[therabidfrog]

Originally Posted by Fantasysci5

I just finished "Faust: Seven Games of the Soul". I was disappointed in it, since everyone was telling me it was so dark, and confused as hell. I loved the end song, but for me to enjoy a game, I like to make sense of it in my head the best way I can. Like "The Lost Crown", there were a lot of questions, but I could make my own opinions. I'm having trouble even understanding Faust...:/

Oh man I loved that game when it came out, but I haven't played it since then. I was looking for a copy, but it ain't easy. Still I probably would feel the same way given that it had to have been at least a decade since I played it... I think.

[Crunchy in milk]

Dragon Quest V, the DS remake (of the playstation remake).

There is quality and love in this game. Its a good fit for the DS, the sprite artwork is charming and the semi-3d works well and looks great (especially the battle backgrounds).

I'm not a hardcore jrpg fan. When its all about the fighting and the rest is mostly stripped away I soon loose interest. DQ V has just enough spit and polish to keep what exploration there is interesting and some cute dialogue, innuendo and gags are there to be found provided you look. The 'talk' button triggers some great one liners from whomever is following you including monsters you've 'caught'.

The best thing I can say about it though as a representative of the genre, there's surprisingly little dedicated grinding required. A natural progression from point A to B will trigger a huge number of random fights, but when you reach the Boss at point B you're not as likely to find you need to STOP and go grind away to be adequate competition.

If you don't like random battles at all then this still means nothing to you, but as I'm trying to give jrpgs a real go at the moment, this one delivered some decent reward for the effort I put in.

By way of comparison, I tried Dragon Quest IV (for the DS) afterwards, and despite a fun start with all the individual characters in the earlier chapters, once the elite team is established (or rather just before the final member is collected). The game gives up all pretense of pacing and direction and devolves to one line quest hints to go to the next town on the map, fight a bunch of pissant minions and then get royally fucked by an overpowered boss.

Its such a drastic shift from the pleasant early chapters and so radically different to the well paced sequel, I can't help but think that it was a difficult time in the original DQ IV's development and this part (the end of the whole damn game) just suffered and was published anyway... and subsequently re-birthed through the re-makes.

I have hopes that DQ VI will be as good or better than V and hopefully doesn't suffer the genre flaws as destructively as IV does.

[kuze]

World in Conflict: Soviet Assault - Great addon, loved the story and the drama. Only dowside: it is way too short. I could have finished the five or so missions in a few hours, but I took my time with them. Hope they make another addon soon, this stuff is addicting.
8.5/10

[Lucien21]

Silent Hill : Homecoming

The first 2 Silent Hill games are right up there with the best games ever created. The creepy atmosphere, the deep psychological stories that make you go WTF just happened, the tension when hiding from the gruesome monsters with only a pipe to defend yourself was scary.

So Silent Hill 5 has a lot to live up to. Sure 3,4 and Origins were a disappointment so could it reclaim it's Survival Horror crown.

Well.....no.

They have thrown out the gradual tension of exploring an eerie town and increased the emphasise on the combat....but I hear you cry the combat in Silent Hill games has always sucked. Well it still does, it's just waaay more important this time as you get mobbed by multiple enemies. Once you work out the best weapon and dodge strategy it eases up, but it's brutal at times in the early part of the game. Strangely towards the end the enemies become pish easy and can be killed with the knife even though you have all these weapons and health packs that were missing from the start. Seriously unbalanced.

There are still the odd puzzle in the game, but seeing as the game word is excruciatingly linear you shouldn't have any bother figuring them out. Very little backtracking involved.

So the story must be good to compensate you would think. You play Alex Shepard, home from the army to find his brother Joshua. When he arrives the town of Shepard Glen is all foggy and monsters start to attack him. So starts the chase through the various buildings of Shepard's Glen and ultimately Silent Hill to find out what happened to your brother. The story is about as deep as a teaspoon, you will have guessed the majority of it before the game hits half way. It does have some nice gruesome scenes towards the end, but by then I was bored.

This ain't Silent Hill , but a cheap American remake which borrows more from the dreadful movie than it does the game series. They really can't do J-Horror very well.

5/10

[JemyM]

Resident Evil 5
A strong contender to game of the year.

