malvasia bianca

N+ is the first XBLA game that I’ve bought. It’s a platformer in its purest form: your only controls are a joystick for movement and a jump button. Each level is a single screen: you start at one point on the screen, there’s an exit somewhere else, and a button that opens up the exit in a third place. The levels are much less left-to-right and involve much more vertical movement than, say, a classic Super Mario Bros. level: they don’t typically have a ground at the bottom as an important component, and you have a wall jump to help you reach higher areas. There are some enemies: the most important are stationary bombs, but there are also moving bombs, and missiles that track you. (You can also die if you fall far enough, though if you’re next to a wall then you can use it to brake.)

The levels are pleasantly challenging while, generally, fair; I had to play many of them over and over again, but I usually felt that dying was my fault rather than the level designers’ fault: if I could just get my movements executed properly, I’d be able to finish the level, and the levels are short enough that you don’t have to retrace your steps much at all.

The graphics style is very bare-bones, which worked just fine: you’re a stick figure (albeit one with amusing death animations: exploding stick-figure limbs setting off a further chain of bomb explosions can be quite charming), there are no textures to speak of, the enemies are the most basic of sprites. All of which just serves to emphasize the pure platformer nature of the game: it’s all about making your jumps, everything else is secondary.

I’m quite happy with it as my first XBLA experience. I didn’t finish the game, and in fact I only made it through about a third of the levels. But that third of the levels was a good 75 levels, and it was a lot cheaper than a retail game; I got my money’s worth, and if they’ll stick in more levels for people who are more obsessed with that sort of gameplay than I am, more power to them! There’s a free version, too (which came out before the XBLA version); I haven’t tried it out myself, but I’m sure the game play is extremely similar, if you’re curious about it.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a puzzle-based adventure game. Actually, that probably gives the wrong impression, making you think that the game is about figuring out how to use these items to get access to a key that you can use to open a door over there; I should say instead that it’s a puzzle-obsessed adventure game, in the sense that, whenever you strike up a conversation with a random NPC, he or she may or may not have anything to say about whatever is on your mind, but will definitely show you a picture drawn with matchsticks and ask you to, say, turn it from four cubes to three cubes by only moving one matchstick. Or might tell you of a farmer trying to convey wolves and chickens across the river using a boat that only carries two animals, where three chickens can successfully defend themselves against two wolves but one chicken can’t. Or he’ll ask you how he can possibly measure five cups of milk, given that he’s somehow lost his five-cup measure but has a helpful set of ten-cup, seven-cup, and three-cup measures.

I might as well stop here; most people will either run screaming from the game or fall in love with it, and the above paragraph should give you enough information to determine which bucket you fall into. If you want puzzles, this is the place to go: there are 130 or so of them, I enjoyed them all, there are ample hints should you need them. On a non-puzzle-related note, the art style is totally charming, in a sort of Triplets of Belleville way.

And there’s already a sequel out in Japan, with a third game in the series promised; yay!

In honor of the release of the Wii version of Okami, I urge all of you who own a Wii (or a PS2) and who haven’t played the game yet to go out and buy a copy. More here, but the short version is: it’s an adventure game based on Japanese mythology with a beautiful art style based on Japanese brush-work, where you level up by (among other things) growing plants and feeding animals, all on a solid core of Zelda-style gameplay. I haven’t played the Wii version, but I can’t imagine adding Wii controls to the brush commands would lower the quality any…

A bit video-heavy today.

• The power of continuous improvement.

• A cool-looking physics “game”:

  (Via BitWorking.)

• Zefrank on complicated stuff:

• Falco PA!

  (Via Game|Life, which also links to a Guitar Hero version.)

• An fun variant on presenting minigames.

• Time to add The Muppet Show to my Netflix queue.

  (Via Cosmic Variance.)

• Brian Dettmer book autopsies. (Via Signal vs. Noise.)

• Fun for your jailbroken iPhone:

  (Via Pink Tentacle.)

Eternal Sonata is a quite good Japanese RPG for the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, the main lesson that I’ve learned from it is that I don’t particularly like JRPG’s; I won’t say I’m swearing off of them forever (in fact, I’m glad I played this one), but I won’t give them the benefit of the doubt in the future.

My first impressions were good. I pretty much decided I had to play it as soon as I heard that it took place in the imagination of a dying Frederic Chopin; they didn’t do as much with that theme as they could have, but there were other compensating virtues. The art style is very nice: I loved the color palette, and it used cel-shading in a subtle, less stylized manner than other cel-shaded games that I’m aware of, to good effect. You could see your enemies and avoid them, should you chose (in particular, there weren’t any random monsters), and the battle system was reasonably clever, with you taking an active role controlling movement, with light and dark areas on the battlefield giving access to different powers, and with a party level system making the fights more complicated (albeit not much more complicated) as the game went on.

It started to go south in chapter 2, in the Fort Fermata dungeon. This is the first puzzle dungeon (almost the only one, really), where you press switches that cause a few of the rooms to move; you’re supposed to figure out the effects of the switches and gain access to areas of the dungeon that you couldn’t before. Unfortunately, there were two problems with this. The lesser problem was that it, frankly, wasn’t a very good puzzle: it was hard to tell the effects of the switches, so ultimately I ended up wandering around more or less at random until I eventually noticed a new room that I couldn’t get to before; repeat three times and you’re done. Which would be okay, except that the areas were quite large, with almost all of it unaffected by the switches, so it was heavy on wandering and light on thinking/progressing.

