Professor Layton

Professor Layton and the Curious Village and Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box are two games created by the developer Level 5 that Nintendo has published for the Nintendo DS. They are puzzle games with a bit of adventure gaming thrown in for good measure, and there really isn’t anything else quite like them for Nintendo’s hand-held juggernaut.

There is something alluring about mind games. Whether it is turning a puzzle over and over in the hazy recesses of one’s brain or just making an educated guess, there is a feeling of reward in having successfully worked out a solution. This is one of the many reasons I will not recommend either of the Professor Layton games to anyone.

While that feeling is there, and you will experience it multiple times, some of the puzzles just seemed so obstinate that it at certain points it seems like the game designers didn’t put ample time into their game, and this is especially irritating when one gets penalized for not getting the solution on the first try simply because of a failure to anticipate a reasonable variance of the solution. I will give examples, but lets get right to it:

STORY: Without spoiling anything, first game follows the adventures of famed archaeologist Professor Herschel Layton and his assistant Luke as they try to find the famed hidden treasure of a deceased Baron. They travel to an unusual village in the remote English countryside with a rather tall and frightening tower in the middle.

I have to say, right off the bat that intrigue was lost on me. The detective part of the story plays out without player input, and despite the numerous red herrings I theorized just how the plot would be resolved early on, and I wasn’t proven wrong by the end… It played out exactly as I thought it would, which is a crushing disappointment when you consider I spent most of that time telling myself that “it couldn’t possibly be that stupid.”

The sequel, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box starts with the Professor and Luke visiting an old friend who has come into the possession of a box purported to kill anyone that opens it. Our heroes find the old man dead in his apartment with all of the doors locked from the inside and the box missing… but was the curse? In order to find out they follow the clues to a mysterious train and its unusual stops.

The second game’s resolution threw me, mostly because the plot is so riddled with holes, leaps of logic, and piss-poor storytelling that it makes Professor Layton and the Curious Village’s storyline look like a Sherlock Holmes novel. This is the kind of storytelling that I’ve come to expect from the Japanese.

GRAPHICS: As any of my friends will tell you, I have an unreasonable hatred of manga, anime, and various other Japanese art styles. This is simply not the case – it is entirely reasonable. What I hate about it is the general lack of variety. Often times, it is merely a brightly colored (but well rendered) background populated by angular androgynous stick figures with no real expression or substantial animation. This lack of quality is also the reason that the people who make this garbage are able to churn it out so quickly. Having said that, it would surprise you to learn that I don’t hate the art in this Japanese-developed game.

While it does retain the low level of animation and certain characters are represented in the most clichéd of anime clichés (yes it’s redundant, but so is anime), the artists at least attempted an early twentieth century European style, and the result is more in line with the works of Georges Remi and less like Masamitsu Hidaka’s directorial excrement.

While the characters and puzzles are either static or visualized with minimum animation there are segments with fully animated video for the more action packed parts of the story. In the context of an adventure game, it works quite well.

SOUND: The sound in this game is a nearly complete failure. While the voice acting is passable, both games lack a variety of music. All of the Puzzles (some of which you will spend around half an hour on if you don’t cheat) have the same thirty second music loop playing in the background, with no option to turn it off other than to turn the sound off entirely. While this in itself is annoying, when you factor in that they use the same thirty second music clip between two (and soon to be three, probably) games the puzzles start to become far more annoying that they would be otherwise. No, not annoying, INFURIATING. I cannot stress how much the lack of music affects the presentation of this game. The music-box-and-ticking-clock melody will HAUNT YOUR DREAMS!

CONTROL: This game suffers the same problem as all Nintendo-branded DS games, in that it forces you to use the stylus for almost all interactions. In a game of this type it makes sense, but there are certain times where I really wish they would just let me use the damn buttons, such as the sliding puzzles. Many people have owned at one point in their life one of those cheap little handheld puzzles where one slides the tiles around until they are arranged into a cohesive picture. I have played many games in the past where these puzzles are very quickly an intuitively played with a standard D-pad. One is very likely to make mistakes in this sort of puzzle and repeatedly dragging the stylus hundreds of times across the screen when you’re already worried about scratches seems like a ploy by Nintendo to ensure that one purchases a new Nintendo DS regularly. To drive this point home, it seems like as much as a third of the games in Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box are these type of puzzles, or puzzles that require less active thinking and more trial-and-error, and that doesn’t endear the franchise to me.

Also of note is the insufficient handwriting recognition, something that could have been easily overcome by including an alphanumeric touch pad or by letting the user scroll through letters and numbers with the D-pad, which seems like it would be clunky, but when the game doesn’t recognize a perfectly rendered “A” for the twentieth time one pines for an alternative.

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box also added a scribble overlay to the puzzle screens, making the need for real pen and paper to figure out the puzzles less likely, but given the thickness of the lines I found myself running out of space on some of the trickier puzzles.

GAMEPLAY: As I have previously stated, this franchise is based in puzzles, but unlike an action puzzler in the vein of, say, Tetris, the puzzles in the Professor Layton games are usually more of the riddle-brain teaser variety. The player is granted as many tries as they like to solve the puzzles but are penalized points (called Picarats) the first two times if they don’t get them right. A player can skip puzzles not directly related to the story; however, a certain number of solved puzzles is required to get further into the game. The puzzles themselves vary from math, to geometry, to word puzzles, to riddles, to optical illusions, to the aforementioned sliders, and one can appreciate the variety (except in Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, where variety and thinking games are usually eschewed in favor of the more “action-packed” slider games). There is a definite variation in difficulty between puzzles, and only ever one answer for each.

