Final Review – Mount&Blade

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It’s been a long time since I first looked at Mount&Blade. This game was my first review subject here at videolamer over two years ago, and it has held my attention for hundreds of hours. It’s progressed a great deal since its original release and my “review update” for .903, and in fact had its final release some weeks ago. As of this writing, Mount&Blade 1.011 has just been released with a demo on Steam, where I hope many prospective gamers will try it out. It’s currently the #5 seller – it’s selling better than Team Fortress 2! – but that spot is very well-deserved.

The improvements over the previous version I reviewed are myriad. Movement, weaponry, and armor are all much more realistic than they were before, and one of the best additions is a completely revamped soundtrack – with 70+ songs that are almost always played in the right situation – trumpet-filled battle themes that play as you clash with your foes, light melodic tracks while making your way through the countryside, and so on. →  Read the rest

King Of Fighters Orochi Collection

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If anyone reading knew that this game was out, give yourself a pat on the back. Once again, SNK Playmore USA serves up some fan favorite 2d fighters. Being that this is SNK Playmore USA, we need to replace “fan favorite” with “a standalone game or compilation that was out in Japan one, maybe even two years ago”. Then replace “serves” with “released so quietly that all but a few major news aggregates had any information on it.” The US branch is so fucked up that they aren’t even handling all of SNK’s games. Thankfully, you have masochist SNK fans like me to keep track of things as best I can, even if that means finding out about their games the week of release.

Orochi Collection is a simple compilation featuring every King Of Fighters game from 1994-98. →  Read the rest

Game forums will be the end of us all

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The internet has brought us many wonderful things. Most notably, a lot of easily accessible niche porn, but also wonderful things like online bill paying, instant messenger, downloadable games, online games, MMORPG… really, the list is endless. Frankly, it is amazing white collar workers are productive at all anymore. Unfortunately, the internet has also brought us some very terrible things. J-Date ranks high on that list (along with the rest of online dating), but by far the worst of all is internet forums.

Why internet forums, you ask eagerly? Your puppy dog eyes betray a depth of hurt: after all, you undoubtedly spend your time trolling gamefaqs.com, or perhaps like me you pick a flavor and hit up the Rock Band forums or Civfanatics. But no matter what forum you read, you’re going to get the same things… over…and over… and over…

Circular Arguments

Perhaps the most time consuming of the forum phenomena. →  Read the rest

Review – World of Goo

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Do you like puzzle games? Do you enjoy gooey things? If so, you should try World of Goo. This blob-based puzzler is one of the latest indie games to be released via Steam (or Wiiware, for the console-inclined). It’s filled with brain-twisting, goo-placing goodness.

Puzzles in World of Goo generally revolve around building structures out of blobs. Each level has a pipe you are trying to reach; once you have reached it, the goo-blobs remaining on your structure shuffle their way into the pipe. There is a simple goal (say, 4 blobs) to complete the level, and a more difficult “OCD” goal (save a lot of goo, complete the level quickly or in very few moves). Any extra blobs you get go into a pool to be used in the tower-building “free” game. →  Read the rest

A Tale of Two Revivals

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Lately Capcom has been one of the best all around publishers in the business. Their games have mostly been of high quality, and time and again they prove that they listen to and want to please their fanbase. The strange twist to all of this is that Capcom is legendary for relying on sequels and familiar franchises, yet two of their recent success stories have come from sequels (of sorts) to two of their oldest franchises, both of which were deemed risks. I am referring of course to Bionic Commando: Rearmed and Mega Man 9. These games are two different takes on the retro revival, and each demonstrate the successes and difficulties that can arise when trying to sell them. Is one better than the other, and which is more likely to be imitated in the future? →  Read the rest

Gaming the System

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Being a lazy man, as well as one who wants to use the best possible television in the house but is too spineless to actively ask for it, I picked up the PS3 memory card adapter this week. If I want to save money this holiday season, the best way to do so is to burn through some PS2 backlog, and the best way to convince myself to do that is to be able to play them upscaled on the PS3 downstairs. However, since I have to share the remote with my housemates, sometimes the upstairs CRT is the only option. The adapter makes the dream a reality, and also means I don’t have to re-unlock all the goodies in my old fighting games.

It turns out that buying the adapter also sparked another idea in my mind. →  Read the rest

Review – Insecticide

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DS Adventure-action hybrid Insecticide attracted some attention (on this site, if not from the videogame community as a whole) when the developer, Mike Levine, criticized negative reviews of the game for overlooking what he considered some of the game’s strengths. What are these supposed strengths? The game is in 3D and features voice acting. To me, the measure of a game isn’t the number of dimensions in which it resides, but how much fun it is to play, and whether I believe the developer tried to do something interesting or innovative.

