I’ve indeed nearly cleaved gaming out of my life entirely, but I hit a stride about 6 months ago where I started working on my Halo mod again quite furiously. My friend and I would get together with beers and game it up till 4am, then I would make adjustments based on the properties of the weapons which either were or weren’t hitting the balance we wanted. Great strides were made over previous versions and a lot of progress was made. We ended up recording some footage for demonstration purposes, then I got burned out and busy with other stuff, and never did anything with it.

Finally in the past week I decided to get the footage together and cut it into some streaming videos, and here are the results.

Pistol, Plasma Pistol
Battle Rifle
Plasma Rifle
Needler
SMG
Rocket Launcher
Covenant Carbine
Brute Shot
Beam Cannon
Shotgun
Sniper Rifle

They can be slow to stream, so I recomend starting the video, pausing it, and waiting  a minute or two before you watch. You might just open them all, set em to load up, and come back later. They are all worth watching, but the Plasma Rifle and Rocket Launcher videos  are undoubtedly the best.

Pistol

This is basically the Halo 1 Pistol, nerfed to be an appropriate spawn/sidearm weapon, rather than a powerful mid/long range weapon. The rate of fire is the same, the accuracy is the same, but there’s no scope and it take 7 hits to deplete shields for a headshot; 8 shot kill total. It also has a 16 round magazine to compensate for the low damage.

It is indeed very weak when used as a primary weapon, but can be very deadly when used in conjunction with melee, grenades, or other weapons to weaken shields and open the enemy to a headshot. It can also be drawn and fired twice as fast as any other weapon (besides the plasma pistol) so for the purpose of finishing the enemy with a headshot, it is actually preferable to the BR in many cases, despite being exactly half as powerful.

I believe the video should drive home that that weapon is plenty capable of making kills, even against weapons as powerful as the BR and Rocket Launcher. It is intended to be the Halo equivalent of Unreal Tournament’s Enforcer pistol – awkward enough to use and weak enough that you are forced to spend your initial moments of combat looking for a primary weapon rather than attacking enemies head on, yet powerful enough in its own right to fend for itself.

The reason why spawning with the BR has been necessary in past Halo iterations is because the rest of the weapon set was too inaccurate and weak – if you didn’t have a BR you were screwed. In the mod, weapons other than the BR and power weapons are actually versatile and effective now. The PR and SMG are effective out to mid range and the Needler is powerful enough at close range to compensate for its long range deficiencies. Therefore, when you spawn, you have plenty of options at your disposal as long as you rush/sneak your way to a primary weapon prior to charging into combat. What’s more, the pistol is versatile enough to defend yourself with if you get cornered – it’s accurate enough to score a headshot in almost any situation, and its rate of fire is just high enough to be serviceable at close range.

Lastly, to answer comparisons to the ODST Pistol – the rate of fire is as slow as it is because the weapon is not intended to be a close range bullet hose. I have experimented with recoil models in Halo since my first Custom Edition (PC) mod in 2005. The problem with relying on recoil to balance out high rates of fire is that no matter how high the recoil, there will always be a point at close ranges where the recoil becomes negligible due to the practical impossibility of missing. Thus a weapon which is not intended to have close range advantage is given an exponential advantage where suddenly you can spam bullets to your heart’s content and not suffer any drawbacks. A higher rate of fire was tried in prior versions of the mod, and with the same damage, it easily out-shoot the SMG at close range. The pistol does not need the capability to fire as fast as you can pull the trigger – that would make it a veritable Assault Rifle-type bullet spam weapon. If you can’t pull off headshots without a faster rate of fire, you need to bring your skill level up to par.

Plasma Pistol

The most immediate change to the Plasma Pistol is the total and utter lack of homing on the overcharge bolt. Instead, the speed of the bolt has been increased a bit to make it more practical to use over distance without the assistance of homing. Still, success with the PP overcharge is totally skill based.

The freeze property from Halo 1 has also been added back to the Plasma Pistol – both to the normal shot and the overcharge bolt. Since the freeze no longer exists on the Plasma Rifle, this is a unique and useful ability, which can be put to good use to surprise and disable even with as weak an attack as the primary fire mode.

Lastly, the overcharge bolt now has a headshot property. It is extremely difficult to land a headshot with the PP overcharge, but it takes a lot of skill and if you pull it off you can land an unexpected kill from close range or across the map. This give the PP a bit of added clout as an actual primary weapon and not just as vehicle for weapon combos. Unfortunately, we didn’t get any shots of this feature on tape this time, though you can see it at 1:10 here.

Like the Magnum Pistol, the PP can also be drawn and fired twice as quickly as other weapons.

Battle Rifle

This is basically the Halo 1 Pistol, but with a rifle skin. It is single shot, 12 round magazine, and depletes shields in 3 hits for a 4 shot kill (if it’s a headshot). The extra shot required to kill makes it a little more fair and balanced than the original Pistol and moreover, you don’t spawn with it, so you are not given a powerful all-purpose weapon on a silver platter – you actually have to work for it. It is also has tighter spread than the H1 Pistol, so it’s more consistent and less random. Lastly, the bullet has actually been slowed down considerably, so you do have to lead subtly at very long ranges to score a proper hit.

To reiterate what I have said before, the 3 shot/second rate of fire was chosen to eschew the bullet spam techniques of the burst fire and rapid fire of the old BR and Carbine. Slower rates of fire as seen in weapons like the Halo 1 Pistol, Unreal Enforcer, Doom Pistol require more skill to score hits. Furthermore, the slower rate of fire is more in line with the actual definition of the term battle rifle as, as such weapons were specialized for long range, single shot firepower at the cost of heavy recoil which made rapid fire practically impossible. Contrary to popular belief, rapid semi-automatic fire was a provision of the assault rifle, and the mod Battle Rifle is intended to fulfill the battle rifle role. If you want rapid semi-automatic fire on the order of an assault rifle, you can pick up the Covenant Carbine.

Note: you may notice the clip a minute into the video where the player is firing from the balcony of Ascension and is swiftly killed by another BR. His shots are being blocked by the wall because the bullets are now projected from the barrel of the 3rd person weapon model (which is aligned with the corner of the screen in 1st person), instead of from the center of the player’s face. This was an experiment which results in much a much better visual of players shooting from 3rd person (it no longer looks like you’re spitting brute grenades and plasma bolts) and allows you to observe your tracers in flight (which helps with leading). However, it also means that in certain instances your shots can be blocked unexpectedly and you have to learn to expect it and compensate.

