03/29/13

Review: SimCity (2013)

SimCity and I have had a sporadic relationship over the years. Before this latest iteration, I recall playing SimCity 3000 and, being 13 at the time, finding it too complex not be overwhelmed. Yet there was something there that fascinated me. Even earlier than that, I recall playing the first entry in the series on my NES and laughing maniacally as Bowser came through and stomped down all of my handiwork. I know now that what fascinated me was the creation, the simulation, of something I would never lay hands on in my real life. That same creationist quality is back in this year’s SimCity, evolving and pulsing with thoroughfare-based progression, and I’m finally old enough to sink into the strategy of it all. The result is a game which steals hours like it does Simoleans, and if you’re not careful, will keep you building long hours into the night.

Welcome the New Mayor!

For those of you afraid of Origin, let me take a moment to assuage your fears. Origin doesn’t intrude on gameplay but enhances it through an integrated friends list and messaging. The server issues you’ve heard about are largely gone and in the entire scope of this review I only experienced one issue: my server being full a day after the more servers were opened up. While we could argue the merits of online gameplay, EA and Maxis have made it clear that offline isn’t in the works, so we are best to take the game as it stands, which remains an accomplishment.

Gameplay follows the expected model but features a robust tutorial that introduces basic gameplay elements before allowing you to venture into un-paved ground. The learning doesn’t stop there, however. As you lay roads and explore the potential your region, advisors pop up offering suggestions and additional lessons to deepen the possibilities of your city. Since these come as a result of gameplay, expect to make some mistakes and, if you’re anything like me, to have your second city be much better planned than your first.

Breaking Ground

When you begin, you will lay roads and zone for residential, commercial, or industrial development. Rather than having you place individual buildings like past games, construction happens automatically. I was taken back by this at first since I had hoped for a greater degree of business control, but it soon becomes apparent that SimCity wants to concern with its larger game over incidental planning.

Rather than worrying where you’ll place your fast food chain, you’ll be adjusting taxes, developing industry, guiding mass transit, and making sure your citizens have plenty of entertainment to keep them happy. You’ll be worried about clean air and water, sewage flow, and how to provide enough electricity to keep the lights on. You’ll also be managing city services like law enforcement and fire, and making sure that each evolves alongside your city. Care must also be taken to maintain a delicate balance between workers and jobs, bulldozing buildings when it inevitably goes awry, and praying a zombie outbreak doesn’t happen as the plates wobble perilously upon their rods.

The progression system is interesting if a bit slow, but also results in a drip-feed of rewards which keep you coming back for more. Buildings begin small, like any little town, but as the amount of residents increase and roads are expanded to accommodate greater traffic, they evolve into complexes and full-on high rises. Every action you take has a reaction. When it’s positive, you’re encouraged to keep on developing and open up the next build tier or answer growing zone demands. When it’s negative you risk driving residents away, such as placing a nuclear power plant in the middle of a residential district. (In my defense, it was temporary, but my sims didn’t seem to forgive me… this is what we do to keep the lights on, people).

Old Boys’ (and Girls’) Club

Just when you think things are done, another problem arises. SimCity is designed for inter-reliance. No one city can do it all and so multiplayer, or single-player region play, becomes an important evolution of the franchise. With regretfully smaller city limits than past games, each mayor will eventually hit a wall providing for their citizens wants and needs. Rather than bulldoze and rebuild, he can enter the global market and request resources from neighboring cities.

Multiplayer shines in this regard, because each city will only reach its highest potential when mayors consider the region rather than solely themselves. In other words, when multiplayer games are taken as shared undertakings rather than quiet, side-by-side mini-games, the potential explodes outwards. Entering into a multiplayer game with a surplus of industrial cities might drive a new player to develop their own with an emphasis on gambling. If another player comes in and sees a need for water services or fire coverage, they would be wise to place additional water towers and buy extra fire trucks. It is very much a give and take and forces the player to think larger than ever before.

This all ties into the new specialization system. Once a mayor has laid the groundwork, they can choose to differentiate their city in one of a number of ways. Each plot features natural resources, so one rich in coal might decide to specialize in coal mining. Another along the seashore might decide to become a tourist hot spot. Specializing a city adds to the strategic side of gameplay by opening up a number of new development options and objectives. It also reinforces cross-city play.

