April 13, 2010 by Greg Noe
The iPhone App Store is flooded with games, some of them very good, most of them bad, but there's just an oversaturation of everything. Only the lowest common denominator crap rises to the top (unless it's Plants vs. Zombies, that game is awesome) and tons of gems are drowned by a sea of Sally Spa clones.
One of my close friends, Rory Johnson, is an iPhone game developer, and he just released his second game: Bad Cube. Early last year he released Circle Challenge, more of a personal challenge than anything else, and I finally got the chance to talk about it at the end of last year. It's a fun, free time waster where the object is to just draw circles. A simple concept, but it helped Rory learn the ropes of Objective C and the App Store.
Bad Cube is definitely a game, and a fun, challenging one at that. It's in 3D, features the shooting of hexahedron objects, and kicked my butt many times. I had the pleasure of watching the game mature from the "look! a 3D cube!" stage to the "look! a 3D cube that I can shoot!" stage, and it was entertaining to say the least.
Read moreApril 12, 2010 by Greg Noe
I've been delaying writing my review for Mass Effect 2for a while now. It was my most anticipated game in years, and Ibought it the day it came out and finished it a few long nights later. I pored over 40 hours into my first playthrough of the game, longerthan even my first run of the original. This was going to be mydefining game of 2010, my Game of the Year. It's two months later now and I've played it more since I beat it, butI still haven't compiled all my thoughts on it. Half of me wants towrite the best review possible for one of the best games ever, and theother half of me wants to make sure it really was one of the best gamesever.
I'll start with my conclusion though: I loved it. It's abeyond excellent game that takes the series and the genre into newterritories. Mass Effect 2 tries something new at every bend andseemingly succeeds at them all. I had built up an incredible amount ofhype for the game, and I can honestly say it surpassed myexpectations. BioWare, my hat goes off to you.
A little moreintroduction though: Mass Effect 2 was released in late January of 2010for the Xbox 360 and Windows. It's the direct sequel to Mass Effectwhich was released in late 2007. The game was published by EA and isits flagship product for its downloadable content scheme. Thefree-with-a-new-purchase Cerberus Network has provided us with plentyof free and paid for DLC since the game was released, and more is onthe way. It's BioWare's second big AAA title in about as many monthswith Dragon Age: Origins coming last November. Everything seems to be going right for them.
So you can tell I enjoyed the game already, but read on to see exactly why. Here's my full review of Mass Effect 2.
April 09, 2010 by Steve
This Psychonauts Audio-Visual (half) Experience contains and displays some of the vibrant, shiny, brilliant, and clever content that exists throughout the game. Unfortunately, due to a variety of bugs that caused me crashes, missing graphical layers, strange periodic muted dialogue, control irregularities, memory leaks, and crippling fps drops, I did not have the heart to continue or even play the game for significant time each session. But there is no question that the game itself has heart and some clever, varied visual design, thus here we are...
April 08, 2010 by Paul Eastwood
Those of us who play a lot of video games know the power that music brings to them. We all have our favorite classic tunes, and we know the feeling of hearing a great piece of music while playing a game. Personally I am a huge fan of game music, listening to soundtracks and remixes of soundtracks in my everyday life.
Video Games Live is a show designed to bring the joys of video game music to the greater public. The show consists of an orchestra playing music from games while footage from the game plays on big screens, accompanied by a light show and sometimes stage antics.
Last week I had the privilege of attending this show. For those of you who are stalking me online, let's just get this out of the way. I live in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the show was just outside the city April 1st.
Now for those of you who listen to the podcast, you will know that myself and one of our other writers, Michael T, were planning on attending the show in February but it was canceled. Although we're still not completely sure why, they rescheduled it at a different venue about six weeks later.
April 07, 2010 by Greg Noe
This is a first for us, but this is our second full review of The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks on the First Hour. Paul first reviewed the game in early February and praised it for its stellar action and improved controls over Phantom Hourglass. He did note some issues with the train in the game, and while most of my opinions will echo his, I would like to get my thoughts down before I move on to other games.
