Gamesugar

November 18, 2010

Review – Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 8:22 pm

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow
I’m riding on the back of a long-dead dragon, the size of a skyscraper, animated through dark necromancy and thundering through the sky. I’m clawing my way up the massive spine, balancing precariously when it rears its head and tries to shake me loose. I slip, and pull the right trigger just in time to jam my ridiculous crucifix-weapon into the bone and save myself from the fall—and this is about the time when it hits me just how much I like this game.

This is the last of three titanic boss encounters in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow; battles that have seen me scaling massive creatures in elaborate platforming puzzles. Like many elements of this game, this may draw comparisons to the defining hack-and-slasher, God of War, and these aren’t unwarranted. Castlevania, when considered piece by piece, is a wholly derivative affair, but as happens so rarely, it manages to provide a unique and worthy experience all the same.

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November 13, 2010

Review – Guwange

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 1:47 pm

Guwange
Cave’s bullethell blast from the past hit Xbox Live Arcade with all the trimmings this week, plus a few features I wouldn’t have anticipated. Running through modes and stages, I can’t shake the thought that Guwange would make a spectacular Wii title. That isn’t intended to veer completely off topic, but has just been floating around in my brain while tackling the core of this game – controlling two physical objects on screen simultaneously.

Each of the game’s three playable characters is linked to a shikigami, an entity that player’s can summon at their leisure, and also one that each character seeks to free themselves from, the driving bit of narrative beneath the barrage of bullets standing between the player and that goal. At first this can result in several shades of retina overload, keeping track of two objects on-screen while Cave’s fine sprites vanish beneath the chaos of color changing bullets and loose change, until survival seems like sheer luck while pushing the analog sticks of the 360 controller in all directions. But a one size fits all difficulty setting, generous screen display and co-op options, as well as three modes to suit all possible tastes should help the uninitiated quickly discover an elegance at work that speaks to Cave’s well earned legacy as shooter royalty.

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November 10, 2010

Review – Fable III

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 9:02 am


The design imperative represented in most games on the market is simple, and nigh-universal: give the player one thing to do, and develop and fortify this mechanic until it is strong enough to engage the player for the bulk of the experience. The addition of the odd mini-game (driving a tank in Gears of War, for example) serves to break up the action, but the focus of the design is still to provide a mechanic that can be successfully repeated for the entire game without becoming tedious.

Fable III represents the opposite extreme, and an entirely alternative design philosophy. Here is a game that provides a myriad of game options, with the caveat that each is relatively simplistic. The effect is that Fable III feels like a game made up of mini-games; an exploration mini-game, a finance mini-game, a combat mini-game, a social mini-game, and so on. The dilemma lies in whether players will find the sheer number of these mini-games to be sufficiently engaging as to offset the fundamental simplicity of the mechanics.

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November 5, 2010

Review – Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage​

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 6:53 pm

Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage​
In many ways the Eighties were a simpler time, when a man could wander the post nuclear apocalyptic landscape secure in the knowledge that the good glowed with blue auras while the sinister shined red, and acupressure specific fist attacks created a reality where if someone screamed “WATTA!” after hitting you, well, you were probably already dead. At least that’s what Fist of the North Star taught me, my first taste coming via the anime that joined Akira and Fighting Seizure Robots in painting my earliest imaginings of what an incredibly cool place Japan must be.

While many years of studious effort to understand the culture that produced such offerings since then has yielded successful addictions, there are still many things about Japan I fail to understand.

Koei is one of those things, a company that I am aware makes videogames every year, but which I have never had much luck in grasping the sensibilities of. In many ways, Fist of the North Star strikes me as an attempt to rectify that situation, applying the Dynasty Warrior trope to a manga series rather than whatever a Dynasty Warriors game is typically about.

It all seems to revolve around the Japanese word “Musou,” which gets poorly translated here as something akin to “The Only One,” or “Without Equal.” My understanding of Koei’s use of the term is a series of games where waves upon waves of enemies come to kick your ass and in turn have their own kicked.

Given the subject matter of Fist of the North Star and Kenshiro’s lonely quest across the wasteland, this all seems like a workable arrangement. And the results are not entirely unsuccessful given the amount of fun I’ve gotten from the release, but there are limits and obligatory missteps, nagging bits of bad-habit design lingering from the past like phantoms in the code; stubborn, unbending, unchanging code.

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November 4, 2010

Return of the Review – Vanquish

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 5:15 pm

Vanquish
In my capacity as a Sugarperson, I really only serve two functions: sometimes I manufacture prettiness in an effort to make it appear that the site was not, in fact, designed in my basement, and other times I play games, and then I tell you about them. This is one of those times. As tasks go, it is not the worst one could hope for. In fact, the only way it could be better is if it caused the numbers on my bank account to increase, or perhaps if writing overly long sentences made me irresistible to nerd girls.

Vanquish is a game that, upon playing, I was compelled to fulfill this second duty; to write words and deliver them to you, so that you might understand their meaning. Accordingly, in addition to our regular review of Vanquish, I am here to provide a rare second opinion. Let’s begin: if anyone tells you that Vanquish is not worth playing, your duty is clear. Cut this person out of your life forever, as this person is a liar who wishes only misfortune upon you. If, after taking this action, you still doubt the value of Vanquish, I suggest the following: visit youtube, and search for “Casshern.” When you come to the inevitable realization that “There should be a videogame of this,” return here, and I will present to you, Vanquish.

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October 29, 2010

Review – Dead Rising 2

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 9:06 am


In playing open-world games, perhaps the quintessential dilemma is to what extent it is necessary for a game to push players to explore what it offers, and at what cost to player freedom–where at one end of the spectrum the player becomes bored and complacent, and at the other, the game is no longer open at all. I have found it can be far too easy to become mired in endless side-quests and irrelevant mini-games, thus losing a sense of progression and purpose, and while it’s certainly true that the player is ultimately responsible for utilizing the game assets, it is also fair to say that the game is responsible for presenting these assets in an engaging way.

Dead Rising 2’s solution to the problem is to grant the player freedom, but with consequences—the same as you find in the good, old fashioned real world. This is achieved chiefly through demanding that the player manage his or her time. Unlike, for example, Red Dead Redemption, where you could conceivably hunt bounties for a month before choosing to start the next plot event, Dead Rising 2 is characterized by a ticking clock, and story events that occur at specific times on that clock—whether the player is ready or not.

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October 25, 2010

Review – Quantum Theory

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 2:29 pm

Quantum Theory
Quantum Theory isn’t the worst game I’ve ever played.

If that line doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement toward the positive however, that’s probably because it’s not.

There’s an early sequence during the player’s rampage through an ominous tower filled with evolutionary chaos, where a cinematic break is required to introduce the largest example of greyish-blobbish indistinguishable enemy yet encountered. The creature materializes from a swirling cloud and kills several smaller enemies before kicking the player back into the game to suddenly deal with this escalation of battle, only to find 4-5 quick shots that would dispatch any normal enemy also enough to stop this beast dead in its tracks as well.

Much ado about nothing seemed to sum up the experience. Yet somewhere in that moment I found words to summarize my time with the game, the distinct feeling that the development team begrudgingly finished this title for release with the collective battlecry “MEH” heard ringing around the office.

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