While the cats are away, the mice will play.
Are you a bad enough dude to save all the rodents?

I suppose it's about time I actually got to play this game. I mean, I didn't have a Dreamcast until a couple of years ago, and I still have no games for it, and then I missed the GBA port, but as luck would have it, Sega decided to have a Valentine's sale event (or a cleverly-disguised "Welcome Verizon iPhone Users" event) and listed this game for a buck. Mind you, I had no idea this game was even ported to iOS, and according to Wikipedia, that was October of last year. I'm too slow, I know.

ChuChu Rocket! is a puzzle game made by Sonic Team. The core aspect of the game is to guide the white blue-eared mice (ChuChus) to the blue rockets, while avoiding the orange cats (KapuKapus). Puzzle mode is the main draw of the game, and you are presented with a 12x9 grid filled with mice, cats, holes, walls, and rockets. At the start of each stage, you are given a screen of varying configurations of the above, and a limited assortment of arrows. The arrows are the only thing you directly control, and their placement alters how the animals move. Anything that touches an arrow must follow its indicated direction, and naturally you will need to use these to lead the mice to safety. Otherwise it wouldn't be much of a puzzle game, would it?


A basic stage setup.

The game is honestly very simple. Use the arrows to guide mice to rockets, if a mouse runs into a cat, if a mouse falls down a hole, or if a cat runs into a rocket, you have to start over. A few later stages start removing the outer walls, allowing for complex solutions as animals will then warp to the opposing side ala Pac-man. I must not be very good at the game as my progress isn't all that hot, and I've been stumped on a few of them, though basic trial-and-error is pretty effective. The screenshots on the App Store boast 500 puzzles, and I'm not even through with a hundred of those. There's a lot of longevity there, and I probably won't remember any solutions if I came back to them later, so that's replay value.

Apart from Puzzle mode, there is Challenge and Battle. Challenge occurs in real-time as opposed to setting everything up and watching the results in Puzzle. This mode gives you a preset stage and a task, such as "get the mice to the rocket as fast as possible" or "feed the cat," and everything will move automatically, so quick-thinking and arrow-placing are essential. Battle mode is also real-time, but it involves four players. Mice and cats will come from predetermined spawn points, and it is your job to guide the mice to your rocket, and cats to your opponents'. Pink "?" mice will trigger a random effect, and golden "50" mice add 50 points to your score. Battle mode is naturally very chaotic as there is much potential for sabotage. Of course, it's not as though anyone can place arrows all over the map, so there is some strategy involved, and there are a number of options for custom games. There is apparently WiFi play with others around the world or nearby, but I've never done it, and reviews have been rather harsh on this aspect.


OMG SPOILERS But the question is, which Stage 05 does this solve?

Things I Liked

-Platform-
I tend to rag on iOS games a lot, but ChuChu Rocket! is probably one of the best games for the platform. It does a great job of the whole 'bite-sized gameplay' the platform is known for, and the controls actually don't suck either. All you do to set an arrow is press down on a tile and then slide the direction you want to go. Precision does go down a bit for Challenge or Battle, but there are no virtual sticks or tilting shenanigans to deal with. The only bad thing with the interface is that the Start/Cancel/Pause buttons are a little tiny, but I haven't had much trouble with those at all. It may not be the best game for people who absolutely must beat a game in a single sitting or like marathon runs, though.

-Longevity-
I'm (currently) on the last stage of Special, and apparently there are two more difficulties to unlock. I already have a good number of Extra courses to work through. And that says nothing of Challenge. I've been for the most part just playing the the game at breakfast, since I've gotten it, and it's done me well. And I already mentioned that I've probably forgotten every solution to the stages I've beaten so far.

Things I Didn't Like

-Stage Builder/Character Creation-
These are features that are in the GBA version of the game. Where are they here? I mean, I know it's not really fair to dislike something a game lacks, but even with 500 puzzles and three skins (ChuChu, Pian, and Chao), there's no input from fans, so far. The game does say "Content coming soon!" but I can't help but wonder if that means these missing features or more levels or what. It'd rock to get those in an update, though I guess it's somewhat acceptable if it is an in-app purchase.


That's a lot of cats...

The Final Verdict
Really, there's not much I can say about the game other than the fact I like it and I'm proud to keep it on my games page on my Touch. I paid a buck for it during a sale, and it's typically $3. I think it's worth $3, but there are many holidays coming up so there is some hope for sales. Who knows. And hey, we might get the Stage Building and Character Creator someday too. It's a great little game and I haven't had a problem playing it during breakfast.

Score:
10/10
The best of the best of the best, Game of the Year material, Best Game Ever candidate, instant Gaming Hall of Fame inductee, God Among Games winner, #1 on the "Games You Must Play Before You Die" list, Best Game Ever winner, approved by four out of five dentists, part of a complete breakfast.

The Broken Lands are beckoning to brave adventurers.
Are you a brave enough dude (or dudette) to reveal the mysteries of the land?

Three heroes embark on a journey to the Broken Lands for their own reasons, and in transit the ship they're on capsizes off the coast, leaving the hero of your choice as the sole survivor. Making your way to the nearby town of Seahaven, you bring news of the wrecked ship and are tasked with helping the residents with defending the town from the slowly encroaching monster hordes, as well as gather food for the citizens or helping find some lost in the wilderness. And like any good dungeon crawler, you will have to fight and kill countless beasts and take massive amounts of loot as you search the Broken Lands for what you're looking for...

Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony is a 'consolized' version of the popular Dungeon Siege series. Like its big brothers, this game is a dungeon crawler, but it strays from the formulas already established by the PC titles and does things its own way. Instead of stats automatically developing due to weapon use, characters are given stat points to distribute across five attributes each time they level up. Skills are also different, in that they are set for each character and are gradually unlocked with levels, and skill points are awarded to increase these. A new feature to the series is defined classes. Unlike having a class set based on what attack type you're most proficient at, each character starts as a base class, and each has two unique "Hero Classes" and four "Legendary Classes." At level 30, you can pick from the two Hero Classes, and then at 60, you pick from two of the Legendary Classes. I've seen this system used before, namely in Seiken Densetsu 3, though there are probably more games that do branched classes. Each class brings a number of new skills for your character to learn, and changes the character's portrait too.

