From the 1-Up article,

“While working on Diablo III we’ve been called out for messing around with systems too much, that the game is good as-is and we should just release it,” Wilson wrote. “I think that’s a fair argument to make, but I also think it’s incorrect. Our job isn’t just to put out a game, it’s to release the next Diablo game. No one will remember if the game is late, only if it’s great. We trust in our ability to put out a great game, but we’re not quite there yet. In addition to finishing and polishing the content of the game we’re continuing to iterate on some of the core game systems.”

I’m skeptical about this position. Diablo III was first announced all of the way back in 2008, and at that point it already looked like near-beta quality. The game currently is in beta, in fact, and still they’re planning to make these major changes. It’s admirable that they want the launch to go as smoothly as possible, but the scope of the changes they’re talking about sounds, on its face, counter-productive.

There’s another way of looking at this, which is the way that I feel is perhaps most accurate: the “real” Diablo III is a game that was never shipped (it should have shipped in 2010) and which was only glimpsed in the public beta. The game that Blizzard is now working on is Diablo IV, some version of which will be released under the title of “Diablo III.” I realize that it’s foolish to question the unassailable wisdom of Blizzard, but that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Hitbox has been pretty good for me so far. I find it easier to execute special moves and some combos on Hitbox than with a conventional arcade stick. Doing so under pressure is a different story, but I think that once I develop the proper muscle memory, Hitbox could be a very powerful tool. Movement takes some getting used to; I still have a tendency to mix-up the crouch and jump buttons, especially under pressure. That’s by far the biggest hurdle facing me at the moment.

The stick is very nicely constructed, although I do have a few minor gripes: the cover is cracked in the bottom-right corner, which I’ve been told is a common fault with these sticks due to how they’re assembled. Also the start button(s) on the top edge are not sunken into the case, so it’s easy to brush up against them accidentally (perhaps with your pant leg or some such) and trigger them, causing an instant disqualification according to typical tournament rules. (I don’t see myself enrolling in a tournament any time soon anyway.) Finally, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to disassemble the stick, whether to do repairs or to install custom face art.

The pros definitely outweigh the cons, however. The button layout is both pleasantly ergonomic and accommodates a number of different hand placements for varying control layouts. It’s a very compact unit–easy to store–but also with some heft to it so it won’t slide around in your lap. I could see this arcade stick working well for games other than fighting games, such as shmpus or rhythm games; it would be a lot of fun to design a game specifically to be played on the Hitbox.

I’m probably going to keep the stick at this point, but the novelty factor still hasn’t worn off at this point, so who knows.

Academy of Champions: Soccer (Wii)

Although I’m writing about this in a “kusoge” post, it’s only because this game is cheap and obscure. It’s really not a bad game at all–perhaps not a must-buy, but a solid game from what little I’ve played of it. When I heard that Ubisoft was shutting down their Vancouver studio, I went to look up what they’d been working on, and I realized that I actually have a copy of Academy of Champions. It was a gift from somebody who knows my passion for underdog games.

A quick YouTube search for some gameplay footage convinced me to give this one a try. From a gameplay standpoint it’s a pretty standard soccer title, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s well executed and fun to play. Visually the game is more fun and interesting than I was expecting, and it’s easy to get a sense of that from the videos. The curvature of the soccer pitch and the zany character designs are nice touches.

There’s also a variety of minigames included, although they need to be unlocked by playing through the story campaign mode. Academy of Champions: Soccer also supports Wiimote Motion Plus and the Balance Board for some minigames, which rounds out the package nicely. If you are a fan of casual Wii games and find a cheap copy of this, it’s well worth it.

TMNT: Smash-Up (Wii)

I might have blogged about this one before, but not as a “weekly kusoge.” I played a little bit of it again recently because I was digging through GameArts titles just for the heck of it. It’s strange to me that this is a GameArts production, but then if you look back at their history of releases, they’re accustomed to doing pop-culture IP cash-in projects.

