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Dragon’s Dogma

Sunday, September 18th, 2011

I’ve been ignoring my PS3 recently, including almost the entire summer, mostly because I haven’t had the time to play anything. Portable games, including on the iPad, fill in the spare time well enough.

There are precious few PS3 games on the horizon that have caught my eye, but one of them is Dragon’s Dogma, by Capcom.

This is their attempt to make an open-world fantasy RPG that (apparently) matches the approach of Monster Hunter with the appeal of a western game. “Monster Hunter meets Dragon Age” in other words. I don’t think for a second it will be as good as Monster Hunter – or even very similar, based on recent views – but it does look impressive.

My interest has risen in recent days with the news that Dragon’s Dogma will contain weapons and gear based on those in the upcoming Berserk motion picture. Capcom has toyed with Berserk-looking gear in the MH games; it seems now we’ll get to use the real stuff 🙂

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GoatUp

Friday, September 16th, 2011

This week has been depressing for various reasons. At a time when I probably need them most, the last thing I can succumb to are distractions.

And yet a bright spot has been the new Jeff Minter iOS game, called GoatUp. Here’s a screenshot:

Gameplay is tough to describe… An infinite climbing platform game with a high level of challenge and yet an equally high level of “just one more time”. My highest score is 680,000 so far.

At $2 it’s a no brainer if you like arcade games. Another winner from Llamasoft 🙂

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Monster Hunter

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

Well it seems the 3DS just beat the Vita in the next handheld war even before the Vita was released. In the last week two new Monster Hunter games have been announced for the 3DS. These two games alone guarantee mega sales in Japan, and a boatload of very excited fans in the rest of the world.

Here’s the trailer for Monster Hunter Tri-G

And here’s the ‘concept trailer’ for the next numbered entry in the series, Monster Hunter 4

Both are loading very slow right now. I recommend reducing the quality to 240 if they stagger.

MH Tri-G is released in Japan this year! No news yet on (what I consider) an inevitable US released.

Here’s a shot of how the game looks running on 3DS:

Diehards like myself will undoubtedly get excited by such trivialities as the persistent map on the lower screen 🙂

Posted in Games, Otaku, Pets, Tech | 5 Comments »

Magic Celebration

Saturday, September 10th, 2011

Today I played in a free MTG ‘Mini masters’ tourney which was held by a local game store to promote MTG.

Each player received one free booster, which he combined with 15 lands (3 per colour) to form a deck. It was to be a four round tournament, with each round best of three. Every time you win you get a new (free) booster to refine your deck, so the ultimate winner would end up getting four boosters. There were no additional prizes.

I lost first round 0-2 🙂

The cards in my booster were a bad match. My rare was this:

and my biggest creature was a serpent that couldn’t even attack! My opponent had a lot of fast fliers and beat me handily each game.

I played at a store different from the ones I usually go to for pre releases. I wasn’t much of a fan of their organization, or how long everything took, so I left after the first round 🙂

However before I left I was happy to find in their binders a card I had been looking for for a while. This is it:

Why did I need this? It’s a perfect fit in one of my Commander decks 🙂

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Ajani vs Nicol Bolas Review

Saturday, September 3rd, 2011

Today I purchased the new Magic The Gathering Duel Deck, “Ajani vs Nicol Bolas”. I played each deck against each other today three times… and found that the Ajani deck destroyed the Bolas deck every time.

Ajani’s is a deck built around fast, aggressive creatures with a good dose of lifegain included. The Bolas deck on the other hand is far less coherent; bits and pieces of powerful spells and strange creatures all limited by high costs or penalties. Yes it has some “I win” cards in the shape of Cruel Ultimatum or Bolas himself, but the deck is so slow that Ajani, in my games, had won handily long before Bolas could cast anything that expensive.

In each game, Ajani defeated Bolas whilst having over 20 life. A complete blowout!

As for the product itself, I’m pretty pleased with it. Not only did I get 2 new art foil Planeswalkers (“Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker” and “Ajani Vengeant”), but there is 7 lands (for my collection!), 2 tokens (also for the collection) and about 6 of the cards are good enough to go into my new Commander decks (ironically enough, most of these are from the Bolas deck).

All things considered, another fine duel deck. Recommended.

Tags:Games
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