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Holy Invasion Of Privacy Badman – PSP Review

I’ve been eyeing on this game for a long time, the English version is finally available. Holy Invasion Of Privacy Badman is a JRPG style strategy game with 2D sprites. The heavily pixelated characters certainly bring back a lot of old school memories.

The “main” objective of the game is pretty simple, all you have to do is defeat the hero or heroes in every stage that venture into your dungeon. That sounds pretty simple right? But things are as straight forward as we progress to more difficult levels. This game really puts heavy emphasis on “food chain”. Basically the monsters you create needs something called nutrients in order to grow stronger and stay alive (as their health diminshes as time goes by). Another way of growing stronger and staying alive is to devour weaker monsters. This is where the game gets a bit more complex to manage because you cannot just create a huge army and think you can beat the levels, you also have to manage your nutrients and monsters.

Some monsters are better suit for physical attacks, while on the other hand some are for magical attacks. So obviously when you are up against heroes that have strong physical resistence, you will want to create monsters that are strong in magic attacks. I am still trying to get a hang of this “monster-nutrient” managment. You can also create “runes” out of undug blocks which you can summon demos upon. They are relatively more powerful, the more spirit type monster (more below) they consume the more powerful they get. They also give defense bonus to all other monsters as long as they are within the dungeon.

So that’s your objective(s), how do you fail the level? If your overlord gets captured by the heroes and successfully and literally, in a funny way, dragged out of the dungeon then its game over. But you don’t have to give up right away when the heroes found your overlord because you can still kill the heroes as long as they are still in the dungeon. Another obvious tip/hint to prevent your overlord from being dragged away is to position your overlord as deep down the dungeon as possible, again pretty common sense.

You are given a number of digs that you can do to build your dungeon, you can only dig blocks that are adjacent to blocks that have already been dug. There are also blocks that have greenish things in them, those are the nutrients. You can dig up these blocks and get your most basic slime monster will absorb and release nutrients as they navigate through the dungeon. So which brings yet another point, you really have to plan ahead and dig paths that can maximize the number of times these slimes visit each of these blocks with nutrients in them. As these blocks absorb back more nutrients, they will allow you to dig up stronger monsters. These slimies will also turn into flowers and when they blossom, they will pop out more slimies, a good way to mulitiply!

Slimes are for nutrients, there is also mana in this game and the corresponding monster type is the spirit. They pretty much act the same except its for storing/releasing mana. You get to dig these “spirit” blocks after wizard class heroes have cast spells inside your dungeon and these spells get absorbed back into the earth, or the undug blocks.

After finishing each level, you have the option to invest your “dig power” to upgrade your monsters and/or you can choose to keep them and carry them over to your next level. There are also treasure chests lying inside undug blocks as well and so far I’ve got a few skeletons to help out.

In terms of graphics, I can’t stop loving its 2D style graphics. Nothing fancy but suits this type of games. Music is pretty good as well, again nothing fancy but good enough. If you are into managing dungons, into JRPG (or just RPG) and you like to be evil for once, then I highly recommend Holy Invasion Of Privacy Badman to you!

8.5/10

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The Lord of the Rings: Conquest – demo review



So I downloaded the demo for The Lord of the Rings: Conquest while playing LittleBigPlanet Metal Gear Style. After going through the rather short demo, I am pretty sure I won’t be getting this game, yet another failed EA game.



The Lord of the Rings: Conquest to me is basically Dynasty Warrior where you hack and slash your way through numerous enemies with swords, arrows, axes and you get to cast magic as well. The demo allows you to play through the tutorial of the game and you start off with the Warrior class and you will get to actually capture a flag which I haven’t seen before in a single player game (this game supports multiplayer co-op by the way). You have to hold off the enemies during the capturing and once its captured you can change your class. The second class unlocked is the Archer, you can zoom in/out while shooting and you have three different arrow types – ice, fire and poison and you can also shoot multiple arrows at more than one enemy. Third class that you get to experience is the scout where you can cloak and perform backstab, its fun to watch for the first few stabs but it gets repetitive afterward.



Last but not least you will yet unlock another class – Mage. With mage, you can chain lightning multiple enemies, cast fire or shock or just perform the plain old hack and slash with the staff. Finally once all 4 classes are unlocked you will get to face dark lord Sauron himself. He is pretty strong and tend to come at you all the time, now you get to fight using a Hero class character, which is basically a stronger version of the warrior class I assume. The demo ends when you defeat Sauron.



I also want to mention each class has its own special attack as well and you can use it when the special attack gauge is full. But the effects are nothing compare to Dynasty Warrior though.

The background of this game is poorly done in my opinion with the two sides’ soldiers fighting each other and they all look exactly the same. Almost feels like its just a simple copy and paste job. The game play range from small scale to large scale battles with more than 20 AIs all fighting each other, but just like Dynasty Warrior, the AIs are pretty dumb. The game’s music is pretty nice though since its basically from the movies. Overall I don’t think this game is worth buying, even if you are really into hack and slash and you are a LOTR fan like me.

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Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice Review

I was going to wait til Friday (day off) to get a copy of Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice from EB Games, I couldn’t wait and got it yesterday I have been waiting for an RPG game for my PlayStation 3 since I got it last November. Until Final Fantasy 13 comes out, which is hopefully end of this year, I would need some RPG to satisfy my RPG hunger til then. And what can suit me better than a Japanese anime style, level grinding RPG game? None except this game. Obviously I have not finished the game, and most likely I won’t in the foreseeable future. Here are my thoughts so far.

As mentioned, this is a RPG game and turn-based with 2D sprites with 3 camera modes (bird’s-eye view, zoomed in view and really zoomed in view). First thing I noticed about this game is the graphics, which is pretty outdated in my opinion. They remind me of an online RPG gamed called Ragnarok Online, which has been out since 2001 and still remains popular even after it started charging monthly fees instead of being free like in the beta period. This shows that a game can still be a considered a good game even without fancy graphics, a game with fancy graphics but with no game play value is still a bad game, well most of the time. Disgaea 3 is exactly the case, even though its graphics are outdated. Its game play more than made up for the short coming.

The game starts you off with your main character, a netherworld student from Maritsu Evil Academy called Mao, a son of the overlord in the Netherworld. You actually play on the evil side for once as oppose to other games where most of the time you are on the “good” side fighting off evil. Here’s the fun part, in the netherworld school, an honor student is a person who skips class and not doing homework as much as possible, whereas a delinquent is a person who acts the exact opposite. And as you can guess, Mao is an honor student. The story is ok, its more suited for teens since most of the conversations are pretty childish, which is ok because the characters are after all, kids. There are also humor here and there as well and some are pretty funny. There is also an option to skip any story telling and conversation between characters by pressing triangle button which is a huge plus since I don’t find the majority of the story interesting, at least not yet. You can also change the voice over from English back to Japanese, which is yet another big plus since it just feels different having English voice over.

Game play of this game is what made me want to buy this game right away as oppose to wait for a couple of months and let the price drop. The play value as well as replay value is amazing. For those of you that are into leveling up your characters, you can level them to level 1000 and each stage can be played repeatedly or you can just play through the game by clearing each level once. Since it is a turn-based game, you get to move and attack/use item and end the turn, then your enemies will do the same. A very noticable difference, or I should say improvement over any other turn-based games is that the enemies move all at once as oppose to one at a time which can be annoying. The game pace is fast even under normal speed setting. Your characters can counter attacks and enemies can do the same randomly, so you can see counter-counter-counter attacks for example. Characters, again enemies as well, can combine attacks and form combos and which also happen randomly. There are also monsters in the game and they can “magichange” which pretty much means morph into weapons and allow human/demon characters to wield them, another fun feature. I’m pretty sure there are other fun features as I play more, but as you can see, this game is packed with so many features. Oh and by the way, I look forward to my first million point damage!

Control is pretty standard and straight forward like any other similar games. You can rotate the map 360 degrees so you don’t miss anything and 3 different views mentioned above.

While I like this game a lot, there is one thing that really bothers me, the music. While the music is very upbeat, it gets boring and down to annoying if you remain in the same area or in the same battle for too long.

That’s all I got to tell you guys for now, I’m sure I have missed something but there are just too much to talk about and I need more time to digest. So if you are an anime fan and are into level grinding, you should really check this game out.

You might save some money by buying on ebay link. I saw some good deals there, even the limited addition version. I would buy games off ebay if there were more Canadian sellers, sending from the US is not worth it and is often more expensive than buying in local stores.

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