I beat the Nintendo DS game Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime over the short vacation I took surrounding Thanksgiving this year. It’s a charming, slightly flawed but very fun little action adventure game. Think ‘simple portable zelda,’ and you have some notion of what the gameplay is all about. It has a couple of novel elements – your character is the equivalent of a rubber band in terms of mechanics, so you spend a good bit of the game bounding about the levels spranging into and off of things, which is more fun than it sounds. It also features ridiculously silly giant tank battle sequences which pit you and your crew against an enemy crew. You can spend your time loading the tanks guns, defending against enemy assaults on your tank, or you can try and infiltrate the enemy tank and take the battle to them, sprangy rubber band style.

The game’s intended for kids but is still great fun. It has a few flaws – it’s way to easy, it’s on the short side, it’s easy to exploit the enemy ai during the tank battles, and the general ease of play means you don’t have to interact with some of the gameplay systems, like collecting items and formulas that allow you to develop better ammunition for your tank. Despite all this, it’s still a great little game and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes the zelda action adventure school of gaming and can tolerate the kiddie aesthetic.

I’ve posted occasionally about many things zombie. In honor of Halloween, I’ll link to a great post covering a ton of different zombie games that first appears in mid-august on metafilter. In case you haven’t seen it, and like me you have an interest in zombie games, check out the list and discussion thread on metafilter, then get busy with some zombie bashing action.

Note that many of these are flash or otherwise browser-based and thus available to any platform that can run flash and a recent vintage browser with competent JS support. Many are also PC specific, but the central point is that one should be able to find a zombie game that both appeals and that can run on your machine from this extensive list.

In the spirit of the season, I offer up another zombie link – this one to the free, open source Win32/OSX zombie blasting action game ‘Zombies.’ It’s not going to win any awards, but it’s a reasonably fun turn based zombie game – think Daleks for those of you who’ve been gaming for a while, only with hordes of zombies, priests, shotgun wielding badasses, and lots of brain munching.

…if so, check out Marvel Ultimate Alliance. MUA is a fantastic old school beat em up with a dash of diablo rpg-lite mechanics. It’s available on pretty much every platform under the sun, but to my great surprise the PC port is really well done and so I picked it up for PC. Make no mistake, this is a mindless button mashing slugfest, but it’s got all those comic book heroes you grew up with to play with, it has reasonably good graphics and a very solid combat engine. This is the third Superhero game by Raven Software, the old FPS engine masters, and the third time is definitely the charm. I own both of the previous X-Men-focused games and they’ve gotten successively better. The notable improvements this time around include no more healing potions, a much broader selection of heroes to play with, better networking play, less complicated level up systems, and an actual playable PC port. It’s also on sale this week at Best Buy for PC – anyone want to team up to take down Dr. Doom?

I did something uncharacteristic and pre-ordered Ubisoft’s new Might and Magic game, Dark Messiah, after playing the demo. The demo ran fine on my system, I love this style of game, and I was looking forward to it. Its retail release is a pile of steaming crap, however, and this post is a warning to anyone considering buying it – don’t. Wait until they patch it such that it works as it was intended. Right now it appears it’s a crap shoot in terms of whether the game will run on your system, and I’m one of the folks who simply cannot get it to run without crashing after the start of the first level. In the last 3 days, I’ve:

* Reinstalled directx9.0c, october edition (and thanks so very much for abandoning version numbers for Directx, Microsoft. You suck)
* Reinstalled the video drivers for my video card. Anyone who’s been through this with an ATI card knows what a time consuming pain in the ass that is.
* Reinstalled the MS audio framework and audio drivers for my sound card.
* used Valve’s Steam interface to rebuild my installed game files, repeatedly.
* Tinkered endlessly with the video and audio settings inside the game in an effort to get it running. I do not exaggerate, I have launched the game at least 20-30 times.
* Tried every tweak and setting suggestion found in Valve and in Ubisoft’s forums.

Despite all this, at the conclusion of the in-game cinematic at the beginning of chapter 1, the game locks up, most of the time locking up my entire system, something which very rarely happens. Ubisoft and the developers should be ashamed of themselves for releasing a game in such a buggy state. I know this isn’t true but it feels at this point like I’ve done more testing on their damned game than they have. I’m also not alone with this problem – not everyone is having it, but a significant number of players are, as well as a host of additional issues.

I’ve asked Valve for a refund since I bought it on Steam and since from my perspective it reflects badly on Steam. I doubt I’ll get it though since their terms of service are that no refunds will be granted. This in itself seems unfair to me. If I bought it at retail, I understand why I can’t return it because once I’ve installed it on my computer the retailer has no idea whether I’ve removed it before returning the game. Valve absolutely knows because of how Steam works, and they should grant refunds for helplessly buggy games like this.

The greatest shame is that the game shows promise. The in-game cinematic that happens right before the crash is excellent. I can’t think of the last time I’ve had such a promising tease from a game I can’t actually play. I’m pissed.

Anyway you’ve been warned – stay away until Ubisoft addresses this with substantive patches.