This site reviews the first hour, and only the first hour, of video games. It gives a minute by minute look at what is potentially a deal breaker for many games. If a game isn't fun during the initial hour, why should we expect the last 10 to 50 hours to be any different? The First Hour updates every few days with a new game review. Please contact greg@firsthour.net for comments, game suggestions, or if you'd like to write for the site.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days

Half-Hour Handheld
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days coverIf you didn't already know, Kingdom Hearts is a crossover series between Square Enix and Disney.  As unlikely as that seems, the games have been quite popular.  Two Playstation 2 games, a GameBoy Advance game that was later ported to the PS2 (I know) and a PSP game have come out of this union.

358/2 Days is the DS (and latest) installation of the franchise.  Although nobody's really sure how to say the title, it was a smart move to develop it for the dual-screened handheld, as more people own a DS than any other system.  The question we'll be asking ourselves today is the usual: is this game worth continuing?  Because it's a handheld game, which I believe should be designed for shorter playing sessions, I'll be playing just the first half-hour for review.

Kingdom Hearts has a lot of... how to say... avid fans.  Personally, I'm more of a casual fan.  I think that strikes a good balance for reviewing this game.

Mirror's Edge

Full Review

Mirror's Edge coverHere we have Mirror's Edge, a first-person platformer of sorts, released in late 2008/early 2009 by DICE/EA. I've been interested in the game for a while, starting from its strong marketing campaign, so I jumped on the chance to play it recently.

It can be briefly summarized that in Mirror's Edge, you are a runner, tasked to transfer information between groups looking to avoid the surveillance of an overbearing government and its allies. As escaping capture is of utmost importance, runners do most of their travel on free outdoor environments, especially rooftops. Thus the gameplay is largely parkour-based, emphasizing proper use of momentum, speed and techniques to accomplish goals. At its best, this leads to a smooth, sublime experience, reminiscent of games like Jet Set Radio, Shadow of the Colossus, NiGHTS, and the original Prince of Persia. Mirror's Edge takes the player further into that experience, locking you to a first-person view with constant reminders of your physical struggles with and against the forces of gravity and objects in your world.

Major League Baseball 2K10

Full Review

MLB 2K10 coverAnother year, another sports game.  Gamers hear this every few months when the newest Madden is coming out, or the next iteration in a 2K series, or even for the Tiger Woods series.  Sure, you updated the roster, but what did you really spend the last 12 months on?  That is the eternal question for series with annual updates, and it's always one someone is forced to answer.

For 2K Sports' MLB series, 2009 was a rough year.  The series was switching developers and reactions from the fanbase was generally bad.  With Sony's rival series, The Show, growing stronger and stronger with every iteration, it was not a good year to take two steps back.  2K and Visual Concepts desperately needed to show that they still worth the MLB license they paid for: 2K10 needed to be the Comeback Player of the Year.  If you believe Metacritic, they have definitely improved.  2K9 has a metascore of 64 with a user score of only 5.2, whereas 2K10 has a metascore of 76 but even more importantly, a user score of 8.0.  The MLB 2K series seems to be back on the right track.

But I never played a previous iteration of the series, let alone 2K9, so I'm coming into this season as a rookie.  I'm still expecting a lot though, my favorite baseball games are more arcadey, like Base Wars or the Ken Griffey Jr. series.  Those games were just pure fun and the gameplay was great not because it was great baseball, but because it was a great video game.  MLB 2K10, however, is realistic and trying to not let you realize that it is a video game.  Quite a bit different than what I'm used to.

So here's my full review of MLB 2K10, this was a review copy provided to me by 2K Games.  You can see read my "first hour review" of the game that actually follows me through about the first 10 hours of the game.

Chrono Trigger 15th Anniversary Tribute

Gaming Nostalgia
Chrono Trigger Super Nintendo coverI will readily admit that Chrono Trigger is my favorite game of all time.  I love the game to its full extent and no other game has really ever even come close to unseating it over the last 15 years.  That's over half of my life, and considering the hundreds of games I've played, I think it is an awesome accomplishment that one has reigned for so long.  I currently own three copies of the game, one for the Super Nintendo, one for the Super Famicon, and finally the re-release on the Nintendo DS.  They each have their unique story that I will tell.  I have chosen never to buy the PSX version for a few reasons.

