Sorry about yesterday - my server was sulking and, as I had a morning appointment, I never got around to posting.
I worked out the chart for the cable on the pinwheel hat. I really love that cable and wanted a quick and easy way to use it without having to go through the pattern each time just looking for the cable bit.
Braided Cable chart
I did start the scarf yesterday, after much plotting and mathematics. I’ve only about an inch done so far, but I’m hopeful it will work out; it’ll need a bit more length before I can really tell - but at least I got the right number of stitches cast on! At least, I think I did :)
I’m introducing a new feature today - or perhaps re-introducing an old one. As some of you already know, Myria writes game reviews. They are going to be showing up here on a semi-regular basis. I’m posting two today: Drakan and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I’ll post another one on Tuesday next week and we’ll see how things go from there.
Hope you all have splendid, holiday weekends!
Drakan: The Ancients’ Gates (PS2):
One of the greatest of those good Dragons, Arokh, was awakened after six centuries by a young woman named Rynn. Arokh and Rynn become bonded and together they’ll try to bring back The Elder Breed and restore peace and order to the world of Drakan…
I can’t say as I expected a whole lot out of Drakan, I picked it up primarily because it was cheap (Drakangard had just come out and Best Buy had Drakan for $9.99 as a loss-leader), had a female protagonist (tall, long-legged, and with long auburn hair, no less, all traits I can relate to), and had dragons—I love dragons. Honestly, though, I expected Drakan to be something along the lines of Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat—id est, decent enough, but not anything at risk of being called a great game and likely something you’ll barely remember having played in a year. While Drakan was certainly no Ico, it was a lot better than Black Kat and a lot better than I was expecting it to be.
Depending on the situation, you may find yourself controlling Rynn alone (generally on dungeon crawls), controlling Arokh while Rynn rides, or controlling Rynn while Arokh hovers above and toasts anything remotely threatening that gets near her.
Rynn tends to control quite well, though she does make this odd little squeak when she jumps and in cutscenes she tends to sound (and, for that matter, look) like last month’s flavor of eurotrash supermodel. As for weapons, well she can carry a fair variety, though just not too much of anything at once. Swords, both mundane and magical, pikes, hammers, staffs, you name the melee weapon and it’s here. There’s also a wide variety of bows, again both mundane and magical, Rynn can use as well as a variety of magic spells. As far as the weapons, bows, and spells, whether she can use any particular item depends on its level and hers. Every so many heads she bashes, Rynn goes up a level and this gives you one skill point that you can put into your weapon, bow, or magic level—as far as I could tell the only thing putting a skill point into a skill did was to effect what weapons/bows/spells you could use, it does not seem to effect how good you are at using them otherwise (in other words, none of this Morrowind-style low skill levels can’t hit a barn even when it’s right in front of them stuff). As far as magic is concerned, with the exception of two spells you’ll get as rewards for completing certain missions, you’ll have to buy all your spell upgrades from this weird gypsy woman with a bustline that’d make Laura Croft blush. For swords, bows, and armor, there are armorers in most major areas (and the armorer in the central town is absolutely hilarious), but in the main you can find better weapons and bows than you can buy. The one important thing you’ll need an armorer for (besides selling the junk you don’t want) is repairing your equipment. Pretty much everything takes wear and tear at a rapid rate and once its durability is used up then it’s useless to you. Items can be repaired for a cost, but any time an item is repaired it will lose some of its durability until basically it’s useless. Besides the gypsy chick and the amusingly bloodthirsty armorer, there’s also an alchemist who can sell you potions to restore your health or mana—in most areas armorers also sell these. Besides the health and mana potions (the latter of which I never used, Rynn’s mana regenerates relatively quickly), you’ll also come across invisibility and invulnerability potions. Both work for only a short time and they’re not common, but there are enough of them in the game to get you past most of the tough spots if you save them for when you reallyreallyreally need them.
