:B: - Heroes of Might and Magic V

As part of a new internal initiative, I've been using the Fortune Cookie to pick 5 games to play for 5 hours each. This time round, Heroes of Might and Magic V was chosen. It's a spinoff of the Might and Magic RPGs, and is a strategy game set in the same sort of universe.

I have a confession. I'm not very good at strategy. Real-time, turn-based, I'm just no good at all and so it was with delight that I saw the HoMMV has an option to automatically play out the majority of fights. Yes, yes, missing the point of the game, but honestly, I get a lot of joy out of exploring the map, managing my resources and bolstering my defenses. So you can shut up. I still fight some of the battles.

4/5 stars

:B: - Theatrhythm Final Fantasy

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy is a rhythm game most easily likened to Elite Beat Agents or Ouendan. You tap and swipe the screen when the markers appear, and the music is from Final Fantasy games. With me so far? It gets complicated, which by now you have to expect from a Final Fantasy spinoff.

There are three kinds of songs: Field, Event and Battle. Each has a different way of the markers appearing, and each requires different stats on your characters to get the most points. You pick a team of 4 from the leads of each main FF, and can unlock more later using shards. They each have stats which effect the types of songs in a different way, to hopefully get better items (such as the aforementioned shards). There are more nuances than this but I'm not even sure I fully understand them myself.

There's also three modes: Series, where you play three songs from each main FF plus an intro and outro; Challenge, where you play to get the best scores; and Dark Notes, which are randomly generated depending on your team level and is where all the systems come together with great effect. There's a hell of a lot to be getting your teeth into here.

The game is well designed and the graphics are great, and of course the music is good too. If you like rhythm games you might like this, if you like Final Fantasy you might like it, but if you like Final Fantasy and rhythm games you should go out right now and purchase this.

Now, what do I have to do to get Capcom to make this for Breath of Fire?

5/5 stars

:B: - Titan Quest - Immortal Throne

As you may well be aware, Diablo III came out last month. And, if you've read my previous article on the game you might also be aware that I have not and will not be purchasing it. However, I'm not immune to Diablo fever, so I've devised a scheme.

Meet the Ginormous List of Diablo Clones. This is, as far as I know, the most complete list of Diablo-like games on the internet. Games where you clicky-clicky loot and monsters, perhaps with a heavy story structure, but mostly just "here are some things go kill them now plx". If I can get a max-level character and beat the highest difficulty setting on each of these games (barring inability to load game on 64-bit Windows or the game being absolute crap), I can buy Diablo 3. And by the time that happens, always-online issues probably won't matter anyway.

Enter Titan Quest. I got this a couple Christmas's ago in the THQ pack in the Steam sale. I played it way back when but gave up about 3/4s of the way through Act 1 due to framerate issues. That isn't a problem on my new laptop so I've been having a great amount of fun.

I felt a bit of fatigue towards the end of Act 3 and throughout Act 4, so I stopped doing sidequests and powered through to the end. I felt like by the end of the game there was a lot less imagination in the monster design, I had stopped picking up any item drop less than Green and I ended up with way more than the caravan could hold just in set items and artifact recipe ingredients.

After playing a little bit of Epic difficulty and receiving a higher level of ingredients I went back to Normal to farm lower level ones. I'd like to finish all the artifacts I have recipes for before getting a bunch of higher level ones as as far as I can tell some higher level ones need lower level artifacts as ingredients. And it's kind of nice now I'm not feeling the pressure to see the end of the game, I'm just killing dudes and watching their bodies fly for miles.

4/5 stars.

:B: - Dungeons of Dredmore

Indie darling Dungeons of Dredmore has been out for a good while and I've been playing it off and on since release. I still haven't managed to beat Dredmore, indeed, I usually die to monster zoos on Floor 2/3, but I'm happy to mark it as :B: as I don't know if I'll ever kill Dredmore. I have even been playing on the easiest difficulty and can't do it so this may never get a :C:, but I'll keep trying on and off for the rest of eternity, probably.

I think the game is totally hilarious (though YMMV) and I still haven't even seen everything. There are whole skill trees I haven't even selected yet, never mind put points into. I don't know what the Lutefisk statues do. Crafting still confuses the crap out of me and I keep drinking poisonous potions by accident even though by now I should know the differences between potions. If it isn't clear, I've been avoiding guides and wikis which might be part of my problem. Roguelikes are notorious for requiring wikis to get to the bottom of the dungeon - has anyone ever beaten Nethack without help? - and I am sure Dungeons of Dredmore is no different.

