The Gamer's Quarter

[Shapermc]

[Harveyjames]

[ApM]

I like Rayman OK. In all honesty, I got more enjoyment out of watching my lapsed-gamer friends have a great time with it than actually playing it.

The physical endurance games don't bother me, but I get REALLY upset at the game(s) that require me to play them a hundred times to beat them. Stupid fucking game where you fling yourself on ice at three other computer players who are flinging themselves at you and have to be right in the middle three times in a row, I'm looking at you. Ubisoft, you are giving me three seconds to determine where the hurricane will hit the US when the butterfly in Japan flaps its wings. That is beyond broken.

I picked up WarioWare: Smooth Moves yesterday, and it's fucking fantastic.

[Nana Komatsu]

I like puzzle games. I also like Bejewed.

I have tried very, very hard to like Hexic 3D. I have played it many times now, spending late hours into the night trying to find some kind of merit to its gameplay, something that's fucking worth my time in there thinking that if I dig deep enough there has to be SOMETHING.

There isn't.

What scares me more is that SuperWes apparently got 90,000 points (which in Hexic 3D terms is a metric fuckton) in this game.
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[Lasa]

I'm finally going to finish Victory Road in Fire Pro D.

[a_plus]

for the first time, i just got to the sacred grounds/hell stage in cave story. holy hard!
i first thought that the 'hidden' last cave was the big bad level everyone was talking about and thought i was real tough stuff.

i've noticed i get motion sickness while playing this game, too. i usually only get that from 3d games (fps and over-the-shoulder 3rd person) but i guess the way the screen lurches when you move to the left or right does that? parallaxin' backgrounds?

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

The Sword of Fargoal remake is really really good.
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[Nana Komatsu]

I beat Gears Queers of War.

It was okay.
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[Harveyjames]

OH SNAP

[Shapermc]

I finally finished RE4 over the weekend.

I originally purchased the game within weeks of release, and after feeling exceptionally bored in the castle I got to the most irritating boss fight in the game (the two El Gigante with the lava pit). I beat that boss but my spirits with the game were at an extreme low. I don’t even know how much I did (or even what I did) after that fight, but when I loaded my game I was at the part where you have to get the “sacrifice” for the lion (which is the little thing you get for the puzzle after the mine cart section).

I still wasn’t really grooving with the game even at that point on Thursday, and got to the boss fight with the Napoleon kid, then paused it.

Saturday noon: I had an extremely stressful day and I was sitting on the couch debating on things to do. I ended up not doing anything for a good hour at least. Then I looked over and thought “why is my Wii on?” I decided to pick up the game again. I played from the Napoleon looking kid boss fight all the way until the end of the game. It took me about 8 hours to do. It was a better game than I had initially given it credit for. I still feel that the Castle is poorly paced and would be better at the end of the game, but oh well. I think I was just taking it a little too seriously.

That said, my end time for the game was 64 hours almost. Damn timer still going while it’s paused.
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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!"

[Harveyjames]

I wish his real name in the game was 'Napoleon Kid'.

The two Gigante isn't such a bad boss fight. Try fighting the monster who chases you through the giant shipping crates, on hard mode! It's the opposite of fun!

[helicopterp]

That was my favorite fight of the game on normal. Really tense.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Harveyjames]

My favorite was the first village before the church bells sound. The fight in the house with Luis is ok, too.

[Lasa]

The Chainsaw Sisters fight was one of the high points for me. Along with the absurdly great Krauser fight.

[Harveyjames]

Each to their own, but I felt that by the time you get to Krauser you're playing a completely different game than the one you thought you were buying.

[Lasa]

Would you say that the island was worse or better than the castle?

[ryan]

Tony Hawk's Project 8: I've enjoyed this one more than any others since the second on the Dreamcast. I still find a lot of it obnoxious, but the new approach (open world with a lot more varied goals) and skill-based leveling is a big step up from American Wasteland.

InuYasha: Secret of the Divine Jewel: Two feet. Fight. Two feet. Fight. Two feet. Fight. I can't wait to be done with this.

Death Jr. 2: Still. Some of the level design is just incredible, but then there are some portions that are just so horribly done that I question the sanity of the designer.

