By Jerome Cartagena
Dragonball Otaku

Dragonball Z games have gone through as many evolutions as the consoles they’re made for. They’ve started out as sprites and made their stumbling way to polygons.

Now in Dragonball Z Burst limit, we have a title that comes startlingly close to the anime. Fans of the franchise will be pleased with this game as many of its features bring justice to the DBZ legacy.

Visually, Burst Limit makes you feel like you’re part of the original show, with most of the fighting stages faithfully depicting key scenes from the show. Everything from Kame’s house to planet Namek has been rendered beautifully with traditional DBZ look and feel. There are plenty of cut scenes and it’s enough to leave this DBZ fan reminiscing about the good ol’ days.

In terms of characters, I was pleased to see the attention brought to all the characters so that their personalities and expressions show through. More than that, the characters like Goku grow and develop as I progressed through the story.

I loved seeing little Gohan turn from a whining wimp to a seasoned fighter. I even got the chills when Goku is pushed in his battle with Frieza and unleashed the legendary warrior inside him. That level of detail is one of my favorite parts of Burst Limit.

More kamehamehas and otaku analysis on the jump

I’ve played all the Metal Gears (except for the real Japanese sequel), and I say I have pretty good grasp of the franchise. I know the major plots from the past (Gray Fox, Big Boss) and present (Shadow Moses Island, Virtuous Mission) but sometimes I forget the details.

That’s when you need to look up FAQs or catch-me-up guides. I swear Metal Gear is the one of the few franchises where you have to read layers and layers of information to understand the mythology. This is where the Metal Gear 4 Database helps out.

It’s a great resource if you’re just getting into the series or if you haven’t played a Metal Gear game in a while. It has all the information you need to know and blacks out any possible spoilers. (How convenient!) I’m tearing through the game right now and I need to know what was up with Liquid’s arm or find out who was that buxom triple agent.

It even files the game’s mythology according to relationships, timelines and categories. The interface isn’t that bad either, very easy to use.

It’s good idea to download the program. It’s available free on the PlayStation Store and at 77MB it doesn’t take that long to download.

And this is what a month on Wii Fit looks like. I didn’t religiously exercise with the Balance Board, but I did go at least once a week. I was gung-ho about it in the beginning, and toward the end, my enthusiasm peters out.

Nevertheless, my weight stayed the same. I believe part of it was eating right and the other half was consistently going on 30-minute walks with my dog. I kind of programmed that in the game and got credits for it.

More results and thoughts on the jump

The best cell phone game I’ve played was a golf title. I don’t remember the exact name of it, but it became an addiction on an eight-hour bus trip and an obsession in the weeks and months I had the thing. It was a simple. Just aim the shot, time the power meter and hit the button.

It’s formula that hasn’t changed much since the original Golf on the NES. The only thing that’s different now is that the courses look prettier, the physics have gotten more realistic and fans can duel each other online.

Playing Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 felt like that same cell phone title except this one was on polygonal steroids. If the goal of PSP titles is to make the console experience portable, then this game accomplishes a lot. On the other hand, if players are looking for a one-of-a-kind experience they should look elsewhere.

Fore more on Hot Shots Golf, hit the jump

The Good: The hand-to-hand combat system would make a quality fighting game all on its own. The graphics and acting are well above the average for video games.

The Bad: It has quicktime events. The difficulty is hilariously uneven. All the really cool stuff is done for you. It has quicktime events. The game is on rails but it’s occasionally difficult to find where to go. Much of it is too simple for a hardcore gamer and the rest is too difficult for a casual gamer so nobody is likely to walk away happy. Did I mention I hate quicktime events?

• WHAT: “Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy”
• PLATFORM: Xbox 360 (reviewed), Playstation 3
• RATING: Teen
• GRADE: C

Click here for the full review.

This series was intended to be five parts but as I started Part 4 I realized there was nothing new going on. That’s not to say there’s nothing more to the game - on the contrary, there’s a whole lot more to the world, these barely scratched the surface - but the last two parts of this series would just be repeating the first three. This is an MMO after all. They can’t give you everything up front. So I’ve decided to call it a series and end at the city gates.

Of course it deserves a summary. For those of you who missed it, what did we learn in parts one through three of our adventures with Barbaro?

