The Return of the Video Games Thread

[bloop]

The Phoenix Wright series is the exception to the rule in this case (pun maybe intended?).

Phoenix Wright would be considered the same genre?  Huh...

[NinjaRob17]

Well, it's an adventure game, but it's a text-adventure game. Zelda is a puzzle/adventure/action hybrid.

[Vlad!]

Calling Zelda a puzzle game is an affront to puzzle games everywhere. The only puzzle worth the name I've seen in the series is why I keep trying to play them.

[bloop]

I don't think the puzzles are very difficult usually, but they are puzzles by definition.  The hybrid element does a little something for it, though, since I'd rather play almost any Zelda game over almost any given game in the proper puzzle genre.

[Vlad!]

Well, sure, the game has puzzles in it occasionally, if "pull the levers/light the torches/step on the switches in the right order" counts as a puzzle. But calling it an action/adventure/puzzle hybrid is like calling it an action/adventure/shooter hybrid because you shoot things with the bow and arrow.

[bloop]

Yeah, I would probably describe it as an "action/adventure" game.  "Puzzle" might fit something like Prince of Persia a little better.

[valleycat]

I'm playing The Longest Journey, an adventure game that came out like ten years ago.  It's amazing.

[Vlad!]

My final time on FFXII was 86 freaking hours. And I didn't even get to the bottom of the Lhusu mines or go through the optional part of the great crystal at Giruvegan.
Since I'm done with Phoenix Wright 3, I think I'm also going to rock me some Revenant Wings. My DS queue is growing faster than I can play the games; Front Mission has been sitting on my shelf still in its freaking package for months now.

[Vlad!]

Started playing FFXII: Revenant Wings for the DS, on the theory that if I started it this soon after finishing FFXII then I might actually
remember what was going on. Of course, as it turns out it didn't really matter.

Note: this post contains minor FFXII spoilers. Ir you plan to finish #12 and have yet to do so, you might want to give this post a miss.

So Revenant Wings starts off pretty much where FFXII left off; i.e. one year after the defeat of Vayne and the re-establishment of the Dalmascan
monarchy. Vaan and Penelo are doing sky-piratey things with Balthier and Fran. Then (and this all happens in the prologue, so it's not like I'm
spoiling much) the game decides to ditch pretty much everything and press the reset button, moving Vaan and Penelo back to Rabanastre and taking
away their airship.

Which really brings me to my core complaint about the game: it cheapens the franchise and the source material. The characters have been forced
into one-dimensional molds, the plot takes a completely new direction and abandons the majority or the FFXII backstory, and all the familiar
elements from the PS2 game have been diluted and simplified to the point of ludicrousness. With FFXII, the amount of time and effort put into
every corner or the game shows. With Revenant Wings, it feels like the form was copied without understanding the substance.

Another complaint I have is that the control just feels really awkward. For a DS game this is a big deal, since the control mechanism is one of
the major gimmicksselling points of the system. The game overloads the stylus so much that it's really easy to give a unit the wrong
order. To add to this, once you give an order to a unit, the game (for reasons known but to God) deselects that unit or group, so you have
to reselect the unit to give a new order. This flies in the race or pretty much every RTS game  since Command and Conquer came out over a decade
ago. And theoretically you can drag the stylus to scroll the screen. Well, I've never gotten that to work consistently, since it always thinks
I'm trying to do a group select. You can scroll the screen using the d-pad as well, but for me that causes thumb cramping in short order.

Speaking or hand cramping, what is up with games requiring you to use both the stylus and the face buttons? Pressing X selects all or your units.
I know you can do this through the interface by dragging your stylus across the unit bar, but this takes a while and sometimes is misinterpreted
as a screen scroll move. But for a righty to press X, it requires some awkward finger manipulation, since the buttons are not sensitive enough to
be easily pressed with the stylus (if the designers had thought to make them concave rather than convex, they probably could be pressed with the
stylus, but nooooo, it generally just slides right off). Why is there no "select all" button next to the unit bar? Probably just because that
would make too much sense.

