Posted by Doomeru Woebashi at on Monday, April 14, 2008





We here at Resigned Gamer have been reeling from the increased traffic and attention we've gotten since being posted on both G4 and Kotaku. Our mom is certainly proud of us. I was planning to respond to some comments on my Crisis Core post that I found on reddit, but I think I can address them in what I'm writing today.



We started this site to write about the games we play. Not good or bad, just whatever was spinning in the drive (no offense to our solid state DS friends). The point is that we've been doing this our whole lives and it's gotten to the point where we find ourselves playing stuff just for the sake of playing something; anything. So what you'll often find on this site is really an attempt to rationalize the whole time-wasting enterprise of being a gamer. We don't get review copies of anything so more often then not what we review isn't current, plus we both have a backlog of stuff to get through so even when we buy a new game there's other stuff to win before we can get to it. Also we have jobs and girlfriends. So how do we review the games we own and still remain relevant?



Our game reviews don't dick around a lot, I think it's safe to say. You can go elsewhere to read the plot synopsis or the developer's history. I could tell you but I just don't care that much. I'll mention if the plot is crap or not, or if it enhances the gameplay, but I just don't see the point when anyone who makes their way to our site probably already knows all that stuff already.



Sir Cucumber and I concern ourselves with the details that affect us the most as we play a particular game. Instead of developing a tolerance, years of banging our heads against the same blatant design mistakes has heightened our sensitivity to things that ruin a game's experience. This is why we hate turn-based strat games with unskippable animations, game menus with 15 steps before you can even start, run-and-gun action games that make you press a button to pick up items on the ground, and unsortable inventory systems. There are other reviewers that note this stuff, but not many and these game-breaking details get lost in mainstream reviews that have to cover the gist of the game and get straight to the score, or grade, or whatever metric EGM pulls out of their collective ass these days.



I guess the only direct response I have to the commenters on reddit would be that Crisis Core is indeed a high quality production, but no amount of time spent with the game will fix the broken and misguided roulette system. I'm not sure how one can derive from my review that I only spent a few hours with the title. Hour one and hour nine are filled with the same unskippable "random" materia cinemas. I probably should have expected some run-of-the-mill Final Fantasy fanboy sniping, and I guess I'd feel a bit testy as well after watching Square rape the festering carcass of FF7 through every available orifice, including a cell phone game.



But at least the game loads quickly...On a modded PSP...









Let us know if there are any games you'd like to see covered. Yahtzee might not appreciate requests but we sure do.

UPDATE: