Linktown Bus, all aboard!

Persona 3

Persona 4

Peggle (iPhone)

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

N+

Rhythm Heaven

NPD numbers for April

New Tony Hawk game comes with silly peripheral

Green Day Rock Band tracks?  Please?

Rock Band Unplugged track list revealed

Dissidia PSP bundle America vs. Japan

Final Fantasy XIII may be monolingual on the 360

Fallout DLC coming to the PS3, also coming in disc-based form

Break music for this episode is a remix of the Love Potion game song from Rhythm Heaven with music and lyrics from Dale North

Listener mail makes us smile big happy smiles, and keeps us from being sad.  Do you see where I’m going with this?  Good.  Then get going and ship your questions to podcast@someothercastle.com!

Okay, so yes, I did play a fairly large amount of Persona 3 this week.  I’ll get back to that.  First, though, I want to talk about Rhythm Heaven, a game at which I should not have any sort of talent at all.  I mentioned last week that I was doing pretty well at the game, but I didn’t really elaborate.  Now, though, I think it’s fair to say that I qualify as a Rhythm Heaven savant.  As Elaine put it, I am the Rain Man of Rhythm Heaven; the evil got into my hand and…. well, made it really good at Rhythm Heaven, I guess.  (Kind of ran out of comparisons there…)

What’s so bizarre to me about playing Rhythm Heaven is that it’s almost a transcendent thing.  (Beginning to see why I thought this would sound weird?) If I think too hard about it, I can’t do it; I just have to shut down the part of my brain that wants to make conscious connections and work on pure reaction.  The best example I can think of for that is in the way that the minigames are set up.  In general, save for the remix sections, you get a practice session before the game actually begins.  Some of them are, of course, harder than others, and I imagine which ones are the most difficult varies from person to person (for me, the bane of my existence was the one called LockStep….).  When I would run into one of the more difficult games, it would sometimes be a struggle for me to figure out what exactly they wanted me to do; the explanations aren’t always that great, and even when you think you know what they’re looking for, it can still be tricky to pull off the first few times.  The result of this would often be that I would try to get the hang of something on purpose, get frustrated, stop trying as hard, and then have something click in my brain that meant I just suddenly GOT it.  When that part of my brain takes over, I become scary good at it, almost like it’s not even me playing.  I’m in the zone, as it were.

As of now, I’m counting Rhythm Heaven finished; there are a few of the second-level games (the ones that you open up once you complete all of the others through Remix 6) I haven’t gold-framed yet, and the perfectionist in me will probably ensure that I go back and work on that eventually, but I did get Superb ratings on all of the regular levels, and completed the rest of them as well.  Scary good, I tell you.  Oh, and a hot tip: if you’re having trouble clearing a level and you find you’re just a teeny bit off, close your eyes and play.  Seriously.  It worked for me!

Persona 3 continues to be a bundle of fucked-right-up-fun; I’ve maxed out one of my social links (the one you get from the chick you play an MMO with), and I’ve created a couple more.  Just need to get that Academics stat up so I can link with Mitsuru.  I really feel kind of wrong talking about this.  Doesn’t mean I’ll stop, though.  Maybe by next week I’ll be able to report more progress with the ladies.

Recap:

Current backlog total: 115

Now playing: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES(PS2); N+ (PSP)

New games added: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha versus King Abaddon  (PS2) (and yes, I did need the full title there)

Games completed: Rhythm Heaven (DS)

Links-a-plenty (if something is missing, blame the booze… my notebook looks like something they use to train cryptologists right now)!

Call of Duty 4

Fable 2

Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

Persona 3

Persona 4

Rhythm Heaven

Patapon 2

PS3 to be “a platform for web services,” also moving toward online delivery and other platforms for PSN

Activision announces oodles of new music games

Pearl Jam Rock Band project “forthcoming”

Beatles guitar controllers are sexy and expensive

Bioshock 2 multiplayer being developed by Dark Sector devs

Pokemon Gold and Silver receiving DS remakes

Street Fighter IV PC version ships at $60 and includes Madcatz fight stick

Cooking Mama franchise sells 4 million units over 4 titles

Gameloft to announce Oregon Trail for DSiWare at E3

Peggle for the iPhone makes Elaine look like this

Fudgie the Whale

Break music for this episode is “Mass Destruction” aka Battle Music from Persona 3.  (I totally wanted to include Patapon but I couldn’t find a good piece of music).

