July 2010

100 Classic Books

July 11, 2010

100 Classic Books is exactly what it sounds like – 100 books in digital format for your DS. Now you can read Wuthering Heights without lugging around a book. If you’re in the market for eBooks but don’t own any of the various e-readers then 100 Classic Books is a decent start.

100 Classic Books requires only the stylus to select a book, turn pages, or place a bookmark. Text is easy to read, and when a book is completed it is marked with a small r on the spine. If you’re not sure what you’d like to read a built-in quiz will examine your interests and recommend you a book. And when you finish reading the 100 included books more are available to download via Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.

I have a hard time recommending 100 Classic Books despite it being a perfectly serviceable book-reading utility. While new books can be downloaded via Nintendo WFC I can’t see this one DS cart getting the same support as, say, the Kindle store. Granted, the investment is higher with a dedicated device, but you’ll be able to purchase whatever you’d like to read in the future, and you’re not stuck paying for novels that you don’t want. If you’re dead set of buying digital books and like what you see in the following list then save some cash and pick up 100 Classic Books. Everybody else, a dedicated eReader will serve you better in the long run.

Louisa May Alcott

Little Women

Jane Austen

Emma

Mansfield Park

Persuasion

Pride and Prejudice

Sense and Sensibility

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

R.D. Blackmore

Lorna Doone

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Jane Eyre

The Professor

Shirley

Villette

Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights

John Bunyan

The Pilgrim’s Progress

Frances Burnett

Little Lord Fauntleroy

The Secret Garden

Lewis Carroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Through the Looking-Glass

Wilkie Collins

The Moonstone

The Woman in White

Carlo Collodi

Adventures of Pinnocchio

Arthur Conan Doyle

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes

Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim

Susan Coolidge

What Katy Did

James Fenimore Cooper

Last of the Mohicans

Daniel Defoe

Robinson Crusoe

Charles Dickens

Barnaby Rudge

Bleak House

A Christmas Carol

David Copperfield

Dombey and Son

Great Expectations

Hard Times

Martin Chuzzlewit

Nicholas Nickleby

The Old Curiosity Shop

Oliver Twist

The Pickwick Papers

A Tale of Two Cities

Alexandre Dumas

The Count of Monte Cristo

The Three Musketeers

George Eliot

Adam Bede

Middlemarch

The Mill on the Floss

Henry Rider Haggard

King Solomon’s Mines

Thomas Hardy

Far From the Madding Crowd

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Tess of the D’Urbevilles

Under the Greenwood Tree

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter

Victor Hugo

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Les Miserables

Washington Irving

The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon

Charles Kingsley

Westward Ho!

D.H. Lawrence

Sons and Lovers

Gaston Leroux

The Phantom of the Opera

Jack London

The Call of the Wild

White Fang

Herman Melville

Moby Dick

Edgar Allen Poe

Tales of Mystery and Imagination

Sir Walter Scott

Ivanhoe

Rob Roy

Waverley

Anna Sewell

Black Beauty

William Shakespeare

All’s Well That Ends Well

Antony and Cleopatra

As You Like It

The Comedy of Errors

Hamlet

Julius Caesar

King Henry the Fifth

King Lear

King Richard the Third

Love’s Labour’s Lost

Macbeth

The Merchant of Venice

A Midsummer-Night’s Dream

Much Ado About Nothing

Othello, the Moor of Venice

Romeo and Juliet

The Taming of the Shrew

The Tempest

Timon of Athens

Titus Andronicus

Twelfth Night

The Winter’s Tale

Kidnapped

Robert Louis Stevenson

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Treasure Island

Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s Travels

William Thackeray

Vanity Fair

Anthony Trollope

Barchester Towers

Mark Twain

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Jules Verne

Round the World in Eighty Days

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Oscar Wilde

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Pros: Lots of books to choose from, large easy-to-read text

Cons: Dedicated devices have larger selection and better support

Plays Like: A small Kindle with a limited library

Disgaea Infinite

July 11, 2010

PSP / Reviews / by Justin Last /

Disgaea Infinite is Nippon Ichi’s attempt at turning the popular strategy RPG series into a “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel. The first three Disgaea games all featured well-written and entertaining characters in fun situations featuring well-written dialog. All of these things used to be window dressing for deep RPGs with an unending supply of dungeons and equipment, interesting mechanics, and multiple paths through the story.

I love Groundhog Day as much as the next guy, but repetition is only funny in small doses. Repetition doesn’t get as much of a pass in video games. Gamers are a fickle lot, and we don’t like to do the same things over and over. It’s bad enough when a game doesn’t offer anything new or evolve the gameplay at all – it’s a whole different affair when you’re genuinely watching and doing the same things over and over. Unfortunately, that’s where the Infinite comes in. Overlord Laharl has been assassinated by way of exploding pudding, and it’s up to one lone Prinny to unravel the mystery. This Prinny has access to a magical watch that lets him relive events. He can also possess characters to influence their decisions and hopefully keep the Overlord from being laid to waste by explosive dessert.

