Game Reviews: Fatal Hearts by Hanako Games

This is going to be one of the last entries I’m going to post in a long while (a week at least). You’ll still see me around (check your comments, shoutboxes, MyBlogLog, Nuffnang community, etc) but I’m taking a break to complete the 1001 things I’ve left out while playing games.

Yes, shame-shame on me...

Out of the Four Commandments of Games, there are two that I really dig; Storyline and Visuals (if you don’t know what’s the other two, it’s Gameplay and Music/Sound-Effects). I had second thoughts about reviewing this one, mainly because I kept forgetting/not-bothering to Print-Screen while playing it.

Heh. So prepare to be slightly disappointed though.

Enemies - and allies - come in many disguises.

The second concern was the poor visual environment (and I did say Visuals is my bias!) as this game is a simplistic, Flash-style interface in which its scenes were drawn by a collaboration of various artists and their own art styles. The end result is mismatched anime plus paintbrush, which was painful to view as the tale progresses.

Another point to remember is that although storyline is essential, it doesn’t make the game that moves the concept of the game (which what I believe the designer forgot to take note of). This game follows the visual novel styles of which your actions at certain events determines which of the game’s 14 endings you’ll encounter.

Thus, if you’re not a reader (unlike me) this game will definitely bore you.

With all this and that said, Fatal Hearts is really cool.


Some nightmares are just harder to wake up from.

You play Christina Robinson, an overly sensitive teenager fraught with strange dreams that may or may not have a connection with the sudden outbreak of murders amongst young women in your neighborhood.

Things are already bad enough with your best friend’s parents behaving strangely around you, encounters with a gang of werewolves-cum-vigilantes and a centuries-old vampire pining for his lost girlfriend.

The only way this story can get any cheesier is if they added a macaroni-and-cheese cooking puzzle.

Oh wait, they did (hahaha...).


Bullies always target those who think they’re strong.

What really, really stand out in Fatal Hearts is its big step away from all the conventional visual novel gameplay. Unlike Azada or Hidden Secrets or Mystery in London, this game uses some new puzzle challenges that are a new breath from the repetitive.

Be warned though, many of these puzzles are mighty challenging, - like the clock puzzle, the cultists’ hooks, etc - preferably targeted for veteran players (preferably veteran players with some inkling of German culture).


Ack! Does anybody know which one was the symbol for Fire again?

Overall, I liked Fatal Hearts as much as I like reading a new book by a favorite author (duh! Visual novel genre). Good, engaging, lots of replay potential without a doubt, but it kind of fails overall as a game.

I recommended this game for a rainy afternoon with no money, no car and lots of free time (which is not a bad thing to play actually).


Ripples in your fragile reality.

PS: Downloads for this game can be found in Reflexive Arcade. If you want the cracked version, ask me nicely.
PPS: Download for Fatal Hearts’ Walkthrough can be found here, or better yet, you can visit the designer’s website at http://hanako.informe.com/

Diary: Life Before Blogging

Has anybody ever thought about keeping a diary? I mean those days when you were younger, you had a small book stashed away somewhere nobody would ever find and read what you thought about the world.

I did once, back in primary school dayz. In fact, I had several stacks of various forms of kid journalism; notebooks, exercise books, slips of paper, even a cassette tape.

But I quitted a few times, either because Arsenal and MySis always finds them and tease me about it or I just lost interest due to an unbelievably innocent boredom.

Whole-heartedly, I liked the concept of journals. It’s one of the most cost-effective methods of recording pieces of what life had passed by as you get older, worldlier. You can’t take things with you when you die but you can leave something behind.

Almost all my pieces of childhood are gone now, thrown away ages ago due to insecurity. Really, the things I write about that had awed me at the time would be a really big embarrassment if anybody finds it (like how I panicked on my first period).

So there’s kind of a void during the secondary school dayz. Grow up, meet guys, fail algebra... just blurry details.

There is one thing though.

I’ve made something like a letter to my future self. I think I was 18 or 19 years old when I wrote this letter and stuck it inside this Guide for Writers book. I hadn’t touched it since.

I have some vague memories of its contents. Something about friends in secondary school who had left for overseas, my SPM results and yes, the book project I had been working on (though it had changed and reshaped many times since then).

It’s still in there, mainly because my evil siblings, Arsenal and MySis, had long since outgrew sneaking into their baby sister’s room and prying through her stuff.

I don’t know how long before I want to open it and read again what I’ve written, maybe in another 5 years or so. It’ll probably be embarrassing, it’ll probably nostalgic, it’ll probably be... I don’t know, maybe really sweet.

Maybe that’s why I blog.
To be able to read back and say, “Oh crap, that wasn’t how I wrote it!”
And then laugh about it.

Life always tells us to open our minds to others and listen with our hearts. In finding others.

Diaries, I suppose, is life teaching us to do the same to ourselves. In finding ourselves.

Games Review: Spirit of Wandering - The Legend

Alright! Continuing the blog-o-posting of Saturday - I originally meant Sunday but my class ended earlier than I thought - I giving out a game review to one of the new games in the Reflexive market.

