racketboy.com

Posted: **Mon Aug 22, 2016 6:36 pm**

1. Ys Book II: Ancient Ys Vanished - The Final Chapter PSN Vita
2. 3D Streets of Rage 2 3DS eShop
3. 3D Gunstar Heroes 3DS eShop
4. 3D Sonic the Hedgehog 2 3DS eShop
5. 3D OutRun 3DS eShop
6. Mugen Senshi Valis II: The Fantasm Soldier PCE CD
7. Mugen Senshi Valis III: The Fantasm Soldier PCE CD
8. Bomberman PCE CD
9. Rocket Knight Adventures Mega Drive
10. Trax Game Boy
11. Panic Bomber Virtual Boy
12. Arcana Heart 3: Love MAX!!!!! Vita
13. Super Monkey Ball Gamecube
14. Lost Kingdoms Gamecube
15. Sonic Adventure 2 Battle Gamecube
16. 1080° Avalanche Gamecube
17. Bubble Ghost Game Boy
18. Catrap Game Boy
19. 3D Thunder Blade 3DS eShop
20. 3D AfterBurner II 3DS eShop
21. 3D Fantasy Zone II W: The Tears of Opa-Opa 3DS eShop
22. Ikaruga Gamecube
23. Dungeon Travelers 2: The Royal Library & The Monster Seal Vita
24. New Adventure Island PCE
25. WarioWare Twisted! GBA
26. Dragon Warrior NES
27. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D 3DS eShop
28. Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors DS
29. Gargoyle's Quest Game Boy
30. Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee PS1
31. Puyo Puyo CD PCE CD
32. Retro City Rampage DX 3DS eShop
33. Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition 3DS eShop
34. Super Puyo Puyo Tsuu Remix SFC
35. Super Aleste SNES
36. Sega Rally Championship Saturn
37. Knuckles' Chaotix 32X
38. Mystic Quest Game Boy
39. Nano Assault EX 3DS eShop
40. BOXBOY! 3DS eShop
41. Gunman Clive 3DS eShop
42. Persona 4 Golden Vita *NEW*
43. IA/VT Colorful Vita *NEW*
44. Persona 4: Dancing All Night Vita *NEW*
45. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards N64 *NEW*
46. Quartet Master System *NEW*
47. Die Hard Arcade Saturn *NEW*
48. Metal Slug: 1st Mission NGPC *NEW*

OK.....Here goes. I have quite a few of these to catch up on. I'm gonna stick these in spoilers so as not to make this page ridiculously long.

Persona 4 Golden

Persona 4 was game P of my long delayed alphabet marathon.

Persona 4 Golden is the updated Vita port of the popular PS2 RPG. I understand it adds and refines a lot, but as I haven't played the original, I don't know exactly what. What I do know, is that is an absolutely phenomenal RPG.

Persona 4 tells the story of you (actually Yu, canonically), a high school student who moves out into the country to stay with his detective uncle and his cousin for some reason. Once he arrives, a murder mystery kicks off - corpses start appearing mysteriously, hanging from TV antennae, and Yu and his friends take it upon themselves to figure out who is doing the killing. Eventually, they discover a world inside a tv, and lots of strange stuff happens from there. Lots of plot twists and a really compelling story await.

The game is split between 2 major gameplay elements - during the day to day in-game, you'll improve social relationships with your friends, improve your social stats, buy new items and other standard teenager stuff. Social links can be made with various characters which add lots of backstory, come with fun cutscenes and have benefits in the other half of the game - the dungeon crawling and battling half of the game.

On occassion, you will have to go into the TV world to try and save people who have been kidnapped by the murderer. In the TV world, you must trawl through a dungeon, fighting enemies in order to progress through the floors and find the dungeon boss. The gameplay is very focused around finding enemy weaknesses - hitting a weakness normally does lots more damage, stuns the enemy AND gives you an extra turn. Enemies can equally do the same to you.

