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Vita Review: Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention

By
Jeremy Goodson
– April 30, 2012Posted in: Reviews, Vita

For those that don’t know, Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention is the re-release of Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice combined with all of its DLC. The original game was for PS3, and is largely considered to be one of the best RPGs available on the system. Even though I had never played a Disgaea game before this one, I was looking forward to taking a crack at it because of all of the hype from the others.

I have to say, that I don’t normally get into Strategy RPGs, mostly because I don’t like the Grid-based combat. Final Fantasy Tactics and all of its incarnates have been exception to the rule for me, as the story far outweighed my general distaste for the gameplay. After all of this time, though, I have finally found another series of this type that I cannot wait to devour fully.

The main story of Disgaea 3 is one that will blow your mind. You are a Demon (bad guy), who wants to become a Hero (good guy), so that you can kill and overthrow your father, and take his seat as the Overlord of the Underworld (head bad guy), all because he erased your 4 million hours of save data for your favorite game. While normally, this frame of thought in a serious story would not work well, in Disgaea’s parody based world it makes perfect sense. And hilarity ensues.

While the story is actually extremely enjoyable and what made me want to keep going through the game, the humor really took me by surprise. It wasn’t what I was expecting, and was an extremely refreshing change to the very dark and gritty games that seem to rule the gaming market now-a-days.

The game has a ton of replay value as well, since when you reach max level, you can actually start over at the beginning with higher stats. The only frustrating part to this start-over system, is that if you lose a battle at certain parts of the game, you are forced to start over from the beginning at that point. While you do keep your level, gear, and abilities, this really took me by surprise. I really wish that this was explained to me early on in the game, as I was a bit mad at first, thinking that I had lost all of my progress. Luckily, as I said, that was not the case and I learned to actually come to a love-hate relationship with this system. The good part is, it made me start playing smarter.

The story of the game is told through the viewpoint of Mao, who seems kind of like a spoiled brat at the beginning of the game, but turns into a character that you will love. The majority of the narrative is played out through anime-inspired vignettes that are fully voice acted and will keep you enthralled throughout. For the most part, which was also refreshing, the voice acting was actually well done, with some familiar voices that anime fans will definitely recognize.

Having never played the PS3 version of the game before this, I couldn’t tell you exactly what specifically the DLC added to the base game, but from what I’ve been researching, it is a good deal of content that wasn’t in the original game, as well as a cameo by some characters from Disgaea 4 (which I can’t wait to start playing myself now).

I feel that if I talk too much more about it, I may give away spoilers, so I will end it at this: If you are an RPG Fan, Strategy-RPG Fan, or just love a good game, PICK THIS GAME UP! It is worth every penny, and then some.

Pros

  •  Hilarious Story
  •  Fun characters
  •  High Replay Value with the Start-Over Feature
  •  A Strategy-RPGers dream game
  •  Tons of Geek Culture references

Cons

  •  If you lose certain battles, you have to start the game over
  •  A niche game, with its SRPG elements and Grid-Based combat system

Overall Score: 5/5

This review was performed on the Playstation Vita system, with review materials supplied by the publisher.

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Review: World Gone Sour

By
Kyle Baron
– April 27, 2012Posted in: PC, PS3, Reviews, Xbox 360

The visual fidelity doesn't match up to the art design, but the music is bumpin'

By the end of World Gone Sour you will have fought a tennis shoe, thrown your allies into deep fryers for points, and watched Method Man rap about Sour Patch Kids and the dangers they pose when left uneaten.

Developed by Beefy Media and Playbrains, World Gone Sour seems like it’d just be a phoned-in game built to advertise candy. Booting up the game brings this into question, as you see Sour Patch Kids scampering across the dimly lit start screen playing with each other one minute and brutally murdering one another the next. It doesn’t take all of the four or five hours of the game to finally realize that World Gone Sour is actually a competent platformer with all the clever art design of a twisted version of Toy Story.

