Lately I’ve turned my sight towards independantly-made games. Most are in good ol’ 2D.  It’s kinda refreshing. 2D definitely is making a comeback overall, and there’s good reason for it. It’s still, and always will be, fun.

What makes indie games so special? Well, first you have to understand that most big companies don’t try too many original concepts when making games. When you already have a fanbase or are pressured to keep up with the trends, taking a risk and making something too different can be disastrous, and since they’re in it for the money, you can understand why great innovation is hard to find. Some Indie developers are much more risky, or go into designing a game mostly from a gamer’s perspective. There’s lots of crap too, of course, but there’s quite some awesome gems here and there.

There’s a few popular indie gaming sites, that can be found easily. I don’t really have much more to say, as indie games are less underground then they used to, so they’re relatively easy to find now.  Cave Story, considered an excellent indie game, can be downloaded on the Wii, pretty cool. I think we’ll be seeing an interesting rise of indie games and 2D games.

Now, as someone who aspires to make a game, I’ve seen a bit just how much effort it takes to make one. Frankly, I’m not an artist, so for me the biggest pain is finding all the sprites I need to make the game. I’ve a few games in mind though, for when I do dedicate more resources. For now though, I’ll stick to playing them. Although there’s an seemingly-awesome gaming engine coming out soon called Stencyl that might nudge my decision to sit down and make some games.

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There’s an interesting gaming scene, which was present when I was young, but that has almost died off for a while. A program called ZZT, and what it is basically, is a gaming engine for making games using ASCII characters. So, it’s using letters and other keyboard symbols as sprites. The games can be played using ZZT. Thousands of games have been made, some pretty fun, actually. The simplicity makes it so that people don’t expect good sprites and animations, and rely on the gameplay. And I approve of that concept. Games are about gameplay, so the looks shouldn’t be absolutely necessary. And others seem to think so, because ZZT has remained alive throughout the years.

A sortof upgraded program, inspired from ZZT was made, called Megazeux. This improved greatly on ZZT, and you could draw your own sprites. It got popular for a while, but died down quite a bit. There’s still an active community, but it’s much smaller than ZZT.
I actually had fun playing different games of both these engines. But because it is simpler to make a game, there’s a lot more crappy games out there. There are well rated ones though, which are the ones you should play if you ever want to try.

If anyone’s curious about ZZT and Megazeux, here’s the sites you should be visiting:

http://zzt.belsambar.net/

http://www.digitalmzx.net ( be sure to check out “The Vault” — link on top — for the games. Click on ‘Everything’ once there. You can sort by rating)

That’s all for now.

Final Fantasy XIII has basically two parts to it: the initial set up of the game, and then the actual game.

The first 20 hours is the initial set up of the story and characters, and tutorial to the battle system.
You might say 20 hours is a long time just to get to know the characters and initial story and get used to the battle… and you’d be right…

Let’s talk about that first part:

It’s interesting to get to really see the characters’ personalities and get attached to them, and I think that’s what was intended — in order to try and suck you into the game. However, it feels overdrawn; the cutscenes are long and unneccesarily dramatic, turning off those who don’t like long drawn-out movie-like drama. They could have cut out a lot of it, or make it a bit more interesting — not everyone likes to see such emotional characters in a game.

Getting to know the characters… takes too long, as they only tell you their back-stories a little at a time. A role-playing game is supposed to make you feel involved in the adventure, as if you have a ‘role’; the initial story progression is too slow in doing that, and it doesn’t feel like you have a role in the adventure at all, it just feels like a movie. It really does feel like a long set up, with your adventure beginning only once you reach the 2nd part of the game, 20 hours in.

There’s no exploration, whatsoever, in the first part; you basically go to point A to point B, in a quasi-straight line… even the treasure chests are either right in your path, or very close. The surroundings are beautiful though, that’s for sure; but simply walking in a straight line is boring.