Combat has been drastically changed. Movement is controlled with the analog stick, and you will lock onto targets as they come into range. As there are active skills/spells, you can set up to six of them to shortcut keys, the Cross button does the basic attack, and Square interacts with things in the field and opens loot bags. Instead of there being a pickup-everything key, gold drops separately from monsters and can be walked over for collecting, and items drop in glittering bags. After looking at it with the Square button, you can then decide to take one, all, or none of the items, and carry on. Instead of a grid inventory for items, there is now a numerical limit based on the Strength stat and some skills. Items cannot be dropped, just destroyed on the spot or sold. Allies are also different. Instead of leading a small army to victory, you have your player character and a "follower" that assists you in battle. You have to choose between two at character creation (unique to each character), and during the game you are able to find and recruit five more, though you are only able to have one with you at a time. Followers have their own skills too, though you need to pay to level those up.


DESTROOOOOOOOOY BUSTERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!

Things I Liked

-Characters-
The characters are mostly identical in terms of the story (as far as I have played), so their personalities aren't really defined well, but they thankfully aren't identical in terms of skills. Mogrim the Half-Giant is meant to be the meaty powerhouse, Serrin the Elf is a ranged attacker, and Allister the Human is the nuke-em-dead caster. And despite these traits, you're able to build them in any way you like. Mogrim can wind up being a mage, Serrin can be a dual-wielding physical nightmare, and Allister can be a nigh-immortal staff-whacking behemoth. As every character has four final classes, there are technically twelve character setups just by class alone, and that says nothing of stat/skill layouts.

-Free Skills-
When you level up, your skills will unlock but you also get a free rank in them at the same time. It's pretty handy to try out some skills to see if they're worth using, and it's also good since there is no way to reset skills. A lot of skills seem decent on paper, but they may be slow-casts or just awkward to use, or even more powerful than you'd think.

-Cutscenes-
Though they're few and far between, I really liked the style of the cutscenes in the game. Fully-voiced, they're sorta like those "comic in motion" Flash comics I've seen a few places. There is no real animation, but still images are placed on layers and they move independently of other layers, or they rotate, or fade in/out, and so on. It's a bit of a shame there weren't more of them, but they were done rather well.

-Gear-
Good God can you equip stuff in this game. Not only do you have primary and secondary weapons (so you can actually use melee and ranged weapons on the same character without impacting your growth), but the basic body armor, helmets, boots, and gloves, but then a necklace, two rings, arm guard, cape, and a pair of trinkets. Since everything can come with enchantments of some type, this can lead to your character being exceptionally powerful...but then unable to really carry much. Everything you equip still counts against your carrying total.


What the...

Things I Didn't Like

-Buggy Mess-
I've had the good fortune of having the game freeze up on me only once, and others have fared much worse. There are a few things I noticed where the game sorta fell apart. I noticed some stats attempted to raise my Defense stat, but when confirmed the stat went back to its default value. Sometimes spells would just not affect my character at all, buffs would just disappear without warning, followers would either not teleport or just unsummon themselves...oh yeah, getting stuck on level geometry is awesome too. I've had the good fortune of not being the victim of many of these, but it kinda sucks there wasn't more polish added to the game.

-Increasing Skills-
In Dungeon Siege II, you are able to review what the each skill does when boosted to that specific level before you confirm your changes and you are allowed to reset them before confirming. Throne of Agony does this too...with the stats. The system's exactly the same--you put in points and can preview the changes, and then reset or confirm, but what gets me is why there is no such system in place for the skills. Accidentally pressing the Cross button on a skill puts a point into it, and there's no way to get it back. No confirmation or reset? I mean, this game even came out after the expansion for the second game, so the lack of a skill-preview system is really jarring.

-Final Boss-
I killed the final boss in three hits. With the mage. Granted, I built him with melee in mind, but I had more trouble with the bosses before this one. I didn't get hit, or rather, there wasn't even the chance for offensive action on her part. What the hell? I wasn't overleveled (still sub-60), and it wasn't like I steamrolled everything else in the game. It just made beating the game feel kinda hollow. Previous games in the series actually made the bosses challenging and even somewhat tactical in killing them. I guess we'll see how my other characters do, when I get there.

-Dungeon Siege?-
Differences aren't bad, but taking away the few references to the previous games (the copy-pasted books from the second game placed seemingly at random in this world, the races, reference to the apocalypse from the end of the second game), this game feels really nothing at all like previous Dungeon Siege games. I mean, I understand a lot had to be changed in order to work on a portable, but...this game felt closer to a portable Diablo more than anything. The skills are different, but there are a few places where they really could've used spell names from the series or something, but there's just so many differences it doesn't feel like improvements, but a completely different game. I dunno.


Mmm, I taste good.

The Final Verdict
It's not the best game ever, but this was my second dungeon-crawler for the PSP, so it was actually fairly decent. It's not on PSN, so if you really want it, it'll have to be on UMD on a non-GO/NGP system. TThere are many items to collect, and a number of different character setups to use, and they're all viable. It's not really a hard game, but the series isn't known for its difficulty. You will need patience, as it has long load times as well as the potential for much frustration due to the bugs and such.

A Tip From DF
Keep a ranged weapon with you as often as possible. It's the best defensive weapon type, and kiting enemies is really easy here too. Use ranged, soften up a target as it closes, and then switch to melee and finish it off with ease.

The Path To Victory
I went with Allister for my first playthrough. I generally used bows until the first class-change, but I eventually dumped all of my unspent points in Strength and boosted the Staff Mastery skill, as well as using the Weapon Enchant - Death skill to regenerate health whenever I hit anything. From there, I just mainly sniped things and then beat monsters up with a staff when they got close. This was before the Death Knight class, which gets a class that further boosts regeneration-on-attack. I'm also doing a run with Mogrim putting all points in Stamina and I'll maybe make him a bow-using mage of some sort. I won't die quickly, but neither will my foes.

