No joke. I hate ths game.
I bought Arkham City because I had watched Drave play Arkham Asylum and thought it looked really cool. When Black Friday rolled around, I used a variety of coupons and deals to get the game for somewhere in the vicinity of $3. Last night, I sold it on eBay for $30. Of course, I had started playing it only three days earlier. Completion percentage? Around 4%. So why is it gone so fast? Continue reading
Filed under Adventure Games
The greatest one-hit wonder of all time; it was the one hit for two bands!
Try Doodle Jump, they told me. And for 99 cents, I was on board. Why not? How much could I lose? A dollar? So I downloaded the game, figured out how to play, marveled at the cool art style, and then missed a platform. Game over. Wait. What? Continue reading
Filed under Mobile Games
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? Continue reading
Filed under Uncategorized
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. Continue reading
Filed under General Gaming
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.
Filed under State of the Blog
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.
Filed under Puzzle Games
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.
Filed under Adventure Games
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.
Filed under Music
