Last week I had a $25 GameStop giftcard burning a whole in my pocket and wanted something new for the PSP. I’d read some quickie previews of Half-Minute Hero, it was within reach and my spending limit, so I picked it up on impulse. This has quickly turned out to be the most fun I’ve had with the PSP in a while.

The premise of Half-Minute Hero sounds sounds simplistic but essentially the goal is to save the world from the Evil Lord in 30 seconds. Doesn’t sound like much of a game from that description but I assure you, there’s much more to it. The game is broken up into three main chapters and with some challenge stages that can be played separately. Each chapter is made up of several episodes, and yes the goal is to complete each one in 30 seconds. Every episode is set up so that it feels like you’ve played an entire game, the credits even roll after you complete an episode. The next episode starts up with a recap of what you just accomplished and then sets the stage for the next Evil Lord you must defeat.

I suppose the best way to describe the gameplay is to say it’s a mini-RPG, with minimal user input. You can acquire gear and weapons with your standard RPG stats, and each item nicely affects your performance. You are then dispatched to defeat the Evil Lord and the 30 second timer starts ticking away. However, there are a few caveats to the time limit. Time stops when you enter villages or towns. You can also buy more time from
the Time Goddess (who is wickedly funny) but your funds have to be closely managed between purchasing healing items, buying the necessary weapons and gear or extending your time. You may not always have the money to extend the time limit and will have to hustle or watch the Evil Lord destroy the world when time runs out. Of course, the Time Goddess has ways of putting you back in the action but this makes every episode require a different set of strategies. Do you buy more time or pick up that Fly Swatter that will let you defeat insect enemies in one hit? So many decisions, so little time…

Once you set out on your adventure, you’ll run around on the world map looking for the Evil Lord and will then bump into any number of random encounters. Combat switches to side view and is automatic (hey, you really can’t do turn based or hack ‘n slash in just 30 seconds) so you’ll plow through enemies or be kicked back to the world map. You’ll also level up based on these encounters, sometimes 2-3 levels per fight, which is required for when you face the toughies at the end of each episode. There may also be side quests that have to be completed before you can tackle the Evil Lord, almost requiring that you buy extra time. Defeating the Evil Lord pops up a flag on his castle, Super Mario Bros. 3 style and then you’ve saved the world. For now.

Graphically the game is very different from what you’d expect from a PSP game. You get a top down world map view ala The Legend of Zelda (yes, the NES version) and then combat is sidescrolling ala Super Mario Bros. (again, the NES version). If my hints didn’t already tip you off, the game is presented in an over exaggereated 8/16-Bit style. It’s done in such a way that you can tell they’re making things purposely blurry or pixelated to poke fun at the adventure games from days gone by. I really like it, cracks me up when you get close-ups of your hero or the Evil Lords and have to try to figure out what you’re looking at.

I really enjoy games that don’t take themselves too seriously and Half-Minute Hero surely knows how to make fun of its gameplay gimmick. About 10 episodes in, the game pits you against a crocodilian Evil Lord and admits it’s having a hard time coming up with new Evil Lords for you to fight. Sometimes after battles on the world map you’ll get the message “You > Evil”. Another of the Evil Lords is an afro’d wizard that stole a
ship’s sails for bedsheets, complete with groovy disco music in the background. Even the gear and supporting characters are all in on the joke.

For a handheld game, this one hits on all the right levels. You get some quick, fun gameplay, with enough adventure and RPG elements to keep you coming back time after time. For a game that sells 30 seconds of adventure, I’ve spent nearly three hours with it already and I’m still on the 1st chapter. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to save the world and the clock is ticking.

Before you jump all over me about the post title, hear me out and understand my point. Before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, elves were little foot-tall guys who ran around in faerie forests and made Keebler cookies. Dwarves were midgets – human beings with far below average height. And orcs… like ROUS‘s, I don’t believe they existed.

I’ll fully admit that Gary Gygax is at least as much to blame. Dungeons and Dragons further cemented elves and dwarves as humanlike PC races. Perhaps the title of this story should name both deceased authors. I’ll fully admit that both of their works have affected my life greatly and I have a good deal of respect for each.

