PixlBit

As I keep adding estimated completion times to my games, I keep adding to my current playlist of shortest games to play. Two I added, and then played right away this week, were Dark Void Zero and Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale. I downloaded both of them onto my 3DS for $5 and $8 respectively.

Dark Void Zero is a Metroid style game that originally tied into the full console game Dark Void back in 2010. I was excited for the console game but didn't enjoy the demo much, so never bought it until recently at some bottom barrel price. It didn't get great reviews either, but a little tie-in game, Dark Void Zero, got some notice and was talked about a lot at the time. I've always wanted to try it.

It's a really cool nod to retro NES games like Metroid. You start the game by blowing on the 3DS to simulate clearing dust off a NES cart. DVZ looks exactly like a NES game and has great 8-bit music too. The gameplay is well designed and fair. You have platforms to navigate and aliens to shoot at. You can pick up new weapons that can blast away walls and a jetpack to navigate quickly across the levels. You're mission is to pickup codes for the portals that allow aliens to come to Earth and shut them down. My only problem is that I dislike platform games. Darn it if I didn't just slightly misjudge that ledge I've jumped to dozens of times already and lost a life in the lava pit. Grrr. I hate repeating the same seqence of jumps over and over! Aside from my own disinterest, this is an excellent game for anyone interesting in that style of gameplay. You can pick it up on the 3DS, iOS or PC.

Attack of the Friday Monsters: A Tokyo Tale is a Level-5 game on the 3DS store. It plays very similarly to the opening segements of Ni No Kuni where you run around your home town talking to people to advance the story. It even looks a bit like Ni No Kuni. You are a new resident of a Japanese town and are initially given a task to deliver laundry by your parents. From there you talk to people in the town and get new missions to complete, each one of which reveals more of the story.

There is also a card game you can play with other kids in the town. You gain cards by picking up glowing orbs which either appear randomly on the ground, by completeing missions and by winning card games. The main reward for winning a card game, though, is the right to cast a spell on your opponent which makes him/her your "servant". It's a kid's game of imagination, not a real spell, and it just enables you to get more information from your conversations.

The story is interesting and touching. The kids all watch the TV shows about monsters and then watch them appear in the real world too. Through the shows and the imagination of the kids, the lives of the real world people are revealed.

The game isn't long. I finished the main story in about four hours. There is some extra matterial in that you can card battle a few new town members and complete missions you might have missed from the main story, but there's not much else to do. I was glued to my 3DS for a few days playing this though. I thoroughly enjoyed it and want more of the same. I feel, for the content, that $8 was a little high a price, but I still think it's worth it.

There be my weekday gaming. Tomorrow starts my weekend and we'll see what I get to then. Au revoir!