The game itself is actually fairly entertaining. Not FFXII-level entertaining, but the missions aren't terribly complex up to this point (I'm in
chapter 3) and the learning curve is pretty shallow. The terrible interface (and I know I'm repeating myself, but I can't get over how bad it is)
gets in the way far more often than it should (which would be never), but you can really just chalk that up as being part of the
difficulty and let the chips fall where they may, I suppose.

Ultimately I feel like Revenant Wings is more evidence that Square is willing to whore out its franchises wholesale, creating endless spin-offs--generally developed by third-party shops--which milk their big-name franchises for a quick buck without adding the quality that got those franchises to the big time in the first place. It's worth playing, but is a far cry from the game it claims to be the successor of.

[NinjaRob17]

I'm working through the Castlevania series backwards for some reason. I started with Portrait of Ruin and have just finished Circle of the Moon. I plan to buy Symphony of the Night from the XBOX Live Marketplace on my dorm-mate's 360. Yeah, it's definitely an addicting series (though Circle of the Moon was pretty tough).

[Vlad!]

Circle of the Moon is utter pants. IMO it is by far the weakest of the series.

Symphony of the Night is a great game, but unfortunately since you're playing them backwards, you'll probably find it a bit awkward because it had a few...idiosyncrasies...that got ironed out in later versions. Nonetheless, I've played through SotN twice, and found it very enjoyable both times.

[valleycat]

I finished The Longest Journey last night. The ending leaves a lot open for personal interpretation but it was still very riveting and scary. I discovered a sequel called Dreamfall but it doesn't look as good and I might leave it alone.

Instead I think I'll start Syberia now.

[Ian]

I was enjoying Brawl quite well, but last week it got stolen, along with my Wii and all controllers.  Don't have the money for another one, so I guess I'm taking a break from gaming for a while...

[Vlad!]

I was enjoying Brawl quite well, but last week it got stolen, along with my Wii and all controllers.  Don't have the money for another one, so I guess I'm taking a break from gaming for a while...

Geez, you have some pretty sucky luck, man. I take it you don't have insurance?

[Vlad!]

Started playing some Contra 4, just casually. I have great memories of putting in far too many hours on Contra III with my brother back in the day. And even before that, we played the original Contra on the NES. And before I say anything else let me say this: Contra 4 is absolutely a worthy successor to the Contra name.

For veterans of Contra III, it won't take too long to adapt. Some of the controls are unnecessarily different which messes with those of us who spent hours developing the muscle memory to avoid death at the hands of aliens in The Alien Wars, but the basic mechanic remains much the same. Weapons are upgradeable, which is an interesting twist (I think I remember reading that this was present in an earlier Contra, but not, as far as I recall, in C3). The basic gun is also the weaksauce pea-shooter you get in the original Contra rather than the fully-automatic machine gun you get in C3, which adds to the difficulty a tad. The megabombs have been done away with, which is too bad since they added a level of tactics to the gameplay that I think is now missing, and the ability to hold down both shoulder buttons and jump, spraying bullets around Rambo-style, is gone as well. Added is a grappling hook that hoists your character up to higher levels, including the upper screen--yes, action takes place on both screens.

One thing that I don't quite understand is why the game feels it necessary to limit the number of continues you have. I mean, it's not like you're feeding coins into a machine, so is it really that important to define a specific point where the character has utterly lost the game? Even in the Metal Slug anthology games there's the ability to choose the number of continues you get, allowing the hardcore players to shoot for cred by beating it on five, three, or even one continue, while the more casual gamers can die to their heart's content (and when I play Metal Slug, that translates into a lot of dying).

The point of the game, as with pretty much all arcade-style games, is level memorization. The game designers feel fully justified in screwing you by having things pop up out of the ground, shoot in from the sky, roll in quickly from offscreen, and generally come out of nowhere to kill you, the idea being that *next time*, you'll remember and avoid it. This especially made sense in the arcade, since it was designed to keep gamers feeding in quarters, but it's also one of the best skill-equalizing systems available, next to the RPG level up system. No matter how talented a twitch gamer may be, there is no way he or she can outperform a mediocre gamer who has put hours into playing through the levels until the location of each powerup and the trajectory of each bullet is fully burned into his mind. I'm not saying this as a criticism of Contra 4 or the genre in general, mind you, I'm just pointing out that C4 is very true to this model.

