Armored Princess Review: Part III

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When I initially conceived of the idea of writing episodic reviews I planned on concluding the series when I had also finished the game. Well I haven’t finished Armored Princess yet, but it’s also been almost two months since I posted part one of this review. I think the time has come to wrap this up. Actually it’s probably way past time. But better late than never I suppose.

Anyway, I spent part one and part two talking about different individual aspects of the game, so I’ll finish this by summarizing my feelings of the game as a whole.

THE REVIEW OF THE ARMORED PRINCESS
– Part III: The End is Another Beginning –

This is the kind of game that I enjoy playing for reasons completely unrelated to any of the gameplay or presentation that I’ve mentioned so far. →  Read the rest

Nuggets of Wisdom – Slime that Designer!

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As a gamer, I’m often puzzled by decisions game designers make. This most often occurs with MMOs, where the eternal question of “poor decision or lack of resources?” seems to apply, but many console games come to mind, like the Gears of War magic chainsaw. Of course, as a gaming consumer, I am simply the target of disdain, condescension, and of course greed of the gaming industry. I sat pondering my frustration with the lack of two-way communication about design decisions in an era where second guessing the experts is the norm: we can go on WebMD and diagnose ourselves, yet I can’t get a straight answer out of a game designer. I’ve often wondered what it’d be like to sit down with a game designer and get the real scoop on why they did something in their game that makes absolutely no sense. →  Read the rest

Review – Sands of Destruction

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How is it that nobody can make a good JRPG for the DS? Some remakes have been all right, and a strategy RPG or two have been good. But every original RPG for the system seems somehow tainted by the platform. Black Sigil, Nostalgia, Beyond the Yellow Brick Road – hell, even a Suikoden spin-off was barely up to par on the system. Sands of Destruction is sadly no exception.

This isn’t to say it’s a bad game. Sands of Destruction’s problem isn’t that it’s actually bad – it’s just that it’s never good. It manages to be almost entirely middle-of-the-road throughout, with no particularly exciting moments and only a few terribly boring ones. Its plot has an interesting premise, but gets dragged down by bland characters and predictable twists. →  Read the rest

Review – Torchlight

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Torchlight should be branded with a warning. The game is pornographic, it’s number porn and clicking porn with a Tolkienesque fantasy fetish thrown into the mix. After loading the game there is a brief introduction to set the scene, and immediately the player begins clicking madly on everything moving.

With each click the characters moan, scream, and produce other sounds juicy with stimulation. Of course it’s not the meaning of the sound they make, it’s the fact that each of these noises is calculated to be so brief and repetitious, fading in and out instantly and producing a peak at just the right tone. It elicits pleasure in the player’s brain, and without thinking he or she understands that another such buzz is only a click away. When the clicking is finished, the number action begins. →  Read the rest

Valve Be Trippin’

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I think of Valve as both the most interesting and depressing developer we have.  Interesting because they are a shining example of what can happen when you give time, money, and freedom to developers.  Depressing because they are an increasingly obvious outlier.  If armchair analysis of the industry were a fighting game, Valve would be the character banned from tournament play.   It just wouldn’t be fair.

That being said, we can still admire their most recent bout of antics.  Earlier this week, the company released a series of parody images that inserted Valve characters into classic Apple advertisements.  That might not sound entirely clever, but this is Valve we’re talking about.  They always have tricks up their sleeve.  Each of the fake ads was sent to just one news site, and the one that has actual text in it is an incredible homage to the rambling copy Apple used in the 80’s (90’s too?).   →  Read the rest

Ragin’ Again

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The God of War 3 demo is out.  Let’s discuss!

– Dear Sony – screw you.  I understand that you wanted to put a demo out right before the game is released.  Everyone does it (or at least they should do it).  But you’ve got a lot of guts to then go ahead and tell the world that yes, this is the same thing you showed at E3 2009.    I might be reading too much into this one, but I think this is quite a daring bit of marketing psychology.  Sony knows that “core” gamers would kill to be able to attend E3 and feel like they’re actually a part of the industry.  Putting this label on the demo is a great way to convince this audience that, through their benevolence, Sony is giving them an opportunity to be part of the Secret Fraternity of Real Games Journalists, if only for a few minutes. →  Read the rest

SNK A-OK

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If you’ve ever read any of my reviews of SNK games, you will know that I had an absurd fascination with the firm’s US branch.  For the most part, they were a complete and utter mystery.  The quality and frequency of their releases fluctuated constantly, and since they barely talked to the press, any and all rumors about their status were allowed to fly around.   I finally stopped trying to keep score  sometime last year, when suddenly every SNK game was being released by other publishers.  Ignition handled the localization of Metal Slug 7 and King of Fighters 12, and Atlus just released Metal Slug XX this week.  I figured that the US branch was finally done for, and that the folks in Japan were now just cutting deals themselves with interested publishers. →  Read the rest

