Heidi Kemps

Reviews By Heidi Kemps

Pandora's Tower review: Chained blades

It's hard to say for certain what a platform's last game will be, but it's pretty easy to guess what a platform's last noteworthy release will be. I'm sure the endless parade of impulse-buy, waggletastic Wii shovelware will continue to trickle out for a while yet, but the last significant Wii release for North America looks to be Pandora's Tower. As the last of the three Operation Rainfall games brought over from Europe (via Japan), it was bound to garner plenty of attention, regardless of its quality. The good news is that Pandora's Tower deserves it.%Gallery-187276%

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Harmoknight review: Out of step

I love Game Freak. The studio's rise from being Satoshi Tajiri's one-man doujin strategy guide production house to creating Pokémon, a franchise beloved the world over, is both incredible and inspiring. But Pokémon's success also came with a cost. Before addicting a generation to pocket monsters, Game Freak made games of all different genres across multiple platforms – the awesome action/puzzler Mendel Palace for the NES, Jelly Boy and its sequel on SNES, and my personal favorite, Pulseman – a Mega Drive title I rank among the best 16-bit platformers ever made. Since Pokémon took Japan by storm in 1995, however, Game Freak has devoted the vast majority of its resources to making more critters for us to catch. It's only made three non-Pokémon games since, most recently 2005's distressingly overlooked Drill Dozer on GBA. Now, 8 years after Drill Dozer, we've finally got another new and original Game Freak IP in Harmoknight. As a longtime fan of the developer – and someone very hungry for something new – I was eager to get my hands on this one. %Gallery-184909%

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Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien review: Running down a dream

If you asked me in person for my opinion of Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, I'd probably just respond with a string of rambling praise, eager to explain the game to you and enthusiastically answer any questions you might have. In fact, every attempt to write this review so far has resulted in just such an imaginary conversation in my head.So, I'm just going to go with it. Without further ado, here's my attempt to explain the radness of Runner 2 to a fictional, random gamer.%Gallery-173614%

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A loose cannon snaps into place in Lego City Undercover

With the delay of Rayman Legends, you might be thinking that the Wii U gamescape is looking rather bleak until much later this year. As it turns out, though, there's a crafty little ... well, actually a crafty big open-world game hitting next month that, true to its title, might have avoided your attention until now.Lego City Undercover is the latest in the ever-growing line of Lego-themed games by the "TT Fusion" division of UK developer TT Games. Despite not really registering on the radars of the "hardcore" crowd, the Lego games have been hugely popular, selling many millions of copies the world over. Undercover is different from previous games based around the brand in a few key respects, however.%Gallery-178698%

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Everything old is new and weird again in the Deadly Premonition: Director's Cut

Deadly Premonition's release history has been strange: In the United States and Europe, the game launched as an exclusive to the Xbox 360, while Japan received the game as a limited PlayStation 3-only release (albeit under the name "Red Seeds Profile"). Two years after its initial launch, Deadly Premonition's cult status has earned it a 'Director's Cut' release, exclusively planned for release in multiple regions worldwide on the PS3.Aside from bringing the game to Sony loyalists outside of Japan, the Director's Cut also introduces more than a few overhauls to the original, along with stereoscopic 3D and PlayStation Move support, making this visit to Deadly Premonition's 'Greenvale' worthwhile to tourists and citizens alike.%Gallery-178696%

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The multiplayer Scarescraper of Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon

It was rather disappointing when Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon was delayed out of last year into the increasingly crowded early 2013 timeframe, but if there's any company that wants its headline products to be top-notch, it's Nintendo. (After all, it was Miyamoto who uttered the now-famous "A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is forever bad" quote.) Plus, every time I've had a chance with some hands-on with the game, I've come away more and more impressed with how much it builds on the concepts of the original GameCube game. Now there's a brand-new multiplayer element in the mix, and it's not what you might expect.The multiplayer mode is separate from the single-player campaign, and supports up to four players either locally or online. (Players without the game can also join in with limited-function download play.) Rather than retreading the Luigi's Mansion inspired minigame in Nintendo Land, the Dark Moon multiplayer mode has more in common with a roguelike than the simple hide-and-seek of Nintendo Land's adaptation.%Gallery-177167%

