The Return of the Video Games Thread

[bloop]

Plugged In's Arkham Asylum Review

When they don't get it, they don't get it spectacularly. 

It's a great action game.  Really.

[Vlad!]

So I played more--a decent amount more, actually--of Dokopon Journey.

For me, the dealbreaker is actually the movement mechanism--the random "die" roll. I know, it's a fundamental game mechanic, but what gets me is that you (or at least I) spend a huge amount of time trying to roll the number that lets me actually land on the space I want to land on. This is made even more frustrating by the fact that the computer players seem to be able to roll the number they need at will. I actually wondered if maybe I just sucked and you're supposed to be able to get the number you want by concentrating hard, but though I can sometimes narrow it down to half of the spinner I cannot reliably roll a four when I'm four spaces away from my destination. The fact that you can purchase gems that allow you to roll a certain number suggests to me that I'm not supposed to be able to summon up specific rolls at will, but the fact that there are only six inventory slots (with no stacking) means that the option of stocking up on these gems is a non-starter.

This isn't a problem with games such as Mario Party (or the venerable board games such as Candyland, Monopoly, Parcheesi, et al) because although you might want to land on a certain space, you don't have to. With Dokopon, for example, consider the chapter I just completed. I had to journey through a forest, enter the Sea Shrine, go down a staircase, get a treasure from a treasure chest, go back up the staircase, exit the shrine, go back through the forest, and deliver it to the castle. Considering that to "enter" something you have to land exactly on its entrance, that's eight times I had to roll a specific number in order to do what I had to do. This wasn't a huge problem for me because the computer players, at least on Normal difficulty, are terminally retarded and spent the entire time trying to beat a monster ten levels higher than them and dying over and over again, but if I were playing with humans then it would have ended up being one huge swarm around each point as we tried to land on each specific spot.

And how is this supposed to model anything useful? "Man, I was trying to get into my house but I walked past the door so now I have to walk around my house and try again". This problem could be trivially solved by allowing you to stop at any point within your roll (i.e. if you roll a 4 then you can stop 1, 2, 3, or 4 spaces ahead of where you are). In fact, there's an item in the game (the 'spinner' items) that actually let you do this, but again the limited inventory means that you can't just carry like a hundred of them around.

For me, this is pretty much a dealbreaker. I can put up with a lot, but boredom or tedium is intolerable. If I wanted to be bored or frustrated I would stare at a wall or watch the news. By forcing this mechanic into this style of gameplay, Dokopon Journey is making their game more annoying without adding an element of challenge[1]. It's too bad, because I think the art is cute and the game is amusing and easy to pick up and put down again. If only they didn't fail so hard in that one area it would be a lot more enjoyable.

Next up: missing robots, mysterious technology, and the most common superpower.

[1] I'm willing to entertain the possibility that it's supposed to be possible to roll the number you want four or five times out of six and I just suck at it, but I can't even roll close to the number I want three times out of six and I like to think I don't suck quite that badly.

[Vlad!]

Japan has a huge market for nerdery. I imagine that if you're an entrepreneur in Japan, your business model looks like the following:
1. Find untapped niche market
2. Tap it
3. Profit
One company in particular, Bandai, stands out as being founded on the principle that nerds will gladly spend money on anything even marginally related to their nerdery. And one of their profitable product lines is selling little plastic models of fictional giant robots. Have you ever heard sci-fi nerds arguing about whether the Starship Enterprise could take on the Imperial Star Destroyer Executor? Well, in Japan nerds talk about whether Mazinger Z could take on Getter Robo G. And then they build little plastic models of these robots.

A couple decades ago, Bandai saw that a new market was coming into play: arcade games and home video games. Thus, it purchased software development company Coreland in the late 80s and renamed them Banpresto. Their charter? To make video games about giant robots fighting each-other. And thus was born the Super Robot Taisen (or Super Robot Wars, in the US) series.

Basically, the premise is that you have a giant robots from some anime teaming up with giant robots from other anime, and then they fight enemy giant robots from still more anime. Since many of these anime never even came out in the US and since Western nerds were at the time still busy arguing about whether Kirk or Han was the bee's metaphorical knees, we never saw these games. There were some fan translations, which I played, but I recognized pretty much none of the characters or the robots. I just liked them because they were fairly decent strategy games.

But now there's another twist: as Western nerds have been increasingly absorbing Japanese culture and as Japan has come to realize that capturing even a fraction of the Western nerd market can be very lucrative given that we have more than double their population (though possibly not double their nerds), video game developers have increasingly tried to make money off of us. And so Banpresto released a Super Robot Original Generation series. This is where original (i.e. not swiped from anime) characters and robots are introduced alongside (or instead of) the well-known characters and robots. No cultural knowledge required = greater adoption in Western markets (goes the theory).

