Announement Concerning Change of Format

Dear Internet,

          Starting now, I will not be able to post regularly as I have done so these last 130 entries.  Short of two times of two week each where I had circumstances that could not be helped, I have posted regularly and consistently every week day for the last few months.  Due to circumstances of my life, I will not be able to continue the Backlog in this format.  It is both a relief and a heartache.  For the last few months, I have been habitually writing to the point that I have a collection of writings that I can show proof of my ability.  Whether or not I have any ability is another question entirely.  In total, I have typed approximately 150,00 words in those 130 entries.  For reference,  "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Price" clocks in at 169k and "A Tale of Two Cities" is about 135k. 

          From now on, I will not be posting every day.  I will most likely not be post most days.  I may only be posting once a week.  This of course means that the review format is going to change drastically.  Before, I could show how my feelings towards a work can change drastically from one day to another.  You can take my "Fable III" review for example.  From now on, I will most likely be posting final reviews instead of a series of reviews.  But I am unsure as to any sort of specifics.  Everything right now is a bit up in the air.

          So, until further notice, do not expect habitual postings.  I wish I could continue this format, but all things change in life, and so must I.  If anything, I want to thank you for reading what I have had to say, even if it was not all that interesting.  Having a series of entries about media that has already been picked apart until all that remains is dust is not all that thrilling to read.  I know this, but this experiment has given me a bit of pleasure, so thank you for that.  Thank you for reading my little musings while I play catch-up with everyone else.

Yours in digital,
BeepBoop

Entry 130: "Epic Mickey 2" Pt. 2 End

Dear Internet,

                I was able to finish off the main story of "Epic Mickey 2" today.  If I took the time to complete all the various side-quests, I might be able to add another five hours on to the play time, but I will stop playing here.  The length of the game does not surprise me.  I knew that it was shorter than the original by the average play times I have seen.  I did think it was going to last me a bit longer since I was doing some of the side-quests as I was going along, but I still finished the main game in 10 hours.  So, I will try to cover everything I can in this last post.

                The gameplay is very similar to the first game.  The paint/thinner mechanic returns, as well as the game's dual morality system.  The controls of course are a bit different because I am using the Wii U gamepad this time.  Instead of pointing the aiming cursor with a remote, the cursor is controlled with the right control stick.  This in turn also moves the game's camera, which is helpful.  Added to the control scheme is the co-op move button which comes from the biggest change of the game.  Throughout the game, the player is accompanied by Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.  Oswald can either be played by a second player who can jump in and out of play seamlessly or the computer controls Oswald.  Oswald is controlled with a Wii Remote and Nunchuck and handles nearly exactly as Mickey did in the first game, short of a few differences.  He has a remote with him that can shoot electricity or take control of electrical panels.  On top of that, he can glide while falling so he can jump farther than Mickey.  Most of this is moot if you are playing by yourself.  Oswald just becomes a little helper that follows you around.  He is there mostly so that someone can jump in and play at any time.

                With this in mind, I found myself sometimes frustrated with the rabbit because I would get to a location and have to wait for him to get where I was or wait until the game spawned him next to me.  There are a number of puzzles that require co-operation between Mickey and Oswald.  What this usually means is that both characters have to pull switches or spin gears at the same time.  Think the dual key lock mechanisms you see in war films before they launch the final big bomb.  The AI handles it well enough when Oswald finally catches up to the player.  Other than that, Oswald does help out in combat by stunning enemies, but I did not find him all that helpful.  The only thing that did make him greatly helpful was that if the player uses up all their health points and is not in a toxic pit Oswald can revive the player with a limited amount of health points.  This is helpful because it prevents the player having to return to the last checkpoint when dying.  Oswald does need to revive Mickey within a certain amount of time before the game automatically makes the player return to the last checkpoint, so it is not a full-proof method.  

                The game obviously has a shorter main story as compared to the first one.  It does however make up this with the fact that there are many more side quests to do.  I do not think I even finished a quarter to a third of the quests.   "Epic Mickey 2" has got more things to collect and find than the original.  It helps that after finishing the story, the game does not start over like the first.  Instead, the player is able to wander around and finish the various quests they had not completed.  It trades off re-playability for a singular long play.  However, this comes with a drawback.  The game for some reason feels smaller than the original.  Maybe, it is because the levels feel smaller than the first game's levels or because they can be played through and explored quickly.   It may be just my imagination, but many of the game's levels can be visited once and be forgotten since the player can explore them entirely and quickly.  

