The Dungeon’s Boss: Games Played, a Preview

Once my quest for a higher plane of gaming existence begins in earnest, I plan on making posts at least monthly in which I will detail those titles that I am either currently playing or have recently beaten. I will describe the joy and pain which they bring me, and generally treat my gaming collection like the beloved child that it is. Although that won’t be until 2010, I have games I’ve been playing that I’d like to talk about, some of which have been haunting me on the backlog for some time. Think of this as a sort of non-canonical prequel to those upcoming posts.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: The Ace Attorney series is one of my favourites, and one that forces the DS near the top whenever I consider what might be the best game system. Because the first game in the series is hard to find in stores, I started with the second game in the franchise, loved it, moved on to the third, loved it, and then went to eBay for the first, this game. I went into Phoenix Wright pretty sure there were five cases, and so I was quite confused when I was finishing the fourth case and everything seemed to be tying up so neatly. It turned out that there was a fifth case, but it was one added later on when the game was ported to the DS, and so it has little to do with the rest of the game, and a lot to do with being on the DS. I found the first four cases to be of the same caliber as those found in the rest of the series, but the fifth case was slow, painfully long, and non-engaging, with just a few highlights coming from the DS-specific gameplay. This game is probably my least favourite of the series, but still a great game in its own right.

F-Zero: Maximum Velocity: A lot of the games in my collection were not bought with a “must have” mindset. Indeed, much of the fun in collecting games for me comes from obsessively looking for deals, waiting for sales, and scouring bargain bins. Buying F-Zero: Maximum Velocity stands as one of my proudest miser moments. I was in EB one day, staring at the lock-box of old games as I always do, and found a copy of this game for just a couple dollars. That’s cheap even for that box, where games are usually at least $6. The game was fairly enjoyable once I found a control setup I was comfortable with, although it doesn’t really add anything new to the original F-Zero formula. The game’s main Grand Prix mode isn’t set up for portable gaming very well, requiring you to play five tracks in a series (I would have preferred four, with one more series instead), and then sit through your results which are slow and unskippable.