Dharma Bum

[ Mood: Angry ]
Kameo
This was a fun children’s game that suffered from poorly implemented controls. It was originally a GameCube title, but moved to the X-Box when its developer was bought by Microsoft, and then bumped again to become a launch title for the X-Box 360. It can be completed in about a day, and the story is not very strong, but the character design alone has been enough to inspire talks to make this game into a feature film. You spend most of your time looking up the skirt of a sprite named Kameo, the adopted daughter of a legendary conjurer. Kameo’s mission lies mainly in seeking to free her royal family members from your traitorous sister.

Her underwear is green.

Along the way, you must fend off armies of sieging trolls and gather creatures that you can transform into. There are ten in all, and each one does have a unique look and numerous abilities. None of them are useless, and the level design is simple enough that an eight year old can master the game, which is perfect, considering the demographic. Not my kind of game, but its great way to get a little girl to sit down and shut up for a few days.

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
If your idea of a good time is getting ruthlessly torn into quarters by an angry mob, this is the game for you. The story makes no sense, the camera work is confusing, the targeting system is tedious, and it hits every branch on the stupid videogame cliche on its way into crashing into the ground. Reviewers have praised the game for its impressive smoke graphics and realistic blinding snow. Whats impressive about not being able to see anything?

Actual screenshot of Lost Planet.

And there’s a part in the game that doesn’t make sense to me… Like it was taken out of a horrible 1980s art film… The main character of the game, a white man named Wayne who looks Japanese, has some sort of flashback of his dying father’s last words. He was not there to witness his father’s demise, but somehow he knows exactly what happened. Its not explained if this is a telekenitic link, a video recording, or an assumption, but here’s this blood covered old man, crawling on his hands and knees towards us, begging for his son to complete his mission. He reaches out to us, and wipes some blood on the camera. What the Hell? Why the crap is there a camera in this telekinetic flashback?

In short, yet again, Capcom fails to localize a Japanese game for an American audience.

Blazing Angels
Yet ANOTHER World War II game! Kinda fun at first, but the game doesn’t explain its controls very often, and you’re often left guessing at what to do next. The camera is poor and the gameplay is fast, just like real war. And oh, yeah, once again, it rapes history.