The streets are flowing with the blood of the innocents, two sides are fighting to what seems an everlasting war, a war that rages on for only a few years, yet they have the same goal – to entertain. Yeah, to entertain ungrateful people who think there is a war between the casual and hardcore gaming market. There’s a lot of gripe lately on how the casuals (the games and the people) are killing the gaming industry. To tell truth, the hardcore consumers are as much to blame as the casual ones. (continue reading…)

The rise of technology with the industrial revolution came about the assembly line, often used in factories to quickly make, build, and send off the factory’s product; be it cars, electronics, weapons, and even video games. The same and formulaic games often do seem like they just came hot off the assembly line that they get their very own genre beneath what they suppose to be – The WWII shooter, The Hack n Slash, Shovelware, etc. Of course with the Wii being the new fangled device that everyone must have and Nintendo being at the zenith of profits came about the truckload of shovelware. That is, the current trend, and trends come and go so the factories need to replace their rubber stamps to fit the new trend of games they must shovel out.
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After nearly half of century of development and the synergy of growing technology, video games have become a major part of modern society, an interactive form of entertainment. Separating itself from moving pictures, sequential notes, and walls of words; gaming is unique as it combines all three of these mediums, maybe even fourth, the sweaty test of endurance, with the rise of the Wii. But with all these ways one can entertain oneself, what do we call people who read books? Readers? Who enjoy music? Listeners? How about movie goers? Watchers? At least we have a definite term for people who play sports – athletes.

What am I getting at is the term “Gamer”. Does the culture as a whole really accept to call themselves “Gamers” and not “one who plays video games?”. I truly and always have hated the term “gamer” (and don’t bother pointing out that this place use to be called gamerblag). There are many reason why I might hate the term or maybe I just hate the people who use it.
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Having fun while raging? Possible? Yeah, that describes my childhood alright as it does now when I played Metal Warriors for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System; developed by Lucas Arts and published by Konami. In my own personal opinion, this is has got to be the best mech game for the SNES and within my top 10 of favorite games for the SNES.

The story begins in the 22nd century as you are one of the last survivors of Earth fighting against an evil axis ruled by a dictatorship. You are Lt. Stone and part of team called the Metal Warriors who fly around in mechs or “Space Armors.” You go from mission to mission to stop this evil axis, and you must do it all in one sitting because there aren’t any passwords or save points; you did it all in a single afternoon and you liked it, if not, then I don’t know why you are here – go back to playing your Bejeweled. That’s all there is to say about the story but unless you were playing a RPG, I wouldn’t think most people would care about the story for the majority of SNES games; because back then, all the story was in the manual and no one read those. You will get some story out of this in the cut scenes, but nothing too exhilarating. The cut scenes themselves though were well animated, at least for being on the SNES, so the opening one might be worth watching, while every other is just simply a mission briefing which can be skipped over. (continue reading…)

I am sure everyone has at least played one online multiplayer game, ranging from First Person Shooters to Real-Time Strategy. This is the new form of competition that has arisen within the past decade and a half due to video games and the internet. This new form of competition has come up so strong that there is a whole entire country dedicated to it, though it maybe only one game, it still applies. Then there is of course the tournaments, LAN parties, even conventions that celebrate these competitive games; things like QuakeCON or the World Cyber Games. It has come to the point that this new form of competition should get their own ESPN or something but let’s take it to a smaller scale, that simple internet lobby where some gather to play competitively, lobbies like Battle dot net, Steam, Playstation Network, and even Xbox Live. But I’m not here to talk about the new age of online sports, but rather online sportsmanship – what the hell happened to it?
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I am sure everyone knows what the tutorial level is and I am also sure that some of you readers can agree with me that they are one of the most annoying things about video games today and within the past decade. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, the tutorial level is a level in a game that teaches you the basic mechanics of the game. Why is this so bad that I’m raging about it? It’s the fact every developer out there deems it necessary to have this level mandatory to complete in order to learn how jump and then double-jump. This makes the notion that these developers are targeting their games toward the “casual” crowd, non-gamers, or even your grandmother. Because, hell, everyone is a brand new player into the world of video games but let’s get back on track.