But where's the fun in knowing what to do? My dudes will continue to take their random skillsets into the dungeon and die horribly to Diggles in the first room, and I wouldn't have it any other way. 5/5 stars.

:B: - Fairway Solitaire

Fairway Solitaire is a free game on iOS - it's a solitaire game with a golf theme which lets you pay £1.69 to unlock about a billion levels, and also has a bunch of other in-app-purchases which I have totally ignored.

The idea is thus - you have to get rid of cards to below a par, a certain amount of cards, by selecting cards on the field which are one higher or lower than the one you are holding. You can draw cards from the deck to get a new card, or you can use a golf club to change number, say using a 9 iron to get a 9 card. There are water hazards and sand traps which make certain levels tougher, and there are 3 stars to get depending on how below par you are.

This game gets into your brain. For a number of weeks I just could not stop playing - every opportunity I'd whip out the phone and knock a level out. And I have not even managed to finish all of the levels. It gets really, really hard later on and I tapped out a couple of sets of levels before the end. I totally intend to go back and earn enough points to buy the bonus levels but I have enough iPhone games to play without spending all my bus time on Fairway Solitaire for months on end. 5/5 stars, you should get this if you like solitaire, golf, or have a bunch of free time sitting around waiting to be sucked up.

:B: / :C: - Life Quest 2: Metropoville

So it turns out I never learn. I played the original Life Quest here, and apparently that wasn't enough mediocrity. I like the idea so much that when I saw there was a Life Quest 2 on BigFishGames whilst trying to spend two credits I decided to take the plunge. It seemed like it had learned from the mistakes of the original so I went for it. That was a mistake.

You are a new citizen of Metropoville and you are put in their 12 steps to success program which gives you 12 sets of goals each split into three smaller goals. You can race against other characters to beat these goals which gives you extra money. You have to increase your stats, work, socialize and generally live life.

My criticisms of the last game by and large continue here. You can still do everything without having to specialize and while this game is more structured there's still not a great amount to do. It's longer than 1 by about threefold but a large part of that was doing the same thing over and over to get enough money for things. It's not challenging even at the beginning and never really evolves. It is kind of funny at times so there is that.

It is better than the original and if you were picking between them I'd recommend it, but there are better life simulators out there. If you can get it for free I'd say go for it if there was nothing else up your alley but otherwise save your money. 3/5 stars

:B: - Viva Pinata

This is not the first time I have beaten Viva Pinata, and it will not be the last considering I lost most of my achievements from this game whilst switching 360's.

Viva Pinata is a pretty simple game. You have a garden, and you have to attract and breed pinatas for fun and profit. You get experience for pretty much everything, and sometimes badguys come in to mess stuff up. It is also a pretty easy 1000 gamerscore points.

I played this when my 360 was offline, and somehow messed up getting back online so all my achievements were overwritten by the gamertag stored in the cloud. But I'm not so mad, I don't mind playing through it again. It's nice and relaxing and I like seeing my pinatas do their stuff. 5/5 stars.

:B: - Rayman Origins

Before Rayman Origins, the last platformer I really got into was the first Rayman so many years ago. I had high expectations of this game because of my really fond memories of the first, and I can happily say that it smashed them.

Rayman Origins is a 2D platformer of the type that was so common in the SNES/Mega Drive era. It's also pretty much the only 2D platformer released for a home console in about 10 years. I'm not sure which I think is better, the graphics or the sound design. Both are absolutely phenomenal. The characters and environments are hand-drawn and high resolution, having been done with a new type of engine built to do exactly this and the animations are very fluid. And the sound design is incredibly good - so good it makes me sad that I didn't get the Collector's Edition to get the soundtrack.

Rayman and his friends control really well, they are very responsive and the only times I got frustrated was when I was being an idiot. The game starts off slow and builds up until it gets really rather hard but never too hard - I always felt like the challenge ahead of me was just within my reach if only I wasn't being stupid.

I really cannot recommend this game enough. Seriously, go buy it right this second if you like fun. It's beautiful, fun, has a well-balanced difficulty curve and best of all is four player. 5/5 stars.

:B: / :C: - Mass Effect 3

It's always intimidating to finish a game that's immensely popular, knowing you have to write about it. Especially when that game is Mass Effect 3. There are few games that are more written about, more analyzed, that have a more fanatical fanbase.

Having played through to the end, I am a little confused as to the completely violent reaction towards the ending. It's almost like the fans expected a Fallout 3-esque slideshow showing what happened to every single character after your actions in the previous two games. And I have a few things to say about that.

