Reviews

Review – Contact

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A game is like a meal. An excellent one both pleases your palette and assuages your hunger. Resident Evil 4 was a full plate of filet mignon. Extremely filling, but not excessive, and delectable (this is getting creepy). A Nippon Ichi game is more like three plates of macaroni and cheese. Decent, but if you eat it all you’ll feel sick. And then there are games that are so bad you look forward to them ending. Eating less vomit or dog shit is preferable.

Enough of something decent can make an average game more satisfying than it should be. Dragon Quest Rocket Slime is by no means gourmet, but there is enough of it to really fill the player. The play mechanics aren’t spectacular, but the game is long enough to both build and expand on them. It achieves the rank of full plate of steamed vegetables.

Contact is barely palatable and, even worse, is at most an appetizer. This is a letdown because its packaging (complete with blog entries in the manual) and buzz – which drools over the music for no apparent reason – make it sound like an exotic dish most of us have never tasted. →  Fire Post Wrestling Returns

Review – Sam & Max Episode 4: Abe Lincoln Must Die

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Something tells me I will be in the minority with this one, but Sam and Max Episode 4 is perhaps the weakest entry yet (or close behind the first one). This seems odd at first, because this time Telltale worked on many of the issues that fans (and reviewers like myself) brought up with the last few episodes, namely length and difficulty. I appreciate and respect this, however their solutions to the problems do more harm than good, while the formerly sound humor of past episodes gets less attention and falls flat. I started playing these episodes with excitement and praise. Now I’m starting to get genuinely worried.

The previous three episodes were indeed easy to complete and on the short side time wise. This never really bothered me because the settings were fun, the scripts sharp, and the puzzles weren’t damningly hard. I never expected a long quest or deep gameplay from Sam and Max, just a lighthearted adventure with some humor above the grade-school level of most games. →  What is word? Baby don’t read me.

Review – God Hand

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When Clover Studio was ultimately closed by Capcom, they left us with two games; Okami and God Hand. The former gained quite a bit of attention, at least from the gamer press and enthusiasts, and it is not hard to see why. The game sported lush, unique visuals, safe Zelda style gameplay, and a universe steeped in Japanese mythology (which seems to be all the rage these days with the kids). While I can’t say anything of the sales numbers, it certainly left an impression with the community’s most critical.

This wasn’t at all the situation with God Hand. Here was a title with with crummy visuals, a strange sense of humor and style, “tank like controls” and seemingly outdated beat ’em up gameplay. How could this game have been made by the same people behind the lush and elegant Okami? The answer is simple. God Hand doesn’t really do anything to attract the player to its cause. Its a crude, harsh game that taunts you for playing on easy and doesn’t give a shit about millions of polygons. →  Europa Universalis IV: Articles of War

Review – Space Rangers 2: Rise of the Dominators

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It’s hard to find a recent game with a name more cheesy than Space Rangers 2: Rise of the Dominators. It has all the classiness of a corny low-budget science fiction movie.

In fact, its name could be the main reason why nobody’s noticed the game, despite a lot of acclaim from reviewers. So much so that the publishing company is now asking users to suggest a better game name… possibly to re-release it.

In any case, Space Rangers 2 hails from Russia, courtesy of Cinemaware Marquee. Most of the game script feels pretty natural, but there’s just enough awkwardness to indicate it was not originally in English (other ships will ask your help to take out “this type”). That said, the script actually contains a lot of jokes. For example, the Faeyans discover a human toothbrush, and claim to have “improved” it to the point of also cleaning out the brain cavity. Maloqs will tell you of their annual Scoffing Ceremony, where they assert the superiority of their race over all others. →  Read me now, believe me later.

Review – Final Fantasy X

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It’s not some startling revelation to say that jRPGs are a hotly debated topic among many gamers, as they struggle to figure out the present and future of the genre. I have absolutely no clue what the developers behind FFX were trying to do, but I know the result of their work is a game that fully embraces what these games have become. It has been streamlined and simplified so as to provide players with something easy, relaxing, and colorful. It’s like an anime Disney attraction where you get to play a part.

Take the combat. It is a system where mages have enough MP to cast plenty of spells, and tank characters can one-hit-kill. Enemies are designed so that you can tell just by looking at them what characters you will need in order to end the battle in three steps. It even goes so far as to give you visual cues when delivering a killing blow. Status effects work, summons can be used for quick damage (or to absorb damage), and you can instantly swap party members. →  Can you read me now?

