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June 4, 2009

Grumbel commented on snide's video E3 2009: Sony Motion Demo

Are there any closeup pictures of the controller available or information on how many sticks/buttons it will have exactly?

5 months, 1 week ago

May 30, 2009

Grumbel reviewed Mass Effect

Near perfect mix of tactic shooter, rpg and space exploration: Unlike Bioshock and a few other modern console ports, Mass Effect does not support a gamepad, so I had to go with mouse and keyboard, which however worked quite fine, as the UI of Mass Effect has been changed quite a bit to work well with mouse and keyboard.The game puts you in the shoes of Shepard on a quest to save the galaxy. RPG typical you can create a ...

5 months, 1 week ago

May 1, 2009

Grumbel reviewed Sam & Max Save the World

Not quite as good as in the golden age, but still lots of fun: Sam & Max: Season 1 tries to continue what LucasArts stopped doing a decade ago, namely being a point&click adventure in the very classical sense. The interface is for most part what you expect, you have an inventory as usual, classic dialog trees and control your character by good old point&click. The interface however got simplified in that you no longer have any verbs left, actions are automatically triggered by ...

6 months, 1 week ago
Grumbel reviewed Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Anniversary

Awesome remake of the orignal, highly recommend: [This review was done while playing the Windows version on Linux in Wine]Some days ago I picked up Tomb Raider: Anniversary for the PC (yes, thats the old one, not the new Underworld). Its a standard Windows game, of course, but it actually works near perfectly under Linux in. No hacks or cracks requires, it works out of the box. The only issue I could find is that one has ...

6 months, 1 week ago
Grumbel reviewed Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend

Great game, great replayability, just a little on the sort side: [This review was written while playing the PC version on Linux in Wine]Just as Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Legend works near perfect in Linux in Wine. One additional issue issue is that the "next generation graphics" option doesn't work and causes plenty of graphical glitches which makes it unusable, so one has to play with the low graphic settings, which by the way is the same graphic quality that Anniversary had, ...

6 months, 1 week ago
Grumbel reviewed Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones

Not a worthy SoT successor, but still good: After Warrior Within Two Thrones however was a pleasant supprise. It is still nowhere near as good as Sands of Time, but it actually is a good game on its own. The level design is back to being linear and the map screen is gone. The game actually feels a little to linear at times, since often your path is predetermined by a number of 'jump-spots', leaving little room for ...

6 months, 1 week ago
Grumbel reviewed Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

Annoying,frustrating and one of the worst sequels ever: [This review was written while playing the Windows version of the game in Linux under Wine]On the technical side, Warrior Within has the same small problems as Sands on Time, but adds some more on top of it. It requires a no-cd crack to function in Wine and when you up the graphic detail level the picture ends up being upside down. Playing a bit around with the detail level ...

6 months, 1 week ago
Grumbel reviewed Tomb Raider: Underworld

Sadly riddled with bugs, but still a decent TombRaider experience: A few first impressions after playing Tomb Raider: Underworld for an hour or two. The graphics are pretty nice, they capture the feeling of scale pretty well, frame rates however aren't so great. Animations feel pretty broken in this one, some things such as diving into the water just look plain wrong and looked much better in previous parts. In addition collision detection is pretty wonky, you clip through other ...

6 months, 1 week ago
Grumbel reviewed Boom Blox

Simple premise executed to near perfection: Some quick first impression of Boom Blox for the Wii. Since the game was selling for just 9EUR on Amazon.de I couldn't resist to give it a try, its after all one of the tiny few original and good games on the Wii.The gameplay of Boom Blox is pretty much a cross between Jenga and a physics engine sandbox. Each level consists of a structure build out of blocks. Some ...

6 months, 1 week ago
Grumbel reviewed BioShock

Great for a FPS, but not more: I finally managed to play Bioshock. I picked the PC version instead of the PS3 one, since it was quite a bit cheaper and because it had support for the Xbox360 controller. The controller support works for most part extremely well, you flip a switch in the option menu and the whole thing behaves pretty much like a console game and works out of the box without more configuration. Its ...

6 months, 1 week ago
Grumbel reviewed Mirror's Edge

Not as deep as I would have liked, but whats there is great: Mirror's Edge, is a first person platform for the PS3. It follows into the footsteps of games like Prince of Persia or Tomb Raider, except its all from the first person perspective this time. In many aspects the game is quite a bit like Breakdown, which had first person platforming as well, but with Mirror's Edge there is a much stronger focus on running and momentum and much less focus ...

