Status: “150%” complete. Unlikely to put more work into it Most Intriguing Idea: Making a 2-D platformer from projections of a 3-D world. Best Design Decision: The rotation mechanic. Worst Design Decision: Being indecisive about the point of the platforming Summary: Fez is a very nice game, with an intriguing central conceit, that doesn’t hold up against the puzzle-platformer genre’s recent classics. In part, this is because Fez can’t seem to decide whether its platforming is a puzzle, or just a traversal challenge on the way to the puzzle. The indecision turns out to be a problem. The controls feel [Read more...]
Sparky
Apr 302012
Apr 192012
I Am Alive is a post-apocalyptic platforming and combat game that does a few things right and many things very poorly. My upcoming second opinion on GameCritics will cover many of the mechanical and technical issues, but I didn’t have enough space to address an additional, more subtle point about the story. I Am Alive clearly wants to be a serious, adult take on post-apocalyptic survival, and in some respects it is. Unfortunately, the game’s treatment of women, among other things, seems to devolve back to the attitudes of a teenaged boy. In I Am Alive, women are helpless objects [Read more...]
Apr 162012
Status: Completed main quest, second quest… mehbe later Most Intriguing Idea: Essentially eliminating “mana” and cooldowns. Best Design Decision: The dodge/cc-regeneration mechanic. Worst Design Decision: Pretty much everything else. Summary: Thanks to Tales of Legendia, Tales of Graces f is not the worst game in the Tales series, but oh how close it came. That’s through no fault of the combat design; I found the battles to be exceptionally slick and with very few exceptions very enjoyable to play. By removing the separate “mana” gauge and linking all combat actions to a single, recharging counter, the battles gained a lot [Read more...]
Apr 112012
I spent more time than I had anticipated down on the show floor at PAX, although the only thing I visited that had much of a line was XCOM, which was a theater demo and ended up in the “Panels” post. I might have gone for Assassin’s Creed, but they had a woman shouting nonsense through a megaphone and the prospect of listening to her for 30-plus minutes was more than I could bear. Also, the simple truth is that if you spend your time at PAX waiting around in line for a demo you’ll play on XBOX Live in [Read more...]
Recent Comments