Bastion is an action RPG, in a similar vein to the Diablo series, but the RPG mechanics are much simpler. You only have weapons and potions to worry about—there’s no armor/rings/etc. to worry about, no complicated skill trees. The set of weapons that you find throughout the game is fixed, not randomized, and you can upgrade the weapons for a cost. Potions provide passive benefits (such as increasing your chance of critical hits when low on health), and you can carry more potions as you level up.

Three things really make this game shine and put it on another level from your typical hack-n-slash game:

• The narration—Logan Cunningham narrates the game, and he does a phenomenal job of it. Not only is he a great voice actor that really adds character to the game, but the narration is dynamic, based on what you do in the game. When you walk off the edge of the world for the first time, he comments “…and he falls to his death. (pause) Nah, I’m just kidding with you.” Check out the trailer videos for a sampling.

• The artwork—it’s just plain gorgeous. Supergiant Games obviously put a lot of love in this one.

• The adaptive difficulty level—you can make the game harder for an additional challenge. But it’s not your usual “pick easy, medium, or hard for your difficulty level and stick with that throughout the game”. Instead, the game starts off at a particular difficulty level, and when you reach a certain point in the game, you can make it harder in smaller increments.

  There are 10 gods in the game, and activating each god makes the game harder in a certain way. One god makes enemies more resilient to damage, another makes them hit harder, another makes them move faster, another makes them regenerate health, yet another makes them randomly deflect attacks, and so on. Playing with more gods activated increases the risk but also the reward—you earn more experience and money by playing with more gods. This unique system makes a fantastic addition to the game.

My only complaint is that the game is too short. The “New Game Plus” feature—which allows you to replay the game after beating it, starting with all of your weapons, weapon upgrades, experience, items, etc. from the end of the game—adds some replay value, but not a huge amount. I got maybe 12-15 hours total of the game, and I’d easily pay $60 for 40+ hours of gameplay.

Bottom line: 9.5/10

The sequel to the hit game Rock Band Country Track Pack, Country Track Pack 2 brings you such songs as Dwight Yoakam’s country rap “Intentional Heartache” that involves spraying various things neon green:

At one point during development, we had a bug relating to the scoring of the “talky” vocal parts of that song beginning around 2:55. So unlike most other bugs, we couldn’t use autoplay for testing and debugging—we actually had to sing. Normally this isn’t a problem for our QA team, who sat in a different room (they got to be really good at singing the songs in the game), but for the developers, it was a whole different story. The lyrics to the song are so ridiculous (if you haven’t watched the video above, you really should), that every time we picked up the mic to test something, it brought the productivity of everyone else in the room (including much of the Shoot Many Robots team) to a screeching halt.

Another interesting thing to note is that while all of the previous track packs have shipped on the PlayStation 2, this was the first track pack not to do so; it only shipped on the PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360. I don’t know why that decision was made, since the game is based on the original Rock Band 1 engine, which runs just fine on the PS2. My guess is that the PS2 sales of the previous track packs were so low that the revenue from that platform did not outweigh the cost of licensing, manufacturing, and distributing it, but that is purely speculation.

With 3 track packs under Demiurge’s belt, I cannot comment on whether or not any further track packs are in development. I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of Rock Band Metal Track Pack 2, Rock Band Country Track Pack 3, Green Day: Rock Band 2, Rock Band Emo Track Pack, Rock Band Japanese Hip-Hop Track Pack, or Rock Band Alternative Punk Acid Black Death Metal Calypso Pop Extreme Edition Track Pack.

Ok, so that teaser trailer only raises more questions than it answers, but rest assured that this game will involve the shooting of many robots. Many many many robots.

Check out IGN for an interview with studio director Al Reed and the official website, and follow us on Twitter to keep up-to-date on all of the latest news on Shoot Many Robots.

(Not to be confused with Mega Man X)

Can’t wait. Though I will be avoiding easy mode, its existence will appease the people who thought Mega Man 9 was way too hard. Kids these days. They wouldn’t last more than 5 minutes in Battletoads before

And for the first^H^H^H^H^Hsecond time, Proto Man is playable! First not counting DLC. Or spin-off games. Speaking of which, why haven’t I bought the Mega Man 9 DLC? I really should. I just….haven’t. Don’t know why.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that Proto Man’s character was supposed to be the original design for Mega Man, but the NES color palette didn’t have enough reds in it to make him look good, so the designers made him blue instead, and saved the red design for Proto. But, I can’t find a source for this fact, so take this with a grain of salt. I also don’t know much about the NES video hardware, so it’s entirely conceivable that it supports a customizable palette that can handle several shades of red at once.

