Reviews

Review – King of Fighters XII

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The King of Fighters XII has been out for close to four months. I have had it since day one. I apologize for the delay, but I finally came to terms with why it took me so long. KOF XII is not a good game, and my old review tried to hide it by going over every detail and feature while ignoring the big picture. And the big picture is not pretty.

Here’s the problem – SNK had a vision, one that involved taking this franchise in a slightly new direction. Tag battles, quicker combat, and a new story and new characters were all in the cards. It may not be what everyone wanted, but it was a good excuse to keep the series going well after it probably should have died. →  Read the rest

Review – Shadow Hearts

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Continuing my trend of catching up on PS2 RPGs, I picked up the Shadow Hearts series a few months ago. Since a recent spate of games (including Demon’s Souls, which seems to be a videolamer favorite) has kept me busy, I’m just now making my way through the series. The PS2 may have an impressive spread of RPGs – as I’ve discovered, still playing games I had barely heard about – but Shadow Hearts really stands apart, despite being an early game on the system that hasn’t really aged well.

By far the most impressive part of Shadow Hearts is the atmosphere. Set a little over a year before World War I and taking place in both East Asia and Western Europe, SH manages to portray a surprisingly realistic world, given its focus on demons both internal and external. →  Read the rest

Review – The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

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The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, was not simply good relative to other licensed games. It is one of the best games in its genre, both upon release and to this very day. People with no interest in the genre have picked it up and had a blast. Shooter fans were stunned that something that looked so derivative on the surface could be so engaging. While it might not have been quite the miracle that Goldeneye was, it was still a blessing, and hopes were high that developer Starbreeze Studios could take their formula and strike gold again with The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.

Let this be another lesson on the importance of execution when it comes to making a good game. All of the elements that made Butcher Bay a classic are back, but arranged so that they have hardly any potency. →  Read the rest

Review – League of Legends

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League of Legends, the stand alone Defense Of The Ancients clone released by Riot Games, bills itself as better than DOTA. The good news: it lives up to its billing. Without a doubt, LoL is a superior product to DOTA. This should not be surprising. Being able to draw from established source material, recruit one of the recent caretakers of the map (Pendragon) and build a real, non-volunteer design team, made the first part of Riot Games’ job easy. But credit should be given where credit is due: these ingredients do not automatically make a good game, but Riot has ensured that they have taken the best of DOTA and added much more.

As one would expect, there is much to love about LoL. The evolution of the DOTA concept can be extended to two distinct aspects: the community interface, and the game itself. →  Read the rest

Review – Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon

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After a few minutes of playing Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon I realized that this was a game that I’ve always wanted to play but never knew existed until recently. I was quite late to the party since the game came out in the early 90s, back when point and click adventures were cool and “interactive movie” sounded like something futuristic and not something cheesy. It was also a time when technology didn’t quite know what to do with itself; for some reason Access Software couldn’t quite figure out how to use a keyboard and mouse to make someone move around a 2.5D world in a way that makes sense, and there are specific instances where the smooth gameplay suddenly breaks into jagged fragments.

Nonetheless, it’s fascinating to be able to load Tex Murphey in DOSBOX and travel back in time to the past’s virtual imagining of the future. →  Read the rest

Review – Ninja Blade

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They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but don’t tell that to us gamers. We love to find copycats and string them up. Whether it is this year’s triple-A game taking ideas from last year’s, or some media darling that stole its innovations from an ancient and obscure release, we will find the progenitor game, and we will make disparaging remarks.

Of course, we seldom practice what we preach. Kill.Switch may have dabbled with cover long before Gears of War, but we know which is the better game. On the other hand, most gamers shunned From Software’s game Ninja Blade as soon as the early screenshots showed us what looked to be a shameless clone of Ninja Gaiden. Even when the reviews rolled in, the same sentiments were common, despite the fact that Ninja Blade has quite a different purpose. →  Read the rest

Review – 100 Classic Book Collection

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100 Classic Book Collection for the DS is awesomesauce. That’s the gist of this whole review for those of you unwilling or unable to read further. However, for those with some staying power I will qualify why it is such an amazing condiment after I clarify that it isn’t a game.

100 Classic Book Collection is not a game. Don’t be confused by the packaging, the little box and the little game shaped cartridge. When you pop the cart into the DS and open it up you will not find a game. Instead you will find an assortment of 100 classic books to read. It could have been that simple. Here’s 100 books. Read them all. Cheevos for reading all of them. But much like an exotic alcoholic cocktail so many extra bits have been squeezed in to make it all the more worthwhile. →  Read the rest

Review – Persona

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Nothing but Playstation remakes. The PSP seems to be relegated to the unusual role of a “Remake system”. Nearly all the RPGs (which are, of course, the only real games out there) on the system are remakes, or generally reputed to be bad. And Persona is falls neatly in the first category, as you might expect.

