61 Frames Per Second : whatcha playing

Whatcha Playing: Earth Day Edition

Derrick Sanskrit — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

April 22nd, the day we all take off from work and gather at our local mosques and synagogues to solemnly pay respects to our mother Earth on the anniversary of her creation... or something. So do your part and take your game time today away from blasting zombies and chainsawing aliens in half, instead playing games all about helping mother Earth. Here are the four games that I'm playing for Earth Day:

Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol for Nintendo DS

Rather than cleaning up a house and helping with domestic troubles, this Chibi-Robo has been tasked with turning a barren field of sand into a lush flourishing public park. Like SimCity, you get to design your own world, laying paths and streams, rocks and hills, even benches, fountains, clock towers, statues, and mini-games to your liking. The nicer your park, the more visitors it gets each day. You also have to befriend local toys (including Molly Mapletree, seen above) to help you build up your park and battle smoglings who aim to pollute all the beautiful nature you've brought to the park, but the majority of gameplay is planting flowers. It's actually a lot more fun than it sounds, thanks to the charm and playfulness found in all Skip-developed Nintendo games.

Flower for Playstation 3

Nature is so relaxing for those first few levels, but the final stage really flaunts the nature vs. man-made-atrocities vibe. It's vindicating to smash your trail of flower petals straight through scaffolding and watch a child's swing-set color itself and start swinging in the wind. My only problem with this for Earth Day is that it romanticizes the wind more than the flowers. Playing Flower makes me want to go ride a bike, not water a tree. Still, at least it's prompting me to go outside.

Bonsai Barber for Nintendo Wii

This WiiWare title asks you to be kind to nature in a very different way, by playing the neighborhood barber in a village of anthropomorphic plants. Yes, it's a cute and quirky little topiary simulation. The adorable factor in this game is fairly high without ever becoming sugary sweet, and seeing your shrubbery clientele bristle with joy when you've completed their new 'dos might just make you want to go outside and trim those hedges.

Pixeljunk Eden for Sony Playstation 3

If the above games are a bit too casual and cutesy for you, though, here's a true hardcore platformer. While a bit more abstract, the main focus of the game is pollinating flowers. You essentially play as a spider who thinks it's a bee who has done some psychadelic drugs in the garden. Through the techno and bright colors, the message is clear: more flowers = more awesome.

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Whatcha Playing: GTI Club+

Joe Keiser — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Did everyone miss this little racing gem when it came out a earlier this year? I know I did, and that’s a shame—but not as shameful as the fact that I missed the original game when it game out 12 years ago. I’m pretty sure I’ve never even seen the cabinet, and I spent a lot of time in arcades in 1996. Maybe GTI Club was a Euro-specific thing?

Whatever. It’s mine now.

The original GTI Club came from the era that was undeniably the heyday of arcade racers, when titles like Daytona and Sega Rally were filling arcade goer’s fields of vision with hairpin turns and sunlit vistas. It’s a time period that’s not very well cataloged—major titles in the genre, like Daytona 2 and, until now, GTI Club, have never gotten home conversions of any sort. It’s sad because these games are not like today’s racing games, with all their twitch or slavish devotion to realism. Mid-90s arcade racers offer a specific mix of mechanical precision and simplified physics, and are uniquely satisfying in their sense of control.

The heart of this era beats in GTI Club+, and I could feel its pulse even though I had never played the original before. It turns out that GTI Club is actually a very nice example of the genre, and the remake retains the classic-feeling mechanics while augmenting the aesthetics to create a reasonable facsimile of what it must have felt like to play GTI Club in 1996. It’s a gorgeous, simple, three-minute romp through a beautiful beachside town in a tiny European car.

Most reviewers have said it’s only worthwhile if you remember the game, but that’s not quite true. This game is emblematic of a sort of game that isn’t really done anymore, and if you like that sort of game this is pretty much your only modern option. It feels as if it’s as loving a remake as Bionic Commando: Rearmed, and it’s a shame that more people haven’t picked up on its charms.

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Whatcha Playing: Dungeon Maker II

Joe Keiser — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

These days my launch PSP is held together by masking tape, spit, and prayer. But it does work (for now), and I’m trying to get to know it a little bit better before it inevitably decomposes into its constituent parts. The game of the hour is Dungeon Maker II: The Hidden War, a title from last Christmas that was roundly ignored by all humans.

To be fair, it’s a bit of a minor effort. It’s low budget, free of any and all flashiness, and doesn’t have a lick of polish. But it’s also curiously addictive, so it provides a nice contrast to the modern AAA titles that hide their mechanics deep under pixel shaders and mocap animation. Dungeon Maker II is a throwback: like the low-tech games of yore, its mechanics sit exposed and naked under the nose of the player, and so have to be compelling on their own.

A dungeon crawler at heart, you can probably glean the twist that makes the game worth playing from its title. Dungeon Maker II’s conceit is that you are a warrior-architect. Your goal is to build a luxurious dungeon that will attract monsters to its depths, because when monsters are in dungeons they’re not annoying people in the streets. It’s more or less Diablo, except instead of a randomly generated dungeon you’re traversing a constantly repopulating lair of your own design. It’s a trade-off of a sense of exploration for a sense of ownership (though there are still some computer-generated spaces for when your own space makes you stir-crazy), and gives the game a charm all its own.

It’s also a simply implemented twist—dungeons are graph paper dungeons, two-dimensional and all right angles, but that makes them intuitive to set up. The graphics are plain as is technically possible, but are iconic so it’s easy to get on with the building/slaying/loot gathering aspects that will keep you playing. Combat is…clunky and mechanical, but it gets the job done. There’s no excuse for the music, though, so you should mute that.

So the game has lots of edges, and none of them were smoothed off. It gives a lot in return, though. In just a few hours, you’ll have a cavernous self-built play space that you feel a strong connection to. The game drops loot frequently and with significant variety, which you can bring to town (again, a work of minimalism—it’s a single, hand-painted screen) to trade for a constantly growing array of spells, cooking ingredients, and exotic dungeon rooms.

Dungeon Maker II is not shy about its grind cycle. This is a game where every gear is exposed, a game so plain and unpretentious that its closest technical relative might be NetHack. And yet after a game like Star Ocean: The Last Hope, little, obsolete Dungeon Maker II feels refreshingly straightforward.

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Whatcha Playing: Tappable Rhythm Sequels

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

I love a good rhythm game, but Guitar Hero and Rock Band have always felt forced to me. Holding a plastic representation of the object I'm simulating using just feels awkward to me (the same reason I've not enjoyed my few sessions with Mario Kart Wii so far). PaRappa The Rapper and Dance Dance Revolution really did it right, making a game out of the music rather than a simulation. My favorite, as I've mentioned before, is Rhythm Tengoku, the Japan-only Gameboy Advance cart from the WarioWare team that's all about keeping the beat in a series of wild and hilarious cartoon scenarios.

It dawned on me the other day that Rhythm Tengoku's DS sequel is finally being released in the west next month as Rhythm Heaven and that it may very well be a deservedly huge hit for Nintendo. I brushed off my nearly year-old import copy last week for a refresher. I was joyously reminded of how addictive and utterly charming the game is. Using the touch screen to tap, hold, and flick isn't quite as precise as the original's button taps, but very few of the games suffer as a result. The all-Japanese text is a bit more daunting this time as they're most likely describing what you should do on the touch screen and you have to use trial and error to figure out what to do when, but I still managed to make my way straight on through the end credits without frustration. In fact, I didn't think it possible, but I find the DS version much more lighthearted and playful than the GBA game. Only one minigame returns for the sequel, the rest are all new with new characters, and it's hard not to have your heart warmed by some of them. Every time I do the mating dance with the little lizard-with-a-maraca-for-a-tail, its warm, approving chirps actually make me fall in love with it just a little.

I've also been pretty fond of Tap Tap Revenge 2 on my iPod Touch since its release a week and a half ago. The engine is overhauled and much improved since the original, which was little more than a touch screen Guitar Hero. There are local and online competitive play and achievement-like rewards, but the truly fantastic feature that keeps me playing is the licensed downloadable songs. The basic game comes with three tracks: Death Cab For Cutie's "the Sound of Settling," a world premiere of the Crystal Method's new single "Double Down Under," and a brand-new exclusive theme song from Stroke 9 (remember them?), the surprisingly awesome "Tap Tap DomiNation". As with all music games, most of the downloadable tracks are stuff I don't care about nor do I even want to try, but there are a few that caught my interest. Daft Punk's "Technologic" is a must. Breakbot's remix of Fatlip's now-legendary "What's Up, Fatlip?" is synthetic bliss. Tap Tap Revenge even had another world-premiere last week with The Prodigy's new single "Omen". Weekly updates promise a smooth stream of new material, and the casual affair is well worth the price of admission for a free application with free song downloads. I'll never be truly satisfied, though, until these games start bringing in more Professor Murder, His Name is Alive and B-52s, but hey, that's what the rest of my iPod is for.

