Forums > Contributor Zone > RotW: Jan. 9-15, 2017: First one for me in a new year!

Looks like a busy week this time, with a few more reviews than I'd been doing, dealing with games I've heard of, games I haven't heard of and games I probably currently wish I'd never heard of. And that doesn't even count my Minelvaton Saga review (originally in category #2 and now, very definitely in #3), which gets shunted off to EmP because site rules say I can't simply give myself first place this week and ignore the other two places, leaving me with a lot more free time!

THIRD PLACE

Joe's Anima: Ark of Sinners (Wii)

First off, this was a tough competition again. It's always a good problem to realize that most of the submitted reviews could easily be judged a top-three effort for the week and then have to really delve into them to find something or other that puts one review above a couple others. For you, that moment came pretty early, as you quickly give a great comparison point, mentioning Symphony of the Night and Devil May Cry…and then immediately take it away by noting this game is like those if a great deal of what made them so good had been stripped away. From there, you talk about how short the game is, how it's not overly challenging, how the dialogue is easy to miss and how said dialogue is crucial to knowing what you need to do. If I decide to buy another game for THE WII I RARELY CAN BE BOTHERED TO PLAY BECAUSE, YOU KNOW, THE CONTROLS, it won't be this one!

---

SECOND PLACE

Nightfire's Duke Nukem Forever (PC)

As a guy who had a good bit of fun with Duke Nukem 3D, I dug this review a lot, as it really gets to the heart of why this game would be horribly disappointing to fans of 3D. There was some good stuff about how the long developmental hell period had a negative effect, with various elements and jokes that would have been good, if not for how some other game had done that or made that reference a few years previously. The talk about the inconsistent tone also made a lot of sense, as it seems this game is all over the place, from self-parody to being completely serious OR making bizarre attempts at humor at times where doing so is rather nonsensical. Comparing the alien-goo girls from 3D to the more realized models in Forever was a nice tough to show how one treated them as scenery that can be destroyed (I believe that can help getting 100% kills in a level, as destroying a lot of them causes an alien or two to spawn near you, if I remember quickly), while the other uses them to create a seemingly horrific stage verging on horror…and then ruins the atmosphere with Duke's ability to make bad jokes about things. I really liked the ending too, where you basically were like, "After that, I decided to screw with multiplayer, but since no one else plays this crap, that didn't last long." Good way to end this review, I think!

---

REVIEW OF THE WEEK (aka: Overdrive Place)

EmP's Don't Chat With Strangers (PC)

You know, it's rare that I get interested in actually playing a lot of these cheap PC games that you and a few others review a lot, but it's common that I get interested in finding out more by getting online and either watching a video or reading a guide or whatever. And so I watched a couple 15-20 minute videos of people playing this game. Or I least I watched parts of a couple videos. The cool thing was that I felt I was essentially watching your review in video form. Not because of commentary by the dude doing the video, but because I saw virtually everything you were talking about and I could easily see just what was so frustrating about things. Like you said, some of the stuff is cool and reasonably straight-forward, such as you having to be chill with the girl while online with her unless you want the lights to go out and then return with you hanging from the season and "DON'T LEAVE ME" or whatever scrawled on the wall. I also watched the guy use the phone and get electrocuted, I watched him turn the radio on before the game cues you to do so and it blew up, I watched him go outside and get run over by his car. The kind of stuff that makes it feel less like a game and more like an interactive trial-and-error experience where you have to figure out just when to click on stuff or die horribly for not clicking on it or clicking at the wrong time or whatever. I also have to say that from watching the video, if someone asked me to play against them in that "buttons" game, I'd pick the horrible death.

---

That's it for another week, so now it's time to get back to Super Meat Boy until my thumb starts to bleed! Or read more about this bizarre world-spanning, geo-caching easter egg located in Trials Evolution that I knew nothing about despite playing that game for dozens of hours.

I'm not afraid to die because I am invincible
Viva la muerte, that's my goddamn principle

Thank you for the placement! I had a feeling I wouldn't take first this week since I was up against the Slime Lord, but that's par for the course.

That Dont Chat With Strangers was a rightful lambasting anyway. Reading about it reminded me of all those old annoying Sierra adventure games, where if you coughed in the wrong way at the wrong time, it was instantly game over. Sierra did this, of course, to sell "Hint Books" at the game shops, which were packaged with a magic marker that could reveal answers that were printed in invisible ink (I'm not joking). Or, conversely, you could call their pay-by-the-minute hint lines, where a grinning employee would profit off your frustration. I hated a lot of those Sierra games for this reason and more, and there is absolutely no reason to bring back such a punishing format in 2017.

/end rant

Anyway, it was yet another week of good competition. Gratz to Joe for his placement as well!

placid like acid

Thanks for the topic, Overdrive, and congratulations to those who participated!

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

Yay for placement! Thanks, OD and congrats to Nightfire and EmP!

The only thing my milkshake brings to the yard is a subpoena.

Grats to me, but also for excellent efforts from Nightfire and Joe, who both picked great games to talk about. I just grabbed game that looked good but then wasn't, like a hack.

I don't feel comfortable comparing Don't Chat With Strangers to the Sierra fare of yesteryear, because the cheap deaths were just a part of Sierra's game. The most annoying part by far, for sure, but they at least had a game going on around them, simple as it might have been. Don't Chat is just about staying alive long enough until you've exhausted the game's attempts at killing you and it ends with a whimper. Really disappointing stuff. But it's out of the way now - let's see what'll disappoint me next!

Thanks for getting the topic out without me having to nag you, OD!

For us. For them. For you.