Duality

QSK: Alexis has gone crazy. Better send him to the place with padded walls before he sells his GC ;)

prez (Xero’s RM): uh oh. what he do

QSK: sold his DS =(
QSK: and bought a PSP =(

prez: wait…wait…let me go check outside
prez: hmm…seems the world is not ending

QSK: the sky’s red over here… wait an hour then check again ;)

prez: well…we do have to change our clocks a hour ahead soon…..a sign I should have seen coming

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QSK: besides, I need to save money so I can restore the balance of the universe by buying a DS =)

prez: yes!

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We’re just joking… maybe.

Let me first say that Castle Shikigami 2 (CS2 from now on) is a shoot’em up (shmup). And when it comes to shmups, you either love’em or hate’em. So if you love’em, stop reading right now and pick this game up (it’s only $10!); and if you hate’em, you’re probably better off renting or borrowing it for a one night stand.

Welcome to Bullet Hell
Like other shmups, the goal of CS2 is simple: shoot down anything that moves. But of course, it’s not really that simple. While you’re shooting, you’ll have to dodge enemy bullets—something that the game gives you plenty of. In the later levels, the screen is often filled with so many bullets that the game will lag. In any other game, that would be bad; but in shmups, anything that gives you more time to react is always welcome.

CS2 features a cast of seven characters, each with their own shot pattern, bomb attack, and Shikigami attack. Shikigami attacks (enabled by holding down the shoot button) vary quite a bit from character to character. Ko calls a spirit which automatically attacks enemies; Kim projects three swords around him (type-1 variant); Nigi creates a barrier that reflects bullets back at her enemies (ala GigaWing). Shikigami attacks slow down a character’s movement, but all coins generated when enemies are destroyed are automatically collected.

Live Dangerously
What sets CS2 apart from other shmups is its Tension Bonus System (TBS). The TBS rewards players for putting themselves in harm’s way—in this case, being close to enemies or bullets. The closer you get, the more points you get (up to 8x) and the more coins spewed out from enemies you destroy. As a handy indicator, your character’s normally-green aura will change to yellow, orange, and finally red. When your character’s aura is red, his shot pattern will also be powered up.

The TBS works incredibly well with Shikigami attacks. Without the TBS, Shikigami attacks might go unused because of their start-up delay (0.5 seconds approx.) and how much characters slow down while using them. With the TBS, Shikigami attacks become indispensible when going for high scores. As I mentioned before, coins are automatically collected from enemies destroyed by Shikigami attacks. Thus, to maximize your score, you’d want to jump from bullet to bullet while using your Shikigami attack to destroy enemies—no easy feat.

Concluding Comments
In case you’re wondering, the graphics and sound of CS2 are average, but both are just icing. The cake is the gameplay and CS2’s gameplay is excellent. The TBS combined with Shikigami attacks introduce risk/reward decisions on multiple levels: more damage from powered-up shot patterns vs. less damage but safer position; more points using Shikigami attacks vs. more maneuverability using normal shot. It’s a refreshing addition to the tried-and-true challenge of staying alive.

(boxed rating and few-liner summary goes here)

Oh, Nintendo, you didn’t have to release four new DS colors. Just adding black trim around the top of the existing silver/black (like in the E3 pictures) would’ve made me satisfied. But since you’re experimenting, how come there’s no hot orange+red/black, Metroid DS? Yeah, I know you want to reel in female gamers with the pink and aquamarine—but come on, orange+red/black is too good!

What? Yeah, I’ll buy a DS soon, Nintendo. Promise. I already have Mr. Driller DS, man! Hey, you know what will make me buy a DS faster? Bring Meteos to the U.S ASAP. It’s a puzzle game, how long could it possibly take to localize it?

Oh yeah, whatever happened to your Puzzle Collection? Don’t make me pay $60 to import it and another who-knows-how-much to add a region switch to my GC. There are plenty of people in the U.S. that want to play Panel de Pon (Tetris Attack), Dr. Mario, and Yoshi on their GCs. Trust me.

I’ve been playing Soul Calibur II again. See, Isaac challenged Joe (both HKN officers) to a match under the condition that Joe can’t practice. When I heard about it, all I could think about was playing SC2 again.

I love to compete. I think I love to compete to the point that it turns most people off. Most people play to have fun. To an extent, I do too, but I like to win as well. I end up practicing so much that the game becomes unfair. It’s not that I’m great at games; the beatdowns I’ve taken at the BEARcade are proof of that. It’s just that I practice more—perhaps too much.

