malvasia bianca

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.

Picross is Nintendo’s name for a certain genre of picture logic puzzles. Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation, and it’s easy enough to find places where you can play them online (this site seemed like the best of the first page of search results): the game consists of a grid, together with a set of numbers for each row and column. Those numbers tell you how many squares in that row/column are filled in, and how they cluster, so if the numbers are, say, “4, 5″ then you know that there’s a set of four black squares, then one or more empty squares, then a set of five black squares. (Possibly with white space before the first set and/or after the last set.) The easiest example of how this helps is if you see one number that’s more than half the length of the row: if the row just contains an 8 and the row is 10 squares wide, then you don’t know exactly where the 8 goes (it could touch the left side, it could touch the right side, or it could leave one empty square on either side), but you know that, no matter what, the middle six squares are filled in.

Liesl and I had been doing these for years in Games magazine. (We also worked through most a book of them.) So, when they released Picross DS, I knew we had to get it. In particular, I was really curious how it would turn out on the DS; it seemed like a natural fit for the stylus interface.

At first, I wasn’t too impressed. It doesn’t have multiple save slots, in a blatant attempt to get people to buy multiple copies for their household. (The flip side is that it only costs $20, so even two copies don’t add up to much.) They’d advertised online features, including online competitive gameplay and new downloadable puzzles every week; I got connection failures when I first tried the former, and no puzzles were available for the latter. Puzzles are hardwired to play in either “normal” or “free” mode; in the former, you get told whenever you fill in a square that you shouldn’t, which I found fairly annoying. And the stylus controls don’t work well for puzzles larger than 10×10: you have to move around the puzzle instead of seeing it all at once.

But I kept on going, and soon none of that mattered. It has two control modes, and the D-pad + button version works just fine: you can see the whole grid at once, and it’s easier to mark squares as known to be empty in that control scheme. I let Liesl work puzzles first, and did a row of puzzles at a time; with that, it was easy enough for both of us to keep track of where we were. I still wish there were an option to do all puzzles in free mode, but I can deal. Downloadable content started appearing (every two weeks, though, not every week), and I even got in some online matches. Which turns out to be pleasantly different from the regular game: I treat the regular game as “prove that there’s a unique solution”, while on the online version you really have to go as fast as possible, so you can use things like symmetry and guesses about what the picture will look like.

And then the puzzles started to get nice and hard. They go up to 25×20, which is actually a bit much for me (not so much because of the difficulty but because of the increased amount of fiddly counting), but the hardest 20×20 puzzles were really something, and even the hardest 15×15 puzzles were quite good. Only a few of the puzzles were at the best difficulty level, but there’s a wide range that requires at least some thought, and I enjoy even the easy ones.

I’m not sure how much time I sunk into the game; it comes with about 400 puzzles, I’ve downloaded another 150 or so, and while there are a lot more that take only a couple of minutes than ones that take an hour, it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve spent 50 hours on the game, or even more. Add in Liesl’s time spent on it, and we may have gotten 100 hours of gameplay out of our $20 purchase; hard to beat that for value.

I wasn’t expecting a simple puzzle game to be the second best game I’ve played this year, but there you have it. (Hmm, maybe third best, and some other contenders may also force their way in over the next few days.) A perfect game for a portable system; you can pick it up and play it anywhere, for minutes or hours at a time.

My current spate of video game playing began in grad school when my friend Wayne gave me his old NES, together with Super Mario Bros.. If I’m remembering correctly, Jordan later found a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 at a yard scale, after which I was doomed to several years of platforming addiction. Not that they were the only NES games I played—I was rather fond of Solomon’s Key, and Jordan will be pleased to hear that Blades of Steel was just rereleased on the Virtual Console—but I sunk by far the most hours into the two SMB games. I loved running, jumping, and stomping my way through the levels; I loved the way the focus was on the level design, with combat largely there to keep you on your toes; I loved the way you could explore every nook and cranny of the levels and find hidden stuff; I loved it that, even when I died, I knew it was my fault, and if I just tried the level again (and sometimes again and again and again) and just, you know, didn’t screw up, I’d get past it eventually!