The game is set over the course of a year, with you able to take one major action each afternoon and evening. There's a strong element of time management to the game. When someone is kidnapped, you must rescue them within a few in game weeks. Completing everything in one playthrough isn't possible, so presumably there is a lot of replay value. That said, at around 90 hours to finish the first time round, I'm in no rush to start over right away. I did get the true ending, for anyone wondering.

I adored Persona 4, and it's made me super excited for Persona 5 next year. Definitely recommended, and one of the must own games for the Vita.

Oh, and my main party was Yu, Yukiko, Kanji and Naoto, in case anyone wondered.

IA/VT Colorful

IA/VT Colorful is a Japan-only rhythm game for Vita featuring one of the innumerable Vocaloid characters. Now, I'm a huge fan of the Hatsune Miku Project DIVA games, so I was curious if this game would hold up for me in comparison. In summary: eh, not really?

IA/VT does have a lot of interesting things going for it. For a start, in terms of content, this game has tons. Compared to DIVAs 30-40 songs, this game has way over 50, and rather than cut down 3 minute versions, they're all full length songs - some as long as 6 minutes or more.

Visually, the game has a lot of spectacle in it's interface - it lives up to it's 'colorful' moniker for sure. The game features a 'colorful' mechanic, where hitting certain icons boosts your colorful metre. Once you hit the correct part of the song, a ring of color will appear and depending how high you filled the color meter, you will receive bonus points on the notes during this time.

Other than these mechanics though, the rhythm mechanics are nice and simple - hit the button that matches the icon as it hits the right point on the track. The tracks move around a lot which adds spectacle, but nothing that actually changes the gameplay. Unlike DIVA, the arrow buttons must be hit on the d-pad and the X, Square, Circle and Triangle on the buttons, which can make for some interesting mechanics, but this is generally underutilised.

The biggest issue with Colorful is that it doesn't mix stuff up enough. Normal modes takes FOREVER to finish with 55 full length songs, and you can't play hard mode until then. Hard mode is a little too easy for my tastes. The basic mechanics don't ovver as mch variety as DIVA. One vocaloid (IA) singing all of the songs can get stale quickly, and she has a voice that really only has one tone (soft) too. Also, it sounds like many of the songs are kinda...second rate compared to Miku's stuff. It's all very generic and not too interesting for the most part.

Despite some promising elements, IA/VT just fell a bit flat for me. Had I played this a few years ago, I would have liked it well enough. After DIVA F and F 2nd, it's just not worth anything other than a passing mention to me. It feels like a step back to the PSP DIVA games - Decent, but completely outdone.

Persona 4: Dancing All Night

So, after playing a Persona game and a rhythm game, I decided to follow it up with a Persona rhythm game. This game surprisingly has a story, which canonically follows on from the Persona 4. It'z a bizarre plot involving a 'midnight stage' - a world where people are dragged to perform on stage and become one with a crowd. However, by dancing to show your feelings, you can free the entrapped audience and save the day. And so, the Persona 4 cast dance, to Persona 4 songs. It's stupid and cheesy and fun. It is a bit poorly paced though - I didn't play a single rhythm stagte in the first hour of play, just tapped X through text boxed. Thankfully, it speeds up a lot later, but in return the story starts to get rather formulaic. I did like the final twist though, and hey, it's a rhythm game, you don't generally buy them for epic, stirring tales. It does the job well enough.

Mechanically, the game uses the X, Circle and Triangle buttons, plus up, left and down on the d=pad. You tap the buttons as the icons hit the outside of the screen, moving outwards from the centre. Rings appear which you must hit with the analogue stick, but these are optional - hitting them fills the fever meter though, which rewards you with a duet dance during certain song segments if it's filled high enough. Sometimes connected notes appear too, which must be hit simultaneously on both the d-pad and buttons. If you finish well, you get a silly cutscene where your Persona plays an epic instrumental solo. It's so silly and I love it/.