So basically I'm spending my daily commute looking at bright colors and tapping on touch screens to catchy music. Ain't technology grand? And to think, now we've got Bit.Trip Beat at home to keep the rhythm going...

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NYCC 2009 - Comic Authors Love Video Games!

Derrick Sanskrit — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Have you ever felt awkward going to a party-like event filled with people from your old job? Will they remember you? Will they harbor negative feelings for your leaving? Will you just cling to the wall drinking punch all night hoping nobody sees you? This is something I worried about going into New York Comic-Con, as I am no longer a member of "team comics" the way I had so actively advocated for years. I was there to look at video games, encircled by the comic book professionals I'd surrounded myself with for years.

My fears were for naught, of course, as the majority of the professionals and press I ran into over the weekend both remembered and embraced me. I even asked six of my favorite comic creators, all of whom I knew to be avid gamers, to take part in the following video. They were asked three simple questions: What are you playing now? What are your favorite "classic" games? What is your all-time favorite power-up? The answers ranged from the expected to the somewhat hilarious. Please, watch and enjoy:

Special thanks to Dave Roman, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Andrew Bell, Matt Loux, Jacob Chabot, and Jared Gniewek. I count myself lucky to consider at least half of you to be my friends, and the others are awesome dudes as well. Let's do karaoke sometime.

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Whatcha Playing: Cute Is The New Hardcore

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

My DS Lite has been booked solid lately. Three new releases have been keeping me very busy: Konami's Elebits: The Adventures of Kai and Zero, South Peak's Big Bang Mini, and Atari's The Chase: Felix Meets Felicity. All three are wildly different games, all three have beautiful graphics that will unfortunately be labelled as "cute" and therefore "for the kids", and all three are a lot deeper than they initially look, gameplay-wise.

Elebits is a direct-sequel to the early Wii title, which served as a much more impressive tech demo than Wii Play ever did and maybe even paved the way for the currently anticipated Ghostbusters video game. Kai and Zero plays more like the handheld Zeldas, though, with a top-down view and a lot of environmental puzzle solving. Omega Elebits allow you to burn barriers, create ice bridges, dig holes, see invisible platforms and more. They're essentially Link's weapons in Zelda, only they look like Pokémon. Boss battles are short but vaguely awesome, though one of the most compelling aspects of gameplay is what should be the most monotonous – the collection of basic elebits hiding everwhere in the environment. Release, then tap as many wild elebits on the touch-screen as you can before your timer runs down, then touch your partner omega to capture them. Larger chains create bigger bonuses, and it's fun to try to catch more than twelve elebits at once before they scurry off to hide again.

Big Bang Mini is a globe-trotting shooter based around fireworks, and each of the game's nine locales offers unique power-ups and challenges. Kamakura's walls close in on you the longer you go without destroying a target and the Abyss requires you to grab oxygen bubbles and avoid hitting the instant-kill mines (the first time I've ever been made to play a shooter slowly and with such a relaxed precision) while horizontal strokes in Luxor bounce enemy attacks back at them and vertical strokes in Paris freeze time. The visual package is completely overhauled for each new city, and every stage ends with a Bonus Zone that somehow manages to turn connect-the-dots into a fun and challenging mini-game. Yes, it's totally connect-the-dots-TO-THE-MAX with a whole new set of obstacles in each city.

And then there's The Chase: Felix Meets Felicity, decidedly the most adorable looking of the batch. It is also the most f'ing brutal. Yes, its a cute story about a boy and girl meeting up for their first date, but mostly it's an unforgiving witch of speed run platform madness. Go down a dead end and risk certain death turning around as there is a Dino Rush-like thunderstorm of world-destroying devestation hot on your trail. Run out of lives and use some of your precious collected coins to buy a continue. Run out of coins and its game over, back to the start, and you can't replay levels until you've unlocked Score Attack mode, meaning you're always stuck battling traffic demons in the stage more difficult than the one you last completed until you beat the game or start anew. And even if you cleared a stage and made great time, if you didn't collect enough flowers, do enough flips and/or knock over enough other guys to raise your heart/star level, the game will still grade you as "rubbish" (and yeah, the game's text is decidedly British for that added sense of snark). The Chase's aesthetics completely betray what an monumentally challenging game it is.

So yeah, I've been spending alot of time getting really quite hostile at my DS for all the right reasons. It's a good time to be a DS gamer looking for excitement and challenge, just as long as you're not afraid of bright colors and sweetness.

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Whatcha Playing?: Okami

Cole Stryker — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

I finally got around to playing Okami on the Wii this week. I really wanted to enjoy the game, but it's difficult for me to get past all the collecting and endless NPC conversations that drag down the pace of the game. It seems that the only complaint most critics had with the Wii version is its poorly implemented Celestial Brush controls. Sure these are annoying, but I think that they are far from the game's cardinal sin.

It's basically a Zelda game, for better and for worse. It looks great. The world is a joy to traverse, and the ancient oriental flourishes are a welcome change of pace from the usual medieval sword and sorcery. It's a stylistic triumph.

The thing I hate most about action-adventure games is the impulse that the developers have to litter the game's environment with collectables. It's repetitious and it prevents me from enjoying the beautiful surroundings. Just once I'd like to pass through a forest without having to dig up medallions, shake fruit out of trees, or cut through grass in order to collect butterflies or beetles or some other meaningless token. It's lazy game design. I'd much rather play a game half as long if it were stripped of the mundane.

The other drawback is a bevy of bloated dialogue. Fortunately most of it is skippable, but it would have been even better to eliminate the player's annoying sidekick who serves to state the obvious constantly.

Why can't more 3D adventure games be like Cave Story?

Whatcha Playing: FusionFall

Nadia Oxford — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 04:53:00 GMT

Yeah, uh, I'm only playing this for work-related purposes.

I...I...

I'm still cool.

Actually, FusionFall has received a lot of hype, and there's quite a bit of charm to it. Worried parents wonder if Cartoon Network's MMORPG is merely another name for Billy's Gateway World of Warcraft Addiction, but there are some interesting speed bumps that are in place to keep kids from descending down the vortex in its entirety. Levelling up occurs through the completion of missions, not hours of grinding, and your rewards actually lessen if you log several consecutive hours of gameplay.

These restrictions serve well as wake-ups for enraptured children who will hopefully realise that it's a good idea to go outside and play once the cow has been milked dry. It's probably not foolproof, though. Who wants to stop when they're with their friends, giving evil what for? It's still up to the parents to pull the game when their kids' eyes start turning into squares. Pity the poor hand-wringing adults: the thought of having to administer some means of discipline on their children will send many of them scrambling for their stationary so they can re-direct their energies into writing a blame piece for Scare Weekly.

It's too bad, because I believe FusionFall might serve well as an introduction to MMORPGs. The game is marketed to kids eight through 14. The missions needed to level up aren't overwhelming, as the game in its entirety is meant to be played in quick intervals. The monthly subscription fee is cheap ($5.95), you tailor your own costume suited for a post-apocalyptic battleground and you basically let loose in a low-stress environment where nobody compares the size of your sword to theirs. It's better to learn to respect the MMORPG environment through an age-appropriate game than to just be thrown head-first into Warcraft.

It's also just kind of cool to explore the Cartoon Network schedule come to life. FusionFall's biggest disappointment is that the art style has been homogenised, and interesting-looking characters like Dexter look like they've come off Generic Anime Template #475. It's not so bad, though. I can finally meet Samurai Jack and ask him if he got that love sonnet I wrote for him in 2005.

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Whatcha Playing: Feintly Familiar

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Way back in the summer, when the iTunes App Store officially launched, iPhone owners were inundated with hundreds of sloppy applications and poorly constructed games. It was understandable, very few platforms have quality applications so early in their lifespan. There were a few surprisingly solid apps, though, that found their supportive base. One of the first games to really endear itself to JesusPhone users was Aurora Feint: The Beginning.

