Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Higurashi's downtime

Seriously, I'm not getting my Higurashi kick for the week. What gives? I want to see what happens next, considering that it was a CLIFFHANGER they ended it on. >.>

Blah stupid axe murder incident.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Disgaea 3 get!

Disgaea 3 official website

So this puppy decides to launch itself, so I decided to post it for everybody. :D

This is a strange one, with Mao as the main character, and the rest of them brand new, I'm not sure on what to expect from a storyline perspective (though the school setting is still kinda weird). I guess more info will come, but I lack a dictionary atm. lol

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Lorwyn

Wherefor art thou, Lorwyn? Errr...I mean like *cough* anyway...Lorwyn previews have been around and really it looks like Lorwyn's going to be a great set to just fiddle around and play things with, which is a nice break from Time Spiral, which I just had no clue on what to do, and pretty much build decks around single cards and hope for the best. This time they poured on the elves, goblins, and what not. I'm just glad the merfolk are back for good. :3

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Pro Tetris



This is how tetris should be played! Wow, this is so like ridiculous it's not even funny. The ending part is even more awesome. The speed is freaking awesome. :3

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Love Death 2

http://youtube.com/watch?v=za-Dorj4CsE

After watching it, I had to find myself a copy to try this rather elusive game out. And you know what? This game doesn't disappoint! It's EVERYTHING you'd think it would be. XD

First thing I noticed: FRAME RATE IS CRAP. It was like 15fps (a full 15 less than to run relatively smoothly), and this laptop isn't that bad either...

So like you skip a whole bunch of scenes, and then you get to control your dude finally in the school. It's weird how they used the controls here in this game. W moves you forward (or left mouse lick), S moving backwards. A and D turns you left and right, but there are NO buttons for turning up or down (it has to be mouse). Selecting items/abilities is just pressing left/right or Q/E. The z button, you shoot the infamous "saran wrap/glue/spider web". And right click makes you use the item/ability.

So apparently you get out of conversation by doing a right click, but during "cinematic" scenes, you dont' know what ability you have selected, so you might acidentally like slap the girl or something. So after fiddling with the stupidity, I decided to explore the bugginess of this game. Yes, and in this aspect, it did not disappoint. I can find countless holes in which I can run through. The game itself apparently thinks backgrounds outside windows are just an extra "sheet" behind it, and the infinite vastness of blue shall be ignored or something. The problem here is that I can get into this blue vastness quite easily. Hey wait nevermind that, wtf is with the doors in this game? I like run through them and stuff. D:

So After exploring the school, which happens to have several floors, all of which have these little holes you can run through into the blue vastness (and getting stuck a couple of times with no way back), I decided to deal with the girls. There is an ability outside of "talk", "slap", and "items", which is strangely named "unzip". So while I'm having fun, might as well torture people or something. Actually nothing actually happens, and they'll just run away from you as they keep on saying "what are you doing?" and slapping you (dealing no damage as far as I can tell). The infamous chalkboard run happened several times, with the characters disappearing through solid walls and what not. Wow.

Anyway, if you happen to like manage to keep the girl running around and like not run through a wall, she would fall down, in which the obvious stuff happens (censored...well it's more like the girl keeps everything on, and the guy just gets a censored block near his crotch and that's about it). But you still get to like command him to do things. Even here the game's crap. I like randomly click on things and sometimes menus pop up, or he starts kissing the girl or w/e. I still have no clue wtf happens during then. Anyway, the camera angles were like wtf, and so after like messing around with it (and solving the "mystery" of the "saran wrap"), I decided to get out of the sequence. Except I can't. I like tried everything. wtf? Oh, then I figured out that you can by like right clicking with the talk ability equipped (which sometimes you can't get to for a strange an unapparent reason). Anyway, After playing for like however long it took for me to be wtf'd out, I stopped playing this awful game. Or rather, this game lives up to every minute of what that youtube video had.

Kenny (who just played a game so bad, it's funny) out. XD

Oh, and if you want to waste bandwidth as well, the game's on a torrent in hongfire.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Luminous Arc review

Luminous Arc
Published by: Atlus
Genre: sRPG

It's been a long time coming, but Atlus finally publishes the first DS sRPG game since pretty much the beginning of the DS era. Players have highly anticipated a game like this for ages, but it seems to be just simply something to quench your thirst before Final Fantasy Tactics comes out.

