First Impressions of King's Field

King's Field is a Playstation game that comes in a big Sega CD/Saturn sized box, except that the plastic is black and the cover has a sticker on it instead of the manual being the box's cover. Due the first King's Field not being released in english, King's Field is actually King's Field II and King's Field II is actually King's Field III, and King's Field: The Ancient City is actually King's Field IV, so as to not scare off new customers that might not play King's Field IV because they are afraid of high numbers.

I played the first King's Field for a short while so far:

- it's first-person action dungeonship crawling
- there are lots of scary skeletons
- the music is scary
- I'm scared of getting lost
- it takes me 4 seconds to turn around to check if there's a scary skeleton behind me


Another first-person view dungeonship crawling game I tried earlier was Arx Fatalis. I stopped playing shortly in when the game required that I draw symbols with the cursor to cast spells. Maybe I just found it extra annoying because I was doing it with a touchpad and a pen tablet, but I suspect I would still not enjoy doing it with a mouse.

Crusader: No Remorse PS1 review

I recently came across Crusader: No Remorse for PS1 and bought it because it was only a few bucks. I was going to get the Saturn port because it has a sweet big saturn case, but it was more expensive, and I could get a sharper picture from the PS1 version through an HDMI cable.

I've played Crusader: No Remorse and Crusader: No Regret on my PC years back, so I'll just list some of the differences in this port from about 5 minutes of playing it:

- The game's resolution is 320x240 instead of the original's 640x480, so there is a lot less detail in everything.
- There are 5 setups for mapping the buttons to the controller. It really makes me wish there were at least two more buttons on the dualshock controller. It would have been a lot better if the game just let me assign buttons to commands myself instead of giving these premade setups.
- You can set the game to absolute movement instead of relative, which makes it so that you don't have to rotate your little man to change the direction he's facing.
- You run all the time and you cannot walk. Your weapon is always readied.
- You can roll forward.
- The automatic pistols have been removed from the game and you start with the first machine gun.
- According to the manual, there is no lasor pistol and no riot gun.
- There is a new weapon, the "Massdriver", which uses ammunition and energy.
- The shotgun does not fire more rapidly when you crouch.
- The HUD is more in the style of No Regret's HUD.
- The sprites are mirrored instead of having animations for facing left.
- When you hold down a shift button, and then left or right to roll or strafe, your little guy will keep strafing or rolling nonstop if you have the shift button pressed but stop pressing left or right.
- Some floors that used to be able to fall apart due to explosions are now solid floors.
- The music doesn't loop properly. And it seems to select a random track each time it is paused and then unpaused. It can play the final stage's music and the option screen's music during the first stage.
- Walls can be changed to transparent so you can see your little guy when you're behind them.
- Moving doesn't feel as precise as in the original version. It feels like the little guy slides around a bit.
- Because you cannot unready your weapon, there is no animation for the Silencer standing still with his arms at his sides. When you enter a health booth, he will not move to face outwards as his health recovers.
- You can see blood splatters from enemies as you shoot them.
- Robots are much more difficult to control because they can only walk in four directions now.

Note: I haven't played the original in years and I'm going by memory of what it was like.

Space Invaders Infinity Gene review

Space Invaders is a pretty old vimeo game. It's one of those games that it's cool to tell people you like it. Sort of like how people will talk about how they love to play Pac-Man or how the best vimeo game ever is Galaga. They're okay games I guess, if you like to ignore every single better game that has come out since then - which these people probably do. Either that or these people just like these games for the cooldude points they get from talking to other people who know even less about vimeo games than they do. I hardly ever play these games, and I bet the people who claim they love them have played them even less than I have. I don't feel like reviewing the original Space Invaders from 1978, so here's a review of a new version of it I played on PS3 that was released recently:

Space Invaders Infinity Gene
- developer: Taito
- publisher: Square-Enix
- for: iOS
- ports for: Xdude 360, PS3
- on: you can't display it on a shelf because it's a download
- released: 2009/07/27 (iOS), 2010/09/14 (PS3), 2010/09/15 (Xdude 360)
- type of vimeogame: Spaceship Shooting Game

At first this game is like Space Invaders. You get a spaceship that can only move left and right, and it sucks at shooting. And then the game changes and becomes completely different as you keep playing, giving you things like super rapid fire, the ability to move everywhere on the screen, and different weapons to choose from before starting a stage. The game will tell you some quote about evolving and adapting while it does this. I guess you're supposed to adapt to Space Invaders becoming not Space Invaders. The original Space Invaders had an interesting thing going on with the destructible barriers between you and the aliens, and how you're going to automatically lose if you don't make sure to kill all the bad guys, but this game is all tons of bad guy formations flying around all over the place while you whale on them.

There are wire frame graphics everywhere in this game. It looks kind of boring. In addition to the standard alien enemies, there's a bunch of random shapes that fly around for you to shoot at. All your favorites are here, such as star, hexagon, the other hexagon with two lines in it, large wireframe battleships with rectangles inside of them, and I think I even saw octadecahedrons.

I quickly found the real reason to play this game: the Music Mode. What the game does is take a music file you pick from the hard drive, and then construct a stage based on that file while it plays that music as the stage music. I had a lot of fun playing music from other spaceship shooting games and pretending to myself that I was playing a better spaceship shooting game instead of Space Invaders Infinity Gene. Also fun is playing music that is totally inappropriate for a spaceship shooting game, like Lady Gaga music. I guess that you could just instead play any other spaceship shooting game with the music volume set at zero and have something playing on your laptop though, and it'd be better. This game only lets you have one song per music stage and do one music stage at a time, so when the boss appears, it just loops the song from the beginning again. I've never felt the need to change a game's music something else though. Games's normal music always suits them just fine, unless I'm making a youtube video of me playing the game. Then I would have to replace the normal music with Korn.

I rate this spaceship shooting game 0 out of 2.