posts by jay
jay

Features for Monster Hunter 4

by

I try to deny it but I may have secretly been interested because it’s on the Wii and as any Wii game review on most major sites will tell you over and over again the system lacks a plethora of high-quality third-party titles. Maybe it’s just that I don’t have a PSP and the series has always somewhat appealed to me. Whatever the case, I think Pat put it best when he said, “I thought the game would be fun because we could play online together but it’s legitimately a good game.” I agree, Monster Hunter is better than I expected.

Still, there are a few things Capcom could have done better to really capture that hunting spirit (I say this from a position of absolute authority as I have never been hunting in my life). →  Read the rest

Little Big Planet, Huge Enormous Marketing Budget

by

Little Big Planet 2 is in production and the gaming sites want you to know it.

Currently the front page of Edge has four LBP2 related stories running, including the top article:
An announcement of the game
A news piece on how it is not just an expansion
An article detailing the newest Edge issue, featuring a LBP2 cover story
A story on the new features

1Up is also a little LBP2 crazy, with five stories on the game including the top article:
An announcement of the game
A news piece on how it is not just an expansion
“Six Levels I’d Love To Create Using Little Big Planet 2’s New Features and Themes”
A LBP2 music announcements piece
And the LBP2 debut trailer

IGN has LBP2 as their top story but only sports two other related stories:
LBP2 preview
LBP2 supports Move
LBP2 reveal trailer

Finally, Gamespot follows suit and has a LBP2 top story:
LBP2 preview
LBP2 interview
LBP2 announcement

Gamespot and IGN are behind in terms of Little Big Planet coverage. →  Read the rest

Review – Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes

by

As my friend drove us out to eat the other night I kept envisioning our car crashing into the one in front of it and that one following suit so that we had three aligned cars that could presumably then cross some screen gap threshold in order to attack some other cars. This phenomenon is usually discussed in terms of seeing giant Tetris blocks everywhere you look but I have also experienced it in the desire to continuously roll up objects. That Clash of Heroes has begun to project itself into my real life is a sign of something – this is the best damn DS game America has ever made. So much so that it was made in Canada.

Clash of Heroes is a variant of the match three puzzle game on the surface, but deeper down it doesn’t kind of suck like Puzzle Quest. →  Read the rest

Bordello of Bugs

by

A few days ago I lost about five hours of time to the notoriously buggy Age of Empires DS. I’d waged a long war of attrition against the Taira and it was roughly round 80 when mid combat the game just froze. Majesco did put a piece of printing paper in the game’s case that warned of bugs, so really it was my own fault.

Ten minutes ago I got permanently stuck in Grandia for the PS1. A river of poison was just too magnetic for my four member party to escape and so no matter what direction I pushed, they simultaneously ran in place.

We have written about bugs and glitches many times before, but this time I have a solution. Not a useful, working or well thought out solution, but a solution none the less. →  Read the rest

Review – Devil Survivor

by

Sometimes innovation doesn’t come from wild, crazy new ideas but from the melding of old. Like combining the wheel with fire, Devil Survivor melds two of the oldest RPG battle systems and the result is a flaming tire of fun. Battles take place on a grid following the standard SRPG trope of battles taking place on grids, but when two combatants meet the map cuts to a standard turn-based party-on-party RPG system. Suffice to say, the integration of these two long lived standards is almost as exciting as the monetary standard integration of Europe following World War II.
What Yuzu lacks in personality she makes up in breasts.

Battles are entertaining and copious; free battles are always available and the grind is only mostly mind crushing and soul numbing, a definite improvement over most RPGs. →  Read the rest

iPhone to utterly destroy Nintendo and Sony

by

While searching the web for cats that look like Wilford Brimley, I stumbled upon an article on John Carmack’s view of the iPhone. He thinks it will pose a significant threat to handheld gaming devices. I think this is stupid. There are always the traditional reasons the iPhone won’t steal much thunder from handhelds: the battery life isn’t long enough and the lack of any actual tacticle buttons is a turn off for many and hampers control, but I am more fond of an analogy.

Proponents of the iPhone argue that developer freedom over content and cost will separate the platform from competitors. Let’s try this same argument to explain the death of game consoles:

Man of the Future: Did you hear about this new platform that nearly everyone in the country owns? →  Read the rest

“Screw you America” – Nintendo

by

Why doesn’t Nintendo release every game they create in every market? The traditional glib answer is some variant of “Nintendo is a business and not a charity.” This may be true, but some companies have found a way to both make money and pay tribute to their medium. For example, HBO is known for keeping shows afloat despite poor ratings. These “prestige shows” are too good to simply cancel and for the sake of television as an art, HBO keeps them on the air.

