I’ll confess: I really wanted to start this review with a choice quote from George R R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels. “Winter is coming” is played, I just did a riff on “You Know Nothing, Jon Snow” the other week… maybe a less common one, like, “Jon Snow flexed his sword hand” or something.
When I first heard that a visual novel centered around dating girls with physical disabilities was being made, my first thought was “only in Japan”. Of course, I was completely wrong. While made in the style of a typical Japanese visual novel — and even based on a Japanese sketch — Katawa Shoujo was created by a group of fans from all over the world who met on the message board 4chan.
Some video game assessments break down the graphics, sound and music of a new release. Functional, maybe, but a little soulless. Other reviews — like the ones that run on GamePeople — use the different forms of sketch comedy, songwriting and radio plays to get at the heart of what makes a game worth caring about. Now, the unconventional content from GamePeople will be making the leap from the screen to the stage.
In 1987, a young director by the name of Hironobu Sakaguchi was charged with making a game for his small game company, Square. Up until this point the company had had moderate success with racing and platforming games, but it was clear to all that Sakaguchi’s game was likely to be his — if not the company’s — final project. And as he had always wanted to make a fantasy game along the lines of Ultima and Wizardry, he named the game Final Fantasy.
Reviews score eh? First there was the outcry over Eurogamer’s 8/10 Uncharted 3 review (a review that I personally really enjoyed reading) and then Gamespot’s 7.5/10 for Skyward Sword. Bloody review scores — everyone knows they’re broken. Kotaku reader and GameTaco stalwart Smoolander has some top notch ideas about how we change them!
Uncharted 3 has done pretty darn well, going by the hive mind judgement of Metacritic. All but three outlets gave the game a score of nine or above. Of the sites to assign the game an 8 or less, Eurogamer is arguably the one with the highest profile — a profile significant enough for the game’s lead designer, Richard Lemarchand, to speak about it.
