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I’m still only about seven hours in, but my first impression of pretty much every aspect of FF13 is “I remember this from FF10… only it sucked.”

First: the high energy intro. FF10’s intro involved Tidus playing blitzball to this weird heavy metal, which was fine, but didn’t really get me into the game, per se. The blitzball cinematic was fun to watch, but then came to an abrupt stop so Tidus could sign some kids ball (read: input his name). The first scene in FF13 is: Lightning stands up on a trian and kicks everyone’s ass. Why? Don’t worry about it, player — just get to work. It’ll make sense eventually.

As I recounted to a buddy of mine later: if you recall how FF7’s intro was pretty much spot-on, and every FF game since has been lacking something, then you’ll be delighted to know that FF13 does it like FF7. That was my first impression.

The prologue is designed to throw five characters at you and force you to use each in turn. The idea is you get to know a little bit about your entire party in the first couple hours of game, while at the same time hiding the contrivance of getting them all together. It does drag in places, and it takes a little too long to get to any of the game’s systems, but at least it’s a string of action scenes. FF10 tried to pull this same trick by introducing a party member, then taking him away, then introducing another party member, then taking her away, then a few hours of boring welcome-to-our-town nonsense, then dropping the lady lead and three nobodies in your party so you could walk to the beach.

Which is another anomaly of FF10: the party set-up. Typically in an FF game you start with Heroguy and maybe Heroguy’s best friend. Other characters come and go as part of the plot up until about the 50% mark, where you’ve got everyone. FF10 tried to structure things so that your party was a cohesive group right from the outset — the summoner and her guardians on a pilgrimage — but didn’t really give you any real context to work with. Each of the five characters you start the “real game” with have different strengths and weaknesses, and you have to learn them all at once if you want to succeed in the game. Maybe 10-20 hours later you’d get some backstory on one of them… maybe.

FF13 walks the same path, but more deftly. You still begin the “real game” with five characters, but the events leading up to their convergence are explained in detail. Their goals and motivations are not identical, which creates some interesting in-party strife that isn’t present in FF10. Rather than being on a journey together these characters are “stuck in the same boat” as it were.

Unlike FF10, FF13 isn’t really a game where individual characters have strengths and weaknesses to exploit (or maybe it is, and I just wont’ know until the game starts letting me select my own party), but it does its part to not drop the entire battle system in your lap all at once. You learn a few concepts, then play half a dungeon, then learn a few more, gradually building up your bag of tricks until suddenly things start making sense.

This is all small potatoes compared to the Big Two, though.

Cutscenes. FF10 came out at a weird time in video game history where your game would be considered “cinematic” simply for having voice acting. FF10 did have voice acting, that’s true, but it was terrible more often than not, and most of the cutscenes involved the camera just cutting back and forth between whatever anime faces happened to be standing around. Awkward silences punctured any sense of flow the story might have otherwise had. Nobody really moved, unless it was Yuna’s goofy head nod or Tidus nervously scratching the back of his head.

FF12 did things a little better by virtue of being more reserved in its characters and dialogue. This paragraph is about FF12. What the hell is this paragraph doing in this post. Get out of here, paragraph!

FF13 really nails this, though, in a way I don’t think I’ve seen in a JRPG. Characters have actual conversations — they interrupt and interject, they talk over each other, they use their jargon with confidence. I remember playing Metal Gear Solid a few years later than everyone else, and being pretty much amazed with how fluid the story scenes were. It was a far cry from folks just standing around blue-dialogue-boxing at each other, that’s for sure. Problem is, MGS was doing it right and pretty much nobody else was; they just replaced the blue dialogue boxes with stilted voice acting. Then a few games started to get it right, then a few more, then the current gen of consoles came out and lots of genres were getting it right except, for some reason, JRPGs.

Well, now a JRPG has gotten it right and everyone else can stop slacking off.

Also! The cutscenes are skippable. Yes, even on your first playthrough. Thank you thank you thank you, Squenix.

Finally, we have the Sphere Grid 2.0: the Crystalium. It works for all the reasons the Sphere Grid didn’t, at least, not for me. To describe what was wrong with the Sphere Grid though I guess I need to describe the Sphere Grid.

First, imagine a typical oldschool no-frills JRPG. Say, oh, FF4. Imagine a black mage from that game, like Rydia. When Rydia wins fights she earns EXP, and when she has enough EXP she gains levels. Those levels come with stat boosts and, sometimes, new abilities. You can envision this as Rydia traveling forward on a line, with a level-up spot every few miles.

