Put the turkey down and put your design caps on!
We hope you’re not too full of turkey and shopping deals, because we have a full plate of Nerds Without Pants for you this week! It’s just Julian and Patrick this time, but that doesn’t stop us from delivering a delicious meal of podcasting goodness. So dig in!
Crush my brain with an anvil.
It’s hard to believe that a quaint game concept where you play the part of an apprentice arms dealer in an RPG could lead me to a dark place, but it happened. Weapon Shop de Omasse, with its cute exterior, forces you to spend time between intended-to-be-comical character interactions pounding away at the most laborious, repetitive, and malformed rhythm game ever created.
Level designer > Random level generator
I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t realize that Cloudberry Kingdom is entirely made up of randomly generated stages. They demand a level of precision and contain enough traps that you’d think some masochistic level designer was madly laughing as he put most of them together. Of course, this does speak volumes of the quality of the level generator that sits behind this intensely challenging 2D platformer, but without anything pulling everything together, it’s more of a never ending gauntlet of disparate levels than a game.
Get your hands on the highly anticipated Level-5 RPG this week.
Level-5’s Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is one of next year’s most sought after Playstation 3 titles. For those curious about its premise, you might be happy to know that Namco Bandai has announced a playable demo that will be released tomorrow, Tuesday, December 4th in North American. The demo will hit Europe the following day on Wednesday, December 5th.
No matter your political stance, you would think that a president that flew around and shot missiles would be awesome. Turns out it’s boring.
I thought we had moved past the era of silly touch-screen controls early in the lifespan of the DS, but apparently it still has its proponents. Grasshopper Manufacture and Level 5 have teamed up to make sure that the dying art of crappy stylus futzing stays around a little longer with their joint downloadable venture, Liberation Maiden. Maybe the controls themselves wouldn’t be so objectionable if there was some other entertainment value in the package, but as it is, Liberation Maiden is just a boring series of stylus rubbings in an anime wrapper.
A brief look at the options available in Shootmania Storm's level editing mode.