Mario Kart DS: AAAHHH! This game is awesome! I'm sorry it took so long for me to get you, buddy. My fault.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[Harveyjames]

[Nana Komatsu]

[Mister Toups]

[Harveyjames]

Yeah, I quite liked Assignment Ada. I guess I can accept the island bits more when they're packaged as a seperate game.

Mercenaries is pretty great.

What are the bonus modes in the PS2 version like?

[Nana Komatsu]

I am playing Phoenix Wright: Justice For All and liveblogging it in this thread.

I like it so far!
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[dessgeega]

new zealand story revolution (ds) is disappointing. it really feels like it began as a straightforward remake of the original, because the stages initially share much of the same level design as the original, and it really does look gorgeous. but they couldn't leave well enough alone: they added stuff. harmless things like power-ups that give you freezing arrows or a lance and shield. confusing things like double-jumping and three hits to a life. stupid things like rooms where you have to kill a certain number of enemies before you can proceed.

but the worst is that the developers felt compelled to make use of the touch screen, and did so in the most intrusive way possible. the first example is innocuous enough: you approach a door in a place where there was none in the original. a picture of a handle appears on the bottom screen. "turn the handle to open the door!" you slide out the stylus (because the platforming and shooting are handled with the d-pad and face buttons, like they should) and draw a few circles on the touch screen, turning the wheel. the door opens and play continues. what does this add to the game?

it gets more aggressive. in other stages a seemingly identical image of the play screen appears on the bottom screen, and you're told "find the difference!" before you're allowed to continue the smartly-paced platforming arcade game, you have to hunt through this huge room, squinting at both screens to find the single different tile, trying to dodge attacks by enemies as you glance between the screens and fumble for the stylus. it's game-breaking. another stage is full of pits too large to jump over. when you fall you float down the bottom screen - "catch the kiwi!" you need to touch your falling character with the stylus and fling it back up to the top screen. where it falls down again. you catch it again. you do this over and over before the stage ends.

it's really a disappointment. there are too many otherwise-good games saddled with needless touch screen gimmicky. speaking of which...

kaitou wario the seven, aka wario the thief. it's a cadash-a-like set aboard a cruise ship, and does get points for having a vaguely logical layout (too few games of that variety do). to switch between wario's abilities (the keys to the game's obligatory locks) you draw on wario (a circle around his head gives him a spacesuit, complete with laser gun). this would be cumbersome, but the game is actually designed to be played with one hand on the d-pad* (up is jump) and the other holding the stylus.

* face buttons work too for lefties.

the cruise ship is full of treasures, of course, and to get them you need to play touch screen minigames, like a sliding 9 puzzle or color-in-the-picture. most of them are optional, but a few are required to get the power-ups you need. it seems unnecessary.
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[Winged Assassins (1984)]

That sounds horrible, who were the devs that ruined The New Zealand Story?

It seems that only Dig-Dug Digging Strike is the only good update of an old game on the DS.
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[helicopterp]

[dessgeega]

not really, no. the lock-and-key design means you switch costumes a lot (you can only use one ability at a time), and the costume-switching means you spend a lot of time scribbling on the screen. and that means the game plays more slowly than it should.

[Ethoscapade]

man what is wrong with nintendo's first-party DS dev lately, i didn't expect to like wario but really now why should that be.

it seems like now that they have confidence in the thing it's all gone wacky. i mean. there's a custom and chibi robo game coming out this summer? zelda and pokemon? what the hell.

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

[dessgeega]

new zealand story ds isn't half as bad as rainbow islands ds. take a platformer with tight level design and a clever platform / attack mechanic and make it so you can fly and attack anywhere onscreen!
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[Winged Assassins (1984)]

I was going to buy Rainbow Islands but then I heard exactly about that and it totally killed my interest.

