![Headphones Review Round Up [Hardware]: SIVGA SV021, VR500, UX3000, and VR2000](/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/unnamed-5.jpg "Headphones Review Round Up [Hardware]: SIVGA SV021, VR500, UX3000, and VR2000")
Headphones Review Round Up [Hardware]: SIVGA SV021, VR500, UX3000, and VR2000
Update: SIVGA SV021 tested and rated!![Boulies Elite Max Chair [Hardware] Review – Assemble, Adjust, Relax](/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/boulies-elite-max-chair-review.jpg "Boulies Elite Max Chair [Hardware] Review – Assemble, Adjust, Relax")
Boulies Elite Max Chair [Hardware] Review – Assemble, Adjust, Relax
What do we think of the Boulies Elite Max Chair?![Red Magic 9S Pro [Hardware] Review – The New Standard For Mobile Gaming?](/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/red-magic-9s-pro.jpg "Red Magic 9S Pro [Hardware] Review – The New Standard For Mobile Gaming?")
Red Magic 9S Pro [Hardware] Review – The New Standard For Mobile Gaming?
My Red Magic 9S Pro Review puts this incredible bit of tech through its paces to determine whether it's worth your money.
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Category: Reviews
Namco High Review
Namco High is the latest video game to come from ShiftyLook, the online branch of Namco Bandai which reinvigorates several of the company's various, more latent intellectual property as webcomics and cartoons. It's only fitting, then, that in this browser-based dating simulator from the creator of Homestuck, you get to pal around with various characters from ShiftyLook's comics and beyond.Well, they tout it as a dating sim, but from what we've played, that's a little bit of a misnomer. You get to engage and interact with numerous characters (15 on the Namco side, three from Homestuck), but things never get deeply romantic. They do, however, get rather humorous in a way which feels rather reminiscent of Capcom's Ace Attorney series—which is never a bad thing.You take on the role of a gender-neutral Cousin from Katamari, which you can rename anything you like, and you find yourself in detention with the odd crew of what Principal Dig Dug and his detention supervisor, King, call a group of "delinquents". Before long, though, you come to find out that your fellow captives aren't so bad after all.
Ratchet and Clank: Before the Nexus Review
Ratchet and Clank is a popular action game property that's exclusive to Sony and the PlayStation, so it's only natural to do a double-take at Ratchet and Clank: Before the Nexus for mobile.Before the Nexus isn't actually a full-fledged Ratchet and Clanktitle, however, nor does it contain the depth of any of the series' mainstream entries. In fact, Before the Nexus is a 3D endless running game that plays much like any other runner slumming around on the App Store or Google Play. It looks great and it should keep you busy for an hour or two, but the game obviously exists just to whet your appetite for the latest Ratchet and Clank title, Into the Nexus for the PlayStation 3.As its name implies, Before the Nexus takes place before the events that unfurl in Into the Nexus. Vendra Prog and her brother, Neftin Prog, are making trouble. And, like most villains in endless running games, they're making a beeline for the horizon. Ratchet gears up to stop them. Luckily, Lombaxes are fleet of foot.
Fighting Fantasy: Island of the Lizard King Review
The final paragraphs of the gamebook Island of the Lizard King contain a scene I can still remember clearly today, nearly thirty years after I first read it. It stamped itself on my ten-year old brain because it seemed so hideous at the time. I'm made of sterner stuff today, and was positively anticipating re-living those climatic moments on my iPad.As a digital gamebook, you'll spend most of the time reading paragraphs of text and then being presented with a series of possible choices at the end. In this way, you work your own chosen path through a work of fiction. Occasionally you'll be called on to fight creatures or test one of your three statistics, all mediated by dice rolls with a slick and satisfying system.As the title suggests, the plot of this tale sees you travelling to a tropical island to search for, and hopefully dispatch, a deranged lizardman who's been terrorizing local populations with slave raids.
Cat Story Review
Waking on the shore of a strange island, your first realization is that your friends are missing. Your second realization is that it's time to get to work! Much like CityVille and The Tribez, Cat Story puts you in control of creating a functional town one building at a time. Harvest food, gather resources, and build bungalows as you find your friends and expand the village to take over the island!It starts with simple strawberry farms and fisheries, the most fundamental things necessary to keep your village alive. You'll grow basic food products so you can refine them into more marketable items, slowly increasing your pot of gold with each sale.Once an item is ready to collect, tap the building to take its resources, then tap it again to set the workers on a new task. Quests appear on the side of the screen to guide you forward, instructing you in the ways of wheat production and sawmill construction as well as pushing the story forward with new events and challenges to complete.