When cities within a region work together, they also unlock Great Works sites. These are massive undertakings requiring great amounts of money and resources for all involved. It’s delightfully rewarding to see your first work go up and know that it is one of the game’s great milestones. Building them also rewards the connected cities with development bonuses to tourism, education, and more, so it’s worthwhile to invest in their creation.

SimCity is also a visual and informational feast. You can zoom into street level or pan outwards to view a whole region. Changing the angle or zooming in provides a delightful cinematic motion blur. Buildings also construct in stages, so you’ll see them progress from the foundations, to scaffolds, to full buildings and then grow through their natural building progression as conditions allow. If you’re into data maps, the game also offers a number of overlays so you can see information flow by the building. Each Sim also has its own life and many will share their thoughts and concerns as cities progress giving a sense of life and activity fresh to the franchise.

Traffic Jam

While the game is a lot of fun, there are still a number issues that need to be addressed. Advancements have been made with the traffic system, but it’s still not perfect. Lots of bugs remain, both graphical and functional. To their credit, Maxis is doing a good job of addressing these, but some of them can have a profound impact on the game’s functionality. Certain buildings can stop working, city systems such as water and electricity can break down and not deliver correctly, and trading between cities is still iffy. That said, many of these will go un-noticed by all but the most attentive players. More noticeable is the inability to keep a city truly happy. While it may mimic real life and so be classified as part of the sim, it’s a bit disheartening to see a flurry of red faces when your response was to a previous flurry of red faces. Also, where is the undo button? This, to me, is one of the true downsides to the online functionality. It’s terribly frustrating to misplace an expensive structure and have to chalk it up to a loss because of a simple miss-click.

Final Thoughts

Overall, SimCity is still well worth the cost of entry. Before sitting down with it, the proverbial example of looking up to find three hours gone had been all but make believe to me. Here, however, it happened twice in a single week. The game has a way of drawing you in for “one more building” or “one more expansion,” while making you forget that each leads to the next, and the next, and the next. Is it perfect? No, that much should be clear after the last few week’s fallout. Thankfully a game doesn’t need to be perfect to be stellar. If you have a reliable internet connection and enjoy city builders, SimCity provides hours of entertainment both with friends and without.

Final Score: 8.5 out of 10
Pros: Deep, long lasting gameplay, great strategy, city inter-reliance
Cons: Bugs still need fixing, no undo button

02/7/13

Persona 4 Golden Review (PS Vita)

Persona 4 Golden hits you like a ton of bricks. Here on the Playstation Vita, the best handheld nobody bothered to market, is a game that’s not just fantastic for appearing on a portable, but that’s a victory for video games in general. That you can take Persona on the go is just icing on the cake. Part high school sim and part dungeon runner, the game presents an enchanting mix of character based progression that becomes progressively more addicting the further you go.

Let’s get a couple of things out of the way up front. First, I didn’t play the original Persona 4. I understand this game is a port that offers a lot of enhancements over the original, but I really can’t speak to that. What I can say is that, unless you hated the original, everyone else should dive right in. Second, I’m not a fan of anime. Something about the animation style never clicked with me. That’s important because there are times playing Persona is a lot like playing interactive fiction. And yet, here I am telling you to sell the family horse to buy this game. You bet. Give Nessie a good home.

The basic premise is this: you play a big city kid transported to the country to live with your uncle, Detective Dojima. Shortly after you arrive, people start showing up dead, the first hung upside down from a television antenna. The friends you make all take a dare to look into the television at midnight the next rainy night. From there, you’re drawn into a mysterious world of fog and shadows, one with no humanly exit other than expiration. Someone is throwing people in there, even your friends, and your group is the only one who can stop the murderer.

But this is all at night. During the day you’re a teenager attending high school, taking a job, and trying to get a girlfriend. Fun dichotomy, right?

Persona 4 is anime in a lot of ways, but it’s also genuinely well written. It doesn’t overburden the Western player with long over-dubbed animations. Those sequences are there, to be sure, but they’re short and well placed such that they enhance the game rather than remove it from the easily identifiable. Instead, the bulk of the dialog is delivered through character stills and voice over.

The voice work in the game is generally quite good, but there are some instances of over-acting (I’m looking at you, Chie). For the most part, I quite enjoyed it. Even lines that didn’t ring quite right could often be forgiven with the mysterious detachment from reality much of the game demands of you. But not always.

