Crazy Taxi Fare Wars CSO Size: 337 MB

Crazy Taxi Fare Wars CSO Size: 337 MB

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [99 MB]

Part 3 [99 MB]

Part 4 [40 MB]

Sad as it is to report, Crazy Taxi just isn't very much fun anymore. Though they were once shining examples of over-the-top, wacky-as-heck arcade driving games, the original and its sequels have not been treated kindly by the years, a fact highlighted by Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars for the PSP. This release includes Dreamcast ports of both Crazy Taxi and its follow-up, Crazy Taxi 2, then tosses in a bit of ad-hoc multiplayer, and calls it a day. What it doesn't do is adjust the game in any way, shape, or form for modern times. The shallowness of the gameplay is likely to turn off anyone who isn't intensely nostalgic for all things Crazy Taxi. And even those folk will likely take umbrage with the sluggish gameplay and dodgy controls in this version.

Time to make some craaaaaaaazy money!
Any card-carrying Sega fan already knows what to expect from these two games, but for the uninitiated, a brief synopsis. In both games, your goal is to take control of one of four different cabbies and drive around the city lickety-split, picking up customers and getting them to their desired location. That might not sound like much of a concept, but the thing that made the games so much fun back in the day was the jaunty, kooky nature of the gameplay, where driving like a maniac to fly over hills and narrowly avoid head-on collisions actually made your passengers happier and increased your score. Cars bounce off one another like they're made of rubber, and insane drifts take the place of proper steering. Likewise, big jumps litter every city block, and in Crazy Taxi 2, you can even use supercharged hydraulics to leap over any oncoming traffic. The game also imposed some rather stiff time limits for each passenger, lending to the immediacy and frantic pacing of it all.
For their time, these games were plenty of fun, but they don't really stand up especially well when you put them up against other arcade driving games. Part of the problem is that the core gameplay just isn't fun for more than very short bursts. Racing around the city and picking up passengers is amusing for a bit, but there's really nothing else to the main game. You either do it in arcade mode, where you get a very short amount of time and only earn time boosts from picking up more passengers, or you set specific minute limits for the game and play that way. Again, it's fun for a bit to race around and try to get as much cash as possible, but it's not something that will sustain your interest for long, especially when you take into account some of the frustrations of this specific release.
By and large, Fare Wars offers up solid ports of Crazy Taxi and Crazy Taxi 2, but there are some caveats. Crazy Taxi 2 always had worse handling than the original game, due largely to its overreliance on drifting, but in Fare Wars, neither game controls well at all. Drifting is a pain, and the turning radius on your cab seems decidedly lacking. Furthermore, there are times when you'll simply be driving along, and you start to turn in one direction, but then feel like your car is getting sucked in the opposing direction. It's tough to say if this is specifically a control quirk, or something else, as it always seems like you're getting sucked toward another car or piece of the scenery. This issue makes keeping a good handle on your car a severe pain when rounding tight corners or trying to veer away from oncoming traffic.
Another issue is that the sense of speed just isn't there in either game, but especially in Crazy Taxi 2. It's not just the frame rate, either--the games themselves are running markedly slower than the Dreamcast originals. You can tell because the timer clocks are counting down slower than real time. Otherwise, there aren't many differences between this version and the originals. Graphics and audio are pretty much identical, save for a few changes to the pop-punk soundtracks. Still, that slowness is a real killer.

Nothing kills the fun of Crazy Taxi quite like slowed-down gameplay.
If you get bored with the main game, there are some minigames and multiplayer modes to mess with. The minigames are the same ones from the original games, so you'll find yourself popping balloons with your car, doing big jumps for distance ratings, driving around narrow, rail-less courses while trying to avoid falling off the edge, and the like. Each of these games is at least mildly amusing, though a few of them are a touch on the overly difficult side. Multiplayer consists of some crummy single-system trade-off modes (time trials, and such), and ad-hoc play, where you and a friend can basically compete for fares. The one neat twist is that you can track down your opponent and ram to your heart's content, which sometimes causes his or her passenger to be lost. Otherwise, it's pretty much just the main game with a competing cabbie, which is actually more interesting than playing the main game alone. Too bad it's only for two players, and that it's not online.
Even though you can't call Crazy Taxi or Crazy Taxi 2 great games anymore, these games could still have made for a decent little handheld release if it weren't for Fare Wars' sluggishness and control issues. Fiends for Sega-brand nostalgia might still be able to take away a bit of enjoyment from simply being able to play Crazy Taxi and Crazy Taxi 2 on the go. Anybody who experiences the series for the first time playing Fare Wars will probably just wonder why this series was so popular in the first place.
By Alex Navarro, GameSpot
Posted Aug 22, 2007 4:19 pm PT

Coded Arms CSO Size: 110 MB

Coded Arms CSO Size: 110 MB

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [11 MB]

Konami's Coded Arms has the distinction of being the very first first-person shooter developed for the PSP. Unfortunately, that's where its level of distinction starts and stops. In Coded Arms, Konami has created a shooter so rooted in old-school-shooter design that it feels like a relic from too many years ago. You'll find yourself wandering through randomly generated corridor after randomly generated room, blasting merely competent robots and insects with a scattershot collection of weapons. The control scheme works, but it takes more time getting used to than may actually be worth your time. And the included multiplayer is made less fun by the game's lousy collection of maps. While you might be able to forgive some of Coded Arms' problems simply for the fact that it's the first game of its kind on the system, this kind of forgiveness can only take a game so far, and in this case, it's not quite far enough.

You kill a lot of bugs and robots in innocuous, square rooms in Coded Arms.
If there's one big question mark that Coded Arms manages to do away with, it's whether or not the PSP can do FPS controls. After all, the genre is at its best when played with a keyboard and mouse (and, to a lesser degree, two analog sticks), so how would the PSP's controls handle a game of this type? As Coded Arms demonstrates, the PSP can most definitely do a controllable FPS, but it takes a bit of doing. For starters, Coded Arms' default control scheme is complete trash. It relegates your look movements to the four face buttons and assigns movement controls to the analog stick, effectively robbing you of any degree of proper aiming. Thankfully, there are three other control schemes, and you are openly invited to try out each scheme right at the beginning of the required tutorial level. We found the most usable one to be the scheme that might seem the most counterintuitive from the outset: the one that gave look controls to the analog stick and movement controls to the face buttons. It's basically a left-handed person's FPS scheme, and while righties might balk at it initially, they'll be able to adjust without too much duress. Also, the targeting reticle will magnetize itself to a nearby foe (provided they don't jump around too much), which seems to make up for any jitteriness that one might experience trying to get used to the aiming mechanics. It works to a degree, but it's more of a helpful guide than an automatic lock, so don't expect the game to just auto-lock to everything.
While the controls can certainly be worked with, regrettably, the game doesn't provide an awful lot of content for you to do anything with them. The scope of the game's design is so wantonly repetitive and exceedingly exposition-free, that it's hard to imagine anyone playing more than a handful of the levels before just becoming bored with the whole thing. Coded Arms' minimalist premise is sort of like a Matrix meets Tron meets Doom kind of thing. You're a hacker, you go into cyberspace, and kill many invading robot men and ugly insects (they're bugs, get it?). The single-player setup simply jacks you into one of the available worlds. While in each world's six levels, you'll blast away at anything that comes into your path as you move from room to room, looking for the "gatekeeper" (sadly, not of the vixenish, Sigourney Weaver variety), which is the enemy you have to kill to unlock the gate to get out of there. There are around 30 different weapons in the game, and each one packs varying levels of a satisfying punch. However, thanks to some lousy level design and mostly uninteresting enemies, you won't have a whole lot of fun with the shooting.
The one supposed hook the game has going for it is the fact that the level designs are all randomly generated...to a degree. The basic objectives for a given level are always the same, but you'll simply find obstacles moved around, corridors narrowed or elongated, and occasional gateways moved around a bit. The problem with this whole random generation thing is that only once in a great while does the game generate something enjoyable. The maps are always pretty cramped and small, so even when the game does randomly put together something slightly more interesting it doesn't make much of a difference, because you're still running through a cramped corridor or one flat, boxy room, killing the same enemies over and over again. What's more, the enemies are rarely even that challenging. The only real difficulty comes from when they come at you in larger swarms, and even then, they tend to drop enough health power-ups to where you're rarely in any severe danger. You'll probably have more trouble simply trying to aim right than you will with the enemy artificial intelligence itself.
The cramped maps plague the multiplayer component as well. You can pick from some previously set, ambiguously named maps from the beginning (or have a random selection), but none are all that great. It's doubly unfortunate, as the gameplay itself could have been enjoyable in a multiplayer setting. The three multiplayer modes--deathmatch, last man standing, and a sort of "kill the guy with the ball" kind of thing--all have great potential to be fun, but instead they're dragged down by the lousy maps. There are also a couple of goofy problems with the multiplayer, including some occasional bouts of lag (especially odd, since the game is ad hoc only) and weird weapon balancing. Essentially, you can opt to pick specific weapon sets at the outset of the game, which are fine (though a little on the dull side). However, if you just want to go in with your own weapons you've unlocked in single-player, you may be horribly outmatched if your friends have completed more of the game than you have. In essence, to play the multiplayer effectively, you pretty much have to beat the single-player game first--unless you just want to stick with the predetermined weapon sets.