That said, with my C3 experience latent in my mind and some muscle memory left in my fingers, the first time I picked up the game I was able to get through the first level without burning a continue. I would characterize the difficulty (on normal mode, at least) as hard but fair. I would definitely say it's harder than C3, with the lack of a bomb, the weaker starting gun, and the need to power up your guns before they reach their full potential (with a couple exceptions, the powered-up form of the C4 guns is roughly equivalent to the standard guns from C3). The grappling hook adds a way to possibly save yourself from certain death, but also adds another element to the game that can be difficult to mentally deal with, making it a push.

With multiplayer co-op, the arcade feel, and the classic look of the game, Contra 4 is a solid installment, and is definitely a return to form for the series. Much like the Metal Slug games to which comparison is practically inevitable, the differences between C3 and C4 are small enough that it is essentially an extension to the same game (except probably not storywise; I have never particularly paid attention to Contra's story, as it's basically a minute amount of glue that binds alien-killing sections together). For those looking for more of the same, C4 is unquestionably where it's at.

[Vlad!]

Played the PS3 downloadable demo of the game Haze.

The demo drops you straight into combat armed with nothing more than a submachine gun and a pistol. The first bit of trickery is that the SMG is pretty much worthless but the pistol is freaking sweet--it's a one-hit-kill number that leaves a tracer as big around as your thumb. The demo informs you that you have access to a substance called Nectar, which allows you to get hopped up and tear some crap apart. And it appears to work as advertised; using Nectar, enemies are highlighted, your speed increases, you can absorb more damage, and your melee attacks go from pitiful joke to overpowered Hulk smash that sends enemies flying comically through the air Devil May Cry style.

And therein lies the crux of the plot: there are soldiers who use this Nectar to beef themselves up in battle, and soldiers who (apparently) think it's a bad thing. The plot is quite obviously leading into the standard conspiracy-theory-esque "government controlled substance with undisclosed but hideous side-effects". I even saw some hints of this; about halfway through the demo, my screen went grey for a couple seconds and it sounded like my character had been gut punched. Then, on my second playthrough, a heavily-wounded ally went berserk and started shooting me, forcing me to put a bullet through his head.

The Nectar aspect feels a bit gimmicky, and if you think the same way you will probably be pleased to know that on my second playthrough I didn't use the Nectar at all, and I blazed through the level on Normal difficulty with no problems. The game also offers Hard and Very Hard levels (the latter of which is disabled in the demo), so presumably if your twitch skillz aren't up to snuff then you'll be relying on the Nectar more and more heavily as the game progresses.

As for the gameplay, Haze is a very solid FPS. It showcases the PS3's power with lush scenery, well-rendered characters, and very smooth controls and scene transitions with no loading (whether the actual game played of the BD-ROM would be the same, I don't know). The combat feels very much like Rainbow Six, though the tactics aspect doesn't really seem to be there. I could probably make a more intelligent comparison if FPSes were my genre, but they aren't so I can't. Anyway, if you've gotten tired of R6 Vegas 2 already and you're looking for your next fix, you could do worse than Haze.

[RedcoatJones]

As a total non-gamer, a new online game, PMOG (The Passively Multiplayer Online Game) amused me greatly today. I'll probably keep it active to entertain distract me at work.

[bloop]

My brother, Steven, got a blurb on this MSN article about the critical response to GTAIV (he's mildly critical of the game, but he has told me it's a good one).

[Vlad!]

I've put off getting GTA4 until I've heard that the issues with the PS3 version have been fixed. Those games are most fun when played with a few friends anyway, and none of my local friends are really into video gaming. And unfortunately, most of my remote friends have the xbox version.

[Ian]

Found the person who took my Wii, so I got that back.

And have been playing some MGS3, my first Metal Gear game, and I like it quite a lot.

[Vlad!]

That's pretty sweet. In my experience it's rare to find the culprit in these things unless it's someone who you know, but if you've got to have bad luck, you might as well combine it with some good luck.

I actually have yet to play any Metal Gear except the first one, and by the first one I mean the 8-bit NES one that most people don't know about or have forgotten. It seems like a potentially amusing game series, but third-person action/adventures and I have historically not gotten along well at all.