This was the first piece of Gaming Nostalgia I ever wrote, but it's been sitting on the back-burner until the right moment.  This is as good as time as any since Chrono Trigger was released 15 years ago in Japan (and August of 1995 in North America).  I'm a sucker for celebrating anniversaries, so here's my tribute to the best game ever.

The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

Full Review
Incredible Hulk Ultimate Destruction cover"Comic book video game."  Maybe not the most successful four-word combination in the history of the world.  But you can't blame them for trying, right?  What could be cooler than playing as your favorite super-hero?  The premise of Ultimate Destruction is that you play as the Hulk, and the Hulk smashes things.  And although there's more to the game than that, smashing things is the basis of the gameplay, and guess what.  It's fun.

This game was developed by Radical Entertainment and released in August 2005 for XBox, PS2, and GameCube.

Ultimate Destruction is an open-world game.  Basically, there are three areas. Two of the areas are huge, the third is a hub that is much smaller.  In each area, you can go wherever you want and do whatever you want.  And by that I mean smash whatever you want.  The main progression of the game involves buying new moves for hulk to smash things.  In order to unlock new moves, you play through story missions.  The story missions are normal comic book video game fare, and they mostly boil down to smashing things, getting from point A to point B while smashing things, or smashing things while trying to keep something from being smashed.

Major League Baseball 2K10

First Hour Review
Mlb 2k10 Cover

While I love baseball, I don't play a lot of baseball games anymore. The last baseball game I played was MVP Baseball 2005 from EA, and before that it was Major League Baseball featuring Ken Griffey Jr. I also grew up playing the Bases Loaded series and Base Wars on the NES along with a smattering of sims on the PC such as Earl Weaver Baseball. An erratic and interesting history, to say the least.

So when 2K Sports offered me a review copy of their newest baseball iteration: Major League Baseball 2K10, I jumped at it. I really have very little idea how the baseball genre has evolved over the years, but I like the direction 2K10 is taking it. MLB 2K09 was generally panned by reviewers and let Sony's The Show really grab the spotlight. So developers Visual Concepts really had a lot to prove with 2K10, and while I'm not totally sold on the entire game yet, I do like the My Player mode.

My Player mode is new to MLB 2K10, and let's you create a baseball player and guide him from AA baseball in the minor leagues to the Major Leagues and maybe eventually election into the Baseball Hall of Fame. It's curious that this feature is just being added to the series since The Show has featured this since the series was introduced in 2006, but I'm really glad it's there because it is all I've been playing. My Player mode only let's you play as the character you created, so games move quicker and you really feel like you're part of a team effort.

This isn't going to be a typical first hour review where I play 60 minutes and describe the action, but instead I'm going to describe my experience of trying to make the Major Leagues. The road to the Show (sorry, can't help it) does take a few hours, but it is a unique and fun experience to someone who's picking up their first baseball video game in a while.

Day Five Recap

Recap

Five full days of first hour gaming have been completed, and talk about a blockbuster 24 hours! We played Modern Warfare 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2, and BioShock 2 for fans of the latest and greatest, and tried out The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks and Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story to see how Nintendo's latest portable offerings fared. In November, we featured a licensed games month, and played a bunch of first hours of a wide variety of games including Beetle Adventure Racing and Dragon Ball Z: Budokai.

We also introduced a new feature called Half-Hour handheld, for those portable games where playing for an hour is just too long. TouchMaster 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Mobilized have been played so far, with more to come in the future. I decided not to include them in the recap because introducing half-hour increments might get a tad messy.

Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars

Full Review
Tatsunoko Vs Capcom Cover

Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars is the latest installment in the crossover series developed by Eighting and published by Capcom. Originally released in Japan more than a year ago (Dec 11, 2008), Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is finally making it's stateside debut January 26th, 2010.

