24-UP, Part 2: Fuckin With My Head (Mountain Dew Rock)

Posted by Nate Patrin at 3:00 AM Apr 30, 2008

WED, 3AM: Professor Layton and the Curious Village (DS)

"Perfesser, why don't'cha got white in yer eyes like I do?"

So, how's my deductive reasoning at this point in the proceedings? Probably horseshit, especially after about an hour's worth of fleeing from and/or shooting a whole lot of not-actually-zombies. I made it a deliberate point to break up the stretch of typically fast action-based games with one that required attention to detail and a bit of logical thinking, so this well-received puzzle game (well, mostly well-received) should do the trick nicely. This is basically an exhibition in brainteasery, and while it’s rendered with characters that look a bit like toned-down and friendlier versions of the character designs in The Triplets of Belleville and apparently involves some sort of plot revolving around some kinda will, this seems to be largely a modernized update on an old issue of Games magazine. Which I am totally cool with.

3:00 AM: Yeah, this is going to work out great.

3:04 AM: Wow, voice acting! cel animation! Whimsical characters driving around in a 2CV and talking all British-like! This is really the only game you can follow Resident Evil 4 with, if you ask me.

3:11 AM: So apparently the will involves having to find some kind of mysterious Golden Apple (albeit not one of the moon variety), and apparently whoever locates it gets everything in Baron Vaguelyeuropean's estate. Nice. I bet it's all hidden with puzzles so stupid people don't wind up with all his money. Again, if real life were more like video games we could avoid so much misfortune. Another funny thing is how during the conversation in the car between the Professor and his little sidekick Luke you have to touch the screen to continue the conversation. If you don't, the looped sound of the car's motor just keeps on going, and it looks as though the two have reached this really awkward silence and are basically just waiting to arrive at their destination, which could take hours assuming you don't touch the screen.

3:15 AM: It seems I have to decipher a map just to actually make it to the village. That seems a bit unfair, but on the other hand I bet [insert pejorative joke at the expense of MapQuest here].

3:22 AM: So we arrive at the village and now it looks like we need to cross a drawbridge to get in, only some mook in a wifebeater and a porn 'stache is all "you guys look suspicious and fancy-pants, go screw". You have to help him figure out the right crank to use (hey stop snickering) to lower the bridge (why are you snickering, that's not even a double-entendre) so we can get across (it's not a euphemism, either). I get it right on the second try and am informed by the Good Perfesser that "critical thinking is the key to success". That, or knowing who to threaten and how.

3:24 AM: Wait, the town's called "St. Mystere"? Man, talk about your name-as-destiny conceits. The funny thing is, St. Mystere's actually the patron saint of the gapingly obvious. Do your research, Level 5, developers of Professor Layton and the Curious Village!

3:28 AM: I am asked to pick, out of four pictures, which hat has the same height and brim length. It takes three tries. Come on, when has life and death ever hinged on something like that?

3:31 AM: This was a used cart, so when I went to save my game somebody else (named "Kevin") had three saves already. Haha, kiss all your hard work goodbye, Kev, I'm overwriting your first save! Soon I will overwrite the second and third, and then you will not exist in any capacity at all!

3:34 AM: Another puzzle, involving trying to guess which house some guy lived in with the directions he gives you, only takes a second guess to solve. I think my brain's doing OK. So why do I smell burning?

3:42 AM: I think I've figured out the pattern to the storyline in this game's first chapter: suspicious asshole prevents the Professor and Luke from going anywhere or doing anything unless they can solve a puzzle. Yeah. There's some damn weirdos in this town, all right. This guy's in the way of the path we need to take to get to the big fancy manor where more plot things happen, and he talks like Rain Man. His puzzle involves trying to figure out one out of a series of eight identical-looking weights is lighter than the others, and that this can be done by using the supplied scale only twice. Oh man. Uh... hrm. Well, looks like I got it right by mistake; apparently you're supposed to load three weights on each scale, but I started with four on each, reduced it to two each, then took a 50-50 shot on which one of the weights on the lighter end of the scale would be the correct one. Score one for random chance, you logic-flogging doorknob.

3:51 AM: Huh, apparently it's the guy the Black Lips named their band after. His name's Ramon, and he has a boat. When a game centered around puzzles brings a boat into the equation, you know headaches follow close behind, so yeah, this is that stupid "wolf and animal wolf eats need to get across the river" thing that drives everyone bonkers. "This feat can be accomplished in as few as 11 moves," says the guide. Oh no. Yeah, I'm doing this some other time.