The story, introduced by the first of many well animated cutscenes, follows the tale of a Sour Patch Kid who was dropped in a movie theatre. Candies go insane when they aren’t eaten, apparently, and the nooks and crannies of the everyday human worlds you explore are made sinister by all of the traps and hazards added into the environment by the Sour Patch Kids and other members of the candy community that have gone insane. Usually it’s quite obvious, like yo-yos that crush you or evil pieces of bubble gum that use bottle caps for helmets; sometimes it’s more subtle, like seeing evil Sour Patch Kids torturing their brethren with pencils or trying to saw apart the ledges you use for platforms.

The boss battles are creative and never work to sour the experience. Sorry.

The hazards, be they deep fryers and spilled soda in a concession stand or table saws in a shed, are smartly designed with the progression of your abilities in mind. Safety pins stuck in gum serve as grapple points you can swing from, while popsicle stick barriers are only breakable with a ground pound. The enemies follow suit as well, with the nefarious blobs of bubble gum adopting spiked helmets that you have to knock off by throwing other Sour Patch Kids like bowling balls.

That brings me to my next point, you’ll see a lot of sour patch kids die by the end of this game. Heck, there’s a trophy/achievement tied to sacrificing 1000 of the little Sour Patch Kid candies that rally to your side when you rescue them. The game encourages you to do so, as you get bonus points at the end of each level for having your hapless buddies meet their ends by being melted, crushed, flung into orbit, burned, impaled, chopped up – you get the idea; it’s a bit like playing the Grape Escape board game from the ’90s where it was an every grape for itself run to the finish past saws and rolling pins.

A game about candy may seem like it’s geared towards children, but the T for teen rating ends up feeling partly in tune with the difficulty and not just the comically morbid ends of animate candy people. This difficulty comes from a couple tricky platforming sequences, especially if you want to go for all of the collectibles. The bad part comes from jumping physics that, although competent, never feel quite up to the precision of Mario Bros or the floaty forgiving leaps of Super Meat Boy. Also, the wall jumping feels like it works most of the time, rather than whenever you think it should; there were many times when my co-op buddy and I would leap towards a wall, only to have one of us slide uselessly into a pit of spikes. The game hands out extra lives generously, but this doesn’t make the occasionally finicky precision negligible.

Co-op lets you ham it up with a friend for sizzling excitement. Sound pun to you?

The sound design, like the atmosphere and art design, is effective.  The grunts, gasps, and squeaks of the Sour Patch Kids play colorfully overtop the growls of enemy bosses and the searing death rattles that all of the hazards draw out of their victims. The music helps too, with every world having its own catchy meld of hip hop beats and elevator music. No, really, it works. It makes it more of a shame that my [mostly] co-op playthrough saw a few glitches where the music and sound effects cut out for a few seconds.

The sound cutting out only happened two or three times, but the long load times were always a bit out of place. There were times when I was sitting around for 30-45 seconds wondering whether the game had crashed or if the bouncing-Sour Patch Kid loading screen animation was just taking a break.

Technical grievances aside, I was pleasantly surprised with World Gone Sour and I recommend it to anyone looking for a competent platformer with a sadistically comical atmosphere. Also, the end credits are tied in with a music video that has Method Man rapping about candy.

Pros

  • Good soundtrack
  • Clever art design
  • Unlockable video where Method Man gets angry and raps about candy
  • Funny narration
  • Good cutscenes and an overall effective atmosphere
  • It costs five bucks

Cons

  • Some sloppy looking textures
  • Wall jumping sometimes doesn’t work
  • Long load times
  • Two player co-op is local only

4/5

Note: The Playstation Network version of World Gone Sour was used for the review and was provided by the publisher. The game is also available on PC and Xbox Live Marketplace

1

Review: The Walking Dead

By
Chris Scott
– April 27, 2012Posted in: PC, PS3, Reviews, Xbox 360

I met Robert Kirkman at a comic signing shortly after The Walking Dead launched. It was a nice little shop attached to a dingy little shopping center in Levittown, PA. As much as I loved the comic at that moment in time, I never would have thought that his little black and white comic book, published by a second tier comics company, focusing on the zombie apocalypse would spawn into the cross media sensation it has today. But that is exactly where we are. AMC has brought the adaptation of the comic series to television with astounding success and now Telltale Games brings fans its own vision of the series in the gaming space.