Plasma Rifle

The spread has been removed entirely and the damage upgraded to a 8-10 hit kill. As you can see, this increases the range considerably, and the weapon can hold it’s own against the BR and Carbine at mid range. One would think that this also overpowers the weapon at close range, but the truth is, without cross-hair magnetism it’s much harder than expected to make easy spray kills at close range. It takes 2-3 hits to deplete shields for a melee or headshot, which is virtually the same as in Halo 3.

All in all the damage of the weapon is exactly in proportion to the effort required to use it – if you can execute the leading necessary to land hits with the slow-moving plasma bolts, you deserve to make the kill. It is powerful enough to use as a finisher in conjunction with weapons like the Sniper Rifle and Rocket Launcher, but it’s still not as damaging against health (vs shields) as the SMG. All the same, Plasma Rifle still has been given the potential to score a total kill at distance much faster than the SMG, if you use it properly, because it takes MUCH more skill to land the slow plasma bolts using leading than to simply point and click with the SMG.

Needler

As should be obvious, the primary change to the Needler is the complete omission of homing. Instead, it is a skilled non-homing weapon which grants heavy damage (4-5 hit kill) in exchange for an extremely slow needle travel speed (twice as slow as plasma bolts). Coupled with the fact that needles have the potential to ricochet and deal damage around corners, the Needler becomes a unique close range powerhouse weapon. Unlike the SMG/PR/Needler of past Halo iterations, which were easily outshot by longer range weapons even at point-blank range; the modded Needler actually does have the CQB advantage over midrange weapons it advertises.

And the best part about the Needler’s close range power is that it is still not a mindless or unskilled weapon. The slow speed of the needles require a heavy degree of leading to hit even at short distances, so it is not just a point-and-click bullet hose. It can also be used to make a lot of tricky kills at various distances by using its ricochet properties to strike around corners or funnel heavy fire into narrow corridors. At times it outdoes the pointblank destruction even of the shotgun – and deservedly so, because it’s a skilled and complex weapon.

SMG

The SMG has come a long way from it’s piss-poor Halo 2 and Halo 3 counterparts. It now strikes comparison to the Quake 3 Machinegun or Unreal Tournament Minigun – it can be effective over almost any range as long as you can concentrate the fire on the target to compensate for its relatively low per-bullet damage.

The muzzle climb has been completely removed. The spread is now quite tight – about half the size of the reticule (unzoomed) and the entire size of the reticule when scoped (yes, all weapons have a scope now, besides the Pistol and Plasma Pistol). The damage is pretty low, it takes about 22-25 hits to kill, but the magazine carries precisely three times that many rounds, so you have plenty of ammo to get the job done.

As the video shows, despite the relatively low damage rate, the SMG can hold its own at close range against the Needler and Plasma Rifle. This is because the advantage of an instant-hitting bullet over slow-moving bolts is so pronounced, even at close range. The Plasma Rifle and Needler can definitely crush it if they do their job right, but a sloppy PR or Needler shooter can be easily toppled by a good SMG user.

The SMG clearly also has a use now over long range. It does take a while to kill, but its instant-hitting properties and bullet-hose rate of fire make it quite easy to use at such a range. As long as you make sure to concentrate the reticule on the enemy precisely, you can suppress or kill a BR or Carbine user in the amount of time it takes them to land a successful 4th or 8th headshot – unless they are just really good, in which case you don’t deserve to live anyway. Because of it’s high rate of knocking targets out of scope, it can even be effective as an anti-sniper weapon. It is indeed weak and takes a while to kill, but because that weakness is in conjunction with it’s high easy of use – it is still an effective weapon overall.

Rocket Launcher

The total and complete design of the mod Rocket Launcher is to achieve a style of rocket combat far closer to that of Quake and Unreal Tournament than Halo’s typical fire-and-forget mininuke rockets – where the only thing balancing the weapon’s mindless ease-of-use is it’s ease-of-suicide.

The rockets’ blast radius and blast damage have been greatly reduced. You will only score a 1 hit kill on a full-shield, full-health opponent by directly hitting them with the rocket itself. At max, a glancing blow will only deal about 2/3 of the lethal dose of damage. On the flip side, you get four rockets per magazine, and a relatively high rate of fire.

This makes for sustained, skilled rocket fights which revolve around precise predictive fire. You will either kill the opponent with 2-3 well-placed glancing blows, or a single masterful direct hit. You can not match the precision involved in a direct hit-only rocket using a mini-nuke design. This does not under-power the weapon, because the increase in magazine capacity and rate of fire is exactly in proportion to its decrease in explosive power.

It quite plainly does not erase the risk of suicide either, as the video shows. Firing double the rockets to make the kill means double the chances to fire one off near an obstruction and hurt yourself. Because of the reduced blast damage, and it’s increased damage versus health compared to shields, it is actually possible to shoot the enemy and kill yourself without killing the opponent.

Covenant Carbine

The Carbine is intended as the sole concession to rapid fire, bullet spam headshots in the mod. To bring it in line with the new Battle Rifle, the rate of fire has been increased a bit to double that of the Battle Rifle (meaning it now fires exactly 6 shots per second) and deals exactly half the damage (potential headshot kill in 8 shots). The magazine capacity is also now 24 rounds instead of 18, meaning you’ve got triple the minimum amount of ammo required to make a kill (as with most weapons in the game).

The big catch with the Carbine is that it now uses the shield damage vs health weakness damage property. That means that even though it depletes shields in 7 hits, it can take up to 24 hits or more to completely deplete the enemy’s health if you don’t score a headshot. This places a much higher emphasis on shot placement than with the BR and Magnum – if you don’t score the 4 hit headshot kill with the BR, it kills on the 7th body shot, if you don’t score the 8 hit headshot kill with the Pistol, it kills on the 12th body shot.

The Carbine also has a major difference from the Battle Rifle, Pistol, SMG, and Sniper Rifle in that those weapons’ bullets do not hit absolutely instantly. Their bullet speeds have all been reduced to speeds between 100-400 units per second, so that even though they still travel much faster than a plasma or needler bolt, you still need to lead a bit at extreme ranges to hit the target. The Carbine (and Beam Rifle) actually do hit instantly so that there is precisely 0 leading required even at extreme ranges.

While one might think the Covenant Carbine would those have a distinct long range advantage over the BR, the end result can often be the opposite. While the BR does require leading at long range, the fact that it does not require a headshot to kill becomes an increasingly large advantage the further you are from the target. This is exacerbated by the fact that the Carbine has virtually 0 spread, so whaling on the trigger at a distance is not going to saturate with fire the entire area over the enemy’s shoulders, as it did with past Halo iterations. Despite the fact that the Carbine beam travels 100% instantly, scoring a precise headshot at such great distances is so difficult that it all balances out.