Now imagine, instead of level-up spots every few miles, Rydia’s individual stat boosts and ability gains were more evenly spread across the line. Instead of “spending” her EXP in big bursts she could “spend” it in small chunks, gaining lesser but more frequent boosts. A +1 Int here, a new Fire spell there… it’s the same line she was walking before, only now she gets a boost every couple steps rather than every few miles.

Now imagine that, instead of the game applying these boosts and gains automatically, you had to go into the goddamn menu and activate them yourself. Every single +1 Int and new Fire spell, every step of the way, for the entire game. You spend as much manually leveling Rydia up as you do in combat, uh, leveling her up — only menu manipulation isn’t fun. Congratulations! Now you’re envisioning the Sphere Grid from FF10!

To be fair, the Sphere Grid does open up eventually. You can, if you were so inclined, get every stat boost and every ability for every character. But for most of the game, and “most” in this context means 80%+, Lulu is your black mage and Yuna is your white mage, and them’s just the breaks. What’s missing is an element of choice. For much of the game your only options on the Sphere Grid are “move forward” or “don’t move forward”.

FF13 revisits this system, except each character has several smaller grids. Each grid corresponds to a role they can play during combat. They can switch roles on the fly as often as you like, so there is some benefit to developing each role evenly… but at the same time each character has strengths and weaknesses of their own that need to be harnessed. You get to make choices — real choices — and the choices you make have immediate and noticable effects in combat.

I’m sure the endpoint is still the same: every character will learn every ability from every role. But rather than waiting until just-before-the-endgame to start making decisions you get to make them through the entire course of the game.

Let’s see… what else? Well, both games have a cumbersome and not-adequately-explained equipment upgrade system that isn’t appreciably better than the standard buy-and-replace system. I guess they didn’t feel right totally knocking it out of the park.

The end question, really, is: why couldn’t FF10 get this right ten years ago? Is it just a matter of the gaming landscape being so different now? FF10 really was kind of one-foot-in, one-foot-out when it game to employing new ideas, whereas FF13 (like FF12 before it) really attempts to go full-hog with redefining the genre it’s in. It’s not trying to pretend to be something new while also remaining something old. Does it succeed? I’m not sure — I haven’t hit the ten hour mark yet. But the comparisons to its closest sibling are encouraging.

And I’m still in love with Lightning. I’ll let you know if that changes anytime soon.

So I was expecting today’s blog post to pretty much just be “I AM PLAYING FF13 LEAVE ME ALONE” in giant bold letters… but then the PS3 was like “lol u need to update dudez” so I’m kind of just sitting here fondling the game box. So I guess I’ll review that.

Cover Art
On the cover is a cute pink-haired swordswoman I just so happen to know is named “Lightning”. I have been in love with Lightning pretty much every since they released the first shots of her back in, what was that? 1999? I think maybe FF9 had just come out. Christ this game has been in the works forever.

Anyway the title is on there, so that’s cool, and it has the traditional Final Fantasy “thing behind the title” design. It’s a globe or an orb or something. Not really sure. I think I see some faces on it? Anyway it is not as awesome as FF12’s kickass Judge Gabranth logo. That logo looked like it was gonna jump off the box and mess a bitch up. I don’t even think this sphere logo thing knows what a bitch is.

On the back are some screenshots and things. Pretty standard. I wish the PlayStation Network logo wasn’t on the front. It kind of ruins the pristine simplicity of the box art, you know? 7.5/10

—

Material
The box is made out of the same plastic as every other PS3 box I’ve seen. The inside doesn’t have big chunks missing like most of the Xbox 360 games I’ve bought recently, which is nice. It’s like, where did those chunks go? Nowhere good, I bet.

The plastic doesn’t really taste like anything.

I’d give this a 10/10, but the FF12 box is made of kickass black metal. Based on the logo design and the make-up of the box itself, FF12 makes FF13 look like a piece of shit. 6/10

—

Disc
FF13 comes on a single Blu-Ray disc. My mom still calls these things “CDs”. Oh well.

