SNK A-OK

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If you’ve ever read any of my reviews of SNK games, you will know that I had an absurd fascination with the firm’s US branch.  For the most part, they were a complete and utter mystery.  The quality and frequency of their releases fluctuated constantly, and since they barely talked to the press, any and all rumors about their status were allowed to fly around.   I finally stopped trying to keep score  sometime last year, when suddenly every SNK game was being released by other publishers.  Ignition handled the localization of Metal Slug 7 and King of Fighters 12, and Atlus just released Metal Slug XX this week.  I figured that the US branch was finally done for, and that the folks in Japan were now just cutting deals themselves with interested publishers.

Turns out I was wrong.  SNK PLAYMORE USA CORPORATION still lives!  I just found out that their once dead website (filled with broken links) has been revamped. →  Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about huffing paint.

Review – Vandal Hearts: Flame of Judgment

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Watching a beloved series re-emerge after years of lying dormant is always disconcerting. On the one hand, it’s nice to see developers expand on a world already well-fleshed out and attempt to recapture something that was thought lost forever. On the other hand, it may be worse to have a crappy sequel than to have no sequel at all. Worst of all would be a sequel that’s good enough to look promising and manages to recreate many of the best elements of the series, but ends up being mediocre and only dulls the series in the fans’ eyes. The last, unfortunately, is the case with Vandal Hearts: Flame of Judgment, a western-developed entry in Konami’s strategy RPG series.

It’s not that the game doesn’t have good elements. On the contrary, it’s brimming with promise: there’s an impressively deep skill system that makes leveling transparent and continual; variety in the missions ultimately makes several scenarios better than many in the original Vandal Hearts games; bonus “treasure” maps allow for hidden stages, and skirmish maps let the grind-lovers do their thing. →  You think about everything.

Resident Evil 4 Revisited

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Recently, a brand spanking new copy of Resident Evil 4 for the Wii caught my eye. Reduced to clear and put in the shop window of a generic electronics shop in London’s laughable ‘electronics mile’, I couldn’t face the heart break over the thought of that particular copy of that gem of a game slowly yellowing and fading in the shop window, destined to be ignored by the people looking to buy new headphones or a replacement ipod nano charger.

So now I have two copies of Resident Evil 4. One for the PS2. One for the Wii. I should buy the Gamecube version to complete the shelf. Feeling slightly embarrassed in my hideous capitalist material ways with the realisation that there are people in this very world who struggle to have potable water or enough food to survive and here I am, Cunzy “two copies of Resident Evil 4” they call me now. I’d played the PS2 version to death but in order to ease my pig-dog conscience I decided to fire it up at least once and see how one of the best games of the last decade and in theory, therefore, of all time, translated to the Wii. →  Call me game-shmael.

NISA, no sir

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I haven’t played any games localized by NISA, save for the 15 minutes I’ve spent with Disgaea on PSP.  Yet I find myself fascinated with the company, thanks to the many stories of I hear of the mind boggling mistakes and blunders they have suffered over time.  Here are a few that I have heard of, complete with links to disappointed gamers discussing them (warning – links may contain dangerous doses of weeaboo).

– Ar Tornelico 2 features poor translation, loss of vocal work, and a crash bug for one of the last bosses.

– DLC for Disgaea 2 on PSP pulled, then returned after being buggy.

– Disgaea visual novel officially announced with a typo ridden, horribly awkward sounding  comic.

– Holy Invasion of Privacy Badman! (What did I do to Deserve This?) leads to a lawsuit from Warner Bros. for its similarity to a classic catchphrase coined by Batman and Robin.  The second game will be delayed by two months, while the original version will be pulled from the Playstation Network until modified, thus creating one of the first examples of a digital collector’s item.  →  I can has post?

Review – Children of the Nile / Alexandria

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Children of the Nile is a continuation, and possibly the final installment of the fairly successful Pharaoh series, taking advantage of the excellent setting of ancient Egypt as a basis for a robust city builder. The people of ancient Egypt are civilized enough to be needy bastards– a prerequisite for any builder, and in an era filled with war and great deeds, we’re off to the races of conquest and glory.

COTN’s greatest strength, without a doubt, is the ecosystem of its city. Your people have multiple “tiers” of social standing, with each level having its own behavior and needs. Your job, of course, is to keep those needs satisfied so their efforts can be directed towards doing useful things for you: killing your enemies and building great works in your name.