Except that there isn’t always just one answer for each. And sometimes the game tries so hard to trick the player that its answers are THE WRONG ANSWERS. Allow me to demonstrate with two puzzles that had me so stumped that I actually resorted to looking for the answers online:

Curious Village Puzzle No. 66 – “Birthday Girl”: When asked about her birthday, a young woman gives the following information:

“The day after tomorrow, I turn 22, but I was still 19 on New Year’s Day last year.”

When is her birthday?

After thinking that if she was nineteen on New Year’s Day, She must have turned twenty on the second, and she was telling the person asking this on December 31^st of the next year (because she would have had two birthdays since then, one on the day after New Year’s when she was nineteen and turned twenty, and one after the New Year’s of the currently ending year when she was twenty turning twenty-one). Therefore, when the game asked for my four-digit answer I input “01/02.” The game then proceeded to give me the “Incorrect!” screen and took away my Picarats. Thinking that perhaps I had made an error in the date, I then guessed “01/01,” “01/03,” “12/31,” and so on until I was amply frustrated. The more I calculated the answer, the more I felt that it was “01/02,” but the game didn’t take it. I looked up the answer online, and was told that it was “January 2^nd,” which blew my mind with rabid-foaming anger. I had already entered that date twice! I was right! What the hell? It turns out that the game will accept “ _1/_ 2” (note the blank spaces) but not “01/02.” This is the type of ill-thought dickery that makes these games frustrating – and this isn’t the only time it happened.

The more memorable example in my mind is Curious Village No. 76 “A Tile Square”:

You have at your disposal a large number of tiles like the one shown below.

If you were to take these tiles and try to make a square, what is the fewest number of tiles that you would need?

The puzzle then shows a diagram with the following information:

Now, the popular use of tiles is to cover a surface, so the “real” answer here is 30 (6x10” across, 5x12” deep)

I noticed that the game was also giving a width of half an inch on the tiles, so I knew that factored in somehow. I surmised that you only needed five tiles to make a square: one laying flat, and four on their edge (2” high) stacked on the 12” side making the 10” side 12” wide: a square:

But, the game told me this was incorrect. Knowing how stupid some of the questions were, I guessed that they meant 20 tiles stacked on top of one another.

BUT THIS IS WRONG. I’ll freely admit that my solution is inelegant, but it is more correct than their answer and every bit as impractical. The question just asks to make a simple geometric square (note: it is not asking for a cube) using as few materials as possible. My diagrams prove that I was right. They were modeled in a 3D program using the values that the game gave me. Given the wordplay and the way the game jerks you around the rest of the time, it’s downright unfair to have a wrong answer as the ONLY answer to the question. If they had just programmed a little leeway into the game or even checked their work this might not have riled me so much, but when you’re testing the player’s intelligence MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT ANSWERS.

These irritants might not happen frequently in the game, but just the fact that they happen at all breaks the gameplay.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the last puzzle in Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, the eponymous box itself, was a huge letdown. I mean, the game is named after it, and one would expect a worthy puzzle to solve it, but after I got the clue I managed to beat it in less than ten seconds. I AM NOT EXAGGERATING.

OVERALL: After playing a demo copy in the store I was excited about these games, but I have come to see beating them as a sort of an obligation to the stories, and they both fell short on both counts. If you like being frustrated for no reason, do yourself a favor and invest in a cheap book of puzzles and riddles and pass up on the Layton games.

E-F#$%ing-3

Yes, my four readers, I am still alive, but only just barely. Having a boring, tiring, trying, and soul-crushing job tends to take the wind out of one's sails, but I've been exercising a bit more lately and have been feeling better. Since I've neglected this so long, I have some catching up to do:

Duke Nukem Forever: Hooray! Let's all break into a chorus of "Ding-dong, the Witch is Dead!" I know that one should not take solace in the passing of an industry giant, but with this train wreck finally buried maybe the public can focus on more original, better games.

Project Natal: Microsoft's attempt to wrest market share away from Nintendo's iron grip on housewives, senior citizens, and other culturally challenged individuals looks amazing... for a mock-up. If this thing works even half - even half - as good as they say it will, I will finally be freed from that nasty, putrid, stinking game controller I've spent half of my life mastering! Aside from making impressions that the project will never be able to live up to, Microsoft will presumably sell a living room add-on kit to cover the extra twenty square feet of floor space one will need to use it. Even if it does what they say it will without slowing your Xbox 360 to a snail's crawl, using Steven "I've-never-read-a-book-in-my-life" Spielberg to pitch for it just seems like an act of sad desperation.

Sony: Pffft. It seems that the general public is becoming acutely aware of what I have maintained since 1998: Sony doesn't know what the hell it is doing. Aside from their gay magic wand, they have also announced what is basically a pre-broken PSP for $100 more than a regular one!

New Super Mario Bros. Wii: Considering how little I've come to expect from Nintendo, New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS wasn't all that bad (if you ignore Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World). While I'm curious to see how it turns out on the Wii, my expectations that Nintendo will be able to craft even a halfway decent big screen Mario platforming game post Mario 64 are almost nil.

Shigeru Miyamoto: Oh snap! Miyamoto didn't attend the press conference? The man single-handedly responsible for Nintendo's brand recognition to the point where he has been elevated to the status of a pagan god wasn't carted out to shill the Big-N's crap at the p.c.? Could it be that the one-trick pony is finally too old to pull the cart?

