Categories » ‘Review’
March 5th, 2012 by Fade to Slack
I’m not particularly shy about my love for Cooking Mama. The series may be catered towards girls, no pun intended, but the minigames found in the first two Nintendo DS games just resonated with me.
A couple years ago, I lost my Nintendo DS Phat to gravity. My muscle memory betrayed me when I went to put it into the inside pocket of my new coat that, turns out, didn’t have an inside pocket like the one I had worn for years. I’ve mourned ever since.
I don’t know why, but I got the itch to play Cooking Mama again recently. The Facebook version, and its social and resource elements, didn’t cut it. So, I picked it up in the App Store and decided to give her a go.
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March 3rd, 2012 by Fade to Slack
One of the better things about Korea is that, like Japan, the arcade scene is still alive and well. A trip to an arcade can even make for an appropriate date, where couples play rhythm-based games together. Think Knives and Scott in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but with DJ Max games.
Chances are, you’ve never heard of Jubeat. And why should you? It’s an obscure, niche title that only the most devout rhythm enthusiasts know about. I posted about it before, but only as a primer for this review. On two separate, but equally halfhearted occasions, Konami tested versions under the titles “uBeat” and “jukebeat” before ultimately passing on localizing it until now.
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February 25th, 2012 by Fade to Slack
Twenty years ago, WWF WrestleFest was THE multiplayer arcade experience. Okay, that’s not entirely true. There was this other game called Street Fighter II that was pretty popular around that time, but it was certainly the best wrestling game at the time. Moreover, the presentation was, for its time, top notch. Mean Gene Okerlund provided commentary between fights that advanced the story mode, wrestlers had entrance animations as they made their way to the ring, and wrestlers were introduced by a ring announcer before the match began.
I have a lot of fond memories of playing WWF WrestleFest with my friends. While Street Fighter II got more playtime courtesy accurate console ports, the memories of sitting around and feeding quarters into Technos’ little slice of the squared circle will forever remain a fond one. It was a four-player, button-mashing blast.
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February 16th, 2012 by Fade to Slack
XBLIG is home to more than its fair share of dual-stick shooters. You know, because Geometry Wars and its sequel weren’t enough. However, Beat Hazard by Cold Beam Games came with a gimmick. Your music became the levels. It’s amazing how this simple concept, really nothing more than an interactive music visualizer, took something tired and made it into something new. It was like Vib Ribbon, minus all the quirkiness.
If there was one thing that made me salty about Beat Hazard, it was that I wasn’t earning any achievements. It’s been a couple of years since I spent any serious time with Beat Hazard, one of the gems of the Xbox Live Indie Games channel, but there was little hesitation when I saw this port pop up in the App Store last week.
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January 27th, 2012 by Fade to Slack
Match-3. Yes, you’re probably sick of those words by now. You’ve played the hell out of one at some time or another, be it Bejeweled, Tetris Attack, or Puzzle Quest.
Well, tough luck. Welcome to Triple Town, an aptly named match-3 game with a town-building twist.
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January 23rd, 2012 by Fade to Slack
I love me some Jetpack Joyride. It’s the game I play between games. I keep coming back to Halfbrick’s little gem, and I’m not entirely sure why. Sometimes you need to take a step back to get a better look. Sometimes, like almost every episode of Scrubs, it takes a third party to show you just what answer you’ve been looking for the whole time.
Enter Hothead Games.
You remember Hothead Games, right?
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January 22nd, 2012 by Fade to Slack
There’s this great quote from Zynga CEO, Mark Pincus, to an ex-employee on SFWeekly, “I don’t fucking want innovation… You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.” While it’s impossible to verify, seeing Zynga’s business strategy thus far, it hardly seems like much of a stretch.
Hidden Chronicles is the latest in Zynga’s long line of unethical game theft, where they make a shameless, heartless copycat of a popular, existing game. The game in question is Playdom’s hidden-object game, Gardens of Time.
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