For the uninitiated (read: all of you) Hamster Speak is a monthly magazine for the community surrounding the OHRRPGCE, an RPG maker with a small but dedicated fanbase. Including me.

I’ll be doing another article next month for a game called Bloodlust, which is a survival horror RPG. Also, it has a monstrous vagina, so keep an eye out for that when you play it.

Mario is better known around the world than Jesus.  No, seriously, I read that somewhere, once, so it must be true. Regardless, he’s been in 250+ games to date, which might make him the most prolific video game character of all time, except for that one NPC who sells shields and healing herbs.

I’ve been playing a lot of Mario recently, and I’m starting to see some interesting patterns emerge. Today, I’m going to stare deep into the abyss of Mario and hopefully tear myself away long enough to recover my soul.

Mario 64 DS (Nintendo DS, 2004)

My favorite Mario game of all time is Super Mario World.  You could argue that it lacks the shininess of Mario 3, or that its environments are bland, but I really think it’s amazing.  The difficulty is perfectly balanced, the world maps are memorable and imaginative, the mechanics are fine tuned to near perfection…it’s great.

Mario 64 seems like the direct descendant of SMW.  There’s a pretty heavy focus on building a memorable world, and the platforming mechanics are precise without being jerky or overdone.  Exploration is key, and the worlds have a lot of horizontal and vertical space to play in.  There are moments of quick action mixed with moments of slower, precise movement.  It’s still not my favorite, but it’s pretty darn good.

Mario 64 DS is all of those things, except with more crap I don’t care about.  With all of the added junk (new characters to switch between, new powerups that don’t fit the theme of the original game, admittedly decent but still distracting minigames), I feel like that there’s a layer of doodads and shiny bits obfuscating (word of the day) the actual gameplay elements.

This will become a recurring theme later in this article.

I mean, it’s not a bad game by any means, but it certainly does not do anything to make Mario 64 look better.  In fact, now when I play Mario 64, it’s much easier to see all of its glaring deficiencies.

But that’s okay, because we’re moving on to…

Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Nintendo Wii, 2010)

So…Super Mario Galaxy was pretty rad, right?  I mean, you could run all the way around planets and fly in space and stuff.  That was cool.

Well, sort of anyway.  I mean, there were some annoying bits; those blue stars that you had to point at and float around to were sort of irritating after the first or second time.  And collecting all those little shiny star things felt sort of pointless, and really a waste of time.  But overall, not bad.

Really, I’d say it’s a descendant of Super Mario Bros. 3, if anything.  It’s got lots of neat powerups and cool level features, and all sorts of one-time events.  It’s pretty linear, though, and exploration is kept to a minimum.  The controls are really tight, but at times they feel a bit jerky.  It doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of inbetween space for, say, going full tilt and stopping immediately.

And now we come to SMG2.  At first, it appears to be much the same, except with a dull world map.  But the further I got in, the more I realized how much is standing between me and actually playing the game.

There’s so many things to consider: Collecting little star bits and coins and planning around the time it takes to recover from a spin and deciding whether to stomp on or kick an enemy because you get different currencies for each and which do I need more and is there any real reason that I’m collecting coins because it seems like they don’t actually serve a purpose and they sit there in an imaginary bank OH and the bank toad generates interest now and again but it’s negligible and all I want to do is jump on badguys and unrealistically orbit a small planet in space as a fat Italian Plumber.

Why do you keep trying to distract me from playing your game?  Everything is so SHINY and LOUD but none of it SERVES A PURPOSE.  Arrrgh.

Playing as Luigi is nice though; I can identify with a man whose whole world is against him.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Nintendo Wii, 2009)

If we’re keeping to our genetic metaphors, this game is like the abandoned child of Super Mario Bros 1 and 3 that was left in a dumpster and found by someone who didn’t really know what to do with a kid (probably Tom Selleck) and raised her to be kind of a jerk but not really all that smart.  It’s like they took all the good things about Mario (running real fast, stomping on things, smashing blocks) and covered it in that marshmallow cream stuff.  Now it’s all sticky and you can’t really feel the texture and man it’s just annoying.