At the first mention of Telltale developing an episodic game based on the series, I was apprehensively optimistic. Telltale after all has a history of developing great adventure games and making The Walking Dead into an adventure game made perfect sense because of how much exploration and character interactions play a part in the series. However, the content of The Walking Dead was so unlike anything they had ever done before that I could not help but worry.

While zombies are the catalyst for the events taking place in the world, The Walking Dead is really about the character interactions and choices that are made by those that are still living. Telltale completely understood what makes the series tick and nails it from the opening moments of the game. Instead of focusing on the zombie outbreak, the beginning of the game is just a simple conversation during a car ride out of Atlanta. The whole thing lulls the player into a false sense of security and because of the underlying premise, players know something bad is going to happen, it is just a matter of when and the tension mounts as the climactic delivery is waited on.

Building and maintaining tension consistently is something The Walking Dead had to do especially well, fortunately with a solid combination of good writing and smartly designed gameplay, it is able to deliver it throughout the episode. The gameplay system The Walking Dead utilizes is a hodgepodge of design elements from other games. The dialog system in particular is very reminiscent of Alpha Protocol’s timed dialog wheel, while the navigation and environmental interaction pieces seem strongly influenced by Heavy Rain, albeit heavily modified.

These design choices give the biggest boon to the game via how Telltale has implemented the action sequences in the game. Forgoing generic third person scenarios that would have lost the feel of the series, action sequences are built around disorienting the player and making them feel uncomfortable. These scenarios generally have an easy solution but ,whether it is through visual manipulation, making it hard to see what needs to be done, or by presenting to the player a choice that needs to be decided immediately, The Walking Dead makes it hard on the player. And doing something or failing to do something can have major repercussions down the line.

Cause and effect are two major players in The Walking Dead and seeing how my choices played out in the game was emotionally draining. Unlike something like Mass Effect where my decisions are recorded and played out over the course of three complete games, to varying degrees of satisfaction, The Walking Dead delivers on player choice. If I neglect to do something it could be the difference between a character living or dying. If I seemingly insult someone that person could very well hold it against me causing me potentially irreparable harm down the line. While it is true that some of the decisions are purely cosmetic because the story has to be directed down a certain path but most of them have weight, making the game quite satisfying to play.

Due to the nature of the content, The Walking Dead will not be for everyone. However for fans of the comic and television series, for fans of the horror genre, and even for those just looking for a mature take on mature content, The Walking Dead is a treat. It is too bad we have to wait a month before episode two.

Pros

  • Decisions matter.
  • Smartly designed gameplay.
  • Excellent story dealing with mature topics.
  • Visual style is eye catching.

Cons

  • We have to wait a month for the next installment.

5 / 5

Note: The Walking Dead is an episodic series, this review was done using the PC version of the first episode of the game. It is also available on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

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Vita Review: Wipeout 2048

By
Chris Scott
– April 26, 2012Posted in: Reviews, Vita

Racing is a delicate balance of speed and control. Knowing how and when to shift that balance from one to the other is the key to victory or failure. This is true whether you are driving karts, supercars or even futuristic racecars that travel faster than anything we can fathom today. Of course the entire dynamic gets tossed out the window when you add in weaponry, which is probably why I never felt at ease with Sony’s premier Vita racer, Wipeout 2048.

Wipeout, Sony’s long running futuristic racing franchise, takes place in a world where racing consists of more than just rubbing out your opponent. Featuring pickups to enable combat weaponry and effective countermeasures, racing in Wipeout is just as much about balancing offensive and defensive tactics as it is about balancing speed and control. Wipeout 2048 brings this all to the Vita, in a package that may be the best showcase for the system out of the launch lineup games.

Like any good racing game, Wipeout 2048 delivers a great sense of speed. This is all the more impressive considering the futuristic nature of the vehicles. Balancing the speed is simple to learn, yet hard to master. Screeching out of the gate is liable to get your vehicle a one way ticket to the junk yard though, so mastering braking and sliding on the track are musts.  Then comes the combat power-ups, running over an active pickup spot will activate the power-up on the craft, which can then be easily deployed via a simple button press. I had more than enough trouble adjusting to the ultra high speeds of the races  that combat was something I never got a good handle on, despite seeming so simple. While being a well rounded racer is certainly beneficial to success, to the Wipeout 2048’s credit the game allows for players to play to their strengths. All of this together helps to make Wipeout 2048 one of the more easily accessible Vita games to launch with the system.

