Review – Ninja Blade

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They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but don’t tell that to us gamers. We love to find copycats and string them up. Whether it is this year’s triple-A game taking ideas from last year’s, or some media darling that stole its innovations from an ancient and obscure release, we will find the progenitor game, and we will make disparaging remarks.

Of course, we seldom practice what we preach. Kill.Switch may have dabbled with cover long before Gears of War, but we know which is the better game. On the other hand, most gamers shunned From Software’s game Ninja Blade as soon as the early screenshots showed us what looked to be a shameless clone of Ninja Gaiden. Even when the reviews rolled in, the same sentiments were common, despite the fact that Ninja Blade has quite a different purpose. Unfortunately, said purpose has little use in today’s world of action games.

Like Ninja Gaiden’s Ryu Hayabusa, Ninja Blade’s Ken Ogawa is able to run along walls and use potent ninja magic (manifested here as elemental shuriken attacks), all while wearing a heavy and ornate headguard. →  I’m gonna take you for a read.

Review – 100 Classic Book Collection

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100 Classic Book Collection for the DS is awesomesauce. That’s the gist of this whole review for those of you unwilling or unable to read further. However, for those with some staying power I will qualify why it is such an amazing condiment after I clarify that it isn’t a game.

100 Classic Book Collection is not a game. Don’t be confused by the packaging, the little box and the little game shaped cartridge. When you pop the cart into the DS and open it up you will not find a game. Instead you will find an assortment of 100 classic books to read. It could have been that simple. Here’s 100 books. Read them all. Cheevos for reading all of them. But much like an exotic alcoholic cocktail so many extra bits have been squeezed in to make it all the more worthwhile.

There is Background Music. Oh yes there is. This feature blows my mind. You can choose between a whole range of background music so although you may be sitting on a train or in bed reading the wordies from a screen you can choose a range of background music to make you feel like some kind of arthouse cunt deliberately reading classic books in a number of settings you might hope to pick up a girl in because she digs your goatee, your pink tinted glasses and your choice of literature. →  Now with fewer vowels.

Return to Yokosuka

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Last night I finally succeeded in persuading a friend to start Shenmue. It had been a long, drawn out affair. He agreed to play weeks ago but there was always some reason to put it off: my girlfriend was there and would be bored, a Nic Cage movie was on TV, I just got a PS3, I couldn’t find the VGA Dreamcast cable and wasn’t some sort of barbarian who could use S-video, a different Nic Cage movie was on TV, and so on.

As always happens when sharing something close to the heart with a friend, I was very nervous about how he would react. When I explained that at one time it was the best looking game on the market he said, “Yeah, this looks really good for 1991.” He probably doesn’t play games or look at calendars as frequently as I do. Had Shenmue come out a decade earlier it likely would have validated the many cults that worship Yu Suzuki’s as some sort of demigod, but even as a game from 2001 it still looks good today. →  Read Band 2

Review – Persona

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Nothing but Playstation remakes. The PSP seems to be relegated to the unusual role of a “Remake system”. Nearly all the RPGs (which are, of course, the only real games out there) on the system are remakes, or generally reputed to be bad. And Persona is falls neatly in the first category, as you might expect.

But as I’ve written before – the Persona we received back when it was among the first in its genre for the Playstation wasn’t quite the same game they saw in Japan. Set in the sleepy US town of Lunarvale (which still managed to house a several-storied corporate office), the American students (who all wear school uniforms and are taught in a traditional Japanese concrete-block school) face an invasion of demons from an unknown source. Whereas much of the story itself is intact, some of the characters were… err… modified. Add this to the removal of the “bonus” branch of the story (which replaces the last 4/5 of the adventure with a few hefty dungeon crawls and a completely different plot), and Persona PSP seems like a remake with bonuses. →  Assassin’s Read

Demon’s Sells

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Niche publisher Atlus USA is known for having a strict policy of printing very limited quantities of their games.  This allows them to keep costs down, and it keeps their fanbase in a rabid state wherein they will scoop up any new releases right away, even if they have to wait a year to find time to play it, or have to give blood to afford it.  But every so often, when the moon is full, Atlus decides to bless us with additional print runs.  The last notable example of this was in 2008, when they did a quiet reissue of three Shin Megami Tensei games on PS2.

But this month saw the publisher jump to action with far greater speed, shipping an emergency second printing of their new PS3 RPG Demon’s Souls just two weeks after its release.  This is a win win for everyone.  Atlus gets to benefit from fulfilling the extra demand, and we gamers get a better chance at experience the game. →  Nobody puts article in a corner.

