I recently made an executive decision in order to help out The Gamer’s Quarter to pimp my soul out to Ziff Davis. I am going to cross post all game related posts over to there now. I am also going to attempt to do fancy things to gain attention there. I have done some image stuff here, but most is copy and paste work. I am going to attempt to make things look more personal to grab people’s attention to me and TGQ.

I feel like a whore, but interest of the magazine wanes so-o much between issues that it seems like a ghost town at times.

If you have a 1up blog, friend me please: http://shapermc.1up.com/

Just as a side note, we really need a bit of help with designers for layouts of The Gamer’s Quarter.

I finished Riviera: The Promised Land last night. It was a pretty good RPG, and this coming from someone who generally detests the genera.

I got the game for one of the most minor details that it offers: the relationships. I had heard that there were dating sim like elements to the game. I had no idea how small they were though. Most of them are related to not insulting someone’s weight, clothes or looks.

This made me miss more than one item.

But the game was fun. It never felt big. The scope and focus was always tight so that you did not get lost or confused. It took me about two weeks playing here and there to finish it up and my in game clock read at 30:21:00 or something. I know that 5 of those hours were the GBA just sitting off to the side not being used.

But I like the date-sim like elements. I liked the story. It was only half cliched, and humurous about it too. It was like a recipe for a new game: two parts RPG, one part SRPG, one part story, and a dash of date-sim. It worked out, but leaves many aspects of it hard to define. Durring points it almost seemed like it was an evolution of a text adventure.

And then I barged in on them taking a bath.

There was enough for me not to get bored with the game more than once or twice, which usually happens from repeat excercises in random battles. Which, there really aren’t any, that is to say, they are all self inflicted. I never really felt that I was leveling up in the game either. I was training to get proficient with weapons. I hated going into battle and grabbing a weapon I was not proficient with. So I only “trained” when necessary; all battles were significant in some way to me in this game.

The game was also perfect for a portable system. It was simple, most battle were fast, and it was not too long. There are other factors to this that I cannot put my finger on that make it work well for a portable platform. I think some of it was the simplicity of the battles. Probably just an overall simplicity that goes through out the game, even down to how you explore the enviroments.

Lina was my “favorite” character as decided by the game. I stopped choosing favorites towards the middle of the game and just went with natural choices, but I always had a soft spot for Lina’s character.