Plot Review:
Your main character is Alph, and he's a knight working for a church along with his brother and friends (notice anything so far?). The church wishes to destroy the evil witches living throughout the world in order to stop them from gathering crystals that could ultimately destroy the world. Alph followed that train of thought, until Lucia came...

The plot is...generic anime. I really can't think of anything but that. The whole "church is evil" plot has been done to death in these types of games (Ar Tonelico called, they want their evil church leader back). It's also quite easy to tell who's a good guy and who isn't simply by seeing whether or not they look cute or not, just like an anime. Wow, I sound like a broken record already. At least the storyline is somewhat enjoyable. Somehwat.

Characters:
Nothing special. The characters in Luminous Arc aren't anywhere near high quality, and shouldn't be judged as such in the first place. It's a typical anime game. It needs big breasted good girl, and big breasted tsundere, and big breasted timid girl, and them lolis. The personalities are pretty much set in stone via these typical methods, while your hero is the same as all the other anime heroes. Can't they think of anything original anymore?

Graphics:
Graphically, the 2D sprites during dialog are beautiful, anime style. Unfortunately, gameplay graphics are lackluster at best, having graphics that is merely comparable to Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis during the GBA era several years ago. These are not good graphics. On top of that, the characters' death animations are weird and don't exist. On top of that, having too many characters in one place slows the game down considerably. While sRPGs should not care so much about graphics, this is not acceptable.

Gameplay:
An sRPG has its biggest attraction in its gameplay. All sRPGs should have good gameplay, and should have an enjoyable story. But still the #1 thing for an sRPG is its gameplay. Luminous Arc flops and fails badly.

First of all, the game has your characters being stuck with the same skill set and same classes (class changes happen only during story, and are few). The characters you play also have a tremendous imbalance between the different characters. A character such as Leon is considerably more powerful than nearly every other character in the game, allowing for a dominant strategy to emerge. This problem is heightened by the fact that there is no class/job system in this game, and no advancement in classes for the most part. Customization by equipment is also fairly simple, and thus do not warrant any attention.

Besides that point, the AI is stupid. They tend to like to rush your characters, giving you plenty of time to get those first strikes in. On top of that, the computer has this stupid idea that guys with low HP should always retreat, and thus you don't always have to kill guys off to lessen the amount of damage you take. You just need to get them into the red. In any case, the AI is too stupid to form any strategy of its own.

Overall the gameplay of Luminous Arc is lackluster, and really doesn't hold much water. Online gaming does not make this a better game, since it's pretty much who has the highest level, and at lv. 99, it's basically a war between players to see who came keep the dominant guy alive longer and thus deal more damage to their enemy.

On a side note, the stylus response is rather bad as well. I remember trying to select a unit to kill for like 30 seconds simply because the game isn't registering the location of the screen touched in relation to itself or something. I had to be a bit off on each stylus selection to get things right. This new stylus control, while welcome, is not exactly user friendly either.

Overall Rating:
Luminous arc came at a time when sRPG players are thirsting for one on the DS. Unfortunately, this game will not live up to the expectations of these players. The gameplay is lackluster at best, the graphics are mediocre GBA graphics with slow downs, the storyline was somewhat decent to wrap up an overall mediocre game. Luminous Arc 2 is already announced, meaning that they want to get another one of these in before the good stuff (Disgaea and FFTA2) come in, most likely. Perhaps they might actually fix the gameplay this time around, but I'm not hoping for much. If you own a DS and is desperate for an sRPG game, go get Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis for the GBA at a used game store. To the very least you get to play a game that is the benchmark for sRPGs in the handheld market, but Luminous Arc is below that same benchmark.

5/10

Yay Bad Games!

Bad Game Design

Errr... Anyway, the aritcle over at gameasutra is a decent read that talks about some design errors people go through. It talks about how a game that has manditory, but wildly different gameplay should be discouraged, or why playtesting a game is just as important a part of game design as it is the design itself, which to the very least allows for game balancing. Interesting read, and something to brood over. ^^