The early criticisms, as well as Levine’s retort, turned on two key disagreements. Reviewers thought the controls were poor and the game had technical problems. Levine thought the reviewers did not completely explore the controls (ie complained about using the d-pad and buttons while stylus controls were available) and argued the game is technically very impressive (in 3D and featuring voice) even if there are a few hiccups. →  Read the rest

Review – The Force Unleashed

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Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is now the fastest selling Star Wars game of all time. Being the biggest closet Star Wars fan on this site, this was reason enough for me to check it out. The current general sentiment about the game is that it is a rental at best, and perhaps not even worth that due to a variety of issues.

Some of these gripes are valid, but others appear to be the usual negatives that spread thanks to speedy reviewers (and the comment section trolls that parrot what they hear from them). Force Unleashed is buggy and filled with many of modern gaming’s worst tropes, but it also has decent action bolstered by the sheer fun of using The Force, and it tells a story that tries hard to be worthy. →  Read the rest

The games begin to drag me down

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Apple Corps (Not to be confused with Pretentious Hipster Apple Computers) and MTV, announced today they are teaming up to create an all new music game featuring the Beatles. The Beatles have long been viewed as a gold standard of music, both because their music is awesome, and because their licensing situation is complicated, therefore making awesome music more desirable due to lack of availability.

Unfortunately, by creating a whole new game to accommodate a single band, the announcement has a sellout tinge to me. The whole point of building a phenomenally successful platform like Rock Band is to bring content to it and sell the hell out of it, while leveraging the core platform, guaranteeing huge margins – a model that has worked phenomenally well for Harmonix to date.

But when it comes to a band like the Beatles, selling even 20 million tracks at $2 per is far outshadowed by selling 2 million games at $60 per, especially after licensing fees. →  Read the rest

Review – Lock’s Quest

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My quest for time killing DS games that aren’t infantile and minimize the use of the stylus came to an abrupt end when I purchased Lock’s Quest. Lock’s Quest does use the stylus, but in a manner which doesn’t offend my manly lifestyle of sex with supermodels and drinking rye whiskey (when drawing rainbows in Kirby, I pick up a hankering for an appletini) but feels familiar, in a very mouse-like style.

This is helpful, because Lock’s Quest is a tower defense game – you construct defenses in an RTS-style world against unintelligent, persistent, and most importantly plentiful, clockwork monsters – a genre that would be unplayable without a touch screen (or a mouse).

I was unaware that tower defense was a game genre that extended beyond Warcraft 3 custom maps, but seeing as I enjoy those, I decided to see if THQ could turn them into a meaningful DS experience. →  Read the rest

A Letter

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Dear Bethesda,

It’s Christian. I hope you have been well. It has been a long time since we played together. I know those few hours in Morrowind weren’t too exciting, but I still appreciated how hard you tried. I also saw you play with some friends in Oblivion, and they all had a lot of fun.

That is why I am looking forward to our next play date. I hear you are bringing Fallout 3. I can’t wait. In case you didn’t know, Fallout is my favorite RPG series ever. I like it so much, I’d rather play them again and again than play some other RPGs for the first time. Still, I hope that we can have as much fun with Fallout 3. It shouldn’t be too hard, right Bethesda? →  Read the rest

No one who worked with Eidos should ever be taken seriously

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In a new Gamasutra editorial, Keith Boesky – “a long-standing game agent and attorney as well as former Eidos president” discusses the problems with game critics. Dismissing him immediately because he was in charge of Eidos would be unfair. I’m kidding, of course. The only reason he can’t be entirely ignored is because Gamasutra publishes his articles.

Boesky actually opens up with some insightful points. Contrasting the game industry’s critics to others, he observes that ours are nearly alone in frothing over huge budget, AAA material. We do not wait for art house games with bated breath, nor condemn anything that cost over 50 million dollars to make and is 90% spectacle.

His next idea is that people of my generation and older tend to mentally separate their passive and active media. →  Read the rest

Golden Jew’s Nuggets of Wisdom #1

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It recently occurred to me that I have a great deal of pithy wisdom to pass out, but often cannot express such wisdom in a detailed format as would traditionally befit this site. As a result, this knowledge is lost, much like many of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the QA department of Firaxis. To staunch the hemorrhaging of this critical knowledge, I bring you my irregular Nuggets of Wisdom, where I will give quick shout-outs to games, concepts, society–whatever I feel like. You are to take these nuggets and to cling to them like the final acorn a squirrel devours in a harsh winter, not knowing when the next meal will come. You will get extra points for contradicting me, and even more points for worshiping my mighty e-peen.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

A good friend of mine (actually several) have gotten back into WoW in preparation for the release of the next expansion. →  Read the rest

Battle of the Bands

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There is no question that music/rhythm games have become huge sellers across all demographics. In fact, they may just be as popular as Madden and company. With that success comes a small problem: retailers are stuffed to the gills with music games. Their boxes are often big and clunky, and there simply isn’t enough shelf and floor space for all of them.

