Psychic Detective (PS1 game)

Psychic Detective is a game for Playstation 1. Here's my copy, it's PAL, 18 rated and 3 disks long.

I've been meaning to write something up about it for a while but have been putting it off... I never got a "good" ending to the story, though I kind of worked out how to get one (find out the secret of the old woman, save her, use her in the end game...)

It's an interactive movie. As in, actual film footage. The picture quality is not great but it's a lot better than most; it's about what you expect from PS1 era technology. The main character is a psychic, he gets roped into being a detective. His power is that he can get into the mind of people he can see. This means that you can switch the game flow to the viewpoint of other characters, and view their interactions, if they leave the room you can switch to other characters, etc etc etc. You also have a small amount of influence, so you can try and save people or find out things, or whatever.

In terms of technical achievement... well, it must have taken ages to film and re-film scenes from different viewpoints, and the transition is quite believeable. You would not think that the same scene had been re-filmed from another angle when playing.

In terms of story and gameplay... the first time I played through the story I got to the end and was "wha???". It made no sense. Well, it made a bit of sense but not really. It doesn't take too long to play through the game again, so I played it through a few times, took different routes, found out some more and then I knew what is going on in the story.

I still have some gripes:

* The story, when unravelled, is still not that amazing.
* It's really annoying to have to change disks on Playstation every 10 minutes.
* It's boring to watch the same scene lots of times just to choose a different path in the story.

So, I know what to do to get a good ending but I have run out of motivation to go and watch it again to get better endings.

A lot of story-based games these days (e.g. visual novels) have a "skip" option so you can quickly run through bits you've read before, and choose an alternate path in the story. It would be difficult to put that in this game though, because paths are taken in a more organic fashion - the film never stops to let you choose, you have to hop to the next person or perform an action when the chance arrives.

So one of the game's strong points also leads to its weak point. I could use a lot of save files, I suppose...

Pizza Suicide

A mere photo cannot show how intense this pizza was.

I'd had my eye on this for a while but wasn't brave enough to try it. A fast-food takeaway shop near my workplace sells these as their speciality. "Pizza Suicide". It is a pizza topped with fresh green chilli, jalepeno chillis, chilli beef, tandoori chicken, and it's probably hot sauce as the base too. And some black pepper. Cheese on top.

I bought one on Thursday, knowing I had Friday off work, a small one just for myself, and started walking home with it. It's probably about 2 miles, usually takes 40 minutes. Yay! Pizza! By the time I was walking past the football ground, I was too impatient, so I opened the box and tried a slice. "Ohhhhhhhhhh that's nice. Not so hot after all!" I thought. And I walked on. By the time I was walking through the school playing fields, I was impatient again. So I tried another slice. This time it really hit hard! Oh so hot! So intense! Haaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!!! I was in the middle of a park, no access to water or drinks... I walked on as fast as I could with my tongue hanging out. Must get home! Oh but this pizza.... so addictive!

By the time I got home, all the way up the hill, I'd eaten half of the pizza and was completely insane. Joyous, rapturous, intense, floaty, immortal, chilli high.

So, er, that was quite a fun meal. :)

Puzzle Quest Galactrix

I've recently been playing a lot of Puzzle Quest Galactrix, the XBLA version.

It's a puzzle game where you match up differently coloured hexagons in a sci-fi setting. There are battles against others (both in the game and online) where you try and use weapons and match up bombs to defeat the opponent. There are variations on the game in mining mode, hacking leap-gates mode, discovering rumours mode. There's an overall universe map and an overarching story to the game together with little bonus missions. There's a trading system which lets you buy new ships and weapons and sell things which you mined from asteroids to make you more popular within a territory as well.

So, it's quite full-featured for a puzzle game.

I love the artwork. Really good, really detailed artwork. Reminds me of the covers of old sci-fi novels and magazines my dad owns from the 1960s-1980s, when people would draw photorealistic sci-fi art on books, before computer graphics could render this kind of thing at all.

There's not much more to say about it really!

It's good for playing while chatting to a friend on XBLA. Engaging and addictive but for the most part you can play at your own pace and it's not too taxing.