The more serious problem, though, was that this was where the monsters started getting to me. There was a reasonably high density of monsters in this dungeon, but the monsters (like pretty much all (non-boss?) monsters in the game) just weren’t that much fun to fight. So about five battles into the dungeon, I’d gotten all the pleasure I was going to get from fighting in the dungeon, and was only fighting battles to make sure I’d be appropriately leveled up when I reached the boss; ten battles in, I was actively avoiding the monsters, and cursing when I accidentally touched one of them.

Even that might have been okay, were it not for one very serious flaw: the monsters respawn each time you re-enter an area that you’d previously left. So if I find a room and press a switch, the monsters outside will reappear when I exit. The dungeon was divided into two halves; each time I went from one into the other, the monsters respawned.

There is, as far as I’m concerned, no justification for this. Maybe there is a video game player who would fight all thirty or forty monsters in that dungeon and still be thirsting for more; I have to believe that such players are few and far between. More seriously, there are only so many ways you can enjoy the core mechanics of a game like this; one of those ways of enjoying the game is exploring, seeing what’s around the next corner. But the respawning directly attacks that way of enjoying the game: if poking around a corner brings you into a new area, and then you decide that you wanted to look around the original area some more, tough like, you’ll have to refight all those monsters again. I really would like to know what the thinking was here: did they not think about the matter at all, did they think that players would enjoy respawning monsters? Did they playtest the game or not; if they playtested it, did this issue come up?

Fortunately, that dungeon was the one that was most hurt by that flaw. Having said that, the respawning enemies problem kept on biting me on a lesser scale. Most dungeons were relatively linear, but you frequently came to a fork in the path where going in one direction would keep you in the same area and lead to a chest while the other direction would lead to the next area. The problem is that you couldn’t see the chest from where you were: you’d have to go part way down, and then the camera would shift for you. And if you picked the wrong one, it was very hard to figure out how far to go before deciding that the camera should have shifted by now; if you went too far, you’d be in the next area, at which point you’d have to go back (assuming you didn’t want to skip the chest), and the monsters would respawn.

I should emphasize that there are a lot of traditional RPG mistakes that they didn’t make. As I mentioned above, the battle system was better than normal, and at least you could see and avoid the respawning monsters. And avoiding them was a realistic possibility: most of the time, you could avoid almost all of them if you wished, and while doing so would mean that you weren’t leveling up enough for the boss battles, you certainly could skip several of the monsters and still be strong enough to fight the bosses without breaking too much of a sweat. You had up to nine people in your party, of whom only three could fight at once, but the others leveled up anyways; I believe they leveled up at a somewhat slower rate, but not enough to make the characters unusable if a plot twist forced you to use somebody other than your favorite characters.

The overall rhythm was off, too. Typically, RPGs have a mixture of fighting, exploring your environments, and plot advancement. As I’ve said above, the fighting got in the way of exploring your enviroments in the overworld and dungeons; unfortunately, you spend far too much of your time such environments. The towns are nice enough, but they generally felt like way stations that you’re just passing through. As far as plot goes, I like it, but it’s conveyed by cut scenes that are way too long: about once per chapter, you’ll run into a cut scene that is long enough that your controller will go to sleep if you don’t fiddle with it during the cut scene. (I believe that the sequence of cut scenes at the end of the game lasted a full thirty minutes.)

Having said that, the cut scenes are pretty good. Mostly they’re advancing the plot of the game, but once per chapter there’s a cut scene (usually paired with a traditional one) that consists of somebody playing a piece by Chopin, along with pictures showing places where Chopin spent his life and subtitles explaining that portion of Chopin’s life. So you get some quite nice music and reasonably interesting history mixed in with your adventuring. Also convenient for me was that you can set the game to Japanese voices with English subtitles, so the cut scenes (and many other areas, e.g. battles) let me practice my Japanese; I certainly wouldn’t have been able to follow most of the conversations without the subtitles, but I was glad to be able to pick up words and phrases. (Warning for other people who do the same thing: for whatever reason, they leave off subtitles for most of the final cut scene, so you might want to switch back to English right before the end.)

It’s a quite good game; I’m happy to have played it, though I’m also happy that it’s now over. Miranda really liked it, and has started playing it herself; I’m curious how far she will get. They made several decisions which I consider boneheaded, and which soured me on the genre: Lost Odyssey is getting some amount of buzz right now, for example, but I’m going to stay away from that one. (Admittedly, enough games are clamoring for my attention right now that I would probably have stayed away anyways.) But there are more than enough surprising good decisions that the good outweighs the bad.

Half a year or so ago, I retrieved my Nintendo 64 from a friend’s house, since I thought Miranda might enjoy some of the games on it. The one she settled on was Harvest Moon 64, a delightful little farming simulator. So, when Christmas came by, I thought she might want another Harvest Moon; I was interested in Rune Factory, but when she read the reviews, she (correctly, I suspect) thought that she would prefer Harvest Moon DS.

So we got her a copy of that, she’s been playing it off and on. (She doesn’t focus on one game the way I do, so she’s still playing both Harvest Moon games, both Animal Crossing games, and occasional spurts of other games.)

And then Liesl was bored last weekend, and picked it up. And now, every evening, I’m sitting here reading blogs while Liesl is next to me gathering wood to build a barn so she’ll be able to successfully woo the archaeologist, or something like that. Pretty convenient, actually, since it means we don’t have to fight for the computer. (Though it’s a good thing this week was a vacation week from school, because we’ve stayed up rather later than was wise on a few occasions.)

