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First DS game I finished, woo! Really liked it, a bit linear, possibly - and some parts of it was a bit obscure, but still, good fun!
While I don't really like "scary games" (or movies), I decided to play the first Dead Space because of how much positive feedback it had received, and boy did it have atmosphere! EA's dumb "Your mom will hate it"-ad campaign almost turned me off the game, but in the end... I decided to pick it up, and have really enjoyed it, when I wasn't freaking out over the weird shit that's going on. FYI: SCREWDRIVERS AREN'T MADE FOR THAT! ps. @EA: Your ad campaign still sucks.
After playing Dragon Age: Origins back in... uh, when it came out (2009?), I pretty much hated the game. Dragon Age is a very mixed, uneven experience. While the story is good, and the characters are very interesting, the actual game always felt poorly made to me. For starters, there is clearly a memory leak issue with the game that still hasn't been fixed - for me, the game becomes almost unplayable after 5 hours, and just restarting the game fixes it. Then there are the regular crashing - which has turned me into everything I hate about PC-gamnig: One hand on the quick-save button. Beyond that, Dragon Age feels like Baldur's Gate. By which, I mean it feels anachronistic - dated gameplay, and poorly balanced, switching rapidly between stupidly easy to impossibly hard within the span of 2 fights. Mechanics wise, it's poorly implemented - the stats are not intuitive, and even reading the tooltips doesn't really help. I'm left sitting there going "As a Warrior, should I be getting dexterity? What about magic? Oh, I don't know, I guess I'll just dump everything into strength." And then there's the Awful class/subclass system. Especially for mages. Now, don't get me wrong - activated abilities ARE the most interesting parts of a game, but when you start picking up abilities that you'll never use because... let's face it, your action bar is already full, and the ability you are getting isn't solving a problem you have (it's not doing more damage, it's not healing more, it's not CCing better/different) - it's just taking up even more space on your action bars, and, like the stats, it makes game play non-intuitive. Again, I'm all for having a ton of abilities to pick from, I just don't think that every character needs to have 30 (exaggerating, I think?) of them. That said, I think that just rebuilding the level/stats/ability system would've made DA:O a much better game. And then there's the HORRIBLE INVENTORY SYSTEM, and the HORRIBLE CRAFTING SYSTEM. Where would I typically go to craft? Yeah - my camp/base, where I have my personal storage, and where I can access all my characters. Right? WRONG. You can only access crafting panels when you have the characters in your party. Which they aren't in camp. Also, because of how they are handling the crafting system, you probably won't pick crafting skills on your main character (there is no combat or dialog benefit!) or your "main party" (again, no benefit), but rather use the guys you for whatever reason chose never to bring to missions - as crafters. Not sure what to say about the inventory management system, other than that it's horrible. I don't want to spend half my play session messing about in an inventory screen deciding if I should throw away this leather armor with strength on it ("is strength good for rogues?"), or if I should put my dual-wielding warrior in a suit of leather to decrease fatigue. (Which does what, again?) But... this is about Awakening. So, why bring up my pet peeves about DA:O when I mean to talk about Awakening? Because it's all still here. And there are a few new things that pissed me off as well - want to change a party member? Yeah, too bad - now you have to run all the way back to your home base and swap your party. In most cases, that means about 3 loading screens (dungeon -> above ground -> home town (outside) -> swap party -> go back to where you were). Couple that with the memory leak issue I mentioned earlier, and you can see why that might become a problem. There are also a couple of other problems with gameplay design, like the cop-out that is the "respec tome" - they're pretty much going "Ok, so everyone got that respec mod. I guess we failed at designing classes, so let's just make respeccing even easier. That'll solve the issues with game design, right?" No. But I understand why they did it - you don't entirely change such mechanics in an expansion. Also, the issue I had with inventory management and crafting? Similar to how terribly Awakening handles the party-swapping, it pulls the same shit on crafting and inventory management. Let's say you are making a Paragon Rune. Right. You go into the keep, you go to the rune vendor and go "Oh, wait, I can't remember making a Paragon rune takes". So you leave the rune vendor again, and ZONE OUT of the keep to get to the court yard (where you get to select your party), pick your token crafting characters and zone out. Navigating through the HORRIBLE crafting menu, you figure out roughly what materials you need to buy. And ZONE INTO THE KEEP again. Walk up to the vendor, and start trying to buy things. Only to realize that to make high level runes, you buy a ton of low-level runes, and level them up. Ok. that's fine. Except even in stacks, low-level runes TAKE ONE BAG SLOT EACH. So you dump all your crap into the personal storage chest and buy the runes. ZONE OUT again and craft it. Something that should take less than 10 minutes have not taken you an hour. This is the dumb shit that they need to solve in DA2. But, at the end of the day, technical crap aside, Awakening does what Bioware does best. It delivers a compelling story, strong characters and I really enjoyed it. When I wasn't fighting the game. Now I just have to finish Golems of Amgarrak and Witch hunt before tuesday, and I'll be ready for Dragon Age 2, which... is a different topic!
Took a while - but finally got around to finishing Magicka in co-op. I absolutely love it. Amazing humor throughout the game, not only in the expertly crafted speech/dialog, but also in the detail throughout the game. Also, I still think the gameplay is pretty revolutionary - it definately has it's problems, and it's cumbersome, has a huge threshold to get into... but it's still fairly simple, and you get fairly adept at it as you go through the story. Also: NEW GAME ! On the down side, the game (currently) suffers from both design and technical issues... but for an indie game like this, I'm more than willing to look the other way. Good job, Arrowhead. Good job.
Finally got around to play it. Very fun, if somewhat oppressive at times.
Terrible. Dull. Not even co-op is enough to redeem it. The question "Why do companies like these disappear when great companies [like Troika] die?". Basically, it's another poor licensed game. Low budget or lazy developers? Probably both. Don't buy it.
More Dawn of War 2 can just be amazing. The fact that "ALL RACES HAVE A CAMPAIGN" is a selling point feels a bit cheap when you realize that while the "local story" from race to race is different, the over-arching story is the same - and is essentially the space marine story. That said, it's still really good. However, if I were to suggest a campaign to play - go for the Orks, their motivation is superior.
Most controversial game of the year?! The amount of Hyperbole spouted in relation to Dragon Age 2 is stupid. FACT: Dragon Age 2 is as good, if not BETTER than Dragon Age: Origin - but both games are deeply flawed. Combat is better, story is just as good. Worst thing? Re-use of certain areas (one cave-system? one ware-house? one "outside area"?) is horrible... and I had some serious issues with how they handle a certain faction at the end of the game. But I really liked it.
Been playing Picross on and off for a year... I love it! Best Puzzlegame on any platform, ever?
Similar to Miles Edgeworth - this is among the best games I've played on the DS. The story was hugely amazing - even once I figured out "the kicker"; I couldn't see where they would go with it. Great game.