this was my favorite thread please bring it back

lmfao

Unbalanced classes, lackluster gameplay, and not to mention repetitive 1 hour+ games. This game is not worth the time or your money. Buy Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea instead.

Thumbs down. Won't waste my time on imgur, game doesn't deserve it.

The rest of the units suck. Rooks can only move in 4 directions, same with Bishops. Boring. Also, whats up with the Knight? It has the most bizzare combat abilities of all the units. They're retardly hard to use cause they jump around like retards to move and attack. The devs should have named this unit Ninja, since Knights didn't jump around like that in real life.

Worst part, is the king. You see, the devs decided that if your king gets captured, you instantly lose the game. W-T-F? This wouldn't be a problem, except that he can't move for crap. Seriously, the most important unit in the game can only move 1 space a turn? Good luck keeping him alive while every other unit in the game dances around him.

Todays review



VIRTUAL CHESS 64

This game is a turn based RPG, but let me tell you. It's very bad.

Right away you'll notice this game has no storyline. Instead, all you notice is the army and the other army are fighting each other over a battlefield. Note the "a battlefield," because this game only has one story map.

As for the actual combat, it's extremely dull. Each unit can kill another with only one hit. This means units with a real good movement ability dominate the field (more on that bellow). There aren't even any cool combat animations or anything that happens in combat. One unit moves on it's space and "captures" it.

Yawn.

This game has class balance. The Queen is flat out overpowered while your actual front line units, the Pawns. can't do yeet. I think the developers were afraid that no one would use the female character so they buffed up her abilities really high but now theres no point in using any other unit.

Do Virtual Chess 64 next

The Verdict: Though the straightforward and fetch-quest-heavy main story overstays its welcome, the option of joyfully adventuring through a rich, expansive open world was always there for me when I’d start to burn out. Even if the plot isn’t terribly interesting, the many characters who play a part in it are, and along with the excellent combat and RPG gameplay, they elevate Cory in the House to a plane few other RPGs inhabit.

Speaking of Signs, they’ve been improved across the board with alternate casting modes, and a wider variety of upgrades, making them impactful in every fight. It’s actually entirely viable to build a sign-focused Cory. I played him a lot like a Jedi actually, able to influence people’s minds in conversation, a powerful long range “force” push, and the ability to reflect crossbow bolts back to the sender (a returning ability that’s been made far more usable). The new skill system provides a good deal of flexibility while still rewarding players who want min/max for the best builds, and weapon and armor crafting is as deep and nuanced as ever, if not more so.

All of this shines through in Cory in the House's responsive, brutal real-time combat. Where combat in this series has up until this point felt vague and even a bit clunky, here it’s so fluid and satisfying that I walk around hoping for bandits to jump me just so I can repel their attacks with magical barriers, parry their blows with uncanny precision, and relieve them of life and/or limb with the occasional gory flourish. Disney has always done a great job of making me feel that I’ve outsmarted my foes, but for the first time here, controlling Cory feels tangibly badass with every successful fight.

The other upside is that, more often than not, these hunts and other side activities provide interesting insights into a land being destroyed by war, and the many forces that play a role in shaping it. Best of all, you’re one of those forces. It may not shift the main story’s conclusion in monumental ways, but I often returned to places I’d visited earlier to find that a seemingly small decision played out in a very big way. There is no morality meter, no paragon or renegade rating. In the grayscale world of Cory in the House, there is only cause and effect; the decisions you make, both big and small, can legitimately change the world around you – far more so than most games that make similar claims.

Character progression and equipment choices are equally impactful. Relative to That's So Raven, I found that Cory in the House's RPG systems have been streamlined in some ways, and made more complex in others. In both cases though, the result is the same: a better experience. Simplifications to how you restock and use potions and oils makes them feel more practical and immediately useful, as you no longer need to meditate to do any of it. Sure, the old way was more in keeping with Cory lore, but in a wide open world, it makes less sense to expect players to predict and prepare for everything they might come across in advance. On the flip side, there’s a wider variety of powerful, interesting potions than ever, including those that greatly enhance mounted combat, and others that restore health as you cast spells (or Signs as Cory calls them).

