Gungnir, the latest in Atlus and Sting’s Dept. Heaven series, is supposed to be bizarre. It is, after all, Episode IX of a series that, while jumping and skipping around rather than releasing sequentially, is supposed to be further and further from normal the higher that episode number gets. It’s five installments crazier than Knights in the Nightmare, a game that put bullet-hell mechanics into a tactical RPG.
As it turns out, though, Gungnir is relatively traditional. It’s a strange choice, but one that results in a game that’s more accessible and still fun. READ MORE
I like Gratuitous Space Battles a lot, so I was surprised to find that Gratuitous Tank Battles didn’t really live up to my expectations. I was expecting the same sorts of mechanics and progression with ground units instead of spaceships, and if that’s what I’d gotten I would have been perfectly happy. There is a lot of similarity between the two titles, but where Gratuitous Space Battles is all sandbox and building blocks, Gratuitous Tank Battles changes things up and turns the whole thing into a tower defense game that never feels quite right. READ MORE
Shin’en is continuing its efforts to port its WiiWare library to the 3DS eShop, following Fun! Fun! Minigolf TOUCH! with a port of the relatively-popular Art of Balance. Oh, and there’s touch control, so it’s called Art of Balance TOUCH! Because you TOUCH! it!
Seriously, though, the game works really well on the system. READ MORE
Batman: Arkham City was among my favorite games of 2011. Everything that worked in Batman: Arkham Asylum was added to, and that’s all I really wanted. The combat is more satisfying, the explorable sandbox is larger, the challenge rooms are more varied, and there are more villains and mooks for Batman to punch in the throat. Anybody else considering developing a superhero game needs to play both of Rocksteady’s Batman titles, take notes, and hope to deliver as good a product. READ MORE
Virtua Fighter 5 has lived a long, fruitful life through this generation. First making its appearance on the PS3 early on in its life, it was later ported to the Xbox 360 with added online play. For years, the game would stay quiet up until the Final Showdown update for the arcades in 2010. With the addition of new characters and rebalancing the game over the last console release, it would finally reach consoles in 2012 as a downloadable title. This would mark the first “new” Virtua Fighter game that would not be released through physical distribution. READ MORE
