What do you do when you’re faced with a major loss? Some people go for the extreme “solution” and commit suicide. Others attempt to drown out their sorrows with alcohol. Me, I fixate on video games.

This was especially true during the first half of 2007. During that year, two people were diagnosed with cancer.  One was the father of a friend of mine. The other one was my mother.

To make a long story short, my friend’s father pulled through. My mother didn’t.

I’d already played a bit of Trauma Center: Second Opinion before she died. After her passing, I went all out. I rented the Nintendo Wii at my friend’s Internet Cafe.  I played almost non-stop everyday from the time it opened till the time it closed its doors before dawn. At the time, it seemed to be one of my main forms of coping with the stages of Kubler-Ross’ model. (continue reading…)

As a brief reprieve from the normal articles I shoot out, I figured I’d take a moment and talk to you all about something that bugs every gamer – Bad Endings.

Now I don’t mean bad endings as in “You didn’t complete a mission objective – bad end” sorta bad endings, but ones that are just highly disappointing and brief or offer little closure.

This may become a weekly thing, I’m not too sure, but today we cover four from the days of my childhood.

#4 – Bad Dudes :

Internet memes aside, really what the hell, a solid beat’em up on the NES where President Ronnie takes the Bad Dudes out for Hamburger after they beat up a legion of ninjas who kidnapped him. I mean really think about that. That’s it? I’d feel kinda pissed off if I was them. Also, what the hell did the ninjas kidnap the president for? Was this part of a larger global plot? What were their demands? Also – why the hell weren’t these guys part of the President’s elite personal security to begin with if they’re such Bad Dudes?

Screw you man, saving your ass is only worth a Burger?

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In the current generation of party games across the platforms – Mario Party, Wii-Sports, Guitar Hero/Rock Band, Rayman Raving Rabbids, Wario Ware, etc – there’s one major thing these games have in common

Co-ordination and or timing – and mini-games.

Now I don’t know about you, but back in my day, we were lazy. Our ‘party’ games so to speak were the likes of Madden, Tecmo Bowl, NBA JAM, Blitz, You Don’t Know Jack, Pong and such. (Shh I’m leaving Track N Field out of this one.)

What I mean by this, is they were relatively sedentary games, learn a few button clicks, maybe a little bit of choice quick finger movements, but that was really it. We had buttons dedicated to juke around an opponent, or to dribble between their legs. Long gone are these games and their lazy ire for the lazy video game playing nerd. Now we have the six-axis to flick our controller in various directions to help angle his shot, a guitar with a gyro in it to detect when we are swishing our instrument into the air to ‘rock out’ harder, or a wii-mote to swish around in a graceful ark to do make a hook at a guy’s jaw. (continue reading…)

Would you wait nine years before you bought a console of your own?

I’d like to think that the universe sends you signs when the time for something is right. For example, I noticed certain hints in the past few weeks, and all of them had at least one common denominator.

Sign Number One: a friend of mine who owns an Internet cafe (the very same cafe where I’ve been renting his PS2 per hour) said “maybe you should get your own console.”

Sign Number Two: I received a little news item when I logged on to Windows Live Messenger. Sony had apparently slashed the price of the PlayStation 2 down to US$100.

Sign Number Three: An ad on the Internet mentioned that someone was selling her PS2 for a little over US$50.

I figured these three signals were enough for me to go around. It was time. (continue reading…)

Games aren’t that hard anymore, that’s an argument often thrown around these days by many gamers. “Well that’s why they put difficulty settings in!” – is often the retort.

I generally play a game the first time through on Normal, to get a feel of what the developers wanted the average player to see, when I find that it is in fact incredibly easy – I’ll replay it on a harder difficulty (especially when this results in a different ending or extra levels/bonus-dungeons.) Most of my reviews are on a game’s native, default, normal, medium settings of difficulty – because that’s what I expect the developers wanted the average person to play on and it generally seems to be what the average person starts out on (whether or not they finish up on harder ones is another issue all together.) (Such as this preview/review for Fire Emblem) (continue reading…)

The following article contains SPOILERS.  You done been warned.