6 months, 1 week ago
Grumbel reviewed Braid

Great time mechanic, but a little low on the jump'run fun: The 2D graphics are pretty cool, Braid does some great things with particles, color and light that give it a very dynamic quality, haven't seen anything quite like it. Music is pretty good too. The story is far out in the weird artsy territory, every now and then it seemed to make a little sense, but then it lost me again. The story doesn't really have any impact on the ...

6 months, 1 week ago
Grumbel reviewed Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Great use of the DS, good fun and a bad story: What I really liked about the game was that for the first time in a long while it felt like a full blown original game on the system. Most other games either boil down to simple puzzle mini-game stuff or cheap rip-off of titles from the big consoles. GTA:CW on the other side, while not 100% original, knows that its not running on a big console and doesn't try to ...

6 months, 1 week ago

April 25, 2009

Grumbel commented on snide's video Alpha Protocol Dev Diary

Their whole talk sounded a lot more interesting then the game looked. All that RPG talk and then you see a guy shooting dudes and it looks a third class shooter instead of a first class RPG? Why that? Where are the cities filled with civilians that allow you to talk too? Why do the environments looks so blant and boring? Why do the characters look so bad and comical? ...

6 months, 2 weeks ago

Nov. 11, 2008

Grumbel commented on Jeff's topic Standard-Def Banjo To Get Fix After All

I don't quite get why this issue even poped up in the first place, shouldn't that be something that is catched in QA long before release? Why hasn't Microsoft addresses this and added it on their QA checklist? Its after all not the first game to run into these problems and its really not that hard of an issue to fix. Especially today when the Xbox360 is the cheapest of ...
12 months ago

Oct. 29, 2008

Grumbel reviewed Assassin's Creed

Not without faults, but overall an awesome and unique experience: The press and plenty of forum posts have been rather negative on the game and not completly without reason, but overall I think a lot of it was really overreacting and missing the point.The game puts you into the role of an assassins at the time of the crusade that has to kill a handful of evildoers spread out over a handful of cities, but all that happens with a ...

1 year ago

Sept. 12, 2008

Grumbel commented on Vinny's news Heavy Rain Refuses to Fear the Reaper

In Maniac Mansian you could also let your main character die and continue and finish the game, thanks to having two sidekicks, so it might not be all so revolutionary as it sounds. On the other Fahrenheit had not only multiple sidekicks but also gave you control over the other people in the story, who knows, maybe they have extended on it in that direction, since judging from Fahrenheit it ...

1 year, 1 month ago

Aug. 26, 2008

Grumbel replied to the topic History of double jump in the Double Jump board.

Does anybody know more about the history of the double jump, i.e. in the 2D days it was rather unpopular and used only by a tiny few games, while in the 3D platformers it is nearly omnipresent, with Mario being one of the few exceptions? Is it just because it allows to correct the jump direction mid air, those giving you a way to compesate for bad camera that you ...
1 year, 2 months ago
Grumbel replied to the topic Your Double Jump experiences... in the Double Jump board.

There was a place in God of War where you had to reach a higher ledge under a very strict time limit, else you would get killed by spikes. It took me like 30 tries to actually reach that ledge in time, because the way I did the double jump just didn't give me enough height, had to go back and study how the jump mechanic actually worked to make ...
1 year, 2 months ago

Aug. 22, 2008

Grumbel commented on Ryan's news Stop Hitting Yourself!

The grabbing is silly not because they grab things, but how they do it, i.e. the hands simply stick to stuff instead of that it looks like they are actually grabbing things. They also keep hold to their gun while grabbing things, which of course doesn't look good. The idea behind the grabbing is a right one, but in over the top force fights it feels out of place and ...

1 year, 2 months ago

Grumbel's Reviews

Near perfect mix of tactic shooter, rpg and space exploration (PC)

Unlike Bioshock and a few other modern console ports, Mass Effect does not support a gamepad, so I had to go with mouse and keyboard, which however worked quite fine, as the UI of Mass Effect has been changed quite a bit to work well with mouse and keyboard.The game ...

Reviewed by Grumbel on May 30, 2009

Not quite as good as in the golden age, but still lots of fun (PC)

Sam & Max: Season 1 tries to continue what LucasArts stopped doing a decade ago, namely being a point&click adventure in the very classical sense. The interface is for most part what you expect, you have an inventory as usual, classic dialog trees and control your character by good old ...