Auricular Discovery

Easily one of the best $2.50′s I have ever spent. I grabbed this rock-solid PSN-to-PC port during a crazy Steam sale, along with many other great deals a while back. I feel like I’ve played a couple dozen revivals of the Arkanoid/Breakout concept, mostly freeware, and I have to give props here. Shatter is by far the best effort. None of the new mechanics derail the core experience. The whole thing remains very balanced and fun, with every step the developer took forward. It also came with the full Steamworks community support. It’s the total package, as far as time-sink casual games are concerned. Newcomer to game music, Module hits us with a fantastically refreshing trip into a kind of 80′s space synth pop that I can’t get enough of. I’ve listened to this album probably 7 times at work. Definitely in my top 3 soundtracks of 2009! Be sure to check out the official music video for Amethyst Caverns, which was definitely the weirdest track of the set!

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Comix Zone. There is still nothing like it. Well maybe Viewtiful Joe , but that’s stretching it. One of the final great Genesis titles, Comix Zone was a love letter to comics nerds everywhere. Tons of 4th wall breaking to be had here, by the very fact that you get pulled into your own comic book from the real world. Easily one of the most beautiful and creative Genesis games ever made. It only really suffers from high difficulty and short length, and lack of multiplayer perhaps. Brawlers always need multi. The music, while catchy, had some pretty rough quality samples on the guitar side of things. Fortunately, Howard Drossin, Sega-centric composer, lead an effort to perform, arrange, and vocalize 6 tracks from the game. And what a great job he did. This stuff could have passed for radio play in the 90′s, I think, not that I’m being condescending in that statement. That’s a unique thing in the world of game music.

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I loved Populous 3 so much. It’s probably the only god-sim I can fully enjoy. They usually involve way too much micromanagement for me. Pop3 instead focuses on the combat between the tribes, and having a central character, your shaman, where most of your attention will go to. It was really ahead of its time in some ways. You could pull out into space and see the entire world. You could deform the land in real 3D to your liking. You could use spells like tornado to see your enemy’s structures ripped to shreads. It was such an atmospheric experience too, thanks mainly to Mark Knight‘s soothing sounds. This track here is actually a piece he posted on his site, which is a preemptive example of what his Populous 4 score would sound like, if it ever came to be made.

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SimCity 2000 was probably the first game to strike me with the depressing realization that I have no creativity. I absolutely fail at these kind of god games. I know not how to create, but to destroy. Maybe if I grew up with a PC instead of a NES/Genesis, I’d have developed some different interests. Oh well. That’s why the game offered you wonderful catastrophe tools such as plane crashes, floods, and volcanos. The music is a delightfully cheesy jazz. It sounds like the kind of background music that would serve as a segue piece for an 80′s urban sitcom, as the camera converges from one setting to the other. Maybe it’s a retired genre, but I keep it for the nostalgia.

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Crayon Physics is a very unique idea, if anything. The only thing I can really compare it to is the recent Scribblenauts, being that both involve reaching a goal item via the conjuring of practically limitless objects. The difference here is that you draw the objects yourself. Personally, I found the game to be very overrated. I think it would really shine on a tablet PC or on the Nintendo DS, as the mouse control just doesn’t compliment things very much. They could have also expanded more on an objective mode so we’d feel compelled get creative with our solutions. There’s something like that in place, but its the same rules for every level, and quite vague. I find myself finishing every single level easily, but completely failing at the creativity aspect. But since I only paid a buck during the “pay whatever you want” sale they held a while back, I can’t complain. The game sports a scant 3 music tracks. This one has the strongest hold over me.

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Easily one of the best JRPGs of all time. Why is Grandia 2 so great? Well, what can I say? It polishes the genre mechanics to perfection, while having the balls to ditch or replace the aspects that often fail. No random encounters. A turn based combat system that moves like a real-time one. A phenomenal soundtrack that makes full use of streamed audio instead of sequencing. A perfect frame rate. A high contrast story that can handle cute, upbeat moments and dark, mature, tragic scenes while treating you like a mature adult. An English dub that includes much of the Metal Gear Solid cast is the cherry on top. While it doesn’t reinvent anything, it administered a much needed evaluation of the JRPG. Even if you absolutely hate the genre to a borderline racist degree, give this one a shot. But, for your own sake, stick with the Dreamcast version. The PS2 got the laziest port imaginable.

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Finished Trine this week. It’s not often we get a 2.5D sidescroller, so I had to check it out. I really don’t have a whole lot to say about it. You’ll have some fun for the first hour dealing with physics-based puzzles but before you know it, you’ll find that there’s little motivation to solve anything  in the intended complex ways. The game leaves itself quite open to exploiting certain elements. For example, anytime there was something out of reach, I would just conjure a plate in mid air with the Wizard and double jump off of it before it fell. I didn’t have the patience to do things carefully, especially when health is plentiful and dying has no real punishment. I also never have any interest in Tolkien-type fantasy, so I skipped past the narration. At least the score was top notch. Crystal Caverns is a really tranquil piece that stuck with me.

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I’ll try not to repeat what hundreds of blogs have stated but the short of it is, this game was amazing, yet it sold terribly. You need to acquire it by any means necessary. A lot of the blame can be placed on UbiSoft for not marketing it worth a shit, and also for releasing it in November, the most competitive month for game releases. There have been a couple videos hinting at a sequel, but if you’ve followed the roller-coaster of announcements and denouncements, you’d believe that nothing is set in stone. Even if we do get a sequel, I’m not sure it will be what we want. I’m sure UbiSoft will be making some massive changes to the formula. From a business point of view, the product didn’t sell, therefor something must be wrong with it, and needs “fixing”. I’ve seen a lot of fans clamoring for more Jade, but I’m placing my coin on pessimism this time.

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This was probably the first Playstation title that made me second guess my choice to go with the Saturn. Many, many weekends were spent in the deathmatch mode with a friend. The series has definitely seen better days. The first launched strong, the 2nd perfected the formula, but everything after that point went downhill. The series traded hands here and there, and in the process, it lost a lot of it’s identity. The sequels were lacking in metal, too wacky, too drab, or the gameplay just wasn’t there. In some cases, it was all of the above. What’s even stranger is that the composer for TM1 and TM2 seems to have absolutely no other music credits to his name. Know that there are rumblings of a new sequel/reboot, but I’m keeping my expectations in check.

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Hard to believe, but Iji was likely my GOTY for 2008. I don’t know why it is, but I was really moved by this little freeware title. I think I have a thing for sympathetic female cyborg ass-kickers. I went so far as to conduct an interview with the surprisingly modest developer. The composer has since started up his own little company here, and it looks like he’s had some new jobs since. The track I’m sharing is actually a fan-remix of the end boss theme found on youtube. It’s unfortunate that the majority of the game’s score was in mono sound. Chris said there’s no fixing that, as that’s just how it was sequenced together, and he also lost the project files in a crash at some point. Final note: You can find my own playthroughs of the boss battles here.

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