So, after this long wad of background information, I bring you the ludicrously-titled Super Robot Taisen Original Generation Saga: Endless Frontier. I didn't even know DS carts were large enough to fit all that text on them (and they're not; they call it "OG saga" and expect you to know that it means "Original Generation").

The first thing I noticed is how very different from the SRW games of old this one is. In the old ones, you follow the traditional straight-up-tactics-RPG model where you alternate between drawn-out turn-based tactical battles and cutscenes. In Endless Frontier, at least in the first handful of hours, not only are there no actual giant robots to be seen but there is neither hide nor hair of any tactical battles whatsoever! That's right: it's actually a much more traditional RPG--random battles, world map, dungeon crawling...the works.

The battle system is kind of cool at first. It reminds me a bit of the system in Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, which I liked: there's an emphasis on timing your button presses for maximum effect and choosing which attacks will be done when to deal the max amount of damage to your foe. There's even a bonus for juggling your enemy in the air, same as with CotP. Of course, I say it's cool "at first" because I suspect it's going to get pretty old. Fortunately, the encounter rate is low enough that the longish battles aren't a big deal. It would be better if there was more stuff that you could do in battle; basically, you're just hitting the A button at the right time, while occasionally hitting right on the D-pad to switch characters.

I'm assuming at some point the game will feature some actual Super Robos. It may be pulling a Xenogears or Goemon where the real cool tech doesn't come into play until a bit later in the game, or it may be that the game has eschewed giant robots entirely. I hope it's the former rather than the latter, because although large guns that have retractable bayonets allowing me to shoot my enemy and then stab him in the face are cool, robots the size of an office building which still inexplicably wield swords are super cool.

Just to be clear, it's the robots wielding the swords, not the office buildings. That would just be weird.

The other thing I want to mention is that it's quite obvious that Banpresto knows their audience: the unrealistically-proportioned heroines tend to strike poses that make one wonder if they are conversing or advertising (or perhaps those poses help alleviate their constant lower-back pain). The game is fun enough to keep me playing on its own merits; Banpresto didn't have to stoop to softcore pornography.

So far the game is fun, but I'm not sure if it has enough draw. There's not a whole lot there to turn me away, but I feel like there's not a whole lot there to keep me playing it either. I just don't feel very strongly one way or the other. Several years ago I told myself that I must not feel bad or guilty for quitting a video game. They exist for my entertainment, and if I feel like I'm being insufficiently entertained then there's nothing wrong with bailing on it. I'm not saying that this is necessarily going to happen with Endless Frontier, but it might. We'll see.

[Vlad!]

I'm finishing up with SRW:OG. I have a lot of games I could go with next, so I figured I'd ask the few (if any) here who read this thread: what should I play next?

I'd prefer that you choose from this list of games I already own and haven't played, but if you have one you think warrants my attention then let me know:
* Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon
* Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box
* Scribblenauts
* Rune Factory 2
* Dragon Quest VIII
* Suikoden V

[bloop]

DQVIII is great if you're in the mood for old-school RPG goodness with a more modern look.

[enemy anemone]

Scribblenauts!

[Vlad!]

I was going to start this post out with "if you read this thread, you probably like reading good writing about video games", but I realized in time that this was needlessly self-promoting and probably not true anyway, but at least if you read this thread you enjoy reading (or you're an accomplished skimmer).

I took a fun trip down memory lane yesterday by re-reading a website. Yes, I read a website. Remember back in the day when the manuals that came with games were quirky, funny, well-written, and atmospheric? Now they're mostly boilerplate and dry prose. But one company, SSG (now known as Infinite Interactive) decided to revive the old-school manual in website form for their game Warlords Battlecry II. (Before you click that link I suggest you read the next paragraph. What? You say I should have said that before the link? Pshaw.)

Though some of that site is the obligatory dry news posts and patch announcements, there's one section, under "Game" in the sidebar, that was clearly written by someone who knew how to produce entertaining prose. The "Races" section is extremely amusing, but the gold mine is that little link at the end, "Battle Reports". The developers played a series of five games against one-another and wrote up reports of them for our amusement. Why? Because writing a game is stressful and you need to blow off steam. Because they needed to do some testing and they might as well have fun. But I think the biggest reason is because they just really love what they do. You can tell.

The Warlords Battlecry series was one of my favorite PC game series. I never got much into the original Warlords series, but for a few years I was subscribed to PC Gamer magazine back before it became advertising that you had to pay for, and I remember playing the demo for the original Battlecry over and over again. By the time I actually bought the game I was really quite good at it because I had played the demo so much. I'm typically terrible at RTS games (though I enjoy them anyway, so long as I'm not playing against an opponent that can clearly crush me at his whim), but I actually developed a certain amount of proficiency at Battlecry, a proficiency which carried over to its two sequels.