Here's the high-concept: the match-three puzzle play of Nintendo's Puzzle League plus the RPG character-building of Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords with touch and tilt controls thrown in. If that sounds deliciously addictive to you, you're right.

I'd read about Aurora Feint months ago, but I only got around to downloading it and playing around with it this past weekend. As a big fan of both of the above mentioned puzzlers, Aurora Feint instantly had me hooked. In order to fit your finger, the play field is smaller than that of Puzzle League, so it's a bit harder to pull of massive chains and combos. It also doesn't have the competative head-to-head aspect of either "Puzzle" game. What it does have is compelling casual fun. Just playing in "The Mine" (essentially "Endless" mode) allows you to level up, increasing the number of magicbooks and blueprints available in the "store". Blueprints are taken to the Smith and turned into time attack challenges to introduce special item tiles into the playfield and magicbooks open limited-move puzzles (exactly like Puzzle League's "Puzzle" mode) that multiply the resources collected for each colored tile.

For fans of action puzzlers like Tetris, Puzzle League and Rotohex, Aurora Feint is very likely to please. The Beginning is a great place to start, especially as its free. That's right, pay nothing. If you like that enough, there are three versions of Aurora Feint II now available on the App Store with improved graphics and new features. The biggest of the bunch, The Arena, includes new character classes, online leaderboards, online chat and offline dueling (which really seems essential, considering the atmosphere of the game as a feudal sorcery RPG), but that version will set you back eight bucks. Thankfully, you can transfer your built-up character from Aurora Feint: The Beginning over to The Arena, so your time grinding away in the freeware version won't be wasted if you upgrade.

Previously:
Myst III: Exile
Persona, Fallout, and the Trans-Pacific RPG Ideal
Holiday Blessings... and Curses
On The Road Again
Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

Whatcha Playing: Myst III: Exile

Cole Stryker — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:00:00 GMT

So, I'm still home for the holidays and I found this 4-disc baby lying around. Since I never actually played it after picking it up for $3 at a used bookstore, and since it's the only thing around that will run on my mom's Compaq Presario, I've "linked" back into the world of D'ni.

Exile excells in it's presentation. I've always felt that the Myst games were some of the best examples of an original art style. The blend of natural, primitive settings and cyberpunkish machinery is still enough to elicit dropped jaws, even today. Similarly, the score is among the medium's best, with new-agey instrumentals enhancing ambient sounds like dewdrops hitting puddles and wind whistling through rocky coves.

Maybe it's because my brain has grown soft and sluggish from party games and FPS's, but I found this game infuriatingly obtuse. I had to close out of it on many occasions to check my Youtube walkthrough. Yet, I think a lot of it has to do with the confusing environments that encourage players to click on every pixel to ensure that we're not missing something.

Whatcha Playing: Persona, Fallout, and the Trans-Pacific RPG Ideal

John Constantine — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Somewhere, probably not too far from Hawaii, the perfect role-playing game is waiting to be discovered. A volatile, volcanic outcropping boiling over with an expert blend of relatable, colorful characters, deep, directed narrative, and open, exploration-rich adventuring, alongside intimidatingly deep avatar customization. Its game world is both fantastic and hyper-real, vast yet structured enough to inexplicitly guide the player along scaling challenges.

Alright, I’m kidding. I know this game isn’t real. Of course it isn’t. But after the past couple of weeks, I sincerely wish it was.

It’s been a very long time since I last took a two week vacation, and even longer since I took one where I played so few games. It was strange that I spent so few hours with a controller in hand, especially considering what I was playing when I fired up one of the boxes. Coupling Persona 4 and Fallout 3 as your outlets for digital shenanigans might seem like a recipe for life-threatening anti-social tendencies, but I managed to keep things in check, a couple of hours here and there for each game. But now that my vacation’s over and I’ve barely dented either, I almost wish they could be a single game. I wish they could be that mythical mid-Pacific island I just described.

This is the first time I’ve ever played a Japanese RPG and a Western, D&D-style RPG simultaneously. Detailing the differences between the two styles of game is a like pointing at the moon. They’re flat-out different genres. Heather Campbell of Play said it best: JRPGs are a story that’s told to you, whereas WRPGs are a world that you investigate. But why is it that, with East and West borrowing and imitating one another so frequently in the past decade of game design, no game has successfully made an RPG that marries the best bits of both into a single game? Why can’t I have the freedom of Fallout 3 but also the cast of characters with rich personalities and stories of their own that I get in Persona?

There are great games that have come very close to pulling this off. Bioware RPGs, particularly Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, effectively marry the directed narrative of JRPGs with the customizability and freedom of your average Elder Scrolls adventure, but even those suffer from extreme linearity. You can choose whatever you want to do next, but eventually you have to go to the one planet/town to go any further, and there’s no masking the inevitability of that choice. (The same can be said of Peter Molynuex’s Fable and its sequel, but those games are concerned with their own sort of freedom and narrative.)

Strangely enough, I think the makings of a model blend of Eastern-aesthetic and Western-mechanic can be found in Quest for Glory II and III. Those games are less classic adventure than they are role-playing games, asking you to constantly solve moral quandaries that will affect a plethora of very well-defined characters in unreal yet familiar landscapes. Maybe some development team will look at those games again and see an opportunity to offer RPG fans something altogether new. In the meantime, I’m off for some more post-apocalyptic roaming and high school classes. See y’all in a couple of months when I re-emerge.

Related links:

Whatcha Not Playing: Persona 4
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For Love of the Game: Quest for Glory II
Screen Test: Fallout 3

Whatcha Playing: Holiday Blessings…and Curses

Joe Keiser — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

A few days before we each make the traditional pilgrimage to our ancestral homes, my gaming friends and I take an evening to party and exchange an assortment of strange and geeky presents. It’s always a good time, but even more so because we all leave with bags full of eclectic goodies we wouldn’t have sought out ourselves.

I left the event cradling many wonderful things in my arms, including a Penny Arcade print, an Aperture Science poster pack, and a quaffable bottle of golden rum. Of course, there were also some games in there. My friends know that I revel in the best and the worst of the medium, and so apparently colluded to give me a selection from each end of this vast spectrum.

From the side cast in beauty and light I received Valkyria Chronicles, the critically acclaimed retail failure from Sega’s talented Overworks team. I really feel for these guys; the last time they got to flex their creative muscles they made Skies of Arcadia, my favorite non-taxi oriented Dreamcast game. Then the Dreamcast died, so they got to remake that cult classic—exclusively for the third place GameCube. And now, with Valkyria Chronicles, they’ve gotten to make another gorgeous, innovative, and apparently beloved game—exclusively for the third place PS3. For the holidays, the Sega home office should gift these guys an Xbox 360 development kit and a blank check.

From the malignant, reprehensible side of the medium came Jumper: Griffin’s Story. Now, I was not given the current-gen version of the game, the one that trades your pain for achievement points. No, I got the Wii version, a completely different and even worse (at least, I think it’s even worse—the majority of the internet was too scared to find out for itself) game that takes your pound of flesh and gives you nothing in return. Keep in mind that this was the flagship product from Brash, the licensed game publisher that imploded when (among other reasons) it couldn’t even live up to the low bar of its chosen niche. This game should pair nicely with that bottle of rum.

Now thanks to the aforementioned pilgrimage I won’t be able to actually play these games over the holiday hiatus—though when I do get to them you will be the first to know. After the jump is the holiday travel pack that will sustain me in the last days of 2008.

My first job is to finish Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, a game I’m currently gritting my teeth to get through. It’s not that it’s bad, because it absolutely isn’t. Rather it’s the weight of playing one of these a year, every year, since Harmony of Dissonance in 2002, that’s finally getting to me. I think the Symphony blueprint is finally exhausted, though Konami can probably get away with one more of these before popular opinion agrees. The pressure to get this franchise right in 3D is building.

After that, I have two options. I could join my fellow bloggers in the Dragon Quest IV love-in and fill my days with cute slimes, fat merchants, and well-worn RPG tradition. Or I could dig in to Dungeon Maker II, a game that was entirely ignored by everyone on account of being a recent PSP release—I know, I thought those were mythical too. Reviews for this are sparse, making it a risky, unknown quality. But then, I do love to live dangerously.

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Indie Dev Moment: Hunted Forever

Cole Stryker — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I wrote about Time magazine's Top 10 Video Games of 2008. One of the games they listed was a free flash game that I had never heard of called Hunted Forever. I spent a little time with the game last night, and found to to occupy a nice little crevice between Metanet Software's N and Pixeljam's Dino Run.