Wipeout 2048 utilizes a honeycombing node structure for both its single player and multiplayer career modes. Each node has a specific set of challenges that need to be achieved before it can be cleared. Focusing on both the racing and combat aspects of the game, these challenges offer quite the variety in gameplay and did a great job in keeping me interested as I progressed through the career. Being able to select nodes that work to my strengths, particularly speed trials, also did wonders to keep me engaged.

While the progression of the single player and multiplayer career nodes are two separate entities, overall experience is shared between the two. For someone like me, that mostly plays single player, being able to jump in and still be competitive in the multiplayer career was a huge bonus and it made me actively want to play more. Unfortunately, due to some sloppy design choices the game itself made it quite difficult to remain engaged in any of the multiplayer features for any length of time.

For a game that revolves around speed, Wipeout 2048 surprisingly takes inexcusable amounts of time to get players into a multiplayer game. Wait times can be upwards of five minutes and considering the battery life of the Vita, these extended waiting periods can add up to a small amount of time actually playing the game. On top of that, the lobby system implemented by the game is atrocious. In my time with the game, I found no way to communicate with other racers while waiting instead being forced to stare at the same few screens available to me.

Compounding the issue even further is the excruciatingly long track loading times. To load into a track, both single player and multiplayer, load times of over a minute are common place. Some may see this as a very nitpicky complaint but I do not care how great the game actually looks and plays, these load times are completely unacceptable for a game on a portable device. When I take out my Vita, I want to be able to jump into a game as quickly as possible and Wipeout 2048 makes that process exceptionally difficult.

Despite these functionality issues, the gameplay is top notch and visually it looks stellar; all of this combines to make Wipeout 2048 one of the premier releases on the Vita system. It is a definite showcase piece for Sony’s portable system. But more importantly it is a fantastic racing game, not just on the Vita but on any system.

Pros

  • Exceptional Sense of Speed.
  • Great looking.
  • Seamless crossplay with PS3 players.

Cons

  • Brutal load times.
  • Lobby system for multiplayer leaves a lot to be desired.

4 / 5

1

PC Review: Hack, Slash, Loot

By
Don Parsons
– April 26, 2012Posted in: PC, Reviews

Meet my favorite example of the genre - ADOM

As a teenager, I spent countless hours exploring dungeons. Whether it was on a quest for gold, to save some fair maiden, or to slay some demonic force, my adventurer days wove wonderful tales that I created. Don’t mind the fact that all of these brave journeys had me slaying “k’s” (kobolds) and “O’s” (orcs) at my keyboard; they are days that I miss regardless of being a lone “@”.

If you are unfamiliar with Rogue-likes, allow me to briefly explain. Around the year 1980, a game called Rogue was developed that started the player on the top floor of a dungeon, with the ultimate goal of getting to the bottom to retrieve an artifact and return with it. The whole game was designed using ASCII characters to represent both the dungeon, the player, and enemies. Rogue is still quite popular to this day and has spawned a seemingly-endless amount of copies (aka, Rogue-likes). A personal favorite of mine due to its amount of depth (Rogue-likes are generally basic in design) is ADOM. Rogue-likes are typically suicidal games, with the hope of getting further and further each time you play, and since the dungeons are randomly generated, they offer great replayability.

Meet David Williamson, developer of PC game Hack, Slash, Loot. David has been developing games for the PC as an independent/hobbyist developer for quite some time. As if reading my mind, he pairs my love with dungeon crawling, Rogue-likes with another love of mine – pixelated graphics. Hack, Slash, Loot (HSL) looks like a Rogue-like from the early-console days, only sharper. Instead of the usual ASCII characters, HSL has very charming characterizations of the heroes and enemies.

Oh, how far we've come..... the charming Hack, Slash, Loot

You’ll get your pick from different characters, each with their own perks and flaws. More characters unlock as you die  and complete games. The problem with this is the game’s difficulty and the starting characters. One would expect the difficulty of the game to come from mastering unlockable characters that, although more difficult to use, reward a higher level of playing skill. Instead, you start with basic versions of atypical classes and unlock better versions. The first character you unlock got me quite a bit further than any of the starting characters did.

