Hello again everyone. Though I usually spend a few paragraphs setting up this feature and what it's about, I'm going to talk about how crazy all this moderator business has been. If you want the usual opening spiel, go check out one of the previous Comic Commishes.

So yeah, I was made one of the two new mods last week. I can't really talk about that process, beyond saying that the current moderators kind of decide between themselves who gets the figurative purple nurple, but now I'm zapping spambots and keeping the peace in chatrooms and such. It's cool and all, but it's probably going to end up cutting into my blogging time. I'll keep up the Commishes, of course, since I owe my friend for his generous donation but some other features might be falling to the wayside. Just a heads up, I guess.

Anyway, we're covering the second half of 2008 this time. This is also when we're entering the beginning of Giant Bomb in its current incarnation as an expansive video content/wiki website. Probably goes without saying, but feel free to click the games' links to see if Giant Bomb's Bomb Crew had anything to say about them. This is a recommendations list, after all, and those are some good second opinions.

I Spent Way Too Long On Some Of These

Looking past its ending, and the latter third of the game where it become a 24/7 Super Mutant Jamboree, Fallout 3 was a compelling combination of the original series's post-apocalyptic, semi-satirical setting and Bethesda's trademark sprawling if broken open-world exploration. Some of the complexity of the original Infinity Engine (or close enough to IE, anyway) RPGs was diminished, as was the quality of its writing, but there's so much to see and find and shoot and craft and whatever else you want to do that you could potentially spend hundreds of hours in the wastelands surrounding the irradiated ruins of Washington DC. It also proved that Bethesda could take their big open world RPG template and create a game that was not necessarily about dragons and magic and still make it work. I've no doubt purists will be arguing the pros and cons of 3 and New Vegas against 1 and 2 until our world is eventually blown up as well, after which whatever mutated beings that are left will probably be arguing if the current world is better or worse off than Fallout's. Gotta keep your spirits up with ribald debate in the nuclear wastes, I suppose.

Infinite Undiscovery is one of a great many seventh generation console RPGs which I only begrudgingly recommend due to my sponsor's (@omghisam, since I forgot to drop a shout out earlier) predilection towards goofy examples of that genre. Infinite's got a lot of problems, but is still a fairly decent RPG in the mold of the more recent Star Oceans (they share a developer) or perhaps a lesser Tales game. A bunch of stalwart heroes, and a considerably less courageous bard who happens to look like the leader of the heroes and is summarily drafted in as a decoy, travel around the world destroying the magical chains that are holding the moon in place and disrupting the natural order of things. Yep, another one of those realistic JRPG plots. I actually kind of like the twists and turns of Infinite's bizarre story, and the combat, crafting and character development systems are fairly good if largely forgettable. If you're a fan of really odd JRPGs and don't feel like they're represented much these days, either due to publishers balking at the idea of localizing some of Japan's crazier games or because this genre seems to have all but entirely migrated to the handheld market, then maybe check this one out. I can't imagine it's commanding a high price tag these days. (If you're wondering about the Achewood thing, click here.)

Valkyria Chronicles, along with Ratchet and Clank Future, was one of the first PS3 exclusives to really make me sit up and notice the system. While it is essentially a fictional anime take on World War II, Valkyria doesn't deserve such a simple and reductive descriptor. The actual means with which Valkyria presents its strategic, turn-based gameplay in a world full of armed skirmishes, cover positions and mad dashes across the field of vision of a sniper nest or gun turret embankment wouldn't work without a bit of real-time danger, so the game somehow manages to factor that in too. What it creates is this idiosyncratic combination of the strategic and the reflexive, where your every action point counts. The player can choose to keep moving the same overpowered unit with diminishing returns - the tank, for instance, costs twice as many "command points" to use, and characters have smaller movement bars each time you select them in the same turn, so it instead asks that you think tactically, using every soldier and exploiting every advantage afforded to you. The net benefit of all this is that each map mission feels like a cross between something like Fire Emblem and a Medal of Honor game. There's really nothing else out there quite like it, though that's partly Sega's fault for not bringing games very much like it (say, Valkyria Chronicles 3) over here.

Revisited

Right, so here's a new category for this Comic Commish going forward. A few years back I used to make comics regularly for the games I'd played that week, as such many of the games of the last generation have already been rendered into glorious MS Paint stickpeople stories. Obviously, it would be lazy for me to include them in the three comics I make each month for this thing, so instead I'm giving them their own separate section where I can re-upload the comic and talk about it with all the other recommendations.