[bloop]

MGS4 has the potential to be the PS3 system seller for me.  I just have to sell my soul or something for the $. 

I have MGS3: Subsistence, and I remember it had the older 8-bit MG games on it (my brother still has my copy of the game).

[Vlad!]

MGS4 has the potential to be the PS3 system seller for me.  I just have to sell my soul or something for the $.

It's a real dilemma. For me with my 60GB, having a PS2, a Blu-ray player, a fantastic upconverting DVD player, and a (crappy) media player is worth the price of admission even though I only own one PS3 game (Motorstorm, which came with the freakin thing). Granted, when Disgaea 3 (which had the potential to be a system seller for me anyway) and FFXIII come out, I anticipate this changing, but quite possibly not until then. However, with 60s becoming increasingly rare, the value proposition isn't really there for a non-backwards-compatible PS3, at least in my eyes.

[NinjaRob17]

I recently finished Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, and I thought it was fantastic. It was pretty short (without doing missions and sidequests, it only takes about 11-15 hours to finish), and the randomness of the combat system was kind of annoying at times, but the story is engaging, the characters are likable, and the graphics (especially the cutscenes!) and voice-overs are great. I liked Final Fantasy VII, but wasn't a big fanboy of it. I just thought it was a good game. Crisis Core made me want to play VII again.

I'm playing Phoenix Wright: Justice For All now, and I'm not liking it as much as Ace Attorney. The first "real" trial was very good, but I'm on the circus one at the moment and am not very interested in the characters. It reminds me of the samurai trial of Ace Attorney, which also didn't interest me much.

[Vlad!]

I'm playing Phoenix Wright: Justice For All now, and I'm not liking it as much as Ace Attorney. The first "real" trial was very good, but I'm on the circus one at the moment and am not very interested in the characters. It reminds me of the samurai trial of Ace Attorney, which also didn't interest me much.

I did like the third one more than the second. By the end of the circus case, I definitely wanted to stab Moe the clown to death. I also don't like Franziska von Karma as a prosecutor.

While I'm still looking forward to playing the fourth one, I'm a little concerned that in attempts to keep the series fresh and different, the core gameplay ends up being lost. I know Capcom is one of the most notorious for taking a franchise and running it into the ground, so I'm definitely hoping that they take a long look at their material before they commit to Gyakuten Saiban 5.

[Vlad!]

Finished up Revenant Wings. Took me a month and a half for just shy of 21 hours of gameplay. What can I say; I don't have as much free time as I used to

My original complaint is still at the forefront: the new story really butchers the characterization, turning multifaceted characters down to one-dimensional cliches. I just plain don't feel like the game was anywhere near as strong as FFXII.

That said, it's an amusing diversion. The control awkwardness is something I got used to fairly quickly, and for most of the game I think the difficulty was tuned well. The exception to this would be at the end, where I really hit a brick wall difficultywise. While the final battle was suitably epic (and took me about four or five tries), the last handful of optional quests (which naturally reward the player with some of the best summon monsters and, presumably, equipment in the game) definitely required my party to be about ten to fifteen levels above where it was. Fortunately, you can exit a battle at any time without penalty, so I just left those unfinished.

Ultimately, Revenant Wings is the quintessential tie-in game: solid enough to not sully the series whose name it bears, while clearly benefiting from branding because it's not a stellar game in its own right. Personally, I feel like there are games more deserving of my gaming dollar (and gaming hour, which is definitely the more weighty of the two), but I did see it through to completion, so that should say something right there.

Next up: Rune Factory!

[Vlad!]

Spent some time with Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon.

Harvest Moon and I have had sort of a varied relationship. I remember a friend telling me that he liked the game, and I made fun of him because, hey, it's a freaking farm simulator. How stupid is that? But I fired it up to give it a go...and then six hours later I was having to prop my eyelids open because it was suddenly time for bed. I woke up the next morning excited about when I would get to play it again because I couldn't wait to harvest those crops. The most clear thing I recall about that time is me marveling in the back of my head that Harvest Moon made work feel like fun.

