Author: Grubdog

Nier

Nier is a hard game to review. On the outside it’s a fairly standard RPG with hack and slash gameplay, but the experience is anything but standard. The game is full of style and the only thing constant is surprise. The story premise features the familiar concept of humans destroying the world with technology. The game is set far in the future where all human advances have vanished and we’re left with the same basic stuff we had in ancient times, with a few evil bad guys in the mix and a deadly disease.

Continue reading “Nier” →

Game of the Year awards thoughts

I feel like these are counter productive to a gamers mind. Trying to summarise a years worth of content, all I think about are the games I left out, not the games that make it. How do you decide what was best anyway? On a given Friday night, Fragile Dreams was the greatest game of all time. Then on Sunday morning, Wario Ware DIY was. How do we compare that? What about the experiences that you didn’t have, that could’ve happened. The games of 2010 that you’ll play in 2011? I’m trying to find a way of doing this and feeling good about it but I can’t do it. I’m living in today. I never took pictures of these moments. I’ll always look at a great game and smile at the enjoyment it brought me, but it lives inside itself, free from comparisons. That’s a big reason I enjoy games, they take me into their own world. Gutting them and sending them to a battlefield only ends up with all of them getting shot with the blood on my hands. I feel the same about review scores, I can’t get my head around doing them either.

The only thing I can say for sure is what I want to play right now, so i’m declaring Last Window the GOTM (Game of the Minute) and going to bed.

Canvass Quest 9 – Journey of a Lonely Traveler

Another day, another slim chance of finding a friend. I boot up my fully charged DS Lite to the familiar but empty sight of Stornway Inn in Dragon Quest 9, and select the canvass mode, today I was going to find a guest. I watch the screen for a few moments in the hope of a minor miracle. Maybe my neighbour had the game? Nah. I put the console in my bag and head off into the world, uncertain where the day will take me, but hopeful.

Sydney is a big place, there’s got to be quite a few people here who own Dragon Quest 9. It’s not the most successful game in the world, but it’s a damn good one, and a lot of people can’t resist a good RPG. I just had to find them. DS is quite popular too, I see them everywhere. At least a few of them must have DQ9. Surely. Even if nobody bought it, at least ten copies that I know of were given away in competitions.

Continue reading “Canvass Quest 9 – Journey of a Lonely Traveler” →