jdarrell

Is euchre against the AI fun?

If you're selling a non-resellable game for over $20, it better be one hell of a game. I think they've crossed a line here so congrats to the ones that were smart enough to do it first.

I haven't played Stratego in a long time...

And this is my excuse to call all young people dumb, get off my lawn!

Re: Left-handed

I'm not left handed and could be wrong but the controls seem more configurable and dependent on touch. You can change the L R buttons though. Don't think you'll have to worry about using the face buttons too much. Only possible annoying thing I see is having to hit select to get into the settings menu.

"The only buttons in the game are up, down, and A (and X/L/R to open menus), think about it."

It's the exact same as the other ten baseball games I've played that use a D-pad, except you don't control the players.

I've already said the players are generic, selection is repetitive but fast, and there's no limits on number of switches --except that you have a limited number of players and the reserves all have useless stats-- so the only way left to answer is to say they're perfect. How could they have screwed it up to be less than perfect? How could it possibly be unintuitive? You said you don't have a DSi, so are you forgetting how convenient having dual-screens on a handheld device is for menus?

I've never had a point in the game where hitting up/down and the A button to switch a player was too much of a hassle (pointless yes, hassle no), especially since it's the only actual gameplay in the game. No injuries or trades is important because your starting lineup is so overpowered compared to your reserves. I'm more used to hockey games though so that's probably why I expect injuries and for "line changes" to have a significant impact.

If you use the stat points, you'll spend more time distributing stat points than switching players (that's how easy it is to switch players!), so why wouldn't someone want to know about a point example instead? I said how intuitive the most unintuitive features of the game are.

Your question has already been answered several times, it really is as mindlessly simple, painless, and intuitive as hitting up down A. It's as easy as clicking the post comment button here. It's a menu, imagine a baseball game from 1985, it's not some goofy iPhone app, it's a low budget game menu that didn't even bother including touchscreen controls and crams text explanations of what everything does (as seen in the screenshots).

In the pinch-hitter video, at 6:40, the four blurry words are the player names, L R cycles through pitchers [10 players total], catchers [1], infielders [2], outfielders [current screen, 4], and I popped up the giant blurry white box below their names so I could look at the numeric values of their various stats. It is very easy to switch a pitcher and multiple fielders; it's as easy as hitting up down A.

@tbd: In the later levels, personally for non-bosses I would've liked to see them zoom out a bit (instead of doing larger tattoos). This would've put more focus on precision inking instead of the other stuff. (I haven't played enough to fully comment though). And you could buy one of those cheap 100-packs of multi-coloured styluses if you want cross-contamination realism

"I'd expect nothing less than to be able to do all those things, but how well does it work to do those things? Is it intuitive? Does it avoid confusion? Is it relatively fast to make changes? Does it avoid unnecessary steps?"

The only buttons in the game are up, down, and A (and X/L/R to open menus), think about it. It's fast, painless, and so simple that it's impossible to screw up; I found it intuitive, but others were confused about how to fast forward and where all the manual information is. To put ten points into a character, I have to tediously open the team screen, move down to the player, hit right a few times until I'm at batter stats. Then I have to repeat the following ten times: hit X, hit down a few times until I'm at the stat I want, then hit A, then left, then A again. But it doesn't matter how repetitive this is and that they didn't care enough to put in touch controls because it's impossible for such a simple game to be slow in the menus.

There's no player injuries, so having two good pitchers has been enough for me to win about 30 of my 35 games basically effortlessly. (I just use whatever pitcher the game puts in automatically, and 9 outta 10 times it's one of those two). Perhaps for a challenge I'm not supposed to use any stat points. I'm having fun with it though, I like games like this.

Here's the worst Absolute Baseball video in the world (I forgot to show the standings screen, but it's the same as you'd expect on an official website or newspaper) [It's a 1-1 tie game. At 6:40 I put in a pinch hitter, at 7:05 I use the motivation ability, both fail. Game ends at 8:35]:
[youtube:h2K5_gFHHVo]

Layton is a puzzle game. Shameless trailer aside this looks like an adventure game.

It's not trying to be a detailed simulator review so the review does cover everything and focuses on what the game is about. "You can change the lineup, distribute growth points, and tell you batter/pitcher what to do. But that's it."

