The 71st GBAtemp book game club would appear to be this one. Tradition dictates we start with an overview of the series so that is what follows. Here at GBAtemp we are quite known for our fondness for games and as such we have a variety of features aimed at sharing ones worth playing, this particular feature is less about the staff or a single guest reviewing a title and more about those participating in the club to discuss the titles as a whole or any aspect of them.
The GBA, DS and Wii will be the systems that most of our suggestions are drawn from but as each of those features a wide variety of commercial releases, homebrew code, leaked code and ROM hacks they will keep us going for a while yet, on rare occasion we might pick a title that the DS can emulate however.
"worth playing" was a choice piece of phrasing as well as it reflects our desire not to make this series a top ? games series as we hold those are well catered for elsewhere and more importantly they miss out a lot of interesting titles.
We are not in the habit of elaborating upon our selection process but there might be a special reason for one which we will state at the time. For the most part it will be one game per edition but comparing and contrasting titles (we had one for the various options for Tetris on the DS) and if there are a series of closely related games they might be suggested as a whole. Runs and certain challenges may be posed on occasion but we are more interested in the vanilla game (save for any ROM hacks that might be suggested).
#71 - CIMA: The Enemy (GBA)
Developers Neverland are better known for their Lufia and Rune Factory franchises but their sole attempt at a GBA game is our choice of title this week. A fortnight ago we suggested Juka and the monophonic menace and part of our description was that it was something of a "RPG lite" type of game, here although combat is still largely real time in many ways this is the complete opposite; most would argue it is incredibly involved so it is not recommended for those without a serious amount of patience. Various reviewers at the time seemed to lack the patience to play it so going by mainstream reviews alone it often languishes towards the bottom of lists of things to play which is a pity as it tried some interesting things. To that end those that thrive when faced with offbeat (complex might be a bit of a strong word) combat systems quite often count it among their favourite GBA titles and if you have found yourself wanting to get into tactics games but them not working for you might like this. If you are familiar with the rough setting of Rune Factory, Neverland's shining force titles and Lufia then you will probably find the setting for this game familiar as well (it is by no means a shared universe with any of them but many of the broad strokes are similar) and the story itself works quite well with the offbeat setting working well for it although it is nothing ground breaking. So far it is only available on the GBA and very little has been said about returning to the franchise although aspects of this title can be seen in Neverland's Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals on the DS.
Something of a hidden gem on GBA or why play this over any of the other similar titles?
On a related note Neverland's SNES classic Energy Breaker (one of the earlier tactics games) finally saw a translation patch released last week which you can read about here.
gbagotw should get you other links in this series
Saturday dude. 
