[BE88] The Strategist

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I'm moving there. I feel that Blogger is not keeping up with the times, and that its functionality is very limited.

Updates stopped for this blog. Last post 20 August 2013.

Sunday, August 02, 2009

Prinny - Can I Really Be The Hero? Yeah, you definitely can.

Its been a long time since I felt such a great sense of satisfaction and and achievement from a game. If my memory serves me correctly, the last time I ever felt so good from completing a game was in November 2006; that was the time I completed Company of Heroes.

Prinny has 10 stages. Lets see what it took.

Number of lives used: 493
Time Taken: 8 hours 23 minutes 9 seconds

If you've been following me on Twitter, you would have known that I used 126 lives for the last stage alone, and it took 93 minutes to complete. What made me decide to get Prinny is the fact that everyone seems to say its a very hard game. The fact that you're given 1000 lives seems to back it up. I've been bobbing about in the video games world with no real sense of mission for the past few years, completing game after game. The 2300+ gameplay hours I've clocked on Xfire can attest to this. But each time I played a game, or each time I completed a game, it just gave me a "meh" kind of feeling. Yeah, it was good, it was interesting, but it didn't really have that "damn that was great" kind of feeling. I completed Guild Wars a year ago, and that was the best after Company of Heroes. But that best didn't feel good. Maybe because it was an MMORPG game completed with only 10% of the time interacting with players. That might have killed the overall experience for me.

Anyway, you get the point. Basically I'm just saying that satisfying (not just good) games come like once every 5 years, as if its some sort of magnitude 9 earthquake. So... enough with this melodramatic post.

Ever get that situation when the enemy boss's health bar is almost to the end, and the countdown timer is on its last five seconds? Yeah, that happened to me. I had never in my life pressed a button to quickly. My heart was beating like hell, and the adrenaline was pumping like hell. Like damn dude. Adrenaline never ever flows when I take my tests during PE, but it pumps now. Anyway, I didn't make it to complete that stage that time. I had to stare at the screen for like, 30 seconds. Wait for my hands to stop trembling, just needed to calm down.

I tried a few more times. When I was going to kill the boss, in this case, Sir Sweet's second form, that ping sound, that flash of white, that slow-mo, it all played in my mind. And then it happened. If I could, I would have screamed "wooooooooooooo", but I didn't because I was at a birthday party (yeah, its anti-social behaviour playing a PSP at a party). Damn dude. If you want to see what the game is like, search for Prinny on Youtube. However, the people that make is a lot easier than it really is. Too much easier.

I need more of such games. To me, games nowadays are just played for the story. I don't even give a damn about playing it properly anymore. If its an RTS, there's no point building up my base then attacking the enemy, after all,
1. There's no real challenge doing it
2. Its just a matter of time before I do it
3. So why not speed it up? I cheat.

If its an MMO, more specifically, WoW,
1. There's not much point playing level 1-79, unless you're a twink
2. There's very few people to play with at those levels
3. I just get ganked all day long at these levels
4. So why bother, hop on a private server and speed things up.

I want games that require effort to complete. I know developers have to cater to the casual market, but there should always be varying difficulties in a game. From what I've seen, the different difficulties aren't very different at all. Sigh. _l_ you EA. _l_ you Nintendo. _l_ you Wii.

posted @ 7:37 pm
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