So after Apples big announcement I have ponder the abilities of Apple and questioned their decision. Honestly I don’t think we fully understand what was released, Apple/Steve Jobs has the habit of releasing Devices, ie iPod, and iPhone, that people think that is what everyone else is doing but somehow they dominate the market. I think it finally dawned on my this weekend who the iPad was perfect for and why they are going to sell. Its for your parents and grandparents, for those who don’t understand why their computer slows down or why they get viruses from email. This is for those you just want to do internet, email and for 9 bucks they can do a little word processing.
So I recently walked into the local Wal-Mart with the intent of buying a long deserved game and had a hard choice to make for a DS game between Mario and Luigi: Bowsers inside story, and Kingdom hearts. Apparently I picked up Kingdom Hearts in the end when I decided I wanted something a bit different. I don’t regret the choice because this game was beautiful! Though the gameplay may have lacked a little bit or the things seemed to drag and become a little monotonous when I hit one of the cut scenes it became totally worth it. Never have I seen such great art on the DS. I was suprised I wasn’t looking at console graphics on this little handheld. The gameplay itself could tend to get ugly, but I could tell how much I thought moments of this game utterly priceless.
First the bad, frames were choppy when a lot of stuff happened on screen I saw fps drop to nearly half of what it was normally running and I knew this wasn’t right in the least. The other thing about this game is that as you go on from day to day I found myself completely lost granted I haven’t gone through all of the kingdom hearts series, but I found myself begging for more plot and somehow not getting it at all. In fact as the game ended I found myself asking what the heck just happened I knew I’d liked the story, buttt I wasn’t quite sure what had exactly happened in it. Also as you progressed in the game I got fed a little bit of story then got sent on four or five mindless missions that didn’t reveal anything. They felt were more like time fillers in the story and I found it hard for me to go back and complete things one hundred percent when I wasn’t learning anything more about the characters and was doing the exact same thing constantly, going into a world beating a few heartless only to come back. Over and over and over again or my all time least favorite mission, go collect random items then come back. I felt like I was really wasting my time even though for some people that could really be a upside to the game to me it made the game drag on longer than it should have.
Last, but most definitely not least the good, as I mentioned above this game has a stellar story as they fed me a little bit of story I asked for more and more and more to the point I really didn’t wanna go back and find the last treasure chest in mission 42 I just wanted to head forward in the game. Though the story is weird and quirky and I’ll admit the slightest bit cheesy it reminded me of the Square Enix I love with deep multi faceted charactered and weird off the wall events that made absolutely no sense at all, but somehow was amazing! Don’t get me wrong it could have been better but it definitely was a good reminder of the good ole days of gaming when it wasn’t perfect by far, but it was a great attempt at an amazing thing. I also will commend Sqaure for creating a different approach at stats and items, the game works by assigning a different block shape to each power or ability or level then slowly as your beat missions you unlock slots in your stat board and you are allowed to assign to abilities to the new empty tiles. It may not be perfect but I sure liked it it was fun and enjoyable and a fresh take on the old cut and dry RPG. Along with this system hours of replayablity were worked into this game by making it so you can hop back to any mission you have completed and do it over to earn challenge awards to get your cooler stronger gear for your character, while not something will be doing all the time any time soon I’m sure I will pick this game up just to try and see how much of the challenges and such I can possibly finish.
The Verdict: I really liked this game a lot though it did drag all the time story wise through the whole experience, even though I completely loved the story that was there. I personally put a lot on a good story and a battle system that works in any RPG that I play.
Score 8.2/10
The DSi LL has now been confirmed for North America and Europe for Q1 2010. There are basically two major changes to it, first the screen size which is increased from 3.2 inches to 4.2 inches. This is actually a very significant size difference and even more so for people like me that did not feel like the DSi was enough to upgrade. The question that this whole issue raises in my mind is how big is too big? Are people not going to buy it simply because as the screens get bigger it loses portability. With the new specs will it still be pocketable?
The second major change is the battery life. This was a major reason that I did not want to upgrade to the DSi. I go on long trips sometimes and I did not want to see my DS cease to a an entertainment source any sooner than it already was. The new specs say that it will last 9 to 11 hours on mid-brightness. That is enough for me to be willing to upgrade. My DS Lite is beginning to show some wear and finally a few games on the DSi Ware are starting to catch my eye.
