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Best of 2008 - #5 The World Ends With You (NDS)

Let me start saying this is one unorthodox game: you collect pins that gives use special abilities, the brands you wear determine your strengths/weaknesses, there are fashion trends that you can influence to your benefit, battles occur in realtime on both screens at the same time. If all these hasn't scared you away, you have one hell of a game awaiting you. In TWEWY you play as Neku and a couple of other characters who must defeat the "noise" in Shibuya. The noise are enemies that feed from the bad emotions from the world. And let's just leave it there, the story is actually quite complex and it is not worth revealing too much at this point. The important thing is that you are Neku, you collect pins and you battle monsters. The music in this game is fantastic, if you enjoy j-pop. If you never heard this genre but are open minded, this game might help you discover a whole new musical world.
This is one of the best RPGs I've played in a long time and definitvely one of the best games on the Nintendo DS. It is not a game for everybody, but if you can overcome its quirks and surrender to its weird charm, you'll have a blast battling noise in Shibuya.

Best of 2008 - #6 Super Smash Brothers Brawl (Wii)

I don't think there's much to say about Brawl that hasn't been said before.. It is a game that was unveiled daily by a blog and left almost nothing to surprise, a fighter filled with Nintendo fan service and it even includes a "story/platforming" mode that features all the characters. If you have a Wii and you are a hardcore Nintendo fan, you must own this game.

Best of 2008 - #7 Pxeljunk Eden (PSN)

I've already talked about this game on this post, and I still find it hard to describe. PixelJunk Eden is an amazing platform, like nothing I've played before. All I can do is recommend you to have a look in YouTube to see how amazing this game is.

Best of 2008 - #8 Dead Space (PS3)

Dead Space will remind you of many games: Resident Evil, Half Life, Resistance and list will continue depending on what other games you've played.
You control Isaac Clarke, an engineer member of a spaceship responding to a distress call sent by the USG Ishimura, a massive mining ship (it actually cuts giant chunks of planets to extract its minerals)
Of course, when Isaac and the crew arrive to the Ishimura, they are welcomed by a series of horrible ailen-like monsters that they must defeat.
Where the game shines is in its presentation, the first thing you will notice is that there's no hud. All the information you need will be displayed on Isaac's suit (Energy) and on each one of the guns (Ammo). All the cutscenes are either displayed via the suit's holographic projector or in game as you encounter different characters in the Ishimura. You also collect diferent logs along the game (audio, video and text) which add so much to the game making the experience richer. Even the "weapons" are actually tools that have other pusposes than "killing the monsters". All of them (including your suit) can be upgraded using "Power Nodes", which add an extra level of strategy deciding how are you going to spend them.
The atmosphere is amazing as well: flickering lights, far away noises, dark corridors make this game very scary.
With all these said, I can't recommend this game enough.

Best of 2008 - #9 Fallout 3 (PS3)

I must confess that I've only flirted around with the series in the past and I've never sat down a played any of the previous games before. I haven't played Oblivion either, which is the engine used on Fallout 3. I'm not even a fan of western RPGs, so the fact that I've even tried this game is a huge thing for me.
The second confession I have to make is that I've played less that 10 hours of the game and I've just scratched the surface of what this virtual world has to offer, but I've been so impressed so far that I thought it deserved a spot on the top 10.
I'm not going to make any judgements on the game right now, but if you are considering whether you should play this game or not, remember what I said on this post and get it for your platform of choice.

Best of 2008 - #10 Mirror's Edge (PS3)

There's a saying in the hardcore videogame world: "first person platforming doesn't work". I must say that considering how many times I've complained about jumping in FPSs, this is somewhat true. The difference in Mirror's Edge is that it is not an FPS and it has been designed around the "parkour" mechanic.
The game follows the story of Faith, a "runner" that is investigating a murder blamed on her sister. She navigates through the rooftops, sewers, subway tunnels and other places around the city using different parkour techniques. Controls are unusual but work pretty well: one of the triggers is "Jump/pull up/climb up" and another one is "slide/crouch". As I said before, this is not an FPS. And even though you can disarm enemies and use their guns ths is not recommended. As you use you need your arms to jump/climb around the levels, so having a gun actually cripples you and limits your movements. There's even a trophy for finishing the game without shooting, which is not impossible because I've done it. There's also a "Portal" element to the game. In some situations you'll be in a room trying to figure out how to get out of it, which turns the game into a more puzzle-like one.
The most tedious part of Mirro's Edge is re-trying sections of the levels when you die. You might find yourselft re-playing 10 to 30 seconds of the game trying to succeed at a jump or escape from the enemies. This can become super tedious, but once you pull off that massive jump, you feel overpowered and want to keep playing. This is where the game succeeds: making you feel badass jumping from point a to point b, disarming a couple of enemies and making a massive jump between 2 building.
Without much more to say than how good it looks and sounds, give this game a try because it's 10 hours of awesome that you won't regret. And if you like it enough, you can always play the different time attack modes.