The first thing is that the ending could only really be one thing. Throughout the series, regardless of choices made, the same events have happened. You go to the same planets, meet the same people, fight the same enemies; it was just specifics - how the events unfolded - that differed. Expecting the ending to reflect everything you've ever done is naive at best. The developers trusted you to fill in the blanks yourself - just like every other sci-fi series in existence.

I have a bit of a rant about the complaints about peoples' choices not having an effect on the ending and how that ruined their enjoyment of the whole series. To those people I say - shut the fuck up! The entire game is literally consequence after consequence for your past actions. While playing I was constantly reacting to the results of decisions I made two years ago. It seemed like everything that was happening was altered in some way - from minor things like my team-mates referencing their roles in the suicide mission of the last game, to major things like decisions I made from specific loyalty missions shaping the future of entire races. I really felt like my actions left a permanent mark on the galaxy, regardless of what happened in the ending. It makes me angry that so many people totally ignored the 30 hours of consequences that happens before the end. Do tens of thousands of people lose all good memories of something the moment it ends poorly? It's utterly ridiculous.

I don't know if it's come across, but I have been thoroughly satisfied by the final foray into Commander Shepard's story. 5/5 stars and I'll see you in Insanity.

:B: - Trackmania Nations United Forever

Trackmania is a bewilderingly names, many pronged series of videogames. In technical terms, there are only two: Trackmania and Trackmania 2 Canyon. However, the first game has many releases, each more confusingly named than the last.

There are two versions right now. There is the free version, Trackmania Nations Forever, which has enough content to play forever, and then there's Trackmania United Nations Forever, which has all the content of the free version plus a bunch more modes.

I've had the full version for quite a while now and I've been chipping away - over 3 computers and many failures to backup save-files when reinstalling Windows. I'm finally comfortable enough marking this as :B:. I may not have a lot of medals or True Skill points, but I am currently in the top 40% which I think is pretty respectable considering how long a lot of people have been playing this game for.

This game makes me oscillate between 'omg I love this' and 'omg why can't I do this bloody race' and I wouldn't have it anyway. 5/5 stars.

:B: - Everyday Genius - SquareLogic

I love puzzles. Any kind of puzzles, but especially puzzles in videogames. Specifically games dedicated to one type of puzzle (not to rag on Professor Layton, he's cool too).

SquareLogic is sudoku with a few more rules, basically. It starts off on a 4x4 grid and goes up to... I don't know. Probably 9x9. You have to figure out the numbers with rules it gives you instead of being given some other numbers. If you like sudoku, you'll love this.

I've given it 4/5 stars, not because it could be better, but because every time you do a preliminary set of levels (of which there are about 59 sets of 13), you unlock a further 150-800 puzzles just on that set. I do really like the game, but I think there's probably more puzzles in this game that I'll be able to do in my entire life so I'll never be able to see it.

I say pick it up. Just be prepared for it to take up a large portion of your life.

:B: - RPG Snake

I did this a couple of weeks ago but I forgot to mark it down. There's not a lot I can say about it. It's Snake, but with a hero as the snake and enemies as the dots. It's kind of difficult to play and there's only 9 levels, and I'm unhappy I paid for this. I could have got two milky bars with that 99p. 2/5 stars.

:B: - Final Fantasy XIII-2

I didn't quite get to the end of Final Fantasy XIII-2. It's a shame, truly, because my journey through the game was almost definitely the most fun I've had with a JRPG in a long time. However, there's a new contender for 'most frustrating last boss ever', at least in my eyes. Spoilers, obviously.

The final boss comes a bit out of nowhere. It's three Bahamuts, two of which are less powerful and a third one with more than a million HP. You need to beat the first two before being able to fight the third, and they regenerate fairly often. I was using a strategy I found on the internet which was working pretty well for me.

You have to stay on your toes during the battle to quickly swap Paradigms so you take less damage. It's a stressful experience because you can't take your eyes of the screen for even a second, because if you miss them advertising an attack and you don't switch to Sentinel quick enough, it's game over. It was on my third attempt when I quit.

I'm not someone who can sit down and do the same bit over and over. The third time, I was 30 minutes into the battle and the main Bahamut was almost down to half HP. I was keeping my HP up religiously and one of the lesser Bahamuts regenerated back into battle. He used an attack I'd survived many times already but I went to swap to Sentinel anyway. I wasn't quick enough, and that attack that shouldn't have killed 3 fully-healed characters, did.

