SF's 2010 Year in Review: Games.
Hey all my geeky gaming friends are still here not Facebook. So. Games I played in 2010. No particular order within each category, though vaguely a back-to-front of recent games first.
Awesome
StarCraft II - Campaign is solid, lots of interesting stuff and surprisingly non-fail plot so long as you're okay with pulpy space marines. MP with the DL crew is also fun, definitely better than playing random faceless people. Even random stuff like the challenges and collecting achievements is neat. Has eaten a huge amount of time since it's easy to pick up.
Heavy Rain - Very nicely done. Some plot weirdness but honestly if you analyze your average murder mystery TV show or movie too you'll find some there as well. Fantastic production values. Liked most of the characters, although Madison was definitely the biggest stretch to work into the plot.
Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth - Came up with a way to play as Edgeworth that didn't break PW canon over the wacky way trials work, which was neat, and they didn't make Gumshoe competent, which was also refreshing (it sounded like they might from the previews). Kay is one of the best of the "crazy female assistants" in the series. And, surprisingly, Franzy came off pretty well, too. I always felt she was something of a weak link before (haha she whips things) but AAI used her well by playing into the fact that she's worse than Edgeworth and resents this and letting her come up with the loopy theories Edgey shoots down. My only complaint is that they made the "link thoughts" system way too easy; they needed to toss in, say, 8 or so complete red herrings per case to be noticed that never get connected to anything. Okay, and Case 5 embraces the Phoenix Wright tradition of "absurdly over-complex plot to kill people and frame others despite the fact that the villain is established to have henchmen and could have ordered them to do the killing, or the cleanup, or hell, just shoot the guy and move on."
Team Fortress 2 - I got the Orange Box at last Christmas's Steam Holiday sale. Brought back memories of UT in the computer lab at college. In all seriousness, the class system is really multiplayer FPS done right - memorizing weapon drops on the map is far less important, so it feels like the focus is on fighting rather than playing collect-the-weapons. And damn if the characters aren't amusing.
Portal - Still alive.
Pretty Good
A lot of weird indie games that take < 5 hours here. Huh, that was not intentional.
Iji - Deus Ex meets Metroid. I like both so I like this. The dialogue / plot is written in the style of a very smart high school senior who is a sci-fi fanboy, which is actually fine; I've definitely read worse. Just the TONE and STYLE sets off some first-timer alarms despite the underlying IDEAS being serviceable. Music shockingly good for freeware title, too. The MGS-esque "don't kill people" thing is pretty hypocritical (reflecting shots is a-okay!) but the pure stealth options in 2D are limited so I'm okay with it. A+ moment: exploring a secret deserted bunker to unsettling ambient noise, getting to the end, then watching as all the doors close and teleporting assassins stop by oh god.
Puzzle Agent - The puzzles are nothing special but the dialogue + humor + Minnesota accents + art style + (the plot?) are great. And it's just ~4 hours or so. On the downside: argh non-ending ending WTF. I'm fine with leaving some MYSTARY about give us some closure, since, you know, Gloria Davner tries to kill Agent Tethers and the Sherrif holds him up and all so we can at least settle some of the human plotlines.
Where We Remain - Like Puzzle Agent, the gameplay itself is nothing special but I approve of the meta in this game. I always think it's neat when a game actually explains something that normally must be taken for granted because it's a game. Definitely FAQ how the temples work though, the game is too annoying if you don't understand that.
Scribblenauts - Such a bizarre idea for a game. But amusing and if you get stuck you just skip that one puzzle. Plus you get to inflict such crazy fates on people, repeatedly. Now if only the control scheme was moderately sane...
Wild Arms: XF - Finished about half of this in 2009 but the rest in Jan 2010. Anyway. The battle system is cool! That's the most important thing. Felt I had options, the unique characters tended to have cool quirks to make them worth using, and classes having almost everything unlocked if you switch into them meant I felt free to experiment knowing I could grab a class if need be. The difficulty was also a pleasant surprise - WA:XF feels like a puzzle game too much at times, but I appreciated being challenged. (Although Chapter 3 is a pretty giant letdown in the difficulty curve for some reason.) Plot and character wise... well, no lies, I rage a lot about some silly plot twists and excuses for fights. A good amount of the character work I felt had problems too (Clarissa is too much a Mary Sue, Felius is too bland, Ragnar loses infinite points for his actions toward the end of Chapter 1, Alexia is a phoned-in battle princess, Charlton is supposed to be competent but this comes off erratically at best, Eisen is likewise erratic, and I think the "what is fear" plotline for Katrina was stupid.). But in spite of all that, I seriously respect that WA:XF tried to have a big epic plot with some themes I like, and plenty of the plot worked fine. Levin had his moments, as did Clarissa and Labby. Even Ragnar got to occasionally shine when yabbering with Chelle. Charlton gets some presence points, and Weisheit works well for the kind of villain he is. Rupert and Edna were both awesome start to finish. The game does the most important thing which is plain devoting a lot of time and lines to the characters - lots of in-between battle chats, villain-cam expositions, exploring weird places like spaceships, etc. I'm pretty much willing to enjoy the good and write-off the bad as stuff that didn't appeal to me. Really, a bigger downside with the game is probably that the replay value is questionable - the puzzley nature of many missions means that you're actively handicapping yourself if you try to do it the "wrong" way, and playing with all generics rather than uniques is probably just less fun.
Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core - For a game with so many objectively bad design choices, it's shockingly good. Definitely best played on Hard, albeit with the slight annoyance that monitoring when your Protect / Shell wears off is very important. Plotless "Missions" for extra lootz are a terrible idea but oh well, I guess it saves disc space. Appropriately enough, Sephy was the hardest fight in the game for me - he Game Overed me twice with nasty DEF-ignoring hits that can kill you very fast if you don't have Protect up. Plot / character wise... Zack was fun! Which is important since you play as him. Basically I liked what they did with the pre-existing characters (Zack, Tseng, Sephiroth, Aeris, Hojo) - sane, competent Sephy was in particular nicely sympathetic at first, which was well done. I like that they remember how badly everyone misinterpreted Jenova / the Ancients and run with that. Most of the new characters were lame, though. Hollander was nothing special but worked I guess as enemy Hojo. Lazard's plot feels incomplete - so why does he betray SOLDIER again? And plotwise this seems to accomplish nothing anyway? They forgot to do anything with Cissnei who serves entirely as "the other distraction not-a-love-interest," and also seems to play up the idea that the Turks are competent which is shaky at best. Angeal... okay at first, later plot was kinda nonsensical. And lastly the ultimate red leather wanker himself, Genesis. Why does he think a freaking play means anything, again? They try to give Genesis other motivations, badly, but as it stands the only one that still even vaguely explains his actions is the first one - "screw Shinra, screw everyone, me & me monsters are gonna blow shit up." I'm standing by my "Genesis was just totally crazy and all the babble about the Goddess was just him being crazy" theory of FF7CC. Sorry, he's not sympathetic, Angeal and Zack are crazy if they want to save him, he needs a good killing. But whatever. Badass presence + zillions of clones worked for getting to fight Genesis a whole lot so that was fun at least.
Castlevania Rondo of Blood PSP - It's been awhile since I played a straight-up 2D platformer. This is among the best of them.
Decent
Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened Remastered - Aka Holmes vs. Cthulu. Anyway, Chapter 2 is quite good (Sherlock Holmes at the insane asylum), and Chapter 1 is okay. Unfortunately Chapters 3 and 4 are kind of lame, as is the final showdown. I do like that some of the puzzles are "here's a question and an empty text box. Go to!" Too much prompting makes too many puzzles too easy with multiple choice, or even a finite list of items / evidence to try. The "type your answer" is a nice antidoe where you *have* to actually think. (Or admit defeat and use the in-game hint system. Which was also neat.) Also the characters kind of suck except for Holmes, but the game is about Holmes so they picked the right one to get right.
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars Director's Cut (DS edition) - I'm not 100% sure this was 2010 (coulda been 2009) but whatever. Amusing enough dialogue and I like that they wrote it for handing over pretty much anything in your inventory. And the new stuff they added with Nico as the main character was interesting. On the downside, from talking with longdeadturkey who played the original, they took OUT some parts to save room that rendered some plot twists meaningless and/or nonsensical. The final showdown was also a total letdown - some very, very, very easy non-puzzles, and plotwise it didn't add up. There was nothing supernatural actually in the game. So this big ritual should accomplish exactly squat, though I guess using it as an excuse to try and assassinate them all is fair enough. I'm just not seeing the tension in "stop the Templars from pretending to take over the world with a fancy artifact" or whatever. If that WAS supposed to be supernaturally potent they needed to give me some reason to believe so.
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (final 3 missions) - Hey it's Fire Emblem gameplay. With some interesting twists. Neat. It'd have been more compelling if I'd cared about the characters, which earlier FE games generally made me do. Just, the plot and characters to SD are so very very bad. Like, bad bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, BAD. Bad.