The gameplay of the game is fun and fast paced. It really felt refreshing compared to the likes of IA/VT. It's also really challenging - the hard difficulty lives up to it's name, and I think there's another difficulty after that too - I've not unlocked it yet.

The one downside I found was that the music selection was a bit limited. Despite the solid soundtrack of Persona 4, there were multiple different remixes of certain songs. The style of some of them wasn't to my tastes either, but they're fun enough.

I liked Persona 4 Dancing All Night quite a bit. It's not necessarily a must-own game for Persona fans, but if you're Rhythm game afficianado and a Persona 4 fan together, it's definitely worth a play.

I'll post reviews of the other 4 games tomorrow. It's taken me quite a while writing up the first three and I'm not sure how much text I can put in one post. :lol:

Posted: **Mon Aug 22, 2016 7:12 pm**

I like rhythm games, but I've never been able to get into Persona 4 (I always just lose interest after that hella-difficult fire bird boss near the start). Do you think I'd still be able to enjoy Persona Dancing All Night?

Posted: **Tue Aug 23, 2016 5:09 am**

PartridgeSenpai wrote:I like rhythm games, but I've never been able to get into Persona 4 (I always just lose interest after that hella-difficult fire bird boss near the start). Do you think I'd still be able to enjoy Persona Dancing All Night?

That depends. The story makes loads of references to the occurences of Persona 4 and is kinda fanservicey (in the reference sort of way, not the usual Vita sort of way

) so you'll likely not get as much from it. There is also some reasonable spoilers for the RPG game, so if you DO plan on playing it, I'd not play this yet.

On the other hand, the Rhythm stuff you'll be fine with. There's a free-play mode which has more songs and unlocks them as you play too, so you could just skip the story entirely if you liked.

Posted: **Tue Aug 23, 2016 10:39 am**

alienjesus wrote:
PartridgeSenpai wrote:I like rhythm games, but I've never been able to get into Persona 4 (I always just lose interest after that hella-difficult fire bird boss near the start). Do you think I'd still be able to enjoy Persona Dancing All Night?

That depends. The story makes loads of references to the occurences of Persona 4 and is kinda fanservicey (in the reference sort of way, not the usual Vita sort of way ) so you'll likely not get as much from it. There is also some reasonable spoilers for the RPG game, so if you DO plan on playing it, I'd not play this yet.

On the other hand, the Rhythm stuff you'll be fine with. There's a free-play mode which has more songs and unlocks them as you play too, so you could just skip the story entirely if you liked.

That free-play mode is such a good idea! I'd say I wish more rhythm spin-off games did something like that, but there aren't really a terrible amount of them Xp (at least not in America). I will be sure to put that on my watch-out list for Vita stuff

Posted: **Tue Aug 23, 2016 1:26 pm**

Games Beaten in 2016 So Far - 89

January (20 Games Beaten)

February (8 Games Beaten)

March (8 Games Beaten)

April (13 Games Beaten)

May (6 Games Beaten)

June (13 Games Beaten)

July (7 Games Beaten)

August (14 Games Beaten)

89. Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype - Vita - August 22

Some people may argue with my saying that I "beat" Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype because the way that they have the levels structured, people are going to have different definitions of what they call "beaten." For me, "beaten" is when you finish the core storyline or all levels that don't require "secret" or collectible items to unlock. Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype has, I think 10 or 12 levels, but only 4 or 5 can be accessed without collecting a certain number of "secret keys" in certain levels. I didn't unlock any of those, getting the "The End?" ending before being reminded that I can get the "true" ending by unlocking the other levels and beating them. That's what I would call "completed." Make sense? Anyway, onward to the review (while I pretend to pay attention during this meeting about Google Classroom)!

Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype is a horizontally scrolling shmup not unlike R-Type. It has two difficulty settings available at the beginning - Easy and Normal. I'm NOT good at horizontally scrolling shooters, so I played on easy, and that was a pretty perfect level of challenge for a player of my skill (perhaps a little too easy but pretty good). I had to get my shit together by the time I got to the boss, but I did manage to beat all of the levels I finished without dying. When you start, you pick from three ships to use (two of which are available at the start), and each ship has three weapons - a standard pew pew laser, a PHWOOOSH narrow but powerful beam, and a (in my opinion) useless more defensive laser that has a pseudo-auto targetting feature in a short range.

