Reviews

Review – Indigo Prophecy

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Bonjour. I made this game and am better than you, non?

About halfway through Indigo Prophecy I began outlining this review. Had I finished the review but not the game you’d be reading something very different. This is a game with massive potential that completely implodes. But still, for trying something innovative and nearly succeeding, Quantic Dream deserves much respect and anyone interested in innovation and experimentation should try it out.

Indigo Prophecy was made by the French developer Quantic Dream, who were behind the poorly received Dreamcast title Omnikron (I hate it just because David Bowie is in it). This is not a modest company; or rather this company is not run by a modest man. My first experience with Indigo Prophecy was on a demo disc from a magazine. David Cage, the head of Quantic Dreams, does a whole lot of talking about his game on the demo. He also wrote the introduction of the game’s manual. Maybe he won’t come off as pompous after he gets a few hits under his belt, but for now there is a very short list of designers who can brag about their games in their games without sounding like snobs. →  Oops, I did it again.

Review – Neopets Petpet Adventure: The Wand of Wishing

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It’s like Animal Crossing, only for even younger players.

Cute, cuddly, and lovable are just a few words I would use to describe the ever-popular amongst kids Neopets, but the PSP game, Petpet Adventure: The Wand of Wishing, is anything but. Don’t let the title fool you into thinking that this is simply for spoiled eight year-old little girls lucky enough to own PSPs.

It has a cute story line, but it’s in no way original – Neopia, the land of Neopets, is in grave danger when the Wand of Wishing disappears into a hidden portal. Now the Neopets are racing against time to retrieve the Wand of Wishing before the powerful villains do so that they can undo the evils the villains have visited upon the world.

The graphics are nothing to write home about, and the game takes unnecessarily long to load between different scenes and if there is one thing I hate, waiting would be it, so that aspect is a thumb’s down for me. →  Game is dead. Game remains dead. And we have killed it.

Review – Eternal Darkness

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These guys are pretty athletic considering they have no skin.

Eternal Darkness can join Psychonauts and a few others on the list of the Best Games from this generation that no one played. While it is difficult to understand how titles of such high quality continue to be shunned by the public, it is not difficult to see why the few die hards who played Eternal Darkness enjoyed it so immensely.

You start the game as a Roman officer named Pious and at the end of the first level you choose your fate. There are three paths, and the choice you make influences both the storyline and the gameplay. In Eternal Darkness you have three gauges to monitor (health, magick, and sanity — more on this later) rather than the standard two. Choosing one artifact over another at this first of twelve stages determines which of these gauges will be the most difficult to maintain, and tweaks a few other gameplay mechanisms. →  Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatarticle

Review – Psychonauts

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I know this scene is somehow sexual, I’m just not sure exactly how.

Psychonauts came out to little fanfare in the broader sense, but there are dedicated Tim Schaefer fans who had been looking forward to the title for quite some time. Growing up I played a few of his PC adventure games and while I enjoyed them, I was probably a little too young to appreciate them as much as they deserved. Everything about Psychonauts appealed to me though and when I eventually found a copy, the experience did not disappoint.

In an interesting twist, the main character runs away from the circus in order to join an elite force of psychic detectives. The Psychonauts operate by entering people’s minds and ridding them of their demons. Raz, in a shocking turn of events, shows real promise as a psychonaut, but has to fight his father for the right to do what he wants. The story is by turns creative, funny (although I do think reports of its hilarity are a little overblown), and touching. →  Oops, I did it again.

Review – Ninja Gaiden

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I wanted to like Ninja Gaiden. I really did. Despite my disinterest in Namco’s Team Ninja and their “style over substance” approach to game design, I always hoped that this new Ninja Gaiden would live up to the high standards set by the 2d originals. It turns out that the final product is much like I expected. Team Ninja has a history of being able to do one thing incredibly well, be it the graphics of Dead or Alive or the … models in Extreme Beach Volleyball. Meanwhile pretty much everything else in the game ends up being mediocre at best.

The good news is that Ninja Gaiden’s combat happens to be the one thing that is done right. The bad news is that once again everything else is rather crummy. You’ll have to cut through both your enemies and several layers of bullshit in order to become a true ninja, and whether this is actually worth doing is a difficult question to answer.