Sands of Destruction - Hey look it's the only straight-up console RPG I finished in 2010. I can rant for some time on this one, but in fairness... the battle system, while overly easy, was still fun. Some of the plot ideas were good, enough to string me along. On the downside, the plot and characters have some giant, undeniable problems as well. And unlike WA:XF, it's frequently errors of omission in SoD where, say, Kyrie and Morte will stop talking. Give me more melodramatic plot twists and party chatter. But yeah, almost nothing about the overall plot is done right. The early part of the game features entirely too much fetch-questing and poor dungeon design. The middle part of the game has the Beastlords gunning for you because... because... I dunno. Only one of the beastlords seems to exhibit the proper horror at "oh god world destruction" so I guess they see you as political rivals, but wouldn't it have been so much cooler if your party was gunning for *them*? The scene with (Eagle) Rex where you walk into town and have a giant fight needed to be replicated a lot more. It's really bad when Tales of Symphonia handled its human / demihuman tensions plot far better. Kyrie was a bad choice for main; they should have made Morte the main character and not included Kyrie, or done something totally different with him. Given that he is a generic do-gooder, I do appreciate his plot twist where he finally does the sensible thing a do-gooder should. The last third of the game just sucks plotwise. Make your sekrit evil plotters make at least a smidgen of sense, please, game. So yeah. Still decent but lots of ARGH.
Retro games I've long since beaten that I screwed with:
Master of Orion 2 - Tried some weird MOO2 hacks that tried to balance picks better. Eh.
Liberty or Death - Patriot blood has flowed like wine, yet they still come despite having eaten like 20,000 fighting men lost to our ~2,000 or so. Words cannot describe how screwed the British are in this game even with some light cheating + save state scumming on their side. I'm trying to push the Americans entirely out of New York so I can turn off the NY militia but figures that Ft. Stanwix has the American fleet somehow teleporting into the Great Lakes just after I asked for British fleet support in the Mid-Atlantic provinces only. Crap.
Deadlock - This game's AI is still made out of tapioca.
Incomplete and won't complete due to being bad / not owning a PSP
Jeanne d'Arc - Okay this was tolerable enough while I played it but it has severe plot / character fail, if not quite at FE:SD level, and it's supposed to get even worse.
Final Fantasy Dissidia - Not my cup of tea. Having to level all the characters up to get their moves? Yuck. Wasn't really feeling the combat system and the "plot" felt like it would be actively painful. Glad I tried this only on loan, I only got ~30 minutes in.
Rondo of Swords - Played mission 1, seemed terrible, moved on to FF12: RW instead.
Incomplete
Half-Life 2 - This game hasn't aged as well as expected. Stopped in Ravenholm as the game was way too linear for my tastes.
Avalon Code - Started this back in ~Dec 2009, stopped briefly, got worried this meant I would suck at the game since I had to go collect a specific code but I'd forgotten where one was and didn't feel like re-scanning everything with the Doomsday Book.
Mega Man 10 - Fun! Got to Wily's base and was unsure if I could save in the middle after using screw-powered items and screw myself over (har). So kinda stalled out on part II and didn't return and lost my notes as to which repeat robot bosses were weak to what, found via the good old fashioned way of trial & error. Should return some time, definitely.
Valkyria Chronicles - "Kill the Emperor's tank" mission. Cool idea but all sorts of random traps that aren't obvious at first. Will definitely return sometime though.
Laggy Fantasy Tactics - Had barely started it when I saw FF13 for thirty bucks.
Final Fantasy 13 - Got to Sazh's major twist (around when he gets an Eidolon). Tentatively liking so far. I hope they give Cid a motivation other than "helping the protagonists" like "attempting to overthrow government in military coup, install self as dictator." We'll see.
Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale - Look it was 5 dollars on Steam and came with Puzzle Agent + stuff. Eh. Played 1.5 dungeons in, got bored, not compelling enough.
Final Fantasy 12: Revenant Wings - Vaan and Penelo have lines! And personalities! And there's a plot! And you get to fight a big bad guy as early as Chapter 3! Wow! The script is snappily written and this time they've given lines to everyone. Gameplay is kinda meh so far but it's passable; I could do without the VaanCraft armies. Also, the game is calling back to FF12 really really hard - basically every piece of music is a remix. On one hand, Cerobi Steppe was the best piece in FF12, so it's nice it gets a prominent position here as the overworld music; on the downside the DS instrumentation kind of butchered it. On the other hand, I actively like better the battle preparation music, which is a far better use of the Phon Coast music.