This mechanic sounds fine, but it isn’t used in moderation, and much like late cases in Phoenix Wright games, solutions are often obtuse which leads to watching the same scene over and over until you stumble across the right way to progress the story. There are 14 endings, but some aren’t available other endings have been seen, and at that point you’ll need to replay complete segments of the game to see them. It’s possible to skip dialog, but since Disgaea Infinite is all text doing so makes it very simple to miss branching paths.

If you like the characters and oddball stories of the Disgaea series then Infinite is worth playing through once, but you’ll watch the scenes enough times that the polish wears off and you’ll have no drive to see the other 13 endings. Disgaea Infinite is an interactive novel before it’s a game, and that’s okay if the characters and scenarios are entertaining, but watching those characters act out the exact same scenarios time and again in an attempt to unlock a new ending is cumbersome enough that the developers included a spreadsheet of branching points. When the player needs a spreadsheet to continue the narrative then something terrible has happened. When you finally know what all the decision points are it’s possible to breeze through the story quickly, but getting to that point takes a long time, and you’ll probably have shelved the game long before it happens.

Pros: Great characters, interesting story the first time through

Cons: Scenes are entertaining once or twice, but you’ll be watching them many more times than that

Plays Like: A “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11

July 7, 2010

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Shawn Vermette /

Every year EA comes out with a new installment in their Tiger Woods series, and this year they added enough new features and modes to this year’s edition to make it a worthwhile upgrade over last year’s model.

The three big additions to Tiger Woods this year are the new Ryder Cup mode, the Focus system and the true-aim mode. Ryder Cup mode allows you to play with up to three friends in a team match pitting American players versus European players. Unfortunately, while it lets you customize the roster of each team, there are only 25 golfers in the game, so there really aren’t enough other golfers around to change up the teams. However, the mix of foursomes and fourballs is an enjoyably different way of playing Tiger Woods. During the Ryder Cup, you are playing a match play style of competition. This means that it doesn’t matter how many strokes your team wins a hole by, if you win a hole, you get one point. The team with the most points after four times through the course wins.

The Focus system is the way Tiger Woods controls how often you can use the various power-ups present in the game. These power-ups are extra power on your stroke, adding spin to the ball, tightening your aim, and getting a preview of your putts. Each use of these power-ups uses up some of your focus, and the only way to restore your focus is by not using any of your power-ups when you take a shot. This is a great way of making a player restrain themselves from using power-ups every shot.

The true-aim mode is a new, more realistic way of playing Tiger Woods. It gets rid of all the power-ups and forces you to play from the player’s perspective the entire round. This is great for those who want an added difficulty for their game.

The highlight of the single player game is undoubtedly the career mode. The first thing you’ll do upon turning on Tiger Woods 11 is create a custom golfer. The career mode takes your created golfer and puts him through his paces by pitting him against the world’s top golfers in a year’s worth of tournaments that make up the PGA Tour. The great thing about using your created golfer is that you gain experience points you can use to improve his stats by doing anything in the game, from landing on the fairway to scoring long putts to getting birdies or eagles.

As far as the multiplayer is concerned, there are ten modes you can play, ranging from the standard stroke play to foursomes to a 24-player team play. There are ample amounts of people playing online at almost any time off day, though you’ll rarely get into a 24-player team match simply because few are willing to wait around for 24 people to join a single match. You are much more likely to find yourself in a match with 2 to 8 players. Regardless of how many players you end up playing with, you’ll have a great time doing so.

Tiger Woods 11 includes 17 different courses, all of which look amazing. The graphics are some of the best and most realistic I’ve seen in a sports game and the sounds really bring out the feeling of being out on the courses. Unfortunately, the commentary leaves much to be desired. The commentators regularly get your lie wrong, and in general detract from the overall experience.

The only real problem I had with the mechanics of the game lies with the putting meter. It gives you a ‘sweet spot’ which it claims is the amount of force you need to use to reach the spot you are aiming for. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take elevation into account, so it is often dead wrong.

The last thing to mention is that Tiger Woods 11 is the first game to use EA’s Online Pass initiative. This means that the only way to play online is to either buy the game new or to purchase a new code to play online, if you buy the game used. Luckily, it does include a 7 day trial that you can activate once, to see whether you want to purchase the online portion or not.

In the end, Tiger Woods 11 is the best golf game available right now. Whether it is worth an upgrade if you already have Tiger Woods 10 is debatable, but it is definitely worth upgrading from any previous version.

Pros: Custom golfer is a nice touch; Playing through the Ryder Cup is fun and different; Plenty of online modes

Cons: Putting meter makes putting harder than it should be.