Introduction
The Resident Evil series is one of the gameworlds greatest franchises. Only counting games considering "canon" this is the eleventh game (including RE0, Outbreak 1&2, Codename Veronica and Umbrella Chronicles) and there's even a recent feature-length fully animated movie that is also considered canon (Degeneration). Part of it's success is that they treated every core game (RE0-4 and Codename Veronica) of the series with outmost respect, never saving in on quality testing and bonus content. It also had a strong story from the first game on with much loved characters. Despite all the fame, RE4's stepped away from the horror genré into a more actionoriented game, which ofcourse pissed off many fans but also created one of the highest rated games ever made. Still the very strong mythology and an on-going story made many fans play it anyway.

Story
Resident Evil 5 takes on the gameplay of RE4, but storywise it ties back to many of the old games of the series such as Resident Evil 1 and Codename Veronica, making Chris Redfield the main hero and the villian is very familiar to fans. The game throws the player right into the story with Chris Redfield arriving to Africa, now member of BSAA, a group that fight bioterrorists all across the globe. He meets up with his new partner Sheva Alomar and together they visit a contact who reveal the name Irving to them. Soon enough all hell breaks loose as everyone in the area turns hostile, seemingly infected with a new type of bioweapon (although somewhat familiar to the Las Plagas in Resident Evil 4). Eventually it's revealed that Chris Redfield have greater reasons to be there than he first revealed. Personal reasons.

Fans have much to get here as RE5 ties the plot of most previous games together. The story is mostly told through cutscenes or scattered around documents that can be read. There are also out-of-game documents that reveal more info on the major characters that can be read between maps.

Graphics and sound
This is easily one of the best looking games available on consoles. It's not that the engine is up to Crysis-standard, but the artwork poured down into each map, character, oponent etc is simply amazing. The maps ok really good and there are tons of minor features that sticks out. The voice acting is excellent, as it should be.

Gameplay
Like I said, RE5 copy the gameplay of RE4. This basically means a 3rd-person over-the-shoulder shooter along with "press this button quickly" type of cutscenes. But it would be a shame to say that's all. RE5 does take on plenty of features that are nowadays in every major title, and also add some of it's own. It's difficult to explain every mechanic in the game since frankly almost every other map have some new unique feature or innovative bossfight that I could mention. Like all current games there are turrets, no game these days can go without turrets it seems. There are a somewhat "free-roaming" map in which you also get to control a vehicle. I noticed the "take cover" element as well as "Hand of Dawn" from Gears of War. The game also feature a co-op play where a second player can take control of Sheva Alomar and play her, otherwise she is played by the console. I found her A.I. to be way above average and there were only a few minor issues I could complain about. I also found it a bit annoying that you must stand still to use a knife.

For those who aren't satisfied with one playthrough there are plenty of stuff to do after you beated the game. You can replay any chapter you like and you seem to keep the inventory no matter which order you play. There are special BSAA badges to find throughout the game that need to be shot to count. You can use money you get to upgrade items and unlock new weapons. Whenever you beat a map you get a score, this score can be used to buy even more custom features such as "figurines" (like a gallery of characters/monsters), infinite ammo for weapons, new outfits to use in the game and "custom filters" that make the game look different. There's also a different kind of game unlocked after finishing the game once which is called Mercenaries, where you get to shoot as many opponents as possible before the time runs out.

Final Thoughts
Any real gamer should have played the Resident Evil series and this is yet another classic delivering content only few games come up to.

[Jelena]

Ghost in the Sheet
Lovely adventure which kept me glued to the computer.

[Lucien21]

Wallace & Gromit :Fright of the Bumblebees

Telltale's latest episodic game takes on one of the UK's biggest licences. It was a scary prospect at first. Could they capture the british humour and style?

Gladly Telltale seem to have a decent handle on the licence. Everything looks spot on artistically with the locations and character models being distinctly W&G.

Special mention should be made to the Gromit model who's little facial movements that are so crucial to the success of the show have been faithfully recreated.

So once again one of Wallace's inventions goes haywire and it's up to Gromit to save the day.

The game follows the well trodden Telltale formula, a couple of main locations, Inventory puzzles mostly involved around finding 3 main items and snappy dialogue. The new controls were functional, but would still have prefered P&C.

The episode feels about the right length for these games, the puzzles were way too easy side for veteran adventure gamers, but that is in line with most Telltale games.

The games is not without it's problems though:

* The music was too LOUD during the dialogue so that it was hard to hear Wallace speak at times. (A seperate level control for music and speech is needed.)
* The voice of Wallace was a decent impersonation, but not perfect.
* Wasn't really that funny. No LOL moments for me, just some small chuckles.

So overall I had fun with the first episode and look forward to the rest of the season. It's a distinct step up from Strong Bad, but not quite Sam and Max level.