Other rumors include the ability of making your DS an e-Reader and 3G access which would definitely be welcome. We will just have to wait and see what is truth and what is simply dreaming. It all seems like a move to fight of the iPhone in what is becoming a very interesting handheld war. So, will the DSi LL convince you to upgrade?
As I mentioned a few weeks ago my Xbox gave me the RROD error, which i was very sad about, I was extremely nervous about the repair as I had never experienced Microsoft’s service from their xbox repair division, and I have to say thus far it has been relatively painless. I Packaged it up and got it sent off after a few days the progress on the website changed I do have to say I got an email stating it has shipped back to me though it didn’t actually ship for 4 more days. But still with in the time frame that they gave me on the repair.
In the box their was a free month card for Xbox live I’m sure to replace the 1 month I was without my Xbox. I didn’t notice upon receipt that they front USB Door cover was missing so I promptly called them and even though my Xbox is a special edition Halo green color they were able to replace the whole faceplate, which I’m still waiting for. All in all, it wasn’t that bad of an experience.
If you haven’t heard of World of Goo, what rock have you been hiding under? It is one of the greatest Physics based indie games ever. To celebrate 1 year, they have a special sale going on at their homepage that you really should check out: http://www.2dboy.com/games.php It allows you to pay whatever you want for a copy of their game! There have been some pretty crazy estimates that 80%+ of the copies of their game has been pirated. If you are one of those, here is a chance to make yourselves feel better. You can pay as little as $.01 but give them a few dollars and let them keep developing games. Currently the site is being hammered so if it doesn’t work right away, give it a few hours. The sale is supposed to be on for a week. If you don’t own this game you really should. It is an absolute classic!
In a brief text message exchange my brother put it rather mildly, what is it with all the zombie games. Now not being much of a horror buff, it has kind of put me outta the loop when it comes to zombie, and I have ventured into a few more mild ones.
After burning a few hours on the game Zombieville, on my iPhone, I realize it could be a fairly addicting game, you can come at it from a few different ways, either you kill as many zombies as you can to upgrade all your weapons or you just run through trying to get to the highest level you can. My suggestion try it one way then the other, you quickly learn strategies to push them back and manage the mobs.
On a More G Rated level I recently downloaded Zombie Vs Plants for my Mac, now this game is published by the company that brings us so so addicting games as Bejeweled, PopCap, as soon as I saw the name I became slightly worried because I now what kind of time vampire PopCap games can become. Being a giant fan of tower defense games it was fairly easy to catch on, basically you have plants with all kinds of special abilities, by collecting sun you can “build” new plants to defend your house from the zombie attack. After spending a couple hours with this game, I have to say its is well worth the 20 bucks, just try it out they offer a 60 minute demo that will give you a good feel for the progression of the game.
So really I don’t know who is to blame for my last 2 days of headache either att or apple, but this weekend they released the MMS update from AT&T, being totally excited about this and immediately clicking the update button, Sure I’ll upgrade to version 3.1 sure I’ll take the new carrier setting, not realizing that 3.1 “nerfs” the ability to load custom profiles in phone. ie. the profile that unlocks the internet tethering of the iPhone so AT&T can control and charge you more for the service.
Well after a couple hours of battling it out with my phone, and swearing I didn’t need to jail break it I successfully reverted my firmware back to 3.0 and update my carrier setting with 5.5. Just a couple of useful apps I used, mind you these are all mac apps, first off just search for the 3.0 firmware its all over the net called. iPhone1,2_3.0_7A341_restore.ipsw. This is the original 3.0 firmware, Second get a copy of iRevovery and libusb.pkg, I believe this is the 0.1.13 version.
Overall I am very disappointed with the process, its easy enough and I think I only slammed my head against the desk once. Come one AT&T/Apple, how can you justify removing features what every happened to being consumer friendly, when you purposely turn your amazing piece of hardware into a little tikes toys.
