Niahak's Place

I just got back from a three-week trip to India.  I’ll have more stuff about India specifically later, hopefully with pictures, but I wanted to wrap up a few DS games and one GBA game I’d been playing the most while traveling.

• Lock’s Quest – an odd take on the classic “Tower Defense” style games of Warcraft 3 fame.  It’s fun for a while, but it got old quickly.  It’s pretty repetitive, and with the fact that enemies attack your towers specifically, there’s no element of “mazing” that makes many tower defenses a lot of fun.
• Etrian Odyssey – I restarted this dungeon-crawly RPG during the trip, and it’s much the same as when I left it.  It progresses very, very slowly.  While this is understandable, it isn’t really suitable for a portable game.  I must’ve played it at least 15 hours, and even knowing what I’m doing I just finished Floor 8 yesterday.
• Civilization Revolution – I gained a bit of respect for this game.  While it may not be nearly the incredible game that Alpha Centauri is, and it still seems horribly imbalanced, it’s still sort-of-Civ in portable form.  The difficulty levels are stupid, though – I hate games where higher difficulties just give the AI ridiculous bonuses instead of actually making it smarter.  Did manage to beat Civ-Rev on Deity mode, though.
• Advance Wars: Days of Ruin – The Advance Wars games had been all alike, but this one maintained the core strategy while drastically changing the tone.  Once I started this one, I didn’t play anything else until I reached the final mission – which, like in Advance Wars 2, is pretty ridiculous.  I’ll beat it someday.
• Fire Emblem (GBA) – I started this one, too.  The only other FE game I’d played was Path of Radiance, and this is quite similar.  It’s a good thing, for sure, but it’s something you have to be in the mood for and you have to stick with.

That’s about it.  More posts eventually, as usual.