In any case, I recommend that you take half an hour and read all the battle reports, if nothing else.

(The jury is still out on what game I play next, by the way).

[Vlad!]

I finally finished Super Robot Taisen OG: Endless Frontier.  I went through about the last 1/3 of the game thinking I was near the end, so my estimate of when I thought I'd finish differed significantly from when I actually finished.

In any case, SRW:EF was a pretty good game. I liked the battle mechanic, and though it had the ability to get old the reasonable encounter rate and the ability to run without penalty basically makes it work. The difficulty level was fair; I got beat down by a couple bosses, but the cheap-factor is pretty low because save points are plentiful and convenient. There was only one time when I got into a situation where I thought "man, if I can't win this fight then I'm screwed", but I manned up and won the fight so it worked out. There was also one battle where I was forced to use two party members that I never used (and of course had no idea how to use, since each character's moves are different). However, I still managed to bumble my way through it.

I also appreciated the tone of the game. It was very lighthearted and the protagonists are all likeable (especially the main character), so it's pretty easy to get into and stay into. It was fairly story-light for such a long game; I suspect that's primarily due to the lack of explorable towns. Also, the crossover characters are from Xenosaga and Namco X Capcom, two games that I have a bit of trouble getting excited over. However, I think overall it works well and I enjoyed it from start to finish.

I ended up choosing Scribblenauts for my next game; I saw a bit of DQVIII when my roommate was playing through it, and the one thing that stood out is how epically long it is. I'd rather churn through some shorter games in the lead-up to the holidays and then maybe make some time for a longer one once holiday shenanigans have settled down.

[Vlad!]

Normally when I play a game I try to go into it with as few preconceptions as possible. I think part of the reason is because I'm very easily disappointed, and if I think a game is going to be super special awesome and it turns out to be merely super and awesome but lacking in special I can rag on the game far more than it actually deserves. However, it's been difficult to not hear about Scribblenauts. This is a blessing and a curse: I probably wouldn't have given it a second thought if everybody and their walrus wasn't talking about it, but the praise elicited certain expectations that the game will have to fulfill.

So I gave it a try, and though I initially thought it was pretty cool, the novelty wore off fairly quickly. I love the concept--if you can type it, you can create it, so let your imagination run wild--but the problem is that my imagination is much more robust than the game, or so it appears.

The first problem is that though you can create something, you then have to do something with what you've created. For instance, in one level there's a switch on an inaccessible peak. Figuring that I would spawn an animal minion to do my dirty work, I typed 'badger' and placed my striped sidekick next to the switch. The badger proceeded to ignore the switch completely, roaming around wherever he saw fit. "Well", thought I, "perhaps he needs some motivation". So I typed "truffle"[1], but the game apparently doesn't know what a truffle is. So I typed "mushroom" (having no idea what badgers eat apart from truffles) and placed the resulting fungus on the switch, but my furry familiar treated it with disdain. So at that point I decided to take matters into my own (well, my avatar's) hands, so I typed "grappling hook". A grappling hook gun appeared, which is pretty fancy, but I soon discovered that you can only shoot your hooks at objects, not at terrain. So I typed "pole", figuring it was as good an object as any, only to discover that the ledge was out of range of my grappling hook gun. Excuse me, if I can summon a grappling hook gun ex nihilo, I should be able to summon one with enough cable to get me to the ledge, thank you very much.

The second problem with the game is that the controls are incredibly awkward. You have to alternate between controlling your avatar and manipulating the world around you, and honestly you just can't do both at once. This is especially problematic because the d-pad has been co-opted for camera control, meaning that the stylus is really overloaded, serving to both control the character's motion and also manipulate objects in the world.

This leads to bizarre behavior sometimes, especially when controlling vehicles. I find that it's just not possible to move in the way I want to move. Here, 5th Cell, this one's a freebie: you should have designed your interface so that the d-pad would move the avatar and holding some button (L seems reasonable) plus the d-pad would move the camera. This would free up the stylus for interaction tasks only, making your interface suck a whole lot less. Here's an example of this level of failure: for one of the first easy levels (and I apologize for the minor spoiler) I wanted to create a chainsaw and give it to a lumberjack. I created the chainsaw, tapped the lumberjack, and my avatar blithely walked over and slaughtered the poor guy with nary a backward glance. As a second example, I was trying to position an object across a bottomless pit. As I was trying to move the item, apparently the character interpreted one of my taps as a command and cheerfully ran forward and leapt to his doom, forcing me to start the level over again.