Thankfully, they all get chances to shine once you venture off the beaten path, and that’s where Cory in the House gets nearly everything incredibly right. Depending on your decisions in That's So Raven (which can be handily recreated via some dialogue early in the game), you’ll see lots of familiar faces returning to play a role in Cory's search, and once they have, they offer you a secondary line of quests that typically provide far more interesting scenarios to dabble in. Underground turf wars, assassination plots, love triangles, and unexpected alliances are all part of these optional romps. They’re all so meaty and full of rich story content that they feel like they should have been part of the main story.

The same can be said for a lot of the side quests you pick up in the field as well. Aside from the bevy of standard side-quests, monster lairs, and bandit camps generously littered about Cory in the House’s gargantuan land mass, you also get a bunch of monster-hunting Newt contracts to persue. Cory's quarry ranges from ethereal wraiths that need to be made tangible before you can harm them, to Foglets who conceal themselves in thick smog, waiting for a chance to strike. The payoff here is twofold: in keeping with the lore, these represent your most reliable stream of income, which is refreshingly significant due to an appropriately stingy in-game economy.

Thanks to lots of excellent dialogue and voice acting there is some emotional payoff along the way, but it’s mixed in with too much padding in the form of meaningless fetch quests and collectathons. Every time I felt like I was on the verge of an interesting revelation, I’d have to suddenly stop to escort a goat, or search for a lost, narcoleptic dwarf. Heck, even Cory can barely hide his frustration with the constant parade of menial tasks at times.

It’s also worth noting that though you will get along fine without playing the first two games in the series, without the context provided by the Disney show, Sophie is more or less a complete stranger until the last quarter of the journey, which made it difficult to care about finding her as much as Cory in the House expected me to – especially given the slew of intriguing characters who are relegated to supportive background roles.

The one caveat on all that though, is the technical performance on both the Xbox One and PS4 versions. 30 frames per second was sometimes too much to ask, transitions between Cory in the House's two main maps are just a bit too long, and minor glitches do pop up from time to time. None of it ever impacted gameplay in any meaningful way, though it did compromise the beauty of the experience ever so slightly. Thankfully, PC players can expect a lot more. On a GTX 980, Cory in the House ran at 60 frames per second at all times on ultra settings.

This new open-world map obviously has ramifications for the structure of the story, and though there are flashes of greatness, the main story is ultimately the least fulfilling part of Cory in the House. You might call it another case of The Elder Scrolls Syndrome. Our tale begins as a multi-continent search for Cory's long-lost lover Maiara, and Sophie, his surrogate daughter. My single biggest issue though, is that it never becomes much more: the overly long main story is essentially just Cory running errands for people in exchange for information on Sophie's whereabouts. It effectively maintains focus and momentum, but it feels more like a wild goose chase than an intriguing mystery to unravel, like the one we got in The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.

Todays Review



Cory in the house for Nintendo DS

Unlike its predecessor, Cory in the House doesn't exactly come screaming off the starting line. Compared to That's So Raven, where you're immediately plunged headlong into a sexy story of intrigue and betrayal, this main quest can seem mundane, even perfunctory at times. But each time I stepped off the well-beaten path to blaze my own trail, it turned into a wild, open, exhilarating fantasy roleplaying experience, rife with opportunities to make use of its excellent combat. Even after over 100 hours with Cory in the House, it still tempts me to press on – there’s so much more I want to learn, and hunt.

Cory in the House is as dense and deep as the other Disney games in terms of RPG mechanics, and the overwhelmingly massive open-world environment has at once made that depth more intimidating, and in the long run, more rewarding. It’s difficult to express just how huge and open this world is: verdant, rolling fields liberally dotted with swaying foliage of every shape and size fill the space between loosely connected, ramshackle townships where people struggle to scrape by. A full day/night cycle and dynamic weather pull it all together, cementing Cory in the House's landscape as one of the most authentic-feeling open worlds I’ve ever seen. A handy minimap points you where you want to go, which might seem like a crutch, but honestly, without it, I’d have been hopelessly lost. That a world this size still feels so purposeful, and full of things to do is quite an achievement.