Seriously, I used to admire Miyamoto - his games (in the beginning) weren't like anything else out there, head and shoulders above the rest in terms of quality and playability. When the technology evolved so too did the graphics, but the gameplay seemed left behind. Now when he talks smack about other companies (see above) creating game ideas before the technology is ready, I just have to look back on my pile of broken N64 "Mario Party" controllers, the huge scratches the stylus leaves on my DS, and the repetitive stress injuries and property damage caused by haphazardly waggling the Wii-mote around to see that Nintendo doesn't consider whether a technology works when they build a game around it. In my opinion, Miyamoto, it's far better to build technology around a game concept than to build a game around a somewhat-working gimmick.

Oooh, the next Zelda game will have four players? BIG STINKING DEAL! Four Swords was okay, and only okay, because it lacked an inventory and the co-op elements were overshadowed by constantly fighting over gems, bringing the gameplay to a halt. WARNING: RACIST COMMENT COMING UP IN 3... 2... 1... RACIST COMMENT GO!: Besides, the Japanese are about as good at four-player co-op as the Chinese are at mine safety (read: not so much). Four Swords aside, licensed Nintendo games that could have been excellent multiplayer games are always brought down by some mind-boggling technical or design decisions - Crystal Chronicles, Children of Mana, etc. (okay those are all square games but they are usually my basis for comparison).

To sum up:

Microsoft: Put up or shut up.
Sony: Price down or stay down (in third).
Nintendo: Shut up.

First impressions: Mega Man 9

Why does Capcom hate me so? All I've ever done is try to like their games, and yet they keep fundamentally missing the point: fun games are fun, difficult games are not.

Whether you're a stalwart Capcom fan-boy or just a casual gamer who has purchased a Capcom title after being told, "you have to try this, it's awesome!" you know exactly what I'm talking about, whether it be the cheap and unblockable boss attacks in Street Fighter 2 or the completely unmanageable camera in Devil May Cry. In the old NES days I used to tell myself that it was a limitation of the hardware not living up to the designers' vision, but Mega Man 9 makes me question that even more.

HISTORY: If you're reading this review, then you probably have at the very least a passing interest in the Mega Man series of games, at least enough to know that the series is more than twenty years old now. Mega Man 2 is considered by many to be the best in the series, because it was the first Mega Man (and probably the first game in general) where you could choose any of eight different stages (Mega Man only had six stages before the last one), and upon defeating the boss of each gained a power that would help you defeat another one more easily. When my friend Chris rented it one Friday night back in 1988 we had no idea that you could do this. Unfortunately we had started the game on one boss, Quick Man. If one is familiar with Mega Man 2, then one also knows that they should never attempt Quick Man's level on the first go without taking on Flash Man first. With enough practice we beat it, only to find out that we could have chosen any of the other bosses at any time. With Quick Man under our belt, the other bosses weren't much of a problem. After we learned what the game was about, it quickly became one of our favorites.

Mega Man 3 was the next game in the series, and Capcom ramped up the difficulty so high that Quick Man's stages didn't seem like such a challenge anymore. This was the last game in the original series that I bought for the NES, as much of the fun was gone by this point. It took strategy guides, the Nintendo hot line, and word of mouth to figure out which weapons were effective against which bosses - and they still didn't have one or two hit kills for any of them like the previous game! The rewards for figuring any of this out was low indeed! Still, Mega Man 3 was longer than the previous game, and in those days bigger evidently meant better - some people to this day consider MM3 the superior.

I could never get by the difficulty of Mega Man X, and by Mega Man 8 on the Playstation console almost all of what had made Mega Man 2 so fun was gone from the series. It was my sincere hope that Mega Man 9 would change that, as it was actually developed by former Mega Man Capcom employees. I was out of points, so I decided to download the trial as soon as it was available. Here is what I found...

GRAPHICS: I have maintained for years that if you took an old video game and just re-made it for a new system that could handle everything you want to do with it, that it would look and play much better than the envelope-pushing garbage we are faced with as gamers every day. I'm proud to say that in that respect Mega Man 9 proves me right. This is an unabashedly eight-bit game, and it looks beautiful, with none of the slowdown and sprite loading errors that plagued these games on the earlier systems. You can select whether to turn the sprite flickering on and off, if you want to make it feel slightly more old-school, but it still runs smoother than any NES Mega Man title.

SOUND: The hard techno eight-bit music of the series makes a resurgence, and with the familiar boss theme to boot! I can already tell that the tunes will be mostly forgettable, which is unfortunate for reasons of the soundtrack artist, but still keeps up with the overall aesthetic of the game.

CONTROL: While Mega Man 9 looks and sounds like these old NES games it isn't so much a throwback to them, as that series worked to give the "Blue Bomber" more abilities and equipment as time went on. The developers obviously felt that Mega Man 2 was the last balanced game in the series, as from Mega Man 3 on he could slide and from MM4 on he could charge up the Mega-Buster weapon and blast enemies with it more effectively than before, making all of the other weapons he collects along the way irrelevant; Mega Man 9 in contrast keeps Mega Man's abilities to the bare minimum: running, jumping, and shooting the underpowered Mega-Buster. This is a very welcome subtraction from the previous games, and it just muddled something that used to be completely straightforward.