I guess my biggest frustration with the game is a combination of these two problems: Scribblenauts will consistently and flagrantly not do what I want it to do. The game is good enough that it lets me use my imagination but limited enough that it cramps me before I get a chance to stretch it. Honestly, when played straight the game is not that challenging--I have found few levels indeed that some combination of "fire", "jetpack", and "gun" can't beat--so the fun comes from devising new and inventive solutions. However, there have been several times when I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea only to have it fizzle because the game just doesn't react the way I expect, and there have been other times when I thought of a very logical way to solve the puzzle only to give it up because I despaired of trying to make the game understand what I wanted to do.

Much like with developer 5th Cell's previous game Drawn to Life, I feel like the concept is excellent but the implementation is spotty[2]. I plan to continue playing away at it for a little bit to see if it grows on me, but thus far it has been an exercise in frustration.

[1] I have no idea if badgers actually like truffles, but C.S. Lewis has it firmly ingrained in my mind that they do.

[2] Ironically the third 5th Cell game I've played, Lock's Quest, has very solid implementation but the design isn't very original or fun, giving it the exact opposite problem.

[enemy anemone]

aw, apart from the fiddly controls, it sounds like the sort of game I would love. summoning random things to see them not-work sounds hilarious. (also, I am convinced that a mountain goat would have climbed the mountain on its own. but a badger and a mushroom...hahaha! I thought for sure you'd summon a snake to chase the badger.)

[Vlad!]

It's hilarious for the first set of challenges or so. For the later ones, failure often means restarting the level, which is sufficiently annoying to make it not particularly fun (for me, at least). This is compounded by the fact that the game sort of encourages Rube Goldbergian contraptions and if you have to restart this means that you have to resummon the badger, mushroom, snake, firehose, stethoscope, screwdriver, Canadian two-dollar coin, gibbon, pneumatic drill, bushel of artichokes, and bill of lading so you can try your plan all over again.

There are actually two modes: the 'puzzle' mode, which is generally more creative, and the 'action' mode, which is the sort that requires you to do things like flip switches and scale walls. The puzzle mode levels are actually way more fun and the awkward controls don't get in the way as much, but you have to beat both modes before you can advance in the game.

[Vlad!]

I've played through the first two stages on Scribblenauts (for both the puzzle and the action games), and I feel like the lackluster review I gave it in my initial impression post pretty much sums it up. I was wrong about one thing: you don't have to do all the puzzle games and all the action games to progress; rather, you use the money you've accumulated to purchase new stages. Thus, if you're good at racking up bonuses, and apparently I'm at least not too shabby at it, you can quite possibly get through all the stages in puzzle mode, say, without even touching an action mode game. I don't know if this is true for the later stages, though, so don't hold me to that.

When I was playing for the second time I tried to ignore the fact that the game tells me I suck if I summon too many things and ignore the fact that I can win the level easily in several well-known ways and just let my imagination run wild. But again, I felt like the game served as much to constrain my imagination as it did to stimulate it. For example, there's one level where you have to get past some guards without killing them. I thought "aha, I'll distract this guard with a monkey. So I summoned a monkey (a gibbon, if you're curious, though it appears that many different types of monkeys summon a generic monkey), but after I placed it in front of the guard they both just stood there chillaxin, clearly not perturbed by the other's presence.

The limitations on me, the player, are also a little strange to wrap my head around. I can manipulate objects to essentially any degree I wish, but only if they're objects I myself have created. My divine powers apparently end where the level design begins. This causes weird situations where I can create a rope, attach it to the star I'm trying to get, and I can drag the rope around until it is fully extended but can't move the star at all. Obviously this makes a lot of sense, but intuitively it feels a little weird.

(Speaking of rope physics, somehow I've never gotten winches to work. There have been several times when I thought "oh, I'll create a rope, create a winch, attach the rope to the winch and the other side to this 1967 Volkswagen Rabbit, and pull the car with the winch" but then it just didn't work. Every time I thought "Oh, I guess I'm doing it wrong", but I think they just failed to implement a winching mechanism.)

As the stages progress each level gets increasingly annoying--even the puzzle levels--and honestly it's more frustrating than fun. This is one of the few things I can't forgive in a game, so I think I'm going to move on.

It's too bad; I really did want to like it.

[Vlad!]

When I saw NIS America announce that they were publishing the game A Witch's Tale in North America, I wasn't entirely sure what to think, primarily because the game had flown completely under my radar. Developed by the humbly-named studio Hit Maker (and I question the accuracy of the name given that they've been making games for ten years and I'm not sure I would describe any of them as a hit thus far...), apparently AWT is supposed to be some sort of Tim Burton-esque horror-themed fantasy RPG. Well, OK, I figured I'd give it a shot, what with Halloween and all.

