PixlBit

It's Wednesday, and good grief, my productivity is out the window. Classes went fine today, but after gorging myself on some good, solid titles yesterday, my appetite for gaming seems to be back in full swing. Maybe this warmer weather has something to do with it, too... hmm.

Anyway, I finished Monster Tale yesterday, and it was a satisfying romp overall. I probably won't ever get around to a full review of it, but if you read any of the reviews listed on Metacritic, most of them will tell you the same things - compelling monster raising, too much backtracking, and, in some cases, too high of a difficulty towards the end. Personally, I thought that the difficulty claim was a little more valid in Henry Hatsworth because exploiting the match-three system took a good bit of finesse in the later areas. Here, it's just a matter of leveling what you need, and doing so efficiently. Also, the lack of post-game content was a little disappointing - a final "ultimate arena" of sorts might have been nice. Or, perhaps, just hiding some of the secret items a little more cleverly.

But I'm nitpicking. If you own a DS and are looking for a dozen or so hours of solid "Metroidvania" action, you won't be disappointed.

In other news, I've been reading some of the announcements about the new XBox and Playstation consoles, and good night, these people have lost the plot. Isn't all this "more power, more technology" business what's gotten the industry into such a mess in the first place? Do games need to be any more expensive to develop than they already are? I feel like so much of what's out there these days is either big-budget sequels and clones, which are often frustratingly conservative in design, or casual, low-budget sequels and clones, which are no more forward-thinking.

That, and the talk of requiring an internet connection to play a game in single-player mode with the new XBox, something that's already caused a fuss with the new SimCity game... did EA learn nothing from Spore? I don't care if you're not calling it DRM; it's still going to be a problem for users like me, who don't have an internet connection and do all their digital downloading from a friend's place. I can only hope that this is only a rumor, and that any sort of forced always-online setup or used-game restriction doesn't pan out. Not that I've had enough time to enjoy my PS3 anyway...

Meh. Retro gamer that I am, I'll always have my old systems to keep me company. Even if Sony and Microsoft's new systems fall off a cliff and don't go anywhere (aside from, you know, falling off a cliff) - which is a somewhat doubtful scenario in my mind - I could easily live off of my current holdings for several more years. Heck, I could probably get a few months out of my backlog of tactical RPGs alone.

So that's it for the moment. My next post will be the promised Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! review, so stay tuned!