The multiplayer is designed to make people hate each other.  Between constantly stomping on other people’s heads, accidentally killing them with shells (no really honey I promise it was an accident of course I wouldn’t take revenge for the time you pushed me into a piranha plant), or popping their little safety bubbles using a fireball while they are floating over a pit, nobody will like each other after they play this game.  It’s like there was a whole team of people who thought of as many obscure ways as possible of making the 2nd (and 3rd and 4th) player a total, absolute nuisance.

For some reason they also decided it was a good idea to make save points limited.  If you lose all of your lives, you have to start over alllll the way at the last save point.  For me and my wife, that could be several days worth of horrible burning death-by-spouse and slapstick domestic violence (man my arm is still bruised).

So yeah, I’m not a big fan I guess.

This quickly degraded into stream-of-consciousness weirdness, which was not what I intended.  But I guess that’s how passionate I am about games!  Or maybe it’s because I’ve given up on sleeping…anyway, follow me on Twitter or I’ll be sad.

As you may know (or probably not) I’m in the middle of learning Japanese.  Mostly for fun. I’m still learning the Kanji (850 baby!) but part of my setup includes listening only to Japanese music, and playing only Japanese video games.

Obviously, I’m not doing so hot on the last one, but I do have a bunch of Japanese games for my DS that I’ve been playing recently.  Here’s a few of them!

Ketsui: Death Label (Nintendo DS, 2008)

This game is research for me on two levels: I’ve never really played a Bullet Hell game before, plus it’s in Japanese.  And holy crap, I think I remember why I never really got into bullet hell games.

So yeah.  It’s basically just a boss rush with a bunch of different difficulty levels, and scads of bullets.  I’m not very good at it, but I am having fun with it.  I can’t really tell the difference between the two available ships, though.

The biggest problem I have with this game is also its biggest feature: too many damned bullets.  I don’t mind dodging the bullets that the enemies fire, as those are always on top of everything else visually, but the player ship also shoots a ludicrous amount of bullets.  This becomes a problem when the player’s bullets entirely obscure the enemy, which can actually come in contact with your ship and kill you.

So yeah, I might not be the intended audience, but it’s good fun for a while.  And those bullet patterns certainly make math pretty.

Croket! DS Heroes of Sky (Nintendo DS, 2005)

So…this is a tactical RPG, except the combat is hashed out in fighting-game style reminiscent of Super Smash Bros.  Sort of.  I only played the first level before accidentally picking the wrong option and deleting my save file.  Hooray not knowing the language of the game!

It is interesting though, and reminds me somewhat of Super Ninja Boy, which was a traditional JRPG where combat was resolved through a side-scrolling beat-em-up style game.  It wasn’t great, but it was interesting.

I have a feeling that’s where this game is headed- it looks decent, but not super amazing.  We’ll find out!

Slitherlink (Nintendo DS, 2006)

I hate sudoku.  It’s like math homework plus a word search to me.  I’m fine with other people doing them, but I certainly can’t stand them myself.  I’ve never really liked puzzle type games in general either; I feel like I’m organizing an Excel spreadsheet without the payoff of never having to do it again.

However, I am having problems cutting myself off from Slitherlink.  It is everything I hate about puzzle games: repetitive, number-y, has only one solution…but I like it a lot anyway!

The idea is that you have a square grid of a certain size, and some of the cells have numbers in them.  To solve the puzzle, you must trace a line that touches each number the allotted amount of times, and connects at both ends.  For example, if you have a 3 and a 1, the line must touch the 3 on 3 sides, the 1 on 1 side, and somehow also loop back around.

Maybe it’s the added spatial dimension, or maybe it’s the physicality of drawing a line, or maybe it’s all the shiny lights, but I really really like Slitherlink.  I’m sure there are non-digital versions of it as well, so I’d suggest it to anyone with an eye for a new puzzle game, or any game at all really.

That’s my game round-up for this week!  Got any new games you’re playing?  Any suggestions for me?  Let me know.  I’m sort of a comment whore anyway.