Now, the relationship between developer and publisher is a complicated one. However, in many cases the publisher is also a development studio themselves and can lend QA resources and give design guidance. This makes me wonder, then, how Nippon Ichi Software let A Witch's Tale publish with such an awkward UI. It's actually not bad, overall, but it has two platform-related problems:

First, the hit detection is remarkably dodgy on the touchscreen, so on a few occasions I wasn't aware that I could actually interact with an object because I tried tapping it and nothing happened. This is compounded by the problem that if your character is not close enough to interact with the thing you tapped, instead of moving closer (as would be the logical response), the game acts as if it just didn't understand your input.

Second, the DS is far too slow to handle loading some of the dialog screens. I appreciate the desire to have a fancy screen with character portraits and all the rest, but if it takes you several seconds to achieve that, well, maybe you're better off with a simple overlay.

Another thing that seems a bit odd about this title, and I hesitate to say this because it's as much of a charge against my beloved NIS America as it is against Hit Maker, but for a kids' game theres a remarkable amount of language that American parents are traditionally loathe to let their kids hear (I say "traditionally" because the notoriously conservative ESRB gave AWT a "E 10+" rating, suggesting that they seemed to think it's OK for any kid at about third grade or above, so maybe I'm just being overly conservative). Nothing horrible, but it does seem odd that a game ostensibly targeted toward a younger audience would have such content, especially considering that there's not really a 1:1 mapping when it comes to translating vulgarity so the localizers had a lot of wiggle room when it comes to bowdlerization.

I think A Witch's Tale is an acceptable game, and I'm continuing to play more of it. I'll be interested to see where it goes and whether it manages to annoy me into stopping, because honestly at this point I'm still a bit on the fence about it.

[RedcoatJones]

I'm not a video game person, but Paste released their top 20 video games of the decade, so I figured I would post it here for critique, scorn or praise.

The 20 Best Video Games of the Decade (Paste)

[bloop]

I've played 8 of those.

[Vlad!]

I've actually only played one out of those 20...Final Fantasy XII. I'm always skeptical of 'best game' countdowns, and though this one does an OK job I still feel like it could have done better in defining what constitutes 'best' and why each game deserves its spot. For example, look at the description for the #1 game, Portal. I mean, no question this game was fun in a way that modern games too often are not, but when you contrast it to the descriptions of other games, they say something like "advanced the genre of sandbox games" or "looked pretty", while portal was "it was a lot of fun".

Ultimately, this is why I distrust these lists. You might try to be objective and rank games based on their contributions, but in the end it's all about fun, and fun is very subjective.

I also notice that the list contains no games from my platform of choice, the Nintendo DS. Even the Wii is severely underrepresented. What about Wii Sports, the game that brought casual gaming to the forefront and introduced so many 'non-gamers' to the world of electronic interactive entertainment? Why is there only one Japanese-style roleplaying game representing the decade that brought us Persona 4, Suikoden V, and (this being in my mind the most criminal of omissions) freaking Makai Senki Disgaea, one of my favorite games of all time?

Let's not forget the first part of the decade, either. One of the best games for the PC ever, Deus Ex, revolutionized the first-person adventure/RPG/shooter/stealth game and paved the way for IMO inferior clones like Bioshock (which I note is actually on this list). And what about strategy games? The genre-defining games, Command and Conquer and Starcraft, were a bit too early for this list, but Warcraft III was quite the excellent update to the venerable franchise and I see nary a mention.

It's a good list, sure, but let's not make it more than what it is: a subjective, personal look at a subset of the genres available with a bias toward the latter half of the decade.

[NinjaRob17]

I don't have a problem with most of the games I've played that are on this list (Portal would probably be my #1 game, too), but why is Guitar Hero III even near this list? Just because it's popular doesn't make it good.

[Vlad!]

I don't understand why I love me some turn-based strategy RPG. However, it's a pretty well-known phenomenon that if you tack the word "Strategy" or "Tactics" on to the title of a game I will be way more likely to buy it, sight unseen.

However, when I grabbed Rondo of Swords an embarrassingly long time ago, I didn't really even know that it was a tactics RPG (apparently if you tack the word "swords" on the title I'll pick it up without knowing anything about it as well). On the face of it, the game appears to be a pretty standard fare. Warring nations, displaced royalty trying to regain the throne and throw of the oppression of the evil empire (remember: Kingdoms good, Empires bad). It's pretty much the exact plot of Yggdra Union or the Gamecube Fire Emblem game. Class change happens by finding an item and using it at the right time (I'm not sure if Nintendo thought of that first with Fire Emblem or if the Ogre Battle games did it before them; I'm too lazy to look it up but it's probably one of those two). There's actually no weapons triangle, which is interesting, but that is far from the biggest change to the battle system. You see, Rondo of Swords decided to completely change up the way turn-based strategy combat works.