But nowadays, when talking about fantasy settings – not only video games – just about every one has elves and dwarves, and many have orcs. Not only the games based on Dungeons and Dragons (Pool of Radiance, Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Temple of Elemental Evil) but also many other fantasy RPGs: the Warcraft franchise, the Elder Scrolls series, the early Ultima games, and Dragon Age: Origins.

Why? Why do so many creators of fantasy worlds fall back on the generic Tolkien standard? We need more videogame fantasy settings like that of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, where the only non-human race is The Others, a mysterious and perhaps undead race. Like the late Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, where the only non-humans are magical creations and abberations like Gholams and Trollocs.

Non-human races certainly aren’t an essential component of a good FRPG, as shown by games like Final Fantasy and Torchlight. And if you’re going to include non-human races, why not make them original ones rather than elves and dwarves? They’re a tired cliche.

Just thought I’d share a couple of my favorite Borderlands weapons here.

I’m playing as Mordecai the sniper, so first off I’ve got my PPZ Liquid Wrath sniper rifle. In addition to doing over 200 damage, it zaps right through enemies’ shields. Very nice.

And secondly, my standby at medium range. The HLK War Cobra. It’s got a scope nearly as good as the sniper rifle, and fires in three-shot bursts. That’s 72 damage times three. Very nice.

My sniper, Beernut, is level 22 right now. As I move along in the game, I’ll probably post some more weapons as I get new favorites.

Here’s another game that hadn’t been on my radar at all until I saw this trailer. Magicka – a four-player Diablo-like RPG with a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor, as you can certainly tell by this trailer. Currently, it’s only a XBLA game, but I’d love to see it on PSN. This is exactly the type of game that my wife and I would have a blast with.

Time Fcuk is a very Portal-like game. Each level challenges you to reach the end portal by changing “layers”, reversing gravity, and listening to the humorous advice of… yourself. Yourself from the future.

Play Time Fcuk

I’m playing the Steam version of Borderlands on a PC, which means that I’ve been playing about a week less than the XBox and PS3 folks. It also means that I’m not playing on a platform for which the game was designed. The menus in Borderlands were obviously put together for a console, and it shows. I’ve got to hit ‘E’ to compare weapons and the space bar to drop a weapon. It would have been so easy for them to create a mouse-based GUI with right-click options had they only decided to spend the time.

Even more frustrating is the flaky online connectivity. Rather than using Steamworks to connect players, they went with Gamespy. I’m still not exactly sure what my initial issue was, but the first day I tried, I was completely unable to connect to a multiplayer game. I suspect that setting up port forwarding (how to) is what fixed the problem, but that type of router wizardry is beyond many people. The game’s online functionality should have been designed to be as easy on the PC as it is on consoles. I swear – the PC doesn’t have achievements, but there really should be a fifty-pointer for successfully connecting to a private game.

On Tuesday night, I played the game for a few hours with my cousin Paul in Connecticut. Once we got the game successfully running, we gave Steam’s built-in voice chat a try. It worked, but only in the same sense that an overnight security guard “works”. That is to say, the push-to-talk was broken, voices cut out mid-sentence, and Paul observed that speaking at all on loading screens made me sound like Max Headroom. Next time we’ll probably use Skype.

After the ordeal of starting a multiplayer game was complete, it actually became kind of fun. I was playing Brick, the tank, and Paul was playing as Lilith, the siren. You get no skill points for the first five levels, but they whizzed by and I reached 5th level and got my berserk ability before I knew it. Berserking turned out to be far more fun than I’d expected. Brick screams like an enraged mental patient who missed his antipsychotic meds, sprinting around and throwing punches at the rate of a machine gun. Except the punches do way more damage than any machine gun I’ve found in the game so far. I ain’t kidding.

As it turns out, Brick and Lilith work really well together. He absorbs the damage and gets in close for punches while she keeps her distance. If need be, she can get in close too, and then escape with her phase ability. I end up using Brick’s rage a lot of times just to heal myself, since he heals continuously while raging.

