Aussie Ben

Wow! That was a great little game! Well done. Simple to pick up and understand the rules, and gets addictive. I like that there's a progressive difficulty curve, but not too hard. Also, it's fun. Also, you've picked up on the smaller stuff that a lot of people miss, like giving the players visual rewards for success - your confetti over the "CLEARED!" text that the player gets at the end of a level is a good example of this. Simple things like this give positive feedback to the player. When I was doing QA on a GBA racing game, we got feedback from Super Mario Club, and this was one of the things that I still remember from them - really hammer in that each good thing the player does is an achievement - whether it be with confetti, a trophy, visual reward is quite important.

I'm up to the third dungeon excluding the Ocean King one, and overall I'm having a great time with the game. (I'll get to my one big gripe later.) I love that everything has been simplified to just touch screen controls and (AND!) that one of the first things the game does is ask you if you are left or right handed. THANK YOU. Using weapons and objects has never been easier, because you now know exactly where things are going to go. A bomb will be placed where you point. The boomerang follows your precise path unless it hits an obstacle. You'll hit the enemy you pointed at, and so on. My biggest hate of Wind Waker, the dull as ditchwater tiresome sailing bits (and boy WEREN'T THERE A LOT OF THOSE!) are completely gone, and I couldn't be happier. We've entered the Steam Age, thankfully, meaning that you can just plot your course, and instead be concerned with more fun things like looking around the entire view in 360 degrees, shooting cannons, fishing and treasure salvage. It's a huge improvement over "time to switch to picture-in-picture mode" sailing of the previous game. Luckily, there's an all NEW tiresome artificial busywork inflationfest. This one is called the "Temple of the Ocean King" or some such. Oooh, it's cursed, meaning your life gets drained as you progress through it unless you're in a safe spot. Sounds interesting. There's enemies that you can't kill and need to avoid instead. A bit of a twist, okay. You have to revisit through this dungeon, needlessly repeating the existing sections of the dungeon again even though you've already solved them! Okay, fair enou-WHAT? No. That's just shit. All it would take to fix this would be teleporters that unlock which take you back to particular floors of the dungeon (and you could do it without breaking this dungeon's big 'hook', either, for those who have gotten up to it and know what it is). Aside from this one thing, I'm enjoying the game. Wonderful presentation, great controls, a little over-crazy on the collecting of trinkets and doodads, but I don't really mind that. The whole "wow you can draw on your map" thing which I initially thought was just going to be a novelty has been emphasized, well thought out, and used for some clever situations. Great work, guys.

The bit that made me laugh the most was the Australian flag desperately running after the UK/US van shouting "Wait for meeeeee!" It's funny because it's true.

Are you kidding? A game about crazy astronauts? What's not to like? etc. A lot of game titles sound either ridiculously stupid or terribly generic when you actually read them out. In Camp Stupid we have: Metal Gear Solid Final Fantasy (10(2)) Call of Duty: Big Red One Tony Hawk's Underground (well get him out before he suffocates) Unreal Tournament Super Smash Bros. Melee/Brawl While aboard the S.S. Generic is: Grand Theft Auto Halo God of War Gears of War And in a complete league of its own: Freshly Picked: Tingle's Rosy Rupee Land Thinking up a good game title is never easy. And a good game title is certainly no measure of a game's quality or success.

I always thought Tingle was supposed to be a parody of the Nintendo otaku (a thirty year old grown man constantly obsessing with something), which is why Japanese gamers seem to find him hilarious - they understand what he's supposed to be. Most Western gamers seem to hate him - either because they don't understand that he's supposed to be a parody, or they DO understand that he's supposed to be a parody, they've just realised that they are, in fact, thirty, and they don't like what they see. Also, in an unrelated side note, I still find it riotously funny that Tingle had been in more games in the space of two years of his first appearance than Kid Icarus had seen in his entire lifetime. Some Nintendo fans still insist that Kid Icarus is a brilliant game (hint: it isn't).

Oh also, I heard there's a 40 meg limit for WiiWare titles, so it'll be fun to see how that pans out for devs.

Brilliant reviews - I can't wait for the next one he does. That Darkness one made me laugh when he said "Personally, at this point, I'd only consider buying the full version of The Darkness it if it came down to budget price. And they threw in another, BETTER game. And some cake. And Belgium." I also found this. The enemies he has to face alone are making me laugh.

Five minutes into the game and a haemorrhoid joke turns up. Oh Phoenix Wright, it's good to be playing it again. (Spell check report: reads "on one" instead of "no one" in chapter 2. You heard it here first.)

No, that's Gyakuten Saiban 4. That doesn't have an English option. All the other DS releases have had English options - according to Capcom Japan, they've been using this as a selling point. "Learn English with Phoenix Wright!" Etc. etc.. And from what I understand, there are NO differences between the Japanese version's English translation and the English version's translation. All the spelling mistakes present in the Jap one are also in the US one, which meant a lot of bitching and moaning for those who waited for the local version of Phoenix 2.

