Tag Archives: Review

Killing Mario for coins in Super Mario 3D Land

Written by Chris Sommer on December 19, 2011 at 4:17 pm

I have a problem, an addiction really, and I hear admitting it is the first step to recovery. It wasn’t always a problem; back before Yoshi’s Island I was a hale and healthy chap without this crippling hunger. The real damage was when Mario 64 came around and gave me my first star. It was delicious, easy to get, and oh so satisfying. The more stars I got, the more levels I could open, but I soon realized I was only opening them so I could get more stars. I was hooked.

The games have changed over time. Sometimes I was after stars, other times coins that were larger then the other ones; basically whatever the games were pushing I was after. Now we have Super Mario 3D Land and its three coins per level. I won’t leave a level without them. I can’t leave a level without them. If I miss one and can’t go back I will immediately hurl Mario to his death. This has caused a bit of a delay for this review.

Look, the logo has a tail!

That introduction is brought to you by my need for a support group and a sponsor, but also to lend …

Review: Skydrift

Written by Tom Auxier on December 8, 2011 at 12:34 pm

A couple days ago I wrote about downloadable games, ideally, being perfect little bites of gaming designed for the short experience. They’re either well-crafted, focused experiences, or they’re grasping for big budget success and gasping for air.

Skydrift falls in with the latter group, but it does so with a huge asterisk. I’d say it’s a near great game. Yes, it feels like it’s missing something, and it’s definitely got aspirations bigger than its budget, but very few games offer quite as solid a core mechanic.

The core of Skydrift feels like a combination of the plane levels from Diddy Kong Racing and Hydro Thunder. That is, you fly planes around tracks at incredibly high speeds while your opponents shoot rockets at your tailpipe. It feels fresh, though. It does this by creating the traditional kart race “rubber band” without feeling cheap. In effect, everyone gets the same items, but everyone can turn these items into boost. If the player in first does this, they get a tiny bit; if the player in second does it, they get a few seconds worth; if the player in last does it, well, they’ll be boosting for fifteen seconds. Players can also do stunts …

Fancy On The Outside, Rotten At The Core – A Sequence Review

Written by Jonas Jurgens on November 7, 2011 at 2:22 pm

Sequence is a very special game, as it combines the rhythm and RPG genres, much like Puzzle Quest combined the seemingly utterly unrelated genres puzzle and RPG. However, Puzzle Quest was actually rather good, whereas Sequence examines the two genres, but has no idea how to put them together. All the pieces of the puzzles lie ready on the table, but unfortunately Sequence is incapable of assembling them correctly. The end result is not a genuinely innovative and unique game that pushes the limits of the genres it involves, but that both elements feel watered-down.

For some inexplicable reason, the young graduate student Ky has wound up on the first floor of an elegantly adorned tower. He wakes up to the voice of Naia, his “sheppard” in the tower. She is to guide him through his many fights and trials in the tower, and hopefully get him through it alive, a feat no one has accomplished before him. Amazingly calm, considering he has just been torn out of his everyday life and dumped inside a mysterious tower, being told that if he fails he dies, he engages in first fight.

As with many JRPGs, the combat takes place in a …

Xotic Review

Written by Chris Sommer on October 4, 2011 at 5:39 pm

I was fortunate enough to have a small amount of overlap with the now endangered species known as arcade cabinets. Mind you, I’m not so old that I got to marvel at the majesty of their golden age, but some of my misspent youth was spent in some of the last true arcades before the mass extinction hit. I was a picky little bastard about the games I liked. I was all about twitch and go games largely based on instinct for the first quarter and memorization for whatever quarters I could get before my mom cut me off. Hated Donkey Kong Jr. but loved Galaga and any Metal Slug games I could find. Of course I loved the side scrolling Simpson’s beat-em-ups and a weird fighting game with a Pepsi themed fighter that I sometimes worry I dreamed up, but those are not applicable here.

If Xotic had a time machine, it would drop its RPG elements in favor of a power-up system and launch itself back into a cabinet to munch quarters. Its a shooter that plays like an arcade game with combo counters, multipliers, and level designs that demand replays; a game all about the almighty high score. …

Deus Ex: Human Revolution Review

Written by Brice Simmons on October 1, 2011 at 3:22 pm

Detroit, 2027 AD. You are Adam Jensen. An ex-SWAT operative, now head of security at Sarif Industries–A biomedical augmentation manufacturer central to the game’s primary conflict. A group of terrorists have attacked the company you work for, murdered the woman you love, and damaged you to the point where drastic measures have been taken to save your life. It’s this encounter that sets the stage for the newest entry, and prequel, in the much beloved Deus Ex franchise. Naturally, expectations have set the bar quite high, but has Eidos Montreal delivered?

***

“There is no right or wrong. Just the consequences of your actions.”

The story is centered around an ongoing civil rights battle between the haves and have-nots, with human naturalists opposing augmentation enhancement that eerily echoes the anti-science conservative movement present in America today. However, unlike current day tea partiers, Eidos have given a sense of legitimacy to the Humanity Front. From Neuropozyne dependency to government control, not everything is better on the side of technology in the world of Deus Ex, and it’s this balancing act that’s at the heart of the game’s story. Who is good and who is bad? Both sides fight for a reasonable cause …

E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy review

Written by Chris Sommer on September 26, 2011 at 10:01 pm

I love weird things. The absurd and the surreal are always welcome additions to my life, and I tend to gravitate towards these things. Bizarre speculative fiction worlds filled with trans-humanism and rich histories involving mushroom people and fungus based science are the basis to some of my favorite books. My favorite moments in games are non-moments for most people, little nods toward a larger unspoken world, like the creepy watchers in that one world of Mario Galaxy 2.