For all that Rynn has the option between spells, bows, or weapons, she’s mostly a melee fighter, with the right sword she can wade through bad guys like dragon’s breath through ice. Bows come in extremely handy for taking out bad guys at a distance, the game’s AI can be very stupid (not a lot of ‘I’ in that ‘AI’...) about letting enemies get turned into pincushions if they can’t fully see Rynn. Magic comes in extremely handy for a couple of defensive spells that can, especially towards the end of the game, make the difference between life and death—a spell that slows down time, a spell that creates a fake Rynn and makes the real Rynn invulnerable for a short time, and a spell that makes the bad guys cower particularly come in handy. So basically on most of the dungeon crawls Rynn hauls out the bow to take out a couple of enemies too stupid to come after her, swaps to magic for a quick defensive spell, then hauls out the pig sticker to wade through the waves of bad-nasty-jump-jumps that think (wrongly) that they’re going to ruin her day.
When Rynn isn’t on a dungeon crawl she’s most often riding Arokh’s back to some new godforsaken location. Arokh controls beautifully, once you learn to use both joysticks you’ll have him dancing on air in no time. As far as his offensive capabilities, pretty much anything on the ground is toast, literally. Things in the air, well that’s a different story. In the course of your adventures you’ll come across a variety of feral dragons, gryphons, and some of Arokh’s old enemies from the war (at one point, after yet another set of old enemies decides they’re going to try and trash Rynn and Arokh, Rynn asks “Didn’t you have any friends back then?"). In general Arokh is more than a match for any one airborne enemy, the problem is that they tend to gang up on him. That, and in the later areas some of the enemies can kill you with two shots. The other problem is that it is rather difficult (and often fatal) to try and use health potions whilst flying. When you’re controlling Rynn you can cycle through and bring up a variety of items, including health potions, on-the-fly—it’s not the most elegant system, but it works. But while you’re riding Arokh you have no such ability, you have to pull up the menu, pick the item, and hit the key to use it, all whilst the bad guys are still blasting away at you—not a good situation. Airborne battles become a matter of picking the best weapon/breath (Arokh gets new weapon/breath abilities as the game progresses) and trying to pick the bad guys off one or two at a time. Rinse, repeat as needed, and, for god’s sake, save early and save often!
Saving the game is one of Drakan’s downsides. Each save file is 1.5mb, which is huge for a PS2 save game. If your card (Drakan can only read/save to slot one) is mostly empty, no biggie, but if you’ve got a lot of stuff on there it could be an issue and you could be stuck with only enough space for one savegame. This would definitely not be a Good Thing(tm). Why? Well, two reasons. The first is that there are several areas that once you’ve completed the primary objectives for them and left you can never go back. This is very annoying if you don’t know about this beforehand as there are often secondary quests you can fulfill that will get you good stuff cheap. So you finish the main quests, decide to go back to town to heal and repair, thinking you’ll just come right back and finish those two side quests, and you find out you can’t go back in that area ever. Annoying, I hate it when a game closes off an area, especially when there’s no real reason for it. The other potential issue is that it’s possible to “break” the game by losing Arokh. There are any number of times when you go through tunnels or whatnot with just Rynn, this becomes commonplace very early in the game. But there are some tunnels, and it’s not clear to you at first which ones, that you have to go through riding Arokh or the game will break. A serious design flaw, whether it was ever fixed or not is unclear but, just to be safe, it’s best to have a couple of savegames going at any given time so you can go back if something like that were to happen.
Other than that little problem, I’ve few issues with the game. In the main I did find the bosses a bit anticlimactic, but that might be my fault. The first problem was that I kept looking for some kind of weakness or what have you, there often being some special technique or weapon or whatever that should be used on a boss. In this case, with the exception of one boss, it’s just a matter of wailing away as fast as you can and not letting the boss pulverize you. That was the other issue, the bosses are often so big and, many of them, capable of insta-kills, that I saved up my inviso-potions or invulnerability and used those to easily defeat the big honkin’ killer boss (*yawn*). The other problem is that the ending kinda sucks blue iguana eggs. Basically you defeat the big bad and get to watch a cut scene of a book—Oh, the excitement!—as a narrator tells you what happened.
Show, don’t tell, anyone?
Really these complaints—with the exception of the losing Arokh problem that’s easily avoided if you know about it—are relatively minor. The game is very well paced, a little silly but with a good sense of humor, the relationship between Arokh and Rynn plays well, and there’s a wide variety of things to do and places to do them.
Besides, who doesn’t want to be a tall, long-legged long-haired redheaded eurotrash supermodel with a sharp pig sticker and a dragon for a best friend?
