Geek Woman Speaks » DS

Vampire Moon DS Review

geek-woman — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 20:58:33 +0000

First thing the game says is something about an Eclipse. The lunar eclipse was this morning. Was that the Vampire Moon? OMG. By coincidence, I’ve managed to creep myself out with a DS game. No, only kidding.

It’s been a while. I pick the coral pink fat DS to play on. Get the stylus, noting the different and stiffer feel of the small pre iPhone touch pad technology and begin on this point and click, hunt and seek puzzler from City Interactive. It feels similar to a Nancy Drew type games, which is complimentary.

Instead, the main character Emily is a reporter. Who is sent to Transylvania to chase a story. The dialog rolls out on the top screen and you tap objects on the second screen below. It feels a bit retro typing about a DS game on the iPad, it’s like the iPad is talking about her Grandma.

Vampire Moon the Mystery of the Hidden Sun has a gothic feel to it. There are gargoyles and bats. The menus and the story are told in a bookish format with a cherry sienna hue. It’s a palette of old book leather. The reading material writes out in the book for you. As the story is explained, you are asked to find various items. You may need an old knight’s shield to cover a hole in a wooden bridge to be able to get across. Or you could need a hammer to complete a task.

The game – play consists mainly of seek and find puzzles. The spooky environments have many objects embedded in them for you to find. Some of them are timed. Finding gems and jewels adds to your score. If you tap on the wrong items too many times then it will deduct from your score. Hints are provided and you can earn more.

The puzzles range from easy to exasperating. It depends on how good your imagination and skills are. The game has about twenty five levels. It is somewhat repetitive, but if you get that need to find everything then you will like this game. The story line is very simplistic and seems to be geared to teens. I did catch a few spelling errors in the items. On the list is “Tub” when what you are actually looking for is a “Tube” of paint.

This game doesn’t offer anything much new. It does what is expected of it fairly well enough. It lacks excitement and a genuine horror feel. The Vampire aspect of it isn’t very developed and it mainly deals with legends rather than flesh and cold blooded vampires like Edward Cullen.

This is a tame game that makes a fine time waster. It can draw you into it easily because it is relaxing. Unless you get stuck on one of the puzzles. It doesn’t seem like it’s harsh or violent at all. Young teens would probably enjoy it. I ive Vampire Moon 8 t padlocks out of 10.

Played on an original DS with a copy provided by the publisher.

E3 Nintendo Impressive Highlights

geek-woman — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 17:24:16 +0000

As the game industry press nodded off to the usual boring Nintendo conference, we all thought we were being returned to 1986. Mickey Mouse and vintage black and white comics were shown made into a side scroller. That 100 year old material was referred to as “fresh”. Then another Zelda came out and they said it was a “new game experience”. And then they tried to show off yet another version of Metroid. Sure they top the numbers charts each year by re – releasing the same IP’s over and over.

Everyone almost fell off thier chairs when they finally made a big reveal.

The 3DS. It has a 3D screen on top which will play 3D games and movies. No 3D glasses are needed. An impressive list of 3RD party developers was rattled off. The new device will also have a double camera which you can use to take 3D digital photos. It will have wifi and the usual connectivity.

Then they sent out about a hundred sexy models with the new 3DS chained to their metal belts. And then game play stations lifted up out of the floor with the new Zelda playing on them. What a presentation!
They did actually have an innovation. A very well kept secret. Perhaps even something revolutionary. Again.

Geek Woman’s 9 Worst Games of ’09

geek-woman — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 07:04:25 +0000

I take no pleasure in playing a bad game. There isn’t much joy in writing a review of them either. It’s all for you dear readers. I play bad games so you don’t have to. For some reason crappy games were plentiful this year. There were more than 9 to pick from. Here’s the list of the worst games of the year. Don’t buy them, rent them or keep them. If some uninformed idiot gives one of these piles to you, keep the plastic on, hell put a condom on too, and take it back to the store.

9. Overlord 2 PS3 A sequel that just plain sucked.
8. Wolfenstien PS3 An old franchise that shouldn’t have been resurected.
7. Sacred 2 Fallen Angel PS3 Fallen, failing same thing.
6. Xblades PS3 You can X this one off your list.
5. Flower, Sun, Rain DS Don’t confuse this weed with Flower.
4. Cloudy with A Side of Meatballs PS3 Nauseating not fun.
3. The Clique Diss and Make Up DS Sexist drivel.
2. Maple Story PC Malware and even worse players.
1. And the worst game that I played in ’09 goes to Girl Time DS Unplayable and insulting as well.

Cooking Mama 3 DS Review

geek-woman — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:02:06 +0000

Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop is just as much fun as the first two games. You can practice, cook with Mama or compete. It has a new Shopping mode as well. There are mini games which are silly like the capering crustaceans that you have to catch. Though there isn’t enough content in the Shopping to make it imperative to go out and get it if you all ready own the first two.

There is a wide range of recipes with different degrees of difficulty from marsh mellows to more complex meals. You can expect to do things like peel boiled tomatoes, before your hand gets burned and keep food from burning on sticks. The kitchen disasters are funnier and just as rewarding as winning. You grind beans, extrude pastes, whip, chop and stir. Game play is mainly about following all the steps and getting the recipe correct. Mama has a few new lines to say in her endearing broken English.
But not enough has changed. The backgrounds are still the same as before with the same drab color choices and appliances. There should be more to do with the clothing and kitchen decor. There could be so much more content here, it feels like Mama is witholding the love and being stingy.

Cooking Mama 3 has the new shopping part of the game. When Mama gives you a list of items to pick up at the grocery store you’ll get a mini game. There are a variety of them. You may encounter falling veggies, flipping fish, a potato chip purchase and others. They begin in a 2D puzzle inside a crowded store. While in there you need to find the items without depleting the hearts that represent lives. The shopping adds a whole new dimension to the game and it is lots of fun. Too bad there isn’t more of it. Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop has Mulitplayer. You can now use the DS’s Wi-Fi connection play with up to four people. Enter a race to cook the fastest in battles to crack eggs, catch the most toast, or fry the most fish. I give Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop 7 stir fried shrimp out of 10.

Bleach : The 3rd Phantom DS Review

geek-woman — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:44:16 +0000

Fans of Bleach will enjoy this DS game. This is the third one that I have reviewed, each one has had a different format. This one is a turn based RPG so there is no button mashing. You select the activities of your characters from menus and wait it out while the animations go. It may sound boring, but I found it addicting, and had a harder time letting it go back to Gamefly than I’d like to admit.

You’ll play as either Matsuri or Fujimaru Kudo, who are twin Shinigami from the Rukon District of Soul Society. It takes place 100 years before to the main Bleach storyline. You get a team of eight Shinigami to play in the turn-based isometric tactical combat. You can power up some of the characters to use Bankai. Eventually points gained from kills can be used to increase stats. Some of the characters can support each other on the battlefield with attacks or blocks.
There is an overall problem with 3rd Phantom that has more to do with the level design and how the game play events are paced. The customization options come too slowly, and don’t do enough to make it more fun. It plays solidly, if not stoically. You can almost get a nap in while the games AI plays against you. The battles take an eternity to play out. Everything takes a long time to navigate. A battle plan that should take mintues can take a half an hour to execute. Then if you have to go someplace in a hurry it is really difficult. If you shut down in the middle of the battle, you might be sent back.

Seeing your favorite Bleach cast members in a game is always fun. Most of Bleach’s English voice actors are on there. The expressions they say, the little jokes and remarks are what you are really there for. The animations will be interesting at first, but there is lots and lots of repetition.

Game – play seems to be centered on tactics and strategy. It might have sounded like a good time on the drawing board. In reality it is monotonos and the fun factor is some where near dull. I made it fun by choosing all girl teams which made it challanging. Who will enjoy this game is going to depend on their perspective. If just seeing Rukia and Rangiku in a game is enough for you then you’d be satisfyied. If you are looking for the great music and spirited battles that make Bleach so popular you won’t find it in Bleach 3rd Phantom. I give it 6 Zanpaktou out of 10.

Marker Man Adventures DS Review

geek-woman — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:04:30 +0000

Like Kirby and other games that have you drawing on the DS it depends mainly on how much sensitivity is left in your touch pad, and how accurate the stylus is calibrated into the game. This one does it, but not great. It gets most of its score for creativity. The little guy you use is a stick figure, and it isn’t a cheap gimmick alone. You empathize with the minimalistic man and you want to help him find his see through dog. It has a simple humility to it that does take it up a notch to art. But the execution of the high ideas is where the game has problems.If you rent this one you are going to need to track down the manual or game-play video. There are puzzles and without any prompts you are expected to use your imagination. You draw the basic shapes circle, triangle square or lines to interact with the side scrolling world. Marker Man also has special powers and will turn colors besides black.