WED, 4AM: Street Fighter Alpha 3 (PS1)

Thumbs up to electricity-conducting beast-men!

As an arcade kid, Street Fighter II was my Super Mario Bros. I suppose that makes Alpha 3 my Super Mario World, though I could possibly be getting that metaphor wrong, so never mind. The important thing is that this, to me, is the ultimate incarnation of the classic Street Fighter II generation of the series: nearly every single character to appear in a SF II-era game is in here, there’s a pretty damn solid anti-turtling mechanism (the “Guard Impact Meter”) to keep things fast-paced and on the offensive, the stages and characters are rendered nicely, and it’s not too complex, even with a wide variety of stylistic and super-meter variations to choose from. Now watch me fail horribly at getting past my fourth opponent.

4:00 AM: Fatigue is starting to set in, subtly but surely. I am pondering the possibility of me being able to literally pull off super combos in my sleep. I know damn well I am perfectly capable of doing somnambulant dragon punches.

4:12 AM: I do well enough with Charlie for a bit -- Dan gets the crap beaten out of him, per usual, and Vega puts up a decent three-round fight before getting knocked out, but Sagat completely murders me in a three-round fight where I can hardly get off a single special move. I mean, say what you will about preferring D-pads to analog sticks when it comes to controlling 2-D fighting games, but I can't do those directional charge moves for shit, much less the back-forward-back-forward supers.

4:30 AM: Here's an ingenious way to avoid losing to Sagat: pick Sagat. I do a hell of a lot better with him -- no charge moves means more fluidity -- and make it all the way to my sixth opponent, Rose, before I get done in by a pretty solid high-low combo at the end of a close Round 3. If I had an arcade stick, I might've made it even further, but if I had an arcade stick it'd probably wind up gathering dust by month 3 of my GTA IV bender.

4:52 AM: The PS1 version of SFA3 has something called World Tour mode, which is basically just a lite-RPG based around going all over the place and just kicking peoples' asses to gain experience. I'm using my favorite Bruce Lee clone in all of fighting games, Fei Long, who has all kinds of wickedly-animated means of just basically kunging fu all over your sorry ass, and by the time I'm done with World Tour mode I've buffed him up to a pretty decent clobberin' machine. And then I get to a stage where I have to defeat Zangief using nothing but Super Combos and I get spinning piledriven all to hell. D'aw.

WED, 5AM: Rez HD (XBLA)

DOONF DOONF DOONF DOONF DOONF

I am guessing that by this point in the marathon I will be some kind of fog-brained wreck running on fumes and reduced to a series of reflexive, zombie-like reactions spurred on by the most basic stimulus. What else could I play at this point besides a psychedelic wireframe blank-void cyberpunk/rave-influenced 3-D railshooter that gets more "drugs were involved" speculation than almost any other video game in history? And since I'll be playing until 6AM, I'm literally going to be raving 'til dawn here.

5:00 AM: I could start from the beginning here, but I'm going to go for broke first (sorry, still in SFA3 mode) and pick up at Area 3, just to see if I can get going in medias res in this state.

5:05 AM: Nope. Got blown up pretty quickly. But man, that was pretty. Wouldn't mind starting from the beginning, actually.

5:35 AM: A half hour later I think I can see through time, taste vectors, smell music, communicate with electricity, summon up the very essence of mind-altering hallucinogenics simply by thinking about them, slap-box the universe, wrestle with a double-digit number of spatial dimensions, see backwards, swim through steel and understand every language that has ever and will ever exist. Yet I still can't beat Area 3. You win some, you lose some.

5:45 AM: Another unsuccessful assault on Area 3 leaves me a bit addled. I walk up to the windows, and open the blinds to find that it's starting to get light out -- overcast, so I'm missing the sunrise, but it's clearly becoming morning. I still have a long way to go, but if I can put every thought of previous wakefulness behind me and attempt to think of this as a completely new day, I could make it. I've been up since 9 on Tuesday, so that's 21 hours down, 13 to go before I can finally collapse in a heap on my futon. This could go anywhere now.