Score:
10/10
The best of the best of the best, Game of the Year material, Best Game Ever candidate, instant Gaming Hall of Fame inductee, God Among Games winner, #1 on the "Games You Must Play Before You Die" list, Best Game Ever winner, approved by four out of five dentists, part of a complete breakfast.

In the future, aliens will hate us. They'll hate us so much that they'll send a planet on a collision course with ours, and if that wasn't enough, they're adding insult to injury by infesting the hurtling planet with all sorts of deadly lifeforms. As though impact wouldn't just wipe out all life on our world, the freed monsters would certainly finish the job. They really want to make sure we die. So what does Earth do? Instead of merely letting calamity come to our doorstep such as is the case in your typical sci-fi summer blockbuster film, we send the Guardian of Earth to that planet with a mission: Destroy it from within or we're all doomed.

A death in the family is usually hard for most people. When I was in the fifth grade, I had to bear the unfortunate passing of my uncle, who was one of the only other gamers in my family. My parents gave me the task of going through his games, so I started with the NES as I had the least amount of experience with it, what with not owning one. To my surprise, the system still worked, and he had the Super Mario. Bros/Duck Hunt cart so I popped it in. The game worked perfectly, so after fiddling around with it for a while, I started to look at the other games he had. Since he only kept the carts, I had only the label to look at.



Well, that told me nothing. So I popped it in and powered on the system.




The game was a vertical-scrolling shoot-em-up. Enemies came into view and crashed into me and I shot them and by some miracle I didn't die. The screen started to slow down and then I found out what those glowing clouds enemies sometimes dropped were (recovery items), and I started to get pelted with more shots and mines. The screen then stopped scrolling and a warning buzzer sounded as the music changed. Boss time.



A simple array of cannons, meaning the only danger was getting overwhelmed with shots, which you could nullify with your own anyway. It didn't even move. The fact that there were plenty of recovery drops made the whole affair pretty easy, even for me at my young age. The boss defeated, a victory jingle played and my jet flew off the top of the screen...



Huh, so I guess this woman was in the jet? I was greeted with a bit of an apocalyptic log. Apparently this planet, Naju, wasn't always infested with monsters, and the last survivors managed to leave a log of events in various rooms. According to the log, there were self-destruct mechanisms scattered in the planet, making my job all the easier. Consulting my map, I made my way to the flashing dot several screens away, adjusting myself for the change in controls. It reminded me a lot of Zelda, not only in the perspective, but in the way I had to move. Instead of the automatic scrolling in the introduction, I moved screen-by-screen through a grassy stone-walled area. Instead of a sword, I had my gun from before so I could shoot my foes from afar. Because there were walls not accounted for on the map in my way, I got lost but found another room that said each of the critical Corridor levels were locked and could be unlocked in specific ways. For example, Corridor 1 required the door be shot repeatedly. It also mentioned that I would need keys to get through some of the 'warp panels' to get into other rooms. Finally making my way to Corridor 1, I blasted open the gate and jumped inside.


Well, uh, I guess that solves the mystery of what happened to the jet.

The Guardian Legend is a hybrid shmup-exploration game. As I mentioned above, gameplay takes place in two phases: The first being the 'underworld' jet sections where you can control the movement of your jet but not the screen, and the second is the 'overworld' where you're in humanoid form walking through Naju and finding weapons scattered about, unlocking Corridors, and getting passwords for play later. What makes this game work is how it flows. Between the two modes of play, you can use all but one special weapon in both, and each will behave almost exactly the same. For instance, the Laser Sword weapon sticks out in front of the Guardian so in the overworld, she can spin it around, but in the Corridors, as the jet can't face different directions, it only points upward.

Weapons consume Power Chips, which are restored in both stages of the game by collecting the blue or red orbs found in the boxes enemies drop. Collecting 'Red Lander' icons (red :D faces) expand your Chip capacity, and reaching certain milestones expands the number of shots you fire at once and the width of these shots, eventually bringing you back down through the levels to a single stream of shots if you let your Chips get low enough. There is a variety of different weapons too. One is a basic multi-directional bullet, one is a grenade, one is a slow-moving spinning projectile, and there is even one that runs off its own ammo count that destroys normal enemies on the screen. Weapons can be upgraded twice by collecting it either as a boss reward or buying it, whereupon its power and Chip consumption rate is increased. The Guardian herself can find items to power up her core systems. A gun icon increases her attack power, a shield icon reduces the amount of damage she takes, and a set of chevrons increases her rate of fire. Blue Lander icons increase maximum health, as well as certain score milestones.

I've seen at least one person compare The Guardian Legend to 'Metroidvania' titles like the Metroid or post-Symphony of the Night Castlevania games. It's somewhat true, as you do need specific items in the keys you get for killing bosses to open up new areas, but this is an exceedingly linear process--killing the boss of Corridor 1 for example opens up only two areas, and this pattern continues through to the end of the game. You can actually play any of the Corridors you have access to in any order, but there are times when it feels like the game assumes you've done them in a specific order, as the difficulty may get too high without a defense upgrade you may've skipped.



Why do I like this game? For one, it's pretty unknown and at best a cult classic to some. Perhaps my interest in the game would drive interest in others. Maybe that's why I like games that aren't obscenely popular? Though of course, since it's a title from many generations past, finding it may be difficult, though I found three eBay bids at the time of this writing under $10USD. Shocking. Another reason is the music. Music has always been a pretty big thing for me as far as games go, and The Guardian Legend has a few catchy tunes. A lot of the like is due to nostalgia, yes, but it honestly is a fun game. There's no save option (just a rather long password), there's a game-breaking bug if you max out the score, and Red Grimgrin will haunt my memory forever, but the game is fun. It's a great mix of two different genres of gameplay, there is a variety of areas to visit, monsters to kill, and weapons to collect, and it's still a blast to play, even after these twenty-plus years since its original release. I keep coming back to it because it's hard. Excessively so at times, yes, but thankfully the Blue Lander guy you talk to will let you set a reload point (provided you don't turn off the console) if you continue after dying. And hey, the Guardian of Earth is one of the earliest female protagonists in gaming, though she may not count due to not being (entirely? At all?) human. Did I mention it's fun? And there's even a secret mode if you just want a pure shmupy experience without all of that overworld tomfoolery.