Multiple scenarios are available. Each one features different environments and different enemies. One, for example, is littered with coffins that will randomly give you loot or a skeleton that will do some serious damage to you up close. A mini-map will help you on your quest to the next floor;  the brilliant aspect of this little guide is that you can click anywhere on the mini-map that you have already explored and your little adventurer will scampers off across the pixel dungeon to where ever you clicked, which is such a time saver.

Did someone order loot?

Loot is everywhere in HSL. The problem is that so much of it is specific to certain classes that it becomes tedious to even look at it. Who wants to pick up a wand when you are a Barbarian-type close-combat class?

The look of your sprite doesn’t change with the loot, which is understandable, though it would have been an amazing addition. Starting with leather garb and finding plate mail would have made me look as tough as I felt when enemies were doing little-to-no damage to me.

With a lack of character levels, upgrading your gear becomes the progression system in HSL, so it’s a very important factor and will determine how far along you get in your quest.

The brutal difficulty in the game can be off-putting so players that aren’t used to games like this. There’s also really nothing inventive to it to make it a must-play for newcomers and veterans of the genre. That said, for a $10 USD price on Steam, anyone looking to go on some difficult adventures into some dark dungeons can get their moneys worth with David Williamsons little gem, Hack Slash Loot.

Pros:

  • Whimsical graphics
  • Loads of characters to pick between
  • Great pricepoint

Cons:

  • Initial character selection
  • Wasteful loot
  • Difficulty can be steep for people that don’t play these types of games

Score: 3/5

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Film Review: The Cabin in the Woods

By
Chris Scott
– April 24, 2012Posted in: Movie Reviews, Reviews

For the most part the horror genre survives by utilizing well worn clichés. Unfortunately, this approach has made much of the genre into a color-by-numbers book; delivering cookie cutter experiences that seemingly get more and more unsatisfactory each time out. However, there are some films that take these clichés, do something new with them, and deliver thoroughly entertaining experiences. The Cabin in the Woods is one of these films.

The Cabin in the Woods features five college kids setting out on a weekend getaway to, wait for it… a cabin in the woods. The five fit the stereotypical horror roles, there is the dumb jock (Chris Hemsworth), the slut (Anna Hutchinson), the nice guy (Jesse Williams), the stoner (Fran Kranz) and the virgin (Kristen Connolly) and being a horror film that is working with standard genre clichés, bad things are bound to happen to these kids. But there is something else at play as well. Talking about this something else would spoil the fun but let us just say that this is not your normal trip to the woods.

The film, written by Joss Whedon and Drew Godard (also the director), is smart and witty throughout. It has fun with the genre, playing with genre conventions in such a way that made the 90 minute run time some of the most fun I have had in a theater in a long time. Knowing beforehand that Whedon was involved in the writing of the film, I expected witty dialog and a frantic pace mixed in amongst standard genre tropes and that is exactly what I got. But, it should be noted that while it plays with the tropes of the slasher genre, the film is not particularly scary. This is not to say that The Cabin in the Woods is any less of a horror film than say the latest Friday the 13th film, but rather that ingrained expectations can be deceiving.

Most people walk into a horror film knowing what to expect and The Cabin in the Woods manipulates these expectations to deliver something unique. If the film is about anything other than delivering a good time, it is about shattering expectations. On one hand it openly mocks the conventions of the genre and what they have become, while at the same time it treats the genre with the reverence it deserves. Each turn of the film plays with the viewer and at times I felt like the film was actively mocking me, leading me down familiar paths with unexpected outcomes.

It is a shame that the lack of genuine scares in the film might be seen as a turn off to some viewers and that others that will not be able to get past their pre-conceived expectations for the film. But for those that can accept it for what it is and what it does with and to the horror genre, The Cabin in the Woods offers a fun, thrill ride that should not be missed.

4 / 5

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XBLA Review: The Splatters

By
Magnus Risebro
– April 22, 2012Posted in: Reviews, Xbox 360

With physics-based puzzlers abundant, the requisites for originality and quality within the genre have risen. Making a block fall over and bounce off another block is no longer sufficient. The Splatters seems to know this, but its attempts at relevance and innovation feel forced.

