The Gamer's Quarter

[daphaknee]

[dessgeega]

the more i play that donkey kong game the more it seems designed by checklist. the mechanics are interesting enough that there shouldn't need to be a new gimmick in every stage. i'm also not sure why the game can't stick with a simple island setting; instead there are magic portals to take donkey kong to generic landscapes like the crystal labyrinth and toybox land.

it makes me want to try the gameboy version, actually.
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[dessgeega]

playing the original, it seems to have a real problem with aiming attacks, which makes the game very frustrating and is probably the reason i gave up on it. that's unfortunate, because it's much more simple and focused than its sequel. it's possible the problems i'm having are due to the fact i'm playing the game in an emulator, though. has anyone played this?
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[ryan]

Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for the DS is a pretty good translation of the title. I find it odd that this is actually being released in the first place, as opposed to a compilation, but so far so good. None of this keeps Motaro from not being a bitch though. Puzzle Kombat drags on as well, with each battle taking a long time being two rounds each, but the ability to play as an SD MK: DA era Baraka is always good times.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[Ethoscapade]

dess - i played the king of swing at a time when, if i recall correctly, i was just beginning some sort of horrible subconscious quest for evidence of nintendo's new(?) horrid design philosophy (which, if i still can't quite pass judgment on, i've at least made peace with), and the game had it for me in spades. the core game mechanics seemed to me like they were doing nothing with nothing. it's like- credit for doing something "new," but so much shoulder-button novelty doesn't really amount to much more than navel-gazing at the SNES era, which is just a big bowl of

[dessgeega]

it seems like an interesting way to explore vertical space, which is often neglected in platformers.

i'm still enjoying big brain academy. the big difference between it and brain age, i've decided, is that brain age is interested in routine: it encourages the player to play it once a day, for a few minutes, it encourages the player to work it into her routine. so the game opens up gradually, over the course of a few months, rather than immediately. big brain academy is fully open from the beginning, and leaves the player to work at the game at her own pace. i have gold medals in most of the games at easy and medium (plus a few silvers and bronzes), and my test score is B-.

i've also been replaying new super mario bros., without using the touch screen or visiting any secret stages. i posted this at another forum:

[Ryan - SuperWes' Bane]

For some odd reason, I'm still playing Pokemon Pearl and I'm at about 357 hours.

Also playing FFVII for the anniversary and Kingdom Hearts 2. I got freaking stuck on Metroid Prime 2 a few months ago and haven't picked it up since.

[Lasa]

I'm playing Ghost Squad and enjoying it. For anyone that has played Virtua Cop 3, how do the two compare?

[JasonMoses]

They're very different games - Ghost Squad is all about replaying the game through various routes and difficulties, unlocking different items for your soldier to goof around with, while Virtua Cop 3 is a very straightforward arcade gun game where you can press a pedal to go into bullet time and shoot the enemy's bullets for ridiculous points (so ridiculous that it's not too hard to just max out the score by shooting so many enemy bullets in a row).

I'm interested in playing the wii port of Ghost Squad, for sure.

[dessgeega]

finished new super mario bros., started playing super mario 64 on the virtual console. playing super mario galaxy made me want to take another look at it, and the ds version wasn't cutting it. i'm close to done.

i've gotten all gold medals in big brain academy, except for the "compute" exercises, which are silver, and i absolutely can't do better. i have the brain of a film critic (B), which is a step up from sherlock holmes.

the slut informed me that neves apparently doesn't use the "official" tangram shapes. i love it anyway.
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[ryan]

I've been playing quite a bit of Virtua Fighter 5 Online. I know the inclusion of the first Virtua Fighter in Evolution was because of its 10th anniversary, but I wish they would've snuck it into Online as well. In general, the unlockables aren't that great when compared to 4. I really miss the videos of players doing moves with one hand, and there's just nothing in Online that compares. And after finally filling a disc with orbs all I received was a crappy shirt. Fiddlesticks. Once I run the ol' ethernet cable across a few rooms, I'm going to see just how bad my Lion is when compared with real competition. Humiliation awaits!
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[Pijaibros]

[Neal]

Anyone pick up King of Fighters 11?
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[Pink Teddy Bear]

I did, and I'm loving the hell out of it. Great addition to the series.

[Lackey]

I bought Gromada for 2 dollars and it's actually pretty neat. It's kind of odd too. It's developed by Buka and published by Bethesda. Apparently "Gromada" means 'a gathering' in Polish. I'm not sure what that has to do with driving a tank around an alien testing ground.