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Magical Drop 5 review: Magical Mess

I'd imagine that most people would pick something like Resident Evil 6, or Assassin's Creed 3, or the original ending of Mass Effect 3 as their biggest gaming disappointment of 2012. But as a testament to my oddball taste in gaming, I'd list my biggest disappointment as Magical Drop 5. I've been a fan of this weird, underappreciated little puzzle series for many years, and I have been eagerly awaiting the latest sequel since it was revealed at E3 2011. The reason I'm disappointed isn't because Magical Drop 5 is inherently a bad game, but rather because it's an unfinished one.The fact that this was released in 2012 and I'm only reviewing it now isn't due to laziness on my part. Developer Golgoth promised a major patch to fix many of the game's issues since its release and, in good faith, I decided to wait until the patch hit before I wrote my review. But as said patch saw delay after delay, I began having a difficult time justifying my decision. "But Golgoth is a small developer," I said to myself. "You know how rough game development is, so cut them some slack." Besides, I was familiar with the myriad issues the game encountered simply being released at all.Approaching two months after the game's release, MD5 is still riddled with online play bugs and missing some features. At this point, I think I've been patient enough.%Gallery-175748%

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Sports

Sports By Heidi Kemps

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed review: Morphenomenal

Kart racing games rank perhaps a notch above licensed cartoon platformers in the category of "assumed quality at first glance" – which is to say they don't rank highly at all. The only kart racer that a "serious" gamer will even give the time of day is the stalwart Mario Kart, and even that series has offered up some recent disappointments: Mario Kart Wii was utterly blasé, and Mario Kart 7, as fun as it is, squandered promising chances to deliver some much-needed retooling to the formula.With such low expectations, it's much too easy to write off Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed as a cynical cash-in featuring a past-his-prime mascot. But I'm here to deliver an important message: if you do that, you will be depriving yourselves of what might be the best racer of its kind to come along in years, and that's no exaggeration.%Gallery-162455%

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Orgarhythm review: Laying down godlike beats

If it's possible to have a favorite "type" of game – not genre, mind you, but favorite "type" – I'd have to say that the games I love most are "ambitious but imperfect." These are games that try to do intriguing, daring things: meld genres together, build themselves around an interesting theme, tell a story in an unconventional manner. Often they run into more than a few technical and design hiccups, perhaps because the developers' ambitions outstripped their team's capability to realize them. But in spite of their flaws, there's something secretly awesome about them that makes wrestling with all their foibles worth it.Having read all that, you've probably already guessed that Orgarhythm falls into this category. It's a bizarre mix of god-sim, rhythm game, and RTS that mostly – mostly – works. When it shines brightest, it's a fabulous and unique experience.%Gallery-169120%

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Delver's Drop makes a promising first impression

One of the awesome things about indie gaming expos is the ability to interact directly with the developers. When most games are previewed at events, you'll be walked through a carefully selected segment of game that showcases a few key setpieces by a trained PR expert, then - if you're lucky - you'll get to ask one of the developers 10 minutes of carefully worded questions that they may or may not be able to actually answer.When it's indie stuff, however, things are very different. The person walking you through the demo and introducing all of the game's concepts to you will, more likely than not, be one of the people most directly involved in the game's creation. Every one of these demo sessions, along with seeing your reactions and hearing your feedback, means something to them personally. My time meeting with the team at Pixelscopic and playing a very early prototype of its first fully indepedent game, Delver's Drop, was a reminder of just how refreshing interactions with indie game developers can feel.The game immediately caught my eye as I wandered the PAX Prime indie megabooth. A traditionally styled, top-down action RPG was fairly unusual given the more esoteric and experimental subject matter most indie titles tend to embrace. It was obvious that the game was still very early, but already I could see the spark of something potentially awesome to be.

