Gamer's Diary 2009-04-26

More deals, mostly from Cheap Ass Gamer.

Broken Sword is an old fashioned LucasArts-style adventure game on the Nintendo DS, originally on PC. It is well adapted to the DS, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit so far. Unlike most of the LucasArts games it resembles, this game isn't particularly funny. The player takes on the role of a journalist, originally invited to meet a French dignitary but then finding herself investigating his murder. Descriptions of the game suggest that the investigation will lead her to ancient global conspiracies involving the Knights Templar, but I haven't gotten that far yet. All I have so far are hints, a cloth with a cross on it, and a cylinder with writing on it suggesting a connection to a Catholic graveyard. I'm looking forward to digging deeper into the mystery.

Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles for PSP is essentially Rondo of Blood with an unlockable Symphony of the Night, with some minor updates to the localization. I played through a bit of the main game, and boy is it tough. I will be coming back to it - when I want a serious, old-school challenge.

I played some more Elite Beat Agents. It's hard to put this one down. It's definitely got that "just one more time and I'll get it" vibe.

I hadn't realized it, but Final Fantasy Tactics War of the Lions is a port (with minor updates and improvements) of Final Fantasy Tactics for the PS1 - which I already have. Given that, I'm happy enough with it, but I probably wouldn't have bought it if I'd known.

More Rez HD. Flow it has.

Medieval II Total War and Medieval II Total War Kingdoms took a very long time to install. I only played the basic campaign (England), but I don't expect the Kingdoms content to be much different - different skins, and maybe some differences in weapons and balance, but mostly the same. Fun stuff. Just like Rome: Total War, I'm enjoying the back-and-forth between Risk-style strategic empire management and tactical level real-time combat.

Gamer's Diary 2009-04-25

I recently discovered CheapAssGamer.com and have been using the site to find sweet deals. They even have a site feature which will send you an email when a game's price falls below a threshold you set.

Using them I found a great deal on Elite Beat Agents and Project Gotham Racing 4, and picked up both.

I didn't expect to like Elite Beat Agents that much, as my last experience with a rhythm action game (excluding Guitar Hero) was the PS2 port of Space Channel 5. That game had a poor system for player input and feedback, and its difficulty was unforgiving, to put it mildly.

So I put the game in my DS, and played it a while. I discovered that I was right. I don't like Elite Beat Agents.

I love it.

The controls are just right, the music is upbeat, and the stories are funny. I found myself repeating the same mission again and again, even after I'd finished it, in order to get a perfect run where I'd hit every beat. When I succeeded, I'd get that sense of flow that I crave.

Project Gotham Racing 4 seems to me much like Project Gotham Racing 3, with motorcycles. There are some changes to the interface and mission structure, but the change that stands out is the bikes. I can't say yet whether I like how it handles bikes. On the one hand, the forgiving nature of driving the bikes makes it far more accessible than something like Superbike or Moto GP. On the other, the way the view tilts - and rather abruptly - when turning a bike can be disconcerting, almost to the point of vertigo.

Other than the bike jerky tilty thingy, it's a lot of fun. I haven't played enough of it yet to know whether it requires one to focus on Kudos challenges, which I despise almost as much as the Gran Turismo series' license tests. I'll find out when I play it some more.

My ex-girlfriends's son sent me a message on Xbox Live and invited me to play some Halo 3 with him and his girlfriend. So I did. And had fun, though I sucked at it. I think you'd have to play an awful lot of this in order to get really good at it.

Rez HD continues to delight. I managed to hundred-percent the first area, and got an awesome sensation of flow doing it.