Puzzle games usually work because of a simple clever concept and ruleset: In Portal, you place portals in the environment; in Braid, you manipulate time; in World Of Goo, you build structures of goo balls. The Splatters’s premise is less elegant – Gelatinous, eerily smiling blobs are launched at stacks of bombs. Upon hitting a sharp edge or hard surface, the jelly-blobs explode into paint-like liquid which detonates the bombs at contact. Sometimes there are differently-colored bombs only able to detonate by using blobs of corresponding color. The gameplay happens in side-on 2D arenas with platforms, ramps to glide along and spikes to gut your blobs on. Victory happens when all bombs are cleared. So far, so decent.

Eventually, more mechanics are introduced, including a pseudo-time-reversal ability and a trick-system. These somewhat successfully add depth, though it’s a messy kind of depth that feels unshakably desperate. The mechanics have few, specific uses and can scarcely be twisted cleverly. For instance, the kinda-time-manipulation is only useful for shifting momentum on ramps or aligning goo-rain to hit bombs, techniques you’ll repeat innumerable times. Instead of few but dynamic mechanics, the game opts for many restrictive ones, and thus feels clumsy.

The Splatters rarely demands outside-the-box thought and, as the difficulty surges in later levels, it’s your split-second timing being challenged, rather than your strategic muscle. Exploring all of the possible approaches to a level is mostly straightforward, making for scant “Aha-that-was-right-in-front-of-my-face-the-whole-time” moments. This isn’t necessarily a detriment – many good ostensibly “puzzle” games have reflex-based, thoughtless gameplay. Indeed, The Splatters can be rewarding when you’re firing a blob at the right angle, timing your double-boost perfectly and seeing the bomb-stack showered in colored gunk, all with suitably squelchy sound-effects and cool zooming camera shots. But, with increasing regularity, my progress was arrested in scenarios demanding ridiculously tight timing and little else, where success was a mere numbers game of waiting – not trying – to get it right.

Ultimately, The Splatters is decent. The blob-flinging gameplay, despite its contrived design, is mostly solid. It features impressively elastic goo-physics and has a good volume of stages. There are far better places to squander 800 MS points, but you’ll mildly enjoy yourself if you are stuck playing it.

Pros:

  • Cool semi-liquid physics model
  • Plenty of stages
  • Nice, tactile feel
  • …Fun?

Cons:

  • Ugly, Worms-esque visual design
  • Messy gameplay
  • Monotonous trial-and-error in later levels

3 out of 5.

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Vita Review: Touch My Katamari

By
Royel Edwards
– April 21, 2012Posted in: Reviews, Vita

Imagine you have the power to create planets from rolling up countless items into a ball – everything from the smallest gold coin to a Hippopotamus just lazing around at the local zoo, you’d have a lot ahead of you and that is one of the many things I had to deal while playing Touch My Katamari.

The story begins as the King of Cosmos overhears a conversation of the earthlings talking about how no one cares about him. The obvious only way to fix this problem is to take advantage of his son, the Prince to do all the dirty work to restore the world into working order through his eyes to make people like him again.

During each level you are given a little Katamari ball and it is your job to roll as many items as you possibly can to get the desired size Katamari. You do this to not only please your father but the people of the world as well. At the end of each level, the King of Cosmos will analyze your ball and if it fits his standards, he’ll consume it, make weird feminine body gestures and produce a planet from his gut. Every time he does it, I had to smile a little because he just looks so awkward making planets in that fashion.

Touch My Katamari is fairly short and only contains 12 stages. If you’re a master Katamari roller, you will fly right through this game, however for all the treasure hunters there are a few hidden treasures located within each level giving you some additional things to look for while rolling up stop signs and small puppies.

Each level will contain a royal cousin hiding somewhere where you have to run them over to acquire them as well as special items called Curos. The more items collected during a stage, the more the King will be proud of you and give you a higher score. You are definitely going to have to find some during a level because if you don’t you’ll be greeted with the aura of lightning and thunder and the King telling you how much you suck.