Actually the game is somewhat dull, but it still feels very complete. I also think this is the best pre-rendered sprite art I've seen. Everything is very geometric and clean, it's a good aesthetic response to the technique used in the art making. And there's lot of incidental details like little plants waving back and forth and spores and bubbles floating through the air. Too bad these are probably the strongest features of the game!
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[kirkjerk]

What the hell is the point of God of War? Just a cinematic exercise in bad-assery?
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=/ \(<D)_/
==/\/ >_ kirkjerk.com

[sediment]

yeah, pretty much. also to poop on a whole lot of greek mythos, but in ways i felt were at least somewhat cool.

my disc is fucked and i can't load the montage into the second part of the last battle. i am not really upset about that though.
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[kirkjerk]

It makes me realize that it has been a while since I've seen a game with so many "you can't walk there" invisible walls.
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=/ \(<D)_/
==/\/ >_ kirkjerk.com

[sediment]

hey, can't sequence break 'em all.

i'm honestly reaching a point where if i can't desequence an action game i'm not so sure about playing it.
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[Intentionally Wrong]

I played a little bit of Cave Story again today.

Cave Story is not a Metroidvania.

No, really!

See, a Metroidvania (my definition, anyway) is a "massive map" game where sections only become available once you gain a specific move, ability, or key. Metroid games are like this. So are latter-day Castlevanias. So are most Zelda games, really. I'm going to break with tradition and say that metroidvanias in and of themselves are not necessarily good; usually they're a very linear level structure that's been chopped up and glued back together such that you have to retread familiar ground over and over again. This cyclic structure is a great excuse to hide a bunch of secrets in the walls, or behind super-bomb blocks, or just past hookshot targets. This has not been awesome for a very, very long time.

Cave Story doesn't really do this. You don't need to revisit areas to find secrets you couldn't get because you didn't yet have a certain item. (Maybe once or twice, for really awesome secrets. Not thirty or forty times for energy tanks and pieces of heart.) You aren't constantly being reminded of your limited state. When you realize an amazing new ability like hovering with the machine gun, it's amazing because you had no idea this was even possible. Miyamoto's rule of always showing the player something he can't do yet shits all over the happy surprise of tomorrow in favor of anxious delayed gratification today.

[Lackey]

Machine gun flying is awesome just for that reason, it's not like you go back to a bunch of suspicious looking open ceilings to check them out. Instead it just suddenly becomes: whee! fly everywhere!
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Fred]

I know back-quoting is passé but I've been out of town and I just want to say to this:

[ryan]

[Fred]

Wow, I didn't know such a thing as this existed. Thanks, that's great news! I guess I know what I'm doing with my holiday bonus now...

(...and before you go calling me a horrible person for spending my holiday bonus on myself, you should know that I work in a small business and that the owner won't get around to handing out holiday bonuses 'til February.)
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[dhex]

[helicopterp]

[ryan]

[Harveyjames]

[daphaknee]

fred, i spend my holiday bonus on myself as well, theres nothing to be ashamed of

[friedchicken]

[dessgeega]

geometry wars on the xbox live arcade is a game i really wanted to like. but the ridiculous amount of special effects noise on the screen makes it impossible for me, at least on my television, to make out where enemies are when the game really gets going, and the 360 pad's control stick makes swivelling to fire in a different direction much too slow.

i'm pleased that geometry wars galaxies for the ds fixes both of these problems: the visual clutter has been much turned down (i don't know if this is the case with the wii version), and the stylus controls make firing in any direction quick and accurate. i was able to break 500,000 points on the included port of "retro evolved", the live arcade game, which i could never approach playing on the xbox.

the main game survives the transition to a stage-based game remarkably well, considering one of the most interesting things about geometry wars is that it's unbroken by stage transitions. the thing with galaxies is that each stage is actually a unique arena that you play in, as you would with "retro evolved", until you die. and there are some neat ones: one i just unlocked gave me one life and no bombs and put me in a big space with ever-larger hordes of enemies coming from all directions.

and yes, by "unlocked" i mean i had to collect doodads dropped by enemies in order to gain access to new stages. but the doodads are in generous supply, and you'll probably get most by meeting score requirements for each stage (bronze, silver and gold), and the stages, so far, have been cheap to unlock - i've never not been able to afford a new stage. you can also unlock new behaviors for your option, which are pricier.

also: master of illusion might be the best piece of software on the ds. it is a collection of magic tricks, and it's so good. the game's divided into tricks which the ds performs with your input - the best part is figuring out how they work - and tricks for you to perform on other people, which are more similiar to penn & teller's unreleased sega cd game than anything else. the game gives you secret instructions on how to perform the tricks, then has you hand the ds to your audience. (there are a few mini-games, too.) it is a very smart piece of software. apparently if you buy off a shelf, and not off a rom download site, it comes with a deck of marked cards.

curiously, it features some reused art from band brothers. band brothers wasn't released in the west; i wonder if master of illusion was released in japan?
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[Pink Teddy Bear]

I have to disagree with dess on the Geometry Wars issue I'm afraid.

