November Gaming

I haven’t updated this blog for a while so I thought I’d put something up about what I’ve been doing gaming wise recently. The most major thing is that I bought a 3DS when the price dropped in August, and generally I like it, although I haven’t bought any 3DS specific games yet, I’ve just been playing DS ones. On to what I’ve been playing though:

Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker (DS)

The week that Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 was released in the UK, Tesco reduced the price of the first game to £4.99 online, so I picked it up to get a taste of the series. Essentially its a cross between a regular Dragon Quest game and Pokemon, in that you capture and train monsters, so that you can improve them, and therefore capture more impressive monsters. The game is surprisingly good fun, even if its probably aimed at younger players, the 3D world of Dragon Quest is brightly coloured and the presentation is what you would expect of a Dragon Quest game.

Infinite Space (DS)

I won’t say much about this but its basically a tactical space game from Sega, which has anime style visuals. Kat Bailey from Roleplayers Realm has talked about it a number of times on the podcast, but if I’m totally honest I didn’t find it that interesting, which is surprising as I like tactical games and anime style space opera.

Halo Reach (Xbox 360)

If someone asked me about my favourite games then there would be little or no chance I’d mention the Halo series, but the fact is I have bought and played through them all apart from the first one. Reach has been sat on my shelf for a while and I fancied something fairly mindless so I cracked it open last week, and finished it a couple of nights ago. I enjoyed it, it was good fun and I imagine I might play the fire fight mode every now and then, but if you don’t like Halo then it won’t convert you.

Do-Don-Pachi Resurrection (Xbox 360)

This game was recently released in the UK by Rising Star Games in Europe, and its the latest title in Caves DonPachi series. In short its a fairly typical Cave shmup, with the crazyness turned up to 11. There is an awful lot going on at once, the graphics are great and the sound pounding, if you like this sort of game then you really need to pick it up. Its also worth noting that its apparently region free for North American users.

Tatsujin (Arcade)

Tatsujin or Truxton as its known in the west is an old classic Toaplan shooter. Its quite funny that I was playing this back to back with Do-Don-Pachi Resurrection and its amazing how two shooters can be so totally different. For a start everything feels fairly slow in Tatsujin, at least until you pick up all the speed ups, and there are few bullets on screen. That said it feels significantly more difficult, whereas in DDP the bullet patterns just spread across the screen in Tatsujin they really try to shoot you down with fast direct bullets. I like the game, although prefer the sequel, both are hard going for me, with their long stages, and restart points, but I guess that’s not surprising given Tatsujin translates to expert.

This next month I’ll try and start Xenoblade Chronicles, which has been sat on my shelf for a few weeks.