Crayon Physics Deluxe (PC, Mac, Linux, $20)

I think I may have waited too long to play this game.  The idea is to get the little red ball to the star by building a crayon contraption of sorts.  It’s a physics game of the finest rank, and spawned all sorts of spin offs (spins off?) and straight up ripoffs.

Once upon a time, I had a little homebrew game on my DS that was essentially a sandbox version of this with no rules or goals.  I made a number of bizarre things, including a car that rolled into a self closing garage, and a series of dominoes that ended up knocking a mannequin looking guy into a pit of spikes.

I think because of that, plus the overall childish feel of this game, I’m having a really hard time getting into finishing the levels.  The game encourages finding an elegant, single piece solution, but also an “Awesome” solution that involves extraneous pieces, overly complex  mechanisms, and impractical paths. In my mind, this amounts to finishing every level twice, because I’m a completionist like that.  Which is less than fun.  I guess what I’m saying is that this game would have been better without the well defined goals that are in place.

Probably not fair to say, like, 3 years after the fact, but oh well.

Atom Zombie Smasher (PC, Mac, Linux, $15)

Atom Zombie Smasher reminds me a lot of a previous favorite of mine, Defcon.  Where Defcon takes the horrible visions of a global thermonuclear war and abstracts them into a Dr. Strangelove or WarGames-esque vector interface, Atom Zombie Smasher takes a decidedly more modern approach by allowing us to view a zombie war from the safety of a military satellite. 

I’ve only just started this game, but it’s intriguing. Essentially, you must use a rescue chopper to evacuate cities while also defending its citizens (temporarily) from zombies. It’s a little bit tower defense, a little bit Real-Time Strategy, and a whole lot of nail-biting.

This is all played out by tiny purple and yellow and blue dots, representing Zeds (zombies), Citizens, and Scientists respectively.  Choosing who is going to live and who is more than likely going to die is horrible at first, but later becomes less emotionally scarring. Watching a group of terrified citizens (yellow dots) being pursued by a hungry mob of zombies (purple dots) can be extremely tense (or awfully hopeless, if they happen to be running in the opposite direction as the rescue team), but eventually the dots stopped being people and became points, at least in my mind.

This game encapsulates everything I like about zombie games, but does it with very little in the way of gore.  It’s an interesting statement on how ingrained the zombie thing is in our minds; we don’t even need to see the gore anymore, we can imply and imagine it. It also manages to mentally turn people into resources to be won or lost, though I’m not sure that was intended.  It definitely makes me feel like a bastard, though.

I could write a lot more, but I won’t for right now.  Suffice to say, this is a pretty damned good game, and runs great on my tiny netbook, so go buy it now.

Fable 3 (Xbox 360)

Not to continue a trend of hating on big games that came out a while ago…but I’m going to hate on a big game that came out a while ago.

So yeah.  Fable 3.  I’m playing through it again on and off with my wife, and I’m reminded why I liked this game, and why I did not like this game.

I’m torn, honestly.  Fable 2 was great fun, but the co-op was horrid.  Awful.  Argument-causing.  When I heard Fable 3 was going to have massively improved co-op, I actually pre-ordered it.  This is rare for me, as I am astonishingly cheap.

And it does have much better co-op.  Fantastic even.

However, the rest of the game is much like how I envision it would be to wade through a knee-deep pile of custard for 8 hours.  While it offers mild resistance and a certain amount of sweetness, it gets old real fast, and leaves me with a stomach-ache. Miles of custard await without any texture or resistance to speak of.

Fable 2 had a few points going for it: Interesting and memorable geography, engaging combat, neat spells, and overall a pretty high level of interaction.  Fable 3 does away with most of that and replaces it with a “walk forward and hit some buttons until we give you the option of being a saint or a total, horrible douchey bastard. Repeat.”

Combat is serviceable, but hardly what I would call difficult, and with very few options to make it interesting.  Gone are the days of dashing behind a Balverine in the blink of an eye and hitting him with a hammer in the head, then casting a fireball spell to fry somebody across the screen.  Here are the days (weeks, years) of shooting stuff repeatedly until it dies, hitting stuff repeatedly until it dies, or blowing up a magical nuclear bomb and killing everything in sight.

