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Review – Portal

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Portal is a fantastic little game that really compliments Valve’s Orange Box compilation. If it were just a Half-Life collection with Team Fortress thrown in (as it pretty much always was with the PC versions of the franchise) then the Orange Box would still be a steal at $60, but Portal adds some great new game play and some interesting story elements to the Half-Life universe. The only problem I have with the game is that it’s too short, which isn’t the worst problem you could have.

Starting with a tech demo called Narbacular Drop, the student developers at DigiPen caught the attention of the Valve team and it’s easy to see why. I haven’t played an FPS or adventure game in a long time that had me scratching my head like some of the puzzles Portal throws at you. →  Post of Tsushima

PS1 games you may have missed: More RPGs edition

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In my last entry I took a break from mentioning RPGs. Since, however, RPGs are my favorite genre, you’re just going to have to live with a few more of them now.

Before we begin, I would like to briefly mention the first two games of both the Suikoden and Wild ARMs series. I have discussed them in more detail elsewhere, but all four are great games.

Lunar & Lunar 2: Originally released on Sega CD, these classic games were once again translated by Working Designs. Therein lies a lot of the appeal of the Lunars: Not only do you get a solid battle system, you also get a fun-filled localization. The voice acting leaves something to be desired, and the translation isn’t always true to the original, but the Lunars were the first games where I enjoyed simply running around talking to people in towns. →  Hey, hey, hey, it’s time to make some crazy reading!

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 10.5.07

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Dream team created to make MMO
One of the three guys behind Fallout and 17 ex-Blizzard guys all in one development team? You know these are going to be amazingly well crafted fetch quests that change absolutely nothing in a static MMO world. And think of the grinding!

Halo 3 is the biggest event in human history
The release of Halo 3 makes John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald look like footnotes in history. The moon landing is dwarfed by Bungie’s newest game, which sold approximately thirty thousand times more than any other product ever created. There are now significantly more copies of Halo 3 than wheels, and just about the same number of grains of sand.

This game topped the charts in Japan last week, proving that in a tepid market environment an American game can actually sell well in the East. →  It was the best of games, it was the worst of games

Review – Rune Factory

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Game flow usually follows a straightforward path. In any Zelda game, you adventure, find items, speak to an odd character like Tingle, then adventure some more. The adventuring itself is compelling because it is great fun and the items you receive for adventuring often add a new play mechanic and unlock new areas for adventuring — it’s a very simple loop that has worked well for 20 years.

A game like The Sims is significantly more complex but the game flow is still easy to understand. The players micromanage their Sims in order to gain skills and keep their various meters high. In turn, they are rewarded with job promotions because they are skilled, socially relevant, and come to work with full stomachs and empty bladders. With the promotion money, players extend their homes, plant bushes and buy new furniture and electronics. →  I’m readin’ here!

I hate Halo and I hate Final Fantasy

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Not because I’m one of those rebellious gamers who thinks hating popular franchises is cool (though it is cool, you should try it), and not because Halo and Final Fantasy games are bad. I hate mega-popular franchises because gamers love them too much.

Every copy of Halo 3 sold tells Microsoft they should pay for a dozen more “I’m a big guy with a big gun and I plan on shooting you in the face, also there are aliens or Germans” games for the 360. Every copy of Final Fantasy Crisis Core sold sends the message to Square that they are right to limit original output and they should in fact support their enormous company by releasing 4,000 titles in the same series (or two).

Really I’m not mad at these games at all, but rather I’m mad at gamers. →  The Adventures of Cookie and Read

A deeper look into Nintendo’s bling

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Nintendo’s recent ascension to become the second largest company in Japan has been making news on a few sites which track the business aspect of video games. While it is true that a company’s market capitalization (basically a measure of what the stock market thinks a company is worth) has grown by leaps and bounds of late (as will happen when the price shoots up as much as Nintendo’s has) some of the underlying financial numbers are even more fascinating than the headlines.

By market cap, Nintendo is substantially larger than Sony (Nintendo is worth about $75 billion, to Sony’s $47 billion). In truth, this metric is only one way to judge the size of a company. What’s another, you may ask? How about sales, I answer. Sony’s sales are leaps and bounds higher than Nintendo’s. →  Who is that standing behind you?

PSP-2000: Two years too late

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Last month saw the introduction of the new PSP Slim. I gave my personal impressions on the silver unit earlier, but I wanted to go more in-depth with what the system means for Sony overall. In the last few years, Sony has been on a constant downward spiral in terms of consumer popularity. With a $600 system that has very few games and a handheld system that’s been out for more than two years and still has a less than stellar software lineup, Sony’s Golden Age has clearly been tarnished.