The controls are squishy and inconsistent. And it will deduct from your stats every time you make an attempt. There doesn’t seem to be a reason why sometimes you can get it to work and other times it doesn’t. It’s puzzling and frustrating. When you lose three lives you have to start over. All over, from the beginning. It’s too much to ask. There are deadly ducks and boomy birthday cakes. Anything cute is actually suspect.

Unfortunately it’s a good idea that just didn’t have enough development time spent on it. It could have used a more polished engine, and mabe some way to synchronize your handwriting with the game software. I give marker man 6 rainbow colors out of 10.

The Clique: Diss and Make Up DS Review

geek-woman — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:58:06 +0000

The Clique is another movie that never should have become a game. The theme of this game is perhaps more morally reprehensible than Left For Dead 2 which is so violent that it is banned in Australia. The ethically sensitive Aussies missed this horror show. The game is a psychological head case sure to screw up any tween who happens to be unlucky enough to play this trash. It gives point ratings for the clothing on slider bars indicating which clique would be accepting of the girl wearing it. It emphasizes the mandate to fit in, and to dress superficially to impress others. Gossip is used as a method of currency to buy the loyalty of “friends”. The genius that wrote this garbage for the consumption of girl gamers made a lot of money on the books and the movie, but that doesn’t prove that it was actually good. Teens emulating a life style like this reality simulation game will be on the way to a padded room and Ritalin. Not college and riches.Girls in the game compete not to become something admirable or interesting but instead they are given a “game” of how to become vacant bitches. Game -play is unimaginative tapping which move the screen between different areas. Dialog boxes appear often, you talk to people and interact with the objects. Mini-games take place in classrooms. You schedule them and they represent lessons in art, geometry, chemistry, gym and home ec. None of them is enough fun to recommend this title as a puzzle game.

In an exercise in even more ridiculousness directed at girls the part-time jobs in the boutique, a coffee shop, an ice cream parlor or a taco stand pay far more money than they would in reality. $400 an afternoon isn’t earned doing these jobs at the mall. Perhaps on the corner in front of the bathroom at the mall instead. The clothing to impress the other cliques is frighteningly expensive too. Getting invited to the landmark social events, specific parties raises your status up the social ladder.

This game is terrible. The game – play is boring, the mini games are really crappy knock offs of Diner Dash. The central theme of conformity, bullying and gossip is just horrible. The video game watch dogs are busy barking about games they have never played. They should be playing all of them. Something that was acually dangerous is wrapped up in pink packaging. It got by them, but not me. I give this demonic piece of stinking crap a 1 out of 10.

Ultimate Game Room DS Review

geek-woman — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:36:51 +0000

It isn’t so Ultimate. The only thing it’s exceptional at is being average. When you have seen and played game collections on DS that have dozens of games on them, something like this has a long way to go to prove itself to deserve that grandiose name. There are only three games on the card. Darts, bowling and pool. You choose an avatar, but it seems that you are playing against the cartoon person not as them. Occasionally the little person is seen, but it is so infrequent that is doesn’t make sense why they have them in it at all. The controls for the darts game were simple and it was easy to master in a few minutes. The darts game was boring to look at but was really the only tolerable game. Then the bowling was slanted to make the CPU win. You toss your ball down the alley, then you wait and watch the CPU score one strike after another. More time is spent watching the computer bowl than playing. Then lastly is the pool game. There are many controls for the angle of the pool cue. You can move the camera in various ways. It seems like some effort was put into it. But the actual striking of the ball with the stick should have had more contact, such as a shoulder button press with a feel to it like pinball. Instead there is a white line going across the bottom screen of the DS. It’s sideways, and doesn’t fit right at all. Even with all the camera angles having that little white strip doesn’t make it as a pool simulation. What ever the features are in the pool game, they don’t work well enough to make an impression.Then in tournament mode, the darts match ended and suddenly bowling came up. It seemed strange that all of the sudden in a darts tournament you have bowling. Each event should have its own tournament. It doesn’t make sense. There is multi-player mode offered on the game. On the whole, the game doesn’t have much to offer. What it does have is poorly done and the replayability factor is doubtful. This was a waste of the slot in the Gamefly que. There are much better game collections to try. Most of them have many more games, and do a better job on it. I give “Ultimate Game Room” DS an ultimately disappointing 4 out of 10.