Actually, I didn’t pay for anything but it’s a better courtesy for the company that I try to promote and give reviews.

There, my conscience is cleared. Almost.

No it’s not.
Yes it is.
It’ll be clearer if you’ll admit who gave you that game crack program.
Ooo, secret tool versus dirty conscience. Gee, such a difficult choice.

*whacks Brainy and Baddie selves*

ANYWAY...

I suppose it was the play of fickle fate when I played this game with a ridiculously long name called Spirit of Wandering - The Legend (let’s refer to it as SoWTL). I say fickle fate because I downloaded this on Valentine’s Day and this game turns out to be some kind of mushy romance quest (complete with a kissing couple in the starting menu).

Not that I’m complaining. I like romance as much as the next sorry-girl but I was hoping there’ll be more to this than meets the heart.

The game portrays the pirate ship Spirit of Wandering - hence game title - and you as the captain’s tragically separated bride of the pirate captain. On the eve of your wedding, the ship called the Flying Dutchman came and pretty much crashed the seas.

The spirits of your crew is connected with earthly items which you must find.

As the remaining survivor, you must rescue all your trapped friends and your love from the reality of limbo. The story didn’t say why the Flying Dutchman has a vendetta against your ship or why that captain has a grudge against your captain.

But the crew did have some mysterious background story you can only guess about. Apparently, SoWTL is the first is a trilogy.

I think after Hidden Secret - The Nightmare, this game has the best visual in any hidden-objects game. Most games in this genre were painfully bad to look at; just a bunch of photograph cut-outs jumbled into one 800 by 600 pixels image.

SoWTL tastefully recreated a 3D environment and thankfully avoided photographic cut-outs, allowing you to be able to seek the intended objects better. Unfortunately, that’s the best I can say about SoWTL.


As you rescue your crew, the seas become more visible to you.

The gameplay doesn’t stand-out much from the current systems, maybe because of the lack of more challenging puzzle quests. It’s just a short seek-and-find game with really nice visuals and a compelling story. Music and sound effects don’t stand out either (the same music over and over again).

Replay value is not much in my estimate. But I really like it for its style of visuals, almost to the par of Dream Chronicles. Would that other hidden objects games learn from this art style.

If you want a really good seek-and-find game, I still recommended Dream Chronicles. However, as SoWTL is the first of a series of games, it may yet deliver a surprise.


The advance mode offer a bit more of a challenge.

PS: Downloads for this game can be found in Reflexive Arcade. If you want the cracked version, ask me nicely.

Book Project: Myths of Suvon

I wrote earlier today about a book project I’ve been working on for several years. That one’s just for fun and (hopefully!) for this year’s NaNoWriMo.

Suvon Reality is my really serious book project.

This baby of mine was the pinnacle of those entire fantasy books I’ve indulged in, much to my folks’ horror (they are, if not, my least-determined support). It was from trying to create a historical society that I looked through Victorian England as an example and ended up being immersed in Europe’s mid-1800s.

So what is Suvon Reality project anyway?

I can’t describe it in a few words without comparing it to current fantasy bigwigs; but I do hope not to be sidelined against them or influenced by them. This project is my own and for me to keep it as my idea.

It’s an entire world really, complete with histories, politics, natural disasters... and magic. Yes, I’m working on a fantasy series.

I’m taking up common fantasy themes (like dragon, wizards, towers, etc) and making up my own ideas. I’m borrowing snippets of what’s around me, what I’ve read and real human issues to fuse them in a sequence of events around one female character.

The story spans millenniums, an age of ages, but the book starts when 16-year-old Zakia Azhara brought home a wounded crow to her Damansara Utama home. She thought she would help him heal or at least, die peacefully, but instead, she was catapult into a parallel world beyond anything she had ever dreamed of.

Or had nightmares about.

But because of her actions in that parallel world called Suvon, she became entangled in a twisted fate that followed her back to her Earth life. She became from a refugee outcast to a caster of hope to martyred queen to a tool of rebellion to a broken spirit of survival.

Most of all, it is a story of a changing world on the brink of doomsday, from the life of a living catalyst.

I’ve always wanted something about mystery on the backdrop of fantasy or science-fantasy. Call it Final Fantasy disease. But unlike fantasy, the events that drive the story would be very real issues currently facing this world, like slavery, discrimination, corrupt judicial bar, caste levels, and everything else coming out of Pandora’s box.

And I’ve even created a native language for that world.
Neqi areasaiiy irione areuqanu
Asnut isnot saiya arealaas, esanasta.
I got the alphanumeric right but I’m working on proper pronunciations. This is a translation from a chorus on a Linkin Park song (heh...).

I don’t know how long this project will take, only that I won’t die without completing it first. I’m working on the background origins and histories, intelligent social species and the technical aspects of magic (from source to link to effect).

But mostly, I need to graduate and get a job to support myself first. No matter how big a world I can create, nothing beats the real thing...

Especially when the real thing wants your big fees due for this semester or you can’t enter the exams hall (Ack! To the bank! Get a check!).

