Filed under: Organized Event, games | Tags: dow, gaming, NDS, rob is great, Rondo of Swords
Well lately my posts have been spread pretty thin, like the last scraping of butter from the tub. Just like that very same butter, it’s very hard for this post to cover everything I’ve got to mention, so I’ll be brief.
Firstly, Rondo of Swords for the Nintendo DS. It’s a neat little strategy / rpg-ish game. Set in your standard fantasy world with fairly standard characters (actually, they’re far more cliche than that, but it’s ok because of the pure class). I’d say there are probably two things that come to mind about this game. Firstly is one of the characters will hit on every single girl he comes across in the game. That’s what really endeared me to the game to be honest.
Surrounded by enemies, your own life bar reduced to a sliver like the progress bar of your computer trying to defrag itself and scan for viruses at the same time, this guy still has time to pull one liners in the most casual way. Pure bond. Unfortunately the responses he gets aren’t usually so positive…
The other thing is that this game dares to be unintuitive in a time, and on a platform where being intuitive and ‘casual friendly’ is the same as being available in stores. There isn’t a particularly steep learning curve, and the tutorials will have you rolling pretty quickly… but if you try to move up to an enemy and THEN attack him… well too bad for you.
Ok, now that’s out of the way… My experience with the Microsoft support line in Japan. WOW. This it worth a post all of its own. Infact I might save most of it for its own post when the deal is finally done. For the time being I’ll tell you about the call I tried to make. This was AFTER Rika had called and failed to get help. She’s a native Japanese speaker, I’m not. I can speak a bit and understand a lot more, but for things like getting support I generally found people will go out of their way a bit more if they can’t just give you the company lines.
I called and was given a set of ‘push this button to continue’ style menus. I bungled through the first THREE, then gave up and kept pressing 0 until it started dialing for a human. I said “Excuse me, I need help with my xbox 360, my Japanese is very poor, can you help me?”
He went on to tell me in the bluntest of Japanese that ‘this is Japan’ and if I was going to speak English, then he wasn’t going to be able to help me. In Japanese it’s very easy to tell when somebody’s being polite or not. *sigh*
Ok, finally games are on for this weekend. Can I shotgun Sunday afternoon?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: gaming, portal, reviews, rob is great, steam, you have to burn the rope
I played two games today. Through an exercise of extraordinary gaming prowess I also finished both of them in enough time to do a quick review of each. So here are my thoughts on ‘You have to burn the rope,’ and ‘Portal.’
This is a classic game from the top game studio mazapan.se. The mechanics of the game are fairly intuitive – the title screen, for example is fairly self-explanatory:
…and it doesn’t get much more complicated after that. You’ll find that once you load the game, most keys are bound to either ‘jump’ or ‘throw axe.’ The movement keys work in a similar way to the smash bros system with up being ‘jump.’
One of the more challenging elements of the game is the end boss, the Grinning Colossus:
This boss is impervious to your weapons and grins evilly knowing exactly how weak your are against it, and exactly how big it is. It is indeed big. One might even say gargantuan, titanic or mcdonalds. Fortunately there is a way to get through its near-invincible veneer of amicability.
I’ll leave finding the answer up to you, but just to show that it can be done, here’s my killshot:
The other game I played was the ever-famous PORTAL.
This game has been reviewed to death with many a cake joke, and many a reference to Jonathan Coulton’s song “still alive.” It has received near perfect praise from any reviewer who came off their drug high long enough to sit down for 5 minutes and write a few words. Even the notorious Yahtzee gave it a big thumbs up.
It’s not difficult to see why. The learning curve is forgiving, introducing you slowly to the new game mechanics, as a sadist might slowly lower a lobster into a boiling pot. There are two things, I suppose that really stand out in this game. Firstly there is a nice sardonic sense of humour at work throughout the game. In general this comes through the ever-present voice-overs, although there are other touches, such as warning signs or impressively designed cubes that draw you into the darkly humourous world of portal.
The other sticking point of the game is that I have never come across game mechanics like this before. Certainly there have been games that allowed teleportation of one sort or another. There have been plenty of problem solving games too, but none really meshed so perfectly, or relied on one another so profusely as this does.
All in all I’d say both games are worth playing. The price is only one afternoon of effort, which for me at least, is a very reasonable effort.
Filed under: Game Reviews, games | Tags: dow, gaming, rob is great, soulstorm, wh40k
The dark eldar have finally been unleashed onto the land of Kansai. So far I’ve noticed the same things that everybody seems to be talking about – conquering planets is the same as conquering countries; and flying is essentially the same as not flying.
Regardless, this game comes from good heritage, and that alone is enough to make it a game worth playing. To be honest though, I’m still finding my feet with the new races. To be honest, apart from the sex appeal, the Sisters of Battle have nothing for me. Sturdy, sure, but…. slow and boring.
The Dark Eldar on the other hand have a certain… allure. Having said that though, I’m yet to really get a feel for them. Playing a couple of skirmishes it didn’t really feel like my tactical decisions or different troop types made much of a difference. The exception being Raiders. Those are damn handy bastards.
I’ll keep playing though and try to give a more educated opinion later when I’ve become more educated in the opinion area.