I haven't lost so much good will to a game so quickly in a long time. I loved the journey, truly I did. I like the battles, I love the stat-balancing, I love finding fragments and I even thought the story was pretty good. But I just can't deal with final bosses that take an age to beat and have attacks that kill you in one hit. I really, really can't. Give him loads of HP, fine. Give him super strong attacks, fine. But don't, for the love of god, give him both.

Up until now, this game was a certain 5 stars. But after that battle, I just can't bring myself to because I'm too bitter. 4/5 stars.

:B: / :C: - Jane's Zoo

So I have this guilty gaming pleasure. I have a bit of a thing for time management games. I'm not totally sure I can adequately explain why I find them appealing. It might be because they're kind of soothing, but ultimately I have no idea why I like them.

Jane's Zoo is one of the aforementioned type of game, set in a zoo. You have to feed/clean/entertain/cheer up your increasing stable of animals and get a certain score to proceed to the next level. There's 40 levels, and expert score to achieve on each one, but beyond that there's nothing else to do so it's not a particularly long game. Once you have expert on all 40 levels, that's it - and it's not a particularly difficult feat.

I did have fun, but I can't really recommend buying it. It's cute and enjoyable, but paying more than a couple quid for a game that lasts little more than two hours leaves a bit of a sour taste. 3/5 stars.

:B: - PGR 4

Project Gotham Racing 4 is a really excellent racing game.

On the scale of simulation to arcade, it leans more towards arcade, but is still kind of in the middle. It's a 'realistic' racing game where you get points to unlock stuff by doing drifts, 360s, drafting your opponents, or doing tricks on your bike. It has weather, loads of tracks, loads of unlockables and lots of modes so you don't get bored just going round a track over and over again.

I think PGR 4 might be my favourite racing game ever, and I'd nominate it for best racing game ever.

I started a new game since the last time I played, 2 or 3 years ago, was on my old gamer profile so I don't have access to it any more. I had forgotten how much stuff there was to do in this game. I started the career, because that's the easiest way to earn Kudos, which unlocks things. I've been dilligently completing races, drift events, time trials and invitationals for a good 10 hours now and I've only just broken into the Master rank. I'm 17th, and am about 250 points away from being first. In any other game, this would only be a few races, but here, your rivals also get points for each race, so it's going to be a long time to get to the top, which I guess is accurate.

I've barely scraped the surface of the arcade mode, which has 108 medals in total, split roughly evenly between car and bike. Each medal has five ranks, for difficulty - Steel, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum - and Platinums are really, really hard to get. It'll be a very long road finishing this mode too.

Then there's the DLC packs, which added World Championship mode. There are three parts to World Championship mode - Arcade Challenge, DLC Challenge, and Platinum Plus. Arcade and DLC Challenge are pretty easy going, at least as far as Platinum Plus is concerned. Platinum Plus takes the difficulty of Platinum to a whole new level. I'm not sure I'll ever complete that mode.

All this and I haven't even touched on the online. I haven't played any of it, so I wouldn't know where to begin with telling you about it. It's really intimidating as the game has been out a very long time, so the only people left playing it will be experts. This is an open offer for anyone to add me to their friends list - I'm RequiredCosine - so we could play sometime. I just don't want to go it alone.

PGR 4 is so much fun, I'll probably continue playing this for a while.  5/5 stars.

:B: - Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords

I was determined today to check a game off as beaten. So I picked a game that would be simple and easy to plow hours into. That game is Puzzle Quest. I had not, however bet on how compulsive the game would be.

Puzzle Quest is a match-the-blocks game with an added helping of RPG elements. You go round the map, fight stuff by the match-the-blocks game, level up and that's pretty much the long and short of it. It's really simple and really, really hard to put down. I had no time put into this before this afternoon and yet here I am 8 hours later with 6 hours put into it.

I'm not really sure what to say. 4/5 stars, I guess.

:B: - Burnout 3: Takedown

I have, for a long time, maintained that Burnout 3 is probably the greatest car game ever. I recently had the desire to go back to it as it's been a long time since I last played it, and I no longer had my save file.

This was probably a mistake.

When I was 15, Crash Mode was totally unlike anything else I'd ever played and I got so much pleasure out of causing as much damage as possible. Takedown mode too. 8 years later, however, and I get more fun out of racing and time trials. Sadly, this is Takedown's weak point as the PS2 just doesn't have enough power to clearly display upcoming obstactles and that, combined with absolutely vicious rubberbanding AI, makes for a frustrating experience.

I want to really, really like this game still, but I wish it was in high definition and on a console with more processing power. Give me Paradise's engine but with Takedown's structure. I'd buy it for full price, no doubt about it.  That would reconvince me of it's title as number 1, but for now I'm not even sure it's the best Burnout game. It makes me sad. 4/5 stars.