So, when I got a job offer, I celebrated by buying a Nintendo 64, and one of the first games I got for it was Super Mario 64. (It was temporarily out of stock, else it would have been the first N64 game I bought; that honor fell to Extreme-G instead.) And it was great! All the crazy jumping and lightweight combat that I liked, just in 3D, but there were these huge areas for you to explore, with stuff all over the place. In fact, the environmental design in some ways took even more pride of place in Super Mario 64 than in the 2D Mario games: there were goals (stars) for you to accomplish, should you choose, but, unlike the persistent forward drive of the 2D games, you could simply wander around the levels if you wished, just poking your nose in places and having fun. There wasn’t even a strict correspondence between levels and stars: each level was big enough to have six different stars in it. (Plus a seventh that you could get by collecting 100 coins.)

I was blown away, and I wasn’t the only one: this wasn’t just the natural evolution of the platforming genre, this way a statement about how 3D games should be made, with lessons for the entire industry in its transition to the first generation of consoles that could really support 3D gaming. I collected all 120 stars, and would happily have collected twice as many; fortunately, Rare released Banjo-Kazooie a few months later. (I didn’t buy an N64 until a year and a half after launch, so they’d had almost two years to learn the lessons from Super Mario 64.)

Again, I played straight through that one, collecting every puzzle piece, finding all 100 notes on each level, and so forth. Those notes are worth mention: one aspect of 2D platformers that turned out not to translate quite as well to 3D platformers is the “find a way to hit every block to uncover secrets” part of the gameplay. I’m not sure entirely why, but my guess is that, in a 2D world, it’s easy to have constricted areas with multiple levels, which means that it’s easy to place lots of blocks that you can jump up to hit. In a 3D world, however, you need many more open spaces, otherwise the camera can’t see anything; while they still have a lot of vertical exploration, they come more in the form of hills (perhaps with paths cut in the side), trees, or just mounds with no open space between. This means that you don’t have as much freedom to place blocks to break open; Banjo-Kazooie’s solution to this, which I think is as good as any, is to scatter 100 musical notes lying on the ground (or on hills or in trees or in caves or …) in each level. This is great for the game player who, like myself, wants to prove that he can explore every nook and cranny; if I can get all 100 on a single play through a level, I know I’ve mastered exploring that level. (I’d remembered that as unlocking a puzzle piece, but googling shows that I was wrong, so it really is quite optional.)

More platformers followed, but they didn’t have nearly the same spark for me. I finished them, but I didn’t track down every loose end, and they felt like a slog by the end. They kept the same core gameplay design; that was great the first couple of times, but it was getting stale. Levels got larger; at first, I thought this was a blessing, but at times it started to feel like a slog. Also, part of the core platformer tradition is giving your character access to a range of different abilities (the most prominent example of this being the suits in Super Mario Bros. 3); each new game experimented with new vehicles for delivering abilities, but none of them worked very well. (Rare was going through a “let the player switch between multiple characters” phase at this time, and Donkey Kong 64 showed that at its worst.)

The one shining bulwark against the rising tide of platformer mediocrity was Conker’s Bad Fur Day: it was one of the last games on the N64, and one of the best. The reasons, however, had nothing to do with the platforming gameplay, but rather had everything to do with the humor of the game. (And the pop culture references, though I probably didn’t get as much out of those as most people, since I basically hadn’t watched any new movies since moving to California.) The best example, one of my single favorite video game sequences of all time, is the “Great Mighty Poo” song; YouTube has this version with non-singing gameplay edited out, and this longer version without cuts. Please go watch one of them (warning: quite possibly NSFW) and come back. Basically, the main character in the game is a quite profane squirrel; I still laugh when I see a button described as “context-sensitive”, because of a sequence in that game involving such buttons after Conker’s been drinking rather heavily.

Conker was a glorious end to platformers on that generation of consoles, but there’s only so much that the industry could have taken from it as a model going forward. By this time, I was pretty burned out on the genre; in the next generation (Dreamcast/PS2/Gamecube/Xbox), I played almost none, and I don’t think I missed much. I did, of course, play Super Mario Sunshine, and it was pretty good, but nothing special: the core level design was solid, but the new gameplay mechanic wasn’t anything to write home about (in fact, in some ways, it weakened the traditional jumping mechanic), and I thought the “explore every nook and cranny” mechanism (blue coins) was actively annoying.

What’s going on here? The basic problem is that Super Mario 64 got so many things right that it’s hard to see what to do to incrementally improve on it. (Hmm, maybe I should spend more time thinking about lessons from completely different games with strong platforming elements, e.g. Shadow of the Colossus.) The idea of big, wide-open world that you can explore to your heart’s content is pretty compelling; Miranda has spent hours and hours over the last three or so years roaming through the environments of Super Mario Sunshine, not trying to get the stars at all, and she’s still not bored with it.