In N, the player employs all manner of gymanstics to get from one point on the map to another, collecting bits and bobs along the way. In Dino Run, the player runs from left to right as quickly as possible, avoiding obstacles as your little velociraptor attempts to escape a wall of volcanic doom.

In Hunted Forever, your dude runs around the map, avoiding an everpresent, laser-spitting, bomb-belching machine. You can run, but you can't hide, making for a consistently thrilling, if brief, adventure. With slick design and a good sense of humor, Hunted Forever surely belongs on a list of the year's best free games, though I don't think I'd go as far as placing it on a year-end list. Nice to see some indie love, though. Go play it.

Whatcha Playing: On the Road Again

John Constantine — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:15:00 GMT

Wherein travelling inevitably leads to thinking about Zelda, the nature of game linearity and unskippable passive sequences in games.

Five men in their late 20s are heading south on route 80 through New Jersey in a white Dodge Caravan. They listen to loud music and discuss plans for the weekend ahead of them. Before too long, they pass signs for a town called Hibernia. As they are a group raised on far, far too many videogames, the fanciful name of what is likely a small, simple town full of good, honest folk quickly transforms it into a land of adventure, intrigue and obnoxious obligation.

“Ho stranger! You have stopped for gasoline in Hibernia? I would love to give you some, but first you must travel beyond the woods and acquire a ruffled dragoon feather. I need them to make gasoline!”

“Hey! Hey! Have you tried pressing Z to look at signs? Press A to read signs! Hey!”

“You must equip a sword and a shield before you can leave the car. Who would leave the car without a sword and a shield?”

Yes, even something as an innocuous as a roadtrip leads to making fun of Zelda, and by proxy, every other videogame that makes you engage in a string of needless bullshit before letting you actually play. After we got the jokes out of our systems, we did start talking about how, when the itch arises, we all love going back and replaying past Zeldas, but have almost no desire to replay any of the 3D games any time soon. Everyone in the van has affection for Ocarina and Wind Waker – Opinions on Majora’s Mask vary. Personally, I find it to be a freaking chore to play, no matter how creative. Twilight Princess, we agreed, feels like actually doing chores when you play it. – but the prospect of wading through a never ending stream of unskippable conversations makes returning to these games unsavory. The constant handholding is bad enough, even without taking five minutes to listen to some owl made of triangles rant about a mountain, finally getting through the diatribe, and accidentally asking him to repeat himself.

The conversation was oddly prescient. I started playing the DS remake of Final Fantasy IV for the first time shortly after everyone settled into the drive. I enjoyed the Final Fantasy III remake two years back, and was ready to see what IV had to offer. After the ever-familiar Red Wings assault on Mysidia, Cecil’s sad departure from Baron, his introduction to Rydia and sad exile, I noticed that the shift from Final Fantasy III to IV was significant. Between 1990 and 1991, Hirnobu Sakaguchi made two RPGs, one that offered a great deal of exploratory freedom at the game’s outset and then another that led the player largely by the nose throughout its initial hours. Final Fantasy IV, in any of its incarnations, is nowhere near as coddling as Ocarina of Time, but it is representative of games, specifically adventure and role-playing games, becoming increasingly linear following the 8-bit era. What caused the shift? Why did adventure in games start to become as directed as it is in the mediums that inspired it?

Yesterday, on our return trip, we passed by Hibernia a second time and chuckled again. It occurred to me that the trip made a good model for adventure design. We couldn’t avoid passing Hibernia. It was inevitable that our route would bring us past it multiple times. But we didn’t know it ahead of time, we were left to find it on our own. Shouldn’t every adventure be that way?

Related links:

Whatcha Playing: Tale of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World
Whatcha Playing: The Palette Cleanser
Whatcha Playing: de Blob
Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone
Know Your Final Fantasy IV Trivia. It Could Save Your Life.
Gaming on a Train: Final Fantasy IV

Whatcha Playing: Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

Bob Mackey — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

I've probably blathered about this before on 61FPS, but the original Tales of Symphonia marks the most time I spent with a game during the last generation of consoles. I spent over 100 hours milking that game for all it was worth, and I don't regret it at all--though, to be fair, at the time I was living at home and only marginally employed. So when a semi-sequel to one of my favorite games snuck up on me, I had to check it out; and while common sense told me the my disappointment in Tales of Legendia and The Abyss may indicate Dawn of the New World's quality, I decided to pick it up anyway. (I'm a weak, weak man.)

As a sequel to Symphonia, Dawn of the New World is a pretty shameless cash-in full of recycled assets with a decidedly last-gen look. But, in coping with its shamelessness, New World has some interesting qualities; namely, its status as a direct successor to a previous RPG. Outside of stuff like FFX-2, you don't find games like this too often--most RPG sequels usually end up taking place 100 or 1000 years before/after their previously-released games. Not so with New World; the events of Symphonia are in the not-too-distant past, which actually explains the state of the in-game world. Turns out that 100-hour quest from Symphonia actually made things worse, and managed to turn Symphonia-protagonist Lloyd into a ruthless killer. Go fig.

And, in keeping with the connection to the previous game, importing your complete Symphonia save rewards you with a meager set of items (with a few very rare ones thrown in) to start your quest. It's a nice extra, and quite possibly the only example of cross-generational save imports outside of Suikoden III.

In the hour-or-so that I played New World last night, I only made it to three different battles--all of which were "YOU CAN'T LOSE" tutorials, so that should give you some insight into the pacing of this game. As with most modern JRPGs, the introduction of New World is completely weighed down with pointless exposition that could have been integrated in a less passive way--say, by starting the game with the player actually doing something and working in some quick flashbacks while he or she moves along. Seasoned JRPGers may be used to lousy pacing, but one element of New World may actually turn off the most battle-hardened Tales vet: our hero Emil, who starts off as one of the most pathetic, simpering, and browbeaten heroes in JRPG history. Case in point: your first mission in the game involves building up the courage to thank someone. I think Emil starts of with a dignity level of zero to make his change throughout the game more significant, but that doesn't make him a less-annoying character.

The most fun part of the Tales games--the battle system--seems to have been left intact, so that makes me happy; I was known to grind for levels in Symphonia for the sheer joy of it. I'm just looking forward to the point where New World actually lets me play it. Hopefully that's not more than a few hours in.

Related Links:

Pay-Per-Grind: Tales of Vesperia Lets You Level With Cash
Turning Japanese: Microsoft’s Latest Ditch Effort to Win the East
Watcha Playing: Opoona

GWI: Gaming While Intoxicated

Bob Mackey — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Like any sensible young man, I am a fan of good beer. And obviously, a fan of video games as well. For certain reasons, these two interests don't usually intertwine. I usually unwind with an adult-style beverage (or two) along with some quality gaming at the end of the day, but I get hopelessly distracted when operating on anything more than a solid buzz. However, a recent purchase of mine proved to me that some games actually get better as your BAC rises.

Folks, Rock Band 2 has driven me to drink. More.

Of course, this really should have come as no surprise; I've done karaoke before, and I can say that if you aren't sick the following morning (and not from shame), you're doing it wrong. So I decided to test out the Karaoke Principle by inviting a few friends over who had never played Rock Band before. Here's some dialogue that was exchanged as we were sober and holding plastic instruments:

Friend 1: I'm not gonna lie. I feel like a pretty big nerd right now.

Me: Don't worry; this is the first step of our suicide pact.

Before the drinks were poured and/or swigged, one Rock Band item found itself completely untouched: the microphone. It dared us to grab it, but the basic limits of human shame had not been brought down to the level where singing in front of each other would be socially acceptable. But, given enough time, the Karaoke Principle took over and we were soon singing as loudly and as badly as humanly possible. My neighbors must have all been murdered in their sleep because the next day there wasn't as much as a written warning or brutal police stand-off to be found.

We left Rock Band briefly to pick up more music fuel downtown, and actually ended bringing a few people back with us (don't worry, I knew them an am well aware of stranger danger); until about three in the morning, me and five other people sat/stood in my cramped living room as we tried to see the TV screen through visible, floating clouds of alcohol. Some of the most fun I've had with a video game? You bet. Strange, because I've played Guitar Hero at a dozen parties, and it just seemed tedious at the time.

So are there any other games worth checking out with a room full of drunks? So far, my other option has been the Wii version of The House of the Dead 2, but you can only make fun of shitty acting so much before irony collapses in on itself.

