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Vidya Game Reviews
Topic Started: Feb 26 2011, 03:27 AM (11,979 Views)
Volt
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Keep Moving Forward

MrMarill
Feb 27 2013, 05:14 PM
No way to exit to Mobile Suit, meaning you have to get hit repeatedly to destroy it; really, Capcom?

Press up and jump.

n00b.
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MrMarill
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DAT STORY TIEM

I tried that are you serious

EDIT: Regardless, when you die in the mobile suit, you spent about seven years exploding with no indication you actually are
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Romanticide
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Cult Leader
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http://z15.invisionfree.com/SPV3/index.php...post&p=22004972

I thought of quoting this post, but I don't really have any direct responses to it (I agree with Marill, for the most part), and quoting the whole thing is just plain unnecessary.

Anyway, for those of you too lazy to click on the link, some (additional) Journey thoughts. It's $10.34 or some shit until the 4th, so you might as well get it now if you intend to. This is Sony we speak of; will it ever get much cheaper? I suppose you could get the physical version, though.

Marill pretty much hit on all the gameplay stuff. Not that there's a lot to hit on, but still. Anyway, there isn't really any win condition as you would know it. There are no enemies to kill, no competition to trump, no objectives to fulfill, or anything like that. Not that having a wincon gets in the way of making great games (most great games have one, as we know), but with it out of the way, all there is to focus on is a story, which in theory should make our medium more accessible and allow for more storytelling possibilities. In practice, nobody knows, but Journey is a good sign of possible things to come.

I don't know about you guys, but I tend to be a fan of things with some sort of definitive story, no matter how hard it might be to suss out. However, it's completely subjective, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The only people who *might* know the real meaning are Thatgamecompany, and they most likely won't tell us because to do so would be to ruin whatever we've built up in our imaginations.

You could be cynical and say they did this to avoid the trouble of writing a good character/story, or you could say they did it to enhance the mystique of the game. I'm personally leaning towards the latter. As it is, it feels more like *your* journey, as opposed to plodding through generic video game plot #293457269354.

A number of things that have post-apocalyptic themes will serve as good reference points: Casshern Sins, The Road (I need to read this; No Country For Old Men was really good), Final Fantasy 13 once you reach Gran Pulse, etc. The point is, you will feel small and alone. Even though you will run into other players, they will eventually leave you and you'll have to press onward alone again.

In terms of aesthetics, the graphics didn't "wow" me technically, but I loved the artstyle. It was relatively simple, with few colors and intricate designs, but still gorgeous to look at. The music is atmospheric and works quite well with the game. There isn't a moment where you'll feel the music is out of place.


I'm not going to sit here and pretend my mind was blown or anything, but I enjoyed my time with the game. I've paid more money for less enjoyable and less unique content than this, so it wasn't a bad purchase by any means.
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LightningBolt
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Boring Person
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Finished up Persona 3 Portable just now, and thought I'd write a bit of a review.

Game: Persona 3 Portable
Platform: Playstation Portable
Genre: RPG

In P3P, you play as a high school student who just moved into a new town. In this new town, you start making new friends and all that jazz. Then suddenly, monsters. Every night at midnight, the Dark Hour occurs. During the Dark Hour, most people aren't conscious and thus most of the world has no clue it exists. The main character and his new dorm-mates do, however. Together they form the group SEES and set out to find out the secrets behind the Dark Hour, these monsters, and the strange tower that appears during the Dark Hour, Tartarus.

The gameplay is split between time in the Dark Hour and in the real world. The Dark Hour is where your normal RPG gameplay takes place. You level up as your climb the many floors of Tartarus, obtaining new weapons and equipment as you go. The battle system is a turn-based system where you can choose to attack with your character, have your character summon a Persona which has its own skills, defend, use an item, or flee from battle. The Personas are probably the most unique and important aspect of the battle system. It's what truly sets it apart from other games. If you defeat an enemy in a specific way (usually by using an elemental attack or physical attack that the enemy is weak to), you can play a mini game after the battle where you can obtain new Personas. You can then fuse these Personas in the Velvet Room located in Tartarus's lobby in order to create even stronger ones.

To be honest, the Tartarus side of the gameplay is not very good. You will spend dozens of hours going through the many floors of Tartarus, defeating hundreds of enemies as you go. The battle system isn't bad at all, but it's really not so great that you want to go through so many battles like this. And even worse is that most of the battles are so easy and you likely won't be in any danger of losing outside of the boss battles scattered throughout the tower. Even worse still is that each floor is randomly generated and you will only get a new art style five times through the tower's 250+ floors. Tartarus was, quite honestly, tedious and dull.

On the other hand, the gameplay that occurs outside of Tartarus in the real world is great. You spend your time outside of Tartarus building up relationships with the people of your new town. Each of these relationships, called Social Links, will strengthen an "Arcana" in the game. Personas created within Tartarus belonging to this Arcana will become more powerful as the corresponding Social Link is strengthened. In P3P, this is carried out in a point-and-click style where you interact to characters with exclamation points over their heads and seeing if they want to hang out. So why is this fairly simple concept so fun? This is because the dialogue and characters are so damn good. You legitimately enjoy seeing these characters interact and seeing the relationship progress. You can also build up some of the "real world stats" in the game, consisting of Courage, Academics, and Charm. These will allow you to begin relationships with people you otherwise aren't able to.

In addition to the real life gameplay and characters, the story is another place where this game shines. As your group finds out more about Dark Hour, more characters are introduced, the history of the individual characters and how they are related to Dark Hour comes to light, and you go through several twists and turns along the way that all work very well. The biggest knock on the story is its pacing. The game suffers from some bad pacing issues, due largely in part to how the game is divided into "Tartarus" and "everything else" gameplay. Even though you'll probably spend at least half your time in Tartarus, nothing plot-oriented occurs there until near the end of the game. So you'll spend hours grinding your way through Tartarus's floors with no plot development occurring whatsoever. The original version of the game had a "tired" system where your characters eventually get tired after going through Tartarus, forcing you to leave and rest after a while (to the best of my knowledge). While this probably would have gotten pretty annoying, I actually do think something like that's necessary to keep the plot moving smoothly.

The music in this game is superb, as well. All of the tracks are varying levels of "good", for the most part. My main complaint would be that you can only listen to the battle theme and the Tartarus theme so many times before getting sick of them. The songs themselves are fine, but this game is 70+ hours long and you're spending a damn good portion of that listening to those two songs. Several different random encounter themes and the Tartarus theme changing with each block would have been appreciated (the Tartarus theme does change a little bit, but it's the same song with a slight variation here and there). But yeah the standout songs are the Velvet Room theme, the final boss theme, and the ending credits song.

So, I'd recommend this game for its great cast of characters, great story, and awesome music and gameplay outside of Tartarus. But if you're like me at all, you'll probably simply be putting up with Tartarus itself just to get to those other aspects. I'm personally hoping to get Persona 4 in some form in the future.
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MrMarill
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DAT STORY TIEM

Tomb Raider
PS3, Xbox 360, PC


Introduction

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Fire, explosions; get used to them.


Tomb Raider's always been a funny series to me. It's one that almost everyone recognises, but very few people seem to have actually played or know much of it outside of "Lara Croft has massive boobs and there are lots of questionable camera angles". As such, if the average person were going into this game armed with just this piece of knowledge and the game's title, they'd be very surprised to discover that not only does Lara Croft look like a human being with reasonable proportions, but there aren't really that many tombs to be raided here.