Gone are the highly visible changes to your demeanor and attitude depending on your (admittedly farcical) moral actions.  Here are the slow, minor, useless changes to some things, maybe, in a vague-ish kind of way.  Evil is reduced to a red glow on your weapon, good to a blue one.  Your actions determine whether Albion is…clean or dirty?  That’s about it.

And I’m not even going to talk about the king section of the game, and how it equates morality with cash.

So yeah, it’s not terrible.  Maybe I’m asking a lot for a game of this stature to have an interesting art direction with great gameplay and a compelling story, but I’d prefer even just one of those. Walking the middle of the line for all of those gives me a game that tastes a lot like oatmeal: bland and unremarkable.  And gloopy.

Boy, that’s two food comparisons in one mini-review.  I must be hungry.

—

Well, that’s all for this week.  Let me know what you’re playing, I always love to hear other player stories

Onward!

VVVVVV (PC, $5)

Why did I not buy this game when it came out?  I played the demo and thought “Oh, another masocore platformer, no thanks.”  I am so dumb sometimes.

First of all, it’s not that hard, except for a couple of the extra trinkets.  The challenges are immediate and obvious, and figuring out what to do is less difficult than just carrying out those actions.  Most of the obstacles are restricted to a single screen, which increases the immediacy of the challenge and eased my frustration significantly.

Second, it’s charming as hell.  Not only is the dialogue strangely upbeat (and not ironically, really), but the design is fantastic. Every important room has a bizarre name, which also helps to navigate, and Terry Cavanagh, the creator, put every effort into making this a detailed, immersive game.  One thing that really struck me is that every single enemy is different and never reused.  It gives a personality to every room that screenshots and small pieces of the game can’t reveal.

And finally, the soundtrack is incredible.  Chiptune lover or not, the music is just…awesome.

So yes, I was stupid not to buy it for, what, two years?  But don’t be stupid like me.

I might write a post on this later.

Epic Dungeon (XBLIG, $1)

Epic Dungeon is billed as an Action Roguelike.  Okay, I’m making that up, but it should be if it isn’t. Basically, you get to pick one of four classes, which differ in their starting stats and specialized skill, then dive to the bottom of a dungeon and…win?

It has a lot of the mechanics of a roguelike (randomized weapons/potions/scrolls, perma-death, tile based movement), but does away with the turn based gameplay and makes everything realtime.  This shows the true colors of a roguelike, which often involves steamrolling everything in your path until you reach a difficult level and having to slow your pace and strategize.

I beat it on Normal the other day, which may color the below comments, but I did have some problems with it. There’s no food limit, so I didn’t see any impetus to move on from the current level, as you can’t starve. The one resource that drains away, the light from your lamp, is actually unimportant if you’ve already explored the level and infinitely replenish-able from shops.  Combined with the fact that you can buy a skill that auto-regenerates your health, you can grind away into infinity and become extremely powerful.

…actually, that’s probably it.  I wish there was more enemy variety, but for a dollar it’s hard to complain.  The sequel Cursed Loot, which came out a few days after I bought this, may address the problems I had.  Also, it’s a dollar too. I’d say there’s no reason to buy it. Also, try turning off the gore…it’s super distracting.

Of course, if you’re ever looking for an authentic Roguelike experience, try Crawl.

P.S. I can’t link to these games, because the Xbox site sucks so bad and their search function doesn’t seem to work for Indie Games.  What? I hate Microsoft.

Oblivion (Xbox 360)

I am going to assume you know what Oblivion is.

I am always surprised at how much this game sucks.

I mean, it’s a great game, really.  I love wandering around and exploring ruins, finding strange things in the woods, picking flowers.

But the game sucks.  Admit it.

I’m talking about vanilla Oblivion here.  You know the one, where levelling without keeping a detailed log of your stats actually makes the game harder or nigh-impossible.  Where everyone’s face looks like it was hit by a truck covered in cheese graters.  Where every wolf and bear that you see runs mindlessly toward you and tries to kill you. Where, eventually, every lowly bandit that demands 100 gold is fully equipped with the best armor in the game.