Braid Soundtrack - out now

Well, Braid was a big hit on Xbox Live Arcade last year, and it's out on PC now... I tried the demo when it first came out and I hated it with a passion, not for the gameplay but for the story. So, I never went back to play the game.

As I mentioned when I first played it, though... the music is quite nice.

So when the soundtrack came out, I went to listen to it. You can too! It's here:

http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/braid-soundtrack/

It's kind of peaceful but at times very dark, lingering, unsettling. Like when you feel the air becomes charged just before a big thunderstorm, though it appears to be nice weather at the moment.

I listened to it constantly for a few days while at work, so I decided to give in and buy a copy. :)

Magnatune are great BTW. You can choose how much you want to pay for the album (there's a fee on top if you want them to send you a copy on CD), then you can download the album (even if you bought the CD) in any of a range of DRM-free formats: WAV, MP3 (high quality or low), FLAC, OGG, and AAC. On top of that, they let you legally give away a copy of the album to three of your friends. (Well you could give away more but that just wouldn't be sporting).

So, haha, I bought the soundtrack but not the game. Better than that, I get to listen to the music when I want and don't have to endure the ego of the protagonist in that game! Hurrah! :D

Beneath a Steel Sky

I first played this game when it came out, a PC game which I bought in a double pack with Cannon Fodder. It's a sci-fi point and click adventure game.

I came back to play this the other week, as it's freeware now.

A lot of these old point and click adventures run on an engine called SCUMM, so now that engine has been remade and ported to a ton of different platforms under the name of SCUMMVM. It's really good, because you don't need to emulate an old operating system, this engine works as its own standalone machine for these games, making them far more portable than other older games.

You can get SCUMMVM and Beneath a Steel Sky here:
SCUMMVM downloads page

I couldn't remember very much at all about this game, so I had to refer to the manual to find out: if you want to access your items, move the pointer to the top of the screen.

It's a really good adventure. The script is very funny at times, gets far more serious near the end, and when it's infuruating it tends to be at the nature of the characters or whatever, rather than at obscurity of puzzles or game mechanics. There are a few points where it's hard to proceed because you simply haven't seen an object you should have picked up to use. There's a section near the end of the game where it's suddenly really really easy to die, as well. Apart from that, it's fairly straightforward.

The graphics are good, detailed, atmospheric and largely clear to see objects in. The sound... well, the voices are good, it's unusual to hear strong Northern English accents in a sci-fi game... the music really seems outdated and a bit annoying, though.

Overall, well worth my time playing. :)

My World My Way

This is a Nintendo DS game by Global A Entertainment, originally called "Sekai wa Atashi de Mawatteru" (the world revolves around me), and localised by Atlus USA for North America.

It's a solid light-hearted turn-based RPG. Battles use a face-on view, e.g. like Dragon Quest games. The player is not forced to use the touch screen. It has fairly simple mechanics, open to be fully exploited by the player for maximum reward!

It's very funny, never really takes itself seriously. An actual motive / plot never emerges until right at the end of the game! XD

You really get the feeling that you are powering up your characters on your own terms. Whether you are grinding exp for levels or grinding money for meals for stat boosts or grinding high level monsters for powering up your mimic partner or grinding monsters for rare drops... it feels like you're in control, doing things in your own way. And I love that.

It's certainly not for everyone, but I think it's my favourite DS game this year so far! The last last boss is SO DIFFICULT! The game would have been really short if it wasn't for the last area - I think the in-game clock was at under 40 hours before I went to the last area, and over 50 hours by the time I had finished, and I got wiped out a lot.

(reflecting the attacks from the last boss is the way to go!)

I wish there was some post-game content, "new game +" or something. :/

Global A Entertainment also made the Dungeon Maker games, which I really like. A lot of monsters and dungeon rooms / corridors are shared between this game and those ones. All good fun. ^_^

(I have a game by them called "Innocent Tears" for Xbox... comes in a huge box, which I've never opened... I get the feeling that I can't read enough Japanese to play it though...)

I only just found out that there is a Dungeon Maker 2 game released in English for PSP, so maybe I will try that next.

I noticed another game related to this "My World My Way" game on the Global A's website, for PSP and with a dark version of the princess. I wonder how that one is...