Sunken Treasures Games

Warning! — the following blurb contains copious amount of kawaii. Please understand that this cannot be helped.

Death Smiles, an intense scrolling shooter for XBOX 360, has always been a game that I’d kept my eye on, even when it was initially released in Japan in 2007. It was another one of those rare instances where I thought, the 360’s getting support overseas!? Well I’ll be damned…

Sarah and I were doubtful that Death Smiles would ever see a North American release, but Aksys Games (the publisher of Blazblue and Record of Agarest War) made it happen!

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The first time I heard of Catan was over three years ago — Shane Bettenhausen was talking about the on the 1Up Yours podcast. And by talking about it, I mean raving about it. At the time, I didn’t understand his description of the game so I didn’t pay any attention to it. This last Tuesday our friend Adam picked up a copy of the Catan board game and taught Aaron and I how to play. Much to our surprise we thoroughly enjoyed it so we ended up picking up our own copy the next day.

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This Sunday Sarah and I sat down to blast through Limbo, the exciting and stylistic new puzzle/platformer for XBOX Live! Arcade. Having tried to read through Dante’s Divine Comedy in the 9th grade, I consider myself able to judge this purgatory of a videogame just as well as the next guy (who also tried to read Dante’s Divine Comedy and failed).

As you can see in the trailer above, Limbo takes a very unique, minimalistic approach when it comes to the visuals. This incredibly dark look makes for some pretty tense sequences (damn you giant spider!) where you’re constantly second guessing whether or not it’s safe to advance. Developer Playdead does a great job of utilizing the limited color palette to help guide the player through some of the more complex puzzles you encounter. In most cases, if something is important, they’ve made sure to make it stand out. This “everything you notice, you’re probably meant to notice” approach to game design really reminds me of Valve’s work, which is always a good thing.

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This weekend was a perfect weekend for games. TheCherneymin, his parents, nephew (Kartman), and myself went to Seattle for Friday and Saturday’s Mariner’s games against the Red Sox. This would account for the quiet website over the last few days. Vacations are a great time for gaming, I think. Late nights spent at the hotel staying up playing games is something theCherneymin and I love to do. And with Kartman there we had even more gaming fun!

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The last few weeks have been full of PC gaming fun for us here at Sunken Treasures. Last Friday we went over to our friend Scott’s, who invited us TeamHoward kids over to his place for an evening of well mannered FPS death and destruction.

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A few weeks ago, I finished Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney for the DS. In the fourth installment of the Ace Attorney series, a new main character is introduced and takes center stage in the court room- Apollo Justice. Apollo is enthusiastic and ready to prove his worth in court by putting his “chords of steel” to the test against some pretty tough witnesses and courtroom officials. The startling first case sets Apollo defending previous hero, Phoenix Wright, in court where he is being charged with murder. Phoenix Wight? Murder?!

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Yeah, Dragon Quest IX is all I’ve been playing. I even bought a DS XL for it! I really dig the customization, as well as the vignettes in each of the towns, but I’m definitely missing the character development from some of the previous games (I’m still coming down from the high that was DQV). Still, the world, side characters, monsters, and soundtrack are as wonderful as ever.

Basically I can’t stop playing this game. Sarah and I messed around with a bit of the multiplayer throughout the week and it’s pretty damn entertaining. I’m really looking forward to PAX for collecting treasure maps and tagging people. ^_^

Here’s my little hero so far:

Yeah buddy!

This 4th of July weekend, Sarah and I had the opportunity to watch some fireworks… just not the typical kind — you know, outdoors on a warm summer night. Nope, the fireworks we saw preceded the ending credits of LucasArts’ amazing remake of the Secret of Monkey Isand.

My first introduction to the Monkey Island series was roughly 13 years ago, when I played the demo for the 3rd game, the Curse of Monkey Island. I was really blown away by the beautiful hand drawn art style, and surprised to learn that it was a genuinely funny game. I’d always been a fan of the point and click adventure genre, but for whatever reason I missed the boat on a few of the classics. So last year, when LucasArts announced that they’d be remaking the first Monkey Island game as an HD download I was pretty ecstatic!

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I for one, love watching people play games. This all started when Aaron and I first started dating. He was trying to get me interested in console games so he started up Final Fantasy X we took turns playing it. For a while we would swap the controller back and forth every so often, but when the story started getting really good, I gave up my controller time so I could just watch. Over the span of the next nine years we would sit down together, and I would watch him play through many other games: Valkyria Chronicles (PS3) , Yakuza (PS2), Yakuza 2 (PS2), Shenmue (DC), Shenmue 2 (Xbox), Silent Hill 1-4, God of War (PS2), Killzone (PS3), Modern Warfare (360), Bioshock (360), Half-Life 2 (PC), Half-Life 2 Episodes 1-2 (PC), Motorstorm (PS3), Heavy Rain (PS3)… just to name a few. For me, watching Aaron play a game is a way we can experience games together and spend time together. It’s very fun for me, and I treasure every moment I watched Aaron play a game.

Endurance Run from the guys at Giant Bomb is another way for me to experience watching a game. Persona 4 isn’t a game that I expect I’ll ever play, so watching the guys at Giant Bomb play it allows me to see the gameplay, watch the story, and be a part of the experience.

It would be neat to do something like Endurance Run on Sunken Treasures, maybe with retro games or something. I know this has already been done before, and I’m not very witty/cleaver, but I would love to show other people awesome retro games that I’ve played that maybe they haven’t heard of before.

Maybe what I envision is something along the lines of GameCenter CX, a Japanese TV show where comedian Shinya Arino will sit down and try to complete a FamiCom or Super FamiCom game in about 13 hours. This show is in Japanese, but you don’t need to know or understand Japanese to understand what is going on because getting psyched about doing well or getting frustrated for sucking is the same in any language. We have discovered numerous NES and SNES games from watching this show and we demo them in the store, and talk about them in the Sunken Treasures Newsletter or even here on the site. Games like Septentrion on the Super FamiCom (known in America as S.O.S. on the SNES), City Connection (NES), Mighty Bomb Jack (NES), Ganbere Goemon (SNES), Rainbow Island along with many many others.

I will have to keep my ears and eyes open for ideas that would help me bring the video medium to Sunken Treasures. Maybe one day I’ll make it happen. Until then, I will continue to share my love of games by writing here on the site.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by at Cool Desert Nights this weekend. Our sidewalk sale was a success. We started sign ups to win a FREE Xbox 360 Slim and so far a ton of people have signed up. If you haven’t had a chance to do it yet, no worries, you can sign up once a day, everyday from now until August 1st!

Thanks again to everyone who stopped by! We had a blast- great games on demo, fun people to talk to, and of course awesome cars. The night before, a Delorian was parked outside the store with it’s doors up. I wish I had a camera to show you, it was unreal!

Hope to see everyone again next year for the next Cool Desert Nights and sidewalk sale.