TMNT brings back fond memories and I’m a fan of GameArts in general, but TMNT Smash-Up isn’t something I can whole-heartedly recommend. The gameplay is similar to Smash Bros, which may be a plus if you’re a fan of Smash Bros, but is also kind of annoying for casual fighting game fans because it feels unresponsive and clumsy. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of variety to the characters, and the stages themselves feel uninspired as well, especially when compared to Smash Bros games.

TMNT Smash-Up is okay for some mindless fun, but I have a hard time imagining anybody–fighting game fan or not–getting seriously into it.

Rooms: The Main Building (Wii)

This game baffles me a little. It may be a port of an iPhone game–it certainly has a touch-friendly style interface. If that’s the case, it has surprisingly good production value, but it’s a corny game regardless.

Rooms: The Main Building is a puzzle game with a design that crosses the old “Fifteen Puzzle” concept with a maze navigation challenge. Walls, locks, and ladders put restrictions on which pieces can be moved when. It’s an okay concept but not particularly exciting.

Overall the game feels a bit sloppy and I found it to be a yawn-inducer. There may be some value to be had here if you’re an absolute puzzle fiend, but the rest of us are best advised to stay clear.

In terms of gameplay, Asura’s Wrath is roughly the worst combination of mechanics I’ve ever encountered: a balance between on-rail shooter sections and quick time event boss fights. On-rail shooters can be fun, as evidenced by Panzer Dragoon and Sin & Punishment, but far more often than not they’re terrible. Similarly, QTEs are sometimes effective when used properly (eg. God of War), but typically they’re abused and serve only to detract from my enjoyment of the game (eg. roughly a third of all next-gen games that I’ve played in the last five years). The Asura’s Wrath demo doesn’t do a very good job with the on-rail shooter parts, at least from what I saw, and relies heavily on QTEs for the rest. I find myself waiting for it to open up into a brawler style game, but my waiting is in vain.

As I suffered through this demo–because I really want Asura’s Wrath to be good–a funny thing happened: I started to like it. The QTE-driven gameplay is obnoxious, but there’s a consistency to it that makes it at least good quality QTE gameplay. It’s a huge improvement over the crap that Resident Evil 5 forced on me. The shonen manga style dialogue and presentation also appeals to me, and it’s hard not to notice how beautiful Asura’s Wrath often is. It puts on a great spectacle, and although I resent the lack of gameplay depth, that still counts for something.

I was surprised to find that although Asura’s Wrath is exactly the kind of game that I don’t want to see being made, it pushes the envelope of what it’s trying to be far enough that I find it interesting. It turns out to be a game that I want to play, even though on its face I expected to thoroughly despise it. Maybe I’m making a big mistake here, but I’ll take a chance on it–and I’ll write more if I discover that I don’t like the game after all. Either way, the demo is worth trying.

Majesty on Android is a decent little port and well worth the $1 price tag. I am especially pleased to find that it runs lean enough to be playable on my slow-assed phone (an HTC Magic, variant of the G1). It’s faithful to the original and does alright with touch controls.

The core concept of Majesty is that of an RTS-RPG hybrid in which the player does not have direct control over the units. There are peasants, who build and repair, tax collectors, who gather resources, and heroes, who fight enemies and raze enemy encampments. But the player cannot issue orders directly to any of these units; all that the player can do is lay down construction plans, purchase research for upgrades, and set bounty flags on the map which offer a reward for whatever heroes accomplish the associated task–such as killing an enemy or guarding a location. There’s potency to this idea in that it removes a lot of the need for micro-management that typically defines the RTS genre.

For a player coming from RTS games like WarCraft III, Dawn of War II, etc., giving up the fine granularity of control that is generally expected from RTS games can be a big adjustment. It’s not unlike making the leap from Dragon Quest VIII or IX to Final Fantasy XII or XIII. Decisions are made at a higher, more strategic level, with the result that a lot of inefficiency and chaos at the tactical level is unavoidable. It’s painful watching as heroes make dumb decisions, or worse yet, waiting around for a unit to finally decide to undertake a task that you’ve set a bounty for. At times the game seems to drag on, leaving the player wishing they could just issue a direct order and get on with it.

