Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Can't remember...

...I know I picked something else up since my last post, but I can't remeber what it is.

Wait, I did find Tiger Woods '10 for Wii (sans MotionPlus) for $29, and that was pretty sweet; there was something else though... I'll hafta get back to you on that.

Anyway, I finished Shadow Complex, and it was really good. The game was a little on the easy side and the dialogue was horrible (though the actors struggle through it admirably), but everything else was top-shelf stuff. Gorgeous graphics, visceral gameplay, plenty to explore, room for creative problem-solving, and compelling reasons to go back and find what you may have missed.

I then took some time to get into Muramasa, and quickly realised just how similar it is to Odin Sphere... But with a far less overwhelming inventory/forge/whatever, and with an amazingly fluid combat system. After the Bayonetta demo (which, like Devil May Cry, was very pretty but played very much not to my liking), Muramasa was a nice reminder that the hack-'n-slash/beat-'em-up genre hasn't completely left me behind in the '90s ;)

Before I got too far into Muramasa, I set aside an evening to finish LostWinds 2. I cannot stress enough just how amazing this series is. These two games, at only $10 each, are reason enough to get a Wii; they employ the Wii's controllers in a way so intuitive that I almost never paused to marvel at how well it worked; the graphics are beautiful; the music is hypnotic and suitably mysterious; the gameplay offers a challenging, but not overwhelming mix of puzzle-solving and platforming; and everything is bursting with character, from the animations and lighting to the musical cues and journal entries. The second game adds a great selection of new obstacles along with new tools to overcome them, and really feels like a new game instead of just another episode in the series. My only complaint is with the time between releases, and that's more of a compliment than anything else.

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