There’s a spider boss, but when you start the section you have to run down a hallway, then complete a quick “hit two switches” section. It might be a little tricky the first time, but it’s no big deal.  After that the spider drops down, and you have to run through a bunch more stuff to get to the real fight. It takes a minute and a half to get there in this video, and he’s fast:

1:30 may not sound like a lot of time, but chances are it’s going to take you multiple tries to beat this boss.  You’re going to spend 1:30 just to get to the part where you die trying to figure out the patterns. It took me four or five tries, I don’t remember. It’s frustrating, more than it is actual wasted time, and it’s needless. Just add a checkpoint there!

Example two is the final boss in the game, so don’t watch the whole video if you don’t want to spoil it (watch the first 45 seconds).

Thirty seconds of climbing up a ladder, every time you restart! Then another 15 seconds for the fight to begin. Again, not a ton of actual time, but imagine climbing that ladder ten times. If they wanted that for dramatic effect, fine, show that the first time you load the game, but if you die or restart, have a temporary checkpoint at the top of the ladder!

I don’t mind if the game is hard. Hell, you can even make the game harder, just stop punishing me by making me replay these boring sections!

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LIMBO:

Really fantastic game, the art style is great. It’s funny how disturbing some parts of it are even though you can’t really see what’s happening. Ripping off a spider’s leg makes you squeamish, though it’s largely in your imagination. I haven’t gotten the “Complete the game in one sitting with five or less deaths” achievement, and don’t know that I’ll try. I wish they had made it “complete all chapters without dying” — that way you could do it in chunks, and replay any chapter you messed up.

Costume Quest: Psychonauts is one of my favorite games, and I was really looking forward to this. I loved it. Yes, it was easy, and yes, the battles were a bit repetitive, but I didn’t really mind. The game was adorable, and that rainbow unicorn? Amazing. And I’ll never get tired of seeing the Statue of Liberty’s special attack animation. I think they should have required the use of certain costumes in some boss battles, and also required certain battle stamps to win. I don’t mean they’d tell you which to use, I mean you’d have to figure out that a certain special attack was the key to winning. That would have changed up the battles enough I think, and added more strategy to it.

Costume Quest: Grubbins on Ice DLC I also got the DLC pack. I had hoped that they would have improved some things and changed up the combat a bit, but they didn’t. It came out so quickly that they probably had it almost ready to go right when CQ first launched. I don’t mind supporting Double Fine, but it was really just more of the same, so I’m not sure it was worth $5 (I completed it in one sitting).

Trials HD: Really fun but holy shit hard later on. I was able to get most of the achievements, which I’m pretty proud of, especially “Unyielding” where you must complete it using only gas/brake, no “leaning.”

The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom: Love it. Got all the achievements, wish there were more levels. Really great concept, and it would be perfect for user-created levels. (Also, I just bought it again on Steam for 49 cents! BUY IT if it’s still on sale! Crazy!)

Zeno Clash Ultimate Edition: Weird game, love the style, had fun playing it, but no achievements in the main game? Really? Come onnnnn.

‘Splosion Man: Great game, love the co-op.

Just bought Hydro Thunder Hurricane (fun so far!), and am looking forward to Ilomilo and Stacking.

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Kodu, you may remember, is the game programming tool shown at CES by “actual 12-year-old girl,” Sparrow. It was cartoony and cute and bright, and many people wrote it off instantly: “LBP rip-off!”, “Stupid rock-carrying game?!”, and so on. I really wanted to try it out, and now, apparently, it’s out. I say apparently because it’s gotten almost no press, and the only way I found out was by randomly browsing the Community Games channel and seeing it there. (Okay, Joystiq and other sites did post about it, but I had relatives over for the past two weeks so maybe I just missed it.) Still, after the CES demo I thought its release would be a much bigger event, and it would show up somewhere on the Xbox dashboard (Spotlight). It’s too bad it wasn’t released on XBLA rather than the CG channel, the place where no one dares tread.

