Valkyria Chronicles

By Brendan Rose

Remember SEGA? Back in the nineties the Sega master system was still a serious competitor to the Super Nintendo. They made Sonic, and they were cool, but by the time the Dreamcast was released they were already financial toast, and now they make games for other systems, games like Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3.

Valkyria Chronicles is a bit reminiscent of games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea, except with no grid, bigger levels, and an emphasis on guns and tanks with elements of a third person shooter thrown in for good measure. It starts with an overview map in the Player Phase where you have a limited amount of CP to select units to move. You can select the same unit more than once per turn, but they're able to move less each time. The movement phase is a bit like a third person shooter. You run around until the movement bar is finished, and you can attack once per turn. Enemies automatically attack as you appear within range. When you are out of CP, or finished the round, you end the phase. Then the Enemy Phase starts, they move their units and attack, your characters fire at targets within range, and then the process repeats until somebody wins.

The goals are stuff like:

"Victory"
The enemy base camp is captured.

"Failure"
Welkin dies

Valkyria Chronicles is one of those games that tries to make you gay. For instance clearly the enemy is your heterosexuality, and Welkin is their own salivating sense of arousal. The cell shading however makes up for this with lots of lively pastel colors.

The game is awesome; it's actually one of the best games I've played this year. It's very tactical and you have to work strategically as a team to win. One of the important factors is hiding behind cover, you take a lot less damage from behind cover, and in turn sandbags and cover can be destroyed by tanks and explosives. You're also able to issue orders (like attack boost). You can fight skirmish battles to gain experience and you level up by class. So if you spend all your experience to bring up Shock Troopers to level 6, all your Shock Troopers will level up. There are also Scouts, Lancers, Engineers and Snipers.

The “plot” is simple. The Empire was at war with a united group of democratic states, and the minor state of Galia had remained neutral in the conflict, but was later invaded by the Empire. You take control of a local militia, and kill an endless slew of nameless, faceless soldiers. Your militia soldiers all look different and have their own personalities. They have individual if somewhat repetitive animations, voices, special abilities and afflictions, and if they die in combat and don't get to a medic, that's it. There are about 50 of them to choose from.

Welkin meets Alicia when he is drawing fish by a stream. Alicia points a gun at his back and tries to arrest him, and eventually they join together to fight the Empire. The story is good, and there's a lot of it, but it is a little bit happy flying pigs and kitty butterflies. Every time it loads there's a picture of two pretty flowers. Still, that is tempered by some rather good action, and the graphics are great. The plot is told by selecting frames on the pages of a book, and is partly in fmv and partly in animated frames. It gets a little tired playing the same skirmish missions over and over for experience, but it is a rich and rewarding game, and a lot of fun. There are at least 20 hours of gameplay, and 9 skirmish missions to unlock. If you try Valkyria Chronicles out you'll find one of the better RPG’s on PlayStation 3, and nobody wants to see SEGA begging for change at the side of the street in ten years. So, if you need a good game, try Valkyria Chronicles.

Halo Revisited

by Tiberius Jonez

In November of 2001, Microsoft released the original Xbox, and the game touted as the console's "killer app" at launch was Halo. Halo was a trend-setting game in many respects, such as the auto-recharging shield, which has been adopted by virtually every major shooter since, in the form of auto-regenerating health systems like those used in Gears of War and Call of Duty. It was also the first major game to limit you to carrying two weapons at a time. Another first was the Warthog, Master Chief's favorite armored 4X4. Halo was the first game I can remember to present driving in a shooter in an accesible, fun and satisfying way.

At the time of its release, the Xbox was far superior, technically, to the Playstation 2, and Halo showed us exactly what the new-kid-on-the-block console could do; and the results were stunning; no game had ever looked this good. The first time you emerged from the drop ship and stepped into Halo's ring world is a moment permanently etched in the minds of many gamers. The Xbox was the first console to include a hard-drive, and as such, programmers were able to stream information from the hard-drive, lightening a considerable load for the processor and RAM. The ability to stream from the hard-drive allowed Halo to become the first single-player game to offer an entire game world free of loading screens, so there was nothing to pull you out of the experience; an absolute technical marvel at the time.

While Halo was a trend-setter, it was also just plain fun. It was the first console game to spawn a serious LAN party following; something previously reserved for blockbuster PC titles. In fact, before Xbox Live was even born, loyal players had already figured out a way to play Halo online using their PC's and "tunnel" software. I admit, I used the Xbox Tunnel software to play Halo online with my brother. Even though it was a less than smooth online experience, when it worked it was great fun, and it gave us a taste of things to come.

Sure, it took PC veterans a while to adjust to using a controller in a shooter...but Halo proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a console shooter with a gamepad control scheme could work, and work well. Seven years later, I now prefer an Xbox 360 controller over a mouse and keyboard anyday.

I recently installed Halo on my PC to see what I thought of the game today, and somewhat to my surprise - it holds up amazingly well, even by today's graphical standards. The animations are excellent, the textures, while not high-res by today's standards, are bright and crisp, and the environmental effects like flying dirt, smoke and muzzle flashes still look very nice.

What made Halo the complete package was its story. Bungie crafted a legitimate sci-fi masterpiece that told an imaginative and well-written story using strong dialogue and the occasional plot twist. It didn't hurt that the game's voice-acting was universally strong...for once voice acting didn't make you cringe - quite the opposite - even today, Halo's voice work sucks you in and keeps you there for the duration.

Some may say the end portion of the game is cheap by virtue of the fact that you essentially play the game's levels in reverse. But in reality, it sticks with the story - you have to go in deep to complete your objective, and you have to get your ass back out of there in one piece to escape.

Another area in which Halo excelled was enemy A.I.. Few games today can match the cunning and unpredictablilty of Master Chief's many foes.

Aside from the weak story, many Xbox fans consider Halo 2 to be the better game, but not me. Sure, Halo 2 had it all over the original in terms of online play, with its fantastic matchmaking and bazillion game types. But the original Halo set the stage for that game and Halo 3 as well as virtually every other online shooter released since on any platform, both in terms of gameplay and presentation.

More than seven years after its original release, I enjoyed Halo as much today as I did then, and in some ways I enjoyed it more now, mainly due to the new respect and admiration gained with the perspective of time. If you've been living under a rock since November, 2001 and have somehow never played Halo, please, do yourself a favor and play it now. I guarantee you will have some fun, whether you play it on the Xbox, Xbox 360 or the PC.