Quote:Wipeout Pure looks awesome, but other than that I don't care much about the launch lineup...

Quote:9 Presentation

Tetsuya Mizuguchi is known for putting together as much an experience as a game, and Lumines is no less the whole trip for being a launch game on Sony's new handheld.

8 Graphics

The shape and the sound of puzzle gaming is rarely the focus, but Q Entertainment fused the external design to the gaming experience here with great care.

9 Sound

Even for those who have no desire to dance to this music, the selection of tracks and the variety of music is mondo engrossing.

9 Gameplay

A brand new concept in puzzle gaming, Lumines is an earnest addiction that's elegantly simple and disarmingly challenging.

8 Lasting Appeal

A few missing options hurt the appeal of playing it too often, but it's a very diggable puzzle game that you can pick back up years from now and enjoy.

Quote:But I'm sure that the standard for sci-fi tactical strategy games will continue to be the same game it's been for over a decade now: X-Com: UFO Assualt.

Quote:Kojima still believes his most brilliant invention so far was putting
Meryl's codec frequency only on the back of the CD case.

It's only a matter of time before he returns to the adventure genre.
So he says. His pick for game of the year 2004, he told me a few
weeks back, remains "Gyakuten Saiban 3." So!!

Good things might happen.

And Metal Gear Ac!d is, well, kind of trippy. No pun intended. It
is, effectively, a Japanese graphic adventure game, with a card-
collecting flavor.

Quote:What the creators of this game want you to understand is that, despite the shift to a new play style, this is still Metal Gear to the core. Konami had the first English language version of the game at its Gamer's Day event to prove this point. The setting is tangential, the control is totally different, and yet, once you go looking, you will find a Metal Gear threatening to conquer gamers yet again.

When you break down the gameplay of a Metal Gear game to the metal, you will find some of the locked-in elements that make this a fine series for a card battler. Enemy AI gets brilliant when it needs to track you down and cease your life, but the majority of play in a Metal Gear game is spent analyzing the patrol routes of enemies and sneaking past leaks in their defenses. Metal Gear Acid simply takes the directional control and the tension of making a controller slip too soon out of the picture.

Instead, Metal Gear Acid has a deck of cards dealt to you on each room of a stage. These cards have specific values for a given technique -- a SOCOM or FAMAS weapon card will allow you to open fire on an enemy, while Ration cards allow healing -- but you can and often will have to sacrifice cards for movement across the stage. You'll want to keep your best cards for when the action gets heavy, but every card has the potential to be useful in certain circumstances, so choose wisely from your deck every time you pull. And don't forget that each card has a value for use, which delays how long a player must wait out while the enemy makes its own maneuvers -- if you're expecting to run and gun with your biggest cards all through the game, you'll be out-timed, outwitted, and out of life long before you learn your lesson.

Tactical techniques from the Metal Gear series have made their way intact to the PSP strategy game. After every move, Snake will have the ability to either stand ready or crouch out of sight as he awaits his next move. Snake can also flatten against walls and other barriers, and can knock on the wall to attract guards towards traps or lure them away from guarded areas. Snake can also make very complicated maneuvers by putting certain cards together in a combo -- for instance, if he tosses a grenade into a crowd of enemies, then quickly uses a few pistol shots to detonate the explosive, there will be no danger from the other soldiers since they have been blown up before it is their turn to react.

Quote:As far as the story goes, diehard may have trouble adjusting to this game's narrative concept than they will to the peculiar action. This is precious ground that the team is treading across, and it is doing it as a side-story officially not connected to the real MGS storyline. Fortunately, the ability to play the game in English for the first time at Konami's event allowed us to settle into the break-away style and story concepts more comfortably. It helped that we've already been conditioned for something very different from our experience with the previous handheld Metal Gear Solid on GBC -- that game felt like the Metal Gear story and included many of the characters familiar to fans, but it really was its own entity that continued on in something of an alternate universe from the real MGS series. Metal Gear Acid plays out much the same way, using the ending of the first PlayStation MGS as a jumping-off point for a story that takes its own trip through its own version of what would be Snake's never-ending call to duty instead of peaceful retirement.

The story is played out through animated cut-scenes and striking, almost cartoonish caricatures of the game's regulars -- it's a far break from the ultra-realism of the franchise proper (and is also missing MGS's familiar voiceovers), but in the context of the game itself, the art style is distinct and memorable, and the animated Flash-style cutscenes pack a unique impact. Telling of an airplane hijacking that has given hostages command over a presidential candidate, the story feels less epic than past Metal Gear infiltrations, but the themes of the series quickly rear up, and the way these animatics intercut with the 3D action in the opening scenes we were privy to in this early demo gave the game a style all its own that still felt right for the franchise.

Quote:And Metal Gear Ac!d is, well, kind of trippy. No pun intended. It
is, effectively, a Japanese graphic adventure game, with a card-
collecting flavor.

Quote:But Tim Rogers, who's a big fan of Japanese graphic adventure games (which can be very different from MI and even Snatcher, which is why your ignorant statement that "there's only ONE kind of graphic adventure is so laughable), has met Hideo Kojima on a number of occasions, and is in love with the Metal Gear series, says that Ac!d is "a Japanese graphic adventure game, with a card-
collecting flavor", and he knows a hell of a lot more about this subject than you, me, and all of IGN's staff put together. So pardon me if I don't put much stock into an ignorant fanboy's opinion on a game that he has never played that largely falls into a genre that he has never played. I'm talking about you, btw. In case you didn't get that.

Quote:which can be very different from MI and even Snatcher, which is why your ignorant statement that "there's only ONE kind of graphic adventure is so laughable),

A Black Falcon Wrote:Have you noticed yet that I haven't said he's wrong? No? Didn't think so... sigh...



I have played far more adventure games than you, of that I'm pretty sure. It isn't exactly a genre I don't know well. Sure, I haven't played Japanese-only interactive stories. Neither have you, I'm sure. But given how such games go in English, it's not hard to guess the general way such things would work... and a connection between Kojima and those makes sense because the MGS games are very heavy on the story and conversations... like an adventure game or an RPG (the two genres that are the most conversation-heavy, excepting the Myst-branch of graphic adventures of course), not an action game. Having that continue -- with changes, like the animated, somewhat cartoonish, cutscenes -- in this game makes perfect sense.




There is one subgenre (of the 'adventure' genre). It has many divisions: Graphical/text ones like King's Quest I or Hugo's House of Horrors, all-graphical ones like Maniac Mansion or Grim Fandango, ones with action elements like Full Throttle and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, logic puzzle-focused titles such as Myst and Riven, all menu-driven games like Snatcher... there are many subgenres with many differences (like how the Myst-style ones don't have much conversations, have no inventories, and usually tell their stories mostly through cutscenes and reading books in the game for backstory -- VERY different gameplay from Monkey Island, that's for sure!). But they all share common themes.