I don't follow baseball enough to understand what you're asking by in-game lineup management. You have the same players for the entire season, about 13 fielders and 10 pitchers. Even though pitchers bat in A-league (B-league has DH), the pitchers all have 60 points (the worst) in batting stats and the batters all have the worst possible pitching stats. So if you substitute your pitcher while batting, when your side retires the game will pop up the switch screen again so you can tell an actual pitcher to pitch. You can also switch base runners and fielders whenever and as many times as you want, and switch their field positions. But most fielders have the worst possible stats in every position except their current one. (There's one stat each for 1st base, 2B, 3B, Outfield, Catcher, Short Stop)

To add on to what GreenAbobo said, many of the innings have been shut-outs for me so far. Normally I would prefer higher scoring games, but since this is a management simulation the low scoring has made the games more competitive to me, it's pretty nice. And then when your strategy does get you some runs that shall probably win you the game it's great.

(Keeping in mind I have a limited understanding of the details. For example, the game claims weather has an effect, but I haven't noticed any weather yet.)

The players are generic clones so line-up changes aren't very fun; paying attention to fielding stats would probably be more pointless and tedious than it should be. No bullpen or warmups. There are seven commands when pitching such as grounder, strike out, motivation, you can only use one at a time, two of them are temporarily "move infield" and "move outfield." I think as a batter there's seven commands including everything you mentioned except to hit a batsman, and another one is to tell them to "swing stronger" (at the expense of fatigue or higher odds of striking out.)

For gameplay basically what happens is you hit button "A" and a random number of strikes and balls occur. (At this point the opponents command is displayed, so I think you're supposed to counter with the appropriate command here.) Press "A" again and the batter swings and either hits, fouls, strikes out, or walks. If you set it to automatic it hits "A" for you but gives you enough time to interrupt with the command "X" button whenever you want.

Stats? For team stats I think it's just win/loss record in the standings. It keeps track of player batting average, hits / RBI / Home runs, but these stats are hidden in a part of the menu you won't want to look at often and there's no way to see during a game. During game you see their letter grade stats (eyes, base stealing, etc.; and every player also has a conditioning and focus icon). There's other little details throughout the game such as attendance per game and which hand pitcher batters are good against. When slidecage mentions his good stat player doing badly, it could be a right handed player that's better against left-handed pitchers but really I have no idea. Also, in the games I've played the other pitcher throws a lot of grounders so that could make power stats irrelevant.

I don't think I saw anyone mention you can speed up the animations by pressing L at the command selection, makes games five times faster (edit: zeppray mentioned this in the other comments). It's a simple DSiWare baseball simulator, I haven't played enough to think about how fun it is.

Great joke.

Earthquake related?

Are there any legitimate sources for 3D complaints? The only ones I've seen all sourced the same troll site.

From what I've read it's the exact same as the warning for the Wii, and is therefore currently not news-worthy at all.

Apparently I don't know how to use a video camera well:
[youtube:emUXRnYhi6I]

Downloaded it yesterday, might try to post a video of gameplay in a couple days. For now I'll call it below average due to lack of strategic decisions, but possibly fun enough to play to have excellent replay value. Personally it's been worth it for me so far, but not completely certain that it'll hold up yet. It actually reminds me of if the developers of BlayzBloo made a card game, except there's slightly more variety.

"The resources in question are, as best we can tell,"
There's a better description in the tutorial... Four of them are oil and other utilities, and the more expensive three are different types of plans. And the chair card has an F on it for function, the functions are pretty easy to remember because there's not many of them (chair changes players seats). The main strategy to the game is to draw 13-15 cards, then play and/or discard 5 cards at a time. There isn't much memorization required to play, it's way too simple instead of complex in my opinion. "Difficult to learn, easy to master."

The scenario where you had one resource and then magically received ten more isn't likely to happen for many reasons. (1) You can use up five at a time. (2) Reset cards and the Sell ANY card make it even easier to get rid of your last resource (3) There are two defense cards to nullify opponent attacks... have to check if the half card also reduces quantities received (4) To get ten resources, your opponent must've sent three plus seven because only one SAME card can be used per turn. The only possible confusion is if you have no defense cards then there's no pop-up when you get attacked so it happens fast if you're not watching the top screen, but I like the pace.

