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Cheap games shootout 2009 - The Last Quintet
Friday / 01.29.10 / 01:06AM / Joe / all entries in Cheapo Game Shootout 2009 / comments: 0
We had one, we had two, now the inevitable Part Three.
Metal Gear Solid Touch, iPhone
I had an iPhone for, like, a week when I bought this. It is a strange little shooting gallery game, but wonderfully themed to Metal Gear Solid (specifically #4, Guns of the Patriots). Merely OK, but you'd probably have to be a huge MGS fan to even travel that far. I bet it's down to $1 by now.
DISCOUNT VALUE: $3 on sale. Was it $8 originally? I forget. I'm bad at this.
GAMEPLAY: The pinch gesture for using the sniper score is difficult to pull off. There's a bunch of nice unlockable wallpapers, but you have to play for days to accrue enough in-game points to buy any of them.
PRESENTATION: A solid match with the franchise's look and feel across years of PlayStation games.
SCORE: (Discount Value) 3, (Gameplay) 3, (Presentation) 5
TOTAL: 11
World of Goo, Mac
I am a total cad. I picked this up during 2D Boy's big pay-what-you-want sale. I elected to pay a quarter. And you know what? I didn't think it was that great. Certainly not worthy of all the OMG WII DOWNLOAD INCREDIBLE WOOT chatter that it received upon the WiiWare release.
DISCOUNT VALUE: 25 cents! Embarrassing!
GAMEPLAY: Too imprecise for me. I guess I was expecting something more along the lines of a rigid puzzler. Seems like you can very easily get to a point where it is impossible to clear the board, thanks to the overly sensitive gravity and limited pool of goo. Not for me.
PRESENTATION: Great art direction, though.
SCORE: (Discount Value) 9, (Gameplay) 2, (Presentation) 5
TOTAL: 16
Bomberman Ultra, PSN
I've never actually owned a Bomberman title, so I figured a PSN sale was good enough reason to bite. Turns out, Bomberman just isn't that much fun.
DISCOUNT VALUE: $5, I think during a PSN half-off sale.
GAMEPLAY: I think the core multiplayer model is flawed. With all the power-ups turned on, the game has no balance to allow trailing players the chance to catch up. We sort of like the floor-painting "zombie" variant (WARNING: NO ACTUAL ZOMBIES) where you have infinite lives, but even that one ends up sucking because only the last ten seconds count.
PRESENTATION: Amateurish menus, screechy sound samples and lots of overdone design. It's easy to tell when a company craps out a DLC game. The only real shining moment is that the game doesn't ruin the XMB menu with audio/images... but that's probably due to the bargain basement dev, not any altruistic respect for my PS3 menu screen.
SCORE: (Discount Value) 5, (Gameplay) 3, (Presentation) 3
TOTAL: 11
Assassin's Creed II, PS3
I had no interest in this franchise until the E3 2009 PS3 demo video. That looked pretty cool. So when Amazon put it on a Gold Box deal, I grabbed it.
DISCOUNT VALUE: $40 on Amazon. Not bad for a $60 that just came out.
GAMEPLAY: It's parts of GTA combined with parts of MGS. And even a little Professor Layton. Win win win. Now, it's not as uniformly excellent as those three franchises would lead you to believe, but it is definitely a name to watch. And I sure had a blast playing it. My fourth Platinum Trophy.
PRESENTATION: Some very clever ideas, using a modern sci-fi overlay on a historical setting... all intended to mask and immerse basic video game elements. I can't help but feel that the franchise will lose something special once they finally resolve the plotline and end up in a dull Logan's Run near-future setting.
SCORE: (Discount Value) 4, (Gameplay) 8, (Presentation) 7
TOTAL: 19
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, PS3
You know, I've often complained about not having enough Wild West games, but there's probably enough of them. I must be a sucker for the genre, since I've liked all of them. Bound in Blood is a sequel/prequel with two playable characters, each with different skills/weapons. Kind of melodramatic, and the voice acting is poorly edited.
DISCOUNT VALUE: $27, a Target red-tag. The game would originally been $60, and I'm sure I saw it down to $40 before this red-tagging.
GAMEPLAY: Not bad at all. Been a while since I did an FPS (I didn't even know it was an FPS when I bought it), and it seemed a tad clumsy. Great environments.
PRESENTATION: Little rough around the edges, but not in a good Old West way (although the overall menu design is). The same character models show up over and over again as different people, sort of like watching a Monty Python movie. AND NO MORE STILL ARTWORK CUTSCENES, PLEASE.
SCORE: (Discount Value) 5, (Gameplay) 6, (Presentation) 7
TOTAL: 18
With all fifteen games analyzed, here's your Top Three:
Burnout Paradise (21)
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (20)
Warioland: Shake It (19)
Assassin's Creed II (19)
What? Top Four!? Well, this is indeed unforseen. We'll amend the longstanding Top Three rules and slip Assassin's Creed II into the Anoop slot.
Next time, these four stand before the Final Judge of fourhman.com's Best Cheapest Game, 2009 Edition. Who will earn the coveted title?
Just as last year, the judge will be Clark. There is no predicting how this will turn out. |