Flower, Sun, Rain DS Review

geek-woman — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:17:32 +0000

Flower, Sun, and Rain’s intriguing title isn’t for an ingenious Zen garden sim like it sounds, it’s the name of a hotel. Where presumably some crime has transpired. It was a mistake playing Flower, Sun, Rain right after GTA China Town Wars. I was expecting a quirky 3D mystery romp with blocky DS graphics. Instead this game was an even bigger disappointment. It lacked the readily accessible controls, and the clever button layout that GTA had. I wasn’t intending to write about comparisons of the two, but I couldn’t help thinking of it that way. The original Flower, Sun, and Rain game was made in 2001 for PlayStation 2. By developer Goichi Suda. Known for his unconventional game-play and offbeat characters, made expectations indeed high. It would have been a great game if the port had been done with half the attention that GTA: CW had. It wasn’t. When the controls aren’t there in a game and successive presses of every button and combination produce nothing, not even an error message, something is very wrong. There is a difference between quirky / fun and stupid / tedious. This game is the latter. Game-play if you can call it that, is annoying. No effort was made to customize level design to suit the DS. Everything you do basically has to go through the ugly laptop interface. The process is only entering numbers that you find randomly in the game. It’s the lamest, thinnest sort of hunt and fetch device in a game ever. The puzzles were terribly dull and the overall presentation was monotonous looking. The game graphics were texture-less and flat. It looked like a bad game on the Game Boy from twenty years ago.

You need to keep solving puzzles at the hotel to reach the airport. The plot is like Groundhog Day the movie, or on that episode of Xena Warrior Princess.
Over and over you are placed back at the beginning of the day and each day brings a new set of puzzles. Puzzles are done by entering a number into a suit-cased laptop named “Catherine”. Guys that name their computers after women are strange.

With the lame “Catherine” computer as the main interface, the frustrating camera, poor navigation, level design and controls this game is a mess. There isn’t any reason to try and play it. Don’t waste a rental on it. I give Flower, Sun, Rain 2 soggy petals out of 10.

DS Disintegration

geek-woman — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:32:47 +0000

My original DS was an import from Japan that I got in ’05. It’s the pretty pink pearl color. A couple weeks ago the hinges disintegrated. I’m the proverbial old lady that only drives her DS on Sundays. I keep all my gadgets clean and happy. They get stored in their box or a case. They get cleaned and pampered until their eventual release into the wilds of eBay. I was very surprised to see the hinges go considering how much I loved this thing and took care of it. Apparently it’s a known issue. It’s even more prevalent with the DS Lite, and I am very glad that I haven’t bought one. The next handheld I get will not be a Nintendo. Great software, crap hardware. Browsing YouTube showed up thousands of the same complaints. It is as common as the red ring of death on the Xbox. Nintendo will fix the hinges in some situations. It is still the principle that there shouldn’t be a problem in the first place which is irritating. It is important to stop using the DS and put it aside as soon as it cracks. Otherwise the screen can come off, snapping the tiny cable. There are several ways to deal with the bad hinges. First would be to sell the broken DS for parts and sell the games for it too. Then buy one of the new PSP’s. Second choice could be to go through the hassle of sending off the DS to Nintendo to get fixed. I’ve seen people saying that Nintendo has charged them in the range of $60-70 US for that. There are several fix it shops online that will do it for less. But keep in mind that you would be giving out your Friend Id and your WiFi WEP password to whoever works on it. They may not care about that, but you never know who exactly you are dealing with online, of course.

Perhaps a better choice is to go ahead and fix it yourself. There are a number of websites and videos that show you how to do open heart surgery on your DS. The bad hinges can be replaced and for that you will need a new shell. You will need a special screwdriver that is available at many websites. You will also need a lot of nerve and steady hands. Dissecting a small gadget might not be for you if you don’t have a clean table to work on, and lots of free time. This isn’t something that your cat or your children should get access to while you are working on it, or it will get ruined.

You’ll have to remove lots of teenie screws. Get a small pair channel lock pliers and clear silicone adhesive, for the operation as well. There are cables to peel off carefully, and metal backing on the display which cannot touch the board or you’ll blow the board. There are instructional sites aplenty that will sell you the parts and tell you how to accomplish the repairs. The instructions are always peppered with warnings in all caps telling you to watch out for this or that, putting your DS at risk of an untimely bricking.

Scared yet? I was. My solution, buying a refurbed DS off of eBay. If I get brave enough I can swap out the parts and build one perfect DS. Or I can put up with the salmon pink instead of the pink pearl color. I miss the welcome screens written in Japanese, and the iridescent shine, but I have a machine to do reviews on and that’s the bottom line.