Virtual Adept

My latest reviews at Game Chronicles:

Alpha Prime, first person shooter for PC.

Conan, action beat-em-up for PS3 (it has a 360 ver also).

My Spanish Coach - learn to speak Spanish on the DS.

My French Coach - learn to speak French on the DS.

My Word Coach - learn to speak English better (bigger vocabulary) on the Wii. Also on the DS.

Sam & Max 201: Ice Station Santa - the latest adventure for the comedic duo, for PC.

Just saw the list of games to be released this week over on Joystiq. Their full list is amazing, there’s going to be over 20 games released this week. Here is just a sample, the ones I might actually be interested in:

• Baten Kaitos Origins (GCN) - this is a must have for me.
• Mario vs Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis (DS) - will wait on reviews but this looks great.
• Just Cause (PC, Xbox, PS2, 360) - liked the demo for this for 360, might try the PC ver.
• Mage Knight: Apocalypse (PC) - I’m mainly interested in this so i can get the cool dragon pack-in.
• DEFCON (PC) - this is from the makers of Darwinia. Might be good, I’ll wait and see though.
• Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria (PS2) - this is a must have for me.
• Caesar IV (PC) - will look at reviews.
• ParaWorld (PC) - will look at reviews.

I am really getting behind on my RPGs, There are now like 6 or 7 out for the PS2 that I haven’t aquired yet. I am kind of obsessive about collecting all of them so I will probably be dishing out some dosh soon. But on the downside, I really wanted to save my money to get a Wii in November.

 

One of the more quirkier titles I have snagged recently for the Nintendo DS is Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! This passes itself off as some kind of brain training program by a virtual brain doctor of some kind (he has a name and I think it is based on a real person but I forgot the name).

The program keeps track of stats for up to four people. You first take a Brain Age Test, which is a series of logic puzzles or math puzzles or memory games that will estimate your “Brain Age”. Your Brain Age can range from 20 (the best) to 80 (the worst). When I first started I had a Brain Age of like 70 or so. Now I’m down to 42 I think but at one point I was down to 33 so it varies every time you take the test.

In addition to the test, you can do Daily Training, which is a series of routines that you should do every day to keep the brain fresh. This is stuff like doing 20 math calculations as fast as you can, or 100 of them, or reading aloud, or other little memory games. The program tracks how well you do at these daily training sessions and charts your progress over time, even allowing you to compare your charts to other people using the same cart.

 The cartridge also has sudoku games on it, and you can play those independently of the brain age checks or daily training. It keeps track of which ones you complete and how fast you did them. This was my first time to actually learn how to do sudoku and it is pretty fun. I can’t compare this game to any others however, since this is the first computerized sudoku I’ve played. It is kind of nice in that it lets you write in “temporary” numbers in the spaces to help you remember things you’re not quite sure of, like if you know it could be a 4 or a 7 you can write those as temporary numbers in a block and then when you figure out which it is, write 4 in big as a permanent answer.

One flaw with the game is that the voice recognition isn’t perfect, and neither is the hand writing recognition. In one of the brain age check games, you have to say the color that is flashing on the screen, like it might write the word “black” but the color it’s written in is actually yellow so you are supposed to say “yellow” but it doesn’t always understand what you say every time. The word “blue” seems to be the biggest one it hangs up on. I don’t know if it’s just my hick accent that it can’t get or what. Also, when writing numbers, you will have to possibly retrain yourself how to write the numbers in a way that can be read correctly. When I first started the game thought I was writing a 1 every time I wrote 7 until I changed how I was writing it. I still sometimes miss questions because it doesn’t read my numbers correctly. And there is a word memory game where you have to write down words that you saw on a previous screen, and that game is attrocious as far as being able to consistantly understand what letters you write. That one seriously needs work and practice on the part of the player to write your letters a specific way so that they are read correctly. All of these recognition problems add up to some frustration, but once you do get the hang of it the game becomes a lot more fun.

At the bargain price of $20, Brain Age is seeking a wide audience. I think it has a lot of mass-market appeal. I got Kim doing it and I think it appeals to the non-gamer quite a bit. She loved the sudoku so much that she bought another sudoku game just for that (which I’ll review later). This game was entertaining enough to keep me doing it steadily for three weeks, and I still have it as my main cart for the DS although I’ve slacked off a bit in using it. I think for the price that’s a decent amount of entertainment. Your milage may vary, of course!  I’d give it a B-. Could have been higher if the letter/number/voice recognition problems had been worked out better before release.