You can tweak this platforming/exploration design by adding new gameplay mechanics (which is inherently hit or miss, since jumping is always the core of platformer gameplay), you can make the worlds bigger (as happened every year), you can even stitch the worlds together so you have more one big world instead of a hub world that can magically transport you to other, distinct worlds. There’s a bit of the latter in Super Mario Sunshine, but to see where the idea of one big world leads you, it’s best to go outside of the genre entirely: if you stitch together all your worlds into one big world, keep the idea of multiple goals (”stars”) within this big world, and give up on the idea that the goals should have anything to do with jumping, then you’re led to the direction of GTA-style mission-based gameplay within a massive world. One of the biggest platformer series during the second 3D console generation was Jak and Daxter, on the PS2; by the time I got around to giving that series a try, in Jak 3, it was no longer a platformer, but had turned into a sort of GTA with furry animals and (much) less brutality.

So: was the platformer dead? Had we mined everything we could out of it, and had the time come for it to step aside and make way to the new genres that it had helped give birth to? I was wondering that myself, and I certainly wasn’t optimistic about Nintendo’s ability to do significantly advance the genre. (See my standard Nintendo review.) But then something funny happened: a year and a half, Nintendo released New Super Mario Bros. for the DS, bringing back old-school 2D platformer gameplay, and the world has lapped it up to the extent of more than 12 million copies sold. Which is a staggering amount of sales (significantly more than any Final Fantasy or Halo game, for example), and this for a game that brings nothing new to the table, just revives a genre (2D platformers) that’s been rather out of fashion for a while.

So maybe there’s more to be mined from 2D platformers than we’d seen? Let’s go back and re-envision how the genre might have transitioned differently to 3D. In particular, as we’ve seen above, wide open levels with multiple goals evolved into mission-based gameplay; this is, in retrospect, a significant departure from the linear, independent levels that 2D platformers had. So what if we went back to lots of linear levels, and made sure to turn up the jumping knob even further?

This is exactly what Super Mario Galaxy did, and carried it off extraordinarily well. I’ve seen people say that it’s the Super Mario Bros. 3 of the 3D platformer genre, and I don’t agree: SMB3 is an evolution of the original Super Mario Bros. design, while Galaxy goes back to the 2D roots of the genre and imagines a different way in which the gameplay might have evolved. Like Super Mario 64, it is divided up into a collection of worlds, each with multiple stars in them; unlike its predecessor, however, you go on a linear path to each star, and those linear paths diverge almost immediately after entering the world, sharing only marginally more context than the different levels on one world of SMB3 did.

And gone are the wide open spaces, which are largely incompatible with linear gameplay. The “galaxy” notion isn’t an arbitrary choice of setting in the way that Super Mario Sunshine happened to be set on an island: instead, the astronomical setting lets Nintendo create a level out of a sequence of planetoids. (Or other random surfaces - they’re happy to plunk a water slide with no means of support floating in the middle of nowhere.) On each planetoid, you run around and accomplish a sub-goal (sometimes just reach a location, but frequently you beat a monster or hit a block which triggers an event or any number of other things) which opens up a transportation mechanism to the next planetoid. So you’re still moving in a 3D world, but at the same time the gameplay is always along a clear path, driving you towards the star at the end of the level.

The galaxy setting also lets them turn up the platforming mechanics to insane heights. They felt absolutely unconstrained by logic when designing the planetoids; in particular, if they wanted to have, say, a huge mesa rising out of nowhere that you’d run around the outside of, platforming your way up, they would freely do so, giving a very good approximation of a traditional 2D platforming mechanic in a 3D world. But they also used gravity to great effect, having levels where different regions have gravity tugging you in different directions (up, down, left, right), or having traditional “moving platform” segments where, in addition to jumping to avoid obstacles, you could walk around to the bottom of the platform to avoid them.

I could go on to describe the game in more detail; I think I’ll leave that to a separate blog post. Suffice it to say that Nintendo/Miyamoto have revisited the genre’s roots, rethought some very basic decisions that they made in the initial transition to 3D, and ended up with a very convincing alternate notion of the core concept of a 3D platformer. In fact, it’s rather more convincing a translation of the genre than Super Mario 64 was, and, partly because of that, I think it will ultimately be significantly less influential.

In retrospect, Super Mario 64 was an explanation of how to design a general 3D game, and happened to do that in a fashion that involved a lot of platforming. Whereas Super Mario Galaxy is a platformer through and through; I love that genre, a lot of other people love that genre, but I don’t expect to see a thousand flowers bloom from it.

