Resistance: Fall of Man -- Initial Impression.

I have a PlayStation 3, so I might as well use it. Right? There isn't a better place to start than with the PlayStation 3's marquee launch title Resistance: Fall of Man. The game is a first person shooter that puts you into a universe where World War II never happened because of an alien invasion. The year is 1951, so the humans essentially have use of W.W.II technology. It's an interesting premise. The game seems to be very traditional otherwise. It's not as run and gun, but more stop and pop. You have to make use of cover. The graphics initially seem detailed and clean. But not overly impressive as to make X360 owners worried by any means. The sound initially comes off as far more impressive with good use of surround sound. The story seems to be playing out in a traditional way. Nothing surprising and very by the book, just seemingly well done. So far it comes off as a good introduction to what can be done with the PS3. We'll have to see how it all plays out, of course.

Dragon's Curse -- All in One.

A little history maybe? Dragon's Curse is the name of the TurboGrafx-16 version of a SEGA owned property called Wonderboy III: The Dragon's Trap which happened to be developed by Westone.  It was published on the TG-16 by Hudson.  On the SEGA side of things it's the third proper entry in the Wonderboy series which began life as a SEGA arcade title that was ported to the SEGA Master System among others.  Dragon's Curse is the direct sequel to the arcade and SEGA Master System game Wonderboy in Monster Land.  It's literally a direct sequel with the game having you replay the last section of the final dungeon and then fighting the Mecha Dragon end boss. Only this time instead of the happy ending you witnessed at the end of Wonderboy in Monster Land you witness the Mecha Dragon's trap upon his death as you're turned into a Lizard-man. Dragon's Curse has you searching for the Salamander Cross which is able to end the curse and return you to your Hu-man form. To find the cross you'll need to defeat the other dragons in Monster Land. The gameplay is action adventure with you being able to jump and attack. You can use a couple of items and a couple forms of magic. You have arrows that shoot straight up and a boomerang that shoots out in front of you in an arc curving upwards. You get fireball and tornado magic. There are bottles of medicine to be bought and found that are used automatically when your hearts run out. You can add more hearts to your lifebar by finding the hidden hearts around Monster Land. You have access to a menu where you'll be able to equip various swords, armor, and shields. You'll spend a lot of time switching between them as each different sword, armor, and shield offers various levels of power and defense based on your current form.  As you defeat each dragon on the way to finding the Salamander Cross you'll be transformed into another form. Each form has its own unique abilities. Eventually you'll find a way to switch between them. The layout of Monster Land will restrict your movement and as you find the new forms with their abilities you'll be able to open up more of Monster Land to explore. Mouse-man for example will enable you to stick to certain blocks allowing you to walk up walls and even walk on the ceiling.  Lion-man's sword swipe will enable you to break certain blocks below and above you that the other forms just can't hit. Hawk-Man will allow you to fly while Piranha-Man will allow you to swim. In 1989 Wonderboy III: The Dragon's Trap was absolutely brilliant fun on the SEGA Master System. The TG-16 version offers up the same exact art and graphics. Except they changed the Hu-man form of the character to sort of distance him from SEGA's Wonderboy model.  The music in the Dragon's Trap was amazing and the music in Dragon's Curse are the exact same compositions. The TG-16 offers up a richer sound quality so the music comes off as improved where the graphics come off as pretty much the same. The gameplay is identical. It's very much explore and figure it out as you go with little help from the game itself. In other words, it's entirely 8-bit.  There is one area where there is a distinct difference between the two versions and that's in the translation. Hudson's translation is humorously corny. It's pure camp. While SEGA's translation is decidedly straight. I prefer the SEGA translation but Hudson's is entirely fine and it's not so big a deal as you really only get text in the intro and ending. I actually played the game via the Nintendo Wii and its Virtual Console. The emulation is great and the game comes off as the TG-16 version exactly.  Wonderboy III: The Dragon's Trap is unquestionably one of the greatest games of the 8-bit generation.  It belongs up there with Phantasy Star and Metroid and Zelda and Mega Man, it just happened that only those smart enough to own the SEGA Master System got a chance to play it. Now the Nintendo Wii provides a means for gamers to rediscover a true classic, or find it for the first time. If you have a Wii and don't have Dragon's Curse, what the hell are you waiting on? If you don't have a Wii, make Dragon's Curse one of the first titles you purchase off the Wii Shop Channel.  I'm giving Dragon's Curse for the TG-16 via the Nintendo Wii a 9.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney -- Just the Facts.

