DS

Review – Retro Game Challenge

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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. The twist is that none of them are “real” Famicom games, but instead are new retro styled games meant to parody and champion a variety of classic titles from the era. →  U R Not lamE.

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. Apparently that puts me ahead of the experts who made this game. →  Read Danger!

Review – Chrono Trigger

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Chrono Trigger is an embarrassment for the gaming industry. Straight up embarrassment. It’s embarrassing that a game that is over ten years old can be so well made as to put many current games to shame. It’s like the Roman Empire, without all of the strange pedophiliac tendencies but all of the impressive works of art.

Chrono Trigger is the latest in a series of Square-Enix remakes designed to milk old titles for every last dollar and yen. Like Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger is a game that I somehow missed (though I did play the under appreciated Chrono Cross at some point).

Chrono Trigger is, simply put, a pleasure to play. The casual gaming experience (by which I mean, the fights, going from A to B, etc) completely trumps a game like Dragon Quest. The characters have diverse skill sets and magic, individual elemental affinities, and attacks that allow them to team up in pairs or trios depending on who is in your party. →  The Adventures of Cookie and Read

Review – Dragon Quest IV

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For many, the Dragon Warrior/Quest franchise has a great deal of meaning, nostalgia and history. I remember playing Dragon Warrior on the NES when I was a young whippersnapper. I also remember that when faced with a choice at the end of joining the last boss or killing him, I decided to join him. The screen acquired an orange glow and my Nintendo froze. Was that what was supposed to happen? After my orange experience, I never touched a Dragon Warrior game again.

Dragon Quest IV, a Square Enix port of the original to the DS, presented an opportunity to reacquaint myself with the franchise. Having just run through the remake of Final Fantasy IV, I had high hopes that Square Enix would have scrubbed through the original and done away with any lingering issues to create a superior RPG experience, as they had in FFIV. While the makeover was not as extreme as FFIV received, the original game experience has enough strengths to compete with today’s DS RPG options. →  Read like G did.

“Handheld games suck” say reviewers

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The best reviewed PSP game on Metacritic is God of War at a 91, on the DS Chrono Trigger just edged out Mario Kart, the game’s scores are 94 and 91 respectively. The GBA’s highest rated game is Link to the Past at 95.

On the console side the top reviewed games are the Grand Theft Autos, Halos, Marios and Zeldas, spanning from 95 to 99. Console game scores for the top games seem to be significantly higher and the high ranking handheld games are either console franchises or direct ports of console games.

So what is going on here?

There are two possible explanations I can think of. Handheld games could actually be worse than console games. This may be true to someone subjectively, but it seems an absurd position for professional reviewers to adopt. It’s like saying strippers are better than clowns. Maybe it is true to some people in some situations, but as a universal truth it just doesn’t pan out. →  [do not click]

Review – Rondo of Swords

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What we have already played shapes our opinions of new games. To an SRPG fan, a game like Luminous Arc is old hat. Yet people new to the genre may be taken in by the musical score, voice acting, interesting story and quality breast-focused character art. Without knowing what has come before, the game seems competent enough and can provide some good strategic fun.

The experienced SRPG fan likely sees Luminous Arc in a very different light. Its serviceable gameplay is often boring and it does very little to distinguish itself from older SRPGs beyond the innovative addition of painful load times between character turns. If you have played an SRPG or two in the past few years you will miss little by ignoring Luminous Arc. Of course if you are partial to the genre you may have already played the game and then realized the wallpaper images are the best thing to come from the design team.

Rondo of Swords would likely strike an SRPG novice as abstruse, masochistically difficult and ugly in both sight and sound. →  It’s not you, it’s me.

I fought the law and the law won – Tactics A2

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I picked up Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift the other day and was initially very pleased to be playing it. I missed out on Tactics Advance on the GBA, but I am a longtime fan of the original. With about a hojillion classes, and the weapon-based learning system of FF9 (my personal favorite) I was immediately hooked.

But those details can wait for the full review. What I want to talk about is the law system. For those of you who haven’t yet played a portable Tactics, the law system is a mechanic that assigns a “law” to every battle. The laws aren’t your usual “no killing your neighbor” or “no raping your neighbor’s dog.” Instead they’re more Ivalice-relevant “no use of fire spells” or “no magic restoration items.” If you obey the law, you get bonus items at the end of the fight. In some cases, if you break the law, you fail specific quests.

This wouldn’t bother me but for two instances, one of which was annoying but possibly excusable, but a second that proves Squenix employs either sadists (possible, the Japanese have weird fetishes) or lazy programmers. →  Readius III and IV

Apple and Agents (of the Elite Beat variety)

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The Apple/Nintendo rumor mill has existed for a few years now, usually popping up quarterly or biannually with either a rumor about the two companies, or simple posturing about them. This leads to armies of geeks believing a merger is imminent, even though there is no proof or even any grumblings from either company about it. People simply look at how similar the two companies are, and somehow put two and two together (even if there is nothing to put together).

But maybe we are getting smarter about this inane trend. This time around, Forbes looks at how the iPhone might kill the Nintendo DS. The article cites the iPhone’s touch screen and accelerometer abilities as combining the features of the Wii and the DS. It also claims that the ability to quickly and easily download software wirelessly will make gaming simple and painless. Fair points to be sure, but it fails to address several massive advantages that the DS has, as well as some simple facts from the past. →  Game. James Game.

Quick Impressions – The World Ends with You

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I’ve put around five hours into The World Ends with You and besides the “I cut myself to see if I can still feel pain” emo moniker I am very pleased. The battle system makes use of both DS screens simultaneously and though movement of your character via stylus is sort of spotty, everything ultimately works together nicely. The music is absurd Japanese pop that’s both infectious and terrible and the graphics are very stylized – this is one of the few DS games that has a AAA presentation and Squeenix deserves praise for actually trying. Of course the game flopped in Japan and will likely follow suit worldwide, so their effort will be entirely unrewarded and they will realize what a huge mistake taking a chance was. Life is back to normal.

The translation is very well done and includes a number of inside jokes. “Spoony Bard” pops up as well as a reference to Fawful’s glorious dialog in Super Star Saga (food of choice + “of your doom!” →  Fire Post Wrestling Returns

Review – Shiren the Wanderer

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Shiren the Wanderer is the video game equivalent of Candide. Think of something that can go wrong and it will, but not in the normal “I locked my keys in my car” kind of way. Like its literary inspiration, things don’t just not work out, they go absurdly wrong. As in “I locked my tiger in my car but forgot to unstrap my newborn child from the baby seat” wrong.

Shiren meets so many untimely deaths so often that it seems the game is mocking you. The most ridiculous deaths at least allow you to join in the laughter. For example, on the last level of the game a minotaur picked me up and threw me into a corner, then proceeded to pick up and hurl another minotaur at my head, followed by an undead mage, followed by the final boss itself. Had the mage not already sealed my ability to use items I may have stood a chance, but in the state I was in all I could do was wait for each of these enemies to take turns pummeling me. →  Assassin’s Read