February 2, 2010
Thanks to a great movie from the early ’90s, we now associate the annual tradition of Groundhog Day with time loops rather than the prediction of more or less cold weather. This association has managed to find its way into video games over the years as both unique gameplay mechanics and shallow gimmicks.
Majora’s Mask seems to be the most well-known, but a quick Google search reveals a handful of games notable for their “Groundhog Day” concepts. I haven’t played, much less heard of, many of them. Flower, Sun and Rain was my most recent venture into living the same day over and over again, but I’d like to throw a more recent, lesser-known (and free) game into the discussion.
Every Day the Same Dream, a free indie game , illustrates its “Groundhog Day” connection right in the title. The concept is simple, and painfully familiar.
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January 24, 2010
Up until now, Goichi Suda, aka Suda51, has been making games for the future.
Flower, Sun and Rain relayed a nonsense plot to American gamers last year through the use of boring, number-related riddles. It also dared them to question the very reason they play games with its characters’ long-winded, often self-referential soliloquies.
Metacritic: 54
Killer7 treated its audience to an ultra-violent, ultra-confusing tale of multiple personalities centered around infinitely respawning, suicidal, invisible zombies. It also united gameplay and plot by allowing players to guide themselves along a critically misunderstood rail system.
Metacritic: 74
No More Heroes exposed players to an open, yet barren Grand Theft Auto-inspired world of sexual innuendo and mindless violence. It also showed players that it’s okay to not have fun in a video game through its use of mundane but satirical mini-games and side-missions.
Metacritic: 83
Let’s be honest: Suda51’s games are not fun. They’re hardly even games in the traditional sense. They are, however, where games should be going.
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January 16, 2010
Demoman is a feature in which I make (incredibly harsh) assumptions about upcoming games based upon their (horrible) demos, while making observations about their purpose and importance.
Today’s victims: Bayonetta and Dante’s Inferno
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January 11, 2010
Today, Capcom has made available the first of its WiiWare ports of the Ace Attorney series. Aside from added motion controls, the games will be relatively unchanged except for today’s release, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, which is missing its fifth bonus case, a feature added during its original port from the GBA to the DS. The extra case will be made available in May for 100 Wii points, but its exclusion, alongside new motion controls, help illustrate popular misconceptions, which both reviewers and fans seem to be totally unaware of.
Majority of Phoenix Wright reviews praise the DS port’s inclusion of a fifth bonus case, which made use of the handheld’s touch controls. Meanwhile, most reviews of Justice For All and Trials and Tribulations lament the inclusion of psyche locks, a mechanic added to break up the monotony of investigation sequences. To understand why these cheers and jeers should be the other way around, it’s important to first understand what it is that makes the Ace Attorney series work.
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December 29, 2009
I’ve said before that Professor Layton and the Curious Village was the best game of 2008, but that’s obviously my opinion, especially when you consider heavyweights like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Grand Theft Auto IV were also released that year. While big sites were debating over which of the big games deserved their big “Game of the Year” award, I was trying to decide if I enjoyed Curious Village more than World of Goo and if the MOTHER 3 fan translation should be eligible for consideration. This year, I considered submitting to the “game of the year” craze, but it occurred to me that no one cares or should care. It’s not because I’m just one guy writing for a small site but because the honor is so broad that it loses all of its meaning.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves appears to be receiving this year’s award from many outlets but I’ve never played the game and never had any desire to do so. The award means nothing to me, and it shouldn’t mean anything to you.
“Game of the Year” implies that there was a consensus among the staff of an outlet that this one game is better than every other game that came out that year. I imagine it’s left up to little more than a vote and maybe a bit of debate, but that isn’t representative of a staff’s opinion. What if some of them hated Uncharted 2 or didn’t even play it? A simple vote doesn’t convey that, but this only sheds light on a bigger issue that plagues all attempts to rank video games.
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December 19, 2009
The developers behind games like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy XIII must have contemplated suicide when they discovered that perhaps the best looking game of all time, Muramasa: The Demon Blade, is exclusive to the Wii. Perhaps the only thing that saved their lives was the fact that Muramasa’s graphical style and placement on the Wii are both marketing stunts designed to generate interest in an otherwise niche game.