Basically, the way they changed it up is to completely remove the separation between moving and attacking. Instead, you just choose how you want your character to move, and if this path includes enemy spaces, that enemy gets attacked along the way. This means two important things: first, that you can attack multiple enemies per turn, and second, that the age-old rule that friendly units can't move through tiles with an enemy unit on them goes right out the window.

This creates some intriguing possibilities. However, there's one other thing that I've noticed: it amplifies the numbers advantage. If I play poorly and cluster my troops together, every enemy unit can attack every allied unit. Position your dudes wrongly and you could wind up losing in one turn. Also, think about pretty much every TBS-RPG game you've played. Which side is usually outnumbered? Yeah, it's yours.

The other interesting (and I am using interesting in this case as a euphemism for "it's annoying but I don't want to come out and say it's annoying because it may just annoy me due to being different") decision made when designing combat is that you can't both move and act in the same turn. If you want to cast magic or do a ranged attack or use an item, you better be OK with staying right where you are. This decision obviously stems out of the initial design choice, because since moving and attacking are now one command, the ability to say cast magic after moving would mean that you could potentially attack a whole row of enemies and then turn around and cast magic on all of them too. However, this decision also means that if you have a character who's near death and also near the enemy lines, you have to choose whether to flee and not heal or heal and not flee, and that's never a good decision to have to make.

So far (and the definition of "so far" is "not very far at all", since as of this writing I'm only about two hours in), I am only mildly impressed. I like it in theory, but in practice I feel like it just doesn't play out very well. However, I'm still hopeful that maybe once my brain comes around to this new way of thinking about combat I'll wind up really enjoying it. RPGs in general and TRPGs in particular also have a much shallower game development curve than many other games, so it's often the case that a game will turn the corner and go from "annoying" to "awesome" (Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume was one of these games for me; I started out both entertained and annoyed, but as I progressed the entertained part increased and the annoyed part decreased until I actually really liked the game by the end of it).

(If you're wondering what happened to A Witch's Tale, well, I picked up my DS and didn't feel like playing it anymore. So I didn't. The end).

[Vlad!]

Random smattering o' reviews:

The Batman: Arkham Asylum Demo is certainly interesting...I've registered my displeasure before with third-person combat/adventure games, and while those complaints certainly extend to AA as well, I have to say that what it does, it does well.

As for Spore: Hero Arena, well, if you liked Spore and wanted it on your DS, then hey, there you go. Actually, that's probably not a good way to generalize it, because unlike Spore, Hero Arena isn't divided up into developmental stages. Instead, you create a full-fledged creature and control that specific creature from the get-go, attacking other creatures in battle. It's sort of like what you would get if you mixed Spore with Custom Robo Arena.

Finally, I played the Fat Princess Demo. This game was a lot of fun, actually. I may have to figure out how to put money on my PSN account so I can buy it, but it seems like the sort of thing that would be most fun when played with friends, and I'm not sure any of my friends with PS3s (all two of them) have any desire to purchase or play this game with me, and I certainly don't play games online much at all so I don't really know if I have a desire to play it with any of them. Still, very amusing.

[enemy anemone]

I was able to try out Scribblenauts. kind of amusing and kind of annoying, and overall slightly more annoying than amusing. oh well. my curiosity was satisfied, anyway.

oh, and you know what you can summon to pull switches for you? an engineer.

[Vlad!]

o_O

I guess that makes sense.

I still think the badger should have worked

[NinjaRob17]

The Batman: Arkham Asylum Demo is certainly interesting...I've registered my displeasure before with third-person combat/adventure games, and while those complaints certainly extend to AA as well, I have to say that what it does, it does well.

I haven't heard or can't remember your complaints on these games. Some of my favorite games are third-person combat/adventure games (Ratchet & Clank series, God of War series, first three Spyro games, Kingdom Hearts series...etc.). Why don't you like them?

[Vlad!]

I haven't heard or can't remember your complaints on these games. Some of my favorite games are third-person combat/adventure games (Ratchet & Clank series, God of War series, first three Spyro games, Kingdom Hearts series...etc.). Why don't you like them?

The review I was referring to specifically is this one, though I just read it over again and it doesn't provide a whole lot of information.

Basically, the controls feel unnatural, they tend to be button-mashers when it comes to combat, and frequently involve a lot of 3-D platforming. I realize that this is mostly a matter of preference, so if you like platforming and don't mind alternating between two or three buttons to fight your enemies, hey, go for it.