GAMEPLAY: The enemies in this game seem to keep some sense of elemental weakness - with names like Concrete Man, Splash Woman, Magma Man, and Tornado Man you at least know that you are dealing with earth, water, fire and wind, as opposed to Mega Man 3's completely nonsensical Gemini Man, Snake Man, Top Man, Shadow Man, etc. Thus it seems as if the design team finally figured out that it's better for the gamers to be able to figure out the weaknesses in their own right, like Mega Man 2 did. In the demo, you only get to go up against Concrete Man. If this stage is any indication, I will skip the rest of the game.

You see, what the developers seem to fail to understand is that Mega Man 2 has difficulty settings. There is a "normal" difficulty, and a "difficult" difficulty. From MM3 on the "normal' difficulty level has been absent, and Mega Man 9 is no exception.

I'll admit it - I can't get through the demo. It is not fun to play. Any sense of nostalgia that I feel is wiped away mere seconds later when I'm faced with three consecutively harder versions of the same robot. I'm all for a challenge, mind you, I'm just getting tired of the word challenge meaning that no matter what I do a robot elephant is going to suck me off... a platform, that is. I could probably get through it too, if one of the stupid robots would just drop a large "life energy" once in a while instead of useless power-ups I don't need, or if the game didn't send me back to the beginning of the level every stinking time. I know that MM2 does the same thing, but at least MM2's stages were shorter and therefore not as much of a setback!

What it amounts to is that the developers kept all of the difficulty of the later Mega Man games and then crippled the main character so that the stages are even more needlessly difficult.

AN ASIDE: I've been noticing this in a lot of games recently, where the gameplay time is "padded out" just to add artificial "value." Some examples are the puzzling Braid (I liked your game and paid the $15 for it, so why is it that some puzzles require a tremendously stupid leap of logic to figure out? It's so incredibly padded that once one figures out the puzzles they can get through the game in less than an hour every time!), the acrobatic physics-driven N+ (every fifth stage requires about 1,000 attempts before I can get through it - no, I'm not exaggerating, I got an Xbox achievement for it. The other stages are challenging, but these stages are nearly impossible!), and Capcom's own Bionic Commando: Rearmed (did that last stage really need to be so hard? I mean, the NES version was hard, but Rearmed takes that word to a whole new meaning with those stupid collapsing platforms!).

Let's look at a fun, but still almost universally loved game, Super Mario Bros. 3 on the NES. It plays fast, the player has at most two hit points, and there are stages that are filled with enemies, but even when the player dies they almost never feel like the game has cheated them. I was even able to beat it on one "life" on several occasions. Now lets compare and contrast that to a game like Capcom's Super Ghouls & Ghosts on the SNES. The player similarly has two hit points and the stages are relatively barren of enemies in the early stages. So why is it that even on the lowest difficulty setting, and the maximum number of lives and continues (a total of twenty-seven tries) I cant get past stage 2? Is it because enemies just appear at odd spots on the screen with no way to avoid them, or is it because the stage will actually kill you without warning or any way of knowing where to stand when it tries? One constantly dies in this game without knowing how or why it happened, and trying to navigate the stage differently a second time doesn't mean that the previous obstacles will be avoided. Worth it? Most definitely not!

Capcom as a developer has been doing this for years - if they'd just put half as much effort into making the game mechanics work smoothly than trying to put as many cheap enemies as possible into Super Ghouls & Ghosts, it probably wouldn't have been the only game I ever took a masonry hammer to. I'm willing to bet not many people were able to get through the original Strider on the Genesis either. Did those few stubborn people who wasted twenty-three hours a day get a pot of gold at the end of the pain rainbow? No! While the rest of us were out working, romancing women, or moving on to games that were actually fun they got hundreds of hours of frustrating controls, cheap bosses, and "gamer's thumb." If you actually played through the game I salute you, jackass! Capcom did me one further with Maximo: Ghosts to Glory on the PS2. I was apprehensive, but my manager lent it to me, and I liked it! Except that when I bought it with the intention of finishing the game the dick game designers decided to punish me - when one continues so many times in the game, the game starts requiring more coins to continue, and as the game progresses they get extremely rare. Fun? No! Frustrating? Yes!

OVERALL: My beef with this game is my beef with Capcom, is my beef with all game designers: if you're going to make a game specifically for the hardcore market, perhaps you should start labelling all of your games "WARNING: HARD CORE DIFFICULTY" in big red letters on the front. This way, people with little skill or no patience (like me) won't waste our time or money on something that gives no enjoyment, and very little content, only "challenge."

Castle Crashed

My friend Seth and I were playing Castle Crashers online last night and had it give out on us multiple times, so the rumors are true. Even the best games have their flaws, I guess.

Still, it's a dynamite local game that should be enjoyed with friends.

The game that ended it all: Zelda: The Ocarina of Time

Every Nintendo fan has his or her favorite Zelda game. My personal favorite is The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the SNES, with a close runner-up being Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, so that shows you how out of touch I am Nintendo fans. Link to the Past had everything that made the original Zelda so great and kicked it up a notch - not a mere sequel to the original game, but a re-envisioning of it: fixing old game-play elements, tidying up less-developed areas, and all the while including the player in a unique narrative that spanned the gamut of heroes and legends.

Players took the role of Link, a pointy-eared but otherwise ordinary boy living with his uncle. One dark and stormy night, Link dreams of a princess named Zelda calling for help. He awakens to find his uncle wielding the family sword and shield, shaken and preparing for a late night rescue. Despite his uncle's command to stay put, Link follows him to the castle of Hyrule, where there is clearly something evil at work. Link sneaks inside only to find his mortally wounded uncle, who passes him the sword, and tells him to rescue Zelda. It's a classic opening to a story worthy of an epic game, and lacks in the pretentiousness so many game stories are obsessed with nowadays. The rest of the game follows suit, and although challenging, it engages the player in a way that few games at the time could. This is what made it my all-time favorite Super Nintendo game.

