What Are You Playing? (Spring 2011)

Strania - The wacky weapon switching/mixing is fun, and the bosses are awesome, but stage one with its endless sweeping transitions and nothing happening game-wise blows. Hurts the whole game a little bit. Periods of inactivity in the first two stages put this below Border Down and Under Defeat, but it's still pretty cool. Getting all up in it with the sword is encouraged, and slicing up the stage 4 boss is magical.

Yakuza 4 - A good amount better than the first two games. There's plenty of stuff to do in the world, the combat is easily the best in the series, hard mode isn't a drag at all, and I'm all for how the characters are switched up.

Tactics Ogre (PSP) - Currently I'm mulling over whether to take the Law or Chaos path in the next battle.

On one hand, agreeing to kill a bunch of civilians for tactical gain goes completely against the characters' background as a weak and oppressed people fighting for freedom and justice. They'd be the last ones to agree to something like that and would completely identify with the civilians in question. On the other hand, being righteous all the time can get boring.

I like that many aspects of the game are streamlined compared to Final Fantasy Tactics, not only because of my attention span but because of the larger number of characters you use. I'm talking mostly about class levelling and the lack of prerequisites to change classes.

My only real gripe is the Shop menu. Figuring out who can use what in regards to equipment and spells basically requires you to use memorization and flip back and forth between the Party and Shop menus. All they needed to do was change the "which classes can use this item" pane to a "which individuals can use this item" pane, and let you highlight each character to see the stat differences. I also can't figure out why I have Astromancer in my list of classes in the Shop, except maybe I had one as a guest at some point.

Don't let the bitching fool you though, I'm loving it.

The more I love a game, the more I'll bitch about the relatively minor things. If I didn't like it, why would I care.

Tokyo Beat Down (DS)

There's no good reason to like this, but I do. Its flat gameplay is constantly resuscitated by Atlus's superb translation.

Dark Messiah: TNL is pretty much the only place this game got any love. Which is shameful, because this game is absolutely badass. I went through the demo multiple times before it came out, but have just now gotten around to playing it. I can't say enough good about it. So far the only negative for me is some of the dumb shit one of the companion characters keeps yelling out.

Getting aggressive about The Witcher finally. I'm about 10 hours in and making real progress now. I'm liking it, definitely more than I did before, although it's not really standing out for me yet, either. It seems very level-based rather than open-world which makes it seem a little narrow, and the combat is, of course, not very interesting.

But Witcher 2 looks soooo good, and I'm liking it enough. I'm going to try to get through as much as I can before Portal 2 comes out.

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Originally Posted by Vasteel

Dark Messiah: TNL is pretty much the only place this game got any love. Which is shameful, because this game is absolutely badass. I went through the demo multiple times before it came out, but have just now gotten around to playing it. I can't say enough good about it. So far the only negative for me is some of the dumb shit one of the companion characters keeps yelling out.

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I completely forgot that game even existed until just right now, but I so wanted to play it when it came out and just didn't have a PC that could handle it.

I'm gonna get it tonight, thanks for bringing this up.

It's really not that great.

Dishwasher: Vampire Smile is amazing. Need to finish up the hardest difficulty, which is somewhat easier than my first time through on hard since I now know the game and have all the upgrades.

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Originally Posted by Compass

It's really not that great.

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But it totally is.