"Spectrobes". to be honest with you, it has some nice features and a good initial storyline, but the gameplay gets worse and worse as you get through it, as the more you play, the more you eventually realise that this seems annoyingly similar to pokemon except for the fact that you can pick up monsters and i quote, "minerals" pretty much anywhere by using your tiny baby monster thing (which you have to give minerals to grow up) to scan by tapping on it every time you stop, on the offchance it will discover something useful and new, only to realise its a monster you've already dug up 9 times before so you can ressurect it by singing violantly at the DS microphone.
You heard me, you dig up monsters as fossils, and then using your somewhat, new and undiscovered talent, you wake them up by singing at them. Bear in mind that the character you play seems to already be quite adept at archeology, how he hasnt discovered that making noise at these things with his voice wakes them up is beyond me, although, it might be something to do with the odd item called a "prizmod" which stores a certain number of monsters, for different tasks, some for fighting, one for scanning a minute section of land for items to dig up.
He learns he can wake hem up after picking up this prizmod after being called to investigate a crash site, as, not only are you an archeologist, your some kind of space marine; so he picks up this item that just crashed to earth, with some old man in a stasis pod, see's that by some rare chance that it fits in his wrist-gadget-motron which allows him to wake the creatures stored inside this to fight off an incoming purple tornado; with monsters in it.
On the result of this battle, you eventually walk over to the crashed vessel, which turns out to be a life support pod from some distant planet that was entirely eaten by more of the creatures you just destroyed, inside is one man who decides that he's going to help you as he now has no home, and couldnt get the prizmod thing to work in the first place.
The most annoying thing about this is the whole backstory they forget to tell us, but then again, if it did spend a quick hour just explaining to me what these people actually do for a living then i'd be complaining about that now wouldnt I. Regardless, you go back to your command to find they want you to go see an old professor, to see what he thinks of these monsters, but on arrival to the planet, you discover he went into the jungle earlier that week and you now have to find him.
Dont get me wrong, this is probably the winning formula for most games of this caliber, but its always the same tripe, you want to do something, you get to the appropriate place to do it and then realise that you now have to wander into an annoyingly derilict, dangerous area to finally achieve your objective by defeating a rather difficult enemy; using only a spoon, and a well seasoned chicken.
Like pokemon, you spend hours and hours and hours looking for different monsters throughout the game, but on reflection, its quite pointless, as there arent that many variations of monster, and the minerals are mostly just for leveling up your monsters attributes until they "evolve" and thats exactly how they put it, "evolve", and after such an event, they dont evolve again, so there isnt much point giving them even more minerals, maybe its the same as pokemon in the respect that once you have all the monsters in your database, you go see christian bale, and fun things happen.
So with the storyline being as twisted and silly as a game of Scrabble with every letter of Kanji, the gameplay seems tedious, as you could never really understand why you are actually playing the game, but any person who likes to play boring repetetive games like "Runescape" or "World of Warcraft" would love this game as thats what this is, boring, and repetetive.
I had bought this game under the influence it had a good innovation at first, as it may have become something interesting if monsters were dug up less frequently, and the missions werent tedious "go and find this" missions. But im afraid i was somewhat disappointed with it.
A few things I was glad of, was how well it used all of the DS's functions, e.g. the microphone, the touchpad and the normal buttons, not many can use all three well at once; although I have played a rather depressing game which used every function possible; "Trace Memory", although being dull, it used a very interesting idea, where you had to close the DS lid, to make a virtual wood-block print on virtual paper to solve a riddle, as well as utilising the microphone, touchpad and buttons.
Back to the subject at hand, "Spectrobes". Aside from the annoying gameplay and twisted storyline, its a good sit-n-grind game, literally, you just sit there, and grind at it until the final boss has dropped enough health for the final sequence to emerge.
Any Questions?
You heard me, you dig up monsters as fossils, and then using your somewhat, new and undiscovered talent, you wake them up by singing at them. Bear in mind that the character you play seems to already be quite adept at archeology, how he hasnt discovered that making noise at these things with his voice wakes them up is beyond me, although, it might be something to do with the odd item called a "prizmod" which stores a certain number of monsters, for different tasks, some for fighting, one for scanning a minute section of land for items to dig up.
He learns he can wake hem up after picking up this prizmod after being called to investigate a crash site, as, not only are you an archeologist, your some kind of space marine; so he picks up this item that just crashed to earth, with some old man in a stasis pod, see's that by some rare chance that it fits in his wrist-gadget-motron which allows him to wake the creatures stored inside this to fight off an incoming purple tornado; with monsters in it.
On the result of this battle, you eventually walk over to the crashed vessel, which turns out to be a life support pod from some distant planet that was entirely eaten by more of the creatures you just destroyed, inside is one man who decides that he's going to help you as he now has no home, and couldnt get the prizmod thing to work in the first place.
The most annoying thing about this is the whole backstory they forget to tell us, but then again, if it did spend a quick hour just explaining to me what these people actually do for a living then i'd be complaining about that now wouldnt I. Regardless, you go back to your command to find they want you to go see an old professor, to see what he thinks of these monsters, but on arrival to the planet, you discover he went into the jungle earlier that week and you now have to find him.
Dont get me wrong, this is probably the winning formula for most games of this caliber, but its always the same tripe, you want to do something, you get to the appropriate place to do it and then realise that you now have to wander into an annoyingly derilict, dangerous area to finally achieve your objective by defeating a rather difficult enemy; using only a spoon, and a well seasoned chicken.
Like pokemon, you spend hours and hours and hours looking for different monsters throughout the game, but on reflection, its quite pointless, as there arent that many variations of monster, and the minerals are mostly just for leveling up your monsters attributes until they "evolve" and thats exactly how they put it, "evolve", and after such an event, they dont evolve again, so there isnt much point giving them even more minerals, maybe its the same as pokemon in the respect that once you have all the monsters in your database, you go see christian bale, and fun things happen.
So with the storyline being as twisted and silly as a game of Scrabble with every letter of Kanji, the gameplay seems tedious, as you could never really understand why you are actually playing the game, but any person who likes to play boring repetetive games like "Runescape" or "World of Warcraft" would love this game as thats what this is, boring, and repetetive.
I had bought this game under the influence it had a good innovation at first, as it may have become something interesting if monsters were dug up less frequently, and the missions werent tedious "go and find this" missions. But im afraid i was somewhat disappointed with it.
A few things I was glad of, was how well it used all of the DS's functions, e.g. the microphone, the touchpad and the normal buttons, not many can use all three well at once; although I have played a rather depressing game which used every function possible; "Trace Memory", although being dull, it used a very interesting idea, where you had to close the DS lid, to make a virtual wood-block print on virtual paper to solve a riddle, as well as utilising the microphone, touchpad and buttons.
Back to the subject at hand, "Spectrobes". Aside from the annoying gameplay and twisted storyline, its a good sit-n-grind game, literally, you just sit there, and grind at it until the final boss has dropped enough health for the final sequence to emerge.
Any Questions?