I have completed three of the five cases in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. The game follows a flow pattern of investigation and court room sections. The investigation sections play out as detective work. You have five commands available on the touchscreen. Move allows you to move from one location to another via menu selection. Everything is done in stills. You don't have any physical control over your character. The Examine command allows you to search around the room with the stylus to highlight items and receive a detailed description about said item. This is how you'll find most of your evidence for use in court. The Talk command allows you to interact with the other characters in the locations. You'll need to pay attention to the conversations for information that will help your case.  The Present command allows you to show another character evidence you've collected and have them comment on it. The final selection is Court Record where you can view all the evidence you've collected and get a basic description for each item.  Only after you've acquired all the evidence you'll need are you allowed to move on to the court room sections. Here you'll have the options of advancing or going back through witness testimony. You're able to Press or Present during the cross-examination. Pressing will get you more information on whatever the witness has just said. Presenting allows for you to confront a witness with the evidence within the court record. It's mostly used to expose inconsistencies in witness testimony. Pressing has no penalty, but presenting irrelevant evidence to a witness' testimony will cost you to lose one exclamation point. You're allowed four mistakes. Make a fifth and it's game over. This is so you can't just present on every statement with every piece of evidence until you get it to advance the story. It's so there is an actual game element to what's otherwise an interactive digital novel. As far as the control goes for Phoenix Wright, I have no complaints. The stylus control is fast and easy and entirely point and touch compared to point and click. It controls fine. The bigger question is does the story make it worth the effort? Next time...

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney -- Initial Impression.

I have played through the first case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney on the Nintendo DS. Capcom's comic courtroom adventure game was all the rage early on in the Nintendo DS's life do it selling through its initial tiny first print run and the much ballyhooed reprinting of the game. So I've finally gotten around to seeing what all the fuss was about. I have to say, my initial impression says it was much ado about nothing. Now I do understand that the first case is a mere tutorial and that hopefully the other cases are much more substantive. The first case is very much about jumping through the right hoops at the right time and not much else. Along the way you're subjected to some goofy humor. The music is rather bland digital comic stuff. It's just there. The graphics seem to be predominantly still 2D art with minimal transition frames between stills for the character animation. The success of this title for me is all going to come down to the humor and the stories being told. As well as how much the gameplay makes you jump through those hoops. Hopefully it turns out better than my initial impression.

General Update -- PSU, Halo 3 Beta, and Stuff.

It's been nine days since my last entry and what have I done? Not much. Even though I'm still sitting behind a mountain of unplayed games I want to get through this summer. I haven't started anything new. I've been spending a lot of time messing around with a couple of new gadgets. A digital camera and an iPod. I have been playing Phantasy Star Universe here and there. My primary character is sitting at the level cap of level eighty. He's also capped at his class type of Fortegunner. Which means I'm not gaining any experience for either my level or my class type. I can only build up my Photon Arts and earn Photon Fragments and money in the form of Meseta. Next week will see a major update to PSU. A new event called Firebreak. If you've played Phantasy Star Online at all, and remember the events like Massive Attack or Massive Attack 2 then you'll have the general idea. We'll be running through the missions earning communal points towards unlocking rewards at set intervals. I have put in eight-hundred hours on my primary character. Eight-hundred hours is thirty-three and a third days. Over a solid month of my life has been taken by this game and it shows no signs of slowing down. Especially with the announced expansion Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus due this fall. Where will it end? Fifteen-hundred hours? Two-thousand? Scary, isn't it? What else is going on? Oh yeah, a little thing called the Halo 3 Beta hit on Wednesday. It didn't go off without a hitch though. The people who bought Crackdown as their means to access the beta found themselves locked out as the download option remained grayed out. Microsoft got it fixed about fourteen hours behind the original scheduled time. In that fourteen hours the gaming section of the Internet went totally batshit insane. I know it's the Internet, but still, even by those standards it was an amazingly pathetic display. The mistaken sense of entitlement that these people have is astounding. There was a fervor of bitching the likes of which I hadn't thought possible. Everything from my life is totally ruined because I stayed home from work or school to play the beta and now I can't to it's a conspiracy by Microsoft. Cries of fuck Bungie and that's it I'm selling my Xbox 360 and buying a PlayStation 3 rang out across the Internet. As for the Halo 3 Beta itself, color me impressed. No, it's not the massive graphical leap people wanted. It's still very good looking. But that really doesn't mean much because it's Halo gameplay through and through. It's instantly accessible and instantly fun. The new weapons and vehicles and items really make the gameplay all that much more dynamic. They up the tactical level considerably. They just offer up so much more potential. The new weapons and items all have their uses. Nothing seems throwaway or a waste. Everything comes off as useful. The real big innovation though is the saved films feature. The game allows you to save the previous match. In the beta you can pretty much just save them in their entirety. In the final you'll be able to move the camera around and edit them down to just the key moments if you so choose. You can create private rooms and go in and watch the saved films of other players and have a realtime discussion about them. It's just pure genius. It'll change everything going forward. The Halo 3 beta tells me that Halo 3 is more than a safe bet. It's a sure thing. It'll provide me with hundreds of hours of online multiplayer mayhem this fall. What else? Hmm, Aegis Wing is pretty cool, for a free game. Three interns at Microsoft are responsible for this sidescrolling shooter. The big feature here is that it's a standard sidescrolling shooter that can be played cooperatively online with up to four players. We've also been having fun playing revisiting Texas Hold 'em. One of the other originally free Xbox Live Arcade games. I do need to get my head out of my ass and actually start something though...

Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves -- Final Opinion.

If you could sum up the Sly series with one word, that word would be charming. And Sly 3 certainly fits that description. Charming in character and story as well as in the variety of action gameplay. As usual the story and the character of the characters are top notch here. Sly 3 continues the story established in Sly 1 and Sly 2. And as with the ending of Sly 2, the ending of Sly 3 is quite surprising and not what you'd expect. The endings have real emotional impact due to the brilliant comedic storytelling style employed by Sucker Punch. These guys know how to tell a great story and they're not afraid to take it places that the art style wouldn't immediately suggest. It's not all rainbows and sunshine, it actually gets real. The exceptional voice acting and the characters you've come to care about make it easy for a willing developer to push the story into loftier areas. Sucker Punch is able to push buttons with a cartoon raccoon in a way most realistic styled games couldn't ever hope to. Sly 3 features great graphics with a very cool Saturday morning cartoon art direction. It features well-fitting music and some of the best voice acting ever heard. A story that's more than worth actually paying attention to. I laughed out loud at Sly 3 more than any other game in the last decade. The ending to Sly 3 provides a good amount of closure and teases what may come if a fourth game ever arrives. But as it is, it's a great ending to a trilogy of must play PlayStation 2 games. I'm giving Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves a 9.

Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves -- Out with Some Old, in with Some New.

Sly 3 is predominantly the same game as the others in the series with a few key changes. Let's start with what isn't there. The clue bottles are no more. Which means no more scurrying the hub levels for all those bottles for collection's sake because the collection aspect is entirely gone with the bottles. For me personally I could go either way. I did in fact collect every last bottle in Sly 1 and Sly 2 and I was expecting to do so again with Sly 3. It does remove some the purely exploration aspects of the previous titles as you literally had to check every last nook and cranny in the levels for them. I think most people will be fine with their removal. The new comes in two ways. One is in the level structuring.  You're still free to move around the hub levels so you can pickpocket guards for their money. And you're still free to select this mission or that from the waypoints. The levels are more focused without the collection aspect. So now you just go through playing the game in a more straightforward fashion. After you've completed the story for a given chapter you're able to go back into the chapter's menu and select challenges to complete. These consist mainly of completing sections of the previous chapter under a time limit. Such as defeating the boss, or running some gauntlet, or finding all the items on time. These challenges count towards the 100% completion rating within the game. The other new aspect to the game are the new playable characters. The story has Sly needing to add new talent to the gang to pull off the latest caper. This comes in the form of five new playable characters. Beyond playing as Sly, Bentley, and Murray, you'll be able to play as The Guru, Penelope, Panda King, Dimitri, and Carmelita Fox. No, Carmelita doesn't join the gang. Yes, it's that Panda King. And yes, it's that Dimitri. Greasy-sweet, right? For the most part the five new playable characters are very context sensitive within the story. In other words, you don't get free access to them and they'll be used sparingly. This is welcome by me as I don't need the game to be stretched too far from the gameplay of the main three characters. Outside of these changes it's still the very same game at the core. Which is a good thing. The game is still a great example of using a variety of gameplay concepts. Action and vehicles and minigames abound in one seamless package. It's still as fun as it ever was.

Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves -- Initial Impression.

Next up for me is a return to the PlayStation 2 via the PlayStation 3 with Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves. From the time I've spent with it thus far I can tell that it's still a continuation of the same story established in Sly 1 and Sly 2. And that the same brilliant art style and approach to storytelling are still being employed. It makes me expect great things from Sly 3. I'm expecting a great comic caper of a story with some tight and fun platform gameplay with various other action elements thrown in for variety. We'll see what comes....

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin -- Final Opinion.