The disc is already in my PS3. I forget what the artwork on it looks like, and I’m afraid if I eject it now I’ll have to start this whole system update process all over again. ?/10

—

Aerodynamics
I tossed the box across the room. It landed on the futon with a kind of dull “thump” sound. I went and retrieved it before my dog could investigate. I didn’t throw it very hard… I don’t want to ruin my new game, you know? But I feel like if I gave it a bit of heft I could get some real distance out of it. 8/10 for distance, 10/10 for arousal of canine curiosity.

—

PS3 Updates Screen
It is plain black and pretty boring looking… and going really really slow. It’s kind of pissing me off to be honest. I think they should replace it with a picture of someone kicking you in the dick, with a caption reading “shoulda got the 360 version, sucker!” I guess you’d need a PSEye for that, though. 0/10

—

Instruction Manual
Inside the case was an insert saying I could retrieve a special item if I go to some website and punch in a code. So I guess I’ll do that now.

…

Okay, I’m back, and that was a pretty awful experience. The website was kinda confusing. Fortunately I already had login information saved from when I signed up for the FF14 beta earlier this week, but it still took me a minute or two to find the registration. Then my serial number didn’t work. The page has a “serial number font sample” on it so you don’t mix up your 0s with your Os, but it looks nothing like the goddamned font printed on my card. Whatever. I’m sure it was just like a Potion or something anyway.

The manual itself has color pictures in it, and lots of fancy terms for every aspect of gameplay you could possibly imagine. I’d read it if I weren’t convinced the first ten hours of gameplay would be forced tutorial sections. Anyway, flipping through it is pretty OH HOLY SHIT.

Sorry. One of the last pages has a photo of this freaky snakewoman lady who looks like she wants to eat me. Jesus, who is this woman? Leona Lewis? You are horribly ugly and your lipstick makes you look like you just sucked the life force out of a hobo. x_x/10

—

I’d keep this up but the game is starting now. Have fun Final Fantasy-ing, guys!

(Disclaimer: I am bad at maths. If these calculations are faulty please feel free to leave me a comment letting me know what a dummy I am.)

I caught an ad for Brita water filters recently which said you should buy a Brita filter because it will reduce the number of empty bottles you will throw away over the course of a year.

I tend to find claims like this dubious at best, but Brita gave us some numbers to work with. They claim that American drink enough bottled water every year that they could stretch around the world over 100 times. They further claim that if you buy a Brita water filter you can reduce that number of bottles by 300.

The commercial showed an endless row of empty bottles stretched across otherwise pristine natural landscapes, implying that your bottled water consumption leads directly to the polution of lush forests and live-giving rivers. It was difficult to tell whether the bottles were laying side-to-side or end-to-end.

I didn’t have a water bottle handy, so I measured a 20 oz. Pepsi instead. Water bottles come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, so this probably won’t affect the calculations much; a standard 20 oz. bottle is a good rough average. Coca-cola’s bottled water product Dasani does, as far as I know, come in a standard 20 oz. bottle.

My Mountain Dew bottle was ≈8.5 inches tall with the cap on, and ≈2.6 inches wide at the widest part. Of course in real life a discarded plastic bottle wouldn’t take up nearly that much space, because they can be crushed to a small fraction of their regular size… but the commercial showed whole, un-crushed bottles. I believe they were trying to illustrate the number of empty bottles, rather than the amount of space they would take up in a landfill.

The mean circumference of the Earth at the equator is ≈24,880.6 miles. So:

(bottles laid side-to-side)
4.6 bottles per foot = 24,288 bottles per mile = 604,300,012.8 bottles per Earth = 61,034,301,292.8 bottles per 101 Earths.

Do you believe Americans drink 61 billion bottles of water every year? That breaks down to ≈197 bottles of water for every man, woman and child in the US every year, or about one bottle per person every two days.

(bottles laid end-to-end)
1.41 bottles per foot = 7444.8 bottles per mile = 185,231,090.88 bottles per Earth = 18,708,340,178.88 bottles per 101 Earths.

18.7 billion bottles works out to ≈60.6 bottles per American per year, or about one bottle per person every six days.

How many water filters does Brita have to sell in order to eliminate this plastic-y blight on our existence? They didn’t specify whether a filter was good for one person or one household, but they did make it clear that buying on means you can keep 300 bottles per year from clogging up our lush forests etc. So:

(bottles laid side-to-side)
61,034,301,292.8 / 300 ≈ 203,447,671 filters required.

(bottles laid end-to-end)
18,708,340,178.88 / 300 ≈ 62,361,134 filters required.

