This last week I played through the new Monkey Island special edition. This year it’s the second game, LeChuck’s Revenge. I don’t remember especially liking the game when it came out before and honestly it’s no different now.

On the plus side, the sequel looks way better. The environments and character models are beautiful. Most adventure games only wish they could look this good. The music and voice acting is on par as well as some of the best out there.

Some of the problems with the game come from the desire of the developers to reproduce the game as closely as they could to the original. Some things just don’t hold up well.

First there’s the matter of the control scheme. In the first Monkey Island, this didn’t matter so much. In LeChuck’s revenge, though, there are all sorts of parts that require some fast-paced clicking. Waiting for someone to put something down so you can grab it is just one example. The end of the game is especially irritating, and since we’re long past spoilers, I think it’s okay to go into it. Eventually you end up in this series of tunnels (tubes, if you will) and LeChuck is chasing you around with a voodoo doll he made of you. While avoiding him, you have to pick up all these different parts for a doll of your own. Each time you get to one of the rooms you have a few seconds before LeChuck pops in and zaps you again. It makes searching especially irritating and draws it out far longer than it should.

So, how do you resolve this without pulling the game apart and just making a new game? Well for one, buy it on PC. that’s the easy answer. But I like playing games in my living room. Having a click-snap option would make the game too easy - though there are some parts where I really would’ve appreciated it. There’s a spot where you have to hang something on a hook and the gorgeously lush art made the hook virtually impossible to spot.

Another way this one feels like a step back from the first Monkey Island Special Edition is the hint system. I remember loving the hint system in the first one, and while this one works for the most part, it has some major progress-halting problems. I’m not going to mince words: I’m terrible at Monkey Island games, but I adore them. I need the hint system. I haven’t played this game in, what, 15 years? Yeah, I forgot a few things. Due to the more open nature of the game I did a few things way out of order, and as a result something just didn’t occur to me at all. The problem is, if I was away from the location i needed to be at, the hint system would just tell me to go there. So I go there, and all it would tell me is “You should try to think of a way to get this item.” WELL THANK YOU VERY MUCH HINT SYSTEM BECAUSE I WASN’T ALREADY DOING THAT!!1 I ended up having to check a FAQ. For Monkey Island 2. What is this, 1994?

On the voice-recording side of things, there are a few things to talk about. First is the addition of the director’s commentary. Getting the original Monkey Island guys—including Psychonauts’ Tim Schafer and DeathSpank’s Ron Gilbert—into a room to talk about one of the earliest creations? Brilliant!

The voice acting, while mostly good, is not perfect either. Things that aren’t annoying in text can be very annoying when spoken. On Booty Island, Kate Capsize is advertising for her ship. “Glass bottom boat. Cruises. Glass bottom boat. Glass bottom boat.” The developers really should’ve… I don’t know, slowed down the repeat time on that. Just put a 10 second gap after the first round. Maybe a 15 second gap. Or five minute gap. Ugh. Also, the sound effects during the spit contest made me want to puke. UGH.

Of course my overall impression is positive because it’s Monkey Island. I LOVE Monkey Island. I just hope they bring the third one out as a special edition. Now THAT would be cool.

I started playing Darksiders today. I’m trying to decide if I want to keep going. Playing it right after playing Bayonetta was a poor decision.

Bayonetta was an incredibly well tuned action game that just oozed style from every pore. Everything that happens in the game is crazy, sexy, and cool. Like the TLC album. At one point Bayonetta loses her lollipop and instead of just letting it go she runs down the wall and dives toward lava to catch it.

Not only that, but the characters are pretty cool as well. I’m not going to suggest that the characters in Bayonetta are award-winning by any means, but they’re fun to watch the same way Dante is fun to watch in Devil May Cry.

War in Darksiders is the opposite. He’s this one-dimensional World of Warcraft-reject, giant shoulder pads, huge sword, and everything. Normally I have a weakness for a badass with a giant sword but War manages to take everything I like about a character and make it boring. I’m also getting a little tired of the whole “War between Heaven and Hell with Man caught in the middle!” thing.

