Forums > Contributor Zone > RotW // 2nd March – 8th March // No such thing as an easy EmP week

You industrious swines.

There’s about eight reviews on offer this week. But two of them are mine, making me the mist industrious of them all! Let’s wait for Marc to forget them again during his week, he says, all passive aggressively. Even so, that means it’s no podium finishes for all of you.

Jason writes an informative review of a tower defense game, so the genre provides a hurdle of sorts right off. I’m not a huge fan of dating reviews by talking about price points, but sometimes you gotta do it when you talk about the game’s value. Jason finds the game a little overpriced. If only a little (and coupled with a 4 / 5 review score) I wonder if it’s worth mentioning? Still, I think it’s a good review that spends time trying to communicate the accessibility of the game.

DE makes a solid come back review by finding a point and click game I’ve not played yet and them making me want to change that. There’s the occasional weird phrase or dragged-out line in there from time to time, but I stopped being critical at the sliding tile puzzle rant. God, I hate sliding tile puzzles. Why are these still a bloody thing?

THIRD Space Channel 5 VR: Kinda Funky News Flash! [PS4] Pickhut

Pick goes back to Space Channel 5 to make an unfortunate argument; a once creative game with unreliable controls now has surprisingly reliable controls but is absolutely void of creativity. It’s the right point to make and it’s annoying the game has so little content when it nails the very thing that held it back the most back when. Another unfortunate bout of dating the review with a price point, but this time with more of a reason behind it; charging full retail price for an almost demo reel amount of content is rightfully lambasted.

SECOND Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin (360) Overdrive

I’ve been pretty good to Rob ( he’s won 2 of my last three topics) and have largely enjoyed his recent run of action RPG-ish games that aren’t cut and paste mobile games. This review gets off to a bit of a bumpy start that seems necessary when you learn there’s two different versions of the game floating about. That’s just bad branding. You then follow this with a case error which we will now point and laugh at: Basically, this Scholar of the FIrst Sin is nothing more than.

I think the review’s main problem is that it jumps around its points a bit and your thought process seems a bit jumbled at times. You need some of that because you’re trying to differentiate Souls 2 from Souls 1, but it sometimes comes across as you remembering a thing that you should have been mentioning, so IT’S JUST GOING TO HAVE TO GO IN RIGHT HERE.

Good stuff, though. Now you’re running out of Souls/Witcher games, I suggest giving Dragon’s Dogma a spin.

WINNER Star Girl Proxima [PC] Masters

“I could compare this to a popular game you can all easily recognise,” say Marc Golding, “but, instead, I’ll compare it to this semi obscure one so you can tell I have aces of nerdy genre knowledge”

Only Zig liked ValisThe thing I think Masters does better than perhaps any of us is manage to say so much is so little space. Current Year Marc hardly ever goes over 600 words, but still says as much as the rest of us at double the word count. I used to be able to put this down to staying strictly on target and offering no tagenants, but he’s since ‘borrowed’ my use-a-strikethrough-every-half chance-you-get gag, so he’s even taken those on.

Yet, still, I know exactly what I should expect from Proxima; good boss battles broken up by meandering platforming that sometimes forgets to put the enemies in. You’re also starting to become a real threat to my site-wide tagline dominance. Cut that out.

For us. For them. For you.

Thanks for the placement, EmP. Speaking of prices, this was honestly one of the more tougher decisions I had to make buying a VR game. I kept thinking, "What if it really sucks?" But at the same time I was like, "But I get to save the galaxy by dancing. With Ulala. >_>" So the choice was obvious. For me, at least. Still highly recommend anyone with a PSVR to skip unless it sees a huge drop in price during a sale. Controls are solid, but the game as a whole isn't.

Congrats to OD for second placement, and Masters for nabbing yet another RotW!

I head spaceshit noises.

If I had a VR set up, something like a Space Channel 5 game would be exactly the kind of offbeat thing that would tempt me. Alas!

For us. For them. For you.

I'm not sure I agree mentioning the price necessarily "dates" a review in a 2020 sort of world.

Most games on the eShop retain the same price for many years, until finally they just disappear one day either on a publisher's whim or as that particular system's presence on the eShop ends... in which case a discussion of its price is still relevant for people who might wonder after the fact what the game cost. After all, we're only occasionally talking about fluctuating prices for physical releases in this era when something like 90% of games never get released in a physical format (and even a lot of the ones that do are offered in limited quantities by a company such as Limited Run Games).

With that said, I didn't actually expect to place well with this review, since most people who handle RotW topics do seem to find tower defense games outlandishly dull by their very nature, even though the gaming public at large--that includes me in particular--finds them especially enjoyable/addictive.

Thanks for the timely topic, anyway. And congratulations to the winners, who submitted some stellar reviews this week. Thanks also to all who participated to ensure I had basically no shot at the top three. Despite what that does for my Site King standings, the activity and quality make me happy!

"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

Thanks for the comments and placement. Yeah, if there is one thing I seem to struggle with a lot, it's accidentally capitalizing the second letter of a word IF THAT LETTER is an "I". Apparently, from "home position" on a keyboard, my finger moving from "K" to "I" almost always moves more quickly than my finger going from "A" to "shift" can get off the shift key. And it only happens if the second letter is an "I".

As for the commentary on the review, I definitely understand what you're saying. The "two version of Scholar of the First Sin" bit led to me scrapping and rewriting the intro a couple times before I got it to where I at least thought it was decent AND it was a bit hard for me to not lapse into comparisons between the two last-gen Dark Souls games, simply because they were so similar with many of the alterations being smaller things, rather than any huge overhaul to the mechanics. I'm glad I maneuvered through all that at least skillfully enough to get second, as I also did a fair amount of trimming before even handing it to Jason.

Oh, and "running out of" these games? In my backlog box at home, I have Bloodborne and Dark Souls III and Sekiro is one Amazon order away! I do have some degree of interest in Dragon's Dogma, but man, unless it gets dumped on PS Now for free, that could take a real long while to even think about. The backlog isn't getting any smaller and that PS Now library is only adding to my "stuff I gotta play...sometime...maybe...I hope?" catalog. I'm gonna have to find a way to extend my natural lifespan by 30-100 years, I think.

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

Thanks, Gary -- it's nice to get a win here and there. Maybe if the rest of us pool our points we can catch Joe in Site King as a group.

I don't have to prove I'm refined - that's what makes me refined!