Tag Archives: PS3

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed: Driving Into Dreams

There have been a number of attempts to dethrone Nintendo’s Mario Kart over the years, but none of them have been successful, at least in the multiplayer sphere.

There is one aspect of Mario Kart that has pretty consistently sucked over the years, though, and that’s the single-player offering. Offering little more than predefined Grand Prix championships, one-off races or time trials even in the most recent installments, Mario Kart has always struggled to provide anything of real substance for the solo player. Which is fine, as the series has always been known for being best experienced with at least one friend, right from its inception in the 16-bit era.

This has, however, left a decent-sized gap in the market for other developers to come along and offer more robust solo experiences in kart racing titles. And one game that succeeds admirably in this regard is the cumbersomely titled Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed from Sega.

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Shmup Essentials: Gundemonium Recollection

Any self-respecting gamer knows that if you really want to impress someone with your dexterity and prowess, you don’t fire up a Souls game, you fire up a bullet hell shmup.

Notorious for their screen-filling bullet patterns that seemingly demand superhuman reflexes to navigate, bullet hell (or, to give them their more “proper” name, danmaku) shoot ’em ups are a frightening prospect to get involved with. But you might be surprised at quite how approachable some of them are.

One such example of a danmaku shmup that is both accepting to genre newcomers and monstrously challenging to veterans is Gundemonium Recollection from Japanese doujin circle Platine Dispositif, originally localised for PS3 and PC by Rockin’ Android. It’s a game that isn’t afraid to slap you about a bit, but also a good place to familiarise yourself with some conventions of the genre.

And, well, it’s just a really good game to boot, too.

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Nier Automata: Introduction and History

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Nier: Automata is a fascinating game in its own right, but it becomes even more of an interesting story when you take it in context of everything that led to its creation.

In order to understand Nier: Automata and its predecessors, it is particularly important to understand creator Taro Yoko, one of the most distinctive “auteurs” in all of video game making — albeit one who, until the release of Automata, had largely flown under the radar in stark contrast to his contemporaries such as Hideo Kojima.

Yoko is a creator who, it’s fair to say, has consistently pushed back against the boundaries of what is “accepted practice” in video game development — both in terms of subject matter and mechanical considerations. And the results of his resistance to conventions and norms are some of the most distinctive and interesting — albeit sometimes flawed — creations in all of gaming.

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From the Archives: Birds Suddenly Appear Every Time You Are Nier

Nier is possibly one of Square Enix’s most misunderstood games.

Released to a rather lukewarm critical response back in 2010, this Cavia-developed PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 action RPG, directed by Taro Yoko, is actually a fascinating game that is well worth your time and attention — so long as you have a bit of patience to deal with its idiosyncrasies.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2012 as part of the site’s regular Swords and Zippers column on JRPGs. It has been republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

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Megadimension Neptunia V-II: Introduction

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Since its original appearance in 2010, the Neptunia series has grown from a niche-interest RPG into one of developer Compile Heart’s biggest success stories.

This is a particularly remarkable achievement, given that the first installment in the series didn’t have a strong critical reception at all — while review score aggregation isn’t an exact science by any means, the fact that the first Hyperdimension Neptunia game sits at a not-so-proud score of 45 on Metacritic should make it fairly clear that this is not a game that the mainstream press liked. At all.

And yet here we are, six years later at the time of writing, celebrating the release of the seventh (or fourth, depending on how you want to look at it) installment in the mainline, canonical Neptunia series, and the tenth overall release to carry the Neptunia name in the West.

How did this happen? How did a series that started with a game almost universally panned by professional critics become one of the most recognisable Japanese franchises on the worldwide market?

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I Shall Give You Endless Earth

Every avid gamer out there has at least one series — or perhaps even just one game — that they latch onto and will defend to the death.

For my friend Alex, it was the Ar Tonelico series, a generation-spanning series of role-playing games from Gust, the team best-known for the Atelier series. And, once I’d played through all three games in the series, I became a true believer, too.

