Metal Gear Solid

This old classic has aged gracefully. The controls are so crisp and responsive it makes me want to go back and give Fear Effect an even lower star rating. The radio system was a stroke of brilliance, I love the little picture of the person you are talking to and the banter that goes back and forth. Despite the fact that every stealth game, and every ill conceived stealth section which was shoe horned into a game was partially informed by the mile stone opus, very few ever came close to doing as good a job as this one does. Except of course for the Batman Arkham games. Those are the best stealth games ever.

Game play video

In a five star ranking system,
I give this game 4

Vagrant Story

I was hoping this would be a homelessness sim. The porfessions of assasin, and mercinary are hugely overrepresented in video games, but even on the rare occasions a story focuses on a character with some other job, it is still a job. I was excited to play a game that explored the completely unexplored territory of playing as a hobo. Of course the moment I looked at the cover are it was immedately obvious this was a Japanese RPG. This is a genera I don't particularly care for, and the graphics are at the painfully ugly pixelated low end of the Play Station 1's already limited capabilities. That being said, they manage to pull of a very cinematic feel, and the combat system is unique and interesting. It allows free motion throughout the fight so you can dodge if you are fast enough. The action freezes when an attack is happening and the number of hit points taken pops up. When you attack it allows you to pick which part of the enemies body you want to target. This makes it much more engaging than Final Fantasy style rotational battle.

Game play video (Skip to 5:15 for the part that isn't boring)

In a five star rating system,
I give this game 3

Fear Effect 2

This game improves significantly upon the previous installment in the series. You start out with a better weapon selection, a larger area to explore, and you have the ability to save in the items menu, so hypothetically the problem of reloading at the beginning and having to get back to where you were should be solved. I didn't die during the time I was playing so I don't know for sure.
Where as the last one was, in my opinion, a profoundly unsatisfying gaming experience, this one seemed to be reasonably adaquit, it was simply not my cup of tea.

game play video

In a five star rating system,
I give this game 2.5

Fear Effect

In stark contrast to the previous game I reviewed (Hear of Darkness) this game take incredibly long to reload when you die, in fact it kicks you back to the menu screen if you haven't made it to a save point yet. Assuming you start mashing the triangle button continuously the second you die, so that you select new game the second the menu screen loads, it will take you 15 seconds from the moment you die until you can start playing again. Think about that. Think about it for 15 seconds, go ahead and count. Once you are back it doesn't mean you are back to where you died, oh no, you are back at the beginning of the level. You still have to walk to the elevator, press the button, skip the cinematic, and go down a hallway until you can get shot again. This game has a marvelously well developed esthetic. An obvious take off on blade runner, with one of the earlier attempts at cell shading, it would be really interesting if everything in the actual play experience, from the sluggish and clumsy controls to the painfully slow loading screens, wasn't absolutely terrible.

Game play video

In a five star ranking system,
I give this game 2 and it is lucky to get that many.

Heart of Darkness

 This is the only game so far that I am DEFINITELY going to go back and play more of once I have given all of them their 30 minutes of play. It is a lot like Out of This World, or Flash Back. It has a beautiful side scroll play style with a crisp and engaging visual esthetic and lots of fun death sequences, everything I want from an adventure game. The most important thing is that it offers very quick refresh time, and starts you right back where you died, which keeps it from getting obnoxiously frustrating. Why most of the games in the past 15 years never picked up on this magic formula of NOT having really long drawn out "you suck for dying" sequences is a mystery to me.

Game play video

In a five star ranking system,
I give this game 5

The Unholy War

This game is pretty cool. You play either as the monsters or robots and take turns moving your wide selection of characters around a landscape/board, and when your guy is next to your opponents guy you can order an attack. This brings you to a battle arena that is modeled off of the pentagonal section of board that your opponents guy was standing on when you attacked (grassy field, lava flow, desert, ect.). Once this has happened you move your character around the space trying to avoid enviromental dangers such as lava, and trying to either fire off projectiles off at your opponent or get up close to attack them. This will depend a lot on which of your characters you are attacking or defending with and which of your opponents character you are defending against or attacking. If you are the six legged rhinoceros monster you always want to get in close and use your heavy attack, if you are the sexy robot you always want to keep your distance and use projectiles, there are many shades of strategy in between these two extremes of course.