If anything the Carbine’s ability to spam headshots becomes more of a close range advantage. The speed and ease of scoring headshots once shields are depleted is indeed very impressive, as shown in the many plasma pistol combos in the videos. I am almost tempted to call the current Carbine implementation overpowered as compared to the Battle Rifle and Pistol. However, I know for all the easy headshot spam kills shown in the video, I’ve seen firefights where the Carbine’s virtually worthless damage to the rest of the body resulted in countless magazines expended without making a kill. Ultimately I think so far it’s still a unique, complex, and varied equal to the BR and Pistol after the changes I’ve made to it.

Beam Cannon

This is the Halo version of Quake’s Railgun. It kills in one hit (to chest, legs, whatever) and overheats after every shot. It also has no scope magnification, so you are essentially noscoping every shot you make. The beam itself has also been made visually wider, larger, and it takes longer to fade. After such changes we felt the term Beam Rifle was ineffectual…one look at the weapon in action and you’ll see…it’s the Beam Cannon.

The weapon speaks for itself. It is immensely powerful but it also comes with challenges to match. Since it has no splash damage and the visual size of the beam does not affect the actual hit zone, it requires more precision that Halo 3’s Spartan Laser. The rate of fire is extremely slow, and while it can kill from across the map, you’ll have to make that shot without any zoom. I would have liked to disable the ability to switch weapons during the overheat cycle, and add some sort of reloading requirement every 3 shots, but it balances out pretty well.

This weapon was designed not just to add a very powerful, exciting weapon to the game, but to ad variety. First and foremost the problem with the old Beam Rifle was that it was essentially a purple Sniper Rifle with an overheat function and a spammy rate of fire. With my changes, the weapon now has much greater differences in terms of damage, rate of fire, and the basic manner which the weapon is aimed. What’s more, since the Sniper Rifle bullet has been slowed to lead-worthy speeds while the Beam Cannon is hitscan, that ads an extra layer of complexity – you have an extra incentive to try for those extremely long distance noscope beam shots.

Brute Shot

As with many weapons, the changes to the Brute Shot were geared to reduce spam in exchange for skill-intensive precision. The rate of fire was cut in half, the spread removed, and the grenade fuse time lengthened five or ten fold. This causes the Brute Shot grenade to travel further after bouncing, allowing you to utilize its arc and ricochet properties in a wider variety of situations – though it also means that if you miss the target, the grenade is more likely to pass by without exploding and dealing any damage. It now has a 6 round magazine instead of 4; at two direct hits needed to kill, that’s a healthy amount of ammo. The Brute Shot has also been added to more maps, making it more of a main stay of the game and less of a mere novelty.

I believe I have taken the Brute Shot from a spammy token weapon to a unique, tactical, and complex part of the arsenal. The ricochet physics change the weapon’s character completely depending on the situation – in some instances you are forced to make totally precise hits without relying on splash damage at all, in others you can skip the grenade off the ground to explode in the air, maximizing the area of effect. The slow rate of fire, heavy damage, and the precision of the weapon put it in league with the Rocket Launcher, but it still offers a large host of unique features, from the grenade physics, to the faster grenade travel speed, to the higher rate of fire possible.

Sniper Rifle

The Sniper Rifle is undoubtedly the least changed weapon in the game, because it’s always been the least broken. It has been made pretty similar to the Sniper Rifle of Halo 3 – the refire rate was reduced to one shot per 0.75 seconds, and the recoil effect was added to decrease the effective rate of fire even a bit further. The scope was changed from the 2x/10x of prior mod versions, to 5x only. This entails more skill in close-mid range shots as you are forced to noscope rather than rely on the easy 2x magnification, and it entails more skill at extreme long ranges as you have to make do with the relatively low-powered 5x, rather than have a silver platter handed to you with the 10x scope. Lastly, there is no spread on unscoped fire (or any sort of fire) and the bullet has been slowed to speeds where you have to lead a bit at extreme ranges to score a perfect hit.

A large part of the reason these changes were made is because after extensive time spent fighting at mid range with weapons like the BR, PR, RL, and Brute Shot…making long range kills with the SR just feels too easy, and despite the greatly increased range of all other weapons in the game, holding the Sniper Rifle still decides the game a little too easily even on close range maps. I believe the Sniper Rifle should still qualify as a power weapon which plays heavily into resource control to decide matches, and it has the skill curve in manuevers like noscope headshots to deserve that kind of power – I just feel it should be made a bit more challenging. Were it up to me, I’d change the weapon to a bolt-action with 1 to 1.25 second delay between shots, but given that completely remodeling and reanimating the weapon is not practical, recoil will have to do for now.

Shotgun

The Shotgun has finally been completely un-fucked. Gone is the donut spread pattern present in default Halo 2. Gone is the magic distance cap still present  even in Halo 3, where pellets would just disapear and no longer damage after 5-10 yards. In fact, as with the rest of the ordnance in the game, the damage of the shotgun pellets does not reduce over distance at all – it’s already hard enough to hit anything at range in the first place.

The spread has been dialed down from 10 degree to 6 degrees…this is actually virtually identical to the spread of the Quake 3 shotgun. The shotgun now fires 10 pellets, and it takes 10 pellets to kill, so the weapon essentially cannot be overpowered. You’re only going to score a one hit kill if you’re close enough that NONE of the pellets miss – however, you can still deal out a generous pelting over a pretty wide range, often killing in 2, 3, or 4 well placed blasts.

To protect against concerns  that the weapon would be overpowered, I dialed the rate of fire back so there is now a 1.25 second delay between shots, rather than the default 1 second. This is consistent with classic shotguns such as that of the original Doom, Doom 3, and Quake 2. However, it’s been found that the weapon really doesn’t need the slower rate of fire, so this will probably be changed back to 1 second in future versions.

To understand the balance of the Shotgun, it really must be pointed out how inneffective shotgun designs inherently are at longer ranges. The Shotgun really did not need all the EXTRA range nerfs present in Halo’s 1-3. Even with all those extra nerfs stripped out in the mod, the Shotgun still has the shortest range in the game. Even though the spread of the weapon is quite wide, one must realize that the center of the crosshair is still where the most pellets are likely to land. This means means that at mid range, you can’t just point the weapon in the general direction of the target and strike an easy hit. If you do that, you might hit 1 out of 10 times. If you perfectly center the enemy in your crosshairs, you have maybe a 50% or 75% chance of striking with 1 or 2 pellets.