Of course, it didn't last. I don't even think I beat the original Harvest Moon (I seem to recall that it had multiple endings, so I may have gotten one of the lamer endings). I definitely didn't get married in that one, since I was too busy molesting my cows with the tentacle monstermilking machine to worry about things like wooing the girl of my dreams.

I gave the series a miss for a good long while. I tried Harvest Moon 64, but never really got into it--the game did not make a very graceful transition into 3d on that platform. The next iteration I played was Friends of Mineral Town, for the GBA. The farming was still there. The dating sim was still there. The addictiveness was still there, but in addition, there was something new. Now you could take your hammer, go into a cave, and smash rocks, extracting ore from them. The interesting thing (to me) was how it was implemented. The mining part felt almost bolted on. Time stopped when in the cave, which was definitely a departure from the frantic "finish the daily routine" mindset of the series, and the cave floors were randomly generated, with stairways that only went down. In other words, Natsume and Marvelous had added a roguelike into Harvest Moon! Unfortunately, the stamina system made it very difficult to get a lot done in the mines without careful planning, so even though time had stopped, you didn't have free reign. I did beat FoMT (by getting married, which as far as I know is the only way to beat the game), but still got bored with it.

Now, here's Rune Factory, a Harvest Moon RPG spinoff. Natsume and Marvelous are at it again, but interestingly Natsume also pulled in Neverland, which old school fans might remember as the partnership that created Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals (and subsequent titles in the series, but unfortunately the less said about those the better). I was kind of curious to see how "fantasy RPG" and "Harvest Moon" would go together, and unfortunately the answer is "they don't".

The game starts out with our hero Raguna (or as the game prefers to spell it, RAGUNA)[1], who (you guessed it) has amnesia and passed out in front of the house of Mist, who happens to own a farm that he can work on. The farm borders a town containing no fewer than 10 eligible maidens and many other characters (or caricatures, perhaps) whose main purpose is to say the same thing over and over again until you hit the next plot trigger. One interesting twist is that the love meter possessed by the girls in all previous games has been replaced by a love + friendship meter for every single NPC you meet. Actually, this would be an interesting twist if said meters actually did anything, but I have yet to see evidence of that fact.

Anyway, the start of the game involves basic Harvest Moon schtick: clearing ground, hoeing ground, buying seeds, planting seeds,
making money by shipping things you grew (or found lying around on the ground, or stole from others, etc.), and stalking all the eligible females. However, the fantasy twist comes when you realize that there are caves all around. These aren't randomly generated caves. No, these are full cave levels, complete with monsters and traps and minerals to mine (natch) and...farmland? Yes, for some inexplicable reason, you are supposed to grow crops inside the caves. True to life, of course, the conditions inside the caves never change, so you can grow seasonal crops year round, adding an interesting twist. Which seems cool until you realize that by the end of the game your morning routine is going to involve walking to each of five or six different caves, battling your way through multiple floors' worth of monsters, and watering your crops. All on a finite stamina bar. Yeah, it's about at that point where I realized that the caves which seemed like such a good idea in theory would swiftly become an albatross around my neck. Even if I decided to grow crops just on the first level of each cave, I would have to walk all over creation just to do the watering, and of course this would be the case even on rainy days!

Another change is that, instead of farm animals, you capture monsters. Yeah, there's the pokemon aspect as well. Personally, I feel a little weirded out when the game expects me to treat monsters like farm animals (including brushing them, shearing them, taking their eggs, and milking them (and hopefully not impregnating them, as with previous games)). The monsters also fill the role of the harvest sprites from FoMT. Or rather, they would fill that role if they weren't useless sacks of crap. I have yet to figure out how to make my monsters do any work for me.

The most infuriating thing about the game, though, is the total awkwardness of the interface. Harvest Moon has always been a little...special...in the interface department [2], but what is OK for a farming sim is not OK for a dungeon crawler, and I have taken it to the chin several times when I was looking through my inventory to find my sword and was still sorting through my hoes [3] and monster brushes and seed packets and whatnot when the monster started gnawing on my posterior. It also includes the absolutely frustrating Harvest Moon tradition of holding items above your head and hurling them at things, and of course if you're off by a single pixel then the item immediately shatters into one million pieces, never to be seen again. This is made worse because items can stack now. Stacking items is a great feature, but I've had $3600 worth of feed be irrevocably lost because I was standing one pixel off from the feeding trough and threw it on the ground instead. Couple this with the awkward button configuration, and it really makes me want to throw my DS across the room sometimes.