Screenshot thumbnails only display the top screen. The first screenshot shows gameplay if you click on it.

Is the gameplay like Crazy 8s or UNO or a resource game such as ? I'm mainly just wondering how original it is, I think I'd need a video so shall probably get it to see it for myself this week.

There's 200 levels... and because of the shop where you can level up your stats, you can play or replay them at your own pace. For variety, they could be large or small, or lots of fish or low amount of fish, or hexagonal or square grid pieces. Some of the levels do get huge though, the gold medal time is over an hour for some of them.

I think they're designed to gradually get you more used to using the radar. It starts off almost useless, but eventually you'll be using it to find all the fish of X size one by one.

The game is easy enough that the flag tool is useless until you get to the last 30 levels in my opinion. Fortunately it's easy to skip ahead levels when you want more of a challenge.

Based on one of the videos, I wouldn't be surprised if you unlock a custom level creator at the end of the game.

"Is there any reason just not to click on any spot once you start buying upgrades and your line can not snap..."

For platinum medals you need to beat the gold time with zero errors. Power-ups make you invincible in many of the smaller and earlier levels though.

I had Qix (I have no idea why I owned a puzzle game on the Gameboy, but I did for some reason...), but the controls make it a completely different game in my opinion. Personally I like Qix much more than Filler.

The paint is for signing your name; there's four accounts/save files.

I'm betting we won't hear anything about a 3DS XL until other popular companies start doing 3d without glasses.

@9 Most people don't mind getting the retail version of a game like Civilization (compared to tower defense). There aren't many users who buy only downloadable games, so it's useless to complain about not being able to download DS games that you can get at retail.

Edit: When people want more tower defense, they likely get made for DSiWare. When people want more strategy, it could go either way, but will probably be retail.

I like these games, but still think it's a great review.

@12: There's downloadable wallpapers and avatars, I'm assuming you need the 100% for that. You can get that last snowflake by tilting the iceberg and then jumping from the peak.

I was surprised how fun that was, even though I kept dying at first.

I think the puzzles were poorly done (not fun).

It looks fun (Quick9 mode) and accessible, don't need much else from a 200-point game. Who doesn't like playing Tic-Tac-Toe while on vacation?

Losing equipped equipment when characters switch in the first half of the game was irritating though.

This is my favourite DS game for 2010.

@2 3 5 6 8 9 10 15
He's talking about players who call each other noobs, etc. He's not talking about players who criticize the game.

I think the jokes are pretty funny.

The main stat is it records your fastest time for each of the 50 levels.

@Klapaucius
Paperfield has three maps (which is less than six) and the two teams have four characters each (which is less than six.) If you have the 500-point game, you receive bonus maps and characters such that each game has equal amounts of different content (both games have the All Black team). But the amount you get with just the 200-point game is definitely worth it.

Edit: I was wrong, the original has eight maps. Paperfield has three plus three bonus.

If you hit left at the level select screen, you can replay old levels (useful if you missed a chest.)

This and the freeplay mode convinced me.

Thanks for the review, I didn't notice this game when it was released

Most of the subtitles for good games here seem suspenseful to me, this one included. Guess it was a miss for some though?

I liked the controls in Looksley's Line Up so this review easily has me convinced to get this game when it comes out here.

He wants to see it sell for $300 which is more than most people, so we can still call him clueless

From the quotes, it sounds like the only action they're planning is to make a new good online game.

Re: Gameplay
There's only five input buttons: up, down, left, right, A

You have to guess and memorize when to use them to cause the correct scene to play next.

I liked it, but mainly because it reminded me of when I played the sequel in the arcade once.

He really should've brought a sickle and said he was with the Animal Crossing team.

If anyone's looking for the trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkI0zy10vhM

I like EA Sudoku, but this is also 200 points so I'll get it too.

I used irken004's suggestion of adjusting screen brightness and that seemed to help for me. Since my room is bright, used the second lowest brightness such that the background is barely picked up when the camera is moved around.

If this was legal, I would've sold my soul for a better price long ago

I basically agree with Sean. When you're used to a tablet, it's hard to go back to settling for a netbook or laptop.

Tablets are fun to write on, and have respectable games, but Nintendo is better off focusing on their own market, and that's why a device without buttons isn't a threat.

I hope this is as good of a breakout game as it sounds here.