WED, 6AM: Bubble Bobble (NES)

This is the fabled cave of monsters? Pfft. What a shitshow

I am pretty certain that the music from this game will reduce my now-fragile psyche to a complete shambles, since it makes earworms like "Still Alive" and the theme to Tetris sound like Brian Eno's Music for Airports. But it might also transport me back to the neighborhood corner store circa 1987, where I fed countless quarters into this game’s arcade incarnation and forgot for a while that I didn’t have a Nintendo and I wasn't that good at video games and most of my classmates thought I was a spaz and that, actually, I kind of was a spaz. Anyways: you're a dragon; you blow bubbles at enemies; you trap enemies in said bubbles; you break the bubbles; the enemies turn into fruit; you get points. How was this not the biggest thing since Pac-Man?

6:00 AM: Now, it is beginning of a fantastic story! Let's make a journey to the cave of uh where am I

6:01 AM: I lose my first guy in five seconds. Ew boy.

6:04 AM: And there go my other two lives. Is this going to happen some 25 times now or something?

6:07 AM: Maybe not. I continue off level 3 and make it all the way to level 9 with 58,810 points. Not all that terrible, but I'm starting to wonder if this game can carry an hour's worth of entertainment, either as a game to play or a game to blog about. I mean, yeah, it's got a wide array of stages and enemies and powerups (I felt a severe rush of dewy-eyed nostalgia when I burst the waterfall bubble and rode it all the way from the top to the bottom of the screen at breakneck speed), but it basically all comes down to "I will catch you in my bubble and break you and turn you into food which is assigned a point value for some reason". And there's something about the graphics of the NES version which lack the technicolor goofball charm of the arcade original, though I can't quite place it. Maybe I'll just keep continuing and see how far I get.

6:23 AM: So after 15ish minutes and an unknowable number of deaths, I finally got to level 20 -- which, apparently, is 1/5 of the game. This does not necessarily mean I am progressing. Far from it; I think I'm actually getting worse at this game the further I go. Another 15 minutes and I'll just be walking into enemies trying to figure out which button has the "shake hands" command.

6:39 AM: In the first 15 minutes, I progressed through 20 levels. Now, 15 minutes after that, I haven't even hit level 30. I'd also mention what my score's been, but that almost seems irrelevant now. In fact, I haven't even really gone into that much detail concerning what the game's like per se and it kind of hurts to think any further about it, really. And I was right: the moment I fall asleep, that song's going to start running through my head and I'm going to wake up screaming.

6:47 AM: All hail Nate Patrin, the 2001 Barry Bonds of getting killed at Bubble Bobble.

WED, 7AM: Hulk: Ultimate Destruction (XBox)

Rudest titties on the block

There's a thread on Penny Arcade's messageboard that declares this to be the best game of all time, and though that seems like the kind of hyperbole cranked up to specifically tweak the self-seriousness of your typical Zelda/Final Fantasy/Halo fanboys, well… maybe it’s true. Why? Because you get to be the Incredible Hulk, running around and smashing everything in your path. That’s a good start. The fact that it’s set in a big open GTA-style world? Even better. Time to throw some tanks at other tanks, and then jump on the tanks and stomp 'em flat, and then throw the remains of the tanks at a helicopter.

7:00 AM: Here we go -- half the games behind me already. I can make this happen. If all else fails, I still got about 12 cans of pop and a whole lot of room to pace back and forth. And no way in hell can a man fall asleep when he is doing Hulk Business.

7:02 AM: So the Hulk's home base is a church. OK, fine, the Hulk is a Jesus figure, we get the idea. But he can apparently wander around in the graveyard outside of the church and punch the hell out of some crypts. That's kinda tacky there, Bruce.

7:19 AM: Mr. Hulk visits the big city and finds it to be a nice place to visit, what with all the wonderful and amazing things he can throw at policemen and the vehicles he can tear in twain and use as big steel gauntlets to punch things with. Plus he can run up the sides of buildings. The plot of this game is to find the parts for a machine which will cure the Hulk of the condition that lets him do things like this, and seriously, does that make the slightest bit of sense to you? It doesn't to me.

7:42 AM: I have just repeatedly failed what I think is an escort mission in disguise. Sure, you're not escorting anybody anywhere, but you're trying to protect an apparently weak structure (a big-ass office building) from a ridiculous number of enemies (tanks) for a certain amount of time and I don't know, that seems kind of escort mission-y to me. By which I mean damn irritating. Back to running around breaking random shit in free roam mode, I suppose.

7:49 AM: Today's game: What Can the Hulk Chuck Off the Top of a Skyscraper? The contestants: a city bus, an ambulance, and a police officer. Who will fly the furthest? Only five or six ways to find out!