So by buying a Brita water filter, your actual impact on the endless march of empty water bottles is considerably less than 1% of 1% of 1%.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy a Brita water filter based on this data, even if it’s all accurate. (You shouldn’t buy one, but that’s not the reason.) I’m saying that the “go green” angle of this particular commercial is a mite disingenuous given two key points:

1. Measuring the impact empty bottles have on our environment isn’t as easy as simply counting the bottles; you have to measure the actual space taken up. Most of the volume of an empty bottle is just air. Similarly you currently have about 26 feet of intestines in your gut, but that doesn’t mean you have to be 26 feet tall to hold them all in.
2. Purchasing a Brita water filter for your family does virtually nothing to reduce the total number of bottles anyway. If you’re worried about where your plastic bottles end up, you could store considerably more than 300 of them in your garage if you so chose, where you could prevent them from escaping into the wilderness.

Want to reduce your bottle consumption? Purchase a re-usable bottle. Then, if you’re worried about the environment, donate the remaining $18 to the environmentalist group of your choice.

Fun episode! Some interesting shifting took place on each of the two tribes, causing me to rethink the players left in the game and what they’re likely to do. Then Probst yelled at Rupert for saying something stupid, which I enjoyed merrily.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s how the episode started:

Coach collapsed into Tyson’s arms because Sandra said something that hurt his feelings. See, not only is Coach a macho tough guy superman, but he’s also a sensitive and delicate, beautiful snowflake. So he decided to quit (because that’s what coaches do when things get tough) until Tyson and Rob talked him out of it.

What a weiner. That’s all the more I really feel like saying about it.

“There’s strength in weakness.” What the hell does that even mean? Okay — that’s all I really feel like saying about it.

There was a reward challenge which was pretty much good for nothing other than taking my breath away with the sight of James’s gorgeous oiled-up Adonis body. Villains took home the prize: tools and materials to improve their suckass shelter.

Now the episode begins for real: both tribes find the clue leading to their hidden immunity idols. The clues came out right in the open, so it was up to each tribe to decide how to tackle the issue. Here’s what’s interesting: the Villains took the “heroic” stance on the idol, while the Heroes took the “villainous” stance.

Boston Rob steered his tribe into a friendly agreement to find the idol together and then dispose of it. They all decided that one individual having an idol would be unfair, and if anyone was caught looking for it, that person would be marked and voted off next. Of course Russell, who developed a sexual attraction to hidden idols in Samoa, was unable to contain himself. Rob and Sandra caught him looking, and now he’s “marked”. I’ll revisit this at the end of the post.

The Heroes decided to abandon all pretenses of unity and play the idol game individually. Everyone was searching for it, which led to humorous images such as five or six Heroes all digging at the same tree roots. Tom walks out of the situation with the idol in his sock, but he was caught with it. This gives him and Colby a minor bargaining chip…

…which turned out to be important, since they lost immunity.

Candice knew exactly how to get rid of the idol: split the votes evenly between Tom and Colby, then whichever of them doesn’t play it goes home. Cirie endorsed this plan because her game relies on eliminating as many strong contenders as possible. A smart ploy, if  you’re Cirie — and I remind you, this is a woman who came withing grasping distance of the endgame prize both times she played. She would easily be the most devious player on the Heroes tribe, if not for J.T.

See, Cirie’s playing the same game she played previously, while J.T. is playing it totally different. When Cirie snakes someone, well, that’s just what Cirie does, isn’t it? Bears in the woods, etc. When J.T. snakes someone, nobody sees it coming, because it’s J.T. and gosh durn it he’s a nice guy. J.T. switched his vote, Tom burned up his idol, and Cirie melted away from the game before she could get her machinations going.

Also of note: Probst got Rupert to admit that he’s following a proven losing strategy because it’s the honorable thing to do. I mused that Rupert would come back to the game having learned absolutely nothing from his first two outings, and that seems to be precisely the case. He’ll make fourth or fifth place, again, being manipulated by better players who require his physique and his loyalty. He will then be totally flabbergasted when they cut him loose. I may have to make another BAWWWWW image.

Who’s gonna win? If it’s a Hero, I’m sticking with J.T. I feel as though the dynamics in this season really are a lot different than they were in All-Stars, where prior winners could not come within eyeshot of the endgame.