That means at best it will take 5-10 shots to kill someone at a distance even if you aim every shot perfectly. The shotgun has a rate of fire of less than 1 shot per second; to fire 5-10 shots it will take 6-12 seconds. Also, bear in mind that the Shotgun only has a 6 round magazine so you would have to reload before finishing the kill. Meanwhile, an enemy with a BR has a 100% chance of hitting the target every time they have the enemy centered in the crosshairs, they can kill in 4 – 7 hits, and the weapon fires 3 shots per second so if they aim perfectly, they can score a kill in 1-2 seconds. The magazine is also 12 rounds.

If you have a perfectly accurate weapon which can kill in 2-3 seconds, and you are beaten by someone with a weapon that takes at least 6-12 seconds (plus reload time) to kill (if they are lucky), you fucked up royally and you deserve to die. That is the inherant stupidity in claiming that any added range to the shotgun makes it overpowered. The mod at least give you a chance – practically speaking you can at least knock the opponent out of scope while you try to land a grenade or escape the situation, and if the enemy fights so badly that they lose out of attrition – that’s their fault, the odds were all in their favor. In summary, making balance claims against my shotgun is like saying that in real life if a lunatic randomly decides to set up outside with a hunting rifle and shoot innocent bystanders, and a bystander is lucky enough to see the lunatic ahead of time, pick up a rock, and throw it – even though the rock has a very small chance of reaching the lunatic, hitting him in the eye before the lunatic makes the shot, and disabling him for an escape – the situation is unfair to the lunatic with the rifle unless God arbitrarily intervenes and magically scoops the rock out of the air before it gets halfway across the street.

This actually started as a straight forward review of Soul Calibur 4, but as it was developed, discussing the evolution of online play in fighters and how SC4’s online play stacks up therein became such an overbearing focus that the editor suggested I simply make it a feature specifically to that end. Consequently, some paragraphs on SC4’s other features and it’s overall purchasing value got cut.

Also, I must admit that if it had been planned as an essay entirely focused on the evolution of online play in fighters from the start, I would have gone about things differently – mainly I would have detailed and compared the online implementations of all the online fighters mentioned. That being said, just focusing on SC4 already greatly exceeded the typical word count for an Otaku USA feature, so it was for the best that things turned out the way they did.

Continue reading ‘Soul Calibur Goes Online’

Hear ye hear ye, lo and behold a rare occurrence… a new game that I don’t find heavily flawed and substandard!! Here is my review of Unreal Tournament 3 for Xbox 360, posted at Otaku USA, so I actually get paid for this shit. I won’t go into details here, since you’re theoretically about the read them in the review anyway, but the gist is that this is a complete reversal from shoddy past console ports of the series and easily the best shooter on consoles right now.

Continue reading ‘UT3 for 360: a new game that’s actually good!’

I finally gave Super Mario Galaxy a rental last week after being told that it was considerably more challenging than its predecessors and closer to recreating the classic Super Mario Bros feel than any of the other 3D Super Mario games. Rather than writing a review, which would inevitably just be beating negative aspects of the game like a dead horse, I decided to write an article focusing on specific things that would have made the game more enjoyable.

1) Hard Mode

The primary reason I didn’t have fun with Super Mario Galaxy was that the vast majority of the game was so mind-numbingly easy that virtually no effort or input was really needed from the player. It didn’t even feel like gameplay. Action Button described Super Mario Galaxy as evidently being created in ever-present fear of “a class-action lawsuit from widows of old men with overloaded pacemakers” and Capcom USA staff Dave Sirlin admits “I played probably the last third of the game on low volume while I watched reruns of Frasier and The Golden Girls on a second TV.” Personally, after the first 20 minutes playing the game, my eyes were literally glazed over and I was seconds from falling asleep on the couch. I had to run to the gas station and return with an arm full of Starbucks doubleshots, which I had to consume at a rate of approximately one per half-hour just to keep going at the game for the rest of the night.

The truth is, I really don’t mind if developers want to provide an easy mode for grandma and the kids, and for lazy gamers that just want to see all the set pieces and cut scenes. What Nintendo (and a lot of other developers) need to learn is that the gimmick approach to multiple difficulty levels, where you make the main portion of the game really easy, but then you insert extra missions and hidden features that will supposedly satisfy the hardcore gamer in the end, doesn’t work. The experienced gamer should not be forced to play the entire game in retarded mode first before he can start to enjoy it, and unless you actually provide a harder version of the entire game, the harder bonus missions at the end are going to be just that – a few missions. In essence the hardcore player only gets to enjoy a small fraction of the whole game.

The Prankster Comets were probably the worst offenders in this regard. They could have provided a way to challenge the experienced gamer from the beginning, but they appeared all too rarely and randomly. During the rare instances when they were around, they tended to always appear at the easiest early levels which you didn’t even want to bother with again, and then when you payed the luma star to move the comets in hope that they’d appear at harder levels, most of the time they would just disappear from the map entirely. The fact that the hidden levels like the Trial Galaxies were the only significantly challenging ones in the game, and were totally hidden, didn’t help either. The hardcore gamer is already going to be bored to death having to play hours and hours of easy levels just to get to the good parts, forcing him to then mess around with randomly appearing comets and scour the easy levels to find the difficult levels just makes it way too much work to actually have fun at the game.

To hell with “prankster comets”, I want to be able to activate “hard mode” from the beginning and play the whole game that way immediately. I want faster monsters, time limits, and other challenging features all the time, all the way through the whole game from the start. I don’t know how Nintendo can bill games like Super Mario Galaxy as one of their major “hardcore” titles, when hardcore gamers are not even given the common courtesy of selectable difficulty levels, and they have to go through hours of boring gameplay to actually start enjoying themselves in the game.

2) Old School Health System

Finally in Super Mario Galaxy, someone at Nintendo realized that the 8-part health bar from Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine was too fucking much, and they brought it down to 3 hit points. This was a step in the right direction, but given the pedestrian nature of the rest of the game, a less forgiving health system would have been more desirable, at least for hard mode.

Honestly, given Nintendo’s attitude as an “innovative” developer which prides itself on uniqueness, I don’t know why 3D Super Mario games are still using a generic health bar just like every other game out there. Why not go back to the original Super Mario Bros health system? You start out small, and one hit kills you. Grab a mushroom to get big, and now you can take 2 hits before dieing. Stack another powerup like a Fire Flower on top of that, and now you can take 3 hits before dieing.

