Tiny review: Sakura Samurai

Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword is an eShop game about timing, about knowing the right moment to dodge and riposte, like Punch-Out!! but set in feudal Japan, yes, but it’s also about patience and gambling, sometimes literally with the coins you’ve pocketed from making short work out of enemies that have no business holding a katana, and other times with your life as you push your luck to see how long your sense of timing will keep you alive.

It’s in those gambles when patience comes into play — you can sidestep and attack the moment your foe pulls his sword up, or you can stand steady and wait a breath, wager a heart or two, then slip around your enemy’s swing at the last second for a counterattack and a Precision Point. You can dispatch your enemies efficiently, never wasting a movement, mimicking the proficiency of Samurai Seven’s Kyuzo or Zatoichi’s Gennosuke. Or you can toy with the clumsy conscripts that circle around you, skipping away from their strikes repeatedly, racking up Precision Points that you can later cash in at the village shop.

As you master Sakura Samurai’s timing and learn to practice patience in every encounter, those gambles begin to tip more and more in your favor, your pockets start to bulge with gold, and the corpses behind you multiply.

Read More →

tags / review / sakura samurai / gaming / nintendo 3ds / 3ds / eshop / ec

Tiny Review: Mutant Mudds

Dementium developer Renegade Kid releases its first self-published game this week, the 3DS eShop title Mutant Mudds. At first, it seems like a very simple game with a 3D gimmick: you can jump, shoot, and hover, and you can move to one of three different “planes” of action by jumping on certain blocks in the level, with the goal of collecting all the floating items in each.

However, it very quickly becomes obvious that Renegade Kid is not messing around, as the difficulty curve quickly jumps, and you find yourself dying multiple times just to learn the layout of each perilous world.

Read More →

tags / eshop / gaming / mutant mudds / nintendo 3ds / renegade kid / review / 3ds

Tiny Review: XStylus Crayon

Finally, after a long Kickstarter/Indiegogo campaign, the fan-supported, extensible XStylus Crayon has been produced, and is now available for purchase. Greenbulb sent a few over, and I’ve been using one exclusively on my 3DS for the past week or so.

For the most part … it’s a stylus, and I’m not sure how much I need to say about a plastic stick you use to poke a touchscreen. But, like, this is a pretty nice plastic stick.

Read More →

tags / xstylus / jc / xstylus crayon / accessories / nintendo 3ds / gaming / review / tiny review

Solatorobo - a fond farewell to the DS, and a testament to an era that’s slowly fading

[Some doubted it would ever happen, but Solatorobo releases in the States tomorrow for the DS — Infinity Counter’s Francesco Dagostino provides us with this thoughtful guest review of the action RPG.]

Furry. Kemono. Call them what you will; associate them with the worst kinks on the internet. But anthropomorphic animals are also the symbol of a long-decayed video game era, lost to the encroaching desert of the medium’s Westernization.

They dwelt in an era made of happy-go-lucky worlds, now eroded by the obsessive pursuit of pseudo-Hollywood photorealism; creativity sacrificed as hypertrophic muscles contract, in response to the button-mashing of foolproof controls.

Obviously enough, there are still developers refusing to follow this sea change: software houses swimming against the current to preserve values that everyone else gave up on for the sake of easy revenues.

CyberConnect2 is one of these.

Read More →

tags / cyberconnect2 / ds / francesco dagostino / gaming / infinity counter / nintendo ds / review / solatorobo / xseed / guest

Tiny Review: Nintendo Magic

Vertical, Inc. brought a surprising Nintendo title to the West last April, but unlike the typical Japanese items reviewed here, this isn’t a game! Originally released across the Pacific in February 2009 (as Nintendo: Formula for Surprise), Nintendo Magic: Winning the Videogame Wars is a 224-page book offering insight on the card/toy/game company’s history, its important figures, the development of its DS/Wii consoles, and more.

I featured an excerpt from the book earlier this week in our post about the sturdiness of Nintendo’s systems, and some of you wanted to hear more about it, so I collected a few thoughts on Nintendo Magic for a quick review.

Read More →

tags / nintendo magic / vertical inc / books / osamu inoue / review / ec

Review: Maestro: Jump In Music

Just as console rhythm games have cluttered your living room with piles of plastic instrument controllers, their portable counterparts have taken to bundling themselves with miniature accessories: guitar grips, piano peripherals, and silicon drum skins, all offering an even more inaccurate imitation of the music playing experience.

Two music games got it right on the DS this year, both eschewing fancy controllers, instead focusing on the system’s touchscreen to present their engaging concepts: Rhythm Heaven and Maestro: Jump in Music.