This game is an origin story for everyone's favourite female gaming protagonist, but it doesn't really feel connected to the other games at all. Instead, it ignores what happens in the other games almost completely and takes as many liberties as it wants in developing Lara's character. I actually think this is good as it allows them freedom to create an original story as a reboot to the series and not be constrained by their previous titles.

Indeed, they didn't really seem to care for the previous titles at all; the tombs that are in the game are just slapped in weird locations for the sake of having them there and there's a lot heavier emphasis on combat this time around. One wonders why the game has the title of Tomb Raider for at all, but I guess that's what a reboot is meant to be for. Without further ado...


Storyline

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Yeah, better get used to this too.


Considering story is a massive focus, I'll make a whole section for it.

Essentially, Lara's on an expedition and makes the call to go to a rough area of sea. Naturally, storms hit and all hell breaks loose as Lara is thrown left and right before eventually ending up on the beach of an unknown island. She's knocked out cold and wakes up hanging upside down in a dark cave with corpses hanging either side of her. With that, the game begins.

At first, the aim is to just meet up with everyone and get off the island, but it soon becomes clear that there's more to this place than meets the eye. It turns out there's a huge amount of people living on the island who waste no time in capturing Lara and her friends and then somehow letting Lara escape to wreck havoc on them. Just what are these people up to? Why are they so interested in Lara's university colleague and friend Samantha? What exactly does the Sun Queen have to do with everything? The story constantly throws you curveballs and asks more questions as it answers insignificant ones.

Think Final Fantasy XIII with the pacing; the game is essentially a glorified straight line with things off the path for you to collect. Every time you reach an objective, things turn south fast and you're suddenly given another. It's very easy to spend hours in this game by accident because at no point in the story does it feel like Lara has a break to sit down and rest besides a few sections at the very start. It creates the illusion of one very long level that interwinds and links itself together for you. The story is a driving force to keep the player searching for answers with Lara.

Speaking of Lara, her characterisation and development takes up a significant chunk of the story, and I actually feel this is where the game falls short. At first, they portray her as this terrified young woman that has to stand up and fight because the times demand it. As she develops, she becomes more efficient and things that scared her are mere annoyances and just part of the job.

The problem is that this change and development is done way too quickly; when she first kills someone, she has something of a mental breakdown over it in cutscene form then just gets up and starts murdering everyone in sight. No, seriously, everyone; in the first kill, she was facing rape so it's understandable, but within ten minutes she's sneaking up behind some poor bastard and murdering him in cold blood for merely existing. In addition, she never seems concerned or even slightly worried by anything by endgame; on the contrary, she's shouting abuse and jeering at the enemies. Again, all fine and dandy, but the game takes place over around three or four days. You don't go from "terrified of balancing on a log" to "shouting 'I'll kill you all, you bastards!' at a force of twenty people" in the space of three days. It's a shame that they put so much focus on an element of the story which honestly didn't really make much sense.


Presentation

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See that red dot? That's where you're going. If you can see it, you can probably reach it.


Right out the bat, this game looks... appalling. You load up the game and it shows you the opening credits, that's all fine and dandy, then the screen starts flickering like crazy and showing a pixelated black mess between credits or when the logo comes in. That's all fine and dandy, Crystal Dynamics, looks very experimental, but it also looks like my disc is broken and it looks horrible. Just no.

You press "New Game" and then bazam, the graphics are fucking beautiful. The textures look great, the environments look diverse and interesting and the character models are fantastic too. The particles look great for the most part; electricity doesn't look all that fantastic, but I can only really think of one sequence where it's actually used. If there's one complaint I have about the graphics, it's that the game incorporates a lot of grey. The island is mountainous, all right, and apparently all its buildings had to be grey too for some reason. It has its fair shares of browns and reds, but last time I checked a forest is green and brown. Not grey.

Lara herself has a fantastic amount of detail to her. The little details are what make this game so fantastic to play; she pans her hands on walls as she passes, clutches her side when wounded at the beginning, trips on uneven footing and so on. Her clothes become damp going in and out of water, she gets completely caked in dirt after certain cutscenes with long falls and then cleaned when walking through waterfalls or swimming or something similar... the attention to detail here is just jawdropping.

The soundtrack is pretty spot-on, too. There are only two or three tracks that come to mind that are "worth-putting-on-your-iPod-good", but battle themes drive you, violins chill you as you walk through a dark cave and the music accompanies you pretty much as you'd expect. There's lots of traditional jungle beats, but the game has its fair share of orchestral epics too.

One thing to note is that the game's third person camera is great too. It plays out and looks like a documentary as the expedition was meant to be; during cutscenes, the camera is shaky but not Hunger Games shaky or something retarded. It just looks like somebody's actually holding it which is pretty cool.


Gameplay

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Expect this plane to fall apart. Somehow.


To put it simply, this is one of the best feeling games I think I've ever played in my whole life.

Platforming feels like Mirror's Edge with Mario style jump arcs; or, if you'd rather, it feels like having sex with Katy Perry for an hour straight. Intense, quick platforming is common in this game, and you'll find yourself missing them when they end. Lara reacts perfectly to your every movement and can pull off lots of awesome maneuvers to get out of whatever's exploding behind her this time. If you die during one of these parts, it's your fault.

The game feeling so good and reacting so well to your every touch really helps for combat, which is a surprisingly huge focus in this game. For a game which had lots of adverts saying "A Survivor is Born", there isn't much survival to be doing. At the very start, you're taught how to kill a deer and scavenge it for food, but then the feature is never touched on again. Instead, this game plays out like an action movie, throwing you between set pieces and occasionally into rooms of twenty baddies all ready to fuck you up.

There are two ways you can go about combat.
One: Rambo into everything and give zero fucks. I'm going to assume this doesn't work quite so well on Hard mode.
Two: Snipe everybody from afar with your bow and take the fight down by half before its even begun.

If you kill somebody without anyone near them with the bow, nobody hears it. You can go through most of the game just murdering everybody you come across using Silent Takedowns or precision headshots, meaning you very rarely have to pull out another weapon. This is fine, though, as the bow is one of the most surprisingly satisfying weapons in gaming ever, really. Lining up a headshot, charging it up and letting it fly all while they're blissfully unaware feels almost deliciously satisfying to the point where I worry for my own sanity. Similarly, you can get through a lot of the enemy-infested rooms by sitting in a corner and slowly sniping enemies one at a time. If they get up in your face, dodge them a few times then smash them in the face with a pickaxe.

All the weapons feel good and are good, though, which is the main thing. The pistol is far more useful for mid-range combat against more destructive enemies, while the machine gun is incredibly useful for mowing down a band that have managed to sneak around your blind spot.

There are also lots of puzzles in the main quest and in hidden "optional secret tombs", which helpfully alert you to their not-so-secret location if you walk by one. Honestly, these puzzles shouldn't leave you stumped for too long; similar to Zelda, most are solved by pointing your newest toy at them and smashing the fire button repeatedly. There are some interesting physics puzzles, but most of them are solved the second you realise that certain objects interact in the way you wanted them to.

Honestly, the gameplay really just comes down to walking in a straight line, jumping as shit explodes for no reason and then shooting everything in sight and it is fun. The game just feels so good that sniping people and making leaps of faith never feels stale. In fact, the game tries a little too hard to surprise you, if anything; by the end, it's more surprising if a piece of floorboard or even cave wall doesn't explode when you tread on it. Everything on the damn island is made of explodium, but that's one of the best things about the game; it doesn't try to be all that realistic. It realises it's a silly game about a girl taking on several hundred guys alone and not sleeping or eating for several days and rolls with it. The game doesn't have to make sense when its own set of rules are quickly defined and set up so beautifully and exquisitely.