Anyway, I’ve been playing around with it for the past few days, and it’s great! You really can create all sorts of games, from FPSs, to side-scrollers, to racing games. The interface is very well designed, for the most part, using nested pie menus for all of the actions/objects. There are lots of different lighting options and ground materials to help change the look of your games, so don’t think everything created has to be blue-skies-and-rainbows. The programming is easy, but surprisingly deep if you learn how everything works. Because it was initially designed for kids, it’s also very fast. You can go from editing your level to playing it in under a second.

I was programming a dual-stick shooter for a video I hope to put up, and my roommate started watching. “What happens when you run into the UFOs?” he asked.
“They blow up and damage your ship.”
“Is that what always happens?”
“Well no, that’s what I made them do. I can program it to do whatever. I can make them…turn into apples, if I wanted to.”
“Do it!” Literally twenty seconds later I had it working that way, just for fun. The Kode (yes, I just called it that):
WHEN bump puck DO vanish me
WHEN bump puck DO create apple
Crazy how simple it can be, isn’t it?

There are definitely limitations though. One of my biggest complaints is that not every object has every option available to it — you can create a tree that shoots missiles, but a soccer ball can’t follow a path the way lights and bots can. I was hoping each object would simply look different, and have sliders set differently (bounciness, speed, etc.), but could be programmed however you want. If you like how one vehicle controls, but wished you could use a different 3D model, you’re out of luck. But this is where extreme creativity shines. With these limitations, how far can you take it? Some game types seem impossible, but someone will figure out how to make it work. Kodu comes with a bunch of samples and prebuilt games, so you can learn how the more advanced games are programmed (they’re all editable). Be sure to check out “gawlf” to see how they brilliantly used the health bar to act as your swing power meter.

Did I mention it’s only five dollars, which is a steal? I easily would have paid $20, and with a more robust system it could have been a retail game. I should mention that Kodu does a pretty poor job at introducing you to the game. They desperately need a “play tutorials” button on the main menu, with a list of tutorials that get checked off as you go along, each one with a hint system (where’s Clippy when you need him?*). There are just three tutorials that come with Kodu, mixed in with the other games, and they don’t actually explain anything. I guess they thought it was so well designed it didn’t need any explanation. So I recommend watching some video tutorials (online — none are included) first to get an idea of it before you jump in (I hope to have some tutorials up in the near future).

You won’t be able to make the next Gears of War, and you won’t even be able to make exactly the arcade game you had in mind, but new ideas will appear, and you’ll have fun doing it. If you have kids, buy Kodu. Even if they can’t use it on their own, you can create things with them. If you’ve ever had a game idea of your own, buy Kodu. It’s designed to get you thinking like a programmer, and it succeeds.

Other Notes:
Right now game sharing sucks — you have to be friends with the person, and both be running Kodu at the same time. They are working on a patch though, which will add three dedicated servers! There’s also a bug where levels seem to get deleted — if it happens, restart Kodu and it might fix it (more info here). The patch will also fix this and other issues.
The patch is out! Delete Kodu and re-download if you don’t have it (there’s no “update” function).

Links:
Kodu fan forum
Audio interview with Matt MacLaurin — back when it was called Boku.
The Kodu Blog

* Please don’t include Clippy. In anything. Ever.

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You step into the shoes of Ol’ Master Ninja, tasked with defending Ninjatown from waves of enemies trying to make their way through the town. To stop them, you construct Ninja Huts along their path, from which Ninjas will emerge to engage the enemy. Building each hut costs you Ninja Star Cookies, the currency of Ninjatown, and as you defeat enemies, you earn more cookies. You then re-invest these cookies into building and upgrading huts to deal with the ever increasing waves of enemies. You can also build something we call Modifier Buildings, that will endow any adjacent huts with a special ability. These include buildings like the Training Dojo, which can increase your attack power, or the Tea Shop, which makes your units move faster.

That’s only the basics though, among the new gameplay elements we introduce are Ol’ Master Ninja (OMN) Powers, which are unlocked throughout the game and help to supplement your defensive abilities. These give you powers like Get Off My Lawn, where the player blows into the microphone to push enemies around on the map, or Magnifryer, which lets you direct a beam of scorching hot light on your enemies.