7:50 AM: So obviously we are not talking the most cerebral game in the world here.

WED, 8AM: MLB 08: The Show (PS3)

How many bandwagon fans can you spot in this picture?

More than one person has suggested this game in the wake of my "9 steps towards a better baseball game" post, and seeing as how I've been hurting bad for great PS3 exclusives since I bought the damned thing I say good. This is the second '08-season baseball game I've played this year, and it presents me with the second reiteration of a moral dilemma I've had to fight over for months: should I leave Santana on the Minnesota Twins and send the Mets Boof Bonser for Carlos Gomez instead, attempting to dupe a virtual Omar Minaya by claiming that the portly white dude is actually Johan and pointing out his goatee as evidence? Not that it matters, since playing as the Twins might be too exhaustingly depressing at this late/early hour; I'm gonna see if I can get some licks in with the Mariners instead. At least they stink in a way that's a lot less close to home. And they have Ichiro.

8:00 AM: Huh. Looks like my PS3 apparently has to download some kind of system update to play this game. Hrm. Well, see you guys in 25 minutes!

8:07 AM OK, looks like we're good. Anyway. One thing I really love about MLB 08 is the thing in the menu screen where it plays some random audio clips featuring play-by-play of notable moments of the 2007 season. I really hope Prince Fielder's inside-the-park home run at the Metrodome is included in there somewhere.

8:10 AM: I'm going to start a game featuring the Mariners versus... hrm. Who stinks? I know: the Orioles! A night game at Safeco, with Felix Hernandez squaring off against Erik Bedard. On easy difficulty. This should be good. And by good I mean ridiculous.

8:23 AM: After a protracted first inning, I've gotten the hang of pitching and fielding all right, but hitting is the usual crapshoot that expects you to have eyes as good as an actual major league hitter's. Two of the Mariners batters I controlled swung and missed on third strikes that were, in retrospect, nowhere near the strike zone, and I had no way of telling that they were that far out until it was too late. Ugh. I foresee a pitchers' duel.

8:35 AM: Two innings over and it's clear I can't hit to save my life, something the announcers like pointing out at every opportunity ("Boy, he really got duped by that pitch, and he swung way out in front of it and didn't even come remotely close to making contact; that was an awful swing and he should feel bad about himself. What an asshole."). If this game didn't look so damn pretty -- even the reflections off the teams' jersey numbers are immaculate -- I'd be really pissed.

8:45 AM: Three innings down and Erik Bedard already has six strikeouts. I know Bedard's good, but this is Rookie difficulty, where every AI opposing pitcher is Sidney Ponson with a hangover. Feh and double feh.

8:52 AM: You know what? I'm calling this game off. Due to rain. I know Safeco has a roof, but let's say that it started raining frogs and everybody got too freaked out to continue playing.

WED, 9AM: Yakuza (PS2)

"Have a crate day! Hahahah- oh, wait, I'm speaking Japanese, that pun doesn't work."

Most of the risk in this exercise involves me staying up for a possibly unhealthy period of time to see what it does to my brain, while there's actually little to no danger of playing a game that turns out to be actively bad. The vast majority of games I've played so far and will play from here on out are ones I either know are good or have been overwhemingly told are good. This, obviously, needed to be rectified. So I formulated a plan: go to the used PS2 discount bin at GameStop, close my eyes and pick something out at random. (I did convince Jeff that I would in no way be obliged to commit to a randomly-picked game if the word 'Cabela's' was anywhere in the title.) This plan quickly backfired when I realized that (a), I would look suspicious and/or stupid standing in the middle of the Block E GameStop putting a hand over my eyes and pointing randomly at something; (b) I would probably wind up paying $14.99 for something I would play for an hour and never touch again, which doesn't entirely sit right with me (and I paid $60 for Import Tuner Challenge, ferchrissakes); and (c), when I actually did try to pick something at random it was always something I either already owned -- like a Gran Turismo or Grand Theft Auto game – or something I’d already played and formulated an opinion of years ago, like any of the three dozen copies of some WWE SmackDown! game or another. Eventually I noticed that they had a copy of Yakuza, the faux-GTA-in-Japan beat-em-up that I already owned (and stopped playing because of a godawful irritating stealth mission), and I figured that if I already had a bargain-bin game in my possession, that'd be the one I'd play.