So of course E.Y.E. caught my… eye. It’s a blend of steam punk, cyber punk, and a dystopian future all wrapped up in an FPS/RPG hybrid with multiple solutions to problems. How could I resist? I had my fond memories of Deus Ex to fuel the fire, and by the time I started the game I was excited for the experience. The entire game was summed up for me in character creation, not that I knew this at the time. You are presented with an assortment of skill modifiers, none of which are explained to you in anyway. So, with no understanding of how it will impact the game, you spend your points and build your character. I can tell you now …

To Live And Die In Banoi – A Dead Island Review

Written by Jonas Jurgens on September 21, 2011 at 3:39 pm

A while ago I wrote an article about the zombie genre, and why it needed revitalization. In it I voiced my concerns regarding Techland’s Dead Island, where I stated that it seemed to be too arcade-like rather than aiming for the more serious tone that the game’s teaser hinted at. Now I’ve finally had the opportunity to actually play it, and I’m afraid Dead Island is best described as a mixed bag.
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First, introductions are in order. Dead Island, like so many other games in the genre before it, is about stomping, crushing, smashing, shooting, burning, kicking and mutilating zombies in various inventive ways. As usual, a mysterious new virus suddenly emerges and transforms its victims into flesh-eating freaks, this time in the tropical paradise of Banoi. Predictably, the player(s) must go through a number of repetetive and deadly ordeals to make it off the island in one piece.

In the beginning of the game, the player chooses one of four characters that each specializes in different forms of combat. However, in my experience, it didn’t actually matter that much in the game. For instance, I chose a blunt weapon expert ready to crack skulls, but found myself mostly using my nifty …

Gone with the Timewave: Achron Impressions Part I

Written by Ramunas Jakimavicius on September 6, 2011 at 5:53 am

Warning: This review contains some mechanical spoilers but only minimal narrative spoilers.

If I could travel through time, I’d go back to when I first got interested in Achron and kick myself. Then I’d give past-me a stern lecture.

“Haven’t you learned not to get suckered in by hype?”

“But Achron looks so interesting! Achron could be to RTS games what Braid was to puzzle-platformers! Just imagine: real-time strategy that actually emphasizes careful strategization rather than rush tactics and throwing a battalion of tanks against everything!”

Future-me would then shake his head at seeing how naïve he once was. He’d then go on to ask: “But what about the RTS core?”

“What about it?”

“Think about buildings. Isn’t the ability to capture and sell them useful?”

“Well, yeah, but that’s usually only done when sabotaging or rushing the enemy, right?”

“Okay, but what about the fact that you can’t sell your own buildings?”

“What?”

“If you want to remove a building, you’ll have to force fire on its position to destroy it.”

“That’s kind of weird, …

Sky Island Review

Written by Ramunas Jakimavicius on July 17, 2011 at 1:13 am

Warning: This review contains detailed and unrestricted spoilers.

Sky Island is a puzzle platformer starring a vaguely humanoid star who collects stars. If your mind isn’t completely blown yet, let me add that you can collect coins for points, Goomba-stomp enemies and fall to your death via a bottomless abyss. Too pedestrian? Well, Sky Island includes the ability to horizontally rotate your two-dimensional perspective to bypass obstacles and rearrange the landscape to your advantage. Similar systems have appeared in games like Super Paper Mario and Miegakure, but the central mechanic most resembles the one in Fez, a currently unreleased puzzle platformer starring a vaguely humanoid thing who collects cubes.

Co-starring some of the tetrominoes from Tetris!

Sky Island is a puzzle platformer in the same way that Braid (which stars a vaguely humanoid thing who collects stars and puzzle pieces!) is; namely that while platforming skills and killing enemies are required to complete the game, they’re mostly tangential. The focus is squarely on navigating and manipulating the environment in order to collect every star and then afterwards it shifts to reaching the checkered block that demarcates the end of each level.

To add yet another …

Space Pirates and Zombies: Impressions Part III

Written by Chris Sommer on June 17, 2011 at 5:04 pm

Man, that Space Pirates and Zombies game is something else, right? What? You don’t know what I’m talking about? Sounds like you better read PART 1 and PART 2 of my time with SPAZ then!

When last we met, I anticipated the game becoming rather zombie centric. I expected to change up my combat tactics to better face large zombie fleets and to jettison many poor sprite people into the void. What I did not expect was for a massive shift in the game play and a widening of the game’s focus. I won’t be going into plot, but obviously I’ll be talking about this shift and its impact on the last act of the game. So if you want to keep this game a total surprise, then perhaps this isn’t something you want to dive right into. But if you don’t mind surprising mechanics being revealed to you, then read on. Well, alright, some smaller elements of the story will be revealed, but I promise to be vague for you.

I love this dude.

Shortly after some twists and turns in the games story, and some harrowing stealth …

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