The ninja huts you build are what you’d expect — slow powerful ninjas, fast weak ones, snipers, ice/fire ninjas, and so on. There are also building modifiers, which raise the attack power of the surrounding ninjas, increase their range, or get you more cookies (money). You can upgrade the huts, but that takes time, so you need to do it between waves, or hope you have enough ninjas out there while upgrading.

I just beat the game, getting A ranks on every stage (with the help of strategies on a couple stages). It’s an incredibly fun game, and its biggest fault is its length! It’s not that it’s so short, but it’s so much fun it leaves you wanting more, and there were so many obvious, easy ways to extend it!
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Read the rest of Totally addicted to Ninjatown (DS) (454 words)

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1. I didn’t buy it until just now, because I’ve been broke
2. the blistering speed of the new songs melded my hands to the guitar, leaving me unable to use a computer keyboard
3. I’ve been so addicted to GHtunes that I’ve spent every moment creating and playing new songs
4. although we bought it on day one, it’s not very good so we haven’t beaten it yet, and instead simply unlocked all the songs with a cheatcode and played the ones we liked in quickplay, then went back to RB2

Yes, it’s the last one (though I’ve played it more than that). How can a game that seems almost identical to RB be so much worse? It’s the little things…
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Read the rest of Review: Guitar Hero World Tour (1,657 words)

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There are a lot of features I have yet to try, but let me run down some of the biggest improvements (and worst removals) Harmonix has made, and suggest some more changes. I haven’t played online at all, so I can’t comment on that, nor do I have any of the new instruments. I’m calling this a “quick” review only because I’m focusing on specific things that matter to us RB-obsessed players, not reviewing every part of the game.

Solo World Tour

As previously mentioned.

Characters Not Tied to Instruments, No Band Leader

Now you can create a band, create up to 24 characters (per profile), and use any of them. I drummed for most of the day, but when I got tired, I switched to vocals, and then to guitar — something that wasn’t possible in RB1.

Character Stand-ins

This is actually a great new addition, but you might not realize it at first. If you go to your Band Profile, you can choose other characters you’ve made who will stand-in if you’re not playing as a full band (something we always wished for with RB1). I created three new characters, and when I played Solo, they were there on guitar/bass/vocals. Whenever there’s a lull in the instrument you’re playing, what does it show? Not your character obviously, since you’re not playing. It shows the guitarist (or whomever) playing their solo — and now you have your customized stand-in characters to watch!

This also made me want to customize them more, so I switched characters throughout the day to build up their money and buy new clothes. It really didn’t take much, as I only needed ~$500 to get all the stuff I wanted in most cases, but it was fun. The only remaining issue is that you assign them specific instruments (not again, HMX!) to stand-in for, so if I play drums with my stand-in for bass, then some random character joins (unless I take the time to switch the stand-ins around). They should have a few “universal” stand-ins you can select, so you’ll always have your characters playing.

Drum Trainer / Fill Trainer

I had a lot of fun with this. They give you a bunch of drum patterns, and you can change the speed on the fly. 100% a pattern and it’ll mark the speed you beat it at, so you can try for a higher speed, or see which ones you need work on. It’s like a little mini-game that also really helps you improve. The fill trainer is also great, and something I definitely need work on (remembering to do the fills while playing the main game is the big problem).

Challenges / Battle of the Bands

I actually didn’t play much of this yet, but there will be new ones often, which will really help increase the replay value of the game, and add incentive to buying full albums/packs.

No Fan Caps

In RB1, once you hit the cap, continuing to play meant you could only lose fans — stupid, right? Now, you’ll still gain fans, but at a certain point you won’t receive as many unless you switch to a higher difficulty. When I switched to vocals on Medium, I had already hit the Medium “soft cap” (since I play everything else on Expert), but was still able to keep unlocking stuff.

Some new clothes, makeup, hats, piercings, etc.

While the main “stores” contain the same clothes as RB1, there’s a new “thrift store” as well as some other additions. I don’t feel like it’s a very important part of the game, but other people may be slightly disappointed there isn’t more. I’d like to see them work the characters into the game a little more in RB3, so there’s a more of a point to this. Stand-ins is a start. Really though, it’s all about the music.

