.hack review and then some
Happy Post-Halloween. I was kind of bummed that practically no one recognized my costume. How hard is it to find someone who knows what a white mage is from the earlier Final Fantasy games? I like how some people think if I’m dorky enough to dress up as a game character, I’m dorky enough to role play. “Omg, heal me! Cast some healing magic on me!” No way, I’m not an NPC!
My review of .hack://G.U. Vol 1 Rebirth is up at Silicon Era if you’re interested in reading the long version. The short version: Boring dungeons, tons of cut scenes, terrible voice acting, but good music. I really wanted to like Rebirth because the pseudo MMO aspect was so well done, but there were just so many awful things about it, I couldn’t keep playing.
One of the worst things that happens to games is that execution of a good idea can often be terrible. These games make me sad because I think, “If only they pulled this off, the game would be awesome!” I hope developers of games like these don’t end up thinking their game is doing badly because the idea is too different to be successful. What really happens is their game does badly becaues they get lazy and put in crappy things like repetitive hallways, awful battle systems, and too many emo-boy protagonists. I felt the same way about Killer 7. The story was twisted and I loved the style of the visuals, but the controls were too weird to get used to. It also didn’t help that I played it on a PS2 with terrible load times.
I know there have been mediocre reviews on Touch Detective, but I had to give this a try because I liked the character designs so much. I don’t know why, but I like graphics with heavy and bold outlines. It’s like an overexaggerated cartoon style. After playing the latest episode of Sam & Max, I started craving some more touch-and-click adventure games. The DS is the perfect system for them to be on thanks to the stylus.
I’m still on the first case in Touch Detective, but so far I’m liking it. I’m glad there isn’t any voiced dialog and the voices for characters are just different little beeps. I don’t think I can take any more bad voice acting for a wihle. The top screen is used to display just McKenzie’s front. You can see her facial features and sometimes she has thought bubbles in conjunction to what’s happening on the bottom screen. It gets kind of confusing to read both at the same time and I think I’ve missed a couple thoughts, but hopefully the top screen isn’t that important to gathering clues.