                I should not make it seem that the game has no good qualities.  It did make me laugh quite a number of times and smile fondly at others.  Take the Mad Doctor for example.  In nearly every one of his appearances, he sings when he talks.  He talks as if the game was a musical, with full rhyme and tempo.  It is such a stark contrast to everyone else that it feels completely out of place, which makes it all that more funny.  Then there is the Jimmy Stewart robotic tour guide.  Or how about the goofy way that Oswald waddles around?  Then there are the good gameplay mechanics.  There are numerous ways that the player can get around the Wasteland provided that they meet certain requirements.  Train stations, film reels, and balloons all make traveling easier if the player spends a little amount of time to ease the annoyance.  The game thankfully remembers which segments are painted in or thinned out rather than resetting each time you re-enter the area.  The pause menu is much better than the first game's, displaying much more information and having a more accurate map.  The environments are designed well enough to make them fun to explore.  

Who does not like Robo-Stewart?

                Overall, I found the game to be enjoyable, but it had a lot it could improve upon.  The biggest problem is of course its length being so short, but it was an enjoyable two days.  If you play this game with the mind of getting through it as fast as you can, you will burn out and speed along pretty quickly.  You can try to spend as much time exploring and looking for all the game's secrets, but I do not know if you will feel compelled to spend time looking for obscure treasures.  "Epic Mickey 2" is mediocre but it is far from being a bad game.  It is just underwhelming with what is expected for a sequel from the first game.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Entry 129: "Epic Mickey 2" Pt. 1

I am sure Disney can get their name in that title a few more times.

Dear Internet,

                It is time to tackle "Epic Mickey 2" after having finished the first one.  Unlike the original which was only developed for the Wii after having both a PS3 and Xbox 360 version being scrapped, the sequel was released for all major consoles.  Since the initial release of version on the Wii, Wii U, PS3, and Xbox 360, "Epic Mickey 2" has since been released on the Playstation Vita and just ported for the PC this month.  In fact, by sheer coincidence today is the day that "Epic Mickey 2" is being released exclusively on Nintendo consoles in Japan.  The version that I am playing for this review is one for the Wii U.  This means that I will have to address the gamepad control being used in the game at one point or another.

                The game follows pretty much right where the first game left off.  The denizens of the Wasteland have found peace through the eradication of the Shadow Blot.  Everything seems on the up and up until an earthquake rocks their peaceful lives.  During the confusion, the Mad Doctor appears and claims that he has turned over a new leaf.  He claims, through the power of song, that he wants to redeem himself for his misdeeds and wishes to help solve the riddle as to why earthquakes are occurring.  Oswald the Lucky Rabbit believes the Mad Doctor to be genuine while Gus the gremlin and Ortensia the cat do not believe his words.  Gus and Ortensia call for help to Mickey in hopes that he can come back to the Wasteland and aid the forgotten cartoons.  Mickey hears them and figures out a way to return to the Wasteland to help.  Together with Oswald at his side, the mouse sets off on an adventure to prevent the Wasteland from crumbling apart again.

                The game's world is vastly different from that of the original.  It is not because the game has only new locations.  Mean Street makes a reappearance, even if it is split into two parts.  The world was made from scratch.  The locations that repeat only resembles their earlier appearance in key similarities like location to one another or visual identifiers like shop signs.  What is most notable about how different the world is stems from the game's art direction.  In the first game, the tone was very dark and filled with doom.  I sometimes had difficulty navigating around because the game used so many dark colors and I had difficulty distinguishing where the ground stopped and the pit began.  In the sequel, there are colors galore.  I can easily distinguish one object from another.  But the differences go deeper than a palette swap or a higher screen resolution.

