Reviews

Review – Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria

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The original Valkyrie Profile was, for a time, the poster child for good, rare, and probably overpriced PSX RPGs. In a surprising move a few years ago, Square Enix announced (to the joy of JRPG fans) not only a sequel, but a remake of the original. At the time I was interested, but had played through the original a couple of years earlier – not so long that I would want to replay it, but long enough that I had forgotten all the subplot related to the principal character of the sequel – the Valkyrie Silmeria. Not that there is a whole lot of it or anything, but it was important to me at the time. Despite the fact it is a prequel I’m glad I waited until I replayed the original – although it isn’t necessary, it clarifies much of the ending.

Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria is, as its name implies, a game that deals heavily with Norse mythology. In Silmeria, you play a valkyrie on the run from the gods – having been brought into existence by mistake. →  Four out of five dentists recommend reading more.

Review – Orbient

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I love puzzle games. I don’t mean that I love most puzzle games, but that I love the puzzle genre. This actually leads me to hate most puzzle games because of the unreasonably high expectations I set for them. But when I do find one that I like, I really like it. Orbient is one of those games.

The gameplay is simple. You are a planet wandering through a two dimensional universe filled with other planets. Most planets just follow their orbit patterns, but for some unexplained reason you have the ability to control gravity’s effect on you. There’s a button to activate regular gravity, and a button to activate anti-gravity. As you wander you’ll have to use these strategically to control your movement. Unlike most games, there are no buttons for moving an exact direction. The gravity physics are completely dependent on how large and far away your neighbors are. The game would be stupidly easy if you could just walk over to the goal, so this challenging mode of travel is what really makes the game. →  Readbot Chronicles

Review – LocoRoco 2

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The original LocoRoco was a PSP game I wanted to get behind. The artwork not only looked good, but animated gorgeously and demonstrated what the PSP’s horsepower could for 2d gaming if the industry had not insisted on flooding the handheld with watered down PS2 downports. The simple, two button platforming concept was also a nostalgic throwback to platformers of old. Its sugary sweet cuteness was also an odd but welcome sight in today’s gaming climate, and the adorable cast alone was enticing to anyone without a heart of stone.

Ultimately, the game simply did not know where to go with any of its ideas. The level progression had no logic or reason behind it and felt tiresome before you got through all 40-something stages. If you just want to beat them, the challenge is a bit too easy, while aiming to replay them in order to collect special items or beat the speedrun times proved shockingly hard. There was no real drive to push forward, and the assorted minigames and bonuses proved to be unworthy distractions. →  Hot Shots Post 3

Review – Wario Land: Shake It!

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I have been trying to figure out the “new” Nintendo ever since the Wii launch, and a game like Warioland Shake It! both enlightens and confounds me. It is perhaps the best picture of what Nintendo can do (as opposed to what they may want to do) with their traditions, yet I cannot find a reviewer that sees it the same way as me. While in all likelihood this is a clue that I am going off on a wild tangent, I cannot help but feel that Shake It! is a sign of a community that at times has an ass backwards opinion of Nintendo, or in some cases is having a hard time adjusting.

I am going to put it bluntly – Shake It! is a kid’s game, a description which I do not use pejoratively. As a few critics have rightfully pointed out, Shake It! plays much like Warioland 4 with a few simple motion controls and with smaller, simpler levels. →  Game is dead. Game remains dead. And we have killed it.

Review – EVE Online: Apocrypha

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Apocrypha, the latest expansion of Eve Online – my gaming mistress with whom I continually flirt, tease, and occasionally enjoy for hours on end to the exclusion of all else – was recently released. Unlike many other MMOs, Eve expansions are free, with typically 2-3 major expansions released a year. Apocrypha is the latest, and perhaps one of the most ambitious expansions produced yet, with a variety of features for new and old players alike.

Most notable for new players is a revamping of the Eve character creation experience. In earlier versions, the character creation experience involved choosing a variety of broad traits for your character which would translate into attributes and starting skills. This process was extremely opaque, particularly for a new player, resulting in many players being confused with their starting attributes, often with a variety of worthless skills that prevented them from enjoying the game immediately. This was one of the many reasons Eve has been viewed as unfriendly to new players, which can kill an MMO. →  Some say the world will end in fire, some say in read more

Review – Valkyria Chronicles

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Strategy games have proven to be a bitter mistress for me. It is an unfortunate genre because it is home to one of my all-time favorite games, X-Com. When I first boot up a strategy game, especially one that has a similar mechanic to X-Com, I find myself comparing whatever game I may be playing to the venial alien blasting classic. When this happens, almost all games fail and I end up ditching the discs in one of my many binders, never to play it again.

It was with a great amount of trepidation that I purchased Valkyria Chronicles. I loved what I had seen of the game, the story is set in an alternate WWII universe, it is graphically an anime-styled game, and you get to run over people with a big ass tank. I really wanted this game to work out; I strove to fall in love with it. And in the end, I did. It is an event on par with the appearance of Haley’s comet when a video game meets or exceeds all of my expectations but I can safely proclaim to the world that I am in love with Valkyria Chronicles and if the law allows, I may indeed marry it someday. →  In the beginning games created the heavens and the earth.

Review – LIT

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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. →  Today I consider myself the luckiest reader on the face of the earth.

Review – Time Hollow

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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). →  Final Fantasy Mystic Post

Review – My Japanese Coach

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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. →  Oreshika: Tainted Postlines

Review – World of Goo

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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. →  Hey, hey, hey, it’s time to make some crazy reading!