Masem’s Gaming Blog

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.

Review Helpfulness: (2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)
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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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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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Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a mix of a puzzle and adventure game from Level-5 and published by Nintendo for the DS.  The game is basically 120 brain teasers of various difficulty, wrapped in a well-presented story that helps to encourage progression through the game. Though there are a few small problems with the game and it lacks some replay value, it is definitely a nice title that can appeal to a wide range of gamers.

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Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is the fourth game in the laywering adventure game series by Capcom, and the first game in the series specifically developed for the Nintendo DS, such that it incorporates DS-unique features in part of the investigation and trial phases that were introduced in the DS remake of the first game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. The game definitely is a step up from the previous entries; the DS graphics are much more vivid, the added investigation methods work well, and the cases are much tighter and make more sense, though to some extent, this makes the game somewhat easier. However, it is still a good play and requires only minimal familiarity with the previous works to appreciate.

Review helpfulness: (1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure, developed by Capcom, is hopefully what is the first of many more adventure/puzzle games for the Wii console. The game combines situational puzzles with the use of the Wii Remote nicely, albeit that it is possible to run into a situation where you have to restart a puzzle completely from the start and can be a major source of annoyance in the game. Regardless, the rest of the gameplay is pretty well done and provides a nice framework for followup games to work from.

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The third entry in Capcom’s Ace Attorney series, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations, continues with the same core gameplay and presentation from the previous games, but manages to bring a much more interesting story with elements that carry over not only between cases, but as well as from the previous two games. While there’s the usual issues with the text display being naggingly slow when you want it fast, or that there’s a few puzzles that may take a bit of time to wrap your head around, the game is the strongest entry in the series to date. (Of course, it should be noted that I am reviewing the Import version, which has the “early” English localization which does have a few notable flaws, which Capcom says they will have fixed for the North American version. I am ignoring any such problems in my review).

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For those that miss text adventures or LucasArts style games, or like anything offbeat, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attoney for the DS is definitely a fun, strong plot and character-driven game that can fill the niche with some pretty good brain-teasing puzzles.

Phoenix Wright, simply, is one of those odd Japanese games, based weakly on their classic dating sims, that has been translated to English and brought onto the DS platform. In Phoenix Wright, you play as Phoenix, a just-off-the-bench defense attorney on his first 5 cases in court, defending the innocent of murder charges. The game is set in the near future, where the justice system has been radically revises as to have all criminal court cases take at most 3 days, thus requiring a significant burden of proof on the defendant. As the player, you have to work your lawyer-y skills in court to disprove witnesses’ testimony with evidence and information that you collect, and prevent the prosecution from overruling you. The game, while based on the idea of Japanese dating simulations, feels that it has strong comedic influences from the Adult Swim show, “Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law” in that shouts of “Objection!” and “Hold it!” stand out like the cartoon onomatopoeia effects from Batman, key points are punctuated with fighting sound effects, and the bumbling attitude of Phoenix, though the game’s plot is still (mostly) firmly grounded in reality. I think it’s more that stateside, without the popularity of Harvey Birdman, this game would have had little chance to succeed without a major media push, but with it, the game can easily become popular by word-of-mouth.

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Overlord, developed by Trimuph Studios and distributed by Codemasters, is a game in the same vein of play like Pikmin, a mix of a third-person fantasy hack-and-slash and minimal RTS elements. The game is pretty fun, offering puzzles and monsters that are just right in difficulty, an entertaining story, and plenty to do outside of the main plot with only minimal problems.

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(Ok, not quite initial, I’m about 1/2 through, but first time I posted on this).

Overlord is definitely an interesting game; its fashioned off of one of the best games ever, Pikmin, but adds a few twists.  Basically, you’re an evil being (read: somewhere around lawful evil to chaotic good in D&D terms) that needs to rebuild his castle, but to do this, you need to do good deeds to rid the world of nasty evil (chaotic evil!).  To do this, you can’t fight off those hordes yourself but you get access to minions.  Like Pikmin’s Pikmin, your minions come in 4 varierties: Browns are good fighters but otherwise have no special power; Reds can use fireballs from a range and can douse fires; Greens can withstand and neutralize poison and can perform nasty back-attacks; and Blues can attack magic beings, use magic and regenerate others, and can cross through water (the others can’t), but are the weakest fighters.  You “sweep” your minions around the levels as well as set vantage points; you can control all of them at once, or by color, or a small subgroup, and usually it’s a matter of puzzle solving: monsters are there, but it’s usually how you face them that is the puzzle.  For example, monsters wandering around in water need to be lured to land to allow the more powerful minions attack.  Minions themselves will wreck havoc on boxes and the like about, collecting the items for themselves to use as weapons and armor, while giving you money, life and magic potions they find.

Destroying monsters gives you life force for your minions (each color tracked separately), but you can use your minions to upgrade your armor as well.

The game has a decidedly twisted bent, reminding me much of the humor in the (newer) The Bard’s Tale.  E.g. in this game, halflings (read: hobbits) are evil, and their hero “Melvin” is so rotund as to make him a tricky boss.

The only major issue with it is the lack of camera controls: the left stick is used for movement, the right is used to sweep your minions; moving around will move the camera, but I found the easiest way is to turn in the direction you want to look and then tapping a shoulder button to make the camera jump that way.  Also, the game feels like it was built off the Fable engine, not so much in the gameplay, but just how the people respond to you, how the camera follows you around, etc… which is not the best engine, but so far, it hasn’t failed me yet in the game.