Well anyway, I’m playing Nightmare the wrong way. I practiced against the “Extremely Hard” Nightmare AI and spent most of the time on the ground. It unsurprisingly parries most of my attacks, but when it doesn’t, it always uses the right attack to counter my attack. That’s the way I need to play Nightmare. His attacks are all pretty slow, so you can’t keep throwing out attacks hoping your opponent doesn’t block correctly.

Today, Microsoft finally gave away the last remaining details of what’s got to be the worst kept console secret of all time. While the X-BOX 360 has some incredibly powerful hardware (we’re looking at a Tera-flop of data per second) there are some who can draw some similarities between the new X-BOX 360 and the Dreamcast. Both were the leading technological breakthroughs of their time periods, both had the next Sony Console coming out about a half a year afterwards, and most importantly, both were white. That’s right, the new X-BOX is white. Will the new 360 peak before it’s time and go the way of the Dreamcast? Well, with Microsoft’s infinite pockets probably not, but it’ll be interesting to see. Oh, and did I mention it’s coming out THIS CHRISTMAS!

Anyway, for more info, check out this article at Gamespot. And I’d love to hear your comments (without the unnecessary bashing). In the meantime, just know that Sony and Nintendo are due for their own announcements next week. (God I can’t wait to hear about the Revolution!)

While next week is going to be mainly focused on the release of the final Star Wars movie, it is also the week of E3 and I for one couldn’t be more excited. Every year I spend a good 90% of my free time during the week of E3 finding out every single detail I can. Usually I only have my roommates to share this information with (and usually my schoolgirl glee is met with unenthusiastic responses), but this year I have you guys. So, for the next week or so prepare to have the best and worst of E3 brought right to your doorstep. I’ve even created a new E3 category for you all to check out. This year marks the premier of Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft’s new consoles and there’s going to be a lot to discuss. Feel free to comment on any and all of my postings and I’ll do my best to bring you as much as I can.

The fun is almost here!!

For those of you who don’t know who Tim Schafer is, then you’ve been missing out on some of the greatest games of all time. His most recent of those being Psychonauts. So, does it live up to the legendary Tim Schafer reputation? You damn right it does.

Learn From the Past
Tim Schafer is considered to be a god in the Adventure gaming world. More specifically, PC Adventure games. Back when times were simpler and games were point and click, Tim Schafer found a job at LucasArts (then known as LucasGames) and began working on games built around the SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) engine. One of the first games he worked on was The Secret of Monkey Island. He was primarily a writer and it was because of his hard work Monkey Island became on of the funniest games available. Afterwords it was quickly followed up Monkey Island 2 - LeChuck’s Revenge. Again, the game was unrivaled in it’s hilarity and ingenuity. The most amazing thing about them was how perfectly they got the secret of comedy, timing. Timing in video games was, and still is, a hard thing to get, but Schafer and his teams seemed to hit on the head every time. Other titles that you might have heard of are Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and one of my favorite games of all time, Grim Fandango.

Look Towards the Future
After Grim Fandango, Schafer took many of his Fandango teammates and formed there own company, Double Fine. This was back in July of 2000 and they’ve been working on Psychonauts ever since so you can only imagine how perfectly polished this game is. And it is! Throughout the entire game I never ran into a single bug! They’re that good. Anyway, unlike all of Schafer’s previous games, Psychonauts is not a point and click adventure game. It is a fully 3D action adventure game and unlike most games these days that strive for ‘realism’, Psychonauts has its own brand of almost cartoony graphics that fit perfectly into its world.

A story for the Ages
The story of Psychonauts centers around a young boy named Rasputin (but everyone calls him Raz) who’s sole dream is to become a secret government agent of the mind, aka a Psychonaut! To accomplish this goal, he runs away from the circus to join a summer camp for the psychically gifted. While there, he discovers a horrible plot to steal all the children’s brains and implant them in psychic death tanks to take over the world! Of course, it’s up to Raz to set things right, earn all his merit badges, and try to become a Psychonaut before his dad comes and picks him up. To do this, Raz will psychically enter people’s minds to try to unravel all the clues and help set things right.

