Lokathor

This game is pretty hard, but in a way that feels totally fair. When you screw up, it's your own fault. The physics feel good, and very consistent. The music is wonderful even on the tiny speakers of a 3DS XL. I never played the Wii version, so I don't know how it compares really, but this is a very solid 3DS experience.

It's a pretty normal pokemon game overall. The 5th generation has scaled EXP so that you can't easily out-level your opponents, which is great for keeping the challenge even, though it's never super hard. There's not too much variety to the post game content, but they did add a pokemon world tourment thing in addition to black/white's battle subway. The story isn't really interesting or anything. You can get more pokemon in-game than you could with the first black/white, but they still expect you to use the stupid dream world for the rest of them, which is an online flash minigame thing that's mostly dumb. It's all sorta just average and "what you'd expect" sort of stuff.

All of the boards are extremely short. All the minigames are free-for-all style. The game doesn't have an online mode. All the major features you'd want in a Mario Party game on the 3DS are not in this game.

An amazing new direction for zelda games to move in, but with some hiccups that naturally result from being rather different. The game feels very crisp in terms of movement and fighting, and the special items feel good to use. In terms of the dungeons, because you don't get the special items in any particular order, instead of each dungeon sometimes having you use a previous dungeon's item as a way of adding complexity to a puzzle, each dungeon simply relies on just one particular special item and ignores the rest. I think it's a loss there, and they should have done more multi-item rooms and puzzles. As it is though, each dungeon feels sufficiently complex because of the wall-melding mechanic, and each dungeon gets you to think for a moment or two. Not too hard, but not too easy. Most of the dungeons require you to walk back over your own path at several points instead of simply clearing the whole dungeon room by room, which some folks might like or not like depending on their own style. Dungeon bosses aren't quite too hard to fight, but they do feel somewhat tense and it's pretty satisfying when you win and get that heart container. Hyrule is almost an exact copy of the LTTP world. Lorule is almost a copy of the Dark World. It gives them a feeling of being already explored, even if you've never seen a particular area yet. Probably not a good route for them to have gone on that one. The map itself keeps a solid flow in terms of letting you get around from place to place without too much trouble. There's also weather vanes spread everywhere which are both the save points of the game and also the warp points. The story is really standard for a zelda game, and kinda a shame at that. They use a blending of Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past's story, and you even end up in the Temple of Light after you save each princess. Natural perhaps, since it's supposed to be a sequel, but they probably could have come up with something better if they'd tried at all (I'm looking at Link's Awakening and Majora's Mask here). Overall, it's a strong showing, and a good direction for Zelda games to turn towards. If future zelda games keep heading in this more open world metroidy direction instead of leading you by the nose all the time the series could be improved by a whole lot.

This game has among the best story/setting among video games. There's a great amount of attention given to setting details, and strong characterization from all of the party NPCs. Not everything gets explained to you all the time, and it leaves you with the feeling that you're one person in a larger world that's moving along with or without you. The downsides of the game are that, considering that the game is largely about dialog options and how you talk to people and so forth, the game itself won't tell you most of the time when your stats have given you a special dialog option, or your lack of stats have prevented you from picking an option. You have to read a guide to know any of that. Special dialog options being labeled didn't really become popular until some later RPGs that came after this one. Also, the game is an Infinity Engine game, so naturally you have to vaguely understand the 2nd edition ADnD rules to get what's going on some of the time (same as Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale). Ehhhh. I know how the combat system works from playing the table-top game and Baldur's Gate, so it doesn't bother me too much, but I could easily see how it might hold back someone who was otherwise unfamiliar with it and just wanted to play an RPG with a strong story element. If you like RPGs that go in the direction of grinding for levels and stat building and so on, then this game isn't gonna be your thing. A few fights are hard, but most of the time if you just fight things that show up then you can just get through everything that's a fight without much trouble. The game doesn't even have much in the way of fights compared to most other RPGs. There's a lot of talking and doing stuff "in town" instead of "in dungeons". If you like character based RPGs with lots of story, this game is exactly what you're looking for. A party full of interesting characters, and nice setting and quests that are a little unusual for fantasy, but not so unusual that you can't follow along with what's happening.