But I feel a bit left out of the fun! Harvest Moon DS only has two save slots (why?, why?); then again, I think I’d probably prefer Rune Factory, so if I really wanted to join in, I’d be better off buying a copy of that game instead. (Plus, we have two DSes, a fat one and a lite one, so it would avoid an unnecessary bottleneck if we had two games to play.) The truth is, though, that Eternal Sonata is taking up all my video game time (especially since we have too many series we’re in the middle of watching on TV), and there are other games I’d rather play on the DS when time frees up. (E.g. when we next go on vacation.)

But it is nice being surrounded by farmers. And I’ll join them eventually: it’s a charming series.

• I still haven’t figured out Cursor*10, but it has some neat ideas. (Via GayGamer.)
• An ActiveRecord tutorial; a nice little introduction to the concepts, I liked the way they get their hands dirty with showing you the SQL.
• Yeah, that’s kind of the way I feel about Obama…

• For no particular reason, a random bit of Sesame Street:

  (Via Cosmic Variance.)

• Who am I? I’m Andrew F***ing Jackson! (Via The Edge of the American West.)

• Crazy things with soccer balls:

  (Via Tim Ferriss.)

• Quite a case mod.
• Tim Bray on people involved in the XML standard, ten years after its ratification.
• Some charming, subdued flash games. (The web site isn’t working as I type this, but it was as of yesterday…) (Via Game|Life.)

I’ve talked enough about Zack and Wiki that I’m not quite sure what to say here. It’s a puzzle-solving point and click adventure game, with excellent use of Wii motion-sensing controls and a great sense of humor. And a great set of puzzles: Liesl and I thoroughly enjoyed working through them; I was continually amazed at the clever new puzzles that they came up with, given the small number of objects that are in play on each individual level. And the game gets plenty difficult, but, between the two of us, we managed to solve all but two of the levels without any hints at all, and the in-game hints sufficed for those two levels.

There are some annoying aspects: in particular, it punishes you too actively for your mistakes. Requiring you to restart a level by default if you die is fine, as long as there’s some sort of out; they do, in fact, give you an out in the form of tickets you can purchase that revive you if you die, but if you use one of them and die further on in the level, it returns you to the start of the level (unless you spend another ticket!) instead of reviving you at the state where you used your last ticket. That was a bad choice, but not a bad enough one to put me off the game too much.

It’s also totally charming. I love the art style, the Rose Rock Pirates are an amusing bunch of enemies, Wiki (with his cute little pseudo-baby-Japanese(?) utterances) is very cute.

And it’s budget-priced, despite which (and despite active lobbying from various sources), very few people bought it; I don’t know if it didn’t get enough publicity or if hard-core gamers were put off by the name and cover art or if, ultimately, it’s just a niche product. (Why aren’t the Phoenix Wright fans all buying it?) But it’s a niche that I’m very happy to have spent time in.

Portal is a first-person puzzle game. The controls are like a first-person shooter, but your gun shoots portals onto flat surfaces (walls, floor, ceiling): you can have one blue portal and one orange portal, and the two teleport you from one to another.

The game starts out with simple puzzles: you need to get to a door on a ledge, so you shoot one portal to the wall next to the ledge and the other portal on the wall (or floor) near you, walk through it, and you’re on the ledge. Later puzzles include more of a physics component: e.g. if you have the blue portal on the floor and the orange portal on the ceiling directly above it, then you can fall through them over and over, building up a fair amount of momentum, and then at some point you can shoot the orange portal onto a side wall, sending you horizontally away from that wall at high speed. (Perhaps over a barrier or something.)

Also, unlike an FPS, there aren’t enemies to shoot. Most levels have no enemies at all; some have guns that you need to either evade or disable. (Either by shooting a portal on the ground beneath them or dropping something through a portal above them.)

It’s a bit hard for me to know what else to say about it: it’s been discussed so much on the interwebs, typically in such gushing terms, that I don’t know whether or where to enter that conversation. So I won’t say much, I guess. It’s a very nice illustration of how to mix genres (which was a bit of a theme last year), how to divorce a control style from the gameplay that it’s traditionally associated with. It’s a fun little puzzle game; I enjoyed the three or so hour I spent going through the levels, but I was glad it was done when it was. (There are some harder versions of a few of the original levels that open up once you’ve finished the game; I did one of them, tried another, and decided that I wasn’t looking for that sort of challenge.) So, on that level, I’m glad I played the game, I’m certainly glad it exists, but I don’t see it as the first of dozens of games with that particular mechanic.

What is completely surprising and wonderful about the game (certainly not something that one would traditionally expect from either the FPS or puzzle genres) is its style and sense of humor. You almost never directly interact with anybody else in the game (though the turrets are careful to assure you that they don’t hate you when you disable them), there’s just this voice that comes through the grill occasionally. (Well, that plus little drawings on the wall, e.g. guides to the level and pictures of cake.) But those snippets of voice give the game as much personality as any other game I’ve played over the last couple of years.

Which is reinforced by the last level, which is almost as long as the 18 levels preceding it put together and is a very well-done capstone. I’ve already posted the end-credits song, but I’ll do so again because I love it so much:

I’m still not ready to join the legion of Portal cultists, and I don’t quite understand the Companion Cube gushing. But the game does manage to cram an amazing amount of style and new directions in its three hours.

Mass Effect is the latest RPG from BioWare, makers of the excellent Jade Empire. Like that one, it’s an action RPG: combat takes place in the middle of the environment you’re running around in, and different characters don’t take turns attacking each other. (Though the details are quite different: in particular, the combat is based around shooting people rather than whacking people.)