The Setlist is Great

There were definitely some surprises. Dinosaur Jr.’s “Feel the Pain” was a lot of fun on drums, as well as Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” There’s always some disappointment when my favorite songs are easy (and boring) to play, but at least they’ll be fun to sing with a group. My most anticipated song, Silversun Pickups’s “Lazy Eye,” has over 100 tambourine hits in a row! But it’s awesome.

Hiring Staff Members

I’m not sure they have a huge effect, but it helps if you’re going for money, or fans, to be able to pick someone who’ll boost that for you. We didn’t care about money at all in RB1, but really needed fans, and this would have helped.

No Fail Mode / Setlists

I haven’t used this yet, but I’m so glad it’s finally here! Drunk parties are not fun when everyone fails ten seconds into the song. Some non-drunks just aren’t very good, and refuse to play if they think they’re going to fail, so this fixes that, too. RB2 can be used as a general karaoke machine now.

Now Quickplay allows you to make a long setlist.

Minor Gameplay Tweaks

There are now drum solos (blue scroll, percentage counter), there are HOPO chords, and they increased the readability of HOPOs by adding dual grooves on both sides.

World Tour is Mostly the Same

I really thought it would be a lot different, with less repetition, but aside from being able to play Solo and without band leaders, it’s mostly like RB1. Of course now we all have tons of DLC, so that helps, but they need to do away with pre-made setlists entirely! Make them themed setlists! Have a randomly generated “80′s” setlist (that we can “reshuffle”), or let us create our own (forcing us to choose only 80′s songs). Make a “Southern Rock” setlist, a “Tier 6″ setlist, and so on, so we can avoid songs we really hate, but still fall within the guidelines.

Some Interface Improvements, Lots Still Missing

Using the music store interface for the song selection is great. It shows the album art, and sorting is much better. You can hold a button (bass pedal on drums, Right Bumper on controller, etc.) to bring up a list of headings (genres, A-Z, decades — whatever you’re sorting it by) and skip directly to what you want. You can also just tap the button to jump to the next heading. No more holding “down” for ten minutes!

While that’s a big improvement, there are still a lot of things missing. How do I get back to the main menu? What? I still have to hit “B” fifty times? They need a “quick menu” assigned to a button that you can bring up at any time to perform various tasks. More improvements in the next item.

Needs More Profiles! For Everything!

I could write an entire book on this subject (being a web designer, usability is a big thing for me), but let me try to be brief.

Your current calibration setting should be displayed on the main screen, so you always know you’re on the correct setting. There should be customizable calibration profiles (that you can name, like “John’s house”). I know the new guitar has auto calibration, but why have to do it every time? Calibrate something once, why calibrate it again? (“…psycho killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est? fa fa fa fa fa fa fa”–sorry.) Speaking of calibration, let me play a song to test the calibration immediately! Don’t require me to back all the way out, go through quickplay, test the song, quit, back to calibration, etc. etc.!

It should save your previous band arrangement, and load it immediately. You should not have to pick your character every time, there should be a “change band members” option available for when you do want to. Give us “band profiles” for often-selected arrangements (e.g., Profile 1: Character “Amy” on bass, character “Tommy” on drums, etc.). Make a thumbnail button for each profile with a picture of the characters on their respective instruments, so we can quickly switch between them.

No Stars Shown…Pretty Much Anywhere.

People. Are. Pissed. Myself included. Ever since the original Guitar Hero, your “stars” were displayed right next to the songs. This way you could scroll down and see how you were doing, and see which songs you needed to improve on. For the hardcore players, this is essential. Rock Band 2 — they’re gone. Not in quickplay, nowhere. The only place the stars are saved is in World Tour, on single song sets. But that would require you to hunt through all the venues to find the song you want to play.

There are some issues here. Since there’s no “solo tour” list like in RB1, they would have to be displayed in (solo) Quickplay. But as it is, you select your difficulty after selecting the song, so they just need to reverse that, or copy the way DDR does it. DDR lets you double-tap up or down to switch your difficulty on the songlist, and it changes your “grades” in real time to reflect that. This NEEDS a patch.

Rock Band 2 also needs a “score sync” feature, so you can play either RB1 or 2, and it’ll update all your scores from the leaderboards. Seriously, for the hardcore players, this is the stuff that matters the most.

