Niahak's Place

I recently picked up a Dreamcast and a copy of Shenmue.  I’d been planning on trying the Shenmue games for a while now, and finally got a chance.  The first is great in its own way – in some ways, it’s great for precisely the same reasons that it’s tedious.  I would recommend it for anybody who can tolerate a game that moves slowly.  I think I’m almost through the first game, but it looks like I won’t be able to finish it for a while.

In about 20 minutes, I’ll be leaving for the airport.  I’m headed on a trip to Japan.

Long time in the planning, but now that I think about it… there’s nothing in particular I want to see – just want to be there again, and have the chance to explore.  Sure, I’ll be looking for cool stuff – but the simple chance to get away from the routine (much as I enjoy routines) will be nice.  To say nothing of the appeal of the trip.  Japan is foreign and yet familiar, and (one of the themes in Shenmue, coincidentally) contains a culture centuries old that coexists with and is offset by one of the most consumerist, modern cultures on the planet.  It doesn’t do either halfway, either – nothing seems to be halfway there.  It’s a place of extremes.  That’s not to say it’s entirely a good thing… but it is certainly different from the usual.

I’ll be back, hopefully with more pictures and other goodness, at the beginning of September.

Over the past week, I played through Parasite Eve.  I’d played through it years ago, but only remembered a couple of the scenes and areas.  Now that it’s fresher in my mind, it’s a game that’s largely impressive, but has some issues here and there.

First, the game really is cinematic.  It makes great use of perspective, like the Resident Evil games, except in PE a sudden shift in perspective won’t kill you.  It has a great realistic ambiance and feel to it despite the fact that its premise is campy and the “engine” abandons any sense of realism (i.e. kill a rat, get 6 bullets, kill a T-Rex, get a nice pistol).  Whereas RE, Doom, and the like tend to go for cheap “shocks”, PE follows the footsteps of the System Shocks by generating an atmosphere of menace.  Its puzzles are likewise more realistic – instead of finding a key lying on the ground in a room, you might find it in a desk, or on a corpse – there’s a motivation to search everything that might contain something.