Added: 02.02.2015 21:29 | 3 views | 0 comments

Stop me if you've heard this one: The vice president, his mom, his brother, and a conspiracy theorist walk into a forest. They get into a random encounter with a deer with a telephone attached to its antlers. The entire group gets hit with roaming charges.

Badumtiss.

Welcome to most of your time in Citizens of Earth, where state-of-the-art bad puns, visual gags, and Colbert Report-lite political jabs are the glue holding together a fun, accessible, ‘90s-throwback RPG. This is a delightful game about the newly elected and clueless vice president of Earth finding himself and his random collection of constituents fighting the evil, caffeinated influence of the Moonbucks Corporation all over the streets and underground lairs of Crystal City.

Citizens of Earth wears its influences proudly. The obvious joke to make is that the game's title stops just short of calling itself Citizens of Earthbound, which would be appropriate, but also not necessarily an insult, considering that the game shows an enormous amount of respect for its inspiration; and really, comparisons come because, after recruitment, each character has to be trained up in order to take full use of their talents, some of which are useful both in and out of combat--like the Pilot, who can fly your party anywhere in the game world in seconds, or the Baker, who can make you delicious items without having to visit a store. As with Pokemon, all training requires is that characters be present during combat and they'll reap the XP benefits. It leads to the typical Pokemon situation of having to feed XP to underleveled characters to get them where they need to be. And afterward, you occasionally have situations like the Yoga Instructor or School Mascot, who provide such insane stat boosts per level that it almost feels like a cheat--but this is simply the double-edged sword that comes with being able to play the game in so many different ways.

From Earthbound, we get virtually everything else. CoE's graphics are much higher res and better drawn than Earthbound's 8-bit stylings, but the simplicity of CoE's Crystal City, how each area connects to the other, and the small-town feel of the place are familiar and functional. From merely walking down Main Street, to getting lost on Mount Pom Pom, it's simply a fun place just to wander in. And this is a feeling that doesn't go away the further you go, and the weirder the game gets. If there's a downside here, it's that the game's soundtrack is too nondescript for a game with so much character in every other respect.

Earthbound's combat system is almost copy-pasted here, right down to the trippy Hypnotoad backgrounds when fights start. You get a set of attacks--some basic, some costing energy orbs that replenish after a successful attack, and a few basic elemental strengths/weaknesses thrown in for good measure--and wail on enemies till they drop. The game has a nasty habit of making fights go on longer than they have to, because enemies will have transformations or defense moves that take multiple turns to compensate for, like the low-level walking java bean that transforms into a rabid, high-defense plant at the worst possible times. Citizens of Earth is a lot more forgiving, however, in that if your current character configuration isn't doing the trick fast enough, you can restart combat and swap out characters you don't need for that fight. Even if you die, you restart from the same spot on the map.

The game's biggest issue is that while the enemies are at least visible, they are legion, they start fights if they touch any of your characters onscreen, and they respawn the second you leave a room, even for a second. There's a neat trick where you can charge your characters at an enemy on the map who's got their back turned and kill them without even needing to fight, but the game gets finicky as to where some characters' backs are. It's frustrating at times, for sure, but there are so many ways to compensate that it's a wash.

Ultimately, the game is such an infinite fountain of charming and funny, that even when you've started rolling your eyes at how often you've had to wait for one of the traffic cone/hermit crab enemies to come out of defense, you end up getting into a conversation with an NPC and forgetting it ever happened. It's a fine slice of the ‘90s that developer Eden Industries has delivered here, and it's just too good being the Veep to let a few minor issues bring it down.

Added: 31.01.2015 12:10 | 3 views | 0 comments


SP: Avernum 2: Crystal Souls is out, offering fans of tactical role-playing games another avenue to waste some time in a pleasant manner. The game is a remake of a remade game from 1996, coming with spiffier visuals and a bunch of new content. Creator Jeff Vogel himself stated that even players who enjoyed both previous editions would find a lot of new stuff to do, which pretty much puts me in a privileged position, as I haven't had the pleasure of coming in contact with neither of them.

Added: 31.01.2015 10:56 | 2 views | 0 comments


Meet Ariael - she is the devil scientist who has created God. She specializes in crystal energetics and uses the Awaken Fate Crystal to make Shin God. She researches humans who have the potential to be God and loves eating instant noodles. About the game: Several years after a certain revolution came to pass, and the powerful Satanael was defeated, the devils were still dominant in their constant war against the angels. Meanwhile, a certain Celestia was resorting to guerilla warfare to survive. They focused on researching a way to create a "God" to use as their ultimate weapon against the devils. After creating the "Fate Awakening Crystal," which can turn a human into a God, the angels could only wait for the day they found someone who was compatible with it... http://www.nisamerica.com/games/awakened_fate_ultimatum/index.html

Added: 31.01.2015 10:52 | 12 views | 0 comments


Welcome to Celestia! On the day he was killed by demons, Shin has the Awaken Fate Crystal inserted into his chest and becomes God. Thrusted into the war between angels and devils, Shin acts as God, making "Ultimate Decisions" and must face the consequences of those actions. In the end, Shin must make the ultimate decision to save only one of the two girls closest to him. Which will you pick - Ariael or Jupiel? About the game: Several years after a certain revolution came to pass, and the powerful Satanael was defeated, the devils were still dominant in their constant war against the angels. Meanwhile, a certain Celestia was resorting to guerilla warfare to survive. They focused on researching a way to create a "God" to use as their ultimate weapon against the devils. After creating the "Fate Awakening Crystal," which can turn a human into a God, the angels could only wait for the day they found someone who was compatible with it... http://www.nisamerica.com/games/awakened_fate_ultimatum/index.html

Added: 30.01.2015 19:09 | 2 views | 0 comments



Do you have so much money that you're running out of things to buy? No? Oh, well then don't bother purchasing this crystal-studded PS4.

Added: 28.01.2015 6:13 | 10 views | 0 comments


While the world knows Lara best from the genre-defining Tomb Raider games, she's carved an unlikely niche with arcade-style dungeon crawlers, too. Anyone who played video games in the '90s surely remembers the days when Lara Croft seemed omnipresent. Her polygonal face adorned books, magazines, and posters. Angelina Jolie strutted about as Lara on the silver screen. Lara even flitted about, larger than life, as part of the multimedia visual overload U2 presented as the centerpiece of a concert tour. A decade and change of struggling for relevance since then has made Lara's face a far less familiar one, however and it probably doesn't help that her face itself has undergone such radical changes. After several attempts to modernize the former action star, developer Crystal Dynamics basically went back to the drawing board for 2013's reboot, called simply Tomb Raider.