The game is (mercifully) not a one-hit-kill type of shmup. You have a life bar, and you can take a decent number of hits before you die. Destroyed enemy ships occasionally droop health regeneration items. You can also pick up items like score multipliers, bonus points, and power boosts. Your enemies' endurance vary, too, from little nothing enemies that die with a single shot from any weapon all the way to bigger enemies that take a good 10 seconds of concentrated fire with your PHWOOOSH laser to destroy.

One of the things that a lot of shmups forego (or at least don't spend much time establishing) that I really appreciated about Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype is the storyline. Yeah, at the end of the day, you're just going to be blowing shit up in space, but it's nice to have a backstory to along with your shit in space destroying. All in all, Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype doesn't revolutionize the genre or anything, but horizontally scrolling shooters aren't as common as vertically scrolling shooters (because they're not as good), and it's a very competent game. It just won't really stand out from the crowd after you finish it, and - for me, personally, at least - it's not special enough to make it worthwhile to go through and get the bonus keys to unlock the rest of the levels.

Posted: **Wed Aug 24, 2016 4:46 am**

ElkinFencer10 wrote: horizontally scrolling shooters aren't as common as vertically scrolling shooters (because they're not as good).

Preach!

Another great write-up! You seem to have excellent taste. Have you tried Dariusburst CS by chance?

Posted: **Wed Aug 24, 2016 7:35 am**

dunpeal2064 wrote:
ElkinFencer10 wrote: horizontally scrolling shooters aren't as common as vertically scrolling shooters (because they're not as good).

Preach!

Another great write-up! You seem to have excellent taste. Have you tried Dariusburst CS by chance?

I have not. Did it get a physical release for PS4, or is it digital only? I'd be tempted to get the PSP original if not unless there are ridiculous enhancements.

Posted: **Wed Aug 24, 2016 7:55 am**

I'm not aware of a physical release. It definitely didn't get one state-side, but I don't recall a Japanese/Asia release either.

The PSP game is actually the first DB game, the ps4 one is the second. Its a spectacular package though, almost too much content honestly!

Edit: Hmm, maybe the Vita version got a physical release? Not seeing any ps4 versions though.

Posted: **Wed Aug 24, 2016 8:24 am**

No physical release. I picked it up when it was like 60% off on a flash sale as it commands a hefty tag for a digital title (and lots of content so not complaining).

Posted: **Wed Aug 24, 2016 5:18 pm**

Well after reading the incredible Silent Hill write up a few weeks back I have decided to go on a Silent Hill / Resident Evil run. Going to play and beat them all, (well most of them) at least once.

So far I have beaten:

RE: 1 and 2
Silent Hill 1, 2 and part into 3 now.

These games are incredible, and never get old. I can replay them over and over and still not get enough. With the extra endings and other goodies for playing more than once they offer more replay value than most any other game. With summer ending and fall approaching I hope to get them all done by Halloween. If time permits I am going to play all the versions also. I think I have finally accumulated them all. These are all replays, nothing new, just more goodness.

I will be skipping RE for the gameboy color. I have it, but I never considered a real RE game. I will also be skipping the newest digital only release unless we get a physical release. The other RE games I plan on skipping are the two rail shooters and Raccoon City. That was just a piece of garbage to me. I will also be skipping the Silent Hill for the Vita, I forget the title and am too lazy to go upstairs to see!

So I have a couple questions about RE maybe you guys can help me:

I have never beaten 5 in a solo campaign, I always played it through with my daughter. Does the computer controlled player really get in the way or can they be largely ignored?

When I go to the next RE game should I play Code Veronica, Code Veronica X or RE 3 next? Never really gave much thought to the order of these.

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