Managing quests in multiplayer can be a bit annoying. Since Paul has played through a decent bit of the game before, he runs up and gets quests, then switches active quests from the log screen all the time. At first, I didn’t even realize there was a log screen, since I hadn’t gotten that far along in the tutorial in my single-player game. Honestly, I suppose there’s really no good way to handle this, short of making the player hosting the game a kind of “party leader”. And although I’ve heard that the game doesn’t have much plot, I can’t help but feel that I’m missing out on what little story there is.

Other annoyances:

• If your inventory is full and you try to pick something up, you’ll drop a random item. Could be really bad if you’re in a public multiplayer game and you accidentally drop that ultra-rare sniper rifle. Some unscrupulous bozo could snatch it up before you have a chance to recover.
• Vehicles are a pain in the ass to steer. You accelerate and brake with ‘W’ and ‘S’ and steer with the mouse. Boo.
• There’s too little story. The game feels like an endless series of fetch quests. I could sure do with some more variety.

But all in all, I’m still playing the game. I’m actually playing it a bit more than I’m playing Trine. I won’t recommend the game, but I also won’t suggest that you not buy it. Just read some reviews and make up your own mind.

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

As Lore Sjoberg once brilliantly put it, video games and movies get along like cats made of oil and dogs made of water. Aside from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, there are no good movies based on video games. No! Shut up. I don’t want to hear about Doom, Resident Evil, or anything Uwe Boll has come within a furlong of.

On the flip side of the coin, you have video games based on movies. While the good ones may still be rare, they’re likely still countable on your fingers unless your name is Frodo. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay is one of a rare breed: very good games that are based on movie properties. I’ve played through Escape From Butcher Bay twice now, and it’s likely that I will again. I can’t think of a shooter that has better stealth mechanics, although Dark Messiah of Might and Magic comes close. Lurking in the Pitch Dark (har har) and seeing every move your enemies make while they can’t see you at all is loads of fun. But that’s Riddick.

I just bought a copy of Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena for $5 from Direct2Drive. I hope it’s as good as the original.

Chase sequences in games are really difficult to do well. How many can you think of? Generally they’re either of the timed sort such as in Prototype, where you’ve got to navigate obstacles and reach your target before the timer elapses, or else they’re of the untimed sort where you can wait around for as long as you like. When you reach a certain point, you’ve caught your target – not really much of a chase. But there are a very few games in which the chase has been made into a very well-done, very fun scenario. Here are the best five I can think of.

5 – Dark Messiah of Might & Magic

Fairly early on in the game, a ghoul steals an important artifact, and to catch him you’ve got to do a poor man’s parkour across rooftops, through windows, and across rickety scaffolding to catch it. While the ghoul is climbing walls and leaping twenty feet through the air, you need to resort to climbing ladders and leaping two foot gaps between wooden planks. Being forced to take a far more circuitous route and leap before you look makes the chase frantic, and I personally plunged to my death at least a half dozen times. But once you learn the route you need to take and are racing along, the chase is indeed exhilirating.

Watch the Ghoul Chase from Dark Messiah of Might & Magic

4 – Enter the Matrix

I don’t remember very much detail about the gameplay in Enter the Matrix. The game was most notable for its FMV sequences with footage that was filmed at the same time and with the same actors that were in Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions. But once part that I remember quite well is being chased by an agent early in the game. If you remember the opening scene in the first Matrix movie, Trinity was in a frenzied flight from an agent. The sequence from the game captured that feeling perfectly – you’ve got to run as fast as you can, and you have absolutely no chance to look back. If you look behind you, you die. It’s the most frantic chase scene in any game I’ve ever played.

3 – Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

Overall, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was a frustrating game. A bug prevented me from even completing it. But the first real action in the game, before you have any weapons, is a scene where you’re running from townsfolk who want to kill you. You’re staying in an inn, and you’ve locked your door, but you’ve only got a few seconds before the townies break it down. You move to the adjacent room and push a bookcase in front of the door to block it, then start working on opening the window to get out. This is the beginning of an insane chase that constitutes the only really well crafted part of this game. Very memorable.

