Playing this game is like standing on a sinking ship.
“Write anything, solve everything” states the advertising for Scribblenauts, the much hyped puzzle game for Nintendo DS that came out last week. I’ve been obsessed with the concept of this game since the moment I heard about it. In Scribblenauts, you’re presented with a puzzle. In order to solve the puzzle, you need things. To create things, you simply write down anything you can think of.
That seems simple, right? Keep reading →
Wait, I play this how?
Yesterday, Apple gave one of their big deal press conferences where they announce new products and software. This was known to be an iPod event, and it was promoted using the tagline, “It’s only rock n’ roll, but we like it.” So what did they spend nearly half of the time promoting? Games. Yes, they promoted games for the iPod Touch and the iPhone, bringing up people from Gameloft and Ubisoft to demo upcoming titles. But here’s something they won’t tell you: gaming on the iPhone sucks. Keep reading →
When I went to Japan last year and asked the girl working at the hostel to help me translate the menu screens of my newly purchased Japanese version of Tetris DS, she asked “why did you buy the Japanese version?” I explained that this was no longer available in the U.S., and Tetris is the same in any language.
“You should just get an R4,” she told me.
I’ve never been secretive about the fact that I download music like crazy. All I do these days is illegal downloading and buying vinyl. There’s hardly any CDs in my present, and even fewer in my future. That said, I’ve always been anti-pirating when it comes to videogames. It’s always seemed like too much work? I’ve always felt dirty about it for some reason? I can’t explain why this is so, but I’ve never pirated a game before.
Until now.
And here’s why.
To start this review, I’m going to quote my review of the original Puzzle Quest game for DS:
Puzzle Quest: This one had me seeing circles for weeks! This is an RPG, but instead of fighting with swords, you fight with Bejeweled. Brilliant! The story is so bad, I was just begging for opportunities to skip past it, but the actual battles were puzzlerific! And the system to get new spells and character upgrades was fantastic. I beat this game, collected all the spells, captured all the monsters, and realized I would never play it again. So to eBay it went. But before then, I had a great time with it.
So if you read that last sentence, it says I had a great time with it before it went on eBay. Puzzle Quest Galactrix is going on eBay before having a great time with it. There’s no great time to be had here.
This game moves along so incredibly slowly. To get from one puzzle to the next takes 2-3 minutes. There’s a load time (a load time on a DS game!), the autosave, the incredibly poor navigation system, and the crap story. This is just miserable.
Then there’s the gameplay itself which is really clunky. There’s a mode where you race against time, and you have to wait for a couple of seconds after your previous move to make your next move. And the puzzle pieces break so slowly, which also counts against your time. If you’re in a battle, and you make a mistake, you lose your turn. At one point, I was trying to move a piece in the middle of my screen, and the game had some sort of bug that always made me choose a piece that was far away from where I was pointing. Finally, I chose a different piece and it moved the right one. Was this thing playtested?
I just hate this game. I hate playing it. I hate the look of it, the feel of it, and the speed of it. I am never playing this thing again.
I recently got a PS3, and while I’ve been sucking at other games, I’m still working through them so I’ll comment on those later. I did, however, get Prince of Persia from Gamefly (quick before I cancel this crappy service again), and I’m ready to report on it.
I hate it; it hates me.
When I played Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for the OXB (Original X-Box — can we see if this acronym catches on?), I was defeated by that game’s awful camera. You’d be running across some wall, or leaping across some gap, and the camera would change angles just enough to have me fall to my death. The good news on Prince of Persia for PS3? You can’t die. The bad news? The camera changes angles just enough to have me nearly fall to my death.
This whole “you can’t die” thing supposedly makes this game easy, and yeah it really does. The combat is lame button mashing, and if you do manage to “die,” the character you’re traveling with will pull you out of death with her magic. What’s the point in that?
And the bits stolen from other games? Hello! Upon defeating a boss, you refertilize fertile lands (or something equally lame) by bringing color and flowers back to the world. The cut scene is basically a less artistic bite of Okami. What’s the point? If I want to do that, I’ll play Okami. It’s a better game.
As for the dialogue, oh goodness gracious, it hurts. If you can handle it, you can see what I mean in this video, part of a series that shows the entire game being played all the way through.
I don’t think this would be the worst game I could play right now, but I definitely don’t intend to finish it. It’s going back in the mail today.
Every year, I produce a Best Of list for the albums of the year, and every year I have to talk about how I make my selections. In a year where the Fleet Foxes are appearing near the top of everyone’s list, I think I should emphasize my criteria. I chose albums based on what I not only liked to listen to during the past year, but what I’m really likely to continue listening to. I think the Fleet Foxes album is excellent; it’s very pretty. But for something to really touch me, I have to know I am going to keep on singing, dancing or playing my drums along with the album for some time to come.
This is always the longest thing I write every year. Comments of “tl;dr” will not be appreciated.
I also do this thing where I don’t choose my favorite album of the year until two years later. Maybe I haven’t heard it yet! I don’t have time to buy pirate every album that comes out during a year. So look for bonus content at the end, where I select my favorite album of 2006. The 2008 albums–11 of them–are listed in alphabetical order by artist.
As reported previously, I went to a book launch party for a book called Arcade Mania, which is subtitled “The Turbo-Charged World of Japan’s Game Centers.” I’ve finished this book, and then used what I learned inside to go look around the game centers of Tokyo. I’m going to follow the format of the book, and report on my experiences with these games as a gonzo-style review of sorts of the book. As the book is sorted by game type, I’ll be sorting by the exact same format. Inside, we’ll find details on:
1. Crane Games
2. Sticker-Picture Machines
3. Rhythm Games
4. Shooting Games
5. Fighting Games
6. Games of Chance
7. Dedicated Cabinets
8. Retro Games
9. Card-Based Games
Warning: there is a lot of gaming content within. I suggest reading it anyway, even if you’re not interested, because there is also a lot of Japan content within. Now join me as I game in Japan!
Hi all of you readers back in the states, and welcome to any International visitors!
Joel gave me a great idea. He said I should write a mailbag column where I answer people’s questions about Japan. This is a great idea. Now I just need some darned questions. Comment them below, please, and I will answer them in a future post.
Here’s some questions I’ve already received:
Gordon from Oakland asks, “How can the streets be so clean when it’s impossible to find a trash can?” That’s a great question, Gordon! I have absolutely no idea. There’s no litter, yet if I have something to throw away, I need to carry it around with me for an hour until I find a place to toss it. That’s the trick, apparently. Japanese people simply cart their trash around with them until they have an opportunity to throw it away.
Gordon from Oakland asks, “How crazy are the vending machines anyway?” Not really that crazy, Gordon, at least not that I’ve seen. There are certainly a lot of them, both for drinks and cigarettes, and the number of brands and varieties of water-based drinks and coffee drinks is staggering. Also, some of the machines have both hot and cold drinks, which is really neat. My favorite thing to buy out of a vending machine is plain old bottled water. Got to keep myself hydrated with all of the walking I’ve been doing.
OK, now let’s get some questions from someone other than Gordon!
Today I went to the Tokyo National Museum, which was a very nice museum, but I was pretty bored pretty quickly. The coolest stuff in there was the Kofun burial sculptures. When I get my camera hooked up to my Mac, I may add a photo if one came out. They keep it awfully dark in the museum, and no flash photography is allowed, natch.
I’m at the Apple Store in Ginza right now, and I am using a Japanese keyboard. What this means is that a lot of the punctuation is in the wrong place, if I type an incorrect key I switch the keyboard to Japanese, and worst of all, the space bar is REALLY tiny. It makes it difficult to type. So that’s going to be the whole post.