Related posts:

1. Rock Band: Expert Pro Drums 100% flawless scores Here are some of the more notable 100%s I’ve gotten...

Quick Thoughts

Dark Sector isn’t a terrible game if you’re a fan of the genre, but there are a lot of weaknesses. Enemies respawn far too often, which amounts to you ducking behind a wall for ten minutes shooting the same enemies. It copies Gears of War too much, including things that don’t make sense: as GiantBomb pointed out, your running and sprinting speed is the same as GoW — which makes no sense here as Hayden (your character) is a skinny guy, not a giant man in armor.

The “glaive” is great, and is one of the only things that sets this game apart. It’s a blade that acts as a boomerang; throw it to slice enemies in half, and it’ll come back to you. You’ll gain an “aftertouch” ability which lets you slow down time and actually direct the glaive mid-flight, which is what I spent most of the game doing.

Aside from that it’s a pretty standard shooter.

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Read the rest of Dark Sector, and Poor Game Design (1,010 words)

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Both of these podcasts are very in-depth (i.e., LONG), and we really just did them for fun. We’ll try to make future podcasts shorter. Originally it was going to be a single podcast, but I decided to split it in two because of the length.

See videos for both games at the bottom of this post.

Part 1: Space Invaders Extreme (Tommy Gun + Neofletcher)

This is an update to Space Invaders, similar to what they did with Pac-Man CE on Live Arcade. New enemies, new weapons, and best of all, the whole game thumps to the music (think Rez, Lumines)! As of this recording it’s an import, but it’s coming to the US on June 17th.

20 minutes, 8MB:

Corrections and Additional Info:
It’s called “Fever Time” not “Frenzy.”

I found out that the bosses in the PSP version are not shrunk down, it actually is a differently shaped field than on the DS, although they remove the borders on the PSP to give it slightly more height than the main PSP levels.

Part 2: Nanostray 2 (Tommy Gun + Neofletcher)

A sequel, this is a very traditional shmup (more so than Nanostray 1). Has D-pad control or touch-screen control.

43 minutes, 17MB:

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Read the rest of Podcast #1 – Space Invaders Extreme, Nanostray 2 (16 words)

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I loved Deus Ex, but halfway through my save file got corrupted, and I couldn’t finish it. I really love cyberpunk, so this game really interested me. After I beat it, I made some videos of it, and decided I might as well review it while I was at it. This was about a year ago, and all this content has been sitting on my hard drive since then. So, while this review was mostly done, keep in mind that I may have left some things out. Links to both videos are in the review below.

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Read the rest of Review: “Project: Snowblind” (Xbox, PS2, PC) (879 words)

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Read the rest of Review: “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” (1,064 words)

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The game is awesome.

I’m not going to focus on all the little good things here, so let me just say that I love the game. There are some major usability issues that I’ll be discussing in the future, but the venues, characters, and core gameplay are fantastic.

Stars are displayed as you earn them.

You always know exactly how well you’re doing because the stars have orange circles around them. They fill up as you’re playing, and when you earn another star it “dings.” This can anger you when you’re one pixel away from five stars, but it also creates some cool moments. I finished the Vocal Solo Tour on Medium (my voice sucks). On a few of the songs, I just barely got five stars. I was singing “Suffragette City,” and at the end saw I was so close to five stars. I had already activated my overdrive, and just had a tiny bit left. The very last part of the song isn’t singing, it’s just yelling “Suff-ra-gette!” at the right time. Well I literally got five stars on the last syllable of the song!

The solo buttons on the guitar make tapping much easier.

Not just during the official solo sections, but for any HOPOs, you can use your right hand to hit the small orange button since it’s so close to the strum bar.

The audience sings along.

During certain parts of the song, the audience will actually sing along in the background. It’s great.

The avatars are tied to their instruments.

This part was really confusing me until I actually played it. When you create a character, you do it with the instrument you’re using. After that, you can ONLY use that character on that instrument! So when I went to play the Solo Tour, I had to create TWO more characters in order to sing and play guitar, since my original character could ONLY play the drums. Stupid. This was because our singer and guitarist were on different Xbox profiles. You also can never change height/weight/face of your character, so choose wisely! (You can change hair/clothes later.)