Total disinterest in the main character aside, the worst part for me is probably the gameplay.

Bayonetta’s long fight sequences were alleviated by the sheer variety of moves and animations. No matter what, you were always doing SOMETHING cool in Bayonetta. Darksiders has been compared to the Zelda series by more than one review and it’s easy to see why. Not only do you go along finding things like bomb plants, the first item you find is a boomerang. The combat, unfortunately, is about as deep. There’s one kind of attack, making any real combinations or moves uninteresting at best. Further, dodging and blocking often just don’t work. If I’m trying to dodge a swing and my character dodges INTO the boss, that’s a problem. Same if he dodges into the swing.

Whilst fighting Tiamat, the grotesque, bare-breasted bat-queen, I eventually set the controller down when I realized the game was making me swear.

Will I go back? Will I play again? Find out next time, on Dukes of Hazzard!

Silent Hill

Splinter Cell, Tomb Raider, and Heavy Rain after the cut!

Everyone knows it: Nintendo has that special something that inspires people of all walks to pick up a game controller and just have fun. My mom's playing video games for the first time since The Legend of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. My mother and father-in-law compete in Mario Kart nightly. I know more people with multiple Nintendo DSes than I do people that own none. This makes the release of Osamu Inoue's Nintendo Magic, translated and distributed by Vertical, Inc. seem especially well timed.

Nintendo Magic starts with Nintendo's resurgence at the top of the charts, detailing the origins and successes of the DS and Wii, along with in-depth profiles of the Nintendo executives that made it possible. Too bad the book reads more like an amalgam of edited-together company brochures instead of a disciplined, thoughtful overview of one of Japan's most secretive and transformative companies.

Check out the full review.

One question that comes up over and over in the world of gaming enthusiast press and game review/critique is “how much of a game must you play before you can fairly review it?”

There are a few schools of thought.

The first goes something like my method of judging anime. That is to say, I know before the end of the theme song whether I’m going to like the show or not. Some people will give a show 30 episodes to “pick up.” Similarly, some people are done reviewing games as soon as they find some game-breaking mechanic or it’s too, you know, “Japanese.” Or whatever.

On the opposite side, some people—gamers and reviewers both—feel that a game review must, similar to a DVD review, encompass all the content. The same way a DVD review includes not just the movie, but the extras, menus, box art and everything else in between, some reviewers and gamers expect a review to encompass not only the main game and primary mechanics but also every little minigame or sidequest, collectible, and every line of dialogue.

Me, I’m somewhere in between.

The review has to fit the game, obviously. But game reviewing is, if nothing else, time consuming. As the reviewer, you want to be sure that nothing is missed because gamers are mean, and will tear apart every little mistake you make. But there’s a line. It’s thin, faint, and fuzzy.

I have never felt the need, for example, to beat all the challenge levels in Peggle to review it. That’s not something most players are going to bother with, and you don’t learn anything more about the game by doing it.

With longform RPGs like Fallout, Final Fantasy and such, playing them to completion is often a lot of fun but again, not necessary for a proper review. Certainly, the main quest must be seen through to completion, and other aspects of the game should be played to the point of having a good idea what’s there for gamers to enjoy (or not). But will playing another 20 hours of the same minigame to get that last unlockable tell you anything more about the game? No, it won’t. And if it does, then that’s great but the designers had a responsibility to make the game a little more welcoming. If someone under Miyamoto tried to put a feature into a game that took 20 hours to become fun, he’d go Super Saiyan and unleash some Dragon Ball Z shit upon them.

But then again, what about a game that’s so broken that playing through the main quest puts you at the border of insanity? Should people really expect the reviewer to dump 30 hours of their life into something so painfully bad? The pay-versus-play ratio is so poor most of the time that it’s not only unreasonable but laughable as well. Unless, of course, you’re a salaried worker and you make your living playing games.