It took me a little while to decide what I think about the game. Don’t get me wrong, it was obvious from the start that it’s a quite good game: it’s gorgeous, has the best conversation system I’ve seen, and is well plotted, which adds up to the most theatrical experience (in a good way) that I can think of in a video game. The intro world was pretty good, but there was a fair amount of combat, and I wasn’t sure how much I liked the shooter RPG idea. The main city after that had some interesting environments and fun tasks, but it wasn’t quite as large as I expected. Then I explored a couple of small side-planets (of which there are a dozen or two); pretty neat to have that wealth of side-tasks to complete, but they didn’t add much to the plot and reused environments in a big way. And I started Feros, one of the three main quests which are open to you at the start; about halfway through that quest, I was enjoying myself, but I kind of wished that there was more of a city there to wander around in.

And then things sort of clicked. To explain the “more of a city” comment: in a traditional RPG, your environment is divided into cities, overworld, and dungeons. Cities are great for talking to people and getting quests and doing commerce and such; dungeons are great for focused exploration and combat and key plot moments; overworld are great for, well, nothing, they’re usually just filler. I personally enjoy cities the most, but you need to balance them; in particular, it’s traditional to pair each dungeon with a city.

Feros wasn’t doing that for me. There was this small, weird town there, but it was really basically just one room, surrounded by… surrounded by what? I’m still not sure how to analyze it: there was combat in those areas, but it didn’t feel like a traditional overworld or dungeon. There were plot elements (stemming from quests I’d been given in the town), and I went back to the town afterwards, so it didn’t feel like overworld. There wasn’t one linear goal, so it didn’t feel like a dungeon. Maybe that whole chunk was one big town, just a particularly dangerous one? Once I’d finished that area, there was a bit of overworld, but it was mercifully short, then another tiny town next to something that did feel like a dungeon (because I had one specific goal), but in a somewhat townish setting. Then I went back to the first town, a new area opened up, and I had a small dungeon with a nice plot bit at the end.

Basically, my analytic categories had largely broken down, but it didn’t matter: I was having a lot of fun. Much more combat than I normally like, but I’d started understanding the combat by then (about which more later), and was rather liking it. Conversations, side quests, main quests, plot elements, cityscapes, less urban areas were all woven together, giving me a constant flow of challenges and rewards and story advancement.

About that combat: there are three basic classes, one fighter type and two magic-user types (technician and biotic). (Plus three hybrid classes.) I wasn’t sure what to start with: I’m usually drawn to the more magic-user types but end up taking a straightforward approach, which suggested I should be a fighter or a hybrid. But I really don’t like shooting or feeling like a brute, which argues against the former, and the hybrids couldn’t use enough weapons to really feel worthwhile. Ultimately, I went for technician, because I didn’t want to focus too much on shooting and because that would allow me to open up locked items without depending on having the right fellow party members equipped.

Which turned out to be a great choice for me. Your characters (especially technicians and biotics) have special abilities (offensive and defensive) that you can select from a menu that you can bring up by pressing the right bumper. (Which also pauses the game and lets you change your aim at the same time.) And technicians have some nice attacks that work well against robots and well enough against normal humans/aliens with their shields and weapons; they don’t work well against zombie types, but there weren’t too many of those. (I really wish I’d started using A.I. Hacking against the Geth enemies much earlier than I did: some of my initial attempts failed for whatever reason, so I put it on the shelf, but once I got it leveled up a bit more and started using the technique, I quite enjoyed entering a room, hacking the first Geth I saw, and letting it soften up the room for me.) I still had to do some amount of shooting, but my special attacks were good enough to seriously weaken the enemies, so I didn’t have to be all that good at shooting. (And I got good enough at it by the time I was done with Feros.)

And they got one thing right that is so much more important than the details of combat mechanics that I don’t know why I’m talking about the latter: the battles happen in the regular environment and aren’t turn-based. Right now, I’m playing Eternal Sonata, which is a more traditional RPG (and actually one with a pretty good combat system as traditional RPGs go). And every time I enter a non-boss battle, I just get annoyed: I know I’m going to have to spend a minute or two on a separate screen, waiting for various turns to happen, just going through a battle using the same strategies that I’ve used dozens or hundreds of times before. I know I’m going to win, I know I’m going to end up with good health, I know I’m not going to have any interesting experiences honing my skills, it’s almost a pure waste of time.

Most battles in Mass Effect are also almost as lacking in real thought or drama. But they’re over a lot faster: no waiting for turns, no fancy animations of attacks. I’m spending all of my time focusing on what my main character should be doing right then, I don’t have to wait for anything, and in the mean time other parts of the battle are littering the ground around me. Also, the separate battle arenas of traditional RPGs have a real psychological effect: they force you to treat battles as a phenomenon to be considered in isolation, which raises the question of “are they good or bad in isolation?”, to which the only answer is “bad”. Whereas Mass Effect avoids that question: battles are one way of changing the texture of a larger sweep of action, and their effects on that texture are a generally positive one, as long as they’re not overdone. (Which they’re not here.)

From the end of Feros on, I was just having fun. I stopped doing as many of the side-planet quests, because they didn’t add much; that was fine, I’m happy to have optional tasks available for people who like them. The main quests continued to be very good, in different ways: the dig site was a much more focused dungeon run, Noveria had a reasonably satisfying city at the start of it and another small one in the middle, and the final dungeon run at the end of the game was satisfying without being drawn out in the way that the later parts of Jade Empire were. They continued to avoid stupid traditional RPG gameplay decisions. (Hint to other developers: if you’re going to make me chose a subset of the party to play with, have us all level up as a group, don’t punish me by having people level up individually based on how much combat they’ve seen.) The environments are extremely well done, and the theatrical nature of the conversation, plot, cut scenes, etc. was top-notch all the way through. Great alien races, too.