Having to work for your health instead of having it handed to you on a silver platter is much more unique and much more challenging. Perhaps even more importantly, seeking out powerups as a key to your survival is considerably more fun and exciting than just collecting mundane piddly tokens like coins and star bits. That brings us to our next point…

3) Better Use of Powerups and Items

In Super Mario Galaxy, powerups are still used merely as keys to unlock not-so-cleverly disguised doors, instead of as ways to increase your survival and exploration abilities. They’re put on strict timers, and you can’t take them with you to other levels. When you find powerups, instead of being excited at the new abilities you’re going to acquire, you’re just disappointed that undoubtedly you’re just going to be put through another simplistic puzzle segment or lame obstacle course. The stupid torch-lighting puzzles you’re forced to “solve” with the Fire Flower in Galaxy make even the most insulting Zelda torch puzzles look like god damned Sudoku.

If powerups were taken off of their timers and integrated into the health system, the abilities they grant would be balanced by the fact that one hit will kill you if you lose them. Instead of being placed on pedestals to be used in puzzles, powerups could be distributed liberally across levels to be used regularly as a means of survival and exploration. Also, powerups could be put in question mark blocks, so those staples of the Super Mario universe weren’t so shamefully rare, and didn’t always contain something lame, like star bits.

Speaking of which, having both coins and star bits in the game is rather redundant. For starters, the whole star-shooting ability was a weak and misguided attempt to integrate multiplayer into the game, and was not needed as a means of self defense playing alone since the game was so easy. Removing star bits and just keeping coins as a means to collect 100 for an extra life and pay Luma’s to unlock stuff would be better. It’s not like star bits really contributed to your motivation to platform, since you didn’t have to actually go after them to retrieve them.

Lastly, imagine if the spin attack was only available as Bee Mario. That way, in other situations you’d be much more motivated to either avoid enemies or stomp on their heads; the old-fashioned, more skilled method of Super Mario combat. Then when you got the Bee Suit, you wouldn’t feel like such a panzy, and would be given an extra melee ability comparable to the Racoon Tail and Super Cape of classic Super Mario games.

4) More Robust Level/Scenario Design

Super Mario Galaxy’s levels may look cool, but even if you pile on stuff like faster monsters, time limits, and old school health, you’re still going to run into the problem that the levels were just not designed to be challenging. It seems that so many levels in the game aren’t even about platforming, but instead are simply about finding all the star fragments, solving some simple puzzle, or just wandering your way to the end of a trail of star bit breadcrumbs. If the sort of basic platforming seen in levels like Sweet Sweet Galaxy and Toy Time had started at the beginning of the game and built up from there, the end result would have been a much more consistent, lively, and engaging experience. Super Mario Galaxy has amazingly little in the way of actual platforming challenges for a platforming game.

Another point worth mentioning is that the enemies don’t present much of an obstacle in your path through any of the challenges. There has been an ever present habit throughout the 3D Mario games of placing enemies out of the way where you only really have to fight them if you want extra coins. By contrast, it wasn’t unusual in the 2D Mario games to encounter enemies right at the launch point for a jump, or right at the landing of a jump, forcing you to deal with them simultaneously with the platforming challenges. Had Nintendo put more thought into how they placed enemies in Super Mario Galaxy, it would have made for a more hair-raising experience, as you’d be forced to think faster to handle both the platforming and enemy obstacles all at once.

One argument I’ve heard is that enemies simply don’t work well in 3D platformers, since you have the ability to run around them instead of being forced to kill them or jump over as in sidescrolling games. This is simply lazy, unimaginative thinking. Does existence in 3 dimensions allow a football player to run for touchdowns without ever being tackled by his opponents? Does existence in 3 dimensions prevent a goalie in soccer from blocking the ball? No. The answer is that enemies in 3D platformers simply have to be a little faster and smarter to keep up with the player in 3 dimensions. While a simple speed boost would help Galaxy monsters to do this, it must be pointed out that making enemies capable of mirroring Mario’s movements in order to stop him from easily just running past them is very simple AI. The enemies are not as incompetent as they are in Super Mario 64, Sunshine, and Galaxy because the game is 3D, they’re incompetent because Nintendo is afraid to challenge gamers.

As clever as Super Mario Galaxy’s set pieces and gravity gimmicks were, that’s no substitute for solid platforming action. Had the levels been designed with more platforming challenges and more threatening enemies, it would have offered more exciting gameplay.

5) Better Camera Control

Super Mario Galaxy’s camera is functional, but not as polished as I’d expect from a next generation 3D game. Operating via the d-pad, you don”t have a smooth range of analog motion with the camera as you did with PS2 DualShock and Gamecube C-stick controls. The levels are designed so that the camera is almost always unobstructed, but you can only toggle the camera digitally left or right. A much more prominent limitation is that the game only allows you to move the camera some of the time, in fact I found that in almost all of the situations where I wanted a better angle, I’d start pushing the D-pad only to hear a denial buzzer reply in every direction.

Except sometimes in the few indoor areas in the game, the camera is almost never blocked from view of Mario, but that doesn’t mean that you always get a good angle to see all the relevant info. In a lot of situations you can’t judge the distances between platforms properly because of the angle, and you’re forced to basically make a blind jump and hope you’re not overshooting or undershooting. Other times, the camera is positioned in a way that you can see yourself, but you can’t see what’s ahead of you, so by the time something like an enemy, incoming missile, or pitfall comes into view, you don’t have time to react to it.

Lastly, it must be mentioned that a lot of the scenarios are designed to deliberately obscure your view, so you’ll often be on a planetoid that’s so small that as you run across it, things don’t come into view till they’re 3 feet in front of you. The game frequently sets the camera up to emphasize when you’re walking “upside down” even though in space there isn’t actually an up or down, and if you could set the camera yourself, you could just put it right side up so you weren’t so disoriented. Of course, since the game isn’t actually hard at all, none of these camera issues really become a serious obstacle in beating the game, they’re just really annoying, and seem like sloppy design work. If the game actually was challenge, the camera would probably not be ttotally suitable for hardcore play.

6) Actual Multiplayer Support

Back in the day, my sister was my trusty video gaming companion, and while it was occasionally frustrating having to stop and wait for someone else to take their turn when you died, we had great fun working together to rip through the original Super Mario Bros games. Super Mario World was particularly good in this respect, as we could play cooperatively unlocking different secrets from the same level in succession, working different parts of the same world at once, and sharing extra lives. If one person was having trouble and was too far across the map to do it themselves, the other could make a run through Forest of Illusion 1 to score a bunch of extra men and fork them over to the dieing player.

Then the Nintendo 64 came out. We were not the kids you saw on Youtube, but the scene in our house the Christmas after the N64 launched was pretty much the same. And while we were at first quite excited to explore the 3D worlds of Super Mario 64, the novelty wore off after a while. Since there was no 2-player mode, we each ended up with our own separate save files. Super Mario went from a force which brought us together to one that caused arguments over whose turn it was with the infernal black system. Since watching someone wander around those big, empty uneventful 3D worlds collecting tokens and solving puzzles was almost as boring as actually doing it yourself, pretty soon instead of watching or providing hints and moral support while waiting their turn, the person not playing would just go off somewhere and do something else. Eventually when the marathon star-snagging session was over and the person playing got burned out, we’d pass eachother in the hallway and switch places.