I know neither that all games do not have a tutorial level nor that all games have it mandatory – but I’m not talking about all games. I am talking about the games within this generation and those in last generation where the majority of games had the tutorial level. I am sick of playing a level where it does nothing to teach me, does nothing to advance the story, and most importantly, it does nothing to entertain me. Press A to jump, press square to shoot, swing your controller to awkwardly attack – it’s just plain annoying, especially when the game offers nothing complex to the already copy-and-paste game play of its genre.
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Are you ready to tread through horrible voice acting and predictable story line to get to the mech on mech action? Hope you are because Robot Alchemic Drive (RAD) for the Playstation 2 contains all the above; developed by Sandlot and published by Enix (not Square Enix you pre-teen gaming mongoloid). RAD offers something different to the mech fans out there as well to those who are nostalgic for bad anime dubbing.

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Deciding that I want eye cancer and to become obese at the same time, I played Jack Bros. by Atlus for the Virtual Boy. Jack Bros. is a very simple dungeon crawler for the Virtual Boy using original icons from Atlus, such as Jack Frost and Pyro Jack.

The story is very simplistic but it gets the job done. On Halloween all the faeries come out play with the small children to have fun and cause mischief. You play as a one of the Jack brothers, either Jack Frost, Pyro Jack (Jack Lantern in this game) or Jack Skelton (aka Jack the Ripper). Having so much fun playing with the children, you forgot you’re suppose to go home by the end of the day or else you will die because faeries don’t belong in the realm of humans. So off you go on your adventure to get back home with the aid of a small pixie that nags you at every single floor giving you the most obvious hints.

The game play itself is just as simple as the story. You go through many floors of a dungeon collecting keys and eventually get back to the faerie world. Each character plays pretty much same, the only difference is the sprites. So I decide to play through the game as Jack Frost, who in my opinion is the most lovable one of the three. The gameplay consists of running around collecting keys and shooting ice/fire/knives at enemies, and if you’re feeling feisty you can use a bomb too, which kills everything on the screen. The dungeons are small and narrow, so there’s not much room for you or the enemies. The floors are designed to be maze-like but can easily be solved by any grade school child; so it becomes hard to lose yourself on the map. There is also a radar that tells you where the keys are and where the exit is. There is no life bar, but rather a timer. The timer goes down every time you are damaged and once the time runs out its game over.

Overall the game play is just basic and repetitive. There’s nothing really much else to it besides the dungeon crawling aspect of the game. The monotony does break up when you reach the end of a dungeon to fight a boss, which changes things around as you now have an arena to fight in and it suddenly feels like I’m playing Smash TV. Each boss is unique in their own way and all of them are very fun fights. Even though the boss fights can be very exhilarating, everything in between gets a bit boring after mere minutes of playtime.

Nothing really much to say about the graphics in the game, besides staring at them for too long can cause eye problems. Shades of red aren’t really a beautiful sight to see, but it gets the job done, sort of. I would say besides the eyestrain, everything else about the graphics is just fine; everything is identifiable and you really can’t get confused between one sprite or the next. The music seems to remind me of every DOS game there is, even the NES and Gameboy had some catchy bits in their music library but the music in this really reminds me of the days of DOS music which can be either good or bad depending how you like it. Even though the music was a step backward in synthesis, it was for the most part adequate, I’ll say just above mediocre but that’s it.

The game is simple and fun for those who enjoy the dungeon crawling. If you like to kill thirty minutes, give the game a try; if you want to kill over thirty minutes, give the game a try – just go see optometrist afterwards.

Now something for you well rounded Atlus fans, a First Person Fighter/Slasher/Melee, Maken X for the Sega Dreamcast. Maken X is about a weapon, as the protagonist; that’s right, you’re playing as a sword that takes control of people. As a sword you can’t really talk but everyone person around you will talk to you and for you, and at some points at the game give you a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ choice like “do you want to save the world or not?” To simply describe the story, you are made to defeat an evil entity because of some virus or something. It becomes really hard to pay attention to any of the story when the cut scenes are completely horrendous to watch. The voice acting is absolutely terrible and it doesn’t help that in the cut scenes, the dolls don’t move their lips to go with their bad voices – at least half the time, they tend to lip-sync when they feel like it.

The real appeal to play this game would not be the story but rather the gameplay. The gameplay is indeed unique, as you do not use a gun at all. Instead you get to hack and slash your way through enemies in first person perspective. For someone like me who plays every FPS ever just to go around meleeing everything I see, this was indeed a game for me. The melee is simple, move around, jump and attack – nothing much to it. Of course there is variety in weapon choices, or rather people choices. Can’t switch weapons, since you are the weapon, but you can take control of different people who have different styles of fighting and abilities. Every person you can ‘brainjack’ in the game has their own unique way of fighting, traits and abilities. But, before you can go taking people’s brains, you have to defeat them, which can be very fun.
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