Some games (Uncharted, Ratchet & Clank) actually use firearms as a third-person shooter, and I find those even more unnatural. There are three strategies for making aiming work: the first is autolock, which feels like cheating when it works well and is an exercise in frustration when it works poorly (because you know it always ends up locking on the one enemy who's just standing around picking his nose while there's three other enemies firing at you with machine guns); the second is controlling the reticle with one stick while controlling the movement with the other stick, which is way too fiddly and doesn't work at all in heated combat; and the third is dropping into first-person in aiming mode, which works because first-person is the way God intended aiming to be done but usually means you can't move while aiming (because otherwise the game would essentially devolve into a first-person shooter, and presumably if they wanted it that way they would have made it that way in the first place).

If you like the genre, great for you. But I don't, and will thus review even the best games in that genre very unfavorably as a result.

[bloop]

The controls in AA become just about second-nature pretty fast, actually.

I do like the Fat Princess demo quite a bit.  I need to download the whole thing sometime.

[Vlad!]

I decided to stop playing Rondo of Swords. I still maintain that the concept is interesting, and honestly part of the reason I'm giving up is because I keep getting beat down horribly. However, the missions seem designed to make you lose on the first time through just so you can figure out the different ways that the game decides to screw you.

For example, in one of the early missions you're assaulting a well-defended castle. You note that there are two prisoners, so naturally the first inclination is to go toward the prisoners to try and free them in the hope that they'll join your cause. However, one of the guards on the way to the prisoners is a trigger, and when you kill him every single enemy in the castle immediately rushes your party. If you're not ready for that, you're going to get beat down.

As another example, in one of the next missions, you have the option of either fighting your way through a group of enemies or having the weakest member of your party talk to the leader of the enemies and have him stand down. Obviously, the second seems like it would be a win...except that the leader is way more mobile than the person you need to talk to him with, so you end up defeating most of the enemies either way just to get your weak healer over to talk to this guy who keeps trying to lure her out and then get her killed.

Ultimately, I realized that I had Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and Front Mission 1st sitting on my shelf gathering dust while I'm getting frustrated playing some knock-off. Why not get rid of the knock off and play something I know I'm going to like?

(I'll probably end up having to replay between 25-30% of the levels in Fire Emblem to keep my party members from dying, but I don't mind that because the game itself is fun enough that it removes a lot of the frustration).

[Ian]

That list left off not only the best game of the decade, but perhaps the greatest video game of all time, Metroid Prime.  MP raises the video game medium to an art form on nearly every level.  WindWaker is probably my second favorite from the decade.  No mention of Zelda is kind pretty damn iffy.  MGS3 shits all over MGS2, and GH3 overr GH1 and 2 is puzzling as well.  Props for including Shadow of the Colossus though, that game definitely deserves to be near the top.

[Vlad!]

Ian, you have to understand: you're perpetuating the same fallacy that you're arguing against. By asserting some sort of objective scale by which we can say that some game is better than another game you are implicitly setting yourself up as the arbiter of that same scale.

Personally, I haven't enjoyed any Metroid game since Super Metroid. The only Metroid Prime game I've played much of at all was Metroid Prime: Hunters for the DS, and I found it to be awful and an embarrassment to the franchise. Even so, there are plenty of people who liked it. The ones for the GCN were better, but I think the series was at its best as a 2-D side scroller.

Also, I never finished Ocarina of Time and never even played Majora's Mask. I tried to get back into the Zelda series with Phantom Hourglass, but some of the design decisions were perplexing and wrong. I think that the best Zelda game was A Link to the Past, though Link's Awakening was also quite good.

You see? This is exactly what I'm saying about that list. We all have games we think it's borderline criminal not to have included, and there are games on that list that will leave each of us scratching our heads.

[Ian]

I thought we could all assume that when I say something, it's my opinion.

[Vlad!]

I thought we could all assume that when I say something, it's my opinion.

When I read your post, I read it as asserting that the list is wrong because it doesn't include certain games and does include others. If that's not what you were saying then I'm sorry for misinterpreting what you wrote.

[Ian]

The list is wrong.

And that... is my humble opinion. :D  Seriously though, I'm not a big fan of constantly clarifying that yes, the things I say are still just opinions.  If I say something is good or bad, it should go without saying that that's just my point of view.  It's especially kind of hard to take annual media lists as anything but opinion, no matter the tone of the list maker.

[bloop]

I don't know.  If you merely say something is good or bad, that's one thing.  If you support it in ways that are hard to assail, that's something else entirely.

[Ian]

I guess a lot of the time I just don't take my opinions very seriously.

[Vlad!]

Behold the power of nostalgia:

Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals was one of my favorite games on the Super Nintendo. It was well-written, well-designed, had great music, and was just downright fun. It also tied into its predecessor (Lufia and the Fortress of Doom, which was a very decent game in its own right) in a very interesting way.

Rumors that I cried at the ending are malicious and false.

All the subsequent games, however, have been big buckets of fail. The Legend Returns was heavily crippled by the capabilities of the Gameboy, while Ruins of Lore was, well, just plain not very fun (it wasn't bad, it just wasn't fun).