Coded Arms aptly demonstrates that an FPS can work on the PSP--it just isn't a very fun game on its own merits.
From a pure, technological view, Coded Arms is visually quite impressive. This is one of the smoother-running games on the PSP, with a constant, steady frame rate and load times that rarely take more than 10 seconds, tops. Indeed, this is a technically impressive game; it's just not a visually entertaining one. The best part of the visual design is the menu setup, which does a really nice job of presenting the sort of uberfuturistic vibe the game is going for. Unfortunately, the in-game visual style is just sorely lacking. There are really only three environment types, and after a while, they all blend together into one generic mess. The set pieces are remarkably dull, the enemy designs are terribly uninspired, and the weapons just look like the kind of boilerplate near-future schlock you'd find in practically any other FPS. There are a few neat little visual touches here and there, like how fallen enemies and busted-up objects explode into little wafts of floating computer code--but that's about as much aesthetic praise as the game warrants. The audio isn't exactly impressive either, but it's OK for what it needs to be. Blaring techno loops throughout, though all it really does is loop, as there's no discernable hook to any of it beyond droning beats and synth. The guns sound good, but not great, and there's no voice work to be found anywhere. Then again, there aren't really any characters to be found anywhere, either, so maybe that's to be expected.
None of what brings down Coded Arms is inherent to it being a first-person shooter on a portable game system. The controls, while initially weird, can be adjusted to, and it's one of the better-looking games on the system from a technology standpoint. The problems are within the underlying design, which simply doesn't have a lot to offer beyond a bland, unappealing corridor crawl with similarly boring multiplayer. PSP owners may find a passable rental in Coded Arms, but that's about all. The first-person shooter genre may have a bright future on the PSP, but Coded Arms isn't it.
By Alex Navarro, GameSpot
Posted Jul 8, 2005 5:09 pm PT

Chili Con Carnage CSO Size: 620 MB

Chili Con Carnage CSO Size: 620 MB

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [99 MB]

Part 3 [99 MB]

Part 4 [99 MB]

Part 5 [99 MB]

Part 6 [99 MB]

Part 7 [26 MB]

The PlayStation Portable has been suffering through a long bout of PlayStation 2 hand-me-down syndrome ever since the system's release. In that time, dozens of PS2 games (some of them years old) have been ported, remixed, or otherwise crammed onto UMDs and rereleased as PSP games, usually with some lame subtitle to try to make the game seem different. But as annoying as this syndrome has been up to this point, occasionally some games are exempt. Such is the case with Chili Con Carnage, a reworking of a little-known action game from 2005 called Total Overdose: A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico. It was basically a Robert Rodriguez movie and Max Payne all rolled up into one, and it was a patently silly piece of work, emphasizing ridiculous shoot-dodging moves and big explosions over...well, just about everything else. In Chili Con Carnage, developer Deadline Games has made the experience much better by stripping away some of the more superfluous elements of the console game (such as the open-ended, GTA-esque city) and turning in an even more ridiculous adventure.