Related Links:

Whatcha Playing: A Little Singin’, a Little Dancin’
The Magical Mystery Tour is Coming to Take You Away
Everyone Will be Able to Rock

Watcha Playing: The Palette Cleanser

John Constantine — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:45:00 GMT

The past six weeks have been teeming with meaty, action games. I’ve been working through them slowly but surely, like an elegant seven course meal. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was thick, hot comfort fare, a brief appetizer of sloppy design coated in delicious Stormtrooper and rancor killing action. The game’s a buggy mess, really, the gaming equivalent of empty calories, but definitely satisfying. Then there was the dynamic horror duo of Dead Space and Silent Hill: Homecoming, a soup and salad combo built to terrify. They didn’t really scare, but instead delivered visceral body simulations. Both games succeeded by making you constantly aware of your avatar’s physical presence and the heft of their actions, and they achieved this through a careful synergy between atmosphere and play. Yakuza 2 was truly the main course, a game I had no expectations for whatsoever that turned into an all time favorite. Its broad adventure, pulp tale of cops and crooks, and simple but ceaselessly engaging fisticuffs were nourishing, more substantial than anything released on current gen consoles. For dessert, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. Another bonafide surprise, Ecclesia turned out to not be another retread through Igarashi’s decade-old formula, but a challenging successor to Castlevania 2 with fierce action whose variety and elegance was exceeded only by the game’s environments. Yes, it’s been a great month of big games, but it’s been the small things I’ve played in between them, games I’ve played for no more than a handful of minutes here and there, that have given the most *ahem* food for thought.

The palette cleansers, as it were, aren’t what you might expect either. These quick play sessions, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, haven’t been with simplistic small titles. Far from it actually. The ones I keep returning to are Wipeout HD, Mega Man 9, the original Katamari Damacy, and Castle Crashers, all games that sport demanding mechanics, all games that get very stressful very quickly. Hairpin turns at high speed in Wipeout and precision jumps toward clandestine robot master confrontations don’t exactly seem like the ingredients for refreshment, but they’ve been restorative between the larger games. What makes these games perfect palette cleansers isn’t their immediacy, nor is it their lack of an expansive narrative. The key characteristic is that they don’t demand a serious investment in their world before and after. You don’t have to remember what you were on your way to do before your last save, what sidequests you’ve half completed. You simply need to know how to control them, and all of them take practice to control well.

Strange as it is to say, after recently starting a game of Fable 2, I immediately thought that it would make for an excellent palette cleanser. The game may be huge in scope and have a sweeping story to tell, but its play and guiding hand towards objectives don’t ask much of you beyond an understanding of the world’s rules. Molyneux’s made a sprawling RPG that’s less of a filet mignon and more of a small dish of sherbert. I’m wondering what other fall blockbusters may hide the same quality.

What are some of your favorite palette cleansers, everyone?

Related links:

The 61FPS Review: Dead Space
Katamari in the Classroom, Part 1
Style Over Substance: Why I'm In Love With WiiWare's "Art Style"
Screen Test: Star Wars – The Force Unleashed
Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone
Surprise of the Week: Sega Releases a Good Game
Impressions: Fable 2
Gears of LittleBig Fable Music: Considering the First-Party Blitz
New Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia Pics
Suffering Castlevania Fatigue

Whatcha Playing: de Blob

Cole Stryker — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Just a few short days ago, I was "Whatcha Playing" Secret of Evermore. That is, until de Blob arrived in my mailbox. It's a delightful romp through an increasingly complex and challenging environment, where just a few basic skills are utilized in clever ways. In short, this game is everything that Super Mario Galaxy should have been, but wasn't.

If there were any justice in the world, this game would outsell that old plumber's celestial adventure, because it's much more approachable, smart, and rewarding. Sadly, with that goofy French-sounding title (What were they thinking?), it will likely be lumped in with the dozens of colorful also-ran platformers vying for your holiday dollars. It's a shame, because I think it's the Best Wii Game Yet.

It's like Katamari Damacy meets Jet Grind Radio. Roll and bounce around, paint all the gray surfaces different colors. It appeals to one's OCD like nothing since Diablo. You won't be able to put it down until you've made sure every inch of gray has been splashed with color. If you have a Wii than you'd better buy this. Otherwise it's time to turn in your Serious Gamer card.

Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone

John Constantine — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Videogames are rich with memorable moments. Born of both play and story, there are those images, those brief passages of achievement, that are emblazoned in your memory: the first time you clear 100,000 points in Tetris, the dogs bursting through the window in Resident Evil, the booming march that begins to play after the baby metroid’s sacrifice during Super Metroid’s climactic battle with Mother Brain. We are tied to these events thanks not only to those games’ mechanical and artistic design but because of our agency in them. We facilitate these conclusions and, since the game is well-made, we feel them. Another classic: Solid Snake’s first fight with the cyborg ninja, Grey Fox. Like so much of the Metal Gear Solid series, this sequence is ludicrous: simplistic to play, overdramatic, over-everything. But when Grey Fox begins screaming, “Make me feel!” and your controller begins to shake in time with his uncontrollable gesticulations, the scene becomes something else. In 1998, rumble technology was still relatively new in home gaming, so having this drama reflected in the physical world made that much more of an impression. Every time Snake was kicked in the gut or when you landed a hit amidst this half-man’s yowling was tangible.

I feel a lot like Grey Fox when I play videogames these days, particularly action fare. I want an action game to make me feel. Not necessarily a profound emotional reaction – though that’s always a plus – so much as a physical one. When I’m playing an action or sport game, it’s essential that the game translates the physicality and impact of my actions well lest the aesthetic façade covering the game’s rules be ruined. It’s no easy thing to affect either. This past week, I finished playing through what may well be Lucasarts’ final in-house game, the damn-near-ubiquitous Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. TFU is a good game, not a great one; its big-scale Jedi power fantasy is marred by some serious glitches and questionable design choices, like its over-reliance on quick time events. Even though I had a good time playing through it, I was perturbed by how weightless much of the action felt. It’s incredible that TFU’s three physics engines allow me to pick up almost every part of a game’s environment and toss it about willie-nillie, but a mammoth, building crushing boulder shouldn’t feel like it has the same mass as shoe-sized robot. (Before any of you Star Wars nerds pipe-up about size mattering not, shut up. Idiots.)

Alternatively, Sega’s Yakuza 2, a nearly three year-old game running on hardware that couldn’t hope to run the engine beneath TFU’s hood, has been an eye-opening physical experience. Yakuza 2 is, at heart, a modern Japanese role-playing game that trades ponderous turn-based fighting for beat’em-up combat that recalls Die Hard Arcade. Yakuza 2’s combat is deliciously precise and, more importantly, visceral. Every impact of the fist is felt in Yakuza 2, and it keeps what would otherwise be a very repetitive game constantly rewarding, but it takes every facet of the game working in concert for this to work. The fights are fast, never lasting more than ninety seconds, and there’s no discernible delay between your button inputs and your character’s moves outside of what seems natural (throwing a fat guy over your shoulder or landing a jump kick should, after all, take a few more seconds than a jab.) This is on top of impact sound effects (grunts, the exaggerated thump-pop of a blow landing). What puts it over the top is the game’s “Heat” moves, a one-button super move that activates a contextual one-hit kill provided you’ve filled a meter. “Heat” moves are brutal enough to make Tony Soprano blush, but their presentation is remarkable. The screen becomes slightly washed out, the camera provides a shifting, dramatic perspective, the controller shudders, and the onscreen characters enact serious violence like, say, ramming a thug’s head through a car windshield. But it all takes little more than five seconds. Every single aspect has weight and every aspect of the game is built to translate that weight to the player.

This marks the difference between a good game and a great game. Not every game needs to translate literal physicality, but every game should leave you feeling like you’ve transcended the many, many barriers between you and the actual game. When the controller, the television screen, and the cognitive dissonance between your brain and making something happen on screen disappear, that’s when the game becomes something more. It becomes unforgettable.

This is What We’re Playing. Here’s What We Played.

Whatcha Playing: Bubbles, Bubbles, Bubbles!!!
Whatcha Playing?: Final Ninja
Whatcha Playing: Cleaning House, Finding Roots
Whatcha Playing: The Thirst For Adventure, Pointing At Things, and Not Knowing What to Say
Whatcha Playing: The New Adventures of the Nintendo DS

Whatcha Playing: Bubbles, Bubbles, Bubbles!!!