PS: My monthly fiction writing, Ireulun’s Travels or Something-Like-It, is set in the world of Suvon, many years after the end of the book project. It helps to give me an idea or an outline of how I want my plot and the stories to be or not to be.

Image: Charging Kudu by Bill Melvin

Shucks.

I wish I had some time management skills or something. There’s a course about it in Basic Business Skills class I had in my foundation year and I aced it. I think somewhere between foundation and final year, all them learnings must have leaked out of my head while I was asleep.

Bah, I was looking forward to the movie Jumper coming out in theaters on last Thursday. Wouldn’t it be cool to travel as fast as the speed of thought? Your Ferrari is nothing to my smokescreen.

It’ll cut down on a lot of traveling time too. No more queues, no more petrol money. Hey, I could sleep-in on Saturday and still be in time for class. I’ll just have to remember to change out of my pajamas first (don’t think Lec-Xercise would appreciate baggy pants with tiny printed blue flowers).

If you’re wondering what the heck the movie Jumper have anything to do with this week’s image critique... it doesn’t. I’m just filling up blabbing space.

It’s just that Jumper is a noun from a verb becoming an adjective, I found one image from CGSociety.org that fascinates me as a ‘jumper’.

Definitely something for the desktop - that is, if your computer is fast enough.

This is an artwork of a charging kudu by Bill Melvin, an award-inflated artist with his website at http://billmelvinart.com. He made it as part of a mini art contest in the CGS forums, and then later decided that it would look great in a stormy African setting.

I got to say that this is a really cool rendition of a beast in running flight. I liked how he drew the accurate proportions of the deer to the real thing. However, I did not like the expression on the deer is too flat (one would have thought he would be panting, then it’ll look more real).

Oooh, yeah. Speaking of jumping and running, it’s my hour with Lec-Xercise now. Must learn VR theory. I wonder if Jumper did any VR scenes or they just used a dummy and burned it in speedy ash?

Book Project: Marigold’s Masquerade

I like to read romance. I’ll admit that.

What I won’t admit is that I’m working on a romance book myself.

Oh.
I just did.

Well, actually I’m quite shy of confessing of writing something like this. My biggest dream since I was 9 - when I managed to spell ‘insignificant’ correctly all by myself (also a word that would haunt me for too long) - was to become a fiction author.

Call it whatever you think I’m inflicted with. Singles awareness, bluestocking-loner, never-been-kissed, overly-sensitive-biological-clock, day-dream-addict, always-the-bridesmaid-never-the-bride status.

Just don’t you dare call it post-Valentine’s blues.

This is a serious project I had been working on for some years. It’s been put on hold due to my approaching final year. Another problem is that the market for fiction books in Malaysia is pretty darn small, so agents won’t take a pile of printed dust from an IT undergraduate,

Hahaha, enough crap. I’m finally admitting it because I don’t want to forget this venture of my heart. Kind of like a second stowaway compartment from my under-used PC folder in my hard-drive.

This story is a mystery-cum-romance set in the era of Victorian London in 1855 AD. It was also the same year that the British Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, stepped down because of poor management of the Crimean War.

It was not the overseas war against the Russians that Nate, Lord Evans, had in his mind recently. After his farms in Ireland had been struck by a potato famine, he was the secret owner of a domestic employment agency that had a dual-purpose; helping to replenish his income and find new positions for his Irish tenants.

But something was trying to bring down his small business enterprise. First it was just devious rumors. Then some near-fatal accidents. It was not long before those accidents were no longer so near-fatal...

Then came Marigold, a young girl of the London slums, desperate to find a maid’s job and keep herself and her sister off the streets. Nate knew it was fate in a flash of light - right at the moment when Marigold delivered a stinging right hook to his eye.

Annie Bright was torn between finding the murderer of her elder sister and securing safety for her younger sister from the darker denizens of London. When Lord Evans offered her a job, as a maid-of-work in his household - even after she blacken his eye - Annie knew it was fate brought with dread. For Lord Evans was her chief suspect...

Between the backgrounds of London, countryside Norfolk and gardens of Kent, both individuals danced a game of intrigue and danger while trying to hide both motives and secrets. Neither knew that their destinies were intertwined in one conclusion.

Cheap, it ain’t.

I have a lot of fascinations about England’s industrial revolution and the era of society during Queen Victoria. I’ve made a lot of research about how they lived, how they worked, what enlightens, what shames, etc. I just couldn’t help making up a story in a certain situation.

I plan to write Marigold’s Masquerade as the first of a series called The Wildflowers. The continuing tales looks at the many changes as England progresses, like the last of France’s Napoleonic dynasty, the pirates’ activity in the East Indies and the rise that triggered the American civil war.

Like I said, it ain’t cheap.

I’m working on the second chapter of this book and currently I’ve got 5/6 of the series plot outlined. My plan is to put it as an entry in 2008’s NaNoWriMo and the rest of the series as private collection (no, I won’t publish it until I’m more sure of the local market). I hope this doesn’t count as cheating.