The Gamer's Quarter

[SuperWes]

This week sees the release of a ton of games I'm interested in. What should I get?!

- The Darkness (360 or PS3) ($50 at Circuit City this week)
- Transformers (360)
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (360, PS3, or Wii)
- Pokemon: Battle Revolution (Wii) ($40 at Circuit City this week)
- Hoshigami Remix: Running Blue (DS)
- Nervous Brickdown (DS)
- Transformers DS Autobots (DS) ($20 at Circuit City this week)
- Carcassonne (360)
- Grim Grimoire (PS2)
- New Beastie Boys CD

Oh yeah, and Toys R US is having a buy 2 get one free sale on DS games! I could get Puzzle League! FUCK!

SO MUCH STUFF! I'm resigned to for sure getting Transformers 360, but what else should I get?

-Wes
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[dhex]

the darkness? everything else on your list is icky.
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[dessgeega]

you want nervous fucking brickdown, westminster ehrlichman.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

[SuperWes]

[SuperWes]

Oh yeah, and Overlord was pretty good from the demo, but not $60 good. More like $20-30 good.

-Wes
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[dhex]

i'm racially biased against movie tie-ins - i imagine them to be italian-americans and act accordingly.

speaking of which, here's a joke i made up:

Q: what's the difference between a guidette and a yeti?
A: only one is valued for its pelt.
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[Swimmy]

I'm gonna pick up Hoshigami. I want to see if they really made it playable. The original came out when I was almost a sucker for tactics games and it disillusioned me pretty well.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[Wall of Beef]

Carcassonne, I guess. Don't know much about it, but seems more interesting than anything else on your list.

But I would get that Overlord game, the demo was fun + funny. I like how the servents will just pick up stuff they find on the ground and wear. Like a helmet, or a pumpkin.

[JasonMoses]

I'll put Nervous Brickdown and Hoshigami Remix on my flashcard at the very least!

[Shapermc]

Shadowrun :'(
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Mr. Mechanical]

[ApM]

Carcassonne is pretty good, though I imagine that the value-add of the 360 version over owning the actual board game is basically that it's cheaper. I like it because it works pretty well with two players, so my wife and I can play it in the evenings when we're bored. It's not as good as Settlers, but putting the map together and managing your resources is a light, fluffy sort of fun.

Until you start laying down map tiles to keep your wife's pieces locked up until the end of the game. Then it's fucking war.

[dhex]

[SuperWes]

Alright, you're going to be disappointed. I bought Transformers, Harry Potter, and The Darkness, all for 360. I'm all out of money now for the next month

(I may sneak in Carcassonne though if the demo seems good enough)

-Wes
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[Mr. Mechanical]

I expect to hear more from you re: The Darkness, Wes. I hear you can turn on a television in the game and watch old movies in their entirety.

Also, dhex, you would be lieing to me if you said you didn't see Emma Watson blossoming into quite the fine young thing. I would totally play a Harry Potter game if I could maneuver her through obstacles and such.
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Mr. Mechanical

[SuperWes]

[wourme]

I was trying to find out what this Grim Grimoire game is last night, but then I got distracted reading about Soul Nomad instead. Apparently, at least one character from Phantom Brave appears in it, so it might just be the second NIS game that I'll find tolerable. I sure hope that's the case.

I also discovered that we're getting another Growlanser game, which is very good news. And the best part of all is that all of these games are on PS2, not some new console I don't have and don't want.

[dhex]

[table_and_chair]

Wish I could check out carcassone, see what all the talk is about. that said, i`lll definitely pick up hoshigami. i've been waiting for a ds srpg. wish there were more of these. seems a crime there aren't, with the stylus and everything. i tried to go back and find an old gba strategy that i hadn't played, ended up with onimusha tactics which actually seemed pretty okay. it just didn't draw me in. (tangentially, today i began shining force III)
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BUT I HATE COMICS

[Cycle]

The DS transformers is horrible, but it gets me excited for a home console version, if it's anything like the DS one (but on a system that can handle this kind of stuff), which is like GTA, but with giant robots!
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[SuperWes]

Well peeps, I spent last night trying out my new acquisitions.