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (available on PS2/XBox/GC, PS2 version reviewed):
A confession—I’m not a Harry Potter fan, anything but, but I watched Robbyn play some of the PC HP:CoS game and it looked pretty fun. Silly me, I figured the PS2 version would probably be roughly the same thing and figured I’d have a go. How dumb could I be? The PC version looked like it was based on the Unreal engine, the PS2 version like it was based on the Wolfenstein engine (and I don’t mean the recent “Return to” or ancient PC versions, I’m talkin’ the original Apple II game, circa 1982 or so—ach-freakin’-tung, baby). The PC version had interesting spell challenges and some reasonably (sometimes overly) challenging enemies, the PS2 version had mindlessly simplistic spell challenges and the most annoying and challenge-free enemies ever put to disk. The PC version looked good and looked fun, the PS2 version looked like rat-poop and was one of, perhaps THE, worst console game it’s ever been my displeasure to play.
HP:CoS is meant to follow the basic storyline from the book and movies, which it basically paraphrases by giving you the first line of every other chapter. Rather large chunks of the story are left out entirely and what story elements are included are most often tossed in with all the subtlety and charm of a thermonuclear detonation. Literally the only way you’ll have any idea what’s going on is if you already know the story which, fortunately for the inept dipsticks that made this game, is nearly universally the case.
The graphics aren’t quite as bad as I indicated above, but it’s a close thing. The character models are certainly nothing to write home about, they look vaguely as you’d expect them to but are decidedly low on the polygon count even for the PS2 (I’m spoiled by the Xbox, it’s a sad, sad situation). Hogwarts actually looks pretty good, as long as you don’t look too close and try and ignore that the vast majority of it is inaccessible window dressing. There are a lot of clipping issues with the engine and a lot of objects look decidedly 2D—in some scenes it’s like you’ve suddenly been teleported back to the N64 days. If you get close to a wall the wall itself will look paper-thin and you can often see what (if anything) is on the other side. Running along a wall or through a tunnel looks decidedly weird.
The audio is passable enough but very few of the characters sound anything like what you’d expect. The music is decent enough, if fairly scant, with one major exception. Later on in the game you get a broom that you can ride whenever you want (as long as it’s not at night or indoors or… Okay, not exactly whenever you want...), whenever you get on the broom this grand orchestral score starts up suddenly and ends immediately when you get off. To put it mildly, this sounds bizarre.
(Note that I would complain about the lack of 5.1 audio, but, well, this is the PS2)
While neither the storytelling, graphics, nor audio impresses, it is the gameplay that really kills things. HP:CoS has one of the worst cameras I’ve ever seen in a 3D game (which is saying something) and has by far the worst lock-on system I have ever seen. The combination of the bad camera and the horrid lock-on system make controlling Harry a nightmare. In a game with enemies that posed a serious threat these two elements would kill things, but in HP:CoS the enemies aren’t a serious threat, they’re just annoying as all hell. At night (and sometimes during the day) books fly at you seemingly at random, generally there’s nothing you can do about them. In some situations you’ll run into ghosts that scream, hit you, and steal your beans (money). Again, nothing you can do about the ghosts. There are gnomes that are as annoying as mosquitoes (and nearly as common) and bugs that fart fire at you (I kid you not). You can knock either over with a spell but generally there’s little point unless you’re doing gnome tossing, something you’ll be doing a lot of, because they get back up a few seconds later. There are these ghost dogs that, aside from one early sequence, you can easily avoid and will likely never have to deal with again. That’s really about it. Not many enemies and what of them there are will quickly prove themselves annoying—little white yappy bastard dogs when what you really need for interest’s sake is Fluffy.
Aside from a few opening sequences (a brief sequence at the Weasley’s, another at Diagon Alley, and a sequence by the whomping willow) the game plays out in a fairly simple episodic manner. You get up in the morning and either Ron or Hermione will tell you what class you’ve got for the day. Go to class and the professor will make you go on a challenge to get a particular spell (apparently Harry is the only one in the school who has to work for it). The challenges are generally a couple of rooms with some enemies and a couple of simplistic puzzles that require the spell you’re getting in order to solve. Finish the challenge (which shan’t take long at
all) and the professor will give you some house points.