 →  Ridge Reader V

Review – Kingdom Hearts 2

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Sora picks up a new, more badass outfit in KHII. Donald still uses his sailor outfit left over from his porn star days.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away (let’s call it Japan), a man from SquareEnix and a man from Disney were getting drunk in a karaoke bar when, somewhere between sake and bad renditions of Michael Jackson songs, one of them stumbled upon a most wonderful idea: why not take all the best aspects of the Disney universe, throw them together with all the best parts of the Final Fantasy series, and from this soup of uberness draw the most amazing game ever conceived by man? The two set off to do just this, and on September 16th 2002, if Jesus himself had come down from heaven to bring rapture to the world, no one would have noticed because they’d have been too busy picking up their reserved copies of Kingdom Hearts from Gamestop.

Fast forward three and a half years later, and Square and Disney have gotten together again to bring us heaven-in-a-DVD in the sequel, Kingdom Hearts II. →  Onimusha 2: Samuread’s Destiny

Review – Star Trek: Shattered Universe

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Developed by Stasphere Interactive
Published by TDK Mediactive
Released 1.13.04

No … this game was not made in 1990. Why would you say that?

This Trek game was developed by Starsphere Interactive whos last game seems to have been You Don’t Know Jack for the PS1. They should have stopped there. Just take a look at their impressive list of games and I believe you will already know where this review is going.

Being an enormous fan of the Trek universe, I really want the franchise to do well. Movies, books, new shows, video games; I just want them to make enough money to keep the universe alive. That’s why games like Shattered Universe bother me so much. I think this game was made in two months … by monkeys … monkeys who were somewhat slow. A couple of these in a row and you have a seriously dying franchise, which is exactly what’s happening to Star Trek these days. →  Now bear my arctic post.

Review – Morning’s Wrath

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Hey, where’s the doll I put my equipment on? What kind of second rate Diablo clone is this?

Morning’s Wrath is an RGP put out by Ethereal Darkness Interactive, a tiny independent game studio, which I am willing to bet is less of a company and more of a dedicated group of friends who collectively thought, “What the hell, lets do it” and made a videogame. Let me make it clear off the bat; making a video game is HARD. Anyone who has managed to do it deserves a tremendous amount of respect, especially when they don’t have the resources like other mega-gaming studios have. Even if they have the resources, making a good video is still hard, as EA demonstrates every single day.

After that all too easy dig against EA, I have to say this: Morning’s Wrath is just another mediocre videogame that should have come out a couple of years ago. It’s not particularly bad, but the whole thing just seems played out. →  The fuck does Cuno care about reading?

Review – Disaster Report

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Developed by Irem
Published by Agetec Inc.
Released 2.15.03

car falling off bridge

I hope he has collision insurance.

Disaster Report begins by introducing your setting: a completely manmade island with a newspaper that needed a reporter. While crossing a bridge from the airport to the city en route to filling that role, the main character, Keith, suffers a major setback in the form of an earthquake, the aftershocks of which continue throughout the game. A helicopter sees you, but is not able to rescue you and instead drops some provisions (this is a recurring theme). If Disaster Report were a movie, we would probably consider this premise clichéd, and dismiss it. It is a very fresh idea for a game however, and is therefore intriguing.

There are some very ambitious aspects to the game. The most obvious is that the tremors that occur during gameplay affect the environment of the game. Exits are closed off, new paths are opened, and detritus creates or destroys bridges. →  Some say the world will end in fire, some say in read more

Review – Wipeout Pure

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Wipeout Pure
Developed by SCEE
Published by SCEE
Released 3.16.05

Wipeout Pure is one of my first PSP games. I must say, not being totally into racing games (I’m more of a RPG person), I found this game to be pretty exciting and entertaining for my daily commute to work. From the get-go, you have a choice of ten or so “spacecrafts” to choose from. I put spacecrafts in quotation because they look more like pen caps and paper clips then anything that resembles what people typically think a futurist spaceship will look like.

It’s like someone updated F Zero and didn’t call it F Zero GX.

The graphics for this game are excellent, but I use that term loosely because, honestly, I have no idea what is considered “good” graphics or “bad” graphics. To me, as long as the game quality doesn’t resemble my all-time, circa Windows 95, favorites Doom or Castle Wolfenstein, it is “good” graphics to me. Basically, anything that is not pixilated could be considered “good” quality in my book. →  Silent Post 2