This week has been awesome. Why? I finally beat Patapon 2. I will do a review shortly but let me just say in my opinion this is one of the greatest games I have ever played. Probably within the top All-Time games in my list. I also beat Build-A-Lot which is alright and very much a time management game. Expect a review for that this weekend. However the big news this week was Nintendo dropping the price on the Wii and releasing the dates for their holiday line up. This year is kind of weak in my opinion, there are only two games I am interested in for the Wii: A Boy and His Blob and New Super Mario Bros. On the DS there is Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks but that is really about it. The Wife will be happy to know that they costs might be a little lower for a while though I haven’t had time to play so I am pretty much not buying at the moment. Here is the list of what I have been playing:
Patapon 2 (PSP)- This game is amazing and I highly recommend it to anyone who owns a PSP. I honestly will probably keep this thing around and play it randomly to stregthen my little guys. I will write more on it soon.
Build-a-lot (iTouch)- This was a fun game that was very addicting which is often my problem with time management games. I play it and nothing else when I have a quick bit of time until I finish it. Well it is finished now.
Defender Chronicles (iTouch)- A fun tower defense style game. I have kind of decided to start focusing on the second hero now and I think it might be easier with her.
I Dig It (iTouch)- This game was surprisingly fun. It was better to me than California Gold Rush as you just tried to dig lower and lower. It is very unforgiving because if you are even close to the end, you have to come up so you don’t die underground. Even if you have been playing for two hours it is extremely frustrating when all the sudden you are done. Pick it up if you get it cheap, I need to play it more.
I am getting settled in here. Now I have to figure out what my new games are going to be with a few of the mainstays being gone. Any recommendations, feel free to post!
So after two phone calls with customer support, their application that generates shipping labels doesn’t seem to work properly so I get wait 4 business days for them to ship me one. Don’t worry I won’t hold my breathe, on a side note I am seriously contemplating the purchase of a new XBox, due to the fact the 20GB hard drive seems awefully small since the update of the software to allow you to copy your games to the hard drive for faster playback. Microsoft announce a new pack that include a 250GB hard drive, which is the first we have seen one that large, 2 wireless controllers and a game for only 100 bucks more then the Elite which has 120GB.
My opinion if you are in the market for a new XBox 360 make sure to pick up one of these 250GB version, with the new content and loading full games on the console it will be well worth the purchase. I’d hate to see anyone purchase a new XBox with a 20GB hard drive or the arcade version.
Okay so I promised our readers to go through each category of phones specifcally and talk about the different phones and what they are like. As far as simple phones that are pretty easy on the wallet Nokia is really quite good at it for offering what the phone has in it these phones are surprisingly cheap.
Nokia N79 – In the ever changing world of phones its harder and harder to find a phone that you JUST use for calling and not texting or email or music but the Nokia N79 is almost there it does have goodies like a music player and optional everything but it wasn’t built for any of that and so we know it doesn’t function for that purpose. Nokia is known for a great operating system that is highly customizable and easy to work with otherwise known as the symbian operating system. Most people don’t think Symbian is much different than a windows operating system and the truth is that is Really isn’t much different. Its Windows mobile on with a Nokia twist and thats about it it’s nothing super special like it is put out to be most the time. The up side to this phone is that it generally is very easy to work on and very simple and easy to navigate. It’s a great phone that has a little bit of everything inside of it and works pretty well.
Nokia N85- Another example of Nokia offering a good phone in a little package, The N85 is surprisingly functional phone with a music player than can expand to and eight GB micro SD card. The downside being SD cards can go for the same price you payed for the phone originally. The N85 also has an amazingly great camera on it that is five megapixels while it may not offer everything and anything you want the N85 is definitely a great possibility when your looking for a new phone.
Nokia 1661- The cheapest of the cheap phones usually you can find this phone for free with a contract, or for a few dollars at most. This phone is truly meant for maybe a bit of texting calling people and that’s it what a phone was originally meant for. The problem is that it ends up breaking often its not very durable. If you want a phone that just works for calling other people and doesn’t have any of those bells and whistles.
These are just three of Nokia’s many phones but were the ones I felt worth great mention, Nokia phones in general are usually great phones. They don’t tend to be to highly priced and they also are fairly reliable they may be a little on the easy to break side on some phones but others or their phones are truly durable phones that can be beat around and not even feel it. Look forward to other articles soon!