Hanging off of a helicopter while blasting away at scads and scads of Mexican thugs? Just another day in the life of Ramiro Cruz.
Chili Con Carnage's main story follows Ramiro (or Ram), who goes to visit his government-agent father at work one day to bring him a birthday present--a box full of kittens. The father and son commiserate for a moment as the father opens his gifts. But not two seconds after the father utters the word "kittens!" does a gigantic thrasher come crashing into his office, with a cackling villain behind the wheel, giggling with glee as Ram's father (and those poor, poor kittens) are horribly murdered. And that's not even the most ridiculous thing to happen in the game. As Ram goes on a revenge hunt to kill those responsible for his father's death, Ram finds himself mixed up with several wacky Mexican crime lords, from a bull-charging behemoth to a drug lord with his own jet fighter.
Some of this premise might sound familiar to those who played Total Overdose, but the vast bulk of the story has been totally redone. Chili Con Carnage reuses some of the core level designs and characters from the original game, but the story takes wildly different turns. The developer essentially scraped off whatever hard-boiled or minutely serious elements the original game had in favor of making the whole thing a totally bonkers affair. And that really works to the game's benefit, too. Chili Con Carnage is legitimately funny in a number of spots, and even when it's not funny "ha-ha," it's still goofy enough to enjoy just because of how over the top everything is.
A lot of the humor is in the action. Total Overdose revolved its action almost exclusively on the act of Ram being able to leap around like a bandito inside the Matrix while shooting copious amounts of exploding barrels and boilerplate thugs. In Chili Con Carnage, the number of explodable objects has become even more copious, and the thugs have been given more personality, making them all the more fun to waste. You also get a myriad of weird power-ups that do everything from providing you a pair of machine-gunning guitar cases that instantly destroy anyone in their path to creating a giant Mexican wrestler to bully any nearby enemies. What ties all this carnage together is a Tony Hawk-esque combo system that racks up points based on how many kills you can string together, as well as how crazily your kills play out. An onscreen meter drops when you aren't in the process of wrecking shop, so the goal is to try to keep the crazy going as long as possible. In fact, you could theoretically keep the combo meter going for the entire length of a level, if you were talented enough.
The scoring system makes what is otherwise a fairly simple combat system more enjoyable. There's not much depth to what you're doing, as all the shoot-dodge moves are just one button press away and the targeting system usually does a pretty good job of picking out the more threatening enemies to blast away at. There's even a target-lock button that specifically latches onto inanimate objects that can be blown up or otherwise decimated, making more explosive kills that much easier a process. Some of the stages are a bit tough, simply because of the ridiculous number of enemies the game throws at you; but other than that, the only thing that makes Chili Con Carnage even remotely difficult is some of the camera and aiming functionality. Specifically, if there's ever an enemy you have to blast that isn't easily targeted (namely, a boss character) and you have to use the free-look function to manually move the camera up and down, because the camera doesn't stay positioned for very long, you end up having only a tiny window to take your shot. Also, the analog sensitivity during some of the on-rails missions and turret-shooting sequences is rather obnoxious, making precise aiming a severe chore. Still, control issues and lack of depth and difficulty aside, the sheer absurdity of the combat is enough to keep you entertained.
Of course, it won't keep you entertained for all that long. The story mode won't take you more than four or five hours to bust through, though if you're just playing through the game to get to the end, you're not going to get a whole lot out of the experience. Getting the most out of the game is all about high scores and completing some of the off-the-wall challenges that pop up in between story missions. The other single-player mode is just a purely score-based mode in which you try to off as many chicken-costumed enemies as you can before your combo meter drops to zero. The multiplayer modes work similarly. The one mode that requires between two and four players via ad hoc, fiesta, doesn't pit you or your opponents directly against one another, but rather transports each of you to the same environment and just has you running around, killing everything in sight to try to get the best score. The slightly confusing thing is that the character models of your opponents will randomly spawn inside the level you're playing in, but they're computer controlled. You're not totally devoid of the ability to mess with your opponents, though, as there are some cool power-ups that do everything from flipping your opponents' screens upside down to creating an earthquake that makes it impossible for them to stop moving. The other multiplayer mode, hangman, is just a pass-and-play version of the same basic mode, with slightly different rules.

