NFOpocalypse

Superior Epic [ Legendary ]

As the spiritual predecessor to the future Horror sub-genre and the first reported game to receive a parental advisory warning (and you thought it was Mortal Kombat!), Splatterhouse is a significant point in video game history.  By today’s standards, fighting crucifixes and zombies as a Jason Voorhees-esque maniac might seem tame, but this marked a step towards opening darker-themed mature content to players.  Ultimately, we have Splatterhouse to thank for letting video games become more than a teenager’s delight.

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In Dominus, you control the ruler of a small province, which consists of a castle, outlying towns, city walls, forests, and the like. It’s divided up into about thirty different area maps. Your goal is to defend the province against eight invading tribes, which have randomized personalities. You combat these tribes using your own armies of monsters, traps, and spells. Additionally, you have four generals at your disposal, which you can use to automate setting up area defenses and other attacks. You win the game when all of the invading tribes have been eliminated, either through warfare or diplomacy.

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One of my hobbies is collecting old PC games. Over the years, however, I’ve amassed a large number of games that I’ve never gotten around to playing. I would like to play all of these eventually, but I don’t have a lot of time to invest into playing them all to completion. Therefore, I’m going to play them all for an hour or two and discuss my preliminary findings. I’ve chosen to start with strategy and war games.

Home of the Underdogs calls Silicon Knight’s 1993 D&D-licensed title Fantasy Empires as “one of the best fantasy games ever made.” I was not as impressed.

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In the last decade video games have gone from being something nerds did instead of meeting the opposite sex to that thing almost all people do instead of meeting the opposite sex. While video games have become possibly the largest entertainment industry in history, they have also gained some of the most sickly parasites of all. I speak, of course, about hack critics. While you are playing a game to enjoy it’s deep mechanics, gorgeous art, or complete lack of either, your critic counterpart is busy picking big words from a thesaurus so he can shit on your favorite new title. The OBRR is the line in the sand, and I stand on one side armed with poor grammar and crude language. Watch where you step.

Let’s start this off with the most obvious fart-sniffer on the whole goddamn Internet

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Don’t you just love that nice alliteration? But the crassness and vulgarity of this article’s title captures the essence of it perfectly. Sometimes when a series moves forward, the hardcore fans bitch and moan because the game isn’t exactly like it was before. Fuck Fallout fans. Fuck them so hard.

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I don’t care what everyone else says. Akitoshi Kawazu is a genius. He work’s with an indie gamer mindset—unafraid of experimentation and rejection, and just making whatever game he feels like making at that moment. So, I’d like to talk for a little bit about the first SaGa game I played—Final Fantasy Legend 2.

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Another Atlus game in the Shin Megami Tensei series (and spinoffs), Digital Devil Saga is bizarre. I don’t mean the regular kind of bizarre, which is what Persona 3 or Final Fantasy X might fall under. Digital Devil Saga is downright creepy in its employment of the surreal, creepy, and extraordinary elements of its plot. Perhaps the biggest element of this insane aesthetic is in the fact that you consume your defeated enemies. Not only that, but the enemies you defeat used to be human. So, in essence, Digital Devil Saga is about cannibalism.

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To put this into context, I tend to go through phases when playing videogames. It normally goes along the lines of first-person shooter, American RPG, Japanese RPG, Strategy RPG, Turn-based Strategy, Real-time strategy, and then repeat at FPS. This is just how I function as a gamer. There’s individual games within those genres that I always play, and there’s some genres that are always good to play at any time. For example, I always play shoot-’em-ups. I always play Team Fortress 2. And when it comes to Japanese RPGs, I always play Persona 3.

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There’s just something that draws me in about Survival Crisis Z. I can’t quite place what it is, because there’s so many amazing aspects behind the game. I guess the biggest thing that compels me to play it would have to be the persistence of my character’s progress, even if the random generation removes the emotional attachment I have to the characters and the persistence isn’t really true persistence. The only person I really care for is myself, since eventually my party comes back and just leaving and reentering buildings respawns the characters. It’s a sort of let down, but I can understand why.

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One of the more interesting Pokemon spin-offs, there were actually two Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games before the two I’m focusing on in this article; Red Rescue Team on the GBA, and Blue Rescue Team on the DS. The second pair, both DS games, are Explorers of Time and Explorers of Darkness (sometimes collectively called Mystery Dungeon 2 since they’re the second set). Please note, I never played the first two, mainly because I had no idea what sort of games they were.

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