                "Epic Mickey 2" still retains a number of the disturbing elements from the first game, but it handles it differently from the first game.  The first game had the mountains of Disney and Mickey merchandise garbage towering away with rivers of thinner running through them.  The sequel does the same while using a broader array of colors to prevent it from delving too deeply into resembling a nightmare.  There are disembodied toy heads, but they retain their paint as if they were manufactured yesterday.  The effect is that the game is holding back some of the dismal themes in the first game.  This is not a bad thing, per say.  If you look hard enough, you can still see certain elements of the terrain that will make your skin crawl.  The game is thus more kid-friendly, but it makes up in other ways.

Still creepy, just now with more color.

                I am happy to see that the game has reworked inter-leveling traveling.  The 2D levels based on old cartoons are still there.  However, the player can take one of two different routes through each 2D level.  This means that the player can end up completely missing a collectable if they take the wrong route.  With how often the game will probably make the player re-travel through these levels, it makes for a more enjoyable experience since there are multiple ways of traveling.  On top of that are new 2D levels not based on old cartoons.  These are underground, highly explorable levels with many nooks and crannies filled with hidden collectables for the player to find.  Of course, the player can just made a dash straight through them, but they would end up missing a lot of helpful equipment and unique puzzles.  

                Another notable change is that the game is completely filled with voice acting.  Every character talks in this game.  On one hand, it feels refreshing because it allows the story to be better expressed.  On the other hand, even the side characters get voiced.  This would not be a problem if it were not for two specific things.  First, it makes going through menial dialog a chore, especially when you realize that the character has nothing useful to share.  Thankfully, the player can skip to the next line without having to wait for the first line to finish.  Second, the voice acting can be grating.  The actors that handle the main characters are skilled veterans.  The game uses the same actors that Disney employs for any of their most notable characters.  The side characters however feel like they are being handled by any collection of average Joe's from the street.  Some of the dialog is painfully slow and stretched out.  It is obvious that they are reading from a script or worse yet reading it for the first time.  Then there are the Gremlins, who all seem to have a collection of overly exaggerated foreign accents with no explanation as to why they are talking like that.  Some of these Gremlins are making their second appearance in this game, but they were never shown to have these foreign verbal mannerisms before.  These accents feel forced and unnecessary.  If it is done for comedic effect, it failed to make me laugh.

                I will start tomorrow speaking about the gameplay.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Entry 128: "Epic Mickey" Pt. 3 End

The single most annoying level in the game.

Dear Internet,

                "Epic Mickey" was an enjoyable game.  It made me think fondly back on many platforming games that I enjoyed when I was a kid.  At the same time, it makes me think of the morality system that many games being made today implement.  The game pulls itself from a variety of sources while making sure to be itself.  How well of a job it does this is what is up for debate.  I finished talking yesterday about a few gripes I have with the game, and I should continue with a bit of that.

                The duel morality system of the paint/thinner, while remembering not to strictly define itself into good/evil, leaves something nagging in the back of my head.  It works quite well, truth be told.  The player gets a feedback from the NPCs' behaviors reflecting the player's choices.  The epilogue shows the most noticeable reflection of the player's actions.  Depending on how the player dealt with bosses, how they chose to aid certain NPCs, and who the player helped, certain short scenes will play out to show how those choices make ripples down the lane.  If you redeemed a bad guy, the game will show them acting friendly towards others.  If you disposed of them, the game will show their remains or something equivalently depressing.  By showing the consequences of the player's actions, the game goes one step further than most by illustrating how both action and inaction can cause problems later on.  However, this is not what is scratching the back of my head.

                I cannot but help but wonder if there was even a need for a moral choice system in this game.  This is a Mickey Mouse game, which was made primarily for children.  Made to scare them, but still made for them to play.  With that in mind, the game has to stress a moral; otherwise it does not fit in line with the Disney creed.  Then again, if it is a straightforward comedy, it can ignore having to instill a moral, but "Epic Mickey" is not a comedy.  The moral of the game is your actions can have far reaching consequences and one must correct ones mistakes when possible.  Mickey accidentally unleashed the Shadow Blot years ago and caused the Thinner Disaster.  By the end of the game, he admits his guilt and works to make amends.  This is done without regard to how the player chooses to fight.  It is the central plot that cannot be changed.  The minute choices that the player makes along the way do not alter the final outcome of Mickey and the Wasteland.  They only affect the side details.