It wouldn’t be so bad except the game tries so hard (SO HARD) at being immersive, and then takes every possible chance to break that immersion with weird glitches, crap dialogue, untenable AI and a horrible progression system.

If you removed every NPC, every enemy, every scripted event and piece of dialogue, the game would be a perfect simulator of an empty, immersive world.  A flower picking simulator, if you will.

But without any mods or additions, this game is a flower picking simulator trying to be an RPG.

—

So that’s it!  If you’re reading this, I’d be interested to know what games YOU are playing…I’m always in need of good games.

I’m not the type of person to do things that don’t serve some purpose, be that exposure to a new source of ideas, a time to think about things, or an actual physical outcome. This means that, often, I am trying to divine what value I get out of the things I do most.

Some things are easy.  I play Bomberman with my wife because it builds our relationship and is great fun.  I go to work because I learn new things and get paid.  I use Twitter because it’s an amazing source of new ideas and inspiration (sometimes, other times it’s quite crap and I have to turn it off).

But other activities are harder to define as useful. For example, playing Twisted Metal is not exactly solving any problems or creating anything of real worth.  However, this obvious lack of surface value hides something deeper: time to reflect.  If I’m playing a game that takes little more than mechanical skill, I’m more than likely reflecting on my day or an idea that I have.  I find that my most mentally productive times are while I’m doing something to occupy the more physical part of my brain, activities that are somewhat rote.

I usually judge the worth of any activity in particular by the feelings I have afterwards, or the new ideas that have formed. This line of thought has lead me to a problem.

I’ve been bothered for a long time about the feelings I get when I play certain games versus the actual outcome of that play.  I feel great about playing Minecraft: I’m digging out secret lairs, making tools, assembling new and interesting architectural structures, carrying around lava in buckets…great fun, right?  And it has to be stimulating in some way, or I wouldn’t keep doing it…right?

At the end of a session, I feel a vague sense of productivity, of having done something of value.  If I’m pressed to quantify that value, however, I come up blank.  I built a fireplace with a secret entrance, I mined a new vein of Redstone, but once the game is off, what have I come away with?  If my hard drive were to fall off a cliff, could I say that the time I spent creating these things was truly worthwhile?

It’s easy to throw things out that are obviously worthless to me.  Playing Farmville is an exercise in frustration and forced responsibility for nothing but bragging rights and a false sense of wealth.  Other people may experience some glimmer of creativity, or use it as a source of ideas, but I find that it takes up too much of my brain to be worthwhile as mechanical.  I find myself thinking about Farmville for the sake of Farmville.

(On a side note, Farmville is apparently part of Word 2007’s dictionary, as it auto-corrects it to a capitalized version…creepy.)

Minecraft is more difficult though, as there are no forced social obligations and it has interesting implications of building an entire world for yourself.   I feel like I’m doing something awesome, creating something to enjoy.  These are the same feelings that I get when I write something, make a game, design a level, or other pursuits of a creative nature.  Both require hard work and dedication, and a sense of how to express your imagination with the tools given to you.

But here’s the difference: Minecraft is a crappy tool of expression.  The materials are rare and take time and effort to discover, but no ingenuity.  Once discovered, they must be made into more useful materials, which is another function of time.  The game generates interesting structures, then has me investing hours of time trying to find and get to them.  All this adds up to give me a sense of slowly peeling away the layers of an onion, but in truth the core is rotten.  The heart of the game is creating things, and it takes every possible measure to prevent this. (Another sidenote: I feel like this is why Spore’s creature creator was amazing, but the game itself sucked.)

The end result is a game that takes up too much of my brain function to be useful as a time of contemplation, but not enough to actually stimulate worthwhile thoughts. Minecraft takes a natural urge, the urge to feel like I’m making things, and turns it into a useless pursuit of materials with no value.  I build chairs I can’t sit in, houses I can’t live in, tunnels I can’t use, and I do it not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.  This resistance to my creativity feels like I’m doing something productive, but it is a dishonest kind of work that could be avoided altogether.