Watch the Call of Cthulhu chase

2 – Gravity Bone

It’s very possible that you’ve never heard of Gravity Bone. It’s not an actual commercially available full game. It’s a short, free, downloadable game that I’ve featured on Free Game Friday. But it’s one of the best Free Game Friday games I’ve ever covered. If it were a full game, I’d buy it in a minute. The first level is a 2-minute romp. The second is fun but not phenomenal… until the end. The twist is brilliant and unexpected, and leads to an amazing chase with an equally unexpected ending. I loved it. You can link to the video below, or better yet – download and play the game.

Watch the Gravity Bone chase (skip to 3:30)

1 – Beyond Good and Evil

I’m sure that the people of Lungfishopolis wish by now that I’d shut up about Beyond Good and Evil. I try to keep my raving to a minimum, but when I thought of chases in games, this is simply the best. The cinematic chase near the end of Beyond Good and Evil breaks the rules of the game by changing the camera angle multiple times and intercutting slow-motion mini-cut-scenes in a way that results in a beautiful foot chase. At one point, you’re actually running directly towards the camera, which seems odd until you realize that in that point of the chase, dodging projectiles thrown by your pursuers is more important than dodging upcoming obstacles.

Watch the chase from Beyond Good and Evil

My wife and I have been seriously digging Trine. After having played it over the weekend, I’m ready to say that it’s a front-runner for best game I’ve played in 2009. Granted, I have yet to play Dragon Age: Origins, and I’m not sure whether I’ll be playing Uncharted 2 in 2009, but as of right now my “best games” list has only two titles: Dead Space and Trine.

First things first: Trine’s graphics are absolutely amazing. Not since Oblivion and Half-Life 2 have I actually had to stop and admire the scenery. These are some serious triple-A graphics – more than you’d generally expect in a $20 downloadable game. The music is likewise very well composed and performed. I’ve had the songs from Trine stuck in my head for the last 48 hours.

I’ve primarily been playing through the game multiplayer with my wife, and we’ve been loving it. Maybe there’s something to this gaming as therapy thing. She’s playing primarily as the thief, and I’m switching back and forth from the knight to the wizard. Although there are certainly frustrating moments, such as when my wizard drops a plank on her head and knocks her down a bottomless pit, or when I get annoyed that she hasn’t spent the past two decades perfecting her platforming skills like I have, it’s generally a really good time. The moments where the teamwork really clicks are immensely satisfying – when she stands on a block that my knight throws upwards to an inaccessible ledge or she pulls off some impossible-looking grappling swing. It’s also really fun to get creative with the structures the wizard can build.

I’d been concerned with how the game’s view would work with two players. It’s not split-screen, so what would happen if the two characters moved too far away from each other? Thankfully, the game handles it as well as I could have hoped – it zooms back just slightly as you move apart, and when you get too far away, it’s actually possible for one character to be off-screen. While that’s certainly annoying, it’s rare and usually easy to fix. If the characters get very far away, one is teleported to the other’s location – a mechanic that we’ve exploited more than once.

Another thing I really like about the game is that the achievements seem difficult yet doable. In my single-player game, I’ve collected all experience in the first three levels, plus gotten the “Whoops!” and “Survivor” trophies. The more difficult achievements include getting all experience on all levels and completing the final level without dying. Nothing tedious or impossibly difficult like playing through Dead Space using only the plasma cutter or winning 10 consecutive ranked matches in Street Fighter 4.

I think I’ll be playing and enjoying Trine for a long time.

Wow. Check it out. It looks like Playstation 3 owners will be able to stream content from Netflix as early as November. This is huge news for me, as my household doesn’t even subscribe to cable. We get pretty much all our programming from Netflix and from Hulu. Now there’ll be no more waiting for the discs. I know that Netflix only streams a small percentage of its content, but we’ve seldom used it, since we were unable to watch the programming on our big LCD screen.

The cool thing is that Playstation 3 owners won’t need to pay Sony a fee in the way that XBox 360 owners have to pay for “Gold” tier XBox live services – the Netflix streaming is provided by popping in a custom Blu-Ray disc shipped from Netflix. It’s odd that a disc is required, but Michael Pachter says that it’s likely to explot a legal loophole in Netflix’s deal with Microsoft – having a disc required means that it’s technically not a feature that’s included with the Playstation. Whatever. All I know is that I’ll be able to stream Netflix. It’s good news now that I hear Hulu will be charging for streaming content as of 2010.