A style of your own
To me, the most impressive thing about Psychonauts was its design. The main focus of the game is entering people’s minds. Inside you find a whole new world filled with figments of imagination, emotional baggage, and memory vaults. But the truly amazing thing about it is that each person’s mind is completely different from everyone else’s. They are completely unique. For example, at one point you enter the head of an old actress and enter the world of a theatre—complete with actors, sets, and even it’s own critic. At another point you go inside the head of a conspiracy theory nut. Inside is one of the most absurd and genius level designs I have ever seen. The world may look like 1950’s suburbia (complete with mailboxes, fire hydrants, and plastic pink flamingos, all of which can turn into cameras and take your picture. They’re always watching!) but that’s only until you look up and realize that what should be a straight road curves and twists in every direction imaginable. Imagine a roller coaster loop-de-loop and you’ll begin to see what I’m trying to describe. As you walk, the world around you moves and what was upside down and right above you is now rightside up and just as it should be. I could go on and talk about the levels where you’re a giant (Godzilla-size) and destroying a city inhabited by lungfish, or the level where you play a board game version of “Waterloo” against Napoleon. There are non-stop dance party levels, and even one that is literally a six-sided cube and you can travel from face to face. There is no simple way to describe the design and style of Psychonauts other than ‘extremely unique.’

And the Fun Starts Here
Remember when I said Tim Schafer was amazing at using comedy in his games? Well Psychonauts is no different than any other. The writing is so superb I can barely describe it. The timing of every line is perfect and cutscenes will have you rolling on the floor. And in regards to the cutscenes, they are placed apart just far enough to make you feel like you can’t wait to see the next one. They’re so good that you can end up playing the game only so that you can get to see the next cutscene. But Raz isn’t the only funny character. Your friends are just as good. Along your adventures you meet everyone from a Russian child who wants to fight bears, to a giant, deep-voiced, mutated lungfish named Linda. And who could forget the smooth-talking, “Issac Hayes”-voiced turtle, Sam Pokelope.

Gotta Catch ‘em All!
For me and those of you who like collection games (Pokémon, I’m looking at you) then Psychonauts is perfect. Every world has Emotional Baggage, Emotional Vaults, and most numerously Figments of Imagination. The latter of which can sometimes rise above 300 in a single world. Now, while collecting them all is not a necessity, it is needed if you want to reach level 100 and acquire all the Psychic powers (like telekinesis, levitation, and pyrokinesis just to name a few). If you do manage to reach level 100, you’re awarded with a scandalous cutscene involving Linda and Sam. ;)

In the end…
To sum it all up, Psychonauts is one of those completely original and purely fun games (lighting squirrels on fire never gets old) that come around all too rarely these days. It has no bugs (none that I found at least) and such a slick presentation, you can tell that a lot of people put a lot of work into making this game what it is. If you own an XBOX, you owe it to them, to the gaming community, and—most importantly—to yourself to try this game. I guarantee you’ll be hooked by minute one and laughing till it hurts.

5 out of 5 and my highest recommendation.

I just finished Psychonaughts and wow…what a great game. I’ll be posting a review in the next day or so. Also, I finished Jade Empire about a week ago and should be posting that review as well. So stay tuned for great things to come! ;)

For the increasingly small number of people who have yet to watch this video, do so immediately. If you’ve ever considered yourself a Nintendo fan, then this is for you.

I would like to first state that I am a Nintendo fan and always will be. Most of my friends are huge Nintendo fans. However, now having stated that, I would like to say that Nintendo has really let me down. As some of you may know. I own a Nintendo DS. In fact, I was standing outside my local game store the morning it came out just waiting to get my hands on Nintendo’s newest baby. But now, many months later, I’ve been seriously disappointed in the lack of software.

The number one reason a gaming platform fails is a lack of games, with number two being a horrible design (I’m looking at you N-Gage). Now I’m not saying that the DS had a horrible design, far from it. It has one of the most original designs I’ve ever seen. However, it does have an incredibly lacking library of games. As of today there are only 18 DS games available in North America. 18! After almost six months? If Nintendo really wanted to make this console a winner, they would have waited until the software was actually there before releasing the hardware. And out of the 13 or so other DS titles announced for the US, almost all of them fall into the same category. Puzzle.

Look, I don’t hate puzzle games, in fact some of my favorite games of all time are puzzle games, but honestly, there’s only so much a man can take before he looks at his screen and puts the stylus down. I am that man. As of today I have put my stylus down. Forever. “How can you say ‘Forever’? You might somewhere down the line pick it up again.” Well (and here’s where I get lynched by almost everyone I know), that’s impossible because I have sold my Nintendo DS. I sold my DS, I sold my games, heck I even sold my carrying case. And what did I buy with my newfound riches? That’s right. Sony’s PSP.