Somehow, some way, Chili Con Carnage is bound to offend somebody.
Even if the action is a bit simple, it's a lot of fun to watch. Chili Con Carnage has great graphics that are both technically proficient and stylish. All the slow-motion camera angles, rampant explosions, and barrages of bullets look fantastic in motion, and the game never slows down (unless you want it to). The character models are all a little chunky and deformed, but that seems more like a stylistic choice than anything else. The audio is just as enjoyable, despite how awful some of the voice acting is. The voice acting seems like it's awful with a purpose, however, as everyone speaks with the kind of hyperexaggerated accents that bad comedians can't even get away with. The dialogue is actually pretty funny, and the actors ham it up so much that the cheesiness of the acting is legitimately enjoyable. The soundtrack is much the same as Total Overdose's, relying heavily on Mexican hip-hop that's mostly quite good. However, the best part of the music is the way it fades in and out during a level, depending on what's going on. When you're not shooting stuff, the game goes dead silent, but when you're in action, it kicks in and adds a backbeat to the chaos. It's as if the game is actively punishing you when you aren't wrecking shop.
Though Chili Con Carnage isn't likely to win any awards for originality or gameplay depth, you've got to give the developers credit for taking a console game that wasn't anything special to begin with and revamping it into something that's legitimately good. By trimming the fat and ramping up the ludicrous factor, Chili Con Carnage does what Total Overdose couldn't, and creates a wildly over-the-top action game that's not only bizarre and funny, but also fun to play all the way through. The multiplayer maybe isn't as good as you'd hope it would be, and you won't find a ton of content to play with in the single-player modes, but brief as it is, Chili Con Carnage does what it does well, and it's precisely the kind of cockamamie fun that Total Overdose ought to have been in the first place.

Castlevania - the Dracula X Chronicles CSO Size: 767 MB

Castlevania - the Dracula X Chronicles CSO Size: 767 MB

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [99 MB]

Part 3 [99 MB]

Part 4 [99 MB]

Part 5 [99 MB]

Part 6 [99 MB]

Part 7 [99 MB]

Part 8 [74 MB]

Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles is an entirely new take at the best Castlevania game to never be released in the US, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood. The Dracula X Chronicles brings the beloved action/adventure franchise to the PSP system for the first time, complete with 3D graphics, enhanced gameplay and new music. Completing the Dracula X storyline, this game also includes an unlockable version of Symphony of the Night and players will also be able to unlock the original Rondo of Blood from the NEC PC Engine.

The classic action game Castlevania: Rondo of Blood re-imagined for the PSP® system with 3D graphics, enhanced gameplay and new music
Includes unlockable versions of the original Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night games, optimized for the PSP® system
Timeless side scrolling action through more than 10 gothic stages and additional hidden areas
Return to previously completed levels to find additional secrets

