Masem’s Gaming Blog

Namco’s first venture of the Tales series onto the current generation of consoles, Tales of Vesperia, will feature little surprise to those that have played the series before, not that this is a problem; the few touches on gameplay changes make for a familiar, yet new, experience, and the advantages of the new hardware help to make the presentation nicer.  For those that haven’t had a chance to experience the series, the game is very accodating to new users and is a good introduction to the series.  It still, however, has the usual stereotypical elements of a JRPG and is not going to convince those with an aversion to them to reconsider.

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de Blob, developed by Blue Tongue and distributed by THQ, is an interesting title - there’s similarities to Katamari Damacy throughout, but though it is not as quirky as that title, there’s still little touchs that remind me of why I enjoyed that game.  de Blob is a very good effort for a third party Wii game; it’s fun though can be tedious near the end, but does have a lot of collection items that will interest those types of games.  The presentation is very well done, particularly in the sound department.  It’s definitely the type of game that will appeal to those that like ones that go off the beaten path.

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Harmonix’s and MTV Games’ Rock Band was a stunning success last year, beating the Guitar Hero to the punch at incorporating several more instruments besides just guitar into the music game set.  Now, less than a year later, we’ve got Rock Band 2 (at least, those of us on Xbox 360s), and while it’s denoted as a sequel, it’s better to think of it as a version upgrade; there’s no major changes to gameplay (unless you never had the opportunity to play in Band World Tour mode before), and the set list is full of 84 new songs, so it may seem like simply a quick way to chug out a new title.  But Rock Band 2 is very very polished, and a few new features and some tweaks to gameplay really make up for all the small failings that were in Rock Band.  But more importantly, add in the fact that while there may only be 84 songs on disk, you have your DLC library as well as most of the original game’s songs available to play, making this title one that will continue to expand week after week.

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Played through a campaign up through the Space stage yesterday and I’m very impressed - though still disappointed about what was once in the game that has been removed.

Cell Stage - Less esotertic version of flOw, works well but goes by quickly.

Tribe Stage - A bit repetitive but instant gratification with the evolution of your species via its rewards.

City Stage - Not thrilled with this, I suck as RTSs and had troubles getting through it the first time until I figured that the best time to attack a village is after they sent all their forces to raid yours and you’ve defeated them sounding (as I could still pump out new units as others died right there.)

Civilization Stage - Maybe a bit too easy; I did find that they didn’t mention that your city gets stuck with whatever branch (economic, military, or religious) once you set it, and wondered why I had no military units.  This felt like the stage with the least helpful hints on what to do, despite how close to any Civilization game ever was.

Space Stage - Have to agree with most everyone else, this is where the game really pays off - it feels open and expansive yet not too open (ala the Oblivion problem) as the missions help guide you with what to do.

The user content and sharing aspects are of course awesome.

My primary disappointment with the game is the loss of how the game was to determine what abilities and skills your creatures, buildings, and vehicles would have based on how you designed it.  There’s still a taste of this; most parts you install (up to a limited number, of course) give certain benefits, but there was supposed to be something more organic and less exacting about the way it is currently.  For example, adding any pair of legs gets you a speed boost, regardless of how “functional” the being may end up being; original demos for this showed that the game would have adjusted the speed bonus for strategically placed legs over useless ones, and other aspects of the design.  Similar for all other design elements.  It’s still the same user-created aspects which makes the game extremely fresh, but the lack of significant impact of how well the design aspects are put together is disappointing to see.

The other disappointment is the minimal (to some extent) impact of previous phases on successive ones.  Certainly your route through one phase sets what you are in the next, but this seems to be a choice out of three options.  Physical appearance and other aspects set in the Tribe phase don’t mean anything in the City stage, for example.  Basically, each phase is almost a unique phase with minimal bearing beyond appearance that what you created before carries forward.

This is not to say Spore is bad; it is still impressive.  It is just lacking elements that were shown originally to be in the game that are no longer present that had piqued my interest much more in this game.   Still, the Space stage alone is worth the cost of the game.

Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty is a downloadable title from Insomniac games for the PlayStation 3, continuing on from Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction in both story and gameplay.  The overall game continues the high quality work from Insomniac in the past and include new gameplay elements, but there are some aspects of design that are questionable and make the game feel as if it is lacking in features and content.  It is still a good effort and captures the series’ gameplay faithfully, but I feel more could have been done for such content.

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PixelJunk Eden is the third game from Q-Games on the PlayStation Network for the PlayStation 3 and is probably the most abstract game of the three.  The game is based on using your “grimp” character to swing on plant to collect pollen, pollinating seeds that will grow into new plants in order to reach the farthest heights of each “garden”.  The core gameplay, visuals, and soundtrack are excellent, though there are a few questionable elements that could have been removed to make the game much tighter, but overall the game is fun and enjoyable.

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Braid is a rather unique puzzler-platform game available through Xbox Live.  While the basic play makes the game look like your typical Mario clone, the bulk of the game is centered around the use of time manipulation and other time-related puzzles in order to collect hard-to-reach puzzles and complete the game.  The game is fantastically presented, and while the unique time-based puzzles are great, there is a very very steep learning curve as well as puzzles that require tight timing and controls in order to complete, and these may make the game too frustrating for those that lack the patience to solve them.  I feel the game could have used just a few more “tutorial” type puzzles which would have smoothed out the difficulty curve and made the game much more accessible.  Still, however, the game is one that should be praised for its distinctive approach.

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Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is the second expansion/spin-off of the Guitar Hero, the first being the rather dismal Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s.  This time around, RedOctane and Neversoft have focused the game on the career of one of rock’s more influential bands, Aerosmith, providing a song list with more than half the titles from the band, the rest from groups that Aerosmith based their style on or similar genre-wise.  While the game shows a lot more effort by the developers than Rocks the 80s, the fact that the game is short is a major problem, and likely puts this in the rent column for all but die-hard Aerosmith fans.

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The World Ends With You is a non-traditional RPG from Square Enix and Jupiter for the Nintendo DS that uses a battle system that involves a lot of use of the touchscreen.  There are a lot of gameplay aspects within the game, but the game itself is wisely crafted around those elements to allow you to use as many or as little of the elements as needed, effectively letting you drink as much of the game as you want but tempting you with better rewards if you take on the added challenges.  This approach, as well as the overall combination of tight gameplay, interesting story, and outstanding design, make this one of the most impressive RPGs that I’ve seen in a long time.

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LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures is another LEGO-based game from Traveler’s Tales, who have previously done both LEGO Star Wars games.  While there are several elements that are reused, and much of the general gameplay hasn’t changed much, they have refocused the general approach on the adventure genre and solving puzzles to progress in the game, making it feel pretty fresh and showing that the series has more legs with other popular franchises.  The game is generally on the easy side and is a bit short, but it is entertaining throughout.

Review Helpfulness: (3 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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