Game play video

In a five star ranking system,
I give this game 3

Silent Hill

This game deserves every bit of the acclaim it has earned for its skill at setting the mood. Even with the painfully ugly blocky first generation 3D graphics of the Play Station, they manage to hone an esthetic and the music really sells the atmosphere. The controls, however, are a major problem. They are slow, the button mapping is a little unintuitive, and it fails to adjust with the different camera angle as you enter a new area so I frequently find my self hopping backward even though I am pressing forward on the D-pad. They did some very interesting things with the transition of camera angles as you enter new areas. A great example of this is at 1:45 on the video below, and the part where he crashes into a wall is also a great example of how the directional controls fail to keep pace with this avant garde camera work. These controls are truly terrible, I am glad they did not prevent the game for getting recognition for all the things it did right.

A game play video

In a five star ranking system,
the controls get a 1.5
every other aspect of the game gets a 5
and so the game overall gets a 4

No One Can Stop Mr. Domino

The Japanese pedigree of this game is immediately obvious from the moment the title video starts. The art and sound design have the characteristic wacky fun quality of a very Japanese game, such as katamari damacy.
You are a smiley faced domino with legs that walks around a track that changes every level. The first level is a Casino, the second level is a shopping center, I never made it to the later levels. Your character can be steered and his or her speed can be adjusted but it will never stop walking. beyond this you have only one other control input, that is to hold down a button (any button) and leave a trail of dominos in your wake. The objective is to set up a string of dominos that will hit the little check points around the track, on your next circut around the track you knock down your string of dominos and when they hit the check points they will set off events such as knocking over a house of cars, or a tower of playing dice, or sending a ball down a ramp. This game would be much more fun if it had embraced the continuous play, impossible to lose, complete the objectives in your own time, style that one would expect from this sort of nontraditional and off beat game. The timer that kills you if you do not complete all the objectives in time detracts heavily from the game play in my opinion.

Here is a video of some game play.

In a five star ranking system,
I give this game 3.5

Qix Neo

I spent countless hours of my wasted youth playing Qix for the original Nintendo. Much like Tetris it had an oddly soothing quality (due in no small part to the sound design) punctuated by periodic moments of white knuckle tension when you were about to lose. The game mechanic was all about drawing little boxes to quarantine off areas populated by erratically moving enemies. You were safe as long as you were not drawing, but if an enemy touched you as you were drawing one of these boxes you would lose a life.

This video tells you everything you need to know about this NES classic

Qix Neo is an interesting spin on this old favorite of mine. There is a timer counting down to keep you from camping out too long looking for an optimal opportunity to draw lines, there are way more enemies on the screen at a given moment, and every level has a new one with a new random movement pattern. Projectiles from enemies are a major concern in this game and did not exist in the previous installment. The sound design, although radically different, is just as satisfying as the original. Death rays sound the way that death rays ought to. This is not as relaxing to play as the original, but just as much fun.

This video shows some game play of Qix Neo and tells a bit of its history.

On a five star ranking system,
I give this game 4.5

Video gaming challange

My brother came into town this week for the decades old, multi family, annual tradition that is:

THE COTTON-ROWLAND HALLOWEEN PARTY.

Before he came I called him and asked if he might be able to brig his copy of rouge squadron for the N64.
"I'll bring the one for the game cube, it was better"
When I reminded him that I don't have a game cube he said
"I'll bring a game cube too"
When he got here he presented me with these two boxes.

Inside the boxes.

He explained that since Arkham Origins was out he figured he would lend me his PS3 to play it on, and figured he would bring "a few" other games as well.
"I mean you've only got one class this semester right? You've got some time on your hands"

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

69 games spanning 5 systems, representing decades of gaming history and hundreds, most likely over one thousand, gaming hours. I could not hope to beat all of these games. Some will be stupidly hard, some would just be an unpleasant chore to play through, but I could sample all of them. Ever game on this table represents the work of a team of skilled programmers working 40 hour weeks for months some times years on end. I can sacrifice 30 minutes of my time to sample and appreciate their artistic output.

THE RULES
(as arbitrarily made up by me just now)

I play each game for a minimum of half an hour.

I write a quick review of each (time spent writing review is NOT to exceed time spent playing game).

I work through one system before I move on to another.

The order of systems will be:
Play station 1
Play station 2
Xbox
Game cube
Play station 3

Let the games begin.