Gamesugar

February 28, 2010

Lazy Sunday – Join The Club

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , — Jamie Love @ 10:21 am

Join The Club
Drifting through aisles of older games is one of life’s more precious delights, one which I ended up enjoying yesterday, while actually trying to take an afternoon off from gaming – an utterly impossible goal. For some reason drowning in new title choices drives me toward seeking out ones I missed, the result being that I came home with Tomb Raider Underworld and The Club.

The continuing saga of Lara Croft is like a disease I willingly infect myself with – the game absolutely aggravates me to no end, but I can’t stop playing it. I’m pretty sure the answer for my illness is that repeatedly dying over simple mistakes makes me desperate to do it right doublefast. If I die fighting the toughest boss in the world, I never find it hard to put the controller down. But when I die because Lara misses a ledge grab, or decides to jump in the wrong direction, well then I can’t leave off looking that inept, even if no one is there to see it. As frustrating as this experience is, I’ll still take its worn-out wares over the stripped down Prince of Persia solution any day.

Now while I didn’t play it as much last night, The Club is a glorious surprise, one of those games that reminds me that I should occasionally pay attention to Sega titles that didn’t just get off the plane from Japan – it’s hard to believe the game comes from Bizarre Creations.

(more…)

February 23, 2010

Unused Sentences from Revisits of Madworld, No More Heroes, and Possibly Onechanbara

Filed under: Features — Tags: , , , — Jamie Love @ 3:52 pm

A Little Of This, A Little Of That...
-As before, the welcoming party consisted of armed thugs swinging chains and spikes, meat grinders waiting for fresh juice, walls of spikes, and all other manner of death traps eager to paint the town red all over again. In short, it reaffirmed my long running suspicion that cities are intent on killing us, or at least hurrying the speeds at which we kill each other.

-The city is where we need to go in order to make a name for ourselves as well, where we can fight to claw our way ahead and raise our rank and edge ever closer to the prize that eluded us everyplace else.

-Is it any fun?

(more…)

It’s The Little Things…

Filed under: Archives — Tags: , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 12:28 pm

Ghost in the Shell
Moving boxes around yesterday turned up more than a few PS1 games I hadn’t seen in awhile – my life is mostly comprised of boxes in case you’re curious, and every so often I turn them over instead of writing semi-cohesive paragraphs about how important videogames are. Along the way I found the original Ghost in the Shell, which often gets labeled as a mediocre licensed title by people who haven’t played it.

In actuality the game is several shades of meeting and beating expectations, tossing players into a nimble tank, your trusty Fuchikoma, and offering up animation work from Production I.G – essentially making the game a precursor to all the work done on the Stand Alone Complex series.

The game was made by Exact in Japan, an internal Sony Japan studio that became Sugar & Rockets (the studio that inspired this site’s name) for awhile before apparently vanishing – but I’ve pieced that last bit together mostly from sugar packets given the fleeting and scarce nature of information regarding internal Sony Japan.

Anyway, what’s particularly special about this copy I turned up is that it’s an import from Japan. Not surprisingly, I’m a bit obsessive about collecting import copies of games whenever possible, but PS1 titles are one of the sweetest in my opinion. So long story short, I’ve tossed together some pictures of what certainly isn’t the rarest, but does qualify as one of the most impressively packaged games I own, which you can catch after the break if you’re into that sort of thing.

(more…)

February 21, 2010

Lazy Sunday – Production I.G To The Rescue

Halo Legends
Last night I took time out to watch Halo Legends, because despite my dickish reputation I am, in earnest, a fountain of eternal optimism. Thematically and structurally Legends is chasing after The Animatrix, no surprises there, and while it misses that mark it is also littered with sequences and ideas that make the work hard to dismiss entirely.

Rather than a focused and stylish effort, Legends is more like a sloppy bomb that leaves just enough shrapnel embedded in the subculture it wants to wrap itself in to find extended life, not unlike the Skeksis. Repeated viewings turn up interesting pieces, but it’s clear from the first run through that Production I.G is in many ways without peers, with The Duel easily standing out from the pack both for its visual challenge and narrative focus.

(more…)

February 18, 2010

Review – Fret Nice

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 9:19 pm

Fret Nice
Fret Nice’s invitation to play through familiar territory with a slightly skewed set of controls is as alluring as it is frustrating at first. Short on fancier words, I’ll suggest that there are plenty of moments in this writing about games experiment where I spend days puzzling over what to make of a title, and this is no exception.

The nagging sensation biting at my neck makes it hard to simply brush the game aside as a mediocre platformer with a hook. Even without the guitar, Fret Nice would be an interesting diversion from the everyday, though a little light on content. And so here we are, with me kinda liking the game, but entirely unsure of what to do with it – of course I realize the obvious answer is to be playing it.

(more…)

February 14, 2010

Lazy Sunday – Valkyria Chronicles Is Still My Valentine

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , — Jamie Love @ 10:05 am

Lazy Sunday
So it occurred to me while slurping the necessary amount of coffee to spark my bones to life for another day that I spend quite a bit of my Sunday morning half-mindlessly checking out websites, and that perhaps I could make a thing out of that. Time will tell if this continues or not I suppose.

Anyway, it’s Valentine’s Day, which would be incomplete without some game related cardness in Japanese, so says I, and the girls of Valkyria Chronicles 2 have me covered via Famitsu. Famitsu also has a very sweet page for 100mt, or Patchwork Heroes for those of us in the land of poorly named NA PSP games.

As always the good Rebels at 4cr have the best Valentine’s Day Cards. Though Mitch didn’t have time to do it up right and proper this year, the choice between Snake’s two greatest admirers from MGS is much appreciated – though a third one with Liquid might have been an additionally nice touch.

In other news, and to wrap this up so I can get back to my coffee, I came across yet another comparison between game box art releases in different regions, which is entirely important because I had no idea that the Japanese cover for Batman Returns was so incredibly awesome – so much so that I have to use the word awesome. Near the bottom of that same page you’ll also find Shadowrun, where the Japanese cover definitely feasts on a rich Blade Runner vein to really capture how I thought of the game back when it released.

Happy Valentine’s Day, if only so that I can offer much love from a guy named love.

February 10, 2010

Review – No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

No More Heroes 2
Margaret waits patiently on the rooftops of Santa Destroy, another female sniper, distinguished by her Gothic Lolita attire and the player’s knowledge that her song is enough to kill. Charging toward her like a bull causes her to fire bullets on cue, which are either blocked at the expense of blade energy or dodged.

When I can get in close enough for the kill, the action is a mash of hack and slash that lands like sloppy kisses to push her back, save for that precise and precious moment where our blades lock and I fall off the edge of the couch from the force of spinning the WiiMote.

During every fight I’ll end up standing on the couch before the end, consistently overcompensating the actions needed as my health drops lower and I run out of pizza slices. I’m earnestly sweating after nearly every encounter as if my life were on the line over this stripped down story of revenge. It doesn’t really matter if the story seems straightforward though, because it’s much more about the player than the adventures of Travis Touchdown this time around.

(more…)

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress