Ultima VI Project: A Fine Remake to Fuel Our Nostalgia

We have long anticipated Ultima VI Project since we played Lazarus 3 years ago, calling it one of the best games ever made. Ultima VI: False Prophet, back when it was released in 1990, felt like the first big budget Ultima Origin developed, stretching the everyday PCs players had to a crawl; Similar to today’s Crysis (or yesterday’s Strike Commander), It featured state-of-the-art graphics and for the first time, a 1:1 scale of town to over-world eliminating combat transition screens … More…

Again — Another Hidden Gem Butchered by Unjust Reviews

One of the major reasons we started AGG  is because we are really unhappy with how the conventional metric system of game reviews has developed into, and how much they actually affect sales — and the fact is that, like it or not, a game getting good metric scores IS sometimes the deciding factor of the fate of certain smaller studios.  Again is Cinq’s 3rd entry into the Nintendo DS adventure space, following the quite juvenile yet utilizes amazing features … More…

Zen Impression – King’s Quest The Silver Lining Episode 1

Eagerly awaiting for this 10-years-in-the-making unofficial but better than the official sequel to the King’s Quest series, we downloaded The Silver Lining and quickly finished it in one sitting.  And before we post our impression, the reader should know that we have been keeping taps on the game’s progress for the past decade — we have lamented when Activision shut down the project and we rejoiced its resurrection regardless. Not having played the demo (we didn’t want the demo to … More…

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker – Walks Among The Best

It’s true that we never tried to hide our blatant distaste of Metal Gear solid 4, a crappy piece of work that Hideo Kojima tested his fans just to see that he could get away with doing such disservice and he was right — most people didn’t notice it was bad; juxtaposed against the masterpiece MGS3 Snake Eater, which we thought to be one of the best told story of all times. Peace Walker on the PSP follows the footsteps … More…

Alpha Protocol — A Hidden Gem Among Rough Reviews

Alpha Protocol, the latest espionage RPG from Obsidian, years in the making — so how bad is it really after seeing all the harsh reviews from so-called professional reviewers out there? That isn’t the right question to ask at all. One should ask just how good is it? And it is good, it is even bloody brilliant. Alpha Protocol is  a spy game that is every bit an RPG in its tiniest details, from character-building, stats, dialogue choices with moral … More…

Zen Review: Hector Episode 1: Badge of Carnage

Hector Episode 1: Badge of Carnage: We Negotiate with Terrorists (no comment about the title), is the first true original Point-and-Click adventure game for the iPhone in vein of the LucasArts / Sierra games from the early games of PC gaming (Forget about the terrible 1112 adventure game also originally made for the iPhone). And let me go right out and say it — Hector Episode 1 is great — and there is no other game quite like it on … More…

3D Dot Game Heroes — Retro Love Letter

It really is impossible to not talk about this game with a sly smile on our faces. 3D Dot Game Heroes is the ultimate homage to the NES-era games; in fact we would describe it as the porn for the 30 year old — those of us who grew up playing the first Zelda and Dragon Quest. We once saw people on message boards commenting on this game as a blatant rip-off of Zelda; they are missing the point — … More…

Trauma Team – Traumatizingly Great

There hasn’t been a lot of good serious titles on the Wii, and if you are not into Mario and platformers your Wii most likely has been gathering dust on the shelf for over a year. In this month of busy triple A releases like Red Dead Redemption, Alan Wake, 3D Dot Game Heroes, Super Street Fighter 4, and the really sucky Lost Planet 2, oh and not to mention Sam and Max S3E2; Trauma Team on Wii came as … More…

Super Street Fighter 4 — Great Value Package, Poor Game Design

Despite the title of this article, it really isn’t any indication that we dislike Super Street Fighter 4 and that it isn’t worth your money — in fact it is a great steal at 39 bucks (cheaper if you get the PS3 version from Amazon and stop paying those suckers for monthly fees at Microsoft… the PS3 version actually has better load times this time around), kudos to Capcom who actually has a heart to not release this great update … More…

Babylonian Twins HD on the iPad – A Frustrating Treasure

Ever since we got our hands on the iPad, we refused to touch our iPhones (except when talking to people we don’t hate), the 1024 x 768 screen is just so much nicer than the tiny iPhone and graphics on the iPad almost seemed superior to the PSP and DS (pay attention to the word almost); hoping to find some hardcore gaming experiences on this new gadget, we got our hands on Babylonian Twins HD, after our satisfying experience with … More…

Square’s Chaos Rings on the iPad — the Age of Hardcore Gaming on Apple Devices Begins

We haven’t been fans of serious gaming on the iPhone — first of all, the longevity of the battery power literally sucks; secondly, the screen is too small; and the third major point being that the lack of any physical controller options throw any serious action gaming out the window. Sure we have played games on the iPhone, we’ve done that a lot, we have even developed games on it – but we went for that magic 5 min that … More…

Final Fantasy XIII 26 hours in, Just About Done With the Tutorial?

We are one of the few people that dreaded the release of FF XIII, because we knew it was going to be bad, but we had to play it anyway, if not just to see how drastically different it was. I’ll be frank here — it isn’t disastrously bad, it is just simply quite a disappointment, something that you would come to expect, with the decline of the qualities of JRPGs. This generation has been terrible — the decent ones … More…

Zen Review – Heavy Rain Taxidermist

If you’ve been on our site for a while, you would know that our article titles are usually quite deceiving. So we confess here right now that we aren’t just dissecting the Taxidermist DLC of Heavy Rain but also the full game itself. First we’ll talk about the DLC, which comes with the pre-order of Heavy Rain — but if you belong to one of those morons that didn’t pay for it in advance, you’d have to shell out another … More…

Zen Review — Fatal Frame 4 Fan Translation Project

So officially there isn’t a Fatal Frame 4, but the dedicated fans team Riivolution made it happen. A commendable effort really, almost inline with the remakes of classics like Ultima V and Quest For Glory 2, thanks to the Wii’s extremely friendly hackability and import capabilities — we are not responsible for what you do with your Wii, sure you can play this easily on Homebrew with a prepatched disk image, but being law abiding citizens, as long as you … More…

Muramasa — A Lush Painting lacking the Substance of its Predecessor

Muramasa: The Demon Blade was actually the first game we booted up on the Wii back in our tiny office. We are huge fans of Vanillaware, the Developer of the sleeper hit Odin Sphere, which Muramasa is the spiritual successor of. Odin Sphere probably belongs to one of our top 10 favorite games on the PS2. Being a 2D game consisting entirely of hand-drawn sprites and backdrops, Muramasa is the one game that doesn’t suffer from performance issues on the … More…