Bright Lights, Screaming And Pointy Hair

As you probably are aware of, if you've read the blog for any period of time, I enjoy video games. And depending on how long you've been reading the blog, you might also know I enjoy the anime. And so it stands to reason that I would like to enjoy video games based on animes, if only so many weren't so awful. This is true of comic book games as well, because with a story that has a particular style, it can be difficult sometimes to capture the proper feel in a format that lets a person interact. A lot of times, the games seem to be fighting games, and they often seem to be - how can I put this? - half-assed. That's not fair, but it does seem like they're banking on the fans of the property to buy the game, so it isn't as vital to make it an actual enjoyable gaming experience.

I don't know if that paragraph actually had a point. I guess it serves as a lead-in to me talking about games based on DragonBall Z, which is a pretty spotty track record. It ought to be pretty easy, since it should be a lot of zipping around really fast, firing energy at other players, and occasionally charging at each other really fast and throwing punches and kicks. And to be fair, some of the games released in the last few years have been pretty good, not just by the standards of the franchise, but as actual fighting games. They won't be confused with {insert title of your preferred fighting game franchise}, but they actually look like some work was put in to make them fun games.

But I'm not actually going to talk about those games, since they haven't been released on consoles I own (I do own DBZ Budokai, but that one was only meh). So I guess that means the first two paragraphs of this were a waste. Ha! (Why the hell am I laughing? It's my time being wasted.) What I'm actually going to talk about is one of my few excursions into computer gaming, a little something called Bid for Power. Man, I hope I don't get sued by someone. See, sometime in the past, back when Quake 3 was still a relatively new game, some people figured out that it was pretty well designed to be a DBZ game, with the focus on the flying, shooting, big explosions, killing, etc. And, it could modified to look like a DragonBall Z game (computer scientists, is there anything they can't do?), with the actual characters, attacks, landscapes, and so on. And so they made it so. The version I had (because I certainly don't have it now, after they were ordered to cease and desist putting it out there for download, no sirree) was I suppose the original, with only six playable characters (but no unlocking required), but it didn't have the occasional glitches a later version I saw did. And it's a very basic game. You pick your character, the type of game, the location, how many enemies you've got, what your power level is starting out, and away you go.

You have a total of five different attacks, and what you set your power level at, determines how many of those attacks you start out with. As you use the attacks, your energy falls, so you've got to periodically stop and concentrate (that'd be the part of the show where you stand in one spot and yell loudly) to replenish it. You can run or fly, there are melee attacks, though not very refined. Hey, that's not what Quake 3 was about. It's just an easy way for me to relax a little, which is always appreciated.