Phantasmaburbia - Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good

Phantasmaburbia is an indie RPG set in a small suburban neighborhood that, overnight, has become host to a large population of ghosts and dark spirits. In the middle of the night, four teenagers are woken up by ghostly disturbances in their houses; seeking weapons with which to defend themselves, they each meet with a friendly spirit who helps them quell the ghosts in their homes. With their new ghost buddies, the four protagonists set out into the neighborhood on their own personal quests, but soon come to join forces to defeat the demon responsible for awakening the evil spirits and casting their families and neighbors into unwaking slumber.

The premise itself is pretty interesting, but there's a whole lot going in this game's favor. It has a really nice atmosphere (thanks to the visual design and the music), an engaging and unpredictable story, pretty decent character development, fun battle mechanics, clever puzzles, and several interesting twists on the typical RPG formula. Certain elements of the game even remind me of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. And with a single playthrough lasting 10-12 hours, with good pacing throughout, I had a very wholesome, fulfilling experience with Phantasmaburbia.

As usual, if that summary isn't enough to convince you, I have more thoughts on the game after the jump.

Vampire Lemmings - An Indie Game Review

Vampires! is a (wait for it....) vampire-themed puzzle game by CBE Software, the developer behind the recent sci-fi adventure/puzzle game J.U.L.I.A. and Ghost in the Sheet. Vampires! plays loosely like the classic Lemmings game (except with vampires) -- it's almost dawn, and the vampires have to get back to their crypts before the sun comes up. The problem is that they seem to roam through hallways almost aimlessly, so it's up to you to help them avoid traps and make it back to the crypt safely, before sunrise. 

The game is played from an overhead perspective with small, self-contained map scenarios. Using the mouse, you click on tiles to alter the environment while the vampires drone ever onward through the hallways and intersections. Your primary interaction is rotating tiles so that you can shape the path you want the vampires to take, even rotating a tile while a vampire is currently in the tile. At first, all you have to worry about is patches of sunlight, which kill the vampires instantly if they walk into it, but things quickly become more complicated.

The Witcher 2 Screenshots & Wallpapers (Part 1)

The Witcher 2 is easily one of the best-looking games I've ever played. The amount of detail in the graphics is simply astonishing, and there's an awful lot of artistic splendor in many of the landscapes. I took 701 screenshots during a single playthrough -- here are some of my favorites. Continued in part 2.

The Witcher 2 Screenshots & Wallpapers (Part 2)

The Witcher 2 is easily one of the best-looking games I've ever played. The amount of detail in the graphics is simply astonishing, and there's an awful lot of artistic splendor in many of the landscapes. I took 701 screenshots during a single playthrough -- here are some of my favorites. Continued from part 1.

The Witcher 2 is Pretty Good

In 2007, The Witcher earned a strong reputation among RPG enthusiasts because it felt like a traditional, old-school RPG in a modern era of streamlined, dumbed-down pseudo-RPGs. Its sequel from 2011, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, feels less like a true RPG and more like a mainstream action-RPG, as if it's trying to appeal to the crowd of gamers who turn to Bethesda and BioWare for their annual RPG fix. That would ordinarily be a pretty damning criticism coming from me, but compared to the likes of Bethesda and BioWare games, The Witcher 2 is a mighty fine game that still understands what makes a good, satisfying RPG.

I Miss Rareware Difficulties

Back in the 90s, Rareware was a juggernaut among game developers, rivaling and perhaps even surpassing the great and almighty Nintendo. Games like GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, and Conker's Bad Fur Day were just as essential to the N64's library as any of Nintendo's flagship IPs. Without Rareware, the N64 would've only been half the console it was. When Microsoft bought Rare, it was an attack on Nintendo that's still felt to this day; Nintendo lost one of its best developers, and Rare has since developed barely anything of worth on the Xbox.

Rare's presence is sorely missed, but one thing I miss in particular is how they handled the difficulty in their games. When most game developers put different difficulty options into their games, they tend just to provide the same game experience with certain statistics on a slider. Enemies deal more damage and have higher hitpoints, resources are more scarce, there might be more or fewer checkpoints, and so on. What Rare did, by contrast, was provide a completely different gameplay experience for each difficulty.

Retro Review: Conker's Bad Fur Day

Ever since its release back in 2001, Conker's Bad Fur Day has been lauded as one of the best games on the Nintendo 64 and is considered by some to be Rareware's best game. Rareware and Microsoft liked it so much they remade the game for the original Xbox in 2005 in the form of Conker: Live & Reloaded. For some reason, the game never appealed to me when I was younger (I guess because it had a cartoon squirrel as the protagonist and I didn't really know what the premise was supposed to be about), and as such I never played it. Until now.

I can definitely see why Conker was so highly praised back in 2001. It's a very impressive game for its time, especially in terms of the technology in its graphics and sound, and many of its gamepay elements still hold up well today. The thing I like most about it is that it was a refreshing change of pace from similar platformers of that era. It does show its age in a few areas, however, and there are a couple of design choices that bother me and things that I think could've been better.