I came to Ar Tonelico and its two sequels quite a while after their initial release, but they’re not as old as you might think — or as their dated graphics might suggest. In fact, the initial games’ release on the PlayStation 2 just as the PlayStation 3 was starting to wind up and capture the attention of everyone probably contributed to the fact that, although rather wonderful, these three games are somewhat underappreciated by many, and even unknown to some.

So let’s rectify that, shall we?

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Eorzea Diaries: Fixing the Hunt

It’s been a little while since our last report from Eorzea, the setting of Square Enix’s spectacular rebooted MMO Final Fantasy XIV, and so it’s about time we checked in.

Last time we spoke, you may recall that there was some controversy over a new game system added in the 2.3 Defenders of Eorzea patch, known as The Hunt.

Loosely inspired by the similar mechanic in Final Fantasy XII, The Hunt challenges denizens of Eorzea to track down and defeat numerous powerful monsters in exchange for a new type of currency: Allied Seals. This currency is in high demand because not only does it allow access to some attractive vanity gear and exclusive minions, it also indirectly allows players to acquire Sands and Oils of Time, which in turn allow them to upgrade item level 100 “Weathered” weapons, armour and accessories into their item level 110 counterparts.

There was a problem, though: the attractiveness of these rewards meant that there were suddenly swathes of people zerg-rushing the monsters for The Hunt, which caused all manner of other problems.

Now that patch 2.35 has been released, incorporating a few fixes to The Hunt, is the experience at least playable now?

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Tales of Xillia 2: The Difficult Second Game

There’s a reason we don’t see all that many direct sequels in gaming these days: they’re extremely difficult to do effectively.

This is particularly true in genres where individual installments are sprawling, lengthy affairs with narratives of a length equivalent to your average TV series — such as, say, role-playing games. This isn’t to say that developers don’t have a good go at it — Square Enix has done it three times to date with the Final Fantasy series’ X-2, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns installments, for example, and one of the best things about the wonderful Shadow Hearts series is the coherence of its narrative, particularly between the first two games — but often it’s just easier to have games in a series like this be thematically similar rather than directly related to one another.

Such has been the case for most of the Tales series’ lifespan, bar a few outliers like Tales of Destiny 2 and Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. Xillia 2 has a difficult role to fulfil, then: it’s the sequel to a great game, and it needs to follow up all the things that title did well, improve the things it could have done better and provide a very good reason for people to go back into the same world with the same characters.

Does it manage this without “reducing, reusing and recycling?”

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Tales of Xillia 2: Those Who Fight Together…

While it may be hyperbolic to say that an RPG can live or die by its combat system — I’ve played plenty of games over the years that remained compelling despite shambolic or overly simplistic battle systems — it’s certainly an important part of the experience as a whole.

The Tales series has always somewhat done its own thing with regard to battles over the years, eschewing both the turn-based nature of many traditional RPGs and the quasi-real-time Active Time Battle style of most Final Fantasy games. For those unfamiliar, a Tales game typically involves real-time combat with a party of four characters, with various button combinations unleashing both a selection of regular attacks and special “artes” that differ according to the character. In many cases, the games have even offered multiplayer functionality, with additional players able to take on manual control of other party members alongside the main player.

Tales of Xillia featured a particularly strong take on this battle system, with a cast of characters who all handled markedly differently from one another thanks to different weapon types and unique special abilities. When combined with the Link system that allowed characters to attach themselves to one another and trigger further unique skills, it became a flexible but easy-to-understand system into which you could delve as much as you desired. Those who simply wanted to button-mash hack-and-slash could stick with a single character; those who wanted a little more variety could switch around who they played as at a moment’s notice.

Tales of Xillia 2, unsurprisingly, follows suit, with a few little twists here and there.

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Tales of Xillia 2: Becoming a Better Person

Long gone are the days when an RPG could get away with a linear progression system, with characters simply learning skills at predefined levels.

Instead, these days we see all manner of different takes on the traditional “level up” system — and a few games that abandon it altogether in favour of alternative means of progression.

Tales of Xillia 2 doesn’t totally abandon a conventional progression model, but it does do some interesting things with how you develop your characters’ abilities and progress through the story. A number of different systems all interact with one another, ultimately allowing you to tailor the game somewhat to how you want to play.

But does it work? Well, read on and find out.

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