This game was always under my radar, I would pick it up and look at box each time I perused the GBA/DS aisle at Gamestop. After awhile it became a bit hard to come by so I ended up renting it from Gamefly. If you are looking for an excellent and cute RPG for your GBA, then look no further!

The story is nothing new, you have your plucky hero Ein, who just happens to be an angel of death with amnesia. You have his plucky female companions, the cutesy Lina, serious Fia, mischievous Serene, and Cierra the crimson witch. Basically Ein was sent to destroy Riviera but he ends up helping the sprites that inhabit the land. The narration of the story is actually handled quite well as your party members are very chatty with their own distinct personalities. They often have witty things to say about each situation and really fill in the back story. There is also an affection meter with each chick in your harem and what girl you end up with is determined by your actions.

What makes this game different from standard RPGs is how game progression is handled. The game is divided into seven levels with six to seven sub-levels contained in each one. There is also a bonus eighth level that can be unlocked by acquiring an in-game item. After each level you return to the home town and can talk to villagers and possibly upgrade your weapons/items. Exploration in the game definitely takes getting used to. You get “Trigger Points” by fighting battles (by the way, there are no random battles; we will get to that in a sec), and have to use those points to explore the levels. Want to look at a chest? You will need to use TP for that. Don’t have any? Well, tough luck no chest for you. This will drive people who want to explore every nook and cranny in a game nuts.

The way to get around that is do well in battle. You get a grade after each battle, the better the grade, the more TP you get. All the battles in this game are scripted. You will meet the same enemies at the same point every time you play. The battle system is pretty standard turn based stuff. Your heroes have an overdrive meter that fills up as they fight for more powerful “Breakout” attacks, and your enemies have something similar called the “Rage” meter. This game also has an odd way to level up. There are no levels per say, you gain stat boosts by using weapons a certain amount of times. The weapons do break and have limited amount of uses. You can also only choose four weapons/items to take with you into battle which adds a good bit of strategy. The weapon breaking thing isn’t all bad because you can go into practice mode to level up your weapons. In practice mode your weapons do not get used up and it can be quite addicting. As soon as I got a new weapon I always went straight into practice mode to level up all my characters with it.

This game has lots of mini-games to determine if you can open a chest or dodge an arrow somebody shoots at you. They are random and usually consist of pressing certain buttons in a certain amount of time. Sometimes they pop up un expectantly and that can cause you to fail and miss out on a cool event. That is what replays are for, I guess.

This game looks like a SNES game with more fluid character animations. The colors are very vibrant, but the backgrounds in some of the levels can get a bit repetitive. Each character has a well drawn portrait that pops up when they talk. The music is very good, especially for a GBA game. There are even some voice samples when characters do their special attacks! If you don’t dig 2D then you might not like the style of this game.

It took me about 22 hours to beat the game including the bonus level. There are tons of unlockables and due to the random nature of the game you won’t see the same thing twice. There are also multiple endings based upon which girl you hook up with at the end. The game has save points galore and you can also suspend play if you need to turn it off for some reason, which I think is an important feature in portable games. I really enjoyed this game, and I am glad I gave it a chance.

Never has a game made me feel such an extreme variety of emotions. Dead Rising is the greatest and most frustrating zombie game I have ever played. It is a realization of every idea I have ever thought would be awesome in a game about zombies. Zombies are by far my favorite type of monster and I boast a pretty impressive collection of zombie paraphernalia. Dead Rising is a worthy addition.

The story is basic, Frank, an intrepid reporter, goes to a small town to get the scoop of his life. Flying in by helicopter he sees a town gone mad with crazies attacking and eating people. He lands on the roof of a mall and tells the helicopter pilot to come back in 72 hours. This is where the game starts. Time goes faster in this game, so 72 game hours equals about 8 hours (give or take) of real time. Time is more your enemy than the zombies.