The game is heartily Japanese. The main real world setting is in the rural Japanese town of Inaba but it expands from there. Since much of the game is founded in being a teenager, I found the depiction of the culture almost enchanting. Seeing a Japanese developer present rural Japanese life felt foreign and homey all at once. The real world setting and the characters that inhabited it were easy to relate to because they were so similar, yet ever so slightly different, from my own life here in America.

The game seems founded on Studio Ghibli-esque foundations, so it wasn’t surprising to find the writing permeated mythological quirks equal parts mysterious, disturbing, and non-sensical. One of the first other worldly characters your group encounters is the Humpty Dumpty-like Teddie. In a rather uncomfortable moment, Yosuke tries to remove his “costume” only to detach his head and finding him completely empty inside.

That mysteriousness accompanies the player throughout the game. Through expertly crafted musical cues and haunting environments, to delightfully spooky unfolding events — even conversations spoken directly into your character’s mind! – Persona 4 Golden is a game much about leading the player through its dark corridors.

What’s wonderful about Persona is that virtually everything ties into character progression. Nearly everything you do in the real world relates back into your adventures. Whether it’s attending class, joining a sports team, or flirting with a cute girl, you’re able to earn bonuses to knowledge, understanding, courage, diligence, and expression. These, in turn, help you build social links, which empowers their and your abilities in battle. More importantly, earning points here can just as often come from choosing different options in conversation. By the end of the game, you really feel like your experience and your character were your own, not unlike The Walking Dead: The Game. The path is linear, but the journey is unique.

In the fiction of the game, your character doesn’t have magic abilities of his own. Instead, these abilities are cast using creatures called personas. With over 150 of these to collect, combine, and evolve, it’s easy to think of them like less-cute Pokemon. When you complete dungeon encounters, your persona earns bonuses to core stats like strength, magic, agility and luck and can gain levels. The sheer amount of personas can be a bit overwhelming for completionists but the longevity they add to the game is outstanding.

Gameplay is turn-based like the best JRPGs of the past. Completing battles involves choosing to attack or defend, analyzing your enemy for weaknesses and exploiting them, and proper use of personas and items. It’s a strategic affair that gains depth the further into the game you go; however, grinding for levels does become an element later on in the game. Going in under-powered can be downright punishing.

p4g2

Let’s talk about grinding for a minute. I don’t like it and haven’t since I was a teenager. Now, I avoid it like the plague. And yet, it doesn’t really bother me in Persona. Since the game is portable, playing it in short bursts meshes extremely well with battle system and grinding, really, lost a lot of the monotony it might have had on a full console.

Graphically, the game looks great on the Vita’s OLED screen. I especially liked how the dialogue brought high-res art to the forefront drawing the eye from the actual graphics. The game looks great, don’t get me wrong, but during these dialogue sequences, the characters aren’t doing much, so the transitions between character art add some extra movement. The audio in the game is also great. The music really sets the mood and is about pitch perfect for tracks you’ll hear over and over through the game’s 40+ hour runtime.

So for all of these things that I liked about it, what didn’t I like? Well, put simply, the game takes too long to get into. The first few hours are spent mainly clicking through dialogue as the story sets up. It’s all good and I enjoyed it, but after a while I really just wanted to start playing. The game is also huge. I can’t take points for this since that fact is also one of the game’s biggest selling points, but played in short bursts, it will likely take quite a while for the commuter-player to see it all the way through. In that area, it comes down to taste. JRPGs are known for their length, however, and P4G packs an epic scope.

If you have a Vita and are a fan of RPGs, you owe it to yourself to play Persona 4 Golden. There is nothing quite like it yet available on the handheld and it’s rightfully held up as a beacon of what the system needs more of. Without a doubt, this is a recommended purchase.

Final Score: 9 out of 10
Pros: Story, character authority, depth of options, persona collecting, classic and strategic combat
Cons: Long set-up, could be a little overwhelming at first, some poorly delivered lines

07/24/10

A Spoilerish Discussion of Inception

Update: If you want a good idea of some of the complexity (and plot holes) I talk about below, see this great write up at Cinematical. Judging by the number of comments, I’m not alone in my ponderings.