This is a European Nobility and Feudalism Simulator. You play as a Noble of some rank or another (Count, Duke, King, or Emperor), and you must manage your realm and dynasty to see it through from 1066 (or 867 with DLC) until 1453. The game makes an effort to be historical in terms of starting points, but once you begin playing the game things can quickly become very ahistorical. Now the pros of the game are that it's got interesting mechanics for most things. Combats only take place at the strategic level, it's not a game about battles really. Instead, it's a game about all the tings you do outside of battles. Fabricating claims so that you can declare wars, improving your holdings so that you can train more troops and collect more tax, plotting to kill those that have become troublesome, and so on. The game is very time intensive to learn. There's a lot of things going on, and small details are important. It can take hours of attempted gameplay to really begin to get a grasp of what's going on. You'll play a bit and start to get the hang of it and then everything will explode and you'll have to start over. Most of the time the game labels where numbers are coming from with clear tool-tips, and there's several nice wikis and youtube vids on the various concepts of the game to keep things clear. I wouldn't even say that the game is hard to learn, it just takes time and persistence. Now, all that said, this game will totally draw you in once you begin to get what's going on. The potential complexity of situations are exactly what make it great to me. The stories that you can tell about wild events are what make this game so charming. If you're the kind of person that can play strategy games in the first place, this game has dozens of hours of gameplay waiting for you.

You drive your car around the track and try to get the best time you can. Very simple, no frills. The game didn't do anything to amaze me and it didn't do anything that annoyed me. This is the kind of game you can just zone out and play for a while while you listen to a podcast or audiobook.

For a game that's supposed to have the customization as a fun new feature, there's not too many options to pick from. Since they're all aesthetic anyway, they should have had like 10 times as many things to pick form in every category. I don't have any helpful advice to add to this point, they just needed to put in more content. The game doesn't have too much in the way of systems or simulation; it's not any more intricate than the first harvest moon. Considering that this is like the 17th game in the series, it's really a disappointment. The people don't have much to them at all, you just give each one a specific thing each day until a number fills up. Not really any jobs or interactions there. The economy has fixed prices for buying and selling everything, it doesn't shift from year to year or adjust based on how much you sell of a particular thing or anything like that. It's all very static sort of stuff. Starting a new game is video game agony, the first month prevents you from doing most of the things until you go through a tutorial on each thing, and each tutorial doesn't show up until a specific day. It seems like designers should be aware by now that some players know what they're doing, particularly anyone that's played a harvest moon game before, and they should have tutorials that you can skip over. They even provide the info in a help menu in case you forget later on, so there's no reason at all to not have all the slow opening stuff be skippable. I thought that this game would be a great purchase, but it turns out that it's probably gonna be the worst 3ds game I'll have ever bought.