Closing Comments

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The red dot still beckons... got a long way to go, Lara.


Tomb Raider is a beautifully crafted adventure which leaves your sense of belief at the door and takes you on a roller coaster of emotional highs, lows and everything else between. Some of the areas are truly breathtaking or downright creepy, and I didn't even touch on the hidden relics that reveal the true lore behind the island on closer examination. There is so much to do in this game that even when you complete it, you'll want to go back and find what you missed.

It's unlikely you'll do that in the same session, though, after an incredibly disappointing ending. The "final boss" is built up and foreshadowed throughout the entire game and turns out to be a repetitive "hit the weak point" with absolutely no variation in its movements besides "it looks angrier". After that, the ending sequence itself tries (and fails) to throw a connection between this game and the personality Lara then forms for the rest of them. I would have much rather had a new Tomb Raider saga building directly from this one rather than having an inexplicably silly reason for what does happen.

Despite this, though, the game is exciting, fresh for this day and age, and fun. It's a game, after all, and it's a pretty good escape from the realism and drollness of modern gaming and into the excitement and insanity of Lara's manic world.


Pros
-Sublime control and feel
-Exploring constantly rewards you with awesome extras
-Combat is exciting and sniping is just awesome
-Great plot in general

Cons
-Lara's characterisation doesn't really make much sense
-There isn't really any tomb raiding at all...

Final score: 9.4/10
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Olinea
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No finesse
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
Game: Fire Emblem: Rekka No Ken
Console: Nintendo GBA
Sex: Male

Well, given the relatively recent release of Fire Emblem: Awakening, me having completed my runs of Oracle of Seasons & Oracle of Ages resulting in a need/desire/insatiable hunger for a new emulator game, I decided to dip my feet into the water that is the Fire Emblem series. After asking around for recommendations on the game to get me started on the series, I was told to try FE7 (which it is not called, by the way, and I forget how I figured out Rekka No Ken is the 7th one. Actually it might not be). So in the middle of the night someone hacked into my computer and made me download the ROM and then I started playing.

For those who go “what the hell is Fire Emblem”, my three-word summary is “Pokémon plus chess”. You play the role of ___________, a military strategist who helps your ever-growing band of troops win fights with your brilliant decision-making, so that your army can stop the bad guys. In your average fight, you’ll get to choose from the selection of people who have joined your team (starting with one, the lord Lyn, and expanding to a group of potentially 40+) and they’ll be placed in preset positions on the battlefield. The game is turn-based, meaning you have no time-based pressure such as in Mario, Kirby, or Call of Duty. Every unit can move some distance and then perform an action (usually either an attack or being told to wait). Once everyone in your squadron makes their move, or you end your turn early because you’re only using 2-3 people at a time to save the world, your opponent takes their turn to move whoever they want, attack, and you take your turn again (in some cases, you’ll have NPC characters colored green who suicidally Rambo bumrush entire armies as if they had no sense of self-preservation). This continues until either you achieve the goal of the mission; usually “kill the boss” or the occasional “protect this dude/dudette for some amount of time”, or you make a tactical blunder and restart your game because you can’t afford to lose whoever just took the fall for your fuckup.

But of course there’s more to the game than “move, hit, move, hit”. Most notably, the combat system uses sets of triangles (think Grass < Fire < Water < Grass) for melee and magical combat. Swords beat axes (presumably because axes take too damn long to swing and swordspeople are fast? Idk I don’t remember them explaining this), axes beat lances (because your wussy-ass lance is just going to get chopped in half by that giant axe), and lances beat swords (like in elementary school when you put your hand on someone’s head and say “why can’t you hit me dude”, lances just outrange swords) . Similarly, the triangle of magic goes in a rotation of Anima (nature; fire/lightning, for example) < Dark < Light < Anima), although mages are a bit more rare and it’s unlikely you’ll have to pick and choose the kind of mage you’re sending in. In addition, you also have archers (shoot at a distance, but can’t fight up close), healers, flying units, bards (allow someone to move again), thieves, horsemen, armored units, and more. As they fight in combat, land successful hits, survive damage, and kill enemies, they gain experience to level up and gain stats. Once you reach a certain threshold and find an item specific to your class you can then “promote” them to a more powerful unit; for example, your Archer may become a Sniper, or a Cavalier into a Paladin. Units can use different weapons of varying qualities, support each other in combat, pick up allies to shield them from harm, recruit special characters from the enemy team, place things on the battlefield, and a crapload of other stuff. So yeah, it’s very complex, and when you’re starting out you’re likely to say “fuck it I’ll just play suboptimally” and be on your merry way. And that’s perfectly fine, you’ll still have fun.

Here are some pictures of how you handle your gameplay.

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Here’s the beginning setup of the mission. The blue units are owned by me, reds are enemies. The objective is displayed on the screen (it seems intrusive in the picture but I honestly never notice it, I couldn’t tell you if it just keeps moving or disappears somehow), and also displays the type of terrain you have selected; the terrain you stand on can influence your ability to dodge attacks or defend yourself, so it provides small tactical advantage to stand your ground in a forest or fortress. So, to progress through the level, I’ll have to deal with that axe-wielding bandit you see in the bottom right corner. During the level setup, you normally can choose which unit starts in which position. Ideally you’d like the first person to reach the bandit to have a weapon advantage. So which type of weapon beats axes? Swords! Fortunately, the game pre-placed Lowen, the cavalier, close to the bandit. He’s best suited to attack the bandit, given his ability to wield a sword as well as having innate mobility advantages from being on horseback. So we’re going to order Lowen to attack the bandit.

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Lowen is currently selected. Here, you can see the available places he has to move; blue is accessible, and red represents the squares he is capable of attacking (in addition to a sword to attack units directly next to him, Lowen wields a javelin he can throw to act as a lance; here that isn’t ideal, given the weapon triangle). Your mobility is limited by factors like the type of unit, weather occurrences, positioning of enemies (you can’t run through an enemy), and terrain type (horses can’t go over mountains). So Lowen’s a good unit to have in his position, now he can pick a fight in the forest over there and he’ll most likely be able to trounce the bandit with little struggle.

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Lowen stares down his opponent. Notice that the bandit has a 25% chance of actually having his attack connect, thanks to his inaccuracy, my use of the forest, and the weapon triangle. Success is all but assured.

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Right in the face. Lowen scores a hit for some nice damage.

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The bandit misses his attack, and Lowen gets some damage for free.

So what’d your next move be? Well, you might be tempted to send in Rebecca, the archer, to damage the bandit, and hopefully make a kill. But once she’s made her attack, if she fails to kill the bandit then you have no nearby units to finish him off, and on his turn he’ll be able to freely attack Rebecca up close, where her low defenses and absence of melee weapons make her a sitting duck. That’s tactical intuition that you need to develop playing this game. We’ll all make mistakes. I am far from perfect of a commander; I frequently leave key units out of position so they can’t respond to threats in time, don’t shift weapons around properly all the time, and let my impatience split my army in two. My point is that you don’t need to be perfect at this game to enjoy it, if people were perfect strategists then the games would never be challenging or fun. The level of complexity makes decision-making and foresight invaluable tools, and while it may be frustrating to have the AI capitalize on your small slip, it’s all part of the game. Because of my embarrassingly high number of blunders in which my squishies are left exposed, I’m a bit more aware of the worst-case scenario, and I moved Hector (the axe man next to Rebecca) down 2 squares and right 2 squares, in order to block the bandit’s direct path in case he sees an opening.