This is Nintendo's second attempt at going for an entirely stylus-driven Zelda experience. I'm actually still a bit shocked that this works. It's not perfect, but it is definitely not substantially worse than playing a console Zelda game, and in some ways works better than the old 2D games. Paul said he noticed improvements in the control, but either it's been so long since I played Phantom Hourglass that I didn't notice, or... they didn't make any improvements. I'm guessing the former as I was rarely frustrated with the game control-wise.
Just like to quickly mention how awesome it is that we got two Legend of Zelda games on the Nintendo DS, especially considering it was nearly three years after the system debuted that Phantom Hourglass finally landed. It'd be great to see a third, but I imagine Nintendo will be refocusing their efforts on the DSi or 3DS at this point. Hey, you can always hire Capcom to make more portable iterations.
April 06, 2010 by Greg Noe
I received Borderlands from my brother-in-law for Christmas, but didn't have the opportunity to play it until my other brother-in-law was over to visit and asked to play it. I watched him play while trying out the new Miles Edgeworth game, but Borderlands really grabbed my attention.
He chose to play as a berserker, and after the initial bus ride cutscene, he was on Pandora and kicking butt. The game was very open but it always seemed like he had something to do. There were a couple of quest givers, he was leveling up, finding new guns, shooting more and more enemies. He played for about two hours and had taken out the game's first boss after a few attempts, and then it was my turn to give it a go.
I can't believe I left this game on my shelf for so long, it's... awesome. I haven't played a game like it since World of Warcraft. The open world feels big and intimidating, but it's one of those perfect examples of sandbox non-linearity with just the right amount of linear guidance. The quests keep coming and I just kept leveling up. There were skill points to earn and bigger and better guns to collect. I'm already hooked.
Read moreApril 05, 2010 by Ian M. Bagley
Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber is a mixed game, and has had mixed reviews. Some hold it as the holy grail of RPG/Strategy gaming, while others find it about as entertaining as a box of rocks.
I’m of the former. When I saw this game in Nintendo Power, and read about it, it was all new to me. I never played its SNES predecessor. But it looked so awesome. Being an RPG fan, and desperately wanting a reason to play my Nintendo 64 other than to play Super Smash Bros. or Star Fox. The game Quest 64 left a terrible taste in my mouth and made me desperately want a Playstation for some good RPG games.
Read moreApril 02, 2010 by Paul Eastwood
Glory of Heracles is a DS RPG published by Nintendo and developed by Paon. It attempts to harken back to the old school of RPGs, leaning toward the SNES era.
The playing of this game by me will discover whether this game achieves that goal, and if that goal is worthy. Are SNES RPGs still relevant? Have we moved on, or will the sense of nostalgia be enough to reel us in?
Glory of Heracles was actually a series of games in Japan published by Data East since 1987. Nintendo acquired the rights when Data East went bankrupt in 2003. This is the first game to make it to the west; apparently Nintendo is hoping to pull a Fire Emblem.
April 01, 2010 by Paul Eastwood
Here it is, the fifth episode of The First Hour Podcast! In this episode, Paul and Greg discuss their views on the 3DS announcement, another writer (also named Paul) drops in to talk about the latest Pokemon games, and Mike returns to give his opinion of Final Fantasy XIII. And that's not all!
Download Read moreMarch 31, 2010 by Ian M. Bagley
Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts is a game I knew very little about. When I was about eight years old, a few of my friends said it was "the destroyer of worlds." Not just difficult, but impossible. None of my friends could progress very far, and as an eight year old, I wanted to prove to them that I was superior. Unfortunately, none of them would lend it to me, and I never really had the money to buy it and every time I went to the video store to rent it, it was always out. I don't know if it was just that popular, or if they lost it. I'm guessing the latter.
Now, I understand that it was made in 1991 by Capcom. It’s been ported to a bunch of different gaming platforms including the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, Xbox, PlayStation Portable and Virtual Console on the Wii.
It is the sequel to Ghosts 'n Goblins and Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and also loosely related to Demon's Crest. I've played games like Contra and got pretty far before hitting a mark that was impassable for me, even at the wee ages of nine. So I figured… how hard can this game be? Here's the first hour of Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts.
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