Twenty-seven hours and twenty-five minutes later I have finished Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. I ended up with 100% completion in the enemy list with all drops accounted for. Same goes for all skills at master level. I completed the quests at 100%. I ended up with a perfect 1,000% of the castle explored. I pretty much did everything in the main game except for 100% of the items which would have involved a couple hours of running around earning money so I could buy every last item from the shop. I ended up with like 89.4% of all the items or thereabouts. I have to say I really liked the changes made to the game's mechanics. The leveling of skills. The more defined level structure caused by the painting gimmick. And of course the ability to play as or with the tagalong character as well as being able to do it all with switching on the fly. It couldn't be more easy and it works very well. Even the story is decent and coherent. Which is something I can't say for most of the Metroidvania style Castlevania games. The graphics are gorgeous with liberal uses of parallax scrolling and bits of 3D thrown in for good measure. The creatures are a mix of old and new. The old creatures and the castle layout itself help connect this one to Symphony of the Night more than the others. The music is great. The composition is once again handled by series veteran Michiru Yamane. Only this time around she's joined by legendary game music composer Yuzo Koshiro who composed five tracks for the game. The gameplay is classic Metroidvania. It only feels a little more fresh to me this time around. I had a great time with Portrait of Ruin and I eagerly await the next Metroidvania game. Only this time, I hope it's for a console.  It's about time the series returns to one in my opinion. I'm giving Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin a 9.5.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin -- The Mechanics of Metroidvania V6.0.

I consider Portrait of Ruin to be the sixth iteration of the style of Castlevania commonly known as Metroidvania. The Metroidvania style began with Symphony of the Night and it continued on through Circle of the Moon, Aria of Sorrow, Harmony of Dissonance, Dawn of Sorrow, and into Portrait of Ruin. All of these games have played the same at their cores. They're all action games with RPG overtones. They've messed around with the systems in each game to make then seem different and new. That trend continues into Portrait of Ruin. At its heart Portrait of Ruin is Symphony of the Night. So what did they change this time to help with the illusion of being new? Quite a lot actually. As this version of the game feels the most fresh to me personally. Most prominent in the list of changes is the addition of a secondary character that can called to fight along side your primary character, or can be switched to be the primary character, or can be sent away entirely. Portrait of Ruin has you playing as Jonathan Morris and or Charlotte Aulin. The control pad controls your character's movements. The Y button attacks. The B button jumps. The A button calls the other character. The X button switches between characters. The L button is for a backwards dash. The R button activates the partner's skill. The skill will be a sub-weapon for Jonathan and magic for Charlotte. You can control either character alone or partnered whenever you wish it. There will be situations where you'll need to call the partner character to get around certain obstacles and solve minor puzzles. The characters share the same life and skill meters so there isn't any switching that will act as a saving grace. There is a combination move that can be performed called a Dual Crush. The Dual Crush is done by pressing up and X. The select button with toggle between the castle map and the enemy data in the upper screen. This is actually quite helpful, more than I would have expected, as the nature of the collection aspect of the game lends itself to a lot of referring to the enemy listing. And being able to do that instantly is very welcome. There are a lot of optional items to collect. Most creatures have one item drop, with more than a few having two drops. This amounts in a large number of weapons and items and armor. With two characters to equip and tons of possible combinations to experiment with looking for interesting and useful effects, you'll want to spend some time collecting the drops. You're able to equip items in eight categories. They are weapon, skills, body, head, legs, accessory one, accessory two, and Dual Crush. They have also changed the sub-weapons. You know, the things like the dagger or the holy water or the axe we all know and love. You still use your magic to use them and the magic is still restored from the hearts you'll earn from destroying candles and the like. They are referred to as skills for Jonathan and you actually equip them. They don't switch out from picking up another kind this time around.  They also can be mastered. The more you use them, the stronger they become. There is a guide for the skills in the menu in which you'll be able to track your progress as to how far you've leveled each one. There are considerably more this time around than that of previous games. They can be acquired as rare item drops from creatures or as quest rewards or just sitting there out in the open. There are two other areas of the game with changes worth noting. One is in the structure of the castle and the fact that you spend a great deal of time outside of the castle. The title of the game comes from the portraits hanging within the castle that warp you to new locations outside the castle. This provides a breath of fresh air in my opinion. No pun intended. Just being somewhere else besides the castle is very welcome by me at this point. The other major change comes with the character named Wind. Once you meet Wind in the game you'll start to be able to undertake his quests. He'll want you to do a variety of things for a reward. Some of them are just a matter of fetching all the needed items and others are about being able to pull off a certain skill or move. And others are far more puzzle orientated and not so immediately obvious as to what needs to be done. The rewards are along the lines of new skills and abilities so the quests are well worth doing. I have to say that thus far I'm really taking to Portrait of Ruin's system changes. I like them a lot. They actually feel fresh and different from the others. Especially combined with the new locations the portraits provide and the two distinct styles of play from the main characters.