Reviews – Page 85 – Games Asylum

Lux-Pain

With a name like Lux-Pain, Rising Star’s latest DS endeavour could entail just about anything. Well, you wouldn’t be able to get away with calling a kid’s game Lux-Pain but it’s a name that would definitely suffice for a beat’em up or a shoot’em up. It’s neither of those though – it’s an incredibly text heavy anime-influenced adventure game, not dissimilar to the Phoenix Wright series.

Lead character Atsuki is a telepathy-blessed detective out to find the source of a parasitic virus infecting Japanese citizens. It kicks off with an investigation on a crime scene where a man who tortures animals has been laying dead for weeks, before moving onto a Japanese high school where the kids have been committing suicide. Grim stuff, then.

Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust

Reviews

Activision dropped this after merging with Vivendi on the grounds that they only wanted games in their portfolio that they could make sequels out of. What’s ironic about saying this is that Box Office Bust is the 11th game in the Leisure Suit Larry series. Not that it actually bares any resemblance to Larry’s original 2D point-and-click adventure games. In fact, it doesn’t actually bare any resemblances to any decent game you care to think of.

House of the Dead: Overkill

Reviews

It’s hard to imagine a more successful game, if you judge success by the extent to which the developers achieved what they set out to do. I am of course assuming that I know what the developers set out to do. But in this case I think that’s safe: make an unreasonably entertaining light gun game.

Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon

Reviews

If you give a man a plough and a bag of seeds instead of a loaf of bread he can feed himself for months. Give a man a fishing rod instead of a fish and he can catch his own food. Give a man a copy of Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon to review and he’ll wonder where several hours have gone. Not all of it was enjoyable, mind you.

Like the previous Harvest Moon games, tolling away on a patch of raggedy land to create a fertile farm full of fruit and fortune is rewarding. The town has plenty of shops to spend your sweat-covered cash on while the townsfolk themselves are a curious bunch, often mid-conversation as you enter their homes and happy to let you eavesdrop. If watering and sowing crops starts getting laborious then you can also pick up a rod and go fishing.

Populous DS

Reviews

EA asked Japanese developer Genki to bring Populous to the DS for the Japanese market, but have ditched it by the wayside for the western world, leaving Rising Star to pick up the pieces. I don’t know about you, but my warning bells always ring when a publisher won’t even touch one of their own games. It’s like a parent trying to disown an ugly child.

Genki aren’t to blame for the shunning though – this is a decent conversion. The problem is that it’s a decent conversion of a twenty year old game. Back in 1989 (the same year as the original Sim City and Prince of Persia were released, incidentally) this was top stuff. In today’s world though it both looks and feels incredibly dated. Having a tiny three-inch playing area doesn’t exactly help either. It may have been what the PC original was blessed with but there’s no need for it now.

XG Blast

Reviews

Right. This is basically Geometry Wars. But that doesn’t make it bad. In fact, it makes it largely good. So: 2D, shoot in any direction, while moving in any direction. The d-pad obviously controls movement, and because this is a Nintendo DS game, you can choose to use the stylus to direct your fire instead …

Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection

Retro, Reviews

It’ll be a cold day in Hull – sorry, Hell – when Nintendo releases a 16-bit retro collection of this magnitude. So, let’s use this review as a means to honour Sega for not being as stingy as Nintendo are with their primitive pixels. All together now: hip, hip, hooray!

SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1

Reviews

One of the biggest joys of rummaging around a retro collection is the feeling of nostalgia, with previous Sega, Midway and Capcom collections bringing back fond memories of the 16-bit era. And when arcades weren’t full of fruit machines. Personally speaking I didn’t get the same buzz from this 16-strong collection. The NeoGeo was one of those mysterious consoles only seen in the likes of Mean Machines and CVG, with games costing more than the console itself. As such, this was more of a SNK history lesson than a trip back to the past. Rose tinted specs, anybody?

World of Goo

Reviews

The problem with WiiWare – apart from Nintendo’s lack of quality control – is that many titles appear on the download service with a barely a whisper. World of Goo has had more publicity than most, but it’s still a shame that a game this good is going to go largely undownloaded. Which isn’t a real word.

Playing like a gooey mixture of LocoRoco and Lemmings, the idea is to guide goo balls safely to an exit pipe by constructing bridges, towers and so on out of the titular blobs. Physics play a big part – build a tower without a firm base and it’ll topple over, while bridges require supports and can’t be too top-heavy. While you build, white flying blobs appear that can be used to skip back in time briefly if you mess up, and there’s also the chance to skip levels entirely if they’re causing too much hassle. The mystical â€˜sign painter’ also gives hints during levels. Whoever could he be?

Flower, Sun and Rain

Reviews

Flower, Sun and Rain is almost unplayable, it looks like someone has kicked the graphics into the DS with a muddy boot and I couldn’t possibly recommend playing it to anybody, yet at the same time it’s a game that everyone should go out of their way to experience. Let me explain.

In Flower, Sun and Rain you play as Sumio Mondo, a man sent to Lospass island to prevent a terrorist from blowing up a plane. It sounds pretty normal so far, however the game was designed by Suda51, the mind behind Killer7 and No More Heroes, so it’s batshit insane. The way Sumio tries to stop the attack is to solve really stupid code puzzles.

Dungeon Maker

Reviews

Back when my PC wasn’t so elderly and I could be bothered to mess around with video drivers and all that guff, Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper was a game that I clocked up plenty of hours on. You had to build a dungeon to attract monsters, who would then fight for you when the pesky humans came knocking. There was resource management to deal with and also a wicked black sense of humour – whoever knew that vampires enjoyed smearing faecal matter on people’s door handles? Sadly, Dungeon Maker – or Master of the Monster Lair, as it’s known in the US – is nowhere near as amusing.

Hasbro Family Game Night

Reviews

Mr. Potato Head’s career is a long and illustrious one. He’s been around since the early ’50s, was the first toy to be advertised on TV, appeared in Toy Story and recently came out in Star Wars and Spider-Man variants. Will this family friendly collection from EA be something to mark up on his CV, or something to hide? Like when the original Mr. Potato Head was criticised for being a waste of a good potato.

Colour Cross

Reviews

If this review was for a printed magazine, it would probably end up in the round-up section along with half a dozen others spread over a couple of pages. Not because Colour Cross is a bad game, but because there isn’t much to say about it. It isn’t the first Picross game to arrive on …

Cradle of Rome

Reviews

I maintain that Zoo Keeper is the best Nintendo DS game. I know that, by any objective measure, it isn’t. But I don’t care. So I approached Cradle of Rome with little short of hostility – I thought it was a stupid title for a stupid game. Hostility because it is, essentially, the same game: …

WWE Smackdown Vs Raw 2009

Reviews

There aren’t many fighting games for the DS (Ultimate Mortal Kombat is about as good as it gets at the moment) and although this effort isn’t awful, it’s too middling to recommend to anybody but WWE fans. Which makes this review kind of pointless – if I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that WWE fans are the type of people that would buy anything with WWE stamped over it, not to mention defend the â€˜sport’ to their very graves. But that’s a rant for another time.

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