GameSided Roundtable: Late To The Party

Daniel George (Twitter)

The last proper handheld gaming device that I have owned myself was the Gameboy Advance. That means that I’ve been missing out on a great deal of great titles over the years. Normally to get caught up I borrow a friend’s Nintendo DS or 3DS in order to play some of the more key franchises and entries. That’s what I did when catching up for some of 2013’s best games. Somehow, though, it took me until a few weeks ago to finally get around to playing Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

Boy, was it a mistake not playing this sooner. The amount of charm, care and attention to detail paid to each facet of every case is remarkable. For a Nintendo game, it dealt with the harsh realities of losing a mentor in a gruesome murder, yet somehow managed to avoid the darker sensibilities of criminal justice. The investigation and trial sequences bring an entirely new realm of gameplay style that the adventure genre greatly welcomes. It rewards studious and attentive players with progress in discovering discrepancies, while advancing in a steady difficulty curve as the game goes on.

Plus, there’s nothing quite as wackily funny as cross-examining a parrot on the stand and the testimony that comes forward bearing a great deal of relevance to its case!  I look forward to playing through the rest of the Phoenix Wright catalog once review season is finally over to sere what more is in store for the lovable crew at the Wright & Co. Law Offices.

Georgina Young (Twitter)

While I got started with this game around 25 years ago, I didn’t complete it until this year. Being one of the first games to ever make the analogue controller compulsory, Ape Escape was, at first, challenging and then exhilarating.

As Ape Escape came out in 1999 and my house didn’t get the internet until around 2003, GameFAQs wasn’t a thing in my little world, and I had absolutely no idea how close I was to completion. I would always have to retry one annoying spiral staircase part over and over as I was attacked by enemies and plummeted to the bottom. I eventually gave up for good, put Ape Escape in the corner, and decades later discovered that at the top of that spiral staircase was the final boss.

Not only that but he was a piece of cake and took just a few tries to complete, far less than that goddamn spiral staircase.

I stand by Ape Escape still as one of my childhood’s most beloved games. Forcing me to hone my analogue stick skills when everyone thought it was a fad, and giving me a story that took me to another world. All that adventure even if the characters heads looked like hexagons, but that’s the charm right?