My uncle sure picked out a hell of a game. Though the circumstances I got to play it are sad, it is an experience I'll never forget, probably because I'll keep coming back to it. There may never be a chance for a sequel, a remake, or even a port, but it'll always hold a special place in my heart in all its pixelated glory.

The obviously evil Valdis has hatched a plan for world domination.
Are you a bad enough dude to--wait, why are you working for him?

Note: This covers not only the original game and the expansion, but also touches on bits of the Aranna Legacy mod found here.

Over a thousand years ago, a great war between the Azunites and Zaramoth ended the world when the Sword of Zaramoth clashed with and destroyed the Shield of Azunai. These artifacts were once lost to history, until the Sword was recovered by Valdis, who then started a campaign to find the missing pieces of the Shield of Azunai...this starts the game, where you are a mercenary in Valdis' employ, starting the siege of Greilyn Beach where Dryads are supposedly guarding one of the pieces. Things go south for you not long after the success of the mission, and you quickly find yourself a prisoner of the Dryads and work against Valdis' dark forces.

Dungeon Siege II is pretty good as far as sequels go. It adds a number of things from the previous entry and is overall a better game. It plays almost exactly the same, though now instead of you the player having mostly passive control over your team, you directly control your hero and the AI handles the other people as per the (rather limited) AI controls. Leveling is still the same with the three stats and four classes, but now there are skill trees ala Diablo II and other games that contain nothing but passive skills that improve each of your characters in your team. The expansion builds upon this system and supports two dual-classes, while the mod adds more pseudo-classes with no skills but a number of spells that do various interesting things like making enemies explode when their health falls to a certain level, or fanning your arrows in a spread.


Pow, haha! Powers are a new feature that can be pretty damaging. And look at the body parts fly!

There would be a lot of overlap if I continued with the changes and what I liked/disliked, so I'll just jump into that now.

Things I Liked

-Ch-ch-ch-changes-
Passive skills make your army highly customizable on top of specializing them for specific roles. Take the basic warrior for example. There are three main branches of skills: Dual-wield for massive damage-per-second, two-handed for slow, heavy damage and resistance to damage with chance to stun, and one-handed plus shield, for massive defense and tanking. The expansion adds people to reset your skills, and the mod puts these people in the original campaign as well, so experimentation is encouraged.

Certain skill levels unlock Powers, which do a variety of things: Heavy direct damage, attracts the aggro of every monster in a certain range, makes everyone immune to damage for a few seconds, etc.

Monsters respawn! Though they respawn while you play which can make corpse retrieval a bit dangerous. Dying is easier to manage too. You still need methods to revive people, but items stay on corpses and if the entire party wipes, you all revive in town and 25% of your total gold remains on your bodies, whereupon you can then decide to go fetch them, or have someone in town warp the bodies to you while keeping that portion of your money.

There are now specific spellbook slots for automatically casting spells! So say you have a mage that knows a number of buffs. In Dungeon Siege, you would have to make note of the timer and recast when needed. The sequel recasts buffs, debuffs, and summons as necessary and when there's enough mana to use.

Monsters have 'Hatreds' that naturally piss them off if you do certain things in battle. Some monsters will have "Hates characters who use potions" or whatnot below their info window, and if said monster sees anyone using a potion, it will fly into a fury and target only that character while doubling its efforts to kill the character in question. This lends some strategic quality to the battles, as you can manipulate monsters into attacking your tank, keeping the heat off of your weaker allies. It also lends strategy to not anger a group of monsters when you're already weakened.

There's story. Sure, there was in the previous game, but there is a greater emphasis on it this time around, and for once your protagonist isn't entirely silent. Though there isn't much variety in the responses, some of them expedite matters and many in the expansion are pretty snarky. Characters are improved too. Not only do they have their own specific quests, but characters say things to the hero and to each other. I'm not sure to what extent this goes, but it gives some incentive to use different allies each time you go through the game, so you can see the different banters. Or, you know, just run through the old areas of the game with different team combinations.

Speaking of team, there are pets to play with. Pets expand the idea of the Pack Mule from the original game to include different species of pets that do a variety of things. Pets grow by being fed items, and their stats improve at set levels depending on what you feed them. Giving them fighter weapons improves their strength, armor improves their defense, and potions boost their HP and MP. Each specie of pet has its own unique attack, some learn spells, but all get their own Powers and learn Emanations (auras) that boost the party. They can't equip any gear or learn any skills, so their usefulness is mostly up to the player.

Teleporters back to town are sprinkled through the landscape as well as a learnable Town Portal spell, so you never need worry about running out of supplies or getting too many items on your travels.

-Difficulties-
One problem I had with the previous game was how, when you beat the game, that's it barring diving into multiplayer. The sequel handles this better by having three difficulty levels unlock as you beat the game, much like Diablo has done long beforehand. Also applying to this section is how monsters scale. The more people in your party, the more difficult monsters become. This happened in Dungeon Siege's multiplayer mode, but was largely absent in single-player, so soloing the game was pretty difficult for anyone without a ranged attack.

-Variety-
Dungeon Siege has always allowed you to build your own character, though the first game limited you to humans of varying appearance. The second game lets you use a number of races that have their own traits, though in the end, many traits (such as starting with two ranks in Fortitude and having 6 Strength to start) aren't terribly important so it's a matter of appearance the most. I can't say for sure (as I've only gone through the game once) if NPCs say different things based on your gender/race, though I think there was a small mention of the fact that my hero was a female Elf. If it was there, it was once, sadly.

-Journal-
The Journal is a pretty handy tool. Apart from telling you about quests and what to do next, it lists Key Items you've found, Chants for temporary buffs, and even has a robust Bestiary where you can see the stats of monsters as well as a description of the beast and any Hatred it has.


