snap-judgment
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Snap Judgment: Infinite Space
When we review a game without finishing it, we call it a Snap Judgment. Read why here. Time played: 3 hours Portable games are often expected to be light, short-session experiences that you can jump into at any time, understand immediately, and play for minutes at a time. Infinite Space is not that at all. It is a deeply complex RPG with several interacting systems, all wrapped in a not-too-friendly interface. In fact, it's pretty much as baroque as you would expect a game about leading fleets of spaceships of your own design to be. %Gallery-22958%
Snap Judgment: Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver
I can't remember a single game release I ever anticipated more in my life than Pokémon Gold and Silver. By the time the game hit U.S. store shelves in 2000, I'd been rendered a shivering addict to versions Blue and Red for nearly two years. The promise of new pocket-sized monsters and new areas to explore thrilled me to the central of my very being -- and thankfully, the franchise's massive second generation did not disappoint. I'm a decade older now, and while I've retained most of my love for the franchise since my middle school career, I worried that the recently released remakes, HeartGold and SoulSilver, wouldn't have the same intoxicating properties as their source materials. Now that I've spent about eight hours in the game, I feel confident in reporting that these remakes possess the same gripping magic as the originals -- partially due to the infusion of new elements introduced in later generations of the series, and, surprisingly, due to the bundled Pokéwalker peripheral. %Gallery-65398%
Snap Judgment: The Secret Armory of General Knoxx
When we review a game without finishing it, we call it a Snap Judgment. Read why here. Time played: 4 hours I was in for a surprise as I set out for The Secret Armory of General Knoxx with a level 50 character, because as beefy as I thought my Siren was, she couldn't stand up to what was waiting for me at T-Bone Junction and beyond. Basically, I died. All of the time. I went from having around four million dollars in my bank account down to under a million before I even gained my first level in the DLC -- the hefty cost of respawning in the wilds of Pandora. And that's what made this whole thing so odd. The expansion -- which is intended to give you some more mileage out of your maxed-out characters by raising the level cap to 61 -- continues from the end of the Borderlands story, so playing it before finishing the game proper is not advised. I finished my second playthrough with a level 50 character, so to start this add-on and run into such a wall, such constantly merciless opposition, was pretty perplexing. %Gallery-84191%
Review: Assassin's Creed 2: Battle of Forli (DLC)
Initially scrapped from the main game due to time constraints, Battle of Forli seems like an acceptable casualty in Ubisoft's war to complete Assassin's Creed 2. Considering the grandeur of Ezio's quest, it's easy to see why this man got left behind -- or woman, rather. In a significant upgrade from her brief role as glorified gondola tutorial, Caterina Sforza assumes the role of leader and custodian of Forli, the drab, melancholy settlement that acted as a rest stop on the way to Venice in Assassin's Creed 2. Ezio's unacknowledged meddling with 15th-century history proves to be the biggest draw of this DLC subplot, even though most of his participation involves putting sharp things through soft spots.
Snap Judgment: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers
When we review a game without finishing it, we call it a Snap Judgment. Read why here. Time played: 10 hours Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers is a game with seemingly no built-in audience. There aren't any Final Fantasy fans, that I can imagine, who love the series but hate all that role-playing and complexity, and there's likely a very small portion of the fanbase that love the Crystal Chronicles universe, but hate multiplayer. Because of that, because of the current climate for third-party Wii games, and because of the sizeable budget and long development time that went into this project, Crystal Bearers is a bold experiment that's unlikely to be repeated. Which is a shame, because I've really enjoyed what I've played so far, and I feel like some small tweaks in a sequel could make a truly great game out of what is currently an interesting, flawed (and very, very strange) game.