I'll start of by saying this, if you really liked the original Geometry Wars, you probably same joy from the DS version of the game.
I
really enjoyed the visual clutter of the original game. It's what drew me into the game in the first place. This game does indeed turn this down, as dess said, and it turns it down a lot. The grid no longer moves in a sweet wavy fashion, the black holes are just small red circles with small red particles flying into them. The amount of force the black holes have seems to have been turned down too. The game is pretty easy now too, I think I got a score of a billion in the first four minutes of playing.

So, everything dess said is pretty much true, and how you look at that all depends on what type of game you like. I liked the style of the orignal, stuff always happening all around you, the playing field warping in response to explosions and your firing. It was an awesome mess. The DS version just feels kinda hollowed out.

Also, moving with the D-Pad and moving the stylus to fire really killed my hands, and using the buttons for firing is not an option, at all. Only being able to shoot in 8 directions (Unless you count the transition sweep when you go from one button to the next) is no good.

As for the "story mode", dess summed that up really well, so there's no real point in me talking about that.

That's just my look at it though.

[daphaknee]

so the ds version is just for people to feel good about themselves for sucking at geometry wars

argh

[Lasa]

Kane & Lynch turned out to be pretty awesome until it decided it wanted to be a watered down GRAW for the last few levels.
Fragile Alliance is hit or miss, sometimes you will find games where no one wants to betray anyone, going so far as to help out the "team" if they become a cop. On other occasions everyone just ends up killing each other before getting any loot.
The 2 out of 10 times where people are smart about things, it can actually be pretty fun & unique!

[JasonMoses]

[dessgeega]

[dessgeega]

actually, i've gotten bored of geometry wars's stage-based mode. probably a consequence of a small amount of content stretched too thin: there's little more content in galaxies than there is in retro evolved, and yet there are so many more stages in galaxies. a few of them are interesting, which is why the game should have only four stages.

some of the larger stages, it's been pointed out, also have slowdown issues on the ds, which makes them impossible to lose. i ended up letting the enemies get me in one stage because it was going on for just too long.

but there's the port of retro evolved, at least, and i'm glad to finally be able to play that game without all the visual clutter. and i have it on a flash card, so as far as i'm concerned this makes up for paying for that unplayable copy of the game on xbox live arcade.
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[dessgeega]

to unlock tricks in master of illusion you need to accumulate magic points. you get magic points by doing tricks or playing minigames. you get ten each time you do that; you need about forty to unlock a new trick, and you can only get eighty points a day.

i don't really have a problem with only being able to see two new tricks a day, though it seems kind of a needless way to pad out the game's content, but every day i need to play through seven tricks i've already seen in order to see two new ones.

this sort of thing makes sense in brain age, where the game is trying to help you cultivate a routine, but it doesn't really make much sense in master of illusion. maybe if you're more intent on rehearsing.
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[helicopterp]

I love Team Fortress 2.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Pink Teddy Bear]

360 or PC?

[helicopterp]

360.

Hey I added a lot of your gamertags, people!
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Pink Teddy Bear]

Dag, how unfortunate. Well, at least a few of you Gamersquarter people play the PC version. I'll have to keep a look out in the GC Vent community to see if more people play it than I know of.

[dessgeega]

i'm terrible at rock band. it seems like harmonix is headed further towards minimizing abstraction, by making a game where people actually sing into a mic and hit drums, while neversoft is headed (as tony hawk did) in the opposite direction: now when two guitar heroes duel, they don't play guitar at each other but use puzzle game sorts of booby traps to mess up the other player. that's a step away from realism and towards videogamey abstraction that doesn't really serve anything. rock band is the opposite and i can't decide if i like it.

i like pain (on the ps3) (aka stair dismount advance).

super stardust seems bland but i'll have to play more of it.
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[Shapermc]

Oh, I kinda forgot about this. I wrote up some early Silent Hill Origins impressions
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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!"

[sediment]

I'll back you up on all points, Shaper. The scenery is really pretty though! Especially the asylum lobby.

Oh, and also the asylum is way too huge for the "CROSS THE ZONE FIVE TIMES" 'puzzle' they put in there. The hospital's "collect and assemble" deal was cute and quick, but with those dead cow monsters and all the invisible inmates in the asylum it's a real, real pain in the ass. At least your fists are a pretty effective weapon in 0rigins, I guess Travis got into a lot of barfights or something.

I have not gotten to play past the asylum as I was borrowing both PSP and game.
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[JasonMoses]

[dessgeega]

maybe. i havn't played a lot of rhythm games, i just think guitar hero III and rock band merit comparison, since they're both more or less follow-ups to guitar hero. i decided, incidentally, that rock band is a lot less ugly than guitar hero, and ditches those terrible character designs and hollow attempts at rock and roll humor that make the earlier games so grating.
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[Shapermc]

[dhex]

rock band is fast approach nintendogs like levels of heterotopic mirage.

on the other hand, maybe preventing people from getting up and starting bands isn't a bad thing after all.
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[Shapermc]