Review – Vandal Hearts: Flame of Judgment

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Watching a beloved series re-emerge after years of lying dormant is always disconcerting. On the one hand, it’s nice to see developers expand on a world already well-fleshed out and attempt to recapture something that was thought lost forever. On the other hand, it may be worse to have a crappy sequel than to have no sequel at all. Worst of all would be a sequel that’s good enough to look promising and manages to recreate many of the best elements of the series, but ends up being mediocre and only dulls the series in the fans’ eyes. The last, unfortunately, is the case with Vandal Hearts: Flame of Judgment, a western-developed entry in Konami’s strategy RPG series.

It’s not that the game doesn’t have good elements. On the contrary, it’s brimming with promise: there’s an impressively deep skill system that makes leveling transparent and continual; variety in the missions ultimately makes several scenarios better than many in the original Vandal Hearts games; bonus “treasure” maps allow for hidden stages, and skirmish maps let the grind-lovers do their thing. →  Read the rest

Resident Evil 4 Revisited

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Recently, a brand spanking new copy of Resident Evil 4 for the Wii caught my eye. Reduced to clear and put in the shop window of a generic electronics shop in London’s laughable ‘electronics mile’, I couldn’t face the heart break over the thought of that particular copy of that gem of a game slowly yellowing and fading in the shop window, destined to be ignored by the people looking to buy new headphones or a replacement ipod nano charger.

So now I have two copies of Resident Evil 4. One for the PS2. One for the Wii. I should buy the Gamecube version to complete the shelf. Feeling slightly embarrassed in my hideous capitalist material ways with the realisation that there are people in this very world who struggle to have potable water or enough food to survive and here I am, Cunzy “two copies of Resident Evil 4” they call me now. →  Read the rest

NISA, no sir

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I haven’t played any games localized by NISA, save for the 15 minutes I’ve spent with Disgaea on PSP.  Yet I find myself fascinated with the company, thanks to the many stories of I hear of the mind boggling mistakes and blunders they have suffered over time.  Here are a few that I have heard of, complete with links to disappointed gamers discussing them (warning – links may contain dangerous doses of weeaboo).

– Ar Tornelico 2 features poor translation, loss of vocal work, and a crash bug for one of the last bosses.

– DLC for Disgaea 2 on PSP pulled, then returned after being buggy.

– Disgaea visual novel officially announced with a typo ridden, horribly awkward sounding  comic.

– Holy Invasion of Privacy Badman! (What did I do to Deserve This?) →  Read the rest

Review – Children of the Nile / Alexandria

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Children of the Nile is a continuation, and possibly the final installment of the fairly successful Pharaoh series, taking advantage of the excellent setting of ancient Egypt as a basis for a robust city builder. The people of ancient Egypt are civilized enough to be needy bastards– a prerequisite for any builder, and in an era filled with war and great deeds, we’re off to the races of conquest and glory.

COTN’s greatest strength, without a doubt, is the ecosystem of its city. Your people have multiple “tiers” of social standing, with each level having its own behavior and needs. Your job, of course, is to keep those needs satisfied so their efforts can be directed towards doing useful things for you: killing your enemies and building great works in your name. →  Read the rest

Armored Princess Review: Part II

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Sometime while I was busy writing about how much the PC is awesome and how much BioShock sucks I realized that I was still actively playing King’s Bounty: Armored Princess and I’m overdue in my second review installment. I’m probably about half way through the game at this point. Considering I’ve spent a total of 35 hours so far, part of my brain is telling me to play something else that I have hope of finishing; but I just keep trudging on anyway.

Part 1 was about the world of Armored Princess. It dealt with things that people tend to think don’t matter in games. Whenever a critic rambles on about inconsistent details in fantasy worlds then they can expect insane fans to blow their comment section through the roof with defamatory accusations. →  Read the rest

Why I Like Playing Games at my Desk

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I like to think of myself as above silly things like console wars, but let’s face it, we all have our certain preferences. When we were kids our preferences came from the fact that our parents would only buy us one console, so whichever one we got was automatically the best. Nintendo’s exclusives were always better than Sega’s exclusives. Sony’s exclusives better than Microsoft’s. Of course if you happened to be the kid who got a Genesis or an Xbox then the reverse became true. As an adult I’m mature enough to understand that each piece of hardware has its own strengths and weaknesses, and each deserve the same amount of respect. But I’m also a human, and I have certain tastes and preferences. They aren’t based on exclusives or brand names anymore, just my personal style. →  Read the rest

Weekend in Review

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Pat came to town last weekend and we took a break from our regularly scheduled God Hand and Shining Force 3 to play a bunch of games we had but had yet to really play. Our backlog is daunting so spending 30 hours skipping from disc to disc felt productive, even if we only finished two titles.