Harvest Moon has been Natsume's baby for too long. When a baby makes a mess, it's just sort of expected, and you accept that because someday you hope the baby will become a properly functioning adult. But Harvest Moon has been making messes of the fecal variety for over ten years now, and it's no longer expected and should no longer be accepted. Rune Factory 2 has been out in Japan for a bit less than six months now. Whether it will come over here I don't know (it took the original about a year, though I can't imagine why since the voice acting is terrible and the translation is riddled with errors), but if it does then we'll see whether it's grown up any. Unfortunately, the smart money is on "no".

[1] Does this make anyone else think of Laguna, the random side story guy from Final Fantasy 8?
[2] I mean "rode the short bus to school" special.
[3] When I say "sorting through my hoes" I'm talking about my farming implements, as Raguna isn't enough of a stud to have multiple of the other sort of hoes to sort through.

[Vlad!]

Drone Tactics, the strategy RPG from Atlus and Success.

I don't know how many people in the US are familiar with Banpresto's Super Robot War series of video games, since only one or two of them have been localized. Basically, Drone Tactics takes Super Robot War, mixes in a little bit of Advance Wars, and presents it to the US market.

I am a big fan of games that do what they say they do without unnecessary bells and whistles. Drone Tactics appears to be one of those games. It has a fairly generic plot with extremely generic characters which serves first, foremost, and always to drive the action. The gameplay should be familiar to most strategy RPG fans and is quite uncomplicated. I've only played through the first few battles so far, but I can say that I really enjoy the chance to play a game that does one thing and does it well.

[Yes, I am trying to keep my game reviews shorter after the dissertation above on Rune Factory]

[spacebrat311]

Playing through the Meta Gear Solid series chronologically. I'm in the middle of 3.

Lo-ving-it.

[Vlad!]

Started playing around with Professor Layton and the Curious Village, by Nintendo and Level 5.

I'll just come right out and say that this game just oozes quality. I haven't played much of it, but what I have seen shows commendably high production values. So far the puzzles have been fairly easy, though I imagine they will become more difficult as the game progresses.

I doubt I'll play it through, but I'm glad to see that it's still possible for Nintendo to produce a decent, fairly original[1] game (which I'm sure will swiftly become a franchise, as I hear a sequel is already pretty far along).

[1] It feels a bit like Touch Detective, but it's different enough that I'm willing to call it "fairly original".

[Vlad!]

I was finishing up some unpacking (yes, I still haven't quite unpacked everything yet. Shut up.) and I came across my N64. A couple hours of Super Smash Bros. and Road Rash 64 later, and I know why I haven't finished unpacking yet. This sort of thing keeps happening.

[spacebrat311]

A couple hours of Super Smash Bros. ...

This game has caused me to miss so many early morning classes...

[Vlad!]

I wanted something a little more action-oriented to complement Professor Layton [1], so I tried Mega Man Star Force: Pegasus.

For those of you who have trouble keeping your Mega Mans (Mega Men?) straight, you're not alone. The original series, which I never really enjoyed, comes first. Then Mega Man X (the first four or so of which I really liked) takes place about a century later and follows X, a Maverick Hunter whose relationship to the original Mega Man is not, at least to me, particularly clear. Then there's Mega Man Zero, for the GBA, which takes place I believe subsequent to Mega Man X. I actually haven't played and Mega Man Zero games, but I hear that the later ones lead into the next series, which is Mega Man ZX. Interestingly, by the time ZX rolls around (two or three centuries after the original, I believe), humans have apparently come back and they fight alongside the reploids against the mavericks. This is where chronology breaks, because the Mega Man .EXE (Mega Man Battle Network) series originated before Mega Man Zero but takes place either after the ZX stuff or in a different timeline, because it revolves around humans who control the familiar Mega Man characters as avatars in a virtual world.