Awesome
StarCraft II - Campaign is solid, lots of interesting stuff and surprisingly non-fail plot so long as you're okay with pulpy space marines. MP with the DL crew is also fun, definitely better than playing random faceless people. Even random stuff like the challenges and collecting achievements is neat. Has eaten a huge amount of time since it's easy to pick up.
Heavy Rain - Very nicely done. Some plot weirdness but honestly if you analyze your average murder mystery TV show or movie too you'll find some there as well. Fantastic production values. Liked most of the characters, although Madison was definitely the biggest stretch to work into the plot.
Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth - Came up with a way to play as Edgeworth that didn't break PW canon over the wacky way trials work, which was neat, and they didn't make Gumshoe competent, which was also refreshing (it sounded like they might from the previews). Kay is one of the best of the "crazy female assistants" in the series. And, surprisingly, Franzy came off pretty well, too. I always felt she was something of a weak link before (haha she whips things) but AAI used her well by playing into the fact that she's worse than Edgeworth and resents this and letting her come up with the loopy theories Edgey shoots down. My only complaint is that they made the "link thoughts" system way too easy; they needed to toss in, say, 8 or so complete red herrings per case to be noticed that never get connected to anything. Okay, and Case 5 embraces the Phoenix Wright tradition of "absurdly over-complex plot to kill people and frame others despite the fact that the villain is established to have henchmen and could have ordered them to do the killing, or the cleanup, or hell, just shoot the guy and move on."
Team Fortress 2 - I got the Orange Box at last Christmas's Steam Holiday sale. Brought back memories of UT in the computer lab at college. In all seriousness, the class system is really multiplayer FPS done right - memorizing weapon drops on the map is far less important, so it feels like the focus is on fighting rather than playing collect-the-weapons. And damn if the characters aren't amusing.
Portal - Still alive.
Pretty Good
A lot of weird indie games that take < 5 hours here. Huh, that was not intentional.
Iji - Deus Ex meets Metroid. I like both so I like this. The dialogue / plot is written in the style of a very smart high school senior who is a sci-fi fanboy, which is actually fine; I've definitely read worse. Just the TONE and STYLE sets off some first-timer alarms despite the underlying IDEAS being serviceable. Music shockingly good for freeware title, too. The MGS-esque "don't kill people" thing is pretty hypocritical (reflecting shots is a-okay!) but the pure stealth options in 2D are limited so I'm okay with it. A+ moment: exploring a secret deserted bunker to unsettling ambient noise, getting to the end, then watching as all the doors close and teleporting assassins stop by oh god.
Puzzle Agent - The puzzles are nothing special but the dialogue + humor + Minnesota accents + art style + (the plot?) are great. And it's just ~4 hours or so. On the downside: argh non-ending ending WTF. I'm fine with leaving some MYSTARY about give us some closure, since, you know, Gloria Davner tries to kill Agent Tethers and the Sherrif holds him up and all so we can at least settle some of the human plotlines.
Where We Remain - Like Puzzle Agent, the gameplay itself is nothing special but I approve of the meta in this game. I always think it's neat when a game actually explains something that normally must be taken for granted because it's a game. Definitely FAQ how the temples work though, the game is too annoying if you don't understand that.
Scribblenauts - Such a bizarre idea for a game. But amusing and if you get stuck you just skip that one puzzle. Plus you get to inflict such crazy fates on people, repeatedly. Now if only the control scheme was moderately sane...
Wild Arms: XF - Finished about half of this in 2009 but the rest in Jan 2010. Anyway. The battle system is cool! That's the most important thing. Felt I had options, the unique characters tended to have cool quirks to make them worth using, and classes having almost everything unlocked if you switch into them meant I felt free to experiment knowing I could grab a class if need be. The difficulty was also a pleasant surprise - WA:XF feels like a puzzle game too much at times, but I appreciated being challenged. (Although Chapter 3 is a pretty giant letdown in the difficulty curve for some reason.) Plot and character wise... well, no lies, I rage a lot about some silly plot twists and excuses for fights. A good amount of the character work I felt had problems too (Clarissa is too much a Mary Sue, Felius is too bland, Ragnar loses infinite points for his actions toward the end of Chapter 1, Alexia is a phoned-in battle princess, Charlton is supposed to be competent but this comes off erratically at best, Eisen is likewise erratic, and I think the "what is fear" plotline for Katrina was stupid.). But in spite of all that, I seriously respect that WA:XF tried to have a big epic plot with some themes I like, and plenty of the plot worked fine. Levin had his moments, as did Clarissa and Labby. Even Ragnar got to occasionally shine when yabbering with Chelle. Charlton gets some presence points, and Weisheit works well for the kind of villain he is. Rupert and Edna were both awesome start to finish. The game does the most important thing which is plain devoting a lot of time and lines to the characters - lots of in-between battle chats, villain-cam expositions, exploring weird places like spaceships, etc. I'm pretty much willing to enjoy the good and write-off the bad as stuff that didn't appeal to me. Really, a bigger downside with the game is probably that the replay value is questionable - the puzzley nature of many missions means that you're actively handicapping yourself if you try to do it the "wrong" way, and playing with all generics rather than uniques is probably just less fun.
Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core - For a game with so many objectively bad design choices, it's shockingly good. Definitely best played on Hard, albeit with the slight annoyance that monitoring when your Protect / Shell wears off is very important. Plotless "Missions" for extra lootz are a terrible idea but oh well, I guess it saves disc space. Appropriately enough, Sephy was the hardest fight in the game for me - he Game Overed me twice with nasty DEF-ignoring hits that can kill you very fast if you don't have Protect up. Plot / character wise... Zack was fun! Which is important since you play as him. Basically I liked what they did with the pre-existing characters (Zack, Tseng, Sephiroth, Aeris, Hojo) - sane, competent Sephy was in particular nicely sympathetic at first, which was well done. I like that they remember how badly everyone misinterpreted Jenova / the Ancients and run with that. Most of the new characters were lame, though. Hollander was nothing special but worked I guess as enemy Hojo. Lazard's plot feels incomplete - so why does he betray SOLDIER again? And plotwise this seems to accomplish nothing anyway? They forgot to do anything with Cissnei who serves entirely as "the other distraction not-a-love-interest," and also seems to play up the idea that the Turks are competent which is shaky at best. Angeal... okay at first, later plot was kinda nonsensical. And lastly the ultimate red leather wanker himself, Genesis. Why does he think a freaking play means anything, again? They try to give Genesis other motivations, badly, but as it stands the only one that still even vaguely explains his actions is the first one - "screw Shinra, screw everyone, me & me monsters are gonna blow shit up." I'm standing by my "Genesis was just totally crazy and all the babble about the Goddess was just him being crazy" theory of FF7CC. Sorry, he's not sympathetic, Angeal and Zack are crazy if they want to save him, he needs a good killing. But whatever. Badass presence + zillions of clones worked for getting to fight Genesis a whole lot so that was fun at least.
Castlevania Rondo of Blood PSP - It's been awhile since I played a straight-up 2D platformer. This is among the best of them.
Decent
Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened Remastered - Aka Holmes vs. Cthulu. Anyway, Chapter 2 is quite good (Sherlock Holmes at the insane asylum), and Chapter 1 is okay. Unfortunately Chapters 3 and 4 are kind of lame, as is the final showdown. I do like that some of the puzzles are "here's a question and an empty text box. Go to!" Too much prompting makes too many puzzles too easy with multiple choice, or even a finite list of items / evidence to try. The "type your answer" is a nice antidoe where you *have* to actually think. (Or admit defeat and use the in-game hint system. Which was also neat.) Also the characters kind of suck except for Holmes, but the game is about Holmes so they picked the right one to get right.
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars Director's Cut (DS edition) - I'm not 100% sure this was 2010 (coulda been 2009) but whatever. Amusing enough dialogue and I like that they wrote it for handing over pretty much anything in your inventory. And the new stuff they added with Nico as the main character was interesting. On the downside, from talking with longdeadturkey who played the original, they took OUT some parts to save room that rendered some plot twists meaningless and/or nonsensical. The final showdown was also a total letdown - some very, very, very easy non-puzzles, and plotwise it didn't add up. There was nothing supernatural actually in the game. So this big ritual should accomplish exactly squat, though I guess using it as an excuse to try and assassinate them all is fair enough. I'm just not seeing the tension in "stop the Templars from pretending to take over the world with a fancy artifact" or whatever. If that WAS supposed to be supernaturally potent they needed to give me some reason to believe so.
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (final 3 missions) - Hey it's Fire Emblem gameplay. With some interesting twists. Neat. It'd have been more compelling if I'd cared about the characters, which earlier FE games generally made me do. Just, the plot and characters to SD are so very very bad. Like, bad bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, BAD. Bad.
