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December 24, 2010

Review – Back to the Future: The Game Episode 1 – It’s About Time

Back to the Future The Game Episode 1 Its about time
Telltale Games picks up the ball where the DeLorean fueled film trilogy ended years ago, bringing a Hollywood franchise into their niche playground of point and click adventure. If you’ve “been there and done that” with Telltale’s many releases to date, Back to the Future is certainly a curve ball. Significant expectations ride on the release of this first episode given a legacy of lackluster conversions of films to the gaming medium, predating Back to the Future’s own awkward release to the NES – back during an era where every film franchise was fair game for pixelated exploitation.

Gains have been made in creating richer gaming spaces from such properties, but plenty is still wanting from the bigger development studios typically in control – so double up those expectations yet again on a smaller studio such as Telltale.

But let me spread the good news that the game immediately exhibits the touch of hands belonging to fans, who, fortunately for us, also know how to stitch a game together. From the outset the release offers gamers a lift back to the world of the films, where Doc launches into an apocalyptic spiel about the fabric of space and time at the drop of a hat, and Biff remains the biggest jerk this side of any time period.

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December 21, 2010

Review – 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , — Mister Raroo @ 9:18 am

999 Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors
I recently came to a conclusion: I don’t think I have what it takes to be a survivor. My wife and I were discussing what would happen if a zombie apocalypse actually fell upon mankind, and we both decided we would rather become zombies than deal with the stress of struggling to live on. Neither of us possesses the types of aggressive personalities that would be necessary to cope with the rigors that such a grueling, exhausting existence would bring.

Perhaps the largest and scariest threat of all in any survival scenario comes in the form of other survivors. With zombies, for instance, at least you have an idea of what to expect. They may be relentless, but they all follow similar patterns of behavior. Not so with humans. You never know when your so-called allies might turn on you in order to get a leg up and boost their own chances of living to see another day.

With this in mind, I think it’s safe to say that should I find myself in the situation of protagonist Junpei from 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, I probably wouldn’t even make it through the first challenge he faces.

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December 20, 2010

Review – ClaDun: This is an RPG!

ClaDun This is an RPG
“This is an RPG!” declares ClaDun’s subtitle – and the statement is most definitely warranted. Actually, ClaDun is more of an action RPG but I won’t be a stickler. I will serve you with a warning though: ClaDun is old school in both style and substance. It’s a dungeon crawler that will ask you to spend time grinding. You will have to repeat multiple floors and entire dungeons many, many times, and you WILL die. You will die a lot.

At the game’s onset you are introduced to Pudding, a female wanna-be adventurer, and Soma, her lap dog male companion. Pudding, we discover, is terminally ill with “die laughing disease” and is desperately seeking Arcanus Cella, a mythical realm where you find whatever you are looking for. As it turns out, Pudding is looking for treasure, which is the perfect motive for a dungeon crawler.

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Derezzing Tron: Legacy

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 4:59 pm

Tron Legacy
I didn’t exist when Tron hit theaters twenty-eight years ago, but elements of the film so permeate pop culture that it’s impossible not to be familiar with it, even if you’ve never seen it. When Tron: Legacy trailers began to disperse across the internets, intriguing me with their dark Daft Punk soundtrack and impressive amounts of shiny, I made it my business to go seek out the original film, so that I might be prepared to digest the sequel. Having seen Tron Guy and lightcycles and old jokes from The Simpsons and Family Guy, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.

It was weird. My impression was distinctly that the film would have been received very different in 1982, but now, as a twenty-something in 2010, there was a real problem. Nevermind dated effects; Tron was a film that only made sense in the loosest way, with simplistic and sometimes unclear ideas. The world of Tron was one that it wasn’t easy to grasp, because the film doesn’t really tell you what that world is. There’s no mythology there, only the bare bones of a concept to fuel a special-effects adventure.

I walked into Tron: Legacy looking for the concepts and ideas of the original film to be expanded and developed into a modern story that would satisfy my need for detail, for understanding, and for a mythology that simply didn’t exist in the original film. Sadly, Tron: Legacy makes a tradition of vagaries and half-ideas, equally unformed and unsatisfying.

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December 18, 2010

Review – lilt line

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Aileen Viray @ 12:20 pm

lilt line
lilt: “to sing or play in a light, tripping, or rhythmic manner.”

Recently released by Gaijin games on WiiWare, lilt line is a game being marketed as “a retro rhythm racing beat ’em up action game with a dubstep flavour,” which bothered when I first started the game.

I took one look at the UI and level design and flashbacks of raver kids tripping on E wearing stunna shades at HARD Summer’s electro festival came to mind, not dubstep. Around here, dubstep is a mellow, mostly downtempo scene, devoid of bright neon colors, and saying “rapid” is almost an oxymoron, so I feel it is an imperfect visual representation of dubstep. The scene is becoming a bit more commercialized as groups like Magnetic Man lead it into the mainstream, perhaps melding perceptions of dubstep into an all-encompassing view of electronic music, but I digress.

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December 12, 2010

Review – Sonic Colors

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 2:06 pm

Sonic Colors Wii
Rose tinted retina make the Sega of my youth an experimental laboratory, a torrid love affair of success and failure, never short on wonder by the means in which releases explored the boundaries of evolving genre templates. I’m entirely uncertain whether such pretty words apply here, whether Sonic Team’s latest attempt to put the hedgehog on track has tapped the original spirit of the endeavor, or if the law of averages has inevitably produced a title better than those released since the demise of the Dreamcast.

It’s ever tempting to suggest that the demise of the hardware was responsible for the continual release of the Sonic missteps we’ve suffered with, but that would be the real red nostalgia talking. From the beginning, Sonic has struggled to run outside the lines that structure the platformer, while awkwardly seeking to incorporate elements of that genre even while fighting to escape it – the shift into three dimensions simply made the conflict more visible, and often frustrating.

During a year when Sega seeks to appease fans with a classic revisit of the series’ roots via Sonic The Hedgehog Episode 4, Sonic Colors continues the quest for a solution to that long running problem. It’s as polarizing as ever, but Sonic Colors hits upon the reason we continue playing through a conflicted franchise, reminding us that when Sonic finds his groove, the experience can reach heights worth all the heartache.

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December 10, 2010

Review – Dead Nation

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 8:59 am

Dead Nation
Last week Sony delivered unto us Dead Nation, the latest entry in the increasingly swamped “Kill a crapload of zombies” market. When we talk about the popularity of zombie games (and movies, TV shows, and probably Halloween prosthetics), there’s a joke in there somewhere about a spreading infection, but I’ll save you a groan and not make it.

Dead Nation takes the form of a top-down shoot-‘em-up, as appears to be the pattern for a number of recent small digital releases. You’ll choose a male or female character to fight through the zombie ravaged city in an effort to retrieve the apparently important body of Patient Zero and hopefully formulate a cure. There’s a story to be had here, though the product may have been better off without it. Rarely would I champion the cause for less narrative, but this story is a strange half-measure that seems to exist only to showcase some (admittedly sharp) artwork. Told through brief interludes between missions, it describes the journey of your character through the zombie wasteland in such thin detail that it may as well not bother at all. Your character has lines, but they exist only to tell you what your objective is, not because you’re actually a person with thoughts—and since the objective is always the same (get from point A to point B), this is entirely superfluous.

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