It’s rare these days to see the Square-Enix name within a mile of anything original. “Rehashing sells” has been their motto for the past few years, to the detriment of the JRPG genre as a whole. However, Square wasn’t always like that (well, okay, yes they were). There was a time, back in 1994, when Square released the second-best JRPG on the SNES, second only to Earthbound. That game is Live A Live, which unfortunately never saw a release outside Japan.

About a week ago, I got introduced to The Longest (-winded) Journey, which people told me was the best point-and-click adventure game ever made, and that I would instantly love it the second I began playing it. So I downloaded it, installed it, and played about halfway through. What I found is that The Longest Journey definitely lives up to its name, but that it definitely is NOT the god-adventure I was told it would be, and is DEFINITELY not the best adventure game of all time.

There comes a time in every man’s life when for the sake of a seemingly pointless competition he is required to review a game whose name is a number because he wasn’t lucky enough to be one of the twenty-six other people and get a letter. Unfortunately for me, I have a terrible university internet connection, which ruled out downloading the game XIII and reviewing that. So naturally, I began looking through some romsets and picked the first game in my 7,637 SNES roms – 3x3 Eyes: Juuma Houkan. Go...

In this day and age, marking a game as “casual” is usually a kiss of death, forever putting it into the same genre as non-games like Brain Age, Wii Fit, and Wii Music and killing off any hope of being bought by a core gamer audience. In the eyes of many, casual “games” only sell to two types of people: clueless parents that buy them for their kids, and clueless non-gamers who will buy anything that’s popular. For the longest time, this has been the truth – any game that calls itself casual will ...

By all accounts, Mother 3 is a game that should never have been playable by an English-speaking audience. First you have Nintendo’s outspoken hatred of fans of the Mother/Earthbound series – their refusal to translate Mother 1+2 on the GBA, their refusal to translate Mother 3, their refusal to bring Earthbound to the Wii Virtual Console in America/Europe despite Earthbound ranking #1 in their polls of what games to bring to the VC every single time, their outright mocking of Earthbound fans in t...

Since time immemorial (read: 1997), Konami has promised a worthy sequel to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Every couple of years, the developers rise from their graves, and not even a long history of half-assed failures can stop them. First, there was Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance. Then there was Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin. In the middle was Curse of Darkness and Lament of Innocence, both 3D bastard children in a 2D series. The only post-SOTN Castlevania that can even...

When I heard that Atlus/Nippon Ichi had decided to port the first Disgaea to the DS, I was shocked. For one thing, they’d already ported it to the PSP and had hinted at the port being a PSP exclusive. For a second, there was no way the DS’s extremely limited hardware could ever hope to run a game that was originally for the PS2, even if it came nowhere close to stretching the PS2’s hardware limits. What Atlus delivered was a bad port of a good game.

There’s been a rash of new DS titles recently – Kirby Super Star Ultra, the remake of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, and the craptacular Sonic Chronicles. Yet, out of all the releases this week, most people have forgotten about one that would be the best had Nintendo not decided to release Kirby this week. That game is Time Hollow.

THQ as a company can be summed up in one word: shovelware. All those bad movie tie-in games you see? That’s THQ. I don’t think THQ has ever published a worthwhile game in their entire history as a company. They’re attracted to bad games like flies to shit. Then I heard a select few morons saying that THQ had finally published a good game – Lock’s Quest. Naturally, I downloaded it to see what was up. What I expected was a bad Western shovelware title, and that’s pretty much exactly what I got.