But as I’ve written before – the Persona we received back when it was among the first in its genre for the Playstation wasn’t quite the same game they saw in Japan. Set in the sleepy US town of Lunarvale (which still managed to house a several-storied corporate office), the American students (who all wear school uniforms and are taught in a traditional Japanese concrete-block school) face an invasion of demons from an unknown source. →  Read the rest

Review – Wheelman

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Wheelman is a straightforward looking Grand Theft Auto clone, made by a dying publisher and featuring the voice and likeness of Vin “I End Lives” Diesel. A recipe for failure if there ever was one, save for the fact that Diesel’s track record with the game industry has been stellar. After the two Chronicles of Riddick games, Wheelman becomes the third release blessed by his Tigon Studios label, and like the others, is better than you might expect.

The key thing to remember about Wheelman is that it isn’t aping the Grand Theft Auto series as a whole. Specifically, it bases itself on GTA 3. All the extra cruft that Rockstar would later add to their series is nowhere to be found here. You have driving, on foot action, and a couple of secrets to find. →  Read the rest

Review – Another Code: R A Journey Into Lost Memories

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Another Code:R A Journey Into Lost Memories (herein abbreviated to AC:RAJILM) is from the same developer behind the rather excellent Hotel Dusk. So I was somewhat excited when AC:RAJILM was announced for the Wii.

After an extensive playthrough, it seems that this excitement was altogether misplaced. This is not necessarily to say that the game is bad, or that this review will be negative, but just don’t expect to ever get excited in AC:RAJILM.

It seems that CING, when mixing up AC:RAJILM in the laboratory, accidentally got some of the quantities of the point ‘n’ click ingredients wrong. They have definitely made an adventure with pointing and clicking but some of the elements aren’t optimally balanced.

So, for example, a staple technique used in these kinds of games is to give players lots of things to investigate, the payoff for throroughness being hidden items, secret bonuses, hints or extra flavour. →  Read the rest

Review – Digital Devil Saga 2

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I have heard it said that the second Digital Devil Saga was rushed. The four hour long final dungeon might be evidence of this, given that the whole game is still only about 25 hours long total. This makes DDS2 only a bit longer than the first one. While DDS2 maintains the solid Press combat system of the first game, in terms of scope and story, it is leaps and bounds more engrossing.

In Digital Devil Saga 1, the player would often find himself wondering what in the blazes could be going on. Each new answer brought with it two or three new questions, making for a veritable hydra of a storyline. While DDS was interesting enough on its own, DDS2 actually does answer all of these questions. It adds a few more at the end, but they are the usual questions one might expect of the genre – “What is the nature of mankind?”, →  Read the rest

Review – Muramasa: The Demon Blade

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“An ancient pond. A frog jumps in. The splash of water. Hmm… Not a bad haiku.” -Old Man living in Sagami

Muramasa is like a haiku. It’s simple and concise. It comes from an ancient era where a direction pad and a button or two were all anyone needed to escape into virtual reality. Its three metric phrases are its combat, its art and music, and its role playing. Games like this are rare these days in the retail world, having been mostly contained into digital distribution and indie divisions. I don’t know how this one managed to make it onto store shelves, but I commend whoever was responsible.

Muramasa is set in mythological Japan, where mortal life rides upon the outcome of conflicts between the gods and demons, and human civilization sprawls across the countryside. →  Read the rest

Review – Silent Hill: Homecoming

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The last time I reviewed a Silent Hill game, I was playing through SH:Origins, a PSP original developed by an American team with a greater focus on combat than previous games in the series. At the time, I made two points which I thought encapsulated the nature of Silent Hill games. Firstly, I asserted that reliance on locked doors, constant map checking, and finicky combat are an easy way to make your game feel tedious, repetitive, and full of cheap parlor tricks. True they can help create a frightening and oppressive tone when used correctly, but I would argue that no one has been able to do that since the very first game. Secondly, I stated Silent Hill games benefit from their tendency to shape enemies and environments around the mental projections of their protagonist. →  Read the rest

Review – Cursed Mountain

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Cursed Mountain is the latest game in the survival horror mountain climbing genre. It really wants to let everyone know that it’s scary, it has angry contorted faces all over the place, deep dramatic music, and lots of dark shadowy stuff everywhere. It also really wants to recreate the feeling of climbing up a mountain. You will have to literally climb every inch of this huge mountain. Except for a few parts where they jump you ahead a little, since only so much mountain can fit into a ten hour game.