How much difference a generation makes, eh?

I'll save a full gripe of the N64 for later, suffice it to say that it had already ruined my other favorite Nintendo franchise (Super Mario Brothers) with a collect-a-thon of poorly controlling but nonetheless pretty 3D garbage. What's more, most other N64 offerings were ugly, blocky, polygonal low-res textured messes with choppy frame-rates to match. Still, when I heard that Zelda was coming out for the N64, I was excited: I loved the four Nintendo-produced Zelda games out at that time, and the last two (Link to the Past and Link's Awakening) had streamlined the franchise into something water-tight and exciting. I paid the $49.99 for the game well in advance of its release date, which I then began to see getting pushed back before my eyes. When it finally did come out, the price had gone up twenty dollars, but I got a free hat with it (whoop-de-doo). It now stands with Mass Effect as the two most expensive games I have ever purchased, and I have never finished either of them. That's right, I never beat Zelda:TOOT, and I never will.

Here's why:

GRAPHICS: No real complaints here. Though everything does look low-poly, low-texture, and washed out in a cruel and pathetic attempt at realism, that's pretty much par for the course since developers back then decided to make everything 3D on woefully under-powered equipment.

SOUND: Terrible. There are only a few voices in the game, all of them are repeated endlessly, and most are just those annoying "girly giggles" that ten-year-old Japanese school girls make and that all Japanese men seem to find disturbingly alluring. They do a good job on ambiance for the most part, and overall the sound effects are good, but the Legend of Zelda theme is nowhere to be found in this game. AT ALL. I'm sorry, but I'm not tired of it yet, and it's exclusion makes the game seem less epic and more malaise. I remember when Link pulled the Master Sword(tm) from the stone in A Link to the Past, and when the Zelda theme started afterwards I felt charged and ready. Almost all of the music in this game is stolen from A Link to the Past, but they didn't include the most important song, and I can't forgive it for that.

STORY: Remember when I was discussing A Link to the Past's story earlier? Most non-orphan people can relate to losing a loved one or a father figure. Young Link being left alone in a world that is out to destroy him is a powerful statement.

Now, contrast that to Zelda: The Ocarina of Time where you are avenging a tree. Let me state that for you again, just in case you think that was a typo: Link is avenging a talking tree when he sets out on his quest. There's nothing even remotely analogous to this in real life. I've had plants that have died, sure, but I've never cried out on the dark precipice to the night and said "by the power of Thor(tm), I will avenge you my hibiscus!" Not once. The game tries to make up for this by having Link live with a bunch of "lost boys" type elves, who are all pretty annoying to begin with, like self-sufficient first-graders. The tree is supposed to be the wise father figure, but it's a tree and can't move, so one has to wonder how good its parenting skills actually are.

In his journey to stop the "evil man" that is causing all the trouble in Hyrule, Link meets a plethora of friendly characters that basically amount to the enemy races in the previous games. Rather than fight them directly, now they just give Link pointless and irritating quests to waste his time. Personally I liked the earlier versions.

I struggled to keep my interest up until Link got the Master Sword(tm), the pulling out of which sends Link forward in time and ages him into an N*Sync-style douche bag complete with fingerless elbow-length gloves and an earring. This is where the game lost me because far be it for me to question the sword making him go forward in time, am I to understand that "young adult" Link has the diminutive mind of an eight-year-old? Or, if he's spent the last ten years in limbo training to become a master fighter, then why doesn't he know how to do anything significantly different than accessorize his wardrobe?

I still struggled on hoping that there would be some payoff to the whole thing, but by the time the fairy had told me to listen for the 79,898, 636,873rd time I just stop caring.

Ah yes, let's get to that:

FAIRY: Navi is to the player as Kryptonite is to Superman and good taste is to 50 Cent - they all want it to go away, but as soon as they come into contact it can be lethal to them. I would like to know what wonderful drugs the design "teem" (not to be confused with "team," as in people working together would eventually figure out that this was a bad idea) were sniffing when they decided to put a little voice in the game that pops in every other minute to let the player know that they're supposed to be going to the castle to see the princess. The problem is, it takes about five minutes to reach the castle which means that in an even number of minutes you'll hear it twice, and at the odd worst, three before you reach the castle gate. Once you have reached the castle and are attempting to navigate the streets to find the princess, the fairy then proceeds to tell you to find the princess. There isn't even an option to turn it off! I'm sure when gamers (note: not Nintendo fan boys) began to complain about this Shigeru Miyamoto just packed his ears with some $1000 bills that were conveniently lying around.

GAMEPLAY: Some would argue that TOOT's control scheme is revolutionary, I argue that it is convoluted. It's obvious that they were trying to do too much with what control they had, so they decided to take a share of it away from the player. Typically, there is one button that takes multiple actions whenever Link is in a certain position. While this does make the game easier to play on some level, it often devolves into trying to position Link so that he can access the one spot where the button changes actions.

