Tag Archive for 'Games'

Review: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor — for Nintendo DS

This game is, in some ways, very reminiscent of The World Ends With You. They’re both set in Tokyo, they both involve a 7-day countdown, they both have time limits for each mission, and they both have to do with the afterlife/underworld.

Devil Survivor, however, plays completely differently. It’s a tactical RPG with many layers of depth. You control a party of up to four humans. Each human is accompanied by two demons. There are no “action points” like some tactical games. Instead, you can take every action once per turn, in any order.

For example, you can cast a defense-boosting spell with one demon, and offence boosting spell with the other, then move towards an enemy, then attack the enemy, then cast a healing spell with the human.

Yes, all on one turn.

Demons are are like Pokemon, only cooler. But these creatures don’t come in poke balls — they’re bought and sold in a market. Any demons you defeat in battle are sent to the market. You then can buy them — bid on them, actually. Computer players bid against you, and can win if you’re stingy with your cash.

But not all demons can be bought — the really awesome ones have to be created. You can fuse demons together to form new type. This requires some strategy in order to get the best carry-over of stats and spells from you old demons to the new one.

Speaking of spells, it’s rather interesting how you learn new ones. Your demons learn them automatically, but your human party members have to fight for them. At the beginning of every battle, you can set the “skill cracks,” where you assign a party member to a particular demon’s skill. If you defeat that demon with that party member, you “steal” the selected spell. You can only assign three spells at once, per character, so your extra spells go in your skill folder. You can reassign them to your hearts content outside of battle.

Battles are interesting. You first choose what each of your fighters (your two demons and the human) are going to do. Then every body springs into motion and blasts the hell out of each other with crazy-awesome (and very pretty) spells. There’s six elemental types, to which every demon can be weak or strong against (or absorb, block, or reflect). Likewise, every spell is aligned to one of those elements.

After everbody finishes their move, each combatant gets a chance at an extra turn. These are awarded for doing certain things, such as scoring a critical hit, absorbing or reflecting a spell, or just being lucky. After the extra turn (if there is any) combat ends.

tl;dr: This game is awesome. If you like RPGs and/or tactical games, I suggest you rent/buy/pirate the game right now.

ITT Tech vs. King Critter’s Excellent College of Fawesomeness

I went to ITT Tech yesterday for a guided tour.

For those of you who are not in the know, ITT Tech is a private college devoted to very technical subjects — game design, 3D modeling, architecture, web design, system administration, and programming, among other things.

It’s kind of funny how I ended up on that tour. I’d been sitting at my computer, writing my High School And Beyond essay (short essay about what I planned on doing after high school) when I thought of checking out the ITT website. So I did. Then I noticed the “send me a brochure” link, so I clicked that. Half an hour later the phone rings, and it’s someone from ITT Tech asking me when she should schedule my guided tour! Mentally I was screaming “I just want a damn brochure!” but I made an appointment anyway. And I’m glad I did — it was rather… enlightening.

Long story short: if I were rich, and $11,000 a year was no big deal, I’d sign up in a heartbeat. There’s a lot of cool classes (plus a gaming group! :P ) and ITT offers some neat advantages. For example, after completing a course, you can come back at any time — even twenty years later — and retake the course for free. If you move to a different city in the middle of a course, your tuition carries over to any other ITT school in the nation. Another thing is that textbooks and equipment/software are included in the tuition, and they’re yours to keep forever.

Of course, there is one slight problem: I’m not rich, and 11 grand makes my brain bleed thinking about trying to pay off a loan like that. I know I can get financial aid, and I know I can get scholarships, but I’d be looking at 22 grand minimum for an associates degree. I’m going to have to pay some of that.

Then we get to the real bummer: they don’t actually offer the course I want. I want a comprehensive course in C++, geared toward game development — from beginner, moving quickly into intermediate, then advanced. By the end of two years I’d be able to program the Matrix.

But with ITT — well, you know that game design course mentioned above? It’s just that — game design. The reason my tour guide gave does actually make sense — companies don’t want really advanced programmers, they want well rounded individuals. This meshes with what I remember reading in some magazine; that there are way more designers and artists in a video game company then programmers.

My problem? I don’t want to work for a company, I want to start my own indie company and make my own games! There’s a lot of people who would undoubtedly tell me to start small, work your way up, etc. To all those people: fuck you!

I haven’t yet been beaten down by the man. I still have dreams, and the ability to realize them. I’m not a sheeple, content to work for a faceless conglomerate programming the next Barbie’s Adventures game, while around me society crumbles, North Korea starts World War III, and Britain turns into Oceania.

Even if we dodge WW3 and a host of other problems, there’s the fact that college degrees — along with a lot of other stuff — is going to become pretty much useless after the Humanity 2.0 revolution in ~2030, whenever they invent multi-purpose molecular assemblers (nanobots). Don’t even get me started on the singularity.

Well, this post got a bit off topic. Long story short: dunno if I’ll go to ITT. Still gotta think about it some more, and see if I can’t teach myself C++ well enough to start on my indie game dev idea.

Aagh we’re doomed

Well, I never got around to posting anything yesterday. I offer you my most insincere apologies, and a gift: a brand new homebrew page. Furthermore, I put some stuff up in my movies page a while ago but never actually mentioned it. So I’m mentioning it now. Have fun. ^_^

I’ve been playing a lot of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon recently. It’s… well, it’s awesome. The game is a hybrid turn-based strategy/RPG, and unlike Final Fantasy Tactics it doesn’t suck. Oh, and the battle animations are flipp’n beautiful. Seriously, they’re practically 3D. I was going to post a screenshot, but I can’t find any that look good — it’s something that must be seen in motion. The dialogue doesn’t completely suck, either. The story is pretty much your standard, boring JRPG, but the actual dialogue is OK. Better then some games, at least.

Further more, it’s the only game that’s ever made me feel bad for killing the enemy. Seriously. There are some enemy units that have a unique name and portrait picture, and when they die really sad music starts playing and they say something poignant. Kind of disturbing. Can you imagine if this happened in, say, Halo? Or Diablo?

The TV show Castle premieres today at 10:00 PM. I’m planning on watching it, mainly due to the presence of Nathan Fillion. He played Malcolm Reynolds in the uber-awesome TV show Firefly, and I thought he was a really good actor.