9:00 AM: Did I mention how much I hate stealth missions in non-stealth-based games sometime before? Because if I haven't, oh, motherfucker. Every time my Yakuza dude gets made during his attempt to sneak into a rival boss' funeral, some goon yells "HEY YOO" and it makes me so mad, because I have to go all the way back to the beginning of the stage. All I wanna do is punch dudes, c'mon.

9:20 AM: After a big long ordeal evading assorted security guards, sneaking my way onto the registration, and retrieving a funeral parlor staff pass in order to sneak in the back and meet my contact, I finally think I'm going to get to the point where I can throw down and get some fisticuffs happening. And, in fact, I do get to that point, since apparently the one dude who knows who I really am is guarding the back entrance and he's a big burly cranky bastard. This should be fun, I thi... wait, shouldn't there be a save point or something? If I lose this fight, do I have to do this stealth shit all over again?

9:25 AM: Well, I'll never find out, since I paste the crap outta the galoot even though I forgot just about every single combo and special maneuver in the game. Hooray! Now to get an update from my pal Shinji.

9:30 AM: OK, it's plot time. There's some kind of extremely convoluted power dynamic happening here, with betrayals and murder happening all over the place, and damned if I can sort it all out. Someone is about to reveal a big important secret, but he gets shot by a mysterious unseen assailant, and then a bunch of goons bust into the room and guess who they think shot the guy? Yeah. I'm kind of lost here. Less plot more clobber.

9:55 AM: Long story short: I beat up four goons with assorted furniture, leap out a window, beat up another dozen goons, get bum rushed by another dozen goons (including a big burly motherfucker), fend them off, then another dozen, then holy shit there are a lot of thugs at this funeral, ain't there? Finally I get to the front gate, and this big bald fuck Shimano steps to me. Bam, I knock his ass out without taking a sliver of damage. I guess I'd feel a lot more badass if it wasn't something I accomplished by spamming the same combo over and over and over again, but that's what they get for saddling me with a terrible camera and an obtuse plot and a stupid goddamned hatefuck stealth mission. Fuckers.

WED, 10AM: Psychonauts (XBox)

Discount Lasik!

I love and resent this game equally. Love, because it's brilliant and hilarious and, despite some acquired-taste character designs that look like Genndy Tartakovsky drew 'em after an absinthe bender, really cool-looking. Resent, because its commercial failure is used as a bludgeon by gamer snobs against the general buying public for failing to make this game a colossal blockbuster success and playing Madden and Halo instead and blah blah blee bluh feh. I suppose Psychonauts' failure would be a bit more troubling if it was one of the best overall gameplay experiences of all time instead of a great story and script written around something that plays kind of like a utilitarian Crash Bandicoot title, but whatever, it's still pretty damn entertaining. The important thing is that you can still buy it and play it any time you want (it's a download on Xbox Live, and free on GameTap), and Tim Schaefer's still making ridiculous and hilarious games. I originally screwed up and bought this for PS2 and got as far as the infamous Milkman Conspiracy level before discovering that it was backwards-compatible on 360 and downloadable from the Marketplace, so I'm going to be starting pretty much from scratch here.

10:00 AM: Yep, it's the basic training level. Only it's called "Basic Braining" because you are running around inside some guy's brain, the guy in question being the war-obsessed camp counselor Oleander, who puts you through all kinds of obstacle course crapola. Well, yay.

10:18 AM: See, the problem with talking about Psychonauts -- even the first level -- is that there's fifteen different weird things to sort out at once. There's the scuzzy bully that establishes himself as the game's earliest antagonist, the potential pseudo-love interest, the whole setting of a summer camp for kids with psychic abilities, the main gameplay worlds being other peoples' subconscious, the various weird collectable hoohaas (including weeping satchels and steamer trunks -- yes, that's right, emotional baggage -- that you need to find the tags for to make them happy again), the reasonably smart and not entirely uninventive platforming mechanics, the mile-a-minute comedy, it's just all too much. Especially in my state. Best I can hope for is to hold on.

10:41 AM: Man. For an ostensible tutorial level, that was pretty hardassed. Still, I have to admit that my assessment of the game's platforming mechanics might have been a bit unfair. Some of the bits -- like the last "crazy rotating logs" section of the obstacle course -- are flat-out diabolical. And aside from the tedious collectathon bits, it all seems to gel really well.

10:46 AM: And hooray, I get my first Psychonaut Merit Badge for not dying in the tutorial! Rock and/or roll!

On to Part 3. I CANNOT BE STOPPED. Much.

JUMP TO: PART 1 || PART 3