I may have to buy a new DS Lite for Kim to use.

Joystiq posted up a blurb about an upcomming RPG for the Nintendo DS, Lunar Knights. This is apparently set in the same world as the awesome Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar: Eternal Blue originally for the Sega CD, then Saturn, Then Playstation. This one has vampires!

Joystiq has posted a list of over 100 upcomming Nintendo DS titles! Wow, 2006 and 2007 will be great years to own a NDS or NDS Lite!

Nintendo’s press conference at E3 was amazing. They brought the Revolution/Wii out right away, and yes, Wii is apparently the official name, it wasn’t a joke. But the Wii looks incredible and is going to have an amazing line-up of games. The “wii-mote” remote/wand controller truly does appear to work very well and will change the way we play games. Here’s some of the games they announced for Wii:

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - yes, it’s a full Wii game, with enhanced graphics and of course fully using the wii-mote interface, you use the nunchuk addon to control Link’s movement and shield, and the wii-mote to aim and attack and for most functions. The interface looked slick. And the wii-mote apparently has a speaker and rumble capability, which is used to great effect in the new Zelda. When you pull your bow string back, you’ll hear it right on your wii-mote, and feel it get taunt. When you shove your nun-chuk forward, you’ll bash with Link’s shield and feel it. Yes, that’s right, the nun-chuk also has the motion/position detection in it, and force feedback on it too. And for those unlucky enough not to score a Wii, there will be a version of Twilight Princess released for the GameCube as well with standard GC controls. Best of all, this game will be a launch title for the Wii.

Red Steel - The Ubisoft shooter/brawler. Apparently you’re some kind of vigilante or cop, I’m not sure but you shoot bad guys with the wii-mote and move with the nun-chuk, and you can also do all kinds of cool moves, plus you can sword fight with the wii-mote, using it like an actual sword (oh yeah, forgot to mention that you also do this for Link in the Zelda game). While Zelda will concentrate on the adventure and puzzle solving aspects, Red Steel focuses on the action.

Super Mario Galaxy - this will be a system launch Mario game for the Wii and it looked great. You use the wii-mote to direct mario, but it’s not clear to me how that worked, although it seems like the wii-mote has very precise motion detection and can detect mere flicks of the wrist to do stuff in Mario.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption - we only got to see glimpses of this but it looked amazing and will use a control scheme similar to what I described for Red Steel. This I think will be a 2007 release.

Wii Sports - up to four players can whip our their wii-sticks to play tennis, golf, or baseball, and the motion of the controller is used exactly like you’d expect to control your player, so you’ll swing it like a golf club in the golf game, or like a tennis racket in the tennis game, or like a baseball bat in the baseball game. Should be fun, the tennis demo looked really neat.

Several others were mentioned or shown, including a Rayman game, Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam, ExciteTruck (sort of a 3D “exitebike” but with an off-road 4×4 truck instead), Metroid Prime 3, Project H.A.M.M.E.R. (some kind of beat-em-up I think), Animal Crossing, Disaster: Day of Crisis, Super Smash Bros. Wii, WarioWare: Smooth Moves, Batallion Wars Wii, Pilot Wings, Pokemon, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, Donkey Kong Wii, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, Fire Emblem Wii, Mario Kart Wii, Madden 07, NCAA Football 07, NBA Live, NASCAR 07. Also they said that 27 games would be playable on the E3 floor so we should be hearing a lot more about those games this week.

But that wasn’t the only thing exciting at the conference. Nintendo also revealed a bunch of new DS titles, such as a new Yoshi’s Island 2, a new Kirby game, a Star Fox game, DiddyKong Racing, Magical Vacation, and more, plus games we already knew about such as the Final Fantasy III remake got some great footage shown. The DS will be the handheld to own this year.

In short, Nintendo pwned Sony, their show was far more exciting and far more cool stuff was shown, with actual gameplay footage, not just cinematics. The only downside is that they did not announce a price or a firm launch date yet.