The Nintendo DSi

I'll be very brief about the DSi. I'm not interested a bit about it until there are some games that use the new features of the portable or are online only.
I'm not interested in any of the features (music player, camera, sd card slot) unless there's software that can take advantage of them.

Nintendo DS +? 2? Next? Why?

Nikkei is reporting that a new DS, with bigger screen, media playback and a camera will be released in Japan this year. As a technophile, I'm curious about this new gadget but... why announce it now?
The DS is incredibly successful, and even though the sales in Japan are lower than previous year, Nintendo keeps pumping the portable into that market week after week in spite of its huge installed base.
Maybe Nintendo can see that the saturation point is looming and the PSP has seen a surge in sales thanks to games like Monster Hunter. Maybe it is a reaction of the success of Apple's App Store and the iphone.
Even if it comes out to light that all of the above is true, I'm sure that Nintendo will find a way to make it very successful, very cheap to produce and very accessible to the "non-gamers".

update: what if this came out on the same day of Nintendogs 2? Then it would be a whole different story...

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

When this game was first announced, I was quite skeptical: a Level 5 adventure game, for the Nintendo DS that looks like an European cartoon sounded too amazing and risky at the same time to end up being a good game.
I should have never doubted from Level 5, Layton is an incredible game. It literally grabbed me from the first half hour when the main characters, Layton and his apprentice Luke, head to St. Mystere to find the Golden Apple. Even before getting to the village, the first puzzle gives you a taste of what's ahead. And be prepared, because there are over 100 of them.
Layton and Luke will encounter plenty of mysteries that they must solve by talking to the town's inhabitants, which will only cooperate if you solve riddles and brain teasers. There's a wide variety of  puzzles: math, logic, tongue twisters and some of them make no sense.

The animated cutscenes look great, and they are fully voice acted! That's someting that Nintendo owners are not used to! Thought it seems that all the budget went on the cutscenes and the voice actors, because the music gets repetitive quite fast.

If I had to complain about anything, it'd have to be that some of the puzzles follow absolutely no logic and I had to have a look at some FAQs to find the answer. I don't really mind if my mind has been so dumbed down by TV and computer games that I cannot solve a simple math puzzle. But when the answer is something completely random, I feel that the developer is not being fair with the player.

When I started the game I thought: "Wow, this game is like brain training, but fun! Every kid should play this!" but as the game progressed, I started to believe that this game was actually conceived for somebody like me. The puzzles can get really hard and I believe kids won't be able to solve them. Also some of the plots of the story are a bit dark, which are more suitable for more mature audiences.

At the end of the day, if you like adventure games and puzzles, you will love Layton. It is very hard to resist its charm and the as the story unfolds, it is inevitable to start caring about the characters. The ending is great, loved it and left me wanting for more. Thanks God there's a "Professor Layton and Pandora's box" in the pipeline :)

What have I been playing: the soul still burns in the garden of Eden

Those who know me have heard that I've declared August the ultimate gaming month. These first 4 days have been awesome:

Soul Calibur IV:I am a big Soul Calibur fan. The Dreamcast disc was so scractched from playing it over and over and over that everytime we played it with my friends, we were begging it would work.

Soul Calibur 2 brought us Link and what I consider the best "adventure" mode in a fighting game: Weapon Master mode. I didn't play this as much as the DC one, I didn't have a place to get together with friends and play. I think it was in this edition where my Cervantes became my favourite character, specially because I was playing mostly 1 player it forced me to learns most of his moves, combos and techniques.

Along came Soul Calibur 3... and I didn't have a PS2 at that time, it never had an Arcade version, many people believed gameplay was unbalanced, those are enough reasons why I never tried this one.

Which brings us to number 4. I know I've only played it for four days, but I really like this game. Graphics are great (boobs engine aside), music is great, gameplay is as good as I remember, custom characters are fun, online is surprisingly good... what more could I ask? I suspect that Namco will find a why to try to screw western players with DLC (e.g. pay to unlock things that are already in the disc). Shouldn't you have learnt the lesson with Katamari and Ridge Racer Namco? If  Yoda is on my PS3 game and I just need to download the "key" to unlock it, many people will be pissed.

PixelJunk Eden: I will set things straight from the beggining: this is a game about collecting pollen. No, there are no bees involved, but there are seeds, gardens and a "a tiny, silk-spinning ‘grimp'". I think that if I had to classify this game I'd put it under "platformer". There's lots of jumping, grabbing from plants and sprouts, enemies to destroy and secret paths to discover. But what sets this game aside are the graphics and the music: subtle, always evolving techno music combines with brush painted like plants that grow and change as you collect more polen. Did I say I love this game? On top of everything, it supports trophies! Check this video out to get a better idea of what I'm talking about

Space invaders extreme: I'd love to talk about this game, but I bought it and guess what: oh surprise, my PSP has no batteries. So stay tuned for comments on that game.