Posts Tagged ‘XBLA’

Yay, the New Xbox Experience is here. Well I say ‘Yay’ but in fact it caused me a headache. And a revelation.

If you haven’t been paying attention you may not know that I live in Japan. My Xbox is Japanese and for whatever I did with my Live account it knew this to be the case. I got Japanese Live. Luckily the 360 itself was nice enough to listen to my requests for English and converted all the menus into English for me.

Then came NXE. Shiny it maybe, but all the menu options became locked to Japanese making navigation far harder. My solution, experiment. I created a new account, attached to a new MSN id, and so DoFuss was born. The MSN id was bound to the UK, so suddenly everything was English. Plus I can now look at everything you lucky people in the UK can download.

Poor little guy. Over the years Megaman has been pimped so hard he bleeds from most orifices. Like any one in his situation his game has become looser. Now he even turns tricks with RPG.

Now he’s tried to go back to his glory days. Trying to look like he did twenty years ago and charging a thousand Wii points a ride. The little blue guy is hoping he can entice enough nostalgic customers back for another ride to turn a profit.

Let not think about his self-esteem.

It looks and handles the same as the NES games. Where it does differ is that it takes the original’s punishing but balanced level design and replaces it with levels that punish you and then laughing in your face.

It’s good, but unless you have played the early Megamans you are better off with Megaman 2. It’s more balanced, less sadistic experience.

Braid is a platform-puzzler claiming to be art. Puzzles require you to interact with time in different ways through the levels and leave you feeling perplexed or smug depending on the outcome. As art its success vs. pretension is up to you. As a game it’s definitely worth a look.

Next a pure action platformer, Bionic Commando. I can’t testify to the faithfulness’ to the NES original, but it feels 8-bit, in all the good ways. It takes time to get used to the fact you can’t jump but after that you realize there’s a reason it’s considered a classic.

Finally Castle Crashers, which brings back one of the great forgot genres. The scrolling, 2D, medieval, co-op fighter. The ultimate party game. Four player local play is better than any Wii party game (excluding Wii Sports) assuming every player has at least a rudimentary knowledge of gaming. Download and enjoy!

We don’t manage to discuss every thing on the menu despite talking for an hour and a half. It’s Wii parties for starters, Street Fighter 4 and recent XBLA games for the main course with a ‘games as art’ discussion for dessert.

By then you should be full so be happy we decided leave the fighting games retrospective till next time.

Click here to download Podcast 3 (58MB)