So, I guess it's time that I start thi blog thingy, even if it's more a thread thingy until the admins sort out any software troubles for proper blogging.
And while they're at it, I still have time to think about a name for this blog...I have a couple of ideas, but I'm totally helpless when it comes to give names to things, being them living or not.
OK, I'm done with the introduction, let's get rolling.
I'll be posting at least on a weekly basis and I'll try to keep everything as much as game-related as possible, trying to keep personal life outside this blog as much as I can.
If there's something you have to know about me, it's that I'm weak to cute Japanese characters.
Extremely weak.
For example, I never considered buying a PS2 until Xenosaga ep.I and Disgaea came out. And I was hooked to those games for their character design even before knowing anything about the game. Etna was such a magnet that I later became engrossed by Harada's work and started collecting all his doujins and buying almost anything Harada/Disgaea related.
Such insanity also shows up during comic fairs where I spend a lot (= too much) on artbooks of series I don't even know; sometime I discover from where they come from and most of the times it's all about eroges.
I also have an artbook fetish, which, for example, made me buy Wild Arms 5 just because it had an artbook.
The truth is, I desperately buy all those things because I'm completely unable to draw cute things. The more I try, the more I realize it. Round, chubby lines aren't for me, I simply can't draw a deformed character without it ending with somewhat realistic proportions, it's beyond my capability. I envy Japanese artist for their skill in drawing such characters, there's nothing I could do about this.
And so, here we are at the main point of this post, Gadget Trial.
Gadget Trial is a strategy game published by Kumasan Team and developed by Studio Kogado in 2006. It was never published out of Japan because it's a doujinshi game and runs on Windows PCs.
You can grab a demo of the game here; the game can still be found in online store at a ridicously insanely price (100USD plus shipping) and it's compeltely in Japanese, but you can download an unofficial English translation here for both the full game and the demo.
If you've played Advance Wars you'll be at home the moment you see the map - however, you'll have to live through lenghty dialogues to get to the real game, and when I mean lenghty, I mean it: Fire Emblem dailogues are short by comparison, and although Gadget Trial features full voice overs, it's not easy to keep focused on what's going on; there's hardly something interesting told by the characters and the manual gives you all details you need to know.
In the first mission you'll be introduced to five young girls that represent unit types: Izen for infantry, Souka for air, Yu-ri for artillery, Isoka for naval units and Nei for tanks.
The girls are mechanical creations able to give birth - no wait, to "divide like bacteria", as the game itself says - to smaller version of themselves and equip those...things with various weapons, creating units like standard infantry, mechanized infantry, scout vehicles, tanks, submarines, battleships, fighter, bombers and so on for a total of 30 different unit.
If you lived through the dialogues and pointless arguments between the girls, you'll finally end on a isometric battlefield, divided into squares where you have to destroy all enemy units. Mission objectives don't get better than this, and in fact the game is pretty limited, but Gadget Trial did its homework (directly copying its sempai Advance Wars) by giving each terrain type a defense value, rock-paper-scissor system and even an experience system; turns are taken by individual units based on their speed and everything is fashonabily fast. Units move from a point to an other in a blink of an eye and the battle animations take 5 seconds to complete and are nicer than Advance Wars DS: no pixellated sprites and 8-bit explosions, backgrounds and effects are painted (or drawn in Painter) and each sprite is big and detailed, with simple animations.
At the end of the battle, you'll get an other dialogue session (much shorter than the introduction, thanks to whatever God took the project at hearth) and each girl will get experience based on kills and how many of their subtypes survived.
Unfortunately, people ay Studio Kogado thought you can only save during battles, dialogues can't be skipped (there's a fast forward option though) and there's no autosave feature, meaning that you'll have to save at the begining (or end) of each battle or you'll have to start from the beginning again.
Of course, to me the main selling point of the games are its illustrations - they aren't exactly original (how many times have you seen blonde, stuck-up girls in anime or videogames?) but they're well executed and chibi units are incredibly cute and there's this gallery thing for all the artwork and so on...defenitively NOT worth 100USD,but, hell, money's here to be spent, right?