And really, I think the N64 was the system that turned my sister off from gaming, as pretty soon I was the only one that bothered with the stupid black box. When I finally got bored of N64 too, I got a Playstation and played games like fighters and RPG’s which were not sister-friendly. So, with the exception of a few good 2-player games like Legend of Mana, we rarely ever played games together after that. At one time we were best friends, and now we live in separate states with seperate lives and only ever talk once every few months at best…:(

If my sister and I ever did have the opportunity to play Super Mario Galaxy together, the star-shooting lightgun mode would soon be discarded and regarded as even more of a joke than Duck Hunt’s control-the-duck gamepad mode (which we actually did try a few times back in the day). Particularly now that Super Mario Galaxy features tighter level designs and shorter missions which would involve less waiting around to play, the return of a real 2-player mode, where one player is Mario and the other is Luigi and you take turns beating levels, would have been awesome.

However, even cooler would be a true split-screen co-op mode, which is something we wished for with the 2D games as children, but always just assumed was impossible due to technical limitations of the early consoles. If the Wii was supposed to be such a goddamn “revolution” then why do so many features of its new Super Mario game feel like several steps backwards from Super Marios of yesteryear, rather than the several steps forward we’ve been dreaming of since childhood?

After leaving the public in the dark since the game’s prior tentative release date last November, Brothers in Arms 3: Hell’s Highway has made a reappearance on the gaming radar via a hands-on preview with 1up this week.

The game is now slated for an August 2008 release, which is still a ways off, but at least reassures us that the game hasn’t gone into DNF (Duke Nukem Forever) status. While the delays have caused me to begin doubting whether or not this game will be free of the type of shortcomings which plagued prior titles in the series, I’d still say it has the best chance so far of becoming the first 360 title I’m actually glad to own, and the second game in my entire 360 collection.

Here’s hoping BIA3 trades the cosmetic realism and tactics of the overhyped Call of Duty 4 for actual realism and tactics, and makes for an FPS experience of true quality.

The site Insomnia somehow recently resurrected the “Domination 101″ series of articles on Street Fighter, which were originally posted by Seth Killian on Shoryuken.com circa 2001. At one time, these articles appeared prominently on the site itself, providing insight from a hardcore Street Fighter competitor into the world of fighting games. Subjects ranged from the game mechanics themselves and what went into making a good fighting game, to the conduct of players (most notably, scrubs) within the competitive community.

Unfortunately, as time went on production of these articles dwindled and as Shoryuken continually revised and restructured itself, these articles fell off the site and ended up relegated to a dark obscure corner of the forums, where they sat unnoticed for many years. At this point, I don’t even know if the Domination 101 area of the Shoryuken forums still exists.

Fortunately, Alex Kierkegaard (gesundheit) from Insomnia has gotten permission to “reprint” the articles on his own site so at least they can be presented properly somewhere where they might be seen and appreciated. Despite being almost a decade old, the articles still hold up, and if you’ve ever been into fighting games, you should check them out.

Domination 101: Why Street Fighter Rules, Part 1

Domination 101: Prelude To a Dis

If I’m not mistaken, there’s at least a few more Domination articles out there, so hopefully Insomnia will continue re-posting them. Until then, if you’re desperate you could go digging around the Shoryuken forums and see what you find.

In recent months as the quality of games and my accompanying interest in them continue to deteriorate, there’s been only one thing that’s kept me going in the gaming world, and that’s my renewed design efforts with Halo 2.

Basically, it’s a mod I’m developing geared towards removing persistent skill-mitigating features and balance issues in the Halo series, making it a more respectable shooter, rather than purely a concession to casual gamers.

This sort of venture has taken on more of an appeal to me lately compared to simply writing gaming opinion, as you’re really putting your money where your mouth is. Rather than ranting about why a game is bad and what it should have done instead, and just relying on people to get the idea from reading your article, you can physically make the game the way it should have been. Then it’s right there for people to play it and see for themselves whether your criticisms are on target and the game is really more enjoyable to play the way the developers didn’t actually do it.

At some point I may write a whole article explaining what I’m doing with it and why I think it’s a better way to play Halo, but for now I’m just going to link you to the most recent public release, the extensive readme doc that comes with the mod, and a bunch of gameplay videos my friend and I recorded in order to give you an idea of how the game plays with these changes.

The Full Explanation
The Gameplay Videos
More Gameplay Videos
The Download (6.7k)

I was rooting around the Q3 Promode site the other day and stumbled across this article which I’d already read years ago, enjoyed, but then forgot about…

CPMA Competitive Level Design Guide

For those that don’t know, Quake 3 Challenge Pro Mode is a gameplay mod created by Quake 1 and Quake 2 tourney vets who felt that Quake 3 was too n00bified. Considering that by the standards of modern day, mainstream FPS, Quake 3 is widely considered the most hardcore out there, that means that Q3 CPMA is honest to god the hardest of the hardcore you can get in FPS multiplayer action.

These guys spent years fine tuning Quake 3 for the best competitive play possible, willing to make no concessions to the casual gamer. Not only did they revise all the weapons and the game’s movement physics and general mechanics, they created an entire set of solid maps to play the game in, that far outstrips Id Software’s out-of-the-box arenas.

As such, the people behind CPMA know what they’re doing, so if you have any interest in FPS game mechanics at all, this is worth a read. The author goes into not only what makes a good map structure, but the role of different weapons in the game, and how their placement affects the quality of combat. At a time when the supposed golden standard for arcade shooters is Halo, where every map is devoutly symmetrical and the most powerful weapons are always placed on the highest, safest places on the map (two major FPS design no-no’s), the concepts explained in this article are of particular importance.

As anyone who might have bothered to check back on this blog from time to time may have noticed, it’s completely fallen by the wayside in terms of actually getting updated on a frequent basis. This is a combination of my dwindling interest in gaming, and the fact that with my last major articles, I’ve raised the bar so high for the quality of each post that I can’t possibly meet it… particularly not with my apathetic attitude towards games and their disappointing quality these days. I’ve had a review of Halo 3 sitting in progress in the drafts bank here for months and never finished it, because it’s just become too big a deal to finish…its like that damn Axel Rose album that’s never coming out.

Really the only thing that’s kept me interested in gaming at all lately is my ongoing project modding Halo 2. Fortunately, it’s given me a sort of second wind and given me just enough to keep up with the gaming world from time to time.

