Reviews

Review – BIT.TRIP BEAT

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It’s been 37 years now since Pong became the first commercially successful videogame. 37 years isn’t very long in the grand scheme of things, so with gaming still so young it’s not surprising that only recently there has been a popular interest in its history. Although the medium owes its existence to computer technology, games are unlike most computer software in the sense that the latest versions aren’t always the “best.” Every game offers its own unique experience.

Unfortunately most games don’t manage to transcend time completely, and large aspects of them are trapped as artifacts of their era. Essentially no one today could enjoy Pong the way its first audience did in 1972. This is why remakes are not just popular, but essential for most games. And sometimes someone will make a completely new game that borrows the best qualities from games of the past, and integrates them with the best qualities of today. →  Read the rest

Review – Suikoden Tierkreis

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I have enjoyed the Suikoden franchise for a good chunk of my life now, and have come to appreciate the series standards: 108 varied and colorful (if often throwaway) characters, no small amount of intrigue and diplomacy, a focus on large-scale battles and political or ideological change, and so on. Although the series has had its problems, even the worst Suikoden is a decent RPG with a few issues that drag it somewhat below the other games. The overall quality of the series has me eagerly awaiting any announcements, even in the case of the most recent entry/spinoff, Suikoden Tierkreis.
Maybe it’s the fabled Orb of Knowledge, prize possession of an advanced ancient civilization and key to overthrowing the evil empire.

Tierkreis breaks away from several of the series’ main ideas. →  Read the rest

Review – Retro Game Challange

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Retro Game Challenge is rather difficult to describe to the uninitiated, despite the fact that the overall concept is deliberately simple. Its creation is the result of Game Center CX, a popular Japanese TV program in which comedian Shinya Arino is forced to play old Famicom games until he either beats them, or the day ends. Coupled with a variety of other game-related features and the interaction between Arino and his crew, the show is said to be incredibly funny (while also being a nostalgic look at the ever loved Famicom era).

Its popularity spawned a game with its own clever concept: a virtual version of Arino decides to trap you in the 1980’s, where the kid version of you is forced to complete challenges in a variety of games with the help of kid Arino. →  Read the rest

Review – Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon

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Underneath every game’s artwork, sound effects and voice acting lies a set of core mechanics. All the extra stuff, the facade if you will, exists to enhance the mechanics and design of a game. I tend to value the facade less than the other half of the dichotomy because there are many examples of bad games with brilliant coats of paint and few if any examples of bad games with amazing design. Even so, the difference a little bit of well mixed paint can make is hard to overestimate.

Ico and Zelda are very similar games with very different facades. The former focuses on giving the play rules context and emotional resonance while the latter indulges in playful variations of its mechanics while mostly ignoring the artistry that sits atop them. →  Read the rest

Review – Dwarf Fortress

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Freedom, sweet freedom. Hours disappear, days melt away, weeks pass in a blur.

Having returned to a society that is busy imploding into an apocalyptic mess that any supervillain would be proud to have caused, I find myself spending my few sober hours preparing for the end of the world. And also playing video games.

I have been busy stockpiling bottlecaps, because we all know that bottlecaps are the currency of a world gone wrong. My stupid neighbor downstairs has taken a lesson from my fevered preparations and has begun to create his own stash of pop can tabs, but this is wrong. He will be penniless and alone in the wastelands of the near future while I will be king of all I survey. There will be no shotgun ammo that I cannot buy, no can of beans out of my reach. →  Read the rest

Review – Resident Evil 5

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The release of Resident Evil 5 has brought any number of potential problems along with it. Is the game racist? Will the co-op structure ruin the excellent formula laid down in RE4? Will fans cringe at the story?

These are all valid questions and unfortunately the game does not dispel all of our concerns. Having played it to completion, I find that the game ends up faring better in a few regards, and worse in others.

Capcom’s attempt at a hip hop video.

To begin, let me state that I do not wish to cover the racism aspect in this review. It isn’t that I don’t care about the topic, or that I believe it doesn’t exist. I simply feel that it is important enough that it demands discussion between people with sufficient knowledge and experience on the subject. →  Read the rest

Review – Space War Commander

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As many of you know, I am the Master of the 4X Universe here at videolamer (self proclaimed, patent pending). The echoing of these proclamations is so great, it reverberated from my mom’s basement where I live and into Dreamspike Studios and so they sent over a copy of Space War Commander to review.

Poking around the manual and the website, I was intrigued by the presence of starports, cruisers, interceptors and destroyers, along with asteroids to capture and harvest, and began eagerly looking forward to a sort of Spaceward Ho-esque game. I began to get excited, but I also had this vague nagging feeling in the back of my head that something wasn’t quite right.

You sunk my battle ship.

This feeling was correctly placed: although you have the usual things to expect in a game titled Space War Commander, including seven different ship types to build, asteroids and planets to control and enemies to slaughter, Space War Commander is not actually a 4X game. →  Read the rest

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. →  Read the rest

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. →  Read the rest

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. →  Read the rest

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. →  Read the rest

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. →  Read the rest

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. →  Read the rest

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). →  Read the rest

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). →  Read the rest

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. →  Read the rest

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. →  Read the rest

Review – No More Heroes

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No More Heroes came out a little more than a year ago, but I’m reviewing it now since the current economy is helping me appreciate older games I already have lying around my room. I remember playing it soon after it came out and thought it was fun at the time. Once I beat single player story mode though I essentially lost interest in ever picking it back up because that was all there is to it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a game simply having a twenty or so hour long single player mode, but once you beat it you’re through. There’s no way to select levels afterward and replay your favorite parts, so you simply have to make the whole twenty hour investment all over again in order to get the full experience. →  Read the rest

Review – Fable II

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For a change of pace over the holidays I went through Fable II, a light-hearted fantasy role-playing game developed by Lionhead Studios and its industry leading founder, Peter Molyneaux. Between the first and second Fable, Lionhead was purchased by Microsoft, meaning that Peter was now in the market of making Xbox 360 exclusives. I was especially curious to see if Peter and his team were going to take special advantage of the console like Epic Games has done with Gears of War. Sadly this wasn’t the case.

Before I get into that, let’s give the good stuff its due. In Fable II you play a hero born from a powerful bloodline, one that allows you to wield magic. A hero hunting villain is hot to kill you in hopes of ending the line and preventing your kind from stopping his plans for world domination. →  Read the rest

Review – Flower

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If you haven’t noticed…and you probably haven’t, I have not written much lately. Truth be told, there hasn’t been a lot in gaming that has inspired me in the past couple of weeks. That is, until tonight. Flower has been on the Playstation Store now for roughly six or seven hours and in that time, I can safely say this game has answered the video games as art argument with a resounding, YES!

This review is not going to be very long because the game is not very long and it is hard to do justice to it without letting you just play it and experience it for yourself. The premise is simple, tilt the controller and press any button to make the wind blow. That is it. Of course there is more to it, but really how much can I say about a series of flower petals blowing in the wind? →  Read the rest