Gamesugar

March 23, 2010

The Post in Which We Speculate About the 3DS

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , — Sam Scott Given @ 12:53 pm

3DS
On today of all days (obviously to commemorate Ben and Jerry’s free ice cream day), Nintendo decides to slip out a nifty press release about their upcoming successor to the DS, the 3DS. The press release is lacking on a lot of key details, which means we get to speculate as much as we want until they tell us more.

The largest gap of information has to be about the screens. “…on which games can be enjoyed with 3D effects without the need for any special glasses.” 3D? without glasses? Well, there are a handful of routes this could take us. The main method everyone’s mind is jumping to is one recently popularized by the DSiWare game “Rittai Kakushi e AttaKoreda” – which roughly translates into “Hidden 3D image: There it is!”

What this game does is use the forward facing camera in the DSi to look at the face of the person playing (more specifically the light on the face) and tilts the environment in the game to make it appear as if you are looking into a diorama of sorts.

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March 19, 2010

Catching Up With Heavy Rain

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , — Rey Ortega @ 7:39 am

Heavy Rain
Let me make this clear right off the bat, Heavy Rain is a videogame. You may have heard, from other gamers or websites, or from David Cage himself, that Heavy Rain is some kind of tectonic shift in the way we think about videogames. In fact, the first trophy you receive is called “Interactive Drama – Thank you for supporting Interactive Drama”.

Heavy Rain might still be all of those things, but that isn’t for us to decide, not right now. In the future, if we see more games of this kind expanded upon, then we can talk about Heavy Rain’s place in history. For now though, and for the purpose of this post, we need to look at Heavy Rain solely as a videogame, and on that note I’m happy to report that it’s a good one.

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March 18, 2010

My New Addiction – The PokéWalker

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 8:11 am

The PokeWalker
My hesitance to call Nintendo’s PokéWalker the greatest invention since sliced bread has less to do with a desire to spare you the hyperbole, and more about the fact that as much as I enjoy a well made sandwich, the PokéWalker is better. I’ve been carrying it with me constantly this week, encouraging people to ask me what I mean when I say that there’s a Mareep in my pocket, and gushing on about the device when someone is brave enough to do so.

For those in the gaming-know, the pack-in device with the recent release of Pokémon HeartGold & SoulSilver helps both titles overcome the hurdle of being considered simply DS rehashes. For those not familiar with the originals or the add-ons of the past, the PokéWalker functions on just enough magic to feed the curiosity of even the most devotedly disinterested.

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March 7, 2010

Lazy Sunday – My Weekend is a Blur

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 9:59 am

Lazy Sunday
Explaining how the multiplayer beta for Blur took up so much of my weekend has been a bit of a challenge, particularly with other editors who dismissed the game after previews last year – I don’t blame any of them because I earnestly couldn’t have cared less about the game myself.

Activision’s PR suit pitches of WipEout on wheels and Mario Kart for adults did little to change my interest, which flatlined completely when I heard hype cycles about Blur doing for online racing what Modern Warfare did for the online FPS. Blur offers up a leveling system that increases as completed races earn players fans, offering access to new vehicles and levels, and also coupled with the ability to modify how certain power-ups work, but I wouldn’t go calling it Modern Warfare Kart Racing just yet.

An Editor from another site talked me into at least trying the game, and about 50 races later there’s a few points worth mentioning.

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March 5, 2010

Demo Report – Patchwork Heroes

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 2:12 pm

Patchwork Heroes
While the demo for Patchwork Heroes only offers up three of the game’s warship sabotaging missions, it’s clear after the very first that few games could ever hope to occupy so little space on a memorystick while offering so much of what has been missing from the Sony diet.

Take the weight of the bloated development cycles and money invested in offering more of the same experiences, only in higher definition for a pack of clapping seals hungry for mediocrity, and lose all connection to that misguided faith as this tiny demo offers up more charm, heart, tactile pleasure, control freedom, and divine spark than should be possible from the hollowed out husk of the great beast that once ruled this industry with an iron fist, and still kinda likes to think it does.

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March 4, 2010

Last Rebellion Ain’t So Bad

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 9:53 pm

Last Rebellion
I’d lean toward saying that the art direction is what first attracted me to NIS America’s latest PS3 RPG outing, but it’s more a case of art promotion. The game’s two central characters, Aisha and Nine have had some extremely note-worthy artists give their own take on portraying the pair. Within the game proper, both characters possess a hand-painted edge that cuts them free of the barren and brown landscapes players tread across while leveling up, fighting monsters, and all the other many splendid things one expects to do within an RPG.

As I’ve come to expect from titles NISA publishes, Last Rebellion cuts its own path as if there were no standards for the genre. I respect that resistance to the “me too” illness quite a bit, but my respect for an approach does not inherently make Last Rebellion a good game – that and there’s always the possibility Hitmaker couldn’t afford fancier presentation for the title. The game lacks the CG sequences expected from the genre, offers up monotonously bland landscapes, and serves it cold with voice acting that is every bit a set of freshly painted nails running across a chalkboard.

At times the dialogue seems to hit inadvertent spots of humor, at other times making little sense at all, but more often than not leaving me convinced that when the voice actors asked for motivation, someone simply shrugged at them.

But I can get past those issues so long as the game beneath the dressing, or lack thereof, offers something interesting. So I guess we better talk about the battle system, since that’s all we’ve really got to work with in the attempt to back up the title of this post.

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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.

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