What are you playing today?

[j-man]

Super Mario Galaxy 2. Absolutely phenomenal.

[Dr. BUGMAN]

Inquiry: have any of you played Tsumuji for the DS? It's been on the back of my mind since it was announced late '09. Well, apparently it was released earlier last year, but only in Japan. Play-Asia is apparently having limited-time sale. Is it worthwhile? Is it playable without knowing any Japanese?



Is it delightfully retro as this concept art?

[Tsuyoshi-kun]

I almost never play the DS anymore, so no.

Recently I've been playing the two PS2 Kamatari games again, mainly the second one. I keep forgetting how easy it is to get stuck in the first game and reverse a lot of progress you make. That alone is why I prefer the sequel gameplay-wise (though the original has arguably better music). I didn't realize how badly I did in the sumo rolls in the sequel until I went back and beat my record on all three variations by around/over 100kg.

[Malchik]

Well, I just completed Super Mario World, on to 3.

Well, just completed Super Mario 3, on to 2.

(I also just discovered EarthBound. Now, that game owns.)

[Dr. BUGMAN]

So I knuckled down and finally played through the entirety of Pulseman. It's a game I really want to love, but it lacks any sort of bite. Pulseman is way too overpowered; I beat the finally boss by just spamming his upward air kick maneuver without any sort of ramifications.

In other news Chiki Chiki Boys is all kinds of awesome.

[Kogen]

I downloaded Netflix on PS3 and it does not work right. Hyacinth`s face was not keeping up its appearance.

[gr4yJ4Y]

I watched Old Boy on PS3 Netflix last night. It worked pretty well, but it has no subtitle option and it decided to pause to load more of the movie every few minutes in the last half-hour.

[Tsuyoshi-kun]

Playing Grandia 2, which crashed barely 6 hours in on me. Nice to know the tradition of abrupt, annoying crashing that I saw in my play of the PS1 port of Grandia lives on in its sequel. It really isn't as good as the original, but still okay.

[gr4yJ4Y]

Playing Grandia 2, which crashed barely 6 hours in on me. Nice to know the tradition of abrupt, annoying crashing that I saw in my play of the PS1 port of Grandia lives on in its sequel. It really isn't as good as the original, but still okay.

I've only seen a little bit of the PS2 version, but apparently it's got long load times, slow down, texture problems, worse voice acting, etc. And you've already experienced crashing. The Dreamcast version remains one of my favorite RPGs.

[Isuka]

Wow, the first one's PlayStation port used to crash, too? What shitty development... or maybe it's your luck, I think I haven't had it crash on me yet (I started playing it some years ago and get bored of playing it just some minutes after I fire it up, so maybe it did back then and I can't remember).

Just finished Beyond Good & Evil yesterday and uh... huh? Man, the credits... Ancel deserves a medal for trolling, it's the best tease I've been subjected to since Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt's. As for the stuff that comes before it, it's pretty evident it's missing a whole lotta cutscenes. The story ain't all that hard to get, but it's definitely missing the needed exposure for making you actually care 'bout it and the characters in it... actually, as it stands the story itself is tripe and laughable, it's not even the barebones of what you could reasonably call a "conspiracy". As for the game itself, combat is brainless button mashin' (though you gotta do it with some rhythm with the final boss), the stealth stuff is half-cooked at best, there isn't much to say about the hovercraft other than it works OK for what little you do with it... oh, and the camera is a bit busted, at least on the PS2 version. And yeah, I fell for the second triangular card bug. >:(

I hope they really work their asses off with the sequel, there's loads upon loads of room to improve.

Played Street Fighter III: Double Impact during the recesses. The contrast between a focused versus fighting game and a jack-of-all-trades one was a somewhat curious experience. I love how the 2nd Impact CP-S III disc art apparently read "The best just got better!", since by the time New Generation showed up it had a very small character roster compared to Super Turbo and Alpha 2 and barely any of the latter's features, and that's not even touching other contemporary versus fighters like Real Bout Fatal Fury Special, KOF '97 and Samurai Shodown IV. The only thing New Generation had going for it was character animation, seriously.

So, enter 2nd Impact. No wonder the series canon kinda drops New Generation for 2nd Impact, this one's much more like it. The extra characters, EX moves, bonus game, no stupid wavy Super Arts background effect, brand new and touched-up backgrounds... Definitely not "the best", but nevertheless a pretty damn good (and also just plain pretty), varied and fun fighting game, and the music is a bit closer to II and the Alpha series than 3rd Strike, which you already know kicks superlative amounts of ass.

Oh, and playing fighting games with a Dreamcast controller sucking fucks.