This is where the game might piss off some people. The main story is divided into “cases” and you only have a certain amount of time to complete each case. If you miss a case then you will miss out on the rest of the story. On top of cases you get “scoops” which is information about survivors trapped in various parts of the mall. That’s right, every bodies favorite game play mechanic ESCORT MISSIONS rears its ugly head. I personally hate them and in this game it is frustrating as hell. The A.I. is just terrible; your escorts get caught in holes, around corners and they usually just let the zombies eat their tasty innards. It isn’t the worst ever, but it could have been implemented much better.

Luckily, if you want you can ignore the survivors on your first play through and just do cases. There are also boss fights against people aptly named “Psychopaths”, which are regular people gone crazy. These can be really fun and all of them have awesome intros. However, this game has THE most frustrating boss battle I have played in a long time. I won’t spoil it for you, but you will know when you get to it.

There are light RPG elements in this game, Frank can level up to 50 and each level nets him more health, new moves, etc. If you die during the game you can choose to start over again from the beginning with all your stats intact. I actually did this a few times and it made the game a lot more bearable.

Being that the game takes place in a mall, you have many weapons at your disposal. If you can see it, you can bash a zombie’s head in with it. You can also dine on many gourmet foods (to replenish your health), and change into tons of stylish outfits to suit your fancy. Want to prance around in a sundress smashing brains in with a broom? Be my guest. This by far is where the game shines. The graphics allow for hundreds of zombies to be on screen at a time with almost no slowdown. Make no mistake, this game is HARD. There is no difficulty slider, you can and will be killed at anytime. The save system completes the tag team of pain by only allowing you to save in the Security Room or bathrooms scattered throughout the mall. You will be redoing portions of the game.

There is tons of replay value with multiple endings. In fact, I think it is impossible to do everything in one play through, much to the chagrin of completists. This game begs to be played multiple times and is never boring. The 360 finally has its killer app.

I’m not a fan of first person shooters. In fact, I pretty much suck at playing them. I had, however, heard many good things about Deus Ex, especially concerning the story. I am a sucker for a good story so I decided to give it a try. For only five measly dollars, I had the PS2 version of the game in my possession. Since I already knew I sucked at these types of games, I put the difficulty on Easy and went on my merry way.

The first thing that popped out at me were the kinda lousy graphics. The environments were bland and the character models looked blocky and had little animation. I realize I was playing the inferior version on the PS2 but it even looked crappy for a PS2 game. The frame rate was somewhat steady but if the action got too fierce, slowdown would rear it’s ugly head. It is not the worst looking game I have ever seen, but I thought it could have definitely used some extra polish. The music in this game fared much better, each piece was moody and fit each section of the game perfectly. I also enjoyed *most* of the voice acting but in some areas (Hong Kong I am looking at you) the accents were just terrible. Don’t even get me started about Paris.

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I thoroughly enjoyed the first Atelier Iris game, I was in love with the cute and vibrant art style and I love games that involve alchemy. I was overjoyed to hear that the sequel was being localized and bought it the first day it came out.

If there is one theme that runs through both games (and perhaps the whole series) it is whimsy. The story never gets too heavy or the plot too involving. You can spend most of your time hanging about making items and hunting for ingredients. Atelier Iris 2 focuses more on fighting this time, but don’t fret, there is plenty of synthesizing for you to experiment with.

The story starts out with two alchemists, Viese and Felt (who makes these names up?). Viese is a cheery girl who is average at alchemy but studies hard, while Felt would rather practice sword fighting than read a book. They live in Eden a place of magic and Mana. The story gets underway when Felt pulls the legendary Azoth sword from the stone and sets into motion a chain of events. It eventually spans between two worlds, Eden the Mana Land and Belkhyde a land with no Mana.

In a more original twist, Viese and Felt are now in two different worlds but they remain connected through a Share Ring which allows them to communicate and share items. Viese stays in Eden to synthesize items and Felt goes to Belkhyde to fight. The alchemy has been streamlined in this game, Viese only needs to make a Mana Item once with the materials then Felt can replicate them using only Mana Energy. This makes finding and making items much less tedious.

