all of you!
Gameplay of the first few screens of the first game
Poll: You should play this game... (Vote): right now! (Vote): only if you like the genre. (Vote): never.
Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere takes place 40 years or so from now. In the future according to Namco nations are left with nothing but corporations to run them. It's this very corporations that will fight over territories and will want to get your help to win.
The game features a big number of missions which branch according to the story and our choices. Every 8 missions or so we will get to choose which corporation to fight for. Different corporations have different airplanes, weapons and missions we must accomplish.
Missions include killing enemy planes, bombarding enemy buildings, going inside hangars with our aircraft. The story branching adds to re-playability, by making you replay the game to be able to play all the missions, get all the endings and all the planes.
The graphics are good and fit the futuristic theme. The controls are good and we have full control of the camera with our analog pad to view incoming enemy planes. The techno music that goes with each mission is very fitting, sometimes relaxing (for the missions we go to outer space for example) but dramatic when fighting big enemies.
The characters are all anime like, and talk when close to each other via radio to add story elements to the fights. they also try to convince you to join different sides of the fight.
But not everything is good regarding AC3. Only the Japanese version features the story, the anime cut scenes and well made videos and the between mission chats. For some reason I will never understand, Namco decided to removed them from the European and American versions. So we can get the Japanese version to get the videos and the story, but we will only get a tiny bit of it, unless you can read Japanese.
Yay
Game design.
Shooting down enemies with futuristic planes is lots of fun.
Graphics, music, cameras, controls. All systems green.
Nay
エースコンバット３ エレクトロスフィア.
Poll: You should play this game... (Vote): right now! (Vote): only if you like the genre. (Vote): never.
Deception is a hard game to define. Basically we are some defenseless girl in the middle of armed men that want to kill us for some reason. There is a story in the game, but to be honest, I never payed attention to it. It's not catchy, or relevant to what you have to do in the game: kill people with self made traps.
The game is divided in scenarios. Each scenario is a grid defined room with stairs, fireplaces, precipices, rivers, anything. At the start of each of this scenarios we are given the stats of the enemy and a overview of the place were we are going to fight.
Once the "fight" begins, we are left in the room, where we can access a menu to set up our traps. Once we do so, we must act as bait to lure the enemy into walking into it, activate them, and kill them.
What makes Deception fun is the number of traps available and how they can be combined. For example in the picture below Hans is about to get his feet trapped by a bear trap, followed by some arrows going through his right arm and a failing boulder by the stairs as a finishing blow.
The damage a combo does combined, the number of hits our combos had, the damage we received and how fast we killed our enemy determines a number of "Dreak" we acquire. Dreak is the currency used, along with items we unlock by progressing to make new traps.
We have different types of traps available: floor, wall and ceiling. Inside each of those types, you can pick different categories, such as boulder or pendulums inside ceiling traps. We can also enchant our trap by using "emblems" with the elements of fire, ice, thunder among others.
The next variable we have in a trap is rings. Rings modify how much a trap takes to recharge (fast recharging traps can be used more often within the same combo). Rings can also make traps self trigger, or attract the enemy to them among other stuff. Finally there's the orbs, the higher the orb number, the higher the level of the trap we are creating will be.
All this variables make a ridiculous amount of combination's one can use to create different traps and makes you want to defeat more evil guys to unlock them. Also as the story progresses, our enemies will have special scenarios in which they will take damage. For example some enemies will only receive damage if hit in mid-air, some others will only take damage after the 3rd hit of a combo, some only will die if you attack them with fire and so on.
There's isn't much more to say about the game, the music is "OK", the graphics are not excellent but serve their purpose, the story you won't care about and the character movement isn't the best; but the concept of the game will probably keep you hooked until you can finish it.
Yay
Original idea.
Addictive.
Infinite trap numbers you can create.
Nay
The camera sometimes
The non existing story. (but it's not such a big deal)
The movement of the characters
Poll: You should play this game... (Vote): right now! (Vote): only if you like the genre (?????). (Vote): never.
Everything was fun and parties in Buddie land. But one day, for the sake of the existence of the game, crates started falling from the sky. This crates were filled with all kind of weaponry: from small guns to armored tanks.
Hell broke loose and buddies segregated according to color, with the purpose of killing each other D:!!!!
The game works as some sort of worms game, combined with some elements of real strategy. You start with one buddy and crates start falling from the sky. In your starting zone there's a grid pad. With our buddy we can carry the crates to our starting zone to create new weapons, vehicles or new buddies!
For example, if we stack 2 crates one of top of each other and break them a new buddy will appear. We can swap between buddies to do different tasks. We could also place one crate alone to get a gun, 2 crates horizontally to get an granades, 4 crates horizontally for a Bazooka, and so on.
The crates fall in neutral areas and by building up buddies and weapons we try to kill our enemy.
Occasionally some rare creates drop. If we add those crates to our experiments in the pad, we can get enhanced weapons, soldiers or vehicles.
We win a scenario by capturing key points in a map. These points can be trees, hills or anything. Each captured point gives a number of points every 5 seconds. We win by reaching a certain amount of points or by having more points when the clock reaches 0.
In the "Story" mode, we take control over different color teams. Each team represents a nationality. For example: purple (I think) buddies talk in a language resembling Japanese (and you can create ninja buddies!), Blue are English and so on. Depending on the match up we can get funny dialogs resembling conflicts between countries or wars.
If you are going to play this game I strongly recommend getting the European version as the US one suffered from heavy censorship in the dialog which is a very fun part of the game. I also thing it goes some scenes removes, but I don't remember for sure.