Last week or two since finishing Final Fantasy, I have been in “game browser” mode, as usual, playing various games and trying to find my next big addiction. I think I may have found it… and it’s not at all what I would have expected.

Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time (Nintendo DS) - this is an RPG mixed with a platformer. It’s basically a sequel to the GBA game Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, which I haven’t played. I am trying to aquire a copy of Superstar Saga, because I think playing it first might help me. Although, the difficulty in Partners in Time ramps up pretty gradually, really. But I still kind of want to play Superstar Saga first, since Partners is sort of like Superstar but on steriods, and I’m worried that Superstar won’t be as fun after finishing Partners. I’m only level 7 or 8 or so in the game so still early. It is definitely a fun game, for sure. Tentatively I’d give it an A.

DUO (PC) - this is a free little shooter by Binary Zoo that I’ve been spending a few hours on so far. It’s highly addictive and very innovative. Kind of hard to describe. It will run on even older PCs. Go ahead, download it, you’ll like it! Definitely a B+ and for free you can’t beat that.

RPG Maker 3 (PS2) - this is a toolbox game. It comes with a sample adventure, but the main purpose of the sample is to show off the editor. The game lets you design your own 3D RPG game. The look and feel of it reminds me somewhat of Grandia 2 or something similar. The combat, however, is not as good as Grandia series, it’s just a simple turn-based system it seems. I’m kind of bummed that they don’t really include any easy way to share your adventures with others, so what’s the point? I know you can supposedly somehow get the adventures off and upload them to a web site, because there is a web site for it for sharing the adventures. But it’s not intuitive. Slow loading times when transfering between areas of the game and going in and out of combat was also a turn-off to it for me. This was a rental, not sure if I’ll pick it up or not, might. The thing is, it doesn’t seem to have a very thriving community, and any editor game has to have a community otherwise you got no audience for your work. I’d be better off waiting for Neverwinter Nights 2, or even just writing a module for the original Neverwinter Nights, which has a thriving community. So far I’d give RPG Maker 3 a C or so, and that’s only if you are interested in the editor.

80 Days (PC) - this is a review game, can’t say much on it except it’s kind of an action/adventure. Check back here for a linky to a review on GameChronicles soon.

Crime Life: Gang Wars (Xbox) - this is another review game, a beat ‘em up action game. Look for a review on GameChronicles soon.

None of those really grabbed me fully, however, to the extent of “addiction”…. but …. one game has ….

Animal Crossing: Wild World (Nintendo DS) - This game is pure crack. I laughed at people who had pre-ordered this game, thinking it was going to be dorky. Well, call me a dork. I’m hooked. It’s a very simple game, really. You make up a character name and a town name. You move into town and immediately get sandbagged by the local entrepreneur with a big mortgage for your house, and you got no money. But there are lots of ways to make “bells” in the game (the currency). And you’ll get to meet all the talking animals that also live in your town. The main purpose of the game seems to be in collecting stuff. You can catch fish, bugs, find fossils, collect furniture and items for your house, upgrade your house, try and build up relationships with the other town folk, etc. It’s got a suprising amount of depth. And you can even go online using Nintendo Wi-Fi and visit the towns of your friends. I haven’t had a chance to try that yet, but plan to do it this weekend some. I wanted to get a feel for the game first. So far I’m rating this game A+, best game on the DS so far. If you have this game, post me or email me your friends code so we can visit each other in the game!

This will be a “mini-review” of the Nintendo DS game, Texas Hold ‘Em Poker DS. This is a poker game, obviously. The game has a bunch of different flavors of poker, not just Texas Hold ‘Em. The game also will play Omaha and Tahoe Hold ‘Em, which are basically the same as Texas version except you get four and three face-down cards respectively from which to choose 2 to combine with the table cards to make your hand. The game also has 5-card stud, 5-card draw, and 7-card stud. The game has several variations of limit-play and no-limit.

Game play is moderately fast if you turn off “tells”. If you turn on tells, then you have to wait while the game shows you a little “video” of each player deciding what they want to do when it’s their turn to make a bet, since they might cross their arm or lift their hat or some such. Not only that, but on your own turn you have to decide what “tell” to do, or pick “none”, so that’s one more click you have to do each turn. So I quickly turned off tells, since they didn’t add anything to the gameplay and just slowed down the game.