First I popped in Transformers. It's a go-anywhere explore-a-thon where there isn't a lot to find when exploring other than missions. Thankfully, the missions are enough of a game to keep it interesting. The first mission they give you makes you think the game's going to be a straight brawler, which is kind of annoying because the controls are sort of plodding. You move really slow when you walk so that there's a reason to turn into a car, but this becomes really annoying when you punch an enemy across the screen and have to stroll toward him to hit him while he's down. After that first mission though, you start to get the idea of what they were going for, and most of the stuff you have to do involves chasing down enemies as a car and beating them down before they can wreak havok. It's not exactly pushing the medium forward, but it's fun, and the graphics, sound, and story really indicate that the movie's going to do the Transformers justice.

Unfortunately I'm at a point in the game where I feel like playing any more would spoil too much of the movie. I'm going to put the game on hold until the middle of next week.

Next up was Harry Potter, and I didn't actually play this one because I got it partially for my girl. It was really frustrating watching her play because the game looked really fun and I wanted to try it myself! It's EXACTLY what a Harry Potter game should be, and leagues better than what I expected. The right stick controls Harry's wand and you can do magic that fucks with any object in the world. You can push and pull chairs across the room by double tapping the stick forward or back, you can make anything float by waggling the stick in the upward direction, and you can fix broken objects by rotating the stick slowly in a circle. It matches the Harry Potter world perfectly and is a total blast.

After learning how to use the stick you arrive in Hogwarts where you can go anywhere and do anything. This would be overwhelming, but pressing the select button brings up the Marauder's Map, which lets you select any mission, person, or room you want to go to. Then - just like in the movie - footsteps appear on the ground in the direction of that object and following them gets you to where you're going. It's so elegant and so perfect, and it would be kind of boring, but there's stuff all over the place to keep you entertained along the way by using your wand to solve little puzzles. These range from fixing broken vases, to putting pictures on the wall, to playing Wizard's Chess (actually a full-featured chess game!). If you have even a passing interest in Harry Potter I highly recommend it.

And lastly is the Darkness. I don't have time to talk about it now, but it's my favorite of the bunch and if you liked Riddick you should go out and buy it right now. More in a bit.

-Wes
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[Lestrade]

MOTHERFUCKING TRANSFORMERS DUDE

[dessgeega]

so is nervous brickdown out?
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[SuperWes]

[JasonMoses]

dess, it seems like there's an obvious reason for me to be excited about Nervous Brickdown that I just haven't heard about. But what?!

[SuperWes]

Alright, it's boring at work today, so here's the deal:

The Darkness rocks.

I knew pretty much nothing going into it aside from the fact that it's based on a Garth Ennis (Preacher) comic and that it's by the Riddick guys. To be honest, I only played Riddick for a day and, although it seemed pretty good, I never really went back to it. I'd been waiting for it to be announced as backwards compatible to jump back in, but it never was.

Regardless of my experience with Riddick, there's something very distinct about the game's graphics. Things are textured with some kind of crazy shiny mappy bullshit that gives everything a sort of strange look. The Darkness carries on this tradition. It's hard to call it realistic, but it does succeed in making people feel organic and walls and floors feel real. It's the organic part that really makes the game feel unique. Earlier I compared The Darkness to Prey, and even though they're both FPS games, the main characters looks pretty similar, and both games are published by 2K, there's a big difference. Prey is solid feeling. It feels like the control and graphics were polished to a tee. It's mechanical and gamey, and exactly what the Doom 3 engine was made for. The Darkness on the other hand, is not - it's loose, it's messy, it's occasionally inconsistent, it's-- human. There's something very realistic feeling about everything from the graphics, to the controls, to the camera, and to the structure of the game and I think that's what they were going for.