Ow. Soloing is hard.

Things I Didn't Like

-Expansion's Story-
Because it's on the back of the expansion's box, it's not a spoiler (technically): The world ends again during your adventure in the original game, and the expansion picks up a year after it's all said and done. The world of course looks much different, there are freakish creatures running amok, and best of all, almost everyone hates you for the apocalypse! It wasn't even your fault at that. Say what you will about heroes forging on no matter what, but it was damned hard to really care about the people I was supposedly saving when they all spat at me and wished I hadn't bothered in the first place. It was actually refreshing that your hero felt the same way in many cases, though being snarky didn't have positive results all the time.

-Expansion's Monsters-
The Bound are the expansion's featured monsters. They're...especially creepy. Long story short, they're the monsters you've gotten used to killing, now horrifically modified and mish-mashed together with other monsters. The best part is that many of the Bestiary entries imply that they were operated on while conscious, and are aware of their situation. It's odd of me to care about the things I'm going to slaughter endlessly, but this was the thing that made me care about the antagonists of the expansion as opposed to the NPCs who hated me. Weird how that works, huh?

-Ventriloquists-
When people speak, don't they tend to use their mouths? You know, open and close? In the original game and the core sequel, characters don't move their mouths at all when they're talking, which looks rather funny in the sequel when there are close-ups and the like where it's really obvious. This is something that was changed in the expansion, with characters not only getting different models, but ones that actually move their mouths.

-AI-
I really didn't like the change to the AI. There are only four patterns (mimic hero, fight separately, defense, and do nothing) and those are the only settings you have. You can't command just one person to wait, or just one person to do everything the hero does. There were also a number of times where my allies just stood around and did nothing for no reason at all. Mimic hero works best for general travel, but then only one monster gets the force of your team and if you don't change targets, they stand around even if they get hit. What? I know you're supposed to change which strategy everyone follows as you fight, but I rather liked the old system of setting everyone up in a specific way and just using Ctrl-A to move everyone at once.

The Final Verdict
Hey, you like dungeon crawlers? Dungeon Siege II and its expansion are just what you want. I like it more than its predecessor, despite the fact it runs worse on my machine. It's a very proper sequel and anyone who liked the first would like the second. Just, uh, because so much is changed in terms of hotkeys, it's difficult to go back to the first. And hey, there is a demo for you to try out. And, the next BoB will be another Dungeon Siege but it'll be the last one you'll have to read for a while! Honest! And hey, I hear if you preorder the third game on Steam, you get the first two games free...

A Tip From DF
Use the Aranna Legacy mod if you have both halves of the game, or just the Hotfix Mod for the original. They're the same thing, but they add quite a lot to the game, and still are in development to this day. The added weapon enhancement spells give even more variety to the classes your characters can become, and they're decent enough to ignore how there are no added skills to take advantage of the pseudo-classes.

The Path To Victory
This is a new section where I talk a bit about what I did in the game, mainly what builds I went with and so on. I played as a female Elf based heavily in Combat Magic eventually using Nature Magic too, Lothar was a shield tank until I got the Mythrilhorn and then I turned him into a dual-wielder that subbed in Combat Magic, the Mythrilhorn pet was my main tank/aggro sponge, Deru was a Blood Assassin sniper who used bows, Vix used throwing weapons and mainly used the spread-arrow buff at mid-range, and Taar I kept as a healing-focused Nature Mage with some Fist of Stone levels for boosts to defense/health. I didn't use anyone else for the most part. I'm currently attempting to solo the game as a male Human focused on ranged weapons and Nature Magic.

Score:
10/10
The best of the best of the best, Game of the Year material, Best Game Ever candidate, instant Gaming Hall of Fame inductee, God Among Games winner, #1 on the "Games You Must Play Before You Die" list, Best Game Ever winner, approved by four out of five dentists, part of a complete breakfast.

A whole horde of Krug are stirring up trouble in nearby Stonebridge.
Are you a bad enough dude to go kick Krug ass across the country?

Note: This covers the original game and the Legends of Aranna expansion.

Dungeon Siege is, as you can probably guess by the name, an action-RPG dungeon crawler. The game starts with you, a lowly farmer, having a friend come into your farm badly wounded from an attack by the invading Krug force, and he promptly dies in your arms. Weapon in hand, you start killing foes on the way to nearby town Stonebridge to get help. In terms of story, Dungeon Siege isn't really robust. Most of the game is "Go from Point A to Point B, kill foes, get items, gain allies, buy/sell gear, repeat." That's pretty much how most dungeon crawler games go, so Dungeon Siege is pretty par for the course. It was touted to be a "Diablo-killer" in the press, but did it succeed? No, but the only thing that can kill such a juggernaut series like Diablo is Diablo itself, or perhaps Activision-Blizzard...


Eight characters' inventories plus the various formation types and AI controls.

The gameplay is surprisingly like what you'd find in some RTS titles. Take creep mode from Warcraft III for example. You have a small band of units, you go around a map killing enemies and you don't really have to do much since everyone is set to move-to-attack. Dungeon Siege works roughly the same way, as you and your allies will target and begin to attack any foe that comes within range as per your AI settings per character. The only clicking you need to do is to move your team through the map, rearrange inventories, equip items, and manually targeting enemies/destroyable objects. I had no problem with being a passive player to the events in the game, since it was a welcome change from other click-happy fests I had grown accustomed to. There are four "classes" in the game, each based upon which weapon you or other characters use the most to fight (Melee, Ranged, Combat Magic, and Nature Magic), and there are three stats that increase automatically depending again on what weapon you use most (Melee raises Strength and HP fastest, Ranged does Dexterity and Defense, and both Magics raise Intelligence and MP the most), though your other two stats increase at a slower rate. There is little incentive to completely dual- or multi-class, as there are only a limited number of monsters in the world and the way the stats work makes focusing on more than one class inefficient for everyone but the mages, since either type of magic uses the same Intelligence stat. It still is handy to at least work everyone into having everyone get enough Nature Magic to learn Healing Hands, as your fighters and archers aren't going to use their MP at all. Also, Real Time With Pause is the core system of the game. Pause the game, turn the camera, change gear, target enemies, drink potions, and it all happens when you unpause. Pretty neat feature that I unfortunately have tried to invoke in other games to no effect. You can also set the game speed to 20% of normal speed or 20% faster than normal, though just pausing works better.