So now that I’ve given you a gigantic tutorial, let’s get on to the review.

I don’t really know how to structure this so let’s go with pros and cons.



The good
My enjoyment of this game snowballed for the same reasons that I imagine people enjoy Pokémon. The tactical element and control of so many variables allows you to turn around a situation that would normally end disastrously; for example, in one mission I was forced to have 4 people in a secluded building that would take my main army several turns to reach; by selecting a combination of a strong defensive Paladin to tank the hordes of enemies, Sage to attack over the walls and clear out opposing Archers trying to get free damage on my Paladin, a Cleric to heal the Paladin, and a Swordmaster to switch out with the Paladin in case of emergency, I was able to hold off the initial scattered wave of enemies, place a special “Light Rune” item to block the advances of their reinforcements through the choke spot, and turtle in safety until the large army fought their way through the crowd to ambush the remaining offense and reunite the group. By controlling the people placed in their initial spots, knowledge of the weapon triangle, and using items obtained throughout the game, I turned the daunting task of having a miniature army act as a fully-fledged legion into a much simpler and more manageable mission.

While the story mode initially starts as “your guys went to a city and fought a bunch of guys on the way to your ultimate destination”, eventually the game gives you impetus for completing these missions, and the storyline drives the introduction of tons of different characters, each with their own reason for helping you and responding to the events of the storyline. Paying attention to the story can actually be beneficial to gameplay in some cases; for example, normally when recruiting a unit you’ll talk to them using Eliwood, the main character for a majority of the game. However, in some cases, a backstory may explain a link between a unit you own and a unit on the battlefield; by paying attention to the story, you can know which unit to use in order to recruit someone new to your ranks. The story gives you more to appreciate than mindless combat; while it’s certainly a bit of a cliché in that you’re a band of heroes working to defeat an evil wizard, you get to see characters interact and develop. It’s not going to win an Oscar or anything but it supplements the game to more than “fight this, fight that” which others of its genre have likely been.

The game also has incredible replay value. The vast number of units you can acquire results in having such a large array of potential “one man armies” that it’s impossible to make everyone max out and see their full potential. On my second runthrough I’m obtaining units I never knew I could recruit and making the stars of the show the units I cast aside on my first run, and there are still people I have never been able to fully train in either run. In addition, different difficulty levels exist for those who think they’ve mastered the art of Normal mode. You can set your own limitations on playthroughs; limiting the use of certain characters, action limitations, I’ve heard of the “No B button challenge” so you can’t back out of certain decisions. Versatility exists both in what you’re capable of doing in the game and challenges you set for yourself. This is a game that, once you beat it the first time around, you’re most likely going to immediately say “okay I need to beat this again because there’s so much I never got to do”. That, in my opinion, is the sign of a very well-designed game.



The Bad
I think my #1 (possibly only) gripe with the game, which can be taken as a good point depending on what kind of gamer you are, is that this game is difficult. This difficulty isn’t just “have to keep retrying this”, but it’s tough because you may think you’re okay, making the right choices and beating on bad guys, and suddenly the power spikes way up and suddenly you’re thinking “uhhh shit how am I going to beat this game without losing everybody powerful”. Difficulty comes from the fact that losing a non-main character will cause them to die forever, and become unusable for the rest of the game. So basically for several of the later levels you have to find a way to get through hordes of enemies, keep track of everyone, make sure nobody dies or gets left behind, secure objectives (visiting villages before they’re attacked, for example), and then find a way to beat a unit who’s twice as powerful as anyone you have, armed tooth and nail with any combination of melee, ranged, or magical weapons, critical hit capabilities, and defenses that make you want to pull your hair out. And he heals between turns. He’s like Misty’s Starmie, Flannery’s Torkoal, Whitney’s Miltank. Sure, you can beat him by pulling out everybody you own and wailing on him, but if you don’t slay him in one rotation he is going to go to town on anyone he wants and nobody can withstand it. And the difference here is that you don’t get anyone back. Fortunately, because I played on an emulator, I was able to constantly abuse save states and forsee a battle’s outcome by testing it and restarting to the original state if it ended poorly. Cheating? To some degree yes, while it’s possible to just restart the mission even after beating it, using save states saved me veritable hours upon hours upon hours of performing the same fights over and over again. Without this, I can’t imagine beating the game after losing every significantly strong unit in my team to these mini-bosses. The game is tough, and unfortunately that difficulty comes from stupidly powerful units and a numbers/luck game instead of toughness associated with strategically adapting to the changes your opponent makes in battle.

The game can also be tougher for the more casual gamer, because optimizing your play isn’t something that the game really leads you into. The biggest example I can give is the unit Marcus. Marcus is the equivalent of getting a level 50 Corsola at the second gym and you say “cool this guy owns” and you have your Corsola do everything up until you realize that training your weaker guys would’ve been a better use of your time, because Corsola was only strong due to being a much higher level, not because Corsola is an awesome fighter. I made this mistake in my first runthrough and relied on Marcus to clear out people that could be taken down with just a tiny bit more effort, and while it worked well in the earlier portions where Marcus was considerably stronger, in the later portions he had absorbed a lot of experience that could’ve gone to units that would eventually outscale him. The result was that I had a level 70 Corsola when I could’ve had a level 65 Dragonite and it hurt my performance later down the road because Marcus just didn’t hold up to standard. He was a crutch and the game didn’t exactly steer me to examine his growth trends (I have no idea how to view those other than looking at it online or playing through dozens of times) so a combination of my refusal to research the game online (fear of spoilers) and failure to warn me of potentially backfiring experience investments (a limited number of army members exist on the enemy team, so your total experience to be earned in the game is limited) led me into a situation where I had a harder time than usual progressing.

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Never trust a guy with purple hair anyways.

Another example of the game leading you into poor decisions is the upgrade system. Unpromoted units, like Rebecca the Archer, can gain levels up to level 20, and their promoted selves can also gain levels up to 20. However, the game tells you that upgrades can occur starting at level 10, provided you have the correct item. The natural reaction here is that once you get the correct item, you should evolve Rebecca as soon as you can, because her Sniper incarnation is much stronger and has better stat gains.

False.

The issue here is that evolving Rebecca at level 10 means you miss out on any stat gains she’d get from 11 – 20. So by evolving Rebecca at 10, you gimp her by removing her ability to see her full potential through evolution at 20. This one is a lot harder for me to take personal responsibility for, since the tutorial even forces you to upgrade a new unit when he’s level 10; a higher level than what most of your units will be at this time, so you wouldn’t know to wait it out. Sometimes the game simply leads you down a bad path and I think that level of difficulty is even worse than “go fight gigantoboss without losing your ace in the hole”, because it just seems bastardly and penalizes you for not being fully familiarized with the system. Someone who’s played Fire Emblem before would surely know that your early upgrade is a bad thing; for a newbie like me, it seemed like the logical choice to make, because the game even pushed me into making it. If you’re willing to do your research it’ll make the game much easier, as with most games, and I realize it’s not the game’s job to hold my hand the entire way, but I felt it was poor design to advise me to play in a way that’s not different, but just plain worse.

