I know I am supposed to be reviewing iPhone games and I know I’ve missed a few days…. But I get distracted easily, so in order to get it out of my system I’m going to declare this week CAVE WEEK. Yes Cave, the company that produces some of the best shooters ever. There is nothing particularly special about this week but there are two pieces of recent news that should make North American Cave fans drop to their knees and thank whatever god you believe in, and my excitement has finally reached megaton status.

For those of you who do not know, Do-Don-Pachi Resurrection is a port of Do-don-Pachi Dai-Fukkatsu which is the 5th and latest installment of the well known Don-Pachi series. A series that is very dear to me as Do-Don-Pachi was the first of Caves shooters I managed to get my hands on. Guwange is another (maybe) lesser known title to North American players as it never hit our shores. It was released in Japan arcades in 1999 and was a hit for hardcore gamers because of its high difficulty of play. I had a chance to play this a long time ago and while it is one of the harder shooters I’ve played, it is also one of the most gorgeous shooters on the market, it is very worthy of the patience it takes to get good at it and still holds up by today’s standards of what a shooter should be, graphically and game play wise.  Guwange on XBLA will include 2 additional modes,  Cave Festival “Blue”, and a new Arrange mode that uses dual stick control.

Since these games seem may scary to the “non-hardcore” crowd, I would like to try and convince people like me, not hardcore but above casual, that these games are not only exciting and challenging, but also very approachable. My next series of post will be reviews of all the Cave shooters that came to North America, and maybe some noteworthy imports that are worth the hefty price tag or better yet have gone down in price and are (semi)easily obtainable. Hopefully if you aren’t already excited about these two new releases you will be after reading the forthcoming posts or at least understand why others are. Up until recently it was rare to get a release from Cave in any region outside japan, and difficult/expensive to import these titles. I for one this is a sign of things to come and we will see a backlog of other titles…. who knows maybe someday soon we will be playing Muchi Muchi Pork on our iPhones.

I will begin tomorrow with the games most easily accessible to me, which are Espgaluda 2 for the iphone and Death smiles for the Xbox 360, so stay tuned.

I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed lately. Yes, Assassin’s Creed 1, not 2. I’m not rich, and I can’t buy every brand new game they throw on the shelf. I’ve had this game sitting around for some time and I decided that I should play, beat, and be finished with every single one of my old games before I even think about getting something new. Aside from being a very economical decision, I’ve actually been enjoying some of these older games immensely. But then there’s Assassin’s Creed. I’m going to beat the game and get all the achievements, but I’m not gonna enjoy it. As a matter of fact, if you want to do everything there is to do in the game, the creators have made it pretty much impossible to enjoy the game. Millions of flags to collect…in each SECTION of each town. The missions aren’t different from one another at all, not even in the prep work before the actual kill. Every single time, you have to climb up a dozen or more huge towers scattered across the specific section of town that your target resides in. Slowly scaling walls and hunting for spots your main character is willing to climb on sounds thrilling at first, I know, but after doing it 500 times, it’s really tedious. This is definitely not the most repetitive game ever, but it definitely is the most tedious game I’ve ever played. I believe the reason for this is that none of it is challenging, just time consuming. It’s not difficult to to do anything in this game. It just takes forever. If I wanted to play an easy game that eats up all my time to win, I’d play World of Warcraft.

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Pretty amusing flash game, its like a mashup of typing of the dead and beatmania, but with anime music.

There’s a couple of english songs on there too.
http://somoe.org/typing/

Also, for your enjoyment, the novelization of Mega Man 2.

An exciting new game on PS3 you say? And its not MGS4 or Devil May Cry 4? Yeah, its true! Little Big Planet combines oldschool 2D platformer-puzzle gameplay with next-gen physics and graphics, and allows players to design their own stages. Check out this video from the Game Developers Conference taking place this week to get an idea of the gameplay.

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There is something magical about this blue bomber, It seems no matter how many mega man games are made people just can not get enough of them, and powered up is no exception. Although Mega man powered up is yet another remake of mega man 1, it’s easily the best remake to date and also of one of the few games that makes a PSP worth buying. This mega man doesn’t just come with a graphical update, It also added challenge mode and it also allows you to “save” the robot masters you to play as them in the main game, and also create your own stage and download stages made by others off the Mega man network. (more…)