In spite of its flaws, I’ve enjoyed Majesty a great deal so far, and Majesty 2 all the more-so as it addresses several frequently occurring problems in the original game. For instance, heroes are far less suicidal in Majesty 2, or perhaps they’re simply tougher at low levels. Maps also tend to have more terrain, which creates natural lanes of enemy attack that can be anticipated in advance, whereas I found the maps in the original Majesty to often be entirely free-form making the direction of enemy attack chaotic.

There’s still plenty of chaos in Majesty 2. As your town expands, sewer openings pop up in random places and spew forth waves of low-level monsters to wreak havoc. It still happens that a wave of enemy attack might hit just as your heroes are all pre-occupied in odd places around the map, resulting in massive damage to your economy. Simply put, there’s more chance involved in Majesty and Majesty 2 than in StarCraft 2 or Company of Heroes, and in order to learn to enjoy it, you need to let go of the very same inner control-freak that most enjoys RTS genre games in the first place.

If you’re looking for a minor departure from the same-old, same-old RTSes and their WarCraft III / RPG-influenced variants (such as Spellforce), Majesty might just fit the bill neatly. Majesty 2 is currently only $4 on Steam (the regular price is $10) and at that price, it’s not a big loss even if you only play it for a couple of hours before getting fed up. My biggest reservation about the series is that it is quite a slow-paced game; if you’re looking for the fast-moving, thundering action of Dawn of War II, or the tight, tense rhythm of StarCraft II, you aren’t going to find it here. Majesty / Majesty 2 is more the kind of game where you settle in for a long, slow session of strategy empire building that unfolds a little like a session of SimCity or Tropico. But that’s as valid of a reason to like it as not to like it, in my opinion.

Dungeon Siege III is a solid Diablo-like action RPG with a bit of emphasis on button mashing. Visually and stylistically, it exceeded my expectations–it could almost hold its own up against Dragon Age. But it does rely on twitch reflex gaming (such as dodging and blocking), which is bound to put RPG purists off.

I’ve been struggling a lot with the controls; although it does have the ability to remap keys, I get the impression that the control scheme was designed for console gamers foremost with the PC version created as an afterthought. I may try playing using a X360 wired controller next time to see how that feels. Although I was frustrated with a few of the tougher battles, I respect the fact that there’s some significant challenge to be found even early on in the campaign.

Hard Reset is a straight-up, old school FPS with a heavy cyberpunk theme. It is what it is–there are no RPG elements to be found here, no cover system to speak of, no regenerating health (although there are shields that regenerate, slowly), mostly linear levels, and an abundance of exploding barrels that can easily kill you in an instant. These are all good things, more or less; it’s refreshing to see a new FPS adhere to the old conventions.

For a budget-priced indie title, the art production and visual effects are impressive. The weapons are flashy, the enemies are nicely animated, and there are lots of nice touches showing a bit of extra polish everywhere you look. This game is well worth a try, so long as you aren’t expecting it to be more than a straightforward run-and-gun experience.

One thing I couldn’t help noticing with both of these titles is that a lot of games are very visually noisy these days. Sonic moves at a break-neck pace, as it should, and Bulletstorm doesn’t pull punches with the ol’ hyper-violence. But seriously, part of the reason I got into gaming in the first place was because I liked the way that games presented simplified alternate realities in which all of the elements that I need to be aware of are easily distinguished on-screen. Games these days have so much on-screen action that sometimes it hurts my brain to play them.

That aside, Sonic Generations looks slick and packs a lot of old school appeal. I haven’t followed many, if any, of the Sonic games in the last decade, and what little I’ve seen suggested to me that they’re more work than they are fun. Sonic Generations at least seems to mix things up enough that it doesn’t get tedious quickly. It’s still not as much fun as playing the original Sonic games for the Genesis, but it’s not so far off from the mark as to be offensive.