For my wife’s birthday today, we went out to a matinee showing of Inception. As many of you may know, this is Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest mindbending offering and one of the year’s most original takes on the action-suspense genre. It’s also one of the more complex narratives to hit the scene in recent memory.

There’s a lot I was left wondering about and to discuss it we’ll have to put any pretense of being spoiler-free behind. If you’d like a great review of the film without any of the spoilers found here, check out Professor Beej’s excellent review. If you don’t want anything spoiled, stop reading now.

Let’s start with a brief rundown of the film.

Summary

The premise of the movie is that the military has developed technology that allows people to enter, or be injected into, the dreams of others. Within, characters like ex-military DiCaprio can steal classified information or, as is the case in this movie, plant ideas in the heads of their victims – in essence, making them do something they wouldn’t otherwise have done. DiCaprio and crew are tasked with incepting the son of a dead corporate businessman the idea to break up his company so that DiCaprio’s employer, a competing businessman, can stay in business. In exchange, DiCaprio’s record will be cleared (a false accusation of the murder of his wife) and allow him to return to the US to be with his children. To incept their target, they plant ideas within not only a surface level dream but also much deeper: dreams within dreams within dreams. The problem is, as far down as they have to go, it becomes harder to wake up. On the surface, you can wake by dying within the dream or the sensation of falling in reality. On the lower levels, if you die you slip further away into the prison-like level of Limbo. Once you’re there, there’s no escape – you’re trapped for decades. If you come back, you’ll have lost touch with reality.

Likes

This movie featured great acting, an incredible plot, and some wonderful visual effects. We saw it in 2D by Beej’s recommendation but it’s also out in IMAX 3D. This is a movie you have to pay attention to. The action and suspense go a long ways toward keeping you hooked from beginning until end. I’m a fan of mindbending films and this movie was definitely it. It questions the very fabric of reality, what we know and what we question, and the nature of dreams themselves. I especially liked that dreamers eventually get hooked on the dream, like a drug. Without being synthetically put under, they lose the ability to dream on their own and will eventually go mad.

Dislikes

It pains me to say this, but Inception was simply too long. Clocking in at nearly two and a half hours, I couldn’t help but feel like it was being unnecessarily drawn out. At one point, you literally spend a good half an hour waiting for a van to fall twenty feet. After the third time of seeing that, indeed, the van had dropped another foot, I was ready to see something happen. Now, since there are characters in three different dream-worlds at this point, it’s not as slow as it seems here. Still, during this part of the movie in particular, everything seems to take way too long. Honestly, this is a film that could, and should, have been done in ninety minutes. That being said, it’s a passable blemish on an otherwise entertaining film.

Convulsion Galore!

This is an intricate movie. Beej wasn’t kidding when he said stepping out for a minute will leave you in the dark on some vital piece of information. There are so many twists and turns that, while entertaining and a pleasant change from the average “turn your brain off” movies, it can be a little taxing if you’re planning on watching it in the theater. I’d even venture so far as to say that you probably shouldn’t expect to understand everything on your first run through. It’s definitely a watch-it-twice kind of film.

Plot Hole or Missed Point?

And that’s really what I want to hash out here. I can’t watch it twice, so I’m left wondering whether I missed something or am simply seeing some gaping plot holes.

The biggest has to do with the different levels of dreaming. On the first level, it’s pretty easy to wake up. You die or experience the sensation of falling and you’re good. On levels two and three, however, the dreamers are so heavily sedated and entrenched within the dream that they must be “kicked” awake (a more rough, synchronized falling sensation – ie, the van driving off of a bridge). If you die on these levels, your mind slips into the lowest level of dreaming: limbo. The movie makes a point to say that death doesn’t get you out of limbo. Once you’re there, plan on living the rest of your life there. DiCaprio and his wife grew old together in this place before waking up in their living room young and healthy.

I find it confusing, then, that in the end they seem to escape quite easily. Ellen Page jumps out a window and is wakes. DiCaprio meets up with his employer and, before the screen cuts away, looks like he’s getting ready to be shot, and wakes. Um, did I miss something? Wasn’t the whole point of limbo that you couldn’t just escape? Or, am I wrong and this “fourth level” isn’t actually limbo? But, then, that opens up a whole slew of other questions, so I find it unlikely.