This episode powered by Raspberry Sparkle Arbor Mist (”it tastes like a strip club would taste!”) and Smirnoff Tuscan Lemonade.

Pretty please, send us listener mail!  It goes, if you are so inclined, to podcast@someothercastle.com; if you’d like to send Edie mail, ship it to edie@gamehounds.net.  Happy listening!

Elaine has been very enthusiastic about her enjoyment of Persona 4 (and her hatred of me for introducing her to it), which made me really want to go back to my Persona 3 save; I was about 30 hours in when I drifted away (I forget to what), and while I didn’t really want to start a new game and lose all that time, I did want to play again.  Was I going to be able to remember where my social links stood?  What Personas (Personae?) I was carrying around with me, and how they all functioned?  How combat worked?  Which Japanese schoolgirl’s pants I was currently trying to get into?  Yes, as it turns out.  All of that came flooding back in about the first fifteen minutes I played, subsuquently making me nearly miss work that day.

The story so far is this (spoilers a’coming, probably): bad shit is happening, and you can shoot yourself in the head and save everyone!  You and your buddies are equipped with these nifty little gun-but-not-really-a-gun-gee-I-wonder-why-this-is-an-M-rated-game things called Evokers, which you use in battle to shoot yourself in the head and bring out your Persona.  Everyone else has a set Persona, which is sort of their inner self and allows them to cast magic and use special abilities, but you, as the unnamed protagonist (in my case, he’s Yuri Hyuga…. bonus Leah points if you can tell me where I got that name, and yes, using Google is cheating) can call upon a seemingly infinite number of Personae (yeah, I think I like that better), which you can either obtain through the dungeons themselves or by fusing pre-existing ones together to bring out something new.  At the moment, I can carry an even dozen of them around with me, but I think my Persona-bank has…. well, I don’t even know.  Probably verging on a hundred, if I had to guess.  And I can always make more.

Anyway, there’s an hour called the Dark Hour between midnight and 12:01 every night during which only you and your friends are functional.  Everyone else is enclosed in coffins during that time, right where they stand, or sleep, or whatever.  Creepy, huh?  They don’t have any knowledge or memory of it, but that’s when the Shadows come out to play, and also when your school turns into Tartarus, a massively multi-floor dungeon that houses the worst of the baddies.  The game basically consists of balancing the clearing of shadows with building social links (these also give your Personae extra power, depending on their alignment), macking on chicks (Yuko totally wants up on this), and of course, keeping track of your class work.  You are in high school, after all.

Have I confused anyone yet?  I think I’ve confused myself.  But you can see where that would become immersive and addictive, right?  Good.  Let’s talk about something a little less complicated, and I’m sure I’ll return to gush about Persona more next week.  I finished both halves of Chronicles of Riddick this week, Escape From Butcher Bay as well as Assault on Dark Athena, even without the aid of a usable map.  I feel this is something of a step forward for me, really.  In what is sure to be an unpopular choice, I’m going to go ahead and say that I think I liked Dark Athena more than Butcher Bay, although I really enjoyed both of them.  I think my preference really stems from the type of player that I am rather than the overall quality of the games, though; Dark Athena seemed to be better at guiding me where I needed to be without getting me thoroughly lost (and also, I just liked the setting better).  I got, as is evident in last week’s column, very very VERY angry when I would become lost or stuck in Butcher Bay, which seemed to happen pretty often, but in Dark Athena, even though there were a few puzzlers, I was able to flow through the story and concentrate on blowing shit up rather than worrying about why that stupid wall really wasn’t there ten minutes ago (THEY MOVE!).  Fuck spider turrets, though.  Seriously.

I also started playing Rhythm Heaven this week; I’ve heard from many people that it’s really hard, but actually, I seem to be pretty damn good at it.  (The music teacher’s daughter has rhythm?  Who knew?)  I haven’t gotten to any of the later levels yet though, so when it gets more difficult I may yet crumble.  I’ll keep you updated on that as well.  I just…. I find it hard to look past the social linking right now…. *twitch*

Recap:

Current backlog total: 115

Now playing: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES (PS2); Rhythm Heaven (DS)

New games added: Puzzle Kingdoms (DS)

Games completed: Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (PS3)