Overall I really did enjoy playing the game with the emulator states, it removed some of the challenge but it was the frustrating part that left, I still got the full experience of commanding my units, picking and choosing fights, adapting to enemy tactics, and playing through the story mode, and I’m currently on my second runthrough with a possible third in sight. I hear there are some pitfalls in the Fire Emblem series so I’ll probably ask around for which game is the next best to play now that I’m mostly familiar with how it works. In the meantime, for anyone whose curiosity was piqued by the discussions revolving around the release of Fire Emblem: Awakening, I suggest you two things: this game, and sagelike patience.



Pros
~Complex strategy, tons of required variables and knowledge (weapon triangles, movement, foresight) mixed with supplemental knowledge, like “support conversations”, help make the game appear basic on your first runthrough with room for discovery in a second play.
~Large range of characters allow for high replayability

Cons
~Difficulty of the “ugh” variety, where the difficulty can’t really be remedied based on how well you play
~At times misleading; not enough to completely ruin your first playthrough, but take the tutorial with a grain of salt.
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LightningBolt
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Boring Person
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Game: Okami HD
Platform: Playstation 3
Genre: Action/Adventure

Once upon a time, an evil monster called Orochi terrorized all of Japan. On the night of the full moon, Orochi marks the house of the maiden whom he desires as a sacrifice in the small Kamiki Village. On the night of a certain full moon, however, a mysterious white wolf called Shiranui and a warrior named Nagi confront and defeat Orochi. Their heroic deeds become legendary all throughout Japan and the country enters a period of peace. However, 100 years later, Orochi's seal is broken and an intense evil covers all of Japan. The deceased Shiranui is then revived as Amaterasu and sets out with her tiny companion, Issun, to fight against this evil. It's at this point that the game begins, as you travel all around Japan (referred to in the game as Nippon) reviving the land and defeating Orochi and his minions.

If you want a good idea of how this game plays, the obvious and common comparison is The Legend of Zelda. You simply walk around the game's world as you go through dungeons, defeat enemies, go through some platforming sections, and solve puzzles, as you would in any 3D Zelda game. You make very heavy use of the "Celestial Brush" in these puzzles and combat. With the Celestial Brush you draw using the controller to create things such as bombs, wind, slashes, and whatever else. It's a very easy-to-use system that provides a nice and different aspect to gameplay. Its use is a very frequent, but also quite varied and never overstays its welcome. Thankfully, the use of the brush during puzzles is never convoluted and near-impossible to figure out.

The gameplay in Okami is very straightforward, though varied and fun. However, it's definitely not the main draw to the game. Among the many ways in which this game towers above any other I've personally played, the most obvious is in its art style. Okami is an absolutely beautiful game, and I imagine the HD version that I played is even more beautiful than the original. Its beauty is further magnified by the various "purification" sections in the game where you restore the land to its natural state. The art style is a water color traditional Japanese style is incredibly colorful. The game is seriously worth its $20 price for the art alone. Absolutely stunning. I want to post a bunch of pictures, but the number available on a quick Google Images search is very limited unfortunately.

Like the incredible art style, the music is in the vein of a traditional Japanese style, and it is also fantastic. There aren't too many stand out tracks, but it's always fairly noticeable in a good way. There are moments of absolute brilliance in the soundtrack, too. Two tracks in particular sound out as being fantastic, one which plays during several of the more dramatic and important moments in the game, and the other during the final boss. Music is one of this game's many strong suits.

The story in this game is also very surprisingly good. There are many twists and turns along the way, with several emotional moments mixed in. This is definitely aided by a great cast of characters. Our silent protagonist Amaterasu has a ton of personality given her inability to speak. Issun, the one who does much of the speaking on behalf of the player's party, is a funny character and forms a great pair with Amaterasu. Along the way they meet many memorable supporting characters, such as the inept self-proclaimed warrior Susano, the wood sprite who revived our protagonist, Sakuya, a mysterious prophet who appears throughout the story, Waka, and many others. I'll admit that when I went into this game, I wasn't expecting such a standout cast of characters. Also aiding the story was a very good sense of humor. The humor reminded me of a Paper Mario kind of humor. I really laughed several times through the course of the game. Don't let me give the wrong impression, though, the game is full of touching and serious moments and manages to balance all of these feelings with ease. With all of these aspects, the story takes a pretty standard premise and delivers in a fantastic way. Another interesting feature is that there are more than one story arcs present. There are three story arcs, each several hours long and each just as good as the others. My time ended up being over 34 hours for the three story arcs, just to give an idea.

There are a few other aspects I haven't really touched on that should probably be mentioned. The difficulty in this game is just right. The bosses are typically your most difficult battles (there's an extremely easy boss in there, but whatever). The first time you discover an enemy, they can be quite difficult without knowing the way to defeat them. Afterward, you can look through your enemy log and it will often give hints to dealing with specific enemies. In Zelda games you get different weapons to use, but in this games you get different brush techniques, like the ability to manipulate fire, create bombs, cut through rocks, and whatever else. Unlike Zelda games, these are all pretty important through the duration of your journey, which was nice. You also get weapons, but they're only for combat. You also actually want to explore this game's world. Seriously. I explored every nook and cranny available to me as I went proceeded through this game and purified every plant, took every path, and did everything available to me. There's also something that seems like a New Game+. I'm not really sure, though. I haven't gotten a chance to play around with it yet.

I'm not sure I'm satisfied with how much I've said about Okami, because it's a game I truly loved. Really it reminds me of a Legend of Zelda game with much better artist direction, characters, story, music, and way more personality. And I love the Zelda games I've played. This is the kind of game that I rate a 10/10 and reconsider the ratings of other games I've made because there are very few that deserve to be rated as highly as this one.

Rating: 10/10
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Romanticide
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Cult Leader
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Game: To the Moon
Platform: PC
Genre: Adventure

By now, we're all familiar with the growing "GAMES AS ART!!1" movement. You know, the idea that games can be more than toys designed to help us while away the hours, the idea that games can deliver deep and meaningful stories just like any other medium, or deliver altogether unique experiences that just aren't possible anywhere else. You know some of the games - Journey, Shadow of the Colossus/Ico (not recent, but they're thrown in there), The Walking Dead, amongst many others. It's in this category that I would place To the Moon.

There isn't really much "gameplay", per se. The reason I picked adventure as opposed to visual novel (which would also work) for the genre is that the gameplay aspects are more reminiscent of an adventure game like Syberia or something along those lines than of a visual novel like Clannad. What little gameplay you'll be doing here consists of finding memory links, either by clicking objects or exploring, solving puzzles that consist of flipping panels, along with a whack-a-mole game at one point. The part that's most like a traditional game involves you dodging traps and shooting enemies, though even this isn't challenging because you cannot lose. This is pretty much all the gameplay. It's nothing spectacular nor is it even really relevant to the story, but its purpose is to make you feel more invested in the story's events.

The basic premise of the game is that you're playing as a pair of doctors, Eva Rosalene and Neil Watts, whose job consists of fulfilling their clients' unfulfilled wishes. However, since the Inception-esque process involves overwriting their actual memories, it's only done with patients who are about to die. The client in this game is Johnny and his final wish is to go to the moon. Sounds simple enough, does it not? Just go back to a random early in his memories, implant the desire, let it play out, and call it a day, right? Wrong of course; that's not much of a story. The real story is less "going to the moon" and more so sorting through Johnny's life. During the course of the game, you'll learn about his wife River's condition and how it manifests itself, how Johnny and River met, a traumatic event in Johnny's childhood, and other pivotal events in his life. I'll leave the rest for you to discover, since I feel going too in-depth would spoil them.