The game's flow also seems less open than in the older games. The original Legend of Zelda and Zelda II were all about exploration. Zelda: A Link to the Past continued that tradition to an extent, allowing players to move around the environments at their leisure to look for items that might help them navigate to more complicated dungeons. This Zelda is strictly by-the-book: An item that you find in a dungeon will HAVE to be used to get to the boss, and will HAVE to be used to make the boss vulnerable so that you can hurt it. As before, you need to collect three things to get the Master Sword(tm), and there are three different temples that you must enter to find them. You can't move on to the next dungeon until you've completed the one that you're on. The roads to get to these dungeons are just that: roads. You can't deviate too much from the prescribed course, and even if there is more virtual landscape than in previous Zelda games it seems constrained. I mean, why even put the Hookshot(tm) in the game if the stupid thing can only attach to a few sparse surfaces throughout the map? It sometimes makes going forward difficult becuase the player has been trained not to rely on it because of its almost utter uselessness - they only use it as a last resort!

Finding heart containers has become more of a chore than a feeling of discovery, involving the ironically time-consuming task of travelling in time, and having the right item at just the right time, and just pads out what is essentially a really short game.

Battles are many, but significant battles are few, predictable, and not very interesting. Bosses are cheap, moving out of camera range and striking distance just to frustrate the player, who has to wait for "just the right moment" to strike, every time, because they have no inherently vulnerable spots. I remember in the Link to the Past, finding just the right weapon to tackle a difficult boss was fun, because bosses could be hurt by multiple weapons. With the advent of the 3D Zelda games, this seems to be a thing of the past.

OVERALL: I think that the worst thing about this game is that so many people like it better than the superior old ones, and that the 3D downgrade to the graphics was so immediately popular. So well was this game received that recent releases of 3D Zelda games all follow the same framework, with almost no originality other than art style or what gimmick Link uses to solve puzzles and navigate the world. Zelda: TOOT made me far more excited about Wind Waker, but after becoming similarly disappointed by it all I can say is this: if I want to experience the feelings of awe and exploration that I got from the original games, I now play Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series. It might lack some of Zelda's polish, but it's a helluva lot more fun to play.

It Came From the Bargain Bin: Jurassic Park (SNES)

Boy, this takes me back.

When Jurassic Park came out in theaters back in 1993, moviegoers were exposed to the most astounding digital effects ever seen up until that point. Dinosaurs never looked so real (well, except for maybe when they were real... unless you're a member of the extreme religious right... in which case the debate between hundred-ton monsters who died out for no perceivable reason leaving behind giant stone bones and a supreme being that looks like an old man sitting on a cloud surrounded by light and naked winged babies urging the republican party to outlaw gay marriage is ongoing)! Even though the movie was for the most part mediocre, it was directed by Stephen Spielberg, back when that actually meant something other than, "Sigh. Are we going to see yet another bad, mediocre, or overly schmaltzy Stephen Spielberg movie?"

In the marketing blitz that followed, Jurassic Park became a hot property with a line of action figures (courtesy of Kenner, the Star Wars toys people), children's clothing lines, and unique video games for every system out at that time - no two were alike! This is part in the individual licenses going to different developers, but it also seemed like they were drawing on the unique aspects of the various systems; the Sega Genesis had a side-scrolling action game, the Sega CD had a Myst-like point-and-click adventure, the 3DO got a series of pointless "multimedia" games, the NES got a two-player exploratory shooter, the PC got a buggy 2D/3D shooter, and the Super Nintendo got an action adventure experience.

The SNES game was developed by Ocean Software and it was an impressive package back in its day, with a large Legend of Zelda-like overworld, 3D interior environments, Dolby Surround Sound, a colorful color palette, multiple weapons with limited ammunition (akin to the survival horror genre), huge sprites, digitized sound, a great soundtrack, mouse support - the list just goes on and on!

So why is it here, on the list of games that I hate? Because for all of its exciting innovation, it has several flaws that could have (and should have) been dealt with before its release, and they just ruined the game completely. As such, I'm going to forgo the usual review structure and concentrate on what's wrong.

5 THINGS THAT MAKE JURASSIC PARK FOR THE SUPER NINTENDO UNPLAYABLE.

1.) THE TEXT POP-UPS DO NOT PAUSE THE ACTION. There's nothing more irritating than walking into an open field in the game, only to have that annoying little twerp, Tim Murphy pop in and tell me not to shoot the Gallimimus, because they could stampede, right before the aforementioned dinosaurs trample me to death because Tim's shit-eating grin is preventing me from seeing them. Better still is when I was collecting eggs from the raptor nests and Ian Malcolm pops up to tell me how many eggs I have left, basically blinding me in a dark room with giant disemboweling dinosaurs. They could have put this message at the bottom of the screen, or at the top, or made it transparent, or paused the game while it was on the screen, or NOT HAD THE FREAKIN' USELESS INFORMATION THERE TO BEGIN WITH. It seems obvious to me that Ocean looked at all of the design options and decided to go with the worst one.

2.) THE BUTTONS ARE MAPPED BADLY. The control actually isn't all that bad, even giving me the carte blanche to manually pick up weapons, deciding what I want to take with me... in the overworld. When I was in the inside stages the character automatically picked up weapons and health, which required me to backtrack every time I accidentally walked over a less-effective weapon. When I was on the overworld, I noticed that the button on the right of my controller (the "A" button) controls the weapon that is on the left of the display while the button on the left (the "X" button) controls the weapon displayed on the right, making the simplest and most often used command in the game something that hurts my brain. As with most games of this era, there is no way to change it in the options.

