Year: 2009

Review – LIT

by

LIT’s brilliance is not in the game itself (though it is a great game, to be sure), but in its ability to illuminate what makes a game fun and how developers ought to make use of the opportunity to make small games – an opportunity afforded by the Wii Shop Channel, PSN, etc. Set in an undead-filled school, LIT is a puzzle game that spans 30 levels, including 5 bosses, with each level being represented by a classroom. When I say puzzle game, however, I mean puzzle game like Zak and Wiki was a puzzle game, or perhaps even Wario Ware is a puzzle game; LIT is a metapuzzle game, the puzzle is figuring out how to solve each puzzle.

This is the first way in which LIT shines (for those playing the home game we’re up to three light puns now). Gameplay, essentially, can be split into two parts: 1. Figuring out what you need to do, 2. doing. Most games are successful by only challenging you in one of these dimensions, or perhaps at best challenging you with each one at a time. →  Ring of Read

Rock Band Beatles – Facts and Opinions

by

Last week saw the announcement of a few more details on the Harmonix developed Beatles music game. The information can be described in one or two sentences, and doesn’t add up to much more than a release date, but that hasn’t stopped many from speculating, worrying, and hoping. However, using common sense and just a bit of guesswork, we can try and make some more accurate predictions.

Fact 1: The game will be released on September 9th, 2009.

Christian’s take: This all but guarantees that there will not be a Rock Band 3 this year. In fact, Harmonix already said so a while ago. I don’t think anyone will have a problem with this. The market for downloadable songs is lucrative right now, and retail shelves are already stuffed to the gills with hardware. There aren’t enough possible upgrades to justify a new disc based RB right now.

At the same time, this release ensures that HMX and pals continue their streak of yearly game releases, while honoring the band at the same time (September will be the 40th anniversary of the release of Abbey Road). →  It’s dangerous to read alone, take this.

Most reviews aren’t worth reading

by

It’s not very often that I actually read a game review. Over the years I’ve realized it saves a lot of time to just check Metacritic’s aggregated score, or maybe read the excerpts that it lists.

Why don’t I actually read what the reviewers have to say? Because their score is all they have to say. It was a while ago when I first realized that all their words are only there to validate that number. I don’t think anyone cares if the reviewer has something to say about a game, it’s the final percentage that matters.

Reviewers get their fair share of criticism though, and a lot of resounding complaints. Are they being objective? Are they getting paid by the publishers? Is the score fair? I have my own to throw in. Is the reviewer a talented writer with something interesting to say? The answer is almost always “no.”

I don’t dislike reading reviews. For example I love Roger Ebert’s reviews. →  Read or Alive 2: Hardcore

Review – Time Hollow

by

Adventure games exist on a spectrum from what are essentially puzzle games with characters (such as Zack and Wiki and possibly Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village) to games with little interaction that are basically interactive books (I would include an example here, but, at risk of blowing the punchline, the game I am reviewing is further on this side of the spectrum than anything else I have ever played). The interactivity in Time Hollow consists mostly of moving from area to area. Once you find the right location (park, school, home) events frequently set themselves in motion and you just have to tap the screen to advance the dialogue; sometimes you have to tap each character on screen to get him or her to speak.

There are a handful of objects in the game which are very obviously interactive, so finding them and their application is rarely a challenge (the plus side of this is that it means there is no pixel hunting). →  The happiest post on Earth.

eBay + Japanese Games = Financial Ruin

by

I was recently banned from a forum I frequently frequent for a matter I’d rather not discuss in detail (suffice to say playing devil’s advocate on matters of morality can be quite dangerous). After looking through a handful of other gaming forums and being disappointed because the big ones are full of stupid people and the good ones have new posts at a rate of one every three days, I found myself on eBay.

It had been months since I’d won any auctions and years since my brief and costly bidding war addiction. After randomly skimming through pages of games I found the links to my saved sellers. This was a mistake because it led me to yamatoku, purveyor of extremely cheap Japanese retro games. Winning six of his auctions in two weeks and reading through hundreds of listings, I was struck with how many Japanese titles I have never even heard of.

For those curious, here are a handful of the games I hadn’t heard of –
Death Bringer, Gdleen, Regret of Wind, Soldnerschild, and Dark Kingdom. →  Hey, hey, hey, it’s time to make some crazy reading!

