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.

Gamer's Diary 2009-04-09

I haven't been playing a lot of games in the last two weeks, at least until last night.

I did give Desktop Tower Defense a try during that dry spell. I beat it on easy, and it was amusing. I did bookmark it afterward (it can't be played offline), but I doubt I'll be playing it again. I've seen everything in the game, and beating it on a harder level just doesn't appeal to me. If I want a mindless distraction, I'll play Klondike or Bejeweled 2 in Endless mode.

Also, twice when I had fifteen minutes to play, I fired up Rez and played through the first level. This is a game I keep coming back to, especially when I don't have a lot of time.

Then came yesterday. I bought two games that were Day One purchases for me: The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena and the Xbox Live Arcade version of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. While at Target, I also made two bargain impulse buys: Dead Space ($30 USD) and Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts ($20 USD). I only had time to play two of them last night, but I really enjoyed both.

Of the four, the only one I still have reservations about is Banjo Kazooie. Banjo games are for completists, and I'm primarily a tourist with only mild completist tendencies. But I enjoyed the gameplay in the demo, so there may be enough to see in the game to make it worth my while. And at $20 USD, it met my price point for a game on the bubble.

I still have The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay for the original Xbox, but I bought Dark Athena because I wanted the new content and HD upgrade. So I put it in and started playing, and before I knew it I'd played to - and past - the same point I'd gotten to in the original game.

What a great game this is. I had to tear myself away from it to play my other pick for the night. I'll mention one thing that stood out for me, then leave you to find and read other reviews of it on the 'net. Riddick knows what Doom3 forgot: in a shooter with dark environments, guns come with integrated flashlights.

Dead Space was a lot better than I had expected, after the mixed reviews and the ridiculously hard demo. In the demo I died in my first room full of zombies, every time. Not fun. But with the full game, I started on the easiest difficulty setting and have enjoyed every minute of it.

The most important thing about a horror game is whether it's scary. Reviewers have claimed that Dead Space is not particularly scary. Well, they're right if your definition of scary is monster closets. But really, haven't we had enough of that from Doom3, Resident Evil and the like? What this game does, and does fairly well, is to create an atmosphere of dread, much like the Silent Hill series.

I wouldn't say that it reaches the level of creepiness of, say, Silent Hill 2 - it especially lacks some of the more disturbing aspects - but it is pretty frightening in its own right. Much of this is due to the excellent sound, set and lighting design.

The use of sound in particular is well-crafted. There is little more unsettling than to hear the muffled cries of terror from one of the few remaining survivors as they're torn apart on the other side of a bulkhead, or the nearby skittering sounds of one of the zombie monsters moving through the ventilation system. Even the nearby sound of a malfunctioning door repeatedly opening and closing contributes to the pervasive unease.

But enough reviewerish (yes I know that's not a word) details. Suffice it to say that Dead Space will scratch your Tourist itch, especially if you like creepy horror games like Silent Hill 2 and movies like The Shining.