Snap Judgment: Army of Two: The 40th Day (PSP)
As the world's most dyed-in-the-wool twin-stick shooter advocate, I found myself really wanting to fall in love with the PSP version of Army of Two: The 40th Day. My brief time with the handheld title at E3 filled me with unbridled hope -- on the surface, it's a decent-looking multiplayer action title that hearkened back to the good ol' days of Smash TV, while simultaneously mimicking the aggro mechanics of its home console brethren. That's a tall order to expect from such a little guy. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to test out how well the game worked in its ideal environment: With two players cooperatively tackling the campaign. Apparently, the likelihood of corralling two people with two PSPs and two copies of the game is about as low as corralling one unicorn. %Gallery-73575%
Snap Judgment: Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes
Having received my copy yesterday, I've only been able to put a few hours into Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes for DS. However, I can already tell that it's going to become an obsession, at the expense of things like other games and interacting with my family. Critter Crunch developer Capy has created an incredibly engrossing game that melds the best aspects of both strategy RPGs and puzzle games. %Gallery-63309%
Snap Judgment: Serious Sam HD
In Serious Sam, you use an increasingly powerful and ridiculous set of weaponry to blast an increasingly horrifying array of demons back to the dimension they came from. To put it another way, Serious Sam is what your grandmother imagines every video game to be. Serious Sam: The First Encounter has just been brought into the modern era by Majesco and Devolver Digital with Serious Sam HD, on Steam today with a $20 price tag. I stepped into the beefy hero's signature T-shirt for a couple of hours to see how well the experience had held up over the years. %Gallery-66818%
Snap Judgment: Dead Space Extraction
When we review a game without finishing it, we call it a Snap Judgment. Read why here. Time played: 3 hours I'm personally a big fan of on-rails shooters, a genre that I think rarely gets its due. I'm not all that big on exploration, and I'm lazy, so having someone else take the reigns for me is a welcome relief, allowing me to focus on the all-important business of murder. So it's quite a treat to see a game like Dead Space Extraction that strikes a blow for lazy guys everywhere by finding the strengths of the genre and running with them. %Gallery-49881%
Snap Judgment: Star Wars: Republic Squadron
Listen, we know that you've seen it on the shelves and been curious. Who can blame you? Not only does the Star Wars: Republic Squadron TV game look totally awesome, it also has motion controls! How can you beat that?Anyway, we've taken the bullet for you and are happy to present our video hands-on with the game, which wasn't nearly as bad as we assumed. Enjoy.
Snap Judgment: Battlefield 1943
It's not for lack of time that this Battlefield 1943 review has instead become a ... Snap Judgment! Actually, Snapped Judgment would be more applicable to my personal experience with this game over the past week. My first day was spent Googling various iterations of "EA connection problems" and scouring forum threads for solutions to why I couldn't get beyond the initial connection to the EA server (never mind a secondary game server). Logging into EA's website, my Gamertag was clearly linked to my EA account -- no problem there. Attempting to connect through several other EA games (which had worked fine in the past), though, revealed that my problem had become console-wide. After following several red herrings -- deleting, re-downloading, searching for the elusive FaceBreaker demo -- I did finally succeed at connecting to the EA server and thereby gained "permission" to attempt to connect to a Battlefield match. Guess how? %Gallery-63331%
Snap Judgment: Treasure World (DS)
Treasure World is such an innovative, potentially important game that I felt like it needed to be highlighted with a review, if only to get the word out about one of the most clever ideas to hit the DS (a system overrun with clever ideas). However, time constraints and Wi-Fi issues prevented me from obtaining what I would consider an exhaustive enough experience for an authoritative review. Hence, Snap Judgment.%Gallery-67057%
Snap Judgment: Overlord 2
With limited time in the day to review all the games we want to tell you about, some have a habit of falling through the cracks before we've been able to get our thoughts onto the site. In the hopes of remedying that, we've created a new feature we're calling Snap Judgment. Here's the gist: We'll play enough of the game to get the lay of the land -- what we liked, what we didn't, etc. -- and then pass our opinions on to you. It's not a full "review" in the traditional sense, but we're hoping you'll scroll away just a bit more informed.So, shall we?%Gallery-48075%