7.5/10

[MikeLXXXVIII]

Some thoughts about the recent games I have finished..

Resident Evil 5: A solid action game but if you are looking for something new in the gameplay department this installment is just a huge disapointment (corrupted by uncreativity which I knew beforehand). The first hour was very addicting and incredible but then the repetition and relying too much on the 4th installment just failed to keep impressing. The worst part is how the dialogue is so dry and bad, at least with 4 it had humour and cheese with style. Also the game lacks completely the Resident Evil atmosphere that Mikami managed to achieve with Resident Evil 4, even when he made the game completely different compared to prior games. So this game just leaves me very disapointed imagining what the game could have been if the founder of the series was involved again with the series. I am fed up with just gunning and shooting for the hell of it.

It is by no means a bad game, but its forgettable if you look at once a truly great survival horror series.

Tales of the Abyss:

I have been a tales fan since Tales of Symphonia and have for a long time wanted to play this game. Its presentation is great (beautiful art style), and despite the cliched forgetable story the characters make it shine (good voice acting) like in most tales games. The gameplay is top notch and has many nice improvements from Tales of Symphonia (free roaming around the battlefield, and fun new super attacks to pull off). However this might be old news as many people have tried Vesperia. However what drags it down while being a very engaging fun experience is the amount of backtracking in the game. I thought at first people were exaggerating ,but in the end I noticed that it felt like it was just throwing it in for the sake of the length because it became ridiculous. The game might have benefited to end when you first think the game was going to end. A very pleasant rpg despite its annoyances.

Disgaea:
My prior experience with Nippon Ichi was with Makai Kingdom and Disgaea 2, so due to enjoying those games a lot I had to give the first game a try. Here I eventually got the DS port. I must say I am very suprised at the quality over the dialogue and characters in the game, since
the other games were a mixed bag. In this game theres always some clever joke around and the characters felt alive with a personality in comparison to later games. However what didn't help by playing the other games first were that the gameplay wasn't as deep as later games. But that didn't exacly effect that much of the enjoyment of the game since they haven't really added much new to the formula.

It did hurt to play through the DS port in terms of presentation as it lacked voice acting for cut scenes and butchered the animations. Like a lot of the appeal came from the overthetop great animations they have for attacks. However in this version explosions look like mud (seriously its that terrible). Voice acting I can live without as those areas can be either a hit or miss. An example is if a dialogue is funny, but the voice acting however is making your ears bleed. I doubt pretty much that the joke will process well into your mind while hearing the horrifying voice.

The game has also a bad difficulty pacing. There will be a lot of grinding that has to be done. Like while you progress within the chapters of the game the enemies can increase rapidly many levels which will force you to retake old chapters in order to "catch up". Which delays your proper progress into the game. However if there were side missions where you could level up at least that would be much more fullfilling than repeating the same old missions.

Despite the irritating grinding shortcomings (but it's not like there exist many rpgs with the perfect pacing) I would recomend getting into this series if you are looking for an SRPGs that doesn't take itself serious and makes fun of itself while retaining a deep addicting battle system.

[MoriartyL]

I just finished Bit.Trip Beat, a WiiWare game as good as its name is awkward. It's like Pong set to techno music, where in order to hit all the balls that come your way you have to sort of dance around to the rhythm. It's ridiculously hard, which is just my style. And it's controlled with precise tilting of the remote, which is also a plus in my book. There hasn't been enough serious use of the Wii's motion sensing for my tastes.

As the dances get tougher and faster, they also get better-constructed. There are themes which repeat and are given variations and are reversed or inverted. Sometimes the screen is covered with flashy distractions and it's hard to see what you're doing, so you need to understand the patterns of movement to pull it off.

Though I enjoyed the game tremendously, I have a lot of problems with it as well. Most importantly, there is no way to practice individual parts. Each of the three levels is around fifteen minutes long. When I wasn't getting something right at the end of that, I'd have to go back to the beginning through a lot of parts I was already good at. Even now that I've beaten the game, I feel that there are a lot of little bits here and there that I'm not as good at as I'd like to be, and I'm not presented with any opportunity to improve those parts without going through the rest. The designers may have figured that a practice mode wouldn't fit in with the retro aesthetic, but it's a serious omission.

Then there's how the game is unbelievably pretentious. It seems to think it's making some deep statement on mankind, by sticking lots of (admittedly pretty) videos in the background of the gameplay. The names of the levels are "Transition", "Descent", and "Growth". The trouble is, nothing in the dances has anything to do with those ideas. It feels very flimsily tacked on top, rather than having anything at all to do with the experience of playing.