• Hyboria, the world the game takes place in, is brutal. That’s not to say most MMOs aren’t brutal, they all involve hoards of enemies all out to kill you, but this one is a different type of brutal. Blood flies everywhere, slavery and tyranny are presented pretty bluntly, racism abounds. It’s pretty gritty.
• Then of course there’s the sex. What I’m saying is that this isn’t your typical PG-13 grade MMO. Adult themes abound. Which does make it distinct.
• The combat system actually is a pretty solid selling point. It’s still pretty simplistic but it does add some element of skill. Bad guys are easier to kill when you watch their defenses and hit their weak point, even if there are only three possibilities and they’re clearly marked.
• That said, it’s not perfect. It stutters and stalls out when the screen gets crowded, the enemies don’t always level at the same speed you do so it’s often either far too easy or far too hard, the quests put you on rails far more than other MMOs and though the enemies may be humans rather than rats they’re still the same generic hoard.
• The single-player portions are a welcome addition. Certain quests key to the plot, for instance the entire segment these writeups went through, are instanced. Think of the game like a single-player RPG, except the town sequences and subplots are an MMO. The other townsfolk are actual people who can join you on the mindless fetch quests the NPCs assign. It’s a lot cooler than that made it sound.

I do have this tagged as review, because this is as close to a review as you’re going to get. I can’t beat an MMO to give it a proper review. The entire middle and advanced segments of the game aren’t even mentioned because, frankly, I haven’t gotten to them yet. It’s a long game.

However some things stay the same throughout. The themes, the style, the combat, the graphics, all those are static. So read through those three impressions if you haven’t already. If it sounds like fun, give the game a try. If they don’t you should probably wait for the next one. But I can say that Barbaro’s adventures will continue even though I generally can’t stand MMOs, it’s got me pretty well hooked.

Now that Afrika is back on everyone’s radar, it’s good time to take a look at Wild Earth African Safari, which beat Sony’s project to the punch. But though it’s the first out of the gate, African Safari isn’t necessarily a good game.

It puts players in the role of a wildlife photographer and uses the same first-person controls as other shooters such as Metroid Prime 3, but there’s one distinct difference. Instead of pointing and blasting creatures, players point, maybe zoom in and out, and snap pictures of animals on the Serengeti.

Each mission is a photo assignment, where players go on safari snapping shots of elephants, giraffes and the occasional lion. Like real photojournalists, they’ll have to be careful and keep a mindful distance from their subjects. Players can’t go right up to lion’s grill and expect to leave unscathed. There’s an Impact Meter that, like a health bar, falls each time they move too-close to a creature.

The whole game sounds like it would work, especially for casual gamer, but it’s in the execution that it falters. A title like African Safari needs a boatload of realism. This should be a title that players get lost in, and it should do everything to make them feel like they are on the Serengeti.

It’s no jungle out there, find out why on the jump

I picked up downloaded the new video magazine Qore for the PlayStation 3. It took a long time to get on the system (It was about an hour.) and what do I get for my $24.99 subscription? A couple of ho-hum interviews, a complimentary copy of Calling All Cars (a good game) and a beta for the PlayStation 3’s SOCOM US Navy SEALs Confrontation THAT YOU CAN’T PLAY YET as of June 6.

Judging from the first issue, Qore is underwhelming. It’s slim on the content and the interviews and such are a little dry. There isn’t anything that wows you. The advertisement are slightly annoying, but Qore lets you skip them. If players don’t have a Calling All Cars, they should think about getting a subscription. It’s a good deal.

But fans who already have David Jaffe’s latest may not want to jump on the bandwagon just yet. Other than the SOCOM beta, which isn’t up yet, there isn’t much of an incentive to pick it up. Most of the content is stuff you can see free on the Web or if it’s exclusive maybe you can watch something similar. Perhaps, the best course of action is taking a wait-and-see approach and see if the content improves over the next couple of issues before committing to a 13-issue subscription.

For fans of the Wii Fit, the pickings are slim when it comes to games that use the Balance Board. There’s Nintendo’s pack-in fitness title and then there’s NamcoBandai’s We Ski.

With its cutesy art style and presumably casual controls, players would think that the game would be intuitive and appeal to a broad audience. But that’s only half the story. The title does take the skiing minigame in Wii Fit and fills in some of the gameplay blanks.

But as it takes on more levels and events, that ease of use becomes muddied in an unwarranted complexity. We Ski transforms something as simple as leaning left and right and turns it into a multibutton extravaganza, in which you need to know different combinations for a snowplow turn or 360 spin off a jump.

More on other Balance Board game on the jump

(Oh, like you wouldn’t type out the whole 12-word title too.)

I’m trying something new for reviews. Rather than give you the first couple paragraphs, I’m putting the summary right here with the full review after the jump. Let me know which way you prefer.

The Good: It’s hilarious in that crude-but-intellectual Penny Arcade way; It’s challenging without being too difficult; The combat system is incredibly deep once you get the hang of it; Did I mention it’s pretty hilarious?

The Bad: The initial learning curve is incredibly steep for an overall simple game; Those who aren’t Penny Arcade fans won’t get a lot of the references, it’s still funny for a newcomer but not as much so; It feels short, even knowing it’s 1 of 4.

• WHAT: “Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1″
• PLATFORM: Xbox 360, PC, Mac, Linux
• RATING: Mature
• GRADE: A-

Click here for the full review.