So the tentative plan going forward is to continue this blog, albeit with more of a quantity over quality approach. At once time, I wanted to make every post an extensive multi-page article on some subject or other, and there was a period last summer where I was actually able to accomplish this on a regular basis, but that time has gone as I’ve got too much other stuff to do. So, unfortunately, this site will largely have to resort to the more common “tidbit” format, but I think there should still be something in each one that’s worth reading in some capacity to “hardcore” gamers.

If I do actually muster the energy to write something extensive, you’ll see it listed under the Articles/Editorials section in the right side Categories bar. If you’re just looking for lengthy stuff, just click there. In the mean time, I should be pumping out smaller posts touching on various topics on a reasonably frequent basis. We’ll see how it goes.

I first did a preview which touched on Final Fantasy IV DS some time ago, but there were only a paltry few images out there to show for the game. Now more artwork and screenshots are turning up on the internet, and I’m compelled to do a another one… simply because FFIV holds such a special place in my heart, and the new artwork being done for the game looks so awesome.

This new preview shows off the new CGI character renderings for the game, assessing how they compare to Yoshitaka Amano’s original artwork and the original SNES sprites.

For the uninitiated, FFIV DS is a remake of the original SNES game (known as Final Fantasy II in the US) which has already been re-released once each on the PS1, GBA, and Wonderswan. This new version for the Nintendo DS is getting a complete graphical overhaul, in the same style has the recent Final Fantasy III DS. The story is also being expanded upon, as apparently only small portion of the initial script for the game was ever actually used the original writer is now adding some of the omitted material back in. There is also rumor of changes being made to the gameplay, though what exactly they will be has not been completely nailed down.

I first stumbled upon these images looking over a forum I used to post at, the Final Fantasy Online forums. A few of the moderators there disliked me for my strong opinions, so I was eventually banned (I was ChrisG, for any FFO members reading this), but I still check back there every once in a while to see if anything of interest is happening. Usually, there isn’t, as the mods maintain an intellect-stifling iron grip over the place. But, this time, there was a huge FFIVDS thread full of links to magazine scans and refreshing discussion of the game. It was probably about the most you can enjoy a forum when you can no longer actually participate there.

When FFIV DS was first announced, we only saw a few images, giving us merely an inkling of how the characters would look in the remake. Fortunately, there was a production drawing showing the “schematics” for how Cecil would be modeled in game. It clearly was inspired directly by one of Yoshitaka Amano’s original illustrations.

The design mimics Amano’s illustration very closely…the only hitch is that because Amano draws his characters slightly differently from picture to picture, that particular illustration shows Cecil looking differently than he does in most of Amano’s other illustrations, and how he looks in the original SNES sprites. In particular, while Cecil is almost always depicted with many different horns on his helmet, two horns (one on each side) are usually emphasized as longer than the others. In the above illustration, and in the DS design, all the horns are of roughly equal size, giving Cecil a different look than in the SNES sprites and some of the other illustrations.

Now we finally have finished, fully rendered images of most of the cast, which are being used in the CGI cutscenes for the game, scanned out of recent issues of Famitsu and other Japanese game magazines. For each character, I will display the new CGI image on the right, with the original sprites, and some of Amano’s other illustrations on the left to give you an idea of how the new DS rendering compare:

To be fair, this depiction of Cecil still misses the “two-horned look” that the original sprites and much of the artwork had, but it’s so detailed and so accurate to Yoshitaka Amano’s work in every other respect, that I love it anyway.

Also notable is that they thankfully didn’t cop out and go for the “Boba Fett look” when handling the face and eyes, a phenomenon strongly present in the original SNES portrait sprite. As much as we all love Boba Fett, he’s not Cecil, and his face is plastered in enough places as it is. We don’t want Cecil’s identity as a character design to become simply the derivation of a Star Wars character, as happened with Vile from Mega Man X.

Lastly, I must admit that had they emphasized two horns on either side with more length, as was done in the sprites and some of the original artwork, it first of all would run the risk of trespassing into a “batman look”, and secondly, would run risk of being confused with Final Fantasy I’s “Warrior of Light” character, which apeared in Yoshitaka Amano’s artwork, and is now being reworked by Tetsuya Nomura for the new Final Fantasy Dissidea fighting game.

But enough about the dark knight, let’s look at Cecil’s Paladin form. As before, these are his original SNES sprites, followed by the Yoshitaka Amano artwork that inspired them. Then finally, there is the FFIV DS rendering on the right:

Here we have yet another exquisitely detailed representation, my only complaint is that there isn’t enough color. Granted, in Amano’s artwork, Cecil is pretty much all white, but there are still some colors there which could have been better represented. The crown/tiara thing, in gold encrusted with red gems, probably would have been cooler than the plain black headband on his forehead. Furthermore, given how colorful the SNES sprites were, which for most was our only conception of Cecil for years until the internet and mail-ordered books allowed us to see the original artwork, it seems that the rendering could have used that much more emphasis on color.

I would have liked to see a strong presence of yellow, particularly in the cape area, rather than Cecil being completely blue and white. It also would have been nice to have a bit more tinge of purple in his hair, the green eyes of the sprite, and maybe a few spots of red on his clothes here and there. In other words, I wish it looked more like this. I feel my 5 minute photoshop job strikes a better compromise between Amano’s illustrations, and the SNES sprites, and serves to be a little more varied.

Oh well, FFIV DS’s rendering is still very well done and very faithful to Amano’s original work.

Kain’s is looking to be one of the best renditions in the whole game. It’s extremely true to Amano’s designs, while still containing enough purple and blue to bear resemblance to the original sprites. I suppose to some degree, unless his armor is changed to turquoise, Kain will still never quite look completely like his old SNES self, but who cares? Turquoise is for fags!

It should be noted that while it’s a staple class in the FF series, FFIV DS marks the first time we’re seeing a proper dragoon/lancer rendered in high detail cgi, instead of some flimsy stand-in like Freya or Khimari. Kain’s badass-ness speaks for itself.

Rosa’s design is one of the few cases where FFIV DS’s CGI renderings actually seem to compromise heavily between the look of Yoshitaka Amano’s illustrations and the original in-game sprites. While the basic details of the clothing, like the spiked shoulder pads and the sash around the hips come straight from Amano’s illustrations, the color palette is clearly derived right out of the SNES graphics. Amano’s mottled grey, beige, and blue tones are converted to pink, purple, magenta, and cream colors.

