Chezni – Page 8 – Please Insert CD

Thief Gold

Well, the title pretty much sums it up. Occupation followed by desired acquisition.

Thief, conceptually is a simple game. Load level, steal stuff, get out. For the time period that this game came out, it made a lot of thief tools available to you that not every stealth game (not that there were an abundant of them) was necessarily providing at the time. You can avoid bloody messes by knocking people out. You can drag bodies to hide them. You can walk on soft surfaces to hide your footsteps. You can hide in the shadows. If being a thief is your role-playing thing, then this game is completely tailored to providing you that experience.

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Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior

by Chezni

Uh… what?

As you might have read, I enjoyed the Shadow Warrior remake, rating it at Tier 1. This is a freebie game that came along with the purchase of Shadow Warrior. Calling it a game is generous. It’s more of a punchline. The punchline you ask? Well, the entire game is you, playing as a janitor, where you have to clean up to the mess left behind by Lo Wang.

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Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure

by Chezni

Drrrriiiillllllllssssss…. *ahem* I’m sorry. What I meant to say was… Driiiiiiiiiiilllllllllllllllssss

Did you ever wish you were a kid again? You know, the whole “adults are boring, there are no kids to play with so I’m going to invent my own adventure” part of being a kid? Well that’s Gurumin and it’s done so well. You play as Parin, a young girl who moved in with her grandfather for the summer. The town her grandfather lives in is a miner’s town so with no kids at all to play with, Parin quickly finds herself bored out of her mind… that is, until she bumps into a monster.

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Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight

by Chezni

And they laughed when I said we should be weaponizing maple leaves. Well, we’ll see who has the last laugh now…

A while back I played Inexistence and rated it at Tier 2, saying that it was a moderately fun Castlevania clone. Momodora is Inexistence on steroids. …but pleasant, soulful steroids. Actually, to compare it to Inexistence does the game a great disservice–Inexistence drew many of its strengths by parodying or copying mechanics from popular games of the SNES era, largely Castlevania. Momodora on the other hand, just happens to be a game in the same in the same genre as Castelvania and instead of copying other games, merely draws inspiration from them. In truth, it is completely its own game, with its own characters, setting, plot and story.

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NEStalgia

by Chezni

At some point in life, you just have to let go.

This project of Lepcis and I’s have brought me a different perspective on the value of nostalgia. If you’re not having fun doing it, then don’t do it. It’s pretty much that simple. 7 months ago, before we started doing this, my plan was to play every single game I could get my hands on–even if it was trash or if I was miserable while playing it. I wanted an encyclopedic knowledge in my databanks of “game” and wouldn’t be satisfied until it was completely filled. Now, I’m not saying that I will never play and finish a sub-par game again. After all, I still really want to finish Wizardry 6, a Tier 3 game in my mind, so that I can import my characters into Wizardry 7, a Tier 1 game. I think the difference is perspective and obsession. My perspective shows me that something that isn’t fun and is poorly made does not intrinsically have value just because it is a game. If I choose to play it, it will be just that–a choice–not a result compelled by my obsession to play all games.

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Super Meat Boy

by Chezni

Wow, we are really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

Look, I don’t care what you’ve heard, this is not a good game. I only have it because it was packaged along with some humble bundle or another. I have no idea why this ever became popular. You play as a cube of meat. You jump. You jump on walls. There are cinematics where you poop on people. The butt of many-a-joke is that your girlfriend gets beat up. Amazing. That about sums up this Tier 4 mess.

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Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth3 V Generation

by Chezni

Errrgh…

I think they may have been trying a bit harder in this one. Maybe. There a few small changes in combat that imply design. SP now starts at 0 and regenerates through combat which means you can’t open up with your strongest moves right off the bat. Menus have been cleaned up a bit to provide slightly more tactical data. The opening to this game was actually… kind of funny. It showed a near identical scene of the 4 goddesses fighting each other from one, but then it cuts to reveal that it was actually just the four goddesses playing a video game. Then again…

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Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 2 Sisters Generation

by Chezni

Yes, I believe I can just quote Yhatzee on this one. *ahem* “Bosoms, melons, milk factories, busts, funbags, knockers, ballistics, boobies, jugs, nipples, jubblies, STONKING GREAT TITS!”

This is the part of the article where I tell some anecdote. Sometimes it’s interesting. Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes it’s like 90% of the episodes of Inuyasha and just exists to take up space before getting to the point. This time I’ll just give it to you straight; a while back I played a game called Fairy Fencer F. I really liked it and it restored my faith in the JRPG genre. It had just the right amount of anime, relationship simulation, fan service and interesting-yet-gratuitous mechanics that had me yearning for more when I finished. That’s when I found out that Compile Heart had made a whole slew of games under the Neptunia franchise. Excitedly, I purchased a few and dove into Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 1. It was not good.

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E.T. Armies

by Chezni

Ah yes, *ahem* waiter! Yes, I’d like a main dish prematurity of with a heaping side of pretentiousness please!

My wife worked for a brief time on a rather unstable game team lead by a self-bloated egotistical idiot. His game was going to be the game to end all games, the alpha and the omega. It was going to have the relationship structure of the Persona series but it was also going to be an intense top-down bullet hell, but it was also going to be a game where time passed on a calendar but it was also going to be…

Needless to say, she and most of her workers quit that team rather quickly.

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Penumbra: Requiem

by Chezni

Haha… well, played in completely the wrong order by me, I finally get the conclusion of the Penumbra series in the form of…

–Spoiler Alert–

I’m going to be referencing the key plots of this and the other two Penumbra games throughout this article, so if you want a chance to play them spoiler free, stop reading here.

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