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

It's always a curious thing when games are sold exclusively at one chain of stores. I can understand if, hypothetically, Big Box Store shells out big bucks to have the exclusive sales of Frat House FPS Sequel. The built-in fanbase will want the game and rush to the nearest Big Box Store, that store makes enough money to profit from their initial investment, and the publisher still got their game out there to the masses and made some extra cash while they were doing it. What bothers me is when smaller, somewhat unknown or niche games are exclusive to one store, making it harder to find and less likely that curious gamers unfamiliar with the property will give it a chance. I was worried when this happened last year with the long-awaited Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol which found its way exclusively to Wal-Mart shelves, but thankfully that game turned out wonderfully. And so now, some three months after its release exclusively to Toys R Us, I have finally gotten my hands on a copy of Soul Bubbles for the Nintendo DS. I can't say whether it was worth the added trouble of having to go find it, but I can say that so far it is one of the most enjoyable DS titles I've played in months.

First off, check out this beautiful opening screen that welcomes you when you start the game.

I already like this third-party developer.

The gameplay itself so far feels like a wonderful mix of LostWinds and Locoroco. Transport a bubble or series of bubbles containing spirits around an obstacle-filled labyrinth using the incredible lung capacity of a floating mostly naked kid (he wears a scarf). The controls really utilize the DS hardware remarkably well. I keep imagining playing Soul Bubbles with dual analog sticks and, while certainly possible, its just not as fun or intuitive. The art direction is downright impressive, with lush landscapes and beautiful particle effects. As demonstrated in LostWinds, when a game's play mechanic is based around wind and blowing, it is imperative that every element in the environment react naturally with the breeze or the fourth wall is broken, and in this regard Soul Bubbles is an astounding achievement. The farther along I venture into this world, the more it seems every individual element has been carefully considered. Much like in Boom Blox, I am often miffed when something doesn't move the way I want it to, but accept that hey, that's realistic physics and I just kind of suck.

I'm only about halfway through the game right now, having cleared the fourth of eight worlds, and only recently has the game really started to demonstrate its nefarious environmental challenges. Slime is sticking my bubbles to walls as angry bees attack or wind tunnels are shooting my bubbles wildly into mazes of sharp thorns and puffer fish. I was particularly smitten with one recent puzzling section where it was required to capture lake water in a bubble, run it along a path and into a thorned vine, releasing the water below onto a rock that split the water into two streams to put out two fires, and later another lake that was closed off by vines, so I had to pop the bubble and then quickly form a new bubble to catch the water that fell through the vines. Despite the steady increase in difficulty, though, there is never a sense of urgency or of real imminent danger, which is much appreciated in a portable game. The levels so far have ranged from two to twelve minute playthroughs on the first try, perfect for on-the-go adventuring, and every stage has a healthy smattering of hidden objects to collect.

Completing a stage presents you with how many souls were safely delivered, how much hidden stuff you gathered, and your time, meaning Soul Bubbles should have a healthy chunk of replay value to collect everything, especially for speedrunners. Rapidly devouring all of my DS playing time, Soul Bubbles is easily the most casually hardcore game I've played since Eden.

Previously on Whatcha Playing:

The Thirst For Adventure, Pointing At Things, and Not Knowing What to Say
Cleaning House, Finding Roots
How Does Your Garden Grow?
The New Adventures of the Nintendo DS
Fallout (Metaphorically Speaking)
Loving/Hating Mario Kart Wii

Whatcha Playing: The Thirst For Adventure, Pointing At Things, and Not Knowing What to Say

John Constantine — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:49:00 GMT

Amidst the cavalcade of blockbusters, handheld eccentricities, and Rock Band I’ve been indulging in over the summer, a grand season now a mere two weeks from being officially dead, I’ve been getting a crash course in one of gaming’s most respected and forbidding forms: the adventure game. Though I started playing games during the genre’s heyday, I’ve always been somewhat less than literate when it comes to the many point-and-click and text-commanded classics crafted by Sierra and Lucasarts. My only real experiences came from visiting my aunt Donna. At the ripe age of seven years-old, she introduced me to the wonders of Kings Quest and, er, Leisure Suit Larry. Yeah. It’s not that I didn’t have fun with these eye-openers – they certainly expanded my vocabulary – I was just more interested in walking from left to right, jumping, and shooting when it came to videogames. I always knew that I was missing out on something, listening to friends chortle over playing Space Quest and even later, as a teenager, looking at lush screens of Grim Fandango. I’ve only gotten around to them recently thanks to three conditions working in concert. One is that there are new, easy to access (read: on Wii) point-and-clickers being released with regularity by folks like Telltale Games. Two and three regard vintage software: Nerve is equipped with numerous PCs capable of running things machines in my home twenty years ago could not, but also (and most importantly) I have a guide.

It’s easy to approach Telltale’s Strong Bad games because they move at a brisk pace and they work on a very simplified version of classic point-and-click language: see something, point at it to interact with it. Got an item? Point at it, click, then point the item at what you want to use it on. Repeat playings of King’s Quest V left me acclimated to both the process and the occasionally obtuse logic at work in these sorts of games, so it’s been a painless process and a reminder of the genre’s charms. Playing through the first two episodes of Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People (more on Episode 2 when I’m allowed to talk about it) has, however, made it abundantly clear that adventure games are not inherently relaxing in comparison to more action oriented fare. Nothing on earth is more frustrating than wandering around not knowing what the hell you’re supposed to do. In a platformer, if you keep losing, you know it’s because the challenge is a difficult one, tasking your reflexes and timing. If you keep dying in a shooter, it’s because you aren’t shooting the things shooting you fast enough. When you get lost in an adventure game, you’re just plain missing something and, unlike when you lose your keys or you forget what you’re doing when you walk into a room, the answer isn’t always right in front of you. You are at the whim of a designer’s train of thought, your agency stripped away. The problem is even worse in older adventures where you literally have to talk to the game.

This is why I’ve needed a guide. Pointing and clicking are fine for me, but when it comes to text interfaces, my illiteracy becomes a barrier too high to overcome. Pete Smith urged along my education in adventure, insisting I start with Conquests of Camelot and Quest for Glory. I played Quest for Glory for about twenty minutes before quitting. I spent the majority of this time swearing at everything I could interact with (hey, it worked in Leisure Suit Larry.) But even when I tried to get going, I couldn’t figure out what words the game wanted me to use to accomplish anything. I watched the Quest for Glory and Conquests of Camelot played instead of playing them myself and, now, I feel that I could comfortably tackle an adventure game with a text interface again. But if I hadn’t had someone playing the whole thing in front of me, explaining how to actually play the game at every step, I just wouldn’t have taken the time.

That inability to progress has got me thinking about what happens when you try to go back and play vintage games. Gaming has aged to the point where a modern player isn’t equipped with the language and experience to even play a lot of older software. I see my experience with Quest for Glory mirrored in the online testimonials of people playing Bionic Commando Rearmed, staggered by its difficulty and the demands that type of game makes of players. While games are finally entering an era of preservation through services like Gametap and the Wii’s Virtual Console, how do players get around this sort of cognitive dissonance? Let me know your theories in the comments.

(Yeah, I know. FAQs. But who wants to use a FAQ?)

Related links:

WiiWare: Nintendo, Babe, It Just Isn’t Working Out
Quickies: Homestar Ruiner
Unsolved Crimes and the New Setting
Lucasarts Classics on Nintendo DS?

Whatcha Playing: Cleaning House, Finding Roots

John Constantine — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It has been well over a month since my last Whatcha Playing here at 61 Frames Per Second. The vicious truth of the matter is that I haven’t been playing that much since the beginning of July. The summer will do that to you. When the weather is as nice as its been here in the northeastern United States (mild, sunny as hell, great thunderstorms), its hard to devote eight hours of a Saturday to grinding RPG characters, engaging in manic shoot-outs, or even just taking in some classics (especially if your apartment isn’t air conditioned.) Last Thursday, though, I finally downloaded Bionic Commando Rearmed, a game I may have mentioned anticipating. Those first delicious minutes I spent grappling around the vibrant world GRIN created signaled one undeniable fact: come the weekend, it was time to play some freaking videogames.

But first I had to clean house. Twice a year, I take a look at my game library and growing collection of consoles and peripherals to take stock of what needs to stay, what can be tossed, and what needs to be reorganized. The process is cathartic. Old games in dire need of revisiting reclaim your attention, it’s determined what unbeaten titles need finishing, and old consoles end up reconnected to the TV for the first time in ages.

