Not surprisingly, my brash assertion that I’d be playing an hour of video games every day this year hasn’t quite panned out as intended. I fell off the wagon over the weekend, since the lady and I were checking out some local gyms and undermining the correlated weight-loss goals by having dinner with a friend. And while I’ve managed to catch up, time-wise, the whole “play a single game to its completion” ambition is well off the rails.
Blame work for that one, though. It’s the second week of the year and I’m already up to my ears in reviews. I muddled through Prinny 2: I’m Not Writing Out the Damn Subtitle. It was a real disappointment. The first game had promise, but Nippon Ichi somehow managed to completely disregard the opportunity to realize said promise via sequel improvements, actually amplifying the flaws of the original game with its follow-up. And, god, that plot and script and voice acting: just awful.
In my dreams, I am forcing the Prinny dev team to play through Donkey Kong Country Returns to see how one goes about making a good, fair, polished, creative, yet altogether challenging platformer. They’re nice dreams.
Next on the slate are Mass Effect 2 on PS3, Radiant Historia, and the English-language copy of Tactics Ogre that showed up on my desk this morning.
I also have been writing some articles, like a piece about how good Super Mario All-Stars could have been. That should make for some amusing conversations next week when I’m at the 3DS press event!
In my free time, I have been browsing the reader comments one articles like these and staring at them in mixed amusement and bemusement.
Thanks for the heads up about Prinny 2. I was going to buy it, but after reading that review I bought Ghost Trick instead.
You done the right thing, son.
I’m glad someone else realizes what a hack the Super Mario All Stars compilation is. Why doesn’t it include the old games? Why less content than a SNES pack in game (Super Mario All Stars + Super Mario World)? Why do people pay insane prices for it on eBay? Sorry Nintendo, but if you want to make a compilation that isn’t a piece of crap, look at what M2 did with the Wonder Boy and Treasure compilations. It would be so awesome if the game had all of the different versions of Super Mario Bros., maybe some Donkey Kong for good measure, the Game Boy games, all of the wacky spinoffs like Yoshi’s Cookie, etc.
All of the supplemental material kinda sucks too. Just wish Nintendo actually made something worthwhile. When I saw Super Mario Collection being announced, I had high hopes for it. Needless to say, I won’t be paying super inflated eBay prices for this compilation.
I would kill a man to be playing Tactics Ogre in English right now. Unfortunately I couldn’t use a tarot card to reverse this decision after I’ve completed the game.
This seems like a biased review by yet another person on 1up who doesn’t know how to review.
Was going to comment how Jeremy has a knack for insulting his readers sometimes, but then I read this and I understand why.
“Bemusement” was the right word after all.
Assuming that Loki is the Loki we know, you done got trolled, son.
Anyway, definitely looking forward to the upcoming Radiant Historia review, since I’m very on the fence about that game. Will I be playing it, or just searching out the Shimomura soundtrack? Help me, oh Parish whose tastes are at least comparable enough to mine to be useful.
I was actually directly quoting a real comment from the Prinny 2 review.
Well, Loki was joking, but… Anyway, I do try not to insult readers, but man, that doesn’t keep the reverse from happening. Hence the bemusement.
Hahaha, well, now I’m the fool here! Sorry Loki, went over my head.
Re: bemusement
If you know a more appropriate place for a rambling discussion about pedophilia than the comments thread for a video game review, I’d certainly like to hear it. /harrumph
I like the tag, “oh internet”. Indeed.
I made a futile attempt at defending your review in the comments. I sometimes momentarily forget how pointless it is, how posting reasonable (I hope) comments doesn’t provide balance for the ridiculous ones, it just feeds them.
Apparently getting shot from off-screen in a sidescroller is NOT poor design. You should try to remember that for your next reviews.
The above was meant to be a comment on the blog entry, not a reply to the comment above it. I’m such a noob.
“Oh Internet” has been an internal tag here for years, but now that I’m WordPress you can actually see it! Here’s the old version:
http://www.gamespite.net/verbalspew/pivot/tags.php?tag=oh_internet
Reading some of those responses makes me chuckle. You at least give good reasoning as to why you thought it didn’t meet expectations, as opposed to some magazines that I’ve read that don’t always go beyond a nebulous “didn’t like it”.
At the end of the day, it’s an opinion. It may be rational or irrational, but that’s up to the reader to determine by reading the text of review. And I would hope said reader would actually try to say why the reviewer is wrong, instead of just saying “dude, you suck” or the like.
For a brief, shining moment, I thought “I’m Not Writing Out the Damn Subtitle” was the greatest subtitle for a game ever…
Then I realized you were mocking the actual subtitle. Damn you Parish!
Hey Jeremy! Since you were talking about bewildering comments, I figured I should make my own contribution by saying that my love of Retronauts still burns! The actually podcast RSS feed does not go back past a certain episode, so I’ve decided to create my own complete, organized compilation of Retronauts episodes (including an audio recording of Episode 00) with improved labeling, art, and info. The results will be glorious!