Upon completion of a stage, you are given a score between 1-100 and depending on your performance you are given candy, which is used as currency to buy neat items from a legit in-game fashion stylist to purchase clothing for you and the king. I wanted my king to look like a pretty princess so I cloaked him with a white cape and dressed the king to wear a pretty bridal gown.

The humor in the game is great and sometimes in-between levels the king will start rambling that he can prove his ‘coolness’ to the world but he just keeps talking and talking. All the colorful fonts that the text is displayed with was rainbow-filled and jiggling and to be honest, it was a little bit annoying, but I got used to it.

The most interesting part of playing Touch My Katamari was that the the game made very good use of the Playstation Vita’s rear touch panel. By bringing your fingers together or spreading them apart, you were able to morph the Katamari ball to different sizes in order to get hard to reach collectibles while in game.

I found it to be a little hard to balance both moving around using the traditional thumbstick controls and using rear touch controls at the same time. I would have to briefly do one at a time, but it still works very well.

I really enjoyed playing Touch My Katamari with all the cute animations the various kinds of things you can roll up, but I feel like that game could have been much more. The game is too short and the fact that they tossed in a mode where you in a sense, roll till you drop, just wasn’t enough and had me hoping that there was more levels for me to play rather than going back to previously played levels to better my score each time. Hopefully they’ll add additional levels for users to play as DLC sometime down the road to satisfy my appetite to roll the perfect Katamari.

Pros:

  • Very catchy soundtrack
  • Playing Katamari—style dress up is fun
  • Fun humor

Cons:

  • Way too short
  • Some levels can be frustrating

3/5 

1

iOS Review: Battleloot Adventure

By
Don Parsons
– April 20, 2012Posted in: Mobile Gaming, Reviews

After playing Battleheart on my iPod, I longed for a similar structure but with classic RPG elements. On paper, Battleloot Adventure sounds just like that; lots of quests, different character classes to level up and manage and an assortment of equipment to arm yourself with. The perk here is the turn-based battle system, as opposed to the drag-and-attack nature of Battleheart.

Battleloot starts you off with a warrior-class and quickly introduces the mechanics. Combat is simple and starts with you tapping who you wish to use, and then double-tap who you wish to attack. Defense can be increased by tapping the character being attacked and they will parry. The caveat is that you only have so much energy, which is used for parrying and combo attacks. But in the grand scheme of things, the control system is genuinely easy to use (Note: I generally don’t like controls in iOS games.).

Once you have multiple characters in your party, you can use your energy to chain attacks together. While it depletes your energy, you also gain stars for doing so which are handy once you have unlocked skills. With the assorted character types being assigned a color, and the Pokemon [Water] > [Fire] > [Grass]  approach being used, combat is a matter of matching your party’s strengths against the weaknesses.

The problem with this becomes apparent after an hour or so of play. You can only have three members in your party and there are four class-types. If a class is not weak against anything in your party, battles become drawn out annoyances. In Battlehearts, you picked your party based on preference and skills. In Battleloot, you struggle through a battle mad that you didn’t pick your Rogue-class because all you ran into were Warriors.

Skills in Battleloot are rather bland and un-inventive. The Knight, instead of having some devastating physical blow, heals some HP each turn  instead. That is the payoff for reaching level five. While the Knight helps defend other units, he doesn’t personally take damage during this so it seemed rather moot.

The rest of the aspects to the game are rather pleasant. Graphically, the cartoon characters pop out of the vibrant backdrops while dancing back and forth. The sound effects are ear-catching, and never really got old. The large over-map drops you into a more detailed area map where you accept your quests. The characters have little quips that are entertaining, though the story is obviously not supposed to be taken seriously. It all presents itself in a whimsical way that shouldn’t be ignore because of the few problems I mentioned before.

For a limited time, Battleloot Adventure is on sale for $0.99 USD, so it may be worth grabbing now. Despite the shortcomings, it was an enjoyable adventure that was worth the money. An added bonus is the fact that weapons and gear all change your overall appearance. Battleheart stole my heart for a much longer period of time, but I don’t regret picking up this turn-based variant at all.