This month I only have one "previously featured" game, but we'll be seeing way more for the Comic Commishes to come.

I just had a pal of mine ask about Tales of Vesperia as it seems to be in the new XBLA sale for Gold subscribers, so this is as much for him as it is for everyone else: Vesperia's great. I would recommend it as the gateway to the Tales series, partly because it's cheaply available for 360 right now but also because it has the most relatable and down-to-earth plot of a series that's admittedly quite outrageously anime at times. I kid about dress up contests, but the main character Yuri (who is a boy, if that's not clear) is actually a well-defined and deep character with internal struggles which aren't so much "I hope senpai notices me" than "I should probably stop murdering people and claiming it as justice before I alienate the far more good-hearted people I travel with". It's around this point in the Tales series when they finally figured out how to make their 3D real-time combat system fun (Symphonia, which would be my second choice for the Tales newcomer intro game, was a bit rough in this regard) and it's a super long JRPG with a lot going on in the sidelines. It's also got some really nice cel-shaded graphics business going on too. Thoroughly recommended, and I'm almost a little apologetic that I had to talk about Infinite Undiscovery instead in the main article this month. (It also behooves me to tell you all that Dark Souls is also in the same sale, in case you still haven't taken the plunge into darkness. The 360 Dark Souls is not the best version, but it's certainly more competent than the PC port.) (Also The Witcher 2 and FFXIII-2 is in the same sale, so if you like RPGs Microsoft apparently has you covered this month.)

The Other Ones!

Here's a few more games from this particular period of time that I thought were pretty neat. Of course, you're free to suggest your own in the comments (I'm going by initial Western release, either US or Europe) - I've no doubt missed several, either deliberately (I never played them or thought much of them) or accidental.