The movie tries to compensate for this by leaving a question mark ending. Did he wake up or is he still dreaming? It is, after all, through DiCaprio’s perspective. Forgive me, but that kind of ending just seems like a cop out. I’m all for letting the viewer come to conclusions on their own, but this needs to be cleared up. How do they get out of limbo and where does that fit in with the previous two hours saying it was impossible? And, if it was so easy to get out, how come DiCaprio and his wife’s attempt at suicide didn’t work for them?

There’s a definite lack of consistency in the end of the film and it makes me wonder if the writers wrote themselves into a corner. Here you have an excellent build up into this place of no return – but then, that’s the problem. How do you get the characters to return. In the case of Inception, it seems like leaving a swinging door ending was the only option. After all, if everything after DiCaprio meeting his employer isn’t real, then we can’t assume Ellen Page – or anyone – really survived.

Help me out here, guys. Did I miss something or is this just a mystery?

Final Thoughts

Even though I walked away from the film with some troubling questions, it has such a high minded essence that I feel like the answer is there, I just have to find it. It’s surprising, but that actually counts for a lot. I don’t feel cheated by the film. I feel… well, like I need to see it again, or do some reading on it, or something to find out what I missed.

From the great visuals, to the wonderful concepts and strong acting, this is an original film that needs to be seen. It’s a rollercoaster ride, to be sure, but a fun one.

As time goes on, I get more and more respect for Leonardo DiCaprio as an actor. He’s really come into his own and tends to choose movies that strike a chord with me. They’re all twisty and turny, usually a little violent but mostly just poignant, and have real punch. It takes a lot to carry a 145 minute movie and, even though this one dragged at a couple points, I’m glad we went to see it.

7/10

05/29/10

First Impressions: Split/Second (PS3)

Since I’ve been piecing together my new and improved rig the past couple of days, I thought I’d take a minute and recommend to you a game that I’ve been in fallen in love with: Split/Second.

Now, before I go on, let me make a disclaimer and say that I’m not a fan of racing games. Well, since my days of working in an arcade, anyways (I loved some of those). Driving Sims don’t do it for me; I have a car, driving a virtual version of it in a game doesn’t really ring my bell.

Enter Split/Second, a game good enough to convince me to go from ‘rental’ to ‘purchase’ three days before it was due back. Split/Second is a high-intensity racing game that focuses on the speed and flair of racing as only Hollywood can show it: fast cars and big explosions.

The main trademark of the game is the Power Plays. Power Plays, in short, let you blow the track to hell and back, taking down the other racers in the process. By drifting (sliding around corners) or riding nearby to another racer, you earn points that you can use towards executing these plays; if you save them up until your power bar is maxed, you’re able to initiate some of the most powerful explosions of all. These range from detonating a nuclear power plant, to totally changing the direction of the course. One blocks off the lane you’re in and sends you down an airport tarmac as a passenger jet speeds at you in mid-land.

Real blockbuster stuff.

I don’t know if the cars are real or not, and I don’t really mind; usually, I would. This game isn’t about realism, so much as it is about getting to the core of what made racing games popular in the first place: speed (and boy does it feel like you’re going fast) and the thrill of intense competition.

The game also features a full-fledged online multiplayer system, so you can race with players from around the world. The only real drawback is that the progression system pales in comparison to the likes of Blur. You’re also limited to only racing with vehicles you’ve unlocked in the Single Player campaign, but it’s so good, I don’t even care – though, I’m sure some people do.

As an MMO player, I’ve found the game to be an excellent change of pace from the slowed combat of questing. It’s very different and, yet, seems to address that social desire I crave in games too—even in single player, though multiplayer is obviously better. The game does this by displaying the names of your opponents prominently above their position: you always know who you’re racing, and you will develop a nemesis. Online opens it up to voice chat, which is surprisingly appropriate compared to the likes of Call of Duty and Halo.

So, if you’re interested in spending a little time with your console, and are looking for a exciting, rewarding, and, most importantly, refreshing game experience, I recommend Split/Second for at least a rental. It takes a little practice, but, once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to sink in to.