Even knowing this, when Famitsu broke the news that there's a new one coming out in Japan, I was tentatively excited (if you're confused by that page, Lufia is called Estpolis in Japan). When I saw that it was being developed by the original team that did Lufia and the Fortress of Doom and published by Square Enix, I became a lot more excited.

Of course, I see nothing on that page related to platform; Neverland has done most of their stuff for Nintendo, but it's always possible it will come out on the PSP. That would definitely quench my excitement right there.

In any case, getting excited about a game that's not yet been announced for my own country and might not even be on a platform I own despite the suckiness of the last two games in the series...now that's the power of nostalgia!

[Vlad!]

As I mentioned in my Rondo of Swords impression, if I am your target demographic then the surest way to get to my wallet is by putting the word 'tactics' in the name of your game.

It should not come as a surprise to anyone, then, that I picked up Hero's Saga: Laevatein Tactics. Actually, if it weren't for the name I definitely wouldn't have given it much thought, since it's published by Aksys (known primarily for publishing fighting games and crappy WiiWare titles) and was developed by GungHo Works, which is significant only in that this appears to be the first of their games released outside of Japan (their portfolio includes, among other things, some suspicious-looking games that appear to cater to younger children and, interestingly, a PSP port of Lunar: The Sliver Star and what appears to be a PSN port of Grandia, though I can't tell for sure because the product page is a 404).

Perhaps surprisingly, the game is quite good. It has some quirks which take getting used to, but that's hardly a criticism. Perhaps more importantly, it stands out from the genre by being different, and not Rondo of Swords-style different where you take from the most successful games and then make it worse, but a genuine different feel that shows some actual honest thought and design. I like this.

Another thing that I like and which is different is the continental Europe aesthetic. I don't know if this was added by the localization team or if the original was steeped in it as well, but your nation is clearly Hispanic and the evil empire (because empires are always evil) is clearly Francophone. This is cool; I kind of like playing as something a little less generic. The hero's name is Ernesto, and I like pronouncing it as "Errrrrrnesto" in the most clichéd Spanish accent I can muster.

What I do find a little irritating, admittedly, is the failure of basic technical elements. Skippable cutscenes, skippable battle animations, the ability to seamlessly access information on the battlefield...seriously, people, this is 2009. If your game has a long unskippable cutscene before a tough battle, you fail. Didn't the Geneva convention address this?

Another nit I feel the need to pick is the story progression. I know a lot of games do this so it's not like it's a cardinal sin or anything, but do you have to tell your story by giving us a couple paragraphs of narration? "So Errrrrrnesto and his troops marched forth along the mountain path, but lately bandit attacks have been increasing in the area. They proceed with caution". Great. If there's a mountain path, I'm pretty much already going to assume bandits; that's standard issue. But even if I didn't, does that narration really add anything? Couldn't it at least be told through dialog (Ernesto: Let's go over the mountain. Pedro: There's only one path, it's over here. Maria: I've heard rumors of bandits along that path. Ernesto: Roger. Stay frosty, people.)?

I'm enjoying Laevatein Tactics, and I plan to invest some more time in it, at least for now.

[Vlad!]

Re: Lufia nostalgia:

That's interesting...

On one hand, Lufia II is on my short list of "best games for the SNES", which is in turn on my short list of "best console evar". On the other, changing from a turn-based battle system to an action RPG? 2-d to 3-d? Combos? Voice acting?

But on the third hand, it's for the DS, which is awesome because the DS is also awesome.

"But Vlad!, 3-d is better than 2-d. It has more 'd's!"

Get off my lawn. Dang kids.

[bloop]

New Super Mario Bros. Wii is great - familiar in the best possible way.

Unfortunately, it's also appropriate for my son to play, so I get very little time with it.

[Vlad!]

New Super Mario Bros. Wii is great - familiar in the best possible way.

Unfortunately, it's also appropriate for my son to play, so I get very little time with it.

Did you play the one for the DS? It was pretty good.

[bloop]

I have and loved the one for the DS, so yes.  I have Galaxy, too.  The only major Mario game I've skipped was Sunshine.

(it also happens to be a bit more accessible for Isaac, so I didn't have to help him as much with it)

[Ian]

You should get Sunshine.

[Vlad!]

You should get Sunshine.

Opinions are mixed on that front; my roommate (who loves platformers in general and the Mario games in particular) got so frustrated with Sunshine that he quit about halfway through. Just from watching him play it looked like an exercise in frustration. (And it's not like he just sucks at games, either; I've watched him beat the old-school Metroid games and the NES Castlevanias).

I'm sure you can find it cheap somewhere if you want to judge for yourself, but if you have to miss one, Sunshine looks like a good one to miss.