To buy new songs, you need to quit to the dashboard.

There’s no in-game menu for it, you actually have to quit the game, go to the dashboard, find Rock Band on marketplace, then buy songs. It’s just one giant list, and will be very cluttered once more songs are available. (And be careful not to buy a song pack, and also buy the songs again individually.)

Fan limit depends on lowest difficulty.

In BWT mode, there is a cap on the number of fans you can get, depending on the lowest difficulty someone is playing on. So if ONE person is playing on Medium, and the others are playing on Expert, Medium counts. You’ll still gain money, but no more fans once you’re at the limit. For a longer discussion on this, see my future posts.

Drum bass notes “bounce” the screen.

Every time you hit a bass note on the drums, the drum lanes “bounce” on screen. It’s very subtle, but I find it pretty annoying. I’m already getting tunnel vision from the game, and this doesn’t help. Maybe it’s cool on Easy, but on the harder difficulties there are constant bass notes. I don’t really notice it much anymore, but then what’s the point? If you see it, it’s annoying; if you don’t, why bother putting it in?

DLC songs are not well implemented

When you buy new songs, they will appear in Random setlists, or you can use them in “make your own” sets. It’s better than nothing, but I really hope they’ll change this. More about this in future posts.

Band Leader

You need to choose a “band leader” to play BWT mode. After they’re chosen, they ALWAYS have to be playing, and can’t switch instruments. So if you start with the leader on drums, and later want to play guitar/mic with someone, you can’t. Someone will always have to play the drums, or you’ll have to start a new band or play quickplay. Recommendation: make the guitarist the leader, since you’ll probably always have someone on guitar. If you want to play BWT by yourself (must play two instruments), make the vocalist the leader, and then you can switch your other instrument whenever you want. You CAN change your band name whenever you want, so that’s good.

Related posts:

1. Rock Band: Expert Pro Drums 100% flawless scores Here are some of the more notable 100%s I’ve gotten...

I started writing this review right after getting the game, two months ago, and have since added to it. There is so much more to say about the game, though, that I have left some things out to talk about later. I have broken it into two parts, and apologize for the unorganized format. It's not so much a review as it is a discussion.

Instruments:

I actually love the guitar. The neck is a bit smaller, so it doesn’t hurt my fingers as much (I have small hands), but it’s also longer, which is nice. I absolutely love the feel of the fret buttons, it’s something you really just have to try. The strum bar is…weird. It’s kind of nice because you don’t have to move it very far, so you can alt strum really fast. However, there’s no click, and it’s so “soft” that it’s not as easy to keep a constant rhythm. So far it has not broken, after two months of play.

The drums: well, I’m pretty biased here, because I play Drummania on a Yamaha DTXplorer set in my room. So, compared to that, these aren’t great. But compared to the home drummania controller, these are way better.

The drum pads are hard, and LOUD. It takes some getting used to the placement of them, and they almost drown out the music. Mine don’t register rolls very well, which is a problem others have had. This is serious. There are songs that I’ve failed on Hard, because it has a string of red notes, and the drum simply can’t keep up with it, even though I’m hitting them. I’m going to get a replacement and hope it’s better. I’ve done the “tape mod” and beat the game on Expert, but it’s not perfect.

I was worried about the bass pedal, but it’s actually better than I expected, and pretty easy to press. Be careful not to step too hard in the middle of it, because you can feel it flex and other people have broken theirs. After beating Expert, I now loathe the pedal. It is okay for a plastic pedal, but boy does it wear out your leg. Since there’s no rebound, it’s very hard to sustain rapid beats. I hope to do one of the “real bass pedal mods.”

I also didn’t get the official “Rock Band” drumsticks, I got cheaper, rough (blank) ones. I wouldn’t use them anyway, since I have my own, but hey, I want some Rock Band drumsticks.

The microphone is good. Just a USB mic, but it’s solid, with a Rock Band logo.

Difficulty:

I was worried about the guitar difficulty, but now I’m totally fine with it. It IS easier than Guitar Hero (save for the DLC), but that doesn’t mean it’s boring. Since the guitar takes some getting used to, it’s probably a good thing they didn’t rival GH3. Plus, GH3 was hard for the sake of being hard, where RB is more logical.