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Dokuro review: The Mr. Skullhead Show

Let's talk about puzzle games. When you hear the term, your mind usually goes to falling-block stuff like Tetris and Puyo Puyo, right? But it's broad terminology: it can also apply to games in which you are presented with a series of problems that need solving – say, escaping a room, moving objects into certain positions, solving riddles ... you know what I mean, right?Well, I have an issue with these games: I'm almost universally terrible at them. I can't really tell you why, either. I like most of the ones I play, mind you. But as soon as I start feeling that twinge of frustration from a solution that eludes me, I hop on the internet and turn on Youtube. If I don't, I'm just going to fluster myself trying to figure it out. By the time the game reaches its climax, I have a controller under one hand and my laptop under the other, checking to make sure I'm doing everything right.This is one of the reasons why GungHo and GameArts's Dokuro sticks out so much. For perhaps the first time since the original Portal, I'm not immediately running to the online solution bin the moment things start to get tricky. I'm savoring the feeling of gradually figuring things out for myself, discovering how mechanics work together and deducing how they can be used to accomplish the task at hand, and I'm loving it.%Gallery-168492%

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New Little King's Story review: All the King's swordsmen, farmers, chefs, TV broadcasters...

The original Little King's Story on Wii is a game I greatly regret not finding the time to play. It was the sort of niche Japanese title that I gravitate towards: a unique mix of ideas with a cute visual style and distinct humor. While I heard lots of good things, circumstances conspired to the point that Little King's Story was relegated to the ever-growing Pile of Shame alongside several other non-work titles I wanted to play. When it was announced that New Little King's Story would be coming to the PS Vita in portable form, I made a vow to myself that I'd not miss this opportunity to try the series out. I wasn't too worried that I'd miss anything by being unfamiliar with the original. After all, a game should be able to stand up on its own merits, right?You begin New Little King's Story as Corobo, a young ruler who has been forced to flee his castle by an overwhelming surprise attack by mysterious forces. He escapes with only a few trusted aides by his side, and is forced to take up residence far from his land and regroup for a counterattack. That isn't an easy task: the area he governs in exile is a shantytown filled with a handful of slackers and eccentrics. It's up to you to aid Corobo to rebuild his kingdom, save the princesses held hostage, and defeat the demon army – with the help of your makeshift citizen army.%Gallery-157372%

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Rainbow Moon review: A real grind

Playing the PSN exclusive Rainbow Moon evokes an unusual sort of frustration: it's a victim of wasted potential. This kind of game does a lot of things right, features some neat ideas and fun play elements, but is crippled by one or two major problems – problems so significant that they drag the rest of the product down. All it would take are a couple of fixes to make a great game instead of a merely passable one but, alas, you're stuck with a product that, for everything it does right, is damaged by very obvious flaws.In Rainbow Moon's case, the novel idea is to blend two distinct types of role-playing game into a unique experience. Exploration is done in the overhead, isometric perspective of classic dungeon-crawlers, and both the overworld and the puzzle-filled labyrinths you'll wind up spelunking are littered with copious amounts of loot and roaming beasties out for your blood. Touch one of the monsters on the map, however, and you'll be spirited off to a new playfield: a miniature version of the grid-based arenas so common in strategy-RPGs like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics.%Gallery-158468%

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Deja Review: Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention

We're of the firm opinion that your time is too precious, too valuable to be spent reading a full review for a game that was already reviewed many, many years ago. What's the point of applying a score to a game that's old enough to be enrolled in the sixth grade? That's why we invented Deja Review: A quick look at the new features and relative agelessness of remade, revived and re-released games. Disgaea is a series that just seems to work better in portable form. The series' approach to character building – in which you can basically raise levels to stratospheric proportions with time, effort, and the best power-leveling locales – is more suited to on-the-go play. It's a lot easier to make your way through the randomly generated Item Worlds to level up your gear in thirty-minute commute blocks, putting your system to sleep as needed, than it is to devote hours to a single grind session squatting in front of a TV.It's for this reason that I tend to invest far more time in the portable versions of Disgaea than their console counterparts. I'll generally put down the console editions once I've cleared the main story, but I'll invest an absurd amount of time in the portable editions to scout out many of their extras, simply because the format makes them more easily digestible. The number of hours played on my Disgaea 2 PSP save have long since passed the triple digits.Now, we've got Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention on the Vita. I've always felt that D3 was the weakest of the series in terms of both gameplay and its story and characters. That doesn't mean it's bad, just not as good as some of the other installments. I had hoped that playing it in my preferred format would change my mind, but, unfortunately, it didn't. It's still my least favorite Disgaea game. However, it's still a very good portable strategy game with several noteworthy new additions.