12/30/09

Odds and Ends

It’s been a few days since my last post, so I thought I’d stop in and give you a quick update. My wife has this week off for the holidays, so we’re spending a lot of time together, not leaving much for gaming or blogging. That doesn’t mean nothing’s been happening, however. For example, we got out to the theater today to see a little movie called…

Avatar

This movie was awesome. At two hours and forty-one minutes, I was a little concerned going in. I hate movies that drag on. I’m looking at you, Funny People. My wife and I both agree, though, this is not one of those movies. I was hooked the whole way through.

The acting was great and the story was well done. Some people have criticized the film because they main bad guy is predictable. And he is, but it didn’t bother me. There’s a certain purity about the character archetypes here that heralds back to the pre-CGI days, when monsters were made in studios and not on a computer. There’s a definite, “the nineties meet modern day” vibe going on, when you consider how much of the movie is done with special effects.

Which are incredible. In the beginning, I took note of what was computer animated but after a few minutes, that visibility faded away into the periphery. It became hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t, and that says a lot for how well done this movie is.

If you can, watch it in digital 3D. It takes the experience to a whole new level and isn’t distracting like it was prone to be in the past.

Oh, and it’s a definite homage to Aliens. 100%. You can’t tell me that the helicopter and mech-warrior models aren’t meant to be a throw back.

Under the Dome

I finished this book a couple of days ago. It’s a slow starter and, honestly, I found the character dialogue fairly clunk for the first three hundred pages. Even though it’s set in Maine, lots of characters seemed to have this country bumpkin way of speaking that drove me a little crazy (didn’t becomes “dint,” and other phonetic spellings). It was bad enough where I considered putting the book down. I’m glad I didn’t though.

After the three hundred mark, the dialect became noticeably better and the book seemed to pick up steam too. By the end, I found myself both surprised and surprisingly attached to the characters. Like little Ollie Dinsmore. He played a very small part in novel, but I was touched by him in the end.

Like you would expect in King novel over a thousand pages, there are some dry spots. They’re short, however, and the rest of the novel more than makes up for them. There are also some spots of truly exquisite prose where I found myself taking pause.

I recommend this novel for anyone used to reading books that are more than a thousand pages or that doesn’t mind phonetic spelling. If you’re used to shorter books, those first 300 pages will probably seem exceptionally long. Give it a shot though. What have you got to lose?

Thanks to Professor Beej for the encouragement to read this book. His enthusiasm was infectious, especially since I was a big fan of The Stand.

Gaming

I’ve been playing a lot of Modern Warfare 2 lately. I got myself into a bit of a stride, I think, where I’m consistently in the top few players. The level progression is excellent and I love that each map seems to have it’s own little trick that will really help you dominate. I didn’t like the first game too much but, I can safely say, I was totally wrong in my previous post. If you’re a fan of shooters, you should own this game.

I also traded in my DSi for a new PSP. Gamestop had a sale going on, so I was able to restock on games too without spending any money out of pocket. The reason, though? They put Final Fantasy 8 on the PSN Store. FF7-9 are my favorite Final Fantasy games ever, titles I know I’ll play and love, and more than justified switching up. They’re really fleshing out their download store. I’m much more impressed than when I traded my last PSP in for the DSi.

In the MMO realm, I got things sorted out with my Fallen Earth account. After a couple quick emails (they responded at 11PM EST!), they thanked me for my honesty and took care of the problem. I’ll be re-upping tomorrow. There’s something about that game, maybe the wide-openness of it, that’s hard to let go of. It seems to get better as you go too.

I’ve also been playing WoW quite a bit. I got into ToC 25-man the other night, which was my first 25-player raid ever. It was fun and I only died once. I was also able to trade the belt I won for a new set of robes and gloves to another player, on top of winning a roll on a Crusader Trophy. My brother-in-law was also kind enough to hook me up with the trophy he won, since he didn’t need it. Now, I just need 150 emblems and I’ll be up to 4 great upgrades for the one hour run.

I’ve also been working on a little Death Knight to run with another friend of mine. I went Frost, for tanking, and have found it to be very easy once you get the rotation down and learn to manage your cooldowns. Far easier than I ever remember it being on my warrior, anyways.

In the LotRO realm, my transfer was resubmitted this past Sunday so I should have my transfer back to Landroval done soon. Hopefully, nothing will go wrong this time and I can get back in the swing of things. I haven’t had much heart to log on since I submitted my first transfer request (a month ago), since I know my experience will pick up so much when I join with my new guild. I’m really itching to get that move done and over with, so I can enjoy playing again. I really like LotRO, I just seem to fall into slumps when things happen and get in the way. I guess I’m prone to mental blockages with that game more than the others.