Lastly, I started Fatal Frame II. It's barely scary, but the combat is kinda fun, although the game does some stupid shit like pitting you against two ghosts in a very small room that has some stuff lying on the floor that encumbers my character's movement, so I have an extra hard time avoiding the damn ghosts' attacks.

[FlashTHD]

The story ain't all that hard to get, but it's definitely missing the needed exposure for making you actually care 'bout it and the characters in it...

Oh come on, man. If not even the lighthouse getting attacked and the subsequent cutscenes did anything for you, then I just don't know.

Most any other problems with the story have to do with the curiously tiny size of the overworld and the fact that the game is just too short; annoying though they are, both of these can prolly be explained by the game's apparently turbulent development. Honestly, I was having too much fun with the game to care about most of its' problems, apart from the barrage of glitches.

[Dr. BUGMAN]

Really here nor there, but I think BG&E suffered from the same thing Okami did: they were released around the same time of a Zelda game, and people tend to stick to the tried and true. That's not to say I regret choosing Wind Waker, as it's my third-favorite of the series. I'm now thinking Spirit Tracks was the reason Tsumujin didn't see a stateside release despite EA's love for money.

Okamiden should do fine, but I hope for Ancel's sake that BG&E2 isn't released anytime near Skywards Sword.

[Isuka]

Yeah, to be fair the moment Jade notices that and the urgency and desperation in her voice all the way to it was frankly awesome (it helped that I was just wandering around doing some shopping at Mammago's and just minding my own business, 'twas quite shocking)... but when she starts talking to the dog, dude, it got corny, even though the background music was a perfect match for the moment (in fact all the game's music is great), and the tone of her voice felt just a bit down instead of utterly broken, which was probably what they were trying to shoot for. When they finally find Pey'j in the DomZ base, now that shit was a downer, very accomplished and almost touching.

I didn't think I'd ever say this, but here's a game that could really use some work on its cutscenes to better the whole experience, instead of the opposite. I don't want them cut off the game, I want them to be better and either feature some more of them or more stages/ places that serve to both expand the game's world and further, deepen the narrative.

And as for the game being fun... I honestly can't say it was boring, but it most certainly didn't keep me on the edge of my seat. It was fun to figure out some puzzles and stealth sequences, but beyond that I felt I was just going from some place to another and little more besides that...

On second thought yeah, this game could've used more of pretty much everything. Didn't know it had a troubled development, looking back to it now it does make sense.

Re: Ōkami, I can't bring myself to beat it. It's stretched way too long, there's no challenge, it's overpopulated and overwritten up its ass... it's almost like the complete opposite of BG&E. A pity 'cause it's pretty.

[FlashTHD]

Really here nor there, but I think BG&E suffered from the same thing Okami did: they were released around the same time of a Zelda game, and people tend to stick to the tried and true.

Not just that, it was crammed dead in the middle of the ridiculously busy '03 holiday releases, and was even up against one of Ubisoft's own big sellers (Prince of Persia). It didn't stand a chance and perhaps should've been held over a couple of months, especially if it would have meant more bugtesting.

As for Skyward Sword, it's out this year, but BG&E2 might dodge that bullet altogether because according to Ancel, development of the game will be relatively slow since they're working with a small team.

[gr4yJ4Y]

I got Peggle. You drop a marble from the top of the screen and try to get it to hit all the orange pegs (of which there's about 20 per level, with the rest being blue). You just let the ball go and don't have any control over it after that. It's simple (simple is all Pop Cap does really), but can be a little addicting. Adventure mode can be breezed through, with levels getting kind of tough near the end, but there's also challenges (this level now has more pegs, beat this level with this kind of a score, etc.), and online multiplayer. I beat it over a week ago, but still haven't stopped playing.

Angry Birds has been mentioned a ton in mainstream media without really discussing the gameplay, so I bought it without knowing hardly anything about it just to experience the hoopla. You sling what essentially function as bird-shaped rocks at structures trying to cause trauma to these stationary green pigs. As the game progresses you get offered different kinds of birds that have different powers (for example, one of these birds divides out into 3 separate birds while in mid-air, giving a shot-gun effect), which helps keep things interesting. The game is perfectly suited for portables. You can shoot your bird, stop paying attention until the damage is done, and look back at the screen to figure out how to shoot the next. Its levels are usually no more than a minute long, but will probably take you at least a few tries to get through each of them. And there are a ton of levels - over 100, for sure. I'm at less than a quarter of the way through, and the game's levels have become pretty challenging. I can see myself getting to the end eventually, a few minutes at a time.