Behold the aptly-named mega-map. You can actually play the entire game like this, though it would be kinda difficult to see much of anything.

In terms of allies, you can have up to eight characters in your party at one time, though there are many more than that available to hire. These characters often specialize in a single class, though you're certainly free to try to sway them to another class. You are also able to hire pack mules in towns. Mules aren't very capable of fighting (barring the expansion-exclusive Trarg that can fight but carry less than mules), can't equip anything, but they can hold several times more items than your other characters can. Mules are necessary because once you leave town, there is no fast way to return barring running all the way back, or trudging forward with hope the next shop isn't far off (at least until the expansion-only campaign as that introduces a couple of warps). This would be a problem were it not for the low-level Nature Magic spell Transmute that turns items on the ground into gold at a fraction of their real value, or its cousin spells that turn items into Health or Mana Potions. It sounds daunting at first, but weaning myself away from the necessity of Town Portal was actually a pretty neat experience.

This next section's going to be a bit unbalanced, so I apologize.

Things I Liked

-Z-
The Z key is the greatest key of all time. Press it and you/your allies go pick up nearby items. Diablo has trained me to eventually just stop picking up regular items or those of no value, instead getting just magic or set items since they're valuable/powerful. With the Transmute spell, I can pick up absolutely everything I find and with a bit of work, be all the richer for it. There is even an auto-sort feature to get the most out of your bag space, though at times I have no idea how it actually puts things in any order if any at all.

-Potions-
How many RPGs have I played where using a potion or other healing item of some type uses up the entire thing? I can't readily recall any where this wasn't the norm, but Dungeon Siege does something a little different: When you command your characters to drink, they'll only use what they need. So for example, say your hero is down 50HP and you happen to have a potion with 73 points of healing in it. Your hero downs the potion and 23 points are left on it, ready for use later. You can even combine partially-filled potions of the same type together to save space, though this is limited by the size of the bottles used (if you get a bigger potion size, you can just drink from that and refill it with the smaller ones you find). Rejuvenation Potions restore HP and MP but are all-at-once use, so this isn't completely turned on its head. The expansion even adds a button/key to redistribute potions between everyone, so fighters and rangers get more health-restoring ones while mages get most of the mana-restorers.

-Aranna Is Huge-
Well no, the Kingdom of Ehb (setting of the original game) is huge. Inability to just teleport to town at-will tends to make the world as a whole big, but considering the entire game is one long game of "go to Point A, now go to Point B, now go to Point C," you start to appreciate just how big the kingdom in which everyone lives is. Mainly when you want to trek back to town for some arbitrary reason. But no, it's nice to have such a big world to explore and a number of hostiles to slay and treasures to hoard and...There is some variety with the places you go. I can't say for certain whether you spend more of your time above ground or below, but you will go through forested areas, a mine, a snowy mountainside, ice caves, a castle, etc. The expansion gives more reason to explore with the set items dropping from specific chests tucked away off the beaten path. The expansion gives you a type of teleporter, though they only really link a couple of places at a time, so it's not at all like the waypoint system in Diablo II.

-Old Games Rock-
Personal bias here, but this game ran exceptionally well on my poor old laptop. Being an older game, it doesn't require much for power, and can probably run on most computers though I cannot speak for top-of-the-line hardware or Windows 7. The game does show its age, but for a 3D title, it does pretty well. Apart from the few cutscenes, you'll likely have the camera panned back as far as possible to see the enemies (or you'll use the mega-map), so the ugliness of the models won't really bother you. At least, it didn't bother me, but I'm not someone hung up on graphics to begin with.


It's ugly (by today's standards), but it'll do.

Things I Didn't Like

-The Expansion-
Good news! If you buy Legends of Aranna, you get the original Dungeon Siege for free! Bad news. Hey, remember that save you made partway into the game when you decided to install the expansion? Well guess what--you have to start all over. For some strange reason, any single-player saves cannot be used in the expansion, even on the 'Kingdom of Ehb' map that the original game uses. I don't know why this is, like...did they change how the stats were calculated and this made the old saves incompatible? The expansion retroactively added new items and spells and that couldn't have caused a problem. Thankfully, if you buy Legends of Aranna you won't run into this as it already comes with the original right in the box. It just kinda burned me to have a save of the original partway into the game and not be able to do anything with it except import it into Multiplayer mode.

-The Expansion, Again-
Tell me, what does 'expansion' mean? To me, it's...you know, the addition of content. The expansion does this with items and spells and a new campaign, but that campaign is something that I didn't like. So you beat the original game and save the world blah blah blah, so you move onto the expansion campaign. But wait, it's asking you to make a new character? What gives? The expansion's campaign isn't really an 'expansion' but is more of a self-contained experience. You have new characters to recruit and it's a new part of Aranna, and you have to start a new character. All of your previous efforts and accomplishments are reduced to nothing. I dunno, I admit to being new to this genre, so does this happen a lot? I just kinda figured that since the expansion comes with the original game already, then having higher-level expansion content come after the original content would be...you know, pretty smart?

-Anti-Grinding/Now What?-
Aranna is a persistent world. If you save your game, you'll load back at that very same spot and all the baddies you killed will still be dead. I actually liked this, but the problem I had is the fact that there's no way to reset the world. The first Diablo had this kind of system, except at any time you could restart the world with your same character and all of your quests, monsters, items, etc. would reset for more dungeon-plundering. It's bad to slight any game with customizable characters for the fact that you can potentially screw them up, but grinding is always at least a decent way to make your screw-ups less bad. I love grinding as long as the option is there and it's not required, you know? The other thing partially related to this is that you have no hope to reach the max level unless you do Multiplayer. You beat the game, and after the credits you're told to import your character into Multiplayer if you want to keep playing. That wouldn't be a problem except you can only import one character at a time and you can only use that one character when you do Multi. Say you play through either campaign and you talk to your former allies--no recruit option. The world does (somewhat) reset in terms of quests, drops, and mobs this way, but without your allies it becomes kinda bland. But then, you get on Multiplayer to play with others, so...yeah. I just wish there was a solution for people who'd rather play alone.

