Monthly Archives: March 2008

Stupid XBLA, Be More Funner!

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I returned to the land of the 360 tonight to check up on some of the newer stuff, and first up were some trials of recent XBLA games.

Bliss Island looks way too cutesy, and is just a bunch of silly games that aren’t too interesting on their own, so I’ll pass on that one. Brain Challenge is kind of like Brain Age on the DS, but the difference is that I’m not going to fire up my 360 on a daily basis just to play this, so this one’s a pass too. And Rocketmen: Axis of Evil has an interesting style to it, but the basic game is just another twin-stick shooter, and with a really bad camera and awful hit detection. Yawn.

After that I downloaded the Still Alive track for Rock Band. Although a bit overreferenced on the forums nowadays, it’s a nifty song, but it doesn’t really fit in with the Rock Band vibe. Fortunately the lead guitar on it is still moderately interesting, though the bass is a bit of a bore. It’s interesting as a one-off at least, and hey, it was free.

Back In The Driver’s Rickety Old Wooden Chair

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And the other big thing I did today was to replace the standard Windows XBox 360 controller drivers with XBCD.

The built-in drivers technically work, but suffer from a few flaws and missing features. There’s no built-in deadzone adjustment, for example, and a lot of the older games I just installed don’t account for it either, leading it to drift slightly to the left or right when the stick is supposed to be centered. The standard drivers also treat the triggers as a single axis, so that pressing on one is essentially canceled out by a simultaneous press on the other. This matters in things like racing games, where something like a slight tap on the brakes is not the same thing as letting off on the throttle slightly, which is how it gets treated on a single axis.

XBCD solves these problems, and I spent a few hours fiddling around in RACE 07 with it. Unfortunately, gamepads are still a little oversensitive due to the small travel on the sticks, so it’s like you’re frequently slamming the wheel to the extreme left and right. It was still good enough to win a few events though, including one Formula 3000 race in the extreme rain, with even the AI spinning out all over the place. RACE 07 doesn’t really have as much variety to it as other SimBin games, but it’s very well-polished, and the more mid-level cars in it are a lot easier to control than the supercars of GTR2.

I really should be using my wheel more often for racing games, but it’s such a pain to set up and take down…

Working For A Killing

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I had to pump gas a few more times to get the money for the next ranked fight in No More Heroes, which took place on the land-mine-filled beach.

The henchmen in this case were soldiers, many of whom had rapid-fire machine pistols that drained my katana very quickly as I blocked shots, so I had to hurry in close to finish them off quickly. The only other obstacle was the occasional land mine, which was more of a distraction than threat.

The rank 6 boss herself was Holly Summers, a combat veteran with an artificial leg who loved to launch missiles at me and whack me with a shovel if I got too close. The big annoyance here was a whole bunch of hidden pits that dotted that part of the beach, and upon falling in, you had to rapidly respond to some on-screen action request in order to get out in time before she threw a grenade in and hurt you. I failed this battle the first time since the missiles she launches do a lot of damage, but on the second attempt I was able to get the timing on avoiding them and circling back around to get a few hits on her between waves, and managed to whittle her down.

I got the ‘military secret’ for winning the fight, and turned it in at the lab for the opportunity to buy a new beam katana model. The usual wrestling video, gym exercises, and side job also opened up. This new side job involved clearing mines off the beach, and although I got the gold medal ranking for it, it doesn’t pay nearly as well as the gas pumping job.

Now I just need a ton more cash for the next ranked fight… This is where it’s starting to get tedious.

Worms Have Poor Vocabularies

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The next game I had a hankering to return to for a bit was Bookworm Adventures Deluxe, which is kind of a mix between Boggle and an RPG-ish combat system. I finished off the rest of the first 10 levels, reaching Cassandra for the first time (only to have her whisked away again, of course), before remembering that there are two more books of ten more levels each after that, so I wouldn’t be able to finish it off today.

And let me press Attack, dammit! It is so a valid word…

Getting Dirty

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While reinstalling all those PC games, I couldn’t help but get distracted, since a lot of them are still unfinished. I remembered that I was still about 2/3 of the way through the career mode in DiRT, and so I finished it off tonight. About the only really notable thing was that the final series was a mix of different types and forced you to use a specific vehicle against a field of the same vehicle, instead of letting you choose yours and varying the others like usual.

I only did them on the easiest difficulty for now, though. The reason for that is twofold: one, just to get them out of the way so I can consider the game finished, without having to retry each race a few times, and two, because of the weird reward structure. When you beat a race, the prize amount for winning it is reduced if you do it again, but it also reduces the reward for all lower difficulties, too. If you want to maximize your earnings, you have to beat each one in order of difficulty, from easiest to hardest, so that you get the full amount at each difficulty level.