Ok, so the Blue Bomber is back in town this March. Awesome. But you know else is back in town? The Blue Blur:

There was a pretty awesome leaked video showing actual gameplay, though that was quickly brought down by Sega, so I’ll have to settle for the interesting-but-not-a-lot-of-juicy-content official video above.

For the first time since the Genesis days of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic finally comes back to his roots for some good old-fashioned 2 (and-a-half) D speed platforming. I was a huge fan of the Sonic series back in the day, but nothing after the Genesis has been good enough for me. Though I hear that Sonic Rush was fairly decent; maybe I’ll get around to that some day, but it’s fairly low in my queue.

Yes, spring-summer 2010 is shaping up to be a fine, fine season of neo-retro-gaming.

Not included in the announcement was the fact that Demiurge Studios was working on Green Day: Rock Band. And I gotta say, it’s pretty freakin’ awesome working on it. I’d love to tell you more, but NDAs, yada yada yada, so I can’t say much else.

It’s strange, though, that I didn’t realize how big of a Green Day fan I was until we started working on this game and I listened to all of their albums. I loved a lot of their songs beforehand, but I didn’t know that those songs I loved were Green Day songs since I pay next to no attention to the artists behind particular songs. I don’t really buy much music, so most of the songs that I like that I’ve only heard on the radio, at parties, etc., I have no idea who plays them.

This makes the third Rock Band title I’ve worked on, the other two being Rock Band Country Track Pack and Rock Band Metal Track Pack. [Aside: Metal was originally announced to be released on Rocktober 13; we'd wrapped up work on it long before then. Then, lo and behold, on September 22, an email went around with "hey look, we've got a game on store shelves". Turns out the release date got pushed forward by 3 weeks, and nobody at Demiurge realized it]. But this ain’t no wimpy little track pack — it’s a whole new game that’s an order of magnitude more challenging, and we’re working as hard as possible to make this game as awesome as possible.

Rock on!

Enough with the blatant advertising. Rock Band Country Track Pack was a joint venture between Demiurge Studios and Harmonix Music Systems that I’m proud to say I was a part of. I had a blast working on it, since I was already a huge fan of the Rock Band franchise. But prior to this past Tuesday’s release, we couldn’t tell anyone we were working on it, even though the game had been announced in May, thanks to some bigwigs in upper management who decided it wasn’t in their interests. Of course, now that the game is on the street and our logo and names are in the credits, we can talk freely.

Rock Band Country Track Pack now joins Brothers in Arms: Double Time in the elite class of retail games with my name in them. Mass Effect (PC) also has my name in it, as Demiurge credits all people in the studio in its products, although I only worked on that game for about two weeks. Word-Fu (iPhone) was another game I worked on, but it has very minimal credits. You can still find my (first) name at the top of the built-in high scores table — of course, that’s not my real high score. If they’d let me put in my real high score, that would have just been too depressing to people who bought the game who aren’t very good spellers.

What’s next for Demiurge? Only time will tell. Well, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

Each day, four games battled it out in the Poll of the Day, with the top two advancing in the bracket. In the final battle, Ocarina of Time edged out Final Fantasy VII. With the third- and fourth-place games from that match removed (also Zelda and Final Fantasy games, incidentally), Ocarina held onto its title in the bonus match, taking in 52.69% of the 155,838 votes cast.

GameFAQs has held some sort of tournament-style contest every year since 2002, with some years hosting multiple contests. There have been seven character battles, one game villains battle, two games battles, and one game series battle. The other games battle prior to this year took place in 2004. That battle was a 64-game 1-on-1 single-elimination tournament, in which Final Fantasy VII emerged victorious over Chrono Trigger in the finals, after defeating Ocarina of Time in the Division Finals [full bracket and stats] [bonus poll].

What does this turnabout mean for GameFAQs? I’d say it’s most likely a shift in user base demographics towards Nintendo. Nintendo games absolutely dominated the contest, what with a whopping four Mario games, four Zelda games, two Super Smash Bros. games, and a Pokémon game comprising 11 of the 16 final games, the other five being three Final Fantasy games, Resident Evil 4, and Metal Gear Solid 4.