Is there a terrible Bubble Bobble "re-envisioning" yet?
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[SuperWes]

[dessgeega]

while i'm playing a suspicious amount of nintendo ds games: picross ds is great. the presentation is very clean - devoid of mascots but not of character. it's aimed at casual players. each set of puzzles has its own visual design, and they're not without charm.

the game is played by tapping tiles with the stylus while holding up (to mark a filled space) or down (to mark an unfilled space), which works well for me, since you can take your finger off the pad and use the stylus to count spaces without marking any. you can also tap onscreen icons to swap between filled and unfilled, and there are also button controls if you absolutely need them. this is definitely a game that benefits from the stylus, though.

there are some nice touches over the original gameboy titles. guide numbers will grey as you locate the correct spaces on the grid. only when you can prove those spaces definitively correspond to those numbers, though - the game is pretty smart. when you finish a picture, the pixels you've uncovered are colored in like in guru logic champ - and then animate. every puzzle earns you a short, happy pixel animation. and every five stages earns you a small reflex-based minigame - like "catch", which is similiar to flyswatter, or "sketch", which challenges you to draw a given pixel picture within the time limit.

also nice is the presence of a "daily picross", a set of five quick puzzles that are new every day. the game records your times and tracks your ongoing progress. there's also wifi puzzle distribution. it's a nice little game, and i can't imagine that nintendo won't release it outside of japan.

also: deep labyrinth, a three-dee realtime dungeon crawl with kenshin dragon quest-style stylus sword slashing. it was originally developed as a cell phone game; when the developers brought it to the ds they added all the stuff they thought players would expect out of a ds swords and sorcery game: lots of dialogue, character-signposts, ages of tutorial. i hate that stuff. fortunately you can choose to just play the original game, which starts with you locked in combat with a sword-wielding skeleton. this mode is much more tolerable, but it's still no ultima underworld.
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[Cycle]

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

Except that picture is only telling one; shit.
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[Cycle]

One word, said a thousand times.

The DS version doesn't look as ugly, it still uses sprites, but the gameplay was still ruined.
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[Winged Assassins (1984)]

I really hope noone decides to touch Snow Bros.

EDIT: Or Mutant Night, that is long due for a hideous update.
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[Harveyjames]

Hey Ice Climbers might work ok on the DS. You could use the touchscreen to manipulate the elastic cord they're attached to each other by.

[SuperWes]

[Harveyjames]

I didn't realize Ice Climbers fandom had developed to the point where people had begun discussing it in terms of canon and non-canon.

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

Hey, let's all suggest games that can be remade and list horrible changes and additions that are totally feasible and not obviously silly sounding.
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[Harveyjames]

Wow, I'm taking it in every thread! It's like when Marvel comics did those massive cross-over continuities like Secret Wars, and no matter which Marvel comic you picked up - whether it was Fantasic Four or Spider Man - everyone was fighting a different part of the same battle! It's almost exciting!

I'll endure my tenure as the forum Boogeyman for as long as it takes for you to realise I'm actually a nice guy and this is over absolutely nothing. It's no skin off my nose!

[Lestrade]

[Harveyjames]

How do you rate the island?

[Shapermc]

[Lestrade]

I rented Lost Planet. I only played one mission, but I don't think this game is for me. I'm just not feeling it, and I hate the way Wayne controls—the way he pauses after jumps, the sluggishness of his run, even on a normal surface.

I do, however, dig Luka's completely impractical cleavage. It's freezing even indoors and she's so hot she can show off her chest. Classy.

[Nana Komatsu]

Didn't you play the demo?
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[Nana Komatsu]

Wrong opinions about Xbox Live Arcade game demos:

Assault Heroes is fucking AMAZING. I bought it in about thirty seconds.

Marble Blast Ultra: Not bad, I don't know how much I'd enjoy the full version.

Root Beer Tapper: what the fuck?

Outpost Katoki X: I enjoyed the demo, but don't know if it's worth $10.

Small Arms: Reminds me more of Jump Superstars than Super Smash Bros, I don't quite know how I feel about it.

Mutant Storm Reloaded: I would have liked this demo a lot more if they didnt try to make me hit "Buy Now" after every single fucking portion.
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[Lestrade]

[Shapermc]

That's unfortunate lestrade :(

The game is really fantastic for all the things it does right, but I don't think I can convince you to enjoy it. EDIT: Have you tried switing the controls to fixed 7 (or Fixed 8)? A lot of people claim that makes it play a ton better.

Anyways, Nana's right: Assault Heroes is way better than it should be. Bonus nostalgia points for the Sierra Online logo at the opening.

Heavy Arms (?) for XBLA is really terrible. Thank god the demo is really long, I got my free monies worth out of that.
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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!"

[Mister Toups]