Graphics for this game are about what you would expect for a card game. That is, not very great but serviceable. They get the job done. Sound is about the same, they have a fairly annoying announcer that will announce in the bigger tournaments, but most of the game is pretty quiet except for some background casino noise in a few of the settings. You could just turn off the sound and listen to an iPod or stereo instead.

Texas Hold ‘Em Poker DS supports local multiplayer via wi-fi, but not internet play, which is a sorely missed opportunity. After playing Mario Kart DS online, I’m spoiled, I want to be able to play all my DS games online like that now. And the worse news is that the local wi-fi multiplayer only works if every player has a copy of the game, which is to say, most likely very rarely. I sure hope that someone releases a poker game for the DS that will support this and some other missing features I will go into in a bit.

There are two critical flaws in Texas Hold ‘Em Poker DS. The first flaw is that you can not just save the state of a tournament at any time. You must finish the tournament and it only saves which tournament you’re on and your winnings so far if you’re doing career mode. For the quick-game mode, you can’t save at all. Now this, is a major flaw, because a tournament of poker can take quite a while to finish, sometimes over an hour. That’s just too long for a mobile game to go without saving. If this game supported saving at any time, like it should, it would be a lot more playable.

The second critical flaw of the game is that your AI opponents are abso-freakin’-lutely brain dead poker players. They must have been programmed with AS instead, Artificial Stupidity. I’m playing 5-card stud, which is one card face down and then each player gets dealt up to 4 cards face up, with a round of bets between each deal. I got a pair of kings showing, which is the best hand visible on the table, and the last cards have been dealt, and so I raise the bet by a significant amount. What do two of the AI players do? They CALL! They should know that there is no way possible for them to win the hand so they call? That’s insane. And sometimes the AI will wildly bet All-in when they got nothing better than a high face card, not even a pair. It’s whacko.

Unfortunately since I’m unable to go to the internet to find competent opponents, the AI is pretty much a deal-killer for this game. Sure, it’s okay fun for a little while, but it’s not nearly challenging enough to challenge even a novice poker player like myself, and so there’s really not a lot of replay value here. Because of this flaw and the missing save feature, I have to rate this game poorly. The good news is, there’s still room in the DS market for a good poker game that supports wi-fi internet play. Don’t waste your money on this one. D-

Pics.

Ok, I have now had a chance to get my Nintendo Wi-Fi USB Dongle working and played some Mario Kart DS online. This is totally sweet, I hope most games coming out for the DS from now on will support this, it rocks!!

I remember when the Nintendo DS was first announced, and I thought how stupid a portable with two screens would be. Boy, I can’t tell you how wrong I was. I’ve only had my DS since Christmas, but I’m already spending an average of 2-3 hours per day playing it. I’ve already got a little library of titles for it, about 6 games or so. Not to mention that it plays GBA games too, which I have maybe 8 or 9. Here’s some micro-reviews of the games I’ve played so far:

1. Mario Kart DS - just got my wi-fi usb thingy and have not yet played online, but this game even in single player is a blast, one of the most fun racing titles I’ve played on any platform. what’s also great besides straight racing is that it’s got missions where you have to do certain goals, and also a battle mode where the object is to take out the other racers. A+

2. Meteos - great tetris-similar puzzle game, what’s so great about it is using the stylus to manipulate the blocks, it’s so intuitive and fast! really the only thing lacking in this one is wi-fi internet play (you can multi-play with nearby DS’s but not over the internet). A

3. Pac-Pix - another cool use of the touch-screen, in this game you draw little pac-man’s and watch them gobble up ghosts, it’s kind of hard to describe but it’s seriously fun. this game is pretty difficult, though, and if you die, you have to restart a whole chapter (each chapter is about 5 or 6 levels). B+

4. Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney - Very cool courtroom drama adventure. You play the role of Phoenix Wright, a fledgling lawyer, and your very first case is to defend one of your friends for murder charges. Of course, you manage to not only defend your client but catch the killer too, just like old Matlock. Touch screen support is there but isn’t really mandatory. Mostly what’s great about this game is the story. A+

5. Mario 64 DS - I haven’t spent much time on this one yet. Controls are not very intuitive, really, and seem sluggish compared to what I remember of the Nintendo 64 version. I am too early in the game to grade this one yet.