When we started the BWT mode, I played drums on Expert. Compared to Drummania, it’s considerably easier. Due to my dislike of the pedal, and the fact that my other bandmates (roommates) play on Easy/Medium, I just play on Hard for the BWT. There’s no incentive to play higher, and we play for long periods at a time. The only other complaint is the lack of hyperspeed! I play Drummania on 3.5x hi-speed, and some of these songs really need it.

Difficulty Requirements:

In BWT mode, some setlists must be played with everyone on Hard/Expert, which some people don’t like. I don’t mind it, it gives the game legs — keep playing and you’ll get better, and there will be new stuff you can do. But for people who don’t like it, maybe they should have made it like the wagers (e.g., “get five stars for double the fans”). Play on Hard and you’ll get something extra if you pass it. At the very least, I wish the setlist had an icon next to it telling you what difficulty is required. It’s frustrating going through all the venues, finding a setlist you want to play, and then finding out it’s too hard for my roommates.

Logo Creator:

The logo creator is cool, and easy to use. You can grab different pieces of art, change the size/rotation/color, and use multiple layers. The annoying thing is that it takes a million button clicks! You have to select a layer, then select “modify,” then “rotate,” etc. It would be much better to have quick-menus when you pull the triggers. Hold L to select a layer, hold R to select modification — that sort of thing.

Rock Band vs. Karaoke Revolution:

I have Karaoke Revolution, and we’ve had big parties where we all play. But somehow, the RB karaoke is even better, and shouldn’t be underestimated. The scoring is even better in RB.

KR has a meter you need to fill up by singing on pitch. On Expert, you have a bigger meter. RB is different, in that you actually can be a little off pitch on the easier difficulties, but on Expert the “pitch line” is thinner so you need to be more accurate. In other words, in KR your pitch has to be dead-on, most of the time. In RB your pitch can be slightly off the entire time.

The only downside is that RB doesn’t have duet mode with the band.

Tutorials:

The tutorials are pretty cool, because they’re taught by people from the bonus song bands. The vocal tutorial is taught by Helen from Vagiant, while the drum one is taught by the dude from The Konks. I didn’t bother with the guitar tutorial.

Practice Mode:

You can change the speed of the replay by pressing the D-pad, which is great, because it also automatically loops the section you chose. So you can just keep playing it, gradually speeding it up, without ever stopping.

Disconnected instruments:

Just a tip: we accidentally bumped the cord or something, and the mic said it was disconnected. Even after completely unplugging, and plugging it back into the hub, it wouldn’t work. The same thing happened with the drum later that night. If that happens, unplug the whole hub from the Xbox, then reconnect it.

Read part 2 of the review »

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The good thing is that the game saves all the checkpoints, so you can replay any part you want — so as long as the same is true about the remake, I won’t have to play through the entire game again (not that that would be a bad thing). I’m hoping one of my roommates will get it and beat it, so I can just go back and play my favorite parts, and the new content.

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The Thylus is a thumb stylus designed for PDAs, Nintendo DSs, and other touch screen devices. The makers were nice enough to send us a few to test out. We tested them on a DS, DS Lite, and many different games.
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Ever since I heard about this game, I was interested in it. Something about it really grabbed my attention. It sounded like a semi-realistic experience unlike any other. There are obvious comparisons to Jet Grind Radio that can be made, but it was because of the ways it wasn’t like JGR that drew me to it. I beat JGR on Dreamcast and really liked it, but I wanted something more realistic. Something that really made you feel like you were in a real city doing real things, but things you’d never do, or couldn’t do, in real life. I wanted to climb up buildings and along subway cars.
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I’ve had the game for a couple days and I already beat it, it’s really short. Still, it’s actually quite good! It’s mostly a platformer, but there are some other things thrown in. For instance, when you fall down the rabbit hole, you have to float back and forth collecting stars and avoiding obstacles. Then later (when you’re huge and cry, then shrink and fall into the bottle), you have to float down the river and move back and forth avoiding things. That brings up a good point — it actually follows the story! There are also some cutscenes between levels, either animated or still frames with text.
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