Suffice it to say this is the most emotional story in a game I've ever played, easily. When AAA publishers can pour tens of millions or even over a hundred million into a game and not deliver something as emotional as this, something is quite wrong with the gaming industry.

What are events without a great cast of characters? A collection of random happenstances without any meaning, that's what. I don't think Johnny is all that special of a main character; we don't learn much about him outside of that he loves River and that he wants to go to the moon. Neil Watts is somewhat like Dr. House, but he's a nicer, more sympathetic guy, and his humor is rooted in nerd culture instead of abuse. He's nowhere near as smart either, which is a key difference. Eva is obviously the smarter and more serious of the two, and the leader to boot. However, she has her humorous moments as well, most of which come when picking on Neil. River is probably my favorite character in the game. Entertainment as a whole tends to assume that someone with autism/Asperger's is some sort of savant. This is rarely the case and just serves to create unrealistic expectations of those on the spectrum/mis-perceptions of what autism is, so it's heartening to see that the developers didn't go this route with River. They didn't just take the lazy route and create a blank slate either; they created a character with emotions and motivations. The supporting cast doesn't stand out as much outside of maybe Nicholas, who serves as a good foil/best friend to Johnny, but every character does their job and is decent.

The graphics are about what you'd expect out of an SNES title. They aren't going to blow you away, but the game was made in RPG Maker, so what do you expect? The artstyle in the few "cutscenes" is excellent hand-drawn looking (if not actually hand-drawn, idk lol) stuff. I personally don't mind the graphics (many of my favorite games are SNES titles with a similar look), but they can be off-putting if you're not into older games.

The sound, on the other hand, is amazing. It's a major reason the game is so emotional. While many of the events in this game are in and of themselves sad, the game's soundtrack is a complement to what you're seeing. I could list pretty much every song as a "standout track" or whatever, but THE BEST tracks would be any version of "To the Moon", "For River" (except the holiday one, that's just weird), and "Everything's Alright". It's one of those soundtracks that is worthy of being on an iPod, a phone, a computer, or whatever device you have. It's that damn good.

This is only a four hour game or so, but it doesn't overstay its welcome. It tells its story, delivers an emotional punch, and doesn't get in its own way by trying to draw the story out and/or add (too many) needless gameplay segments. It also doesn't have any replayability, unless you want to experience the story more than once. If it hits you anywhere near as hard as it hit me, why wouldn't you want to?

I debated even writing this review. It hits way too close to home for me to be truly objective, but I feel it's a transcendent experience and what is a transcendent experience if not one to be shared? I can't say I have the most consistent scoring scale ever in place (it's one of those things I want to work on, one of these days), but there aren't many 10/10 games anyway.

This is a 10/10 game.
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SaiyanShredder
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Saiyan gon...
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I think I'm going to post a review for Assassin's Creed 3 when I finish it.
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Olinea
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No finesse
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Game: True Crime: Streets of L.A.
Console: Nintendo Gamecube, Xbox, PlayStation 2, PC
Rating: M

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”True Crime in L.A. is through the roof
and they’ll shoot you if you come in
and testify with the proof”
~”Tha Truth” – Bad Azz


For those of us who grew up with Nintendo, one franchise we never got to experience for ourselves was the Grand Theft Auto series, games where you can play normally but it was much more fun to run around on a rampage until you’re silenced by the cops for committing all these murders in broad daylight and then you die and you just do it again. True Crime is probably best equated to the GTA series, although having not played GTA it’s hard for me to draw proper comparisons between the two so I’ll be writing as though I’ve never heard of it. Plus this is a True Crime review anyways, not GTA.

You play as Nick Kang, ex-LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) officer, now hired by the EOD (Elite Operations Division) to solve a crime that just keeps getting bigger as he looks into it. Through tailing the elusive character “Rocky”, encounters with the old cop Rafferty, and even a few visits to Ancient Wu, thought to be an urban legend by all else on the police force, Nick is a loose cannon who is determined to solve the case his way, no matter what he’s ordered to do.

Gameplay
True Crime is split into three different styles of gameplay: driving, shooting, and fighting. Different missions exist to test your proficiency in these areas, sometimes combining them together to make the job easier. As you complete missions and solve crimes, the way in which you resolve these disputes will dictate your status as a “good cop” (using restraint by pulling out guns only when necessary, using non-lethal takedowns, arresting instead of killing targets, shooting targets in the knee, shoulder, hand, or other spots that qualify as a “Neutralizing shot”) or “bad cop” (harming innocent civilians, killing criminals without attempting to subdue them, shooting perps in the head). Your status will ultimately dictate how far you are allowed to progress in the story mode (so the account we use with around 1600 civilian kills is not making it to the next part any time soon) as well as changing other things, such as making civilians more likely to pull guns on you if you pull yours out. Additionally, as you resolve a case, you’ll receive points towards a token that you can use at upgrade locations scattered around L.A. to teach you a new skill – for example, laser sight or hollow-point bullets on your guns, new combo finishers and attacks on grounded enemies when fighting, or 180 turns and the ability to go on two wheels when driving. If you’ve maxed out on your upgrades, you can instead use your earned token to heal yourself or repair the car you’re driving, if you’re feeling particularly attached to it.

Driving
A good bit of time in True Crime will be spent driving. As a member of EOD, Nick is able to “hijack” (commandeer, if you prefer) any civilian’s car for as long as he desires; no penalties for taking it, the NPCs may sound angry but they won’t come after you, the cops don’t care, nothing. Don’t be scared to say “that Lamborghini looks much nicer than this Taxi, I want that instead”. A huge range of cars exist in the game, some faster than others, some large buses and trucks that can ram cars and cause them to fly out of control, or speedy ones that come in handy during rush missions or if you have somewhere you want to reach faster. Several perps have cars, such as kidnappers and street racers, and you’ll never progress through the game without a good speedy drive. In the story mode, driving missions typically come in 3 variants – racing to a location in some given amount of time, tailing a suspect by staying far enough away so as to not attract suspicion but not far enough where you lose the tail, and escaping enemy cars that threaten to shoot down and ram whatever you’re driving. Driving can be pretty fun for reasons I’ll get into later, and really showcases what the game has to offer.

Shooting
In my opinion, shooting is probably the most important skill you can develop in this game, because of its use in almost any situation except where they’re disabled. Nick is armed with two pistols (if you upgrade them, eventually turning into what I believe are magnums) which are, well, guns. The game features an auto-targetting system which will let you just hammer the R button and bullets will fly in the general direction of your target, making it hard to really pin down a running target without use of the slow-mo feature, which lets you zoom in and aim as time slows down for a while, making it easier to hit the neutralizing locations on your target (or slay civilians before they can run, if that’s your deal). Shooting’s just very useful because at times it’s like “what am I doing, I can just pull out my gun and this gets 10x easier”. When you’re driving and chasing down a stolen car or fleeing from mobsters, you can either try to perform some fancy maneuver where you block their car or make them spin out by ramming them at an angle, or just pull out your gun and shoot their tires to slow them down (or just shoot the car until it explodes). Instead of engaging in a street fight with a criminal, you can just fire a warning shot and either have them surrender or start running, in which case you’ll never get them without pumping a few rounds. Only in missions where you’re forced to fight or drive or whatever is the gun really not useful. Shooting missions tend to be pretty binary – get to some location as people pop out and try to gun you down. It does feel good to take the guns out, though, and it’s the cornerstone of a lot of stuff – good and bad – that you can do.

