Review: Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection
The shares of Gamindustri are in trouble! Guide the CPU Goddesses to become idols by training them, promoting their careers and helping them rise to the top of the charts!
The shares of Gamindustri are in trouble! Guide the CPU Goddesses to become idols by training them, promoting their careers and helping them rise to the top of the charts!
It’s been a hell of a journey. Two years ago, the first Rocksmith came onto the scene, but was unfortunately loaded with problems like poor menu design, commonplace issues with lag (not always eliminated by analog audio solutions in some setups), and some detection issues not necessarily tied to player skill. With the coming of Rocksmith 2014 Edition, signifying a serialization of the series, we see many minor fixes that overshadow and erase the original’s issues as well as major overhauls that take the game to new heights.
In spirit, The Wolf Among Us is not such a grand deviation from Telltale’s previous endeavor, The Walking Dead. Their art style is similar, they are both adventure games with deviating routes, they are both tied to comic series in one form or another. Yet, though their settings are different, The Wolf Among Us offers a vastly dissimilar experience.
Dragon’s Crown, under the watchful eye of the not-so-benevolent press, received a great deal of negative criticism before being made available to our lovely consoles, both home and handheld, to truly give it a think before passing judgement. With its release under a week away, did Vanillaware‘s latest offering deserve to be observed with such spiteful scrutiny for its appearance or is there more to it than meets the eye?
JRPG week! With yesterday’s under the radar release of Atelier Totori Plus on the PlayStation Vita, today we’re seeing the release of Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory on the PlayStation 3! You’ll be able to take your favorite console patrons into an alternate reality of 1989 where Lowee, Leanbox, and Lastation all exist, but they’re far different from the familiar Gamindustri counterparts. Tensions are high between Lowee and Leanbox as the two are on the brink of war, and Neptune is caught in the middle of it, being sucked through time for unknown reasons! Again, the game’s out today in North America exclusively for the PlayStation 3, and those in the United Kingdom can grab it tomorrow!
Um, what? Unbeknownst to a great deal of us, myself included, Tecmo Koei has very silently launched Atelier Totori Plus for the PlayStation Vita. The now-handheld version of the very fun alchemy RPG is widely available for your on-the-go gaming for $39.99 from the PlayStation Store. Players who purchase the title between now and April 16th will also get the ‘Devil Bikini’ and ‘Angel Smiwsuit’ costume packs for being early adopters.
I often joke about how diabolical Skylanders is, being a heartless fusion of toys and video games that encourages you to purchase more toys to play in your video game which then encourages you to purchase more toys. Skylanders Giants is essentially a repeat of the first Spyro spin-off title, drawing even further away from the dragon’s legacy by dropping his name completely in favor of advertising these slightly larger toys you can acquire to lift and smash slightly larger objects within the game. Despite how inherently evil this ploy is, I am inclined to say that Skylanders Giants is not some haphazardly thrown together piece of gaming “sequel-itis” as Activision is known for producing just to make a quick buck, but is instead another enjoyable action platforming romp through Skylands with the titular motley crew of beasts, dragons, monsters, and oddities. If you’re already familiar with Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure, you are already familiar with the bulk of what Skylanders Giants has to offer—you’ll once again take to the sky,
I’m not going to sugarcoat this review—Ninja Gaiden 3 is a bad game. Borderline awful, even. There’s no amount of DLC, no number of patches, and absolutely zero justification pronounceable in human tongue by any sentient being that could somehow make Team Ninja‘s latest “effort” even remotely okay. After two incredibly brutal games, Team Ninja return for the third chronological entry of the Ninja Gaiden series, Ninja Gaiden 3. Though Tomonobu Itagaki was not directing the title, leaving Team Ninja altogether to pursue The Devil’s Third with a new team at Valhalla Studios, Yosuke Hayashi, designer on all of the Sigma games, stepped up as the lead, showing a great deal of promise, though inexperienced. There’s virtually no point to touch on anything that doesn’t have to do with combat as far as the series is concerned. I mean, really, who gives a damn about the enemies’ intentions or the purpose of Ryu Hayabusa’s adventure therein? Ninja Gaiden has always been—and always should be—about rage-inducing, visceral combat, laden with bombastic
If you haven’t gotten around to it yet, now’s definitely the time to pick up your copy of Mass Effect 3. Right now and all day until supplies run out, you can hop on Amazon.com and grab a copy for only $29.99. That’s right, less than half of the regular MSRP and you get to pick it on your preferred platform, so whether you play on 360, PS3 or PC, you’re not getting alienated. Hurry! This deal isn’t going to be around very long.
Hey, do you like things that are kawaii-uguu~ and moe, and you’d like to absolutely call every playable and non-playable character your waifu? Well, hold on to your anime pillows and put on some deodorant, because Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 is here and in your face with extreme loli action that will keep you up all night salivating over these fantastic digital bishōjo.
After the seemingly endless onslaught of negativity that the title had received prior to release, I reached out to publisher Lexis Numérique to procure a download of survival-horror AMY that had been critically lambasted for being too buggy, and not simply just difficult. A lot of the criticisms towards AMY are harsh, but not entirely unfounded. Solid ideas permeate the whole, but each of AMY‘s drawbacks become compounded on one another, creating a mishmash of inescapable gunk that really great intentions become completely lost in. AMY is horrifying in the fact that VectorCell have managed to craft a game that is truly bad in execution. At its heart, AMY is a return to the survival horror games of yore, reminiscent of early Silent Hill titles or the first Resident Evil, filling you with that hopeless terror of being alone in a world gone completely to Hell. And not being strong enough to do anything about it. VectorCell manages to capture that essence rather well, with a desolate, forsaken city filled
Afterfall: InSanity is one of those games that seemingly grew out of nowhere. With humble beginnings as an homage to games like Fallout and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., this Unreal Engine-powered project became professionalized by Nicolas Entertainment Group partway through 2008.