News: TGS impressions part 2

September 22, 2007, 08:01 PM

by brandon, via various -
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More stuff I played.

Guilty Gear II Overture - it basically plays like capture the flag so far. You've got a base that's sending out little red dudes (or whatever color you are) and they're trying to get to the next little post that's blue (or whatever color they are). You smack that post until it turns red with your dudes, and hit enemies along the way. Repeat this at each post until you reach the enemy base. I found it pretty boring. Everyone who was hoping it wouldn't be like a Musou game will find themselves wishing it actually was a Musou game instead. The combat is ok, but there's no dashing that I can see. At least it's four player! Yeah.

Lux-Pain is a new game from Killaware, a company made up of ex Atlus people. It's an adventure game where you have to get these viruses out of people using the stylus. The art is stylish, but the mechanics are pretty straightforward. Hopefully the story is pretty good.

Sengoku Basara 2 - This game is even more like sentai version of the Musou games than ever before. It's really simple, but kind of fun if you like mashing buttons. Looks stylish and all, but like with other games in this genre, if you just stand around, nothing happens. Nobody comes to attack you or anything. But you've got two other characters with you at all times, who sort of do stuff, occasionally, and riding horses is fun. That's about all I have to say about that.

Zak & Wiki - this game will be great, I'm sure of it. It's essentially a 3D adventure game in which most of the puzzles are common sense, or based on just one extra bit of knowledge, which is that your little monkey pal can be rung like a bell to transform things, or open things, or dispel demons, etc. I played two levels and basically wanted to take the game home. I recommend getting it. I'll bust my Wii out of the box for it.

R-Type Tactics - this game is out now, but I played it at TGS. Basically it's really, really hard to figure out how to start a battle, even for people who read Japanese. Maybe the manual helps with that. Anyway, you first choose your units, then place them, then somehow start the battle - which turns out to be quite a standard affair. The battles are turn-based, and you can choose to counter sometimes if enemies attack you, depending on units. Honestly it's a little silly to have ships that can't attack simultaneously without special maneuvers, but hey. The coolest thing about it is the ships and environments, of course, which are really neat if you like R-Type. I'm not a big fan though, so for me this game was kind of a bust, even though I love strategy RPGS. I really wanted to like it!

Dragon Quest 4 - it's Dragon Quest 4. But you can rotate environments. Looks ok!

Played some Virtual Console Neo Geo games, and they were ok, but had some slowdown in places I didn't remember, like in Magician Lord. Luckily there's no loading though, which I would expect them to fix, but still good to see. World Heroes played really well, and I was able to get off good, consistent 5-hit combos with Dragon, which I suppose means it's about as responsive as it needs to be. The ports were done by D4 Enterprise, the company that also made the one-chip MSX and new console.

I think that's all I played. Tough to recall...but there'll be more posts about things as I think of them!