Slightly Late Game Reviews: NES Joust
Arcade machines in the 80s were bastards. Later on, I would learn they were built to the two-minute standard. Three lives, just enough to last through two minutes of play, then you’re out and pawing through your Levis for another quarter. But way back then, younger me just knew I’d better have a few week’s worth of allowance on me when the family went out to the frozen yogurt shop. And for good reason.
That’s where the Joust machine lived.
Lived, perhaps, isn’t the best term. Lurked, waited, hungered, maybe. Crouched in darkness near the back of the store, just off the restroom entrance, it was a sit-down cabinet, the table-top kind, where 1982’s most glorious colours and sounds flickered with temptation beneath a glass top and your vanilla-chocolate …
Review: Petz 4 (Part II)
Before talking about the Petz 4 life cycle, it is important to note that their life cycle is based on a certain number of days at each stage. There are ways around these time delays.
One day in the Petz program is counted by one real day; once midnight has passed, you can open the program and your Petz will all have aged one more day. However, they only age if you open the program at least once a day. If you don’t open the program, your Petz are frozen in time.
Because the Petz day starts at 12:00am and ends at 11:59pm, it leaves a window for manipulation. Impatient kids like myself – who wanted to super-age the Petz to see what their kittens looked like – …
Review: Petz 4 (Part I)
Petz 4 is the combination of two programs designed to go together: Catz 4 and Dogz 4. Both have the same play scenes and most of the same objects; they just have different species that come with them. The program is fairly simple and easy to predict and manipulate; it’s an old program designed for Windows 95 & 98. However, it is not without its charms and Easter eggs.
The program does little to tax the modern computer; it was designed for older systems and ran quite well on my old computer with the 4GB hard drive. It will run on Windows XP and Vista, but only with the sound disabled (sound can be turned off under Options > General Options). It also crashes occasionally in the …
Dead Rising on Xbox 360 – A Reader Review
Reader Dracul sent in this review of the Xbox 360 game, Dead Rising. I’m sure we all remember this zombie cruncher from the early days of the Xbox’s timid entry into the gaming market. Let’s see what Dracul has to say about it. Take it away…
Contrary to what some may say about Dead Rising, how lame or uncanny this is with its strange sense of humor and random happenings around the mall, there is actually a pretty decent game in here. If you can manage to get through more then half of it without giving up, of course. You’ll discover plenty of certain little parts in Dead Rising where you’ll just want to throw the controller at the wall and scream, but we’ll get to those moments later. First …
Review: Restricted Area
Welcome to the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Restricted Area by Whiptail Interactive and Master Creating. The game crawls out of the reduced price game bin having replaced a multitude of its own organs with those grown in vats cloned from Diablo—no, not Diablo II, straight original Diablo. The first thing that we thought when we were thrust into the windblown, sun caked desert outside of the central city is that we may once again be visiting the Valley of the Kings soon.
The first massive caveat against buying this game is that it’s loaded down with Starforce DRM—the fact that it’s loaded down with invasive DRM at all turns us off; but this particular DRM company has seen a very bad run (Reboots your computer without …
Unreal Tournament 3 Review For Xbox 360
Today, I’d like to present a special guest piece from one of our readers, a fellow named Dracul, who sent along this review of Unreal Tournament 3 for the Xbox 360.
If you have something to say, go ahead and let us know! Send in a review, a story, whatever you think the internet would like to see. Just click that Contact Us link up at the top of the page.
And now, on the with the show. Take it away, Dracul.
Unreal Tournament 3 for the Xbox 360 gives the players what most would look for in a typical shoot ‘em up kind of game; Violence, gibs, heavy gun, and the ability to get a pretty good headshot from miles away.
Unreal Tournament 3 does have a pretty decent story line, …
Review: Bookworm Adventures Deluxe
Behold the lowly bookworm—green, bespectacled, and possessing of terrible wit. This little fellow is named Lex, and he’s from a previous game, Bookworm. From our experience with that game, Bookworm Adventures does differ somewhat. For example, the puzzle interface is basically a scrambled set of lettered tiles in a 4×4 field; in Bookworm the selected letters had to be touching in order to spell words—in Bookworm Adventures they can be grabbed from anywhere.
The game presents itself with a somewhat flimsy but adorable narrative about a character trapped in a book about Greek mythology. Her name is Cassandra, a lovely, alabaster skinned Helena of Troy with green eyes and shimmering blonde hair who cries out to Lex for aid. As a bookworm, of course,
…
Review: AstroPop Deluxe
We came into this game looking at the cute, smooth rendered characters as mascots for space adventures and companions in this arcade puzzler—however, when it came down to the brass tacks, this game just wasn’t our cup of tea.
AstroPop presents itself as an action puzzler involving another color matching mechanism that we’ve seen many times before. It sets itself aside from other games by presenting a new way to approach this color matching. Bricks arrive from the top of the screen with the player at the bottom. The player flies a ship with the ability to grab blocks from the descending colorful menace up to a stack of four, and can release them back. Matching four or more blocks causes them to vanish as per usual.
While …
Review: Bejeweled Twist
Continuing on with our trek through casual gaming, we took a break from abusing cute, fuzzy colored koosh-balls for their eyeballs and decided to move onto shattering glittering gemstones in spaaaace. At least, this is how our first impression of Bejeweled Twist came about. A great deal of the artwork and presentation tied up in the game seems to suggest SciFi elements, right down to alien landscapes, and a spacecraft moving between levels.
The game itself is remarkably similar to the original title of Bejeweled: take a 2D grid of gemstones of various colors, exchange the positions of the precious gems to match them in rows, once matched they shatter and their neighbors collapse in to take up the emptied space. The twist of Bejeweled Twist, of …
Review: FATE Undiscovered Realms
FATE Undiscovered Realms is the sequel to FATE by WildTangent. Both of which have all the appearance of Diablo clones with numerous UI and game play design elements in common with the famous Blizzard game. A great deal of the story is front loaded in a long, tedious narrative voiced by an almost Shakespearian actor, but when it comes down to it, playing this game is less about the story and more about plunging through wave after wave of interesting monsters and then tripping over their beautifully rendered corpses.
The narrative and story of this game could have been done a lot better than it was. Especially being that the entire story at the beginning was narrated. Instead it comes across as a 1-2-3 style quest with nearly no explanation of why the 1-2-3 need be done. We found ourselves …
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