As MTV blogger Patrick Klepek sharply points out, this issue may affect the games themselves. Walmart and other big retailers are very powerful in this industry. If they choose not to sell a niche game, no one is crying, but if you are trying to make something that could appeal to the entire market, you need to be everywhere. If Wallyworld and others decide to put a strict limit on their music games, then up and coming developers may find their chances squandered as they are denied shelf space. →  Read the rest

Retrospective – Phoenix Wright

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I rented Phoenix Wright from Gamefly sometime last month. After burning through the game, I added a few brand spanking new games to the queue for the purpose of review. Instead of sending these low availability titles, they saw fit to send me the next two PW games in a row. After a constant stream of Ace Attorney over the last month, I feel it is time to take a look the series – its strengths and weaknesses – and how Capcom should handle it in the future.

The Good
Character art: The character animations convey a lot of emotion in just a few frames. It is striking to see just how much you can understand a character simply by how they move in different situations (for example, Ema Skye’s design and movements perfectly convey the idea that she wants to be an adult, but still looks and acts like a kid). →  Read the rest

Crap Dump 10.16.08

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Do we have to?
I hope that the delay in the World of Warcraft movie (which apparently is still being planned) is a result of them deciding to not make it about Orcs and Wizards and all that crap but instead, about the broken marriages, child neglect, olestra o.d.’ing and all that stuff that goes on when people spend all their days trying to get more powerful in a game that has no point and no “end.”

Oh wait that’s already a South Park episode. I guess I’m not that funny. :(

Ok well maybe the hero could be some mama’s-basement-dwelling gamer who gets sucked into the magical WoW world like in TRON and The Last Starfighter and all those other wonderful family classics. And then the movie goes on for two years and nothing really ever happens. →  Read the rest

Review – Civilization 4: Colonization?

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I can’t even figure out exactly what the name of the Colonization remake is, so we’ll just call it Colonization 2. In an attempt to drive sales, it has Civ 4 mixed in the title, since the game leverages the Civ 4 engine (and more importantly the Civilization brand name), but you don’t actually need Civ 4 to play. Despite the confusing title, the game itself is not confusing.

Like every Firaxis effort for the past two years or so, it’s a game with a great deal of promise and terrible QA testing that is largely carried by a talented and extremely forgiving community that does Firaxis’ work for them. Interestingly, this might be why Civ Revs is currently covered in “This game sucks” threads; the community cannot mod an Xbox 360 game. →  Read the rest

Rerouting the ‘Tap

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Sorry to be a bit late in posting, but there is some important news in Gametap land. The service is being acquired by European company Metaboli, which offers a Gametap style service exclusive to Europe. The deal lays it down like so: both services will keep their names in their respective regions, and Gametap will still be maintained in Atlanta, but Time Warner will step down by year’s end and Metaboli will be in complete control of business decisions and management.

We have known since August that Time Warner has been looking to sell Gametap, so this does not come as a surprise. The question now is whether this will cause any major changes, for good or bad. For instance, price changes have been on the minds of many people on the ‘tap forums. →  Read the rest

Review – The Spirit Engine 2

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Five years ago, as a younger lad with a small budget and an unending hankering for good games, I would scour the internet searching for quality freeware. Generally my searches ended in failure; though such games existed, they often had no story and little depth. One of the few games that caught my attention, though, was The Spirit Engine. It looked polished (for the time) and had the feel of a late SNES RPG – the perfect combination. Although my interest waned over the course of several hours, and I did not complete it (though I now intend to), it was a refreshing experience for the same reasons for which I will now laud its successor.

On finding out The Spirit Engine 2 even existed several days ago, nostalgia for the original drove me to look into it. →  Read the rest

October Nintendo conference – new games, DS, xenophobia

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The October Nintendo conference, held close to the Tokyo Games Show because Nintendo are jerks and won’t go to the TGS, was received better by gamers than their last E3 show. Among the new titles shown off were Wii Punch Out, Mario & Luigi 3 for the DS, a Klonoa remake for the Wii, a Trace Memory sequel for Wii, and most importantly, Sin and Punishment 2. Beyond the slew of new games, mostly focused at the core market (us), they also announced that they would be refitting Cube games with Wii controls. Donkey Konga and Pikmin are among the confirmed reworks.

The problem with all of these nice announcements is those of us in the West have no assurance these titles will make the trip. Sin and Punishment 2 was confirmed, and Punch Out will obviously make it, but what about the smaller Wii titles like Dynamic Slash, Cosmic Walker, Endless Ocean 2, and Spawn Smasher, also all announced at this year’s show? →  Read the rest