6 Apr, 2008
Yumiko is one of my favorite Chinese singers. She’s got a lot of songs that I’d describe as “Creep Pop”, a sort of mix of typical pop designs with sci-fi-esque melodies and soft back bass beats. This song, despite being titled Arabic Market, has that same feel mixed with an appropriately Arabic sound. It’s also one of the few songs I can comfortably pass on Extreme difficulty so it gets featured today for helping plump up my ego.
I could never have predicted it but 2014 was perfectly bookended by two big 3DS bummers. Bright and early in January I was excited about Chibi-Robo: Photo Finder because I love the little plug-in pal and his disturbing world of characters. But this 3DS game — ergh! The photo mechanic is neat but the 3DS camera outputs the worst garbage and all the minigames you play in between are either immensely infuriating or just boring. The final blow is Chibi-Robo’s battery mechanic which requires you to plug in and recharge after every little thing you do. I can’t believe how big of disappointment this game turned out to be.
I cannot actively recall playing Strider 2014 so I’ll just copy and paste this summation from my Done Playing post: A few thousand button presses and a minimum of concentration is all it takes to blaze through in 4 or 5 hours. It’s all flashes, explosions and wonky mechanics and while that is Strider in a nutshell, this 2014 edition isn’t as memorable as either a Strider game or a Metroidvania game.
So excited was I for a spiritual successor to Panzer Dragoon that I denied all claims that Crimson Dragon was terrible until I finally played it myself. Thankfully it was a “free” Xbox Game with Gold but even still it wanted more money from me. Littered with time-limited boosts and daily energy meters — oh god, they made it a full price free-to-play monstrosity! All that aside it requires a lot of grinding on past levels and it just wasn’t much fun to play.
Shame of the Year winner ‘Chibi-Robo: Photo Finder’ with trophy
Maybe I can come around on The Sun at Night down the road. Its alternate history world that stars the augmented Russian space dog, Laika, is the kind of weird I get into. It’s also an interesting and sprawling Metroidvania style game with quests and loads of upgrades. But that first night with it, wrangling its peculiar controls, getting past the lengthy text introductions and then having it all reset when I died was a terrible shock. I couldn’t put my hands on it again for the rest of the year… but maybe in 2015?
Come December and we’re back where we started with another downloadable 3DS game I was excited for. Yumi’s Odd Odyssey (otherwise known as Umihara Kawase) has been flirting with a Western release for years and it finally happened. I put it off until it was on sale for $10 but, ya know, maybe even that’s a little steep. The game is tough and requires an expert understanding of its rope physics to fling your character around perilous and abstract 2D levels. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was faster to reload and reset but it moves at the plodding pace of the Super Famicom original. We’re talking Super Meat Boy levels of start-to-death time with 10+ seconds of waiting to give it another go. I came back and made some progress but the first boss fight is more than enough for me. I’m done.
Culture / Done Playing / Feature / Microsoft
7 Feb, 2011
Feeling a little better this afternoon after a crippling Saturday of sickness, I was on my way to finally starting Alpha Protocol but stopped by the Indie Games channel to see what was new. Extreme Baby Maker got a sequel (still with Avatars) but I didn’t bother with the free trial. Instead I found a trio of neo-retro 2D platformers, each with a twist of their own.
Nyan-Tech (80 Microsoft Points)
A single-screen puzzle platformer, I dig the minimalist look and the super tiny, super cute art. It also has an interesting hook in that you have to hold different buttons on the controller to solidify the platforms you need to jump across. Navigating the stages looks simple at first but timing button presses (and button releases) in mid-jump proved more hysterical and challenging than I expected. A score timer also starts counting down once you begin moving, making it not only a dexterous challenge but a quick-thinking one as well. In searching for wallpaper and more info I happened upon a couple reviews of the game that point out how short it is.
Maid_san’s Caving Adventure (80 Microsoft Points)
Yeah, so I checked it out because it has an anime maid in it. It also has some pretty 2D environs and I’m a sucker for both caving and adventures. It also reminded me a bit of Yumi’s Odd Odyssey only without the bipedal land-fish or the grappling hook. What you get is a platformer that’s as much about grabbing shiny stars at it is about stealth. Stealth in the form of Maid_san’s special “trembling” technique that makes her invisible to the wandering troll guys, the Benars. It looks good but this is classic Japanese fare that’s all about doing everything perfectly and being critically graded on your performance. I couldn’t muster anything above a failing ‘D Rank’ and decided to move on.
Aban Hawkins & the 1000 SPIKES (80 Microsoft Points)
Oh look, someone made their own ‘I Wanna Be the Guy’ on the Indie Games Channel! Oi! Along with the 1,000 tricky spikes that shoot out of nearly every platform you land on you also get 1,000 lives, and I needed them; it took about a dozen just to get past one of the first obstacles. When I thought I was finally up to speed with the game an unexpected patch of spikes killed me and sent me all the way back to the start. I love the look and sound of it but I got all my punishing platforming from Super Meat Boy, thanks.
And then I was done with those trials and ready to start Alpha Protocal which I am, shockingly, enjoying given how much gum-flappin’, conspiracy-talkin’, dialog is packed on that disc. More on that at [REDACTED] and on the [CLASSIFIED] Show.