Burnout Dominator rip CSO Size: 141 MB

Burnout Dominator rip CSO Size: 141 MB

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [42 MB]

playing Burnout for years now. Famed for its fast and frenetic racing action, the series has always been king for driving fans who prefer something a little different from straight racing. Packing a handy boost meter that’s upped via dangerous driving, the aim is to drive down the wrong side of the road, barely missing head on collisions with huge car smashing trucks. The previous game – Burnout Takedown – was more obsessed with multiple pile ups, but Dominator claims to hark back to the series’ racing roots. Can it still cut it with the big boys? Fans of the series will be right at home with Dominator. Its unique brand of risk versus reward racing will still make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end as you speedily weave through oncoming traffic. You don’t learn this at driving school that’s for sure. If you’re looking for thrills, you’ll find them right here. Simply keeping your foot down on the wrong side of the road will get your heart pumping and boost meter ticking over. As for jumping twenty feet in the air, well, that’ll probably give you a cardiac arrest. When your boost turns blue its time to unleash the full power of your mighty vehicle. Simply hold down the button for the length of time it takes for the bar to completely disappear and you’ll soon reach ridiculously over the top speeds. Racing along at 150mph doesn’t allow you to neglect your other dangerous driving duties though. A second meter slowly fills as the first is being used up, allowing you to let rip pretty much continually. Work the two meters effectively and you’ll be well on your way to winning races. Dominator’s single player career mode plays out just as before with a long line of challenges awaiting you. Most are straight races, but there’s the odd "Maniac" task that awards points for driving as if you’re invulnerable. Just call us Richard Hammond. The career mode won’t last you too long, but that’s where the multiplayer kicks in. Plug in a few more controllers and get ready for the fastest and most frenetic multiplayer racing action available on PS2. Sadly there’s no online options, so Billy No Mates will miss out on Dominator’s biggest selling point. The visuals continue to impress. Everything runs as smooth as silk and we didn’t see a single stuttering frame. It’s not next gen by any means, but it’ll do until the PS3’s price falls to something closer to reasonable.

Brooktown High CSO Size: 662 MB

Brooktown High CSO Size: 662 MB

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [99 MB]

Part 3 [99 MB]

Part 4 [99 MB]

Part 5 [99 MB]

Part 6 [99 MB]

Part 7 [68 MB]

While a multitude of dating simulations have allowed the socially awkward to live out their romantic fantasies in Japan, the genre never really caught on here in the US, which is a big part of what gives Konami's Brooktown High for the PlayStation Portable any of its appeal. Similar to the voyeuristic thrill of watching little suburbanites toil away in The Sims, the idea of playing the part of a high school senior juggling his or her social and scholastic obligations is intriguing. This promise is squandered in Brooktown High, which suffers from really awkward pacing, is sorely lacking in content, and leans on the most unimaginative high school stereotypes this side of an early '80s teen comedy.