Awakening Kingdoms Review
Awakening is one of Big Fish Games' most popular series, and this month the publisher brings us what it hopes will be the next evolutionary step in the hidden object genre: namely a free-to-play hidden object/building sim hybrid called Awakening Kingdoms. While it skillfully combines many of the most prevalent casual game types—hidden object hunts, jigsaw puzzles, building simulations and collectibles—it also fails to overcome the repetitiousness seemingly inherent to the social game milieu.Kingdoms starts well by casting you as the steward of Queen Sophia's ill-fated Skyward Kingdom. Having clashed with and vanquished the evil mage Dreadmyre, the queen asks you to help her people recover and rebuild her war-torn lands. After choosing a name and an avatar, you get to work by becoming acquainted with the kingdom's various human and non-human inhabitants, and then Harry Potter-like, take on an owl assistant named Linea. Gamers familiar with the Awakening universe will feel immediately at home with the game's fantasy characters and landscapes, and social gamers will take its energy-based hidden object searches as a matter of course. Fortunately, in addition to these familiar things, there are a few new elements on offer to pique the interest of less-casual, casual gamers."Then again, Kingdoms'features aren't really new; it's the way they're presented that freshens them up. Since your job is to rebuild the kingdom, a good amount of your time is spent constructing and upgrading the queen's castle and environs. This is more satisfying than in most "ville"-type games because you're given a closer view of things as they improve. It's also better because you have to do something more engaging than clicking and waiting to gain money and resources. Both of these come from exploring various hidden object scenes; alas, this hidden-object-dependency is unfortunate because the process is so repetitive.
Frozen Free Fall Review
By many people's reckoning, Disney's Frozen might be one of the best animated films they've done in a while; even so, there's nothing that says the movie's ancillary products are up to snuff. Disney's team knows how to market with things like dolls, toys, and clothing, and these days they're reinforcing their cinematic brands with mobile games. Sadly, interactive entertainment is not their forte, as evidenced by the mediocre free-to-play match-three game Frozen Free Fall.It's no surprise that Free Fall tells more or less the same story as the film and banks on the film's appeal. Starting with sisters Elsa and Anna, it sets you to removing the snow and frost slowly taking over the kingdom of Arendelle. There's nothing earth (or ice)-shattering here; like a thousand other match-three games, you're asked to achieve a set score or clear the board by matching three or more same-colored crystals. Also like other games in the genre, power-ups like Icebergs are created when you match four or five crystals; other power-ups cause entire vertical or horizontal rows, or rectangular groups of nine crystals, to explode."Disney tries to connect the game with the movie by including some of its imagery in the game's backdrops, as well as its music. It also connects the two through the inclusion of various minor characters who appear here in the form of helpers. It tries to add some Frozen flavor by offering purchasable tools like Ice Picks that can remove a single tile, by scoring each level from one to three snowflakes, and by making you buy snowballs (which are used to add five additional moves if you come within a hair's breadth of winning a certain level). The problem is all of this is window-dressing.
Quarriors Review
If, like me, you've never played a physical dice-building game before, then Quarriors should be the right game for you. It's not very complicated. You roll your dice, gather your resources, and attack with your monsters while your enemies defend. Sometimes you buy monsters or spells and build up a whole virtual dice bag of possibilities.Unfortunately, that last paragraph is far and away a better tutorial than the one the game provides. In Quarriors, the actual tutorial is a dizzying info dump of pop-up windows and flavor terms with nary a layman's interpretation to guide you. It will teach you to collect "quiddity" to capture monsters from the "wilds" so you can accrue "glory;" just don't expect a breakdown of what any of that means, or for any of it to be eased into your game organically. If you miss the tutorial blast at the top of your first round, you can dig through a series of static PDFs in the help section for a dictionary of terms and turn orders, but that's hardly optimal. Quarriors does not make a good first impression."Lucky for the developers, then, that the game is so addictive. Once you parse the learning curve, the core mechanics are surprisingly simple - and more importantly, incredibly fun. You can get through an entire match in a few minutes if you play with other humans in the room, or against the game's AI. Online matches take longer, being asynchronous, and unfortunately share the offline mode's drought of information. It took me a few moments to even realize online play was asynchronous.
Disney Hidden Worlds Review
Disney has a new hidden object game (HOG), and despite some of the rumors and urban legends that still haunt the House of Mouse, it has nothing to do with finding bad words or naughty imagery in movies like Aladdin, The Lion King, or The Little Mermaid (Say, Disney - are you taking pitches for game ideas?).No, Disney Hidden Worlds is very innocent. It also features its own unique cast of characters that guide the player through several familiar Disney worlds - an admirable addition, given Disney could have easily phoned in the game's presentation. In fact, Disney Hidden Worlds would be a perfect "starter" HOG for young people if not for some problematic bugs and an energy system that makes it difficult to play for an extended period of time without paying."Disney Hidden Worlds stages several hidden object scenes across popular movie properties like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Tangled. If you know your way around a hidden object game, then you should be able to jump straight into Disney Hidden Worlds. Each scenario provides a list of items to find in a crowded scene, and you simply tap or click on the object to grab it.The faster you find items, the higher your score multiplier becomes. The higher your score at the end of a hunt, the faster you fill up stars that indicate you've mastered the scene.