When I was a kid, there was a game series  that EVERYONE played, or else they were stupid.  Even the local Sega fans begrudgingly picked up a SNES, or borrowed one from a friend, for just one game.  If you’re in the know, and read the title of this article, you’ve probably guessed that the series in question is The Legend of Zelda.  If you didn’t guess that, you probably owned (Or still own) an XBox.

Now, I bring this up because I’ve been playing The Wind Waker again, because I just got my GameCube back, and unfortunately, my favourite games, Metroid Prime 1&2, were destroyed.  So I pulled out my next favourite, and it’s definitely worthwhile to play through.

I won’t recap the story or something, this isn’t a review of the game.  This is me stating the reasons why I love Toon Link, and why you’re a jerk if you don’t.

1. (continue reading…)

No, no I can’t. You can’t either and neither can the Japanese who are notoriously good at these rhythm based games. (I’m kidding) But that should give you an idea of how hard and unforgiving this game is.

‘What is this game,’ I hear you ask (through the mysteries of the Internet) out loud? It’s one of the strangest mix-ups of genres I’ve seen to date – Part WarioWare, part Elite Beat Agents, all frustration on your Nintendo DS. Rhythm Heaven brings to the plate over 30 mini-games that are all rhythm based, everything from helping a little cartoon monkey clap along with the beat to a cutesy j-pop (’Japanese Pop’, for those who are unaware) singer to a platoon of dancing ducks following the orders of their ducky drill sergeant. Not that all the games are dancing based, one game has you filling up robots on a factory line who will fly off to do who-knows-what (attack John Conner I assume) and another has you flipping dumplings into a monk’s mouth.

Yeah, I had the same puzzled look on my face too. (continue reading…)

Okay there are a few things I love dearly in life.

• RPGs
• SRPGs
• Fighting games with ludicrous combos
• Badassery(Badassitude?)

(This is not a full and comprehensive list of all things The Reverend Lei loves dearly in life but can be taken as the context of such for this article.)

That said, tri-Ace has come through with another brilliant installment of Valkyrie Profile (Covenant of the Plume,) it’s brilliant and just like..wait a minute no it’s not – It’s an SRPG? That’s right VP-CotP (here on known as Valk – Plume) is an SRPG, with a twist, combo-combat. What I mean by this is that when you initiate combat, it goes into a semi-action based combat, where your characters are no longer bound by turns but can freely attack at their own discretion, (well, your discretion,) assuming you have enough attacks left for that character, or the monster is still in range of their next attack – similar to the prior games. (continue reading…)

Presenting…

…The Top Five Signs That a DLC Should Have Just Been Free

Brought to you by Fedora Man

Well it finally April and you have to love how easy it is to open an article with the lines “so it’s finally whatever month we’re in right now”. It’s time for the next step in my great journey to earn money through a video game blog. Now I know you might be wondering “I thought you had billions! Were you lying to me?” The answer is of course, no. Stupid. Why would I make something like that up? But the difference between that money and the money I’ll earn on this site is I actually had to do work to earn it, unlike my corporation where I really don’t do any work at all. I can show all my friend “yeah this is the ten dollars I earned THROUGH WORK!” and if they say that they also have a job and have made more money, I’ll pull out my emergency one million dollars that I always keep stashed in my pants and laugh at them, probably while rubbing the money all over myself. (continue reading…)

Long ago, there was a web game called Neopets.  It was basically a collection of minigames, combined with Pokemon-like cockfighting.  When I was about 13 or 14, EVERYONE was into it:  Male, female, kids, pederasts… It was a sensation.

If you’re unfamiliar, I’ll give you a quick rundown.  There are a bunch of cute little animals you could adopt in a variety of colours and designs, with whom you can play games (Which are more often than not cutely redecorated clones of Apple IIe 5 1/4in floppy titles reprogrammed in Flash), train at various schools to raise their stats, and of course, have the viciously beat the hell out of each other.

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