30-Second Review: Half-Minute Hero
HALF-MINUTE HERO is a PSP game from Marvelous Entertainment that boils jRPG tropes down into easily digestible chunks. Looting and level grinding are still here, they just take seconds instead of hours. It's based on the freeware game 30 Second Hero, and playing that gives you a good idea of what to expect from the game's title mode. When it sticks to the formula of short, self-contained RPGs, it works beautifully.
Unfortunately, the game deviates often, breaking up play into four separate modes. It tries to simplify the RTS, shoot-'em-up and escort styles the same way it does with the RPG, but with varying degrees of success.
Hero finishes off a dark lord.
Each mode has a goal that must be completed in 30 seconds. The hero has to defeat a dark lord. The knight has to make sure nothing distracts the sage while he casts a spell. The evil lord and the princess both have curfews for some silly reason. Each mode ranks you by how fast you're able to complete the level. If your overall rank is high enough for the mode, you unlock a harder enemy in a later mode, sort of like the Weapons in the Final Fantasy series.
Playing Friday: Dhampirs, Heroes, Blobs and Metal
I picked up a used PSP this week, so I spent a good portion of the past seven days experimenting with the system. Word of warning: Don't buy a game on the account of the guy who owned it before you and then reset the settings so you can set up your own account.
The first thing I did was download Castlevania: Symphony of the Night from the PSN store. I had been playing through Dawn of Sorrow on my DS, but the PlayStation classic takes precedence over any of its spiritual sequels. It is just as awesome on a tiny screen as it was on the television in my brother's room in high school. Or Benji's room at college. Or in the other four or five places I've played through it.
Then Brutal Legend, A Boy and His Blob and Half-Minute Hero came out on Tuesday and halted my Castlevania retrospective. The only one of them I can recommend without reservation is Half-Minute hero.
HALF-MINUTE HERO is an absolute joy to play. It's divided into various games that breed traditional RPGs, shooters and RTSs with WarioWare titles. It all started with a flash game called 30 Second Hero, where you have to discover your purpose, level up, buy weapons and save the kingdom from an evil lord in less than 30 seconds. And that's basically what you do in the Hero 30 mode.
In Princess 30 mode, you fetch items for your sick father and shoot bad guys with a crossbow. In Evil Lord 30, you summon monsters and throw them at bad guys. Hero 30 is the most fun, probably because that's the concept that launched the game, and the other modes are afterthoughts. The Evil Lord 30 mode is cool, but it's very hard to tell what's going on, and Princess 30 suffers from a lot of repetition, but they're both still quite a bit of fun.
There are three other modes I have yet to unlock. If the rest of the games on the PSP are this good, I'll shoot myself for putting off the purchase for so long.
A BOY AND HIS BLOB is adorable, but it's also surprisingly thin. I played the original way back when, and it was inscrutable and frustrating and virtually impossible for a small child of my age to play. The remake is a game only a child could play. The game holds your hand through all of the first world's 2D platforming stages, telling you what jellybeans to feed your blob and where to do it. Hopefully things will change after the first world, and the platforming and puzzles will become more interesting.
I would never have thought to use the parachute to fall down that cliff safely without that sign.
And finally, BRUTAL LEGEND is a joy to watch someone else play. It has a great story, mediocre controls and an RTS component where you play as a general on the ground. I think that mode has a lot of potential, but I handed off the controller to my roommate right before the first of those missions. So I need more time Brutal Legend's to determine for myself if that works.
Eddie Riggs prefers not to suffer the heretical practitioners of hair metal.
Some of the news we'll be talking about this week:
A gamer's wife describes the benefits of being married to a console slave and living in an entertainment hub.
Mario is dead.
Gamefly has been having some trouble with the USPS lately. And a lot of trouble with the USPS lately.