GAMES

Dilemma at the arcade

So I recently bought a new MSPoints card so that I could get the full version of Boom Boom Rocket at the Marketplace, and now I’m wondering what I should do with the rest of my points – hold out for greater things, or make up for my late entrance into the new generation by purchasing older titles?

I was very tempted to download Disposable’s very own 360 Special Edition to remind myself about what I wrote in my Live Arcade feature, but that would be incredibly vain, wouldn’t it? For the moment I think I’ll just wait and see what’s around the corner…

qazimod

PS: if you’re wondering why the Wii Special Edition isn’t on the site’s sidebar…stop being picky. There’s a link right there on the front page. Besides, we’ll prolly be switching to WordPress or something soon. Er.

https://www.disposablemedia.co.uk/2007/04/3079/

GAMES

So wrong…and yet so Wright…

Like Disposable, you’re probably a fan of Capcom’s excellent Phoenix Wright games on the DS and, previously, the GBA (oh, and there was a release on the PC, too, but that’s another story.) I finished a mini review of Justice For All a few weeks ago and if all goes well it should make it into Issue 7 of the magazine. However, since this place is a deserted wasteland and I’m using my other Blogger haunt as a lab for my “five-word-opinion” experiments, I’d like to use this space to ramble about where the games succeed and where they, er, don’t.

Immediately, at least, Phoenix Wright is a series that’s easy to dislike. It’s a retrograde formula that meanders along a linear path, with simple audio, scant animation and dated mechanics of item manipulation and conversation. It’s impossible to deviate from what the developers want you to do without wasting time or being punished, and there are times when the trials and Psyche-Locks can, at best, have you second-guessing the developer’s intentions and, at worst, have you abusing the ability to save anywhere as you try every option available until you succeed.

I liken it to Final Fantasy VII: I love that game, but I mostly love it for it’s story, characters, and evocative locations. Why? Because it’s gameplay is, being brutally honest, a series of conversations (and maybe the odd minigame) bookended by dozens of random, turn-based, tiresome battles. Battles that, being the hopeless case that I am, I can only win by first going to the World map and beginning a long grind to the point were my adversary is a walkover. It’s the equivalent of Wright‘s game-save abuse.

I think that games don’t necessarily have to be delightful and immediate in order to be rewarding; Wright‘s more detail-heavy scenarios only serve to make the game a more thought-provoking experience. At the most basic level, this can be seen by the fact that, in so many cases, the real culprit uses a misleading personality to hide their true self (Dolores Willow, April May.) Further cases then build the complexity up to a point where the finale is as headache-inducing as it is ingenious, and the revelation of the truth is nearly always a fitting reward for the hours you spent trying to out-crazy the solutions you were dreaming up: proof that retrograde formulas with dated mechanics confined to linear paths have their place in gaming.

qazimod

https://www.disposablemedia.co.uk/2007/04/3080/

ARCHIVES

Freeware: Gunroar

Picked up from the old boards: an Issue 1 freeware article that never was…

“Ask a passionate gamer to list some of the finest homebrew developers whose work should be the first to be downloaded by homebrew virgins, and there’s a chance that one of the names to drop off their tongue would be Kenta Cho of ABA Games, especially if shooters are the focus of the discussion: The developer has created plenty of polished and exhilerating shooters in the past – TUMIKI Fighters, rRootage and Torus Trooper to name but three – and at the time of writing Gunroar is one of his latest releases: if you hadn’t guessed, it’s a shooter as well…”

Read the full story here

qazimod

https://www.disposablemedia.co.uk/2006/03/3082/

GAMES/TECH

Download play: making demographic-chasing child’s play

One of the clever things The Sims is able to do in order to guarantee financial success is to theme it’s world around a new demographic with every expansion pack. So people are into metal? Fine, release The Sims: Rockin’ Out. Everyone’s watching – I don’t know – American crime dramas on Sky? Time to develop The Sims: Whodunnit? It’s effortless, and yet it could become even more effortless with new X360 services that, if Allard is to be believed, stream new content directly to the hard drive whilst the game is being played. Sure, we’re not likely to see a Sims on the 360, but something like Tony Hawks could keep up with the kidz by streaming the latest angst-metal to your big white box (for a small fee, I guess), or Epic’s US offices could track a US war film’s journey to UK shores so that army camo skin downloads for Gears of War are published in time to coincide with the hypothetical film’s release. It’d be like releasing lots of cheap expansion packs over short periods of time; perhaps not something people want, but still something that’s feasible.

Hell, it could happen to PC owners as well: just look at Valve’s Steam service: if it weren’t for the downloads being manually activated, they could partake in “chase the demographic” as well. We’d leave Half-Life 2 alone for a few weeks because there’s a new series of 24 on, and by the time we return we’re foiling terrorists and being paranoid about our co-workers. I just see it being a more likely scenario for the console kids. Maybe there’s a future DM feature in this…

qazimod

https://www.disposablemedia.co.uk/2006/03/3083/

ONLINE; Freeware
by Qazimod

Tsubushi (Kenka Bancho)

Some things simply defy explanation – to play is the only way to see.
http://jp.shockwave.com/games/arcade/shooting/tsubushi/play.html

https://www.disposablemedia.co.uk/2006/03/3086/