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Review: Final Fantasy XIII
Final Fantasy XIII’s gimmick is that it pares down the gameplay to a few basic elements: Turn-based battles against mobs of fantastic creatures and elaborate, movielike story sequences. But this time, Square Enix finally threw the baby out with the bathwater: The things that make RPGs feel so different from other games — the sense of a grand, nonlinear adventure and the rising and falling action of an open-ended world — are gone.
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Review: Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Military-based action games have become the first-person-shooter staple thanks to franchises like Call of Duty. We’ve seen attempts to capture the same experience before, but Battlefield: Bad Company seems to do the best job at tackling the genre with its own take on things.
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Review: Flipper
If you ever had a childhood pet that you loved dearly you’ll understand the appeal of Flipper, a DSiWare puzzle game. The premise is simple: you play a young boy whose beloved goldfish, Flipper, has been stolen. In order to get him back for good you’ll have to rescue him from 20 puzzle levels in five worlds. Successfully get through all the worlds, and you’ll be reunited with your little pal.
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Review: Call of Duty: Zombies (iPhone)
Killing Nazi zombies is a guilt-free pleasure. Killing zombies you might feel bad about. But Nazi zombies? They were evil before they became mindless ghouls. Activision recognizes the pleasures inherit in killing the fascist undead, and thus charges you a full $10 to download and play their Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies. Whether or not its worth it is completely dependent on your lust for blood.
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Review: Ingenious (iPhone)
Ingenious may be the perfect name for this puzzle game from developer United Soft Media Verlag, because you pretty much have to be a genius to master it.
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Review: Viva il Re
Viva il Re (which means “Long live the King” in Italian) is a well-designed board game by Stefano Luperto that has been beautifully ported to the iPhone by by Pro-netics S.p.A. The object is to score points and hopefully get one of your characters to become the new king, because the old king has decided to retire.
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Review: Toy Soldiers
Toy Soldiers—the new Xbox Live Arcade game from Microsoft Game Studios that kicks off the March’s Block Party promotion of hot new XBLA games—is one of those games that could have been a military strategy game that went for realism, but instead stayed closer to its die-cast inspiration and is a game about playing with toys: toy soldiers and their wind-up weapons of war, fighting large-scale battles out in large dioramas set up in bedrooms and backyards.
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Review: Wii Motion Plus
The Wii Motion Plus is a small addition to the Wii Remote, often referred to as, the Wii-mote. When people purchased this latest generation of Nintendo home gaming console, they purchased it for the motion controls and innovative game play. While many games worked quite well with the Wii remote, many players complained about the sensitivity of the controls. With the release of the Wii Motion Plus, the remote becomes everything players originally expected from Nintendo.
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Review: Snood for iPhone
Snood is a “match-three” puzzle game from Electronic Arts. First released in 1996, the colorful puzzle game has graced multiple platforms and has become arguably the most successful casual game in history (save Solitaire). EA brings the classic gameplay elements to the iPhone and embellishes the title with new modes and features, making this version of Snood more than a simple port.
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Review: Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey
If you are a gamer that has roots in the earliest Shin Megami Tensei series games, I’m sure you’ve already pre-ordered this, knowing exactly what to expect. Likewise, the savvy gamer that jokingly calls this game SMT: Etrian Odyssey surely knows what they’re buying. This is a big, console-sized dungeon crawler in a little tiny package, and it gets back to the series’ roots. If you’re looking for that, this is your game.
On the other hand, if you came into Atlus games later, and find that most of your enjoyment of the Persona series was the social links and the cute girls, and you found yourself running through dungeons to get to the next story bit, you might want to try Strange Journey before you buy. Or read our review.
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