[G.Silver]

I really liked Popcap's Heavy Weapon. It's about shooting stuff with a cute little tank, and had a pretty unique sort of action, too, since you aim your weapons and move with the mouse, you have to balance free-form shooting with the possibility that if you get reckless with it, you'll also steer yourself into something bad. As I say, I really liked it, but they haven't done anything even remotely similar since so I have a feeling it wasn't a great seller for them.

[Crisis]

I've always been partial to a little bit of Bejeweled. Emphasis on "a little". More than about 15 minutes and I start to feel brain cells melting. I quite like the little Bejeweled addon in WoW that activates when you use a flight path, it makes the long flight times that much tolerable.

And on that segue, the Cataclysm honeymoon is officially over. Dungeons got a round of nerfs for being too hard (they weren't, just too linear and too colour-by-numbers). The game is now painfully easy outside of raids and PvP. You can easily reach level 85 without dying once, although you probably wouldn't notice considering that there's basically no penalty for dying with spirit healers every 50 feet. I'll revise my previous statement and admit that the PvP endgame is as balanced as it's ever been, although melee seem to be more powerful than casters, which has always been the case (largely because casters have to deal with silence, interrupts, slowdown due to damage, and running out of mana, not to mention typically low levels of armour). The biggest problem is actually that the game is just unfun.

I briefly mentioned this before, but the Cataclysm designers have forgotten how to make a game fun. WoW's strength has always been its cooperative play, but cooperation is hard to balance (see: pre-Cata arenas), so instead Blizzard have homogenised the classes and made them all work independently. A class plays the exact same way that they do while soloing as in a group, without having to pay attention to the rest of the team, and the only obstacles in heroics and raids are ones that you have to run away from or you die. Boss mechanics, with a few rare exceptions, generally don't do anything to encourage teamwork. DPS never has to worry about taking aggro, for instance, and it's never worthwhile setting up an off-tank to protect the healer. Everyone just does the same thing every boss fight while making sure to step out of stuff.

Check out Ghostcrawler's, lead game designer for Cataclysm, analysis of the PvE aspect of the game:

We’re happy with damage overall. We have very few traditional tank and spank fights (even Argaloth likes to parry melee) so it’s hard to get consistent numbers without very large data sets. Still, we see Survival hunters and Unholy DKs on top of a lot of single target fights. Arcane, Marksman, and Beastmaster damage is too low. Retribution, Shadow, and Fire and Frost mage damage might be too low, but we’re still watching them. We aren’t seeing a lot of Subtlety rogues in PvE yet, so that sample size is still small. On fights where there is a lot of area damage, Demonology warlocks, Frost DKs and possibly Survival hunters are all too high. Shadow priest AE, mostly due to a weak Mind Sear, feels too low.

It goes on like this. I think he uses the word "fun" once in the entire article. The man is talking about the world's most popular video game with the passion and excitement of discussing a spreadsheet. If I was actually paying for my WoW subscription I'd be tempted to cancel on the basis of Ghostcrawler's blog alone.

[Kogen]

Paying 15 dollars a month plus 50 dollars x4 for retail packages to watch a 3-polygon dwarf fly across an ocean to fight mountain goats all comes together quite well when you add some Bejeweled.

[Crisis]

The price of WoW is a fairly reasonable one to pay for the upkeep of a good game on that kind of scale. The problem is that it hasn't really been a good game for a very long time.

[Kogen]

I thought it stopped being a good game in 2003.

As for the topic: I have been playing with a bee. I think it died. I never actually liked it though, so wuteva.

[Yami CJMErl]

Just got You Don't Know Jack for PS3, and it's just as funny as I remember it.

[Segaholic2]

Just got You Don't Know Jack for PS3, and it's just as funny as I remember it.

My copy is being held hostage by UPS thanks to a couple inches of snow last Friday. Fuck you, UPS!!

[Farmer]

Sonic Heroes. Utterly horrendous to play, but there's an unfathomable charm to it.

[Arcade]

Yeah the charm of Sonic games after it being even worse!

[Green Gibbon!]

The story mode in Little Big 2 is pretty short. I know it's basically just meant to be a demonstration of stuff you can do with the creation tools, but only 5 levels? Seriously? The first one had at least 8. I think even the PSP one had more. I guess it's six if you count Sackboy's Prehistoric Moves, but you need two people to play that. Though I did make it pretty far by myself with some thumb acrobatics.

Also, I seem to have a really hard time playing it online, I assume because I'm overseas from the majority of the userbase. The one time I did find a couple of players in this country, it was noticably smoother. Which makes me wish there was an option to select only local groups.

Also, is there no way to tell which new stickers/objects you've acquired? I imported all my shit from the first one, so my inventory is so huge I can't even tell what new things I've collected after I've finished a stage.