Saukra Samurai - 3DS
Recently released as a downloadable title from the 3DS eShop, I decided to give Sakura Samurai a shot after I read a glowing review over at IGN. Boy, downloadable titles sure are getting nicer these days! This tight little sword combat game is a blast to play and features some lovely graphics and music as well. Best described as a combination between Onimusha and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!, players lead a young samurai into battle against groups of enemies who come at him one at a time. The combat resembles Punch-Out! in that you must read your enemies movements, dodging their attacks and slashing at them when they're vulnerable. Some light RPG elements (sword upgrades, new special attacks) help fill out the experience, but timing-based swordplay is the meat of the experience. Easy to pick up, but challenging to master, Sakura Samurai is a stand out title that's well suited to the 3DS system. Recommended!
Intelligent Qube - PS1
Inteligent Qube (or Kuroshi as it's known in some parts of the world) is a Playstation 1 puzzle game that was originally released in 1997. It was actually one of the first PS1 games I ever played. I loved it then, I love it now, and I usually dust it off and play through it once every couple of years. I won't bore you by trying to describe the mechanics of a 15 year old puzzle game in print, but suffice to say that it's fun to play. Still, there's more to this title than its basic elements. Perhaps the biggest draw of Intelligent Qube is its presentation. Instead of viewing the action from a 2D perspective (a la Tetris, Plants Vs. Zombies, or just about any other puzzler out there) players guide a man across a stark, floating 3D landscape. Giant cubes bear down on our hero and he must clear a path through them or risk being crushed and sent plummeting to his doom. It's as if Masahiko Sato, the game's creator, deliberately tried to make a game that played like a fever dream. The empty black backgrounds, Takayuki Hattori's dramatic orchestral score, and the God-like voice that bellows "PERRR-FECT!" when you successfully clear a stage all come together to create a tense, yet thrilling puzzle experience.
GRADE: B+
Regular readers know that I generally love me some Resident Evil, but playing through this latest adventure has opened my eyes a bit and showed me some of the series flaws. Before I go there, however, I'd like to acknowledge that this game does indeed look and play marvelously well. With some expected limitations to its visuals and general scope aside, this is a fully fledged Resident Evil adventure that actually stands up well next to its console brothers. The thing that sets this game apart from RE 4 and 5, and ultimately tarnishes the experience for me, is the combat. In RE 4 and 5 the series moved away from its roots as exploration/puzzle driven and became more combat oriented. It was no longer so much about making your way through a huge mansion while outrunning lumbering zombies and conserving scant resources; gameplay became more linear, the puzzle aspects were less prominent, and gunplay became the order of the day. This change served to divide Resident Evil's fan base somewhat, and I feel that since that time Capcom has been trying to find a way to bridge the gap between the tense, claustrophobic gameplay of the original trilogy, and the run and gun pacing of the more recent games.
Now, I may have mentioned this before, but I was never a fan of the series until RE 4 came out. The earlier entries in the series bored me with their stiff controls and emphasis on asset management, and it wasn't until RE 4 that Capcom made the necessary adjustments to draw me in. Not only did they make the shooting aspects of the game more prominent and engaging, they also introduced a more sophisticated melee system, thus making combat a more up-close and visceral experience. Shoot a bad guy in the shin and when he drops to his knees, hit him with a roundhouse kick to the face....oh so satisfying! Now I only say all of this because I want to be clear which side of the fence I'm on. For me, when it comes to Resident Evil, puzzles are bad and combat is good, but I also understand that Capcom is trying to appeal to a bit of a fractured fanbase. So with that in mind I understood what they they were trying to do when, for this game, they basically took the tight corridors, blind corners, and asset management of the original trilogy and combined it with the combat mechanics of the more recent games. Seems like a decent way to try and appeal to both camps, right? The problem is that, for some unknown reason, Capcom decided to basically remove the melee aspect of combat. Well actually, they didn't REMOVE it... it's technically still there, but it can't be reliably triggered and when you DO make contact it seems to have very little effect on your enemies. Thinking about it now, I suppose there's a chance that this was done in an attempt to appeal to fans of the original trilogy, where melee combat was even LESS prominent, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. Perhaps this seems like a small detail, but it really limits the experience for me. The shooting aspect of the game works well and all, but the decision to give melee combat such a diminished role really narrows the scope of this title and it forced me to reevaluate my feelings about the series as a whole. Chuck in some of the series' blandest enemy design, and the whole affair starts to feel a little half-baked. Indeed, I had a revelation of my own while playing this game: I don't really care for any other aspect of this series beyond the combat. The story and characters are lame (except for maybe Leon and Wesker who aren't in this game) and hacking out an important part of the gameplay experience only highlights this. I'm still looking forward to RE 6 later this year, and I'm sure that Capcom will be on the ball with that one, but Revelations just didn't do much for me.
GRADE: C+
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