Now, this could have really been a First Play thread, why a blog post? Uh, at least I had something to write about, or do you want to know what to do when the oxygen mask doesn't pump the precious gas into your breathing apparatus when you're above 10'000ft. on a Swiss F/A-18?
No, wait, this could be more interesting, but being hosted on NTSC-UK requires some game-related posts, right?
Then, games is it.
Tomorrow I'll get Super Mario Galaxy, which is currently held captive by a DHL airplane somewhere in the UK. I can't wait to have that game into my hands. Too bad tomorrow evening I have the first RPG session with a new party. I hope the master and party members are good, but I suspect everyone will be playing stereotypized characters...I expect two or three elven maidens, 2 warriors, a cleric (played by one old friend of mine that always plays the cleric) and...well, I guess I'll try to be a bard if everyone is sticking to standard classes (aaaah yes, we're speaking of D&D 3rd edition; first time playing this too).
I'm playing Phoenix Wright 3 too; dunno, after two games, this third installment feels a bit...mhmm...outdated. Same sprites, same music, same places...probably it's just the beginning of the first case being slow and all, but it's not entertaining me as the previous two titles did.
Found Loco Roco for 10 euros in a supermarket and bought it. Finished two worlds but after the third stage I felt that the game shown me everything it had to offer; graphic style is brilliant and the music is insanely cute, but gameplay wise looks like it's built on a way-too-simple idea to live as a full game. Nevertheless, Patapon looks promising. Rhythm games are something I would have never played (nor I will spell correctly) unless Ouendan never got my attention...ah, this could be material for the next post.
In the meantime I've come up with a possible title: Reo-chan's rambling hour. Or Heaven and Hell: where I write and you have to read.
Speaking of Heaven and Hell, I'll test Guilty Gear Wii with the Hori arcade stick soon.
(oh God how much I've written - and in the end Reo-chan's rambling hour won as title).
And while they're at it, I still have time to think about a name for this blog...I have a couple of ideas, but I'm totally helpless when it comes to give names to things, being them living or not.
OK, I'm done with the introduction, let's get rolling.
I'll be posting at least on a weekly basis and I'll try to keep everything as much as game-related as possible, trying to keep personal life outside this blog as much as I can.
If there's something you have to know about me, it's that I'm weak to cute Japanese characters.
Extremely weak.
For example, I never considered buying a PS2 until Xenosaga ep.I and Disgaea came out. And I was hooked to those games for their character design even before knowing anything about the game. Etna was such a magnet that I later became engrossed by Harada's work and started collecting all his doujins and buying almost anything Harada/Disgaea related.
Such insanity also shows up during comic fairs where I spend a lot (= too much) on artbooks of series I don't even know; sometime I discover from where they come from and most of the times it's all about eroges.
I also have an artbook fetish, which, for example, made me buy Wild Arms 5 just because it had an artbook.
The truth is, I desperately buy all those things because I'm completely unable to draw cute things. The more I try, the more I realize it. Round, chubby lines aren't for me, I simply can't draw a deformed character without it ending with somewhat realistic proportions, it's beyond my capability. I envy Japanese artist for their skill in drawing such characters, there's nothing I could do about this.
And so, here we are at the main point of this post, Gadget Trial.
Gadget Trial is a strategy game published by Kumasan Team and developed by Studio Kogado in 2006. It was never published out of Japan because it's a doujinshi game and runs on Windows PCs.
You can grab a demo of the game here; the game can still be found in online store at a ridicously insanely price (100USD plus shipping) and it's compeltely in Japanese, but you can download an unofficial English translation here for both the full game and the demo.
If you've played Advance Wars you'll be at home the moment you see the map - however, you'll have to live through lenghty dialogues to get to the real game, and when I mean lenghty, I mean it: Fire Emblem dailogues are short by comparison, and although Gadget Trial features full voice overs, it's not easy to keep focused on what's going on; there's hardly something interesting told by the characters and the manual gives you all details you need to know.
