Parkingtigers

I've got high hopes for this.  I can strum through the chords of a few songs, and so far YouTube videos and tab websites have been all I needed.  Picking out notes at the right time ... well I need some help and guidance for that.  This sounds like it is the right thing for me at my ability level.

The gameplay will suffer without having a grid.  An essential part of any turn-based strategy game is being able to quickly see how far you, and the enemy, can move.  Taking away that precision of unit placement and there is a real danger of it becoming a mess of fiddly blobs of units. 
 
I'll take a fresh look at it when it comes out, as I love TBS games, but so far this looks nothing special.  Certainly nothing to appeal to a huge Advance Wars fan like myself.  For one thing, the story and the characters will need to be better than generic skeleton dudes floating around.  Presentation will be everything.

"I couldn't play guitar. Within 10 minutes of playing this game, I believed that I could play guitar." So basically you are just playing a glorifying air guitar and you know jack shit about playing the actualy instrument. Look at me MA no hands! BOWW-WOWW-EWWww-Di-Doo-Da-BWAAAAH *floorslide*

For those of you that have never played a Tomb Raider game, pick up a copy of Tomb Raider Anniversary while you wait.  That game took everything that was great about the first game, and coated it in next-gen graphics and proper controls.  There were a lot of tepid Tomb Raider games put out, but the first (and the remake) was one of the greatest games ever made.

I loved the hell out of my DS, but I can't justify the expense of DS games any more.  Certainly not when compared to the price of other games on other systems.  Here in Hong Kong, I can pick up Xbox 360 games, new, for only slightly more than the price of a DS game.  L.A. Noire cost me $300 HK, which is about $30 US.  Most DS games sell for about the same.  Disc based games often appear cheap, and can be discounted later, due to them being able to mass produce the discs pretty cheaply.  Cartridges never drop in price, so finding a "platinum hits" version of an older title just doesn't happen. 
 
That's not to say that there aren't some DS games that I sank tons of hours into, but sitting hunched over a small screen as opposed to sitting in front of the big TV ... when the price is comparable but the experience is not, then the choice is easy to make.  Mostly I played my DS when I was travelling around, and wasn't settled enough to have access to a home console.  Once I got my 360 back my handhelds started to gather dust. 
 
Coming from the other end, the iOS devices are really starting to punch above their weight now in terms of games.  Some good games are getting ported over, and some very good system originals are eating into the desire for a dedicated handheld.  Street Fighter 3D?  Well, I'm not much of a fighting fan, I'm very casual.  $30 for a gimmicky version of a game that I'll only play a bit ... well I can't justify that.  I picked up the iOS version when it went on sale for one US dollar.  One buck.  One.  Sure it has touch controls, but it works fine enough and I had a hell of a lot of fun for my dollar.  Because of the price, and the ubiquity of iOS devices, I was able to play it multiplayer in the pub against my friend too.  He was playing on his iPhone, I was playing the pixel-doubled version on my iPad, and it was the first time I had played Street Fighter against another human for 20 years.  Good times.   The chances of that ever happening if I were to make the substantial cash investment for the 3DS?  Pretty much zero. 
 
The App Store's pricing patterns are going to make it harder for other handhelds now.  I may still pull the trigger on the 3DS at some point, but it would be to buy and play specific titles only.  I would need to know that I'm going to get my money's worth from a game, and it would need to be a game that I couldn't buy anywhere else.  The days of taking a chance on a $30 game are over for me, not when for the same money I could get 25 games on the App Store.  Hell, worst case I could get 6 top iPad games for the same money.  Not to mention the sheer number of games that go for free, and I do mean FREE, in the regular promotions offered on the App Store.  Today alone I got Back to the Future Episode 1 and Speedball 2 for the grand price of zero dollars and zero cents.  I've literally been picking up free games faster than I can actually finish them.
 
Latest purchase for me was iPACROSS.  I put 100 hours into Picross DS, and 150 into 3D Picross on my NDS.  I love those games.  Now I have iPACROSS on my iPad.  Comes with the same sort of production values (though misses the victory animations), and has 400 puzzles.  Only cost $3 US though.  Well, that's game over as far as I'm concerned.

I'm currently replaying SR2 in co-op, and fuck me it's the most fun you can have with a friend in a videogame.  Tears of laughter every session, it's joyous.   
 
The third game is a day one purchase.  Day one.

GTA IV is a bad example to use when talking about compassion.  How about the option to not kill either of those people?  That wasn't there.  How about the option to kill both?  Nope.  The player was railroaded into killing someone, heartlessly, with no chance to say "fuck this" and walk away.  Now normally that would be fine in a game, as often these things drive the narrative, but neither death advanced the story of the game at all.  It was murder for the sake of murder, and the developers wanting to tout the supposed choice the game offered.  
 
Edit:  I absolutely do want more games to offer more failure states though, and no chance to try again for a better outcome.  L.A. Noire so far hasn't gone far enough down this path for my liking.  Having some cases become completely unsolvable if the player messed up would have been wonderful, realistic, and an incentive to replay the game again. 

There are also some infamous Bugs Bunny cartoons featuring some bucktoothed Japanese stereotypes. 
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjLfyooJQEc 
 
Like the new poster btw.  The retro thing has been done to death, but that doesn't stop it being a valid learning experience for you.  This one has a clean simplicity to it that makes it work well.  It's one of your better efforts, well done.

I like Starfox Adventures.  Never got around to finishing it, but that's true of many games that I played, but I really liked it. 
 
Ultimately the reason most people hated it was that they got this game instead of a regular Starfox game.  If it had been put out in addition to a regular update of the series it would have been much better received.  For context, imagine if they had never released Halo 2 or 3 on the Xbox 360 and instead only put out Halo Wars.  Yeah, that's basically what happened on the GameCube.