Fuzzy's Media Consumption

It was a fun little experiment, but I've folded the content from Fuzzy's Media Consumption back into the main FuzzyCo blog and new updates will appear there, mixed in with regular posts.

I haven't played any of the Dragon Quest games, except for the weird little spin-off game/toy, Kenshin Dragon Quest, which features a sword controller that you wave around in front of your TV*. The first enemy you encounter in that game, and I'm guessing in many of the other Dragon Quest games, is a happy little blue slime ball. Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime is an adventure game for the Nintendo DS that is entirely from the perspective of one of these blue slimes. Now, this is no bold deconstruction of the fantasy game genre, ala Mary Gentle's Grunts. Rather it's a quick, fun adventure game pitting your plucky blue slime against a gang of punk platypuses who have kidnapped the other 100 residents of your slime village. The game play is fun and the recurring "tank battle" mini-game is one of the most original battle mechanisms I've ever encountered. And there are plenty terrible puns on elements from other Square/Enix games.

FuzzyCo grade: A.

* Which now has a sequel for the Wii.

Puzzle Quest is a rather frustrating game: the graphics are terrible and the game is buggy and crashed frequently* -- a rarity for a console game. But it's also incredibly addictive. There's a veneer of an RPG game bolted onto Bejeweled as a battle mechanic (and item-forging, spell-researching, etc. mechanic). Something about the near-mindless pattern matching combined with the "I'm making progress" of the RPG system combined to keep me (and Erica) playing the game for months. When I hit a brickwall at the final boss, even after completing all the side-quests, Erica helped me grind through enough battles to get enough gold to improve my stats to the point where I could beat Bane. And now that the game is finished, Erica is still playing to finish researching all the spells.

I did have a pet peeve with the intersection of the story and game mechanic. It was incredibly unrealistic that you could capture and control entire cities and it didn't affect your relationship with the inhabitants at all. I realize I'm making that complant about a game where this is high battle, but still.

* Fortunately the game auto-saves after battles, otherwise it would have been thrown out the window in frustration.