Just a couple gems to tell you about this week:
Rainbow Moon is a classically-styled tactical role-playing game. Players adventure through an open world, collecting cool artifacts and using a robust class and item crafting system to customize their character. When enemies are encountered the play moves into a gridded tactical field with contemplative turn-based combat. There doesn’t seem to be much to the plot, but the engine hearkens back to a classical age of gaming, reminding me of the early Fallout games, just with a very different theme. The game features dozens of enemy types, each with their own tactical behavior patters to figure out, an intuitive skills development system with lots of feedback for micro-managers, a crafting process with special materials and hidden recipes—resulting in highly customizable equipment sets in hundreds of thousands of combinations for a multi-character party, and a social element that allows players to publish and compare accomplishments.
Ace Mathician is a surprisingly clever little math game. The protagonist is a hungry Koala, named Ace, who just wants some fruit. He’s not very agile however, so has to get around using his math magic to manipulate the world. Each level presents the player with a basic level which looks like it’s been drawn on a graphing calculator, and which prompts the player to enter a formula. It’s not a math problem to solve, however. Any formula that the player enters will alter the level for Ace to attempt to navigate his way over to the fruit. Levels are open ended, and many can be solved in a variety of different ways. Think Scribblenauts, only with numbers. I’ll be honest with you, it looks daunting to me. Looking at the example in this video, I have no understanding of what goes on there, but I’m a words guy, not a numbers guy. Any math-lover will surely get a kick out of the opportunity to be creative and ‘draw’ some solutions with equations.
Following is a full list of this week’s North American releases:
Windows
- Criminal Investigation Agents – Petrodollars
Wii
- Ice Age: Continental Drift – Arctic Games
- Summer Stars 2012
- Frogger: Hyper Arcade Edition
- 2020 Super Baseball (VC)
DS
- Ice Age: Continental Drift – Arctic Games
- Ace Mathician
- Candle Route
3DS
- Rhythm Thief & the Emperor’s Treasure
- Johnny Kung Fu
Xbox 360
- Ice Age: Continental Drift – Arctic Games
- NCAA Football 13
PS3
- Frogger: Hyper Arcade Edition
- NCAA Football 13
- Rainbow Moon
- Summer Stars 2012
Articles RSS