Hot damn! I had no idea this was coming out! And at a budget price, too! SOLD. Sure it's Japanese, but you don't need to read Japanese to play Picross. I had so much fun with Mario's Picross back on the Gameboy - I'm thrilled that a DS version has finally been made. It's such a perfect fit for the system. Has anyone else played a Picross game before?

Yeah, I ordered back when it popped up on Play Asia in July. Looking forward to receiving my copy!

Surprisingly, no! Although she did buy my brother a BMX Bandits picture story book when we were younger - does that help?

Interestingly, some of the puzzles were "localised". There's pictures of beer and wine in the Japanese version which got replaced with other more family friendly images for the English version. Booo.

OH FOR CHRISSAKE! Yet another game that I'm going to have to do all sorts of pissing about to get a copy. It was hard enough to get a US copy of the FIRST Chibi-Robo.

I thought this was pretty cool. Keiji Inafune, creator of Mega Man and a whole lot of other games you've probably played, was in NYC to celebrate 20 years of Mega Man(and 20 billion Mega Man games). You could bring assorted stuff for him to sign - one story in particular I saw on Kotaku was just awesome, I thought: I had no idea he worked on Ducktales, but it's so cool to see that the guy got such a positive response from it. Ducktales was (and IS!) one of my favourite games which I treasured for the Game Boy (I never had a NES). Absolute fun all the way. In other, non-signing related news - I was wondering if anyone could help me purchase the Dragon (green) version of Mega Man Star Force for the DS? I was just going to import it myself, but of course, it's turned out to be the only version that is exclusive to GameStop, making it nearly impossible for me to purchase (getting it direct from GameStop online means that I have to pay the price of the game and then the same price again in shipping, which is ludicrously overblown). I can pay in REAL HUMAN DOLLARS (ie, US monies), or if you like, I've got some US NTSC GameCube games that I don't want any more (specifically, Mario Golf, Star Fox Adventures, and Mega Man Network Transmission). I apologize for using this thread to whore out a request, but I don't know how else I can get the bloody thing. But I figured it would be better to do it with some interesting information too.

Congratulations on finding all the Agility Orbs! That really is an achievement - even WITH the update that makes the noise occur in a larger radius with the fewer there are. Out of curiosity, how many Hidden Orbs have you got?

God Hand is certainly filling that realism requirement with ALL THAT BROWN. After playing Okami, I'm stunned that this game is from the same developer. You can't lock onto an enemy manually (odd for a 3D fighter like this), you can't control the camera, and oh my the random disappearing of walls and stuff is fun. There are good bits, but so far it's less of a rollercoaster ride of fun, and more of a rollercoaster which goes like this: =========== <- get off here I like the setting though, we don't have enough Western games at all. Just a pity about so much brown. I know it's a desert, but aren't there cactii and stuff in the desert too? They have flowers you know, we have some cactii in the garden at home.

So you'll soon be able to play Viva Pinata on the DS. Being developed by Rare's DS team, interestingly enough - hopefully there's no unnecessary microphone blowing and suchlike. The pinata mailing over wi-fi should work pretty well though. I wonder if they'll have new species? Looks like they're adding a sandbox mode for this version too, which is pretty neat - I think I'll be picking this up. (Not that 360 party game though, that looks bloody awful.)

This is what was available for the DLC. You can also download some bonus different character skins.

Yes, the 360's D-Pad is indeed clunky. What it is, is that the pad will often hit the white plastic ring before it hits the connections that indicate a button press. I did this controller mod to the pad I use most, and it helped quite a lot. Doesn't make it as good as, say, a Nintendo Control Pad, but it improves it quite a bit. But, yeah, you're probably just best off sticking to the Analog Stick.

It's all part of the Doughnut of Life. Don't get too attatched to your pinatas, they're not like Pokémon - they're animals that are bred to fill your garden and attract other animals. If there's one you really want to nurture, you might just be best off to send it to yourself (via a mailbox) and make a new garden for it where you can protect it much more easily. That's what I think, anyway.

Well, according to an interview with Major Nelson, they'll be rolling out downloadable content for Bomberman Live, too. The first one is supposed to come about a month after the game's initial release. They've mentioned adding new game modes and new levels, so that should be pretty damn cool.

..but...but... they took the idea of opening Pandora's Box, you know, the box of CHAOS AND HORROR AND DESTRUCTION...and the best they could think of was a shooter with werewolves, polar bears and large birds? Where's the things that turn buildings inside out, the inverse gravity, and the body part swapper? Now THAT'S chaos.

Current E3 highlight for me - SUPER MARIO BEE:

Depends what you like, really. For a nice 2D platformer, Klonoa 2 is a must get (or the original PSone game if you can find it). 3D platformers? Take a look at the Sly games (Sly 2 is probably the best, but all are pretty good), and the Ratchet & Clank games (Ratchet 2 is the best of this lot, don't bother with Deadlocked, it just goes into dull "you're trapped in a gameshow and have to fight your way out" insipidness).