Category: Games

Summer Land

June 15, 2007

Time for the summer plan update!

Summer, a time that I have for the past few years had off, is busier for me this year because I’ll be going to the lab most days a week to work on my experiment. However, I still have a good deal on my ‘to-do’ list during these next three months.

On the lego front, I’ve made good work of the backlog of kits I picked up over the spring. This past week I finished the Slave 1 kit and this weekend I will work on a kit I truly love, a crane from the Lego City line. Once that is complete work will begin on the mother of all lego kits, the Death Star II. 3449 pieces! Fifty centimeters in diameter! Approximately 15 hours construction time! I plan on taking many photographs to blog the entire process.

On the game front I made a good few purchases recently. I’m nearing the end of Super Paper Mario for Wii (fantastic) and well into the hardcore postgame of Etrian Odyssey for DS (one of the more difficult, strategic and challenging RPGs I have played in years). Next on the list is Baten Kaitos Origins for Gamecube, followed by Rogue Galaxy and Odin Sphere for PS2. It is always possible I may renew World Of Warcraft as well, just to see how things are going in Azeroth (it’s been four months since I cancelled).

Summer also sees Heroscape dragged out of the storage again. Anti-Yossie measures will have to be implemented. For instance, I won’t be able to build the map and leave the figures out while we are away since she may nibble on them. But I have a plan. Last year I bought the castle expansion for the game and have not even opened it, so I’m looking forward to making a map with a castle on it. Again, this will be blogged.

And also – if I have time – I still have a good few FF gamebooks to delve into. I want to (re)play each of them at least once, and there are nearly two dozen of the higher numbered volumes I haven’t gotten to. I also bought a couple of high-number Lone Wolf books in Hawaii (of all places…) that I wanted to play through at least once.

I’d like to go camping as well. Over to Ohio, somewhere near Cedar Point and Kennywood…

Amazing

May 22, 2007

There was a debate on one of the gaming blogs about the accuracy and response time of the Wii controller. Now from personal experience I know it’s pretty damn accurate and pretty damn fast, but others suggested the opposite – and that a limitation on response time would prevent very fast action games to be created.

The someone posted this video and the debate was over 🙂

To those that haven’t yet used a Wii – think of the remote as sort of a light gun. It’s a wand you point at the TV to use (the cursor in the video is where the player is pointing the remote). It has other functionality as well (accelerometers, positional detectors), but they aren’t in use in this game. The game show is one stage from Wii Play, and is basically a shooting alley type game (Duck Hunt clone).

Yggdrasil Labyrinth

May 19, 2007

Some time ago, I made a post about Wizardry games and mentioned a new one that had entered my radar named Yggdrasil Labyrinth. That game, now named Etrian Odyssey came out this past week (for the DS), and it’s fantastic.

Gameplay is very Wizardry – create a party from scratch (there are nine classes) and explore a dangerous dungeon. Improvements on the usual formula include character skills that you can customize (and of course you have far less points to spend than there are good skills to learn), wandering powerful monsters you can see on the map, and – of course – the fact that you draw the map yourself on the touchscreen.

Take a look at the screenshots above. The top DS screen shows the game action and the bottom shows the map. Using a simple editor, the player draws the map themselves, marking in floors and walls and the various obstacles encountered in the dungeon. A gimmick perhaps, but a delightful one for the gamer like myself that can remember doing the same thing on graph paper as I played.

What makes Etrian extra special is the game has a very high level of polish. Graphics and sound are beautiful (spell effects are remarkable actually), and the interface design is perfect on the DS. The developers comment on the game’s website that they were striving to create ‘the last great dungeon crawl’, and, although I hope it’s not the last one, it certainly seems so far that they have nailed the ‘great’ part of their goal.

Robot Claw