The graphics are more of the same, in fact they reused a lot of enemy sprites and even some backgrounds from the first game. The high-res 2D art looks wonderful if you are into that type of thing, but some people may find it dated. The animation is pretty smooth, but there can be some slowdown in a battle if there is a lot of enemies on the screen. The music is the high point of the series and does not disappoint here. Each track is catchy and memorable and hopefully you preordered the game and got the free soundtrack.

Complex battle systems have never been a staple with this series, but they tried to put some spice into this one. You can learn many skills by equipping items and some of them have pretty neat animations. You can also upgrade your weapons and learn new character specific skills that way. You have two types of attacks Charge and Break. A Charge Attack fills your SP (Special Points) gauge which enables you to use your skills. A Break Attack pushes an enemy back on the timeline and allows you to rack up combos. High combos equal higher bonuses after the battle. I found myself getting bored of the battle system by the end of the game.

This game is about 40 hours long and that is with doing all the side quests and making every item. Not much opens up after you beat the game. You can listen to all the music in the game, watch the anime cut scenes, look at character profiles and art galleries. You can also fight a few extra battles at the Dragon’s Den an arena type place. I think it was the perfect length for this type of game but I wish it would have had an extra dungeon like the first one.

I would say I enjoyed this game about as much as the first one, but I prefer the characters and story of the first Atelier Iris more. If you are a fan of the first game you might want to give this one a rent to see how you like it.

Now that I have this new sexmazing DS Lite, I needed a good game to break it in. What can be better than an old-fashioned Mario game? How about an old-fashioned Mario game with TWO SCREENS! I was pretty excited about New Super Mario Brothers (NSMB) and snatched it up the day it was released.

The story is still the same, Peach has been kidnapped and Mario has to go save her as it has been since the beginning of time. You want a story, go buy Paper Mario. You can play single player, touch mini games from Mario 64 and a two player versus game. The versus game is a load of fun and you only need one copy of the game. You basically run around levels trying to get more stars than your opponent and you can use all the conventional items such as mushrooms and fire flowers. The touch games are nothing new if you played Super Mario 64 on DS, but they were a nice addition.

The first thing you will notice (especially on the Lite) are the bright vibrant graphics. While the game is a sidescroller, Mario and company are rendered in 3D. It blends in well together and looks awesome. While not as whimsical as say, Yoshi’s Island, it still looks very nice. The music is the usual happy-go-lucky Nintendo fare and none of the tunes are very memorable. They of course throw in some of the retro tunes to up the nostalgia factor but the new music just doesn’t have much zing to it. As a funny aside, the Koopas like to dance to the BGM while you are playing which can really screw with your jump timing.

Speaking of jumping, the controls in the game are top notch. At first Mario seems a bit “floaty” but after about ten minutes you will be smushing Goombas with the best of them. The touch screen really has no purpose, it shows your progress in the level and you can keep one power up in reserve which you can touch to use if you need it. There are three new power ups in this game, Mini Mario, Ginormas Mario, and Blue Shell Mario. Mini Mario is my favorite, he jumps very high and can be hard to control and can fit into tight spaces. He can also run on top of water, how cool is that! Ginormas Mario can just rampage through a level, taking everything out in his path and Blue Shell Mario can hide in his shell for protection and also spin around in it to take out enemies.

The game has eight worlds and is a little on the short side. Each level has three gold coins to collect, some of which can be pretty hard to get to. Some worlds also have alternate exits which can lead to a bonus level. There is a nice mix of levels including snow, water, spinney trampolines and the like. While not as diverse as Super Mario World, there are a few surprises along the way. The only thing that is rather annoying about this game is the saving process. You can only save after beating a fortress, a castle or at mushroom houses. You cannot save wherever you want which seems counterproductive for a portable game. After you beat the game once you can save anytime but that should be available from the start.

I have beaten the game, which took me about two weeks of casual playing. I am still trying to collect all the gold coins and find all the extra levels which has added a few hours to the game. I would say it is about a 7-10 hour game depending on how much you try to collect. Nothing really special opens up after you find all the stuff, so the replay value isn’t that great. It is definitely a good solid game for DS though, especially if this is your first foray into the awesomeness of DS.