PixlBit

Well it's valentine's day everyone and as a special gift I got a box o' games! HO HO! You thought it was a box o' chocolates! Bad jokes aside... here is today's batch!

 Earth Seeker was released only in Japan and it's a shame too, as it's quite good.  Earth Seeker is based in a post apocalyptic world, in which your spaceship crash lands onto a mysterious planet. A machine that controls planetary climates aboard the spaceship then malfunctions, causing problems for the humans as well as the planet's inhabitants. The best I can describe the game as is Monster Hunter-lite meets monster raising. As the games heroine, you control a small horde of cute little monsters to take on big ones. It's realtively simple thanks to it's time stop battle mechanic. Throughout the game you'll collect fossils, paintings, etc. It's a very engaging game if you can wrap your head around translating it.

Endless Ocean and Endless Ocean: Blue World.are diving simulators. In a sense I didn't think I'd enjoy just swimming and diving in a virtual ocean. And honestly...it's really engaging. In the first game you find fish, take pictures, dive, and even train dolphins. The game is really fun, but incredibly easy. The sharks don't even attack you. The sequel does rectify this, meaning that you can't engage sharks willy nilly and the dolphin training is even more enhanced. Terrific games to just play and relax to.

Excitebots: Trick Racing and Excite Truck brought back the Excite series after a long hiatus and man are they fun! Excite Truck was released as a launch game and features only trucks, but it's still a pretty fun and frantic racing game with boosts, and super jumps. The sequel ups the experience two-fold. All the bots in excitebots have different aspects and stats. My favorite is probably the Bat bot. There's so many things you can do whetehr it's throwing a pie at a clown face, knocking over bowling pins and getting a strike, or kicking a soccer ball in a goal. It's zany, crazy, and definitely a heck of a lot of fun.

Far Cry Vengeance is a port of a game... a bad port of a game at that. I covered this as a garbage game way back and while running around the game in feral mode can be fun, and tearing through the jungle in a jeep is a blast...the combat gets boring, the gun fights are a chore, the enemy a.i. is a joke, and the dialogue is just laughable.

Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse was exclusively released only in Japan. This is mostly due to some bugs that were present to be found in the game, but it's relatively minor as they don't have any major effect on the game. There are some photo missions you can't do, and you can't "S" rank the game, but it's fairly good. The game received a patched fan translation and it was very well done. As for the game, it is a tad slow and you have to get used to the way the flashlight mechanic of the tilting torch, but the game is really enjoyable overall.

 

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time is not a terrific game, but is fairly average on the Nintendo DS. The Wii version however is downright terrible. It splits the DS screens into two on your tv requiring you to constantly zoom in and out of both screens just to see anything. Why they couldn't just map it to a seperate screen is beyond me. It's also pretty uninteresting overall.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers is an action adventure RPG. It's got elements of Final Fantasy with it chocobos and moogles. However it's almost an odd mash up of ideas. In one instance it's a arcade shooter, a QTE, and a platformer. The actual bulk of the gameplay comes through in segments where you pick up various objects with your crystal bearer powers and throw them at enemies. It can be an enjoyable game, but overall it's not quite the Final Fantasy game you want and not quite Crystal Chronicles style gameplay either. Still the music is pretty darn good and the locales you explore are pretty enjoyable to meander around in.

Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon  is one I covered as a bargain bin buy. It's not a typical Final Fantasy game and instead deceives you with it's kiddie box art. It's a mystery dungeon crawler that is incredibly tough. If you like rogue-like mystery dungeon crawlers, then give it a shot.

FlingSmash is a game packed with a Wii Motion plus accessory. The Wii motion plus was pretty good to use in games like Wii Sport Resort or Skyward Sword. However, FlingSmash is just boring. It's more of a tech demo type of game. The overall package with FlingSmash and the motion plus ran for $50, the Wii motion plus by itself was a $40 accessory at the time. So as a $10 game...I can't say I expected much, but it's still a far cry away from other better motion plus games.

Flip's Twisted World was covered another garbage game I covered. It's got a really nice idea, if not totally uninspired. Taking cues from Galaxy you can literally flip the world with the twist of the remote. The game suffers from the 3rd party shovelware syndrome. If it had been polished and playtested more, it could have been a fairly decent game.

Fortune Street is the first in a series of a long series of games that was released outside of Japan. The first was Itadaki Street which released as far back as 1991 on the NES Famicom. It plays similarly to Monopoly as you roll a die and go from square to square buying stock on a block (look at that rhyme!) Essentially you win by being the one with the most and highest stock across the board, bankrupting other players.It also featured an online mode and it was super fun. Nintendo are you paying attention? Board party games can work online! Why isn't Mario Party online!? It's one way to rejuvenate the series that has gone stale! Call it "Ultimate Mario Party Online". You can feature the best boards and mini games across the series! Think about it Nintendo!

Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is a game driven more so based on the way iot presents itself and tells it's story. The overall gameplay is fairly simple and even the rpg mechanics are fairly tame. By about halfway through the game you'll have the best equipment needed to beat every enemy fairly easily and the best weapons in the game take a fair bit of time to actually break. It's a fairly short game overall, with some backtracking elements contained within, but even so it's a mostly linear game. As I said it's more about the characters, story, and elements of isolation that the game provides. As the main character Seto you'll explore a desolate, isolated, wasteland of Japan with some incredible attention to detail.