3.) I CAN'T STRAFE IN THE 3D ROOMS. There is no excuse for this one, as the game came out well after Wolfenstien 3D on the PC, and strafing by then was a standard, not an option. It's not like they ran out of button space: as established earlier, the "pick up" button from the overworld is not used in addition to the "jump button." The "L" and "R" buttons on the top of the controller are used to turn the player slower than with the D-pad, for precision aiming, but there is little reason that they couldn't have skipped that feature and just let the player strafe left and right with them. The mouse is used entirely by itself inside: pushing forward makes Alan Grant walk forward, pulling is backwards, left and right turn, button one is one weapon and button two is the other, so no strafing option there either. This makes the game much, much harder than it has to be.

4.) THERE IS NO AUTOMAP. If any game needs a map, it's this one. Some environments tend to look the same, and the island is actually much bigger than one would expect for an SNES game. Granted, auto-mapping wasn't really widely used when this game was made, but if Zelda: Link to the Past can have a map that shows the general area of goals then there's no reason that this couldn't have one either, as it came out much later than Link to the Past.

5.) As I have mentioned before, this game is quite large, and to collect all of the dinosaur eggs, key cards, and various other items one has to spend a considerable time backtracking or remembering where they've been. I have a friend who took notes as he played and managed to get through the game in about ten hours using his notes from start to finish (I have heard of "speed gamers" beating the game in an hour, but I can't imagine anyone playing it enough to do that). He left it on overnight so that he could continue the next day, but if the power had gone out he would have lost everything and had to start over, because THERE IS NO WAY TO SAVE THE GAME, AND NO PASSWORD TO CONTINUE. Imagine playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Now imagine playing the game, but never getting any more heart containers than the three that you start out with, out of the potential twenty that you could normally end the game with. Now imagine that the battery backup on your cartridge has died, and that in order to see the end you have to play through all three palaces of Hyrule and all seven of the Dark Palaces in one sitting. Now Imagine that when you used up all of your fairies that the game was over, and you had to start from the beginning. That's hardcore gaming right there! Jurassic Park even goes one step further by giving an inhumanely cruel "Congratulations! You escaped Jurassic Park!" text on black screen ending, giving no payoff to hours of torture! This is basically the developer saying that they hate me, this despite the fact that I bought their crappy movie tie-in game.

OVERALL: This is the classic example of how something could have been phenomenal was destroyed simply by lack of common sense. The game's art direction and scope really is impressive for the day it was made. As it stands now, it is merely a long-forgotten footnote in an otherwise impressive SNES library.

It's still better than the last two Jurassic Park movie sequels, though.

First impressions: Castle Crashers

I know that I've been neglecting my blogs lately. It's mostly due to my continuing search for employment, but it's partly due to my new-found calling in life. That calling is Castle Crashers for the Xbox 360 Live Arcade.

Castle Crashers is a four-player simultaneous side-scrolling beat-'em-up in the tradition of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the arcade game) brought to us by the gods at Behemoth, who also gave us the fantastic (yet too difficult) Alien Hominid some years ago.

History time:

Little Mikey got his first glimpse of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game at the Warren Mall's arcade, Aladdin's Castle, waaaay back in 1989, we he and his friend Kelly would frequent it on those winter Friday nights after school. With the addition of two other people, we were able to play through an adventure of epic proportions. The action was frantic, the enemies were many, and the sights and sounds were spectacular for that time. It was more than that to me, though - something about being able to play a game with the help of three of my best friends just clicked, and this game had none of the frustrating backtracking of Gauntlet, Midway's pioneering and flawed aging arcade sword fest. I was ecstatic when I found out Nintendo was releasing a four player adapter (the NES Satellite) soon afterwards - could it be that I could take this experience home with me?

Alas, the answer was a resounding Episode 3-style NOOOOOOOO!

Because this wouldn't be my blog if I actually praised something, and because I have nothing bad (at all) to say about Castle Crashers, I'm going to take you on a look at the many disappointments I've had with the beat-'em-up genre on home systems throughout the years, so that maybe when I show you how deceitful and poorly executed some of this stuff is, my new favorite game will seem better by comparison (everything they get right, it gets right, everything they get wrong, it gets right). I'm only listing games that I've played, so if there is one out there that meets my high standards, let me know.

(An aside: I'm only putting Gauntlet Legends on the list because it lacks the depth of a conventional dungeon crawler, making it closer to a beat-'em-up than an action RPG, though it is not as good as any other example of either)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Arcade Game (NES): I know that the NES was an aging machine even back when I first got one in 1988. I know that it was foolish of me to expect an arcade-exact translation of anything on that system. When Ultra Games released this port of my favorite arcade game I was skeptical. It looked about average for an NES game, but that doesn't mean that it looked any good at all. They really pushed the hardware to get the size of characters out of it that they did, but that means very little when you've cut two players out of the equation and had to take most of the enemies out just to fit it on a tiny NES cart. Even more annoying is that they only gave the player limited continues, making the game much harder than it had to be. At least it came with a coupon for a Pizza Hut pizza; that's something, I guess.

Battletoads (NES): This is by and large one of the most blatant TMNT ripoffs you'll ever see. The graphics are quite good in an 8-bit way, so what makes it worse is that having two players makes the game more difficult; not from the perspective that there are more enemies, but because every gameplay mechanic one could think of that makes multi-player co-op not fun is here: Two players instead of four, attacks hurt each other, when one person dies both have to restart a level, there are a limited number of continues, falling off of a cliff results in insta-death etc.