• Siren: Blood Curse (Project Siren, PS3, July) - The Siren series has always felt like this odd little brother to Silent Hill, built by many of the same staff including project lead Keiichirou Toyama. It's significantly more difficult than its spiritual predecessor though, as much of the gameplay revolves around the characters' ability to see through the eyes of their immortal zombified foes and use this advantage to avoid them at all costs. The series takes a chilling look at rituals and customs of smaller Japanese villages, in much the same way as Fatal Frame games, and manage to concoct several really quite disturbing stories of all-powerful supernatural entities. Though Blood Curse is really just a reimagining of the original PS2 game, it made the series more accessible to a wider audience through its presence on PSN. (I think I still prefer the second game on the whole, but given that it never came out in the US it kind of seemed like the "hipster" choice.)
• Braid (Number None, 360, August) - Braid's a great little indie puzzle-platformer, released back when that combination of words didn't automatically elicit sighs of ennui. If anything, Braid's probably the reason why so many clever little puzzle-platformers with often melancholy stories exist. It launched Jonathan Blow as a figure to watch in the Indie game industry and does a fine job respecting the player's intelligence with its puzzles. The symbolism of its ambiguous ending sticks with you, as well.
• Mount & Blade (TaleWorlds, PC, September) - Mount & Blade is a labor of love from a husband and wife team from Turkey that eventually managed to reach completion in 2008. It feels like it's been around a lot longer, though, due to the amount of hype early builds had been generating for years prior. Though definitely a bit rough around the edges, especially graphically, Mount & Blade presents a really compelling "medieval simulator" that allows players to fight in huge battles, develop characters and organize their own mercenary units, eventually growing a reputation for getting things done and becoming embroiled in the feudal politics of the game's fictional take on Europe. That it builds from a small party of warriors going around bashing bandits to allowing you to lead entire factions into wars against one another is one of Mount and Blade's most fascinating strengths.
• Disaster: Day of Crisis (Monolith Soft, Wii, October) - Disaster's a really appealing mess of light gun sequences and motion control mini-games which are framed with a completely ludicrous action movie story of a man trying to rescue his dead partner's sister from ex-paramilitary terrorists while about half a dozen massive, consecutive natural disasters occur around him. Though the stages of the game can be very hit or miss (the driving sections fall squarely in the latter), they're always funneling you towards the next big stupid action scene. Neither the plot nor the action sequences are ever predictable, though, and it makes for an exciting game that I'm not too guilty about loving to pieces. It's worth keeping in mind that I'm kind of an unapologetic Monolith Soft fanboy these days, so take this appraisal with a grain of volcanic ash.
• Dead Space (EA, 360/PS3/PC, October) - Dead Space launched what might have been the last big AAA horror game series to make much of a visceral splash, though it's lost its way somewhat in recent times depending on who you ask. Predicated on violin-screeching jump scares and absurdly gory body horror, Dead Space is a taut, suspenseful sci-fi third-person shooter that earnestly tries to be more Alien than Aliens, despite being a shooter from EA. Like BioShock, it's not simply a matter of running through corridors shooting monstrosities to literal pieces, but taking time exploring the surroundings, comprehending what has occurred from the subtext of audio notes and visual cues and enjoying a standard sci-fi horror tale. We aren't getting an Event Horizon game any time soon, so this'll have to suffice.
• Saints Row 2 (Volition Inc., PS3/360, October) - Though perhaps dated by most people's standards of the sandbox city game, especially compared to its sequels, Saints Row 2 properly defines what the sandbox genre should be all about: unbridled chaos, entirely directed by the player's whims. There's a veritable plethora of activities to partake in, most of which are so hilarious and fun that you'll be sad when you've played through them all (though others were a bit more like a chore for completionist types), and the world is full of collectibles and incidental mayhem to busy oneself with. The plot's a bit on the dry side, especially compared to how insane the main story of 3 and 4 would eventually become, but the Saints Row series has yet to equal the sheer scale of what the player can get up to in the well-realized city of Stilwater. I think only Just Cause 2 pips it in open world content, and as fun as that game's grapple mechanics were it did not have side-missions where you chainsaw protesters in half in a police uniform to improve the ratings for a sleazy Cops knock-off TV show nor any where you're throwing celebrity stalkers through an airplane engine.
• Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (Konami, DS, October) - The last of the great 2D Castlevanias, Ecclesia takes the series back to its roots somewhat by presenting a series of sequential areas to explore, rather than dumping you in one huge castle and calling it a day. The tattooed and enigmatic Shanoa adopts a system not unlike the Sorrow games' Soma Cruz's soul absorption that allows her to acquire and employ the enemy's skills and attacks against them, and the game has you flitting around area to area with the requisite action platforming, back-tracking and exploration this and its peer series Metroid are known for. It's also a bit more challenging than most portable 2D Castlevanias have been, though if you've been gorging yourself on Indie 2D platformers with their inherent masocore leanings in lieu of any new 2D Castlevanias to play, I'm sure you'll manage.
• Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts (Rare, 360, November) - There was a conversation going on in the chatroom of the most recent UPF, spurred by Brad's checking-in of Rare's Viva Pinata, about why precisely this spin-off game needed to use Banjo and Kazooie beyond the nostalgic fanbase when it chose to facetiously crap on its heroes' platformer legacy and instead present a game all about various vehicle-based missions. Though a perfectly serviceable game that presented a fairly innovative challenge with its almost puzzle-like approach in tasking players to create specific vehicles for specific objectives, to say it rubbed Banjo Kazooie fans the wrong way would be an understatement. Anyway, the nature of the conversation was why Rare couldn't have used any other member of the stable of characters they created for Diddy Kong Racing (which, allow me to remind you, was a game that also involved driving numerous vehicles around) to headline the game. Bumper the Badger's due for a breakout role, darn it. (Also, yes, these exciting deliberations are precisely the sort of thing you are missing out on without a premium membership. Sign up today! Sorry, site plugs are written into my moderator job contract.)
• Mirror's Edge (EA DICE, 360/PS3, November) - Mirror's Edge was pretty divisive when it came out, and is probably still a bit divisive today, but its first-person parkour shenanigans were actually a lot better and more accessible than they had any right to be. The whites and reds of its stark visual design and the suspenseful roof leaping and disarm counters made for a game with a cool atmosphere that rewarded players who took the time to get to grips with its fiddly mechanics.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 (Atlus, PS2, December) - Probably doesn't need much of an introduction from me, but the last sixth gen game to really rock the pillars of heaven was Atlus's RPG/Dating Sim hybrid Persona 4. An almost obscene amount of great character moments, challenging strategic turn-based combat and a bizarre story that twists and turns as the months roll by. But hey, there's around 100 hours of content on this very site that can vouch for its quality. Go watch that series (or hell, play the game) if you've been incarcerated for a minor offense or flying to Mars or somehow have a month of free time to fritter away on anime teenagers. You'll be glad you did.