Ys Origin (PC) - Guest Post

Hi, I'm Ray Hardgrit and the following words are not written by me. They were put there by some guy called Jihaus who wants to show off the first hour or so of a game called Ys Origin and infect my site with his opinions.

I've never seen the point in asking guest posters to stick with my rating system though, as everyone's got very different taste and it seems like it'd be misleading somehow. You can only really trust a rating when you know the critic and can compare it against their other reviews. Basically what I'm saying is don't flip out if this doesn't get a 'gold star' badge at the end, as Jihaus doesn't hand the things out.

Developer:

Nihon Falcom

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Release Date:

2012 (WW)

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Systems:

Windows

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Today I'm finally playing Ys Origin on PC, an action RPG with platforming elements and fast-paced combat. I've played my share of Ys games so I'm no stranger to their brand of anime-style characters combined with rockin' music combined with crushing difficulty, and this one in particular uses the same engine as its last two predecessors so it should be relatively familiar territory. I always did find it extremely amusing that the correct pronunciation of "Ys" sounds a lot like "ease", because that is entirely the opposite of what these games tend to be.

Unlike the other games in this series which deal with the adventures of the red-haired swordsman, Adol, this game instead goes in a different direction - specifically, 700 years before the first Ys game in the chronology. Despite the the huge departure, it treads a lot of familiar territory, and fans of the first and second Ys games will see familiar people, places, and terminology. In particular, most of not all of the game takes place in the enormous demon tower of the first game, which has changed little on the outside but got a serious renovation on the inside. That's about the extent of what I know going in anyway, so I can't wait to see what we'll find.

I've heard horrifying things about the difficulty in this particular installment but I will proceed to flagrantly disregard such warnings and play on its hardest difficulty, nightmare. Without further ado, time to die!

(Click images to view them at their original weird-ass 1024 x 578 resolution)

Long Live the Queen (PC) - Guest Post

Sorry, can't talk long, too busy. Bad time management and poor decision making on my part has given my scheming friend Jihaus an opportunity to (temporarily) invade my site, so today he'll be sharing what he thinks about this recent indie game. You'd think that with a name like Long Live the Queen this would be a British game about assassinations and intrigue... and it actually is! Also anime girls, apparently. I'll leave Jihaus to explain how that works out.

Today I play Long Live The Queen, a harsh game about medieval court intrigue and politics wrapped up in a deceptively kawaii package. A cursory glance at the main developer, Hanako Games, shows a history of visual novels and casual games for girls which tend to be on the cute side. Of course I know going in that the story is anything but that, and that the title itself is the challenge of the game. Let us see about meeting that challenge then.

(Clicking screenshots will display them at their original resolution).

Elder Scrolls Online (PC) Beta - Part 3 - Guest Post

Welcome to the final part of an epic early look at the latest Elder Scrolls game, where guest poster Jihaus reveals his experience of the game from a MMO player's point of view. I explained why we're both writing about the same game in back in part 1, and if you want to see the game from the perspective of an Elder Scrolls fan, you might want to read what I thought about it in part 2 as well.

Today we get to take a different look at the beta of the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online, because this is going to be the first Elder Scrolls game I'll have played in my life. I have a passing knowledge of the series from various friends, but otherwise the series is new to me. I have however played other MMORPGS, with World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV clocking the most hours, so that's the perspective I'll be coming from.

This being an MMORPG it's a slow burn experience, so you'll be seeing a lot more time compression in this article than you're used to from SAG. Ray and I played this beta for about three days, which for an MMO is actually not far in at all.

We begin of course by logging in, which comes after the lengthy installation and setup that precedes most any MMORPG. I'm greeted by a short placeholder video that consists of text on a slideshow that tells me that my character is some poor schmoe who gets taken to an underground ritual site and carved up, and then wakes up without a soul in Oblivion, which as far as I know is hell. Then we get to see what our soulless protagonist looks like.

(Click the screenshots to view the 1024x786 resolution originals.)

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (PC) - Guest Post

I don't generally play multiplayer games for Super Adventures, as I just don't feel like they're a good fit for the site. But Jihaus here plays what he damn well pleases and today he's taking on the latest MMO to steal a numbered slot in the Final Fantasy line: Final Fantasy 14: Online 2: A Realm Reborn.

Ray was hitting a bunch of Final Fantasy games recently and I figured it'd be a good time to jump back into Final Fantasy XIV. I'm relatively familiar with the game from the short time I played the beta earlier this year but this time I have a chance to start over with it and really analyze it.

This will be the first MMORPG post of Super Adventures in Gaming so some may be wondering how this is going to work, being that MMORPGs are long, drawn out affairs in which it takes a lot longer to do things compared to offline games. The answer to that is, about the same, I'll just be compressing the timeline a bit here so this will seem a lot faster than the game really is.

As a bit of backstory, we're actually playing A Realm Reborn, not the original FFXIV Online released in 2010, which was apparently such a critical flop that Square Enix shut down the servers and redid the game, rereleasing it 3 years later in this newer, improved package. I haven't played the original so I can't compare, but I'd say I'm familiar enough with MMORPG mechanics to give this a fair shake.

Of course you run into the most horrible of MMO roadblocks before getting here: installing the game, and waiting for it to update EVERYTHING, a process I let run overnight as the ETA was in the thousands of minutes at first. Once that was over, I was able to just use the same account I had and proceed.

Abuse (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

At last, some more words by someone who isn't me! This time I've brought alien bug killing expert Jihaus in to talk about about killing alien bugs in frantic DOS shooter Abuse.

Let's do this.

The game doesn't really have a proper splash screen so I'm using the box art.

This awesome run and gun platformer made by Crack Dot Com came out in '96 and gave us an early vision of what you'd get if you combined a platformer with the mechanics of an FPS (such as multiple weapons and mouse aiming). The game sports a control scheme that at the time was crazy different, resulting in a fast paced and unique alien/mutant blasting experience that you didn't really see in platformers at the time (or at least I didn't, I was poor).

I played and finished this game long ago but it's been so long that I am pretty much playing this as a newbie again.