Sands of Destruction - Hey look it's the only straight-up console RPG I finished in 2010. I can rant for some time on this one, but in fairness... the battle system, while overly easy, was still fun. Some of the plot ideas were good, enough to string me along. On the downside, the plot and characters have some giant, undeniable problems as well. And unlike WA:XF, it's frequently errors of omission in SoD where, say, Kyrie and Morte will stop talking. Give me more melodramatic plot twists and party chatter. But yeah, almost nothing about the overall plot is done right. The early part of the game features entirely too much fetch-questing and poor dungeon design. The middle part of the game has the Beastlords gunning for you because... because... I dunno. Only one of the beastlords seems to exhibit the proper horror at "oh god world destruction" so I guess they see you as political rivals, but wouldn't it have been so much cooler if your party was gunning for *them*? The scene with (Eagle) Rex where you walk into town and have a giant fight needed to be replicated a lot more. It's really bad when Tales of Symphonia handled its human / demihuman tensions plot far better. Kyrie was a bad choice for main; they should have made Morte the main character and not included Kyrie, or done something totally different with him. Given that he is a generic do-gooder, I do appreciate his plot twist where he finally does the sensible thing a do-gooder should. The last third of the game just sucks plotwise. Make your sekrit evil plotters make at least a smidgen of sense, please, game. So yeah. Still decent but lots of ARGH.
Retro games I've long since beaten that I screwed with:
Master of Orion 2 - Tried some weird MOO2 hacks that tried to balance picks better. Eh.
Liberty or Death - Patriot blood has flowed like wine, yet they still come despite having eaten like 20,000 fighting men lost to our ~2,000 or so. Words cannot describe how screwed the British are in this game even with some light cheating + save state scumming on their side. I'm trying to push the Americans entirely out of New York so I can turn off the NY militia but figures that Ft. Stanwix has the American fleet somehow teleporting into the Great Lakes just after I asked for British fleet support in the Mid-Atlantic provinces only. Crap.
Deadlock - This game's AI is still made out of tapioca.
Incomplete and won't complete due to being bad / not owning a PSP
Jeanne d'Arc - Okay this was tolerable enough while I played it but it has severe plot / character fail, if not quite at FE:SD level, and it's supposed to get even worse.
Final Fantasy Dissidia - Not my cup of tea. Having to level all the characters up to get their moves? Yuck. Wasn't really feeling the combat system and the "plot" felt like it would be actively painful. Glad I tried this only on loan, I only got ~30 minutes in.
Rondo of Swords - Played mission 1, seemed terrible, moved on to FF12: RW instead.
Incomplete
Half-Life 2 - This game hasn't aged as well as expected. Stopped in Ravenholm as the game was way too linear for my tastes.
Avalon Code - Started this back in ~Dec 2009, stopped briefly, got worried this meant I would suck at the game since I had to go collect a specific code but I'd forgotten where one was and didn't feel like re-scanning everything with the Doomsday Book.
Mega Man 10 - Fun! Got to Wily's base and was unsure if I could save in the middle after using screw-powered items and screw myself over (har). So kinda stalled out on part II and didn't return and lost my notes as to which repeat robot bosses were weak to what, found via the good old fashioned way of trial & error. Should return some time, definitely.
Valkyria Chronicles - "Kill the Emperor's tank" mission. Cool idea but all sorts of random traps that aren't obvious at first. Will definitely return sometime though.
Laggy Fantasy Tactics - Had barely started it when I saw FF13 for thirty bucks.
Final Fantasy 13 - Got to Sazh's major twist (around when he gets an Eidolon). Tentatively liking so far. I hope they give Cid a motivation other than "helping the protagonists" like "attempting to overthrow government in military coup, install self as dictator." We'll see.
Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale - Look it was 5 dollars on Steam and came with Puzzle Agent + stuff. Eh. Played 1.5 dungeons in, got bored, not compelling enough.
Final Fantasy 12: Revenant Wings - Vaan and Penelo have lines! And personalities! And there's a plot! And you get to fight a big bad guy as early as Chapter 3! Wow! The script is snappily written and this time they've given lines to everyone. Gameplay is kinda meh so far but it's passable; I could do without the VaanCraft armies. Also, the game is calling back to FF12 really really hard - basically every piece of music is a remix. On one hand, Cerobi Steppe was the best piece in FF12, so it's nice it gets a prominent position here as the overworld music; on the downside the DS instrumentation kind of butchered it. On the other hand, I actively like better the battle preparation music, which is a far better use of the Phon Coast music.