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I have new games! Weeeeeeeee! Thanks to the dubious joys of trading (farewell, Mario Kart: Double Dash - you were excellent fun for a couple of weeks, but after that initial period you were dull as dishwater).
Pokemon Colosseum - great! Nice little changes to the Pokeworld, so now you're a reformed member of a team of bad guys and the action takes place in a world that's a Poketake on the western. You now gain monsters by - gasp! - stealing them from otehr trainers, as there are no wild creatures here, and navigation of the overworld takes place by selecting points on a static map. It's all good, though - for "stealing" read "saving from slavery". For these are abused ‘Shadow’ Pokemon, who've had the doors to their hearts closed(!) and will now refuse to obey their owners and even attack humans(!!).
You need to be a Pokefan for this one, obviously. The thrill comes from seeing all yr team in full-on 3Dvision. The character modelling is excellent, mostly. A couple of monsters look a bit crap (they’ve messed up Psyduck, which is annoying) but the overwhelming majority are really impressive. The animation is so good that you end up feeling a bit guilty about making them faint. Being able to see the trainers in the battles for the first time adds a huge amount of excitement, mainly because of the way that they’ve shown Pokeballs being thrown and capturing monsters. Watching the ball rock backwards and forwards after capturing a creature inside it, witing to find out if it’s truly been caught or is just about to break free, is still one of the most tense experiences gaming has to offer.
Colosseum mode I’ve not touched yet, because I’ve done all that before in the Stadium games and I want the newness of the story mode first. Bad points include the generally rushed feel that some of the presentation has. In Stadium 2, you were on a giant Pokecollege (I’m going to keep doing that, btw) campus, and had stuff like minigames, an extremely anal battle strategy library, the ability to play the GBA games through yr telly… all gone, here. Navigation around the Colosseum mode is now just a set of options on a menu screen. For shame. They’ve also missed a trick in the story mode, by limiting movement between the various towns to selection of points on a map. Transition between towns is shown by a couple of seconds of in-engine cut-scene, showing your character riding his huge, rusty hoverbike thingy through the desert. It looks fantastic, so much so that you can’t help but feel cheated about not being able to control these sections yourself.
Oh, and the other slightly annoying thing is that, six and a half hours in, I’ve still not got to the point in the storyline where I can cure the Shadow Pokemon in my possession of their taint. Frustrating, because until that happens they won’t gain any EXP from battles, and may still refuse to obey me. Which means I’ve been playing for six hours with the same two monsters. But it’s Pokemon, and I’m a self-confessed Pokefan, so these minor negatives are never going to have a huge effect on my enjoyment of the game. And I can’t wait until I’m able to transfer the monsters caught in this back to my GBA games, finally getting that step closer to completing my Pokedex.
The other new one I’m playing is Castlevania: Lament of Innocence. Well, that’s what it should be called, but Konami Europe have performed their usual pointless trick and pulled the subtitle, so now it’s just Castlevania. Again. Silly Konami Europe – do you not understand the confusion that doing this all the time might cause?
Anyway, it’s very good. Technically, it’s about the best-looking PS2 game I’ve seen. Amazingly detailed textures, great lighting, solid areas. Music, as ever for a game in this series, is perfect.
Combat is basic, but fun. Weak attack on square, heavy attack on triangle, combinations of button presses pulling off combinations of moves, with more combos becoming available as you progress. The usual series staple of having to explore a sprawling castle remains intact. But…
It’s not perfect. Because, for some strange reason, there’s no height to the castle this time around. Instead, it covers a huge amount of flat ground, with rooms all linking to each other on the same floor. It’s 3D in the same way that Doom was 3D – you’ll never find one room on top of another here. There’s also a problem with the basic structure of the game. There are five distinct areas in the castle, but none of them feel as though they’re really part of the castle – instead of walking or running to them, you step on a teleporter to get there. None of them are physically linked together. Again, an unwanted break from series tradition, because it negatively affects the experience.
Also a little worried about the apparent lack of hidden areas – 50% of the castle explored and, so far, I’ve only discovered one. Where are the breakable walls from every other game in the series, the sections that hide entire new areas? They may still be here and it’s just that I’ve either not noticed them or I need an item to see them. I hope that’s the case, because otherwise that’s a huge part of the series’ appeal thrown away.
As ever, I’m pointing out the problems because I’m actually getting a lot from the game, which makes it easier to notice the little things that aren’t quite right. It’s still a huge amount of fun, and definitely recommended. Reviews were mediocre, and it deserves better. It also makes me *very* excited about the forthcoming sequel, which is rumoured to have a structure more closely based on the sort of thing in the classic Symphony of the Night and the three GBA games. This gets a lot of things right, and the main downer is the issue about castle structure - if they fix that, it'll be perfect. This one's £15 new in Gamestation now, so PS2 owners don't really have an excuse not to.
Finally, considering getting that second hand copy of Maximo vs Army of Zin that I saw in Blockbusters a couple of days ago. I got a lot out of the first game, so the promise of a more polished follow-up is tempting. Anyone here played it and care to give their opinion? |
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