-Characters-
Oh look, it's this again. Your characters lose all personality once they join your troupe. They become extensions of your already mute and essentially featureless hero, and the only way to get them to really say anything is to drop them from your team. Then they say something joining back up, and that's roughly it. There's no interaction or anything, they're just...there. The expansion has your allies give affirmations or whatnot when you order them about, which strangely furthers the parallels with RTS games.

The Final Verdict
If you're looking to buy the game, get Legends of Aranna since it includes the original. I think I've mentioned this enough already, but it'll save you some potential headaches and some money too. Need a good dungeon-crawler that can last you around 30 hours (20 for the original, 10 for the expansion by my clock), then Dungeon Siege is a pretty cheap solution, and it's pretty fun despite the hands-off approach the game takes. Despite my complaints, I think anyone who has some interest in a dungeon-crawler would like this game. It's fun and while the story is pretty thin and it's not really too difficult, it's a great addition to my library.

A Tip From DF
Get used to moving your team all at once with CTRL-A, since the regular follow mode isn't as effective. Moving all-at-once allows you to take advantage of your formation more effectively and keeps the random straggler from getting lost and unable to follow your commands. And another tip (two for one, aren't you lucky?): Carry Resurrection Scrolls and have someone know the spell. Death sucks and revivals have to be performed on-the-spot or you're always going to have literal dead weight on your team until you go back to the corpse in question.

Score:
10/10
The best of the best of the best, Game of the Year material, Best Game Ever candidate, instant Gaming Hall of Fame inductee, God Among Games winner, #1 on the "Games You Must Play Before You Die" list, Best Game Ever winner, approved by four out of five dentists, part of a complete breakfast.

That mean ol' doctor is up to his tricks again.
Are you and your tethered buddy bad enough dudes to go wreck his latest plan?

For a traditional 2D Sonic title, Knuckles' Chaotix is a pretty weird game. Like most Genesis-era Sonic games, the story is light. In the US manual, Knuckles is tasked to go to Carnival Island to make sure the opening day goes well (which naturally goes to pot fast with the good doctor's meddling). In the Japanese manual, a mysterious island has risen out of the ocean after the events of Sonic and Knuckles and Knuckles goes to investigate, again to find the doctor up to no good. That's honestly it as far as the story goes, but instead of trying to fill this space with anything I can think of, instead I'll go into a bit of a history lesson.



The top game turned into the bottom one.

Chaotix started as another game called Sonic Stadium or Sonic Crackers as the leaked ROM is called. As you'd expect, it stars Sonic and Tails and there are a couple of levels, though the only ROM of Crackers is obviously unfinished and what playable parts are small and few. The game has the same 'elastic line' system in place, and you can carry/throw Tails much like in Chaotix, and there are even some songs from this game that carry over into Chaotix, but that begs the question: What happened? I don't think it was originally Sonic 4 since it plays quite differently from previous titles, and I've never seen that name brought up anywhere officially until the episodic series from last year. Going by ROM dates, Crackers was moved from the Genesis to the 32x as Chaotix in as little as eight months, Sonic was turned into Mighty (obvious by looks, but compare this to this), Tails was dummied out (appears as '*********' in the Stage Select menu as a glitchy mess), and the main character was changed to Knuckles...then to Espio and back. I guess Sega decided they needed a Sonic game on the 32x to push units. It's really an interesting history, and you can read more over on Sonic Retro. Now, back to your regularly-scheduled BoB.

As I mentioned earlier, there is an 'elastic line' or rubberband-like tether between you and your partner, and this is the main gimmick of the game. This keeps your partner on-screen with you constantly, as opposed to previous Sonic games having 'Sonic and Tails' mode be 'Sonic and Tails drops by every once in a while.' Because the tether is stretchy and elastic, there is a bit of fun to be had with physics. You can have your partner hold himself to the ground and you can run in one direction, then either one of you releases to go zooming off, or you can throw your partner onto an out-of-reach platform and you can bungee up to him, etc. Or you can just be boring and hold your partner the entire Act until you absolutely need to use him as a vault. If your partner gets stuck, you can call him with the A button, though this costs 10 rings (and this is the only Sonic game I know of where your ring count can go into negatives). It is also worth noting that you must have a partner at almost all times. Though you are able to choose to play as any of five characters once you beat the intro stage, you have to use the Combi Catcher skill claw game to choose your partner from the remaining four plus two 'joke' characters. Your partner can take damage and loses a single ring in the process, but should either of you get hurt while you have zero rings, he drops off the screen and you're left alone for a few moments before he returns. Since there are no lives in Chaotix, 'dying' boots you out of the current Act and you're taken back to the hub area.


AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Special Stages return, and this time you must collect six Chaos Rings (no relation to Square-Enix's iOS title of the same name) by finishing an Act with 50 or more rings and hopping into the giant ring at the end ala Sonic 1. In the Special Stages, one person runs through a hollow hexagonal prism collecting blue spheres and rings while the number of rings collected in the previous Act count down. You can walk on any of the six sides by moving left or right, and jumping is required in some parts to clear gaps or other obstacles. Having your ring count reach zero or falling out of the stage completely kicks you out with no reward. Collecting all six Chaos Rings opens the good ending (sorry, no Super forms this time), and alters any future forays into the Special Stages by making the walls and ceilings wireframe.