Developed by French studio Pastagames and released in Europe last month, Maestro has you strumming, tapping, and sliding your stylus to nearly 25 classic and somewhat contemporary tracks (e.g. “ABC”, “House of the Rising Sun”). A bird runs across your screen at a steady pace, you strum his tightrope to play a note and make him hop or drop to another string, and that’s the basic idea. It’s simple, and it’s fun like you wouldn’t believe.

Read More →

tags / maestro / big ben / pastagames / review / imports / neko / ec

Tiny Review: Blip Festival 2007

In a perfect world, we’d all get to attend Blip Festival, the annual chiptune music event gathering over 30 artists who perform with hacked Game Boys, C64s, and other video game consoles repurposed as music instruments.

In this fallen — some would even say doomed — world, though, most of our schedules and localities don’t match up with the four-day, New York City show. Thankfully, 2 Player Productions chronicled the festival with 2006 and 2007 DVDs designed to “[position viewers] directly between a surging crowd and a bracing wall of sound, one built upon familiar technology turned on its ear.”

True, this review covers a 2.5-year-old show, but 2PP is gearing up to release a Blip 08 live album soon, as well as its Reformat the Planet documentary, so watching this DVD is a good lead-up. Plus, the performances are as great now as they were the day these discs were pressed.

Three details that are fab:

1. Provides a condensed experience. The 32 sets are collected into four chapters or days, each beginning with a montage of artists setting up their gear in the empty venue. Someone takes the stage, and a sampling of eight sets, one song from each act, stream onto your screen, like a short mixtape.
2. Excellent way to discover new groups/songs. This mixtape format made it easy for me to hear (and love!) artists that I didn’t pay attention to previously, like Rugar and The Depreciation Guild.
3. Always interesting cinematography. 2PP received “unrestricted camera access” throughout the festival, which the film crew combined with cuts of the audience, projected animations accompanying the sets, and special effects techniques that kept every performance visually exciting (see Loud Objects’ circuit-bending clip below).
4. A second disc packed with features, including interviews with the artists, Reformat the Planet clips, Pulsewave videos and flyers, and more.

One detail that is butt:

1. I wish the DVD extras included more non-show, jam session videos other than the bit with Graffiti Monsters. Speaking of jams, you should check out the Hello France/Farewell Swine Flu sessions, which 2PP recently posted with JDDJ3J, Larry, Glomag, Anamanaguchi, and Starstream.

Score:

• “Staring at My Spaceship” by Virt

Buy: Blip Festival 2007: The Videos DVD, Blip Festival 2006: The Videos DVD

See also: Tree Wave performing “May Banners” at Blip Festival 2007

tags / blip festival / chiptunes / 2 player productions / review / ec

Tiny Review: Octopounce

Created by Anna “Auntie Pixelante” Anthropy (Mighty Jill Off) and artist Saelee Oh, Octopounce was one of four indie PC games that debuted at the ARTXGAME portion of Giant Robot’s Game Over/Continue? show last April.

As Offworld’s Brandon Boyer mentions in his preview of the ARTXGAME titles, Octopounce was the only piece with an actual name. It was also the only game of the bunch that I tried out, as the other developers worked on their games up until the last minute before the show kicked off, as artists tend to do. Not that I should talk, considering I’ve put off this review for a month!

Octopounce allows up to four players to work with or against each other to catch the fish (and other sealife or birds) around them. Gulping a fish rewards you with “a blossom of sparkles” and makes your octopus brighter.

Four details that are fab:

1. The octopodes doze and drift in the sea, waiting for you to pick up a controller and rouse them. Even if only two players are around, they can bounce off the snoozing cephalopods’ heads to grab the fish.
2. Oh’s serene, cerulean backdrop and Anthropy’s pale squiggling sprites make a for a terrific scene to leave displayed on your monitor. It’s artwork (and a digital aquarium) that awakens as a game with a button tap.
3. Dozens of messages scroll at the bottom, some with instructions (“Hi, Green! Jump and catch fish!”), others inviting more players or describing the action (“Caught one!”, “Green is the brightest right now!”).
4. The ghostly swimmer that floats across the screen.

Two details that are butt:

1. I might recall this incorrectly, but the bouncing sound effects are reminiscent of Sonic the Hedgehog vaulting from a spring, which isn’t an issue itself, but hearing it so many times became annoying.
2. As with the other ARTXGAME pieces, Octopounce was available to the public for only one night! Organizer Adam Robezzoli, however, said a month ago, “It is possible that the games will be playable sometime in the future.”

Score:

• The most fun multiplayer game I’ve played all year (the only other multiplayer games I’ve played in 2009 are Resistance 2 and Jason Rohrer’s Between). My wife really enjoyed it, too!

See also: Tombed, Tiny Review: Calamity Annie

tags / auntie pixelante / artxgame / game over / octopounce / saelee oh / giant robot / review / ec