It has been some time since my last rating, but sometimes back-to-the-roots is not a bad thing. So I’ve been playing GTA Chinatown Wars for one or two weeks now.

Rating:

I must say it really is one of the greatest DS games I’ve played. It’s practically on a par with Tetris. The city is huge, the missions are diverse as well as exciting, the story is great and simply cruising or getting chased by police isn’t worse than on any other platform.

I recently completed Edna bricht aus by Daedalic Entertainment, a developer from Hamburg.

The game is a very nice old school point-and-click adventure. It references quite a few genre classics and it’s often funny. The only drawbacks are:

• The end sucks.
• A loading screen would have been nice, even though you can always tell when the game is loading by the crackling music.
• The game doesn’t work with FAT32. Would have been so difficult to put less than 65.536 files in one folder?
• The game crashes sometimes. So save often.

Rating:

Bottom line: It’s an adventure jewel.

So I was lucky and Santa brought me a Wii.

Wii: Rating:

Naturally, it’s not the first time I played with it, but it really is a lot of fun – especially for multi-player sessions. A few days later I bought myself Super Mario Galaxy because you cannot not have the Mario game for your Nintendo console.

Super Mario Galaxy: Rating:

I had to subtract half a star for making me sick the first two times I played it and making me mad everytime I fall off some platform.

Rating:

This game is actually a lot of fun. It certainly makes use of the DS’ unique input capabilities, i. e. the touchscreen. A game in which you draw the character and pieces of the world seems impossible on other platforms.

There is just the one drawback: I’m not that good at drawing. So I have to cope with an ugly character and an ugly world while it would have been a lot fancier if the developer’s artists had drawn all of the game. But there wouldn’t be quite as much fun then..

Besides the drawing the stuff, there is lot of talking going on in the game’s village and the game is not a lot more than just a normal jump’n'run.

Rating:

First off, the graphics are rather nice. I’ve also played SimCity 4 and in this aspect of City Life is clearly superior, not just because it’s 3d, but also because of the zoom and rotation possibilities.

But there is also a dark side to the game. I’ve failed miserably at it. There are several citizen groups and I couldn’t manage to please the better-off ones. After that I haven’t yet picked up the game again. Two more things I didn’t like:

• You can build subway stations, but there are no rails connecting them. Such stations simply relieve the streets which lie in-between them.
• There is no zoning like in SimCity. You have to build the same buildings over and over again.

Bottom line: SimCity is clearly better gameplay-wise, but I’m probably going to take a look at the DS version of City Life when it’s available anyway.

Rating:

Normally, I keep these ratings rather short. This time though, I’m going have to go into greater detail as this is one of the most bug-ridden games I’ve ever played. And this is the “gold” version!

Yesterday, I’ve completed the original game (without the add-on Underworld) with my girlfriend, i. e. we played the whole campaign over a LAN. I’m just going to recount the worst bugs, not mentioning synchronization issues (enemies like dragons looking in different directions on the two computers or her being invisible to me and so on):

• A few hours into the game (probably between 5-10), we had just made our way through a very hard area called Tyr-Haddar and we were on our way back. But we couldn’t get back, there was an invisible barrier on the only way back to the game’s main area. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a save game before that area. So we had to start a new game and play the whole main quest again. This problem is also reported here and here.
• One dungeon didn’t have any enemies at all. I don’t think that was right.
• All my girlfriend’s character’s spells in the slots in the lower right of the screen were at some point suddenly halfed in their level and thus useless.
• When we got to the demon almost at the end of the game, my girlfriend suddenly couldn’t use her spells anymore at all. Right clicks just didn’t work anymore. Restarting the game or loading a different save game didn’t help either. (I’ve also read about this bug somewhere in a forum, but can’t find it now.)
• So, we finally reached the end boss where you are supposed to get some blue symbols above your character’s head in order to be able to damage the boss. On the one machine those symbols appeared only once during the whole fight while we could see them more often on the other machine.
• The extro then was a good summary of the whole game: the client was simply disconnected while the server showed a white screen with the extro’s sounds playing in the background.

Yes, the game really is that buggy. We’re now asking ourselves frequently “is this supposed to be this way or is it a bug?”, but we keep playing the game anyway because it’s fun.

What are your experiences with bugs in Sacred?

Rating:

A very beautiful and fun game. It’s also good to play as a short break because every level takes approximately 5 to 10 minutes. A rather big drawback is that you cannot save more than one game, i. e. there is only one gamestate that is saved automatically.

Update: I’ve played the game through yesterday and now I have to change my comment a little. While the game is still fun in the last few worlds, it can get a little frustrating at times. Most importantly, there is some kind of bees that will just kill one of your souls if you’re not prepared for their attack. It’s virtually impossible to do anything against as soon as the have appeared.

Rating:
It’s an OK adventure, some parts are a little boring, the end is too short and doesn’t satisfy (as with most adventures) and it crashes every now and then which is especially bad when you’ve just spent about half an hour solving a disgruntling puzzle.

Rating:

A comprehensive and overall interesting book. I just feel that at some points it says more about the use of the presented ideas rather than about the implementation of those ideas which I would have preferred.

Rating:
Not what I expected, but very funny anyway.