Look, Nintendo really let me down with the DS. It had such potential, but with such an utter lack of support, they turned into a cheap gimmick. I won’t deny that it was a sad moment to let go of my DS, but it was not a painful one. These days it did little more than way down my backpack. I had nothing left to play. And out of all the upcoming DS titles that I was even remotely excited about, Animal Crossing DS was the only one, and only because I loved the original, and it was supposed to be online, but it doesn’t even come out till the end of the year.

Sony’s PSP launched with 17 titles. That’s practically the same amount of games it took Nintendo six months to conjure up! And, within the next month, 8 more titles will be released for the PSP. It may be sad to say, but Sony is leaving Nintendo behind in the dust.

Anyway, on the bright side, I can now bring you PSP reviews, and when Quadoshock gets around to buying a DS, he can take over the DS reviews. There are numerous things about the PSP that have me as giddy as a school girl, but I’ll leave them for another day. For now, let us all mourn in the loss of friend, but know that in his ashes, a power greater than he could ever imagine has been born.

I recently got Half-Life 2 and have been playing through it nonstop. Well, ok, I’ve been stopping every now and then, but only because this game is that amazing. This game keeps me on edge so much, that my body has been getting too much adrenaline and my nerves are shot. If I play too long without stopping, I start feeling completely sick. That is how awesome this game is. At this point I’m about halfway through with the game, and I haven’t even started playing anything online.

Not only does this game have some of the greatest graphics I’ve ever seen, but the gameplay is so realistic, you’d swear you were actually there. One of the highlights of this game is it’s physics. Everything in the game has perfectly realistic physics. They’re so integral to the game, that it even gives you a Gravity Gun to pick things up and shoot at people. For example, shooting a can of soda at a guard? Not very effective. Shooting a cinder block, muuuch more effective. Anyway, as soon as I get further into the game and can tear my self away from it long enough, I’ll write a full review for you guys. Till then, I’ll be off throwing cardboard at zombies.

So I recently got WarioWare: Touched! and I just want to say that Wario will make you his bitch. Yeah yeah, it might sound simple enough, use the stylus, play a minigame, repeat. But after the 25th or 30th round, they get so incredibly fast, it’ll smoke your mind.

Touching is Good
So the big selling point of WW: Touched! is of course, the touching. Each character has minigames designed around a certain aspect of using the stylus, except for the karaoke robot. He just wants you to blow. For example, Wario likes you to tap, while Kat and Ana like you to slice. Other uses include scribbling, circling, and dragging. And then there are the weird ones, like 9-Volt and his old school Nintendo related minigames. One of my favorites is probably one of 9-Volt’s games in which there is a GBA on the screen with the original WarioWare’s nose picking game in which you have to then tap the A button on the screen to pick the nose.

Laugh till it Hurts
This game is funny. Hands down, plain and simple, no doubt about it, and whatever other clichéd phrase you can think of. There is such a twisted sense of the bizarre that you can’t play this game for more than a minute without seeing something so weird, so odd, so ‘what-the-fuck-were-they-smoking’ that you can’t help but break out laughing. Here is but an example of some of the game’s instructions: “Bubbles have only two purposes in life: confusing animals and irritating adults. Choose one and run with it!” or “Hey, Nerdy McGeekerson! You might be a little less of a dweeb if you joined a band! But you gotta learn how to play an instrument, first!”

Toys for Tots
Probably my favorite part of the game is the toy room. After completing different people’s minigames you start acquiring toys. These are essentially minigames that have no point. Also, they are some of the most random things I’ve ever seen in a game. Almost every one makes you say “why the hell did they put that in this game??” Because they could, my friend, because the could. Some of the toys you acquire include: a metronome, a calculator (that only adds or subtracts), a wind chime that blows when you blow in the microphone, a kitchen timer, a parrot (that randomly repeats things you say), and even a big piece of Jello which has absolutely no purpose other than to jiggle when you touch it. So far I’ve acquired about 30 of these things and each one is crazier than the last.

Bottom Line
WarioWare: Touched! may not have packed the same punch as the original WarioWare: Mini MicroGames did a couple years ago, but with 180 new minigames and a completely new way to play each one of them, this is one game that you’ll be keeping in your DS for months to come.