With so much out-of-date vernacular, we were surprised not to find any instances of 'gnarly' or 'tubular'.
You start the game as a fresh transfer from Ohio to Brooktown High School, an institution where overbearing cliques of jocks, nerds, preps, and rebels define the social landscape and the actual schoolwork is primarily a means for fitting into one of these cliques. After choosing your gender, you'll take a MySpace-style questionnaire that defines your initial stats and your starting allowance. With gender limiting who you can date and who you can just be BFFs with, the game plays pretty much the same regardless of which sex you choose. From here, you'll run though a light character-creation process before being dumped right into your first day of school, where a very predictable pattern quickly develops.
Every Monday morning, you'll wake up at 8:00 a.m., and if you know what's good for you, you'll head straight to school. Classes don't start until around 8:30 a.m., but that precious half-hour, which plays at a highly accelerated speed, is some of your most significant social time in the game. Here, you'll find the entire population of Brooktown High, which consists of just 20 students, wandering around the halls. You can walk up to anyone during this time and start chatting with them, which will bring up a standard multichoice dialogue tree. What you say here, or in any of the conversations you have in the game, will play a large part in what this student thinks of you. Since there's very rare benefit to being loathed by anyone, all your conversations turn into guessing games of what you think people want to hear based on their apparent clique affiliation. Pick the right answers, and you'll get a boost in both your confidence and your overall popularity. Through these conversations, you'll occasionally earn tidbits of personal information, as well as phone numbers and the occasional date. Aside from the fact that everyone fits so snugly into their clique affiliation, the worst part of these conversations is how quickly they begin repeating. You can expect to have the exact same conversations with certain characters at the beginning of the year as you will at the end.
Students will also ask for favors during these before-school chats, which, if completed, can earn you additional confidence and popularity boosts. The favors can be as benign as buying something off the Internet for them or asking another student if they like them, though they can also be quite divisive, requiring you to do something nasty like spread rumors about another student's promiscuity or post compromising videos of them on the Internet. Though you can usually recover from any bad blood that gets spilled with a little sweet-talking, it's usually not a good idea to betray someone whom you've already built up a good relationship with. Hey, just like in real life!
Running around the hallways is a little awkward because your character movement is so twitchy, and students often stand so close together, it can take a few tries before you finally engage the person you wanted to talk to. If you're looking for a particular student, there's no predicting where they'll be on the school grounds. The time limit is the real killer, though, because once the second bell rings at 8:30 a.m., you'd best make a mad dash to class, as the halls of Brooktown High are patrolled by a somewhat terrifying robotic hall monitor that will electrocute any students it finds in the halls. Brooktown has a pretty bizarre curriculum, consisting of just four classes--physical education, French, art, and physics. What's weirder is that the students get to pick which class they want to attend a week at a time. The class you choose to attend will boost one of your four primary stats--originality, athletics, smarts, and charm--which will determine who will find you attractive. While the game is pretty transparent in how it encourages you to pick a clique, it's not hard to keep all of your stats high enough to stay on good terms with everyone. The fact that you as the player don't actually get to do anything while in class seems like a real missed opportunity.
Same goes for your Friday after-school activity, which can either be a part-time job or an academic club. Jobs make you money while clubs help you maintain a good grade in one of your classes; but again, after choosing the activity, you don't actually get to do anything. You have basically all day Saturday for yourself, though in a developing pattern, there's not much to fill the hours with. You can spend time studying to improve your grades, or you can chat on the phone, possibly setting up a date for later in the day, if you didn't already set something up on Monday morning. Dating isn't much different from any other conversations you'll have in Brooktown High, though if you play your cards right, there's the promise of a kiss at the end of it all.
In your bedroom there are also three stat-boosting minigames you can play. BoogieTron 5000 is a lame Dance Dance Revolution knockoff, 21 Knickers is strip blackjack that you play against the computer, and Tongue Twister is a disgusting kissing game where the screen is filled with two gigantic tongues flapping at each other while inappropriate slurping noises play in the background. The games themselves get old quick, and their benefit is so marginal that you'd have to play them over and over again to see any real results. At 6:00 p.m. Saturday, the week is over, and you're back to 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning. The only permutations you'll find from week to week over the course of the school year are the Winter Formal, the Spring Fling, and Prom, which are really just fancy dates. With nothing really changing from week to week, and without much to actually do, Brooktown High gets tedious quickly.

Just agree with everything everyone else says, and you'll be the most popular, bland kid in school.
And it's not like the game gives you a lot of great stuff to see and hear to pass the time. While the game does a good job of evoking a prototypical suburban high school with its simple visuals, the characters all look vaguely similar, and you'll see the same half-dozen locations over and over again. There's a smattering of passable voice work, as well as a surprisingly good soundtrack with cuts from The Futureheads, The Velvet Teen, and Dashboard Confessional. Again, though, the constant repetition undermines any inherent quality. On top of all this, the game is shouldered with some pretty severe load times, which do nothing positive for the game's pacing.
Once you reach the end of the school year, you're provided with a quick summary of how the rest of your life panned out based on your cumulative actions in the game. How long it takes you to get through the school year can vary pretty wildly depending on how much time you spend toiling over your character's stats. Either way, it's apparent that the game really wants to be played through multiple times to see the different possible outcomes, but it's unlikely that you'll want to play through the game more than once, if even that. Without enough to do, Brooktown High ends up being as shallow as the lame caricatures that populate it.