Pros:

  • Beautiful, eye-catching visuals
  • Turn-based RPG, unlike every-other action-RPG on the iTunes Store
  • Weapons and armor change your look

Cons:

  • Combat gets tedious
  • Skills are rather lackluster

Score: 3/5

0

Review: I Am Alive

By
Don Parsons
– April 19, 2012Posted in: PS3, Reviews, Xbox 360

You’ll be hard pressed to find a survival game without some sort of supernatural gimmick playing into it such as zombies or ghosts. Ubisoft Shanghai knocks that stigma away with its latest digital release, I Am Alive. Instead of surviving horrible creatures with limited supplies, you are tasked with surviving the elements and the harsh survivors within it.

You play the part of Adam, a man who has traveled across the country in hopes of finding his wife and daughter. The world has been devastated by “The Event,” something the game never touches on, but traversing the fictional city of Haventon leads one to believe it was unapologetically brutal. While the overlying story is you trying to find your wife, you eventually meet up with a few friendly characters that you help out through the duration of the game. I won’t spoil anything, as that is the joy of such a game, but I found the story arch to play second fiddle to the gameplay; though the end sequence was quite a surprise and ended the game with a thoughtful moment of “what just happened”.

The strength in I Am Alive is the platforming. This is the selling point, in my opinion, and anyone who enjoys platformers should take interest. Stamina sets I Am Alive apart from every other platforming game I have played, and it’s so well done that anytime I got to a combat situation I grumbled because I wanted to scale more buildings. Some of the jumps and climbs Adam performs are a little unbelievable, but the stamina bar is the key element in creating tension.

As you climb around the environments, your stamina bar slowly drains and once you hit your limit you begin permanently stunting your stamina. You’ll find items to replenish the damaged stamina bar but these items are rare in the beginning of the game. The situations are so well placed and designed that, as you are making your way up to that open window, you really don’t know if you are going to make it into the window (climbing up to a standing position replenishes your stamina, though, if you lost of the bar itself, you’ll need an item to correct it) or if you’ll have to exert extra energy.

The environments themselves are a little wasteful, though. You can spend an hour of your five hour playthrough roaming around looking for hidden items only to come up empty handed. That’s not to say roaming won’t get you anything, as there are some people that need help scattered across Haventon. But the majority of the time I spent checking around corners and what-nots, I was left disappointed. I kept expecting little notes to fill in the details on what exactly “The Event” was, but nothing ever came up. That said, the areas you will roam around all look fantastic. The character models may look dated, but the environments look great.

Combat is handled in an interesting way, and even though I didn’t particularly care for it, it was because I enjoyed the platforming so much that combat just felt unnecessary. Most of the survivors of “The Event” are territorial, so the moment you walk into view, they will start to approach you. Thankfully, each situation is different, so you may get approached by one person with a gun and two with a machete, or vice-versa. The combinations make you think, because you can quick-kill one of them and then have the option to scare the others off by aiming a gun at them or outright shooting them. Bullets are in short-supply, so you really have to think about each situation carefully. It’s a genuine system, I will say that. After you have played through it once, you can go back through on a harder difficulty and try your hand at surviving the harshness with even more limited supplies.

My biggest complaint is the checkpoint/save system. Being an autosave-only game, you have to rely on the game saving at certain intervals. I didn’t actually know this in the beginning, and thought maybe a checkpoint would have been a good stopping point during one play session. When I booted it back up, I have lost 15 minutes of playtime and had to redo a few things I had already had a problem getting through. It’s not really the games fault, more-so the system the developers chose to work with. Much like quick-time events, I will state this is a personal preference thing, and I can’t stand these systems in games.

I Am Alive is a tense survival game. It stacks the cards differently and plays a great hand despite the few shortcomings. If you are looking for something with a gripping story that will keep you playing to see what happens, though, I Am Alive may wind up disappointing you. If you can get past the last-gen character models, and get into what the game is going for, you will find enjoyment and won’t regret your purchase.

Pros:

  • Very tense, edge-of-your seat gameplay
  • Unique combat system that makes you think
  • The platforming is top-notch

Cons:

  • No explaination what “The Event” is
  • Sub-par story-telling
  • Save system

Score: 3/5

Note: This game was played on the Playstation 3 console with a code provided by the publisher. It is also available on the X360 console.

 

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