Things are about to get ultra busy between work, E3, and NfamousGamers. I don’t know how much I’ll have time to post here (I’ll link to whatever I have that goes up elsewhere) so I thought I’d take a look back at a less hectic E3, E308. I dug up my blist (which is now socrada or something equally silly sounding) and I hope you’re ready for a whole year of disappointments, darlings, and delays.
Forgettable and Unforgivable
I haven’t even attempted to play Velvet Assassin based on its horrendous reviews (or non-reviews) but a year ago I was all for it, saying “A female lead that’s NOT a slutty caricature of a woman? Based on a “real person”? Looks sorta like a WWII-era Splinter Cell.” I’m still interested to try the game but it really fell apart in development.
Though Big Bang Mini looked like “Geometry Wars meets Boom Boom Rocket” the final product turned out to be more strict puzzle solving than frantic puzzle action and really kind of boring. I was wise to steer clear of X-Blades as I predicted while both Defendin’ de Penguin and Ninjatown let me down on the tower defense front on the DS. But the biggest disappointment of all has to be Samba de Amigo on the Wii. A year ago I mused that the waggle control couldn’t possibly be worse than the Dreamcast’s wacky infrared sensor control… but boy, was I wrong!
On the Up and Up
Although I didn’t get to it until I found it on clearance, Mercenaries 2 entertained in a big explosive open world way, just as I had hoped a year ago. It still wasn’t on par with the exemplary original but it was dumb fun with explosives and that’s definitely worth the discount price I paid. LittleBigPlanet is a game I still hold near to my heart (even though I probably only spent 3 months with it), Flower was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had with a game and Pixeljunk Eden is probably the best from Q Games (although I ended up not enjoying it much in the end). Rock Band 2 was indeed full of improvements and a gob of new songs (most of which were pretty lame to me) as expected and Zubo was as surprising as a final product as it was on my first look, I just didn’t stick with it for long.
??!?!
What’s more surprising than Zubo’s gameplay is how many games I was eagerly anticipating that I still haven’t even played. The list of shame ensues:
What the hell was I doing all year? Surely I could’ve rented one or two of these in even the last six months right? I definitely need to catch up this Summer with some of my free Blockbuster game rental coupons from e-Rewards! I can’t let that many great games from this E3 pass me by!
The Lost (but not yet Damned)
In a way it’s a good thing that so many captivating games from E308 have yet to be released because they’d probably have wound up on the list above. I still haven’t heard, read, or seen any more on Raven Squad, This is Vegas is now in development limbo as Midway spirals down the drain, Our House remains one of the few Wii minigame collections I’m still interested in, and Yumi’s Odd Odyssey on PSP was such a horrendous port of the Japanese original that it caused boycotts in Japan and may explain why it’s still not out here, but Afrika is once again on its way to us. Then there’s a whole other level of Lost-ness with games like I Am Alive, Infinte Line, MAG, and the ever-ethereal third title from Team ICO that practically refuse to exist and that will probably be just as mysterious after this year’s show.
Looking back, I think what I’ve learned is that I need to play more games this year. I feel so guilty about having missed out on all those games I listed to spend my precious free time beating myself up over some frivolous post about a Pac-Man art installation. I’m desperately close to losing touch with the industry I love writing about and that’s only going to turn me into some kind of crazed Dvorak-styled gamer. As entertaining as it’d be to blog (and read), that’s not what I want to become. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got one afternoon to catch up on dozens of games before I lose myself in E3 ’09 coverage.
21 Jul, 2008
I really, really wanted to see the PlayStation Portable excel at E3. New game announcements were fired off one after another but at the end of the week just twenty-one games were shoved into existence for PSP. Sony themselves put more emphasis on PlayStation 2 and even let the PS3 footage of Valkyria Chronicles get mixed up in their PSP video, creating a sensation whose disheartening explanation (NOT coming to PSP) further deflated the handheld’s presence at E3.
Worse still, several major releases spanning all consoles like Tomb Raider Underworld, Bolt, and Ghostbusters are completely ignoring the PSP, even though the PS2 version of each could probably be ported over. Polyphony Digital head Kazunori Yamauchi was cornered at E3 and revealed that Gran Turismo 4: Mobile is still in development but that it wouldn’t be released until after GT5, possibly not until 2011. Ironically, the biggest PSP news of the week was when I found that cheap copy of Jeanne D’Arc at Target.
For me personally this list begins and ends with Yumi’s Odd Odyssey. It’s the only domestic PSP title I’m interested in. I wish Carpenter’s Story and There’s Japan were heading our way or even some new downloadable titles but it looks like I’ll have to keep busy with R-Type Command, Jeanne D’Arc, and Beats for the foreseeable future. And now, the list of E3’s PSP titles, in no particular order.
N+
Duke Nukem Trilogy
Star Ocean: First Departure
Star Ocean: Second Evolution
Madden NFL 2009
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2009
Yumi’s Odd Odyssey
SBK08 Superbike World Championship
WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009
Smash Court Tennis 3
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Ford Racing Off Road
Ben 10: Alien Force
LEGO Batman: The Videogame
BUZZ! Master Quiz
NBA 09 The Inside
Patapon 2
Resistance: Retribution
Super Stardust Portable
LocoRoco 2
Valhalla Knights 2
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Jun | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
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