Next up will generally be a Quidditch match. The flying mechanic whilst playing Quidditch actually works pretty well. Harry isn’t what you’d call aerodynamic, but then one wouldn’t expect a boy on a broom to be an SR-71 so the flying comes across as about right. The same can be said of the races (more on them in a moment), which play out essentially identically to Quidditch matches, but what’s odd is the flying mechanic when you’re not playing Quidditch or racing absolutely sux. I have no idea why that might be and it makes zero sense, but there you go. In any event, in Quidditch you fly along behind the snitch and try and catch it. The snitch leaves behind a trail of gold rings that you can fly through, these both give you a slight speed boost and, once you’ve gone through a sufficient number of them, allow you a kind of “hyper-boost”. It generally takes a couple of “hyper-boosts” to get close to the snitch, once you do the scene switches to a front view of Harry chasing the snitch and you’re supposed to hit ‘X’ when the snitch is on Harry’s right side.
After the Quidditch match, which you’ll almost certainly win easily, there’s usually a short cutscene and everyone decides to go to bed. This comes across very oddly as it’s still full daylight out (and they’re usually telling you they’re going to bed while you’re all standing in the field in front of the Quidditch pitch) and one would expect a full school day to be made up of more than one short class and one shorter sports [bleh] event. After your friends go to bed you can wander around doing side quests or simply go to bed yourself.
If you think you’re sleeping in, though, you’re wrong. There’s a reason everyone goes to bed at one in the afternoon and that reason is that they’re up all bloody night. Sometime in the middle of the night Ron or Hermione will wake you up, generally so you can go fetch something or other for Hermione (that girl seriously needs to start running some of her own damn errands). These fetch quests are complicated by a generally increased annoying-enemy-you-can-do-nothing-about count at night and the fact that a good half the places you’ll need to go into or through will be crawling with prefects—apparently no one sleeps in this place save the professors. Prefects can be avoided and/or distracted in a number of ways, but if a prefect sees you they’ll yell, thus bringing all of the other prefects down on your head, and start tossing spells at you. If they hit you they’ll take house points and you’ll have to start again. Since learning their patterns and how to avoid them rapidly gets boring (or annoying, depending on your disposition and frustration level), you’ll soon discover that there’s little point. In most situations you’ll find that with the right timing you can just run right past them. They’ll yell and toss a spell or three, but Harry is faster than they are and if you reach the door you’re safe. Why bother with stealth when running through the room screaming at the top of your lungs will do?
The prefects did highlight one other problem with the game for me (as if the mediocre graphics and audio combined with crappy gameplay weren’t enough). See, I’m a completist and perfectionist and I’m not bloody-well about to accept some snot-nosed prefect taking five bloody house points from my boy Potter when I can just reload the game. I did this many a time—stealth elements of just about any game being mostly trial and error at best—before discovering that you could just have Harry run like a bunny through the room. Reloading the game more than twice was almost enough to make even me wonder if losing five points isn’t an acceptable cost. Load times in this game are absolutely glacial. Loading a savegame can take literally minutes, scene transitions can take almost as long to load, even swapping which spell is hot-keyed gives you a thirty-odd second load screen (why, since nothing should be being loaded, I have no idea). Almost any time you go through a door—and there are a lot of doors in Hogwarts—you will be faced with a load screen from here to eternity. Going from the entrance hall to the grounds outside, well you may as well plan on tea and crumpets. The load times get to be so long and so frequent that I kept a pillow handy for quick naps. Unlike many reviewers, I’m not overly bothered by a load time here or there, you’ve gotta kinda expect them. But, good god, HP:CoS pushed even my patience level out over the edge.