In the first mission you'll be introduced to five young girls that represent unit types: Izen for infantry, Souka for air, Yu-ri for artillery, Isoka for naval units and Nei for tanks.
The girls are mechanical creations able to give birth - no wait, to "divide like bacteria", as the game itself says - to smaller version of themselves and equip those...things with various weapons, creating units like standard infantry, mechanized infantry, scout vehicles, tanks, submarines, battleships, fighter, bombers and so on for a total of 30 different unit.
If you lived through the dialogues and pointless arguments between the girls, you'll finally end on a isometric battlefield, divided into squares where you have to destroy all enemy units. Mission objectives don't get better than this, and in fact the game is pretty limited, but Gadget Trial did its homework (directly copying its sempai Advance Wars) by giving each terrain type a defense value, rock-paper-scissor system and even an experience system; turns are taken by individual units based on their speed and everything is fashonabily fast. Units move from a point to an other in a blink of an eye and the battle animations take 5 seconds to complete and are nicer than Advance Wars DS: no pixellated sprites and 8-bit explosions, backgrounds and effects are painted (or drawn in Painter) and each sprite is big and detailed, with simple animations.
At the end of the battle, you'll get an other dialogue session (much shorter than the introduction, thanks to whatever God took the project at hearth) and each girl will get experience based on kills and how many of their subtypes survived.
Unfortunately, people ay Studio Kogado thought you can only save during battles, dialogues can't be skipped (there's a fast forward option though) and there's no autosave feature, meaning that you'll have to save at the begining (or end) of each battle or you'll have to start from the beginning again.
Of course, to me the main selling point of the games are its illustrations - they aren't exactly original (how many times have you seen blonde, stuck-up girls in anime or videogames?) but they're well executed and chibi units are incredibly cute and there's this gallery thing for all the artwork and so on...defenitively NOT worth 100USD,but, hell, money's here to be spent, right?
Now, this could have really been a First Play thread, why a blog post? Uh, at least I had something to write about, or do you want to know what to do when the oxygen mask doesn't pump the precious gas into your breathing apparatus when you're above 10'000ft. on a Swiss F/A-18?
No, wait, this could be more interesting, but being hosted on NTSC-UK requires some game-related posts, right?
Then, games is it.
Tomorrow I'll get Super Mario Galaxy, which is currently held captive by a DHL airplane somewhere in the UK. I can't wait to have that game into my hands. Too bad tomorrow evening I have the first RPG session with a new party. I hope the master and party members are good, but I suspect everyone will be playing stereotypized characters...I expect two or three elven maidens, 2 warriors, a cleric (played by one old friend of mine that always plays the cleric) and...well, I guess I'll try to be a bard if everyone is sticking to standard classes (aaaah yes, we're speaking of D&D 3rd edition; first time playing this too).
I'm playing Phoenix Wright 3 too; dunno, after two games, this third installment feels a bit...mhmm...outdated. Same sprites, same music, same places...probably it's just the beginning of the first case being slow and all, but it's not entertaining me as the previous two titles did.
Found Loco Roco for 10 euros in a supermarket and bought it. Finished two worlds but after the third stage I felt that the game shown me everything it had to offer; graphic style is brilliant and the music is insanely cute, but gameplay wise looks like it's built on a way-too-simple idea to live as a full game. Nevertheless, Patapon looks promising. Rhythm games are something I would have never played (nor I will spell correctly) unless Ouendan never got my attention...ah, this could be material for the next post.
In the meantime I've come up with a possible title: Reo-chan's rambling hour. Or Heaven and Hell: where I write and you have to read.
Speaking of Heaven and Hell, I'll test Guilty Gear Wii with the Hori arcade stick soon.
(oh God how much I've written - and in the end Reo-chan's rambling hour won as title).