Nintendo has made billions of dollars selling video games and has some of the most dedicated fans in the industry; it seems like they should not only be a producer of games but also part of the video game vanguard by protecting and honoring interactive entertainment. Unfortunately, Nintendo and Nintendo of America more specifically simply do not agree with this philosophy. →  Read the rest

Return to Yokosuka

by

Last night I finally succeeded in persuading a friend to start Shenmue. It had been a long, drawn out affair. He agreed to play weeks ago but there was always some reason to put it off: my girlfriend was there and would be bored, a Nic Cage movie was on TV, I just got a PS3, I couldn’t find the VGA Dreamcast cable and wasn’t some sort of barbarian who could use S-video, a different Nic Cage movie was on TV, and so on.

As always happens when sharing something close to the heart with a friend, I was very nervous about how he would react. When I explained that at one time it was the best looking game on the market he said, “Yeah, this looks really good for 1991.” →  Read the rest

Breaking: Old news and images from canceled Suda game

by

Being a game journalist is hard. From thinking of sensational headlines to figuring out how to post rumors as truth, the pressure to deliver stories whether they exist or not can be crushing. Luckily there is a web forum called NeoGAF that any reputable journalist can use as a primary source without that pesky “old man journalist” idea of citing sources.

A poster on NeoGAF believed he found new information about an old Suda51 project for the PS3 that Edge magazine profiled years ago. Other forum members, being significantly more discerning than game journalists, realized this was old news, mocked the poster and then moderators locked the thread.

Instead of ending there, as a simple mistake by an excited fan on a web forum, the news was picked up by multiple outlets. →  Read the rest

Reggie asks who should make Nintendo games

by

Your favorite band wants to know who you think should compose their next album. No, that’s too obvious, try this. Your favorite author wants to know who you think should write his next book.

Reggie has asked Kotaku readers who Nintendo should collaborate with next, implying the Metroid Team Ninja project won’t be the last time Nintendo brings in outside help. The problem with calling in third parties is apparently not obvious to everyone, as fans filled forums with names like Blizzard, Team Ico, Square, Treasure and so on.

Mario games aren’t great because of the Mushroom Kingdom and Zelda games aren’t great because of Hyrule. All the themes, plots, artwork and music may add to these series but they are not fundamentally what they are about. No, Mario and Zelda games are great because one of the best developers on the planet spends three years designing each new entry. →  Read the rest

Review – Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon

by

Underneath every game’s artwork, sound effects and voice acting lies a set of core mechanics. All the extra stuff, the facade if you will, exists to enhance the mechanics and design of a game. I tend to value the facade less than the other half of the dichotomy because there are many examples of bad games with brilliant coats of paint and few if any examples of bad games with amazing design. Even so, the difference a little bit of well mixed paint can make is hard to overestimate.

Ico and Zelda are very similar games with very different facades. The former focuses on giving the play rules context and emotional resonance while the latter indulges in playful variations of its mechanics while mostly ignoring the artistry that sits atop them. →  Read the rest

March game avalanche

by

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

by

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

eBay + Japanese Games = Financial Ruin

by

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?

by

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

by

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

by

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

News We Care About Update

by

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

An ode to a fallen memory card

by

In a spontaneous fit of impatience and retardation, I recently reformatted my GameCube memory card. Tales of Symphonia, which I picked up after not having played in two years, insisted the card was corrupt and needed to be wiped clean first by the GameCube’s internal mechanism, then by being throw into a wall. Instead of thinking it through and realizing I’d just been playing Metroid Prime and it saved fine and fearing I’d lose my 30 hours of Symphonia-ing, I hit “Sure, erase all of my saved games, it’s not like I put any time or effort into them” then practiced my pitching for 15 minutes.

The bad news is it was for naught as I had no clue what I needed to do next in Symphonia. After reading all of the back story (nice feature by the way) and then wandering and sailing and giant monster riding around the map for an hour I gave up knowing it was just as well. →  Read the rest

Wii gets another once HD game

by

EA recently announced (or Twittered) that it is bringing Dead Space to the Wii. The company says they “will rival Nintendo in terms of quality,” which is frighteningly close to Ubisoft’s claim that in ’08 their Wii games would be of “Nintendo-like quality.” Of course, Ubisoft’s Wii games are shitty so EA’s bold words don’t really inspire me.

Empty promises aside, an alarming trend is beginning to emerge – HD games with watered down Wii ports. I am a proponent of good games getting wider audiences and if you’re reading this site you’re likely a “core” gamer, in which case you likely agree with me (unless you’re one of those casuals-gone-core via GTA and Halo who hates the fact that people who aren’t 16-21 year old males play games). Games that expand gaming’s audience is good for the industry – people who wouldn’t play these games now may, and there’s the potential casual gamers move upstream by buying other core titles. →  Read the rest