Review – Office Purks

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christian says:
About a month ago I played The Shivah. Although it was made in something simple like Adventure Game Studio, it had fantastic production values, a lot of craft to the graphical design, and some decent gameplay hampered by a lack of originality. Bottom line was that for the five five dollars I paid for it, I got a great little game that showed a lot of personality.

To me, this is what indie gaming is all about. Yes, I love to see innovations and new ideas floating around. But if an indie developer can get personal, to use their game to show us something special to them, then they’ve used their avenue of development to the fullest, because its something you just can’t do very easily within a big time studio.

Which brings us to Office Purks, an example at the other end of the spectrum. This is an nothing more than a Pac-Man clone with style and humor that’s been done to death since the film Office Space became a cult classic. →  Gotta get down on Friday.

Review – Super Swing Golf

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After playing my first round of Wii Sports golf I couldn’t wait for a developer to make a golf simulator for the system. I’m a huge fan of the Tiger Woods and Links series and an actual real-life golfer and the possibility of getting a solid golf sim on the Wii was quite exciting. Until then, I’ll have to make due with Super Swing Golf.

The primary thing that makes Super Swing Golf practically unplayable is the swing controls. If you’re going to put out a golf sim you’d better made sure your swing mechanics are rock solid. I don’t care that it’s a pseudo-rpg. I don’t care about the cutesy graphics and plot. I don’t care about fantasy courses. I want to swing my Wiimote like a real golf club and get real club-like results.

Sadly, this isn’t the game for that. In order to even get ready to hit the ball the player has to zoom out to view the course, select a club and spot to aim for, exit that view, return to the swing camera, use the Wiimote to hit a small “Swing” button on the left of the screen and then pretend to address the ball. →  Read, you fools!

A manifesto on Manifesto Games with a review of The Shivah for added value

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Greg Costikyan’s name comes up a lot when it comes to indie game development. Apparently, the man has worked on a few games and written some fiction in his life, and somehow he has become a major voice on independent games. He seems to believe that indie games can and will crush largescale publishers and end their greedy and bullying practices. To help do this, he has created Manifesto Games, a place where indie developers and fans can join together to buy, discuss and promote the best in indie gaming.

I have a lot of respect for Costikyan’s ideal, but every time I read anything written by him, I can’t help but feel that he’s batshit insane. Maybe that is too strong of a phrase, but he certainly reminds me of college students who worship indie anything like a religion and still think that communism can actually work (after all, his site is called Manifesto, and its splashed all over with red). →  Do the math.

Review – Metropolismania

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Some games are hard to put down. Often this is because a game is great fun, but entertainment isn’t always the force that drives us to keep playing. Sometimes we continue gaming because of a lack of clearly defined beginnings and endings; we don’t know when or where to stop so we just keep on going. Oddly enough, games that break play into nearly infinite tiny rounds deliver the same psychological effect as games that have no levels nor turns.

Will Wright and Sid Meier are experts at creating addictive gameplay through this method. Both Pirates! and Sims lack any clear level progression, while Civilization cuts up play time into such minute turns that each feel too short to be considered optimal stopping points. “Just one more turn!” is a cry familiar to anyone who has fallen victim to Meier’s brilliant design.

Hope you don’t mind working for Hitler.

It is almost as if Natsume studied these classics and decided they would perform an experiment: “What if we designed a bad game that is addictive? →  Castle Readigami 2

Review – Okami

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While some genres are mainly constructive (most sim games for example), the action adventure genre has historically been destructive. Even though your character is generally on the side of good and fighting evil there is something dissatisfying about achieving your ends using strictly violent means. Rarely does a game come along (outside the real time strategy genre) that gives the player the ability to create as well as destroy. Okami is such a game.

As the goddess Amaterasu you alternate between attacking demons with a variety of swords, mirrors(?) and rosaries(??) and restoring the world around you to its former natural beauty. This makes the experience of playing the game much more complete, since you actually have the capability to act like a god (assuming its not the spiteful, vengeful type of god), meting out punishment to offenders and aiding the just in their day to day lives.

Okami has more mechanics than most players (myself included) will know what to do with. →  Some say the world will end in fire, some say in read more