As I noted in my review of Datura a few weeks back, indie games often use vagueness and minimalism as a means of attracting players. However, there is a difference between using minimalism to benefit the game and being vague for the sake of being vague. Sadly, Vigil (or Victi as it’s known in Europe) does the latter. While it drags players in with its Sin-City-style graphics and interesting storyline, it’s vagueness and frustrating gameplay will turn off players with the quickness.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Datura stramonium, also known as moonflower and Angel’s trumpet is a genus of flowering weeds in the Solanaceae family of plants. This family also includes Tomatoes, Mandrake, Potatoes, and Tobacco. While it’s used to treat Asthma and nausea symptoms, it can be very harmful at larger doses, causing delirium, photophobia, amnesia, and even death. For this reason, it’s known by another name: The Devil’s Weed. Shockingly enough, unlike marijuana, it’s not illegal. You can grow it, cultivate, and even use it. However, only a complete moron would do so.

So why am I telling you this? Because apparently you have to be high as shit in order to play Sony’s 2012 PS Move title, and even then it still won’t make any sense.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

As with any great franchise, there is the potential for spinoffs. As with any spinoff, there is also a chance for it to get out of hand. This is one of those times it got out of hand.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Taboo Sixth Sense was one of the first apps for the Nintendo. Unfortunately, this was decades before everyone and their mom had a smartphone. Therefore an app back in the NES days basically meant an overpriced piece of shit that was lacking in gameplay. It’s based upon a rather fascinating concept: The Tarot. Sadly, there was little else to it. Oh, and you won’t believed who this game was developed by! Click after the jump to see the twist ending!
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Many people, including myself, thought that the movie starring Jean Claude Van Damne was the low point of the Street Fighter franchise. Or you may have thought it was the game based on said movie. However, you’d be wrong on both counts. At least that movie was goofy enough to get some chuckles out of, and you can’t blame a developer for wanting to cash in on the digitized fighter craze. This 3-issue comic from Malibu however, was Street Fighter at it’s worst. How bad was it? Capcom itself asked them to pull the plug. This despite the company giving the okay to Hasbro to make a line of action figures that barely look like Street Fighter characters.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Contra – Legacy of War represents one of the franchise’s lowest points. As the sequel to the Genesis classic Contra – Hard Corps, Legacy of War should have used the Playstation’s processing power to bring the franchise to the next generation with full force. Instead, it became one of the bastard step children of one of Konami’s most beloved franchises, right along side the Nintendo 64 Castlevania titles.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Once upon a time, there was a video game called Jagged Alliance. You hired a team of mercenaries to liberate an island from a ruthless dictator and assist a scientist and his daughter in the research of a rare plant sap with medical properties. Each of your mercs could develop their abilities RPG-style, and combat was done in a turn-based style. It was basically Tactics Ogre with guns and on steroids. It was awesome. It spawned a sequel which had 2 expansions, which were even more awesome. The series then went off the grid until a JA1 was re-released on the Nintendo DS in 2009 while JA2 was remade this past year. Jury is still out on both of those. However, in the years between JA2 and the remake, several games popped up that were ‘inspired’ by Jagged Alliance. Most of them sucked. Brigade E5 is one of the worst offenders. In case you don’t believe that it’s a rip off of JA, just take one look at its cover. Still don’t believe me? Here’s its European cover.

But which designer? The Interior Designer? The Toilet designer? It sure as hell wasn't the Lead Designer.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Remember when before Final Fantasy 7 came out, the graphics in Playstation role playing games weren’t that much different from 16-bit role playing games? Thankfully early Playstation RPGs, like their 16-bit ancestors, made up gameplay and storywise for what they were lacking in graphics, so you were still able to enjoy titles like Suikoden and Arc The Lad I and II. Sadly, this was not the case with Beyond the Beyond. This game had a boring storyline which did nothing to move the genre forward, and it didn’t exactly help matters that the game’s graphics resembled a 1993 SNES RPG. Actually, scratch that. In 1993, the SNES had games like Lufia and Secret of Mana that made this game’s graphics look like pong. Not that that was hard to do,
[Read the rest of this entry…]