March game avalanche

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Looking through the list of recently released and upcoming March titles makes me think about sacrifice. Which games will I skip, which developers do I want to support with full price upfront, and on which days of the week will I eat Ramen? This isn’t a consumer product site like say IGN, who I recently notice house an inordinate number of game previews and features all obviously in an attempt at hyping and selling games, so I rarely discuss upcoming releases. Speaking to a few friends, however, I realized many of the games I am excited about are pretty low profile.

I thought of Pat’s old article on whose responsibility it was that we have heard of a game and then realized that quite frequently, within my small group of friends, it’s my responsibility. →  Read the rest

Creativity oozes from every pore of Bioshock 2

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If you’ve been following Bioshock 2 at all you have probably seen the pics of the new Game Informer cover. Following the same logic that created Poochie the Dog (the animal hierarchy goes mouse, cat, dog…), the BS team has created the Big Sister. I could speculate about how creatively bankrupt the design seems but really it’s the least of the problems of Bioshock 2.

As far as I can tell, Bioshock 2 is an admission that games are not art, or at least that Bioshock was not art. Despite the short and underwhelming ending, the setting, atmosphere, plot twists and most importantly, ideology of Bioshock made it an amazing game. Announcing a sequel to a completed story arc indicates that the team is somewhat unaware of why their game was good (or that their publisher gave them clear orders). →  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

Rock Band Beatles – Facts and Opinions

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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. →  Read the rest

Most reviews aren’t worth reading

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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. →  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

eBay + Japanese Games = Financial Ruin

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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. →  Read the rest

How should game collections be reviewed?

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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. →  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

Now on Virtual Console: My childhood

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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. →  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

The Value of a Dollar

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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. →  Read the rest

Race to the Finish

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Here is a tip for developers.  Whenever you issue a challenge to the gaming masses, don’t make any bets, assessments, or guesses about how long it will take them to complete it, or if they will even complete it at all.  They will simply let out a long cackle, and by the time they take a breath, they will have finished it, perhaps twice over.  Usually these feats are seen in MMO’s like World of Warcraft, but this time it has popped up in the most unlikely of games – Noby Noby Boy.

In case you haven’t been following Keita Takahashi’s newest bit of quirk, Noby Noby Boy is an experience with a passive goal.  As each player plays around with Boy and makes him stretch his body, they can report to their friend Girl, a similar creature who is chilling out in space.  →  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

News We Care About Update

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Why Ensemble Closed
Once designer at Ensemble Studios, Bruce Shelley explained what went wrong at the DICE 09 conference. He kept it overly civilized and focused on what they should have done differently internally. Things like working on games in different genres and not expanding too quickly made his list, though he forgot to mention “Don’t be owned by a giant evil corporation.”

It must have taken an abundance of self control to not simply declare Microsoft the sole problem Ensemble faced. The studio created some of the best received and selling strategy games in the industry and sold millions of games. Despite being profitable, they were apparently not profitable enough for Microsoft to keep open. Just when I thought I was beginning to understand economics…

Single Player Games on their Deathbed
David Perry is more famous for saying controversial things than making good games. →  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

Street Fighter Folks

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Yesterday was the release date for Street Fighter 4, at least if you’re being technical. Most every store in the nation won’t be offering it until today, but if you had a preorder, or a lucky store, then your local Gamestop may have been your potential source for a Tuesday pickup. When it comes to broken street dates and flaky launches, the Maryland area seems neither particularly lucky nor unlucky. Furthermore, these days my buying habits are such that I never pick up a new game the week of its release, so I avoid such flaky launches.

I knew I should wait until today to find Street Fighter 4, yet I found myself ignoring my bus to the metro station, instead taking the 40 minute walk so I could stop by the Gamestop and scout their stock. →  Read the rest

Playing catch up – Phantasy Star IV

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I was a Nintendo kid growing up (until that stopped being cool, when I defected to Sony). I got a Genesis very late in the game, so I’m still playing catch-up on the Phantasy Star games. A couple months ago, the final game worth mentioning in the series was released on Virtual Console. I played through Phantasy Star 2 several months ago, so I figured I’d give its better-regarded descendant a go now that current-gen RPG releases have calmed down a bit.

Phantasy Star 4 deserves all of the acclaim it gets. If its fans are not heard as loudly as those of other, better-known series, they should be. Is it the Second Coming? Perhaps not. But it has all the requirements for a good RPG (aside from only one of two established religions being evil – I’ll overlook that). →  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

Review – Prince of Persia

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The games and film industries are currently obsessed with the concept of reboots. While this is not a new concept, traditionally reboots are greenlit for franchises that are fairly old, and only when the IP holder feels that it will remain commercially viable after a modern facelift. Certain entities in the gaming world have bucked this trend, prescribing reboots for series that are still currently popular, and have likely had at least one new entry in the last five or so years. From a theoretical standpoint, this makes sense. If you are choosing something to to reboot from a list of modern franchises, it is much easier to determine their viability when your audience still remembers them. It also allows a publisher to continue churning out sequels at a steady clip without the new entries feeling immediately stale. →  Read the rest