The RPG is a divisive genre. While there are innumerable people who enjoy the sense of scale and atmosphere these games at their best can create, RPG detractors will deride the genre for its reliance on lengthy, self indulgent and let’s face it, poorly written, and more poorly localised plots and irritating characters, not to mention combat systems that seem like a relic of table top pen and paper games where outcomes are decided by an electronic roll of the 26 sided die.

Guess what? I’m in the latter camp. Show me an RPG and I’ll normally don my +4 robe of indifference and walk away. Despite being a Mario fan, then, I was predisposed against Bowser’s Inside Story, the western localisation of February’s Mario and Luigi RPG 3!!!. Yup, the Japanese title really does have three exclamation marks in it, and with the box art being a shabby knocked up image of the eponymous brothers and Bowser on a plain white background above the writ large title, it always seemed to me to drone from the shelf ‘this ain’t for you, chum, move along..’ Read the rest of this entry »

While I applaud the effort that has gone into to making a piece of software that encourages the mono-lingual gaming public to develop an interest in a very foreign and difficult language like Japanese, the game *really* sucks.

Mini “games”

The main in-game interface is a beautifully simple 3D walk-around thing similar to animal crossing – the only on screen icon being a backpack. The interfaces for each mini-game however are so badly thought out with irritating minor quirks that it really detracts from the overall experience. For instance, the first two mini-games I found after jumping in (it took a good 30 minutes to find anything mind you) were the hopscotch game for learning adjectives, and a slingshot shooting game for nouns, both of which were essentially the same stupid spelling game.

Who the _____ doesn’t know the rules of hopscotch?!

As far as I remember, hopscotch is a game where you jump along a series of chalk drawn squares. So when the game asked me to spell out the Japanese word for yellow (KIIRO, by the way), I found myself stumped to find neither of the letter squares in front of my character contained a K. Little did I know that they had rewritten the rules of hopscotch so that now you could jump on empty squares and go back and forward finding the right letters. Fair enough once you figure that out, but even then it’s so damn frustrating and slow to move around that I really just wanted to click on the right letters and be done with it – but then where’s the “game” in that. Don’t even mention the retarded balancing part that they tacked on one when they realized THIS SUCKS – apparently your character has troubling standing on one leg and hopping, so you constantly have to adjust the balance while doing the whole painfully slow jumping on the right letters thing … It made me want to kill myself, and certainly not “learn” more words.

Hit the letter in the right order – again!

And as for the slingshot game – this time you have to shoot the right letters from the selection rather than jumping on them. While the shooting feels vaguely satisfying – the stretchy sound when pulling back and moving around the lower screen by touch to aim at the letters on the top screen – I was frustrated again to find that the right letters weren’t always an option. You have to wait for at a whole damned minute or more sometimes for the next correct letter to pop up again before you can shoot it and continue. When I realized it was taking 5 minutes or more for one word I powered off my DS.

GFX

The graphics are nice enough for an adventure game, but then it fails in every other aspect so whats the point in praising that? Oh, I should mention that if you double tap while moving around you do a little jump, if thats enough to convince you to buy it. NOTHING in the environment is interactive, though. So essentially the whole wondering around the school thing is just a really slow menu systen, but the PR blurb wouldn’t have worked so well.

THE AMAZON BLURB vs REALITY

Mind your Language; turns understanding a new language into a fun, exciting game, where you learn while you play.

Mind your language turns learning a limited number of basic new words into a tedious, drawn-out and frustrating experience where you learn whilst using a really slow non-conventional menu system.

By using mini games to teach Vocabulary and Grammar, Players gain a knowledge of a foreign language without even realising they are learning.

By using mini “games” to frustrate, players are painfully aware that the software is trying to teach them something whilst simultaneously wasting their time and effort.

DO NOT BUY THIS CRAP

By all means, this ninja implores you to learn Japanese and expand your cultural horizons – just don’t touch this. Don’t even download it, like I did. If you want a lame adventure game that fails to teach you anything then go ahead – if you want to actually learn Japanese I suggest you take a look at the free smart.fm online learning tools which are infinitely more effective and will teach you a million times more vocab in half as much time. Bring your own motivation.

When not wasting his time with badly written DS software, Blue Lightning also masquerades as a tech professional over at TokyoBIT, where you can learn all sorts of things like tethering your iPhone in Japan and safe torrenting

Reviewers for the new Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box were given a bit of an unboxing shock to find the package completely empty! But in the spirit of the game, most people would probably guess that there was some kind of trick involved — and indeed that turned out to be the case.

Check out some pictures below from the folks over at Joystiq showing the details of their unboxing adventure! Stay tuned for the Diabolical Box Trailer at the bottom of the page. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nintendo DS, that most ubiquitous of console hardware, has a problem. The truth is, there’s just too many games knocking about for the little thing. Visiting any games shop with a second hand section will give you a glimpse of how Ninty’s a victim of it’s own successas racks upon racks and floor upon floor is taken up by copies of stuff like ASH, Eyeshield 21, or, um, Girl’s Mode, lowering their cover price steadily in a bid to gain some, any, attention, like a lady of the night with the years catching up to her. It’s like 1983 all over again, and soon Nintendo will be drowning in a flooded market, or worse yet, entire continents will sink under the weight of unwanted shovelware. Right? Read the rest of this entry »

We ninjas have never been fans of pirates, but we’re not a fan of this move by Nintendo to bring in so-called “digital expert” Neil Boyd as their new anti-piracy czar. While a name like Neil Boyd does buy him significant geek-cred, we’re not impressed by some of the actions that he’s reportedly taking.



Referring to R4 and other similar cards as piracy equipment is analogous to calling a blank CD piracy equipment. And of course when blank CDs hit the market years ago we heard the same rumblings from the music industry that we’re hearing from guys like Boyd now. Flash cards are perfectly legitimate as long as they are used for storage or homebrew game/app development.



While I believe Nintendo has a right to protect it’s IP, I think they’d be far better off hiring a team of ninjas instead of a bunch of legal-talkin’ scumbags. MCV mentions that Boyd is urging internet service providers to “put more pressure on consumers they know are illegally downloading games.”



That would be a bonehead move if I ever saw one. What Nintendo needs to do is focus more on developing DSiWare and their digital delivery service and phase out game cartridges altogether. That’s the solution at the end of the tunnel. No need to cherry pick cash in the courts via litigation when you should be innovating a pirate-proof game delivery system.