Things I Liked

-The Characters-
Yes, I realize one of the biggest criticisms of the Sonic series is the number of characters, but it's interesting that all of the playable characters (barring joke characters Heavy and Bomb) have their own abilities and they can interact with walls. Knuckles can glide and climb as in Sonic and Knuckles, Mighty can jump off of walls and is the fastest, Vector has the largest hitbox and can also climb walls, Espio can walk on walls/ceilings, and Charmy can just fly indefinitely (that's just cheating, man). I haven't done enough testing, but I'm pretty sure each character has his own weight too, which would play into how the tether works. There are also Heavy and Bomb; Heavy is true to his name by being incredibly slow and barely capable of jumping, and Bomb is average in terms of abilities, can't do anything with walls, and explodes when damaged, potentially hurting you as well.

-Tether-
This is the thing people hated most about the game from what I've heard. The tether makes springs difficult to use, renders the Spin Dash less useful than normal, and to many, is completely unnecessary in the main scope of the game. True, but it's actually pretty fun to use (once you get used to it). It's hard to use since you're partially controlling your partner as well as your main, but there is a lot of potential for neat tricks, though many would probably just hold their partner the entire Act until they needed to throw him for a platform. I can't wait to see what devilry tool-assisted speedrunners do with this feature.

-Music-
Sonic games are notable for usually having catchy tunes, and Chaotix doesn't disappoint, though it goes back to having one tune for each Zone as opposed to Sonic 3's method of giving the second Act a variation of the first Act's tune. A sound test feature is always a bonus, and there are a number of keyboards displayed in the sound test that correspond to the notes being played by the game. You can (technically) use this to learn the game's music, though each song is split across the six FM channels and three PSG channels. It's still cool to see the keyboards play themselves to the song, at least.

-Power-Ups-
There are a couple of additions to the standard monitors in this game that are pretty cool. The first is the 'blue ring' power-up that causes all of the rings you lose to instead be dropped as a single bigger ring, though only once per item. The grow/shrink boxes are neat too (at least, the grow ones are) since you grow huge and your jump and throw strength is much higher than normal. Shrink boxes do the opposite, and while your partner can get either power-up, they won't really get as much benefit. It's also nice how active effects are displayed on the bottom of the screen; on the left for Player 1, on the right for the partner/Player 2, and in the middle for both.

Things I Didn't Like

-Special Stages-
I'll be honest here. This is me bitching about difficulty again. The Special Stages in this game are pretty hard for the last couple of Chaos Rings. Apart from the fact that you have a timer to work against and the blue spheres to pick up, you can screw up a jump and fall off the map completely to undermine all of your efforts. You can potentially screw yourself by getting a low number of rings during an Act, and while you can always pick up a few during the Special Stage, sometimes that means skipping a blue sphere. The game does have a bit of mercy in that if you make it to the checkpoint/finish without enough collected spheres, you're given another pass to get the last few, but your rings aren't refunded. The wireframe Special Stages are worse since it's a lot harder to see what's solid ground, but at least those are only played for a 50,000 point bonus and nothing more.

-Amazing Arena-
It's weird to dislike one entire Zone, but this happened. Amazing Arena differs from the other four Zones in that it is entirely possible to fail the Act. Each Act requires you to find a switch in order to 'activate' the Act, bring it to life, etc. If you make it to the end of the Act without hitting this switch, you're presented with this screen:

Sorry, try again, no refunds. You're kicked back to the hub area as though you died and you have to do the whole thing over again. Thankfully, there is a display telling you in what general direction you can find the switch, but it is rather frustrating to get to the end and have it be pointless. As far as I know, this is the only Zone in the series to do this.

-Metal Sonic-
Hang on, Metal Sonic is one of my series-favorite characters. How can I hate him? His inclusion in this game seems kinda...I dunno, unnecessary? Metal Sonic is usually put into games to antagonize Sonic, so why is he harassing Knuckles? That and (breaking my vow about spoilers), I hate the battle against Metal Sonic. When you get your partner from the Combi Catcher, you then have a roulette wheel to pick your Zone/Act at random. You use this mechanism to fight Metal Sonic. You hit the plunger thing, and the roulette starts, and it has to land on the panel marked 'X' to do damage to him. If it lands on a number, he triggers a pre-determined attack you have to survive. You have no rings, only your partner to absorb a hit every few seconds. And may I note that the battle is entirely random? Okay, I don't know the mechanics behind the wheel, but getting it to land on the right space is down to luck for most people. You could luck out and spend only a couple of minutes on the battle, or luck could spite you and you'll fight him for ten minutes or more. The only positive thing is that for each time you get the roulette to stop on the X, an attack panel is destroyed. But hey, it'll be worth it to see the good ending, right?

-The Ending-
Wrong. What ending? You beat the final boss, and it cuts to the credits. The 'good ending' is a rehash of the (animated sprites on the) title screen along with Sonic and Tails out of nowhere! Where the HELL were you guys to begin with?! I mean, this game has cutscenes for when you reach the end of Act 5 of each Zone and you fight the doctor, but there's nothing at all for the ending? The doctor built an amusement park on the island, and we don't even get a Castlevania-esque crumbling animation? Come on, at least the Genesis Sonic games had something before the credits. The bad ending is just as bad, except what you see is of course different.

The Final Verdict
Well, I'm pretty lenient when it comes to mediocre or average games, and Knuckles' Chaotix is nothing really spectacular, but it's a pretty game and isn't a total waste of an afternoon. The only problem is, good luck finding it. It apparently is on GameTap, but I can't navigate their site at all since I'm not a member, so yeah. It was apparently going to be in Sonic Gems Collection but it's nowhere to be found, so GameTap and emulation are your only options. You won't really be missing much by skipping this, but hey, this is (currently) Mighty's last game ever so...


Mighty who? I love hacks sometimes.

A Tip From DF
Pick Charmy and intentionally try to get joke character Heavy for probably the easiest time in the game. Charmy can fly indefinitely (something not even Tails can do) and Heavy is indestructible, and Charmy's flight won't let Heavy's weight be a big factor. It won't be particularly fun, but it's one of the most effective character combos.

Score:
10/10
The best of the best of the best, Game of the Year material, Best Game Ever candidate, instant Gaming Hall of Fame inductee, God Among Games winner, #1 on the "Games You Must Play Before You Die" list, Best Game Ever winner, approved by four out of five dentists, part of a complete breakfast.