This sense of false productivity that stems from useless work is deceptive, but important to identify.  And there are ways around it.

If Minecraft gave you all the tools right from the start, did not limit your materials at all, and truly allowed you to be a god of your realm, then it would be an amazing tool for realizing an entire world collaboratively.  In fact, it would be Sauerbraten, which is a first person shooter that’s actually a collaborative level designer in disguise.

If Farmville acted as a way to stimulate active discussion and trade between Facebook users, it couple be argued that it is at least enhancing relationships between people and letting them interact on a new level.  (Any good examples of this?  I’m not up on my social games.)

I agree that raging against things that frustrate and mystify us is not a worthwhile end.  However, rage and frustration are almost always the starting points to self improvement and the creation of a world that we truly desire.  When used correctly, they also lead to a greater understanding of our perceptions of the world through intelligent conversation and discourse.  Dwelling on rage doesn’t help, but using it to identify our problems does.  And sometimes it takes another person’s rage to snap us out of our belief set.  In fact, I didn’t even think about any of this until I read Shit Crayons.  I’d probably still be playing Minecraft, wasting my lunch hours.

So, Mr. Bogost, keep on raging, at least for my benefit.

Bonus Points: Tadhg argues that memetic evolution will let the crap die.  I disagree: look at reality TV.  Look at Farmville.  These things provide nothing of true value, but they fool us into thinking they do, so they last and last.  We feel like we are participating in a great social idea, but we are truly isolated and lonely, and in the end, we are wasting our time.  Our brains don’t naturally realize that what we’re doing is worthless, because these things are by their very design trying to trick us into thinking we are being productive and social.  I say kill the crap actively, because evolution can make mistakes.

Disagree with me?  Find me on Twitter and yell at me, or yell at me in the comments below.  Even better: do both!

Oh my god that’s scary.

So!  Not only have I started backing things up online, I have located  my games or otherwise uploaded them so that they can be downloaded again, and hopefully not lost forever the next time I drop something.  Here they are:

Moon Harpoon

My one button game entry for GAMMA IV.  Harpoon flying creatures on the moon! Hold button to fly, let go to fall, and hit again to zoom forward, harpoon extended to gloriously impale these majestic and harmless dangerous creatures of space.

Controls are Z for player 1, X for player 2, C for player 3, and V for player 4.  Joytokey is included, set to use 4 Xbox controllers.

I like this one for the one color sprites.

All of my Glorious Trainwrecks (Slightly NSFW.)

These are all of the games (12) that I have made for Glorious Trainwrecks.  Most were made in less than 2 hours; some were made in less than 15 minutes.  All of them are ridiculous.  Two Castles is a pretty cool Knytt story, and Grocery BASEing is…interesting.

So, uh, I might celebrate with a post later.

For now, you should totally check out http://www.indiegames-uprising.com/ for a bunch of awesome Xbox Live Indie Games whose designers teamed up for extra publicity.  There are like 14 games coming out over the next week.

Sweet Jesus Cthulhu Saves the World looks awesome.

Surprisingly, one of my favorite JRPGs is the original Dragon Warrior (well, technically I played the GBC remake of Dragon Warrior, but it’s pretty similar), mainly because it doesn’t try to fool you into thinking you’re getting some amazing, life-changing, War and Peace-esque story.  It pretty much tells you that, yes, you’re going to have to hit A repeatedly to get anywhere, but god damnit, being a hero is hard work.  In fact, it’s one of the few games I’ve played that actually makes me feel like slaying a dragonwould not be very glorious at all, and mostly consists of the training and preparation.  And when all is said and done, you still have to walk home.

So when I  heard about Breath of Death VII: The Beginning, an Xbox Live Indie Game , which is usually described as a parody of an old school JRPG, I figured I’d waste some time on it.  It’s only a dollar, after all.  Most of my purchases have more than a dollar in taxes alone.