You may be asking yourself, "Who the heck are these Tatsunoko characters?". I myself am asking this same question as I venture into this unknown universe. To my current knowledge, it is basically one of the grandfather anime production studios that really took off in the 80s and early 90s in Japan. Most of their work made it overseas with the likes of Samarai Pizza Cats, G-Force, and Robotech. If you grew up with cartoons in the 90s, there is a chance you will run across some familiar faces here (though you may have forgotten their names).

Capcom took a huge gamble bringing such an unknown universe stateside. To put the odds in their favor, the game has gained a few critical changes. First off, online match making has been included. Secondly, at the cost of losing one character from the original Japanese game due to licensing issues (see Hakushon Daimaō), Capcom has graciously added five new playable characters to the international version of the game.

This game was never originally planned to make it over here. I was able to play the title while I was over in Japan a year ago and was super excited to hear Capcom was putting so much effort into bringing it overseas. The game definitely warrants a purchase and fills the empty void of 2D fighters (with online) on the Wii. Hopefully word gets out about this game because I have a feeling it's going to be an uphill battle. I've lived in Japan for two years and I still don't know who half these Tatsunoko characters are.

Mass Effect: An Audio-Visual Experience

Audio-Visual Experience
Mass Effect Cover

Welcome to Mass Effect: An Audio-Visual Experience.

Often in life, people notice a gorgeous environment or model or visual effect or even just an angle in relation to the scenery. Thanks to the magic of image capturing, these moments can be preserved for future savoring and to remember the moment. The same experiences can happen while playing games. Due to the magic of screen/video capture software (Fraps in particular), these moments and experiences can be captured for display for others or self in the future.

While playing Mass Effect, I noticed a relatively high amount of impressive scenery and images being captured, from which this idea was formed. As far as the specific idea for an audio-visual experience, I'll start by saying that people do things for any large number of reasons. To narrow down, common reasons for playing games may include the desire to distract oneself, desire for competition, desire for mental stimulation, and/or the desire to get lost in a new subjective experience. The goal of this article is to give you a subjective audio-visual experience without needing to travel through the entire game yourself. If you are new to the game, it will lead you through its entirety, accustoming yourself to the environments, style, and action. If you have already played the game, it will jog memories and rekindle an experience trapped down in long-term memory. Great care has been taken to withhold any apparent spoilers for those who have not experienced the game while still keeping the experience intact.

This introduction may be withheld in future iterations of Audio-Visual Experiences (if any) to better focus on the experience. In addition, this installment will only be a pictorial experience due to a sudden, poorly-timed harddrive failure. Only the images were uploaded to the internet before the unfortunate crash.

Gratuitous Space Battles

Full Review
Gratuitous Space Battles Cover

We finish off our second annual indie games month with Gratuitous Space Battles, an epic space battle simulator from Positech Games. During our first independent games month last year, we featured Kudos 2, a life simulator also created by the one man team of Cliff Harris at Positech Games. This guy likes his simulators, whether they're of space, life, or Democracy, but Gratuitous Space Battles is a seriously awesome game.

Gratuitous Space Battles is the first game I ever played of its kind. It's almost like one giant, single turn of a board game, or Civilization. Your opponent's pieces are in place and visible on the board, and it is your job to create and deploy a fleet of ships that can combat and destroy them, hopefully while taking minimal losses yourself. Once you click Fight, there's nothing else you can do. It feels very... unnatural at first, like the developer is taking away control of the most enjoyable part of the game. There are explosions and debris everywhere, and you want to be part of the action. But then you begin to realize that the actual simulation isn't the game, but everything before it.

It's fairly obvious that Gratuitous Space Battles is not a game for everyone. There's no real-time micro-management, no hotkeys to quick select a group of ships, and especially no mouse button spamming to get your point across. Gratuitous Space Battles is one of the finest, genre-defining games I've ever played. The game is simply in its own category. I honestly can't give the game a final score because I don't know what to compare it against.

Gratuitous Space Battles was developed for Windows but also works great in Wine on Linux, which is how I played it.

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