But I will say this: Sony has restored my faith in them with the PSP Slim. It’s an amazing piece of tech, no small thanks to the newly added video-out option through separate component video cables. If you were on the fence about the the first model, I can wholeheartedly recommend getting the Slim model. →  Xenoblade Articles X

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 9.21.07

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PSP outsells DS in Japan
Square’s Final Fantasy VII spin off for the PSP, Crisis Core, sold half a million copies last week. It also sold PSPs. Possibly not all of the 95 thousand Sony sold in the week, but likely around 80 thousand, which is how many more units were sold than the previous week. Sony’s business strategy should be clear – simply release a spinoff of one of the most beloved games of all time once a week and the PSP will handily outsell the DS in Japan 1.2 to 1.

Or, to quote someone from a forum I read:
“If DS stopped selling and PSP continued at this rate, it would catch up in 139.7 weeks (May 21, 2010).”

Does anyone else feel nauseous?

Home delayed till Spring
Good for Sony. →  An article approaches.
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Dual Shock 3 please, with a side of rumble

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Well, it’s official, rumble is back. Officially dubbed the Dual Shock 3, Sony has “listened” to its fans and added the most basic of features to their much scoffed-at SIXAXIS controller. Isn’t it amazing?!

Yeah, not really. This should have been implemented with the PS3 before it even came out. This is Sony playing catch-up, but it’s not the cool kind, especially when they make people spend $600 on something that lacks an integral piece of the gaming equation.

And why did I surround the word listen with quotation marks in my introduction, you ask? It’s simple, my dear reader. Other than being clever/snooty, I was trying to point out that Sony knew not having rumble in their PS3 controller was a serious problem the entire time. They didn’t need to listen to their consumers to see if it was a problem or not. →  Tokyo Xtreme Reader: Drift 2

Dreamcast Mania! – Great games you can’t get anywhere else

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Videolamer noticed that in our attempts to keep Dreamcast Mania! alive, so very many of our articles were about the things we missed out on, rather than a celebration of what we had. That changes now. Today we will be going over some of the absolute best games the DC (and only the DC) has to offer. These are not only the reasons why we loved it, but while we still do. These are the games that make it a system still worth owning and playing (meaning you won’t find games like Third Strike, which has a superior PS2 port).

Oh, and I only have a paragraph to describe each game. Prepare for distilled glory.

Soul Calibur – As far as I am concerned, the only game in the Soul series that you can argue was better than this one (and have me actually listen to you) is Soul Blade. →  Max Post 2: The Fall of Max Post

Do bad games get better as they drop in price?

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Game Revolution gave Excite Truck a C, partly because it wasn’t worth 50 bucks. Does this mean that when the game sells for $20 they will change the review score to a B?

Factoring cost into a game’s review has always been something I try to avoid. It is very difficult to do. As much as I pretend games should be considered as stand-alone pieces of art and should not be compared to other things you could do with the money, this is at least partially idealistic bullshit. If a crappy $10 downloadable game is a waste of time, maybe it wouldn’t be at $1, and part of the reason it’s a waste of time is because an episode of Sam & Max is only $8. Clearly, on at least some level, it makes sense to consider the cost of a game when deciding whether you should recommend it to potential buyers. →  Finger lickin’ read.

Guitar’d Hero – Downloadable song packs sell like lightning

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Guitar Hero 2 on the 360 is making Activision loads of cash monies thanks to its downloadable content.

This is interesting on several levels. For one, I find it curious that people are gobbling up these song packs when all but one of them feature tracks from Guitar Hero 1. If you haven’t played GH1, then the packs are a no-brainer, but I personally will never play Smoke on the Water again after five staring it (great song to hear, boring as fuck to play through to the end).

Of course the news is outraging the Kids of the Internet (uh-woo-oh), who are quick to call us “Sheep” for buying these packs at a high price point. Aside from the fact that I haven’t actually bought them myself, I’m still cringing at this nerd rage. →  Contains 10% more consonants than comparable articles.

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 9.7.07

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Molyneux takes a shocking stand – his company is more influential than its competitor
In a recent interview, designer Peter Molyneux said that Microsoft’s Live will be more impactful than the Wii remote. Molyneux was clearly kidding – would anyone use the non-word “impactful” in a serious statement?

Pretend he was serious. Is Live more influential than motion sensing controls? This is not easy to answer, partly because it’s comparing apples to gypsies, partly because the Wii is very young and partly because in some form, both things being compared have already existed for years. At its base level, Live is the internet. Should we thank Al Gore for being more impactful on games than Microsoft? If that’s too far a leap, what about X-Band on the Genesis or SNES? Surely Seganet was impactful as all get out. →  I got served!