All of that is to lead up to Mega Man Star Force. Basically, MMSF is a successor to the Mega Man Battle Network timeline. However, as Capcom is wont to do, it sucks mightily and suffers from a heavy bout of sequelitis. The gameplay is wonky, what few compelling story elements there are were lifted nearly verbatim from Mega Man Battle Network 5, and it followed MMBN5's example (and Pokemon's example before that) of having like three different versions of the same game, and if you or your friends don't have all three versions then there's no way you can unlock the coolest stuff. I enjoyed MMBN5, especially the DS version which combined both of the GBA games onto a single cart so you only have to buy one game (and just play it twice, heh) to get the whole story. Honestly, MMSF feels like Capcom showed MMBN to their team of crappy sequel programmers in some third-world country and then just phoned in the quality control and story writing.

The Mega Man franchise is very hit-or-miss [2], and this one seems to me like it's a big whiff.

[1] I like Professor Layton, but I've had afternoon naps more action-oriented than it is.
[2] Sadly, IMO it's mostly miss. Of the probably 30- or 35-odd Mega Man titles I could name, I  have actually played about twelve and liked maybe four or five. Not a good average. Of course, some of those I liked a lot (Mega Man X3, Mega Man ZX, Mega Man Battle Network 5).

[enemy anemone]

For those of you who have trouble keeping your Mega Mans (Mega Men?) straight, you're not alone.

can't you just force them to play with trucks and guns when they're young? 

(sorry)

[Ian]

Vlad, you forgot MegaMan Legends.  I may just have to kill you for that. *is super Legends fanatic* (check avatar)

As for the timeline sequence, it goes like this: Classic > X > Zero > ZX > Legends.  EXE > Starforce is an alternate universe.  My favorites are the X and Legends series, but Zero and ZX are both really good alternatives to the X series.  Not a huge Classic fan, but it's a fun challenge now and then.  EXE was fun for a while, but Starforce can go do something nasty to itself.

Playing through the Meta Gear Solid series chronologically. I'm in the middle of 3.

Lo-ving-it.

Omg, been doing the same thing, except in reverse order.  Just beat 2, now I need to go find 1.  MGS is a fantastic series.

[NinjaRob17]

I'm a huge fan of the classic Megaman series. That's why I'm so stoked about Megaman 9, classic 8-bit everything and all.

[Vlad!]

Vlad, you forgot MegaMan Legends. 

Yeah, I also forgot Mega Man Soccer. I consider(ed) both to be awkward spinoffs. Much like the Castlevania series, I like the 2d platforming more than the 3d adventure ones or the brand cash-in games (like that freaking Castlevania fighter game at E3...what is up with that?). I did a little bit of looking into it, though, and it seems like the series might be underrated. Assuming I can find the game and it's one of the ones my PS3 can play without crapping itself, maybe I'll give it a shot.

As for the timeline sequence, it goes like this: Classic > X > Zero > ZX > Legends.  EXE > Starforce is an alternate universe. 

Hm, interesting. Thanks for clearing that up.

EXE was fun for a while, but Starforce can go do something nasty to itself.

Yeah, that pretty much echoes my experience. The only .exe one I've played is the port of 5 for the DS, but I imagine that (like most of the Mega Man series) they're all very similar. I got sick of the X series after 4 or 5 and sick of ZX after 1 (I don't know if I just wasn't feelin' it with ZX advent or if the game just sucks worse than the original, but I dropped it after like the first level).

I'm a huge fan of the classic Megaman series. That's why I'm so stoked about Megaman 9, classic 8-bit everything and all.

I've played a bit of 2 and a bit of 7, but that's about all. I'm just not a big fan of gameplay that requires a large time investment just to get around the ways the game purposely tries to own you.

[Vlad!]

We finally got our Wii in at work, so I just got paid to play an hour's worth of Super Smash Bros: Brawl. I know, it's a hard life.

I've been an outspoken critic of Melee. Too many characters that are just clones of one-another, control a lot more loose, too hard to see what's going on, and just feels like they phoned it in after the success of the original. However, I can say that the hour I spent playing Brawl was the sort of madcap mayhem that made the N64 one quite possibly the best party game for 2-4 players on a system known for its strong party game lineup.