Gaming Unplugged: Race for the Galaxy: The Brink of War

July 4, 2010

Features / Unplugged / by Chris Ingersoll /

The third and final expansion for Tom Lehmann’s Race for the Galaxy card game, The Brink of War adds an entirely new mechanic to the normal world-claiming and development: prestige. Prestige is a sort of currency, a hybrid between the game’s victory points and goods. You normally earn prestige by adding specific cards to your tableau, although there are a large number of powers that can generate it as well.

Of course, one of the advantages of having a lot of prestige is simply that you could become the Prestige Leader. After every phase, players check to see if one has more prestige than everybody else; if so, that player becomes the Prestige Leader and places any prestige earned that phase (and any subsequent phase in which is is Leader) on the Prestige Leader tile. At the end of the round, before new phases are selected, if the Prestige Leader has one or more prestige on the tile, he earns one VP and draws a card; if he does not have any prestige on the tile (e.g., he just retained Leader without increasing his prestige) then he simply gains one VP. If one or more players is tied for Leader (with at least one prestige each), they each get one VP instead. Due to the free VP doled out by the Leader mechanic, games played with The Brink of War have an additional 5VP in their starting pool beyond the usual 12 VP per player.

The other major addition to the game is the Search/Prestige action. Once per game, each player may use their Search/Prestige card instead of selecting a phase normally. If they choose the prestige option, they pay one prestige and then earn an additional bonus to whatever phase they would normally have chosen; this bonus is in addition to the bonus they receive for selecting that phase. If they choose to search, there are nine categories of card for which they may go digging: a development that gives +1 or +2 military, any military windfall world of strength 1 or 2, any normal windfall world of cost 1 or 2, any world with the “uplift” chromosome symbol, any world that can produce “alien” goods, any variable-point 6-cost development, any world with a military strength of 5+, any card that is capable of consuming two or more goods, or any card with a takeover power (either offensive or defensive). Before any phases are resolved, the search actions happen (in homeworld order if necessary) by revealing cards from the top of the deck until a card that meets the search criteria is found; the searching player may either take that card (putting the rest face-down on the discard pile) or ignore it until they find a second such card, which they must take. If the deck becomes exhausted without finding a valid card, the search fails and the player retains his Search/Prestige action for later use.

The Search action is just one way the game compensates for the ever-growing size of the deck. With all three expansions, the deck has doubled in size from the core game’s 114 to 228. As a result, there are a lot of additional Explore powers littered throughout the newer cards, as well as a new “draw and discard” power that helps players cycle through their options. All of this card filtering comes at a small price, however, as games played with The Brink of War usually take about ten minutes longer than an average Race for the Galaxy game, at least while players are getting used to the new options.

The Brink of War is a fitting conclusion for the Race for the Galaxy story, and the addition of the prestige gives the game an extra dimension that makes it feel like a more “complete” game overall. While the base set is still just as playable today as it was when it was first introduced (and is still how newcomers should first experience the game), the gradual evolution of the game over the last three expansions has been quite rewarding for those of us who have been along for the ride.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms Touch Plus

July 3, 2010

iPad / Reviews / by Graham Russell /

Romance of the Three Kingdoms has a devoted following. The series has been active since the SNES days, and though a few tweaks have come along with new iterations, it has, for the most part, the same gameplay. So when an iPad iteration came out, we pretty much knew what to expect.

Tecmo Koei didn’t scale back the gameplay for this one. The options are still here, from wooing officers with bribes and visits to increasing the productivity of your people. As far as I can tell, nothing here has been streamlined, and RTK fans have always wanted total control. Speaking of control, everything here is controlled by a simple menu interface with large buttons and actions grouped by type. This town management would have been easier with some more detailed tutorials about what works strategically, instead of just where to find what options. Koei’s assuming that only fans are buying this, and at the steep $15 price tag, that’s a safe bet.

Conversely, the battle system is fairly straightforward, with larger armies having an advantage but no guarantee of victory. (Watch out for fires, Lu Bu.) The armies move along a hex grid, and touch controls make everything intuitive.

There is a very limited selection of scenarios available: four historically accurate ones and four fictional versions of the original with more interesting setups. You go through these fairly quickly, and it seems like a few more options wouldn’t have been that hard to implement.

There are a few bonuses included here. Custom officers can be created, so if you want yourself in the game, go ahead! (You’ll need to use a stock photo though, so unless you look like an ancient Chinese warrior, there won’t be a resemblance.)

Romance of the Three Kingdoms Touch Plus is a solid implementation of a game that has limited appeal at a price ($15) that won’t get many new players to try it. Heck, even if they do there’s not enough explanation here to get them into the action. If you like RTK and want it on your iPad, though, it’s here and has decent production values.

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