Brave Story - New Traveler CSO Size: 150 MB

Brave Story - New Traveler CSO Size: 150 MB

Part 1 [99 MB]

Part 2 [51 MB]

Brave Story: New Traveler is a game you'll want to like. A role-playing game in the mold of Final Fantasy, it has all the ingredients of its Final forebear and even some helpful touches of its own. The problem is that New Traveler takes its cues from ancient entries in the genre and suffers from maladies long ago cured. You'll wander through labyrinthine dungeons tangled with dead ends and random encounters in the name of thwarting evil, as well as coming of age. If only this game took its own advice and grew up.
At least the story writers are abreast of recent trends. Like so many RPGs these days, New Traveler's tale begins in modern-day Japan, with your hero sitting on a park bench next to his girlfriend playing on his PSP. Your dog, Kratos, chases a frog, perhaps under a log, and your girlfriend follows. You, too busy playing your game, fail to notice anything is amiss until she's been afflicted with an incurable curse of the darkest magic. Whoops?

Meet Yuno, your catty sidekick.
So, you go on a quest into the realm of Vision (that's a place, by the way) seeking the Goddess of Destiny so she'll grant you a wish. To gain an audience, you must capture several gems and attach them to your sword (this tells the Goddess of Destiny that you're serious and aren't going to wish for a Coca-Cola or a million heads of lettuce). Once you get your wish, your girlfriend will wake up and probably dump you, but that's OK because minutes after arriving in Vision, you run into a sexy kitty girl. You know the type: the scantily dressed, sassy girls you always wish the heroes in these Japanese RPGs would go for, but never do.
You and kitten girl eventually find a big lizard guy to team up with to hunt down the gems while killing monsters, capturing bandits, as well as generally saving the day. This is almost always achieved through typical turn-based RPG violence. Your characters can attack, special attack, and perform team moves. The latter two use BP (read: mana), which, in a cool twist, normal attacks replenish. This basically means you'll be able to completely whip your foes with special attacks two or three fights in a row before cooling down and killing them the old-fashioned way to build up some more mana.
The Team Moves, as you might imagine, are special attacks that include two or three players. They cost BP for everyone involved, but tend to damage every enemy or apply a powerful, party wide status boost. Most importantly, they're a great way to quickly get out of random battles without running away--you just kill everything in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, like every other aspect of the combat, team moves don't require any timing or input. There are no button presses for extra damage, you just set it and forget it.
At least there is a modicum of strategy involved. Finishing foes off will usually grant the attacking hero another strike, so if you plan carefully, you can frequently land two shots for the price of one. The enemies strategically up the ante a bit by going berserk, cancelling your attacks, paralyzing your party members, and calling for help. You've seen it all before, but at least the enemies try to keep the fights interesting.
Still, you can only fight so many large, carrot-wielding bunny rabbits before you start asking serious, soul-searching questions about life, the nature of time, and refunds. The game tries to propel you past this interminable grinding toward the conclusion in three ways: with the story, with new weapons, and with Goalfinches. For the most part, the story is well written but completely predictable. Your sword, the main weapon in the game, drastically changes appearance every time you gain a gem, but never feels different. Goalfinches are Pokémon-inspired birds you catch and then make fight. Collecting these critters involves a simple game of scooping them up in a net, while battling them involves pitting your strongest five against another bird collector's five. If you win, you get an item. So yeah, you can cock fight, but you can't fool around with the cat girl. This fantasy has its priorities backward.

They get younger every year.
At least it looks good. New Traveler doesn't push any aesthetic envelopes: Everyone has big eyes and silly hair. The environments are all various shades of dungeon, but the visual fidelity is there, and it sounds alright too. The production values in general are high-quality, which includes everything from the normal graphics and the voice acting to the localized dialogue.
Brave Story: New Traveler does several little things right, but it doesn't do enough for $40. Although it isn't by any means a bad game, it is kind of a boring one. The enemies are homogenous and never-ending, the dungeons are exhausting, and the game is long. You could definitely do worse, but remember: It's always better to lift a game like New Traveler out of the bargain bin than to put it in there.