Lack of Love

This is a game I've been meaning to play for ages. It's an extremely unknown dreamcast game developed by Lovedelic, with music by Hollywood composer and synth-pop legend Ryuichi Sakamoto.
A few days ago I finally plugged in the dreamcast and played through it. But I'm not quite sure if it's absolutly brillaint or plain awful. The game is a kind of evolution adventure, kindof like Evo and Spore. You start off as a small squid-like creature and then gradually evolve into a large mammal. In order to evolve you need to befriend other creatures and collect their DNA. Each type of creature has a different way to befriend them, and you have to figure out how by observing their behaviour and experimenting, without any dialog or text. I really wish I had the patience to enjoy it but in the end I had to use a walkthrough for most of the game. A lot of times it just seems like you have to do random things or you have to watch the creatures for ages before they'll show you what they want; but when I did figure things out myself it felt really great.
Still the game is charming and definitely unique; it has a nice story and some great music, but it's very hard to play after having been spoiled by games that constantly tell you what to do

...

I haven't been very productive lately, but as the documets are signed and the money is invested to start the company I'm not feeling much motivation to continue working on my game. Also I still can't get over how brilliant the story in Shattered Memories is, so I've been playing through (or in some cases youtubing through) most of the old silent hill games. I was definatly right in thinking Shattered Memories is different from SH1, in fact it's very different from all the previous games, but I like it a lot more. I really recomend it to everyone, it's also available on PS2 and PSP; I don't know how good those versions are but the story ought to be the same, which is the important part.

Best name for a remake ever

I played though the new Silent Hill game today. The only memories I have from Silent Hill 1 are from a demo and from the movie though so there wasn't that much shattering going on, but I believe it has very little in common with the original or any other game in the series for that matter, though I've only really played SH2 before.

However I must say I really liked the game and the story was quite brilliant;
the ending left me speechless and after reading some forum discussions about it online I'm actually temped to play through it again for all the stuff I missed and didn't think about the first time. The ending really makes you re-evalute the whole story.

From a gameplay perspective it suffers from some usual problems in survival horror games though; namely that there isn't that much gameplay. However one thing that I really like is that they have dared remove the awful combat, instead youre just running from monster's occasionally. While I can't really say that the chase sequenses are that much better gameplay wise it's refreshing to see a game without a crappy combat system crammed in there; I can think of a handful of other series that really should cut the combat system (Prince of Persia for example).

It's a shame the game is getting so little hype. I'm not sure if Silent Hill puritans would like it, and most people probably doesn't even know it exists as the series has been on a steady decline ever since SH3, but personally I think it's just as good as Silent Hill 2, if not better.

Insomnia and late night gaming

I couldn't sleep and I have to go up at 6 am to catch a train to Stockholm tomorrow so I decided to stay up and then sleep on the train instead... we'll see how that goes.... Anyway I turned on the Wii and realized that Megaman 10 has been released in europe now. I guess the proper thing to do would be to make some remark about how Capcom are starting to milk the franchise again, but I find that I don't really mind. I'm not looking for any ground breaking innovation in a pseudo-NES game and I'm perfectly fine with getting a new Megaman every other year or so; they still feel more fresh than a lot of games trying to be ground breaking in today's market. I'm not enjoying it quite as much as MM9 though, but I can't really point to any specific reason, other than the music being slightly less awesome. Maybe I'm just not in the right mood; I am pretty tired and still not quite sober, so this might not be the ideal state to Megaman. I'll play it some more on wednesday; now it's almost time for me to head to the station. I'm temped to try and squeeze in an hour of sleep first but I'm not sure if I dare risk it

Ace Attorney Investigations

Ok I don't want to turn this into a regular gaming blog but I felt I needed to wright something about the awesomeness of the new Ace Attourney since I mentioned it in my Heavy Rain post. One of the biggest differences from the previous games is that they've switched to third person view in the investigation scenes, and the sprites are absolutly gorgeous. If there was anything that could make me love this series anymore it's a 16-colors, 80 pixels high sprite of Edgeworth pointing his finger.

Heavy Rain

There hasn't relly been much progress on my game lately unfourtunatly; mainly because I haven't been working very much, but also because stuff takes time.

Anyway, I played through Heavy Rain yesterday. There are a lot of nice things you could say about the game; the graphics are really nice, the story is intruiging, the production values are excellent and I definatly like the lack of aliens, zombies and superheroes. However, as a game it fails miserably; for the most part it can be described as watching a decent crime drama while someone is constantly pressing pause and hiding the remote... and sometimes beat you with it. The gameplay very heavy on quick time events (as well as not so quick events where you just have to do a weird button combo to move on) and when you're actually moving around freely the controls are just painful. As for the choices it's hard to know exactly how much you are actually affecting, there are a couple of branches in the storyline, but most of the stuff seems pretty isolated.

It has a couple of technical issues as well; I got three crashes during a single playthrough and when I tried replaying the last chapter to get a better ending the game won't load. Also the game isn't very kind to us SDTV enthusiasts; when you're making choices it's really hard to see the button icons that corresponds to the different alternatives so I had to guess a lot of the time.

Next I'll be playing Ace Attourney Investigations for a very different take on the Crime genre.

The adventures of Lolo

I finally got around to playing the first Lolo game for the NES today (another excellent excuse not to work on my game). It's been on my todo list for years as I've never really played any of them. It was actually a really fun puzzle puzzle game and a decent challenge towards the end; though parts of the ruleset felt a bit arbitrary and illogical at first, and the music is really annoying...