There are two backbones of the COTN experience: food, which serves as universal currency in a barter system, and the satisfaction of needs. Food is harvested by farmers, of course, and then wends its way through a variety of nobles (through taxes) and shopkeeps (for purchase of common and luxury goods, keys to happiness for your people). →  Please sir, can I have some more?

Armored Princess Review: Part II

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Sometime while I was busy writing about how much the PC is awesome and how much BioShock sucks I realized that I was still actively playing King’s Bounty: Armored Princess and I’m overdue in my second review installment. I’m probably about half way through the game at this point. Considering I’ve spent a total of 35 hours so far, part of my brain is telling me to play something else that I have hope of finishing; but I just keep trudging on anyway.

Part 1 was about the world of Armored Princess. It dealt with things that people tend to think don’t matter in games. Whenever a critic rambles on about inconsistent details in fantasy worlds then they can expect insane fans to blow their comment section through the roof with defamatory accusations. Fortunately my reviews don’t get featured on Metacritic so no one cares about them and Armored Princess doesn’t have a lot of fans anyway. But the fans it does have might appreciate this review since it’s about a thing that supposedly is all that matters in a game: the gameplay. →  You fool. Don’t you understand? No one wishes to read on…

Why I Like Playing Games at my Desk

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I like to think of myself as above silly things like console wars, but let’s face it, we all have our certain preferences. When we were kids our preferences came from the fact that our parents would only buy us one console, so whichever one we got was automatically the best. Nintendo’s exclusives were always better than Sega’s exclusives. Sony’s exclusives better than Microsoft’s. Of course if you happened to be the kid who got a Genesis or an Xbox then the reverse became true. As an adult I’m mature enough to understand that each piece of hardware has its own strengths and weaknesses, and each deserve the same amount of respect. But I’m also a human, and I have certain tastes and preferences. They aren’t based on exclusives or brand names anymore, just my personal style. I’ve always been a PC gamer, even when I didn’t label myself as one. It was always the platform for me, and here’s why:

The PC has the most diverse and oldest available library

I can play games that came out in the 80s with no problem. →  Actraiser Readnaissance

Weekend in Review

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Pat came to town last weekend and we took a break from our regularly scheduled God Hand and Shining Force 3 to play a bunch of games we had but had yet to really play. Our backlog is daunting so spending 30 hours skipping from disc to disc felt productive, even if we only finished two titles.

Superman 64
Superman 64 is a landmark game by French developer Titus. No other Superman title has focused primarily on flying through hoops while Lex Luthor laughs. Widely regarded as unplayable, we began our weekend here with high hopes.

Pat: Over the past several months, Jay and I have been stockpiling a collection of the worst games ever made (guess how many Sega CD games we have) and of course this would have to be among them. The developers made some inexplicable decisons (like having Superman spend much of the game struggling to fly through hoops) but when you aren’t flittting around like Tinkerbell, at least you are ugly and difficult to control. →  Some say the world will end in fire, some say in read more

Building a Mystery… I mean a City Builder

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Growing up, I was a huge fan of Legos. Loved the damn things–I think I spent time after grade school every day building Legos and watching old Batman reruns (POW!). Now that I’m an adult, it’s not really appropriate for me to build Legos, but it is OK for me to play video games. This is probably why I gravitate towards city building games: I like the act of creation, and seeing the fruits of my labor, even if not a damn street in the city goes in a straight line because I am a creature of impulse.

While recently lamenting the lack of new city builders (triggered by playing Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and associated expansions yet again), I decided to dig around for some of the “golden oldie” city builders. Immediately what came to mind were Tropico and Pharaoh, two very different, but very entertaining city builders. Imagine my shock when I found that both had additional installments in their series. →  Disaster Readport

Looking Back at BioShock

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The release date for BioShock 2 is around the corner; the game is already available for preorder in some places. So I’m going to take this moment to look back at the first game. BioShock one was kind of a big deal when it came out, and it still is; not a lot of games make it to the high 90s on Metacritic. Michael Abbot of brainygamer.com calls it “one of the defining games of its generation.” Calling three years ago a different generation is odd, but given the speed that the videogame culture moves, it’s not unreasonable. For better or for worse the statement is hard to dispute. BioShock left a lasting impression. Journalists for non-game oriented publishers even cite it as an example of how games can be an expressive art form. I didn’t play it when it was first released (I rarely do for games anymore). I waited for the hype (and the price) to die down, to see if it could withstand the test of time before I dropped twenty hours of my life into it. →  Knock knock. Who’s there? This article.