Muramasa’s painted backgrounds and elaborate sprites, combined with Japanese voice acting and music, result in a gorgeous video game experience. I shouldn’t have enjoyed the game, though, because it also combined repetitive beat ‘em up gameplay with unintuitive JRPG elements to create a mindless video game experience. Once you understand the mechanics behind the game, however, Muramasa becomes the perfect kind of mindless a good video game should be. The story makes no damn sense, at least not to anyone who didn’t grow up with or study Japanese history and mythology, and you do little more than run back and forth while button mashing, but it’s all very addicting. The entire experience is devoid of motion controls, and that’s what got me asking “Why the Wii?”
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December 19, 2009
I can play through a good sixty-dollar game in a couple of weeks (or even a couple of days), never play it again and be content because it offered a satisfying experience. I can also play a game with good online multiplayer for months and feel that it was time and money well spent. Unfortunately, there are the occasional good games that I can say were disappointing because they didn’t offer an actual experience or last very long. Wii Sports Resort, one such game, is Nintendo trying to make good on a nearly three year-old promise with underwhelming results.
Don’t take that to mean Resort wasn’t a fun game. It offered a fun distraction for my friends and I for about a month, but in the end, it’s just a collection of mini-games made to demonstrate the Wii MotionPlus. The device was designed to finally show off what the Wii can really do, but instead, it highlights what the Wii hasn’t done and how it will most likely struggle to remedy that.
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December 19, 2009
Believe or not, Professor Layton and the Curious Village was the best game of 2008. In the year of AAA fourths (Grand Theft Auto 4, Metal Gear Solid 4, Devil May Cry 4, Soul Calibur IV, etc.), Curious Village introduced DS-owners to a delightful new IP made for everyone, starring the gentile professor and his young apprentice Luke. Brainteasers weren’t rare on the DS and neither were point-and-click adventures, but Curious Village combined the two with charming visuals and animated cutscenes reminiscent of “The Triplets of Bellville.”
The combination proved perfect, encouraging 
short play sessions, but rewarding players to stick around with a simple yet satisfying plot. If there was a downside to Curious Village, it would have to be the disconnect between the puzzles and the mystery. Not until the end of the game did it make sense why the village was obsessed with unrelated puzzles, but one could have argued the puzzles needed to be unrelated in order to maintain the game’s casual style. The sequel, Diabolical Box, proved this when it attempted to tie the two elements together.
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December 19, 2009
The Ultimate Fighting Championship has grown over the years from its humble roots as an obscure, misunderstood sport to an impressive technical showcase. UFC video games have also grown over the years, and like the sport itself, developers have gone from misunderstanding how to portray mixed martial arts in video games to creating a technically impressive simulator worthy of what the sport has become.
UFC 2009 Undisputed isn’t for everyone, but that’s only because it goes to great lengths to accurately portray the ground game, which often elicits groans from the sport’s more casual viewers. Your first time grappling on the ground will probably be a frustrating one due to the unique, right stick-oriented control scheme, but Undisputed does an excellent job in both its tutorial and career modes to ease you into the process.
The result is a dynamic game, allowing for drastically different outcomes depending on personal preferences and skill. Once you understand how the controls work, they’re yours to manipulate granted your opponent can’t manipulate them better than you can. Unfortunately, this style of understanding controls to understand how to win isn’t present in the year’s most famous fighter, Street Fighter IV, at least not in my experience.
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December 12, 2009
I have selfish reasons for enjoying Borderlands: to me, it’s everything Fallout 3 should have been, allowing me to finally experience the “what could have been” that everyone seemed so content to ignore with Bethesda’s game last year.
I’m aware that there’s much more to Fallout 3 than there is to Borderlands, but it’s all just fluff to make an already overly ambitious game look and feel bigger than it already is without making it any more fun to play. Fallout 3 was pure tedium, forcing numbers down the players throat until they came flying out of his ears. Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t find any of it fun.
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Thanks to a great movie from the early ’90s, we now associate the annual tradition of Groundhog Day with time loops rather than the prediction of more or less cold weather. This association has managed to find its way into video games over the years as both unique gameplay mechanics and shallow gimmicks.
