The Icewind Dale series is built on the same game system as the Baldur’s Gate games. Unlike Baldur’s Gate these games are focused more on the fighting and less on the story. As far as I’m concerned that’s a good thing. These old Infinity Engine games are just filled with pages and pages of boring fantasy text. It’s hard to get a sense of character and mood when every NPC has a ridiculous apostrophe-laden name like “Yxbudur’zmutkimdu.” Just point me towards a horde of goblins and let me click them to death. Icewind Dale II is very good at just keeping the monsters coming and follows a very linear progression from area to area. Not until the later chapters do you start to get bogged down with quests requiring putting specific items in specific containers to solve puzzles. The shift of pace was a little jarring and took me a while and a few jumps to a walk-through to get past some areas. I prefer the sword as a puzzle solving tool.
Many of my old complaints about the D & D system still apply here. There’s too many numbers thrown at the player and it’s difficult to know which weapons are more powerful than others. The magic system is immense and it was just too much work to figure out which spells were best against which enemies. C’mon devs, us gamers are lazy! Give us a tutorial mission or two for each class. All that said and in spite of my ignorance of the subtleties of the rules, the combat is fun and satisfying. I hope recent Kickstarter projects attempting to modernize this game system are sucessful.
Watch as Peter Lorre plays a Japanese man who is a master of disguise. This movie is pretty boring but it does feature a super-spy villain whose cover is a light-hearted vaudeville ventriloquist.
Although there are some great songs on this record (“Nashville Toupee” and “Daddy Was A Preacher But Mama Was A Go-Go Girl”), there are a couple overly-long stinkers. They don’t seem to have quite gelled as a band yet and there is a certain spark of energy missing from the music. After this record is when SCOTS really began to hit their stride.
Giana Sisters is a reworking of an old Commodore 64 game that itself was a note-for-note ripoff of Super Mario Bros. This new version has updated graphics and sound and around eighty new levels to explore. As far as platformers go, this is as about as derivative as you can get, and yet, the solid controls and cutesy graphics make this one worth playing. There is a very gentle difficulty curve, and it isn’t until about two-thirds the way through the game that things finally start to ramp up and get tricky. If you manage to beat the game you are rewarded with a final challenge level that is actually the original version’s entire set of levels all linked together as a single challenge level. I had a lot of fun with this one and am looking forward to taking on the new incarnation of the series, Twisted Dreams.
I take back what I took back last post. This Shonen Knife album is a bit of a bore. Again, they are trying to sound like the Ramones, and I guess I don’t really like bands that sound like the Ramones. There is no space in the production and the drums just sound like an (off tempo) drum machine.
I take back a little about what I said in my Pretty Little Baka Guy post. This record definitely has an obvious Beatles vibe and it works very well. I can remember the slightly out-of-tune vocals really annoying some of my roommates back in college. I really like them.
This is one of my wife’s CDs that made its way into my collection. Shonen Knife is one of those bands which you kinda laugh at when you first hear them and then they grow on you. They draw upon a lot of the same sources as The Pebbles—a band which I like much more—but they don’t quite have that 60’s girl group appeal. They are more a product of the Ramones rather than The Beatles.
This is the story of an American GI who returns to Sicily years after the war to find the girl he loved only to find himself held captive by the Mafiosi who run the town. The story is pretty good but it falters in the third act without ever really paying off.
Costume Quest feels like an off-hand idea thrown out there at a pitch meeting. I’m sure the designers had just taken their kids out trick-or-treating for the first time and thought to themselves, “Geesh, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a game where you were trick-or-treating and your costumes gave you superpowers!” Well, it might have been cool except for the fact that knocking on doors only to have repetitive battles is not fun at all. If there is one thing Doublefine Studios is good at is creative art direction and silly dialogue. Much like the critically lauded Psychonauts, this game is dripping with style and creativity. But, also like Psychonauts, the actual game play is just ho-hum. The game is just a lot of walking around, picking up candy and then having the occasional timing-based (ala Mario RPG) and strategy-free battles. This game was entertaining for about a half hour but got old really fast.
Syberia II picks up right where the first game left off with you racing by train into northern Russia in search of the mysterious island of Syberia. Of course there are plenty of obstacles along the way and lots of new and fantastical places to explore. The writing here is top-notch (with the exception of the completely redundant side story of Kate’s employers attempting to track her down) and I genuinely cared about the characters and their fates. My usual complaints about point-and-click adventures still apply here, but I never felt the game was (too) unfair with its puzzles.
