Reviews Written by David
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Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles Nintendo DS
Nintendo DSPrice: $10.00 to $19.99 Compare PricesFebruary 16, 2008
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August 9, 2006
A guilty pleasure that's actually best shared
Pros: Fun gameplay, hot chicks with the best jiggle physics ever
Cons: looooong load times, iffy voice acting, limited selection of fight areas
To all appearances, Rumble Roses is a terrible game. After all, it features nearly naked women, which surely must be a cover-up for bad gameplay, right? Not. Rumble Roses is a surprisingly good wrestling game, which also happens to have only female wrestlers, which also happen to be scantily clad. That's it.
For the record, I have never played a wrestling game before, for any platform. Wrestling as a "sport" has never interested me, apart from being something to laugh at for a couple minutes while channel-surfing. Rumble Roses didn't do much to change my mind on that account, but it showed me that wrestling can be a whole lot of fun. The "plot" for the Story mode of the game is ridiculously insane, so bad that I was constantly laughing out loud. This actually encouraged me to play through with all 10 characters, and again with all their alter-egos, just to see how bad/funny it could get.
The characters are quite diverse, ranging from sexy nurse to sexy cowgirl and sexy ninja. Pretty much every character can be given the adjective sexy, really. You can tell the developers spent most of their time working on the look of the girls. In fact, the lead developer for the game admitted in an interview that when they had to choose between getting the girls to look really good, or adding in 4-player tag-team mode, they chose the former. I say they made the right choice.
Of course, the only reason I kept playing that long was that the game itself is loads of fun. Controls are tight and responsive. They're also deceptively simply, mostly using the four main buttons and R1. The real trick is timing everything correctly, and using counter-moves against your opponent. I really enjoyed figuring out all the grapples and submissions for each character, and there are a fair number of them. Then there are a few weapons to add to the mix, which allow you to perform attacks that probably wouldn't show up in the WWE.
To spice things up, there is a vow system, where your character chooses certain tasks to perform during the fight, such as executing five diving attacks. This adds challenge to the fights, and is the way to transform characters to their alter-ego version in Exhibition mode.
After building up the special meter, Lethal and Killer moves can be performed, which are often fight-enders. You can also build up the opponent's "humiliation" guage, by doing humiliating moves on them, and then perform an H-Move on them. This is pretty much a guaranteed end to the fight, as well as a whole lot of fun to watch.
Despite all of this, I was bored with the game after a couple weeks, mostly due to the not-so-tough AI. What has renewed my interest is playing with a friend. The game is much more challenging, and thus much more enjoyable. Thing is, your friend will have to be comfortable with a game that shows frequent (and I mean nearly constantly) panties and bounteous bosom-flesh.
However, things aren't all roses in this game. There are only four fighting rings available, one beach-side mudpit and three arenas which seem to differ only in the shade of lighting. As well, the three arenas all have the same weapons, so essentially there are only two fight locations in the game. Bo-ring. Worse is the load time for each fight. I don't understand how it can take five minutes to load two characters. Seriously.
In short, if you own a PS2 and not an Xbox360, and you'd like a wrestling game to play with a friend that's very easy on the eyes, give Rumble Roses a go. ... -
August 7, 2006
The first Tomb Raider game worth playing
Pros: Fun, great looking, not too long, awesome new weapon
Cons: Jumping puzzles too tricky at times
Tomb Raider: Legend is in fact the first Tomb Raider game I have been able to play to completion. I have attempted every single previous game, and given up within an hour or so. That time decreased with every game, until I was only able to stomach Angel of Darkness for about 10 minutes. Imagine my surprise when I started playing Legend and found myself *enjoying* the experience.
Controls, the major downside of all previous incarnations, have been updated to the 21st century. No more using the D-pad to turn Lara left and right. Now, a simple press of the analog stick moves Lara instantly in the chosen direction. It's tight, and beautiful to watch. Jumping, climbing, dodging and shooting are equally intuitive, responsive and animated well.
The plot, according to my Tomb Raider expert friend (from whom this game was borrowed), deviates from the Tomb Radider canon, but in fact more closely resembles the first two games in the series, previous ly judge to be the best by fans. It tossed in some old friends and colleagues, as well as a healthy dose of mythology and supernatural goings-on, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
The addition of checkpoints and the ability to save anytime were long overdue and heartily welcomed. If anything, they made the game a bit too easy, but I'd rather have slightly too easy than rage-enducing difficulty. The only part that really got to me was all the jumping puzzles in the second-to-last level, Nepal. Jumping isn't quite as accurate as I'm used to from the Prince of Persia series, so I had to repeat some frustrating sections more times than I enjoyed. Overall it wasn't a problem, though.
Finally, the addition of the grappling hook allowed for a bunch of cool puzzles that would have been impossible in previous games, and other stuff like jumping over extra-long pits and pulling down otherwise unreachable objects in high places. Little things like that make the game feel less gamey, less like the world has been specifically designed for someone with your exact skills and abilities.
As for replay value, there are items scattered throughout each level which, when collected, unlock various bonus content. This is pretty standard stuff, but it probably doubles the life of the game, at least, if you're a completist sort. I might even do it myself, just so I can do things like play the entire game in a ripped evening dress. If you're only going to play though once, though, a rental might make more sense than a purchase, at least until the price comes down. I completed the whole game in under 9 hours, spread between two days, on the middle difficulty setting, so make of that what you will.
Oh, and how could I forget? Lara looks great. Supposedly they redid her from scratch this game, with less emphasis on her assets. I don't know about that, as her cleavage was clearly emphasized by every single outfit, and of course her ass spends a lot of time in your face. I'm not complaining, though. I like what Crystal Dynamics has done with her. And, assuming Legend sells well, the plot leaves things wide open for a sequel, which will give us another dose of this newfound Lara goodness. ...
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An ugly and mostly unpleasant experience
Pros: Combat can be quite enjoyable (and there's a lot of it)
Cons: Ugly graphics, bad camera, minimal story, dodgy control input detection
The best elements of the original Assassin's Creed were the Spiderman-like wall crawling and the cinematic combat animations. In attempting to mimic it's big brother, Altair's Chronicles serves only to showcase the limitations of the DS hardware, with blocky and heavily pixellated 3D graphics. The frequent combat can at times be quite enjoyable, but the limited amount of animations gets dull. Multiple enemy crossbowmen can turn combat from fun to frustrating, particularly one boss fight. Mashed into this is a whole bunch of Prince of Persia-esque platforming, complete with swinging blades, flames and the like. Trouble is, the fixed camera tends to produce occasional 'leap of faith' moments, and extremely frequent depth judgement issues, leading to a lot of deaths. Thankfully checkpoints are liberally placed, though there are a few spots that could use more. All in all, this game just feels like it's going through the motions; it even has the obligatory "you lose your weapons and must rely on stealth" section. In a head-scratching moment, some ordinary guards demand your weapons, and rather than striking them down like the previous few hundred guards, Altair cheerfully hands over his hardware. No joke. It's this and many other "what were they thinking?" moments, combined with a ubiquitous problem of animation sequences having to finish before input is detected, that lead me to recommend giving this title a pass. ...