Final Fight (SNES): This game was released just after the SNES came out, and suffered the same problem all of the early SNES Capcom games did: the two-player arcade games were truncated to a single player (Magic Sword, U.N. Squadron, etc.). This version cut out one of the three selectable characters (Guy), replaced the women with androgynous men, and was essentially a major disappointment all around.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time (SNES): When the Super Nintendo was released, it only had two controller ports and it took a third party company to make a four-player adapter for the unit. That game was (you guessed it!) Super Bomberman. TMNT4 was released well before this, and couldn't take advantage of it. This one is noteworthy because it is actually better than the arcade game - maybe it doesn't look as nice, but there are enough extras that it doesn't need to. The two-player mode is nearly perfect, with just the right level of difficulty so that eventually the player and a friend can get through it on hard mode and feel like they accomplished something. It still needs four players though.

Streets of Rage, Streets of Rage 2, Streets of Rage 3 (Sega Genesis): These are all A+ Final Fight knockoffs, and nothing more. Given the Genesis' purported "Blast Processing" I fail to see why they couldn't have included a four-player mode, other than the fact that "Blast Processing" is a total crock.

Final Fight CD (Sega CD): By and large the best version of Final Fight I have ever played, even better than the arcade version; it's the music... I still wish that they could have re-mixed it for more players, though.

The Peace Keepers (SNES): Here's where the real bullshit starts. The back of the box clearly states four players with the SNES Multitap, and there are four players - in Arena mode, four players can fight each other. This pisses me off because it doesn't indicate that in any way shape or form that it is just the Arena mode - I was finally hoping for a true four-player beat-'em- up at home, and instead I get a mediocre two-player one. They knew that's what I wanted, and they just spat in my face. Otherwise it's a pretty standard game with a few innovations, like multiple pathways through the game, unlockable characters that you can change the color palette of, and more references to Arnold Schwartezneggar movies than should be allowed. Aside from two missing players, bland artwork, repetitive enemies, and limited continues keep this from being a memorable experience.

Captain America and The Avengers (SNES): This is a port of one of the most hilarious badly translated arcade games to date. Too limited continues, two players, too bad.

Captain Commando (SNES): The arcade game had some originality to it: giant robots that you could ride, enemies that you could slice in half. Yeah. The censored SNES version takes all of that out, then takes away two of the four players... again.

Batman Returns (SNES): Proof that even the best production values can't make up for the fact that it's a one-player game.

Batman Forever (SNES): Proof positive that Acclaim has something terribly wrong with them.

Three Dirty Dwarves (Saturn): Wow! Segasoft actually got something right! This game has three characters, and three players can play! There is an annoying "one hit and you're down" rule, but the players are only defeated if all three dwarves go down at the same time, which isn't often if they play cooperatively. Not quite perfect, but still very good.

Guardian Heroes (Saturn): I am among the proud few gamers that own a Sega Saturn and this game. To experience the pinnacle of two-player co-op beat-'em-ups, this is the game that must be played. It has multiple paths, changeable stats, dozens of special attacks per character, scaling (depending on how far apart players are from each other), a huge variety of enemies (and once they've been beaten the players can play as them in the arena mode), a story where the players save a kingdom and go on to beat up heaven and hell, everything! Everything that is, EXCEPT FOUR PLAYERS. The back of the box (again) claims up to six can play, but this is only in its Arena mode, which is fun for awhile, but having just two other players to kick the crap out of the computer would have been more fun. Why do they have to torture me with these bullshit arena modes? WHY?!!

Gauntlet Legends (Dreamcast): All right, four players! Too bad the gameplay is about as deep as an inverted milk saucer. The game can be played with one hand. Yep, every character will attack enemies just by running into them. Prepare to spend countless hours running around empty levels trying to find that one missed switch so that the exit can be found. Sometimes, my friends and I have contests to see who can stay awake the longest while playing this game.

Dynamite Cop (Dreamcast): This game runs at sixty frames-per-second, there are four controller ports, and three characters to choose from, so why is it that this is only a two-player game? And why is it over so quickly?

Zombie Revenge (Dreamcast): Everything I hate about Dynamite Cop revisited, plus the hilariously broken and stupid script from House of the Dead with appropriately cheesy voice acting.

Jedi Power Battles (Dreamcast): As much as I can't stand the prequel episodes of Star Wars, this would be a contender for my favorite beat-'em-up of all time, but for a few fatal flaws: Bottomless pits kill instead of just taking a little health (and there are far too damn many of them), not enough continues, two players share continues, some of the environments have hidden holes that will kill the player if they're off-screen for too long. Otherwise my usual four-player complaint remains.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The New Animated Series (Xbox): The first one (again) only supports two players for no perceivable reason other then this was released on the PS2, and we couldn't make a decent product and scale it back for the PS2, no! We have to make a shitty product that will run on the PS2 and make all of those who have superior hardware suffer. The sequel fixed this problem, but I'm having trouble finding people interested enough to play it.

(Nintendo 64): What? There isn't even one beat-'em-up for this system? What the hell?

(Gamecube): Does Viewtiful Joe count? It's pretty close... but it's only one player, and only ever has been one player, so I feel that qualifies it as a platformer. So the Gamecube doesn't have any beat-'em-ups either. Stupid Nintendo! (Okay, so Zelda Four Swords should count, but I don't have four Game Boy Advances or friends willing to play it). (Note to fan boys: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is drawn out, boring, and no one should have to play it - just like all of Square's games.)

That's my list. I've waited nearly twenty of your Earth-years to play a four-player co-op beat-'em-up game with character development and multiple paths from the comfort of my living room. It's not just that Castle Crashers is an affordable, funny, game that has far exceeded my expectations, but also because all of these other games have made me that much hungrier for the experience.