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”Hell hath no fury like Nick Kang pissed off!”


Fighting
I’m iffy about fighting. Of the three it’s probably the least enjoyable mode, for a couple of reasons. Fighting is pretty simple – A to punch, B to kick, Y to jump kick, X to grab for a takedown. Enemies have a series of exclamation points, ranging from 3 to 6, which is basically temporary stamina. Each time you land a hit, they lose an exclamation point – if you get them all, your target is dazed and stunned for a while, during which you can enter button combinations to perform more powerful moves which knock them to the ground and deal more damage. Fighting is just tedious at times, since while the game urges you to strategically punch when the target’s in a high stance and kick when in a low stance, the weaker enemies (civilians, petty criminals) don’t ever dodge and it’s too easy to land hits, and story mode enemies and bosses always seem to dodge both so fighting them turns into mashing kicks and punches hoping you get lucky. Playing through the story mode it was just “ughhh a fighting mission” and you go mash A and B until you defeat the easy enemy or spend ages on the hard ones. Some people have weapons like knives and other small held objects which you can pick up but they really just change what your attack looks like and don’t add much other than the fact that you don’t get to use them whenever you want and it’s more variety than your (basically) 2 basic attacks and strongest finisher you’ve unlocked at the time. It certainly makes the game more well-rounded because a game with only driving and shooting, I imagine, would be kinda lame but the combat system is so simple that it gets annoying and you never really use it at all.

Story Mode
There isn’t much to say about it, if I’m honest. You drive around chasing down your lead, get to the building, then need to shoot people, sneak in, fight people, or somebody’s getting away and you chase them, go to new location, rinse and repeat. There aren’t a lot of characters or character development; it’s a pretty old game, I’ll give it that, but I suppose giving you a progression which allows you to do things you can’t easily do in “sandbox” missions (“sandbox” missions being ones in which you can drive, shoot, fight, no time limit, just reach destination X) is nicer than saying “here are guns, go do things”. It’s nice that it has a story mode but I wouldn’t buy the game for it or you’ll be left disappointed.

Pros
True Crime is one of those games that my brothers and I pop into the Gamecube once in a while because running around shooting things, hijacking cars, and the occasional crime-solving is something we haven’t grown tired of. Perhaps it depends on the player (because I can certainly imagine that after “accidentally” shooting your 500th civilian that it would grow stale to some) but the huge variance in cars, NPC civilians walking around the street committing crimes and talking to each other, and your own creativity in exploring the world set out in front of you, will dictate for how long you can play this until you get bored and move along. In all fairness this quality is due to the style of game rather than how it’s implemented so I won’t give all credit to Luxoflux/Activision but there’s a little more to the game than driving and shooting.

I figured I’d comment on the soundtrack and whatnot seeing as how it’s pretty good, in my opinion. The game is rated M and as such the music will have some pretty questionable themes in it, but if you can get past that, then it’s pretty fun driving in your Porsche blasting Snoop Dogg and other tunes you’ll grow to love as you play. Some missions feature other songs like Peace Sells (Megadeth) which is a little disappointing as I’d have preferred to have every song available to you when driving but it’s understandable that not everything is fitting for it. Some songs like Tha Truth are heard in the odd mission but always appreciate hearing, others like the aforementioned Snoop Dogg song and Legends you’ll hear a lot while driving. The songs you’ll tend to hear will be a small subset of ones on the disk which is kinda disappointing and the setlist is very rap-heavy but the music does what it’s supposed to – convey the high-rolling, laid-back yet straightedge feeling of cruising the streets looking for trouble.

I think one of the biggest pros to this game – maybe not even a pro, but just damn impressive, is that when the title includes “Streets of L.A.”, they mean exactly that. You see, the playable map in the game is a section of Los Angeles (with a few buildings where some stuff takes place) designed, to my knowledge, exactly according to this cross-section. And they do a bang-up job of making it accurate beyond the street names and composition.

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Google maps don’t lie! Granted, this game was developed 8 years before the photo, and it’s an impossible task to recreate all of L.A. down exactly, but it’s still impressive that they undertook something of this caliber.


It is really that accurate. I’ve used Google Maps to find various locations and it checks out every time. They even have special landmarks like UCLA and the Staples center (the latter of which has a special crime where basketball fans are out fighting and you can arrest like 6 people if everything goes your way), the Hollywood sign, the Santa Monica Airport, and more. I never appreciated how cool that really is when I was younger; now I think it’s probably the coolest thing about this game. That and driving your car off the cliffs of Santa Monica and watching it do flips as it crashes to the ground.

Cons
The biggest con I can think of is that the game is still preeeeetty glitch, to the point where you wonder how long the testers really spent on the game at all. Stuff handles normally until you start trying to push its boundaries. You play through the story mode, do what you’re supposed to do, go where you’re supposed to go? No problems. Find some random group of houses in the middle of Los Feliz and ram your car really fast into an impenetrable fence? There’s a chance you’ll break through, or that your car gets stuck in there or something. It can be cool going “hey I got somewhere I’m not supposed to be” but getting out is harder and you’ll most likely hit the Reset button shortly. The game’s AI tries to act very normal; NPC cars will obey traffic signals, follow normal driving laws, pedestrians stay to the sidewalk, but once in a while you get some screwball bus driver who turns poorly and ends up on the sidewalk, or you’re driving along and accidentally run over an NPC who decided jaywalking just sounded positively dandy. I dunno if that’s intentional or not, it’s funny when it happens but it just makes you wonder if that’s supposed to happen. Other than the glitchy gameplay (it sounds like you can’t go 5 feet without the game breaking but that’s not the case at all, just don’t try to ram through any walls or anything and you’ll have a normal experience) I think I’ve tried to give my opinion on everything so there are various “con”s scattered around if you care to find them.

Overall
True Crime is one of those games you’ll either play for 10 minutes and go “this is stupid how could anybody enjoy this” or play for hours on hours trying everything out. It does a great job of delivering varied gameplay, contains a multitude of crimes, cars, and people, and remains one of my favorite games even 10 years after its release. If you're after a game with a rich, though-provoking, heart-wrenching storyline with HD graphics and online multiplayer, look beyond 2003 for your game releases. If you'd like a laid-back game where you're free to dick around and cruise around with Snoop Dogg pumping in the background, shooting criminals or civilians, it's a game that you'll find is worth your money.
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MrMarill
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DAT STORY TIEM

Pokemon X and Y
Nintendo 3DS

Introduction


I think I always take a biased standpoint when talking about Pokemon. It's always been my favourite video game series and I've stuck with it both casually and competitively throughout my entire life on the internet and off it. Despite this, I was quite concerned for this game after how bland Black and White 2 were. The trailers shown looked unfinished, rushed and I was very scared considering that this game came out a mere two years after Gen 5.

I'm glad to say it was unfounded. This game is a masterpiece and the more I play of it, the less I want to put it down.


Storyline

Nintendo games get a lot of hate for unoriginal or forgettable storylines. A lot of people claim that nobody plays them for the storylines and I would be inclined to agree in many cases. However, Nintendo has recently shown they can tell fantastic stories like in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, Skyward Sword and Pokemon Black and White. That's probably why I'm disappointed that there's a very bland storyline here.

To its credit, X and Y do away with a lot of the shitty boringness at the start. You have your starter, your first badge and nearly twenty Pokemon to choose from in the first hour of the game. After this, the game's first issue, pacing, becomes apparent. The time taken to reach the second gym is nearly four or five hours after you beat the first one... and then after that you can clear three gyms in under an hour. It's underwhelming and screamed of the final product being rushed.