In any event, in between boring classes, Quidditch, and fetching the occasional eye-of-newt for Hermione in the middle of the night, there’s collecting things and side quests to perform. Collection boils down to beans, which act as currency (though there are really only a couple of things to buy and most of those don’t matter to the game), and famous witches and wizard’s cards. Every ten cards your health bar goes up a little (not that it much matters, you’ll almost never be at any serious risk from anything but poor game design) and if you collect all one hundred you get one more “special one” (Can you say “anticlimactic”? Knew ya’ could...) from Professor Dumbledore. Side quests generally get you cards, though there are a few that get you other things, and they boil down to fetch quests, gnome tossing, and races. The fetch quests are particularly asinine as 90% of the time they tell you what to look for but there’s no clue as to where. Combine that with the fact that the fetch items only show up when you’re on that particular fetch quest—in other words, there’s no risk you’ll happen to run into fetch items as you go along—and you have a recipe for extreme frustration. That, or you have a good incentive to go to gamefaqs.com
and find an FAQ that will list the locations for you. Gnome tossing shows up several different times and involves everything from tossing gnomes at piles of hay to tossing them into lakes to tossing them through rings in the air
-- apparently someone really hates gnomes. To toss them you basically zap the annoying little buggers, walk up and pick them up, then hit a button to spin around—ah, the excitement of it all. Races play out pretty much the same as Quidditch, only without the “hyper-boost” mechanic, each race gets progressively harder and by the end the AI isn’t even pretending to play fair. Not that it’ll matter much, none of the races are overly difficult to win.
After a few days of doing the class/Quidditch/side-quest/late-night-fetch
thing—the school year literally takes less than a week—you’ll rather abruptly find yourself in the Chamber of Secrets (by the way, only Nick and Hermione get petrified, apparently they couldn’t afford the special effects for anyone else… Not that, come to think of it, you ever see Hermione once she’s petrified, Ron just tells you about it...) and fighting a big-assed snake. As with the rest of the game, this is rather anticlimactic and the snake dies surprisingly easily. Once that’s said and done, the game gives you a chance to run around and finish any side-quests you might not yet have done before going in for the final scene. A brief scene with Dumbledore awarding the house cup (Gee, I wonder who will win this year?) and then there’s a final scene where Harry “explains” (it’s not much of an
explanation) everything to Dumbledore, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and Mrs. Weasely—no Dobby (who isn’t in the game) or Lucius Malfoy (who shows up twice early on) present.
And, well, that’s it—crap, crap, and more crap. In case you were wondering, I didn’t think much of this game and wouldn’t recommend you play it. No… No, that’s not strong enough. I don’t just think you shouldn’t play it, I think everyone who has played it, including myself, should be lobotomized as part of a needed effort to wipe out any trace or memory of it ever having existed. Yeah, that’s the ticket. First take every copy of the game ever made, melt them down to their component quarks, collect those up and shoot them in the general direction of the nearest supermassive black hole, then lobotomize anyone who has ever even heard of this game… Yeah, that’ll work!
HP:CoS? More like HP:PoS. Avoid it as you would the black plague.
No trackbacks yet.
i do like the pinwheel hat and plan to give one a try- i’ve got some lovely smooshy (but long nameless as i seem to have bought a batch of yarn w/o ballbands during some long ago shopping frenzy) cream yarn- daughter who lives in snowy region should find it useful especially if i can get through a whole pair of mittens to match- along with afghans that i get excited about to begin with but never finish, i am also the queen of the single sock and mitten-
i am still having a case of poncho fever and found some (more unnamed- geez, i see a pattern here) sky-blue heavy boucle that i fully intend to put to use in a little girl poncho- i’m wondering though if people are really going to WEAR ponchos or if they are just something that is a nifty idea- they are in the magazines and in the stores, but i haven’t seen any signs of them being actually worn except in ‘fo’ shots or magazine pics- of course the fact that it is 98 degrees here still could have a definite impact on that-
i feel sure that ‘gamers’ will bless you for the reviews- i think i am hand-eye handicapped as the mere sight of someone operating game controls with speed and accuracy makes me dizzy-
stay happy-
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Ahh - the blue boucle sounds lovely and just right. I have seen an occasional poncho and I expect to see more as the wether further cools off towards fall and winter. I fully intend to wear mine - always assuming I actually get it finished :)
I’m not a gamer myself - but love watching Myria play and seeing the story unfold. I am a heavy looker-on, shouter of warnings and sometime assistant puzzle-solver. It’s enough :)
Have a great weekend!
Hmm, this sounds like a sneaky hint that you want the HP&CS sequel for Christmas then???
Ahh - no, not really Pam :) The game was so thoroughly un-enjoyable that I don’t care if I ever see another one. I am eagerly looking forward to the next book though :)