In playing Deadly Premonition, I played through the main quest and did a few side quests. 20 hours with a game is plenty of time to figure out whether you like it, though with a good game it’s a shame to miss the sidequests, admittedly.

Does it matter, in the end, how someone reviews a game? I suppose it probably doesn’t in the grand scheme. Reviews are a timely thing though, and letting a game languish to drill down into every minigame just isn’t worth it.

/rant

This week, Ubisoft announced that it intends to stop including instruction manuals in its games for environmental concerns and cost reductions. There are all kinds of possibilities with this new format. Ubisoft, get this right so other publishers will follow suit. I'll even give you some free ideas. Use them; I won't even try to take credit.

First, visual flair.

The instruction manuals of old were often the only content gamers had to flesh out the more primitive 8-bit versions of heroes to bring them to life. As graphics improved and more accurate representations of characters begun appearing in games, the need to do that has faded.

However, that doesn't mean we don't still want it! A full-screen, hi-def manual would be a great place to show off some of the concept art and supporting artwork that comes out of game creation. Normally reserved for an unlockable gallery that no-one every looks at, the freedom from paper should make for some great looking instruction manuals that encourage players to read by rewarding them with cool images.

Check out the full article.

One of the most common complaints about the first Mass Effect was the dearth of DLC following the promise of a bounty. Mass Effect 2 has been almost opposite. While the DLC hasn't had a massive effect on the gameplay yet, there's been plenty of it. Better yet, almost all of it has been free to those who logged into the Ceberus Network when they picked up their new copies of the game.

The bonuses had to end somewhere, though, and the Kasumi Stolen Memory pack marks the first paid DLC for Mass Effect 2 (not counting the horse armor, I mean character costumes). Like the first downloadable character, Zaeed, Kasumi is a mysterious, shadowy character that joins your mission on the condition that you help her with her own quest.

Check out the full review.

Whenever a game crashes through the top of the sales charts or even just pulls enough mindshare, you know what comes next: copycat after copycat.

There's a period of a few years after a big game where every publisher under the sun has to put out their own take on it. You've seen it. Grand Theft Auto breeds everything from True Crime and Saints Row; Modern Warfare's success results in Bad Company, new Medal of Honor, and more. We're right on the cusp of about a thousand Farmville clones, too.

Obviously, some of these games are good. Some argued that Saints Row 2 was more what GTA fans were looking for than GTA4. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has won over its fair share as well. Most of the games are just also-rans, very rarely are there actual contenders. Just like anything else that becomes popular suddenly, there's a temporary deluge of the given game type before settling into its place in the gaming genre pantheon.

Check out the full article.

This week we did graphics for Sonic. My contribution was small, but the overall piece turned out great. Matt Green and Joey Davidson also of Kombo worked with me on this one. Here’s one of my two contributions.

Check out the full article!

You know, I thought I had totally lost interest in Japanese RPGs. In fact, I was quite sure if it; passionate, even. But that might not be quite right.

The last week or so, I've been playing Yakuza 3. I haven't been thinking of it as a traditional RPG, and in some ways it does break that mold but in others it adheres to them quite closely. Much of Yakuza could be reskinned with kimonos and top-knots (or belts, zippers, and bare midriffs for you Final Fantasy fans) without having to really change anything.

There are towns with different shops, various weapons, dungeons (in the form of yakuza hideouts), and bosses with multiple transformations (the sword breaks and out come the throwing knives). You spend much of your time in Okinawa and Tokyo accomplishing side-missions for random joes on the street to level up your abilities.

It breaks away from RPG tropes first with the solo, real-time combat. The fast-paced brawls are more about speed and skill than strategy. The real draw for me, though, is the mature story. Not to say that other RPGs don't have mature, interesting stories. Rather, Kiryu Kazuma's story in particular draws me in.

Check out the full article.