This videogame is less “survival horror” (most noticeably absent from the game is the whole “survival” aspect) and more of a genre that I made up after playing Gears of War, which I like to call “on rails but not really.” →  Read the rest

Review – Digital Devil Saga

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Atlus has a reputation for releasing games that appreciate in value. They print a bunch of copies, but they sell slowly at first but eventually you’ll need to trade in a console or two to have enough credit to pick them up.

Recently, they have been trying to curb that reputation – partly by printing more copies of new titles, but also by reprinting old games. Shortly before the ultimate demise of the PS1, they reprinted Persona 2, for example. More recently, they reprinted three Shin Megami Tensei PS2 games: Nocturne and the two Digital Devil Saga games, each of which had been selling for more than $60 for a good while.

Being the dedicated RPG enthusiast I am, I completed my PS2 SMT collection with the two DDSes when I heard the news. →  Read the rest

Review – Wanted: Weapons of Fate

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These days, it does not take much to get a 3rd person, cover based action game greenlighted for production. Do you have some sort of licensed property to link it to? Then you’re golden! But if you really want to spice it up, find a property that has some sort of silly gimmick for you to work with. That will help justify having the publisher spend millions (and the consumer $60) on a disposable six hour experience. This is exactly the kind of mentality behind Wanted: Weapons of Fate, the tie in game to 2008’s Angelina Jolie vehicle developed by recently defunct developer GriN. In such a crowded genre, Weapons of Fate likes to think of itself as being different and better from the rest, similarly to its source material, this is nothing more than a case of self delusion. →  Read the rest

Review – Personal Nightmare

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There once was a time where games were designed to ease the player into the gameplay, get him addicted, and then proceed to murder him. This was naturally because the games could only be sustained through a diet of quarters, and demanding a constant flow of money from addicted players was the most effective way to separate a gamer from his cash. Games today have the liberty to come in a lot of forms and sustain themselves in many different ways, so that cliché difficulty curve isn’t used so often anymore. Personal Nightmare, for example, simply murders the player right off the bat.

Personal Nightmare was made by Horrorsoft, creators of Waxworks (which I reviewed previously). Both inhabit the very specific niche genre commonly called “survival horror,” although they existed before that term was coined. →  Read the rest

Review – Hearts of Iron III

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Paradox Interactive is becoming known in the innermost of hardcore gaming circles as “the only grand strategy gaming company left on earth,” a level of praise earned by their constant desire to take giant swaths of history and make games out of it. Instead of reading this, you could in fact be playing what we insiders call the “unnecessary gauntlet” of grand strategy gaming: repeating all of human history from 200 BC to 1956, the last moment in history that needs to be covered because Eisenhower’s presidency is the absolute pinnacle of mankind’s achievement. Year by year, hour by hour. No, Paradox Interactive doesn’t cheat like Firaxis, doesn’t do things like assigning one turn of gameplay a five year value in world time. You want to play five years? Then you better be prepared to play them out. →  Read the rest

Review – Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

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Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is a strong candidate for the title of “most beloved exclusive in the early days of the PS3”. While this can, in part, be attributed to the lack of competition, there were also plenty of good words said about its quality. I believed them, but any number of screenshots suggested that the game hemmed close to the Tomb Raider mold of exploration and action. Not a bad comparison per se, but the best I can say about Tomb Raider: Legend and Anniversary were that they were worth playing through, though they were certainly not the best releases on any console. Uncharted would have to do more to earn its title.

The reality of the game is that it doesn’t stray from the above description. The platforming controls are straight out of the recent Tomb Raiders, which it, in turn, learned from the modern Prince of Persia trilogy. →  Read the rest

Review – Animal Crossing Wild World

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Animal Crossing isn’t a game. It’s a career. A vocation, a mini alternative life. You could educate a child with it and it would turn out OK. It teaches you everything you need to know about the real world. It teaches you the importance of money, shows you the true value of patience, punishes you for lying, and when characters move out of your town it’s an important lesson about the harsh realities of bereavement in adult life. Freckles is gone, Timothy, she’s gone to another town very far away and she’s never coming back.

It’s not a game, it’s a job. You HAVE to collect your fruit to begin with, else you can’t afford the cool furniture. You HAVE to keep fishing, else you might miss a rare fish. You HAVE to collect all the fossils, fish and insects because something cool might happen when you do. →  Read the rest