Hardcore Amano fans would probably lament this decision, but I think it was a smart move. Granted, Amano’s color choices are excellent in their own right, but in the context of a game, there are more considerations to a character’s palette than than simply whichever colors make a nice illustration. By using the comparatively stark pinks and purples, Rosa is differentiated more from the other characters; if the graphics were constructed solely using Amano’s color choices, then half the cast would be wearing blue, beige, and white.

I suppose to some, Rosa may now look a little too much like “Fantasy Sorceress Barbie”, but I think it works. As I said before, the way most people came to know FFIV’s characters was mainly by the original sprites. No fans got to see Amano’s original character illustrations until several years after the game came out; therefore, for most people, if the new depictions were based solely on Amano’s designs, they simply wouldn’t look like the characters we’ve come to know and love since 1991.

My former cohorts at the FFO forums complained that Rydia’s outfit somehow looked “low rent”, but I don’t quite see it. I mean, sure, I guess the fabric rendered could have been less “flimsy” looking, and the clothes could have been cut differently to look less like modern stripper’s garments, but if you look at the sprites and the original art, it’s not far off from the original designs.

The new rendering matches up particularly closely with the original SNES sprite. If anything, I suppose her hair could use more of a stylish “flip” to the side, but all in all I’m quite happy with the new rendering. These are some of the best character designs I’ve seen from Square in years.

The distinctive issue with Yang is that he’s clearly a Chinese-inspired character, but Yoshitaka Amano represented him with blond hair. In the sprites, his hair color was changed to black, and that’s how we all grew to know him. I wondered how he would be handled in FFIV DS, as despite being an ardent Amano fan, I couldn’t imagine the blond hair “looking right”. However, the way it’s been pulled off, it works quite well; he looks neither too Chinese, nor too white, and the result is a design that feels truly creative rather than derivative.

I can’t say I’m sad that the pink smiley-faces on his pants from Amano’s original depiction were omitted from the FFIV DS rendering.

Here is Edward, the spoony bard everyone loves to hate. His new rendering is dead on. No one is at better delivering effeminate wimp character designs than Square, and nowhere is such a design more appropriate than for this cowardly minstrel that fights by shooting music notes at his enemies from a magic harp.

I suppose he could have looked a little more like a true white/Caucasian pretty-boy and a little less like a random Asian kid with bleached hair, but hey, Square is a Japanese company developing for a Japanese audience, so who are we to complain?

Here’s Edge. He looks cool. He seems to be missing a bit of red from his costume, and his haircut seems a little too symmetrical, but otherwise, not much else to say…solid work.

If anything, the only issue with Edge arises out of problems with paladin Cecil’s new design, which places a huge emphasis on the colors white and blue. Had Cecil’s new design placed more emphasis on gold, purple, and red, then Edge and Cecil would be amply differentiated, but as it stands, especially in the small in-game models, where both characters wear exclusively white and blue, and have white hair, they look far too similar.

Perhaps it would help if Edge’s pants and face mask were more bluish than white, but again, this is mainly a problem with a lack of gold in Cecil’s palette.

Above are the “twins” Palom and Porom. They’ve always been rather subtle “Plain Jane” characters, so it’s nice to see that their “chibi” factor was not over-emphasized, nor their hair styles made overly spiky and ridiculous, as is typical of modern Square-enix releases.

Beyond just the character designs, it’s quite exciting to see memorable scenes from the original game depicted in 3D with actual cinematic camera angles, even when it’s just with the simple, small in-game models.

Some of the small in-game models I feel are handled very well given the amount of detail their have to work with. Rosa, Rydia, Edward, and Tellah look exactly as I would have imagined them.

In other cases, I feel the in-game models missed the mark somewhat. Paladin Cecil’s rendering looks good, but his in-game model is way too high on blue and way too devoid of yellow. He just doesn’t register as Cecil to me; he just looks like some random anime dude wearing blue and white armor. I also feel that Kain’s in-game model doesn’t look quite right either…his helmet doesn’t seem to have the “dragon horns” in the proper places, and he’s missing the wing-like flaps protruding from the back of armor, putting far too much emphasis on his scrawny legs. Again, he doesn’t really register as Kain, he looks like some stupid super-deformed rendering of The Tick.

Moving on, there’s this awesome poster-style image done for FFIV DS’s release:

I’m not so crazy about the foreshortening on Kain’s spear, but it’s still cool to see this scene illustrated in high detail, considering we’d only seen it represented in 16-bit tiles n’ sprites, and used our own imaginations to fill in the blanks up to now.

Finally, saving the best for last, here are two trailers, showing various cgi clips, in-game clips, and voice acting in action. Also, I threw in the music video for Ida Emi’s rendition of FFIV’s “Theme of Love”…

It looks awesome, and almost makes me want to buy a DS just for FFIV, solely on the basis of the game’s visuals. At the same time, some of the FMV makes me wish this game was made for PS3, Wii, or 360 with full-scale graphics and not just PS1-grade stuff…then the whole game would be depicted with the same detail as the FMV’s, and we wouldn’t be stuck with blocky, pixelated, chibi-fied characters and simplified lego environments.

Oh well, at least it’s not just another lame FFVII or FFXII spin-off.

The only thing that remains to be seen which could potentially mar the quality of this release is the gameplay changes which may or may not take place.

Personally, having played through the game a few times between the Super Nintendo and Playstation versions, I’d love it if the gameplay were made a little more challenging and complex…up the strategy factor that already exists to make it truly worthwhile playing again. As flawed as Final Fantasy XII was, after having it’s gambit system essentially fight through the redundant, repetitive parts of RPG combat for me, and being burned out enough on RPG’s as it is, trudging through an RPG I’ve already played repeatedly throughout the years is going to need significant improvements to negate the “been there, done that” factor and be bearable to me.

Unfortunately, the main gameplay improvement I’ve heard rumored to be coming to Final Fantasy IV DS is the ability to change your characters’ classes, or teach them new abilities from other characters. As much as I’d like some additions to gameplay, this seems like it would just water down one of FFIV’s better features…

The fact that the game’s characters are unique, and you have to actually think in order to take advantage of their limited, but focused skill sets, it what makes the game a refreshing change from other titles in the series. I don’t want FFIV to become like most other Final Fantasy titles, where you can just get all abilities on every character, and then have them all do the same ever round regardless of your party combination. If FFIV plays anything like FFVII or FFVIII, or even FFVI or FFX, then I can’t see the fun in giving it another run, even with the enhanced visuals and story.

Regardless of how Final Fantasy IV DS will turn out as a game, it’s great to see its characters revitalized with new renderings which do justice to Yoshitaka Amano’s original illustrations, while taking on some traits from the original sprites. At the very least, I will pick up the art book, or the strategy guide, just too look at the pictures.