Bulletstorm is marred by more of an EA stench than I was prepared for. I didn’t even realize that EA had anything to do with the publication of this game, but some of the scripting and dialogue of this title reminded me (in a bad way) of Army of Two. The story is exactly like something an EA producer would come up with–as is the information-saturated presentation style–and the characters are like a cast of rejects from the Gears of War franchise.

That having been said, if you scrape away the shit, there’s some worthwhile stuff in Bulletstorm. The gameplay is decent, although it uses a few too many keys (Q, E, and R are all bound to different actions), which I attribute to it likely being designed as a console game first and foremost. I’m really happy that they have the ol’ boot of death in there; after both Duke Nukem 3D and Return to Castle Wolfenstein proved the kick button out as a satisfying mechanic (a gritty melee attack, a way to smash down doors, etc.), I’m surprised that more FPS games haven’t run with it.

In spite of most of the writing being pretty bad, there are elements of it that impressed me–at least within the first hour of play. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a situation similar to Dead Space where the first hour of the game struck me as impressive, only for the rest of the game to not introduce anything interesting, but that’s just me ragging on EA again. For $5, one solid hour of gameplay alone is almost enough to justify the purchase; throw in another few hours of middling gameplay and I’ll be satisfied that it wasn’t a waste.

3DS ownership has shifted from being a novel luxury to a practical tool for me in just the last month. Whereas I used to dig out my 3DS only for a change of pace from the DS and PSP, it has now become a go-to platform for mobile gaming. I bring it to work and sometimes even out to the movies or wherever, just as I once did with my DS and GBA before it.

Mario Kart 7 makes excellent use of social gaming features, such as automatically exchanging ghost data with tagged friends using wireless StreetPass networking. The global leaderboards, wireless local network play, and other features all add up to make it a pretty damn compelling experience. There’s perhaps not a whole lot more here than you’ll have already seen in Mario Kart Wii, but there doesn’t really have to be. For a venerable franchise like Mario Kart, incremental tweaks and improvements tend to be enough.

Mario Land 3DS looks and feels amazing. I love the fact that it departs from Mario 64 conventions in notable ways: coins don’t heal your heath, swimming controls are more consistent with classic Mario, and the big/little Mario mushroom mechanic is back. This game creatively fuses the conventions of Mario 1-4 with the visual tech and 3D style of the post-Mario 64 games. It’s a refreshing departure and an ideal game to relax with. The difficulty curve is gentle but the game is long enough to offer some real challenge as well.

Finally, I’d like to mention Cobalt, the new game being published by Mojang (the Minecraft guys) and developed by Oxeye. In the same style as Minecraft, there’s a pay-for alpha release of Cobalt out, and I’ve spent a few hours with it. There’s not a lot of content there yet, but what is there is promising.

Cobalt most reminds me of Worms, Altitude, and Super Smash Bros. The bulk of the game consists of fast-paced multiplayer mayhem where you shoot, blast, jump, and dodge your way around a 2D platformer style arena. There’s also a co-op survival mode where the levels are more open-ended and your goal is to collect resources by killing mobs so that you can afford upgrades and supplies.

Even at this early stage, Cobalt is highly polished and appealing. It’s not the kind of paradigm-shaking visionary masterpiece that Minecraft is, but it does carry some of the same spirit of being simple, honest fun of the type that AAA game studios so rarely provide. It’s worth keeping an eye on, at least.

I hope your peckers rot off, Robot Entertainment.

Having spent a couple of hours with it already, I’m very happy with this version of Chu-Chu Rocket. It runs fine on my slow-assed phone and is a surprisingly faithful port of the original game. They even included the battle mode, although from what I can tell multiplayer is not supported–you are limited to playing against AI opponents. The puzzle mode is much more well suited to gaming on the go anyway, and provides hours of satisfying puzzle content.

Big thumbs up. If you’re still not convinced, you can find some gameplay footage and an old Japanese commercial for the game here.