Recensioni recenti di Tim Carroll

It's fun, it's challenging, and it will test the basic logic skills of even an adult. Well worthwhile if you want to get your kids into math.

It's a little on the nose to set a game this boring in a forced labor camp.

I'm not going to fault Infinifactory for trying so hard to look like Portal, and I have to assume that they are: It's a first person puzzle platformer with a dark sense of humor, a villain with an odd way of motivating you and a story mostly related to you through what is left by those that went before. It's a good formula with a lot of room to move around in. The problem is that each time you build and transport something (ie the primary mechanic of the game) it takes a ton of time and experimentation. You don't come to understand the world or your character or your enemy. For 99% of the game you're just working, and that's just, well, not fun. "A" for effort though.

I've heard it said that this is mechanically a better game than the original. I suppose that's true; the combat's cleaner, the enemies more varried, and you're not actively rewarded for not upgrading your plasmids this time around. Of course, if you're just playing Bioshock for the mechanics, you're missing something, and unfortunately it's the same thing that the devs missed this time around. The meaningful character backstories and dank, oppressive feel of Rapture have both been dialed back a lot. Sinclair is definitely no Atlas and Lamb is, well, pretty shoehorned in when it comes down to it.

That being said, there's a lot of fun to be had here. The weapons are fun and have much better variety than in the first, and the moral choices are a bit bigger this time around (as in bigger than "would you murder a child for profit"- though that one's still here). All in all, not a bad deal if you get it on sale.

Okay, I did try. I love the idea of this game, but the execution was so buggy that it wasn't worth my time. I can't change the graphics settings from the default Gameboy screen size, so I'm sitting inches from the giant TV I use as a monitor. The gameplay isn't much to write home about. I've only played ninety minutes and I had to check a guide twice to figure out where to go next.

In short, this game isn't fun, and I've got better ones to try.

Um, wow.

When this showed up in my discovery queue I figured "Eh, time traveling RPG. Chrono Trigger was possibly the best game ever made for SNES, I'll give it a try." And for most of the first hour, that's kind of what I got: the mechanics of Secret of Mana, the gimick of Chrono Trigger with a mostly vestigial change in aesthetic as you change between past, present and future. Oh yeah, and tons of referential humor.

Then I started finding myself in combat/platforming dungeons. Then I was in a top down bullet hell airborne shooter. Then I fought a cult leader Street Fighter style, complete with Hadukens. Then I was playing an optional CCG. Then there was the Mega Man X level complete with boss battle rising doors...

I'm not to the end yet, but I'm ready to call it: tons of good variety and a solid storyline that lends that "just one more hour" feel. I love this game.

Ah, another game that needs no review. Let's face it, if you're looking into buying Bioshock, you're probably buying it again because you lost your old install disc. So yes, the story is as engrossing as you remember it, even if the developers didn't seem to know what they wanted to do after the big reveal in the fifth area (wierdly only about 60% of the way into the game).

Now that that's out of the way, I want to point out my favorite element of this game. It's not Atlas, Ryan or Fontane (who you all remember perfectly). It's the side characters that you only hear in their tapes. I can't express the sadness I felt hearing MacDonogh's final transmission as I looked at where I got it from. Sullivan the security chief goes through this deep and wierdly understandable transition from staunchly opposing the death penalty to executing a woman in her bathtub for writing a song that Ryan didn't like (the blanket thing makes me want to cry even now). And poor Diane McClintock, stumbling Forrest Gump style through every major event in Rapture. They're all sad stories, but let's face it, you don't play Bioshock for sunshine and rainbows.

My one compaint is that this game crashes a lot. Like every hour and a half, a lot. It does give me a pretty good idea when to pack it in for the day, though.

Let's face it, if you're even thinking of buying this game, you already know the old playstation version by heart. It's still got that outstanding story and addictive playability that you fell in love with if you liked it. It still has the cartoony art style that prevented you from even trying it if you were in that camp.

Honestly, I'm only writing this to give myself a little closure after finishing it for the way-too-manyth time.

Look, the only changes that they made were a little touch up to the appearance and the addition of a very helpful autosave function. Buy it again so you never have to brush the dust off those old disks.

Okay, I loved this game. The ship models are fantastic and deeply customizable. The "Heroes" that can optionally be hunted down have curiously ordinary names and faces - I think I've been killing the developers inside their own game. The sandbox is massive, and while most of the missions really boil down to "go here and kill this guy" and "go here without getting killed", the enemies scale well enough that you're never really assured a victory.

Until you get a titan. I didn't play the first game, but I get the feeling that the Levithan was the final battle. Building your own ship off of that design, then, really skews the odds in your favor. Fortunately, this is only an option at the very end, so look forward to scurrying away from enemy reinforcements.

Long story short, this will probably devour almost a hundred hours of your life and you won't resent it for that.

Bottom line: this game is fun, but I can see why I'd never heard of it when I got it in a Square/Enix bundle. The sandbox is a little small and not exactly overflowing with things to do, but it does open up a bit as you buy more cars and meet more people. It offers a variety of minigames and hidden secrets that you don't have to look up online to find out how to solve.

The biggest condemnation of this game is the same problem that every Squenix game has: characters. You play as a cop in deep cover with the triad, an organized crime syndicate in Hong Kong. Your character falls into a moral crisis as he begins to identify more and more with the gangsters than he does with the police. It sounds intriguing, but the execution is slapdash to say the least. I found my character chewing out his superior for wanting to arrest a lovably inept compulsive thief, but essentially shrugging it off as I shoved a nurse in my trunk so I could blackmail her husband. Mild spoiler: there's another scene where your character mourns the death of a roided out lunatic that nearly shot him in the face on the word of a double dealing crackhead. (Come on, he spends the last two missions that he's alive talking about family and how Wei should take care of his mom if anything happens to him).

The game is fun, the atmosphere is immersive, the racing minigame is challenging without being hair-pullingly hard. I like the four way experience level system - especially since being a good gangster doesn't mean being a bad cop. It's an alright game, but nothing to write home about.

Have you ever wondered what Mechwarior would have been like as a steampunk puzzle game? Of course you haven't, that's insane. But somebody did, and yes it is as awesome as that sounds. Choose a mech, power its systems by stringing together the four different color nodes, shoot up somebody else's mech and then outfit yours from the remains of your enemies. It's a complex strategy game that's as addictive as any puzzle game.

Where it falls apart a little is in length. The campaign appears to be about sixteen short levels long (I haven't beaten the boss on 16 yet), but anytime you die, you start from the beginning. Also, dying raises your "global level", giving you perks that make the game easier. Seeing as how my mech was destroyed in a few hits in that final battle, I'm thinking you're going to have to get your level up pretty high to stand a chance, which is going to mean some grinding. So there you have it, a short game made unnecesarily long with a cheap trick.

All in all, the game is a lot of fun, full of interesting art assets, and overflowing with variety considering its small scale. Sometimes you'll find an amazing new weapon on a simple enemy. Other times the game board won't cooperate and you'll find yourself desperate for just a little more energy for your shields. Either way, you'll never be bored in this one.