First of all, my biggest complaint about Melee was that the graphics rendered in a more modern (read: indistinguishable and murky) style made it difficult to tell what was going on. It's hard to call out specifically what Brawl did to improve this[1], but I had a lot fewer "where the heck am I...oh, I just walked off a cliff" moments. I was also impressed that the character lineup was a lot more diverse than in Melee. A lot of the clone characters are gone[2] and have been replaced by new ones which have unique control schemes and moves[3]. An hour was certainly not enough time to fully (or even partially) explore all the character options, but it was good to see more diversity.

Not owning a Wii myself, I'm not very good with the controller. I was impressed that there are at least four ways I know of to control the action[4], lending an unprecedented amount of control choice to the series. I went the Wiimote + nunchuk route, and it felt extremely natural. The only surprise was that I had no idea how to pull off my character (Ike)'s third jump. It's possible that he doesn't have one, or that I suck, but other than that I was surprised at how well it worked out.

I also noticed that a bone, albiet a small one, was thrown to the fans of the fighting game genre. One of the biggest complaints I've heard from that quarter is that Smash Bros. isn't a "real" fighting game because it doesn't have "moves" in the traditional sense. Everyone has essentially the same array of short range melee and either long-ranged shots or ranged powerful melee attacks. If you've ever played a fighting game with one of these genre enthusiasts, you'll notice that they take the time to "learn" one or two characters, by which is meant learn unique button combinations that unleash powerful and punishing moves on their foes--essentially rewarding time spent researching, experimenting, and practicing with an increased arsenal. I personally feel like the lack of special combos really adds to the franchise's accessibility, but what we noticed with Brawl is that occasionally a character would pull off a "super" and the person controlling the character would remark "I have no idea how I did that, but it was sweet". This suggests to me that characters have unique combo moves[5] designed to appease the hardcore fans, though not the vast array of combos available in a Soul Calibur or King of Fighters.

All in all, I am pleased to see indications that the franchise is still moving, if not in new directions, at least not on a beeline to crappytown. After Melee, I had pretty much assumed that SSB was a one-hit wonder and the inevitable sequels would just be a poor reflection on the original. I'm not ready to declare myself wrong in this regard yet, but I will say that after one hour of Brawl I'm far more optimistic than I was after my first hour of Melee.

...and there goes my goal of shorter game reviews...

[1] Offhand I would say that smaller levels leading to closer camera work and backgrounds which are less busy contribute the most to this, but it will warrant more study
[2] They may just be unlockable, as I seem to recall seeing a screenshot of a Brawl roster screen including far more characters than we got to choose from.
[3] One possible rebuttal to my gripe is that, for example, Ganondorf gave players who liked Captain Falcon another option when someone else took their main man. I will acknowledge this, but at the same time I just don't feel like that's enough justification to pad the roster with four characters who all play like Mario.
[4] Wiimote, Wiimote + nunchuk, classic controller, gamecube controller
[5] It's possible that, as with the other character moves, it's the same combo for each character. I don't know enough about the game to be able to tell.

[spacebrat311]

Meh. I kind of think Brawl blows hard. To be fair though, I find Melee to be far superior to the original in every respect. The problem with Brawl is that after introducing a bunch of new moves and advanced play mechanics in Melee to make a game that can be played at a competitive level (not that I play videogames at that kind of level, it was just cool to have that kind of nuance.) Brawl dumbs down both the moveset and the mechanics to a kind of original/melee hybrid. It caps the abilities of advanced players much lower, which makes it a better introduction to the Super Smash Bros. formula than, say melee, but takes away a lot of features that more advanced players live by. It's kind of an unnecessary intermediate in that if I'm in the mood for a simpler play mechanic, I'll turn to the original, but if I want to play to potential I'll be pulling out melee. There simply isn't a situation in which one of those two isn't a better choice than Brawl.

[Vlad!]

Heh, if you claim the original couldn't be played at a competitive level then you clearly are mistaken. I've played in SSB tournaments before (I generally come in middle of the pack), and I can tell you that there's some crazy stuff that you can pull off in that game.

Honestly, I can't stand fighting games as a genre, and the part I like about SSB is how it took the tired formula and made it into something I enjoy playing with my friends. I am not at all interested in what makes hardcore gamers happy, only about what is fun when I play it with others.