But one beautiful flower has bloomed, which is ultimately all I want out of a game.

Whenever I start a new Nintendo game in an established series, I do so assuming I’m going to be disappointed. Their core series made the leap brilliantly to 3D, opening up gameplay in ways that I’d never imagined. And then, with one idiosyncratic exception, Nintendo has mined that gameplay in subsequent installments, not adding anything to the mix. (Actually, I’m happy to say that there’s now a second exception, which I hope to have time to write more about soon.) The resulting games aren’t bad; they’re building off of extremely solid core gameplay, and they’re not doing anything to actively screw it up. They just don’t have the freshness of the originals, or of the best of other recent games.

Which brings me to Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Any new ideas here? Are they, perhaps, doing something interesting with the Wii?

The answer: no, not really. It’s a good game, I’m happy to have played it; in fact, I ended up with a better feeling about it than its predecessor. I’m not an FPS connoisseur, but the controls seemed good to me: I could aim where I wanted, I could turn reasonably freely, my hand didn’t get excessively tired from having to stay pointed within a fairly small region of the screen (unless I wanted to turn). (And yes, I do realize that the game, while in the first person and involving shooting, isn’t best described as an FPS: I’m just talking about (part of) the control scheme, not the gameplay structure.)

Hmm, other than the controls, what else is there to say, given its predecessors? You go to different worlds instead of different areas of the same world; okay, but it doesn’t make any real difference. The scanning is starting to get to me, especially at the start of the game. I still like searching through the environments enough to revisit them once, trying to get power-ups, after I’ve leveled up fully. Nice that the different beams stack their powers on top of each other, removing the need to switch between them. Ship commands are kind of silly, but not actively offensive.

As I increasingly prefer in my old age, it’s pleasantly easy. Gone are the days when I have the time or desire to devote dozens of hours to master most games, especially games that make it actively difficult to do so; while I gave up its predecessor in disgust at the final boss battle, I had no such problem with this game. I had to fight some of the bosses two or three times, but I always felt that I was learning something, and just as frequently I beat them the first time on my last energy tank, with a pleasant sense of accomplishment. Hmm, now that I think about it, its predecessor’s bosses weren’t bad except for the last one, and in this game as well they committed the same structural flaw of having your last fight go too long without a save opportunity; it would have been better if they’d fixed that flaw instead of addressing the problem by making the last boss a bit of a pushover, but I’ll take what they ended up with.

As always when I write this sort of review, I feel guilty at the end. Really, it’s a good game; really, if you haven’t played another 3D Metroid game, you should give something in the series a try, and this one is a good choice. And even though I wish I were seeing more new, I’m glad to have invested 15 hours (or however much it was; a good choice of length, incidentally) of my life in playing it. In fact, I really should go give Super Metroid a try, now that it’s been released on the Virtual Console; if only there weren’t so many allegedly great games out this fall…

Over the months of reading server usage states for the blog, I have noticed that many of the search results that bring people here include the word “bianca”. Hmm, I thought, I didn’t recall writing about “bianca red latex”. Is Bianca some character in a video game that I wrote about but have since forgotten?

It only dawned on me this weekend that the frequency of the word comes from the title of the blog. I am slow at times.

Though that did get me thinking: I should have an Xbox 360 arriving tomorrow, I plan to sign up for Xbox Live, so I will need a gamertag. (I believe that’s what account names for the service are called.) I normally use names that are relatively closely aligned with my real name, but I assume said service is popular enough that carlton, dbcarlton, etc. will be taken. But surely nobody has taken “malvasia bianca” as a gamertag? The idea of using a female-associated name on the service (which is apparently full of sexist, bigoted assholes) has a certain sick interest.

Not that I plan to play multiplayer much, if any.

To all you Wii owners, I add my voice to the chorus of recommendations for Zack & Wiki. I’m not sure whether to call it a point-and-click adventure game or a puzzle game: it’s a sequence of set pieces all revolving around manipulating your environment to get to where you can open a treasure chest. Say you, for example, see a chest behind a door surrounded by bad guys. If you just go down there, you’ll die, so you go around the side passages until, say, you find an item that you can use to distract them. But the door is locked; you need a key. Oh, there’s a key hanging from a peg that you can’t reach; can you find an item that will let you reach up there?