The only down side is that now I’m afraid to play other RPGs. I like the plot-driven nature of the genre, but a lot of the basic gameplay mechanics that the genre traditionally uses that are just plain broken. On the whole, that’s a tradeoff that I’m willing to make some of the time, but why oh why do I have to?

• Pretty sand pictures:

  (Via Backreaction, which has links to more.)

• Those are some big crystals.
• Van Jacobson on networking. More than an hour long, which is why it took me more than a year to get around to watching it, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here.
• You’re probably already all aware of Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, but if not, you should be.
• I’d never heard of High Dynamic Range photography before seeing these gorgeous photographs of various scenes in Japan.

• Fighting giraffes:

  (Via Mad Prime.)

• A different take on Zack & Wiki.

I just started Eternal Sonata. It’s a Japanese RPG on the Xbox 360 that takes place in the dreams of Frederic Chopin as he’s about to die from tuberculosis; how could I pass up a concept like that?

A few hours in, I’m quite happy to be playing it. At the core, it’s a not-too-outlandish JRPG, but there are several nice touches. The visuals are quite distinctive: lots of bright colors everywhere, and the characters are done in a sort of cel-shaded style, with a little less detail and flatter textures than the backgrounds, making for a distinctive but subdued look. The combat and leveling up system are on the action RPG end, with a real time component (including movement) to your turns, not too many options at any given time, and the playing field divided into light and shadow areas that give you different attacks. And there’s a concept of a “party level” which increases very slowly, giving rise to new nuances in the combat system, so while combat is quite straightforward now, I imagine it will get noticeably more complicated by the time I’m ten hours in.

It’s not my shaping up to be my favorite underappreciated 2007 game or my favorite RPG of 2007, but it’s certainly a good way to pass several hours.

When I went to download the Devil May Cry 4 demo just now, I was amused to see its genre given as “Stylish Action”.

I bought my first single this week, “Still Alive” from Portal:

Or at least my first online single; I dimly recall buying a few 45 rpm singles when I was a teenager, out of bemused curiosity that they existed.

Buying online singles isn’t something I’d been planning to do. For one thing, I’m the sort of person who, if I find one book by an author that I like, goes out and reads another three or four by the same author, and similarly with music. Also, my main constraint right now in music listening isn’t money or having an overabundance of new stuff to listen to, it’s finding new music that I like, so buying whole albums by artists when I’ve heard a single song that I like is generally a good way to approach that constraint.

Though now I’m rethinking that policy: I still support buying the whole album if there’s any serious chance that I’ll like it, but spending 89 cents on a whim is also probably something I should do more often. Though this song really is a special case. It’s from a video game soundtrack, or rather a soundtrack from a collection of video games. I haven’t played the other games in the collection, the other music is by different artists, the other music is all instrumental, so there’s no particular reason to think I’ll enjoy the rest of the music in the collection. I’m not ruling out the possibility of buying the rest of the album when I’ve played more of the games, but it will take a little while for me to get around to doing that.

And I certainly wasn’t going to wait to buy this one; I’ve been singing it over and over the last few days, I can’t think of a video game song that I like more. I suspect it holds up pretty well for people who haven’t played the game, too—it’s so delicious and moist—but who knows.

Look at me still talking when there’s science to do. Or blog reading. Hopefully I’ll get back to blog writing this weekend, though.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is the first Zelda game for the DS, and Nintendo decided to go whole-hog. No D-pad and buttons for them: you move by touching the screen in the direction you want to go, you attack an enemy by either drawing a slashing motion or by touching an enemy.

Which must have taken a lot of guts to decide on; I commend them for it. And it works well enough; unfortunately, enough of the other decisions that they made in the game grated on me that it ended up being the first new Zelda that I didn’t finish.

Hmm, how to structure this post? Let’s try an experiment:

Good: Moving and fighting with the stylus works surprisingly well.

Bad: It’s partly good in a “talking dog” sort of way: my expectations were pretty low, so I’m impressed that it works at all. To be fair, it works fine for core stuff, but it has its rough spots (switching between items, in particular), and I don’t think it actually improved movement/combat at all.

Good: You get to draw on the map. In particular, that’s a nice way to set your course while sailing the ship.

Bad:: It’s only a nice way because the ocean environment is so plain; ship travel is less tedious here than in Wind Waker, but I still far prefer dry land overworlds. Also, drawing on maps to take notes in dungeons mean that you got lots of puzzles of the form “there are four switches over here, and you learn over there in which order to hit them” (And then write the numbers on the map to remember them.) Which gets a little old.

Bad: The microphone-based puzzles were really annoying. (And limited the locations in which you can play the game.) I particularly disliked the bit where how loud you shouted into the mic determined the cost of your salvage arm.

Good: Uh, there were only three or four of them?

Good: I liked the grappling hook item where you could draw on the screen to connect two posts.

Bad: The cartridge only has two save slots.

Good: Only two people can be annoyed by the game at once?

Enough of that; basically, it’s a series of interesting experiments, most of which weren’t too bad, some of which had some real benefits. I hope that they tone it down in their next offering, but I hope that they take some of those techniques and use them on their next DS outing. (Some of the ideas might even work on the Wii.)

But partially successful experiments don’t add up to a reason for me to stop playing the game. The reason why I stopped is that one of the dungeons isn’t like the others. There’s this central dungeon that you start and (I believe?) end the game in, and return to after almost every other dungeon. Each time in the dungeon, you retrace your steps, going a bit farther.