I dislike the game's use of power-ups, which make the game feel less elegant. Making the paddle bigger and smaller is just a distraction from how you're moving around, and doubling the paddle makes it seem less precise. These don't add enough to the game that I feel they belong here. I also disliked the difficulty level of the latter two bosses, though I very much enjoyed them on a conceptual level. After a fifteen minute level successfully passed, losing at the very end because of a ball that goes way too fast in chaotic directions feels very cheap and unfair. There's not much way to get better at that, either- it's just a matter of reflexes, not practice.

I also think, considering how prominent it is, that the music should have been much better. It's not remotely interesting or catchy, and the beat is really simplistic. As someone with an understanding of music, I wished there were more complex and tricky rhythms. The music is just passable, and I wish they had done more with it.

Overall, though, this is a very good game for the hardcore. And the fact that there's nothing exactly like it makes me feel more charitable toward it than I otherwise might be. I'm probably going to keep playing it, to see if I can beat the whole thing in one sitting.

3/5

[therabidfrog]

Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason. I got passed a review copy. It's best summed up by saying that it had A list graphics and budget game play.

[Hillseeker]

Just finished a game called Overlord.
Nice cartoon graphic and a lot of humour in it and besides that its fun to play a evil character again.
Now I'm going to bury myself in the expansion for a few days.

[copycat]

I recently finished Fable – The Lost Chapters on Mac, and it was a pleasant experience. The story might be a bit superficial and the characters don't show a lot of depth – but the overall atmosphere is amazing!

Even though the game is nearly 4 years old and the graphics are outdated: Albion is an interesting, lively place I really liked to visit.

Hopefully, Fable 2 also makes its way from 360 to PC to OS X.

[TiAgUh]

Startopia, its like Dungen Keeper in space. Funny and addicting, I love this game .

8 out of 10

cons: kinda easy sometimes, too easy

[Shany]

Bioshock:
I knew about the reveal before playing (never thought I'd actually play the game), so it did ruin it a little for me.
Anyway, I didn't find the story that interesting, or maybe I just wasn't paying attention. Also some of the subplots were so-so.

Other than that, this is the first time where the 'Easy' difficulty in a game is actually easy. I am horrible at FPSs but only even came close to dying once. Very nice. If I play again I will do it on Medium.

The gameplay was fun, though reloading was friggin' slow and your ammo would be gone really fast. I hated the flying turrets, and stopped bothering with hacking after the first area - I suck at Pipe Dream. Oh, the plasmids were really fun, too.
The pacing was what I hated most. You'd be given a goal, reach the destination, then find out that you have to go back and run errands until you can move on. Since you already had to go through an area one time, why not do everything there and be done with it?

The graphics are beautiful. I kept looking outside the windows and seeing the skyscrapers, the fish and even plankton. Really cool.

[Lucien21]

Broken Sword: Directors Cut (DS)

Works perfectly on the DS.

Same classic storyline and puzzles expanded with new puzzles to use the DS functionality, new close up artwork and new story elements to pad out Nico's storyline.

Most of the new stuff fit's into the game seemlessly, my only reservation is that the game starts out with Nico and skips the iconic starting animation from the original. It feels wrong, George is the main character and we spend the vast majority of the game with him, it should have started with him.

So apart from the story being ordered in the wrong way the game is the same game you know and love, but with cool new additions.

8/10

[J-MAN]

The Dig

One of the best adventure games I've ever played. I was consumed from the start. The shape codes were a little tedious and I would have liked to move on somewhere from the nexus place maybe to a different part of the planet but a great game still.

[Denaron]

Originally Posted by J-MAN

The Dig

One of the best adventure games I've ever played. I was consumed from the start. The shape codes were a little tedious and I would have liked to move on somewhere from the nexus place maybe to a different part of the planet but a great game still.

Agreed. Never finished it, but it's a nice game for sure.

[J-MAN]

Originally Posted by Denaron

Agreed. Never finished it, but it's a nice game for sure.

You should finish it mate it's good. I'm re-playing grime fandango and b2 atm.

[TiAgUh]

Originally Posted by Denaron

Agreed. Never finished it, but it's a nice game for sure.

You did well 'cuz the ending sucks real bad.

[J-MAN]

Originally Posted by TiAgUh

You did well 'cuz the ending sucks real bad.

I didn't mind the ending, it could have been worse. It was way to hollywood though tbh lol