For being the fourth entry in the series, the game hasn't advanced much since the first one. You're the mayor of town in this one, which lets you setup Public Works Projects. They're decorations for your town, and they let you customize how your town is. Except you can only make 30 of them, even though there's space for tons and tons of them. Also, the selection of public projects is mostly limited to things like lamps and benches and statues. You can build up to three bridges across your town's river, but you can't divert the river, you can't add a pond or fill in a pond, you can't add or remove a ramp down to the beach. When villagers move in, they just move in any old place that fits, you can't declare where house lots should go. What I'm saying is that, for a game that tries to sell you on the point of being able to customize your town, you don't get access to a lot of very obvious customization options. Houses are about the same as before. You can change the outside of your house some, and you can get several rooms inside of your house. All rooms start off at 4x4, then have a 6x6 and 8x8 upgrade you can buy. Always a central room, a room left, back, and right, and an upstairs and downstairs. You can't re-arrange the orientation of your house's rooms, like having it be a long ranch-style house or a tower house where you just stack it five floors high. Even if the exterior didn't change to match it, it would have been nice for your house's rooms to be arrangable. Of course there's a ton of goodies to put inside of your house, wallpapers, floors, beds, chairs, etc, etc. Once you've picked up an item once, it goes into your catalog, so you can buy it again from Nook's if you sell or lose it. Except some items are "special event" items, so you can't re-purcahse them from your catalog. It'll show the item, and then not let you buy it. Not being able to just buy anything in your catalog is pretty poop. There's a "Mall" section, behind your main town, and you can upgrade it a bit. Re-Tail is in the main area, but all the rest of the stores, and the Museum and Post Office, are in the Mall area. Behind the Mall is the Happy Home section, where the houses of people you Street Pass are displayed, and you can order items that you see in their home. It follows the same rules as the catalog though, so if they have a limited item then you can't order it. Which is, again, poop. The villagers in town are kinda alright, some of them are fun characters that I really like (Ken and Bruce). Except they're a little shallow. You interact with them or not, and based on that they'll usually stay in town. If they decide to move, you can tell them to stay, and they'll stay if you've interacted with them a lot. I say "interact" instead of "be nice to" because it doesn't matter what your interaction is. You can talk to them, send them letters, hit them with a net, push them into pit-falls, whatever. It's all the same to them. They each start off with a house customized to them when they move into town, but they don't have any sort of style as to what things get replaced with what, so they'll just use anything you give them and anything they see in Re-Tail. Their houses end up looking like weird mish-mashes of all sorts of styles at once. The villagers aren't very distinct in how they act in general. Internally, the game itself has like 6 general personality types, and it kinda shows through even without knowing that. There's apparently 110 or so villagers in the game, but you can only have up to 10 in your town at once. It'd probably have been better for them to make fewer villagers that are each more distinct. I guess what I'm getting at in general is that the game has stuff in it, but most of the options are kinda shallow or surface or whatever you wanna call it. There's not many systems driven interactions going on, and the game regularly feels like a disappointment and an "if only they had" sort ****.

Ocarina of Time is a solid game, and this this is a good remake of it. Higher resolution everything, nice controls, master quest included. A person could hardly ask for more. The 3D stuff even looks pretty good most of the time, if you care about that. I think my favorite part of the remake is that first-person aiming has (optional) motion controls, which makes things way cool. If you've got a 3DS, you should pick up this game.

SPAZ is an alright asteroids-like space game. You can customize your ship with different upgrades that you pick up as you play. You get more than one ship in your little fleet and can swap control between them if you want. Usually you always wanna play as your biggest and toughest ship, but not always. There's several types of weapon that you can focus on using, and the game allows you to "rebuild" your level ups for a cost if you realize that you made a mistake. The writing in this game is pretty deadful though, and the gameplay gets very samey after just a few hours of play. Some of the time you have to take a break from constant space fighting to go and restock on your resources, which gets a little dull. It's a good game to play while listening to a podcast or audiobook or something like that.

The most packed pokemon game, with a post-game second quest, a selection of touch screen minigames, and a battle frontier. Visually, the game is a nice remake of the GBC classic. Updating the battle systems to Gen4 lets you use a few new moves than you could before, but mostly doesn't change the overall flow of the main game too much. The legendary pokemon have had a few more story elements placed around them, which I didn't quite like. I think it was better when the legendaries were just mysterious pokemon that you had to go and find on your own, not pokemon that have a weird cult following in one form or another, and that must be encountered to progress the main storyline. The single biggest drawback of this game is that the EXP curve and type distribution of the enemies is rather poorly done towards the end of the game, and training to get those final levels for the elite four is just a grinding slog. Pokemon has always has problems with grinding, particularly when trying to level up newly bred pokemon in the post-game. In SoulSilver it's particularly noticeable above level 50, and you need to get well in to the 60s for the Elite 4 Round 2 matches, so you're stuck with a long boring period towards the end of the storyline. I'm willing to forgive them though, because you get two whole regions to explore as it is. I'd still say that this is the best of the pokemon games.

A moderately addictive match-three game. The special pieces have nice mechanics, but the things that get in your way are often piled too high against you, and winning a level becomes a matter of just playing it over and over again until the RNG happens to give you a super good set of drops so that you can win. In that way, it doesn't strike me as very good design, but it also kept me interested until level 102, so I guess it's a good enough design.