–

Anyways, that’s the news. Hopefully, I’ll get some MMO time in tomorrow.

After the museum trip.

Until then!

07/29/09

Should I Buy: Korg-DS10 – Nintendo DS

Let me start off by saying that this is not a game. That being said, it is a wonderful piece of software to add to your DS library… if you have an interest in making music. That’s what this “game” is: a music making tool.

Korg: MS-10 - the real life equivalent of the DS-10

Korg-DS10 is modeled after the Korg-MS10, a popular synthesizer released in the mid 1970′s. Effectively, they’ve packaged the whole of that technology and put it into a portable DS cartridge for you to play with on the go.

The game is more than just a keyboard though. It’s also a sequencer. For those of you who aren’t sure what that means, it effectively lets you record 16 beats (represented by boxes a little red dot moves across) per “pattern” and then string them together by clicking with your stylus, as a whole, this can be used to make a complete song.

Korg-DS10 is also fully customizable. Each beat may have two keyboard tracks and a drum track, so you can layer things nicely. On top of that, you can select from a wide array of 21 stock keyboard tones and about 16 or so drum tones. This lets you customize the song and achieve that certain “feel” you may be going for.

Apart from that, the game also features a control unit that lets you alter the sound further by connecting your keyboard to different sound ports, each able to be modified with control knobs that can vastly alter the sound.

Switch between views by pressing the left trigger

Sound like a bit much? It is. This game is a beast and has a steep learning curve. The instruction manual doesn’t do a lot to introduce you to the game or it’s controls. However, like many good things in life, the best way to learn is to dive right in. In truth, you don’t really have to know what each knob does or controls. It’s fully possible to just move things around until you get the sound you’re looking for. Still, a little background knowledge is, I’m sure, very helpful.

Graphically, this title offers virtually nothing. The best you’re getting here is a 2D keyboard. Most of your time will probably be spent working with the beat grid as well, which is a grid of squares you’ll fill in to choose when notes play.

Most importantly, how does it play? Fairly well. All of the notes and beats are plotted on the grid mentioned above by simply touching them with your stylus. You get instant feedback on how it sounds by allowing your track to play in a loop in the background. Doesn’t sound good? Touch the note with a stylus to remove it and then touch the next another one (higher or lower depending on what pitch you want) until you find the right pitch. Want a longer note? Slide your stylus to the right the amount of beats you want the note held.

It is important to point out that the game does limit you to normal synthesizer tones and beats. It would have been nice if they’d included some more modern keyboard tones but, then again, that’s not really what this was about. Still, the DS-10 is ideally suited towards creating techno beats and psychedelic rhythms.

The process of creation is what’s most fun about the game. Because each pattern is generally short, you’ll have to make new patterns to go along with them to make the full song work. Once you have something you’re happy with, you can go to the pattern screen and simply click on each pattern to play it through, lacing them together at your whim. After playing through it this way, it’s not hard to imagine why some people use the Korg-DS10 as a tool during live performances.

What I really love about this game is that it lets even those with no musical background create music in a fun and, after a little practice, simple way. As a musician and amateur songwriter myself, I appreciate having a portable tool to capture little melodies that may pop into my heard from time to time, too.

Overall, I think Korg-DS10 is a strong application and a bargain buy. Players wanting a real “game” experience should stay away from this one. Those of you that’d like to do something unconventional yet thoroughly enjoyable with your DS, I highly recommend picking it up. This is the kind of software that gives new meaning to handheld consoles. This title gives your DS another purpose, makes it a tool, and I never thought I’d see anything like it. Try it. After all, even if you pick this game up and only play it when you’re bored, it was still only a $20 or less investment.

This video sums it upper better than I can in a review. Check it out.

Gameplay: 8/10 -This was hard to rate because there’s not much actual “game”play. Still, it offered a lot of what it’s offering, so I ranked it up.
Functionality: 10/10
Graphics: 1/10
Sound: 10/10
Replayability: 8/10 – Even though the customizablity of the sounds is top notch, it would have been nice to move away from the “techno” feel a bit more. Hopefully Korg releases another version of the game with some newer tones.
Overall: 74% – Good game.