Super Mario 3D Land review – Out of the box 19/01/2012
Posted by jspanero in Game Reviews.Tags: nintendo 3ds, super mario 3D land
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A Nintendo system without a Mario game is like a Meryl Streep film without a crying close-up: a lot of things going for it but essentially incomplete. This is why Nintendo’s latest hardware offering, the intriguing 3DS, had been feeling a lot more River Wild than Sophie’s Choice in its first eight months of shelf life. However, November finally saw the release of the awkwardly yet fittingly titled new Mario game Super Mario 3D Land. Forget Mii-infested Pilotwings and rehashes of old legends: it’s been a long and complicated birth but the real launch title of the N3DS is at last with us.
Tactics Ogre Let Us Cling Together Review: Safety in Numbers 20/06/2011
Posted by jspanero in Game Reviews.Tags: let us cling together, psp, tactics ogre, yasumi matsuno
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Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, the eldest and often overlooked sibling of the Tactics RPG family, finally made it to European shores last February without much funfare. Harking back to a time when terms like “quicksave” hadn’t even been coined, Tactics Ogre is a slow-burn experience for people with an acquired taste in chess and arithmetic. But is it possible to find feeling in accuracy percentages and critical hit ratios?
A perfect circle
Square-Enix, notoriously shameless when it comes to reawakening and repackaging dead relics from their illustrious pantheon (the irony of them now owning the Tomb Raider license!), surprised everyone last year by announcing a worldwide release of a so-called ‘reinvention’ of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together for the PSP. The original game, a tactical-RPG developed for the SNES by Quest with video game designer Yasumi Matsuno at the helm, had only made it to North America via a PSX port, with Europe missing it altogether. Such an under-the-radar title only found fame retrospectively, after the success of its spiritual follow-up Final Fantasty Tactics in the United States. The very few copies available of Tactics Ogre in English soon shot up in value and the game ascended to cult limbo, limited to a few Westerners. Until now.
Donkey Kong Country Returns – Nintendo’s banana skin moment 04/05/2011
Posted by jspanero in Game Reviews.Tags: donkey kong, donkey kong country, donkey kong country returns, rare, retro
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14 years after his last outing, Nintendo has surprised everyone by bringing Donkey Kong back to one of his most famous territories, the Donkey Kong Country famed by British developers Rareware. Magnificently quirky experiments aside (DK Jungle Beat), Donkey Kong and friends had been filling their spare time since their 90’s heyday cameoing in the usual Nintendo-rostered games (Mario Kart and Smash Bros) or headlining portable fare with some solid successes (the Mario VS DK series for the GBA and DS) and some fillers (King of Swing). Donkey Kong Country Returns picks up where we left the simian gang around the time of Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble, the third game in the original Country trilogy, hoping to recreate the magic and accompanying sales of the Super Nintendo classics. Shame that what these monkeys need in 2010 is something Nintendo just cannot give them: a trip in space and time to Rare’s offices in Twycross, Leicestershire circa 1995.
- Monkey cryogenics
Last Window: The Secret of Cape West Review – A Room with No View 13/04/2011
Posted by jspanero in Game Reviews.Tags: hotel dusk, last window
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Cing’s swansong adventure for the Nintendo DS starts as a study in the sublimation of idleness, with a protagonist haunted by introspection and plenty of wandering around empty corridors unraveling an improbable mystery. But is Cing trying to send out an S.O.S. or deliberately boring everyone, including themselves, to death?
- This is how it always ends
Cing is a small Japanese studio founded in 1999 who, after publishing a handful of mobile games in their homeland, gained international notoriety with the release of the adventure game Another Code: Two Memories for the Nintendo DS in 2005. Another Code was a minor hit worldwide, and although it had an interesting premise and enough aplomb to pull off a story about dysfunctional parenthood in a +7 rated game, it sold well mainly because the DS catalogue was in its infancy back then. If ever a game was deserving of the cult hit tag, Another Code was it. Their follow up, Hotel Dusk: Room 215 didn’t exactly fight hard to dismiss this tag: a slow-burning interactive novel with a convoluted plot but a striking style (hand drawn visuals and jazzy codas), unlike anything else on the console.
Last Window: The Secret of Cape West is a sequel to Hotel Dusk and was released in early 2010 in Japan and in autumn of the same year in Europe. It also happens to be Cing’s last ever release, as the company filed for bankruptcy in March 2010. The game follows in the steps of Hotel Dusk, with the same artistic direction, the same interface (holding the DS book-style, with the touchscreen acting as a 2D navigational map and a shoddy 3D environment in the other screen), the same protagonist (Kyle Hyde, a retired cop with more skeletons in the closet than Montgomery Clift) and a very similar premise (an enclosed set with a buried secret).
Bayonetta Review – A Marked Woman 11/04/2011
Posted by jspanero in Game Reviews.Tags: bayonetta, hideki kamiya, platinum games, review
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Fiercer than Grace Jones after midnight and starring in a game that catapults the action genre into the stratosphere in more ways than one, Bayonetta the witch seemed destined for gaming stardom when she hit the scene in late 2009. She was Hideki Kamiya’s wildest wet dream yet, a spunky woman doing all kinds of things a lady was not supposed to do – mainly dismembering gruesome angels, saving the universe from collapsing and, oh, oozing confidence from every single pore of her hair-made catsuit (don’t ask). Clearly she was to be too much for an industry grown on the back of saving an elusive princess locked away in another castle.
- You’re facing the wrong way, darling
Bayonetta had a promising start, though: the reviews for this Platinum Games outing were mostly positive (Famitsu, amongst other publications, awarded top marks to the Xbox360 version of the game) and the hardcore community lapped up an organic battle system that encouraged experimentation and not just mindless button-mashing. But fast-forward one year on, and although SEGA ran a decent marketing campaign for it and a respectable 1.1 million copies were sold worldwide, the game came and went with a whisper rather than a bang and has since become bargain bin fodder. Mentions of a possible sequel by Kamiya have also been met with a collective shrug of shoulders – why is Bayonetta failing to ignite the passion of gamers and could that certain female strutting her stuff onscreen have something to do with it?
Press Start to Play 10/04/2011
Posted by jspanero in Game Reviews.Tags: games reviews, heart games
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I love games with all my heart. I get swept away by their geniality, only to be left with an empty void inside when they go away.
Even after all these years they still lift my spirits
make me laugh,
inspire me,
and sometimes they break my heart too.
This is a recollection of my one night stands, flings, platonic romances and long term relationships. Enjoy.
Heart Games 