If it’s a Villain… well, it depends largely on how this individual idol business plays out. I don’t know that I buy the whole “black mark” idea. Russell seems to be banking on an idol in his pocket being unequivocally better than an idol elsewhere, even if his entire tribe believes him to be scum. I gotta say, I’m not sure he’s wrong. Rob and Sandra and the rest of them may talk big now, but when it actually comes time to put his name down I’m not sure their conviction will stick. See, Russell might be marked… but he knows he’s marked. So he knows he’ll have to play his idol. And everyone knows he knows that — so the discussion is no longer “we have to vote out Russell because he broke Holy Tribal Law”; now it’s “who should we sacrifice to eliminate Russell’s idol because he broke Holy Tribal Law?” Will Rob take that gamble? Will Sandra? I don’t know.

If Russell has the idol he is in a decent position. He can spend a few days engineering someone else’s exit from the game (since they’re so dead-set on sacrificing someone), play his idol, then spend the next few days engineering himself a safety net. Or just looking for the next idol. That worked well enough for him the first time around. Sticking with Russell, myself.

Didn’t get a chance to catch Survivor on Thursday, so it’s Peemeister today and Survivor tomorrow. Enjoy!

From 2005 to 2008 I maintained a blog about my experiences working in the drug test industry. Every Sunday I revive one of those experiences here. The following was originally posted May 27, 2008.

The Super-translator.

…and I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s difficult to judge, really, but I’m fairly certain MM10 is much more difficult than MM9 was. I couldn’t even make it to the boss doors in half of the stages. In some cases the mid-point boss was tougher than the robot master was. I’m sure practice, weapon experimentation and pattern recognition will mitigate this somewhat on replays…

…but man. The soccer ball monster in Strike Man’s stage? Ridiculous.

Standing on its own I really had a blast with the game. Many of the levels did wonderful things I hadn’t seen before in a 2d platformer, let alone a Mega Man game. The ideas in Sheep Man’s level alone left me with a huge grin on my face. A few stages left me shaking my head wondering, “Why would they do that?” but I think most of those areas will smooth out as I get better at the game.

Maybe not Wily 3. That stage is just mean.

Inevitably, though, the game must be compared to MM9. And… MM9 was better in almost every way that matters. The weapons are more fun, there’s less blatantly dickish level design, and of course MM9 has Splash Woman. They were aiming for a gold and they got a silver-and-a-half.

One novelty I noted was the tendency for special weapons to have a duality to them. Weapons in the Mega Man series often have multiple phases to them; Mega Man throws a bomb which then explodes, or fires a laser which splits into three separate shots. MM10 continues this tradition, but now the different phases are meaningful. As in, if you hit a boss with the correct weapon but the incorrect phase, you won’t score critical damage. This made it far more difficult to actually find the proper strategies and weak point weapons than was probably intended.

I still don’t really know how Blade Man’s weakness is supposed to work.

The Challenge Rooms are an interesting idea, but most of them just consist of fighting all the bosses again. Ho hum. I’m not saying I want Horrible Spike Gauntlet Deluxe, here, but… maybe something that I can’t get just by replaying the main game?

Favorite boss: Sheep Man
Favorite weapon: Triple Blade
Favorite stage: Wily 1
Clear time: 3.5 hours

Here’s to dozens of joyous replays!

One of the primary issues people have with time travel stories is inconsistent application of the rules. This is why “old” Doc Brown doesn’t remember meeting Marty McFly in 1955, but does know to protect himself from terrorist gunfire. Or how everyone “remembers” the Black Omen having always been dangling there in mid-air, while the king of Guardia knows absolutely nothing about the priceless artifact that has been hidden in his basement “all along”.

People are generally more forgiving of plot holes like these in time travel stories, since they’re required to make the plot work. Events might be mutable in one scene and immutable in the next. Changes made in the first act might alter the future entirely, but in the second act might instead cause an entire spin-off timeline.

My solution: instead of calling these “inconsistencies” why not call them “side effects of time travel”? Since time travel is an utterly bizarre twist of natural law, wouldn’t we expect it to have some utterly bizarre aftereffects? Throw a huge rock into a lake and you somewhat predictable ripples. But if the lake has an awkward size or shape they will become more irregular and haphazard.

Surely a magic phone booth punching holes in the time/space continuum would have similar irregular effects?