Moving Pictures

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While the details are scarce, apparently Insomniac Games did some sort of “study” that came to an interesting conclusion about graphics fidelity.  Apparently, if gamers had to choose between great visuals with a choppy framerate, or smooth framerate and simpler visuals, they would choose the former.  Not only that, but they concluded that games that adopt the  former can even gain better review scores.  They go so far as to say that some study respondents claimed that better visuals made the game more fun to play. As a result, Insomniac will no longer strive for 60 frames per second in future releases, which used to be one of their top priorities.

Three thoughts come to mind.  First, I would love to see how they conducted this study (likely with focus groups).  Second, I don’t blame Insomniac for their choice;  apparently they do not like it any more than we do.  Third, I would like to hear the explanations given during the study, or even some examples of what games are considered to look “great”. →  Ring of Read

Houston, Wii Have a Problem

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When the Wii was first heralded as the “next big thing” in video games, I was watching from the sidelines (or possibly the frontlines) in Japan. I admit that like everyone else, I got caught up in the hype and wanted…nay…needed a Wii. That was a couple of years ago. Since then, I have decided a didn’t need a Wii and then ended up getting one for practically free off of Craigslist about five months ago. I haven’t played the damned thing in almost three months, confirming my suspicions that the Wii was not a console for me. However, this is not a blurb of why I dislike the Wii; it is an article explaining why I think the Wii was a bad idea for Nintendo.

At first glance, the Wii was a nifty concept. Instead of a controller, you get a wand that you wave like a madman at your television and stuff happens. People seemed to enjoy the idea of having to play games standing up (though I have never understood why) and actually going through the motions of the activities portrayed on the screen. →  Phoenix Write: Just Posts for All

Review – Wheelman

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Wheelman is a straightforward looking Grand Theft Auto clone, made by a dying publisher and featuring the voice and likeness of Vin “I End Lives” Diesel. A recipe for failure if there ever was one, save for the fact that Diesel’s track record with the game industry has been stellar. After the two Chronicles of Riddick games, Wheelman becomes the third release blessed by his Tigon Studios label, and like the others, is better than you might expect.

The key thing to remember about Wheelman is that it isn’t aping the Grand Theft Auto series as a whole. Specifically, it bases itself on GTA 3. All the extra cruft that Rockstar would later add to their series is nowhere to be found here. You have driving, on foot action, and a couple of secrets to find. This is a good start, as GTA 3 struck a fine balance between wild arcade action and depth. What makes it worth playing in 2009 is that the game takes this foundation and removes most of the bullshit. →  Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the article?

Third party publishers as RPG archetypes

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Imagine if you will some kind of strange alternate meta-world, where major third party games publishers form a rag-tag party and embark upon a quest to… make an awful lot of money? I suppose they’re going to steal some Dragon’s gold, that can be the story. Although in reality, in our universe, they’re just corporate entities raking in the cash for their shareholders and higher echelon types. But in this otherworld, they’re taking on a Dragon, and I think we can all get behind that.

Valve – The hero

Emerging from obscurity, our hero plots an unlikely meteoric rise to widespread acclaim and influence. It also emerges that he is the only one who can wield the arcane STEAM, a mystical source of great power which makes him all but unstoppable. He is unlike his companions, somehow set apart by destiny; he isn’t really a publisher at all, yet at the same time they flock to his banner. In the end no one can argue with the sheer quality of his work, even if he hardly ever seems to say anything. →  A reader is you.

Figuring out Brutal Legend

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Brutal Legend is out this week, and already the praise and reviews are rolling in. That’s great, considering Tim Schafer’s Doublefine Studios has been around for ages with no apparent source of significant revenue, but I am not going to lie – I have no intention of playing it in 2009, and no idea when I might get to it in 2010. To be honest, I am not entirely sure what I am supposed to be getting excited for.

Is it because it is such an awesome parody of Metal? Between the works of Tenacious D, the show Metalocalypse, and even some of the jokes and jabs from Guitar Hero/Rock Band, I feel like this ground has been covered extensively in recent years. Hell, even Homestar Runner has taken a stab at it.  I have seen the arguments that this is something new and fresh, but that is only true if we limit ourselves to just games, which is hard to do when the aforementioned examples are often catered towards the same people who play games. →  Lame is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.