Gamesugar

April 22, 2010

Review – Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 9:05 pm

Sakura Wars
Within an alternate and slightly steampunk infused depiction of 1920’s New York City, the Little Lips Theater serves as a cover for an elite force of agents known as the STAR Division, who use mech suits to battle evil while also performing in musical dramas to raise the spirits of the city they defend – rounded out with a Samurai and a Cowgirl searching to find their place within the city and that group of heroes.

I’ve really come to savor telling people about this game over the past few weeks, because they can’t help but laugh and scratch their head over how a structured game would even begin to make unifying sense of those ideas with any degree of success. Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love is a game exploding with ideas, a late to the party visitor from Japan that has curiously shown up on North American shores exactly when titles of this kind are needed most – hard pressed as we’ve been for new releases that don’t wear their glib intention entirely in the straight-to-the-point box title making them 90% marketing, 9% entertainment, and 1% any of the fanciful things we’d like to say about the medium’s artful possibilities, were we not generally sick of kicking that dead horse.

Sakura Wars opts for putting the horse in an apartment, and brings an energy that succeeds in blazing a path free of any genre binding obligations or easy explanations – great for gamers, bad for indexing.

And in a rare twist Sakura Wars isn’t one of those games where I laud the ideas and forgive the actual playing of the game. I don’t need to make any excuses for a game that’s every bit as fun to play as it is to talk about, I just have to try and clear up what the hell is going on when playing it.

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April 21, 2010

Check Your Enthusiasm – Arc Rise Fantasia

Filed under: News Feed — Tags: , , , — Jamie Love @ 1:10 pm

Arc Rise Fantasia
If you’d asked me how I felt about Ignition Entertainment at E3 last year, I would have been fairly optimistic – the company genuinely seemed “in it to win it”, grabbing Muramasa away from XSEED and focusing on a social media push that worked pretty damn hard to spread the word and help that title perform long after its release.

Even now, the willingness of gamers to love a bad game for being bad, as in the case of Deadly Premonition, makes it appear as if Ignition is on the ball.

But let’s talk about Arc Rise Fantasia.

Siliconera posted IGN video from the game yesterday, with a pessimistic appraisal of the work so far seen in the dub of the title – producing a landslide of comments from gamers who have every right to rage when a game that is anticipated is so instantly derailed by an apparent lack of respect for the source material.

What remains is some of the worst voice-over work I’ve yet heard in a videogame, and I survived two Magna Carta titles.

I don’t use the phrase “affront to God” often, but I’m backed against a wall here – particularly when the potential for XSEED to have done an English voice track while still offering the original Japanese one was on the table.

But don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself after the break – and please give your own two cents, because it’s increasingly obvious that feedback from you needs to be continually ringing in the ears of people who let things like this happen. And also because the possibility of Ignition handling Heroes’ Paradise at this point makes me feel a bit ill.

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April 13, 2010

Cave Story – A Single Man Makes A Memorable Game

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , — Michael Tucker @ 6:32 pm

Cave Story

Title Image by Rey Ortega

A lone developer once sat in his home in Japan and committed himself to making the most hauntingly fantastic independent videogame ever. Five years later, he emerged with Cave Story.

A lot of eloquent praise has been given to Cave Story over the years and there’s not much that I can add to what’s already been said, but there are a few things that struck me during my most recent play through of the title in its new WiiWare form and I can’t help wanting to write a love letter of my own.

The nigh-perfection of this simple title made by a single man (Pixel is Daisuke Amaya’s self-appointed handle) was and is far-and-away a greater achievement than anything I’ve experienced from the professional industry in many years – if nowhere else than on a tasteful, emotional level.
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April 9, 2010

Review – Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 7:31 pm

Fragile Dreams
Wandering through the decaying monuments to civilization that litter the world of Fragile like dead museums, Seto attempts to give words of justification to his obsessive search for a survivor, Ren, the girl with silver hair, who leaves a trail of cave art chalk drawings on the crumbling walls like breadcrumbs meant to lead the player toward understanding the abandoned landscape.

Reflecting on the sight of a pale moon against Fragile’s chilling sky, Seto realizes that if he can never tell another human about that sight, never share the feelings it stirred within him with another living person, that the memory and moment will never achieve meaning and ultimately be lost.

Fragile Dreams is a game possessed of a goal, a hope of making a connection with the player. And while this is ideally the goal of any release, this particular title continually reflects upon this need as the only way in which the experience of the game can achieve a sense of meaning that extends beyond the disc containing that hope.

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April 1, 2010

Review – Calling

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , — Jamie Love @ 6:07 pm

Calling
Despite repeated attempts to lighten my workload and appease attention deficit, I’ve never successfully produced a one sentence review. If I had, I believe Hudson’s horror Wii title, Calling would earn “the not-so-bad game that should have been great but was likely going to be so-so and finally ends up dipping more toward terrible with a fleeting few sparks of creativity worth noting.”

After a short and lagging introduction about a website where people can speak with the dead, known as “the Black Page”, Calling drops players into a darkened room with a first person perspective and plenty of space for optimism about the experience to follow. That first-person Wii perspective is the most ideal setup for a horror game to date, the player forced to sit with more attention and focus than usual while aiming the WiiMote, ripe for the attacks of designers suddenly in possession of a more captive audience.

That controller determined position also forces the idea that playing horror is very different from simply watching it, with the player no longer a passive observer of another person’s misfortunes, challenged to push themselves forward even while knowing the game is out to get them as they move ahead.

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March 30, 2010

Farewell My Love, and Tomorrow We Shall Meet Again

Fragile Dreams
When Muramasa released last year, I understood why some criticized the game for not offering more to collect, find, and simply “do” while running through the crafted backdrops Vanillaware paints with a level of detail and skill worthy of history’s artistic masters. I didn’t agree with any of those people, but I grasped the complaints of those that weren’t drawn into the real depth of that living-breathing world just beneath the digital brush strokes of painted splendor those same people saw as the game’s central draw.

When it comes to Fragile, I can already hear a similar chorus not so thoroughly impressed with the way the furnishings of the apocalypse are offered on the Wii. Part of me enjoys a ruined world full of junk to collect and strange personalities to catalog – the world of Fallout does make for good stories from the road.

And yet, Fragile is carving a path that allows me to justifiably use the word unique for once, exploring a neglected aspect attached to the end of civilization – the immense and chilling isolation that leaves stray animals to inherit the earth.

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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?

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