                In one way, the game does succeed in attempting to illustrate to its audience that those choices do matter.  I will give it that, but I still wonder why it was needed.  Having the player go through a game with no choices and being tasked with being the hero would have been perfectly acceptable for a Mickey Mouse game.  Did the game have to have a moral system when the ending was pretty much the same no matter the choices made?  It does spur the player to complete the game again and choose something different to see the effect.  I am not saying that the moral system is a bad mechanism or does a poor job in what it aims to do.  I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I feel that it is out of place in a game like this.  It is a sort of happy accident, if you will.

                Another thing that I have to begrudge the game is the camera.  The camera was poorly implemented and difficult to control at times.  This lead to a number of untimely deaths because I could not tell how far I had to jump or was killed because an enemy had come from out of nowhere to sucker-punch me.  One annoying circular room had me confined fighting a single difficult enemy.  Since it was not a boss, the camera was freely up to the player's control.  I spent more time trying to get the camera at a good angle to see the enemy than I did trying to fight him.  The camera leads up to another of the game's problems.  When pointing at the screen to aim the brush, a cursor appears to show where Mickey will shoot paint/thinner.  He then will shoot paint/thinner at where the cursor is pointing from his perspective.  Many times, I found him shooting straight at the camera towards the player or angled oddly so that he completely missed the curser.  Changing to a first person perspective to shoot did not always work because he shoots from the hip.  If there is a hip high ledge, the paint/thinner will stop at less than a foot away, never reaching where you want to hit.  I am reminded of "Super Mario Galaxy" which allowed the player to shoot hand-sized stars at enemies.  The difference was that the star was launched from the perspective of the third person camera instead from the player controlled character.  This maximized accuracy at the expense of immersion.  "Epic Mickey" requires an accurate aiming system, but it hiccups at moments where the player has to fight the controls.  

                My last grumbles is a lack of voice acting throughout the game instead of grunt talking, no good map, a minimal menu, many repeating character models, and a world hub that is not all that interesting beyond the first few times that the player visits it.  There is also the final boss levels (that is "levels" as in plural) that seems to last much too long to hold the dramatic tension that the game tries to create.  I just want to throw those out there before I finish.

                "Epic Mickey" is a good game with enough thrills and replay value to go through it a second time to try and find all the missable collectables and alternative decisions.  It has great atmosphere that it is able to keep for the entire duration.  The characters are complex, showing a range of emotions and desires, some of which contradict one another.  The game has a number of problems that are not big by themselves but add together to cause frustration in even some of the most patient players.  Overall, I liked the game, and it makes me all that more interested to play the sequel.   

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next is "Epic Mickey2: The Power of Two."

Entry 127: "Epic Mickey" Pt. 2

I do not get why they needed to smack "Disney" so prominent onto the title screens.

Dear Internet,

                I spent the majority of yesterday talking about the story and art direction of "Epic Mickey."  It would do well to talk about the gameplay lest I forget the most important thing about what distinguishes the video game from other media.  

                "Epic Mickey" at its core is a platformer.  You control Mickey from a third person perspective, running around, bopping enemies on the head, and leaping over gaps.  The game is as close to the definition of a platformer that a game can get.  On top of all that, there are collectables, fetch quests, and many levels hidden corners with nooks and crannies.  Everything is there to make a by the book platformer.  But every platformer must have at least one gimmick to make it stand out from the many other games I the genre.  Merely having Mickey Mouse as the protagonist may have been enough at one point, but thankfully, this game tries to do something unique.  Beyond an all purpose spin-kick, Mickey has a magic brush that dispenses paint thinner and paint.  It is this one mechanic that a majority of the game's challenges and puzzles are solved.  There are also disposable sketches, but the game definitely stresses the paint/thinner mechanic.

                The game is made up of two different types of materials.  There is the permanent material that is not affected by the paint/thinner, and then there is the "toon" material.  The toon material is noticeably more saturated and colorful when compared to the non-toon material.  Using the paint and thinner, Mickey can make the toon material materialize or disappear.  When thinner is used, the object becomes nearly invisible short of a ghostly white shadow.  The object then cannot be interacted with unless the paint is used to bring it back.  This created a number of possible abilities which can be built upon.  See an enemy coming near you?  Make the bridge it is standing on disappear, causing the creature to fall into the river of turpentine.  Need a platform to just up to the next level?  Materialize the hidden ledge to get yourself up.  This mechanic also creates a lot of hidden locations because of the beginning state of each level.

