malkav11

Thoughts on my current Gamefly rentals:

The Warriors I may have mentioned previously (I forget these things easily). I honestly believe Rockstar has the golden touch. I don't think there's a single post-GTA III Rockstar game I haven't loved to bits. The Warriors is certainly not that exception. I'd never previously heard of the movie it's based on, but when I heard about the game I stuck it on my Netflix queue and wound up enjoying it a fair bit. Ultimately, the movie was a mood piece more than anything. The plot and characterization were not exactly all that.

The game expands and elaborates on those things enormously, and really helps flesh out the dark, violent New York it portrays. All the missions are long, full of things to do, and have quite the variety of objectives and enemies to face. The fighting is unbelievably brutal and enjoyable. I'm not as fond of the minigames you do to accomplish various criminal activities, but fuck it, they don't hurt the experience.

The AI's pretty competent and you can give basic directions, but I strongly recommend playing the game with a friend. You can tackle things in more ways, and you have a safety net against death or arrest. Plus nothing gives you a sense of the camaraderie of the gang like breaking skulls next to your buddy.

I myself will be starting the level sequence that covers the events of the movie tonight as soon as my friend is over.

Suikoden IV never really let me down. I'm almost done with it, just doing some level grinding and treasure finding to beef up for the last naval battle, dungeon, and bosses. It's still classic Suikoden all the way. The random battles are irritating but not game breaking, and once you get Viki the amount of time you *have* to spend dealing with them goes way down. The naval battles are never very complex, but they're an adequate "large scale" battle system, and, frankly, it's not that hard to beat the ones from I and II, which didn't really work all that well.

The biggest shock is the game's length. It starts kind of slow, and then by the time you get your stronghold, the game winds up being all about sailing to the next island, having a few events and a bit of wandering around or a naval battle or two, then going and grabbing the newly available members of the 108 Stars. Seriously. There are, as far as I can tell, only three, maybe four dungeons worthy of the name, and exactly one you have to traverse as part of the storyline (well, two if you count the last area. I haven't been there yet, so I'm not sure if it should be counted.). Unfortunately, it makes for kind of a weak main plot.

It's still reasonably fun, and most of the things I like about Suikoden are still present. Tracking down the Stars, building up your stronghold, large scale and duel battles. The rune system. The character-intrinsic, levelled weapons. The silly newspapers and comments and bath scenes and such. Teleportation to important locations. And so on.

And finally, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, just received on Friday. It's pretty obviously not going to take that long to beat or have any replay value, so it's probably just as well that I'm renting it. Though I'm loving it enough that I wish I *could* own it..

There's not that much to say, really. It's the DS equivalent of a point-and-click, mostly text-oriented, lawyer adventure. It feels kind of sort of like the one Law and Order game I played, only a lot sillier and more Japanese. Excellent localization, great lines and humor, excellent controls, and the feeling of victory you get when you catch up the flaws in witness testimony and beat out the prosecution is tremendous. The cases are also quite interesting with plenty of twists and turns. I'd really like to see more games in the series brought to the DS (in America), not to mention other similar games (like Famicom Detective Club). The touch screen and stylus make a perfect mouse substitute, and with the genre dying on PC, I think the DS is the logical environment to continue that legacy.