I’m not sure if it’ll have any further lasting appeal now that I’ve beaten it though, especially since the multiplayer is rather weak. Oh well, I need to get back to rFactor some day anyway…

Well, One Less Hero

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Today I got back to No More Heroes, and collected the rest of the Lovikov balls and most of the buried treasure on the world map. I still needed more cash for the next ranking fight though, so I did the coconut and garbage collection side jobs a few times.

The rank 7 boss didn’t seem to have as many henchmen as the others, and the only really notable part about the trip to meet him was near the end where a group of his henchmen also had beam katanas and were kicking my ass pretty thoroughly. A lucky pull on the slot machine let me finish off the last two easily, though. The boss himself was a superhero named Destroyman, with an array of various superhero-ish attacks and a rather disturbing beam he shot from a device mounted on his crotch. He wasn’t too hard though, as it was easy to tell what attack he was about to use from his stance and shouting, so they were fairly easy to block or dodge.

After beating him, I was able to get a new wrestling move from another video, do some more gym training, and opened up a new side job filling cars with gas. This job’s fairly easy, and pays better than the others so far, which is good because the stretches of having to save up cash for the next fight are getting a bit tedious.

Old vs. New

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I finally got in the mood to try and finish my migration from XP to Vista, and spent a lot of the last couple days installing a whole whack of my older games under it, with less trouble than I expected. The ones that failed to work well enough or at all (Spellcross, Blade Runner, Star Control 3, Chaos Gate) were mostly ones that I remember having trouble with under XP as well, and I might be able to get them working under DOSBox instead.

One little ‘trick’ I tried for helping the older games was to create a separate directory for them (e.g., c:\old) and setting the permissions on it so that I had full control over it and all subdirs. Games can then create their own save/config/etc. files in their install directory without needing admin rights or dragging in the VirtualStore confusion.

There were still various glitches and minor problems, but they were mostly solvable. Some games needed to be patched up manually before they would run at all (Diablo 2 LoD, Riddick). Titan Quest: Immortal Throne had to be run as admin the first time for the update of the original game files, but could run as a regular user after that. Freedom Force had no sound within missions, until I noticed that it had selected the DirectX Hardware Accelerated sound provider by default, and switching it to the software emulation provider fixed that. Worms: Armageddon initially crashed when a round started, but that was fixed by a beta patch found after digging through some forums. And a couple others would seem to run fine as a regular user, but wouldn’t save your preferences unless run as admin (Raven Shield, probably a couple others I’m forgetting).

StarForce was a bit of a pain when it came time to install GT Legends, but it eventually worked. I had to let it install the included drivers, reboot, let Vista whine about an incompatibility while getting the update from the SF site, installing that, and rebooting again. Attempting to install the update before running the game doesn’t work, it seems.

And in one final surprise, I had never gotten Incubation to work very well under XP due to stuttery performance making it impossible to control, but it’s perfectly fine under Vista.

I’ve only given each one a few minutes of testing though, so maybe there are still mid-game crashes awaiting, but they seem to run fine for now at least. My little trick might not really be worth it in the end; may as well just tag them all as admin and with the appropriate compatibility mode, since it doesn’t really hurt.

Next Week: Albuquerque

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Today was the traditional Rock Band DLC day, and consisted of a six-pack of Boston songs. I wasn’t really that familiar with them, but a few of them triggered those “oh yeah, *that* song” memories.

All of them are fairly fun and challenging to play on the guitar, but “More Than A Feeling” is my favourite of the bunch so far. “Smokin'” is probably the toughest of the bunch, largely thanks to having to play the extended, complex organ solos as guitar bits instead. The bass versions of them are pretty good too, never getting too repetitive even without any chords.

Blast From The Past

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On a whim, I’ve started installing more of my older games on my Vista partition. I gave Interstate ’76 a whirl, and was surprised to find that it actually works, since it’s supposedly a bit touchy on XP. Well, mostly. The physics seem a bit dodgy in the main campaign and the NPC cars often bounce and wiggle rapidly, though it’s still mostly playable. I wonder if I can still get it to work online…

Update: The dodgy physics were fixed by installing a Glide wrapper and using that mode instead, somehow.

Finally, Some Combat

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Suikoden V resumed today with the trip to Stormfist, where we got to fight a lizard on board the ship along the way. That was only a tease though, as there wouldn’t be any more battle for a while yet.

In Stormfist we met Gizel Godwin, the other major noble competing to marry my sister, and learn that although he’s much more handsome and dignified than the other guy, he has a bit of a cruel streak. A spy hunt ensued a little while later, leading us into the sewers, where I could finally get some regular combat after 4.5 hours into the game. The spy was caught, some politicking followed (the Suikoden games are known for having rather intricate, political plots), and the Sacred Games began.

They started with a duel between myself and one of the gladiators we met, and although it follows the same form as duels in previous series entries, they’re harder this time because your response has a time limit, making it difficult to ‘cheat’ by looking up what the appropriate counter is. I forsee a lot of reloading over those in the future…