Unfortunately, there are two things I didn’t like about that dungeon: it was stealth-based and it was timed. Stealth-based games may be other people’s cup of tea; they are not mine. I’m not violently against the notion, and certainly I would have been fine with one or two dungeons with a significant stealth element. But I didn’t want to play a stealth-based segment over and over again.

And having it timed was just rubbing salt in my wounds: if I can’t figure out how to retrace my steps and do the next two levels of the dungeon that I’ve unlocked quickly enough, my reward is to replay my last fifteen minutes. None of your traditional wandering around, thinking about puzzles, wondering how on earth you’ll get to that chest over there: you have to be focused on optimizing your path through the dungeon. It also hurts your ability to stop playing the game at a moment’s notice, which can be important on a handheld system, and you probably don’t want to take a couple of weeks, off from playing the game. (Or even a couple of days off, depending on your memory.)

I played through most of it; at the place where I stopped, I had (as far as I can tell) two trips remaining to the annoying dungeon and one traditional dungeon that I hadn’t explored. (Which I couldn’t get to without going back to the annoying dungeon first.) And I decided that it was unlikely that I’d enjoy or learn enough from the remaining traditional dungeon to make it worth going through the annoying dungeon again.

Other people may well like the game more (indeed, clearly have); I probably would have thought it was pretty good if I basically enjoyed stealth games. And I’m glad I gave it a try, so I could see what the controls were like. But it still left a bad taste in my mouth.

Reviews of three games that don’t deserve a full post:

Beautiful Katamari

If you’ve played its predecessors, you know what to expect, and you’ll probably be disappointed. More of the same; the music is still good, but no track was nearly as good as, say, Everlasting Love from the second game. They continued to ratchet up the scale of the later levels, to bad effect: you lose the detail when you get to rolling up islands, which this game goes far beyond. The good news is that there was only one level with a significant non-size-based goal. (Which was by far the most annoying level in the game!)

The main bad news is that there are too few levels, especially since it’s getting priced at close to a full game price (the original launched at 20 bucks); to make things worse, a quick scan through the game’s downloadable content suggests that Namco is trying to get greedy and nickel-and-dime fans to death. A thin enough experience to switch the series from “default buy” to “default don’t buy”, which makes me sad.

Hexic HD

An XBLA game that came for free with the system. It’s a puzzle game, and an awful one: I tried it once, and lasted for 20-30 minutes, not because of my l33t puzzle skills but because there’s no way to lose. Or win. Actually, there is apparently a way to win (but it’s really hard without interesting intermediate goals), and there are ways to lose if you play for long enough, but the basic tension that this style of puzzle game should provide is completely absent: reducing the feedback to how many points you’re getting meant that I never felt that I was doing well or badly, and after five minutes or so I was just waiting for me to die somehow, anyhow.

Reading other reviews of the game, it would seem that the other gameplay modes have a bit more potential for tension. (I did “marathon mode”, because it was first on the list and sounded like a sensible default puzzle game mode.) I have no desire to give them a try.

Gradius III

A shooter. I enjoyed playing Life Force, which is one of its predecessors on the NES, so I thought I’d give this one a try. I remember that game being a fair amount of fun, though its power-up mechanism was a bit off: when you died, you lost all (or all but one) of your powerups, and the game structure was such that, after that happened, you were basically screwed, but it was a pleasant way to spend time if you didn’t mind that.

Either my skills have atrophied, or Gradius III isn’t as good: I had a harder time making it through the earlier levels (though, oddly, the level 1 boss is actually noticeably harder than the level 2 one, so if I made it through level 1 I had a good chance of reaching level 3), to the extent that I wasn’t really enjoying the game. Some of that was due to my not wanting to invest the time in memorizing where every enemy entered the screen, which I recall doing in Life Force. (Also, playing while either Miranda or Zippy was acting antsy made it quite difficult to concentrate enough to avoid swarms of enemies.) Though the good news is that, even when I died, losing powerups didn’t hurt me so much, so I didn’t always have to start over from scratch.

I think it’s probably an okay game in the right context, but right now I have other ways that I’d rather spend my time, so rather than banging my head against it to improve my abilities, I decided to move on. Hmm, that seems to be a theme for me with Virtual Console games…

I (correctly) didn’t think that I’d have enough video games on consoles I already own to get me through the holiday break, so I got an Xbox 360 a couple of weeks ago. Some notes:

• I messed up a couple of cables when installing; probably because I’m conditioned to think that they’re all broken, it took me a little while to find my mistakes. (A misleading bit in the manual didn’t help.) Works fine, though.
• The initial games that I bought for it: Beautiful Katamari, Mass Effect, and Portal. I imagine I’ll try the other four games that are packed in with the latter, too; other games that I expect to try soon are Bioshock and Eternal Sonata.
• I spent too much time typing on virtual keyboards when setting it up, but at least that’s a one-time thing.
• I paid the money for a gold Xbox Live account; not sure how much I’ll use it, but since online features seems to be one of the defining things that the console does better than the others, I figured I might as well give it a try. My username (sorry, “gamertag”) is “malvasia bianca”; if any of my blog readers also have accounts, please let me know.
• You can see my vast number of achievements on my gamercard. As far as I can tell, there’s no way for you to see my actual achievements without having an account of your own; I’m under the impression that this is my public page, for a narrow definition of “public”.
• As far as I can tell, the support for multiple users on the same console is pretty bad. I guess the right way to handle that is to create multiple Xbox Live accounts? And if we all want to do online multiplayer with separately tracked stats, we have to fork over fifty bucks a person a year? Seems a bit much. I like the Wii’s idea of just giving everybody a Mii; I only wish more games used them. (Of course, using them as your character in the game is rarely appropriate, but just using them to identify your save file, as Super Mario Galaxy does, is a great idea.)
• The interface is rather busy, and has ads; I much prefer the Wii’s simplicity. (At least at the top level of the interface.) Though the two interfaces are trying to do different things; I haven’t really thought about what that means.
• It came with a bunch of preloaded content on the hard drive, mostly demos but also some videos and one (bad) full game.
• I can easily imagine myself getting hooked on trying out demos (I went to the store and downloaded several more), and switching over to having that be a big way in which I evaluate games for purchase; I can also imagine playing them just so I have a better idea of what people are talking about, even if I have no intention of buying the game. The existence of downloadable demos seems all to the good to me.
• The download service has issues, though. On several occasions, it had problems downloading a demo, but it didn’t automatically retry, and marked it in the store as being downloaded. So I had to go out of the store, double check that I didn’t have a copy saved, go back into the store, tell it to download it again, and reassure it that, yes, it’s fine for it to erase the non-existent copy that I’d previously attempted to download.
• When I add up space for the downloaded content and the free space on my hard drive, it still doesn’t add up to 20GB. Where’s the rest of the space? I’m used to drive numbers not adding up, for various reasons, but this seems excessive. Does it maintain a few gigabytes of free space that games can use as a cache? That would make sense, I guess.
• I wish it came with a larger hard drive, but I refuse to pay a hundred bucks for an extra 100 gigs of disk space.

I’m happy so far, and I’ll have to be disciplined for the next few weeks to stop playing Mass Effect at a reasonable time of night lest I turn into a zombie at work. Team members, if you see me yawning in the daily standup, feel free to chastize me…

• Beautiful libraries. (I think I linked to a similar gallery before, but this one’s better.)
• From Pink Tentacle: the chopsticks bra and two bathroom-related entries.
• Remarkable underground temples. (Via tecosystems.)
• If video game systems start doing head-tracking, watch out:

  (Via Games Are Art 2.0; the good stuff starts at around 2:30.)

• A fun word-association game. (Via Mark Gritter; even with Googling, I couldn’t get very far…)
• Don’t trust encryption standards. (At least not that one…)
• Give it a few seconds.

Ken Robinson’s TED talk on “Do schools kill creativity?”

You can also watch it at its web page; I like the chapter markings on the full-screen version of the video player on their page. (Not the embedded one here.)

I heard about this talk via two separate routes: Presentation Zen and Evolving Excellence. Two blogs which don’t normally have much in common, but in retrospect it makes sense that you’d see this in both places: in particular, the lean folks know as much as anybody about the value of encouraging creativity at all levels of your organization.

Lots of good stuff in the talk; some ideas I particularly liked:

• Students who are in school now will still be working half a century from now, yet we have a hard time predicting what the world will be like half a decade from now; can we afford to do anything other than do anything other than encourage their creativity and capacities for innovation?
• To be creative, you need to make mistakes; yet schools punish you ruthlessly for making them. (They could take a lesson from Super Mario Galaxy: feedback doesn’t mean punishment. Or, for that matter, from more sandboxy games: you don’t need pervasive feedback, either.)
• Different people have different strengths, yet schools focus on an obscenely small portion of those. If somebody is fidgeting in your math class, perhaps discovering that they’re a dancer is a better idea than putting them on ADHD drugs.

As always, I’m very glad that we found PACT. It’s not perfect, but it’s worlds better than what I hear of schools elsewhere.

My thoughts on Super Mario Galaxy got long enough that I spun the first part off into a separate entry. In short, we’re back to linear platforming, with tons of jumping, done very well.

One question that any platformer has to answer is: what non-core player abilities will it mix in? Jumping is great, but platformers always go somewhat beyond that: the fireballs in the original Super Mario Bros. to the suits in SMB3. There are different ways to handle this: in particular, you can add one pervasive theme (the waterpack in Super Mario Sunshine, which didn’t turn out so well), or you can sprinkle in different capabilities (SMB3 again).

Galaxy does some of both: they add one general capability, a spin attack, activated by shaking the wiimote. About which I have mixed feelings: it’s probably useful to have some sort of general mechanism other than jumping, and the small radius of many of the planetoids can make it a bit hard to judge offensive jumps accurately, so a spinning ground attack works well enough. But I don’t like having to shake the wiimote quite so frequently, and I wish the spin attack wasn’t quite as prominent as it is.

There are also a handful of secondary capabilities, accessible by wearing suits that are available in certain areas. (Levels or sections of levels that are designed around them.) I liked the gameplay choices here: it adds a pleasant variety and gives the designers new options that they can use to extend the basic platforming concepts without distracting you from what the game is about, or for that matter what individual levels are about. None of the suits are anything special, but that’s okay, they don’t have to be: they increase the variety of levels, and that’s enough. (And I am fond of some of the new puzzles that the ice suit allowed.)

What I really want to talk about, though, is the line the game walks between challenge and frustration. Any video game is trying to keep the player from getting annoyed while providing the player who wants challenge a way to get that challenge. (Providing interesting environments to explore is also a plus; Galaxy does that well enough, too, though (as I said before) it explicitly doesn’t do that by providing big worlds to roam around in.) And I’m very impressed with how Galaxy balances those two constraints.

The early levels are pretty easy; in a couple of not very long sittings, I’d accumulated about 40 or so stars. Granted, I’m a relatively experienced player of platformers; probably a less experienced player would find them more of a challenge. Even so, I didn’t feel like I was wasting my time getting to the good stuff: they were fun levels, well designed, throwing a grab bag full of concepts at you. They also provided an easy out for the non-completists, or for people who aren’t as fond of platformers as I am: you can reach the final Bowser challenge after you’ve finished 60 of the stars (out of the 120 that the game contains), so you can happily route around challenges that you don’t particularly enjoy. (Incidentally, for those of you who are completists, you should still beat Bowser early on: you need to do that to unlock some of the stars.)