There's different modes, like capture the flag, deathmatch, etc which is very fun if you can play with other people.
The number of crate combination is pretty big too, which adds more fun. The music is fitting, the graphics are cartoonish and cute.
Yay
Game design and dialogues.
Addictive.
Simple but versatile.
Nay
It can turn repetitive if you play alone after finishing the story mode.
Poll: You should play this game... (Vote): right now! (Vote): only if you like the genre. (Vote): never.
Every year the Magellanic Penguins arrive to Peninsula de Valdes in the southeast of Argentina. To the same place, but at different times of the year you can see lots of animals really close to you, like Whales, Orcas (Killer Whales), Sea Lions, some really fat hares called Maras, etc.
Now is the time for the penguins. The come here, have their little baby penguins, change feathers and do their business, before leaving again.
So if anyone is interested here's a live stream of the rocky beach where they are showing cute penguins
This story is not related to the movie or the book in any sort of way. They are just victims of my marketing abilities
When I was a kid, I had a Nintendo. On a sunny Saturday, I sat in front of the TV to play Megaman 2. At that time, 13 or so years back, most of the games came directly from Japan, with their audience on mind. It was not but several years after that the video game industry realized that the western hemisphere was not ready to handle the "reward/punish" system that the nippon no hito folk had for their games. A typical player from Occident wants the penalty for losing to be, in a worst case scenario, a grimace. For the Japanese to make a mistake in a game should be as distressful as losing a baby, in your father's death anniversary.
Megaman 2 is not an exception. I remember one of my friends saying: "When I'm older I'm going to marry a girl that tells me she finished Megaman 2 with all the power ups". The dificulty is legendary, and that sunny Saturday morning I had decided I would finish it.
In a spontaneous show of my stupidity that flourished as the first hairs in my armpit, I chose to not write down any password, a token of consideration the game offered after each "boss" so as not to start all over. My plan was to finish the game that day, no matter the consequences.
:D
Many hours went by, and I had already skipped dinner when I reached the last part. In front of me, in all its glory and power, the one and only, the "Final Boss". I had no lives left. I closed my eyes. I prayed. I really prayed. I begged my Lord and my Savior to finish this fucking game. I opened my eyes. Power went down. I stayed there, both hands grappling the Joystick, in front of the TV in despair. Power went up again. I had no time to curse, I just screamed in agony.
Two months ago my internet started working like shit (or should I say not working?). You have no idea what I had to go trough to be able to post this. It was not as bad as that fatal saturday, but damn it comes close.
As soon as I detected the deficiency in my service, I called tech support to as for a technician to come and check everything. After writing all my data down, they told me they would call me to tell me when the technician would come.
Days passed by without any news. I called again to claim for the service to come. This time they gave me a date: 26 of Never. Of course they weren't that explicit, they disguised it as 26th of May, and I, filled with hope, believed them. Weeks went by and I waited like a kid on Christmas for the technician to arrive. Please remember that I was at my house without internet, waiting in this case mean literally that: waiting. The most exciting thing that could happen on a day was probably ordering pizza, asking them to put extra cheese on it, because if I have to pay an extra 2$ for more cheese, you know how I am, I can't resist cheese. It was 2 in the afternoon on the 26th of May.
I called tech support again. They informed me that the technician was running late, a detail I had not a hard time guessing, and that he would be at my house later on the same day. Didn't have much to do, so I just waited again.
At 1900 I started to get worried, called again and the bad news arrived.
(:
Some days after a girl called and gave me a new date: Never Again - Never Ever - Never more of June. As I could not wait that long, I decided to get help from the internets, which is sort of like a reverse bat sign. I called a technician from another company. From that moment on, a battle between two companies started. Both of them, like two princes in a kingdom where there is only one tower, and I, combing my hair against the wind, waiting for one of them to come over, while I wondered why in my metaphors I was a beautiful princess.
Of course these two princes could care less about me and the stupid tower, which by the way, had no internet access. With all these happenings, it had been more than 1 month without internet. And I, being a kid from the generation that saw the internet be born, went back for the time being to shitty series re-runs like "Suddenly Susan" and softcore porn movies on unknown cable channels.
A week after, someone called me at 8am. It was a girl from my ISP asking if it was ok for them to come that week to fix my internet connection. "Is the pope catholic?" I asked. Which is like saying Yes.
A mermaid trying to catch a pass from a shotgun formation makes more sense that this story
On the same day, someone knocked on my door. It was the technician himself asking if he could come in to fix my problem. "Does the pope wear a funny hat?" I asked. Which is like saying Yes.
Today I am a free man again. I' connected to the internets again, today... a new blog entry.
Ok, so I'm working on a spreadsheet that solves an electrical circuit and changes all the answers depending on some parameters I change.
I have a back sheet with all my calculations and a front sheet that shows the results.
So, for one of the items I need to show the value of a capacitor in both mF and μF. When I tell the cell where the answer goes to do the calculation to get the number, it displays it as XX.XE-5 (or xx,x*10^-5). So what i need to know is, How do I "code" a custom cell format so it always shows the result with a -6 exponent and a -3 exponent?
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. There's plenty of details on the screen at all times: from characters behaviors to animated backgrounds. The voice acting is pretty good to tell you how each enemy is. Music changes according to situations and there's always new things to do with the same abilities you start with. And I guess I could write two or three more paragraphs about good things the game has, but it will be faster telling you the bad things it has: nothing.![[image loading]](http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/IntoTheWow/GWP/Ac3jacket.gif)
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