:B: - Resident Evil - Mercenaries 3D

I'm going to take a moment here and complain how it seems like virtually every 3DS game has 3D in the title. It's on the 3DS, and it has "has 3D effects" listed on the back, so you'd think it'd be superfluous. Out of my 6 3DS games, 4 have 3D in the title. I can almost forgive it for the 3D remakes of Ocarina of Time and Starfox 64, but Super Mario 3D Land and RE: Mercenaries 3D? It's pointless and it irritates the hell out of me.

Anyway, Resident Evil: Mercenaries. Mercenaries was my favourite bit of Resident Evil 4. I wasn't all that keen on the main game, it being a glorified escort mission once you were past the beginning, but mercenaries mode was flipping amazing. Score-based time-limited shooting with some of my favourite Resident Evil characters? Yes please. So I was really happy that they released a version of the mode without that crappy RE4 game included, and with a bunch more stuff.

It's really good. You start off with three levels, and one character. There are 6 sets of levels, increasing progressively in difficulty, 7 characters to unlock, an alternate costume for each character, skills to unlock to help in the levels, and medals to get in case you got bored with all the other stuff. To get to the later levels, you have to prove your skills in the final showdown of that set, and get a ranking of B or above. (The rankings go up to SS, as far as I can tell.)

I have been having a blast for the most part, except for two notable occasions. The first was realising that playing it on the bus gives me a most severe case of motion sickness. The second was getting to level 5-5, which after getting a B or above, the credits roll, you unlock Wesker, and the final set of levels, EX, appear.

I can't do it. I'm not even having difficulty staying alive, mostly, but you have to beat the boss within the strict time limit whilst also dealing with infected monks (that are tough mooks) and axe-wielding twatbags that totally wreck your shit if they hit. And I am getting so, so stressed out in trying to do it. I haven't had even remotely this much difficulty with the rest of the game. I did the level before it, 5-4, in one attempt. But I just. Can't. Do it. It's totally ridiculous.

And so, with a heavy heart, I give Resident Evil: Mercenaries 3D a 4/5, instead of the 5/5 I was totally ready to give it before this level. I hear its easier in two-player mode, but I haven't even Street Passed a single person in carrying my 3DS everywhere, so that's not going to happen. I recommend it, but only if you want a challenge.

:B: - Super Mario 3D Land

I've been playing this a little bit over the past week and I have to say it's pretty thoroughly enjoyable. It's got a good mix of retro and new, and blends playstyles of the 2D and 3D Mario games seamlessly.

It does annoy me when there's parts that they've made just to show off the 3D effects of the 3DS though. I am unable to see 3D, so these parts are unnecessarily hard for me, and it's unpleasant that they've made certain parts of their game fairly inaccessable to people like me.

But other than that, I've been having fun. The game was a touch easy for most of it, but 8-8 tested my skills well enough. I defeated Bowser, rescued Peach, the credits rolled... and then it gave me a whole new set of levels. On the one hand, more game! Yeah! On the other hand, that's a rotten sneaky trick. Boo! But 5/5 stars, and I reckon I'll continue to play it on the bus.

:B: - Super Pokemon Rumble

I have been playing rather a lot of Super Pokemon Rumble since last Wednesday. I have no excuses, it's probably average at best, but I really love it. I played the original way back when and figured I'd pick up the new one to make up for not actually having bought the first.

I've been neglecting Ocarina of Time, Starfox 64, Four Swords, Excitebike and now, after Christmas, Super Mario Land 3 and Resident Evil: Mercenaries for it. I feel really rather guilty because it's a children's game. Not only that, but it's a simplified spinoff from a children's game. (Disclaimer: I love Pokemon and am aware it has its complexities, but at its heart its for kids.)

So the story goes, all the Pokemon are wind-up toys and you have to find the glowdrops that heal everyone... or something, I haven't exactly been paying attention. Each toy has a designated power level and two moves that you can swap out if you have the money. You go through a series of levels to collect more powerful Pokemon and take on Battle Royales to progress. There's different kinds of levels to, where you have to fight with different rules, such as controlling three at once or not being able to swap out. It's nice that there's a little variety.

I have been really enjoying it but I'm at a point where all my brain wants to do is go through old levels to collect Pokemon that I haven't yet recruited, so I'm retiring it for now. I'll go back once I've cleansed my palate with some other games. 4/5 stars.

Now the question is, what 3DS game should I play now? I'm spoilt for choice.