Cleaning house also reveals just what your predilections are. By the time I’d finished, the library was a bit lighter, and I had a nice smorgasbord put together for Saturday and Sunday. The Playstation 3 was going to get put through its paces with Bionic Commando, PixelJunk Eden, and Lair, the 360 would get love from Too Human and Braid, and the freshly reconnected Gamecube would play host to Metroid Fusion and a little Ninja Five-O.

What did I find out? Well, clearly, I have some kind of grappling hook obsession I need to work out. It also looks like my absence from playing games subconsciously drove me to get back to my platforming roots. I never did fire up Lair and played only a smattering of Too Human (more on those beasts later this week.) The craving for two-dimensions and precision jumps was undeniable. But it occurred to me that the games I was playing, Braid, Eden, and Bionic Commando, aren’t just relics of yesteryear but brand new games, full on fresh ideas. Seems developers broadly are cleaning house themselves these days and rediscovering just what works again.

Summer is in the home stretch now and fall’s bringing cool weather and games to match; the cutting edge of current technology and design will be our hands. A few months back, I felt rabid for the future and the evolution of three-dimensional, narrative driven design. But now that I’m finally playing on the regular again, I’m wondering just what it is I’ll be craving when the fall’s blockbusters arrive. Will I want the meaty story, the deep 3D space? Or will I just want to run and jump?

More Whatcha Playing:

Whatcha Playing: The New Adventures of the Nintendo DS
Whatcha Playing: Fallout (Metaphorically Speaking)
Whatcha' (Wish You Were) Playing: How Does Your Garden Grow?
Watcha Playing: Loving/Hating Mario Kart Wii
Whatcha Playing: How Many Buttons Do I Gotta Push?
Whatcha Playing: Fire Emblem is Pretty Hard
Whatcha Playing: Keeping the Beat, Drum Master Style
Whatcha Playing: A Little Singin’, a Little Dancin’
Whatcha Playing: Another Slice of Cake
Whatcha Playing: BS Zelda
Whatcha Playing: With a Little Help From My Friends

Whatcha' (Wish You Were) Playing: How Does Your Garden Grow?

Derrick Sanskrit — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Last night, PS3 owners got a special treat in the weekly Playstation Store update, and no, I'm not talking about the Street Fighter IV system theme – a downloadable demo of the newest game in the PixelJunk series, Eden. While I am enthused by the PixelJunk concept of innovative idea-based reasonably priced games, Racers and Monsters just didn't grab my attention. With my first playthrough of Eden last night, however, I was instantly smitten.

In this garden-building action-puzzler, the player controls a small "Grimp" character, swinging on silk threads and jumping from calligraphic leaf to calligraphic leaf of thoroughly modern stylized garden. Crashing into pods releases clouds of pollen, which is gathered in seeds which can then be activated to sprout new plants, which allow you to travel farther, to even more seeds, pollen, and techno-organic bliss. It sounds complicated, and at first it feels like it too. I'm not ashamed to admit that I failed the first garden miserably (twice!), but the environment and surprisingly compelling physics were just so captivating that I couldn't stop.

One of the curious but intriguing elements of Eden is that the game instantly supports video recording and upload to YouTube from within the game with absolutely no delay, thanks to the PS3's underused SPUs, so get ready to see a massive tidal wave of videos (like the one above) showing off people's best times and acrobatic prowess. The game also supports local co-op multiplayer, is one of the first PS3 games to utilize the new Trophy system, and BEGS to be played on an HDTV for crisp, monochromatic graphics and lush sound, thanks to the original soundtrack by Japanese multimedia artist Baiyon.

In fact, my only problem with the game and these spectacular features right now is that all these YouTube videos make me want to play it right now. Man, I can't wait to get home and collect some pollen!

Related articles:
Trailer Review: The Last Guy
Fat Princess Gobbles Her Way Into Blog Drama
Progress Quest: Playstation 3 Growing Up and the General Beauty of Firmware Updates

Whatcha Playing: The New Adventures of the Nintendo DS

John Constantine — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A strange thing happened ‘round about last October. For the first time since its release in April 2005, I was regularly playing games on PSP. I had been carrying a grudge against Sony for promising the world with their first handheld and not delivering even a fraction of the compelling software that they had on the first two home Playstations. But then, all of a sudden, there were all these fantastic games to sink my teeth into. Strategy RPGs like Jeanne D’Arc, old-school action like Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, and true genre benders like Crush had finally brought me into the PSP fold. The drawback? My DS went on the shelf and wasn’t touched for months. Oh, I brought it down when Contra 4 came out and on that rare Saturday morning that I felt like going back to my Animal Crossing village to do some weeding, stomp some roaches, and writing some letters. But I wasn’t playing anything new and I started wondering if the brief reign of the DS — not as a force of business but as a fount of compelling design — was over.

Man, was that stupid. For all of the greatness we’re seeing on the current crop of consoles, nothing can touch the dual-screened wonder for sheer versatility. My second honeymoon with the DS started with my introduction to the Phoenix Wright games, a series I was none too fond of at first. As I plunged deeper into the game, I became addicted to the story and the satisfaction of pushing it forward through simple logic puzzles. I never thought I would use a gaming console to read comic books, yet here I am, plowing through the second Phoenix Wright, loving every minute of it. I also mentioned last week that I’m taking on my first full Pokemon game, an experience that’s proving perilously habit-forming. My complete conversion back to the system came this weekend though. I spent time with games on opposite ends of the play spectrum, Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword and Shiren the Wanderer. Gaiden is a forward thinking action experience, a game as much about new ideas than it is about series tropes. Shiren the Wanderer is the pinnacle of throwbacks, a roguelike dungeon crawler as mechanically obtuse as it is simple to play. This is the essence of gaming on the DS, a constant barrage of new and old, design of yesteryear melding perfectly with fresh ways to, no pun intended, touch art. As the fall approaches and new console titles start dominating the gaming frontline, I’m sure I’ll gravitate back to playing at home. For now, I’ll be out in the sun, getting to know an old friend all over again.

Related links:

Going Back in There: My Very First Hour With Pokemon
Whatcha Playing: Ninja Gaiden – Dragon Sword
Whatcha Playing: How Many Buttons I Gotta Push

Whatcha Playing: Fallout (Metaphorically Speaking)

John Constantine — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Truth to tell, I’ve never played a Fallout game. The vast majority of my gaming career has been spent in front of a television, not a monitor, my hands clutching a controller instead of hovering over a keyboard. It’s not a point of pride, let me tell you. Not gaming on a PC throughout the ‘90s meant you were perpetually on the outside of the cutting edge, waiting for advancements to come to Nintendo, Sony, or whoever else’s systems sometimes years later. Deus Ex, Half-Life, Diablo, even Sierra’s King’s Quest V, all games I’ve gotten to try my hand at, eventually, when they were ported to a console, shadows of their former selves. It’s even kept me from really experiencing whole genres; I’ve never played a real-time strategy game for more than a few minutes and my aging laptop could barely run World of Warcraft when I tried it out in 2005. Since that year, though, consoles have started gaining on PCs as the place where developers make their greatest strides. It’s not too surprising. Consoles have turned into high-end computers themselves.

Since finishing off Metal Gear Solid 4 a week and a half back, I haven’t played much of anything. I’ve spent spring 2008 devouring the cutting edge, playing Grand Theft Auto 4, Rock Band, Wii Fit, Hideo Kojima’s magnum opus, playing and replaying the games on Valve’s Orange Box, my morning commute spent with the best the PSP and DS have to offer with games like Crisis Core and The World Ends With You. As summer starts to kick into high gear, I’m finding myself grateful for the encroaching lull in the release schedule. I suppose it’s the fallout from too much of the present. Maybe this is why today’s reveal of Mega Man 9 has me so excited. Art, whatever shape it comes in, doesn’t always need to push at the future’s edges. Sometimes its greatest delights are slightly behind tomorrow.

Previous Whatcha Playings.

Related links:

Mega Man 9 Goes Back to Your Roots. Way Back.
Don't Call it Retro: Mega Man 9 and Design Resurrection
The 61FPS Review: Metal Gear Solid 4

Watcha Playing: Loving/Hating Mario Kart Wii

Amber Ahlborn — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Mama Mia!