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Xenoblade Chronicles review: A cut above

I'll confess, I wasn't terribly excited for Xenoblade Chronicles at first. My experience with other "Xeno" titles (Xenogears, Xenosaga) could perhaps best be described as contemptuous. To me, those titles paraded the worst elements of Japanese role-playing games in front of a spotlight, gleefully showcasing the genre's biggest flaws to the world for excruciatingly painful stretches. Going into the nitty-gritty of why I find those games awful is another article entirely, but suffice it to say that another Xeno-game wasn't exactly high on my want-to-play list -- until I started hearing nothing but praise for Xenoblade from like-minded JRPG genre fans. Imagine my surprise at popping the disc into my Wii to discover a game nothing like Xenos past -- a game that, instead of stubbornly shoving the worst parts of JRPGs in your face, makes substantial advancements to the genre.%Gallery-152491%

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Gaming

Gaming By Heidi Kemps

Portabliss: Chaos Rings 2 (iOS)

Did you know that you can download handheld games now? That's amazingly convenient! The only inconvenient part of it is finding the right games to buy -- and that's where we come in, with our Portabliss column. In each installment, we'll tell you about a downloadable game on the iPhone, iPad, Android device, DSi, 3DS, PSP, etc. Today: Chaos Rings 2. During GDC this year, Cave Vice-President Mikio Watanabe implored smartphone and tablet game developers to price their products appropriately: a high-quality game should come with a higher pricetag. Square Enix's Chaos Rings 2 certainly follows Watanabe's advice.At $18 on iPhone and $20 on iPad, it's among the higher-priced big-name iOS releases. But that old adage of "getting what you pay for" applies, too, as Chaos Rings II is a superb RPG that easily justifies its premium pricetag.%Gallery-151691%

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Apps

Apps By Heidi Kemps

Cave's Watanabe on the benefits of premium app pricing

Conventional wisdom says that expensive iOS and Android games don't sell, but in a speech at GDC, Mikio Watanabe, COO of shmup developer Cave, frankly stated the exact opposite. In a presentation entitled "Japanese Retro and Social Games on Smartphones," Watanabe gave advice to developers looking to port their companies' legacy IPs to the rapidly blossoming smartphone and tablet markets.His advice? For starters, keep the games running at a good clip instead of focusing too much on graphical clarity. "When games are running quickly, the human eye misses tiny imperfections in the visuals," he noted, encouraging developers to try to shoot for an average of 50 FPS or better. To increase the profitability, he encouraged developers to include unique and interesting DLC to spur in-app purchases.

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Gaming

Gaming By Heidi Kemps

Yasuhiro Wada waxes nostalgic about Harvest Moon

Yasuhiro Wada has been engaged in the games industry for over 20 years, but lately he's been more into management than actual game production. With the formation of Toybox Inc, however, he joins the ranks of Japanese developers like Yuji Naka and Keiji Inafune – developers who left top management positions at major companies to pursue more active creative roles at smaller startups. While his name might not be the biggest in the biz, he's responsible for one of the most quietly influential games in the industry: Bokujou Monogatari, known outside of Japan as Harvest Moon.Wada grew up in the countryside, where he dreamed of eventually making his way to the big city. When he finally did get to Tokyo, however, he learned that there are some elements to good ol' country living that deserve appreciation. It was this experience that served as the inspiration for a game idea: A non-combative game that conveyed the simple pleasures of country life. It wasn't an easy pitch, and Wada had to build rapport at his company first with a portfolio of small successes. It took about 2 years to build both the record and the budget necessary to propose Harvest Moon to his higher-ups, but his patience paid off in both development and marketing experience.[Image: GameFAQS]

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