Mega Man 10 on Wii, big bottle of Pepsi and a bag of cheeseburger flavored Doritos. Does life get more gluttonous or self-indulgent than this? I submit that it does not, sir.

Mega Man 10 is, of course, amazing so far. I’ve only seen three levels and I’m already in love. In fact, I want to hurry up and finish typing this post so I can get back to the other five. Baseball Man awaits!

First though, a few notes about what’s happening on the Let’s Play front:

1) YouTube is being a weepy bitch for some reason. I cannot upload files or access most of the features on my own gorram channel page. So even though I have the next two episodes of Mega Man X4 sitting right here… you can’t watch them. Sorry. YouTube’s stock response page says this is a known issue that happens to “certain users” from time to time, and that it will hopefully go away eventually maybe. Once it does, X4 will come back.

2) The massive co-op LP I’ve been working on is finished! What’s more, the early parts of it were finished a long time ago, and are already uploaded and waiting for me to toggle them over to be shared publicly. I’ve made the first two episodes available, and this series is so massive that at two-a-day it won’t be finished until halfway through April. Here’s a link to the playlist: Let’s play Secret of Evermore with SovanJedi.

3) After days of screwing with compression settings and deinterlacing filters I finally have a recording rig set up that can handle console games. I plan to screw around with some more Little Big Planet videos in the near future, but I’d also like to dip my toes into the wonderful world of streaming Let’s Plays. I’ve got three people who intend to join me for a Mega Man 9 jam session sometime in the (near?) future. That should be awesome.

…oh, and cheeseburger Doritos? Well, they’re not bad I guess. They don’t really taste like cheeseburgers. In fact the most distinct flavor I’m getting out of them are those little rubbery diced onions that come on a McDonald’s double cheese. Which, now that I’m actually thinking about it some more, is making me a little gaggy.

The title is dumb. It’s unpronouncable. It’s not unrecognizable, though; ten years from now you’ll be able to talk about “veevuhveeveevuhvee” or “that game with all the Vs in it” and people will be able to understand you. (Providing they’ve played the game of course.) I’ve seen the idea bandied about that a string of capital Vs is supposed to resemble spikes, or the constant changing of gravity. Both nice ideas, if a little on the “too clever for their own good” side, but it doesn’t make the title not-dumb.

No, I don’t have any suggestions for alternate titles. Why do you ask?

I like the visuals. They have a retro Atari 2600 feel to them, and if not for the ultra-smooth movement you would pretty much just need an old-fashioned joystick to complete the experience. I particularly like the bizarre “enemies” in the game, which range from gibberish symbols to endless rivers of lies. (And you’ll know they’re lies, too, when you see them.)

The sound is simplistic, but great. I’ve been humming bits of the VVVVVV soundtrack in the shower and during car trips all week, and likely will be into the forseeable future. There isn’t really much in the way of sound effects outside of a few miscellaneous  cracks and bangs, except for a gutwrenching “sad noise” which you’ll be hearing a lot over the course of your many frequent deaths. It’s specifically crafted to make you feel bad for your little VVV-guy, and you will at first, but you’ll get tired of it after a while.

So gameplay, then. VVVVVV is about 75% of a good game. I’ll start by talking about the demo. You can download it if you want, though I don’t see why you would since you can just play it up at Kongregate. And you should play it — the demo is fantastic. I’m getting ahead of myself, though.

The primary gameplay element in VVVVVV is there is no jumping. It’s a platformer, sure, but rather than getting a “hop” button you get a “reverse gravity” button. Any time you’re standing on the ground (or ceiling) you can hit that button, causing your little pixel man to flip upside-down (or right-side-up) and fall (rise) through empty space. You can’t flip in mid-air, however, so you’d better have a landing strategy in place or you’re like to have a bed of spikes in your future.

The demo consists of two levels. The first of these is the game’s introductory stage, which serves to ease you into the gravity-flipping mechanic with some decent-but-not-overwhelming challenges. This stage is fun mainly because the novelty hasn’t worn off yet, but it is fun. Canny players will note that the intro stage actually runs alongside some later areas of the game, which look much more difficult, but can’t be accessed in the demo.

The other available stage introduces a second mechanic: trampolines. These are flashing lines which cause VVV-man to flip even in mid-air; horizontal ones cause you to automatically “bounce” while vertical ones cause you to switch polarity and sort of “float”. It’s much tougher than the intro level, but definitely not too tough, and I found it to be very satisfying.