How should game collections be reviewed?

by

If every game ever made were on a single disc, would that compilation deserve a “10” just based on volume? Would it make more sense to average the reviews of all the games and use that as the compilations official review score? Should points be deducted from the score for every game the reviewer already owns? And if this every-game game came out again in five years, should its past availability negate any value it would otherwise offer the consumer?

These are the questions I have been pondering as I look through the reviews for Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection. Many bring up the fact that much of the collection has been released multiple times in multiple formats. Something seems faulty about criticizing the quality of a game on the basis of its distribution.

I cannot wrap my head around the contrast between the rave reviews the Chrono Trigger port received and the scores given to the Genesis Collection. Chrono Trigger is worth a 10 but the entire Phantasy Star series, both Genesis Shining Force games, the whole Streets of Rage series, third Shinobi, Dynamite Headdy, and all three classic 2D Sonic games on a disc deserve a 7? →  And so it games…

Review – My Japanese Coach

by

I have no idea how to review a language learning game before I’ve learned the language. Stay tuned for my full review of My Japanese Coach sometime in the next seven years. For now, though, I can address some of the valid and not so valid complaints people have had about the game.

The most flagrant problem is Ubisoft published a Japanese game that teaches you the wrong stroke order for some kana and kanji. Writing characters and syllables in the correct stroke order is (I am told) crucial in Japanese and it’s embarrassing that this game doesn’t get them all right. There are under 100 syllable symbols in Japanese and My Japanese Coach teaches at least five incorrectly. I can understand teaching kanji incorrectly, there are thousands of them and they’re complex, but after a few weeks of using an actual textbook, I could write all of the kana correctly. Apparently that puts me ahead of the experts who made this game. →  Professor Layton and the Diabolical Post

Now on Virtual Console: My childhood

by

This Monday the Virtual Console got its first batch of Commodore 64 titles (in the states). Though I haven’t played the released games, it was a momentous occasion for me because the C64 was home to my first gaming experiences. While the other kids were playing their Nintendos, I was learning run “*” ,8,1 (only with the shortcut of “u” plus the shift key that yielded some bizarre symbol I don’t remember).

The majority of American gamers likely haven’t even touched a Commodore so VC sales will probably be pretty slow. Honestly, I’m not sure they deserve to be brisk – most of the titles I remember were fun at the time but seem archaic and shallow now. Still, I feel a responsibility to present a list of favorites just in case the planets align and Nintendo releases good C64 games and you happen to find yourself with five bucks to burn.

There is a robust lineup of classics for the computer that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. →  There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is games.

Review – World of Goo

by

What a strange and intriguing little beast this is. I’m hesitant to call it a game. It most certainly is a game in the sense that it places a series of challenges before you, with rewards meted out along the way, and then a credit sequence plays. But in some ways that are intangible, and other that are, it doesn’t quite feel like a game. Before I go off on some bizarre experiential recollection of my time spent with it, I will give you a more straightforward recounting of what I felt about the game. I believe in times past they were called “reviews”.

There is a lot to like about World of Goo.

I’m going to get the look and feel out of the way first, because it’s pretty much perfect. Stories of the game’s creators subsisting on cat food for years to bring their vision to life are probably apocryphal but probably not entirely inaccurate. This is what passionate and driven young people are willing to do for their art. →  Eh, I’ve got nothing better to do.

The Value of a Dollar

by

I have discussed the dilemmas of downloadable content frequently in the past, and each new piece of news gives us more to chew on. Soon we will be seeing the very first DLC for Tomb Raider: Underworld. You know, the content that was meant for the original game, but eventually wasn’t. We may never know if someone put a gun to Eric Lindstrom’s head in order to change his story, but we’re here to discuss value.

This joystiq newscontains a quote from Crystal Dynamics claiming each piece of DLC will take between three to six hours to complete. Scroll down further and you will see that a few commenters simply won’t fork over the 800 MS points for it. Since then, joystiq’s more recent review of the level clocks in at around an hour and a half.

We have a few observations here. First, is an hour and a half of entertainment worth ten bucks? I would say it depends greatly on the quality. →  Double your reading, double your fun.