Another surprises was Chrono Trigger getting narrowly defeated by Super Mario 64. There were also a few times where one game beat another in one round but then lost to it the next, such as Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow and Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy X and Super Smash Bros. Melee, and Metal Gear Solid 4 and Super Smash Bros. Brawl. There were a lot of other results that differed greatly from something which happened in 2004, but I won’t continue boring you with statistics.

All in all, it was a fun contest with a number of surprises, but I’m starting to question the value of these contests. They were fun and exciting at first when they were completely unpredictable, but now they’re starting to get dull as people get better and better at understanding what GameFAQs visitors like. It was refreshing to have a games contest this year after not having had one for five years. I suspect, though, that the contests will continue so long as they continue to attract more visitors to the site. So what will see next year? I’m hoping to see something completely new and different, but odds are it’ll be Character Battle VIII, with some mildly interesting gimmick.

My personal Best. Game. Ever. is Final Fantasy VI. What’s yours?

So what is Word-Fu? Word-Fu is a Boggle-like spelling game, where you’re given a bunch of dice with letters on them, you shake them up with the iPhone’s accelerometers, and then touch them to spell words. Unlike Boggle, there is no constraint that consecutive letters must be adjacent—you can use the letters in any order. If you happen to get a particularly good set of letters (such as ACEIKORTS) and you know a lot of anagrams, you can just keep spelling more and more words. You get extra time for each word spelled, so you can keep playing for quite a long time and rack up your score.

You can even reuse letters in the same word, so if you get an A, an E, and an S, and you spell long words like ASSESSES with just those three dice. There were some discussions during development with very strong opinions regarding this feature—I was in favor of not being able to reuse letters—and we ended up supporting both modes of play. The mode where you can’t reuse letters is called Shaolin Style, and it can be turned on in the Options screen; it is disabled by default.

So if you’re a word game freak, what are you waiting for? Go check out Word-Fu in the iTunes App Store today! It’s currently $1.99, although there was a special promotional price of $0.99 for the first couple of weeks after the game launched.

It’s about two years old now, and there weren’t really any warning signs.  I went to turn it on, and….it didn’t.  Most RRoDs are caused by overheating; I generally keep my 360 well-ventilated, and I definitely don’t leave it running for long periods of time when I’m not playing it.  I’m going to chalk this one up to poor hardware design and workmanship.

I immediately called 1-800-4MYXBOX.  Boy were they unhelpful.  The automated voice-activated menus were a pain to work through, and I had to repeat myself several times to get what I wanted.  Why can’t we just have a plain old “Press 1″ instead of say “Three flashing red lights”?  It’s easier for everyone.

After wasting my time with that, I instead went to xbox.com/support and had a much easier time.  It took me less than five minutes to file a support ticket and print out a pre-paid shipping label (I also had the option of getting a box shipped to me, but that would have taken longer obviously).  No human interaction required.

The next morning I brought my 360 down to the UPS Store and had it shipped off to the repair center in Mesquite, Texas.  It took about a week to get there, a couple days to get fixed, and another week to come home.

Now it’s back to Mega Man 9!  I’ve completed all 12/12 achievements (200 points) and 34/38 challenges.  All I have left are “Beat the game without getting hit”, “beat the game while picking up only 8 energy capsules”, “beat the game 30 times”, and “beat every boss with 1 hit point left”.

The Green Ring of Life is back, but for how long?

And if you do so, you’ll notice that the programming team at Demiurge is listed alphabetically by first name, except for me. I was added to the project midway through development. The credits had already been (mostly) done before I joined the team, and then they slapped my name onto the end of the list; nobody ever bothered to resort it afterwards. Was it intern bias? Nah, I think they just didn’t think to resort it.

Double Time is a port of the two games Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 and Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood to the Wii. The two games were originally made by Gearbox Software for the Xbox in 2005; they had been previously ported to the PS2 and Windows. Gearbox contracted Demiurge to do the Wii ports. If you’re into war games, you’d probably enjoy Double Time, since it’s not your typical run-and-gun shooter — you (gasp) have to use tactics to beat it.

You should all go down to your friendly neighborhood video game store and buy Brothers in Arms: Double Time! Two great games for the low price of $50!