The intro level showed me the flipping mechanic and what it could do. The trampoline level showed me one interesting direction the flipping mechanic could take. I wanted to see what other directions the game went in, so I ponied up $15 for the full game.

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is… none. The vanilla flipping sections never get anything but more difficult, and the trampolines are the only environmental gimmick ever introduced. There are six or seven more levels to go through, depending on how you choose to define “level”, but none of them explore territory that hadn’t already been covered in the demo.

That isn’t precisely true. Some stages ave a screen-wrapping gimmick, where falling off the edge of one side causes you to appear on the other. Others are auto-scrolling levels where you’ll die (from spikes!) if you get too close to the top of bottom of the screen. But the wrapping stages don’t do anything interesting in tandem with the gravity flipping, and auto-scrolling levels are sins punishable by damnation to one of the upper circles of Hell.

Even so, though, eight-ish levels of pretty decent gravity-flipping is enough for a fun Flash game. I’m unconvinced it’s enough for a $15 downloadable game. I kinda sorta feel like the demo promised me something that ended up never materializing.

Aside from just not meeting my (possibly unwarranted) expectations, the game has a few sour patches. As an example, one of the bullet points in the “buy the full version!” sales pitch is that there is a vast overworld to explore. And boy howdy, is there ever! Another bullet point, though, is that there are no arbitrary barriers; no keys, switches, levers or power-ups to bar your progress. Hmm… there’s a disconnet here, no? If there’s nothing barring my passage into the levels, what incentive do I have to explore this sprawling overworld? Why would I want to waste time in the overworld, when most of the interesting gameplay happens in the levels?

But explore it you will, for it is nothing if not huge. It’s also featureless and empty. And remember, VVV-dude can’t jump, so if you’re walking along and find a three-pixel-high rock you’re powerless to do anything about it except to flip and land on wherever the ceiling happens to be above you. Most of the time spent “exploring” the overworld is falling past large stacks of empty, pointless screens.

Solution: instead of acting like your giant empty hub area is worthwhile, just give me a room with eight teleporters so I can jump instantly to the fun bits. The grey outer-space wasteland does nothing for me.

My other niggle is that the game occassionally dips into that nebulous territory of difficulty where it’s no longer trying to provide a challenge and instead is just being a dick. Some of the actions the game asks of you are borderline unreasonable. You get unlimited tries, of course, and your checkpoint is never more than a few seconds away… but failing a task thirty times in a row because you held the button a split-second too long doesn’t score the game any points. My favorite areas where the ones you had to solve. Okay, here I am in a room. How is flipping going to help me here? Where are the safe spots? What can I reach from this ledge, and how does that get me to the next room? There are some areas where that would have been enough, but everything also happens to be covered by spikes because hey why not.

I’m not trying to come out against challenge levels, here. The actions required to collect some of the game’s optional “shiny trinkets” are, for lack of a better term, bitch-hard. One in particular is downride mental, and you know what? I loved those areas. I hammered away at them, dying 20 times on this one, 60 times on that one, until I got them all. I persevered, and I felt like I had accomplished something. Those areas are optional, though; they don’t bar your passage to the end of the game. Just as often, though, would be a bitch-hard screen right in the middle of the beaten path. “Avoid all these spikes by a matter of pixels, or fail.” “Learn the cryptic timing on these fast-moving bad guys, or fail.” “Navigate this trampoline section perfectly, or fail.”

Left a bad taste in my mouth.

Finally, there doesn’t seem to be any gamepad support. I would have never finished this game without Joy2Key.

So that’s the long and the short of it. (Or, at 1300 words, just the long of it, I guess.) Definitely play the demo, because it’s great. If you feel like another hour or two of not-so-great is worth your $15, by all means. I love the idea of VVVVVV, but it needs a spit-shine and a few more ways to push the gravity-flipping to its limits.

…but then I got sidetracked with trying to get DScaler to record decent video from my Wii. I can either get a crystal clear half-height video (like in this Little Big Planet video I put up a couple days ago) or a nigh-unwatchable blurry full-height video.

It’s all codecs and de-interlacers and encoders and whatnot. I don’t understand any of it. I might as well be trying to learn black magic.

Hmm… I do need to write up a post about VVVVVV though. It’s a game what deserves some discussion. I’ll see if I can collect my thoughts on it tonight for a post to go live tomorrow.