They also avoided the cheap, annoying ways to extend replay value. Within each level, there are relatively frequent checkpoints, so you never get stuck having to repeat yourself too far: the levels are broken up into relatively discrete challenges, you have to accomplish each in one go, but you can die between challenges without serious repercussions.

And, speaking of dying, you’ll do that a lot - it’s easy enough to fall off the edge of many of the environments, and your life bar is only three units long. (Which was kind of shocking at first—I can’t remember the last game I played with that short a life bar—but was absolutely the right choice.) Except for when it’s six units long: in certain, well-selected places (usually before relatively tricky end-of-level boss fights), there’s a mushroom that temporarily doubles your life bar. (A great example of slightly tweaking the gameplay to enhance the design of a portion of a level.)

But dying isn’t a big deal: on tricky sections, there’s almost always either a 1-up mushroom near the star of that section or enough star bits that you can almost always collect 50 of them, earning an extra life, before dying. (Star bits are a minor gameplay addition that exist both to give a spectator something to do—a second player can optionally collect them for you—and to provide a less-heavy-handed way of giving frequent extra lives.) The result is that I have no idea how many hundreds of times I died while finishing the game, but I ran out of my lives exactly once over the course of my playing. (The purple coin challenge on the Luigi picture with disappearing/rotating floors, if you’re curious; I entered it with 25 lives, but that wasn’t enough!) The result is that dying, instead of a punishment, is simply a feedback mechanism, and manages to enhance the gameplay instead of detracting from it.

So the core gameplay works well for people who want to play some of the game, and see bits and pieces of it, but not bang their head against it for hours on end. What about those of us who want more? Here, too, the game provides a range of pleasing solutions. The most basic: the levels are collected into galaxies, and the main galaxies each have three paths in them. (Diverging almost from the start, but sharing at least themes in common.) On one of the paths, though, there are actually two stars, so you need to keep your eyes open for a place where you have two choices as to what to do. Often, you don’t have to keep your eyes very open—half the time, there’s somebody there offering to open up a path if you feed him star bits—but sometimes you have to look harder.

Which could suck if you had to look through all three paths to find which one contains a hidden route. Fortunately, you don’t have to: the game is happy to tell you which path contains the hidden route, so you can narrow your search. (If you don’t want to be given that hint, you also have that option; nice to be given that choice.)

Or what if you want to be given a harder challenge once you’ve proven yourself capable of beating a given star? There, too, the game has an answer: each of the fifteen key galaxies comes with one comet challenge, where you have to do some or all of a level you’ve played before, but with a new rule: maybe you have a time limit, maybe you can’t get hurt, maybe enemies are faster. All of which (well, almost all of which, the one full of top-like enemies annoyed me) are great examples of tough but fair level design: they’re hard, but when you fail, it’s your fault, you know that if you’d done some one thing a little better, you wouldn’t have died, and you’ve usually gotten an extra life somewhere along the path so dying doesn’t do you any permanent harm.

The best example of those are the purple comet levels: you also get one of those in each of the key galaxies. (They only open up once you’ve beaten the final Bowser level, so don’t wait too long before doing that.) In each of those levels, they give you a portion of one of your original paths, and strew it with purple coins; you have to get 100 of them. So the focus isn’t on, say, enemy/boss fights at all: it’s all about proving that you know your environment.

Which I fully support (and, if you don’t, that’s fine, they’re optional), but it turns out that there’s more to them than that. They start off with an introductory one where there are relatively obvious paths through the environment, and it’s easy to get all 100 coins. After that, though, the gloves are off. In some of them, the challenge is looking everywhere without missing anything or falling off the edge or getting hurt by the environment. (In particular, the ice level is a masterpiece in that sub-genre, with some remarkable jumps that you have to make to find them all; there’s nothing unfair about the level, but the challenges that it presents you with are wonderful.) And some force you to really learn your controls; in particular, there’s one jump in the ghost ship purple coin level that’s almost impossible to pull off.

Some are timed: one of the ones on a bee level has you going along an obvious path, but doing it without stopping at all. But, in the game’s commitment to fairness, not only are the coins all in fairly obvious places along that path, there are even bees at various checkpoints telling you “you should have 50 coins by now”, “you should have 70 coins by now”, etc. So you never have to worry about missing something: the level is about quickly going through it while picking up the coins, not about doing that except that you have to magically know that one extra one is hidden somewhere even though you don’t have time to search for it.

In three or four of the timed levels, you have a very short timer, but, to compensate, the level has 150 very tightly-packed coins, of which you only have to get 100. Those have their own joy: you have to frantically make your way through the environment, never pausing, always heading to the densest areas of remaining coins. Which could be a bit boring, but usually the environments are hazardous in some fashion, so you also have to not screw up while doing that. I wouldn’t have wanted every level to be that way (and, in particular, there was one of these that I probably died 50 times before I finished, without any easy access to extra lives), but having a few of them scattered in was a great capstone experience for that particular aspect of platforming challenge.

It’s really a remarkable game. It’s focused on a single gameplay theme, while working in an amazing variety of experiences around that theme. It gives a wonderful range of challenges, while never stooping to cheap tricks for “extending” replay. Because of its narrow genre focus, it’s not for everybody—shooter fans need not apply, for example—but it’s by far the best game so far on the Wii in any of the traditional genres.