Dwarf Fortress is the ultimate example **** that favors system and simulation over interface and graphics. There are a lot of things going on, and it's easy for a fort to collapse when the unexpectedly bad happens. Because of this, the game has a pretty brutal learning curve, even if the interface weren't totally weird and borderline nonsensical. I can't entirely deny that the game might simply rely on a form of Stockholm Syndrome to keep a large portion of its fanbase. However, "Losing is fun" is the game's motto, after all. There's even a "reclaim" mode so you can try to take back an old fort (if you dare). So go out and strike the earth!

The game is Sonic 1, on your 3ds. That's great. What's new? There's a save/load feature (just one save state), you can use the spindash from the later games if you want, and when you start the game from the title menu there's a stage select. The music is crisp and clear, it even allows you to emulate the sounds as they were on a Genesis or Genesis 2 (though I don't know what that sound difference is exactly, it seemed to be the same to me either way). The emulation is smooth, and accurate to the point where minor graphical hiccups such as with the Green Hill Zone waterfalls are replicated exactly. A completely faithful Sonic game, here's hoping that they give Sonic 2 the same treatment very soon.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

This is my favorite cart to keep around and have in my DS when I'm not actively playing through a different game. Lots of games, good selection. The AI is competent at most of the games when you turn it to "Hard". All of the games play entirely through the touch screen, and it always feels totally natural to me. You're moving pieces on a game board, or picking up and placing cards, things like that. It's very nice. There's even both online multiplayer and download play multiplayer. And it has Shogi, which isn't a game that you normally see in games packs like this. The downsides to the game are particular to different games. The betting games let you bet into negative chip counts, without making you just lose the game. Their version of battleship has two different 1x1 pieces, which makes the games take forever to resolve because you can't use a grid search to try and find enemy ships. Their version of Stratego is sound, but the AI for it is just not competent even on the highest setting. If they re-released this for 3ds and fixed these problems it'd be an easy 10/10 game.

This game is really fun... when you're actually able to play it. However, each mission only lets you explore a limited amount of a mansion at once. Also, you're constantly interrupted by message from the Professor telling you what to do. Even when you replay a mission, there's still the same constant interruptions that you've already heard. The mansion bosses are kinda all over the place in terms of fun and difficulty. There's upgrades you can get for Luigi, but they're all in a fixed order, and you get all of them pretty early on. Really, the biggest thing to me is that the replay value of the game is killed because there's always stuff in your way preventing you from just exploring a whole mansion at once, and there's always dumb messages from E. Gad that you can't skip over, telling you the same things you already know.

This game sets the bar that other hack and slack games are measured against. And it sets the bar very high. Single player is a passable experience, and it lets the time go by while you wait for some program to run/download/update/whatever, or while you watch a TV show at the same time, etc. However, the heart of the game is multiplayer, either LAN or Online. Then it becomes a fun fest of spells and melee. This is a strong contender for being the best LAN party game, because players of different skill levels can roughly keep up with one another, and there are several "easy mode" build options for beginner players to play. Advanced players can keep coming back again and again to find and craft the best loot possible and get every damage point possible out of their build. The down sides to this game are that it's sometimes hard to get the graphics right on newer versions of windows because of compatibility issues. Some of the skills are just very poorly balanced. The item customization isn't as intricate as it could be. There's places where this game could be improved in a "HD re-release" type of scenario, but it stands tall even without modernization.

The story is poorly written, though I suppose that's to be expected in a pokemon game. Having beat the game, the post-game is almost non-existent. That's a huge shame, because they took out the scaling-EXP system from Gen5, and combined with the "EXP All" the game just becomes too easy; you'll quickly out level the opponents and then have nothing left to do. On the good side: The battles look pretty great, which is nice I guess. You can find more pokemon within the game, and the friend safari lets you get potentially all the non-legendary pokemon on your own, which is cool. The pokemon breeding mechanics have been updated again, allowing you to very easily get a pokemon with maxed out stats, if you care about those last few stat points. Overall, there's a lot of wasted potential here, and I don't think the game has staying power. In a few generations we'll care about as much about X/Y as we do about Diamond/Pearl. Perhaps the "Z" game later on will fix these issues.