reviews

Stallion Solitaire: Pocket Card Jockey

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Reviews •   1

It’s usually the games you love – or the games that are really, really bad – that are the easiest to write about. When you’re singing praise, the words seem to flow effortlessly from your pen – and the same goes for when you’re telling everyone about a phenomenal piece of hot garbage.

But Pocket Card Jockey for the 3DS? Hoo boy. I mean, how do you even begin to sell this concept of horse-racing sim solitaire to people? That sounds like the most aggressively boring thing on the planet. In actuality, though, it’s an amazingly complex and deep game! …with a huge mess of intertwining game systems that sounds like complete gibberish if you try to describe them rather than showing them.

But by god, I’m gonna try. Because you know what? Pocket Card Jockey is already one of the best games released in 2016. No horsin’ around.

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Figure Review: Nendoroid Kirby (Good Smile Company)

• by Heidi Kemps • In Figures, Reviews •   0

Jeez, do you know how long I’ve wanted to do a proper figure review on this site? I’ve done plenty of reports on interesting gaming stuff coming from the Wonder Festivals, but I haven’t really sat down to review a complete product yet. The main reason is that my photography setup isn’t particularly ideal: I don’t have a mini-booth or anything for shooting pictures in, and my best camera is my iPhone 6S. For reviews like these, photography is a pretty crucial element.

But, eventually, I felt like I just had to suck it up and make do with what I had on hand. After all, pictures might be worth a thousand words, but I could also write thousands more words to go with them if I had to!

Of course, then I had to choose a subject. There were two figures I really wanted to talk about, one smaller and fairly inexpensive and another that was positioned as a more high-end product. I figured we should start with the smaller one first — not only did it turn out to be the better piece overall, it’s also one of Nintendo’s most beloved characters, with a new game due out just a few months from now.

Without further ado…

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Here’s Kirby!

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Matsuno Family Double Whammy: Osomatsu-kun (Megadrive)

• by Heidi Kemps • In Kusoge, Retro, Reviews •   0

With the good comes the bad, I suppose…

So hey, I just wrote an anime review about Osomatsu-san, the recent reboot of a classic gag manga/anime that was a massive hit overseas. Remember how I mentioned that there were two Osomatsu-kun anime series before it, one from 1966 and another from 1988? Well, as you might already know, 1988 was the launch year of the Sega Megadrive in Japan. The console launched in October of that year with Space Harrier II and Super Thunder Blade, impressive renditions of popular arcade titles, while a very faithful port of Juuouki/Altered Beast followed soon after in November. But here’s a factoid for you: the fourth-ever Megadrive game, released a little under two months after the console’s debut, was a licensed game based on Osomatsu-kun.

Titled Osomatsu-kun: Hachamecha Gekijou (“Nonsense Theatre”), the game features a bunch of familiar series characters: the Matsuno brothers, Totoko, Chibita, Iyami, Hatabou, and so on – in new and bizarre roles in a strange-as-hell series of fantasy settings.

It’s also an astounding pile of garbage. And I played all of it.

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Bloody Disappointing! The Corpse Party: Blood Drive Review

• by Heidi Kemps • In Reviews •   4

Well, so far my most anticipated Vita releases for 2015 have (mostly) been serious disappointments.1 First there was Persona 4 Dancing All Night and its numerous issues, and now we have Corpse Party: Blood Drive, a follow-up to the superb (and very under-the-radar) PSP horror title Corpse Party. Unfortunately, Corpse Party: Blood Drive is most certainly not superb. Quite far from it, actually.

Let’s look back at the original game for a moment. Corpse Party was a horror-themed adventure game that began life as an RPG Maker project on the Japanese PC-98 computer, and eventually wound up on the PSP after numerous remakes and revisions. It’s the story of a group of students (and a teacher) who wind up trapped in the abandoned, cursed Heavenly Host Elementary after performing what they think is a harmless friendship ritual, but is actually a rite to enter an evil alternate dimension. Heavenly Host is a long-abandoned school that was the site of numerous horrific happenings, filled with numerous tortured souls who want nothing but to inflict their pain and suffering on others in the most agonizing ways possible. Its roots as an RPG Maker game were obvious in the visuals, which consisted of 2D sprite graphics and top-down environments, as well as its simple interactions, which made it more of a 2D horror adventure game than a “survival horror” experience.

Corpse Party was unusual in many ways, but it worked wonderfully as a horror game: the sprite visuals were incredibly unsettling once the awfulness of Heavenly Host began to set in, the sound design and voice acting was nothing short of amazing (listening to characters’ death throes is nothing short of terrifying), and the technical/engine limitations meant that most of the game’s scariest scenes were told through only text and sound – making them even more effective than if they were purely visual. (You can only see so much hyper-detailed viscera before it loses its impact, but detailed descriptions and sounds of pain and suffering can be absolutely brutal.) The characters were engaging, and they interacted quite well with each other, revealing lots of weird and unique little personality quirks (some far more disturbing than others).

That’s a brief summary. If you want a more detailed review of the original Corpse Party, I shall point you in the direction of friend-of-the-site Gaming Hell!

Anyhow, despite being a PSP exclusive, the game seemed to do well for publisher XSEED – in fact, we wound up getting a collection of side stories (and a brief prologue to Blood Drive) in the 2012 release of Corpse Party: Book of Shadows, which took the game even further into adventure game/visual novel territory. Some folks found it disappointing, but I enjoyed seeing more about the characters and setting of the game as revealed through its various vignettes.

So how does Corpse Party: Blood Drive manage to screw up such a good thing? Oh boy, where to begin…

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  1. Ultra Despair Girls was riveting, though certainly janky at points, so at least there’s that. ↩

Controller Review: HORI Fighting Commander 4 for PS3/PS4/PC

• by Heidi Kemps • In Reviews •   6

If you asked me what the worst part of the last console generation was, I’d probably say “too much overproduced yet soulless design-by-marketing-committee games.” But perhaps, on occasion, you might catch me complaining about the controllers. As far as I’m concerned, last gen was the absolute dregs when it came to controller design: the 360 pad was ergonomic but had possibly the worst D-pad ever inflicted upon mankind, the SixAxis/DualShock 3 fixed approximately zero of the issues with the previous DualShocks (clunky ergonomics, still-awful D-pad, and horribly placed convex analog sticks), and… well, I mean, the Wii Remote should probably go without saying.

Then again, my taste in controllers is a little odd in general – after all, I love the GameCube controller for games that aren’t Smash. My favorite controllers are generally third-party or custom-made options, though I’ve had really good luck with HORI products in the past. (Hell, I owned – and rather liked – that crazy Dragon Quest slime controller they made!) I’ve been looking to get a new digital-input-centric pad for my PS3 for a while, but I was never able to jump on the Fighting Commander 3s when a limited amount were made available Stateside, and their aftermarket prices wound up being downright stupid.

Cut to the present day, where I have acquired a PS4 and Guilty Gear Xrd, and it’s looking like the PS4 will be the console of choice for future fighting game endeavors.  I wanted something nice to play 2D-heavy games with, but I was disappointed to see that many games still do not support PS3 controller backwards compatibility (which simply require the implementation of a freely available driver – seriously, what’s the excuse?), meaning I can’t use my custom stick. After surveying some folks online, the HORI Fighting Commander 4 emerged as a good option – I wanted a pad more than another stick right now, it was backwards compatible with the PS3, and my experience with HORI products has been overwhelmingly positive. Even better, Play-Asia had the controller on sale at the time – along with shockingly cheap overseas express shipping – so I figured now was as good a time to take the plunge as any. Did the Fighting Commander 4 live up to my high hopes?

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