Every weekend I try to get together with a group of friends to play Mario Kart Wii online. We have a blast battling it out for first place and lobbing weapons of happy destruction at each other. I really love this game and it is, hands down, my favorite console iteration of the series to date. I'm definitely a fan of the bikes and the stunts and I quite enjoy the “Whiil” (sorry). Alas, it has no voice chat so communicating with my fellow racers involves a little racing of my own; from my living room, where the Wii is ensconced, to my studio where my computer sits. But, I know why there is no voice chat. It's because of me.

Nobody wants to listen to me scream expletives at the top of my lungs because I just got hit with a blue bhell, followed up by a Bullet Bill and three red shells; surviving the item onslaught only to get sumo-ed off the track by one of the heavy weight characters. Five seconds of agony later and I've dropped from first place to tenth. No worries right? I'll just grab this item box and...CRAP! It's a Lightning Cloud! I've always liked the crazy items in Mario Kart but I think things are starting to get a “wii” bit out of control (sorry again).

I honestly wouldn't get rid of any of the items, but I would tweak them a bit. It's nice that the game gives hope of ranking positions to the folks in the rear but now the front of the pack is getting overly punished. Sometimes it just doesn't pay to fight my way into first place. And yet, I keep coming back to race once again. I'll just have to remember to keep the windows shut lest the neighbors complain. Remember folks, don't drive angry.

Yep, that's about right...

Whatcha Playing: How Many Buttons Do I Gotta Push?

John Constantine — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Last week, while watching video of Final Fantasy VI, I commented to my colleague Pete that old Final Fantasy is not fun to watch. He laughed and replied, “No comment.” The inherent absurdity of what I’d just said wasn’t lost on me either. There’s a constant disconnect between you and the activity in role-playing games. You select an action from a menu and then watch your avatar on the screen carry out the command after the fact; more often than not, you only watch the game. The basic design of an RPG necessitates strategy behind each selected action, but most RPGs are so simple that you can win by just pressing a single button to do one thing over and over again. I love role-playing games and, if I’m completely honest, I can admit that I get immense satisfaction of pressing that one button repeatedly and watching numbers (a character’s attributes or any other arbitrary statistic) rise as a result. Sometimes, just pressing a button is enough for a game to engage me.

This past weekend, I spent a couple of hours playing through Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney on the Nintendo DS. I’ve missed out on the series over the past few years. There are only so many games a person can play. The Ace Attorney games are part role-playing, part point-and-click adventure, and part comic book. The amount of interactivity you have in the games' murder investigations and bizarre court trials is extremely limited even though you are tapping the touch screen – Ace Attorney’s one button – repeatedly. After playing through two of the game’s five cases, I realized that I wasn’t enjoying it very much. I couldn’t figure out why. The characters were charming, the activities novel, the dialogue entertainingly eccentric. Then it hit me: there’s no threat of failure in Ace Attorney. It’s possible; take one too many incorrect actions in court and the game stops. I came close to that breaking point in the game’s second trial, and was truly stumped as to how to proceed. Then the game took over, a character told me that I’d already won, there was just one thing left to do. The drama was interesting but the game wasn’t anymore.

How many buttons do I have to push for a game to be a game? Is the capacity to win or lose in a game essential to the experience? If so, what does that say about simulation games like Animal Crossing where it’s impossible to win or lose? I’m not sure if my experience with Ace Attorney says anything about design but I do know that it’s one that’s gotten me thinking about why we play at all. Good food for thought.

Whatcha Playing: Fire Emblem is Pretty Hard

John Constantine — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Introducing 61 Frames Per Second's latest blogger: Amber Ahlborn

I think I can hear the strategy role-playing veterans laughing at me, but cut me a little slack, I'm pretty new to the genre. Fire Emblem is a series with deep roots. I didn't become personally acquainted with the series until Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance hit the GameCube. The game absolutely captivated me.

Convinced that Fire Emblem is awesome, I snapped up Radiant Dawn the day it released for Wii. After playing both Path and Dawn on Normal Difficulty I can tell you, Path is a cakewalk compared to Dawn. For the uninitiated, Fire Emblem play consists of battles bookended by dialog, narrative and cutscenes. Each character has a distinct look and personality. It stinks if you make a stupid tactical error on the battle field and get one of them killed — no resurrection in this game. Since I like to keep everyone alive, I use the rest button liberally and Battle Save with great care. Combat is turn based. Each unit has limits on how far it can move. Different characters have different weapon/magic proficiencies and each weapon type has specific characteristics. All of this and more needs to be considered if you want to win, and win without casualties. It can get incredibly frustrating but I love it all the same and the final satisfaction factor is very high indeed.

Do you like games that make you think? Are you patient and unafraid of a serious challenge? Give Fire Emblem a look. Check out this YouTube footage to give you an idea what the game is like.

Don't spend too much time window shopping. Fire Emblems don't stay easily findable for long.

Oh! And a heads up, the very first game in the series is getting a remake on the DS. There's something worth watching.

Whatcha Playing: Keeping the Beat, Drum Master Style

John Constantine — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Written by Derrick Sanskrit

This hip urban lifestyle is killing me. Even though I walk a couple miles each day going to and from various places, I spend at least three hours a day sitting in place on trains as they scuttle my person between points A and R. Three hours! I'd probably go crazy or fall asleep and get mugged if it weren't for portable games. The problem is carrying games that can hold my interest for an extended period of time. Almost all of the most compelling DS games have little to no replay value (the Ace Attorney series, Hotel Dusk: Room 215) and many of the other better games require such precise stylus control that a simple jostle of the train car can ruin the entire experience (Elite Beat Agents, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass). What am I supposed to play?

Thanks to importers and the region-free DS, I have found my answer: Taiko no Tatsujin DS: Touch de Dokodon!, aka "Taiko Drum Master DS". It keeps all the familiar elements of the popular arcade and home console Taiko Drum Master games (J-pop and classical songs play, cute cartoon characters dance, you beat the shit out of a big-ass drum) and makes it portable. Is there a story? Damned if I know, I just know that I get a more visceral thrill out of pounding a cartoon drum than I do shooting an AK-47 at Nazis.

If I'm waiting at the station, it's fun to rest the DS in my lap and pull out the twin styli (included with the game) to tap out beats on the touch screen. When the train's in motion and I'm shoulder-to-shoulder with disgruntled strangers, I switch to the buttons (face buttons for the drum skin, shoulders for the drum edge). It takes some getting used to the two control schemes, but it’s still a very satisfying, if mindless, experience. For all I know, all these J-Pop songs could be about sodomy, but as long as I don't understand the words and I can dress my cartoon drum up as a punk rocker, circus clown, geisha, or Santa Claus, I'm going to keep my headphones on and a smile on my face, continuing to freak out the old lady in the opposite seat.

Whatcha Playing: A Little Singin’, a Little Dancin’

John Constantine — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Last Saturday, I woke up, put on the coffee, and sat down on the couch with the full intention of finishing off the remaining story missions in Grand Theft Auto 4. As the day wore on, though, I found myself continuing to ignore the controller, unable to muster the enthusiasm to play at being a hardened criminal. A whole Saturday was passing me by, gameless. It wasn’t until around nine o’clock that my roommate and I decided to bust out Rock Band that I got to gaming. I’ve been fairly indifferent to the music game revolution of the passed two years for one very specific reason: I suck at Guitar Hero. My finger dexterity simply doesn’t match my thumb dexterity. But, since a friend loaned his copy of Rock Band to my apartment full of twenty-something ne’er-do-wells, I’ve come to see the light, and it’s all thanks to singing. Karaoke videogames are too laden with pop and karaoke bars are simply too expensive for a man of my meager means. Rock Band lets me be Ozzy, Kurt, Shirley Manson, and Ad-Rock and the experience has been eye opening. Even more so than the Wii, Rock Band has proven to me the opportunity offered by alternative forms of control in games. And rest assured, Rock Band is a game, a clearly defined set of rules adhered to in order to achieve a specific goal. I just never thought my drunken rendition of “Say It Ain’t So” would ever be the route to the highest score or the next level.

I still haven’t finished Grand Theft Auto 4 but last night, I tried Wii Fit for the first time, adding a little more physicality to my recent digital rocking. I’m about as sore today as I was after three hours of drumming and singing. I’m not quite sure if Wii Fit is the product it’s been touted to be. So far, it’s missing Nintendo’s secret ingredient: fun. But more on that next week.

Previous Watcha Playings:

Another Slice of Cake

BS Zelda

With a Little Help From My Friends