The meat of the game is in the battles, and man, are they fun; they’re fast-paced, the animations are cool, and the harder ones require some interesting strategy. You control one character at a time, and select a chain of abilities for your character to combo with when a gauge fills up — it fills up quick, so there’s little waiting around. Switching between roles to either attack, heal, defend, etc, in the actual battle, is a big part of the battle system, and it’s amusing. You don’t level up your characters in this game, you level up ‘roles’, which is well done; different roles have different abilities and advantages of which you can make use in battle. For those that are lazy about combos, there’s an auto-combo feature, and even a repeat feature, so you can more or less button-mash if you want.

However, you quickly realize that you aren’t allowed to use the battle’s full potential until the second part of the game, as you are given very little to level-up, in fact, they only give you a little at a time, so that you can’t get over-powerful. Being able to customize your team how you want, using roles and different types of weapons, surely is awesome, but you don’t get to do much, if any, of that in the first part, as you have very little available to you. It’s to get you used to the battle-system and to certain basic strategies, but the problem with this is that it’s longer than it should be and feels very repetitive. However, you realize the potential of awesomeness that’s coming, and drool.

So, the game only really starts after many hours of sometimes tedious storyline, walking, and gameplay; this could have been prevented.

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To comment on a few other things, they did a really good job in removing many outdated RPG elements, such as the constant buying of new Armor and weapons. There are fewer weapons in this game, and even the first one you get can stay good throughout a good chunk of the game, since you can upgrade them using enemy drops. Different weapons and accessories have different advantages, rather than simply being superior to the previous ones, so it feels a lot more strategic.

Another thing they removed is MP, which turns out to be a great idea, because the battles feel a lot better more balanced, intuitive and fun, with being able to use magic freely. Strategies from past games, with magic, consisted mainly of not using magic in normal battles (Attack Attack Attack), and then only using magic in boss battles — rather boring. Although, now, TP which is needed for summons, can be conserved for tough battles, so those tho like to conserve things still have something to look forward to.
Speaking of summons… some of them look very cheezy ( a car, and a motorcycle transformation?! dude…)

Overall, the game has a long and slow beginning, but at least it has awesomeness to look forward to after the initial 20 hours set up, when it starts to open up a bit more. I’m not that far in the second part yet though, so I’m looking forward to what’s to come.

I really didn`t feel like talking about this issue at first, because frankly it seemed so stupid, but it`s gotten so out of hand that I really felt like inserting a small voice of reason.

Final Fantasy XIII is being bashed left and right by gamers, because of one of its characteristics: linearity.

It’s gotten so bad, that more than two-tirds of the comments on Final Fantasy 13 articles I’ve seen are negative and saying that the game will suck because of its linearity.
One of my friends came up to me and said, “Hey, so turns out FF13 sucks “. A bit surprized, I ask: “Have you played it?” He replies to this: “Nah man, a lot of people say it is”. Knowing what the problem was, I ask: ” And  they haven’t played it either, right?”

From what I`ve heard, the logic seems to be that since Open-ended games like Fallout 3 are fun, as well as other good RPGs which are less linear, then the game will suck. Do you see what is flawed about this logic?

If you don’t get it then let me point it out:

Just because a game has characteristics that are different in some ways to games that are fun, does not mean the game will not be fun… both types of games have the possibility of being fun.

Is this so hard to understand??

There is such a thing as irrational trends, and judging things and people without knowing them is quite frequent in human history.

Anything can be fun if it’s well done or integrated, and that includes linearity. There are certain games that work perfectly well with certain aspects that might not work in other types of games.

It’s strange that this train of thought (that FF13 sucks) is even circulating, as FF10, which was extremely liked, as well as many awesome Strategy RPGs, are extremely linear.

The strangest thing of all though, is that the game isn’t even released in North America, and is being judged before having even been played, by mostly North Americans and others who have not even played the game yet.

I really would like gamers to be a bit more open-minded. I hope you come to realize the flawed logic behind this judgementalism, as most of us wish to play it first and enjoy the game if we can once it comes out, but the irrational progoganda floating around the internet may affect our appreciation of a potential gem.  SE usually knows how to make a good game, so why not give it a chance for what the game is instead of comparing it to what it isn’t?

That is all.

Trailer revealing it:

Other 2009 trailer (Japanese):

Another one, but in english

(Click the image to view)

(Click the image to view)

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