Oh boy.  What a surprise this game has been.  If Dragon Warrior is a six course meal with dessert at the end, Breath of Death is six courses consisting of ice cream, cake, cotton candy, and rainbows.  Then ice cream twice more.  It takes all the tedium of out of battling and exploring, and replaces it with excitement and near death experiences.

Let me explain.

The main draw of BoD is…battling.  Every battle, at least on hard mode, has the potential of killing you violently if you’re not on the ball.  On top of the fact that every turn will, if you’re properly leveled, deplete about 1/3 of your HP, your enemies also get stronger each round of battle.  Finishing a battle quickly is no longer a response to being bored, it’s necessary for your continued survival.

To make up for the fact that you’re barely surviving many battles, at the end of every conflict, your HP is fully restored and all deceased party members are revived at full health.  You also gain a little bit of your MP back, more if you finished the battle in fewer turns.

“Now wait a minute,” I hear you saying (Zach), “where’s the challenge in that?  It sounds like there’s no attrition or resource management whatsoever!”  Here you are wrong, sir or ma’am.  While you do gain some MP back at the end of a battle, it’s not much.  And when the key to your existence is finishing a battle quickly, that MP is more precious than gold.

This is true of Dragon Quest as well, except it translated into healing after every battle, which was boring.  BoD eliminates this by just healing you for free, but preserving the idea that MP is more important than anything else.  It’s beautiful.

In essence, it makes every fight feel like a boss fight.  You must plan carefully for every battle, and use your resources wisely.  However, each battle is also relatively quick and you will either live or die within about 2 minutes at most, depending on how long you take to decide things.

“So if battle is the meat, then what about everything else?” you rudely interrupt.  Alright, well, the dialogue is superb. The setting is post apocalyptic, but only because everybody is dead, and the undead (with no explanation as to where they came from) have rebuilt society.  The main character is a skeleton who is a silent protagonist…because he has no tongue.  Luckily, you can read his thoughts, which are extremely verbose and oftentimes hilarious, and parody the strong, heroic types most JRPGs focus on.  In fact, the game is more than parody, it’s a loving joke.  It’s not laughing at JRPGs, it’s laughing with them, as any good parody should do.

More stuff:there’s no boring inventory management beyond buying and equipping better stuff, there’s a run button, the encounter rate is tolerably light, you level quickly, there’s easy and powerful character customization each time you level (sometimes you even get to pick between two different versions of the same spell), the achievement system is an epitaph of your (un)dead hero…I could go on and on.  I mean, seriously, I have had to edit out two paragraphs of praise, and I could write even more.

The only downers:  The music is awful (please go with chiptunes next time!), and there aren’t enough people to talk to.  There is a nice “chat” function in the menu that allows your party members to talk amongst themselves, but it doesn’t have as much content as I would like.

That’s it!  That’s the only bad stuff I can think of!

I can’t recommend this game enough.  I’m not finished yet, but it reportedly has about 6 hours of game play.  AND IT’S A DOLLAR.  IT IS LUDICROUS TO NOT BUY THIS GAME.

Do it!  FREAKING DO IT! I am dead serious. I will be disappointed if you don’t buy this game, unless you don’t have an Xbox 360.  That’s the only excuse.

To summarize: Breath of Death VII is the best dollar you will ever spend, ever ever.

I’d say, for now, we really try to report on the tiny indie games that you know isn’t going to get much coverage. Sometimes we’ll follow a particularly hot indie game that will get treated by the big websites (Joe Danger, and Super Meat Boy) simply because as an indie blog we’re kind of expected to cover those, but, at least for me, the real passion comes from helping out games that truly have no following, and no marketing arm at all.

Thats why we started this website actually.

I think it’s a pretty neat mission.  Go check ‘em out.  I’m registered on the forums as TheCube, as I am pretty much everywhere else.

In other news, I am working on an arena shooter in the vein of Geometry Wars, except that everything is easily editable and distributable…sort of a DIY Geometry Wars.  Well, at least that’s the goal.  I will also probably be doing a write-up on Breath of Death VII, and its psychological impact on the modern…okay, so mostly just why it’s fun.

Rock on!