The pointing and clicking to move and examine is, of course, done with the wiimote. But using items is also done with the wiimote, and is one of the better uses of its motion sensing: you hold the remote like would hold the actual item, and turn it or shake it or flip it or whatever to cause the item to do what you want.

We’re all playing; the puzzles are usually too hard for Miranda to figure out completely on her own, but she likes watching us and giving us suggestions, and then replaying the levels on her own later. I suspect that the levels will soon be hard enough that Liesl and I won’t be able to solve them independently, and will need to both work together to solve some of the tougher ones.

Something new, and the game isn’t getting nearly the publicity or shelf space of some other titles, so I wanted to help spread the word. It’s even a bit cheaper than your typical game.

• xkcd:
• One person, one vote in the Texas legislature: (Via Lawrence Lessig.)
• Starlings flocking; it starts to get good at about 2:00, though if that’s not good enough for you, go to 3:20. (Via Cosmic Variance.)
• Weird Hand-Drawn Game certainly qualifies on the first two counts… (Via Game|Life.)
• I don’t have much to say about The Wealth of Networks, other than to second Lawrence Lessig’s recommendation and to say that it’s useful to be reminded that, from the point of view of mainstream economy taking a snapshot of one isolated state the market, copyright makes no sense. (The book is available for free, by the way.)
• Synesthesia meets color blindness.

Also, some notes to myself: these are links that have stuck around as saved items in my blog reader where I can’t imagine what will either trigger me to act on the information therein yet where I want to keep them around somewhere. So I’m moving them here.

• Ergonomic keyboard recommendations.
• Martin Fowler on board games.
• Zelda reorchestrated. (Via Opposable Thumbs.)
• OpenID notes.

I essentially finished Brain Buster Puzzle Pak some time towards the end of the summer. I’d finished all the built-in levels for the puzzles that I cared about; it has a random puzzle generator, though, which I wanted to explore more. But I never got around to doing that, and then I looked for it last week, and couldn’t find it! Annoying because, if those random puzzles are good (which they were in my brief experience), it’s actually a perfect game for having available at odd moments. Not sure if I like it enough to buy another copy, but I’m considering it. (If I can even find another copy; Amazon for one doesn’t carry the game.)

Enough blathering: I suppose I should tell you what the game is. As you might suspect from the title, it’s a collection of puzzle games. (Of the pen-and-pencil variety as opposed to, say, the falling blocks variety.) It has five types of puzzles in it: Sudoku, Kakuro, Nurikabe, Light On, and Slitherlink.

The sudoku interface is crap, at least compared to the interface in Brain Age. (Or, for that matter, the interface in a random physical book of sudoku puzzles.) And I don’t particularly like kakuro. So I gave up on those puzzles ten or twenty into them, and only made it that far because the initial puzzles were so mindnumbingly easy.

The other puzzle variants, however, were much better. I’d seen nurikabe and slitherlink before; they’re both pleasantly geometric (or perhaps topological would be a more appropriate adjective?), and have a completely different feel to me than most other puzzle types that I’m aware of. (Masyu is another example of that; a pity there aren’t any examples here.) Nurikabe is actually the reason why I’m currently subscribed to Games magazine: before a trip a few years ago, I picked up a copy to go through on the plane, and they had some really fun nurikabe puzzles. Of course, not all puzzle makers are of equal quality, but the ones in Games magazine and the ones in this game are both by Nikoli, and they definitely know their stuff.

So: good puzzles. The DS screen is only so large, and they decided to avoid scrolling, which meant that there weren’t any enormous nurikabe puzzles that take an hour to solve. I can live with that. The slitherlink puzzles were actually done on a grid that was a bit too small, so it occasionally read me as trying to draw a line somewhere other than where I intended; annoying, but I could deal. I’d never seen light up before; it’s a pleasant genre, though all the puzzles that were included were basically trivial, which makes me suspect that it’s impossible to make difficult light up puzzles unless you’re working on a larger grid.

And, in my brief experience, the randomly generated light up puzzles were good, too. I didn’t get around to trying the randomly generated nurikabe or slitherlink puzzles before I lost my copy of the game, unfortunately.

I recommend the game, and Liesl enjoyed it as well. Having said that, if you’re only going to get one DS puzzle game, then Picross is the one you want: Liesl is sitting to my left playing it right now, and it is insanely addictive. But this is good, too; writing this review, I want more of those puzzles to work through! Hmm, I was thinking of doing an order from Amazon Japan soon; I should throw in some of Nikoli’s puzzle books…