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 8.31.07

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Nintendo stops whoring out Metroid, or at least Retro stops
Please, let Retro make a game it wants to make. I know you own them and want to assign them to a franchise because franchises make all the bling, but it’s really not in your (my) best interest. You have no “mature” themed franchises left, unless you’re giving them the next console Zelda. An excellent developer like Retro also deserves to be rewarded – let them design a game from the ground up. It could be dark, with nudity and blood everywhere. Perhaps bloody nipples. You know, mature.

You would get what you need out of them – an awesome title for the older gamer who is too insecure to play something cute and candy colored. Retro would get what (I assume) they want – the chance to make a game without being assigned 75% of the design. →  Jet fuel can’t melt videolamer.

Metal Gear Silly 4

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I should begin this blog with a disclaimer – I have played all of the Metal Gear Solid games, and sooner or later I know I will play 4. With that out of the way, I want to say that the hype for MGS4 can get puzzling at best.

Now I’m not saying that the game deserves no hype. Anything MGS is guaranteed to get people talking, and for good reason. It just seems weird. Unless I wasn’t paying attention, it felt like MGS3 had the least amount of hype and talk before its release, and yet it for my money its the best game in the series. Now with MGS4 we get a new trailer ever few months, and from just this we’ve got floods of comments where people are already claiming it to be the best game of this generation. →  Silent Post 2

Super Metroid lands on VC, slaps your face

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…and makes you its bitch. Super Metroid, regarded as one of the best games of all time, has become available for a meager eight dollars through the all-mighty Virtual Console service. EIGHT DOLLARS! If you don’t take the smallest of steps to secure this game on your Wii, then may God herself have mercy on your soul.

But seriously, get Super Metroid. You’ll be surprised how accurate all those crazy fanboys on the net really were. It really is one of the greatest games of all time. I myself would say that it is the best 2D adventure ever made, and any gamer should play it at least once. You owe it to yourself to part with that $8 you stole from ol’ Granny.

Trust me, if she played Super Metroid, she would have done the same thing.

Review – Halo 2 Vista

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Is Halo 2 for Windows Vista Worth Your Hard Earned Cash?

If you’re reading this (which you clearly are) I assume that you fall into one of two categories:

1. You are thinking of re-buying your favorite XBOX game for the PC and are wondering if $50 for a three year old game that you already have might be worth it.

2. You want to get a well detailed laugh at the people in category #1.

So, sure, I’ll save you some precious expending of your literacy skill and humor you with the summary of this review: Of course not.

But you already knew that. Unless you suffer from chronic short term memory, and frequent Books-A-Million every ten minutes to pick up your copy of Teen People, you don’t need me to tell you not to buy things that you already bought. →  Read or die.

Pieces of a Perfect Game: Koei’s arduous slip into mediocrity

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Good strategy games can be hard to come by on consoles. The only company that reliably produces games in the genre is Koei, and, as I’ve noted before, their recent track record is not so good.

Koei is now widely known for their willingness to recycle old work in the form of Dynasty Warriors – to put it more nicely, they haven’t fixed anything that isn’t broken in a while. Their lesser-known, but longer-running, Romance of the Three Kingdoms series is now on its eleventh iteration. I haven’t gotten the latest one yet, because by now I’ve figured it out (took me long enough): Koei has a secret recipe for the ultimate officer-based strategy game, but they insist on releasing it a piece at a time.

You don’t even have to look within the series itself. →  Please sir, can I have some more?

Game genres and classifications

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Recently I’ve been enjoying Gungrave Overdose, which you might remember as being reviewed as a solid little action game with a ridiculous 15 dollar retail price. With a solid combat system and great presentation, you could do a lot worse in the genre.

The question is, what genre am I talking about? The obvious answer is that this is an “action game”. But even though you shoot many enemies, this isn’t Gears of War or Rainbow Six. Gungrave is all about racking up multiple kills in a row with successive attacks, and using your limited arsenal to create combos. Playing it as a simple run-and-gun makes it a far more mindless experience than it actually is. So to be more specific, I would classify this as a “Devil May Cry”- like, something that most reviews agree with. →  All I want for Christmas is my PSP.

On licensed games

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Licensed games are probably the last thing an avid gamer would be worried about. Aside from the occasional gem, they are quite often the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of quality. I still worry about them however, and there are plenty of reasons to do so. Let’s take a look at why.

The most important thing to understand about the modern licensed game is that it has changed greatly since the old days. Time was when video games were just another niche to exploit. They were never a primary source of profit, and so they never got a lot of money or attention. If they could whip up something playable and use marketing strength to sell enough copies, then that was good enough. Thus you had just about every movie or cartoon character finding their way into some sort of platformer or shooter. →  Theme Postital