February 23rd, 2007
I recently finished up a very peculiar, but thoroughly enjoyable game that goes by the name Chibi-Robo! (The ‘!’ is actually in the title, I’m really not that excited that I finished a game). Chibi-Robo! might be one of the singularly least-violent games that I’ve ever played. Even calling it a “game” is a bit of a stretch.
Your character, appropriately named Chibi-Robo, is a diminutive robot with the goal to make his family happy. How do you make your family happy? By cleaning up stains, picking up trash, and doing ridiculous tasks for the inhabitants of the house. Just the first two tasks alone will take up a significant portion of your time as all the members of the family are complete slobs. There’s mud, sticks, cookie crumbs, candy wrappers, soda cans, and assorted miscellany absolutely everywhere. You’ll gladly clean up every piece of trash and scrub every floor to gain ‘happy points’ and raise your ‘Chibi-Ranking’ to get the carrot dangled in front of your nose since the beginning of the game: to become the number one ranked Chibi-Robo in the world, Super Chibi-Robo.
The house that is your domain is split up into six distinct rooms. Curiously, a bathroom is not one of them. That may not sound like a whole lot, but remember that you are playing the part of a robot that’s only about three or four inches tall. Something as seemingly simple as navigating a staircase becomes nigh-impossible.
The tiny house is chock-full of things to do. It’s quite easy to rack up a dozen or so hours doing silly little side-quests, without touching the main story (yes, there is one). You don’t even have to touch the main story if you don’t want to. Overall, I’d expect the average player to get about 20 hours out of the whole thing.
20 non-violent, making people happy, cleaning the house hours. If this game isn’t family-friendly, I don’t know what is.
Posted in GameCube | 1 Comment »
February 22nd, 2007
Last night I began, for the fourth time, a new character in Dungeon Siege 2. Not necessarily because I have an unhealthy affinity for the game, but every time I start one up, circumstances conspire against me and for one reason or another I can’t complete the game. The furthest I’ve gotten was Act 2 (out of what I understand to be four three). That was quite some time ago, and that character and the three that followed were consumed mostly by my apparent inability to perform a proper backup. (Yeah, I know. No backup, no whining). I even bought the expansion pack for this game to be my impetus to actually see the game all the way through, but I keep getting distracted… Usually by something shiny.
It strikes me each and every time that I begin one of these characters how much it unabashedly resembles Diablo II in almost every conceivable way, right down to the swag being named “The (Adjective) (Noun) of the (Attribute)”. Indeed, the loot tables seem to have been crafted someone with a tenuous grasp of balance, as ‘the good stuff’ seems to drop all the time. I frequently find myself running out of room in my backpack and must either tediously run back and forth to town to sell the weapons and armor that carpet the forest (and why is a giant spider carrying a breast plate anyway?) or feeding them to my pet.
I’ll admit that feeding a pack mule my entire inventory of magical swords it simultaneously bizarre and intriguing, that too gets old quickly. To get your pets to the optimum stats, you have to feed it only the best stuff, which coincidentally also sells for the most money. So you have to make the trade-off between having a nice bankroll or a combat pet that’s actually worth having.
Maybe I can finally see what the 2nd half of the game looks like.
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