Saturday!

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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5 Responses

  1. Doctor Jay says:

    I played paperclips for roughly 8 hours, at which point all the resources of the world were mine. That felt like enough. As you say, I left for lunch and came back to it with no real harm. I mean, we’re just making paperclips, right? What could go wrong?Report

  2. Brandon Berg says:

    Back in 2001, Falcom, the company behind Ys, Sorcerian, Brandish, and the Legend of Heroes, released a one-off action RPG for Windows called Zwei!!, and it was one of my all-time favorites. It was adorable, beautifully animated, laugh-out-loud hilarious at times, and had an excellent soundtrack, which is the other thing Falcom is known for. I think you mentioned Recettear before — it was kind of like that in terms of general flavor, but without the shopkeeping element and better in every other way.

    They procedeed to sit on the IP for seven years — though I think of Gurumin as kind of a spiritual successor — and then released a sequel, disappointingly titled not Drei!!! or Zwei Zwei!!, but just Zwei II. It didn’t even have the exclamation marks. It was the last PC game by one of the last family-friendly Japanese game developers to develop for PC. You go to a game store in Japan nowadays, and the PC floor is pretty much wall-to-wall porn. </Kimmi>

    Anyway, I bought a copy of Zwei II back in 2011, and as much as I loved the original, it ended up sitting on a shelf for six years. I was reminded of this when I heard that XSeed was going to be releasing an English version on Steam on Halloween, so I finally decided to dust it off and give it a go last week.

    So far it’s not quite living up to the legacy of its predecessor, but it’s still a lot of fun. It retains most of the charm of the original, and it added some features, but the high points aren’t quite as high. It’s good for a chuckle now and then, but never really hilarious. The music is good, but not great. The dungeon crawling and combat are fun, though they can get a bit repetitive. The graphics weren’t cutting edge in 2008, and they sure aren’t now, but they’ve aged fairly well due to the cartoonish style and art direction.

    None of which is to suggest that the game is bad or even mediocre, just that the original was that good. Overall I’d say it’s 8/10 and well worth the $30 and 25-30 hours it takes for a playthrough.Report