The actual storyline is underwhelming too. The main bad guy team don't really seem to have any goal besides being evil right up until the end where the game gets SO serious that I've lost track of why they were comedy relief throughout the game. You start the game travelling with four friends who are characterised to such extremes that they don't make for believable characters and they're all rather forgettable outside of your main rival and one very out of place scene involving fireworks if you picked a male.


Presentation

The game is just straight up gorgeous. Pokemon are animated very smoothly, the game's art style compliments other game aspects well and everything has a really nice buzz to it. Pokemon are all delighted to exist and it makes the game quite joyous to romp through.

There are still a few issues with this. The switch to a 3D Overworld has created a few issues with foreground blocking where you're going and occasionally the camera dynamically shifts. Sometimes this is fine and sometimes it's jarring as all hell. The main city in particular is an absolute nightmare to traverse and, of course, it's the part you'll be going through and exploring the most. It's also rather lackluster that characters don't have idle animations so they stand perfectly still during cutscenes with just text boxes.

The soundtrack is top notch. The generic battle music is catchy, the sampling is good but the main thing is that the epic feeling that bosses are meant to give you is nailed perfectly. The legendary Pokemon and Champion theme in particular are really great.

Game Freak have also taken the liberty of updating old Pokemon cries to sound more modern. They still let out incomprehensible shrieks but they are no longer 8-bit and Pikachu's has been updated to be the cries made in the anime.

Of course, a big part of a new generation is the new Pokemon themselves and I'm actually a big fan of this generation. There are very few ones that are forgettable or just downright bad (lookin' at you, Klefki) and most Pokemon serve their role and archetype well. There's a disappointing lack of them (only 69) so I can only assume there's some event Legendaries still to come.


Gameplay

The term "Quality of Life Changes" basically refer to very small updates that make a game a lot more playable. I don't even know where to begin with changes here. Diagonal movement, running shoes are turned on automatically, your party is viewable from your bag for TMs and healing - the amount of things to make the game easier to play is mind boggling and it really makes you wonder how you ever played without them.

I said earlier that the story is aimed at kids and the game feels no different. It is easy. You will end up five or ten levels ahead of every opponent with absolutely no effort and it's really disappointing. The game doesn't get any harder with postgame, either! It just remains a cakewalk and it turns what could be a fun, strategic game into a destruction.

The big "mechanic change" this time round is Mega Evolution. A handfull of final form Pokemon can evolve again in battle to look super badass or super retarded based on what Game Freak felt like doing that day. They're not all that game changing but God do they feel good to use.

For what the game lacks in difficulty it makes up for in features. This is the first game to acknowledge EV Training's existance - not only that, but it actively encourages the player to EV Train using a new mode called "Super Training". It isn't exciting to do and it is still repetitive to max out stats but it's far more exciting than grinding against Magikarps for five or six hours to max Speed.

There's also a way to pet and play with your Pokemon called "Pokemon-Amie". All my manly parts hate me for typing this but this is an amazing feature because it's cute as fuck. In addition to being unbelievably adorable, getting more affection for your Pokemon increases their EXP Gained, their chances to critically strike and will make your Pokemon, on occasion, not faint for fear of disappointing you. What soldiers.

The final feature is what brings Pokemon to the 21st century at last. At any point, you can connect to the internet and battle or trade against friends or strangers. There's a million and one other things to do with this - Global Trade Station, syncing your game to Nintendo's website for tournaments, giving out "O-Powers" (buffs to your friend's game for a few minutes), Wonder Trading or just taking your team online and battling friends at random. Nintendo have finally acknowledged the competitive scene and added a Ranked ladder in Seasons as well, so feel free to just join that when you feel like it too. Their restrictions are retarded but it's absolutely fantastic to see it as such a supported part of Pokemon when it's been one of my favourite niches throughout my life.


Closing Comments

I went into this game with doubts, went out of it with issues and I've really come to love it. I don't only welcome it to the Pokemon family, but I hope this new style of gameplay will be here to stay. I don't think I've felt like I've had so much to do and experience in a Pokemon game since my childhood. It's nostalgic and refreshingly new. A must-have for all 3DS owners.


Pros
-Fantastic new features
-15-year overdue updates
-Great, appealing new Pokemon
-A recognition of the competitive scene

Cons
-Rushed, jagged pacing
-Forgettable rival team
-Overlevelling makes the game a cakewalk

Score: 9.5/10
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Granskjegg
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Eg e husfar.
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9.5 seems a bit high considering all the negative aspects you pointed out, but still I'm excited that they actually UPDATED THE POKEMON SOUNDS OMG WHAT?!

It seems I need to get my hands on a 3DS XL/2DS relatively soon. :P
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MrMarill
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DAT STORY TIEM

Well there's no point me singing the game's praises that everyone knows. It's Pokemon. It's incredibly fun, has great collection, fantastic battle system and so on. No point me commenting on all the things that make it awesome when everybody already knows that. That said, I think the review wasn't one of my better ones =/
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Granskjegg
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Eg e husfar.
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Nah, it was fine. You touched on all the important and new stuff.
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Snowman
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Berserker
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Game: Metal Gear
Platform: MSX (through MGS3 HD for PS3)
Genre: Stealth/Action

Posted Image

This is going to be really brief, like the game.

Story: In the beginning of the game, FOXHOUND's top operative is captured, so they send in Solid Snake, a rookie. I didn't think that made a whole lot of sense, but oh well. FOXHOUND is/are investigating a nuclear weapon called Metal Gear. So after that, all the talking is basically leading you around the three buildings of the game. Aside from a plot twist at the end, not much happens with the story.

Gameplay: I enjoyed playing it, but some things annoyed me. Most of the problems are probably just because of the technology at the time it was made (1987). Guards can only see in straight lines. If a guard is facing left, you can stand anywhere to the left of him and not be seen unless you cross the line that he's standing on. Still, that's stealthier than Assassin's Creed (QUICK SIT ON A BENCH THEY WON'T SEE YOU) so it was fun. But when I did get caught, I didn't change up the guns much... Some bosses could only be killed by certain weapons, but other than that, I used the pistol for most enemies and the machine gun if there were a lot, which was rare. All enemies except bosses are just the guards (including dogs) that watch for you. Early in the game, they all just take one shot to kill, but later they take two, so it's not all that exciting. Oh and uh there's scorpions later and they can poison you. They also die if you shoot them once.

As for the bosses, they were all pretty unexciting. Some might seem intimidating at first, but for most bosses, you'll find a location where you can easily hit them and they'll have a hard time hitting you, or you'll find out that only a rocket launcher will damage them (or mines, for one of them). The second-to-last "boss fight" (destroying the Metal Gear) should have been the toughest, in my opinion, but it wasn't. After my first or second death, I realized that there was an incredibly simple way to destroy it without taking any damage. So that was disappointing.

Anyway, the majority of your journey is spent just looking for ways to move on. You don't always know what you're looking for at first, but most of the time, you're just looking for one-time-use key items that allow you to overcome obstacles, like doors. Still, there are some traps and the different rooms/buildings are fresh enough that you don't feel like you're doing the same thing over and over.

Graphics: Posted Image

Overall, I enjoyed the game. I'd probably only recommend it to people who don't own the MGS HD collection because AFAIK that's the only way to get it. I never hear anyone talk about it, though, so I assume it's not essential to understanding the MGS games, but eh. It was available so I wanted to start here.
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