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Showing posts from April 23, 2008

The World Ends With You Review

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April 16, 2008 - Most gamers out there would probably agree that the world of role-playing games has been stuck in a specific rut for quite a while. We're not talking down on games like Fire Emblem and Advance Wars on DS (RPG-like tactical games), or the still-remarkable Final Fantasy series, but rather the hundreds upon hundreds of RPGs out there that don't dare to be different. We can understand a few "period piece" role-playing games, but does every story-heavy adventure out there need to revolve around swords, bows, magic, castles, and hoards of monsters emerging from some sort of ultimate evil? It's fine in moderation – and when done extremely well, games go beyond any preconceptions – but the RPG world could use a little kick in the pants to get it moving, and that's exactly what The World Ends With You is. Square Enix – more specifically Team Jupiter, the creators of Kingdom Hearts – has challenged every facet of the RPG genre, and the result is one o

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time Review

April 22, 2008 - The Mystery Dungeon series is a franchise that's been going on since the days of the Super NES – just recently Sega released a remake of one of the original Mystery Dungeon games: Shiren the Wanderer. The latest version in the series is the second one Chunsoft has made for Nintendo, titled Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness . The team created two versions of the same game, and more doesn't necessarily mean better. This sequel isn't much of a step up from the first game in the series, which wasn't all that great to begin with. Mystery Dungeon features a distinct gaming style: it's all about randomly generated dungeons in a turn-based, real-time RPG hybrid design. The whole idea of Mystery Dungeon revolves around working your way through a series of multi-level dungeons, with each floor being generated on the fly when you get there. What this means is, potentially, you'll never see the sa