Don't take this to mean it's not well-made. It's very complete and solid, but unlike other FPS games, it's not level based. As far as I can tell, you can go pretty much anywhere you want at almost any time, and what happens there is going to be a fair approximation of what would happen there in real life. It'd be pretty boring. To prevent this downtime, as Jamie (the main character) explores the world he's always got somewhere to go and, assuming you're paying attention to the story, he'd logically want to get there as soon as possible. We're talking about this in the "Games you're playing" thread, but The Darkness succeeds in making you play the role of the main character by providing total freedom and requiring the player to take on Jamie's role in order to keep the story moving forward. You've actually got to learn the subway system and use street signs and neon maps to progress in the game. It's elegant, realistic, and, to bring it back to my earlier thesis, organic and human.

I'm just past what I would assume is the biggest, most emotional plot point in the game, and I seriously doubt the game will be able to top it. So far things are better than I thought they'd be, and I can say if you're even a little curious, it's probably worth checking out.

Oh, and the "old movie" you can watch in its entirety is To Kill a Mockingbird. Fucking awesome.

-Wes
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[dessgeega]

[JasonMoses]

Sold!

[Mr. Mechanical]

Thanks for those impressions on The Darkness, Wes. I'm glad to see it's living up to the hype so far.
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Mr. Mechanical

[SuperWes]

Played more of my haul over the past few days and things are changing a bit.

First off, Transformers. It's not too bad as the Autobots, but when you take on the Decepticon missions it seems a lot more difficult, and the mission structure doesn't really support high levels of difficulty very well. Things are usually timing based, and the world is emergent enough that sometimes you just end up with a situation where it's just not possible to complete a mission regardless of what you do. It's really annoying. Still, the game lets you transform to/from a giant robot, so it's still better than most licensed games.

Harry Potter took a huge turn for the worse. It's got such an amazing world and system that things shouldn't possibly be able to go wrong, but when they started trying to graft a game to it they decided that the best thing to do would be to give the player a ton of busywork. Less than an hour into the game they give you a mission to track down students to be in Dumbledor's Army. It's great that the game tries to be non-linear, but because of the huge dump of missions that amount to "talk to this student" it feels like they're throwing the Triforce Quest from Wind Waker in as your first substantial task. Not good. Still, exploring the castle and casting spells might be enough to carry it above the mediocrity.

And finally, the Darkness. I like it a lot, but after reading several sub-par reviews I'm starting to get the feeling that what I'm getting out of the game is very different from what most people expected to get from it. I'm enjoying it almost purely for its atmosphere, for the way it tells its story, and (in an odd change of pace for me) for the story itself. The game is set up so that there are long sections that essentially boil down to first person adventure gaming, which is split up by sections of - admittedly a bit sub-par - gunplay. In the adventure sections you've got to talk to people, collect items, and solve missions that usually have an actual context within the story/universe.

The reviews seem to critique the game as an FPS, and I can admit that by those standards it's pretty meh. It's basically a shooting gallery where you're more likely to die from the opponent's strength in numbers than their tactics. The AI that impresses isn't that of the guys who are shooting you, but that of the people who are talking to you. They wave their hands a bit too much, but a lot of the time they seem to react realistically to what you do. If you move away while they're talking, they respond accordingly. If you bust your gun out at the wrong time, they'll either cower down or attack you. It's scripted so that you can't pull your guns out when it has the potential to ruin the game's storytelling, but there are some moments where you yourself get to establish what kind of person Jamie really is.

So yeah, if you're looking for a good FPS, I would probably look elsewhere. But if you're looking for a good, well-told story that takes place in a dark and gritty world, and don't mind sitting through the occasional average FPS to get to it, you could do a lot worse than The Darkness.

-Wes
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[dessgeega]

i tagged along with my sister to the gamestop where her boy works, and bought a copy of nervous brickdown.

more when i've played it!
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[TOLLMASTER]

Grim Grimoire doesn't seem like a real game to me. I look at screenshots and it looks like some kind of pipedream beta that will never be released. I can't actually convince myself to spend money on something that I can't believe exists. I do know the following, however:

1. released by Nippon Ichi

2. developed by Vanillaware

3. said to be the first console RTS that is awesome

It should be nothing less than epic!

EDIT: Also there are sexy witches. I don't know about you guys, but to me Sexy Witch games are practically their own genre, such is the importance of a Sexy Witch.

[Scratchmonkey]

TOLL, I've played an early build!

So, uh, it exists. Also, there were standees.