Superman 64
Superman 64 is a landmark game by French developer Titus. No other Superman title has focused primarily on flying through hoops while Lex Luthor laughs. Widely regarded as unplayable, we began our weekend here with high hopes.

Pat: Over the past several months, Jay and I have been stockpiling a collection of the worst games ever made (guess how many Sega CD games we have) and of course this would have to be among them. →  Read the rest

Building a Mystery… I mean a City Builder

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Growing up, I was a huge fan of Legos. Loved the damn things–I think I spent time after grade school every day building Legos and watching old Batman reruns (POW!). Now that I’m an adult, it’s not really appropriate for me to build Legos, but it is OK for me to play video games. This is probably why I gravitate towards city building games: I like the act of creation, and seeing the fruits of my labor, even if not a damn street in the city goes in a straight line because I am a creature of impulse.

While recently lamenting the lack of new city builders (triggered by playing Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and associated expansions yet again), I decided to dig around for some of the “golden oldie” city builders. →  Read the rest

Looking Back at BioShock

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The release date for BioShock 2 is around the corner; the game is already available for preorder in some places. So I’m going to take this moment to look back at the first game. BioShock one was kind of a big deal when it came out, and it still is; not a lot of games make it to the high 90s on Metacritic. Michael Abbot of brainygamer.com calls it “one of the defining games of its generation.” Calling three years ago a different generation is odd, but given the speed that the videogame culture moves, it’s not unreasonable. For better or for worse the statement is hard to dispute. BioShock left a lasting impression. Journalists for non-game oriented publishers even cite it as an example of how games can be an expressive art form. →  Read the rest

Review – Eve Online Dominion

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Being primarily an MMO gamer for the past decade, I am continually amazed at my ability to be angry when developers release an untested pile of crap and demand you pay for it–which of course a gamer will. However, much as an old faithful geyser, my naiveté and then resulting hatred spring eternal. The latest source of my ire is none other than my mistress Eve’s latest expansion: Dominion.

Eve has continued to capture my attention for a variety of reasons. It remains an incomparable sandbox of player driven activity, a unique novelty amongst the “theme park” style that dominates MMOs today. The fact that it is a single server, one giant, interrelated universe also adds to its charm. And finally, the fact that their expansion packs, as a result of the other two reasons, are always free works to developer’s CCP’s favor. →  Read the rest

Armored Princess Review: Part I

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I’ve been playing King’s Bounty: Armored Princess for almost sixteen hours now. For lots of games that would mean I’m approaching the ending, or perhaps I even surpassed the ending and cycled back to the beginning for another playthrough. Such is not the case with this game, I’ve only traveled to two and a half islands out of… I’m not sure. But judging by my incomplete map I’ve only covered a small percentage of the world. This is my primary motivation for taking a break and writing a partial review. It makes no sense to me if I wait another week or month to complete the entire game and then write a review summarizing all of the dozens of hours, at least those that I can recollect. Is it unfair to judge a game I have not yet finished? →  Read the rest

Resist the Temptation

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I just recently finished Resistance: Retribution on PSP. I’m not sure how I feel about it.  On one hand, I played through its campaign in three straight nights of gaming, which means it was least somewhat addictive.  On the other hand, I was so thoroughly finished with it by the end that I sent it back to Gamefly without exploring any of the extra content.  The entire experience can be summed up in this kind of love/hate duality.  For example, I admire how well developer Sony Bend managed to capture the scope and style of the setting on a more limited piece of hardware.  On the other hand, I couldn’t stand how many assets from their Syphon Filter PSP games were reused.  It isn’t just the control scheme they took — sounds effects, character animations, and even large chunks of the in game menus were reused in Retribution.  →  Read the rest

Blood N’ Guts

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This week, Sega announced that they plan to make few Mature Wii games.  Capcom followed with a similar statement (which they had to clarify with simple PR speak).  Some folks seem to be in a frenzy over the news, so let us slow down and parse it a bit.

Yes, their decision is a bit puzzling at first glance.  They claim that some of their M rated games, like Madworld and House of the Dead: Overkill, sold as well as they expected, yet the failure of games like EA’s Dead Space: Extraction scares them.  Why be scared of someone else’s failure when your own product is doing “well enough” by your own standards? Because while small companies like Atlus build their business model around games that can keep them afloat with modest sales, Sega is (or pretends to be) a bigger entity that wants and needs bigger numbers.  →  Read the rest