                When the player enters each location, some objects are materialized and some are not.  The player can go ahead and make everything possible disappear to determine if there are any hidden crevices, but this will come as a backlash.  It will make the non-toon objects as the only things remaining.  Besides making the landscape devoid of any color or life, the residents will look unfavorably upon Mickey, since all he will be doing is making their already decaying world ruin quicker.  If the player decides to make all the invisible toon objects appear, then they will seal off possible routes that can be traversed.  There exists a certain balance that has to be done to traverse the landscape efficiently.  Although, the player will find themselves drifting either towards the paint or the thinner.  This has got more to do with the choices that the player has to make to push forward the story.

                The player is often given the choice as how to solve each location's puzzles.  Sometimes they are tasked with turning on a series of switches that would cause a mechanism to begin moving.  Alternatively, they can explore the level until they find a hidden character that is trapped.  Freeing the character will allow that character to fix the problem directly.  This is a choice mad by the player that is sometimes unconsciously.  You can happen upon the trapped character without knowing he is there or that he will solve your problem for you.  Opposite of that are the times when the player is given a choice between two known ways of reaching the goal.  Take for example the detective side-quests.  The player can either follow the toon footprints, filling them in to prove that they lead directly to the suspect, proving the character's guilt, or the player can pay off the thief using collected tickets.  This objective can be reached through different means which had different levels of difficulty.  Trying to paint all the footprints can be frustrating because of their small size.  Paying off the thief can be easy sometimes, depending on the amount of tickets the character wants.  The correct moral choice then comes into play.  This is made even more prominent in a side-quest where the player had to help a man find a gift for a woman that he wanted to impress.  The player could either get an ice-cream cone or a bouquet of flowers.  Either choice would get the man to do what the character wanted eventually, but only one item would be enjoyed by the woman.  The flowers is much more difficult to obtain because the player has to travel much farther to get it and has to then find the hidden flowers before delivering it back to the man.  The ice-cream can be bought, but the woman will scorn the man.  The player then has to buy the object that they were trying to get from the man.  

I am a sucker for a happy ending.

                "Epic Mickey" has often got many either/or ways of solving the puzzles and challenges.  The game usually refrains from straightforwardly referring to them as good and bad choices, but the player can infer such things on their own.  Defeating bosses usually requires only one specific method as compared to using both the paint and thinner in conjunction.  This is because after defeating a boss, the player is rewarded with an upgrade to the capacity of wither their paint supply or their thinner supply depending on which was used to defeat the boss.  The game goes one step further in distinguishing the differences between using either paint or thinner.  The choice of manner in defeating a boss determines if the boss is destroyed or made friendly, as with the lower minions.  This may have longer lasting effects upon the game, but I will have to address this when I finish the game.  For the most part, I cannot tell if my actions have had long reaching effects.  Other than a few lines of dialog taking note of my actions, I cannot see my actions taking a noticeable effect.

                I should probably close on a bad note, lest you think that I find no faults so far.  One annoyance is that when the player revisits an area like the central hub of Mean Street, the game does not remember what the player had materialized or made invisible though the use of paint or thinner.  This is a big letdown for me because I had carefully materialized everything that I could because I wanted the town to become alive and vivid of color.  Seeing that all of that effort was just going to be forgotten and resettled completely altered how I was exploring the game.  Then there are the inter-level corridors.  In between levels, the player has to go through a straightforward 2D mini-level that is in the style of some old iconic cartoon shorts.  There is hidden in each mini-level a roll of film to collect.  It acts as a nice break from the vast size of the main worlds, but these smaller worlds wear out their welcome very quickly.  Even after having collected the hidden film reel, the player cannot fast-travel between worlds.  It makes these repeated 2D levels annoying and tedious, only creating filler time since after the third time the player has mastered the minute and a half corridor.  They begin to make traveling between levels a chore, which may be the point considering that some of the quests' difficulties are directly tied to how much time it would take to make the right choice rather than the easy one.

The less exposure the player has to each inter-level, the better it resounds in the mind.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop